December 13, 2010
Jonesing for Eden
This week, we conclude our examination of the first dispensation. I will be the first to admit that this series went on a LOT longer than I had originally planned – not only because I had to take a break from posting for a couple of months, but also in the number of posts in the series. I had initially planned to do only do 3 to 4 posts on the first dispensation. As of this week’s post, I’m up to 14!
The reason for the extra time is that as I was writing each post, I kept realizing that there were more and more fundamental aspects of the Eden narrative that needed extrapolation in order for readers to gain a fuller understanding of all that occurred during this dispensation, and the wide raging implications of Original sin.
The purpose of this blog is to help the reader gain a better understanding of Christian philosophy, and as I was writing about the first dispensation, it became abundantly clear to me that it is not possible to understand Christianity without a thorough understanding of what happened in Eden and ALL the ramifications therein.
The bottom line is that if you don’t fully understand this fundamental and foundational information, you will not accurately understand God, the Bible, Jesus, or Christianity. And without this understanding, you may be in danger of allowing false/comparative information to be put in the gaps of what you don’t understand. This is the kind of thinking that results in contradictions, frustration, unbelief, and religion.
However, if you do gain an understanding of what Eden was, and what we lost when man fell, not only will you better understand God and His purpose, you will unlock the key to what is perhaps the primary motivation of all of our thoughts and actions. The purpose of this post is to help give you that understanding.
As we saw in the last post, when Adam and Eve committed Original Sin, it not only resulted in their own deaths, but the death of their “kingdom” as well. All of creation began to die.
Everything in the natural world was in harmony and order before Original Sin and the judgment. There were no bear maulings, earthquakes, hurricanes, disease, or Reality TV. But when the order that God established in creation was violated, chaos entered into existence and began to grow exponentially.
People blame God for natural disasters, going so far as calling them “Acts of God” and disparaging God’s character or existence when they occur. But they are not God’s fault. They are part of the just judgment that Adam brought upon himself. Adam intentionally gave up his rulership over nature. Thus God does not, and cannot arbitrary cause OR stop natural disasters without violating justice. He can only (justly) do so in response to justice (this is a complex subject that deserves its own post).
The term “Acts of God” should be removed from insurance policies and replaced with “Results of Adam”.
The first man and woman; the ultimate, unblemished expression of human perfection, were “optimized” for their existence in paradise. As their descendants, our bodies and minds are also engineered for Eden. Our bodies were designed to live forever. Our minds have the capability to commune with the divine. We were supposed to be the rulers of the world. Creation was supposed to obey us. The world was supposed to work for us. We were supposed to live in perfect harmony. We were supposed to be happy.
But we are not happy. Our lives are not a perfect harmony, and the world is far from a paradise. We are deposed monarchs, but we still have royal desires. We fundamentally know that we are supposed to live in perfection, and nothing less than paradise will satisfy us. In the depths of our souls, we expect to live in perfection. But we don’t. We suffer from Adam’s frustration. And in our perpetual dissatisfaction we ask, “what’s the point?”
We all want to go back to Eden. We desire that return to harmonious perfection with the same pervasive, all-encompassing, and unrepentant longing with which a drug addicts longs for his next fix. This desire is the root of all our behavior.
If recapturing Eden is possible, we essentially have two choices in trying to achieve it: we can either choose God’s way or we can try to do it ourselves.
Without God, man’s only choice is to try to create paradise on earth. What are all the various sociopolitical, utopian aspirations of men (imperialism, socialism, capitalism, communism, feminism, theocracies, etc.) other than the desire to create a harmonious social structure on earth?
And if this earth is all we have, then is it any wonder that people are willing to kill, die, lie, corrupt and destroy for the sake of their particular utopian goals? If this earth is all there is, then the ends ultimately justify the means.
This desire for a God-less Eden is not just expressed in grandiose social schemes; it hits us in our most personal lives as well. Our expectation and desire for harmonious perfection (and our frustration in never achieving it) affects the way we manage our careers, our homes, our families, and our finances.
It’s the reason many grow to despise the spouses that they once thought were “perfect” for them. It’s why some parents drive their kids to reach a perfection they themselves were not able to achieve. It’s why we drive ourselves to get better jobs, more money, or a more attractive spouse. It’s why people are driven to lie, cheat, scheme, and betray to amass power. Its because of the idea that if we just had “a little more” or if we could just make things “a little better” we would finally reach perfection.
When I compared our desire for Eden to that of a drug addict, I wasn’t just being metaphorical. ALL of our addictions are rooted in our desire for paradise. What is an addiction, (be it to a substance, or activity), other than a desire to capture, however briefly, an ecstasy, a beauty, an existential happiness that we cannot grasp in our reality? Our desire for Eden is so strong that we will endure the destructive long-term consequences of addiction for a brief connection to a false transcendence.
Even if you don’t believe in the Bible, the record of human history should provide abundant proof that man cannot create paradise on his own. Unfortunately the comparative thinking that accompanies Godlessness causes the brain damage that keeps those trying to create utopias from seeing their error.
So what is God’s solution to this problem? God’s way is the meaning of life – Heaven. To quote C.S. Lewis, “If we find ourselves with a desire that nothing in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that we were made for another world.”
God’s way does not involve trying to force-fit perfection into an imperfect world filled with imperfect people. God’s desire is to redeem those of us who are willing, into new bodies with new spirits. The dispensations are a part of this process.
