two commandments

“Teacher, which is the greatest commandment in the Law?”

 

Jesus replied: “‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.”

- Matthew 22:36-40

The second is like it. Love your neighbor as yourself. The second is like it.

lord (n):
1. a person who has authority, control, or power over others; a master, chief, or ruler
2. a person who exercises authority from property rights; an owner of land, houses, etc
3. a person who is a leader or has a great influence in a chosen profession

We have free will. We have authority, control, and power over ourselves as well as our homes. We lead ourselves, through our consciousness. Whoever is your Lord is your God. That's you.

Be your own God. Love yourself. And if you can't yet, become a God you can love. That means being yourself--because you won't love yourself, if you're being something you're not--and possibly making a few changes. But really, wouldn't they be changes you've always intended, deep down, to make someday? There's no hope for you if you lack a conscience, but if you have a conscience, trust it, as well as your consciousness--and you can do and be the god that you're meant to be, perhaps not now, not overnight, but someday.

A teacher once told me in class, "You do not have a soul. You are a soul." I disagree. I am not a soul; I have a soul. I am a human, but that is only a shell. What makes me alive, immortal, and divine is the essence of life within me, the force that drives me, the eternal destiny that I am always moving toward. Every living creature has that, but because I am human, I am conscious of it--although not fully, not yet. That is god. That is my higher conscious, my greater purpose, my true nature, and it trascends the trappings of this life and every lifetime I shall endure. And that is where love comes from.

Questions

If you were God, would you live differently?

If you realized that someone you knew was God, would you treat them diffrently?

Why?

Why not try living in a way that would not need to be altered if you were God--and treating people in a way that would not need to change if they were?

And if you were God, would you love yourself as you do not now? If someone you loved was God, would you love them more?

Why?

What kind of god would you be? Would you pick someone specific to embody--a Greek god, an Indian goddess, the Great Mother, the All Father, Jesus Christ?

Or would you be your own god, like all of the rest have been? Would it be enough to be yourself? Would you need to change?

What if finding god is just finding yourself?

What kind of god are you? Are you the type of god that you or anyone else would want to worship?

What kind of god do you want to be? What kind of (wo)man do you want to be?

Different?

In the polythiestic pantheons, each god is an individual--with his or her own strengths and weaknesses, flaws and virtues. They were not perfect, but they were still gods. They did not try to be anything other than themselves, for better or for worse. Most pantheons had a chief god, but one thing they seem to agree upon was that the lesser gods had free will. Each stood for something; each one's personality represented an aspect of life, and yet it was not all that they were. Their lives were as complex as ours, and aside from immortality and their magical abilities, they were quite human. There was nothing divine about them at all, really, nothing you couldn't find in humans--except their immortality.

Do our souls live on after death? Are our souls mortal or immortal? When we die, do we return to a great sea of consciousness, losing memory and self, and becoming one with it, melding with the energies of others? Do we remain there, or are we reincarnated? If we're reincarnated, are we wiped clean at a soul level--do our souls cease to exist as they were and become part of a sort of homogenous pool, from which new souls are created? Or do our souls stay in tact throughout all of our lifetimes? Do we go to Heaven or to Hell? As long as you believe we do something more than cease to exist, our souls are immortal.

And while we may not have the literal magic abilities of the gods, we can wield the power of magic and of prayer in our lives. We can change--ourselves, others, the world. We can create anything--new life, art, cities, technology. We can destroy--life and nature, things that are good, things that are evil. We can wield the forces of "good" and "evil," with the very same hands. The gods could do things that we know are impossible, but then things are possible for us now that once were impossible.

What, then, makes us different from the gods of the polytheistic pantheons?

And if man is both human and divine, both good and evil, what makes us different from the God of the Abrahamic peoples, who has his own duality?

Who are your Gods?

God gives us free will and demands that we respect his. He loves us unconditionally and commands the same of us towards him. He forgives us anything and expects the same from us.

If we can do this for God, we can do this for the people in our lives--maybe not everyone, because we're not perfect, and neither is anyone else. But we can still apply these basic principles.

