Concepts of God Affect Justice

God gave us reason so that we could determine the nature and place of God in our world. Even that statement makes an initial assumption that places God at the origin of our ability to reason, and places us in a position of subservience to the very being of whom we need to ascertain the truth – a seeming conflict of interest.

I've long had a belief that what one believe affects how one acts, and when summed across sentient humanity, affects the state of the world. With that in mind, I am of the mindset that one needs to first, as openly and impartially as possible, consider their values about how the world should be, recognize the actions that are required on their part to help make it that way, and finally identify the beliefs that will effectively persuade one's actions. A people's definition of God, and how God handles (or doesn't handle) affairs in the world is therefore critical to real-world outcomes.

This belief in the context of “The Postmodern Debate,” by Michael J. Scanlon, regarding the need for attentiveness to others' perspectives, as brought to mind a concept for which I'm not sure a compact verbiage yet exists – namely the notion of being able to consolidate two or more models of reasoning or perspectives into one larger set. Viewed in combination, one can then view them critically in order to perform a comparative analysis and search for identical concepts expressed in different terms, for places where the topology of thought differs significantly, and for perspectives that one may offer when the another may not acknowledge it at all.

The term I want to use for holding multiple perspectives or models into one combined model cluster is multithetical unity. Similarly, the term I'd put forward when two models express the same thing differently, or are actually different sides of the same coin, so to speak, is multithetical identity. While the use of these terms may cause the thinker to synthesize new insights, and therefore understand a hybrid (or entirely novel) model of theology, they consider the models as sufficiently partitioned, in order to retain their original meaning and context, and are not intended to cause any theological model to change form, become blended or watered down.

From Scanlon, it appears that models or cultures can have different underlying assumptions, definitions, and structures, and blending two or more can be like mixing oil and water. While deconstructing and reconstructing the elements presented, listeners may hear words from an unfamiliar model and apply it erroneously from their previous frame of reference – one which may lead to either major misunderstandings, or as learning occurs and the two models interact, perhaps new understandings. Thinkers from two different models can only communicate rationally if they agree on terms, and understand the hermeneutics required to translate across cultures. This process of agreement requires a statement of assumptions from each party, followed by negotiations to step into the larger arena of thought contained within the cluster of multithetical unity, and to see where multithetical identities exist. At this point, the thinkers may see their thought processes within the multithetical unity as being loosely expressible in a Venn diagram.

Moving on, one can suggest that a discussion of the conception of the divine, and its actions upon the world, would do well to be considered within the context of multithetical unity. There are so many models to choose from, such that including every conception of the divine and negotiating between them all could take many lifetimes, so it may be best to consider only a handful of models at a time.

I would like to briefly compare the models presented by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, William R. Jones, and an American religious-right narrow definition of family. In Gilman's “His Religion and Hers,” she portrays a compelling array of benefits of viewing God in terms of motherhood, and presents the male-focused God's inability to see life in terms of birth, but rather in terms of death. Considering the interests of yin/yang, and the “one-man, one-woman” view of family multithetically, it becomes apparent that there may be good reason to have more than one God (or at least more than one way of conceiving of God for) bringing up the human race. In the same sense that having a masculine and feminine figure available during the formative years of a child, during these ongoing formative years in the history of the human race, having a conception of God who is able to offer two perspectives to choose from will help us be more reasoning, selective, and provide a wider breadth of understanding.

In Jones' presentation of humanocentric theism and secular humanism, he shows us a model in which the figurative parent or parents have passed on. In this conception, without a God or with a God who only calls from a distance, the former child of God is now grown up, the eldest in the family, and much maturity is required. It is possible that many secular humanists, atheists, and entirely non-religious people choose what they do because their concept of the Christian God is of a parent who is irrational, arbitrary, capricious and judgmental. To the child who has figuratively run from an abusive relationship or grew up an orphan, or been treated poorly by their siblings at the urging of their father, God has no leverage in the arena of justice or non-justice.

------------------

Bibliography:

Scanlon, Michael J., O.S.A., “The Postmodern Debate,” The Twentieth Century: A Theological Overview, Ed. Gregory Baum, Marynoll, New York: Orbis Books, 1999

Gilman, Charlotte Perkins, His Religion and Hers: A Study of the Faith of our Fathers and the Work of Our Mothers, Connecticut: Hyperion Press Inc, 1976 (originally published 1923)

Jones, William R., Is God a White Racist? A Preamble to Black Theology, Boston: Beacon Press, 1973, 1998

Scanlon also mentions Jacques Derrida.