Once we are redeemed, all of creation will be redeemed as well. In fact, the Bible says that creation is “jonesing” for Eden just like we are. Creation longs for our redemption so that it can be redeemed.
Our desire for Eden shapes our lives. How we choose to pursue that desire will shape our eternity
In the first dispensation, God addressed the question: “if man was completely innocent, with no knowledge of good and evil, would he choose God on his own?” The answer was “no”, and the result was death. If the lack of knowledge did not cause man to choose God, what would happen if man were given an abundance of knowledge? Does knowledge alone lead to God? We’ll examine those questions next time when we begin our look at the second dispensation.
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November 20, 2010
A Tale of Two Trees part 5 – Eating Yourself to Death
THE EPITOME OF SHORT-TERM THINKING
This week we conclude our examination of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil by understanding why eating the fruit of the Tree led to death for Adam and Eve (and consequently, for all of us).
It’s easy to see what has become of humanity since the fall of man (just watch an episode of “Jersey Shore”). But what were things like before Original Sin?
Before Adam and Eve ate the forbidden fruit, they were in a state of complete innocence. They lived and thought only in the moment. They “walked with God” daily and thus received constant direction from Him. They never had to think about tomorrow or “what to do next”, because God was always there to tell them. Their only obligation was to obey.
The Bible makes a point of saying that they were naked and unashamed. They didn’t know the implications of being naked because they never thought that far ahead! They ran around naked and free in their naïveté without giving any thought to what would happen next. They were like babies in that sense (or college kids on spring break).
So what happened when they ate from the Tree? Well, as advertised, they gained knowledge of good and evil – of creation and destruction.
Does this mean that Adam and Eve did not know what creation and destruction were before they ate the fruit? No, they knew about creation because God undoubtedly explained the origin of the world to them, plus Adam knew that Eve had been created. They knew about destruction because they witnessed it on a small scale whenever they ate fruit from the other trees (“destroying” it in the process).
But the complete definitions of good and evil are creation and destruction in the long-term. That is what Adam and Eve gained knowledge of: the long-term!
When they disobeyed God, they voluntarily disconnected themselves from His influence. Their constant “life guide” was gone. They were on their own for the first time in their existence. They were no longer led by an intelligence that was always and completely right and just. They had to figure out what to do next based on their own imperfect judgment and thought processes.
The human brain is in a constant state of creating and “rewiring” itself based on our thoughts and experiences. This is most dramatically true with infants because their lack of experience gives them the most new neural connections to make. As heretofore-innocent beings, Adam and Eve were in a similar position.
When they had to think long-term for the first time, brand new connections would have begun to form in their brains. They began to process long-term cause/effect relationships and they started to understand the ramifications of what they had done. They were able to imagine a future in which they were separated from God. They became afraid, and they hid.
When Adam and Eve ate the fruit, they began to see all the long-term implications of their nakedness – desire, sexual intimacy, joy, pregnancy, heart break, child rearing, guilt, jealousy, etc. (basically, they took on the opposite mindset of a kid on spring break).
When they experienced this flood of knowledge and the guilt associated with it, Adam and Eve committed the first religious act by covering their “shame” with fig leaves.
What was it about the fruit that caused this? Did it have some type of “magical” composition? Did it contain a deadly brain toxin (could this have been the origin of high-fructose corn syrup)? No, I think that it was just regular fruit. What made it significant was God’s command not to eat it, which entailed the choice to stop living with moment-by-moment direction from Him. It was the choice that disconnected Adam and Eve from God, not the fruity goodness.
God told Adam that in the day that he ate the fruit, he would die. How could God accurately make that prediction? Because He knew the causes that would lead to the effects. God knew that Adam and Eve were not always and completely right and just, so when they gained the knowledge of the long term and had the burden of decision, they would choose to pursue death by being comparative.
But God, being just, had to give them the opportunity to be contrastive – to repair their brains and live. Instead, they predictably chose to be comparative. They chose death.
And thus all of their descendants (us) follow the same pattern. We are all born innocent, however, since we are born without a connection to God, we all quickly gain knowledge of the long term. And since we are not always and completely right and just, we (like our original ancestors) choose to be comparative. We all eventually commit Original Sin and our brains become wired to pursue death. We damage our brains and compound and escalate that damage as we gain more experience.
But fear not. All is not lost. In the next post we will conclude our study of the first dispensation by examining the curses that God placed on Adam, Eve, and the serpent after Original Sin. The curses are the source of many of the struggles we face today, but in the midst of the curses He pronounces, God also gives us our greatest hope for redemption. Next time.
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October 31, 2010
A Tale of Two Trees part 4 – Evil is as Evil Does
THE GATEWAY TO EVIL (AND CHLAMYDIA)
In order to understand why eating fruit from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil would lead to death for Adam and Eve we have to first gain an objective understanding of what “good” and “evil” are.
In the last post, we examined the Biblical definition of “good”. In this post, we will address “evil”.
In the last post we saw that “good” is “that which creates”. However we also saw that sometimes circumstances call for short term destruction in order for there to be long-term creation. So the complete definition of “good” is the idea of “that which creates in the long-term”
Biblically speaking, evil is presented as the opposite of good. So “evil” would then obviously be defined as “that which destroys in the long term”.
