July 5, 2020

Dear Virtuals:

If you happen to be that rare person (or persons) who “get” and “like” my lengthy theological treatises (like the really long one I posted in the night last night) – you might like this.

This is related to the earlier posted one. It is something I worked through to help me understand and to find the voice with which to express that magnificent tome. I wrote this when I wasn’t feeling it and when I was trying to feel it. I wasn’t feeling the voice yet, so I wrote this. It is a valuable adjunct to that tome, I think. It is like a footnote, stripped of the historical material.
I cover some of the same ground in a different way. So, here you are. I hope someone likes it. I hope someone gets it. I hope someone gets something out of it. I hope it helps.

Sincerely,

me. just me.


It is commonplace and obvious to look about at the world and see an arbitrary cruelty of needless and pointless death and suffering. It is commonplace and obvious to see a base, fundamental depravity from which we need salvation.

Every arbitrary wasted cut-short life. Even of the fetus. Every pointless miscarriage of justice. Every wrong. Every lynching. Every counter-lynching (as if that is even a thing, but I want to be inclusive). Every cruel infliction: they all pile up and accumulate – (they measure out our lives, teaspoon by teaspoon) – until they overwhelm. Certain despair ensues.

Pointless death, selfish endangerment, unruly anarchic destruction. All is out to get you. And the world can end.

It is commonplace and obvious to seek consolation.

But any bridge from this physical arbitrary chaotic depravity to something secure, just and permanent is conceptual: intellectual in nature. Every hope of salvation is ethereal in nature. And we want and need real in a world of real.

So, thus, consensus has created real. Thus Spake Zarathustra. Consensus does have the advantage of strength in numbers. And the more are certain in a like manner the more solid the security is. Or appears. Or is known. Yet, it can’t escape from its nature and its nature is intellectual. This is perhaps the primary paradox to the anti-intellectual.

O where is the solace?

Hidden in the strength of numbers is a real weakness. The lifeline of promise desperately clung to by physical beings who fancy a spiritual future is as arbitrary as it is insecure.

And this is the part that outsiders can never get. To the outsider – or ‘other’ if you will – it is commonplace and obvious to see a privileged group banning together to exclude. It is not commonplace and obvious that the very exclusion is a consequence of insecurity, a fearful terrorized shuddering at the very overwhelming arbitrariness of it all.

I’d like to explain this further. Actually I will. This comes from an earlier conceived discussion which this formerly brief exposition is but an outcrop of. So there’s *that* to look forward to!

The hatefulness of the “saved” towards the depraved looks, at face value, to be just that: hatefulness. Passive aggressive or defensive aggressive or just plain conquering aggressive hatefulness perhaps. At different times and contexts and situations and occasions all of the above, of course. But hatefulness nonetheless. And, obviously upon observation, commonplace and obvious hatefulness. Experience can be a tough-love teacher.

This outward commonplace obviously misleads. It is the root source of much deep misunderstanding. The outsider can hardly be blamed for finding the excluders hateful. That much should be obvious, but it isn’t.

How to explain how the picture changes based on perspective? How can the excluded ones see obvious hate directed at them as excluded pariahs while from the ones being sheltered from the dangers of the depraved the opposite is obviously seen? For those on the inside just know there is an absence of hate given out, only love. Yet from the precarious inside is seen a chaotic violent ungrateful mean petty hate being fed back on an unfair and unjust basis. How to explain such convoluted sentences?

Schizophrenia is one way to explain. For projection is the phenomenon at play. The insecurity of the insider must be considered and, to what degree possible, appreciated.

It is the emphasis of love and goodness that blinds the insider. They, of course, are desperate for salvation from the onslaught of depravity. Semblance of security within the physical world is only gained precariously from strength in numbers illusion and conviction of love and goodness. Yet insiders can never sit well with assurance.

Unspoken but terrorizing is the arbitrariness of it all. There is no bridge to the spiritual world. It is all only an intellectual exercise. It is only a concept. It is a salvaged and repurposed concept too, outdated and made for different times and circumstances altogether. The insider is never assured of anything. He gyrates from assurance to terrorized despair. (She gyrates likewise and is additionally terrorized as an outsider from the He within as well). In this terrorized bi-polar despair of mental anguish they project fearful hate. They never see it as hate only as love. This is pure schizophrenic projection.

WTF I can see you saying about this as you go about vigorously shaking your head. Don’t shake it off. Your reaction is just another symptom of your projection. It will only come across as hate to an observer.

What if I told you that this whole physical world doesn’t exist? The very depraved violent wasteful, evil killing hateful unjust impure suffering hypocritical succotash of a world does not even exist? Crazy, you well might say. But it is true. The physical world is an illusion. If I said that all the wrongful death, all the cruel wrongs inflicted all the hate is a playing out of something in a spiritual world in which all are included in which there is no hate no arbitrary suffering nothing wasted but everything is a crucible to spiritual perfection? The physical world that you know is mostly filled with empty space. Sure it contains plenty enough hardness to kill you if you fall from high enough. Sure there is a gravity that will cause this. Sure earthquakes and floods and disease and war and sexual depravity and the hordes of libtards are just out there to hurt you to hate you to become dependent upon you and to take your stuff – sure, all these are “real”. But this is not reality.

Spiritual reality is the only reality. There is not a bridge to it. It is here. It is now. Eternity goes on within us. Freedom from suffering and death and fear is here for the asking.

But you don’t see it. But you won’t see it. But you’ll laugh at me until you hate me because you are insecure and hate yourself. You’ll hate me with your love as long as you don’t see it. But it’s there. You can tune into it. You can tap it now. You will get there in the end anyway. It’s where you were always going. The pain and suffering and injustice and arbitrariness are all part of the karma of eternity. There is no karma of one lifetime. There is no eternal hell. You live in your very own hell of fear and doubt. What you rely on is arbitrary. You know it but might not acknowledge it. The fate you project out to the depraved is hanging over you too for your faith informs you that you are just as depraved and you know it. Your love (projected hate) is self-hate and fear of the arbitrary.

