EASTER 2024, A Brief Summing Up :Inca Jesus, GOD, TIME, Carnivores, Death, Killing, ABSURD JESUS, Dr. Gene Scott, Paul and Heaven AL,L IN ONE BLOG
For some inscrutable reason, this Blogger and his brother were vacationing in Peru, up the Urabamba River, dodging bullets of malice from SHINING PATH revolutionaries. One night, the Brothers, and their Inca guide, stayed in a wondrous estancia, owned by a clever and erudite descendant of some Inca chieftain.
The Brothers had a fabulous meal; Peru has great food and wine. Then, all parties reconvened in the sitting room, for cigars and Piscos sours. In the room, in a prominent place, was this painting, a religious painting, of a Christ-like figure; but who was clearly not a Jew from Nazareth, but an Inca.
Never one to be discreetly silent after a few Piscos sours, this Blogger's brother told the Inca host " You know Christ did not look like that; he was not an Inca."
The gracious host laughed and said "The Christ is the same to all men, but looks different to all men. To an Inca, the Christ looks like an Inca; to a Jew, he looks Semitic; to an American he looks Anglo-Saxon; to an African, he looks like a Black man. To Ingmar Bergman, he looks like Max von Sydow. But it is the same Christ, shift shaping for the eye of the beholder, but the same Christ. And in the end, He will have his way."
The Psychology of God and Death.
The linchpin to understanding the Universe is not Mass, nor Light, but TIME. Why did God invent TIME? He did not have to; he could have created a Universe like BRIGADOON, a static Universe; in which everything stands fixed in an eternal moment. And no one dies.
But He didn’t; He created TIME, which goes only one way, in one direction. Even if we built a time machine, we could only go into the future, never into the past. And even if we went into the future, with our time machine, we could not come back to the present.
Stephen Hawking asked us to believe that before the BIG BANG, there was an era WITHOUT TIME, a TIME before time without TIME.
Hawking believed that the BIG BANG naturally created TIME, going in only one direction.
TIME is too absurd an invention to happen naturally; if TIME were organic, there would be mutations which would allow living creatures to go back in time.
TIME is too absurd to be organic.
TIME, going in only one direction, is the foundation of everything; for with TIME comes DEATH, singularly and in mass, to extinction.
There was an experiment in which perfect, healthy living cells were put in a germ free, sterile environment, without predators or danger, to see how long they could live. Within ten reiterations, all the healthy cells died…..not from disease per se, but weariness of living.
God wants us to die; this Blogger assumes He wants that; so, each living entity must appreciate living, or existing.
GOD AND KILLING
God seems to endorse killing.
The first animals were carnivores; peaceful herbivores evolved from killer predators.
“The ancestor of all animals was most likely a carnivore, according to a new study that examines animal diets dating back 800 million years. The research also finds that there are many more meat eaters out there than scientists would expect.
To analyze how diets evolved across the animal kingdom, John Wiens, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Arizona in Tucson, and his colleagues compiled a data set of more than 1000 extant species….. The researchers then created a phylogeny—a huge family tree—of all the creatures to determine what their ancestors likely ate.
The first multicellular animal was probably a meat eater, the team reports this month in Evolution Letters. The finding contradicts prior studies based on fossil data, which suggested early animals were probably herbivores. …... Wiens defines “carnivore” as a creature that eats other heterotrophs (organisms that do not create their own energy from sunlight), and said the ancient animal might have eaten protists, a catch-all term for tiny one-celled organisms that are not plants, animals, or fungi.
…..…..Of all the present-day animals Wiens and colleagues surveyed, 63% were carnivores, 32% were herbivores, and 3% were omnivores. (The rest were ambiguous.) The smaller proportion of herbivores and omnivores may seem surprising, Wiens says, because plants are such a plentiful resource. “In some ways the question might be, why doesn’t everything eat plants?”
…….Even humans, textbook omnivores, can’t really break down the cell walls of leaves and grasses. “The only way you can be a vegan is by basically eating seeds and fruits, which is the protein that the plants are putting out,” Wiens says. Herbivory as a diet system, he says, is “relatively hard to evolve.”
Because of the evolutionary hurdles involved in being a vegetarian, “it seems intuitively reasonable that [the first animal] was a carnivore,” says V. Louise Roth, an evolutionary biologist at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, who was not involved in the study.
….., so humans that can only eat plants won’t branch off as a separate species any time soon……science.”
From the beginning of evolution, God created Life to kill other living creatures, to survive.
Occasionally, deer, does and fawns wander down from the nearby regional park to munch on the lawn; they are extraordinarily beautiful and miraculous creatures. They may be the highest form of evolution, but also an anomaly. Mankind may be the most favorable of God’s creatures because he is adept at killing; and can be tortured by conscience.
THE BIBLE is the Psychology of God as told to Mankind by God.
The first step in plumbing the Psychology of God is to accept the Bible, as THE LITERAL WORD OF GOD. If God Himself did not write the Bible word for word, the Bible is surely what He wanted mankind to know about Him.
