Author: Roberta Grimes

Seeking God’s Plan (Part IV)

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

A mighty fortress is our God, a bulwark never failing.
Our Helper He, amid the flood of mortal ills prevailing.
For still our ancient foe doth seek to work us woe!
His craft and power are great, and, armed with cruel hate,
On earth is not his equal.
– Martin Luther (1483-1546) from “A Mighty Fortress is Our God” (1529)

The first modern people date to about two hundred thousand years ago. And that is astoundingly recent! The whole of our human existence on earth is just a hundred times the number of years that have passed since Jesus was born. And for nearly all that time we have been spiritual infants and toddlers, born repeatedly and dying soon, probably learning little in each lifetime as we struggled just to survive.  But even with that, it isn’t accurate to say that the Godhead was ignoring our worship of the often-barbaric Gods that we kept creating in our own image. God’s relationship with each individual always has been intimate. Every human being ever born has had a primary spirit guide whose role was to act internally and help that person to grow spiritually; and through those primary guides we always have been directly connected with the Godhead. In any event, the most basic spiritual lessons likely were better learned without God’s even hinting while we still were spiritual babies that eventually we were going to be trying to earn our spiritual Ph.D.s!

And of course, here again we should mention that pesky concept of time. The Godhead appears to be so disconnected from time that we cannot entirely imagine the divine perspective, no matter how we try. For example, we are told that all our earth-lives are happening at once, which means that from every earliest human life lived 200,000 years ago and right on through every far-future final necessary lifetime of every being who incarnates primarily on this planet, everything is happening right now. Clearly, we who are currently limited to just our earth-minds cannot begin to imagine the Godhead’s no-time perspective! So for now, we will make our learning a little easier by taking the matter-based position that time and our earth-lives are as perfectly linear as they seem to us to be.

The Jews of the Christian Old Testament have left us a wonderful history of some of God’s earliest attempts to spiritually awaken humankind. The Godhead likely first revealed Itself in many places on earth at around the same time. Here is how it happened for the Jewish prophet Moses in about 1500 BC: The angel of the Lord appeared to him in a blazing fire from the midst of a bush; and he looked, and behold, the bush was burning with fire, yet the bush was not consumed. So Moses said, “I must turn aside now and see this marvelous sight, why the bush is not burned up.”  When the Lord saw that he turned aside to look, God called to him from the midst of the bush and said, “Moses, Moses!” And he said, “Here I am.” Then He said, “Do not come near here; remove your sandals from your feet, for the place on which you are standing is holy ground.” He said also, “I am the God of your father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob.” Then Moses hid his face, for he was afraid to look at God (Exodus 3:2-6). What Moses had that day was an experience of light, which is a powerful tool the Godhead can use to grab our attention. The same thing happened to the Apostle Paul when Jesus recruited him (Acts 9:1-9); and it also happened to me when I was eight. Go figure.

The Old Testament reads like a fear-based history shot through with cruelty and pain. There is in it, though, a consistent strain of prophets who claimed to be speaking for God.  With everything we have learned about how things work, we know that these prophets were recruited before birth, and their life-plans would have included doing this work for the Godhead. But they always had the free-will right to refuse the task at any point! I was assured by Thomas after I had tried to refuse to write Liberating Jesus that if I had not finally yielded, others were in line to take my place. There are roughly sixteen Old Testament prophets, although the count can differ depending on whether a few borderline figures are included. The prophetic period of Jewish history extends from 1450 BC until a century or so before the birth of Jesus, and for our purposes there are six main themes. Here they are, each  with an example of what the prophets claimed that God was saying to us:

  • There is one eternal and all-powerful God. Notions like spiritual growth and a Collective of Perfected Beings were beyond what any Bronze Age primitive could have comprehended, so the Godhead kept it simple. For example, Thus says the Lord, the King of Israel and his Redeemer, the Lord of hosts: ‘I am the first and I am the last, and there is no God besides Me’ (Isaiah 44:6).
  • It is time for us to know the genuine God. For almost two hundred thousands years we had made and worshipped our own false gods, but it was time at last for us to begin a closer relationship with the genuine Godhead.  “The Lord was very angry with your fathers. Therefore say to them, ‘Thus says the Lord of hosts, “Return to Me,” declares the Lord of hosts, “that I may return to you,” says the Lord of hosts” (Zechariah 1:2-3).
  • God is angry. Since anger is a low-vibration emotion and the Godhead is at the highest vibration, it is probably impossible for God to actually be angry; but for the prophets to say that God was angry put the situation in terms that people could understand. The prophet Ezekiel said, “They will fling their silver into the streets and their gold will become an abhorrent thing; their silver and their gold will not be able to deliver them in the day of the wrath of the Lord” (Ezekiel 7:19).
  • God is jealous. God wasn’t actually jealous, since after all God has all the power! But here again, jealousy is a human analogy to describe God’s feelings when we worship other gods. “All the earth will be devoured in the fire of His jealousy” (Zephaniah 1:18).
  • God is heartily sick of our ritual worship. Jesus will later use this passage from Isaiah to call for an end to religious rituals, and arguably for an end to religions altogether. “Bring your worthless offerings no longer. Incense is an abomination to Me. New moon and sabbath, the calling of assemblies—I cannot endure iniquity and the solemn assembly. I hate your new moon festivals and your appointed feasts, They have become a burden to Me; I am weary of bearing them” (Isaiah 1:13-14).
  • There will be a New Covenant. Those early Jews were promised a new and more direct relationship with the genuine Godhead. For example, “Behold, days are coming,” declares the Lord, “when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and with the house of Judah” (Jeremiah 31:31).

The greatest of the Old Testament prophets also gave us some hint of what life will be like when at last the kingdom of God arrives on earth. Here is my favorite passage in the entire Old Testament:

“And the wolf will dwell with the lamb,
And the leopard will lie down with the young goat,
And the calf and the young lion and the fatling together;
And a little boy will lead them.
Also the cow and the bear will graze,
Their young will lie down together,
And the lion will eat straw like the ox.
The nursing child will play by the hole of the cobra,
And the weaned child will put his hand on the viper’s den.
They will not hurt or destroy in all My holy mountain,
For the earth will be full of the knowledge of the Lord
As the waters cover the sea” (Isaiah 11:6-9).

Isaiah also gave us a prediction of the coming miraculous birth of Jesus as God on earth:

“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, Eternal 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. The zeal of the Lord of hosts will accomplish this” (Isaiah 9:6-7).

And there was one prophet who foretold the next stage of humankind’s relationship with God by giving us an early version of the message of Jesus. What God wants from us is nothing more than just those last few lines:

With what shall I come to the Lord
And bow myself before the God on high?
Shall I come to Him with burnt offerings,
With yearling calves?
Does the Lord take delight in thousands of rams,
In ten thousand rivers of oil?
Shall I present my firstborn for my rebellious acts,
The fruit of my body for the sin of my soul?
He has told you, O man, 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 6:6-9).

Less than four thousand years ago the Godhead at last began to educate us. After having lived the first 200,000 years of humanity’s existence in superstitious fear of our human-made gods, at last we were past our toddlerhood and ready to enter spiritual kindergarten! And in order to make sure we would have the best start, an aspect of the Godhead descended in person and became our divine Teacher….

 

And though this world with devils filled should threaten to undo us,
We will not fear, for God hath willed His truth to triumph through us.
The Prince of Darkness grim, we tremble not for him!
His rage we can endure, for lo, his doom is sure.
One little word shall fell him.
– Martin Luther (1483-1546) from “A Mighty Fortress is Our God” (1529)

 

Vienna – Fresco of Moses in Altlerchenfelder church Pro Photo
Spring lambs relaxing – Vecteezy Pro Photo
Vienna – Fresco of prophet Micah Pro Photo

Seeking God’s Plan (Part III)

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

Day by day, Day by day,
Oh Dear Lord, Three things I pray.
To see thee more clearly, Love thee more dearly,
Follow thee more nearly Day by day.
– Stephen Schwartz, “Day by Day” from “Godspell” (1972)

Last week we discussed our need to better understand the Godhead so we can explore the history of humankind’s relationship with God from something like God’s perspective. It is clear from the response to what we said last week that for us truly to take the Godhead’s point of view, even just as an exercise, is going to be something of a stretch! So I hope that if you still are troubled by some of what we said last week, you will pause and read that post again. And if anything still feels like a sticking-point, please ask your questions in the comments below. If you are confused, then there are others, too, who will have those same questions in mind.

In order for us to come even close to taking the Godhead’s point of view, we first must fully internalize the fact that this universe is a pure illusion. Everything about it is freshly created in each micro-instant of artificial time, including what we think of as “the past.” You and I are eternal beings who chose to come here to have emotionally stressful experiences that will help us to learn and grow spiritually There is a lot more to know about who and what we are, but right now our focus is on coming to understanding God enough that we will be able to imagine something like God’s point of view. And to do that, we’ve got to get out of the way!

We now know that this material universe is neither very large nor very old. Evidence strongly suggests that it was created together with the first modern people, animals, and plants about 200,000 years ago. This universe has never needed to be more than a large enough habitat that the people in it would never find an edge, and it always has been freshly made in each micro-instant of its own artificial time. It may not even have been a planet at first! It might not have had a sun, but it could instead have been lit as the astral plane is lit, by the Godhead’s white spiritual light. But then of course those first people would have started to wonder where the light was coming from, especially as fire was added as a tool for human use and people witnessed their first naturally-occurring fires and learned how to make fire happen. They would have thought there must be a big fire somewhere! So to preserve humanity’s investment in the illusion, a simple solar system would have been born. And every change would have been at once part of an ever-more-complex built-in history, so it would “always” have been there.

Do you see how this apparently worked? We have no way to know how creation happened in what we might euphemistically call real-time, since time is not real and any later enhancements that were needed to keep us believing in the illusion were built into each new instant of this reality as if they had been there forever. But there was no need for the Godhead to begin with figuring out how to generate the Big Bang. And the way that it almost certainly happened would likely have produced an ever-growing Godhead Collective of Perfected Beings, just as the human need grew for ever more creative complexity.