Spirituality can free you. Your choice: more of this insecure hell or freedom sped up. Yet desperation keeps you in hock to physical illusion and dogma and doctrine designed by crazy people in crazy human terms of bargain, and ransom, and redemption and general deal-making to maintain the absurd craziness which passes for security in the physical world.

I wish I could explain it better, but on the by and by you’ll see.

(A product of the delusional physical world, the world of Maya)

And Primarily, Secondarily, That There is a Higher Plane Accessible to All, With Ease

(The Spiritual Plane, the Realm of Wisdom, Is Indeed Real & Readily Accessible)

Consider . . .

Consider something different.

Consider perspective and consider the counter intuitive.  Consider what you might have missed.  Consider what’s hiding in plain sight.

My discussion which follows is based on an imperceptible slow-cook of consideration over a period of years, bolstered by wide reading and more occasion-specific, inspired by a couple of recent exposures to BBC Radio Four’s “In Our Time” program.  To any who haven’t been “turned on” to “In Our Time” I’d expect you’re in for a treat if you ever do.  I highly recommend it.  I’ve grown to love Melvyn Bragg and guests.  But that’s well beside any point.

The specific programmes [American sic] I’m referring to are the one on John Calvin and more recently (in the listening order) the one on St. Paul.

This got me thinking stimulated.  Made me consider things (and reconsider other things) . . .

All that I say (in this piece) is borne from my experience of life, my active experience of an intellectual busy-head, and from the thrice-read Bible – (in full context for I avoid [like hell] whenever possible the reading of select passages).  All this unorthodox consideration is fortified by my general free-lance theological experience, by my half-remembered doctrines of Catholic upbringing, and by my exposure to the unique American illogic of culture-war based radical evangelical protestant politics.  This latter is sometimes a painful exposure, bringing little in the way of cathartic benefit.  Some dear much-loved ones have succumbed to infection by the cult’s illogic.  And the feeling of doing anything particular about it festers as a largely helpless feeling.

But, out of consideration, let’s move back to consideration . . .

You’ve heard, I’m sure, of the Law of Unintended Consequences?  It might not even be a real law, I suspect, but it does make sense and can be observed many a time.  Consider also that a solution to a problem made in one age can have a tendency to live on as the inertia of tradition for the longest time.  It can and does mutate to take on a different kind of reality within the context and problems and challenges of a different age.  This, I’m sure, can be readily imagined.  I’ll come back to this later, but the devil is like that:  in the details.

Well, we’ll consider some basic things about Paul in his context-bound situation before projecting in a sort of extrapolation just such an imagination exercising consideration through the mists of time into a time far, far into the future, the time chummy folk oftimes  refer to reflexively as “nowadays”.

First some things about Paul’s positioning.  He never met Jesus in the flesh.  (Though there is little doubt that he did meet Christ – the everpresent spiritual Christ whom, while being the living Christ, no one can meet in the flesh).  [Optional lifeline to the reader:  that was a lot of theological leap of faith thrown in there – for effect mostly.  You don’t have to buy any of that at all.  I’m not selling anything, just considering freely.  Excuse me while I kiss the sky!].

But, to continue the blurred line I was going along before that twice parenthetical aside . . .

 . . . Paul did not have the benefit of Gospels.  Paul, like Jesus, was Jewish.  Paul lived in a time of the aftermath.  Literally.  70 and all that.  (An obscure British History reference that).  The expectation zeitgeist of Paul’s time was literally end-time expectation.  This was not a 2,000-year left-over carryover that we now toy our fear-mongering minds with.  This was reality.  It had been said to have been announced.  It was certainly expected.  Paul was a Pharisee (a law-picking nit-picker) of the establishment of Jewish society.  He persecuted break-away cultists.  Until he met with the living Christ.  He then seemed to genuinely want to share his experiential knowledge, a “gnosis” of this living Christ, with all others.  He got involved in grassroots organization efforts.  He led.  He community organized.  He butted heads with original followers of Christ who, like Jesus, remained Jewish and remained in the Jewish tradition.  He believed he had something available to and for everybody.  He was radical in this.  He was like Origen in this manner.

Yet, politics.

I’ll eventually get around to explaining my considered point-of-view.

First, let that word sink in better and more thoroughly:  politics.

Then, let me taunt you a second time (in an imaginary French accent):  politics.

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Let me do a bit of personal aside time-travel first.  Back where I am in the 21^st century, I can see that I’m touching a couple of taboo third-rails here at the same time.  I understand that it’s hard for people now to calmly consider politics with a judicious stripping away of emotion.  For us politics Я emotion!  We all know that!  Only a total fool would venture to disagree.  But I am a genuine y sincere eternal optimist, with a [sic] sense of humor.  I ask and hope for such consideration, if not respect.  And I can and do push the envelope.  I’ll freely touch third rails.  Fuck me if I can find some kind of way to bring sex into the conversation too!

So, fool that I am, in talking about religion I’ve brought up the taboo word and the no-no concept of politics into it!  What can I possibly be getting at?

First let me get personal with history.  You know it’s wrong to judge persons and personas of the past with the standards of the present.  I’m aware of this and I try to practice it when practicable and feasible.  Yet, like absolutely everything else, ‘tis thinking makes it so!  I can’t help to have always in my past given Paul some guilt-by-association.  I used to consider him a psychopath, like I’m pretty sure I still know Calvin to have been – as Calvin has put his imprimatur and indelible stamp of dismal pure self-loathing and grim fear and inadvertent damnable politics on everything.  Calvin made depravity an institution.  Thanks to Calvin witches and demons walked among us and permeated society.  No doubt.  Augustine, in a like manner, as a forefather, had to have been some kind of psychopath too, with his untenable but very, very popular fixation on depravity and convincing articulation of same.  Regarding a third prominent character, Constantine, there should be no doubt about it.  Murderous he and his Grendel’s mother of a violent pathological killer of a mother undoubtedly were.  Their conquering imperial clout, privilege and institution-making (& sustaining) institutional power is responsible for the most formidable and lasting institution paradigm the physical world has ever seen.  (And persecuting and how!).  (Acute persecute).  [You can agree to disagree with me on that and those points] [That, my friends, you can call my “opinion” and match it against your separate but equal “opinion” in your legacy of privilege as you will][And we’ll never advance.] [Nowhere.] [We’ll get nowhere].  [And as a conservative, you’d like that, wouldn’t you, nowhere man?].

