The Sermon on the Mount

Posted on February 10, 2024February 11, 2024 by Roberta Grimes

I am weak but Thou art strong.
Jesus, keep me from all wrong!
I’ll be satisfied as long
As I walk, let me walk close to Thee.

Just a closer walk with Thee.
Grant it, Jesus, is my plea!
Daily walking close to Thee.
Let it be, dear Lord, let it be.
Traditional, from “Just a Closer Walk with Thee,” 19^th Cen.

Jesus taught many truths so rich in meaning that just to read them can fill our hearts with joy. And His Sermon on the Mount (MT 5:1-48) is such glorious spiritual food that ideally we will study it at least once, and perhaps two or three times each year. Simply open your red-letter modern translation of the Bible, and read it slowly. Savor it. Enjoy even the slightly alarming parts. “What, Jesus? Pluck out my eye, if it might cause me to offend God? Or cut off my hand? Surely You don’t mean that?” But you know Jesus pretty well by now, and you know that sometimes He will say such things for dramatic effect, so you share a smile with Him, and you read on. You can feel the drama building in the latter part of His sermon, as like any good preacher, Jesus builds toward His finish. And of course, the place where He is going is where you were sure that He would be going. He is always headed toward unlimited love. And He begins, too, as any good preacher would begin. First of all, before this crowd of many thousands of people, He praises and encourages His twelve close Disciples. The Sermon on the Mount begins with what are called The Beatitudes. Which are the nine ways that Jesus tells His Disciples that they are richly blessed, even though people may oppress them in His name.

5 Now when Jesus saw the crowds, He went up on the mountain; and after He sat down, His disciples came to Him. ²And He opened His mouth and began to teach them, saying,

³“Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

⁴“Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.

⁵“Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth.

⁶“Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be satisfied.

⁷“Blessed are the merciful, for they will receive mercy.

⁸“Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God.

⁹“Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called sons of God.

¹⁰“Blessed are those who have been persecuted for the sake of righteousness, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

¹¹“Blessed are you when people insult you and persecute you, and falsely say all kinds of evil against you because of Me. ¹²Rejoice and be glad, for your reward in heaven is great; for in this same way they persecuted the prophets who were before you.

¹³“You are the salt of the earth; but if the salt has become tasteless, how can it be made salty again? It is no longer good for anything, except to be thrown out and trampled underfoot by people.

¹⁴“You are the light of the world. A city set on a hill cannot be hidden; ¹⁵nor do people light a lamp and put it under a basket, but on the lampstand, and it gives light to all who are in the house. ¹⁶Your light must shine before people in such a way that they may see your good works, and glorify your Father who is in heaven.

¹⁷“Do not presume that I came to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I did not come to abolish, but to fulfill. ¹⁸For truly I say to you, until heaven and earth pass away, not the smallest letter or stroke of a letter shall pass from the Law, until all is accomplished! ¹⁹Therefore, whoever nullifies one of the least of these commandments, and teaches others to do the same, shall be called least in the kingdom of heaven; but whoever keeps and teaches them, he shall be called great in the kingdom of heaven.

²⁰“For I say to you that unless your righteousness far surpasses that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will not enter the kingdom of heaven.

²¹“You have heard that the ancients were told, ‘You shall not murder,’ and ‘Whoever commits murder shall be answerable to the court.’ ²²But I say to you that everyone who is angry with his brother shall be answerable to the court; and whoever says to his brother, ‘You good-for-nothing,’ shall be answerable to the supreme court; and whoever says, ‘You fool,’ shall be guilty enough to go into Gehenna. ²³Therefore, if you are presenting your gift at the altar, and there you remember that your brother has something against you, ²⁴leave your gift here before the altar and go; first be reconciled to your brother, and then come and present your gift. ²⁵Come to good terms with your accuser quickly, while you are with him on the way to court, so that your accuser will not hand you over to the judge, and the judge to the officer, and you will not be thrown into prison. ²⁶Truly I say to you, you will not come out of there until you have paid up the last penny.

²⁷“You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall not commit adultery’; ²⁸but I say to you that everyone who looks at a woman with lust for her has already committed adultery with her in his heart. ²⁹Now if your right eye is causing you to sin, tear it out and throw it away from you; for it is better for you to lose one of the parts of your body, than for your whole body to be thrown into Gehenna. ³⁰And if your right hand is causing you to sin, cut it off and throw it away from you; for it is better for you to lose one of the parts of your body, than for your whole body to go into Gehenna.

³¹“Now it was said, ‘Whoever sends his wife away is to give her a certificate of divorce’; ³²but I say to you that everyone who divorces his wife, except for the reason of sexual immorality, makes her commit adultery; and whoever marries a divorced woman commits adultery.

³³“Again, you have heard that the ancients were told, ‘You shall not make false vows, but shall fulfill your vows to the Lord.’ ³⁴But I say to you, take no oath at all, neither by heaven, for it is the throne of God, ³⁵nor by the earth, for it is the footstool of His feet, nor by Jerusalem, for it is the city of the great King. ³⁶Nor shall you take an oath by your head, for you cannot make a single hair white or black. ³⁷But make sure your statement is, ‘Yes, yes’ or ‘No, no’; anything beyond these is of evil origin.

³⁸“You have heard that it was said, ‘Eye for eye, and tooth for tooth.’ ³⁹But I say to you, do not show opposition against an evil person; but whoever slaps you on your right cheek, turn the other toward him also. ⁴⁰And if anyone wants to sue you and take your tunic, let him have your cloak also. ⁴¹Whoever forces you to go one mile, go with him two. ⁴²Give to him who asks of you, and do not turn away from him who wants to borrow from you.

⁴³“You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ ⁴⁴But I say to you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, ⁴⁵so that you may prove yourselves to be sons of your Father who is in heaven; for He causes His sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous. ⁴⁶For if you love those who love you, what reward do you have? Even the tax collectors, do they not do the same? ⁴⁷And if you greet only your brothers and sisters, what more are you doing than others? Even the Gentiles, do they not do the same? ⁴⁸Therefore you shall be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect. (MT 5:1-48)

Wow. All right. Now let’s together analyze Jesus’s greatest sermon! At another time we might devote a whole blog post separately to just the Beatitudes, which are those nine introductory blessings at MT 5:3-11, where Jesus orients his Disciples to the finer points of their place in the world. But today I would like to look at what I think of as Jesus’s view of the big spiritual picture as He gave it to all those thousands of His followers. In Jesus’s time on earth, salt was important as a flavoring and a preservative, and it was so valuable that it could be used as a medium of exchange. And a lamp, or a candle, also was of great value, since it could be used to extend the daylight for an entire house. And similarly, we ourselves are of great value! At MT 5:13-16, Jesus begins by telling that entire hillside, every one of His listeners, that each of them is extraordinarily precious. We are the salt and the light of the world.

Then Jesus says the first thing that brings us up short. At MT 5:17-20 He says that He did not come to abolish the Law and the Prophets, but to fulfill them. The Law and the Prophets is what the Jews of Jesus’s day called the Old Testament, and it seems to me that if they have indeed been fulfilled, then we don’t have to study them anymore, right? And what does “until all is accomplished” mean here? Isn’t Jesus actually accomplishing them in His lifetime on earth? My goodness, how I have puzzled over this passage at MT 5:17-19! At length, I have come to think that MT 5:20 is really the key to this section. Jesus is repeatedly exasperated throughout the Gospels by the form-over-substance lack of love-based spiritual merit of the clergymen of His day. I think that what He may be doing here is reinforcing our need to shift our attention away from the clergy’s mere parroting of rules, and toward our need to establish a deeper relationship with the spiritual substance of the Law. What the Law is meant to create and support for us spiritually is what matters, while the mere words of the Law themselves do not matter at all. The words alone mean nothing! Recall here, too, that the Kingdom of Heaven is the Sixth Level of the afterlife, that high level which is just below the Seventh, or Source Level, which is the Godhead level.

And of course, as we continue to read on, we see that this is precisely what the whole next six paragraphs are about! Jesus is quite literally transforming our entire relationship with the Old Testament Law from a shallow, black-letter, minimalist sort of what we students in law school used to call hornbook law, where we just have to obey the technical letter of the law, into a deeper, entirely spiritual sort of love-based law that lives within us. The letters themselves are entirely gone, and now the meaning is written in words of love upon our deepest hearts.

Wow, this is extraordinary. It gives me chills! Look at the passage that begins with MT 5:21. Now it is all about making amends with everyone in order to create our own absolute spiritual purity. And then, as Jesus gets really warmed up, beginning at MT 5:27, He starts talking about cutting off parts of our own bodies, for heaven’s sake, rather than letting those misguided parts lead us astray. Of course, we know that He doesn’t mean that literally. But as with what follows here, He is demanding of us that we demand of ourselves the complete and joyous spiritual unity with God that can only come from such a thorough and ecstatic love that we can never again be satisfied with just a scribe’s measly and minimalist parsing of religious words! Jesus really was bothered by the clergy’s shallow and self-important shows of piety.

And the same is true of making vows.Instead of swearing big, flowery vows that make you sound like a hypocrite, just always simply make good on your word. Yes means yes and no means no. Clearly, it especially bothered Jesus when these professional religious folks swore their vows in God’s sacred name!

In this company, Jesus’s insistence that we always turn the other cheek makes so much sense (MT 5:38). First, of course, Jesus’s supposition is that someone who hits you must be “an evil person.” Which therefore means that if you were to hit him back, you would be lowering yourself to his same evil level. And you cannot do that. “An eye for an eye” makes the whole world blind. So you accept his abuse without retaliation, out of God’s love for him and for you, whether it might be a slap on the cheek or a lawsuit or having been compelled to walk a mile with him, or whatever it might be. You never retaliate! Instead, you simply accept, you forgive, and then in kindness and love you move on with him from there.

And you love. (MT 5:43-48) Always, always with Jesus it is always all about love! Read that final paragraph of the Sermon on the Mount again. And know that in Jesus’s mind, our goal is always nothing less than God’s entirely love-based level of spiritual perfection.

Learning to love with our whole hearts even those who are most unlovable is the entire reason why we enter these lifetimes! And knowing how perfectly true that is makes all the fear- and negativity-based distractions of this life, and the fact that mainstream Christianity actually fosters negativity as if it were a virtue, so frustrating. But we do have our beloved Jesus. His guidance is loving, His wisdom is sure, and His teachings are the certain truth. Even two thousand years after He was last on earth, He speaks to us as if He still walks close beside us to this day.

When my feeble life is o’er,
Time for me will be no more.
Guide me gently, safely o’er
To Thy kingdom’s shore, to Thy shore.

Just a closer walk with Thee,
Grant it, Jesus, is my plea!
Daily walking close to Thee.
Let it be, dear Lord, let it be.
Traditional, from “Just a Closer Walk with Thee,” 19^th Cen.

Materialist Science Leaves the Rails

Posted on February 3, 2024February 4, 2024 by Roberta Grimes

The Cruel War is raging, Johnny has to fight,
I want to be with him from morning to night.
I want to be with him, it grieves my heart so,
Won’t you let me go with you? No, my love, no.

Tomorrow is Sunday, Monday is the day
That your Captain will call you and you must obey.
Your captain will call you, it grieves my heart so,
Won’t you let me go with you? No, my love, no.
– Traditional, from “The Cruel War,” 1700s

We have reached a singular moment in history when a bioethicist writing for a prestigious journal actually can push literal human extinction as a rational idea, while at the same time the venerable Nobel laureate Sir Roger Penrose is pushing… Lord, having read this several times, I still have frankly no idea what it is that he is pushing now! To have been doing this work for as long as I have done it does give you some considerable perspective. I can recall the deeply rational eighties and nineties, and even the respectable aughts in mainstream science, when you eagerly read all the popular-science magazines as they hit your mailbox each month, and you would find article after article about the confident research that was being done then in all the key fields of scientific inquiry. It was the heyday of modern scientific research!

Origin of the universe and origin of life were of course the major fields, but there were many others, too. Human origins, speciation, and many more, and not a bit of craziness in the bunch. The researchers were young, and they were making confident predictions about how soon we would have established our big, definitive theories, backed by what would be solid scientific evidence. And very soon now, or by the turn of this coming century – or no, let’s say by 2010 at the latest – for sure we were going to know how life began. The Big Bang was going to be timed to the micro-instant. I used to love reading all their confident articles!

But then, gradually all the long years passed. Eventually, even 2015 came and went. Those bold young researchers became long in the tooth, and their confidently-set deadlines for their major scientific discoveries had long-since gone by without much notice, except perhaps by me. I wanted to know how life actually began! What we were getting, though, in our popular-science magazines was more and more ever-meeker-sounding articles about how many difficulties science was encountering in discovering the building blocks of life. And in solving basically every sort of unexpected scientific problem you can imagine.

Younger physicists and others in the hard sciences in particular were becoming ever more stymied, too, by declining educational standards. As a result of a combination of factors, mainstream science even today still has not yet managed to answer even one of those tantalizing Big Questions that just a few decades ago it had undertaken to address so confidently, and with such certainty about its sure ability to slay every dragon in the scientific woods. There has been a complete multiple-systems failure in materialist mainstream science at this point. And reading about it over the past couple of decades has felt very much like following the documentation of the gradual health-breakdown, and then the actual death of a longtime precious friend.

And meanwhile, The Discovery Institute Center for Science and Culture in Seattle is doing yeoman’s work right now in the field of open-minded scientific research. It is carrying on where the closed-minded materialist scientific community simply cannot go, and investigating intelligent design theories and various hybrid solutions to the real-world scientific questions that mainstream science is now gradually coming to admit that perhaps it never is going to be able to solve. Mainstream science cannot answer these questions, and not because the questions are insoluble, mind you. But because more than a century ago, the mainstream science gatekeepers, the university departments and the peer-reviewed journals, decided to limit all mainstream scientists to finding exclusively matter-based answers to every scientific question that ever in the future is going to be asked.

This decision to hobble the work of all scientists forever into the future seemed to make sense to the scientific community of a century ago. Back then, the risk of perhaps inadvertently finding God was apparently a real one to the scientific gatekeepers of that day. And a century ago, Christianity seemed to be still enough of a rival that the mainstream scientific gatekeepers didn’t want to give Christianity even the remotest possibility of any more support. But for The Discovery Institute, the risk of finding God is not a bug, but rather it is a feature. And to read their frequent newsletters now, all full of breezy genuine news, feels like such a happy escape into some unexpected field of common sense!

What seems to have completely flummoxed the mainstream scientific community, to the point where hands are thrown up in a kind of end-stage frustration, is our wonderful all-purpose friend, fundamental Consciousness. I have taken to capitalizing the word “Consciousness” at this point, because of course at its highest vibration, Consciousness is in fact God; and we have lately come to understand that Consciousness, which also is our own personal sense of awareness, is really all that there actually is. It is apparent at this point that nothing else exists.

