Posted by Roberta Grimes • September 04, 2021 • 53 Comments
Book News, Jesus, The Teachings of Jesus
Let every tongue and every tribe
responsive to his call,
to him all majesty ascribe,
and crown him Lord of all!
– Edward Perronet (1726-1792), from “All Hail the Power of Jesus’s Name” (1779)
The Christian religion is all about judgment and condemnation. Its central dogma is built on the notion that Adam sinned in the Garden of Eden by eating a forbidden apple, and all of us are therefore “fallen” and sinful by our very nature. God therefore rightfully judges us, and God condemns every one of us to be alive and aware as we burn in hell forever while never being consumed. Our loving and merciful God refuses to simply forgive us for Adam’s sin and for our own sinful natures, but fortunately God has an alternative solution. He sends his pure Son – not descended from Adam, and therefore entirely immune from sin – to take upon himself all of our own sins, and to die horribly in our place. By being God’s perfect sacrifice, Jesus saves us from burning in hell forevermore.
If you are familiar with the Gospels, you know that this whole awful piece of theology altogether rejects the message of Jesus. Even as a child, I thought it made no sense! Jesus tells me to forgive seventy times seven times, but God can’t forgive me even once? We are all fallen because of what Adam did, and all Adam did was to eat an apple when God told him not to eat that apple? Nobody got hurt or anything! So, why couldn’t God forgive Adam for that? And, worst of all, God will only forgive us if he gets to watch his own child being murdered? But I’m a child! I have a father, too! And my father isn’t perfect, but I know he would fight and would give his own life to keep me from being murdered!
I’m sure I’m not the only one who secretly realized in childhood that the Christian God is a ruthless monster. God is not even as loving and forgiving as our own very fallible parents!
The Christian God is a direct descendant of Moloch, the Canaanite god with a head like a bull who devoured first-born infants in his belly of fire. The Christian God is not even as loving as the rather stern Old Testament Jehovah, whose prophets railed against Moloch and all the other bloody human-made gods. Jehovah contented himself with little non-human sacrifices of calves and pigeons. Given the dramatically loving and world-changing teachings that Jesus brought to us, how can the Christian God be such a judgmental and compassionless being?
You may be thinking that no Christian preacher still teaches substitutionary atonement as plainly as I have set it out above, but you would be wrong. Many preachers still talk about a Christian God who is not only pitiless and judgmental, but is also sadistic. This was written in August of 2021 by an earnest Christian preacher with a large following:
Even though a person may choose to reject Christ during his life, there will come a moment when they die and stand before God when they will bow their knee to Jesus and confess him to be lord before they are sentenced to eternity in hell. When Pilate died, he bowed his knee to Jesus and confessed Him to be Lord! When Nero died, he bowed his knee to Jesus and confessed Him to be Lord! When Buddha died, he bowed his knee to Jesus and confessed Him to be Lord! When Gandhi died, he bowed his knee to Jesus and confessed Him to be Lord! … When any person dies that has rejected Christ, before they are cast into everlasting darkness they will bow their knee to Jesus and confess Him to be Lord!
According to this version of Christianity, God does give us complete free will, but not so we can learn and grow spiritually. We have free will so we can choose whether or not to worship a God so judgmental and barbaric that he enjoys watching his own Son being murdered. And if we choose wrong, then when we die we are going to suffer the ultimate gotcha.
Here is where having the testimony of people that we used to think were dead is important! The plain fact is that nothing that Christians believe about the genuine Godhead is true. We know now that everyone, of every religion and of no religion, goes to the self-same afterlife. There is no powerful devil and no fiery hell. There is no post-death judgment by anyone but ourselves. We have been receiving good and abundant communications from the afterlife for a century and a half, and everything the dead are telling us is wonderfully consistent with what Jesus tells us in the Gospels. It is not, however, consistent with the religion that unfortunately bears the Lord’s name.
And there is no way that we can fix Christianity! I know that, because I have spent decades trying to find some way to lessen the sting of the Christian God’s refusal to forgive us for being fallibly human, and his frankly sick and evil insistence on watching his own Son’s crucifixion. And we haven’t even mentioned here what these Christian teachings do to people, but if you have spent much time with especially devout Christians you know that they tend to be the most judgmental and least forgiving people on earth.
When you have substitutionary atonement in mind as you sit down to read the Lord’s Gospel words, the complete dissonance between the religion and the Man makes your head spin.
He tells us that God never judges us, and He tells us that we also must never judge anyone!
“For not even the Father judges anyone, but He has given all judgment to the Son, so that all will honor the Son even as they honor the Father” (JN 5:22-23).
“If anyone hears My sayings and does not keep them, I do not judge him; for I did not come to judge the world, but to save the world” (JN 12:47).
