A New Christian Blog

This blog has always been a reasonably orthodox blog. Things have rapidly developed over the last couple weeks, however, to make me a non-orthodox Christian. This chain of events was primarily precipitated by one question:

Is the God of Moses the same God as Jesus' Father?

The God of Moses commanded Moses, and later Joshua, to undertake events which can only be described as crimes against humanity. Elsewhere in the Old Testament, God acts in much the same vein, sending a wild bear to maul and kill the children who taunted Elisha for being bald, for example. Torturing Job for the intellectual curiosity of Lucifer, who appears as God's employee not his enemy. I could quote chapter and verse on a whole litany of lies, genocide, murder and jealousy on the part of the Old Testament God, but I think anyone who knows the Old Testament can easily find the passages I refer to. I, like a number of Christians, have been content to ignore the Old Testament for the most part rather than really confront this question.

Well I am confronting it. It is apparent to me that the nature of the One True God as I know Him and as revealed by Jesus, and the god of Moses (who I call Mo'god, a contraction of 'Moses god') are completely incompatible. I know God, the Father, and know that He does not sin and His word is truth. He is full of love and mercy. Mo'god, assuming that I am right that he exists, is a fallen being much like us, a celestial being of some sort but not God.

Because of this radical new thinking, I have decided to create a new Christian blog, The Heavenly Father. My concerns over such things as social ethics remains unchanged, my understanding has been changed to reflect the God that I know and separate him from the ruler of this world.

http://heavenlyfatherabove.blogspot.com/

This is probably the end of posting on this blog, I will keep it around so that I can see where I have come from and as reference to help me to return to themes I have addressed in the past from time to time.

Peace and love to all of you in the name of the One True Father in heaven.


IMPORTANT NOTE:
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I no longer believe in the sharp dualism which was the point of departure for the new blog. My feeling at the time when I started the new blog was that the world was so evil that God cannot be involved in its origin.

I have since come to believe that God had to allow a certain amount of evil to exist for our own benefit. God does not coerce anyone (although He leads strongly at times) to follow Him, so there had to be a neutral place in which we could come to a decision about Him on our own. God wants us to freely decide to follow Him. Those who don't, don't get anything but what they chose. If they chose evil, they got evil. Everyone gets what they in fact want.

However, my thinking (including still disavowing Moses as nothing but a ruthless military leader who abused the name of God) is still sufficiently changed to merit its own blog.

Peace, Robert

The greatest of these

My mind is full of many concerns and questions these days, so much so that it robs me of peace. Therefore I have decided to focus on only one thing, and forget the rest for now. This is the one thing:

If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal. If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have a faith that can move mountains, but have not love, I am nothing. If I give all I possess to the poor and surrender my body to the flames, but have not love, I gain nothing.


Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.


Love never fails. But where there are prophecies, they will cease; where there are tongues, they will be stilled; where there is knowledge, it will pass away. For we know in part and we prophesy in part, but when perfection comes, the imperfect disappears. When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put childish ways behind me. Now we see but a poor reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known.

And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love.

-1 Corinthians 13:1-13

Take up your OWN cross

We have allowed our faith to become remote from us, and we have allowed ourselves to become remote from each other. We have delegated the business of being Christians to churches and organizations, and they have not used that delegation wisely nor should they have ever had it to begin with. It is time to decentralize the business of being a Christian. Time for the job of ministry to return to EVERY CHRISTIAN. Our shepherd is from above, we do not need other shepherds.

Like the synagogues of old, everyone who is a full member of a church and approved as being of sound understanding of the Gospel should be able, if they wish to, to take the podium and preach. Now it is usually only people in or heading for a career in ministry.

The church should be a face-to-face organization - megachurches are an excuse to be a spectator of Christianity not a doer of it.

The church must not have control by denominations, so that if a church falls from the true faith, it falls alone. If a denomination falls, its fall taints all its churches.

There should be no sole preacher or pastor of the church; but all are called to ministry in some form. Some to preach, some to give good council, some to tend the sick as their own gifts lend them. If there is a leader, let him be like the quartermaster of a ship: in charge of keeping everything in good order, but not the captain. We have only one captain.

We have a great enemy standing in our way. The spirit of this age, which listens to its master the devil, would like nothing more than for our communities to fade away, to be replaced by solitary persons who live out of community with others. The devil loves nothing better than a rugged individualist who regards himself as an island. Delegating Christianity to churches and ministry people facilitates this. You can pop in on Sunday, do your praying thing, put a buck in the plate and consider yourself a Christian, so you can go on to do exactly whatever you like the other six days. This is not what our Lord called us to.

