Can you have faith without religion?

God is so reliable. I was perusing my list of blog post ideas, looking for inspiration, when one caught my eye: Can you have faith without religion?

The substance of things hoped for, The evidence of things not seen. Hebrews 11:1, KJV

It’s a compelling question, especially since an increasing number of Americans now describe themselves as “spiritual, not religious.” One study reports that as many as 33% self-identify as such. I am among them.

Before I could expound on some of the reasons millions today believe God is spirit [John 4:24], rather than an angry, judgmental and vindictive Being who lives beyond the farthest star, a browser tab caught my eye. I typically have at least a dozen browser tabs visible. They’re frequently visited sites, including CNN, The Weather Channel, a couple of unfinished books on Kindle Cloud Reader, Facebook and Twitter, and sites related to whatever research I’m conducting. Right now I have 18 tabs at the ready.

It was Facebook that lured me from my writing. At the top of my news feed was a story, “My Neighbor’s Faith: The rabbi and the Christian cab driver.” I was instantly intrigued.

Rabbi Brad Hirschfield recounted the time he hopped into a Syracuse cab and was stunned to discover “JESUS LOVES YOU” stickers on practically every surface of the interior. The dashboard bore a crucifix; pocket Bibles hung from the windshield. He quipped, “This wasn’t just a cab, it was a rolling cathedral!”

The scruffy looking cabbie asked the rabbi what he thought of Jesus, and why he didn’t believe Jesus was his path to salvation. The rabbi’s response was profound:

“I can believe that Jesus is a great teacher without believing that he is God’s son and the only path to salvation. One truth doesn’t negate the other. I can love Jesus in my way. And you can love Jesus in yours. There is room for both of our understandings of Jesus. I don’t believe that you have to be wrong for me to be right.”

“I don’t believe that you have to be wrong for me to be right.” The words hit the cabbie like a ton of bricks.

I felt a punch in the gut, too. Why? Because I’m keenly aware that the Loud Mouth can be as strident and judgmental as those who describe themselves as religious, particularly those who describe themselves as Christians.

God's wrath was aimed at you. Jesus took it. Don't reject him. Many Christians criticize those who don’t believe that we need to be saved from God’s judgment and eternal punishment. I, on the other hand, criticize anyone who believes that God is judgmental, sadistic and unforgiving. Neither position reflects Yeshua’s (aka Jesus) teachings.

Days ago, I expressed to a Facebook friend that I wanted to be more mindful of Jesus’s admonition to “judge not” and “condemn not.” It obviously put the spiritual wheels in motion.

Enter Rabbi Hirschfield, stage right: “Why do religious people have to be wrong for you to be right, Pat?”

I’m sure he is only the first of many who will offer me opportunities to rise above my Virgo propensity to criticize and analyze.

Rabbi Hirschfield didn’t say that I have to believe that God is an angry, judgmental, genocidal and vindictive Being who lives in the sky. I don’t have to believe that God’s forgiveness has strings attached, or that God solves problems by killing, banishing, forsaking or sadistically torturing anyone to death. I also don’t have to believe that sadistically torturing an innocent child to death is a divine way to demonstrate one’s love for the guilty children.

What he said was that others don’t have to be wrong for believing any or all of these things. Another great Jewish rabbi, Jesus of Nazareth, probably would concur: “Whosoever shall not receive you, nor hear your words, when ye depart out of that house or city, shake off the dust of your feet,” he reportedly said.

I have faith that I can shake the dust off my feet. I can give others loving allowance to believe whatever they want and worship whatever kind of God they want. I have faith that I can practice Jesus’s teachings until they are second nature: Love my neighbor as myself; forgive 70 times 7; judge not; condemn not; God is within.

I have faith that I can experience and radiate the Christ within me, as he did. I have faith that with practice, I will grow in love so consistently that I’m will not be the person I was the day before.

Where Is God?

I was absentmindedly watching the flight information screen as we ascended toward Istanbul from Cairo, and noticed a little factoid that had previously escaped me: The outside temperature. It was plummeting by the second. Before I switched screens to scroll through my movie choices, it was -98°F out there—almost 200° cooler than the Sahara.

