Author: Roberta Grimes

Forgiving

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

God hath not promised skies always blue,
flower-strewn pathways all our lives through.
God hath not promised sun without rain,
joy without sorrow, peace without pain.

God hath not promised we shall not know
toil and temptation, trouble and woe.
He hath not told us we shall not bear
many a burden, many a care.

But God hath promised strength for the day,
rest for the labor, light for the way,
Grace for the trials, help from above,
unfailing sympathy, undying love.
– Annie Johnson Flint (1866-1932), from “What God Hath Promised” (1919)

The best way to better understand anything is to attempt to teach it to others. And as we are moving through our first course on using the teachings of Jesus to make this your last necessary earth-lifetime, which by the way I am very much enjoying, I am struck by how much better I can now see the way that Jesus’s teachings on forgiveness and His teachings on love fit together. Indeed, now I would say that until you first understand and can apply Jesus’s method of prevenient forgiveness, for you to love as Jesus wants us to love is probably impossible.

I invite emails from those who have questions or problems, so I hear from many people. And in answering thousands of emails over the years, I have been struck by some consistent strains. Nearly everyone I hear from is a lifelong Christian who has left daily church attendance and has a problem that in earlier years they might have taken to a clergyman; but since they have become un-churched, they think of me as the next best thing. What strikes me, though, is that these people generally have little to no spiritual resources. In all their lifelong church attendance, most of them have learned little of what Jesus taught beyond “love your neighbor.” They have learned almost nothing about how to reach out to God beyond The Lord’s Prayer, and they never have been given the spiritual depth to cope with earth-life’s many problems. Religions are supposed to be all about spirituality, and yet from what I can see there is little if any useful spirituality taught by any Christian denomination.

Your first thought will be that, well, this is a deeply un-spiritual age, so no wonder. But isn’t this something of a chicken-and-egg situation? If the world’s most prominent religion better taught its followers the importance of acquiring the basics of living a spiritual life, and how those basics can support us in times of trouble, then surely ours would be a far more spiritual period in human history! And sadly, modern Westerners who hear the word “spiritual” too often think we must be referring to Eastern religious practices. Or if we are talking about Christianity, they imagine that we are discussing mostly hymn-singing and after-services conviviality.

But our spiritual aspect is the most deeply human aspect of our lives. We eat and sleep and procreate, but so do all the beasts. The only thing that any of us has that the animals around us do not have is the core certainty that we are part of Something much greater than ourselves. And in accessing and dwelling in and feeding that certainty, we strengthen and empower its role in our lives. Our innate personal spiritual aspect then can be steadily nurtured, to the point where we rise spiritually beyond the need to incarnate on the earth ever again. And that, my dear friends, in secular terms is what spirituality is. There is nothing woo-woo about it. Best of all, growing spiritually makes you happy! Beyond anything else that the world has to offer, growing spiritually fills you with joy, and with a peaceful certainty that rights your whole life.

For each of us to do this spiritual work is our fundamental need as human beings. A Course in Miracles tells us that the Course itself is required; it is only the decision about when we are going to take it that is up to us. And ACIM is in fact just a much more elaborate version of the basic teachings of Jesus. Indeed, ACIM was channeled to us by Jesus. But whether we do it with ACIM or with a simpler version of the same thing such as the course that I am presently teaching, using the teachings of Jesus is the easiest way for us to achieve rapid and sustained spiritual growth. And we must do it. Until we do, we will keep returning to earth-lives – or “turning on the wheel,” as the Buddhists say – until eventually we decide to finally attend to our own essential spiritual needs.

And yet, growing spiritually is not difficult. In fact, growing spiritually as Jesus taught it is easy and enjoyable. Our primary problem is that the Christianity that the Romans designed at First Nicaea in 325 CE gives no thought at all to spiritual growth, and in fact its awful notion that Jesus was born to die for our sins only works to depress us spiritually. Christianity as the religion has been practiced turns the teachings of Jesus into just the nice thought that we should try to love and forgive. What a tragic waste! When instead, the real reason why Jesus was born was to bring to us the most effective means of rapid spiritual growth that ever has been taught by anyone.  

