So few fear that God is on the other side of the fight

George Will wrote a column for the Washington Post yesterday that’s such junk, I’m not going to link to it. In it he calls Jeremiah Wright a demagogue and says that Obama’s association with such a man for 20 years should be a central issue for the Presidential campaign. Ah yes, judging a black man for having poor judgment while all these white people making that judgment don’t worry at all about how strangely any white preachers preach. What a world.

Reverend Wright doesn’t strike me as a demagogue, defined in my dictionary as a leader who obtains power by means of impassioned appeals to the emotions and prejudices of the populace. Wright only has power inside a church, where being a pastor is a lot more about getting things done and serving people than manipulating them. Yes, he is emotional, and that is unacceptable to some people, isn’t it? So many people have such inexperience with emotion that they see anger and they say it is hate. No, not necessarily.

A big part of my story since first experiencing God 19 years ago is that I wanted to know God wherever I could find him. I went to liberal churches and conservative churches. The difference there is simple enough. The latter believe the Bible was almost dictated by God. The former drifted away from that. They don’t often drift away as far as I have. I’m sure the Bible is strictly the words of men, even if some of those men knew a little about the real God.

There is another dimension that defines churches, namely how emotional a church is, what kind of music they play. Unfortunately for me there isn’t such a thing as a very liberal, very charismatic church, not one with a grip on reality as well as spirituality. That’s where I’d like to go. I know that from my time in more sedate liberal churches and fairly conservative, charismatic churches like the Vineyard fellowships. Ooh, I’d like to do some cultural engineering combining things I like about those while leaving out things I don’t like, such as the prejudices of sedate liberals against strong spiritual experience and the prejudices of conservatives against both liberal religion and liberal politics.

It’s occurred to me before that a Spirit-filled African-American church might be closest to what I want, but then I have this obvious reason not to fit in there, even if there’s plenty of testimony from whites attending Trinity United Church of Christ that they felt comfortable there, testimony lost on so many who have judged Reverend Wright recently. Still I wouldn’t fit in that well culturally, and I’m still too liberal for them theologically. I don’t think God punishes anyone with weather or strife. I don’t see that God controls the physical world at all. I don’t see any reason to believe in physical miracles. I don’t receive any revelation from God that I should believe in them anyway, just the opposite. I’m not sure what kind of church would put up with such beliefs from me.

I do know that I can have church just with God, communing with Him away from any distractions in prayer and in other ways. From that I’ve received God’s direction, comfort, strength, love, and hope for many years. Anyone could join me in that church. No one has wanted to. I understand. It’s too different.

I could be wrong. Maybe those few Catholics are right who claim their church is the only one God established. Maybe it’s that broader belief that conservatives have that believing the Bible to be the Word of God is what is critical. Maybe the real God goes even further than that, but not as far as I go.

I’ve worried about that at times, talked with God about that many times. That’s one reason I’ve explored every kind of church, even religions beyond Christianity. Where is God? I’ve wanted to know, relentlessly.

That’s how I’ve come to seeing my basic belief as being that God is whoever and whatever God is, not what any human being says God is, as that human being has no way of knowing anything of God except by God, and the mistakes human beings have made about this are plentiful and obvious.

That doesn’t exclude God being the traditional God of absolute power, knowledge, love, and goodness despite how this world looks, but that’s not the God I experience. My experience is no guarantee that God is as I experience Him to be. I can only rely on God to lead me past my experience if that is the direction I should follow, so that has been my constant prayer for years, for God to do just that. So from that, here I am, an extremely liberal, extremely charismatic Christian who understands Jeremiah Wright a lot better despite my light skin than so many know-it-alls in the media.

I know God might be very much with Jeremiah Wright. “God Damn America” is just as biblical as he said it is. Every “woe to” in the Bible, such as Luke 6: 24-26, can be replaced by “damn”. Instead of “woe to hypocrites”, “damn hypocrites” means the same thing.

Is that for this world or the next world? You can do what I do and ask God such questions. It’s usually slow getting an answer that way, but I’m quite grateful for how that’s worked for me. It doesn’t seem Sean Hannity has gotten good answers about Jeremiah Wright. Who do suppose Hannity asked? Perhaps it was his image in the mirror.

God is whoever and whatever God is. One can call that a tautology, but it isn’t if each “is” is somewhat different. Oh, someone beat me to that one, but it’s true. Words can be so ambiguous, any of them. How can people never wonder if God is on the other side of their fight? How can people dismiss the possibility that they’re wrong so easily?

