Author: Roberta Grimes

Jesus’s Lost Years

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

Precious Lord, take my hand,
Lead me on, let me stand.
I am tired, I am weak, I am worn.
Through the storm, through the night,
Lead me on through the light,
Take my hand, precious Lord,
And lead me home.
– Thomas A. Dorsey (1899-1993), from “Take My Hand Precious Lord” (1937)

One question about which there is much confusion is how Jesus might have spent what are called His “lost years.” After He was briefly left behind at the Temple in Jerusalem by His parents at the age of twelve, so they had to go back and fetch Him (see LK 43-50), there is nothing in the Biblical Gospels about what Jesus was doing with His life until much later, when He was baptized by John the Baptist at the age of thirty and He then began His public life. So, what was Jesus doing during those eighteen early years of his life? 

This has always been a puzzle. The notion that He might simply have been growing up, living as a carpenter during His teens and twenties, caring for His mother and His younger siblings, assisting His carpenter father, enjoying His friends and living His life, is impossible for most people to contemplate. So the theory has grown that He must have been traveling to the Far East and learning the wisdom of the ancient sages of that part of the world. Yes! That’s the ticket! A book is currently being written comparing Jesus’s teachings with the wisdom of the Tao Te Ching,  which dates to the late fourth century BCE. Some people firmly believe that Jesus journeyed to India, to Tibet, and perhaps even to China, and He studied under various sages along the way, so His teachings surely incorporate wisdom that He learned on those distant travels.

Let’s pause and consider this idea for a moment. Jesus spoke Aramaic. There is no Gospel evidence that He was fluent in other languages. Of course, He also could read the ancient Hebrew scrolls, and there is evidence that He had a good Hebrew religious education, but that is the whole extent of His literacy. So, how did Jesus communicate with people in India and Tibet and even perhaps in China, and with those who spoke all the many different languages that He would have encountered in the course of His long journey to the east, and then His similar journey back toward home? It Is more than two thousand, eight hundred miles from Israel to India. And if Jesus went as far as China, that would have been almost four thousand miles, and there are some pretty big mountains in the way. And how did he go? By camel? On foot? Jesus was poor. How did He purchase and transport provisions? Because it is hard to imagine what He might have managed to find to consistently eat on a journey like that, and never mind how He could have afforded to transport Himself.

And did He go all that way alone? I find that idea to be inconceivable. Jesus was always surrounded by companions, and especially as He went through the wild tribal lands of Iraq, Iran, and Afghanistan, a man alone who didn’t speak the local language would have been slaughtered without a thought. And my dear ones, there is frankly no other way to get to India and China from Israel than through those hostile areas. All I can think is that Jesus has to have made such a trip as part of a trade caravan, if indeed He made it at all. But that would have cost quite a lot of money. Why He did it, without knowing what He might have encountered along the way, and what He could have hoped to find at journey’s end that would have been worthy of such a tremendous effort, and then how He might have calculated His odds of ever making it back home again, and also why He later never mentioned having undertaken such a long journey, are all questions which seem to demand some answers that are never even whispered about in the Gospels.

Now, I know what you are thinking. This is Jesus we are talking about here! He could probably speak every language on earth, and he could teleport himself right over the Himalayas. You see no problems for our Jesus at all. But, yes, this is Jesus we are talking about. And there is no Biblical evidence whatsoever that He ever spoke any other language, or used any magical powers at all in His lifetime as Jesus. No smiting enemies dead with a touch. No teleportation, either. In fact, whenever Jesus healed anyone, He always made a point of using the faith of the person being healed to effect the healing (see, e.g. MT 9:28; LK 8:50). There were no companions around Him in the Gospels who ever gave any evidence at all that they had traveled with him to exotic climes, and no turbaned or otherwise exotic fellows who seemed to have returned with him as trophies of His visits to far distant places.

There is no Gospel evidence at all that Jesus ever traveled beyond the bounds of what is now modern Israel. None whatsoever. Everything that Jesus taught was knowledge that He brought to earth from the Father. We have no reason to believe otherwise.

