Truth vs. Good

what i learned this morning.

learned item #1:

truth does not equal good... in otherwords, these are not the same... it can not be assumed that truth itself will always produce good. It does not.

The serpent told the truth to Eve in the garden that if she ate the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil she would become LIKE God himself - knowing both good and evil. He told her the truth. But knowing the truth in itself was not a good thing - for Eve, and Adam, and for all their children forever.

this is one of the secrets of the story of the garden.

hmmmm...

I always assumed that truth = good. That if I could find the knowledge and facts and history and truth of the story and nature of man and God and earth - that that would be good.

Wrong-oh!

learned item #2:

God is not the god of this world... in fact there probably is no god of this world other than the billions of human beings living here. Each.

(Jesus, David, and God all said humans were gods - look it up.)

consider Jesus's prayer:

"Daddy - who lives in ANOTHER WORLD"
"Hallowed by thy name" - whatever it is, however its pronounced, hats off to the eternal taboo of man that words in this world are a bridge to the next - including the power to tap into or offend that other world.
"May Your world come."
"May Your will" (and desires and control and government) be done -
"in THIS world like it is in YOUR world."

Get it? God is god of his own world. Not this one. His will isn't done here on earth. Jesus said we should pray and ask him and wish that it would happen.

So if he is the god of heaven then he's not the god of earth which is where I live - here - 3D visual, green, planet with blue water as seen from the space shuttle.

Conclusion: There is no God - in this world. (God being defined as the supreme being of "Good" and all-mighty power that makes all things happen)


if i combined this items i could conclude that if the God we understand and believe in (Supreme all-mighty loving power in another world) does NOT EXIST IN THIS WORLD

and

it may not actually be good to know this (truth does NOT = good), then its probably best to believe that there is a God over our world even though there isn't one.

So, the Great God in Heaven may be there but He's not here but its good to pretend that he is. (presto! - religion!)

Everybody - one big group-hug illusion - let's prayer and pretend He answers, hears us, does what we ask (if its good and He knows its good - which nullifies the whole request kinda doesn't it?) and gives us comfort and relief and salvation and hope etc. etc.

Man, I didn't even know he died

Dough boy found dead. Foul play? Maybe.

Two Sources of Truth: Sacred Scripture and Sacred Tradition

******* Email Repsonse from my friend John in Chicago ********************

Just wanted to get back to you with some ideas
Thought filled considerate compassionate and on fire rhetoric
First and probably essential to my thought process of God is that there are two sources of Truth
Sacred scripture and Sacred Tradition
2nd I have chosen to accept the teaching of the Apostles and their successors
3rd my confidence rests on historical foundation of the literature commonly accepted and taught throughout the world
Some conclusions are an accurate assessment of reality
Some conclusions are my impressions of the meanings of this information
Delusions developed by my imagination or created for me by misunderstanding Truth
These are my perceptions, as inaccurate and flawed as the case maybe
I hope I am not being abstract or evasive am I ????
So too the big IF does lay in the back of my mind any way
Perhaps this is just an illusion?????
However, the foundation of the entire idea of God is FAITH I think don't you???
So then there must be even an incling of this Faith to be earnestly and honestly pursuing God
Otherwise we proceed from this vantage point into imagination and illusion
I recall reading John Paul Sartre and William Percy
But does this bore you ??sorry if it does. I'll drop it.
Moving into the arena of Faith I find myself swept away by my presumption
The unexplainable taken at the simple words handed down to us by those who gave their very own blood and suffering for this Truth which they died for
Jesus himself the prime suffering one the bearer of that great God we all long to know
The tangible of the intangible the visible of the invisible
His word more carefully chosen than my own will ever be
He is the One revealer of all that is good all that is Truth
Sorry I'm on fire Hope that you didn't get burned

I don’t wanna get burned either

****** my reply to John ********

Thanks for the on-fire hope…. I don’t wanna get burned either. My apologies if I introduced you to Sartre’ and sorry if you spent unneeded time reading Percy (he was a believing Catholic, you know.)

The two sources of truth are the easiest to sweep away, although yes, the historical sound case can be made for belief.

Faith – I’m not sure what this is or where it comes from or what it even means really…. Can you have faith in a truism ? I suspect you can only have faith (or not) in Good itself – being what we wrap with the persona of God. Yes that’s abstract, but my hunch is that the fall of man itself is seeded in the FINDING of good and evil, i.e. the Knowledge of good and evil, i.e. the fact that we think in terms of and sort out categorically things into ‘good’ and ‘evil’. The fact that we bucketize, categorize it all! (but yet we have to – that’s what speech is)

Did Adam separate out in his mind and speech into good and evil before the discovery of knowledge? No.

How did he know God before? By faith? I think not.