This earth-habitat that was being gradually enriched with an ever-increasing size and an ever more complex past had just one purpose, insofar as we can determine. It was designed to facilitate the spiritual growth and enrichment of Consciousness itself. And of course that raises the question of why, as parts of the same Consciousness as the Godhead, we are not already perfect. Why was there ever this sudden need to do more? Some people, too, have asked me where the Godhead came from and how the Members of the Godhead developed spiritually before there even was a material reality. A lot of these questions can make your head spin! And with access to just our limited earth-minds, we will have to simply accept the fact that there are things that will not make sense to us until after we have died and gone home. But I think that something like the answer to most of these origin questions can be found in what A Course in Miracles suggests happened, which is that the whole need for our spiritual growth in this universe is the result of one stupid mistake. In that scenario, the brief thought of a separation within infinitely creative Mind led to an instant of actual separation, and that created the necessity for that separated part to rescue itself and figure out how to reunite with the Whole. And it may well be that since time is not real, the first Members of the Godhead were developed just as that separated part made the first bit of universe, and then They “always” were there. Do you see how weird the lack of objective time can make things seem to us?

So we know now that humanity – and probably the universe itself – all originated no more than 200,000 earth-years ago. And there would have been no need at first for the Godhead to reveal Itself. Indeed, for that to have happened so early would have interfered with early man’s emotional investment in the illusion! But still, from humankind’s very beginning the Godhead was deeply involved in the life of each individual person on earth. Everyone is born with both a guardian angel for physical protection until a chosen exit point is reached, and a spirit guide for internal guidance in helping us to make the most of our life-plans. For the helpless prey animals that we were then, these invisible helpers were miraculously important! And probably almost immediately the most spiritually sensitive members of the first human tribes were feeling and hearing their guides enough that those folks likely became our first shamans. Their spirit guides were the inspiration for our first gods.

Evidence of religious practice has been found that is many thousands of years old. It seems likely that the first human-made gods date to the advent of the earliest people, when life was tough and most of us never saw the age of thirty. Those earliest folks had no energy to spare for anything that didn’t feel essential to their survival, and yet many thousands of years before it first occurred to anyone to invent an alphabet, domesticate dogs, or even plant a seed, people were inventing gods and putting considerable effort into trying to build cooperative relationships with their gods. And all of this happened long before there is any surviving evidence that the Godhead was actively intervening in human history! Indeed, I will here go out on what feels like a fairly solid limb and say that prior to about five thousand years ago, the Godhead’s involvement in human affairs consisted of just three things:

Maintaining This Ongoing Creation

From what might at first have been nothing more than a grassy plain surrounded by a ring of forest and full of animals that you and I would recognize today, and the earliest people, created as adults, who gave birth to and nurtured the very first children, right down through a split-millisecond ago when the same illusion consists of nearly fourteen billion years of invented history and a hundred billion light-years of space, the Godhead’s patient and loving effort at perfectly preserving this illusion and continuing to build it so we will never find an edge still goes on.

Although a few scientists suspect that it is all an illusion. They just consider that suspicion to be The Truth That Cannot Speak Its Name until they have become so highly respected that they can frankly state it, as did the two greatest physicists of the twentieth century. Just a few decades into that century, Max Planck said, “I regard consciousness as fundamental…. Everything that we talk about, everything that we regard as existing, postulates consciousness.” He added in 1944, “There is no matter as such. All matter originates and exists only by virtue of a force which brings the particle of an atom to vibration and holds this most minute solar system of the atom together. We must assume behind this force the existence of a conscious and intelligent mind. This mind is the matrix of all matter.” And Albert Einstein was wonderfully insightful when he said, “Concerning matter, we have been all wrong. What we have called matter is energy, whose vibration has been so lowered as to be perceptible to the senses. There is no matter.” And, “Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one.”

Maintaining the Afterlife and the Greater Reality

Insofar as we can determine, the astral plane which is our eternal home is much bigger and more substantial than is this entire material universe. It still exists within Consciousness, true, and it is variously lit by the Godhead’s white light, but it is populated by people who know the basics of what is actually going on. All the real-seeming places in the astral plane are also mind-created, and the people themselves can choose to create and enjoy their own illusions. Most importantly of all, they know that only Mind exists, that they are part of that Mind, and that they are eternal. Everything else is beside the point.    

Guiding Each Individual on Earth

Every primary spirit guide is someone who has lived on earth fairly recently, has achieved the upper fifth level developmentally and therefore doesn’t need earth-stress to achieve more spiritual growth, and now continues to grow spiritually by guiding someone else. Our primary guides sign up with us before we are born, help us with life-planning, and then assist us in living out our plan and getting the most learning from each lesson. And they do this while they are in direct contact with the most advanced beings, including the Godhead Itself. Through our primary guides, each of us has constant intimate contact with God.

So God has always been involved in the spiritual progress of all humanity, and intimately concerned about the spiritual welfare of each precious human being. But for those first 195,000 or so earth-years of humanity’s existence we were spiritual infants in this playpen of an expanding illusory universe, just trying to learn how to sit and stand and bashing one another with anything handy. And then something amazing happened….

 

Day by day, Day by day,
Oh Dear Lord, Three things I pray.
To see thee more clearly, Love thee more dearly,
Follow thee more nearly Day by day.
– Stephen Schwartz, “Day by Day” from “Godspell” (1972)

Seeking God’s Plan (Part II)

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

O most merciful Redeemer, friend and brother,
May I know Thee more clearly,
Love Thee more dearly,
Follow Thee more nearly.
– St. Richard of Chichester (1197-1253), From his deathbed prayer (1253)

If we hope to achieve some level of understanding of how the Godhead works in the world, we are going to have to find a way to see things more from God’s perspective. And doing that is going to take a lot more humility than we have yet mustered! So as we begin, we ought to pray for God’s help in better understanding God. St. Richard’s prayer, the end of which is above, was said in Latin by the then-Bishop of Chichester on his deathbed. Praying in gratitude affirmations puts the power of our own minds into our receipt of the gift, so now in beginning with you this effort to come to better know the genuine Godhead, I pray, “Dear God, I thank You that I know Thee more clearly, love Thee more dearly, follow Thee more nearly every day.” Amen. God’s Will be done.

Before we make our attempt to know God outside of all religions, let’s first reassure ourselves that we have the Godhead’s permission. There is so much fear-based superstition surrounding religions that the notion of trying to find and know God independently makes some people afraid. But Jesus urges us to ask questions and to seek the truth. And the plain fact is that God is real! And the God that we are coming to perceive as we study the greater reality is much nicer and more loving than the Christian God, who is frankly the fantastical relic of thousands of years of fear-based human ideas about gods. It has occurred to me that what we are learning now about God might be the genuine Godhead’s direct revelation, else otherwise why would so much new information be suddenly so easy to find?

Our quest to come to know God better is easier now because in recent decades there has been an explosion of new information about what really is going on. Insofar as we can determine, the bounty of evidence that we have come to take for granted began with a concerted attempt by elevated beings not in bodies to make their presence known to us; and that effort seems to have had its beginnings about two hundred years ago. We’ve got to stress the fact that none of this new information was available to the builders of any religion! And in making a fresh effort to understand God that is rooted in these modern facts, we are doing what we should have been doing all along. We are putting God first. One fact that is abundantly obvious to every researcher of the greater reality is that God is even much more involved in each separate moment of our existence than any religious person in human history has heretofore imagined!

We could not possibly know any of what follows if it were not by divine revelation. And here are some things that we now very strongly suspect are true:

  • THE ONLY THING THAT EXISTS IS CONSCIOUSNESS. When the eminent physicist Max Planck discovered that consciousness underlies everything, he in fact began for all of us the process of finding the genuine God.
  • THE GODHEAD IS A COLLECTIVE OF PERFECTED BEINGS. Oh, how I have fought this idea! But it fits with so much else that we have learned about how things work at the highest levels, and Thomas is telling me now to just get over my squeamishness. There is no One Big Guy on a Throne with a Long Beard and Thunderbolts, far away from us and looking down on us. There is instead an infinitely powerful Collective of what is actually Us Perfected. No wonder God knows us and loves us so well!
  • WHAT WE EXPERIENCE AS REALITY IS IN THE NATURE OF SHARED THOUGHT. Our own thoughts feel ephemeral and private to us, but the Godhead’s “thoughts” are as solid and public as the hand in front of your face.
  • MATTER, ENERGY, SPACE AND TIME ARE NOT OBJECTIVELY REAL. We can accept this fact about everything but time, since we can think about the universe (for example) as solid and gigantic when we know the thought of it has neither substance nor size. But without time, doesn’t everything just happen at once? Doesn’t even a thought require time for you to think it? As difficult as this is for us to imagine, objective time simply is not real. Welcome to eternity! If something real exists in this moment, then it always has existed and it always will exist. And the only thing that exists right now is Mind. Your own mind is inextricably part of that one Mind, so you are eternal. By definition.
  • OUR REALITY IS NEWLY CREATED IN EACH MICRO-INSTANT OF NON-TIME. Here is another notion that I have been fighting, but no other theory makes so much sense. Reality can best be understood as something like a filmstrip, which is a series of pictures in which tiny changes are made from picture to picture. When those pictures are run in quick series, we experience it as one continuous reality. And the same is true of the reality around us now! Each “picture” in this ongoing reality includes all of what we think of as the past, which means that our past can be freshly revised or augmented in each instant. And apparently our past is being created to be steadily more complex, as human beings become both more curious and better able to figure things out. The Godhead wants to stay ahead of us in order to preserve this illusion! I understand how impossible it seems to us for each instant to be freshly created with tiny changes for each of more than seven billion people, many trillions of animals and insects, and even many more trillions of galaxies, each containing no-number-is-big-enough stars which might carry planets that harbor their own versions of living things. But apparently the Godhead does it easily, although if we understand what is going on we can spot God’s little fudges here and there. I’ll give you a few examples below.

