Did Jesus Die to Appease God?

(image from http://www.anchor1611.org, item #4)

Jesus didn't die to appease God. Jesus died because he wouldn't appease men. 

God sacrificed his ineffable infinity to become a finite human with human limits in order to demonstrate The Way of Compassion and a bottom-up society. He was killed "for our sins" in that the society and culture we humans have created, ego-driven and top-down, couldn't tolerate the radical and transformative message. Oppression sells. When the oppressed rise up, the oppressors kill them. That is our collective human sin. And that is what killed Jesus.

Penal substitution is one of the biggest lies Christians tell themselves. When Christ “paid it all, all to him I owe” (as the hymn goes), he wasn't paying a debt incurred by the individual sins of believers (or the world, if you're a universalist). His sacrifice was not death on the cross as some kind of late era human offering. His sacrifice was in accepting the human limits on his infinite divinity in order to teach us compassion and equality. The human culture, created out of the blindly ego-driven human desires for authority, hierarchy, and power-over, killed him to save itself.

Despite the sincere efforts of groups like Anchor Baptist Church, who published the photo above, to establish that Jesus paid a debt to appease a deity whose holiness demanded perfection according to an impossible standard set by himself, the Bible actually never speaks of any debt owed to God (or even Satan, as one version of this doctrine states) nor that Jesus paid it. Nor does the Bible explain how failure to live up to the Ten Commandment standard, which standard even God himself couldn’t maintain in the Old Testament, incurs a debt, demands punitive justice, or is actually in any way responsible for the death of Jesus.

Sin is “having eaten of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil”, or, having come to a state of consciousness in which duality is possible, believing that separation from God is not only possible but the inherent way of existence.  Sin is living in denial of the fundamental unity of All That Is.  Sin creates the human conditions of power-over and oppression, of hoarding resources and poverty, of In-groups and Othering.  The consequence of such belief and behavior is death and degradation of most of the human race. And a nearly irreconcilable poverty of spirit for those few at the top of the heap.  There is reason to believe that the poverty of spirit is so acute that the One Percenters indeed lack any capacity for empathy or compassion at all.  Sociopathy rules.

Jesus’ death was not to justify some cosmic accounting ledger for a tyrannically holy, fully Other, tortuously punitive deity.  That story isn’t in the Bible.  It’s a story modern Christians have made up for themselves to keep the masses shame-laden and burdened with exalting the few who manipulate the stories.  Much like the few who didn’t approve of the story Jesus was telling of a radical, inclusive, egalitarian compassion. 

Jesus told of unity and oneness and the inseparability of holy and human.  He taught that the weak and the poor are as worthy and powerful as the rich and the strong.  The One Percenters of his day had created a society in which such talk wasn’t only heretical but treason.  The social climbers and power-hungry and would-be rich-and-famous colluded with the society of sin and degradation to put that story to death.

We crucify Jesus again and all like him whenever we allow oppression, hierarchy, poverty, or exclusion to occur.  When we believe in the separation of sacred and secular, when we ascribe to the few more worth than the many, when we deny the holiness of all humanity.

A Rant on Christmas Day 2013

I was so happy to finally be able to go to Midnight Mass again.  I've been too sick to go for the last three or four years and I was excited to feel up to a late night in a crowd.  I began attending Mass about ten years ago when I missed a religious component to Christmas in our very secular household—I particularly missed singing all the Christmas carols.  I chose Mass over a Protestant service because there's lots of singing, praying, liturgy (that I can bring my own meaning to), and not so much preaching.  And generally Catholics really know how to enjoy the Baby Jesus and the Holy Family, Protestants tend to skip over Jesus' actual life—he was born so he could die, that's the only important thing!

Last night my 15yo and I went to a different church than we've gone to in the past, to meet up with a friend of hers.  The service was very much about the pageantry and spectacle:  the Knights of Columbus in full regalia, swords aloft, to guard the procession of the Bible and the priests to the altar; incensing everything; bowing, kissing, crossing, in front of statues, Bibles, Eucharist paraphernalia; the entire liturgy was sung, we bounced from seated to standing to kneeling to standing.  It was high drama religious theater.

