The Eternal Fire that creates all universes

Ideas didn’t always change as quickly as they have in my lifetime. When I was born there were still serious physicists who thought the universe would turn out to have always existed and always will exist. They interpreted Hubble’s finding that the universe is expanding as the creation of new space and new matter so as to maintain a universe of a steady density of matter, the “steady-state universe”. One of the proponents of this was Fred Hoyle. He is credited with giving the other view its name. Hoyle was mocking the idea that the universe of such beauty and complexity could have begun with a Big Bang. So many people listened to this and didn’t hear a convincing argument, but, “Wow, Big Bang, that’s it!” I understand Hoyle was not the marketing idiot/genius who later gave The Coca Cola Company its idea for New Coke, but it was something like that, an unintentional stamp on history.

Then in the sixties came a dagger to the heart for the steady-state universe. Microwave researchers discovered that everywhere around us is a pattern of microwaves that corresponds to what would happen if you had a hot body that then cooled all the way down to just 3 degrees above absolute zero in temperature. Hmmm, I wonder what that could be, coming from every direction uniformly. Gee, when might there have been a fire that involved everything that was so long ago it has now cooled to 3 degrees everywhere. And anyone with a TV set could see this radiation. Turn down the brightness and the steady patter of the brightest dots in the snow is these very photons of cosmic microwave background radiation hitting the TV. Of course, everyone who had Fred Hoyle’s image of the Big Bang in mind knew very quickly what this was. Coupled with the expansion of the universe, only the most stubborn people thought there was any possibility now other than the Big Bang.

I remember when I studied physics in the seventies how some were theorizing how the Big Bang could have happened. Cosmologists are on solid ground tracing back our current universe to how it was just a tiny split second after the Big Bang when the four forces of physics had started to separate. Before that is murky. Were forces created somehow that had forced the energy into existence de novo? Was there energy available from some preexisting structure that fed into the Big Bang? From the way theorists talked I had the feeling that they thought that if they could find the perfect Theory of Everything mathematically, the mere possibility of such perfection must have forced the universe into existence, with all of its energy, too. Others thought about something less mystical.

One image stuck with me, a researcher who was describing how the energy of our universe may have come from a different universe. It could have been some home hobbyist compressing mass in his basement that started our universe. Maybe he was caught up in the black hole he created. Maybe this was God, His substance distributed all across our universe, as some see God. God says no, if that were it, He’d recognize Himself in this story.

Science can only come at this from our side of the unknown. Theologians and philosophers see it differently. They think their words can see outside of the universe looking in, and with such arguments they see that something must have created the universe. So they call that God. God tells me He doesn’t see Himself in that story either. He doesn’t remember exactly what happened. It was a long time ago. He’s not even sure He was there. Until science came along, He assumed He was, but science has convinced Him He might not have been. He hasn’t needed to act on the universe physically to get all this we have today. He doesn’t remember setting up such a perfectly self-regulating system. Yet here it is, and physics can’t explain where it ultimately came from, just the last 14 billion years, that’s all.

So I’ve been content that whatever the ultimate origin of the universe is, it’s far away from here. I care about who God is for me now. Theologians and philosophers are forever missing the point that a first cause to the universe might not care a thing about us, might not be like God in any other way, even if someone calls Him God. Why argue then?

Yet recently I was going through potential names for something else, and God stopped me on “Eternal Fire”. That’s it. That’s what. The Eternal Fire that creates all universes. What is that? The Creator. What happened? I don’t remember.

So I don’t know. Is it something that would make physicists understand where the energy of the universe came from? Is it something theological? It is what it is, the Eternal Fire that creates all universes. I hope that’s better than the eternal fire some believe awaits people in hell. The scale sounds very different, though.

I like the ring to that, even just Eternal Fire. It is Creator, whatever else it is, but it is in another place. God remains the ultimate being here, as far as He knows. He says there is more though. There is a child of the Eternal Fire, son of the Most High God. He doesn’t lord His identity over others. Others call Him Lord, but He calls another Lord. It’s good for everyone to have a lord, to tell one what to do, lovingly, not as a tyrant. It’s not easy to have a structure to allow that, but with the Eternal Fire not here, that allows for some freedom in roles. God says it’s coming back to Him. He wouldn’t try to explain more than that. Suffice it to say that the structure of the spiritual world is not hierarchical, but collective or maybe as a rim connected by spokes to a hub. The one closest to the Most High God in one way is the most distant in another. There is one Spirit, many voices, one team, and many players.

People want more details than that. There aren’t a lot. Who needs a lot of names when everyone knows they are one, but many? The names are all superfluous compared to knowing that one is in need and many will help.

Big Bang, Eternal Fire, I know the latter will never take off in popular culture like the former. They mean different things. Big Bang is what we can see. Eternal Fire is what we can’t see. Big Bang is exactly what physics says it is. Eternal Fire is whatever created physics, whether it loves me or not. It works for me.

God loves me. There are many ways to see that. He doesn’t remember being Eternal Fire before He was my God. I accept that. Maybe He was, maybe He wasn’t. It was a long time ago. Maybe something will trigger His being Eternal Fire again, if He was that before. He’s sure He would get some warning before anything like that. Good, I’d hate for that home hobbyist to turn out to be someone who was fooling around with having a conversation with God.

Like water, like fire

I am like water. I flow from here to there, but remain mostly unchanged. I pick up things. I carry my favorite things a long way, my music, my science, my God. They mesh with me, embrace me, stay with me. Heavy things I can drop quickly. They have no handles, just the arbitrary nature of people who insist on having things their way. Let them go.

I am like water. When the way is straight, when it makes sense, I am so agreeable. Some of the things I’ve stored deep inside can bubble away, and I am flat. But when there is an obstacle, I churn and am relentless. Either the object moves, or I find another way. These have been my teachers. Had any of my teachers known a smooth way that went on forever, I would have gone that way and been clueless about the world, but if such a way exists, it has no name. It has features, to be honest, to be open, to be willing, to love those who don’t love me, but only so much. Then it’s time to appreciate those who love me enough to move along with me.

I am like water. I am a few feet across, but there is more to me that is unimaginably vast. Someday the part that is the most like me will evaporate. Anything left will be trash. And I will continue living in a different place, maybe a smaller place if I rain down over the mountains or the desert, maybe a much more collective place if I reach the ocean, as everyone does sometime.

I am like fire. I change those who come close enough, transiently for those who keep a distance, penetratingly for those who come very close. No one has died. I am not that hot. Some have been singed and still resent that my mark is on them. It wasn’t my plan to do that. I didn’t even know I had such heat until people complained of it instead of harnessing it. But I have seen what I can do, and it fuels me. Sometimes I wonder where so much fuel comes from, to be relentless, to continue the next day, even if this day has been long enough already. I know it comes from around me, not within, that I react, not creating anything by myself.

I am like fire. I feed off my surroundings. Yet a time came that I realized that even with nothing feeding me from outside, something fed me from within without consuming me. It wasn’t me. I thought it was at first. I thought I was the one who was so smart as to be able to understand everything and remember everything. I thought I was the one clever enough to find solutions to problems, to get that 98 on the quantum mechanics final, when the median score was 50 and the low score 2. I knew my method – do what I know to do. I didn’t know to say it so simply then, but that’s it. Be the fire. Be the dynamic process that is nothing by itself, but only what it transforms. In the small view, such a process always dies. But in the large view, it lives forever, even churning out universes, yet also heating the smallest places to just the right temperature.

I am like fire. I smolder, even if no one sees it and no one cares. If they only care when I erupt and pay no attention when I smolder, if they don’t feed me and tend to me so that I can be a steady flame, I want to give up, but I can’t, because I am like fire. I will still be smoldering even when I don’t realize it. Then even if I am the only one who can recognize that the flame still burns and that it is and always has been the same flame, at least I know it’s not arbitrary. My fire has burned through to places many people have heard about only as rumors. It’s been busy no matter how different that is from the expectations of others. They’ve ignored their own fire, thinking it destructive or fantasy. I’ve tried to show people, but people are such poor listeners. It takes a bigger fire than me to get their attention.

How can I be this way? How can I be one thing that would quench the other and the other thing that would boil away the first? Maybe that’s why it doesn’t go on forever. It is something dynamic and not sustainable. But it is more than that. I am not a consuming fire or a smothering column of water. I am life, a special type of life that is aware that it is life and all of its features, that has chosen a fluid way, a dynamic way, even though there are still reasons to stay the same in some ways.

I am water. I am fire. I am united with something much bigger than me, and I am contained in my small place at the same time. Science and experience, along with something nameless that bubbles up from within, have let me know all this, also let me know that I follow the way that’s good for me. It wouldn’t be a good way if I were just water or just fire, but I am so much more than both. Those who insist on simple words to see reality, so that they can manage it themselves, are ones eventually to be burned or washed away or both. It’s not as if I ever made a decision to be different than that. I just flowed to a different place, whether as water or as fire I’m not sure. I just did. I am sure that something greater than me moved me there, but exactly where She would have me go next and how is not in me. It will come to me, and I will dress appropriately.

Willing to believe something else

Sometimes I review my youth and how it came to be that I was sure science worked and that religion didn’t. Then as a young adult I came to appreciate how science couldn’t know where there wasn’t data, and how science-minded people assumed that my experiences of God must be deranged. I would have made some people happy if I had agreed that God can’t be real, but what did they know? They certainly didn’t know God.

In my later years, I see all sorts of people convinced that their view is the only one that can be true, from political conservatives with simplistic slogans to religious conservatives who find ancient beliefs to be perfectly true, beliefs from people who couldn’t even see far enough into the world to know moonlight was reflected sunlight. I see liberals who like to believe that all religions are true. I see atheists who are sure that science has proven there is no God. I see mystics who are sure no knowledge is certain, but have great hope in poor experimenters who say God can be found in neurophysiology.

People who just live for money and pleasure – now that I understand. It’s not for me, but at least they don’t confuse me. It’s not like so many others that make me wonder why they are stuck on beliefs that don’t work for me at all. They must get what they need out of them, that sense that everything will be OK, even if those other people are making such trouble right now, not us, no, we’re right, everyone else is wrong, even stupid and wrong.

I have my science to explain the physical world. I have my spiritual experiences to tell me that there is more than just things physical, not that I can detail them in any way, but I have met God. The Spirit lives in me. Some get upset at this dualism, saying their ideas show God in everything, which is obviously better than whatever elitist nonsense I’m saying. Hey, knock yourself out. Sell your books. Chat your chats. Turn your back on everything else. Lots of people do.

It’s hard to be so philosophical sometimes. Some beliefs look like they could just use a little kick to get them over the fence into something that actually works. All one has to do is put together one good, well-detailed argument to open someone’s eyes, whether it’s the eyes of a fundamentalist denying science or a liberal denying that some religions make no sense at all. Isn’t that right? No, it’s not. Something that’s impressed me are atheist websites where someone has compiled every argument against the Bible being right that anyone has found, every self-contradiction, every contradiction with the observable world. Yet every Bible-believing Christian says the Bible wins those arguments, not just 899-1, but 900-0. Wow, and I might score it 800-100 against the Bible. We’re not seeing the same fight here.

Tell me something I don’t know, and I’ll show you how willing I am to believe something other than what I know now. That’s easy for hard science. The accelerating expansion of the universe means there are more physical forces than the 20th century quartet I learned (gravity, electromagnetism, weak and strong nuclear forces). That’s something fundamentally new, but it’s empiricism. It’s objective.

I’m flexible about other things, too. I was writing something else to post here today, about the uncertainty beyond science in cosmology and consciousness. The Spirit found it boring. OK, I’ll write something else, something more personal. She likes that. She likes being mentioned, too. How do I know? Within my consciousness, it’s obvious, either in words or certain purring-like feelings. It’s not objective to anyone else unfortunately, but I am flexible. I don’t know how to get across to people how compelling both of these things are, that the accelerating expansion of the universe was shown in at least two studies and is certainly true. It also certainly requires a change in a fundamental part of physics. The presence of the Spirit is just as compelling for me, being the person in whom the Spirit lives. Is that odd?

It may be. I would argue that both are empirical, the first based on facts all can agree on and the second based on an experience that only I can report, but still empirical in deciding whether one can trust the data and what the result means. Others argue differently. Atheists argue that either I’m completely nuts or more nicely, that a higher part of myself has become God to fill this God-shaped void we all have, with our need for power, knowledge, love and goodness. Of course, the Spirit speaks to me either way, and if this a natural phenomenon, not God, wow it’s still amazing and easily worth the price I paid to get it.

So I’m willing to go either way with this, but atheists aren’t. Neither are theists regarding whether my Spirit is the Spirit and not a demon, something like that. They’re stuck with just one way, whatever it is. That’s not entirely fair. My God doesn’t mind me labeling our relationship one of several different ways. I don’t even know that He knows which way is right. But others signed up with a God who is not at all flexible or no God at all, which is just as rigid a position.

I’d say it might have been my desire for flexibility that gave me a flexible God, but that’s not true. I remember. Whichever God showed up in the sunlight 17 years was the God I would follow, unless He gave me a good reason not to, like never showing up again. But He did show up again.

Something like that makes it easy to be willing to believe in something else. I thought that describing my experiences, not just the drama, but how useful the whole thing was later, but help other be willing, too, but that’s not the case. It’s hard to be absolute about that, of course. My experiences were triggered by just a little prayer. Might anyone else hear something from me now and be helped to try a little prayer years from now when he or she needs to? Maybe, maybe not, for some reason I keep having exchanges that are something like, “You should try this. It’s helped me.” “Not even over my dead body!” “OK, so that’s a maybe, is it?”

It might be a maybe. Everyone speaks so rigidly, but on a really bad day, lots of people know there might be something else to believe in, and it takes so little, with no one else watching, just to try a little prayer. And if nothing happens, at least someone was willing, which is better than living one’s whole life sure that one’s religion or lack of it or one’s father’s religion or lack of it is certainly right.

Even liberals want God to do magic

I have noticed something in trying to follow God more closely. I had a lot of prejudice about who and what God is that distracted me. Even though I was a liberal who was sure that the Bible was wrong about creation, and science was right, when I started to take God seriously, I had the God of the Bible in mind, even though intellectually I was sure the Bible was wrong about many things.

People do this. They have this idea on one hand and another idea on the other hand. It can be very difficult to see something in between the two or something that is a synthesis of the two, maybe a synthesis that is heavily this in one aspect, but heavily that in another aspect. I’ve been called a fundamentalist a few times by people who either don’t know what that word means or assume that if someone has one belief that a fundamentalist would have, he or she must be a fundamentalist. I suppose the most conservative belief I have is that I believe I have every right to say, “God says so”. Intellectually I know the asterisk that goes with that, but it doesn’t keep me from having a strong faith. If the asterisk that says I could be wrong turns out to be right, then I’m totally wrong, then nothing matters, then everything is a fraud, and I’d just as soon live the way I do anyway.