And the first, key step in the process is forgiveness. Not just everyday forgiveness, mind you, but an extreme type of forgiveness that is based in what scientists are only now learning are deep characteristics of the human brain. How Jesus two thousand years ago so clearly understood the inner workings of the human brain is something that I cannot fathom! But Jesus’s prevenient forgiveness trick absolves everyone and everything automatically; and in so doing, it deeply frees us, too. What I am coming to ever better see as I teach this class is not only how forgiveness and love are tied, with forgiveness necessarily coming before love; but also that our properly learning universal forgiveness in the aggressive way that Jesus taught it is essential if we are ever to get past the petty and selfish ego-based issues that too often keep us from learning to perfectly and wholeheartedly love our fellow man. Until we can forgive as Jesus taught us to forgive, instead of our being able to love as Jesus taught us to love, we always will have a kind of  “yellow light” step that requires that we first make sure that the person before us is in fact worthy of our love.

So to properly love, we must forgive everything! And this includes possible membership in a culturally disfavored class or race; a personal history that might include crime or other unsavory behaviors; and other things, right down to whatever negative interactions might have happened between us and the person we are trying to love. Jesus insists that we must forgive it all! When Jesus’s disciple Peter asked Him, “Lord, how often shall my brother sin against me and I forgive him? Up to seven times?” Jesus said, “I do not say to you, up to seven times, but up to seventy times seven” (MT 18:21-23). Or in other words, every single time.

Does our practicing universal prevenient forgiveness mean that we then will never feel anger? Not at all. But more spiritually developed people feel anger much less often. They will tend to feel it for great causes and for others being wronged, but usually not for wrongs against themselves. They also can quickly kill any angry impulse that might arise as they automatically forgive whatever might have provoked it. Even Jesus, who while He was on earth was  an extremely spiritually advanced being, did feel and act upon anger; but His was always appropriate anger, and very well controlled. Everyone knows that He had no use for clergymen, calling them hypocrites and false prophets. He treated them so differently from the way He treated everyone else that personally I think He may have literally despised them. But despite His sometimes fiery words against the clergy, Jesus’s anger was always under perfect control.

Jesus’s most notable bout of rage was what is called the cleansing of the Temple. “The Passover of the Jews was near, and Jesus went up to Jerusalem. And within the Temple grounds He found those who were selling oxen, sheep, and doves, and the money changers seated at their tables.  And He made a whip of cords, and drove them all out of the Temple area, with the sheep and the oxen; and He poured out the coins of the money changers and overturned their tables; and to those who were selling the doves He said, ‘Take these things away from here; stop making My Father’s house a place of business!’” (JN 2:13-16) My own spirit guide Thomas was Jesus’s friend in that lifetime. His role for Jesus was to go out among the people and report back what they were saying. And wonderfully, Thomas now tells me that he actually was there for the Temple cleansing. He saw it happen! He says that Jesus was then entered Jerusalem for His final Passover and His crucifixion. His work on earth was nearly done, and this was primarily a burst of frustration that He had been able to do so little to end these disrespectful practices. But his anger was mostly at the fact that He had run out of time, Thomas thought. And Jesus made the whip just to drive out the cattle. He didn’t hit the people!

Jesus taught an exercise that makes our obeying His command to practice prevenient forgiveness much easier. This exercise cleverly relies on innate characteristics of our minds, but it is physical so a how-to for doing it never made it into the Gospels. When I was trying to learn to forgive more aggressively back in 2011, Thomas taught it to me. And it works so amazingly well! It’s a way to force your mind to reverse the process of becoming angry, and to teach it never to be bothered by anything again. So using His method, you really can reprogram your mind to forgive beforehand everything that ever might happen in all the rest of your life. Later on I asked Thomas where that amazing exercise had come from, and that was when he told me that Jesus had taught it. Wow. So that was the reason why Jesus could so easily insist that people forgive everything, every time, even if some specific wrong was committed by the same person over and over again.

Having learned that the Apostles must have been teaching the making of forgiveness balls, just as I teach the process today, makes that first three hundred years after Jesus ascended feel more real to me. Here is my favorite passage from the Book of Acts, which is the fifth book of the New Testament. In some Bibles it’s called The Acts of the Apostles. This scene showcases the Apostle Paul, a man who began his career as a persecutor of the followers of Jesus, but then was recruited by Jesus Himself soon after His resurrection to become a great crusader for Jesus’s Way. Paul is the author of most of the letters that make up the bulk of our Bible’s New Testament. Given the adverse conditions under which he had to operate, it is lovely here to see Paul in action before a Greek governing council! Through him, we get a further delightful glimpse of what Jesus actually taught. And Paul clearly loves doing this, advocating for Jesus and the all-encompassing identity of the one true God:

