"Ownership of the Christian Message?"

Barry has been engaged in an interesting discussion called Ownership of the Christian Message in which all the various forms of Christianity are being looked at. Which then begs the question, how do you cope with all these different views and how do you know which one’s are true?

I’ll tell you how I cope, I tend to descend into complete hysterics and start shrieking about moral ambiguity while tossing teacups at people’s heads. I only partially jest here, a world without any rules at all where anything goes is a bit like free-falling through the universe and sure to evoke complete panic in someone already as melodramatic as I am.

Keep in mind that I am not talking about slight variations in doctrine, like the way some  believe the Lord’s prayer says “forgive us our sins” while others believe it is “forgive us our trespasses” and still others believe it says “forgive us our debts.” These are trivial things in a world run by insane clowns, let me tell you. No I’m speaking of things like the atheist church or those who don’t believe in the Divinity of Christ or those who have removed Christ from the picture entirely. I call these people “-ians.”

Barry mentions some “clergy who have taught that belief in the Resurrection, Christ’s divinity, and God as a being, are not essential to the Christian faith.” Yes, this is a real thing in the world, although somewhat rare because that is so contrary to the entire foundation of faith. From Catholic to protestant, through all denominations, there is one thing that unites us all and that is the Divinity of 

Christ, His resurrection, and our own salvation through Him. That is the basic fundamental message. Take that away and no, you cannot be a Christ-ian. Look at the word there.  Now some may well call themselves disciples, followers, prophets, or saints, but we’ve all got the Divinity of Christ in our minds and hearts.

Everything from that point forward becomes a matter of belief, study, opinion, the language you speak. You do not really have to believe in creationism or the end times or hell or even in the trinity. This is all just background noise, feedback from the speakers, or perhaps the spices and flavors we add to our food. It is not the bread itself. Accepting the Divinity of Christ and surrendering to your need for redemption, is often called justification. Sanctification is a word sometimes used to describe the process of allowing Him to do His work within you. Faith is a process, we are all works in progress.

Outside the context of faith and theology, and into the realm of emotion and psychology, there is this thing called spiritual abuse. There are people in the world who call themselves Christians, who abuse children, who condemn, ostracize, and bully others, and they do it under the guise of faith. Good grief, this is an appalling thing that will truly mess with your head. I have a powerful faith, I am not a child, and it still messes with my head. This is an issue that truly pushes my buttons. It is wrong to abuse others, but to attempt to separate and alienate them from their Creator just takes it to a whole new level. The harm that can be done there is just astronomical. These days it seems as if many people coming to faith actually have to first unlearn things, rather than to learn things. That is not so easy.

I’m reminded that scripture addresses this issue in a myriad of ways, from clearly stating that those who lead others will be held twice as accountable, to making it quite clear that “whosoever shall offend one of these little ones that believe in me, it is better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and he were cast into the sea.” There are wolves in sheep’s clothing and false teachings. In the bible Christ Himself spends a great deal of time addressing the religious leaders of the day, the pharisees. In the final chapter of the bible, Christ does not have a bone to pick with prostitutes, addicts, and atheists, He has a bone to pick with churches. It is not the lost who are accountable for Christ’s word, but rather the found.

So in answer to ownership of the Christian message, it belongs to those of us who claim Him name. Now needless to say Christians cannot control the actions or behaviors of everyone, but if we are talking in a moral and spiritual sense, I believe we are all called to get the word out and to properly represent the faith, to heal some of those spiritual fractures, and to speak up when we see something wrong. Once again, it is not the lost who are accountable for Christ’s word, but rather the found.

Spiritual abuse however, is not doctrine, it is not faith, and it is not the church. The personal is not political. One’s experiences and suffering at the hands of others does not define all of Christianity. Christ is to be our representative, not some lost or abusive soul professing His name.

So how do you discern, how do you know what is Truth? You go straight to the Source, you ask Christ into your heart and you invite Him to teach you. You humble yourself and you allow Him to speak to you in a language you understand. You pray, you read the bible, you allow the Holy Spirit to fill you and teach you and guide you. You avail yourself of bible studies and other believers, of church, always remembering who is at the top of your relationship, whose favor your seek. Christ should always be first.