For now, we only know that the evidence is strong that these five statements are some version of true. And wonderfully, they help us explain so much! Here are three quick examples to ponder:

The Godhead Can be Both Powerful and Personal

I have always been a skeptic. I don’t want just comforting answers that make no sense! When I was a child, I would hear people talk glowingly about a “personal God,” and I knew even then that One God on a Throne in Heaven could not possibly be a personal God for each of us individually. If it were not for my experiences of light, I likely would have ended up an atheist. But the genuine Godhead turns out to be a gigantic Collective of thousands of Perfected Beings whose minds are in such perfect harmony that together they make one infinitely powerful Mind. There also are billions of beings who have grown past their need to incarnate and are furthering their ongoing spiritual growth by serving humanity. Each of us has at least one spirit guide, and for all we know each guide works with a preferred aspect of the Godhead. Jesus is an aspect of the Godhead with whom many of our guides are in contact. That seems to be roughly how it actually works. And that makes sense. Even to me!

Reality is Infinitely Scalable

There are many very important questions that materialist scientists never will answer. But the Godhead, in staying always just ahead of us, is able to keep scientists happily busy trying! Here are three such scientifically insoluble and highly scalable puzzles out of very many:

  • How did the universe begin? Our ancestors ten thousand years ago (or even just a hundred years ago) had little interest in figuring out the history of the universe. Then in 1920 someone was inspired to propose what became known as the Big Bang. Of course, going back to something the size of a single atom that explodes to become the universe still doesn’t tell us where that first speck came from or what caused that amazing explosion, but no doubt the Godhead will eventually build in answers to those questions that will “always” have been there.
  • How did life begin? The simplest explanation is that life is a property of consciousness, but scientists aren’t yet ready to accept the idea that consciousness is primary. To indulge them, the Godhead may well soon come up with a life-creating process to be found by scientists that “always” has existed but was just “overlooked.”
  • What is beyond the universe? Neanderthals needed only this solar system. We, however, need a gigantic and ever-expanding universe so we never will find a disturbing edge and have to fret about what might be beyond that. So we have precisely the limitless universe that we need! And there is some evidence that the process of creating ever more galaxies to stay ahead of us still goes on.  

A Lot of Odd Glitches Are Now More Understandable

A reality that is remade freshly in each instant can remain stable while it is being tailored on an ongoing basis to the Godhead’s needs and to our own. For example, here are just three of what are many impossible-seeming facts that represent what amount to God’s short-cuts in creating our past and present earth-reality. When it becomes necessary to fill them in with more details to keep us busy, we can only assume that will happen:

  • Cosmological constants. We are told that there are 26 values that must remain within tiny tolerances or the universe will either implode or blow apart. They must remain “constant,” but in fact some of them keep minutely adjusting!
  • Punctuated equilibrium. There are many “missing links” in the histories of each of the 8.7 million species of plants and animals living on earth. Species will remain stable for thousands or millions of years, and then they will be replaced by new species almost at once and without anything like a sufficiently long transitional period of Darwinian natural selection.
  • About ninety percent of modern species came into existence within the last two hundred thousand years. When God established modern people, God almost simultaneously set the stage for us with all the other modern animals and plants. For this to have happened on its own, so recently and so quickly, is so unlikely that just thinking about it can make your eyes cross.

God is real! And God loves us! There is nothing else that matters beside that single perfect truth. God has always been minutely involved with us, but so respectfully that spotting God’s precise role is difficult. Let’s see now what we can discover about God’s involvement from God’s perspective….

Thanks be to Thee, my Lord Jesus Christ,
For all the benefits Thou hast given me,
For all the pains and insults Thou hast borne for me.
– St. Richard of Chichester (1197-1253), From his deathbed prayer (1253)

 

Texas desert photo credit: G Yancy <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/141788246@N08/51010193191″>Arches Canyon</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/”>(license)</a>

 

Seeking God’s Plan (Part I)

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

Love’s redeeming work is done, Alleluia!
Fought the fight, the battle won, Alleluia!
Death in vain forbids him rise, Alleluia!
Christ has opened paradise, Alleluia!
Charles Wesley (1707-1788), from “Christ the Lord Is Risen Today” (1739)

All the gods that we ever have worshiped have been human–made. This is true even of the Christian God, who is based on the ancient Hebrew Yahweh. We have imagined the modern versions of our gods to be less cruel and a lot less scary, but still their ancient shape remains. And now I am wondering why.  Humanity has long since split the atom, journeyed to the moon, even begun to cure cancer; but still we envision the same static God for whom the first Christian martyrs died. We haven’t even progressed to the much more loving God-just-as-Spirit that Jesus introduced! Despite the tweaks of the Protestant Reformation, we still adhere to basically the same Christianity that ruled by superstitious terror, carried out the barbaric Crusades, and tortured and burned many infidels alive.

But why should it still have to be this way, when at last we know that there actually is a genuine Creator God unlike any god that any religion has imagined? Being reminded last week of the staggering eternal importance of the Easter events that we never could have fully appreciated until after the twenty-first century began has made me think that it might be time for us to reconsider everything. Two thousand years ago the Godhead directly intervened in human history in a way that was designed to be fully obvious to us only two thousand years later. It was a genuine divine revelation! But then, as with every other religion, Christianity was created and soon frozen in time. Its dogmas have changed little in a thousand years.  If God was watching our subsequent progress and later judged that the time was right for another major revelation, then unfortunately God would have been out of luck because the religion based in the incomparable divine events that were the life and teachings of Jesus has been sealed by its people for all time. If the Godhead has something more to say, how will any of us ever hear it? Isn’t it time for us to start to try to better understand what the living God actually wants?

Albert Einstein was a gigantic intellect, but at heart he was a relatable guy. One day in 1925 as he shared a walk with a young student he said to her, “I want to know how God created this world. I’m not interested in this or that phenomenon, in the spectrum of this or that element. I want to know His thoughts. The rest are just details.” How perfectly wise he was! And now you and I want to know God’s thoughts about the Godhead’s eternal plan for humankind. We aren’t interested in physics, which turns out to be a mere detail of this limited illusion that seems to be solid but in fact is not. Nothing physical is objectively real, since all that actually exists is Mind; and the laws and details of human physics seem more and more to be just the Godhead’s inventions to keep us amused and distracted. And of course that raises yet another question! There have been increasing hints that the Godhead is a Collective of Perfected Beings that is continuously creating the universe freshly in each instant of artificial time, and is steadily making our past more complex in what seems to be an effort to stay ahead of our attempts to figure things out. But why is that? What on earth is going on?

A quick perusal of our archive here reveals that we have asked variations of these biggest of all human questions many times, but always just in limited ways. It seems that we had to tackle this process in pieces and build toward even knowing how to ask the biggest questions. And beings who are no longer in bodies have lately been telling us that the limited aspects of our vast, eternal minds that we bring into these material bodies are meant just for efficient spiritual learning. They say that we cannot possibly expect to use such puny earth-minds to address the very biggest things!

That may be true. But we are not deterred. Jesus invites us to ask our questions, not suggesting that we limit them by size; and already our trusting Him to give us answers has yielded some amazing insights! He says, “Ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives, and he who seeks finds, and to him who knocks it will be opened” (MT 7:7-8). So now we ask Him to help us find some answers to the biggest questions of all, while knowing that we won’t fully understand whatever answers we might find. We trust that over time our perceptions will grow. And finally, when at last we get to go home, we are assured that we will know it all! Here is one way that we might frame our primary question:

 How is the Godhead involved in human affairs?

This always has been humanity’s core question, even though we seldom have posed it as a question. Religions have assumed all kinds of things, from gods that deal minutely with every one of our individual wishes and needs to gods that hold us on the edge of disaster and require that we placate them by throwing our firstborn infants into their belly of fire. The Christian version of God is both gods at once, since we confidently pray for things like no rain for some event on Thursday while we also know that because of Adam’s sin we might wind up burning in hell forever. And I cannot recall even once in all my years of being a practicing Christian being told that we should, in complete love and trust, pray only and always for what God wants!

No, that is not quite true. In the greatest prayer ever imagined, the prayer that God in Human Form taught us to pray, we do say “Thy will be done.” But have we ever seen any Christian take those words seriously enough to stop asking God for anything else?

Last week we talked about the life of Jesus. We know now that there was a time when the highest aspect of the Godhead lived a whole life as a human being in an effort to understand us on our own terms. And we are told that Jesus did that so He could then teach us how we could better grow spiritually. Knowing what we know now, it is not an overreach for us to see the life of Jesus on earth as a hinge of human history, since it was the first moment when we could have ceased our endless religious floundering and begun a real relationship with the genuine Godhead.

But, why then? And why just once? And also, here is an astounding question: Why was evidence given to us way back then in all the details of the Shroud of Turin that we would be unable to see as key evidence for an additional two thousand years?

 Since it is reasonable to assume there may be a divine plan, how does that singular gigantic event two thousand years ago fit with whatever came before it, and also fit with whatever divine events may have come after it? It seems to be extremely important that we seek now to know as much as we can! We have talked here about human religious history, but always just from our human perspective. Even when we thought we saw God taking some role, we clueless human beings have applied that role to whatever particular religious tradition we personally most favored. This is why Christians love the new evidence provided by the Shroud of Turin! They don’t yet see it as the reproof to all of Christian history that it might well be.

These musings are not sacrilegious. They are instead the height of loving respect for the only genuine Godhead! As humankind still continues to worship human-made gods in the very same ways that our human-made religions already were prescribing to us many centuries ago, we tell ourselves that we are honoring the genuine God. In fact, we are doing nothing of the kind. Instead, we are smugly telling God that we already know what God wants from us!

That fact is indisputably true. No clergyman can deny it! Many years ago, as I was converting to Catholicism and trying to do my best at it, I asked my priest a great many of the same questions that we have been asking here. And soon his answer was automatic. No matter what I asked him, he would simply say, “That is what we believe. You’re going to have to accept it.” Which is precisely the same thing that all our religions are saying now to the genuine Godhead! Every religious person is always telling God that we already know what God wants. And maybe we do, since after all Christians believe that God ‘inspired” all the councilors at the First Council of Nicaea. And perhaps all the other Christian councils, too. Maybe God has been whispering in human ears every one of the times that anyone on earth has assumed that any event at all has actually been a new divine revelation, from the Buddha’s moment of murmuring “I am awake” some five hundred years before the Lord was born to the amazing discovery of messages on “golden plates” in New York State in 1830. And we could name fifty other such “divine revelations,” just off the top of our heads! Convincing people we have received the Divine Word of God and then starting or revising some religion or other has long been a productive and highly satisfying role in life for a great many people.