Okay, I’m ready to leave this particular aside.  Bile has been extracted.  I’m feeling catharthed [sic].  I think I’ve probably stoked up your politics/emotion enough to more than prove or disprove any point.  To bring sex back into the equation:  Fuck me!

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So I was talking about Paul.  About how he was a spiritual experiential sort of human, much like Origen.  Both are all about the cosmic spiritual engagement.  Both experienced something cosmic and spiritual, zen-like, meditation-driven, quiet peace.  But Origen got thrown out of the established Church as a heretic and was tortured to death.  The rub is that Origen came later.  As a contemporary of Ambrose, influencer of Augustine, Origen came on the scene after there were “writings” and just before there was the empire’s established institution, the legacy work of pathological Constantine.  The established institutional budding behemoth, of course, made something out of these writings over a variety of committee meetings, after the likes of Origen and long, long well after Paul were off the scene.

That’s just reality.  It can be looked up.  You don’t have to like it, follow it, or believe it.  Just consider.

Paul’s great contribution, of course, over and above his organizational fortitude and propensity to freely communicate his leadership and organizational prescriptions by missive, was the great opening to the gentiles.  A certain respect for the individual’s integrity of faith experience came to be associated with this.  Like Shakespeare (who articulately expressed it and brought it to real fictional life [individualism, that is]), Paul is often revered by our advanced freedom-worshiping society as a pioneer in the advancement of the development of the sanctity of individualism.  This is the necessary pre-requisite ingredient for all that we as freedom-loving Americans value.  It is the basis for life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness as we post-moderns understand it. Of course, in the course of all this development and (dare I say?) evolution, the Jewish practitioners of the following of Jesus went by the wayside.  I cannot emphasize enough that Jesus himself never was anything other than Jewish.  Nor was Paul.  All that “ ” identity came later. Give all due credit to the label-makers, for they will inherit the power and the glory of the head!

But just what were the implications and occasions of this “opening” to gentiles?  It was pretty radical.  Remember that everyone who lived while Jesus had lived were literally living in the literal “end times”.  Remember that the big distinctive thing about the fiercely monotheistic Jewish religion was that identification as the “Chosen” people.  Paul was saying that the whole meaning and nomenclature of the “Chosen” people was done with. It is highly ironic how it came back with a vengeance of nationalism in Jesus’ name (through Paul).  Paul was saying that it wasn’t race and cultural identity and the keeping of laws and traditions that counted any more.  Of course he had experiential psychic spiritual “gnosis” to back this up. 

Don’t miss this point.  The entire referential point of “Chosen” “salvation” from the bi-polar loving-Hating God has been moved like so much very critical cheese.  From the moment of Jesus’ death (and resurrection as the spiritual ever-living Christ) [an “opinion” you are free to dispute and/or deny] the “chosen” thing is a matter of you choosing to follow and not having been born or acculturated into it.  This can’t be emphasized enough.

This really seems a minor point.  But it was radical.  Those who were without a doubt inside were all now, suddenly, without a doubt, outside.  All others (and all previous “insiders” [now “outsiders”] were, of course, invited and qualified to the availability and the possibility of being “inside” again).  And Paul said it was a pure and totally unconditional gift.  That is good news on the face of it.  But the fine print is politics.  The devil is in the details and in the fine print and, mostly, in the politics.

I used to think Paul a particularly heinous man for doing what he did. And, after I bring Calvin into the conversation later, it’ll be better expressed – (I hope) — just what I mean by all of this “what he did” stuff.  But in the course (and the intercourse) of my theological development I have been blessed to have been involved with the teaching and the osmosis of a prominent Greek and Paul scholar.  It turns out that in this later “writing” and “committee” process, there has been much work done to tailor Paul’s legacy into something more serving of the empire and its empire-maintaining institutional cornerstones.  If you don’t believe that a few years might make a huge difference in legacy making, I say you’ve lived it and actually seen it happen.  Consider, the example of Ronald Reagan.  Consider comparing the actual man you knew and experienced between 1980 and 1986 with the legendary Christ-like legend that is peddled just a mere twenty years later.  Don’t know what I’m saying?  Think I’m crazy?  Totally off base?  Then you’ve already been effectively duped.  As was the legacy of Paul, in a much bigger sense.  For there are whole faux letters, there are ghostwritten passages, there are insertions and additions.  There were other hands in the pot.  I’m not out to give examples but it seems to me that some of the more popular Paulisms (the ones which serve the evangelical strain of the institution best even today) are some of the most susceptible to being “faux”. 

But that’s not my whole point.  It’s just that in learning this and in learning of this and in witnessing a trust-worthy person’s reverence for the optimistic deep spirit of Paul and in my learning of Origen and of Paul’s shared ideals and spiritual other-worldly essence, I can have changed my opinion.  And have.  And how!  I believe Paul genuinely was more positive and open. I believe Paul believed in a more universal accessibility of cosmic spiritual individual experience than the institution leads us to believe.

But the problem, of course, is the fate of Origen.  For he came at a different time.  He came along at a time when this optimistic openness to all was no longer allowed.  It was D.O.A. in the parlance.  What happened is something that falls into the cachet of the law of unintended consequences.  Heretics are killed over it.  Religion is threatened by too much of the wrong kind of individualism.  The “chosen” people of the old religion have been replaced by a new kind of chosen, by an “elect”.  While this “insiderness” [sic] is indeed said to be good news available to all, it is in no wise available on any freely accessible terms.  The ironies of history and all that.

And here’s where I want to bring Calvin (and his legacy of progeny of today’s fear-mongering culture warriors) into the consideration.

First I’d like to shelve discussion and consideration and delve into another of my lengthy asides.  Pretty soon enough I’ll be able to show how this CULT is attempting to force a square peg into a round hole (and calling it “good”).

