CHRISTMAS STORIES

In the beginning, the elohim created skies and earth.

Welcome back.  

Today, I thought about all the wonderful Christmas stories I know simply because I was born after the advent of film and television.

Just about every famous Christmas story I read or viewed has one small element in common.  It is the motif of transformation.

The Grinch transforms from the Whoville boogeyman to a good old green guy as his mean little heart becomes larger and more generous.

George Bailey transforms from a failure in a town where he tried to raise the standard of living for poor working people to a successful, beloved citizen who realizes his self worth.

Scrooge transforms from a clutching, covetous old sinner to a man who could celebrate Christmas with the best.

Emmet Otter's jug band is transformed from penniless contestants who lost the grand prize in a contest into paid performers in Doc Bullfrog's restaurant called the Riverside Rest.

Rudolph is transformed when he discovers that the one thing that makes him peculiar saves Christmas.

There are stories also that are not about transformation so much, but they are about Christmas.

Ralphie gets what he wants for Christmas, an air rifle, and he receives so much more.  He receives the gift of being in a family that loves each other and can create marvelous memories together.

One of my favorite Christmas stories is a tale from World War II.  It tells of a shared Christmas between American GIs and enemy German soldiers.  It is a Christmas tale unlike any ever told. 

Of course, the greatest story for Christians transforms the world.  

In Luke it is the story of a nobody from nowhere whose birth was announced from the sky as if he were Caesar.  This announcement came to shepherds, the poorest of the poor, who were guarding their livelihood at night. The baby was born in a place where animals were kept and fed.

In Matthew, it is the story of astrologers who saw in the skies the birth of a king and departed to see that king.  All they had to lead them was a star.  It led them to a boy king who came from poor people in a poor land.  

On this night before Christmas, we know our story celebrates the unexpected, for it can spring into being and transform the world.  

This is an everlasting story that may not have happened, but is as true as history.  

In our love story, where the simplest hearts beat and where the unadorned places lie, our God of love is revealed...not in palaces.

Blessings...

CHRISTMAS THANKSGIVING

In beginning, the elohim created skies and earth.

Welcome back.

I did not post for Thanksgiving, but that special holiday is ever on my mind because I love Thanksgiving. It is a uniquely American holiday.

It celebrates the underlying optimism of our nation which believes at its core, and expresses in its founding documents that life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness, establishing justice, insuring domestic tranquility, providing for the common defense, promoting the general welfare, and securing the blessings of liberty for ourselves and our posterity are human rights, not just for ourselves, but for all humanity.

You can’t be more Christian without mentioning Christ than that. 

And for that, I am truly thankful.

We Christians are expected to be thankful every day. Thanksgiving is built into the system of our faith.

We love our God of love for whom we are thankful. We love our messiah who revealed a kingdom of God that is possible when Christians love one another and others.

Now, it is Christmas time. It is that time when we express our gratitude for the birth of our brother, our father of our faith, and our savior of the world who showed what our God of love looks like in a human life.

We are thankful that we are condemned by people, but we are not condemned by God. All we must do is love God and love others.

In that, there is no condemnation.

I am truly thankful. To be honest, folks, I struggled with my faith.  

I struggled for a long time because of the load of condemnation that came with the ancient baggage that the substance of our faith came neatly folded within.  

I struggled for a long time with superstitions that conflicted with what I knew to be true and yet were presented as gospel.

I yet struggle with what faith means.

But I never struggled with this love for our God of love whom I have known—as if our God of love was loving God within me.

I am ever thankful that Christmas happens. I am thankful that there are such days as holidays, which are truly holy days.

I am thankful for no other reason than these are the days set aside so that all I have to do is be with people I love and who love me.

It will not ever be so: to know such good days as these are now. I have known lonelier days, desperate days during this time of year.

This past year has been a desperate year for billions of other human beings, including myself. 

But not now.  Not today.  For the sake of the joy I feel at this time, I will revel in the holiness of it.

I know nothing wonderful lasts forever, but it is marvelous that something wonderful happens still. 

Blessings…

A CHRISTMAS STORY

In the beginning the elohim created skies and earth.

Welcome back.  I just love this time of year.  This is the first year I can remember when I heard Christmas songs the week before Thanksgiving and did not change the station.  I must have needed Christmas carols at this time in my life.

I was so happy when the week before our recent Thanksgiving Day, I saw a Salvation Army volunteer ringing her bell beside her red offering bowl in front of Kroger.  