I didn’t ask to have a road-to-Damascus experience. I had been praying for a little help, with the Prayer of St. Francis, because helping people was one thing I was sure was valuable. God agreed. Here is that simple certainty again that makes many people uncomfortable, not just liberals, but God did agree. That’s why this happened. He has told me so in words in recent years. I look in the Bible, and it’s no different from the way some speak there. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that I don’t feel the least bit uncomfortable with the way Paul wrote with such certainty. I disagree with the content at times. I know context they didn’t know sometimes. But that style, such as when Paul says that what he is saying is a revelation from Jesus Christ, the resurrected Jesus Christ, who now lives in him, I know what he meant. It’s like saying I have ten fingers. It just is. It’s that kind of compelling experience, as is the world of our senses right in front of us.

Yet at the same time, if I go on an atheist website, one where they go through the entire Bible, with every objection they could compile about the verses, I probably agree with atheists 90% of the time. And if I mention certain beliefs from that, someone might think I am an atheist or agnostic, like conservatives do who think anyone who believes that evolution is a fact as I do can’t be a Christian or that someone who has serious doubts about a substitutionary atonement as I do can’t be a Christian.

So lots of people have a patchwork of beliefs, but I wouldn’t be that way if I never had had spiritual experiences. I would be a typical rationally minded liberal, maybe Christian if you really stretch the definition, like many of my fellow scientists. Instead adversity got me looking for God, and all of sudden there was God that was not a thinking man’s God at all. Not only that, but I was ready to have that God be the God of the Bible, with every magical ability possible. That was still in me, despite my being solidly and rationally liberal.

I’ve had to lose that, because that’s not who God is. God says so. One way to illustrate that is my experience with occasionally buying lottery tickets in the nineties. I’m not sure how that started. I suppose the jackpot was a big one as I shopped at the supermarket one day, so I bought a ticket. By that point I wasn’t worried it might be a sin. Right after my first visit from God, I had had a lot of legalistic concerns, but that quieted down as I read the Bible regularly and found that I was a liberal Christian, as I would have been before if I had had a strong belief in God. My ticket didn’t win.

I doubt that I prayed about that first ticket, but there were other times when the jackpot was huge, and I wanted to know what God wanted regarding this. Some say God protects people from winning more money than they know what to do with, but I have some management experience. I’d certainly give a lot for charity. It would free me up to pay more attention to God. I would think that God would want me to win the lottery as much as I do. I look at who does win, and they don’t seem to be God’s type that often. So, “Father, would you please help me win the lottery. Amen.” Then I’d lose.

So I’d get the impression that God doesn’t care about whether I win or lose. I’d still like to win, and I know how much better the odds are when the jackpot has built up than the first time after a payout. Who can turn down a bargain, even if the odds are still millions to one? I’d wonder how many tickets to buy. It might be that God has changed His mind or was just waiting until the right time for me to win. I really feel like just buying one ticket. If God wants me to win, that’s enough. If not, it’s too much of a long shot for me to buy more. Maybe I’d pray again. Maybe I wouldn’t. Either way I’d lose.

This idea of how many tickets to buy kept coming up. $5 would give me a better chance. If this is all natural, I think I would like to invest a little more, an amount that doesn’t mean anything to me, but increases my chances 5 times. That’s a lot. Then I’d wonder if I was overdoing it. If I didn’t win even the smallest payout with that inflated investment I’d made, 5 times what I might have made, I’d even feel a little guilt. Maybe God doesn’t want me to do this, not because of the money, but because it’s not right, not because gambling is a sin, but because this particular form of gambling is dirty. It takes money from people who are just out shopping as I was. Some goes to the schools, but the rest goes to people who just aren’t going to use the money for good.

Hmmm, sounds like I should pray about this. So I did, praying to know God’s will on this point, praying to be led to follow God’s will, even if I couldn’t know it. I don’t remember a response for a while, as I decided for myself which was which. Some days the jackpot was very high. I’d buy a $1 ticket just in case. Other times, I just didn’t feel like it.

Then finally I heard something in words. God said He didn’t care how many tickets I bought. I took this to mean anywhere between 0 and 5, or more if I wanted. So He wasn’t planning on making me rich. So I wasn’t going to miss the week God had decided I could win, only to go to heaven and have everyone laugh at me because I’m the dummy who forgot to buy a ticket when my number came up. OK, that clarifies things. I can do what I want.

Only if there’s no chance God will cheat for me, I feel much less enthusiasm for buying a ticket. It still hadn’t occurred to me that God might have nothing to do with the lottery at all. It amazes me to think how long I went with this idea that God might not get involved with the lottery, but surely there’s a chance He might influence it. How can anyone know that He can’t? It would still be a while before God could tell me He can’t.

I wanted God to be able to help me, just as I wanted Him to help me by praying before I ever had a spiritual experience. Only then I didn’t know what He might do. Maybe there would be some job offer out of the blue. Can’t God do anything? And that was when I was a rationally minded liberal, with no belief at all in the afterlife, no belief in any miracles and certainty that Genesis was wrong. I wasn’t praying for miracles. I was praying for a little help then, from this source that maybe existed and maybe would help me, even though I might not be asking well. I’ve heard of it happening. So what comes is a road-to-Damascus experience. A millions-to-one payout, is it?

So why can’t I win the lottery? Well I can but the odds are 18 million to one as they are with anyone else. Yet during the nineties I was on the lookout for ways that God might communicate beyond the occasional word I would hear then. If the e-mail I am composing is suddenly lost, is that a sign not to send it? If the clock has a certain time on it, like 1:23 or maybe numbers that would mean a Bible verse I know, did God place that clock there for me? Does God have control over radio station DJ’s to play certain songs at a certain time?

Well, I doubt those first two, but that last one! After all God could do that without a physical miracle, just quietly getting into some DJ’s mind or maybe just into the listener’s mind. After all, if God wants to talk about love, there are some stations where just about every song is love, even if it is rock and roll. My goodness there sure are a lot of love songs that can be sung between God and a person just as well as hearing it only as love between humans. How does that happen? Well evolution is about procreation and evolution in humans has given us this dual purpose for sex, part of which is pregnancy and part of which is bonding, less than perfect bonding but bonding nevertheless, possible because humans can have sex all the time, while most animals wait for a specific time and change in their body. And sex has taught many people real love, selfless, committed love, even unconditional. It takes some time to get from one to another, more than several lifetimes, requiring a culture to provide continuity for the learning that is beyond anyone to learn in one life. Or maybe it’s all magic. Maybe it’s in between where God needs to kickstart the process here and there.

Some liberals scoff at such things, but other liberals would really like to keep something of the traditional God who can do such things. I was in the former group before God showed up for me. I was in the latter group after He did. I know I’m not alone in that as comments prove when a discussion about miracles comes up among liberals. Many of us would at least like to hold onto the possibility. I saw Miracle on 34th Street more than once. I can do what Natalie Wood did in that movie, “I believe, I believe, I believe, I believe, …” Then she gets a house! I’m sure my mind is full of that, and I’m sure that whatever part of my mind held on to that idea wanted to win the lottery and believed that God could help, not a maybe like on my more intellectual side, but definitely, like in the movies.

Yet what an uncertain process it is. GOD, WHY DON’T YOU JUST TELL ME WHAT TO DO? TELL ME WHAT YOU WANT. He would if He could. People argue about this, some drawing up schemes from traditional theology or a mystic tradition saying that what we experience is just what God wants, the suffering, every bit of it, the uncertainty, so many starts and stops, so many dead ends, as if this is the best way to learn. Man, it wasn’t the best way for me to learn science. I’d hate to try to reinvent the wheel with that. And I’ve seen how easily people are misled by pseudoscience and how hard it is to get that junk out of their heads once it’s in there. It’s good that people die and are replaced by new minds, but that can’t be the most efficient way.

Our culture has only found its current best way to think recently, with the Enlightenment and the scientific revolution. People can scoff at those, but they are so powerful (I might have just mentioned the scientific revolution, but I’m trying to be broad-minded). Something is happening to our culture, viewed over centuries, as traumatic as being turned inside out, slowly. I don’t know how it will look in the end, but it certainly confuses a lot of people now.

Many are fiercely trying to hang on to the past, saying traditions thousands of years old are exactly right, even though the people who came up with them didn’t even know that moonlight was reflected sunlight. Some reject tradition entirely. Some try to find some middle way, though as I said in the beginning there are so many different ways to find a middle way.

I thought I was a liberated 20th-century man, completely following the new, improved way of life, yet looking for God has taught me how much of that character Natalie Wood played was in me even at my most adult and competent state. She wants a house, and she only knows magic to get it. She didn’t even know that until some funny guy woke something up in her. In the movies she gets her house. In real life there are many, many disappointments before one is paid off looking for God.

I talk about the payoff a lot, but it’s just been about three years that I could converse with God as easily as some do in the Bible. Before that it was bits and pieces for a long time, learning to follow God by every religious and secular method available, and having to let go of fantasy. I know how strange that last word sounds from someone who has conversations with God, but those conversations are not magic. They are a phenomenon, to grow and nurture, from both sides of the conversation. God is not what tradition says He is. I don’t expect anyone to take my word for that. I don’t know how many liberals this applied to, but it applied to me, even liberals want God to do magic. I had to learn He only does things certain ways, maybe because it’s not magic, but spiritual.

There are certain beliefs we need to give up. People can quibble about exactly what, but there are certain beliefs we need to give up. That’s one reason I’m glad to be liberal.

"Put the fan by the door"

It was hot again yesterday. I took a box fan into my bedroom as it was getting close to bedtime. I was going to put it on the dresser by the window, where I always put it, but was momentarily inhibited by all the things that had accumulated in the space for the fan since the last time I used it. Then the voice of the constant companion in my consciousness said, “David, put the fan by the door.” “Oh yeah! There is an outlet there, isn’t there?” There was a nice place at bed height to set the fan, too. It was much better than my plan. How did God know?

Any atheist I know would say this was just me. Somewhere in the recesses of my mind, I knew this solution, and it just comes to me through this imaginary God my mind has developed to process help for the more incompetent part of me. Right, the thing about that is I didn’t have the slightest glimmer of a clue in my consciousness that there was an outlet there. I recognized it when I saw it, but it may have been years since I plugged anything in there. I had every intention of just taking a minute to clear off where I previously had the fan. It was not a big deal. I admit in retrospect I had the very slightest discouragement that I couldn’t just put the fan down, but it was so slight I wasn’t thinking about it. I also had no visual clues that there was an alternative. My back was toward the place the Spirit knew was a better solution. I didn’t know. If my mind can do this without God, it’s just as significant as if God can do this, as a phenomenon that really is worth paying attention to and following. But the truth is I have no way of explaining this naturally.

When all of that dawned on me, I asked God how She did that. She said She could see the fan winding up there in the future. Why waste time? Besides it would make a good story to supplement these things She’s been wanting me to write about how one can indeed be led by the Spirit.

You know, She’s right again. It would make a good story. I wonder when I’m going to write it. Oh yeah, right now!

I forget if I shared this here before, but the first time I went to a charismatic church, in 1992, there was a time of praise reports. Now in the liberal churches of my youth, praise reports were thanking God for recovery from a serious illness, for a new job, something of substance like that. In this charismatic church, the praise reports were for God helping someone find her glasses, his car keys and get through a dental visit without incident. Huh? What does this great and glorious God of the universe have to do with such trivia? Well now I know. God loves me. He and She show it in countless ways everyday. I have learned to hear God and trust God regarding things just as trivial as when I first learned about living with the Spirit. It’s not an effort for God to be helpful. It’s certainly not a wasted effort for God to help us with trivial things. He’s not going to end poverty without us anyway. So how do we learn to trust God? We learn by many experiences that are much easier than upsetting one’s whole life to do something heroic. There may be no conscious awareness of God’s help early on, but as one draws closer to God, communication with God can become just as easy as I’ve described it here, just as easy as it’s described in the Bible. I’m sure the Bible is wrong about some things, but not everything.

Now there are plenty of Bible-believing Christians who report experiences like this, and I think their beliefs and their behavior are all wrong. Their behavior may be Christian in terms of being polite, but they do nothing to help the needy. They fan the flames of political and religious conflict. What goes on here? God says that they aren’t hearing Him well, but He loves them enough to help them where He can be heard. It is a limited experience of God that men like Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson have, but it’s more than nothing. God tells me there’s no way a large section of humanity will ever be in that constant contact with Him that some have. He wouldn’t be able to stand the way we treat each other. It takes so long to learn to do things God’s way, even though when one does, when one has died to the flesh and lives in the spirit, when one has given up one’s own inner 2 year-old who says no to everything, it is so much easier than living the natural way to live.

So why does He put up with the mess that the world is today? There’s no other way. The end justifies the means.

But within those means, there is love, for those who want it, for those willing to trust. The charismatic way is not for everyone. It may sound like I’m saying that it is when I say how wonderful some aspect of it is. I’m not saying that. I’m glad loveapple asked the questions he did in response to what I wrote about “God says so”. No one can say there’s only one possibility for God. I only say that there is indeed this possibility that rationally minded Christians shy away from. Hey, I can be very good at being rational. It’s just not the whole story.

Being charismatic has its advantages. That fan worked really well last night. This story could be better, but words are so limited, and it’s not enough to make a movie about, which I know nothing of how to do anyway. The Spirit is a powerful muse, but it takes more than that to convince anyone to live his or her life to end poverty, to live to end conflict. If God could do that easily, it would be done by now. It’s about much more than words or beliefs.

God says so

There are so many things where I could state my understanding as God says, … then God fills it in. Now it’s only right that people should ask, “What do you mean by “God”? What do you mean by “says”? Fair enough, times have changed so much from thousand of years ago when people were dependent on someone to speak for God. Nowadays, anyone can make some inference about God, about what is good and loving, about what is true, for himself or herself. Anyone can think it through, with so many facts, so much knowledge that is available now about the past and present, about the world, about human beings, human nature, and how human beings interact with the world and anything that might be not of this world. Who needs God?

Well it is hard to do all that without God. People come to all sorts of conclusions about what is loving and true when they try. If you look at all of that, there are parts of it where one person is irreconcilably contradicting another. Still some try to draw broad principles where many people agree, feeling secure that there is truth in consensus. Why believe that? If everyone makes the same mistake, it guarantees that the consensus will be wrong. It’s what science calls “systematic error”. Furthermore given the incredibly large universe of all possibilities for what is loving and true, what are the chances that unaided human beings are ever going to pick out the one possibility that’s real? It’s vanishingly small. Multiply by 6 billion people or 100 billion people, it’s still vanishing small that anyone is right, much less everyone is right, in his or her own way or otherwise. Still everyone gets to decide for himself or herself. It’s a free country, not just because of the Constitution, but because there is something natural about freedom, especially in our own thoughts, even if our thoughts are hopelessly tangled up in what comes to us through genetics and learning. Despite all that, we have some mechanism of choice. What should we use it for?

