The Jesus paradox.

One point that Richard Dawkins raises in his book ' The God Delusion' is that if everything needs a Designer, why is God Himself exempt?

It is a valid question , but then he postulates that Natural Selection gives forth everything alive on earth today.

It might seem rational that we find religion of one form or another around the world, and that Pantheism and Animism gradually develop into Monotheism, as it did with the Jews.

Let's be honest, the God of Abraham needed to go send a couple of angels into Sodom to go check it out - this is a far cry from an Omniscient God  who according to Jesus, knows when a sparrow falls.We may say that either God has changed, or is it our awareness that has grown? Hebrew religion shows sign of having developed over time, rather than being handed down, all complete, from the hands of a Divine Revealer.

And yet, there is a paradox about Jesus that I cannot quite fathom.

If Jesus is a legend, as Dawkins insists, then I would expect Jesus to be shaped by the dictates and fancies of his followers. How much easier it would have been for monotheistic Jews to conclude along with the JWs, Arians  and  Moslems  that Jesus was simply a messenger - an angel or Archangel on a mission.

Yet this is not what we see. After meeting Him , not only are they emboldened to declare that He rose from the dead, but they also declared Him to be God incarnate,  and started behaving in line with this. And these were men who were monotheistic Jews who had real problems in letting go of circumcision, don't forget.

Darwin's theory of Evolution was inevitable, it is argued. If Darwin had not found it, Wallace or someone else would. And yet, was Christianity ' inevitable' - something just waiting to happen when the time became right?

I don't get that this was entirely the case. It is as if God, whatever He happens to be, came into our world, and then  went out again , in the person of Jesus of Nazareth. Not so much to fulfil Jewish hopes and expectations , but to affirm His love for all humanity. And perhaps, this is what actually did occur.

The Mystical Quaballah.

In my last post , I posed the question  - what exactly did Jesus encounter in the man called 'Legion'?

For many people today, the Devil does not exist, and any talk of hauntings or the supernatural is laughed off as mere superstition. On the other hand, many Christians deeply believe that the Devil is out to ensnare people into ' the occult', and some Christian writers would even warn us off of playing D&D and reading Harry Potter.

I have to be  honest, I have struggled long and hard with this question of what to make of the Bibliccal accounts of angels and demons flitting in and out of Christ's ministry. I believe, though, that the best book on the subject was ' The Mystical Quaballah' by Dione Fortune.

Although a Christian , she spent a lot of time in India, and this led her to investigate eastern , and then Western Mystical traditions, including the Jewish Quaballah, a body of lore that really repays study, in my view.

From a Quaballist point of view, God is unmanifest, dwelling in unapproachable light, but causes Creation to happen on several different levels. there is the physical plane , but also an emotional plane , and a Plane of Ideas, as well as the spiritual plane. Force on one plane is Form on another.

In brief, this means that if I think something, it has no efffect on a physical level, however, the force of my thinking takes form on a higher level. What has all thiis to do with Jesus and His miracles , I hear you ask - well, back in the 1970s, if I recall it right, there were a group of phychic reasearcher who decided to test the 'Tulpa theory' and see if they could construct a thought form, so they did. 'Tulpa' is a word meaning ' thought form '. The theory states that a human mind can construct a form on another plane and then let it act as a vessel for non physical energy.

They thought hard, concentrated and invented a fictional character called ' Philip', they gave Philip an outlandishly impossible life story so that they could never stumble upon a real person who matched him by mistake, and then they started conducting seances. Sure enough, 'Philip' came through to them. not only that but other psychics and mediums unconnected to the circle began to get Philip coming in on their sittings as well. A small number of skilled and dedicated psychic researchers had  manufactured a spiritual entity on the Astral plane, which is one level up from the material one we live on.

Now, if a small group of people can raise enough energy to construct something like that , imagine what a few thousand people could so, having their minds directed by someone conducting a magical or religious service. Arthur C.  Clarke once said that any form of technology sufficiently advanced would be indistinguishable from magic - and any form of technology that was still distinguishable had not been advanced far enough!

I should point out that when I left Jehovah's Witnesses in 1984, I went into the ' alternative politics' of the day. Thatcher was in at Number 10, Greenham Common Airbase had Cruise Missiles sitting in it and people came there to protest and link up with others opposed to Thatchers plans. . CND had a lot of members, some of whom were trade unionists and Left wingers, other were people who were into ' New Age', some were conventional Christians,  and some were into alternative forms of Spirituality, like Wicca, Astrology , Buddhism and the like.

It was there that I began to rub shoulders with such people, went to meetings run by groups who were not JWs or even Christian and eventually joined  Ashrams , or teaching circles - in fact I belonged to several such groups. As well as taking part in training exercised and group ceremonies, I was also given a lot of reading to do as homework, and was initiated to several levels in a few groups. I got to meet people who practised what some would term ' magic', and learned something about magical workings myself.