I said, "Welcome back!"  

Her face registered surprise.  She grinned broadly and said, "Thank you!  Merry Christmas!"

"Merry Christmas and Happy Hanukkah!"

I know for a lot of people this time of year yanks hard at their heart strings.  I know, because I've experienced lonely Yuletides.  Even now, I sense the angst in myself as I anticipate a Christmas with family and friends.

For a lot of Americans, Christmas is a routine that includes travel.  It's finagling finances to afford the gifts, the cards, the eating out, and the long drive or airport ordeal.  

It's also finagling time.  Which relatives and friends will we visit?  How long do we visit them?  How many books should we take to read?   (The answer:  zero, but take them anyway.)

Visiting relatives can be stressful as everyone knows who has attempted it.  It's stressful having me visit. 

Being knocked out of our daily routine makes busy the peace that should dominate our Christmas experience.  

I wonder if Christmas time for everyone, no matter where they are in life, no matter what they believe, creates a shift, even if it is a moment of ever-so-slight good will.

I have always loved this time of year.  I imagine Christmas time being the climax of a freshly lived, annual holiday story.

The story begins with Thanksgiving, giving thanks, and the action rises for days until it climaxes on Christmas Day.  

After the presents are opened, a strange sensation occurs when the action in the holiday story falls.  Activity may go on as we depart our relatives or return gifts, but we sense some kind of letdown.  

The holiday story moves to its crowning denouement, which is New Year's Day, my favorite holiday, the Gentile Yom Kippur.  

That is the time when I reflect on the person I've been as I resolve to be better next year.  

I experience New Years Day the way I experience any good story I read, even during sad times, which are experienced as stories with sad, but never final, endings.

I have been transformed by stories I read.  Each time, I am transformed following those weeks that are the holiday story I live.

I pray all our stories are special this year.

Although I have not mentioned our God of love in this post, does it not radiate faith, hope, and love?  I hope it does.

Blessings…

THE BAPTIST IN ALL OF US

In the beginning, the elohim created skies and earth.

Welcome back.  A thought came to me this morning from my grandfather, the fundamentalist Baptist preacher who was mean, yet never cruel, and who believed that only Baptists went to heaven.

It was a thought, but it comes to me as a voice from the past. 

We all have the voices of our relatives, ministers, teachers, coaches, and other significant adults in our heads.  As we grow older, the addition of children and friends can make our minds into one crowded room, a raucous cacophony of the past, especially if all the voices are clamoring at the same time.

Fortunately, mine is a disciplined mind that has the stronger voice of my Self musing to a listening me who considers what is being mused.  Occasionally, however, that Self''s voice sounds a lot like my grandfather.

It happened a few minutes before I began writing this post. 

So please indulge me as I write a little about Granddaddy.

My grandfather attended Southern Baptist seminary after returning home from the Philippines during World War II.  

I surmise that at that time, landmarkism was still lingering as an influential force among Baptist professors and students.

I surmise this because my grandfather was a landmarkist.  He believed what James Graves taught in the late 19th Century: Baptists are the true New Testament church on earth. 

Baptists only preach the gospel and "get it right" while everyone else "gets it wrong."

Furthermore, the only baptism recognized by God happens in a Baptist church.

This might be the place where a lot of Baptists got lost.  While Methodists were saving people, Baptists were saving souls. What made Billy Graham a great preacher, in the minds of many Baptists, was that he saved souls. 

If the souls saved died soon thereafter of malnutrition, well... it's on them!

To save souls, the words you use to communicate your message are crucial.  The words must be true and come straight out of the (KJV) New Testament.  

Of course, the evidence that you were saved was that you attended a Baptist church, you believed a flat earth theology, and you practiced droll piety until you nearly perfected it. 

This kind of Christianity was about going to heaven, as if any of us had a say in that possibility!  It was not about revealing our God of love in the way we treat other people.

It preached transformation:  from a person who was lost and going to hell into a person who is saved and going to heaven.

It did not preach this transformation: from people who love imperfectly into people through whom God loves.

I think my grandfather believed that John the Baptist was the first Baptist.  I recall also that he believed the King James Version of the Bible was not only inspired, but the Greek, Hebrew, and Aramaic texts may have been retroactively translated from the KJV.

That voice about Baptists being the only way to God came back to me this morning.  

I tend to scoff at such notions:  Only way to God, indeed! 