My dear Thomas’s proposed definition for Consciousness is the best definition that I have yet found. Nothing else can touch it! Thomas says, “Consciousness is an infinitely creative energy-like potentiality without size or form, alive in the sense that your mind is alive, governed by emotion and therefore self-aware.” Thomas also says that “Consciousness is all that independently exists.” And he tells us that “Consciousness is an aspect of the Mind of God,” and it includes all human Minds. But the problem is that mainstream scientists cannot understand Consciousness at all! And mainstream scientists cannot study it, since it gives them no material handle to grasp. What the materialist scientific community imagined about Consciousness five years ago is the same thing that it was saying about Consciousness fifty years ago, and even a hundred years ago. It still is mostly wrong, of course, but it remains the height of scientific understanding to this day. Which is to say that when it comes to their study of Consciousness, materialist scientists have made no progress at all in the past century.

When the fundamental dogma that governs all your work is materialism, you have no way to study what is in no way material. So then you look at Consciousness, and you assume that actually there must be nothing there to see. Most scientists therefore assume as a matter of professional certainty that it is impossible for anyone to understand what Consciousness is, where it comes from, how it interacts with our human brains, or really anything whatsoever about Consciousness. And since Consciousness is foundational, this hampers the materialist scientific community’s understanding of a number of other things as well.

For example, here are three areas where materialist scientists are not going to make much headway until they are willing to deal with the active primacy of non-material Consciousness:

Consciousness is Matter’s First Cause. The Big Bang is a kind of fudge placeholder, if you will. Scientists know that, and in their more relaxed moments they will admit it to you, because Something cannot have come from Nothing. Still, they need a starting point, and they could have put it just about anywhere in time and space as a first-cause point where matter was assumed to have sprung forth from Nothing. For materialists, there has to be a time/place where this happens, even though in fact within their belief-system it makes no sense. It is foundational for them to have to say “Just give us one free miracle and we will explain the rest.”

Life is a Property Inherent in Consciousness Itself. So in fact, life is not a rarity at all, but rather the whole cosmos probably teems with life. The problem for scientists is not to explain how life first arose, but rather to understand how it evolved sufficient structural complexity soon enough to be able to maintain itself. Once scientists get past their materialist silliness, they then eventually will have to accept the fact that of course there must be a designer. Because otherwise, they will never be able to explain how all the complexities of a cell arose together randomly, which would have been flat impossible.

Intelligent Design is Evident Everywhere. My favorite go-to explanations for the astonishing and manifold complexities of intelligent design are all the various and immensely adorable Evolution News videos. You can watch them for hours, going from one to the next and then to the next. You soon come to understand why it seems to be impossible for basically anything to exist without very many things existing all at once, since they all seem to so profoundly support one another.

It seems as if God has been hiding in plain sight all along, and in fact God found that to be easy to do, until at last we all focused our attention on Consciousness. It was only when mainstream science attempted to understand what materialist thinking cannot conceivably understand, while at the same time traditional religions attempted to pin down and create their own dogmas around what is spiritual, and therefore altogether ineffable, that both traditional materialist science and traditional dogma-based religions both lost the ability to make sense of reality, pretty much simultaneously. Consciousness then entirely escaped the ken of both scientists and most conventional religionists once they tried to find a way to understand Consciousness using their own archaic modes of understanding. Whereupon, both scientists and religionists realized that they were out there beyond their depth altogether.

But some highly visionary scientists at the Discovery Institute managed to make the stretch. It is laughable that the atheist position has for so long been considered by so many to be some sort of default position, and a position that we had to assume must be right, when we see now how easily a new age of visionary scientists who are willing to allow for a designer wherever a designer is naturally found, and they are not at all flummoxed by old superstitions, can make such extraordinary scientific strides! Science is, and science always should have been by definition nothing more nor less than the intellectually free and independent pursuit of the truth wherever the truth may lead. And with the Discovery Institute, that joyous pursuit can at last eternally be humankind’s default scientific position.

Of course there is a Designer behind the extraordinarily complex and fine-tuned design that is the reality in which we live! No one can be a part of this world to adulthood without coming to understand that certainty. You don’t gaze at a great stone castle, or a cathedral in all its magnificence, without knowing that someone must at some point have chiseled and formed its blocks and established the master design by which they all were set in place. Someone drew the designs for the windows, and cut the glass, and set the pieces of glass in place. Whenever you see a design to anything, you know that there must have been a Designer.

What the death of mainstream science’s materialism-obsessed nonsense can mean is a bright new day of healthy, fearless, and entirely facts-based scientific research for all of humankind.

I’ll tie back my hair, men’s clothing I’ll put on,
I’ll pass as your comrade, as we march along.
I’ll pass as your comrade, no one will ever know.
Won’t you let me go with you? No, my love, no.

Oh Johnny, oh Johnny, I fear you are unkind,
I love you far better than all of mankind.
I love you far better than words can e’re express!
Won’t you let me go with you? Yes, my love, yes.
– Traditional, from “The Cruel War,” 1700s

Happiness

Posted on January 27, 2024January 28, 2024 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 (1928-2023) and Hal David (1921-2012), from “Alfie” (1966)

Those who first created the Christian religion, early in the fourth century CE, put no stock at all in advancing human happiness. You can tell how little the Romans cared for making people happy by the way their armies ruthlessly destroyed every form of Christianity then extant that did not conform to the Romans’ own narrow concept of Christianity as it was designed at the First Council of Nicaea in the year 325 CE. Oh, no. And then for most of the rest of Christian history, making people happy has sadly been the last thing on the minds of those who were working to advance the Christian religion! In fact, now that we mention it, those early widespread Christian massacres led to my Thomas’s first, tentative attempt at breaking the conversational ice with me one morning in the summer of 2015. This was not long after my Thomas had first announced himself to me through a medium. And then he had pressured me into channeling Liberating Jesus. So our first open interactions were not what you might call easy or friendly, his and mine. But I guess that once that first compulsory task of channeling Liberating Jesus had been completed, Thomas decided that since we were going to be occupying one body for the rest of my lifetime, perhaps now we ought to work on becoming friends.

It was very early on a late-May morning. The sun was just rising, and we were sitting at my kitchen table, sipping coffee and watching the sharply slanted sunlight taking over my backyard, coming in from the right through the trees. I was becoming used to hearing a distinctive voice in my mind from behind my left shoulder. Since my husband is not an early riser, I would have seemed to you to be sitting there alone.

But I was not alone. Thomas was saying to me from behind my left shoulder, sounding dreamy and almost romantic, “Does this remind you of the morning when we first met?”

“We met?” I said to him in my mind. “What are you talking about? I don’t know when we met. Did we ever meet?”

“Of course we met! Don’t you remember? The Romans had massacred a Christian village. You were the teenage son of the chieftain. I found you just as the sun was rising.”

He talked on in that soft and dreamy voice until I began dimly to remember what he was talking about. I had been badly wounded. He had been a grizzled old giant of a man who had been badly wounded, too, in defending the village that now lay destroyed around us, and littered with dead and dying people. He found me just at dawn. He held me until I died in his arms. Then later that same morning, he died as well. He took me back with him to Jesus in the astral plane, and he told me as I sipped my coffee and watched the sun rise on my modern backyard that although I would have no memory of it now because of the amnesia that we accept when we enter these earth-lives, I have been a part of Jesus’s circle of friends ever since that ancient Roman massacre. So, I have been Jesus’s friend for almost two thousand years? That was what he was trying to tell me? And I have been Thomas’s friend ever since then as well.

But Christianity, tragically, has not followed Jesus at all! The religion has taught just sin and our certain punishment for sin, while Jesus has taught only love and forgiveness and happiness in our certainty of God’s love and care. How can the religion have gone so completely and so hideously wrong, and for so long?

Even to this day, Christianity has given no attention to the promotion of human happiness. But Jesus, throughout His ministry, really talked of little else but how to ease the painful struggles of human life! Jesus wanted people to be happy, as He still wants us to find happiness in these lifetimes as we can, despite the fact that our lives on earth are difficult, and are meant to be difficult in order to give us the negativity that we need to push against in order to grow spiritually. Repeatedly we see in the Gospels Jesus promising us joy as a result of His coming. I have always especially enjoyed the following passage from the Gospel of John, which is the most spiritual Gospel. Although what Jesus might have known of childbirth during His life on earth, I cannot imagine. But I think what He was referring to here was the birth of His spiritual Way, and the fact that the Romans might not like it to begin with, but nevertheless He would guide it and care for it from the astral plane, and He planned for it to succeed wonderfully. Which indeed it did, for three hundred years, until the Roman Emperor Constantine much later on had his ruthless way with it.

Jesus said, “Truly, truly I say to you that you will weep and mourn, but the world will rejoice; you will grieve, but your grief will be turned into joy! Whenever a woman is in labor, she has pain, because her hour has come; but when she gives birth to the child, she no longer remembers the anguish because of the joy that a child has been born into the world. Therefore, you too have grief now; but I will see you again, and your heart will rejoice, and no one is going to take your joy away from you. And on that day, you will not question Me about anything. Truly, truly I say to you, if you ask the Father for anything in My name, He will give it to you. Until now you have asked for nothing in My name; ask, and you will receive, so that your joy may be made full.” (JN 16:20-24)

“Ask, and you will receive, so that your joy may be made full.”

Please read that passage from John again. That is the very essence, the sum total and the entirety of Jesus’s mission and His message on earth! Those words in one variation or another are in the Gospels from Jesus over and over again. That is what Jesus’s teachings on forgiveness and love amount to. That is what Jesus came to bring to us. So it is simply incredible that Christianity as the Romans designed it and as it still is taught to this day is such a flat-out dour and depressing religion, built as it is around sin and shame and guilt, when Jesus says these beautiful and uplifting words in the Gospels over and over again! Our daily happiness mattered to Jesus then, and it still matters very much to Jesus now. For us to be happy each day of our lives matters to Him so much, although to see the religion that the Romans designed three hundred years after Jesus’s ascension, that thought is almost inconceivable to us. No, the architects of Christianity cared less than nothing about human happiness. They built a Christian religion so harshly negative that it is difficult for people who have been Christians ever to believe that the Being they know as Jesus the Christ came to make people happy! Even though in the Biblical Gospels we find Him repeatedly saying things like, “I came so that they would have life, and have it abundantly” (JN 10:11). The religionists entirely ignore His words, and instead they beat their ugly guilt-based drums that emphasize our hopeless sinfulness and the dogma that Jesus had to die such a horrible death on the cross as a sacrifice to God in order to redeem us from God’s judgment for our sins. None of that religious nonsense is, nor has it ever been true!

It is no wonder any more that Christianity is dying. As recently as 1990, 90% 0f Americans were Christians. That percentage had already declined to 80% by the year 2000. And in 2022, just 64% of Americans still identified as Christian. That percentage continues to drop rapidly. For my part, though, what I notice is how far down on the happiness list the most traditionally Christian countries fall. It should not be so, of course, when Jesus Himself makes such a point of teaching happiness! But to this day, the religion that carries Jesus’s name simply does not care one fig about the happiness of the people who are its parishioners. Not when Christianity remains so obsessed with sin and guilt and shame and punishment.

Perhaps, my dear ones, it is time that I come out to you as a modern oddity. Even though I am otherwise a normal third-generation American who seems to have successfully melted into our melting-pot, by reason of the fact that there was still a thriving Danish expat community in Massachusetts less than a century ago, every one of my ancestors came from Denmark around 1900. Genetically I am a purebred Viking, which is something that I have enjoyed throwing at my husband on occasion throughout our marriage, whenever it has seemed to be necessary that he be reminded of the sort of fierce, wild thing he married. My parents raised me to be proud of being an expat Dane, a native of such a minuscule but nevertheless fiercely independent country which managed to save nearly all of its Jews from the Holocaust. And I learned to be especially proud of that particular bit of history when I was barely a toddler. I could say the word “Jew” before I could speak in sentences. When my younger daughter lately took her family to the Holocaust Museum in DC, she was dumbfounded to discover a whole room devoted to the Danish rescue effort that she had been hearing about for her entire life, but that I guess she never had quite believed. I have taken of late to keeping a Danish flag on my desk, with a picture of my Danish farmer immigrant grandparents.

On happiness indices, Denmark and Finland routinely rank as the two happiest countries in the world. (Here is a short film about Denmark and Finland, if you have the time; it’s quite wonderful.) In fact, all the Scandinavian countries generally rank at the top of world happiness indices. Billionaires claim more attention, but it seems that having more money actually does not make people happier. Instead, the more money you have above a certain modest amount, the more it complicates your life and the more dissatisfied you become. The fact that these cold and dark countries which actually look down on the accumulation of excess wealth are generally rated the happiest worldwide still mystifies people. But it really shouldn’t. Less actually is more.

I have come to believe that Danish happiness may be in some part genetic. It is difficult for any of us to know how other people feel about life on a daily basis, but as I was working on this blog post after Thomas had chosen the topic, I came to realize that my own happiness set-point always has been quite a bit higher than are most people’s happiness set-points. It used to irritate many of the boys that I knew in college that I was always happy for no reason. And I, in turn, can recall feeling confused by the fact that most other people were not happy all the time. What was there for them to be not-happy about? I can see now that my constant cheerfulness is a reason why my husband likes to be around me, because he finds it harder to be always cheerful. I guess I never really had thought about any of this. And my grandparents, the Danish subsistence farmers whose picture I keep on my desk, also had my Danish happy gene. They never had anything in their lives except family, which meant to them that they had everything. I should have thought about this much sooner, that there are so many people who find it hard to be happy. But oddly, it just never before in my life has occurred to me that I cannot recall ever having had even one truly unhappy day.

And so does our beloved Jesus seem to have this same high happiness set-point. With Him, of course, it cannot be genetic! No, with Him it is a deep and abiding love for people as individuals, a joy that He takes in each human being, a deep desire for each of us to be living in a rich and mutually satisfying love for one another as we go about our days, living always without the least sense of guilt or shame, without even the smallest feeling of sin to ever weigh us down; and without fear of course, without any anxiety, and knowing only the joy of perfect happiness in living in deep harmony with one another. That is what Jesus wants for each of us! So what Jesus teaches is a pattern for living on such a high spiritual level that human joy is absolute.

Abraham Lincoln said that most folks are as happy as they make up their minds to be. Which seems to be just simple common sense! And it gives is a pretty low bar, perhaps. But it does give us a place to begin.