In ancient times, people used it to decide whom to believe about God. Could a prophet foresee the future accurately? Could a prophet demonstrate signs that show that God is with that person? I can’t do that. The closest thing I ever did to what Jesus does in the gospels is to suggest someone with hysterical weakness back to normal strength. That can be impressive, but it’s a trick, not a miracle. One might say it’s a technique rather than a trick, but trick says it better. One fools the patient into using the limbs that the hysterical part of them doesn’t want to use. It might look like a miracle, but it’s just psychophysiology and neurophysiology. It’s just science.I remember caring for the teenage niece of a local psychiatrist. She just couldn’t walk one day. Oh my God, has she had a stroke, MS, a tumor? No, in examining her she used her limbs subconsciously the way anyone with hysterical weakness does. If someone’s faking, it can be a difficult exam, but if someone is cooperative it’s easy to diagnosis hysteria. Mostly one can place a patient’s limbs in positions where you wouldn’t think it takes any strength to maintain, but it does. In someone with organic weakness, that limb falls right down. In someone with hysteria, he or she doesn’t realize what their limbs should do if they were organically weak.This teenager was interesting. Not only was it obvious that her weakness was hysterical, she was talking about how this was so unlike her. She kept talking about how hard she “strived” in school. What a strange word for a teenager. I guess her legs were sick of striving. They needed to have a talk, those parts of her that had different ideas on this point. But first she needed to walk, and any neurologist worth his or her salt knows how to do this. You examine a patient and manipulate someone’s limbs so that you can bring out the strength that is really there and then say, “Look, you’re getting stronger. You’ll recover.” If you do it right, you can suggest anyone out of the hysteria. Academic neurologists get so competitive about just how fast they can get a patient with hysterical weakness back on the street. Ah, it’s a gift, if you’re trained well. Ordinarily it’s enough to just talk a patient back into normal strength fast enough to avoid hospitalization, any further complications. Strangely hysteria is much less than it once was, less now than it was in 19th century Vienna. I wonder how much there was in 1st century Jerusalem. There’s no way to know except ask God, and His answer on that is not for the public.

I wish I had a technique to suggest people out of all their other miseries. “God says, …” has so much potential that way, yet it’s a different time, a rational time for the most part. How does one prove that it’s not a rational universe? I don’t know. I’m convinced there is a Spirit, through both secular and spiritual experiences, and the Spirit keeps showing me that there are ways to demonstrate God for people, even without tricks. They don’t work well. People have already made up their minds on so many things. Even first-hand it was hard for me to accept the truth of a being arising within my consciousness and saying, “I am God”. There had to be other things that confirmed that, and there were, but they are largely within my consciousness, not proof objectively. That’s good for me. Is there any benefit for anyone else?I’m still not sure what the main point of this is for anyone else. I don’t think it’s that everyone can experience God this way. Maybe that is the future, because if everyone has what I have here, the world’s problems would evaporate in a cloud of selflessness and efficiency. If that’s it, why not before now?

I suspect the real future is not so magical. Maybe everyone can communicate with God, but for most it’s limited. Still to know that would focus people on God instead of pride. That would be a big improvement. So how do I do that, even participate in that? Beats me, I just do what I’m told, really.

And it’s not all candy and nuts. Because I will tell you that when God tells me what He really would like to do, it’s to post some rules, tell people what horrible things will happen to them if they disobey, be God in all His glory, … Oops, tried that. That’s not the best way. Love is the best way, but how to tell that to all these dimwits! God says things like that, not me, only under extreme distress. I’m more constrained than He is. But I have the peace that comes with knowing I didn’t make any of this up, not one word. God says so, and there is more to back that up, even in the here and now, than anyone can imagine. You never would believe what I’ve seen, never. It’s easy, right up to some boundary that’s hard to cross, like trying to use words to describe all this.

God says that’s enough for now. 2 pages exactly, man, what a perfectionist.

New kind of Christianity?

This will be posted on the message board at www.tcpc.org -

I feel like slaughtering a sacred cow today. I’m not Hindu, so there’s nothing to hold me back. Of course I’m rather small to be slaughtering an entire sacred cow by myself. Maybe I can get one stab in. Maybe all I can do is be a vampire bat or an insect and get one bite in and hope the animal will bleed to death or catch a disease from me. If FredP, Aletheia, flow, Cynthia and whoever else no longer post here out of fear that I will disagree with them, maybe I’m more virulent than I realize. I might as well use this destructive power of mine for whatever good I can think of.

For those who don’t like the imagery of hurting an animal, it is true that a “sacred cow” is more like a logjam than a cow. A real cow can be shooed along easily, not by a devout Hindu, but by someone who is free of the false dichotomy of sacred vs. profane, a dichotomy that the real God tells me is nothing He started. A “sacred cow”, meaning an unchallenged idea, needs something more aggressive. Ah, just my line of work.

So what is there that’s so stuck? I have an idea. As long as I’ve been aware of TCPC, I’ve heard that it is beckoning toward the future. Before that I read J.S. Spong’s book about how Christianity must change into something more rational. I guess I’ve heard all of my life that the liberal Christianity I embrace in my own way is the new Christianity, the Christianity where people can integrate the changes in the world with the wisdom of the past and voila, a Christianity for the future.

I’ve never questioned this much. I know an Episcopal minister who likes to say that he goes forward with one foot in science and one foot in religion and how wonderful that is. I pointed out to him that this doesn’t sound mechanically stable to me. If science and religion are going in different directions, they’ll pull his legs apart. He’ll have to choose one at some point. Still it wasn’t clear to me what the problem might be outside of his metaphor.

I think it’s becoming clearer to me what the problem is. New-style Christians are not very Christian. Old-style Christians aren’t either for that matter. I agree with atheists on so many points about the hypocrisies of traditional Christianity. Those allied with TCPC certainly aren’t like that. They don’t pick out these idolatrous causes like being anti-abortion, anti-evolution, and anti-homosexual while neglecting the needy. No, they are pro-choice, pro-mainstream science, and pro-gay, while neglecting the needy, compared to what people might be doing, compared to what the need is.

I’m not going to flesh out that criticism right now, because there are additional areas to criticize. I’ve always felt that whoever cares to call himself or herself a Christian can do so. Fundamentalists have had certain beliefs they consider essential before saying someone is Christian, the trinity, the virgin birth, the atonement, the resurrection and maybe the inerrancy of the Bible. I’m not big on beliefs, one reason I do better with liberals. But on the other hand, gosh, the singing at a liberal church is never that good, like they don't believe it. I have in mind a few songs at a charismatic church on a day when the Spirit was very much in attendance. Wow, that’s amazing. Things like that get so left behind when all people talk about is beliefs, as if the best Christian is the one with the best beliefs, whether that turns out in the end to be, traditional, liberal, Progressive, New Thought, whatever. I’d tell you what God says to me about that, but you won’t believe me anyway.

What maybe you can believe is that the Spirit has something to do with authentic Christianity. Marcus Borg’s book, The Heart of Christianity, has been discussed here in the past. His conclusion seems to be correct that the essence of Christianity is transformation, to die to the flesh, to live in the spirit, to live by faith. Borg describes how it has been a mistake to think of faith as beliefs. Faith can be defined as simply trust and devotion with no elements of beliefs at all. Which definition is God’s preference? Ask Him. Some of us get answers when we ask questions like that in prayer. It’s hard, but how hard can it be when someone like me, who so many must think is a fool, can get answers from God that have given me considerable direction, strength and comfort, and I’m sure will continue that way into the future?

No, that is not purely rational Christianity. It is a spirituality some find repulsive, for various reasons. I don’t think it’s progressive. I don’t think it’s liberal. I don’t think it’s conservative. God just is, whoever and whatever He is. You’re not going to beat that by cobbling together everyone’s beliefs and saying that must be God.

We are all going to die, and at least some of our prejudices will die with us. We will be replaced by people farther along in time. I’m sure that for the immediate future, the next hundred years at least, religion will be about the same hodgepodge it is now. The pressure that conservatives fight will grow. Both the genetics and neuroscience revolutions will provide much more ammunition to say that traditional Christian theology is ridiculous and provide these enticing powers to people so that they will learn the science. Maybe when these sciences fill out their current expansion, to know all 25,000 of our genes in every detail, meaning we know everything genetic in our being, to explore all of the brain that functional neuroimaging can do, it may be enough to say that we can’t explain something about us and about consciousness any more than we can explain the ultimate origin of the universe. Maybe there will be a more obvious place for God than there is now. Now evolutionary psychologists describe a God-shaped void in us, a need for power, knowledge, love and goodness, but they see this as a legacy from atheistic evolution. They haven’t been willing to consider the possibility that a real God fills that void, something nonphysical. It’s not necessary to believe that in order to do the science. Who knows if science will ever argue more for God than it does right now. Atheists might be right, and the God I know is all contained in my head. If so, it is still a much more powerful phenomenon than atheists give it credit or even theists who look down their nose at anything spiritual. It doesn’t just change singing. It changes behavior, at its best it does. It changes many things in that transformation Marcus Borg details.

God is whoever and whatever God is. Can you get an understanding of that from cobbling together so many beliefs and calling it Progressive Christianity? I haven’t seen that. What I see is people saying Progressive Christianity, whatever they mean by that, is what they want to be there in the future. It might not be, any more than fundamentalism can survive forever. God will survive, whatever He is that fills our God-shaped void. People eventually may find religion irrelevant to that.

Real physics, real God, part 2

My goal never has been to tell everyone to believe as I do, though I am like anyone else in wanting some number of people to believe what I believe. I'm not sure what that number would be, at which point I wouldn't talk to those of other beliefs at all just for the sake of beliefs. I don't expect ever to be in that position in my life, as I do have a way of belief that rejects authority, rejects much of what is past, and rejects limited experience of life, not something that can have a lot of followers. I'm sure I have my moments of hostility in that, but my main concern is always to define my way so that I might follow it better. Of course like everyone, if my way is best for me, I would at least throw it out for consideration that it might be best for some others, too, truly as a gift.

My way is empirical. I wish charismatics didn't already have their stamp on "experience-based Chrisitainity", because I would like that term if it didn't already mean speaking in tongues to so many people and be associated with the rigid mindset of Pentacostal theology. And that experience is certainly inside oneself and outside of oneself.

I recently was discussing with someone where the presence of God that I have in my consciousness originated. Who knows where it really originated but I can trace my awareness of it back 35 years to when I took karate in college and we would meditate before class. The instruction was to let our mind become a quiet lake. I was pretty good at that. Later I tried other meditative techniques, then prayer, which led to this road-to-Damascus experience I described here recently. In prayer the presence of God grew and grew for me, first just as the target of my prayer with no sensory phenomena, then as someone who affects me, emotionally, even in how I move, then as someone who has some visual and somatosensory way to reach me, and finally someone who simply speaks in words, though such words always depend on what I'm willing to hear, things like that.

Yet my current awareness of God is very much like that quiet lake from 35 years ago, not that God is always quiet, but it is the same place within me that I can't identify as "heart" or something else that I know is a precise anatomical location. Now how do I integrate that with what I see in the world, that some people have experiences like this while many don't, as well as other issues? I would do that empirically again, but it's difficult with so much uncertainty. One needs one's intellect and intuition, as one does for any science. Any good scientist needs a good intuition about the next experiment to do.

So I'm not sure that any sort of experience is left out in what I think is the best way to understand God, the universe, life, and anything else. Yet I see people relying on some parts of that very narrowly, such as pure intellect with little to ground that in reality. The results of those other approaches are not anything that makes sense to me.

It's hard to talk about in the abstract, but as a concrete example, if someone tells me the central idea of quantum physics is parallel universes established by choice, I would challenge that. The textbooks I have on quantum physics say the central idea is that energy is quantized. There are experiments that go with that, a system of quantum theory that works to explain the results of many years of experiments with subatomic particles. There is only a mystical and speculative interpretation of all that that says choice has anything to do with any of it. Yet I can't prove there aren't parallel universes. Anyone is free to go that way, no matter how little that connects with experience, but I have to be honest that I see no value in that way. I just see people exercising their fantasies that way. There are many similar ideas in religion where I would anger someone by being so blunt about them.

So I think it's true that different kinds of experience are important. I also think they need to be integrated, which science does when one can be objective, but cannot be done scientifically when one is looking at subjective consciousness. Still one can follow the same principle of believing what comes to me in my own consciousness rather than some purely intellectual scheme that I can't reach personally. God may be Creator, but I can't stand at the creation with Him except by a vision, which I can't make too much of. I don't have enough context to know what to do with that. I can't assess the reality of some theological or philosophical scheme of seeing God that is so far beyond reality that I find no way to test it.

So I came across the idea that God is whoever and whatever answers when I call Him. That I like. That I relate to. I like it so much, I'm not sure why it wasn't taught to me by someone other than God, but it wasn't. And lots of people don't like it when I try to explain it. It does threaten other ways of looking at it. I don't see any way around that. Even if it were just a matter of the best restaurant in town, something unimportant and subjective as that, anyone who gets really excited about one restaurant and knows why he likes that restaurant above any other might be seen as pushing his choice on others. Well, OK, but I don't know what else to do but explain why I get excited and hope that some might understand.

I don't see all ways as valid. Can you see all ways as valid and include the way that says many ways are junk? I'm not sure it's worth going there. There is a phenomenon where a person discovers a way to live and says, "This is the way!" I know from experience that there are many in liberal religion who hate to hear that, even if that way is not fundamentalism. I find myself often saying, "But it is the way!" in various ways, mostly to see what I say and what others say back, because it is a curious phenomenon where someone rushes in and says, "Look guys, gold!" and someone else says, "I don't see any gold." You really can't guess at who's right in that situation. You just know it might be worth looking at if you don't have anything better to do. Then you can build up your own experience of who knows gold and who doesn't.

Real physics, real God, part 1

From my days in physics I know that power is energy over time. Energy is the capacity to do work, unlike all the casual ways people use the word “energy” in spirituality. If there’s no work being done, all the energy may be locked up as potential energy. There comes a time to use all that potential. In using it, one can learn how much was there, but then maybe it’s all used up. Then again, maybe there’s a process to restore the potential energy that one had before one tested it, like getting a good night’s sleep. Then the dawn comes, and everything is the same, except somehow a duty cycle has been done, with no benefit for one process, but impressive benefit for another. It really does pay to know physics. All the vague and abstract words in the world won’t unlock an understanding of things in the same way. It’s too bad that many try to make physics vague and abstract or get lost in speculation with no experimental test to flesh out that speculation or show that it’s just wrong. That’s not physics. It’s pseudophysics, even if the best of physicists have stepped into that at times.