Paul stood in the midst of the Council of the Areopagus and said, “Men of Athens, I see that you are very religious in all respects. For while I was passing through and examining the objects of your worship, I also found an altar with this inscription, ‘TO AN UNKNOWN GOD.’ Therefore, what you worship in ignorance, this I proclaim to you! The God who made the world and everything that is in the world, since He is Lord of heaven and earth, does not dwell in temples made by hands; nor is He served by human hands, as though He needed anything, since He Himself gives to all people life and breath and all things; and He made from one man every nation of mankind to live on all the face of the earth, having determined their appointed times and the boundaries of their habitation, that they would seek God, if perhaps they might feel around for Him and find Him, though He is not far from each one of us; for in Him we live and move and have our being, as even some of your own poets have said, ‘For we also are His descendants.’ Therefore, since we are the descendants of God, we ought not to think that the Divine Nature is like gold or silver or stone, an image formed by human skill and thought. So having overlooked the times of ignorance, God is now proclaiming to mankind that all people everywhere are to reform their minds, because He has sent a Man whom He has appointed to teach the world in righteousness, having furnished proof to all people by raising Him from the dead” (Acts 17:22-31).

This is what Christianity should have been! With a heavy stress on celebrating the one true God “in whom we live and move and have our being,” and on God’s mastery of all creation and His centrality in each one of our lives, Paul announces that God has sent Jesus to teach and lead the world in righteousness, having first proven Jesus’s dominion by raising Him from the dead. Paul was speaking here just a decade or two after Jesus’s ascension. This was three hundred years before the Romans destroyed Jesus’s love-based Way and attached His name to their own fear-based religion.

Still, these years depicted in the Book of Acts were a time of persecution for Jesus’s followers. The courage that it took for Paul and the other Apostles repeatedly to speak so boldly and so publicly as they advocated for Jesus and His Way, even in Rome itself, is astounding. Every one of Jesus’s leading first followers died a martyr’s death, with many of His Apostles being crucified or beheaded. Paul was beheaded in Rome by the Emperor Nero around the year 64 CE; and Peter was crucified in Rome in the same year, having insisted upon being nailed to the cross upside-down, since he considered himself to be unworthy to die in precisely the same way that Jesus had died. Those in the next generation were often burned alive, either in coliseums or to provide light along roadways. Following Jesus in those early years was an occupation not for sissies. Even now, incredibly, there are people in this world being martyred for their refusal to renounce Jesus. And all of Jesus’s martyrs even to this day have one precious thing in common. With their last breath, they forgive their tormentors. In whatever language they speak, they often use the same words that Jesus used as His executioners were pounding nails into His wrists and feet. He said, Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing” (LK 23:34).

God hath not promised smooth roads and wide,
Swift, easy travel, needing no guide;
Never a mountain rocky and steep,
Never a river turbid and deep.

But God hath promised strength for the day,
Rest for the labor, light for the way,
Grace for the trials, help from above,
Unfailing sympathy, undying love.
– Annie Johnson Flint (1866-1932), from “What God Hath Promised” (1919)

Our Forefathers’ Gift

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

My country, ’tis of thee, sweet land of liberty, of thee I sing.
Land where my fathers died, land of the pilgrims’ pride,
From every mountainside, let freedom ring!

My native country, thee, land of the noble free, thy name I love!
I love thy rocks and rills, thy woods and templed hills,
My heart will rapture fills like that above!

Let music swell the breeze and ring from all the trees
Sweet freedom’s song.
Let mortal tongues awake, Let all that breathe partake,
Let rocks their silence break, the sound prolong!
– Samuel Francis Smith (1831-1895), from “My Country ‘Tis of Thee” (1831)

One of our great shared possessions as human beings is a few sheets of parchment which are housed in the Rotunda for the Charters of Freedom on the second floor of the National Archives Museum in Washington, D.C. Faded and barely readable now, those documents are the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution of the United States, and the Bill of Rights. And yes, I understand and I love the fact that our family of readers here is worldwide. But at this point, those documents belong to all of humanity. The five wise and far-seeing gentlemen who together led the process of designing the government of the United States of America cannot have known that they were creating what was going to become to date perhaps the most stable and beneficent and among the longest-lived governmental designs in all of human history. Four Virginians and one Bay Stater together created two hundred and thirty-eight years (and counting) of the same form of government of more than three hundred and thirty million people, all living together in one place.

This ability of our style of government to be so stable and so resilient is essential! Human beings as individuals can own and can do nothing on our own, so having a stable government which protects fundamental human rights is the first and most essential element of civilization. Without it, we cannot even own our own lives.