Then the pastor comes down in front of the altar to preach and starts out with a slide of an Orthodox icon that he used to introduce his point in object lesson form.  Initially I was impressed because this guy was clearly reaching outside his own tradition in what he considered a broad-minded and ecumenical inclusion.  But then he veered off into his main point—the baby Jesus depicted in grave clothes and in a coffin, the Reason for the Season is Death and Ultimate Sacrifice (as if being born a human baby isn't a bigger sacrifice for a deity).  That God "loved" us so much that …blah, blah, blah, John 3:16…that God loves us enough to transform us (loves us enough to change us from our obviously currently unacceptable selves) if only we will let him.  Still the onus on us to DO something to "be reconciled" with God.

But truly, all that depressing theology aside, the bits of the homily that upset me the most, that I raved about all the way home (at one in the morning, to the annoyance of my totally "all religion is a joke" daughter) was the casual, almost throwaway references to the Culture War:  the priest opened his homily with "Merry Christmas! (We responded "Merry Christmas, Father") You can say that here.  Unlike Out There, like in the stores and stuff, where you might not be able to say it, here we rejoice that we can loudly proclaim the reason for our celebration…."  (Really?  There are places, stores or anywhere, where people are not allowed to say Merry Christmas to each other?  Where does this priest hang out?), and then later his patronizing tirade about an atheist conspiracy to evangelize our youth into atheism, by spending "lots and lots and lots" of money on "billboards around town, I'm sure you've seen them" that try to claim God isn't a rational proposition "when we all know, everyone knows deep in your heart that God exists."

Why?  Why make up shit like that? There are enough reasons that actually do exist, that are real problems faced by Christians even in a society that privileges Christianity, why make up stuff?  Although I admitted, that he probably actually believed it was true.  He seemed like a True Believer™ so he most likely didn't even think he was propagandizing. 

Which was probably the saddest thing I saw last night.

Sin and Repentance II: Separated from God

[comment]  "Sin" just means an act that separates us from God (usually an immoral act). The concept of sin is theologically sound, even though for psychological reasons, we carry the emotional baggage which is socially implied in the word: rejection by God, by everybody because you are a "sinner". The idea of God being merciful only makes sense when we take into account that we return to Him as a source of unconditional love. Sin exists because of our free will....

Scott Morizot said...

If Christianity is true, then describing "sin" as something that separates us from God has the character of the absurd. As the Psalmist cries, there is nowhere we can go where God is not. As Paul declares in Athens, in God we live and move and have our being. As he writes in Colossians, everything subsists in and is contingent on Jesus.

Nor does sin have the solid character of an independent "act." Missing the mark involves action, of course, but it's more of a failure to reach the goal. How do we fail? Here the NT is abundantly clear. We fail to love. And because God is love, when we do so, we do attempt -- consciously or not -- to distance or separate ourselves from him.

But we can't actually be separated from God in any sense. If we could, we would simply cease to exist. But non-existence -- however much we strive for it -- lies beyond our power. Moreover, it's a struggle to even maintain the illusion of separation. God keeps pursuing and piercing our bubble. Adam (which simply means 'man') hides only to hear God asking him where he is. Jacob grasps for all he can hold only to find himself wrestling with God. Moses flees, but even on the remotest mountain encounters God. Israel is unfaithful, yet like Hosea with Gomer, God remains faithful and ultimately becomes the faithfulness of Israel in Christ.

Man turns from his only source of life and is enslaved by death. And even there, God follows him.

No, if it's possible for a human being to separate themselves from God, then Christianity is not true. And if it's not true, it's a waste of time and lives.

I'm not really trying to pick on anyone, but it seems to me that too many Christians today speak sincerely, but injudiciously.

