Did Jesus get His message mixed-up?

This would present theologians with a big problem. Inconsistency is imperfection. Imperfection cannot therefore be attributed to God. Furthermore, inconsistencies in God’s message would dangerously threaten the authority, sanctity and inerrancy of Holy Scripture.

Yet we have the Lord God making the following two statements:

I came to set a man at variance against his father, and the daughter against her mother, and the daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law; and a man’s foes shall be they of his own household. (Matthew 10:35,36)

If any man cometh unto Me, and hate not his father, and mother, and wife, and children, and brethren, and sisters, yea, and his own soul also, he cannot be My disciple. (Luke 14:26)

So Jesus states in both passages that He wants domestic disharmony not peace, and warns people that without such family hatred they cannot become His followers.

What gives here? These statements are diametrically opposed to Jehovah’s Fourth Commandment of honoring father and mother (not to mention pooh-poohing spiritual love).

Thankfully, scientist/theologian Emanuel Swedenborg offers us a rational explanation by which we can escape such doctrinal schizophrenia and even strengthen our faith in God’s Word.

Swedenborg claimed that God’s Holy Word was a multi-leveled document. Its stories were more than a literal account of human history. They contained higher levels of meanings that conveyed purely spiritual content (as opposed to merely worldly or materialist content).

So even worldly terms like “father,” “brother,” ”sister,” “mother” and “household” contained richer messages about various qualities of the human spirit. Therefore, the word “father,” understood spiritually, would represent the main values and choices we make in life. These values impregnate the human heart and mind (mother), thus fathering and giving birth to our ideas about reality. One’s household is his or her worldview (or faith-system). “Sons” and “brothers” and “sisters” and “mothers” represent the various feelings (loves) and ideas (knowledge) and their resulting activities that occupy one’s spiritual household.

Knowing this we can now begin to make sense of the Lord’s apparent bad advice illustrated in the biblical verses quoted above. First, if one does not accept the Lord Jesus Christ as Savior, then one’s inner household contains a “father” and “progeny” that is opposed to God’s teachings. A household operating under opposing principles to that of spiritual love (which unites) will be divided against itself. It is such a household, that the Lord has issues with, for everything in it represents a man or a woman’s true spiritual foe and enemy (our true spiritual enemy is a worldview that stands in the way of peace and eternal blessedness).

The passages which lead up to the verses quoted above make it more clear that Jesus is referring to individuals whose household is not based on God’s spiritual tenets (and therefore adopt a different family of qualities into their household—qualities unworthy of spiritual love). This difference in orientation is the reason for the seeming discrepancy between Jesus and Jehovah—a discrepancy that cannot be reconciled with a simple terrestrial understanding of the terms “father,” “mother,” “brother,” “sister” or “household” used in Scripture.

I have shown you just a glimpse of the deeper revelations that are contained within God’s revealed wisdom. The Lord God has promised to return and reveal His true glory. It is by means of the deeper teachings and levels of meaning contained within Scripture that the Lord God’s true glory will unveil itself. How else can a finite book like the Bible hold God’s Infinite Wisdom?

My upcoming book Proving God will not only discuss these deeper teachings, it will actually show that this scaffolding of the biblical architecture also provides the means by which religion can interface with modern science in a most rational and orderly way!

http://www.provinggod.com

Are heaven’s angels in agreement with quantum physics?

Yes and no. Terrestrial scientists are not even in agreement as to what is really going on in the quantum world. That is why several different models have been developed over the last 80 years to express different interpretations.

While scientists do agree that the quantum micro-world represents a strange realm where primal entities exist in a non-local state of potentials (superposition), they are unsure whether this state is something strangely physical or completely non-material. Adding to this difficulty, scientists cannot grasp how the indeterminate and schizophrenic world of quantum froth (wave/particle duality) gives birth to the determinate properties of larger scale systems (like solar systems and galaxies). What is the causal connection between these opposing situations?

Simply throwing up one’s hands and chalking up everything to irreducible chance means there is no rational reason for why the universe is structured so rationally and orderly. Which is awkward since science believes it has reasoning on its side (rather than faith and religion). Furthermore, if scientists cling to the notion that the universe appeared out of nothing (ex nihilo) then creation could not have had a physical cause!