I apologize for this detour from our usual range of blog topics, but once in a while I come across what feels like a compelling reason to write about something else. And I am one of many Americans who have become alarmed to see how many of our next generation are taking for granted, and even are disparaging this incomparable gift that has been passed down to us by our forefathers. Those young folks’ problem is our failing public school system, which has ceased to teach our children as well as it has taught American generations past how very well our system of government works. And that is one danger that has been present from the beginning. As Benjamin Franklin was exiting the Constitutional Convention in 1787, a lady asked him what sort of government the attendees were designing. Franklin said, “A republic, madam. If you can keep it.”

George Orwell, the author of the dystopian novel 1984, said, “The most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history.” Which is why the recent attacks on America’s Founders and their work for some of the personal details of their lives, and most often because some of them were slaveholders at a time when slaveholding was seen as less reprehensible than it is today, is so troubling. These attempts to destroy our young people’s understanding and appreciation of the value of their American heritage are unforgivable. And they are motivated by the short-term self-interest of a malicious few.  

The usual enemies of this precious system have been those to whom its protection of the rights of even the least of us has been seen as a challenge to the aggrandizement of their own power. It was seen as extraordinary by many at the time of this nation’s founding that the five most prominent Founding Fathers, who then became this nation’s first five presidents and all of whom were wealthy aristocrats, were so eager to give their power over to the people. King George III of England once remarked that if George Washington gave up his power after the American Revolution, he would be truly the greatest man in the world. But Washington gladly gave up his power after two presidential terms, and he thus began a tradition of no more than two terms for any American president. That tradition, after Franklin D. Roosevelt attempted a third term, was eventually enshrined into law.

I came to see and to understand the devotion that one of our Founding Fathers felt to the welfare of the common man. When my Thomas wanted to prove to Jesus that I was very well able to channel so I would for sure be able to channel Liberating Jesus for Him, Thomas led me in the late eighties (and long before I knew him as my spirit guide) to research and then to channel his own autobiography of Thomas Jefferson’s ten-year marriage, which spanned the American Revolutionary War. I knew nothing about Thomas’s motive in doing this at the time. I thought the book was just an historical novel, and I assumed that writing it was my own idea. But Thomas led me to do a great deal of historical research, and I came to know the American Revolutionary period, and especially the young Thomas Jefferson, pretty well. And when I say that he was young, I do mean that he was very young! The author of the Declaration of Independence was just thirty-three years old when he wrote what are this nation’s founding words. Here is how the Declaration of Independence begins:

In Congress, July 4, 1776

The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America, When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.–That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, –That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

Thomas Jefferson was the youngest member of the Congress in 1776. That he was entrusted with the task of writing such an important document shows the esteem in which both he and his writing skills were held by his fellow Virginians. And whenever I mention the Declaration of Independence, I feel the need to point out two things:

  • Note that instead of the standard recitation of our rights to “life, liberty and property,” which would have given comfort to slaveholders, Jefferson changed the recitation of our unalienable rights to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, which comforts all people equally. And it especially comforts the slaves.
  • The bulk of the Declaration of Independence is devoted to a recitation of grievances against the British, those “causes which impel them to the separation,” as he says in his first paragraph above. And you ought to read Jefferson’s first draft. It is a marvel of furious indignation at the way the British have polluted this pristine continent by introducing slavery here! Any other complaints were for him mere afterthoughts. Of course, for the southern states that never would have flown, so the Congress reworded his grievances section. But Jefferson bitterly hated slavery, and if his wife had not died at the end of the war, I am confident that he would have made ending slavery his life’s great cause. More on this below.

That generation of giants, as they often are called, were truly moral marvels. What was especially amazing to me when I was doing my research was that Thomas Jefferson, this highly educated young aristocrat, was so determined to take down his own class, and to elevate the farmers and shopkeepers and the poor. You had to love the guy! Some of his youthful writings survive, where he talks about how the time has come, and how important it is that the working class rise and rule itself. Karl Marx could not have said it better. Although, unlike Marx, Jefferson truly meant it.

Thomas Jefferson lived his childhood and youth on the edge of the great and still largely unexplored continental forest. He was confident that all that new, wild land and the yeomen who were going to fill it were the future. He loved Monticello, his mountain farm, and as the Revolutionary War moved toward its favorable conclusion, he began to make plans for his future life at Monticello with Martha, the woman he called Patty, the love of his life whom he had married as the war was beginning. But tragically, the life that Jefferson was planning with Patty was not to be, because she died of complications of diabetes in the late summer of 1782.

