To: Adventure-Dude

You are evidently a thinking person. A person who has given thought to your religious/spiritual perspective on the world. You and I may disagree (not that that matters because I'm right and you're wrong - excuse me, I was channeling KFC there) but it's evident from your contributions that you exercise thought in relation to your ritual observance.

In all matters of religious/spiritual observance I look for a sense of adulthood in the observant person with whom I'm engaged in conversation. Adulthood, in these matters, is defined for me by a sense that while I (the observant person) have faith, I understand that my faith is incomplete. It's incomplete because it's human. Faith is the response of the human spirit to the conundrum that is the presence of God. God is. Man is. Somehow, the one must deal with the other.

I no longer have any interest in promoting my conception of the divine in the presence of others in such a way that they, eventually, agree with me. For all I know, I'm as deluded as any Christian. I have, however, an interest in debating with the god-bothering majority the finer points of their particular delusions. I believe it to be incumbent on those who have progressed beyond the simple dichotomies of faith without thought that they contest with those who are convinced that they are righteous. I know that there is no one righteous before God. How could there be? God is more. And what is less is, by definition, neither righteous nor holy.

This is the root of my on-going fascination with Jesus, the latest incarnation of the Solar Myth. I ask you a question as one human being to another. Who is there that, knowing themselves to be in immediate peril of horrible death, wouldn't want someone to selflessly rescue them simply because they are loved? To rescue them at the cost of their own life? Simply because they are loved. There is not a soul alive that is immune to the attraction of that kind of imagery, that kind of appeal.

We all want to be loved. And we all want to be loved absolutely and for ourselves alone.

And as the Gospels testify, Jesus is Love. The power of the Christian myth is in its perfect combination of the Terrifying Judge and the Sacrificial Lover. The one will kill your ass simply because you deserve nothing else. The other will save your ass because he loves you. And that in essence is the whole of Christianity.

It would be wonderful, if it wasn't bullshit.

The God I know thinks genocide is funny. It invented Bubonic Plague, and Cholera. It invented us, the Great Exterminator, and set us to hate one another. It's as much at home in cellars where people are tortured to death as It is in Cathedrals. Maybe more so. And It doesn't give a shit whether I, or you, or anyone else, lives or dies. It regards us as we regard insects, or viruses, or the atoms that compose the air we breathe. With complete and utter indifference. If it possesses any kind of morality at all that morality is nothing but an exaggerated sense of irony.

And at the same time and in the same instant the God I know is Holy, Righteous and Just.

These two completely opposed points of view live together in me because I have an adult understanding of the difficulties involved in understanding God. God is not what I am. Nor is God what I can conceive. The only way to speak the truth concerning God is to be silent. Everything else is idolatry and blasphemy. And there are moments, and days, in which I grow weary of idolatry and blasphemy - and simple, bloody-minded, ignorance.

But I take comfort in this. God is. And God will repay.

And none will be exempt.

But being able to agree to disagree seems to show maturity (spiritual and emotional). I know there are areas that we disagree on but I respect your perspective because you didn't read about it and consider it your own. You've obviously thought about it and chewed on it for a good length of time.

I for one do not feel that I have 'arrived' and have more knowledge than anyone else nor righteous than any other. I have learned enough to know that I know SO VERY LITTLE! The one thing that seems to irk me the most is the revelation of implications in Scriptures. This, I find to be the most dangerous road to travel down. Especially when you point it out that it doesn't say that they say, but it implies it and references a non-relevant set of scriptures. I would be lying to everyone who reads this if I were to say I was innocent from doing the same. We all do it. And it irks me!



While I will disagree with you here. I see this as more of the curses that were mentioned in scriptures. So many refuse to acknowledge that curses do exist (especially generational) but yet what is the first thing you fill out at a doctor's visit? They ask you if anyone in your family tree have xyz disease. Why? Because they see a pattern of them being passed from generation to generation. The era of Sterilization here in the US was based upon this same principle!



Very true!

To: Adventure-Dude

The purpose of my comment was not to commend you. You are, in your own way, as complete and utter a blasphemer, idolator, devil-worshipper, and rampant, screaming hypocite as is KFC. You differ from her only in this. You actively think. If I 'support', 'defend', 'agree with', anything you have to say it's only in the sense that I support the deliberate effort to think. And to that degree and in that way alone, I suppose I do indeed commend you. Thinking persons, no matter the utter idiocy of their thought, are in short supply.

So desperate are our times that the important question is not 'how do you think?' but 'can you think at all?'

I am not in agreement with you. The fiction you believe in as 'G_d' is as much a fraud, a deceit, a thing derivative of your own desire, as is anything produced by the incomparable arrogance, stupidity, complicity and deceit, of the likes of KFC. You are both blasphemers, and you are both idolators.

It just so happens that I find your idolatry and blasphemy less intellectually and aesthetically displeasing than hers.

That doesn't alter the fact that the way you are in the world, your most absolute and private being, is an insult in the face of God that will not go unpunished. Exactly the same can be said of me. But I don't give a shit.

Why? Because I'm a Magickian, not an observant convert to a religion that is as much a nonsense as is every other.

I am not what you think I am. Your god is even less what you imagine it to be.

And, unlike me, your god bears grudges, and will repay.

I ask you this as one man to another and one believer to another. What have you done for your god that It should spare you its righteous judgment?