Religious manipulation, oppression, ignorance and heaven

[David Pinnegar]

Hi!

Last weekend was shocking, not just for the fact that the bees that lived in the wall have died.

I heard the story about how someone's life was changed being taken to the front in a war between an Islamic country and its neighbour. The border was heavily mined. "We have our secret weapon" declared the generals working for the Islamist protagonists. Coach loads of young kids had been brought in by the busload to the front. The regime had commissioned thousands of little plastic keys to be stamped out and were given to the young lads, persuading them that these were the keys to heaven. "Just go, run over there, and this is your key to instant heaven." They did. The mines were cleared The regime won its way.

For whom? In worship and praise of the glorious ALLAH - breath in and out through your mouth and listen AAIAA - the breath of life - the god of life - AAHEY - YHWH?? No - not in the name of any God of Life, universal to all, but for a corrupt regime.

Then I heard the story of the soldiers who raped girls before they shot them the next day, and then turned up on the parent's doorstep the next week with their belongings. "Hello. These are the personal possessions of your daughter. I am your son in law. I was with her for just one night, the night before I shot her." A Fatwah had gone out ordering that virgins could not go to heaven, so soldiers were to do their duty to get them there to heaven.

Then I went to church. The incumbant had sent a friend to preach. The sermon was on the subject of the second reading from Acts which was of Peter's vision of the four legged lamb enlightening him to look among the gentiles to spread the good news, and not just among the Jews. This vision was just as much a Gnostic text as any thrown out of the Canonical texts by Iraneus in the 2nd century AD but it served Iraneaus' purposes for it, and the Book of Revelation to be included whilst other valuable texts at Nag Hammadi and elsewhere were excluded.

The preacher used the vision to urge us to embrace new things - an argument much espoused by people wanting to get rid of church pews - but to keep some tradition alive otherwise risking throwing out the baby with the bathwater.

The first reading, from John, had been ignored by the preacher. It was of the incident when Jesus found the man sitting at the Lamb's Gate, who had been an invalid for 38 years and told him to pick up his bed and walk, and to sin no more. What magic this is seen to be, curing the lame and getting them to be able to walk. Those seeking Jesus as a SuperHero for what He can do for them are no more in tune with God than those followers of the Cargo Cult in Vanuatu waiting for John Frum to return. (Attenborough's documentary about the Cargo Cult is fascinating. ) This preacher, like many of the past 1970 years expects her superhero Jesus to return likewise. Instead, He will descend from the clouds in our minds, when we see face to face rather than through a glass darkly. So after the service I suggested to her that the Lamb's Gate reading was interesting. Just as Jesus had the courage to overturn the money-changers' tables, he had had the courage to tell the professional invalid that he could walk, that he shouldn't beg under false pretences - thus to sin no more - and that he could walk and needed to get a life. After all, if the God of Life is to be worshipped, then we need to use our lives - to make the most of our lives - to breathe life - AAYAAH. Would the bloke finding the end of life really not be in hell finding that he'd wasted his life sitting at a gate begging for the crumbs of other people's lives?

Of course the extent of the nature of the circumstances is a spectrum. Some people might need just that bit of encouragement to be positive that they really can achieve something without a prop - that they are able, that they reallly aren't dependant upon getting into that pool of healing water, that they don't need an excuse to justify them not getting up and walking.

The reaction from the preacher was instant. Without contemplation, "You're wrong. It says quite clearly that he had been an invalid for 38 years. It was a miracle."

Elsewhere in these postings I have written about the feeding of the 5000 as the miracle of getting human kind to cooperate together, to use their minds. This is a much larger miracle than any food that a magicsuperhero could superhumanly have magicked into existence out of thin air. Just by encouraging the people to bring out what they had hidden for themselves in fear of losing it, the people realised they had enough to eat having produced it from under their robes was a much simpler, but more challenging task - and Jesus did it.

The invalid at the Lamb's Gate is actually how we approach heaven. We are beggars at the gate of heaven thinking that heaven is on the other side of life, beyond death. We get titbits and crumbs of heaven as people walk through the gate but fear that we can't reach it without that plastic key, or being blessed by that pool of healing water. So-called Christian preachers tell us that we have to plead with Jesus to let us into Heaven, just as the invalid pleads at the gate. (The word "just" should be made illegal in any prayer. "We're good boys and girls really - just please let us in") The story is not about an invalid who was magically cured, nor a man who was told to get off his backside and get a life, but about us, about Christ descending from the clouds in our minds, about the holy spirit, not as a mysterious ectoplasm that only the weird can see and that we need to touch if we are to get to heaven, but about the idea of the God of Life that enables us to live, to have free minds and to achieve Heaven on Earth - an Earth fashioned in the nature of Heaven in our minds. We're just that step away from it and we have simply to pick up our bed, pack up our excuses, see as irrelevant the false god of the healing water or the ectoplasmic mist of the Idea of God . . . and walk . . . with our own legs of our own minds.