It must be human nature. Yet when one becomes aware of the true range of possibilities, such as what science shows compared to what we learn only directly with our senses, one can learn not to be so limited, even to think that there might be more than just the physical universe. Experience helps in many ways. One way is that once you have considered that you are on the wrong side of God, it’s not as hard to imagine that possibility the next time.

My first experience with God was God telling me that I was wrong in giving up on the possibility that there is a God who loved me. That teaches me that I can drift off into being wrong again. It’s easier to consider the second time, the third time, ….

So many in politics and religion don’t seem to know this. I find that to be much more important than whether one expresses emotions “arrogantly” or suppresses one’s emotions so much that one’s anger and fear only comes out in intellectual prejudices.

Is God on the other side? I’ve asked that regularly. I’m with Jeremiah Wright, not that everything he says is right, but I’m with him, and I’m against the uninformed judgments in the media that says Wright should be shunned. That doesn’t mean God is with him also, unless you’re willing to believe how God answers me.

Yet all these conservatives are sure that God is with them or maybe that God is above all this. How do they know if they don’t ask that question from the only One who can answer it accurately?

Will lies ever be completely unacceptable?

I paused on Fox News while channel surfing today. Fred “Beetle” Barnes and Morton Kondracke were expressing such sympathy for the Democratic Party. Barack Obama is in trouble they say because he can’t carry the traditional Democrats Hillary Clinton won in Pennsylvania, such as union members. Yet it would divide Democrats terribly for superdelegates to give the nomination to Senator Clinton. I guess Democrats just have to get used to the inevitability of President John McCain. I’m glad that such a mainstream neo-con as Barnes and Republicanly minded independent as Kondracke would take the time to give us Democrats such compassionate advice as just to give up all hope.

The lies these two were telling were not entirely invented. The exit polls indicating how union members voted in Pennsylvania are a matter of record. Yet consider the possibilities that The Beltway Boys didn’t, that Obama will win the votes of many who voted for Clinton in the primary, that there are many groups that will determine the next President, not just union members, that the number of McCain Democrats will not challenge the phenomenon of Reagan Democrats. There are always many more possibilities than know-it-alls on TV are likely to consider. Why don’t they consider them? Well, there are a number of possibilities.

However one labels lies that aren’t complete fiction, be that spin, concern trolling, a false front, partisan speculation, poor documentation, rationales or false hope, they are less than the whole truth. People tend to pick out what’s wrong with the other guy instead of what’s wrong with me or my guy. It seems to be human nature. Was that nature all The Beltway Boys were expressing, or were they more deliberately being optimistic for McCain and pessimistic for us enemy Democrats? I don’t know, but I know it was some kind of lie. Otherwise why didn’t they consider other possibilities? Why didn’t they consider how they might be exactly wrong? Oh, would that be bad for ratings? So that’s just another type of lie, irrational confidence so as to impress viewers.

Everyone lies sometimes, but some go farther than others. Both Obama and Clinton claim to have misspoke in the past month, “misspoke” for me meaning someone made a slip of the tongue such as if I said Iran when I meant Iraq. Neither misspoke in that sense. Senator Clinton told the same story about her courageous experience several times, and it was so different from what actually happened when she landed in Bosnia that to say she “misspoke” is just another lie. Then Senator Obama copied her “misspoke” label to explain away his going too far in his analysis of the sociology of bitter votes.

Some in the media essentially called Senator Clinton a liar by juxtaposing her story with what is documented. I didn’t hear anyone suggest Senator Obama did more than misspeak, but then I didn’t search for that. Yes, I’m sure there are different degrees of lying, and this is an example. To me Senator Clinton’s lies are simply unacceptable. They are forgivable if she wanted forgiveness for them, but I have no reason to think she wants that. It seems she wants to say she’s said nothing morally wrong, just factually incorrect. Oh come on. You may keep most of your supporters with that claim, but not me.

Senator Clinton continues to lie today by saying she is ahead in the popular vote without explaining what an eccentric definition of popular vote she is using. That’s a lie. It’s deception. It’s deliberate. It’s to make her look better than she is. It is immoral according to any moral system that says love and truth are the ultimate good things. There are many such systems, theistic and atheistic.

How many people care if the person they support politically lies? I’m sure it depends on how bad the lie is and what trouble that lie causes. I myself have given up on Senator Clinton because of her lies after voting for her on February 5. I haven’t done that with Senator Obama’s lies. They aren’t as bad as Clinton’s lies, in my judgment.