-----------------

Hope you enjoyed.

pax hominibus,
joel

"And so, Theodore Donald Karabotsos, in accordance with what we think your dying wishes might well have been, we commit your final mortal remains to the bosom of the Pacific Ocean"

Multithetical Manifesto: Hardcore Angel Power

There is a practice in Unitarian Universalism where the youths spend a year studying a wide variety of religious beliefs. Then they get an opportunity to get up in front of the congregation and make their individual statements of belief. Not having grown up in the tradition, I'd like to now share my faith statement, after a fashion. And yes, I do still plan for it to fit within the parameters of the actual assignment of preaching prophetically.

Here, now, please let’s take a quick journey out into the solar system. It takes about 8 minutes for light to travel from the Sun to the Earth. And it actually takes over 100,000 years for the photons produced in the sun's core to travel the 700,000 kilometers John 3:17, metaphor, Multitheticalism, personal religion, renewable energy, salvation, theology, sefrom the core to its surface, and then for those final eight minutes, it travels to Earth at the speed of light. This parallels how our ideas and communication work. Our collective ideas gestate for a long time before they're ready. Then we communicate them orally and they are delivered at the speed of sound, or we can type them and they end up halfway across the world in seconds.

Growing up, math, along with spelling, was always my favorite subject. Now, it informs my theology in fundamental ways. One primary way is through set theory. For example, imagine the set of whole numbers between 1 and 5, inclusive. The subset of all odd numbers is 1, 3, and 5. The subset of all even numbers is 2 and 4. 1 by itself is a subset. So is 2 by itself, and on and on. The largest “subset” is all five numbers, and then there is the empty set, which includes nothing at all, but still qualifies as a set.

I wonder: Do you see where I'm going with this, theologically? To put a word to it, I'm a multitheticalist. That means I'm an atheist, including Buddhism and Humanism – either a system of religious belief that doesn't consider any god, or a religious belief that specifically denies that a god exists. And I'm a theist. And a monotheist at that – including each of the various descriptions of “the one God” written by leaders such as Moses, Zoroaster, Jesus, Paul of Tarsus, and Mohammad. And I’m a polytheist, to the degree that I can learn about the many Hindu gods, and the pantheons of Greek and Roman deities. And I'm a pantheist, a panentheist, and even an animist.

“But which of those do you believe,” I hear my 20 year old fundamentalist self demand of me. “You have to believe something!” And I do. I believe that it's impossible to know anything about the divine, so that might lead one to label me as an agnostic. But agnostic is too simple a term, without sufficient examination of the complexity of meaning at play here.

In a fluid bedrock kind of way, I've come to appreciate that anything carried with words is metaphor – it's meaning attributed to physical happenings and existences. But in telling stories about the world, by necessity, we are mapping from the ultimate reality into stories that we believe, to help us make sense of the world. That mapping simplifies complex things however. It distorts events to fit into recognizable frameworks. This mapping deletes things because telling the whole truth in all its complexity would mean recreating the whole universe. And the mapping that accompanies systems of belief also generalizes things, turning them into archetypes, stereotypes, and symbols within our stories.

Knowing all that, choosing just one belief is like being stranded on an island and choosing only one book, or one album, or one type of food. Or one thing for my mind and spirit to ingest. Therefore, I'm a multitheticalist (from “multi-thesis”) – or holding several theses in balance all at once, and keeping them open for critical evaluation. My free and responsible search for truth and meaning demands this of me.

But it's not just about belief. It's about the heart. When I first got into this, God told me that it was going to be my heart on the line. But like Jonah, I escaped for a while. I escaped into concepts and theories, and reveled in wonderment at the opportunity to examine the “Big Picture,” (whatever size that actually is). But going beyond means coming back. That's the responsible part of the search. Even with all the angels and demons I’ve collected along my journey, I still feel inadequate to tell my prophetic story. All I know is that for everyone out there with messages (either to deliver from your mind through your voice, or to your mind from your senses), we're cut from the same cloth as those other prophets, especially when we can see beyond the boundaries of our cultural contexts. With all my agnosticism, that is a story I do know.

But what's a prophet to tell? Ideally, I'd light up a cigarette, strap on a guitar, and sing for you, about you, and with you. Why use this gracious gift of breath just to expound on so much theology, or to craft something that compels people to action, but what action? There are SO MANY of them!

There's the age-old practice of taking moral stances on issues:

• The ERA still hasn't passed. What gives?
• The construction of race, and how racism undergirds so many other justice issues
• LGBTIQ – an alphabet soup that simply says “equal rights to all regardless of gender or sexual expression”
• The creation and continuance of class structures, and ownership, and workers' rights.
• Earth justice and animal rights
• Abortion issues
• Drug policies

Or budgetary concerns like:

• Putting money toward wars and failed prison systems and
• Laws to ensure certain economic controls and property rights are secured,
• Instead of putting resources to Education, Energy policies, Scientific research, and Health care

I feel like I could (and very well might) speak to these things from the pulpit every week. It just goes round and round, like wheels in icy slush in March in Minnesota. I want to put sand down under the tires. I want to dig out to the concrete below the ice and get some traction! I want to be primal, to recognize it's not just about squeezing out words as breath flows out past my vocal cords. Text and speech is necessary, but so insufficient. I want to put out that all-too-necessary barbaric “yop” -- I'm ALIVE!!!!! And I hope you do too.