How anybody can think that way after reading theology, studying the Bible, and living in a world informed by science?  
It strikes me as peculiar.

Theology today is so much better than it was when brothers and sisters believed God lived in the sky and the stars were lights, not suns.  Biblical studies are so much better now that we have scientific ways to compare texts, and we link history to the literature of the Bible.

Indeed, science has done us all a favor by extricating superstition from our faith.  In the past, the Reformers believed transubstantiation and indulgences were superstitions based on reason and on textual interpretation.

The Reformers and Radical Reformers did not see their own superstitions.

I am a Baptist.  I come from the Radical Reformation tradition.  Worse still, I am a Southern Baptist.  An ordained Southern Baptist minister, no less!  I come from a tradition that began over the acceptance of slavery.  

Few denominations are as heavily laden with superstition and ignorance as mine.

I ask myself often, why am I a Baptist?  I have admired the Anglican Church for decades.  Since Pope Francis received the vote, I admire Catholicism.  Both of those traditions are rich in history and wisdom.

Here's why: there's a simplicity that defines what a Baptist is.  
That simplicity exists as a hope for all believers.  I am hopelessly drawn to that.

We love religious liberty; at least we did before the larger part of us who are Southern Baptists started acting like moral and spiritual inquisitors.  

However, being a Baptist is knowing that all people have the right to believe whatever their conscience tells them.  Why? 

Because we Baptists believe in the competency of the person to make up his or her own mind, since our God of love comes to each of us and loves each of us in God's unique way.  

So let's say I'm an atheist, right?  Then our God of love is coming to me as no God at all and loving me, keeping me, and beatifying me as mysteriously as if I were any other person of faith.

So being an atheist is okay.  By talking or writing books about no God, I am talking about God, nonetheless, and thereby talking with God.

I love religious liberty.  It's spare, so I'll keep it.  It's spare, so I have more fun appreciating the diverse flourishes all peoples of faith create in their worship.

Who am I to say they are merely flourishes?

Blessings...

A SABBATH WISH

In the beginning, the elohim created skies and earth.

May our God of love bless you, keep you, and heal you wherever you may be torn or troubled.

A CHRISTIAN PHILOSOPHY

In the beginning, the elohim created skies and earth.

Welcome back.  

It's almost Christmas time.  I hope everyone is as excited as I am about it.  I love the lights, the songs, and the stories even more.

Christmas is a nice metaphor about reality and God.  In reality, Christmas is just another day in the calendar.  

In fact, December 25 is just another turn of our world as it orbits the sun.  

In fact, a day is a name we give to a turn of the world as it orbits the sun.

All that would pass unnoticed if human minds had not given names to these events.

You see, I think the nature of reality explains itself.  Anything that happens has a natural cause.  If we do not discover the cause, we will if we keep looking.  We do not need any supernatural agents to explain anything.

That way of thinking is called monism.

Now, monism is about oneness, but it is complicated.  To account for the plurality in the nature of reality (the phrase nature of reality implies duality, doesn't it?) philosophers have conceived of different monisms.  

Imagine that.  The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, which can be accessed online for free, explains different monisms.

Yes, December 25th is a day, but when we think of it, imagine it, experience it... that day...for centuries even before the Christ...that day with all of its oneness as a day is transcended by so much more.  We add the magic to that day.

Our faith imbues the reality with magic.  That is why Christianity can assimilate any philosophy because it is more about love than reason.  

Faith and reason are in a dynamic relationship with one another.  

We take a leap of faith where reason cannot move us.  We leap back to reason when faith tumbles down cliffs that fall into superstition and silliness.

But love transcends faith and reason.  We who are Christians experience the mystery of life as love’s conundrum.

Someone has said that when we stare into the abyss, we see it staring back…or maybe we see a reflection.  Some just see the abyss. 

We who love our God of love see all that and more, even a shadow of Being-itself within which we live, breathe, and have our being.

I look forward with glad expectation to that mere day to which our world turns and beyond.

Blessings…

PERSON OF THE YEAR: POPE EVERLASTING

In the beginning, the elohim created skies and earth.

Welcome back. 

I took some time off recently as life swarmed upon me these past few days like angry hornets pouring out of their troubled nest. That happens a lot when you are a teacher, and so many responsibilities overtake you and sting you. But I am back where I should be.

I just love this pope!

