Separation of Church and State

“The morality of the priesthood, and the devotion of the people, have been manifestly increased by the total separation of the church from the State.”—James Madison 

"The question before the human race is, whether the God of nature shall govern the world by his own laws, or whether priests and kings shall rule it by fictitious miracles."--John Adams

"The United States of America should have a foundation free from the influence of clergy."—George Washington

“Persecution is not an original feature in any religion; but it is always the strongly marked feature of all religions established by law.” ― Thomas Paine

“I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people (the First Amendment) which declared that their legislature should ‘make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,’ thus building a wall of separation between Church & State.”—Thomas Jefferson
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There are plenty more such quotes, but they won’t impress anyone determined to believe that separation of church and state is defended only by a small vocal group.  Most people haven’t noticed how many believers in God, including a surprising number of Christians are for the absolute separation of church and state.  Baptists have been among the most stalwart supporters, and it was in their defense that Jefferson created his now famous “wall of separation” analogy, in 1802, expounding on the meaning of the First Amendment.

John Leland, a Baptist minister from Massachusetts, supported Madison against Patrick Henry’s attempt to establish state support for religion in Virginia.  Leland said, “If all the souls in a government were saints of God, (and) should they be formed into a society by law, that society could not be a Gospel Church, but a creature of state."  That Baptist position survives to this day in the American Baptist Convention, which resolved in 1963, and reiterated in 1983 and 1993, “that separation of church and state is central to our American heritage; that it has made possible a measure of freedom not previously achieved under any other system; that it is indispensable to our national policy of equal rights for all [religions], and special privileges for no religion.”  Freewill Baptists, American/Northern Baptists, Bible Baptists, General Baptists, National Baptists, Primitive Baptists as well as Methodists hold similar positions.

Where then does the virulent and vocal opposition to the mere mention of separation of church and state come from?  From the Southern Baptists, who split from their brethren in 1845 in order to defend the biblical sanctity of slavery.  They are now the dominant evangelical leaders opposing separation of church and state, even though in 1963 their Baptist Faith and Message said:  “God alone is Lord of the conscience, and He has left it free from the doctrines and commandments of men which are contrary to His Word or not contained in it.  Church and state should be separate.”

It wasn’t until 1995 that the Southern Baptist Convention voted to condemn its historic support for slavery and failure to confront racism in the South.

Adding "under God" to the Pledge of Allegiance seems like such a small thing, but it is the seed of what can become a dangerous violation of  the separation principle.  And what is the motivation behind it but an attempt at indoctrination, after all.  President Eisenhower, when signing the bill to add it to the Pledge (and also "In God We Trust" to paper money, making it the country's second moto with E Pluribus Unum), said, "From this day forward, the millions of our school children will daily proclaim in every city and town, every village and rural school house, the dedication of our nation and our people to the Almighty. ... In this way we are reaffirming the transcendence of religious faith in America's heritage and future; in this way we shall constantly strengthen those spiritual weapons which forever will be our country's most powerful resource, in peace or in war."

Spiritual weapon indeed.

The Holy of Holies

“The Truth is clever. The minute we create an idol for it, it becomes a lie.” -TPT



Is rule by fear as used by Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Hussein or Taliban/Iranian theocracies et al. any different than that of the Biblical Jehovah, held by dogma to be an object of fear? Are we not taught by biblical scripture to fear God?

In I Samuel 8—“God” begrudgingly accedes to the selection of a king to reign over Israel. Why did the Israelites desire a king against "God’s wishes" for continued rule via the priests, prophets and judges with Saul as “God’s” spokesman? Because the theocratic priesthood used the name of God to justify their corruption. Samuel warned the people of the power of a king but didn’t mention that corruption would be just as much of a problem with a king as it had been with the priests and judges. The people didn’t disagree with Samuel’s warnings, so we are left to conclude that the corruption of their theocracy was worse than the picture he painted of life under a king.

History’s most successful and revered leaders lead through respect earned by demonstration of ability and integrity, not fear.
The temple in Jerusalem was designed to represent the source of fear and awe the theocracy wished to project, but it’s Holy of Holies was as empty of Truth as are all such shams created to validate the power of its custodians. It was itself an idol, and as with all idols, a lie; the great temple, adorned with flowing sacrificial blood, was constructed to shelter fear in a barren room to perpetuate and reinforce a lie. A building is a building unless it is said to be holier than the rocks and stones around it. Then it becomes an idol.  You can’t enshrine Truth in a temple or behind an altar--only in our minds and hearts.

Truth itself is the Holy of Holies, the universe its temple and the souls who seek it are its apostles.

Is Sex Unholy?

On what basis can sex be considered unholy while claiming that contraception is unholy as well. Who decides that birth control stops at conception? If not, then when does abortion become evil?

Look to the extremes. Is "aborting" a one cell zygote when the mother is pregnant as a result of being raped by her father, immoral?  Is partial-birth abortion of a healthy baby in the process of being born anything but murder?  Abortion is the most difficult moral issue we face because it involves the rights of the mother, and the question of when an embryo acquires its rights.  

