Author: Roberta Grimes

Liberating Christians?

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

I come to the garden alone, while the dew is still on the roses;
And the voice I hear, falling on my ear, the Son of God discloses.
And He walks with me, and He talks with me, And He tells me I am His own,
And the joy we share, as we tarry there, none other has ever known.
– Charles Austin Miles (1868-1946), from “In the Garden” (1913)

 

I love Christianity. I love it desperately, dotingly, stupidly, as an infant loves its mother or a lover cherishes the beloved, and as the center of all goodness and safety. Christianity has been so much a part of my life! From the moment when I first saw the light of God in my nighttime bedroom at the age of eight, I have deeply associated the religion with God, with Jesus, and with everything that is right and just. After I first saw that light as a child, I gave up Sunday school for grown-up church, and my mother had trouble understanding that. I recall her telling me more than once how it amazed her to watch my face in church, a little child earnestly singing the hymns and transfixed by sermons that should have gone over my head. But I was sitting at the literal feet of God! So of course I was in rapture. And when I was twelve, I discovered that I could read the Bible and comprehend it, so I began a habit of reading a couple of pages every night that continued for the next forty years.

Given my history of devotion from childhood, my long fall from belief in Christianity has been painful. It began when I took college courses in early Christian history from a professor who seemed to bear a personal grudge against the authors of the religion. Miss Corwin was close to retirement age when I knew her. And she was ardent! She was my faculty adviser, and my devotion to the religion rather than to Jesus Himself seemed to irritate her to the point where I still recall having to submit to lectures in her office as I resisted learning what she was trying to teach. I didn’t want to look behind my beloved religion’s beautiful façade. I hadn’t realized that was what my choosing to major in Christian history was going to mean, and I could already tell from Miss Corwin’s classroom lectures on the corrupt church councils that I didn’t want to know any of that. If you enjoy sausage, never watch it being made! I am realizing only now that I have blocked her point of view for most of my life as I tried to hold onto my youthful love for Christianity, so it really is only in the last few years that I am remembering much of what she said.

If you’ve been reading these weekly missives for a while, you have seen me fall from my lifelong faith as from the top of a tall tower,  relying on floor after floor of that tower of Christian faith to break my fall; but then falling to the next, and then to the next as each successive floor failed to hold. The poet Robert Frost directed that his epitaph should be “I had a lover’s quarrel with the world,” and I can identify with that. My own lover’s quarrel is with Christianity, the great love of my life that I met in childhood as a burst of nighttime light and a sweet voice of love and the blessed certainty that if I ever again forget that God is real, I can trust Him to remind me. That set of pat religious beliefs was such an easy comfort! Christianity was the package that contained all truth, and it was so simple and so neat. Everything that was important for us to know had been figured out before I was born, so I didn’t need to think about it much at all.

But we know now from the not-really-dead that Christianity is altogether wrong. And it isn’t even just a little bit wrong! In fact, every core Christian teaching is nothing more than human-made nonsense. The Godhead is not a Big Guy with thunderbolts. The Godhead has no human flaws, and It never judges or condemns us to a fiery hell that does not exist. Every person of every faith or no faith at all goes to precisely the same beautiful afterlife. The Christian religion has almost nothing to do with either the Jesus of the Gospels or the genuine Godhead, but rather it is an amalgam of ancient beliefs well-seasoned with the Roman Emperors’ need to control people by inspiring fear. The Christian Bible as it was assembled at First Nicaea and the other Councils is a collection of writings that could not possibly be all the work of a consistent and loving, or even of a sane and rational God. For me, the kill-shot of my Christian faith was the moment when I accepted the fact that after my decades of reading hundreds of different communications from the dead that had been received over more than a century in southern England and in the eastern United States, I never had found one bit of evidence that the death of Jesus on the cross has ever made an afterlife difference for a single human being.       

It strikes me now that my relationship with Christianity can be divided into thirds. I was a Protestant until I was twenty-five, and so filled with conviction that I intended to enter the ministry. Then I fell in love with and married a Catholic, and at twenty-six I converted to Catholicism. I was a Lector, I attended Mass each week, and I sent my children to parochial schools. I was an ardent Catholic while I continued to do my decades of afterlife research, until the lowest floors of my tower of faith eventually were forced to give way beneath the weight of all that I was learning. So in my early fifties I was left bereft, with almost no religion at all. As the title of my weekly podcast insists, I only ever wanted to know what is true! And I have spent this most recent twenty-five years pulling bits of truth from the debris of the tower of my old lost faith, and combining those bits with the afterlife evidence, quantum mechanics, and a lifetime of studying parts of what is one absolutely gigantic truth, until now – within just the past few years – I have managed to replace my makeshift tower of human-created Christian faith with a solid edifice of what I know for certain is nothing but the most wonderful and entirely nonreligious ultimate truth.

But I still love Christianity! As I study the pictures that accompany this post, to this day I yearn for the certainty and safety of my old lost faith. Even though it was a false certainty. Even though now we know so much about what actually is going on that I have established in place of my old religion such abundant bedrock knowledge about what happens at and after death, and where it happens, how it happens, and even a lot about why it happens, that now I look forward to my own transition with a joy that feels like waiting for Christmas. Going home is going to be so much fun! And it turns out that I won’t have to leave my love for Christianity behind altogether. Those that we used to think were dead now tell us that although there is no religion practiced in the afterlife, Christians will sometimes get together to sing hymns for nostalgia’s sake. And wow, do I ever understand that impulse!

So now the jig is up for Christianity. It had a good, long run! Although of course not all of its dominance on earth was positive, what with the Inquisition and the Crusades, the burning of witches and the forced conversions of indigenous peoples here and there. But those embarrassing glitches were by and large the result of cultural influences, weren’t they? Christianity has always been a movement of whatever was its current time and place. So, by and large, Christianity has softened dramatically in the course of the past hundred years.

And the truth about the nature of reality and what happens at and after death is about to become quite broadly known. All the gaps have been filled. There is no need any more for additional theories, no room for further speculation, and Craig Hogan and I are not the only people who are being called to share with the world the beyond-wonderful truth about humankind’s eternal nature and how reality actually works. That old-time religion doesn’t stand a chance! And yes, for Christians the wonderful truth is that we can keep the genuine Jesus. It turns out that Jesus is in fact an aspect of the Godhead, quite literally God on earth, and we can follow Him in undivided joy once all our old religion-based fears are gone.

All of this seems to be such good news! So, why am I suddenly feeling so anxious?

This fluttery feeling of inchoate dread reminds me of the summer of 2010, when The Fun of Dying was about to be published. For the first time I was going to go public with what I had learned about how broadly the actual teachings of Jesus differ from what Christianity teaches. It was to be my first shot across the bow of the religion that I so much loved! I was confident that what I had learned was true, but what if it was supposed to remain secret? Or what if it was supposed to become known eventually, only not just yet?

My anxiety about my perhaps letting some cosmic cat out of God’s personal bag became so acute that one evening about a month before the book’s publication date, I took to my knees. I prayed fervently that if there was anything in that book that was not supposed to come to light now, please God, just take me in my sleep. I had already emailed the publisher that if I were to die, The Fun of Dying should be kept out of print. I prayed so long and so hard that night that God’s will and not my own be done that I was mildly surprised to wake up the next morning to a flood of normal earthly sunlight.

So apparently what is happening now is God’s will. Sooner or later, humanity was going to have to leave behind all its false beliefs and at last grow up! As the Apostle Paul said, “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 the ways of childhood behind me. For now we see only a 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” (1Cor 13:11-12). But still, there seems to be tremendous danger in sharing these truths with practicing Christians!

Learning that Christianity’s teachings are at utter variance with the words of Jesus and the testimony of the not-really-dead was what finally wrecked my own faith. I don’t want to put others through that, so I have always thought my ministry was just to lapsed Christians. I have regularly urged people who were happy with their Christian beliefs to just ignore what I was saying. So I worry now that our making these truths a lot more broadly available is going to separate a great many more people from the Christian religion that I still love. I have no idea what to do about that, but Thomas tells me that the time is now, and just as I am so much happier being free from my old Christian fears, so as more Christians liberate themselves from the religion and discover the genuine Godhead they are going to be a lot happier, too. But still, this effort at religious patricide that is turning out to be the theme of my life makes me on some level very sad. Perhaps in some far-future day, when we all are free from superstitious fears, we can return in some way to a few of the comforting trappings of the faith of our fathers. Then I can be again that child who used to look forward to the Sunday mornings when she was falling in love with her Christian faith.

He speaks, and the sound of His voice is so sweet the birds hush their singing;
And the melody that He gave to me within my heart is ringing.
I’d stay in the garden with Him tho’ the night around me be falling;
But He bids me go; thro’ the voice of woe, His voice to me is calling.
– Charles Austin Miles (1868-1946), from “In the Garden” (1913)

Index Photo Attribution: <a href=”https://www.vecteezy.com/free-photos”>Free Stock photos by Vecteezy</a>

Judging History

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal,
that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights,
that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.–
That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men,
deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.”
– Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826), from “The Declaration of Independence” (1776)

I know from the emails I receive that our readership is worldwide. I never could have imagined that one day I would have friends in almost every country on earth! So I understand that this post which is aimed at Americans is going to disappoint some readers. I apologize, but it’s time for a bit of much-needed in-country shop-talk. Too many Americans have come to take for granted the government that was established some 230 years ago by a generation of giants so sensible and altruistic, so wise and so far-seeing that this remains a strong and stable nation still controlled by the world’s oldest continuing government. We can speak our minds and earn and keep our own wealth, and we go to bed peacefully each night under the protection and not under the boot of our leaders! But these gifts from our Founding Fathers have become just the water in which we swim. Not only do we take all our freedoms for granted, but we feel free to attack the long-dead authors of this brilliant experiment in citizen government. It makes sense to far too many Americans to call them out for the sin of not having lived by our twenty-first-century standards. How infantile this is! How inexcusably childish! And how dangerous it is for those who take for granted the incomparable worth of their daily freedoms to play at weakening the once-solid pillars of this nation.