We have to, all of us, make a sometimes herculean effort to break down this system that would keep us separated. A world in which Facebook stands in for community. I don't have any answers for how to do that, except to keep trying.

We must ALL minister in some form, do not leave it to priests and pastors. Take up your cross.

Christianity Without Denominations

Or rather those who SAY they are your followers.

Your enemy the devil prowls around like a roaring lion looking for someone to devour

-1 Peter 5:8


There are two big problems with the existence of denominations. One, there are no denominations in heaven, no presbyterian and baptist sections. There is in truth only one Church and never has been more than one. That church is temporarily distinguished between those who are here on Earth and those on the other side, but even that distinction will fall in time.

The second problem is, when a denomination falls, when it surrenders the truth to expediency and lands in the hands of false teachers, all the myriad churches connected to it fall as well, because the individual church belongs, often in a very physical financial property sense, to the denomination. And denominations will fall, we have seen it time and again. Rome has had its Borgia popes and other misbehaving pontiffs through history; the Episcopalians have their Schori (not to mention evil king Henry who started it all), the other ones have already or easily could go the same way.

An individual church, when it falls, only takes that church with it. When a denomination falls, it takes every church of that denomination with it, even good churches, because the denomination sets and enforces doctrine.

Think of the Internet. If the Internet were to be vulnerable to the failure of one computer, the whole thing would have fallen in a heap long ago. The internet survives because it can route around a failed server. The connections between churches can be in the same manner. Church A is in communion with churches B and C, but if B becomes a bunch of dope-smoking neopagans, the link to C remains unharmed.

The main denominations will fade away rather in the manner of the Soviet Union, because nobody believes in them any more. Did the Soviet Union fall apart because of the military or economic threat from the West? Not at all, it fell because of Pepsi and blue jeans. Because nobody believed in their Leninism anymore and they wanted to be free to pursue their own materialistic ends. Had everyday Russians still believed in that Leninist junk, there would still be a Soviet Union.

They will also fade because God will take away His people from them and send them somewhere else.

It is also wrong to chop the church of God into pieces. Not that the church is in truth chopped, but it is chopped apart in our minds because we have all fallen away from the truth. We should be seeking the One and fellowship with His One Church, and not invent names for ourselves to distinguish ourselves from other Christians, some of whom may be closer to God than we are. To have different church BUILDINGS is unavoidable since we do not all live in the same place nor do we all accept the same kind of church service. But let the government of that congregation not be ruled by religious potentates from afar.

The devil is all about devouring churches where he can. There is no need to make it easy for him.

The Way and the Truth

It is amazing to me that so many people, including Pope Benedict, apparently believe it is possible to reason to God. That through thought alone, you can become a Christian. Were that to be true, then anyone who can do math would be a Christian, and non-Christians would be as rare as those who believe that 2+2 do not equal 4. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Were it possible for anyone to reason to God, it would have been me. Educated in logical philosophy, I spent pretty much my whole life trying to reason out why we are here and what all this means. I got nowhere. Like one of the Upanishads, the early Hindu books of wisdom, the best I could do is say "it is not this, it is not that." Not this that or the other thing. Like physicists who are continually reminded that they do not understand the fundamental nature of the world, but yet they grope in vain for a precise formulation. General Relativity, classical quantum mechanics, string theory, membrane theory, 10 or 11 dimensional membrane theory, parallel universes, each theory falls before the next one, reinforcing the central mystery and truth that we have no clue what this existence is made of. The most basic thing, we have no real understanding of whatsoever, despite the decades of work by the most brilliant minds on Earth.

You cannot seize the truth in your talons of pure reason. Your hands will come up empty.

I did not become a Christian initially (the first three year period after which I turned my back on Christ) because I thought life through to that conclusion. There is only one thing which I reasoned, which is that I am fundamentally inherently unable to know the truth by myself. Had it been possible, I would have done it.

I did not come to God like Sherlock Holmes coming to the culprit. I came as a penitant, a beggar, and asked:

God, you are my last hope for finding a light in this darkness, the truth. I know I cannot find it myself, nor do I believe anyone else can. Please help!

In John 3 when talking to Nicodemus, Jesus lays out his mission. "For God so loved the world that he gave his own Son, that he who believes will not perish, but have eternal life." The logical response to this is "whaa??" "What in the world are you talking about, Jesus?" Knowing of course that this is a lot to take in, he prefaces it by saying this:

"The wind blows wherever it pleases. You hear its sound, but you cannot tell where it comes from or where it is going. So it is with everyone born of the Spirit."
-John 3:8

He says that it is the Spirit that gives birth to the Spirit, that you must have God's spirit implanted in you and like the wind, the Spirit is under no man's control but follows its own will. He then makes the curious reference to Moses holding up the bronze snake in the desert.

