My Natural Law

Spanning the Colorado River - near Moab Utah

Christianity

A Follower of Jesus

Now you might be thinking that for someone who is of the opinion that no truth is absolute given our current intellectual state and everything is relative, my beliefs are pretty well defined and fixed.  In reality, they are a developing collection that reflect my chosen paradigm.

Religion is always evolving to meet the needs of people at any given point in history.  All the great religions of the past have slowly faded into mythology or even been forgotten all together only to be replaced with something newer and more relevant.  Odin and Frigg, Zeus and Hera, and farther back than we have record to recall, once mighty systems of faith fall to the relentless march of social evolution.  Allah, God, Buddha, Jesus... all the great religions of today’s world will, at some point, join our pantheon of mythology and be relegated to the history of once practiced and revered faith.

Some of the faithful cling desperately to an imaginary permanence and refuse to see the subtle changes evident even during our own short recorded history.  “What is is and will always be” just isn’t.

So if religion isn’t absolute and forever, is there any value in it?  Of course there is!  There still is a continuity of truth... it’s just much more fluid than many feel comfortable admitting to.

Christianity was given me by my parents.  Just like it was given to them by theirs.  It shapes my understanding.  It colors my perceptions.  It molds my thoughts and feelings.  It is a vessel of truth and not necessarily the truth itself.  It is a philosophy that helps defines the universe in which I live.  Its comfortable confines concentrate and focus my perceptions.  It is the allegorical model which gives course and direction to my inner spiritual journey.

I strive to uncover and incorporate the ideals and teachings attributed to Jesus of Nazareth as I understand and need them to be.  I value the concept of the Christ and am intent on unlocking its gift.

“For it is an indubitable and evident thing that he who is born a Christian, Jew, Pagan, Turk, Infidel, or whatever religion it may be, can arrive at the perfection of this Work or Art and become a Master, but he who hath abandoned his natural Law, and embraced another religion opposed to his own, can never arrive at the summit of this sacred Science.”

~ Rabbi Yaakov Moelin 1365-1427 CE

Sin and Satan

Camping along the bank of the Colorado River - Near Moab Utah

The Truth Behind Error

“A wicked mortal is not the idea of God. He is little else than the expression of error. To suppose that sin, lust, hatred, envy, hypocrisy, revenge, have life abiding in them, is a terrible mistake. Life and Life’s idea, Truth and Truth’s idea, never make men sick, sinful, or mortal.”

“Error is neither Mind nor one of Mind’s faculties. Error is the contradiction of Truth. Error is a belief without understanding. Error is unreal because untrue. It is that which stemma to be and is not. If error were true, its truth would be error, and we should have a self-evident absurdity; namely, erroneous truth. Thus we should continue to lose the standard of Truth.”

~ Mary Baker Eddy

First and foremost, I do not believe in Satan as an actual entity with sentience or motivation.  My faith dictates he is a metaphor... a metaphor for mortal sin.  Sin is nothing more than human failing or, in the simplest term, error.  Temptation is the expression of human weakness and not the product of some spiritual adversary intent on causing harm.

It is my firm belief that the whole creation myth is a profound spiritual allegory intended to reveal eternal truths only to those who study and ponder it sufficiently.  Heavenly wars, banished hosts, and earthly temptations spawned by the demonic are all part of a rich oral history of tremendous depth and meaning that has, sadly, been reduced to a ridiculously simplistic face-value “historical” narrative in the pages of a terribly misunderstood book.

We are the real Satan and his only power is what we surrender through error.

The Value of Storytelling

The Great Salt Lake and Antelope Island - Utah

Myth and Legend

"To wish to teach all men the truth of the gods causes the foolish to despise, because they can not learn, and the good to be slothful, whereas to conceal the truth by myths prevents the former from despising philosophy and compels the latter to study it."

~ Sallustius

I’ve long been fascinated by parables and allegory... especially those involving Jesus.  Human beings have used allegory as a teaching aid for as far back as anyone knows.  Scripture employs allegory on a grand scale.

The Human Genome Project, comparing samples from hundreds of thousands of native populations from every corner of the globe, has pretty conclusively ruled out the possibility of the Jewish nation being the “principle ancestor” of any surviving native American.  For as long as Jews isolated themselves as a distinct population, there has been no identifiable relation between them and native American populations before modern times.  Their connection dates to the out-of-Africa bottleneck of pre-history in the days of Neanderthal predominance.  Even within the Book of Mormon narrative itself, there are many glaring inconsistencies with the anthropological record.

Given the conflicts and other social issues with native peoples dominating the American mindset during our nation’s expansion westward, it stands to reason these native populations would have been an excellent learning tool.  I view the Book of Mormon as a parable or allegory instead of an exacting history of a people.