“Do not judge so that you will not be judged. For in the way you judge, you will be judged; and by your standard of measure, it will be measured to you” (MT 7:1-2).
He insists that we must always forgive, and we even must forgive those who have most harmed us!
“But I say to you, do not resist an evil person; but whoever slaps you on your right cheek, turn the other to him also. If anyone wants to sue you and take your shirt, let him have your coat also. Whoever forces you to go one mile, go with him two” (MT 5:39-41).
“But love your enemies, and do good, and lend, expecting nothing in return; and your reward will be great, and you will be sons of the Most High; for He Himself is kind to ungrateful and evil men. Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful” (LK 6:35-36).
“Do not judge, and you will not be judged; and do not condemn, and you will not be condemned; pardon, and you will be pardoned. Give, and it will be given to you. They will pour into your lap a good measure—pressed down, shaken together, and running over. For by your standard of measure it will be measured to you in return” (LK 6:37-38).
“It is the Spirit who gives life; the flesh profits nothing; the words that I have spoken to you are spirit and are life” (JN 6:63).
The whole problem with the dogma of substitutionary atonement for Christians trying hard to follow Jesus is that Jesus makes forgiveness a primary commandment. And yet the Christian religion insists that God can’t forgive us unless God receives the blood-sacrifice of God’s own Son? We know now that learning prevenient forgiveness makes universal forgiveness almost absurdly easy. I have spent this past week proofreading The Fun of Growing Forever – We Can’t Transform the World Until We Transform Ourselves in preparation for releasing its Second Edition, and I am freshly astonished to realize how easily Thomas’s prevenient forgiveness trick works the miracle of teaching us complete and permanent forgiveness. Anyone can do it! But Christianity still insists to us that God can’t do it?
The early Christians who thought up substitutionary atonement had the words of Jesus right in front of them! How can they possibly have gotten the Lord’s teachings so completely wrong? I think it was because Jesus says things like, “I did not come to judge the world, but to save the world” (JN 12:47). Which is precisely true! He makes it clear in the Gospels that He came to save us from the false dogmas of all human-made religions and teach us to relate to God directly. But the Emperor Constantine’s councilors at First Nicaea in 325 were unlikely to flout the Emperor’s will and say, “Oopsie! Jesus doesn’t want us to make a new religion after all!” Instead, they edited Gospel passages like the one that follows. Here they turned “believes Him” into “believes in Him”; the italicized sentence was surely added; and what follows it may have been tweaked:
“For God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him shall not perish, but have eternal life. For God did not send the Son into the world to judge the world, but that the world might be saved through Him. He who believes in Him is not judged; he who does not believe has been judged already, because he has not believed in the name of the only begotten Son of God. This is the judgment, that the Light has come into the world, and men loved the darkness rather than the Light, for their deeds were evil. For everyone who does evil hates the Light, and does not come to the Light for fear that his deeds will be exposed. But he who practices the truth comes to the Light, so that his deeds may be manifested as having been wrought in God” (JN 3:16-21).
Jesus tells us right in the Gospels that He came to teach us. He didn’t come to sacrifice Himself to save us from a 
divine judgment that He tells us in the Gospels never happens. But the Christian God is judgmental, mean-spirited, and much too small! Four years ago, Thomas channeled to me The Fun of Loving Jesus – Embracing the Christianity That Jesus Taught; But then he wouldn’t let that book be published. He kept saying the time was not yet right. But now he is saying it will soon be time to begin to help Jesus to lead directly those who continue to love and trust Him, despite the errors and lies of a misguided and dying Christianity. It will soon be time to enter into the Lord’s much more glorious relationship with the genuine, eternal Godhead. A relationship that only and forever is based in the Godhead’s perfect truth!
Oh, that with all the sacred throng
we at his feet may fall!
We’ll join the everlasting song,
and crown him Lord of all!
– Edward Perronet (1726-1792), from “All Hail the Power of Jesus’s Name” (1779)
What do you say about John 12:48?
After reading John 12:48, it does seem Jesus is referring something or someone that judges those who do not accept him.
I never really understood the sacrifice of Jesus. But, in the Old Testament, they sacrificed animals, but Jesus was the ultimate sacrifice, and there was no longer any need to sacrifice animals, and it gave Jesus the title to now become like God.
Dear Terry, Jesus came to us from the highest aspect of the Godhead – Jesus came to us as God, and had no need for any further becoming. And it was the line of thinking that you express exactly that made it seem to the Council of Nicaea to be okay to turn Jesus into a human sacrifice to God. But it emphatically never was God’s idea. And what is actually in the mind and heart of the Godhead is really all that matters in this, don’t you think?