Sin and Repentance I: Disgusting to God

I had the following conversation with Scott Morizot of Faith and Food:

[The Heretic]  I’m still struggling with the idea of Sin. I’m still too steeped in the Augustinian idea of Original Sin that condemned me before I was born and the Evangelical idea that sin makes me so disgusting to God that he can’t look at me without the Jesus sunglasses. I don’t accept that those ideas are correct any longer and I am coming to see that there are some other much healthier ways of defining sin (thanks for all your blogging on Orthodoxy) but there is still that knee-jerk self-hatred when I see the word sin or try to request mercy for myself. Sigh.


[Scott replies]  I can empathize. I long struggled trying to grasp what Christianity really meant by that word, though for very different reasons. I did keep hearing explanations like the ones you mentioned, but since I was an adult without any real predisposition to accept them, they mostly got the Spock raised eyebrow reaction from me. (Internally, that is. My life has conditioned me to be able to smile and nod pleasantly even if I believe you’re completely off your rocker.) I also intuitively distrust an approach that basically says that before you can be a Christian, you first have to somehow feel bad about yourself. It can be effective, since most of us have done things over the course of our lives about which we feel badly, but it’s manipulative and paints God in a bad light. 


Almost everyone in any tradition will tell you that the Christian concept of ‘sin’ is most closely tied to the idea of missing the mark. Most people, however, don’t even notice that the statement begs the question: What’s the mark? For Christians, the ‘mark’ is, of course, love of God and others (which is one thing, not two separate things) and union with Christ. So when we miss the mark, we fail to love as human beings should and we try to distance ourselves from God. 


When we repent, then, we keep turning back to God and we keep trying to love. But we’re not good at it and we usually get ourselves and others all twisted up and damaged. So when we pray for mercy, we are asking for help and healing. God offers both in overflowing abundance. He gives us himself (or as much of him as we can bear) to help us. 


The Jesus Prayer, in particular, simply asks for mercy because, if we’re honest with ourselves, we don’t actually know what sort of help we need most of the time. In fact, we sometimes don’t want the help we truly do need. Sometimes we’re afraid of being healed. We are often impatient, but God’s not in a rush. I try to remember that fact.

 (reposted from the-jesus-prayer-18-repentance with permission)

Knowledge of Good and Evil

I dreamed of holocaust and genocide last night.  Recently, I’ve been staring again into my own personal Abyss.  I guess now I’ve moved to staring into the communal Abyss of all humanity.  Whence comes man’s inhumanity to man? That very phrase implies that the evil perpetrated person to person is something intrinsically not human. It seems, however, that the perpetration of evil is specifically a human quality.  

Animals, to my knowledge, to do not engineer genocide, although they may murder, bully, and rape in maintaining social order or in a battle for territory. Animals, according to current research, commit personal atrocities as a means to an end but only people commit large-scale, tribal atrocities as ends to themselves.  At the opposite end of the spectrum, while animals may act with individual altruism in order to benefit the group, only people show any willingness to martyr themselves for ideology (a fact exploited by those engineering atrocity). 

Both poles of the human dichotomy, atrocity and martyrdom, can result only from the same aspect of humanity that I think is the defining separation of man and animal: self-consciousness. Self-consciousness is a sense of separateness from the rest of the world. 

There is no conclusive research on whether animals are self-conscious; certainly, they are aware of themselves—that my dog can be embarrassed when I talk about him is proof enough for me—but even animals that have been taught to sign do not refer to themselves in the first person.  They use the third person or call themselves by name. Human children commonly develop this sense around the third birthday, maybe a few months later.  They will start to use the word I to reference the self. 

Similarly, there seems to be no indication that animals have any sense of existentialism, that is, awareness that one day they will die (this is different than an end-of-life awareness of impending death).  Human children come to this awareness around age nine.  My elder daughter was 8½.  We were listening to the soundtrack to Ella Enchanted, and she was singing along.  She sang the first line of a song “every day, you die a little”, when abruptly she stopped singing, and ever so seriously informed me, “That’s true, you know.  Every day you live is one day sooner that you will die.”