When NBC revealed Time Magazine's possible covers for their Person of the Year--the notorious, the nefarious, and the nice--was there doubt in anyone's mind that Pope Francis would be chosen?

It amazes me the fuss over this pope as if he has brought something new into the world. He is not bringing anything new, but something that has existed since the Big Bang of creation. He is showing us what God's love looks like in a life.

Jesus did this two thousand years ago, so we are seeing nothing new. But it seems new because it comes to us as good news. Pope Francis, like Jesus, is giving us permission to love one another.

He's saying, "It's okay to be humble and kind. Go ahead.  Show love to strangers. You don't have to hate. You don't have to own the most toys. You need not prove your self worth is greater than others.  What a terrible burden that is to bear. Love one another instead as I have loved you and as your Father in eternity loves you."

Jesus of Nazareth gave us that permission two thousand years ago. This excitement over Pope Francis reveals a deep and abiding hunger for who Christ was on earth. 

He manifests to the world what the church should have been revealing for centuries everlasting.

Pope Francis is right-on when he remind us that the love of Christ is beyond doctrine.

It amazes me that Jesus-in-the-world is so popular even after centuries of distortion. Compare that Jesus to the popular theology of Jesus the Stern, Judging, Heterosexual Son of God who would never want his government to be just and fair and who will make you wealthy if you follow him--compare Him to him. 

He is more like the Jesus who rode into Jerusalem on a donkey, not the bloody conquering octavius-caesar-christ that John of Patmos imagined and many of our fundamentalist brothers and sisters celebrate.

We know so little about Jesus. We know not how he looked, his height, his weight, yet only what the earliest Christians wrote for us. What remains is so obscure yet everlasting.

We know all we need to know to make real our God of love in this good, beautiful, sad, cruel, indifferent, awesome world.

I love what I see in Pope Francis. Apparently, so does Time Magazine.

Indeed, I know I want to be like that Jesus whom I see in our brother Pope Francis, for that Jesus has shown our God of love in the flesh.

By the way, I haven't forgotten that I owe a post about reconciling Christianity with Monism.

Blessings...

A WORD ABOUT PHILOSOPHY

In the beginning, the elohim created skies and earth.

Welcome back. I have been writing about Nietzsche’s philosophy as a good basis for our faith.  I now turn to how we can be monists and believe in God. 

For those of you who are philosophers, this should be interesting.  I assure you, that you will hear nothing new from me.

As far as ontology goes, the study of being, philosophy seems to have exhausted itself.  Philosophy has been relegated to the analysis of sentences, the meaning of words, and logic. 

I see books on Barnes and Noble shelves where philosophers are writing about the philosophy of a popular novel, movie, or character. 

Are there any paradigm shaking philosophers today?  Will that be possible in the future? 

We have had all kinds of philosophers from the Pre-Socratics to existentialists to logical positivists.  Recently, philosophy has turned its gaze to phenomenon or things as they appear to be more than things as they be.  I am using the subjunctive mood here to make a point.

We do not really know fully what things truly are, what is the meaning of life, and what it means to say that anything exists.    

Of course, I stopped reading philosophy long ago.  I do not know what is current today.  Maybe someone has come along who has explained the nature of being for us all. 

I doubt it.  I have always preferred existentialism and pragmatism for those philosophies are concerned with how to live.

But we have been pondering God.  The idea of divinity adds another arcane layer to an already perplexing reality. 

The question I seek to answer is this: can we be monists and Christians?  Is monism after all the best basis for Christianity?

Blessings…

ARE WE SHADOWS?

In the beginning, the elohim created skies and earth.

Welcome back. I have been writing about Nietzsche’s philosophy as a good basis for our faith.

Make no mistake; our faith has to be explained to other people.  Many of them will be very intelligent.  

If our faith sounds superstitious to the intelligent, nonreligious, unaffiliated people whose ranks are swelling, then it will die out. 

The world needs at least one faith that preaches our God of love.  

The world needs Jesus who shows us what God’s love looks like... in the world.  

That must never die.  Humanity needs love.

It would be a shame if a thousand years from now Christianity was relegated to a dictionary of famous superstitions because no generation protested the lie that the gospel includes supernatural magic as a part of its message.

Giving Christianity a philosophical basis should propel our faith into the future.  How do we begin? 

Let us begin with shadows.  Let us go to the Bible.  Paul wrote about “seeing through a dark glass,” or in another translation, “seeing through a mirror dimly.” 