I would agree with you totally because you are searching for the truth as I am!
Dear Terry, finding what is actually true – and not just what someone or other may have guessed or imagined – is the whole point of this exercise. When I began this work in the seventies, I thought the odds were long against ever finding what is true and putting it all together, especially since the truth is so gigantic! But indeed the truth is available to us, if we are ruthless about searching for it. And it is beyond-belief glorious!
Dear Ed, welcome to our merry band! This is a great question. Let’s look at JN 12:48:
“He who rejects Me and does not receive My sayings, has one who judges him; the word I spoke is what will judge him at the last day.”
In order to read the Gospel words of Jesus with any understanding, we must keep in mind the ways in which what He said was subject to distortion on its way to us:
1) He lived in a time and place where speaking against the prevailing religion was a capital crime, so since much of what He said would have been considered to be against the prevailing religion, He had to resort to a few tricks that would let His followers get His meaning while hiding it from the listening Temple guards. We have talked about this in other posts, and in an Appendix to my Fun books.
2) His words were an oral tradition for years – and likely for a decade or more – before they were first written down. Since His primitive listeners probably did not fully understand what an aspect of the genuine Godhead was saying, their imperfect memories provide a further place where distortion was possible.
3) The Council of Nicaea in 325 subtracted, tweaked, and added some of their own idea to the Gospels. Fortunately they didn’t do much of this, and what they added or tweaked is pretty easy to spot.
4) He spoke Aramaic, but His words were first written down in Greek and later translated into Latin and into modern languages, including English. All are very different languages!
With all of that in mind, we read JN 12:48, and it looks pretty straightforward.
“He who rejects Me and does not receive My sayings, has one who judges him; the word I spoke is what will judge him at the last day.” In other words, to accept Him means to accept his “sayings” – His teachings – and if we don’t accept His teachings and live by them, those teachings – “the word I spoke” – will be the standard by which the one who hasn’t listened will judge himself when he goes home – on his “last day” on earth.
Simple! Remember that He has told us elsewhere that (a) God and Jesus do not judge us, and (b) we will be judging ourselves.
Actually, this is a near-duplicate of something that He said and we quote often here:
“If you hold to my teaching, you are really my disciples. Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free” (JN 8:31-32).
Hi Roberta, hi everybody!
This is fundamental to the experience we express as incarnation. We are each here to bring back a unique epiphany. The basis of “judgment” as described here is assuming you are here for the same epiphany as I and I for the same as you. Once we act on that assumption and forget the reality, everything becomes a “judgment” call. Thank you for this insight!
My dear Mike, I didn’t realize what you were saying at first, but now I think I see.
Each of us is here with a different life-plan, on a different mission, and with a different “epiphany” to gain, as you put it. If we really understand that, we will see that we really have no universal basis by which to judge anyone!
Good point, my dear 🙂
Yes, Roberta! Thank you. That is what I meant, but you phrased it more succinctly than I did.
Wow, well that was a first! You usually get the words more precisely than I do 🙂
Sometimes her mystic concepts are so esoteric I don’t always nail the words myself!♐️🤷
Yes, that rings true to me. Judgments are often based on what a certain person or group believes to be “right.” It leaves no room for self expression and/or a different way of thinking and ultimately defeats the purpose of our coming here to have different experiences.
Heh – My dear Lola, you got it before I did!
Dear Roberta, Your analysis is so clearly correct, and yet clashes so directly with church Christianity, it is truly remarkable that intelligent Christians insist that God and his Son are highly judgmental, and we are born sinners to make matters worse. One of the reliable features of NDE life reviews is the surprise that God, Jesus, and no one else judges, only the self, with the result of disappointment at failing so often to be kind and loving, and then a new energy to do better. When Jesus appears, before each spirit is sent back for more life He tells them what amounts to the Golden Rule– that’s all.
Yesterday, I happened to watch one of the excellent programs from the BBC which display wonderful imagery of plant and animal life. I was struck at how loving lion and bear Moms were of their playful offspring, but how cruel that had to be in killing and devouring smaller animals. And it struck me again that as mortal, we too often find ourselves in situations with the temptation to better our own position by hurting others. Our mortal body has its own agenda to stay alive and seek power over others, and that places it in conflict with its soul. Ironically, its precisely the conflicts of mortal life that enable spiritual learning, because such direct learning is unavailable in the bliss of Heaven where we have no competition and stress, but instead bath in God’s love.
