In the Beginning

What is it you want?
Do you know?
Can you articulate it?
Who do you serve?

One thing I do want, is sensibility out of the 4,743,981,650,342 answers to the simple utterance Why?
From my earliest years until late adulthood I have been unraveling all the questions imposed on me by the voices of Authority.  I wasn’t given much opportunity, much less instruction, on how to compose my own questions.  Those who have obtained the status of Authority it seems, want to impose their own questions and answers before one obtains the gift of Sight.  And the absolute WORST word to use around them was Why?

It began sometime around the age of four.  I was taught to pray to God, a being who lived in heaven (wherever that was), and he, being my Father, would answer all my desires, for he knew everything, was more powerful than anything, and could keep an eye on everybody at once.  (They never did get around to what heavenly mother was doing…. Busy according to Morg-think I suppose, generating replicants, close kingdom cousins to miscreants and malcontents.)  At four this is total magic—and terror.  My first question was, Why must I talk to a being who knows everything?  Surely he knew my question before it was asked!  If he was truly my father, then Why had I never met him?  Why must I ask him for things I wanted, since most of the time I could go and get what I wanted all by myself?  It was only if my power to acquire failed, did I need somebody to do it for me.  Since the mother and father I did know did not always give me what I wanted, Why would this being I had never seen nor heard, and more wise than my mother and father give me anything I wanted just for the asking?  Children at age four may believe in magic, but Why would people with Authority think they’re stupid?

For that matter, Why did such a Being need anyone to worship him?  This I thought was not only silly, but contradictory.  Anyone who had all the answers, power to do anything, and could be watching everybody no matter where they were surely did not need all these people to come worship him so he could be happy?  Boy! I said to myself, this guy really has a problem!  Only much later did I learn this craving for worship was a fundamental trait of the megalomaniac.  Discovering this only compounded the difficulty in making sense of the dogma imposed by Authority.  Magic as a child I understood.  Megalomania I recognized immediately as a major human defect, even though I couldn’t articulate the concept.  If this was what God truly was, he had at least as big a defect as some people in Authority I crossed wires with.  These people were always cranky.  I promptly lost interest in praying to him, nor did I think he was such a great guy to be asking things from, especially if it went against what my mother and father said was “right.”  He had not employed any magic on me, so I wasn’t about to cowtow to anything I was told Authority claimed he wanted me to do.  I’d been read the story of Brer Rabbit.  I knew what a tar-baby was, and God seemed to me to be the biggest tar-baby of all!  When the day came the tar-baby spoke, that was when I would listen up.

This formed the thinking of a child from four to about seven.  Apparently this is extraordinary, as to date, I have never heard any of my peers, or elders, profess to have had such thoughts at this early age.  In fact, many of them, especially my siblings and relatives in their senior years, are still going around believing this dogma in spite of what their eyes, ears, and faculties tell them.  Enter Brer Bear….

Come eight years of age the scene began to change.  Suddenly, I was expected to be all-knowing.  See, there was this rule of Authority that said children when they arrived at their eighth birthday were suddenly accountable for their actions.  (How absurd.  Accountability is a journey in self-knowing and personal honor.)  Wow!  I looked forward to this great magical transformation after cake and ice cream!  Now at that time these Authority folks all seemed to have a little bit different version of what accountability meant.  At that time I naturally thought accountability was being able to re-tell exactly what happened when they were looking for a scapegoat over something which violated their sense of fair play.  As I had quickly learned around Authority figures, the better I was at re-telling, while leaving out certain incriminating facts, the less likely I was to be made a scapegoat for their own failure of oversight.  This was our religion, and shortly after I arrived at the Age of No Excuse my mother gathered her children then living at home and proceeded to tell us about how God intended us all to be saved….

How many different versions are there of In the Beginning…?  There are more versions of it within Mormon dogma than one can possibly harmonize, much less integrate.  Upon this specious conflicting mass of myth, Mormonism predicates their Plan of Salvation.  You may observe various parodies of Mormonism’s Creation Story on the web.  The range is from hilarious to totally bizarre.  But through it all, one must ask Why would God be able to “save” all of mankind who are under the Age of No Excuse, but cannot do a thing for those who have never heard of the “Plan”?  Oh yes, sooner or later, those who have not, are entitled to hear this preaching.  But for a religion that claims men are saved by their works, and thereby become worthy of His Grace, it seems highly unlikely that the ignorant can accept this form of Gospel as if they had lived it while in the body and receive of the same salvation as those who were required to attend to every outward duty prescribed by Mormon policy, practice, and dogma until they expired in the flesh.  Do those “lost souls” who had never heard Mormon dogma and accepted of its vicarious “saving” rituals while in mortality get to bypass the extortion of tithing which the Hierarchy uses to finance their expansionist programs?  Absolutely.  The ignorant dead have it made.  All they have to do is accept the vicarious programs of penance by someone still living, and off they go to live with God in Eternal bliss.  BUT, among those who knew the dogma here, and abandoned it, they have no chance to redeem themselves once they’re dead.  They have no chance to say to God, Oops, I didn’t realize what I was doing in the flesh, please can I make amends?  This is Mormon reconciliation with God!  There are variations on this theme.  But they’re all of the same color of “justice.”

