The Painful Truth

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2010-06-30T20:30:00.000-07:00

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Hello Friends

2010-06-01T19:07:00.000-07:00

My name is Richard D. Armstrong II, most people who were in the W.W.C.G. knew me as a youngster as "Dicky". I've been called Richard, Rick or Dick for more than 30 years now and it amazes me how time has flown by. I began looking for ways to reconnect with classmates of mine from Big Sandy Texas recently and ran across this blog and found some interesting things here. After writing the editor James, I decided I'd contribute some things when I have time - I'm very busy working now, driving for Swift Transportation. I'm able to get online several times a week, though sometimes only for a limited time.
I would just start by saying that I have had many great opportunities in my life and many of my occupational endeavors have kept me busy day to day, but some have offered me plenty of time for reflection on my life. I lived in the Chetco, Illinois and Wild Rogue River wildernesses of Southern Oregon for many years in the early 1980s, working as a Forest Service caretaker at a historical guard station built by the Civilian Conservation Corps. in the 1930s, I also worked in the same area at McCaleb Ranch. During these times I was able to form myself as a young adult and decided who I was and what I wanted to be in life. In 1985 I reunited with my grandfather Herbert W. Armstrong and was blessed to spend much of the last year of his life with him, living with him for a time at the Ambassador College Pasadena campus. I attended college there in 1985 and left after his death in 1986.
I have many great fond memories of the church and the people I knew and grew up with. When I look back on my memories of the Church, Imperial School and Ambassador College, I'm reminded of how blessed we all were to have the fellowship we shared. The tumultuous things that have transpired over the years since the late 1970s and especially since my grandfathers death in 1986 are sad and it's a shame that the Church organization was not able to continue into the future with the same goodwill and co-operation that was the hallmark of the Church and it's people from inception until the breakup and selling off of the Church and it's holdings. I think there may be a time and place to write about some of the really bad things that have transpired within the Church over time - I have personally been affected by things like Stanley Rader influencing my grandfather into terrible decisions, also the much publicized personal turmoil of my uncle Garner Ted, the accusations of abuse by grandpa by my late Aunt Dorothy, the receivership by the state of California in the late 70s, also - perhaps most disappointing to me - the way the Church was handled by those who took over after my grandfathers death in 1986. However, one thing I have been able to do with my adult life, is to not dwell on negative things any longer than is beneficially necessary. Sadly, I know many people who have been hurt and have not been able to pick up and move forward. I have had to work hard my whole life and I'm still working on my own personal dreams and goals. My purpose in writing here is to share what has been a wonderful upbringing and life within the church from my birth in 1958 until the day I left my job at the college library in Pasadena in 1979 and moved to Oregon to "find out who I was" and make a life for myself and my family. I too have been close to the negativity and harm that has happened within the Church and it's affiliated organizations - the reason I left my job at the college library in Pasadena that early summer day in 1979 was that people there were constantly trying to talk to me about "what was going on" and some were trying to convince me that my own Mother was complicit in a plot to overthrow my grandfather and put Garner Ted at the helm of the Church - NOT TRUE and I knew better. My family is very loving and supportive of each other - for the most part. In any case, I would be glad to relate these things I experienced at some point - but for the most part, I have great memories I'd like to share of happier times and that will be the purpose of my writing here. I am not ignorant of the negative things that transpired within the Church and it's affiliations, yet there were so many fine things to recall and that is what I'd like to share with people. Lots of water has gone under the bridge, so I am choosing to recall the good things, I'll let God sort out the bad things as I don't feel it's my job to focus on the negative black hole that so many people get caught in.
My intent in writing here is to share memories with any interested readers of what it was like to grow up in the thick of the Worldwide Church of God, Imperial Schools and Ambassador College. My memories are of wonderful people, wonderful gatherings, people working together and helping each other. I will share with you how lucky I feel to have experienced growing up on the campus in Bricket Wood England, then Big Sandy Texas and eventually Pasadena California. I was blessed to be part of the Church and it's workings during a wonderful period of time and my memories are 99% great memories.
Some of my earliest childhood memories are of growing up at my grandfather Armstrong's home in Bricket Wood England, then eventually living in the cottage next door to the Raymond McNair family after my Mom remarried to Ben Chapman. My Mom has related to me how she basically "blacked out" upon the death of my father, after they had a very special and almost "fairy tale" relationship. It is understandable that this would devastate anyone - and it was especially hard on my Mom who was a new mother with a 6 month old baby. My grandfather suggested to her that it would be best if she got a new start in Bricket Wood and we were moved there and initially lived with Grandpa Armstrong at his home. As my Mom got involved with the Church and College there, I had allot of babysitters from the college (college students) and I remember very much of these experiences from ages as early as age 2. I distinctly remember being pulled through the snow in a cardboard box my Mom had rigged up with rope, so she could run through the snow, pulling me behind her - of course I thought life could not get any better than that! I also vividly remember being looked after by Andrew Silcox and his father, who was the groundskeeper in Bricket Wood. I'm sure that like any young boy with a tricycle and a ton of energy, I must have been a real pest - though Mr. Silcox always seemed to love having me around. He would give me "missions" to go on - "Dicky, take your tricycle out and get me as many worms as you can find!". I was so happy to go digging around the rich English soil and come back with a trunk (my tricycle had a trunk on it) full of night crawlers. I also have fond memories of my grandpa telling me he had gotten 2 shetland ponies that I could ride and at a very early age I was out riding with Andrew Silcox who was so good to me - we had an absolute storybook good time, out riding the English countryside looking for lost swords and treasure - how could a kid forget wonderful things like that? I certainly remember more than I have time to write about here, but my early life in Bricket Wood was very special and I've talked to my Mom many times about the things we did - she has been amazed that I remember that far back and I've reminded her of many things that she had forgotten. I remember playing with Ruth and Bruce Mcnair at the cottage next door - so great to have kids to play with from the church. I also remember that the McNairs had taken a trip to the English countryside and somehow ended up bringing back a wild goat, then tying it up in the back yard. One day - I think after a day at Church, they returned home to find their back yard very much re-arranged by the goat and I'm pretty sure they ate it after that, but I'd have to ask Raymond about the particulars - he might not want to admit to whatever the goats fate was - HA! I also remember every day of a car tour we took as a family in England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland in a Jaguar my dad Ben Chapman had purchased. Along with the spectacular scenery we saw, I remember Mom and Dad kicking me out of the back seat where I slept, when their air mattress gave way on a rainy English night. I remember being very frightened for my Moms safety as she made her way along slippery rock steps at a waterfall in Wales. We camped at Loch Ness and drove through the mountains in Scotland - I remember seeing it all like it was yesterday.
There came a point where my Grandpa thought dad (Ben Chapman) would be a good fit for the campus in Big Sandy Texas, so we packed up and boarded the S.S. United States for an Atlantic Crossing. The story has been told to me, that grandpa would have had the presidential suite, but the President happened to be on board for this trip - this is true, Dwight D. Eisenhower was on this crossing and I remember seeing him. I also remember the theatre on board, where we watched a Johnny Weismueller Tarzan film, also I recall dad tossing me into the water (sink or swim) in the Olympic pool. What a ship this S.S. United States was - the ring toss on board was very cool too - I remember stopping from the ring toss game and just staring out at all that water - it seemed so magical and so infinite. As we approached the New York Harbor, grandpa Armstrong got me out of bed early to see the sun rise on the statue of Liberty - I will never forget him telling me the story of Lady Liberty and what that meant to Americans. After a trip through Immigration, we were in an apartment in New York City for a time, then we drove the Jaguar across the U.S. to Big Sandy where we set up camp in a home that was still being worked on. I will write more later, picking up there when I have time next. Best Wishes to you all and I'd love to reconnect with anyone who I knew from the Church, College or Schools.

God is in control. Aren't You Glad You Went Green?

2010-05-28T17:03:00.000-07:00

Many of you probably have seen this email about the Icelandic volcano eruption. It was forwarded to me by a retired-Lutheran-minister in-law. He, more than likely, received it from one of his former parishioners. (Ah, yes, he taught his congregations well.) I would love to tell all of them: "If God is always in control, then he must have caused the volcanic eruption in the first place." Actually, whoever wrote this admitted as much by the use of “a single act of God.”

God is in control---ALWAYS!!!!!

Aren't You Glad You Went Green?

6 billion people try for 5 years.... then the earth burps, and it's all for naught!

For all of you out there in America and across the globe who have fought so hard to tackle that hideous enemy of our planet, namely carbon emissions, I have some really bad news that will be very painful for you to process. But it is my duty to pass it on to you anyway.

Are you sitting down?

Okay, here's the bombshell. The current volcanic eruption going on in Iceland, since it first started spewing volcanic ash a week or so ago, has to this point, NEGATED EVERY SINGLE EFFORT you have made in the past five years to control CO2 emissions on our planet. Not only that, this single act of God has added emissions to the earth estimated to be 42 times more than can be corrected by the extreme human regulations that have been proposed for annual reductions.

I know, I know.... (now have a group hug)...it's very disheartening to realize that all of the carbon emission savings you have accomplished while suffering the inconvenience and expense of driving Prius hybrids, buying reusable fabric grocery bags, sitting up till midnight to finish your kid's "The Green Revolution" science project, throwing out all of your non-green cleaning supplies, using only two squares of toilet paper, putting a brick in your toilet tank reservoir, selling your SUV and speedboat,
going on vacation to a city park instead of to Yosemite, nearly getting hit by a car every day while riding your bicycle to work, replacing all of your one dollar light bulbs with ten dollar fluorescent light bulbs that don't give as much light or last as long (and you cannot dispose of ANYWHERE legally)...well, all of those things you have been doing all this time, at great inconvenience and great expense, have all gone down the tubes in just the past week...

The volcanic ash emitted into the Earth's atmosphere in the past week has totally erased every single effort you have made to reduce that evil beast, carbon. And, those hundreds of thousands of American jobs you helped move to Asia with expensive emissions demands that were put on American businesses... you know, the ones over there that are creating even more emissions than when the companies stayed

home creating American jobs, well that must all seem really worthwhile now. I'm so sorry. And I do wish that there was some kind of a silver

lining to this volcanic ash cloud but the fact of the matter is that the brush fire season across the western U.S.A. will start in about two months and those fires will negate your efforts to reduce carbon emissions in our world for the next two years!

So grab a Coke, give the world a hug, and have a nice day while Al Gore contemplates suicide!

I forwarded this on to some of my freethinking friends. None of their responses were positive. In fact, they were a bit disgruntled that Christians have this attitude. Here is what one of them, with a background in Christian fundamentalism before “seeing the light“ of unbelief, wrote back to me:

I think you should respond to this, Betty. [I didn’t. What good would it have done?] He is really nasty, isn’t he?? Just what the world needs now . . . folks like him. The last line is just about as “nice” as his fellow Christians that are “praying” for Obama’s death… So now, with this attitude, we’re supposed to “give up” trying to do any more green things for our planet? Oh, I forgot, we shouldn’t care . . . Armageddon is near . . . and all these wonderful folks will just be “swept
up in the clouds,” and to hell with future generations that have to live here on this planet….

If you’re interested, here is an interesting website with an article from a Russian scientist who says that volcanic eruptions slow global warming:

http://en.rian.ru/russia/20100429/158805885.html

Whether this scientist is correct in his assessment, I simply don’t know. Actually, I hope he is.

Formative, Normative, and Cultural Doctrines

2010-05-22T05:47:00.000-07:00

In the introduction of my book, The Homemade Atheist, I asked, "Why are there so many different doctrines on the same subject from the same book? It has been an enigma to me for years that if God exists and is perfect, and if he indeed has a standard by which all should live, why doesn't everyone understand the truth he apparently meant to convey in the same way?

Wide variations in belief exist in all religious systems partly because of three main methods of scripture interpretations: (1) formative; (2) normative; (3) cultural.

The Formative Method, according to some Biblical scholars, includes glossalalia which was not intended to be used throughout the life of the church. Speaking in tongues is only addressed at any length in the Book of Acts (where actual languages seem to have been spoken somewhere on earth to establish the legitimacy of the church) and the first epistle to the Corinthians where "unknown" languages were spoken and interpretation had to be given. These "spiritual gifts" might have been given because there was yet no New Testament. The Formative Method is also sometimes used to explain the deaths of Ananias and Saphira after they lied to the Holy Spirit in the person of Peter. Their deaths, also, may have been recorded to give the new religion God's sanction. And even though lying still goes on in the church worldwide (no pun intended), I don't see wholesale death occuring in "holy" sanctuaries today because of deceit and lying.
The Normative Method of interpretation establishes an unchangeable standard or pattern for believers everywhere and at all times. Examples in this case would be proper Christian conduct (especially for women) at home and in communal worship, prophesying and preaching (which many believe are quite different), and the Lord's Supper. (References: 1 Corinthians 11 and Galations 3.)
The Cultural Method is used by denominations claiming that the entire Bible was influenced by cultural conditions at the time of its writing such as length of hair for both sexes. And especially concerning women, since females today are most often as educated as males are, it is, therefore, so say some scholars, appropriate now for women to teach, pray, and preach in worship assemblies. But this argument from cultural bias could be used to dismiss anything in the Bible if it does not suit someone's sensibilities in the modern world.

I am not lobbying for either the formative, normative, or cultural methods of interpreting scripture. To me, the real question is whether the Bible is the inerrant Word of God and how one can tell. As I read it, there are many unfulfilled prophecies, scientific inaccuracies including the mention of mythical beasts and the belief that the earth has corners and is flat in this revered work. And a perfect God is its author?

Fear of God

2010-05-19T09:32:00.000-07:00

In a speech in Germany, Pope Benedict attacked both Islam and secularism. During the course of that speech, he said that atheists are "afraid of God." This sticks in my mind because, ironically, an acquaintance of mine had asked me if I was an unbeliever because I fear God! (And she's not even Catholic!)

I simply answered, "How can I fear or be afraid of anything that doesn't even exist?"

I went on to say, "Frankly, in certain situations, I'm actually much more afraid of militant religionists. I wouldn't want to meet one in a dark alley somewhere."

(Of course, I can't even remember a time when I was ever in a dark alley.)

Many followers of religion malign and kill each other in great numbers over insignificant issues. Austin Cline, in an article about fear of God and atheism, stated: "Beliefs [of religious adherents] can cause them to develop inflated egos all out of proportion to anything that is really deserved. This does not mean, however, that any of their beliefs have any basis in reality or that their gods, spirits, fairies, and whatnot are anything to be afraid of."

Fear based on religious faith that cannot be proven true often leaves emotional scars. Many of those who were in the Worldwide Church of God and other legalistic belief systems can attest to that fact.

Of course, I know that atheists are in the minority, but our numbers are growing. Fear would most probably greatly diminish if we understood what Clarence Darrow articulated in a most astute article. This agnostic (primarily famous because of the Scopes Monkey Trial in Tennessee way back in 1925) said:

"When we fully understand the brevity of life, its fleeting joys and unavoidable pains; when we accept the facts that all men and women are approaching an inevitable doom: the consciousness of it should make us more kindly and considerate of each other. This feeling should make men and women use their best efforts to help their fellow travelers on the road, to make the path brighter and easier as we journey on. It should bring a closer kinship, a better understanding, and a deeper sympathy for the wayfarers who must live a common life and die a common death."

I admire that man. We need more like him.

To me, the fear of God is not the beginning of wisdom, but the end.

Faith and Hope

2010-05-16T06:13:00.000-07:00

So many evil deeds are carried out every day throughout the globe. I sometimes can't bear watching TV news or reading newspaper articles about war atrocities, genocide, and the enourmous cruelty carried out by individuals against other individuals for no apparent reason other than the thrill it gives to warped minds.

One of the most tragic murders I've heard or read about locally in recent years happened on Halloween in 2005. The victim was an attractive, unmarried woman, 25 years of age, who earned her living as a freelance pholographer. Apparently she was a happy, family-and-church-oriented daughter, sister, and aunt who lived with a friend next door to her parents.

While on a photo shoot, from what newspapers reported and what scant information can be pieced together from one of the two convicted perpetrators, she alledgedly was kidnapped, stripped naked, spread-eagled and bound in a bed, repeatedly and brutally raped, tortured with a knife and finally shot numerous times. This young woman was humiliated and tormented until her life was snuffed out. Her lifeless body was then burned.

A shirttail relative of this horribly abused, victimized woman and one of my co-workers expressed to me her belief (faith) that the murdered woman did not experience any pain during her ordeal since God was watching over her!

"Why would you think that?" I asked.

"Because it just makes me feel better," my friend pitifully replied as tears welled in her eyes. "And she was a wonderful Christian!"

I said nothing in an attempt to reason with her. I just gave her a big hug and let her cry.

I would describe this dear friend as devout, morally scrupulous, generally thoughtful, and polite. She is a widow and a caring mother and grandmother. She is a dedicated, knowledgeable employee in a women's health clinic. She works tirelessly for her church and attends mass regularly. Yet, she had no objective proof for the validity of her statement. She only had "faith" that her God protected this young woman from actual, physical pain because, otherwise what happened was too horrible to contemplate. I wonder if my friend thinks that God also watched as the young woman cried out for mercy while she was raped and mutilated; or did he simply turn his back on her after he fixed it so she at least wouldn't feel physical pain.

To me this is a graphic example of what faith (firm belief without logical proof) does to a person. It distorts rationality. If my friend's God has the kind of power to eradicate pain, why didn't he step in and prevent this senseless atrocity from happening in the first place?

In several thesauruses (or thesauri), the words "faith" and "hope" are synonyms. To me, no matter how strong a person says their "faith" is, it's really just "fervent hope."

What Can We Do?

2010-05-12T16:40:00.000-07:00

Biker Bob’s blog article last month titled “The Future” was well written, and some of the comments that it engendered were insightful. I hope you don’t mind if I pick up on that theme from a slightly different, expanded angle and in a different context.

I just finished reading a science fiction novel (Book IV of Voyagers: The Return by Ben Bova) set far into the future. It depicts earth suffering from disastrous greenhouse flooding. Almost all countries have been taken over by ultraconservative religion-based governments such as the novel’s New Morality in the United States. Population is ballooning throughout the globe, and resources are running out. In addition, the planet is heading for nuclear war with nations refusing to dismantle whatever stockpile of warheads they have.

In the novel, the memoirs of a very old retired schoolteacher are shown in about three places. She says that it took her a long time to understand what was happening in the schools. The kids didn’t read T.S. Eliot or Shakespeare anymore because they were too difficult. They didn’t even read Dr. Seuss. And forget Hemingway because he used foul language and openly depicted sex. The New Morality took smiling advantage of what was going on and used it for their own purposes.

The retired teacher says there was a slow, patient, inevitable dumbing down of the schools including the students, teachers, and the administrators. And she admits that “we let them make things easier.” She describes the process:

"The overarching goal of education was to achieve equality…[A brilliant child] is no better than the intellectually challenged [child]. [We can’’t hurt the feelings of children who are autistic, have attention deficit disorder or were born with Down’s syndrome]…by putting them in separate facilities with specialists to look after them. [It was decided that they deserved] to be mainstreamed and attend school with everybody else….

"Equality of outcome…was our aim. Everyone was to be treated equally; every student would finish school the equal to every other student. And what was the easiest way to achieve equality? Teach to the lowest common denominator. Make certain that every student got exactly what every other student received. No fast lane for the so-called bright ones. That wouldn't be equal….

"Self-esteem. We tried to teach the kids to have pride in themselves. It took me years to figure out that for a youngster to have pride in herself she had to be able to accomplish things, achieve something to be proud of. But somehow we left that part out of the curricula….

"So we taught less and less of the things that made the kids feel unhappy with themselves and spent more and more classroom time on teaching them self-esteem…Arithmetic made them feel bad, so we eased off on the math. And the spelling. And the reading assignments. And homework….

"…Parents didn’t want their kids exposed to political beliefs that went against their own politics. So we stopped teaching civics. When an activist group decided that the Declaration of Independence was a subversive document…we stopped teaching about the American Revolution altogether….

"Darwin. When I first started teaching we were forbidden by the state legislature to use the word 'evolution' in class. Then we stopped teaching biology altogether. And physics. And chemistry. Instead we taught general science, including 'alternative' concepts such as intelligent design and astrology. It was a lot easier on the children, and we teachers didn’t have to defend ourselves against righteous parents who got blue in the face over 'godless secularist ideas.'

"We went along with it. The kids were happier; the pressure groups were happier. A few die-hard scientists and university academics warned that we were turning out a generation of ignoramuses, but they were happy ignoramuses and we could keep our jobs and avoid all the painful conflicts."

The retired teacher goes on to say that in spite of all this, there were a precious few kids who managed to get ahead anyway. A handful of schools managed to cater to those budding geniuses thirsting for real knowledge, but they were always distrusted and carefully watched. Their work was closely controlled by the government and the New Morality.

To me, much of this sounds like our present, dangerous, unstable world. These are alarming times.

I agree with Biker Bob that we need to get involved in helping all people--believers and nonbelievers--to help “minimize whatever societal problems we can.” How can we do this? Is cooperation between individuals and nations even possible?

When Believers and Unbelievers Collide

2010-05-07T05:38:00.000-07:00

A few weeks ago, I took my car to the mechanic because of a noise in its front end. It turned out there was nothing seriously wrong with it. But car problems are not what I want to talk about. Rather, it's about one of many false impressions that people have about agnostics or atheists in general.

My Christian mechanic is a kind, gentle, honest person and married to one of my late husband's high school classmates. Before he became ill and died, Fred had told this man--I'll call him Karl, but that's not his real name--that I was no longer a believer. Until over a year after Fred's death, nothing was mentioned to me personally by Karl or his wife about my unbelieving status.

(And, by the way, I didn't hold it against my Fred for talking to his Christian friends about my de-conversion. He needed to confide in believers just as I need to confide in my unbelieving friends for support. I'm quite sure Fred asked many to pray for me. When I left relgion, this was one of the few times in our long married life that Fred and I weren't able to express our deepest feelings to each other. Our love was just as strong, but a "knot" formed in our otherwise smooth relationship.)

Anyway, during the course of a conversation around the first of this year, Karl told me that Fred had informed him of my leaving religion and church behind. We then had a short discussion about my humanist atheism. My first book (Dare to Think for Yourself) was mentioned, and I asked Karl if he would like to read it.

"Well," he said, "I'll take a look at it if you will agree to watch a Lutheran TV program that I think you'll find interesting and may change your mind and bring you back to God."

"Okay," I replied, "I have no problem with that." In fact, I watched two of the telecasts and later told Karl that the man was a fine speaker, but he didn't convince me that I am wrong. I told him that he sounded like any other conservative televangelist and offered no proof for his beliefs.

Karl said nothing about my assessment of the messages from the Lutheran pastor whom he no doubt respects and admires other than, "You have too many questions, Betty."

Later, Karl returned my book through an employee of his without a note or a relayed "thank you" or any other comment. So at the recent encounter mentioned in the beginning of this short article, I asked if he read the book and what he thought of it.

I had never heard this gentle man gossip about another person, utter one curse word, or denigrate anyone (except maybe politicians). On that day, however, the expression on his face hardened; and he said, "Betty, I think you're a tool of the Devil."

I just smiled, shrugged and replied, "Well, Karl, I don't even believe there is a devil. In fact, I don't believe there is any so-called spiritual entity of any kind."

"Then I suppose you think that when you die, that's it. No afterlife, no looking forward to heaven or fearing hell?" he spat out.

"That's right, Karl. But I enjoy this life. I look forward to every day. I enjoy helping others and doing what I can to alleviate pain, loneliness, and suffering. I volunteer at a local food bank, contribute what little money I can afford to help those in disaster stricken areas as well as animal welfare agencies."

"Why do you do all that? What do you get out of it when you are an admitted atheist? What do you hope to gain?" he asked in bewilderment.

"I don't know that I personally get anything out of it except the satisfaction of helping others," I responded. "Unlike when I was a Christian I don't expect a reward for doing something good or to earn points with some sort of god or even with other people."

Karl just glared at me without comment, and I took that opportunity to excuse myself and let him get back to his work.

I don't think I'll ask him if he would like to read my recently published second book (The Homemade Atheist). I don't want to antagonize him further and maybe lose the services of a good mechanic--or, more importantly, friendship, if I already haven't, of a couple whom I've enjoyed knowing for about 19 years.

But such things happen. Believe me they happen.

I wonder how many others (both believers and unbelievers) have had similar experiences.

Why Do You Believe or Not Believe?

2010-05-01T06:00:00.000-07:00

Many "searching" people, or so it seems to me, are looking for a religion that does not stand in judgment of others and that does not tell them what to believe. What they are seeking is a religion that has no religious demands, a religion without authority and without condemnation of any type. But there is no such religion!

The primary definition of "religion" is a belief in a superhuman controlling power, i.e. a personal God or gods entitled to obedience and worship. Without this description, the word "religion" has no meaning. If individuals want to be free of the pressures to conform why don't they simply take hold of that precious freedom to think for themselves while it still exists? Religion, traditionally, is the institution that is said to give safety, peace of mind, and community which is what most postmodern people are seeking. If this is so, then I wonder why there is such misery, even among believers, and evil throughout this world.

The Unitarian-Universalist (UU) fellowships embrace people of all faiths and non-faiths. Their membership includes disgruntled or disheartened Catholics and Protestants, Buddhists and Hindus, agnostics and atheists, pagans and Wiccans, humanists and Taoists, perhaps a few Muslims, etc. They come together without a unifying creed or theological interpretation to which members must subscribe. Attendees, ostensibly, are encouraged to freely and responsibly search for truth and meaning for themselves in their own way.

These fellowships, obviously, are not communities of wholly like-minded individuals. I once attended over a period of a few years a UU fellowship (and still do on occasion if the advertised sermon topic appeals to me). Even though I never signed their membership book, for the most part gathering with the UUs for Sunday services was a pleasant, educational experience. It served as a peaceful transition from orthodoxy as I struggled to come to terms with my growing unbelief. By then I had severed my membership in both the Worldwide Church of God and the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod.

Eventually and ironically, the UU meetings became too ecumenical for me as I became more familiar with the many different religious viewpoints in that fellowship. I was searching and trying to "pick brains," but not one person ever gave me objective reasons for their particular belief positions. Even though I met a number of nice people, they seemed somewhat threatened if I questioned how and why they came to adopt their positions. My experience with the UUs was little different from the orthodox church I had left after I started asking pointed questions about its doctrines and creeds.

I did not become an unbeliever because I was angry with any deity or human being, for that matter, nor because my life was filled with disappointment or anguish. My humanistic atheism developed gradually through intensive personal research and study over many years. I began my investigation of religion because I had so many questions about the Bible and what I was taught it means, what others of different denominations say it means, and why a presumably loving, all-knowing god allows evil to perpetuate.

In a recent Gallop poll, 60% percent of Americans say that religion can answer all of today's problems, while 26% say religion is old-fashioned and out-of-date. I don't know what the remaining 14% say. Perhaps they include the many people who are looking for a religious or spiritual high without the burden of religious or spiritual baggage. They want to believe in something without objectively investigating their beliefs. They want to be a part of a community that gives them a sense of security but doesn't require religious doctrine or rules.

As a sometimes-despised atheist, I know that the majority of people, especially in the United States, do not respect my stance. Religionists would much rather have nominal believers or even those who say they're agnostics in their midst. After all, they might say, there is hope for them.

I respect sincere, nonmilitant adherents of any religious faith even though I disagree with all of them. I do, however, have a hard time with those who want community and meaning from a "spiritual" group but don't even know the meaning of the word "spiritual." (Please see my recently published second book, The Homemade Atheist, for an explanation of my feelings on the subject of spirituality).

If you want community without religious attachments, then join a country club, the Rotarians, or a bowling team. But be assured that you can't be a member in good standing of an established church without at least an outward appearance of conformity to certain rules or commandments of the god or gods which church members say they worship.

Like a TV commercial for a popular cookie once advertised, "If you're going to eat a cookie, then eat a cookie." And I say, "If you're going to believe in god, then believe in god--but know objectively why you do--uncolored by emotion, fear, or bigotry.

Thanks, Everybody!

2010-04-29T13:58:00.000-07:00

It's been an interesting month, and I appreciate having been able to hang out with everyone here on PT Blog. I knew that some of the ideas I'd be expressing would be controversial, to say the least, but thanks for listening, and James, thanks for not censoring.

I don't know to what extent I'll be participating here in the coming months. I do have a business to run, private studies, and about ten hobbies in which I'm active. There is quite a bit of emotional involvement, and time and thought that goes into producing articles for a blog site, even as a guest editor. Anyone who can do this for an extended time period has my complete respect!

In the inimitable words of Porky Pig: "A ba beya ba beya, That's all Folks!"

BB

Prophecy?

2010-04-28T15:33:00.000-07:00

I've got an old Iron Maiden song playing somewhere back in the caverns of my cranium as I visualize my Christian brothers and sisters running for the hills to avoid capture by Nero's soldiers back in the first century. Nero, by this point, was already soaking Christians in flammable liquids, and igniting them to warm and illuminate his lavish parties, a practice which would be difficult to visualize or justify if the life of Jesus Christ had been at that time simply a 25-30 year old bucolic legend based on the story of Mithra.

I know that many things fade with time. They certainly did for me. Also, there are things I'm now learning that I never knew. I thought I'd take some time and share some information, out of love, and in the spirit of the parable of Lazarus and the Rich Man. We've entertained the theory that prophecy was written after it had already been fulfilled. There are some notable exceptions to this, and the case of Jesus would seem to be one of them. One resource we have during our own lifespans is proof of the relative intactness of the Old Testament scriptures, at least over a 2,500 year time span, because of the ways in which these compare to the so-called "Dead Sea" scrolls. So, any theories involving Catholic tampering do not apply. There are some fairly specific prophecies, part of the ancient Jewish literature, which pertain directly to Jesus Christ, and were written well in advance of His life, death, and resurrection.

First, lets turn to Luke 24: 44-45, where we read:

"He said to them, 'This is what I told you while I was still with you: Everything must be fulfilled that is written about me in the Law of Moses, the Prophets, and the Psalms.' Then he opened their minds so they could understand the Scriptures."

There are two major Old Testament passages which describe and directly apply to the experiences of Jesus. Psalm 22, and Isaiah 52, and 53 contain some amazing descriptive language, and there are certainly others. Bible Scholars have identified scores of references in the Law, Prophets, and Psalms which foreshadow, prophesy, or describe Jesus Christ.

I'm going to highlight, or excerpt these chapters, because I know from experience that if I just list chapter and verse, most people will never look them up and read them for themselves.

Psalm 22:

1. My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Why are you so far from saving me, so far from the words of my groaning?

6. But, I am a worm, not a human being. I am scorned by everyone, despised by the people.
7. All who see me mock me, they hurl insults, shaking their heads.
8. He trusts in the Lord, they say, let the Lord rescue him. Let him deliver him, since he delights in him.
9. Yet you brought me out of the womb; you made me feel secure on my mother's breast.
10. From birth I was cast on you; from my mother's womb you have been my God.

15. My mouth is dried up like a potsherd, and my tongue sticks to the roof of my mouth; you lay me in the dust of death.
16 Dogs surround me, a pack of villains encircles me; they pierce my hands and my feet.
17 All my bones are on display; people stare and gloat over me.
18. They divide my clothes among them, and cast lots for my garment.

25. From you comes the theme of my praise in the great assembly, before those who fear you I will fulfill my vows.
26. The poor will eat and be satisfied; those who seek the Lord will praise him-may your hearts live forever.
27 All the ends of the earth will remember and turn to the Lord, and all the families of the nations will bow down before him,
28 for dominion belongs to the Lord and he rules over the nations.
29. All the rich of the earth will feast and worship, all those who go down to the dust will kneel before him--those who cannot keep themselves alive.
30. Posterity will serve him; future generations will be told about the Lord.
31 They will proclaim his righteousness, declaring to a people yet unborn. He has done it!

Isaiah 52: 13 See my servant will act wisely; he will be raised and lifted up and highly exalted.
14 Just as there were many who were appalled at him--his appearance was so disfigured beyond that of any human being and his form marred beyond human likeness--
15 so he will sprinkle many nations, and kings will shut their mouths because of him. For what they were not told, they will see, and what they have not heard, they will understand.

Isaiah 53:
1 Who has believed our message, and to whom has the arm of the Lord been revealed?
2 He grew up before him like a tender shoot, and like a root out of dry ground. He had no beauty or majesty to attract us to him, nothing in his appearance that we should desire him.
3 He was despised and rejected by others, a man of suffering, and familiar with pain. Like one from whom people hide their faces he was despised, and we held him in low esteem.
4 Surely he took up our pain and bore our suffering, yet we considered him punished by God, stricken by him and afflicted.
5 But he was pierced for our transgressions, he was crushed for our iniquities; the punishment that brought us peace was on him, and by his wounds we are healed.
6 We all, like sheep, have gone astray, each of us has turned to our own way; and the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all.
7 He was oppressed and afflicted, yet he did not open his mouth; he was led like a lamb to the slaughter, and as a sheep before its shearers is silent, so he did not open his mouth.
8 By oppression and judgment he was taken away. Yet who of his generation protested? For he was cut off from the land of the living; for the transgression of my people he was punished.
9 He was assigned a grave with the wicked, and with the rich in his death, though he had done no violence, nor was any deceit in his mouth.
10 Yet it was the Lord's will to crush him and cause him to suffer, and though the Lord makes his life an offering for sin, he will see his offspring and prolong his days, and the will of the Lord will prosper in his hand.
11 After he has suffered, he will see the light of life, and be satisfied by his knowledge my righteous servant will justify many and he will bear their iniquities.
12 Therefore I will give him a portion among the great, and he will divide the spoils with the strong, because he poured out his life unto death, and was numbered with the transgressors. For he bore the sin of many, and made intercession for the transgressors.