I said somewhere before that I avoid — (unlike the current plague: which turns out to be political and emotional in nature too and can’t be avoided as a plague should, such avoidance being all too politically correct) – precise citation of scripture.  (That was a clear 2020 date-stamp put on this piece there.  And who knows what the coming future might hold?)   I don’t want to get into offering precise examples of the general rule I’m about to introduce.  For reading scripture and utilizing it in a leading way to “prove” things is a sophistic trick of post-modern political evangelists.  If you want to see a reasonable facsimile thereof of this technique in operation, just sit through a whole-life insurance salesman’s presentation.  It’s a grand polished sales technique designed to lead you to a seemingly indisputable and very, very inevitable logical conclusion. 

The point I do want to make is that Jesus himself is much more open and accessible and “spiritual” vis a vis the spiritual vs religion issue.  You can always delve in and find your own examples.  But a saying that Jesus often communicates is this:  “doesn’t it also say?”  Just like Jesus used this to undermine the traps and snares of Pharisees and Sadducees so, too, we, all of us, can fend off these selective citations of the post-modern trappists [sic].  For Jesus was consistently more forgiving, open, accepting and accessible than these scripture quota quoters will have you believe.  I believe Jesus to be much more like the ever living ever present ever available spiritual Christ that spiritual Paul and spiritual Origen adore.

But that’s just me.

Yet, consider this.  It is quite likely that some the favorite “Paul” citations these sophistic salesmen love to exploit are indeed the political fine-print introduced by the “faux Paul” writers years later while in the ‘righteous’ course of developing an institutional legend.  Politics and all that.

Let’s fast-forward. The expiration date of the literal and literally expected end times is long, long past any semblance of freshness.  It is kept alive in legend form by well-developed presumably well-intentioned fear-mongering and institutionalized political/emotional considerations, traditions.  We have gotten here by psychopaths standing on the shoulders of psychopaths.  And indeed ‘twas intense psychopathic fear that created the devil.  ‘Twas terrific tyrannical fear what gave him a name.  The name and the prideful evil indeed became institutionalized and rode the inertia of tradition to infamy to become the perfect I[m]ago Iago for all times, especially for the perpetual all-times of the terrifically tyrannical “end times”.  The institution has been thoroughly co-opted by the establishment, empire after empire. And the Empire hath smote!  The Empire, indeed, has stricken back and has stricken back.  Committees have solidified all writings and interpretations.  Legacies live on.  Codified.  Well endowed.  Augustine has come and gone and stamped his special stamp of depravity.  Luther has done legendary Paul much further and has opened up individual’s power even more.  To make it more open, Luther conveniently and generously did away with “works” as any precondition to anything.  Such freedom!

Yet Paul’s “chosen” people trap remains.  What was probably sincerely and optimistically looked upon as good news then and now has become an unintended trap.  For, to “open” “salvation” to gentiles, the gate must be replaced. 

First, though, consider this:  consider how fragmented like broken pieces within the kaleidoscope the institutional organized religion we know has actually all become.  Time travel forward into the future and consider the aftermath of empire adventurism, active proselytization, evolution of freedom-loving individualism.  We have one kaleidoscope, for sure.  It is tempting, as we do, to label it all as the one.  It is intoxicating tempting and ever so easy to see it all as one whole.  But try and count the pieces!  I’ll let you count the ways!  Take your time.  See?  You can’t.

What do I mean by the “gate must be replaced?”  That seems to be very counter intuitive.  But let’s discuss Calvin’s impact and we’ll get to that.  Calvin, for one, took the possible psychopathy of Augustine and made it his own personal obsessive revved-up psychopathy on steroids:  depravity is Calvin’s most lasting legacy.  I would almost call it depravity worship, but that would offend too many.  Accordingly, we are deeply born hopelessly depraved.  We absolutely need salvation.  Each one of us and, more critically importantly, each one of them!  All lives matter!  ALL lives are depraved.  Moreover, there are no works.  There is no good in works.  There is nothing you can do about it.  Just be depraved and hope you are saved.  But don’t enjoy it.  Don’t enjoy yourself in depravity in the least.  Fear it terribly!  Be afraid.  Be very afraid.  Your depravity deserves eternal hell.  ‘The wages of sin is death’.  There is no doubt.  There can be no doubt.  But there is good news.  There is that “gift” of which Paul spake.  Salvation is freely given.  To the “elect”.  God is an angry God.  Angry as hell.  (And jealous too.  See how the “chosen” concept refuses to die?)  But He favors the chosen people.  There is that concept again.  Because since Jesus’ death and resurrection says the orthodoxy, salvation is a matter of the sacrifice and redemption, the “chosen nation’ has righteously been disinherited.  You must be “born again” in “Christ”.  The crux is a fix.  None of this is really new, but Calvin did articulate well.  The real difference Calvin makes is the psychopathic part:  his grim obsession with depravity.  He really played that one up.  He tanned you in the hide with that one.  Pure.  To make a pun, your ass (i.e. your hide) is “pure a tan”.  And he made a lasting impression on an already ‘end-times’ fear-mongered totally insecure people.  Total depravity just makes perfect sense in a fear-monger environment.  Total insecurity.  Total sinfulness.  Total fear and loathing.  You name it.  Totally.  And the susceptibility is not, of course, all Calvin’s doing.  The 2,000 years of institutionalism and effective control and the ever-increasing unreality of the tension of the permanent continuation of the End Times and emphasis on hell has ratcheted up some serious need of fear.  Believe it or not.  Or else, don’t believe me.  (But you know you believe in fear).

Calvin and his followers were big into the good news and into the benefits of being “elect”.  But here’s the real catch.  Here’s the trap that no one sees.

Consider this:

To replace the “chosen people” with the “elect saints” while interposing the doctrine of works does not fit.  What is the problem?  You might never ask.  You might never wonder.  You might get by, secure that you are saved and never think to know.