By the time of puberty I began looking for some meaning to life.  Especially with the demise of my mother, and abandonment of my father.  What I could not articulate until well into grandparenthood, is that religion is not synonymous with spirituality.  I was told by presumed “experts who talked with God,” that the Book of Mormon was the best tome to read to attain at-one-ment with Jesus.  I proceeded to tear to pieces, to dissect, analyze, reconstruct and incorporate everything inscribed in the religious tomes.  When pulpit speeches became vapid, I spent hours searching every “good book” in and out of the pews.  The spirituality, the at-one-ment I was seeking never materialized, not in the books, not in the worship services, and not in the charitable activities.  When I dropped the books and sought spiritual communion, I found transcendence and eventually the at-one-ment I was seeking.  It came in the still of night like Jacob of old.  Not once, but twice, so far.

Of all the people I observed who seemed to have attained transcendence and communion with God, virtually all of them were men, and they had not achieved it through religious piety nor conformity.  (By their Nature, women are not normally constituted to seek this state.  It is a form of surrender that spooks the hell out of them.)  Fifty years to discover that religion is not about spirituality!  Mormonism is not designed to promote spirituality.  It is designed to promote Authority through spiritual impotence.  All religions do this, but Mormonism has the disease in spades and clubs.  The so-called “experts” within Mormonism’s hierarchy don’t commune with God.  They speak as though they were God.  They assert all manner of rules, policies, practices, and rites as if it came from God’s own mouth.  But if you ask any of them about the nature of their communion with God, all they can profess is some lame, vague “testimony” about His words in the “tomes.”  They profess an unutterable feeling, or worse, an irrational, indefensible conviction as the basis for their ability to speak for God.  What they say sounds just like what the Levite priests proclaimed in Deuteronomy.  What they do reflects what the Sanhedrin priests did which Jesus condemned.  None of them since the beginning of Mormonism’s organization have ever professed the transcendent experience, claimed by ancient prophets.  Take the Enochic, or the Jacobian accounts of heavenly vision as the pattern of prophetic impetus, and align it with that of Mormon authority personalities, and they are as dry as the dead men’s bones Jesus denounced.

What IS spirituality?  One can start with what it is not, and that is anything connected with religion.  Did Jesus or Mohammed join a religion?  Jesus didn’t preach joining a religion to find spiritual communion.  And if you think he started a religion because he started a “church”, you don’t know your own language, nor the history of Christian religion, nor the manner of teaching Jesus employed.  To begin with, Jesus was not a Christian!  And if you think Jesus is the symbolic embodiment of Christianity, compare the Christianity of Jesus admonishing Peter to put up his sword with Christianity from that moment forward.

In the first place the language Jesus spoke was Aramaic.  Most of the religious world spins on the Greek translated form of Matthew 16:18.  Mistake number one in interpreting this passage is the assumption that the book of Matthew contains Jesus’ actual words! (Bart Ehrman, Jesus Interrupted)  Number two is accepting the Greek versions of “rock” for the singular version in Aramaic—which is a pun, consistent with allegory.  And three, to assume there is no difference between the word “church” and religion.  On this singular passage in all the New Testament Christianity bases the credibility and validity of authority of their religious dogmas.

Puns are metaphors.  Part of what makes them so humorous is contemplating the literal existence of something abstract and its consequent absurdity.  Did Jesus literally mean Peter was a rock?  Did he literally mean the “rock” of his “church” was Peter the “rock”?  To literalize this is not only absurd, but is inconsistent with the manner in which Jesus taught his followers—his congregation—his “church.”  Jesus taught by allegory, which in Hebrew has many English forms, but all viewed as deriving from the same root.  In the English translation the allegory is referred to as a parable.  It is a synthetic story with a moral value.  Clearly this passage in Matthew is an allegory.  I find it most remarkable that few, if any, religious intellectuals have observed this glaring, obvious utility.  Jesus was comparing Peter’s exclamation of conviction to that which others would exhibit among his congregation of followers—his “church.”  Church derives from the Greek word kyriake, meaning supply or house.  But the word apparently used in the Greek to compliment the Aramaic meaning was ekklesia.  Its meaning derives from the Greek usage of summoning an army.  What army?  The “army” of his followers—those who subscribed to his teachings—that the “Kingdom of Heaven” was not only at hand, but within each one of them.  His “army”, his “church” was not of this world—meaning that it was not constituted after the manner of men when they organize themselves together.  This is the only interpretation that is consistent with the ancient Essene texts which describe the life and philosophy of Jesus.  The reason the Sanhedrin rejected him as the Messiah is he did not have any interest in the literal liberation of the Jews.  He wanted to liberate them from their spiritual servitude.  So they murdered him for the insurrection his teachings caused.