As the human race achieves saturation point on Planet Earth, it is for us to decide whether we are animal parasites on earth, or beings fashioned in the spirit of the creator, the process of creation that enables us to function in the image of the God of Life, the Creator, that process by which we are here on earth and can achieve heaven.

The places of organs, the houses of the God of Life, have a lot to bring to teach humanity, even including preachers who think we need cleansing in that pool of healing water.

As Christians in worship of the God of Life we have much to give Muslims in the worship of the God of Life and to the achievement of Heaven in life. My son pointed me to http://miriams-well.org/lectures/HeavenAs.html echoing the concept. In our Christian texts, it's not our text that's wrong but that some perspectives of its meaning are more helpful to humanity and relevant to how we live our lives than others. Likewise we can be assured that nothing in the Holy Quran is wrong but some perspectives of some interpretations are more helpful than others.

If we take this point of view, as Christians we can obey the injunction of the Quran to fight what is bad by what is better.

What is better is by definition better than what is less good, less helpful, less productive (parable of the talents) to the point that what is less good, less helpful, less productive is outshadowed by what is more helpful to the point at which the less helpful ceases to have any relevance at all. This is the natural law, the law of the matter of which the earth and everything is made, of lifeforms too. People have the choice to be like that also.

By opening our minds to the God of Life, we free ourselves of religious manipulation, brainwashing by those wanting to exert authority for their own ends, and give those lads sent to the minefield the Breath of Life. AAHAAH

Best wishes,

David P

[KB7DQH]

As the human race achieves saturation point on Planet Earth, it is for us to decide whether we are animal parasites on earth, or beings fashioned in the spirit of the creator, the process of creation that enables us to function in the image of the God of Life, the Creator, that process by which we are here on earth and can achieve heaven.

What is better is by definition better than what is less good, less helpful, less productive (parable of the talents) to the point that what is less good, less helpful, less productive is outshadowed by what is more helpful to the point at which the less helpful ceases to have any relevance at all. This is the natural law, the law of the matter of which the earth and everything is made, of lifeforms too. People have the choice to be like that also.

At many points in the history of civilized society "we" were thought to have reached that "saturation" point... but have moved beyond these points  through our ability to use our minds to "evolve" rather than waiting around for natural processes to achieve this for us.   Once again the homo sapiens are presented with a collectively perceived "saturation" and the solution presented to us by some is the removal of around 90% of us.   I say perceived as there is much of the planet's land surface which goes totally un- utilized for the purposes of "pro-creation" among other things........ 

Those who frequent this forum may have noticed a decline in the quantity of news items I post here, largely because I have been distracted as of late... and in many cases the quantity vs quality exceeds the time (and bandwidth) I have available so although I continue to scan through the "available data"
I will forward on those stories I find of particular relevance. 

But these "distractions" have been expanding my research into other areas which have become areas of interest partly through activities here, in trying to answer some of the "bigger" questions related to the underlying influences which may relate to my "endangered species thesis as applied to the King of Instruments and its relevance to civilized society"...   

What fascinates me so about David's latest offering is how closely it parallels what I have been finding elsewhere :o :o :o 8) ;D ;) ;) ;) ;)

Eric
KB7DQH

[revtonynewnham]

Hi

Unless David is taking his reading from an extra-Biblical source, Peter's vision in Acts has nothing whatsoever to do with a four-legged lamb - it's about clean and unclean, and God declaring all animals clean - symbolic of the fact that Peter was about to preach the gospel to Gentiles - people he, as a "good Jew", would regard as unclean and beyond the pale.

Not sure where "Lamb's Gate" comes from in the John passage either.

Every Blessing

Tony

[David Pinnegar]

Dear Tony

Thanks for drawing these glaring inconsistencies to my attention.

Four legged animals in terms of lambs and sheep are clearly on my mind at the moment. The particular church holds inescapably torturous memories of adults being given paper and scissors and pens and being told to cut out the outline of a sheep, write their names upon them, and then bring them to the front to stick on a board - because Jesus loves you as his flock.

With such banality it's no surprise that intelligent thinking people have left churches, and the church, in droves. Unfortunately with this is disappearing fast the collective memory that there is anything worthwhile in the sacred texts, let alone the context of organs.

So yes - it's the vision of the four legged beasts. Acts 11:1-18

And the invalid of 38 years John 5:5 - it's the pool at the Sheep Market, Bethesda, with five porches.