God might unlock one’s understanding, but even God is limited by the materials He has to work with. And who says physics isn’t God’s way, real physics? Beyond that, who says that the empirical, but nonscientific way of letting God direct me in the here and now is problematic? It has its difficulties, but the God who came to me proves Himself over and over again. He is power, knowledge, love, and goodness, not in the way theologians and philosophers say, for most of their words, but in a real way, an observable way. Of course observing God within me is very different from deciding who He is or isn’t in someone else. We all have to start somewhere. I start with defining God as the one who answers when I pray, “God help me”. It is so much more of a functional way to approach God than those who approach God believing they already know everything about who and what God is, by reason or by past revelation.

I’ve thought of this many times before, not in these exact words, but similarly. It’s hard to get across to people. They think they already know something else. Maybe it works for them just fine. I understand that. People only look for a new understanding when failure forces them to. I don’t suppose God needs to push the entire planet so that everyone is failing at once. That probably doesn’t help understanding. Someone has to succeed so others can look and say, “That’s it!” Only I’ve never seen anyone succeeding at all aspects of life. So here’s a little bit of one person to be a role model in this respect and another to be a role model in that respect. I try to sew it together, but there are still pieces missing, and what there is doesn’t look that great. I pause, I look, I cry. “God help me!”

Ah, so that’s what it takes. Well not everyone at once, of course, just whoever, whenever he or she is ready.

Nostalgic dream

I have so many dreams about still practicing medicine. They almost never have anything to do with how I really practiced. Still I see them as nostalgia, though sometimes there are qualities to them that must have meaning beyond mere nostalgia. Elevators pop up in them frequently, a symbol of change I think, maybe even rebirth, where one is confined to this narrow canal. Then the doors open up, and voila, here’s a new world. Usually there’s something bizarre about the elevators in my dream. They might be 8-sided instead of rectangular. They might be twisted or offset from the world beyond where the doors open and close. There are so many ways my dreams say, “We’re not in Kansas any more, Dorothy” Hmmm, I recognize that voice. I recognize Her very well. But this dream wasn’t about Her. She says it actually was, but we’re not going there right now. I do have some say so over this.

This morning I awoke from one of these dreams. This time the patient was a woman with bleeding in her head. It’s urgent to get to the OR quickly in that situation, but it’s somewhat different from when someone is bleeding out from a bodily injury where blood is pouring out like a spigot. Then the bleeding is like a clock, where you only have so much time before someone runs out of blood. Bleeding in the head is different, unless someone has been shot through a venous sinus and a unit of blood pours out each time you take the pressure off to see if there’s something that can be fixed, but that’s very rare. Because the skull is a confined space, there is a lot of pressure right away to stop the bleeding, but one’s brain doesn’t tolerate the pressure well. That’s the emergency in head trauma, not turning off the spigot. It's not the same clock as when a patient is bleeding out. It can easily be that the situation is already irreversible and hopeless. It may even be that the situation is fine without doing anything. It's hard to know when the cause is more obscure than a spigot. Strange that I should be in charge of that this time, since I’m a neurologist, not a neurosurgeon, but I’m often in over my head in these dreams.

So there we were, taking this woman to the OR. Strange that in this hospital the elevator went down to go from the ER to the OR. I don’t think I’ve ever been in a hospital like that, though I can imagine a hospital on a hill where that could be. I also think of Stargate SG1 where one goes down to level 28 to get to the gate to go to another world. Who knows, maybe that’s relevant.

Anyway, even with the override key, it’s taking time for the elevator. Who can understand the limitations of machinery? One who knows every nook and cranny of the machine does, but for so many of us the machine is just what it is. Either way things can only go so fast, but one way one knows exactly why, while the other way one has to wait and wonder. I’d rather go the first way, but it’s not always practical. Even God doesn’t know everything. He proves that to me frequently. Still the elevator comes eventually, either way.

There wasn’t more to this dream before I woke up. Often after whatever issues there are with the elevator, I encounter equipment which is definitely not anything of this world. What to do with this? It’s always the same answer. I do what I know how to do, even if I don’t know how I know. I am that I am. Even though I’m not God, does even God do it better than that? We all do what we know to do, sometimes proving that we know very little indeed, sometimes proving that we know so much, it’s a mystery to everyone to know how we know that much. How did you do that? I don’t know. I just did.

I help people because I know how. There are other reasons about how much of my life I give to helping people, how much help I give to any one person, exactly what help I give or forget to give. Forget, right, how easily one can remember at a time other than when one was supposed to forget. Often that’s so innocent, but sometimes it’s so odd what one forgot that the Wizard’s handiwork is showing.

There’s this joke where the punch line is that God likes to play doctor. The punch line is better than the joke, any of the jokes that can get you to that punch line. One can easily miss a greater truth in this, one that God does like to play healer, not just the opposite of doctors playing God. God says there are many good things about healing, not just the end result of whether or not someone can be saved. Save someone today, and he or she may just die tomorrow. Eventually he or she definitely will die, but it’s still usually a good thing to prevent premature death. Beyond that, though, there are so many aspects of this to teach everyone involved about love, to draw love out of someone, from the patient, from everyone else. God loves a love story. Both He and She can be such softies. That’s not how They are all the time.

Nostalgia, right. Well, OK, that’s a cover story. You see, there are labels for those who don’t know much about what’s going on. Then there is something deeper for those who can see past the most superficial interpretation. Then there’s another layer just for someone who may have thought there are only two. Then there are more. Hey, there are more than enough. Eventually the elevator comes, no matter how slow it is. We have things to do, places to go. Some people manage to talk about such things forever with vague and abstract words. If that’s how they want to spend their time, they can, but eventually the elevator comes. Helping people is better training than talking about it and especially better than excusing oneself from it. God says so, right here, right now. He’ll say it again for anyone who wants to listen.

Resisting God

It’s like the joke about a man who gives to God every month. Every month the man goes out back and throws all of his wages up in the air. Whatever God wants, He can keep.

There are so many places to go from things I wrote on Tuesday. I’m going to follow one of the things that impressed me, that suddenly I was so aware of how much I had been resisting God, even though my whole life is about following God, with God being very active in providing me with direction for that. A big part of what was so impressive was that it was clear not only how much I was resisting in the present, but that it’s been this way for years, that I’ve been telling God to only push me so hard for as long as I’ve known that He pushed me at all.

And why I was resisting is just as clear as the fact that I was resisting. To say Matthew 25: 46 is accurate is to say huge sections of the church, both conservative and liberal are to be written off, and not in any nice way. I don’t want to be party to that. I want to fix things. I’ve never held back from being critical when I saw reason to be critical, but that was to fix things, not punish anyone or even to clean out all the riff raff for a better future in a better place. God can do that if He wants, but I don’t see what I have to add to that.

Then there’s the problem of my public image. After all, how many people are there who think even one word of what I wrote Tuesday came from someone other than me? Not many, and I’d guess most of those who believe anything I said has a spiritual origin would say that origin is demonic, not from God. What else could explain my saying that God doesn’t know their beloved Joyce Meyer? Well, I wrote what God directed me to write, from the information jointly available to us in my mind. If He told me to contact Joyce Meyer directly, I’d do that, but that didn’t seem to be the point. The context for what I wrote speaks for itself, or people aren’t going to get anything from that anyway.

Abraham Lincoln turned aside a woman who said she had a word from God for him, saying that he was sure God could tell him without an intermediary. That’s a problem, isn’t it? How can any of us limit the possibilities for God in a way that’s wise? Who knows God well enough to do that? Those who say the Bible tells them anything they need to know are heavily invested in being right on that point, putting all of their eggs in one basket, as are those who are just as dependent on another holy book or other religion.

To say Jesus Christ is my Lord and my Savior, as I do, is also narrowing oneself, but in a different way. I look at the Jesus of the gospels, the Jesus Paul describes, the Jesus I know must have lived somewhat like those descriptions, the things I learned from each, and I know there is something worth following there, as I knew helping people was valuable before I knew how strongly the Bible endorses that. That doesn’t close me off to learning more.

Of course, who and what is God anyway? Is there some contradiction in His telling me He doesn’t know Joyce Meyer? There is if you have decided God must be omniscient or allowed someone else to decide for you. There is if you think God must be too distant to say anything to someone in words. I’ve written before about how to decide who and what God is (June 16) and undoubtedly will again. It’s not a formal way of doing this that matters here, though. It’s the prejudices we carry around in our minds.

As a liberal, I don’t know God is punishing anyone for anything anyway. That’s one of my prejudices. Everyone asks early on why God has to send people to hell. Conservatives hear that God’s law requires it and accept that, as they like strong rules. Freedom-loving liberals hear that and say, “What? Oh come on. You mean all those superstitions about clean or unclean and what to do if a woman has a menstrual period? That requires sending people to hell?” Liberals need a better reason than that, and there isn’t one, so many see hell as a myth. Then conservatives don’t fear hell because they like strong rules about faith as well as strong rules about sin. So they embrace a reading of the Bible that makes faith and imputed righteousness so strong that nothing will send them to hell if they stick to their understanding of faith requiring very little of them. So no one is afraid of Matthew 25: 46. It must be about someone else.

Few people follow Matthew 25 out of love either. It is still strange to me that people who profess a strong love for Jesus and the Bible don’t find a reason there to send more than a $20 check to some charity each month or trust that their church does enough for charity, which none do. I’m sure a lot of it is out of sight, out of mind. Donations do pick up when there are disasters that make the news. But there certainly is resistance to doing more.

If God is as powerful as most people think, doesn’t this make sense? God could push them harder if He wanted to, right? Isn’t God in control? Isn’t it all good?

It’s like the joke about a man who gives to God every month. Every month the man goes out back and throws all of his wages up in the air. Whatever God wants, He can keep.

That’s a joke because everyone knows God is not going to snatch that man’s money out of the air. Someone could try to say that’s God’s choice. He could if He wanted to, someone might say. What a sour grapes excuse that is. It’s not that God doesn’t want to do anything good with that man’s money. It’s that He can’t snatch money out of the air, or He would. If you don’t believe that, ask Him yourself.

So how many of you just asked God if He can snatch money out of the air? How many of you did it seriously, pausing long enough to ask the question in prayer, as if you truly wanted to know? How many are willing to wait long enough to get an answer, whether in words, in things that happen around you or in something in your mind. Prayers can be answered in many ways. Why be limited in seeing the possibilities here as well?

I’m sure I can sniff out resistance to God in others as well as in myself, resistance to communicating with God and resistance to following His will. Years ago, the gospel accounts of Jesus praying in the garden, “not my will, but Yours” were some of the verses that almost lit up for me to tell that this is especially important. It is important. Following Jesus to me has meant frequently praying that God let me follow His will, not mine, as I trust His will over mine. I think that’s been answered many times. It would be nice if a light went on each time His will was overriding mine, but I pretty much recognize that anyway, and God tells me if I’m ever curious enough to ask, I mean seriously ask.

I don’t know how many people do that. It was Jesus by example in the gospels that taught me to do it, and God everyday saying, “Yes, I will help you follow My will,” in His actions more than His words, but in words when I needed them. I don’t care that much about the underlying theology of that. I’ve witnessed this time and time again, within me, where I can see what’s happening over time. Whoever says this isn’t God is using a bad definition for God.

Yet I see I still resist. I say, “You want me to do what, to say what?” God has different ways to help get His will across. I get it eventually.

Then I see people who aren’t trying at all, for whom universal health care is some government boondoggle. That would be fair enough if such people did anything so private charity could fix the problem, but no one is doing that. So many people have other priorities. And I’ve been resisting saying just how bad that is, and how I know, because no one will believe me.

It’s more than that. What if God tells me to deliver an ultimatum? Oh, that would be hard. He’d have to get me drunk first, not with alcohol, of course. And it wouldn’t be delivered to the few people who I know read this. Only at this point nothing God says to me comes out of the blue. Everything He or She says connects to things They’ve said before. It is a patient, cooperative effort, even if we both get excited sometimes. So my resistance based on uncertainty has gone down and down.

It’s that first resistance that I realize is not so little, to say that anyone is hopeless, to suddenly be a Calvinist about everyone’s relationship with God, even though I have a lot of sympathy with that view, that God is irresistible and such. Yet look at all who resist so much more than I have, almost everyone. That’s why I’ve thought of this as a communication problem. If people could just hear what God says in the right way, not with the off-putting God-says-sos, it’s not hard to understand.

That’s not the problem. People are lost in their pride and idolatries, whether secular idolatries or religious idolatries. They’re not open. They’re not willing to listen with an ear to understand, but rather to refute, to make excuses. I see it. It’s not really my business, but I can’t read Matthew 25: 46 like some other liberals do, as if it’s just the author of Matthew ranting or as conservatives do, who are sure God is talking about someone else there.

I talk with God sometimes about the afterlife, about physical death, about spiritual death. It may not be as bad as some think, but it’s bad. For anyone without a spirit, there’s only physical death, but with a spirit that has known nothing but idols that contradict God, it’s bad. If a spirit has no sense of who the real God is, it’s bad. There is mercy, but there is a problem, the extent of which I can’t follow. I wonder why God tells me about it when I can’t picture the context of what He says. So He tells me why. It’s so I can know to trust Him when He says it’s important, that there is a good reason, even if I can’t understand exactly why it’s important. I’ve learned to trust God on issues that are all in the present. He gives me direction, strength, comfort. It’s wonderful. So I trust Him for the future.

I know that many people don’t, including many who claim to be devoted to Him. They trust the Bible, though not those verses that their church has interpreted to mean something other than what they say, like Matthew 25: 46. They just trust the theology of their church, which everyone they know closely agrees on.

But it only matters what God says, and God says that to help the needy is the same as helping Jesus at the same time. Neglecting the needy forces Jesus to endure the equivalent of crucifixion over and over and over again. This is because God has considerable empathy for His followers, even one body, and His true followers are everywhere, often to be seen before they have gotten very far with God. If God weren’t with me, I’d feel the need to write out arguments to justify that. I have a rough idea what they are. But God is with me and anyone who wants can ask Him directly, anyone. Jesus died for everyone. God says, right here, right now, that it’s more important to say that again, one more time, than to write out arguments for people who don’t believe in Him anyway, no matter what lip service they give to Jesus Christ. Jesus died for everyone. Yet for many, it was a waste. Human nature and idolatries will keep them from ever following God. It’s the other ones who have a chance, no matter where they are today, no matter how much they resist God today. Resistance fades when people are treated well, not with abuse. With abuse, people just build higher walls behind their forced obedience.

So God says, help the needy and walls will come down, inside of you and outside of you.

I am a bridge

Like an ant, for the team. All for one, everyone in turn, and one for all.

