The Straightforward Elements of Divine Goodness

In the conceptualized universe consistent with Jesus’ premises, the divine accounts for three main elements: good themes, good things, and good thoughts.  I would be presumptuous enough to say that, ultimately, heaven is responsible for all good.  “Why callest thou me good? there is none good but one, that is, God” (Matthew 19:17, KJV).

To the notion of the first element, that the divine accounts for good themes, there might be the rejoinder—echoing through the ages—that God unaccountably created evil.  I say that God might as well be upbraided for creating north or left.  “Evil” is a description of states of affairs (as disparate as murder and earthquakes) that are held to be negative rather than positive.  Of course, the opposition of one tendency to another need not be seen as straddling a midpoint (evil, in this case, as opposed to good on the other side.)  If God created a good universe, then what we call “evil” can just be some state that is less good than otherwise might be the case.  Indeed, Jesus swats aside the idea of total human depravity and entertains the notion that evil as we are, that does not befoul us with the inability to act out of basic decency: “If ye then, being evil, know how to give good gifts unto your children….” (Luke 11:13).

This, then, leads us to the second element: the description of the divine as the author of good things.  “Evil” as we know it is describable most typically in the existence of negative things.  Jesus has no patience for our feeling powerless in the face of evil.  If something strikes us as being evil or bad (depending on how we choose at any moment to describe negativity) then we are merely to ask that the negative thing be removed while believing that—in the good order of God’s universe—God can and will remove it.  “Ask, and it shall be given you….” (Matthew 7:7).

Of course, we are not inclined to believe that evil can be made so easily to disappear, and we are even less inclined to believe that we can successfully petition God to do the disappearing.  We choose instead to see a universe created unaccountably by God to contain evil, and we see ourselves as being unable to contain the capacity to persuade God to eliminate evil.  In short, we deny the first two elements: that the divine can be seen as creating only good themes and only good things.

Which leads us to our problem with the description of the divine as creating only good thoughts—the third and final element.  We see instead a universe darkened with an intrinsic stain of evil contemplation that entwines and directs evil things.  Here is where we invent horrid fantasies of layer upon layer of duplicity such that we can no longer trust our senses or our judgments.  Here is where we find ourselves tragically in the company of the Pharisees quoted in Matthew 9: “He casteth out devils through the prince of the devils.”

Jesus’ view of the universe is more straightforward: “Ye shall know them by their fruits” (Matthew 7:16).  We are to believe that life is a straightforward process through a straightforward world created by a straight-talking God.  It is a good idea to embrace those themes, pursue those things, and think those thoughts.

The Faults of Our Minds

Who are we—in a universe that defies our sense of proportion, and with individual selves to which we can lay only tenuous claim—to speak with assurance about what might or might not be called “miracles”?  For this is really the focus of this and the previous two posts: The importance of remembering that attention to the teachings of Jesus hinges not on an acceptance of Jesus’ challenging assertions as rightfully altering our perceptions of ourselves within a universe that we understand, but rather on an acceptance of Jesus’ mission to challenge our prevailing conceptions of that universe itself.

It is not that Jesus is presenting a version of the universe that must be gleaned simply from his recorded teachings; rather Jesus is presenting a version of the universe consistent with the initial statements in Genesis.  To Jesus Genesis is neither historical nor mythological (or at least fundamental in either sense); to Jesus Genesis is normative, and much of this blog must explore how the prevailing Christian view of Genesis is demonstrably untenable.

For the moment I will touch on how our perceptions of ourselves lead to indefensible ideas about our origins and our relationship to the world.  One apt example is to be found in the types of silly arguments that much of Christianity can hold.  It is not at all uncommon for otherwise reasonable Christians to hold (or at least tolerate unchallenged in their belief systems) two contradictory assertions.  One, that the argument from causation is valid—that God must exist as the first cause, since everything in our perceived world must have a cause.  Two, that the historical evidence in its preponderance supports the historicity of the miraculous resurrection.  A moment’s reflection will reveal that the second argument asserts a situation existing within the scope of secular analysis: an uncaused event (the resurrection) by the very rules of logic as applied to our understanding of the empirically-observable world.  So, apparently, there ARE uncaused phenomena—and the argument for the first cause is rendered without substance to the conscientious secular observer.

