Jesus and the Womb of God

This is where I get creative and inspired and perhaps even mystical.

Creative is a dirty word in American business. I learned that the hard way. It shows signs of intelligence which is verboten in our present American fascist state of things left undone, half-assed in the political and religious forums now abandoned to MBAs, PhDs, lawyers and hedge fund managers.

I am inpired by my recent postings on the forgotten female half of our civilisation. I use the British/European spelling. There is no civilization left in the American myth. But that is another story. (sorry for the negative aside)

If you look at anything, you can look at it twice and in a totally different light. I like to use the Earp Brothers and the fight at the O.K. Corral in 1881 in Tombstone Arizona as an example of an urban legend being cast into stone. It, the bottom line, was that the Earp brothers were out to make money and blow town. The truth is that they acquired a lot of deeds for land, property and mines.

They wanted to leave but there were bigger crooks than they running the town. Somebody redrew the town map and every lot in town was in dispute and had to be resurveyed. Of course the surveying fee was outrageous and enough to make most people sell out at a discount and leave town. Or you could sue in court.

So while the Earp brothers got entangled in Republican urban politics they crossed paths with the cowboys and rural democratic politics. The demographics have reversed over a century later. While the Earps didn’t mind eating stolen Mexican beef bought off the Cowboys, the Cowboys wanted a little more respect from the Earps while in town. And so it went.

The rest is history or is it? The Urban legend of the good city dweller against the evil cattle rustlers was set in stone by Hollywood. The good guys were the urban crooks and the bad, bad cowboys just drifted away into history.

In dealing with the concept of women in the church or a religious setting, one has to wonder where and how the urban legend of Jesus got set in Stone. At one point Jesus was real and just like the Earp brothers in Tombstone.

Everybody has a story, a direction and a purpose in life. Getting back to Jesus. As I read and read account after account, opinion after opinion, urban legend after urban legend I have strangely come back to some sort of mystical concept of Jesus.

(Here comes the mystical?)

That if the oldest gospel is dated around 70 C.E., then the oral history is being told and few if any living witnesses to Jesus were still around. In a world with a life expectancy of 35 years for the average human beings then and up until the beginning of the twentieth century, then the first and oldest account of Jesus is a third person account of an urban legend.

Let me throw in a little Islamic perspective which says that Jesus did not die on the cross nor was resurrected. That Jesus was assumed into heaven like the legendary prophet Elijah and you have what I mix with the beginning of the Gospel of John.

The beginning of the gospel of John calls Jesus Logos or the word or the reason God comes down to the perception of man.

The gospel of John is much more fluid and poetic in parts than the first three gospels. John is also the start of the Urban legend of the Jews as bad guys and the Jesus posse as the goodie two shoes of that O.K. Corral scenario.

Anyway, I look at the third party account of Mark and realize that if Mark is not a living eyewitness then he is describing Jesus and the perception and assumption of Mark is that Jesus is a man. No. I am not saying that Jesus is a woman. But if a person is writing history later, it is possible that you do not know 100% about who or what your history subject is about.

So if you take the Gnostic concept or poetic license of the Beginning of John 1:1-5 -

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning.

Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made. In him was life, and that life was the light of men. The light shines in the darkness, but the darkness has not understood it.

- You can look at Jesus from a different angle, like looking at a work of true art in a museum. I see some perfections and flaws of the artist so to speak.

That in real time, with a real Jesus preaching a real gospel, Jesus was neither male nor female. Jesus the logos, the word, the reason was standing right in front of you not unlike a space alien and you see, hear and perceive what you want to see, hear and perceive. Or what you are capable of perceiving in matters possibly divine.

If you are a male, you see a male. If you are female, you see a female. Jesus and his grouping of followers were both male and female. In God there is no male or female. In Jesus there is no male or no female as well?

It was not until after he dies or disappears from the scene that petty human traits arise. Suddenly is it not possible that Mary Magdalene was an apostle. Suddenly the gospels or Paul’s obsessions and petty male hang-ups become the things put into stone, into words on paper, a translation. The true and original urban legend fades into obscurity.

The miracle of God’s presence among us in the form of a future man, a humanist man, a divine male/female presence in our midst gets lost in translation.

I do not want to get into the logistics or the semantics of the Trinity which is really a stone age version, interpretation not suited to today’s modern scientific urban global person to deal with in a credible pattern or sense.

Without going much too deeply into this theory of mine which is already probably a half a dozen heresies rolled into one, I look at something rather symbolic of things, of teachings and urban myths and man and his engineering.

I look at the Hagia Sophia, or Santa Sophia, the primary center of Christianity for a thousand years. While this building, this church and the Eastern Rome flourished for a thousand years, they probably were herding domestic animals into the decrepit old Saint Peter’s Basilica in Rome in the winter time for shelter throughout the dark western ages while this magnificent building was the one true Church to the civilized worlds in the east. Here too Islam had one of its grandest buildings for close to five hundred years.

Hagia Sophia is related to the word logos or word or reason or touching the purpose of man in response to God and his prophets to the human race. Hagia Sophia is holy or sacred wisdom. The eastern Roman empire would have seemed to have been more attuned into a feminine sense of wisdom, or understanding, and coming from God. This as opposed to the western male view coming to us to the modern day.

The western church is scared shitless of the feminine and the womb - it is where we all came from - figuratively and literally.