I suspect that it is this existential self-consciousness that allows for both atrocity and ideological altruism.  To know that we are dying is terrifying, deeply and viscerally frightening to the human psyche. Life is a fragile and uncertain proposition.  Whether studied from the perspective of biology, chemistry, poetry, psychology, agriculture, philosophy, economics or religion, the deeper the subject is mined, the more clear the fragility and uncertainties.  It's all a crapshoot and then you die. That very knowledge demands that life become meaningful.  Why do we live, if only to die? We have a will to meaning—a drive innate within us to derive meaning from our lives (c.f. Viktor Frankl and the Third Viennese School of Psychotherapy). If we cannot extract meaning and purpose from our lives, we will go insane.  

When the only certainty in life is death, uncertainty becomes the defining characteristic of Life.  Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle is Pascal’s “God-shaped Vacuum” into which is sucked every possible kind of meaning: tribalism, hedonism, greed, hierarchy, lust, imperialism, socialism, altruism, theism—and all are present and active in every religion in the world.

So few of us have the courage to acknowledge death, to create meaning, to accept uncertainty. We would prefer instead to expend our enormous psychic energies on denying the one certainty we have by inventing elaborate theories and formulae to simulate certainty.  Even simpler is to accept the theories and formulae of people we deem more willing than we to have looked into the Abyss (though we rarely check this sort of credential in deciding the credibility of our experts). And even more common than anything else is the tendency to abuse substances, behaviors, religions or other people to deny even the fear we feel at the uncertainty of Life.

Anyone who has looked into the Abyss and come away (too often people venture willingly or unwillingly into the Abyss and, in their terror, they get stuck there—our modern religious, medical, and psychiatric professions are more likely to ensure the stuckness rather than facilitating a return) has one other certainty in Life.  That Love exists.  That Love matters. Whether called Love, God, Allah, Light, OM, Brahman, or All/Nothing, whether found through science, religion, mysticism, or poetry, this succoring, sublime, transcendent Ineffability suffuses the Universe, both physical and psychic.  And that Love trumps existentialism in aeternum.

Original Sin vs. Imago Dei III: Selfish Babies

[comment] … any parent can tell you just how selfish and completely lacking in empathy babies are…

I completely disagree with this thought.  I found my babies to be very empathetic to each other and to my moods and they continue to be.  A lot behavior of babies and young children that is commonly regarded as rebellious or selfish, I found to be the product of inappropriate nutrition or exercise or poor parenting on my part.  My first daughter used to be a very aggressive, crabby, biting, hyperactive infant/toddler.  It would have been easy to see her as selfish or "willful", in fact, most people did think that, even I thought so, although less often than most people.  Then she was treated for her excessive allergy load, we moved out of a house with lead-based paint dust and ancient leaky plumbing (heavy metal toxicities), and 80% of those behaviors disappeared.  Later, when I began to understand how foods triggered my own tendency to temper tantrums and I began to avoid those foods for myself (evening out my own moods), even more of her “willfulness” and “disobedience” disappeared.  Then I learned about the correlation between exercise and hyperactivity and began to look for ways that she could get a huge workout. Since then, when she has sufficient nutrition and exercise, she become the sweetest, most agreeable, humorous, generous child I've ever met.  

When I hear people talk about selfishness, sin, the rebellion of children, I hear an implication that this is somehow the child's fault (a sin nature to be overcome, "whip the devil out of him", “break her will”, etc) that puts the fault on the child rather than on the whole system of influences that contribute to a collection of behaviors that we call a child's character.  From my own experience, the shame of being sinful did not lead me to feel grateful for anything to do with God—after all, God made me, right?  But God made me defective? And the only means of becoming better was prayer and trying harder?  How exactly was God supposed to fix me in any way that turned me into someone more acceptable to the Powers That Were in my world?

