Category Archives: Metaphysics

What Does God Really Know? What CAN God Really Know?

Metaphysics, Metaphysics of Time

This post is the first of two parts, dealing with the metaphysical boundaries of God’s knowledge as compared to man’s.  This kind of discussion cannot be limited to merely an analysis of the “cognition” of God, as it were; but also most take a deep look at both tangible and abstract realities of Him.  Time and space, for instance. 

Man’s existential reality and necessary attributes makes man’s knowledge and attaining of it fundamentally different than that of God’s.  Explaining these differences is the point of the proceeding two posts.  As usual, my posits will be challenging…that is, they will challenge our assumptions of and make distinctions between theoretical reality (abstract) and the visceral reality (tangible).  It is in finding the clear distinction between these two things, and understanding our assumptions and biases and where we almost constantly, instinctively and automatically blur of the lines between the two that we will be able to come to a truer knowledge of God, and how His omnipotence explicitly means that He cannot function like us, or think like us, or exist like us.  Once this is done, we can permanently and forever dismantle the false and tyrannical philosophical underpinnings of the neo-Reformed movement and its narcissistic father, the theology of John Calvin.  

Of course, I am under no illusions that this will happen anytime particularly soon. To assume so is to be obtuse.   But the fact is that someone must start somewhere.  We must begin to rethink and reinterpret some of the most basic understandings of our reality if we can ever, ever hope to undo a thousand years of non-Christian (actually…a better description would be non-Jewish) philosophical integration within our understanding of God, ourselves, and the Universe.  This of course will take a long, long time…not so much to explain, or even prove (if you’ll excuse the arrogant nature of THAT statement), but I hope that you and I, and those that we acknowledge and respect–our co-rebels of the Faith–can be that someone.

Part I

What Does God Really Know?  What CAN God Really Know?

Christians I think can agree that it is axiomatic that God is the Creator of everything that is not God.  By “create”, I mean–as a resolute and indefatigable freewill-ist—all things in Creation which act according to themselves…all of man and everything ; that is, God is not the decision-maker of man, or the controller of the laws of nature.  Instead, He is the Creator of man and the Author of man’s ability to Reason, and is the Creator of the natural world and universe which acts according to the law of itself, which is nature’s ability to be, also Authored by God.  God creates things to do this or that, and they do it (e.g. God commanded them how they should build the Tabernacle, and they did it (Exodus).  That is, God is not Creation FOR Creation…this would constitute a metaphysical impossibility. God cannot possess a created thing in order to do something He can better do alone; which is everything–by the very  definition of “omnipotence”.  And since the perfect purpose and objective of God is to exist–to BE Himself–He would not create Creation in order to possess it.  Obviously, He can better be Himself by Himself rather than by or through Creation.

So, let’s say that again:  Everything that is not God, God created.

I think we should all take a moment to let the profundity of that statement sink in a bit.

Okay.  That’s probably good.  But…then again, maybe not.  For far too many of us do not grasp the gravity of this truth, even though we have been Christians a very long time.  The philosophical implications of such a statement do not seem to guide us to the interpretive places that we need to go in order to practice our faith within the bounds of necessary, existential reason.  This weakens, if not outright destroys, the Christian’s witness to the secular world, who understand enough what even young children do not deny:  that it is wise to accept what our senses tell us; for they are tools we use to apprehend our world).

There is nothing which exists that God did not first make.  In one sense He is the first cause.  Although, as an aside, I should say that I would dispute that assertion on one level: For I submit that God is the Creator of the ability of nature and man to be their OWN causes; to move according to themselves.  God has given them the ability to do what they do according to themselves apart from God.  For if you declare that God is the first (literal) cause, then He is akin to the first link in a chain, and it then is upon this link that the direction of the rest of the chain relies (which, incidentally, is a Jonathon Edwards argument for his Calvinism), and I would utterly dispute this, because this is nothing more than determinism, which must ALWAYS be false if we proclaim that God exists.  I would defend my idea that God is not in fact the first “cause” by explaining  that God needs only to create objects and space, and that once this is done, the ability to exist apart from God, of their own ability, is thus automatically implied.  In other words, ability to be and do and act apart from God doesn’t have to be created, per se, but it is implicit when God creates anything NOT Himself.  Since God cannot duplicate Himself, anything that exists that is NOT Him, must be able to exist on its own, by definition.  The fact that you are not God, for example, is the very proof that God is not in “direct control” of you, but that you must be able to exist on your own, apart from God.  And further, if God creates a you that thinks, then thinking, since it is NOT God, must be itself; and thinking that is itself is, by definition, YOU thinking.  YOU being conscious.  YOU being YOU.  Your thoughts must be YOUR thoughts, not God’s thoughts, because the thoughts and the thinking are not God.

At any rate, there is no thing and no law and no ability which He did not first “cause” (sticking with that term for the sake of clarity) and purposefully design to BE what it IS.  He has the ability to create by Himself, and out of NOTHING  (or, perhaps into nothing), because, by definition, it if is not part of God, it is literally Created from absolutely nothing at all.

This is a profound idea to behold.  And difficult to apprehend, because we really have no frame of reference by which to fathom “nothing”.  “Nothing” might be the most difficult of ALL concepts to grasp, because, by definition, there is nothing in the universe which we can compare nothing to.  Because the Universe, is, of course, a giant collection of somethings.  And if we are to speak of what might be outside of the Universe, well…there may be nothing outside the universe, but if we could see it, or imagine it, it would no longer be nothing; it would be something.  Even the very idea and concept of nothing is really and technically something.

See…kind of hard to grasp, huh?

Anyway…the truth of God’s creative power is profound to the point of affecting how we understand everything of ourselves; and affecting how we contrast what we are with what God is; which is, logically, cannot be according to the truths and laws of our existence.  The fact that He is NOT US on a fundamental, root and basic existential level, is almost as profound a truth as He is the Creator of everything.

As the Creator  of everything, and also as One who is everywhere at once–and everywhen at once–God Almighty is the preeminent IS.  His name is I AM.  There is no before or after with God, no future or past.  There is no right or wrong with God (for His morality is merely a function of Himself; whatever He does is GOOD, by virtue of HIM doing it…it is as simple as that; in a sense, God is a-moral), there is no up or down, or left or right, or backward or forward, for He is His own SPACE, with no boundaries, because He is not within anything.  His space is Him, with no direction, because He IS (I AM); He moves in Himself, which is to say that He does not move at all in the sense that man moves and exists within a space that is not himself.  There is nothing–literally and utterly nothing–that can exist beyond or outside of His omnipotence and omniscience; outside His very being.

For example, I maintain that He cannot know the “future”, because future is purely a theoretical/abstract construct of man needing to move in a space not himself.  As such, God cannot know man’s choices until man makes them, because all things happen “now”.  And since God is His own space, there is no “movement” to His existence whereby He must thus apply the abstract concept of “time”.  Man makes his choices and performs his actions “now”, and “now” is when God knows it.  Thus, any declaration of God as to what He “will (future) do”, is merely a nod to His ability to create, not the  implication that he needs to control/determine (and thus “know perfectly”) every “future” event leading up to His declared action.  In other words, God’s doing is always a function of his omnipotent power, and not the idea that He must somehow control or work within or submit Himself to the existential laws and truths which govern man’s reality.  Or, better said, He cannot control our reality to create an event in the “future”, He simply needs to create.  To BE omnipotent.  To declare something out of nothing. To say that God must control “the future” in order to bring about an act of His limits God to the confines of OUR existence.

This is indicative of a fundamental lack of proper acknowledgment of God’s power.  And yet, it forms the basis for many people’s understanding of God; and is the ROOT premise of all determinist theologies, especially Calvinism and neo-Reformism.

Again, at the risk of being repetitive, I maintain that God cannot know the future, because there is no “future” for God to know because there is no circumstance in the “future” that can exist without Him being their already.  There can be nothing beyond God, and thus, there can be no future to Him.  If there is a “future” (e.g. man’s future “choices” or “actions”) and He creates everything that is not Him, then, by definition, this “future” must have been created and determined by Him.

If the future is not real to us, then it also cannot be real to God.  Something is either theoretical or it is physical.  If the future is purely theoretical, that is, a product of man’s mind, then the future doesn’t really exist, because man is thinking NOW.  And wherever YOU are, THAT is where God is.  Wherever Creation is, that is where God is; not behind, nor ahead in “time”, because time is nothing to God. Meaning it is a concept of man’s ability to create abstract cognitive constructs as a means of quantifying attributes of his existence, and as such, it is utterly irrelevant to God; inapplicable by him…unusable.  An abstract concept, by definition, is not real…well, it is not real in the visceral sense, purely in the theoretical sense…and God, being God, being all time and in all places can never operate by the un-reality of the non-visceral.  He needs NO abstract truths to quantify His existence; to rule and subdue, because HE is God.  He is the very apogee of reality.  HE is His OWN measure of Himself. He cannot think or act theoretically.  Everything God thinks and does is utterly REAL in the visceral, tangible, actual sense.  It IS God.  All that exists is the following:  God, and whatever is NOT God.  Theories are a function of man; they are not God.  Thus, there is nothing theoretical which can be ascribed to God.  And this includes time, which includes the future.  So, yes, I submit that God cannot know the future.

In other words, man cannot create a tangible REALITY by the power of his mind, a real place—that is, the “future”—which then God, by his omnipotence, is obligated to know.  This is a supreme arrogance of man, actually; man becomes the Creator, and God is thus obligated to man’s creation.  Now, He can certainly know of the abstract concept, as a function of man, but He cannot know a real future, or a real past, because, again they are not, in a visceral sense, real.  There is no REAL future to know; there is only man’s conceptualization of “time” to know.  But this conceptualization is not a tangible reality where God can BE.  Man realizes the future when it becomes present, and never before.  It is the same for God.  It is impossible for a perfect, omnipotent Being to know something that isn’t there.  If it doesn’t exist, it is metaphysically redundant that God can know it, having not created it, nor BEING it.  So, wherever and whenever the created thing goes, that is where God is, and no further…insofar as Creation is concerned (God of course can be in Himself, where there is NOT Creation, by definition).  There is no created thing…no event or circumstance, choice or situation, volition or desire, act or movement that can go before God.  As such, God has no future.  And as such, WE have no future. We have movement, implicit in our existence in space, and the future is an abstract quantification of this movement.  It is not a real place; and thus, God cannot be there to KNOW it.    

Nothing is real until it comes to pass; until it is REAL; until it exists in the visceral.  No act is an act before the MOVEMENT occurs.  And further, to say the “future” is real for God to perfectly know is to say that something that does not exist NOW to man or God, actually exists later.  How can this be?  It is impossible…an utter contradiction in terms.  How can the “later” be real NOW?  It is, again, impossible. It is complete nonsense.  It is man attempting to create something out of nothing, and then arrogantly demand God acknowledge man’s theoretical, mental construct as an ACTUAL place and thing.  Again, impossible.  

How can man declare something to exist out of nothing like God does?  Does man possess the same creative power as God.  No…the fact is that the only thing man can create is movement, and the only thing that nature can do is move. And again, no act is an act before the movement occurs.  Movement from one location to another is the function of our existence; past and future is a measurement of motion, nothing more.  The “future” can be a prediction of “might”, or “could be”, or even “will be based on what we have observed in the “past”” (a natural law), but that doesn’t make it literally so before it is literally so.  An act that comes as a result of a cause is simply the outcome of a movement in the “now”, and the result is in the “now”.  Everything in Creation does what it does now.  Not then, not later…all reality is the function of now.  Existence IS.  Again, all time is, is movement.