But in trying to contain God in all these tens of thousands of human-made religious variations, we have been closing our minds and hearts to the love and guidance of the genuine Godhead. So we ought to begin to ask the question that we should have been asking all along:

How has God been relating to us?

I realize now that I was first prompted by Thomas to begin working toward asking these questions a couple of years ago, when I stopped blogging just when I got around to it and began to do it religiously (sorry!) each week. And just as I didn’t know where that was heading, so I have no idea where this is heading now.

But I do know that it is long past time for us to seek to know the genuine Godhead. Unless we at least attempt to understand what has been going on from God’s perspective, we will remain stuck forever in these human-made religions that will let us pursue a relationship with God only from our own perspective. And what kind of a one-sided love is that?

As Moses is quoted as having put it to the Israelites before they entered their Promised Land 3250 years ago, “The eternal God is a refuge, and underneath are the everlasting arms” (Deut 33:27). If there ever has been a time in the past three thousand years when all of humankind together desperately needed the comfort and safety of the genuine Godhead’s everlasting arms, it is now….

 

Lives again our glorious King, Alleluia!
Where, O death, is now thy sting? Alleluia!
Once he died our souls to save, Alleluia!
Where’s thy victory, boasting grave? Alleluia!
Charles Wesley (1707-1788), from “Christ the Lord Is Risen Today” (1739)

 

Sunlit sea foam photo credit: giopuo <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/75459497@N00/48758137336″>2019_09_19a</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/”>(license)</a>

Christ the Lord Is Risen Today

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

Christ the Lord is risen today, Alleluia!
Earth and heaven in chorus say, Alleluia!
Raise your joys and triumphs high, Alleluia!
Sing, ye heavens, and earth reply, Alleluia!
– Charles Wesley (1707-1788), from “Christ the Lord Is Risen Today” (1739)

At Easter we celebrate the most important set of events in human history. Insofar as we know, nothing else like it ever has happened, either before or since; and the significance of those events could not have been understood by anyone who witnessed them. Indeed, it is likely that even today we don’t yet know what it all really means! And the fact that a couple of centuries later a new religion created its own dogmas around that extraordinary set of events doesn’t make what happened any less the wondrous possession of ALL of humankind.

Two thousand years ago an element of the highest aspect of the Godhead was born in a human body as God on earth, both to study humanity and to teach us how to achieve the next stage of our spiritual development. To prove to iron-age primitives that death is an illusion, God in human form then allowed Himself to be publicly murdered so His body could lie in a tomb for two days before He re-animated it and rose from the dead. What an amazing story! And now we know that the miraculous events of that extraordinary life were indisputably REAL!

The fact that God chose to be naturally born and to live an entirely human life and death is important. We assume that God knows everything, but in fact my dear spirit guide, Thomas, has told me that once the more spiritually perfected members of the single consciousness that humanity shares cease to incarnate, they pretty quickly lose touch with what it’s like to be a human being. He tells me that Jesus came to us from the highest aspect of the Godhead in part so God could “look through His eyes” and better understand why we were finding it so hard to do what our earth-life is designed to do, which is to help us grow rapidly away from fear and hatred and toward ever more perfect love.

Last Easter we talked about the fact that based upon very extensive modern studies of the Shroud of Turin, the Resurrection of Jesus can be treated as an evidence-based historical event. And in fact, there also is a lot of evidence that Jesus really did live on earth. Astonishingly, there even is evidence that His death in 33 AD was brought about in part by a financial panic (of all things!). And we know now based on evidence that the Gospels are real historical documents, even if they were somewhat altered by later Christian councils. We are fortunate that an army of Christian researchers has been working for more than a century, seeking  every possible confirmation that Jesus is a proven historical figure and the miraculous events of His life were real.

Anglican scholar and bishop N. T. Wright is one of those seeking to prove the reality of Jesus and His miracles. He has written a facts-dense and lengthy book called The Resurrection of the Son of God, where he makes a number of evidence-based claims. He specifically notes that the eyewitness accounts contain details large and small that strongly suggest that these were real events. For example:

* The idea of a murdered corpse dead for days suddenly reanimating on its own is found in no other religious tradition. Such an event is miraculous, true, but it’s also ghoulish and off-putting.

* The Gospel Resurrection accounts feel grounded in plausible facts. For example, the mentions of the discarded shroud and the face-cloth lying separately folded seem like genuine details that an eyewitness would have noticed and mentioned.

* Jesus’s body had been damaged by its death, decay, and subsequent reanimation. And damaged in ways that Iron Age people creating a story from whole cloth are unlikely to have  considered or known how to describe. People who had been in frequent contact with Jesus didn’t even recognize Him at first, which suggests that two days of decay had altered the body’s appearance and perhaps had interfered with His ability to fully re-animate it. Interestingly, Jesus also seems to have considered His risen body to be so fragile that He asked that Mary not touch it. These are such gritty eyewitness details that even you or I would have been unlikely to have thought of them.

The execution of Jesus was an unexpected disaster for His followers. They had come to believe He was the Messiah, the Son of God, perhaps God on earth. They were so demoralized by the Lord’s death that they hurried to huddle behind closed doors, bereft now of all the excitement and hope that Jesus had inspired in them. He had just been executed as a criminal! And now perhaps they also were criminals? For me, the way so many of them were immediately and altogether transformed by His Resurrection may be the most important evidence of all that Jesus did rise from the dead. Once they saw and talked with the risen Lord, His disciples were infused with implacable zeal! They went from cowering in despair to fearlessly proclaiming what they had witnessed to all who would listen to them, and many of them were eventually martyred. These people were the source of all those Easter stories. And nothing can explain their sudden transformation beyond a certainty that they had witnessed an event so miraculous that it was worth all their lives.

There are other scholars, too, whose work provides further powerful evidence that the Resurrection was real. For example, Timothy Keller is a noted theologian. His brand-new book on the Resurrection of Jesus is called Hope in Times of Fear: The Resurrection and the meaning of Easter. One of Pastor Keller’s many insights is that when English translations of the Bible talk about “hope,” the word doesn’t do justice to the Greek word used in the New Testament, which is elpida. Keller tells us that a more precise translation would be “profound certainty.” This may seem like a little thing, but the New Testament contains many references to “hope in the Resurrection of the dead” and “hope in God.” If we read these passages as “profound certainty” in God and in the Resurrection, they are very different and much more positive claims!

I have mostly dismissed the Apostle Paul as a naïve first-century fabulist who never even knew Jesus. And clearly, Paul never had access to anything like the Lord’s whole story! But Thomas has made me see that Paul was Jesus’s very useful servant. Paul organized and inspired His earliest followers as they preserved His earthly life and teachings, and some of what Paul wrote was actually channeled by Spirit. Now Timothy Keller has helped me see that some of the stories told in Paul’s letters are actual contemporaneous accounts! He says of Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians, Chapter 15, Verses 3-7:

One of the oldest theories is that the legends of Jesus’s resurrection developed only many decades after the actual events had faded from living memory. But the 1 Corinthians text is itself an important piece of evidence against that view. Verses 3–7 are now seen by most New Testament scholars as not an original Pauline composition but rather an early gospel summary used by the earliest church in its evangelism and instruction which Paul is citing. As he says in verse 3, these words were “received,” not created by him, and then “passed on” to others. Scholars also show that the vocabulary in these verses — “according to the Scriptures,” “on the third day,” “the Twelve” are not terms Paul uses elsewhere in his writings. So this was a gospel summary that was already in widespread use by Christians all around the Mediterranean world when Paul wrote. Since this letter to the Corinthians was written only fifteen or twenty years after Jesus’s death, the eminent biblical scholar James Dunn concludes that “we can be entirely confident” that this summary in 1 Corinthians 15:3–7 “was formulated . . . within months of Jesus’s death” (with thanks to Father Richard Rohr).

So there you have it. Two thousand years ago an aspect of the Godhead was born on earth as a human being and lived as one of us for thirty years while He studied the people around Him and came to better understand them. Then for a few years He publicly taught His flock how to overcome this world’s extreme negativity and use it to better grow spiritually. And finally, to prove to primitive people that human beings don’t really die, God in human form allowed Himself to be publicly tortured, murdered, wrapped in a shroud, and laid in a tomb. Two days later He re-animated His dead body with an extraordinary burst of energy, and He showed Himself to His disciples. The entire life of Jesus is a set of divine miracles unique in human history!

But there is no good evidence that Jesus meant to start a new religion. In fact, there is considerable evidence that He came to end our long dependence on our man-made religious beliefs and teach us to relate to God directly and entirely on our own. Jesus is in fact both God on earth and an adamantly non-religious figure. His amazing life is a timeless gift to all of humankind! And now, at long last, it is time for us to listen to the historical Jesus, and to seek to understand and then willingly defer to the Godhead’s wishes about what should come next….   

Soar we now where Christ has led, Alleluia!
Following our exalted Head, Alleluia!
Made like Him, like Him we rise, Alleluia!
Ours the cross, the grave, the skies, Alleluia!
– Charles Wesley (1707-1788), from “Christ the Lord is Risen Today” (1739)

Mourning My Religion

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

How do I love thee? Let me count the ways….
I love thee with the passion put to use
In my old griefs, and with my childhood’s faith.
I love thee with a love I seemed to lose
With my lost saints. I love thee with the breath,
Smiles, tears, of all my life; and, if God choose,
I shall but love thee better after death.
– Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806-1861) from Sonnets from the Portuguese 43 (1850)

I hear from many disaffected Christians. Some pour out their hearts to me, telling me they have been devout and happy in the religion for their entire lives until whatever age they are right now – usually they are in their fifties or sixties – but of late, they have become disillusioned. There are too many questions that lack good answers, too much that troubles them about Christian beliefs, and they simply no longer feel comfortable about being part of any Christian denomination. Many seem to see the way I have freed myself as their welcome inspiration to make the leap themselves. Some will ask me questions that suggest they are still nervous about suffering some level of divine retribution if they actually leave the religion; but most seem to think I can address their worries. After all, I successful broke away, and look how happy I am now! How close to Jesus! How spiritually fed and joyful and fulfilled I seem to be!   