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 (1928-2023) and Hal David (1921-2012), from “Alfie” (1966)

Finding God

Posted on January 20, 2024January 21, 2024 by Roberta Grimes

He can turn the tides and calm the angry sea.
He alone decides who writes a symphony.
He lights evr’y star that makes the darkness bright!
He keeps watch all through each long and lonely night!

He still finds the time to hear a child’s first prayer.
Saint or sinner calls and always finds Him there.
Though it makes Him sad to see the way we live,
He’ll always say, “I forgive.”
Richard Mullan & Al Hibbler (1915-2001), from “He” (1954)

Having faith in God can be a pretty thin gruel. I know that, because for most of my life I have had trouble finding a way to develop much faith in an actual living God that I could feel that I knew personally. I mean, a genuine faith that a God of love was actually, you know, really there. And this was true even after I had that experience of light when I was eight years old. I woke up in the middle of the night with the certainty that there is no God. And then I saw a flash of light out of which a voice said, “You wouldn’t know what it is to have me unless you knew what it is to be without me. I will never leave you again.” I understand now that what I heard that night was my Thomas’s voice. But even after an experience like that, and even though it still feels as if all of it happened just yesterday, I always had trouble really having faith that there was a God behind it all. I think my problem may have been that God seemed to be so distant, and so somehow alienly not human. As presented by Christianity, God so often seemed to be lacking in empathy, too, and unable to understand our world of fallible people. And appallingly, God was sometimes even actively and dispassionately cruel.

My office has a big bow window where I spend most days with my laptop computer. And right outside my window is a bird feeder. We do such active business at our feeder that I don’t know how the local bird population survived before it occurred to us to entertain my daughter’s cats by giving them a bird-watching spot! We get all kinds of birds there, from chickadees to mourning doves, and other kinds of birds that I don’t recognize. And I think that cardinals might be territorial, because we have one pair of fat cardinals which seem to believe that they own our feeder. They are there daily, and when hizonnor is on the feeder, big and bright-red, the smaller birds will give way. The female cardinal seems to be an oddly human-like thinker. I will catch her watching me through the window, head tilted, and she is the only bird who ever does that. When the feeder is empty and needs refilling, The missus might sit on the bracket that holds the feeder suspended, and she stares right at me, as if she is saying that I’ve got to get out there now and fill it. And that fascinates me. Does she perhaps see me as God, somehow? So, is she praying? What does a little bird understand?

I have written here previously about humankind’s historical human-made gods. I majored in early Christian history in college, so I also took courses in comparative religions, and I understand from what I learned in college that there are theories which suggest how essential it was for early human beings to have gods to worship, and to placate. Those earliest gods that the first people created for themselves were awful, and they were deliberately awful, since the first humans needed fierce and powerful gods as their protectors against the even much greater evils that were out there somewhere, arrayed against them and ready to destroy them as such helpless people tried to manage to survive somehow against a howling void. Back then, they understood no more about what was around them than does that female cardinal, sitting on our feeder and staring uncomprehendingly at me through the glass.

And so, in their desperate fear of the unknown, early humans created to defend and provide for their survival some truly awful gods. Even the Old Testament’s Jehovah was a terrible god, sometimes arbitrarily requiring the destruction of whole populations, to the youngest child. I have on occasion mentioned Moloch here, who was worshiped by the Canaanites in the areas that the Israelites conquered as they came back out of Egypt in the thirteenth century BCE. Moloch required the sacrifice of his worshipers’ firstborn infants thrown into the fire in his belly as the extreme price of his reluctant favor. And so, in a sense we can empathize with the modern atheists who want to reject the very idea of having gods. Atheists are factually wrong, but humankind’s long history with gods has been so appalling that we should have little trouble understanding the atheists’ wish to dispense with the very idea of gods. The mistake that atheists make is an understandable one. They ignore the fact that although of course all religions are human-made, it still is possible – and even likely! – for there to be a genuine Creator God.

It is therefore easy to understand that when Jesus came to earth two thousand years ago, He was determined to free us from human-made religions, while at the same time He came to introduced to us the genuine Creator God. He came to bring what was intended to be the next stage of human spiritual evolution. Jesus, our dearly beloved Elder Brother, our Wayshower and our Best Friend whose Name ironically now is attached to the world’s most prominent human-made religion, came to earth determined to help humankind to move past religions altogether. And you can clearly see all of that in the way that Jesus so often talked to and talked about all the clergymen of the human-made religions He encountered.

Jesus was so impatient with those clergymen! He taunted and He insulted them, and they were the only people that He treated that way. For example, we find Jesus saying in the Gospels, “Beware of the scribes who like to walk around in long robes, and like respectful greetings in the market places,and chief seats in the synagogues and places of honor at banquets,who devour widows’ houses, and for appearance’s sake offer long prayers; these will receive greater condemnation” (MK 12:38-40). And, “Woe to you religious lawyers! For you have taken away the key of knowledge; you yourselves did not enter, and you hindered those who were entering” (LK 11:52). (He is referring here to raising people’s vibrations sufficiently that they can enter the kingdom of heaven, which is the upper afterlife levels). Jesus said, “But woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites, because you shut off the kingdom of heaven from people; for you do not enter in yourselves, nor do you allow those who are entering to go in” (MT 23:13). Repeatedly He insulted and reviled what were some of the most respected men of His day and of that place, and they were the only people that He spoke of this way. It is no wonder that the whole religious establishment was soon so eager to be rid of Him!

Jesus could not flat-out tell His followers that He was replacing their false Jehovah with the genuine Creator God. Not without risking quick arrest and potential execution. So instead, He just patiently worked to change the whole image of God in people’s minds. And He changed the ways in which they were to relate to God, gradually and throughout His ministry. He would say things like, “‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.’ This is the great and foremost commandment.The second is like it, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ On these two commandments depend the whole Law and the Prophets” (MT 22:37-40). He simply referred to the truth as a set of new commandments. And to help His listeners to entirely re-envision what used to be a physical and idol-like Jehovah, He said, “God is Spirit, and those who worship Him must worship in spirit and in truth” (JN 4:24).

The genuine Creator God never judges us, no matter what we do, which was gigantic news! As Jesus said, “For not even the Father judges anyone, but He has given all judgment to the Son, so that all will honor the Son even as they honor the Father” (JN 5:22-23). And then, of course, Jesus promptly added that, “If anyone hears My sayings and does not keep them, I do not judge him; for I did not come to judge the world, but to save the world” (JN 12:47). And of course, we already know that what Jesus had come to save the world from was ignorance. That was what His three years spent in teaching us was all about! Jesus minimized the very concept of “sin” as an issue. He tied that outmoded religious concept of sin back to the human-made religions that He had come to us to abolish. And instead of ever saying anything religious, in order to help His followers understand the extraordinary importance of the Creator God, He said that, “all sins will be forgiven the sons and daughters of men, and whatever blasphemies they commit; but whoever blasphemes against the Holy Spirit never has forgiveness, but is guilty of an eternal sin” (MK 3:28-29).

And Jesus tells us that our relationship with the genuine Creator God which is Spirit is meant to be a profoundly personal one! Which of course it now very easily can be, without religions and their attendant clergy in the way. Jesus said, “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.

“When you pray, you are not to be like the hypocrites; for they love to stand and pray in the synagogues and on the street corners so that they may be seen by men. Truly I say to you, they have their reward in full. But you, when you pray, go into your inner room, close your door and pray to your Father who is in secret, and your Father who sees what is done in secret will reward you” (MT 6:1-6).

Perhaps I have put so much effort into my study of Jesus for so many years, even long before I ever met Thomas, and then amazingly I even met Jesus in person. And I have put so much effort into my study of the greater realty as well, precisely because the very notion of God always seemed to be so unreal to me. For so many years, I can remember thinking that since Jesus, who always had seemed so real that I had memorized many of His words, since Jesus really knew God, He even could stay up and talk with God all night! So then at least I could latch my own puny faith on to Jesus’s great faith, and I could sort of be His tagalong. I realize now that I just deeply envied Jesus’s deep and intimate faith in God. There was a certainty about the way that Jesus talked about God, and a sweet love in the way that Jesus spoke with His Father that I could not even imagine feeling.

The problem with religions is that while once, long ago, they served a purpose for humankind, now they have long since become nothing more than obstacles to what should be our own spiritual progress. Our religions once were humankind’s attempt to help us make sense of the howling dark that we could no more ever hope to understand than can the birds ever possibly understand the reality around them! But now, every religion only steeps us in negative emotions, in guilt and fear and shame. Religions just weigh us down spiritually. And Christianity, especially, with its fear-based doctrines acts as an active barrier that keeps most people from ever knowing and understanding what Jesus came to teach. And thereby, Christianity acts as a barrier between Christians and the most effective set of spiritual teachings we ever have been given. So, what to do now?

What my Thomas eventually did to help me was to prompt me to give the rest of my life to God. It was nothing that I ever had planned to do! Just, one day in April of 2009, when I happened to arrive a little early at the Unity Church that I was then attending, and I was sitting and reflecting in the pews, I just said, “Thank You for giving me work to do. Thank You for showing me how to do it.” A simple gratitude affirmation. And of course this was still six years before I ever even met my Thomas! But I said it, then I stopped and thought, Wow. Did I hear what I just said? I did. And did I mean that? Wow, I guess I really did. It seemed to be only fair, after all that God had done for me.

Then Thomas, still trying to be of help, prompted me to stop going to church with my husband. I was at that point going to Saturday five o’clock Mass with him to keep him company, and then we would go out to dinner. Then on Sunday, I would go to my own preferred church as well. How much church is just too much church? But there was a life-size, full-color plaster Jesus bleeding on a cross above the altar in that Catholic church. And within weeks, as I recall it, what was apparently still Thomas had arranged an amicable conversation with Edward that ended our old longstanding 5:00 Mass routine. I really couldn’t take that bleeding Jesus on the cross anymore, and my kindly husband understood. Then soon thereafter, I was writing The Fun of Dying. And within a year I had stopped going to my Unity Church as well. My reasons were complex, but in retrospect, they seemed to center around the fact that sometime around that time, just as an exercise, it had occurred to me to experiment with opening my mind to God and inviting God to come in for a visit. Just come on it and have a chat and share a cup of tea. This is something that I didn’t talk about with anyone at the time, and not for a long time afterward.

But with Thomas and sometimes Jesus there to facilitate our relationship, and as my memories of those terrible Christian fears and guilts and shames at their worst very slowly began to fade, at long last, over months and then years I gradually began to warm to God. It wasn’t so much that my faith deepened, but with Christianity the religion no longer in my life at all, I came to realize that God had always been right there. God had been within me all along! It was only then that I really began with a kind of feverish glee to put together all of what I had been learning over decades about Jesus, the afterlife, and the greater reality. And of course, it all fit together perfectly.

And slowly, and then more quickly after I eventually met my Thomas in 2015, I began to see that God is the very deepest and the best part of me. God loves me more than I can love myself, but I had been so devoutly religious all my life that all the self-revulsion and the profound lack of self-worth that Christianity had instilled in me had kept me from ever finding God where God has always lived, right here within me, all along. Does that make sense? I began to pray The Lord’s Prayer repeatedly, and even aloud and fiercely sometimes, listening to and then loving all the words. To this day, I own and I love my God’s Prayer. When I first truly understood that I am sinless and completely beloved, some terrible resistance to God broke within me, finally.

And that was just a dozen years ago. I have lived my whole life with Christianity between me and God. I was always just an intellectual Christian, without even knowing what that was. And it was only when I left Christianity that I could come to know and love the true God, Who is Spirit, Who is Love, and Who dwells within us, all of which was what Jesus came to teach us long ago! And so now I have become a crusader against the religion that I had always loved. Now I crusade for God! Although of course, I still think that having faith feels pale and unsatisfactory. But now I no longer need to have faith. Because now I know my dearly beloved eternal God as all the best of who I already am.

He can touch a tree and turn the leaves to gold.
He knows every lie that you and I have told.
Though it makes Him sad to see the way we live,
He’ll always say, “I forgive.”
Richard Mullan & Al Hibbler (1915-2001), from “He” (1954)

Nothingism

Posted on January 13, 2024January 14, 2024 by Roberta Grimes

Whether I’m right, or whether I’m wrong,
Whether I find a place in this world or never belong,
I gotta be me! I’ve gotta be me!
What else can I be but what I am?

I want to live, not merely survive.
And I won’t give up this dream of life that keeps me alive!
I gotta be me, I gotta be me,
The dream that I see makes me what I am!

That far away prize, a world of success
Is waiting for me if I heed the call!
I won’t settle down, won’t settle for less
As long as there’s a chance that I can have it all!
– Walter Marks, from “I’ve Gotta be Me” (1968)

The most vexing problem with atheism as a system of belief is that those who want to espouse it have to ignore the fact that there is so much good evidence against it. Although if an atheist is just someone who denies that there ever has been an actual Moloch who demanded that everyone’s firstborn must be thrown into the fire in his belly, or if an atheist is someone who denies that the old man with the long white beard painted on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel is an accurate depiction of the living God, then I guess that I am an atheist as well. Go ahead and sign me up. And of course, in discussing atheists we are not including agnostics, who simply say that they cannot be sure so they choose to think about something else. Well, fair enough. Keeping an open mind is an admirable position. But incredibly, in this day and age there still are some actually out-there, loud-and-proud people who claim to be flat-out atheists. As in, they insist that there is not, and there never has been an actual Creator God. They therefore take the position that everything that we see around us now can reasonably be claimed to have arisen randomly, from out of nowhere, and there is no intelligent creator behind it.

Perhaps I ought not to say this so bluntly, but here is a well-proven fact: to be that brand of atheist today is a fool’s errand. And this statement includes even the famous atheists who believe that they are on the side of science. Indeed, atheism as a belief-system is as much of a nonsensical religion positioned against the scientific evidence as is Christianity. It is juvenile nonsense for atheists to still remain atheists while they stand surrounded by abundant evidence for the fact that an extraordinarily complex reality in fact does exist, and apparently it has existed and been stable for billions of years, and despite its tenuousness and its appalling instability it amazingly remains remarkably stable. But yet those who fondly espouse atheism continue to say that we must not inquire into what caused this reality to exist in the first place, and nor is it permissible for us to wonder what maintains this reality in such stability, simply because we long ago chose to name its hypothetical first cause “God.” Well, okay then. Let’s play the atheists’ game. Let’s give God a friendly nickname, since we know that God won’t mind. From now on we will simply call God “the Uncaused Cause.”