The object in Creation does not exist through its “own future acts”.  That thinking is completely antithetical to the idea of any freewill or real choice…meaning, to believe this way is to be a determinist, whether you think you are or not.  Think of it this way:  If the future is acts of objects which are real before they exist, then the object merely moves through time, moving through it like cars on a roller coaster, having NO say in how or what they do in any sense, doing what it MUST have been determined by God to do.  There is no other way to explain it.  To concede a real, non-abstract, non-theoretical future, you concede determinism, which means you are not you, but merely an extension of God.

And what is an extension of God?

An extension of God is God.  And what we say when we declare that God knows the future is that WE are God.

Is this really what we would consider “sound doctrine”? Is this anywhere hinted at in our faith? In our scriptures?

I doubt it.

End part I

A Devil’s Question: On the nature of consciousness and reason in the imperishable afterlife

Metaphysics

“If you agree than an innocent child goes immediately to heaven for all eternity when they die, and you also agree with the commonly held position that only a minority of adults become Christians and make it to heaven, then, especially in an unbalanced mind, that could justify killing children. An ill individual could easily believe that they are actually doing a good thing, ensuring that those children receive a life of bliss at Jesus side that they might not otherwise have.

I am not trying to be cruel or insensitive, but if you are going to look for answers or possible reasons then no idea should be automatically excluded because it is unpleasant.”

Of all my ideas regarding metaphysics and faith, the one I address in this post is one I have never heard or seen addressed before.  I can’t even recall when it has come up in even a passing conversation.  I don’t exactly understand the reason for this, except to say that it could be one of those things that people simply think of as “ipso facto” to their own obvious existence.  In other words, the way our reality is now is the way it will be in the afterlife.  In this regard, it’s kind of like the subject of “time”.  It never ceases to amaze me just how presumed it is that the passage of time is not only something that will follow us to heaven (or the afterlife/eternal life, whichever way you choose to look at it) as it does on earth, but that it is a force so pervasively permeating and binding to existence and reality that not only are we subject to it but God, Himself is also subject to it.  That is, it is a force outside of Him, and thus, outside of His categorical control.  He can “know” the future, in such a way as we mean he can “perfectly predict” the future, and He can perfectly assess the past; but in no measure is He outside of it.  Time, in essence, defines God as much as it defines man.  The only difference is that God has a greater degree of “predictive” power, so that He can, I suppose, maneuver the reality of the present so that it does or does not approach the perfectly predicted/completely known events of the future (though this is contradictory, of course…but, as I’ve said dozens of times, contradiction simply does not faze Christians, unfortunately…again, even the staunchest anti-Calvinists I know concede “predestination/free will paradox”).  Some Christians will concede that God can control events and as such, He can control time; but again, this still always puts God inside of time, moving and going with it; they never concede that time simply does not EXIST as part of God’s functional reality. The more I ponder this, the more incredulous I become.  Christians are quick to pay lip service to God’s omnipotence, but when the “rubber meets the road”, He is ultimately at the mercy of the same inexorable forces and existential reality as man is.  In effect, they can only envision a “God”  that exists the same way they do.  The way they exist is how He exists.  The way they think is how He thinks.  The way He reasons is how they reason.  The way He can know what He knows is the same way they know what they know.  And so on and so forth.  The only difference that God can do it…well, more so, I guess you could say. He is like us, but even more.  And the “more” is usually subjectively defined by human understanding of what it would mean if they were omnipotent, without much deviation from one person to another I notice.  And it also seems to me that the omnipotence of God tends to follow along the lines of the fantastical superhero paranormal “powers” and extra-physical “abilities” that many young children think about when they play “make believe”, and adults think about when they write comic books and movie scripts.

Fore example, one might say, if I were omnipotent, I would know the future.  I would be able to control the minds of people to get them to do what I want.  I could fly.  I could teleport myself all over the universe.  I could see people’s thoughts; read their minds.  I could push people around with wind and fire and unseen forces like giant invisible limbs, or even visible limbs if you are Green Lantern .  But in all of these cases, never is the “power” defined by a existential reality that is so fundamentally different that it makes “knowing” and “predicting” and “controlling” and the  “future, past, present, movement”, etc., etc., completely irrelevant, which is how I would define the TRULY omnipotent.  The truly Omnipotent, to me, wouldn’t have a thing about MY existential reality that He/She needed or recognized or even employed as a necessary tool to effect an outcome. Well..at least that’s where I would start.  At any rate, this is why, I submit, Christians are so comfortable with logical and metaphysical and moral contradiction as the supreme foundations of their faith.  Since the understanding of God never breaches the HOW of God’s metaphysical existence compared to ours, but it is presumed to be identical to our own–with the addition of “super powers”–then moral and metaphysically impossible contradiction are simply implied in the theology.  And a nod and a shrug is how they explain the contradictions to the world.

It is my posit that we can thank secular, pagan Greek mythology (the original “super heroes”) and philosophy for this.  For ever since the Roman Empire, Christianity has become a strange recipe of Jewish and secular philosophical stew, with gnostic despotism having the final say on matters of “sound doctrine” and faith.

That’s actually pretty gross, when you think about it.

Very little, if anything, has changed to this day.  When we call ourselves Christians, we are generally not identifying with the NECESSARY Jewish philosophical and rational roots of Christ, but with a strange, grotesque version of European dark-aged superstition, with roots in pagan metaphysics.  In other words, Christianity is not an extension of sound Jewish philosophical contexts, as it should be understood, but a tradition of a thin strand of world history; of very strange and narrow-minded Germans and Italians.  And we continue to call these men geniuses, when in reality, within a couple hours of Google, the average American can know more, deduce more, and reason more than most of these “Great Fathers of the Faith” put together.  And with a couple of bucks in late charges at the public library, they can start to write their own superior philosophy of sound doctrine.

Shoot…we have the Bible in our own language.  That puts us ahead of these “Great Fathers” by eons already.  If we’d only read it, starting NOT in the Gospel of John, but in Genesis, which is where GOD starts , we would all have a better understanding of God’s power and perfection.

Anyway…

What I was trying to say way back up there somewhere in the ether of this post is that this next subject is kind of like that of “time”.  It is something that people simply presume.  We “grow up” in this life and in this body, so we assume that children must also “grow up” in heaven.  Again, we assume that the nature of our existential reality is unchanged in eternity as it is on earth in our mortal bodies; and again, this stems from the fact that we think, really, that because we are the IMAGE of God, He and we function pretty much the same, at the mercy of the same forces of time and knowledge and whatever else defines “reality” for us, on “earth as it is in heaven”.

I do not mean to insult or offend; I am merely trying to point out how Christianity has been able to function as a form of subculture tyranny and cultist control of human beings in the face of such obviously antithetical TRUTHS found in the natures of God and Christ and the Spirit as are found in scripture…and function so despotically for so many hundreds of years, with nary a Christian batting an eye.

The next and final chapter in my “Devil’s Question” trifecta has to do with the nature of our consciousness /awareness/cognitive evolution in heaven.  Do we continue to grow and learn and acquire cognitive enlightenment as a function of our minds, as a function of our ability to REASON (to know whatever it is we say we know; even to declare that we know that we DON’T know something), or do we not? In other words, to get to the heart of the matter in question:  do children “grow up” in heaven.  If they are murdered, are they deprived only of their physical bodies, but their consciousness continues to develop as “normal”?  Do they develop and become wise old men and women in heaven, or are they limited to whatever cognitive awareness they possess when they enter heaven?

Now, before you rush to respond in your mind, you need to realize that this is a much harder question to answer than it ostensibly seems like.  No offense, but the obvious response, popping into your mind (which is very likely something along the lines of “Well…of course our consciousness evolves”) is likely very premature. The bible is silent on such a subject.  And because of this, we make assumptions about the nature of our awareness in heaven; and as such, I think we perhaps miss what it is we deprive people of if we murder them.  What if…just what if children do NOT “grow up” in heaven?  What if the cognitive state a human being enters heaven is the same state they spend eternity in.  What if cognitive development is in fact, as the scientists and doctors declare, a direct function of the maturity of the development of the biological brain in THIS body? (I am excepting those who have attained full access to their reason, but developed a limitation later in life; due to dementia, Alzheimer’s, or an accident, for example, under the presumption that when the biological is restored to health, they are able to resume their already-developed grasp of their reason.  I argue that this would NOT be the case with those who’ve NEVER had access fully to their reason for whatever cause; and that simply restoring the biological structure to health does not necessarily assume the ability to apprehend reason fully which was never there in the first place.) If this is true, then murder becomes MUCH more egregious, doesn’t it?  Now you are not only depriving one of a body, but of a mind in a sense.  And why not?  It is obvious that ALL we are and become in this life is directly related to the state of our biological bodies.  The body is as important as the mind, even in scripture, and it is undeniable that limitations of the biological will affect cognition. The mind is inexorably linked to the body; and if we agree that the body does not continue to develop after death in heaven, why should we then assume that the mind does beyond the level attained in the mortal life?  Surely the bible does not declare that we will all have perfect minds, with perfect omnipotent knowledge, and divine awareness in eternity, does it?  We will have imperishable bodies…yes; but from this do we presuppose that the cognition of each “brain” in heaven will be fundamentally transformed into higher functioning awareness of our own selves?  Since self-awareness, and REASON, is not directly related to sin—that is, how self-aware/smart/cognitively developed is not a sin issue, then why can it not be possible that consciousness does not necessarily change even though the brain (body) might be eternal.

It is my opinion that this is the case.  And because of this, we can see the gravity of how we treat ourselves and others, but also arrive at a better understanding of just how destructive and far-reaching the Fall of Man was.  The garden Sin was no trifling fender-bender of narrow and shallow consequences.  No, I believe it has profound effects on the state of man not ONLY in this life but in the next.  Salvation and moral innocence, through Christ, ARE possible now.  But the mortal and perishable body in this life drives the mind in this life.  And the mind, the ability to reason, the soul of man, is developed through the body.  And as such, it is in heaven what it is now, minus sin.  But minus sin does not equal “higher functioning” per se, or a “growing up” of the body and mind.

In light of that idea, can we not see just why God might think that murder is such an evil as to include it in the Ten Commandments?

The state of awareness in which one enters “eternity” is the state of awareness minus the physical imperfections of the temporal body.  The ability to reason (the soul of man) and consciousness is developed in the temporal body.  A fact that is verified by empirical science and medicine the world over.  I maintain that the ability to reason, the development of the consciousness, self-awareness…knowledge and the ability to apprehend abstract truth and physical laws and to live by them, and to rule and subdue one’s self and his/her environment by the apprehension and employing and manipulation of them, is a function of the first body and the first world.  I maintain then that wisdom and understanding are gained in the world we are born into; and that this is the intended function of the first life.  Eternity…the new earth and heaven and even body is a place of perpetual IS, absent the normal passage of time as we understand it (though I maintain that “time” will still have place; as created beings, we need space in which to move, and space and movement imply time; however, I’m not acceding “evolution” of the body, or the material environment, as it were).  That is, the evolution of the soul (the reference ability of reason) cannot be and is not developed in the eternal, heavenly state, where one functions according, not to a hostile world and environment, where all things exist and are defined by the moral law of good and evil, and human knowledge of it, but by what I would describe as “whims”.  Pleasure, peace, comfort…absent a hostile existence of any sort; where needs are met or done away with by God (in the case of moral and mortal “needs” as a function of the degenerating physical body and world).  So, in light of this understanding of eternal existence, we need to ask: what is the purpose of reason in the eternal state?