Respect people's free will, even if we don't agree with their choices. Love people, even if you don't like or even hate what they do. Forgive people, even if they don't deserve it. And ask the same of others.

Are there people in your life who you will always respect and love, no matter what, people you would forgive for anything? Are there those who would do that for you? Who are the Gods in your life?

"God is a Spirit." - Jesus, John 4:24

What can I learn from an imperfect God?

Let's look at this imperfect God of the Abrahamic peoples from a different perspective.

This God sacrifices his son for the sake of the world, and since his son is Him, it's really self-sacrifice. I'm not sure why he needed to do that. He's God, so he was capable of opening the gates of Heaven on his own. But okay.

The Bible is full of words about his jealousy, wrath, and vengeance. He tells man not to be like him in these ways, then condones stoning and gives forth a list of people that should be killed. But then his Son comes along, and we are freed from these old ways so that "Thou shalt not kill" becomes the supreme law. Good call, God. Laws should change with the times, and compassion is admirable.

He drowns the world in a flood, but he saves some righteous people. He later sees what he has done and vows not to do it again. So this is a god that can regret and learn from his mistakes and learn better judgement through experience.

If you apologize, he'll forgive you, as long as you're sincere.

If you come to him, and seek him, he will accept you and give you unconditional love, even if you err, provided you are trying, because he does not expect perfection. He tells us to love. Jesus said that the greatest commandment was to love God, with the second greatest being to love your neighbor.

If you call upon him, he will listen to your prayers, giving you strength, courage, protection, whatever he can, within reason. He can be a good friend.

If you're a good person and you do good in the world, he will bless you--even if you have to wait til you're old and gray for that happy ending you deserve, like in The Color Purple, or until you're dead and go to Heaven. He rewards people for doing good.

God preached a fair bit of intolerance, but then his son Jesus began encouraging tolerance--and yea, God saw that this was good. It's good to change for the better. Sometimes the best thing to do is change your mind.

If you do wrong, he punishes you. There has to be some justice, some repurcussions for a man's actions, after all.

He recognizes the innocence and sacredness of children.

He is a Creator.

He takes full responsibility for his actions and offers no excuses, but does try to explain them. One of my favorite stories of gods taking responsibility is the story of Aries and Aphrodite, who are caught in the act of adultry by Hephaestus; undaunted by their shame, they name their daughter Harmony, who becomes the apple of her father's eye.

He can show mercy.

He acts as our judge in the end, judging us by the summation of our lives rather than this or that, and encourages us not to judge others, as we don't know them as He does. Both God and Jesus were anti-hypocrisy.

He wants us to realize that we are naturally sinners and accept that we are not perfect.

God wants us to have faith. Jesus once praised a Pagan's faith, incidentally. She was Roman.

He encourages people to give to the poor, to be faithful to their spouses, to work hard but observe a day of rest, to tell the truth. Don't kill, don't steal, don't waste.

Therefore be imitators of God, as beloved children. - Ephesians 5:1

The Delusion of a Perfect God

Let's talk about being Godlike. But God is perfect and infallible; he makes no mistakes. He is all-loving and all-forgiving. He is omniscent--sees all, knows all. He can do wrong. No one is that wholly good; no one can be so pure. It's impossible. Right?

That's bullshit.

Find me this perfect, infallible, all-loving, all-forgiving, know-it-all God. He doesn't exist--even in the Bible.

If God is perfect and infallible and makes no mistakes, explain man--man who murders and rapes, lies and cheats and steals, man who turns upon brother and wages war, man who has corrupted the environment and poached species' into extinction. If he is all-loving and all-forgiving, explain the Great Flood; explain the burning of Sodom and Gomorrah. If he knows all, why didn't he know in advance that he would regret the Great Flood and vow never to do that again--and thus not have done it in the first place? If he can do no wrong, wouldn't he have nothing to regret?