And I am indeed joyful. But it hasn’t been easy. My leaving traditional Christianity altogether was a move that I resisted for as long as I could, until in the end I really had no choice. And leaving Christianity has brought me so much closer to God in a truth-based reality that at last makes perfect sense! So I have no regrets about leaving Christianity. But I mourn the religion I have lost. I’ve made peace with my grief over the past two decades, much as you would make peace with the death of anyone very close to you. But still, at this time every year just the thought of what I have given up for Jesus feels like a small cloud of sadness in my springtime sky. Despite everything, I still love my religion!

I know from emails that this pining for Christianity after leaving it happens to others, too; and since that is true, it is past time for us to talk about what for many years felt to me like a personal failing. I converted to Catholicism at marriage, and then I came to love it so much that I held onto it long after I should have let it go. I love Jesus with everything in me! And the more I have studied His life and His words, the more convinced I have become that the religion has nothing to do with Jesus. In fact, it is impossible to follow the Lord if you let the religion remain between you.

But Christianity still displays such a comforting face! Despite all that is wrong with that old-time religion, if you ever have been at all devout you will find that the religion you abandon for Jesus is going to have its roots in your deepest heart. The longer you follow the Way of Jesus, the more He will reinforce your choice; but still, and perhaps forevermore, Christmas and Easter can make you ache for your old-time Christian life. And for the joy of singing Christmas carols! For candle-lit Christmas Eve services that always fill your heart with joy! For glorious sunrise services at dawn on every Easter morning, when you discover once again that empty tomb!

And most of all, what I still miss is that old-time Christian certainty. Growing up in a traditional Christian home makes you know when you are too young to fight the lessons that you are a sinner, that hell is real, and that Jesus had to die so God would forgive you and let you into heaven. You grew up knowing the deal you had made, and you knew that God and Jesus would stand behind it; but to keep your get-out-of-hell-free card you would have to keep going to church each week. Eventually I had done enough research to be sure there is no get-out-of-hell-free card, and nor is there ever any need for one; but nevertheless, I kept going to Mass for years after I could have made the break.

I told myself I was keeping my husband company, but I realize now that I still craved that wafer! I had learned enough of the truth that I was sure that in order to get closer to Jesus I was going to have to abandon the fear-based religion that still came between us; but there remained that small, residual fear that I had internalized in childhood. And I still felt the relief of knowing as that wafer melted on my tongue that I had sealed my deal with God for one more week. It was only when our local parish completed work on its beautiful new church that featured a life-sized, full-color plaster Jesus bleeding on a cross above the altar that I was able to stop attending church. I couldn’t bear even to look at Jesus being eternally crucified,  so at last I welcomed into my heart the eternally risen Lord and asked Him to assume control of my life.

If you also find yourself still mourning your religion at susceptible times of the year, here are some measures that might lessen your burden:

  • You still can call yourself a Christian. When I first realized how harmful to the mission of Jesus all those fear-based Christian dogmas are, I began to tell people I was “an originalist Christian” (whatever that means). But in fact, I soon realized that following just the Lord’s teachings makes us even more profoundly followers of Christ than any traditional Christian ever could be! So now I simply call myself a Christian. If someone asks about my denomination, I say that I strictly follow the Lord’s teachings. Whatever that denomination is, that’s what I am.
  • Minimize your traditional celebrations. With our children grown, we don’t put up a Christmas tree or play carols in the house, but we still give Easter baskets to our grandchildren. We share some lovely family holiday dinners, but we keep them generic. No one seems to mind.
  • Find ways to duplicate the warmth of Christian fellowship. To be a Christian is to have a cozy Sunday family and share lots of weekly smiles and hugs! I finally left Catholicism when my oldest grandchildren were preschoolers, and I wanted them to have an early church experience so I joined a nearby Unity Church and enrolled them in its Sunday school. In retrospect, I realize now that having a pleasant and largely dogma-free church home for a time made my transition to spiritual freedom easier.
  • Find ways to duplicate the joy of Christian service to others. The fact that these messages arrive in your inbox on Sunday mornings is no accident! My faithfully writing these posts, producing Seek Reality podcasts, and answering every stranger’s email has given me a ministry. For you, your calling might instead be to volunteer in a homeless shelter or a soup kitchen, or perhaps to serve as a mentor somewhere. Just prayerfully do whatever feels right to you!
  • Continue to enjoy Christian habits that are not fear-based. My own favorite tradition is the fact that I began to give up chocolate for Lent when I was sixteen years old. I still give up chocolate for Lent to this day, and when my Catholic husband teases me about it I tell him that if I eat chocolate at Lent there will be a thunderbolt right through the ceiling. And he doesn’t want to have to pay to fix that. I never have been afraid to eat chocolate, but rather my habit seems to be a kind of joke that the Lord and I can share. If there is some habit that still feels special to you as a holdover from your former Christian practice, then so long as you aren’t doing it from fear, there is little harm in keeping it going.
  • Spend quality time with Jesus. I think it’s this craving I have to know the Lord better, more than any other single thing, that has helped me to keep my priorities right. If you simply give up practicing your religion and you never find anything to take its place, you are likely to be nagged by the emptiness in your life that you yourself have created. Of course you are going to mourn and feel guilty about having abandoned Christianity, and you’ll keep some residual fears besides! But if you invite Jesus into your heart and develop the habit of reading His words, sharing thoughts with Him, and simply building a closer and richer daily walk, you will find that He soon will nicely fill that briefly empty place in your heart.

It has been estimated that half of the Christian churches in the United States that closed for Covid last spring will be closed for good within the year. Our fading pandemic might be accelerating what already was a rapid decline. So it is time now for all of us to make real for Jesus the Christian Way that He taught us long ago. Next week let’s begin to celebrate the joy of at last really knowing and living the Way of our eternally risen Lord.

 

How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.
I love thee to the depth and breadth and height
My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight
For the ends of being and ideal grace.
I love thee to the level of every day’s
Most quiet need, by sun and candle-light.
I love thee freely, as men strive for right;
I love thee purely, as they turn from praise.
– Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806-1861) from Sonnets from the Portuguese 43 (1850)

Vecteezy – Church in Singapore

 

 

Know Yourself

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, and sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood, and looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair, and having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear; though as for that, the passing there
Had worn them really about the same.
– Robert Frost (1874-1963), from “The Road Less Traveled” (1916)

The strangest part of doing afterlife research is the fact that so much wonderfully consistent evidence is so easily found. You don’t even have to dig for it, so afterlife research is a lot of fun! Then as you pick bushels of low-hanging fruit and the puzzle almost solves itself, you start to wonder, since this is so easy, why everyone doesn’t already enjoy the certainty that human life is eternal. The first decades of the twentieth century were a time of vast progress in both afterlife studies and quantum mechanics; and yet the former went nowhere while the latter has thrived. Why is that?

My weekly podcast, Seek Reality, is nearly eight years old. Many of our guests are experts in afterlife studies and related fields with a recent book to share, and I have just read a book written by future Seek Reality guest Bob Gebelein. Bob is a learned gentleman in his eighties who has spent the past half-century in a fight with the scientific community. The result is his terrific book called Dirty Science – How Unscientific Methods Are Blocking Our Cultural Advancement. Of course, I long ago realized that mainstream science was refusing to study anything that was not material. But it was only when I read Bob’s book that I first could see the extent of the harm that is now being done by the scientific leaders we all so completely (but unjustifiably) trust.

Our discussion here last week horrified some readers. It is hard for us to imagine that an end-times war might be started by Christians in the United States just a mere seven generations from now! How could so much go wrong so fast? As I responded to emails and comments, I began to think Thomas had been off the mark in insisting that we share his Apocalyptic warning. But then I read Bob Gebelein’s Dirty Science. I have pointed out in this space that mainstream science transformed itself into a belief-system more than a century ago by decreeing that all scientific research must henceforth be based in “the fundamental scientific dogma of materialism” (and yes, back then you could find those words in print). But I didn’t realize until I read Dirty Science that the key ingredient in the horrid stew of our twenty-first century reality that might actually end the world before long is that selfsame “dirty science.” To this day, scientists uniformly insist that we are meat and nothing more, that our minds are born and die with our brains, and that the only thing that needs to be studied is all the “solid” stuff we think we see around us. Bob Gebelein has very well described an alarming situation that absolutely could lead to the prompt destruction of our planet by its own inhabitants!

Mainstream science still refuses to investigate any non-material phenomenon. Funding is the lifeblood of scientific research, and except for just a few notable exceptions – reincarnation research at the University of Virginia first comes to mind – there is no significant funding available for scientific research in any non-material field. And yet scientists pontificate. They render dismissive judgments in areas where they are deliberately and proudly ignorant! Bob points out that “In fact, they have been so successful in studying the physical reality that they have asserted that the only way to do science is to explore the physical reality with the physical senses. And they have taken this one step further, to decree that the only reality is the physical reality. The spiritual does not exist, psychic abilities are impossible, and the mind is nothing but the physical brain, which must be studied with the physical senses. But, in fact, these other aspects of reality do exist, and there are other modes of perception besides the physical senses with which to perceive them and make scientific observations.”

He is precisely right. Mainstream science has been remarkably successful at making sense of the physical aspects of our reality, but the non-physical aspects are densely intertwined with the physical. And they are every bit as important! For scientists to study anything without also studying its nonphysical aspects will render any scientific opinion in even what seem to be the physical fields to be only limited and inadequate on its face.

