I was up before noon today, Sunday. Not much before noon. I was up until nearly 2a.m. watching television and reading. It is my morning. I feel so great it is not easy to express, and expression is essential. So, here I sit with my fingers flying too fast across the keyboard tying to keep up with the waves of inspiration that flood through me, especially on Sundays. I make typing mistakes too frequently when trying to keep up with that torrent of bliss and inspiration. I don’t slow down, though. I try to type faster with fewer mistakes. It’s like budgeting. I don’t try to economize. Instead, I try to increase my income to keep up with spending.
Being born in the Protestant Christian area of central Texas has imprinted some special considerations for Sundays. “Remember the sabbath and keep it holy.” That is something I kept after being reborn and recreating myself intentionally. I like that idea of putting aside time for communion with the lord. I don’t have Christian beliefs about God. I rejected them in 1960. When Love caused me to lift from my body and see myself as I was, I decided to start over. I still can’t explain it well, but I can tell you I abandoned all concepts of God and religion. It was about twenty years later when the Heavenly Parents blessed me with something of a psychic visit that I began to include such things in my being. I don’t believe in God. I know God and Goddess, instead. Faith that God exists is not something I am willing to indulge. I do have faith that God is good. I have faith that Goddess is good. I would write page after page about it, but I want mankind to keep such thoughts personal. I don’t like the way people proselytize and try to get others to believe as they do. I am especially opposed to making children go to church or whatever place the delivery of some religion or ideas about theology are taught. Anyone of sound mind can see that horrors of today and yesterday the religions have created. I think God would not come among us as long as so many are so lost in false beliefs and religious zeal, and conflicted beliefs. On the other hand, there is something to be said about history being what it was because it had to be. Can God be everything everyone thinks and has thought since the beginning? I don’t see how. The beliefs are too contradictory and conflicting. The Christian religion cannot be removed from the horrors done in the name of Jesus. The Jewish religion and the Muslim religion, too. So, what can be done?
I wish I knew as much about the Muslim religion as I do about the Christian religion. I know quite a bit about Judaism because of the Old Testament of Christianity, but not enough. The Bible is a beautiful book. Many wonderful and beautiful things have come from Christianity. The Bible has been influential in causing a lot of good and a lot of evil by people. Wisdom is where it is. The Bible is full of wisdom. It is full of contradictions and false reports about facts. If has many stories that are total fiction. This is blasphemy, I know. That is the problem. People have murdered countless people for heresy, and not just murdered but tortured, too. Burning people tied to a stake in a bonfire is one of history’s worst horrors. Killing people because they don’t believe as you do could be the most heinous of all murders. How can it not be the root of bigotry, racism, prejudice, supremacy, and other wrongs that cause horrible actions?
“God’s chosen people,” the temptation of Eve, the covenant with the Israelites, and dominion over the Earth are just some of the roots of things now seen as beliefs that have caused great horrors since they began. If an individual believes such things, that does not cause nearly as much murder and war as vast numbers of people believing does. The things people believe of God are more man creating God in their image than God creating man in his image. This would be obvious to an adult that was not indoctrinated by parents, churches, and members of that child’s society. The Bible tells people they are better than other forms of life even though Genesis says God blessed all forms of life as he created them. It also says that he gave all the animals and man the fruit of plant for food. “And God said, Behold, I have given you every herb bearing seed, which is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree, in the which is the fruit of a tree yielding seed; to you it shall be for meat. And to every beast of the earth, and to every fowl of the air, and to every thing that creepeth upon the earth, wherein there is life, I have given every green herb for meat: and it was so.” Genesis 1:29 – 30. Do you abide by that in your life? Or do you live by the punishment God imposed on Adam and Eve after they ate of the tree of knowledge? You do. Face it.