If the entire Bible is a Covenant between God and Man, then the Old Testament is a Full Disclosure by God. In the Old Testament, God fully discloses that he is brutal, vengeful, and blood thirsty. Every tenth word in the Old Testament is blood or woe.
The Old Testament assures us that God is, take your choice: deranged, unbalanced, or downright mean. Basically the message of the Old Testament is God telling Man this: “Hey I created you, and can befuddle you at will. What can you do about that? Worship a Golden Calf?”
The seminal teachable moment in the Old Testament is the story of King Saul. Anointed by God to be the first King of Israel, Saul commits a cardinal sin, the Christian sin of mercy. God the Merciless demanded that King Saul slay all the Amalekites; "....from man unto woman, from infant unto suckling, from ox unto sheep, so that the name of Amalek not be mentioned even with reference to an animal by saying "This animal belonged to Amalek".
Alas for King Saul, he showed Mercy, he did not massacre ALL the Amalekites.
God was not pleased with Mercy.
The Amalekites spared by King Saul were hacked to pieces by God's Prophet, Samuel, and King Saul lost his anointment to that Biblical rock star cum famed adulterer, cum murderer, King David. God liked King David. Seemingly, God likes murderers and adulterers WHO OBEY.
Worst still, King Saul’s son, Jonathan is also mercilessly doomed by God. Jonathan’s death is profound, for, until the advent of Jesus, Jonathan is the nicest guy in the Bible, a great son, great brother, great friend, soon to be a great King…yet he is cast aside ingloriously because his father did not kill EVERYONE.
The seminal lesson is clear: God shows no mercy to those who show mercy, but only to those who fear him. Or to put it in Biblical speak: God shows mercy to every Generation that fears Him. No Fear-No Mercy.
It is a seminal Millennial fabrication that God is Love; better for Millennials to understand, God Is Fearsome.
God is the invisible entity; we cannot see him in our lives, but like the people in the film, THE INVISIBLE MAN, we can see God’s tracks in the snow, in the lives of men. The trick is to discern which tracks are man-made and which are His. The key to our understanding of the universe is that He does leave tracks.
Perhaps there is a reason God is so invisible; after seeing God, the visage of Moses was so distorted, his fellow Israelites made him wear a veil, to hide the face which saw God. Obviously Moses’ face was not radiant from the encounter.
Melville, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Mauriac, Wilder, Anouilh, MacLeish, Bruce Jay Friedman, and Graham Greene all had an interest in plumbing the psychology of God.
Ingmar Bergman thought God was a big black spider; Kurosawa thought God was a petulant infant who used mankind as his play toys. Theologians can be dismissed in the search for God’s psychology; they are hidebound, morally deficient corporate lawyers. Artists are the idiot savants in the search for God, Graham Greene over Reinhold Niebuhr.
The German philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche committed the ultimate sin against the God of the Old Testament when he advocated the concept GOD IS DEAD (GOTT IST TOT). Since a German committed that sin, God cursed the German people; every time the German people reach a pinnacle of success, their Leadership makes mistakes worthy of a lunatic, the Kaiser going to war in support of a dying empire, Hitler invading Russia. God’s curse on the German people is ongoing, see Merkel’s decisions relative to the migrants.
After Moses, God seemingly rationed his visibility. Jesus himself had more interaction with a visible Devil in the wilderness than his Father in Nazareth.
Then again, if Jesus had had face to face encounters with God, he too may have had to wear a veil.
GOD and JESUS CHRIST
Christianity has lasted for over two thousand years; many Christians believe that its appeal is because it promises everlasting life after Death. This Blogger does not believe that.
This Blogger believes that Christianity’s appeal is its ABSURDITY. It asks its Believers to believe that a carpenter, a man who could built an outhouse on spec, is the SON OF GOD; that he made miracles, brought people back from the dead, walked on water, and was resurrected.
Kings, and emperors, potentates and John Rockefeller believed that a Carpenter, was IMMACULATELY CONCEIVED; that a Carpenter should be WORSHIPPED.
The tale of the Christ is SO ABSURD; one is forced to believe, for who could make up a story like that?
One of the most spiritual Americans of the 20th Century was the great and flawed Johnny Cash. As he laid dying, a friend sent him, tapes of Dr. Gene Scott’s sermons.
Dr. Scott was handsome, charismatic and brilliant. Also outstandingly corrupt.
He raised beautiful Arabian horses, on his palatial horse ranch. He duly informed his congregation, he was paying for his lavish, philistine lifestyle with their donations.
Dr. Scott was the son of a preacher man, who lost his Faith. He went to Stanford, studied psychology, and philosophy. He was awarded a Doctorate from Stanford.
He was a key player in developing the American Government’ s game plan of how to break people, prisoners, opponents, psychologically, in war and peace.
He had a television ministry; every Sunday, he would come to his massive church in Los Angeles( a former movie house), sit on the stage, with a massive cigar and put up the amount of money he needed that week to keep his church and life style going.