Those who say human rights begin at conception based on divine revelation will be as intransigent in that belief as on all their other beliefs based purely on blind faith in the infallibility of scripture that is fraught with contradictions.  So too those who say an embryo gains it's rights somehow instantly once outside the womb, are just as tied to their blind faith of convenience as those to religious revelation.  "Pro-Life" and "Pro-Choice" are simplistic labels which are as evil in their simplicity as the immorality they claim to oppose.

There are no simple answers to the issue any more than sex can be reduced to being simple holiness or Original Sin.

What should be "fair"?.

Can life be made to be fair?  If so how should we go about achieving it?  Who decides what's fair, one person, a committee, a majority?  Would that be fair for all those who aren't that one person, or weren't on that committee or in that majority?  

We aren't all created equal.  Some have greater intelligence, creativity, physical prowess, leadership ability or health than others.  How can we make that fair, by punishing the superior ones and bringing them down to the level of the most inferior ones? 

There is only one thing that can and should be made equal or fair, the moral right of all adults to their life, liberty and property

Afterlife?

The idea of an afterlife in Abrahamic religions does not go back as far in history as popularly supposed.  The first indication of a belief in the idea occurs in 2 Maccabees, about the revolt against the Seleucid King Antiochus Epiphanes, who conquered Jerusalem in 167 BCE and proceeded to start killing all Jews who wouldn't stop practicing their religion and participate in his Hellenistic, pagan religion.  The revolt against his reign was led by Judas Maccabeus who ousted the Seleucids from Jerusalem and the Temple in 164 BCE, (which is still celebrated by Jews as the Festival of Chanukah).

The pertinent passage, 2 Maccabees 7:9 (written c. 124 BCE), concerns a woman who is forced to watch as her 7 sons are tortured and killed for refusing to eat pork.  Before she is martyred herself, she says, "the King of the universe will rise us up to an everlasting renewal of life, because we have died for his laws".  That idea expressed here comes well after the codification of Judaic canon.

By the time of Jesus, the Pharisees and Essenes generally believed in an afterlife, but the Sadducees, the priestly class and Roman collaborators, did not.  The above Maccabean passage sheds some light on why that was likely the case.  People who believed in a reward in the afterlife would be more likely to risk revolt even to death.  Add to that fact that revolt against Antiochus was still relatively fresh in the minds of Jews in Jesus' time, prompting them to be looking for a Maccabean like leader/messiah to oust the Romans and their lackey priesthood and royalty.  Jesus, as the Son of David with his Kingdom of Heaven drew on those powerful associations.

The attitude prior to the hope and belief expressed by the woman in the passage above, is best put by Job's question, "Can the dead live again?"--Job 14:14  Job was written/compiled probably no later than 200 years before 2 Maccabees.

Certainly the exposure of Judaism to the wide cosmopolitan array of religions and cults that accompanied the Roman conquest, had a growing influence on a belief in an afterlife.  The cults of Isis, Dionysus and Mithras, with their resurrected savior-man-gods, communion like rituals and everlasting life (not to mention the sexual exploitation) were tempting even for Jews, particularly outside of Judea.  Paul almost certainly buckled to the pressure to co-opt the popular aspect of these cults and their associated mystery religions.  It makes one wonder if the possibilities of such modification to the Jesus movement wasn't the actual substance of his epiphany on the road to Damascus.

Is there an answer to the possibility of an afterlife?  From the perspective of this blog, assuming a laissez faire God, no--at least not a divinely revealed one.  But reference my article,  The Ethernatural, for a credible suggestion concerning the possible basis for a theory of an afterlife.

Did Jesus Fail?

 Mark 11 (RSV):

12 The next day as they were leaving Bethany, Jesus was hungry. 
13 Seeing in the distance a fig tree in leaf, he went to find out if it had any fruit. When he reached it, he found nothing but leaves, because it was not the season for figs. 
14 Then he said to the tree, “May no one ever eat fruit from you again.” And his disciples heard him say it.
15 On reaching Jerusalem, Jesus entered the temple courts and began driving out those who were buying and selling there. He overturned the tables of the money changers and the benches of those selling doves, 
16 and would not allow anyone to carry merchandise through the temple courts. 
17 And as he taught them, he said, “Is it not written: ‘My house will be called a house of prayer for all nations’? But you have made it ‘a den of robbers.’”
18 The chief priests and the teachers of the law heard this and began looking for a way to kill him, for they feared him, because the whole crowd was amazed at his teaching.
19 When evening came, Jesus and his disciples went out of the city.

(Then seeing the withered fig tree the next day)

23 Truly, I say to you, whoever says to this mountain, 'Be taken up and cast into the sea,' and does not doubt in his heart, but believes that what he says will come to pass, it will be done for him.

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Did Jesus fail?  Did Jesus cleanse the Temple like Joshua fought the battle of Jericho--as the leader. If he single-handedly caused all that chaos, the merchants would have stopped him themselves, much less the Temple guards who were there for that purpose. He had to have been leading a significant band of followers, some (like Peter) who were armed.

