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?

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.”

Forgiveness is Only a Math Problem

Pop quiz: What’s 70 times 7?

No, it’s not 490! It’s the number of times we’re supposed to forgive those who offend us. Oddly enough, more than two thousand years after a profound and rather revolutionary Jewish rabbi taught this lesson, most of us—even those who profess belief in this man’s teachings—still can’t do the math.

Should we blame the teacher? I don’t think so. He delivered his lesson quite clearly and simply. I’m more inclined to believe that the problem lies in the text. It is more than a little confusing, as evidenced by the findings of a recent Gallup poll.

Researchers found that 49% of Americans believe the Bible, the text from which our views of forgiveness are founded, is the inspired word of God. But these same people don’t think it should be taken literally. Clearly, someone’s confused.

The truth and nothing but the truth, so help me...

When did we stop taking Truth at its word? And, I’m sorry, if God inspired texts that can’t be taken literally, what was the point of the divine inspiration? Heck, mere mortals could have simply made up some stuff.

Actually, 17% of the poll respondents think the text was totally man-made, a collection of legends and fables. My guess is that the latter were merely brave enough to say what the 49% were thinking. If we do the math, 66% of us have discovered that the Bible contains information that is untrue, conflicting or incorrectly recorded.

The implications are tremendous. When overlook obvious errors in the text and call it the Word of God, what are we saying about the credibility and trustworthiness of that Word?

Some scholars take this very seriously. For the last 53 years, for example, Orthodox Jewish researchers at a Jerusalem university have been poring over ancient manuscripts, separating the wheat from the chaff. They’re trying to strip the Hebrew Bible down to its oldest and most authentic text. So far, they’ve unearthed evidence that people have been toying with the Bible for centuries. According to a report on this pivotal research called The Bible Project, scholars have concluded that

“This text at the root of Judaism, Christianity and Islam was somewhat fluid for long periods of its history, and that its transmission through the ages was messier and more human than most of us imagine.”

That explains why it took more than five decades for the team to complete a mere three books of the Bible. And we think we’re reading The Word of God.

The messy and human transmission (and let’s not forget tampering) is precisely why I think we can’t wrap our heads or arms around the famous rabbi’s lessons on forgiveness. The tampered text, in not so subtle ways, actually teaches us to be unforgiving.

As kids, we learn that God does not forgive

One of the earliest stories in the Bible is of the Great Flood. For centuries this alleged genocide has been romanticized, most recently in whimsical children’s books. At a very early age, we learned about forgiveness from this story: The Almighty God, Who could do anything “He” desired, preferred to sadistically “destroy everything living thing” [Genesis 7:4] rather than wave the wand of forgiveness over the humans in “His” creation. Not sure what the animals and plants did to deserve this fate.

Of course, our parents and religious teachers didn’t highlight God’s lack of forgiveness; but it is the unmistakable raison d’être in this ghastly story. Instead, we were served a sugar-coated version of the tale, complete with beautiful cartoons depicting the smiling faces of wild but happy animals patiently prancing onto the ark in a polite queue or peeping out of portholes as if they were on a Mediterranean cruise.

Wait a minute! Portholes? According to the story, God ordered Noah to put only one window in that massive vessel—and, excuse me, it wasn’t in the cargo hold. But happy faces are great subterfuge to keep us from realizing that they were about to suffer a punishment worst than death. What child wouldn’t be horrified by the image of carnivores and herbivores crammed into the same dark space? It was nothing less than a Happy Meal for the predators whose prey had no chance of escaping. If kids could figure that out, certainly God could.

And can we talk about poor Noah and his fam? Those poor folks were not only forced to live with the aroma of wild animals and fecal matter; they also suffered the trauma of smelling the stench and, if they could get to that one window, seeing thousands of bloated bodies—infants, children, adults, the disabled and elderly—floating around them for weeks or as much as a year, depending upon how long it took the water to recede, which depended upon which verse of Genesis you read. If their preservative-free, unrefrigerated food supply could last that long, who in the world could eat under those conditions?

Common sense questions are rarely asked by Believers because thinking and questioning are truly the enemies of “blind faith.” In fact, they are considered heretical. (If you think I’m being sacrilegious, simply pick up the copy of whatever version of the Bible you have right now and tell me how many times the facts change in the Flood story, from verse to verse.) So just in case God really is a genocidal maniac rather than the unconditionally forgiving father of prodigal children, we’ve decided to believe some or all of these stories, even the second major lesson in forgiveness, which is even scarier.