And we also ought to call atheism what it actually is. It calls itself a word which simply means not-God-ism, but that word misrepresents what atheists apparently believe. When you read their literature, you find them claiming that nothing in particular created the amazingly complex and profoundly beautiful reality that we can see around us now, which means therefore that all of what we see must have happened randomly. Never mind even talking about the stars! No need to bother to mention the exquisite beauty of a baby’s face! When her cat knocked over and wrecked my lovely amaryllis right before Christmas, my daughter as an apology fetched from the trash at our nearby Home Depot a half-dozen amaryllis bulb rejects, which was all that they had left. The bulbs looked hopeless, sprouted but white and dry and nearly dead in their boxes. My husband planted the two that didn’t come with pots, and I hopefully watered them all. And now, a month later, my office’s bow window is full of green stalks topped with buds that are opening to reveal gigantic bright-red flowers. I look at those plants which would all be dead if we hadn’t given them their chance at life, and I plan to do this every year!

But to atheists, all this easy and abundant life can only have sprung from nothing. My God, dear atheists, just look in the mirror! Honest scientists will tell you that our universe is fine-tuned for life. But this wonderful universe that the rest of us share is not the same universe in which committed atheists exist. They themselves somehow uniquely find themselves living in a universe which just gradually, randomly appeared from out of nowhere, and for no reason after it randomly appeared it simply grew like Topsy and without any form of intelligence guiding it. So let’s call their belief-system what it actually is. We will henceforth call atheism “nothingism.”

To me, simply the previous few paragraphs should be sufficient to demonstrate the folly of nothingism as a system of belief. However, perhaps the one particular famous nothingist that I have in mind but I have not named in reverence for his venerable age might need more persuading that his whole life’s work has been an exercise in absurdity. So let’s offer him some more specific evidence:

Something must have caused this material universe. Since the universe demonstrably exists, something must have been its original mover. To say that the universe arose randomly is a considerable stretch for nothingists to make, in view of all the points given below which strongly imply that some level of intelligence and elemental thinking and planning has been involved. To simply say that you don’t know makes you an agnostic, but you, my dear fellow, claim to be a resolute atheist. And just as a point of observation, in nature we notice that anything that is random soon atrophies away. It doesn’t linger long enough for it to develop into something. Or else it seems never to arise in the first place.
Nothing in the universe is solid. Now, if this universe all were entirely random, it is hard to imagine how random particles, having sprung from out of nowhere and being entirely random and unguided, might have organized themselves into atoms at all, when even the simplest atoms which make up this universe have some level of a design element to them. What explanation might you offer for even the elemental organization and design of atoms? And never mind how those random atoms might then have come together and organized themselves into various types of molecules, and those molecules might eventually have come together to form planets and stars. And, long after that, what about living cells and the bodies of complex creatures like people? My goodness, sir, your whole amazing body with its complex internal organs is still 99.9999999% empty space.
Many scientists believe that the universe is fine-tuned to support life. Not only is it inconceivable for something to have come from nothing, but once scientists had identified the universe’s source in a Big Bang to their own satisfaction, many of those who have made their careers in studying the universe’s origins began to note that out of the nearly infinite number of ways in which it could have developed from there, this universe seems in the manner in which it has developed to be exquisitely fine –tuned to be able to support life. The argument from design is often a religious argument, but it need not be even remotely religious.
Nothingism is a cop-out when we attempt to answer what is really the ultimate question. How did life on earth begin? Scientists still cannot spark life to happen in a laboratory experimentally. And for them to then show how life, once it had entirely randomly been sparked, could then entirely randomly have remained alive long enough to altogether randomly have developed into a single-celled organism, with all of a cell’s essential component parts, and never mind into a multi-trillion-celled and entirely randomly-assembled human being, even in a trillion, trillion years of randomness, without any guiding intelligence behind the process at all, really more than beggars the imagination. Moving from the random life-spark to the sustainable living cell with no intelligence involved seems to be where the big leap of faith in nothingism truly lies.
We are in contact with dead people, who turn out not to be dead after all. I am sorry to break this news to you so abruptly, my dear nothingist friend, but while you were spending your life being a famous nothingist and championing your impossible belief, there were others of us who were studying a body of knowledge that, once it is more broadly known, will bring a new age of enlightenment and joy and a fundamental freedom from fear to all the world. Thousands of thoroughly verified communications from the dead received through physical mediums primarily in southern England and in the eastern United States between the 1850s and the 1930s all report to us in detail on precisely the same afterlife reality. Such close agreement across all the evidence received independently in two different areas of the world would not be possible if the afterlife were not real. And now, as the veil amazingly thins, daily contact with those that we used to think were dead is becoming almost commonplace. So ours is the first generation to be able to demonstrate with certainty that all our lives are in fact eternal.
We have discovered where in relation to the earth the not-actually-dead happily go on living their eternal lives. Those of us who are not tied to any religion, and also are not professionally policed by the scientific gatekeepers, the university departments and the peer-reviewed journals, are beautifully free to put together all the widely available public information. And in doing that, we can make some truly wonderful discoveries! We who have done considerable afterlife research know that the not-really-dead are physically in the same place that we are, but just at higher energy vibrations, much as television programs are all available on one television set but just on various different channels. And we also know that scientists have discovered that our universe is composed of roughly 5% ordinary matter, 27% dark matter, and 68% dark energy, all blended harmoniously together. There is nothing sinister about those “dark” components of course, but it is just that they are not material, so they don’t react with photons of material light. And amazingly, the proportions are precisely right for “dark matter” to be what we refer to as the astral realities, which are humankind’s eternal home. As for “dark energy”? Perhaps that might in fact be our beloved “Uncaused Cause.”

René Descartes (1596-1650) was a French philosopher, scientist, and mathematician who can help to shed some material light on this subject. He said, “Cogito, ergo sum.” Or, being French, what he actually said was, “Je pense, donc je suis.” But Descartes lived in a more pretentious time, so he ended up becoming eternally famous for having said his immortal words in Latin. And Descartes’s point was this: in any language, “I think, therefore I am” is an undeniable fact. We belittle that fact, however, and we belittle and trivialize ourselves when we attempt to make less of our existence on this little speck of matter in the five percent of the greater reality which is the only infinitesimal bit of it which is material, and in the tiny bit of time that we will have to live on this bit of matter. To choose to be a nothingist is to choose to make nothing of yourself.

When my daughter brought those six amaryllis bulbs home with their dead-white tops twisted helplessly in their boxes, as they first were fished out of the trash they looked hopeless. My son laughed at them. One of them even, desperately, was trying to open a flower into the dry dirt in which it had been planted. I work in my office’s bow window with my laptop, so I got to watch those plants recover. They untwisted themselves, but slowly. They gradually filled with green chlorophyll. As the stalks started to grow, and then the buds swelled, each plant seemed to realize with a relief I could feel from feet away that at last it was going to get to become what it always had been meant to be. I grow, therefore I am! And don’t minimize the fact that on some elemental plant level they now feel loved. So now I see before me each day only whole and beautiful amaryllis plants in bloom. You cannot even tell that these ever were the pathetic rejects that were rescued from the Home Depot garbage just a few weeks ago.

The question of whether there must be an Uncaused Cause is settled. No scientist rationally disputes the fact that the universe exists, it is 13.7 billion years old, and it is and still remains stable against what are now scientifically established to be monumental mathematical odds against its ongoing stability. So something must have caused this universe, and something must be maintaining its stability! But scientists still refuse to take seriously what seems to be the next sensible question. When they are pressed to identify the universe’s Uncaused Cause, their answers generally boil down to something like, “Nobody really knows and shut up.” Or, as the brilliant Rupert Sheldrake sums up the general scientific attitude, “Just give us one free miracle and we’ll explain the rest.”

The pioneering father of quantum mechanics, Max Planck, said in 1931, “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.” And Jesus said two thousand years ago, “God is Spirit, and those who worship Him must worship in spirit and in truth” (JN 4:24). Even a thousand years before Jesus’s birth, the forebears of His earthly body knew that “The eternal God is a refuge, and underneath are the Everlasting Arms” (Deut 33:27). The Consciousness that both the ancient Hebrews and Max Planck discovered, and that Jesus called “God,” and that you and I might just as easily call “the Uncaused Cause” is living and infinitely creative Energy. And the fact is now being discussed more and more seriously among scientists that of course Consciousness does not originate inside the human brain! Of course not, even though the sillies who pass for scientists at this point in the United States are now spending more than a billion dollars trying to find its source in there somewhere. No, instead our brains only receive and transmit Consciousness, which makes these material bodies of ours nothing more than avatars that we use while we are having our brief earth-lives. And meanwhile, early in the twenty-first century God is steadily more and more revealing Godself to us, and God is perfect and infinite Love! Look again at that pie chart of the universe as scientists have come to understand it. In reality, of course, all three components are variously blended together. And sixty-eight percent of our universe is looking more and more as if it is going to turn out to be the Uncaused Cause. We live surrounded by, immersed in, and actually composed of God’s infinite Love.

I’ll go it alone. That’s how it must be.
I can’t be right for somebody else if I’m not right for me.
I gotta be free, I just gotta be free!
Daring to try, to do it or die, I gotta be me!
– Walter Marks, from “I’ve Gotta be Me” (1968)

Better Understanding Jesus

Posted on January 6, 2024January 7, 2024 by Roberta Grimes

There is Someone walking behind you. Turn around. Look at Me.
There is Someone watching your footsteps. Turn around. Look at Me.
There is Someone who really needs you. Here’s My heart in My hand!
Turn around. Look at Me. Understand, understand.
And there’s Someone to stand beside you. Turn around, look at Me.
And there’s Someone to love and guide you.
Turn around! Look at Me!
Oh, I’ve waited! And I’ll wait forever for you to come to Me!
Look at Someone Who really loves you! Yeah, loves you!
Turn around! Look at Me!
– Jerry N. Capehart (1928-1998), from “Turn Around, Look at Me” (1968)

As the Christian religion loses its followers, as it gradually shrivels and dies worldwide, a confident dance continues in Spirit of which we always have been unaware. For most of my life I have worried that the slow and writhing death of the Emperor Constantine’s fear-based Christianity was bound to kill off the genuine Jesus, because naturally most people were likely to see Him as just another part of the Christian package. I thought that we were in a fight against time to separate Jesus from Christianity just as quickly as we possibly could! I never realized that Jesus has always known that this time in history was going to come. And He has been working on making this separation happen for a lot longer than we have been alive.

It turns out that Jesus and His followers in Spirit have been planning for the death of Constantine’s religion ever since at least the First Council of Nicaea, and that was way back in 325 CE! Thomas tells me that Jesus’s spiritual team even influenced the councilors who were assembling the first Christian Bible, as to which of the then-available Gospels to choose. And as the councilors edited those Gospels, and they added their sheep-and-goats and Apocalyptic bits, they were being influenced to keep their editing to a minimum. And to move what was not actually said by Jesus to the backs of the Gospels that were chosen for inclusion, so it would be easier for you and me much later to pluck those suspect additions back out again.

It is thanks to what Thomas tells me now has been a close group of about twenty members of Jesus’s inner circle who have been with Him ever since His Ascension that we have any of Jesus’s teachings left to us at all. Although of course, what we have left still cannot be much. Jesus taught on earth for more than three years, and then it was at least fifty years past His Ascension before any of what Jesus had said was written down, so it is amazing that we have anything left of what Jesus said when He was here on earth. But He was teaching very simple folk a few important things that He had tailored to their level of understanding, so He said simple phrases over and over again. Jesus tells us now that He is satisfied with what has survived. The problem is less that a few aspects of what He taught have been lost to us altogether, and more that fear-based ideas have been added, and human concepts have been inserted that Jesus never would have embraced; and, what is harder to detect, subtly fear-based human thoughts have been stuck to the edges of Jesus’s ideas that were not in His original teachings. We are so used to using language to express our own ideas that we simply don’t realize how limiting language is as a method of precise self-expression.

It is only in the past few years that Thomas has made me see this language issue for the problem that it actually is, as I seek to truly and deeply understand our beloved Jesus across two thousand years of time. And as Jesus seeks to be ever better understood! Thomas and Jesus now think that their problems in perfecting this connection with humankind on earth over all the centuries really have been down to these two issues:

Those in spirit communicate mentally, in a universal lingua franca that is almost like reading one another’s minds. Thomas believes that this has meant that those who were doing the church-council monitoring were paying insufficient attention to what was going on verbally in those councils themselves. They missed some of the back-room politicking that we now know was happening with Jesus’s teachings.

As the translating of Jesus’s words was going on, first from Aramaic into ancient Greek, and later from Greek into Latin, and then finally into modern languages, the meanings of some of Jesus’s original teachings were being changed, and sometimes profoundly. I will give you the most prominent example of this major problem below.

As Jesus made plain to us while we were exploring these issues last week, He did not die for our sins. Instead, Jesus was born to be our Teacher. To put a finer point on it, He was born to be our spiritual Teacher. After studying the topic of Jesus and sin in the Gospels in particular, I am convinced that every reference that Jesus makes to sin is either pro forma, in that He says it because it was expected of Him at some moment by the sin-obsessed Jewish clerics around Him, and not because He believed that sin mattered; or instead, it was a later addition by one of the first-millennium church councils. I think now that if we asked Jesus about sin, He would say that sin is a human-religious and not a spiritual term, and since God is at the highest vibration and God is infinite pure love, the concept of sin has nothing whatsoever to do with God.

And there is something else, too, that we will need to get straight. For Jesus to be born on earth two thousand years ago as the Son of God, which is the miracle that we celebrated two weeks ago, He had to be born into some human culture. And that culture was bound to worship one religion or another. But Jesus is an aspect of God, so whether He wants to claim all or any part of that existing human-made religion will be His choice. We know now that Jesus came to abolish religions altogether, and to teach us instead to relate to God entirely on a spiritual level. But given the time and place where He lived and taught, Jesus was not able to come right out and say that He intended to abolish all religions, so what Jesus said instead was that He was replacing what we now call the Old Testament with just two laws. He said, “‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.’ This is the great and foremost commandment. The second is like it, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ On these two commandments depend the whole Law and the Prophets” (MT 22:37-40). And that was it! Jesus did not in fact choose to import Judaism or any part of it into His teachings. He adopted just those two rules: Love God, and love your fellow human being as you love yourself. Therefore, no Adam and Eve with their associated original sin. No Ten Commandments, either. The Way of Jesus is Jesus’s Teachings alone. And your Bible is a whole lot lighter!

So the precise meanings of the words that Jesus actually spoke will be very important to us indeed! Just by even slightly altering the meanings of any of Jesus’s words, perhaps in the simple process of translation, we can hugely – and mistakenly! – alter Jesus’s spiritual teachings. And while I do not now speak any language but English, I have at various times studied Spanish, French, Latin, and a bit of Mandarin. So I do know that saying precisely the same thing in any two of those languages side by side is impossible, since each separate language simply “thinks” differently. And in addition, the words that people say in any language will change in meaning over time. For example, even as late as the early part of the twentieth century, you might have mentioned having seen a gay-looking fellow walking down the street that morning, and meant just that he seemed to be especially happy.