Not only did he lead this operation, but he embargoed the trade in sacrificial animal merchandise for the rest of the day, an impossible feat for one man. The point? His faith did not move the mountain--God didn't show up as he expected Him to do once the Temple was cleansed. The passage about moving mountains by faith immediately follows this, but most likely preceded it originally, just as the passage about cursing the fruitless fig tree (a symbol for his fruitless mission) originally followed it.

Perhaps the chief priests feared Jesus somewhat because of his influence with the people, but more so because the people were very large in number and armed. The irony is that the people probably started to disperse at the end of the day after Jesus failure, some even becoming some of those calling for his death because of it.

In any case, Jesus was crucified, the Roman punishment for insurrection, not for theft, so the other two that were crucified with Jesus were likely two of his followers, not thieves.

Verse 23 appears to be Jesus encouraging or preaching to himself, trying to assuage his doubt.  John the Baptizer's execution had shaken his faith to the core.  It appears he believed  the fruitless fig tree to be a bad omen.  And then, above all, God did not re-inhabited the Temple following its cleansing.  For us, it's just more evidence that God (if He exists) does not intervene, ever, for ANY reason--but Jesus' unreasoned faith kept him from recognizing that evident fact.  The ultimate point is, Jesus believed in revelation, divine intervention and the power of faith, but he was killed anyway, leading to his cry from the cross asking why God had abandoned him.

Yet Jesus' faith was enough to kill the fig tree?  That smacks more of coincidence or latter day editing, exchanging the curse passage with the passage on faith as suggested above.

Did God abandon him?  No. God's prime directive remains the protection of our free will, free from irrational, supernatural exceptions to the natural law that governs our rational universe.

What is The Meaning of Life?

It's become almost a cliche to ridicule the question.  How can we know why we're here if we're not given any reason, purpose or meaning whatsoever?  The only guides that claim to be a book of instructions for living are the self-titled "Holy" Scriptures that are loaded with contradictions and falsehoods, and interspersed with occasional bits of wisdom or evil.  What can we make of the apparent fact that the only Word of God is the ever present natural law staring us in the face, insisting that we take it from there.  It finally becomes obvious that determining the meaning, if there is to be any,  is up to us, which is both exhilarating and terrifying.

Insight often comes from insignificant and unexpected places.  In a current movie preview, a character asks a question that is so above the rest of the subject matter it almost jumps off the screen, "What are you gonna do with this one and only life you've got?"  Profundity in a nutshell.  Since we have free will, therefore we're not going to be told what to do, it's up to us to decide, and it looks like we have three general choices.

The first answer, and probably the most common, is Nothing.  But is it really nothing.  In the old movie, The Magnificent Seven, Charles Bronson's character scolds a child for idolizing him as a hero because he's a gunfighter.  He tells the child that his parents are more courageous than he is because they assume the weight of the responsibility for their family; something he doesn't have the will to do.  Courage comes a lot easier if we don't care.  The only way to truly do nothing is to hide you light under a bushel chasing trivialities.  The true do-nothings refuse to pull their own weight, which often becomes considerable, sitting in front of the boob tube watching programs that offer no substance or challenge, simply making them comfortably numb.  These types may be less plentiful than we tend to think.  We can only hope.

The other two choices are polar opposites, doing good or evil; pursuing the Truth via knowledge, justice, love and beauty, or violating the rights of others for your own advancement, or worse, just because it feels good.  At first blush it appears simple, but we tend to oversimplify good and evil by making them a function of love and nothing else.  Is that correct?  Isn't it prejudicial to assume that we all have the same capacity for love, and if we don't, that those who have a low capacity are doomed?  But meaning, the pursuit of Truth, is up to the individual to determine according to one's abilities, drives and desires.  Charles Bronson in the example above, did well to point out the moral and virtuous behavior of the child's responsible parents, but he is contributing as well, doing what he is good at in the pursuit of Truth via justice.  No one can do it all, and we shouldn't beat ourselves up for it when we can't.  Our job, what gives us meaning, is to find what we can do, and then do it.

Value yourself and do what your good at while honoring the rights of others and their righteousness in doing the same.  Look forward to each day ahead, knowing you are worthy, you can contribute and you can enjoy yourself doing it. You can be no more generous to others than you are generous to yourself.

Is God Cruel?

Is God Cruel?

    “One of the annoying things about believing in free will and individual responsibility is the difficulty of finding somebody to blame your problems on. And when you do find somebody, it's remarkable how often his picture turns up on your driver's license.”                         

                                            —P. J. O’Rourke

The following answer may not be complete, and there’s nothing that anyone can say to soothe the heart-wrenching sorrow of the loss of a loved one who died for no apparent reason.  However, even the most seemingly pointless suffering or death does serve one purpose; it is a monument to and a reminder of God’s commitment to our free will.  This may sound analytical at first, but its implications are truly profound.  If we are to have any meaning for our existence, we must have the ability to live and die with the freedom to make our own choices, free from the supernatural carrot and stick, enabling us to reap the rewards or the anguish of our own decisions.