I'm not sure that the lapses of memory on the specific details recalled from Sunday detract from the thrust that consideration of other interpretations are important. Indeed, perhaps they support the notion moreso.

The fact that in hearing a couple of stories on Sunday and writing about them a couple of days later caused beasts to be turned into lambs and porches to be turned into gates, all connected by the four legs of the Sheep at the market pool. Neither of these changes in my view particularly change the thrust of the possible interpretations I've suggested other than the extent to which we see the invalid is begging. Certainly, in focussing merely on getting into the pool as his main focus in life, he's not making the best use he can of his life and I suspect that that's what Jesus told him. "Go on - get a life!" Perhaps he's not begging of money but of wasting life begging of life whilst not realising he has the capacity to live it. . . .

And I suspect that the story has the same relevance to us in our ability to rise from the dead - not the dead after death but the dead to life in this life and thus to achieve heaven in life, as we pray in the prayer. We sit there on the edge of the healing pool of ectoplasm wasting life begging of the magic necessary to get to heaven when in fact we can walk there freely of our own free will.

The random process of change of connected detail in the retelling of a story is a normal process of Chinese Whispers and is demonstration in itself exactly why we should be examining different layers of meaning in texts of stories handed down by oral tradition.

The response "You're wrong" to an interpretation given to me by the preacher implies lack of consideration of the permutations of circumstances from which a story has arisen and has been retold. In my view it's essential to consider ways in which by chinese whispers a story has been handed down rather embroidered to stress a point even validly but sometimes to the point of losing the point.

When we consider how difficult it is to encourage people
- not to be lazy about thinking for themselves, leaving thinking to other people
- to cooperate with each other, sharing their advantages
the feeding of the 5000 has much more use to teach us in humanity about loving our neighbours as ourselves than does setting up Jesus as an Idol and a SuperHero who does things we cannot hope to do but who we are encouraged to try to emulate. This smacks of the attitude towards John Frum in the Cargo Cults emulating out of wood radio receivers, aerials and headphones, planes, runways and airports in the expectation that emulating John Frum will bring the same benefits of cargo loads of material goods.

So I make the case that re-examining our texts with the freshness of spiritual children rather than accepting the generally given interpretations is a reinvigorating way to approach Christianity. Through the eyes of Christianity viewed in this light, it has a great deal to give to the modern world and without which we are the poorer in our survival ability. Exercising the discipline of illuminating the layers of meanings and possible alternate interpretations would bring people back into churches in their droves.

Best wishes

David P

[revtonynewnham]

Hi David

Your confusion perhaps indicates a lack of communication on the part of the speaker!  (Although I sometimes wonder how much of my sermons some people really listen to!).

You make some good points, although I wouldn't want to try and dismiss the miracle at Bethesda as symbolic - although I'll have to remember and use your comment about the man making the best use of his time next time I preach on that passage - that's well worth thinking about - thanks.

That story also refutes one of the heresies that sadly have become common in certain parts of the church - notably charismatics but it has also spread elsewhere; namely that Jesus healed every sick person who He came into contact with (and hence everyone who is sick today should be healed - I wish).  Picking up the pieces after someone has responded to this sort of call is problematic.  The big, insoluble question is why did Jesus pick that particular person?

Every Blessing

Tony

[David Pinnegar]

Dear Tony

It's great to know some of my strange ideas are capable of being helpful.

Far from dismissing a story as only being symbolic, perhaps as we see white light and know it's composed of a spectrum from red to indigo, no part of a biblical story from the material to the symbolic should be dismissed. All interpretations are possible at the one and same time.

The reason for the grapplings which I've been expressing in these posts is that so many dismiss the place of organs as irrelevant - and in my view, the sort of dogma with which cut-out sheep have been presented to me often make it so.

So how do we see God as relevant today?

As the loving designer of the universe with whom every Christian has a personal relationship, God isn't. Or at least in the sense that this God looks after each and one of us, personally . . . is seen to be illusory when people are caused to ask "How can a loving God let this happen" . . . "How could my son be killed" or this happen or that. The First World War, the Japanese Tsunami. It's then then that the idea doesn't fit the observation. Those that want to stick to it have to jump through intellectual hoops just as the earth centered view of the trajectories of the planets in contrast to the solarcentric view.

Our change of perspective from terracentric to post-Galilean solarcentric didn't change the solar-system, but enabled us to understand it better. It was only our egocentricity that suffered, the illusion of the human self-importance.

So for these reasons I've been examining whether a similar change of perspective about God, the Creator, can enable our vision to fit better the facts.