Reason is there to affirm the free will and volition of the mind; to affirm the status of individual “difference” of the individual from the rest of surrounding creation; “this” and “that”, as it were; and that preference, and choice, and “natural” law is seen not as good and evil, but…well, I would say, rather than degrees of “good” or degrees of “bad”, there are degrees of perhaps “more” or “less”, better or worse, as a function of OUR created reality, verses that of God (there can be no degrees with God, for God is perfect, and as such, there cannot be degrees of perfection, or preferences of perfection, obviously).  So, what I am trying to say is that absent the need to survive in a hostile environment, there is no logical reason why it should be expected that our consciousness grows.  For a developing consciousness is a byproduct of the need to thrive in an antithetical place to man (the fallen world), a growing awareness of good and evil, so that we may consciously choose to pursue either/or, in a manner which speaks to right or wrong moral existence.  But absent the need to thrive, and the need to learn to avoid evil to one’s spiritual (and physical, I could add) advantage, then it does not follow that a developing self-awareness is a prerequisite for eternal existence.  And as such I maintain that if it is redundant for reason/awareness to develop in heaven, like it is redundant that the body should “grow” or mature in heaven, because all its needs are provided for, via its eternal make-up, that the state of man does not MATTER beyond how he enters heaven as a morally innocent creation.  That perfection of the body and mind in heaven does not necessarily need to equal utter maturity as we would define it in THIS life.  Moreover, if a child is murdered before the age of self-awareness, that is, he or she is in a state of moral innocence already, then what is the reason that this should or even can change in heaven?  I suppose this begs the question, then:  is awareness of God a prerequisite of moral purity before Him?

Interesting question, don’t you think?

But we won’t tackle that one just now.  However, any comments or ideas in regards to it, I would more than welcome.

At any rate, what I am suggesting is that the state of awareness with which one enters heaven, or “eternity”, is the state of awareness with which they are perpetually bound to.  (And, yes…I do understand the implications of this statement; I have regarded the consciousnesses of those who perhaps are cognitively challenged (e.g. mentally retarded; autistic), and my answer is:  How much do we really know about their state of consciousness?  What is the level  of contribution the biological handicap plays in a person’s ability to access reason?  The answers are likely nebulous.  In other words, we don’t really know. Since the answers invariably involve a certain amount of spiritual/metaphysical facets, it is likely that we will never know.  All we know is what we can see…and what we can see is the biological.  And what we can reason from what we can see and know about metaphysical reason is that absent sin and hostility in heaven, what does the state of consciousness really have to do with eternity once one is actually in heaven?  What is the logical necessity of a “growing” consciousness absent sin and need?  I’m not saying that I’m categorically right…I’m merely suggesting that, at least ostensibly, the idea of an evolving or growing state of self-awareness/ability to reason is redundant and unnecessary in eternity.  Of course, I could be wrong.  If I am, I would love to hear why.  I don’t say this facetiously either; I mean it.  Help me grow in truth. I welcome it.)  That is, I am not convinced that the body and mind is developmentally different, or that it develops beyond what it is in THIS life, for THIS life is the first, and the first intended life and body of man (see Genesis, Chapter One).  We should not underestimate the supreme importance of our lives in the bodies and in the environments we are in NOW.

Heaven is not more growth and development; for that is the intended purpose of the first life and body.  Heaven is merely a new body that does not decay and a new mind that functions as morally innocent because the law of good and evil is moot in heaven.  Plus, with no physical needs, and no mortal decay, sin is even further mitigated and so the mind is free to be…well, static, I might say.  Because decay implies a place where the body and mind decay from in their temporal, mortal evolution.  If there is no decay, then there is no growth; and if there is no growth in the body, then there is no growth in the brain, by which reason is accessed.  And since awareness is inevitably linked to the body, then how can we argue for an increase in self-awareness/consciousness?  Heaven is not a functional separation of spirit and body, as I think many Christians assume; no it is the consummate integration of one with the other.  An eternal body which houses the eternal spirit.  Body and spirit are not pulled apart in heaven…they become even more ONE with each other in heaven, I believe, than in earth.  Human beings NEED a body in order to exist.  They cannot be simply “spirit”, like God because they need an instrument by which their actions from their volition and reason can be realized.  Without tangible bodies and objects by which to manipulate reality, man cannot exist (why I don’t believe in ghosts, by the way).  And this is quite biblical, I should add.  The body is never denigrated, or given a secondary importance to the mind in light of man’s creation…that is, body and mind are hand in hand; part of the reality of man in total.  On the contrary, notice in Genesis that the body is the FIRST prerequisite to existence; and this in the Garden! Where man was supposed to live forever…in his body.  So, again, body and mind are one in this life, and thus how much moreso will they be as eternal and imperishable entities in the next.

In heaven, then, what I am saying is that in terms of physical and cognitive development you ARE what you ARE; and you ARE forever.  Absent the moral law of sin and physical decay, there is no reason that you can’t exist in whatever state you enter in…forever.  And yes, it is depressing on the one hand to think this, but it is also positive because it helps us realize just why it is SO important that we do all we can to foster love and kindness and peace for our fellow human beings in this life, because though it is redundant to BE cognitively more self-aware, morally speaking, in heaven, it is BETTER to know God than to not know God; because God is the objective we pursue in our existence, because HE is the primary example of freedom of existence.  And it is thus hard to truly be free to BE if we do not know God.  We can live for eternity in a state of lesser awareness, because lesser awareness is not sin; but it is, again, better, and preferable to be more aware of self, in that by this, you can be more aware of God.  Which, again, is simply metaphysically rational because it is why you exist in the first place.  There can be exceptions to living the why of knowing God, in the interest of the supreme morality of love and mercy, but the why of existence cannot be done away with; and man cannot ultimately exist (as a total entity…that is “humanity”) as a created consciousness unless he knows his God.  You can exist more fully when you realize who the Creator of your life is, and you can grasp His TRUTH.  You exist more fully because you can consciously seek Him.  And why should we continue to pursue Him in heaven?  Because by Him we grow in understanding of what it means to be US.  This evolution of knowledge is going to happen in heaven, but not beyond the apprehending of the ability to reason in this body, which is a function of development in this life.

So, this being the case, when we consider murder, and in particular the murder of children, in accordance with the question posed by the atheist I have cited above, we realize that when one murders them prior to the age of “awareness” (i.e. full access to their reason), then the murderer has  deprived them of their fully developed consciousness for all eternity.  They have been deprived of their ability to acquire the understanding necessary in order to understand just how they are and who God is, this being the purpose of existence, and the point of our creation.  They are thus deprived of their ability to fully exist according to their purpose, and while safe with God, they are in a perpetual state of lacking the fullness of their due right and purpose of owning their own existence.  They have been forever robbed of themselves.  Thus murder is not merely larceny of the body, but it is in fact larceny of the mind and soul, as well.  The theft of a fullness of consciousness and therefore existence which will NEVER be aquired.

Are you starting to see why murder is forbidden by God, and punished severely numerous times in the scriptures?  It is a BIG deal.  A big one; and I fear that as evidenced by the question posed by the atheist, the gravity of taking a life has been lost on so many.  To even consider such a question as even remotely reasonable—and for Christians not to have a sensible, moral, and easily understood response to such an abominable idea—strikes me as evidence that we as humans have strayed far beyond the rational metaphysics which should define us, and which, frankly, we all should be utterly aware of from every moment to every moment.

And so we must then debate the morality of the point, for truly this is the crossroads of the debate:  Is it better to rob a human being of their very souls in order that they may live forever in a state of inferior and less functional awareness, where themselves and their Creator are not fully grasped according to their reason, according to the root purpose of their existence?  Or is it better to allow them to grow and develop into the full understanding of themselves and of God…or at least develop into a consciousness which has full access to its own ability to reason; to possess that which is inherent to all human beings who own a fully functional biological structure by virtue of having “grown up” in the body as they, by God and by obvious laws of nature, were intended?  That they might have full possession of their minds and souls and bodies in this life and the next, and so that the choice of Christ, necessary to understand LOVE, can, as it must, be fully their own?

“Thou shall not murder.”

This commandment was written on the stone tablets.  It is as close to inerrant as the Scriptures can get.  It is as close to infallible as any created thing can be.

The Devil is a right proper liar.  And all his words are intended to deprive man of his life and his mind; and God of his place.

The question of murder is therefore a question of the devil.

A Devil’s Question: On the purpose of human existence

Metaphysics, Soteriology

This next post is a continuation on my three-part series entitled “A Devil’s Question” concerning this question, posed by an atheist some time ago on the blog site WartburgWatch.com.

“If you agree than an innocent child goes immediately to heaven for all eternity when they die, and you also agree with the commonly held position that only a minority of adults become Christians and make it to heaven, then, especially in an unbalanced mind, that could justify killing children. An ill individual could easily believe that they are actually doing a good thing, ensuring that those children receive a life of bliss at Jesus side that they might not otherwise have.

I am not trying to be cruel or insensitive, but if you are going to look for answers or possible reasons then no idea should be automatically excluded because it is unpleasant.”

Murdering children in order to compel them to heaven makes their existence functionally irrelevant. Individual self-awareness and ownership thus of one’s reason, and therefore ownership of one’s own self is and can only be the ultimate meaning of human existence.  That is, if we are able to exist at all, by the intention and resolutely conscious action of a Divine Creator (NOTE: thanks to John Immel for his persistence in proclaiming this TRUTH in the face of even Christian opposition…it is by this persistence that I realized that not only is he right, but it is the ONLY way man can possibly exist as a self-aware entity) then it must be for the purpose of each individual consciousness to be the sole owner of his or her self; for any other reason for creation of the human being is impossible because it constitutes a redundant act of the Omnipotent Perfection; which of course is impossible because it would mean that the Divine Omnipotent Perfection is not perfect after all.  For it is obviously impossible that man can BE God for God (the single greatest reason why I utterly and categorically reject any form of determinism from any field of study or any religion or philosophy; it is a lie because it means that creation itself is redundant; thus, impossible).  And, in addition, if the purpose of our creation is to be merely an extension of a collective functioning as LIKE a single entity, with a single consciousness and a single purpose, then it is redundant that God should have made us individually self-aware; for there is only a need for a single created consciousness to exist and to fulfill the purpose of his/her creation (for what meaningful, philosophical, or moral thing can the collective do that the individual single entity cannot do, and really, do better and more efficiently when it comes to intent and meaning?)  All numbers do is determine how much.  And “how much” is irrelevant as far as philosophy is concerned.  “Is” and “is not” relating to “why” and “why not” is the length and breadth of philosophy, and one does not need math for this (a terrible disappointment to the Pythagoreans among us, I know).  God needs only one number of created consciousnesses in order to establish the moral and existential dichotomy, and to exhibit the supremacy of His meaning, power and LOVE, and this number is:  one.  And it’s pretty hard to make it a numbers game if the only number you have to work with is ONE.  (Which again, is why all meaning is going to always be metaphysically based, not physically.  So much for the philosophy of science…sorry, Mr. Hawkings.  Metaphysics is alive and well, Doctor, I’m afraid.)  Thus, in light of the vast number of human consciousnesses in existence, we can conclude this:  The numbers are simply a function of how much, and so instead of loving just one person, which would still be perfect love, God decided that He wanted the “how much” to be MORE than ONE, while still keeping the essence of ONE, that is making consciousnesses individual.  God has chosen to love more than ONE single individual consciousness.  Because…why not?  One love is perfect.  One love extended to many is no less perfect, but it has the advantage of being spread over many more “ones’s”; and in this case, more IS better, because the more people there are, the more dispersed is that perfect love; it spreads, grows, and allows man to be the conduit of it to his fellow man; which, if this is a wonderful thing that God can do, why NOT allow man to do the same thing seeings as how it isn’t at all redundant to share God’s love; for true freedom is being as much like God as man can be without seeking to make God a redundant hypocrite by attempting to usurp His power (like Satan does; he wants to be God instead of God, which is irrelevant and metaphysically nonsensical; but then…he’s a liar, so…).