Like the Book of Mormon, the Bible also suffers from many irreconcilable differences with the archeological record.  For example, we now know the destruction of the Walls of Jericho predates Israelite occupation by several centuries.  The massive ruins would have still been impressive in those days.  It stands to reason, religious scholars used them as teaching elements.  Hence, the story of God’s destruction of wicked Jericho at the hands of the faithful Chosen.

Now, some faithful instinctively react against such notions in a vain effort to preserve the orthodox view.  Without understanding the science or even being familiar with the evidence available to us, they dismiss it all as error.  This is a dangerous stance to take.

Faith, by definition, is belief based on spiritual apprehension rather than proof.  Until our modern age, there were no tools available to us to prove or disprove our mythology.  Some naively hold to the believe of their absolute veracity and turn a blind eye to the mounting evidence against such a claim.  If our mythology is not permitted to disassociate from fact and be allowed to reside in the protective realm of allegory, we risk loosing its spiritual and social relevance forever in our relentless pursuit of empirical knowledge.

A Pluralist’s View of Science and Religion

New York Museum of Natural History - Manhattan

The General Relativity of Truth

The universe is a very strange place and getting stranger the more we learn about it.  Many of the greatest minds of our day are working diligently to craft a universal theory of everything encompassing the smallest of the small to the largest of the large.

There have been some astounding breakthroughs in the the fields of quantum cosmology and theoretical nuclear physics that have challenged many of the old views.  To this end, our mathematical geniuses are proving many of our established models of how things work to be, well, wrong!

The complexities being uncovered at Fermilab, CERN, and other research institutions around the globe promise unparalleled advancements in all scientific disciplines.  But for every question answered, many more new ones are left unanswered.

In addition to reexamining or, probably better said, “re-imagining” the universal governing forces of gravity, electromagnetism, the “strong” force and the “weak” force, these down in the trenches scientists are also inadvertently challenging some very fundamental philosophies like free will and the linear nature of existence.  So astounding the implications, the human mind struggles to even grasp its significance.

In evolutionary speak, it is an immutable fact our puny primate brain, that evolved in some unknown patch of jungle, on an insignificant rock, orbiting a teeny pale yellow star, spinning out in some blackened void, in a tiny far flung galaxy, in an unassuming corner of an ever expanding universe, will never be up to the task of EVER understanding the true nature and grandeur of the universe on all its infinite levels... no matter how much time or instruction is given.

If you think more in creationist terms, consider this:  The difference between God’s intellect, as omniscient, omnipresent, and omnipotent, and our intellect as regular human beings, who can find even an episode of Seinfeld confusing, should be astronomically greater than the difference between our intellect and say the intellect of a typical autotrophic organism like green algae.  Try explaining what we know of the cosmos to that!  What does that say about what God probably got us to understand about what He knows about the universe?

I don’t know about you but it has me thinking that everything we believe we know about the gospel might somehow be a really, really, really, to near infinity really dumbed down version of what actually is going on.  And maybe, “truth” isn’t as exacting and universal as we like to think it is.  Religion must then be considered an allegorical overlay to the incomprehensible universe as seen from a mystical perspective.

By that token, given the very specific and limited environmental conditions under which the human nervous system evolved through which we perceive and experience the universe and the fact all scientific understanding is derived from these same limited senses, it is reasonable to conclude science too is an allegorical overlay to an incomprehensible physical multiverse.

I know that’s a mouthful but consider the platonic allegory of the cave.  By design, we see, feel, smell, taste, and reason from one acutely defined perspective.  We could never hope of experiencing the universe in its proper and complete reference.  Like someone only experiencing shadows on a cave wall, we can never fathom or comprehend the true meaning or context of what we were experiencing.

Now, I know this is an issue of control.  Everyone wants to be right.  There is a lot of comfort in being right.  Atheists seek guidance from science.  The religious seek guidance from philosophy.   Both claim a “higher” truth when in reality, they’re just working different sides of the same street.  Honestly, that’s not a bad situation in be in.  Same problem, different lines of investigation; we should come up with some interesting theories.

It is from the realization that all perspectives are firmly based in the allegorical and not factual that I view life and the universe.  This blog will explore my views using concepts and vocabularies best suited for mystics and theologians only because that is its purpose and focus but I firmly believe spiritual concepts have direct corollaries to scientific ones and vice versa.  To speak to one does not negate the belief in the other.  Both are just a play of conceptual semantics.  It is critically important to remember this when reading my thoughts here.

“The only real wisdom is knowing 

you know nothing.” ~ Socrates