Starting with the concept of the more useful being more useful than the less useful, by definition, to the point that the less useful achieves even irrelevance one can see the way in which the concept of God, the noun, the person, the intelligence, the Designer, is less useful than consideration of God the Creator as the process by which Creation happens, the means of creation, leaving the unintelligence of what doesn't work to be irrelevant to us in this world that comes about through that process. In this way, all has been created, in a sense rather different to the so-called Creationists' view of Genesis, but by this process which we can call God.

The animal world in the instinctive consciousness is entirely unaware of the process that has led to material existence. But the human has the capacity of intellect to understand the process. The animal consciousness is dead to the process. It is subject to the process and is governed by it, but has no capacity to understand its life in terms of the process, let alone to use it, to be part of it, therefore to reflect it. In understanding the process, in being part of it and involving it in our lives, we become in the reflection of the process. So this can explain the concept that we are made in the image of God.

Understanding God as this process of never ending combination of matter and life to explore and find the most useful permutations to live all the better takes away the blame we can put on the God as an Idol that hasn't saved us or our loved ones in the First World War or the Japanese Tsunami.

Of course, when we embrace the concept of the process in our lives, so that we are more useful, more helpful, more creating, more part of the life of our surroundings, we become superliving, living in an echelon of life and understanding beyond the limitations of the animal instinctive behaviour and consciousness. This is why to embrace "God" understanding the process of the natural law of creation, we have to sacrifice our original animal consciousness and mere instinctive reactions. When we do, our old selves with mere instinctive unthinking behaviour dies, indeed we have to nail it up on the cross and crucify it - and we live life after death in this life, being superalive in life. We are resurrected. This is what, I believe, Jesus is asking us to do in the Garden of Gethsemane.

This concept of life after death in this life, life beyond the dead life of the mere animal consciousness, dead to the understanding of the process, dead to what we use a shorthand for in terms of the word God, becomes therefore rather more useful than the life after death to which the young lads were sent having cleared the landmines, more useful than the death to which the virgins were sent after having been raped by the soldiers who killed them.

So in the same way, when we come to the Lord's Supper, we have to have ourselves sacrificed our preconceived vision of Him too, the Idol of the cross, the Idol of all the dogma, the Idol of that Big Designer of the Universe who we can expect to save us but doesn't from material disaster. Having sacrificed any idea that leads to worship of God, Jesus, Christ as an Idol that will save us, we eat his body and drink his blood so that we can be part of the process, part of God, and so that His body and His blood can grow in us so that we become the body of God, hearing the Father's word and doing it, carrying it out, being a product of it (daughter, son or mother of it).

Of course killing the animal consciousness or keeping it as that tiger within us happy so that it doesn't pounce beyond the bounds we set it is all less than easy.

But for the reasons outlined above, I hope that it's possible to see the value of examining the whole spectrum of interpretation and to see which results most helpfully in the process of creation and making us in our turn helpful to the process of life.

Best wishes

David P

[Paul Duffy]

David, if I may say so, you have an unusual perspective on faith. You were in church, which implies that you have some type of belief in the Almighty, yet you seem hell-bent on searching for double-meanings in Bible passages. There is nothing wrong with an enquiring mind, but your attempts to show Jesus as a fake have perhaps not gone unnoticed by your preacher, and will ultimately destroy what little faith you have. For if JC didn't cure the lame, then he didn't rise from the dead. And if we all swallowed that, then church organists like myself could have a lie-in every Sunday. There would be no need for churches, and there would be no need for church organs.

If you keep peeling the layers of an onion away, you end up with nothing. Check out the perspective of religion during the French Revolution.

Best wishes,
Paul

[David Pinnegar]

Dear Paul

Thank you so much on picking me up on what appears to be somewhat strange. I am not at all saying that Jesus was a fake - actually quite the opposite - and am simply stripping away clouds of language to find The Creator, the Breath of Life, the God of Life and which is manifest in Jesus Christ.

We have been presented with some linguistic equations which, religion against religion, appear not to add up and produce some bizarre results. When we insert "the process by which creation comes about" into the the language as the cause of Creation, therefore God, the whole religion actually starts to add up.

My local priest tells me that Jesus _is_ God. But Jesus is the Son of God. This argument was current 500 years ago and appears not to have been sorted out. Let's perhaps take it another way - Jesus is one with God. This can mean Jesus is God, or that Jesus is with God as in has God inside him, or is with God as in next to God. So the unification or separation of Jesus and God are ambigious and, being a quantum physicist it is unsurprising to me to have two mutually exclusive truths that are both true at one and the same time. Nature is like this.