Another Lesson: Forgiveness Requires Suffering

This one’s probably going to make some Christians uncomfortable. The most unforgiving (as in not Christlike) among them might even throw rotting tomatoes into the balcony, dramatically proving my point: Forgiveness is an elementary math problem that we haven’t been able to learn, despite having a Master Teacher. But if we’re ever going to solve this math problem, someone’s got to speak truth to those who would try to control our thoughts and beliefs through fear. Needless to say, the Loud Mouth got the assignment.

Like the Great Flood story, we’ve sugar-coated Jesus’s brutal murder by claiming that he died for us. In this story, as we’ve created it, God’s shows “His” love, mercy and forgiveness in a most peculiar way: God loved “His” bad kids so much that, in the barbaric tradition of those who wrote the story, “He” gave Jesus as a live sacrifice, sending “His” only innocent child to be slowly tortured to death.

We refuse to see that this story, which claims that the only condition under which God would forgive the guilty is by inhumanely brutalizing the innocent, portrays God as satanic. Worse, we promote the idea that if we believe that God placed Jesus in the hands of the sadistic Roman soldiers, “He” will forgive our sins. The cartoon below graphically demonstrates how this principle works.

Wrong Lessons, Well Learned

And that, Boys and Girls, is why we need a refresher course in multiplication. It’s almost impossible to learn to forgive 70 times 7, as Jesus taught, when we’ve been told for thousands of years that 1) Forgiveness is not really divine and 2) If the Divine forgives at all, there are strings attached. And oh, by the way, sometimes those strings have human blood on them.

Refresher Course is Open if You Are

It’s never too late to learn elementary math, as many have discovered in the transformative Drama Queen Workshops, where we free ourselves from the drama of Earth’s myths—beliefs that portray us as separate us from each other and from the Divine. Let me share the truths that seem to speed the path toward knowing Self, trusting God, and attracting a steady flow of Divine Guidance:

Life is always fair.

God is never far.

Death is not “The End.”

Absolutely nothing is unforgivable.

Spirit presented them to me as the Drama Queen Workshop Principles. The fourth principle is the most transformative for every Soul. Forgiveness will absolutely change your eternal life, release you from the chains of anger and resentment that have bound you to your offenders since The Beginning. Do we really want to spend time with those who have hurt, disrespected or abused us? The only way to release them is to forgive them.

Forgiveness comes so naturally when we understand the other three DQW principles. When we realize that we are eternal souls that embody the Divine Spark of Love that we call God, Allah or other revered names, it’s easy. When we understand that in a what-goes-around-comes-around world, Life is always fair, it just happens. When we know that we will receive what we give, at the most perfect time in our eternal life, because death of the mortal body is not the end of us as immortal souls, we don’t hold onto thoughts, anger or resentment about what the other person did to us. We know we won’t be held accountable for the way they treated us, only how we treated them, no matter how they treated us. We release ourselves and move on.

We’ve ignored what Jesus reportedly said in most of the New Testament in favor of scriptures portraying Godliness as unforgiving and mortally vindictive. Let’s not turn a blind eye toward “Judge not, and ye shall not be judged: condemn not, and ye shall not be condemned: forgive, and ye shall be forgiven” [Luke 6:37], “Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive our trespassers” [Matthew 6:12] or the unconditionally forgiving father in “Prodigal Son” parable [Luke 15:11-32]. Forgiveness appears as a recurring theme. It is the good news. God is Love is the good news. Love forgives unconditionally: Good news.

Despite these scriptures’ message that forgiveness is something we do for ourselves, we believe we’re doing our offenders a favor. We act as if we are giving them a gift they don’t deserve when, in fact, we are only hurting ourselves. We deny ourselves forgiveness when we withhold it. If we want to our sins to be forgiven, we must forgive others for theirs—as many times as necessary, as many times as we’d want to be forgiven. Yes, even 70 times 7, although I certainly wouldn’t recommend remaining in the proximity of a such a repeat offender.

Hope is alive! Just as we learned when we were agonizing over our multiplication tables, practice makes perfect. Lessons are always easier to learn when they’re fun, so I invite you to download a supply of Forgiveness Coupons from the DQW home page. Make a game of forgiving unconditionally. See for yourself that forgiveness really is divine. And discover, while you’re at it, that you are, too.

