An apology
I’ve had false starts on this piece several times over the past year or so, but it seems important, so here we go again.
I was raised a Christian, and in a good, solid, Protestant tradition.
My family’s faith traditions were heavily influenced by the teachings and beliefs of my maternal grandfather, Earnest Butterfield, a third-generation Methodist minister who preached for most of his career in the Finger Lakes region of Upstate New York. We attended church weekly. We shared a blessing over every suppertime meal. I was taught to pray every night before I went to sleep, and more, to bring all of my troubles to God—to talk to Him as a friend.
I loved church and enjoyed an exultant sense of closeness to God. I whole-heartedly accepted Christ as my Savior and regularly searched my heart for sins, trying to become more godly, to wrestle into submission my obvious flaws—my quickness to anger, my tendency to trap myself within certain resentments.
My understanding of the Christian faith was, of course, lacking in nuance and depth. As a child, I didn’t have the complex and complicated imprint of life’s experiences that we draw on to truly connect with Scripture, to grasp the emotional and spiritual tension behind what may be, otherwise, only a couple lines of text. A 10-year-old can’t really understand how gutted Job was when he learned his family was obliterated, or why David wanted, urgently, for Uriah to sleep with Bathsheba, or why Peter leapt out of the fishing boat and swam to shore when he realized he and his companions were speaking to the risen Christ—the One he had, such a short time ago, denied, and from whom he therefore thought he was parted forever.
Today, even writing a couple lines about that last story is enough to make tears come to my eyes. As a child, it hardly registered at all.
My own denial of the Lord wasn’t so much a sharp break as a gradual drifting.
Ultimately the fault is my own, of course. I am smart, but I can be undisciplined. (I’m being gentle on myself.) If I see something that excites my interest, I’m likely to run to it. This is why I’m never reading just one book, but always a half-dozen or more at the same time. It’s why, instead of a single major “project” in my life I am always working (and yes, usually imperfectly) on several. [Thank goodness my sweetheart tolerates this!]
Unfortunately, the fallen world obliged by offering up a nice smorgasbord of temptations.
Holding the form of religion but denying the power of it… (2 Timothy 3:5)
One, sadly, was served up by my own church.
As a teenager I read Scripture regularly, favoring the New Testament and within the NT almost exclusively the books of the Apostles and Acts.
I began to stumble (!) in my faith because of passages like Luke 17:5—or, more precisely, the discrepancy between passages like Luke 17:5 and what I saw in our church.
Jesus had said, as plainly as anything could be said, that his followers should be able to perform incredible miracles. In the Books of Acts, his Apostles did perform miracles.
So why weren’t the people in my church doing anything miraculous?
Over a period of time (many years) I began to reason that the answer to this question had to be one of three things. Either my church was a failed institution. Or the Bible was flawed/incomplete. Or the Bible was simply a collection of myths and half-remembered stories and sayings.
Dropping church came first. When I left home for college, I stopped attending church regularly. I still loved my faith’s hymns and ritual, and appreciated the good-heartedness of Methodist parishioners (I swear I can, to this day, pick out a Methodist in a crowd!) but I no longer believed the Methodist church had anything to teach me. It seemed oddly lifeless at its core.
My separation from my childhood faith was exacerbated when my Grandpa Butterfield passed. The loss wrecked me. I’d wake up in the night, sobbing in my bed.
Much of my grief was personal, of course. One of the legs supporting my childhood world had been kicked out. Any young person would feel that sort of loss very deeply.
But I also knew, deeply, that I’d lost a lifeline to my faith. I’d been taking my questions about the church to Grandpa, asking him to help me answer them. As long as he could hear my questions and still love me and accept me, I felt okay. I wasn’t straying too far.
How was I to keep my feet on the path without his love to guide me?
And they cast out many demons… (Mark 6:13)
During this same period, I was also considering the possibility that teachings from other “spiritual” traditions might help me answer my questions about the Bible. If my Methodist church wasn’t performing miracles, well, maybe it was because they were missing some piece of truth that I could find elsewhere. Maybe other traditions could help me patch over the rents that were appearing in my faith.
I won’t go into detail all of the options I weighed as this part of my journey. Suffice to say, first, that I found it unappealing to delve too far into any of the other major religions. Trading the traditions and liturgy and ritual of Christianity for those of Buddhism or Judaism or Sufism seemed like a dead end. What I didn’t want was to change costumes. I wanted to experience a living faith—I wanted to experience a faith that literally overcomes the world.