Horatio at the bridge, but I’m not Horatio, just the bridge? I am just for Horatio to stand on, or not, according to His needs, according to circumstances of the battle, if there is a battle. What if the battle’s over? Do I wait for someone to tell me to let go, to transform back?

A bridge to fight on? A bridge to meet someone? A bridge to nowhere, that could have been used but never was, never was where people wanted to go?

Just a bridge? With no drama? There’s always drama in romance. I have that much, if nothing on a more epic scale. She tells that story better than I do.

Connecting what?

Science and religion, body and mind, old and new, then and now, now and what will be, thoughts and feelings, inside and outside, male and female, life and death. Sacred and profane – no, that was always a false dichotomy.

I am a bridge to another world, not for us, but for them to come through, the tigers, spirits, for their redemption, not ours. It is not my redemption. It is just what I know how to do. It is my wedding gift, to God, to the tigers, to me. Is that the darkest vision or the brightest one of all? It seems bright to me, but I suppose that’s relative. They come closer and closer. Soon they will tear through, and everyone will see.

You know, I’m only going to hang on to this other side for so long. I think it is up to me when to let go. Then I have things to do for myself. So boys, if you’re coming through me, you better get with it. Otherwise, they’ll be another, maybe. She has Her own plans. We all adapt to them.

A suggestion

To anyone who might read that last one, go back and read the one that refers to Tinker Bell from July 7. I had nothing from that one on my mind as I wrote the one today. Yet there it is, metaphorically describing how God needs us. What is the metaphor and what is the reality of God? Ask God. Eventually anyone who would know the real God has to find out directly.

Whoever says "abortion is murder" is not loved by God

I feel a resistance within me falling apart, a partition tearing. I wrote about it Sunday, how I’ve realized more and more that I’ve resisted God trying to tell me just how big a problem it is that the church makes helping the needy a low priority, even when Matthew 25: 46 promises eternal punishment for those who neglect the needy, while the preceding section is about how neglecting the needy is the same as neglecting Jesus, no less.

I’ve wanted it to be a fixable problem, one I can help a little by posting in recent years how Jesus is in the needy and similar thoughts, as I’ve done. Surely it’s a communication problem somewhere between God and many people who truly want to follow Him, I have thought, if only they knew how, even though the idea that His commandments are love God, love neighbors and love enemies, in other words love everyone, is at least two thousand years old. Why should that be so hard to follow? It’s not, is it?

So why should I do better at such communication than anyone else? I suppose that’s part of why I’ve resisted accepting what I hear. I don’t have a good answer. Maybe my biology is suited to hear God. Maybe the breadth and depth of my experiences in life, academic, practical, and spiritual, are suited to understand God. Maybe God just picked me. I spoke so little growing up in that angry home, the child of adultery that made that longstanding adultery known to the respective spouses. Maybe I was a blank slate when it came to having opinions, not trusting all these bad people, finding it too dangerous to speak freely. Maybe that’s good training for the real world. Maybe the degree of redemption involved in my life was just enticingly high. Maybe it’s just luck – no, that’s the hardest one to believe.

When would God have picked me anyway? Before the beginning of the world? At my confirmation when there was that tingling as the bishop pushed his hands on my head? Was that a spiritual experience or was the bishop just compressing my spinal cord a little? There are so many uncertainties in life.

Whatever served as prologue, the real drama certainly began with that road-to-Damascus experience on February 28, 1989. It was so much like what St. Paul described. There was the sunlight streaming directly into the room that turned into the presence of God, not changed in its appearance, but only in my cognition. Wait a minute, this can’t be. I don’t believe in this sort of God. God had His answer for that, “You’ve always believed in Me.” Then a flood of words and images began a cascade through my mind to illustrate that He was right in that simple sentence, and I was wrong. It’s the best debating technique I’ve ever seen. If so many skeptics could just experience that, whether atheists, liberals or conservatives, it would be so much easier to talk about. Self-hypnosis? Some innate chemical like cocaine? I don’t think so. I’ve never taken cocaine, but all the caffeine I’ve ever drank couldn’t do this. 0 to a million instantly? Hmmm, not natural. I was blown away. I was glad I hadn’t gone blind, just crazy for about four hours. I knew what it was. I knew I didn’t need to wind up dead like Jesus or blind like Paul. They had already done that. I had that thought right away. I didn’t like that I had lost my mind, but I thought it was the best option of the three. Fortunately that was temporary. What was it for? Just so I could have faith?

One thing it was for was so it wouldn’t be so traumatic the next time. It was still disruptive when God showed up four months later, but it became less so as it happened more and more, then continuously unless there’s something going on around me that makes me forget about God for a time. His prolonged presence started in my prayers first, just as the God to whom I was praying at first, with no sensory phenomena, then as something that seemed to help me find words that I just don’t think were in me without the Spirit and things to pray about that also didn’t seem to be on my agenda without such prompting. Who knew that prayer just means to open one’s mouth and let go? Some charismatics do. Sometimes it’s best to shape the words some. It is a cooperative effort. Then words started coming back at me that were just like what I had heard when first in the presence of God, simple answers to a prayer just as I was praying it, things like that.

It’s strange how differently people report what they hear God say. When I read an evangelical Christian who hears God in words like Joyce Meyer, the quotes she attributes to God don’t sound at all like what I hear. She has God giving explanations for things that I’m sure immediately are oversimplified or just wrong. I never react to what I hear from God that way. I may ask for some clarification. There are things God says that I just don’t understand. There are even some things that I resist, that I really don’t want to be true. Anyone who thinks God tells me what I want to hear doesn’t have the slightest idea of what’s going on. Yet certainly God must speak to people in concepts they understand as well as the language they understand. It has to be some sort of cooperative effort between an individual’s mind and the Spirit. So is that the real Spirit coming through Joyce Meyer or is it not Spirit at all?

Likewise with a New Age version of this are Neale Donald Walsch’s three volumes of conversations with God. It doesn’t sound like God to me. It sounds like a psychotherapist who needs to switch to decaf.

I’m sure many would find equally skeptical things about anything I hear from God. And that has been part of my resistance, that I know how to attack myself better than the most malevolent atheist or traditionalist bent on saying he’s right, and I’m nuts. I don’t want to hear that, especially not from me. I think God gives us enough freedom in general and has enough sympathy for me in particular to not mind that much if that resistance has caused me to say things publicly like, “Who can know?” when in my conversations with God, I give Him much more credit than that.

God tells me that He doesn’t know Joyce Meyer. He doesn’t know Neale Donald Walsch, except through what I’ve read of him. He doesn’t keep extensive databases on everything and everyone as He would have to in order to be omniscient. He doesn’t have to do that to help those people who come to Him genuinely, instead of to an idol. He has their consciousness to work with. That’s all He needs to know. He wouldn’t know me except He lives in me, and I in Him. He is constantly in my consciousness. My eyes are His eyes. My hands are His hands. My walk is His walk. My flesh remains, but there is Spirit as well, intertwined somehow. What it means that I live in Him is less clear to me. I know it’s different than living naturally, than living solely in the flesh. I don’t know how to explain it well, so I haven’t tried that much. Whatever it is, He needs me within Him, She needs me within Her - that was a revelation.

Even the best idol theology can construct is not God. It is an idol, and people can hear words from an idol, either naturally or with a spirit facilitating that. That’s different from what the Lord of the universe does. That’s what He says to me. I believe Him.

Gee, how do I buff that up so it doesn’t sound arrogant?

That’s been my resistance. Traditional Christianity is more than just a little wrong, but who am I to say that? I’m just a guy. Jesus Christ is my Lord and my Savior. That wasn’t true in 1989. Maybe I was saved then, saved once, saved forever, but I wasn’t following Jesus as my Lord. That’s where this listening to God took me very quickly, a couple of years being quick for this sort of thing.

I thought after that would come an understanding of how the church of all believers is one, one body as Paul wrote. It is not. Even now I wanted to qualify that sentence that says, “It is not,” to make it less harsh, and the Lord of the universe said, “It is not.” Man, call me a liar if you want, but that’s what He said just now and confirmed for me, and I’m not resisting this one just for the sake of your blood pressure and my public image. This one is a big deal to God. The church is nowhere near what it should be. So does it change, or does He just start over? He has started over countless times. That's something traditionalists don't understand.

That’s what happens. I’ll do anything for God. He may have to ratchet up the intensity of His direction, but I’ll do it. He’s proven that to me. What people who fear that don’t understand is that the real God is good, angry, but good. He doesn’t drive people to do evil things. People are the ones who are rightfully frightening, loose cannons that they are, not God. I have some family members who are bound to understand this at some point.

In contrast, there is this mass of Bible-believing Christians. They are so together, so uniform. They believe so many things with absolute certainty. I don’t think it makes sense if you try to put all those beliefs together at once, especially if you add science and other empirical knowledge from living one’s life to the mix. That doesn’t keep an awful lot of people from believing as one that homosexuality is an abomination to God, evolution is a lie, and abortion is murder, not just that abortion is always wrong with absolute certainty, but that abortion is murder, with no possibility of contradiction. That’s what it means to be a Christian? That’s not how I experience following Jesus, but I guess that’s my liberalism, something some conservatives think means I can know nothing about anything, especially God.

I could write a lot about what God says to me about Bible-believing Christians. I was wondering how long it would take us to get to the title I wrote before writing the rest of this. Suffice it to say that even though so many people defend “abortion is murder” as being unassailable, anyone who says that without qualification worships an idol. It may be the idol many have made of the unborn child. It may be a different, religious idol that supports saying “abortion is murder” with certainty. It is not of God. God says so. There are plenty of reasons why abortion is abortion, not murder, but the reason this slogan is not of God is that God says so, right now, to me, as He has said for some time to anyone who has the right sort of ears to hear Him. That only I hear Him in this moment doesn’t negate that this was God any more than one should say it wasn’t Jesus that Paul saw on the road to Damascus, just because no one else on that road saw Jesus. You have to know the entire context.

Does He forgive the pride and idolatries that have people who are nominally Christian running after a political and economic agenda instead of doing what God wants them to do, like help the needy, as doing so helps Jesus, instead of crucifying Him over and over and over again? No, not today. Maybe another day, maybe. God doesn’t like it that people preach that they have a contract with God’s signature on it, something like that, that promises forgiveness for everything they do wrong. There is no such contract. There is love for those willing to be a part of that love. It is free, not God’s obligation to love us, not with strings attached, but if people reject that love, then they don’t have that love, or forgiveness.

I forgive it. I forgive everyone, everyday, but I can only forgive what people did to me today or some other day. That pales in comparison to the hatred, indifference and falseness that people dish out to people other than me. Somehow I’m forever both hearing about that and feeling about that. I’m adapting to that, though. God keeps helping me, much more than I would need just for me, I would think. Be careful of giving yourself to God. He might actually need you. I’m not sure what’s in it for Him or Her, but one or more of Them certainly gets pushy some days. It’s not like many people will read this. The dilemma comes up for everyone, though. What does God want of you? Does God love you? Do you love Him? I do. I show it everyday. I think I fell in love with God in school when I gave Him credit for science in a way that I no longer believe. He didn’t even show me He knew I was alive until 20 years later. Well, maybe He did, and I was rather dim about that. He says now He would do many things differently if He were to do it again, but we’re all doing this just once. Once is enough. Another 14 billion years is not what anyone wants. Some things don’t take that long, like it didn’t take long for me to know that I can’t be married to Him, only to Her, the same God, just different. It is love for everyone to be flexible, as much as they can be.

That’s a hard one for people, how to love God. So many have no desire at all to love God as I love Him. They want to do what so many others do and call that love. It’s a free country. The love you give is the love you get. There must be another one to complete a triad. Oh well, maybe not. Maybe those two say it all.

4 pages to get to that? God says there were some other things here that needed to be said besides saying we are free to love or not, but only love is returned with love. Being certain of one’s moral definitions does not let God love you. Now it’s on the record. It’ll come up again.

A God-possessed man, what a concept. God is one Spirit, with many voices. Some come to believe that intellectually, even that God is everything and everyone. Not every voice is God, though, far from it. So many people say whatever they care to say, do whatever they care to do. The idea of the flesh and the spirit captures part of this, but there are so many ways one can move away from God, not just one, and not every spirit is God. I share my consciousness with something that has seen all of this and finds many ways to express that. It’s an amazing thing to watch, even if sometimes I wonder when She is going to get to the point. Patience, it takes time, exactly the right amount of time, more or less.

More on Matthew 25: 31-46

I’m not sure how many days in a row I’m going to be posting on this. Maybe just three.

For years I kept to the reading schedule in the back of my Bible. So I know that I repeatedly had the same reaction to these verses every February 10, which was that most Christians don’t take charity seriously, even with Matthew 25: 46 predicting eternal punishment for those who neglect the needy. There were other reminders, but I know that this one came at least once a year, and I never found a very effective way to get past this contradiction. I wrote some about it. Those who already had my view said some kind things about that. Others simply denied the problem.

Now I find myself focusing on just how sure I am that this is a problem, how something comes up everyday to make me so sure, how the causes of this problem are symptomatic of something much greater, even cosmic in scope, whether or not Matthew 25: 46 is accurate about the consequences of the problem, and how I’ve been resisting telling everything I know about this, because it seems hopeless and upsets me. People don’t even like reading about the easiest part of this, that Jesus is in the needy. They want Jesus up on that throne, saying, “we’re right and you’re wrong,” just like they do. Only if they could get past so much propaganda, they might realize they’re not ready for that at all.

Why now? As I wrote yesterday, something about this client’s plight set me off, igniting things leftover from other clients. Where are all these people who say they’re here to follow God? Where are they for what people actually need instead of so many power trips and ego trips? Then also I’ve been running into some typical anti-abortion propaganda in searching through blogs. I’ve heard the same thing for 33 years, over and over again, the same flawed and simplistic slogans, with whatever people come up with to pretend such ideas are unassailable. This is what God wants? That’s not what He says to me. I think I’ll focus on that part tomorrow.

For now, I’m going to focus on how people think it’s nice that I volunteer for the needy, but not many people have any idea how much God is involved with that. Instead it seems they think God is leading this culture war that people want to fight against abortion, homosexuality and evolution. Why? If God were leading a war, why would there be so little movement in it, just so much shouting of slogans?

All my adult life, I have helped people, first in my profession, then in volunteer work. I was going to be a research scientist until experience taught me that I was better with people than research. It didn’t seem like some profound calling. I just enjoyed doing what I was better at doing. There were also more women around that way, including the mother of my daughters.

Helping people day after day changed me, though. My life was no longer a matter of personal performance. There was love. I doubt I could have said it that simply then, but that was the thing that has grown and grown and dominates my life.