Killing, then–among the many other reasons it is so abominable–limits the reach of perfect love, which, in light of there being more than ONE person, limits man’s purpose…not necessarily for God, but for himself, which is again to be as much like God as possible because this is the very definition of individual freedom, which again is the sole reason man can BE.

To BE, and to BE like God.  And God is eternally LIVING as Himself.

THAT’S perfect freedom, and so killing, being antithetical to God’s purpose, as the Creator, MUST be antithetical to man’s rational purpose.  By God allowing man to reproduce, God’s love can be extended to more individuals.  Which…more love is always a good thing.  Not necessarily a more perfect version of love, but an extension of perfect love, which is GOOD, because any extension of good is GOOD.  Extension by imitation is no redundancy.  Duplication is redundancy.  And within this, the functional existential truth remains unchanged in light of God’s love and mercy:  man is created to be HIMSELF, alone, and owned and possessed by no one else.  Thus, the reason any ONE exists is:  to exist to themselves.  The foundation of the purpose of creation is the INDIVIDUAL, and the individual’s divinely mandated right to claim and possess him or herself.  To be the sole doer and to bear sole responsibility for his or her volition.  Anything that detracts from this (determinism, the enforcement of biblical “roles”, the coercion into collective group think, forced altruism/morality via force or violence, etc.) detracts from the divine purpose of man.  And it is impossible to be the sole doer and to bear sole responsibility for volition if one has been murdered.  To put it bluntly, if not a bit vulgarly:  a person cannot fulfill his or her divine purpose for living if he or she is dead. 

The reason that God demands that no man murder another is precisely because of this: by violating the right of individuals to own themselves, we make existence moot. Through murder you claim the right to possess another human being; to commit larceny of the body.  It is immoral at its root, because the entire point of God Creating is for Creation to EXIST and to BE itself, and this is particularly true with regards to human beings; and it can thus never be a “loving” thing–or anything in accordance with God’s rational purpose–to murder anyone.

Now, moving on to another facet of my argument, which is that the of killing-children-as-mercy posit dooms all humanity to hell in the end.

The idea behind the greatest commandments (love God, love human beings) is to affirm the relevancy of existence. If we are to assume that murdering children leads to salvation for them, and is a “loving” thing to do, the inevitable outcome is instead, as I just said, a destruction of all humanity.  NO ONE is saved at the end of human existence, is the logical conclusion of the proposition. At the end of the string of murders is no one left but the adults, and they have forsaken Christ and their moral innocence by renouncing God’s purpose for Creation: to exist.

I’ll elaborate.

Since it is morally and metaphysically impossible to murder out of love–as I have explained above–it is also inevitable that this scheme designed to “make sure all the little ones go to heaven” is doomed before it even starts. There is only one way to get to heaven, and that is be morally innocent.  (A fact which is lost on I think even the majority of Christians in the U.S. who have traded in Jewish foundational philosophy as the grounds for the Christian faith for pagan Greek metaphysics.  Oh…don’t believe me?  Ever heard of “penal substitution”?  This is the idea that Jesus was punished for our sin.  That he wasn’t a “sacrifice” for sin at all, but was punished (wrongly, by definition then, making God UNJUST) for the bad stuff WE did.  Which has nothing to do with the Jewish ritual of the sin or Passover sacrifice, because you cannot render man morally innocent, which is how man must be to God for salvation, by punishing for sins…again, by definition.  So again, nothing to do with the Torah.  NOTHING.  Because it is a FALSE western, pagan, neo-Greek (read “medieval European”) metaphysical idea).

Anyway.  Through murder, we renounce the moral innocence we obtained through Christ.  And really, to appeal to rank common sense:  who is willing to condemn themselves to hell in order to send a child, who may or may not accept Christ (even if we DO believe in the reality of “chance”), to heaven? If he or she (the child) were to choose Christ, then the murderer would have renounced Christ for nothing by declaring God a liar and proclaiming that murder is, in fact the primary GOOD man can do in the world, and that to DIE is the singular purpose for LIVING. No…no rational Christian, or even person, I submit, could agree to the “logic” of this idea.

Then again, I know a LOT of Calvinists, so…who said rationality has anything to do with anything?  Heck, even NON-Calvinists agree that there really IS a “paradox” between free will and predestination, making the root foundation of Christian metaphysics impossibly contradictory and destroying all anti-Calvinist arguments, no matter how otherwise rational, in the process, and thus conceding the determinist’s entire argument…aaaaand by conceding Reformed determinism they also make anyone’s argument about pretty much anything moot and pointless, leaving us nothing left to do except admit that we don’t really exist.  We are either God, or nature, or…nothing.  But certainly not ourselves.

But…whatev.  No one said this blog stuff was going to be easy.

Or even read.  LOL

Anyway.

My point is this:  Don’t we think that it is better that those who will choose Him are saved, rather than EVERYONE go to hell by declaring that God is a liar and demanding it be morally accepted that dying is the point to living? Better than man condemning the entirety of his race to hell by rendering his very existence pointless with his evil ideas? This is really the logical conclusion of this kill-the-kids-for-their-own-spiritual-good proposition. As is the case with the Calvinists–which I still maintain have much more in common with atheists than either one of them realize–metaphysical inconsistency forms the basis of this argument.

Response to Lydiasellerofpurple: Destroying the Free-Will/Predestination “paradox” is the ONLY way to ultimately dismantle Reformed determinism (and more on the Divine existential nature)

Metaphysics, Metaphysics of Time

Once again, thanks to Lydia for her excellent insights, questions and comments, which supply me with an indefatigable supply of metaphysical material for this blog!

This is a reply to her comment on the previous post.  Thanks, Lydia!

Hi Lydia,
I want to clarify something.  I am not denying the functional reality of a past and future, both of which can be proven by events in the “present” (whatever that is…present seems to me to be of infinite existence with zero “duration” (that is, proper time), however, we know a present must exist because because “to be” is a static term; in other words “to be” implies eternal “now”, I think.  Anyway; the present is where the visceral creates reality…where things happen, I suppose).  So, I am not saying that the future and past aren’t real to man.  Man’s existence implies a past and future, even though, strictly speaking, “past” and “future” are abstract truths.  They cannot be experienced directly.  All of man’s functional reality occurs in the “now”, I submit (I have a lot on this subject; will post later).  Past and future are always outside of man; they are a function of HOW he is able to exist.

In relation to God, however, since He is His own space and is the entire sum of His existential reality, there can be no past or future to God because NOTHING is outside of God.  God is never separated by an abstract concept from His own reality.  God is God, the I AM; the fullness of His existence is perpetually and eternally visceral.  He IS, and thus He is always NOW.  So when we speak of God “knowing” the future, then, in light of the fact that God has NO future, what can be said about this?  He cannot know man’s future because man’s future is man’s future, not God’s future, because God does not require a future to exist, like man does.  So whatever reality man’s volition and choice creates as a “future” event is wholly man’s doing.  God intervening in man’s life is a function of His power of creation, not “controlling” events that lead to a point in an abstract theoretical future.
What events along the line of “time” did God have to control to create Creation in the first place?  The answer is: none.  He just made it.  There was no “when”, before Creation, because there is no “before” with God.  There is just NOW.  So why do we assume that God’s power–now that Creation exists–has to be as a function of knowing the future, or controlling or determining events that lead to another inexorable event that God is creating as a function of controlling other events (does that even make sense?)?  Why would the God who made the Earth out of ZERO now need to control events to lead to a future that he already knows? (Which means…er, it’s already real, no?  Since God KNOWS it, it must BE true, and so, how is God’s controlling events, which He knows, lead to another event which already exists, and that he ALREADY knows is real…how is that NOT the definition of redundancy?)

God can create anything anywhere, and He always creates NOW, because it is HE creating.  He does not create or control along a line of time (past/future) because THAT is not a function of His existential reality.  Control and knowledge of future and past are strictly functions of man.  God’s power and existential reality precludes the relevance of either “control” or “future knowledge”.

If God speaks to man as “knowing the future”, I submit it is to make Himself accessible and comprehensible to man; or, man is misunderstanding or misinterpreting what God is saying.

I do not mean this to be arrogant, and I’m not directing this at you, Lydia, but I defy anyone to explain to me how God can know a future of man that He did not already per-determine?  And if He did determine it, then how can we believe that man has any will of his own? 

This is why I vehemently disagree with people, even friends and like-minded anti-Calvinist Christians, who argue that the “paradox” of predestination/free-will is unsolvable, unknowable, and ultimately, what we simply have to live with. I especially see red when it is declared that it is an unimportant, tertiary, secondary, disputable matter in the grand debate with neo-Calvinist/Reformed despots. 

This could not be further from the truth!  If we concede that God KNOWS man’s future and that predestination is a reality of Christian doctrine and philosophy in any sense where God preordains in any way, then free will is a lie and the Calvinists are right.  Unless we can effectively argue for God’s metaphysical existential DIFFERENCE in such a way that “fore-knowledge” is LOGICALLY and understandably reconciled with the free volition of man–which MUST be true for man to even EXIST if we believe in God–then for all of our talk of sanctification, justification, the Cross, antinomianism, and whatever else we make the primary issue, we will ALWAYS lose to Reformed foundational suppositions.  Again,  IF God foreknows in a way where God declares the future real BEFORE it exists to MAN, then man is determined…he is not Himself, and can do nothing that is not ultimately directly controlled by God, including “obey” in sanctification and “choose” in salvation.  So, IF we concede that free-will/predestination is a paradox…that is, BOTH are true, then one half of the equation isn’t real.  God is either dead or man is dead.  You cannot have both predestination and free-will be true and have both man and God be real.  It is logically, metaphysically, and rationally impossible.  If we accept the “paradox” of free-will/predestination then Christianity is a religion founded upon a complete contradiction of all of reality, and it SHOULD be rejected because it CANNOT be true. It is the last refuge of the desperate or the spiritually/theologically insane…or both.

But…there is an answer.  The answer is in understanding that God is what He declares: I AM.

Not I WAS, or I WILL be…no, God says He is the “I AM”.  Or He says “was, is, and is to come”, which  means what?  Means NOW.  Means God IS an IS forever.  EVERYTHING is now to God, there is no future to know because the existential reality of God is always and only and ever NOW.  So the way God “foreknows” events is because they are NOW to Him.  In other words, the NOW of when they happen is when God knows them. So, God can only know future events and choices when they happen, or you make them because YOU make them; and you make them when to God?  NOW!  God doesn’t see your choices in the “future”; He sees them the only way He CAN see them, which is NOW.  Your choices are free until you make them, and once made, they are part of the NOW of your own total existence, from start to finish, because the choice and your making it is NOW.  

And here it is:  Since we CAN show metaphysically, rationally, logically, theologically, and philosophically that free-will/predestination is NOT paradoxical NOR contradictory but is merely a function of the existential reality of God versus man–and we CAN–then Reformed theology is DEAD.  It is dead now, and forever.  If it can be proven that man’s will MUST be free as a function of metaphysical logic, and that this not only corresponds with God’s eternal nature (His I AM existence) but is a RESULT of it, then Calvinism has no foundation whatsoever.  Any of its cornerstones, foundations, or pillars rest on a grave.

