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…

Nietzsche Saves...How?

In the beginning, the elohim created skies and earth.

 Welcome back.  

Christianity today owes a lot to Frederick Nietzsche.  Ironically, he despised Christianity.

Yet he gave us a way to think about the world that frees us from past condemnations and makes it more logical to follow our God of love.

Nietzsche wrote about being followers of the earth.  By that he meant that this life we live, that we examine scientifically, that we experience with our senses...this life... is the only reality.

I agree.  To be good Christians we must be monists. 

We can speculate about some perfect Platonic world out there, or buried within matter, but it is all philosophical make believe until we have evidence otherwise.

This world is all there is.  This universe is all there is.  There may be other universes, but they would be natural, following natural laws.  

There are no ghosts, vampires, zombies, angels, demons, flying prophets, and aliens who can breach those laws governing space and time, which include the speed of light.  The latter may be possible technologically, but the former just do not happen.

We live in a world of energy.  It is vast and mysterious.  There are no angels or demons out to get us or save us.  Everything supernatural exits in our imaginations.  This, we live, is it.  

So what do we do?  How shall we then live a life of faith?

One thing we can do is acknowledge that we are one among countless other evolutionary outcomes.  We may be the end of where simian life forms are evolving unless we become hard pressed by nature and require mutations that change our bodies. 

Maybe we will change our bodies with the technology that is evolving with us.  Maybe our technology will keep us "being-fruitful-and-multiplying" a million years past our overdue extinction date.

We must be monists because we cannot afford as a species to be superstitious anymore.  Any philosophical system that does not give us the intellectual wherewithal to preserve our planet is not worth a plugged nickel.

Any theological system that gives us the foolhardy wherewithal to discard our planet for a new sky and a new earth that exists only in the imagination is not worth a plugged penny.

We must acknowledge that most ancient thought is superstitious. 

There is freedom in finally acknowledging the way things are.

What connects us is our tradition.  It is the focal point of the conversations we share with one another as we live out the commandment to love one another.

What connects us is our tradition.  What we need is to learn how to interpret it as earth people, not sky people.

Indeed, there would be no sky, if there were no earth. 

Nietzsche, by persuading us that at the core of our reality, we are earth people is all too liberating to me.  Knowing that beyond earth and the natural universe within which it orbits our sun there is nothing that compels our veneration is all too liberating to me too. 

In that sense, Nietzsche saves. 

Next time, I will write about different ways people think about God and how we can think and pray ourselves out of what appears to be a monist prison.

Blessings…

Nietzsche Saves

In the beginning, the elohim created skies and earth. 

Welcome back.  I hope you are in a time in your life when you feel fully blessed.  

I just heard an owl call out.  It is so early in the morning now.

 My daily perambulation against this morning's stiff, cold wind that nibbled through my layered attire has passed.  I sit in a warm room with only the sound of a clock ticking and my keyboard tapping.  It soothes me.

I am here feeling such joy at being alive.  Despite my job that would wither away lesser mortals, I do feel fully blessed this morning, for I dwell with my greatest loves.  

My greatest love stirs, having been awakened by our moaning cat.  She and I will settle into our morning routine of coffee drinking, breakfast preparing, newspaper reading, and eggs.  

My other love, confirmed by my greatest love, is Being alive in life through any manifestation of love--for my love is Love who also stirs in the cold wind, moves in the night sky, the twittering earth, and the raccoon couple I saw scampering across the street where the seam between lamplight and nighttime stretched over pavement and grass.

Sometimes any singular life, such as mine is, surrounded by a world's woe, must name those spaces where Love dwells.  Our most profound experience of what we call eternity occurs there.

This morning, before I heard the owl, I had been thinking about Frederick Nietzsche and how my faith owes a tremendous debt to his writings.  

Anyone who reads his books knows what it means when someone says they have fallen under his spell at least once in their lives.  

I was such a one.  It is rare that I am utterly surprised by a writer.  Nietzsche wrapped my mind around his prose for a few years.  I read most of his books, and I read other writers searching to gain insight in what the heck Nietzsche meant.  

I sought a system where there was none.  Nietzsche expressed spontaneous insight in a time when the Europe was casting off all sky gods.

Here in the United States, more of us are just beginning to catch up.  When was the last time you saw a NFL player score a touchdown and point upwards in celebration?

Today, Nietzsche would be drowned out except among intellectuals.  His writings are for our generation and others in the future.  

I was so under his spell that when I was in seminary, I wore a shirt to class that said: NIETSCHE SAVES.  

A friend from Chattanooga, who made t-shirts, misspelled his name.  I wore the shirt anyway as a joke.  No one at seminary noticed, or if they did, no one said anything.