And in fact, there is a much better explanation for the so-called “lost years” of Jesus. While there is no evidence for the travels-to-the-east theory, and there is considerable evidence against it, this new theory so neatly fits so many details of the life of Jesus that until now were oddly inexplicable, from the fact that apparently He didn’t marry in His teens, as every other good Jewish boy would have done, to the oddity that His ministry didn’t begin until He reached the ancient age of thirty, that frankly I don’t know why it wasn’t noticed much sooner. I have to think that scholarly squeamishness about the word “slave” was the main reason why no one has raised this possibility until now.

I first learned of this alternative explanation during the summer before last. I was working on researching materials for Jesus’s website at the time, and meeting with Jesus in the astral plane on many nights to discuss what I was finding, So I brought this question up to Him during one of the almost nightly meetings that I was having with Him. “Is it possible that You were born into slavery?” I asked Him. And He just smiled His enigmatic half-smile. He wouldn’t give me a yes-or-no answer, but that is just the way He is. Jesus really won’t answer personal questions. So I researched the idea further, and the more I researched it, the more perfectly all the details seemed to fit.

I first blogged about this possibility last fall. And rather than asking you to follow a link, I will give you the key points here again. Let’s look together at the facts: 

  • Slavery was common in that time and place. But slavery in the area where Jesus lived two thousand years ago was a milder condition than is our image of chattel slavery in the pre-Civil-War American South. For most of those held in bondage then, it was not even a permanent condition. People often sold themselves or their children into servitude for a period of time in order to pay back a debt, or even because they could not otherwise afford food and shelter. The Greek word translated as “servant” generally did mean what we would call a bondsman or a slave, but sometimes it meant just a person hired to do some task; and these people were often bound for a time, and not for life. There were, moreover, strict Biblical rules about how slaves were to be treated (see, e.g., Exod 21.2-6; Lev 25.10, 38-41; and Deut 23.15,16).
  • Jesus’s mother, Mary, identifies herself to the Archangel Gabriel as a slave. She uses the female version of a Greek word which is translated as “slave” whenever it is used for a male (see LK 1:38). And if Mary is a slave, then her child will be born into her same legal status. In which case, insofar as I can determine, Jesus’s status as a slave at birth would have been for life. But when Jesus was four, the Roman Emperor Augustus decreed that those born into slavery as Jesus would have been born into slavery were now to be freed at the age of thirty.
  • If Jesus was a slave until He was thirty, that very well explains both why Jesus was not married in His teens, and also why He did not begin His teaching ministry until He reached the age of thirty. He would have been Joseph’s bondsman working as a carpenter during all His so-called “lost years.” And even though Jesus may have been Joseph’s bondsman, it is clear that Joseph treated Him as His eldest son and gave Him a good religious education. Joseph received and heeded Gabriel’s announcement of Jesus’s impending birth, and he protected Him from the slaughter of the innocents when it happened and educating Him well in preparation for His free adulthood. We have no complaint to make against Jesus’s nominal father.
  • A mere stable is considered to be sufficient shelter for a woman who is about to give birth. We fondly think that the “no room in the inn” story of Jesus’s birth is charming, but in fact it is a sign of Mary’s low status, especially in view of her late stage of pregnancy. Would a free woman of respectable rank have been shuffled off to give birth in a barn?
  • Joseph may never have officially married Mary. Jesus from the cross asks His disciple, John, to look after His mother (see JN 19:27), so we know that Jesus is not certain that Joseph will care for his mother after His own death. As indeed apparently Joseph does not care for her, according to a close reading of the Gospel of Luke, since Mary soon moves into John’s household.
  • Jesus was oddly despised by His childhood neighbors for speaking with authority at the start of His ministry, and for calling Himself the fulfillment of Isaiah’s prophesy. After Jesus was baptized by John the Baptist, He returned to Galilee. And then comes an astonishing scene that never made sense to me before, in which He speaks in His home synagogue and announces that He is the fulfillment of Isaiah’s prophesy. And his home-folks immediately try to throw Him off a cliff. Huh? Here it is:

14 And Jesus returned to Galilee in the power of the Spirit, and news about Him spread through all the surrounding region. 15 And He began teaching in their synagogues and was praised by all.