The theory is that humans have several ' energy centres' in their bodies. these are what the Hindus called 'Chakras'  - there are seven , that roughly correspond to the endocrine glands, and these are said to be linked to the seven visible planets.

Basically, if a group of people imagine a form in unison , that form can then contain all the emotional and intellectual energies that are directed towards it on the Astral Plane, and , given enough energy , it will take on a life of it's own. it will even begin to go around seeking energy to draw from.

An Astral being that is constructed out of love and good will therefore, will seek out those of a similar disposition to replenish itself, so to speak.  However, an entity made up of other emotions and ideas - something like a pagan war god, for instance, would seek out other sources of power. Hence it would be that there are several beings, up there on the Astral plane with a definite interest in seeing as much pain and misery going on down here to keep themselves going. These , I believe, were the demons that christ spent so much of His time kicking out. To be sure, some people were simply lame, blind or otherwise physically impaired, but I am convinced that some were in fact spiritually oppressed.

The fact is that Voodoo is drwn from an African word ' Voudon ', meaning ' idol' - the slaves brought to the Carribean from Africa still kept a lot of their native traditions,  and one of these was belief in the Laos. A Lao is a spirit, and it is believed that in a ceremony where there is dancing and strong, rhythmic drumming , that the worshippers enter into a kind of trance where the Laos descend and ride the dancers, like a person  would ride upon a horse.

Temporarily, during the dancing ,the Voodoo worshipper is possessed and controlled by the Lao, or Spirit. yet this is not seen as being oppressive or malevolent. The Voodoo worshipper welcomes the Lao in the same way that the Christian would seek to be controlled and inspired by the Holy Spirit, and reports the same feelings of ecstasy and being lifted up to a higher state.

So why was it different in Christ's time , and why is it different in so many cases of ' demon possession ' in our culture? Perhaps it is that our Western  minds are differently attuned, and contact a different sort of Entity. The Caribbean slaves were contacting Astral beings who were originally made when their people were free - the benevolent spirits forged by their ancestors. Not for so the people oppressed in Roman occupied Palestine, or for modern day thrill seekers who get in touch with things on the ouija board, it would seem.

The salient thing to remember is that Jesus had control of these things. Astral beings come in all shapes and sizes, but none were any match for Jesus. Nor does Christ need them to reach his people, or for they to gain contact with Him.Some may say ' If the pagan gods are just human creations, what about the God of the Bible - isn't He just another product of human thinking, simply another Tulpa ? The short answer is  " No- not exactly  - He is somewhat different, and this shows up in Scripture.' But that will do for another time, I think.  We need to examine Hebrew really closely to even try to begin to come to some sort of understanding of What god is, and then , we only have an approximation and not an exact assesment .We can never know God fully, but we can come to Know Him better.

You are free to post comments and ask questions if you wish , i have tried to cram an awful lot in here, so please seek clarification  if you want it.

Who do you say I am ?

For someone like me, sitting here on a computer terminal, it is very confusing sometimes.

I mean, I am reasonably educated. I never went to university, but I learned science at school, and know how the world works on a physical level. So, when I come up against stories of people parting th e red sea, or even walking on water, I tend to be something of a sceptic.

The Torah was written in the past tense and the third person.  Later on, people like Jeremiah and Joel write in the first person - they were big on morals and ethics, but light on miraculous deeds. I cannot help  noticing this, and want to bring this to your attention.

It is odd that we don't have any secular details on King Solomon. Ok, the Bible records him , but I know of no receipts, no entries in any ledger from another kingdom, no mention of any foreign princess who became one of his many wives. Nobody I know of has ever  found any mention of him in all the world outside the Bible. How about you? Isn't this a bit strange, if someone like Solomon can completely disappear - or did the Hebrew scribes just make him up?

Now, Jesus lived in obscurity, born in a small village under Roman occupation in a small cultural backwater in the Roman Empire. And although none of his contemporaries took any notice, there was a community of Christians living in Rome in 64 AD. Just 31 years after the crucifixion, Jesus has a following in the heart of the Roman Empire , hundreds of miles from where He was born. Again , I think this is extraordinary.

It is tempting to feel sometimes that it would have been wonderful to have been there when it all started, to have been someone who actually saw Jesus heal the sick and walk on water. But was it?

For when the disciples came back from a preaching tour, they said to him ' some say that you are John  the Baptist, while others say you are Elijah'. And Jesus asked them  "But who do you say I am?" And that is crucial. because the chief priests, the scribes and the  Pharisees saw the miracles too, and they were not impressed.

They could not deny that Christ did these things - but they accused him of doing it with the aid of Satanic powers. They were the the Establishment. the experts on the Law. And they said that if you believed in this lowly carpenter, then you were as damned as he was. Imagine how it must have been for humble Galileans like Peter, John and James to stand up against that sort of opposition.

Today, we know that Jesus was the man who changed History - if he wasn't the Messiah , then who else was? But back then , they only had Jesus. Sometimes, even John the Baptist had his doubts (see Matthew11:3), so it is no surprise if we are confronted with doubts today.