He did not write that because God told him to write it.  He wrote it because Paul, like so many other human beings, was a thinking man.  He knew philosophy.  His statement is very much like something Plato would write.

Paul lived in a Greek world.  Paul was a writer from the city.  

Unlike Jesus, who was a country preacher, Paul was educated and wielded a powerful pen.

Paul was also a nice Jewish boy who was pretty good at assimilating his gospel he received and using Greek thought to explain it.

Does not his poetic way of expressing perception appear meaningful to us?  In some translations the shadow or darkness or dimness is either in the one who sees, or the way one sees the mirror, or the mirror.

There is one constant, and that is the mirror.  Think about looking at the world through a mirror now.  What do you see?  How does it look?

What if you were near sighted or far sighted or nearly blind looking at the mirror?  What if you were totally blind and had to rely on someone else to look at the mirror and then explain it to you?

What if you wore shades while looking at the mirror.

The idea here is this: the reality we study is not crystal clear and certainly not to all of us.

  

Blessings…

SHADOWS UPON SHADOWS

In the beginning, the elohim created skies and earth.

Welcome back.  This morning, during my walk I ambled through a night illuminated by what I at first perceived to be a nearly full moon.  

As it turned out later, when my sleepy eyes cleared, I saw the moon was full.  I do not see as well with sleepy eyes showing me the way.

I did see acutely the darker moon-shadow of the wooden rail that prevents pedestrians from falling off the wooden bridge stretching over the creek coursing beneath the island road near my home.

I thought about shadows then, and how outer space seems like a vast shadow bespeckled with countless pearls.  

When earth turns us away from our star’s light, the shadow we call night strikes us as being lovely, infinite, and ineffable. 

The moon reveals shadows upon shadows.  

We would be in utter darkness if there were no light, and we could live in it, for our bodies would have evolved so we might survive. 

We have brains and hands.  We create our own light with the technology that has evolved with our bodies in this world. 

Lately, I have been writing about Nietzsche's view about earth, sky, and outer space being all the reality there is.  I agree with him totally.  

He has an atheist's view, and such a view may very well keep 

Christianity alive and well for the next one thousand years.

We must be monists. Earth, the sky, and outer space are devoid of supernatural beings. 

There may be extra-terrestrial beings.  They would use technology, not magic, to solve their problems too. 

Indeed, we must be materialists, not in the sense of acquiring riches and expensive stuff, but in the philosophical sense of acknowledging that reality is devoid of the supernatural.

Because the supernatural is superstition, Christians should impugn it.  

The supernatural as a requirement for salvation is not the gospel.  We do not require believing in the supernatural in order to love as Jesus loved and live as Jesus lived.

Supernatural events are the stuff of legends for us.  For ancient people, however, the supernatural imbued everything written and imagined by them. 

In ancient times, more people assumed gods came and went on earth, impregnated women, and broke natural laws than people who did not.

From ancient writing, it would seem that everyone believed chariots can fly, snakes can talk, virgins birth baby boys, and monsters swallow ships whole.  No one would question that.

The concept of natural law simply did not exist so only exceptional people would have questioned miracles.

We know better today.  Those of us who cling to the supernatural are sorely misled.  Our faith sounds absurd when we insist that a pre-scientific world view is true and our scientific world view is not.

The way out of this mess is monism.  We can acknowledge that there are no gods, no demiurges, no half-gods, no other kinds of supernatural beings, and no supernatural events.

The supernatural may easily serve the gospel as a vehicle for imparting the wisdom of God in stories and poetry, but no more than that in reality.

And yet, when I write about the supernatural in that way, I seem to demean it.  In reality, I believe they tell the truth in ways scientific data and theories never can. 

It will ever be so until a natural law is broken and verified by a lot of people.  

Part the Atlantic Ocean with the wave of a hand.  Let us all walk to Europe on dry land, and we will have our evidence.

So that is where we are.  But I have been writing of poetry and fiction. 

What we need is our faith to be grounded in philosophy so it will speak to the best hearts and minds of the next millennium. 

God should always be a possibility for anyone who ponders the meaning of life. 

If we insist on the supernatural to make our case, then God becomes less than possible.  God becomes improbable.

I do not believe it is such a great challenge to make this case.   We really do not have to go much farther or further than our Bibles.

Shadows are a good starting place if we want to make sense of God in a world devoid of gods.  Plato started with shadows in his myth of the cave. 

I think I shall start there tomorrow….with shadows, not Plato.