Free will seems like such a trivial answer for all our senseless tragedies, but only if we don’t credit free will with its true value.  If there’s to be meaning for our lives, it must be through the exercise of free will.  This is not just for our benefit so that we may know that the choices we made were our own.  It’s also so that God may know as well that what we do is our decision, not what He created us to be or do.  This also gives the added benefit for God of a capacity to be surprised or delighted and to gain the eventual companionship of truly independent souls.

Some may reasonably ask, how can or why would an omnipotent God limit his omnipotence?  The paradoxical answer (question?) is, wouldn’t God be limited if He weren’t able to limit Himself, to set something beyond His own power, to bestow a portion of His power on others? 

Consider this short divine comedy:

***BIG BANG!***

           <<><>><<><>>

       <<><><><>><<><><><>>

<<><>The Universe Begins<><>>

God: Gabriel, isn't this a beautiful universe I created?
Gabriel: Yes Boss.
God: (Sigh).  Adam, what about you, what do you think of the universe?
Adam (voice of Eddie Murphy):  Oh, it’s absolutely delightful. I particularly like those sparkly little galaxies, and you just can't beat a brilliant sunset by the ocean or a thunderstorm over the Grand Canyon. I won't even go into women, you hit the jackpot with that one.  But those black holes are a holy terror. And WHY is everything SO----FAR----APART.  Man-o-man, the nearest star is 4 light years away. What were you thinking? And couldn't you at least do something about those damn mosquitoes. I hope I'm not stepping on any toes here, but if I'd have arranged things......
God: (Sigh)………(Smile)

 All this may be of little comfort for our sorrows now, but even the smallest soul stirs ripples and eddies in our universe, and our anguish at their loss is but a blink against the backdrop of eternity. 

"What we do in life, echoes in eternity", Maximus, Gladiator.

Thoughts

Faith is important, in fact, it is vital.  It consists of the positive emotions which motivate us to pursue the path reason indicates—emotions such as courage, energy, honor, nobility, patience, prudence, judgment, respect, self-reliance, sensibility, stability, grace under pressure, conviction and warmth.

Faith is the engine; reason is the operator at the controls.

Without reason we are blind; without faith we are dead.

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If you want to deal with or believe only in the subjective, be an artist.

If you want to deal with or believe only in the objective, be a scientist.

If you want to understand the big picture, be a veritologist, a pursuer of Truth.

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Wherefore angels?

What purpose would they serve? As assistants? Why, when God is omnipresent, omnipotent and omniscient? As companions?  Wouldn't that be like having your hand as a companion?  Their "thoughts" would be divine pretense.

Which brings up another question, why demons? Don't we have enough trouble on our own with natural catastrophes, internal temptations, neighbors with their temptations, and our inevitable deaths.

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We wonder at this Creation and its cause, but it’s becoming apparent that the real wonder is how perfectly that cause has been obscured.

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As surely as we honor Truth as our god, we worship God--if God exists.

 

Corollary to Enlightened Self-Interest: We can't love anyone more than we love ourselves. If we dislike/hate ourselves, the best we can feel about others is nothing.

The Ethernatural

The Ethernatural

 
                                                                                                                                                              The following are several vital but simple scientific concepts or theories of which people are not generally aware.  Each are remarkable on their own, but taken together, they may give us a glimpse of the Grand Unified Theory of Everything, also known as, The Big Picture.  While this is by no means a scientific inquiry into the nature of the cosmos, these serious theories do offer a way to look at the Big Picture through a lens of rose colored intuition.  

>>The first concept, and the most difficult to understand intuitively,  is the multidimensional nature of reality.  Several favored physics theories offer 10, 11 and 24 dimensions, including our 4 dimensions (3 of space and 1 of time).  We're asked to think of these dimensions to be where space curls in on itself.  The curled up concept it the most difficult for us humans to deal with.  One way to wrap our brains around it is to think of our four dimensions as being extruded from all those other dimensions, likely during the Big Bang 13 billion years ago.

Two questions come to mind:  could there be an infinite number of dimensions, and is the nature of time we have here the same as it was before--if "before" can have any meaning at all.  With an infinite number of dimensions, time would be reduced to nothing, one against the infinite....time would be timeless.   Humans are unequipped to comprehend anything (e.g. God) that has "always been", or that there has to have always been something that came before.  Timelessness offers an answer of sorts--there was no before.  What was, is and will be, would all be just what "is".  There'd be no First Cause.

Thankfully, the other concepts are a little easier to grasp:

>>The Planck-epoch is the first and smallest period of space and time.  The minimum values are well defined and widely accepted, albeit infinitesimally small.  A Planck-time and Planck-length, are the smallest divisions possible to time or space.  The first instant of our four dimensional universe was approximately 10 to the -43 seconds after time zero; and the distance light would travel in that time is 10 to the -35 meters.