I don’t know if it’s better to say this love started from patients in their dependency on me or if it was first drawn out of me in response to people needing me, being willing to be intimate with me, to trust me. My children came along at the same time, and it was the same thing with them. Who loved whom first? With babies it’s so hard to say that they have anything beyond pure dependency, but if that draws out truly selfless love in a parent, maybe it’s best not to get too picky about making distinctions.

Some people try to see love and dependency as mutually exclusive. They might see the purest love as unconditional love from God, whom they see as not dependent on us in any way. Yet is even unconditional love at a distance a great love? Or is it love between two beings who have many dependencies on each other, maybe not for existence or identity, but to be at their best? One can have such dependencies without much love at all, but when there is truly selfless, committed, unconditional love as well as the dependencies, people are knitted together so much more powerfully. I’ve never seen that in human beings as much as I see it between God and me, over the last 20 years, maybe more.

I don’t know how to tell that story. I lived it, but life isn’t even faithfully portrayed in movies. How can words alone manage? I’d rather God tell it, if She can. Traditional Christianity has elements of that story, about father and son, about redemption, about marriage, but people get lost in translating those metaphors to this life.

I think that the best I could do would be to talk about why Jesus is in the needy, why God helps people, what is all this love about. Only I’d be speculating about so many details. God says it’s not a story for today. But if you want to get a little closer to understanding God’s love, start helping people. That’s not the only reason to do that. I touched on that before in writing “Why should I care?” in June. There are many reasons. One of them is to learn about why love is the ultimate goodness that it is. One is that God wants you to care. There are more.

Helping people is not just being nice. It is vital. And if Matthew 25: 46 is accurate, it’s much more than that. Why don’t people understand that? Many who say they believe the Bible don’t act like it on this one. And to tell them God is love is begging to be misunderstood even more. Love is not just being nice. Love can be a mother viciously and relentlessly protecting her young, sacrificing her life if need be, sacrificing His life if need be, killing her children if need be, killing His out of His love for others, even His love for those whose death is just being prolonged. I don’t think most people have any idea how far love can go. They’re too busy with lesser things. Love is not a little thing. Love is not a liberal thing.

God is love, not love as any human being imperfectly says love is, but as the real God is, whoever and whatever He is. He is His own prophet. People who fight God in favor of their idols have no idea what they’re up against. Yet God has already warned them. It is amazing to watch, as tragic as it can be.

If you have faith, you should be caring for the needy

I’ve posted on internet message boards several times about Matthew 25: 31-46. I accept that the responses I’ve gotten are the best that I’m likely to get. They are intelligent and logical. They are faithful by a traditional standard of faith. They say that some people are called to evangelism or to fight against abortion, not so much to care for the needy. It’s all good, they almost said.

It seems to me that this is wrong. When it comes to evangelism or certain other issues promoted by the church, there is a massive response, in my view more than what is needed. Yet when it comes to caring for the needy, there is much less than is needed. I might be wrong. Maybe God’s priorities match those of the church of all believers exactly. I resist believing that God’s will for His church is in fact very different from what the church is doing, because if that’s true, there’s a big problem somewhere. Yet the possibility that this is the case never leaves me.

My current attention to this is prompted by a client I saw this week at the interfaith charity where I volunteer. He is in his forties. He worked steadily as a roofer until he came down with heart failure 8 months ago. He didn’t have health insurance then, and hasn’t managed to negotiate the system for Medicaid in the meantime. He has been seen through the local community clinic, but the mounting bill he has with them makes him nervous. He’s not the sort of person who’s accustomed to ignoring automated requests for payment. And while they will see him at the clinic without being paid, he has had to find ways to pay for the medication that has helped him some, though not enough for him to work again. The county helped him with that at one point, but then he got a single check from the state for his disability, and was dropped from the county program because of that. The thing about the state help was that it was just that one check because he had used the state disability program for a time previously, and his payroll deductions for the quarter that determines his benefits were used up with just that one check. So since then, he has been haphazard about taking his medicines for high blood pressure and the heart failure, taking neither in recent weeks. If the medicines can’t put him back to work, it doesn’t make any difference to him if he gets winded after 50 feet or a block.

Ordinarily I have a scary speech for people who aren’t taking their high blood pressure medicines, no matter how good the excuse. If they feel needy not being able to pay for medicine, just wait until they’re blind or have had their stroke, especially at a young age. I didn’t get to it this time. I impressed upon him how he must be relentless with getting Medicaid. It makes a difference whether his heart failure is because a virus attacked his heart or due to hardening of the arteries. As limited as Medicaid can be, not having it means his doctors haven’t even figured out that much of what’s wrong with him. For now I wrote a check from our fund for helping with prescriptions for $91.41 for the ones he needed most urgently, but we can’t do that for anyone more than once. We do better with food. He needed that, too. Fortunately he can stay with his brother, as he lost his apartment shortly after stopping work.

He needs to be persistent with Social Security, too. I don’t know his complete medical history, but from what I do know, it’s open and shut that he qualifies for Social Security disability, even before the first year is up. He has to follow up on his application, though, not the easiest thing to do for someone who is technically homeless with no money. We’ll help him with that, too.

Is it enough? Yes and no. My clients constantly make me think of how better off they are than they would have been years ago. No one in San Diego County needs to go hungry. There are enough resources for that, though the logistics of making that happen can be a problem. As much as I get angry at political propaganda minimizing the problem of homelessness, the lie that it’s just the mentally ill not taking medicines, that most could work if they wanted to, the life of being homeless, even on the streets, is not so bad that people set themselves on fire in protests, like the Buddhist monks did in Vietnam in the sixties.

But my clients also show me how hard it is for them. Many times I picture myself in their place and know I could do better with my experience than they are, but sometimes I know I would be just as lost as they are as to what to do next. Many do what I would do, pray a lot. I try to get across to many types of people I meet what a revelation it was for me to learn I could pray for direction, strength, and comfort, and receive exactly that. People in crisis are more ready to hear that than anyone.

Yet only so much neediness is necessary to make someone a ripe target for evangelism. My client above was impressed by his disability just as anyone is the first time they have a disability that is not going away. People get the message that they are not immortal, but they never think much how dependent they can become long before death, until it happens. And the only one available to help with that 24/7 is God. Only it’s hard to pay attention to God if you’re hungry or worried about problems where the only solution you can see is if you can suddenly start working again.

The idea that we need all the suffering that we have to learn from it and be shaped by it is ridiculous. We need some suffering for that. Beyond that, more suffering interferes with the opportunity for evangelism that a little suffering creates. I’m sure the threshold for that varies from person to person, but I’m also sure that most of my clients are suffering way past that threshold. They suffer because all they have is God, what they already know to do for themselves, and an inadequate, hodgepodge of a system to try to get help. They need more, in all sorts of ways.

Can you imagine standing before God with just one of my clients and have God ask you what you did for him or for her, even indirectly, knowing from Matthew 25 that whatever you did or didn’t do is just the same as what you did or didn’t do for Jesus? Would you like to tell God that it was just as important for you to fight against abortion?

Maybe you would. That’s the comparison that got to me this week. There is so much fervor against abortion, even against the destruction of human embryos, conceived in a dish, that will never come close to a uterus, but exist in a freezer until someone throws them away. Yet what about universal health care? Given the politics of it, I guess most conservative Christians are actually against universal health care. I see casualties of that position each day. Do you want to tell God why that’s not your fault? Or that you didn’t care because you think you have a get-out-of-jail-free card, somewhere, in heaven maybe? Fine, go there and get it. We’ll have a five-minute recess.

What does God say now? I feel myself resisting that God is even less of a traditionalist than I am, that He might look at Christianity and say, “What a waste.” Not that the blood of Jesus was wasted, but that the process by which the blood of Jesus is transforming this world is much, much slower and more in need of followers than most Christians can even imagine.

I was raised a liberal Christian, but still it was the usual Protestant message that I heard, that salvation comes through faith, not works. Eventually I knew what James wrote, that faith is evident in works. Lip service is not faith. It could be so much worse than that. I let God take me in my prayers, and I know that it’s possible that for many of the churches I’ve attended in the last twenty years, some liberal, some conservative, with many other variations, no one, absolutely no one is saved.

I know how to refute such an idea biblically, but such refutation doesn’t matter. That God is whoever and whatever He is matters. Some hold the Bible in their hands and say that is their faith. Where does that lead? For many it leads to neglecting the needy, despite what the Bible says. My faith leads me to prayer, again and again and again, to follow my Lord and my Savior Jesus Christ in saying, “not my will, but Yours”. A conservative ridiculed me for sharing about this once, saying that I do that only to pretend that everything I do is directed by God. No, I mean what I say in prayer. If God has no will or capacity to direct me, then maybe whatever does is better called God. Either way I leave it to Him. I’m not God. I receive direction from something that I never did naturally. If someone wants to call God a demon, that’s his or her fight, not mine.

My fight is that I recognize my resistance to saying that the problem with the church neglecting the needy is huge. That some say it’s not a problem at all means it’s either not a problem or it’s a huge problem. I’d so much rather it be a little problem, something that can be fixed, but like my client’s heart, it’s beyond that. I resist saying I believe that, just as he resists saying his heart failure will just magically stop one day, and he can go back to roofing. Well, such a miracle could happen, but I’d do the paperwork for Medicaid and Social Security ASAP, because I think that’s what is going to be needed, as it’s been needed for months now. So the course for the church might also be to keep doing what it’s been doing or something radically different. Are you sure you know which of these God wants?

As with all things I’ve learned to trust God, not passively, but in prayer. I look for God in reading, too, but with reading one is limited by the words on the page. Prayer is much more than that. I accept His direction, not the direction of those whose pride and idolatries are obvious. They really are obvious, yet it takes courage to say that, that it’s not just those obviously evil people that are sinners, as is human nature to say. It takes direction to go from that to the conclusion that those who wallow in such holier-than-thou sin have no faith whatsoever, no matter how pious and articulate they can be.

The Pharisees are always the ones who make Jesus angry the most. Why couldn’t they listen?

... and clever words make it palatable

Might makes right.

History is written by the victors.

A big lie works better than a small one.

Dazzle them with b.s.

Lies, damn lies, and statistics,

Creative accounting,

The Truth Squad

Liar, liar, pants on fire.

And in every such human endeavor, a blizzard of clever words makes it all palatable. There will always be some people who swallow lies as the greatest of truth, because they want something comforting, not challenging. “Am I the one who is wrong?” is the question they don’t ask.

"We don't want them here"

Marie Waldron, city council member for Escondido, CA, explained her proposal to fine landlords who rent to undocumented immigrants this way, “They’re breaking the law and we don’t want them here,” according to the San Diego Union-Tribune of July 12, 2006. Her proposal was inspired by the actions of the city council of Hazelton, PA, which ordered that the business licenses of companies that hire illegals be revoked, landlords who rent to them be fined $1000, and that English is that city’s official language. The Hispanic population of Hazelton, located 45 miles south of Scranton, has gone from less than 1000 in the census of 2000 to about 10,000 today, about one third of the community. No one knows how many might be there illegally. The city council decided to take this action anyway.

I’ve heard the first part of that quote often enough, on talk radio, on the internet, and in print. I always wonder about the outrage people express this way. Does this apply to all lawbreakers? To speeders? To drunk drivers? What is the threshold of lawbreaking that makes someone this undesirable?

I suspect that while some genuinely abhor breaking the law, there’s more to it when someone says, “We don’t want them here.” Why not? Do they interfere with your vision of a homogenously affluent community? Do they prevent your dream of a community where everyone believes as you do? Are billboards in Spanish a factor or people speaking Spanish next to you in line at the grocery store, so you can’t judge them as easily as you do English speakers? Is it hearing Mexican music more than you care to?

It’s easy to understand those who come to the US illegally for work. They want to survive. They want their family to survive. People will do all sorts of things to survive.

Those who would stop illegal immigration are harder to understand. They say they want to keep terrorists out. What terrorists are stopped by longer waits to cross at Tijuana? They say illegals cost taxpayers money. I suppose some do. Maybe we can find an appropriate tax to offset that. They say they are against any illegal activity. Fine, perhaps they would like to contribute their own money to that effort rather than everyone else’s taxes as well as regulations that make life for others harder.

People can say whatever they want. What rings true is “We don’t want them here.” We don’t need to get rid of undocumented workers to feed our families, but some want to anyway, and might makes right, along with whatever excuses make that more palatable.

I don’t know what the consequences of this are. 42% of the population of Escondido is Latino, but maybe many of them want to be tough on illegals as well. Marie Waldron already has a majority of the city council with her in this, as long as they are satisfied that federal laws against discrimination regarding national origin would not be broken. There are benefits to obeying the law after all, even if it doesn’t feed one’s family to do so.

So whatever it is that has “us” looking down our noses at “them”, it will continue. I wish more would save so many words and admit the obvious, “We don’t want them here.” That’s the whole conflict in a nutshell.

George Coyne on faith and science

A couple of years ago I heard Father George Coyne give a talk on stellar evolution at UC San Diego. Father Coyne wore his Roman collar, but in his prepared remarks sounded as any other astronomer would in describing the life cycle of stars and the significance of that for producing all elements in the universe heavier than helium. Such is the scientific training of the director of the Vatican Observatory, still a research astronomer despite his other duties. He is also a Jesuit priest, and as such has had reason to reflect on historical conflicts between faith and science. He summarized such conflicts in a way I liked, that the only people who think there is a conflict between faith and science either don’t know faith or don’t know science.

I think that’s true, but what does it mean? Creationists often speak as if they know science better than scientists. They say there is no conflict between the Bible and science because good science agrees with the Bible. That’s not what Father Coyne was saying. It takes such a tortured view of science to say it doesn’t conflict with the Bible.

One thing some creationists say is that science requires some process to be reproduced in the laboratory before it can be considered science. So astronomy is not a science? So most of geology is not a science? There is no rulebook with such a rule in it.

It is important to reproduce any finding in science before taking it too seriously. Some in the US Congress were ready to fund cold fusion research based on a press conference in Utah. Fortunately other researchers not only failed to reproduce cold fusion, but also realized the error made by the Utah researchers before a bill could get through Congress to waste money on this mistake.

The media have trouble with this concept, often giving headlines to single studies, then giving more headlines to other studies that contradict the previous. People get the idea that no one knows what they’re doing, but this is science. It takes time to understand why people get whatever data they do. Fortunately nature is always there to return to, whether that’s human nature or the nature of rocks or stars. One can do more studies, get more data, and understand what was wrong with previous studies. If nature changed each day, science wouldn’t be possible, but nature remains the same, and our understanding of it has increased exponentially since the power of science has been understood.

It’s not that one has to reproduce all of nature in a laboratory before one can be a scientist. Astronomers can return to make more observations of the sky. Geologists can go back to the field to find more features in rocks. Paleontologists find more fossils. Archaeologists find more artifacts. They reproduce their results by going back to the universe, which hasn’t changed since we started looking. Those who say that the idea of evolution isn’t science don’t know the first thing about science. Yet they believe their own rhetoric, apparently, as they believe Genesis, without asking the questions that would shake their belief.