I love you!

Prayers that deliver your desires–every time

We frequently receive prayer requests. Sometimes they’re personal appeals, but they also come via the Internet. Lately, I have seen a resurgence of the “Pray for Our President” emails. Yesterday a Facebook friend even requested prayer to help our soldiers prevail in Iraq’s sweltering 122° heat. These requests made me realize that we’re taught to make several presumptions when we pray:

Baby begs in prayer

God is a Being that lives outside of us—in fact, in outer space;
Like a genie, God grants wishes;
Collective prayer can influence God to do what we want, and
If we don’t pray in earnest, God will not lift a gigantic finger to help His distressed children.

Rarely do we consider the possibility that whatever is happening—no matter how it appears on Earth’s surface—has an underlying divine purpose. It certainly doesn’t occur to us that an immortal soul inside a person designed the experience because it had some evolutionary, purgative or karmic value.

We’ve accepted the idea that we are merely bodies—a reality created by the same folks who told us that we have dominion over an Earth that is the center of the Universe; the sun, moon and stars revolve around it. The only time we acknowledge that we have a soul is when we discuss its fate. It’s as if its life doesn’t begin until ours ends. Read More

Hate Takes a Holiday

Thank you, New York lawmakers. Thank you for overturning the ancient Mosaic Law that is at the root of our hate. Marriage for all

Slowly but surely, Americans are shedding their blind belief in ancient misconceptions about human sexuality. The weary “Bible makes it very clear” defense for homophobic belief and behavior is losing its hateful grip on otherwise reasonable people, folks who believe that the Bible is “the Word of God”—with the exceptions of the parts they don’t believe are true.

It is no small irony that people who consider homosexuality a choice made by naturally heterosexual humans selectively choose what is true in the 20th chapter of Leviticus: They consider it diabolical for a parent to murder a child for being disrespectful, and totally wacko for us to kill everyone we know who cheats on a spouse. But the Bible makes it very clear that we should do both. We’ve chosen not to believe it, just as we’ve chosen not to believe God said that menstruation is “a sickness,” as the Bible claims.

We also don’t banish a man from society if he lies with a menstruating woman—and send her packing, too. That says a lot about human nature and and adherence to the Bible when the only verse in the 20th chapter of Leviticus that we choose to embrace is verse 13. We flaunt it with great piety to belittle, bully, discriminate and even legislate against gays and lesbians.

Why don’t we go on a killing spree, as God mandated in the rest of the chapter? Because we choose to be smarter and more evolved than to do what the Bible tells us to do. Read More

Can’t you see that you’re an angel?

If you knew who you really are, you probably would never experience another hurt or disappointment in life. This revelation came to me after watching “The Present Moment,” a video that a physician friend posted on Facebook earlier this week. The more I think about that little video, the more I’m convinced that it has the potential to be liberating, even life-altering for those who have the slightest bit of imagination.

Of course, imagination is a double-edged sword; it very well might be the reason so many of us are unhappy. Most of us imagine, for example, that our fate lies in the hands of an angry, judgmental and vengeful God who doesn’t think we’re worthy to be in His presence and will only allow a few of us to return home. How does that impact the way we perceive ourselves and treat others? How do worthless people behave? How likely are they to behave lovingly? If your All-Knowing Creator doesn’t find you lovable, how can you trust that you’re lovable to mere mortals? Conversely, if you knew that God was in love with you, would it matter whether anyone on planet Earth was?

God: Angry? Judgmental? Sociopathic?

How different would our life experience be if we dared to imagine that God:

Did not put us on a planet over which He had given control to His evil nemesis?
Did not hold us accountable for the original or subsequent sins of others?
Did not challenge us to valiantly resist the potent magnet of The Enemy’s incessant diabolical plots—or face His wrath?
Did not create us as humans—weaker than the stalwart Enemy and capable of error—ultimately to judge us as guilty of making human errors and sentence us to a torture chamber throughout all eternity?
Did not design life to be complicated or painful?
Did not give some—but not all—of us prescribed rules, regulations, rituals, restrictions and readings that must be religiously followed if we are to be saved from sadistic torture?
Did not leave any holy books with directives that conflict each other?
Did not create anything or anyone that is an abomination?
Did not destroy every living thing, in a fit of rage?
Did not unfairly torture the only innocent child to death so that His guilty children could be absolved of their wrongdoing?
Didn’t threaten to cast you into a fiery pit, where you’d suffer forever, if you didn’t believe that He did something so inhumane (arguably satanic) to His only good child?
Did not intend for us to be confused, controlled, frightened, miserable or unloved?

