Schizophrenia and Demons

(Rewritten in a better frame of mind) 

Consider being In the dark where there is an absence of light, sound, feeling, hearing, thinking, where there is no movement of objects, such as stars or planets, nor light of any kind. You are surrounded there in an infinitesimally compacted state with an absence of awareness of any kind whatsoever, with no imagination, no curiosity, no thought, no sensations, with no ability to be ambitious or curious, alone there and unconscious. 

That was all of our conditions one hundred years ago presumably. Now as our predicament is today we strangely look at a much different picture around us, with tomorrow remaining yet still uncertain for us. 

Lets not be too pessimistic about the future nonetheless for tomorrow remains yet as uncertain as today might have seemed before its time with the curios distinction that we now have a glimpse of life and its possibility while before  all we had known was nothingness to argue for any potential meaning of our lives from. Things have improved for us dramatically.

We were nothing before now, absent all instinct, we had no capacity for action, and no consciousness a hundred years ago. Now we look around in bewilderment aware of cherished pleasant experiences while knowing at the same time great struggles, woes, and upheavals in our lives.

 

We naturally enough, as thinking beings, offer hypothesis and theories of explanation that weigh in on this life’s implications and overarching meaning explained often with an individualist slant in our reasoning on what life’s relevancies, ultimate destination, and truths are.

 

Whatever those thoughts are we all materialized here on an orbiting rock in the cosmos while what blankets beyond us in those depths of deep outlying space we don't begin to fathom now but let us not pretend there is nothing out there to offer explanation for our current reality for there more then probably is.

 

We aim our limited syllables of thought at the dusk, at the setting sun leaving the horizon, at the appearing glowing moon rising in the summer sky. We marvel at the changing ocean tides as the idea of our death haunts us in our uncertain capacity to know adequately what will become of us. Might we somehow escape the rotting, worm filled, dust ridden, velvet lined, coffins where we’re laid under the topsoil in our burial plot in those grassy roadside cemeteries dotting the side of winding country roads, between pastures and forest lands, with darting birds, buzzing insects and crawling critters moving around us.

 

We won't be here in another hundred years of course like we weren't here a hundred years ago before now. We almost grasp at straws now, peering around like frightened frenzied schools of fish, grappling unto myths and historic tails, or we may have given up on any hopeful beliefs that this life is special enough to have more in store for us then we understand.

 

I give pause on such considerations as I think of discussions in the past I had over drinks like Captain Morgan rum, Crown Royal Whisky, with dozens of bottles of Keith's and Olson beer laying around, with whiffs of marijuana smoke circling, hanging in suspension, there in lightless, small windowed, paneled basements, with the sounds of angry, defiant voices in states of intoxication spewing out critic at religion and God and hope itself beyond that present vision of how life is lived.

 

Please, I want to argue with some of them, no more talk of Hell like it is a place more accustomed to you and your eternal interests then Heaven. They almost think seriously that Hell would extend a red carpet and that they’d be better off there somehow surrounded by friends in revelry. There is nothing good in Hell if there is such a place I want to argue with them. The illusion you'll be freer there to do things more enjoyable is ridiculous. Real freedom is not denied you in Heaven because there you're in the proximity of God and His will. You may avoid Churches, rebel against Bible talk, never examine your conscience in comparison to religious ideas, that may be the road your presently on, but in Gods company is first off love I want to argue with them.

 

You would like love I can assure you, I want to say to them traversing time. Love is a very good thing blanketed over a human being. Joy comes with Gods gift of love, immeasurable breadths of it, reaching to unimaginable heights, in fathomless forms of pleasure, with gifts of wisdom and knowledge beyond our present and most hopeful estimation.

 

You get free range in Heaven to explore infinitely, to know unending clues into truth, to know experiences beyond experiences, to be free in fairness, where nothing is able to take any of this good away from you I feel inspired to want to say like I’ve been there. Why would you want to sit around with some devil with a pitchfork?

 

How does anyone clarify what the truth in this world is absolutely though. But I believe we can pierce the burier of that unknown in ways of hope and faith seeing past those limits we know and looking within to our bright inestimably grand future home.

 

My grandfather was a wise and educated man who died before I was born. My mother and aunt tell stories of him and how he had lengthy talks in his home on Tain street in Sydney, Nova Scotia while they were children debating with a Baptist clergyman. My grandfather, an historian, would respond to some of the clergyman’s religious certainty with debate. 

 

“But how do you know this is how it is with certainty? All men are subject to error!”

 

 

Changing subjects In life, In exchanges of words and ideas, people want to judge other people for numerous reasons when they get hurt by them in this world.  I think this tendency is widespread in life. People who have slighted , ignored, rejected, humiliated, disrespected, dishonored, and disgraced us meet this criteria.

 

We commonly face a desire for retaliation to insults like just mentioned. In my life I’ve become convinced that the only wise way, the only real way forward, instructs me in the forgiveness of my neighbor and even my enemy. For me Jesus teachings are what I cling to and in my opinion go farther then merely inspiring harmony or conformity. I think those insights come from love, real love, that transcends how my psychological state sees the world.  His teaching offers insight into how God feels about all of us in the human perspective.

 

That love transcends our human resentments pointing to the correct way of seeing each other, which is actually a sublime way, that cares about people everywhere. This witness of love suggests that it is intended for all people, including those people who damage our peace.

 

When I look around at an often angry world I observe that there is a struggle raging and only faint unclear audible voices of council often available in how to free the mind to find peace. What is the way forward for allowing us to let go of the insult of a particularly hurtful personal injury received from someone else when we feel such a strong and determined inclination calling for retaliation. Where is the healthy way forward that is self-evident for us.

 

There are often no road sign present, no instructions in view, so we stumble in life and we can fall hard into great ruin. We witness revenge taking in our entertainments examples in our popular culture. Many of us, especially while younger and growing up, see in our friends too behavior norms mentored to us in small groups. We witness often to our harm or even destruction bad examples as those friendship circles dabble in the wrong ideas.

 

This means the way forward is not an easy or clear way out of harms way. People aren't able easily to resist the nefarious influence for instance if it’s hostility they feel meaning then that many people even act upon it.

 

It has been suggested in religion that there is a demonic force in life. Are we being persuaded unknowingly in our struggles, perhaps being unaware of it, by a foreign influence acting through us that is trying to commandeer the direction of our thinking, like through our daydreaming, creating in us an often inharmonious frame of mind driven toward retaliatory insult and returned injury in a hunger for revenge.

 

Do people feel this from beyond themselves in a craving to respond with verbal harm or physical harm against our enemies? If this is a struggle against evil causing this. Isn’t the person facing this evil struggle extremely vulnerable. We are routinely alone to make these decision with society offering little help to us. We are almost adrift in a small rowboat in a wide open sea with no compass or land in sight.

 

Jesus insight proclaims that He is the light of the world. He declares how this world is in darkness while saying to us that He is the lamp before our path. Jesus insists that we are cared for by God wherever we are. However much darkness we may be in that we are loved. If this is true, it seems then to make rational sense that we love the person in darkness too, starting with ourselves, and then turning our love to humanity at large.

 

Yet we can justify hatred for other people like we do frequently. In this justification of our hatred we find all kinds of arguments in reasoning for supporting it. Are we justified in hatred or intended instead of this hatred to arrive at Gods vision by letting go of our hatred, forgiving others, and loving the person in darkness wherever they are.

 

I may not get how the Bible is understood completely but these teachings of Jesus I listen to carefully. I’ve been lead by both evil and good in life. I’ve grown to recognize in existence that all of us, some of us being more greatly effected then others, are surrounded on a spiritual battlefield here. Many people have been struggling in lengthy wars for years. I have been struggling with mental illness, through its delusions, and with a temper. I’m not alone on this journey, like a freak, either. We are all fighting and frequently losing battles for our thinking whether we’re insane or not.