He that hath an ear, let him hear!

In Christian Love,
BB

The Game

2010-04-27T14:15:00.000-07:00

In view of some of the recent comments, I'm going to expose a certain stereotype for the purpose of discussion. It's a prominent and identifiable one, but what I'm about to share does not apply universally to everyone, so bear with me. I've noticed that this game has been played wherever our former religious experiences have been discussed. It starts with:

"Hi, I'm an atheist, and I'm just so intelligent! Let me acquaint you with the only logical method of determining valid information, and the only rational and acceptable way of interpreting it, and then you'll become an atheist, too, unless of course you are just plain stupid!"

Why don't more believers take this bait, and cross over? The fact is, people make benefit assessments in their lives, related to purchases, friendships, relationships, career choice, and even their faith. For some, faith provides benefits which non-belief simply cannot replace. In fact, it often acts as an all purpose solution, or a one-stop shopping center for a wide collection of needs and desirables, especially if one is raising a family. How can an evangelizing atheist replace these tangibles and intangibles with something of greater or equal value? He can't. All he has to offer is a vacuum. Nothingness. It's like a eunuch going to a dance club to try to pick up women.

Back when I built and rode Triumphs, there were always Harley guys who acted as if they were bigger and badder, had bigger dicks, and were more authentic bikers, just because they rode HD.
One of the lessons from life's school of hard knocks is that, no matter our talents, there is generally someone else who has greater talent. Name the criteria. If you start a contest, sometimes you're going to win and sometimes you're going to lose. What you have is what you have, and successful people learn to use what they have effectively. There will always be someone with a higher IQ, more wealth, bigger muscles, hotter cars or bikes, more lovers, better fighting skills, or more persuasive and magnetic personality. What is true is that often people will become jealous and resent formidably strong or obviously superior types. Idolization and imitation are not universal reactions by any means.

The WCG was a seeker group. The ministry was dedicated to attracting people who either had not thought much about belief, or were looking for solutions to some of life's more vexing problems. The church would seek and pick up whatever stragglers they could find, usually by pretending to provide special information which nobody else had, and to use this information to intellectually back prospectives into a corner, leaving them no other logical course but to join up. No matter that the vast majority of the people who heard the message simply tuned it out as being ridiculous. Many ex-members still have retained this methodology, and since it worked at one time on them, they use it in attempting to spread their new ideas, often with missionary zeal.

I'll concede the fact that many non-believers are indeed happier and better adjusted than those like ourselves who have had or are having a bad religious experience. However, for the most part, Christians have some pretty awesome coping skills, and quite a sense of community. Generally, they help one another, and humanity at large, sharing many of their talents and resources. And, yes you can find these qualities and sense of community elsewhere, if you know where to look. It's just that they seem to be concentrated in the Christian community. In terms of intelligence, interests, and abilities, believers mirror society at large, making it easy for anyone to find and form friendships. Friendship is also a very powerful motivating factor in keeping people attached to any collective group. It's one of the major adjustment problems many of the people who left WCG have cited in their lives.

Benefit assessment is the reason why happy believers do not succumb to the charms and persuasive powers of the "Elvis of Atheism" types. Just in case anyone happened to be wondering.

BB

The Future

2010-04-26T14:43:00.000-07:00

One of the first things people seem to want to ask Christians about is what they believe may happen in the near future. Frankly, I'm not sure we know any more than does anyone else. It's not quite so important to fully understand in advance what God is going to do as it is to realize after the fact that He is always faithful in the fulfillment of His prophecies. But, prophecy was such a hot button issue for those of us who were exposed to the Armstrong problem, because "the end" was used first as a marketing hook to get us or our parents involved, and later as a fearsome cat of nine tails on members once they were inside, always whipping them into shape. Most of us, today, are tired of hearing about it in any form, because of the ways in which it was used to manipulate and exploit us. Oddly, I don't recall the spectre of the end times being raised by mainstream Christianity until the so-called "Jesus movement" of the 1970s. Yet, who hasn't heard of the "Left Behind" series these days? It would appear that "the end" has permanently entered the popular lexicon, and not only from Christian sources.

Politicians have jumped on this bandwagon, and although they are not quoting Bible verses, they are quoting statistics related to the accelerated rate of melting of the glaciers around the world, the accumulation of CO2 and destruction of the ozone layer, the radical changes occurring in the oceans, the destruction of the world's rain forests, and the near extinction of numerous species of animals. While these are all problems which may respond to scientifically oriented solutions, it is unlikely that man would be able to effectively remedy other problems, such as the anticipated reversal of the earth's magnetic polarity.

The news media also seems to want to weigh in on all of this, selling newspapers and boosting ratings as they go by fanning the flames of avian flu, "mad cow" disease, Ebola, the golden algae threat, the resistance to antibiotics of strains of diseases once thought eradicated, the growth of the atomic club, and other issues. Clearly, we have a growing number of existential threats, and everybody seems to want to audition for the role of Chicken Little.

Some or all of these problems or challenges will end up needing to be dealt with, while others will simply fade into insignificance, dying a quiet and natural death, becoming non-issues. In the intervening time, we can expect people to utilize these issues to mold opinion to their own agendas, whether such agendas be scientific, religious, political, or humanitarian.

I am not the type of Christian who claims to have all the answers, or to use information to manipulate people. I did not appreciate being kept on edge about many of these things, in a perpetual state of limbo by WCG, because this kept me from enjoying the peace, tranquility, and many blessings that Christian living is supposed to bring to us on a daily basis in the here and now. Of course, it could be argued very persuasively that we never were Christians, as WCG members, but it is not until we begin to experience some of the good and wholesome things which were obviously missing from WCG culture that we can fully appreciate their value. I don't believe that God intended for us to be continuously whipped into a state of anxiety over what we see around us. I believe that He wants us to trust Him and not focus on "the wind" (remember Peter's attempt to walk on water?). Conversely to WCG teaching, I also believe that God wants us to get involved in helping ALL people (not just members), and helping to minimize whatever societal problems we can. Christians, right in there, at ground zero, helping others, and helping them by example to make sense of it all! Isn't that what "let your light shine" is all about?

There are some general theories floating about, some of which may or may not have a bearing on our future. Though the ACOGs have largely missed this one, because they believe that the Roman Catholic Church is the "Great Whore" of Babylon, one could almost conceptualize a revival of the Roman Empire nations, doing the many things they say it will do, if another "Great Whore", (Islam) were to take root and become the dominating political force there. Jihad co-opting all of the might of Europe would not be a pretty sight. I never could see the Catholics attacking us, but I can most definitely see radical Muslims doing so.

There is also the theory concerning the prophetic sprouting of the tender branch, supposedly representing the rebirth of the nation of Israel. Now, the presence of Israel is actually required for the end time prophecies in Revelation to take place. If in fact this theoretic interpretation has validity, it would be easy to draw the conclusion that the time period is linked to the "baby Boomer" generation, since Israel was reborn as a nation in 1948. So, for all of the younger people here, the baby boomers should nearly all be gone in about twenty years, placing a bit of a timeline on this theory. You'll know a bit more by then........or not.

The Christian community in which I participate is aware of possible end time scenarios, but is not hung up on them. We're more concerned with our daily Adventure with Father God, and the blessings and education we are experiencing. Building a "kingdom" skill set. In the past several years, I've participated in several high profile events where the focus has been prayer for a spiritual awakening, a healing and revival in our nation, and around the world, returning our nation to the largely Christian principles and practices on which it was founded. We believe that the current economic crisis has caused many people to turn to God, and frankly, considering the volatility of past decades, that in and of itself is counter intuitive. It is amazing that we are not experiencing massive civil unrest in response to the hardships people are experiencing. But, in fact, many of our core crime statistics are actually trending downwards.

We may be in the end times, or we may not. So, to me, the only way to live life is to do it in as ethical and loving way as possible. Frankly, that's good advice in any case. Be on the side of good, part of the solution rather than part of the problem. Think of each act in terms of its implications for those around us, be they individuals, animals, or other nations, or our planet.
I don't believe that we have any stupid people on these blogs and forums. Opinionated, yes. Stupid, no. Back when I was a non-believer, in a discussion about the end, I said something which I feel still makes good sense, and bears repeating: If the events outlined in the book of Revelation suddenly begin unfolding in an unmistakable or undeniable way, exactly as they are written, I believe that all of us, be we believer or nonbeliever, will at that point know exactly what is happening, and what to do.

BB

Fallacies Which I Used to Find Comforting

2010-04-22T16:34:00.000-07:00

We often accuse the Armstrong movement of "proof texting". What does this mean? Well, let's take history as an example. Person A is a legitimate history scholar. He knows precisely what happened in given eras, and there is noticeable depth to his comprehension. He can share incredible detail. When history is being discussed, his overview and insights become invaluable. Person B may or may not have a basic, very general idea, and knows the names of some individuals, or locations, as well as some of the events which transpired during a given period. In a discussion, in support of his side, he knows enough to go back, find a quote which supports his particular contention, and in many cases, this makes him appear equally authoritative. However, his knowledge is not as deep, and because of this, he sometimes misses information which directly counters or reverses what he has posted as his "proof text". One guy knows it cold, the other scurries around looking for information to support his contentions. Who would you trust? How could you ascertain whether there was an agenda at play, guiding the evidentiary trail? Most of us realize that there are fewer Person A types than there are Person B types, yet in a highly polarized environment, it is usually the Person B types that get the "high fives". (Hooray for our side). The problem is that both believers and non-believers do this. It is embedded, learned behavior, a hangover from our Armstrong days.

I've always said that I am not a good welder. But, I do recognize good welding when I see it. And, I believe most of us have a certain gift of discernment. Something deep inside of us tends to either validate, or reject incoming information. But, we've also got the ability to "override" those gut feelings, if we have a preference as to the outcome.

Over the past years, we've all encountered people who lift various myths, personalities, and other little clues from history to support the theory that Jesus Christ never existed. Some have stated that He was either loosely based on some mythological character who in fact predated Christianity, or on a composite of teachers, magicians, or alleged do-gooders or miracle workers from the period, or from word of mouth legendary tradition that would not pass Snopes if we were discussing a possible contemporary character. However, it should raise a cautionary red flag that the broad majority of legitimate historians do not question the historicity of Jesus. There is much dispute over whether He was who He said He was, but little doubt that He existed. In fact, there is a documented progression of teachers and students, one having taught the other, extending from Antenicene Fathers of the first, second, third and fourth centuries back to the original disciples and Jesus Himself. The proto-Catholics, and later the Catholics were incredible record keepers, preserving what they felt was an oracle, much the same as were the Jews before them. Though they can't be the entirely secular sources that non-believers would prefer, the Vatican has amassed and preserved, in addition to the Bible, an incredible number of period documents. The Antenicene Fathers were very prolific writers. And, church historians documented the minutes of council meetings such as Nicea and Laodecea, decisions which were made, and often the activities of those considered as exemplary or leaders. There are some "fringe" or radical historians who have advanced theories involving the non-existence of Jesus, but these are not considered to be completely credible. They bear more similarity to our modern holocaust deniers, or those who believe that the astronauts' walk on the moon was actually faked on some back lot of a movie studio in Burbank, California.

I recently watched an episode of 7th Street Theater, in which a young woman had gotten a speeding ticket, but insisted that she was not going over the speed limit. As she agonized over how to approach this in her court appearance, with the help and commiseration of her theater group, a discovery was made. While driving on the freeway, and keeping pace with the freeway traffic, she noticed that her speedometer stuck at 51 miles per hour. So, she ended up paying her fine rather than asserting her innocence in court. As the story developed, her breaking of the speed limit had been caused by reliance on wrong information, and the consequence was that she was still legally accountable. Of course the moral lesson of the episode was that one must be sure that one's sources are accurate, especially when making critical decisions!

How could one possibly have been part of WCG without having been primed to be receptive to conspiracy theories? HWA actually set the blueprint up for this type of thinking via his Simon Magus theory, in which the first century Gnostics were accused of having hijacked the original teachings of Christ, morphing it into what eventually became the Roman Catholic Church. I think it might behoove us to look at the concept of conspiracy theories, and what they do. In many cases, originators of these theories base them loosely on certain facts, draw conclusions, and then extrapolate wildly, imputing sinister and very scary intentions to people perceived as being in power or control. Often, the people advancing these theories utilize them to leverage conventional wisdom or commonly held opinions, and to alter peoples' intentions. This can be very effective, as we've all witnessed, in destroying individuals' confidence in one thing, and subsequently redirecting that confidence to another. It's usually done to combat a seemingly insurmountable obstacle, and is not unlike a magician's sleight of hand. Right now, breaking news has the Securities and Exchange Commission taking Goldman Sachs to court, allegedly for conspiring, putting together, and selling packages of worthless investments, partially causing the recent meltdown in the global economy. Whether or not they did what is alleged remains to be proven in a court of law. Some astute observers find the timing of this SEC suit questionable, in that it seems to be happening just as Congress considers a new package of regulatory legislation pertaining to banks and investment firms. Thus, speculation as to leverage has already begun!We can nearly guarantee that, regardless as to the outcome of the lawsuit, if this is leverage, it is going to further erode trust. And, this erosion of trust is bound to influence the public's perceptions, and the pending legislation. Just seeing how a conspiracy theory works, I am not encouraged to buy into any of the conspiracy theories which people concoct in support of the alternative origins of the Bible, or of Jesus. For one thing, there are far too many of them! Overkill tends to make me suspicious.

There is what is known as oral law, or oral tradition. The Jews have this, in the form of their Talmud and Cabala, and the Catholics have it as well, supposedly the cumulative effect of the primacy of Peter. The Protestant Reformation was all about shedding much of the Catholic oral tradition, and getting back to the Bible as the basic core or source for human actions, rather than the authority of the church. Coinciding with the Reformation was the translation, mass printing of, and availability of the Holy Bible to the masses, so that each individual believer could be responsible for doing the due diligence required by their faith. In the early stages of this, people were actually killed for making the Bible accessible, because it was seen as eroding the power of the church, and even that of secular Kings and Queens.

There are questions and theories regarding the authenticity of the Bible. The Old Testament was available during Jesus' time in the form of the Septuagint, and today we have the Dead Sea Scrolls, which differ very little from what was available prior to the discovery of these scrolls. That is probably a factor as to why there are more questions and theories surrounding the New Testament than the Old. It becomes difficult to imagine, however, how we, two thousand years removed from the selection and canonization process, would be in a better position to make some of the related decisions today than those who were actually part of that process. Those compiling Christian documents treated the materials at hand very reverently. They felt they were preserving an oracle, and did evaluate them very carefully and even agonized over them! We know this based on conflicts such as that between Marcion and Irenaeus. Canonization seems to have been a gradual process, but regardless as to the timing, those actually involved were closer to the time period of the actual early Christian events which the books and letters describe than are those of us living today. They had testimony, materials, and criteria available to them which have long since been lost to antiquity. So, in many cases, the absence of evidence which seems to pose great problems for us today was not a problem for them. For believers, the authenticity of scripture has an additional basis. We believe it to be Spirit protected.

Because Christians have oft cited Josephus as an authority, his account of Jesus is frequently attacked as having been inserted later, and not conforming to his general writing style. And, frankly, this may or may not be true. But, the bottom line is that Josephus is just one of numerous resources. Jesus most certainly does not rise or fall just based on Josephus. You see,
we don't just need to deal with Jesus, but also with Peter, John, Paul, Pilate, the Ossuary of James and other archaeological artifacts, Egyptian Christian traditions, the Antenicene Fathers, the Jewish Talmud and associated historical records, and even the apocryphal gospels and people attacked as having been heretics. They all, in their own way, give testimony of Jesus' existence. If this were all a huge, global conspiracy, can you imagine all of the people who would need to have been complicit? Even the detractors! Plainly, there are odds and the laws of probability in play here, with both believer and non-believer alike placing their bets. Some derive encouragement from the so-called Dark Ages, and cite it as support for the idea that there could have been an all-encompassing black out and control, but the Dark Ages were not global! Some nations existing today never participated in these Dark Ages! Mohammed and the entire early Islamic movement were seen as being on the cutting edge during this era, as compared to the Catholic nations. It is difficult to imagine this today, but apparently they were quite advanced (Incidentally, they also believed in Jesus! They just saw Him as being a prophet)

And, speaking of some of these other nations, I used to ask, "What about the Chinese people? There are some areas of China where nobody has even heard of Jesus. Would a loving god hold them accountable?" This was supposed to be another one of my escape hatches, but the flaw lies in the fact that it applies to the Chinese, not to me regarding my own situation or salvation. It is nice to have brotherly concern for others, but their plight is their plight, and I am responsible based on my own conditions. Lack of knowledge amongst Chinese people is not something which I could logically present to God on judgment day, and expect Him to cut me some slack!

All of the above was at one time used in constructing my "wall", a protective structure which I had built following my exit from Armstrongism. It was designed to keep me from being fooled and hurt again. Judging from discussions and comments on forums and blogs, I believe that others have also used some or all of these in their own walls of non-belief. As one comes in from that deadly and dangerous "road to Damascus", one's perceptions change. My hope is that there are some nuggets here that might either provide food for thought, or perhaps help some other people, those who may also be in the midst of some important decisions in their lives. Non-belief isn't a bad intermediate stage. It serves as an excellent neutral buffer, and helps clear out all of the old baggage. My opinion, though, is that it is not altogether optimal or satisfying as a final stage.

BB

The "B" Word

2010-04-19T10:39:00.000-07:00

The bitterness label is perhaps one of the most irksome and cliched things that practicing Armstrongites can hurl at us. When someone plays the "B" card (actually quite an identifying shibboleth!), it is a device intended to leverage or invalidate us, and to cast doubt upon our opinions and statements. Once employed, it momentarily stops meaningful discourse while the accused suddenly find themselves confronting the topic of bitterness before being able to continue the original discussion. I believe that most people hurling this label know exactly what they are doing, too. They are pressing one of the buttons which their programming has taught them to press. Unfortunately, after about fifty years, it has become so unoriginal that one almost expects it to be accompanied by parrot squawking! "Wwaaakkk! Root of Bitterness! Wwaaakkk!" Yet, so deeply embedded is this in the minds of the cultically programmed that it is something we are unlikely to be able to correct. Best course might be to take it for what it is, and simply ignore it, depriving the utterers of its impact. We should realize that perhaps using it is the only way that the programmed can process our posts, mentally deflecting themselves from some of the very valid issues which we raise from time to time.

In considering bitterness, these folks fail to be able to identify, isolate, and recognize a basic cause and effect relationship. Obviously, there can be, and frequently are spiritual problems, but good theology does not automatically escalate activities from physical to spiritual unless there is a valid reason to do so. And, granted, there can be spiritual undertones to many physical problems. In this case, church practices recognizable as being bad, combined with a sense of having been "ripped off" have caused a very proper and appropriate negative reaction amongst many of us here. Unfortunately, the very ones who would spiritualize our "problem" for us also happen to believe that there is no remedy, save for us to return as members in good standing to the organization which largely caused the problem.

When one is exposed to a person, organization, or situation that has served as a long-term "net taker", as opposed to a "net giver", it is not unusual for there to be some residual sensitivity about the things of which one feels robbed, deprived, or having lost. Many Christians believe in sacrificing everything for their Creator, and for their Savior. The specific set of problems we see today has been caused by the fact that to some people it has become obvious that the Armstrong movement never did have the witness of God behind it. So, any sacrifice was largely useless. Lacking the witness of God, WCG was unable to deliver what was promised as inducement for the sacrifices, either on a personal level for members, or in terms of world events. And it was most certainly anything but a nurturing church! Some, although I can't imagine how they are able to continue to do this, apparently still feel that God is involved in their church or splinter. The bottom line would seem to be that in most cases, these churches have been their own worst enemies. And, now they want to blame the victims. Had a little bit of intelligence, or humanity been part of their equation, much of the suffering and alleged bitterness need never have happened. They are the jetsam and flotsam left in the wake of all false teachers.

In analyzing some of the practices which later resulted in bitterness, it becomes obvious that the roots lie in uncaring, exploitative treatment of members. This is no mystery, curse, or temptation from Satan. There is a very physical, simple, direct cause and effect relationship in play here. People have been treated inconsistently with Jesus' Sermon on the Mount, inconsistently with the fruits of the Holy Spirit. A church institution, to insert, assert, and preserve its own authority and to meet its own objectives, has chronically devalued humans and human relationships, the same humans and relationships that Jesus placed a premium upon. They made them readily expendable. A church taught about the loving shepherd who is unwilling to lose any of his sheep, yet failed to "go and do likewise". Obviously, there do exist some incorrigible people, horribly addictive personalities, sociopaths, and others who for one reason or another need to be taken care of. These, the few but highly visible, do require a highly structured environment, perhaps emphasizing legalism and authority. But, is it reasonable to expect that every member of an organization supposedly devoted to mentoring, and to providing spiritual guidance would be treated as some of these "at risk" people whom I've catalogued? Most humans learn very successfully how to exercise control over the personal details surrounding their lives. Most, also, know to seek advice when situations become overwhelming. The most advanced Christian groups know of this, and factor it into their curriculum, teaching and practicing "good stewardship", not only with financial resources entrusted to them, but also in terms of developing their human resources. Paul speaks of the "great freedoms" of being a Christian.

There was a time in my life when I was involved in assisting some very troubled people close to me. This was gut wrenching for a time, but I actually emerged with a fresh perspective towards humanity, caring people, and spirituality. During that time, you might have seen me visiting someone in jail, or at a halfway house, or traipsing the streets looking for them. Those activities were for me a regular fact of life. I became aware of some of the programs which are commonly used to help such people back into a more mainstream, responsible, and productive lifestyle. Because of many of the negative events in my own life, things for which the ACOG perpetrators claimed authority from Jesus Christ, I have to admit that I saw belief in perhaps some of the same ways those recovering from addictions see the drugs and alcohol which were involved with their lifestyle problems. In a sense, I identified with some of the people whom I sought to help, because, like them, I recognized that my experiences had been damaging. So, imagine the paradox I faced! I saw people actively being counselled to seek their Higher Power, and I was very skeptical. For me, in my somewhat unique position, seeking the Higher Power seemed to be the moral equivalent of relapsing back into a drug which had ruined several decades of my life. Yet, of course, some of these people who were being exposed to God and Jesus, for the first time in their lives, were experiencing results. If you spoke to them you would learn that Jesus was seen as the one who could heal, could put back that which had been lost, or taken away, a just setter of standards, a giver of blessings, and a source of justice in a world cursed with injustice. Whether any of us can make the incredible mental leap to acknowledge this, it was an observable fact that the beliefs of these people either facilitated or enhanced their healing processes. Granted that humans can alter behavior based on secular logic and experience, but adding moral imperatives provided by a Higher Power increases the possibility of a changed life exponentially. Organizers of 12 Step programs retain that as part of their program because it works!

What a surprising trip, considering the places where I'd already been, courtesy of the WCG! One aspect to this which ended up irritating me was the way in which these new Christian people would answer my questions and challenges with almost pre-scripted cliches. I'd challenge them, asking what I thought were deep questions, honestly wanting to know tangible benefits of a Christian life, as compared to my own of non-belief, and get all too familiar cliches. Now, years after the fact, in spite of some of the "novice" answers I had frequently received, I finally got the answers to many of my questions from people who had delved beyond the initial learning stages, and beyond the superficial. And, there was more education. As a non-believer, I had always thought that one could find all of what I then called the "non-imaginary" benefits of Christianity through other sources. What I've learned since, is that so many of these good things and benefits are concentrated within a church community, with the key being whether you can find one with which your are comfortable. The majority of the people who say that you can find some of these benefits in an assortment of other places, while I sincerely believe they are telling the truth, simply don't go to the trouble. They do without. In a way, it becomes like being homeless. Without the very salving nourishment of the soul, many of the things which gnaw at us don't go away. Yet, just like some of the diseases and illnesses ignored because of WCG medical doctrines, these conditions are treatable! We don't need to be living with them.

So, how do we treat or get rid of bitterness? I've never read some of the atheist textbooks, so have no clue as to what their teaching on this very relevant topic might be. Don't know what an Ayn Rand objectivist would do. But, I believe I've learned a very effective method from Christians. Fortunately, it is one of those universal principles which we all can share in, regardless of belief or not. You forgive the people whom you hold responsible for causing the bitterness, and it frees you up to go on with your life. By the way, it won't make a scintilla of difference to these people whether we forgive them, or not. In fact, we don't even need to tell them. You can be sure they would handle your forgiveness in the same arrogant way in which they handle everything else! But, the act of forgiveness provides immediate and tremendous release, something only we can do for ourselves and obtain noticeable results.

BB

Musings on Science and Creation

2010-04-16T11:43:00.000-07:00

I was watching a PBS special program recently, part of their Nova series. I find Nova to be absolutely fascinating because it frequently deals with the natural historical record of the universe. This particular episode was on the topic of "blue hole" diving in the Bahamas. I had never heard of blue hole diving, but soon learned that it is a type of very dangerous, but potentially highly rewarding cave diving. Thousands of years ago, sea level was not so high as it is today in our era. The Bahamian Islands are composed largely of coral, and natural erosion forces have created a network of spectacular underwater caves which often have a depth of 250 feet or more. In these miniaturized ecosystems, there are eons worth of sediment, stalactites, mixtures of fresh water and salt water (responding to the ground table and sea level), and assorted chemistries attributable to the life forms which inhabit such caves. The caves are a natural museum for the preservation of the skeletal remains of past life which at one time surrounded the blue hole. Bones and shells which are frequently found are of nearly museum quality, naturally preserved by the waters, and virtually undisturbed for nearly their entire existence.

Many ideas raced through my mind as I processed what was unfolding on my TV screen. At one point, geologists were shown slicing one of the cave's stalactites, using a high speed diamond tipped saw blade. The cutting revealed many layers, each of which indicated a season, and the climactic conditions that existed in each season, extending back even through several ice ages. While there is no natural iron content in the Bahamas, there were deposits of iron dust in the layer immediately preceding each ice age. I learned that each ice age is anticipated by a massive build up of dust from the Sahara Desert across the ocean, known for its high iron content. Interesting.

Those who watched this show, depending on their particular beliefs or agenda related to God, might see this and think to themselves, "Ah, more evidence invalidating the Genesis account of creation!" But, does it really, or is this yet another example of seemingly sophisticated but in reality simplistic thinking in which we humans often indulge? Who told us that the earth is only approximately 6,000 years old? That is written nowhere. It is a guess, based largely on interpretation. Even if one embraces the so-called "gap theory" creationism, who told us that each day of the Genesis account is an actual 24 hour day? Certainly, we're all familiar with the scriptures which indicate that for God, a day is as a thousand years, but who is to say that even that is literal, as opposed to a figurative description to make the relativity of time and space understandable for a generation of humanity which largely predated modern science? These are all man-made assumptions, some of which are actually taught as part of the official doctrines or dogma of different church groups. But, they are no different from any other extra-biblical teachings which frequently dog organized religion. It is an attempt to legalistically spell out all of the specifics, and to provide answers that are often not even implied. If a Creator wanted us to focus primarily on our own human lives, wouldn't there be a little mystery behind the ultimate beginning of mankind, and the ultimate fulfillment, or end?

Time as we know it is relative to a fixed point in the universe, broadly our own solar system, and specifically our planet. Our time is not absolute for the entire universe. As an example, as we examine what might constitute a day, or a year, relative to the rotation and orbit of the planet Uranus, it's a no brainer that these values will differ quite widely from what we experience on planet Earth. Since these values would vary exponentially throughout the cosmos, for an eternal, omniscient being to communicate with His charges, He would need to link Himself to their own understanding of these things, although He Himself is not constrained or confined by such boundaries. He would have no problem understanding us, but the probability of our own human miscommunication, or misunderstanding relative to Him and amongst ourselves would be high. This is especially true of the generations of people who lived prior to Copernicus, Galileo, and our own Albert Einstein. The time periods in the creation narrative, at least as seen from the Creator's perspectives, would be subject to skew as interpreted by man.

The only terms a writer could use to describe elapsed time to a bunch of pre-Einstein goat herders would be the relative words "day" and "night". If this written description was indeed inspired by the aforementioned Creator, He would have known that once mankind developed sufficiently to understand relativity, the description would still remain appropriate in its reinterpreted, or expanded form. Whether a creator used a slow, gradual method of creation (evolution), or a fast, instant process is largely irrelevant. The creation narrative in Genesis can lend itself to the "Big Bang", expanding universe, and the evolutionary process just as well as it can to instantaneous creation, although to me it makes more sense for an eternal being to take His time. There would be no need for hurry.

Some might wonder about Adam and Eve, whether they were literal created beings, or byproducts of a guided evolutionary process. Part of any creative process involves introducing components into a project at the time the project is prepared for them. Those who have maintained aquariums and terrariums have a deep appreciation for this ecological principle. Anthropologists acknowledge that the human species made an incredible, observable leap forward in terms of accumulated intelligence and ability to preserve and share this intelligence dating from approximately 10,000 years ago. Despite the denials of the 6,000 year/literal 24 hour types of creationists, we know that there are distinct sets of fossils related to specific stages of mankind's development. There is adequate room for the introduction of an Adam, and an Eve into this system. At some point or other in an evolutionary process, one would expect to find the first beings with modern brains, both hemispheres communicating under single control, and for these to be common ancestors for all people with some version of that modern brain today. A Christian would be quick to point out that the writers of the New Testament believed in Adam. Both Jesus and Paul seem to have been convinced that the characters in the Old Testament literally did exist.

Do our geological records invalidate the Bible? As a truth seeker, I don't know that I'd be comfortable rushing to such a judgment. Science presents a neutral evidentiary trail, and often seeks to interpret or explain it. In its purest form, it neither presumes, nor denies a creator. That is left to the individual. The modern church has no problem whatsoever in incorporating Galileo's now much confirmed model of our solar system, and the other astral bodies into belief, although this must have been a source of residual confusion and debate during the generations surrounding his lifetime. What of Darwin's more recent research, and much of our modern science? Is it not possible that the church today and some prominent Christians are behaving in a way similar to the that of the church during the time of the Renaissance? And, would we really respect their integrity if they did not treat their cherished beliefs in a loving, repspectful way, cherishing them, and attempting to preserve them? That is exactly what we'd hope for them to do.

Would UCG be a Good Fit for TBN?

2010-04-13T15:09:00.000-07:00

Again, I'd planned to post another in a series of pre-written posts, but, always sensitive to the latest trend, and wanting to be on the cutting edge of all of the breaking news in COGdom, I thought it might be good to tackle this question.

The ACOGs believe that it is their "Great Commission" to preach the Armstrong version of the gospel around the world prior to the Second Coming of Jesus Christ. Yet, compared to the early pioneering efforts of both HWA and GTA, they are virtually invisible. It was once true that when one mentioned the name "Armstrong", there was instant recognition, and the ministry of HWA, or later GTA, was considered to be just as recognizable as that of Billy Graham, Rex Humbard, AA Allen, Kathryn Kuhlman, Oral Roberts, and others. No ACOG splinter member in his or her right mind would even attempt to compare the World Tomorrow "cookie cutter" offspring of any of the splinter groups to some of the major evangelists of today, such as Joel Osteen, Pat Robertson, James and Betty Robison, Jack Van Impe, Charles Stanley, and a plethora of others.

If indeed, much of the shakeup at UCG is due to differing opinions on diverting funds to increased usage of the media, (and rumors of this type of discord have surfaced before), then it would be of interest to consider one of the primary scenarios available to them.

In the sixties and seventies, there were no huge Christian networks. Religious broadcasters negotiated directly with the management of the stations which they considered desirable in terms of ability to reach their core audience. Many of these broadcasters used what was called "clear channel" AM radio stations. In any given area, smaller, local AM stations were compelled to sign off, or finish their broadcast day at sunset, if they happened to be operating on the same frequency as the huge powerhouse 50,000 and more watt "clear channel" stations. The large stations would then "turn up" their power, giving them incredible coverage throughout their region. At ten in the evening, one could receive WABC, New York in Jekyll Island, Georgia. Or, WLS, Chicago in the mountain towns of Pennsylvania. On the West Coast, one could listen to
the Wolfman Jack program, broadcast from XERB, Monterey Mexico, up in Oregon! (Remember American Graffiti?). These "clear channel" stations were very desirable to radio evangelists, and if you happen to have a very old Plain Truth, you would see from the radio log that most of the stations carrying "The World Tomorrow" were such stations. But, something happened! With improved technology, the ability to broadcast in stereo, FM radio all but ghettoized AM radio, starting in the 1970s.