If the laws of physics ruling the universe on the fundamental level of reality, emerge out of a non-material, pre-space and pre-geometric realm beyond time and space, then you open a door for God to enter into the equation.

So if angels actually exist they would live in a non-local realm and would know which approach to quantum physics was most correct. Angels would have first-hand experience in observing creation and causal process from non-material first principles.

For assistance in helping us understand angelic perception, I believe that scientist/theologian Emanuel Swedenborg offers us the most complete and rational approach. He claimed that angels perceive dynamics, process and action totally removed from their involvement with time and space. While most scientists who cling to materialistic philosophies see action devoid of time or space as impossible, Swedenborg offered an abundance of rational approaches to this problem. By the way, eminent physicist John Wheeler theorized that spacetime might have arisen out of a pre-geometric realm.

Swedenborg would have described Wheeler’s pre-geometry and the Spiritual World as one and the same thing. This means that he would have identified pre-geometry as spiritual forms resulting from spiritual forces and activity. To form a picture of this non-material realm we merely need to focus on our own thoughts. We can be standing at a bus stop in winter but our mind may be on a Caribbean beach. Our thoughts have real trajectories, directionality, and targets. Mental activity is non-physical and not constrained by physical laws. More intriguing, thoughts can be arranged into real order and coherent structure, giving rise to human understanding and belief-systems (worldviews). This non-physical structure and order is oriented towards our life-choices and values.

To sum all this up, Swedenborg claimed that complexity (including bio-structure) emerged from non-material complexity in a non-spatial and non-temporal realm. An Infinite Creator, like God in heaven, certainly fits the bill for representing a non-physical source of irreducible complexity. Nature’s incessant drive for self-organization comes from a creative, unifying force from the non-physical realm of heaven. This force, or first principle in the universe is LOVE!

Everyone can agree that the essence of Love is to unite. Love unites people as well as creates the non-physical structure of our worldviews from the values we choose. What we love, we value. Similarly, all order and orientation in the physical universe comes from Love’s non-material endeavor to unite things into coherent structure.

Love in heaven corresponds to harmonic principles in the physical universe.

So, physicists will be challenged in the future to see that within their idea of quantum foam lay deeper worlds of order and process—including non-physical process. Physicist David Bohm had similar ideas of a hierarchical or layered design of reality.

This is just a small taste of the issues I will be tackling in my upcoming book Proving God. It will be available mid-March.

http://www.provinggod.com

Have you been hacked?

I suspect many of you have. I was hacked not long ago but it was quickly caught and dealt with. Hackers can be mischievous (looking for a challenge) or downright evil. This is the price we pay for the huge benefits of living in the Informational Age of the Internet.

Far more sinister is the fact that the human race has been hacked even before computers were invented. According to scientist/theologian Emanuel Swedenborg, the human mind gets hacked by evil spirits in hell. Deep within the human brain and mind we all share a similar mental plane with the inhabitants of the Spiritual World (because, inwardly, we terrestrial humans are all spirits covered in a material body-suit).

This situation allows both evil entities and heavenly angels to have access to the information of our memories. Evil spirits hack in to find and excite the worst in us while angels serve to provide spiritual security software from heavenly principles of love.

Between the evil spirits and angels, God keeps us in equilibrium between good and bad choices—to protect our free will. Over time, our individual life choices and inclinations determine who gets greater access to our personal info.

Temptation is nothing more than a battle between spiritual hackers and opposing security strategies for our hearts and minds. Within this scheme, religion can be looked at as God’s operating system.

By using the analogy of hackers, we can explore how Emanuel Swedenborg provides us with deeper insights about the Lord’s Advent and its true mission.

By coming into the world and taking on a material brain and body, Jesus not only could interface with and teach terrestrial humans, he could be hacked by the hells.

Since God is Infinite, no finite power can ever hope to attack the Divine. Swedenborg informs us that at the time the Lord came into the world, hell’s growing influence was upsetting the cosmic equilibrium and human free will was threatened.