 

Dark powers aspire against us in nefarious campaigns. In hidden wars we often aren’t informed or aware what is driving certain behavior in and against us. We are nurtured toward responses after being effected by other people’s injurious remarks, bad attitudes, and various kinds of insults, and we create our own aggressions and invented injuries behavior against other people by the same demonic nurturing of our thoughts.

 

These thoughts of anger, cruelty, deception, criminality etc. do they have a manipulator who is trying to lead people obliviously into the engagement of things like violent fantasy. Is it so that this influence may inspire revenge seeking leading for both persons involved, if carried through, to both of their ultimate ruin, one person ending up in prison the other dead perhaps. However much damage Satan can cause in this life it is claimed he will do ruthlessly.

 

I’m now suggesting here that I’ve experienced a nefarious force effecting my own minds journey living with severe mental illness. The impact from this force is responsible for some of my aggression, revengeful ideas, violent fantasy,  but I’m also suggesting that these thoughts are not rare or uncommon to any of us. Such influence meet us in the quiet of our lives creating resistance and unwillingness in us and our reasoning to let go of insult, injury, bitterness, and also facilitating various other malicious justifications for conflict.

 

I believe God is the teacher that we often rebel against by our logic, the counterintuitive teacher for many of us, teaching us to conquer our pride, forgive others, directing us to love our neighbor and enemy, all in spite of our egos. He wants by His purpose for us that we love people everywhere. People innocently, enough often, don’t know or recognize they are at war nor do they recognize that we are directed to love each other in the way we are really loved.

 

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Be sober-minded and alert. Your adversary the devil prowls around like a roaring lion, seeking someone to devour.

 

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For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.

 

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Thy word is a lamp unto my feet, and a light unto my path. It shows me the way wherein I should go.

 

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Then spoke Jesus unto them, saying, I am the light of the world: he that followeth me shall not walk in darkness, but shall have the light of life.

 

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But to those of you who will listen, I say: Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who mistreat you.

 

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And he lifted up his eyes on his disciples, and said, Blessed be ye poor: for yours is the kingdom of God. Blessed are ye that hunger now: for ye shall be filled. Blessed are ye that weep now: for ye shall laugh. Blessed are ye, when men shall hate you, and when they shall separate you from their company, and shall reproach you, and cast out your name as evil, for the Son of man's sake. Rejoice ye in that day, and leap for joy: for, behold, your reward is great in heaven: for in the like manner did their fathers unto the prophets.

 

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But I say unto you which hear, Love your enemies, do good to them which hate you, Bless them that curse you, and pray for them which despitefully use you. And unto him that smiteth thee on the one cheek offer also the other, and him that taketh away they cloke forbid not to take thy coat also. Give to every man that asketh of thee; and of him that taketh away thy goods ask them not again. And as ye would that men should do to you, do ye also to them likewise. For if ye love them which love you, what thanks have ye? for sinners also love those that love them. And if ye lend to them of whom ye hope to receive, what thank have ye? for sinners also lend to sinners, to receive as much again. But love ye your enemies, and do good, and lend, hoping for nothing again; and your reward shall be great, and ye shall be the children of the Highest; for He is kind unto the unthankful and to the evil. Be ye therefore merciful, as your Father also is merciful.

 

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Judge not, and ye shall not be judged; condemn not, and ye shall not be condemned: forgive, and ye shall be forgiven: Give, and it shall be given unto you: good measure, pressed down, and shaken together, and running over, shall men give into your bosom. For with the same measure that ye mete withal it should be measured to you again. 

 

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And he spoke a parable unto them, Can the blind lead the blind? shall they not both fall into the ditch. The disciple is not above his master: but every one that is perfect shall be as his master. And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother's eye, but percievest not the beam that is in thine own eye? Either how canst though say to thy brother, Brother, let me pull out the mote that is in thine eye, when though beholdest not the beam that is in thine own eye? Though hypocrite, cast out first the beam out of thine own eye, and then shall thou see clearly to pull out the mote that is in thy brother's eye.

 

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In my Father's house are many mansions: if it were not so, I would have told you. I go to prepare a place for you.

 

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“A thought occurred to me saying to me ‘Tell them about me.’ And so I began to write down my thoughts in compliance.”

"I will be coming soon. Tell them".

I have a member of my family who recently joked lightly with me, innocently enough, about how younger relatives in the family, relatives who are in their twenties, who live in another part of the province, now look to me and my writings like my thinking has great importance,  her joking with me that these younger people see me almost like a prophet in some of the things I’ve written.

 

For this family member who’s very good natured and kind, who considers herself wiser then they and me are, she in some areas like this, that I find myself questioning why, believes she understands normal and truth so thoroughly and far too well for comfort.

 

This is the case I speculate possibly because she understands normal every day life in a dismissive way of what insight I or anyone else might offer anyone in things pertaining to God or such related mysteries if one goes searching for them personally. Such an understanding by her that I have no prophet like authority, which I don’t, also secondarily I think reflects her attitude toward any insight I may have generally in me attaining any unusual understanding or any real proximity to God. God by this outlook can’t even be recognized or discerned in this way in such pursuits at all partly because she’s completely or partially blind to the existence of God perhaps and partly also because mental cases don’t figure out great truths about the universe and if they think they do the thing to do is to laugh.

 

Such things spiritually discerned go beyond the normal denials common to ego, beyond people’s sarcasm, and the defiance of resistance common to a contempt for spirituality. It’s also a blindness by such attitudes to see the need for any of us just to reach out and give our undivided attention to bigger explanations for reality then our common perceptions in the every day. Such attitudes won’t allow truths on such a level often enough to be looked into in truths about God, for instance, that people tune out far too proudly with great resistance.

 

By  giving attention to bigger questions and to God I’ve gone somewhere foreign and unrecognized to someone dear to me. But If she knew me so well, and if she knew the truth, as she jokingly thinks she knows it so dismissively, she’d be able to understand that mental illness or not I’ve had real experiences of a spiritual kind that these younger relatives are open to considering and that their open mindedness is not ignorance.

 

What can a troubled mind like mine possibly portray to the world in matters of truth or meaning is the attitude that commonly enough people perceive about the nature of reality and the mind I think.

 

Please think about the following. If it were to be suggested that many people alive, and many people dead, are, or were, blank slates adrift in the world to be written on. What If we are all in a place where we’re unavoidably susceptible to numerous and various states of consciousness meaning in many ways of how we think and view everything because of differing phenomena being written on those slates.

 

This nature involves people being vulnerable to many persuasive ideas in influences that many people alive therefore have experienced naturally enough. Those experiences have written on the blank slates of people variations of imperfect understandings sometimes in variations of perspective on matters of moral and ethical understanding, sometimes fairer, more just, more reasonable, more hopeful for instance, and often enough, too, as well, being common to the human condition, a moral and ethical decline and even bankruptcy leading to totally bad thinking and evil itself. Nefarious ideas completely outside people’s control can effect them therefore negatively. The mistake is to think and judge people by suggesting naively that they have a say in these struggles always.

 

Where we’re born for instance, or the condition of those times in those place we are in, can mostly determine who we'll be shaped into as people. People might claim that there is freedom in our choices, like some religious views suggest and argue, but do we unfairly expect multitudes across history in different regions and continents to be able to personally arrange their views of truth, God, their own thoughts, as ideas chaotically confuse them, all into one specific hope that is found only in certain claims and views beyond many people’s reach for different reasons.

 

The human being, wherever he/she lives, is a blank canvass through our development and up against local and personal struggles as well where there too, as those local influences challenge us openly and quietly in our own thinking mind, evil lurks there too.

 

We are challenged through interactions with other imperfect, often misguided, local minds around us in this way. There is much in our own culture here to mislead us with our minds being shaped, with our thoughts arranged unhealthily, as hostilities are formed in us, anger nurtured and conditioned in us, hatreds of others born, prejudices inspired, cruel imaginations normalized, dishonesties habitually shaped, conflicts sought and fantasized about, our journeys all being clouded and distorted by these challenges in our minds journey through the world.