Instead, I built a library that includes a fair number of books that explore “the spiritual” from a more secular, 21st Century perspective, or secular with a healthy dose of mysticism. Many would be considered New Thought and New Age writers. Others proposed quantum phenomena as an explanation for “miracles.” I also own several books by Carl Jung and a handful of his acolytes (e.g. James Hillman, Robert Johnson), owing to my sense that the answer to my questions has something to do with the greater psyche—the more hidden parts of the human mind.
I encountered and read quite a few books that I would classify as more clearly “occult literature,” but for what it’s worth (I have my theories!) I haven’t typically kept that kind of book around for very long. It’s not that I woke up one day and think, “you know, I shouldn’t read these.” However, every time I culled my library to make room for new books or because I was moving, I inevitably decided the occult books were not something I wanted to keep. They seemed like a side road. Or maybe slightly “off” for some reason.
As the years passed, the third possible answer to my question about my faith also began to take form: the possibility that the Bible was no more than a cultural and literary relic. Perhaps there was no God. Perhaps the world is a material place and when we die, poof, we’re gone.
Perhaps the reason my church functioned primarily as an institution of social and emotional support, versus a demonstration of the promised gifts of the Holy Spirit, was because the Holy Spirit doesn’t exist.
Perhaps the reason that none of the other spiritual books I read seemed to offer any fool-proof answers to my questions was because they are also false teachings.
I remember a lecture in one college course that I took. Although I don’t recall the course or the professor’s name, I can still picture a fuzzy image of her standing at the front of the classroom as she told us that scholars believed Jesus was not a historic figure, but a composite of multiple itinerate preachers who lived in Palestine in Roman times.
I was shocked. Could this be true?
Shall the potter be regarded as the clay? (Isaiah 29:16)
I met other people who were staunch materialists. I encountered (who can avoid them?) books and articles by people who argued that we live in a material world, that all “religion” and “spiritualism” is superstition that must be discarded.
I began to accept some aspects of what I’d call the classical materialist model.
Not all aspects. It remained self-evident to me that not all phenomena can be explained by Newtonian physics. Miracles happen. There’s plenty of evidence for them. People experience miraculous healings, for example. There’s plenty of evidence for paranormal phenomena. People see UFOs, ghosts. I’ve had an experience of the paranormal myself, and it was as “real” as any object in the room with me as I type, right now.
Any honest description of reality has to accommodate paranormal phenomena as real, albeit elusive, probably conditional, and with a strongly subjective aspect.
So what shaped up, for me, was something like this: perhaps we live in a universe that is governed solely by physical laws: largely Newtonian but also quantum.
Newtonian physics explains everyday, macro phenomena. Quantum physics explains “miracles” and paranormal phenomena.
Within this worldview, miracles (and for that matter, mystical experiences) are not evidence of an objective God. They are, instead, weird, passing fluctuations in the fabric of material reality. They can be induced by people of faith but also by secular practitioners. They are not particularly predictable or controllable (which is why many people reject that they are possible at all, given that we believe that repeatable experiments are the sole way to measure objective reality).
And there was one “miracle” I could not accept any longer as tenable: the notion of somehow surviving physical death. What objective evidence is there of such a thing? None that could not be described in terms of tricks of the mind—or, at most, a temporary “imprint” in the quantum (energetic) fabric of reality that lingers for a while after a physical body dies.
So (my thinking went) there is no life after death, and there is no higher meaning. The human brain is an unfortunate accident, a cruel cosmic joke that emerged, sadly, from a particular evolutionary equation: as we evolved from apes and (perhaps because our vocalizations reached a certain level of complexity) humans became capable of abstract thought. This allowed us to mentally formulate avatars that represent our own personal selves, i.e. we gained the capacity of self-awareness. That capacity however damned us (pun intended) to also recognize our mortality, and in turn this (naturally) makes us all stark, raving mad.
Unlike the gazelle, which lives in perfect, ignorant contentment until the moment it glimpses the movement of the lion, we anticipate our deaths—consciously or not—every moment of our lives. We are in constant dread of it. We cannot escape.
