But what to do to break this circular cycle? I think we need to iterate.

There are many “problems” that people struggle with. God’s actions do not always make sense to us. We don’t understand what happens in the world because it doesn’t fit with our understanding of God. The Bible has difficult passages because it seems to say two, or three or four, different things. It seems that most mainstream Christians just hunker down and hope that when they get to Heaven God will explain all. They take refuge in the fact of God’s love and omniscience and leave it all up to him. But most of the time, that doesn’t seem to provide much real comfort.

And this is where iteration enters the picture. If something doesn’t make sense then perhaps what we need to do is change something—iterate toward a more consistent solution. The problem is that we get so stuck in our current mindsets that we don’t even consider revising our basic assumptions. Our concept of God should not be static. Our handling of the Bible should not be the same today as it was yesterday. But these are too often not even considered to be variable and so we sit and spin and get no where.

Some commenters say that God’s wrath has to do with the treatment Jesus received. What? God is commanding and condoning the killing of babies because of something that’s going to happen hundreds of years in the future? And I still don’t get all the angst over the death of Jesus. He had to die, didn’t he? That was the whole farggin’ reason he was here. So why is it such a horrible, devastating, criminal act that he was crucified?

Then there’s the person who says that all those Canaanite kiddies had it coming. After all, if they were over the age of accountability, then they must have “done a great many terrible things.” What? Unless that guy thinks the age of accountability is somewhere near 25 then he’s got problems. All (as in every single solitary) 8 year olds had already “done a great terrible things”? That’s inconceivable.

Then there’s the guy who says that everyone God commanded to be killed deserved it because they all saw (or heard about) God in action yet they personally and deliberately chose to harden their hearts against him. What? First of all, back to the 8 year olds. Did they really see or hear about God and did they really harden their own hearts? I know when I was 8, I did what my parents told me and believed what my parents told me.

Secondly, let’s just assume—hypothetically, of course—that Quetzalcoatl is the real God. Now, many people have heard about him but let’s say they are all at the portal to the pearly pyramid and St. Montezuma is the gatekeeper. Who would even possibly accept the judgment that they had heard about Quetzalcoatl and yet personally refused to believe in him and so they are to be sacrificed and sent to hell?

Thirdly, it seems that God does not always play fairly. Let’s look at the plagues God sent on the Egyptians. After plagues 1-7, it seems that Pharoah hardened his heart against God and did not let the Isrealites go. But look at Exodus 10:20, 10:27, and 11:10. There it says that God hardened Pharaoh’s heart! It sounds like Pharaoh was about to give in but God had 10 cool plagues planned out and he just had to get them all in so he put the fix in to make sure he had is fun. Yes, people do deliberatley turn away from God but it seems that God admits to giving them a bit of a nudge sometimes, too.

Most of these rationalizations for God’s wrath in the O.T. are the same arguments that people today use for rationalizing how God can send millions and millions of people to hell because they were born in the wrong place at the wrong time. They just don’t work. They are flawed and inconsistent. And if you really try to make sense of it all, the only option is to alter your notion of God. Trying to say that God is 100% love and God is 100% just and God is 100% this and that and the other doesn’t fit. One characteristic must trump the other and in most cases, when dealing with the “heathen,” it’s justness that trumps love yet when dealing with “Christians” it’s love that trumps justice. That’s just not playing fairly and if you realize that it will force you to reconsider the basic assumptions you’ve unconsciously made.

So don’t question God or the Bible. Simply question your assumptions and see how that changes your view of God and the Bible.

My daughter was equally fascinated by the display but her attention was held by the stones, themselves, rather than by their effect on the water and bubbles. Every time we left the hotel, she wanted to pick out one of the stones and take it with her. When we returned, she’d toss it back into the water and pick out another one to take up to the room.

It was a unique and fascinating dynamic sculpture that evoked a tranquility from the soul.