16 And He came to Nazareth, where He had been brought up; and as was His custom, He entered the synagogue on the Sabbath, and stood up to read. 17 And the scroll of Isaiah the prophet was handed to Him. And He unrolled the scroll and found the place where it was written:

18 “The Spirit of the Lord is upon Me,
Because He anointed Me to bring good news to the poor.
He has sent Me to proclaim release to captives,
And recovery of sight to the blind,
To set free those who are oppressed,
19 To proclaim the favorable year of the Lord.”

20 And He rolled up the scroll, gave it back to the attendant, and sat down; and the eyes of all the people in the synagogue were intently directed at Him. 21 Now He began to say to them, “Today this Scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.” 22 And all the people were speaking well of Him, and admiring the gracious words which were coming from His lips; and yet they were saying, “Is this not Joseph’s son?” 23 And He said to them, “No doubt you will quote this proverb to Me: ‘Physician, heal yourself! All the miracles that we heard were done in Capernaum, do here in your hometown as well.’” 24 But He said, “Truly I say to you, no prophet is welcome in his hometown. 25 But I say to you in truth, there were many widows in Israel in the days of Elijah, when the sky was shut up for three years and six months, when a severe famine came over all the land; 26 and yet Elijah was sent to none of them, but only to Zarephath, in the land of Sidon, to a woman who was a widow. 27 And there were many with leprosy in Israel in the time of Elisha the prophet; and none of them was cleansed, but only Naaman the Syrian.” 28 And all the people in the synagogue were filled with rage as they heard these things; 29 and they got up and drove Him out of the city, and brought Him to the crest of the hill on which their city had been built, so that they could throw Him down from the cliff. 30 But He passed through their midst and went on His way (LK 4:14-30).

This reaction of Jesus’s childhood neighbors may be the greatest “tell” of them all. A presumptuous local boy who had grown up as a slave among them and only just been emancipated might inspire such rage, but surely not a local boy who had been freeborn!

We all plan our lives on earth before we are born, and that was especially true of Jesus. The Jesus that you and I know would have planned an earth-life as the poorest of the poor, and in that time and place, that may well have meant that Jesus deliberately chose to be born of a slave mother, and to live as a slave Himself during most of His life on earth. My Thomas tells us that Jesus was born as God on earth so God could “look through His eyes,” as Thomas puts it, and observe and come to a very much better understanding of humanity. And how much better could God come to understand people when viewing us from the perspective of the very least of these (see MT 25:44-46)?

That perspective of “the least of these” would have additionally suited Jesus’s purpose as He fine-tuned His teachings in preparation for His active teaching phase. And God could easily have influenced Caesar Augustus’s mind to decree an emancipation at the age of thirty for those born into slavery, in plenty of time for Jesus to begin His planned teaching phase when He became thirty years old. That coincidence of ages seems simply too neat for it actually to have been just a coincidence.

So I have come to accept the likelihood that Jesus did indeed begin and live most of His life as a slave, a bondsman, and He did so by strategic choice, so he could better serve God’s need to more perfectly understand people. He also did it by His personal choice. The Jesus that I have lately come to much better know, the Jesus who loves each individual person to the point of obsession, could not have borne the thought of planning a lifetime to be lived among so many slaves unless He also was going to be a slave Himself. Remember that Jesus has lived the past seventeen hundred years doing nothing but loving hundreds of millions of Christianity’s victims back into mental and spiritual health, even though He had no part in causing any of their pain!