What, then, shall we say of miracles within an understanding of the teachings of Jesus?  Do we not have an obligation to consider what a miracle really is, or at least of what a miracle might consist within the arguments that (I say) are inherent in Jesus’ teachings?  I say (for whatever that is worth) that our universe as we might ever experience it is a place of imbalance and disproportion, and that our experiences of ourselves are ever open to question.

More importantly, if we postulate the existence of souls (that is to say, describable entities separate from the biochemical processes of our bodies) then what are be boundaries of miracles as we might experience them?  We can say that our free will as ensouled creatures allows us to speak or to move our limbs, but so far we have contended nothing that will frustrate the analyses of secular physiologists—a person decides to move his or her body, and it moves.  Moreover, the effects of such motions will—it is reasonable to contend—line up with our mundane expectations of causation.

But we do not have to encroach on the realm of the physiologist to create effects on ourselves.  If we contend (and admittedly it is a contention) that we have souls that exert our free wills, can we not rouse our bodies to many states of agitation with only our wills, no physical motion being required?  Setting aside the estimable opinions of psychologists and biochemists, can we ourselves believe other than what we have wrought are miracles?  And can we not, by directing our inner selves this way or that, change the very world we experience?  If our souls exist—a contention about a miracle in any event—then can anything in the universe be held by us to be other than a miracle?

This is one of the most important things to be remembered about the realm of Jesus’ teachings: “signs,” as crucial as they are to many of the narratives, are not most crucially understood as miracles, but rather as collections and presentations of the miracles that always exist.  Nowhere is this more apparent than in the case of the Resurrection; the single greatest “sign,” as conventional Christianity would have it, was something, apparently, that Jesus did not want to show to anyone.  (And small wonder, in the conceptual life of the ancient Near East the relating of this or that person emerging again from the ground was not all that uncommon.)  The “sign” of Jesus’ resurrection was his manifest overpowering of the fears of mortality that cripple mankind—he was never and could never be “dead,” as the world fears it.  Or as the angels told the disciples, who were greeted only with an empty tomb, “Why seek ye the living among the dead?” (Luke 24:5).

This and the prior two posts are directed at a single theme: The contention that our conceptions of the world must be shaken before we can understand the teachings of Jesus.  The world is not proportionate, guided by reassuring certainties; we are not possessors of selves that can function as dispassionate, fixed platforms from which to view the world; and if we can admit the possibility of a miracle of God’s existence or of Creation, then we must admit the possibility that everything is miraculous.  The reverse of such contentions is a person who imagines himself or herself lord of a conceptualized mental dominion, a place of regularized proportions and phenomena that he or she surveys in stability and assurance, a place forcibly sanitized from miracles in which he or she either searches for miracles or searches for their non-existence.  He or she can lord over such an existence as a Christian or as anything else, but he or she cannot thereby inhabit the world that Jesus describes and uses as the setting for his lessons.

The Facts of Our Minds

Why is there only one person in each of our bodies?  Or why, at least, do we account multiple-personality scenarios (such as we might believe them to exist) as abnormal—being convinced that one person per body is somehow ordained?  Surely we have neurons to spare to construct more than one person.

I am not talking about the Christian notion of the supposed creation of the New Man with belief or with baptism.  Jesus spoke of being born again, but it is the same old person being born.  Rather, I am talking about the perception of an unchanging self-identity that we identify with our selves, no matter how that self might change.  Why do we imagine that the single particularly-identified self that we see peering from the inside out of our bodies is necessarily and unalterably the one and only person of which we are comprised?

In the country of the Gadarenes Jesus encounters a man possessed by many devils, the infamous “Legion.”  Jesus drives them out, and the affliction leaves the man.  But he is subsequently described as having regained his sanity.  Is not the assumption here that the man’s self—his perception of one identity localized to his body—has been as fractured as the multi-personality horde of demons that tormented him?

A similar notion exists in the story of the Prodigal Son.  The boy takes his inheritance, squanders it, and is reduced to a state worse than beggary.  He then comes to his senses, as some translations would have it, but it is classically stated that “he came to himself” (KJV), and the Greek indeed has implications of identity.  The young man has indeed cause to be thankful to his father for forgiving him, but he has as much cause to thank the God who gave him himself back.