Then I looked more closely …

Despite the water’s constant motion, there were scummy blobs and strands sticking to the stones. There was a rusty, open safety pin lying on top of one of the stones. The waterfall ended in an off-colored, bubbly froth that brought to mind scenes of industrial waste being dumped into the water supply of an unsuspecting rural town.

In short, the closer I looked the more my stomach was turned and the less tranquil became my soul. The water and stones were beautiful from afar but close-up all their faults became visible. Sort of like those mirrors in hotel rooms—the round ones with the light and the one side magnifies your face to ungodly proportions so you can see everything. And I mean everything. Yuck!

But, despite how revolting it may appear, the face in that mirror, in all it’s massive grandeur, is my face. And there’s nothing I can do about it.

Well, there is one thing I can do: accept it!

As James McGrath points out on Exploring Our Matrix (and whose post’s title subliminally infected my mind so much that I “independently” came up with the exact same title for this post) some of the scum that lies beneath our beautiful exterior needs to be purged, expunged, extirpated. And it is very important to be self aware enough that you know where the scum is and where the weak floor-boards are.

But some of it is simply there and cannot be “rennovated.” We all have a history. We all have biases and prejudices and a worldview that influences—defines—who we are and what we do. And it is not a simple matter to tear out these defining ideas and install new, better ones. So, all we can do is accept that they are there, accept ownership of them, and become aware of how they define us.

It is only by getting to know ourselves that we can have any hope of transforming ourselves. If we continually deny our ugly bits then we’ll never understand their effect on us and, therefore, never have any chance of transforming ourselves.

So, as McGrath points out, “We should investigate deeper than we do when we have opportunity to do so.” It’s not easy and it’s not always the most comfortable task, but it is necessary.

One can be a person of faith without being an idiot.

“Faith and Science” by Mystical Seeker on Find and Ye Shall Seek

It is a notorious fact that the morality of society as a whole is in inverse ratio to its size; for the greater the aggregation of individuals, the more the individual factors are blotted out, and with them morality, which rests entirely on the moral sense of the individual and the freedom necessary for this. Hence, every man is, in a certain sense, unconsciously a worse man when he is in society than when acting alone; for he is carried by society and to that extent relieved of his individual responsibility. . . . Any large company composed of wholly admirable persons has the morality and intelligence of an unwieldy, stupid, and violent animal. The bigger the organization, the more unavoidable is its immorality and blind stupidity. Society, by automatically stressing all the collective qualities in its individual representatives, puts a premium on mediocrity, on everything that settles down to vegetate in an easy, irresponsible way. Individuality will inevitable be driven to the wall. This process begins in school, continues at the university, and rules all departments in which the State has a hand. In a small social body, the individuality of its members is better safeguarded; and the greater is their relative freedom and the possibility of conscious responsibility. Without freedom there can be no morality.

Carl Jung
“The Relations between the Ego and the Unconscious” (1928)
in Two Essays on Analytical Psychology. CW 7

Being opposed to the farming of ducks and geese for foie gras has become the big news way of opposing animal cruelty but there are a lot of other ways to combat animal cruelty and help victims. Similarly, opposing abortion is the “cornerstone” of the pro-life platform but, again, there are many other ways of demonstrating your pro-life beliefs. So, why do these two specific targets seem to get all the attention?

I think it’s because it is extremely easy to be anti abortion and/or anti foie gras. It’s easy because for me to take this stand requires absolutely no change and has absolutely no effect or consequence in my life. None. Zip. Zilch.

To be against the farming of ducks and geese for foie gras simply means that you don’t eat foie gras. Now, I love foie gras — probably more than the average foie gras consumer. But if I had to forgo eating it for the rest of my life it would be no big deal. It would be easy. I could easily take that platform and stick to it. But, animal cruelty is rampant on a much much larger scale in the factory farms where the chickens and cows we eat are raised. But if I start boycotting factory farms and getting states to outlaw factory farms then I’m going to see an effect in my life — specifically in my wallet. I’m going to have to drive further and spend more money to buy free range chickens and eggs and to find grass fed beef. Take the mass-producing factory farm out of the equation and suddenly demand is going to far exceed supply which will only drive up the price more and I won’t be able to buy enough meat to eat 3 times a day 7 days a week.