Bob Gebelein gives us the four dirty methods that the organized scientific community still uses to keep everyone with scientific credentials from venturing beyond approved areas of study, and to keep the public ignorant:

  • Argument from authority. Bob prefers to call it “argument from status.”
  • Refusal to look at the evidence. Scientists can then say “No evidence exists.”
  • Ridicule. They dismiss researchers of nonmaterial phenomena and their whole fields of study with demeaning and insulting labels.
  • Power politics. University departments and peer-reviewed journals exercise tight control over what can be funded, studied, and published. Scientists are quick to say to one another, “Nice career you’ve got there! Too bad if something should happen to it….”

Bob also provides what he calls “the List” of fields where scientists claim to have solidly proven that this or that area of study is bogus, even though they have done no research at all. Here are some scientific claims often made based on no research whatsoever:

  • Intuition doesn’t exist.
  • Psychic abilities don’t exist.
  • Parapsychology is pseudoscience.
  • The spiritual areas do not exist.
  • The mind is nothing but the physical brain.

Yet amazingly, a few scientists have dared to buck mainstream science’s power and have investigated and spoken about some forbidden non-material fields. And these most courageous scientists of all have included a few immortal titans:

Max Planck, the father of quantum mechanics, 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.” Then in 1944 he said, “As a man who has devoted his whole life to the most clear-headed science, to the study of matter, I can tell you as a result of my research about atoms this much: There is no matter as such.”

Albert Einstein also came to understand that nothing is solid. He said, “Concerning matter, we have been all wrong. What we have called matter is energy, whose vibration has been so lowered as to be perceptible to the senses. There is no matter.” He also said, “Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one.”

The dirty methods employed by the scientific community to keep most people ignorant have come to pose an existential threat to the future of humankind. Despite having done little or no research, our culture’s most respected experts still insist that every bit of evidence backs the scientific certainty that:

* We are meat. And despite what so often feels to us like amazingly complex internal lives, our minds and our awareness arise from just the mortal meat enclosed in our skulls.

* Nothing spiritual exists. There is no God, no astral plane, no afterlife, no angels. Every spiritual encounter, near-death experience, out-of-body experience, and sign from a dead loved one is just a hallucination created by our meat-based minds.

* There cannot be any post-death life. Consciousness ends with the death of the brain. The only thing that exists is matter, so our only possible immortality might be as an upload into a machine.

With mainstream science erecting a deliberate wall between us and the possibility of better knowing the non-physical aspects of ourselves, we are left to cope with living a depressing cultural lie. All of us. Even afterlife researchers! Yours truly has spent the past fifty years reveling in so much afterlife evidence that I am more certain now of my own immortality than I am of the existence of Egypt; but still, I am daily confronted by our awful cultural certainty that I am mortal meat. Ultimately, this is the daily harm that dirty science inflicts on the world. The message we are being given about ourselves is poison! “This is all there is, so you’d better get yours!” “Life sucks, then you die, but stay alive at all costs because at death you will blink out like a light!” What else are these deadly scientific lies teaching us? What about, “Loving others is a burden on your freedom to grab more for yourself”? “Kindness to strangers is a sucker’s game”?

Dirty science is giving you an appalling vision of who you are! It’s a set of plain lies in place of the truth that you are an eternal and deeply beloved aspect of the Power that manifests reality.

This scientific barrier to knowing yourself is far more dangerous than it seems! Our resulting cynical and brutal culture creates a lot of the ugly negativity that puts our species and our planet at risk. Once most people start to get the fact that it is impossible for us to die, then our culture will be altogether transformed. We will go from having just a short, sad horizon to living in a joyous eternal frame. So please, for the sake of the world, come to know yourself! Know yourself, and then every beautiful thing will belong to you. Know yourself, in spite of science’s lies. Truly know yourself now! We have a world to save!

 

And both that morning equally lay in leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day! Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I— I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
– Robert Frost (1874-1963), from “The Road Less Traveled” (1916)

 

Yellow road photo credit: yooperann <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/99923398@N00/48901880077″>October road</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/”>(license)</a>
Fork in the road photo credit: MacBeales <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/53073903@N07/36188206372″>Which way now…..</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/2.0/”>(license)</a>

The Coming Apocalypse

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

Some say the world will end in fire, Some say in ice.
From what I’ve tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great. And would suffice.
– Robert Frost (1874-1963), from “Fire and Ice” (1920)

If you had been told that the world will end in two hundred years, what would you do? I suppose your answer would largely depend on the credibility of the source; but let’s assume the source was credible. Would you keep it to yourself? Announce it to the world? Devote the rest of your life to trying to keep the end of the world from happening?

Six years ago this coming May I received precisely that announcement from a highly credible source. I have tried ever since that night to do what I could to delay the end of the world, but I acknowledge now that it hasn’t been much. I have, however, had that warning always foremost in my mind, so it amazes me now to realize that I seem not to have shared it with you beyond a couple of glancing mentions. I think I’ve felt embarrassed by the thought of saying something so alarming just on Spirit’s word alone. But, okay. Thomas has asked me now to tell you the story. He says it is something that you need to hear.

Late in 2014 I had the strong sense that someone in spirit wanted to talk to me. I made an appointment with a well-recommended medium for early in 2015. And after I had a great reunion with my whole extended family at my grandfather’s dairy farm in spirit that overlooks a celestial sea, the medium said that my guides now wanted to have a word with me.

I had lived for more than sixty years with the help of a primary spirit guide that I had met in childhood. He guided me internally, and mainly at night, and he had overseen the channeling of a series of books. The whole relationship was working so well that I had no wish to change it. But although I had no memory of it, apparently for the first time in all our long relationship I had been balking at Thomas’s nighttime guidance. So after the medium had introduced my lesser guides – there were ten, as I recall – I met my beautiful Thomas in person.

I am embarrassed to tell you that my big takeaway from that first face-to-face meeting with him was a groupie’s thrill at having just learned that my primary guide had been Thomas Jefferson in a prior lifetime. I was such a big fan! And apparently I have been his close male friend through seventeen other lifetimes, so he seemed that day to be creeped-out by the fact that I had no memory of our real relationship, and on top of that now I had a schoolgirl crush. I was so star-struck that Thomas said nothing to me. The medium soon ended the session, and Thomas waited for more than a month before he again reached out to us.

My second medium-assisted meeting with Thomas came on May 16, 2015. It began what has become a lovely daytime relationship with my primary spirit guide, but for quite some time that meeting was a highly traumatic memory.

  • Thomas began it by saying that he wanted me to channel a new book about the teachings of Jesus. He told me he had written such a book toward the end of his Jefferson lifetime, but he wanted me to write it again “for this new day.” I told him how unworthy I was to write anything about Jesus, but he insisted. When I still demurred, he added that a team in spirit had been preparing me to do this work for the past twenty years. I didn’t have the right to turn it down now! He seemed surprisingly agitated. I realized only later that my refusing to do what he had committed me to do, and what Spirit had spent twenty years preparing me to do, must have been a humiliation for him. So then he rolled out his bigger guns.
  • Thomas opened a theatrical curtain on a scene of devastation. All was black with drifting smoke, with ruined buildings and some little fires. Here and there were filthy people grubbing in the ground. I was only vaguely seeing it, but the medium rapidly described what she saw. Thomas told us this was how the United States will look in two hundred years. “A religious war . . . small populations . . . we have far fewer people in the world because many have lost the ability to reproduce. And all the food is manufactured. The so-called Christians caused the war to try to force Jesus to come back. We are working to prevent this war! This is a possible future to be prevented.”
  • The curtain closed, and then it opened again on a scene of unearthly beauty in diffuse white light. It looked like Level Three of the afterlife, complete with intensely colored trees and grass and gigantic flowers in unearthly shades. I stared, feeling stunned, as the medium gushed about how lovely it all was. Thomas said, “This is two hundred years from now if you will write this book. We will bring the kingdom of God on earth.” I was dumbfounded. I still was sure I wasn’t worthy! But I said, “I’ll try.”

Thomas and I then began to channel Liberating Jesus. At first it felt like all our other shared literary ventures, with him giving me a table of contents and then starting in on writing the book. He makes me feel so brilliant! No false starts and no need for corrections, just flawless words from flying fingers. But I had a lot going on at the time, and before we had gotten very far into writing Liberating Jesus, almost a month had passed. Then on the afternoon of June 9th the medium we had been using rang me up out of the blue. She told me Thomas had just possessed her body in a Walmart parking lot and said, “Please forgive the speed at which we are dictating, as your soulular self is working directly for the Master now, without benefit of the filters which would slow the transmission. And I hasten to add, you must please of course speak clearly should your physical suffer exhaustion.”

We speculated briefly about what that might mean. And I soon learned exactly what it meant! I came bolt-awake at two o’clock the next morning, ran to my computer, and began to channel a much more powerful entity. Thomas makes me feel smart while he does most of the work, but this new Being was so immensely powerful, and He moved so fast, that He could use me as a word-processor. I had no idea what I was writing, and I had no time to read any of it until He abruptly left me once the book was done.

I know this story is unbelievable. My primary spirit guide told me I had to write a modern version of something he had written when he was Thomas Jefferson, but his request was a trick because it was actually Jesus who later showed up and wrote the book? And the book that Jesus wrote has been in print for five years, and still it hasn’t been much noticed?

My Thomas by Roberta GrimesThomas later gave me the backstory. He told me that I entered this lifetime with writing a new version of Jefferson’s lost Jesus manuscript on my to-do list. But then in the eighties, Jesus decided that His effort to revive His Gospel teachings for modern people as A Course in Miracles had produced a product that was too dense and sophisticated for most of those living now to use, so Jesus decided to do for us just a frank restatement of His Gospel words. He put out a call for a “pure channel” – someone who could channel but had not yet been published – and Thomas nominated me. He channeled My Thomas through me to prove to the Lord that I actually could channel, and in the mid-nineties I was selected. I recall a time around then when I became freshly obsessed with figuring out the science of the afterlife. Was that the start of my closer work with Spirit?