But his own self-awareness (and shame) through the ‘knowledge’ of good and evil was his curse that man has lived with ever since. God himself has faded into the background and has Himself become only some penultimate cloud of conscious ‘Good’ and all that it means to be ‘good’. (total sovereignty, total power, consummate love, biggest baddest bestest father, wisest creator without a face or body but does have a manifestation of himself into flesh (his son) and his invisible being that floats within and upon and around us (his spirit).

THAT is the god I am calling into question! The one that I/we have made and supported with ancient memories, texts, accounts of miracles and walking on water and healings and resurrections that just smell like stories – yet stories that meet a deep need within.

I don’t want to deny God. I just don’t want to be responsible for supporting Him. And I sure don’t want to continue an emotional imagery that tends to fade the longer I live in this world – that even reeks with the feel of self-creation.

It’s been a long time since any of us were in the garden.

Does anybody remember what it was like?

Below the Line of Despair

I've been meaning to post up my present spiritual condition for a while now and haven't had the gumption or opportunity to do it till now. An old close friend that I met in Bible college back in 1976 has come back into my life through email. John was the scholarly thinking, deeply passionate person who wanted to know God with all his mind and heart just like me. We fought many a theological battles together and John was as faithful of a friend as anyone could ever ask for.

So here is my reply to John that developed in an email in the context of each of us trying to discover after all these years what we have come to with our faiths. John is now a dedicated but somewhat fragile Chatholic living in the blood pump of the Evangelical America (Wheaton, Ill.) and I am left over road-kill from the same Christian protestant fundamentalism that arose during the last century and still boltsters forward in strong stride.

LETTER BELOW THIS LINE:

Oh John, oh John…. Good to hear you honest.

First things first: the southern phrase of you all is spelled and pronounced “ya’ll”.

But America is getting pretty homogenous so this is mostly a quaint cultural remnant hardly noticed by any here nor there, I suspect.



Well good to know you still have the faith, even if vulnerable. I’d love hearing more about your experiential side. Catholicism is obviously a deep faith and possibly worthy of great thinkers like yourself.

Please excuse me for being so hard on you and on the faith. I myself just barely (just barely) hold on to any smidgeon of faith I have left. Actually, I’m probably not even a Christian in nearly any kind of sense I can fathom – except for the church going (I go to a Baptist church) and Bible reading and simple spiritual apologetics and uplifting I try to give to my Sunday school class each week.

Inwardly, the spiritually experiential side of me has evaporated due to my intellectual and sensory sides (my eyes and ears, etc.) I’d still like to believe… but believe what? That Jesus rose from the dead? I think there’s a good chance that somehow maybe he did. So? What am I supposed to do with that? Worship the distant memory of him. Believe what his immediate disciples said and try interpreting that over and over again and again for the 21st century? I’ve done that. It leaves me hollow. So where is the experience? Where is he now? If he came up from the grave, why didn’t he stick around? (To leave, so this “spiritual” ghost can float around above our heads and induce circumstantial questionable events left open for our interpretation?)

The chief fundamental problem that Schaffer himself knew and entitled his first book – “God is There” – okay…. Where?

Well…. Enough of that stuff … sorry to dump on you… I even requested prayer in church last Sunday….. it all seems so lame… yet a remnant of faith must be there still… I feel like either such a pawn in this big joke of a game played by the gods or else just another typical human (fancy monkey) with this advanced need to worship a conceptual power to explain personal phenomena in my life and in the world. (the self-delusion you mentioned – thus implying that “good” is more important than “true”.)



Anyway… change the subject a little… Are you familiar with N.T. Wright ? Are you familiar with the “Emerging church” movement and the thoughts around it? A fair non-scholarly place to start is “A Generous Orthodoxy” by Brian McLaren if you’re interested… sounds right up your alley for the “God is one, church is one” thing.

Look at N.T. Wright’s 5 volume study on the original history and context of Jesus and Paul and 1st century Judaism for the scholarly side.

I know you’re life is busy and I’m using time here at work to write so you don’t have to respond in detail. I can’t imagine us really getting together, but it’s possible. Adena goes to Illinois once in a while and I’m toying with the idea of coming up around Thanksgiving.

Let’s keep conversing. Good to hear from you and good to know you still have faith. I have about 1 grain left. 

Mitch

Critters Around My Cabin

Introducing Cory the coral snake, Terri the tarantula, and Porky the porcupine... local characters that I've seen hanging around my cabin in the last couple of weeks. (I didn't get pictures of the oppossum, the squirrel, the garden spider, the skink, the lizard, etc. etc. etc.)

Tyranny of Experts

A Tyranny of Experts: How outsourcing authority demeans democracy.

...ahh, yes... Walker Percy couldn't of stated the loss of the sovereignty of man better.... at least on the global level.

My favorite quote from this article is ...

He seems to be imprisoned in the contemporary technocratic imagination, which views the expert as the solution and the people as a problem.

...wish i'd of said that.