Likewise, I can support the SPCA or animal shelters to demonstrate I’m against animal cruelty. But if I start doing that, I’m likely going to have to adopt a pet or volunteer my time at the shelter or take part in fund raising. In all these cases, demands are made on my time and money.

But people need to be against animal cruelty so they pick the easy case where all they have to do is sign a petition to get foie gras banned in restaurants and then they have bragging rights for how much of an “activist” they are.

The same criticism applies to the anti-abortion movement. Protesting at abortion clinics is easy. You throw all the blame and all the responsibility and all the guilt onto the mother and require her to make changes in her life and make the sacrifices while you can pack up your signs and head back home in time to catch Oprah or the Big Game. See how that works? You get to be pro-life with a squeeky-clean conscious and without lifting a finger! As “Notes From Off Center” points out, abortion is not the disease but the symptom. But treating the symptom is so much easier so that’s what gets done.

Let me suggest that the next time we get up on a soap box or start marching in protest or even start bitching about something to our friends that we take an honest look at what our position costs us. If we don’t see anything in the debit column then, perhaps, we are not fighting the right fight.

Are you freakin’ kidding me?

But what about watches that tell “fuzzy” time. You’ve seen them for your computer on those download-a-useless-app-or-two pages, right? You can control how fuzzy the time is so the clock could read “almost 3:30″ or “around 5″ or “afternoon.” Does it take an intelligent designer to make one of those? I mean a chimpanzee can look at the sun and determine that it’s time to get home and groom his mate. (And I’m not talking about the chimp that “accidentally” wrote Shakespeare’s Othello on the typewriter.)

I think this watchmaker argument hearkens back to an out-dated way of looking at the universe. I mean, back when atoms were mini solar systems with the electron orbiting the nucleus like a tiny Jupiter, this would have been a pretty apt argument. “Look how ordered and mechanical and deterministic the world is. It reminds me of … of … a watch! And we all know that watches don’t assemble themselves so there must have been an atommaker to make those orderly, precise, deterministic, indivisible little critters.”

But that’s not what an atom is at all! The electron is a probability cloud, not a satellite. It has no state until it’s measured. Chaos makes things anything but deterministic. Wind up a watch and you can predict what time it will read in the future. Wind up the weather or a fractal and you never know where it will end up. The world is not based on order and precision. It’s based on probabilities and averages with our meddling scientific observation changing (or determining) the future — literally!

So, I think it’s time to retire this analogy and get one that fits the world as we know it today.

Maddex says:

If gays are the same as the rest of us—if their lifestyles are normal and wrongly maligned—then how do you explain the unhealthy obsession with sex and indecency that is the hallmark of their parades?

Unhealthy obsession with sex and indecency? Have you looked at the heterosexual world lately? TV ads that use sex to sell everything from deodorant to automobiles. Frat parties. Strip clubs. Pornography. Rapes. Mardi Gras. I say there’s a lot of unhealthy obsession in the heterosexual world, too. Then there’s the obsession with sex from the other side of the fence. Anti-homosexual propaganda. Hate crimes. Sex for reproduction only. Missionary position only sex. This, also, is unhealthy obsession.

One would think that if homosexuals were truly psychologically healthy individuals, they would behave like upstanding individuals rather than work themselves up into a debauched lather whenever they congregate.

But just a lather is ok as in college and professional sports, political rantings and ravings, fire and brimstone preaching, anti-_______ (fill in the blank with whatever your favorite pet peeve is) soapbox sermons. We humans act like upstanding individuals about 10% of the time, if you ask me. And for many reasons other than homosexuality.

If you want someone to accept your lifestyle, isn’t the best strategy to show how unthreatening it is?