But of course, my dear ones, it doesn’t matter. You can believe this new wrinkle about Jesus or not, as you like. One thing is for certain, though. Jesus  did not travel to the far east during His “lost years”. Thomas has helped me to work through and accept that fact. He tells me that Jesus spent those years closely studying people and further refining what He was going to be teaching during His coming ministry, and whether He did this as Joseph’s bondsman or as a yeoman carpenter in Joseph’s shop really doesn’t make any difference. But the more I have lived with this slavery theory, the more I have come to rather like the idea. Whoever were the least of those around Him, we know that our so dearly beloved Jesus would always have been right there with them, and eager to share His closer walk with them.

When my way grows dreary,
Precious Lord, lead me near.
When my life is almost gone,
At the river I will stand,
Guide my feet, hold my hand.
Take my hand, precious Lord,
And lead me home.
– Thomas A. Dorsey (1899-1993), from “Take My Hand Precious Lord” (1937

What About Evil?

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)

Two emailed questions that people ask me more often than any others are whether or not there is a devil, and whether or not there is a hell. And I generally answer these questions by saying that while of course there is no fiery hell, there is indeed an outer darkness, which is the lowest afterlife level. But God never puts us there. No, we ourselves are the only ones who can ever put ourselves into the outer darkness if we do something in our lives for which we have trouble forgiving ourselves when we experience it during our post-death life review. So learning self-forgiveness while we are alive is an especially important task! And as for the devil, well, he might exist, but since he has no power at all, you can ignore him. But the follow-up emails that I sometimes get for these answers suggest that for many people, my responses have missed their mark. What lots of people really want to know in answer to their questions about hell and the devil is whether there is some secret truth that I can give them that will make all their deepest childhood terrors go away forevermore. By some miracle, is there somewhere a very powerful and deeply comforting complete answer?

 Well, yes, I think that there actually is. But delivering it will take longer than it takes to give them a quickly-written and emailed response.

By now, most regular readers here understand that the only thing that actually exists is what we experience as consciousness. And consciousness is an energy-like and highly emotional potentiality that exists in a deep range of vibrations, from very high and rapid to very low and slow. Consciousness is alive in the sense that your mind is alive, and at its highest vibration it is perfect love. At its lowest vibration it is fear, anger, hatred, and all the other unpleasant emotions. At its highest vibration, consciousness is infinitely powerful. Consciousness at its highest vibration is God.

At its lowest vibration, however, consciousness has no power at all. We are talking about all of reality, now – the earth and all the galaxies – and as amazing as this sounds, emotion-based and timeless consciousness is all that there is, all that there ever was, and all that there ever is going to be. It is very important that you first get your mind around this central fact of our existence. Before we talk about anything else, it is essential that you understand that your mind and my mind and every other human mind all are part together of this one great Mind. We all live rather cozily as part of the illusion that you might fondly think of as the Mind of God; and frankly, if you keep that fact always in mind, it dispels a lot of your fears right off the bat! Before we move on to talk about hell and the devil, please read these two paragraphs about consciousness again thoughtfully, one more time.

 So, I think that we can largely dispense with hell as an issue. The only sort-of version of a “hell” that actually exists is that awful lowest afterlife level which is cold, dark, smelly, and disgusting. It’s what Jesus called “the outer darkness, where there is wailing and gnashing of teeth” (see MT 8:12, MT 22:13, and MT 25:30).  And since we are the only ones who ever can condemn ourselves to  the outer darkness, and we do that only if we fail to forgive ourselves for something that we have done in life, then for us simply to learn self-forgiveness while we are alive is our complete and fail-safe solution to that worry.

