For years, I have dabbled in a better version of this poem…one with solid rhymes that contains as much information as possible. Here goes:
Thirty days hath September,
April, June and November.
Seven months have one more day,
But February goes astray.
Three years, it hath weeks of four.
Leap Year, it hath one day more.
I am aware that there are other ways of remembering this information (the knuckle method). I am just interested in the poem.
This is a poem I wrote years ago for a friend that believed in fairies.
As cotton drifts between the trees,
And sparrows sing to call a friend,
And grass is coifed by solstice’s breeze,
And insects toil, and spiders tend;
While nothing special stirs the mood,
And no one noted calls the day,
She makes a fleeting interlude
And marks the season in her way.
At first the air is very still,
But then it vibrates just a bit.
Her wings incite a noted thrill,
And then her hair is summer lit.
At last her eyes make their debut:
With dappled sky she marks the scene,
Then confidently steps into
A court prepared for such a queen.
At once the stage belongs to her.
For that small session then she reigns;
And every aspect must defer
To every edict she ordains.
She speaks, but words in stasis live
Amidst the minds of those enthralled
While matters more imperative
And temporal must be resolved.
But then the air retakes its prize
Retracting all except the light
Still scintillating as she flies
From ordinary mortal sight.
Then words unheard and deeds unseen,
Soon carefully and aptly penned,
Are bound with sessions of the Queen
Preserved by subjects who attend.
At length, they wait for her return—
That moment when the ether parts—
Repeating every theme they learn;
Impressing each into their hearts.
On the outside chance that this essay survives the fall of the United States Republic, I want to tell future readers that many of us anticipated this occurrence. I also want to tell them who we were.
Yesterday, Mike Lindell was served a warrant by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Mike Lindell is a successful entrepreneur who founded a business called My Pillow.
Mike Lindell supports one of the greatest presidents to govern the United States, Donald John Trump. Donald trump, as I will explain later, is a visionary that hoped to preserve the United States in its most glorious form.
Many will speculate on the implications of the impropriety of Mike Lindell’s persecution, but some of us have already guessed. Communists in the United States have no intention of turning over power at the November 8, 2022 midterm elections. They are gearing up to systematically steal enough votes in selected contests to retain control of our legislative branch of government through their proxies in the Democrat party. They are making sure that everyone knows what will happen to anyone who suspects the truth and dissents.
In prior essays, I predicted what would happen with Joe Biden assuming the office of the presidency. My predictions were uncannily correct. I also suspected, from the onset, that this would be the end of the United States Republic. That speculation will prove to be correct as well.
To some future reader: the United States was a brave experiment in Democracy. Our founders brilliantly anticipated nearly every contingency that might occur in such an experiment. They delineated an ingenious system of separation of powers in the form of a written contract called the United States Constitution. In this contract, they separated the United States into three branches: a legislative branch to make laws, an administration branch to execute laws, and a judiciary branch to ensure that laws are executed as written. Our founders believed this system would prevent the United States from devolving into tyranny.
However, our founders did not anticipate two things. First, they did not anticipate the spontaneous growth of a fourth branch of government which many have labeled the “Deep State”. The Deep State consists of multiple bureaucracies including the Internal Revenue Service, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and countless agencies. These bureaucracies have permanent employees and, therefore, are immune to the democratic checks that govern our delineated branches of government.
Second, our founders did not anticipate the gradual takeover of our institutions of higher learning by ideologies that are at odds with the principles of the United States Constitution. Specifically, they did not anticipate the spread and allure of “Communism”.
Communism, not always identified by that name, is simply tyranny. It is like all forms of tyranny. It is merely the increase in power of some small group of people. Communism is not unique in its structure. Its appeal comes from the cryptic and poetic way it has been described, first by its originator Karl Marx and later by sundry intellectuals and activists. In the case of Communism in the United States, it spread from our institutions of higher learning to the Deep State.
The Deep State was gaining power unchecked, except for one man. That Man was Donald John Trump. After being elected as president in 2016, he recognized the dangerous ideology sweeping our universities and spreading into the Deep State and was on the verge of reining it in. However, the deep state recognized his intentions and schemed to remove him from power and subsequently keep him from resuming power. They stole the 2020 presidential election through multiple means and prepared to steal all further elections so that Donald Trump and his supporters would never again interfere with its progress. Due to the reach of the Deep State, it was able to gain almost complete control over the machinery, both mechanical and social, of the United States election process.