Until the in-house congregants and television viewers pledged that amount, he would not preach. It was fabulous theater, akin to the audience coaxing James Brown to come back onstage and perform after he would walk off.
This Blogger donated money to hear him peach; for when he did, he exuded an authentic respect for Jesus that only a corrupt sinner could muster.
He preached that he came to Jesus through his psychological studies, through his government funded work on how to psychologically break men and women.
He developed a theory that if you intend to break a person, the first thing you must do is isolate the victim from his peers or support group. Take him away from his fellows. Break him far away from his fellow Believers.
He thought all victims would break under pressure; that all men would recant their beliefs under pressure, if isolated.
Under isolated pressure, the victim would recant; then, once back with his peers, he would recant the recantation. But the initial response, after duly applied pressure, would be abjuring all that he had seen and/or believed. Some men would hold out, the mutation; but out of a group of ten men, seven would certainly recant or abjure.
Then he applied his brilliant psychological and philosophical theories to Jesus; and had an epiphany.
His first conclusion was that something happened around Jesus, concerning Jesus; and what happened was extraordinary.
How extraordinary?
Jesus had twelve disciples. Judas hanged himself; John died a peaceful death.
However, the ten other disciples died, horrible deaths, AWAY FROM EACH OTHER, and NONE RECANTED.
Peter was crucified, upside down
Andrew…crucified.
Thomas…pierced through with the spears of four soldiers.
Philip….tortured to death.
Matthew….stabbed to death.
Bartholomew…crucified
James….stoned to death
James- Beheaded
Simon the Zealot-crucified
Matthais-stoned to death.
Ten men, isolated from each other, no fraternal support, facing and having grisly deaths, AND NO RECANTATIONS among them; about what they saw and believed. Not one abjured.
Scott came to the conclusion that something happened, and they saw it happen and believed in it, without recantation. That is why Scott believed.
The New Testament is an advertisement for Jesus. In a merciless universe created by God, Mankind’s only advocate is Jesus. Jesus is the only lawyer in the phone book, the only website posted on Google, the only 800 number available for Mankind, or any Man in trouble.
It is very conceivable that the God of the Old Testament would give Mankind a Carpenter as its Savior. The God of the Old Testament would inveigle Mankind to worship a Carpenter, not a Prince, nor a Warrior, nor a Rich Merchant but a Carpenter; Mankind has spent two thousand years worshiping a Carpenter, someone who could do a RFQ for an add on. That is absurd; so absurd it must have been a product of the psychology of God. It is the absurdity of Jesus which makes him Divine; for we know from the Old Testament that God is pretty damn absurd, so this extension of absurdity, the Savior as a Carpenter, is not far-fetched from the Psychology of I AM WHO I AM.
The concept of worshiping a Carpenter as the Savior of Mankind is such a perfectly absurd concept that it must be Divine.
HEAVEN-
As for the appeal of Life after death; this Blogger believes that concept has appeal, because so many of our fellow humans have had a paranormal experience ,or seen a ghost, that it is easy to believe in it. The real question is: is eternal life better than oblivion?
This Blogger has his own version/concept of Heaven; Heaven is basically a do over, a free ride at the expense of the Owner. In this Heaven Lincoln is not shot; not only that, he gets to marry Ann Rutledge and live happily ever after. Teddy Roosevelt's first wife does not die on him; FDR does not get polio; the TITANIC does not sink. Hitler sells his art work and become a famous artist; Stalin's first wife does not die on him. Heaven is your life lived again, with one making the right choices, a life without tragedy or jealousy or pettiness. Once lived, that life prepares one for the oblivion of stardust.
This Blog will end with a short reflection on the second most interesting person in the Bible: PAUL.
Paul’s origin story was that he was a Secret Policeman for the authorities, tracking down Christians after the Death of Christ. He is on his way to Damascus to arrest some Christians and bring them back to Jerusalem for punishment.
Paul never met Jesus when Jesus was alive.
On the way to Damascus, Jesus comes to him, in a blinding light, and he has an epiphany.
Paul goes back to Jerusalem to tell Peter, and Jesus’ brother, James, that he saw Jesus on the road to arrest their friends, and now he is a Big Time Believer.
And Peter and James BELIEVED Paul; that Paul indeed saw Jesus.
Why?
Did Jesus give Paul a secret message to tell them?
What sane revolutionary ( as Peter and James were) would believe a secret policeman telling them that he saw their slain leader in a vision, and now he wants to join the ranks, without informing on the rest of the Believers?
Yet they did.
And Paul tells them that, though he was a secret policeman, who was dedicated to exterminating them, and had never seen Jesus in the flesh, that Jesus had told him that the Church was to move on from converting Jews and start converting Gentiles.
There was every reason on this side of Heaven for Peter and James NOT to accept Paul’s epiphany; yet they did.
The upshot of Paul’s transformation from a secret policeman into a Believer was that he was beheaded.
But he never recanted that he saw Jesus on the Road to Damascus.
HAPPY EASTER DR. SCOTT.
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