This entire discussion, all the confusion over what to believe, the uncertainty over who owns the Christian message, all stems from putting people in Christ’s place, from not recognizing who the Source of our faith really is, from transferring authority from Christ over to a group of believers or a denomination….or over to people who abused you while professing His name.

It is both simple and complex, but if you truly wish to discover the Truth, you let go of all that you think you know, you surrender yourself to Christ, and you allow Him to light your path. It is a leap of faith, but you can trust that He will show you the way and order your steps.

Will you ever be asked to change how you perceive something or what you believe in? Most likely. Will He ever lead you astray? Nope, not ever, not if it is Christ who leads you.

Moby and the White Whale

A Moby is like a false flag, a kind of troll that tries to make you look bad politically, ideologically. They do what they can to shape the narrative by exaggerating your position and making you look like a nutcase leading a bunch of nutcases.

In the political world at large many of us have long suspected that the Westboro Baptist church is a moby. In truth they are way too heavily funded, supported and protected by the system at large, and provided massive amounts of free publicity. Why? In truth they are comprised on one small, dysfunctional, cult like family. They are not an actual “church.” They don’t have hundreds of members, they are simply one tiny family, formerly headed by Fred Phelps.

Just the amount of abuse that Fred Phelps heaped on his family, that was actually reported to the authorities is staggering, and yet the system has never once intervened. Until his death he remained one of the most protected and defended serial abusers of all time. We live in a world where people have their children taken from them for allowing them to walk to the store alone, for homeschooling, for taking away their cell phones. People have been arrested for throwing a piece of fruit or spitting and yet Phelps spent his entire life like a piece of teflon. Protected, because he serves the narrative so well, nobody wanted to touch him.

To this day, Fred Phelps and the Westboro Baptist church serve as a convenient stereotype of all Christians and the rabid right-wing, conservatives, republicans, scary people. I have four mentions of Westboro in my FB newsfeed from just this morning. Most people do not know the truth about them and do not care, they are now simply a handy ideological tool that can be shrunk into a 144 characters or less.

It’s how you engage in social engineering. It’s how you control the narrative, how you shape public opinion and mold the culture. It’s actually kind of chilling how easily we can be led to hold certain false perceptions. It’s a form of brainwashing, playing on your emotions, slipping in under your radar, giving you the impression that something is true when it isn’t. Gaming people.

A moby is like a false flag, a diversion designed to distract your attention and present an exaggerated perception of the perceived enemy. You pretend you’re one of them and then make outlandish claims so everybody gets a distorted perception of the group. It’s been going on the internet for decades. People actually impersonate Christians, conservatives, men’s rights activists, red pills, liberals, men, women, minorities, white supremacists, you name it.

One of the problems with the internet is that you never really know who you’re talking to and people hiding in anonymity can impersonate anybody they want. You have to learn to discern and you won’t always get it right. That is another reason I attach my real name to my email and link to my blog and try to make sure I have established I am a real person as best I can. Some do not have this luxury, I understand that and there are many good arguments for anonymity.

Just to really complicate matters, some people play divide and conquer games, so a troll, a moby, becomes anybody you wish to try to discredit. I don’t like the truth you’re speaking, so you’re a troll. Then you tell everyone somebody is a troll and you’ve shut down all lines of communication.

I have been labeled a troll and a moby so many times it’s almost funny. Oh yes, and banned from half a dozen blogs and accused of being a stalker. I like the stalker one, makes me feel very powerful and intimidating. I like to imagine myself as Kathy Bates breaking someone’s ankles. Puh-lease, give me a break. You also know you’ve hit the big time when people accuse you of trolling your very own blog. Say what??

The truth of the matter is that technology and politics is leading us to be more distrustful of each other, to be more suspicious almost to the point of paranoia and irrationality. Everyone is perceived as being out to deceive someone and to play games. Some are, that is also the truth.

The fact that some people are full of guile and that we are being blatantly socially engineered on the internet and within politics at large is depressing as all heck because you really cannot fight back. People don’t care about the truth, they care about having their ideology and perceptions validated. It takes on almost an addictive quality. Naturally everybody also believes they possess the “truth.” That is also a very seductive and addictive notion. Makes you feel extra special.

I’m not paranoid, I’m actually quite rationally convinced we really are just too stupid to govern ourselves. I have absolutely no hope for the future of our politics. I’ll be in my secret underground bunker stocking the spam.