Looking at how the Bible reveals Jesus to be telling us about this process of Creation is refreshing and enlightening. Instead of worshipping Jesus as god, as an idol or graven image, we worship the Creator, the process of Creation - "Love thy God", said Jesus - and in operating the process we become a reflection of that process, so that through Jesus' teaching man is made truly in the image of God, operates the process of God, and thereby attains heaven in the mind which is brought about by action on the earth.

This is what we pray for in the prayer that Jesus taught us.

I don't believe that anything that I'm saying is unChristian therefore. When we kill the animal instinctive behaviour within ourselves, and are dead to the temptations of the animal and alive to the process of Creation, alive to the God of Life, alive, we too experience life after death of our old selves and become alive in the process of Creation, alive in God. Jesus defined his mother and brothers as those who heard his Father's word and did it. That is what a son of God does.

Basically I am looking for the common sense explanation that anyone can understand first before resorting to the inexplicable, the magic, the superstition. Because we are mentally lazy we like to have mummy and daddy and big important men doing the thinking for us. We like to be wrapped in cotton wool so that we don't have to think and whatever happens is someone else's fault. It's easier that way. It's much more difficult to be self determining, responsible for the consequences of ones own actions and only having oneself to blame. Having God as some sort of idol to be worshipped abrogates our decision making powers to the agency of God as a third party, but actioning the Creation process, being God's arms and legs, puts us in the Creation seat, actually enacting God's will.

When we see how terribly wrong the results in Islam are of expecting life after we are buried in the ground, I suggest that examining other ways of interpreting the life after death linguistics is capable of bearing fruit.

Martin Renshaw on this forum tells me that in Mediaeval times, texts were expected to be read, understood, interpreted on at least five different levels or in five different ways.

For the reason that reading in multiple alternative ways is capable of being more useful rather than less useful I suggest them to be worthy of exploration.

The more that I explore the more the faith in the process of Creation is confirmed, certainly not weakened, and operating the Creation process within the Sea of Circumstances brings both reproach when appropriate as well as great reward.

If you want to be shocked then the Edmund Szekerley translation of the Gospel of Peace of Jesus Christ is a book worthy of recommendation.

Best wishes

David P

[David Pinnegar]

Dear Paul

I write a postscript as responding to you having returned from a Cannes Film Festival party in the wee hours I had not encompassed necessary thoughts.

My thanks to you for taking me to task are sincere: I'm writing a book, much of which centres upon topics that have been refined by reason of people good and kind enough such as yourself to pick me apart where needed in areas which are incompletely explained. Even as it is serious feedback has been absent from those to whom I have sent draft copies whilst others have merely said that they've enjoyed it or that it's on track. Such affirmatory feedback is not good enough in ensuring that what I'm writing is comprehensible.

Last night I commented that Mediaevalism required the understanding of simultaneous thruths on five levels. I hope that scholars familiar specifically with this might comment further in relation to historical evidence for the statement.

However in the world in which we live now, the majority of the world's population are informed not by the word and how to decipher its multiple meanings and choose the most likely, the most reasonable or the most useful. The means of communication is visual through TV and "Moovies". I have a personal experience of a young lad who has been brought up on "Moovies" and has been kept in an intellectual playpen until the age of 12. We are currently waking him up. Having watched TV for the whole of his life he has no idea of how the world works. The two dimensional image at best has given him facts - it has given him a menu of what to think, not how to think. The reality is that a population brought up in this way is ripe fodder for the imposition of a totalitarian state - they will accept what is presented to them as fact and be wholly unaware of how things happen and how they can be manipulated. Meanwhile it becomes ever more difficult to discern the conspiracy theories from the reality.

It's for this reason that examining the multiple meanings of what we do in Churches is capable of bearing fruit.

As God is the Breath of Life and the God of Life, this is possibly where we might usefully focus our spectrum of meaning. What happens after our bodies are buried in the ground will take care of itself beyond our control as a matter of death then and this is not a challenge to faith in the afterlife. It is merely a focus on this life, given to us by the God of Life and putting this God into this Life of which we are aware. By understanding "the process of Creation", the cause of creation, God, and putting this process into our lives, our lives are transformed from the dead animal instinctive consciousness into the God consciousness, the Christ consciousness, the Creator consciousness. Dead to our instinctive thoughts and animal behaviour, we are capable of achieving something entirely new, resurrected and raised from the dead of our old selves. Jesus asks us to arise with him from the tomb, to put away the things of death, and to live leaving the old animal selves behind.

I don't think that there is anything unChristian in what I'm saying and that what I'm saying is not exclusive of other interpretations, but in this life I'm suggesting that it's useful.