We can prove that determinism is a lie; and we can show that there is no way God can know the “future” until it IS, without He determining it.  Thus, we can show that Reformed theology is a lie.  Which it is.
The fact MUST BE that the future CANNOT exist until it is the present; and it cannot exist until Creation ACTS to manifest it because everything creation does is its own and is NOW to God, and this especially applies to man’s CHOICE.  The only way God can know man’s choices is after man makes them. Anything else is determinism.

To repeat and reiterate:  What is AFTER to God?  There is no “when” with God, so there is no after, or before.  There is only now.  If God declares that He knows what you “will” choose in the future it is because He sees it NOW; and if He sees it now, then YOU are MAKING it, even though, to you, you may have not made it yet.  But that does not mean that the choice is any less yours.

Now, please…I am not conceding the premise.  I am not simply creating another way of saying that God knows your choices before you make them.  I’m saying that YOU must FREELY make the choice “before” God can know it.  So, when you make a choice, THAT is WHEN God knows it, even though He may have declared it to you “before” (“Before the rooster crows, you will disown me three times.”)…but remember, there is no “before” with God, or “after” so when He reveals His knowledge to you about a choice of yours is irrelevant to God’s metaphysical “time”–for by definition, God can know NOW “whenever” He wants as far as you are concerned–and it does not mean He knows it BEFORE you make it; no, it is just that the WHEN is a function of your life, not His.  Again, when you make a choice, THAT is the only way God can know it without it being determinism.  But how His knowledge looks to you when He interacts with you may seem as though God “knows” the “future”.  But knowledge of the future is utterly impossible, and incompatible with God’s existential nature.

It is confusing, I know, but again…I defy anyone to do better.  Someone…anyone, please tell me how God can know man’s future before it exists unless He determined it.  And if He did, and we concede this, then man is determined and Calvinism is right.

The TRUTH of God’s Perfection: Why my metaphysics speak to God’s omnipotence; and why traditional understanding of the divine existential reality does not

Metaphysics

Man’s ability is a function of his innate existential limitations.  God’s INability is a function of His innate existential omnipotent perfection. 

At the risk of offending what few readers I have (I really hope I don’t, though), I felt it prudent to post an explanation of the morality of my metaphysical statements regarding God’s existential truths.  I want to be clear:  my objective is to laud God’s power, nothing less, and I refuse to limit God by my own fallible existential reality simply because it is the only immediately obvious frame of reference I have.  I mean no offense, but I understand that the “knee jerk” reaction to my ideas can run the scale from “hypocrisy” to “blasphemy” to “apostasy”.

Please know this:  I seek TRUTH, and I appeal to metaphysical reason because apart from that, God will never be anything but a flawed contradiction in terms.  And this simply cannot be true if God is true.  If God is not metaphysically consistent, then I submit He is not real.  And my posits are in keeping with that belief.

When I say that it is IMPOSSIBLE that God know the future, it is because I acknowledge that omnipotence and perfection have rational metaphysical obligations attached to them.  God cannot be a hypocrite and still be God, in other words.  If the Christian faith means that we must accept that He is both perfect and NOT perfect, then the Christian faith is a lie.   And I submit that unless we start to look at how God IS, truly, in light of His omnipotent perfection, then we will never gain anything from Christ’s sacrifice except perhaps that which the apostle Paul declares:  salvation as through fire, with…not much else.  Salvation is good, but it does not stop ignorance and tyranny of the mind and spirit.  THAT will continue unabated unless Christians shed all the influence of the secular philosophical understandings and interpretive premises of their faith; and that means getting new “truth”.  And that means going back to the Bible, especially the Torah for our philosophical and epistemological foundations, and throwing out all that Augustine whispers in your ears as you read it.  And while we’re at it, we can tell Calvin and Luther and Edwards and Knox and Piper and Mahaney and Mohler to go dig a hole…we’ll be there later.

In regards to my ideas and metaphysical arguments, I am well aware that they are striking in their deviation from what we as Christians have come to understand as the nature of God.  I understand how they can appear to “box” God in, as it were (e.g. “God cannot know the future”, “God cannot “control” His Creation”, “God cannot “elect” man”, “Past and present do not contain God”).  However, to be frank, this initial observation of my ideas I think stems from a lack of understanding just how different God is from man, by virtue of His status as Creator, and all that that implies.  Certainly, man is in God’s image, but that idea must be limited to man’s ability to be self-aware; to use reason to recognize the abstract truths that not only form his reality even though they cannot be viscerally “felt”, but also enable him to see himself as a separate entity from the rest of Creation; and to independently use his “soul”, or reason, to determine what is or what is not.  But existentially, it is impossible to apply to God those things that are requisite for man to BE; for God’s being is such that it is not only different, but utterly different from ours.  And, in a slight aside of self-pity, let me say this:  To be fair to me, if I may be so bold, I believe it is wrong to initially assume that somehow my ideas limit God.  On the contrary, I emphatically declare that my ideas do the exact opposite.

My ideas are far from blasphemous…they represent God as true perfection; meaning all that IS is within Himself.  God is the I AM, so we must understand that beyond THAT, there is nothing—and I mean NOTHING—which is necessary for Him to be perfect, which means there is nothing else that can contribute to the truth of His existence.  And if this is true (and it must be if God is, in fact, perfect…meaning ALL in ALL) then God is never truly limited when I say:  God cannot know the future.  Why? Because the future is a function of man’s existence; it is not relevant to God, therefore, for Him to know it is REDUNDANT.  And redundancy is a mark of imperfection; of NON-omnipotence.

God cannot be redundant, therefore, He cannot know or control created things because this would be, in fact, redundant to Him.  He does not NEED to control or know certain things because His power to act is well beyond the need to control or know those things.  What limited thinking of man says that in order for God to affect A, He needs to control B!  THAT is what boxes God in.  But my saying that God cannot control man because God does not create a thing to achieve an objective which He can, by definition, achieve better Himself  (which is everything) is not limiting to God’s omnipotence.  No, it declares it.

Perfection simply cannot be redundant.  So I submit that the true blasphemy is suggesting that God MUST know or control things which are wholly unnecessary to Him to know or control in light of His perfect omnipotent power.  And if God IS beholden to redundant acts, like direct control of creation, “election”, perfect knowledge of the future, etc., etc.–which are things that, by themselves, even outside of His power, can NEVER subvert His will–then He is a false God and our faith should be immediately abandoned like a dead car on the side of the road.

So, in other words, yes, truly, God is “limited, but those things that limit God are not relevant to Him, and as such, are not relevant at all as a means of realizing His perfect Will.  Like I said above, any “limitations” of God merely speak to the fact that God cannot be held accountable to or at the mercy of the “truths” and other entities necessary for US to exist.  And so these are not true limitations at all, but mere functions of His perfection.  Perfection cannot, by definition be limited, because what it is that would “limit” it would simply serve to make the perfect, imperfect.  Perfection IS what it IS.  “Limitations” are merely acknowledging that there is a created existential reality that cannot contain the Perfect, because it is, by definition, outside of and separate from Perfect.

Think for a moment.  Why does man need a future and a past?  Because man is not an AM.  Man’s existential reality is not the SUM of Himself; for he is split between soul and body, reason and brain, will and acts; past, present, future…all of this defines “man”.  Why does man need to “know” abstract things…that is, why does man think, then act?  Why is there thought before reaction?  Why is there contemplation before decision?  Because the existential truth of man is that he is a function of degrees of truth, morality, etc., etc.  Decisions are based on degrees of right and wrong, perfection and imperfection, preference and non-preference, and on and on.  And, also, because man is NOT his own space.  Man, in order to exist needs “space”…he needs spacetime, (for you physicists), in order to BE.  God needs none of this.  None of the above can define God’s existential reality.

So is it wisdom and metaphysical reason to suppose that God, then, does NOT need these things?  Of course!  What I am trying to do is proclaim the need to start grasping the gravity and overwhelming TRUTH of God being ALL in ALL.  What does that mean?  It means that the sum total of God’s existential reality is HIMSELF.  There is nothing beyond HIM that HE needs in order to BE, and to act/create.

Why can God not need a future or a past?  Why is He eternal?  Because He IS His own space.  He is everything to Himself…all time and space is found in Himself, as far as His ability to be is concerned.  He is a perpetual NOW because He is not in need of “room to move”; and room, or space, implies time; implies past and future, and a moving of existence from inward to outward.

Why can God not know his own future?  Because He has no future.  The future, in other words, cannot be real to Him; it is only real to man.  To HIS existential reality, there is NO future, or past; there just IS.  In addition to the metaphysically redundant time aspect of the future, future implies thought…implies contemplation before action or reaction; none of which are necessary to God because He is perfect.  Everything He does is of HIM, so He does not NEED to think in man’s sense (His thoughts are not our thoughts), because thinking implies what?  A moral or practical dichotomy, and degrees thereof, and an abstract truth (time) beyond oneself, NONE of which are relevant to God who is ALL in ALL, whose very meaning of everything He does is Himself.

“Who shall I say sent me?”

“Tell them “I AM” sent you.”

That quote “I AM sent you.” is the sum total of the definition of God. It is the complete metaphysical and moral accumulation of Him.  ANYTHING that falls outside of that is NOT applicable to God; and cannot form part of Him.

Why can God not know man’s future?  Why can God not predict? Why can God not control His Creation?  Because…well, to answer in the form of a question:  Of what ultimate meaning or relevance can knowing or controlling or predicting be to God?  NONE at all!  God is perfectly omnipotent.  God has the power of Creation.  If we can begin to grasp even just a mite of what this means…and the power that is found in One who can create anything that is not HIM (every object, thought, law, event, action, purpose, whim, dream…anything that is outside of Him), then we can begin to understand just why and how we MUST re-evaluate our own existential reality in light of what God can and cannot do, according to HIS existential reality and power.  For what can man do or think that can subvert God’s will or objective?  And what IS then that objective (Himself), and what does this mean for the ultimate FREEDOM of man to BE, APART from God?  It means man must indeed be free to be himself, because, by all metaphysical and moral reason, it is redundant and thus impossible for God to be man FOR man, which is exactly what control, knowledge, and prediction imply.  That man is truly not free to exist; that he, himself is merely an illusion, and that the reality of man is one where he is simply a puppet; a functional extension of the Deity.  THIS is blasphemy, if you want to know what true blasphemy looks like.  If man is determined, then man IS God.  There is your depraved theology and “sound” doctrine.

Friends, this can be nowhere found in any metaphysical or even logical description of true, creative “Omnipotence”.

To a God who is His own space, His own Time, His own utter definition (I AM what I AM…in other words, how do you define God?  The answer is:  God IS God.  That is the beginning and end of His truth), and has the power of creation (to make anything from literally nothing at all), ideas and actions like “control”, “knowledge”, “past, future”, are—in man’s existential sense—irrelevant to God.  And if they are irrelevant to God they cannot be a part of Him, in any sense.

And irrelevancy is always a limitation on perfection.

A Devil’s Question: On the nature of “chance”

Metaphysics, Metaphysics of Time

“If you agree than an innocent child goes immediately to heaven for all eternity when they die, and you also agree with the commonly held position that only a minority of adults become Christians and make it to heaven, then, especially in an unbalanced mind, that could justify killing children. An ill individual could easily believe that they are actually doing a good thing, ensuring that those children receive a life of bliss at Jesus side that they might not otherwise have.

I am not trying to be cruel or insensitive, but if you are going to look for answers or possible reasons then no idea should be automatically excluded because it is unpleasant.”