I know that this is unimaginable for many of us to respond affirmatively to those questions. For centuries, people in authority have told us that God has done all of these things. And we have fervently believed it. In fact, we’re afraid to disbelieve it or call it sadistic. But if a human did any of these things, we’d be more clear and instantaneous about defining this behavior as inhumane.

Is this God frightening and intimidating? Is Love frightening and intimidating? Do we really believe that God is Love if we accept claims that God is frightening and intimidating?

Is there a correlation between what we believe and what we experience in our everyday lives? How does the amount of time we spend worrying about the future, fretting about or regretting the past affect us now and in the future? What is the real reason so many of us suffer from unhappiness and disappointment?

The answer was in this video: It’s simpler than we realize, and requires little or no effort. Really. That’s why “The Present Moment,” is so profound and so powerful.

There is one caveat: You may find that the graphics in the video often compete with or obscure the empowering message in the text. I did, perhaps because I spent so many years in television production.

But just in case you also find that some of the words blend into the background, I froze each frame so that I could capture those words for you. You may download it here. I don’t want you to miss the blessing these words have for you. I hope you watch until the end so that you don’t miss this important message:

The Present Moment is the void where nothing exists and where everything is possible. The Angel can then spread its wings. That Angel, pushing with love, is YOU, alive and vibrant.

Know that I love you—no matter what! If I can do that as a human, just imagine how divinely unconditional God’s love is.

Namaste!

Coming up: Our last week on Earth…

Have you noticed that the only constant on planet Earth is change? It seems that everything–from buildings to bodies, and even the planet itself–ages and decays.

At some point, life as we know it will end. But will it happen because an angry God is coming to judge us, grant eternal life to all who believe that He had Jesus slowly tortured to death, and sadistically torture those who don’t believe He’d do something so satanic? And will it happen next Saturday, May 21, as some folks say?

Who has time to SIT?

Why not next Saturday? It’s as good a guess as any. And let’s face it; there have been many guesses.

“The end” as a human obsession

The Essenes, members of a monklike Jewish sect, were preparing for Judgment Day before the birth of the man we now call Jesus. Scholars say that more than 60 years after Jesus’s death, John Mark, a companion of his disciple Peter, wrote Peter’s recollections of the time he spent with Jesus. Among those recollections, Jesus’s prediction that the end of times would come during the first century. In Chapter 9 of Mark’s gospel, he writes that Jesus told a gathering that some of them would be alive on Judgment Day.

This claim is repeated almost verbatim in Matthew 16 and Luke 9, since both scribes “borrowed” liberally from Mark’s text years later. In the Apostle Paul’s letter to the Thessalonians (Chapters 4 and 5), he, too, warned that the end of the world was near: It would occur during their lifetime. None of these scribes actually knew Jesus. All were incorrect.

Throughout the ages, many others have predicted the so-called End of Times. In most cases, including the latest, the predictions were based on “the inerrant word of God”–the writings of ancient people who fervently believed the Earth was flat, that God lived above the clouds, that the Earth was the center of the universe, and the sun and moon revolved around it.

What’s fascinating is that from these unscientific people, we are basing our scientific calculations.

whom do we trust?

At the heart of the Judgment Day belief is this divine question: Will Earth and every living thing that occupies it die of natural causes–or will it be destroyed by a sadistically punitive God who has no regard for the human life He created, and whose punishment exceeds all human crimes? And if we really believe that God is so diabolical, how do we differentiate Him from the so-called “Enemy?”

Does Good Friday highlight a double standard?

We Christians call this Friday “Good;” but it’s the most heartbreaking day on my calendar. It marks the day when we refresh the accusation that God loved His guilty kids so much that He had His only innocent child brutally tortured to death, effectively letting the others off the hook.

Of course, ancient scribes painted a more rosy picture: They claim that God so loved the world that He “gave” His only begotten son. If we believe this, they say, God won’t torture us throughout eternity. Fear is a great control mechanism. Always has been.

Now we know what giving is—and what it’s not. Or maybe we don’t, so let’s check the dictionary, shall we: Give means to make a present of, to place in the hands of, or to endure the loss of; sacrifice. Giving does not mean handing over your child to sadists, knowing that they are going to nail him to a cross and subject him to a very slow and excruciatingly painful death.