It's commonly thought that religion and science have little interaction, whilst many like to debate it. Certainly science enables us to learn about what works and how it works but the current writers have not drawn any usefulness from science in guiding us better how to live, other than making Prozac and the like for people suffering depression.

Light itself, referred to in the beginning by John, is a model of beauty demonstrating bizarrely incompatible truths to be valid at one and the same time. Light is both a photon, a particle, and an electromagnetic wave. So no singular truth can be the only truth and in being true to nature, we have to reconcile the irreconcilable.

It was upon looking at Feynmann diagrams that I had an awakening. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feynman_diagram
Being able to grapple no longer with the mathematics, I found the whole field hideously confusing. Perhaps you might have sympathy with that view. It's very easy to get bogged down in the theories and the maths and so with years of experience in a wholly different discipline I asked the question "What are these diagrams showing us?". The answer came that they show combinations of particles that interact, work together, and those that don't.

Those particles that don't work together are useless in creating matter at a higher level as building blocks to make more sophisticated matter. Events that don't happen don't result in anything. Events that happen result in something. Those interactions or particles that don't work together are no part of our world or of our understanding. They are elsewhere rather than here and they're pretty inintellegent because they have not produced anything. All the matter that is here, and even of which we are made, has gone through this process of being built by matter coming together to work together at every level from
fundamental - leptons and muons
subatomic - quarks
atomic - protons, neutrons and electrons
molecular
biological
living species
us
and each level has involved greater complexities of the cooperation working together process to result in us, but in our animal state we are unaware of this.

Observing the processes of creation we note that those things that are more successful multiply faster so that there are more of them. So we derive the two rules
1. what doesn't work together doesn't produce anything whilst particles (or people) that work together produce something at a higher level
2. what is more successful is more successful than what is less successful and what is less successful is less successful to the point of irrelevance.

So anyone feeling irrelevant simply has to find a way of being useful. How many people do you know who don't do enough, let alone for others, and think always of themselves. They try to attract attention with their clothes or their fancy cars and they are worried that people won't like them if they have wrinkles on their face or big enough boobs so spend fortunes on plastic surgeons and botox. These concepts are the triggers to go and be useful, more useful than the less useful.

So in reading texts for meanings I look at the spectrum of meaning, such as in the statement "God is one" or that "Jesus is one with God" and look for the meaning that is most useful, like the parable of the talents, and in particular what meaning is teaching us most on how to handle the process of Creation in our lives, and to be the process of Creation in action. It was in this way that Jesus was the son of God, indeed God personified, the process of Creation personified, and how he asks us to be his brothers and sisters. I ask "what meaning is most useful in this life, given to me by the God of Life and the breath of life."

It was in this way that Jesus breathed upon his disciples and spread the holy spirit, not a mist of befuddling ectoplasm but the spirit in the meaning of "idea", the idea of creation.

It was in this way that the disciples at Pentecost were drunk with the life-giving idea (spirit) of the God of Life and spoke with tongues aflame with the enthusiasm of common sense that anyone can understand.

It's more useful to me to realise not perhaps that Jesus was a superman inventing loaves and fishes out of thin air, although a Cannes contact I met yesterday would like to invoke other dimensions invisible to us in which Jesus operated to do so, but in that spirit of getting everyone who had come out for the day of teaching to get out from under their cloaks and cooperate sharing their food for a satisfying meal. It's more useful to me to understand the human resistance to cooperation than it is for me to want to invoke the power of a superman. What Jesus did was to invoke God, the process of Creation, tell people about it and get them to do as fundamental particles and to work together.

This is not, certainly not, portraying Jesus as a fake. It's simply common sense that's rather hard to swallow because our egos tell us that mankind couldn't really be so stupid. In the animal state, he or she is. But in the result of Jesus' teaching about the Creator our lives are transformed.

I have a Tibetan acquaintance at Cannes who writes:
" Cannes' Reign has much more to do with right relationship than with being privately right. It has much more to do with being connected than with being personally correct. Can you feel the total difference between these 2?

The one encourages an impossible notion of individual salvation & creates individualists; the other introduces cosmic raising & creates humans, citizens, caretakers, neighbors...

The divine Reign is simply a world where we can be in real contact with all things, where we can be inherently connected & in communion with what Mary Oliver the poet calls "the daily presentations." Then the whole world is our synergy. Then we can realistically hope for both.

A script calls salvation more than private Individuals !"

Alice Bailey, descendant of Benjamin Henry Latrobe, found no incompatability between Buddhism and Christianity and an Iranian acquaintance who I hope to meet again today told me that God is a word that derives from the old Persian origin of Sanskrit - a contraction of something sounding like "gohda" or "gohdja" and he says that "budhia", "budda" is the same. For the life of me I can't remember the meaning but dimly recall that it's about coming together. So god, the process of creation, is about coming together.