What is crooked cannot be made straight… (Ecclesiastes 1:15)
Instead, we cope. We either delude ourselves into believing this isn’t true (i.e. accept some religious belief, whether Christianity, reincarnation, or similar). Or we hate ourselves and hate and fear our fate to the point of self-destruction (grimly taking down others with us as we go, in some cases) or we opt to ignore. Bury the truth in sensation, pleasure. Party like it’s 1999. Grab madly for all the toys. Or, more recent option: invest our wealth into technology that we hope against hope will enable us to experience a bioengineered immortality. Brain uploaded into a computer, indeed. What fun that would be. Put a clause in your will that whatever evil subsidiaries Facebook spawns won’t have the right to alter your code, hahahahahaha.
Grim stuff. But this is the world we live in, isn’t it. We live in this world, many of us, whether we confront it on those terms or not. No wonder we’ve descended into a fetid soup of collective despair and nihilism.
It took me a long time to get to this, I will say that. I suppose it was my childhood foundation in faith that enabled me to drag my feet for so many years—decades. After all, I could still remember feeling Something that I believed, at the time, was God. It took a very long time for me to finally accept that that Something was a trick of the mind. It wasn’t objectively real. It was induced by a combination of belief, intent, attitude, and conditioning.
If you’ve ever considered the nature of reality in terms of the philosophies of idealism versus materialism, you might pick up on something that I managed to do, with the conclusion I’d reached. I’d threaded an interesting needle.
In simple terms, idealism posits that reality is consciousness. Materialism posits that reality is physical matter—dead billiard balls. Belief in miracles throws materialism into question, so by definition I never became a materialist in the classical, dead-billiard-ball sense.
Instead, I ultimately accepted what I guess you could call quantum materialism. Peer down deeply into the stuff of which billiard balls are made, and things get weird. Observation of phenomena seems to be inexplicably interwoven with behavior of phenomena. Particles are also waves, and can affect each other across space.
The human brain, I concluded, is in part a device that directs, tunes, and focuses subjective “reality” in ways governed by the laws of quantum physics.
This doesn’t prove there’s a God. It’s a function of awareness itself, and as I referenced above, for whatever reason humans have a level of awareness that is different from that of other earthly life forms.
So we sometimes see cryptids or Fatima or ghosts. We sometimes seem able to “manifest” lovers or money or new jobs.
It’s a function of awareness, which is in turn a function of the human brain/body. When the brain/body dies, that particular lens-of-awareness might flicker a bit, but ultimately it shuts off.
And you’d think that would be it. I’d arrived at my conclusion, after literally decades of consideration, study, reading, contemplation.
That man does not live by bread alone… (Deuteronomy 8:3)
It wasn’t a happy conclusion. I’d arrived at something very dark.
Acknowledging that life ends with physical death is a nasty thing to have to live with. That was the personal burden I now carried. It weighed on me.
The other nasty piece, of course, is that without God—i.e., without some supreme, overarching cause or reason for our existence—there can be no real morality. Within this model, morality, like everything else, becomes a human construct and therefore inherently flimsy and subject to negotiation.
I should note that in this, again, the church of my childhood bears some responsibility, in that many of its leaders demonstrate by their actions and dictums that moral law can be negotiated.
It’s also no accident, however, that so-called “moral relativism” goes hand in hand with the materialist worldview.
The problem of evil is therefore not, fundamentally, a problem at all. It’s more accurately described as simply an aspect of “what is.” We use our marvelous mind-brains to manifest what we call “good” or what we call “evil” but in the end, we are each of us snuffed out and turned back to dust—and over time it doesn’t seem like anything fundamentally changes. What’s the difference, after all, between the Nazis exterminating Jews and the Chinese exterminating Uyghurs? We’re still doing, today, the thing that supposedly horrified us a hundred years ago, and not many people seem to mind it very much.
And that’s just one example. Every murder, betrayal, rape—so many of the horrifically cruel things humans do to each other today—are nothing but sad replays of what we’ve been doing to each other since the beginning of recorded history. And why? To my model, it was because, within the quantum-materialist framework, there are no real consequences to evil. It’s just a phenomenon. It’s like a spider capturing an insect in a web, only a little more complex because unlike spiders and flies we are self-aware and aware of our mortality, and therefore the spider is complicit in its act of cruelty—and the entangled fly knows in advance that its personal it-ness is about to be horribly extinguished.