Please note that every Gospel mention by Jesus of “Gehenna” is not a reference to hell either, but rather it is just a mention of the valley outside Jerusalem where trash was often burned. Jesus talks about Gehenna in the Gospels several times, and early Biblical translators often interpreted that word as “hell”; but that, plus Biblical translators’ misunderstanding of the outer darkness, is why some scholars now say that Jesus talked about hell more often than anyone else did. Which certainly is not true! Please note, too, that some other mentions of hell as a fiery place of punishment that appear to come from Jesus were coming from councilors who were working for the Roman Emperor Constantine at First Nicaea in 325, who were creating for him his new religion. And they appear to have been eager to find or to introduce fear into this new religion which was being created as a fear-based means of control. This earth is a place for learning and spiritual growth above all! And for us instead to be condemned by God to burn in hell forevermore for even trivial mistakes made in the course of our efforts to learn and grow spiritually would be nonsensical. So I feel comfortable in assuring you that, no indeed, there is no fiery hell, and our genuine God of perfect love certainly never would condemn us to it in any event.

A brief mention ought also to be made of the fact that some version of hell does rarely turn up in near-death experiences (NDEs). It has been estimated that about one in seven NDEs are negative or even hellish, but that doesn’t matter since NDEs are merely out-of-body experiences (OBEs) in the nature of dreams which are managed for us by our own spirit guides. NDE experiencers never go to the actual afterlife, and neither do they ever go to any actual hell.  

Okay then, so what about the devil? Here the answer is more complicated. I devoutly wish the truth were otherwise, but in fact there are indeed a whole variety of invisible “ghoulies and ghosties and long-leggedy  beasties and things that go bump in the night,” as the Bible and the old Scottish prayer together insist to us that indeed there are. These nasty guys were terrified of Jesus, so He had considerable dealings with them, and probably all of us have at least some dealings with them in the course of our lives without being much aware of it. There likely also is an actual devil, or a Satan if you prefer to use that name. And many of these critters can trouble your life if you allow that to happen. But you should not be afraid of any of them, and that includes even the devil itself. To be afraid of them gives them power over you, and in fact your fear is the only pitiful little bit of power that they ever have. I have never set out to study demonish beings. But I have encountered information about them in my travels. Here, briefly, is a list of the most common kinds of evil discarnate entities:

  • The Devil. There probably is one or more of these. I know very little about devils or their history, and that is the way things will remain. I urge you not to show any curiosity about the devil or devils, since even to think about the devil very much can attract its energies to you. But the devil does show up in the Biblical Gospels interacting with Jesus (see MT 4). His role there was to tempt Jesus with the world’s riches, of course without success.
  • Demons. There are lesser negative entities that are not even fully-formed beings as such, so they need to possess the bodies of susceptible beings in order to have any real existence. They seem to exist in small groups, and they go around causing trouble. People have spiritual auras, and as long as we maintain our auras intact, they protect us from possession by demons; but becoming very drunk or very high on drugs or very ill can damage our auras. You will recall the demons that Jesus cast into the herd of swine (MT 8:30-32).
  • Shadow Men. No kidding, the most evil entities of all are so powerless that they have to lurk in closets and jump out and scare little children because they feed on fear. (And yes, such beings really do exist.) If there is just a bit of light in the room to serve as a night-light, these things have no power at all. So all babies and little children should be given night-lights, and they should never be left to cry in the dark because without the protection of night-lights in babies’ bedrooms these guys will latch on to certain little ones in childhood, and then will plague them even as adults unless their victims always sleep with a light on.
  • Deceased Addicts. People who die while they are addicted to drugs, alcohol, or sex will often refuse to transition, but will instead hang around alleys, bars, or wherever they mistakenly think that they can get their fix of what they still are craving. My own father was an alcoholic until he quit cold-turkey when I was eleven, and he had a possessing alcoholic spirit, or perhaps several such spirits, who gave an odd greenish caste to his eyes. His possessors only left him once he had conquered his own addiction. Anyone who gets very drunk in a bar, or who shoots up in a place where others have gotten high, or who participates in orgies where others also have engaged in group sex is going to shred his or her protective aura briefly, and will then pick up such hitchhikers, almost guaranteed. And since these dead addicts have material cravings that now can never be satisfied, once you are possessed by one or more dead addicts, your own addiction will become that much harder for you ever to cure.
  • Executed Criminals. If you need another reason to be against capital punishment, you might think of this as the ultimate form of air pollution. What capital punishment does is to set loose upon the world an invisible disembodied spirit at the height of his deadly rage, who in life was a murderous criminal and knew that he was about to be killed and had a vicious motive and plenty of time before dying to plot his revenge upon the world. My goodness, talk about air pollution!