But the problem is that the salvation is completely arbitrary.  For there is also doctrine of “predestination”.  Predestination is something that more or less had to be invented to explain the shift to generality with the lack of value of works.  If one’s choice — (free choice I might add!  Thanks to that super-charged individualism inherent in the change, free will ALWAYS has to be explained away) – of one’s actions, intentions or accomplishments has no bearing on salvation, we have a problem, Houston.  Salvation MUST needs be arbitrary.  It can be no other way.  Indeed Calvin emphasizes this:  God has already pre-saved whom is to be saved.  All the rest have hell for recompense.  Eternal hell!  Fire!  Brimstone!  Eternal!

Let that sink in.  Good people may not have been pre-destined for salvation.  A really horrible show-case example of lack of human ethics may have been pre-destined for salvation.  This is fine and dandy.  Except for the one thing we always forget:  even the members of the evangelical protestant political church are subject to the arbitrary.  Sure, the men in the church have told them they are saved.  Sure, the men there always have their say and their sway.  Sure, all the scripture is good news and this assures them.  But all of this thoroughly mansplained security and assurance is based NOT upon the joining up to the right group.  Instead it is arbitrary.  It is possible that one can be saved and secure in the bosom of the “Christian” religion, duly “born again” (in all ways and in all manifestations) to salvation yet still have ARBITRARILY not been pre-destined for salvation.  Secure as they pretend to be, secure as they believe themselves to be, secure as they rely on faith to be, they are ALWAYS subject to and never free from this ARBITRARINESS. Jonathan Edwards and all that.

For consider this:  faith, too, is a choice.  Hence it is literally a “work”.  Hence it has no bearing against the arbitrary.

And I can’t emphasis enough the effect of obsession with depravity coupled with fear of eternal hell wrapped up in an enigma of “works”/faith makes for special pathological insecurity.

And I say this all for a reason.  It might look like I prattle on and on about this arbitrary stuff.  It may even seem I rant with anger like a crazy person because I’ve gone on and capitalized so much.  But this is important.  It is likely the first time you are hearing anything of this sort.  Both my red-state and blue-state friends can equally make this assertion, that they probably haven’t heard anything like it.

But it has implications.

Consider this.  We all know that “Christians” are very much concerned with the whole “pagan” world missing out of the “good news”.  We all see them very actively at work trying to “save” the world. And we can plainly see with cornucopia of observation that their method of saving seems hateful.

On the other hand, my “Christian” friends look around at the world and they pretty much see a whole lot of hate directed at them.

What gives? Why would this be?  How this mutuality of impossibility of vision?  Why all this hate?  Well this obsession with depravity for sure is not very understanding.  But they are genuinely trying to “save” you from eternal hell before the impending “last days” come unannounced.  It is the utmost in caring. 

The circle and the square don’t reconcile.  There is hate and mistrust coming and going.  There is plenty to spread around.

But have compassionate pity for your “Christian” friends.  Please understand that they are projecting out special emotionally-charged pathology, most likely unknowingly.  They have swallowed (with faith) this psychopathic bile about depravity for so long that they don’t have to ever really think about it.  It is total depravity of rote.  To you it looks like outward-directed hate dished out from a privileged unassailable position.  (And to be truthful, they have been trained to appear scripturally sound and indeed unassailable by masters of mass communication, the sophistry of well-regulated, i.e. ‘drilled’, salesmanship.  So that part is no accident).

But consider what they really think about themselves.  They are sin.  They are depraved pieces of shit only “saved” in a very ARBITRARY means.  In other words they don’t know.  They think they have been broken, as in disciplined, as in breaking a horse.  Manly, man. They call this “good”. They doubt their very salvation except for “faith” which is a mere concept.  (A “works”).  They fear hell for themselves as much as they do for anybody born “agay”.  They are projecting.  They don’t just hate you  They self-hate and don’t know what to do with it.  They need compassion and compassionate pity.  (Not that it excuses their hateful behavior). 

This is all deep denial.  Deep denial indeed. And add more layers:  seeing themselves as persecuted somehow helps and enhances, salves and festers more in paradoxical depravity wallowing.  Any positive image work only makes it deeper and worse.

They have never come to terms with the stark reality of the arbitrary.  It has never been explained.  They have been cult-indoctrinated into otherness.  But at heart there are three things:  1) Total Depravity 2) absolutely Arbitrary fate and 3) eternal totalitarian fate to fear:  i.e. hell.

The meanness and hate is inherent.

Please understand.  Please have compassion.

THE REAL POINT.

If I stopped just there I would be a hateful killer of hope.  I would be the one telling poor Virginia that there is no Santa Claus.  It would be a case of “There’s Nothing at the End of the Rainbow.”  (Look that song up).

But I’m here to point out the critical flaw that the religious miss.  I’m here to say that I’m with the spiritual Paul.  Maybe.  Certainly I’m with the spiritual Origen.  I know that.  I also know that organized institutional religion and its cult members could well torture me and kill me as a heretic for this.

But the key is that everything I’ve said about religion and the religious thus far is premised on it being applicable to the physical world.  And the physical world is delusion.  This is something you’ll get out of zen, meditation, Buddhism, etc. It is something considered heresy and worthy of non-salvation.  However, haven’t they already said they believe that nothing is worthy, there are no consequences or works, only predestined salvation that is a total gift from God?  Yes they said this.  And they believe it which is why they are tormented in hell and by hell every moment of their existence, regardless of their religious beliefs.  Must be torture.  But the physical world is delusion.  Al this is delusional.  None of it is real.