Regular readers here know that I have a special fondness for Thomas Jefferson. The man was a polymath, a profound thinker and a prolific writer. He was barely 33 years old when he became the primary author of the American Declaration of Independence, which is the intellectual grounding of this whole experiment in freedom and self-government. And besides being one of the fathers of the American experiment, Thomas Jefferson was a primary founding American President. He pioneered the establishment of our coast-to-coast country with the Louisiana Purchase and the Lewis & Clark expedition, and he established this young nation as a world policeman when he fought the Tripolitan War and ended the piracy that had resulted in the enslavement of more than a million Europeans on the North African coast. He gave his life to the establishment of this country, from serving as a Governor of Virginia during the Revolutionary War through his diplomacy in Paris and his service as the first Secretary of State and the second Vice President of the United States before he became this nation’s third President. If George Washington was the father of his country, then Thomas Jefferson was its doting uncle. So the fact that in this barbaric age his failure to also abolish slavery is held against him to such an extent that some see it as negating the value of all his service is a shame on us that must be called out.

I have a dear friend who is a professional historian. The only time that he and I ever butt heads is when he shares with me something he has written about the fact that Thomas Jefferson never freed his slaves. My friend calls his complaint a legitimate gripe, while I see it as a clueless demand that people who lived centuries ago had to have possessed all our modern knowledge and sensibilities or everything they ever did is tainted. To me, that is not doing history! How is it possible to understand the actions of anyone, living or dead, without at least making some attempt to empathize with the way that person sees the world, what he actually knows, and his motivations? I have written here about Jefferson’s attitudes toward slavery and race and also the Sally Hemings question, and I’ve written as well about the parity that exists between slavery in Jefferson’s day and abortion in ours, so we need not rehash any of that now. I only would say that until you have done enough research to be able to write about a historical figure with empathetic understanding, you have no business writing about him at all.

We know what Jesus said about judgment. He said, “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.” (LK 6:37). Even more pertinently, He also said, “Why do you look at the speck that is in your brother’s eye, but do not notice the log that is in your own eye? How can you say to your brother, ‘Brother, let me take out the speck that is in your eye,’ when you yourself do not see the log that is in your own eye? You hypocrite, first take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take out the speck that is in your brother’s eye” (LK 6:41-42).

And the logs in our own eyes are as thick as a forest! From social and economic disparities through criminal justice cruelties and still-ongoing racial issues, modern Americans have no reason to feel superior to our founders’ generation. And the coincidence of the removal of a Jefferson statue from New York City Hall just as oral arguments about an abortion case are happening before the United States Supreme Court gives us an opportunity for some useful reflection.

For those not familiar with the American system, our Supreme Court’s role is to interpret and enforce the U.S. Constitution. And that’s it! The Supreme Court does not and cannot make laws. That is Congress’s role. And the rights enumerated in the Constitution must be safeguarded as the bedrock of our precious freedoms, so we need a Supreme Court that won’t interpret the Constitution according to changing cultural whims. If the Constitution itself ever needs revision, there is a careful process for that. Still, Supreme Court Justices are human beings with personal opinions, and their temptation to bend the rules according to prevailing cultural winds is strong.

Which is why we sometimes get truly appalling judge-made laws like these:

  • Dred Scott v. Sanford was an 1857 Supreme Court decision that decreed by a 7-2 majority that the U.S. Constitution was never intended to confer American citizenship on people of African descent, so a slave taken by his master into a state that didn’t allow slavery was still a slave and could be forced to return home with him. You read that, and your jaw hits the floor. There is nothing in the Constitution that might support such nonsense! Dred Scott was overturned by the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution in 1868.
  • Roe v. Wade was a 1973 Supreme Court decision that decreed by a 7-2 majority that the U.S. Constitution includes the right of a woman to murder her child in gestation. The Justices even managed to find nonexistent wording in the Constitution that includes not only the right to abortion, but also a division of gestation into three trimesters during which the balance of rights shades more toward the child as the pregnancy progresses.

Roe is an example of judge-made law by a Supreme Court under cultural pressure, just as was Dred Scott a century before. And like Dred Scott, it treats the lives of two human beings as if one is more important than the other simply because one is more powerful than the other, which was what I argued as a law student. But just like antebellum Southerners trying to keep their power over their slaves, my fellow law students shouted me down. So I felt somewhat vindicated this past week when Justice Kavanaugh said something similar during the Supreme Court oral arguments on possibly overturning Roe v. Wade. Justice Kavanaugh pointed out how hard it is to do what Roe tries to do, which is to balance the interests of the mother and the child. “You can’t accommodate both interests. You have to pick. That’s the fundamental problem. And one interest has to prevail over the other at any given point in time. And that’s why this is so challenging.”

It is indeed challenging. And it’s dangerous. The United States Constitution is a brilliant blueprint for a government of checks and balances that can truly be of, by, and for the people being governed. This was a radical idea 230 years ago! And Dred Scott and Roe illustrate for us how fragile our Constitutionally-protected rights still are. All those freedoms that we take for granted could be lost in a single instance of bad Supreme Court judge-made law. Just as the right to citizenship of people being held in slavery was arbitrarily taken away in the prelude to the Civil War, and the right to life of people who were in gestation was stomped when sexual freedom became the current fashion. There is an odd flirtation with collectivist government going on now in the United States. If that sentiment builds, and if sufficient people become enamored of some charismatic leader who will take care of us so we won’t need to work and we all can just play videogames, then what is there to prevent some future Supreme Court from finding that the Constitution includes the power of a duly-elected president to require citizens to give up their basic rights for the greater good of the nation, just as Roe took away the rights of fetuses to be protected in utero for the greater good of the mother? The truth is, there is no protection at all.  

The only way we can protect the rights and freedoms that were so brilliantly crafted by this nation’s founders is to support the processes that they set in place for the maintenance and protection of those rights. When Roe falls, as it must, it will be up to the people of each state in their own legislatures to decide when and to what extent the rights of the mother override the rights of the child. And if your own rights matter to you, then you will applaud that result.

Thomas Jefferson hated slavery. He began his public life with a determination to find a way to end it, and in fact his first draft of the Declaration of Independence called out Britain’s introduction of slavery here as one of its greatest crimes against the American colonies. But when his wife died at the age of 33, he was so bereft that he spent much of the rest of his life living away from the problem, returning to Virginia to live in old age.

Having studied Thomas Jefferson extensively, I can attest that he was a thoroughly good man. He didn’t end slavery because he couldn’t end slavery, and meanwhile he protected his slaves from the miseries that most freedmen of his day were suffering while he waited for a safer and more stable time to free them. In hindsight, you might argue that he should have realized how long that would take. Inevitably, his death intervened. But it remains beyond dispute that his service to this nation and to the freedom and elevation of all of humankind is almost without parallel. When we attack a primary author of the American experiment for having been a man of his time, we show ourselves to be clueless philistines. And we place at risk every one of the advances in human freedom and fundamental rights that he helped to foster. For the sake of our children and their children’s children, it is time for all Americans to start to think as responsible and far-seeing adults.  

 

“We the People of the United States,
in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice,
insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense,
promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty
to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish
this Constitution for the United States of America.”
– The People in Congress Assembled, the Preamble to the U.S. Constitution (1789)

Kindness

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

“Three things in human life are important.
The first is to be kind.
The second is to be kind.
And the third is to be kind.”
– Henry James, novelist (1843-1916)

Kindness seems to most of us to be the weak sister in our pantheon of virtues. Love. Forgiveness. Truth. Wisdom. Justice. Mercy. And, um… kindness? And so I also thought it was. Kindness seemed to be little more than an optional nicety of social behavior, a way to grease the wheels of relationships and add some pleasantness to our days. I assumed the kindest people must be wealthy folks throwing off their excess dollars; or else they were elderly ladies, knitting socks for the poor and feeding stray cats.

Then this week I witnessed the most stunning act of kindness I have seen in my life. You may be aware that I am an attorney who advises closely-held businesses, some of which have been part of my life for decades. I love what I do and the people so much that I think it’s likely that I never will retire! So a woman in her forties came to me with a very vexing problem. She had invested a quarter of a million dollars in loans to a friend’s business because she believed in his products, never realizing that he was someone who had great ideas but little business sense. Other people had made the same mistake, and by the time she raised this issue to me the business owner was out of options and facing bankruptcy. She was angry, distracted, feeling used and betrayed, and trying to find a way to get some of her money back so she could move on with her life.

Over forty years of working with the owners of more than five hundred businesses, I have learned a thing or two about business realities. When I investigated this situation, it was obvious that the business’s problems were all the result of an inexperienced owner’s rookie mistakes; and sadly, it was beyond repair. It needed a cash infusion right away, and no one was going to lend it more money. My client was the biggest lender. Her best option seemed to me to be just to foreclose on its assets, pay some debts that were senior to hers, and shut it down. And she was angry enough to do that! She didn’t start out wealthy, but over twenty years of working in tech she had managed to save close to a million dollars. And now she was about to lose a quarter of her whole net worth.

We talked it through. She made her decision. She had the power and the right to put a dying business out of its misery while it still possessed some saleable assets, and she set off last Tuesday morning to personally deliver a notice that she already had told the owner was coming.