Is this what you meant before by the id and the ego? If so, it seems that our main concern during physical life would be to control the ego so that the id (the soul) would be more dominant. If we could be successful in doing this, everything else would seemingly fall into place. Failing often to become kind and loving seems to be the result of a dominant ego. If people like this come into power (as they often do), there is no end to the misery they could cause
Lolo, Yes, that’s the idea. Freud conceptualized our mental system to have three functionalities. The Id was the term for instinctual urges for sex, food, and any other satisfactions of the body, as well as avoidance of threats of harm and death, The Superego was the moral functionality, but because he was attempting to be ultra-scientific, he rejected the concepts of God and soul. The Ego was the rational arbiter of between the Id and Superego. So, there is a natural, mortal conflict between body and soul.
Dear Jack, since Freud was a materialist, and what he was dealing with was not material at all, he really got nothing right!
Despite his stupidity about God, he did have good insights into how people think and deal, or fail to deal, with emotions. The functions he attributed to the Id and Ego have in fact been found to specific features of brain anatomy and how they function. Where he missed out was assigning the Super Ego to the brain, no such site for this construct had been found in the brain, and that’s because it is worked by the immaterial soul.
ROBERTA’S RESPONSE
My dear Jack, I think you are being perhaps too charitable to Friend Freud. Like all materialists, he assumed that the brain generates consciousness, when in fact it only receives consciousness and animates the body. It doesn’t think, but instead it is activated by the thoughts of our non-material minds, which are not “in” the body at all. This is why scientists get so many things so laughably wrong!
For example, when you are experimentally asked to choose at a random time to move a finger, scientists consistently find that your brain is activated after the decision is made. Incredibly, this has made them conclude that we have no actual free will! But all it really means is that the mind makes the decision, and then it notifies the body – which includes the brain – to get to movin’. The brain is nothing more important than a kind of CPU that runs the body. It is incredible that in the face of so much evidence that they are so wrong, scientists still persist in their materialist delusions!
Oh my dear Jack, the comment with which you start this thread is beautifully said!
Yes, it confounds me to see how absolutely resolute Christianity in all of its 40,000-odd versions still remains about NOT actually reading the Gospels with understanding, and NOT trusting Jesus, or even trusting the Godhead. But the clergy feel that if they don’t have fear to bludgeon people with, they don’t have anything!
I think we are being called now to give Jesus at last His true movement, which He called the Way. Let’s see whether people will still follow Him, if all that is in it for them is perfect love, immense joy, and eternity in God. Will that be enough?
I couldn’t agree with you more Roberta. Without fear, they could not control the way others think. Forgiveness is not really one of Christianity’s strong points. It is either their way or the highway.
It really is surprising, my dear Lola, to see that the religion ignores what Jesus taught about forgiveness, when arguably that was his biggest new teaching. And it is so absolutely critical to our spiritual growth! But this is just yet another reminder that the religion altogether ignores the Lord’s teachings. It is, as you say, all about fear-based control.
Dear Roberta,
Everything you say makes perfect sense to me every time. The ultimate and final connection of the dots.
I saw in your blog today “The Fun of Loving Jesus ” I have all your other books but I didn’t know about this one.
Where can I purchase it ? It sounds so wonderful!
Oh my dear Christi, welcome to our merry Sunday band!
The Fun of Loving Jesus has been in manuscript for four years, but Thomas hasn’t let us publish it. I thought I hadn’t gotten something (or more than one something) right, so he would make me go back and revise it once I had some additional understandings; but now I realize that he means it to be the start of a new spiritual movement, and he didn’t want it released until it was time for that movement to begin. What he and I are doing is just a small part of a gigantic movement, so this hurry-up-and-wait keeps happening as he tries to get the timing right. But I gather that it won’t be long now!
I must be missing something rather obvious but how do you interpret that Scripture quote “He has given all judgement to the Son.”
I wondered about that as well. Later on, he says he didn’t come to judge the world but to save it. These sound like two conflicting statements.
They are conflicting, my dear Lola, and intentionally so. God leaves all judgment to the Son, who also doesn’t judge, so we are stuck with having to do it ourselves. And although that might make it seem that we will be more forgiving, there turns out to be no harder afterlife judge than yourself!
If this is so, then it would be of great importance to forgive ourselves while we are still here rather than wait for a life review to take place. Most people, including myself, have deep regrets about things they did or didn’t do while in a physical body.
Yes! Great point, my dear Lola! The most important reason to master prevenient forgiveness while here is that forgiving is very much harder there than it is here. Much! When we are there, we are back in our greater minds, and we remember why we chose this or that challenge for this lifetime. We thought we could master it, and if we didn’t handle it especially well we can be extremely down on ourselves. If we haven’t learned to forgive automatically, we are likely to need a lot of counseling in order to eventually forgive ourselves at all.