Is it OK if every individual decides for himself or herself when lies are unacceptable? It doesn’t seem to be OK, judging by how much politics is full of lies. It seems many individuals are letting political liars off the hook. Of course religion is also full of lies. Just about anything people believe about themselves, other people, life and the world is full of lies, from nutritional fantasies to what one thinks about one’s job. Human beings desperately want to be seen in a certain way, such as how Bill Clinton doesn’t want his wife to be seen as a quitter. So people tell lies that they like better than reality. Not many people tell them they can’t do that. In this current world I observe I’m not sure whom I would trust to be a judge of who’s lying except doing that for myself. That’s one reason I wish we could be more effective at identifying and having sanctions against all lies, not just the worst ones. I actually would like to be able to trust some random purveyor of information, instead of thinking through or researching whom I can't trust.

I don’t suppose this will change anytime soon. Will it ever? Experience does make people more sensitive to why people say and do what they do. “Concern troll” is recognized by many in the blogosphere, when the deception involved in that wouldn’t have been as obvious in the past. Will people in the future be even less easily fooled, sometime after the Fox News Channel collapses in shame around 2025?

I hope so. Can you imagine just how many words 6 billion people waste on lies? What if we used those words to work on reality instead of on fantasies?

Will cultural evolution go in the direction where lies are less acceptable today? Will people be less partisan so that when they say, “That’s a lie,” they’re more likely to be right than telling their own lie? Will voters and other supporters abandon their leaders if that leader tells lies as big as Hillary Clinton’s lies? It hasn’t happened yet, but I for one don’t want to go through another 8 years where every communication from the government is as creative as they have been in the last 8 years. The specter of that is unacceptable to me. Experience changes us, both individually and collectively. I’m not sure if there are sufficient forces to keep lies as prevalent as they are despite such experience. I don’t find that I want to explore them much. If my hope for the future is false, I don’t mind. False hope is sometimes better than no hope at all. That makes us suckers for some lies, but I hope not too much.

Half empty, half full

I was halfway into a profound thought while seated at my computer recently when I noticed my water glass. Hey, it’s half-full, as exactly as I can tell just looking at it! Now there’s a metaphor that’s been beaten to death. Before everyone had experience with transparent drinking glasses, there was a saying about half a loaf being better than none. I’m sure there’s a series of sayings on this point in various languages going back nearly to when humans first spoke about their possessions, sometime after our ancestors first appreciated that having more is better. Was that even before we had brains? Is there anything that is more of a no-brainer than that having some is better than having none, even if we want more? But where do we go from there? Do we ration what we have? Is only a new supply of resources going to make the situation better?

The thing is that while I do indeed tend to focus on the water or other things I have rather than what I no longer have, it’s not as though there are only two ways to see this. The truth about how I look at my water glass when half the water is left is more complicated than that it is half full. I see my water. Half of this last round I poured is gone. Half remains. When that’s gone, I’ll pour some more. As long as I know there’s more water coming after this, it’s not much of a challenge emotionally or intellectually. A third, three quarters, overflowing, the overall reality remains the same.

If the glass of water or its metaphorical equivalent were the last glass of water that ever would exist, I’d much more likely be a half-empty kind of guy. Like many metaphors, the circumstances of what’s really under discussion are important.

“Do I have enough?” is not a simple question, whether one is discussing physical needs, emotional needs, or spiritual needs. It’s not a simple dichotomy of whether it’s best to look to what one has or to what one no longer has. Aren’t both possible, with other possibilities as well? Yet human nature tries to make everything a dichotomy.

On spiritual topics, I’m forever writing about the atheist vs. traditionalist dichotomy, in my case rejecting both. Within theism, there’s the rigid, conservative vs. the experimental, liberal dichotomy. I firmly belong to the latter school, but that’s not the whole story. People get stuck on such things, on some simple identity, either for ourselves or for the world around us.

There are always many possibilities, not just two. Yet there is always one reality. God is whoever and whatever God is, as is anything else. The things I need form a set that is a single reality, though it’s a different set of what I need to survive vs. what I need to be happy. How I look at my wants is not the most important part of that.

Yet people talk about that last part, because we have this very visual and understandable metaphor of whether a glass is half empty or half full. Right now my water glass is both. Later today I will refill it the same way regardless of how I label it now. It’s not a big deal. Nor is it a big deal for many other things in my life where I might wonder if I have enough, material things or more abstract qualities to my life.