The Deep State realized that if non-Communist actors assumed power in 2022, they would investigate the Deep State and expose its plotting. Therefore they set about stealing the 2022 midterm elections and all following elections, including the 2024 presidential election. As of this writing, I assume the Deep States is essentially unstoppable and will not cease to persecute its adversaries until it is completely and irrevocably in control.
Perhaps some future statesmen wishing to emulate the machinations of the United States’ founders will design an even better form of government that somehow prevents the growth and perversion of institutions like the Deep State. I cannot presently imagine what form such an emulation will take. That is a problem for some future intellectuals.
I wish to preserve for the record that the United States, as it was before the fall, was neither racist nor classist. Like all systems of human organization coming out of the prior centuries, it supported slavery at the onset. However, it eliminated this “peculiar institution” through a bloody and costly civil war. After that, it made steady progress toward universal equality and suffrage. The United States was a great nation built on ingenious and promising foundational principles. If it had somehow lasted, it would have remained the greatest nation ever to have served mankind.
If this document is found, remember that democracy died, not on a battlefield, but in darkness. We never saw the face of our enemy. Remember the United States as it was and not as some will attempt to portray it. Remember that we loved freedom.
“Now, Moses is very fine illustration of little-known fact that men of faith and men of science, by contradicting each other, always manage to arrive at same conclusion.” – King Mongkut of Siam, The King and I, Rogers and Hammerstein, 1951.
As I observed in True Christianity, the Christian religion is becoming increasingly difficult to reconcile with observation and reason. The two problems I pointed out are as follows. First is the problem of how anything as wise and sophisticated as an angel would resolve to turn against God. Second is the problem of reconciling a well-meaning God with a people who were led by the nose for millennia and then led astray just at the moment their long-awaited messiah appeared. I discussed both of those problems at length. However, I am coming to realize that the biggest problem with the Christian religion has to do with what might be called “doctrinal drift”.
It is clear that the first Christians (and many Christians to date) believed in salvation by both works and faith. They also believed that salvation comes upon physical baptism. However, modern evangelical Christians believe in salvation by faith alone and that baptism is not essential because it is a “work”. It is not a big leap from that stage to suppose that belief itself is a work, but such a supposition would be the end of the church. If the beliefs of Christians are to be regarded as “truths” in the sense of mathematical truths and historical truths, how could this happen? What does it mean to “know” something is true if that knowledge has no stability? The Pythagorean Theorem means precisely what it did when it was first discovered (c. 2000 BC) and everywhere in the world that it was discovered. Similarly, the circumference of a circle, when divided by the diameter, has always been precisely the constant pi. Truths do not drift. They stay the same. Therefore, it cannot be the case that Christians believe in “truth”. This does not preclude the possibility, which I suspect, that they are moving toward truth.
The simple fact is that Christianity is drifting. It may be moving toward some immutable principle, but it is not moored to any immutable principle. Christianity is actually a reinterpretation of the much older religion described in the Old Testament. Sometime around the life of Caesar Augustus the beliefs of some Jews drifted very quickly from the original doctrine and gave us the first elements of Christianity. The earliest Christians might have called their new interpretation of Biblical revelation “True Judaism”. For all I know, some of them did. Nevertheless, their new interpretation of the old doctrine came to be known as Christianity.
When I revised Christianity in my essay of three months ago, I called my revision True Christianity. However, I will shortly present a new name.
Before I do that, I want to pick up on another thread of human endeavor: science. Lately, science has been in something of a quandary. It is gradually being realized that the likelihood of a universe like ours existing that can support complex structures like life is improbable to an extreme. In the field of exobiology, it has been realized that the formation of the original nucleotides that make reproduction possible was so improbable that it was unlikely to occur in a universe of this size. When all of this is added up, one cannot help but wonder if we are seeing this in the wrong way. A Christian would certainly say that we are. Perhaps they are at least partially correct.
None of the statistical problems with science come close to the difficulty of accounting for a phenomenon like consciousness, a phenomenon that seems like it should not exist in any universe. There is just no good reason why an essentially mechanical process would have this seemingly magical property of “looking at itself”.