When we are tempted to do evil, we are tempted to do something that will (or that we think will) be good; that will create something for us (pleasure, happiness, satisfaction, reward, etc.). But it only creates in the short term, and the long-term results are destruction.
There are many obvious examples of this – drug and alcohol abuse, reckless driving, lying, cheating, theft, sex with Kim Kardashian (boy, do I regret that now. Thank God for penicillin).
We also saw in the last post that the ultimate expression of “good” is eternal life – perpetual creation. Conversely, the ultimate expression of “evil” would be eternal death – perpetual irreparable destruction. Hell.
The key to determining whether something is good or evil is to look at the long-term intent and results. For example, saving your money is good because the long-term results are the ability to buy a home, send your kids to college, and enjoy a secure retirement. But in the short term, it means the sacrifice of certain pleasures. On the other hand, if you spend all your money as soon as you get it, you can have a great time in the short term, but the long-term results are a future of poverty and debt.
Understanding long-term vs. short-term is also a key to understanding God’s actions in the Bible, in the world, and in our lives. God is good. He creates in the long term. His focus is not on our short-term happiness; His focus is our long term good. The ultimate long-term good is eternal life. And if God has to introduce or allow short-term pain, discomfort, distress and frustration into our lives in order to drive us toward accepting and embracing the things that will lead us to eternal life, then that is what He will do.
When persistent and/or unusual calamities occur in our lives, instead of complaining and questioning God’s goodness, it would probably be more beneficial to ask, “God, what are trying to drive me towards and how will it work for my long-term good?” That, my friends is contrastive thinking!
Contrastive thinking can lead to eternal life, which again, is the ultimate expression of “good”. Therefore, we can say that contrastive thinking is good. Comparative thinking prevents repair and can lead to perpetual death. Therefore, we can say that comparative thinking is evil.
So how can you tell if a person is good or evil? Actually, you can’t. None of us has enough comprehensive information about another person to categorically declare their entire being good or evil.
This is the rationale behind one of the most misquoted verses in the Bible – The admonition not to judge in Matthew 7:1. This verse is often used by a guilty person as their defense when you confront them about their wrongdoings. (Have you ever heard an innocent person tell you not to judge them?) Instead of owning up to their guilt, they try to sidestep it by attacking your right to accuse them. But we are told later in the same chapter of Mathew that we can and should judge what a person does (Matthew 7:15-20).
So while we cannot judge whether a person, is good or evil, we can judge if they are pursuing good or evil. How? Examine the long-term intent and results of their actions. Is the focus of their life the pursuit of creation or destruction? Do their actions lead to repair, and life, or do they lead to stagnation, and destruction? Are they motivated by the desire to grow, even if it causes them discomfort and pain, or do they actively justify themselves in order to avoid pain? When they are wrong, do they think comparatively or contrastively?
What a person pursues in the long-term is the key to understanding their life. Furthermore, examining you own life and looking at what you are pursuing in the long-term can allow you to see if you are headed toward life or death.
Now that we understand good and evil, we are ready to examine the ramifications of Adam and Eve eating from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. But before we do, there is one more question that needs to be addressed. God’s plan of redemption (the Fall of Man, the incarnation of Christ, the cross and the Resurrection) all seem predicated on the existence of evil. So, does God need evil in order to bring about His plan? Does good need evil in order to exist? Next time.
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September 20, 2010
A Tale of Two Trees part 2 – Death
NOT EVERYONE'S IDEA OF HEAVEN
There were two trees in the Eden narrative – the Tree of life, and the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. One sustained life, the other brought death. In the last post, we saw that life is the ability to repair physically and spiritually. Physical life is in the blood, and spiritual life is in words. The right nutrients in blood can repair physical damage, and the right information in words can spiritual damage. The right information (expressed in words) that can repair and lead to spiritual life, are words of repentance. Repentance begins with contrastive thinking.
With the right blood, and the right thinking, you could repair forever and have eternal life.
If life is the ability to repair, then obviously “death” is the inability to repair.
Since death did not exist before Adam and Eve ate from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, it is logical to assume that they were initially immortal, or at least had the means to sustain their “alive” status without any cellular degradation (presumably by eating from the Tree of Life). But when they ate the forbidden fruit, something happened to disrupt this.
So what happened when they ate the fruit? Their disobedience cut them off from righteousness (God) and instead of repenting and repairing, they chose to be comparative. This comparative thinking lead to a form of brain damage that was passed on to their genetic offspring (us). Thus, while Adam and Eve were created in the image of God, we are all born in the image of fallen Adam and Eve.
We’ve inherited their brain damage. We are born without the connection to righteousness (God) that they had. We are born self-centered instead of God-centered. We are born with an innate capacity for comparative thinking. We are born without an innate desire for contrastive thinking (Romans 3:10-12). We are born without the ability for sustainable spiritual self-repair – we are born spiritually dead.
When Adam and Eve got the boot from the Garden of Eden, they also lost access to the Tree of Life (Genesis 3:22-24), so they lost the capacity for sustainable physical self-repair, and their bodies began to age and deteriorate toward physical death. And their offspring suffer the same curse.
But this situation, while just, presents God with a problem. A population of spiritually dead and physically dying people would make it impossible for God to get what He wants (spending eternity with the walking dead probably isn’t much fun – unless you’re Stephen King). So God has to come up with a just way for dead and dying people to regain life.
How can the dead and dying regain life? By being reborn. In order to be reborn, we first have to die.
