Class Discussion Response on Question of Free Will and Judas' Necessitated Betrayal of Jesus for One of Scotty Pants Seminary Classes.

Boy oh boy,
isn't this a tough one?! Free will is a real conundrum. First I have to ask myself, who is the I whose will could be free? Is the soul, which would choose a body to be born into and a life to lead, as Shannon's position suggests, a free enough being in the first place to be able to choose its destiny? This suggests that there is some higher realm with higher beings of our selves who act something like humans in our disconnected earthly reality, up there somewhere still separate from each other, and from God, making free will decisions about being born, lives to live, parents to raise them. And then we become those beings down here in the flesh, and still live separately, still make free will decisions, still determine our own destiny?

My mom has frequently shared this view with me, that no matter how miserable she is, she knows that she chose this life, chose these situations, and is sort of stuck down here, by her own choice. This always struck me as a fairly depressing way to look at things. I mean, I do tend to love my life, but when I don't, I rather like having something other than myself to blame for my circumstances. Choosing to think that I or some higher form of myself has chosen every idiosyncratic little detail of my reality really puts things in an oddly self-centered perspective in the first place. Putting myself as the determinator of both my physical birth circumstances and my life choices brings up some odd questions, and seems to me to lead to a very dark opinion of our species. If we are all in charge of everything, individually, we sure have screwed things up royally, not just for ourselves, but for everybody else, and for many of the life forms we share this planet with. But in such a broad world, with so many infinite possibilities, and billions of years behind us, and billions of years before us, with our physical homo-sapien-sapien present realities as just a blip on the radar of physical existence in this infinite universe of non-physical energy, we really aren't such a big deal, and seems to me, we really don't have quite as much control as we think, or as much power as our free-will dogmas might lead us to believe.

Free will, in these temporary bodies, in this world of instantaneous limitations, of time, gravity, and bathroom stops, is true, but only so far as it goes. It's like saying you have free will within a prison, you can do what you will, but only within these parameters. Someone can go out and kill someone else, but there are consequences. Hitler was responsible for the murder of millions of human beings, but in the end he really just ended up killing himself, literally. We can kill each other in these bodies, but our bodies are going to die even if we don't. Choosing love, life, and hope, using our free wills to their highest potential, does not change the fact that we are going to die. What happens when we die is all just speculation, no matter how convenient we may find putting our faith in some story written at the hands of man. Divinely inspired or not, it is still limited by the hands of authors in the midst of dilapidation.

In regard to Horace' question on the perspective that God needed Jesus' mission fulfilled by Judas' betrayal of him, I can only wonder, did He? What kind of God would send his most beloved son down to earth as a human sacrifice, to pay for the sins of His own creations? I have to admit, it is the kind of thing an Old Testament God would do. It fits in the context of many of his Acts as documented in the Tanakh. He liked sacrifices and could be a ruthless killer, even His own. But I wonder, did the authors of the Book, telling the story the way they did, really have a choice? I think maybe the guilt of having the blood of such a perfect and innocent Man on our own hands had something to do with Judas' betrayal. We say that Judas did it. It was part of greater plan, it wasn't even his fault, it was part of God's plan. It takes some of the responsibility off ourselves. Maybe we had to tell the story that way, to keep from killing ourselves like Hitler. Maybe all this responsibility, in relation to our own ignorance and our potential, was just too much to bear. Nietzsche, one of the fathers of existentialism, certainly went nuts thinking about it.

Blessings,

Andrew S.

Berkeley Smells Like Flowers

Or gad flen mare
the right glenn flee rag
righ crow nee mad
flen mare ree shaw
I saw mee dad
not on righ schmee
not in my life
all lone slad fair
so crow haw
go nigh flee shmay
folk a don rad in your belay
ars felch
my graw heart slime
makes earth wise full rage
see heart crime wee shaw
float down right head cheese
dawns eye
and saves the world