This problem of translation-distortion is of special concern as we try to understand what Jesus actually said. Our beloved Best Friend spoke Aramaic, which is an unusually spiritual and lyrical language. The modern English Gospels were first translated from Aramaic into ancient Greek, and then from ancient Greek into Latin, and then into modern languages. And we frequently see Jesus talking in the Gospels about repentance. The topic of repentance comes up seven times in the Book of Matthew, but an astonishing and even downright punitive fourteen times in Luke. Over and over we see Jesus talking there about “Repentance.” But is that what Jesus ever actually said?

Let’s look at a few of Jesus’s uses of the word “Repent” or “Repentance” in the Gospel of Luke. He reportedly said, “It is not those who are healthy who need a physician, but those who are sick. I have not come to call the righteous to repentance, but sinners” (LK 5:32). This line is suspect not only because Jesus talks about repentance, but also because He probably did not refer to “sinners,” using that precise word. And He reportedly said in the Book of Luke, “Woe to you, Chorazin! Woe to you, Bethsaida! For if the miracles that occurred in you had occurred in Tyre and Sidon, they would have repented long ago, sitting in sackcloth and ashes” (LK 10:13). And what follows here is the worst mention of repentance in the entire Book of Luke! “Now on that very occasion there were some present who reported to Him about the Galileans whose blood Pilate had shed along with their sacrifices. And Jesus responded and said to them, ‘Do you think that these Galileans were worse sinners than all the other Galileans just because they have suffered this fate? No, I tell you, but unless you repent, you will all likewise perish’ (LK 13:1-3). Wow, that doesn’t sound much like the Jesus that you and I thought we knew, does it? All that talk about sinners and repentance and perishing? He sounds pretty harsh and unloving here, don’t you think? Oh my goodness, yes! And there is a reason for that.

Jesus never once suggested that we should “repent.” That word never actually passed His lips. The Greek word which was translated into English as “repent” or “repentance” in all those places is metanoia. And what “metanoia” actually means in ancient Greek is not “repent” at all, but it means instead “change,” “reconsider,” or – more precisely – “reform your mind,” “uplift your mind,” or “transform your mind.” I couldn’t find in a quick search any idea of what the precise Aramaic word or phrase that was first translated into metanoia might have been, but it would have been something more toward the “alter your mind” side of things, which was of course Jesus’s constant theme. And if in all those places in Luke where Jesus seems to be muttering, “Repent!” you simply put something softer like “open and uplift your mind,” you will have a far more Jesus-like, and a far more accurate, set of messages.

Laypeople were not allowed by the Christian church to read the words of Jesus on their own until at least the Middle Ages, and that proscription was enforced by the simple expedient of the church’s decision for its first fifteen hundred years not to translate the Bible into any language but Latin. The complete Bible was first published in English, most likely in Antwerp, in 1535, as a translation out of the German and Latin by an Augustinian friar from Yorkshire named Myles Coverdale (1488-1569) who had been educated at Cambridge. Now, I imagine that the beautifully educated Myles Coverdale was a lovely man. But at some point long before his day, sometime around 300 CE, there lived the man who first translated the words of Jesus into Latin from the ancient Greek in which it had first been written down, presuming that the Aramaic-speakers who had actually heard Jesus speak and had memorized His words had been illiterate. And that first scrivener in Latin was the guy who saw the gentle Greek word “metanoia” at all the places where Jesus had talked about His having come to expand, uplift, and transform the minds and hearts of all people, and to bring light and love to all the world. And that closed-minded and crabby first Greek-to-Latin translator – let’s call him “Igor” – saw only one obvious thing that Jesus must have meant by the word “metanoia.” Igor was working for the current Roman Emperor, and maybe even for Constantine himself, and helping Rome to build a fear-based Christian religion of power and control. What he saw in the Greek word metanoia was, “Repent!” Or in Latin, which is the language into which Igor was translating the ancient Greek, the word would have been “Paeniteat!” And the gentlemanly much later Myles Coverdale, even though he himself was surely a decent fellow, then felt obligated to put the word “Repent!” into Jesus’s mouth, without giving the matter much thought.

Igor’s mistranslation affected John the Baptist’s words as well. In the Gospel of Matthew we read, “Now in those days John the Baptist came, preaching in the wilderness of Judea, saying,“Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.” For this is the one referred to by Isaiah the prophet when he said, “The voice of one calling out in the wilderness, ‘Prepare the way of the Lord, Make His paths straight!’” (MT 3:1-2). Of course, what John the Baptist actually would have said was something more like, “Open and uplift your minds, folks, because the moment that Isaiah foretold has come, and the kingdom of God is at hand!” Now, that makes sense! The way that Igor mistranslated it makes no sense at all in Jesus’s terms, because it is sin-based, fear-based, and not remotely love-based. John the Baptist was Jesus’s messenger, and he would at the time have been inspired by Jesus’s mind and under His mind’s influence.

So now you see some of the problems that we face in reaching back toward Jesus from here as we attempt to deal with serial mistranslations, and also some of our problems of understanding associated with Jesus’s cultural surroundings. Our much-beloved Elder Brother and Best Friend is an extraordinary Being, unique in all of human history. He is God born on earth and outside of time! When I first tried to apply Jesus’s teachings to my own life, without knowing that I had Thomas’s help in doing so because I had not yet met my spirit guide, my life was permanently transformed in only weeks. I was amazed at how completely and how fast that happened! It took me most of a decade to figure out what had happened, why it had happened, and how it could have been so self-reinforcing. And once I had put it all together, I fully understood at last that Jesus really did come to us as God on earth.

If we truly want to understand Jesus, we cannot just look back at Him now. There is too much that is human in the way! We have no choice but to go back ourselves for literally two thousand years, and study Jesus where and when He last wore a human body. We have to go back before all the mistranslations, all the human cultural and religious distortions, all the human mandates, and all the ego notions and fabrications, even especially including our own. We have got to sit down at the feet of God, and simply watch and listen. Seriously! If we want to know what made everyone who ever personally knew Jesus later willing, and even glad to die to ensure that Jesus’s Truths would live, then we will have to sit down respectfully at His feet and hear and see what all those earliest martyrs heard and saw.

As I have said before in this space, my weirdly obsessive lifelong twin hobbies of Gospel studies and afterlife studies turn out to fortuitously intersect. I can prove things about Jesus because of what I know about the genuine afterlife and its associated greater reality, things that I learned as a natural skeptic doing evidence-based afterlife research over fifty years of time. And incredibly, I can prove to you that Jesus actually knew things two thousand years ago that He could not have known if He had not been born with extraordinary knowledge which is beyond what even scientists know today. So I was certain that Jesus was genuine, even before the Shroud of Turin proved that He actually did rise from the dead, and even before I met Him in the astral plane twenty months ago and I felt His incredible personal energy.

Which is why I can tell you with certainty that Jesus was born as God on earth. I am Doubting Thomas. There are few things of which I am certain, but this is one thing that I know is true. And since Jesus told me His story twenty months ago, we know that He is even more amazing than that, if His being even more amazing is possible: He was once just an ordinary human being, and He actually has maintained His fully human status. Nobody at even half His spiritual level ever bothers to keep a fully human past! We all join collectives by the time we reach the sixth level, Mikey Morgan and a few others being the only rare exceptions. The effort that is required for Jesus to remain “fully God and fully Man” is extraordinary, but He continues to make that effort for us, so He can effectively minister to us and serve us. Jesus’s love for each of us as individual people, His love for you as a person and for me as a person, is beyond what we can understand. And this may be even harder for us to comprehend, but as Jesus has been planning for the past seventeen hundred years to separate Himself from Christianity now, He also has been planning for the Way of Jesus that will follow it. And now is when it begins.

We Begin Anew

Posted on December 30, 2023December 31, 2023 by Roberta Grimes

I wonder as I wander, out under the sky,
how Jesus the Savior did come for to die
for poor ordinary people like you and like I;
I wonder as I wander, out under the sky.

When Mary birthed Jesus, ‘twas in a cow’s stall
with wise men and farmers and shepherd and all.
But high from God’s heaven a star’s light did fall,
and the promise of ages it then did recall.
– John Jacob Niles (1892-1980), from “I Wonder as I Wander” (1933)

People have asked me why I so strongly denounce the story that lies at the heart of traditional Christianity. And of course, you and I know that story so well! It is the whole idea that Jesus was born to die for our sins, so if we don’t claim Him as our personal Savior, then tough luck for us because after we die, we are going to burn in hell forevermore. The milder, more moderate versions of Christianity have largely done away with the burn-in-hell part, but they keep the idea that Jesus did indeed “come for to die.” And why should you and I not believe that? It even says it in the Bible! Doesn’t it? “For God so loved the world, that He gave His only Son, so that everyone who believes in Him will not perish, but have eternal life” (JN 3:16). And wow, that is some kind of wonderful love! Don’t you think? Why shouldn’t you and I believe that Jesus came to die for our sins? What harm does it do? Omigod, what harm does it do? Oh, where do we even begin? First of all, let’s just clear this whole mess up right now.

JESUS DID NOT COME TO DIE FOR OUR SINS

It is long past time for us to say that so plainly. There is nothing in the Bible that says that the long-promised Messiah is going to come to die for our sins, and nor is there anything in the Bible that tells us that our cherished Elder Brother and Best Friend, Jesus, actually did die for our sins. Instead, Jesus came with a different and much more wonderful purpose in mind, but we will get to that shortly. And Jesus tells us right there in the Gospel of John, “For not even the Father judges anyone” (JN 5:22). Case Closed! Because if God doesn’t judge us, then God doesn’t hold our sins against us, so God does not demand the blood-sacrifice of God’s Own Son. To whom, then, is the sacrifice of Jesus being made, if not to God? When I was a lot younger, I used to ask this question of people who should have been able to answer it easily. Not trying to be a jerk, but just assuming that much smarter people than I am must have spotted this big contradiction at the center of Christianity a long time before I did. And I really wanting to know! However, all the various priests, Biblical scholars, and others of whom I ever asked my core question refused to even take it seriously. When to me, it is one of the most serious questions in all of human history. Since the Bible itself tells us that God didn’t require the blood-sacrifice of Jesus, then to whom or to what was Jesus being sacrificed?

Finally, a theology student who had gone through the same thinking process that I had was able to give me what I think is the only possible answer. He told me that Jesus was indeed being sacrificed to God, Who did not need or demand the Lord’s sacrifice. But that student told me it was the rest of us who needed it. We feel so sinful and unworthy because of Adam’s sin and all the sins that we commit every day. But now that Jesus, who is Himself sinless and was conceived without sin, had sacrificed Himself to God and made us pure, we had been washed in the Blood of the Lamb of God, so now we could believe that we were made worthy of approaching God. And do you know, I was young enough at the time – I was not a whole lot older than he was – that his answer actually satisfied me?

Okay, great! So God, within Godself, had just put on a little play for our benefit. Jesus, as an aspect of God, had put Himself through that whole charade of suffering and being punished in our place so we would feel that sufficient atonement had been made for Adam’s sin, and for our own sins as well, and therefore we would feel washed clean, and able to approach God at the end of our lives. All better! It was not until I was maybe fifty years old that the sheer, complete nonsense of this whole line of thinking landed one day like a rock on my head. Okay, so let me get this straight. We come into this world as infants, pure as the snow, but just in being born as human beings we acquire Adam’s sin. And just in being alive we commit other sins along the way. God see us feeling guiltier and guiltier. So instead of just saying, “I forgive you everything, my beloved child!” and giving us a big hug and a great big kiss and ice cream, which is what any loving human Father would do, God sends us Jesus to die on a cross for our sins? And all of that is supposed to make us feel better? But wouldn’t it instead make us feel even much guiltier, since now we feel guilty about Jesus’s otherwise unnecessary suffering and death as well? So the gruesome death under torture of a perfectly sinless aspect of the living God was made necessary from God’s point of view because you and I are such hopelessly sinful pieces of crap?

We are supposed to take everything about our religions by faith. But faith cannot triumph over common sense. When Thomas took me to meet Jesus in the Astral plane in April of 2022, Jesus told me that He had indeed come to us two thousand years ago as the Savior of the World. And Jesus said that what He had come to save the world from two thousand years ago was ignorance! And especially all this terrible religious ignorance. Jesus insisted that He had come to us as our Teacher. And what He came to teach us was how to do what He Himself had so easily done when, in His final lifetime as a normal human being in the Neolithic period, He was able to rapidly raise His consciousness vibration and become an Ascended Being. His teachings are now preserved in the Gospels, and when properly applied, they work amazingly well! But the teachings of Jesus have never been much noticed, because to us they sound like just nicey-nice aspirational platitudes. Love. Forgive. Be kind. So what? And His teachings seldom have been tried in the past seventeen hundred years because they are trapped inside a Christian religion that has remained obsessed with the nonsense belief that Jesus was born just to die for our sins.

When you hear the Truth spoken by the Man Himself, you slap your forehead. Of course! If the religion were right about Jesus’s reason for being born, then He would have actually told people that! “Watch Me, folks! I am about to make everything all better between you and God!” He never would have wasted one single breath on talking about all that loving and forgiving stuff for three and a half years. And that sentence on which those who are sure that Jesus died for our sins pin a lot of their hopes is really just a translation mistake. Remove the word “in,” and it reads: “For God so loved the world, that He gave His only Son, so that everyone who believes __ Him will not perish, but have eternal life” (JN 3:16). So then that sentence would be only about our need to listen to and believe the words of Jesus. Which is, of course, the purest truth. (Well, the word “perish” there is still too strong.) But if you closely follow the teachings of Jesus, then instead of continuing to flounder through repeated lifetimes, when you return to the afterlife this time around, you will have made so much spiritual progress that you will advance directly to the fifth level of the afterlife, and you will be forever at home and at peace.

And it is in those two-thousand-year-old teachings of Jesus that the world is going to find its best, and perhaps its only hope. That is true, even buried as those teachings are now in a lot of old Bibles tucked away on bookshelves and never much opened anymore. If you doubt the need for us to open those old Bibles, just look at the world as it is today! It is a sewer of petty hatreds kept seething as just our normal way of life. In North America, college kids march and shout over ancient bitternesses that they cannot begin to understand. While the United States government is inexplicably unwilling to allow this nation to get past stupid racism, even a century and a half after the Civil War. We cannot allow big wars to even get started anymore for fear of a nuclear conflagration, so now the Middle East and also separately Asia, Africa, and even South America are now individual busy factories of little wars and disagreements which cause regular people just trying to live their lives almost constant disruptions and distracting pain. Imagine how things might change if even ten percent of the people in the world were living the Gospel teachings of Jesus. Or what if it were twenty percent? Or even, Omigod, on one bright future day as many as fifty percent?