Blessings…

NIETZSCHE SAVES: FROM IRRATIONAL FEARS

In the beginning, the elohim created skies and earth.

Welcome back. 

My job is pretty tough.  I do not teach in a nice place with wonderful working conditions.  

Many of the students I teach want to be thugs and criminals, few want to learn, and of those few they follow the T&S loud-crowd.

I get cussed out everyday.  So do the other teachers.  The profanity does not bother me so much, although it can be quite tiresome at times.  It is the incessant, militant hostility to my role as a teacher that wears me down.

My students hate teachers, learning, and school.  They utter to my peers and me all the nasty, threatening, mean, and disrespectful verbage they have wanted to say to traditional public school teachers with no consequences.

If some of them can get a teacher to cry or quit, they have had a good day. 

Worse still is the incessant violation of rules.  Couple that with students ignoring teacher directions and you have a frustrating environment for professional educators.

Students are loud, restive, angry, hungry, and oppositional at every turn.  

I use humor to make it through the day.  Most other teachers quit.  The ones who stay do the best they can with grinding resolve.

I wonder sometimes if all the stress is not affecting my sleep.  I have been perturbed of late with an irrational fear that popped into my head.

Recently, I memorized Poe's poem, “The Raven.”  I did it for a kick and because I wanted to know if my memory is okay at my age.   

Every day I have been reciting “The Raven,” and other poems, just to keep them all fresh in my mind.  I never know when I might be called upon to recite a poem that I teach.

Indeed, at the school where I teach now, I often recite a poem when one my students starts rapping about drugs, sex, and lock and load.

I do not recall if this irrational fear came to me in a dream or in an indelible impression, but somehow an idea got into my head that if I ever recited "The Raven" word for word, without a mistake, then I would drop dead.  

This irrational fear has been in the back of my mind for weeks now.

Naturally, I began working really hard to recite “The Raven” word for word, perfectly, with no mistakes or mispronunciations just to prove the irrational fear is nonsense.

Of course, I did not drop dead when I did recite it.  Obviously…

Nor did I die that day.  Obviously…

That is how an irrational fear comes to us, as something impossible to attain.  Often an irrational fear comes with a sensed ritual built into it and a feeling of disaster or great reward to follow if the ritual is executed perfectly.

But it is merely an irrational fear.  The content has no affect on the natural world of my organs whatsoever.  It is not efficacious in my physiology in the sense that reciting the poem would have ever killed me.

If I had died, it would have been an unfortunate coincidence.  Now, those are real.

Since I, obviously, did not die, what happened next?  My mind began to play another trick on me.  

Questions began to emerge.  Did I really recite the poem flawlessly?  Did I? 

Moreover, a suggestion that there are different versions of the poem occurred to me.  

So now I must find the original version that Poe printed in The American Review in 1945?

For me, such an exercise would be a waste of time.  I know the end result would be that I wasted my time after I took the time to find the original poem and then recited it or any version of the "The Raven" perfectly and did not die.

I know this because there is no supernatural menace in the world.  That impression comes from my brain.  What triggered it?  Stress?  Getting older?  The holidays are coming?

Who knows?  Whatever the answer, it lays within this natural world and the explanation will come from sound psychology not superstitious doctrines.

Blessings...

NIETZSCHE SAVES: FROM WITCHES

In the beginning, the elohim created skies and earth.

Welcome back.  I am writing about how Nietzsche can save Christianity so that it remains strong and true for the next 1000 years.

I saw the movie Carrie recently.  I was telling a dear friend about how much I enjoyed this new version and how interesting were the differences between it and the first one. 

I asked if she was going to see it. 

She told me that she and I did not agree about spiritual matters. 

That reply puzzled me.  I already knew that.  She is more conservative than I about religious beliefs, but I was talking about a movie, not religion. 

Then she said that she did not watch witchcraft movies because she was under spiritual attack by certain people whom she knew to be witches.

I did not know what to say to that.  My friend is very intelligent and educated.  Most people who refrain from watching horror movies do so because they do not like that kind of suspense.

I just said, "Really?  Wow.  It’s not really a witchcraft movie.  It’s about telekinesis."

My friend was adamant that the movie would weaken her resistance to a spiritual attack. 

I respected her opinion.  So I changed the subject.

There is a way of healing here for anyone beset by the irrational fears of the ancient world.  If Nietzsche is right, and I just know he is, my friend, also knowing that, would never fear witchery since it does not exist.  