Paul and Jan Crouch suddenly came into the picture. They had a very small Television station in Orange County, California, which carried Christian programming. With much work, the support of the Christian Community, and the advent of satellite technology, they turned this into a powerhouse that revolutionized televangelism. Anyone who wishes to have any impact in terms of preaching the gospel today both recognizes, and is often overwhelmed by the incredible superiority of TBN around the world to any other Christian media capabilities.

Before I began to include TBN in my daily television watching experiences, I had focused on the word "trinity" in the acronym which defines the network. I had imagined that those who presented the individual shows were somewhat united in their doctrinal approach, probably, in fact, some of the evangelicals we had all heard about that seemed to be taking over the schools, the government, wooing Rush Limbaugh, and in general having a huge impact on the politics of the USA. But, that is simply not true. Many of the hosts or evangelists are evangelical, and some are Baptist. They preach classic Christianity, and are very mainstream. But, there are also Messianic Jews, who refer to Jesus as Yeshua, and tell of the blessings realized by those who keep the sabbath and holy days. Walter Pearson is Seventh Day Adventist, and recently has lectured not only on sabbath observance, but also on clean and unclean meats! Jack and Rexella Van Impe, Grant Jeffries, and David Jeremiah all base their ministry on prophecy and the end times. Now, they don't handle this topic in the angry, manipulative way to which we became accustomed, partially because they also believe in the Rapture. Considering the sheer diversity, I can picture ACOG ministers blending into this gumbo of Christianity. They would be accepted, no doubt. But, would they be as accepting of those who did not believe or preach their own views? That, IMO, would probably constitute the largest obstacle!

Many of the shows on TBN are funded by megachurches. The show consists of the evangelist's sermon or lecture the previous weekend (many have 4-5 identical services spread out over Saturday and Sunday). Some of the ACOGs, although geographically spread out, do have the same overall population as do these megachurches, which often, as it turns out, also believe in tithing. So, the financing would be there, and the financial picture would improve because viewers would also contribute, send in donations, and request CDs and monthly devotional booklets. Other shows are not set in a church congregation. Some are in the format of a variety program, others in the classic HWA form, in an office, behind a desk. Still others are organized in the talk show format. Again, there is no question that an ACOG evangelist would fit into all of this.

Finally, once one splinter made entry into the weekly schedule, and began enjoying success, there is no doubt that others would follow suit. In fact, some of the evangelists on TBN appear in one anothers' personal appearance conventions as featured guest lecturers. So, one could almost envision a Roy Holladay convention, in which Rod Meredith and Gerald Flurry are featured guest speakers. If one of the ACOGs succeeds in getting on TBN, it could actually end up reunifying the entire splintered Armstrong movement.

Clearly, there would seem to be an opportunity here, but somehow, I don't see it as ever coming to fruition. Within the Armstrong movement, there has always been the pervasive belief that there is "one true church", and that non-sabbatarian Christians are in fact "Christians, falsely so-called". This type of culture has isolated them from any type of Christian cooperatives, and it is a self-imposed three lock box. Following the Wisconsin LCG massacre, there was an outpouring of sympathy from the local Christian community. All ministers and members could seem to do was to complain about all of the "pagan" crosses used symbolically in this outpouring. When disasters occur, ACOG ministers warn members against sending any of their tithes to relief funds. While the World Tomorrow did appear during timeslots following the evangelists representing other church groups, it would be difficult to imagine an Armstrongite minister contracting with an evangelical network owner, or want to appear complicit with trinitarians, Sunday keepers, or cross wearers. The owners of the radio stations were secular. The owners of the Christian networks are competitors (read "Satan's People")

Is any of this even remotely being considered at UCG? I have no idea. Clearly, if the ACOGs are to survive and grow, they will need to come up with a more contemporary approach. We here on this website have a history of providing information for those who might be considering Armstrongism as their sole-source spiritual solution. I would suggest that we watch this situation carefully, and to be prepared to continue sharing our experiences in ways that help others avoid the toxicities which could come into their lives courtesy of these cults.

BB

Why Did God Come Crashing Back into my Life?

2010-04-10T11:30:00.000-07:00

I really don't know. Certainly, I recognized the irony, having spent perhaps seven years on these blogs and forums as a member of the ad hoc Atheist Sanhedrin, interrogating and challenging the Christians. I hope that I was a kinder inquisitor than some of the examples whom I've seen since, but I fear that I probably was not.

At first, in my vanity, I imagined that perhaps God planned to use me to assist some of my former WCG brethren whose minds had similarly shut down towards Him as a result of the false teachings to which we've all been exposed, but I've since realized that there is nothing I personally can say or do, either logically or by example that will re-open peoples' minds. Only God can prove that he exists, and only God can open a human mind.

I tried to dissect and deconstruct the process by which I was brought back from my prodigal condition. I remember an Australian lady, who somehow in the course of a forum discussion got me to open, and read a few passages from an old Bible which I'd inherited from my Grandmother. I hadn't cracked the cover of a Bible in over twenty-five years at that point. I also recall the enthusiasm and determination displayed by a Christian lady from Texas, in spite of horrible persecution on the forums, and some severe trials in her life. She was very knowledgeable and was of great help to me. I remember overhearing a bowling friend in a supermarket when he didn't know that I was listening in. He was consoling a friend who was undergoing a cluster of severe problems, and he suggested to her, "Ask God to walk with you!" Over the coming months, I thought many times of the beauty and simplicity of that short statement. Nonoffensive. Unintrusive. But, also, very powerful. I remember my neighbor Chris asking me to go down to the mall with him to jumpstart his wife's car. While I was hooking it up, he asked me if anyone had ever talked to me about "the Lord". It irritated me at the time that someone would be evangelizing me, but later as I watched how his family always seemed to have guidance and blessings in the face of trials, unemployment, and problems their children got into, I became convinced that something special was going on there.

The pastor at our church (non-ACOG, non-GCI!) has told us many times that witnessing to people does not arouse their interest in God. Changed lives, however, are very effective in this. I had two incorrigible people in my life whom I loved more than life itself. One was my son, and the other was a very special lady. I had rescued both of them from some particularly bad circumstances. I had tried to set a good secular example of stability and balance for them, and to help them make a few minor but very positive changes in their lives. It ended up being a hopeless exercise, and I found myself being very deeply enmeshed in two codependent relationships. As a matter of fact, I could very easily have ended up either bankrupt, or in jail. Sadly, although I put much effort into my relationship with both of them, there was nothing I could do as a human being to help them. I finally and gut-wrenchingly, walked away from both of them. Shortly after I did this, God came into both of their lives. He changed them, whereas I could do nothing. With my then agnostic mindset, in the beginning stages, I thought, "Well, that's just great! They're both OK now, but I still lost them. It's just that I lost them to Jesus!" That turned out not to be altogether true of my son. We have a better relationship now than we ever did in his entire life. As for the lady, she ended up happily married to a Christian gentleman, and just knowing that she's happy and with the stability that I always wanted for her is enough for me. I had left WCG in 1975 because I could find no evidence that the Holy Spirit was working through it. I had by that time witnessed so much blatant fakery that, religiously or spiritually speaking, I was toast at that point. But, decades later, as I got to have a front row seat, watching the Holy Spirit very powerfully transform two formerly incorrigible people, I immediately knew exactly what was happening. These two made no secret of the source of their help! It is no accident that the Holy Spirit is likened to the wind. You do not see him/it, but you can surely see the work that has been done!

One of my first fears was, what if these people who seem to have been placed in front of me as an example are drawn to the Armstrong doctrines? Believe me, I watched very carefully for all of the signs. But, it never happened, and that became part of the lesson. In fact, I am more convinced today than ever that HWA was very superficial in his understanding of the Bible. There is an incredible understanding, and deep Biblical foundation to classic or mainstream Christianity, the type that was spawned by the Protestant Reformation. The core of this is taught by many of the Baptists and Evangelicals. That is the vehicle through which all of the help became available to my son and ex-girlfriend. What is true, is that most of us who entered Armstrongism were not firmly rooted in the Bible, or basic study and research techniques, making us easy targets for the many cultic fringe doctrinal approaches, as well as HWA's personal theories.

I must admit, it was very difficult to pray again after nearly thirty years. The first prayer was the most difficult. But, soon, it became very natural and actually a pleasure to which I look forward. As a WCG member, I had always done this from a sense of duty, and in the ways that were taught by the church. Perhaps that's why it had always seemed so dry and mechanical, and caused me to wonder if it was going beyond the ceiling. Also, some of the changes in my attidudes were pretty scary. I had always had a kind of a hard edge, an extreme survival mentality, and was afraid that in becoming kinder and more forgiving, I was becoming weak. I worried, too, about losing friends, but in reality have not lost any friends who were real ones to start with. If anything, I now have more friends, and they are not all Christian. That's another potential pitfall which concerned me. I didn't want to become cloistered, and only capable of hanging out with what I used to call the "Bible Thumpers".

I had just enough of a hangover from my WCG intoxication experience that I became worried about some sort of special calling or purpose. The reality is that there are so many more people, and with greater knowledge, understanding, and articulateness than I, that I really need not have worried about this at all. I'd heard of some people from old WCG who immediately came into the forefront of the mainstream New Covenant churches that they found when "the new" WCG became not a very attractive alternative. But, that's just not me. Probably my best value is in quietly doing little things behind the scenes, and below the radar to help and comfort others. Still, one must put God first, and if there is some sort of special calling, one should be willing to do whatever He would have us do for Him.

About a year into the Christian experience, I came upon a very interesting book that described a transformation experience that had many parallels with my own. Stephen Baldwin, the youngest of the acting Baldwin brothers, was perhaps the brother to whom I related the most. He played confident tough guy roles on the screen, and created some characters to whom I could really strongly relate. Through the influence of one of their maids, his wife had become a Christian, and spent a number of hours praying for him. I honestly wonder if someone had been doing the same thing for me, without my knowing. At any rate, Stephen, or Stevie B as he calls himself, soon found his entire life changing. He likens his adventure with God to being dropped from an airplane, every morning, without parachute, from an altitude of about 50,000 feet. He's written a very remarkable and inspiring book, titled "The Unusual Suspect" If any one is even remotely interested in taking another look at the Christian walk, I'd highly recommend it!

Just in case some people are wondering what kind of life I have lead, it is probably important to also share that when I left WCG in 1975, I pursued my passions to the full. In my professional life, I was always a hard worker. I met a lot of people, and sold and repaired quite a bit of machinery over the decades. This provided opportunities to travel, to stay in nice accomodations, and to indulge in business related partying. In my free hours, there are and were a number of hobbies and activities that I was passionate about. I built and raced (on the street!) an endless string of hotrods and motorcycles. My wives and girlfriends, who were amongst the most beautiful women on the face of the earth, and I rode the motorcycles everywhere! We went to the mountains, the beaches, the deserts, you name it. Having also been a lifelong fitness nut, I spent many hours running, bicycling, weight training, and learning karate. This lead to gigs as a body guard and bouncer at the race tracks and in the performing arts community, with opportunities to meet a number of celebrities. There were also legendary Saturday nights, dancing to live music at the blues bars, and more arena style rock, country, and blues concerts than I can remember. I've been to hundreds of professional NHRA drag races, and hundreds of dirt track sprintcar races. Skiing, parasailing, bungee jumping, deep sea fishing, rafting and tubing down rivers, hours of body surfing at the California beaches, hiking and mountain climbing, I and whoever was with me lead life to the full. As I remember and describe all of this, it's difficult for even me to believe that one person could have done all of these things. And, lest anyone feels that I might be exaggerating for the purpose of dramatizing, I'm not. I've deliberately held back on the X-rated, and occasional recreational/illegal stuff. The problem is, that in the end, none of it ever filled a deep void which I had always felt inside. Ultimately, I was left with a decidedly Ecclesiastes point of view.

Anyhoo, this is one of the things which I've been asked to share. I'd been told that people wondered what made me a believer again. There were no visions, no burning bushes, no talking asses, and no psychotic breaks or addictive breakdowns. Just an unlocked mind, and ensuing unexpected transformation, one for which I am just so grateful every waking hour. It would be naive and presumptuous of me to believe that my words are going to touch everyones hearts. I know better. But, if just one person gets a little encouragement, a gentle assist in life, or perhaps just a temporary boost for the day, it will have been worthwhile sharing.

BB

The Sadducees

2010-04-09T15:04:00.000-07:00

Humor me for the moment. I fully realize that some of my dear readers question the historicity of Jesus, the Apostles, or even Moses for that matter, seeing those individuals as perhaps fictional characters in an elaborate anthology of novels produced by the ancient Jews and proto-Catholics. But, even if I have just described your particular viewpoint, the Sadducees would appear to be a most remarkable, and very curious group! They are described in the pages of the Gospels, and in other historical documents, along with other sects of the day, the Pharisees, Essenes, and Zealots.

Here is a list of the beliefs of the Sadducees, as enumerated in the Jewish Sects list found in Zondervan's TNIV Study Bible:

1) They denied that the oral law (Talmud) was authoritative and binding.

2) They interpreted the Mosaic law more literally than did the Pharisees.

3) They were very exacting in Levitical purity.

4) They attributed everything to free will.

5) They argued that there is neither resurrection of the dead, nor a future life.

6) They rejected a belief in angels and demons.

7) They rejected the idea of a spiritual world.

8) They considered only the books of Moses to be canonical Scripture.

What do you make of this? My own take, assuming that this list is accurate, would be that the Sadducees appear to be first century Jewish atheists or agnostics, who simply relied on the code of Moses as the most advanced, logical, and humane system of government known to them. History tells us that this sect had its genesis during the time of the Hasmonean kings (166-63 BC), and ceased to exist shortly following the destruction of the temple in 70 AD.

Normally, one would tend to think of Judaism as being YHWH-based. Yet, here we have a sect with numbers and noteworthiness sufficient to merit mention in the New Testament, fully embracing the laws and rituals for which YHWH is credited in the works of Moses, yet apparently totally disassociating these laws from any type of spiritual implications. While that might seem mind-boggling, we would appear to be living in a modern parallel of this in the USA today, which is now well advanced into the post-Christian era. Many non-believers today have a great love for the system of justice and the founding documents which were created by a group of predominantly Christian and Deist forefathers, based on a combination of logic and principles found in the pages of the Holy Bible. Truly the Ecclesiast was accurate in his observation that there is nothing new under the sun!

Despite their non-belief in the spiritual world, or in the resurrection of the dead, the Sadducees would not have qualified for any more humane treatment from the occupying Romans than would their believer brethren. The Romans considered all peoples who did not believe in the Roman gods, or the godhood of their emperor, to be atheists. Would it be any different today, in the USA, if suddenly we were conquered by Muslim jihadists? No. Our modern day agnostics and atheists who refused to worship Allah, even though their decision would be based totally on logic, would be executed right along with Christians who refused to worship Allah because he or it is a false god.

Some people, upon reading their Bibles, seem to have a black and white concept of the Jews and Israelites of Jesus' time as being an homogeneous group, with unified beliefs. Not only is this clearly not the case, but it presents an overly simplistic picture of the civilization of ancient Jerusalem and the covenant lands of Israel. Consider the sizable population of Samaritans, the mongrel spawn resulting from the Assyrian and Babylonian occupation, in addition to the Jewish sects. Later, Peter and Paul had even more complex challenges in their ministries to the Roman Empire nations surrounding Israel. There was a sizable Jewish diaspora in these nations, as well as a very diverse Gentile population. Throw in a couple of tax collectors, factor in the balance of power between Jewish leaders and the Roman occupation, and you have a pluralistic society rivaling our own modern civilizations.

It seems obvious that in the time just preceding Jesus, and the times shortly thereafter, that the challenges in building and maintaining relationships were just as great, and just as complex as what we experience in our own era. Though perhaps ignored by most of us in the past, although
they were a part of the Septuagint (the "Bible" of Jesus and His disciples), the books of the Maccabees are quite fascinating as historical documents. In these books are described some very troubled times during which apostate Jews actually assumed the roles of persecutors of their former brethren, often even worse than the gentile peoples who held areas of Israel captive. In our modern vernacular, we'd say that these apostates "ratted out" their neighbors, turning them over to the captors for punishment and torture. Though shocking, this is yet another variant of man's inhumanity to fellow man, and has not been as uncommon throughout history as one would hope. Knowing this propensity of human nature, and reading the narratives in the Maccabees might serve to help all of us as former guinea pigs of the Armstrong experiment in dealing with certain challenges today. The lesson lies in seeking not to make the same mistakes, and in seeking not to cause or incur the pain which accompanies these mistakes. And, I believe that it is important to include current splinter group members under our umbrella of humanity. I'm sure that many of us still have relatives who are part of these groups, and one of the things which could possibly help influence some of their major decisions in the future would be the love which we feel for them, and can show them.

Since the Apostle Paul was such a pivotal character of the New Testament, the one who presented a well-developed theology, and basic practical applications for the teachings of Jesus Christ, he is somewhat of a lightning rod, a controversial person about whom virtually everyone has some sort of opinion. He is not a person that it would be easy to be neutral about. What is noteworthy from his ministry would be the principles we find him fighting for, in other words, his passions. We find him preaching amazing tolerance amongst the various factions of Jewish and Gentile Christians. In ministering to his Gentile churches, he had to deal with a number of gut wrenching situations, not the least of which were the expulsion from Rome and eventual repatriation of the Jews, including Jewish Christians. He also had to deal with Judaizers from Jerusalem who insisted that Christians first became Jews before they could become followers of Jesus Christ. These carpetbaggers made numerous attempts to co-opt Paul's ministry. Somehow, he had to manage these situations not only while enjoying personal freedom, but also from a Roman jail cell, sometimes all but deserted by his students and personal friends. His harshest words were reserved for those causing dissension and contempt amongst the brethren, disrupting relationships, causing elitism, and violating the Golden Rule which encapsulates the New Covenant.

These provide some timeless examples of human behavioral patterns, both good and bad. It so happens that they are described in the versions of scripture native to and used by several different cultures. I'll leave it up to the individual reader, rather than actually quoting chapter and verse, whether or not to delve more deeply into the books of the Maccabees, or the epistles of Paul. I fully realize that in some cases, and for many reasons, people who were once Armstrongites actually require years or even decades of recovery before they have the stomach to revisit scripture. Whether we find lessons like the above in scripture, or whether we find them in the works of Shakespeare, Freud, Aristotle, Gandhi, or Dr. Martin Luther King, the best and most timeless precepts for human behavior would seem to be rooted in love and tolerance. Knowing that an unusual group, a seemingly anomalous group, such as the Sadducees could exist somewhat harmoniously in the mainstream of first century Judaism, no less during a period of Roman captivity, certainly we who are dealing with the aftermath of Armstrongism can peacefully coexist in the face of diversity of opinion.

BB

1975

2010-04-07T11:09:00.001-07:00

I had originally planned to post a previously written entry here today, but since the topic of 1975 spawned some interest in some of the comments yesterday, here are some of my thoughts and recollections of what conditions were like in Pasadena during that era. It was indeed a pivotal time period for many reasons. Let me preface my remarks by noting that I personally did not leave WCG because of cruelty. I left because it became obvious to me that WCG was a bogus church, did not in any way have the witness of God behind it, and had been propped up and supported by intellectual dishonesty (end justifies the means) in many ways. I think that by the end of this article, we'll plainly see that following the events of 1975, the church took on a decidedly harsher undertone.

Looking back on the latter portions of my childhood and teenage years, I'd have to say that we did not have cruel, authoritarian, snoopy ministers, at least not in our area of the country. If you like Allen Dexter, you probably would have liked most of the people who preceeded him, those with whom he worked on a daily basis, and those who immediately followed him. Frankly, I have never seen any of these gentlemens' names on the lists of abusers here on the PT website, or any of the other ex-WCG sites over the past ten years. Let me list a few of them for you. There was Wayne Cole, Carlton Smith, Guy Englebart, Raymond Cole, Walter Sharp, Reg Platt, and Ivan Sell. While I don't pretend to know everything that went on in our district, I only knew of about 6 to 10 disfellowshipments over about a decade. Some of those were due to out of control alcoholism, and a couple more were due to schizophrenia, which of course was labelled as demon possession. When these people were marked, the minister generally expressed that he hoped they would repent so that they could be welcomed back. It was not as if they were seen as suddenly being enemies of God and country.

From my list above, Wayne Cole eventually got the axe during the receivership era, because he favored cooperating with the state authorities. His brother Raymond started one of the early splinters immediately after HWA modified some of the original church doctrines. Raymond passed away a few years ago. At last report, there had been a Walter Sharp sighting in Pasadena at the former AC campus, as he and his wife were touring the USA on their Harley Davidson. I have not heard any recent news concerning the other gentlemen on my list.

For those of you who came along sometime after 1975, let me just say that during that era it literally appeared that World War III was breaking out at headquarters. On a day to day basis, we did not know which way events were going to turn. For the previous ten years, some in the field ministry had had grave misgivings about the interpretations of certain scriptures and the ways in which this influenced the church's doctrinal approach and in many cases negatively impacted individuals in their congregations. HWA had been approached, had agreed to review the concerns, but had postponed and procrastinated until there was an increasingly open revolt. If memory serves me correctly, the main issues concerned divorce and remarriage, the church's teaching regarding medical care, and some of the details related to tithing. Dr. Ernest Martin, who was one of the primary researchers, and one of the few actual legitimate Biblical and historical scholars apparently became so frustrated with the endless delays that he began openly sharing some of his research. Others in different areas of the world were also doing this on a local basis. As if to add gasoline to this fire, the full depth of GTA's addictive sexual activities became known, churchwide. At one point, he had actually been reinstated to his position within the church and college, only to relapse into what was by this time a pathology.

As HWA, Stanley Rader, and others wrestled to regain control, an alarming percentage of the field ministry left, for reasons of conscience. This mass exodus caused a radical change in the corporate culture of WCG. The fallout from this affected lay members and employees as well. One morning, I showed up for my shift at AC Press, and was ushered into a rather somber meeting. Forms were passed out, and we were told that in order for our employment to continue, we had to sign oaths of loyalty to HWA. Long term deacons, using some of the college's vans and camera equipment, parked surreptitiously in the vicinity of meetings conducted by Dr. Martin, Al Carrozzo, Richard Plache, and others. In this undercover sting, the deacons photographed any WCG members whom they observed entering the meeting halls. The dormitories at Ambassador College were also electronically bugged. The accounting department, in a joint project with the MIS department, was instructed to review the payroll and tithing records of employees in various departments, an early detection of possible mixed loyalties. There were also frantic member letters, exemplifying HWA's most embarrassing overuse of punctuation and variations in type size, telling of Satan pulling out all stops in his war against what he called "God's Church".

There had been persistent rumors for months amongst employees, staff, and local members in Pasadena concerning secret overseas bank accounts, expensive art collections secreted in the basement storage areas of some headquarters buildings, and extravagant overseas junkets involving HWA, Stanley Rader, Osamu Gotoh, and others, some of it allegedly funded by misappropriation of third tithe funds. A cadre of members and former members contracted with a prominent Southern California attorney in an effort to force financial accountability. The courts felt that there was sufficient merit to their allegations to institute receivership proceedings, but over a period of months the church managed to totally obfuscate the effort, and ultimately had enough lobbying power with the state legislature to get a special law passed that essentially quashed the receivership and investigation. While church officials later credited themselves as having helped preserve the civil liberties of churches throughout the USA, and protecting the Constitutional separation of church and state, the end result was that there never was any sort of financial accountability. As if this were not enough, in the background of all of this, a number of prominent ministers' kids were both indulging in and selling various kinds of dope at Imperial Schools and Ambassador College.

It is difficult, in retrospect, to imagine how WCG could possibly have survived this perfect storm.
They were on the front pages of many newspapers, and the lead story on TV news, day after day after day. This fact did not lend itself to the recruitment of new members!

I was not around much after 1975. Having discussed this with those who were, and having read extensively on the subject, I believe that policies and procedures were gradually put into place to prevent even the remotest possibility of a similar revolt ever again. You'd have to guess that the field ministry, after that point, was instructed to be very suspicious of members, and to take a hard line with possible dissenters to the official doctrinal stances, and even to closely monitor the tithing patterns of members. Eventually it was a total lock, the final ones being applied during the "back on track" era. As we look back on all of this today, it is plain to see that all of the additional suffering, confusion, and general misery were for nought. Gamaliel, in the end, was proven right, in living color right before our eyes!

BB

To learn more about the Worldwide Church of God during the mid 1970s, check out Ambassador Reports, archived conveniently right here at The Painful Truth Website.

Could an Armstrong-style Movement Begin and Prosper Today?

2010-04-05T10:41:00.000-07:00

One Friday night a number of years ago, I had put my son to bed, was working on an icy 16 oz can of Budweiser, and reading an Easyriders Magazine. Spider, as usual, had written an excellent editorial, and in this particular one had opined that if an inventor had just obtained the first patent for a motorcycle today, it was very doubtful that his invention would ever come into production, knowing the government, insurance industry, and the general public's preoccupation with safety. The motorcycle had been grandfathered in from a much more naive, and vastly less sophisticated era in societal evolution, and that and only that was why we still have them to enjoy today.

The fact is, we could probably examine any number of practices, commodities, pieces of machinery, or ideas which we have today, but which were more specific to, and appropriate for times long gone. These relics from the zeitgeist past still exist, but not in the massive numbers in which they once did. Take the oil light, for example. It was totally appropriate for its day, and makes for a nice conversation piece, decorative touch, or auxiliary emergency equipment yet today, but who could be bothered with the sheer messiness, odors, and perhaps hazardous nature of the oil lamp in our modern age? The incandescent light bulb is self-contained, turns off and on at the flick of a switch, is easily regulated for intensity, and is readily available at the local store. Much better!

I am one of the baby boomers, a demographic whose disposable income every manufacturer, every marketer, and every investment counsellor, health care organization, and virtually anyone else who wished to exploit Keynsian economics at its zenith actively solicited. Although I spent the latter half of my youth in WCG, even at that time, I could not fathom how a thinking adult could possibly be so radically indoctrinated into what seemed to be an intoxication based on religious obsessive-compulsiveness (think Philadelphian as opposed to Laodecean). Clearly, the marketing approach of Herbert W. Armstrong was designed for my parents and their contemporaries! These people knew what the Great Depression, Hitler, and World War II were all about, and were just learning about the awful potential of the nuclear bomb. Television might have been a new phenomenon, but radio had been somewhat ubiquitous for several decades. And, of course, we all know the history. Here was a polished, authoritarian voice, seemingly in control of the air waves, warning of a horrible apocalypse which would soon befall all of those who did not repent of their sins, and become part of a small elite group which would be spared from what was soon to occur. Obviously, this technique was both believable, and successful. The booklet "1975 in Prophecy" was freely given, but had it been sold, it most likely would have become a best seller!

Using the same techniques, could a similar group be started, and could it enjoy the phenomenal growth (30% per year) that the WCG once did? I believe that the prospects for such an event would be slim to none. The very concept has been marginalized by a number of external factors, to say nothing of the destructive powers wrought by internal factors specific to that particular group.

Whether or not you personally define Armstrongism (including variants and splinter groups) as a cult, there is today a much greater public awareness of cults and the damage which they do. This was largely unexplored during the 1920s through perhaps the first half of the 1970s. The hip generation explored virtually everything, leading to a much higher level of sophistication. So,
call it cynicism, or perhaps hyper awareness, but the public's current immunity to cults would tend to limit the growth potential of any non-mainstream religious organization, and even make people cautious about the mainstream! Bottom line is, whatever the non-mainstream beliefs happen to be, nobody in their right mind wants to wake up one morning in some compound (or place of "safety"!) owned by the next Jim Jones, or David Koresh. Think this can't happen to an ACOGger? Koresh's movement was actually another offshoot from Adventism!

Let's also examine the topic of fear motivation. This is something which has really come into its own. The World Tomorrow broadcast, and Plain Truth Magazine blatantly and shamelessly created and exploited fear! Today, politicians, environmentalists, conspiracy theorists, and other callers to action have discovered the amplifying qualities of a good dose of fear. How many existential threats do we have today, in addition to the bomb? I believe at last count, the number fell somewhere between ten and twenty. HWA, of course, exploited the bomb, the Germans, and the end times. Later on, GTA introduced environmental concerns into his broadcasts and articles, a passion which he apparently shared with the hippies. Taken in today's context, because of the fear over avian flu, global warming, golden algae, terrorism, horrific disease epidemics, the reversal of the earth's magnetic polarity, fear based preaching is not going to produce the effect it once did. It is a turnoff. Mainstream Christianity recognizes this, and emphasizes God's love and protection, as opposed to deliberately fomenting fear. Subtle difference, but very effective. Perfect love casts out fear. Meanwhile, the Armstrong movement has figuratively shot itself in the foot, destroying its own credibility by continuously setting or approximating dates for the start of the tribulation, or return of Jesus Christ, in spite of Jesus' own words on this topic. It would be downright comical if their actions were not so detrimental to their members' lives, and the lives of the members' innocent children. Yet, time and again, we've witnessed the splinter groups attempting to fan the flames, co-opt the existential threats, and use every tornado, tsunami, or earthquake to cause prospectives to bow to their agenda.

Not everyone who entered Armstrongism was attracted because of the scare tactics. There were a number of people who were attracted because "he teaches from the Bible." I really can't vouch for what mainstream Catholics and Protestants were doing back in our pre-WCG days, because my parents dropped us off at Sunday School while they attended church. But, if TBN,
Christian radio, Internet sites, Barnes and Noble, and Berean Bookstore are a small indicator, it would appear that mainstream Christians of today are doing a much more effective job of documenting their teachings with scripture. The basic problem shared by most Armstrong followers was always that the bulk of them were relative Bible illiterates before HWA began influencing them. Most obtained their entire methodology, logic, and interpretive skills directly from HWA! That is why so many long term members experience such incredible immunity to the works of vastly more educated scholars.

Imagine, prior to the advent of the Internet, how difficult it would have been to check into such things as the so-called lost century of the early Christian church. This is the time period during which a minor character of the New Testament, Simon Magus, a gnostic, had according to Armstrong hijacked the original Christian church and morphed it into Catholicism. Even if a typical working person had been willing to spend countless hours in the public library, how would he have known how to refute this theory? Would he have known to investigate the works of Irenaeus, or even known what an "Antenicene Father" was? Would he have taken the time to read the real history that existed, or simply take HWA's word that there was a lost century? For most of us, when HWA, or his top researchers such as Herman Hoeh lifted a quote from an historical doctrine, ignoring its original context, and creating yet another spurious proof text, we would never have even known what the original work was, let alone where to find it. Footnotes were rarely used to authenticate their contentions. Today, in many cases, all a prospective member need do is to Google "British Israelism" (a common example), and these cults are all finished before they ever get a foothold to begin their dastardly influence.

One of the very wonderful aspects to today's charities and church groups is that they have discovered accountability. There are standards for such things as the loading costs which tend to detract from accomplishing the stated mission of the organizations. The salaries of administrators, one of these loading costs, are held to public scrutiny. It all ends up being good business, and facilitating due diligence, but unfortunately this accountability has been instituted because of past abuses, the reporting of them, and the public's normal and healthy skepticism. This skepticism has been fueled by horror stories regarding expensive art collections, palaces and mansions, sex for hire, thousand dollar dog houses, tithes gambled away in Las Vegas, alleged overseas accounts, and just about every type of fiduciary irresponsibility or mismanagement possible. This accountability, or the lack thereof, factors in very heavily as a potential member considers single sourcing his or her spiritual guidance to one church corporate.

The leaders of Armstrongism, past present and future would probably all give God the credit for the past successes within that movement. Yet, for some reason, none of them seem to be able to completely duplicate that success. Some of the more charismatic ones have attracted significant numbers of the old school, long term members. But, unless you have been prompted as to where to look, the work that these groups are doing is largely invisible. And, they are not growing, at least not on the same level experienced in HWA's heyday. It is not as it once was back in the 1960s when there was tremendous street buzz, and heavy name recognition for both HWA and GTA. Truly, this is a movement which would do well to heed the observations of Gamaliel! Herbert's denials to the contrary, the original WCG was largely based on his personal modifications of Adventism, which as we know today had sprung from the Seventh Day Baptist churches. HWA took a very radical approach, often adapting fringe doctrines from the reject bin of historic Christianity. Most extreme or radical schools of thought cannot be sustained or perpetuated. They die out. Their primary role, when all is said and done, becomes one of either stimulating or influencing the mainstream.

BB

Objective and Subjective

2010-04-02T14:16:00.000-07:00

How many times have we read or heard people attempt to analyze our thought processes and life's philosophies by using the terms objective thinking and subjective thinking? I submit that we humans utilize a blend of both. Our lives consist basically of the events or occurrences of each day, our appetites, and how we feel and react. Drama happens inside of our heads, tailored and personalized to each of us as individuals. It is, in fact, an integral part of what makes each of us unique and human. And, no way has ever been found to rid oneself of something so completely innate.

