. . . Religious blunders - some vital experiences, appreciations and facts that are commonly ignored . . . .


Somewhere between those who simplistically assert that suffering is mere illusion and those who morbidly suppose that sufferings will continue forever - God was patiently calling out with a mocking, thankful sadness - 'Come let us reason together..'

I found this summary of man's confusion on a philosophy webpage...

THE PROBLEM OF EVIL

Here is a metaphysical problem which has puzzled thinkers through the centuries. It is stated this way:
  • If God is all powerful and all good then there would be no evil in the world.
  • But there is evil in the world.
  • Therefore God is not all powerful or all good.
How then do we explain the existence of sin and suffering?

I say God IS good and only allows evil because He can create out of it a greater, happier kind of good which He gives equally to all. So it's all gonna be made infinitely much more than worthwhile for each of us...

What is more - in His fairness - God compassionately shares in the experience of suffering - by suffering the same amount of suffering as each of us suffers - through the enduring of each creature's sinfulness which He hates, and through sharing in the ordeal of our sufferings, and through suffering His Own personal self-sacrificial sufferings by His endurance of the creature's sinful attacks on His Person as made manifest at the crucifixion of Christ.

This gets round the sociologically confused relationship that many have with their Creator - the Creator of their sin and the Judge of their sin...

So then, the overall primary ideal for eternity is that we creatures of God temporarily become sinful and suffer for our sins... But the secondary ideal that contrasts and competes with this priority overall ideal during the time of our sinfulness is that we cease from our sinning and only suffer by doing good... The overall primary ideal makes us sin and brings us judgement until it gradually comes to agree with the secondary competing ideal of mercy to make us righteousness again - so that our sins are progressively removed and our suffering comes to and end... So the primary ideal of sin and judgement is temporary in order to allow and cause the achievement of the ultimate ideal of full happiness in righteousness through God's mercy...


A major blight on Christian thought has been the unbiblical doctrine of endless punishment for the stubborn in the lake of fire. Instead, the following key biblical facts should be embraced by all the saints:


Various other important facts that are often disregarded...

The rule of God's kingdom is socialist - 'having everything in common: from ability to need', a meritocracy - 'capitalising on all good abilities', and a democratic and/or autocratic experience...

BUT things need to go wrong...
Here's a summary of a book enquiring into how study of something effects something:

Neurology and Modernity
A Cultural History of Nervous Systems, 1800-1950
Edited by Laura Salisbury and Andrew Shail

Citizens of the modern era found themselves singularly prone to nervous disorders, while at the same historical moment the nervous system became a privileged model for describing the organization of political and social spheres. Neurology and Modernity describes and explores this intriguing coincidence, uncovering the centrality of neurological ideas of health, disease, and experience within the medical treatises, popular advice manuals, science fiction, literary fiction, spiritualist tracts, philosophy, government reports and military tribunals of the period 1800-1950. This volume traces and illuminates the cultural ideas and anxieties that informed representations of the nervous body, whilst showing how many of the most distinctive features of the period known as modernity seem to vibrate in sympathy with neurology's central concerns. The thirteen new studies in this volume untangle the significant mutual dependencies between scientific neurology and the cultural attitudes of the period, exploring how and why modernity remained such a fundamentally nervous state.



Reading the Love of God into the old Israeli religion:

The law of Moses was given to disciple a whole nation - to lead all the stiff-necked as well as the more conscientious to grow in appreciation of God's higher law of love. Yet because of the callous conscience of the majority and the small number of very righteous men as earthly witnesses - morally primitive laws were necessary to appeal to the inner man through the visual parables of rituals in the outer tangible world using symbolism and priests who conducted outer ceremonies designed to be conducive to worship, meditation and prayer. So that inner principles and spiritual functionality of the inner man were represented in formal worship styles dictated by ordinances, precepts, statues, testimonies, and instructions. So there are higher moral laws which were meant to be applied either eternally or for longer periods lasting into the present New Covenant times and lower ritualistic laws which were designed to last until the greater numbers of more righteous saints were to arrive in forthcoming generations so that the social activity of the saints as salt of the earth and light of the world would be sufficient outer witness to the stubborn and unmerciful of the invisible and the internal realities.