Jesus in speaking by allegory (metaphor) is showing how his followers will come together and “organize” themselves—through the same conviction which Peter declared.  Jesus did not organize a religion (or church as we have altered the meaning) with Peter at its head.  If Peter was at the head of the church (an earthly construct inconsistent with Jesus’ teachings—my kingdom is not of this world), where does that put Jesus?

The spiritual teachings by Jesus in Matthew (6-16) have nothing to do with religion.  It is about a society of people who each have discovered the treasure contained in his declarations of true values.  They are about liberation of the heart, to surrender it to God, and become at-one with him.  This is the meaning of spirituality, and it has nothing to do with the vapid discourses in church, nor the insipid rituals which represent the form of spirituality, but have no substance.  (Women love ritual as it permits self-justification while avoiding the moment of reckoning.  Ritual is the appearance of spirituality without its substance and its required self-sacrifice.  The purpose of the female veil isn’t to conceal a woman’s emotions.  It is there to intercept the all-seeing eye of God.  They don’t want to be found out—that they don’t know what they want because they don’t know who they are.  Reconciliation with God is how one discovers who one is and the beginning of real spirituality.)

As Catholic friar Richard Rohr said: Religion is the safest place to avoid God.  God teaches self-surrender.  Religion teaches self-control. The sum purpose of religion is control—to define limits beyond which man cannot tread.  That is exactly what the Prince of Darkness seeks.  Adam is said to have refused it.  Jesus defied it.  Man upholds it.

The entire concept of the Mormon Plan of Salvation is the impressment of God’s children into hierarchies.  At the top closest to God, are those who conformed to everything Mormon authorities told their acolytes to do, no matter what cost in spirituality or temporal welfare.  From there on down are various divisions splitting people off from each other in terms of how valiant they were in following Mormon authority in the name of God.  Once their kingdom assignment is consummated, that is their fate, worlds without end.  They cannot ever rise any higher.  (Even their most accomplished apologists cannot plainly distinguish between “progression” within a kingdom and advancement to another.)  The carrot and stick of fear is used to goad everyone into the top echelon, full well knowing few can possibly attain that kind of “perfection.”  They proclaim their church as family oriented, but you must be willing to destroy your earthly family and its solidarity if it ever interferes with the church’s objectives.  Personally, I’ve failed over the course of a half century of study to ascertain where any of that practice and dogma coheres with Jesus Talk.   The inconsistency became glaringly acute when I had my first transcendent experience. Once I had been reconciled with myself and Jesus, reviewing my objectives in coming here, I found myself increasingly at odds with Mormonism. But it didn’t stop there.  I found that the entire culture of Christianity had fully missed the mark on what Jesus’ mission was about and the purpose of his doctrines.

By the time I had come to my crossroads with Mormonism, I found I had come full circle with the little child at age four, who continually asked Why?  I had come home, and in so doing discovered who I was, what I wanted, and who I served.  Future posts will present some of the anomalies, the irrationalities of the religion I was told was the only true one.  I now know why I did not observe any association of Jesus with religion during that ascension.  He never started one.  Atonement is about being reconciled with yourself, with him posing as the “mirror” of self-evaluation.  Only he can help you see when you are “good enough.”

SethSmee

REFERENCES

"Although it is true that petros and petra can mean “stone” and “rock” respectively in earlier Greek, the distinction is largely confined to poetry. Moreover the underlying Aramaic is in this case unquestionable; and most probably kepha was used in both clauses (“you are kepha” and “on this kepha”), since the word was used both for a name and for a “rock”. The Peshitta (written in Syriac, a language cognate with Aramaic) makes no distinction between the words in the two clauses. The Greek makes the distinction between petros and petra simply because it is trying to preserve the pun, and in Greek the feminine petra could not very well serve as a masculine name."

The Expositor’s Bible Commentary: Volume 8 (Matthew, Mark, Luke) (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1984), page 368 JPK pages 17-18

Jesus Interrupted Bart Ehrman
Misquoting Jesus Bart Ehrman