Nobody I've ever "met" is a 100% "objective" thinker, except possibly original Star Trek's Spock character, portrayed by the excellent actor, Leonard Nimoy. But, Spock is a fictional, hypothetical character, not a real person. What became painfully and often humorously obvious throughout the run of this TV series was that while Spock's contributions were often valuable, the fact that he was purely a creature of logic became a detriment. There's an axiom, originally taught to me by one of my managers about twenty years ago during one of my career opportunities: "Any strength, practiced to an extreme, becomes a weakness."

Seemingly, we humans must accept the fact that we are occasionally going to be able to detach our personal involvement and emotions from our thinking processes and to indulge in objective thinking, but since we are deeply invested in our own experiences, reactions, and governing beliefs, in most cases our normal patterns will involve subjective, or personalized thinking. This is one of the reasons why we sometimes seek the opinions of, or counsel of professionals, valued friends, or relatives who do not share our emotional investment in a particular situation. As with our Mr. Spock, their detachment is often beneficial in assisting us through some of life's difficult patches.

To eliminate the subjective is to divest oneself of one of the basic components of humanity. To suggest excision of it as part of our healing process is an indicator as to the graveness of our wounds. That would be considered to be an extreme measure. It would be preferable to concentrate on healing rather than excision, rehabilitating the damaged elements so that one can remain a functional human being with the full range of healthy emotions.

As victims of the Armstrong problem, not only was our concept of God misinformed and distorted, but also our basic sense of humanity, family, and community. Cause and effect. It has long been my contention that as a person reads a book, the parts which become memorable are largely a function of his or her own personality. When this is done with a book about God, the process becomes anthropomorphic. Herbert W. Armstrong, consciously or unconsciously, lifted from context and overly dramatized the elements of the Bible with which he personally identified, and which served his purposes. He taught us about a God whose primary way of expressing love was extreme punishment for the slightest hint of disobedience to His laws. This was a way of thinking that was not lost as it filtered down into the parenting skills of church members. HWA's distortions did not provide us with a full and accurate picture, and remain a source of the problems many of us have had with God throughout our lives. They were more of an intoxicant than an aid to mental or spiritual health. So, it is hardly surprising that in order to deal with this, some of our fellow travelers have explored and embraced the importance of objective thinking. I know a little bit about this, because it is a technique which I've explored myself. But, it's all too easy to take extreme measures in an effort to invalidate, eliminate, or compartmentalize activities and channels which have been used to hurt or damage us. Defensive measures often leave visible scar tissue, a remnant which serves as testimony to past injury. Others can sense this scar tissue, although they will not usually know the nature of the wound which produced it. Optimal healing involves regaining as complete functionality as possible, with minimal scarring. Hopefully with a dash of education seasoning the process.

For some reason, while I've been sharing this, the words to the Linda Ronstadt song (later covered by the Eagles) "Desperado" have been going through my head. (If you are unfamiliar with this song, Google it for the lyrics). In some way, they might illustrate the need and importance for healing which all of us share. I think it might even be a good soundtrack for this article.

Probably most people would agree that if there is a God, much of the way in which He could work with each of us as individuals would be through normal, healthy emotions, and a positive outlook towards spirituality. It would by very nature be a mental, highly subjective process, and produces passionate commitment. People of faith honestly believe that God is working in their lives, and many of us find evidence of this on a daily basis. Even while I was an atheist or agnostic, I was constantly amazed at the resilience and sense of well being and purpose of Christian people. This is awesome, and encouraging to watch sometimes, although there are some occasional cliff hangers! But, is what we seem to be seeing real? Isn't it subjective, and in the mind, possibly even imaginary? Some say that we would be better off in detaching ourselves from such subjective thinking, and focusing solely on objective thinking. They say that in so doing, we will become enlightened. But, is this true, or does it constitute yet another set of filters or blinders? How we treat it would seem to be a choice. The fact that some choose one course, while others choose the polar opposite proves this. Apparently, it's an area of our lives in which we can exercise some degree of control. And it would be a shame to make such a decision based on the hurt caused by false teachers.

We humans have five senses, recognized as being limited to specific areas of various spectra. And, if we're fortunate, we get to utilize these senses over a period of roughly 70 years. Science has helped us in building devices to help us perceive some of the events which are occurring outside of our human range, and over greater periods of time than a normal human lifespan. That seems to have expanded our capabilities and understanding, but we are still extremely limited in our perceptions. Seemingly, we are faced with two general paths to greater awareness. One is to look more deeply within. The other is to look to an external source, one more knowledgeable than our own species. One limits us to the here and now. The other would seem to expand infinitely. Each of us must decide which one has greater potential and reliability. Your mileage may vary.

BB

Wine & Cheese Tasting Party Begins........Now!

2010-04-01T13:57:00.000-07:00

Wow! My two predecessors got this new blog off to a rockin' and rollin' start! Thank you, Allen and Ralph for an awesome job, and thanks to James for providing the venue! I'd like to see us continue to grow in numbers here, and to see if we could especially get some of the ladies to begin commenting. So (this is NOT an April Fool's joke!), April will be wine and cheese tasting month. I hope it will be a joyous celebration. Tell a friend!

I understand that we guest editors enjoy a modicum of discretion in these parts during our month, so here is what I have in mind. Basically, I'll cut the cheese and you cats and chicks can pour the wine! What that means is that I'll throw out some basic ideas, hopefully things of common interest that might deserve further exploration, and you folks go ahead and do most of the commenting. Bend it, stretch it, take it anywhere you want to go, as long as nobody gets the bright idea of slipping a little vinegar into one of the wine bottles! Freedom!!!!

So, settle down into some nice comfortable furniture, and let the fun begin. I've got some Stevie Ray Vaughan, some Jeff Healey and some Cracker cued up on the ol' ipod, and we'll be taking some requests for later on.

-Byker Bob

Another post

2010-03-28T07:55:00.000-07:00

My month is almost up, and I have thoroughly enjoyed my stint as guest editor. I want to thank all those who have commented and congratulate them on, as a whole, very substantive and well thought out comments. I hope you will have good points to add to this offering. Here it is:

IMAGE FIRST

by Allen C. Dexter

Just as my last article on hypocrisy appeared, the news coverage suddenly exploded about the new sex scandals bedeviling the Catholic Church – scandals which have since landed firmly in the lap of the Pope himself.

Worldwide wasn't the only entity immersed in hypocrisy. All religions, along with political parties, seem to be especially prone to the evil of hypocrisy.

Why is that so?

I'm sure we could dredge up a lot of contributing factors. However, I believe it all boils down primarily to the old adage that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Anyone who finds him or herself in a position of great power feels they have to do anything necessary to keep their followers and the public from noticing that they, like the famous emperor, might be lacking some necessary moral, doctrinal or intellectual raiment. They stand in danger of their followers and the world at large realizing that they aren't as perfect, wise and infallible as they claim to be.

When the claim is made that you and your organization is the only real representative of Christ, like the WWCG and the Catholic Church have maintained, the perceived need to deceive the faithful and the world at large becomes ever more urgent. When religion seizes control of political parties, the same phenomenon comes into play.

Thus, as soon as something unsavory rears its ugly head, damage control begins and “spin” sets in. If it can be completely covered up and kept from the public, so much the better. Otherwise, denial, obfuscation and questioning the honesty and integrity of the accuser is usually the next courses of action.

Of course, the possibility that the poor people might get offended, turn bitter and lose their salvation has to be emphasized. That gives a righteous and loving motive to the whole thing.

Any of us who spent any time at WWCG headquarters or were closely associated in any way with the ministry have witnessed this image building and deliberate fabrication in action. When we wrote letters to members and listeners and when we visited church members and potential members in the field, the image and welfare of the “work” was always foremost in our minds.

One graphic example of this occurred while I was assisting the pastor of the New York City church between late 1960 and the beginning of 1962.

There was one particular member, an African American young man, who didn't seem able to hold a job and support himself. He ended up homeless in the middle of a New York winter and caught pneumonia from the exposure. He ended up in the hospital, the very hospital where his sister was a nurse. I think she is the one who alerted the church to his condition and situation.

He refused antibiotics that he really needed to treat his condition and his sister appealed to the pastor to try to change his mind. This put him in a bit of a quandary, to say the least. He knew the adverse publicity and possible harm that could come on the church, but he had to uphold Herbert's radical doctrine.

His solution was to manipulate the man into saying he would not take the medication even if his minister told him to do so. He then told his sister that her brother had just told him he wouldn't take the medication even if he told him to. He thought it a rather clever way of taking the church off the hook. I often wonder if he still has that opinion. He seems to have disappeared into the ether, and I doubt he is or has been with any of the splinters.

No matter what excuse or justification may be employed, the fact of the matter is that religious organizations and political parties are first of all interested in their image. That image is the basis of their power and influence. Without that image, they fear they will lose their supporters and, ultimately, their lofty positions, power and income. Few have the moral courage to stand up and speak honestly and forthrightly under those circumstances.

Another topic -- hypocrisy

2010-03-21T12:17:00.000-07:00

A few days ago, I commented to James that I didn't have any new topics to bring up. He suggested I write on the subject of hypocrisy in the old WWCG. VOILA and EUREKA. Here it is:

HYPOCRISY ON PARADE

by Allen C. Dexter

“Hypocrite!”

What a devastating charge!

“Hypocrisy” simply means play acting or carrying on a pretense behind which one hides their real character, actions and intent.

Just about every human being has done something, or several things, during their lifetime that could be described as hypocrisy. We are, after all, just weak humans prone to look out for ourselves first and foremost. That leads us in moments of weakness to do things we are often deeply ashamed of later.

This leads me, in my mid-seventies, to be a bit tolerant toward the failings of others. I understand quite well the ancient remonstrance to let the one who was free of sin cast the first stone.

Hypocrisy rears its ugly head constantly, in private social and business intercourse and especially in politics and religion, the main ideologies seeking to sway and control the masses for the benefit of the controllers. The controllees come last in consideration and often get only condescending lip service. The longer I live, the more I understand that the average person is merely a pawn and a serf who serves only to enrich and aggrandize those who are in ultimate control.

Every news day brings us more examples of hypocrisy. The political, business and religious worlds are loaded with egregious examples – too many to enumerate in one short article. It would take a huge library of books one could add to daily. I choose instead to mention just a few examples from my experiences with The Worldwide Church of God.

Herbert and Ted were walking fountains of hypocrisy.

One such example began to play out in my freshman year at Ambassador. We were talented, enthusiastic young people who tried to lead lives similar to those led by students at other colleges.

Some of us got together and formed a drama club. We settled on a play we felt would be entertaining and set about constructing a set, rehearsing, gathering props, etc. We had a really good time.

The night came for the play and we carried it off to the delight of everyone attending, including Herbert W. I played the villain and received rave reviews from members of the audience.

Our elation and Armstrong's appreciation came to a screeching halt a few days later when an apologetic Herbert explained in a fatherly sounding way that although we had done an admirable job, he couldn't allow such activities in the future. You see, we were play acting, the root of the word, hypocrite. It was wrong for God's representative people to engage in such play acting.

That should have been a red flag to me and others, but we were just too slavishly inclined to accept any “bull+++t” that old geezer came up with.

Stage drama disappeared from Ambassador College – for a while. Years later, It snuck back in with things like a presentation of South Pacific by the Ambassador Chorale.

With construction of the elaborate Ambassador Auditorium – the much heralded “house for God,” the flood gates opened. That grand edifice finally gave ol' Herb another “in” to hob nob and brush elbows with the rich and influential of the world. Soon a whole parade of play actor “hypocrites” were appearing at regular intervals under the auspices of the Ambassador International Cultural foundation (AICF) paid for and maintained by the tithes and offerings of all those church members who had long ago forgotten the original edict.

Now let's consider the titillating subject of sex. That part of life bedevils just about everybody who gets too big and self-important for their pants or panties, in all levels of society, but especially in religion and politics. Just about every person has something in their sexual past they would prefer nobody knew about. It's part of being a normal human.

Ever since “church father” idiots like Augustine came on the scene and managed to seize control of Western religious thought, the Western world went into paranoia where the subject of sex is concerned. Sex just had to be a great evil because it was pleasurable and fun. Any aspect of it was shameful or suspect.

The conundrum was that sex was necessary if the human race was to continue and the religious despots were to have anyone to rule over and exploit. It was judged OK as long as reproduction was the only motive and nobody really enjoyed it. Really “holy” people like priests of every rank, monks and nuns were expected to renounce it entirely. We have ample demonstration of how practical that approach has been.

Anyone who has read Hawaii by Michener knows that the ancient Hawaiians lived an idyllic life and were as a whole extremely happy in their innocent acceptance and enjoyment of their sexual natures. As soon as a bunch of “tight-ass” missionaries happened on the scene, all of that idyllic situation went wafting away on the breeze.

The Armstrong's put up a magnificent facade in the sexual arena. One would have thought they were paragons of virtue and self-control. What went on behind the scenes and very secretly for a time was an entirely different matter.

Long time readers of this and other sites dealing with WWCG history are well aware of the incestuous relationship HWA carried on with one of his daughters and his constant indulgence in masturbation while condemning it in all others. They know about Ted's womanizing and flagrant adulteries. I won't belabor the issue with needless repetition.

There is one great instance of overwhelming hypocrisy I am aware of and of which most former associates are not aware. It shows the absolute ruthlessness and reprehensible character of Herbert W. Armstrong and his wife, Loma.

For many years, Garner Ted Armstrong treated the coeds of Ambassador College like a convenient stable of potential sexual conquests. One can only imagine the psychological traumas those girls he overwhelmed went through.

One former Worldwide minister knew it all too well. He was the one local elder responsible for counseling and ministering to those girls. They brought this very personal and devastating situation to him for his counsel and help.

This put him in a very touchy situation. The Armstrong's soon realized that the “cat was out of the bag.” They began to fear this minister and what he could do with the information to which he was privy. Several times, Herbert Armstrong demanded to know if he was going to blackmail them. He replied simply that such was not the way he operated. He told no one, including his wife.

Herbert accused some of Ted's sexual victims of seducing Ted and verbally did all in his power to demoralize them by calling them every smutty name he could think of. Some of these women eventually died of addictions because they could never recover from the psychological damage. In some cases, Roderick Meredith assisted in demoralizing these young girls, probably because he had hopes of becoming Herbert's successor.

Men like Hitler, Saddam Hussein and Herbert Armstrong don't take chances in such situations. They destroy their potential enemies whatever way they can. Herbert Armstrong set out to destroy this dedicated man with total ruthlessness.

One day, the employees of the department over which he was second in command received a visit from their boss and Herbert himself in which he feigned sorrow over having to put this man out of the Church and ministry for the sin of adultery. The following Sabbath, he made the same announcement in church.

He even tried to alienate this minister's wife from her husband in hopes of gaining her support in his efforts to discredit and destroy him. He had his chauffeur drive him and deaconess Annie Mann more than one thousand miles to Oregon to talk with her. During that meeting, he accused her husband of making up lies about him and Ted. She confronted his charges with "It was not ++++ who told me those things - - it was your son, Ted, who told me!"

Herbert's simple response was "Well, Ted should not have told you!" He then broke off the meeting and returned to Pasadena. Annie Mann witnessed Herbert being a liar and a deceiver. He never apologized to the man's wife for his attempted deception, nor for his efforts to discredit him.

I didn't know until many years later that the charge of adultery was a total lie. This man was so devastated and emotionally distraught that he actually suffered a heart attack with severe chest pains that lasted several days. He didn't realize what had occurred until years later when the evidence showed up on a chest X-ray and the doctor asked him when he had his heart attack.

When he explained to the doctor about his severe chest pains years earlier the doctor said "That is when you had your heart attack!" He suffered an emotional and mental (as well as spiritual) breakdown that took him years to overcome so he could rebuild his life. Herbert died without ever even attempting to undo the damages he inflicted on him and so many others.

I still count this man as a friend. Although we see the world through different reality tunnels (see my article on this subject), I respect his overall character and the principles by which he has guided his life.

When I first became a part of the Worldwide community, it seemed very family-like, and I think it was at that time. That atmosphere changed as the ministry became more of an elite club that maintained itself aloof from what became increasingly viewed as the “common” element of the congregation. This became even more pronounced as the British mindset increased with the addition of the Bricket Wood campus. British-style class awareness became ever more pervasive.

This was shown up vividly by the experience of one of my good friends who found himself called on the carpet about his mother.

His mother and Loma Armstrong had found in each other a commonality of spirit and personality that led to their becoming close friends. This did not fit in with what the powers that were thought was proper. His mother was not especially rich or highly educated, wasn't an executive and had no connection with the ministry. In fact, she had been a Hollywood show girl in her youth. A successful one, I might add. Then, just an ordinary housewife and mother.

I guess, because his father was long deceased, it fell his lot in their eyes to be the head of the family and they remonstrated him about his mother's efforts at “social climbing.”

Maybe the epistle of James somehow got clipped out of their Bibles while they weren't looking. Anyway, unless you were in a special class they thought worthy, you just didn't dare try to hobnob with the exalted elite.

I don't know if anyone bothered to consult Loma on the subject.

I could dredge up more examples if I really wanted to work that hard at it and make this a laborious read. These are the examples that have stood out in my mind, so I'm sharing them with our readers. If some others have examples they can share, please feel free to write an article, send an email or add them to the comments in this blog.

The longer I live and observe, the more I recognize the futility of looking to men and organizations of men as infallible guides to whom we must subject ourselves. That approach only encourages those who become so exalted to be hypocritical in an effort to maintain their positions.

We must learn to think for ourselves and guide our own lives wisely. The earlier in life we learn that lesson, the better our lives will be. I'm thankful that I began to really learn these things at about age forty when I was still in my prime.

A Mind Blowing Concept

2010-03-17T02:08:00.000-07:00

WE SEE THROUGH A TUNNEL

by Allen C. Dexter

Yesterday, my friend, Betty Brogaard, sent me a mind-altering email that I immediately forwarded to several others. The subject of this email is so profound that I am going to reproduce it here. Once you see the video, you will understand the overwhelming effect it had on me. The email:

This video is the simplist explanation I have ever found for all the confusion and violence in the world. Hard to wrap one's mind around, but it makes sense to me.

Subject: Fundamental truth and the key to world peace are with this quote.....

“Relativity and quantum mechanics have demonstrated clearly that what you find out with instruments is true relative only to the instrument you’re using and where that instrument is located in space-time.

So there is no vantage point from which real reality can be seen. We’re all looking from the point of view of our own reality tunnel. When we begin to realiz
e that we are all looking from the point of view of our own reality tunnels, we find it is much easier to understand where other people are coming from.

Then those who don’t have the same reality tunnel as us don’t seem ignorant; deliberately perverse; lying or hypnotised by some mad ideology. They just have a different reality tunnel and every reality tunnel might tell us something interesting about our world.... if we are willing to listen.”

Robert Anton Wilson (1932 – 2007) – Author & polymath (wide-ranging knowledge).

This is just one of the amazing insights from the Youtube video called “Robert Anton Wilson explains Quantum Physics”. Nevertheless I believe this marvelous video could easily be renamed “Robert Anton Wilson explains the fundamental truth and the key to world peace".

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XEZtw1yt8Kc&feature=PlayList&p=ACDD4457D8ABFF89&index=21

2010-03-10T08:11:00.000-08:00

Here I am again, and I suspect this post will generate a lot of controversy. That's OK.
We learn the most from trading thoughts, I hope in an open-minded, civil way.

DEATH – WHAT REALLY HAPPENS

by Allen C. Dexter

What really happens when this physical life ends?

Some people are very adamant in stating that nothing happens except complete cessation of existence and consciousness – the screen just goes black. Any evidence to the contrary is dismissed as wishful thinking, hallucinations, trickery by psychics, etc.

Others are just as adamant that death ushers us into a spirit realm where we had better make sure our passport and visas are in order – specifically by following whatever prescription they advocate for safe passage. Those prescriptions have changed a great deal over the millenniums and vary greatly from group to group.

I will admit that it is hard for me to contemplate not existing. I almost instinctively feel that I will go on in some other state when this life ends.

At the same time, I know that the mythology most people say they believe is total nonsense. There isn't going to be a “last trumpet call” summoning the faithful dead to resurrect and the living faithful to instantly transform to spirit and meet Jesus in the clouds. No one is going to meet St. Peter at the “pearly gates” and be ushered into a boring heaven where they laze around on clouds and play a stupid harp. I'm not going to take a boat across the Styx. Nor am I going to be condemned to some chamber of horrors called “hell” because I think for myself and tell some pompous religious despot to take a hike.

After I started doing wedding ceremonies, some of Phyllis' relatives learned I was an ordained minister. When they came to me to conduct a couple of funeral ceremonies for departed loved ones, I revised my carefully crafted memorial address and helped them out. Then, I officiated the marriage of one of their sons.

That same son was a diabetic and recently went into a heart attack and coma that led to massive brain damage before he was discovered. In a few days, he died in the prime of his life, a great shock to all, especially his bereaved wife and parents.

I was again called upon to conduct his memorial. March 8, we drove to Scottsdale and I delivered another carefully crafted address that avoided all the mythology but still was encouraging and sympathetic and certainly didn't include HWA's pompous practice of ruthlessly condemning all the “pagan” nonsense.

I got through the occasion and was duly complimented for my inspiring address, but I'm sure it was a disappointment to some of those attending and puzzling to still others who expected the usual reading of scripture after scripture and assurances that the dear departed was now in Jesus' presence. I merely placed him at the scene, aware and appreciative of all that was going on.

How could I do that? Do I really believe he was there and aware? Surprising as it may be to some of you, yes, I do.

No, I'm not ready for the “looney bin.” This is not a casual or totally emotional conclusion on my part. It's based on a lot of study, observation and thought.

There are just too many firsthand accounts backing up after death survival for me to dismiss them casually and dogmatically. I related one of those accounts in my address. It was from a television program I happened upon just a few days previously.

In this program, Rue McClanahan, the actress who played Blanche on The Golden Girls sitcom, related her experience with afterlife survival and communication.

She had a very dear lifelong friend who was dying. She stayed by his bedside, holding his hand until his death.

Because she had doubts about an afterlife, she asked her friend to please somehow communicate with her if he survived after death and to make his communication something electronic so she would know it was really from him.

He died a short time later and Rue stayed the rest of the night. In the morning, she went downstairs with the homeowner. They turned on the recessed lights in the kitchen and started to make breakfast. Suddenly, the kitchen went dark as every bulb on that circuit burned out simultaneously.

A short while later, a relative called, mystified over the exact same thing occurring at their home at about the same time.

I will admit that one occurrence like this in one place could be dismissed as pure happenstance, but not two such identical occurrences on the same day, in the same family and right after the death of a family member asked to communicate in such a manner.

Shortly after this occurrence, Ms. McClanahan was sitting alone and got the feeling someone was watching her. She turned around and sitting in a chair in an adjoining room was her departed friend with a broad smile on his face. I'm not sure whether it was telepathic or audible, but her friend said, “Hey, it's no big deal.”

My studies on the subject have encountered far too many such accounts for me to dismiss them. Some have been related to me in person by people who experienced them.

The work of the psychic, John Edward, has also greatly influenced my thinking. I have watched episodes of his television programs and searched for evidence of cold reading or electronic eavesdropping on audience members prior to the program, and I've come up empty. Too often, people will deny or not know what he is talking about only to later realize or find out from someone else that he was right on the mark about some improbable and unknowable to John detail regarding a departed loved one.

Does this mean I'm in danger of reverting back to the nonsense of heaven and hell and all the mythology that pervades the world?

No. Of course not.

I don't know how something survives beyond death or what it is exactly. I just believe the evidence for it doing so is overwhelming, at least to my mind.

Is it part of something divine?

I don't know.

I do know that these manifestations never have any connection with the common conceptions of heaven or hell.

The departed are never off in some mythical place behind pearly gates or skipping down golden streets. They're right here. All around us. If our eyes and other senses were capable, we could see them and reach out and touch them. No first, second, third, etc. resurrection has anything to do with it. No stern judge is sitting on a magnificent throne passing judgment while fawning lackeys cast crowns at his feet like he was some self-important Middle Eastern despot.

So, I'm again an agnostic in another can't know for sure situation. I'm certain I'm not alone in my conclusions and I welcome anyone sharing their feelings and experiences with me. Feel free to email me directly.

2010-03-05T07:54:00.000-08:00

It's Friday and I'm going to be quite busy this weekend, so I'm posting my article today.

BORN INTO “SUCKERHOOD”

by Allen C. Dexter

Everybody loves a baby. They are so cute (most of them), sweet and helpless. They are also born without a clue as to the intricacy and insanity of the world they are entering. They are “sitting ducks” for whatever is shot their way. Yes, those innocents will get older and start a rebellious phase when they enter their teens, but there are still a lot of spurious concepts and beliefs they will usually find difficult to avoid absorbing or to shake off later in life.

I know. I've been there.

When I was born, that chilly October day in 1934, I was a totally blank slate. The change of surroundings and the chill in the air probably helped make me cry lustily. I was hungry, so my mother's soft, warm, milk filled breast was about the best welcome I could have received. Being cuddled close while my tummy filled was very comforting. We never outgrow this desire and need to be hugged lovingly.

Because I was born in the upper Midwest in an agrarian and traditionally Christian society (part of the Bible Belt), my upbringing was predictable. Those who didn't attend a church, like my family, still gave credence to the fables of the Bible. My mother played the piano a little, and her favorite hymn was The Old Rugged Cross. If anyone had told her she was really singing about Mithra, not some manufactured Jewish Jesus, she would have had no idea what they were talking about. I, in turn, just absorbed what I had been born into like all innocent little human sponges do.

It's the same all over the world. If you are born into Hindu India, you grow up believing in all the Hindu deities and think a cow is holy. The very thought of eating a t-bone steak would horrify you. You probably would believe you dare not squash a bug for fear it might be a reincarnated loved one.

If you were to be born into a Muslim society, you couldn't imagine not flopping prostrate several times a day, at the command of “the midnight Haranguer,” with your head pointing in the direction of Mecca. Not to do so would leave a great empty spot in your day and you would feel very guilty. Your speech would be peppered with a constant round of Allah this and Allah that – almost like cussing in other parts of the world.

The recorder starts whirling away in our minds from minute number one. By the time we reach adulthood, our minds are filled with beliefs, practices and concepts we find very hard to either question or expunge. It's like ripping a piece of ourselves off and throwing it away. Every connection to those things and people we have known and loved is at stake.

Everything we cling to as ethics, conscience and tradition comes to us first as absorption from the family unit and the society around us. Japanese warriors had no pangs of conscience for the horrors they committed under their traditional samurai code in China and throughout the Pacific war. They had contempt for any opposing warrior who was so cowardly as to surrender rather than die in place or by their own hand. I knew a survivor of the Bataan Death March. Those Japanese soldiers were monsters. Their culture had made them so. Muslim suicide bombers feel no guilt either, and for the same reason.

Rabid fundamentalist Christians see nothing unfair or immoral in ruthlessly persecuting homosexuals. They can point to plenty of scriptures they use to justify treating them as the scum of the earth. A few would still support the enslavement of other human beings because the Bible upholds the practice in several places. They are absolutely convinced that God wrote the Bible. Ask them. They'll tell you so, and your protestations to the contrary will fall on deaf ears.

The battle to overcome ingrained orthodoxy and cultural norms and get people to really think and reason often seems like a losing proposition, even here in comparatively enlightened America. The propaganda emanating from every societal and media source is so overwhelming that progress is painfully slow. Every book, article or online source of reason and truth is drowned out by a flood of the same old blather that has kept humanity in superstitious bondage for millenniums. It's even harder in parts of the world where any and every attempt at promoting reason is met with overwhelming establishment censorship and brutal force.

A question that constantly plagued my mind when I began to see the light and cast off old ways of thinking was, “How could I have been so dumb?” It was hard to understand how I missed all those cues. Cues that would now stand out like the proverbial sore thumb.

I knew where babies came from rather early in life. How could I be taken in by that virgin birth nonsense? When I learned while still at Ambassador College that the oldest New Testament documents couldn't be traced back beyond the fourth century, an elapsed period greater than the entire history of the USA, why didn't I realize how lacking in authority and made up they had to be? Especially, in light of the nonsensical drivel some of those forced by Constantine to attend the Nicene Counsel put forth in some of their other writings.

I had been brainwashed, like all humans are to one degree or another. Hooking up with super-narcissistic Herbert W. Armstrong just put the cap on what had been going on since the day I was born. It wasn't deliberate on the part of my parents and the many good people I grew up around. However, it was very deliberate on the part of a lot of people, both in and out of WCG, who stood to profit from my brainwashed ignorance.

Back in about 1975 or '76, when the upheavals in Worldwide were just beginning, I had occasion to talk for a while with an old student friend who was now a ranking minister in WCG. Regarding all the turmoil, he said what put his mind at ease was the fact that none of it was his responsibility. He salved his conscience, for the time being anyway, by leaving all the questions in the hands of those he regarded as being responsible.

He later bolted into one of the major splinters and rose rather high in their ranks before retiring. I think he still occupies some position of status. He never did see through all the nonsense, or so I prefer to believe. His mind was (I hope) too thoroughly set in the habitual pattern and the nonsensical doctrines programed into him.

I'm thankful circumstances made it a lot easier for me to see through it all, and I'm still in the process. I often wonder what I might have done under vastly different circumstances. Would I, like many, have compromised and become just another hypocritical hireling? I hope not.

I have hope that reason and science will win out in the end, but that end looks very far off when I take a long, hard look at the world as it is. The world seems to be at the mercy (?) of not only religious, but economic, corporatist and political hirelings who care for naught but their own and their masters' welfare.

I pick up a newspaper or magazine, and there is a stupid horoscope feature leaping out at me. Christmas or Easter comes along, and the same old mythological, totally fabricated out of ignorance pap floods radio and TV and all other available media.

I have a step-daughter who is into the nonsense of numerology. Shades of Gerald Waterhouse!

I see Muslim fanatics who would consider it a great honor and an immediate ticket to paradise if they could find a way to blow up an infidel like me and themselves at the same time. They are breeding like back alley cats and spreading everywhere they can. That gives me serious concern about the future of the world.

No “god” has ever stepped forward thus far to stop any of the madness, murder and mayhem extant in the world. Roman legions, Genghis Khan, Attila, the Japanese warlords, Hitler, Stalin, and a nauseous litany of other human monsters have come and gone through the millenniums and no legions of angels ever rode to the rescue of hapless humanity. No archangel Michael or Gabriel ever set his foot on a Worldwide stage and told Herbie, Hoeh or Meredith (or any other blowhard) to shut the hell up.

The purveyors of religious nonsense have always found a way to claim that any fortunate happenstance was attributable to the god or gods they championed, but demonstrable proof he or they were anywhere in the vicinity has always been absent. They were also right there to assert that every disaster was the fault of the average Joe or Judy Blow who didn't contribute, fast or pray enough or do enough priestly ass-kissing.

So, don't blame yourself or think of yourself as “dumb.”

You were set up! You were bamboozled! Just like all those who came before you.

We've come some of the way toward a truly reasonable and sane world, but the battle is far from over. As long as “creation science” can be lobbied for as a reasonable educational adjunct, we're a long way from “there.” As long as fanatical parents “home school” their children to keep them from the “ungodly” public educational system, ignorance will continue to warp far too many innocent children whose minds will be poisoned with superstitious crap for much, if not all, of their lives.

Whatever progress has been made has been at the behest of good, intelligent, principled men and women willing to expend their blood, sweat and tears for the betterment of themselves and their neighbors.

Be encouraged that you now see things a lot more clearly and keep up the good fight. It can seem like a lonely and hopeless quest, but it always has been. At least we now know that the world is not flat nor the center of the universe. We don't, here in America anyway, stone people to death for moral weaknesses and mistakes. However, I did read that some religious nuts wanted to stone the killer whale that killed its handler!

Oy vay! Ay, yi, yi! Give me a break!

Hellooooo! It's a KILLER whale! That's how your “God” supposedly made him! Why don't you try to stone him? Oh, that's right. Nobody has ever seen the mythical guy. You have no clue where to find him, even to ask him why he made the old boy so blood thirsty and non-discriminating in his prey.

Hang in there. The fight really is worth it and there has been a little progress.

It's OK To Be An Agnostic

2010-03-01T06:33:00.000-08:00

Just so everyone reading my blogs will know the mindset from which I write, I've composed this article:

IT'S OK TO BE AN AGNOSTIC

by Allen C. Dexter

I get all kinds of reactions when I reveal the fact that I am an agnostic. A lot of horrified people think I'm headed straight to that divine Dachau and theological Treblinka they call Hell. They express sorrow and say they'll “pray” for poor me.

Interesting concept of “god.” He's supposedly so thin skinned that if I don't believe in him, he'll get even by making me burn for all eternity. At least, Herbert Armstrong's teaching had him only burning me to ashes, like in the Nazi crematoriums.

If Eichmann was a war criminal, what is their Jehovah?

Often, they will ask me, “What if you're wrong?”

My answer: “What if you're wrong?”