I was proud to be the only Tennessean attending this Southern Baptist seminary in Marin County.  Nearly everybody else was from Texas.  I regret that I did not represent myself better academically.  I was a country boy dropped into the biggest city I had ever seen.  I sought adventures rather than good grades.  

This was the year 1983 when A Clean and Well Lighted Place bookstore in Larkspur Landing, CA sold black hats with author's names emblazoned in gold letters.  Naturally, I snatched up the one with Nietzsche's name and wore it on campus.

I laugh at myself when I recall my seminary days.  I lived richly, thought myself to be quite the theological overman, and I met wonderful people.

The campus was ethereal in its loveliness.  Many nights I sat on Chapel Hill and stared at San Francisco glittering across the bay.  Being-Itself smothered me there and managed to somehow cram itself into this memory that makes my heart race to recall it.

Next time, I will write about how Nietzsche saves.

Blessings...

Absolutely Most Awful Monsters of the Bible

In the beginning, the elohim created skies and earth.

Welcome back.  I hope everyone's holiday was as restful as mine.  

This is my final installment of Monsters of the Bible in keeping with the recent, yet now faraway, celebration of Halloween.  

I really do need to plan these things before the holidays so I can write a little more deliberately.

The absolutely most awful monsters of the Bible are certain people who read it and preach it.

Let's face it.  There are a lot of people who read the Bible who can be very scary.  They are no different than volatile Muslim fanatics exploding themselves, and anyone else within dynamite distance, over a sarcastic comment about their book.

There are a lot of people who preach the Bible who can be as scary as a maniacal Muslim imam.

There are two kinds of monsters who emerge among fanatics. There are monsters who say, "Boo!" and monsters who burn other people.

MONSTERS WHO SAY, "BOO!"

We've all seen them.  The names have changed, but the deeds are the same.  Most of the deeds are expressions of condemnation.  

John Darby of the 19th century despised the world so much he imagined the rapture, a supernatural escape hatch that only his theological kind might flee through, and then he imagined a scenario where his god murders lots of people.  

Yes, people believe this rubbish today.  We recently had a president who may have geared his Middle Eastern policy on this lousy doctrine.  Boo!

Pat Robertson and his 700 Club Christians pray for jets to crash so their imaginary theological enemies might die...of course...along with the 700 Club members who might happen to be flying on that jet that day.  Boo!

Westboro Baptist members picket the funerals of our national human treasure sacrificed in war.  Boo!

Get the picture?

MONSTERS WHO BURN OTHER PEOPLE

Some monsters read the Bible and are inspired to murder our God's children.

The list is long, but below are honorable mentions:

Those who stoned Stephen in Acts

Those who burned heretics after the Edict of Milan

Those who murdered Jewish people

Martin Luther and John Calvin

Those who burned Protestants

Those who burned Roman Catholics

Bloody Hank VIII, Bloody Mary, and Bloody Beth

Puritans in Europe 

Puritans in America

Puritans in Salem, MA

John Brown

Hitler

Jim Jones

These are quite prominent in the way they read the Bible and then killed people in order to express their fervent desire to serve their lord.

They were certainly not acting as disciples of Jesus and his father of love.

So if you are reading the Bible today and the voices from it are not telling you to love your enemies, but to kill them, then put the book down and go to a shrink before you become a monster.

Blessings...

The Penultimate Monster of the Bible

In the beginning, the elohim created skies and earth.

Welcome back and thanks for reading.  In the spirit of Halloween, I've been writing about Monsters of the Bible.  Like any topic touching on scripture, this requires more than one post.  

The Bible has a generous portion of monster stories served within its pages as we have seen, but two monsters are the worst.  

One is scarier than the other, but I am saving it for last.

We are told to fear God.  As theological and reading sophistication grow upon us, we become aware that to fear God is not to be afraid of God, but to revere God.

However, taking the Bible literally, we must be mindful that there are places in the Bible where God is a menacing psychopath were he a man, and we would be terribly afraid.

Now, as I've written before many times, our God of love is not the Hebrew sky god.  Our tradition begins with that god, and as tradition, the stories about that god can be insightful.  

Indeed, Jesus told different stories about God.  His stories show our God of love's nature is revealed in our adoration, our love, and our trust.  

Our God of love is never to be feared...you know...like a loving daddy who is never ever ever a child abuser--for such evil can never be in this father's nature.

Besides, knowing that the one true God is a God of love, we can read those stories about the Hebrew sky god and learn a lot about ourselves.  

Let's face the truth.  In the stories, Yahweh is a monster.

He commits genocide.  He murders every man, woman, child, and (for my fundamentalist brothers and sisters) fetus on the planet short of eight people and two (or seven) of every animal on the planet.  Now, that's evil Hitler might envy.

