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.