I didn’t learn until the end of that day what had happened. Her business-inept friend had been somewhat distraught, but I had prepared her to deal with that. She was planning to give him some personal help, and he had options. He was going to be fine. What she hadn’t expected had been the amazing loyalty of employees who in booming Austin very likely could have found better jobs within days. I’m not privy to how the details went down, but instead of giving a crippled business the kill-shot that might have earned her back perhaps a third of what she had lent, my client had decided by the time she called me not only to forgive every cent of her loan, but also to pay off the rest of the debt, to the tune of another quarter of a million dollars. Not so much for the owner’s sake, but for the sake of employees she barely knew who loved the owner and believed in his dream, she had decided to sign away half of her savings so she could give that business a new beginning. Perhaps even more surprisingly, in the few days since she made that decision she has become ever more at peace with it.

My first phone reaction to her news was shock. To which her immediate response was, “It’s just paper.”

“It’s just paper.” What is important is people! And she earned that paper once. She figures she can earn it again, but unless she steps up right away there are a dozen people who have invested five years of their lives in a dream that is about to die.

Until now, I have never thought much about kindness. I did write about it two years ago, and that post is even more relevant now so please read it as a grounding for our discussion of my client’s gift.  And we ought to talk about that gift! She didn’t ask for stock or a contingent note, just in case the business might take off. No credit on the website. And no credit here, either: when I told her I wanted to write about this, she insisted that I change identifying details. For businesses to fail is a fact of life. More than half of them fail within their first five years. So, why did she save this one? And why was she willing to do it at such a great cost to herself?

Her act feels to me to be something like choosing to adopt a damaged child. You’ve got a beautiful family and a wonderful life! Why complicate and impair your life forevermore? I recall years ago reading about a family that had adopted a child who had been deprived of oxygen at birth, and had been abandoned by her birth-parents while she was still in neonatal intensive care. A couple with two children in the primary grades had read about that baby when she was two years old, by which time she was responsive and becoming verbal although she was blind and nearly quadriplegic. The four of them had talked about it as a family. They had visited her in the facility where she lived. And they had decided together to adopt her. When the reporter telling their story a few years later had asked the mother why she had burdened her family this way for this child when there are so many other damaged children in care, the mother had said, ”This one we can save.”

“This one we can save.”  I think that expresses my client’s impulse as well. We can’t heal the world! But we each can find something kind to do that otherwise will never be done.

And the very thought that anyone might give my client credit for her gift seems to horrify her. She doesn’t want to be thanked. Her attitude puts me in mind of someone who died more than a hundred years ago.

Jesus says, “Beware of practicing your righteousness before men to be noticed by them; otherwise you have no reward with your Father who is in heaven. So when you give to the poor, do not sound a trumpet before you, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and in the streets, so that they may be honored by men. Truly I say to you, they have their reward in full. But when you give to the poor, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing, so that your giving will be in secret; and your Father who sees what is done in secret will reward you” (MT 6:3-4). And a woman who died at least a century ago really took His advice to heart. Someone who had recently died and was communicating with his family through a deep-trance medium just after the turn of the twentieth century told them that he had just come from the biggest parade that any of his friends there had ever seen. It seemed that a woman newly arrived in the afterlife had taken Jesus at His literal word, and she had made a point of doing one anonymous kind thing for someone every day of her whole adult life. And if her kindness was discovered, then it didn’t count and she would quickly figure out and do something else. Parades are a big thing in the afterlife when someone arrives whose life has been well-lived, and apparently when this woman got home she was given a Macy’s-quality parade so impressive that it made it into a dusty old book that I then read in the nineteen-seventies.

Jesus also said, “And if you lend to those from whom you expect repayment, what credit is that to you? Even sinners lend to sinners, expecting to be repaid in full. 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 6:34-36).

I think that many of us read that passage with two simultaneous thoughts. Of course, we hope on a theoretical level that in a pinch we really would lend while expecting nothing in return. Especially if we think Jesus might be watching! But at the same time, we see even making any kind of loan that we expect will be repaid in full to be a pretty big kindness. Just outright giving the money seems to be an unreasonable bridge too far.

But I guess my attitude on that has changed, now that I actually have seen it done. How little fuss she makes about this! She reminds me more and more of the family that found room in their hearts for a damaged child. Kindness is not a showy virtue. Instead, it’s a way of looking at someone else’s problem and really seeing it, and feeling sufficient compassion to then look within our hearts to see whether that problem might be one that we can solve.

And in the past few days I have been unexpectedly seeing kindnesses everywhere. A friend whose parents have recently died and left one aunt as the last in his family of her generation decided last weekend on impulse to spend an afternoon with her and take her out to dinner. Someone with a small plane flew to pick up someone’s lost dog that turned up three states away. A teenager with a friend whose father died last year has been working with her friend to earn money so they can give her two younger siblings their usual gifts from Santa. There is so much kindness now, all around! Is it possible that it always has been going on, and I just never noticed it?

And speaking of kindness, I have just begun a ten-day business trip, so for the next two weeks I will have no time for blogging. But I’ll try! Maybe poetry? Maybe recipes? Who knows? But I’ll write something. And whatever it might turn out to be, I hope that as you read it, you will be kind.

 

“We become great on the backs of those who have loved us into being,
through small, simple acts of everyday kindness.”
– Kute Blackson, author of The Magic of Surrender – Finding the Courage to Let Go (2021)

The Greatest Love

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

No matter what they take from me, they can’t take away my dignity,
Because the greatest love of all is happening to me.
I found the greatest love of all inside of me.
The greatest love of all is easy to achieve!
Learning to love yourself, it is the greatest love of all.
– Linda Creed (1948-1986), from “The Greatest Love of All” (1977)

One of the most important tasks that each of us faces is our need to create a positive and wholly reality-based relationship with ourselves. Until we can know and be comfortable with who we actually are, it is hard for us to have the clarity, the self-confidence, and the daily peace that we are going to need if we are ever to really make the most of our lives. At first, as the song says, this doesn’t seem to be much of a problem. After all, since we spend a lot of time with ourselves, we should know ourselves pretty well by now. But for nearly everyone, our adult self-image is built on erroneous information and distorted assumptions that unfortunately have shaped our whole lives to date. For example:

  • Some of us never learn to tame our needy egos. The ego is a primitive instinct for self-preservation and self-aggrandizement that is part of our limited minds at birth, and that seems to be essential if we are to avoid a host of childhood dangers. It functions almost like a separate being that tells us that the ego itself, this fearful and grabby little gremlin, actually is who we are; and if we continue to believe that, we can grow up to be unpleasantly shallow and self-absorbed. Fortunately, though, our ego can be tamed once we reach young adulthood, and then it will no longer much distract us.
  • Traditional Christianity and mainstream science combine to give us an awful self-image. If we believe them, we internalize the fear-based certainty that we are sinful and fallen meat that will blink out when our bodies die, or else we will likely burn in hell forever. Even the best-case possibility that we might be lucky enough to spend eternity playing harps in God’s throne room starts to seem pretty lousy when you envision living it forevermore.
    * Our view of ourselves is heavily shaped by our cultures. We can see this phenomenon most clearly in the lesser status of women in some cultures, and in the way that indicators of wealth and class can affect our sense of who we are. We even are marked for life by subtle details like birth-order and city-vs.-country. Then on top of all that is piled our online culture, which strokes and batters our egos as it grotesquely distorts the way we see ourselves and plays havoc with what might otherwise have been our life’s more solid and well-considered priorities.
  • Our families were the first to tell us who we are, and we still believe most of whatever they said. I see this as the big one! Too many little children uncritically learn to see themselves negatively, and some of them spend all the rest of their lives still knowing that they are clumsy, not smart enough, inconvenient, or even flat-out bad people, simply because they heard words like these from a parent before the age of six. I had the opposite upbringing. My father wanted me to be the first female American President, and my mother wanted me to write the Great American Novel, so from my infancy they were praising me and telling me I could grow up to be whatever I wanted to be as they each tried to inspire me with a wish to fulfill their own respective dreams. You would think that sort of upbringing would make me feel like a failure for having missed both goals; but all it did was to make me grow up feeling very positive about myself. My own big dream has turned out to be to free the whole world from the fear of death. And thanks to those two sainted people, I never for a moment doubt that I am going to succeed at doing what I guess I already know is impossible.

So, each of us by young adulthood is essential an amalgam of all the cultural and personal information about who and what we are that has been bombarding us from birth. We may wind up feeling somewhat put together, and we may think we actually know and love ourselves; but in fact, for most of us what has been assembled into our present self-image is very different from who we might have seen ourselves to be if we had grown up with different cultural details and with a different set of parents. And then there are all the psychological pathologies that plague some folks, on top of (and perhaps because of) all these sources of bogus information! How can we even begin to discover and learn to love the eternal being that chose to be born in our physical body?

This problem has of late come to trouble me. I hear every day from strangers who have issues they hope I can help them address. I have neither the time nor the training to give them the kind of help that some of them need; and anyway, I am coming to realize that even the professionals they may have consulted don’t have the training that they would need to help these folks get at all the causes of their lifelong self-image problems. All the bogus information about ourselves that bombards us from birth is pure lies! Please read again the four points outlined above. It’s all lies. What is born in each sweet infant body is a powerful eternal being that is hopeful, bright, and already wise! All children arrive with a careful plan to achieve the maximum possible spiritual growth; but they arrive at young adulthood already battered by their ignorant parents and their degenerate culture. Each being is still, beneath it all, that very same eternal being! But sadly, each of them is now weighed down by a lot of confusing and mostly negative information.