I have to do that. When my God speaks (all of them, and none of them, and one of them), it's through me. See, I'm one of those Multithetical Universalists who believes in radical uncertainty. Our salvation is all tied up together in this boat named Earth, and there is no fate but that which we make. This world is so beautiful, and yet so fragile. One of my versions of God is where I am the creator born into creation to walk upon this beautiful blue-green planet I have made, and I weep and marvel all at once at the horror and the beauty of the upside-downness side by side with the right-side-upness. Because like it or not, humanity has declared dominion here. Now, they/we will get credit or blame for whatever is to come. The blame or credit goes not to God, or ancient prophecies – only to humanity's insistence in those gods and prophecies. Demanding that theirs be the true version, and arguing over details in their stories of divinity and prophecy.

Because we have a preponderance of new prophets, telling the story clearly and honestly, from really recent and accurate knowledge about this world and our relationship within it. Yet there is almost no need for prophets now. The story of the condition of our cultures and our planet now comes to us ever more clearly. Humans have to close their ears, eyes, and minds to avoid the trumpets call. In Zoroastrianism, the job of the Saoshyant, or final judge at the end of the age or world, is simply to point that out. In essence saying “Open your eyes. Look around you! There is your prophecy, and my work is done here.” But its not as easy as that, since peoples' frames mask the full truth, until truth's complexities start to pull open the frames. But the process is soooo slow. After all, wasn't it 2000 years ago that Jesus said, “Those who have ears, let them hear...”? It's slow, but it's coming.

There's more to the story. In my rear-view mirror, I have all these memories of the heavens and hells my mind has visited, to bring me here. In my dreams, I've seen chariots and thrones, and so many apocalyptic futures, like the beatific utopian heaven-on-earth that my inner voice compels me to co-create. I do hope one day to write a utopian sci-fi drama. On the other hand, some of those memories of potential futures are outright hellish. I won't go into detail, but those dreams had people in the grayest darkest cavernous pits, stepping on those below them to try to climb out, but always being stepped on from above by someone else. Even those highest up were still in the pit. With nobody ever reaching down to lend a hand. And then there's the bittersweet end, somewhere in between. Where the world plods through, suffering for centuries or millennia because of the damage we've done to our planet and each other.

So, what saves us? Our actions do. Which are influenced by the thoughts and words that compose our world-views. Our actions influenced by our beliefs, with all their tendencies to distort, delete, and generalize. That is why I'm preaching multitheticalism today. It seeks to open wide to any possibility, evaluating it while finding ways to enrich worldviews. But it has one big drawback. It takes a lot of time. It's heavy, and it's slow to come into the light.

It's slow, like the photons inside the sun.

chant/prayer/mantra: For energy to deliver this well.


pax hominibus,
agape to all,
joel

Labels: Atheism, Christianity, drug war, environment, guitar, inter-faith, Islam, John 3:17, metaphor, Multitheticalism, personal religion, renewable energy, salvation, sermons, theology

A friend just sent me a link to this post and I thought it was brilliantly evocative. To understand why Atheists are angry, and why its important that they be so, please read this blog article.

Greta Christina's words helped me to identify some inner turmoil of my own (mainly related to anger and ambivalence). I'm a multitheticalist which is a conglomerate system of belief which includes both atheist and theistic models of understanding the world. For more information on what "multithetical" means, check this previous post.

OK I gotta go fill out some important forms for school.

Thanks, and enjoy every sandwich.

lyrics: John Coltrane Giant Steps.

colors: pink and brown.

mood: distracted.

chant/prayer/mantra:


pax hominibus,
joel

Labels: Atheism, Multitheticalism, oppression

.
Today at the Faithful Fools Bible Study, by asking for 3 one-digit numbers from 0-9, and given 8, 6, and 4, then adding 100 to 864, and multiplying by 2, we ended up at page 1928 in The Message translation of the Bible that was at my seat, which brought us to chapter 2 of the Gospel of John. Inside I groaned a little at first, because it's the story of the wine miracle, and then JC casting out the money changers from the temple. Both of which I've heard so many times...

But a closer examination brought a few new insights, so I'm glad we did it.

According to the story he made approximately 150 gallons of wine (starting from six 20-30 gallon pots of water). That must've been a heck of a big wedding, or a lot of drinking happened. Actually the part I liked the most was the symbolism. The wine miracle story needs to be understood on the symbolic level, or the reading of it is almost entirely wasted.