But thinking of all the possibilities, that I think is a big deal. I look at those who seem needy spiritually, and I think that’s what they’re missing the most. It’s not so much what they wish they still had, such as youth, wealth, family, companions, or a place that felt more like home. It’s not so much focusing on what they have now, as if God has to have given them what they need as far as theology, customs and materials. Otherwise they might need to rethink whether they know anything about God. Who wants to do that?

I think what’s missing is not appreciating the possibilities for becoming content. They are many, though for any one of us, they may boil down to just one possibility, one we may already have in our possession or not. Many possibilities, one reality, it’s not a simple dichotomy. It’s not that feeling empty is bad while full is good, or the opposite. It’s not that the beliefs I have are good, while everything else is bad. There’s more to it than that.

Dead faith walking

“If anybody wants to believe that they are the descendents of a primate, they are certainly welcome to do it. I don’t know how far they will march that back, but I believe all of us in this room are the unique creations of a God who knows us and loves us and who created us for His own purpose.” – Mike Huckabee, New Hampshire Republican debate, June 5, 2007

With Mike Huckabee getting a lot of air time recently, both pro and con, I was curious to look back at some of his videos. So I came across this quote from 6 months ago. The first thing that hit me was the idea that beliefs are based on what we want to believe. Is that just us fools who disagree with Rev. Huckabee, or would the right reverend say everyone believes what they want to believe?

I don’t believe what I want to believe. I want to believe that the Chargers will win the Super Bowl and the Padres the World Series. I want to believe that I’ll meet a beautiful woman 20 years younger than I am who for some reason is utterly devoted to me. I want to believe ice cream has no calories. Instead I believe just the opposite. My experiences have taught me to expect other than what I might want. That’s part of growing up.

There’s evidence that we are descended from primates in comparative anatomy and physiology. I wonder if some even thought of that before the 19th century. It’s so obvious. Then in the 20th century there’s so much biochemistry that connects not just some species, but all of life, at least DNA-based life, so much that education will teach you the truth is much more profound than that we are descended from primates. All of life is made up of cousins of varying distance. Even an animal and a plant are cousins. They weren’t separate creations. Just look at all the data.

Now with fossils that aren’t just an isolated skeleton here and there, but part of a mountain of data to document the 4+ billion year history of the Earth, and molecular clocks that are amazingly consistent at putting together who our ancestors are, for the last 50,000 years or 50 million years, one can be a lot more detailed than saying we’re descended from primates. It’s not some whim. It’s not even mere hypothesis. Either Rev. Huckabee doesn’t know that or dismisses such knowledge. Either way he is deluded that people believe this because they want to believe it.

I learned evolution in school, with a lot of supporting data. It made sense to me. Since then I’ve heard a lot of arguments against evolution. There’s always a flaw in them. I didn’t find those flaws because I wanted the argument to be flawed. I scrutinize any new information skeptically, whether it’s a report of a new experiment or some comment on an old one. I learned that from role models in science and other analytical pursuits. People make mistakes. Sometimes they’re honest mistakes. Sometimes they’re stupid mistakes. Sometimes they’re just engaging in rhetoric and never have done the work to examine all human experience that relates to their topic. It’s good to recognize this.

I suspect that when Genesis was written thousands of years ago, it was the best any human being could do at the time at imagining where the world, life, and his people came from. I suspect when other Bible verses were written, such as God knitting us together in our mother’s womb, there was no data to suggest otherwise. It wasn’t known we had DNA that knitted us together, with no additional supernatural action needed. A lot wasn’t known.

It’s known now. It’s known so well that I can only imagine Mike Huckabee being filled with contempt for such knowledge when he said that believing we are descended from primates comes from wanting to believe that, completely the opposite from when he says that people are welcome to such beliefs. People have such difficulty labeling emotions in their rhetoric designed to make them look good. So they lie a lot.

It’s not that my fellow liberal Christians do much better on this point. Many accept evolution because science says so or for the same reasons that science says so, yet they still want the same Creator God who loves every bit of His creation and has a purpose for each little bit.

Almost 20 years ago I decided to ask God about such things. I’m satisfied with the direction and other answers that approach has gotten me. It’s impossible to recreate a course like that for someone else. Most people come to their beliefs differently than I have. But just believing what they want? I don’t see people doing that, no matter how many people in our culture belittle the beliefs of others that way.