This seems to be a problem as old as human civilization. Everyone is raised by amateurs! And when we grow up with an unpleasant understanding of who and what we actually are, it seems at first blush to be impossible for us to learn to truly love ourselves. Worst of all, a distorted and mostly negative view of ourselves that was built up in childhood from a variety of sources and is now familiar to us might become almost impossible for us to change! That was my first thought when, a week ago, I was dealing with my own emotional fallout from a very troubling counseling call. It was clear that traditional psychological theories and talk-counseling had been of no use to that sadly unstable soul. And with what I now understand about who we are eternally, it occurred to me that no mental-health therapy that is currently being tried is based in any real understanding of who each baby actually is and how it can go wrong. So it is no wonder that so many people now living are feeling so bruised and confounded by life!

And now I can see that Linda Creed and Whitney Houston have given us a potential way forward in their sweetly hopeful song. Two lovely women who died too young had wisdom far beyond their years! Like you, whenever I’ve thought of “The Greatest Love of All” I was hearing Whitney Houston’s voice, but the words seemed to be less important than the sounds. It was just another pop song to form a background for our daily lives. But please read those words! Whether they knew it or not, Linda and Whitney have given us what may be the most important piece of psychological advice of the whole twentieth century:

  • It’s important that we rear children carefully, so as not to impair the precious spiritual beings that they already are.
  • Inside each damaged adult is still that same precious eternal being who was once a newborn child.

Now that we at last understand what hampers so many human lives, what might we do to help each little child to achieve the best possible start, and how can we rescue more damaged adults? The more I think about it, the more confident I am that the best way for us to accomplish both goals will be to make the fact that we are all powerful, eternal beings and deeply beloved of a genuine Godhead the base and the core of our entire culture. That way, we can protect our children from all the worst clueless cultural lies, and we can help parents see their children not as high-grade pets, but as the sacred and joyous responsibility that they are. And we can take each damaged adult straight back to who he was at the beginning, once upon a time, and help him to expand and grow from there.

I can hear what you’re thinking. “Yeah, right. You’re a hammer, so to you everything looks like a nail.” Naturally, someone who was raised and inspired to try to achieve something really great, and who has seized on universal afterlife education, is going to see that mission as the cure for everything! But it’s more than that. I think this really will work, because we already have learned that coming to know the truth about death and about our eternal natures has a number of wonderful effects. Those who already know the truth are:

  • Free from fear. Fear of death seems to be the base fear, so when we no longer fear death, we no longer fear anything.
  • Thinking and living on a universal scale. The “life sucks, then you die” mentality that pervades most modern cultures is altogether gone once someone internalizes the fact that there really is no death.
  • Loving naturally. Since love is the opposite of fear, once we stop fearing death and thereby we lose all our other fears as well, we begin to love everyone more and more, as a bubble rises in water toward the light.

This combination of changes in attitude has been altogether transforming for many of those who have taken the trouble to learn that for certain there actually is no death. The changes we have seen in our earliest students have made me eager to share the truth with all the world!

Silver Birch is a popular disembodied entity who was channeled by a skeptical atheist turned involuntary communicator named Maurice Barbanell (1902-1981). I generally don’t use anything channeled after 1930 as afterlife evidence because the risk that the living might fake these communications for personal gain is simply too great. But I know experts who are as skeptical as I am, and who nevertheless consider Silver Birch to be genuine. And he tells us that from his perspective, we incarnate in order to learn who we are. He said, “Your world is full of millions of people who do not know what they are there for, who they are, what it is that they must achieve whilst they are incarnate on earth. You can help them to realize that they are spirits with bodies, that the real individual is the deathless spirit, that the spirit is there to gain the experience to equip it for its larger life in our world. That is the most important thing that you can do.”

And indeed it is! Even though we cannot yet know the extent to which such knowledge will help people who were sadly damaged in childhood, and how it will help to rescue future children from also being damaged, it certainly will improve many lives worldwide! From birth on earth until graduation, each infinitely precious human being deserves to know the far-beyond-wonderful truth about who and what we really are!

 

I believe the children are our future.
Teach them well and let them lead the way!
Show them all the beauty they possess inside.
Give them a sense of pride, to make it easier.
Let the children’s laughter remind us how we used to be.
– Linda Creed (1948-1986), from “The Greatest Love of All” (1977)

Truth Detector

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

“Everything is energy and that’s all there is to it.
Match the frequency of the reality you want,
and you cannot help but get that reality.
It can be no other way.
This is not philosophy. This is physics.”
– Albert Einstein (1879-1955), quotation (1948)

The above quotation from Albert Einstein shows a profound understanding of  what we now know is true. And for good measure, he also said, “Concerning matter, we have been all wrong. What we have called matter is energy, whose vibration has been so lowered as to be perceptible to the senses. There is no matter.” There is a lot of evidence now that Einstein was right, but still most working physicists would be forced to deny his words because they violate the fundamental scientific dogma of materialism. And the quotation from Einstein that ends this post explains how he was able to achieve his exalted level of understanding! He was a sufficiently revered scientist that he could investigate reality with an open mind without risking his position in the scientific community. So he did just that. And in daring to explore as far as his mind could reach, he found the same basis for reality that afterlife researchers have independently discovered.

It’s the same underlying reality, too, that the second-greatest theoretical physicist of the twentieth century also discovered. Max Planck (1858-1947) won the 1918 Nobel Prize in Physics. He was the father of quantum mechanics, and a deeply brilliant man. In 1931 Planck said, “I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as derivative from consciousness. We cannot get behind consciousness. Everything that we talk about, everything that we regard as existing, postulates consciousness.”  Then in 1944, near the end of his life, he summed up his greatest discovery, and in fact the greatest discovery of the twentieth century. He said, “As a man who has devoted his whole life to the most clear headed science, to the study of matter, I can tell you as a result of my research about atoms this much: There is no matter as such. All matter originates and exists only by virtue of a force which brings the particle of an atom to vibration and holds this most minute solar system of the atom together. We must assume behind this force the existence of a conscious and intelligent mind. This mind is the matrix of all matter.” Max Planck discovered what materialist physicists call quantum physics, which is a variant of the consciousness-based physics that underlies all of reality. He found that quantum physics underlies reality in this material universe as well, although this universe has an additional overlay of what we might call Newtonian physics that keeps our minds from messing with the reality around us while we are having these earth-experiences.

So the two greatest physicists in history both independently discovered the same physics underlying all of reality that afterlife researchers also have found! And afterlife researchers have made our discoveries using neither math nor experiments of any kind, but simply by closely studying nearly two hundred years of abundant and consistent afterlife evidence. Here is what Albert Einstein, Max Plank, Craig Hogan, and Roberta Grimes have each discovered:

  • Nothing is solid. Everything is energy. This fundamental fact of reality is inescapable at this point, and yet it is unknown beyond the scientific community.
  • The base energy is what we experience as consciousness. Your personal awareness is an aspect of the infinitely powerful potentiality that is all that independently exists, and that gives rise to everything else.

But still, the foolish and clearly erroneous fundamental scientific dogma of materialism persists! It forces scientists trying to earn a living to publish scientific papers that are essentially gibberish; it has physicists still searching pointlessly for a way to unify their two incompatible theories; and it sees the whole scientific community forced to struggle with patently absurd random theories that have been suggested by the results of their nonsensical materialist explorations. Because mainstream scientists are not allowed to consider the most important discovery made by history’s two greatest physicists, they must still ignore the base force that underlies reality. So, ultimately, their theories are going to be nonsense. Even when they make what are actually interesting and important discoveries about consciousness, the rules of their profession require that they talk about them in terms of the material brain!

So you and I are positioned to witness a most peculiar situation. The limitations of materialist science are so obvious by now, and their effects on scientific research are so devastating, that it is impossible for us to imagine that any scientific researcher with even a modicum of sense doesn’t see them! But they can’t buck the gatekeepers. The university departments and the peer-reviewed journals. Academic scientists have families to support, tuitions to fund, and a hope to eventually retire; and any research scientist who even considers investigating the primacy of consciousness will soon find himself flipping burgers for a living. At this point, the entire scientific community is reduced to the position of courtiers forced to exclaim about the beauties of the naked Emperor’s imaginary new clothes.

I should mention at this point the leading crusader against all this scientific nonsense, whose next Seek Reality interview will be posted on November 29th. Craig Weiler is a researcher and entrepreneur who has for decades been fighting disinformation with facts. His book, Psi Wars: Ted, Wikipedia and the Battle for the Internet, is a must-read if this problem interests you. Craig is the very model of patient open-mindedness, but at this point I am finding it a great deal harder than he finds it to continue to suffer fools!

The fact is that mainstream science went off the rails a hundred years ago, when it turned itself into a belief-system. The only way it can right itself now is to renounce materialism and then turn every working scientist loose with instructions to pursue the truth wherever it may lead. To help to give those newly-liberated scientists a head start, here is a caution about some common methods of modern-day scientific inquiry that are very unlikely to work when we venture beyond this material universe:

  • Mathematics. From what we can tell, mathematical calculations are close to useless in studying the greater reality. Since consciousness there has all the power, it can make anything happen in any way at any time, so there probably are no fixed “laws of physics” to be discovered.
  • Replicable Experiments. We may eventually work out ways to experiment with a consciousness-based reality. But since the minds of the experimenters are going to affect the results of our experiments, we should assume for now that all experimental results must be considered suspect.
  • Commercial Research. We have already found that work in electronic communication that is based in a hope for earning wealth will be doomed. The genuine experimenters are the dead experts, they easily can read our motives, and they seem to be unwilling to work with anyone who is in it for material gain.