The vessels were for Jewish vessels for purified water. Turning the water into wine--not just wine--but 150 gallons of really awesome wine is symbolic. This was our reading of the story: The wedding party had apparently been going alone just dandily until they were almost out of wine. Jesus' mother asks him to do that one trick he does, and he kind of snubs her, telling her it's not yet time for him to out himself, and not for a wedding (in the Gospel of John, he has not yet performed any miracles, so this would be the first). Then he decides to do it anyway. No doubt the bridegroom would've been pretty embarrassed to throw this big shindig and run out of wine.

The wine is the Spirit. Water is the raw materials (the unanimated, unenlightened life), but then when it's come alive, it's wine. (FWIW, the Spirit isn't some indefinable mojo that only the Church or some formalized Kergyma group has access to--it's simply our down-to-Earth connection to one another as divine beings. It is namaste and recognizing the light between ourselves and each other.)

But the party had run out of wine, and Jesus (as Christ) introduced a ton of it (actually closer to half a ton).

So the bridgegroom then would be the controller of the party. The party is life itself. And when life all around is debased to its raw materials, and for sale, and individualized, and neglects our connections, it's time for Christ to bring the miracle, to let loose with an abundance of connective Spirit.

The fact that it's a wedding, a joining together of two people (or in the thinking of the times, a man acquiring a woman) can be seen in terms of process theology. Things in the world coming together in a concrescence of events. This can sort of be shown a bit by the nexus within the horn torus in the video sermon I showed on Jan 3 at UUSF, which I'll eventually provide a link to once I finalize the images in the video material.

Also at the Bible Study, somebody pointed out how the story expresses Jesus' unwillingness to perform miracles* at times (his push-back on his mother, his denial of Satan during the trial in the desert, and his refusal to do much of anything at Herod's request). IOW, don't do your miracles (or your work) at the devil's request.

*multithetical belief allows for the possibility and impossibility of miracles--both the certitude and certain denial....


Regarding bringing things together, and the Just-in-Time business model, or "just-in-timeness" in general...

This quote is what led me to want to comment on it: "The philosophy of JIT is simple: inventory is waste." I would offer a contradictory/complementary philosophy: "Inventory is security."

"Inventory is waste" combined with "Inventory is security" tells a lot of story, and sometimes one is true, and at other times, the other is true. When the inventory we're talking about is critical for life, inventory IS security. Having enough food, clothing, shelter, and health-care on hand in case of emergencies is really important. In the case of Toyota producing cars, inventory may very well be waste. Imagine creating 10,000 more gas guzzlers than is necessary, and then they're just left sitting on the lot. Or creating way too many of any product--whether it's a raw material being pulled from the Earth, semi-finished materials like gaskets, mufflers, and circuit boards, or final products such as a car or an iPhone--creating too much is indeed a wastefully large buffer. Even though people may clamor for luxury goods, we will be able to continue living if there are hold-ups due to buffer underruns. Not so with critical goods like food. The Mormons are supposed to keep a year's supply of food on-hand, and Joseph told Pharoah to prepare for a seven-year famine. For food, we have the ability to create enough for everyone, to transport it to everyone who needs it, and to keep more than a JIT inventory. For our leaders and property owners to neglect to do so is criminal. Witnessing the tragedy of this week's earthquake in Haiti when many of our church buildings and other buildings in the developed West are earthquake retrofitted at the cost of millions per building sometimes tells a bigger story about inequity. Spending trillions of dollars toward war that would be much better-spent on emergency preparedness is another example of the US government choosing destruction and neglect over creation and preparation. I pray that the US govt, other countries, and other agencies will be able to deliver a strong response to save as many in Haiti as possible.

I envision a world where anyone can plant gardens in the public parks, on the roadsides, and even in the medians (for anyone to tend and to harvest), so that the neediest will never go hungry. Further, I envision a world where our namaste connection is between each of us to every other, even those we've not yet met. Where the call of that light between us makes us recognize who among us is more needy, and make sure their most basic needs are met, and that the buffer for the basic needs is always larger than the buffers for luxury items.