It's F-F-FREEZING up here!

I peered out the window. Why does anyone in the 21st century still believe that God lives above the clouds? I wondered. And why would anyone human want to, especially since we also believe our physical bodies are going to reconstitute for the ascension? What earthly bodies can sustain themselves up here?

Isn’t it interesting how we get so firmly entrenched in other people’s stories that they take on a life of their own (and ours)? The ancients, who hadn’t traveled above the clouds or to other planets, offered us their beliefs. We should thank them and catalog their beliefs for archival purposes, a reference point.

Instead, we revere their vision of a huge man-clone who lives in the frigid sky. We hold that caricature, with all his violent and sociopathic personality traits, close to our bosoms. And how is that working for us?

Humans fear the uncontrollable. That’s why we’ve confined God to a box: a religion box, a denomination box, and a place in the sky box. But how do we build a relationship with this sky-dwelling god of the ancients’ vivid imaginations? How do we feel secure when God is heaven knows how far away? How do we convince ourselves that this condescending god who can’t forgive us without torturing someone to death really loves us? How do we love someone so diabolical and distant—and who considers us so vile? Or do we simply feign love because we’re afraid to claim otherwise?

On this or any Sunday, did we find God in the places we looked? Or have we simply found it safer to keep the God we met at church as far away from us as we can?

A Bag Lady’s Holy Week

Rarely do I want to be that one, the bag lady. But for the next few weeks, I’ll be happily living out of suitcases. The first stop on my journey is the Balcony of Life, where I will stay until Easter is good and over.

In years past, I’ve tried to tough it out and remain on Earth’s stage during Holy Week’s incessant demonization of the Divine, even though the bludgeoning of God’s holiness annoys me to no end.

As Einstein said, “Doing the same thing, and expecting a different result, is insanity.” So this year, I’m changing course: Rather than take myself there, I’m bringing myself here—to the Balcony. Memo to Self: Install an escalator! There’s no graceful way to lug all this stuff up these stairs.

Hmmm, even from the lower balcony, I can see what a blessing the soul we knew as Trayvon Martin has been for race relations in America. He has both awakened us to our tendency to label, judge and respond to another member of the human family based on superficial characteristics such as skin color and attire. He also has stirred our conflicted sense of justice.

As a species, we are still evolving, still trying to resolve our love-hate relationship with violence and vengeance. Sometimes brutalizing an innocent member of our human family is unacceptable to us. More frequently—in fact, daily—brutality is absolutely OK with us.

Why is the murder of one innocent child of God reviled and the brutal murder of another revered?

Trayvon’s murder falls under the unacceptable category. Hundreds of thousands of citizens in this mostly Christian nation have taken to the streets in outrage over the inhumanity of vigilante George Zimmerman and the insensitivity of the non-vigilant Sanford, Florida Police Department. We clearly revile injustice and violence—except when we’re giddy and grateful for it.

During this, the holiest week on the Christian calendar, we will attend vigils, wear hoodies to church, and post cathartic sentiments on social media in protest of the death of this innocent child and its subsequent cover-up. Then we will get down on our knees and thank God for sending another innocent young man to be slowly and sadistically tortured to death so that the guilty could be forgiven.

Let me play that back for you: According to ancient reports, God was so vehemently opposed to forgiveness that “He” stooped to the barbaric and distinctly human practice of sacrificing a live and innocent being before “He” would forgive the guilty. Yes, it’s the same God that wants mere mortals to forgive 70 times 7.

No one’s protesting the inhumanity, injustice or hypocrisy of this alleged act of God. No one’s demanding evidence that Love would do anything inhumane, unjust or hypocritical. No, instead we’re jumping for joy that we are washed in the blood of Jesus. Isn’t that part of a satanic ritual? Where does the Divine fit in that?

Can we legitimately scream for justice in Trayvon’s murder, when we’re not demanding the same for Jesus’s insanely brutal death? Can we credibly call for Zimmerman to be arrested and tried, but continue to give the Roman soldiers a get-out-of-jail-free card?

All of us carry baggage in our heads. Some of it is information and beliefs that harm us or others. We drag it from place to place and it blurs our ability to see Truth. Perhaps it’s time to let some of it go—starting with all illogical thoughts that demonize God.

