Author: Roberta Grimes

Science’s Despair

It seems we’ve stood and talked like this before.
We looked at each other in the same way then,
but I can’t remember where or when.

The clothes you’re wearing are the clothes you wore.
The smile you are smiling you were smiling then,
But I can’t remember where or when.

Some things that happen for the first time
Seem to be happening again.
– Lorenz Hart (1895-1943) & Richard Rodgers (1902-1979), from “Where or When” (1937)

A few research scientists are trying to find the moment in proto-human history when the first entirely human mind kicked in and developed awareness that was deeply and profoundly human. But they seem to be having little success at finding just that precise moment. The problem may lie in their inability to define just which characteristics of the mind they are going to accept as constituting a fully modern human being. Since, after all, each creature’s environment will call forth needed skills from its mind, and if more advanced skills are not required, then that specific creature might have every conceivable human characteristic, but it still likely won’t display them all for far-distant future researchers to see. This is a fascinating question to contemplate, though, don’t you think?

With the recent availability of the reasonably funded and first-rate Seattle-based Discovery Institute, which pursues research science with no materialist restrictions on  its  research scientists at all, lots of sensible, if perhaps somewhat frivolous, questions like this one are now being asked, and such questions are giving our minds a playful place to experiment with seeking answers. Meanwhile, of course, the materialist scientific community continues to more and more hopelessly soldier on its stubbornly materialist way. Mainstream science has just discovered of late that there has been massive fraud among published scientific papers on such a gigantic scale that a recent article in The Wall Street Journal describes how fake scientific papers by the tens of thousands, and even whole fake scientific journals by the many dozens are being discovered, and they all must be discarded.  This watching the materialist scientific boat springing so many leaks really boggles the mind!

I have been among the world’s most eager materialist-science groupies for the past forty years. Every month I would devour half a dozen popular-science magazines, Scientific American first of all but always several others besides, and for years they were full of smug and self-important articles about what the scientific community was just about to discover or to prove to be true about reality. It was all going to happen almost any minute now. For all of the nineties and into the aughts, materialist science’s strong emphasis was on origin and development of the universe and origin and development of life, and testing and proving various theories about when and how these things must have happened without the need to ever posit any form of a Creator or an Un-Caused Cause. Proving and refining Darwin’s theories, too. Everything must have originated and developed from nothing all the way to its lushly current form, entirely without any kind of intelligent intervention whatsoever.

But then, sometime around 2005 the realization began to dawn within the scientific community as a whole that things were not at all working out as everyone had been expecting that they would. As the Discovery Institute continues to prove to us ever more completely, the Intelligent Design explanation is turning out to be ever more clearly the only universally viable way to answer every question about the origin and development of anything. So now, the whole field of mainstream science is sadly drooping like a maiden who has been forced to take to her fainting-couch.

As a result, young scientists have no real clue about the fields in which they can acceptably do their research anymore without running afoul of their scientific gatekeepers. And those gatekeepers are, of course, the university science departments and those now deeply frustrated peer-reviewed science journals. So young scientists of the twenty-first century have apparently done a lot of faking it. Which is why so many of their – shall we say – “creative” scholarly papers must now be dumpedBut this having been forced to resort to committing fraud should not be seen as altogether their fault. The materialist game was always hopelessly rigged against them.

As for me, I still read popular science magazines on occasion, which is easier since everything is now online. But somewhere around a decade ago, reading popular science magazines mostly stopped being fun, because mainstream scientists have given up even pretending that they are on the edge of discovering anything really big. The origin of the universe? The origin of matter? The origin of life? The source of consciousness inside the human brain? Materialist scientists know by now that all their quests are going to be dead-ended. Now it is just, here is a new kind of dinosaur that looks just like the old kinds of dinosaurs, but they imagine this one to have looked even frillier, and it is presumed to have been more colorful. Cloud-geoengineering is being done, and it affects where heat waves will show up; and apparently climate change will make fungi more dangerous. And this is now the very best that they can do for attention-grabbing science news headlines?

By way of contrast, here are some of the kinds of amusing and enjoyable articles that still were being published in popular-science magazines as recently as ten years ago. Physics takes a walk on the wild side in this one, because somehow we are all made of free particles! I loved this article, even though I cannot understand it because I am not a particle physicist. I never took even a high school science course, but just by reading so many popular science magazines, eventually I learned so much about science that I was independently able to discover the fact that consciousness underlies everything. Of course, this author doesn’t actually say that all that exists is consciousness, but you can pretty easily infer that fact when you read enough of these articles. And here, amazingly, some science writer got away with telling the truth about the fact that matter is energy, and it is almost entirely empty space. Again, it’s a flirt with the truth about consciousness. These authors and the publications for which they wrote were testing the rules ten years ago, to see how far the materialist scientific gatekeepers would let them go. But the draconian answer turned out to be, “Not even an inch!” So that was when many of those fraudulent peer-reviewed papers that are now being rooted out and tossed were written and published in desperation, just so young scientists could find jobs or get tenure.

But to be a materialist science gatekeeper today means that you are going to have to police even the civilian publications, where you sometimes can find articles or side notes now proclaiming that death is an illusion. Bully for MSN! No matter how the materialists try to knock it down, the truth is going to start popping up more and more nowadays, through every crack and crevice. Because it is in fact matter that is the complete illusion, a fact which is now easily provable, so the silly “fundamental dogma of materialism” around which more than a century ago those gatekeepers built modern mainstream science should long since have been discarded. But the scientific gatekeepers never found the moment when it felt easy enough to give it up, and by now they have gone too far down that pointless materialist track to nowhere.

Genuine science is supposed to be freewheeling and joyous! Was it Albert Einstein who said he never actually had worked a day in his life? No, it was Thomas Edison who said that. But Einstein likely would have said the same thing. If what you do for a living is fun, then it never is work! My science-groupie habit has mostly switched over to following the Discovery Institute. There the science lacks any dogmas at all, and it still is free and joyous.

Which is why much of my former enthusiasm for educating myself with popular science magazines is being channeled now into following what is going on at the Discovery Institute. They continue to demolish the theory of blind evolution, true, to make sure that Darwin’s Frankenstein monster remains truly flat-out dead. But also, they provide all sorts of information and general public education. I don’t necessarily always agree with them. I continue to seek just the objective truth! But Discovery is up-front about where its bias is: these are trained scientists who are practicing Christians, and they are not materialists. So these are truly honest scientists. Which can never be true of mainstream scientists, all of whom are lying in not publicly disclosing the fact that they will not study anything which they consider to be not material.

The Discovery Institute covers lots of fun things, too. For example, this spring there are two big batches of trillions of periodic cicadas emerging in the American Midwest at once, in a combination that hasn’t happened since 1803, when Thomas Jefferson was the American President. And Discovery uses this concept of periodic cicadas, which emerge from the ground in batches like clockwork every thirteen years or every seventeen years, depending on their clan, as just another of very, very many examples of amusing things that simply could not have developed by natural selection and survival of the fittest because there is not a sufficient survival advantage to their having developed these particular traits. There is, however, as there is in so many things, from a giraffe’s neck to an elephant’s trunk to a kangaroo’s peculiar kangarooishness, to – I don’t know – the orchids in my office window and the angle at which the sunlight hits your lawn and each of a trillion other wondrous things in science a very significant fun advantage! And you have the sense that Discovery gets that. They do some of their best teaching of adults with simple and often adorable videos which you appreciate being able to enjoy during a quick break now and then before you head on back to work. But everything about the Discovery Institute is fun. Perhaps the worst thing about mainstream scientists and their clinging to their pointless materialist lie is the fact that even as they continue to hold back from the public the truth about their materialist bias, to the great disadvantage of humanity and for no good reason, they remain so joyless about it!

That is always true of closed-minded people who fight truth because they prefer their own lies. As the great polymath Nicola Tesla said, “The day science begins to study non-physical phenomena, it will make more progress in one decade than in all the previous centuries of its existence.” And in holding to their lie of materialism, mainstream scientists are very much like the white Dixiecrat bigots of the failed American South, who bitterly clung to racial segregation for a century after the Civil War. But the greatest American of the twentieth century, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., taught us how to respond to pointless evils as he fought the Dixiecrats’ greatest evil of them all. Dr. King said,

“We Negroes have long dreamed of freedom, but still we are confined in an oppressive prison of segregation and discrimination. Must we respond with bitterness and cynicism? Certainly not, for this will destroy and poison our personalities. Must we … resign ourselves to oppression? Of course not, for this blasphemously attributes to God that which is of the devil. To cooperate passively with an unjust system makes the oppressed as evil as the oppressor. Our most fruitful course is to stand firm with courageous determination, move forward nonviolently amid obstacles and setbacks, accept disappointments, and cling to hope. Our determined refusal not to be stopped will eventually open the door to fulfillment.…”

Dr. King’s words ring down to us through time, and now they lift our hearts! As he so well taught us, we must continue to live in free and uncompromising science, no matter what any others may do, until eventually materialist scientists drop their nonsensical bigotry against the truth and they follow Nicola Tesla’s lead and “study nonphysical phenomena”. We must continue to live in the truth! Because we know that free science of the sort being practiced at the Discovery Institute is on the side of truth. And as Jesus also taught us (JN 8:32), sooner or later, whether now or a hundred years from now, eventually the truth will win.

Some things that happen for the first time
Seem to be happening again.

And so it seems that we have met before,
And laughed before, and loved before!
But who knows where or when?
Lorenz Hart (1895-1943) & Richard Rodgers (1902-1979), from “Where or When” (1937)

Love Above All

O Lord my God, When I, in awesome wonder,
Consider all the worlds Thy Hands have made;
I see the stars, I hear the rolling thunder,
Thy power throughout the universe displayed.

Then sings my soul, My Saviour God, to Thee,
How great Thou art, How great Thou art.
Then sings my soul, My Saviour God, to Thee,
How great Thou art, How great Thou art!
– Carl Boberg (1859-1940) & Stuart K. Hine (1899-1989), from “How Great Thou Art” (1949)

You and I are urged to love God, to love Jesus, and to love our fellow man, so the notion that love is a spiritual concept is not surprising to us at all. But it was Jesus who first made love our spiritual imperative! When Moses led the Hebrew people back out of Egypt in the year 1476 BCE after their four-hundred-year-sojourn in Egyptian slavery, God then gave to Moses on the top of Mount Sinai those Ten Commandments by which God’s chosen people were henceforth commanded to live their lives. And while God was delivering His Ten Commandments on the mountaintop, there was smoke, and thunder and lightning, and the sound of a trumpet, so the people shrank away and were terrified. They said to Moses, “Speak to us yourself, and we will listen; but let not God speak to us, or we will die!” (Ex 20:18-19) If love was eventually to become God’s eternal core commandment, wouldn’t you think that God might have maybe mentioned love ro His chosen people back then, if only to offer some comfort as they were being forced to sojourn in the wilderness? But, no. Behold from Exodus 20, God’s Ten Commandments that were handed down to the Hebrew people four thousand, five hundred years ago, amid smoke, lightning, and even a trumpet’s blare:     

From the year 1476 BCE on and throughout the Old Testament, people will on occasion show love for one another, and some of them develop what seems to be a genuine love for God. Consider David, especially. The boy shepherd and psalmist who grew to become a great king of Israel a thousand years before Jesus was born seems in his many profound and beautiful psalms to have developed a surprisingly deep and loving and even quite modern-seeming relationship with God. But still, in all the years before Jesus was born, the Hebrew people’s relationship with God remained deeply respectful and primarily transactional. They had to have clergymen and scribes through whom they related to God, and they had to offer animals as sacrifices in their temples. The Jewish people prior to the advent of Jesus didn’t love God on a personal level, as you and I might think of love. As always has been true whenever people have related to God by means of a human-made religion, they were afraid of God.

So I don’t think it is possible for us to appreciate what a shock to their whole system Jesus’s teachings were in the first-century world in which He taught on earth. Please again read that list of Ten Commandments above, and remember that God delivered them from the top of a mountain amid smoke, lightning flashes and a trumpet’s blare. This was what constituted spirituality in the minds of people in the first century CE, at the time and in the place where Jesus was born on earth. People then were certain that it was adherence to formal religious rules and practices that must of course be what mattered most to God!