A lot of people have an attitude that reminds me of General Patton. Hedge your bets and take advantage of the possible benefits of any faith, such as when he was in the hospital, in traction and staring death in the face. Any minister or priest who offered last rights or any kind of intercession was welcomed.

Patton didn't get deeply into theology. He just read “the book,” took it somewhat seriously, went on cussing up a blue streak when the occasion called for it with an absolute conviction he'd been here in several other lives (all military, apparently) and would probably be here again. Right or wrong, it gave him a purpose and goal in life. I like him. Whatever might be said about him, he was always genuine.

Some atheists seem to have the attitude that being an agnostic is tantamount to being weak kneed and wishy-washy. They are so convinced of their atheistic approach that it becomes a non-believer's dogma.

I've flirted with outright atheism, largely because I know the Bible and the Christian God is a totally concocted farce. All the myths surrounding the biblical Jesus didn't come into anything close to their present form until the fourth century after the composite Jesus the Western world was tricked into believing in supposedly walked the earth.

That's a period longer than our nation has existed!

Who would want to write a history of the Revolutionary War with no authoritative written records penned by those who were there to use as sources? How accurate and authoritative do you think it could be after three hundred years? All this is made plain in The Forged Origins of the New Testament which is available via the link on this site.

After my experiences with dogmatism under Armstrongism, I resist flopping to the exact opposite side of dogmatism by being dogmatic that there can't possibly be any force or entity that could be called “god.” I frankly doubt that there is, but I'd rather take the approach of science and leave the subject open to inquiry. If such a “god” wants to condemn me for that approach, while he steadfastly refuses to reveal himself in an open and tangible way so there can be no question of authenticity, then I'll just have to accept condemnation.

I'm not at all worried.

Concocted scripture tells me I have no excuse for not believing. I reject that haughty pronouncement out of hand. I will not be talked down to in such a manner. Nobody, past or present, gets to judge me in such an attitude of superiority.

Not any more.

I'm not a deist, but I do respect their thinking a whole lot more than the thinking of religionists.

Deism is a close cousin to agnosticism. I'm just not prepared to state that there really was a god who started it all and then took a hands off policy. It does make a whole lot more sense than belief in an interventionist god who never seems to intervene when he is needed most, such as during the holocaust. Most of the “miracles” I've heard people prate about are several steps down the line hearsay and misinterpretations of totally plausible natural happenstances.

The word “miracle” has really been cheapened, especially by people with a religious bent. My wife chided me once for washing a pattern of dark dirt off our cement block wall because it was in the shape of a cross. She opined we might have been able to make some serious money by drawing the gullible public's attention to it and then charging admission to see it.

She was also chagrined once when she was sure she saw the figure of the Virgin Mary on a tortilla. Before she could make a fortune on E bay, her son came home, loaded it with re-fried beans and ate it.

What really happened at the “big bang?” Was there any kind of intelligence behind it? Some scientists have concluded that the universe arose from thought. Are they right? Or, are they succumbing to the same kind of delusions that drive religions?

I don't know and scientists have only theories and speculation at this point – nothing that can be nailed down to absolute specifics. Quantum Physics presents us with some interesting and puzzling facts and theories. Some of them border on the religious.

Religions insist on having a set god, a set revelation and set dogmas. These all originated in human minds, and some of those minds were definitely deranged. The present world is filled with the same kind of people who are absolutely certain that they are one of the “two witnesses,” a reincarnation of Jesus, a prophet or apostle, etc.

As in the past, all such deluded, unbalanced or power mad individuals hark back to the use of fear to keep any adherents they might garner in line. Their first goal is to stop the poor sucker from thinking anything contrary to what they set forth as “the truth.” If it is said to come from whatever “revelation” they champion, it is absolute truth and to reject that “truth” is the same as rejecting god because it came, they staunchly maintain, from that god.

That god, being very sensitive, can't brook any such rejection and reacts by condemning the offending ingrate to either total destruction or an eternity of unimaginable suffering. In the meantime, the hapless individual is assured he will be cursed in all daily affairs and relationships. If he or she is really convinced, they become paralyzed mentally, maybe even physically.

Sound familiar? If you were caught up in Armstrongism, it should.

So, after long and careful analysis, I've concluded that I can't be absolutely sure about a great many things because there are a lot of things I don't and cannot know. That makes me an agnostic, which simply means “don't know for sure.”

I suspect the atheists are right. I have no empirical evidence that they are not. Nor have they been able to present totally irrefutable proof that they are. It's a big can't know for absolutely sure situation right now.

What I do know for sure is that none of the religions, their revelations and their gods currently extant on this earth make sense when examined critically and logically. Therefore, I now believe and follow none of them.

I'm an agnostic. That's an OK position to be in.

Greetings

2010-02-28T08:16:00.000-08:00

Hi, old friends, associates, fellow exs, etc.

For the month of March, I will be editor on this blog. I will post my first material tomorrow and hope to maybe hear from some old friends and fellow refugees.

Allen C. Dexter

Finally!

2010-02-27T07:14:00.000-08:00

Al will be taking over the guest editor spot Monday, I am told, and like the devil, I know I have a little time left. Now I get to shoot and snipe!

James, the PT editor, has suggested a post that I find rather attractive for this last one. James sent me two quotes:

"America is like a healthy body, and its resistance is threefold: its patriotism, its morality, and its spiritual life. If we can undermine these three areas, America will collapse from within"
__Joseph Stalin

"To achieve world government, it is necessary to remove from the minds of men their individualism, loyalty to family traditions, national patriotism and religious dogma"
__Brock Chisholm, Former Director, World health Organization

And James concludes with a statement of his own:

"It seems this is a fence i wish not to climb over and escape from. Loyalty is the undermining concept of these(above) two quotes. They are reinforced by religion; religion that demands just that: traditional values".

My basic thrust in the past humongous number of essays is to point out that all forms of human government ultimately breaks down to algorithms, or decision procedures by which we function.

The US Constitution was not designed as a system of algorithms by which people would be governed, but was actually designed as a limitation of the federal government, so that people could be reasonably free to live by their own decisions. James Madison well understood the difficulty in relating any set of laws to "God":

"When the Almighty himself condescends to address mankind in their own language, his meaning, luminous as it must be, is rendered dim and doubtful by the cloudy medium through which it is communicated".

Madison hit on an interesting concept here, because a man named Claude Shannon would develop a mathematical process known as information theory. The basic idea of information theory is that the more probable a message is, the less information it contains. We could state it another way: the more a message is repeated, the less information it contains.

Based on Madison's observation, if God actually DID speak to men, his message would have a high information content, so much so that it could never be reduced to a fixed set of principles recognized as law. If God did speak to men, "His" language would have to be translated into the medium of their language, and that, said Madison, would render it dim and doubtful. We "see through a glass darkly".

I presented a parallel to that earlier, by pointing out that we cannot program a computer such that it represents God. If it could, it would have to also represent the various differences we would perceive between a physical "brain" like a computer, and what we recognize as God.

If we have over 38,000 versions of God within Christianity alone, and another uncountable number of versions outside Christianity, it is most likely we will never have a computer that can even come close to representation of God, and therefore we can have no human government that will come any closer, either church or state, and that is summed up convincingly in Godel's theorem.

So what is religion for, in terms of James' assessment, above? It can obviously have only one purpose, and that is to block the efforts described by both Stalin and Chisholm, in the above quotes. In short, humans cannot ever find the "answers" within themselves. Does that prove God's existence? No, but it does show that there is always "something" that will forever lie just outside of and representing a completeness just beyond human understanding.

How do I know this? Godel's theorem: In any consistent axiomatic formulation of number theory(or any formal theory of sufficient complexity) there exists an infinity of undecidable propositions.

How does this break down to Constitutional theory? The founders, especially the "Anti-Federalists", argued repeatedly that no system of laws could ever be answerable only to itself. If the Supreme Court was the final arbiter of all law, the natural tendency would be for the Supreme Court to decide all cases in a light that extended the power of its own decisions, or as one Supreme Court Justice put it, "We do not have the last word because we are infallible. We are infallible because we have the last word".

In fact, that is one aspect of Godel's theorem. There exists no such system that prove its own consistency from within itself. It must look "outside" itself to determine truth and justice. That, basically, is why the founders decided on a confederacy of states.

Karl Marx, in his earlier writings, however, realized that if you can change the economic system of any government, you can change the government itself. It is not necessary to attack the content of people's beliefs, but to by-pass those beliefs by establishing a decision procedure or algorithm that rendered their beliefs and traditions unenforceable.

Marx, conclusions were basically simple: If you can establish a form of currency that is a "universal equivalent" of all value, then everyone is ultimately forced to operate completely within the power of that "universal equivalent" no matter what their beliefs or opinions.

If money becomes the universal equivalent, said Marx, then everything is ultimately exchangeable for money. But a thing can only be exchanged for money, said Marx, if the owner has divested himself of its intrinsic worth, or if the owner has been "alienated" from that thing.
The so-called inalienable rights, and the fixed property relationships corresponding to them, said Marx, break down before money.

As the first Baron Rothschild is alleged to have said, "Give me control of the issuance of money, and I care not who makes the laws".

The decision procedures, the algorithms once driven by the de-centralist values of human traditions, are now completely subject to the algorithms controlled by the ones who control money issuance, or to put it in more ancient terms, "The love of money is the root of all evil".

Not money itself, but the love of money, that is, the use and control of issuance of money, to determine how a society must live. Money itself becomes the centralized "information" that completely controls a society, regardless of what they believe!

In contradiction to that idea, people will seek for a truth that allows them personal freedom, but in seeking that personal freedom, they will likely seek also to establish a "higher" authority which they will refer to as God.

One problem: you can't prove the existence of God. There is no way that God can ever be represented in any single human system of government or religion.

BINGO!

That is what our founding fathers referred to as "inalienable human rights". There exists NO collective human system, by any name, that can ever rise above the rights of a single human being!

How can a central government ever recognize and define the rights belonging to humans? It can't! That's why we have this little thing in the US Constitution called the Ninth Amendment.
The rights enumerated in the Constitution cannot be construed to deny or disparage other rights retained by the people.

First Amendment: Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.

In fact, congress cannot authoritatively make such a law, since it has no ability to define "God".

The fact that there is no proof of a defined God is the best insurance of freedom that we can ever know. If there were such proof, imagine one world government, one neck ready for one leash. The freedom of a single mind reduced to a collective. Shades of Ayn Rand!

Just as Chaos science seems to show that chaos is necessary for order, it seems that an uncontrollable power called "God" is supremely necessary to offset the absolute power of law.

The "inalienable rights of man" demands always that there exists something beyond the range of human thought, human conceptions, and collective human power.

I choose to call that "something" God.

"So That They Are Without Excuse"

2010-02-26T07:22:00.000-08:00

Talk to most any of the usual "Christians" today, and you will see them resort to Romans 1:20, assuming they know anything biblically at all.

"For the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and godhead; so that they are without excuse".

There's their "proof". Now, let myself, or Ex-Android or Corky, or perhaps even Byker Bob, say, "What proof? Where is the undeniable proof of God so that I am without excuse?"

"The bible says so! God says so!" They will probably shout.

Circular reasoning, tautology, at the best. But is Paul actually saying that every person on this earth today is "without excuse"?

Well, if you back up to verse 17, you see that the "just shall live by faith". You gotta think about this for a second. If Gods' power is so evident that we are without excuse, why in the world would we have to live by faith? Faith in what? Faith that God will save us? But if we know without excuse there exists a God, then we know that by simple acceptance, there is no doubt we will be "saved'. No faith required.

besides, according to the usual christian teaching, before we "accepted Christ", we ourselves were "ungodly and unrighteous, and held truth in unrighteousness".

That is, while we were still "sinners", we "held truth in unrighteousness", but once we "accept Christ', we must live in faith?

Obviously, by that reasoning, to 'accept Christ", you must be dumbed down, unable to know what was obvious when you were a "sinner".

Of course the good "Christian" folks use this argument to condemn homosexuals. God revealed himself to those "queers", and they're going to hell unless they stop their perverted ways!

That's not my statement. That's the "good ol' "Christian" statement. And like all such statements, it's wrong.

So what exactly was Paul talking about? Why not take a look at Romans 1:19:

"Because that which may be known of God is manifest in them, for God hath shewed it to unto them".

"Them"? Who's "them"? God hasn't showed anything to me. I'm sure Corky or Ex-Android would say the same thing. I haven't been shown the first bit of evidence so that I'm without excuse.

Obviously Paul was referring to a certain group of people, and since he was a Pharisee, and since he was talking about revelations, we can simply look to Deuteronomy 4:35: "Unto thee it was showed, that thou mightest know that the Lord he is God..."

To whom was it showed? Obviously, ancient Israel. Who else? Look through the rest of that chapter, you see it was only ancient Israel.

For further confirmation, look at Amos 3:2 "You only(Israel) have I known of all the families of the earth: therefore i will punish you for all your iniquities".

Simple enough. Paul was talking about ancient Israel.

So, What IS Going On?

2010-02-25T06:44:00.000-08:00

Is the universe a collection of random mutations and accidental assemblies? As I pointed out before, new evidence suggests that there is a process of intelligence that seems to transcend individual decisions. So what's the process? If we could figure it out, then we'd have the meaning of life.

Recently there was the discovery of what is known as "mirror neurons" in the brain. Scientists discovered some amazing things about these mirror neurons. For example, if you see someone pick up a glass of water, the mirror neurons in your brain will be stimulated exactly as if you picked up the glass yourself. Behavior is learned and adapted into the brain by this method, and infants can quickly learn to control certain actions by mimicry, simply because observing the actions trigger the same sections of the brain required to perform that action.

This happens throughout our lives as we observe others. The reason why we know it is not "us" that performs the action is that our skin has sensors that send messages to our brain and allows us to realize that it was another arm, and not our own, that performed the action.

However, it was discovered that if the arms are numbed so that there is no sensory message to the brain, there is no difference at all in the brain as to whether "you" pick an object, or whether someone else did it.

If you keep up with the TV series "House", you might have seen an episode where a man had his hand blown off as he was reaching to grab a child. His muscles remained in that clenched, spasmed conditions for many years after. Dr. House "cured" the problem by taking the man's good arm in front of a mirror in a box, and his stub arm was also in the box, but he only saw the mirror reflection of his good arm. House asked him to then clench and relax his good fist.

Within seconds, the man's muscles on his stub arm began to relax. This has actually been performed as a cure for such people, but not so miraculously as on the TV series. People actually were able to relax muscles on disabled limbs simply by flexing the muscles in their good limbs and watching that same action in the mirror image, which their brain told them was the other limb!

This is so powerful that when we select heroes or leaders, we not only "identify with" them, but we develop actual mirror images so that we "become what we behold"!

This collective identification with "American Idols" can lead to what Hoffer called "estrangement from the self". The power of mimicry is so powerful that certain behaviors are selected and coordinated to the exclusion of other behaviors, leading to ultimate death of a species or culture.

As we see from history, humans have little problem with organizing and centralizing cultures. They're quite good at it. There's Egypt, Babylon, Persia, etc, all of which showed greater capacity for larger organization.

The problem is, the greater the capacity for imitation and centralization, the less ability for freedom to adapt to change as individuals. If there is a "higher intelligence" that directs such activities, that intelligence would actually tend to produce, no collective centralism, but an increasing tendency toward diversity.

In other words, if human intelligence naturally tends to centralize its knowledge and eliminate diversity, there would have to be a kind of "antibody" or "inoculation" that would tend to cause a reversal of the process.

In short, all attempts to discover order and harmony in the universe would tend to reveal that "God throws dice", as Einstein said.

In "Guns, Germs, and Steel", Jared Diamond points out that empires grew from the Middle Eastern sections around Sumer and Babylon because of geography. The environment favored a type of grain that was gradually harvested, and in the harvest, the people naturally selected those grains with the biggest heads and healthiest "fruit" for re-planting. Wheat and oats went through a natural selection process that created larger, healthier crops.

At the same time, said Diamond, the people domesticated various animals such as cows, oxen, horses, chickens, pigs, sheep, and in living alongside them, the people exchanged "germs" and viruses with the farm animals, so that when they invade other countries, they actually caused widespread death and destruction among cultures that had not raised such animals.

In this growth and adaptation of favorable environments that led to empires, we have the history of the Jews, who developed strict dietary, religious, and civil laws as a result of the harsh, demanding environment of the desert. It was, in fact, these very wandering Bedouin types that became highly influential in their cultures because they were, in fact, not able to completely integrate with a fixed, specific environment..

While these Bedouin societies did carry their animals with them and were "cross pollinated" with the germs of the animals, they develop certain resistance to infectious diseases as they traveled to new areas, and their strict dietary laws allowed them to maintain certain resistance to diseases caused by less strict observance.

The general difference between Jewish culture and the usual cultures, is that, while other cultures developed alongside their environment, Israel was not allowed to inhabit a "Promised Land" until they learned to behave in a way deserving of the land. This is a reversal of the general process of social evolutionary development.

Their history suggests they were unable to keep the laws they were given, so they were forced to constantly adapt to their environments in which they found themselves. Not only to the environment, but to the cultures in which they found themselves.

If, in fact, as Paul said, the natural mind is enmity against God and cannot keep God's laws, the natural result would be a continual increase in diversity and individual responses toward external problems. As we see in the biblical book of "Judges", every man did what was right in his own eyes.

This very inability to adapt to a collective ideology by a "stubborn and stiff necked" people, actually created a kind of cultural "antibody" to the various empires and god-kings that had evolved by natural processes of growth. As historian Max DiMont points out in "The Indestructible Jews":

"First, there have been twenty to thirty civilized societies in the history of mankind, the number depending on how one defines a civilization....Then the civilization has either stagnated or disintegrated. The Jews are seemingly the only exception to this 'rule'.
"Second, the moment a people lost its country through war or some other calamity, that people either disappeared as an ethnic entity or regressed into a meaningless existence....Against the odds of history(Jews)survived for two thousand years without a country of their own.
"Finally, no people except the Jews have ever managed to create a culture in exile. The Jews, however, in exile, created not just one, but six different cultures, one in each of the six major civilizations within which their history flowed".

In fact, it is DiMont's thesis that the Jews were actually created to be scattered, to become a "diaspora" that spread the basis of their culture around the world. If so, it makes a lot of sense, because it was a process that forced groups to constantly re-adapt to their environment in more individualized ways, to "repent" as it were.

In more modern language, we might say that the Jews were created to "inform" civilizations, to act as the "salt" that retarded the "leaven" of excessive growth.

What is "sin" called in the Old testament? Leaven. What does leaven do? It expands and grows until it consumes all available fuel, and then it collapses of its own weight. And if those who seek truth are the "salt of the earth", we know that salt acts to retard the excessive growth of leavening.

What emerges is NOT the traditional ideas of growth, proselytizing, and narcissistic expansion of centralized "God-Kings" as Christianity tries to tell us, but rather its opposite, a constant tendency toward greater individuality, uncertainty, breakdown, and re-forming according to new information.

In short, Christianity and government is the "Borg", while intelligence favors individual adaptation to changes within the environment.

Does Conscience Tell You Right From Wrong?

2010-02-24T06:48:00.000-08:00

A few years ago, I was introduced to the idea of transhumanism, as presented by Ray Kurzweil. The idea is that soon, technology will enable us to "upload" ourselves into a computer or robot consisting of enough artificial intelligence that we will no longer have to worry about dying.

When I pointed out that this was nothing more than an ancient religious impulse, I enraged a few "transhumanists" who said there certainly was no religious intent! Far from it!

I pointed out that, while it might not have been a conscious intent, it is still merely a continuation of the religious impulse. After, all what is religion, but an attempt to create a concept of men, give it a physical body, and "upload" ourselves into it so we can escape death?

By the same token, what is government, if not the same thing? Kurzweil talks of physical "substrates" into which human intelligence can be uploaded, even if not strictly into the mechanical processes we envision today.

It all boils down tho the same thing. We create a decision process, we become part of the decision process, and our lives become less than the decision process itself.

But why the mechanical extension? Why did we select this process of organization? Philip Slater, in a book called "EarthWalk", which I highly recommend, says this:

"A machinelike response in the face of danger had no real value until men began to make war on each other--it was of no use either in hunting or in surviving other predators. The most mechanical peoples won over those less so, so that a profound cultural selection took place....When man invented the machine, for which there is no external model in nature, he invented it in his own image. The human is the only animal programmed to ignore the very feedback that it is simultaneously programmed to utilize, which is why only a human can make an animal, or another human, neurotic or crazy."

If humans can create systems large enough, sufficient to enable others to sacrifice themselves to a common cause greater than themselves, then they have achieved a form of "immortality" by "uploading" themselves into the greater system, or as Hoffer wrote, becoming "estranged from self".

The "internal circuitry" by which the group operates assumes greater importance than the "internal circuitry" of the individual. This extension of individual "circuitry" into a greater collective "circuitry" is also known as narcissism, a process by which a person extends himself eternally, in a linear fashion, into his environment. It is also known as the proselytizing zeal.

"God" becomes an extension of ourselves, which is, by definition, idolatry.

But is there something greater than ourselves? A professor at MIT many years ago named Ed Fredkin, decided that the atoms, electrons, protons, etc, were not actually physical sub-atomic structures, but were actually bits of information. Fredkin developed an idea of the universe as "digital physics", with the universe itself as a kind of cosmic computer in which we can't know the outcome of anything until the program actually runs.

Is it possible we are part of an intelligence greater than our own individual thought processes? Well, there is an emergent branch of study called "swarm theory". I first didn't care for this study because it implied, to me, collectivism and majority rule, which my conservative mind rejected. But I found it quite interesting, because it does suggest a power to "compute" solutions that are actually greater than individual calculations.

For example, one professor took a large jar of jelly beans and asked the class to each submit an estimate of how many jelly beans were in the jar. While some of the calculations were fairly close, the professor discovered that by taking the average of the class estimates, the estimated value was surprisingly close to the actual number.

Another example of the "swarm" intelligence was shown when researchers placed a dish of sugar water outside a beehive. The swarm of bees soon found it. Next day, a dish was placed twice as far away. The swarm soon found it. After several days of this, the researchers found that when they set the dishes out at these exact measured distances, they soon found the bees waiting for them. The swarm had somehow computed the next step in a mathematical series.

The point is, this computation process was not subject to the control of one bee, but a process of collaboration among the bees to determine a process that was precisely regulated mathematically.

David Bloom, in an imaginative book called "Global Brain", points out that even ancient bacteria exhibited an ability to adapt and compute necessary changes to their environment!

Quoting from the studies of Eshel Ben-Jacob, Bloom points out that Darwin's theory of evolution regarding random mutations, may soon give way to a far more complex concept.

"Since 1974...a growing body of evidence had accumulated indicating that useful bacterial mutations are not completely random. By 1999, over 880 studies suggested that some mutations might, in fact, be genetic alterations 'custom tailored' to overcome emergencies.
"Ben-Jacob's studies suggested that far more than the self organization of inanimate matter was at work within the petri dish...Ben-Jacob contended that the package of genes carried by each individual bacterium is more than a mere carrier of construction plans(see James' embedded video, "Bruce Lipton and 'Biology of Perception'"). he wrote that genome can 'recognize difficulties and formulate problems'....what's more, the genetic bundle seemed to accomplish something even computers cannot achieve. Said Ben-Jacob, 'The genome makes calculations and changes itself according to the outcome'....Concluded Ben-Jacob, in the bacteria's case 'evolutionary progress is not a result of successful accumulation of mistakes, but is rather the outcome of designed creative processes'."

Assuming such an intelligence, its integrative powers would NOT be dependent on individual choice, but would actually involve a level of complexity of which we could not even be aware. In fact, the effort to control such intelligence and reduce it to our pitiful human concepts, whether we represent it as "God" or "natural selection" would be woefully inadequate.

Such an intelligence, based on the complex integration of life forms, would operate on a much higher level than basic human awareness and organization.

For example, I've often referred to Matthew 10:34-38. Jesus said that the effort to obey him would result in a "sword", a cutting or slicing apart of ideas until a man's enemies would be those of his own household.

Does this process have a biological advantage? Bloom makes an interesting comparison in regard to biology:

"Among the Yanomamo, the biggest clashes are between family members--and between the groups they head. How could evolution favor feuds which current theory says should never be? Creative bickering has been honed by natural selection because, in pitting father against son and brother against brother, it opens up new avenues to genes, clans, cliques and species. It slices through genetic bonds to generate diversity".

Another biblical passage similar to this is found in 1 Corinthians 1:27-29. If "God chose the foolish things to confound the wise, the weak to confound the mighty, and base things which are rejected by the "builders" that "no flesh should glory in his presence", we are not talking about anything subject to human concepts and organization. In fact, we are talking about things which would, to all intents and purposes, appear as random processes, or "natural selection".

It simply would not be subject to human conceptual control.

Does that mean there is a God? No. But it does indicate that we are part of a process of intelligence that operates across species barriers and constantly re-organizes our life processes by both separation and integration.

If truth itself transcends theoremhood, then it is quite possible that there is a process of "truth" that is directing our lives in a way not subject to human thought control.

"For my ways are not your ways, neither are my thoughts your thoughts...."

Pascal's Wager

2010-02-23T06:59:00.000-08:00

You're probably familiar with this. Pascal, mathematician and philosopher, believed that it is best to behave as if there is a God, since if you do not believe, you stand to lose everything should you not believe in God, and you gain everything if you believe. The favorable odds, for Pascal, was to believe.

Richard Dawkins, in "The God Delusion" makes interesting arguments against Pascal's conclusions.

1.Can you decide to believe something as a matter of policy? Hey, it "makes sense"?
If you happen to be Ayn Rand, or Ex-Android, it makes perfect sense not to believe in God. Any behavior on Ms Rand's part, therefore, could not be based on actual belief, but on a statistical probability that it is best in the long run to believe there is a God and behave accordingly.

2.If God is all knowing(omniscient), he's going to know whether or not you truly believe, or whether you're "covering your ass". He might not be happy if you truly do not believe.

3. What if you believe in the wrong God? After all, if we DO make a decision to believe in God, we're assuming that the God we choose is THE God, the one that counts, but what if we're wrong? Then we stand to lose everything by believing.

If we follow Pascal's reasoning, therefore, we must conclude that we are choosing the correct God to believe in, and that God is not concerned with the reasons for our believing, and that we can arrive at correct conclusions as to how we should organize socially in obedience to God.

Think about it. Every choice we make must be based on assumptions that we cannot prove, and since the whole process is based on a statistical probability, we would tend to conclude that "God" is represented by the largest number of people who organize according to a certain process.

Basically, by following Pascal's wager, we have based our entire faith on what is essentially a house of mirrors. "All these people can't be wrong".

But what if they are wrong? By believing, we still cover our bets. So what if there's over 38,000 versions of Christianity? The important thing is to BELIEVE!

See what Eric Hoffer says about this in "The True Believer":

"He who, like Pascal, finds precise reasons for the effectiveness of Christian doctrine has also found the reasons for the effectiveness of Communist, Nazi, and nationalist doctrine. However different the holy causes people die for, they perhaps die basically for the same thing".

In other words, if belief is the only requirement and truth has no value, then it becomes possible to act in any fashion toward our neighbors, as long as we find justification in the rules that make us "special".

And what makes us "special"? Those who believe as we do. What we have done is to multiply ignorance based on statistical probability.

Hoffer refers to this as "estrangement from the self" or renouncing the self. We find our truth in the number of those who behave and believe as we do, and we find our truth from our ability to "convert" others. As Hoffer writes:

"When we lose our individual independence in the corporateness of a mass movement, we find a new freedom--freedom to hate, bully lie, torture, murder and betray without shame and remorse....The hatred and cruelty which have their source in selfishness are ineffectual things compared with the venom and ruthlessness born of selflessness.
"When we see the bloodshed, terror, and destruction born of such generous enthusiasms as the love of God, love of Christ, love of a nation, compassion for the oppressed and so on, we usually blame this shameful perversion on a cynical, power-hungry leadership. Actually, it is the unification set in motion by these enthusiasms, rather than the manipulations of a scheming leadership, that transmutes noble impulses into a reality of hatred and violence. The deindividualization which is a prerequisite for thorough integration and selfless dedication is also, to a considerable extent, a process of dehumanization. The torture chamber is a corporate institution".

Pascal's wager, by reducing everything to "covering your bets", places emphasis on group survival and even the necessity to sacrifice oneself for the "greater good", and with no proof that our sacrifice served any purpose other than a majority assumption based on ignorance.

The natural human tendency, when we believe in anything greater than ourselves, is to assume that that "greater" something must somehow be know by a process of organization, a process of thought that transcends us as individuals. If we believe our "salvation" lies in collective belief in Christianity, we will see it as our duty to either covert, condemn, or destroy those who believe otherwise. The same would follow for Naziism, Communism, or any form of nationalism.

The belief in truth actually demands what seems to be a contradiction to the normal process of reason. The belief in truth CANNOT be equivalent to "estrangement from self", but actually the acceptance of the self, as an individual, as a moral agent, as a person with the right to challenge the majority.

I pointed out earlier that if you can perfectly define "God", then that very definition can ultimately be programmed into a computer, so that there is no humanly definable difference between "God" and the computer we have programmed.

You might instantly object, "Of course there is a difference between God and a computer". Here's the problem: once you can define that difference, the difference itself can be programmed into the computer! But it is impossible to ever define all the differences between "God" and a computer, therefore, no computer can ever be the same as "God".

If that is true, then we must conclude the same thing for any religion, government, or any concept of humankind that attempts to represent God! The more you attempt to define God within any human concept, the more differences you will discover among your own selves!

You will logically end up with over 38,000 versions of Christianity, and the number increases every day!

Here is the point: whether you believe in God or don;t believe in God, you are merely choosing a concept in which to believe, and whatever concept you believe, however sharp or accurate, will STILL end up in an even greater number of ideas.

Even Ayn Rand was not invulnerable. her philosophy has branched into similar but disagreeing philosophies, with the Murray Rothbard branch, the "beltway libertarian" branch, the anarchist branch, the Christian libertarian branch, etc..

We are left, therefore, with the same conclusions as in Romans 8:7, Matthew 10:34-38, and 2 Peter 2:19, and of course Matthew 24:23.

In the search for truth, or for God, assuming God is truth(and why would you choose a God who is not truth?), there is one, AND ONLY ONE, correct choice you can ever make: be free from men. Follow no man, choose to accept all others as equal to you, and yourself as equal to all others.

Whether you believe in "God" or not, you have that one correct choice. All others are false.

Okay, Freedom and Law?

2010-02-22T07:04:00.000-08:00

In my "Freedom" essay below, Byker Bob makes a thoughtful comment:
"...all we really know is that God is looking out for the long term spiritual good of all his children".

Ex-Android, responds, and with sound logic(I'm not "picking" on either person, just trying to make a point):

"Hah! And you don't even 'really know' that. You believe--you don;t know. This is a common error among many theists".

When I read Byker Bob's statement, I think of Romans 8:28: "And we know that all things work together for good to them that love God..."

Do we actually "know" that? If we do, it will not be according to any humanly devised system of thought or decisions, because that very statement leads into the very idea that in fact we CANNOT make such decisions for ourselves!

Even if we look at this statement from the viewpoint of Godel's theorem, it is certainly possible to know something yourself, to actually understand that it is so, BUT once you attempt to define it within any process of organization or decisions leading to absolute truth or to God, it simple falls apart. It is certainly possible to know something for a fact, but not be able to prove it.

And because it is not subject to such proofs, it cannot be subject to the power and control of men. Do I know that there is a God? No, I don't, but even if i did, if God was directly revealed to me, it would still give me no power over the lives and decisions of other human beings, and that is exactly what Paul tells us, following into the rest of chapter 8 and 9.

That was the basic logical flaw of John Calvin, who took Romans 8:29-30 and then decided that he himself, with no proof whatever, was God's chosen, to establish rules over others. he had no such proof, and no man can claim such proof, as we know from our experience with HWA.

So, if "all things work together for the good", then that "good" will not be the result of my attempts to rule or control others in God's name, since as Paul points out, God already knows who will work in "His" name.

So, Ex-Android makes a valid point. We CANNOT know by any process of human "computation", by any process of human reason, that there is a God, and that all things work together for good. If such things WERE subject to the power of human reason, we could cancel the rest of Romans chapter 8 and 9, and Ex-Android would, in fact, be wrong! But he's not. In fact, he has just agreed with the conclusions of Paul in that regard.

Okay, if we can't know these things, and if we can't organize according to these things, what's the purpose for it all, if there is a purpose?

If no human can claim to represent "absolute truth" either in the form of religion or government(and even Ayn Rand would agree on that point), then the "sacrifice of Christ" can only have one purpose: that because he died innocently, his example is one to us that we should not condemn others under human laws and human concepts!

Under U.S. Constitutional law, Fifth Amendment, no person is to be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law. That is a protection from federal government. We see the same clause repeated as a protection from state governments in the Fourteenth Amendment.

Notice that the "due process" package deals with "persons", not 'the people" in regard to passing laws, but with protections of persons, individuals who are accused of breaking the law.