I think there IS a huge aspect of personal responsibility that children need to learn: how to manage the influences to which they are susceptible.  I consider the biggest ongoing lesson of my daughter’s childhood to be helping her to recognize how to manage and prevent moods and behaviors that are not community-building.  The largest part of this lesson is teaching her to regulate her protein:carb ratio, getting a hard enough physical workout for her needs.  Without management of these things, she is so volatile that she "can't stop herself" from violence or temper tantrums.  With appropriate management, the anger, tantrums, and tendency to violence disappear. 

I see this learning to manage as hugely different than owning sinfulness and repenting.  Regulation of the chemical processes of the body (the vehicle of modification of selfishness that works for her) is not at all what I think is meant by church teachings on eradicating our sinful nature, even though the resulting obedient, joyful, peacemaking child is the same.  Thus for me it begged the question what is "sin" and the "sin nature" if it could be managed by diet and exercise much better than shame, punishment, prayers asking God to make me behave better.

[comment] …that does not make babies "bad" that's simply their natural state. We need to make the choice to be unnatural/supernatural, to accept the grace God offers to overcome our natural tendency toward sin.

Although I hope this writer is not meaning this "need to make the choice to be unnatural/supernatural, to accept the grace God offers" the way I heard it...ugh, I absolutely recoiled just reading it.  We, out of all God's creations, need to become unlike our created nature in order to become acceptable to God? We are born "sinful" in our nature (although no other natural creation of God is "sinful") and have to act entirely against nature, which is God's masterpiece, in order to be what God wants us to be?

No other created thing, no matter how corrupted by human intervention, is considered "sinful":  for example, wildlife that has been genetically damaged by pollution--is this a fair analogy to the Adam in the Garden version of Original Sin?  The bird that can't fly didn't choose to be genetically flawed anymore than we choose to be born as "Adam's seed" but we don't call the bird "in sin" or expect that somehow it is not acceptable to God.  Why are people considered as less worthy right from birth than birds?

Original Sin vs. Imago Dei II: Universal Dissonance

Original Sin is the idea that because Adam and Eve sinned, mankind is forever doomed to being inherently evil and redeemed only through an Act of God (or through believing in the Act of God, depending on where you are on the Free Will/predestination spectrum).  While this paradigm may make you delight in the greatness of God, it presupposes that you were in your original state unacceptable to God.  I find that presupposition to be deeply damaging.

During my heathen years I developed a personal cosmology that starts with God as the sentient, eternal, creative, sustaining, resonance/harmonic/vibration, the OM of the yogis, the Word, I AM. My cosmology is in my own mind a nexus of the realms of subatomic and astronomic science with philosophy and spirituality through the ages.  But my Big Idea is, to oversimplify, that this sound (the “Word”) that is God.  All created matter is a harmonic of that sound.  For various reasons, such as entropy, cumulative effects of short-sighted actions during former eras, evolutionary accommodations that are no longer necessary, any individual subset of matter (in this discussion, a person) can become mistuned.

The worse the mistunement (the more we are "separated from God"), the greater propensity for consequences of dissonance: selfish thought, destructive behavior, susceptibility to physical illness.  Physically, we can carry the mistunements of our ancestors in our DNA (perhaps as a kind of retrovirus that develops from suppressing the consequences of their dissonance?) and that acts as a predisposition to various manifestations of dissonance in our own lives—familial disease, inherited “personality quirks”.  

I think the Fall of Adam, Original Sin and the Sins of the Father doctrines are metaphors for this Universal Dissonance.  Grace is the possibility by which this dissonance is brought back into the right harmonic that is God.  This is "the moment of salvation". But because the predisposition for dissonance is hardwired into our matter (the theory of entropy), our souls have a tendency not to stay in harmony.  Wanting to stay in the harmonic, actively doing stuff that keeps us there (do justice, love mercy, walk humbly) increases the pattern that keeps us in harmony.  That is the "working out of our salvation".