While the Lord was on earth a hidden battle was raging. Evil spirits could now attack and tempt God through his finite material brain and human hereditary traits (received from the mother). Every time Jesus overcame an influence from hell, He perfected His human nature until it became perfectly united with His Divine Nature on the Cross (glorification).

The Crucifixion was not salvation in itself. It was the means by which the Lord endured his final temptations of the human flesh from hell and forever gained the power to restore cosmic equilibrium and protect human free will. Without free will the human race cannot be saved from the spiritual hackers who are constantly trying to gain access to our memory and manipulate it. Heaven (or hell) is a choice.

How do you feel about this unique interpretation?

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Happy New Year and a Happy New Jerusalem!

New Year’s Eve, the passing of one year and the ushering in of another, is celebrated all over the world. In New York’s Times Square, called the crossroads of the world, all eyes will be focused on a brightly lit ball that will mark the exact time of this new beginning.

There is obvious symbolism in this event.

New beginnings mean new hopes. The numerous lights which comprise the New Year’s Ball at Times Square represent our anticipation of a brighter future as it defies the darkness of the night and helps to dispel our darker thoughts.

An even deeper symbolic message can be teased out of this yearly celebration. The fact that the New Year’s Ball makes a descent from high above our heads symbolizes that true hope for positive change and a new beginning comes from above—from God.

The many lights that comprise the New Year’s Ball represent the numerous teachings, tenets and truths that descend to us from heaven and offer enlightenment for us to begin our lives anew.  We instinctively grasp this by our inclination to make New Year’s resolutions at this time every year.

Deeper still, this celebration has a strong parallelism with the descent of the Holy City, the New Jerusalem, from heaven. Its light is spiritual and comes from God’s wisdom, and therefore, represents a new habitation for the human soul.

The crowds gathering at Times Square to watch the ball descend symbolize oneness—a unity of hearts and minds. For this to happen in a sustained and permanent way, all eyes must be open to, and focused on God’s heavenly message.

Happy New Year and Happy New YOU!

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Planting seeds in people’s heads

We have all either heard or used the expression of “planting an idea in someone’s head.” It is a wonderful metaphor that is rich in meaning.

Metaphors are a symbolic language used to explain the invisible world of human mental activity in terms of visible things found in the physical world. For instance, the expression stated above treats an “idea” as though it were a “seed.”

The symbolism is easy to follow and makes perfect sense. An idea can be planted into someone’s mind, take root, grow, blossom, and finally bear fruit. “Fruit” represents the goodness of an action produced from the original implanted idea. If other people benefit from this fruitfulness (good works) it will create new seeds in their minds as well.

A seed perfectly portrays how goodness is made fruitful and information is multiplied within the human heart and mind. Nature and human nature are equally prolific!

What I find miraculous in such metaphors is how Mother Nature lends herself so perfectly to helping humans express mental processes with terrestrial processes. The metaphors that can be made between the two distinct worlds are innumerable. To offer a few more simple examples, we can be described as having a “sunny” disposition, a “cloud” over our head, or as a “diamond in the rough.”

The second thing I find miraculous about this procedure is that humans instinctively grasp this transcendental relationship.

According to scientist/theologian, Emanuel Swedenborg, God created things to be that way. The natural world is a physical analog of all the things that can take place in the human mind and spirit.

Evidence for this Divine scheme is that Jesus used parables to communicate deeper messages during His ministry. The irony is that while metaphor is instinctive to humans, such language escapes our everyday habitual minds. This is why many of the fanciful Bible stories have led “reasoning” individuals to challenge the inerrancy and authority of God’s Holy Word.

Every story in Scripture, whether historical or prophetical, contains deeper messages about God’s relationship with each of us. In fact, the Second Coming commences as individuals open up to these deeper teachings and allow for greater understanding and intimacy with the Divine Creator.

The purpose of this blog is to help the Lord God plant new spiritual seeds.

http://www.provinggod.com

I believe in Santa Claus!

Yes, I am all grown up. But the more I look into the spiritual symbolism represented by Santa Claus the more I believe He is fundamentally real!