And of course, JIT is not just limited to production of material goods--this understanding of just-in-timeness can also apply to provisional teachings in religion. Hopefully we can explore that some time.


lyrics: Once in a while, the zebras run to the spaceman and his gun, in the spider's web.
from Superhumans, by Flaming Lips

colors: pink and yellow

mood: procrastinatey

chant/prayer/mantra: let justice roll down like waters, with a half-ton buffer made out of wine (apologies to teetotalers and alcoholics).

pax hominibus,
agape to all,
joel

Labels: Christianity, favorite scriptural passages, metaphor, parousia, religious community, restorative justice, theological sources, theology

music: nothing

colors: nothing

mood: tired, relieved.

thoughts: Here is a nice big hunk of dung I delivered today in my preaching class. The main feedback I got was that the sermon was a big buffet of very nice food, but that I need to deliver individual meals. Dang, it was way too long and with too many supporting messages to fit into the traditional 15-20 minute sermon format, but might work better here. The text might very well be good to read, but I was tired enough today that I wasn't really able to focus as much as I'd like so the delivery was kinda subpar. Anyway, read it at your caution:

Thoughts are Messages, Angels are Messengers (or 'Wrestling with Angels')

Good morning everyone. Today, I'd like to spend some time discussing the state of life in general, our lives in particular, and the critical role that our thoughts play in all of our triumphs and miseries. Here we are in the United States of America, on Earth, in 2006, gathered together in a community with kind and gentle people who are of like-minded persuasion in many regards.

In our daily lives, we are surrounded by the most - amazing - things. We have at our disposal complex and powerful technology that can enrich our lives to bring us a standard of living well beyond the dreams of our ancestors only a century or two ago. On any given morning, we may find ourselves eating processed cereal from a box, or low-fat apricot mango yogurt, perhaps microwaving our breakfast where at the turn of the 20th century, people cooked grains in a pot of water over a wood-burning stove or fire. We may drive to work in an automatic transmission car and pay for gas with a magnetized strip on a piece of plastic associated specifically to our person, where early American settlers walked or depended on horses, and bought horse feed by trading tobacco, shells or deerskins.

We may listen to tapes, CDs, MP3s, or the radio on our way to work, while driving past 20-story steel-reinforced buildings. Then we may park in a large yellow-line painted parking lot, enter into a security-controlled specialized work environment with phones, computers, copiers, fax machines, and email. From there, we can instantly connect with many people at once around the globe, where for our ancestors the best available means of communication was only person to person via pony express, or a runner carrying a message from Marathon to Athens.

We have electricity and water available at the clap or wave of our hands, mobile phones we could use around any sufficiently populated area, a media system which makes available instant humor, visual history, or lots of attractive and sexy celebrities; We have advanced plumbing and sewage-treatment systems, miracle-working medical facilities, Doppler radar for weather forecasts, ever more lethal military technology, an educational system with more knowledge than any person could grasp, and that only scratches the surface of our achievements. Much of this new technology could be supremely beneficial.

So what's impeding us from fully realizing these benefits? Why has our massive collection of human knowledge, along with our technology thus far failed to create the utopia we've been working toward?

The problem may simply be that we are only human, and prone to mistakes on many levels. And in the course of recorded history, we've brought some of the most grievous actions to life. This next part may seem a bit dark, so please keep in mind that in working through this, we will be creating the light at the end of this tunnel. And remember to keep breathing and we'll make it through.

OK..., regarding some of these grievous mistakes: though it may not be obvious at first, at an individual level we suffer because of our tendency to take advantage of these technological advances, - often taking them for granted without a second thought. In the process, many of these advances are taking advantage of us, or more specifically, allowing us to be taken advantage of. Despite the allure of having computers to make our lives easier, so that we can do our work in less time, we find ourselves working long stressful hours for corporate employers with deadlines. In the process of being pulled closer to our jobs, we suffer as we begin to feel more distant from the people we love, and may even come to resent ourselves for allowing that distance.

And every day, our senses are beckoned away from who and what we love, being bombarded by advertisements through television, radio, magazines, billboards, and now the Internet. These ads are often created by people with graduate degrees in marketing, sociology, or psychology. They have insidious effects on us, ungrounding us from our humanity, convincing us to consume their product specifically, or perhaps worse, convincing us -- or reinforcing the belief that -- our primary role here is to consume products, and that to accomplish that, we need to work hard for our paycheck. Breathe - the light is coming.

As a society we suffer because of an economic system which demands growth and artificially scarce resources to thrive, while devaluing people - and relationships - by putting us in the awkward position of supporting contemporary forms of slavery or servitude. By this I mean that the working class and working poor are exploited not only by business executives and corporate investors, but also by those of us who are working hard ourselves, and simply trying to save something for retirement through investing in mutual funds and IRAs.

In government, the apparently intractable corruption - in existence allows for our state and national capitals to become clearinghouses for trillions of tax dollars toward special interests, prisons, and war. This spending comes at great cost to our working poor, our homeless, our children, and future generations who are all given short shrift because they can't afford lobbyists or congressional advocates. Breathe. That great sucking sound at the capital clearinghouses vacuums up resources not only away from people today but leaves our unborn with a debt resulting from luxurious spending from their past which they will never have the opportunity to partake in.