What we have learned works best when we attempt to study consciousness and the greater reality is for researchers to take a more deferential approach:

  • Distant Observation. You can learn about the greater reality the way you might study a black hole or a supernova, by staying out of the way and indirectly observing it.
  • Data Aggregation. When you can’t observe something directly without a fear that your own mind will affect your observations, the best way to study it is to collect a lot of testimony from the participants themselves. This is what the early-20th-century accounts through deep-trance mediums have done for afterlife researchers.
  • Trusted On-Site Observers. As we have come to better understand human life in the greater reality, we have encountered upper-level beings who know a great deal about where they are now, and they are eager to help us get our questions answered.

It will help, too, to have a base understanding of the greater reality already in place against which to test future scientific theories. For example, I have found that what we already know about the greater reality has worked wonderfully in testing what Christianity teaches! For the past twenty years I have been using the testimony of the dead to demolish Christian ideas as varied as judgment, hell, damnation, and the End Times prophesies. When we read the twice-translated Gospel teachings of Jesus in modern English, and we compare them with what the dead have said, what we can learn is especially amazing! It’s as if Jesus is Himself explaining and enriching our understandings. And the dead are anxious to help us in any way they can. Some of the greatest scientists of the twentieth century are still actively working today. So perhaps, when the mainstream scientific gatekeepers at last begin to get a clue, dead greats like Albert Einstein and Max Planck can give us guidance and can serve as a kind of Truth Detector for the far more sensible scientific theories that will soon be on the way?

“I want to know how God created this world.
I’m not interested in this or that phenomenon,
in the spectrum of this or that element.
I want to know His thoughts;
the rest are just details.”
– Albert Einstein (1879-1955), quotation (1925)

Seeing is Believing

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

I believe above the storm the smallest prayer will still be heard.
I believe that someone in that great somewhere hears every word.
Every time I hear a newborn baby cry, or touch a leaf,
Or see the sky, Then I know why I believe.
– Ronnie Dunn & Craig Wiseman, from “I Believe” (1953)

The most dangerous word in the English language is “faith.” It seems ironic, doesn’t it, that we hold such a counterproductive word in such remarkably high esteem?

The word “faith” generally refers to an admirable level of religious piety. It is the highest virtue to have complete faith, and especially faith in God; while the inability to have faith is seen as a weakness, and even as a character flaw. Many people consider the fact that so many Christians seem to be losing their faith to be what lies at the root of much of what is going wrong in the world.

And many people would think the foregoing paragraph is just a simple truism.  But in fact, it is nothing of the kind! Far from being in any way admirable, our having nothing more than faith is a sorry admission that our religion of choice is not based in anything real. It would never stand up to objective scrutiny. No wonder so many modern Christians are feeling increasingly set adrift! I submit to you now that it is finally time for us to look frankly at the fact that what once was a rational way for humankind to make sense of an unfathomable world is now not only sadly outmoded, but it is in fact a perilous and unnecessary diversion from what should be our singular and unrelenting pursuit of the truth.

We tend to use “faith” and “belief” as near-synonyms. But in fact, they are near-opposites! The difference between them is, and always has been, evidence:

  • Faith means having complete confidence in someone or something based in little or no evidence.
  • Belief means holding an evidence-based opinion that some proposition or set of ideas is true.

And that difference is a gulf as wide and deep as the sea!

Having faith in something based in little or no evidence never has been a comfortable way to live. Of course, Christians have good evidence in the Gospels that both Jesus and God are real; and if our Christian faith were based only in the Gospels, it could reasonably rise to the level of belief. But beyond what appears in the Gospels, the entire Christian faith is based not in evidence, but instead in a set of human ideas. From the virgin birth through the God who insists that we learn to forgive perfectly, but that same God refuses to forgive us  unless He gets to see His own Son tortured and murdered: the whole religion is based in human ideas. Not only is there no evidence that any of those later Christian notions is true, but there is considerable evidence at this point that all of them are fear-based nonsense. 

Until quite recently, humankind has had to settle for faith alone. The urge toward coming up with gods may have been innate in the first modern humans as they emerged two hundred thousand years ago, and it likely was their best way to cope with a reality that was incomprehensible to them. Perhaps it even was based in part in inchoate pre-birth memories. But for whatever reason, people thought up gods, and we created especially tough and brutal gods to help us cope with a dog-eat-dog and saber-tooth-cat-eat-human world. Our developing the ability to maintain faith in such gods was our only comfort in a pitiless reality. Looking back from here, it seems that our having developed the ability to have faith without evidence was a useful early survival skill.

And until as late as the start of the twentieth century, we can be forgiven for having clung to being satisfied with faith alone. It was really only about that time that both the advent of modern science and our much-improved communication with those that we used to think were dead began to give us a lot of solid evidence of what actually is going on. And that evidence came together and began to make sense! We don’t yet have anything like all the answers. But for decades, humankind has had a sensible and rapidly improving understanding of a remarkable greater reality that includes our afterlife as a tiny part.

Perhaps we ought to pause here and remind any Christians who might be bothered by the thought of using “Jesus” and “evidence” in the same sentence that Jesus Himself urged us to seek and find the evidence-based Truth. He said:

“Ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives, and he who seeks finds, and to him who knocks it will be opened” (MT 7:7-8).

How could He have made it any plainer than that? He did give some lip-service to the notion of faith, perhaps to placate the listening Temple guards; but then He plunged in and made the most profound call for us to acquire enough evidence for real belief that you ever will read anywhere! He said,

“Have faith in God. Truly I say to you, whoever says to this mountain, ‘Be taken up and cast into the sea,’ and does not doubt in his heart, but believes that what he says is going to happen, it will be granted him. Therefore, I say to you, all things for which you pray and ask, believe that you have received them, and they will be granted to you” (MK 11:22-24).

The only enemy of the kind of mental power that it would take to move a mountain is doubt. And it is impossible for most of us to sustain an abiding and largely evidence-free faith while never once doubting it. That’s especially true when what is required of us is faith in a set of dogmas that with just a bit of critical thinking can be seen to be plain nonsense. There is no evidence for most of what Christianity teaches. And given what Christianity teaches beyond the Gospel words of Jesus, the fact that it isn’t real is actually a good thing. Jesus had something to say about that, too. He said:

“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).

And in fact, He was entirely right about that! The Gospel teachings of Jesus are the most powerful and most direct method for growing spiritually that humankind ever has found. They can free us from every doubt and all fears. It is only when we complicate them with foreign ideas that never came from Jesus that we come up with a religion that in too many ways simply defies belief.

But it isn’t only Christians who are betrayed by and drowning in an antiquated faith. Modern mainstream scientists are even worse off! Mainstream science is based in a supreme faith in materialism, a theory for which there is little evidence, and against which the evidence  is overwhelming. Materialism has let scientists down repeatedly! There can be no hope that it ever will lead anywhere. But still, like devotees of some ancient sect whose faith in Moloch always lets them down, but whose fear of losing out to that upstart Christian sect is even greater, the scientific priests cling to their materialist faith and continue to toil away. They even are starting to investigate consciousness. We know by now that consciousness is the equivalent of the Gospel teachings where evidence-based truth is concerned; but still, even when they study consciousness, modern scientists’ materialist faith requires that they find some material connection. No Christian ever born has been so faithfully and so pointlessly dogmatic.

Rather than doing what they both should do, and deciding at last to transition from their faith in human-made, dead-end dogmas to an evidence-based search for humanity’s common truths, our two faith-deluded core institutions are only now wondering whether they might somehow keep their bogus faiths while they search for better ways to somehow get along.

In August of 1964, Lt. Everett Alvarez was the first American pilot shot down over North Vietnam.  After eight and a half years of misery, Lt. Alvarez finally got to come home. When he was asked how he had made it through, he said, “Faith in God, in our president, and in our country – it was this faith that maintained our hope.”

And that is the only rational use that there ever can be for any kind of faith! Faith belongs to the nearly hopeless, and not to Christians in their Sunday pews. Certainly not to scientists who claim to be engaging in the open-minded pursuit of the truth! What is needed now is some kind of truth-detector that can be used by both scientists and religious folks to begin to seek the actual truth. And that truth will of course be common to both disciplines. We’ll talk more about this next week….

I believe for every drop of rain that falls, a flower grows.
I believe that somewhere in the darkest night, a candle glows.
I believe for everyone who goes astray,
Someone will come to show the way. I believe.  Oh, I believe.
– Ronnie Dunn & Craig Wiseman, from “I Believe” (1953)

Living the Truth

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

What’s it all about, Alfie? Is it just for the moment we live?
What’s it all about When you sort it out, Alfie?
Are we meant to take more than we give? Or are we meant to be kind?
And if only fools are kind, Alfie, Then I guess it is wise to be cruel.
And if life belongs only to the strong, Alfie,
What will you lend on an old golden rule?
– Burt Bacharach and Hal David (1921-2012), from “Alfie” (1966)

We talked last week about the fact that we are left by our two most trusted institutions to try to figure out on our own whatever the true about reality might be. You may bristle at my saying that, since science has been so good at improving our lives! We eat better and more reliably, and we live in far more comfort and safety, than did people even a century ago. And we certainly live a whole lot better than people did a few millennia ago! But none of that has changed our essential natures. Insofar as we can determine, humankind is not one whit kinder, nobler, or daily happier than were people who lived long ages before today.

 Our final frontier is not outer space. It is the deepest human heart! And despite our endless trying, we never have managed to find a way to actually improve human nature. Although we surely have learned what DOES NOT work.