The real Kingdom of Heaven lives.  It is not “coming.”  (But it is too, in a way, waiting for all to get there).  It is not dependent upon “end times” or “rapture” or of anything.  The gift is freely given.  But it is not arbitrary.  It is good news indeed like Paul was trying to say.  But “they” (his followers) didn’t let him. It is like Origen said.  You can experience it for yourself.  Meditate!  Find the quiet space.  Have compassion.  Forgive.  Be peace.  Commune with spiritual.  Live spiritual.  Exist spiritual.  It is actually fact (as we don’t know “fact”).  It is positive.  It is transcendent.  We are not depraved.  We actually have a connection to the divine inside.  Depravity is the lie of tormented psychopathic people.  True freedom is spiritual freedom.  You are not subject to this arbitrariness you fear.  You are not subject to eternal hell.  There is not one life.  There is not one end.  There is spiritual joy and access to all to the Kingdom of Heaven.  There are multiple lifetimes.  Karma does apply, but not only to one life.  That would make no sense.  All are forgiven.  All are saved.  All are destined for the Kingdom of Heaven.  All need awakening.  Now, or over however many lifetimes.  Love is patient.  Love is timeless.  Love is spiritual.  Now or many chances from now.  There is not only one chance.  Free yourself instead.


Consider.

The subtlest wakefulness.  Receptivity.  All are invited.  Nothing is arbitrary.  Nothing to get hung about.

Anything that you can have both ways can equally and unequivocally manifest in opposition to NOT be had both ways.  This is a kind of universal law of converse.  It is real.  Indeed.  That is why people who habitually  — (or selfishly or habitually out of selfish habit) – set themselves up to always have it both ways can never rest easy. 

There is a torturing tyranny in the selfish attempts to have oneself always come out on top.  And when fear and finality is involved this torturing tyranny is terrifically terrorizing.

It works for the individual as well as it works for the institutional.

Therefore have compassionate pity for the meddling selfish for they torment themselves to no end in a temporal hell.

They create the arbitrary out of choice. They set the standard. What they bind is bound upon them. And they never loosen. (For long. Or without severe regret).

Have compassionate pity for them more when, for the image of goodness’ sake, they mindlessly and possibly unknowingly project this depravity outward onto the scapegoat ‘other’. For then they cause worldly harm as they disqualify themselves from celestial goodness in torment of the mind.

Have compassionate pity for them a thousand times more when they cling to the image of them (& their like) as good (or as designated for special goodness).

And the laws work against them.  The more they work the laws the more the laws work against them.  This is true torment.  It is a heavy yoke.

The sincere and honest, on the other hand, who find a way (or ways) to train themselves to be happy with what comes along and with how it comes out and who don’t spend forth wasteful effort to make it come out in their favor:  why they never suffer the universal law of converse. Such law does not apply to them.  They may find that it always comes out well.

The laws work in the quietude for them.  They have peace of mind.

May peace be with you.

Come to see everything in the light of Creation

Can’t you see?

O say, can’t you see?

When you trivialize racism into matters of ‘black and white’ name-calling and into superficial matters of manners (i.e. the way people treat each other) you are the force of white supremacy imperialism.

For it makes it so easy and so convenient for you to ‘do your duty’ and make the *obvious* complaint against stupidity, against arbitrary gross unfairness, against silly injustice.

It is so natural for you to fight against such gregarious affronts to decency, order, and rationality.

You are the Empire striking back.

You say that you don’t see color.  You say that all lives matter.  You complain that “they’re” *making* every thing into a race issue (when it isn’t and there aren’t any such issues, anymore).

You say with especial indignity that you aren’t responsible for something ended and *solved* so long ago.

You say that Obama divides.  But, Trump vehemently opposes division so he  ?????!!!!!    {Well, you can’t say “unites” but he is directly opposite of Obama in ALL ways, so I suppose he fights division by unifying the better –  (*superior*?) – side of the division in deeper but more righteous ways????!!!!!}     

You say that we don’t need black history because we have “history”.

You might even say – or imply with such searing silence –  that ‘they’ should “get over it”.

And playing the slippery slope game of ‘what will it be next?’ in your special innocent indignant and morally affronted way doesn’t make it better, honey.

The forces of white supremacism are so fundamental and so interwoven into all of the threads of the fabric that is our society that it’s so easy to miss the totalitarianism of it all.

It’s more than the outward manly physical force of vigilantism and lynching.  It’s far more than the out-and-out laying the institutionalized as well as the informal traps and snares of impediments to any means of advancement – be it education, be it housing, be the workforce, be it mass imprisonment.  There must be 50 ways to keep down the inferior.

It’s beyond the way “they” are ALWAYS put in a no-win situation, physically and psychically.

It’s beyond the way “they” are given absolutely no outlet of complaint or protest or resistance, be it Ghandian peaceful or be it Jesuit turning-the-other-cheek and enduring, or be it Maccabean violence.

It’s beyond the outright *principled* refusal to *grant* respect (on ALL levels).

No, it’s in the way you so very righteously, so innocently, so decently and so indignantly exercise your privilege of putting it to “the manager” in your victimized light.

All facets of social control work in concert to maintain the critical “fact” of white supremacy, both on the white ‘debit’ side and on the *manifestly* deficient black ‘credick’ side.

So, hence, you have made clear – or obscured and hidden all the much more thoroughly – just how pervasive and ubiquitous and tenacious the total social maintenance of white supremacy in America remains.

You might as well just come out and say that black lives indeed don’t matter as much because they are so inferior to white lives on every nearly every level.  You might as well just come out and say that pc proves it and that it’s the democrats who perpetuate dependency.  O!  But you did.  (Just in that indignant and affronted way that makes certain you come across good and “they” come across silly and unreasonable – obvious signs to you and yours that “they” are indeed wrong and, hence, inferior).

O Karen, don’t you see?  This white supremacy should have been gone long before Emmitt Till whistled.  It should not have been entwined so deeply into the fabled law of our land (even embedded in the 2^nd) – a land which is sure pure and clean and God-like. It is indeed in our “history”.  It, indeed, is taught in clandestine form of indoctrination to white kids and to black kids, while “black” “history” is denied and derided.  All forces combine to perpetuate it. Can’t you see, Karen?  White Supremacy must die!  First its cover must be blown.  It must cease to be fronted by righteousness and decency.

I wish you’d do your part and cut out the triviality and the indignant act.  Don’t be Gone With the Wind.  (For that is deeply racist too, and an integral part and parcel of totalitarian social control).  O! Say!  Can’t you see?