Sacrificing one's animals and valuable possessions to support the judicial teaching and healing functions of God's priesthood was a way of demonstrating that you valued the forgiveness of God about whichever sins they were being given for. This was a discipline to the mind of the person bringing the sacrifice to maximise righteous hate for sin - as well as a demonstration to his associates that he was submissive to God and not proud before God or man. The primitive development in righteousness of the general population meant that if no outward sacrifice was made, people would doubt each other that each one had really exercised sufficient love, mercy or forgiveness in their lives to merit God's forgiveness. Then people might feel inclined to take out vigilante vengence without the ordering of God through the political and judicial ruling of the priesthood and executive cooperation of the people...

God uses the earthly power of the greater species to exercise judgement on the lesser creatures during these times of suffering. The sacrificial demonstrations of personal thankfulness for forgiveness and thankfulness for God's priestly government system would indeed cause pain to the animals but not for very long. And among the infinitely many creatures in existence God could easily choose the exactly best-fit essential spirit and soul to be incarnated into the animal bodies that a follower of Iyehuweh would come to own - so that in bringing the animal's earthly life to an end the owner would be able to exercise good judgement suitable to the creature - just as we are made able to do today in the slaughter houses of the world. If God wants to make a creature of His to live an earthly life as a sheep or goat - that dies instead by wolf, or starvation, or old age or whatever - He is well able to incarnate that being into another animal body somewhere else in the infinite universe where that exact means of judgement can come upon it in due course. If in any way a creature is made to suffer excess suffering at the hands of a cruel earthly judge, then in due course the judge will be called to account and the creature will have this increase of suffering taken into account and, eventually, like all suffering, it will be more than compensated for by being transubstantiated into maximised endless thankful happinesses and pleasures... In any case God so works it that no creature suffers overall in time to any greater extent than any other. All are made to sin in differing degrees and at different times yet overall each being sins the same amount during the times of sin and suffering - as summed across their many and various different lives in different forms and incarnations. God also works it that overall our compensating reward of happiness and pleasure sums up to the same amount for each of us.

This form of argument can be applied to all the strictness and judgements of the Old Testament law to show that, although God is not as yet fully merciful, He is a fervent idealist with a great prioritising of mercy and consolation in His love. God in His infinite wisdom can so preorder the setting up of the infinite universe that each creature will sin in the same overall amount during the times of sin and suffer the same overall amount as a result - and experience the same overall replacing of the sin and suffering with thankful happiness and pleasure in due course. So God's fair and just generosity prevails over all our activities in these times of sin and suffering to bring the full and equal reward of thankful happiness to all creation.

As the law of God became known among the ancients it was made more and more obviously clear to more and more of them that God prefers us to be obedient - in the first place, than to sin and then make sacrifice for it. Also that God prefers us to be appreciative, compassionate, sympathetic, merciful and pitiful towards each other than to seek forgiveness through sacrifices. Jesus summarised a great principle for receiving forgiveness by saying that the more merciful we were the more mercy we would receive. So the outer sacrifices were still necessary to appease the collective conscience of the people - since a large majority of the people were stubborn sinners who saw the necessary response to sins was to make some form of amends and tended to despise the work of forgiveness and mercy towards sins. And running parallel to the system of sacrifice was the transcending law that mercy is better than sacrifice - and this was mostly only accepted by those yielding to God and becoming righteous.