I don’t think that I much overstate the situation when I say that Patty’s death was the most pivotal event in American history between the America Revolution and the beginning of the twentieth century. Jefferson burned all his wife’s letters and papers after her death, which made writing My Thomas, my memoir/novel about their marriage and the Revolution more difficult. But it is easy to see just from the circumstances of her life and from Jefferson’s writings both before and after her death that she was an ardent abolitionist. Her father had been an importer of slaves, and she had a much-beloved slave stepmother and six deeply beloved slave half-siblings, all of whom were members of Thomas Jefferson’s household. While she was alive, her husband’s thoughts were ardently bent toward abolition.

In fact, thanks to Jefferson, Virginia was the first jurisdiction on earth to ban the importation of slaves. And as the war ended, so also did his life on the national stage. He gladly headed home to Monticello to spend the rest of his life as a gentleman farmer who had one remaining public task firmly in mind. With his wife by his side, he planned to end forever the curse of slavery in America. But first, he had to determine the best way to do it, so his mind at the time was full of what he thought of as his great experiment. He was worried that a general emancipation might have adverse implications for the slaves if they simply were freed into the much stronger and more numerous white population, since he had seen and been appalled by the miserable conditions of the freedmen in the northern cities. So he was planning to experiment first on his own farm as to the best way to effect his planned emancipation. Might doing it with a checkerboard of farms be best? But he was determined to work this out, and to make a universal American emancipation before the end of his life his one great cause. So if Patty had lived a normal lifespan, there likely would have been an American abolition and a full emancipation in the first part of the Nineteenth Century, and therefore there never would have been an American Civil War.

Instead, of course, Thomas Jefferson soon lost the love of his life, and with her he lost his abolitionist motor. He could no longer stand the sight of Monticello, so he abandoned his beloved home for decades. He sailed at once for France to assist in negotiating the peace, and he then became America’s first Secretary of State, its second Vice President, and the third President of the United States. Thomas Jefferson never married again, nor does it seem that he ever even had a lady friend; but instead, he mourned Patty for the rest of his life. Even in his old age, he still referred to his long-ago marriage as “ten years of unchequered happiness.” Now, his ten years of marriage spanned the Revolutionary War. So you know that has to have been some marriage!

Everyone wants Thomas Jefferson’s honest answer to the Sally Hemings question. And when eventually I asked my Thomas about it, rather than answering that question himself, he arranged for me to meet personally with the former president in the astral plane. I had already long since done the research and determined, based upon a lot of evidence, that Thomas Jefferson’s younger brother, Randolph, was the probable father of Sally Hemings’s children who had inherited Jefferson DNA (Sally also had a half-dozen children by other fathers). But meeting with my Thomas and also his Thomas Jefferson incarnation, both at the same time, was fascinating! In the astral plane you can feel people’s spiritual vibrations, and their vibrations are very similar but Thomas does vibrate higher. He urged me to ask the venerable president my question, but of course I was shy about doing that so frankly. When I did ask him the question, though, Thomas Jefferson said with the most wonderful soft Virginia accent, “I could not have been intimate with Sally Hemings because she was my property so she could not have consented.” Spoken like a gentleman.

 A friend and political ally of Thomas Jefferson asked the retired president to give some advice to his young son, Thomas Jefferson Smith, who had been named after Jefferson. A little more than a year before Jefferson died, he composed a letter to be given to the boy when he was old enough to appreciate it. Jefferson enclosed some practical advice, such as “Pride costs us more than hunger, thirst and cold,” and “When angry, count ten before you speak. If very angry, a hundred.” But the most moving part is the letter itself, which consists of the following “few words”:

Monticello, February 21, 1825

 This letter will, to you, be as one from the dead. The writer will be in the grave before you can weigh its counsels. Your affectionate and excellent father has requested that I would address to you something which might possibly have a favorable influence on the course of life you have to run, and I too, as a namesake, feel an interest in that course. Few words will be necessary, with good dispositions on your part. Adore God. Reverence and cherish your parents. Love your neighbor as yourself, and your country more than yourself. Be just. Be true. Murmur not at the ways of Providence. So shall the life into which you have entered, be the portal to one of eternal and ineffable bliss. And if to the dead it is permitted to care for the things of this world, every action of your life will be under my regard. Farewell. 

 

Our Father God to Thee, Author of liberty, To Thee I sing.
My country ’tis of Thee, sweet land of liberty,
For all eternity, let freedom ring! Let freedom ring!
Samuel Francis Smith (1831-1895), from “My Country ‘Tis of Thee” (1831)

 

Life in the Illusion

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

“Beware the Jabberwock, my son!
The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!
Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun
The frumious Bandersnatch!” 