Okay, so after fifteen hundred years of their having lived and worshiped that way, then along came Jesus. And what do we know about Jesus, from the Gospels? For one thing, we know that Joseph, Jesus’s earthly father, made sure that Jesus received as he grew up an excellent religious education. Jesus could argue the fine points of scripture with ease and with anyone, and that was important. Jesus was also quite charismatic. He spoke well, and in every group of people He would tend to be the center of it. Think of the most likable guy in your entire high school class, the smartest student and probably also the best athlete. That was Jesus.

Jesus was also what we might call a flaming radical when compared with the stodgy religious teachers around Him, which made Him especially popular as people followed Him around. They were eager to hear whatever He might say next! That list of Ten Commandments that by Jesus’s day were thought of as ancient Holy Writ were to Jesus’s mind quite bendable, and the crowds loved to hear Him successfully handle challenges from religious scholars of His opinions on one or another of those ancient religious rules. To Jesus, the rules were not important. It was the motive behind the way each rule was applied or not applied that was important. “People break the Sabbath all the time to haul their donkey out of a pit, don’t they?” So then, one day and in a single stroke, Jesus used God’s much greater rule of love – a rule that until He began to teach, no one had ever heard of before – to wipe away all Ten Commandments in a single stroke, and with them the whole of what we call the Old Testament. Jesus replaced the entire Hebrew Law and the Prophets with God’s new and greater Law of Love.

This is truly amazing! The Pharisees and the Sadducees were two different schools of Jewish scholars. In the early days of Jesus’s public ministry they would tag-team test Him, until fairly soon He had worn them all down. Jesus seemed to delight in these battles of wits that He was having with stodgy religious scholars, and it is not hard to see why they soon became so fed-up with Him. Here is that wonderful example:

34 But when the Pharisees heard that Jesus had silenced the Sadducees, they gathered themselves together. 35 One of them, a lawyer, asked Jesus a question, testing Him. He said, 36 “Teacher, which is the greatest commandment in the Law?” 37 And Jesus said to him, “‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.’ 38 This is the great and foremost commandment. 39 The second is like it, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ 40 On these two commandments depend the whole Law and the Prophets” (MT 22 34-40).

So Jesus has at last here in one stroke superseded all of the Ten Commandments, and the entire Old Testament with them, and He has commanded us instead to love God and to love our fellow man with everything that is in us! Not because our love is something that God needs, but because, amazingly, Jesus completely understood when He was on earth the makeup of reality, as twenty-first-century materialist scientists still to this day do not understand reality, even two thousand years later! Jesus knew that only what we experience as consciousness exists, and He knew that consciousness is governed by what we experience as emotion. What more certain proof that Jesus came to us as a divine Being can there ever be than this? And because He knew these great truths about reality, He knew that in order for us to grow spiritually, we would have to shed every one of our fears, and especially our ancient fear of God, and learn to embrace ever more perfect love. So Jesus’s teachings are all about helping us to do precisely that!

Religion is a primary source of fear in every culture, so Jesus made it clear repeatedly that He had come to abolish all religions, and to teach us to relate to God individually and based upon love alone. He battled the prevailing religion throughout His public life, and He specifically told us to pray to God in private. For example, He said, “When you pray, you are not to be like the hypocrites; for they love to stand and pray in the synagogues and on the street corners so that they may be seen by men. Truly I say to you, they have their reward in full. But you, when you pray, go into your inner room, close your door and pray to your Father who is in secret, and your Father who sees what is done in secret will reward you (MT 6:5-6). And He was always putting down the clergy, saying things like this: 46 “Beware of the scribes, who like to walk around in long robes, and love respectful greetings in the market places, and chief seats in the synagogues and places of honor at banquets, 47 who devour widows’ houses, and for appearance’s sake offer long prayers. These will receive greater condemnation” (LK 20:46-47).

Jesus told us repeatedly to love one another! He often said things like, 34 A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another, even as I have loved you, that you also love one another. 35 By this all men will know that you are My disciples, if you have love for one another.” (JN 13:34-35)

As Jesus prepared to leave His disciples, that was how He left them. He charged them with spreading over all the earth His great command that we love God and love one another. 18 Jesus spoke to them, saying, “All authority has been given to Me in heaven and on earth. 19 Go therefore and make disciples of all the nations, baptizing them and 20 teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you; and lo, I am with you always, even to the end of the age.” (MT 28: 18-20)

So then we imagine Jesus watching with fond parental eagerness as The Way spread rapidly following His resurrection. But as the decades passed, it occurred to Him that His followers were not sufficiently emphasizing love! They were getting caught up in what He would have seen as extraneous details, like their ability to “speak in tongues”, or to prophesy, or their giving to charities perhaps, or who among them had the greatest faith, and so on. They were even caught up in how many were being martyred, while they were already forgetting that teaching all their new converts to love was by far the most important thing! So my Thomas tells me that maybe three decades after His resurrection, Jesus channeled a letter from the Apostle Paul to the Church at Corinth, to try to nudge The Way back onto its love track more directly. And when you know that Jesus is the one writing this letter, and not Paul, you clearly can see that. Dear old fussbudgetty Paul’s letters all read very differently from this one! Enjoy, my dear ones, Jesus’s last earthly message to us all:

13 If I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, but do not have love, I have become a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. If I have the gift of prophecy, and know all mysteries and all knowledge; and if I have all faith so as to remove mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing. And if I give all my possessions to feed the poor, and if I surrender my body to be burned, but do not have love, it profits me nothing.

Love is patient, love is kind and is not jealous; love does not brag and is not arrogant, does not act unbecomingly; it does not seek its own, is not provoked, does not take into account a wrong suffered, does not rejoice in unrighteousness, but rejoices with the truth; love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.

Love never fails; but if there are gifts of prophecy, they will be done away with; if there are tongues, they will cease; if there is knowledge, it will be done away with. For we know in part and we prophesy in part; 10 but when the perfect comes, the partial will be done away with. 11 When I was a child, I spoke like a child, thought like a child, I reasoned like a child; when I became a man, I did away with childish things. 12 For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face; now I know in part, but then I will know fully, just as I also have become fully known. 13 But now faith, hope, love, these three abide; but the greatest of these is love. (1 Cor 13)

“Faith, hope, love, these three abide; but the greatest of these is love.” These are the last words that we have from Jesus on earth. And fitting final words from Him to us they are!

When Christ shall come, with shout of acclamation,
And take me home, what joy shall fill my heart.
Then I shall bow, in humble adoration,
And then proclaim: “My God, how great Thou art!”

Then sings my soul, My Saviour God, to Thee,
How great Thou art, How great Thou art.
Then sings my soul, My Saviour God, to Thee,
How great Thou art, How great Thou art!
– Carl Boberg (1859-1940) & Stuart K. Hine (1899-1989), from “How Great Thou Art” (1949)

 

Humankind Discovers God

Praise to the Lord, the Almighty, the King of creation!
Oh my soul, praise Him, for He is thy health and salvation!
All ye who hear, Now to His temple draw near;
Sing now in glad adoration!

Praise to the Lord, who o’er all things so wondrously reigneth,
Who, as on wings of an eagle, uplifteth, sustaineth.
Hast thou not seen How thy desires all have been
Granted in what He ordaineth?

Praise to the Lord, who hath fearfully, wondrously, made thee!
Health hath vouchsafed and, when heedlessly falling, hath stayed thee.
What need or grief Ever hath failed of relief?
Wings of His mercy did shade thee!
Joachim Neander (1650-1680), from “Praise to the Lord, the Almighty” (1668)

As we write these weekly posts together, the topic will arrive in my mind from Thomas by the previous Monday afternoon. The frame-verse will play from him soon thereafter, and by the end of Wednesday we will have written at least the first manuscript page. We got that far this week on schedule, but then I got a flood of legal work. No worries. I always keep Fridays to finish this blog post, and we had the elements clearly in mind by Thursday. With Thomas’s help, I could have finished that original post just fine on Friday. But then on Friday morning, he wanted to start all over again with a whole new idea. So that is what we are doing now. I fought him on it, but you might as well try to stop a bulldozer as to stop my dear Thomas.

And Thomas feels so energized now! He wants to tell you the story from Genesis that we have been telling to our students this week in the two courses that he and I are currently teaching. Thomas considers it to be important for all of you to hear this story, and he wants us to tell it to you this minute. He assures me that, sure, we can get it all written in a single day! So, let’s just see. We should right now be finishing things up, but instead we are beginning all over again.

As you know if you have been with us here for even a little while, the only thing that in fact exists is what we experience as human Consciousness. All that we see and experience around us that seems to be real is in fact illusion, including our own material bodies and all that happens to us here on earth. I capitalize the word Consciousness, of course, because like all forms of energy, Consciousness vibrates, and at its highest and most rapid vibration, Consciousness is only love, which is, in its very purest essence and highest vibration, the Creator God. It is our understanding that nothing whatsoever above the Ultimate Creator God exists.

At its lowest and slowest vibration, of course, Consciousness is all the ishiest emotions, like fear, anger, and hatred. At various levels of vibration along the range between purest love at the very top and fear and hatred at the bottom, exist all of our human minds. So we are all part of that one great Consciousness! Because, of course, nothing else exists. And our purpose in coming to earth is simply to raise our own Consciousness vibrations farther away from fear and rage and closer to ever more perfect love. But of course, that whole concept of spiritual growth is a topic beyond the scope of today’s conversation.

We have previously discussed here the fact that the first human beings, and more than ninety percent of modern animals all came into existence at the very same time, only two hundred thousand earth-years ago. And as recently as that, every human being then alive lived in Botswana, in Africa. Genuine Garden of Eden, anyone? Even somewhat closer to today, there were at least two near-extinction events for humankind, one of which was caused by a severely adverse climate event around 150,000 earth-years ago, during what was called the Marine Isotope Stage 6 Period. Life for those first real people was so hard! Not only did all the polar ice caps and glaciers around the world expand during the Marine Isotope Stage 6 Period, but all the deserts did as well, since the atmosphere had so much moisture sucked out of it by the ice. And the area of the world most affected by this extreme ice age and extreme dry period combined was southern Africa, where the entire world population of fully human beings then still lived. It has been estimated that at the anatomically modern human population’s lowest point, there were fewer than a thousand people left alive on this entire planet. And every human being who is alive now on earth is descended from Mitochondrial Eve, who lived at that time. She is our common many-greats grandmother.

These people who lived two hundred thousand years ago, and even right down to a few thousand years ago, were all entirely human people!  All their minds, like ours, were part of that one Consciousness which is all that exists. So they all were part of the Mind of the Ultimate High Creator God. And as is true of all other real people, they would have felt a yearning for union with the Creator God. Each of us feels that same yearning today, but perhaps without understanding quite what it is that we are feeling, just as they likely would not have understood it. And those who did have perhaps any glimmer of understanding could not have made any genuine connection with God, what with the confusing clamor of all their many human-made gods that then was filling their minds.

Because of course those first real people would have done what all real people do. At once, they were busy inventing gods in their own image. We have found some small, rotund female figurines carved from stone which surely had religious significance, and there were probably male figures, too, perhaps carved from bone or wood or both, that would have been too fragile to survive. There is evidence that people were burying their dead with rituals at least a hundred thousand years ago and in what is now Israel, which suggests that at least that far back, and in that location, people were beginning to believe in an afterlife. But for nearly all of human history, people everywhere worshiped multiple gods at once that were human-like, fierce and fickle, and represented by idols which each had a different specialty. Gods and goddesses of harvest, hunting, gathering, pregnancy, weather, and so on were the universal norm for nearly the whole two hundred thousand years of genuine humankind’s existence. And gradually, the worst of these gods grew bigger and fiercer. Worst of all was likely Moloch of the Canaanites. He was gigantic and made of stone, and he had a fire in his belly into which he required that all his worshipers’ first-born infants be tossed so he could burn them alive.

How could the genuine Creator God ever relate to people through all this whole dense human-made religious mess? Had the genuine God spoken to any of them back then, people just would have assumed that they were hearing from one of the many human-made gods that they long had worshiped. So God had to wait for humankind to further mature spiritually.