Scientists who do not want to grapple with the problems presented in the last two paragraphs simply argue “anthropomorphism”. If we weren’t here and weren’t conscious, we wouldn’t be seeing all of this. That is not a very satisfying answer. I often equate it to someone discovering a 1000 gallon pot filled to the brim with refined gold buried in their backyard and declaring, “Well, after all, if it wasn’t there I wouldn’t have found it.” Scientists who are willing to try just a bit harder suggest things like that our universe is just one sample of a much larger selection…a multiverse. To me, that is very much like the aforementioned discoverer of the pot of gold declaring, “I’ll bet there are 1000 gallon pots of gold buried all over these parts!”
For all I know, the scientists who argue anthropomorphism and multiverses are correct. I just don’t think so.
Eventually, religious folk and materialist scientists will all be forced to reconcile their differences. As with the quote that I led with, they must arrive at the same conclusion. When all of these people come together they will ultimately form one coherent and completely consistent philosophy. I have decided to call this philosophy “Magenta”. Therefore, True Christianity and the scientific theory of everything (TOE) must ultimately converge to Magenta.
Here is why I have chosen this name. The visible spectrum consists of colors that range from red to violet:
When some of these colors are mixed (additively), they produce other colors that are already in the spectrum or they produce white. For example, the colors red and green combine to produce yellow. However, there is one combination of colors that produce a result that is nowhere in the spectrum. When the colors red and blue are mixed, they produce an extra-spectral color: magenta. No rainbow ever seen contains the color magenta. It just isn’t there. In actuality, the color magenta exists only in our minds. There is no unique electromagnetic wavelength that corresponds to magenta.
If we think of a spectrum being bent around so that the colors at one end connect with colors at the other end, the place where the two ends meet is typically presented as magenta:
This is not quite consistent with the results of additively mixing colors, but it is close enough. Violet, not blue, is actually at one extreme of the spectrum. However, when red is mixed with extra blue, the color violet is produced, so the color wheel result is isomorphic, if a bit distorted.
We can think of the color magenta being, in a sense, the result of “coming full circle”. I have often felt that this extra-spectral color that exists only in our minds is something of clue from God. It is a kind of model for what must ultimately occur with the human endeavors of religion and science. Eventually, religion and science must come full circle and meet to form something that is not plainly obvious to either. Therefore, I call the result of faith and science coming full circle and converging “Magenta”.
True Christianity and the completion of science are both aspects of Magenta.
One may ask why I have not included other religions like Islam and Buddhism in this discussion. At the risk of offending a large portion of the world, I suspect that those religions are on the wrong track. Neither one accompanied the enlightenment ideas that ultimately led to the industrial revolution and universal human suffrage. Whatever the industrial revolution and universal suffrage required, those religions just didn’t seem to have it. In any case, it hardly matters. All religion and all science must ultimately converge to Magenta, regardless of their origin or progress.
The true theory of everything that humanity is striving for and will ultimately uncover, I have decided to call Magenta. A subscriber to this creed is therefore called a “Magentan”. I am a Magentan.
Someday, all members of humanity may be called Magentans. I just added this word to my spelling dictionary.
The vile person shall be no more called liberal, nor the churl said to be bountiful. – Isaiah 32:5
For some time now, I have been trying to figure out what Leftists and Democrats want. This group, henceforth known collectively as the Groomers, has behaved in such an enigmatic manner that their real motivation has mostly eluded me. Alas, I may have stumbled upon their actual intention.
To be fair, it was not I who made this discovery. It was in a phone conversation with a friend/colleague that she first stumbled onto this idea. Without citing her by name, I cannot give her more credit.
We were discussing how the Groomers have been accusing conservatives of trying to initiate an insurrection and how Joe Biden just recently linked the entire MAGA movement to the lone-wolf attack in Buffalo. He did this with a single sentence by mentioning them together as if they were a single entity but without actually clarifying the connection. I explained to my friend/colleague that I think the Groomers will probably steal the election in November. My reasoning was that they are behaving like people who cannot lose and, more importantly, cannot afford to lose. Somewhere along the way, I mentioned that they always accuse the other side of the exact thing they are actually doing.
Then, my friend/colleague had an epiphany. Maybe, for the Groomers, losing the elections is actually winning. Allow me to explain.