The assumption of the preceding question is that since there is a real chance that a child might NOT accept Christ, then by murdering them you do good, because you eliminate the chance of non-acceptance and ensure their entry into heaven.

This may sound reasonable, but like the philosophical atrocity of Calvinism, it is only reasonable until you employ actual reason; and then, frankly, its truth is revealed; and the truth is that this is a false, and therefore bad assumption.

What exactly do we mean by chance?  What is chance, exactly?

Is chance real?  Or is chance merely a theoretical construct based retrospective analysis; looking at what actually was in order to determine what might be; a mathematical formula shown to predict with varying degrees of precision, depending on the formula and the situation in question?  I submit, yes…THAT.  The latter.  It is not real.

In the grand scheme of reality and existence, I submit that the entire idea of chance is untenable because it has ultimately a fatal flaw, and that is the fact that it deals with the hypothetical–it is not even a verifiable TRUTH, like a natural law, or some other repeatable event. In other words, when you say “chance shows”, and you point to evidence, you are really pointing to something else as the proof of the predicted outcome.  Chance, by definition, means only “possibly“.  And possibly does not equal causality…ever. Chance produces nothing.

Let me explain, lest you think I’m denying math.

I’m not denying math, but I do believe that the math of chance cannot, in fact, declare something that is not, an IS.  Chance does NOT cause, and it does not create reality.  It predicts.  Nothing more.  Chance is the mathematics of prediction, it is not the creator of the present before it is the present.  It is never the cause in the cause and effect relationship of abstract truths.  Thus, to use chance as the primary functional premise for…well, anything is not reasonable.  How much more unreasonable for murder.  How much MORE unreasonable for the murder of the morally innocent.

Again, literally and existentially speaking, chance is NOT in fact, real.  It IS merely theoretical—for nothing IS or has come to pass until it IS and has come to pass, by definition, and so invoking chance is always invoking the purely hypothetical, and is merely making assumptions and guesses (some more “scientific” than others, of course) about what does not yet exist at all—and as such, it should never be used as a foundation for the larceny of anything, but in particular, the human body.  In other words, the idea of murdering the morally innocent to save them from the chance of hell is akin to saying that you will steal a thing from someone to avoid the chance that they might have that thing stolen.  This thinking is patently absurd, but is precisely the argument we make when we argue that killing a child removes the chance that they might not go to heaven.  Chance isn’t in any way real (e.g. tangible; or even a “truth”)…and what you are actually doing by seeking to head off chance at the pass is merely creating a new circumstance which is based on nothing that can be verified as actually true.  Since chance is mere prediction, it doesn’t really exist, and so it cannot be used as a rationale for creating a new circumstance in order to avoid the circumstance which now has, by definition, NO chance of occurring.  Once the circumstance and/or context is changed, chance becomes irrelevant to the entire scenario from beginning to end.  And so it is impossible to invoke chance as the rationale for CHANGING the context.  Again…I stole the thing so that there is no chance the thing could be stolen.  In other words, acting upon “chance” means you remove the chance from the equation; and once that is done, chance is no longer an excuse for doing what it is you did.  You REMOVE chance, so that it no longer applies.  And what I’m saying is that when you do that, then murder is simply murder, removed from chance, making it merely what it is: a brutal, senseless act.  You cannot PROVE chance until you can see the outcome, and then it is no longer chance at all (more later on that); when the outcome is impossible because you changed the context, chance no longer applies.  And to invoke it as a rationale becomes redundant non-logic. Chance is irrelevant unless the circumstance is allowed to come to pass so that what happens can be seen so that chance can be quantified.  And then, once it is quantified, it is by definition, no longer chance.  So…chance CANNOT be PROOF that what you did was morally, legally, or logically JUST, ever, because it is a false idea at the core.  It has only the illusion of efficacy.

Even more, chance is NOT, by definition, even theoretically applicable if we murder, because in murder we seen the utter removal of the life of the person beyond the moment of their death.  There is in fact zero chance that they could not choose Christ, or choose Him, or eat a hamburger, or read a book, or stand on their head, or cluck like a chicken.  Without LIFE, chance is moot.  So—to give another illustration— to declare that we will murder a child in order to avoid the chance that he or she will deny Christ is like saying I will paint the fence white so as to avoid the chance that I will paint it black.  If I paint it white, then there is no chance that I have painted it black.  And also,  if I painted it white then there is, retrospectively, ZERO chance that I could have painted it black.  Chance is, again, a mathematical illusion.  And the danger of using it as an empirical tool is clearly seen in this disturbing scenario.

Ahhhhh…yes, you see it now, don’t you.  What I talked about waaaaaaaay back in some long buried post.  Retroactive Inevitability of Choice (RIC).  And it is precisely this theory of mine that is relevant to this discussion, among others.  Chance, in actually, is a lie…a construct that means nothing ultimately.  There are cause and effect laws, and there are verifiable events and outcomes which have been observed.  But chance itself is really a fantastical construct.  Mathematics makes it seem much more literal and “real” than it is; but remember, the math relies solely on what has already been, and can be verified and observed.  The math is always retrospective; it never observes future events.  Why?  Because the future does not actually exist.  Chance itself can be a useful way to predict, but it is NOT itself causality.

In other words, going back to the fence illustration,  to use chance as a rationale for painting the fence white lacks any fundamental logic at all, because, once I painted it white, I could not have ever painted it black (but the mathematics of chance assume that I could; but I couldn’t, so chance, again, is merely an illusion…predictive, possibly, but never creating reality).  How do I know this?  Because I can clearly see that the fence is white. There is the proof, right before my paint splatter glasses, that chance is an illusion.  Choice is real, yes!  Choice is actual.  You CAN do this or that.  But once done, you could NEVER have done anything but what you CHOSE to do.  But you can never know what it is you inevitably chose to do until and after you chose to do it.

And again, the choice is in fact real. Because the choice is the cause.  The white fence is the effect.  The proof that the choice is real is seen in fact that the white fence exists.   It is a result of the cause, which was the choice. If the choice was not real the fence could not exist because the fence, being the effect, cannot exist by definition absent the cause…that is the law of cause and effect.  It is impossible for the effect to stand APART from the cause, by definition.  And incidentally this is the argument we make when we try to argue determinism via predestination.  We argue that all effects exist without causes, which is metaphysically and physically impossible.  The fact that there is an effect is proof of the choice that is the onus for the cause.   If we argue determinism, we argue effects without causes, which is impossible if we believe that we are predicting what will happen, because what will happen has not, by definition, happened yet.  How does it exist?  Because the cause generates it.  And if the cause generates it, then we must concede that the choice is real.  The choice to paint the fence black or white is real, and the white fence proves it.  The choice is real because it is the cause; if it is not the cause, it is an effect, and an effect cannot generate another effect (I know what some are thinking; let me say that the effect must become a subsequent cause…to argue this further is purely semantics and irrelevant).  So if the choice is not real then the fence is not white. But the white fence also proves that chance is a lie, ultimately.  Because it is white, there is no chance it could ever, ever have been black.

So more to the point, if the children are dead, there is NO chance of them doing anything, by definition; so what, exactly, are you avoiding the chance of?  If a child accepts Christ at some point in their life, then there is NO chance that they could not have not accepted Christ.  As far as you know, because you cannot observe and verify the veracity of your assumptions of “chance” for the person involved—because, among other reasons, the child’s life is terminated—every child you murder DID, in fact, choose Christ, and so you murdered for murder’s sake alone, and risked your own salvation (and I submit that you do forfeit it if you persist in your false assumption that violating God’s command is in fact “good”) by violating a direct command of God for no real altruistic good, no matter how you twisted the logic.  To say that you have murdered only children who have accepted Christ is ultimately just as reasonable as saying there is a “chance” that some were not in fact going to choose Christ.  Because you removed the context where the outcome could be seen, you cannot know anything real.  Murder, again is simply murder.  For literally no reason.  Unless the thing with which we are regarding chance is actually SEEN or NOT SEEN then chance is completely irrelevant (perhaps, mathematical precedence is something to be considered, but never regarding moral decisions…why? because chance is not in fact real, and thus it makes a very poor moral and metaphysical foundational assumption).  So, you are not murdering for chance at all.  You are murdering for murder’s sake, nothing more.

This is the metaphysical and moral truth.  And if you were to persist in the wickedness of murdering the innocent of God, your soul would be in very real mortal danger.  You would have sacrificed your own salvation for rebellion in the form of murder as a philosophy.

Is there anything more wicked?

A Devil’s Question

Metaphysics, Metaphysics of Time, Soteriology

Recently, on a blog that I read and comment on regularly, a very astute atheist (I’m not being facetious; this person is actually quite intelligent, and I appreciate all his/her questions and contributions) posted the following during a discussion of the recent moral catastrophe at Sandy Hook Elementary:

“If you agree than an innocent child goes immediately to heaven for all eternity when they die, and you also agree with the commonly held position that only a minority of adults become Christians and make it to heaven, then, especially in an unbalanced mind, that could justify killing children. An ill individual could easily believe that they are actually doing a good thing, ensuring that those children receive a life of bliss at Jesus side that they might not otherwise have.

I am not trying to be cruel or insensitive, but if you are going to look for answers or possible reasons then no idea should be automatically excluded because it is unpleasant.”

Allow me to boil that down to its functional premise for you.  This particular atheist is asking the age-old question (for those of you who are not adherents of contradictory Calvinist soteriology) “Since babies and little children are morally innocent, and so go to heaven, why not just kill them while they are young, rather than risk the chance that they might not accept Christ once they are morally culpable?”

(NOTE:  For the record, I indeed believe that babies and children who have not reached the age of self-awareness–with regards to a mature and complete synergy between the Ability to Reason (their soul, as I define it) and a full awareness of the moral Law of human existence—do in fact go to heaven.  I reject categorically the Calvinist TULIP construct and all of its assumptions, facets, and implications.  So, for me and what I believe as a Christian, this is a good and reasonable question.  It is vile and wicked because of the solution for evil and suffering it is, in fact, implying; nevertheless I want to make clear that I’m in no way impugning the person asking the question.  I assume the best of that person…that he or she is not in actuality suggesting that the solution for evil is what the question implies, but is merely asking Christians to defend their ideas.  And this is a good thing.  Anytime we can get Christians thinking more individually, the better.   And I thank this atheist for having the courage to bring it up.)

I have read and listened to the responses to this question, and however good they might be, all of them seem to me to miss the metaphysics and existential assumptions of the insanity of the question.  That is, they rightly point out that this is a terrible thought, and render it dangerous indeed.  However, it rarely goes much deeper into the nature of human and divine existence and just what it means for one Consciousness to create another.

To be honest, I admit that my own first thoughts in response to the question only touched upon the metaphysics.  I initially thought something along the lines of:  If we kill the children, then who grows up to be adults, to then continue killing children?  At some point we’ll have to risk the “chance” that some people will not accept Christ and will thus go to hell, and that this is “good” because it is good that one go to hell so that another will go to heaven; which…makes us hypocrites because we will have conceded that good is also found in the precise OPPOSITE of doing good; that is, letting live is as morally right as letting die.  And if we are morally right in taking the chance for some, what is the rationale for not taking the chance for the others?  By what standard do some get the chance to live and others must die in order that they may not get that same chance?  Why is the same chance not not afforded or afforded to all?  Unless, of course, we are assuming the extinction of the human race as the inevitable and desired outcome, and so we’ll just kill all the children and then let the adults die off, as it were.  And if we thus are okay with making the explicit assumption that the only good of man is to be found in his NOT existing, then we are assuming that God is of course a fool for creating.  And if this is our assumption about His nature, we must ask ourselves:  is this the kind of hypocritical Being we want to worship in the first place, and perhaps we should— instead of killing all the children in order to “save” them—examine the rational and metaphysical possibilities of such a Creator actually being God in the first place.  And if the metaphysics prove that it is not, in fact, possible that such a Being who would be so foolish as to create life that can only be good in ANY sense (morally, rationally, logically, philosophically, etc.) if it does not exist at all could be God…well, then we do not need to murder the children in order to save them from a God who does not and cannot possibly exist.  Do we?