The story of the bronze snake in a nutshell is this: the Israelites were afflicted with poisonous snakebites because they were bad. Moses held up a bronze snake, which to start out with is bordering on the ban against graven images, and says all that come to the bronze snake will be healed. Well there is nothing more irrational and arbitrary than that. Trust the bronze snake. Yeah sure. That is for sure not a logical operation there. Jesus is saying, you can't trust your reason on this. You cannot reason, buy, steal, or otherwise obtain salvation on your own strength in any way. The very best you can do, is to realize that your reason is not helpful in this situation. You have to throw up your hands and throw yourself on God's mercy. Then HE not you, helps you out. He gives you the one thing which can help you, a thing which you never had and had no way of getting, a thing which comes from God alone and is dispensed according to God's will alone.

"I will have mercy on whom I have mercy, and I will have compassion on whom I have compassion."
-Romans 9:15, Exodus 33:19

Many liberal Christians and also the Catholic Church have said, being a good person of whatever religion is all you need. Muslim Hindu Jain Daoist Buddhist Jewish, it is all okay so long as you are a good person. The problem is, you are not and never can be inherently good. God alone is good. Receiving His spirit is the only way you can be saved. What is the only way of doing that?

Jesus said:

"I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life. No one comes to the Father except by Me."

The Cleansing Of The Temple

Oh Lord, I wish you would return and open up a can of Grade A whupass on these people.

I am just shaking spitting mad. It is not one thing or the other which has made me so, it is the whole thing. The most recent scandal in the Episcopal Church, the revelation that some priests in the Dallas diocese have been taking financial advantage of their parishioners (one of whom is my friend), is just the straw on the camels back, but there have been lots of straws. Its way bigger than that. It is as big as, virtually the whole state of Christianity in our age.

The cleansing of the temple was not just about the Jewish Temple. Jesus hardly ever did anything for just particular transitory reasons. It's about us, today. YOU CANNOT SERVE BOTH GOD AND MONEY, what part of that is hard to understand? At least one former Episcopal priest obviously didn't get that part.

And I am not just picking on the Episcopal Church here. You would think that the Catholics, since their priests have disavowed both sex AND money, would be better. But not only was there sex, not only sex of a most disturbing nature, but then their hierarchy tried to cover up for them. Just as there are no doubt people in the Dallas diocese right now who are attempting to do spin control on this newest debacle. None of these people apparently really put God first, as was supposedly their call to do.

And then there are the folks on TV, the Bob Tiltons and the Jimmy Swaggarts, whose conspicuous sin and consumption is only exceeded by their piteous moans if caught out. And there are thousands more ready to take their place.

The crucifixion of Christ was just an appetizer compared to the abuse hurled at His holy face since then. The Romans beat and crucified Him, but they never dragged him through the mud like this. To the people who do such things: mountains, whole planets, giant blue stars, the universe itself, won't be big enough to hide you when the time comes. God avenges.

The New Testament reminds us that in the final times, the true Way will be almost invisible amongst the false prophets and general climate of darkness that will prevail. The real Way will not be televised. You won't be able to find it in a church. So much mud will be thrown on the image of Christ that you won't be able to find Him at all, He must find you and against great odds bring you to the right way.

In a previous post in the comments I noted that the cleansing of the Temple was the only time in the Gospels where Jesus became violent. That should tell us something, tell us how much God despises mixing commerce and holiness. In my own church I have seen seminars on "financial security" advertised - no such thing should be taking place in a house of God. If you are really His, you have better than financial security, you have eternal security.

It is past time to take up the stick and start overturning the money changers. Throw down the church hierarchies that no longer follow God. Speak together loudly and unequivocally that anyone who calls himself a teacher must embrace the same poverty as our Teacher embraced. Priests driving BMW's and Mercedes are an abomination. Cast down the false shepherds. Be your own priest, you could hardly do worse than so many of the ordained priests do. Commit to your own ministry, do not rely on churches to do that for you.

To all those false priests and worthless shepherds, you are on notice. I say this to you:

THIS IS A HOUSE OF PRAYER. AND YOU HAVE TURNED IT INTO A DEN OF THIEVES.

Moral Education in Schools

Imagine there's no ethics. Imagine if you can. Nothing you won't kill for. The holocaust of Man.