We will all die at least once. Our physical bodies will one day die and decompose, but our spirit is different. It cannot cease to exist because it is eternal. However, as we just read, our spirit can be “dead” when it cannot repair.
Yet while we are born spiritually dead, we are born physically alive. We continue to grow and repair (non-lethal) damage until we peak in early adulthood, then we deteriorate and die physically.
If a physical rebirth were possible, it would have to happen after physical death. but since we are born spiritually dead, we could conceivably experience spiritual rebirth while we are physically alive. We could be spiritually “born again” even though our physical bodies are deteriorating.
How could this rebirth happen? Through perfect thinking and perfect blood. If we could gain access to perfect thinking and perfect blood, we could be reborn into spiritual life while we are still physically alive (though deteriorating), and regain sustainable physical life after our bodies die.
So if we could experience two births (Initial physical birth and spiritual rebirth) we would only die once (physical body). However if you were to choose not to access the perfect thinking and perfect blood for whatever reason, then when your physical body dies, justice would demand that your spirit be put into a state in which it could not repair for eternity. We’ll discuss this in a later post when we address “Hell”.
In a nutshell – if you’re born twice, you die once. If you’re born once, you die twice.
It would seem then that a result of the first dispensation was the need for God to find a righteous and just way to give humanity access to perfect thinking and perfect blood so that those who chose to accept it could live for eternity. This idea will prove to be the seed plot of our entire history.
Understanding life and death completes our look at the Tree of Life. Now we need to take a look at the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. Why did gaining knowledge of good and evil lead to death for Adam and Eve? In order to answer that, we need to understand what “good” and “evil” are. Next time…
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August 10, 2010
Religion – First Blood
WARNING - Application of religion may result in chaffing
When we do wrong, we need some kind of justification to address our guilt-debt. Thinking contrastively about our wrongdoings can lead to righteousness. If instead we are comparative in our thinking, then we rationalize our wrongs or do something in order to justify ourselves. I call this Justification of Man. The actions we do to justify ourselves are a subset of Justification of Man called religion.
Adam and Eve actually committed the first religious act immediately after they ate the forbidden fruit. They took actions to cover the shame of their newly discovered nakedness. Instead of contrastively addressing the ramifications of their wrongs, they decided to take a few fig leaves and start the world’s first natural clothing outlet.
Since they were not willing to be contrastive and rejected righteousness, God had no other just alternative but to judge them and evict them from the Garden. They lost paradise and probably gained leaf-rash. All would be lost for the First Couple unless they could find some form of atonement for their wrongs.
To atone for an offense is to pay the prescribed penalty for it. Then the scales are balanced and justice has been satisfied. The offended party justly defines the penalty. As we saw in first post on religion, the offended party is God, and in the Eden narrative, God was pretty clear about the penalty – He said that eating the fruit would lead to death (Genesis 2:17).
To atone for Original Sin, someone had to die – justly, the person(s) who did the wrong. Of course, death is a rather permanent way to pay the penalty, and it kind of puts a crimp in the whole “meaning of life” scenario”. Heaven’s not going to be much fun if everybody there is dead.
But God gave the hint of a way around this – a loophole in the “death as payment” scenario.
Justice demands a life as the penalty for Original Sin, but what if the life taken was not that of the perpetrator? What if a different life was sacrificed for the sake of the wrongdoer? What if an innocent (debt-free) person – a “Second Adam” if you will – volunteered to pay the penalty for the perpetrator?
Technically, the penalty would be paid, atonement would be accomplished, and best of all, the perpetrator could live! Everybody wins! Well, except for the innocent person who sacrificed himself . . .unless BY sacrificing himself, the innocent person gets something HE wants . . . (this sounds like something we will need to revisit in the future).
But how does this atonement factor into the discussion of religion? Let’s go back to the Eden narrative.
The fig-leaf covering (the first religious act) would not cut it as atonement in the eyes of a just God. So after God confronted and judged Adam and Eve, He made for them acceptable coverings out of animal skins (Genesis 3:21). How? Well, He killed an animal of course.
It was the first time in history that blood was shed; that a life was taken – and only by the shedding of blood and a sacrifice of a life, could Adam and Eves’ transgressions be “covered”.
Now this covering was not adequate in and of itself because the life of an animal, while “innocent”, was not the equivalent of a human life, and only an innocent human life would be a truly atoning sacrifice.
The animal skin/sacrifice served as a symbol of a future atonement that would become available to man. At some point subsequent to Original Sin, God will accept the sacrifice of an innocent human life on behalf of fallen man just as He did with the animal. But instead of just covering man’s shame, this future sacrifice will completely atone for it. The scales will be completely balanced and the debt will be paid.
Until then, God ordained certain rituals and activities that served as symbols of the coming atonement. These rituals make up a significant portion of the Levitical Laws in the Bible that we will discuss more when we look at the Fifth Dispensation.
These activities are NOT religion! God never said or implied that Levitical rituals alone would ever justify anyone.
This is an extremely important distinction. Not understanding this distinction is the reason that people who claim belief in God confuse ritual with religion – they see the ritual as a form of atonement instead of a symbol, memorial, or commemoration of atonement. As I wrote before, there isn’t anything inherently wrong with performing rituals; it’s the motivation behind the performance that separates ritual from religion.
Unfortunately certain men decided of their own volition (and convinced countless others) that rituals alone could provide justification and atonement, and they warped them into religious acts. But this was NEVER God’s intention.