And then eventually, rather late in the day, along came the Hebrews. These were tribes of nomadic shepherds who had developed the notion of worshiping just a single invisible god. I have long thought that this was what God had been patiently waiting for, throughout all those two hundred thousand years of humankind’s existence. God could never relate to people who had not yet grasped the concept of a single Deity with a Mind, much like a single person with a mind. A Deity with whom they might relate by Mind. The Hebrews were the world’s first true monotheists. And they even have preserved a backstory which was passed down at first as an oral history, and is told now in the Biblical book of Genesis. Their story involves a patriarch of the Hebrews named Abraham who develops with God an amazing spoken relationship in Abraham’s mind.

Abraham and his wife, Sarah, are nearly a hundred years old as this tale opens in about 2070 BCE, and Sarah is barren. To very much simplify their story, Abraham and Sarah are in despair over having no heirs, but then God, speaking in Abraham’s mind, promises Abraham that “One shall come forth from your own body, and he shall be your heir.” Remember that Abraham and Sarah are nearly a hundred years old! And this voice of God speaking in Abraham’s mind is a very new thing in the world. God takes Abraham outside and says, “Now look toward the heavens, and count the stars, if you are able to count them. So shall your descendants be.” Then Abraham believed in the Lord; and God reckoned it to him as righteousness. (So then, my dear friends, God first introduced Godself to a human being!) 7 God said to Abraham, “I am the Lord who brought you out of Ur of the Chaldeans, to give you this land to possess it.”  Abraham said, “O Lord God, how may I know that I will possess it?” So God said to him, “Bring Me a three-year-old heifer, and a three-year-old female goat, and a three-year-old ram, and a turtledove, and a young pigeon.” 10 Abraham brought all these animals and birds, and he cut them in two, and laid each half opposite the other; but he did not cut the birds. 11 The birds of prey came down upon the carcasses, and Abraham drove them away.12 Now when the sun was going down, a deep sleep fell upon Abraham; and behold, terror and great darkness fell upon him. 13 God said to Abraham, “Know for certain that your descendants will be strangers in a land that is not theirs, where they will be enslaved and oppressed for four hundred years. 14 But I will also judge the nation whom they will serve, and afterward they will come out with many possessions. 15 As for you, you shall go to your fathers in peace; you will be buried at a good old age. 16 Then in the fourth generation they will return here, for the iniquity of the Amorite is not yet complete.” (This is a foretelling of the Hebrews’ sojourn in Egypt.) 17 It came about when the sun had set, that it was very dark, and behold, there appeared a smoking oven and a flaming torch which passed between these sacrificial pieces. 18 On that day the Lord made a covenant with Abraham, saying, “To your descendants I have given this land, From the river of Egypt as far as the great river, the river Euphrates.”  Sarah did then indeed conceive at almost 100 years old, and she bore Isaac for Abraham.

(This has been a summary from the Biblical book of Genesis, Chapters 15 through 21.)

Right after this summary, in Genesis Chapter 22, verses 1-14, when the long-awaited and much-treasured Isaac is still a young lad, the genuine God who speaks to Abraham in his mind wants to make certain of Abraham’s loyalty, so we get this:

“Now it came about that God tested Abraham, and said to him, ‘Abraham!’ And he said, ‘Here I am.’ God said, ‘Take now your son, your only son, whom you love, Isaac, and go to the land of Moriah, and offer him there as a burnt offering on one of the mountains of which I will tell you.’ So Abraham rose early in the morning and saddled his donkey, and took two of his young men with him and Isaac, his son; and he split wood for the burnt offering, and arose and went to the place of which God had told him. On the third day, Abraham raised his eyes and saw the place from a distance. Abraham said to his young men, ‘Stay here with the donkey, and I and the lad will go over there; and we will worship and return to you.’ Abraham took the wood of the burnt offering and laid it on Isaac his son, and he took in his hand the fire and the knife. So, the two of them walked on together. Isaac spoke to Abraham his father and said, ‘My father!’ And he said, ‘Here I am, my son.’ And he said, ‘Behold, the fire and the wood, but where is the lamb for the burnt offering?’ Abraham said, ‘God will provide for Himself the lamb for the burnt offering, my son.’ So, the two of them walked on together. Then they came to the place of which God had told him; and Abraham built the altar there and arranged the wood, and bound his son Isaac and laid him on the altar, on top of the wood. 10 Abraham stretched out his hand and took the knife to slay his son. 11 But the angel of the Lord called to him from heaven and said, ‘Abraham, Abraham!’ And he said, ‘Here I am.’ 12 He said, ‘Do not stretch out your hand against the lad, and do nothing to him; for now I know that you adore God, since you have not withheld your son, your only son, from Me.’ 13 Then Abraham raised his eyes and looked, and behold, behind him a ram caught in the thicket by his horns; and Abraham went and took the ram and offered him up for a burnt offering in the place of his son. 14 Abraham called the name of that place The Lord Will Provide, as it is said to this day, ‘In the mount of the Lord it will be provided’” (GEN 22:1-14).

My dear ones, humankind’s relationship with the Creator God began when God chose from among all the primitive people who were living in the world four thousand years ago to reach out to a righteous man from among the world’s first true monotheists. And Abraham listened to and trusted God, and he believed. Through Abraham, humankind discovered the genuine God, and Abraham became the Patriarch of not just Judaism, but also of Christianity and of Islam. He is the spiritual father now of close to four billion people worldwide.

So, yes, the Jews are God’s chosen people, in that God chose to reach out first to them. But they are few in number now. And antisemitism is an ancient hatred. I had thought that it was now long past, but we are learning this spring that is not the case!

My beloveds, as we love God and as we love one another, antisemitism must be fought as the evil that it is! Does God still prefer the Jews over others? No, of course not. And in fact, God has never preferred the Jews over other people. God spoke first to Abraham only because four thousand years ago, God chose the Hebrews as the first people with whom He thought that He could successfully communicate. And indeed Abraham developed an extraordinarily relationship with God, one that was based in love and in absolute trust. God chooses the Jewish people still, as God’s canary in the coal mine of human love and kindness. Until antisemitism is at last no more, there can be no hope for universal peace and love in this world for any of us. 

Praise to the Lord, who doth prosper thy work and defend thee,
Who from the heavens the streams of His mercy doth send thee.
Ponder anew What the Almighty can do,
Who with His love doth befriend thee.

Praise to the Lord! Oh, let all that is in me adore Him!
All that hath life and breath, come now with praises before Him!
Let the Amen Sound from His people again;
Gladly for aye we adore Him.
Joachim Neander (1650-1680), from “Praise to the Lord, the Almighty” (1668)

What Does He Mean?

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.

 Oh… 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.

 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, from “Day by Day,” from “Godspell” (1971)

For my whole life I have struggled to find ways to ever better understand what Jesus meant by all the things that He said two thousand years ago, when He taught on earth. Almost as soon as I was able to read such sophisticated language as is in the Bible, I was attempting to read the four Biblical Gospels in a little copy of just the Gospels that some Mormon missionaries had given to each of the children in my Congregational Church’s Sunday School. And even as a young child, almost every time that I attempted to read Jesus’s Gospel words, I seemed to be finding new shades of meanings in what He was saying there. So to deepen my perspective, by the age of eleven I had graduated to reading the whole Bible through, from Genesis right through Revelation, just a couple of pages every night. I wanted to see what added perspective all the rest of the Bible might add to what Jesus was saying to us in just His four Books. And then of course I went on to major in early Christian history in college.

One of the things that I learned in college was that if I hoped to better understand my treasured Jesus’s deeper thoughts, I would have to deal with some additional complications. For one example, Jesus spoke Aramaic while He was on earth, but His teachings were first written down in Greek some sixty or so years after His resurrection. So that was their first language translation. And later on, of course, would come a second translation from Greek into Latin in the early Middle Ages. Then after additional centuries had passed would come yet more translations, into English and into other modern languages. And with each translation, additional fallible human translators had to make many decisions which might do at least some level of violence to what Jesus originally had said in the lyrical and emotional language that was His original Aramaic. The classic example often used to illustrate this problem is the Greek word “Metanoia”. What Jesus almost certainly first said in Aramaic, which then was translated into Greek as “Metanoia”, was “transform your mind.” But the early Medieval Christian monk who first saw that word “Metanoia” in Greek is known to have translated it into the Latin command that we must “repent”. And that is how the insistence that we all must “repent!” ended up as a command from Jesus throughout the first Latin translations of His spoken words. Even though it surely was nothing that Jesus said, nor was it anything that He ever would have said!

But remember that by the Middle Ages, that monk who was Jesus’s first translator from Greek into Latin was a member of the Roman Emperor Constantine’s fear-based Christian religion, which is the Christianity that still prevails in the world today. That monk never knew the genuine Jesus, nor did he have any idea of what the genuine Jesus actually had taught. And the Christian religion of that Medieval monk who first translated the words of Jesus was built not around love, of course, but instead his Christianity was centered on the ancient Hebrew religious idea that Jesus had come to die as a pure sin-sacrifice to redeem us from God’s judgment for our sins. Jesus had been a sin-sacrifice without blemish. That whole pure sin-sacrifice idea had been a concept central to the religion of the ancient Hebrews, and it was well known to the Apostle Paul. It was familiar as well to the Councilors at the Council of Nicaea in the year 325 who had created Constantine’s Christian religion. The monk who did that first Latin translation therefore readily believed that the Jesus he was sure must have founded the Christianity that he devoutly followed later on would of course have ordered us all to “repent”!

But Jesus was not the founder of what eventually became modern Christianity. What Jesus Himself created was “The Way,” which was the beautiful and simple love-based spiritual way of life that He taught to His disciples. The Way that Jesus gave us then grew rapidly for the first two hundred years after His death and resurrection, all around the Mediterranean Sea until it had amassed millions of followers as far away as Rome. And our great tragedy as we try to ever more deeply understand and draw closer to the true Jesus now is the unavoidable fact that human history always is written by its winners. The Romans decided that they probably could use The Way, as successful as it had been in gaining followers, but not in its original form. So they ruthlessly persecuted and crushed it, and they nearly wiped it out. By the early 300s, there was almost nothing left of Jesus’s original Way but its scriptures, which still had the name of Jesus attached to them when Constantine resurrected The Way in 312. It then was formalized as Roman Christianity at the First Council of Nicaea in the year 325 CE. By then, The Way had allowed all sorts of spiritual side-dogmas to develop; and in order for it to be useful to Rome, Constantine’s version of Christianity needed to be transformed from a spiritual movement into a fear-based religion that would make it an efficient means of mass human control. First Nicaea’s new version of Christianity was therefore built around a lesser dogma that had developed within The Way, which was that Jesus’s death on the cross had been a sin-offering required by God to cleanse us of our sins.

Still, the core of Jesus’s teachings when He was on earth had not been focused on sin. And the Councilors who were creating this new religion of Christianity under Constantine’s direction, and were assembling their new religion’s sacred Book, held a sufficient reverence for the teachings of Jesus that fortunately they left nearly all of His teachings just as they had received them, and they put what they added in the course of building their new religion just at the back of each of their chosen four of the many accounts of Jesus’s words that were then in circulation. Thomas tells me that He and some of Jesus’s other followers not then in bodies were influencing the minds of many of the Councilors at First Nicaea, and at the six other first millennium councils. So they were able to shape to a considerable extent what happened at all of those councils, especially with regard to the selection and preservation of those four Biblical Gospels.