The time device of, self-destruction
Lies, confusion, start eruption…….Paranoia, they destroy ya

Confirmation Bias

Confirmation bias is the way we draw towards ourselves the validation of our own experiences and perceptions of reality. It is the story we tell about ourselves and the world around us.

Merrily, merrily, merrily, life is but a dream. In a way it really is. We create our own realities, define the little individual planets we all live on. A bit like decorating, we will bring the things that match our decor, home with us. We are the interior designers.

Often we do this with little or no awareness. It is seldom a conscious thing. Our brains are simply taking in data and defining the world for us. See, here are the edges, parameters, boundaries. This is how the world around you IS. This is how other people are. Adapt, adjust, and survive. That is pretty much all our brains do. They don’t filter out this info, moralize it, or even ask if it’s true in the context of the greater world. Not unlike a computer, they simply provide us with data based on our experiences and perceptions.

We are the authors of our own stories however, we have the power within ourselves to change those scripts, to alter the outcomes, to redefine the data, to totally control and change our own perceptions. We are the dreamers of our own lives.

It’s a bit ironic, human nature appears to love control, we want the power, we envy authority, and yet most of us are terrified of seizing it. To seize authority over this one aspect of ourselves that we really do have control over, is to take personal responsibility. With that comes accountability, often tainted by shame, blame, and a keen awareness of our own inadequacies. We are not quite the cool unicorns we thought we were, we are vulnerable, flawed and subject to the whims of the world around us.

One of the greatest deceptions of all is this idea that resisting authority, our own and that of others, puts us in control. We deceive ourselves when we do this because what it really means is that we are bound, ruled by an unrecognized script, trapped in a perception malfunction. It’s a protective and defensive stance, we are walled off, usually as a result of some kind of wounding. It provides us the illusion of control, but it is only an illusion, a deception. In truth we are compelled to walk out a script that is replaying in our minds over and over again, even when we are not aware of it. That’s not freedom, it’s a type of bondage. It is not control, it is the result of having lost control.

As long as we remain in this state, we will continue to draw things towards ourselves that confirm our own biases. Confirmation bias is neither good or bad, it simply is. When we become aware of it and seize control and authority over it, it can be a powerful tool because what we seek, we shall find. What we desire, we pull towards ourselves. Seek good things for yourself.

Confirmation bias is a pretty powerful spiritual law. It can be downright uncanny. One of the easiest ways to spot it in action is in the world of dating and relationships between men and women. A woman who has a negative perception about men and herself will, without fail, date all five of the greatest yahoos in a 500 mile radius. She will confirm her biases about herself and about men in general and it will define her entire world. She will conclude, all-men-bad.

A man may well have five ex wives and spend all his days bemoaning the evil nature of women. He will fail to see that he is the only common denominator there, that rather than being a complete victim of the story he now is living, he is actually the author.

To say such things tends to raise people’s hackles. It’s strange, but we’re often far more comfortable perceiving ourselves as victims of a cruel world rather than as the authors of our own stories. We tend to struggle, resist, avoid seizing our own authority over these stories. It’s a shame too, because that is the one thing we are granted full control over. We cannot change events, circumstances, the world around us, but we sure can change our response to it and our response to it is everything. It becomes our entire universe, the little planet we orbit on, the dream we are dreaming about our own lives.

Civilization as Mutually Agreed Upon Delusion

Kenneth over at Culture Monk has recently been exploring some biblical/cultural themes, especially what I jokingly refer to as trying to reconcile God’s love with the seemingly Cranky God of the Old Testament.

There are several things in the Old Testament that give some people pause, especially as we try to view the bible through modern Western eyes, by what we believe is our new and improved progressive morality. We don’t “believe” in things like sex slavery, rape, tortuous executions, or assorted barbarism. We don’t even want to believe such things are possible.

I must say, one of the most disturbing things about living in the Western world for me is the way we deny the nature of ourselves, the way we perceive civilization as “normal,” as our natural state, as that which defines all else. It’s like being forced to live in a dual reality, with a split personality. In our safe little bubble, people are just naturally courteous to each other, cruelty is an abstract idea, and safety while walking in the world is all but assured, barring a few random accidents. Morality is all innate, it’s simply learned behavior and everybody just wants to be good because that is just our nature. Barring some wounding or a good head injury, we’re all like this!