As I wrote last week, the men who perverted Levitical rituals into religion are the ones whose actions led to the death of Christ. Their religion blinded them to the advent of the very person the rituals were put in place to make them aware of! See what I mean when I say religion causes brain damage?
Atonement is an absolutely vital key to understanding Christian philosophy and Biblical doctrine. But in order to understand it better, we need to examine a couple more terms introduced in the Eden narrative. Next time we will discuss “Life” and “Death.”
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July 26, 2010
Religion – Holy Brain Damage
Not only is Steve not contrastive, he’s a lousy parent
As an interlude to our examination of the first dispensation we’ve been looking at some of the terms that the Eden narrative introduced – the first being justification and in the last couple posts, the specific form known as “religion”.
Religion consists of actions we engage in to justify our wrongs and/or pay our guilt debt. In last week’s abbreviated post, I showed how religion gains galvanizing strength by being a communal worldview as well as a personal justification.
Like all comparative thinking, religion is easier and more comfortable than the alternative. Religion does not require objective, critical thought. In fact it discourages it. There is no need for independent thought when you have established dogma to guide your actions, and a high priest directing your mentality (and by high priest, I don’t just mean guys in ceremonial clothing. Al Gore, Karl Marx, Richard Dawkins, Carl Sagan, and Oprah count as the high priests of their particular sects)
It’s easier and more comfortable to keep following the rituals you grew up with and may have been in your family and/or culture for generations than to break with entrenched tradition
It’s easier to embrace a system that makes you feel good and superficially addresses your inherent knowledge that you are less than perfect, than deal with the idea that you can do nothing to be perfectly righteous on your own.
It’s easier to believe that this world is all there is and that you can perfect it (and yourself) by “saving” it via environmentalism or activism, than it is to see the world as fleeting and transitory.
It’s easier to believe that there is no God, and that Right and Just are effects of the universe instead of it’s cause, than to accept the idea that the existence of absolute Righteousness would require that we be accountable for our actions.
Because religion is a socially acceptable form of mass comparative thinking, it is readily and easily embraced. Because it does such a good job imitating contrastive thinking, it is extremely effective at discouraging the pursuit of true righteousness. And because it encourages the vain comfort of self-righteousness (perhaps the most toxic form of comparative thinking) it is extraordinarily difficult to let go of.
But for the remainder of this post, I want to specifically focus on the damage caused by religion done “in the name of God”. Performing works to justify yourself and slapping God’s name on it does not make it righteous. In fact, its self-delusion because God specifically says that our works are unacceptable in relation to true righteousness.
So why do we do it? Pride. It is easier to take some credit for our righteousness than to accept our relative inadequacy before a perfectly righteous God. If we feel that we have “partnered” with God for our righteousness, it makes us feel a little better about ourselves. It gives us a little self-esteem and self-worth. But a little pride is still pride.
The reason that religion is so damaging is that it associates itself with God while being in diametric opposition to God’s way to gaining righteousness! When non-religious people are exposed to religious adherents, their subconscious recognizes that religion is just another man-centered form of justification that damages the brain and really does nothing to alleviate guilt. However, since religion clothes itself in divinity and falsely associates itself with God, people come to believe that God Himself must be as illogical, self-contradictory, hypocritical, comparative, oppressive and futile as the people who practice religion. So they throw the baby out with the bathwater and completely reject all things called “God”. Thus, they put themselves in danger of missing the meaning of life.
But it’s even worse for the religious adherents themselves. At least those who use non-religious Justification of Man to deal with their guilt subconsciously know that they are merely rationalizing their wrongs. They are under no theological delusions regarding the source of their justification. The lack of guilt-satisfaction they get leaves them open to the possibility of being contrastive at some point.
But religious adherents are convinced (or have been convinced) that their religious efforts are required, needed, and/or appealing to God. So when their Acts of Justification do not alleviate their subconscious guilt, religious adherents don’t get contrastive (because they think their actions are divinely inspired), instead they figure that they are not being religious enough! So they get more religious! They intensify their acts of justification. They get more comparative! It’s a vicious circle that escalates the more it’s practiced.
If the contradictory irrationality of Justification of Man causes brain damage, then religion is brain damage to the Nth degree! This is how religious people can rationalize and justify suicide bombings, inquisitions, holy wars, holocausts, ethnic cleansing, etc. This is how certain religious Jews in the first century justified the torture and killing of the Son of the God they claimed to worship.
But isn’t the Bible full of rules and rituals that people were instructed to follow in order to please God? Next time we’ll wrap up our discussion of religion by looking at man’s first religious act, exploring why Biblical doctrine is often confused with religion, and finally, we’ll begin to see where atonement comes in. Stay tuned.
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July 8, 2010
Religion – Acts of Justification
In the last post, we saw that when we do something wrong, we feel guilt which drives us to seek some type of justification for our wrongs. We can either choose the “Justification of God”, which begins with contrastive thinking and can lead to God’s righteousness, or we can choose the “Justification of Man” which begins with comparative thinking. This week I want to examine another aspect of Justification of Man.
The last post also showed that Justification of Man consists primarily of denial or rationalizations; thing we say or think to justify ourselves. This other aspect consists of things we do to justify ourselves. I call them “Acts of Justification” – more commonly known as “Religion”.