Socialists like Bernie Sanders and his fandom, AOC and the Squad, do not want to take meager control of an extant republic…not one with a firm base in capitalism and deep constitutional institutions already in place. They want a revolution. They envision themselves in streets waving red flags and ultimately storming government buildings to declare an end to the old order.
The problem is that one cannot commence such a program of complete renewal when one is already perceived to be in power. The revolutionary zeal only works if one is perceived to be the underdog. For the Groomers, this means they must lose elections in November.
The Groomers are hoping to lose bitterly in November so that their followers will be frightened and angry enough to hit the streets and begin demanding real change. With Roe v Wade overturned and the myth of white supremacy in full force, they will be able to gin up their base. They will finally get to do the thing they have always wanted to do: overturn the US government and replace it with a communist utopia. They will do this during the two months between when they lose the elections in November and when they are actually deprived of power in January. Thus, they will still have control of the police and military while being perceived as the oppressed.
The burning and looting we witnessed in the aftermath of George Floyd’s death were nothing compared to what is coming. The “autonomous zones” set up in Seattle and Portland were just test runs. When the Groomers rise up, this time as an angry injured dragon, they will do so in full force. They will set up really large autonomous zones and patrol them with zeal. They will claim that white supremacists have taken over the Capital in DC and take it back by force. They will call what Trump supporters supposedly did in January 6, 2021 the initial strike and call what they are doing a counter strike. The whole thing will seem completely irrational, but they won’t care. Revolutions, after all, are emotional affairs and no one bothers to analyze the underlying logic. They just carry colorful flags, scream a lot and break things.
The Republicans will win elections in November 2022. It will be the “extinction level event” described by Monica Crowley. But that will not mark the end of Groomer power. It will mark the beginning of the real Groomer revolution.
This essay is the culmination of ideas I have formed over many years. I show that Christianity, as it is currently interpreted, is an untenable philosophy. I follow this with an updated and workable interpretation.
Christianity, as it presently exists, is an untenable philosophy. It has serious structural problems. I do not mean the usual problems such as that the earth was supposedly created in 4004 BCE or that the genealogy of Jesus in Matthew does not agree with the genealogy in Luke. I mean real structural problems.
To begin with, the philosophy really does not work if we cannot make sense of the concept of Satan and the fallen angels. According to Christian belief, there are at least 100 million angels and probably many more in heaven. Also, according to Christian belief, 1/3 of the angels were condemned and fell to earth. This is taken from Revelation 5:11 and Revelation 12:3-9 respectively.
Consider the nature of an angel, the nature of God and their relationship. We do not know that angels are more intelligent than humans, but most Christians assume that they are. Moreover their role and their relationship with God suggest that they are. Since, at the time of the angelic war, angels all originally lived in heaven, we can assume that they were in communion with God. They “saw” God in a way that should have removed all doubt in their minds that God exists and is what he is professed to be: the omniscient and omnipotent creator of all that exists, including the angels. They were never like us poor dumb humans that have never actually seen God and only know of him through intuition and indirect teaching.
Angels knew what God was. Yet, supposedly millions of them resolved that they would somehow conquer God and take over heaven. Ultimately, they acted on this resolution. How could that be? Visualize what God is. He is omniscient, omnipotent and ultimately infinite. He is impossible to comprehend. How could a creature that is more intelligent than a human believe for even a moment that they could somehow conquer God? The idea is not merely untenable. It is meaningless.
The argument is sometimes made that Satan was so jealous of God that he lost his mind. If he was genuinely insane, he would not have been accountable for his actions. But seriously, jealous of an omniscient and omnipotent being? Have those who make this argument ever contemplated what that means? I would like to have a better understanding of higher math and physics. It would be handy to be able to predict the stock market. But omniscient and omnipotent? Infinite? God apparently designed me against that character flaw…if it can even be regarded in that way. Certainly he could have designed angels with a healthy aversion to what arguably would be an unbearable existence.
Nevertheless, I could never imagine “conquering” an infinite being and taking its place. How would one go about that? At what point would one commence the attack? Would one attack a being that is everywhere and sees everything from the front or from the back?
And remember, millions of angels supposedly followed Satan. Were they all so jealous that they lost their minds? Were they coerced to follow a complete fool? Were they so afraid of Satan that they agreed to a completely ridiculous mission? Would not such a being be more afraid of eternal damnation? Did it not occur to them to ask God for protection? I ask God for protection every day, and I have never even seen him.