 

Life doesn’t just point to truth or hope easily then. We can be greatly unaided in the development of our personality as we’re shaped by the world and not given the best way forward. We’re resistant to such things often that would help, defiant against God or Jesus for instance, examples and ways of living that personally I believe would develop healthier, safer, hopeful, compassionate sights forward, ways offering a compass that could open up paths to peace inwardly and outwardly, but no mass of people anywhere in this life is guaranteed the discovery of such ideas, pursuits, or beliefs. If they fail to find such thinking I don’t think we should condemn them as masses or individuals or believe God hasn’t a plan inevitably in mind for them.

 

The human being is a blank canvass and its unreasonable to hold all men/women everywhere to be responsible to doctrine the way things are. The shape our thoughts are in through life lived in this world might offer opportunities for good but they are not available opportunities fairly distributed or discoverable, they are not easily discernable, at least not for many of us.

 

If it's true, and I believe that we should believe it so, that we are all alike, so if there is a God, which I personally believe there is, and if that God is fair, in His justice, which I suggest it to be so that He is, then that love God has then is a love for all of humanity alike, not just some of us, and so then that love far exceeds the religious sermons calculations given from the pulpits of the world about who has hope in this world.

 

God’s love for humanity then stretches even far beyond the religious writings and the doctrine of Churches. His love sees the impossibility, as things now currently are in nature, of all people everywhere being able to align universally as a multitude to one discovery and embrace of certain particular claims and perceptions of who God is and what He teaches relevant.

 

If God loves and understands humanity so that in His great wisdom He knows the age old century to century and millennium to millennium changes of life; If He knows the wars and struggles through history, knowing the processes that go into shaping minds by differing ideas that go roaming in all the impoverished corners and far flung places of life; If He sees thoughts falling on the vulnerable lives of people without them having a direction or fair ability to decipher them recognizably or to properly compare them to other ideas; If God knows the limitations for us to know truth, wherever people are, whatever continent or time period we are in; If God knows all the developments and transformations of history influencing our state of consciousness, knows all our beliefs, our understandings and our prevailing ignorance; If He meets humanity wherever they are in this confusing world and cares for all, cares for every tear shed in every place and time in the world; If He knows how ideologies move, how they are ideas written down to rule and guide and control with people grappling on to one or another of many of them securing those ideas as their truth in the world for better or worse, good or Ill; if He, the God of the universe and beyond, knows humanities inherent vulnerability, as well as indescribable value, He therefore knows what the highest truth is which is Gods nature which is love.

 

If God gets humanities inability to be able to often see each other with understanding or justification where ideas about truth differ; if God loves humanity in spite of all the suspicions we have for each other; If this love is who God really is;  If He cares for us people, us as the blank canvasses being shaped by various winds of change, winds of ideas, by the drifting breezes of ideas of life, then what does it really mean for us?

 

if really we are all the same in this world then we might find it justifiable to love fearlessly every person here in this tired world however misguided they are. If we can have compassion on every human being anywhere and believe God to be fairer then the ideologies we often subscribe to then what we then arrive at by this kind of thinking is it something then to be suspicious of, is it somewhere dark, is it a disturbance of love for all kinds of deceptive reasons, or is it closer to the truth then views that gives up on billions of lives. 

 

“Tell them I love and care for them. I will be coming soon”.

Open spaces in the endless sky a prayer

I’m thinking as I sit here of the open spaces that humanity peers into by looking into the endless sky.

“Hello to you out there wherever out there places exist and whoever you are that is out there in them. I suspect strongly that you’re looking back toward the earth now through the magnificent gulfs between us as I write this.”

 It is perplexing what these mysteries might entail out there but for now they are unanswerable mysteries restricting us from having any concrete knowledge of them. Our curiosities therefore go unsatisfied while looking into these unanswerable depths and any explanations of truth into them for now do not completely exist and so offer us no complete explanations. 

We might suspect beyond all places and beyond all created things there is one who is truly the greatest Being and that He overarches all life everywhere. We might hope it is He who knows these terrains that we try to fathom and that it is He who goes about haunting in us a desire to look at them with wonderment. We might also question if He guides us to search for Him and His friendship and love.

 Is this great power we pursue existent and if so conscious on a superior level of consciousness; is He a Being of grandiosity in size; a Being of unrestrained creativity that is seismically superior in His use of pure thought; a Being able to order and actively speak all realities into existence; a creative power that goes outstretching into deep space knowing there endlessness in strange ulterior realities unfolding creatively forever, infinity there having no limitations in number, newness, or scale to His creative power.

Is He a master planner, a giver of glimpses, tastes and then reward giver of unfathomable joy; Is He a maker of ingenious vistas, like so many jaw dropping sights we see on earth;  a shaper and fulfiller of enormously satisfying experiences holding back in graduations such inestimable discoveries but then revealing them, leading us on over eons of ages to only then again reward us yet again beyond our beliefs by opening our eyes again and again to the heights of His goodness, ability and glory.

Dare we feel assured, if truly we hope it to be so, that this kind of Being is existent and conscious on a mindboggling scale. Can we hope He is freer then our imaginations and magnificently superior to us by existing in a way we cannot even dare to hope in because perhaps such gentle welcomed outcomes fail us in our present lack of faith, hope or evidence.

This Being would be more then we could hope in then. His joyous purpose when revealed might be repeated over again for us to delight in continuously in an outstretching plan lasting forever. He has a hallowed name we hear rumors of knowing now. Truly then this kind of Being might know a creative plan boundless and unimaginable to our highest estimates offering surprisingly perfection in duration and scale beyond our dreams. He might know much grandeur sights then merely colossal buildings with steeples, like the shapes of any of mans mightiest cathedrals, or the ingenious ancient buildings of Roman amphitheaters in the earths achievements of our finest and greatest architecture. He is perhaps even more ingénues in his masterfulness of creation, and then poetic description of it, then ocean tides with their glorious setting sun, then quiet creeks at dusk or dawn, then the wonderment of cycles of planets moving in the celestial Heavens. What we know of Him we see only in part and hardly is that all He has to offer us then.

We may predict rightly that He holds inestimable ages and ages of untold story's countless and fit for endless volumes of encyclopedias that only could hold some of His secrets that He as the revealer of all things ultimately only truly really knows. 

Who is it that you really are oh great God? what are you about in fullness? what do you have inevitably in store for us in all our future experiences? what are the places that await us our God? I wonder this now questioning the present unknown oh merciful Heavenly Father. The unknown is all yours to tell and you are only good and will reveal this in time to us I trust.

How we desire oh maker of life to be your companions oh great loving God and maker of existence. We are feeble, treacherous, unwise, and mistaken in so much that we think and do, but we want to be your friend and to not disappoint you God. 

Thank You for being my God I love you. Heavenly Father please have mercy on me a sinner. In Jesus name I pray.

Amen

Brainless musquitos

If there were billions and trillions of mosquitos amassed and sitting all lined up for several miles on a paved road, the entire worlds population of mosquitos, all tricked into congregating there by the hundreds and billions of trillions. 

 If in front of these oblivious brainless insects on the road was a steam roller and I was sitting behind the wheel of the big machine so If I decide to act, and act quickly, perhaps I can drive the steam roller over each and every last one of them exterminating their scourge from the earth and freeing humanity for happier days.  

If i put the key in the ignition and start the engine and begin to put the steam roller in gear and suddenly some earth loving, insect worshiping, lover of "all life", even these grotesque malaria ridden mosquitos, hollers out in horror. 

 "DON'T DO IT DONALD! THINK ABOUT THEIR POOR BABY’S! THEY HAVE FEELINGS TOO!"  

I'd shed a few tears yes I won’t lie but despite the tears of remorse I’d crank the shift in drive anyway and run down those blood suckers splattering their species guts out all over the asphalt! I'd not leave one of them bastards alive!

She'd be hollering out as I mowed them down "EEEEEEEEEEEEEK!" as I broke out in hilarious and morbid laughter.