No.  We do not.

And…well, I think the logic of this argument is sound, and sufficient to prove the inability of the question to reconcile reasonably the creation of man by God in a way that the question still bears any logical consideration at all (it doesn’t).  And to be sure, this is not a bad way to argue.  But still…it seems so incomplete.  Why is it incomplete?  Well, it is incomplete because there are more things that can and should be said in response to such a vile question; but the primary problem is that my initial response lacks a discussion of love.  Surely, it is full of pragmatic truth, but that’s not really the crux of it, is it?  It answers the logical nonsense, I mean to say, but not the EVIL.  That is, the real reason the idea of murdering children to grant them heaven is so unspeakably horrific is because it is, in reality, stripped bare and cold to the bone of anything even remotely in the same universe as love.

So, in the forthcoming posts I will present three bullet points in response to what I have come to call the Devil’s Question, because I can think of no other place that such an implication (murder of innocents as the solution to man’s moral failings) could be conceived of first except inside the mind of the grand Demon himself.  I could be wrong about this…for man has a way of rivaling even the Devil in wickedness of thought and action; but, in order to get the full effect of the abominable nature of the implicit idea at the core of this question we must first understand that it is an idea that is categorically contradictory to the mind of God and Love.  And, even without any argument of any kind, it can be understood to be just that, and rejected at the face value of it…rejected upon its utter self-evidence.

Bullet one will look at the false presuppositions implicit in the question regarding the nature of “chance”.  Two will look at the divine purpose of human existence; that is, the WHY of God creating man.  And the last will focus heavily on why the idea of murdering innocent children for “heaven” is so unloving by looking at what exactly murder robs one of eternally; what is assumed by man (and even many Christians) to be regained by the murdered person, which will not and cannot in fact be regained, which is why murder is so reviled by God, I would argue, and given its own specific divine injunction.

Response to Lydiasellerofpurple: The Reformed/Calvinist goal of destroying the moral code of biblical GOOD and EVIL

Calvinism/Philosophy, Metaphysics

Recently, the very excellent and wise commenter on this and other blogs, Lydiasellerofpurple, directed me to a link where presumably a neo-Cal, or one who has apparently accepted certain reformed premises as “orthodox”, essentially claimed that they could not condemn Adam Lanza because, doctrinally, their sin was equally condemnable as his was.

Translation:  Just what I said in my post “Christianity: Cult of death, etc.”  If we accept Calvinist theology, WE are are no better than the man who murdered 20 innocent children and 8 innocent adults.  Who are we to judge?  Because but for the grace go I, right?

This is my response, with some editing changes and some additional thoughts blended in.  It was so long, I thought it would make a good post.  At any rate, it clarifies and emphasizes my points on this issue:

Thanks for that link, Lydia. Exactly. I already knew that this was what was going through their reformed minds. “How can we condemn this act? Why, just the other day I thought about stealing a paper clip from work…I am as depraved and wicked as he is.”

CJ Mahaney had a saying, it was my personal favorite because it illustrated so perfectly the lunacy and dysfunctional moral logic from which the theology proceeds:

“Mother Theresa has more in common with Adolph Hitler than with Jesus Christ.”

Now, on the some level, he isn’t wrong. There is a huge distinction between Creator and created. But that’s NOT what CJ means. No, this statement has one point, and it is to make a MORAL comparison; to say that Mother Theresa has more in common, in her moral desires and decisions, with Adolph Hitler than with Jesus Christ.

Now, how can anyone who is not insane make this kind of proclamation. Easy, the kind of person who sees morality in BEING. Mother Theresa’s sin lay precisely in the fact that she is NOT God. Thus, her sin is like yours and mind, and her sin is that she exists at all.

What I mean to say is that neo-Cals blur all moral, metaphysical and physical lines, so that man can make no distinction between them whatsoever. The resulting theological slop is thus parsed into neat little piles, with a ton of semantic gymnastics and redefining of terms, of cohesive and metaphysically impossible black and white (what I mean is that the “black and white” delineation is merely a very good illusion). One pile = God, the other = man. God is good. Man is evil. The IS is what links sin and goodness. Anything else about man is irrelevant because his very existence is his depravity and is why he can do no good. Why he is born condemned, and why he must be elect, and afterwards, compelled into sanctification. His entire existence is defined by an external power beyond himself. Sin nature or God, depending on his elect status. And this is due, again, to the fact that he exists at all.

This of course destroys morality completely, which is exactly what Calvinism is designed to do so that “good” and “bad” may be thus declared to be whatever the gnostic ecclesiastical leadership says it is. Once you are categorically convinced that you have no claim to yourself or your mind because you are depraved and wicked merely by being awake, you can be owned by anyone claiming special divine dispensation. And, really, who in the hell are you to argue? The only “good” you an remotely do, since your sin is that you are awake, is to go back to sleep.

This is what this is all about by declaring none of us any better than Adam Lanza. We exist, so did he, and that is why we are evil.

In addition, the idea of “any sin is equal sin” is also designed to destroy the concept of an objective morality that man can know; that is, kill the idea of good and evil. Think about it, if one sin is as equally heinous as any other, then the converse of that should be true, no? If one sin can condemn to hell, even if it’s something like lying about your weight to your friend, then one act of good should be grounds for your utter vindication before the Lord, right? I mean, if we are being consistent, one act of good, even if it is telling your friend that she or he looks particularly attractive that day, should be as equally righteous as Christ’s perfect morality.

So, why the double standard?

Well, there is no double standard, really, because the idea of “one sin is equal to all sins” has nothing to do with convincing us that we need Christ. It is ALL about destroying the idea of morality altogether so that gnostics can CREATE it for us. All sin is equal because in reality, there is NO such thing as sin. You can do NO good because your very existence is what makes you wicked. There isn’t any chance for a double standard because you can NEVER do any good at all, because all you do is a function of your existence, and your existence is the root of your evil.  And even salvation cannot change the status of your existence, so guess what?  You know all that Calvinist talk about preaching the Gospel to yourself everyday?  Staying at the “foot of the Cross”?  Well, now you know why.  Hard to stop sinning if your definition of sin is “I think, therefore I am…totally depraved” isn’t it?

There is obviously nothing in the faith or the bible to support this abominable lie. If existence itself is sin then that makes the Creator the author of evil. The fact is that man’s existence is GOOD, and has always been GOOD and it is man’s very consciousness, his reason, that allows him to acknowledge good and evil and thus cultivate volition and action in full awareness of the moral code. This means that sin and good are, in fact, existing in degrees. And they must, because the degrees of sin and goodness are the observable plumb lines for progress and regress; to know and understand when we are drawing to and away from God. They allow God to be at the center of what we do, and how we know where we stand relative to morality with regards to our individual context, and to recognize how God is working with us and how we are aware of what our relationship is with Him at any given moment and what we can expect and how we can grow. Once you destroy degrees, you destroy morality at its root.

And that is their goal.  Destroy the biblical code of good and evil so that they may capriciously re-write it.  Daily.  “Whimsically.”  Oh yes…THAT is the whimsical gospel.  Morality becomes whatever THEY say it is.

This is no recipe for good.

 

Christianity: Cult of death, culture of death, and its contribution to our society of death

Calvinism/Philosophy, Metaphysics

In times of national tragedy like this, where 28 innocent human beings are shot dead in cold blood in the middle of the day, in the middle of an elementary school—a time where words cannot describe the horror and evil on display—we are tempted to turn to the Christian faith in an effort to assuage our fears, our sense of helplessness, and to offer hope and peace to those directly affected by such horror.

However, I think perhaps we must first ask ourselves, as good Christians, is this really a good idea?

I mean, in light of the marching hoards of reformed churches, with a heavy and heavy-handed emphasis on Calvinism, even to the point where traditionally non-Calvinist churches are accepting certain reformed doctrines specific to that faith as being utter, God-breathed TRUTH…yes, in light of this, we must ask ourselves again:  Is this really a good idea? Does Christianity in fact have anything to offer those who have suffered?  Or, have we reached a point where the secular society, even atheists perhaps, show rank common human decency and compassion beyond what any “Christian” can offer?  I submit that, yes, this is indeed the case.

This is the case because Christianity, in embracing the reformed premises of total depravity, original sin, and election, biblical infallibility, and scores of other metaphysically and morally impossible and hypocritical doctrines, has become, in fact a cult of death.

What do I mean by this?

I mean that what Christianity means today is:  if you are a human, you just aren’t worth anything.  Indeed, your sin is your existence.  God doesn’t like you.  God only likes Himself, and since you are not Him, He hates your guts.  Now, and forever.  He laments your very existence.  Any good in you is Himself, thus the only thing about you he can possibly love is Himself. If you are not elect, he doesn’t care if you are slaughtered, because, again, your existence is your sin.  If you are elect, He still doesn’t like you, but if He shows you favor, know this:  it is not you He favors, but Himself.  You he hates, and so if you happen to be gunned down by a madman, rejoice in your suffering.  For the pain is the plumb line of truth.  For believer and non-believer alike, the more you suffer, the more you are doing the only “good” you can do.  The more the pain, the more you realize the TRUTH of your existence.  That you are an abomination, and your sin is that you are awake.

This, my friends, is Calvinism; this is the root of reformed theology.  And this is why those who suffer need to run from Christians, not to them.  It is sad, but we have no hope, no comfort to offer.  Nothing.  God hates them.  What else is there to say?

You think I’m horrible, don’t you.  You think I’m a heretic.  You might not personally burn me a the stake for my apostasy; my vile wickedness; my rejection of God; my lack of faith and my lack of suspending my disbelief to proclaim that God can in fact both love and hate sinful, depraved, horrible, wicked humanity at the same time…no, you might not do it.  You might even deign to pay lip service to the fact that it would be wrong to do such a thing.  Vengeance is the Lord’s and all that, right, says your infallible bible.  But, if it happened, if I was led to the bonfire, with my blog and my words burning at my feet like Michael Servitus under the “great reformer”, John Calvin, you wouldn’t care so much, would you?  Deep down, you wouldn’t protest.  I got what I deserve, so this must be God’s vengeance.   For I told people to not turn to Jesus in a time of national tragedy.  And for that, I deserve to die the heretic’s death.

I know.  I know.  It’s okay.  If you are a Calvinist, it is in perfect keeping with your beliefs.  But know this:  whatever hate God has for me, he has for you.  Whatever loathsome thing He finds in me, He finds in you.  I could say even worse things, and I still it would be doctrinally consistent to declare that I may be the elect one and you may be the damned one.

Your righteous indignation at me amounts to nothing; it is all filthy rags.  You must know this.  You have no collateral against me to show to God.  For according to your own doctrine, you are NO BETTER THAN the one who slaughtered 20 innocent children.

Yes, know this before you condemn me.

But you will condemn me anyway, because your doctrine is based on utter contradiction and inconsistency.  You will condemn because you have no choice, because in your mind, your Calvinism only applies to others.  You are one of the gnostic few…a divinely gifted one.  You have the keys to the kingdom, and your condemnation of me, though you are a depraved worm, is proof that God has gifted you to condemn .  Oh, the irony…the impossibility of this thinking.  But that is you.  It is how you can function from day to day.  If you were consistent, you would not be a Calvinist.  And if you ceased to function by impossible contradiction, you would collapse into a heap of useless bones; spontaneously combust inside your own doctrinal funhouse.