A visual metaphor is a guitar: it is created at the factory to resonate at certain frequencies.  When it is strung the first time, it needs to be fine-tuned to the proper frequency.  But over time, through no fault of its own, the instrument will become dissonant and need retuning.  No one imagines it is a “bad” guitar, or that the guitar is “desperately wicked” or “depraved” for needing tuning.  There is no call for the guitar to “repent” from its dissonance and be “saved”. 

There are actions a guitarist can take to help the guitar stay in tune better—not throw it around, expose it to musical vibrations (store it near speakers)—but there is no moral judgment of either the instrument or the owner when the guitar needs constant tuning. 

Original Sin vs. Imago Dei I: Born to Sin

[commenter] What if ...  

• We were CREATED in God's image in Genesis 1-2
  • All God's creation (including man) was declared GOOD (i.e. perfect)
  • Sin entered the world in Genesis 3 and BROKE the goodness/perfection of creation
  • Because of sin, we are incapable of any truly good works/motives on our own (totally depraved, not as in always at the worst, but as in there is no part of us that escapes depravity)
  • Because of Christ, by faith in Him (even for pre-ressurection believers who were looking forward to the coming Messiah), we are RE-created to be perfect again in God's eyes, and to be slowly renewed in the whole man (body, soul, mind, spirit, social, etc.) as a work-in-progress that will be fully completed in the resurrection
  • We still REFLECT God's glory in this life, but imperfectly, as in a cracked and stained mirror

...  just some thoughts....

Interestingly, of all the religions in the world, only Western Christianity, Roman Catholicism and most Protestant denominations, subscribes to the idea that we inherit guilt from sin (or actions that foster less than good) not our own.  Islam, Judaism, Orthodox Christianity, Buddhism, Hinduism, Mormonism, all hold that we are judged strictly on our own choices in this lifetime after reaching an age of reasoning skills. Only Augustine, Luther and Calvin, the biggest names in the Original Sin/Total Depravity game, insist that we are born evil with no capacity whatsoever to do good until and unless we “accept the grace of God”, which phrase will have to be its own whole other post.

The thing about Original Sin/Total Depravity is that it emphasizes the human end of the duality.  I think, from the explanations of those for whom these doctrines work to bring communion with God, that the point of the doctrines is to bring the outrageous grace of God into sharp relief.  To highlight the vastness of his love and the marvel of his works.  All to the good, but my question then is this?  Is God not gracious, vast, and marvelous enough all on his own or does he really need us to be belittled, shamed and beaten down in order for him to look good?

I prefer to worship a God whose people acknowledge that we humans are in our free will sometimes awful, sometimes really great, and usually both at once, and that our God is infinitely more.

I'm reading a book by a fairly traditional (though not at all fundy) preacher--and surprisingly I really am enjoying it--but I'm at a point where he's bemoaning that we don't talk about sin much anymore.  It makes us feel bad.  Well... yeah!  Who wants that? 

Perhaps the Sin/Depravity motif worked in Christianity for so long because it resonated with how people actually already felt about themselves.  I mean, most people in Christendom really had harsh and brutal lives until the modern era so maybe it wasn't so much a beating down of humanity as much as recognition of their place in the world--lowly, abused, exploited, short-lived.

Modernity changed a whole lot about our view of the world and our place in it.  As religion lost favor among intellectuals, psychoanalysis grew in its place.  Sin/redemption themes became alienation and recovering the unconscious.  People still feel separated from the Divine but no longer feel as though they personally are lowly and shameful.  Without Christianity telling me how morally bankrupt I am, any wretchedness I feel has no shame attached.  Most people that I know feel pretty good about their work and their place in the world and see no reason to think of themselves as Sinful--except as it is pounded into their heads from preachers, parents, and religious authorities.