Yet any public figure will likely get away with claiming beliefs are chosen by want and that God’s purpose is in every bit of existence, every open wound, every desperate mind, everyone who is crushed by the world instead of being loved by anyone. I don’t believe that such claims will be accepted forever. God tells me each year will pass without a Rapture. Science tells me that the details of our molecular heritage will become so detailed that it will require no thought at all to see that our creation required neither an omnipotent God nor an accident, but a physical process that Rev. Huckabee doesn’t realize is a third possibility besides his metaphysical dichotomy.

God is whoever and whatever God is. So is the world. So is life. So am I and everyone else. If people don’t consider fully the possibility that they’re wrong, if they only consider straw man arguments as the alternative to their beliefs, what is the chance that their beliefs happen to be the one possibility that is reality? I wouldn’t bet on it. Exploring that takes me farther from tradition every year, farther from atheism, too.

Many people are ducking the conflict between how science shows God does not micromanage the world and how that means God must be different than tradition sees God. Is God Creator at all? What is your definition for God? I’ve written about mine before. I don’t see people doing that. I see people always talking about the Creator, whether theist or atheist. Such talk has a limited future. I suspect someone will still be talking like Rev. Huckabee in 100 years, but not 500 years. It’s a pity so many will waste their time on this in the meantime. Mike Huckabee is just a dead faith walking.

I don’t welcome Mike Huckabee spouting simplicities and fantasies in a public forum. I think people would be better served by a well-informed critique of the contradictions in his beliefs, as well as where he is just ignorant. But there’s very little I can do about that, nor can God. Ask Him. Think about it. Look into it. Ask Him again. It works for me. I don’t know why that doesn’t work for everyone. I know it doesn’t. That it doesn’t is one reason for a dead faith, one that claims that the Bible is all there is to faith. Time will tell. In the meantime I could write for days about why I believe very little of real faith comes from the Bible. I wanted to believe something a lot simpler, whether something as simple as what Mike Huckabee believes or even as simple as what atheists believe. It turns out I can’t believe either one. Reality is more complicated. You do have to want reality instead of fantasy, a reality where God is whoever and whatever God is, whether just inside my head or beyond physical reality in a grander way than any human being has imagined. But to do that you have to be pretty flexible about who your Daddy is, not just limiting yourself to who you want Him and/or Her to be.

Some problems from having a human brain

What single emotion has the greatest representation in our cerebral cortex? I believe the answer is fear. I base that on studies of epileptic foci in patients who have an emotional aura to their seizures, whether those seizures stay as simple partial seizures or progress to a more complex or generalized seizure. I learned about those studies over 20 years ago as I went through Elsevier’s multi-volume Handbook of Clinical Neurology preparing for my board exams, which I was happy to pass. In reading since then I haven’t anything as specific in neuroimaging studies, so I believe this old knowledge remains valid.

Fear is also the most common emotional aura for seizures, though if you count confusion as an emotion, you’ll see more confusion among seizure patients post-ictally than fear pre-ictally. Confusion suggests a wide area of dysfunction, though. Fear doesn’t. Many small areas of either temporal lobe can produce fear. The area that does this overlaps with a part of the temporal lobe that produces a pleasant sensation, “contentment” being the best word for it, I think. Fear extends more anteriorly. Contentment extends more posteriorly, with a lot of overlap. Still there is this duality that makes sense with the basic function of our limbic system being whether we should approach or avoid something in our environment.

Our amygdala is wired up to get our attention if there is a behaviorally significant stimulus among our sensations, but it doesn’t determine the specific reason for such attention. Whether a stimulus is something to eat, something to mate with, something to otherwise make mine or something to run away from requires much more of our brain to determine. The fear vs. contentment coming out of our temporal lobes relates to this.

Not all emotions are so localizable. Perhaps fear and contentment are this localized because they are so sensory. Emotions that are more about what action to take as well as some sensation, like anger, are less likely to correspond to a small area of cortex and less likely to be the aura of a seizure.

Still the above knowledge is so much more than the pitiful knowledge we have of the neuroanatomy and neurophysiology of desires, will, imagination, and such. What do we do when we try to think of something, whether imaginary or remembered? It’s hard to say. There’s a lot of neuroscience about how the hippocampus helps to make memories, but what is the physical basis of how we experience long-term memory, including not recalling something when we try, yet it comes to us hours or days later without effort? Anyone can speculate about such things, but actual neuroscience about such aspects of our mind is scarce.