Didn’t work for Jesus. Doesn’t work for Red Sox fans. Doesn’t work for most evangelicals who insist that we all accept their lifestyle and beliefs and threaten us with hell.

Basically it comes down to this: every single race, group, belief, denomination, faith, age, gender, or whatever, has someone you can point at and say, “Look at how awful that person is.” The problem is when we then generalize based on that person. I could write a similar post as Maddex’s decrying Baptists by citing Fred Phelps and his outrageous, hateful, cruel actions and words. We do it all the time with Muslims, Blacks, men, women, atheists, punks, people with tattoos, etc.

Not so!

I reread it today and several things jumped out at me that I had never noticed.

First, in Genesis 1:31 God pronounced everything to be “very good” yet in Genesis 2:18 he says that something is “not good,” specifically, man’s being alone. What happened here? God says that it’s all good and then realizes something is a tad askew? He made two of every animal but only the human male and it took him a minute to realize he should have made a female human as well? That doesn’t seem very omniscient of him.

But there’s more. Look at Genesis 1:27 and here it sounds like God made male and female together, at the same time and in the same way. Both were made in the image of God. But that’s not the impression I get from Eve’s being created from Adam’s rib.

Now, I do not recall ever hearing a sermon on this and I do not know what the “party line” is but here is an explanation that makes sense to me. God did create man and woman together, in the same way and at the same time, just as with all the other animals. This is what he pronounced as “very good.” Then something happened that left Adam alone, which was “not good,” and so God created Eve.

Hmmmm. Does the name Lilith ring any bells?

Anyway, it seems that God’s first choice of creation method for woman did not work out so well so he chose an alternate method the second go round. If you look at how God addresses man and woman in Genesis 1 they seem to be equals — he says the same things to both. But apparently someone couldn’t handle all this equality and so Eve was made from Adam’s rib.

I couldn’t sleep last night and picked up Volume 9ii of the Collected Works of Carl Jung. Scanning the chapter on Christ, A Symbol of the Self I came across Jung’s thoughts on evil and they are apropos of the discussion in my earlier post.

The fact that God is only good seems to be a doctrine that flies in the face of what we read about Yahweh in the Old Testament but the early church fathers seemed to think it scandalous that there could be anything but good in God. Tatian (2nd century) is the earliest authority for the axiom: “Nothing evil was created by God; we ourselves produced all wickedness.”

Basil the Great said that evil has no substance but “is the privation of good” and “arises from the mutilation of the soul.” Furthermore, “if all things are of God, how can evil arise from good?” In another passage, Basil says:

It is … impious to say that evil has its origin from God, because the contrary cannot proceed from the contrary. Life does not engender death, darkness is not the origin of light, sickness is not the maker of health. … Now if evil is neither uncreated nor created by God, when comes its nature? That evil exists no one living in the world will deny. … Each of us should acknowledge that he is the first author of the wickedness in him.

Jung says that good and evil “are a logically equivalent pair of opposites” and are the premise and co-existent halves for any moral judgment. They do not derive from each other but are “always there together.” Evil is a human value, like good.

Jung continues to say that, as Basil asserts, if evil arises from a “mutilation of the soul” and yet evil really exists then “the relative reality of evil is grounded in a real ‘mutilation’ of the soul which must have an equally real cause.” The real corruption of the originally good soul must be done by something real. Furthermore, how can man be the sole author of evil when Lucifer’s sin proves that evil was in the world before man? What was the cause of the “mutilation” of Lucifer’s heart? Jung points out the logical fallacy in Basil’s argument: “the independent existence of evil must be denied even in the face of the eternity of the devil as asserted by dogma.”

Thomas Aquinas, in Summa Theologica, says:

One opposite is known through the other, as darkness is known through light. Hence also what evil is must be known from the nature of good. Now we have said above that good is everything appetible; and this, since every nature desires its own being and its own perfection, it must necessarily be said that the being and perfection of every created thing is essentially good. Hence it cannot be that evil signifies a being, or any form or nature. Therefore it must be that by the name of evil is signified the absence of good.