One of the most controversial pages on this blog seems to be the “About Me” page. (I never thought my identity would stir up so much trouble). I’ve received several public and private comments deriding my statement that I am not religious. Some people think I’m delusional (which is fine, I’ve been accused of worse). Or they superimpose their own definition of religion (ignoring the one I give), and accuse me of heresy. The truth is, the reason I am not religious is because I want to go to Heaven, and religion won’t get me there. Hopefully this post will add some clarity to my position.
If you ask the average person how you get to heaven or earn God’s favor, they will probably tell you that have to be a “good person” (a good person being someone who behaves in a socially acceptable manner and performs some degree of charitable actions or “good works”).
There are a couple of huge problems with this idea. The first problem is that “good”, in this case, is an extremely subjective measurement. What one person considers good may not be good or even acceptable by the standards of another person or culture. Furthermore, just how “good” do you have to be to please God? Its not like we have a cosmic “goodness meter” we can check.
That’s where religion starts to come in. Islam tells us that if our good works outnumber our bad works at the end of life, then we go to Heaven. Hinduism tells us that by doing enough good works and earning good Karma during our lives, we will be reincarnated as a higher being (and if we earn bad Karma we’ll come back as a dung beetle or a Jonas Brother). Buddhists . . . well, they believe that the meaning of life is to achieve “nothingness” so their opinions are irrelevant.
Even some Christian groups teach that we can only reach Heaven by being a part of their specific congregation, abiding by their definitions of good works, and performing their rituals in order to please God. So there is not much of a consensus on how to be “good enough” to get to Heaven.
The other huge problem is that the Meaning of Life post showed that you only get to Heaven by being like God. You don’t get there by racking up “goodness points”, you get there by being righteous, and being right begins with contrastive thinking.
Religion is not contrastive it is comparative.
Remember, when we do wrong, we have a guilt-debt to pay. We inherently know that we owe that debt because of the existence of Right and Just. Those of us who acknowledge God as the embodiment of righteousness and justice understand that the debt we owe is to God. Performing good works in order to try to please God is the act of attempting to balance the scales of justice with our own efforts.
This is Religion. The insidious thing about this kind of justification is that it seems like you’re being contrastive at first. You do acknowledge your wrongs, but instead of turning to God for righteousness, you try to cover your bad actions with good actions. This is the opposite of Justification of God. This is another form of Justification of Man. Justification of Man is comparative thinking. Comparative thinking is Pride. Religion is an act of pride. It is impossible to be like God when you act in pride.
So am I saying that it is wrong to do good works? Or course not. Being charitable, helping others, and being kind are all great things. Even performing religious rituals is not bad in and of itself. Its not so much what you do, it’s the motivation behind what you do.
If your good works are performed to justify your wrongs, appease God’s justice, or earn salvation, then it is Justification of Man. Nothing we do, no effort we make on our own, can ever undo the wrong we committed. Believing that it can, will lead you away from God because anything you do to justify yourself is pride.
The meaning of life is to be like God. To be like God, you have to be righteous. To be righteous, you have to be contrastive. Religion twists contrastive thinking and increases comparative thinking. Religion is Acts of Justification that lead away from God’s plan.
And that is why I am not religious.
In the last post I mentioned that religion has the most damaging effects of any form of justification. I’ll explain why next week.
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June 30, 2010
Justifiable Guilt
BRAIN DAMAGE RUN AMOK
We’ve been examining how the dispensations are God’s contrastive process of showing how His plan of righteousness is the correct one. In the last post, we saw that Adam and Eve failed in the first dispensation primarily because they chose to justify themselves over God when they committed a wrong act.
Our history on earth is played out through the dispensations. But why does it have to be this way? We’re human beings with a free will right? What if we decide we don’t want to play God’s dispensation game? Can’t we just ignore our wrongs and refuse to justify anyone? (In other words, can’t we all just take on the mentality of politicians?)
Well, for better or worse, that isn’t really an option. When God created Adam and Eve in His image, certain traits and knowledge about existence were irrevocably passed on to us. For example, we inherently know that existence exists. We know that contradictions cannot exist. We know that every effect has a cause, and we know that the concepts of right and just are absolutes.
Though while we tacitly acknowledge that righteousness and justice are optimal, also we know that we are not always and completely right and just. Therefore, we know that at some point we’ll screw up.
We inherently know when we do something wrong because our brains are wired to detect contradictions. Even if we try to deny it consciously, our subconscious (or “unaware brain”) still detects contradictions and inconsistencies whether we want it to or not. Our subconscious makes sure we know when we do wrong by making us feel guilt.
We feel guilt because our inherent awareness of justice tells us that the “wrong” we just did unbalanced the scales and we’re on the wrong side of justice. We’re at a deficit. We owe something. Guilt is our “you need to pay” alert.
But we don’t like feeling guilty, so we want to make it go away. The problem is that we can’t make the “wrong” we committed go away (because it already happened), so the only relief from guilt that we can hope for is some kind of justification.
Justification is the act of rendering an action “just”. If an action is justified, then it is considered fair and appropriate. No one owes anyone anything. The scales are balanced.
There are essentially two categories of justification, which I call the “Justification of God”, and the “Justification of Man”. Justification of God means that we get justification God’s way by being contrastive and/or allowing God to guide us into righteousness. We justify righteousness (God) over ourselves when we are wrong by acknowledging the “wrong”, and then turning from it and embracing “right”. This is called repentance. Repentance leads to “salvation” which is the process by which God renders us justified. We will examine salvation in detail when we look at the sixth dispensation.