These protections are extended under the Fifth Amendment and include not only the right to re main silent and not to give evidence against himself, but protection from double jeopardy and the right to have just compensation for property taken.

Also, we see protections for persons under the Sixth, Seventh, and Eighth Amendments.

But notice that these examples of due process protection of persons is included in Old Testament law!

Isaiah 54:17: No weapon that is formed against thee shall prosper, and every tongue that shall rise against thee in judgement thou shalt condemn.
"This is the heritage of the servants of the Lord, and their righteousness is of me, saith the Lord".

This is the presumption of innocence, long established as part of "due process" protection.
It is part of the right of the individual not to incriminate himself before his accusers.
In other words, because there is no power of man to represent "absolute truth" or an absolute God, it is necessary for ALL collective powers of men to presume the innocence of the accused with God's protection!

Further protection, under OT law, is given in Isaiah 50:8:

"He is near that justifieth me; who will contend with me? Let us stand together. Who is mine adversary? Let him come near to me.
"Behold, the Lord God will help me; who is he that shall condemn me?"

Sound familiar? How about the Sixth Amendment?

"In ALL criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the state...."

First, you can't be forced to incriminate yourself. Why? Because God stands on the side of the accused, not the accuser! Look at every state Constitution of the U.S. Every single one of them recognize the sovereignty of God in some form! That's due process of law!

The Bible is not about any person's right to rule in the name of God, but about EVERY person's right to live freely outside the condemnation of law!

Think about this: every attempt of every human has resulted in more and more confusion and uncertainty regarding the existence of God. But that is merely the logical result of Romans 8:7.

So what does that tell you about law? About all law, church or state? It tells you that no power, either church or state, has the right to convict or condemn you, without recognizing your right to face a legitimate accuser who can claim harm for your actions!

Since there exists no human power that can organize in God's name, or in the power of the state to represent truth, there can be no person who can say truthfully to you, "Here is Christ. Come follow me". And because all fifty US states recognize the sovereignty of God, they must bow to that same individual freedom which you possess!

In other words, the courts are bound by oath or affirmation, since all states recognize the sovereignty of God, to see to it that "all things work together for the good to those that love God", whether they like it or not!

If you choose, as an individual, to live according to principles of truth and goodness, you have the right to expect the state to protect that choice!

Who is the example? Jesus. he died innocently, prosecuted and put to death, even though he remained silent, even though there were no witnesses against him, even though he had harmed no one.

As Supreme Court Justice Abe Fortas said: "But it(the state) has no right to compel the sovereign individual to surrender or impair his right of self defense....Mea culpa belongs to a man and his God. It is a plea that cannot be extracted from free men by human authority. To require it is to insist that the state is the superior of the individuals who compose it, instead of their instrument".

THAT is the essence of Old and New testament law, as derived from the Bible itself! Why?
Because "God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son...."

Was there a God? Did it happen? I can't prove it did, and the law can't prove it didn't, and as long as the law recognizes the sovereignty of God, I have the right to declare myself free as long as I harm no other.

Paradise Recovered

2010-02-20T07:37:00.000-08:00

James here. I received a letter some time back from a Andie Becker. I wish to share an excerpt of this letter here on this blog.....

12/03/2009

Hello.

My name is Andie Redwine, and I am the writer and producer for a new film coming out in 2010 called Paradise Recovered. I was born and raised in the Worldwide Church of God and left at the age of 18. This website was amazingly helpful at assisting me in understanding what had happened to me in the group. Ed Mentell was incredibly helpful as I have spent ten years gathering research, doing some personal healing, and writing a script that I think can be universally helpful to people who have been abused by religious groups.

I am not sure what cast of characters exist on this site these days, as I have not honestly had the time to check the site in over a year, and I am not sure if there are still listservs that people are in. We are starting to assemble some test audiences, and I thought that it might be interesting to have a few of the contributors of this board look over our film and give some feedback.

This isn't an anti-faith film, but it is a pro-freedom film. That is, some choose faith in the film and some do not, and no one is condemned for either choice. But we'd like your opinions on it, and honestly, I made the film to pay back the incredible debt that I owe to people like Ed Mentell and the late John Trechek.

See the trailer here: www.paradiserecovered.com

Idolatry

2010-02-20T06:22:00.000-08:00

Okay, you know this one, right? Second commandment, Exodus 20:4-5. No need to quote it.

That would include any icon, any image created by man, any conceptual framework of knowledge created by man that claims to represent God.

Can we actually choose such a system by any method of human reason? No, not only from the viewpoint of the second commandment, but it is now a mathematical theorem that there exists no process of axiomatic formal reasoning by which we may predictable develop ANY SYSTEM at all that can represent God?

We can know, therefore, as a matter of mathematical proofs, that we not only should not or "shall not", but in fact we CAN NOT create any human made system that represents God in truth!

Which brings us to the question which the Pharisees asked Jesus: "Is it lawful to pay taxes to Caesar?"

Who was Caesar? A self proclaimed god-king, the "Son of God" as recognized by Roman tradition.

How did Jesus respond? he asked for a coin and then asked "Whose image is on this coin?"
Is there a law regarding images? We just referred to it, above. Is it therefore lawful to pay taxes to any system that claims authority over men in the name of God?

Obviously, the answer is "NO!".

Let's look at it another way: First commandment, "Thou shalt have no other gods before me".

All, right, just for argument, which is the one true god? Give me a definition, one that stands up to all logical examination. You will find it impossible to give such a definition. We are left with one logical conclusion, therefore., which is summed up in the second commandment! Nothing created in the "image of God", nothing created by the hands of man, by the iconic concepts of man, by any structure created by man. If you can't define it, there is no reason whatever for me to bow down to it.

And now, thanks to Godel's theorem, we have mathematical proof that no such system can ever be developed! Godel's theorem is merely the mathematical recognition of the second commandment. If you can prove there IS such a system that demands our obedience, you've got me, but you can't. You have no way of proving it. Therefore, to "have no other gods before me" is to be free of all human systems of power and authority, and that would include churches that claim to represent the "true God".

We are left, therefore, with the logic of Jesus' statement in Matthew 24:23. Don't follow any man who says "here is Christ, or there".

Ayn Rand, in the person of the fictional character, Howard Roark, had this marvelous statement which Roark presented at his trial:

"Thousands of years ago, the first man discovered how to make fire. he was probably burned at the stake he had taught his brothers to light. He was considered an evildoer who had dealt with a demon mankind dreaded."

"That man, the unsubmissive and first, stands in the opening chapter of every legend mankind has recorded about its beginning....Throughout the centuries there were men who took first steps down new roads armed with nothing but their own vision. Their goals differed, but they all had this in common: that the step was first, the road new, the vision unborrowed, and the response they received--hatred. The great creators-the thinkers, the artists, the scientists, the inventors--stood alone against the men of their time".

Ayn Rand said there is no God, even though she did refer favorably to the idea of God a few times in "The Fountainhead".

If you claim to follow God, you must follow truth, and if you follow truth, you cannot bow to the whims and false gods of men. If you follow anything less than truth, you follow idols. If you even follow the collective concepts of men for ANY reason other than proven truth, you practice idolatry. No "borrowed vision", no "second-handers".

And what was HWA, other than a flim flam, con man, scam artist, liar and worse? He was an idol, created by men as a "bridge" to God. Of course, he encouraged the bridge, but he, like all men who claim to represent something higher than themselves, are idols.

So what is the truth? If you look for it within ANY collective concept of men, whether of government, religion, or even the bible itself, you will be wrong.

John 14:17; "Even the spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive". Truth is not a "given". It is not any process of rational thought which we can organize and structure and place other men under our control. It is not subject to the power of men, as Godel' theorem now tells us. The "world" cannot receive it.

Matthew 7:14: "because strait is the gate, and narrow is the way, which leadeth unto life, and few there be that find it". Not "choose it". FIND IT.

There is only one possible truth you can derive from that. You are free from men! Even more, if you "bow down" to any concept, any icon chosen among men, you commit idolatry.

If ANY "church of God" or "church of Christ", or whatever title, claims it represents the truth, we now know it is a mathematical impossibility to make such a claim! There never was such a system. Even assuming that Israel was actually chosen to fulfill such a requirement, we know even from biblical statements that the people could not live up to it.

You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free. Simple stuff. The truth is, no power of man has the right to control you unless you harm another. The only power of the state is "vengeance", and that vengeance is only enforced AFTER the people themselves seek other alternatives.

Simple, simple, simple.

From Ayn Rand:

"It's only a matter of discovering the lever. If you learn how to rule one man's soul, you can get the rest of mankind. It's the soul, peter, the soul. Not whips or swords or fire or guns. That's why the Caesars, the Attilas, the Napoleons were fools and did not last. We will. The soul, Peter, is that which can't be ruled. It must be broken. Drive a wedge in, get your fingers on it--and the man is yours. You won't need a whip--he'll bring it to you and ask to be whipped. Set him in reverse--and his own mechanism will do your work for you. Use him against himself. Want to know how it's done?....Make man feel small. Make him feel guilty. Kill his aspiration and his integrity..The worst among you gropes for an ideal in his own twisted way. Kill integrity by internal corruption. Use it against itself. Direct it toward a goal destructive of all integrity. Preach selflessness. Tell man that he must live for others. Tell men that altruism is the ideal...Since the Supreme Ideal is beyond his grasp, he gives up eventually all ideals, all aspiration, all sense of personal value....To preserve one's integrity is a hard battle. Why preserve that which one knows to be corrupt already?...Kill man's sense of values. Kill his capacity to recognize greatness or achieve it. Great men can't be ruled. We don't want any great men....Where there's service, there's someone being served. The man who speaks to you of sacrifice speaks of slaves and masters. And intends to be the master."

"And if any man says to you, Lo, here is Christ, or there, believe it not".

What is "Freedom"?

2010-02-19T07:01:00.000-08:00

Right off the bat, I don't think anyone can really define freedom. Questeruk posed an interesting dilemma, when I stated that "freedom is the absence of absolute knowledge". Questeruk then stated that God is both absolute and free.

I found this response interesting because that is what Ernest Martin said when I discussed the matter with him.

Ernest Martin was a brilliant man, but there were three basic flaws in his conclusion:
1.We can't prove there is a God
2.We have great difficulty in defining "absolute"
3.We have the same problem with "freedom".

This leads to yet another problem: how can anything be both "absolute" and "free"?

If it is absolute, the very absolute itself would provide a limit to what could be done beyond that absolute. If it were free to select otherwise, the limitation of choice itself would not be absolute.

Dr. Martin responded to me then that freedom is like a length of rope or "tether" to which we are bound. To the extent we can move within the length of that tether, we are free, but we are NOT free to move beyond the length of that tether.

I said, "That's all well and good, but now tell me how long the tether is. Can you define the limits?"

There was a man named Georg Cantor who once believed that God would reveal himself to Cantor if he, Cantor, studied into the nature of infinity and was able to offer definitions.

The problem was, Cantor began to realize not only infinity, but an infinity of infinities! Even worse, in trying to list all "real numbers" by the use of a diagonal method, he showed that it was impossible to do so. The list would always remain incomplete.

A "real" number corresponds to what is also called "irrational numbers", like "pi" the square root of 2, 3, etc.

The Euclidean line is said to contain an infinity of points, each corresponding to a number within the infinite continuum. One problem: where is the point corresponding to "pi", and the square root of 2, etc? Not only did there appear to be gaps in the Euclidean line, but the number of gaps seemed to be infinite.

Pythagoras was rather disturbed by this fact when one of his students showed there was a problem with his theorem, A squared plus B squared equals C squared.

Pythagoras's student said, "Sir, what if 'C squared' is '2'? What is the square root of 2?" Legend has it that Pythagoras had the student drowned to keep his mouth shut.

So, in the most formal system of proofs we have, there doesn't seem to exist a process that contains all the other facts within that process which is non-contradictory, or which can be summed up in a "rational" statement(the ratio between two numbers).

So, it seems impossible to define "absolute" as a point beyond which human knowledge cannot go, which would appear to show that we are "free' to choose among an infinite set of alternatives which we can define. But then, if we can't define those alternatives, we cannot choose among them.

Among all the infinity of alternatives, therefore, we can't define "God", because "God" would therefore be the sum of those alternatives. We can't even list all real numbers, much less define God! Any attempt to define God would naturally result in the infinity of alternatives we see around us today.

You can't define a procedure to get from "here" to "God", because you would first have to define limits as to what God is, and that would place God within the measurements of calculus, since calculus seeks to define the number of steps or "decisions" approaching a limit.

Of course, algorithms follow this process by which we define decisions or decision procedures to "terminate" at a certain limit or goal. Regarding truth as one complete, consistent system of thought, might be a useful idea of either "God" or "absolute", but Alan Turing demonstrated there is simply no way by which a computation can prove all such truth(s), as did Godel's theorem.

If you seek to define 'freedom' therefore, you must define it strictly within the context of human definitions. It cannot in any sense be applied to God, since there is no evidence of the existence of God.

That, basically is what Paul told us. If there exists a God, any decisions procedures by which we may hope to get "there" would be completely subject to that God and with "God's" knowledge.

If there is such a decision procedure, that procedure is programmable, which means it can be reduced to human concepts and ideas, which means that "God" is therefore either created by, or creatable by, human ideas. It would necessarily mean that "God" is less than man.

On the other hand, to believe in God is to believe that there does exist knowledge and truth that transcends the knowledge of men. That, in essence, is what Godel's theorem tells us: truth transcends theoremhood. Truth exists as a context of completeness and consistency beyond the power of humans to regulate or measure in one system.

Does truth exist in such a complete and consistent form? If it does, we can't get there from here.
Does God exist as the sum of truth? If "He" does, we can't get there from here.

Paul's statements in Romans 8 and 9 are fully consistent with that fact.

No One Has "Spirit of Christ?"

2010-02-18T11:49:00.000-08:00

Corky continues to privde excellent fodder for a bit of intellectual cud chewing.

Does anyone today have "the spirit of Christ", of the "Holy Spirit"? Even if there is a chance they did, it would be impossible to prove, so the argument would be similar to the atheist's argument concerning God. Since there's no evidence of such a being, we can safely conclude that no one possesses any spirit of God, or spirit of Christ, or Holy Spirit today.

Corky brings up a solid point regarding Romans 8:7 Might as well quote it to get into the "spirit" of things.

"Because the carnal mind is enmity against God: for it is not subject to the law of God, neither indeed can be".

And Corky quotes the next compelling statement: "But ye are not in the flesh, but in the spirit, if so be that the spirit of God dwell in you. Now if any man have not the spirit of Christ, he is none of his".

But who exactly is Paul referring to here? Who is "ye"? The qualifying statement here is "IF so be that the spirit of God dwell in you".

Notice also just below that in Romans 8:11: But IF the spirit of him that raised up Jesus from the dead dwell in you..."

Qualifying statements that lack definition. Paul refers to "IF" and then refers to "WE", as he writes about the "spirit of God" or the "spirit of Christ".

How would we even begin to possibly identify these people? IF the natural mind is enmity against God, what possible process would we use to know who is the "we" to whom Paul refers?
If you took my word for it, how would you know I was telling you the truth? If I took your word for it, how would I know for sure, since our natural minds are enmity against God? How could I possibly prove that "you" somehow have knowledge that "I" don't possess?

Corky gives pretty much the correct answer: you can't know. There is no way of knowing. And even if someone told you truly that he had the "spirit of Christ", it would be meaningless to you in any certain, definable terms.

If you follow Paul's argument from this point and you believe he's going to say, it's a matter of free will choice, you will be disappointed, because in verse 20 he begins:

"For the creature was made subject to vanity, not willingly, but by reason of him who hath subjected the same in hope."

Notice then that Paul refers to "ourselves also, which have the firstfruits of the spirit..."

Paul writes of a group having "firstfruits of the spirit", and Corky seems to agree in principle with this by saying that if anyone claims to have the "spirit of Christ' he's a liar. I'll agree with that, except to say that, from any possible proof he might offer, he's VERY PROBABLY a liar.

Of course, if he told me, "I have the Holy Spirit, and you must follow me", I could say with authority, "You're a liar".

This is so because, as Corky pointed out in quoting Romans 8:9, the big word is IF. And how do we know who is in possession of this "spirit"?

Well, Paul gets to his big "gotcha!" in Romans 8:29-30:

"For whom he did foreknow, he also did predestinate to be comformed to the image of his son...."

So how do you know if "so be that his spirit dwell in you"? You don;t, since God seems to be the only one who makes the choice.

Paul closes off all avenues. First he says the natural mind is enmity against God and cannot be subject to God's laws, and then he takes it to the conclusion that God foreknows, predestines, calls, and glorifies his children. And to top it off, he knew who they were from the very beginning(Ephesians 1:4).

So, where is the "free will" or freedom in that? There is only one possible freedom that can be gained from it. You are free from the proposed religions of all humans. Paul's logic completely cancels all possibility, not only of you knowing by your process of reason which is the true church, but even if you could, God already knows who they are! Consequently, as Corky points out, you must be free of all religions!

In other words, any choice you make will simply be your choice, and that's the very best you can say about it. If you get a bunch of people to agree with you and they give you a lot of money, I applaud your salesmanship, but I'm not going to be following you, because I know better.

Paul declares this freedom from men in Romans 8:33: "Who can lay anything to the charge of God's elect? It is God that justifieth".

Who ARE God's elect? Nobody knows! Nobody CAN know! Therefore, it is perfectly reasonable, by any standard you wish, to say, "I am born of God", and no government can say otherwise!
You're free from men and from the governments and religions of men!

You think not? Prove to me there is no God. You can't! I can't prove there is one, so, all I have to do is say I believe in God, and you cannot say other wise except by legalizing your authority with the force of arms, "mobocracy".

I am not bound to any humanly organized religion because Paul says it's impossible to know which is the true religion, and God does the choosing anyway. Jesus says if any man says "Here is Christ, or there, believe it not", so I don't have to accept anybody's statement that s/he represents God.

1 Corinthians 7;23: "ye are bought with a price; be not ye the servants of men"
1 Corinthians 9:19: "For though I be free from all men..."

1 Corinthians 10:29: "...why is my liberty judged of another man's conscience?"

Colossians 2:8 "beware lest any man spoil you through philosophy and vain deceit, after the tradition of men, after the rudiments of the world, and not after Christ".

"After Christ"? What did he teach? Not to follow any man who said "here is Christ". No point in it, because you couldn't prove it if he did serve Christ.

Col. 2:16: let no man therefore judge you in meat, or in drink, or in respect of an holyday, or of the new moon, of of the sabbath days".

Oh, and here's one for the "nice" people: "Let no man beguile you of your reward in a voluntary humility and worshipping of angels, intruding into those things which he hath not seen, vainly puffed up by his fleshly mind".

Col 3:3: "For ye are dead, and your life is hid with Christ in God".

Dead? No law can punish a dead man, neither human law nor God's law. That's total habeas corpus. No law can "have the body".

In terms of liberty, freedom, and free will, there is only one correct choice you can make: freedom from men, freedom from the ideas of men, freedom from the religions of men, and freedom from the governments of men.

How do you choose freedom from "God's will" when you can't even prove there is a God?

Answer me that.

Corky's Excellent Points

2010-02-18T07:29:00.000-08:00

Again, I'm not picking on Corky, but pointing out that he actually does elevate the whole discussion to a level wothy of dialogue. And his points are excellent. Good, well reasoned responses to get folks to reach for that higher level of understanding.

Of course he and I don't agree, but that's what intelligent discussion is all about. It's about growth, learning, dialogue and sharing.
The points Corky makes that really intrigues me is in regard to government and law. For example, he points out that the Sadducees urged the people to submit to Roman law, not to revolt, but to have patience, that the "zealots" were the ones that usually caused trouble.

In fact, the Sadducees were not well thought of by the general population of Israel. They were considered the Quislings of the Roman government, puppets who ruled simply by the permission of the Roman Empire.

Even worse were the publicans, or tax collectors, who were generally lumped together with "sinners" in the New testament. Jesus associated with "publicans and sinners".

In fact, Jesus told his followers in Matthew 18 that, if a person didn't want to settle matters within the peaceful and non-vengeful treatment of the church or community, that person was to be shunned as a "gentile or tax collector". Not much of a statement in support of Sadducee government.

Pharisees, on the other hand, in spite of their general legislative popularity, were condemned as "Hypocrites!". Jesus said to call no man rabbi, and rabbis were Pharisees. Even though they sat in Moses' seat, they were not to be called "rabbi' or "master". In fact, Jesus accused them of "taking away the key of knowledge" from the people. Pharisees said that certain among them, with proper training and discipline, could understand and define the law of God. Jesus said they were pretentious, that the "key of knowledge" was as much the property of the people as of the Pharisees, and Paul completely insulted them by saying that the natural mind cannot be subject to God's laws, period.

The Sadducees were eliminated finally by the Pharisees, who waged "jihad" against the Roman Empire, only to see themselves scattered to the winds yet again. As Corky pointed out, the zealots gained absolutely nothing.

Why? because they believed something that simply wasn't true. They were NOT God's appointed representatives to establish God's kingdom on earth. It was impossible for any human to claim that right.

And, neither are the "Christians" of today given that right, when you get down to it. If no natural mind can be subject to God, then it logically follows that no "natural" kingdom of God on earth can be established by human will. Can't be done!

There is no "true church of God' organized by any human, nor can there be. To assume there is, one would have to assume that his/her natural mind is the exception to the rule of Romans 8:7.

"I know Paul says that the natural mind cannot be subject to God's law, but my mind is the exception, and I can decide otherwise". Yeah, right. That's pretty much the same attitude attributed to "Lucifer" in the Old Testament. "I will ascend into heaven, I will establish my will..." It's also pretty much what the Pharisees stated, with the very best of intentions. They believed that their minds, with proper training and discipline, actually could be subject to God's law, and they would represent God faithfully to the people. Jesus called them hypocrites, and Paul said it couldn't be done. And so did Kurt Godel about 1900 years later.

Corky's conclusions are correct except for one important point: the bible already pointed these things out.

Thanks, Corky

2010-02-17T06:53:00.000-08:00

Corky, you bring out good statements and scriptures worth examination.

First, Romans 10. First, we see that Paul is addressing himself specifically to Israel, as he does also in Romans 11. "They have zeal of God, but not according to knowledge".

That in itself is an interesting statement. They had the law, they had knowledge of what was expected of them, and they obviously had dedication, but not, apparently, knowledge. Jesus allegedly made a similar statement in Matthew 11:13.

In verse 6-8, this same scripture is also used by Jews to show that the "word of God" is among them, and that they have the right to follow the precepts of that government. In fact, there is an ancient legend among Talmudist Jews that at one point, they were undecided on what was the truth of a particular matter, so they put it to a vote. The majority ruled, based on a lack of clear scriptural guidance, the majority ruled. God, however, came down and told them that in this case, the minority was actually correct. But the Talmudist said that God was "out of order" and quoted from Deuteronomy 30:11-13. They had the law, they were charged with the obedience and upkeep of that law, and it was not for God to constantly interfere with his own creation.

According to the legend, God said "my children have defeated me", and returned to his own place.

This, in essence is the same scripture which Paul uses, yet applies it to the life of Jesus, of which the Jews claimed no knowledge.
Verse 19: "Did not Israel know?" They certainly knew the law. It was right there before them, yet history shows that they continually added to the law and created a class of "masters" called Rabbis, who taught according to the oral traditions given to Moses.

Was the message there? Paul says yes it was, but Israel apparently didn't get it.

Corky, you argue there was a choice, yet following into Romans 11, we see that there was no choice. Israel didn't believe in anything having to do with Jesus. By choice?

Romans 11:7: "Israel hath not obtained that which he seeketh for; but the election hath obtained it, and the rest were blinded".

Election? Those who were born as Isaac was, those born of the promise, foreknown, predestined, called, and chosen, as I examined earlier. Free choice? Apparently not to Israel.

And yet we see this in Romans 11:26: "And so all Israel shall be saved: as it is written, There shall come out of Zion the deliverer, and shall turn away ungodliness from Jacob".

And of course we have Romans 11:32 "For God hath concluded them all in unbelief, that he might have mercy upon all".

So we see as a continuation of Romans 10 nothing about Jews going to hell, nor anything about them being able to freely "choose Christ".

So now we look at John 3;15-19. What was Israel all about? LAW. Law brings "wrath" as Paul wrote. So if people believed in Jesus and his life, they were free from "condemnation", from judgement and the authority imposed by men. That is the entire essence of freedom from law by simply accepting that we are "born of God".

let's forget about the religious mumbo jumbo and mystery BS. As we see from John 1:12-13, if you are "born of God", then you are not born of the will of men. No man can judge or condemn n you, as you are Innocent of all charges. or as Paul said in Romans 8:33: "Who shall lay anything to the charge of God's elect? It is God that justifieth".

The biblical margin I have refers that back to Isaiah 50:8, which says that in any accusation, the accused has the right to face his accuser, and God is on the side of the ACCUSED, not the accuser. In other words, by accepting your "birth of God" by the acceptance of Jesus, you can claim you are not subject to the judgement of men.

That creates a very practical application in terms of law. If you believe in Jesus, then you believe that Jesus came "not to condemn, but that the world through him might be saved".

So, in terms of law, what is gained by this belief? Freedom from "mea culpa", the enforced confession of guilt, the right against self incrimination, the right to claim your freedom before men. The right to live free.

"But he that doeth truth cometh to the light, that his deeds may be made manifest, that they are wrought of God".

If you go before the laws of men, therefore, you can claim to have been free of the imposed obligations of law. You are not condemned. This is the example Paul gave in quoting from the OT, "cursed is he that hangeth on a tree".

So, what is it exactly that you're choosing? To live freely before men, to declare that you are innocent until proven guilty, and that no government of man can determine your guilt by its own accusation. That is the essence of OT law and its protections, not just for Israel, but for all, the 'stranger within thy gates".

As Supreme Court Justice Abe Fortas pointed out, mea culpa belongs between man and his God. It is a confession that cannot be extracted from free men by the state. That, you see, is truth.

The deception and confusion of Christianity is the idea that we can choose strict and legalistic methods to condemn our neighbor, to judge him according to collective efforts, but that is not given, either by Jesus or Paul who taught us not to practice an "eye for an eye". The judgement of "wrath" is reserved ONLY for the state, and the state, as we see, is controlled by Satan(Matthew 4, Luke 4).

Jesus actually challenged the collective birthright promise to Israel when he told Nicodemus "ye must be born again(from above)".

By that choice, you may "see the kingdom of God". And who, exactly, are those people? As we see in John 3:8, no one has a way of identifying them, which means, there is no legal authority of man to claim jurisdiction over those "born again". If you are "born of God", you are not born of "the will of men(John 1:13)", which means that your choices and your life exists OUTSIDE the collective jurisdiction of the "will of men".

Does the U.S. Constitution recognize this? of course it does. Simply look at the First Amendment. To "believe on Jesus" is simply to believe that you are NOT under condemnation of God, and if not under condemnation of God, certainly no government of man can condemn you unless you actually harm another, and that person must accuse you, not the government.

That is the basis and foundation of common law. As I remember, you stress John 3;19: Obviously, if any man is Innocent and has harmed no other, then that man, under BOTH Old and New Testament, has the right to face his accuser with the full vindication of God(Isaiah 54:17). That means anybody and everybody who chooses this freedom and this lifestyle.

So, Corky, you mention Titus 1:13: "This witness is true. Wherefore rebuke them sharply, that they may be sound in the faith."

What faith? A human concept of religion that is by its very nature limited? A religion that seeks to curse or condemn those who don't believe as it does? Not at all. A belief that men are free to live within simple guidelines of love, as James writes, "Pure religion and undefiled before God and the father is this, To visit the fatherless and widows in their affliction, and to keep himself unspotted from the world(James 1:27)".

HWA said we had to keep certain tenets of the law, and by those tenets, we concluded we were 'elect', yet Paul clearly and repeatedly wrote that those 'elect' were one and the same as those born of promise to Abraham, as Isaac was(Gal. 4;28), and that it was simply impossible to make such a choice for ourselves(Romans 9:16-22).

Consequently, the only way to "follow Christ" is to claim freedom from the authority structures, ALL authority structures, of men. "Presumption of innocence".

Titus 2:15: These things speak, and exhort, and rebuke with all authority. let no man despise thee."

What things? How about verse 14; "Who gave himself for us, that he might redeem us from ALL iniquity, and purify unto himself a peculiar people, zealous of good works".

God works? How about James 1:27? And yet, we see from Ephesians 2;8-10, that works do not earn us any special 'elect" place. Nothing earns us "salvation". It's a free gift.

So, what "authority" would a "government of God' have? Presumption of innocence before men, also known from common law and identified by Chief Justice Edward Coke of England as "due process of law".

How do we know that? because the US Supreme Court, in "Miranda vs Arizona", footnote 27, acknowledged that this right against self incrimination in our 5th Amendment has its analogue in the bible. In fact, that is the very essence of the New Testament, that all humans are free from the condemnation of men.

Can I speak that with authority? Of course I can. Anyone can. "We hold these truths to be self evident..."

And, Corky, as you pointed out, of course Jesus told us not to follow others who came in the nbame of Christ, since he told us to follow him. But in words attributed to Jesus himself, what happens if we follow him and seek to obey the law? Matthew 10:34-38.

What is the whole essence of Jesus teaching? he came not to condemn the world, but that the world through him might be saved. Saved from what? Well, sin. And what is sin? lawbreaking. And since he died innocently having broken no law, he became the example of freedom before the law, for every person on this earth.

It's all about freedom.

Corky's Response, Part 2

2010-02-16T10:44:00.000-08:00

I'm not picking on Corky personally, but on the assumptions and arguments which he makes, based on general assumptions rather than proofs.

For example, can we prove, by any physical method known, that there exists a decision procedure such that we can get from "here" to "God" in a proven fashion?

No, there is not, and since there is not, any attempt to try and organize according to "God's will" results in confusion and enslavement to religious ideas. This is fully consistent with Romans 8:7.

I've stated it enough, and with no challengers.

I've also put it in other language. If we could create a decision procedure to get to God, that decision procedure would be subject to language, meaning it is also subject to algorithms and programming. Corky has presented the general "christian" argument that Paul says we can make a decision to "please God" by our efforts at being "born again".

In fact, Paul didn't say that. If he had, then there would be no confusion within Christianity, since all definitions could be reduced to finite, logical, rational processes, thus eliminating any confusion whatever regarding God. This is plainly shown false by Romans 8:7.

Marvin Minsky and Seymour Papert presented a paper on the relationship between the mind and the complexities of the brain, and concluded that the brain itself contained so many levels, and capacity for 'framing" reality that the mind could not represent the workings of the brain due to its complexity, at that time, anyway.

That is also called the Church-Turing thesis, which states that the brain is nothing more than a computer subject to physical laws, and which may ultimately be mapped, but since the mapping process is subject to Godel's theorem, it will never contain a consistent complete framework of the brain's complexity.

That is, we can't know our own mind, because we can't understand how it works. or even more simply, the "software" of our mind cannot reach into the "hardware" of our brain and alter its programming.

The reason why that is so is because the "software" of the mind operates BECAUSE the "hardware" of the brain works as it does. The 'software' performs because the 'hardware' drives it.

Paul makes some interesting statements paralleling this point in Romans 7:14, RSV:

"We know that the law is spiritual; but I am carnal, sold under sin.
"I DO NOT UNDERSTAND MY OWN ACTIONS".

So, we have Paul here saying that the functions of his own physical brain could not be understood by the examination of his mind. Not so different from the conclusions of Minsky and Papert.

Verse 21: "So I find it to be law that when I want to do right, evil lies close at hand.
"I see in my members another law at war with the law of my mind and making me captive to the law of sin that dwells in my members".

Paul quite simply said he couldn't keep the law. he said he had a carnal mind, "sold under sin".
Corky implied that Paul taught we could make choices to keep the law, while Paul admitted that he, Paul, could not obey it. He couldn't obey it because the mind is incapable of reaching into the brain and altering its main drives. The "law" of the brain works at odds with the 'law' of the mind, and as Paul plainly admitted he couldn't understand his actions.

Is this a reason that men should be held in condemnation to "sin"? Of course not. If the mind cannot freely choose to perfectly keep the law in a moral fashion, then one could simply be "dead to the law", free from the penalty.

As I wrote earlier, it is impossible for the mind to define truth. We simply can't do it. Even assuming, therefore, that we COULD control our brains and never break any laws, we could not ever know in advance if the decisions we make will avoid "evil" results(Church's theorem).

Paul clearly admitted this, simply by examining his brain by using his conscious mind, and realizing that there was another level over which he simply had no control because he could not understand it.

So, first of all, we can;t ever define truth in one package of decisions(Godel's theorem), and second, we can't know the overall results of the decisions we actually DO make(Church's theorem).

Douglas Hofstadter, in the book Godel, Escher, Bach, describes it this way:"...it is perfectly obvious that a computer can be instructed to print out a sequence of illogical statements--or for variety's sake, a batch of statements having random truth values. Yet in following such instructions, a computer would not be making any mistakes! On the contrary, it would only be a mistake if the computer printed out something other than the statements it had been instructed to print.. This illustrates how faultless functioning on one level may underlie symbol manipulation on a higher level--and the goals of the higher level may be completely unrelated to the propagation of truth."