Let us start with Santa’s characteristics. He has a long white beard. This symbolizes wisdom (an aged and experienced mind) expressed in outward acts of goodness from purity. All true wisdom is acting from love. Santa’s jolly laugh, rosy cheeks and ample girth (fat symbolizes goodness) are all further outward signs of the inner qualities of his big heart.

Santa’s outfit is red and white. Red symbolizes love and white symbolizes purity, which are spiritual features.

Santa lives at the North Pole. Scientifically speaking, the North Pole represents a singularity. You can’t go further north than the North Pole. A singularity represents a boundary where spacetime ends and physical laws break down. Hence, Santa lives in a realm beyond space and time (like heaven) so his actions are not constrained by the laws of physics. Thus, Santa can perform miraculous things—like deliver toys to every child in the world in a single night and from a single bag! So Santa not only portrays a kind of omniscience (wisdom), but omnipresence (can be in many places at one time) and omnipotence (his bag of gifts never runs out).

Santa’s love is spiritual because it is angelic and inclusive!

Santa’s mode of transportation is a big sleigh driven by reindeer that can fly above the earth. These magical creatures symbolize higher ideals that can soar above the lower and common values of the everyday world. A sleigh symbolizes doctrine or belief system—the mental vehicle that transports us in life.

If you count “eight” reindeer, then the symbol of Santa and his sled represents the approach of a new beginning (an eighth day corresponds to the beginning of a new week or cycle). If you add Rudolph and his shiny red nose to the pack, the symbolism goes further to represent a holistic (nine) perception (nose) of reality from the principle of love (red) and truth (shining light).

That Santa cares about children being “good” is the same message that God gives to the world. And Jesus while on earth urged everyone to be like little children (which symbolizes innocence). Even the tradition of children sitting on Santa’s knee symbolizes that in order to receive our proper gifts we must be willing to be in obedience (sitting) to living a life according to the higher ideals of goodness. A knee, which connects the higher part of a leg to the lower part, represents the connection between higher spiritual ideals to the lower worldly mind so that we can walk in righteousness.

That Santa slides down chimneys is also a symbol with great spiritual significance. The hearth represents the human heart. Therefore, Santa delivers his gifts if we let him into our hearts. We let him into our hearts by being good. Gifts symbolize an increase in the goodness of the heart because they represent sharing.

That is why Santa places the gifts under the Christmas tree. A Christmas tree is representative of the Tree of Life in the Garden of Eden that God planted for the human race, which symbolizes our heart’s harvest of the fruitfulness of God’s love and wisdom.

I believe in Santa Claus because I believe in God. The evolution of the Santa Claus character within the human psyche over the years was a process directed by God’s providence and the angels of heaven, whose job it is to lift our minds to wonderful and miraculous things.

Merry Christmas, everyone!

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The symbolism of the Christmas colors Red and Green

In the same way that Christmas contains a deeper spiritual message within the various external traditions of gift giving, festive meals, eggnog, roasting chestnuts and decorations, so do the colors “green” and “red.”

The color green represents the sprouting of new spiritual thoughts in our mind. Green is the color of the plant kingdom, which emerges from the dead of winter, as the light of the spring sun gets stronger. Similarly, new thoughts arise in our minds as we celebrate the Lord’s Advent of new “light” coming into the world.

Red symbolizes love. New spiritual thoughts need love’s warmth to continue to grow (just like plants also need the sun’s vernal heat). So the colors green and red symbolize the birth of new spiritual activity in our minds and hearts, as we worship the birth of the baby Jesus in the world.

Indeed, this miraculous birth gains deeper meaning if we allow the Lord to be born within our hearts and minds. This is what we do when we follow the Lord’s teachings. Christmas is a game-changer.

The Lord’s birth represents our rebirth.

That fact that we use “red” and “green” for the colors of Christmas is no accident. It is the result of angelic and heavenly influences that flow down into the instinctive operations of the human mind.

So have a very merry (and deeper) Christmas!