The End Of The World. The second coming of Christ.

I left the hollow under the moonlight there beyond the big hill on a walk a few years ago. Then I returned again on another night some time afterwards and walking there I came out under the stars in that same hollow perhaps drawn there for an unknown reason. I beheld standing there that the canopy of Heaven was still there like before.   

I began to murmur to myself appreciatively and then decided to pray there in the valley beneath Heaven and the unknown universe which might even have exploded in singing and weeping there surrounded by the morning dew around me.

I thought then that nothing surpasses the greatness or the dignity of a human person. Human life was not just an idea or an abstraction. Human life is the concrete reality of a being that is capable of love, and this truth endures, this truth will not go away. Ultimate truth I knew too will not pass or change.

I was then reassured having no fear of moving into that unknown. I felt that God was with me and I understood I could step out into uncertainty without fear knowing that no harm can befall me, all is very, very well.

I thought of this experience as I stood tonight on the beck deck in early spring under the April stars. The distance beyond me in the sky was out there to be encountered I thought standing there alone. What was there definitely held something real of that fact I was thoroughly convinced. Yet because human thought cannot see into those depths, with us having no way of traversing the buriers to those unknowns, I think we’ve began to doubt the infinite sky’s potential to contain real answers within it. This hollowed unknown around us now masked in a dark canopy of endless space dotted with a few specs of light. 

I felt inspired to say authoritatively that this unknown holds more value and more mystery then we can begin to estimate or predict. Secrets, I thought I recognized, are out there in space and of an immense size and endless scope offering continues clues and further answers to the origins and mysteries of life. Along with such wisdom is the magnificent unending scenery far superior to what we know in immense outlying beauty. Beyond us too is superior intelligence that is vastly superior to what we now know.

These ageless truths don’t ever instantly become intelligible, I felt inspired to write, but instead discovering them will send us on further on a far reaching journey transforming our understanding and only gradually giving us new glimpses of what ultimate meaning really is that will never totally exhaust itself. Real knowledge, I believe, exceeds our ability to remotely comprehend it now as it is unfathomable to our full understanding as human.

What if a clue came to us of our meaning, all meaning, including what was perhaps out there in the unknown oddly surrounding us in deep space in the cosmos. What if we found a way to traverse those buriers with this discovery. Could we then grow intoxicated by the holy fumes of a grandeur we before underestimated were there to be found. Could we get a glimpse of a previous mystery now greatly expanding our tiny understanding and appreciations. What if our eyes suddenly were opened and we gazed into the stars at those awesome sights within them we had no way of predicting to be out there.

We might learn that life is not absurd or nonsensical at all but is part of an orchestra, something like a symphony, as  a musical like master performance, like something with a brilliance that’s profound, intrinsic, non disappointing, and of unlimited complexity. What if life does have a meaning with a much further scope and so also a truth waiting to reveal itself as we sit on this flying rock moving amid the celestial sky amid Heavens shadow.

If there were no large explanations for us being here then we wouldn't be here to begin with. There would be no orbiting rock in space with this earth in an unusual gravitational orbit moving in precision around a fiery sun. Instead of objects in motion, like there are, there would simply be the natural alternative which would be absolutely nothing but a changeless void, nihilism, simply a nothingness, no objects in motion, as existence as it is would be simply an impossibility without an objective or cause for it’s meaning at all.

Us being here, in a place a part of the infinite sky, among the deep shadows and recesses of unknown space, needs be taken seriously for the size of this mystery and not glossed over naively by us saying in error definitively that life does not having a meaning. To say there aren’t any answers beyond our present knowledge into this phenomenon, as we stand perplexingly amid this grand picture, is premature and naïvely cynical. The honesty of our predicament is that life’s real testimony to the truth could very likely mean that there exists something profoundly mysterious in existence and there is no good reason to think it should end with humanities consciousness asking questions about reality for no good reason. There is existing in truth an existing mind, thought, and further ability far superior to our own.

The possibilities of bigger ideas have not been exhausted. No one can say authoritatively, with any real certainty, at least to say it authoritatively with unquestionable wisdom, that there is no God to this mystery we are a part of.

The only thing certain in this life is we don't get the full picture, not any of the mystery with any adequacy, including none of life’s full reasons for itself; none of the answers as to the potential of endless outstretching distances around us and what radical changes such exploration would offer; or of underlying intelligent purposes;  of why this that we know is all here; of what power and full brilliance might have made this possible sparking our life into origination as existence.

If we think we get all of this life in this unknown place among the celestial sky enough to simplify it we delude ourselves with a presumptuousness that is common to our human reasoning. We do this in error with our absurd convictions and exaggerated knowledge claims. We, the human condition, have a common habit in our thought to say life has no meaning other then what we give it by our knowledge. Yet how far do we delude ourselves with such assertions while we are here existent, somewhere where we know not anything about our neighbors, or practically anything at all about real reality. We suggest and partially assume life is only here but reality really is everywhere including out there beyond us extending out into the infinity around us leading to who knows what unknowns.

 

As we struggle for the truth of our existence here how can God, If God exists, not know how susceptible human beings are to error in life in this world. He after all intricately devised our bodily systems.  He constructed the blue print of everything existent including us and how our minds work. God then has had to have bore witness to every imperfect thought we know across history.

 

After God brought us out of nothingness He would of not only known our hidden thoughts but well in advance God would have known that these thoughts would come long before we as humanity knew of them. So it only stands to reason that He then as God knows of all our vulnerabilities and of our continues, common, and deeply flawed and unavoidable reasoning's leading to the many errors of our ideas and organizational efforts that is common to the human condition we know. 

 

He then as God must know every ideology there is. By seeing clearly into our vulnerability of thought we pursue He  knows how we misunderstand those thoughts. He can hardly be surprised by how common we err. In succumbing to those misleading ideas He as God must relate to our mistakes too. If God knows the mysteries of the cosmos, which I suggest He does, then He knows every struggle that humanity is intricately caught up in.

 

Why then when He see's us in our darkest and most misguided moments can’t He be understanding to what He must recognize as common error to human nature. When we fear God looking at us don’t we occasionally fear in our uncertainty Him as an unreasonable, unmerciful, condemning, judgmental, unfair and ferocious natured power.

 

God as good no doubt sees what influences our reasoning and weak human imaginations experience and that we are being effected  frequently in life by many challenges to us knowing how to be compassionate, fair, peaceful, nonviolent, or forgiving. Is this state of error, through the uncertainty that we face, with us not always knowing what to do on our journey in life is this error entirely our fault alone to face and feel shameful about or is it not at least partially true that influences beyond our momentary awareness effects us. In our often confused grasp into nature, into knowing really what is right, would our confusion really reveal that there are hidden influences we can’t see that exist all around us, often outside of our ability to understand them, that make our ability to use our will or judgment effectively powerless to act fairly in many circumstances.

 

The thing about life too is that we don’t all have a compass fairly navigating us toward a Bible. The statistics are really statistics of people who never go near the Holy scriptures maybe, even probably, because the way toward opening a Bible is a difficult walk for many many people even if one lays nearby in a dresser drawer or on a table which for billions it doesn’t. The fault can hardly belong unto those billions of people in history who don’t naturally get steered even close to Christianity, which is my belief, but I love people of all religions.

 

Even for those people who do pick up a Bible how can an imperfect, continuously challenged, emotional person, a sexual minded being; a person among people often effected temperamentally creating conflict with each other,  susceptible to all the many errors of thought in this life, navigate this world free of the many challenges persuading us continually in error.

 

When mankind under organizational leadership is being persuaded and herded like sheep to the slaughter doesn't God understand the limitations on all His children. I purpose that He as God does understand and remains compassionate above our fears and doubts about the reach of His love.

 

Jesus died Christians believe because none of us can avoid sin so He came to die for those sins. That’s why Christ died to pay that price for us of sin.