How many loving parents would do this? More pertinent, who among us would be glad that our brother was murdered for a crime that we committed? Is gratitude the appropriate response?

I know that this is dangerous turf on which I’m treading. I’ve been told repeatedly that I cannot call myself a Christian if I do not believe that God sent Jesus here to be slaughtered so that I might live. In other words, if I were a real Christian, I would know that torturing an innocent man to death is not sadistic, if it is an act of God.

Let me be clear: I am not questioning any act of God. I’m questioning whether this particular act is God’s. Is there the slightest bit of the Divine tucked inside live sacrifice?

If we believe scriptures that say that God is Love, isn’t it incumbent upon us to ask: Does Love solve problems by killing any of Its children for any reason?

We Christians clearly have a double standard of behavior—and the standard is considerably lower for God. Fascinating stuff. It reminds me of a post I saw on Facebook several months ago. A minister shared a hypothetical scenario that went something like this:

There were two brothers. The older one, who’d previously served a couple of jail terms, had just been arrested again. If convicted, he faced a minimum of 30 years in prison.

His younger brother was studious, college bound and had never been in trouble. The minister said that the young men’s parents had asked if they should ask the younger brother take the rap for his brother. Since he had a clean record, he’d probably only serve 18 months. Afterward, he could resume his studies and go on with his life, while giving his brother a chance to clean up his act.

The overwhelming consensus was that the older brother should take responsibility for his own actions. It would be unfair for the innocent brother to sacrifice 18 months of his life for a crime he didn’t commit. Some even noted that the older brother seemed to be a habitual criminal and probably would be arrested again anyway, making a mockery of the younger brother’s sacrifice.

Where have we heard that story before? I was fascinated that these Christians—folks who do not object to Jesus taking the rap for crimes he didn’t commit—didn’t see the parallel.

His sacrifice far outweighed an 18-month prison term. And guess what? Neither his death nor resurrection ended sin on Earth. But of course, the All-Knowing God probably predicted that.

So, if sadistically slaughtering Jesus wasn’t going to change the world’s behavior, why would God snuff him out a mere three years into his good news ministry? Isn’t it more likely that the Romans mentioned in the scriptures actually committed the crime?

We all know that this isn’t the first time in history that God has been blamed for acts of inhumanity. Just a few years ago, a world leader justified violence against God’s children in Iraq by insisting that God told him to do it.

Such outrageous declarations vilify God. But we so love the words written and repeatedly mistranslated by man that we have given our only begotten brains to the trash heap so that we can blindly believe that God would be so demonic.

We have a double standard: If a blood-thirsty posse approached the home of a guilty man, and his father pushed his innocent brother onto the porch, we’d declare that this father was pure evil. Why can’t we see the parallel when we read that God has done the same thing—and why aren’t we challenging such an implausible accusation?

This really would be a Good Friday, if we took time out to ponder whether we really believe that God is Love. It is impossible to believe that if we also believe that God does things that Love simply would not do.

Is that your Love crammed into that box?

“Freedom and love go together. Love is not a reaction. If I love you because you love me, that is mere trade, a thing to be bought in the market; it is not love. To love is not to ask anything in return, not even to feel that you are giving something—and it is only such love that can know freedom.” Jiddu Krishnamurti

I was watching “A River Runs through It” on Netflix the other day, and smiled when I saw a wooden carving above the pulpit that said, “God Is Love.” Scriptures say that God is Love [1 John 4:8]; but most of us don’t know what that means. We can’t comprehend the vastness, the power and the unconditional nature of real Love. The same can be said for our comprehension of God.

God in a Box We see God through the only lens we have: Human. Our vision is myopic at best, egoic at worst, and assures distortion of the image. Our visual field is somewhat of a box—containing and confining. We’ve placed God there, where we can observe but not experience.

We’ve created and publicized God as looking human, living in the beyond. Before we could fly above the clouds, we believed that God and heaven were there. They weren’t; but at least there was sunlight, which is more than we can say for the darkness that astronomy and astronauts have found in the Deep Beyond. And oh by the way, they haven’t run into God up there, either.

Frankenstein is a rank amateur

We have bestowed upon God a crazed, conflicted, sociopathic human personality that would be natural for anyone confined to a box. In the bat of an eyelash and with the severity of whiplash, our God performs acts that are as angelic as forgiveness and as demonic as genocide.