Did every single man, woman, child, and fetus in Sodom deserve to die?  Really?  Yahweh showered the entire population with fire and brimstone.  

Why didn't he just smite certain individuals?  Although it might have hurt the local economy to have the baker who’s a psycho-rapist taken out, good people eventually would have learned how to make dough.

After persuading Moses to go back to Egypt and deliver his people from bondage, Yahweh meets him on the road to kill him.  

Had Moses' wife, Zipporah, not been around and not kept a flint handy to cut off Moses's foreskin to touch his feet with, Moses would have been out of a calling, out of the book of Exodus, out of Matthew's allusional birth narrative, and out of Cecil De Mille.  

The plagues seem harsh, unnecessary, and certainly not within the purview of our God of love.  Turning the Nile to blood and destroying that habitat for all the creatures living there inspires our desire for retribution akin to the anger we felt towards Saddam Hussein who bathed birds in oil.  Remember that?  

Killing all the first born of all the Egyptians and anyone else who did not have sheep blood smeared over their portals is just plain sicko?  That means the almost certain sympathizers among the Egyptians lost their babies too.  And what about those poor slaughtered sheep?

So who is more fiendish now, Pharaoh or Yahweh? 

When you think about it, if the fundamentalists are right, then Yahweh does not have to go to all this blood, sweat, and tears drama to show off his smite and might. 

Surely a god who can rapture people out of their cars, airplanes, and showers today could have raptured the Hebrews and dropped them into Canaan.  There would have been less fuss and bloodshed. 

The Egyptians still would have looked like fools and would have nary a clue where their slaves went.  Without the telegraph and telephone, they might have learned years later what happened to their slaves...maybe.

Most likely, they would have blamed the event on the wrath of Ra.

Now, that's how a supernatural God of love would act if our God of love reached into history and yanked its chains.

Think about how nice it would have been if those 19 slaves that first disembarked onto the shore of Jamestown had been raptured and returned to their homes instead.

A god who acts in the world is just like the rest of us.  He has to make choices.  He had to exert energy…somehow.

Any god who can drown the entire Egyptian army moments after his people cross the dry land of a parted sea can spend his energy rapturing any slave back home, or for that matter, rapture any slaver before he captures one single slave and set him on Gilligan’s Island. 

Why not?  With Yahweh, all things are possible, right?  If Yahweh were our God of love, the stories about him would have resembled the stories Jesus told of God.

However, Yahweh begins to distance himself from people and either urges them to do his dirty work or he condones the dirty work they do.  He is not a nice god of man.

So, for these and many other reasons, Yahweh gets my vote as the penultimate monster in the Bible.  

Next time: the ultimate Bible monster.

Blessings… 

  

Dishonorable Monster Mention

In the beginning, the elohim created skies and earth.

Welcome back.  There are a couple of other monsters I failed to mention who should be included.  

Cain murdered his brother.  Yahweh was not too happy about it so he marked him.    

What else could he do?  There were so few people on the earth at the time that he could not cast him out of the garden of life.

Doing the math of being fruitful and multiplying cannot happen if you are dead.  

Confused?  So am I, but I love the story.  It provides possibilities for all kinds of writers.  See East of Eden by John Steinbeck for a terrific Cain and Abel story.  

The unnamed Pharaoh of Egypt who ordered the murder of Hebrew boys was a monster.  Here we have another man with lots of power willing to do anything to keep his power.  

He seems like the type of person who would be willing to shut down his own government if he does not get his way and laws restrain him from murder.

We have no idea how many Pharaoh killed.  The person who wrote of battles in Joshua gave us death stats, but the person who wrote of the slaughter of the innocents did not.  Nor do we know which Pharaoh this is.

Of course, his is a story about oppression and liberation.  Although none of it happened, it is all true.  Even today innocents are being slaughtered.  The names of the monsters only have changed.

Now, that we have books and footage of Hitler, how untrue could this monster possibly be?

This Pharaoh does not need to be named for he is all the Pharaohs who ever lived and ever bled people.  

This Pharaoh's fiendish ways were etched into Hebrew lore so unforgettably that the writer of the Gospel of Matthew used it in his birth narrative with King Herod as the perpetrator.

Josephus tells us a lot about those days before and after Jesus was born.  He never mentions that Herod ordered such a slaughter.  It seems unlikely since the symbolism of that deed would not escape Herod.

However, we know Herod was a monster.  He had his wife and son murdered--and others.  So let's include Herod the Grisly on the monster list for this slaughter of the innocents did not happen, but it is true, indeed.

Next time, the two worst monsters of the Bible.

Blessings...