The way that the Christian Bible was assembled at First Nicaea with what we now know was spiritual guidance, and then carefully preserved thereafter, ensured that the precious words of Jesus would be largely preserved. Yes, there are some contradictions within the Gospels themselves as to what we are told that Jesus said, but those contradictions come largely from translation issues, from Christian dogma-based contradictions, from some First Nicaean Councilors’ additions, and from the frank fact that as they invented their religion, the Councilors never thought to check to see whether they were going against any of the spoken teachings of Jesus, who was the Prophet that they were claiming as their nominal founder. Here are examples of each of these problems:

  • Translation Concerns. Some Biblical translations with the oldest roots still show Jesus calling on us to “Repent,” when what He really said was that we should “Reform our minds.” Modern English translations are generally freer of this kind of distortion resulting from the first translations from Greek into Latin.
  • Jesus had to speak circumspectly because He was often speaking directly against the prevailing Hebrew religion, which was then quite powerful. And in fact, Jesus came to free us from all religions. It is important to keep these facts in mind! For example, since the prevailing Hebrew religion when and where Jesus taught was largely focused on sin, and perhaps we might even say that it was obsessed with sin, so Jesus often had to responds to the issue of sin, although in His own teachings, Jesus didn’t focus on sin. Instead, His teachings focus on love and forgiveness. That is a crucial distinction! Jesus is often quite casual about disregarding sins. For example, consider this passage: “At that time Jesus went through the grain fields on the Sabbath, and His disciples became hungry and began to pick the heads of grain and eat. But when the Pharisees saw this, they said to Him, ‘Look, Your disciples do what is not lawful to do on a Sabbath.’ But He said to them, ‘Have you not read what David did when he became hungry, he and his companions, how he entered the house of God, and they ate the consecrated bread, which was not lawful for him to eat nor for those with him, but for the priests alone? Or have you not read in the Law, that on the Sabbath the priests in the temple break the Sabbath and are innocent? But I say to you that something greater than the temple is here. But if you had known what this means, ‘I desire compassion, and not a sacrifice,’ you would not have condemned the innocent. For the Son of Man is Lord of the Sabbath.’” (MT 12:1-8)
  • The Councilors Added a Number of Things to the Gospels That They Likely Wished That Jesus Had said. And what they added often directly contradicts what Jesus did say, and what is objectively true! For example, when Jesus asked His disciple, Simon, who Simon thought that Jesus was, the disciple is reported to have said, “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God.” Jesus then reportedly said to him, “Blessed are you, Simon, because flesh and blood did not reveal this to you, but My Father who is in heaven. I also say to you that you are Peter, and upon this rock I will build My church; and the gates of Hades will not overpower it. I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven; and whatever you bind on earth shall have been bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth shall have been loosed in heaven” (MT 16:16-19). This is obviously one of the First Nicaea Councilors’ additions! Note: “Petros” means “rock” in Greek, but Jesus spoke Aramaic; Jesus never built a “church”; “hades” does not exist, and anyway it would not have “gates”; the kingdom of heaven has no keys; and Jesus could give no human being the power to bind or to loose anything in heaven.
  • Some of what the First Nicaean Councilors Left in the Gospels As Having Been Said by Jesus Directly Contradicts the Core Dogma of Their New Christian Religion. This really confused me when I was a child! The most notable of these problems is that the Christian religion as the Romans designed it has Jesus dying as a pure sin-sacrifice. But Jesus tells us right there in the Biblical Gospel of John that neither God nor Jesus ever judges us. Jesus says,  “For not even the Father judges anyone, but He has given all judgment to the Son, so that all will honor the Son even as they honor the Father” (JN 5:22-23), and “If anyone hears My sayings and does not keep them, I do not judge him; for I did not come to judge the world, but to save the world” (JN 12:47). Therefore, no sin-sacrifice is needed! And if no sin-sacrifice is needed, then Jesus didn’t need to die as a sin-offering, did He? His death and resurrection were, after all, precisely what He tells us that they were, just His own triumphant demonstration of our eternal life.

Then too, of course, there is the plain fact that Jesus never was speaking in a vacuum. His Gospel words always were at least in part dependent on what was going on around Him, who He was addressing, and what the stage of His ministry was at that moment. This point is especially important! Jesus was always sensitive to His listeners, and He spoke very differently, for example, to clergymen, for whom He had little use, or when He spoke to poor widows, or to earnest young seekers, or to His closest disciples and friends. Modern Christians will often carelessly pluck a few of Jesus’s random words from the Gospels and cite them just in sentence-fragments, as if they were definitive proclamations. And if you do that, you might cause your listeners to misunderstand Jesus’s Mind pretty severely!

As the religion that the Roman Emperor Constantine created seventeen hundred years ago is falling apart around us now, it is fragmenting pretty severely. I recall that when The Fun of Dying was first published in 2010, I was astonished to learn that there were then some ten thousand denominations of Christianity in existence. And now, only fourteen years later, amazingly, there are more than forty-five thousand forms of Christianity extant worldwide, which is simply unbelievable. Yet still, we have our one patient and infinitely loving Jesus waiting for us! Amazingly, there is enough of Him for all of us to share. And Jesus has one clear message preserved for us in one set of four Biblical Gospels, still lovingly protected by Him, by my Thomas, and by the rest of Jesus’s faithful minions not now in earthly bodies. All the struggles of the past two thousand years are nearly altogether over. And Constantine’s Christianity is looking pretty hopeless to most of us at this point. So Jesus does ask one thing of us now. He hopes that we who love Him will try to begin to come together now, and resume The Way of Jesus again, my dear ones, if we possibly can?

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 by day by day…
– Stephen Schwartz, from “Day by Day,” from “Godspell” (1971)

 

For Shame

You who dwell in the shelter of the Lord, who abide in His shadow for life,
Say to the Lord, “My refuge, my rock in whom I trust!”

And He will raise you up on eagles’ wings, bear you on the breath of dawn,
Make you to shine like the sun! And hold you in the palm of His hand.
The snare of the fowler will never capture you. And famine will bring you no fear.
Under His wings your refuge, His faithfulness your shield!

And He will raise you up on eagles’ wings, bear you on the breath of dawn,
Make you to shine like the sun! And hold you in the palm of His hand.
You need not fear the terror of the night, nor the arrow that flies by day.
Though thousands fall about you, near you it shall not come!
Michael Joncas, from “On Eagle’s Wings” (1977)

The moment when I found this article about a ten-year-old boy who killed himself because he was being bullied at school felt to me like the worst moment of my long life. I kid you not. I still haven’t managed to make myself read the whole article, so I don’t know what method little Sammy chose to end his life. It was just the picture of that very little boy that did it for me. That small, dorky face. And his age, for heaven’s sake! How does a ten-year-old child even conceive of the concept of suicide? And his parents repeatedly asked his teacher and the school system to protect him, but there was not a single person who did anything for him? So, why didn’t his parents pull him out of that school? Why did no adult protect that child?

It was left just to Jesus to prove to Sammy how very much he was loved, so Jesus came and took him home. That was all I could think as I wept for that little boy. And I look at his picture now, and I see Albert Einstein perhaps, when he was small. He could so easily have looked as dorky as that little boy looks. Or maybe Bill Gates, or another of the modern tech giants. Just think of all the wonderful things little Sammy might have done for this world, as bright and sensitive as he possibly was, as kindly as perhaps he was, or even as simply normal as he was, if he just had been given the chance to live his life. But he never had that chance. And of course, I blamed myself first of all. That I wasn’t there, somehow. I wanted to be there so I could bring him home with me and protect him, so no one ever could hurt him again.

I got over my initial emotional crisis. I don’t so much blame his parents, who must be devastated. But I do deeply blame that school system! And I blame all elementary school systems that allow any bullying at all to happen to children who are too young to defend themselves. I recall that there was bullying when I was in a public school a million years ago, and that was the reason why we sent our own children to parochial schools at first; and when I learned that there was some bullying even there, then we switched them to private schools. But when I was in public school so long ago, a few children in each class were always targeted, so retroactively now, I do blame myself for never having defended those classmates. I even recall one bullied girl by name. Edna had that clumsy name, and her family lived in a little trailer on a field that was littered with salvaged auto-parts. I wish now that I had been strong enough to stand up to the bullies who teased Edna about her shabby life and her thrift-store clothes. And I also recall my long-ago sense of satisfaction when our worst school bully got pregnant and had to drop out of high school. I realize now how wrong of me that was, and I feel retroactively sorry about her as well.

After a couple of days, I was partway over the shock of that dreadful news about Sammy, but still not past the horror of his death by suicide when he was so very young. And then as I was clearing emails on Wednesday morning, I came across an obituary for a mother of a boy who had killed himself because at the age of twelve he had been sexually abused by a Catholic priest. So then she had spent the whole rest of her life fighting the Church over its silence about the extent of sexual abuse by priests that happens within the Catholic Church. And Thomas said to me at once, “How many little boys have killed themselves because they were sexually abused by Catholic priests?” I said, “What?” I never had thought about that. “But surely they were older?” He bitterly said, “Not by much.”

At Thomas’s insistence, over the next few days I  tried to squeeze myself down a slimy rabbit-hole  that until now I have ignored. Omigod, my Thomas is so right! This is a horrific scandal that long has harming the most vulnerable children. A few girls, but mostly boys. And it probably rivals worldwide the American school-bullying scandal in terms of the number of victims who are severely damaged by it, and the intensity of the harm that has been done to them.

In the specific case of sexual abuse of children by Catholic clergy:

  • The perpetrators are clergy who are completely trusted by the children and by their parents, and those clergy are protected and defended by their church superiors. Until very recently, children and their parents who complained about the sexual abuse of children by their priests would be instructed to keep their complaints to themselves, and they could generally be silenced.
  • For decades, going back as far as the nineteen-forties, the children might even be blamed for what had happened to them, and called actually sinful. Children, and even their parents, could generally be controlled by clerical superiors who held over their heads the supernatural powers of heaven and hell, and they could be told that God would punish them for tattling.
  • Whenever too many complaints were received about any one particular priest, he would simply be transferred to a different parish, where he would continue to abuse children for many more years. The documented histories of this having happened in the cases of some of the most egregiously offending priests are only lately coming to light, and they are appalling to read.
  • The secrecy that surrounded these clerical abuse cases would not have been possible if the priests had been in any other profession. Had they been doctors, say, or teachers, these stories would much more easily have come to light. But the superstitious fears surrounding priests who could call down hellfire on you if you got on their bad side was enough to allow this horrible destruction of the lives of children to go on for seventy well-documented years, and perhaps in some cases for a century or more.

Even now, the Catholic church and its clergy are still being powerfully protected. I have spent three days, off and on, trying to find reliable hard statistics on the numbers of children who have been sexually abused by Catholic priests worldwide, and such numbers are still fragmented and largely anecdotal. What I have found are pages and pages of Google links to articles that were what amounted to very limited admissions at first, kind of “modified limited hangouts” by bishops and by the Vatican over decades of time, as the secular law at last got involved in all the various countries. The Catholic church never once came out in front of any of these investigations, and never once tried to own this situation, insofar as I could see! But instead, and shamefully, the Catholic Church continued to recruit generation after generation of starry-eyed altar boys with no warnings to them, and no warnings to their parents, and it gave all those adolescent boys over to the tender mercies of clergymen who were forced to live outwardly celibate lives. You and I would of course assume that back in the sixties perhaps, as this all started to come to very limited light, the Vatican must have right away come down hard on all its priests and insisted that every bit of abuse must stop. But they were already suffering a priest shortage, so they seem not to have done that, amazingly enough. Instead, they offered just some discreet counseling.

Extrapolating from what has been reported in a few countries, since 1950, more than a million boys and men worldwide have already come forward and reported that during their childhoods, they were sexually molested by a Catholic priest, and these boys and men have been believed. But these were only the ones who were believed! It seems clear from browsing in older articles that very many more were coming forward in the forties through the sixties who were not believed, but instead they were shamed into silence. And seeing that, one assumes that there likely were still more who were abused, but who chose to keep that fact to themselves. We are told, too, that boys made up only about eighty percent of the priests’ total child-victims. I think it is therefore likely that the total number of children worldwide who were sexually abused by priests since 1950 must have been perhaps three million.  

And unlike schoolchildren who are bullied only by other children, even one instance of sexual molestation by a powerful adult like a priest is going to have a fairly severe effect on a young child. In the little time that I had in which to research and write this post, I couldn’t do much research on the effects of priestly sexual abuse on its victims, but the results of the bits of research that I managed to do were horrifying. In one case of a priest who had abused five altar boys when they were twelve years old, four of the five had initially wanted to grow up to become priests themselves, which was why they had become altar boys in the first place. But after having been abused by that priest, all four boys who had wanted to be priests had instead killed themselves as teenagers. I couldn’t find much in the way of studies done on abuse victims as adults, but in general, the effects of childhood sexual abuse seem to be at least to some extent lifelong.