 

Keeping this in mind the chaos for billions of people across history has been a course toward mayhem and terror as misguided individuals on earth couldn't in their place in time have stepped free from the course they were set on. The tribal, feudal, empire, nationalistic, religious, ongoing conflicts lead the vulnerable as they, as simple innocent people, couldn’t foresee where they were lead which has often been into deplorable violence and unavoidable error.

 

I profess to hold the opinion then that to hold the entire earth to the demand that they either accept Jesus or reject Him in 2020 AD in order for them to have any hope of a future with God to be arbitrary and unreasonable. This demand on humanity, in this world of competing ideas now, isn't the same kind of reasoning or understanding known as prior understanding was known so long ago. According to how the knowledge of the world was known 2,000 years ago, when the writers of The New Testament had written it in roughly 120 AD, things then were different and have now changed significantly. In that time the writers only understood the margins and limits of the Roman Empire and knew nothing outside it’s boundaries where barbarians lived.

 

As much as God might have inspired the writers of the New Testament that nonetheless does not mean that a human hand was not present too in the authorship. That human authorship reveals a limited world knowledge in that writing that the writers of that time could not have understood regarding anything beyond their time or geography. So in 2020 it is unreasonable to hold a larger world to a required demand of an ideology or to an only saving path that has only a limited effect persuasively to compel belief on most of the world across time and location. To expect people to adhere to that set of ideas, people who will never get a reasonable chance to learn from them or who simply can't be persuaded toward them is more then unreasonable it’s unfair.

 

People live in different parts of the world and live and believe ideas closer to home. For us to believe billions of  people have a desperate fate awaiting in what God has in store for them, an eternal punishment in the afterlife, is a perspective on God and His goodness terribly arbitrary and diabolically cruel if real. If God sees other people’s only real saving hope to be a demand on their humanity that everyone everywhere must at all times get things 100 percent right in life this arithmetic is savage. If He sees a foreign people’s religious claims, the hope of their own ideas, and equates those others beliefs to warrant a vast and deserving rejection of those multitudes of humanity in the afterlife then God is most unreasonable. I believe God is eternally more fair then this.

 

“God is love and in Him there is no darkness at all!” is what I believe about God.

 

The people alternatively who secure for themselves self saving ideas and then turn and judge humanities hope by serving their own interests in their own preservation by saving their own skin from ruin act rather desperately in my opinion. Don’t we really think that instead we should care about the rest of the human condition. By this doctrinal unbending obedience don’t we show a rather cold calculated way of seeing the fate of great parcels of humanity across geography and time.

 

I believe that God is infinitely fairer then we are. We as humanity have a track record of total unfairness, like crucifying Jesus, or leaving each other in malnutrition, or organizing torture, or pursuing dreadful and meaningless wars. We judge each other by our nature ruthlessly.

 

I've faced off with evil a few times in my life already to know it’s real. What I know from those confrontations is that evil exists in this world and it recruits and persuades through ideas, elaborate ideology, and it confronts us in life in our private thoughts through our imaginations. Other people's attitudes and persuaded purposes at times too has them being guided against us in conflict unknowingly by the ideas appearing in their private thoughts. In the world of the mind are the instigating sparks of anger, ideas that enrage hostile opinion, impulsive suspicions reaping confusion, disrupting emotions, ideas compelling hatred. What murky pool of evil might such impulses emerge out of.

 

In the mind can grow perversions and dark desires for great cruelty but opposite such evil is another force that is ultimately good.

 

I don’t think many of us are simply guaranteed the opportunity of a choice of the will  toward figuring out good however. I think that we can figure out the path of the good sometimes, some of us, but that not all of us can in this life know that guiding truth. We can not always choose the narrow road to the good. I feel we often have no available choice of the will to discover it, no real decision to purposefully accept or reject that good, that instead it’s just the confusion many lives know living the way many people do in this world. For many people I suggest the way toward good just never clarifies itself.

 

This worlds full terms are yet known incompletely too. I agree with the saying “How folks get it wrong”. Yet all folks everywhere get many things wrong and no one has it all sorted out. The struggle we're a part of has been a journey shaped under many persuasions and powers working in the judgment and imagination of man. We may wonder why this earth has been such a battlefield in so much of our histories struggles creating so much of the awfulness we know as the pursuit to knowing real knowledge of the truth has had so many different ideas competing for humanities loyalties.

 

And so I suggest that the terms overarching our lives have never been presented to us clearly or fairly for every man to have the same hope or even a resemblance of that hope in this yet to be understood existence. What we can hold fast to in our hopes is that there is evidence of love in the world and that is our real hope. We can experience that hope in a relationship of experiential love with God and each other.

 

I believe my faith is more then a crutch. By faith I experience hope as my mind try’s to be open to possibilities, to further horizons, toward the recognition of an awaiting journey ahead of us beyond all our mortality. I have the hope of an awaiting trip into Heaven to be taken to places beyond reason, beyond imagination, to places of total tranquility, exponential and continuously increasing and changing in beauty, where the pleasant, the joyful and the kind are found in better perfect love. This mystery in God’s love will open a door up to a magnificent joy many more times greater then the joy we dare glimpse now at our freest.

 

This kind of hope for a future joy may not seem realistic to you. It is in our nature to be cynical, doubtful, and to dabble in what we consider to be what’s realistic. Having this realism we think we have our compasses working for what counts as real but I suggest those compasses are off, operating faultily, that they don’t work correctly. Our minds are in rebelliousness and resent ultimate hope reducing our vision to only a short distance ahead of us that is hardly far enough to see into the real nature of realities potential. According to how the cosmos and its mysteries beyond really operate we in this defiance know nothing in certainty of real truth.

 

God is a superior law giver and maker beyond our despair and skepticism.  God governs everything we’re a part of where nothing good will be withheld or lacking toward us in His plan. He offers our future a place where we will be freed to further knowing of the joy of the heights and depths and real potential possibilities of what it truly means being alive before the endless and possible.

 

I profess to know that Jesus is alive and exists and that it is a fact that I know that He is here with me right now. It is true that He is with all people who ask Him into their lives.  He has been speaking with me through my prayer life.

 

Jesus, 2,000 years ago, was beaten severely, mocked foully and ruthlessly, humiliated terribly, by us, and then nailed by rusted jagged spikes crudely to wooden posts in an act that was vicious and cruel. He was the Son of God, our Savior. He was not the “baby Jesus” but Jesus as Gods Son who was hoisted up in the breeze on a Roman cross in the literal history of this world we now live in. Jesus my Lord hung there on the Roman torture device suffocating slowly and then thirsting until the soldiers standing nearby Him drove a spear ruthlessly into His bowls.

 

Jesus came into this world to die as a sacrifice for sin and He died as He was asked to. Once He had died He rose from the dead and appeared unto His disciples in different places in the countryside. Finally He left this world with the promise that one day He would return to it in a second coming. God left us with His Holy Spirit as our comforter until then.

 

I know that Jesus is the Son of God because I sought assurances of that reality through faith and the truth is I received the answers I sought by searching. God is actually sitting here with me right now. I don’t see Him but He is with me, I can tell, and I sometimes hear Him through my thoughts.

 

“Behold, I stand at the door, and knock: If any man hear my voice, and open the door, I will come in to him; and will sup with him; and he with me.  To him that overcometh will I grant to sit with me in my throne; even as I also overcame, and am sat down with my Father in his throne.  He that hath an ear, let him hear what the Spirit saith unto the churches.

 

Revelation 3:20-3:22

“A Rant” Read if you dare!

I’m a little tired of trying to sound like a big expert writer with my blog entry’s when I’m really not. There are so many people, including many people on Facebook, who write really well compared to me. I’m an amateur writer and choose to write mostly  because it helps organize my thoughts but also because I’ve learned that it helps me think through more possibilities in the pursuit of knowledge. Writing is really a form of thinking and so the process has added some complexity to my views of life in this way. I write like an authority but I really have no authority just arguments and observations I like to think matter. 