From where this bag lady is sitting, if I am grateful for anything this Holy Week, it’s that God really is Love, and that Love forgives absolutely and unconditionally—no matter how much or how long we’ve repeated tales that The Divine does anything demonic.

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Death is not…THE END.

Last night I ran across notes hastily jotted during one of the many times in 2003 that Spirit whispered the common sense spirituality that culminated in my first book. Among the wisdom imparted during that time were four profound life principles that have reframed the way I look at life on Earth’s stage, and now form the foundation of my playful Drama Queen Workshop™ exercises:

Life is always fair, God is never far, Death is not THE END, Absolutely nothing is unforgivable

The third Drama Queen principle, “Death is not THE END,” has been uppermost on my mind since hearing the news that Whitney Houston had left the stage. Most around me were focused on this tragic loss. Among them, my singer-songwriter daughter, who grew up worshiping Whitney and has set Whitney’s high musical standards as the bar she strives to reach.

What a thrill it was for Whitney to make a comeback appearance at the Grammys in 2009, the year Maiysha was nominated for best performance in her category. Now this. My child was almost inconsolable.

It was difficult enough to offer adequate comfort across the miles. (Maiysha has always loved to put her head in my lap while I stroke her forehead.) But it was even more difficult—actually, impossible to ignore this truth: Death of a mortal body is not THE END of an immortal soul. The soul who came here as Whitney is very much alive and undoubtedly well.

I’ve learned in the past that those who remain rarely want to hear this when a loved one exits Earth’s stage. Some are actually offended by the possibility that we are more than flesh, bones and blood.

We grieve deeply—not for the departed, but for ourselves because we can no longer be together physically. It matters not that the departed are closer, more accessible as Spirit than when they were weighted down by body costumes.

There’s so much evidence that death of a body is like removing a costume, as I’ve previously posted. I’ve personally witnessed it, as have millions of others. Who hasn’t had a “something told me to…” moment when there was no one else around?

Every Goodbye Ain’t Gone

Something in Whitney’s funeral program reminded me of an incident I recounted in my first book, “EARTH Is the MOTHER of All Drama Queens.” It happened the day my mother made her transition.

Sitting in a hair salon, I heard my mother whisper, “I just wanted to say goodbye.”

I was suddenly overwhelmed with grief. I was crying so hard, I couldn’t visit my mother in the hospital across the street, as planned. When I arrived home, there was a voicemail message that confirmed my suspicions.

At my mother’s visitation, her best friend walked up to me, stunned and a bit spooked. She said that her doorbell had rung the day Mother passed. When she went to the door, my mother was standing there. She just stood. She said nothing. Then she disappeared.

“She was wearing that suit!” Aunt Doris gasped, pointing to the casket.

My heart rose into my throat.

The day Mother made her transition, that gorgeous white suit was hanging in my closet. It was one of my favorites, but I rarely wore it. Days later, I thought it would be perfect for her on this occasion, so I took it to the funeral home.

What Aunt Doris was telling me was that before I’d even made the decision to bury Mother in my suit, she’d had already seen Mother wearing it!

Now we learn that Cissy Houston has a similar testimonial, which she shared in a letter to Whitney published in the funeral program:

Whitney Houston

“[God] came for you. But not without warning. For two months now I have been depressed, crying, lonesome and sad and not knowing why.

“On Saturday before I found out about your transition, my doorbell rang. I went to answer it, but there was no one there. It rang again and again, no one was there. I called the concierge to tell him someone was ringing my doorbell. He checked the camera and told me no one was there.

“You promised me you were coming to spend time with me after the Grammys. I believe the spirits allowed you to come after all.”

As Maiysha said after reading it, “This is the dream we wake up to everyday, but it’s still a dream.”

We thank you, Whitney, for stepping into the dream with us and blessing us with the full concerto that was your life. We delighted in the crescendos, were disappointed by the lows, and cheered for you to thrill us again.

We made your life about us: who we wanted you to be…for us. How excited you must be to step outside of the glare of Earth’s harsh and often painfully judgmental spotlight!

