In The Beginning

 

 

In The Beginning

26 And as they were eating, Jesus took bread, and blessed it, and brake it, and gave it to the disciples, and said, Take, eat; this is my body.

27 And he took the cup, and gave thanks, and gave it to them, saying, Drink ye all of it;

28 For this is my blood of the new testament, which is shed for many for the remission of sins.

The observance of Easter is central to the Christian faith. To believe the unbelievable is the epitome of an elusive factor we call faith. For a man to die in a most brutal way, be buried, and remain for three days, entombed until rigor mortis has relaxed, all impulse has left the brain, and decay has begun and then reanimate and just walk away is unthinkable. In fact, it would be labeled as delusional by any team of psychologists at any mental hospital if a patient stood on that belief if referring to someone that they had known. And yet on Sunday billions will accept that very thing as pastors and priests raise the Hosts in various forms to celebrate what we all call “Easter!”

What does it take to break this faith? I mean, completely break it. Not just sew doubt in the mind of a critic who had never believed in the first place. Not cause a believer to switch from Baptist to Methodist. Or even go from Christian to Muslim or Jew. For all of these retain a belief in something greater than themselves. Something that explains the inconceivable for them. Someone who while switching congregations still has faith!

It would take someone, or something that understands us better than we understand ourselves. Someone who was there in the beginning. Someone who literally had forever and a day to create the vaccine for faith. This entity totally understands what I choose to call The God Hole. There is a part of the human psyche that is blank at birth. The mind as a whole is not blank. 

God Made Man

From the moment the cord is cut the baby understands that it must eat, breathe and defecate. A whole array of duties arise in a moment of time when the responsibility for such things transfers from the mother to the child. And the child has four minutes to master these things. After that the brain will cease to function and the baby will return from whence it came.

But if the child survives there is The God Hole. Even as it struggles to focus new eyes to the light it asks, “What is this that puts substance into its mouth?” And the first bit of information is filed in the God Hole. After that understanding comes. The originator is not mysterious at all. It is mother. Mother good. Mother cares. Until the teen years mother knows everything. But mother can’t explain everything. Mother just like baby, only bigger. Father is like mother in some ways but stronger. Then the God Hole updates and software called Logic is installed. If mother is the purveyor of good things, and father brings good things to mother for baby then who provides these things. Also, let’s include all good things. Things the software of logic asks. Things like air! Where does air come from? Didn’t need air before the cord was cut. Oh! Got it from mother. But. . . The God Hole has its first mystery.

The God Hole is designed for mystery. Things we can’t quite understand and need an additional component. The ultimate cause. The unmoved mover. Something immensely smarter, bigger, and older than us, yet while not being understood can be accepted as the origin of all we see, hear, taste, and touch. Let’s call it God!

Logic dictates that God must be there because we are seeing, hearing, tasting, and touching. And all the unexplained things become very organized when the God factor is applied by way of a patch we call faith. But as baby grows there is a problem. And this problem remains throughout life. If God made baby then who made God. Ok ok, we can see, feel, touch, and all the other things but who or what came up with that?

Man Made Theology

Remember at the beginning of this article. How to alter or destroy faith? You do that with something called Theology. That doesn’t make any sense does it? How can something designed to explain faith destroy faith. It’s very simple. Theology can’t exactly explain faith so it explains at it in various name brands called religion. Buying a religion is like buying any new thing. At first the new thing works well but after a bit you find that there are workarounds that can make it work better. So long as it works, right? And the pastor, priest, Rabbi, or Imam is there to help you drive your religion. Just change the oil every Easter and you’ll be just fine.

Wanna know how to foul this up. Easy. Just add a hundred pages to a fifty-page owner’s manual. That’s how! Take a person who just installed religion into his or her God Hole, and add more rules and regulations than the God Hole can sort. That is the update called dogma. Religion 3.0.

Theology Made Religion

There are certain people who accept the challenge and view the concept of religion as a game to be mastered. And if not mastered at least endured. The original questions are long since forgotten. Just get to the end of the game. At this point the user still accepts the possibility of an eternal source of all things but thinks that maybe different software may be required. So they become a this or that but still retain the core belief at the base level of their God Hole.

But when you make those extra pages in the owner’s manual too many to be completely taken in then people start to back away. Still not good enough. So you take the basic components of the makeup of all things that were clear to baby from the beginning and change it around. And if that’s not enough, when the inevitable cracks begin to appear you change the manual itself. In fact, write and entirely new manual and then begin to update that! And a lot of people will continue to drive that religion as long as it will at least get them to work. But that’s still not what the enemy wants. Enter the final solution.

And Religion Made Atheists

At some point there are people. Those of faith. Left alone they will muddle through life, make mistakes, apologize, but by and large get to heaven or a reasonable facsimile thereof. But then there are those whose faith is so profound that no one can make them doubt it. But one day they do. Why? Trying to work with that five-thousand-page owner’s manual that the originator himself couldn’t use, instead of leaving the Cadillac for a Volkswagen they opt to walk instead. Loosely translated this means they lose all faith, setting their God Hole back to out of the box, and think that’s the answer they have searched for all their life. They won the game of life. They are the master of their fate. They will reprogram the God Hole. They are the originator. And life is perfect. The enemy won. He took a creature of faith and tricked them into trading their God Hole for a hole in the ground, which was his plan all along. Now, eat your apple and shut up!