I have considered this concept from every avenue and there simply is no way to make it work.
The reality is that the concept of fallen angels as demons was invented by humans to explain the then recently adopted assumption that demons exist and must somehow be the result of God’s handiwork. God could not have deliberately created evil beings, so the demons must have been the result of some catastrophic event of their own making. Note the parallel between the fall of the angels and the fall of man. In both cases a way was invented to make the unfortunate Godforsaken beings the engineers of their own fate. The concept of fallen angels was invented by men locked into their time. They looked around them and saw soldiers with swords and they knew only of kings that constantly waged war. They had never contemplated the modern notions of infinity that would have led them to a more mature understanding of God and the angels. When a modern mathematician contemplates finite beings waging war on an infinite being, he cannot help but give a little chuckle.
With the concept of fallen angels gone, the fall of man goes with it. With no fallen angels, there could have been no Satan and thus no snake in the garden to tempt Adam and Eve. I discuss this concept more fully here:
Another serious problem with the philosophy of Christianity is that the Jews did not accept Jesus as their messiah. God supposedly led the Jews by the nose for thousands of years, into Egypt, out of Egypt, and through countless trials and tribulations. They were God’s chosen people whose ancestors would number as the stars and the sands. Ultimately they came to believe that a messiah would be sent to save them. However, when the messiah supposedly came, the Jews were mostly unaware of him and almost completely rejected him. There were probably never more than 1000 Jews who became Christians; and from that point on, Christianity belonged to the gentiles:
At the time of Jesus, there were about 5 million Jews in the world. No more than 0.02% of Jews followed Jesus. I am a retired math teacher. My feeling as a teacher was that if one or two students failed a class, that was probably the fault of the students. However, if nearly all of my students failed a class, there was either a problem with the class or a problem with my teaching. It would not have been appropriate for me to write a decisive final and, at the last minute, include a “fast one” so that nearly all of my students failed. Yet, we are to believe that is exactly what God did to the Jews. He promised the Jews he would send a messiah, but when the messiah arrived, the messiah was so obscure and esoteric that the Jews completely missed him. That could not have been the logistical implementation of an omniscient and omnipotent God.
People observe that God sometimes referred to the Jews as a “stiff-necked people”. But could not God have given the Jews some clue as to what to expect from their messiah when he arrived? I am not a Jew, but I have had Jewish students. They are capable of learning. If they had been given any reasonable expectation of what their messiah would be like, at least a good percentage of them would have accepted him. Yet, almost to a man, they rejected him.
There is a simple, straight-forward explanation for why the Jews rejected Jesus as their messiah. Jesus, the historical figure, probably never existed. For a full presentation of the argument that Jesus was not historical, I refer the reader to the difficult treatise of Richard Carrier:
The first Christians probably believed that Jesus was a celestial being that descended to earth, but not all the way, died somewhere in the heavens and was resurrected in the heavens. However, they attached important ideas to his name. Among these ideas was the notion of loving everyone, including one’s enemies. Jesus absolutely forbad hatred of any sort.
Christianity, as it is observed by most Christians, is an untenable philosophy. However, let us imagine that God did not create an untenable philosophy but, instead, created a riddle that intelligent people would eventually scrutinize and unravel. This idea is not unreasonable. Jesus taught in riddles and parables that ordinary listeners may or may not have understood but that were sometimes explained to his Apostles. It is not unreasonable, therefore, that the entire Bible, especially the New Testament, is a riddle that’s true meaning is only now coming to light.
Consider the effect that Christianity has had on the world and especially western civilization. The world has gradually become a more compassionate place. An observation from Big History illustrates my point:
Distinctive in many ways, French government also illustrated many of the key features of modern government in general. Far-reaching central bureaucracy and representative assemblies seem the defining components of the modern state. Behind them lay a radical shift in the consciousness of Europeans, a new capacity for empathy that developed in the eighteenth century. Somehow, not yet clearly understood and the subject of much debate, many people developed an aversion to cruelties that in previous centuries they took for granted, such as slavery, torture, and extremely harsh criminal punishments. Somehow, many began to recognize in others the same feelings and sentiments as in themselves and to assert the existence of universal, equal and natural human rights. (Benjamin, Christian and Stokes 2014, 254)
Why did this happen? My impression from my history studies is that it was largely a result of the ideas planted by the first Christians: that one should love one’s neighbor and be tolerant and charitable. These ideas have permeated our teaching, our storytelling and our implementation of government. Bullying, once considered a part of life, is now being rooted out of every corner and dark place of western society and more slowly out of the world.