But for the teachings of Jesus to transform the world, we first will have to do away with seventeen hundred years of Christian religious history. The religion of Christianity, as it now stands, is close to useless to us as a method for healing the world because it is fear-based and not love-based. It teaches its adherents to fear God, and to be needlessly suspicious of and widely separated from one another. The poisonous world that we are living in now is one that Christianity played a very prominent role in creating. But the persona and teachings of Jesus the Man are enormously appealing, as He proved to us during the first three hundred years after His Resurrection! And once we have re-started His original Way, it can be abundantly fruitful once again.

Then how did we end up so badly off-track, when the true Way of Jesus made such a great start? Jesus’s disciples, and those who had known His disciples and those that they had taught spread His teachings very rapidly all around the Mediterranean Sea. Most of Jesus’s earliest followers died martyrs’ deaths in the course of spreading His teachings. Our amusing friend Doubting Thomas seems to have made it the farthest away of all of Jesus’s original twelve, because when he finally did get it, he really got it! We are told that Jesus’s disciple Thomas was martyred by a spear in 53 CE in Madras, India. Jesus’s senior disciple, Peter, was executed by the Roman Emperor Nero in the mass executions that followed a big fire in Rome in the year 64 CE that Nero blamed on the city’s burgeoning Christian population. Peter requested that he be crucified upside down, because he felt unworthy of dying in the same manner as Jesus had died. And when Nero tried to grant the old man a reprieve and have him taken off his upside-down cross, Peter insisted on going through with his martyrdom. It is believed that Saint Paul, too, was martyred in 64 CE in Rome because of that fire, his death being by decapitation.

The flame of Jesus’s genuine teachings that He ignited in His disciples continued to burn in all the people they touched, and then in those that Jesus’s second generation of followers touched in their turn. History records that during the first two hundred years after Jesus’s Ascension, as His Way rapidly spread, so also did all those martyrdoms. For example, Clement had been taught by Jesus’s disciples Peter and John, and he worked with Paul and is mentioned in Paul’s letter to the Philippians. The Romans martyred Clement in 99 CE by throwing him into the ocean tied to a boat-anchor. Another of John’s students was Ignatius, and Peter made Ignatius the Bishop of Antioch. Then on July 6, 108 CE, Ignatius was martyred by being fed to wild beasts in the Circus Maximus in Rome for refusing to renounce his loyalty to Christ. Perhaps the best-remembered of these later-generation martyrdoms was Polycarp’s. In 156 CE, the much-loved Bishop of Smyrna first fed a feast to those who were about to burn him to death. Then, as they pleaded with that dear old man to renounce Christ, Polycarp instead climbed onto his funeral pyre. No need even to tie him to a post. He said calmly, “Eighty and six years I have served Him, and He has done me no wrong.” Such was the love and loyalty of those who followed the Way of Jesus.

Until the Romans took it over, the Way of Jesus was for the most part a persecuted underground movement; but nevertheless, it still grew rapidly. it is estimated that in the year 150 CE, there were between thirty thousand and forty thousand followers of Jesus in Rome. In 200 CE, that number was between a hundred and forty thousand and a hundred and seventy thousand followers. And in 300 CE, just before the Romans seized the Jesus movement and made it into the Roman state religion of Christianity that we know today, there were an incredible three million followers of the Way of Jesus in Rome! Many of them lived near the Christian Catacombs which were just outside the city, where there were more than six million burials interred from the third to the seventh centuries. And those Catacomb burials that date to the period of Roman persecution, before 312 CE, show no depictions of crosses at all, which suggests that the followers of the Way never believed that Jesus’s mode of death mattered.

The Catacomb depictions of Jesus from those early years show Him as He shows Himself to His astral plane visitors today, with brown eyes, olive skin, and short, curly hair. And He is often shown as the good shepherd who carries not a lamb, but instead a baby goat about His shoulders. Later Christian theology has Jesus separating the sheep from the goats and throwing the goats into an imagined hell (see e.g. MT 25:31-46, which passage was likely added to the Gospel by First Nicaea in 325 CE). But the deeply loving Jesus of universal kindness and salvation of all the goats as well as the sheep that was taught by the followers of Jesus’s Way is entirely consistent with Jesus’s own Gospel teachings. And it indicates that this is the version of Jesus Who was being ardently followed right through the end of the Third Century CE.

Of course, as the Way of Jesus grew and spread over thousands of miles and through three generations, slightly different ideas were bound to arise. One such different view, and a minority one, came from the ancient Jewish belief in the blood-sacrifice of animals for the forgiveness of sins. This notion as it was applied to Jesus may first have come from Paul, who was a bit of a fussy guy anyway. And it did make sense at the time to early followers of Jesus who had a Jewish background. Given that Jews had long believed that everyone was stained with Adam’s sin, didn’t it simply make sense that God might have sent His only Son as an unblemished sacrifice to wash away the stain of humankind’s original sin?

And that sort of fear-based, guilt-drenched explanation for the crucifixion of Jesus was one that the Roman Emperor Constantine really could use! As is true of all state religions, the Christianity that the Romans designed early in the Fourth Century CE was created as a handy means of fear-based mass control. There is only so much fear that armies can instill, since after a certain point, the people will find ways to tune it out. But owning the religion, too, lets those in power own both here and hereafter. And if, every Sunday, people hear in their churches that they are so sinful that God had to come down and die for them, and if they then hear that they must tithe heavily and give their second son to the priesthood and their oldest daughter to a nunnery and leave a lot of money to the church or else hell awaits them, well, then you, as the Emperor’s sidekick Pope, can really call the shots! The seven first-millennium Ecumenical Councils, beginning with First Nicaea in 325 CE, created a Christian church which was robust and immensely useful to the powerful, even if its core teaching about Jesus dying for our sins had nothing to do with the genuine Jesus.

So now, as Constantine’s Christianity fades, we who love the Lord can return at last to learning and teaching and living the true Way of Jesus that came before it. And I am delighted to tell you that just a couple of mentions in blog posts have gathered such a lovely group of people who are eager to work through establishing this three-month course that can effect their individual transformations under the guidance of our living Lord, and can help to begin the transformation of the world. If you would like to join us, please let me know, because registrations are soon to close. And we are eager to begin!

If Jesus had wanted for any wee thing,
a star in the sky, or a bird on the wing,
or all of God’s angels in heaven for to sing,
he surely could have it, ‘cause he was the King.

I wonder as I wander, out under the sky,
how Jesus the Savior did come for to die
for poor ordinary people like you and like I;
I wonder as I wander, out under the sky.
– John Jacob Niles (1892-1980), from “I Wonder as I Wander” (1933)

The Prophesies are Fulfilled

Posted on December 23, 2023December 24, 2023 by Roberta Grimes

O come, O come, Emmanuel,
And ransom captive Israel,
That mourns in lonely exile here,
Until the Son of God appear.
Rejoice! Rejoice! Emmanuel
Shall come to thee, O Israel.

O come, Thou Rod of Jesse, free
Thine own from Satan’s tyranny;
From depths of hell Thy people save,
And give them victory o’er the grave.
Rejoice! Rejoice! Emmanuel
Shall come to thee, O Israel.

O come, Thou Dayspring, from on high,
And cheer us by Thy drawing nigh;
Disperse the gloomy clouds of night,
And death’s dark shadows put to flight.
Rejoice! Rejoice! Emmanuel
Shall come to thee, O Israel.
– John Mason Neale (1818-1866), translator, from a 15^th century Franciscan Processional.

Never in the long span of human history has there been a people more targeted, more hounded, and more generally all-around cursed and despised than the Jews, who for the past four thousand years have been God’s Chosen People. I like the way Tevye puts it, he who sings as the hero of that delightful musical story of precarious Jewish life amid late Imperial Russia’s persecutions and pogroms, “Fiddler on the Roof.” Tevye says, “It’s nice to be God’s Chosen People. But it might be good if once in a while God chooses someone else.”

And as you and I watch life for God’s Chosen People play out yet again across the twenty-first-century world, we can sympathize with Tevye’s point. When you read the Christian Bible from cover to cover, as I did often during the first half of my life, you see this extraordinary relationship between the Jewish people and their God as a loving, proud and desperate dance of pain and triumph over four thousand years, really ever since Abraham, the founding Patriarch of not just Judaism but also of Christianity and Islam. It is a relationship created by people, of course, and with a God of their own devising, since the genuine God is only love. And as with all such relationships, the Jews’ relationship with their God is fraught with human-created problems. But you can see that it was those very problems that have bound the Jews together as a people, have built their identity down through the ages, and have made them so devout, so resolute, and so unbelievably strong.

It is no wonder to me that Jesus chose to be born and to live His human life as a Jew. He has told me just that He wanted to be born from the Godhead in the same area where He had lived before, where there were settled cities, and where there would not be wars during His lifetime on earth, so He could spend that time first studying humankind, and then teaching what He had been born to teach about human life and the nature of reality, and about God. But He was especially eager to begin His mission by studying people, and there were things that Jesus could learn about being human by living as a member of a persecuted underclass that He never could have learned by being born near any society’s top. There even is some evidence that Jesus might have been born into slavery. And here were God’s Chosen People, the Jews, who perfectly filled the bill for Him.

I don’t know why it took so long after His previous death for Jesus to return to earth. From what little He and Thomas have told me, Jesus’s decision to be born out of the Godhead in order to teach all of us how to escape the cycle of rebirths was immediate: Jesus’s decision was made as soon as He became a Perfected Being and discovered that His earthly brothers could not follow Him. There was some sort of contest going on here that He had apparently won, but without even realizing that there had been a contest going on at all. He flat-out could not stand the unfairness of it! The very thing that had made Jesus such a winner – the fact that He was so naturally loving – made Him insist on going right back to the earth that minute, so He could teach everyone else how to achieve spiritual perfection, just as He had managed to do it, all on His own and without even trying. But yet, there was a delay of some four thousand earth-years between His death as a Neolithic princeling who had become a Perfected Being, and His subsequent birth two thousand years ago that we are once again about to celebrate.

Much is made of the fact that there are ancient Biblical prophesies of the sacred birth of Jesus. And, yes indeed, those prophesies are there in the Christian Bible’s Old Testament. There are not many, but they are there. Some are pretty obscure, like this one: “I see him, but not now; I look at him, but not near; A star shall appear from Jacob, A scepter shall rise from Israel, and shall smash the forehead of Moab, and overcome all the sons of Sheth” (Numbers 24:17). I call this one obscure, because in context you really have trouble seeing it as anything significant. In fact, I have to confess to doubting that it refers to the coming of Jesus at all.

But the two most commonly cited prophecies are in the Book of Isaiah, and they are not obscure! Isaiah is the greatest Old Testament Prophet. He lived some seven hundred years before the birth of Jesus. And he said, “Therefore the Lord Himself will give you a sign: Behold, the virgin will conceive and give birth to a son, and she will name Him Immanuel” (Isaiah 7:14). That name means “God with us,” which of course is precisely the significance of the birth of someone being born directly from the Godhead for the only time in human history. Well, that seems to be pretty profound. And Isaiah also said, “For a Child will be born to us, a Son will be given to us; And the government will rest on His shoulders; And His name will be called Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace. There will be no end to the increase of His government or of peace, on the throne of David and over His kingdom, to establish it and to uphold it with justice and righteousness from then on and forevermore (Isaiah 9:6-7). And wow, that is powerful! Having heard now directly from Jesus that, unlike all the rest of us who ever have been born, He always knew while He was on earth Who He was and what His life-plan was, I have wondered over the past year and a half about some of these key Biblical players. Did Isaiah know that he was foreseeing Jesus’s long-term role in human history?

Or what about Micah of Moresheth, who is my favorite of the Hebrew Prophets? Micah was what was called a “Lesser Prophet.” He lived and prophesied at the same time that the great Isaiah was speaking to kings about the Messiah to be born the King of the Jews. And actually, the ruins of the city of Moresheth have lately been found in the same area of Israel where Hamas conducted their massacre of modern Jews on October 7^th of this year. I have loved Micah ever since my childhood pastor, a humble man himself, printed Micah’s epic sentence in his bulletin one Sunday, and I cut it out and taped it to the wall above my childhood desk, where it remained for the rest of my growing-up. Micah said, “He has told you, Oh mortal one, what is good; and what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?” (Micah 6:8) Oh my dear ones, Jesus loves that sentence! Yes indeed, it is clear that Isaiah foresaw the Lord’s coming. But if any of the Prophets foresaw the Lord’s Message by seven hundred years, it was my beloved Micah and not the great Isaiah.

It is the numbers game, though, that comes at the start of the Book of Matthew, which suggests a reason why so much earth-time was allowed to pass before Jesus returned on His teaching mission. Perhaps God thought it might be a reassuring sign to those on earth who awaited the coming of their Messiah. We who read the whole Bible repeatedly will sometimes joke about always skipping “the begats,” which occur here and there where the Jews kept track of their lineages. One such list of three sets of begats occurs at the start of Matthew, and it traces the lineage of Joseph right back from Jesus to Abraham, concluding with, ¹⁷“So all the generations from Abraham to David are fourteen generations; from David to the deportation to Babylon, fourteen generations; and from the deportation to Babylon to the Messiah, fourteen generations” (MT 1:1-17). And it should be noted here both that Mary also is descended from David, and that, um, it is more generally claimed in the Gospels that Jesus’s earthly body had no human father. Although why that should matter to anyone is something about which I frankly have no clue!

It might be noted, too, that until rather late in His time on earth, Jesus was shy about owning His Messianic role. If indeed Mary was born a slave, and Jesus was emancipated by law at the age of thirty, then His shyness about publicly calling Himself the Messiah might make some sense; and anyway, Jesus seems to have been more comfortable referring to Himself as the “Son of Man,” a term which comes up intermittently in the Old Testament with various and generally more modest everyman spiritual meanings. Perhaps Jesus liked that term because it was a way for Him to refer to Himself as the expected Messiah without being quite so in-your-face about it? He will say things in the Gospels like, “The foxes have holes and the birds of the sky have nests, but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay His head” (MT 8:20). And “so that you may know that the Son of Man has authority on earth to forgive sins,” (MT 9:6) when He forgave a lame man’s sins as part of healing him, and “whoever speaks a word against the Son of Man, it shall be forgiven him; but whoever speaks against the Holy Spirit, it shall not be forgiven him” (MT 12:32), and “Who do people say that the Son of Man is?” (MT 16:13). It was a clever way for Jesus to claim His Divinity while still not quite claiming the Messianic title just yet, in case there were people nearby who could have been made uncomfortable, or even hostile, by His doing so.