Bye White Bitch,
Sincerely,

Mr. & Mrs. Truth and Justice

P.S.  You may think your position unassailable, beyond rational question, and righteously immune to criticism.  You may fool many (or even most) people.  You may have many on your side and you may feel the strength in numbers. You may be certain that your man (or your menfolk) will mangle, maim or shoot anyone who dares.  But we can see right through you.

P.P.S.  I love you

P.P.P.S. You may think that I/we can’t take a joke, but white supremacy is no joke.

P.P.P.P.S.  Don’t look for kisses on the bottom.

If circumstances or palpable ‘attitudes’ gather and pile accumulative around you

To drag you down or if

In negative hysteric yelling tense they call immediacy attention or diversion

To drag you in

Though every habitual fiber in you reacts unthinkingly prompts to react with opposing anger to strike

Center

There is stillness in the space of center

Glow silently in radiant light

Watch, sanely, insanity rush away wreaking as and where it go

We are all time travellers with now issues. The only way to work through these “issues” is with awareness.

Are you working on your now issues?

The Bible is literature.

That should be an obvious statement. Many Biblical scholars, for the most part quite devout, consider this axiomatic and uncontroversial.

And yet. It is also a brash and controversial statement. In some circles it is unsayable, unthinkable and the very idea of someone writing it out like I did above is a pointless affront, a deliberate radical provocation only meant to hurt out of hateful motives. And yet indeed.

The point I want to make is not a big one. It is not all-encompassing. It is not methodical. It is a spark of insight from a perspective of literary criticism. But to get to even a small point within such an asphyxiating lack of atmosphere requires many qualifications and convolutions. So I’ll start. Trying.

I’m going to go many steps further. I’m going to accept that first statement (“the Bible is literature”) as axiom and I will sincerely and respectfully ask that the Bible be read in the manner of literature. Enlightenment should happen if you do so. You should see things in perspective, perhaps for the first time. I will point out some of what becomes obvious if you do. It may (to some) be upsetting to the point of assumed blasphemy on my part. I am sure this is true amongst certain dear ones. It is the sort of thing that has historically gotten many a “blasphemer” or “heretic” killed.

I welcome that. I invite it, like I once invited the rabid supporter of the 2nd Amendment to plead the 2nd on my person. I outlived that person. But there are many dear ones who would see only propriety in having persistent unreformed heretics sacrificed, terminated, crucified or summarily mortally punished in other manners. I welcome them as well. I am at a point in my spiritual development when I know better than to value physical life over real eternal spiritual life. And while I live and respect life with everything that I have and that I am, the Holy Nām is the essence of all that is spiritual and eternal. I do not give the Bible any status as the literal word of God. So crucify me.

It might be useful, at this point, to talk about the forces that make it so hard to see the “Word of God” as something not literally that. Or to put it another way, to talk about the forces that establish and maintain the reverence and maintenance of the literal cult status of the Bible as literally holy and as above any kind of objective criticism.

Such forces are total. Such forces are awesome. All of good is arrayed on the one side and all of bad has been scapegoated on the other and run out of town.

I could provide a historical background on how we got here, but history is the kind of thing best consumed individual by individual. Our experience of encountering “history” in school is a big part of the problem. So, rather than give a historical context I’ll just point out a few things I’d like for you to look into yourself. The exercise of “looking into” may, hopefully, strengthen your abilities to question things. Hopefully, it will embolden you to actually approach things in the Bible like literature (which is it). I can hope.

So, in light of all that, please look into the mish-mash collection that the Bible actually is. Check how patchwork it really is. Check the process of determining what is in “the canon” but, more importantly about how it was determined what was NOT in. Check the timing of the writings. Check the political context at the time of the writing. Consider why someone would want to take a certain line or approach. Look into the status of the year 70. Look into how it came to play out that a “religion” grown so tentatively under such trying conditions of persecution grew into being the state-sponsored persecutor itself. Then think of the ways that the established religion takes advantage of a persecution complex even to this very day. Consider the time-line: a few years of being the persecuted followed by nearly two-thousand years of being the establishment persecutor. Yet the institutionalized cult is able to brandish that sorrowful chip-on-the-shoulder of being persecuted in a 21st century paranoically [sic] imagined “War on Christmas” and like-minded concerns. Inquire into how it turned on the doings of a certain murderous Constantine and his Grendel’s mother of a vengeful woman mother. (Of course, really look into this) (I assume you can approach actual ‘history’ writing as literature and not be sucked into the official state-sponsored official rendering of the story [in which Constantine is ‘saved’) [Maybe I hope too much. Maybe I’m wasting my time]. But I’ll keep trying. Look into. Look into who Origen is and look into why he was killed as a heretic. Look into the Pelagian controversy. Look into the issues of the purity of Paul’s writings. See to what extent ghost writing and embellishment have been factors. There are definitely sections of Paul’s letters that aren’t written by him at all, (we called it “faux Paul” in a certain Theological University sponsored four-year study group I experienced it with).

When you don’t consider context, perspective and background and you accept all is as is destined and as only could have been [the way that it is], you are subject to finding confirmation of what you seek. For instance, I remember personally hearing the argument that the best example of the integrity of the Bible is the fact that it is so seamless and fits together so perfectly well. This, of course, is common sense bonkers, but it transcends common sense. There are untold instances of the opposite, that the book is a hodge-podge gumbo of all sort of mismatches, but a literal “Word of God” person can and will argue the opposite and have all the force and strength of utmost authority on his side, because it is literally written in His name and so doesn’t get questioned by anyone decent.

That is force.

But it is farce too. Just objectively consider how does the “Song of Songs” fit in seamlessly? I’ll leave it at that. (Hint: female sensuality).

Well, I’ve written all that as a preliminary to the small observation point I was intending to make. It doesn’t seem to be going all that well for me. But I am sincere and will leave it at such a shaky level of autonomous and unplanned discussion. (My Muse sometimes seems to might be Mary Ann with the shaky hand). *(obscure Who reference). This is my discourse and it stands.