This, said Hofstadter, may be compared to "an incorrect belief held in the software of the mind, supported by the faultlessly functioning brain".

The brain, by physical, "carnal" standards, functions "faultlessly", yet will produce flawed concepts of truth, resulting in infinite interpretations of truth. And the mind simply cannot access that function to re-program the brain to drive toward truth, because the mind itself cannot define truth!

"There is no reason to believe that a computer's faultlessly functioning hardware could not support high level symbolic behavior which would represent such complex states as confusion, forgetting, or appreciation of beauty. It would require that there exist massive sub-systems interacting with each other according to a complex 'logic'. The overt behavior could appear either rational or irrational; but underneath it would be the performance of reliable, logical hardware".

So, as Paul simply stated, "I do not understand my actions".

Corky attempt to have his cake and eat it too. He proclaims that Paul is flawed because Christianity is confused. How? because Paul allegedly stated that we must somehow choose by "freewill" to somehow overcome the complexity of our mind and organize systems according to "God's truth". Corky is using the flawed premise of Christianity to demonstrate that the premise of Paul is also flawed, while Paul has directly contradicted the premise of Christianity., and so did Jesus in John 6:44 and Matthew 24:23.

"No man can come to me unless the Father draw him..." Quite simply, and consistent with the developments of metamathematics, there exists no decision procedure by which we may get from "here" to "God".

Christianity, therefore, represents confusion precisely because it teaches that we CAN make such decisions. In actual fact, we cannot.

Corky's Response

2010-02-16T09:13:00.000-08:00

I noticed Corky's response in the article "The God Factory" and i will challenge him on his conclusions.

Corky states "What Paul was teaching was the renewing of the mind, the "born again" thing.

The assumption Corky makes, which Paul does not, is that we can, by some process of our own choosing, be "born again". A flawed assumption at the best. Corky does what most people do when attempting to respond "about" something. If I can lead people to conclude that a specific point is made without actually pointing directly to the statement or its philosophical premises, then I can convince people that I have come to the proper conclusion.

First off, let me agree with Corky that there ,most likely was no Adam and Eve, and no "fall" in a magical Garden of Eden. However, dopes that make the philosophical conclusions Paul draws false? Not at all. There are many examples of Narcissism in which psychologists draw perfectly legitimate conclusions regarding the concept of Narcissism, yet we know there most likely never was a Narcissus who fell in love with his own reflection.

Corky would be correct IF Paul had stated that being "born again" actually did lie within the power of our human choice, simply because, as i pointed out in the article regarding Turing, Godel, and Church, any attempt by any human mind to define truth will lead to an infinity if undecidable propositions, which means that any attempt to "decide" which is the true religion will result in thousands of undecidable ideas about Christianity, as we see today.

Therefore, Corky's conclusions "about" Paul's teachings is flawed because he ignores the central statement which Paul makes: the natural mind is enmity against God and cannot be subject to God, which, in itself, points to the obvious conclusion that all human attempts to represent God will result in exactly what we see today, over 38,000 versions of Christianity.

Corky has a bad habit of throwing in general ideas. "The idea is". Whose idea? he doesn't say. That's like the expression 'they say'. Who is "they"?

There is no "they", and there is no human "idea" that can act as authority, for the very simple reason that the natural mind is enmity against God. Does that mean Paul's premise is flawed? Not at all. Does it mean that Christianity is flawed? Obviously, since Christianity assumes that we CAN make "freewill" choices as to what is "God's truth".

As Corky writes: "The natural mind was not subject to the law of God, but the born from above mind was".

The question that immediately presents itself is: what is a "born from above" mind? Who knows? I can't define it, and neither can any other human to the satisfaction of giving a worthwhile answer. The term, therefore, is meaningless from any human definition, and any attempt to define it will produce the "confusion of Christianity" as Corky says.

Corky writes, "Therefore, you have to die and be 'born again'. To be 'in Christ' instead of 'in Adam'.

Is there a flawed conclusion in this? Not at all, since from a purely legal perspective, you would be free from law, which means you are free from the power of human laws that would attempt to punish you of its own power. There are no laws against a dead man. Does this mean you suddenly have the power to know truth? Of course not, nor does Paul say it does. he merely says there is no condemnation to those who follow Christ. Not only a sound but of reasoning, but quite useful in terms of the application of human law.

Corky quotes from the bible: "In Adam, all die, In Christ shall all be made alive".

Again, let's examine this purely from the standpoint of law. The penalty of sin(lawbreaking) is death. Therefore, by the act of one innocent man who was killed and declared it the right of all men to be presumed Innocent, then within that concept, all men will be made alive. Dead to the law, since law cannot punish a dead man. Alive by the recognition that we can not be held responsible simply by the power of law.

Corky further writes: "It all depends on if you are 'in Adam' as 'the natural man' or 'in Christ' as the 'spiritual man'."

Depends on whose conclusions?" By what human standards? By what authority? Name such an authority. You can't. None exists. Therefore, I am "free in Christ" because I say I'm free in Christ. Now suppose I say I'm free with no need of Christ or any religion. That would be equally valid, since Jesus himself told us in Matthew 24;23 not to follow any person who said "here is Christ". That is, we are free from the penalty of law, period, without a proper accuser.

"Just a bunch of hocus pocus since there never was an Adam and Eve in the magical garden...no 'fall'...etc".

I'm fine with that, since I believe it's purely a myth invented by Persian influences.

Corky writes: All this talking around it with quotes from Jesus and Paul is just adding to the confusion that Christianity already is".

I'm not "talking around" it, Corky. You are. I've directly shown that statements made by Paul and Jesus are fully consistent with logic. You have rather sloppily presented arguments "around" ideas taught by people who claim to represent Christ, when there is no possible evidence of such representation.

IF the natural mind is enmity against God and cannot be subject to God, what is the result? Exactly what we see today, showing that Paul's statement is consistent with reality.

And if the natural mind cannot be subject to God, then there is logically no reason to follow any person who claims to represent Christ, which is what Jesus said in Matthew 24:23. Simple, direct logic, Corky, and you insist in "talking around it", not me.

Logically, since there exists no authority to represent God, as we see plainly and logically from statements made by Paul, then there needs to be no "confusing Christianity" since there's no need to follow any religion.

prove me wrong, Corky. And do it by actual logic, not simply implications and insinuations.

Redemption of the Body

2010-02-16T06:04:00.001-08:00

In "Corky's" response in the comments section, he shows a keen insight into what I've been getting at in this whole process.

Jewish law had little to nothing to do with a "soul" that was immortal, to be "saved, by a "higher" doctrine as in traditional Christianity, but with the human body, the human mind, here and now, as we relate to this world around us.

The human body IS a "soul", or at least that was the general assumption of the Jews.

Within the concept of law, the "redemption of the body" was the all important aspect of Jewish law. The "kingdom of God" was an earthly kingdom, to be established in obedience to God, representing all the people of the world.

There is no biblical evidence that Jesus changed that idea into a mystery religion of immortal souls to be saved and taken to heaven, or December 25th as a holy day of his birth, or of Easter, etc..

The teaching was merely about law, how we relate to it, what it means to us, here and now, and how we can claim it for ourselves on this earth. The total reversal of the idea of Jewish birthright was challenged right out of the gate by both Paul and Jesus, who told Nicodemus that unless a man is "born again" or "born from above", he cannot see the kingdom of God.

Contrary to the general assumptions of traditional Christianity, this concept merely challenged the power of worldly government to control any human who chose to be "born of God".

Dominic Crosson, for example, points out that a "son of God" by the usual standards, was a god-king who ruled over empires, born of a family of gods chosen to rule. Yet in John 1:12-13, we see a complete reversal of this process:

"But as many as received him, to them gave he power to become the sons of God, even to them that believe n his name:
"Which were born, not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God".

When you compare this to what Jesus allegedly told Nicodemus, this is complete freedom from ALL human power structures, including the birthright of Israel itself. You are "born of God" and therefore outside the will of man, simply by your choice!

But if you're born of God by free choice, how does that square with Paul's teaching in Romans 8:29-30? It should be easily resolved. While any of us can make the claim to be 'elect" or specially born of God, no human authority can say otherwise, because the ultimate choice lies with God! There can be no human authority that can represent such a power or control us in "God's name", yet each of us, as individuals, can claim the freedom of "sons of God" with none having the right or authority to challenge it! That's individual sovereignty!

What this means, quite simply, is that we have the right to challenge all human authority systems in "God's name". Not only that, but every state constitution within the United States recognizes that fact!

While the mystery religions try to elevate Jesus into some kind of "Mithraized" divinity, the story itself merely tells of a man born of the humblest circumstances who, as Paul said, "thought it not robbery to be equal with God".

The story is merely of a common man who claimed nothing that wasn't claimed by all Jews who declared themselves to be the sons of God by virtue of the promise to Abraham. In fact, no man can make that claim for himself exclusively, as no one except God knows who that person is, as Paul plainly stated. The main difference, of course, is that it was offered to all humankind as an individual right to freedom before the law.

Let's say Pilate wasn't the benign servant of the people that the bible indicates. What it DOES indicate, and the point repeatedly made, is that a man was put to death for whom no crime could be attributed. When Jesus refused to answer his accusers, that was an ancient law recognized as the right against self incrimination. Israel recognized it, and Rome recognized it as the right to face the accuser(Acts 25:16). There was also the right to be informed of the crime accused of committing(Acts 25:27).

Rome also recognized a form of habeas corpus for Roman citizens as Acts 2:27-28 shows. These were all principles of law as recognized by both Jews and Rome(Isaiah 50:8, Isaiah 54:17).

The story is very simple, and need not require any "spiritual" justification to give it authority. Jesus was innocent, and the law put him to death with no justification. Therefore, he paid for no "sin" of his own, since 'sin' is defined as breaking the law(1 John 3:4).

Therefore, in the simplest possible fashion, of you were "born of God", you were no longer subject to god-kings who only claimed that distinction, but you had the right to claim that same sovereignty! You had the presumption of innocence with God's vindication( Isaiah 54;17), the right to face your accuser with God's guarantee of protection(Isaiah 50:8), which we recognize in law today as the presumption of innocence!

The "kingdom of God" can be invoked, any time, any place, anywhere a person so chooses! We see this in Matthew 18:15-18, and in 1 Corinthians 6. Jesus pointed out in Matthew 18 that "whatever you(two or three of you) bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose will be loosed in heaven". That is the complete legal authority of ANY two or three people to agree among themselves!

What does our U.S. Constitution tell us? No person shall be deprived of life, liberty, or property without due process of law. And what is due process of law? It is defined as law which traces to common law, "lawful judgement of peers", rights that pre-existed the Constitution, as defined from Magna Carta. Historian Max DiMont points out that it was the Puritans and Quakers who took the principles of Magna Carta and "Hebraized" them, making them apply to all persons, not just Barons or leaders in government.

"Lawful judgement of peers" goes back to ancient times in the bible itself, guaranteeing the accused the right to be presumed innocent until proven guilty by a legitimate accuser, not a paid advocate of government!

Jesus taught these things, said he would return, and did not return. Dies that make the principle itself false? Or does it mean that we now have the responsibility for ourselves to discover these principles and act on them as free individuals?

Jesus told the Jews of his day, "the kingdom of God is within you". As Supreme Court Justice Abe Fortas said, mea culpa(I am guilty) lies between a man and his God. It is a confession that cannot be extracted by any earthly power.

Corky has touched on a profound idea here, and the "redemption of the body" lies within your choice, my choice, and of any human who wishes for justice, mercy, and judgement on this earth.

The will and the power lies within you. Use it wisely.

The Flood? Garden of Eden?

2010-02-15T10:32:00.000-08:00

James sent me a copy of an email from a Muslim friend, regarding the flood and Noah. James recommends I might comment on it.

To me, such stories are mythology, just as the stories of Hercules, Zeus, and Narcissus are mythologies in Greek society. They start us off in a certain direction and seek to make us understand why a civilization believes as it does.

A study of the Masonic literature, especially Morals And Dogma, written by Albert Pike and published in 1871, reveals interesting tidbits about the development of Jewish history.

"The dominant system among the Jews after their captivity was that of the Pharoschim or Pharisees. Whether their name was derived from that of the Parsees, or followers of Zoroaster, or from some other source, it is certain that they had borrowed much of their doctrine from the Persians. Like them they claimed to have the exclusive and mysterious knowledge, unknown to the mass....They styled themselves interpreters; a name indicating their claim to the exclusive possession of the true meaning of the Holy Writings, by virtue of the oral tradition which Moses had received on Mt Sinai..."

If you put that in context with Jesus' constant condemnation of their control of the law, of their claiming themselves as representatives of the people, it begins to make sense, "teaching for commandments the doctrines of men".

The book tells of the Ormuzd, of whom Mithras is chief. Then you gradually see the development of the Thoughts of Ormuzd, the IDEAS which he conceived before proceeding to the creation of all things. The IDEAS are supposed to be superior to men. They are, wrote Pike, "the tutelary genii,", protecting all men from the fall to the regeneration.

Ahriman was the dragon, whom we recognize as Satan or the serpent-tempter. After 3000 years, Ormuzd had created the material world in six periods. According to the story, Ormuzd and Ahriman concurred in the creation of man. When the first man and woman had been created, Ahriman tempted and seduced them, bringing evil. These doctrines, writes Pike were "sparingly borrowed by the Pharisee Jews".

But Pike also points out that the people who accepted the message of Jesus were neither Pharisees or Sadducees, but the humble, common people.

If we look at the teachings of Jesus and his condemnation of the Pharisees, it would not be absurd to think he also condemned the mythology of Zoroastrianism that accompanied Pharisee thought. The "interpreters" as they styled themselves, the keepers of the secrets, or what later became known as Cabala, was condemned by Jesus, who said they were preventing the people from entering the "kingdom of God" there, at that time.

With the teachings of Paul, a former Pharisee who then completely challenged the whole concept that any human mind could be subject to God, the doctrines of "mystery religions" was challenged, only to be gradually resurrected by Constantine.

The oral traditions of the Pharisees took the form of Mishna, Gemarra, and Talmud, which is the chief work that Rabbis today study. It might surprise you to know, however, that it was the Babylonian Talmud that is highly regarded among Jews, the document beginning in Babylon after the captivity, embracing Persian religion, and further spreading from Babylon to embrace the world with its interpretations regarding money, usury, laws, banking, and legislation that "explains" the commandments given at Sinai.

Writes Pike: "The sources of...the Kabalistic doctrines, are the books of Jezirah and Sohar, the foremer drawn up in the second century, and the latter a little later; but containing materials much older than themselves. In their most characteristic elements, they go back to the time of the exile. In them, as in the teachings of Zoroaster, everything that exists emanated from a source of infinite light....With the idea so expressed is connected the pantheism of India. The King of Light, the ANCIENT, is ALL THAT IS".

And of course you can read about the blending of religions under Constantine with Krishna, Indian and Persian religions blending with mystery religions that became what we know as Christianity today.

But it is these traditions of men that both Jesus and Paul, and the disciples, challenged.

"Beware lest any man spoil you through philosophy and vain deceit, after the tradition of men, after the rudiments of the world...(Colossians 2:8)".

"neither give heed to fables and endless genealogies, which minister questions..."

The mythology that found its way into the Old testament was placed there by the evolution of the Jewish culture in captivity, after the Oral tradition" of Moses, the "traditions of men" condemned by Jesus who taught that all people have the right to be heard, to know the law, and to be protected by that law.

Leavening of the Pharisees And Truth

2010-02-15T05:33:00.000-08:00

When I was in the marines, I became a baker, and later a baking instructor. I liked this for two reasons: first it avoided the militaristic BS that the "grunts" had to endure, and second, bakers had nice little ways of getting even with officers who had to eat the baker's food preparations. I passed on this wisdom to my students when I became an instructor.

Two things about leavening:
1.It will expand within a loaf until it consumes all available fuel
2. Salt acts to retard the growth of leavening

So, as a baker, when I see Jesus telling his followers "ye are the salt of the earth", I see individuals who act to retard the growth of power and general BS.

I find this relationship between leaven and truth to be quite interesting today. For example, in a book by Rudy Rucker called Mind Tools: The Five levels of Mathematical Reality, Rucker explores the relationship between mathematics and truth, and comes to interesting conclusions paralleling the biblical teachings regarding leaven. Here is a statement I found interesting, toward the back of the book:

"Higher properties--such as truth, beauty, or virtue--are prospective. There is no fixed rule or token by which you can recognize the true or the beautiful or the good: these human ideals are not computable. Nor is there any kind of program or attitude that will enable any individual person or school to produce all truth or all beauty or all goodness. Our highest goals are not to be exhausted by the logical working out of any single system."

Let's look at that last statement. It does have a solid connection to the idea of "leavening" in the bible. If any single system continues to grow and grow, and claim to represent truth, whether it is biblical truth, or a god-king who claims his word is truth and cannot be questioned, or any system whatever that seeks to extend itself until it controls all activity, will be false.

We can be certain that such a system will be false. Alonzo Church, who studied Godel's theorem, developed the theorem telling us that no simple yes or no answers can be given for important questions. Godel's theorem tels us that no logical program can hope, even in the limit, to answer all the questions. As Rucker writes:

"After the work of (Alan) Turing, Church, and Godel, the old dream of capturing all truth in a finite logical net can be seen to be thoroughly bankrupt. Turing's analysis of computation suggests that every finitely given logical system(including human beings) is subject to the theorems of Godel and Church. Godel's theorem tells us that no programmatic method can generate all truth; while Church's theorem tells us that we are unable to predict the consequences of the programs that we do devise."

Therefore, if "God" and "truth" are the same, we can be certain that no single religious or logical concept of man can fully represent either one!

No government can represent all truth, and no religion can fully represent God, which strongly suggests that neither church nor state are legitimate authorities over the human mind!

Is that bad? Should we despair because we can never develop such a system? Rucker suggests this to be a reason for joy!

"A world where there is no Godel's theorem would be a world where every property is listable--for any kind of human activity, there would be a programmatic description of how to carry it out[which, after all, is what religions and governments have proposed to do for centuries]. In such a world, it would be possible to learn a hard and fast formula for 'how to be an artist' or 'how to be a scientist'. It would just be a matter of learning the tricks of the trade....Our world is endlessly more complicated than any finite program or any finite set of rules. You're free, and you're really alive, and there's no telling what you'll think of next, nor is there any reason you shouldn't kick over the traces and start a new life at any time".

In history, we see Jesus constantly condemning the "leaven of the Pharisees". And what were the Pharisees doing? Well, constantly condemning and judging those who didn't wash according to tradition, who didn't observe specific rules and formal laws established for standards of "righteousness". In short, they were pretentious.

Not only were they pretentious, but Jesus said they "shut up the kingdom of heaven" and they "take away the key of knowledge" to the people. In short, they taught that it was possible, by observing "programmatic" laws, rules, and rituals, to be "sinless".

In fact, that problem came to a head when Rabbi Hillel, a contemporary of Jesus, stated that, by the process known as his "Seven Laws", it would be possible for humans to establish proper guidelines for obedience to God, that the human mind, in fact, CAN be "subject to God', provided it follows proper procedures and disciplines, or in other words, providing it establishes rote, programmable, finite and rational processes of thought.

Yet that is exactly the process Jesus condemned when he quoted fro Isaiah "In vain do ye worship me, teaching for commandments the doctrines of men". In more modern terms, the Pharisees were creating statutory legislation by which the people could be ruled. It was that very process of statutory legislation that Jesus condemned among the lawyers in Luke 11:52, by saying they "take away the key of knowledge" from the people.

And in fact, that is what Paul directly challenged in Romans 8:7. he told the people that the natural mind, my mind, your mind, is enmity against God and cannot be subject to God. In fact, Paul's statement is mathematically correct! There can be no single system of human thought, in any method of rote or repetition, to represent truth!

That also parallels the statement of Claude Shannon when he developed information theory. The more a message is repeated, the less information it contains. In other words, the more any culture strictly obeys certain rules and rituals because they are convinced those rules and rituals come from some unquestionable source, the less they are able to adapt to change.

That is exactly the same question we face today, in regard to the U.S. Constitution. is it a "living document", or should we follow the "original intent" of the founders?

Believe it or not, when Kurt Godel was studying for citizenship in the U.S., he declared that the laws of the Constitution would lead to dictatorship!

As Godel was preparing fore his citizenship test, a judge mentioned that "wasn't it wonderful that there will be no Hitler in this country?" To which Godel responded that in fact the laws of this country, as written, would very well lead to a dictatorship or tyranny. Fortunately, his friend Einstein, who knew of Godel's misgivings, accompanied Godel to the test, and quickly diverted the conversation away from Godel's findings.

But what led to Godel's conclusions? Palle Yourgrau, in a book titled A World Without Time: The Forgotten Legacy of Godel And Einstein, writes:

"Years later, asked for a legal analogy for his incompleteness theorem, he would comment that a country that depended entirely upon the formal letter of its laws might well find itself defenseless against a crisis that had not, and could not have been foreseen in its legal code. The analogue of his incompleteness theorem, applied to the law, would guarantee that for any legal code, even if intended to be fully explicit and complete, there would always be judgements 'undecided' by the letter of the law".

When you think about it, that is exactly what we are considering regarding Constitutional law today, and was the battle between Jesus and the Pharisees of that time. Can truth be found by any process of finite, programmed, rote law? Jesus and Paul said no, it cannot. The Pharisees said yes, it can. Today, we alternate between "originalism" and "living law". But you will notice that either interpretation, as in the days of the Pharisees, is said to be decided by those who are "experts" in the law.

But there are no such experts, because no single human mind or system can contain all truth!

So again, Jesus and Paul were correct! And from that perspective, so are the atheists today!
There simply exists no "God" that can be contained as a "higher" process of human thought!
There is you, and there is me, and there is our right and obligation to consider others as we consider ourselves.

That, said Jesus, and correctly, is the truthful basis of all law and all commandments.

The God Factory

2010-02-14T05:44:00.000-08:00

I bring attention to Al Dexter's essay again because, while it is an excellent primer and a good beginning, his statement that the bible is a farce is not proven from the article.

In fact, he demonstrates by his conclusions that Paul was telling the truth, as far as truth can be proven.

From The God Factory, we can see that:
1.People will believe what they choose to believe
2.They will build religions based on those beliefs
3.Those beliefs will amount to a "factory" that produces over 38,000 versions of God within Christianity, at the last general estimate.

Does that prove Paul wrong? No, in fact, Paul seems to have anticipated exactly that process, and offered a system of thought that would have made Occam proud.

What is this principle of "parsimony" offered by Occam? If two or more(or in this case 38,000) theories are in competition, the one theory that takes all into account, makes sense of them, and fits into a logical framework, will probably be the truth.

Or, as I remember from the fictional character Sherlock Holmes, if we eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, will be the truth.

In eliminating the impossible, the first choice is, does God exist? Whatever views we offer, no matter how capable or complex, the conclusions we reach will only reflect our personal ideas regarding evidence.

We are therefore left with the conclusions above: people will believe what they choose to believe, based on the evidence and experience that formed their beliefs, which further means that it is impossible to determine whether or not there actually is a God.

Based on all likely evidence, therefore, we come to one conclusion whether there is or is not a God: In either case, such existence is not dependent on either our choice or our beliefs.

Whatever "is", simply "is", which leads me to Ayn Rand's basic definition of reality, for "Ex-Android's" benefit. In her book, Philosophy: Who Needs It, Ayn Rand points out that reality consists of two aspects: the metaphysical and the 'man-made'.

The metaphysical, said Rand, simply is. It exists, and we are part of it. The 'man-made', however, consists of human ideas and interpretations as we apply out ideas to reality, and that 'man-made' aspect of reality is always subject to the choices we make as we try to understand it.

We are therefore Left with the conclusion reached by Ayn Rand and with Occam: whatever choices we make in regard to reality, there is no way to test those ideas to prove or disprove the existence of God.

If there is a God, therefore, we are left with the conclusion given by Paul in Romans 8:7. The natural mind is enmity against God and cannot be subject to God, which will result in exactly the same result as if there is no God at all.

Therefore, in either case, God or no God, we are left with one beginning point: If God exists, his/her/its/their existence cannot be dependent on our choices or beliefs in any meaningful sense.

That, in fact, is what Paul said, and also squares with the statement of Jesus in John 6:44 and Matthew 24:23.

When i realized this back in 1974, my parents each quoted a scripture, quite accidentally, that combined to create an "epiphany' in my own mind. My father quoted from Romans 8:29-30, and my mother quoted from Galatians 3:29.

We know basically what these scriptures say if we're ex-WCG, but what if the two scriptures actually referred to the same phenomenon? What if all those who were "Christ's" were not only the children of the promise, but what if they were also foreknown, predestined, chosen, and called?

In other words, what if this is the deal God made with Abraham:

"Abraham, if you do as I ask, you will have a son. This I guarantee. But you will also have other children, born as Isaac, children that I will specifically foreknow and preselect. Each of these children will be born into this promise I make to you, and each of them will be my special choice, my selection, and you will be the father of all these children by promise, just as you are the father of Isaac by promise".

So, putting Romans 8:29-30 and Galatians 3:29 together, we come up with this conclusion:

If ye be Christ's then are ye Abraham's seed(as Isaac was), and heirs according to the promise(as Isaac was), and you will be foreknown(as Isaac was), predestined(as Isaac was), called and chosen(as Isaac was).

Basically this is what Paul said in Galatians 4:28: "Now we brethren, as Isaac was, are children of the promise".

That is Occam at his finest! People can do as they wish, believe as they wish, experiment as they wish, and none of that will alter the deal made between God and Abraham.

In fact, Paul describes that process in Romans 9: 7-22.

"Neither, because they are the seed of Abraham, are they all children: but, 'In Isaac shall thy seed be called'.
"That is, they which are the children of the flesh, these are not the children of God, but the children of the promise are counted for the seed".

What promise? "At this time will I come, and Sarah shall have a son". Paul leaves no doubt as to what "promise" he is referring to.
Verse 11: "For the children being not yet born, neither having done any good or evil, that the purpose of God according to the election might stand, not of works but of him that calleth".

From that point, Paul continues to point out that it is simply impossible to become one of those "born of promise" by your own choice. In verses `16-22, Paul goes to great length to show it simply cannot be done.

Further, in Galatians 3:17, Paul points out that the promise came 430 years before the law, so the law, the covenant made with Israel at Sinai, cannot "disannul" it. In other words, the promise stands regardless of the law.

Whoever these "children of the promise" are, their personal choices do not affect the nature of God's deal with Abraham in any way.

What if that is not true? Well, your choices will result in the kind of confusion of religions we see today.

What if it IS true? Same result! Therefore, Occam's razor is satisfied! So is Ayn Rand's philosophy, and all religion is discredited. No necessity of following any person who says "here is Christ".

In either case, God or no God, same result. Prove me wrong.

Infinite Regress

2010-02-13T10:59:00.000-08:00

Again, In Christopher Hitchens' God Is Not great, Hitchens makes the valid point regarding infinite regress, or in other words, if God created the world, who created that God, and who created that God, and who created that God...into infinity.

In regard to justice in the bible, Hitchens writes: "An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth and the killing of witches may seem brutish and stupid, but if only non-sinners have the right to punish, then how could an imperfect society ever determine how to prosecute offenders? We should all be hypocrites.

" And what authority did Jesus have to 'forgive'?...."

By combining the two, Hitchens demonstrates the flaw in his own argument. The principle of forgiveness as an aspect of justice is dependent on the very fact that we cannot resolve an absolute authority to define, or divine, justice. None exists. For if we try to punish according to absolute standards, we enter the slippery slope of degrees of evil.

Assuming that somewhere along the continuum "god created God, who then created God, who then created...we would not need to define which God created the law, but the process by which law applied to us as we judged others. What gave Jesus the right to "forgive"? What gives any person the right to forgive?

The answer to that is simple enough: because we can't point to a God, an absolute God, to which we can show a direct line of authority, we are equal before one another. The judgement we render on others can only be just when all other possible alternatives are exhausted.

Does such an idea demand the existence of a God? Not at all, but if such laws are based in the idea of an authority that transcends the laws of men, then human law can never in any sense be absolute.

If law could absolutely represent God, there would be no need for separation of church and state. The state would speak its own authority to punish. But since the state cannot speak for God, and the church cannot show its own direct authority as representative of God, then the law must assume the innocence of the accused until proven guilty by one whom he has harmed.

In Isaiah 54:17, we see exactly that principle, the right of the accused for any reason to have the full vindication of God until proven guilty by unbiased witnesses. Notice, not just one witness, but at least two, and more if possible(Deut.17:6, 19:15).

Consequently, the law that presumes innocence has no power to claim to represent the one true God as an authority. In fact, it cannot logically claim to represent God at all, except to assume that the accused has committed no crime, therefore acquittal is to be assumed unless directly proven otherwise.

How could Jesus "forgive"? Because he, like all of us, could not judge or condemn others in the absence of proof. That was law as understood in Isaiah. Is an infinite regress required for such concepts? Not at all. In fact, such a law would allow for infinite regress and the assumption that man is incapable of judging in place of God.

If man is incapable of judging in place of God, can laws of man, of themselves, condemn? In what sense could an "absolute" law of man claim power over an infinite regress of values in which God cannot be proven? The law would be arbitrary and unjust. Therefore, the accused could only be accused, not by the laws of man but the accuser who actually suffered harm.

In law, this is called the presumption of innocence. It is also recognized under the Fifth Amendment right against self incrimination. Under that law, therefore, Jesus was no more authorized to "forgive" sin than we ourselves, and in fact, forgiveness is the ideal whenever possible.

In fact, Jesus himself taught this directly in Matthew 5:25 and 18:15-18. He further emphasized "separation of church and state" by teaching that we should no longer practice an eye for an eye, but that we should "judge not, lest ye be judged(Matthew 7:1)"

Paul also taught settlement out of court, and added the principle of trial by a form of jury(1 Cor, 6), and further pointed out in Romans `12:19 that we should not practice an eye for an eye, but leave vengeance to God.

It was only AFTER Paul taught this precept that he then emphasized letting "every soul be subject to higher powers". The "higher powers" did execute wrath. That was their job. It was their job because the servants of God could not do so for their own interests.

But the "higher powers" could not execute wrath in their own interest either. Their power of "wrath" was given ONLY after the people had tried other avenues of correction.

In fact, the "execution of wrath" was their only defined function, NOT the making of "moral" laws that forced people to recognize the needs of others by taxation.

"For this cause(execution of wrath) pay ye tribute also: for they are God's ministers, attending continually upon this very thing."

It was in fact the power of the Pharisees to "shut up the kingdom of heaven(Luke 11:52)" to men that Jesus condemned as hypocritical. The right of reach individual to be presumed innocent was to be granted to all the people as a courtesy of law, so that the law itself could not condemn without the right of facing the accuser(Isaiah 50:8).

It is in this all important aspect of law that infinite regress is recognized and honored, and allows the individual the right to live in freedom without condemnation by the presumptions of other humans.

Occam And Church-Turing Thesis

2010-02-12T11:58:00.000-08:00

Since I explored Occam's Razor below, it may also be necessary to discuss something called the Church-Turing thesis in regard to the human mind and computers.

The Church-Turing thesis is named after Alonzo Church and Alan Turing, who arrived at the same general conclusions separately. Very roughly, it says this:

The human brain is nothing more than a computer, since it is subject to the laws of physics. If there is anything more than the laws of physics governing the brain, we have no evidence of it.
Therefore, mathematicians will someday be able to model the human brain so that a computer will be equal in every sense to the brain.

However, since we have no knowledge of anything outside of or "higher" than the brain, we would not be able to program or model any possible concept of that "higher" awareness. Everything that the brain is, as far as we know, will be the same as a computer.

Turing once proposed something called a Turing test, when he was playing with his idea of a universal Turing Machine, his mental creation that was the forerunner of a computer.

Turing proposed that if at some point in the future we could place a computer and a human behind a wall so that a questioner could not tell whether he was posing questions to a human or the computer, and the questions were printed out, given to the computer or person behind the wall, and a printed response was given back, then at some point, if the computer could respond to the questions so that the questioner could not tell the difference between human and computer, the computer would be, in every definable sense, the same as a human regarding knowledge and communication.

Let's take this analogy and suppose we are asking the computer questions about God. Assuming the computer can respond exactly in a way the human can respond, then there would be no possible way for any human to determine any difference between a human "soul" and a computer "soul".

You might say, "Oh, but God can tell the difference". Yes, but God isn't asking the questions. Humans beings are.

Based on that same example of the Turing Test, which religious organization or church actually does represent God? If all of them can give satisfactory answers, if all of them can show truths consistent with human knowledge about God, which one of them would actually be the true representatives of God?

Keep in mind, if you can make that definition, you can then take that same knowledge and program it into a computer, so that the true church of God can be completely computer generated. But if the true church of God can be computer generated, what, really, is the difference between the computer and God himself?