Yes they are incredibly small values, but the fact that there are limits to the division of our four dimensions begs the question, would these limits apply to any or all other dimensions?  Could the fabric of the universe be like a sieve, straining, enclosing or 'curving out' our four dimensions, yet impervious to other dimensions, or other as yet undefined entities?

>>Seth Lloyd, an MIT Professor of Mechanical Engineering and designer of the first feasible quantum computer, makes an excellent argument (in Programming the Universe , 2007) that the Universe is indistinguishable from a quantum computer.  To imagine the power of such a computer, a quantum computer's power the size of today's digital computers, would be comparable to comparing a digital computer to an abacus. A digital bit can be either 1 or 0, but a quantum computer's qubit can be 1, 0 or both!  Now, imagine the universe itself as a quantum computer.

Consider the implications if such is the case.  It would mean that every event from the quantum level on up, including our synaptic intercourse, would not only be abiding by the natural laws governing the computer/universe, it's reasonable to suppose that each interaction is being recorded.... for replay...or erasure.  (This last supposition is my own, not Dr. Lloyd's)

>>So, you ask, what about quantum uncertainty?  There are many competing interpretations of quantum mechanics, but only one, not yet in general scientific favor, which answers ALL quantum weirdness.  It's John Cramer's Transactional Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics, but the price those answers is a big one:  quantum interactions between particles are transacted both forward and backward in time.  Problematic, yes. but then consider the universe as a sieve which the transaction waves might pass "behind" timelessly, and we may have something to assuage our intuition yet.
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Now put all this together.  Could whatever's on the other side of that sieve be what we've come to call the supernatural, but is in fact perhaps what we could more properly call, the Ethernatural--the whole set of natural laws in a cosmos with infinite dimensions, not just four.

Comments welcome.  The Truth stands on its own and error will eventually fall.  Our purpose as individuals and as a society, is to pursue the several aspects of Truth via the infinite paths that lead to it.  Verum est Deus.

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The following is an exchange on this issue that occurred in another venue:

 Assertion: Skeptics, in general, insist that perception is unreliable and unverifiable. Scientists are skeptics and accept that their perceptions and cognitive skills are limited. Objective truth is a probability estimate (guess) based on available information.

No, skeptics, in general, insist that blind faith is unreliable. Realists (scientists) insist on a reliance on reason when dealing with reality. Pure hearsay evidence should be dismissed out-of-hand until such time as corroborating evidence surfaces. It's 13,700,000,000 years and counting with no such evidence presenting itself, and massive quantities of evidence against it.

Our body of scientific knowledge is information that has been deduced and proven to be universally and immutably consistent with natural law. For instance, the fact that we don't know everything about gravity doesn't mean we are unable to know anything about it. There is no reason to assume otherwise until such time as an apple falls up from a tree--and we can eliminate the possibility of artificial gravity.

Keep in mind, this is not evidence for or against God, only against divine intervention; intervention which would negate our free will.

Q: Is Divine revelation from the ether-natural?

Again, there is no divine revelation. All I'm suggesting is that our universe may exist "within", or be associated with, a larger framework of more elaborate natural law, which, until now, has been assumed to be supernatural or the suspension of natural law.

The only evidence we have for divine revelation is hearsay evidence passed on to us (most likely invented) by people who, given human nature and temptation, are much more likely to be doing what they do for self-serving purposes.

Enlightened Self-Interest

A common quesiton asked when considering a laissez-faire, non-interactive God is, how do we then know right from wrong?  Mustn't that come from God?

If we have inalienable, even inherent, rights, wouldn't the violation of those rights also be necessarily  inherent?  The biblical analogy of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil is an excellent example, and in the process shows that the Bible does contain deep wisdom.  When they ate of its fruit, Adam and Eve became self aware, which meant they understood the impact their actions had on others.  We could then put ourselves in the shoes of others and understand how our own actions could cause pain, or pleasure in others.  It also made us aware of our nakedness because the deep intimacy of sexual bonding cannot be physically endured indefinitely--making our clothes part of the mate selection ritual, a barrier the removal of which indicates acceptance.

So then, is sex a subject for morality?  Yes and no.  First we need to determine what our inherent rights are to begin with, and  thus how they are violated--and to do that, we need to come up with what the objective of morality is.  Assuming we're on our own and morality is not coming down to us from God, that's very simple, Good Order.  99% of us (there's always that 1% who want to use anarchy and chaos to their advantage even though it usually puts them at greater risk) want and desire good order so that we can make the most of our lives in peace.  And the need of good order naturally leads us to the behavior we must observe amongst ourselves to achieve it.  So what rule(s) should be followed to achieve this good order?  It's incredibly simple, the Golden Rule is here stated as:

Morality is honoring the equal rights of all  to their life, liberty and property, to be free from violation through force or fraud.

That's it, that's all there is to it.  It covers all interactions between human (or sentients if we're ever faced with them from other worlds or from within our artificial intelligence).  And here the other shoe is dropped--morality does not and should not deal with individual codes of behavior.  For that we should apply the word "virtue" and use it strictly in that sense instead of melding them together, resulting in the "moral" confusion we've been experiencing since....the dawn of time.