This process of coming together is the Almighty.

Best wishes

David P

[Paul Duffy]

David, the idea that Bible passages contain two meanings (a literal one and a metaphorical one) actually came up during mass last Sunday. It was Pentecost, and, to my dismay, our parish priest suggested that the whole 'speaking in tongues' thing could mean that they were all speaking in the language of faith. In my opinion, that is a dangerous road to start down because other Bible stories could then not be taken literally. If the bible is open to interpretation, then the whole thing begins to fall apart. We know that the earth is more that eight thousand years old, that there are no dinosaurs mentioned in Genesis, that we can't drink arsenic and live. But are we now supposed to accept that the Bible does not mean what it says on anything? No doubt this interpretation could get the clergy out of some sticky situations, not least the thorny question of "where did Cain get his wife from"? but it actually renders their vocation (and our faith) pointless. Maybe that is the Bible's biggest flaw, that it can be open to interpretation by humans for their own ends.

The thing that has always troubled me is the need to pray squared with an all-knowing God. Oscar Wilde said that by praying we are seeking to control God and change His plans. If God loves us and knows what we need then prayers are not necessary. You can't trust things to God's will AND pray, it seems.

Anyway, just some random thoughts for you there, David. Hope you enjoyed Cannes!

Best wishes,
Paul.

[David Pinnegar]

Dear Paul

Thanks for your thoughts which are certainly worthily provoking.

There are many who reject the material literal stories told in the bible and, whether they be reality or not, and I don't exclude such meaning, they provide an encoded other meaning with which we enrich our lives and which, by rejection those who discount the bible as meaningless are so much the poorer. And this is sad. And the world is a sadder place for all of that.

We are on the point of war in the world. Most terrible war. A war in which millions will die and in which there will be most pitiful misery in a whole crescent from north to south of the middle east. We are in an echo of the months before July 1914 and this is exascerbated by whole swathes of peoples of the silly idea that the apparent life they are promised after they are buried in the ground will be better than this life. In this life it is this life that is important and not the next . . . and through a wider vision of Jesus' teachings asking us to resurrect ourselves after the death of the animal consciousness and live life after our animal consciousness death in the image of the vision of the creation process, war could be avoided. Jesus in Gethsemene asks us to arise with him from the dead. If there is a next life, we will be judged by how we have embraced the process of creation in this life, and actions leading to death don't fit life.

My Buddhist friend in Cannes uttered those true words:

. . . has much more to do with right relationship than with being privately right. It has much more to do with being connected than with being personally correct.

and in our connexion we explore much and understand more.

In this world we are in desperate need of the idea of both Gohdha and of Bhodha too, the coming together of which the Iranian guy told me from ancient Persia.

Best wishes

David P

(Please don't ask me where to put the "h"s! The Dutch would make cheese of it all  :D )

[Paul Duffy]

An interesting post again!. I am now beginning to understand the thrust of your argument. You are quite correct in your assertion that far too many people are quite willing to annihilate others in the name of God, and it is their obsession with the afterlife which is blurring their ability to see the sanctity of life, human or indeed, animal, in the here and now. I accept that the world is slowly sliding towards a major war in the middle east. The west's eagerness to get involved in Syria has the serious potential to tip us all into a global war when you consider the superpowers lined up on opposing sides. Add religious fervour into the mix and you have a recipe for disaster. But belief is a force for good in the world, too. There are lots of men and women of faith who are thoroughly decent people, indeed, salt to the earth. It is just sad that a murderous, bestial minority undermine them.

Best wishes,
Paul

[David Pinnegar]

Dear Paul

Yes - I'm trying to find common sense, possibly if you like "middle ground", but also on the basis that as children we might romanticise for the magic man conjuror at our childrens' parties but as adults we are actually Father Christmas ourselves. In order to hide this we have to invent all sorts of intellectual jumps about how Father Christmas enters our childrens' bedrooms.

This is the process of growing up. For this reason I'm seeking the mundane common sense interpretations about life now, those things that Jesus taught which are actually within our grasp to do, such as cooperate and share our food at the feeding of the 5000, rather than excuse ourselves as being unable to do them such as inventing food out of an invisible dimension because we are not magic men like him. Ultimately, the two interpretations are the same - that hidden dimension was the dimension hidden under everyone's long robes under which the food was hidden, and the magic key that Jesus unlocked in this dimension was the power of human cooperation, loving one's neighbour as oneself without fear of the animal instincts of greed and loss.