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Barry The Blood Corpuscle

Once upon a time there was a blood corpuscle named Barry. He lived and worked with his blood brothers and sisters to maintain the operational health and integrity of their human host. This included rushing to the face when their human host was angry, leaving the face when their host was frightened, going to the stomach when their host was hungry and entering the various muscles as needed.

Barry and all his other blood buddies had to make sure they were perfectly attuned to the thoughts and wishes of their host or the entire organic system would quickly come to ruin. Most of the time it was a pretty straightforward job.

Then one day Barry and his platelet pals were given a strange new order from the host’s brain. They had just left the liver on their return back to the heart when they received orders to take a detour. Barry’s usual path took him to the heart where he would then be pumped into the lungs. This normal route allowed him and his pals to ditch old, unhealthy and heterogenous substances they had picked up along the way and to freshen up with a new supply of oxygen. That always felt great.

The lungs served to scrutinize the worthiness of the materials Barry and his friends were carrying. Again, this process was to assure that the quality of the blood corpuscles would perfectly reflect and correspond to the quality of their host’s heart and mind. But now they were being told to change their normal routine.

Apparently, their host was at that moment telling a big fat lie for the purpose of deception. Barry and his fellow corpuscles now had to find a way to imitate this diversion through taking a new direction in the body. What made this particularly challenging for Barry is that their host was spouting high-sounding, noble ideas, which involved the host’s intelligence but cleverly hid the intentions of the heart.

Barry and his company of corpuscle-friends were given orders by the brain to take a detour from the heart, passing immediately through the aorta and vena cava before returning back into the lungs. Barry realized that by going to the lungs through a less direct path, he was mimicking his host’s efforts to keep his thoughts refined yet separated and abstracted from his heart’s quality. This tricky maneuver permitted the host to communicate high-sounding ideals while sparing the heart’s intentions from coming under any direct self-scrutiny.

Over time, the host’s deceit became habitual and Barry was less able to jettison the hazardous materials from the host’s body because they now mirrored the toxic proclivity of the host’s heart. Barry noticed that he and his pals were getting thicker, heavier and stickier. Barry also noticed that the host was suffering from bouts of melancholy. If this was allowed to continue, Barry and his friends would eventually be forced to form dangerous clots in order to faithfully mimic the poisonous principles that were adhering to and “gunking-up” the host’s value-system.

Then one day a miracle happened.

Barry and his red-blooded buddies suddenly found themselves receiving directions to begin traveling through the coronary vessels of the heart in a new way that allowed them to pass rigorous inspection in the lungs not once, but two or three times, before being pumped out the ascending and descending aorta and back into the rest of the body. Barry and his cousin corpuscles felt happiness and levity again as they were able to expel their noxious substances with greater zeal.

Barry learned from what was going on in the brain that their host had found God again and began a new life of introspection, incorporating spiritual principles back into his life. It was because of this new endeavor of intensive introspection by the host that Barry and his platelet pals could again take their chemical baggage to be properly inspected by the lungs, bringing new life and vigor to the entire hemoglobinic community and ultimately to their human host.

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Johnny gets a spiritual reading lesson

Once upon a time, a perceptive lad named Johnny was reading the Genesis chapters of the Holy Bible. He was at that age when kids start questioning things. He found the stories fascinating and they kindled his imagination but he found them difficult to believe.

Johnny had just finished the Genesis story where Jacob fools his father Isaac into blessing and giving his older brother’s birthright to him. Since Isaac was getting old, with failing eyesight, and Esau, his older brother was “hairy,” Jacob simply put on a furry glove and pretended he was his father’s firstborn.

Johnny had doubts about the possibility of such an unlikely scenario, especially since Jacob didn’t even bother to disguise his voice. The trick had worked! But no sooner did Jacob get his father’s blessings than Esau walked in to ask for the same thing. Isaac, now realizing that his younger son had committed fraud, experiences a “synaptic” moment.

Not only did Jacob’s glove trick seem improbable to Johnny, he was also surprised that God let the younger son get away with the deceit. What kind of spiritual lesson or message was that? Was the commandment not to steal inoperable at the time?

Suddenly a beautiful angel appeared in Johnny’s room. “You seem perplexed,” said the angel. “Perhaps I can help.”