I first encountered “philosophy” as a thing in college. I took a couple of philosophy electives. I was a dutiful student. I did the reading and wrote the papers, and to this day I still draw on some of what I learned back then, although more in the sense of general frameworks rather than specific arguments, particularly when it comes to the 19th and 20th Century philosophers. I’m sure this is due to my intellectual deficiencies, but to me, much of the more recent philosophy that I read (tried to read) struck me as—apologies for this—word games. “This idea is so terribly complicated that it can only be described by incomprehensible sentences.”
He who trusts in his own mind is a fool (Proverbs 28:26)
It’s not so much that I wouldn’t be able to follow what Philosopher Guy was trying to say, if I tried hard enough. I didn’t have the patience to invest the time. We’re all going to die. I don’t know how much time I have. Just get to the point and tell me if there is a God.
I grasped enough, however, to understand that one of the arguments against idealism is the seeming “solidity” of physical matter. Although miracles suggest that, under certain circumstances, physical matter can be manipulated by non-physical forces (meaning, in this context, Newtonian forces like gravity, heat, etc.) the plain fact is that, most of the time, no such relationship can be demonstrated. At the macro level, Newtonian forces appear to reign supreme.
After we came out of the church, we stood talking for some time together of Bishop Berkeley’s ingenious sophistry to prove the non-existence of matter, and that every thing in the universe is merely ideal. I observed, that though we are satisfied his doctrine is not true, it is impossible to refute it. I never shall forget the alacrity with which Johnson answered, striking his foot with mighty force against a large stone, till he rebounded from it, “I refute it thus.”
—?James Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson
Johnson had a point. If idealism is true, it should be demonstrably true.
So why can’t I pass my foot through a rock, if the rock is Mind? If the rock is Thought?
Well, here comes the big plot twist in my story.
I found the book “Meaning in Absurdity” by philosophical idealist Bernardo Kastrup [affiliate link].
Kastrup’s jumping-off place for this book, interestingly enough, is paranormal phenomena—precisely the kind of seemingly unexplainable events that I have personally accepted can, at times, become physically manifest.
And his defense of idealism includes something I hadn’t considered carefully enough: a heck of a lot of what’s going on is, quite possibly, both invisible and inaccessible to our egos—that is, to our waking minds/everyday awareness.
Recall that Jung is one of the thinkers with whom I am familiar. Turns out Kastrup thinks highly of Jung’s work and finds it useful for solving the problem of Johnson’s rock.
Kastrup uses an analogy. Our waking minds are akin to the top of a partially submerged range of mountains; they are the tips, the bits we can see above the surface of the ocean; they appear to us as islands. But below the water, supporting the islands and giving rise to them, are enormous masses of…something—and, within the idealist model, that “something” is also consciousness, although a form of consciousness that we, from our waking minds, can’t directly access.
Have you seen the gates of deep darkness? (Job 38:17)
This something supporting each island is also connected with the something that gives rise to every other island nearby.
The mountain tops (the islands) are our egos. The “something” below each of our egos is our personal unconscious minds, which at some, even lower point merge into what Jung called the collective unconscious.
Obviously, to buy into this this analogy you have to believe that “the unconscious” is real and in many respects larger/more significant than waking awareness. I accept that this is true, although I don’t plan to try to defend that here. Suffice to say, to my thinking, what we experience as dreams, myths, archetypes, unconscious drives, etc., are energetic patterns that have some sort of reality on the quantum or wave level of reality. And this stuff, considered as a whole, is huge.
If you don’t agree—if you believe your dreams are random, a byproduct of the biological processes of the brain, rather like automobile exhaust as a byproduct of running a car engine, then this won’t make sense to you. But you also won’t be able to explain miracles ?
On the other hand, if you can accept that there’s a whole lot of “reality” that is inaccessible to us (from the standpoint of our waking awareness) then consider what Kastrup proposes: the solidity of physical reality arises from a kind of agreement we make at an unconscious level.
Collectively, but on a level of consciousness that is undetectable and inaccessible to our waking minds, we have accepted that “reality” should follow certain “rules.”
Think of it as patterns of waveforms that lock into place because of entrainment.
Johnson hurt his foot when he kicked his rock because human beings’ minds have collectively generated, on an unconscious level, a thoughtform that defines physical objects as stationary and impenetrable. If you kick a big rock, you won’t have enough kinetic energy to move it. So instead the kick’s energy will be absorbed by the tissues of your body which will crush and damage them. Ouch.
