What laws, and is that all?

 James, the brother of Jesus, was asked what gentiles must do to "obey the law". What laws must a christian obey? James' reply was that gentiles, in order to obey the laws Jesus referred to, follow the Noahide Covenant. What are the laws in the covenant from the "people side" of the equation?

• the positive injunction to set up courts that justly enforce social laws
• the prohibition of blasphemy, i.e. intolerance of worshipping the one God of the universe
• the prohibition of idolatry
• the prohibitions of grave sexual immorality, such as incest and adultery
• the prohibition of murder
• the prohibition of theft
• the prohibition of eating the limb of a live animal, which is a paradigm for cruelty

Courts

Let's go through them, starting with setting up courts. This is the only item that is not a prohibition. It does not define any specific punishments for crimes against the social laws. I'm assuming this has some latitude amongst people/groups as different desires will have different effects as they are removed or applied. I'm making a pretty large leap when I say that Jesus probably expected the courts would be on the more forgiving side and only dole out the most minimal of punishments needed to have the person comply with the laws of prohibition.

Blasphemy

Think of this as behavior that is rude and intolerant of God. Simply saying "Oh, my God" when surprised is not being blasphemous. Nor is "I swear to God." On the other hand, claiming god is non-existent or that god is meaningless would be. Having a discussion where one person take the side of the non-existence of God for the purposes of gaining a better understanding of God is not blasphemous, provided the person was doing it to gain a greater understanding and clarity on god.

Idolatry

Making an image of god is not idolatry. Adoring the image or object as equal or greater than god is idolatry. Making an image to remind you to think of god is a memory device. Thinking that same object represents god or that god is somehow imbued into the object is idolatry.

Incest and Adultery

Incest is defined as having sexual intercourse (of the type that could potentially produce a baby) between a person and their close relatives (anyone who would be the bloodline offspring of any of the person's grandparents... plus the grandparents themselves). Incest also includes sexual intercourse with one's own adopted children or anyone of their bloodline offspring. So, if a cousin has an adopted child, that sex with the adopted child would not be an act of incest.

Adultery is defined as a married person having sexual intercourse with a person other than their own spouse. Note, two unmarried people having sex is not adultery.

Murder

 The intentional killing of another human being is murder. Behaviors what the person could reasonably predict has a noteworthy probability of another person dying would be a grey area, but for the purpose of this list, would be included.

Theft

Taking something that does not belong to you, thereby denying the owner the right to enjoy it is theft. Borrowing something without permission and willingly returning it in the same or better condition before it is needed/wanted by the owner is not theft. So, as an example, taking someone's car while they are asleep and getting it serviced for them would not be theft, if it is returned before they wake up or need to drive anywhere.

Eating live animals

Removing a body part of a living animal, simply to eat it is cruel to the animal.  Plants are not afforded the same consideration.

These are the Noahide laws James referred to when he said that a gentile could follow the teachings of Jesus by obeying the law. According to Jesus, simply obeying the law is not enough. Give away what you own in this world to help those in need. (See the story of the rich man in the gospel.)

So, to be the best we can be, we must obey the laws listed above AND actively help those in need.

What's with the fear?

 I've been taught that God is a loving, personal god. People who describe their near-death experiences refer to a pervasive love. If that is so, then why do the leaders of the faith use fear and threats to demand conformity? "If you don't believe in Jesus, then you go to hell - forever." "You're a sinner and need to be saved." "God's vengeance will be on non-believers." "If you don't confess your sins (and do the penance), your sins will not be forgiven."

The basic process of acquiring and retaining membership seems to be:

1) acquire members... "God is love." "If you confess your belief, you will live forever." "Join us and feel included."

2) retain members... "You are a sinner and must confess if you want to go to heaven." "If you don't do what we say, God will cut you out."

What if it is more simple than all of this. What if God has created what we perceive as the universe to amuse/entertain. God truly loves what God created, and that includes everyone... not just the "faithful". Our souls, being part of the immaterial realm is outside of the physical realm (which is where time exists). Our souls will live on past our physical bodies. We don't need to be threatened by religious leaders to live on in the immaterial realm. It is part of God's creation.

So why have a religion? What do we gain by doing what God tells us to do? This universe is God's creation and God has a purpose for the whole thing. I don't know what that purpose is, but I can guess. My best guess is that God wants the universe to carry on and evolve. When we are hateful and destructive to one another, we risk destroying a part of God's creation. This is why God has revealed himself at various times to various cultures (each in a way that the culture would understand).

The message, while said in different ways at different times, comes down to the same tenets of our faith, namely: Love unconditionally. Encourage diversity. Be a humble servant.