Yet we understand that we are biased. We are biased by emotions. We are biased by having taking shortcuts to thinking that are natural for us to take. We oversimplify, whether by dividing everything into two absolute qualities or by assuming that some simple model we have for a process inside us or out in the world is in fact that simple. We believe the words we use to label an event more than the many possibilities for that event that actually exist. We overgeneralize. We see the faults of others much better than we see faults on our side. We overvalue our own experiences and own beliefs compared to the possibility that others have seen something better than we have.

I understand the difficulty of being emotional. It creates new problems. It stops productive discussion of some issue in order to deal with the emotion. I’ve had occasions to want to be an emotionless automaton. Yet I think the biggest problem with human intelligence isn’t emotions. It’s these cognitive distortions where we think we know much more than we do. We all know when our emotions are tugging at our sleeves, making it hard to be rational. But we don’t know when our thoughts are even more human in their bias than our emotions. Most people speak and write as if they know what they say, yet most people I listen to and read don’t know. It’s not usually because they’re just missing some data. It’s because they’re human, and human beings can be way off in their beliefs.

It’s not just that we’re emotional. It’s not just that we have cognitive distortions. Human beings are often childish, irresponsible in their actions, irresponsible in their beliefs. People cling to their groups, no matter how bad their group might be at thinking. I have a hard time thinking of any strife today where this group bias isn’t a big factor in the strife. People’s desires do indeed conflict over how we should live. Some value selfishness more than others. But the strife over such conflict isn’t just about different desires. Biased beliefs don’t let people even get to the real conflict. The strife winds up being about beliefs, sometimes irrational on both sides.

What is the future course of such human strife? I don’t know. There are many ways that shortcomings of the human brain can be improved. Maybe we’ll be replaced by thinking machines, hopefully more benevolently than in the Matrix or Terminator movies. Maybe we’ll be improved by merging with technology, like the Borg from the later Star Trek stories. Maybe genetic engineering will improve our brains.

I don’t know if any of those are at all likely, but I know how science has helped me with these problems. My emotions sometimes make me want to take shortcuts in how I think of things. I might be willing to jump to conclusions so I can DO SOMETHING. But science has given me many examples of why it’s best to consider all possibilities. When you read about one idea being replaced by another in physics, biology or social science, it makes you consider the possibility of any first idea being wrong.

Cognitive distortions pop up easily, but examples from science have taught me how often something is a spectrum, not black and white, how often a dispute is like whether light is a wave or a particle. The right answer is both, at all times. It’s only human shortcomings that keep anyone from that understanding, even today.

Partisanship pops up even among scientists, yet watching even scientists argue for their side instead of being detached in their analysis doesn’t make me want to be partisans like them. It makes me want to be even more detached, an even better scientist. That’s where the truth is.

Maybe science isn’t enough for most people. Maybe my loyalty to the scientific way of thinking is overdone. Maybe it’s one of those three other solutions to human bias that will dominate our future. Either one of these four possibilities will take over the future or people will decide they’d rather live in strife, a fifth possibility.

I feel like making odds. Maybe I’ll get over that. After all, there’s always another possibility.

If Satan can't be redeemed, what hope is there for anyone?

ABC Family finished a triology last weekend entitled Fallen. I didn't see it when it was a movie last year about a boy who is nephalim, the product of sex between an angel and a woman, the sort of unnatural activity that the Bible says provoked God to cause Noah's flood. But they replayed that along with two new two-hour episodes to take the story to its apparent conclusion. So in six hours I could watch the whole story. Then they replayed each part of that at least once, so I could watch a confusing section yet again.

Our hero in Fallen is not just any nephalim, but the most special one possible, the son of Lucifer and a woman Lucifer claimed to love, even though the plot of this story has all mothers of such children dying in childbirth, and the angels know that, so they know they are murdering women by having sex with them. Such nice boys.

So nephalim in this story are all orphans. Then on top of that they are hunted down by rather dim-witted and uncaring angels called "powers", different from what the Bible means by "powers", who believe their duty to the Creator is to kill all these nephalim and some number of innocents in their immediate vicinity.

Nephalim that can survive to the age of 18 are magically delivered from a transitional state of headaches and other distress into having supernatural powers like flying, throwing fire, and being able to make a sword or two of "angel fire" appear at will. Our hero has an additional talent. Lucifer spread an apparently accurate prophecy that this boy is the Redeemer to fallen angels. If fallen angels come to him sincerely wishing to return to heaven, this boy can lay his hands on them and redeem them, causing them fleetingly to resume the appearance of an angel and then either return to heaven or be distintegrated in a flash, an ambiguity that never is clarified.