Wherever we stand in the stream of time we are faced with the same question  and the same problem when Christ asks us "Who do you say I am "? none of us can fully know all the facts - just what we are able to gather from our own standpoint.  like the Apostles of old, we must make our own leap of faith, going against public opinion and everything we learned in school if we want to say ' you are the Christ' - for that is not where logic, or the majority view, or the experts opinion will usually lead us.

Like me, Peter never saw the resurrection actually happen. Like most people would be perhaps , he was very sceptical when the women in the group came running back and said that the tomb was empty. But he still went there to make sure. And even when he found the tomb , i don't think he really understood what was going on. Like peter, I am still unsure on exactly how it all fits together. But , i am prepared to make the journey to the Empty tomb to see what all the fuss is about.

A few years ago, I went to Jerusalem , and took some photos. You can see my album on Facebook. as we approach Easter, I shall be posting and recounting my own experiences in the Holy Land. I  hope that you will join me on my journey, and share your own thoughts and feelings .about things as we go along.

The treasures of the British Museum

London is a place of wonder. My mother brought me her from a small mining village in derbyshire at the age of five, and I have lived here, on and off  for most of my life. A very cosmopolitan city in its own right , it has several museums of great interest to me.

The Natural History Museum now has a large wing devoted to the Theory of Evolution, and it's place in biological science. the Geology Museum , right next door , tells the story of the earth and it's crust. We have already been to the Planetarium at Greenwich , and will be visiting the other sites in due course - but today, i want to take you to the British  Museum and tell you about it. 

For it is here that you will find the most fascinating artefacts in human history. there is a small ivory casket to be seen, with the Legend of Wayland on one side, and on the other, a strange inscription. the carving below the inscription appears to be of three men holding out small offerings to a seated woman with a child on her lap, and the inscription , in Saxon Runic script reads  Mann , Ansur, Gifu  Issa.  Which transliterates into our alphabet as M A G I - this casket was intended as a gift to a saxon warlord or local king , but the giver maybe hedged his bets and put a pagan scene on one side and a Christian scene on the other, as if he wa not sure which one the recipient would like most.. it dates from the 5th century, when Christianity was new to these islands.

You also find the Rosetta Stone here. It has an inscription in Arabic, Demotic Greek and Egyptian hieroglyphics. The Greek and Arabic are a perfect match for the same message - and the discoverers wondered if the Hieroglyphic text was another repeat - indeed it was, and so the code was cracked and many other inscriptions in many temples and other places could be deciphered.

But some of the most fascinating pieces on show , for me, are the ones where the Bible intersects with history.

Many years ago, I saw an inscription from Assyria, that mentioned Sennacherib.  He was the king of Assyria mentioned in the Bible. it told the story of the campaign he launched against Hezekiah, and how the Hebrew king was shut up like a bird in a cage in the city of Jerusalem as it was under siege.

Here is the bible intersecting human history. there really was a King Hezekiah , and a Sennacherib. secular , independent sources agree on that. We have yet to find any contemporary references to Solomon , though.

But here we see two people mentioned in the Bible, are also seen in a secular document.

Now, the Bible says that the Angel of the Lord came down and slew 185,000 of the Assyrian army in a single night. The Assyrian inscription says that Hezekiah  bought Sennacherib off  with an awful lot of gold, silver, precious stones and the like.  So which story do you want to believe here?

There has been no unearthing of a mass grave, and military historians tell us that Rome at it's hight did not deploy armies of that size in the field. So large a number represents a huge logistical problem in terms of supplying , feeding and deploying in the field. how did the smaller Assyrian Empire out do the much bigger and later empire of Rome many centuries earlier? the Bible does not say.

And the Bible is full of such encounters, where Secular History meets Biblical Narrative. And often , we have to choose which one we believe. for many years, scholars were sceptical of the references in Scripture to the  Hittites. Until fairly recently, the Bible was the only source that mentioned these people. Luke was also the only person who mentioned a Proconsul of Rome ruling over a comaratively small place somewhere in the Med. Luke was obviously making this encounter up, the sceptics said. there was no way that a great Procunsul  would have such a small remit. the whole tale was fabricated to put paul in front of a great Roman magnate, it was claimed. And yet, just as modern archeologists  discovered the whole powerful Hittite civilization in more recent times, an inscription has been unearthed hat names the very procunsul that Luke names, and says that he was ruling over this small place when Luke says he was. We cannot always dismiss the bible out of hand at every turn. And yet, there are still some places where the Bible has yet to be vindicated.

In the life story of Jesus , we read in the Gospels that he cast out demons , and that He even had a conversation with the Devil himself.. Now, I believe Jesus to be a historical figure, like Herod the Great or Pontius Pilate. These people are known and acknowledged as real people by secular historians. But Satan the Devil ? this , for me, is where Narratve and history clash instead of weaving and knitting together. but I hope to resolve this question , one way or another, befoe much longer.