By now, we have learned that you cannot order, persuade, or inspire people to behave for long in ways that are not consistent with their essential natures. And we really have tried! As people began to live in groups that were bigger than extended families, we could see that without a sense of some sort of biological connection, it was hard to maintain a natural will to cooperate and support one another. So we began to offer behavioral guidance. We made civil laws, established religious rules and bureaucratic regulations, and ever more creatively tried to order our ever-larger societies. But in all the days since our last common ancestor lived two hundred thousand years ago, none of what we ever have tried has turned out to be a way to change people internally! To this day, all of us will steal here and there if we think we won’t be caught. Everyone who is given power will engage in petty cruelties. And our secular and religious leaders by and large come nowhere near close to living up to even their own modest standards! To this day, it is our essential nature to fear and dominate one another. We continue to fight wars, large and small. Humankind has changed in some surface details as eons of human history have passed, but we have not changed in our essential nature since the day when it first occurred to someone that nicking flakes off a rock might make a sharper point.

This is the reason why Jesus came to earth. It was to save us not from God, but from ourselves! Thomas tells me that Jesus came from the highest aspect of the Godhead and actually entered a human body so He could “look through our eyes” and try to understand why we were still choosing to live so miserably. Why were we not using this opportunity of being immersed in the negative atmosphere of materiality to push against that negativity and make the choice for love and spiritual growth? His plan was essentially to figure us out, and then to teach us how to grow spiritually, which was what His endlessly mentioning “the kingdom of God” was all about. Thomas told me all of this a decade ago, when he could see that – just like everyone else – I simply wasn’t getting it.

And when you have this insight, suddenly the whole Gospel message makes so much sense! There has been no Christian scholar who seems to have grasped the enormity of Thomas’s insight, which is why we ought to just recap it quickly. Jesus refers to the kingdom of God or the kingdom of heaven some eighty times through all four Gospels. Clearly that kingdom is somewhere else, since He talks about bringing it to earth (LK 7:28; MK 14:25); and in fact, it is the highest aspect of the greater reality, which is perfect love. He told us His mission was to bring that level of love to this abased and negativity-filled level of reality (LK 9:27). He even taught us to pray for it, saying, “Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven” (MT 6:20). He told us the kingdom of God is “within us” (LK 17:21), and invisibly it will overspread the earth (LK 17:20). And Jesus even told us how to make that happen, by learning to forgive and love perfectly.

In the ten years since Thomas gave me that insight, he has coached me through learning how to live the Gospel teachings. And they really do work! When they are taken seriously and not seen as mere suggestions, the Gospel teachings do indeed have the power to transform us at the level of our deepest hearts.

But still, those teachings aren’t quite enough because they don’t address our fears. Since fear is the essence of negativity, we really have to kill all our fears if we hope to raise our vibrations much at all. I take it as a reasonable observation that every human fear is at its base the fear of death. And Jesus addressed our fear of death. He promised to come back for us when we die (JN 14:2-3), and He assured us that even the thief on the cross next to His was going to make it to heaven (LK 23:43). But the religion that bears His name, and the scientific belief-system that tries to erase Him, both only further gin up our fears. Neither does anything whatsoever to ease our primordial fear of death!

Fortunately, though, leading afterlife scholars have come at last to realize that we know enough now to teach the truth about the afterlife without needing further help from mainstream science. As we share our conclusions, we are finding that there is no longer much uncertainty. Our guidance is sound, and what we have been learning all fits together very well. So there is no need for us to wait any longer to begin to free the world from fear! Our goal will be to make knowledge of what happens at and after death a fundamental part of our cultural heritage. Just as broad swathes of the population are now aware of the Big Bang theory, the Jesus-died-for-our-sins theory, and other scientific and religious theories that eventually are going to turn out to be wrong, it is past time for us to start to educate as many people as possible about the our-minds-are-eternal theory. This is one theory that is actually right!

What is more, this will be the world’s first effective push to transform people internally. This time, it really is going to work! And when enough of us lose our fear of death and achieve that inner transformation, at last the kingdom of God can really begin to overspread the earth!

The reason we are so confident this will work is that we can already see it working. Those in the afterlife-education community who have managed to vanquish their fear of death are already being transformed in ways that are frankly extraordinary! For example:

  • We begin to live our lives in an eternal frame. That old “life sucks, then you die” mentality that generally underlies human thinking is, wonderfully, altogether gone. Instead, we live this life more deeply and care about making the best use of these lives on earth as part of what we know is going to be our personal forevermore.
  • We realize that no thought or action is private. Knowing that a lot more is going on and our minds are inextricably part of Mind can be disorienting at first. But then it feels liberating! If nothing can be hidden, then we are forever spared the bother of ever again trying to hide anything.
  • Our personal consciousness vibrations begin to rise naturally. Losing the fear of death sheds a lot of spiritual ballast that has kept us weighed down. I am realizing now that a lot of the change that I had thought had come from applying the Gospel teachings was just as much the result of my having shed the last vestiges of my own fear of death.
  • We are happy! My goodness, I can tell you now that there is no happiness so complete as being certain that you are living eternally as the child of an infinitely loving Godhead!

People whose minds have been transformed this way are essentially living just as our religious and secular laws have always meant us to live. They are optimistic, generous, loving, kindly, peaceful, unselfish, empathetic, and solicitous of the needs of others. You cannot force people to think this way! You only can give the world and yourself the gift of your personal transformation. And when you have done that, your own life will become more glorious than you can imagine. Knowing for certain that your life is eternal, and knowing the science and the truth behind it all, feels like sharing with very few other people what is truly the world’s most glorious secret. It’s a secret that transforms you from the heart, and it makes your whole life a song of joy!

Jesus is more than just a religious figure. Instead, and eternally, He is the world’s ultimate Teacher! He came long ago as the genuine Godhead, seeking to know us well enough to be able eventually to start to transform, and finally to save this desperate world. Even though mainstream scientists remain stuck in their materialist delusions, and even though Christianity still primarily ignores Jesus in favor of its own later dogmas, we realize now that there is no need to delay our sharing of the truth any longer. It is time for us to begin to do what humankind so desperately needs, which is to help as many people as possible to finally shed their fear of death and begin the internal transformation that, for the past two thousand years, has been the Lord’s eternally perfect gift.

As sure as I believe there’s a heaven above, Alfie, I know there’s something much more!
Something even non-believers can believe in.
I believe in love, Alfie. Without true love we just exist, Alfie!
Until you find the love you’ve missed, You’re nothing, Alfie.
When you walk, let your heart lead the way.
And you’ll find love any day, Alfie, Alfie!
– Burt Bacharach and Hal David (1921-2012), from “Alfie” (1966)

Seeking Truth

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

Tell all the Truth but tell it slant –
Success in Circuit lies.
Too bright for our infirm Delight,
The Truth’s superb surprise.

As Lightning to the Children eased
With explanation kind,
The Truth must dazzle gradually
Or every man be blind –
– Emily Dickinson (1830-1886), from “Tell all the Truth but tell it slant” (1865)

We have spoken at length about the fact that neither mainstream Christianity nor mainstream science has any wish to discover the truth about how reality actually works.  Both have cherished dogmas to support, and constituencies with interests that they must protect, so the body of evidence that afterlife researchers have developed over the past hundred and fifty years has been disparaged and dismissed or outright ignored by our two most trusted institutions. Sometimes you and I have actually chuckled about this situation. It’s like having a couple of elderly aunts living in the attic who create a nuisance by feeding stray cats on our back porch. They irritate us, but in a benign sort of way. Auntie Chris and her equally addled scientific sister are making a mess, but they are very old and living in a past that is irrelevant to us now. How much longer can this possibly go on? The intransigence of both science and Christianity has seemed for a long time to be nearly harmless, and ultimately self-limiting. Christianity is just a belief-system anyway, and science advances by deaths (as Max Planck so memorably said). Any minute now, this century-long scientific stonewalling of the truth will end when the last old materialist bull dies away. Or so I have thought. Right up to the moment when I couldn’t think that way anymore.

Christianity and science both claim to own the truth in their respective spheres, but both of their versions of the truth are based in self-serving falsehoods. From their positions of longstanding trust and respect, these two institutions continue to tell us fables that most people continue to believe. If science and Christianity were a pair of criminal enterprises fighting for control of our treasure, they would do nothing differently!

Christianity claims to be based in Jesus, but in fact it uses Him as a figurehead while paying little mind to what He actually said. It claims to be our worthy guide in spiritual matters, when in fact what it teaches is human-made ideas that are downright spiritually harmful. It won’t look at the afterlife evidence because it is so heavily invested in its own ideas that are based in little more than Medieval guesses. So, tell me. Why should we trust this institution?

Science claims to be our reliable source of information about the world around us, when in fact it chooses arbitrarily to investigate only what it considers to be material. Honest scientists have known for a century that matter is just energy and nothing is solid, but the scientific community won’t tell us that. Instead, they keep demanding more and more funding so they can pursue their baseless theories, undaunted by the fact that success still eludes them. Beyond bringing us myriad ways to make our lives more comfortable, what new truths have scientists really discovered in the past hundred years?

And these are the only widely trusted non-governmental institutions in Western culture! Both of them are demonstrably wrong and bent on flogging lame ideas, and neither of them will take responsibility for its own longstanding errors. People trust them primarily because we want to know the essential truths that no other source seems able to provide. But they have never accepted responsibility for actually investigating anything! And their guesses and fabrications are in no way harmless.

In fact, the ongoing refusal of both mainstream science and mainstream Christianity to investigate the afterlife evidence is the source of every evil that is currently loose in the world. Once most people realize their lives are eternal, everything will change for the better! But instead, to this day Western culture assumes that the competing scientific and religious views of the afterlife are our only options. And whichever horse you might choose to ride, whether it’s religious or scientific, the view that both institutions give you of yourself is awful! You are meat, or you carry original sin. Either way, you are venal, selfish and evil, and together all heading for the same pointless end. At your death, either you will blink out like a light, or you will face a choice between roasting in hell or tediously singing hymns forevermore. There is nothing about our lives that means anything.

