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…