He may have been made wary about this possibility by an incident right at the start of His ministry. Returning from His Baptism by John and feeling full of the Spirit, Jesus had naively read aloud from the scroll of the Prophet Isaiah in His hometown synagogue on a Sabbath morning. He had read a prophesy about the Messiah and then said, “Today this Scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.” Jesus then went on to discourse on that topic, thereby making His homies so irate at what they saw as His presumptuousness that they tried to throw Him off a cliff. (See LK 4:14-30). He soon learned to be more circumspect!

Please now read again those prophesies from Isaiah of Jesus’s holy birth. They are all about peace and justice and righteousness, and about bringing the genuine God among us, and therefore they are all about LOVE. Never can you find a single mention of Jesus coming to sacrifice Himself for our sins in those prophesies, no matter how hard you look for it. I am sorry, traditional Christians, and all those who still believe that God required Jesus to be born with that ghastly task before Him. I am sorry, too, for those who think that Jesus’s blood was needed to save us from the wrath of a God whose only actual emotion ever is perfect love! And those who believe that the blundering Roman Emperor Constantine, who founded the Christian religion, ever did anything right in his life. I am sorry to have to say this to those who still are trying to be religious, but the Christian religion is really not about Jesus. Not at all! And sadly, it is fear-based and not love-based, so there is little more of value that it can do for us now. The sooner we can put it behind us, the better.

Jesus’s work and His life are all about His Teachings! I doubt that He was thinking during His lifetime about the fact that a Roman Emperor bent on feeding his own power was three hundred years later going to usurp Jesus’s holy name and use it to create an unrelated religion.

Toward the end of the Lord’s earthly life, there came a remarkable scene. Jesus was with His disciples and lamenting the fact that He had given the people so many signs that He was their Messiah, and yet still, just as Isaiah had prophesied would happen, so many of them still did not believe. This was the moment when at last Jesus fully claimed and owned His role as the Messiah. He claimed it all.

But He was not looking forward to what was coming next. The “fully Man” part of Jesus was briefly transcendent in Him then, and you can see that He was deeply troubled and feeling humanly fallible. But He was not shirking anything! This whole passage is really remarkable, and I urge you to read it all; but it is long, so I will quote here just the end of it, which is relevant to our present discussion. Jesus said, “The one who believes in Me, does not believe only in Me, but also in Him who sent Me. ⁴⁵And the one who sees Me sees Him who sent Me. ⁴⁶I have come as Light into the world, so that no one who believes in Me will remain in darkness. ⁴⁷If anyone hears My Teachings and does not keep them, I do not judge him; for I did not come to judge the world, but to save the world. ⁴⁸The one who rejects Me and does not accept My Teachings has one who judges him: the Word which I spoke. That will judge him on the last day. ⁴⁹For I did not speak on My own, but the Father Himself who sent Me has given Me a commandment as to what to say and what to speak. ⁵⁰And I know that His commandment is eternal life; therefore, the things I speak, I speak just as the Father has told Me” (JN 12:44-50).

How extraordinary that whole passage is, because it is the purest truth! Jesus tells us right here and flat out as He is about to submit to His crucifixion that He is the Messiah, the Promised One of God. And that He came NOT to redeem us from God’s judgment for our sins; but instead, He came to us as our Teacher! And every word that He taught us came through Him from God. And on the “last day” for each of us, when we will have our life review and we will judge ourselves, those words from God that Jesus spoke will be the standard that we will use to judge ourselves. Every word from Jesus’s mouth during His ministry on earth has been God’s Word, all along! Omigod, what I purely love about being a Gospels scholar and an afterlife scholar both at once is the fact that these two sets of knowledge keep validating one another. And you can take it or leave it now, traditional Christians, but Jesus says it all clearly right there in your Bibles, directly in the Gospel of John.

Emmanuel does indeed mean “God with us.” What we will celebrate tomorrow is the human birth of the Son of the Living God, who came to us as our Teacher, and who reveals All Things to us. It is no wonder that Isaiah’s prophesy of Jesus’s birth calls Him the “Prince of Peace,” and says that there will be no end to the increase of His government or of peace, on the throne of David and over His kingdom, to establish it and to uphold it with justice and righteousness from then on and forevermore. Would Isaiah have said that about some poor Lamb who had to die as a sin-sacrifice to a miserly and unforgiving God? Of course not! But about the holy Teacher who came directly from God to teach all of humankind at last how we can bring genuine peace to every human heart over all the world, using God’s Own Words? And whose kingdom truly is eternal? Even two thousand years later, it has only just begun? Oh my, yes!

(For those who have expressed an interest in taking Jesus’s course, there are more than sixty of you now, and we have modified our plan to include you all. There is room for a few more, so if you have been thinking that making this your last earth-lifetime sounds like a good idea, send an email to info@robertagrimes.com by Christmas night. I will send an invitation email to all of you next week. Please watch for it!)

O come, Thou Key of David, come
And open wide our heav’nly home;
Make safe the way that leads on high,
And close the path to misery.
Rejoice! Rejoice! Emmanuel
Shall come to thee, O Israel.

O come, Adonai, Lord of might,
Who to Thy tribes, on Sinai’s height,
In ancient times didst give the law,
In cloud and majesty and awe.
Rejoice! Rejoice! Emmanuel
Shall come to thee, O Israel.
– John Mason Neale (1818-1866), translator, from a 15^th century Franciscan Processional.

Our Very Personal God

Posted on December 16, 2023December 24, 2023 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 A. Miles (1868-1946), from “In the Garden” (1912)

On the morning of April 9, 2009, and on ecstatic impulse, I gave the rest of my life to God. It seemed at the time to be only fair, after all that God had given to me. In retrospect, I have to say that, wow, when you do that, God takes you at your word! Within months after that first April 9^th, I was writing what became The Fun of Dying. Soon after that came The Fun of Staying in Touch and The Fun of Growing Forever. I met Craig Hogan, and soon he and I were giving afterlife conferences. Then Thomas came out to me through a medium. He insisted that I channel Liberating Jesus, which meant that unexpectedly for two weeks’ time I lived as Jesus’s fingers on my keyboard. So really, upon reflection I would have to say that when you give your life to God, you can look back after several years and realize that God does take your gift seriously.

And God makes it all such a happy experience! I am so much loving my life that I am shocked to notice how old the calendar says that I have lately become. In only another decade or two, I will be what sounds to me like seventeen billion years old. And yet, after the heart surgery that I had last summer, I feel as if I am only maybe forty years old. Or, okay, I’ll admit to forty-two. I am delighted to be still practicing law for the family businesses that I adore, and I continue to podcast. I am writing this blog post in the middle of the night because I habitually split-sleep. I have plans now to share the truth with the world, and that will take another fifty years at least, which is where the age thing may be an issue. I have learned so much in my very long life about the afterlife, about God, about Jesus, and about the greater reality. And I feel charged now with sharing all this knowledge with as many people as I can!

I first personally met Jesus in the astral plane just twenty months ago, in April of 2022. I don’t know what it is about April for my dearly beloved Thomas and me! My childhood experience of light happened in April of 1954, and Thomas Jefferson’s earth-birthday is April 13^th. My guess is that the month of April might have even more significance for Thomas than it has for me. But in April of 2022, I thought that even his taking me to the astral plane to meet with Jesus was too amazing a story for me ever to feel entitled to share it, although of course that wasn’t true at all. NDE-ers talk about meeting Jesus in the astral plane all the time. And back then, it was just simply meeting Jesus that absolutely freaked me out. His personal energy feels like silk to be near but it is so immensely powerful, and He was talking to me as if we were friends just casually collaborating on a project, when I was so overwhelmed and starstruck to be suddenly meeting Omigod the real Jesus! Because, of course, what I didn’t know then was that I had been Thomas’s tagalong charge just casually meeting with Jesus and my spirit guide in the astral plane on most of the nights of my earthly life.

Primary spirit guides are never supposed to leave their charges alone for long. And yet Thomas also has another, and a very much greater duty. He is a part of Jesus’s inner circle, and his role for Jesus is what Thomas calls “balance.” He helps Jesus to maintain His connection to the human aspect of Himself, which seems to me mainly as I (rarely) observe it to involve a whole lot of kidding around in what Thomas tells me is a pidgin of several obscure and probably ancient languages, and sometimes actually play-fighting on the ground like foolish teenagers, which apparently nobody else in the universe feels able to do for the Son of the Living God. So when Thomas became my spirit guide, he started to take me along at night when he visits with Jesus while my body sleeps, and he simply gave me complete amnesia for all those out-of-body nights. And his problem was altogether solved. But I had no idea that any of that was ever going on! So to Jesus, I soon became just one more of His many familiars. Thomas tells me now that I have been part of Jesus’s circle of familiars anyway for the past two thousand years, although not nearly to his own extent. But that amazing April night twenty months ago was just dropped on me from out of nowhere with no warning at all.

They had decided to let me remember some of that night, and also many of the subsequent nights of that summer, because it was time for me to start to work with Jesus on the plans that He had been brewing for a website to house His genuine teachings and eventually to become a meeting place as He begins to come out to the world more generally. We all think of Jesus as a million miles above us! He Himself is God, for heaven’s sake. He is fully God and fully Man. You cannot feel His personal energy, so utterly devoid of any human low notes, and not understand that Jesus is God. You are speaking with God. He looks at you, and you see God in His eyes. But as I have begun to know Jesus, I have come to see that what Thomas keeps telling me also is true: Jesus has a gentle servant’s heart. And He has no ego at all! Nothing about Jesus is an affectation. When He asks you questions about your day, He actually is eager to learn about your day. It truly seems never to occur to Jesus that the fact that He operates spiritually even above the Godhead level makes Him any more important than the simple person who is operating barely on spiritual Level Three. Jesus is always sweet and gentle and deeply respectful of everyone. And I cannot tell you how charming that is!

It was on that April 6^th twenty months ago that Jesus first told me His genuine Christmas-and-Easter story. Now He wants us to tell it over again on all the Christmases and Easters to come, to gradually replace what He considers to be the Roman Emperor Constantine’s bogus version that prevails in Christianity today. So here it is again. Please read it, just as Jesus told it to me. We have put Jesus’s true story on teachingsbyjesus.com as well, but Jesus tells us that He never intends to make a major deal of it. He says that He understands that some people still find comfort in the old Christianity with all its fear-based stories, even as more and more people are becoming increasingly appalled by it all. Jesus tells us that in centuries to come, people are going to be relieved to hear the true Christmas-and-Easter story, that Jesus came into the world to teach people how they can easily become Perfected Beings so they can make this lifetime on the earth the last one that they ever will need to live here. It is Jesus’s wish for each of us that we will find and follow the spiritual pathway that leads us most directly to find God’s genuine peace in our own hearts.

And Jesus has made my Thomas know that He wants now to go back to teaching what He came two thousand years ago to teach to us. He wants to share His own original Way with those who no longer find Roman Christianity to be either sensible or satisfactory. The pure Way of Jesus still remains preserved in the four Biblical Gospels. The Nicaean Councilors did modify some of the Lord’s words, true enough, but mostly what they did was just to harvest a few random words that Jesus had said, and then they built the very different fear-based teachings that Constantine and other Roman Emperors had in mind on those single plucked-out sentences. Here is one especially awful example:

“For God so loved the world, that He gave His only Son, so that everyone who believes in Him will not perish, but have eternal life. (JN 3:16)

Constantine’s Christianity uses this beautiful sentence to proclaim that God is so barbaric as to require the blood-sacrifice of God’s own Son to Godself, or else God never will forgive us for our sins.

But when we look at the Gospel passage from which this sentence was taken (it is the first of the two underlined sentences in the Gospel passage below), we see that it is about something else altogether! Jesus is actually explaining here to His loyal follower, Nicodemus, that He came to fight what He has told you and me is His own particular bane, which is our vast spiritual ignorance, and the fact that as a result of our spiritual ignorance, too many people even to this day must be born on earth repeatedly, having to reincarnate (i.e. be “born from above”) over and over again. We come back to earth repeatedly, while making very little spiritual progress each time.

What Jesus came to free us from WAS NOT the judgment and punishment of a vengeful God! Remember, Jesus tells us in that same Gospel of John that God never judges us! Jesus actually says, “For not even the Father judges anyone, but He has given all judgment to the Son, so that all will honor the Son even as they honor the Father” (JN 5:22-23). Which gives the lie altogether to Constantine’s Big Lie about what Jesus meant when He said the words at JN 3:16, does it not? No, what Jesus was born to fight was not our sins at all, but it was instead our own awful spiritual ignorance!

Or else, why did Jesus even bother to teach us anything? Why didn’t He simply step up and die on the cross right away, and then rise from the dead and head back Home? And Jesus makes all of this perfectly clear in the rest of this passage from John, where He says almost wryly that if people won’t listen to Him as He tells them how they can grow spiritually and thereby save themselves from having to keep on reincarnating forever – if they won’t “come to the Light,” as He says to Nicodemus in the passage below – then there is nothing more that He can do to help them. They have judged themselves to be unworthy of advancing spiritually. Or as He plainly puts it below, “They have loved the darkness more than the Light” (JN 3:20). But those who instead have listened to and followed Jesus’s teachings will find when they come to their post-death life-review that they have grown so much spiritually that, as was also true of Him when He lived His last earth-lifetime prior to His first ascension six thousand years ago, they have been practicing the truth so they have come to the Light, just as He says to Nicodemus in the second underlined sentence below, to the point where their deeds literally have been “performed in God.” And remember as you are reading this that the kingdom of God is the upper part of the afterlife. Omigod, how much more obvious can any of this possibly be?

Please read Jesus’s words in their Gospel context for yourself!

3¹Now there was a man of the Pharisees, named Nicodemus, a ruler of the Jews; ²this man came to Jesus at night and said to Him, “Rabbi, we know that You have come from God as a Teacher; for no one can do these signs that You do unless God is with him.” ³Jesus responded and said to him, “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless someone is born again (or born from above), he cannot see the kingdom of God.”

⁴Nicodemus said to Him, “How can a person be born when he is old? He cannot enter his mother’s womb a second time and be born, can he?” ⁵Jesus answered, “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless someone is born of water and the Spirit, he cannot enter the kingdom of God. ⁶That which has been born of the flesh is flesh, and that which has been born of the Spirit is spirit. ⁷Do not be amazed that I said to you, ‘You must be born again (or born from above).’ ⁸The wind blows where it wishes, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it is coming from and where it is going; so is everyone who has been born of the Spirit.”