Then Christ came and mightily demonstrated the fairness of God in His life and through His crucifixion - showing that God does hate and suffer our sins that He makes us to do, and is prepared to suffer with us to release us from these sins - so that He has a right to be angry with sin and is the most merciful Judge of sin. Then the collective conscience of mankind became sharpened to learn to accept and perceive that genuine forgiveness could exist in their fellow man and aquit them of God's judgements without their following the system of sacrifices - but instead learning to be obedient through love or self-sacrifice in everyday life. It became more evident in the evolving consciousness of the sinners on earth to perceive and learn that those who are merciful will receive mercy. And so the lesser rules of sacrifices were dropped and the greater free rule of loving sacrifice exampled by Christ's loving self-sacrifice over-ruled. It became clear that people could demonstrate love with compassion, sympathy, mercy and pity through suffering in their own essence, spirit and soul for the sake of others. And so prove to the doubting that they truely hated sin and yet were genuine forgivers of the sins against them and were receivers of the grace of thankfulness for all things happy and sad, and enjoyers of God's Own happiness and sadness, pleasures and pains...



Reading the evolution into the Genesis account:

Here's an evolutionary-style summary breakdown of the Genesis seven days. This ordering seems to agree with the scientific ordering...



Dust to dust:  God is then said to have created a man called Adam (not the first homosapien) and all the animals from out of the land/soil - this is a quick summary answer to the creative-evolutionary origin of all life forms - since the first replicators came from the chemicals washed out of the 'land' into the oceans - and all life went on from there.

In the garden:  The wife for Adam is however quite clearly created by an operation on Adams 'rib' and presumably some very fast 'metaphysical' evolution...


The sin and curse:  Because Adam fails with his particular relationship with God he is cursed - similarly to how previously incarnated creatures have been cursed when they fail in keeping some law of God in their consciences... The curse of Adam is brought on all humanity everywhere since Adam is spiritually an influential human over all other humans alive at that time and afterwards - so that his sinfulness - propagates spiritually rather than by bodily offspring into all humans on earth - each of whom by sinning with 'Adam's sin' also inherit his curse - and likewise for Eve (which means a 'mother of all living on earth' - spiritually a mother - not a mother by bodily reproduction) the sin and curse spreads into all women also...

The creative spark:  God's creative evolution can progress by a mixture of the 'probable' natural laws and the 'improbable' supernatural/metaphysics of the miraculous. As we know evolution has often been speeded up considerably. Our current science cannot prove that the miraculous is not involved to some measure form time to time...

Selective pressure:  A creature's choices and life activity may spiritually/metaphysically influence the mutation of genes and sexual selection of genes for propagation - either according to their will or in a way that actually opposes their will... So the parent is holistically included as part of the environment that imparts selective pressure on the genes... Getting more esoteric for some - the genes themselves may have individual primitive consciousness and choice by which influence they cause the selection of other genes or themselves for propagation... Our current science cannot prove that the parent and the gene itself is not part of the environmental pressure/influence that selects the genes to propagate...



Using drugs or medicines... Enhancing life and helping to repair and preserve quality of life:

The benign effects of drugs should be shared with others - so that using the drug is socially beneficial, and not selfishly used or addictively relied on.

If used in appropriate quantity and at the right time then they should not be a temptation or have poisonous effects even to those with weaker faith. Usually the drugs should not be taken in ways that damage the body - such as by smoking or injection.

The drugs you use should mostly be cheap, like alcohol so that you are not spending on yourself but are being generous to the poor.

Effects should either enhance or be in harmony with the type of work, play or rest that you currently need to engage in - or at least minimise major disabling effects of illness.

They should be chosen so that particular effects do not overly obstruct the most necessary modes of thinking needed for your work - e.g. driving ability etc.

True happiness comes with thankful open-mindedness for the variety of options that God supplies us with... There's a time to eat and a time to fast. There's a time to take a drug and a time to abstein. There's a time to avoid caffeine and get an early night and a time to take opium and stay up all night.

Being religious involves developing an accurately measured approach to life just as laboratory experimenters must carefully assess the limits within which they should work and give due care to the exact measurements in the experiment so that the experiment can be safely under control and provide them with useful data.

We should employ good measure and good timing and good method.


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