My dear Thomas, this was one of the Lord’s verbal tricks to get past the Temple guards. We are fortunate that this series survived! He couldn’t come right out and say, “Hey, neither God nor any religious figure judges you. Your only judge will be yourself.” So on three different days, with three different sets of guards, He said,
“For not even the Father judges anyone, but He has given all judgment to the Son, so that all will honor the Son even as they honor the Father” (JN 5:22-23).
“If anyone hears My sayings and does not keep them, I do not judge him; for I did not come to judge the world, but to save the world” (JN 12:47).
“Do not judge so that you will not be judged. For in the way you judge, you will be judged; and by your standard of measure, it will be measured to you” (MT 7:1-2).
Three innocuous-seeming sentences said on different days together tell us what we now can confirm via direct contact with the dead is the absolute truth!
Let me add a bit to these apt comments about “judgment.” In the Christian church interpretation of the OT, judgment was a term with the strong connotation that it was rendered by God for deciding about going to Heaven or Hell at death. But Jesus removed the sense of a wrathful God making such judgments, and said that He was given that task by his Father. But the judgement of Jesus was not to be done in the vengeful sense interpreted for the OT, but instead done out of compassion for the weak mortal soul. So, when Jesus meets a spirit (I reserve “soul” as a term applying to spirit attached to the mortal body), in the NDE, His judgment is typically that the person has not been adequately kind and loving, and so they ought do better at that (at applying the Golden Rule) when returning to their body.
Given that its rare that one life time is adequate to learn all of the lessons available from life as a mortal, reincarnation allows for multiple opportunities, and this is one of the common reports from the NDE, that they recalled multiple lives. So it’s reasonable to infer that Jesus judges along with the individual spirit if having another life would be valuable for the development of their spirit; if so, then a general life plan is agreed to. From the NDE reports we are told, for example about a life plan, that birth deformities were agreed to as part of the plan for a life’s mission, and are not accidental misfortunes. An example is in the life of Helen Keller who, although not born blind and deaf, became so from an illness at 19 months old. Her life served as an inspiration for others in her day ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helen_Keller ). Her unfortunate situation was not an accident, and her life was not wasted by the example of her courage, activism in rights for the disabled, and her beautiful spirit.
Helen Keller was a remarkable person. She learned so much while she was here and taught it to others as well. She is a prime example of a success story, assuming she came here to learn how to overcome obstacles and inspire otthers..
Oh, indeed she was! Just block your ears and cover your eyes and imagine being that way since early childhood, and you realize how hard it must have been for her wonderful teacher to break through to her. And then for Helen to grow up to be so spiritually wise. She really was a wonderful gift to us all!
Dear Jack, please never forget that a near-death experience is a generally spontaneous out-of-body experience which does not occur in the actual afterlife, but rather occurs in the general astral plane. Its experiences are pulled from the experiencer’s own mind, and they appear to be tailored by the experiencer’s guides for the experiencer’s own edification. We therefore can’t trust what happens in any NDE as evidence of anything objective! Yes, “Jesus” sometimes appears in NDEs, but so does “God.” The actually dead tell us universally that God never appears as a guy in a body, and the Jesus who appears in NDEs is almost certainly not the genuine Jesus. I did a lot of NDE studies in the eighties and early nineties, before I came to realize that they are individual and aberrant, and you can’t really draw any conclusions about the genuine afterlife from them. While our own dead loved ones do sometimes turn up, the spiritual beings are apparently our own guides and their helpers, impersonating God or Jesus for our personal edification (yes, they sometimes do that in other cases as well). There even are Jesus-types! For example, there is the laughing Jesus which is generally blond and appears primarily to children.
I found the same thing while studying NDE’s. Many people talked to “God” when they had an NDE, and even more often, they talked to “Jesus.” When the blond blue eyed Jesus started showing up, I became suspicious. Unless Jesus has a huge supply of wigs and other cosmetics, this can’t be the “real” Jesus. Other religious figures like Mohammed and Hare Krishna also show up if the experiencer believes in them but they too are not the “real McCoy.” The guides who impersonate these religious figures, are really good at what they do.