⁹Nicodemus responded and said to Him, “How can these things be?” ¹⁰Jesus answered and said to him, “You are the teacher of Israel, and yet you do not understand these things? ¹¹Truly, truly, I say to you, we speak of what we know and testify of what we have seen, and you people do not accept our testimony. ¹²If I told you earthly things and you do not believe, how will you believe if I tell you heavenly things? ¹³No one has ascended into heaven, except He who descended from heaven: the Son of Man. ¹⁴And just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, ¹⁵so that everyone who believes Him will have eternal life in Him.

¹⁶“For God so loved the world, that He gave His only Son, so that everyone who believes in Him will not perish, but have eternal life. ¹⁷For God did not send the Son into the world to judge the world, but so that all the world might be saved through Him. ¹⁸The one who believes in Him is not judged; the one who does not believe has been judged already, because he has not believed in the name of the only Son of God. ¹⁹And this is the judgment, that the Light has come into the world, and people loved the darkness rather than the Light; for their deeds were evil. ²⁰For everyone who does evil hates the Light, and does not come to the Light, so that his deeds will not be exposed. ²¹But the one who practices the truth comes to the Light, so that his deeds will be revealed as having been performed in God” (JN 3:1-21).

Jesus was born to be our spiritual Teacher. He was born on earth two thousand years ago from out of the Godhead as a Divine Being, fully God and fully Man and literally God on earth, with a divine mission, which was His teaching mission, a life-plan chosen by Himself and blessed by God to teach all of us how to raise our spiritual vibrations to the point where this can be our last necessary earth-lifetime. And once His plan was completed, He chose to die a public death by crucifixion so He could then reanimate His dead body and literally rise from the dead in order to teach us that death is just an illusion. He then used that decaying body briefly before He discarded it and used an astral body for a month, after which He was bodily assumed into the astral plane, where He remains to this day. I am a skeptic by nature, so I have pretty thoroughly investigated all of this. And every bit of it is true!

I tested Jesus’s teachings on myself twelve years ago, and they worked within weeks to raise my spiritual vibration to an amazing degree. The effect was dramatic! And it has been permanent. Jesus has asked me now to begin to teach others to do what I have done for myself, so I am completing a course on how to teach a course. After having just once mentioned my plan here to do this, I received about fifty emails. Which was amazing! I had hoped to start with maybe ten people. But I am game, if you are. We will need first to learn what you will need to know and how much of it you will need to know in order for the Lord’s teachings to work their magic for you, just as they have done for me. The result is a literal transformation! And I am planning to guarantee that same transformation to every participant. We expect to begin Zoom classes in January, and to run this course for ten Wednesday evenings and then do support groups afterward. This is going to be fun! My transformation took just a few weeks, but my prior knowledge base was a factor. However, now that I understand how and why the teachings work, I am confident that our success rate can be one hundred percent. Most of the opt-in requests have come to our info@robertagrimes.com address, so to be sure that you receive an invitation, if your first email was to rgrimes@robertagrimes.com, please send a new email to the info address, and be sure to include your correct email address. Then, soon after Christmas, if you have expressed an interest, please watch your inbox!

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.

Knowing God

Posted on December 9, 2023December 10, 2023 by Roberta Grimes

My sweet Lord, Mm, my Lord, Mm, my Lord,
I really want to see you. Really want to be with you.
Really want to see you, Lord, but it takes so long, my Lord.
My sweet Lord. Mm, my Lord. Mm, my Lord.
I really want to know you. Really want to go with you.
Really want to show you, Lord, that it won’t take long, my Lord.
My sweet Lord (Hallelujah!) Mm, my Lord (Hallelujah!) My sweet Lord (Hallelujah!)
Really wanna see you! Really wanna see you! Really wanna see you, Lord!
Really wanna see you, Lord, but it takes so long, my Lord.
My sweet Lord (Hallelujah!) Mm, my Lord (Hallelujah!) My, my, my Lord (Hallelujah!)
I really wanna know you (Hallelujah!) Really wanna go with you (Hallelujah!)
Really wanna show you, Lord, that it won’t take long, my Lord (Hallelujah!)
– George Harrison (1943-2001), from “My Sweet Lord” (1970)

Beginning to find God scientifically, as we have been doing over the past two weeks, can be just the start of really coming to intimately know the genuine God. But the monstrous and distancing notions of God that our religions have been putting into our minds ever since long prehistory have made our being able to think clearly about God so hard! All our versions of gods down through the ages have been created by us in our own image as just bigger, sterner, and much more powerful versions of human beings. And our relationship with even what we thought of as the Creator God of Roman Christianity was always based on a primitive fear of a bearded, human-like and highly judgmental Deity that was loving, yes, but also quick to show anger, and was willing to throw us into a fiery hell for what seemed to be trivial crimes. Even the fact that all our versions of gods have been housed in fear-based religions has made most of us tend to see God as just an abstraction and not as anything real, as if once we do away with religions, then God also likely will disappear.

But God is real, and God is independent of whatever religion-created view of God might have been planted in our minds. That fact should be obvious to us, but somehow it feels like a stunning realization! One of the things that Jesus came to do two thousand years ago was to teach us that God is indeed real. And in so doing, He wanted to move us past our old ways of relating to our human-created gods, and teach us to relate to the genuine God only privately, without religions in the way. This was why He taught us to call God “Father,” an intimate and loving name. And He said, “When you pray, you are not to be like the hypocrites; for they love to stand and pray in the synagogues and on the street corners so that they may be seen by men. Truly I say to you, they have their reward in full. But you, when you pray, go into your inner room, close your door and pray to your Father who is in secret, and your Father who sees what is done in secret will reward you” (MT 6:5-6). Jesus had little use for clergymen. And furthermore, it is clear from the Gospels that He actively despised religious rituals and traditions. The more you read the Biblical Gospels, the more you get the sense that Jesus was trying to get rid of religions altogether so we could begin to relate to God without any remnant of any religion in the way.

So, what we are talking about doing now is developing a much deeper individual relationship with the genuine God. And the first step is to do what Jesus attempted to do for us, which was to remove from our minds the last religion-generated remnants of what God is not. God is not a fear-based and judgmental human-like idol. Instead, “God is spirit, and those who worship Him must worship in spirit and in truth” (JN 4:24). And Jesus then replaced all those old fear-based ideas about God with one new and all-encompassing commandment. “A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another, even as I have loved you, that you also love one another” (JN 13:34). And not only should we love one another, but we must especially love God, who loves us and who is so eminently worthy of our love! “‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.’ This is the great and foremost commandment. The second is like it, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ On these two commandments depend the whole Law and the Prophets” (MT 22:37-40). And Jesus made it perfectly plain that in replacing all the old, much harsher religious rules of what we now call the Old Testament, even including the Ten Commandments, He was fulfilling God’s loving plan for us. He said, “Do not think that I came to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I did not come to abolish but to fulfill” (MT 5:17).

What Jesus could not do, though, two thousand years ago, was to prove to us the existence of God scientifically. Back then there was no science to speak of! No, as we began to see in our last two weeks of posts, we had to come forward in human history by almost another two millennia, to a much more arrogant time in human terms, for people first even to begin to imagine that they could get to the point where they could scientifically explain everything, and thereby they thought that they could avoid the need to even posit the existence of a Creator God. When this peak confidence on the part of scientists was still in full swing, but it was first becoming apparent that science might not necessarily be able to explain precisely everything, which was around the turn of the twentieth century, theologians began to play with a “God of the gaps” idea, which gave a Creator God a real but steadily shrinking role. God still provided an explanation for the things that materialist science still had not yet figured out.

Nowadays, however, the joke is more and more on the materialist scientists! As trained scientists with a Christian bent find ever better funding, they are demonstrating not only the areas where mainstream science never has yet succeeded, and it likely never can succeed; but also, they are discovering that even what once had seemed to be some successful scientific theories and assumptions may not be the most workable explanations for even the most basic phenomena. Here are four core insoluble scientific problems:

The Origin of Matter. As we learned two weeks ago, the Big Bang is no explanation at all for where matter may have come from, since it does nothing more than to set an arbitrary starting point. It doesn’t explain the why or the how, and we always can ask what existed before whatever starting point the scientists might arbitrarily choose. In point of fact, their Big Bang idea explains nothing.

The Origin of Life. As we learned last week, the most intractable set of problems for materialist scientists is where life came from, how life got started, and what life even is. If the university science departments and the peer-reviewed journals had not weirdly set their system up a century ago as a battle to the death against God, literally, they could have given it up a long time ago. But how they can end it now, only God knows!

Random Evolution’s Evident Inadequacy. Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution requires that natural selection must not be driven by a Creator’s guiding hand, so it depends upon an endless series of random mutations. It does seem, though, that other theories, including that of Jean-Baptiste Lamarck that heredity can be influenced by life experiences, may also be right. And mutations occur in nature too infrequently and much too randomly to explain what the fossil record indicates actually happens. What we see instead is a whole lot of what is now being called punctuated equilibrium. Repeatedly, new species appear in the fossil record with little or no discernible evolutionary history, and they remain stable, often for millennia, before being replaced by new and quite different species virtually overnight. Any honest scientist would at this point have to say that the fossil evidence for an intelligent Creator is overwhelming.

Evident Design. The God of the gaps still fills a great many gaps! For one thing, there are far too many parts of material bodies, from eyes and ears right down to the manifold wonders of each living cell, which cannot be explained by evolutionary theory because without all their pieces already assembled and in place, they cannot usefully perform their functions. Which means that all those pieces never would have gradually assembled in the first place if random evolutionary theory were correct.

Taken together, these four points by themselves are proof delivered by the materialist scientific community itself of the obvious existence of a Creator God. Mainstream scientists gave scientific materialism their very best shot for a century, and we certainly ought to acknowledge that fact! At the start of the twentieth century, shortly before Max Planck won the 1918 Nobel Prize in Physics as the father of quantum mechanics, Dr. Planck realized that at the base of all reality is actually non-material consciousness. He came to call it Mind. He understood that he had found the Creator God, and the materialist scientists took these ideas voiced by one of their own as a direct challenge. They established their “fundamental scientific dogma of materialism” to turn the whole scientific community into an atheistic army, and they set out then to prove the estimable Dr. Planck to be entirely wrong.

The worldwide lay community as a whole does not realize that for the past hundred years it has been witnessing a battle royal, but a battle is what has in fact been going on. And until well into this new century, the materialists had the upper hand, because they controlled the money and they controlled the press. The one thing that they cannot control is the truth, and in the end the truth always was going to win. As scientists with a Christian mindset have found ever better funding, a few of the best have banded together and have devoted their careers to doing the independent research that was going to be necessary in order for them to find and to publicize the truth. At this point, and with the healthy leveling of the playing field that the Internet provides, atheistic materialist science is in its waning days. Although they are not yet ready to admit this, the mainstream scientific community itself has conclusively proven that none of what they have been claiming are the best atheistic explanations for the reality that we see around us are in fact atheistic explanations at all. But rather, the irrefutable evidence for the existence of a Creator God that the materialist scientists themselves have produced can no longer be denied.

And Jesus knew and told His disciples that this day would come! Shortly before He went to the cross, Jesus said to them,

“Whenever a woman is in labor she has pain, because her hour has come; but when she gives birth to the child, she no longer remembers the anguish because of the joy that a child has been born into the world. ²²Therefore you too have grief now; but I will see you again, and your heart will rejoice, and no one is going to take your joy away from you.

²³ “And on that day you will not question Me about anything. Truly, truly I say to you, if you ask the Father for anything in My name, He will give it to you. ²⁴Until now you have asked for nothing in My name; ask and you will receive, so that your joy may be made full.

²⁵“These things I have spoken to you in figures of speech; an hour is coming when I will no longer speak to you in figures of speech, but will tell you plainly about the Father. ²⁶On that day you will ask in My name, and I am not saying to you that I will request of the Father on your behalf; ²⁷for the Father Himself loves you, because you have loved Me and have believed that I came forth from the Father. ²⁸I came forth from the Father and have come into the world; again, I am leaving the world and going to the Father.”

²⁹His disciples said, “See, now You are speaking plainly and are not using any figure of speech. ³⁰Now we know that You know all things, and that You have no need for anyone to question You; this is why we believe that You came forth from God.” ³¹Jesus replied to them, “Do you now believe? ³²Behold, an hour is coming, and has already come, for you to be scattered, each to his own home, and to leave Me alone; and yet I am not alone, because the Father is with Me. ³³These things I have spoken to you so that in Me you may have peace. In the world you have tribulation, but take courage; I have overcome the world” (JN 16:22-33).

And my dear ones, so Jesus has indeed overcome the world! It is impossible for us to read these words that He spoke two thousand years ago, even though He spoke them in Aramaic and He spoke simply to very simple people, and not have the feeling that He was speaking to us with a clear understanding of the vastly different world that we would be confronting today. Jesus spent four thousand earth-years after his last fully human lifetime seeking to ever better understand the lush and overwhelmingly perfect love of God for imperfect humankind so He could come back to us, now from out of the Godhead, and teach us how we, too, have overcome the world. His love for us is perhaps as great as God’s love, if that is possible.

Know Jesus, and you will know God in truth! Your heart will swell to bursting if at last you can begin to understand that the God of all really does love imperfect You so much, because so it was also for me when I first understood what I am saying to you now. As hard as this may be to believe, you in particular are God’s best-beloved child, and you are treasured by God more than you can imagine.

So you know now that you fully possess God’s whole creation. You can truly trust it now! Every tiniest bit of what exists, God made for you in the fullness of God’s perfect eternal love for you. So, live in it! And truly own it! Know now, beyond all possible doubt, that none of this is random. And it isn’t even so much that, as we have conclusively demonstrated, the evidence for an intelligent Designer is everywhere. But the need for ongoing maintenance for so many of this Creation’s systems is such that without God’s continuous care in every instant, it would all long since have fallen apart. And every beautiful thing in this universe is yours to enjoy in the perfect splendor of God’s love.

So if you ever again have the slightest doubt of the Creator God’s existence, simply follow and read all the links in this week’s post and in the previous two weeks’ posts. Then go and have a long look in the mirror. Without a Creator God’s first designing and then continuously moment-by-moment maintaining the existence of this entire greater reality, including the universe and right down to all the cells and mechanisms in your own body, none of this could be here at all! Our whole mainstream scientific community has satisfactorily proven the existence of God, quite in spite of itself. Now the onus is on all the smug atheists to prove how any of this could continue to exist without the intelligent design and the ongoing close maintenance of a loving Creator God. Dr. Dawkins? Your move, Sir….

Roberta Grimes

Author: Roberta Grimes

The Sermon on the Mount

Materialist Science Leaves the Rails

Happiness

Finding God

Nothingism

Better Understanding Jesus

We Begin Anew

The Prophesies are Fulfilled

Our Very Personal God

Knowing God

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