Our God issues violent threats of eternal damnation, causes excruciating pain and suffering upon innocent devotees such as Job and Jesus, causes the sun to shine upon the wicked and the good, and welcomes prodigal children home—no matter how errant they’ve been. Did I mention that He’ll bring a pox upon your house? Not really. But He’s ordered you to kill your kids if they’re disrespectful.

According to scripture, a double-minded man is unstable in all his ways [James 1:8]. What does that say about the God that we’ve created? More important, what does it say about us as creators?

Love me, or you’ll regret it!

Our God is so small and humanly insecure that He demands worship. The scriptures we’ve written say that all things work together for good for those that love God [Romans 8:28]. What does that imply about those who don’t? Have we created a quid pro quo God for whom love is a mere trade?

Our limited perception of what God is and what God does makes it difficult, if not impossible, for us to wrap our arms around the notion that Love grants free will to Its beloved. Always and forever, as the song says. Wish it could be on Earth, as it is in Heaven.

If asked, we will tell you that we believe that God has granted us free will. Despite that, we’ll also tell you that we believe that God has gifted us with commandments. Our gaze is so transfixed on the God Box, we seem to have forgotten that commandments are the antithesis of freedom. Commandments control; they don’t liberate.

It’s amazing that it doesn’t occur to thinking people that it would be extremely sadistic for God to grant us total freedom, then brutally punish us throughout eternity for exercising that freedom. Wait a minute! We’re here for less than a century! Even if we sinned every day we’re on the planet, eternal punishment far exceeds any crime. That’s simply another dramatic illustration of how tragically we’ve demonized God—and how thoroughly we misunderstand Love.

The worst job in the Universe

Our God is so small and tyrannical that even though He is sovereign and can do anything He wants, He chooses the mind-numbingly tedious and distasteful task of keeping records of how we use our freedom, every minute of every hour in every time zone for every body. Why would God spend His precious time that way? Oh yeah: So that He can have documented justification for brutally torturing us at a later date. Please, are we talking about Satan or Love?

Beyond not being divine; that story line is disturbingly diabolical. It would be more merciful for God to simply force us to do what He wants. It would spare us the misery and spare Him the drudgery of watching bad acting on every stage on Earth for centuries—without intermission.

But oh! Forcing us to do the right thing wouldn’t grant us freedom, would it? And, boys and girls, if it ain’t freedom, it ain’t Love.

WWLD?

Let’s put our thinking caps on and consider: What would Love do? Well, real Love probably would create a what-goes-around-comes-around world. Haven’t we been admonished to judge not and condemn not? Not one but three gospel writers tell us that “with what judgment ye judge, ye shall be judged: and with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again” [Matthew 7.2] In the Old Testament, it’s “an eye for an eye.” [Exodus 21:23]

Of course, the scribes were not referring to us as we know ourselves: as mortal bodies. We’ve seen many a body’s lifetime end without reaping what it sowed. But we’re not physical bodies. We acknowledge that with the belief that God will punish us forever. I’m sorry, physical bodies don’t last forever.

We are eternal souls, not the physical characters we’re portraying here on Earth’s stage. As souls, we will not escape the karmic ricochet.

Life is always fair

If God is Love, Life will always be fair. It’s the first Drama Queen Workshop Principle. In a whatever-you-do-will-return-to-you world, we have total freedom to choose our outcomes; we are punished by our sins, not for them. That frees us to choose our own karmic butt-whipping. It also frees God to have more joy-filled days. And hey, who deserves it more?

If we don’t know what Love is and what Love does, is it any wonder that so few of us truly experience it? Is it any mystery that we feel emptiness and longing? We yearn for that kind of love from others because inside us, where God really lives, Love seeks its own.

Remarkably, God’s love is so intense and the freedom it grants us is so overwhelming and unfathomable that we separate from it and from each other. Now God sits over there—in a heaven we’ve created in the Great Black Vacuous Hole beyond Earth’s atmosphere with no gravitational pull, performing menial and maniacal tasks, and woefully confined to a box.

And we lie over here, lonely and dying for unconditional Love.

Nobody leaves this planet alive, but everyone does.