Help. Love. Build. Coordinate. These are the things God wants for us. The things God wants us to avoid includes: selfishness, isolation, hierarchy, greed, and such. We need to spend less time threatening one another and controlling others with fear. This builds isolation instead of community.

Thoughts and Prayers

 The OED says "sympathy" is: feelings of pity and sorrow for someone else's misfortune. Whereas, it defines "empathy" as: the ability to understand and share the feelings of another. I have always divided them by how much intellectual versus emotional connection a person has for the other person.

Compassion, on the other hand, involves taking action on those feelings of sympathy and empathy in an effort to relieve the person.

While "thoughts and prayers" is technically an action, it is the very least action imaginable. Thoughts and prayers are really nothing more than washing one's hands of any effort beyond asking someone else to take care of it.

Praying to God to take care of something, which God has asked us to do, is rejecting God's request. How can we feel good about rejecting God's ask of us by simply handing the job back to God?

Occam's Razor

 What is the best analogy of God? Is God a loving, personal god that listens to and answers every prayer? Is God simply a creator who has otherwise abandoned the creation? Or, is God something in between?

Let me start out with an assumption: there is a god, or possibly at least one god. If we agree to the presumption that God created the heavens and the earth (aka the material and immaterial), then it is clear that God is outside of this universe. If that is true, then there is no proof of god we can create to prove one way or another of the existence of God. Our proofs are limited to our understanding based on the universe and not what is beyond it. We cannot measure God with material logic, for material logic is part of God's creation and not part of the realm of God. We cannot prove God exists using immaterial logic, for that too is equally limited. All we can do is simply choose to believe or not believe. I choose to believe.

I believe there is a God (or possibly more than one). That god is outside of our realm of existence. I'm not going so far as to say God doesn't interact with this realm. A person may write a message on a piece of paper. The person is not the paper, but can still interact with it.

So: God exists. God created this universe. God is able to interact with this universe. With the one main assumption, we can say a few things about God. Yes, I realize the other two statements contain some amount of assumption, but the amount of assumptions is rapidly coming to an end. For example, I can say God is able to interact with this universe because people throughout history have identified the divine involvement in a significant way. I'm willing to discount "every claim" of divine intervention as some of them could be explained away with simple natural phenomena or random chance. The fact that different cultures in widely different geographical locations all talk about a divinity and that divine being interacting with this world suggests that it is more reasonable to believe God can interact with this universe than not.

It even suggests that it has happened. Now then, does that mean God answers all our prayers? No. I'm not implying we can come to that statement yet, or ever. God can, and has, interacted with this universe? Yes. I can even go so far as to state that God has interacted with this universe in such a manner that humans have observed God's involvement. So... how frequently? Daily? I don't think so. I don't see God answering everyone's prayers. As a child, I asked God for a million dollars. I never got it. Does that mean God answered my prayer with a "no", or did God simply ignore/not hear my prayer? Either is equally likely.

Let's consider the lesson about God we can gain from both interpretations. If God said "no", then God is not really good at communication. Honestly, I asked many times with no apparent response. I would have thought that if God were to answer my prayer for a million dollars, I would expect that answer to be in a format I would understand. Imagine a grandparent talking to a teenager on the phone. The teenager is asking their grandparent to give them an expensive car for free. Would you say the grandparent is answering back if the teenager sees and hears nothing from the grandparent? What if the grandparent responds with having a cloud pass by outside the teenager's home after asking for a car. Would that be answering in a manner they teenager would understand as a response?

Then again, did God simply ignore me and my prayers? This is the more likely answer, but it doesn't address the individuals throughout history where God did answer, or more often, God contacted a person. In general, I think there is a good argument against God responding to a person's prayer/request using the laws of averages and the chance that the outcome would have happened without the prayer. But what about those times when God reached out to people?

There are not many of them, but they do seem to happen over the history of mankind. I'm lumping in all the religions as it can be argued that a religion is simply a culture's form of expression to describe a God's interaction with that culture. I'm not so shortsighted as to believe that God waited until the jews or christians to show up in a region before God began to interact with that geographical region. If God created a person who converted to "the faith", did God create that person's parents and other ancestors? If so, then wouldn't it be reasonable that God created all of mankind? Why then, would God limit his conversation to just one or two cultural groups when those people had no way to communicate God's message to the world of people? Occam's razor says that is not reasonable. Were all the non-jews and christians doing everything perfectly fine before jew and christians showed up such that God didn't need to send them a message? Did God decide to wait multiple generations of people, thousands of years, to tell another culture of people what God wanted people to know about? It is far more reasonable to suggest God talked to other cultures and people using that culture's knowledge and understanding to get the message across. Looking at the evidence of God's involvement, it seems that is is an intermittent involvement with one person at a time (or a very small segment of people).