We suffer because the military advances purchased by our tax dollars have brought us new wars causing inestimable casualties, both physical and spiritual. Between the wars and our nation's complicity or tacit acceptance of genocide and deplorable living conditions in many developing countries, our nation suffers as its relational capital with the rest of the world continues to dwindle. Meanwhile, our nation's democracy, always reliant upon leaders with authentic integrity, on checks and balances, and a populace informed by a free press, now exists only - in – name. In addition, and perhaps most lasting, the mistreatment and contamination of our earth, water, and air is an embarrassment and a disgraceful legacy which we will leave behind for many generations to come. Breathe.

Meanwhile, many people in our nation follow the contemporary Christian church's biblical interpretation that Jesus is coming to save them, essentially hedging their bets in case there really is a heaven/hell afterlife. Rather, they would do well to hedge their bets that He may have actually been talking about our responsibility of stewarding in heaven on this Earth right here, and that their soul might carry on in this very world, breathing the same molecules they breathe now. In the meantime, we are watching our planet fall toward the very hell they're seeking to avoid. On the other extreme, our country has many people turned off to religion entirely by religious zealots who feel that their God has called upon them to put forth the angry narrow intolerance toward all that which offends God's ego.

Even in Unitarian Universalism, which we tend to hold in such high esteem for its free-thinking values, we have made, and doubtlessly continue to make, mistakes. These mistakes include walking on eggshells regarding any mention of Christian topics in our meeting houses, thereby alienating ourselves from our Christian roots and cutting short meaningful interfaith dialog. We also make the mistake of forgetting that our free and responsible search for truth and meaning calls on us to report, even sound out, the results of that search. Further, we unintentionally neglect the deep intricacies of the web of life when we come up with premature answers to problems so difficult that we may not - yet - even - be asking the right questions. Breathe, the light is coming up.

So here we are – together in our searching community, trying to get a handle on all these problems and more, searching for the right questions to ask about them, and then obtain some answers. Where to start....?

The method I'd like to apply begins by deconstructing the problems en masse, and asking, “From where does our technology, our knowledge, and our social fabric actually originate?” They all appear to have one thing in common – they began with thought, either conscious or unconscious. If you noted the title of the sermon in the bulletin, it also mentions angels, and I promise to shed some light on them shortly, and then begin to tie things together.

Before I go further, I feel compelled to make a quick note of inclusion regarding the forthcoming arguments. For those who were not here for my “God and Not God” sermon last month, it's important to note that while I am going to be making reference to God, through the process of associating various forms of the Divine with each other, which I refer to as “multithetical unity,” we allow for a translation from references of one form of the Divine to apply to others, to the degree that they possess similar qualities. If you're interested in finding out more, I will be offering an adult ed. class on this topic coming up in the fall.

OK, continuing on...

In Genesis, chapter 32, verses 24-28, we find the story of Jacob wrestling the angel. From the World English Bible, the story goes thusly:

Jacob was left alone, and wrestled with a man there until the breaking of the day. When he saw that he didn't prevail against him, he touched the hollow of his thigh, and the hollow of Jacob's thigh was strained, as he wrestled. The man said, "Let me go, for the day breaks."

Jacob said, "I won't let you go, unless you bless me."

He said to him, "What is your name?"

He said, "Jacob."

He said, "Your name will no longer be called Jacob, but Israel; for you have fought with God and with men, and have prevailed."

Though in this story, the text says he wrestled with a man, it's generally understood to be an angel which Jacob wrestles. As noted in the reading, the angel also pronounces that Jacob's name shall be changed to Israel, which translates as “He struggles with God.” This particular angel was likely Uriel, one of the most powerful among angels, whose name translates, among other things as “God is light.” At one point, within the apocryphal texts, Uriel says “I have come down to earth to make my dwelling among men, and I am called Jacob by name.” Well, that's a lot of names - and associations - to take in, but be not confused. And be not afraid, and don't worry about the confusion, because we won't be charging headlong into a full deconstruction of how the identities and associations get interchanged between human and angelic entities here.

However, in order to make the next statement, it's necessary to note that the Greek translation of “angelos,” the root word of angel, means “messenger.” Suffice it to say then, that in this wrestling match, the angel, the man, the messenger and the message become so enmeshed - with each other that it's nearly impossible to distinguish them apart. Does that mean that Israel/Jacob wasn't actually struggling with God, or the angel, but rather with His message?

At this point, I'd like to bring a few more pieces of information into the mix, so that we can answer the question of Jacob's struggle, and also get to a point where we can understand a direct association between angels and thought, and then find a decent way to actually apply this to our lives, honoring our commitment to work against all this suffering.

First, let us consider that angels are messengers of light, and information is associated with light – for example, providing information is described as “shedding light on the subject,” and the phrase in the new testament about not hiding one's light under a basket refers to sharing the truth which one knows.