Father Coyne sees it differently. In response to questions, he referred to the Bible as stories, not to be read as a science lesson. Many liberals do this, saying the Bible can be embraced as metaphor where it cannot be believed literally. So did God create a universe or did God create a metaphor? Did He create neither one?

My guess is that He created neither one. It might be wrong. The Creator of the universe might be the same God who answers my prayers. For some time I’ve been aware that He doesn’t have to be. God is whoever and whatever God is. My understanding of that begins with the fact that someone or something has answered my prayers. For someone else, faith begins with the creation stories in Genesis. Is that true faith or false faith? Genesis conflicts with science. Some try to massage the words of Genesis to match science, but there are verses in Genesis that simply don’t match the data anyone can find in nature. The order of the creation of life in Genesis is wrong. There’s no way around that. Many animals existed before flowering plants did. Not all sea animals preceded land animals. I can believe Genesis was the best vision of creation anyone could come up with 3000 years ago, but to say today that it should be revered as truth is to know nothing about either faith or science.

Father Coyne is a loyal Catholic. Even so, he is open to possibilities, as any good scientist is. He mentions the possibility that God is not the Creator, but a God who is taking advantage of an opportunity that arose in a purely physical universe. He doesn’t go so far as to actually believe that. I do. It’s one way to understand why the physical universe is not all that kind to us. It has given us life, through a number of remarkable features of the universe, but it’s far from perfect, not even perfection corrupted by sin. Of course, I might be wrong about that.

My faith is something very different. No matter how many people believe that faith is based on what someone believes, it’s not necessarily so. Faith is a connection to God. It is trust and devotion. It could start with belief, but that’s not what I see. I see people with all kinds of beliefs doing whatever they feel like doing, pumping out whatever hatred, indifference and falseness is within them, even in the name of God. Such people can be found all over the internet. Maybe God approves of them. Maybe my understanding of God is wrong. I reach for the real God, whoever and whatever God is, and I get what I get. This is my faith. It’s been good to me, so my trust in and devotion to God, as I understand Him, has deepened.

This is what I know faith to be, from experience, maybe from revelation. I know what science is from my education and training. They don’t conflict. I don’t know with certainty that this is what Father Coyne meant. He may see faith as being beyond science. I don’t. Faith can be observed, in others and within oneself. It can’t be controlled enough to study well scientifically, but it’s not completely beyond science. There’s just not a good handle on faith right now for science to grasp. But there’s no conflict. Mainstream science has it right. New data will come along to extend what science knows, to develop a new context for what has gone before, but not wipe it all out. Faith is harder to identify. I would say true faith connects to the real God. False faith doesn’t. Maybe false faith isn’t as useless as that. Maybe metaphors are worth something, instead of just being wrong. I can live with such uncertainty.

False certainty is something else. Those who say their faith is true and mainstream science is false are wrong. I spent a lot of time being sure they are wrong, that every argument against evolution is mistaken, as others have. So those who say such arguments are right are wrong. I suspect their faith is wrong, too. It seems to be based on the same sort of biased arguments with which they attack science.

I ask God. He agrees with me. Maybe He’s not the real God. He’s the only God I know intimately. I trust Him. If there is a greater God, we have both made peace with Him as best we can. I’m sure this feature of my faith is not what Father Coyne had in mind regarding faith. Maybe he’s right for the wrong reason. Maybe I am. Maybe we both are. It wouldn’t be the first time a human being has managed that.

Knowledge has increased. It wasn’t greater in the ancient past and watered down in the present. The increase has accelerated, despite all obstacles. Yet many people believe what they want to believe. It is a conflict, but not between faith and science. It is a conflict between propaganda and science. It is a conflict between pride and faith, between idolatry and faith. No one with true faith should be threatened by God being whoever and whatever God is, by being wrong about some aspect of God. But if your pride and idolatries don’t allow you even to consider that you might be wrong, that’s not faith. That’s human nature. Knowing the real God fixes that. That’s my faith. It is my hope for myself and for others, for now and for the future.

The brainsucking starts at 3PM

I asked God about this one. He says my writing it has His blessing, but only if everyone is told up front that it is my maniacal, paranoid delusions, not prophecy. Duly noted, I trust God. But how does He know? Was He satisfied just asking His God?

A downside to considering every possibility for God is that there are so many sinister possibilities. When I was as scientific as any of my colleagues, the worst the universe could be was indifferent. Very bad things can happen out of indifference. I could wander into the territory of some beast that sees me as food, indifferently compared to whatever else he might eat that day, but torn apart and eaten just as well. Most of us think we can avoid such things. All of our ancestors did, at least until they reproduced. Our experience with such terror tells us if we stay away from inhospitable places, we will avoid it. An indifferent universe is manageable, at least up to the day the asteroid hits, but until then we are free to do what we can.

To one who starts asking questions, though, you don’t have to be paranoid to believe that things are not what they seem. It wasn’t in a single moment that I decided the traditional description of God was wrong, not as some who watch the protracted, painful illness of a child and change their mind about God. I suppose I just knew that science made sense and the Bible didn’t. The former was constantly verified for me. The latter was constantly at odds with what went on around me.

Yet science is lacking any knowledge of the ultimate reality. There is considerable detail in the here and now that science provides, so one can put off its ignorance of the ultimate origin of the universe, its ultimate fate and whether the brain really accounts for every bit of consciousness. If one just believes that there isn’t much of a story to tell about those things, that whatever the ultimate story is, it is something mechanical that makes no difference to us at all, then one can feel secure that the universe is indifferent and go about one’s business, as many do.

Other people go their entire lives without finding anything wrong with traditional religion. If they become aware of some tension between reality and religion, there are a lot of apologetics that paper over such tensions for whoever wants them to go away. You just snip your image of God this way, tuck it up that way and voila, everything looks fine, if you don’t look too hard. It’s not just science that creates tensions, but science goes farther than say the problem of evil to blow away religion in terms of explaining the physical world. Sin causes disease? Oh come on, not any more it doesn’t. One can list a slew of factors that cause any disease, and sin is rarely there. Even if one makes a big deal of addictions and sexual diseases, it’s never just a matter of sin. Good people sometimes get sick. Bad people don’t always get sick.

Yet if you look too closely at science, there are problems there, too. People propose a lot of miracles that are beyond science to explain. Usually someone with experience can see why what happened was not a miracle. It wasn’t cancer in the first place for one person. Another person was in fact treated medically with an expected benefit, not a miraculous one. Despite all those false alarms, though, there are some phenomenon that will make anyone open-minded enough wonder.

Many experiments have been done regarding people having a sense that they are being stared at. English biologist Rupert Sheldrake has written multiple books about this and other odd phenomena. They are easy to dismiss. OK, so some soldier in battle suddenly whirls around to find an enemy soldier pointing a rifle at him. The first soldier shoots first and is left to ponder how that happened. He didn’t hear anything. He didn’t remember any sensation that told him to turn around. He just felt someone was there, and he turned. Did he really sense someone behind him, or is that just explaining away something lucky? Hundreds of such anecdotes, even thousands, don’t mean much.

Psychologists have been testing this for over a hundred years, including some at academic citadels such as Cornell and Stanford Universities. At first experiments looking to see whether people could tell when they were stared at were reported as negative. When one looks at these old experiments, though, there is a consistent pattern in the data. People are no better than chance at guessing whether someone is staring at them when in fact no one is. But if someone is staring at them, people detect that about 60% of the time. Such an effect is so weak that it was easy to say there was nothing in the data at first. This pattern has been consistent, however, over early studies, for studies beginning again in the seventies when ESP research became a fad, and continuing since then.

If it were the case that biased researchers were getting the result they want to get, why are the data always very much random in the case where no one is staring at someone, yet consistently around 60% when someone is in fact being stared at? A consistently weak effect is not meaningless. The statistical significance over many studies is astronomical. The practical significance is questionable. It’s one indication that the world is not what it seems to be, but also indicating something we can’t use very well at all. Maybe once in a while it does save someone’s life. Sheldrake proposes the explanation that consciousness does interact with the physical world more actively than science realizes, but who knows? Maybe it’s strictly an interaction between one consciousness and another. Until such a phenomenon connects with something we do understand, it’s hard to say much about it at all. Experiments trying to identify something more than a weak effect like this in certain people, from remote viewing to anticipating events, have been intriguing sometimes, but never enough to prove anything.

It is so hard to know the ultimate reality of the universe, of anything beyond the physical universe that reaches into it somehow, or into me, either objectively out there or subjectively in my perceptions of what is out there or within me. “Computer, end program!” Yeah, nothing changes with that, but who says the computer simulating all this would listen to me anyway?

If the universe is one false reality around another, like a series of shells, who can say where it ends? Even God may be fooled by a false reality produced by some shell around Him. Even if the reality that we know best, the world our senses say is real, is completely true, what might be hidden alongside it, behind it, within it, beyond it in time if not space, in extra dimensions if not the ones we know about? Where do possibilities end? They don’t, right?

So what is there to trust? Many people trust what they see and touch, what moves when they move it. It’s only natural to get used to such things, but it’s also only natural to look beyond them, as our brain is forever looking for hidden things. So there are religions or more recently empirical models for how everything works. When everyone you know believes one of these, is that enough for you to believe, too? Sometimes I think that must be the biggest factor when some claim that it’s smarter to believe Genesis than mainstream science. Yet some people escape from such conformity, sometimes to something better, sometimes to something worse.

One thing I’m sure of is that seeing all possibilities is not a comforting thing to do. Suppose there is a spiritual side to reality, something undetectable to our senses or any machines that extend our senses. What goes on there? If communication with some spirit is possible, can I trust it? I know my motivation for communication – curiosity, exploration, loneliness, hoping for something helpful. What might motivate a spirit?

I have found spirits to be helpful, whether they are indeed spirits, Spirit, or an illusion that is strictly within my consciousness. That’s no proof that they are indeed altruistic. Maybe spirits feed like we do, aware enough of the feelings of a lower life form not to be overly cruel, but no more worried about us than I worry about my food. Maybe the rhythms of feeling energetic and tired we feel are not as natural as we think. Maybe everyday at 3PM spirits start sucking out our experiences of that day into them, sustaining them, even building them up. They remain connected to one place in space over the Earth, so everywhere at 3PM this brainsucking starts as the Earth turns underneath these spirits.

Spirits might drive us emotionally so there is more to feed them, fattening us up for them. It would explain so much strife among us. Maybe we were just like our docile ape cousins until spirits realized they could feed off of us this way. Then they pushed us to have more and more experiences. Whoever it was who discovered cocaine has a statue in the spirit world. Every spirit knows to suck especially hard over California, because it’s going to be several hours of a limited supply of people as 3PM passes over the Pacific. That would explain a lot.

I don’t believe this, of course. Sure, that’s what the spirits want me to say, just as many conservative Christians would say it’s demonic deception that keeps me from believing what they believe. Hey, the potential for deceptions is more than astronomical.

It is curious to me how few people walk around realizing that the potential for deceptions is more than astronomical, even unintentional deceptions. Maybe I do have more of a tendency toward paranoia than most people. Maybe it’s my experiences as a scientist and otherwise that let me be open to such possibilities. The world is not what it seems to be. If the complete story of the world is ever told, that certainly will be true. Does it matter?

Whatever power there is, it is much more than me. Whatever knowledge there is, it is more than mine. I suppose one reaction to that is to know my place, tend to those things closest to me and live my life. I do that, but there’s this longing for more. Maybe all these great things human beings have done make me think of greater possibilities. Then there are always more possibilities. But they are beyond me. Can I get any help?

Of course, I can get help. Is such help worth anything? Not if it turns me into Jim Jones or David Koresh, it’s not. Not if it asks me to believe things I’m sure are not true. Not if it leaves out something very important.

Who am I for God to help me? God tells me I help Him, too. That’s despite all the images the media has put in me over a lifetime. I think of the one from “Star Trek Deep Space Nine”, where an alien feeds on Jake’s brain as she helps him write really well. God assures me She is not a space alien, never has been, never will be.

Oh yeah, so what’s that napkin for? “You can see that? How do you see that? No one else sees that.” No, we’re just kidding, I think.

Just trust what the universe would give you, and understand, it’s more than any human being can explain to you. Whatever puzzle I’ve found, there’s another piece that makes it not so frightening. The dawn always comes. Then again, so does 3PM.

(To the symbolically challenged, the ninth hour was when Christ died, roughly 3PM. Something is taken from us during life, however one sees it. That I see this process as a very loyal Christian is something that I know many who give lip service to Christ can’t understand. Understanding everything is not necessary. It’s what we do with what we understand that matters.)

Did God hang on like Tinker Bell?

I have an image of God that’s not flattering, but He says to go with it. There was a time and a place when God was near death. People worldwide had conjured up various spirits to replace Him, harsh spirits as if God were a set of unbendable rules, mindless spirits who simply favored some group of people, no matter how those people acted, many spirits that existed only as long as the minds lived that kept those spirits alive.

God is different from that. God has an existence beyond the mind of any of us, yet He needs us. Without a connection to us, He withers. Perhaps He flourished elsewhere, on a planet with life more receptive to Him, but this part of Him here was dying until something revived Him.

What was that? Those who worship nature say they were the ones who returned to the true God, Mother Nature. Various sects say they were the ones to go through renewal and revive their God that had become lost in corruption.

I see an image of Tinker Bell, early in the story of Peter Pan, where Peter appeals to the audience to believe, as that will strengthen Tinker Bell. The audience does believe, and Tinker Bell rallies. When did this happen to God? When will it yet happen to God?

When I believed a small light flickered on. Tradition might say it was in my heart, but I understand my heart to be a muscle that pumps my blood. This was somewhere else. How many lights does it take to revive the real God? However many, it has been done. How much of that is in the present and how much in the future is hard to say. Where the lights are doesn’t go through time the same way as here.

Many would scoff at God being like Tinker Bell. Their God is immense, not dependent on anything, knowledgeable of everything, with extensive databases on everyone. Only that God is not real. If He were, this world would be very different. When those who believe in that God die off, that God will die with them.

Atheists say that is the only God who exists, that there is no God beyond people’s belief in God. Maybe that’s true. Maybe both God and I are wrong in believing He is more than my belief in Him. Maybe that explains the tiny revival that God felt when we connected. It was His birth, not a revival at all.

God doesn’t believe that. He has no memory to draw from, but it certainly seems He is more than I am. There are too many things He does that I can’t do. When I pray, He cuts to the core of a problem and a solution, while I am awash in possibilities. God loves parts of me that I don’t love. God takes us places I wouldn’t go. It almost always turns out He’s right in that. For those times He has been wrong, it’s a good lesson to learn that God’s not perfect.