You deserve this time. Bask in the Loving Light of our Creator, Dearest Sister! We celebrate your new life; we love you and deeply cherish your eternal soul.

Pat Arnold Join me March 29-31 at “The Gold Rush” spiritual conference for women!

Come hear Iyanla Vanzant, Susan Taylor and other dynamic speakers. On Friday, have some fun in my latest Drama Queen Workshop: “Have You Lost Your MINE?” It’s gonna be a blast! For more information, click here.

How groundhogs and falling leaves affect your prosperity

Years ago, a journalist friend in Washington, DC, who also had walked away from her job with a prestigious media outlet, had a suggestion: Why don’t we enroll in a free online 40-day prosperity class?

We could barely afford to wait 40 days for our ships to come in. We immediately plowed into the program and followed all the directives precisely, keenly aware that we had no margin for error.

From prosperity to prospoority

What do you mean, I'm overdrawn? I still have checks left! We joyfully and diligently did the work, fully expecting that the abundance we sought would be the abundance we’d see. A few days before the end of our journey—and just as my rent was due—someone made two $900 charges on my debit card. I was $1,800 less prosperous than when I enrolled!

I eventually got my money back. But I got a lot more: a lesson in cause and effect. Admittedly, the prosperity class didn’t cause dollars to drain from my bank account. But it also didn’t cause a cent to be pumped into it.

Been there, done it

You can imagine my reaction when another entrepreneurial journalist friend told me a few days ago that she had enrolled in a prosperity class. To her delight, she then began receiving offers for freelance work.

“Are you saying the class is the reason you’re getting work?” I asked.

“Absolutely!”

I probed further: “So, if the class hadn’t been offered—or if you hadn’t enrolled in it—your phone wouldn’t have rung?”

She paused. “Good question.”

She wasn’t totally convinced that the class shouldn’t be credited with her good fortune. After all, several classmates had shared great testimonials.

“Did everyone in the class have a testimonial?” I asked.

“No,” she conceded, getting my drift.

My drift was this: If everyone in a class becomes prosperous—and no one outside a class does—then, and only then, can we logically conclude that the class was the cause of the students’ prosperity.

Correlation, causation and coincidence

A psychiatrist recently told a story about folks who noticed a recurring phenomenon: Every year, leaves fell off the trees. After that, it snowed! They concluded that falling leaves cause falling snow.

Punxsutawney Phil on Groundhog Day Don’t snicker. For more than 120 years, we’ve claimed a wacky correlation between spring’s arrival and a hapless rodent “seeing” his shadow. Statistics show no correlation between the two. I think the falling-leaves-cause-snow people get the last laugh!

Looking but not seeing, hearing but not listening

Most of us find it unfathomable that we are made in the image of Our Creator: invincible, immortal, invisible, omniscient and divine. We believe that we are merely the physical shell, and outer conditions and other humans ultimately control our lives.

Our Ego-Selves are outwardly focused, always comparing other physical shells’ possessions with our own. Ego incessantly yammers in our heads: “Let’s go here, do this. Why can’t we have that?” When it’s not dictates our desires, it’s distracting us with fear of loss and worry.

If we don’t own our egos, they will own us

Head for the future, forget the past Those who have learned to be in this world, but not of it, hear Ego’s fear-peddling messages; but they are not disturbed or distracted. In their view, this planet is like educational theater: instructive, but not always entertaining.

They know that every lesson on Earth’s stage has the perfect setting, props and supporting cast. Human is merely a role we play, even though Ego says it is who we are.

Perspective can land you in a trick bag

Through ego's eyes Perspective is a powerful thing, and it comes with consequences attached. For example, Ego has taught us to judge situations and other actors on Earth’s stage as “good” or “bad,” and treat them accordingly. However, if we’re held accountable for how we treat others, and are treated the way we treat others, we can find ourselves in a trick bag, inflicting unnecessary pain and distress upon ourselves.

Through Ego’s eyes, adversity is bad. It should be feared, avoided, and eliminated. That’s why, when adversity enters the stage, we instantly panic. If it doesn’t paralyze us, we rush into “fix it” mode, running around with our hair on fire, looking outside of ourselves for solutions. Like classes or prayer.