Evil is not a being, whereas good is a being.

However, Jung points out, not only is darkness known through light but conversely, and as a logical equivalent, light is known through darkness. Cold is merely the privation of heat but does that make cold non-existent?

The privatio boni argument remains a euphemistic petitio principii no matter whether evil is regarded as a lesser good or as an effect of the finiteness and limitedness of created things. The false conclusion necessarily follows from the premise “Deus = Summum Bonum,” since it is unthinkable that the perfect good could ever have created evil. It merely created the good and the less good … Just as we freeze miserably despite a temperature of 230° above absolute zero, so there are people and things that, although created by God, are good only to the minimal and bad to the maximal degree.

Despite the logical fallacy of the “privation of good” argument, Jung recognizes that it is used and believed and this cannot be disposed of easily. “It proves that there is a tendency, existing right from the start, to give priority to ‘good,’ and to do so with all the means in our power, whether suitable or unsuitable.” In the end, Jung says:

The privatio boni may therefore be a psychological truth. I presume to no judgment on this matter. I must only insist that in our field of experience which and black, light and dark, good and bad, are equivalent opposites which always predicate one another.

I’m sure I have not done Jung’s argument justice, but I hope it’s at least comprehensible.

I’m not exactly sure where in the Bible this is said but it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to me. This seems to be another instance of trying to placate those who suffer now with the promise of something better in the future.

How, exactly, will heaven and hell “make all things right”? Let’s say someone murders my wife. Will knowing that the murderer is going to hell and that I’ll see my wife in heaven after I die really make up for all the agony and loss I’ll feel during my lifetime? And what if my wife wasn’t a Christian? And what if the murderer converts in jail? Then I’m in heaven with the murderer and my wife is in hell! How is that “making all things right”?

Future reward cannot “make right” present suffering. Future reward really amounts to compensation; and compensation is not justice. It can make the suffering bearable or give the suffering the illusion of meaning but it cannot “make it right.”

The problem with this attitude is that, in the end, we still have no reason for our suffering. To say that we will be compensated in the future does nothing to explain why we are suffering right now. This is precisely why Christianity has such a hard time with the existence of evil. All the answers are that “everything will work out in the end.” But that is not a real answer. It does not address the real issue.

Along the lines of this post from Exploring Our Matrix, I was also thinking about how the OT God is most often conceptualized as having a location. He was with the Israelites either as the pillar of fire or in the Ark or he was located on Mount Sinai. In all these cases, you could point to one spot be say, “God is there.” At times, God is seen as locating himself, temporarily, in one spot — as with Moses and the burning bush — which de-emphasises his human characterization. The implicit idea is that God was there to communicate with Moses whereas in the previous examples he was more firmly implanted for a longer time frame.

From the NT, we think of Jesus mostly in his incarnated form and as the son of god. We think of him as an historical person (indeed, some Christians fight tooth and nail for an historical Jesus and claim that Christianity is nothing without it) located in a particular place at a particular time. Even now, after his ascension, he is sitting sitting at the right hand of God — an image which restricts both God and Jesus to a particular space.

There is very little in Christianity that focuses our attention away from the human characteristics attributed to God. Sure we talk about his omnipresence but right behind the words is the image of a father. Even in the end, our souls - the numinous part of ourselves - end up located in space, in heaven, where we will be with God and Jesus. You know, I’ve never thought about seeing the Holy Spirit in heaven. Nor have I heard a sermon preached on what role the Holy Spirit will play in heaven. The one part of the Godhead which retains some non-human characteristic is blatantly missing!

The Trinity could be a medium for concentrating on the non-human characteristics of God yet even here we’ve named them God the father and God the son. We force the divine into a human-shaped mold.

Perhaps it’s not all that surprising given the strong anthropomorphic nature of the OT which is Christianity’s heritage. But I think that it is also one reason we react so negatively to other religions. We call the atheistic because they do not have a God that is a father figure. We call them nihilistic because they do not end up in a specific place when they die.