It is okay for you to kill others and claim you do it out of righteousness because you have no standard of reason or truth.  All you know is you react; and all of it is God’s will, by your doctrine of divine determinism.  Your indignation at my words is not of you, because it is righteous, so it must be of God.

But how do you know?  You don’t.  You are spiritual and literally insane.  And so you can do anything you want.  Even to the point of becoming hypocritically indignant at people who point out that what you believe destroys life, and cannot save it.

You still doubt me.  I know you do.  These words of mine…shock value.  Nothing more.  I’m a smart-ass, capitalizing on death to make a point.

John Piper says this tragedy reminds us of how depraved our souls are.  The translation of this is simple:  God hates you as much as He hates the man who did this, because to Him, there is NO difference.

Within seconds of this tragedy hitting the news, I bet there were thousands of people (indeed, I read it myself on some blogs) declaring:  Who can understand the mind of God?  Who can explain why this was in His plan?

Folks, this is called “determinism”, and it is decidedly reformed.  This is “God controls all things”.

The translation of this seemingly sympathetic statement is this:  God wanted this to happen. He didn’t just allow it, HE did it.  Nothing happens outside of His Will, you see, and so this was planned; pre-ordained.  It could not have gone any other way.  He wanted those beautiful innocent children to die at the hands of a madman; to remind us that we are all likewise horrible, and hated by God.

So, declaring this a lesson in total depravity and determinism means this to me:  God hates your soul, and He will kill children to prove it.

In this way, Christianity is no different than the secular culture of our times, which says that individuals exist to be slaughtered.  We see it in movies, in games, in our altruistic mindsets.  Christianity confirms this, in its own way.  Sure, people can be killed; for that is their greatest good…suffering, death, slavery, subjugation, servitude.  But leave the killing and the autocracy where it belongs:  in the hands of the neo-reformed mystic despots.

The problem is, of course that this is a total lie.  God doesn’t hate you, or those children, whose innocent souls were so NOT depraved that John Piper, stuck in the stocks of his Calvinism, cannot even possibly begin to sympathize with their parents or offer anything in the way of hope or comfort.  He is dead, by his own doctrinal definition.

So we will ignore Piper’s theology of death, after condemning it for the wickedness it is, and turn to what we know is really true of God.

God loves these children.  He LOVES them.  He grieves.  These innocent children are in heaven.  They are with God; and He is telling them now that this was NOT the plan He had for them.  It was not His will.  It was never His will.  His will is life, not death.  His will is for people to be, not to die.

He is happy they are with Him.  He loves them, and they will dwell and sing and play and live with God forever and ever, in His fields of flowers, rolling with angels, protected by God, and are in such great comfort and bliss that you and I cannot even imagine.  God is telling those children that He is moved to tears by such horror; that this is not what He wanted for them.  He never intended this, and He longed to see them grow and live and love and be.

But He is happy they have come to Him.  It’s early, but He is prepared.  They are taken in and all is ready.  Parents, people:  God loves these children, and they are in bliss with Him now.  This is a fact, and no one will harm your little ones ever again.

God and Christ love us all.  God did not plan this.  Prayer helps this.  Prayer can prevent this in the future  because there is power to move reality through prayer, based on our will and our right understanding of what is good.  There is a relationship with Christ that is real; that is not determined, and that is rooted in love and life, and says that it is impossible for man to exist if it is God’s will that he should die.

And until this is the message of Christians, Christianity will continue to be a cult of death.

The Stocks of Christ: The “grace” of God means John Bradford already went, not that he didn’t.

Calvinism/Philosophy, Metaphysics

I suspect a LOT of people entrapped within the neo-Cal juggernaut feel outside themselves, trapped, and strangers to who and what they are, lost and in a perpetual state of terrified uncertainty (they can’t even know if they are really saved); even some of those who may be its most outspoken proponents. It isn’t that they necessarily deny their feelings. It’s that they really think that those feelings are wicked; that the lack of joy cannot possibly be rooted in the fatalistic determinism which drives the theology, but must certainly be instead due to their ongoing depravity and their deep seated inability to be anything other than horrible people, and “but for the grace of God go [them]” (with all due respect, Mr. Bradford, there is something else besides grace that can keep one from the noose; NOT committing a crime) and all of the rest of the incoherent metaphysics . They put up with the torment because they think that this is their cosmic, divine duty. The more miserable they are the better; they are getting their just desserts for being born, after all. And they count themselves lucky!! They think that no matter how terrorized they are in their spirits, no matter how destructive the sum of the neo-Cal doctrine is to humanity, surely it’s better then “what they deserve”…for what they “deserve” are the gallows that John Bradford’s criminals got, even though they likely have as much in common with those convicts as with a spinning toad stool. Whatever…more neo-Calvinist sensationalist propaganda designed to confuse people about who and what they worship, and what God’s love really IS and what it ISN’T.  Doesn’t the bible say that the civil authorities wield the sword of punishment for society’s evildoers?  Why then such fatalistic determinism about a fairly clear biblical truth about the cause and effect of doing evil deeds and getting caught by the cops?  Why this “but for the grace” bit?   Well, I’m guessing that John Bradford copped to the idea that we are all going to burn regardless of what we do, because there really is no TRUTH except that the existence of man is the root of his evil, and so doing or not doing is not only irrelevant, but functionally impossible, really, because we are all bound by some inexorable sin nature that is outside of us, controlling us, usurping us, and yet,WE are still to blame somehow because our inability to choose is based on the choice we made to have a sin nature…and that, whether a criminal or not, but for the grace of some categorically arbitrary “election” process by God, via a cosmic game of eeny-meeny-miney-moe, all of our asses are doomed.

But yes, this is what these poor tortured souls suffering under the boot of Calvinist tyranny really think.  They are just so doggone lucky God isn’t REALLY giving them what for…why He oughta just…and they’d better smile while it’s happening, too.  Why, if they got what they deserved, they might be like those well-adjusted and happy humans who actually think God loves them…yes, they’d be deceived like those poor happy doomed souls. Ah, if only those happy “sinners” knew the depth of their sin (who foolishly think that because THEY accepted Christ that they are saved; when the truth is that most are probably not elect at all, you know…poor bastards). If only they knew that they needed to really just stop being so doggone in love with God and thankful that He loves and cares for them and answers their prayers and instead would just go to the cross, everyday, and get re-saved over and over and over again, to the point where the cross becomes the wooden stocks of puritanical self-deprecation and rank self-hatred and rank hatred of humanity in general until they all but declare God a fool or even creating such a person as they are; and they sit in the Stocks of Christ all day every day while the world throws rotten tomatoes upon their depraved souls because of course, their very existence warrants the abuse…they deserve the spit and rotten broccoli in the mouth because they breath, and even that is done in “sin”. But hey…at least they are elect.

Unless they aren’t.

And,again, they can’t really know one way or the other, because by definition they must deny every thought and deed as filthy rags. For even their hope is sin. So…they wait in the stocks and let the world pass them by and hope that in the end it is all worth it.

And sanctification?  Well, that’s a laugh now, isn’t it.  If you are a person who really believes all that the Calvinists say about you, do you honestly think there is even a shred of the smallest mite of a point to considering just what YOU can do to be good?  I didn’t think so.  And neither do you.  If you happen to smile and forgive the person that got you right in the eye with that moldy turnip, well then, you can just thank God that but for the grace you didn’t go to…the…er…uh…but wait.  There you are, in the stocks, so, where is God’s grace, exactly?  It seems that you actually did go to the place that John said you didn’t go but for God’s grace so…  Oh, who cares, right?  We are all good Calvinists here.  Why quibble over little details like metaphysical, doctrinal, and rational consistency.

At any rate, the smile or the forgiveness in your heart must be of God and never from you because, after all, you’re in the stocks, and you are there for a reason, and it sure as hell isn’t because YOU can do good.  You were born to be there, and so what on earth makes you think that you can sanctify yourself away from the daily torture of the Stocks of Christ?

Sanctification!  Ha, ha.  Yeah.  That’s funny stuff.  As if.

Now, let’s be honest and just grab our courage and our sense and call this what it is: spiritual madness and gnostic tyranny of the worst kind.  This kind of thinking is insane and it cannot possibly be from God.  Here’s the real reason you cannot earn God’s love, and it doesn’t have a thing to do with the false doctrine of pervasive depravity, and certainly nothing to do with the fatalistic determinism wrapped up in the notion of “but for the grace of God go I”.  The reason people cannot earn God’s love is because He has ALWAYS loved them. He doesn’t think they are depraved; He thinks they are good because HE is the author of their reason, and reason, being the CORE of man’s ability to BE, thus must be GOOD.  Man is GOOD, and his existence is GOOD; and His work is good.

I can already hear your thoughts.  But Jesus said “Only God is good.”  Yes, in context, Jesus is absolutely right.  Only God is good because only God is good outside of anything else.  That is, God is synonymous with good because beyond anything else, there will always be God, and God thus MUST be perfect, and thus any proclamation of good by God means that He, Himself is the perfect embodiment of it.  I’m not suggesting people are good in that way.  What I’m suggesting is what I’ve already said.  Man is good because his reason is of God.  His reason is how he can know TRUTH, and God is TRUTH.  If man was really totally depraved he could never, ever know God, and so God could not have created him in the first place.  God would not be known, not because of some fictional depravity, but because man wouldn’t be around to have a thought in his head.  Man’s existence is the very testimony to man’s goodness.  Man is the pinnacle of God’s creation; a creature that is self-aware and free to pursue God in spirit and truth, which is how God pursues Himself.  A being with this inherent Ability CANNOT be totally depraved.

But, one of the reasons the Calvinists get away with their humanity-razing and self-serving theology is because, in a way, they say the right things. They say, for example, that we all need Jesus. They say we cannot earn God’s love. All those things, yes, sound so biblical and true; but see, they are never questioned as to just what they MEAN. And by the time you actually figure out that what they say is so different than the what the truth is, you are already ten miles down the road, confused, nodding and declaring them your overlord “standing in the stead” (and this is just what happened to me; but I blame myself). But once you realize that the premises behind the “orthodox” sounding words is completely contrary to what God actually thinks about man, then the whole false front collapses. The point is: never concede or agree with a Calvinist until you understand what the basis of the point is. NEVER concede a premise. NEVER nod your head when they say something like, “Well, surely we can both agree that God is good.” Because the minute you do that, they have got you on the rails that lead inexorably to THEIR gnostic conclusions, and before you know it, your into the cohesive theology so deeply you can’t ever remember where you started (but they will remind you by simply saying: Just remember, you are awful…so “God is good”, becomes, YOU are awful, and that’s all you need to know).

Because, while yes, God certainly is good, that isn’t the POINT. God’s goodness isn’t a proclamation of TRUTH coming from a Calvinist, because if it was, they’d understand it can only mean: therefore, YOU should CHOOSE to follow Him, because this is wise. But that’s not what they mean. When they say God is good, they mean: you CAN’T possibly follow God because you are evil. The point of God is good is merely to remind you that YOU are not. And that is not the Biblical implication of the truth “God is good”. So, the Calvinists get away with their heresy because they use Biblical language as slight-of-hand. God is good doesn’t mean, God is TRUTH, or God’s work is perfect, or God craves the salvation of all people because He loves them. No, God is good means: man is vile, obey us.