For much of my adult life I’ve admired the honest evangelist Billy Graham. I would watch his televised addresses broadcast from baseball stadiums across the world and I had a collection of tapes of His religious gatherings that had beautiful singing, testimonies, and Billy preaching the word of God. In my twenties I would drink beers watching the tapes when I was alone and seeking much needed spiritual support and uplift in my life. Billy called on the enormous audiences before him to come forward and accept Jesus Christ into their lives. He would quote the Bible telling his audience: “You must be born again of the Spirit”.

I really admired Billy and I myself believe in the actual historical existence of a figure known as Jesus Christ. What has changed for me somewhat is greater knowledge of the world and of history.

The more I’ve had time to think over the years the more I’ve dared asked myself and God some questions. One question I’ve felt compelled to ask is why would this existence be such an unfair place when it came to the experiential chances, and therefore limited opportunity, to hear such a message preached by Billy Graham in order to be saved. Why would so many of us in this life therefore have no fair potential at reaching the saving ideas said to be our only hope beyond this world.

I wonder why the rules of existence would be so unfair like this. Why would God and His created universe calculate terms that the odds of humanity finding hope were odds this desperate and this hopeless a picture for so many.

Multitudes of people, accordingly if such terms are correct, will perish from the odds allowed by those conditions of experience and opportunity. Such reasoning only allows safe passage to a narrow few out of so many other billions of lost souls in life. Such thinking suggests that God demands from us that we must know certain doctrine accurately but doctrine outside many of our human experiences in this world to know.

People fearfully cling to their Bible’s and recite word for word assertions based on, according to them, a flawless literally interpreted word of how history supposedly, word for word, literally happened too.

This is a dangerous life when it comes to physical survival and the ideas human beings dabble in. This life is even more dangerous then we think. If what these systems of thought to date, engineered into concepts, various persuasions, antidotes, and truth claims, are totally correct, word for word in their claims, we all are facing even far worse danger then we could ever of foresaw in our more rosy care free moments of joy. For if ideology in life must be sorted through for explanations of hope and if out of that journey one specific ideology, of so many, must be adopted, and this is how humanity will be determined a fate in the afterlife, then we the sifters, the simple, navigating, error finding persons in this confusing world, best hope we somehow, by rather feeble odds of hope for many of us,  grasp unto the right ideological antidote for hope. We better secure for ourselves that arbitrary antidote wisely otherwise we'll go elsewhere then somewhere pleasant with multitudes of other abandoned human beings running along with us.

 

With so many ideas confusing us, them being diverse and distinct from each other, with them moving across language, culture, tradition, being shaped by histories of family genealogy, then, within this smorgasbord of truth claims and claimed certitudes that are all wrestling for our agreement, is this how God really will unevenly award out rewards and punishments? If this is how it is, this gloom and doomsday calling we are asked to accept on planet Earth, and our hope really only wrests in a minority of voices who stumble into a stadium and hear a charismatic evangelists message being motivated to disturb us into repentance then how is this a fair world for many.

 

While such weak voices make such proclamations into the wind billions of other people, many decent people in India, China, Africa, Indonesia, Iran,  slink off into the sunset of their graves void of this antidote that might of offered them this saving grace.

 

We are in one desperate pickle if God isn’t fairer then we are and we should tremble and shake and let our despair overwhelm us for keeps because life is one strange experiment then.

Why would there be an inferno like punishment of hell for doctrinal incompatibility also when our inadequate discovery of another mans truth is so common to the human condition that it leads mankind to reach many different unavoidable conclusions in how we see the world in order to believe the different ideas that we do.

I still admire Billy and I still believe that Jesus Christ was crucified in history and died for our sins but I have not succumb to accepting that the downfall of most of humanity is included within that saving plan of love.

To add to my confusion of life a full scale Noah's Ark attraction and theme park opened on July 7, 2016 in northern Kentucky. This ark is constructed with the dimensions described in the Bible in the book of Genesis. Visitors to this ark can see life size models of animals such as elephants, unicorns, komodo dragons and velciraptors.

Even though the book of Genesis in the Bible says the Earth is only 6,000 years old the museum claims that there were still dinosaurs less then 6,000 years ago and that they coexisted with people of Bible times in the period of Noah. The museum offers no explanations of how the dinosaurs then went extinct.

I watched the documentary on this Noah’s Ark museum on PBS which had classrooms within the museum that school children visiting the ark daily filled by the hundreds each hour of the day. They teach the children there how dinosaurs were among the creatures to have survived the flood by being permitted access to ride on the giant ark with all the other kinds of animals.

Apparently, for size and space issues however, the dinosaurs were conveniently baby dinosaurs. This all explains then the archeological evidence of dinosaurs while the earth can still be said to really be only 6,000 years old supposedly anyway. I’m left with a reaction to these claims that for me has me feeling a far greater skepticism then  merely having just plenty of uncertain doubts.

On the other side of looking at belief in life is the view that religion or the idea of God is an absurd one. Such human claims of knowledge assert to have a grasp on everything relevant about the world’s mysteries in this way enough so to put God and questions of meaning to rest that look to the unknown for a form of superior life.  This form of atheistic belief explains for us then, supposedly adequately enough, our meaning when it comes to these unknowns, or ultimately our lack of meaning as we will die and cease to exist.

I wonder myself however if it could be possible that we haven't gathered half, or even a few, of the pieces to this puzzle as of yet in order to put them together right. Can the truth in our current understanding of our existence remain vastly incomplete and inadequately resolved. Could the real overarching truth of existence mysteriously still exist as a mystery beyond our present imaginations capacity to understand it.

Maybe then truth isn't all neatly described and laid out by our proud human knowledge claims on both sides. Could it be not only probable but extremely likely that we don't know where we are in the firmament of the infinite sky?

My view of humanity now isn't tribal like it was before so my views have changed in this way too. I don't mistakenly desire to look suspiciously and with hostility towards outsiders beyond the border of my own country. I'll only be on this hostile earth a short while with all the conflict here. Many people in this world will spend their lives justifying hatred and producing in familiar packs selfishness that looks outward and casts blame on others. I choose in my beliefs to unapologetically try and care about people everywhere regardless if their ideas align with my beliefs or even my interests.

 

I'm only human so yes if some ISIS fanatic picked up a knife and sliced off my hand I'd have to abandon my attempt to try and have love for them in that instance. Yet really the view that all humanity is loved and matter, as hard as at times I might try to care in this way and can’t, is how I think God really feels about humanity.

 

People can and will invent all the corrosive, hateful, fanatical, division creating ideas they can indoctrinating the sponge like audiences who are willing to soak it up because minds love a good hate. Despite this truth though when you show hatred you aren't really doing what is ultimately right or what really matters in this life in my opinion. You’re acting in ways I believe that don’t understand that love is what governs everything around us and so you miss life’s real terms and the ultimate picture.

 

You might say fuck that nonsense I don’t believe that. What If however you could have love to be real, as being what overarches everything in life, would you permit it if you were the one to choose if it was allowed or would you rather the way it is now in a divided judgmental world. Would you rather hold unto the idea of this divided world, a world ultimately with no future hope or purpose, a world where every common man is a great angry judge of his neighbor.

 

Many people I think would prefer this later option because they’d rather an imperfect love in the world that was simply on their terms is the sad truth of human belief.

 

When we judge each other we don't usually have a coherent explanation of people’s history and that personal histories effects on the persons thought nor do we have any general or adequate insight into the reality of most other people’s lives. The challenges the human race therefore faces, and has faced since civilization began, means that human lives have always been in a state of real ignorance the majority of the time wherever they sat and analyzed their surroundings and wherever they struggled in their behavior toward each other.

 

What we have in our knowledge when we judge each other is only little bits and pieces of the puzzle strewn together into an argument that feels good. Our judgment secures and justifies ourselves and our need to be right and justified in who we are in a self serving way by pursuing our own self interest.