Her fear exists and that is bad enough without being tormented by imaginary forces.

I have students who believe in voodoo, the Illuminati, demon possession, and other such nonsense.  

Have we not enough to fear from the real world without elevating our make believe fears to the level of reality?

Nietzsche saves us from that.  

Our God of love saves us too, but within the ancient context of believers beset by demonic forces. 

Nietzsche makes a very convincing case that all those disembodied ghosts and demons are hooey.  That goes very well with the nature of our God of love.

God ministers to us in a world beset by disease, natural disasters, accidents, and human wickedness.  A world of undetectable, imperious beings does not reflect a world created by our God of love.

Anything that is undetectable and unproven is make-believe.  Make-believe can be fun.  Stories from a make-believe world give us wisdom.

But we have nothing to fear from this world except, as a great man said, fear itself. 

I have overcome irrational fears by confronting them head on with what I know to be true.  Next time, I will write about a recent irrational fear that I confronted. 

Blessings...

Happy Birthday John Medearis

To my brother and best friend, John Medearis, with whom I have spent hours innumerable communing with our God of love:  

Have a terrific personal new year.  


May this year be better than all the past years combined.  


May you spare sorrow and sport joy.

May your family be safe, well, and happy.

Blessings...

NIETZSCHE SAVES: FROM SUPERSTITION

In the beginning, the elohim created skies and earth.

Welcome back.  Normally, I do not write on the Bible Sabbath Day.  

It's nice to take a day off, but something has been jangling inside my head since I have been writing about Freddy Nietzsche.

The subtitle of my blog is "Christianity for the Next 1000 years."  

I truly believe that Christians must accept the natural life we live if we want our faith to avoid going the way of Zeus and his gang.

Our message will mean nothing if it sounds ignorant and stupid.

I do not write that in a mean way.  I am writing about how our faith is perceived, for the world needs us to truly be Christians and not these blood drenched, hate filled blasphemers.  

The only way the world of men and women should judge us is by our love for them and one another.  

Yet, they are being told that the only way they can share in our love is to believe ancient superstitions such as:

·        The world is six thousand years old…plus the few decades since fundamentalists began making this claim.

·        All organisms appeared in their present forms by the word of a sky god.

·        Adam and Eve birthed all the people on earth, or they had help from their children minus one.

·        People and dinosaurs co-existed.  People were vegetarians.  Luckily, the dinosaurs were too.

·        Sky people descended to earth and had sex with human women.  Gay men, black people, and gay black men were born.  Carnivorous dinosaurs may have been born too.

·        A flood drowned everyone and everything except eight people on a boat and two (or seven?) of every kind of animal.

·        Noah, his wife, three sons, and their wives account for all the people on earth.

·        One of Noah’s sons, ironically named Ham, was cursed by Noah so gay men, black people, and gay black men started up again—this time without the carnivorous dinosaurs.

·        Organisms preserved on the boat account for all life on earth today.

·       Fundamentalist Christians will suddenly be kidnapped into the sky, any second now, by a sky god.

·        The sky god's son will return to earth as a conquering Caesar, riding on a horse with an army of horse bound, pissed off good people and win a military engagement against an enemy, the Anti-Son of Sky God, armed to the teeth with tanks, drones, and nukes.

·        The sky god is our God of love.

·        The sky god’s son is Jesus, the Prince of Peace, delivering a bloodbath in the final chapter of earth’s existence so Jesus will govern a new planet as a benevolent dictator under a new sky.

·        All who are saved, and whose relatives perished in the bloodbath, are exultant with nary a feeling of remorse.

·        Everyone also rejoices that their relatives and loved ones will join other hardheaded infidels inside their benevolent dictator’s concentration camps built within a lake of fire.

·        A sacred anthology of 66 books contains no errors.  Not one. 

·        Places where the sacred anthology says the earth does not move and stars are lights in the sky are only apparent errors.

·        Apparent errors are not errors, apparently.

·        A literal interpretation of that sacred anthology may contain a few errors, and that’s a mighty big maybe with very few errors…no more than three.

·        ...and so on and so forth...

But seriously folks, if no one can participate in the love that comes from our God of love unless they believe such nonsense, then our faith is doomed to the pages of Webster’s Dictionary of Popular Superstitions.

So how does Nietzsche liberate Christianity?  The answer lies in what I am about to post next.

Blessings…