He took his vorpal sword in hand;
Long time the manxome foe he sought—
So rested he by the Tumtum tree
And stood awhile in thought.

And, as in uffish thought he stood,
The Jabberwock, with eyes of flame,
Came whiffling through the tulgey wood,
And burbled as it came!
– Lewis Carroll (1832-1898), from “Jabberwocky” (1871)

Our whole world of ideas must in 2024 walk a most peculiar line. Only consider, if you will, the insular space occupied by mainstream science. To be a working scientist in the modern day is to need to know not only the scientists’ history of well-documented discoveries, but scientists also must know the weird additional facts that you and I also know, but that none of us much likes to think about. Such as, for example, the strange-but-true notion that what seems to be solid matter is not in fact solid at all. But rather, every bit of matter, from the stars and the sun in the inaccessible heavens down to the desk before you and the apple that you are about to eat to finish off your lunch are all 99.9999999% empty space. All the surfaces that seem smooth to your finger’s touch are not smooth, either! And my goodness, only five percent of the matter in the universe, as insubstantial as that matter is, turns out to be all the normal matter that there is, because 25% of the universe is “dark matter,” and a full 70% is “dark energy”. Mainstream scientists have known this jaw-dropping set of facts for at least a century, but they still have no clue about what the dark stuff actually is, or who (if anyone at all) might live there. All they know is that it won’t interact with photons of light.

And even with all of these further complications, mainstream scientists also have to contend now with reconciling with the rest of what they know some pretty freakish subatomic quantum effects. And their confusion there continues to grow even vastly more confusing, since they must still adhere to their profession’s nonsensical century-old insistence that matter must be material, no matter how they confront it and no matter what about it they believe that they are attempting to measure with all their subatomic equations and theories. Wow, how frustrating this all feels to us, so we can only imagine how it must seem to them!

Then too, there is the increasingly wavery history of mainstream science’s most important theories. For example, Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution for the past century and a half has been considered to be the key explanation for the astounding range and diversity of modern species, while Darwin himself has long been one of mainstream science’s most important longtime unquestioned gods. But, no longer. Time marches on. In the past few decades, with the advent of The Discovery Institute in Seattle, Washington,  the investigation of the idea of intelligent design, or ID, as an alternative explanation for the complexity and diversity of life on earth has largely replaced the idea of blind and lumbering natural selection, and with salutary success. Even Darwin himself came to realize that his pet theory had some major flaws, and late in his life he was working on a corrective to his theory of evolution that in the end never was published.

And ultimately, of course, there is mainstream science’s greatest conundrum, which continues to be the whole issue of life itself. Although the scientists at the Discovery Institute, whose minds are much freer to venture into heretofore unexplored pathways, and also are more able to reach for new and possibly amazing ideas than are the minds of conventional mainstream scientists, even they are having trouble defining what life even is. They find themselves still using Darwinian terms as they try to pin life down to a definition, still using terms like “that which is subject to natural selection” and so on. Which feels to me like a step backward. And yet at the same time, those engaged in the study of cellular behavior as they investigate life at the Discovery Institute are coming to suspect that individual cells, and even cells which themselves are part of larger creatures like you and me, may at some level be complex sentient beings. The Discovery Institute scientists have discovered that, for certain, living cells do communicate with one another.  

We might note here just as an aside that we afterlife researchers are by necessity intensive scientific hobbyists, and it was right around the turn of this century that we first began to understand the primary role of Consciousness, and to suspect the boggling fact that nothing else but what we experience as human consciousness actually exists. This astonishing fact doesn’t hit you right away in all its stunning totality, but it feels more like a lot of smaller, inexorable facts each striking you, more or less one right after the other. Materialist scientists can never come close to getting this gigantic picture right because they must be paid for their work, so they must dance to their piper’s tune. And all mainstream scientists are forced by their gatekeepers, their university departments and their peer-reviewed journals, to consider only materialist explanations for each phenomenon that they study. However, one would think that the wonderful scientists at the Discovery Institute, being altogether free of the mainstream scientists’ deadly materialist dogma, should easily have also discovered the obvious primacy of Consciousness. (Note that Craig Hogan’s wonderful book on this topic, There is Nothing But Mind And Experiences, is a great introduction to what turns out to be true.)