God does not say in the Bible that mankind and all the other types of life that can move about will be punished forever because Adam and Eve disobeyed God. There are passages that say the punishments by God will be visited upon the next three or four generations. “Keeping mercy for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, and that will by no means clear the guilty; visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children, and upon the children’s children, unto the third and to the fourth generation.” Exodus 34:7 There are other passages regarding the punishment of the generations, and translations vary too much. “The NIV translates Exodus 20:5 as “punished the children for the sin of the parents,” while the RSV says “visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children.” https://www.christianstudylibrary.org/article/exodus-205-%E2%80%93-punishing-children-sins-fathers Translations vary and the “word of God” changes accordingly. I cannot accept that God’s word can be changed by translations. So, the Bible does not qualify as the “word of God,” but as the faulty word of man. People who are zealous about the Bible being the word of God have done immense evil in the past and continue to do so today. Murder in the name of God is evil. The actions against heresy are evil. Forcing someone to adopt certain beliefs is evil. I define it that way. Those who don’t are more aligned with what they think of as the devil than with God or Jesus. Do you think the Disciples would have burned a human at the stake for not accepting the things they were telling them? Of course, a person who lives according to the Old Testament might.
Are you aware of the War Scroll found at Qumran? It was among the Dead Sea Scrolls. It says there will be “The war of the Sons of Light against the Sons of Darkness.” It is easy to find on the internet, but not so easy to read. I have two books of the English translations of the Dead Sea scrolls. The war scroll is about a war to come in which the divine will help the writers of the scrolls vanquish the opposition. It is a fantastic text. Far out there. There are Christians who believe similarly. Both religions have ardents who want to see the war come. War! That is nothing new. It is still a part of the human desires. The zealous believers of both religions desire an end to opposition. They want supremacy of beliefs and rights to bring others into those beliefs. Add to that the problems of translation and the “rights” to ancient text and we have the world we have today, a world plunging toward a gigantic holocaust with mankind fighting over opposing beliefs. Even the “war” over the right to copyrights for books of interpretation of the Dead Sea Scrolls has happened. See; https://www.bibleinterp.arizona.edu/articles/flesher-111600 Such conflicts have always plagued mankind. As though the beliefs of a person should have sway over the beliefs of others, and even convey the right to kill people who do not conform. The need to keep such things personal and private could not be made more evident.
The troubles of mankind regarding beliefs, theology, ideology, opinions are immense and persistent. It is difficult to comprehend the psychology that dominates such people. It goes far beyond the simple workings of a human brain. I cannot represent the fact about it, but I can feel them. There are things beyond this dimension that influence this one. Theology is of that sort, but there are people who maintain other concepts about other dimensions. The facts are disputed, but the facts are the facts. All that is missing is widespread knowing of the facts. It cannot rationally be a fight or a matter of indoctrinating the young to grow up believing what the adults want them to believe. It must be more objective than that, and it must conform to the facts in the other dimensions, whatever they are. Will we prevent the accomplishment of world-peace and prosperity for all so we can fight over our beliefs about things we cannot even sense with the senses? I say let such thing be personal and help the young find their own way free of indoctrination with the ways and beliefs of the adults. This must be translated into the ways we help adults find their way after tragedies, emotional breakdowns, and other mental/emotional trouble. There are so many people out there trying to help adults who are having trouble by getting them to come into one of the many religions or other beliefs. There is no freedom when there is effort being expended to convince others to think and feel the way the convincer does. Sure, sometimes people get relief and even healing from such efforts, but the history of mankind is old, and the suffering and horrors of life are just as old. To cause an end to it and bring on world-peace, prosperity for all, and personal fulfillment to all things must change at a deep and core level. That says nothing about the dominion over all the other forms of life, and that is essential to a utopic future. The future is coming. That we know. What form will it take? Let’s make it a utopic one.
Victor Frankel’s book, Man’s Search for Meaning, stands immortal in its wisdom. But mankind finds meaning in fiction, horror, evil, and endless horrors committed to living things. The plant kingdom said to be blessed by God in the Bible are nothing to the vast majority of mankind today and throughout history.