Virtue is an individual code of behavior that is up to the individual to determine and follow, but is still subject to religious and other social pressures for non-mandatory conformity.  Immorality, on the other hand, is the only behavior that should be legislated and governed against.

Morality is so simple that it has only one cause, ego; and only one label under which ALL immorality (evil) can be placed, and that label is a legal/moral double standard.   When, we murder, rape, enslave or steal from others, we emote that our egos justify  putting our rights above those of our victims.  Again, morality is the equal rights of all.  We are not all created equal, but we all have equal rights, otherwise good order is impossible.

Even though this site is very much anti-Paul (some considering him to be the beast of Revelation), Truth can come from any source--babes or the devil himself.  In the following instance I think he gets it right.  For the biblically minded (who are certainly not dismissed out of hand, re: the Tree of Knowledge above), see Romans 2:14,  "Even Gentiles, who do not have God's written law, show that they know his law when they instinctively obey it, even without having heard it. 15 They demonstrate that God's law is written in their hearts, for their own conscience and thoughts either accuse them or tell them they are doing right."  NLT

....written in their hearts at the moment of self-awareness.  Truth must be accepted wherever it is found.

Finally, one can ask, what's to motivate us to follow this Golden Rule moral code?  That's where enlightened self-interest comes in, which is accepting the fact that we and our families are most important to us. that enlightened selfishness isn't bad.  Such morality promotes good order inherently, but we also increase that good order by the example we set in  following it.  Enlightened self-interest also compels us to risk ourselves to defend our own rights by defending the rights of others.  In other words we are morally obligated to help others whose rights are being violated if it is within our power--and it's almost always within our power to do something.  You defend your own rights by defending the rights of others.





Coming up next:  What if whatever is "outside" our natural universe is not supernatural, that is, where natural law and rationality don't exist.  Rather what if there is a reality of infinite dimensions which still follows a rational, natural law.  You could call it the hyper-natural, or ultra-rational or even the uber-rational, but let us dub it here as the:

Ethernatural

Job Serves a Summons on God

"There was a man in the land of Uz, whose name [was] Job; and that man was perfect and upright, and one that feared God, and eschewed evil." Job 1:1

"Perfect"?   No authorship is claimed or implied, including God or Job.  It’s the first indication that Job is a parable.  Then later, the author has Job getting frustrated:

"If only someone would listen to me! Look, I will sign my name to my defense. Let the Almighty answer me. Let my accuser write out the charges against me." Job 31:35

But there are no charges, leaving Job with his frustration and his unanswered question, Why?

 Job is perhaps the most enigmatic book in the Bible.  Some also claim that it's the most deistic book in the Bible, but I think it was written as an apologetic for revealed Judaism in answer to that very question religious leaders most often hear, Why?

Revealed religions, by that very act of revelation, are unable to consider the possibility that God must not interact; and it isn't that God can't, it's that God MUST not—in order to preserve our free will.  Consider The Book of Life.  If there were such a book where our names are written from the foundation of the world, then we were all either damned or saved from the beginning. What, then, would be the point or meaning of our mortal lives--for God or ourselves?  Why would a supernatural God go to all that trouble to create this 13 billion year old natural universe, and put us through all these trials and tribulations if our fates were pre-ordained?  The Book of Life can only be a human forgery.

To make a very long story short, Job refuses the advice of friends and his wife to curse God, choosing instead to sue God, forcing God to make an appearance. Job's evidence is many oaths as to his perfection as a human. God does make an appearance in a whirlwind, but instead of answering Job, God sarcastically asks:  “Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth? Tell [Me], if you have understanding."....Job 38:1 & 4  (The arrogance here can be nothing more than priestly intimidation in place of providing an answer.)

IOW, the author is having God say, “who are you, any of you, to ask that question of ME?”  The author, as anyone who’s advocating for the existence of an interactive, personal God, has no answer.  But there is an obvious answer—free will, so that the choices we make are truly our own, but that necessitates God’s non-intervention.  [i]That's the why of it.[/i]

This is clearly a human parable, which is further accentuated by the fact that not only is Job's wealth and status replaced, but he gets a new set of children, like so much chattel.  Although Job doesn't get the answer he was suing for, his being wronged is supposedly righted.  It's tantamount to a divine admission of guilt.

God?  Guilty???  What’s really going on here!

The author, attempting to answer Job’s question (actually accusation), fails miserably; and in an attempt to cover it up, he sweeps his non-answer under the rug by obscuring it under endless chapters of involved dialogue.  When one finally comes upon “God’s answer”, it’s very anti-climactic and intuitively unsatisfying.  But the author had to do something.  Like every other believer in a revealed, interactive God, he believed that God must interact with us and if nothing else tell us what is moral, but in fact, we already know (see below).  IOW, the whole assumption, the whole premise is wrong. God does not, cannot, and must not intervene....ever—not even to let us know that “He” exists.  Revealed religions over the millennia have felt the need to try to answer the Why?, because it is asked so often, but whatever answer they come up with, it always negates free will and rings hollow.