God said "Bring me fifty good men," and they could not--so everyone died, including the innocent children. Yeah, they were innocent children, so they were spared from a lifetime of sin and taken into Heaven to be with God eternally. That makes it all okay. (So does that make abortion okay? Would it be okay for me to kill a few kids? I mean, after all, they'd go to Heaven. It's cool, right?) I wonder if God has just never heard of Detroit or Juarez. But maybe they're next on the list now that New Orleans has been decimated.

And Lot is spared, along with his daughters. LOT, who offered up his virgin daughters to appease the angry mob that had gathered at his door, demanding that he give up his two visitors, angels in disguise, intending as it is insinuated to rape them. "No, spare them--take my daughters instead!" When told not to look back, Lot's wife looked back and was turned into a pillar of salt. Seems a heavy price to pay for looking back, but that's your reward for disobeying God. So God saves Lot, who is willing to sacrifice his daughters to a raping mob, and Lot's disobedient wife, and he lets all those other people, including the babies, die. Then, Lot's stupid, stupid daughters, believing they are the only people left in the world, get Lot drunk on wine and have sex with him to conceive children. You know what we call that today? Rape. But God makes no mistakes?

God tells Abraham to kill his son. Then he's like, "Oh, just testing you." That wasn't wrong? So, would it be okay for me to test my kid's father that way? "Go and kill our son, to prove you love me." Really? But it's okay for God to do it. Because God's God. Different strokes for different folks, you know.

I know, I know. Blasphemy. Burn me at the stake. Stone me. Leviticus commands it. I'm serious. 24:16

God also wants us to kill rape victims who don't scream loud enough:
If a damsel that is a virgin be betrothed unto an husband, and a man find her in the city, and lie with her; Then ye shall bring them both out unto the gate of that city, and ye shall stone them with stones that they die; the damsel, because she cried not, being in the city. Deuteronomy 22:23-24

And women who aren't virgins on their wedding night, and people who worship other gods, and disobedient grownup children, and alcoholics--even men who gather sticks on the Sabbath. It's all in Deuteronomy--quite a read. But per John 8, Jesus himself was opposed to all this stoning.

The point is, if this is the God we accept, then man is quite capable of being Godlike. We can be loving and forgiving; we can be blood-thirsty and wrathful. We can do harm to others; we can commit horrible acts, justifying them to ourselves with whatever reasons we'd like. After all, we were made in His image.

And the gods of the Greek, Roman, Egyptian, and Indian pantheons weren't perfect either. There are hundreds of stories where they commit adultry, rape, murder, lie, steal--just do as they please, and man has to deal with it and still worship them and feel like shit if he himself does any of these things. Ever has it been that what a god does is okay, but if man does it, he should be ashamed and be punished.

So yeah, I'm still waiting for you to find me this God that isn't at all like mankind. Don't say Jesus. He let Lazarus die so he could bring him back from the dead. That's in John. This is quite an interesting read, even if it is long-winded. The guy is obviously biased, but he makes a few good points. I've always had a pretty high opinion of Jesus, but as I read through the Bible lately, he does sound an awful lot like the cult leaders of today--an exaggerated ego, speaking in riddles so that none (or only the enlightened) can follow his logic, switching from a gentle manner to an agitated one (yeah, Jesus does say some pretty rude things in the Bible, calling people swine and fools and whatnot).

I gotta wonder if maybe all of Jesus' miracles were just parlor tricks, and people back then, not understanding science and being more gullible than today, just weren't intelligent enough to see through it--and so immortalized it all in writing. You know, lead poisoning used to make people seem dead--and then they'd wake up in caskets. They used to put bells on the tombstones and have someone watch over each night for a bell-ringing. That's where the term graveyard shift came from. There are ways to "die" and then wake up, without divine intervention.

Now I'm not saying that's how it is, that Jesus was nothing more than a cunning cult leader. I'm just asking, what if?

If God were a man, not God, how would we judge him?

I know, more blasphemy. You'd better get to throwing those stones. We wouldn't want to disregard Leviticus. Or is the bit about homosexuality being a sin the only bit of Leviticus that is still relevant?

If you want to follow this guy, by all means, do it. He has good reasons that we don't always understand for the things that he does. (Just like murderers on Death Row.)