Even when the guidance we are being fed is preposterous, most of us are stuck with using it to try to build our own views of ourselves and the world. And when the guidance we are getting from our two most trusted sources insists that only matter is real, and God is a cranky guy on a throne or else no God exists at all, then each of us is forced to build a worldview that is both erroneous and unpleasant. As our trust in those failing institutions has waned, our personal search for the truth has become more individual and more desperate. The result has been the alarming rise in recent years of the twin banes of atheistic nihilism and societal strife.

Atheistic Nihilism.  If atheism means that one does not believe literally in the Christian God, then I am an atheist. What open-minded researchers have discovered is a Godhead that is infinitely greater and far more loving than the petty and cranky Christian God. The scientific evidence is such that we should be excitedly investigating this wondrous new development! But overriding our happy news is the stark kind of atheism that is rapidly spreading in the West, and holds that not only is there no God, but also there is no point and no meaning.

Societal Strife. Since we are unable to build our worldviews around an open-minded search for the truth by our most trusted institutions, we each are forced to think through and construct our own individually-developed ideas. And then, of course, we defend our ideas against attacks by others who prefer their own ideas, until the only possible truth about anything is whatever you individually believe. We see this happening in our civic life, to the point where we needn’t even discuss it here; and it happens in our personal life as well. At this point,  even Christians are at war with one another over trivial details of their beliefs-based dogmas.

But even worse than the rise of atheism and daily strife, stonewalling by our most trusted institutions is forcing us all to live steeped in fear! Until the truth about death and the afterlife is much more widely known, humankind’s general default setting is one of stark terror of the yawning void. And, tragically, our societal terror of death seems to be hardest on teenagers and young adults. Even I was afraid, despite my two experiences of light! But those experiences at least emboldened me enough that I risked investigating what is true, taking literally the invitation of the Lord to “Ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives, and he who seeks finds, and to him who knocks it will be opened” (MT 7:7-8). And when I asked for the truth with an open mind, I found a whole new gigantic reality far greater than anything we have heretofore imagined! With the help of open-minded folks who have some scientific training, we could learn enough to begin a glorious dawning of the truth all over the world!

But sadly, more than ten years after I joined the public afterlife community, progress in the field of afterlife education still has gone nowhere. A lot more evidence has been developed, and we know in greater detail what is going on, but neither science nor Christianity still shows the slightest interest in investigating all this evidence. There have been no hopeful breakthroughs. At this point, those who were expecting to see breakthroughs have lost a lot of their enthusiasm. And what is worst of all is the fact that both Christianity and science are still giving us awful views of who and what we are! Not a syllable of what either institution tells us about ourselves is true. But due to the frankly evil nonsense they teach, too many of us still continue to live as if there is no point to anything.

It is going to be up to us to work together to begin a new age of actually seeking and finding the truth. We are currently developing a website whose purpose will be to educate people about the afterlife from every perspective, as the evidence actually reveals it to us. We expect to be ready to roll next month! But first, to help you better see how important these efforts are going to be, next week we’ll look at how the world around us is likely to change for the better once most people know for certain that every human life is eternal. I think you will be happily surprised to see just how much of a universal fix this single change might  be….

“If you hold to My teaching, you are really my disciples.
Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.”
– Jesus (JN 8:31-32)

Semi-Conscious

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

Come gather ’round people, wherever you roam,
And admit that the waters around you have grown,
And accept it that soon you’ll be drenched to the bone,
If your time to you is worth savin’.
And you better start swimmin’ or you’ll sink like a stone,
For the times they are a-changin.’
– Bob Dylan, from “The Times They Are a-Changin’” (1964)

It is an extraordinary fact that even though we are already twenty-one percent of the way through the twenty-first century, the mainstream scientific community remains convinced that consciousness is produced by our brains. There is no scientific evidence that this even might be true beyond the fact that parts of the brain can be stimulated by conscious processes! And there is a lot of evidence that it isn’t true.

The fact that consciousness is the base of reality isn’t even a new idea. I have just interviewed Leonard Perlmutter for Seek Reality. He’s an expert on Eastern spiritual teachings, and he shared with us the amazing fact that those who invented the practice of yoga knew five thousand years ago that consciousness is primary and it pre-exists matter. It’s not an especially radical idea, either. Some of the greatest scientists of the twentieth century knew or suspected the primary role of consciousness, in part because this conclusion logically flows from some of the oddities of quantum mechanics.

It has been easy for afterlife researchers to come to appreciate the primacy of consciousness. We who spend a lot of our time in non-material pursuits are used to reasoning outward from the afterlife realities, which clearly are based in consciousness. But mainstream scientists are enmired in studying matter, so understandably their logical model is based in matter. But surely by now they must be getting a clue? I have of late been watching for developments in the field of consciousness research, and this week I attended an online IONS presentation with considerable interest.

If you don’t yet know IONS, you should. The Institute of Noetic Sciences was founded by Apollo 14 astronaut Edgar Mitchell in 1973, after he had a spiritual experience while he was returning from the moon. IONS has always been a serious science-based investigator of what used to be seen as woo-woo ideas, and the very word “noetic” refers to the human intellect. So last week with a lot of hope I attended an online IONS presentation by Joachim Kepler, Ph.D., who is a research director at the Department of Consciousness Research (DIWISS) in Roth, Germany. Both IONS and DIWISS are at the leading edge of consciousness studies, and Dr. Kepler’s talk was called Linking Consciousness to the Foundations of Physics: Toward a Self-Consistent Theory of Consciousness. Linking consciousness to the foundations of physics? Toward a self–consistent theory of consciousness? To someone who has for decades been waiting for mainstream science to catch up with reality, that title sounded like music! But what Dr. Kepler said turned out to be another painful reminder of just how completely lost mainstream science is as a belief-system. I have watched his presentation three times now, trying to find some way that my first reactions were wrong.

Sadly, Dr. Kepler’s ideas amount to a thoughtful rearrangement of the deck chairs on the scientific ship to nowhere.  And he ignores the implications of an enormous body of evidence that helps us to understand consciousness, including telepathy, remote viewing, near-death experiences, and two hundreds of years of abundant and consistent afterlife evidence. All his work amounts to just an attempt to explain how human beings are aware and able to think. And he still is reasoning outward from matter, and not from consciousness itself! How can anyone hope to understand anything if he isn’t trying to get inside whatever he is studying? Dr. Kepler’s presentation still requires matter for the creation of consciousness. He makes the zero-point field the place where consciousness is generated; which isn’t necessary, but as an idea it isn’t flat-out awful. However, he then includes the human brain as a kind of organizer of whatever is given off by the zero-point field. He still requires the brain for the creation of consciousness! And he refers to panpsychism, which is a Medieval idea that posits that all matter is by its nature somewhat conscious. He refines it into cosmopsychism, in which matter by its nature is potentially conscious, but not everything material is conscious. And thus this poor scientist who is trying to be relevant while he keeps his materialist bona fides clings firmly to matter, and he shies away from any thought that consciousness is primary and pre-existing.

But scientists are becoming more desperate now. As recently as a decade ago you could read smug articles in popular science magazines about how we would at any moment be celebrating the discovery of the source of consciousness inside the human brain. But that optimism has largely petered out. You still see cautiously hopeful articles which offer some trivial nothing of an idea that you know is going to lead nowhere; and you see more and more fatalistic thoughts by dead-ended materialist scientists. Here is a response by an “intelligent design” scholar to one such jaded materialist scientist’s article about the impending death of humankind. And his response was published just this month! When you know that the scientist being slapped down is considered by his fellows to be an important thought-leader, you realize that materialist science has arrived at the point of being entirely broken.

The fundamental fact of human existence can be stated in one sentence. What you and I experience in a dim way as human consciousness is the only thing that exists! Everything else that we think is real is created by consciousness, composed of consciousness, and set in place by consciousness. There is nothing else. And our minds are all part of that same consciousness energy, which is one of several important proofs that our minds are eternal. By definition.

The problem with the failed scientific dogma of materialism is that, no matter what we believe, we cannot change reality. Materialism as a strain of rational thought goes back at least three thousand years, and for a while grounding scientific inquiry in “solid” matter made sense. We have talked here at length about the fact that all religions are human-made, and against that backdrop the notion of studying anything non-material probably seemed for a long time to be veering dangerously close to superstition. Mainstream science and mainstream religions have been a pair of worthy adversaries! If there is anything nuttier than designing your system of inquiry around your need for everything to be material, then that nuttier worldview has to be designing all your beliefs around a god that you have thought up yourself and then imbued with superhuman powers.

It is time now for humankind to shun all beliefs and at last try to figure out what actually is going on. What scientists believe has no more value to us than does whatever the Pope believes! And when we investigate all of reality with a truly open mind, we cannot escape the conclusion that a base non-material energy must underlie everything. There have been some wonderful working scientists who have open-mindedly sought the truth and arrived at a similar conclusion, among them Thomas Campbell, Evan Harris Walker, Dean Radin, and now Bernardo Kastrup. And of course, it was the immortal Max Planck who came right out and said ninety years ago that consciousness is primary. So this is a theory backed by illustrious scientific minds who have persisted, even despite the fact that they were defying all the matter-based rules of the scientific playground.