Ego has taught us to pray to a “Maybe I will, maybe I won’t. How much can you grovel” God. And he cleverly placed God light years away, in outer space.

Ego’s no dummy: How fast does sound travel? How many light years away is the Ego’s God? Prayers won’t even arrive before your physical life ends.

It’s to Ego’s advantage that they don’t: Frightened humans, whose prayers aren’t always answered, are so much easier to manipulate. And much more apt to believe it when Ego says, “You can’t trust God. You can only count on yourself.”

The prospering power of adversity

Through the loving, nonjudgmental eyes of the Eternal Spirit of Love that others of us call God, adversity is the identical twin of prosperity. But most of us can’t see that because we’re bouncing around like unguided missiles, looking for something to change our circumstances—ideally, inject some prosperity into our lives.

Unguided missiles

We wonder: Didn’t someone say that God wants us to be rich? In that case, everyone on Earth should be rich!

Just as there is no correlation between groundhogs and spring—or falling leaves and snow—there is no correlation between the outer world and your prosperity.

Prosperity is as invisible as the real you, the invincible, immortal, omniscient and divine you that was made in the image of Your Creator. Your prosperity is the fulfillment of your unique life purpose. It cannot be caused, created or discovered through anything tangible.

Your prosperity lives within you, as you. Just because you refuse to look or acknowledge it or your own divinity doesn’t mean it’s not there.

Keep doin’ what you’re doin’ and you’ll keep gettin’ what you got. You have been given free will to go within, ask, listen and follow divine direction. Or you can keep following Ego’s map.

Pat Arnold Join me March 29-31 at “The Gold Rush” spiritual conference for women!

Opening the eyes in back of your head

I recently reconnected with my college sweetheart and lifelong friend, who initiates a pleasant game of catch-up every once in a while. After all these years, I’m still surprised whenever he and his healthy sense of “what if…” curiosity suddenly reappear on my life path.

During our latest round of shoulda, woulda, coulda catch-up, we had a friendly debate about the value of revisiting the past. He insisted that it’s a healthy exercise, whether our memories are dramatically romanticized or even tinged with regret. Although I didn’t immediately admit it, he was right: Staring straight ahead can be myopic. Worse, we lose the valuable gifts tucked inside those rear view glances: context, life lessons and wisdom.

Perhaps you’ve noticed that we can’t always see where we’re going as clearly as where we’ve been. It’s the birthing chamber for those “If I only knew then what I know now” groans.

Ahhh, if our foresight was as 20/20 as our hindsight, life would be so much easier, wouldn’t it? But let’s be grateful that we have eyes in the back of our heads. With that hindsight, we can squeeze every drop of value from our experiences—pleasant and otherwise.

Easier to believe than to think

Albert Einstein It doesn’t take Jesus to tell us that putting new wine in old skins will make an absolute mess. It doesn’t take Einstein to tell us that doing the same thing and expecting a different outcome is simply wacko. That great teacher, Experience, has told us these things on numerous occasions.

It doesn’t profit us to blindfold the eyes in back of our heads or power down our brains when discerning truth from possibility. By now, we’ve had millions of chances to be “born again”: clear out the debris from thoughts and beliefs that we know, from experience, don’t work and let our evolutionary lessons inhabit this new space—staying open to the possibility that new discoveries might replace them, as well.

Is Earth really flat?

We don’t have to rely on what others told us to believe. For example, several Bible scriptures, including Revelation 7:1, Isaiah 11:12, Job 28:24 and 37:3, tell us that Earth is flat. Eyes open, brains in full throttle, do we embrace these scriptures as Truth (the Word of God), or as insight into what ancient people believed was true?

During an online search for images depicting the “four corners of the Earth,” as described in Revelation 7:1, I discovered the existence of the International Flat Earth Society. Its members are dedicated to “unraveling the true mysteries of the universe and demonstrating that the earth is flat and that Round Earth doctrine is little more than an elaborate hoax.”

Half of what you see, none of what you hear

I also found the image I was seeking, created in 1893, complete with ten Biblical scriptures that “condemn the globe theory.” Among them, included scriptures claiming that the earth, moon and sun stand still.