I grew up on the "hearts desperately wicked", "from the moment of my conceiving" (or whatever those verses are that supposedly prove Original Sin). The idea that I started out behind the cosmic eight ball, through absolutely no fault of my own, so that from the very moment that I came into being, God couldn't stand the sight of me and considered me used tampons ... yup, hard to believe in a God as Love after that. 

And I still carry that baggage embedded in my soul--that I am utterly disgusting and that only when God looks at me through the Jesus-colored sunglasses will I ever be anything else. 

Even though, I no longer rationally subscribe to anything resembling an Original Sin doctrine, or any kind of moral overlay to the fact that there is suffering in the world, I can't seem to transform this hideous indictment of myself.



During my time as a heathen, I developed some interesting theories to describe how I think this whole thing works, based on physics and sound theory and other stuff, that took the whole judgment aspect out of it and also gets rid of the whole either/or polemic that Christianity is so fond of---either I am totally depraved or I am perfect in Christ (when obviously neither one is literally true). And rationally I accept these and reject the total depravity BS. Now if I could just convince my psyche to let go of that ghoul...



I suppose there are those who would use my ongoing struggle as proof of the Holy Spirit convicting me of the truth of Original Sin--except that I've supposedly been saved and made perfect from that so why exactly am I still feeling like steaming dog poop on the bottom of God's foot? No amount of reason and intellect is working on this one, nor is praying or meditating. My husband has suggested exorcism once or twice....

(for a fuller explanation of Original Sin and its history: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Original_sin

Embracing Heresy

her·e·tic [ hérrətik ] (plural her·e·tics) Definition: 1. somebody who holds unorthodox religious belief: a holder or adherent of an opinion or belief that contradicts established religious teaching

2. somebody with unconventional beliefs: somebody whose opinions, beliefs, or theories in any field are considered by others in that field to be extremely unconventional or unorthodox

[14th century. Via French< Greek hairetikos "able to choose" < haireisthai "choose"]

[comment]  I guess that I'm confused about the heretic label you've bestowed upon yourself, for after reading most every post here, I don't think that I see anything heretical -- a very heavy word. … You seem to be professing that you don't really know what to profess -- so long as it’s genuine.

Ah, the short answer is that I am heretical because I choose not to accept any of the doctrinal dogma of Christianity as it is generally understood in our culture.

The longer answer goes like this: My understanding of the nature of spiritual reality is in direct opposition to the teachings about God and humanity and the relationship between the two that I learned growing up.  When I left Evangelicalism (the only version of True Christianity that I knew), I threw absolutely every belief I’d ever been taught into the recycle bin: there was not a single thing that I considered sacrosanct.  I even tried very hard to be an atheist but found that my mystical and psychic experiences made that philosophical position pretty laughable. 

After some twenty years as a non-Christian seeker of Wisdom, I realized a few very basic Truths that have now become my personal Fundamentals.  These are the mantras I’ve been chanting to my daughters since they were old enough to hear:

Treat people the way they want to be treated.

Share the Resources.

It's not funny if someone isn't laughing.

Charity begins at home.

Follow the money.

What goes around, comes around.

People are stupid everywhere; everyone is stupid sometimes; don't be any more stupid than you have to be.

Don't do anything that can get you pregnant until you are ready to welcome a baby, you're not ready for a baby until you pick out a good daddy. (Okay, this one may not be strictly philosophical but darn good advice!)

Here are a few more favorites that pepper the spontaneous sermonizing I do while about my daily business:

God is the creative force.

Hell is other people.

We are Imago Dei (humanity is the face of the divine)

If it is Truth, it is True across Time and Culture.

There are no Either/Or’s—they are always Both/And.

The opposite of a truth is a lie; the opposite of a profound Truth is another profound Truth.

The personal is always political.

Good leaders serve of their people.

Seek and ye shall find (and the flip side: you always find what you go looking for)

God gave us brains; he must expect us to use them.

The measure of holiness, regardless of religious culture, is characterized by love, joy, peace, patience, gentleness, goodness, faithfulness, humility and self-control.