Such a redemption is all Lucifer seems to want from his son. The script makes this difficult. Lucifer is deceptive in meeting his son, giving the impression that he is just another fallen angel at first. If there is honor among theives, isn't there genuine love among the malevolent? There isn't according to this script. Still our hero is about to redeem Lucifer even though he now fully understands that this is Lucifer, but is stopped by visions of so much evil when he puts his hands on Lucifer, images of war and the like. I'm sorry, Dad, you've just been too darn bad for me to redeem you.

Lucifer doesn't take this passively. Now he resorts to intimidation, which breaks down into both Lucifer and our hero bringing forth their swords of angel fire to do battle. A routine cinematic conflict ensues with our hero pushing Lucifer off a cliff back to the depths of hell. Happy ending.

Somewhere along the line in a story like this I wonder about the way authors take such traditional characters, ones that are only in our culture because of Christianity and change their story into something that isn't Christian at all. Jesus is mentioned briefly in Fallen, but apparently both Jesus and the Father are off on some other planet, and these angels are deciding their own fate much as humans do naturally. There isn't an outright denial of God here, but God has no role to play.

I forget about this point as I watch, knowing there's bound to be another father/son battle coming, as with Star Wars, wondering how that will play out here. Isn't it strange that in the somewhat secular Star Wars, there was redemption for the evil father at the end, but not in Fallen, which is supposedly out of a tradition that emphasizes forgiveness?

Of course in Star Wars, there was no redemption for the epitome of evil, the Emperor, though maybe a quick death is something of a redemption compared to other possibilities. Is that the issue in Fallen? If the epitome of evil is redeemed, does that make evil meaningless?

No, it means evil is temporary, which is very different from meaningless. Suffering is temporary, but it is horrible, much more horrible than people will acknowledge, because then they would be obliged to do something about it. For a very long time, humanity has wanted suffering to be the result of what people deserve. Much of the Old Testament is based on such a belief. Arguments against redemption are bound to make this point, whether it's arguing against redeeming Lucifer, a pedophile, a mass murderer, or a corrupt politician or other leader. They must be punished!

Why must they? Is the only reason people have for being good a matter of avoiding punishment? I'm sure that's true as a matter of fact for many people. It's hard for us to say why anyone is Christian, but surely many Christians accept faith out of fear of the consequences of not accepting faith. Some on the internet have even said to me directly that unless my faith is to avoid hell, my faith is meaningless, as if they know anything about that.

But what does God say? The God of the Bible says that He wants mercy, not the animal sacrifices of the Old Testament. You would think it wouldn't be hard for people to take a step beyond that and understand that God also wants love in general, not worship or any of these other artificialities that we make supposedly to honor Him. But that's hard for people. It's hard for people to understand just how much of what's traditional, anyone's tradition, is wrong.

God tells me there never was a being named Satan. Isrealites imagined an adversary to them among God's angels, whom they also imagined. With time both a backstory and stories set in the future grew, making Satan into God's greatest angel named Lucifer, the one associated with such a fundamental element as light. Who else could commit a greater sin of pride than the greatest angel?

Can the greatest sinner be redeemed? Not if sin continues, or sin would have no consequences. But if sin continues, who are any of us to escape it?

Redemption is a tricky business. I finally decided that the ambiguity regarding the redemption of the fallen angels in Fallen is a good thing. Do they really go back to heaven, or is their redemption in fact just a quick death? Who knows? Human beings face the same dilemma. Is there really an afterlife that will be a good place for us or is the best we can hope for a long, productive life with an easy death, as much of the Old Testament suggests? One can have faith about such things, but which is true faith, and which is false faith? Such uncertainty drove me to God. People can say anything they want about how their way is superior to my way. I know there's no way to know that, unless something beyond me knows and tells me.

How does that knowledge beyond me feel about redemption? How about redeeming the epitome of evil? My understanding is that if there is any redemption, it cannot be only for those who need it a little. It must be for everyone, the only requirement being that people accept the redemption. Surely the Satan of myth would be smart enough to be first in line for such a redemption. Well the idea of needing to redeem everyone doesn't preclude requiring someone like the mythical Satan to be last in line, and not cause trouble while waiting. The myths surely would make Lucifer capable of that. Yet stories of good and evil don't make evil so smart. It makes evil too evil to be smart. That's one reason evil needs redemption.

