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.

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.

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.