 

I think we take delight ranting and raving at other people who we think are deserving of our condemnation from our belief we have great understanding and righteousness. For all the injustice and calamity in the world we get to remain pure, innocent and self-righteously right in condemning each other.

 

What this kind of world view misses, at least one important thing it misses, is that real love for people understands instead that people in their numerous states of ignorance and error have no real vision to find their way out of error a great deal of the time.

 

If God is just and fair and loving I can't see Him sifting through all humanity, across all cultures, and assigning blame ruthlessly and then excluding from Heaven, callously, the people who are really beautiful, even when misguided, everywhere in this world regardless what ideas exist there where they live.

 

How, for instance, can a young mind in this world know what's in his or her best interest most of the time. That mind inevitably will find the material unavoidably, in the form of persuasive thought, that is nearest to that persons life, and it will, regardless of it’s value, present itself to them in charismatic form. The guided person in life then won't know how to overt their eyes from the ideas in this innocence and so the older teachers will profit from their vulnerability. Like parasites the idea deliverers act by offering no saving path to avoid any of this toxicity of thinking or ideology and even they usually don’t know any better themselves.

 

The mind of mankind will therefore unavoidably get poisoned in life and our minds are blank canvasses that need direction. You can't just fill a mind with any kind of garbage at all and expect people to be able to reason their way to peace and safety that's what we don't seem to understand. People are stewing in all kinds of ideas through their imagination without any real readable road signs, with no compelling councilor in sight, and succumbing to the worst of influences. So bad ideas lay dormant in the subconscious and within the imagination of people while in many societies throughout this world there is a stubborn unwillingness to help guide humanity by the right kind of teaching for them.

 

When we tell youth that Jesus, for instance, has no relevance, although His ideas really offer us life foundations for how to think healthily in our relationships, we fail them. We fail society because God taught the clearest way to non violence, forgiveness, and toward having real concern and compassion for our fellow man in a demonstration of real love.

 

I think that God exists and looks over all of us human beings with love. I believe that people in their fifties and sixties are still children in the eyes of God. I think that God sees how ideologies spread, knows how those ideas move, understands how susceptible to good and bad ideas we are in this world. I think He knows people fall innocently into error and that people judge error ruthlessly with severity but that those who judge are rarely fair within themselves.

 

I think God gets that multitudes in certain regions of earth will fight for meaningless causes, that regions of the planet will know different religions, and that people will make mistakes. Instead of God severely dividing up those with the right ideas, and casting away those with the wrong ideas, I suggest He as our God will be merciful, fair, and show who He is which is love. He will show us what is love fully revealed, not half-hidden, on a scale so mindboggling we can't even begin to fathom its possibilities for us.

 

When I did a study of history by watching Yale and other university lectures online I learned about Ancient Israel and about the Hebrew or Old Testament scriptures. As the professor went through the first part of the Bible as an historian, and not someone who takes literally accounts of talking donkeys, man eating fish, staves turning into snakes, parting red seas, Moses in a basket rescued from a river by Pharos daughter and etc. I took it all in and thought about what constitutes real knowledge.

 

I spent fifteen years learning of ancient Greece, ancient Egypt, ancient China, ancient Rome, then watching lectures on the middle ages, reading about Christian history, learning of the history of science and other subjects. I mention this to make the point that previously I had no thorough conception for how the world works before I did this study. I still don’t understand a lot about this world but what I did learn by this study is how humanity has always been searching for the truth.

 

You no doubt have heard of the Inquisitions. That was the Church cruelly responding to other ideas threatening their control of thought at the time. These ideas challenged the Church’s self-professed ownership of the right to truth. The punishments were severe too, disembowelments, torture wheels, people burned alive etc..

 

The Church thought it held the only claims that were to be permitted for human beings to think upon. Yet people, like in ancient Greece with men like Aristotle, and many others of every age, they kept pursuing truth. Those that came after them were other philosophers and future scientists who began cataloging nature, philosophizing about our moral rights, constructed political systems, and created rule of law. Such thinkers pursued many other endeavors too too numerous to list. Some thinkers tried to understand the celestial movements of planets in the galaxy and some thinking dared to question the absolute authority of the Bible as literal history or the earth as the center of the universe.

 

I don’t think this is bad at all even if you believe in God like I do. At least such developments of ideas in our history unfolding like this doesn’t have to be bad.  I think truth is something we as humanity have been on course to pursuing and desiring to figure out for a greater reason as far back as our history of ourselves allows us to look. This is why I don’t mind Darwinian evolutionists when their thought is on course in the pursuit of truth wanting to find it. I don’t feel hate or hostility toward people who say there is no God either. In my feeble opinion if humanity was all simply gullible enough to believe in floating arks filled with unicorns and dinosaurs we wouldn’t have much intelligence or much freedom at all to speak of.

 

Such thinking might fail to believe in God yes but to question the idea of there not being a God must be something God allows, if He exists, and that I suspect He finds unthreatening to Him unlike us who can feel greatly insulted and threatened by it.

 

As humanity we wonder about many different possibilities testing uncertainty with different preoccupations by searching and wondering about life’s mysteries in this world. All of us can wonder about life’s mysteries and puzzles by wondering where everything came from and where everything is going. We can ask what really is out there in the cosmos. What natural laws don’t we yet understand. What other life might exist and if we dare ask it if there is hope for us. We can ask can love account for more then merely being an evolutionary adaptation in emotion for social survival and we can ask could God exist giving our lives further future purpose and immeasurable joy.  

 

All through history people have asserted themselves to hold different ideas about our world with certainty. That has always meant that it has been in our nature to be miniature experts.

 

However much I may wonder about all this and try and remain open to different possibilities my trust returns again to my Lord as the figure of a compassionate and loving Jesus hanging on a Roman Cross. For me I really do believe He suffered and died for our sins. Yet I think Jesus was dying too for Hindus and Muslims and Buddhists and Atheists and the entire world population.

 

When the scriptures were written the writers knew nothing of the world beyond that area of the Roman Empire and the area around ancient Israel. If they had written the Bible with the knowledge of our world we have now the pages would likely have been written very differently. This has to be perhaps because the Holy scriptures have human authorship as well as Gods hand in their creation. Imperfect people under Divine inspiration wrote the Bible over many years.

 

I choose to believe this myself and yet I don’t have a complete system of knowledge explaining history in order and completeness and I don’t think anyone does in completeness. We can argue like we have a full account for reality on earth so all history can be all summed up by us and so we can justify our beliefs in this way but in reality no human being can have all of that knowledge. I believe neither of us whether a scientist, a philosopher, a person of faith knows this mystery adequately enough to say absolutely what lies behind us, beyond us etc..

 

I don’t have a neat system therefore like some people that assert by those arguments to know that the obviously fictitious story’s of The Old Testament for instance, which I don’t take to be literal history, are, according to them, real history as it occurred. According to some people to not take everything literally in the Bible throws holes in everything else about God but I don’t believe that to be so. I don’t know if the story’s were allegory's but I choose to think they did come from divine inspiration in people’s lives searching for meaning.

 

Regarding the natural order around us here material particles in various configurations are said to be moving and reconfiguring in accordance with physical law. Philosophers in response have asked that if we assume that the series never had a beginning in time then why is there such a series when there might have been a different one or even a changeless void.

 

Matter too has, in infinite space with all it's unknowns, oddly created us people, constructed in us a complicated brain that curiously has a state of consciousness finding us in a somewhat knowing and observing state. The mental state we now know as living, self aware, conscious beings leads us to make some of our arguments for the existence of God from it. Some of our arguments are based on the demands of mortality, the existence of beauty, the normativity of human rationality, religious experience etc.

 

Life in this way is most interesting such as the desire we have to look outward and beyond us in the universe for clues of our existence. Will we discover other living beings out there somewhere. As we explore far back into our own past in history what might be found there. When we look into the nature of knowledge, its possibility, scope, and general bases where will it lead in our search for certainty in this life.

