If you look at my mountain everything will be alright

 

 

Not by works but by faith. But we learn from our sins. They define your nature. The sin leaves a scar. The wound is healed by the blood of Jesus Christ, but the scar remains as a reminder of our nature and the redemption of that blood. Never forget that Jesus said that even the consideration of lust forms the sin. But the price paid on the cross immunizes us against the ultimate judgement that we all deserve. This is the fallacy of humanism which is the basis of atheism, satanic formula, and science. We are shaved apes. God said, “Let us make man into our own image.” Man already existed. He was swinging from the trees. God breathed a living soul into him. But that soul must be born again because it can never justify itself. The flesh will always long for the trees. The spirit longs for something above the trees. Sigmund Freud tells us the human is comprised of the Id, the Ego, and the Super Ego. Scripture tells us we are The Flesh, the Soul, and the Spirit. This is where science meets faith. At the base of the brain lies the stem. Reptilian. There’s your snake.  Breathe, eat, procreate. The frontal lobe is reason. Control. Consider. Morality. The interaction of the two is a constant battle. Eve must eat in order to live. But she knows not to eat forbidden fruit. Sin tastes good, but it will sour in the stomach. And it affects the DNA, that code written by God that is passed on to subsequent generations. So yes, you can be forgiven your sins, but the scar always remains.

I developed this over many years. I reasoned that if one day is a thousand years for God how can we conform Him to a six-day creation story according to the understanding of man. How can the earth be only six-thousand years old. God is bigger than that. Graves are found older than that adorned with loving care for one sincerely loved and missed but some preacher pounds his King James and calls that grave a dillusion   If you believe in God, and if you accept Him as creator of the universe, then at some point you come to realize that He is not bound by the rules imposed by men.  The very idea of God being reduced to prose is an oxymoron. God cannot lie simply because He is the creator. If He says it is then “it” is true! If a child constructs a Lego’s world on the floor and then changes it that change is what it is. We will not and cannot fully understand the will of God. He is not bound by time. He is not bound by man made laws.

And if we can’t understand that how can we even begin to think we can become “as God?” We are made “In the image.” There is no substance. This is the flaw of fundamentalism. On the surface, accepting the basics of fundamentalism feels good. So does self abuse. So cut your hand off. But God made man, man made theology, and religion comes from theology. Then the attempt to understand theology through the lens of religion can lead to fundamentalism as man tries to cope with something he was never designed to understand. So, he clings to words. Words written under the design of an ancient language that is remote from the language he uses. Virgin becomes what modern man considers a pure woman when the writer two thousand years or more before was writing about a young, unmarried woman. The acceptance of social and political norms have evolved since Babylon. The italicized words in a King James Bible are simply additions to provide continuity where the ancient writers simply had no words. And the compilers of that Bible consistently replaced assembly with church to please a King who was constantly looking over their shoulders and they were “translating” that Bible in defiance of some other guy in a land far far away who is still hanging onto a long dead language (Latin) in place of the original autographs (Greek) where the only copies in existence then as now are at least copies of copies sometimes removed three hundred years distant from the original writer who, no matter what Brother Bob down at the First Baptist Church and BBQ Shop tells you is anonymous! Change my mind.

Love hurts, but that’s why fundamentalism runs rampant all over the world. I once sat alone with a little girl as we stared at the Wasatch Mountains in Utah and she said, “Just look at my mountain. If you look at my mountain everything will be alright.” She might be a prophet. Joseph Smith thought he was.

The simple fact of the matter is by the time you reduce God to a book right away you gotta have readers. Jesus dealt in simple terms because He knew He was dealing with us. Don’t do anything to anybody you don’t want done to you. You run off on your wife for your girlfriend you’re just an adulterer no matter what your therapist tells you. Ignore that line in Mark about picking up snakes, some Jew snuck in while the scribe was taking a pee and added that. But you see where fundamentalism can take you? I give you Arkansas!

Consider this: I know you have probably heard the adage, “Well, if the Bible don’t say it, it should!” Do you not think that some time, somewhere some scribe did just that? Mohammed had a scribe and during one of his “revelations” the man said, “Wouldn’t it be better to say it like this?” to which Mo said, “Yeah. That works!” This dude had been sitting there supposedly getting the dictation directly from Allah! God told Joseph Smith to marry a bunch of teenage girls. Hey! Nice work if you can get it. Verily Verily whenever you have a Mega Church there is invariably a little girl in the woodpile somewhere! Back to the simple words of Jesus: You touch her, and you ought to have a Tesla chained to your neck and thrown into Lake Travis! Oh, and notice how I modernized Christ’s words. He didn’t have a Tesla, He walked everywhere. I had to clarify that before priests started blessing Teslas and the Pope declared Elon Musk a living saint.

All these absurdities point to trying to reduce God to your understanding. God doesn’t speak as man. He speaks to the heart. Understanding. Sure, you can try to explain, but in the end you either fall back to fundamentalism or find them golden tablets and write another Bible.

The Kingdom of God lies within you. You know right from wrong. God put it there. In that way God did, indeed, make you into His image. You will strive for to mark. You will never get there. That’s what Jesus is for. One set of footsteps in the sand.