Hey Craw

My psychiatrist is a loony bird
if I can rant and rave when I'm crazy on this bloog
well then dammit all if I can't rant and rave as a sober graduate student at the Pacific School of Religion
yep
that's right folks
your Goose Wrangler is getting a higher education, and he's not even getting high anymore!
But my fellow students
Stoned
Drunk
and they call themselves Christians...
and still sucking on the lie of separation from GOD
Well they must be High
because this place is a JOKE
Seminary!?
It's Kindergarten
I'm taking a New Testament Class from a Franciscan at the Church Divinity School of the Pacific (an Episcopal Seminary next door), and we don't even have to read the Gospels beginning to end! IT'S a JOKE! ARE they afraid that if they make the students read the whole document the students might realize what a bunch of BULLSHIT it is?! I've been reading it now, over and over, and Scottypants has been making notes...
and here is what it looks like:

The Old Testament just goes downhill after Genesis 1. After the 6th day God looks down and sees his creation and it was most excellent. That about sums it up. Why didn't they just leave it alone? Well instead we got hundreds upon hundreds more pages of a jealous, racist, angry, insane God, perpetrating atrocities, punishing the innocent, ordering the deaths of women and children, swallowing his own chosen up in floods and chasms, and just being an ordinary average prick.

Well, there is your God, and you can have him. Then this Rabbi Jesus came along to liberate his people from their sin, he came to forgive them in the name of a kinder version of God, but his people really didn't want to hear what he had to say so they had him hammered up on a cross to die. So the real lesson of the New Testament is don't question authority, don't knock over the money changers in the temple, don't challenge the higher ups, unless you want to get killed. So there is your story, but somehow this forgiving guy, by the time we get to the end of the New Testament, has been set up next to God in Heaven ready to Judge people and send some to everlasting condemnation, and some to eternal salvation. Well what the hell were they thinking? The Church survived. Judaism survived to keep it's people in the bondage of separation, in the illusion of separation from their fellow man by way of their supposed chosen status, even though we all know that we are all of us human beings god's chosen, Abraham was supposedly a direct descendant of Adam and Eve, just like the rest of us. There were only two to begin with right? Well that makes us all one big, discombobulated, and terribly confused family. And that big Jewish text (the Tanakh, AKA the Old Testament) survived with a tiny little addition called the New Testament, so the rest of the world could inherit this wonderful message of an angry, punishing, insane God, who needed to send his own son as a sacrifice, to die for the sins of his own creations. Thanks.

Once again, we are all Jews. Mislead, entrapped, fooled. God still wants us to stop killing each other. You can put any label on us you want. We are ONE HUMAN RACE.

Aloha.

Haiku for Feb. 17, 2010

Heart shaped water breath
In a bright empty stillness
We're already dead

We all have the same ancestors. Every single human being on earth. Why don't they teach us that in Kindergarten? You practically have to get into college and take Anthropology to get that simple little nugget, and even then you often have to read between the lines. One human race. Ain't that a novel concept.

discussion response for one of the classes... on question about God's presence in relation to Dietrich Bonhoeffer's WWII situation

I have enjoyed reading the conversation thus far; very thought provoking. I have to be another voice of agreement that God is present even in war and atrocity. This Autotheism Kent brings to the conversation is also interesting, especially from the perspective of Jesus's comments on being one with the Father. If we are living in the creation of a Creator, and are therefor part of it, then mustn't we be of the Creator? Jesus may not have been separating himself from us with his description of his relationship with his Father, but rather, as I think Kent is indicating, have been pointing us toward a new understanding of our own relationship with that Father. In being conscious beings in the midst of our own limited perception of creation, we may be little eye balls of creation itself, looking at a limited form of the image manifested by the great Creator. As actors in the manifest realm, we may be the ones we are calling on when we pray for God's intervention. Bonhoeffer chose one path of resistance to engage a dark power he saw acting in the world around him. He saw suffering and he acted in the best way he saw fit to stop Hitler, a figurehead of wrathful violence, cruelty and horror of his time. Where is God in death and dying, cruelty, rape and murder? God is infinite, but we are temporary. Yet we have eyes to see and bodies to experience creation with (and we use them to all these terrible ends sometimes). God, as far as we can see, is not of this world, flesh may be no more his, than ours. So God can be present in death, as God is in life, in that death is the portal to infinity (immortality, heaven, call it what we will), but death is also the price of playing the game. To physically witness infinite creation we have to be separate from it, we have to become temporary to catch a momentary glimpse of timelessness (maybe). To live in the physical realm could be the greatest gift, but death is the price we have to pay for receiving it. Can we stop killing each other and be more God like? Damn good question.

best,

Andrew S