 

Out of history and the doctrines held absolutely to be real by the Church there came also arguably a healthy skepticism. This skepticism became prepared to consider the application of doubt even to oneself and not merely to other things until a solid criterion of truth can be produced and we aren’t there yet in this life.

 

Reading a little on metaphysics made me wonder upon ultimate reality recently and what really exists and what is it that distinguishes existence and makes it possible. Some of us search to find evidence that life has meaning and purpose after our death. But what an anomaly this existence is for us to be a part of all this life here, and maybe, it remaining yet to be revealed, perhaps fantastically, far greater unknown possibilities may await us.

 

Again this existence is a state where we have a consciousness curiously. The question could be then asked does our self-awareness in existence emerge from sheer random chance or for a larger purpose. Can we survive our death and find purpose in a future beyond our lives here and now. I believe that a future with God does exist for us and that even for skeptics and atheists that it’s premature of them to assume that there isn't something important to our being alive and that life doesn’t have something in store for our future. The survival of death would explain further our shared experiences, like the profound meaning we know and feel in the love we have for each other.

 

I think that I know there is something beyond us and it’s God.  He has a guiding hand in matter constructing the design or blueprint and complexity of us and our bodily systems and complex brains. He is responsible as well for the curios and wonderful natural environment we find ourselves surrounded by. So I think that there is something intrinsically valuable in the thought we now know and have freedom to use.

 

I often wonder why God would be threatened in His omnipotence by human freedom. He as God knows past, present and future and in this way therefore understands the course human beings will take across time in every intellectual investigation we undertake that searches for the truth. Will God condemn us for roads He no doubt prepared for us to wonder down.

 

I would like to state this also that I feel that many people in life would be truly kind, on a much larger scale, if they would only be allowed and presented with the right opportunity to be so. The chance rarely presents itself in life by opening up for us the opportunity for a seismic chance at real kindness in a kind action we can take.

 

If many people among us could be transported somehow to 1944 Auschwitz Germany to the concentration camps controlled by the Nazis what might that mean. If somehow the SS guards could become distracted and the people seeking kindness could offer the starving Jewish people there, women, men, old and young, heaping bowls of meat stew. If in these people’s hands now was the opportunity to see the suffering prisoners momentary joy and to feel their extreme gratitude in their malnourished state as they ate the food gratefully. If people could give the prisoners arm loads of loafs of fresh bread and also offer great sympathy and reassurances that the war would soon be over and that they’d be soon released how would showing that kind of love change them?

 

If we could love the people there in that awful place in history as human beings many many people would find such a personal opportunity like this for love, compassion, and kindness to be appreciated from them something deeply satisfying to their souls.

 

In that act of love there would be no doctrinal differences of ideas about who God is interfering in that concern for the prisoners because we'd simply be acting in a way, at least then in that situation, that we could now see was clearly intrinsically right and good. Such an obvious decision of how love works in this instance defies a need for an ideological correctness of belief in others and shows us love and how God really sees humanity I believe. The people in the concentration camp could just as easily have been Muslim, Buddhist, Hindu or any other group and to show love would matter just as much.

 

This is love and this is who I think God really is. This is and how God will treat all of humanity not by our narrow road doctrines that look at humanity and have us figuring from our hardness of heart that only few persons of the human race will find Heaven. Love is the real language God deals in and we only understand it’s light before us dimly.

 

When I posted this argument in a chat room yesterday making reference to the concentration camp one reaction was voiced in reply particularly to it. The remark that was voiced basically said that “this world suffers from over population anyway”.

 

I guess I could interpret that unusual reaction to mean that feeding hungry people is a wasted action in a world of over population by this belief. I could maybe infer perhaps also that this person might see his own interests selfishly, with a self entitlement to his food, and with little empathy beyond his own immediate neighbors. Yet why do we here in North America consider ourselves by this kind of logic to be the one’s of the world who shouldn’t starve and that others in say Africa or India or China to be the one’s burdening the resources of the planet and not us equally so.

 

The people in all corners of this earth are as equally human as anyone  anywhere else. Yet national, racial, religious, cultural identities dissect that perspective alienating people from a belief in a shared equal humanity across the planet.

 

Religion can dissect humanity into distinctions reducing the dignity of other people. Patriotism does the same thing to our trust of others, our understanding, and our compassion toward them. I profess this to be an error most sinister if we think anything about other humanity other then in us trying to bridge our divide with these other people.

 

All people in general believe that God supports their country ahead of, or in spite of, the interest of others regardless which nation they live in. Monarchs, Presidents, Prime Ministers, Dictators all proclaim that God loves them and favors and supports them. It really doesn't matter to the people there therefore if their nations are Socialist, Communist, a Kingdom, or a Democracy because all believe the same thing and justify all kinds of actions, intentions and conduct in the belief their favored and more important then everyone else.

 

Finally our eyes and senses receive stimuli from the world and then our brain organizes that stimuli using language and constructing concepts.  Out of this process, commonly in human nature, the tendency we have in our thought, from it, is to judge others. In this way we unfortunately regularly judge each other very imperfectly.

 

As we judge others we seem to not perceive within ourselves, in our own minds, in how we form our own judgments our own great error. This error believes commonly enough in human nature that instead of being unjust in our indignation that we’re innocent and great in our views and opinions being justifiable authorities in our views of the value of other people.Through our indignant attitudes in judging we err greatly and all people at times of course do.

 

I think the tendency we have to err in judgment is an inherent and prevalent one in human nature. We might understand that a lot of other people have strange ideas and that often they are not simply just flawed but totally wrong. Yet we still live under the illusion that our own particular attitudes read and judge the world personally with flawless and accurate insight even when we condemn others self-righteously.

 

When judging others it isn’t the case however that we are justified in doing so. When we fail to see the worth of other people through our judgment of them and when we justify that we’re righteous and worth something more then someone else then we err. If who we speak angrily of isn’t worth anything then we’re greatly mistaken in our judgment of other people then.

 

I suggest that It's not just ok to love others everywhere but that it’s us with the greatest insight and understanding we can possess when we love all other people in this world regardless of what their ideological condition is.

Yet we can't ordinarily grasp this kind of universal all encompassing love when we see violent people or misunderstood other cultures. We see them instead as being without our own beliefs about ultimate truth of who God is for instance.

 

By showing an all inclusive love, however, it has an importance for our lives more real then the current distinctions we make through our own ideology lenses. This is true because it is really true that love is the ultimate transcending language governing all things in life. Love seen for all life everywhere deserves our true and real attention beyond our judgments of one another. Whatever systems of mistaken thought we may know in the human race as individuals or groups what it all comes down to is that we are all in various states of unavoidable error. We need to love the human person in spite of the moral or idea errors a person gets lost under the spell of in order for us to find real wisdom.

 

The darkness was strung by the stars and as I observed them I kept wanting to stop, and enjoy, and stare, and pray, but I was hurried instead to keep moving on. So I left the hollow under the moonlight. Then it was another time that I returned and came out under the stars again. I beheld this time that the canopy of Heaven was still there and so I murmured and prayed there in that valley beneath Heaven which I thought exploded in singing there in the weeping of the morning dew around me.

 

I realized then in an instant it could be counted on that nothing surpasses the greatness or the dignity of a human person. Human life, I clearly recognized, was not just an idea or an abstraction. Human life is the concrete reality of a being that is capable of love and this truth endures, this truth will not go away.

 

Truth I knew will not pass or change. I was therefore reassured to have no fear of moving into that unknown. I felt that God was with me and I understood I could step out fearlessly knowing that no harm can befall me, all is very, very well.

 

I then dreamed that night that I was in a dory rowboat and paddling across the tranquil, bottomless, star lit, cosmic oceans of Nova Scotia riding and rolling on the tides being there effected by gravity. I rolled there on the water somewhere between the planets and those great unseen ravines of silence out there. I was below the moon somewhere in that awesome emptiness.

 

Beloved, let us love one another; for love is of God; and every one that loveth is born of God, and knoweth God.

 

1 John 4:7