Since President Obama is ducking his tempest in a teacup over addressing youth in school, I figured this was a good time to address moral education in school. I think all the furor over Obama is way silly, but then the rabid right never needs a reason. Its funny that people think I am PART of the rabid right, when I am only rabidly religious. As far as economics go, if Obama wants to bring on the socialism it is okay with me. Jesus didn't have much use for the rich either. If Bush had chosen to address the schoolchildren I would have simply told any school child I was concerned about to "remember that Bush is a clueless nerf-herding puppet." I think they would have survived it okay with that advice. ;)

Anyway, I started out to address a more serious topic here. We seem to see all the time examples of a serious lapse of moral character. All the way from white-collar criminals like Madoff to the crack dealer around the corner. Recently it is revealed that Dallas Police purposely distorted crime figures in order to make themselves look good. There is a prevailing ethic that you do what you can get away with, and if you have to break the rules you break them. Empathy, honor, truthfulness, charity: these are nineteenth century concepts to a lot of people. They do not apply. We even see this among supposed church leaders and certainly televangelists, who are really out for themselves and the money. As I think Dostoyevski said, if God is dead, everything is permissible. Writer William Burroughs had his fictional character Hassan-i Sabbah say:

Nothing is True, Everything is Permitted

Well God is not dead. That way of living is dead. We see its wreckage all around us. You want to see death, look at what our amoral values bring about. Without morality: our economy fails, our social fabric fails, the physical and moral development of the young fails, WE FAIL.

If you want your children to grow up whole and strong, the ethical side of human development can no more be ignored than physical education, math or reading. And we cannot leave the schools out of it any more than we should tell people to turn off their morality in the office and only use it at home. SS concentration camp guards did that much. For the development of the youth, there cannot be two systems, an amoral one and a moral one, a home and church system and a school system. They have to all be on the same page, or indeed we teach our kids that ethics only matter in Sunday School, which is to say they don't really matter at all.

Our current way of living leads only to destruction. Look around yourself sometime in a public place, see all the weary lonely angry hopeless empty faces and all the bodies damaged by alcohol, drugs, a life led without purpose. We are dying, as a people. We are dying because we ignore the source of life.

Now I can imagine some cynic saying, "But Americans are predominately a religious people!" Yes they are, but which religion? They have taken their American religion to heart, individualism, and confess the god which suits their tastes. An "anything goes" god. A "don't worry be happy" god. Their god is not God. The ancient Israelites were predominantly a religious people too, but what did Jesus say about them? They were a people known for stoning prophets.

We do not need gods. We do not need a god construction kit, so we can make our own god in our own image. We need the ONE ETERNAL TRUE GOD. And we need His teaching, which is to be merciful, fair, truthful, courageous for what is right, and honorable.

Now we do have a problem in terms of bringing moral education to the schools, which is that there is such a thing as atheist parents. Even many non-atheist parents, or not avowedly atheist, do not want their children taught morality in school. I don't think Jesus ever used force on anyone, nor do I want to force them to do anything. It is also not enough for Christians to send their children to Christian schools, but we must make Christian education AVAILABLE TO EVERYONE who needs it. If a church is looking for a way to spend some of their money, I can't see a better use for it to be spent on. People who genuinely cannot afford a Christian education must be subsidized: indeed I cannot think of a more effective way of evangelism than this, educating children.

Christian education also has to abandon superstitions against scientific theory in order to be credible. In my mind, there is nothing inherently anti-Christian about the theory of evolution or the Big Bang Theory. Let science be science. Is the part of us made in God's image our bodies? No, our body comes from the Earth. Our spirit is what comes from God. When science genuinely intrudes on God's turf then we can be upset, but give to science what science does best.

Christian moral education alone will not stop the decay of our civilization because the majority will continue on its way. It is only a means of trying to protect what children we can. Unless the nation as a whole turns its heart toward God, which is unlikely, it will continue to decay. Perhaps if Christian schools become the only remaining way people can get a decent education, the public education system will eventually fall under its own weight. Like monasteries in the Dark Ages preserving knowledge for the future, we have to build our own institutions against our current age. Some people call that the "Christian ghetto" in disapproving terms, but we won't attract people unless they see that we have something different and better, a light in the darkness. We are different from the World: we have to show it. The apostle James didn't seem too concerned about the Christian ghetto:

Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this: to look after orphans and widows in their distress and to keep oneself from being polluted by the world.

-James 1:27

But certainly whether other people will agree to moral education in schools or not, it is absolutely necessary, and if the public schools will not do it, Christian schools must, and must open their doors as wide as possible, so that as many children as possible can be saved from a failed system.