Miracles happen, on the other hand, because some peoples’ minds have entrained on a different set of rules.
We break into subsets. We have subsets of people who accept that miracles happen and subsets who do not. We have subsets who ponder UFOs and are fascinated by them, who “want to believe;” these subsets generate waveforms that give UFOs substance and physically-perceivable qualities, while other subsets firmly ignore anything to do with lights in the sky and think UFOs are nonsense.
This is not to say that you’ll experience only the reality accepted by the group of people with whom you most closely identify (although it increases the likelihood). On the contrary, if enough people believe in miracles, miracles can “break out” in the experience of non-believers as well. Sometimes the “evidence” will even be so dramatic and compelling that the non-believer will be unable to rationalize it away.
George P. Hansen’s book, The Trickster and the Paranormal, proposes a model that helps explain how paranormal phenomena break through and emerge into consensus reality. He suggests that the phenomena is strongly associated with weak points in structures, including structures of the psyche, time periods (e.g. the transition from child to adult that we experience as adolescence), society, or even geography. (There’s a reason meetings with the devil are associated with crossroads.)
This makes a lot of sense to me. It explains why the paranormal is so arbitrary.
More broadly, quantum materialism also gives us a model for understanding why it’s so tricky to really grasp the “true” nature of reality—because reality is a funhouse mirror that reflects Mind back to Mind.
It may help to play with this concept to understand what I mean.
Consider that, at one time, huge numbers of people believed the Earth was flat. They believed (sincerely and unquestioningly) some version of “this place was created by God/the gods as a huge dollop of earth floating on a huger pool of water.”
Consider the possibility that if a time-traveler from today, fully equipped with modern measuring devices and technology, was able to go back to that epoch, he might be unable to detect a curvature in the surface of the Earth. He’d find a flat Earth.
Seems impossible to believe, right? So maybe go at it this way: maybe our collective, unconscious beliefs function like a fun-house mirror. They don’t change what is, but they bend the appearance of what is. So, when a large enough subset of people conceive the Earth as flat, our round Earth becomes flattened in terms of what we can perceive with our senses (which includes the readings put out by our measuring devices, which are after all only extensions of our senses; eight inches of curvature per mile means no curvature if our senses tell us that eight inches of curvature per mile is the same as zero inches of curvature per mile) (yes, this suggests that in this alternate reality math as we know it doesn’t exist. Maybe there’s a reason ancient peoples didn’t scrawl mathematical equations under their cave drawings, and it wasn’t because they were dumb?).
After a junior high science unit on the eye, I used to brain-tease myself by wondering whether the world as I perceived it could be upside down—perfectly inverted vertically—from how other people perceive it. How could I know? I point “up” and say up, and they point to their “up” and nod in agreement. To me, their “up” looks the same as my “up,” and vice versa. But to another person, the image of “up” might actually be what I would call an image of “down.”
There’s no way to know. We are each capable of navigating the world perfectly well thanks to the internal consistency of our perceptions. But my “red” could be your “blue,” too.
Or—here’s one that’ll get some people riled up good—suppose the 2020 election was both stolen and completely above board? Suppose there are two subsets of people, each of which literally cannot perceive the evidence which is overwhelmingly obvious to the other?
This sort of game—brain tease—is ultimately pointless if you’re a materialist.
As a materialist, you believe there is an objectively real and inviolate and solid world out there. We humans might delude ourselves or hallucinate or lie, but it’s there and can be measured and validated.
But if it’s all mind, ultimate, objective “reality” is not a collection of solid things that exist independently of mind. Those things are mind—or, maybe better a better way to phrase it is: they are mind-stuff. Meaning: not “mind” in the same sense as the thoughts and ideas and impressions that I, sitting here at my computer, perceive flitting about my own head. The internal “mind” that I can personally perceive from the vantage point of my waking consciousness is insubstantial, weak, impermanent, and exerts very little influence on anything outside of “me.”
In fact, my waking “mind” might be more like a crude antenna that picks up snatches of “signals” emitted by a greater reality and tries to assemble them into something my ego considers intelligible.