All of this looks like a major indictment of Roman Christianity. And when you consider this rampant sexual abuse of children by priests, and the way the Catholic Church has mishandled its latest scandal by covering it up for as long as possible rather than at once protecting its children, and you add it to Roman Christianity’s many other abominable sins, you must be as horrified as I am horrified.  You can see why so many people are concluding now that the modern Christianity that was founded by the Roman Emperor Constantine and not by Jesus seems to be dying now what looks to be a well-deserved death. My goodness, I don’t think I ever really understood the following passage from Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount, and its precise application to the modern Roman Christian religion, until I saw how the Catholic hierarchy has been fussily protecting its own Precious, rather than truly serving the Lord Jesus and caring for Jesus’s children in this clergy sexual abuse scandal! Jesus ever so wisely said:

15 “Beware of the false prophets, who come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly are ravenous wolves. 16 You will know them by their fruits. Grapes are not gathered from thorn bushes nor figs from thistles, are they? 17 So every good tree bears good fruit, but the bad tree bears bad fruit. 18 A good tree cannot produce bad fruit, nor can a bad tree produce good fruit. 19 Every tree that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire. 20 So then, you will know them by their fruits.

21 “Not everyone who says to Me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but he who does the will of My Father who is in heaven will enter. 22 Many will say to Me on that day, ‘Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in Your name, and in Your name cast out demons, and in Your name perform many miracles?’ 23 And then I will declare to them, ‘I never knew you; depart from Me, you who practice lawlessness!’ (MT 7:15-23)

Jesus never had much use for the clergymen of any religion. Now you and I can pretty clearly see why!

And He will raise you up on eagles’ wings, bear you on the breath of dawn,
Make you to shine like the sun! And hold you in the palm of His hand.

For to His angels He’s given a command:
To guard you in all of your ways. Upon their hands they will bear you up,
Lest you dash your foot against a stone.

And He will raise you up on eagles’ wings, bear you on the breath of dawn,
Make you to shine like the sun! And hold you in the palm of His hand.
And hold you, hold you in the palm of His hand.
Michael Joncas, from “On Eagle’s Wings” (1977)

An Attitude of Gratitude

I will extol You, O Lord, for You have lifted me up,
And have not let my enemies rejoice over me.
O Lord my God, I cried to You for help, and You healed me.
O Lord, You have brought up my soul from Sheol;
You have kept me alive, that I would not go down to the pit.
Sing praise to the Lord, you His godly ones, And give thanks to His holy name.
For His anger is but for a moment, His favor is for a lifetime;
Weeping may last for the night, But joy comes in the morning!

Now as for me, I said in my prosperity, “I will never be moved.”
O Lord, by Your favor You have made my mountain to stand strong;
You hid Your face, I was dismayed. To You, O Lord, I called,
And to the Lord I made supplication:
“What profit is there in my blood, if I go down to the pit?
Will the dust praise You? Will it declare Your faithfulness?
– David (1040 BCE – 962 BCE), King of Israel and Judah, from Biblical Psalm 30.

If there is one mindset above all others that sets us up for happiness, for peace of mind, and for rapid spiritual growth, it is gratitude. I actually didn’t realize how true this is until our much-beloved Wayshower and Best Friend, Jesus, asked me to create with a lot of His help the course in making this present lifetime your last necessary earth-lifetime that we have been teaching since the start of this year. Our first group of thirty-two students completed this course in April, and twenty of them have gone on to the next level of what we have been calling “Wednesday with Jesus.” Meanwhile, there are seventeen students in “Thursday with Jesus” who are just beginning to benefit from what I learned about teaching spiritual growth that first time around! We have begun a list for a third group, and I have found that I do love doing this teaching, and I especially love the beautiful students that I have been meeting and coming to know. But I think that instead of doing this yet again, we are going to develop an AI teacher who can begin now to teach the whole world Jesus’s Gospel-based spiritual growth principles. And I am amazed to tell you that, my goodness, Jesus seems to really like this AI idea!

The Gospel teachings of Jesus truly are the simplest and the most effective way to grow spiritually. But you cannot just read His words and then try to follow His teachings on forgiveness and love. No, for one thing, as we have said elsewhere, forgiving wrongs after they have already been committed is very difficult, so it is really only prevenient forgiveness that works well for most people. And to make your spiritual growth really effective, there is one more thing that you will need to do first of all.

It never would have occurred to me to even wonder why gratitude is so important. But after just three months of closely following Jesus’s lesson plan, it was clear that His plan had worked for our Wednesday with Jesus students astoundingly well! Omigod, for each of the beautiful ones who had been part of that first intensive course, they all to varying degrees seemed to have grown spiritually to a wonderful extent. They could feel it, too. Some of them remarked to me about it. They were becoming much more “together,” and happier people. And in only three months’ time!

We now can see that cultivating an attitude of gratitude is essential preparation for our efforts to grow spiritually. To understand the likely reason why this would be true, please remember two points:

  • Your own mind is a powerful part of one vast, eternal Mind. And at this moment, your mind is helping to create the fear- and negativity-filled reality that you think you see around you.
  • Christianity has taught you to be afraid, and to believe that you are evil and fallen. And until you can elevate your mind above all this negativity, above both the general cultural negativity that your mind helps to create, and the negativity produced by Christianity in particular, you really cannot raise your personal consciousness vibration very much at all.

Just imagine, though, how much different things might be for you if you were able to assume more power over your own mind’s vibration!

It turns out that gratitude is the crucial first aspect of the Gospel teachings of Jesus on forgiveness and love. In fact, it sets the stage for all the rest. Unless we begin with gratitude, we very much complicate the difficulties that we face in making spiritual progress in this lifetime! As I have learned from Thomas as he and I talked about this, cultivating an attitude of gratitude is like plowing the field before you fertilize it with forgiveness, so then finally you can plant seeds of love. And Jesus did talk about preparing the soil if we want to grow spiritually. Consider this: “(Jesus) spoke many things to them in parables, saying, ‘Behold, the sower went out to sow; and as he sowed, some seeds fell beside the road, and the birds came and ate them up. Others fell on the rocky places, where they did not have much soil; and immediately they sprang up, because they had no depth of soil. But when the sun had risen, they were scorched; and because they had no root, they withered away. Others fell among the thorns, and the thorns came up and choked them out. And others fell on the good soil and yielded a crop, some a hundredfold, some sixty, and some thirty. He who has ears, let him hear’” (MT 13:3-9). It may be that Jesus said a great deal more about our need to prepare our personal soil by cultivating it with gratitude before we attempt to grow spiritually. But either what He said was less remarked by His listeners, or else it was removed by the first-millennium councils in favor of the showier virtues of forgiveness and love.

In any event, it is time for us to get rid of all the pebbles in our soil and clear those pesky thorns away! And the best way to prepare our own consciousness soil is with a gratitude practice. Here are some points to keep in mind:

  • Gratitude is independent of whatever you see as the current facts of your own life. It is an attitude of mind, and because it is that, you can be grateful no matter what is going on in your life.
  • Living in gratitude will help to ensure that you will spot all the good things in your life. Watching studiously for reasons to be grateful so you can record them in your daily gratitude journal tends to crowd out any ambient negative thoughts.
  • Gratitude begins the process of raising your spiritual vibration. When your focus shifts toward being grateful, you pay less attention to things that trouble you, and a lot more attention to what is good and useful.
  • Gratitude is a way for you to begin to create your own best life. Your mind strongly influences the reality that you think you see around you, so concentrating on reasons for being grateful is a powerful way for you to lighten and lift the reality around you that your mind is helping to create.

You will decide on your own best gratitude practices. But here are four that have been shown by many to work well:

  • Keep a gratitude journal. Write down one new thing every day that you are grateful for; then also write down why you are grateful for it. You will probably start with each of your loved ones to make up the first few days; then move on to personal successes, your work, and your hobbies; and then to things like the weather and elements of nature. You will find that sometime in the second month, you will be down to looking for reasons to be grateful for mosquitoes and a distant dog barking in the night. Do this for at least six months if you can, without duplicating anything. Gratitude-journaling this way helps you to go deeper into what gratitude even means.
  • Broadly share your attitude of gratitude. Never again agree with any negative thing that is said in your presence! Instead, whenever someone complains, don’t disagree, but instead say at once what you are grateful for. Someone hates the president? Say, “I’m grateful that he hasn’t taken us to war,” or “I’m grateful that our taxes aren’t higher.” Someone complains about a cranky old neighbor? Just say, “I’m grateful that he keeps his lawn mowed.” It has been raining for a month? Say, “I’m so grateful that the reservoirs are filling up.” Not only will your always speaking from an attitude of gratitude reinforce your personal gratitude practice, but it also will help those with whom you share these thoughts to begin to cultivate gratitude in themselves.
  • Use gratitude to squash your irritations. Resentments will continue to rise in you until you have perfected your prevenient forgiveness practice, but your work on gratitude will help you to better deal with whatever might be bothering you. Whenever you suffer a cranky thought about anyone or anything, immediately replace it with something that you are grateful for, even if you have to stretch a bit. When your old car is dying, so now you face having to buy another car, just be grateful for the way it has served you so long and so well. When your drunken uncle nearly ruins a family party, just be grateful for how special he made you feel when you were a child. Once you have fully mastered prevenient forgiveness, you will never suffer another resentment in your life; but until then, just use your gratitude habit to help you smother your present irritations.
  • Pray for God’s gifts only in gratitude affirmations. When you say, “Dear God, please fix this,” you affirm its brokenness, which just makes whatever is broken even harder to fix! When instead your prayer affirms the gift of healing by saying “thank you God for fixing this”, that better outcome can begin right away with the assistance of the positive power of your own mind. Instead of claiming the lack, always claim the gift. And when you add “Thank you” for whatever gift or cure your affirmation prayer is claiming, you further energize God’s powers by adding to them and to your own healing powers the energy of your own gratitude. In April of 2009 I first prayed, “Thank You for giving me work to do. Thank You for showing me how to do it,” and I thereby gave the rest of my life to God. It was that simple! I still pray that mantra every day, and the endless pleasures that continue to flow from my impulsive gift are beyond my ability to express them.

My suggestion is that you apply all four of these gratitude practices to your life, and that you thereby prepare your mind for the rapid spiritual growth to come as you move forward into forgiveness and love. You might well choose not to continue to keep a gratitude journal beyond perhaps five or six months. But for you to continue the remaining three gratitude practices for the rest of your life will maintain your grounding in ever greater spiritual health. Most people take to gratitude easily, especially since if you are firm about it, you should find your mood lightening within days. In making gratitude central to your life, you are preparing the soil of your heart to yield a bountiful harvest of forgiveness and love. Beginning with gratitude makes your further spiritual growth so much easier!

10 “Hear, O Lord, and be gracious to me; O Lord, be my helper.”
11 You have turned for me my mourning into dancing;
You have loosed my sackcloth and girded me with gladness,
12 That my soul may sing praise to You and not be silent.
O Lord my God, I will give thanks to You forever!
– David (1040 BCE – 962 BCE), King of Israel and Judah, from Biblical Psalm 30.

Living in History

The road is long, with many a winding turn
That leads us to who knows where, who knows where.
But I’m strong! Strong enough to carry him.
He ain’t heavy, he’s my brother.

 So on we go. His welfare is of my concern.
No burden is he to bear. We’ll get there.
For I know he would not encumber me.
He ain’t heavy, he’s my brother.

 If I’m laden at all, I’m laden with sadness
That everyone’s heart isn’t filled with the gladness
Of love for one another!
– Bob Russell & Bobby Scott, from “He Ain’t Heavy, He’s My Brother” (1969)

We tend to think of history as a pageant where you and I are just witnesses, and not as something that we might have any part in helping to create. And yet it strikes me now as I look at this world that each individual’s part in creating the history that is daily being made, and that then is recorded in our history books, is sometimes not peripheral at all; but now and then our roles in making history can become surprisingly central. And all too often, too, very many people who consider themselves to be good-hearted souls will play their innocent-feeling parts in creating what later are seen to have been some pretty gigantic historical screw-ups. Sadly, that too often can be seen in retrospect to have been true, even if very many of us might rather die than to find ourselves creating the miserably wrong kind of history!