It is a matter of seeing through that glass darkly, and then face to face. The difference between the animal or child fear of the master, doing things from motivation of being beaten or pride in being praised, and that of doing things in the reflection of the master, carrying on the actions as sons and daughters of the idea of the master, as in the image of God, the process of how everything works.

In this way perhaps one might find solutions to the linguistic riddles just as we find algebraic soutions to equations.

Last week I endured a painful sermon about "What is the Gospel?" based on the first chapter of Galatians, which is worth the read. The priest banged on about the Good News being that Jesus died to release us from our sins. I thought back to the gathering of the 5000 and thought whether this was really the Good News that the flock of 5000 had gathered to hear . . . and of course it could not be because Jesus hadn't died yet! So what was the Gospel? What was the Good News that Jesus brought? Were the flock of people there all day in front of a conjuror doing magic trick after magic trick all day and feeding them into the bargain? Of course not. He was teaching about The Creator, the process of how one thing fits with another, how one aspect of things works with another and causes or enables something further to happen. He was teaching common sense so simple that anyone could understand, put it into their lives and take it forward. And the Good News of that is that when one puts the process of Creation into one's understanding and life, then sin is something that actually doesn't contribute to creation, getting things or people to work together and so is irrelevant.

In that way, in worship of the Creator, we are released from the power of sin, as it has no part in our world. Sin, doing things wrong, means that even though sin upon sin might appear to be successful, it isn't as somewhere along the line the two ends of the circle don't meet and the success is discovered to be rubbish. Madoff. So to anyone operating the creation process in their lives puts anything contrary to creation into the category of less useful, irrelevant, and no-one being free of sin, through faith in creation we can pick up the pieces broken by sin and do our best to apply the creation process to mend them.

In looking for the Gospel, Good News, of Jesus teachings of common sense, language that anyone can understand (in terms of Pentecost), we are looking at a more fundamental level of Creation than those hooked by dogma like to promote by which people are divided.

By finding the common sense of which Jesus was teaching, we will be able to speak the language of Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, Jains and Jews too.

It's for this reason that personally when I come to the Lord's table, I come to a sacrificial ceremony. In a very primitive view of sacrificial ceremonies we have actually to have sacrificed the victim. In eating of the flesh, and drinking of the blood, paradoxically we ourselves have to have killed and sacrificed Christ, in order to eat him. OUCH! How can we reconcile this action? It must mean that we have to sacrifice our preconceptions, to kill our previous consciousness and to eat the consciousness of Jesus' teachings anew. In seeking the eternal, the eternal can survive the sacrifice of the temporary.

The Christian narrative plays out on multiple levels and in multiple parallel actions, all based on the same process. In seeking to come to the teachings anew, afresh as children, we have to be fresh, open to ideas, free of things before that we have been told and especially those things that actually are contrary to the creator process, but at the same time as adults willing to operate as the arms and legs of the creator process, to operate as Father Christmas rather than believing that Father Christmas is someone else who magically comes down blocked chimneys, reindeer and all.

Referring back to Galatians, verses 12, 16 and 17 seem to be all about working it out for oneself rather than merely accepting what others have said before.

There is mention somewhere and I apologise for not recalling where, where either Jesus or a disciple says that he will continue until "there is no authority". This can only happen when people think for themselves, apply the process of creation within themselves, do away with the darkness of the glass that hides the face of God in Corinthians 13 and then, as is promised if we do away with the clouds in our minds that cause us to abrogate thought to the big men, the magic man who does what we can't do, and instead we do it, then Jesus will come again descending from the clouds.

Many people I believe reject places of organs because so many priests still want to find Jesus in the nebulations of ectoplasm. Were the church to promote common sense of the process of Creation, Breath of Life, God, the spirit of the teachings rather than the letter of the long written words, the idea, and the son as he who understands the process, hears the idea and spreads it and then carries it out as the process has done before, then the Holy Trinity achieves its power.

There are many who are lost. Many atheists who not being able to find the face of god or see the designer, have rejected the process and who want common sense. There are many who see those blinded by dogma as inflexibly brainwashed and simply want to hear common sense. There are many who love life and think that focus on life after one is buried in the ground is irrelevant. There are many whose lives are broken, often by reason of the unsustainability of sin, one action adding upon another action not ending up with a supporable result in the end, who seek healing and guidance. All of these would flock to the church as a place of relevance in their lives.

The more useful is more useful than the less useful and the less useful can be less useful to the point of irrelevance.

Which interpretations, which linguistic solutions to the riddles of the texts, are more useful, most useful, relevant?

The church, brand of religion or religion which helps in the cause of Creation most usefully will be that which is seen to be most relevant in the world.

Best wishes

David P