But as we discussed earlier, being contrastive is painful, perhaps just as painful as the guilt we’re trying to get rid of. That’s where “Justification of Man” comes in. Justification of Man means we render ourselves just in spite of our wrongs. When we justify ourselves, we are being intentionally comparative. We create some rationalization for our wrongness that allows us to unilaterally declare that either the “wrong” we did wasn’t really wrong, or that we had a just reason for committing it.
Lets say, for example that I make a mean or hurtful comment to someone who doesn’t deserve it. Instead of apologizing, I justify myself by saying that I’ve been under a lot of stress, or that I get irritable without my morning coffee, or that the remark wasn’t really hurtful and the person I offended needs to “lighten up”.
The problem is that Justification of Man is a contradiction. The “wrong” really happened. The scales are still unbalanced and a penalty is still owed, thus the guilt is still there. Self-justification is self-delusion.
Although we can try (with great effort) to deny this reality with our conscious mind, we cannot fool our subconscious. The subconscious only sees reality. It is immune to our delusions, skewed perspectives, rationalizations, social constructs and irrational views. The subconscious is the source of our feeling of guilt because it always sees the reality of our wrongs.
Since our brains function according to electro-chemical feedback loops, this internal conflict between our conscious and subconscious minds can result in actual physical degradation of the brain. So technically, when we engage in Justification of Man, we are intentionally causing ourselves brain damage (this actually goes a long way toward explaining the mentality of politicians).
There is one other category of justification that is a hybrid of Justification of God and Justification of Man. In this form of justification, man acknowledges his wrongness and guilt to varying degrees, but instead of contrastively seeking God’s righteousness, man attempts to make things right by balancing the scales through his own efforts. He tries to make his guilt go away and appease righteousness (God) by performing “good works”. This type of justification is called “religion”. In many ways, it is the worst and most damaging justification of all. We’ll discuss it next week.
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June 22, 2010
Dispensation 1 – Paradise Lost
Shortly after God made Adam, he took him on a tour of the rest of creation. “This is all amazing,” Adam said, “What are you going to do next?” “I’ve decided to make you a companion,” God replied, “I’m going to make her from your body, so you’ll be completely compatible in every way. She’ll always respect and admire you. She will always say exactly what she means at all times. She’ll respond to every situation with logic and rationality, and she will quickly accept accountability when she is wrong. She will have faith in you, be supportive, and always give you the benefit of the doubt. She will consistently be on time for events, she’ll never hide her insecurities behind vanity and when you have a conflict, she will always let you have the last word. “Wow”, Adam said, “She sounds great! What will this cost me?” “In order to create her” God replied. “I’ll need a lung, your left foot, a piece of your heart and liver, a kidney, and three vertebrae.” “That’s an awful lot to give up” Adam said, ”What can I get for a rib?”
(yeah, I know its corny joke, but its my blog so I can be corny if I want)
Our history on this planet can be seen as the story of God contrastively showing that His plan for man’s righteousness is the only one that will work by presenting every reasonable scenario in which man could choose righteousness on his own. These scenarios are called dispensations. In each dispensation, man is given the opportunity to choose God’s way or his own – to either justify God or justify himself.
The first dispensation would logically be a “pure” scenario in which man was in a state of complete innocence – A state in which he had no “baggage”, no preconceived notions, no historical influences, no childhood trauma or growing pains, etc. This first dispensation should address the question, “If man was a completely innocent being with a volitional will, but no knowledge of good or evil and no moral biases, would he, of his own volition, choose righteousness (God)?”
This of course is the familiar narrative of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden (Genesis chapter 3). God creates the first man and woman in His own image and places them in paradise. They have just one rule: they are not to eat the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. The result would be death.
They now have a choice – don’t eat the fruit and live forever in blissful innocence/ignorance, or come to know good and evil with the result being death. (This whole situation seems odd at first glance, but it is actually logical and just. We’ll explore it in an upcoming post.)
Of course, in order to make it a fair choice, you’d have to have someone present a counter-argument to God’s position. Thus enters the serpent. Now some people get hung up on the idea of the talking snake. But considering the fact that in the previous two chapters of Genesis God creates the entire universe by just thinking about it, a talking snake seems like a comparatively minor phenomenon. And for the record, there is reason to believe that it wasn’t a “snake” per se.
The grammatical root of the word translated “serpent” is “nachash” in Hebrew, which means “one who whispers an enchantment”, or “to shine”. As a proper noun, it would be translated “The Shining One”. I believe this is an allusion to the being known as Satan, who was also called Lucifer (Isaiah 14:12-15) the “light bearer”. This idea is also referenced in Revelation 12:9. “Nachash” later became synonymous with slithery reptile in Hebrew vernacular.
Of course I may be overcomplicating the whole matter and it could very well have just been a tree snake with an excellent vocabulary. Either way, for our purposes its taxonomy is not as relevant as what it said. It basically implied that God was wrong. Adam and Eve would not die if they ate the fruit. In fact they would be more like God in that they would know what good and evil was. This was a clever mix of facts and lies that we we’ll discuss later.
In any case, Eve bought the spiel and ate the fruit. She gave some to Adam who followed suit. And presto! Original sin. Right?