Since I am interpreting the story of Jesus as a riddle, I have attached a different meaning to his sacrifice than do contemporary Christians. As I interpret it, Jesus died for two reasons.
First of all, Jesus died so that the church fathers and their predecessors could let go of their guilt. Note that I say “guilt” and not sin. Jesus actually hints in John 9:41 that the real problem of sin is guilt, but almost no one understands the significance of this passage:
Jesus said, “If you were blind, you would not be guilty of sin; but now that you claim you can see, your guilt remains.”
John 9:41, NIV
The Jews and eventual Christians had weird ideas about what was right and wrong. The first thing Adam and Eve supposedly saw after they became aware of sin was their nakedness. The Jews took this notion to a bizarre extreme. Note the prohibition in Exodus 20:26: “Neither shalt thou go up by steps unto mine altar, that thy nakedness be not discovered thereon.” This clearly had nothing to do with God. God is everywhere and can see everything. He was never concerned with grown men exposing their genitals to his altar. That was all in their heads.
Western civilization eventually developed similarly suffocating ideas about nudity and sex that culminated in Victorian morals. The morals were probably a good idea, but the suffocating guilt that accompanied them was unhealthy. Jesus’ sacrifice gave western civilization a way to let go of their guilt sufficiently to form better attitudes about these topics. By believing that their sins could be forgiven and ultimately taken away from them, they lost their fear of making any slight transgression that might put them in disfavor with God. This made it so that westerners could get on with their daily affairs with the confidence of a moral ‘insurance policy’. Curiously, it took Christians quite a while to recognize the real meaning of remission of sins. Yet, it was always there waiting for them. They just had to discover it. I suspect that a lot of the reason for modern relaxed notions about sin is a result of this discovery. One may be tempted to think that Christianity created the suffocating morality of the Victorian era, but that actually makes no sense. The concept of remission of sin through Jesus was always there. My guess is that any society that acquires sufficient sophistication will eventually develop a suffocating system of morals and, without some way to get around them, will simply suffocate. Indeed, contemporary society is developing a particularly suffocating notion of morality based on “wokeness”. The perceived sacrifice of Jesus ultimately gave western civilization a chance to come up for air. It is not clear that the new “woke” morality has a similar snorkeling function.
The concept of remission of sin is certainly nonsense, because it is based on the untenable notions of the fall of man and the need for some kind of species-wide redemption. It portrays sin as a kind of substance that infects people and can be spread like a communicable disease. Perhaps it was inspired by the observation of communicable disease. Recent understanding of the nature of human behavior renders all such notions obsolete. Nevertheless, the concept served its purpose for a time.
Modern civilization could probably do with a strong dose of Victorian resurgence. However, it needs to keep in mind that morals exist for the good of men. The omniscient and omnipotent creator of the universe is more concerned with where we are going than where we have been. Hopefully, we have acquired the philosophical sophistication to grasp this concept. Perhaps that is what Jesus meant when he said that the Sabbath was created for man and not man for the Sabbath.
The second and most important reason that Jesus died and was resurrected was symbolic. This process symbolized the death of the Jewish religion as merely the chronicle of an obscure people and the resurrection of the Jewish religion as a guidebook for the entire world. The Christians lifted the Bible from the Jews and ultimately transformed it into a gentile philosophy which, unfortunately, relegated the Jews to being the bad guys in their own story. The important thing is that the monotheistic wisdom of the Jews was subsequently adopted by the world. Jesus’ death and resurrection represented that transformation.
When John describes Jesus as the “Word” in the opening of his account, he suggests this idea. Jesus was not a man. He was an idea. The idea died as a Jewish chronology and was resurrected as a global phenomenon.