Map of the square, stationary Earth

In the tradition of new wine in old skins, this map presents us with a round and square Earth. It was created using the same methodology as the Christian clergy at the Councils of Nicaea in 325 and 787 CE, who poured an Old Testament God inside New Testament wineskin. All over the floor splashed a bi-polar deity who is genocidal, filicidal, difficult to please, smiting, full of wrath, judgmental, homophobic, punitive, capricious, vindictive, sadistic, AND the unconditionally loving, forgiving father of prodigal children.

Does believing make it so?

Every minute of our lives, we have the opportunity to apply the lessons we’ve learned and use them as guides as we progress along our life paths. Instead, we repeat phrases and hold expectations that they will perform as if they are true, even though we’ve learned through observation and experience, they are not. Phrases that top that list: “Believing makes it so” and “What we think about, we bring about.”

Millions of us quote modern scribes who declare that we can manifest whatever circumstances, possessions and relationships into the physical world that we desire. All we have to do is “claim” them or follow a certain formula or invoke a particular spiritual law.

With all due respect to the writers of those theories, nothing we have experienced or witnessed validates their claim. When our eyes open and brains are in full throttle rather than idling in gullibility, we know that laws produce the same result, 100% of the time for 100% of those affected, independent of our thoughts or beliefs. Yet we keep doing the same thing, expecting a different result.

We also know that laws don’t have to be consciously invoked. When’s the last time you you invoked the Law of Gravity so that you could walk, sit or hang a picture without anything floating away?

Is possibility a law?

Anything is possible. But if the Law of Attraction works the way modern sages say, everything to which we devoted dominant thought and emotional energy, and visualized in great detail would appear in our experience. Nothing else.

In other words, there would be no dictionary entries for surprise or disappointment. We’d be in total control of our experience here; in fact, we’d have dominion over Earth, just as the ancient scribes believed. Wouldn’t that make our physical/ego selves’ toes curl with delight?

Opening the eyes in back of our heads

Perhaps it’s time for us to see a bigger picture, and make a game of it, as creative souls do. My dear friend Joe’s wonder-filled game of “what if…” seems perfect for this:

What if God is so much greater than the brain-limiting images of a huge being who looks like a human and lives in outer space?
What if God is a divine, immortal and invisible intelligence and we are made in that likeness and image, rather than the other way around?
What if we have misidentified ourselves as mere mortals?
What if we, as divine, immortal and invisible souls are much more invincible and intelligent than the sensory human body costumes we are temporarily wearing?
What if, in the divine, immortal and invisible world of Spirit, everything is perfect, in Divine Order?
What if, as divine, immortal and invisible souls, we are precisely where we want to be, having the experiences we want to have for this bat-of-an-eyelash moment in Universal Time?
What if attempts by our mortal, sensory human costumes to control the divinely perfect experience we’ve designed simply don’t work?
What if we let go of our limited vision of ourselves and consciously sought to identify ourselves as the divine, immortal omniscient spirit within us?
What if we trusted the Divine Within to be our pilots, instead of using our bodies and the brains within them to manipulate the circumstances, possessions and people in our physical lives?

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You don’t go to heaven, and other dawnings

The arrival of 11/11/11 has stimulated lots of conversations about the Age of Aquarius. And no, it wasn’t because the moon was in the seventh house and Jupiter had aligned with Mars. Those lyrics gave us a great song in the musical “Hair.” But astrology, the source of all this stuff, tells us that the moon is in the seventh house two hours of every day—and Jupiter aligns with Mars several times every year!

2011 Aquarius Clock

If there is such a thing as an Aquarian Age, I wondered, when does our universal clock transition it from dawning to the full blown thing? And what on Earth will it look and feel like?

If the song was wrong about the planets, it could be wrong about the “Harmony and understanding, sympathy and trust, and no more falsehoods or derisions” part. I decided to check it out.

I was surprised to discover that some folks believe we’re fully into the Aquarian Age. In fact, they say it began centuries before the first flower child was born, all the way back as the 1780s. The marker: Demands for human rights began to escalate.