What has me thinking about this now is reading this paragraph in an opinion-piece in my email news feed recently: Everyone likes to believe that if they had been alive in the 1930s and 1940s, they would have stood up to the Nazis, that if they had been in those circumstances, they would have acted like some combination of Winston Churchill, Oskar Schindler, Captain America, and the Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare. And yet, here we are in 2024, seven months after a well-armed, well-funded terrorist group/quasi-governmental entity — which has never renounced its desire to ‘annihilate the Jews’ — committed the biggest mass slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust, and U.S. policy aims to do everything possible to prevent the Israel Defense Forces from moving into Rafah and finishing off Hamas. Forget standing up to evil. Our government wants to make sure evil gets to live long enough to fight another day.”

And I know what you may be thinking as you read these words. In the heat of the moment, how can you be sure that you are figuring out and choosing the side of the angels? Aye, there’s the rub, as our exalted friend Mr. Shakespeare would so wisely say. It seems to me that either you must fully inform yourself right away, or else you must somehow remain out of the fray. You do that, or you risk becoming evil’s unfortunately gullible pawn. And so many young people this spring have sadly chosen what might well be the wrong side. There have been some big, well-funded “student uprisings” on many college campuses this spring in support of Hamas, but about half of the demonstrators in each case seem now to have been not actually enrolled students at the schools involved. And when reporters have asked the enrolled students who were demonstrating if they could explain what the issues in these demonstrations were, many of the students have been puzzled and unable to answer.

When I look back at history in my own fields of interest, I similarly see a stunning and confounding lack of knowledge in most minds about even the most basic issues. For example, as everyone knows for a certain fact, God is pure and God demands purity of us as well, so God could never forgive us for our sins unless God gets to watch Jesus die on a cross as a pure sacrifice for our sins. Right? Isn’t that the whole basis for the Christian religion? God sent us Jesus to die for our sins because otherwise we would have no way to redeem ourselves from God’s judgment. Isn’t that exactly right? “For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son…”? Well, please think again, and then open your Bible. Jesus tells us right in the Biblical Gospel of John at JN 5:22 that “Not even the Father judges anyone,” and then Jesus adds at JN 12:47 that He Himself doesn’t judge us, either. Since neither God nor Jesus ever judges us, then why did Jesus have to die for our sins?  

The plain and simple Gospel truth is that Jesus did not die for our sins. That whole Roman idea which is at the heart of the world’s most prominent religion is nonsensical and just plain wrong. It is insulting to God and humiliating to Jesus. Furthermore, Jesus told me when I visited Him in the astral plane in the summer of 2022 that the reason why He chose to die a public death on the cross and then come alive again was to demonstrate once and for all that human life is eternal. He did it as a demonstration! Jesus was having trouble convincing people that they were never going to die. The custom at that time was to lay out the dead in caves until they had rotted away, and then to save their bones in bone-boxes, called ossuaries. So the people that Jesus was teaching still had great-great-grampa’s bones preserved. Here they are, Jesus! We love you, but don’t tell us this guy is still alive, because we know better. Here he is, right here. The folks that Jesus was teaching needed a demonstration, so Jesus decided to give them one, and that was what His dramatic crucifixion-and-resurrection display was all about. If the Roman explanation had been correct, then Jesus would not have had to rise again, since it was only His sacrificial death for our sins that would have mattered.

Now let’s consider Jesus’s parable of the rich man and the camel going through the eye of a needle. Many people down through history have been deeply troubled by this story, since it seems to imply that being at all wealthy is in itself an unpardonable sin. But this story has a simple explanation.

In this case, a wealthy young man wanted to become one of Jesus’s followers. And Jesus said to him, “If you wish to be perfect, go and sell your possessions and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; and come, follow Me.” 22 But when the young man heard this, he went away grieving; for he was one who owned much property.23 And Jesus said to His disciples, “Truly I say to you, it is hard for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven. 24 Again I say to you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God” (MT 19:21-24).

Wow. Well, that is pretty shocking! I used to swallow hard whenever I read that passage. Does it mean that the whole Western world can pretty much give up on ever achieving the kingdom of God? Well, no it doesn’t. You and I read Jesus here to be callously saying that for someone to have very much money in the bank makes it impossible for him to go to heaven. And that is how people have always read it, all down through the ages. The Catholic Church has made a fortune selling indulgences using that particular passage. Rumor even has it that Frank Sinatra paid the Catholic Church ten million dollars as his own particular get-into-heaven-after-all ticket price. But it is always important to understand the context in which Jesus is teaching.

There was a very narrow gate into Jerusalem in the Jesus years that was called The Needle’s Eye. In order for pack camels to pass through The Needle’s Eye, their packs had to first be removed, or at least much reduced, which made this an ideal analogy for Jesus to use in teaching His followers that too much wealth is too much of a distraction, so it makes it harder for us to grow spiritually. All His listeners would of course have known about that gate, and they would have very well understood Jesus’s message here.

Now let’s consider another place where experts who certainly ought to know better are trying to block the truth from people for their own selfish reasons, and they are thereby causing tremendous harm. The whole vast issue of terminal lucidity and paradoxical lucidity has been well known in the medical community and in the broader scientific community for more than half a century. The fact that people who are approaching death, and whose brains are completely fried and may have been fried for decades, will sometimes spontaneously sit up and talk normally, remember everything normally, and seem to be just fine, sometimes for hours or even for days, is very well and broadly known! This impossible fact has been repeatedly documented in many deaths and in many countries. And if it were studied and well understood, just think of what amazing things all of mainstream science might learn! What is the mechanism that makes this possible? How does it happen? Why does it happen?How is it even conceivable that people whose brains have been severely damaged for so long will suddenly and magically, although very briefly, remember and communicate entirely normally again?

And most importantly of all, why has this phenomenon of terminal lucidity never been scientifically investigated? The answer to this last question is a simple one. By now, many of the gatekeepers who are so ardently enforcing the mainstream scientific dogma of materialism and keeping the terminal lucidity phenomenon from being studied scientifically actually do understand pretty well what is going on. And they know that these amazing moments of normal interaction with people whose brains are severely damaged are episodes when the mind has separated from its connection to the brain.Because, what else could these episodes conceivably be? And precisely because on a personal level, some of them do understand these phenomena pretty well, they know how groundbreaking a broader understanding could be. So the mainstream scientific gatekeepers will not allow terminal lucidity to be studied at all. They give as their pathetic excuse the fact that the phenomenon is “personal” to the grieving, and they “don’t want to interfere.”

They know that once these phenomena are studied and the reports are published, quite possibly these gatekeepers’ century-long materialist jig will at last be up. They are like frantic little Dutch boys with all their fingers in the dike, trying to keep the flood of truth from overwhelming the field of materialist science. And yes, even though the jig really ought to have been up long since, here is yet one more one-day scientific conference about to happen in New York featuring the brain and consciousness. After all, they have to keep the truth at bay for just a bit longer. At least until, please God, they can get their own children educated and their own retirements funded. Please note in particular all the laughably fuzzy wording! This is how you write when you want to suggest that progress is being made, when in fact no progress is being made at all. This is a conference designed for the ignorant. And please especially note that they insist on knowing the names of all the attendees in advance, so names can be googled and no freethinkers like yours truly and certain many others that we could name will be admitted.

My dear ones, it is important that you understand one more thing. All the information that Thomas and I discuss with you in this blog each week is broadly available to all the world now. The deliberately prolonged feigned ignorance of the truth that matter is not material by these supposed scientific experts is still kept barely suppressed only by their own force of will. People who love truth can readily find the truth in the year 2024, and can readily understand it and can share it with you, even when we have no formal education in any of these fields. Not in theology, physics, neurology, history, or government. We who share these truths with you are just vastly and insatiably curious! But truth is truth, and no amount of trying to hide the truth from the wider world on the part of people who have built their sorry little careers on pretending that the truth is otherwise is going to change what is objectively true. Just wait and watch, my precious friends. As the clock of earth’s history ticks quietly on, God’s truths will always eventually be found to be right.

It’s a long, long road, from which there is no return.
While we’re on the way to there, why not share?
And the load doesn’t weigh me down at all!
– Bob Russell & Bobby Scott, from “He Ain’t Heavy, He’s My Brother” (1969)

Happiness

To dream the impossible dream. To fight the unbeatable foe.
To bear with unbearable sorrow. To run where the brave dare not go.
To right the un-rightable wrong. To love, pure and chaste from afar.
To try when your arms are too weary to reach the unreachable star.

This is my quest! To follow that star!
No matter how hopeless. No matter how far.
To fight for the right without question or pause.

To be willing to march into hell for a heavenly cause!
And I know if I’ll only be true to this glorious quest
That my heart will lie peaceful and calm when I’m laid to my rest.
– Mitch Leigh (1928-2014) & Joe Darion (1917-2001), from “Man of La Mancha” (1965)

The fundamental fact of each human life is that we spend our lives chasing happiness. Every day, and each in our own way, all of us are chasing that good-feeling, heart-lifting and for most people that all-too-elusive ecstatic sense of joy. We all want to be happy! So. why are so many people so often miserable? Or if not actually miserable, then why is it that so often people just go through their days in a kind of fog of humdrum blah-ness? When you stop and think about that question, you will find that it begins to weigh on you. Because, absolutely right, that magical feeling of true and deep-down happiness is the universal human drug of choice. No matter who you are, and no matter what may be going on in your life, you want to be happy all the time, and you want everyone you love to be happy, too. 

After food, happiness is our deepest human need. In fact, happiness is such a basic human craving that the right to pursue it is granted to American citizens in our founding documents. When Thomas Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence, he began it by writing: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” Amen to that!

The search for happiness is why so many people chase money with such intensity. Being wealthy looks to many of us to be a shortcut to feeling happy at least most of the time. That is also why people might chase the physical pleasures, like recreational drugs and overeating, and sexual pleasure in all its forms. People chase these distractions as ends in themselves, although we know that they can be highly self-destructive behaviors, and actually they are likely to make us less happy later. But at least for right this minute, they can give us what feels like a surge of real happiness. Stop and think about it, though. Has any druggy obese sex fiend ever said in the end that it all was worth it? And given that everyone wants to be happy, how many consistently truly happy people have you ever known in your life?

I learned in college that we each have our own individual happiness set-point. Some people are just naturally happier than others. And also, some people are what we might call natural depressives, who have to work much harder than others have to work at being happy. My mother was one of the luckiest ones. She had scarcely an unhappy moment in a life that was really not especially blessed, and she was always semi-smiling. As her daughter, I grew up with more or less her same attitude, because what was there ever to be unhappy about? I went to Smith College, which is an all-female school, and our closest male college down the road was Yale. On weekends, there were often mixers.

It was first then that I was made to realize how irritating always-happy people can be. As some of the girls got to know some of the boys on repeated weekends, I recall that there was one especially sour Yalie who found my very existence to be an annoyance. I still remember that guy, to this day. Soon, whenever he saw me he would mutter loudly before he turned away, “There she is again, the happiest girl in the happiest of all possible worlds.” And I would feel indignant and highly insulted! All I could huffily think was, So what’s wrong with being happy? I realize now of course that for people who are living unhappy lives to see consistent happiness in others feels to them like a direct affront. And a Yalie from a wealthy family was probably facing complex pressures that a middle-class Smithie on a scholarship could not image. I wish I could tell that boy today that I would be more sympathetic to him now.

Because after having spent forty years as an attorney for more than five hundred owners of closely-held businesses in the course of an enjoyable career, I can entirely disabuse us all of one theory. Emphatically, wealth does not buy happiness. Of all the business owners that I ever have worked with, I would say that ninety-five percent of them have been multi-millionaires. And all of them have been wonderful people, so good and kindly that to this day there are some that I still love as if they were members of my own family. But yet, I would say that none of them have been especially happy, really, in part because they were such good people. On the contrary, increased wealth brings with it added complexity, more responsibility for relatives and others, and the worries of added investment concerns. For most or all of them, their wealth has contributed to a burden of cares that the average middle-class person is fortunate to be able to avoid. And then comes the eventual process of retirement. What I have found to my horror is that very wealthy people who own and run businesses often have a lot of trouble letting go. And if their retirement was handled too precipitously, some of my clients who simply have up and sold their businesses so they suddenly were able to literally roll in greenbacks tended to die within a few years’ time. Eventually, I learned to custom-design for each business owner a gradual five- or even a ten-year transition plan through a semi-retirement phase that had as its centerpiece something new and useful that they personally were eager to do!