Frankly, I wouldn’t believe any of this myself if I had not been there. I still recall some of what it was like having Jesus as a presence in my mind, and I kept telling myself I should pay close attention because this was so extraordinary. But you don’t remember it. Not really. I do recall that He was using my body as if it were an inanimate object that I had kindly lent to Him: He would direct my eyes to something previously written, and I would look at it but it would seem fine to me so I would try to move on. He would direct my eyes up again to that word or phrase that He didn’t like, and I would try some different phrasings. I would know I had fixed the problem when He moved my attention rapidly back toward finishing our current leading sentence. I remember hearing what must have been His thoughts as whispers in My mind. The only times He spoke to me were when I had some thought with which He disagreed; and then He was short, sharp, all-business. But as days wore on, He seemed to relax a bit and let me hear what He was thinking. It didn’t seem to be aimed at me, but rather He was addressing the world. He would think things like, “If you love Me, then listen to Me!” And my heart would break for Him.

What Thomas wants us all to know is that Jesus will never return in an End Times war. The Book of Revelation is a random piece of revenge literature that had been circulated in a time of great persecution, and it was added to the Bible a full three centuries after the Lord’s death. But Thomas wants us to know that the danger is real that misguided Christians living in a more desperate near-future time might see the Book of Revelation as a how-to guide and create an Apocalypse all on their own in a misbegotten attempt to summon the Lord.

Thomas warns us now that rather than summoning Jesus, the religionists’ attempt to start an end-times war risks bringing about the end of the world. And what alarms me now is that the decline in fertility and birth rates that Thomas prophesied six years ago already is beginning to happen! We cannot know the future. But we have been warned. There are many ways the world could end, but to know in advance that its present most likely ending is less than two hundred years away and will happen if we refuse to heed Spirit’s warning is a flat-out clarion call! Thomas says the hour is late, but if we will act now it still is not too late. All that Jesus ever has asked is that we listen to Him! And it is time for us to listen now. The Lord’s Way beckons….

Nature’s first green is gold, Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf’s a flower; But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf. So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day. Nothing gold can stay.
– Robert Frost (1874-1963), from “Nothing Gold Can Stay” (1923)

(Postscript for those who think Thomas’s Apocalyptic warning here is excessively alarmist. Apparently his prediction of a plague of infertility is going to be right on the money! An article published five days after this one predicts that a profusion of hormone-disrupting chemicals will drop human sperm counts to zero by the second half of this century. No wonder the earth’s population will be dramatically reduced within two hundred years!)

 

Forest on fire photo credit: franzisko hauser <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/125814940@N06/49361418476″>The Forests are burning</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/”>(license)</a>
Tropical fire photo credit: EU Civil Protection and Humanitarian Aid <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/69583224@N05/50013632122″>Throwback: EU’s response to forest fires in Bolivia</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/”>(license)</a>
Gloomy coast photo credit: Rennett Stowe <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/10393601@N08/35270419294”>Coastal Environs</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/”>(license)</a>
Desert gloom photo credit: Rennett Stowe <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/10393601@N08/33623057468”>Daylight Refraction</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/”>(license)</a>
Dark cathedral ruins photo credit: angelobrathot <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/147755034@N05/50110402698”>au bout de l’Europe           “on explore du 14-07-20”</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <ahref=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/”>(license)</a>
 

 

Considering Babies

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

Jesus loves the little children,
All the little children of the world.
Red and yellow, black and white,
They are precious in His sight.
Jesus loves the little children of the world!
– Clare Herbert Woolston (1856-1927), from “Jesus Loves the Little Children” (1800s)

Anyone who has spent time with a tiny baby has wondered where all the amazingly distinctive traits of newborn children come from. On a superficial level, every newborn child looks and acts like every other child; but parents will tell you that almost from birth each baby has a unique personality. As a mother of three, I am certain that when I looked into the eyes of each newborn bundle, the person that child later grew to be was already complete and inside there, calmly looking back at me.

Scientists believe we are just our material bodies, so they are certain our personalities must somehow arise as a natural function of those bodies. They think that who we are most likely happens in our material brains, although of course they still have no idea about the process or any of the details. And they cannot even hazard a guess as to why an entirely material humanity would bother to have separate personalities at all! Scientists live in a material world. To them, we are meat and nothing more. But you and I now understand that reality is not material. We know that we are eternal beings, that each of us lives many lives, and that every newborn in its mother’s arms is already an ancient being who has bravely planned to live yet another lifetime in which to learn and grow spiritually. Knowing the truth about who and what we are, you and I realize that each newborn child is the complex product of a long, mysterious, and probably fascinating history!

For us to talk about the traits of babies may seem at first to be a diversion from our discussions here that have centered of late on consciousness, Jesus, God, and the meaning and purpose of human life. But in reality, the innate characteristics of babies are at the nexus of all these topics! It is in babies that so much of what we are learning about the greater reality self-integrates. Babies are the fruit, if you will, and the ultimate test of all the truths that we have been researching and patiently trying to fit together in an effort to make some sense of it all.

When I was first researching life after death, what in the end convinced me that life goes on was hundreds of documented communications from the dead that had been received before 1940. They had come through physical and deep-trance mediums in southern England and in the eastern United States over at least half a century of time, and yet all the communicators were obviously speaking from the same gigantic place! The same process, the same physics, the same pastimes, and all the same details: it was like reading hundreds of communications from travelers who all had just arrived in Fiji. I realized then that for all these reports to be so entirely consistent would have been statistically impossible if the afterlife where they said they were now was not entirely real.

And each new baby gives us a similar opportunity to test our evidence-based understanding of humanity’s place in the greater reality. We know now that every human mind is eternal.  We know that each of us lives many different lives on earth – and elsewhere in this universe, too – with each life carefully planned and guided to give us the greatest opportunity to experience and push against negativity, and thereby to ever better grow spiritually. We know or suspect that a great many things might impact a child now entering a newly planned earth-lifetime. In fact, with all that we now know about the venerable being that chose to use that new life as a vehicle for spiritual growth, it would be amazing if new babies did not already have distinct personalities!

With all that we have learned so far about what might be influencing a newborn’s life, let’s look at how those influences could reveal themselves as each child starts to grow. The kinds of traits described here might be apparent from birth, or they may seem to arise later. And some of them will affect that child’s entire life:

  • The Being’s Eternal Nature. During our lives between lives, we are full-fledged and recognizably better versions of ourselves. We lack most of the negativity, whether fear-based or anger-based, that tends to plague us when we are in bodies. And we have access to our entire minds when we are there, which means that we can be comfortably certain that our lives are indeed eternal. So we are a whole lot happier! This nicer base personality that is who we are at home sometimes carries over as a base for our after-birth personality.
  • The Being’s Pre-Birth Spiritual State. People generally continue to incarnate until their personal vibratory rate is close to the top of the fifth afterlife level. This means that some tiny babies are already spiritually pretty advanced beings! The newborn’s spiritual state won’t be immediately obvious, but sometimes a child that is more advanced spiritually will display an especially peaceful and loving personality almost from birth.
  • Skills Learned Before This Lifetime. Many people who didn’t have the opportunity to learn music, painting, sculpture, or various crafts when they were living a previous earthly lifetime will have taken advantage of studying these things as an enjoyable pastime during their lives between lives. Then once they enter a new lifetime, their special skills may become evident even early in life. This is how piano and painting prodigies are born!
  • The Plan For This Lifetime. We come to earth to experience negative stressors so we can push against them and thereby grow spiritually. For a few of us there may be more going on, but for most of us that is the whole story. So when bad things happen to good people, those aren’t bugs at all. They’re features! We plan for illnesses, alcoholic parents, marital problems, career calamities, and any of a hundred other earthly crises as great potential spiritual stressors.
  • Designed-In Assets and Handicaps. As we plan the events of our upcoming lifetime, we also plan for personal characteristics that can make it either easier or more difficult to manage and triumph over our planned life-events. We might plan to be depressive, excitable, bipolar, or plagued by borderline personality disorder; we might have spina bifida, Asperger’s Syndrome, deafness or blindness or another congenital bodily deformity. On the plus side, we could choose to be beautiful, talented, or very bright. Or perhaps we will enjoy being all three.
  • Other-Life Personalities. Each of us has lived many utterly unremarkable lives, but for most of us there have been a few lives that were distinctive in various ways. That innocent little bundle in pink could have been a starlet or a ruthless general; and a babe in blue could have been a courtesan or robber baron or a Biblical prophet. And sometimes one or more of these prior personalities will bleed a bit into the lifetime just beginning.
  • Other-Life Traumas. People who have suffered in wars or died under torture will sometimes carry forward into this new lifetime some fears and angers that are rooted in those old traumas. For example, someone who once burned to death may have an irrational fear of fire; or someone who was buried alive might now be especially claustrophobic.
  • Other-Life Memories. Especially during the first few years of life, many children will have traces of active memories of a recent prior earth-lifetime, and especially of the violent death that ended it. Dr. Ian Stevenson of the University of Virginia made a specialty of studying and writing about such cases.
  • Other-Life Genders. Gender is so central to our human identity that we keep the same gender for most of our lifetimes so we won’t need to freshly adjust each time. And when we do have to adjust, the change can be traumatic! I have nearly always been male, and I have carried for this entire life a vivid memory of the moment when I first discovered this new body was missing something major. I must have been maybe eleven months old and freshly undressed for my bath. I was toddling down an extremely tall hallway as I randomly explored my body, and the shock of realizing what was not there was a trauma that I would never forget. My dispirited thought was, “Oh. I’m the other kind this time.” (I later realized that for a baby to have such a thought says amazing things, in and of itself.) Until I was maybe fourteen years old, I would have done anything to change my gender, but my puberty banished all such thoughts. As it does in more than three-quarters of such cases. Which is why for us to encourage or even to allow children to begin a gender transition before they have completed puberty is a monstrous betrayal of innocent trust.
  • Characteristics of the Available Bodies. As if all this baggage were not enough, we will want to be born in a specific time and place in order to make our life-plan work, so we will be choosing from a limited number of available bodies that each will have its own genetic burdens and potentially negative family issues. Thomas preferred a female body for me, but our best-choice female fetus was conceived illegitimately. Apparently that gave us an early worry, although fortunately the parents soon married so I grew up in a stable home.