We embrace this mutually agreed upon delusion about ourselves, this honor code that we consensually agree to uphold and it serves to disconnect us from the genuine nature of ourselves, from any dark and negative aspects of the world around us. Not all of us in the world live in this blessed bubble of bliss. Civilization is a thin veneer indeed. Even in the modern Western world, many of us have the misfortune of discovering this truth,  that the stories we tell about ourselves are only ideals, they are hopes and dreams, things we want to see manifest in the world. They are not reality or the truth about ourselves as human beings.

So, with all our progressive modern outrage and fury and disgust, we tend to perceive some of these old testament laws as barbaric, and shake our fists at them accordingly. Selling your daughters in to sex slavery? Simply paying 50 shekels for rape? Forced marriage? What is this stuff? Misogyny! Either God is mean and cranky or the bible was written only by power-hungry men who hate women! Men not like us at all, but bad men, rather.

It’s a terrible thing to have to say, but “we” ARE the bad men. Stripped of our modern mores and Christian virtues, we are an appalling species. Heck, such values even momentarily forgotten in the heat of the moment, speak to our horrific nature, over and over again. How quickly we have forgotten that we first passed laws preventing animal cruelty, hardly more than a century ago. It wasn’t until decades later that someone thought to ask, shouldn’t some of these laws apply to women, too?? I mean, if you can’t beat your donkey on a Sunday or let your dog slowly starve to death in the front yard, how come it’s still legal to do such things to your wife? Less than a century ago we asked these question, and in spite of these laws, such atrocities continue to this day.

Yes, it isn’t all goodness and light that lurks in the hearts of men! Women either, women have their own issues. The cruelty and stupidity of women is also evident in the modern world of so-called progressive values and advanced morality, too. I’ll spare you the links to all those dark things. Just saying, human beings are capable of some atrocities that will take your breath away, and not just “those people” either, but us, all of us. Outside this mutually agreed upon veneer of civilized behavior, we aren’t so pretty.

There’s a story told in Matthew 14, about a king and a dancing girl, and the king is well pleased with her.  She seeks his favor, gains it, and he seeks to reward her. Does she ask for gems or gold or perhaps and closet full of shoes? Oh no, she wants the head of John the Baptist delivered to her on a silver platter. The King having given his oath, has little choice but to accommodate her and so the damsel receives John’s head on a platter. The head is for her mother, who felt judged and offended by John. She has won, she has proven her worth, shown her power over a king! She holds  life and death in her hands, she can control and manipulate events with her sexual prowess.  It’s heady stuff. It also speaks well to the nature of women, now since long repressed, but ever-present just the same. Sexual politics were not invented in the 1960’s by the feministi and their academic exercises, they actually have ancient roots.

Evil is not a simple gendered thing, even evil exists in a kind of symbiosis between the two genders.

We forget so many things, like in our outrage over the sex slavery portrayed in the bible, we forget that in the world today there may be more slavery going on than any other time in human history. That today, even with our modern mores and morality, we have failed. Even our self-righteous outrage has not been able to rid the world of people selling their kids into slavery. But still we would believe ourselves qualified to judge biblical law, to judge God Himself, to go on to claim the bible must have been written by bad men? We cannot see the truth of the matter, that those biblical laws regarding sex slavery are no more barbaric then our very own written in just the last century. Those laws were not designed to promote an atrocity, they were designed to assign limits and protection for women and children.

There are children right now smack dab in the modern Western world of so-called progressive values, that would give anything to have the protections handed down in the olden days by old-fashioned biblical laws. They may not be much, but they were something. Today we haven’t even got the courage to look at sex slavery honestly, let alone try to institute some rules and regulations. Today we simply deny its existence entirely, as if lying to ourselves about the nature of human beings is somehow more morally righteous than then laws handed down in biblical times. In our outrage, in our great offense, we deem ourselves worthy to judge not only scripture, but God Himself.

Like it or not, those old biblical laws were tailored made for an un-godly people, not by a mean God who hates us, or a cranky God who advocates such things, but by an honest God who sees us as we really are.

We are hardly even able to see the nature of our own selves clearly and yet we so often feel worthy to judge the very nature of God! There’s an old bit of gallows humor that comes from the world of sex workers, “if I had 50 shekels for every time, my father would be a rich man.” I give great credit to those stuck in sex work, they may have little else but they have the eyes to see the world as it really is.