Even with the seemingly senseless death of an innocent child, God's non-interference is a monument to “It's” commitment to our free will, and a prime indication of its importance; the exercise of which is the purpose for the universe itself.  At least, when we grieve, it need not be compounded by that question.

God, therefore, must remain hidden.  We can never come close to knowing that “It” exists and that is insured by there being no actual evidence (other than human hearsay) whether God exists or doesn't.

What we have with Job is a priest or religious leader who continually has people coming to him asking Why? Why do bad things happen to those who are good, and good things to those who are bad.  I prayed but my faith that can move mountains did nothing. What is God doing?  Why doesn’t He do something? It's a very fair question, otherwise why should they be praying to and worshiping God, can they believe that God is good, or that "It" even exists? It's a question we're raising even more loudly today.

But suffering and injustice still happen with God watching.  Yes they do, and beyond explaining the reason for it, our free will, we must remember that this is but our threescore and ten against the backdrop of eternity.

So God, if He exists, must not even so much as answer Job's question. The answer is there and has been there imbedded in our psyches ever since the Garden of Eden parable where Adam and Eve ate the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, and became self-aware.  Thus, instead of Adam saying "Adam want Eve", he declared, "I want You."  Self-awareness also means that we inherently know what is moral because we can put ourselves in another’s situation.  And, unlike the animals, our awareness condemns us to possess the knowledge that we will eventually die.

The Word of God

Thomas Paine was a revered American Hero of the Revolution.  His Common Sense and American Crisis series inspired the people and soldiers during that period to understand what they were working and fighting for, and to persevere through the enormous hardships they faced.  If he had stopped there with his political publications, he would certainly be remembered today as one of the major founders of the United States of America—the name he coined for it.

But in 1794, facing the guillotine in Paris, he wrote Part 1 of The Age of Reason, which was to relegate him to the status of a footnote in our history.  His open advocacy of deism, a belief in a non-interfering God held by many of his fellow founding patriots, albeit with greater discretion, earned him the vilification of his ecumenical foes who hounded him even to his deathbed, where they demanded that he recant his deism and accept Christianity.  His philosophical contributions are only now coming out of the dark ages of American History where even the likes of Theodore Roosevelt called him “a dirty little atheist”.  Wider recognition of his contributions in this area is long overdue, and as will be shown, they reveal a framework for an even more detailed vision of reasoned reality and spirituality.

The Truth contained in Paine’s thoughts on philosophy and religion recorded in The Age of Reason continues in spite of a long period of its being relegated to the shadows, and slowly gathers momentum through the vastly increased capacity for freedom of discussion and exchange of ideas provided by the modern information age. While his are certainly not the last words on reasoned philosophy, nor is such a claim made here, his courageous social leap ahead of his time speaks to us in the modern world as few have, before or since.

Rarely is the expression of one’s concept of religion more timelessly profound or majestic than this quote from The Age of Reason:

“It is only in the CREATION that all our ideas and conceptions of a Word of God can unite. The Creation speaketh an universal language.... It is an ever-existing original, which every man can read. It cannot be forged; it cannot be counterfeited; it cannot be lost; it cannot be altered; it cannot be suppressed. It does not depend upon the will of man whether it shall be published or not; it publishes itself from one end of the earth to the other. It preaches to all nations and to all worlds; and this Word of God reveals to man all that is necessary for man to know of God.”

                                                         —Thomas Paine

This is not only the best definition ever for the Word of God, it is at the same time a preamble to a Grand Unified Theory of Truth. Anything we believe about God/Truth must be consistent with this one simple paragraph. What are its implications? That there are no supernatural events, there is no revelation other than the natural universe itself, no prophesy; and prayer can only be a simple appreciation for the free will His universe bestows on us in the hope that we will find the strength to pursue the light of Truth (God) with an honest soul.

The purpose here is to take Paine’s conception of the Word of God, and presume to extend the concept one step further—That Truth is God, wherever that Truth leads and whatever it turns out to be.

Truth is God and God is Truth in both the figurative and literal sense. If there is a sentient, all powerful master of the universe, pursuing Truth will lead us in "His" direction along that fascinating road of infinite length. If "He" does not exist, the motivation to follow the road still does, since the pursuit of Truth (knowledge, justice, love, beauty) remains as the only path to genuine fulfillment. We worship this God, Truth, by its pursuit and are rewarded by that fulfillment—here and after(?)life.

Truth as God is the religion/philosophy that you know is correct because you've made Truth itself the pinnacle, the steeple of your religion.  God is a word for the ultimate, unequivocal reality—a definition indistinguishable from Truth. Wherever Truth leads, there too must be God, be that a spiritual, omnipotent being or not.

Why?

Why?  That's the question we learn to pester our parents with, because they can never give an answer that doesn't draw another "Why?", until they resort to the "because I say so" be all, end all, this discussion of over answer.  It's the question that expresses the angst we all feel at times when bad things happen to good people and vice versa.  "Why her?", "Why him?", "Why me?", "Why now?"  I'm sure it was even asked when pristine victims were sacrificed to volcanoes.