Not so fast. While this is the traditional view of what constitutes original sin (i.e., the transgression that got the first couple booted from paradise and made all their descendants the rebellious miscreants that we are today), there is reason to believe that eating the forbidden fruit was only a part of original sin – and not even the most significant part. I base this on three things.
1. God did not immediately bring judgment and end the dispensation after the fruit was eaten.
2. In and of itself, eating the fruit didn’t offer a just opportunity for Adam and Eve to choose to be comparative or contrastive, because they didn’t know what good and evil were until after they eat it.
3. God’s actions immediately after they ate the fruit show that he was much more interested in their reaction to the sin that the sin itself.
So what happened after the fruit was eaten? Adam and Eve suddenly had knowledge of good and evil (and public nudity) and they hid from God. Did God immediately rain down wrath? Nope, he asked them questions.
God asked Adam where he was and what he did. God was not looking for information. He obviously knew where Adam was, what he did, and what the ramifications were.
Adam and God both knew Adam was wrong. The only variable in this situation, was how would Adam react? Would he be comparative or contrastive? God asked questions in order to give Adam the opportunity to either justify himself, or justify God – to keep his new red jellybean or replace it with a blue one.
Adam could have said, “God, I messed up. You told me not to eat the fruit and I did. It was all my fault. I promise not to do it again. Um, could you make me a pair of shorts?”
But instead, Adam justified himself and blamed God for creating Eve! He basically said, “yeah, I screwed up, but it’s your fault God! If you hadn’t given me this harpy, I never would have been tempted to eat the fruit and I’d still have my rib!”
God then turned to Eve who also justified herself and threw the snake under the bus. God didn’t ask the snake anything because, lets face it, no one likes snakes.
Once both of our progenitors showed themselves completely unwilling to accept a shred of responsibility (way to set an example for the kids Mom and Dad), God declared the first dispensation a failure by bringing judgment and an eviction notice on the first couple. So it’s on to the next dispensation.
Now I’ll admit that many of the elements in the Eden narrative seem a bit incredible, (no more incredible than the whole “speaking the universe into existence” preamble, but still). So what do we do with this story? We basically have two options, its either symbolic/allegorical, or it literally happened.
If it’s an allegory, then no further analysis is necessary. It’s just a nice little moral fairy tale about resisting temptation, the corruption of the innocent yadda, yadda. No different than Pandora’s Box or any similar fable. It presents universal wisdom that we can interpret or euphemize in any way we choose. Some religious traditions do just that. The problem is that some of those same religious traditions also believe in a literal Jesus, and according to Luke 3:23-38, Adam is a part of Jesus’ genealogy. Not sure how they navigate that contradiction.
But if the narrative is literal (and I have no reason to believe it is not) then the ramifications of this first dispensation are staggering and give us a lot of terms and ideas that need to be defined and analyzed before we can move on to the next dispensation. These include, good, evil, life, death, knowledge, sin, curse, etc. We’ll start the analysis next week by looking at why doing wrong requires justification.
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June 14, 2010
A Plan for the Ages
We know that the only way for a being whose nature is NOT right and just (us) to be completely righteous is to choose to take direction from a being who IS always and completely right and just (God). The only way to do this would be for us be humble and reject comparative thinking (pride). When we are humble/contrastive, we choose God’s way over our own and justify Him over ourselves when a conflict occurs. When we are proud/comparative, we choose our own way and justify ourselves when we are wrong.
God has a plan for humanity that is right and just. As we saw in the last post, a righteous God would have to show that His plan is the only one that is completely right by using a contrastive process to prove that all other possibilities are wrong.
So how does God do this? He presents a just scenario wherein man has the option to:
a) Contrastively choose God’s way over his own, or
b) Choose to be comparative and justify himself over God
If and when man chooses to be comparative, God can then eliminate that failed scenario and replace it with a new one that gives man another just opportunity to choose to be comparative or contrastive, (to either choose God, or justify himself), until man either proves that he is capable of choosing righteousness on his own, or shows that he cannot be righteous outside of God’s ultimate plan. In each of these scenarios, God progressively deals with mankind in a different way based on what occurred in the previous scenario. These scenarios are commonly referred to as “dispensations”.
Now I know that “dispensation” is a word that carries a lot of religious baggage that goes above and beyond just being a moniker for the different scenarios in which God has dealt, (and will deal) with man. But I’m only using it is because it is convenient. If the word and its various religious connotations makes you uncomfortable, then just substitute the word “ages” where appropriate.
The Bible seems to depict seven such dispensations. Five of them have been tried, and man has failed to choose God in each one. We are currently in the sixth dispensation (and there is reason to believe that we are nearing its end). There will be one more dispensation following this one, after which all just and reasonable scenarios will have been presented and God can justly implement the meaning of life (Heaven). For the rest of this year, we will be exploring these dispensations in detail.
Each dispensation is unique and non-repeatable for reasons that we will discuss as we progress.
So what qualities should the first dispensation have? Since it is the first one, it should be the simplest. It should give man the purest and simplest opportunity to choose God. It should have minimal people, minimal outside influences, minimal information, minimal choice, and maximum innocence.
The first dispensation started with the first two people that God created. The outcome of this scenario obviously had a dramatic impact on the rest of history. Although it is a familiar narrative, some very important details are usually missed or misunderstood in popular culture. We’ll examine it next week.
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Faith By Reason 