And the most profound truth of all:  Honor the divine, however you find it.  Nothing else matters.

As far as I can tell from my studies, none of my personal Fundamentals is contradicted by either Christian Scripture or the preponderance of nearly three millennia of theologians from any of the world’s Wisdom traditions.

As for the established Christian Fundamentals, I find very little evidence of truth to satisfy my rational mind. Mostly I found only parochial interpretations of tradition and scripture to support the dogma. So, I refuse to confess the creeds or to give intellectual assent to most, if any, of the central doctrines. When I first came back to Christianity, I even doubted the historical existence of Jesus himself.  Now I am willing to concede the likelihood of a historical Jesus of Nazareth, a radical iterant teacher who ran afoul of the Establishment and managed to get executed, but I still think a historical Jesus is irrelevant to the spiritual truth of Christianity.

I have not found convincing argument indicating the validity of anything like Biblical Inerrancy or even that the Gospel Truth is in any way historical truth.  Theological constructs such as the Virgin Birth, God in Three Persons or any other version of the Trinity, Deity of Christ (or in fact the deity of God), Original Sin, or even the historicity of the Resurrection or its physical necessity for spiritual redemption are, in my opinion, best understood from an allegorical point of view—as meditative tools or mythology that illustrates ineffable realities—rather than literal fact.

Being a true scientist, I am not arrogant enough to think that none of these doctrines could be absolute truth.  I am only saying that there is not, nor can there be, any way to prove one way or another what the literal truth of these doctrines might be.  And I choose to define the terms of spiritual reality differently, based on alternate interpretations of Scripture, current scientific thought in nearly every field of study, and my own experiences—all subject to change as I and all other scientists continue to ask questions, seek answers, and find more questions.

I have read extensively this last year on Christian theology, doctrine, church history, and my ever-favorite mystics.  I figured I was pretty well versed in the Evangelical dogma so I concentrated on specifically non-Evangelical sources—my favorites are listed in the Bibliography, Etc. page but that is only the tip of the reading iceberg.  I was more than a little dismayed to find how few writers I agreed with who were still identifying themselves as Christians and that none of those who did escaped rabid accusations of heresy. Then I realized that I was in the best company of all: Jesus himself was the first heretic in Christian history.  He was a Jewish heretic, to be sure, but heretical nonetheless.  If my claim to being Christian is that I follow the life and teaching of Jesus, heresy is a pretty good place to start!

Interestingly, while I was a heathen and espousing these ideas, no one much cared.  Non-Christians I knew took most of my conclusions for granted and Christians apparently considered me so far beyond the pale that I wasn’t worth arguing with.  But now that I have started to call myself a Christian again and I still hold to the same ideas, suddenly I get Hebrews (here and here) preached at me.  It didn’t seem to matter to anyone but me that I risked my immortal soul by not accepting the deity of Christ when I was a heathen but a heretic who questions the same is apparently destined to special damnation. As a heathen, I was generally well-respected; as a heretic, I am threatened with hellfire scare tactics by Christians and regarded akin to a first-grader who refuses to learn her ABC’s by non-Christians.

With all due respect to the commenter who wondered why I identify myself as a heretic, I call myself a heretic because I am heretical.  I put it right in the title so that no one reading my posts can be too surprised when I out some of my more outré ideas—truth in advertising, so to speak.  I don’t want anyone to have reason to feel betrayed when they discover that I don’t toe the party line.

The over-arching theme in this blog is that all of Christianity can be, and was by Jesus himself, reduced to a very simple premise: love God, love your neighbor, love your enemy. Nothing else matters.  Everything else is an add-on and a potential distraction from the Truth.  I don’t want my own heresy to be a similar point of distraction from that Truth.  In my own journey, owning my heresy has been crucial to understanding the radical simplicity of Jesus’ teaching, perhaps someone following my blog will find it equally liberating.