If we go through the New Testament and cross out everything that is drawn from the untenable notions of original sin, judgment, harsh punishment, the need for salvation and the existence of an ahistorical preacher we end up with just a handful of ideas. If we further cross out everything that is merely unworkable, such as ‘turning the other cheek’, we end up with about two ideas, both expressed in the book of Matthew. The first of these is typically referred to as the Golden Rule:
Therefore all things whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them: for this is the law and the prophets. (Matthew 7:12)
Jesus said unto him, Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets. (Matthew 22:37-40)
It is interesting to note that each of these assertions is followed by the declaration that they are “the law and the prophets”. This suggests that they are complete in and of themselves and that they are essentially identical.
The assertion of the Golden Rule in Matthew 7:12 further demonstrates the influence that Christianity has had on western civilization and government and demonstrates that all westerners are essentially Christians whether or not they realize it or wish to be.
In the opening of his Second Treatise of Government, John Locke essentially derives his entire treatise from this one concept:
Sect. 5. This equality of men by nature, the judicious Hooker looks upon as so evident in itself, and beyond all question, that he makes it the foundation of that obligation to mutual love amongst men, on which he builds the duties they owe one another, and from whence he derives the great maxims of justice and charity. His words are,
The like natural inducement hath brought men to know that it is no less their duty, to love others than themselves; for seeing those things which are equal, must needs all have one measure; if I cannot but wish to receive good, even as much at every man’s hands, as any man can wish unto his own soul, how should I look to have any part of my desire herein satisfied, unless myself be careful to satisfy the like desire, which is undoubtedly in other men, being of one and the same nature? To have any thing offered them repugnant to this desire, must needs in all respects grieve them as much as me; so that if I do harm, I must look to suffer, there being no reason that others should shew greater measure of love to me, than they have by me shewed unto them: my desire therefore to be loved of my equals in nature as much as possible may be, imposeth upon me a natural duty of bearing to them-ward fully the like affection; from which relation of equality between ourselves and them that are as ourselves, what several rules and canons natural reason hath drawn, for direction of life, no man is ignorant, Eccl. Pol. Lib. 1.
John Locke’s treatise is a significant part of the basis of modern western government.
As for where the teachings of Jesus will ultimately lead us, I find a clue in Mathew 13:31-32:
Another parable put he forth unto them, saying, The kingdom of heaven is like to a grain of mustard seed, which a man took, and sowed in his field: Which indeed is the least of all seeds: but when it is grown, it is the greatest among herbs, and becometh a tree, so that the birds of the air come and lodge in the branches thereof.
As I have explained in other essays, it seems that humans are intended to build heaven themselves:
Matthew 13:31-32 seems to describe this process. The teachings of Jesus will ultimately lead men to build the Kingdom of Heaven. Perhaps the “birds of the air” will be angels alighting in that heaven after we provide the means for them to do so.
There is a lot of reason to believe that we will eventually build AI systems that are more intelligent than humans. However, if my other ideas on this subject are correct, these AI systems will not be conscious. They will not have souls:
However, I hold out the possibility that we may eventually discover how to build a machine that can accommodate consciousness. Perhaps the consciousnesses that will inhabit the greater than human AI will be angelic…real angels, not the imagined ones that turned on the omniscient and omnipotent God.
I call the revised Christianity I have presented here “True Christianity” or just “Christianity”. Consequently, I call all former Christians who interpret the Bible literally “Proto-Christians”.
True Christianity is about love of God and all his handiwork.
True Christianity is about believing in a resurrection of humans that humans will eventually help to bring about.
True Christianity is about forgiveness, both of others and of one’s self. It is about Jesus’ teachings spreading to the world and ultimately helping to create a new and better one. It is about the future and the better life we can build there. It is about believing in God, not as a vengeful overlord that created really dumb angels and an untenable theology, but of a genuinely wise and benevolent God that is leading us out of the darkness. The darkness, indeed, comprehended it not. Perhaps we finally do.
True Christianity is not about a literal interpretation of a book that was never intended, either by God or by most of its contributors, to be interpreted literally. Those who interpret it literally cannot accuse me of blasphemy. They simply have it wrong. It is not possible to break a rule that does not exist.
True Christians should read the Bible, but they should read it for clues to God’s intent and not interpret it as dogma.
Well, there you have it. Proto-Christians lifted the Bible from the Jews and now I have lifted it from Proto-Christians. As an old girlfriend of mine used to say, “Turnabout is fair play.”
spikosauropod 