Behold, I am small account; what shall I answer thee? (Job 40:4)
Mind-stuff, on the other hand, is categorically different because it is generated not by “me,” but by something greater than “me” that involves—minimally—many, many other people (and for all we know, other types of beings).
If you’ve stuck with me so far, hopefully you’ll agree that at the least, this model is a plausible alternative to materialism (or dualism) in the classic sense.
It’s also possible that you’ll think: well, so now you’re just re-defining matter. You’re calling it “mind-stuff.” But if it behaves like matter, is measurable like matter, is solid like matter—then it’s still matter.
To which I respond: but if matter is really mind-stuff, then that explains miracles, because under certain circumstances mind-stuff does follow different laws than those described by Newtonian physics.
And if the mind-stuff emerges out of some sort of en masse, collective act of the unconscious, then we have a reasonable explanation for why miracles don’t happen constantly, on an everyday basis. So many of us neither believe in them nor expect them, and our convictions on this subject are strong ones. Our educational system, after all, indoctrinates us in “the scientific method” from a young age, on a global basis. There is also tremendous societal pressure to reject “superstition.” Many relatively powerful people, including academics, sneer at and ridicule the whole nothing of religious faith.
But suppose we accept the idealist model.
What do we actually do with this information? Is this just more word games? Are we, in the end, merely playing with the definitions of terms?
I would argue that no, there’s more to it.
If I’m right—if “the rules” are set by unconscious consensus, and if different subsets of people can adopt slightly different versions of “the rules”—then it stands to reason that you should associate with people who believe in things that will do you the most good.
Example. If you have cancer and want to survive it, maybe consider not relying entirely on the help of a medical facility where you’ll be surrounded by people who believe that your case and status correlate with a 90% chance you’ll soon be dead. You might be better off seeking out some faith healers. You might be best off seeking out faith healers who have witnessed miraculous cancer healings.
And what happens if we apply that logic more broadly? Say, to the state of one’s entire life, inner and outer, and the state of the world in general?
Where are you going to go?
What ideology are you going to associate with? What family of believers?
For God is with the generation of the righteous… (Psalms 14:5)
As soon as my thought process got to that question, I knew the answer. I knew it was Christianity. I knew I had to go back to Christ. More: I knew I had to go back and pick up where I had dropped Christ, and then I had to follow Him more completely and more deeply than I had as a child.
This realization took shape as I dealt with a terrible loss I suffered within a few months in 2020 and early 2021.
Both my parents died. First my father, after a month alone in a hospital bed on a ventilator. I found myself on my knees as he slowly failed, trying to figure out how to pray for him, because I had nothing else but prayer to offer.
At first, I prayed that he be spared. Toward the end, I could only pray to God to be merciful.
I was close to my father.
I’m aware I was lucky to have him in my life for so long—sixty years. But the shock of suddenly losing him. There are no words.
When it became clear that my mother was following him, something quite different happened: I suddenly began to appreciate how much I owed my childhood faith in God to her.
By His grace I was able to thank her for that before she passed.
It was after her death that I tentatively began to fumble my way back home. Not intellectually. Not by dint of philosophical reasoning. I had already internalized the philosophical piece. I had already found an intellectual basis for rejecting classical materialism—and therefore accepting that there is more to life than the material, there is a Mystery beyond human/ego understanding.
But what I did instead was invite Christ back into my heart. I began seeking God’s felt presence, that I knew as a child but had lost.
Something else also served as a very important factor in this decision to return to Christ: as we’re all aware, during that same period (2020, 2021, today) the outside world began experiencing a bit of tumult. To put it mildly.
For men will be lovers of self (2 Timothy 3:2)
It’s become so clear that “materialism” is an utterly failed model.
The “solutions” proposed within by people who operate within a materialist ideology bear a terrible fruit. It’s no longer debatable.
Technology—and by that I also include biotechnology—has been almost universally tainted by greed and/or the desire to control, which leads inevitably to suffering and death. Period. It’s not debatable. The bad tree bears bad fruit.
You can’t encourage covetousness and not expect resentment and social divisiveness. It’s not debatable. There’s a reason the Bible enjoins us not to covet. And what have we done? We’ve corrupted the fundamental concept of charity (an act of voluntarily sharing with the needy) with something we literally call “entitlements:” I am owed that which my neighbor has acquired. And we are surprised when the fruits we reap from these teachings are bitter?