But unfortunately, where life is concerned, the Discovery Institute’s scientists are in the end no more independent than are the materialists, it feels sad to say. You cannot follow and trust the work of any scientist in 2024 unless you know who is paying that scientist! And those superlative Discovery Institute scientists are Christians, so they are being paid to assume that the Designer behind Intelligent Design must be the literal Christian God. Therefore, to ask them to stretch their minds enough to imagine that the Designer might be Consciousness itself, and for them then to find life within Consciousness as an inherent property, which turns out to be what is actually true about life, doesn’t seem to be very likely to happen.

All of which feels sad and frustrating. Is there really no physicist, no biologist or chemist working on earth in the year 2024 who is free to do fully open-minded scientific research, and is not limited by human-imposed constraints? Well, theoretically at least, there likely are some such scientists. They might be living on inherited wealth while puttering in their basements. But as a practical matter, they still are going to be self-limited by pre-conceived ideas that were developed as they were being educated. You know how it is! They were taught by mainstream scientists, and now to separate out the truths from the falsehoods in their own educational backgrounds is a yeoman’s task all by itself. And then they might read more broadly, and perhaps they might pick up some new ideas and decide to test them. But like fish who never have experienced the fundamental concept of not-water, for trained scientists to grasp the enormity of Max Planck’s and Nicola Tesla’s gigantic century-old discovery that consciousness is primary would be a truly amazing thing. Almost no working scientist has the intellectual heft to do it alone.

And speaking of doing things alone, we now have many people who love Jesus but don’t really know the first thing about Jesus, and who as Christianity dies are being set loose upon the world. I know personally that Jesus will give us powerful guidance when we ask Him for it and allow Him to give us the precious gift of His guidance. But the problem is that those who love Jesus as an idea, but don’t actually know Jesus and His teachings at all, generally think of Him as being long-dead. And Jesus is emphatically not dead at all! He has just been extremely busy for the past seventeen hundred years as He worked to heal the emotional and spiritual damage that was being done to hundreds of millions of people by the Roman Emperor Constantine’s bastardized Christianity. And now, as Roman Christianity dies, as indeed it was inevitably going to die, Jesus is in the process of  beginning again what came before it during those first three hundred years following His teaching life on earth. His intended legacy is His Way, a simple and beautiful method of living and uplifting humankind that is based upon Jesus’s teachings and rooted in love. It was rapidly overspreading the then-known world, and it had attracted millions of adherents before the Romans ruthlessly stamped it out. In the year 2024, Jesus is the most famous and beloved person on earth. And He is inspiring so many people to crave to learn more about Him! I know that, because I am hearing from more and more of those people every day. Now at last His time has come!     

But there are very grave dangers in being the most famous and beloved person in the world when so few people really know You, and most people  think of You as being long dead. Sometimes people will feel entitled to conceive their own ideas about You which they personally think are wonderful. Gosh almighty, just wonderful! They will make up a brand-new Jesus for today out of whole cloth who goes around washing people’s feet, and they will show that brand-new Jesus as a Super Bowl ad. Of course, traditional Christians hate and are making a great fuss about this ad that was lately shown on TV because they think Super Bowl Jesus should be shown to be preaching to and judging the sinners whose feet people are shown to be washing. But I feel rather differently about it. I think that if you are going to work with Jesus at all, then you should work with Him. You should do what He wants you to do, and not just what you feel like doing. And Jesus would say that if you want to work with Him, then share His teachings. That one foot-washing scene in the Gospel of John was an intimate and highly symbolic act at the end of Jesus’s earthly life, when He washed the feet of His Disciples as they were about to set out walking to bring Jesus’s teachings to the world following His coming crucifixion and resurrection. Jesus otherwise never in His life is reported to ever have washed other people’s feet! And for the “He Gets Us” folks to even imply that Jesus did that routinely only proves that in truth they don’t “get Him” at all.

The scientific gatekeepers who imposed materialism as a dogma on mainstream science more than a century ago never meant to do their beloved discipline any harm. Indeed, they thought they were protecting mainstream science from harm! But they have done the work of millions of scientists such tremendous harm, and over many generations. When at last materialism is fully discarded, much of the materialism-polluted work of all the past four or five generations of scientists worldwide will have to be patiently checked, and in many cases partially or completely discarded. And to the extent that the evangelizing of well-meaning fools who won’t bother to learn who Jesus actually is before they set out to try to teach about Him might pollute what the world believes that it knows about Jesus, that eventually is going to have to be corrected, too. So it is wonderful to know that Jesus Himself is still fully alive, and He is quite capable of doing the correcting Himself.