Second, thoughts are the basic means of expressing and organizing information within the mind.

Third, a branch of theology called “process theology” teaches us that at every infinitessimal moment, we are experiencing an event, influenced or informed by events we recall from the past. Every event's action, in addition to being informed by past events, is informed by a multitude of messages of potential courses of action, provided by the Divine. As each moment passes from the now into the past, we take an action, however small, even if its only a thoughtful reflection, which then informs further events, and the process then continues ad infinitum. For the record, process theology is actually a bit more complicated than that, but that's my attempt at a very brief distillation to make this point. At every single moment, God is presenting us with messages from which to choose to act on, which then affects what becomes manifest in the world.

Here's the question that I've been working toward. Who carries those messages?

Those messages must be carried by some type of messengers, so for the sake of argument, and looking back at the Greek word 'angelos,' we'll call those messengers angels. These messages are the thoughts that occur to us: from the definition of thought at selfknowledge.com, these thoughts may carry reflections, or perhaps a judgment or perception, or they could carry an intention or purpose. Reflections, judgments and perceptions are those ruminations which remain in the mind, whereas thoughts carrying intentions and purposes are more often interested in manifesting some change in our shared physical world. Intentions and purposes are the ones I'd like to focus on.

These thoughts exist on a continuum from being salvifically beneficial all the way down to being catastrophically detrimental. Knowing their potential effects, and the possibility they may be unleashed out in the world, and borrowing from standard religious parlance, we'll call the beneficial ones 'angels' and the detrimental ones – you guessed it – 'demons.' Originating as thoughts, the size of each of these at the outset is tiny – a potential answer for the age-old question: you could fit “quite a few” on the head of a pin. As they are reflected upon, released, discussed, expounded upon further, and their purpose implemented or their intention executed, they physically manifest among us.

If a thought takes hold and many others adopt it, add input to it, and modify it, it becomes not the cute little cherubic angels we see in the paintings of Raphael, or the human-sized crimson-red horned devil creature of legend, but they grow to carry the weight and momentum of a great, big, Mack truck going well above the speed limit, or even to hundreds of feet tall, able to nourish or devour entire cities or civilizations. This is how the problems we have before us today came into existence and grew over time to the size they have. And it is also the key to solutions. And this is why it is critical that we learn to exert judicious control over our thoughts, specifically the ones we allow to manifest from ourselves, or the thoughts of others we may allow ourselves to propagate.

I can't stress enough that every endeavor undertaken by humans, including our quest for gathering and storing intelligence, our quest to create new technologies, and the way our social systems have been shaped, including languages, economies, nations, national boundaries, governments, communities, religions, music, art and science – the list goes on and on – every endeavor is the result of our thoughts growing into fruition. If they've turned out amiss, we need look no further than to the root.

Our thoughts count.

What kind of tools, understanding, and knowledge do we need in order to tend to thoughts responsibly?

First, we must each recognize our role as personal gatekeepers. We can and must learn to control and operate our own thought processes, lest they be controlled for us by outside forces. If we can hone our ability to recognize the values and merits of our thoughts, along with their potential for good or bad, we can become adept at filtering out incoming or outgoing thoughts with purposes counter to our goals and aspirations, and at solidifying, releasing, and amplifying thoughts that support our goals and aspirations.

Second, we can recognize that problems can arise when two or more thoughts have purposes that run counter to each other, especially if their continued propagation appears to be mutually exclusive. In that case, especially in the case when one or more demons have been brought to life, we must find methods of elimination, realizing that depending on the size of the adverse thought, the amount of time required for elimination may range from instantaneous up to hundreds of years. Some methods of elimination include dissolving the thought by showing its end results, or creating an alternative thought to supplant the one gone awry, or to inoculate ourselves against the thought with preventative thoughts so that the unwelcome thought does not have fertile ground to grow on in the future.

Third, we can learn how to amplify and align our own thoughts. This can mean that we devote significant time and mind power to focus our individual or collective attention on developing a thought fully so it gains strength and momentum. It can mean getting others to start talking and propagating a thought. It can mean developing a culture for our community to think and share in, knowing that our thoughts are empowered when surrounded by the fertile soil of other amicable thoughts to grow side by side with. It can mean flooding the world, echoing our thoughts until everyone hears them and buys in. Such is the case with memes, which Australian Graduate School of Management professor Robert Marks defines as “A unit of cultural information that represents a basic idea that can be transferred from one individual to another, and subjected to mutation, crossover, and adaptation.”