Just what is evil, anyway? Its literal definition would be the opposite of love, the opposite of spiritual growth, and therefore the opposite of what you and I are born here on earth to try to achieve.  So that is what evil is, and it is to be rejected in every way and at all costs.

The fortunate thing about evil, though, is that the more evil any entity is, the less power it has on the consciousness specrum. General wisdom has it that the most evil entities of all are the Shadow Men, who go around in top hats and capes scaring babies in the dark so they can feed on their screams, because otherwise they don’t have sufficient energy even to lift their heads, or to move at all. And if there is anything more pathetic than that, I cannot at the moment think of what it might be. But, yes, all these invisible negative dudes can trouble your peace if you ever let them in. 

So, how can you protect yourself from evil beings, and even from the devil itself? The only way that you really can protect yourself is by learning to ever more perfectly live in love. You can work on raising your personal consciousness vibration far above anger and fear, and then you can never again in your earthly life allow yourself to have an even remotely evil thought. The easiest way to do this is with the teachings of Jesus. You begin by loving God, and you spread your love for God to all of humankind, because remember that in Consciousness we are all one Being. You never watch a scary movie, either. You never read a scary book. And if there is, let’s say, a coldish place in your house, or a spot where you think that something evil might be trying to lurk, you send it only thoughts of love and kindness and pity. The last thing you must ever do is to be afraid of that cold spot in your darkened hallway! No. Instead, you love it. And even better, pity it. If you thought of yourself as a scary monster, wouldn’t you be demoralized and shrink away sadly if someone only pitied you? Say, “Oh, you poor little thing!” to it aloud, and really mean it, and you will feel the temperature rise in that dark corner. Oh my dear ones, I know how amazing this sounds, but in this great ultimate game of life, the Good Guys truly can always win!

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)

Accepting Design

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

Two and two are four,
Four and four are eight,
Eight and eight are sixteen,
Sixteen and sixteen are thirty-two…

Inchworm, inchworm, measuring the marigolds,
You and your arithmetic, you’ll likely go far.
Inchworm, inchworm, measuring the marigolds,
Seems to me you’d stop and see how lovely they are.

 Inchworm, inchworm, measuring the marigolds,
With such determination you’ll surely go far.
Inchworm, inchworm, measuring the marigolds,
Seems to me you’d stop and see how beautiful they are!
– Frank Loesser (1910-1969), from “Inchworm” (1952)

The one fact that will eventually prove fatal to the mainstream scientists’ atheist-materialist view of reality is the certainty that Some Intelligence designed this universe. If you study the scientific evidence with even minimal objectivity, then sooner or later you must conclude that the universe and the life that it contains simply cannot have developed randomly, or even semi-randomly. Anything with so many trillions of moving parts that all must have fit together precisely and consistently during its entire process of assembly and growth, and down to even its most minute details, or it all would instantly have collapsed in upon itself or altogether blown apart, simply cannot be the product of happenstance. That sentence, while overlong, is true. But nevertheless, mainstream scientists still carry blithely on with their atheist-materialist religion-like belief-system, while ignoring that plain truth’s profound implications.