So what is this about? Why the convoluted windup? Why is it so? Well, those of you who know me in that other incarnation, the one which laughably might be called “real” wouldn’t be surprised to know that the genesis of this ‘essay’ was yesterday when I mowed the lawn. I had a written work in my head which started with what will come below. The windup comes about partly because of a delay in addressing the matter. But the main part comes about because I very much want to paint the perspective picture all too much. It is kind of what can be thought of as development of a “voice”. But maybe not. There is nothing that thinking doesn’t make so. Perhaps today I’m merely suffering from a surfeit of blue chakra energy. I am intellectualizing too much, in other words. I don’t know. But I am ready to begin.

The Bible is literature and should be read that way. Some sections of it obviously seem to be written by a man, a really presumptively patriarchal poser of a pompous puss of a man who needs control, imagining himself to be God. These portions should be questioned and seen in that light. Why do we go for this perpetuation of patriarchy when it is obviously man-oriented, man-convenient, and man-serving?

Why?

Ironically, I see some of these most obviously misogynist passages clung to as the most religiously righteous and moving parts. It hurts me to see any woman respond so. It is wrong. A recent example that got me started this way was from one of the Psalms (a minefield of cultural crap and miscreant nonsense keeping disproportionate company with genuine spiritual beauty). The particular ‘trigger’ incident for me was about how we need to be “broken” by God. This is so antithetical to spirituality and so obviously man-oriented that I couldn’t phantom how in the hell any independently-minded intelligent woman would respond this way. Or course, that is to presume a lot on my part. That is, inadvertently, that I personally seem to seek to contradict and negate the very religious experience of another. And that is patently NOT what I’m trying to do.

But, in another sense, there should be a universal spirituality available and open to all. The Kingdom of Heaven, say. Or the Realm of Wisdom to use a euphemism. I experience and feel this. I know it to be true. There is truly a spiritual Holy Nām, and not an exclusive culturally-bound Holy Name that is a focal point. That whole latter thing is totally man-contrived while the first is spirituality in key with Wisdom the Creator of the Creator of the Creation. So, yes, in a way, I am invalidating organized religion. I invalidate anything that isn’t spiritually involving all of creation all equally. That’s just me. So, we’re back to the beginning. Crucify me.

But let’s rein back! Let’s go back to the beginning, the lawn-moving epiphany!

The Bible is literature. It should be read that way. Please read it that way. Question that which your gut and your intellect tell you is insensitive and stupidly misogynistic and man-convenient. See it for what it is. Question it in the same way you’d question any man-centered misogynistic writing. Much of the Bible is beautiful and truly spiritual and elevating in nature. Almost all of what is in the Gospel of John, for instance, that pertains to light is that way. Spiritually beautiful. Inclusive. Yet, a main theme, a leitmotif of the very same book, is an extended cursing and denigration of Jews. The wonderfully spiritual beauty is fundamentally marred by a politicization. If you see the Bible only as the literal “Word of God” and not as literature, you could not appreciate this. The sad thing, the saddest thing, to me is that the political parts seem to be the ones most clinged to, the most relied upon by those who wish to be the most devout. But that is personal.

Yet, a great remedy is to understand the Bible as what it is: literature. When approached that way, the chaff can be dismissed as chaff and the wheat can be devoured as nourishment. Nourishment is a good thing. And what is the political is also the man-oriented patriarchal self-serving stuff Read that too like literature. Especially that! It is the opposite of nourishing.

And when I say it seems as if a man wrote it thinking he were God, I don’t mean Jesus Christ. For had Jesus had any part with writing a manifesto or even a Bible, and he didn’t, we would have a focused manifesto. It would be the beatitudes and it would be the two commandments. It would be inclusive and forgiving. Of everyone! But this is not the man thinking he’s God that I have in mind. I have in mind the most patriarchal. the most controlling, the most possessive, the most underappreciating of women and the most with the inane tendency to stamp out any sprouting of female initiative or creative invention, the most vile masqueraded as the most caring and ‘protecting’. Like a protection ring. Know those? Never mind the creative reality of Wisdom. Never mind the Holy Nām. Never mind spirituality.

Wake up! Learn to read. See context. Know what’s literature. Free your mind instead.

For it is the for that the metaphor is for.  This sounds ungraspable, though simple.  In some ways it could be more difficult for a mind to “grasp” (comprehend) – (the entomology, of course of the ‘comprehend’ word is half based on the Latin prehendere literally meaning ‘to grasp’) – than is the idea of one hand clapping.

These are thoughts – not exact, of course – that I was having while listening to the fine 1990 recording of Van Morrison’s song ‘Enlightenment’. ‘(Don’t Know What it is)’.  I tripped on this a bit.  Like my back yard, I can dig it.  Indeed.

I started to get into the nuance of just why and how we don’t know what it is.  Why is it ungraspable?

The flash of insight was delightfully sudden.  And simple.  Perhaps we put too much reliance and stock on the thinking of enlightenment as something obtained – either a gnosis kind of knowledge or an awareness obtained, a more awakened state.  Clap, hand!  Clap!  That indeed would be cool, you could ‘get’ an awakened state of gnosis by not ‘getting’.  That indeed leaves us where we always are:  not knowing at all what enlightenment is.  Yes!  That is how.

Yet enlightenment, perhaps, is a little bit more – or a lot bit different – from this.  Yes, that’s what it is.  Nothing is more or less, despite the thinking that makes it so.  It’s just something else.  Maybe enlightenment is not something gotten or obtained at all, but something one becomes to be – in a way.

Enlightenment is in some sort of way – or a multitude of ways! – a becoming of something unknowable, something like light in the metaphoric form.  It is a being spiritual in the spiritual light as spiritual light which is lightness and energy that can only be metaphorically known as light.  We may wave at the particles as they go by.  We may wave and particle.  We may exist in multiple states never observable as any state at all.  Who knows?

But one thing we can know.  Enlightenment is not something learned or obtained.  It is not an awareness gained or awakened to.  Try as you may.  Or even if you successfully don’t try at all!

But it is an eternal way to be.  Just be!  Be thankful!  Be happy! Be joy!  Be the metaphor for light!   Be the lightness of being!  Be creation!  Be! (And radiate!)