Dear Roberta, You made excellent points which merit expansion. In my own view, as I state in my text, God is not in time or space, and despite appearances, God is not light, although may manifest as light. Likewise, God does not intrinsically have a human form, but may appear as such for comfortable communication with us. God and Jesus are pure “consciousness,” and that is a primitive term that cannot be defined exactly by reference to any other words. But God and angels do appear in what you may call the astral plane, which is simplify a segment of the 2nd Domain, what we refer to as Heaven. Here is a report (a key segment) posted just today which stimulated this comment of mine here. It speaks for itself, res ipsa loquitur ( https://www.nderf.org/Experiences/1angela_b_ste.html ):
“In the middle of the night, I awoke with a severe migraine. I’d experienced occasional migraines since I was a teenager, but this particular migraine was extremely painful and I should have sought treatment at the Emergency Room. However, since I had very young children at the time, I didn’t want to wake them or my husband, so I attempted to treat myself. I took my prescription migraine medication, but it did not provide any relief from the pain. Instead of waiting an hour before taking the second dose as the instructions advised, I waited 20 minutes and took the second dose. I also took two over-the-counter pills for migraine. I have always been very sensitive to medications, but at the time I did not consider this. I was only focused on relieving the intense pain. After taking the medications, I became very sleepy and returned to bed. When I drifted off to sleep, I would awaken by gasping for breath. I quickly realized that when I drifted off to sleep, I stopped breathing. I was fearful I would fall asleep and die. I said a very simple prayer, ‘Dear God, please don’t let me die. I want to be a mother and a wife.’ As I said the prayer, I doubted God would hear me. At that time in my life, I felt insignificant. I was not sure God existed, and if He did, I didn’t think he would know me. But I was about to be proven wrong.
Immediately after praying, I felt a presence come over my bed. I was lying on my back with my eyes closed, but I could sense a shadow had been cast as something moved over my body and then stood next to my bed. As soon as I felt the presence, I was frightened and I heard a Bible verse in my mind, ‘An angel of the Lord stood by them, and the glory of the Lord shone round about them: and they were sore afraid.’ I realized I had received the Bible verse telepathically and an angel had arrived to help me. Then it felt as if the angel slipped his hand directly into my stomach. I felt a sensation unlike anything I’d ever experienced. Static was moving in my stomach and throughout my torso. I also saw in my mind’s eye a vison of black and white static, as like on a tv set without reception. At the same time, I felt my deceased father’s presence and I could hear him speaking into my right ear. He repeatedly said, ‘You’re going to be ok, you’re going to be ok, you’re going to be ok.’
As the angel stood to my left and my father spoke to me from my right, a very large, powerful presence hovered over the length of my body. When I noticed the large presence, my inner vision was changed to that of a crystal blue waterfall. The water was sparkling clear and the most beautiful blue I have ever seen. As I marveled at the sight of the water, the static sensation in my torso dissipated and was replaced with a sensation of liquid love rushing into my heart. The love was so pure and overwhelming that I immediately began to weep. The liquid love flowed through my heart and filled up my chest cavity to the point that I could not expand my lungs to inhale. I was aware of having difficulty breathing, but it did not concern me. I was so blissed out from the love, that nothing else mattered. I had the realization of, ‘This must be God.’ It was so large, infinite, and powerful, that I just knew it could have no other name than God. Once I realized I was in the presence of God, my next thought was, ‘Oh no, God is going to judge me for taking too much medication.’ I waited for the judgement. It did not come. I moved into the flow of God, searching for His judgement. No judgement was there. Not a speck. Only pure, adoring love was in the infinite flow of God.
At this point I lost awareness of my body. I did not recall I was a mother, wife, daughter, friend. I had no recollection of life on earth. I merged into an infinite presence that utterly and completely adored me. God did not speak words to me. The love said it all. I felt as if I was an awareness, a being without a name or identity, and I was expanding to the size of the cosmos. I was home …”
ROBERTA’S RESPONSE:
Dear Jack, we are consistently told by those who actually know the truth that the Godhead NEVER appears in differentiated form. What you have cited is an extraordinary experience, but the fact that she thought she was experiencing “God” doesn’t change the fact that what she was experiencing was a presence of indeterminate nature.
For people who have been bound in bodies to be suddenly out of their bodies, in the astral (in some parts of which love is the air they breathe), and expanded and merging with the infinite (which is a feeling much more readily possible during astral travel) is an extraordinary experience indeed! But it does not change the fact that these experiences are not “real,” in the sense that God or Jesus actually shows up, they actually see the afterlife, or anything of the sort. My dear, I love so much of what you do, and I admire your scholarship, but please don’t keep talking about NDEs. They are no more real or universally meaningful than whatever happened in your dreams last night.
The past few days have been the IANDS (International Association of Near-Death Studies) Annual Conference. There have been wonderful presentations of those who have been in the presence of the Light, Divine Love, pure Acceptance. What would you think about a second Christian Reformation, replacing Scripture (which was used to escape Roman Catholicism) with the reality revealed by spiritual teachers (like Thomas, mediums, NDErs, intuitives, meditators)? It might be possible to recreate Christianity more in line with your vision of spirituality. God is bigger than the Bible (Raymond Moody’s new book).
Dear Chuck, I’m sure you realize that I’m not driving my own train! I gave my life to God a dozen years ago, and since then I happily just do as I’m told, so I would never presume to try to start anything on my own. But I am coming to realize just very recently that apparently a reformation of sorts is on the way, and I seem to have some small part to play in it.