So, where are we?  God exists (an assumption). God often does not respond to prayers. God does contact people with a message. It is not frequent (certainly not constant). We, and this universe is God's creation. It is unlikely that God created the universe to simply ignore it entirely. So, God has some interest in this universe and its outcome.

At the core of God's message, repeated to different cultures at different times, is a message to have people get along. As we say in the Church Of Doug: Love unconditionally. Encourage diversity. Be a humble servant. Why is every religion, at its heart some variation of these three tenets?

What if God created for himself a universally large Rube Goldberg machine with a godlike number of variables, including giving people some degree of free will? Consider a second analogy: imagine the universe is like a performer spinning plates on the tops of poles. The performer is trying to keep all the plates spinning so none of them fall down. If each plate was a Rube Goldberg machine and God was trying to keep them all running as long as possible, then God would go from plate to plate to give each one of them a touch on the rims to keep them spinning... or in our case God sees cultures not behaving in a manner that keeps the world of people alive and interacting and gives that culture a nudge to remind them that they need to change their behavior to match God's message, thus keeping the universe moving. God does interact with the universe when things deviate from God's desire to see the universe continue.

Yes, we are a small piece of the universe. Our existence on this one planet of this one solar system in this one galaxy . . . and we have only been in existence for a very short period of time. Perhaps part of the reason God isn't constantly with us is because there are other issues on other planets that needs God's attention too. If God made us, then we are, to some degree, part of God's plan.

This analogy would resolve the questions of what does God want from us? Why doesn't God just reveal himself to everyone at all time? Why God doesn't seem to respond to prayers (when the odds are not in favor of it happening)... and more. I'm not saying God is a child simply playing with a toy. This universe is divinely vast with an unbelievable number of variations (yet with a small set of laws of science) that we cannot comprehend God without some degree of description by use of analogy.

What can we know?

By now, I'm fairly convinced that the Pauline christianity is not the same as the way taught by Jesus. The book of James seems to conflict with Paul. The teachings of Paul conflict with the gospel accounts of what Jesus taught. Even the letters of Paul seem to be justifying why Paul disagrees with Peter and James.

Okay. So Paul is a false prophet who propagated a Hellenistic version of Judaism to gentiles using Jesus as the focal point of the Greek idea of a risen savior. I'm fine with that, because my focus is on the teachings of Jesus (Love unconditionally. Encourage diversity. Be a humble servant.) and not on the deification status of someone and how that belief is the only means of salvation. (Deification? Salvation? What did these ideas have to do with the teachings of Jesus?)

So, here is where I  have to wonder. The letters of Paul are early enough in the written works about Jesus that they are likely to have influenced later writings... such as the gospels. It is reasonably likely that the gospels were written in areas outside of Jerusalem or the communities directly associated with the original apostles picked by Jesus. (for example, the Ebonites.)

How then, can we be certain of separating the teachings of Jesus from something edited by the influence of Pauline thought? What WAS the teachings of Jesus?

The book of James appears to be more in line with a strong Jewish influence. Assuming Jesus was a Jew, his teachings would be jewish in nature. James, assuming James wrote said book (or was written by one of James' followers) is more likely to be in line with the teachings of Jesus than something from a person who never met Jesus.

Sorting out the wheat from the chaff becomes a complex endeavor.

Seek and you shall find

 I am still mulling over some of the ideas that flooded my mind since reading David Hawkins' book titled "Power versus Force". 

So, for starters, I believe in the idea of "Seek and you shall find." By which, I mean that we are subject to confirmation bias. Any given action has no specific interpretation that is universal. Any event can be interpreted in many different ways. For example, if I give my child a $10 bill for running an errand for me, did I pay her for her services rendered? Did I pay enough? Too much? Should a dependent child be given money to support the family?  Isn't that part of being a member of the family? Is cash too impersonal? Is it some form of proof that I'm teaching my child responsibility and value of work? Whatever perspective you choose to see the basic act, that act will be confirmation that what you thought you observed is what happened.

If we are a reporter of events and come across a burning building caused by an arsonist, do we look for the arsonist? Do we try to understand the arsonist's motivation? Or, like Mr. Rogers' mother, do we look for the helpers? Do we focus on how people are always present to help others in their time of need? People will see, in any event, what they seek to see.