Needless to say, that’s in dispute. Those in another camp clock the arrival at November 11, 2011. And yet another group says hold our horses. The Age doesn’t appear until next year’s winter solstice: December 21, 2012.

OK, so it appears to be a guessing game, even among those who study astrology. Do they at least agree on the effect the Aquarian Age will have on the planet and its inhabitants? Negatory.

Most predict a period of awakening, a more enlightened and less superstitious period in human evolution that resembles the “Hair” lyricist’s description. But at least one prominent astrologer has a darker prediction. Robert Zoller sees the Aquarian world as one in which the “secretive power-hungry elites seek absolute power over others.” (Sound familiar?) Zoller’s other indicator: In the Aquarian Age, religion, which he called “the opiate of the masses,” will be viewed as offensive.

If Zoller is correct, the “Occupy” movement sweeping the planet may fulfill one of his criteria. Closer to home, I may have encountered the other. It was nothing short of offensive when a gentleman bearing a handful of little blue religious tracts interrupted my afternoon stroll on one of Chicago’s last 60-degree days.

He looked me dead in the eye, lowered his voice as if he was giving me an insider tip on a potent stock, and said, “Make sure a place is reserved for you in heaven.”

Are. You. Kidding. Me?

At what point in human evolution are we going to stop imagining heaven in outer space? For centuries, the blissful home of God and the angels was on the other side of the clouds. Commercial air travel busted that myth. Soon after that, space exploration forced heaven’s location farther into the distance. Today, instead of that sunny place we enjoy when flying above the fluffy clouds, heaven sits in the dark, in a void. How divine! Who wants to spend all eternity there?

On one hand, I totally understand why we cling to the idea that the God in the Bible now lives millions of light years away. He’s unpredictable: either loving and forgiving or violently angry, sadistically punitive. And He has been known to kill every living thing.

If God is a gigantic male being who lives beyond the farthest star in our galaxy, isn’t it more likely that our Golden Rule violations might go unnoticed? Secondly, if we believe that this gigantic male being has a history of boastfully committing genocide and harming his creation with plagues and wars, wouldn’t we want some distance—lots and lots of it?

Many of us even believe that God blames all of us for the sins of our prehistoric ancestors, and won’t forgive his sinful children without subjecting the only innocent one to an excruciatingly painful death by torture.

Yes, I truly understand why anyone who believes that God does such sadistic things would have to position him in outer space. I simply wish they’d do it in the privacy of their prayer closets and not on city streets.

Full moon: November 10, 2011

While taking an early evening walk down Michigan Avenue a few nights ago, I spotted that bright 11/10/11 full moon hanging over the lake. Before I could grab my BlackBerry to capture it, I heard a familiar voice blaring from a nearby speaker.

“You can’t go to heaven unless you repent your sins! You must repent!”

Aaargh! This gravelly voice of doom has accosted downtown Chicago pedestrians for at least 40 years that I can remember. In all those years, I don’t recall ever seeing the al fresco preacher after sunset or anywhere but State Street. Perhaps he was disoriented by the Universal shift toward Aquarius and he landed on Michigan Avenue in the dark, waving his tattered Bible in one hand and a microphone in the other, warning liars, thieves, smokers, “homosec-shals” and everyone “living in sin” that God is not going to let them into heaven.

He echoes the belief of many who are heavily invested in this denigrating portrayal of a god who creates all of us but heinously allows only a few to return home. They believe God will cast the rest of us, billions upon billions, into a fiery pit. Never mind that dead bodies can’t feel fire (or cold), and never mind that only a sadist would subject his child to eternal torture. This is the god they love and worship, and I’m not going to argue with them.

As the sleeping prophet Edgar Cayce once said, “You grow to heaven. You don’t go to heaven.”

As for me and my house, we will serve a God of Love, an omnipotent, omniscient and omnipresent God who lives in the hearts of all—a God that does nothing Love would not do, who holds a space in His heart for all His children, and harms no one for any reason.

Be it Aquarius or cheddar, I await the Age when “Peace will guide the planets, and love will steer the stars.”

(Cue the 5th Dimension): “Let the sun shine! Let the sun shine in! The sun shine in.”