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...

Village of the Damned

In the beginning, the elohim created skies and earth.

Welcome.  I hope my post today finds you well and happy.  For fun, I've been writing about monsters in the Bible in keeping with our recent celebration of all things horrific.

GIBEAH THE GRISLY

If you ever stray into a town, you would do well to avoid Gibeah.  A lot of Bible lovers, Bible preachers, and such seem to be unaware of its location on the Word of God map.  

I can understand why.  Tis a grisly tale told.

You can locate this town in Judges 19.  In Hebrew chronology, the story falls after Lot's story.  It can be said that Lot's story was so poignant that it had to be told twice.  

A BAD CHOICE

Once upon a time, a Levite was traveling in that region of Israel bounded by one of the twelve tribes of Israel known as the Benjamites.  The Levite sojourned with his second degree wife, called a concubine, and his servant.  It was getting late on the road.  They were getting tired.

The servant suggested they stay in Jebus, which was Jerusalem according to a scribe’s comment.  

The Levite declined, there were too many foreigners there.  He wanted to rest among his kin folk.

A DELIVERANCE HODOWN

They arrived in the town of Gibeah and waited in the open town square.  None of the relatives invited them to their house to stay overnight.  

That is always a bad sign in the ancient world, when hospitality goes awry.  It signals something wicked some way is coming.

A farmer, returning home, invited them to his place, warning them that it was not a good idea to stay in the open town square overnight.

SODOM NEARLY RETOLD

From here on the story follows the Lot story with a few exceptions.

Not all the men, only the base fellows, surrounded the farmer's home demanding that he send out, "the man who came into your house, that we may know him."  

The farmer, like Lot, went outside to confront his neighbors.  He offered his virgin daughter and the second degree wife for an evening of rape and recreation.  

Let me share his own words, "Behold, here are my virgin daughter and his concubine; let me bring them out now.  Ravish them and do with them what seems good to you, but against this man do not do so vile a thing."

THERE'S VILE AND THEN THERE'S VILE

I wonder if the extra inducement of the second degree wife was actually discussed or did the farmer presume.  The base fellows took the concubine and raped her all night long until they killed her.  

This again is story telling at its finest.  You can always tell the greatness of a story teller in the details told.  

In the morning, the farmer opened the door and saw the dead concubine’s hands over the threshold.  Now, that's a detail that is unforgettably vile.  

WITNESS OF THE TWELVE

So the Levite cuts her up into twelve pieces and shows her throughout Israel.  It was so grisly that the scribe who added the detail about Jebus being Jerusalem may have added this comment:  

"Such a thing has never happened or been seen from the day that the people of Israel came up out of land of Egypt until this day:  consider it, take counsel, and speak."

I agree.  We who are alive today know such true horror as this exists in our world.  Let us follow the scribe’s advice.

YAHWEH TO THE RESCUE

By the way, the other tribes were not happy to see what the Levite showed them.  They decided to make war on their kinfolk.

Judah, the tribe that took over this military operation, had a hard time destroying Gibeah’s army.  They got whipped in a couple of battles.  

The sought Yahweh to assume command.  He did.  The result was that they destroyed Gibeah: all of its men, beasts, and property. 

Think of all the blood that would have been spared if Yahweh had merely bombed Gibeah with brimstone.

Next time, a few more monsters of the Bible and the worst of all…in my opinion...

Blessings…

Monster Villages of the Bible

In the beginning, the elohim created skies and earth.

Welcome back.  Continuing the theme: Monsters of the Bible, I shall turn to two particularly nasty towns.  

One town everyone has heard about and the other, well...probably not.  

Imagine an entire town where every single person is evil.  Is that possible?  In the story of Sodom it is.  We suspect Sodom must be pretty awful when Yahweh tells Abraham that he will spare Sodom if there are ten  righteous people in the town.  

That's right, folks, THE Yahweh: Hebrew sky god too holy for Moses to gaze upon face to face, so holy-other that Moses had to glimpse his glory as Yahweh was departing—that is the deity who stood before Abraham and may have eaten cheese with him.  

While Abraham convenes his tête-à-tête with Yahweh, two of Yahweh's messengers, or angels, go to Sodom.  

Of course, the angels had traveled with Yahweh from Cloud City where the rest of the heavenly host dwells in the sky.  

When Lot meets the angels, he urges them to come to his home.  It was dangerous for them to be outside in the city at night.

The townspeople showed up and asked that the messengers, or angels, be given to them for a night of rape and recreation.  Lot implored his fellow citizens to not act so wickedly.  

Genesis tells us that all the men of the village, young and old, came to Lot's home.  

Genesis tells us that every single man in town was wicked.  

Wow.  I for one have never found an exception where there were absolutely no exceptions to generalizations concerning a group of people.  

Even in evil towns in the United States like Salem, Massachusetts in 1692 or Rosewood, Florida in 1923, there were good people who had to endure and survive the tumultuous violence of evil men and women in their towns.

However, this is story telling at its finest with a message.  The story is so good, it remains with us today.  The message is not so clear to people who know little about hospitality violations.

Lot goes outside and offers his virgin daughters.  No Father’s Day card for Lot next June.  That sigh of relief we hear within would be the not-so-virgin daughters in Lot's home.  

The Sodomites menace Lot.  They press him against his door after uttering ugly words about him.  The angels yank Lot back inside and smite the townspeople with blindness.

And we know the rest of the story with its salt-of-the earth ending.  

There be monsters in that town. 

Next time, a terrible town most Bible lovers have never heard about and probably do not want to know shall be recounted.

Blessings…