You can’t give people enormous material power, in a culture that accepts if not celebrates immorality (lying, cheating, “beating the system”) and expect them to use that power wisely and justly and for the good of all. They’ll use it for their own good and to buy loyalty, every. single. time. They’ll become cruel and paranoid and corrupt.
You can’t absolve people of any sense that evil acts will be punished and not expect them to commit even more evil acts, more brazenly and more frequently. And here we are, the blood spilling daily on our streets.
What better way to make sense of any of this than Scripture?
Is Satan a real being? Do we really need to answer that question, when hellish, demonic imagery is suddenly more and more acceptable for use in public events (concerts, political speeches)?
It’s all mind-stuff, remember? Evil exists. That’s not debatable. Look around you.
Give a face to evil and there’s your Satan.
So what team are our rulers playing for, when they frame an angry speech in dark, hellish colors?
Ever heard of a “tell”?
The point is not so much that our rulers are corrupt (although they are) as that I look at the world and ask myself: what team am I playing for?
And I know the answer. And it’s not the team that surrounds itself with demonic imagery.
I believe; help my unbelief! (Mark 9:24)
There was a time when I believed that if you were going to be a Christian—a true, believing Christian, not a lip service Christian—you had to break at least a couple of the springs in the workings of your intellect. This is a religion, after all, that somehow claims to reinterpret the humiliation, torture, and death of God Himself as…redemptive? It’s absurd. You take the worst possible thing that could happen to the Savior of humanity, and you claim that the entire thing was not only okay but somehow a necessary step in your ultimate salvation.
It’s unbelievable.
This is a religion that asks believers to believe the unbelievable.
I understood that some very smart people had somehow became believers. But it seemed to me that they must have done so by breaking something in their minds, or perhaps eliding something in their thinking, the poor dears.
But if reality is not dead billiard balls but mind-stuff, then the rationality—the irrationality—of the thing isn’t what matters. The unbelievability of it doesn’t matter, because it’s not supposed to follow the same set of rules that govern the normal, everyday world.
What matters is exactly what believers say matters. We have this book, the Bible. It is brimming with wisdom that we need to take very, very seriously. And in it, a man named Jesus says He is the son of God, and that we are to love Him and to follow His commandments, that we might gain eternal life.
What is “eternal life”? I have no idea. But again, for which team do I wish to play?
Do not fear what they fear, nor be in dread. (Isaiah 8:12)
And this book also tells us that in His name we should be ministering to others. We should be performing miracles. We should be healing, and casting out demons, and prophesying. And we should love the Lord more than we love anything else, including our own lives.
It says many other things as well. Those are only some of the things it says.
It’s complicated.
Its heart is a mystery.
The mystery is the point.
So maybe, strictly speaking, I was right. Maybe believers do need to break their brains a little bit before they can “get there.” But maybe it’s because becoming a believer requires a shift from an “old,” rational reality into a different one, where God once walked the Earth as a man, where God initiated His disciples to teach the rest of us how to become a different kind of being.
I have a long way to go. I spent many years wandering my dead ends. I’ve broken many things along the way and squandered more opportunities than I care to count (knowing full well that more than likely I will be brought to account for them); sadly, I’ve sinned even more—by a lot—than I’ve squandered.
I’m patching things back together, a little at a time. I read and study Scripture every day, I am finding pastors online whose words are helping me. I’m praying regularly again. I’m fumbling for the right words to find my way to the Lord’s forgiveness and to bring Him as close to me as He wishes to come.
I know I need to find a church but I haven’t figured out how. I’m pretty certain it will be non-denominational.
I’m trying to figure out what work the Lord would like me to do with whatever time I have left.
I’m pretty sure I’ll finish the last novel of my Marion Flarey books. It’s mostly written. I want to bring her story to its conclusion. But after that, I see my writing going in a different direction. Not sure what it will be.
One last thing.
I mentioned at the beginning of this essay that for some reason I never kept the truly occult books in my possession for very long, and I suspected I knew why.
Here’s the rest of that story.
Having been raised in an household of observant Christians, and doted on as well by two sets of Christian grandparents, I know that I was prayed for on a daily basis.
There’s not a doubt in my mind that I am alive and in one piece, today, because of the protections placed over me by those prayers.
So pray for the ones you love.
Pray for the young ones.
You won’t be with them forever.
But the words you whisper to the Lord today just might be…