The author of the biblical Book Of Job gives the divine equivalent of the parental "because I say so":  "Where were you when I laid the foundations of the Earth, when the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy?" Job 38:4,7  This passage was used as a prologue in the movie, The Tree of Life, about a family grappling with the death of one of their children.  So is that all we get, are we so insignificant and unimportant.   Or might there be an answer after all.

Revealed religion ultimately must resort to such an answer, because there can be no rational explanation for us, or Job, that could come from a revealed, personal, interactive God.   But, if God exists, there is an answer to the question, albeit a hard one that we must deduce for ourselves:  Free Will.  God must not interfere because to do so would undermine the gift of free will that God created the natural, rational universe to provide for us.  Can we make our hard moral choices and have them be our own if God is looking over our shoulder.  It appears that God has gone to a lot of trouble to put a barrier between us, a barrier of 13+ billion years and a Big Bang; and to place us (have us evolve naturally) on a natural, rational stage (the universe), in which to make rational moral choices.  God must not violate God' own laissez faire Prime Directive of non-interference without destroying our free will which is established for both God's and our benefit.

So when tragedy strikes or good fortune comes, we will still grieve or celebrate, but knowing the reason God won't interfere, we needn't be tortured with the question why.

A common question that usually comes up is, "Can an omnipotent God put something outside God's own control?"  Wouldn't that be a limitation on God's omnipotence if God couldn't?  There doesn't appear to be anything else God couldn't do in an instant.  God could create an infinite host of angels to sing God's praises, but they would ultimately be nothing but an extension of God, thus God singing praises to God's own self.  He could have created the universe 100 years ago or 6000 years ago with all indications that the universe had come to be13 billion years ago, and  with memories of our past, but that would have been a lie--the one thing that God cannot be or do.  God is Truth and Truth is God.  We, with our unfettered free will, are the only possible source of a lie in or out of the universe.  All other life is innocent.  We are the only ones with fully developed self-awareness, therefore capable of eating from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil.  We're the only ones who can put ourselves in the place or situation of another.

So if God is not personal or interactive, does that mean God doesn't want our love, or worship?  No, but  not even knowing if God exists we can't express it directly, and in fact we must use a proxy.  But what proxy would not be equivalent to idolatry?  Only one thing, Truth, the moral pursuit of which is what we should be about--whether God exists or not.

It's a hard thing to accept but the only difference between a deist, laissez-faire God and atheism, is hope--and, concerning the existence God, those are the only two reasonable choices.  All else is hearsay evidence for the irrational and supernatural in this totally natural universe, which has been so since its beginning.

Why is free will so important to us and God?  This profound quote has stood the test of  time:

"If you love something, set it free.  If it comes back to you, it's yours.  If it doesn't, it never was."--Richard Bach, Johnathan Livingston Seagull.

If Truth is God, what is Truth.

What is your ultimate ideal?  Is it love, power, fame, knowledge, courage, loyalty, wealth, lust, justice, art, beauty?  Even the positive examples can become a detriment if they overwhelm and consume us as an obsession.  Any one of them can  become your god, your driving principle, your ultimate ideal.  And what if there is a God, where does "It" fit in?

This site is dedicated to the proposition that the ultimate ideal, our overall driving pursuit, should beTruth, wherever that leads.  It may eventually lead us to a Cosmic Creator or it may not, but with Truth as the ultimate goal, if we can define it well enough, we'll be on one of many correct paths and moving in the right direction. 

I believe Truth has (at least) four aspects, knowledge, justice, love and beauty--moving from pure objective Truth to pure subjective Truth.  Yes, they both exist, at the ends of the figurative spectrum, innto which they blend in the middle.  Knowledge deals, through science, with universal natural law.  Beauty deals, through art, with individual imagination and creativity.  Justice is the objective determination of what is moral, and the subjective determination of the proper legal punishment within a society for immoral behavior.  Love is (or should be) a commitment to support the well being of another, driven and supported by any number of emotions, the strongest of which are familial bonds and physical attraction.

So which is primal, reason or emotion?  The answer is neither and both, they are a team.  I use the analogy of a car.  The driver is reason at the controls, and the emotions are the motivating force or engine.  Without proper control of the emotions, the car careens out of control and into the ditch.  Without the engine, the car goes nowhere.  To paraphrase Einstein, emotion (faith) without reason is blind, and reason with out emotion is dead.  Perhaps there is something to that trite but profoundly simple yin/yang symbol after all.

So, is there a God, a big Kahuna spirit being in the sky that the pursuit of Truth will lead us toward, but probably to which we'll probably never arrive?  The answer is on the far side of Creation.  We've acquired a lot of knowledge about the natural universe on this side of the Big Bang, but we don't have the first  bit of evidence for what preceded it or caused it.  God with a capital "G" is a 50/50 proposition.  I personally believe that God created it that way for a reason, a reason we'll get into next; which has to do with THE question that no revealed religion can answer--"Why?"