And then there is the enigmatic story of the Good Thief.  In Luke’s gospel the “malefactor” (KJV) says to the other (unrepentant) malefactor: “Dost not thou fear God, seeing thou art in the same condemnation?  And we indeed justly; for we receive the due reward of our deeds: but this man hath done nothing amiss” (23:40-41).  We have no idea how much the good thief knew of the teachings of Jesus, and if he had a notion of Jesus as a perfect sin offering we have no indication of it here.

Indeed, if it be held that the good thief was saved by his faith (in the conventional Christian formulation) then the situation is still more puzzling.  The thief speaks only of Jesus’ innocence, not of Jesus completing a perfect work of expiation (which was at any rate not completed).  He speaks of Jesus only as an innocent man, and asks that Jesus remember him “when thou comest into thy kingdom.”  Remembering, as we must, that Jesus promised heavenly rule to his apostles, it is perfectly logical to contend that an equally good and deserving thief, in some subsequent decade and perhaps in some far-flung locale, might have, in sharing the experience of another crucifixion, looked at a suffering apostle and said “Lord (Master), remember me when thou comest into thy kingdom.”

The point I am making is that it is not the good thief’s perception of Jesus that is at issue here—other than in the negative, in that Jesus has done nothing wrong.  Rather, it is the good thief’s perception of himself that saves him.  The good thief comes to himself—a single, focused, and honestly repentant self-identification—as much a miracle as the incredible business of our bundles of neurons comprising a single self-aware mental entity.

A more important point is the fact that we cannot rely on focused self-awareness at every moment—we tend to go sliding off in unintended directions at virtually any moment.  We can easily lose our sense of proportion—as Jesus often reminded his listeners.  We must add this caution to our remembrance—intended by the previous post—that causes in the universe of our experience have effects of similar disproportion—as Jesus often reminded his listeners.

The Folds of Our Minds

In Genesis 4 Lamech tells his wives, “If Cain shall be avenged sevenfold, truly Lamech seventy and sevenfold” (4:24, KJV.)  (We are probably reminded of how Jesus in Matthew 18 requires us to forgive others “seventy times seven,” drawing out the math still further in favor of us doing the right rather than the wrong.)  While Lamech’s attitude is disturbing, it is worth noting that God is the first, according to the narrative, to introduce the element of imbalance; by divine decree, Cain is to be avenged sevenfold—though how that might be brought about is left unsaid.  Later in the Old Testament, the notions abroad are such that one would assume vengeance would be taken against the family of Cain’s killer, but there are also Old Testament opinions that justice should be meted out only on the guilty.

I would like here to offer the notion that the cause-and-effect thinking in Jesus’ teachings and in Genesis does not square with any dispassionate calculations of proportionality.  Contrary to any assumptions we might bring, the notions of cause and effect are not characterized by proportionality, but rather by cascades of multiples.  Bad things done do not cause directly proportionate harm, and good things done do not bring about proportionate benefit.  In the Parable of the Sower, it is said that the seed that fell on good soil “bare fruit an hundredfold” (Luke 8:8).

It does not matter how logical we want to be.  The idea of a bad deed bearing evil fruit “an hundredfold” might be illustrated by a nasty and unseemly argument held between two people in the presence of four others or in the presence of four hundred.  In the latter case a hundred times more onlookers might be negatively affected, and no sense of proportionality can dampen that effect.  Surely in the latter case the people affected could not all be as close nearby as only four might be—but that does not mean that they might be any less disturbed by it all.  We might argue that the tendency for the situation to be personally disturbing to each and every onlooker is quite proportionate and unsurprising in all human individuals—with the overheard argument being merely a catalyst—but such analysis can scarcely be expected to change our human perception that the argument in front of four hundred people—in and of itself—has borne evil fruit to that extent.

Such is the implication in the words we get from Jesus, and we might find their root in God’s decree that Cain would be avenged sevenfold.  Like it or not, that is the world we inhabit; causes do not have proportionate effects—causes of good produce disproportionate good, and causes of evil produce disproportionate evil.  Things spill about in our messy world.  This might not be logical, and we might refuse to subscribe to it, but that is not pertinent to the point I am trying to make here.  Jesus acted and spoke as though disproportion is the way of the world, and there is little logic in attempting to analyze his teachings otherwise.

Going to Try Writing Again Again

Going to Try Writing Again Again

Going to Try Writing Again

 Going to Try Writing Again