Given the fact that NDEs are personal spiritual experiences, they can tell us only that the mind easily exists apart from the body and that there are parts of the gigantic astral plane which are amazingly love-filled and uplifting. Meditation and other spiritual experiences are similarly personal and mind-expanding, and it’s good to talk about and share them, but they are nothing on which to build a spiritual movement.
But the actual Gospel teachings of Jesus are another matter. They are astonishingly effective at raising our spiritual vibrations, and they were given to us by what is by repeated surveys consistently one of the two or three best-known and best-loved beings among the 7.7 billion people on earth. And they never have been broadly taught or even tried at all!
The question still to be answered is whether it is possible to build a genuine and persistent spiritual movement on love rather than on fear. I don’t think it ever has been done before. We’ll see….
Der Roberta, The Taliban takeover of Afghanistan, with Iran, Pakistan, China, and Russia in support is an instant creation of a country effectively controlled by hate, instead of love. Our State and Defense Depts appear to be prepared to grant the Taliban recognition to free American hostages. Nearly 20 million females have instantly been turned into sex slaves.
Godless China continues to grow in strength, economically and militarily. The world appears to be more dangerous now than it was at 9;11 as Godless folks grow in strength while the West grow more secular by the day, with church attendance in a continuing historical decline. Unless Thomas is explicitly telling you that the world is moving to the love that Christ told us about, what would be the grounds for optimism now?
Dear Jack, Jesus predicted all of this. He called it the Tribulation, and He said it would come before the kingdom of God overspreading the earth. And Thomas is more confident now that he has been, but I agree with you: things look pretty dire at the moment!
Dearest Roberta,
“A persistent spiritual movement on love rather than on fear” wonderful, was my first thought. But that was quickly followed by a second. What about my fellow church members who are also my friends? Will I be creating a rift? I hope not, and would also hope that Thomas could devise a transition from the various sects to the “Originalist Christianity” that is based entirely on love.
Yours,
Cookie
Dear Cookie, I think this concern is one of the reasons why such a movement needs to be based in the teachings of Jesus. We could build a movement on Buddhism or something – it wouldn’t be all that different – but there would be religious discord. But if all we are doing is following Jesus, then at worst it’s like two versions of Protestantism to traditional Christians, I would think; the movements will be something like cousins. Or at least, that is the hope!
Dearest Roberta,
I always seem to find that nature shows us some of the deepest truths if we but sit or stand quietly and observe. Not only do the animals and birds come out of hiding when we sit still and just breathe. The conversation of light, swaying branches and whispering breeze is soft, subtle and soothing. A still mind then, sometimes, allows translucent and unforeseen ideas to filter through to consciousness in nature’s bower. Suddenly one notices that everything is alive, moving and so diverse – even the varying shapes and shades of green!
It was on one such occasion that I realized that nature has a way of transformation to fruition, that repeats itself ubiquitously and endlessly. Flowering plants discard their protective coverings when flowers open and bloom. The husks fall off as stems raise new blooms to the sun. Once the lotus lily rises out of the muddy water, it discards its soiled outer petals to reveal the perfect flower with immaculate, pink petals and pericarp of newly opened glory. The orange tree sheds each flower’s petals before it begins to swell its heavy fruit.
When it is time, change comes and it is unstoppable. Something dry is set aside and what is living grows into its full potential. The ripe avocado then, contains the promise of the whole tree in one seed.
It is time. Time to shed the shriveled, malformed husks of religion to let the true Jesus of love and oneness come to fruition in us. 🙏🏼❣️🌅
Efrem: I used to be an avid hiker, so I am familiar with what you are talking about concerning nature. It does seem that something not eye appealing – maybe even ugly – precedes a beautiful flower or other plant. Yet, without the not so appealing cover, the flower or whatever would be unable to manifest. This would lead one to think that whatever is not appealing is necessary to allow something beautiful to come through. What do you think?
This is a great metaphor for the larger reality.
Yes, it sure is!
Dear Lola, I think your point is a most insightful take on what Mother Nature is showing us here. And I agree with Mike J-R that this is an apt metaphor for the true reality. 🙏🏼 🌅
Yes, without the coarser, uglier protective flower covering the actual bloom (and subsequent fruit) could not exist at all. So there is a growth stage that exists where the plant has to get through the uglier stage to reach its beauty and fullness. As you say Lola, ‘whatever is not appealing is necessary to allow something beautiful to come through.’ 😉
We, like the sacred lotus, must rise out of the muddy water of this world and outgrow the slime stained outer husks to open our perfect, clean petals to the fullness of daylight. In the centre of the flower sits the seed pod. When the time is right, even the bright flower petals fade and fall away to produce many mature lotus seeds within the standing seed pod. We, like the seed, become the whole plant in essence; the microcosm of the macrocosmos.