And once you are used to the primacy of consciousness, you find that it explains so many things that otherwise NEVER will be explained! Let’s list here just a few of the basic questions that materialist scientists will never be able to answer. Not in a thousand years:

  • How did the universe begin? No matter how far back you go, you always can ask, “so what came before that?” And no theory ever advanced has been adequate, including the much-vaunted Big Bang.
  • How did life begin? The notion that lightning struck a primordial soup of just the right combination of molecules has been considerably refined, but the fact remains that every such theory has been demonstrated to be wrong. We frankly still have no idea how life began.
  • How and why did life evolve? Once you’ve got some form of life, you’ve still got to figure out how it turned into an elephant and whatever that elephant had for lunch!
  • What are our minds, and how are they created? For scientists to be searching for a source of consciousness inside the human brain is like taking apart an old transistor radio to try to find the source of Elvis Presley’s voice. Eventually some materialist scientist will win a Nobel Prize for having found a way to convincingly demonstrate the illusion that at last we may have figured it out.
  • What is making that funny sound from the middle of the galaxy? Because matter is seen as both finite and always obedient to human-deciphered laws, whenever something happens that is outside the box of scientific thinking, it confounds everyone.

All of this is going to end, just as deluded thinking always ends. We used to suspect that scientists were going to get a clue only when communication with the not-really-dead had progressed to the place where we were chatting through the veil with a cellphone app. But now I think it will be sooner than that. As Max Planck is reported to have said, science advances by deaths. And right now, in some fourth-grade science class there is a courageous little girl who soon will risk her career to develop a viable consciousness-based theory of everything. The timing will at last be right, and her work will hit this despairing world like a thunderclap of liberation. And then, gloriously, everything really will change!

 

Come writers and critics who prophesize with your pen,
And keep your eyes wide open. The chance won’t come again.
And don’t speak too soon, for the wheel’s still in spin.
there’s no tellin’ who that it’s naming’.
For the loser now will be later to win!
For the times they are a-changin’.
– Bob Dylan, from “The Times They Are a-Changin’” (1964)

Seeking Jesus

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

“We must reduce our volume to the simple evangelists,
select, even from them, the very words only of Jesus…
There will be found remaining the most sublime
and benevolent code of morals
which has ever been offered to man.
I have performed this operation for my own use,
by cutting verse by verse out of the printed book,
and arranging the matter which is evidently his,
and which is as easily distinguishable
as diamonds in a dunghill.”
– Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826), from a letter to John Adams (October 12, 1813)

I have been hearing of late from people who wonder how we can distinguish what Jesus likely said from the corruptions of His words that followed His death. Then last week we performed a bit of analysis on something I had thought He likely hadn’t said, but now it seems that He probably did say it. And that prompted even more people to ask how I ever was able to figure that out! I want to empower you as much as I can, so I am happy to share with you how I continue to seek and to find an ever better understanding of the genuine Jesus.

First, of course, I should acknowledge that I have spent considerable time in self-education:

  • I majored in early Christian history in college. I graduated fifty years ago, and the wonderful professor who was also my adviser was already past retirement age, so I reckon that she likely was educated even before 1930. And what she knew was phenomenal! I learned so much from her that was so earth-shaking for me that it has shaped my worldview ever since. Among other things, she taught her flock that the Council of Nicaea tried to remove every reference in the Gospels to reincarnation “because if we thought we had just one life, we would try harder.” And the Councilors and their predecessors also added references to church-building, end-times, and sheep-and-goats toward the back of each of the three synoptic Gospels which were anachronistic and at odds with the primary things that Jesus actually taught. The Councilors at First Nicaea claimed to be inspired by God, based on nothing beyond their own extreme self-regard.
  • I was reading the Bible from cover to cover repeatedly from the age of twelve until I was in my early fifties. I would read the New Testament twice and go back and read the Gospels a third time, and then I would begin again with Genesis. So I became quite familiar with what is in the Bible, and especially with what Jesus is reported in the Gospels to have spent His greatest efforts in teaching.
  • I continue to read the work of a few Christian scholars. I follow only open-minded seekers who are trying to ever better understand the Lord, and foremost among these is the prolific Keith Giles, an ordained minister who walked away from the church to lead a home ministry. Unlike me, Keith Giles is a genuine scholar in both knowledge and temperament. For example, here he is talking about some of the same sorts of things that we talk about here, but Keith does it with scholastic discipline. He still is trying to reform an institution that I see as irretrievably broken.
  • I have spent the past fifty years in studying the afterlife and the greater reality. All of which could so easily have been an exercise in nonsense! But instead, the communications received through physical mediums and channels in the sixty-odd years before 1940 in southern England and the northeastern United States are all stunningly consistent. Together they paint an amazingly complete picture that we can build on and use with confidence. Best of all, the dead who have communicated with us confirm that much of what Jesus is reported in the Gospels to have said is stunningly accurate and surprisingly complete. In particular, the dead communicating from the highest levels are quick to affirm the Lord’s elevated status, and to corroborate what it was that He came to teach.
  • I make an effort to treat Jesus as a non-religious historical figure. Jesus didn’t start Christianity. Indeed, what He came to free us from was not sin – which is a human construct – but the fears and constraints of human-made religions. He spoke Aramaic. His words were then a folk-memory for years before they were written down in Greek, and much later they were translated from Greek into modern languages. And they could so easily have been garbled in so many spots along the way that we are indulging in magic-think if we don’t look at every word in the Gospels with a jaundiced eye! We want to know what Jesus actually said, and not what some church father wanted Him to have said. And finally, of course, we must never forget that the best evidence now strongly suggests that Jesus was in fact God on earth. His life may have been the only instance of this ever actually happening, which makes the teachings of Jesus even more significant. And our knowing that Jesus came as God on earth puts us into the odd but exciting position of figuring out how we can relate to the genuine Godhead without a religion in between.

So I have known from the age of twenty that we can’t take the Gospels at face value. And furthermore, Miss Corwin (I think that was her name) seems to have transformed me into a radical. She was adamant that her students must internalize her own sense of outrage at the grievous sins against the teachings of Jesus that were committed by the early church councils, and especially by First Nicaea. She was the first person I ever knew who was separating Jesus from Christianity at all, and never mind her defending Him against what I used to think was His very own religion!

With all of that said, let’s look at some Gospel passages and see where this level of analysis takes us. I have included here just four examples from Appendix I of Liberating Jesus:

“I also say to you that you are Peter, and upon this rock I will build My church; and the gates of Hades will not overpower it. I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven; and whatever you bind on earth shall have been bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth shall have been loosed in heaven” (MT 16:18-19).

This is an easy one! “Petros,” meaning “rock,” would have been a pun in Greek, but Jesus spoke Aramaic. Jesus intended to abolish religions and teach us to relate to God on our own, and He never spoke about or even hinted at wanting to found a church. There is no Hades. And of course He never would have given “the keys of heaven” to human beings of limited understanding, with the added authority to bind even God! From beginning to end, this is nonsense.

“If anyone wishes to come after Me, he must deny himself, and take up his cross and follow Me. For whoever wishes to save his life will lose it; but whoever loses his life for My sake will find it. For what will it profit a man if he gains the whole world and forfeits his soul? Or what will a man give in exchange for his soul? For the Son of Man is going to come in the glory of His Father with His angels, and will then repay every man according to his deeds” (MT 16:24-27).

This is one of many examples of the handiwork of Councilors who may have built their nonsense into things that Jesus actually said. But for Jesus to mention a cross here is a frank anachronism, and that reference to Him coming in glory and judging us is end-times nonsense of much later origin.

‘All authority has been given to Me in heaven and on earth. Go therefore and make disciples of all the nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I commanded you; and lo, I am with you always, even to the end of the age’” (MT 28:18-20).

The Great Commission is likely something Jesus actually said, but the words in italics are anachronistic. It was well after the Lord’s death that the notion of a Trinity came along and the Last Supper became a sacrament. But for First Nicaea and the other religion-builders, adding it here made this a charge for His disciples to go out there and spread a religion that during the Lord’s lifetime did not exist! Simply remove those words. Fixing this one is easy.

And finally, the whole of Matthew 24, Mark 13, and Luke 21:8-36 is devoted to end-times and other anachronistic nonsense. All of this was added soon after the Lord’s death, and much of it was probably added even before First Nicaea in 325. All we can conclude is that the earliest religion-builders wanted to tie the end-times prophesies that were in wide circulation during that period of Christian persecution directly back to Jesus, so they cribbed some of their own ideas into His Gospels. When Jesus came to teach us how to use our many earth-lifetimes to ever better grow toward spiritual perfection – when His mission was so far-seeing – it is beyond nonsensical that He ever would have said, “This gospel of the kingdom shall be preached in the whole world as a testimony to all the nations, and then the end will come” (MT 24:14). Or “Truly I tell you, this generation will certainly not pass away until all these things have happened” (MT 24:34).

The fact that those who try to strengthen our belief in Christianity are called “apologists” should tell us something! It is their unenviable task to directly address all the criticisms of Christianity, and to show practicing Christians how they can answer those objections for themselves and for others who might question the religion. One of the articles by Keith Giles linked above gives you the six primary attacks against the religion that Christian apologists must try to address; and here, by way of example, is a very good apologist explaining why the sacrifice of Jesus on the cross doesn’t say anything negative about God. I get it, but I am not convinced. I doubt that you are, either. But still, Christian apologists play a useful role. They encourage us to engage with the religion in a non-superstitious way, and the fact that their explanations really don’t answer the core questions helps us to further see the religion as bankrupt. But there is one institution that, even beyond Christianity, is not only bankrupt but also allowing its stubborn adherence to useless ideas to do immense harm now to all of humanity. We’ll talk about that next week.

 

“Very truly I tell you, whoever believes in me will do the works I
have been doing, and they will do even greater things than these.”
– Jesus (John 14:12)

 

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