To forgive or not to forgive. The God of my understanding is not completely one-sided on this point. When everything is said and done, if He feels the need to inflict vengeance on a small set of evildoers, He will do exactly that. Maybe there will be enough love that such vengeance won't be needed. Maybe there won't be. It's hard to predict. God is flexible and can go either way.

Yet if anyone is subject to vengeance in the end, there can be redemption in that person's surrender, maybe redemption that requires some amends to be made, but still some redemption. If the worst offender is not eligible for such redemption, then how can redemption exist at all? How can the volume of one's sins matter? If God's capacity for forgiveness is so limited, who says it will be enough to extend to you? You can say the Bible says so or anything else. You're just trusting in that. You don't know.

God tells me He is optimistic. The worst evils in our world can be redeemed, but will they surrender? It's hard to say. If they're smart, they'll surrender. Then what is there for the worst evils who are too dumb to surrender? Won't God have sympathy for those who are more ignorant than evil? We'll see. Don't count on knowing the answer to that one.

However the mythological Lucifer is portrayed, he is not dumb, or the author has just changed his character. If he's not dumb, then he must know how to be redeemed and will act accordingly. I'd hope redemption is so easy that Lucifer has already managed to be redeemed. God tells me the only reason he hasn't is that Lucifer doesn't exist. But the idea exists. Somewhere among the men hated by our culture is the greatest evil who ever lived. I don't see a principle by which I can be redeemed and that greatest evil can't be. Maybe I cling to God enough to realize my redemption while someone with no interest in God wastes his, but redemption was available to us both. That's how I see it.

I wasn't expecting Fallen to think it through like that. In Fallen, the bad guys lose, and the good guys win, even the good guys who aren't all that good. We forgive them because they're good guys, just as we don't forgive the bad guys because they're bad guys. That's human nature. If human nature is all there is, there is no redemption. Those who hate who I am will always hate me. Those who love me can overlook my shortcomings, if I don't make them too obvious. That's not redemption. That just staying in character.

The God who came when I prayed, "God help me!" wasn't like that. Our relationship has changed. We both have changed. I have been redeemed from my confusion, from my having no Lord but myself, maybe much more than that. I understand Him in ways I didn't once. If the God who came to me was a bad guy, then He has been redeemed, because He is now a good guy. Either way He is significantly different from the traditional God. He is whoever and whatever God is, not what someone who doesn't know says He is, a concept I wish more people could use as a starting point for God.

There is redemption. I don't know exactly how it works. Willingness is important. How can I know more than Lucifer knows about this? I didn't think that as I watched Lucifer fall back into hell in Fallen, but it didn't take me long to think that. I ask God such things. I'm happy how that's turned out. There's a lot of redemption in life, even enough for Satan, if there were such a person. Maybe even people who insist on being left out of that redemption are not left out. I wouldn't count on that, though.

A natural/cultural/spiritual transition

One of the most profound changes of our time, if not the most profound change is how we see nature. I understand someone 200 years ago thinking that nature is so complex, God simply created it all in His wisdom, even someone with the best education available. 200 years from now it may be hard for anyone to imagine seeing nature that way, when all the mechanisms of nature are so obvious and known to incredible detail. We are in between.

I've listened to so much fighting over creationism and evolution, and it's nothing more than a natural response to such a big transition. It's a clash of worldviews, not psychoses, but understandable views, even if anyone with a decent education knows that the creationist view is obsolete. I think it's important that there is an additional view that though God is understood to be not the Creator as He once was, He is still Helper, but I get tired of saying things that no one hears.

People know what they know and are ignorant and arrogant about the rest. That nature continues even as knowledge expands. I wonder how long it will take before we transition our way past that into something new? Science is good for that, for teaching us what we know well and what we don't, yet so many scientists don't seem to distinguish between what they know from science and their opinions about other things that are no better than anyone else's. It will take more than science for people to admit what they don't know. Will it be culture that teaches us that, maybe even something spiritual?

There is a garbage pile of ideas for things that can't be answered by science, such as how we should live our lives, what our minds know beyond our senses. Someday people in general may be able to see that, as opposed to now when both atheists and Bible-believing Christians insist they're right with very little understanding of where they're wrong . I hope that the transition about the nature of ideas goes better than this one about the nature of our bodies has. I suppose the odds are against that.