David Hawkins' book talks about a number of things, with a focus on kinesiology (the study of human movement). While the book's focus is on that study, it observed that there are, using David's phrase, "Levels of Consciousness" that people can be categorized. I spent a fair amount of time on the table listing those levels and observed a few attributes. At the lowest level, humiliation and elimination, a person views themselves in the world so low that they feel the world would be better off without them. As a person's level of consciousness increases, they go through various stages:

• "I'm not fit for society, but not so worthless I need to be eliminated."
• "I'm worth being someone's doormat."
• "I may not be a contributing member of society, but not someone to be overlooked."
• "HEY! I exist, and deserve to be recognized!"
• "I'm here. I'm normal. I don't need people to accept my existence/value."
• "I've got enough value in myself that I'm willing to trust others."
• "I see harmony in this world and can forgive others to help promote that harmony."
• "I can do more than just forgive. I can understand other people's perspective."
• "The world is beautiful in its completeness. Everyone is part of the whole."
• "There is no such thing as everyone, because there are no parts. Rather there is just ALL."

The table (summarized in this list) has a perspective the book does not address. At the lowest and highest levels, the sense of self is non-existent, while the middle, the sense of oneself's individuality is greatest. Mind you, there is a completely different view of the 'non-self' between the highest and lowest.

Okay, so what has my mind been stuck on? "seek and you shall find"... If I choose to view the world as any of the levels, I will find proof of it wherever I look. So, why don't I simply choose the highest level and see the unity without parts? I try. Unfortunately, I have developed habits over my life that makes me see other levels unless I make a conscious decision to seek the highest level.

One side effect of knowing this (Nothing is obvious to the uninformed.), is that I can see other people and their level of consciousness. It has impacted my conversations with people as I now try to talk to them in the level they see the world. This has added a layer of complexity that I had not considered before. How do I describe something when I know the other person will only interpret/perceive it in a way I do not intend? How can I, knowing what I want to communicate, say something which presumes a perspective the other person doesn't have?

Another thought process I have been having is: why do I spend my time and energy on issues that, in the greater scheme of things is not important? For example, if I believe global warming is counter productive to humanity's current way of living, what do I do? Do I stand up and encourage change: either to reduce global warming or to build solutions to adapt to it? Or, do I simply take a more "enlightened" perspective and realize it is part of the greater whole and is simply part of the big picture... Human's are only one of a series of creatures who have ruled the earth. We are not going to be the only one in the future. Be at peace with knowing that humans are not separate from the whole, but simply a piece of God's overall plan... Just an indistinguishable perspective of the oneness of all... For that matter, why should I care about who is going to run this country?

Should I pray for something?

 Under the category of "Things to Ponder" . . . 

I believe in the power of prayer. It is a great tool for communicating with the divine. It also helps me focus on what is important and gives me the motivation to move. I am forever humbled by the power of the great creator of the universe and all that is within. Prayer has power.

With that in mind, I firmly believe prayer is not a tool to acquire things. "God, give me a million dollars." and "God, make me healthy (or smart)." This is not the role of prayer. Looking at the time Jesus spent in meditation and prayer following his baptism shows that even Jesus understood prayer was not to make God do our bidding. The correct order is the other way around. Prayer and meditation is our way to understand what God wants us to do for God. When we understand that relationship, we are more able to live according to the will and message of God.

So, what should I do when someone in need asks only that I pray for them in their time of need? There is nothing else I can do for them. I do not live nearby. I do not have the skills they need to take care of them. I do not have anything for them except my thoughts.

What they need is comfort. What I need for myself is a resolution to the unknown outcome for that someone. They don't have time to waste on me and I don't want to distract them from the chores and duties they need to complete before they undergo a hardship with an unknown outcome. They will feel comforted if I pray for them. It is something I can do.

I will not lie to them and say "Yes, I will pray for you.", but then do not do so because I don't believe that is the purpose of prayer. That would be hypocrisy and worse than asking God to do my bidding. So, in the end, I will pray to the great architect of the universe and say:

Dear God. Thank you for this beautiful creation and for giving me the awareness to appreciate all that I can sense. It is with what you have done for me that I can appreciate the beauty and glory of you and your creation. While it is your design that the future will unfold in its due time, I cannot help but feel the stress of the unknown. So it is with my friend. Their future is unknown and they fear the potential consequences as they have already experienced. Help me understand what you have given me to help comfort them in their time of need. My friend is struggling with their unknown future and needs compassion that they may once again be able to focus on glorifying you.

I feel the fear and concern of my friend. Will this upcoming event turn out the same as before? Will they need to suffer again? Such thoughts pull us from our desired focus of doing God's will and living as a humble servant. For how can we look to helping others when our own selves need the help? For this, I am reminded of what Jesus taught about the lilies of the field. 

I am also reminded of the value of worry. We worry when we foresee something that could go wrong with something we care about and we are powerless to prevent or protect it. What worry tells us is that we care about that something. Be cheered by knowing that we have something we care about and what that something is. Then, like the lilies of the field, trust God to already have a plan. Be ready to live God's plan.

Thy will be done.