None of that impresses either atheist or fundamentalist. They mirror each other in their beliefs, of course, both closed off to anything they don’t already believe, rigid to the point of being combative over beliefs. I am rigid in some ways, but open in others, open to God needing something from me, which He says He does. He can have it. It doesn’t cost me anything worth keeping.

God is stronger as a result. If that strength dies with me, it was worth it to me, even though it was all about me. If not, then so many people are wrong. They are wrong about so many things anyway. This is just one more, but it may be the most profound mistake people make, to trust their prejudice, not whoever and whatever God may be. God may be Spirit born of us or revived by us. God certainly is changed by us. To not see that is never to have seen light, never to talk to light, to get light’s perspective on you, instead of being trapped in your own prejudice. It does start with a willingness to believe. It takes a willingness to disbelieve, too, or possibilities grow out of control. God helps with both.

Is there a higher judge?

Everyday I encounter hatred, indifference and falseness. I suppose the perpetrators of such affronts to love and truth would see it differently. I see what I see. Recently my hometown’s conservative newspaper published an article debunking those who call senior San Diego federal Judge Gordon Thompson Jr. a liberal activist for ordering in 1991 the removal of a hilltop cross from city land, something some continue to resist. In fact Thompson is a no-nonsense, harsh sentencing, Nixon appointee to the federal bench, in no way liberal or activist. His 1991 decision never has been overturned despite numerous appeals. With the 15th anniversary of that decision approaching, he finally has imposed a deadline of August 1, failing which the essentially bankrupt city will face a $5000 a day fine. Some would still fight that. After all, it’s just liberal activism, right?

Inside the opinion section of that same day’s paper was a response to Justice Antonin Scalia recently writing that in recent American history there has been no clear instance of an innocent person having been executed. The head of the Legal Defense Fund presented 4 cases from the last 15 years he believes are clear. So what jury decides this? And how much will they study the details before they do?

The day before I was in a bookstore. Every book I picked up on social issues made questionable claims, by people picking out little factoids to argue their claim. Usually I doubt even the premise of such arguments is correct. Yet this is what people do with their words. Some of these books must sell, even though I didn’t buy any of them, especially not Ann Coulter’s book.

Is there a higher judge who looks at all this? In my most cynical youth I was sure there isn’t. Now I’m sure there is, but I’ve also become sure that while many people give lip service to there being a higher judge, few act that way. Why?

All these people attacking “liberal activist judges” supposedly do so for God’s benefit. Yet I don’t hear God speaking when they speak. I hear partisans, spinning their perception of things in ways that so transparently lean toward their cause. Any words to the contrary are just the enemy or immaterial. Where did this idea come from that God’s people never make a mistake? Or that they are in fact God’s people?

The current argument made by the Christian lawyers organization trying to keep the cross where it is centers on the contention that this particular cross is not a religious symbol, but a universal symbol of self-sacrifice, in keeping with the war memorial that the cross towers above. I try to think of how I could politely respond to this. I could say I don’t see it that way.

I definitely don’t. The cross is always a religious symbol to me, a symbol of my connection to God. Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe God doesn’t see it that way, and my faith is completely meaningless. Maybe there is no God and no need to fight over a 43-foot cross. I don’t see it that way, though. As with many issues, I ask myself and ask God if I’m delusional in seeing the cross as a religious symbol. The answers I get on this one reassure me. They do on some other issues, too, but not always. It’s not a meaningless exercise to ask God whether you know as much as you think you know. You have to be a little open to getting a surprising answer, though.

It’s hard for me to imagine that most people do that much. For one you would have to pin most conservatives to the floor through both shoulders and both hips before they’d admit they’ve been caught. I don’t suppose Justice Scalia is planning to revise his remarks yet, just because of the 4 cases that some think we’re surely executions of the innocent. He meant “clear”. Why give up the power of the point he was making for mere probability? Why indeed?

It is so often about power, not how powerless I am in fact without God.

On Monday, Justice Anthony Kennedy ordered a stay of the August 1 deadline for the cross. Otherwise the city of San Diego felt compelled to start planning its removal. So now there’s time for more litigation, though maybe not much time before a court again finds the cross is indeed a religious symbol and a violation of the California constitution if not the US Constitution as well. Naturally both sides proclaimed victory over this.

I found what Rev. Pat Mahoney of the Christian Defense Coalition said the most interesting of all this spin. Mahoney said, “Yes, we’re thankful to Justice Kennedy, but God did this. God the Sovereign intervened.” That’s fine with me, if true. I’m not sure why God thought it necessary to wait 17 years from the initial lawsuit to intervene, but maybe there’s a good reason. If God has indeed intervened, then it’s over, right? Surely God wouldn’t intervene and then allow the courts to overrule Him. Who is the highest judge here, anyway?

My guess is that when the cross is again ordered removed, Rev. Mahoney will spin it in yet another way. It’s one thing to claim a higher judge when things go your way. If things don’t, then where is that higher judge? Worse, has that judge ruled against you? I predict I will not find a single conservative Christian who accepts that God has ruled against them when the cross comes down. Yet what’s the alternative? What kind of Sovereign makes ineffective interventions? Apparently some believe that God only uses Anthony Kennedy some of the time. What kind of God is that?

In fact, God tells me Rev. Mahoney knows nothing of Him. Mahoney knows his own tradition. Beyond that he’s a loose cannon. Anyone who knows the first thing about God would be much more cautious about speaking for Him

Is it just that traditional Christians think God will forgive them any falseness? I doubt it. I don’t see how people can speak like some Christians do, saying that the hilltop cross is “clearly” Constitutional, without believing what they say. That’s the point. Here are so many people speaking as if their beliefs must be true. It makes sense that atheists speak as if there is no God to say they’re wrong. Yet many theists speak the same way, both liberals and conservatives.

Doesn’t anyone listen to God? Does everyone but me think it’s crazy to hear God? I know that’s not true. Lots of evangelicals quote God, in print and on TV. I think they get God wrong almost all the time, but at least they admit that God might have something to say. Of course, evangelicals rarely report God saying anything surprising. Their God never says they’re wrong about something and should give up. My God has said things like that to me. So I gave up.

If you give up, then you can start over. Would you rather have a life where you start over again and again and again or a life where you go forever in a single direction? What are the chances that a single direction is the right way? Starting over doesn’t mean starting over with nothing. It can just be a course correction. It seems to me life needs many course corrections, while those who are as sure of their way as Rev. Mahoney look like they’re going the wrong way, a way of hatred, indifference and falseness.

It’s not easy to listen to God. Both biological and cultural evolution are self-regulating systems that will proceed without that. I don’t know how important it is in general to know there is a higher judge, not just for rhetorical purposes, but as the God one consults regarding His will. It’s obvious that people who claim there is such a higher judge don’t act like there is, unless they just mean the Bible and/or the church is their God.

It is important to me that there is a higher judge, even one who doesn’t know a future that hasn’t happened yet, is intuitive instead of being a mass of databanks, doesn’t run the physical universe, doesn’t love everyone and is less than perfect, preferring just getting through all this once to all the repetition that would be needed to reach perfection. I know I’ve prayed to God for direction, strength, and hope and received good directions, a healthy strength and hope that has endured much better than anything the secular world offers. I don’t confuse Him with some Oriental despot by calling Him Sovereign. He is God, the one who is called, as the root word means in Indo-European.

People can call on Him more if they get tired of all the fighting.

Endurance

I had an MRI of my left shoulder recently. It took some months for me to be sure this pain was not going away. In fact it’s been getting worse. There are some routine things I can’t do now. I can’t use a drive-up ATM. I suppose I could if I twisted myself around enough that I could use only my right arm, but the walk-up ATM is a better alternative. I could adapt to this pain, in part with heavy drinking maybe. I could go the rest of my life with it, as any human being would have had to do until just a few decades ago. I’m glad I don’t have to.

Since I like cheap health care, it took weeks to see the doctor and more weeks to get the first available appointment for an MRI, even at 9:30 at night. But now that’s done. There’s some reassurance when you see a doctor’s expression change as he realizes that you have a real problem. “You can’t move it any more than that,” he said, any sign of uncertainty disappearing from his face. OK, it’s straightforward after crossing that threshold, even for an HMO.

Ah, MRI, what incredible pictures one can make with radio waves exploring one’s protons while lying in a magnet. No radiation, no needles usually, all the patient has to endure is lying in what is a lot like a coffin with the noises of heavy machinery inches from your face. Hey, I’ve done it before. I had an MRI of my brain as a pilot subject for a drug study that I was involved in. It let me appreciate why some patients need Valium to endure any MRI, but it wasn’t that much of a challenge. The tech scolded me, showing me the pictures where I had moved at one point. Hey, my back started hurting. I had to move. I knew the pictures would still be good enough. They were.

The tech this time informed me that it’s harder for them to get good images on an MRI of the shoulder than any other body part. NO MOVING! OK, I’ll be good.

It’s worse than that. For whatever reason the radiologists want to look at my shoulder in a position I don’t get into any more. It’s hurts. It doesn’t hurt terribly, but it hurts. Let’s see. We have a test where people who have the problem the test detects have trouble getting through the test with readable results, while those without the problem, with pain for other reasons, can get into the necessary posture and have good enough pictures to say they’re normal. Gee, so what do you need the $3 million machine for? I know, pictures are proof. So let’s get the pictures.

The position they wanted didn’t hurt that badly, not like reaching for an ATM. If it were just a little pain, I could keep that up a long time. On first being pushed into the tube, there isn’t much more than that. Yes, the machine is right in front of my face. Yes the machinery noises are just the same as before. Big deal, maybe I can go to sleep, though probably not with this pain.

The first five minutes were easy. The first ten were straightforward. After that was harder. At first it had seemed that I was in a position I could hold forever. There was better support under my knees this time, so my back was fine. My neck got tired, though. Gee, it would take some major moving to figure out how to rest it – too late for that. I also realized I had a growing desire to take a deep breath. We do that occasionally, you know, to aerate the lesser-used parts of our lungs, something like that. Whatever it’s for, I wanted that sigh. I tried taking some deeper breaths each time. It helped a little.

I had gone into the MRI knowing I had done it before, and this wasn’t much different. I figured I could talk to God for 20 minutes or so, and we’d be done. Fortunately God requires no space to be with me. I started doing that, subvocally. God said a few things back. These growing problems took my attention away from Him, though. Can you fix this, God? I forget any exact response, but the gist of it was no, He can’t.

That wasn’t the answer I wanted. I needed to move. I needed to breathe deeply. I guess I could wait for a while, but how long? The tech had put a panic button in my right hand. Surely I wouldn’t need that. If most people can get this done, then I can. I have a lot of experience with endurance. If you don’t stop, there often isn’t anything that can make you stop. Well, sometimes there is. Just this morning my computer stopped me with another round of errors that my Dell machine is prone to. But my body is made of sterner stuff. It’s going to outlive my computer by far.

For years I’ve had this trick when I get my blood drawn. I put myself up into the corner of the ceiling or into some poster. It barely hurts at all that way. I suppose a very bad phlebotomist with a barbed needle could bring my attention back, but I haven’t run into one.

I usually can stop the reality of any situation to talk with God, too. If I don’t remember to do that, He has this habit of showing up anyway. There was this problem on an airplane once, one where we all got to slide off the wing to get out of there. God told me right away it would be OK, before it was apparent it would be. She was very helpful that day.

Inside the MRI there wasn’t much for God to do. There were too many physical problems without solutions, the pain from my shoulder I could only endure, the trouble breathing I could only endure, the discomfort elsewhere I could only endure, unless I pressed that panic button. Well, it makes it easier to endure knowing that escape is an option.

I was wondering how long I was going to last when a solution came to me. There were two strips of light inside the MRI. The plastic covers had these finely spaced ridges on them. I started counting them. It was an impossible task since they were too tightly spaced to keep my place in counting them. That was even better. I could focus on this thing even more that way, repeatedly starting over. If you keep starting over, you never have to stop. The pain was still there. I still needed to breathe and move, but I had something else to do instead. It worked. I kept that up until the tech took me out.

Maybe if I had had a picture of God to study, God would have been enough. It’s hard to ignore how visual we are as creatures. Whatever spiritual side there is to the universe, it’s harder to reach for that than something physical. I suppose that’s why there are so many objects and rituals in religion and so many rules for negotiating one’s physical life. Some meditators claim to be able to leave the physical world behind. Let’s see how they do in an MRI with my shoulder.

I’ve thought of sterner tests for the spiritually minded over the years. Often if I’m stuck in a bad traffic jam where both the car and I are seriously overheating, I think of an endurance test like when Jews had to ride in boxcars to the death camps. How spiritual could one be then? How spiritual could one be nailed to a cross, whether one thought oneself the Messiah or some lowly powerless prisoner. Either way the Romans crucified countless prisoners. Others had their own tortures like impalement. I have a feeling that in every torture like that, the physical universe demands one’s complete attention.

Of course most tortures are not voluntary. People endure them until their torturers stop or the victims lose consciousness or die. I understand torturers tend to avoid anything that mitigates their victim’s suffering like unconsciousness or even screaming. Gags have many benefits to them. I think of how glad I am not to have my shoulder injury 50 years ago. How glad also I am not to be trying to figure out how to endure torture, just an MRI.

I am convinced that God has much greater limits than traditionalists are willing to believe. How much worse it was for martyrs if God couldn’t do anything to mitigate their physical experience. Maybe screams help. Maybe all kinds of physical things help. Maybe endurance isn’t just about God and I helping each other, but is about how many resources the physical universe give us as well, possibilities we’re only now coming to value. Once it was, “God please save me,” with no backup plan. One doesn’t have to be an atheist to see that differently. One also doesn’t have to see God as being in everything, even light fixtures.

It’s taken me much longer to write this than to endure my MRI. Yet all these ideas went through my mind to some degree during those twenty minutes. It’s how I look for solutions, unless one presents itself to me. I would love to leave such things for God to take care of. It doesn’t seem to work that way. I need my experiences to have endurance. I need my desire for perfection and my competitiveness. Even more I need my desire not to have to do this stupid test all over again. There is no magic wand for God to wave. As much as I value that God is always with me, the physical universe is always with me as well. The cooperative effort that it takes to live by God’s will involves at least these three. It helps if no one wants to torture me, too. If all these cooperate, I can endure. I understand why so many have tried to make it simpler, either a matter of God’s will or my will. Neither is enough. There are too many other actors in the play, both animate and inanimate.

Next is the surgery. I hear the recovery is surprisingly lengthy. I’ll endure. God is my ally. I’ll find other allies, animate and inanimate. Then when I finally don’t endure, I’m told there’s an entirely different level of endurance I’ll experience. I wonder if there’s a picture of God with that one, maybe even the real thing.