Fourth, we can realize that thoughts do not exist in a vacuum. Logic and intelligence on their own can have a tendency toward being amoral. We must learn to trust our feelings and convictions as guides to provide direction, and to help us set up our filters regarding which thoughts deserve to live, and which the world actually may benefit from having be “no more.” This should not be construed as a vehicle for the cold compassion of censorship, but as an invitation for our spiritual knowledge, true compassion and reason to come together to nurture that which heals and to abandon that which damages.

Fifth, we can recognize that underdeveloped ideas can be among the most dangerous of all, especially if they're implemented before they're ready, or before their potential results are adequately considered. And we also can understand that an even more dangerous idea is the one that a thought is fully complete. In this instance, the angel starts to deliver the message, and is interrupted. We deny or cut off the rest of the message. Instead, we can understand that every thought is a revelation which is always capable of continually being built upon, saying “and, - and, - and.”

Sixth, we must allow ourselves freedom of thought. The philosopher Soren Kierkegaard once said “People demand freedom of speech as a compensation for the freedom of thought which they seldom use.” Just because we're disciplining ourselves about which thoughts we want to escape into the wild doesn't mean we need to confine the arena of thought in our own minds. Our minds are powerful playgrounds, in fact, they've been breeding grounds for some of the most horrific demons we battle today. But when we allow our divergent, artistic selves to shine, our minds are also capable of giving birth to benificent messages and manifestations truly worthy of the name 'angels.'

Now for real-life applicability: Using these tools, we can see that a thought put upon us that our job matters more than our home life needs to be filtered or countered. We recognize the thought within ourselves that we need to manifest to our families the thoughts we have had about wanting to be with them.

We recognize that the advertisements and commercials on buses and television are amplifications of thoughts from marketers, convincing us to consume – thoughts that perhaps shouldn't have made it out into the world in the first place. We develop our own thoughts, that the buses, TV, and radio could all still exist just fine without commercials, and could be replaced with art for art's sake, to the benefit of the stifled culture in our country aching to be let out again, escaping the bonds of commercial oppression. We develop thoughts to counter the argument that says “How could television, radio, buses, and subways exist without advertising money to support them?”

We spread thoughts that our current economic system is only one opinion of a way to use natural resources and human labor toward producing and distributing goods and services among us. We focus our thoughts toward developing ideas and implementations of alternative systems of production and distribution. We also are able to recognize that the capitalist economic system, injustices to the exploited excluded, has indeed been very beneficial in many ways to the advancement of humanity in general up until some time in the mid 20th century, but with that in mind, we also recognize that sometimes our angels - go - bad, while we keep hanging onto them, wishing they were still good.

We realize (or make truly real to ourselves in our minds) that our feelings and convictions have been correct about the state of corruption in our government and the effect it has on us and our world. We understand that we need to empower ourselves by creating a culture which amplifies the thoughts necessary to bring about a way of salvaging and reworking the system that should manifests our ideals of democracy. And we may find ways to synthesize thoughts together to become new safeguards which make our system of government less corruptible.

We may find that the people of the world have all been searching for peace, and that by disempowering our economic systems, the military-industrial and prison complexes, and many other industries founded on the old system will discover that they no longer are needed. We will then find that those people who have worked in the sectors of the economy that have dissolved will have free time, while we still are able to provide the same real goods and services we have today to everyone, but can now do it more efficiently.

We may find that the staggering amounts of debt incurred by many nations and people are only socially agreed-upon numbers, and that if we erase them tomorrow, the world will have the same ten trillion hours of human labor available per year that it had today, only the control of that labor permeates throughout societies, rather than resting only in the hands of an elite few.

We may find that more and more people are out of work as we use our technology to develop robots to make our menial tasks happen automatically for us, and we'll find that those out of work people now have time to read the paper, or learn piano, or sit with their children, or under a tree.

We may find that the thought of true global security unleashed from someone's mind has developed and flowered to a point that it becomes unnecessary to worry about resources
for our childrens' education, or our individual health care, about nuclear warfare, or terrorism, or hostile corporate take-overs.

We may find that our fragile world begins to recover as we slay these demons – perhaps it will be a little worse for wear, but then it would give our descendants some worthy restoration goals to work toward. And we may find that the thought of heaven on earth unleashed from the mind of a bright thinker many centuries ago may still come to fruition as the bright angel its conceiver originally intended.

And may we also find that an all-inclusive - multithetically unified - system of religion waits there for us with open arms.


chant/prayer/mantra:
K.I.S.S.

pax hominibus,
joel

I intend to explain why I keep including this quote below, then dispense with always including it sometime soon.

"And so, Theodore Donald Karabotsos, in accordance with what we think your dying wishes might well have been, we commit your final mortal remains to the bosom of the Pacific Ocean"

Labels: anti-oppression, favorite scriptural passages, Multitheticalism, paradigm shift, Process Thought, sermons, theology