Okay, so if money can’t buy happiness, and if the short-term highs of drugs and food and recreational sex turn out to be unsatisfactory happiness lures as well, then where does the key to real happiness lie? I actually do suspect, based on having watched my mother’s life, my own life, and the lives of some others, that in part, a tendency toward happiness really is genetic. Both of my parents were Danish, so that is my genetic heritage as well. And, what do you know, for the umpteenth time, Denmark turns out yet again this year to be either the happiest or the second-happiest country on earth. Since Scandinavian countries always top the list, and since those countries are cold and dreary for much of the year and they really don’t have much to recommend them, and since after seventy-odd years of life I frankly cannot tell you what being depressed even would feel like, I have come to think that the notion of genetics as a contributing factor to happiness has some merit.

But still, there is a lot more to happiness than genetics. So, how then can we best pursue happiness? As always, Jesus has the best suggestion, but first let’s hear what some other notables have to say. I consider these quotations to be the deepest wisdom:

“Folks are usually about as happy as they make their minds up to be.” ― Abraham Lincoln

“I never did a day’s work in my life. It was all fun.” – Thomas A. Edison   

“Happiness is when what you think, what you say, and what you do are in harmony.” ― Mahatma Gandhi

“Let no one ever come to you without leaving better and happier. Be the living expression of God’s kindness: kindness in your face, kindness in your eyes, kindness in your smile.” ― Mother Teresa

“What makes you happiest is spending your life for a cause that is greater than yourself.” – I don’t know who said that, but for years I had it taped to the wall above my desk, together with Einstein’s “Only a life lived for others is a life worthwhile.”

I think you may begin to get the drift. In fact, nothing that comes from outside of you ever can make you happy, and if you become dependent on anything from outside of you – or even on any person outside of you – that will only tend to make your life miserable. And I say this as someone who has been joyously married for five decades. Nothing that you can acquire, and no amount of worldly praise, and in fact nothing that comes from the world at all ever can make you happy in anything more than a brief and transitory way. The only possible source of real and deep happiness for any of us is internal. Happiness always comes from within us.

Happiness must be who you are. And knowing that is a great relief, is it not? Because it means that you and I can stop right now looking outside ourselves for happiness! And instead, we know that the series of quotations given above can indeed be taken as the beginning of wisdom. We begin with ourselves, and then we turn to Jesus. And Jesus says, “My food is to do the will of the One who sent Me, and to finish His work” (JN 4:34). To you and me He says, “The kingdom of God is not coming with signs to be observed; nor will they say, ‘Look, here it is!’ or, ‘There it is!’ For behold, the kingdom of God is within you” (LK 17:20-21).

If our only source of real happiness is within us, then wow, that is wonderful to hear! And now you know just what to do. You simply open the whole top of your head and nicely tidy up your living room, and then you invite God and your beloved Wayshower and Best Friend to come right in and make themselves at home and offer them glorious cups of ambrosia so they can spend some quality time with you. There is a lot that the three of you have to talk about, now that you have come to realize that making your life simple and filling it with purpose is going to make you very happy indeed!

Oh my goodness, Jesus can sound radical when He calls people to come and follow Him. He wants us not to have any earthly distractions at all in our lives, but to give everything that we own to the poor, and to rely on God to supply all our needs! For example, when a rich young man wanted to become Jesus’s disciple, Jesus said to him, “If you wish to be perfect, go and sell your possessions and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; and come, follow Me.” But when the young man heard this statement, he went away grieving; for he was one who owned much property. And Jesus said to His disciples, “Truly I say to you, it is hard for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven. Again I say to you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God. (MT 19:21-24). And when Jesus first called the Twelve together, and He gave them power and authority over all the demons, and to heal diseases, and He sent them out to proclaim the kingdom of God and to perform healing, He said to them, “Take nothing for your journey, neither a staff, nor a carrying bag, nor bread, nor money; and do not even have two tunics apiece” (LK 9:1-3).

Jesus calls upon us now to learn to rely only on Him. That is the great lesson of human life, is it not? We brought nothing material into this life, and it is certain that we will take nothing material out of it. So clinging to things will never make you happy. There always is something more that you can buy. There never is a top to that ladder of possessions! But when personally doing for other people is your only goal, then each individual interaction makes you very happy indeed. Your return on investment is phenomenal!

“We spend the first half of our life accumulating stuff, and the second half getting rid of it.” A much older friend made that remark to me long ago, and more and more now I see the truth of what he said. Once you realize that the only happiness is within you, you likely will begin to see so much of what you own as just obstacles to your own happiness, as I have come to see all material possessions as obstacles to mine. And as this sweet Ted talk suggests, our reliable friend Gratitude plays such an important part in helping us to find the best aspects of happiness within us. As we stop looking for happiness anywhere else but within ourselves, and as we ask Jesus for His help in finding our own best and truest happiness, we find it easier, and we find it so freeing to give to those who need them our superfluous material possessions. And the more we give things away, the more we gradually come to see that actually, most of what we own seems superfluous. And the more we give away, the lighter and freer we feel as we enter this joyous spiritual phase of our earthly lives!

And the world will be better for this:
that one man, scorned and covered with scars,
Still strove with his last ounce of courage
to reach the unreachable stars!
– Mitch Leigh (1928-2014) & Joe Darion (1917-2001), from “Man of La Mancha” (1965)

 

Slouching Toward Bethlehem

Raindrops are falling on my head.
And just like the guy whose feet are too big for his bed,
Nothing seems to fit.
Those raindrops are falling on my head, they keep falling.

… So I just did me some talking to the sun,
And I told him I didn’t like the way he got things done.
Sleeping on the job!
Those raindrops are falling on my head, they keep falling.

… But there’s one thing I know.
The blues they send to meet me won’t defeat me,
it won’t be long till happiness steps up to greet me!
Burt F. Bacharach (1928-2023), from “Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head” (1969)

I still can remember the banner year of 1970 as if it were yesterday. I was right out of college, living in Boston, and working for a big life insurance company. My job was to program in Cobol an IBM 360 computer that had just a tiny fraction of the power of my modern cellphone, even though that nearly useless early computer took up one entire floor of a downtown office building. There was a war still going on in Vietnam that year, but it never had really hit home for me because the love of my life had not yet been drafted. And besides, what was the point of worrying about a war that was going on half a world away, when here in America we were just becoming aware of a vastly different kind of war that was going to make it impossible for any of us ever to have much of a future? In the spring of 1970, I was something brand-new for my staid old Boston life insurance company. I was then their leading ecological activist. I wrote articles for my company’s internal publication about how to conserve everything, so together we might somehow manage to barely save this planet. And that April, which was fifty-four years ago now, I participated in Boston’s first Earth Day.  

Back then, we did not believe that there ever would be a year 2024. Heck, even a viable year 2000 was hardly conceivable for us. Edward and I wanted children, so we were going to have children but we full-well knew that their lives would be different from and very much less than what we would have wanted for them. My beloved had just finished his residency when he was drafted, and it was a close thing because by then the Vietnam War was winding down. He was one of the last Berry-plan physicians to be caught in the draft, which delayed our wedding by another year.

What brings all of this to mind this week is my having come across a folder of materials from that long-ago time as I was searching through some very old files. And I was struck as I went through that folder by how much what is going on now in this country must be damaging so many of the minds of today’s young people, just as was my own youthful mind distorted by Vietnam, and by the suddenly prominent ecological terrors which were pummeling us with our severely damaged future. Back then, we assumed that the ecological mess that was about to fall on all our heads would be an unavoidable apocalyptic tragedy.

I am going to lay it all out for you now. But first, please allow me this little impassioned digression. I am not taking a political side here. But having found myself briefly back in 1970 has put me again close to the Civil Rights era in the US. Which makes me forcefully realize how terrible it is for today’s young Americans to be raging antisemites now, as so many of them apparently are, to my amazement and to my disgust. Can you believe what you are seeing in the news? Lots of otherwise normal young Americans are suddenly antisemitic Nazi pigs and bullies! Even though soon they will horribly realize that never again in their lives will they be able to bear to be inside any room which contains an uncovered mirror. For them to be shouting some of the things that they are shouting at their Jewish classmates now is the precise equivalent of their shouting “Ni**er!” at black people. How can they not realize that?

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was the greatest American of the twentieth century. My high school and college years were the years when he and many less prominent heroes marched for and at last won racial justice. They won racial justice for every American, forevermore! How have all these college students so quickly and easily forgotten that fact? To see precisely the same racial hatred that distorted the faces of nasty racists fifty years ago now on the faces of these viciously antisemitic college students chanting ugly Hamas slogans at their Jewish classmates turns my stomach. It horrifies me. And it breaks my heart. They know not what they do!  

Okay. End of digression. What I want to talk about today, my dear ones, is prophesy, and the wisdom and balance that a little time and distance can provide. I had altogether forgotten that back in 1970, we were certain that there could be no future. Or at least, there could be no possible future in which you and I would want to rear our children. The experts had convinced us of that fact, and who were we to tell them they were wrong? I am going to give you a summary of confident predictions from some of the greatest experts of 1970, the people who truly knew their stuff, and I am going to ask you please to read these items thoughtfully. Pay special attention to the dates by which all of these calamities were certain to happen:

  • “The Great Die-Off”! “Population will inevitably and completely outstrip whatever small increases in food supplies we make,” Paul Ehrlich confidently declared in the April 1970 issue of Mademoiselle. “The death rate will increase until at least 100-200 million people per year will be starving to death during the next ten years [by 1980].” “Most of the people who are going to die in the greatest cataclysm in the history of man have already been born,” wrote Ehrlich in a 1969 essay titled “Eco-Catastrophe! “By…[1975] some experts feel that food shortages will have escalated the present level of world hunger and starvation into famines of unbelievable proportions. Other experts, more optimistic, think the ultimate food-population collision will not occur until the decade of the 1980s.” Ehrlich sketched out his most alarmist scenario for the 1970 Earth Day issue of The Progressive, assuring readers that between 1980 and 1989, some 4 billion people, including 65 million Americans, would perish in “the Great Die-Off.”
  • Worldwide Famine! Peter Gunter, a North Texas State University professor, wrote in 1970, “Demographers agree almost unanimously on the following grim timetable: by 1975 widespread famines will begin in India; these will spread by 1990 to include all of India, Pakistan, China, the Near East, Africa. By the year 2000, or conceivably sooner, South and Central America will exist under famine conditions…. By the year 2000, thirty years from now, the entire world, with the exception of Western Europe, North America, and Australia, will be in famine.”
  • Air Pollution! In January 1970, Life reported, “Scientists have solid experimental and theoretical evidence to support…the following predictions: In a decade, [1980] urban dwellers will have to wear gas masks to survive air pollution…by 1985 air pollution will have reduced the amount of sunlight reaching earth by one half….” Ecologist Kenneth Watt told Time that, “At the present rate of nitrogen buildup, it’s only a matter of time before light will be filtered out of the atmosphere and none of our land will be usable.” Paul Ehrlich chimed in, predicting in 1970 that “air pollution…is certainly going to take hundreds of thousands of lives in the next few years alone.” Ehrlich sketched a scenario in which 200,000 Americans would die in 1973 during “smog disasters” in New York and Los Angeles.
  • Reduced Life Expectancy! Paul Ehrlich warned in the May 1970 issue of Audubon that DDT and other chlorinated hydrocarbons “may have substantially reduced the life expectancy of people born since 1945.” Ehrlich warned that Americans born since 1946…now had a life expectancy of only 49 years, and he predicted that if current patterns continued, Americans’ life expectancy would reach 42 years by 1980, when it might level out. (Note: According to the most recent CDC report, life expectancy in the US is now 76.4 years).
  • No More Oil or Minerals! Ecologist Kenneth Watt declared, “By the year 2000 if present trends continue, we will be using up crude oil at such a rate…that there won’t be any more crude oil. You’ll drive up to the pump and say, `Fill ‘er up, buddy,’ and he’ll say, `I am very sorry, there isn’t any.’” Harrison Brown, a scientist at the National Academy of Sciences, published a chart in Scientific American that looked at metal reserves and estimated that humanity would totally run out of copper shortly after 2000. Lead, zinc, tin, gold, and silver would be gone before 1990.
  • No More Wild Animals! Sen. Gaylord Nelson wrote in Look, “Dr. S. Dillon Ripley, secretary of the Smithsonian Institute, believes that in 25 years [by 1995], somewhere between 75 and 80 percent of all the species of living animals will be extinct.” Barry Commoner predicted that decaying organic pollutants would use up all of the oxygen in America’s rivers, causing freshwater fish to suffocate. In 1975, Paul Ehrlich predicted that “since more than nine-tenths of the original tropical rainforests will be removed in most areas within the next 30 years or so [by 2005], it is expected that half of the organisms in these areas will vanish with it.”
  • New Ice Age! Kenneth Watt warned about a pending Ice Age in a speech. “The world has been chilling sharply for about twenty years,” he declared. “If present trends continue, the world will be about four degrees colder for the global mean temperature in 1990, but eleven degrees colder in the year 2000. This is about twice what it would take to put us into an Ice Age.”