This would follow Occam's razor, since it would reduce all possible answers to one system of thought, and that system can be reduced completely to a mechanical, finite, logical process.

Do you begin to smell a rat in the form of church and state? What is the state? A system of finite, logical, mechanical rules by which we organize human lives.
What is a religion? A system of logical, mechanical, finite rules by which we organize human lives.

And where do both systems come from? The human mind. They would therefore be "Attila and the Witch Doctor" as Ayn Rand calls them, or the "Beast and False Prophet" as the bible calls them.

If you belong to either system, in any definable form, it is a certainty you are not following the truth. How do I know that? Godel's theorem. In any axiomatic formulation of number theory, there exists an infinity of undecidable propositions. That applies to laws as well as numbers. There exists no formal system of knowledge such that it leads to a complete, consistent definition of truth.

And thanks to Byker Bob, what is "God" telling you in regard to truth? Basically, there is only one possible conclusion: you are the final authority in the matter, you and you alone.

There is no government that can prove legitimate authority, and there is no religion to prove legitimate authority, and that's exactly what both Jesus and Paul told us.

Occam's Razor

2010-02-12T05:38:00.000-08:00

In his book God is Not Great, Christoper Hitchens makes excellent arguments against God.

One of Hitchens' first arguments deals with Laplace, who, when asked where God stood in his cosmology, simply said there was no place for God, and in fact, no need. The simple fact is, if we attempt to explain the universe in terms of a creation of God, we must first demonstrate that there is or was actually a God to create it.

Hitchens then goes into the arguments known as Occam's Razor, or Ockham's razor, developed by one William of Ockham. Ockham developed what was recognized as a "principle of economy", stated simply as "Do not multiply entities beyond necessity".

If you watched the movie "Contact" the idea of Occam's Razor was employed quite often. If two or more competing theories attempt to explain a theory of existence, the one that explains the most with the least effort and unnecessary detail will probably be the truth. (I quote from memory. I'm sure there are better explanations).

To quote from Hitchens' book, "Ockham stated that it cannot be strictly proved that god, if defined as a being who possesses the qualities of supremacy, perfection, uniqueness, and infinity, even exists at all....'It is difficult or impossible(wrote Ockham) to prove against the philosophers that there cannot be an infinite regress in causes of the same kind, of which one can exist without the other'. Thus the postulate of a designer or creator only raises the unanswerable question of who designed the designer or created the creator".

Stated in a popular fashion by such people as physicist Paul Davies, "it's turtles all the way down". I hope you're familiar with that story.

I like Hitchens' statement just a paragraph later: "If one must have faith in order to believe something, or believe in something, then the likelihood of that something having any truth or value is considerably diminished."

So, if I tell you "there is a God", the only possible "explanation" can come up with is that it was "revealed".

Big problem: how does one prove a revelation? Only one way it can be done, and that is to prove it by some method that demonstrates beyond any doubt, by reason, logic, or physical demonstration. But that presents a further problem: if I can prove it by reason, logic, or demonstration of physical example, I don't need a revelation! it would be a fact of existence!

Ockham, therefore, has left us with the realization that existence, and the reason we discover within existence, simply cannot rely on revelation, since the very process of explaining the revelation makes it unnecessary in the first place.

However, this leaves us right in the same position as I mentioned earlier: I will add a qualifying statement to it. If there is a God, any facts of evidence we present to demonstrate existence could not depend on unproven revelations, since the very proof of itself would be contained with no necessity for such a revelation. It would simple "follow" from the proofs inherent in the explanation.

So, if there is a God, it would stand to reason that such a God would either exist within the proofs stated by reason, or that "God" cannot exist within those proofs, leaving us with exactly the same statement made by the apostle Paul in Romans 8:7: the natural mind is enmity against God, and cannot be subject to "his" laws.

And that places us on a par with Occam's razor, since the results achieved IF the mind is enmity against God, will produce no evidence of God, and further would produce no decision procedure by which we may demonstrate any relationship to God.

And that is precisely what Paul said in Romans 9:16-22. Further, if we try to apply definitions of "God" in any human sense, both Occam's Razor and Romans 8:7 would lead logically to the same results: a multiplication of entities trying to define "God" outside the power of human reason.

But Ockham says that such multiplication of entities is unnecessary, and would prove absolutely nothing. Therefore, with both Paul's statement and with Occam's Razor, we are left with one unavoidable conclusion: there is no need to follow or believe in any religion that claims to represent God. That is just what Jesus said in Matthew 24:23.

Prove me wrong.

Scary!

2010-02-11T06:47:00.000-08:00

I suppose there are those of you who think I must be intimidated by your constant, useless, and meaningless ad hominem attempts to "put me down".

I didn't suggest this to James, he suggested it to me. I started this out only with the intention of expressing ideas, and it turned into pretty much an insult match. I personally like insult matches.

A bit of my background. As you already know I spent time in the marines. Not being particularly impressed by authority, I spent probably as much time in jail as in regular service. I stood two Company Office Hours, Two Battalion Office Hours, was sentenced to two months Correctional Custody, and stood a Special Court Martial, which I won on my own defense.

The reason I was court martialed is that the marines sentenced me to two months Correctional Custody, which would make most any civilian jail today look like time spent in Paris Hilton(the building).

Since they took my money I said "no pay, no play. I'm going home".

I spent eight months of freedom before the FBI convinced me to return, and then faced court martial for desertion.

As a result of my defense, I not only won the court martial, but the marines apologized and promoted me meritoriously. To my knowledge, that has never been done in the history of the marine corps.

During my time waiting for court martial, I quite literally had to "watch my back". At one point, five marines gathered, and tried to "adjust my attitude". They caught me on a good day , but not for them. At that time, I was deadlifting 500 lbs, squatting 600, bench pressing over 300, and I ran 8 miles a day for good measure. It wasn't much of a problem for me to throw two average marines like a baseball. When those five marines came at me, and of course not realizing the fed up state of mind I was in, to paraphrase Clint Eastwood, they "made my day".

You think your puny garbage bothers me? I've had REAL harassment from experts.

You think I'm crazy? I'm an ex-marine. Of course I'm crazy.

A side story of interest. After i won my court martial, I was assigned a room in the 22 area at Camp Pendleton, Ca. We were given rooms much like an average motel room, and three marines lived in each room. Me, I like to make things shine. Spit and polish really suits my nature. On Thursdays, we had to 'field day" our rooms for inspection Friday. If we failed that inspection, we spent the weekend doing it all over again, until the inspector got bored from watching.

I hand buffed the tile floors in my room, every single square, until it shone like crystal. If an inspector opened the door and looked in my room, he saw that almost crystalline reflection of my room perfectly in the floor.

People talked about my floor. People came to look at my floor. Inspectors used my floor as an example of what floors should look like.

And then one day the company sergeant, who was responsible for inspecting rooms, decided he wanted my floor. I was ordered to move out. As the sergeant moved in , I told him, "You know, sergeant, that i won that court martial. Nobody in the history of the marines has ever done that.
You really should re-consider, sergeant, because somebody up there really likes me".

Of course I was joking. The sergeant smirked and said "Yeah, right".

That night, after the sergeant and i got re-settled in our new rooms, a toad strangling rain came. It poured torrents almost all night, in Southern California, where everyone who lived there back in the 70's knows, as the old song said "It never rains in Southern California".

I had been moved to the front of the building, where the rain simply drained away. I was high and dry. But in my old room, on the back side of the building, rain and slime and mud ran under the threshold guard of the Sergeant's door, and he awakened that morning to about two inches of mud and slime and ooze all over his floor.

I walked by and saw him sweeping the filth off the floor, and I said "Sergeant, I told you somebody up there likes me!".

He grinned sheepishly and said "I'm startin' to believe it".

That's a true story. Am I threatening you with "God"? Of course not. Just wanted you hecklers out there to know, unless James decides to cut me off, I'm looking forward to March even more than you!

Ha Ha!

2010-02-10T07:08:00.000-08:00

The general reaction to my essays are about the usual, and generally what I expected from ex-WCG members.

Except for "Bykker Bob" and "Questeruk", the usual response is merely a form of ad himinem that demonstrates nothing at all. My response is merely to demonstrate the childish attempts to refute me(not the message, but me).

James, of course, is trying to show me not to "insult" the members of this body, when in fact I have offered no insults. I have merely offered a logical proposition constantly which none of you have even managed to begin to challenge. Simple premise, simple statement.

I'm not concerned with whether you hate me or like me, since what I am or am not, is irrelevant to any pursuit of truth, just as it is irrelevant whether Paul or Simon Magus wrote the things attributed to Paul.

The question is, is the statement true within itself, or is it not true within itself, regardless of the character or nature of the person who wrote it.

I have argued, and with good reason, that there is no way Paul could have started Christianity as we know it today, simply because the logic of Romans 8:7, 8:29-30, and 9:16-22, not to mention Ephesians 2:8-10, and 1 Corinthians 1:27-29, and a host of other scriptures I can explore to prove my point.

And of course, there is the old saw "you can prove anything by the bible", which is exactly the point. There exists no human authority structure that can ever claim truthfully to represent God, and that is the whole point of the book.

This conclusion must really bother you folks, because there's no way to argue around it, and that in itself just tickles me no end. I have provided an unassailable argument, and the very best that you can manage is various forms of ad hominem.

"Ex-Android" claims to represent the logic of Ayn Rand, with whom I am very familiar, and offers nothing more against my statement than "This is so because i say it is so".

Guess what, "Ex", that's religion. It is a statement of dogmatic faith. If you accept it and cannot prove it, or if you accept it because someone else said it must be so, then you are merely following human arguments about truth, which is no more than following human arguments about God.

In fact, by your response, you merely attempt to declare that i cannot possibly be any smarter than you, and your knowledge therefore must be the final word. You can't prove that of course, but why not find reasons to condemn me and show my failings rather than face the discipline of logical discourse?

One of the more interesting aspects of the ad hominem attack is that, by attacking ans showing the flaws of the messenger while ignoring the message, you merely attempt to reduce all people to "equality" by showing that the people themselves are irremediably spoiled, and therefore not to be heard.

That, essentially, is the definition of religion. What is the religious concept of christian "sin" if not the attempt to say that all human 'souls" are so spoiled that individual knowledge is not to be heard, but the judgement of the collective must be superior?

You can be atheist or theist, and you can be subject to that very flaw of reasoning. In fact, it was Ayn Rand herself who pointed out the logical flaw of using "psychology" to demonstrate the depravity of an individual who dared challenge the status quo. The are no heroes, says the psychologizers, since all humans are forever incomplete and incurably spoiled in their attempts to succeed as individuals.

Ayn Rand called such psychological moralizers and ad hominem spoilers "second-handers".

"The second hander acts, but the source of his actions is scattered in every other living person".

The ex-WCG members, having no guidelines to show them there is a God, now collectively gather among themselves, and find their "truth" by agreeing with one another that there can be no God. How do you know? You don't, any more than I know that there can be a God.

So, in true second-hand fashion, you agree among yourselves that anything that smacks of "God" cannot possibly be true. Why? because another group of second handers with no ability to think for themselves agree that there must be a God who is reflected n their second hand collective thoughts.

And so you have the two collectives, the two groups of second-handers that never step out to think or create or reason for themselves, but find their solace in the collective. True Believers that there is no God to combat the True Believers that there is a God.

proof for either side? None at all.

From Ayn Rand: "Notice how they(second handers) will accept anything except a man who stands alone. There's a special insidious kind of hatred for him. The forgive criminals, they admire dictators. Crime and violence are a tie. A form of mutual dependence. They've got to force their miserable little personalities on every single person they meet....Notice the malignant kind of resentment against any idea that propounds independence. Notice the malice toward an independent man."

And what have I said? I have said there is no human authority structure to represent God or truth. None can. I have said there is no reason to follow any human, since no human can know the truth in any absolute sense. I have shown the full consistency between that statement and the statements of both Jesus and Paul, with no one to prove otherwise.

James says he gets emails from people saying "WTF?". Has anyone, as an individual, challenged my thinking or shown the flaw? No, you have resorted to the arguments of the collectivist and second hander, the psychology and ad hominem of the collectivist. The mentality of the group.

Ex-Anrdoid, you want to show the truth of Ayn Rand to me? Show me you can grasp the range and application of her thoughts.

Retired prof, don't hide be hid the facade of "nice'. Show me the flaw in my reason. I don't think you can.

I'm accused of playing games, when all I've done is to repeat a simple argument and a simple conclusion over and over, with no one even trying to challenge it. Your response is collectivist and "democratic". It is 'democratic" because you must insist that no individual can ever ho;p to show intelligence that rises above your own, and that no individual can ever claim the right to rise above the collectivism of mobocracy. Reduce everything to the lowest possible common denominator. Find the new priesthood of the deniers and expert demoralizers. Find the leaders whom you can hide behind to justify your anguish and hate, but never step outside as an individual to think, to question. No, can't do that. Must reduce every single human to the collective of the group. Nonbe higher than the group. None higher than your hatred.

And what have you hated? A man named HWA. Were you warned in advance? Yes, about two thousand years in advance. Jesus said it. Don't follow any man saying "here is Christ". Paul said it There exists no decision procedure by which any person can get from here to God by his own power. You were warned, I was warned, but you see, this educational system in which we live, this 'world" in which we exist, must derive its power from our acceptance of non-existence, acceptance that no man can ever rise above the group and say "I am!" .

I stand alone, proudly, defiantly, and I challenge all of you and all who read: Prove me wrong!

For James, PT Editor

2010-02-09T07:59:00.000-08:00

I'm assuming it was James who posted the comment regarding Woodrow Wilson and the central banking system.

Of course I'm opposed to that system, and have been from the beginning. In fact, everything I write is to find a synthesis that allows people to challenge the authority of the Federal Reserve Board and the central government which has sprung up around it.

This shouldn't really be hard to do. What is the method by which the "Fed" regulates the economy? Interest rates. What is interest? The bible calls it usury. What does the bible say about usury? It's bad. It is called an abomination, it is not allowed by God's law(Deut.23:19, though verse 20 allows it to a "stranger").

But even more interesting, notice what power the government is to have regarding loans.

Deut.24:10: "When thou dost lend thy brother any thing thou shalt not go into his house to fetch his pledge.
"Thou shalt strand abroad, and the man to whom thou dost lend shall bring out the pledge unto thee".

First, there was to be no interest charged, second, the man owed could never enter the home of the debtor to collect the debt.

We might ask, from this, is the home itself to be the instrument on which the debt is based? if the collector can not enter the house to collect a debt, shouldn't the house itself be immune to the power of loans?

If you look at Nehemiah 5 , you see that the Israelites, after their return from captivity, were in a state of near starvation. Verse 4: "We have borrowed money for the king's tribute, and that upon our lands and vineyards.
"Yet now our flesh is as the flesh of our brethren, our children as their children: and lo, we bring into bondage our sons and daughters to be servants...."

Nehemiah was very angry when he heard that, and he named the culprit causing the problem:

Verse 7: "ye exact usury, every one of his brother(in direct violation of law, apparently, with interest placed on property).

Verse 10: "I pray you, let us leave off this usury".

How much usury? Verse 11: "the hundredth part of the money". A hundredth part? Small amount it seems, and yet look at the rates of interest paid to banks today!

It was Karl Marx who pointed out that if money became the "universal equivalent" the central value of everything, then, said Marx, the "so-called inalienable rights and the fixed property relationships corresponding to them break down before money".

How about the right of governments to control property by financial organization?

Micah 2:5: "Therefore thou shalt have none that shall cast the cord(surveyor's line) by lot(by vote) in the congregation of the Lord".

Sounds like a law against zoning to me.

It is said in Daniel 2 that the empire to come at the 'end time" will be mixed of iron and clay. Clay? How about Habakkuk 2:6: "Woe to him that increaseth that which is not his! How long? And to him that ladeth himself with thick clay?"

If you look at the Hebrew translation, you will see that "clay" refers to money pledges, loans, control of borrowing.

In fact, if you look at Daniel chapter 2, you see the "evolution of money", from gold, which limited government power in Babylon, to silver, which was not only added to gold, thus expanding the power of the state, but that silver was also made into coins, which greatly facilitated the power of the state to control commerce.

With the development of bronze, Greece emerged, and coins could be made of cheaper metal, until with Rome it was recognized that it only required an image of a ruler on virtually any metal, even iron, to make the coin of value for tax purposes.

That is basically what Jesus pointed out when he was asked if it as lawful to "render unto Caesar". he pointed to the coin and asked "whose image is on this coin?"

We know from the second commandment that the use of images to "bow down" to them, was forbidden. So, is it lawful to pay taxes to "Caesar" using images imprinted on money? Not according to the second commandment. So what do we render to Caesar? Nothing!

The power of any individual to reject currency based on interest is granted fully in the bible, as Jesus also pointed out we are not to be controlled by images.

It's all about freedom.

Abraham and Freedom

2010-02-09T06:08:00.000-08:00

Questeruk in the "comments" section says there is no way to have a rational discussion with me since I keep "changing the rules".

I've never stated there were any rules. If there were rules we could define, then quite obviously we could define God. We could eliminate all confusion, prove there is a God, and what God expects to the degree we could eliminate all competition among so-called christian religions.

If there is a set of rules, there would also be a system of algorithms, a set of decision procedures, by which we could somehow represent God. But as I stated earlier, if there are such definitions, they can be translated into language, and if translated into language, they can be programmed into a computer, such that a computer could represent all necessary rules and definitions of God.

That in itself creates a contradiction, since if we could do that, we could contain "God" in a creation of our own minds, which means that God would be less than ourselves, not to mention the fact that it would be a form of idolatry, which is condemned by the second commandment.

I pointed out earlier that William James stated, if God is all knowing, then we are not free, since God would know in advance who would accept or reject him.

We can argue this back and forth an infinity of ways, and what will be the result? Exactly what you see today, over 38,000 versions of christianity and growing. Is there such a decision procedure by which we can identify in amny special way with God?

If we could, we would not see obvious evidence to the contrary. The very attempt to supply definitions or "rules" in ANY sense, will lead to an infinity of undecidable propositions about God, in full accordance with Godel's theorem.

All you have to do to prove me wrong is to demonstrate that there IS such a process by which we can make such definitions, which are demonstrated as truth to all.

Simple premise, simple logic. No "rules changing", nothing as been stated in any way contradictory to the physical evidence we see around us.

What is the conclusion of this? "If any man says to you, Lo, here is Christ, or there, believe it not".

Have I told you a "way to Christ"? No, because it is impossible. Therefore, have I told you the truth? YES! I have.

Let's balance this with a statement by Ayn Rand, whom "Ex-Android" admires, as do I:

"Nature allows no vacuum. Empty men's soul--and the space is yours to fill. I don't see why you should look so shocked... this is the oldest one of all. Look back at history. Look at any great system of ethics, from the Orient up. Didn't they all preach the sacrifice of personal joy? Under all the complications of verbiage, haven't they all had a single leitmotif: sacrifice, renunciation, denial? Haven't you been able to catch the theme song, 'Give up, give up, give up, give up'?....Every system of ethics that preached sacrifice grew into a world power and ruled millions of men".

What do religions, ALL religions, teach? That we should "give our heart and souls to the "Lord". If you wish to serve God, we are told, you should join a church, follow the rules, sacrifice our individuality to the collective of a church.

But what about government? SAME THING.

Now, I have been accused of applying Paul's teachings of Romans 8:29-30 as "dogmatic truth". Let's assume you are right, that I am asserting that statement dogmatically(which basically I would have to, in light of any proof to the opposite conclusion).

What are the results of such "dogmatic assertion"? It would mean that no human being would have the ability to define God, to organize in the name of God, or to claim authority in God's name. Why? because if God already knows who his children are to be, there is no thing whatever we can do, by any method, to change the outcome.

So, if I accept this as a "dogmatic belief", then I have automatically concluded that no person can ever claim authority over me as a representative of God. In other words, there exists no "vacuum", in the words of Ayn Rand, above, by which any man can claim my allegiance because of my ignorance.

So, let's throw out Paul' statement in Romans 8:29-30. God doesn't know everything. Salvation is dependent on our free will decisions, of which God cannot know the outcome. Which one of those "free will" decisions will lead us to "salvation"?

All of them? Not according to Jesus in Matthew 24. it is possible to be deceived, and we are told we should not be deceived. So, we are back to the same question again: which one of the religions of Christ are we to accept in order to escape deception?

Which one? Define it. Show me. You can't, at least not to the extent that you can show any connection to God, or if there is a God, or if anything you do can alter your destiny in any way.

So, we're right back to the "dogmatic belief", regarding Romans 8:29-30, which tells us exactly the same thing we see around us by direct physical evidence!

The only difference is that Paul eliminates such necessity of choice from the start, and we have to arrive at the same conclusion by two thousand years of experience, and a scammer called HWA.

Can you define God? If you can, then God can be reduced to a concept that is defined and known by humans, making "God" the creation of man, and not the other way around.

What "rules" have I changed? What free will choice do you have that places you any closer to God by your definitions than any other religion? What can you show, in any sense at all, that would make your "free will" belief any different from the thousands of other 'free will" beliefs?

You can't! it can't be done! If you can show me otherwise, we can legitimately rule the world, right here, right now!

It is said that there can be no rational discussion regarding God. Exactly! That is now proven mathematically! God cannot be reduced to any rational, finite, logical conclusion, simply because the very attempt to define God would have to include an infinity of ideas, none of which can be established as truth!

There is no rational discussion of God. It does not exist, cannot exist, and any attempt to do so will result in exactly what we see today: over 38,000 versions of "truth".

Therefore, what Ayn rand said, what Jesus said, what Paul said, all boil down to the very same conclusion: if any man says to you "here is Christ(or God) or there, BELIEVE IT NOT".

It is just that simple! It cannot be any simpler! So, how does this relate to government in regard to central banking systems and laws of men, as James pointed out in "comments"?

Both church and state, religion and government, are the collective creations of men, nothing more, nothing less. Ayn Rand calls them "Attila and the Witch Doctor" and the bible refers to them as the "beast and false prophet". Is there truly any difference in these two terms? Attila was a power hungry government "beast". A "false prophet" is nothing more than a 'witch doctor' who tries to convince us that we need to obey, obey, obey.

What did Ayn Rand say? Don't follow them. What did Jesus say? Don't follow them. What did Paul say? It does no good to follow them, since God already knows his children anyway. No choice can alter your destiny in that regard(Romans 9:16-22).

All of them amount to the same conclusions! What is that conclusion? You are free from all men or persons who would try to enslave you for any collective reason.

"Converting" Others

2010-02-08T12:26:00.000-08:00

I read a very good book many years ago, published in 1979, I think. It won the Pulitzer prize, and it was concerned with Godel's theorem, entitled "Godel, Escher, Bach".

I had to read it several times before I grasped the basic ideas, But the author, Douglas Hofstadter, also wrote a book a bit simpler, called "I Am A Strange Loop". A pretty good read.

In "Godel, Escher, Bach", Hofstadter would introduce his ideas with a conversation, in Lewis Carrol fashion, between Achilles and the Tortoise. The conversations were based loosely around Zeno's paradox.

At one point, Achilles was trying to use logic to convince the Tortoise that Achilles' conclusions simply could not be denied if the tortoise accepted logic as the ultimate arbiter of truth.

The Tortoise, like most humans, said that he was very reasonable, and would never accept a conclusion that was illogical. Achilles just knew the argument as won.

Achilles began, "If I show that A is true, and B follows from A, then we must also conclude that C is also true as a conclusion following from the premises of A and B".

"Of course" said the Tortoise, "It's obvious that this should be the case".

"Then you agree?"

"In principle".

"What do you mean, 'In principle'?"

"I mean that if A is true, and B is true, the we would conclude that C s true as a premise following from A and B".

"That's what I said"

"Yes" said the Tortoise, "But if A is true, and B is true, and C follows logically as a premise resulting from A and B, then we would conclude that this is summed up in premise D".

"What?"

"You see, if A, B, and C are true, we would establish this as premise D, which simply states the fact of the truth of A,B,and C".

"Okay" said Achilles, "I'll accept that. But then surely you must accept D as the final statement of truth".

"Not at all" said the Tortoise, "If D is the statement of truth summing up A,B.and C, then certainly we would establish this as a subset of premise E, which states that if A,B, C, and D are true, then E".

Achilles smelled a rat. "But surely there would be a stopping point. Let's say that Z is the statement that sums up the truth of A through Y. Surely you then have to accept that Z is the truth?"

"Of course" said Tortoise, "But then we would also have to say that A1 is the statement that demonstrates the truth of A through Z, and then A2, A3, A4, until we finally arrive at the ultimate truth".

"Which is?"

"I don't know. How many numbers are there?"

"Infinite numbers. So if I say that infinity sums up the truth of all previous statements, we can stop there?"

"I suppose, but where does infinity stop?"

What occurred was that both Achilles and Tortoise were discussing a kind of "schematic" of truth. not the truth in terms of each statement itself, but in terms of statements that represented truth or statements about truth, as each one saw it.

This is my point in talking "about" truth. We can develop processes of organization, mechanical representations of 'truth', but in fact, the arguments can proceed into infinity. The system of mathematics simply cannot define truth in any limited fashion. It can go on forever....

That is the essence of Godel's theorem. In order to find out if truth could be represented in mathematics, Godel had to develop a system in which the system of math actually referred back to itself. To do this, he had to develop a "Godel number" system in which the axioms of math( plus, minus, division, multiplication, etc) were represented as numbers themselves, so that the system was "self referencing".

What Godel demonstrated b this was that a system of complex mathematics would produce a statement which said of itself, "I exist, but I cannot be proven within this system".

From "outside" the system, the person could see if it was true, but the system itself simply had nothing to say about it! it was undecidable, therefore making the system incomplete.

The result was "in any consistent axiomatic formulation of number theory, there exists undecidable propositions".

This same process may also be admitted by looking at Jeremiah 17:9 and Romans 8:7. When the human mind looks inside itself for truth, "self references", it will come up with an infinity of possibilities as to what is true, especially in regard to God!

If we seek to organize truth about God in the form of rules and laws, that organization will have to reflect the limitations of our own minds. It will reflect also the incompleteness of our mathematical systems and our systems of logic as well.

We can't get "there" from "here".

That's why, if we seek to "convert" others to a certain truth, that truth will ultimately split into an infinity of different ideas and concepts! No human mind can represent God in a complete sense, and that's what both Paul and Jesus tells us.

Did Abraham Have "Free Will"?

2010-02-08T07:49:00.001-08:00

Good arguments about free will and omniscience building.

When God "tested" Abraham, did he know for sure what Abraham would do?(Assuming, of course, that there was an Abraham, or God).

How about Genesis 15? God allegedly put Abraham to sleep and pointed out: "Know of a surety that thy seed shall be a stranger in a land that is not their's, and shall serve them. And they shall afflict them four hundred years".

This was a guarantee of something that would happen to Abraham's children BEFORE Isaac was even born. assuming the story was true, therefore, we are forced to logically conclude that it would occur as prophesied regardless of what choice Abraham made regarding the sacrifice of Isaac on the alter.

Of course you can argue that "God is this, God is that, or god is the other..." but the fact given is this: Abraham's descendants were to be enslaved four hundred years. Of course, this assumes that any of it ever happened, but if you're going to argue "God" from a biblical perspective, you're sort of stuck with what you're given.

Of course, we can take it as a lesson similar to conclusions of Talmudic scholars: God was showing Abraham that sacrifice would not be the way of obedience or "proof testing" of faithfulness. In fact, the chief "sin" or blasphemy against God is the sacrifice of children at "Tophet", which is to be a great place of burning.

Now, you can argue on this a million different ways, but from what we read above, we would have to conclude that whether Abraham sacrificed Isaac or not, Abraham's descendants would be slaves in Israel four hundred years.

And while we're arguing it, does God create evil? How about Isaiah 45:7? Or Amos 3:6?

Does "free will" mean freedom from God's foreknowledge? From every definition available, from a purely physical view, "free will" is simply the ability to choose as we believe. There is no evidence for anything greater. Freedom is the absence of absolute knowledge.

If you want to try and define God, you will end up exactly with the situation we see today: over 38,000 estimated versions of christianity, none of which can prove the authority of their beliefs, and therefore, as Jesus said in Matthew 24;23, no reason to follow any of them.

Omniscience

2010-02-08T05:50:00.000-08:00

I got a great question in the "comments" section. Is it a problem, humanity being free, and God not being all knowing? After all, we do seem to see evidence in numerous place in which God is not all knowing.

In fact, the fundamental premise of christianity is that God does not know whether we will "accept" him or 'reject" him. But that is where we immediately run into a problem, not only with Paul's teaching, but with those teachings attributed to Jesus, as in Matthew 13:11. Whatever "it" was that the people of Israel were supposed to know, "it" was not given. Paul says pretty much the same thing in Romans 11:7.

The flaw in christianity that stares us in the face is that if it is necessary to "choose Christ", there should be something we can choose and know for a fact that we have chosen correctly, yet Jesus(or somebody) gives us the ONE obvious and truthful answer: follow none of them?

Why? Simply because we have no logical reasonable, rational criteria by which we can choose. Any attempt to do so, based on the condition of human ignorance, would only produce increasing chaos and confusion, and we are told that God is not the author of confusion.

If you believe in confusion, therefore, you don;t believe in God. But by the same token(for the atheist's benefit), if you believe in truth, you cannot believe in confusion, since truth must be consistent with all truth. Therefore, if you believe in "God" and "truth" as a basis of anything worth believing in, you would have to assume that one is basically the same as the other.

EXCEPT for one big problem: Paul says the natural mind is enmity against God and cannot be subject to God's laws. Jesus himself(allegedly) refers to truth in that same sense when he speaks of the "spirit of truth" in John 14:17: "Even the spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive..."

Truth is not "received", nor is it a 'given". We see this indicated in Matthew 7:14. "Strait is the gate, and narrow is the way that leadeth unto life, and few there be that find it".

Notice, it didn't say "choose it". It said "find it".

How would one know when they have found truth? They would know when they realized that other humans can no more tap into the truth in any absolute sense than they, the individual, can.
That is exactly consistent with the quote I gave of Ayn Rand in my other post.

Are we free from God? First, is there even a God? How do we possibly define God? What process of choices can we assume that leads us to God? We simply don't know. But we CAN test the limits of the knowledge of man! We know now mathematically that it is simply impossible to contain all truth in one single package, and any attempt to organize truth will only lead to an infinity of undecidable propositions!

Look at "christianity" around you today. What do you see? Over 38,000 versions estimated within christianity, and who knows how many religious ideas outside of christianity.

Is the natural mind, therefore, subject to God? Every scrap of physical evidence says no! Romans 8:7, therefore, must have been correct, and if that was correct, then so must Romans 9:16-22 be correct. We simply have no process of choice as to the "one true way" to God!

Like the punchline of the old joke says, you can't get there from here!

So, in what context are you free? It means you're free from men(or women) who try to tell you "this way to God!". As "Ex-Android" pointed out, "belief is not akin to truth". However, if I get an idea that something is true, then I must believe that if I pursue it, it can be proven one way or another. I may not know it to be true, but I can believe it to be true and seek to prove it or disprove it. Or to put it in more scientific terms, in order to prove something, it must be falsifiable. If it can be proven true, you must also have the ability to prove it false.

Can I prove there is a God? No. Can I prove there is not a God? No. In order to prove either conclusion, I must have some way of showing the possibility of a belief being false, and we simply do not have that kind of knowledge.

Consequently, we must prove what is true in terms of physical evidence. If "God" is shown to be inconsistent with physical evidence, then we must reject "God" to the extent we can show inconsistency. But keep in mind that in absolute terms of "infinity", there is no way to demonstrate the consistency of our thinking from within that system itself!

What odes it mean? Again, it means we can't get from "here" to "truth" in any ABSOLUTE SENSE, nor can we get from "here" to "God" as an absolute representation of truth!

Therefore, our freedom, whether atheist or "christian", must consist of being free from ALL authority structures of men! 1 Cor 7:23: "..be ye not the servants of men".

1Cor 9:19: "For though I be free from all men..."

2 Peter 2:19: "While they promise them liberty, they themselves are the servants of corruption: for of whom a man is overcome, of the same is he brought in bondage".

The RSV says "he is ENSLAVED". So what did Jesus say? "If any man says to you, Lo, here is Christ, or there, believe it not"(Matthew 24;23).

The atheist and the TRUE christian find unity in that statement. If you would follow truth, you cannot follow men, and that definitely includes religions of men(and they ALL are religions of men or women). If you would be free, you must learn to think for yourselves!

proselytizing? See what Jesus said about the dominant religious leaders of his day: "For ye compass sea and land to make one proselyte, and when he is made, ye make him twofold more a child of hell than yourselves(Matt.23:15)".

As Hebrews 4:12 tells us, the truth is like a two edged sword. It cuts collectivism both ways. The statements in Romans 8:7, 8:29-30, and 9:16-22, cuts collectivism both in terms of christianity AND in terms of the collectivism of atheism. There is no "us" and "them", because no person can have a monopoly on truth.

"ye shall know the truth, and the truth will set you free". You can't have two "truths". Truth is consistent with all truth.