God is more than our anthropomorphic conceptions of him. We can’t even refer to god without assigning a human gender to … him. I think most Christians would be offended if we called God “It.” God is more than our human conceptions otherwise he would not be God; he’d be understood by us. So why do we insist that everyone hold the same limited conceptions as we? Can’t the ineffable be reduced to more than one subset of ideas and still be the same?

I realize delays are unavoidable but a half hour before departure when boarding has not yet begun it would just be nice for them to make another announcement. Everyone knows we will not be leaving when they said so how about some kind of update. It’s only common courtesy.

A deep calm settled inside him. His heart filled with trust and joy.
Wrapped in the boy’s arms, Dog felt himself grow lighter and lighter.
And he never came back again.

Samsara Dog by Helen Manos, illustrated by Julie Vivas

What’s your favorite sentence(s) from a children’s book?

According to my Strong’s Exhaustive Concordance of the Bible, the word for “sin” in the N.T. is derived from the word hamartano, which means “to miss the mark (and so not share in the prize).” The Greek-English Lexicon by Liddell and Scott also cites the following phrases as meanings for hamartano: “to miss the road”; “to miss one’s point”; “failed in hitting upon the thought”; “to be deprived of, lose.”

According to Vedanta, my individual self is none other than Brahman, the universal self. My “sin” is that I don’t realize this. I’ve missed the mark and so do not share in the prize of peace and tranquility during my life. I’ve missed the point. I’ve failed to hit upon this thought and understand it fully. In other words, I’ve sinned. I was born in this sinful state because from birth, I’ve not realized what I really am. In a way, according to Vedanta, I am totally depraved (at least as far as the doctrine relates to being born a sinner) but my punishment is merely the hell of eternal rebirth into a suffering life rather than the Hell of eternal teeth gnashing in the Lake of Fire.

But then there’s the “no morality apart from God” crowd. (And by “God” they, of course, mean “their God”.) “Look at the Nazis!” they say while shutting their eyes to Gandhi, Siddhartha, &c. Anyway, I see a grave danger in the combination of these two ideas. If I am a) born a total sinner and b) have no moral compass apart from God then the only conclusion is that there is absolutely nothing preventing me from committing every heinous, despicable, detestable act imaginable. Can you see how this attitude colors — or perhaps more precisely, discolors — one’s view of the world? No longer do you see people; you see potential murderers and rapists.

I have personally felt the effect of this attitude. Someone very close to me accused me of doing something that someone else did. I shall not go into details but let’s just say that it was more along the lines of emotionally damaging than physically. There was no reason to believe that it was I who did this act. I had never done anything even remotely like it; never hinted that I would do such a thing. It was totally out of character for me. Again, not wanting to go into details, there were several other circumstances and pieces of evidence that would have pointed away from me as the perpetrator. But this person was absolutely convinced that it was I. They went to their pastor for guidance on what to do about it. They even threatened me with legal action if I did it again. In their mind, I was a sinner without God and so there was nothing I would not do. I had no moral compass and so it was perfectly reasonable to conclude that I did it. Needless to say, that accusation caused more than a little tension in the relationship.

I am no expert in Vedanta, but I don’t see the same reaction from “believers” toward “sinners” as with some Christians. Reading people like Alan Watts who seem to agree with the Vedanta viewpoint, there seems to be more tolerance of those who don’t understand the way things really are. These poor souls are not evil, merely deluded. And it is realized that forcing reality down their throats will not make them see it any more quickly. Which reminds me of a quote from Carl Jung (of course, I cannot find it at the moment) which says that people with faith should be more understanding of people without faith for having faith is easier. (I’ll add an update to this post when I find the exact quote).

Now, what SHOULD we do?
Well . . .
What would YOU do
If your mother asked YOU?

Dr. Seuss, The Cat in the Hat

What’s your favorite sentence from a children’s book?