With so many factors potentially influencing each newborn baby’s entire life, it’s no wonder that human beings at birth are so amazingly different from one another! And as we grow, all these different factors conflict with one another and wax and wane in us, so scientists who still willfully insist that each newborn is only meat and nothing more are flat unable to understand the complex psychology of all human minds. The study of the afterlife inevitably leads to the study of the greater reality. And everything that we have learned about the amazingly complex reality in which we live our eternal lives finds its complex fruition and its validation in the miracle of each newborn child.    

Jesus loves me, this I know,
For the Bible tells me so.
Little ones to Him belong.
They are weak, but He is strong.
– Anna Bartlett Warner (1827-1915), from “Jesus Loves Me” (1862)

 

Asian baby with hat photo credit: Ted’s photos – For Me & You <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/90955804@N04/49361679528″>2019 – Vietnam-Avalon-Siem Reap – 29 – Mekong River Cu Lao Gieng (January) Island</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/”>(license)</a>
Baby in a red dress photo credit: Carlos Bustamante Restrepo <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/65957926@N02/50559817057″>My niece Margarita wearing a red dress</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/”>(license)</a>

Believing vs. Having Faith

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

I really wanna know You. I really wanna see You.
I’d like to see You, Lord. I wanna see You, Lord!
It takes so long, my Lord. My sweet Lord!
Oh my sweet Lord! My sweet Lord!
– George Harrison (1943-2001), from “My Sweet Lord” (1970)

Seeking and relating to gods is a process as innate to human life as thinking and speaking. That is an amazing fact! We can trace organized religions back to at least 8,000 BCE, to the advent of farming and the first settlements; and the earliest archeological evidence for religious beliefs dates to at least 200,000 BCE. The notion of gods is fully as old as humanity itself. This fact suggests that our having lived before birth in a very much better place may always have been a kind of folk-memory. Perhaps we always have known on some level that there was Something Greater that called to us and nagged us with Its wish to be found. And we have had no way to imagine the Source of that call except as a mimic of ourselves, so every god created by humankind has been an extra-powerful human-like being. Naturally, all those human-made gods were imagined to also have outsized human flaws! Including even the Christian God. The God that you and I met in our childhood churches was envisioned as a strict but loving Father who insisted that we must learn to better love and forgive. He demanded love and forgiveness of us, even though the Christian God was Himself so lacking in love and forgiveness that He refused to forgive us for our human failings unless He first got to watch His Own Son being tortured and murdered. People have created some awful gods! 

We have talked here about the fact that Christianity has been declining rapidly in the United States and worldwide. Currently 43% of adults in the U.S. identify as Protestants, which is down from 51% in 2009; and 20% of American adults are Catholics, down from 23% in 2009. The forced lockdowns of 2020 seem to be accelerating this trend, so it is estimated now that fully one-fifth of the Christian churches in the United States that temporarily closed their doors last spring will close them for good within the year. This dramatic implosion of the world’s most popular religion seems to have a number of causes. But I think the primary reason why Christianity is desperately struggling now is the fact that it requires us to believe what to most modern adults is flat-out unbelievable.

People have learned a lot in two thousand years. When Jesus was born, human beings knew almost nothing about anything! And we had few intellectual skills with which we might begin to figure things out, so for religions to give us their dogmas around which we could build a bit of hopeful faith was better than accepting that everything was and would forever remain a puzzle. But after the advent of the scientific method, the Enlightenment and the first human landing on the moon, humankind’s default setting has been reversed. Today many people’s general assumption is that we already understand most things, and many in the West are sure that before long we are going to figure out everything else. From our present, much more  self-assured perspective on reality, many moderns are finding it harder to believe in anything that they cannot see. And what Christianity requires of us is even more of a stretch than mere belief! After all, each of us holds many “beliefs” that are supported by good evidence, from the notion that the sun will rise in the east to the theories that gold is worth more than lead and season will follow season in a predictable way. None of what we believe is an eternal certainty. In fact, everything that we believe with confidence is likely to one day no longer be true; but for purposes of planning our daily lives, our beliefs based in longstanding evidence have proven to be pretty reliable. Unlike our ancient ancestors, we have good reason to be confident now that we live in a stable and comprehensibly facts-based world.

It is precisely our experience that facts-based beliefs are reliable that is the enemy of religions. Each religion is based in its own dogmas, which are arbitrary ideas not rooted in evidence so they don’t rise to the level of actual beliefs. And yet they are essential, since without a broad acceptance of its dogmas each religion would topple like a paper house. And for us to firmly hold religious beliefs that are unsupported by evidence requires that we believe without needing evidence. Christians have a favorite word for that! Quite simply, “faith” means something like “confident belief not rooted in evidence.” The word is derived from the Latin “fides,” which means something like “trust that a concept or idea is true, even though we have no definitive evidence.” To the Christian ear, “belief” sounds cold and mechanical, while “faith” is the warm and spiritual way to describe our relationship to the religion and to God. This notion that believing without evidence is a virtue likely stems from what Jesus is quoted as having said to Thomas when His disciple put a hand into the spear wound in the side of the Lord’s risen body and then said, “My Lord and my God!” Jesus said, “Because you have seen Me, have you believed? Blessed are they who did not see, and yet believed” (JN 20:29). So Christians have been sure from the founding of the religion that the highest virtue is for us to have faith in God, in Jesus, and in all the Christian dogmas, even without evidence that any of it is real.

This notion that “having faith” is a virtue lasted throughout Christian history until about the middle of the twentieth century. By the Sixties, that ancient cultural understanding that just about everything was inexplicable and required of us a lot of faith was being replaced by a modern confidence that since we even had learned how to split the atom, we were likely before long to work out everything else! So by the start of the twenty-first century, having faith without evidence was no longer seen as the virtue that it once had been, and many more sophisticated Christians were starting to look askance at a lot of the peculiar dogmas they still were being asked to take entirely on faith.

So then some of the most ardent Christian apologists sought to prove that Christian dogmas could indeed be supported by evidence. They found and trumpeted evidence that Jesus actually had lived on earth, and even that the Shroud of Turin could be used as evidence that He had been crucified and resurrected.  But of course, far from supporting the fear-based and frankly unbelievable central Christian dogma, all the evidence that Jesus was an historical figure who had died and then reanimated His body gave no support at all to the religion’s assertion that God had long ago required the torture and murder of His Own Son.

There are a number of reasons why Christian church membership is in such sharp decline, but the fact that having faith without evidence is such thin gruel for modern people is a big one. When you and I were learning in our childhood churches that Jesus had died as a sacrifice to His Father because God would never forgive us otherwise, perhaps we looked suspiciously at our own dads at the time, but we accepted that central Christian teaching. We also were accepting television, telephones, automobiles, and electric lights without knowing how any of them worked, either! But as we grew and finished our educations, we were figuring out a great many things. And then another generation came, and another very soon followed it, with each of them feeling ever more confident that truths require real evidence, and therefore they were ever more suspicious of Christianity’s insistence that we trust its dogmas. In the twenty-first century, any religion that demands that its adherents “just have faith” and offers no evidence to support its ideas is simply no longer viable.

Christianity’s dogmas always have been built on nothing but faith-based ideas. There was no need for supporting evidence when Christianity first began, and nor was there a need for evidence during most of the religion’s history. But emphatically, we need evidence now! And importantly, we do have evidence that, far from being bothered by our now seeking meatier evidence-based truths, the Godhead welcomes our curiosity and will gladly reward it!

The world’s greatest pioneers in the field of afterlife research are Victor and Wendy Zammit of Sidney, Australia. One of the Zammits’ own special teachers is an elevated collective in spirit that speaks through an entity called Silver Birch and gives us encouragement. Silver Birch says, “We never say to you ‘… do not use your reason: faith only.’ We say ‘Use that which the Great Power has given you. Test us. Examine us. If aught that we say is debasing, cruel or immoral, then reject us ….’ If we seek always to teach you to live nobler lives, lives of greater self-sacrifice and of idealism, then surely that demonstrates that the hallmark of the Great Power is stamped upon our teaching.” – (Silver Birch Anthology – p.43 The Divine Plan)

Even more importantly, Jesus says the same thing! He encourages us to “Ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives, and he who seeks finds, and to him who knocks it will be opened” (MT 7:7-8).

For most of Christian history, no amount of seeking with the primitive intellectual tools that then were available to us could have helped us learn much of anything! So these words of the Lord’s seem to have been spoken and preserved just for this beautiful day, when we can begin to seek and find in Christianity only the parts of it that are worthy of a rational and evidence–based belief. Now, in the twenty-first century, when so many things can be researched and will yield to our reason-based understanding, Christians who no longer feel able to believe the fear-based dogmas of a human-made religion can now take Jesus at His word. We can seek, and we will find inside the ugly shell of Christianity’s fears the real and abundant evidence we crave for the glorious truths that Jesus taught.

Then I heard the voice of the Lord, saying,
“Whom shall I send, and who will go for Us?”
Then I said, “Here am I. Send me!”
– The Prophet Isaiah (ca 700 BC) (Isaiah 6:8)

 

White peacock on a dock photo credit: Stanley Zimny (Thank You for 54 Million views) <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/82256086@N00/46949504502″>Great Tail</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0/”>(license)</a>
Blue peacock photo credit: Andy Magee <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/84272941@N00/4860975561″>Peacock Tail</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/”>(license)</a>
Peacock strolling photo credit: fishhawk <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/16502322@N03/48280164762″>Peacock strolling through a field.</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/”>(license)</a>
White peacock photo credit: joiseyshowaa <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/30201239@N00/49880832741″>Explosion of White</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/”>(license)</a>
Peacock on a roof photo credit: Taiga ISHIBASHI <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/68601213@N05/49887613387″>Blue Phoenix</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/2.0/”>(license)</a>
Peacock portrait photo credit: Stanley Zimny (Thank You for 54 Million views) <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/82256086@N00/49415653341″>Like My Hat?</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0/”>(license)</a>

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