This problem exists in even more precise detail with scientists’ ongoing attempts to investigate the origin and development of life on this planet. Scientists will notice only what they think is favorable to their atheist-materialist position, and will over-hype each isolated bit of what might look to them like a successful discovery, while ignoring the larger fact that mainstream scientists have made little or no real progress in establishing the probable origin of life in their more than a century of earnestly trying. In fact, the prestigious mainstream scientific journal Nature has just published a major critique of the efforts being made by scientists in the field of origin-of-life research. To quote from that Nature article, “Explaining isolated steps on the road from simple chemicals to complex living organisms is not enough. Looking at the big picture could help to bridge rifts in this fractured research field.” And, “The origins-of-life field faces the same problems with culture and incentives that afflict all of science — overselling ideas towards publication and funding, too little common ground between competing groups and perhaps too much pride: too strong an attachment to favoured scenarios, and too little willingness to be proved wrong.” Ouch. That Nature article’s authors helpfully list whole basic areas for research that mainstream origins-of-life researchers are ignoring, from how natural selection is targeted through where genes and proteins actually came from. And these authors are true believers in what the researchers they are critiquing are doing. They actually are trying to be helpful!

Meanwhile, of course, while the scientific gatekeepers rail pointlessly against what are in fact undeniable truths, mainstream science itself has more and more basic problems to address with even its most fundamental theories. For example, scientists still do not understand at all the dark energy that they theorize makes up a full two-thirds of this universe, while the 2022 Nobel Prize winners in physics earned their prize for proving that the universe is not even locally real. And in another groundbreaking recent Nature article, Oxford emeritus biologist Denis Noble calls for a major “rethink” of biology by charging that “It’s time to admit that genes are not the blueprint for life” because this “view of biology often presented to the public is oversimplified and out of date.” Wow. So right there are three major areas of science where a whole lot more fundamental work is going to be needed! We have been saying for a while in this space that when the scientific gatekeepers finally give up on enforcing materialism as their “fundamental scientific dogma,” they will have to largely rework or even altogether abandon most of the scientific discoveries of the past century; and more and more, that is looking to be a pretty sure bet. When you base the work of major fields of research on a flawed fundamental dogma like materialism, you are building your system on such a crooked foundation that inevitably, it is all going to fall apart.

Meanwhile, creationist scientists under the leadership of The Discovery Institute Center for Science and Culture in Seattle continue to enjoy ever-increasing success. Their field of study is often referred to almost dismissively as “intelligent design,” but in fact they are fully credentialed scientists who just are broadly researching what is true. Their basic difference from mainstream science is that they don’t enforce any predetermined dogmas, and they simply welcome the obvious fact that of course there is a fundamental Intelligence behind it all. Researchers in this broad field test mainstream scientific theories, and they will incorporate them or parts of them wherever in their work that seems to make sense. I enjoy reading their newsletters, just as I do those sent by the major popular-science magazines. But while Popular Science and New Scientist will generally have pitifully little real news to offer, The Discovery Institute’s Evolution News is often full of the kinds of groundbreaking information that ought to be making headlines. Their new information would make for the most part the kinds of headlines, however, that Charles Darwin’s biggest supporters would likely be saddened to read.

Let’s look at a typical week’s sample of what the researchers whose work is featured by The Discovery Institute have lately had to say: 