Are we not the flower and fruit that will become seed? Are we then, not the seed that will become the tree again? (Take time out of the equation and we kind of already are the tree at a deeper level of reality.)
It seems that a great theme of growth, transformation and return to oneness, flows through all nature including us. 🌲🌳🌲
There is hope. There exists a deep hope that the ugly bits of Christianity can now be seen as dry and withering husks because we are ready to see Jesus clearly now. Their will be a movement in the human awareness that will at last see the living flower distinctly. And people will yearn, and will choose to swell into the fullness and ripeness of the fruit. ❣️
Oh my dear Efrem, you have such a wonderful way with words! It is true that the dry and fear-based husk of Christianity in all its 40,000-odd versions is long past the point where it should have shriveled of its very absurdity. It made sense in 1510, perhaps. In 2010, it simply makes no sense at all. But yet inside its desiccated husk are still those perfect teachings of Jesus, never tried and as always the fertile seed of a whole new Way for all the world!
I guess that in order to appreciate beauty, we would need to be exposed to its opposite. It’s one more reason not to judge as it is all necessary. I’m glad you brought this up, Efrem. I never looked at it that way before. I was at Mystic Seaport 2 years ago and they had a display of unusual fish with names I couldn’t even pronounce, and they had symmetric markings that only the best artists in the world could dream up. It sure makes you wonder.
Dear Lola, I think it’s simply a new way of seeing, to seek and appreciate the beauty in simple things. In plain things. And in nature, especially! Where I live, I am blessed with the choice of taking walks in the neighborhood or walks in the woods, and I generally choose to go where nothing is cultivated, all is natural, and there are surprising bits of beauty everywhere!
Dear Roberta. When I read what you wrote above, “But now he is saying it will soon be time to begin to help Jesus to lead directly those who continue to love and trust him, despite the errors and lies of a misguided and dying Christianity.” it made me think of something my team brought up last week, which is the idea of being, “Christ lead 24/7.” In your opinion, is such a thing possible, and if so how might that work? Also, what might the term “Christ” refer to? Would that be Jesus as an individual being, more like what some call Christ Consciousness, perhaps a collective as you have suggested, or some state that one can maintain at all times? It definitely sounds like something internal, not dependent on any external institution beyond maybe just giving people some pointers on how to achieve this for themselves. (How threatening this would be to the church!) If such a thing as being Christ lead 24/7 is possible, I would want to make it the goal of whatever remains of my time in this mortal coil, and I really look forward to what pointers you will have in your updated “The Fun of Growing Together” and your forthcoming “The Fun of Loving Jesus.”
Dear Scott, the teachings of Jesus are the basis for a whole way of life that never has been tried, entirely in the world but transformed internally and therefore capable of transforming the world. Always before, when religious groups tried to do better and be the leaven in the loaf, they have set themselves apart from the world: Amish and Mennonite communities, religious orders, and so on. But imagine followers of Jesus who aren’t judging or condemning the world, and who are living among us their normal lives, but who have allowed themselves to be transformed internally, so – as Jesus says – their light will shine before men. I think that is what Jesus actually wants. We’ll see if we can make it work!
That’s a beautiful thing to imagine, Roberta. There is much darkness in the world to be illuminated, from religious extremism violently forcing conformity at one end, to extreme materialism at another, worshiping at the altar of artificial intelligence and wanting to turn us all into something akin to machines, or at least monitor and control every aspect of our lives, to propaganda and marketing of all stripes treating us like so many cattle in a herd. Real understanding and implementation of spiritual precepts, what Jesus meant to bring, is the best counterbalance I can see to all of these forces. The kind of internal transformation and guidance you speak of, insulated from external manipulation or domination, within people’s own “inner rooms” as Jesus recommended, could help steer humanity away from the brink and back towards sanity, humanity, and true spirituality. I think mankind is truly at a crossroads, and the kind of world our descendants will inherit, or that we will have to reincarnate into, lies in the balance – either something dark, heavy, and unpleasant, or raised up by that leaven of people entirely in the world but internally transfomed that you speak, of into somethong lighter and brighter.
Oh my dear Scott, you have said it more beautifully than I ever could! I think the hardest part of all of this will be helping people to realize how completely the Way is NOT Christianity! Everyone – Christians and non-Christians alike – is convinced that Christianity is based in Jesus at some level, when in fact the religion has nothing to do with the genuine Jesus who walked the earth, and taught, and tried to elevate humankind. Nothing. And saying that in such a way that we don’t turn off either Christians or non-Christians seems to me to be our biggest challenge!