Johnny was momentarily stunned but recovered quickly from the sight of this heavenly visitor. He lifted up the Bible and asked, “are these stories true?”

“The Bible stories are more true than most humans can comprehend,” came the angel’s unexpected answer.

“How can a story be more” true” than being an historical fact?” asked the confused boy.

“God has infinite wisdom and creativity,” explained the angel. “God’s divine writing style uses people in ways to portray many levels of meaning. When a person has access to these higher meanings, then the stories of Scripture make more a lot more sense, especially as to their relevancy in the modern world.”

“What higher meanings are behind Jacob’s trickery?” asked Johnny.

The angel’s face took on the countenance of someone who had a difficult topic to explain. “Here goes… The story of Isaac and his two sons symbolize the mental process people must go through in their spiritual evolution. Esau and Jacob represent the two main offspring of the human rational mind—knowledge and love.

Love is the firstborn of the two, because without some passion knowledge will not be sought. But knowledge—which accumulates from learning and education—takes precedence and is of more immediate value at the first stage of mental growth. It is from knowledge that we first discern what is good and what to love.

But over time we begin to discern truth from what is good. This is a reversal of order. Since the human mind first gives more value to knowledge, this is symbolized as Jacob trying to portray his older brother as goodness itself. But until sincere goodness is obtained, Esau has to play second fiddle to his younger brother. The “trickery” of Jacob merely symbolizes that the human mind first is made to believe that procuring knowledge is goodness itself but learns otherwise later—when Esau enters the scene and Isaac has a ‘synaptic’ moment.”

Johnny thought about this for a while then asked the angel, “Why doesn’t God just explain these things in simple ordinary language?”

“I have only scratched the surface of the infinite wisdom portrayed In God’s Holy Word. Ordinary language can only express one meaning—a literal meaning. Only a symbolic language could contain all these wonderful things that even we angels in heaven find inexhaustible,” said the angel with great humility and reverence.

“Will religion ever teach these amazing things about Scripture?” asked Johnny.

“Yes,” said the angel. “That is why the Lord said He would return and make his full glory known.”

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Where will human evolution go next?

Evolution shows a real trajectory towards increased bio-complexity yielding greater intelligence and consciousness. The human race and its complex brain structure represent the cutting edge of this trajectory—so far.

Based on the evidence that evolution has provided us it would be a safe bet to assume that life’s continuing trajectory will be towards further increased intelligence and consciousness. After all, the human brain is still gathering more knowledge about the world it finds itself in.

What differentiates the human brain from brains of other creatures is that it can take in the sensory data from the circumfluent world and find deeper meaning through mental abstractions. As physicist David Bohm once put it “…to recognize anything whatsoever is to see that as various ratios are related to an object, so are they related to our mental concept of it.”

Human consciousness and its intelligence can recognize and distill ratios out of nature that other animals are oblivious to. Furthermore, new mental insights and creative thought come from recognizing novel ratios and analogies within the subject matter (ratios of ratio). These new ratios and analogies lead to profound mental abstractions including mathematics.

Currently, science does not embrace the idea of “purposeful” design in creation or evolution. So God is not a part of the scientific equation. But what if it could be proven that God had anticipated the future trajectory of human intelligence and consciousness by providing special hidden substrata within sensory experience that would allow humans to discover deeper analogies and ratios?

Scientist/theologian Emanuel Swedenborg claimed that God indeed designed Sacred Scripture in a way that new analogies could be distilled (revelation) from the ordinary sensory experience of it various narratives. In other words, the stories within Holy Scripture have substrates built into their architecture in the form of higher levels of meaning and analog. It is in these substrates (sacred scaffolding) that God’s Word displays its authority, inerrancy and sacredness.

The caveat is that embracing such an unexpected reality in God’s Word requires an evolutionary “jump” in human cognitive function. Few scientists or theologians are mentally and emotionally disposed to hearing such things.

So I will keep writing my blog posts in the hope that human evolution will catch up to the cognitive level required for recognizing the deeper ratios and analogies of God’s revealed wisdom.

http://www.provinggod.com