  • Carnivory in Plants is a Problem for Darwin’s Theory of Evolution. There are approximately 500 species of carnivorous plants, belonging to nine families and six different plant orders, so carnivory in plants must have arisen several times independently. Carnivorous plants use a number of different methods for catching their prey, and researchers now believe that the pitchers might have arisen seven times independently, adhesive traps at least four times, snap traps twice, and suction traps possibly also twice. The fact that each of these complex systems arose separately so many different times in plants poses a direct challenge to Charles Darwin himself, who said in the Origin of Species that “If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed, which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down.”
  • “Junk DNA” May be a “Placeholder for Ignorance.” It is even now still assumed that some 90% of our genome is what is called “junk DNA,” which has no function; but upon closer study, a surprising amount of this so-called junk DNA does turn out to have an actual role to play. This article’s author says, “science writer Philip Ball, formerly a lead editor at the journal Nature, … is exasperated by junk DNA defenders who blithely assure the rest of the biological community that the non-functional portion of the human genome… can be fixed at 90 percent or thereabouts. The mindless processes of evolution, junk’s proponents say, are of course responsible for this huge putative junk percentage. As long as species continue to leave offspring, junk can accumulate in their genomes like so many cardboard boxes piling up in the attic, filled with school trophies and old sweaters. … Here is Ball’s proposed rule for molecular biologists: “stop assuming,” he writes, (that) “we know which parts of DNA matter and which don’t.” Take another look in that waste bin.
  • Stifling Opposition is the Real Anti-Science Position. Until recently, it has been fashionable to talk about the science on various matters as being “settled” in order to shut off debate. But the author here argues that no science is ever settled, and that shutting off scientific debate this way on anything is the antithesis of the actual scientific method. He offers wonderful examples of instances where the “experts” were wrong, from the need to close schools during the time of COVID through the purported uselessness of the actually quite useful human appendix. As he says, “Stifling the messy and contentious process required for scientific knowledge to advance undermines science. Yes, that means charlatans and frauds may, at times, successfully beguile the ignorant. But just like the most efficacious answer to bad speech is good speech, the way to overcome bad science is for good science to demonstrate its veracity. Attempts to short-circuit that contentious process betray the very purposes science is supposed to serve.”
  • Memories Are Not “Stored” in the Brain. Here a brief philosophical discussion helps us understand that memories are not material, and they cannot be stored in the same way that something that is physical can be stored in one’s back pocket. We might have expected a discussion of how those memories are stored in consciousness itself, but this careful author doesn’t go that far; he simply says, “Knowing is an ability to do something, and memories are our retained knowledge. I remember how to play chess and I remember my grandmother. That means I retain the ability to play chess and I retain the ability to recognize my grandmother. So that’s all memory is — retained knowledge.”
  • Does the World Need Another Book About Darwin? Darwin’s Bluff: The Mystery of the Book Darwin Never Finished by Robert F. Shedinger is just out, and his article about why he wrote the book makes for fascinating reading. Shedinger says that “In truth, The Origin of Species was an abstract of a much larger book on species that Darwin was working on (and that was three-quarters complete) before events forced him to put the larger book aside and instead publish a mere abstract of it. Once the Origin was in circulation, Darwin’s many correspondents anticipated that he would quickly follow up with the publication of his big book on species so they could better evaluate the argument for natural selection made in the Origin. Indeed, Darwin himself created this expectation both in the Origin and in his correspondence. … A rough, handwritten manuscript of Darwin’s big book, titled Natural Selection, survived among his papers and was published by Cambridge University Press in 1975. Yet despite the easy access scholars now have to this work (I bought a copy on Amazon), there has been little detailed engagement with its contents or comparison of this work with its abstracted form in the Origin. Such a comparison proves enlightening, for it serves to highlight the secondary nature of the Origin as a hastily written abstract rather than a finely honed scientific treatise, thus challenging the iconic status of the Origin as the foundational text of the modern biological sciences. This, of course, may be precisely why the big book gets overlooked. And in short, Shedinger finds that the ultimate book by Darwin, Natural Selection, never was finished and published because Darwin never was able to solve his theory’s most intractable problems.

Five interesting, well-reasoned, and scholarly articles. All of them balanced, useful, and worthy of a much broader audience than they will receive.

What gets me most of all when I compare the limited and dead-ended world of mainstream science with the open and joyous research of the creationists is the fact that most mainstream scientists, like that inchworm, really are missing so much! By looking at our reality so often first in terms of numbers; by self-limiting to the dogma that intelligence can never be a factor, and with the corollary dogma that matter must be primary; and finally by requiring so many scientists to need to seek funds for their separate little bits of research, mainstream science still is missing just about everything. Above all, as those articles in Nature lately have pointed out, mainstream science is missing altogether the beautiful and truly far beyond glorious Big Picture, which is what science really is supposed to be all about! 

Two and two are four, four and four are eight…
Seems to me you’d stop and see how beautiful they are!
– Frank Loesser (1910-1969), from “Inchworm” (1952)

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)

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