Even though we were told repeatedly back in 1970 that each of these calamities was absolutely unavoidable, not one of the disasters that haunted our nightmares in 1970 has ever happened. What changed our future so unexpectedly and so wonderfully? Well, a few big miracles rapidly came along. For one thing, considerably improved living conditions in the third world during the seventies and eighties reduced birth rates suddenly and dramatically worldwide. And what was then called “the green revolution” of new and better food-plant species and more advanced growing methods made for much bigger and better-quality harvests, especially of rice, as early as the mid-seventies. And that combination of sharply reduced population growth and much better and more abundant food harvests together averted the worldwide famine conditions that had been so confidently expected. A move away from dictatorships and toward more economic freedoms in some countries helped as well, as did new discoveries of oil and basic minerals that had then been thought to be in very short supply. In the early eighties, Ronald Reagan cut US income taxes substantially, and he thereby began, and Bill Clinton then fostered, what became a twenty-five-year economic boom in America that enabled this nation to spread some of its wealth to the poorer parts of the world. A very happy turn toward global warming kept creeping glaciers from taking over the northern hemisphere, and rain forest conservation efforts, and efforts to reduce air pollution worldwide each also played their respective parts. My goodness, when I was a young child, I can recall that nearly every city in this country could be spotted from a distance because it had a mushroom cloud of smog above it! You know, come to think of it, perhaps we have 1970’s Earth Day clarion calls to thank, at least in part, for many of these miracles after all.

I do think, though, that our having lived through all those strident 1970 alarms has made many of us who remember that year reluctant to worry very much whenever the next big government-touted crisis comes along. We took the coming ice age very seriously back then! But the much later advent of “global warming,” which has apparently saved us from having to open our front doors on some much later morning to find that a creeping glacier has taken over our front yards? Not so much. My generation has already been there. So we assume now that we won’t need to make extreme global-warming-inspired changes to our own lifestyles until those who fly to Davos each year on private jets for their global-warming chats take the threat of global warming seriously enough that they feel the need to start to fly commercial. And maybe we’ll just wait and begin to worry about global warming ourselves when Al Gore and Barack Obama find it necessary to put their oceanfront homes on the market.  

I asked my wonderful Thomas how we might best end this post. And he answered me with a sentence that his earlier incarnation wrote two hundred and eight years ago, almost to the day. These are wise words indeed!

“How much pain have cost us the evils which have never happened!” Thomas Jefferson wrote to John Adams in April of 1816, in an extremely long letter on this same topic of doomsayers and prophets of certain catastrophes which then never see the light of day. As Jefferson points out in his letter to Adams that was written barely a decade before his and Adams’s deaths both occurred on the fiftieth anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, he himself was always hopeful, always sanguine and cheerful about the future. As indeed he should have been. After all, it was Thomas Jefferson who penned these sacred words which begin the American Declaration of Independence, and these words have well stood the test of time. Thomas Jefferson wrote these words which every college student in America should be especially keeping in mind this spring: We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

… Raindrops keep falling on my head,
But that doesn’t mean my eyes will soon be turning red.
Crying’s not for me!
‘Cause I’m never gonna stop the rain by complaining.
Because I’m free. Nothing’s worrying me!

– Burt F. Bacharach (1928-2023), from “Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head” (1969)

Non-material Consciousness

There is someone walking behind you.
Turn around. Look at me.
There is someone watching your footsteps.
Turn around, look at me.

There is someone who really needs you!
Here’s my heart in my hand!
Turn around, look at me!
Understand, understand!
– Jerry N. Capehart (1928-1998), from “Turn Around, Look at Me” (1968)

How is all this further materialist scientific dithering and nonsense even possible anymore in the twenty-first century? We all have learned long since that everything is consciousness. So watching so many supposedly well-educated people battling about whether or not consciousness even actually exists at all, and what it is, or whether what they are ostensibly using to think about these matters is, you know, only after all just an illusion in some way, or an artifact produced by their material brain and somehow not real is actually hysterically funny, when you think about it. Well, you are using your mind, of course. And your mind is objectively real. But as has also been true in the field of origin-of-life research, where thanks to the brilliant origin-of-life scientist James Tour, there is no traditional matter-based scientist who seems to be able to do anything right. So also, in traditional matter-based consciousness studies, the scientific old guard has been having a rough time of late.

Okay, so it does seem to be clear even to most scientists by now that what we experience as human consciousness is at least something objectively real that we can study. But, where does consciousness come from? The notion that it springs from matter in some fashion, which is what traditional scientists still insist must be true in order for consciousness to fit their materialist paradigm, in fact makes no sense. It is a pity, really, that the only nontraditional scientists working in this field are batting for the Christian team, because one need not have a religious bias to simply be investigating these basic truths. As you will shortly see.

There is an organization called Hillfaith.org which apparently is largely political. But its scientific arm does brilliant, cutting-edge work, and their videos are extraordinary! A short while back, Hillfaith.org produced five videos which are a must-watch series for anyone who is trying to better understand consciousness. They are beautifully produced and easy to understand, and the case that they make together for how consciousness actually works is really impossible to refute:

  • Matter Does Not Produce Consciousness. Here we see in wonderful detail how impossible it would be for consciousness to be merely somehow the product of the material human brain.
  • How Consciousness and Yellow are Alike. Okay, so these folks can be playful when they want to be, and especially when they find playfulness to be useful in proving their point! And it really is impossible to explain awareness in terms of matter, and to correlate any felt experience to matter. Consciousness is not in any way reducible to matter at all.
  • Why Materialists Cannot Fully Explain Consciousness. What is monumentally complex about consciousness is here shown in a series of detailed experiments that more or less literally blow your mind, ending with one where all connection is severed between the two hemispheres of the brain, each of which separately operates the opposite side of the body. And yet the victim can move in the world almost perfectly normally, including coordinating both sides of her body in order to smoothly and safely drive a car. Think about that.
  • And Then There is Quantum Biology.  This video also blows your mind. There is something about consciousness which causes an irreducible conscious agent not created by the brain to be able to act in certain specific ways. To be frank, this video actually made my eyes cross, and I wanted to watch it a second time but couldn’t because my schedule was so tight. Maybe I will find some extra time later on to fit it in.
  • How Can Someone with Partial or No Brain Have Consciousness? This video proves pretty satisfactorily that the brain acts to receive consciousness, and it certainly does not produce it!

It will take you some time to watch all five of these videos plus the video that begins this post, but I urge you strongly to watch them all. It is important that you fully grasp the fact that every working traditional scientist of today very sadly must contend with an impossible problem. They are stuck for their entire careers trying to make something happen that never can happen. They are trying to square a circle, and to make what long ago was proven to be false become now somehow magically and eternally true, and their gatekeepers have oddly made their ability to prove that something which is impossible is now not only possible, but actually is a matter of even religious certainty the very crux of their careers. They are seeking to make matter-based foolishness not only a matter of Fact, in other words, but a matter of something that is even beyond Fact. it is a matter of flat Institutional Truth. Does it make sense to you that scientists, of all people, would persist in trying to make this nonsensical belief in materialism somehow an institutional truth for the whole field of mainstream science, and try even to bind all future scientists to it for all eternity?

I have been watching this incredible scientific materialist nonsense go on for my entire life. Because in fact, it began very early in the twentieth century. I thought surely that after a century or more had passed, someone with sufficient professional gravitas to be taken seriously would say, Hey guys, there is a rather big Oopsie going on here in science, in case you haven’t noticed it, and we had better fix it before any more whole careers are entirely wasted. But alas, still No. Albert Einstein tried to point it out, but he did it too subtly. Toward the end of his life 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.” Were you aware that Einstein ever said such a thing? Nikola Tesla, however, was not subtle about it. He said, “The day science begins to study non-physical phenomena, it will make more progress in one decade than in all the previous centuries of its existence.”

But still, all these modern academic scientists of far less intellectual heft than those two giants continue to pointlessly muddle on. Like politicians who cannot conceive of a world in which their own careers have been wasted on a failed political theory, they rigidly enforce their old long-since-discredited materialist dogma. And so modern materialist science, droopy dinosaur that it is, still stubbornly and pointlessly lumbers on for one more year.

It truly is incredible that some of the most visionary scientists of today must by default be just a few old afterlife researchers. What Craig Hogan and I and others of our ilk have learned in the course of doing our afterlife investigations is that the only thing that in fact objectively exists is what you and I experience as consciousness. And what is consciousness? The best definition of it that I have seen has come from Thomas, my venerable spirit guide, who when asked for a definition of consciousness gave me this:

“Consciousness is an infinitely creative energy-like potentiality without size or form, alive in the sense that your mind is alive, governed by emotion and therefore self-aware.” Thomas also says that “Consciousness is all that independently exists.” And he tells us that “Consciousness is an aspect of the Mind of God,” and it includes all human minds.

I have read that definition over and over as I studied it with Thomas! It is clear that every word of it is important. He insists to me that all of what we think we see around us is mere illusion. It seems solid to us only because we test its solidity with a hand which is also illusory. But then, in an unguarded moment even Albert Einstein once also said, “Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one.” Thomas tells us that at its lowest vibration, consciousness is all the ugliest emotions, like fear, anger and hatred; while at its highest vibration, Consciousness – and here we capitalize the word – is perfect Love, and it is the Godhead of our universe. Our minds are all ranged at various spots along the vibrational range of consciousness, depending upon our personal vibratory levels. And once we have learned to raise our spiritual vibrations sufficiently, we can cease to incarnate on earth ever again.

Of course, none of these are religious beliefs. They are instead certain facts that have been discerned through lengthy, careful, and objective research. We have spent our lives doing the kind of free and joyous research that all those hapless materialist sciencecritters still are not allowed to pursue. But whenever eventually mainstream scientists are at last set free, whether it happens next year or after another thousand years have passed, they all will reach precisely the same  conclusions about the universality of Consciousness that the free scientists at the Discovery Institute, Hillfaith.org, Craig Hogan, and I, among others have together reached by the banner year of 2024. Because truth always is truth, is it not?

So then, my dear ones, whenever in the distant future this whole world comes at last to know that Consciousness is the only reality, as we knew was true way back in the year 2024, please just raise a glass of something merry to us? And when you do that, only know that Craig and I will be right there with you. And, what the heck, maybe Thomas and even Jesus will be joining us as well. And we will be raising our glasses of divine ambrosia all together! And we will celebrate the fact that, at last and forevermore, this ultimate and universal truth of reality is finally and forever set free!

Oh, I’ve waited, and I’ll wait forever for you to come to me!
Look at someone who really loves you, yeah, loves you!
Turn around, look at me!
Turn around! Look at me!
Jerry N. Capehart (1928-1998), from “Turn Around, Look at Me” (1968)