“In death, only the body dies. Life does not, consciousness does not, reality does not. And the life is never so alive as after death.” Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj, spiritual teacher and philosopher

I received an email from my cousin Burnadette, who was outraged by a TV news story from a network in Great Britain. Watch the video and tell me: Is this an infuriating news story about a two-year-old boy who is addicted to cigarettes—or do you see something more? Let’s look at the facts that were reported here:

Two-year-old Ardi Rizal of Jakarta, Indonesia is addicted to cigarettes.
His father introduced him to smoking when he was 18 months old.
The toddler is a chain smoker who consumes two packs a day.
Efforts to stop him have failed.
He throws a tantrum and even becomes ill if he doesn’t get his cigarettes.
He’s now in government-mandated rehab.

Undeniably, these are the facts, but are they the truth? I know you’re wondering: Aren’t facts the truth? Not always. When we’re standing on Earth’s stage, our vantage point is limited. Often we can’t see beyond the footlights. And rarely can we see what’s going on behind the curtain. But when we climb into the balcony of Earth’s theater, we can see beyond the actors’ peripheral vision. Our vantage point is 360°, broader and often deeper. We can see on all sides of each character and quite frequently, backstage of the entire scene.

Ardi Rizal-infant chain-smoker This smoking baby drama is fascinating, even on the surface. Anyone who’s watched an infant transition into a toddler expects certain developmental milestones—but smoking? I’ve seen college students, dying (literally) to look more mature, who aren’t as proficient with a cigarette as this baby.

How in the world does an adult teach an 18-month-old to smoke? How do you teach a baby to hold a lit cigarette—let alone twirl it like a baton—without burning himself? How does a two-year-old develop the fine motor skills to light one cigarette with another? How does a toddler learn to deeply inhale and blow out rings of smoke without choking?

Did you see Ardi’s mannerisms? Was I the only one who saw an “old soul” in that young body?

Little Ardi reminded me of a case study I read several years ago. In this case, a toddler in another country stunned his parents by asking where was his wife. They hadn’t a clue what he was talking about. He insisted that he was married, told his parents his name—which wasn’t the name they had given him—his wife’s name and her address, which was in a city that they had never discussed with him. He also gave them details about the home he had shared with his wife, his secret hiding place in that home, and the items he had stashed there.

After the boy had pestered them relentlessly for weeks, the parents decided to prove to him that he had no wife or home elsewhere. After traveling to the nearby town, they were surprised to find a house at the address he’d given them. At that house was a woman the boy instantly recognized and who answered to the name he called her.

He insisted to the frightened woman that he was her husband. She insisted that her husband had died years earlier. Frustrated, the toddler went directly to his hiding place and retrieved the treasures he’d claimed to have stashed there.

What if we really leave Earth alive?

Over the years, I’ve read a number of dramatic (and often traumatic) soul testimonials such as this—including powerful eye-opening stories from those who survived near death experiences. Afterward, they no longer feared death. Most looked forward to it.

In some cultures, elders watch a new baby very carefully, looking deep into the eyes, searching for clues that might reveal which ancestor’s soul is inhabiting this new body. This information provides a different context for scenes such as the one in Jakarta. Plus there’s the accidental discovery of some of my own soul history, which I shared in my metaphysical memoir, EARTH Is the MOTHER of All Drama Queens, that influences my world view.

Most of us believe that every human has a soul, and that our souls live forever. It’s at this juncture that we begin to confuse ourselves: We believe that there is something invisible and immortal inside of us. We believe that it leaves when the body is dead. Or did the body die because it left? Was it, in fact, the Life in the body?

We also believe that we’re not that immortal soul. We are the part that remains here on the planet; we are the carcass.

Since we believe that we are made in God’s image, we’ve concluded that God looks like the mortal part of us rather than the immortal soul. In our confusion, we’ve given God a body, gender and the temperament of a sadistic sociopath whose “behavior” is unpredictable: He grants favor to some of His children, has savagely murdered many, and has promised to torture most throughout all eternity.

No wonder we’re afraid of death.

Believing that we’re going to die—or that we have to do or say something to earn eternal life—doesn’t make it true, and it doesn’t make death fearsome. But if it brings you peace, if it inspires a deeper trust in God, and if it makes sense to you, by all means, believe it.

Nobody has ever come onto Earth’s stage and stayed forever. Have you ever wondered why? Are we immortal souls who have infinite possibilities or mortal bodies with a finite lifespan?

If every soul is leaving his planet alive, but every body will be left behind, which are you?

Religion-Controversial