There was a recent time when I used to worry. There were people, including the “He Gets Us” campaign, who had spurious and even shockingly wrong ideas based upon too little information about who Jesus is, why He came to earth, and what His followers should be doing now to help Him. And yet those ignorant but well-meaning folks were loudly out there proclaiming their own opinions. Was something like the materialists’ takeover of the scientific world developing with Jesus’s legacy? Omigod, that very thought was horrifying! But after April of 2022, I don’t worry anymore. I have met the living Jesus, and I have personally heard Him speak of His plans for the next stage of His eternal life and work. And I don’t care how much money you might have. Your ideas and your power are no match for His!

One, two! One, two! And through and through
The vorpal blade went snicker-snack!
He left it dead, and with its head
He went galumphing back.

“And hast thou slain the Jabberwock?
Come to my arms, my beamish boy!
O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!”
He chortled in his joy.

 ’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.
– Lewis Carroll (1832-1898), from “Jabberwocky” (1871)

 

The Sermon on the Mount

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Materialist Science Leaves the Rails

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  • Consciousness is Matter’s First Cause. The Big Bang is a kind of fudge placeholder, if you will. Scientists know that, and in their more relaxed moments they will admit it to you, because Something cannot have come from Nothing. Still, they need a starting point, and they could have put it just about anywhere in time and space as a first-cause point where matter was assumed to have sprung forth from Nothing. For materialists, there has to be a time/place where this happens, even though in fact within their belief-system it makes no sense. It is foundational for them to have to say “Just give us one free miracle and we will explain the rest.”
  • Life is a Property Inherent in Consciousness Itself. So in fact, life is not a rarity at all, but rather the whole cosmos probably teems with life. The problem for scientists is not to explain how life first arose, but rather to understand how it evolved sufficient structural complexity soon enough to be able to maintain itself. Once scientists get past their materialist silliness, they then eventually will have to accept the fact that of course there must be a designer. Because otherwise, they will never be able to explain how all the complexities of a cell arose together randomly, which would have been flat impossible.
  • Intelligent Design is Evident Everywhere. My favorite go-to explanations for the astonishing and manifold complexities of intelligent design are all the various and immensely adorable Evolution News videos. You can watch them for hours, going from one to the next and then to the next. You soon come to understand why it seems to be impossible for basically anything to exist without very many things existing all at once, since they all seem to so profoundly support one another.

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

Happiness

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

What’s it all about, Alfie? Is it just for the moment we live?
What’s it all about when you sort it out, Alfie?
Are we meant to take more than we give? Or are we meant to be kind?
And if only fools are kind, Alfie, Then I guess it is wise to be cruel.
And if life belongs only to the strong, Alfie,
What will you lend on an old golden rule?
– Burt Bacharach (1928-2023) and Hal David (1921-2012), from “Alfie” (1966)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

As sure as I believe there’s a heaven above, Alfie, I know there’s something much more!
Something even non-believers can believe in.
I believe in love, Alfie. Without true love we just exist, Alfie!
Until you find the love you’ve missed, You’re nothing, Alfie.
When you walk, let your heart lead the way.
And you’ll find love any day, Alfie, Alfie!
– Burt Bacharach (1928-2023) and Hal David (1921-2012), from “Alfie” (1966)

Finding God

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And Jesus tells us that our relationship with the genuine Creator God which is Spirit is meant to be a profoundly personal one! Which of course it now very easily can be, without religions and their attendant clergy in the way. Jesus said, “Beware of practicing your righteousness before men, to be noticed by them; otherwise, you have no reward with your Father who is in heaven. So when you give to the poor, do not sound a trumpet before you, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and in the streets, so that they may be honored by men. Truly I say to you, they have their reward in full. But when you give to the poor, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing, so that your giving will be in secret; and your Father who sees what is done in secret will reward you.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nothingism

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Better Understanding Jesus

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

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

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

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

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

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

  • Those in spirit communicate mentally, in a universal lingua franca that is almost like reading one another’s minds. Thomas believes that this has meant that those who were doing the church-council monitoring were paying insufficient attention to what was going on verbally in those councils themselves. They missed some of the back-room politicking that we now know was happening with Jesus’s teachings.
  • As the translating of Jesus’s words was going on, first from Aramaic into ancient Greek, and later from Greek into Latin, and then finally into modern languages, the meanings of some of Jesus’s original teachings were being changed, and sometimes profoundly. I will give you the most prominent example of this major problem below.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We Begin Anew

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

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

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

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

JESUS DID NOT COME TO DIE FOR OUR SINS 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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