When I look at the image above, (click for a larger image), I see wisdom written in stone, in concrete, in mosaics and the “Allah is Great” Quran plagues. I see mankind reaching out to the universe before science or man had a clue or sense about what the universe truly is.

Click on the image above of the Hagia Sophia. It was the center of Christian faith, the premier center for a thousand years. It was a major center of Islam, its grandest mosque, for close to five hundred years. It is the most sacred spot on planet earth to all faiths of the one God concept.

Sacred wisdom, sacred knowledge, the word, the reason, the logos – no matter how you translate it – here is the spot where heaven touched earth directly for fifteen hundred years.

Look at the enlarged image. What do you see? Is it a museum? Is it a basilica, a church? Is it a mosque?

Look deeper. What humankind has left here for all generations to see is the myth of God, the myth of the Prophets like Jesus among others. I would see a cave if I were a caveman.

I see a womb, perhaps the womb of God. I see great mystery. And then I am transported back to reality and it is just a building.

The perception of man toward - God, Jesus, Science, Art are all in their own way part of a formula, a plan, a logos, a reason, a whisper from above and a meaning for all things.

The purpose of life is a mystery. To an artist, life is poetry.

tolerance as a reason in this and every season

People and individuals keep on searching for meaning to life and circumstance in this cold, materialistic, godless, secular global culture.

Some people are writing columns to say that the movie Avatar is a vehicle to sell nature and pantheism. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar and not a penis. Sometimes a computer enhanced cartoon or Hollywood fantasy is just a computer enhanced cartoon or just a Hollywood fantasy.

This 24/7/365 knit picking over everything that does not conform to the traditional exceptional American concept of God is not a call to arms to preserve the traditional religionist culture. It is more a shouting in a warehouse, taking inventory, of obsolete aspects of the old Christian belief system before they are carted off onto the trash heap of history.

In my own personal search for a new meaning of the concept of God, I end this year listening to some Christmas Carols like the Brit atheist dilettante Richard Dawkins.

I am more convinced than ever that the current phase of belief in non-belief is wall paper glue filling in the voids of a yet to be printed or determined pastel belief pattern on that wallpaper that will be the norm for decades or centuries to come. Old paper comes down. New paper goes up. The practical and the mundane non-belief is a stop gap glue of many for the moment.

Many years ago as a native tourist investigating every nook and cranny of Independence National Historical Park, I came upon a gem of a colonial building. Back then the only entrance way was down an alley way and into a courtyard. The courtyard with gray paving stones and surrounding brick buildings and simple paned glass windows reminded me of something very plain but European. The RC church of St. Joseph’s was behind a very plain entrance way. Thus I found out that in History, this very pagan Jesuit church was allowed in Quaker Tolerant Pennsylvania in colonial times and still stands in present day downtown Philadelphia. Back then it was probably the only RC church for a hundred miles. It is also a gem inside architecturally in a very subtle kind of Baroque mixed with colonial style interior design.

This story leads me to the Quakers or Society of Friends, or I should say leads me back to Quakers because no matter what your beliefs or ethnic origins, if you grow up in Philly the subtle imprint of a Quaker sub-cultural essence lives on to this day.

This is not an endorsement of the Friends but in reading again in full detail their habits and beliefs I seem to be drawn back to the concept of simplistic beliefs in my personal search for God.

Indeed, the persistent agitator of George Fox against the established COE types is what no doubt got Charles II to settle his debts to the Quaker William Penn’s father’s estate with a land grant to his son a whole ocean away. Best to ship the pesky little religious varmints off to the New World than build more prisons. The Brits had yet to find and settle Australia.

One has to wonder in the recognizable shape of the Quakers that evolved in England, that someone like George Fox was not unaware of the various simplistic aspects of Islam. Perhaps there was a hidden mosque down some London alleyway in days of yore for a native tourist to discover and wonder at. Many books back then about Islam and the Gnostic thing but no hard manuscript evidence, only rumors, on the latter at that time.

I perceive some possible similarities between the two belief systems.

Quakers - the Religious Society of Friends

Among key Quaker beliefs are:

• God is love

• the light of God is in every single person

• a person who lets their life be guided by that light will achieve a full relationship with God

• everyone can have a direct, personal relationship with God without involving a priest or minister

• redemption and the Kingdom of Heaven are to be experienced now, in this world

It is in the inner light thing, this almost Gnostic thing that is a hallmark of Quaker belief.

The Quakers are also not very evangelical, preaching and recruiting to their belief system like some screaming Christian Constantine army press-gang thing.

The inner light of the creative force within endures. You must come to it. It does not necessarily come to you. Indeed, many people raised as a Quaker are not shining examples of this belief system like Richard Nixon as one example. But who is to judge really?

Putting beliefs aside I have to say that for a quiet bunch of unnoticed people in the woodwork so to speak they have founded and maintain many schools, universities – as well as maintain the ground work for doing what some would label as Christian but they themselves do not cling to any faith describing labels or agenda.

The most powerful thing I saw in my youth was a single force, behind the scenes in the widespread opposition to the Vietnam War, in the American Service Friends Committee and its lobbying efforts. At the height of the anger and discord in America around 1972, I remember how the city wanted to widen the road in front of a bunch of nineteenth century brick buildings. The buildings had to come down to make way for the widened street. One of the buildings I believe housed the local AFSC. When vacated I remember a home made sign of about a foot square made of shirt box cardboard and embellished with three simple words in laundry marker or dark crayon – it was tacked over the door of one of these abandoned buildings.

Those words were “Rendered unto Caesar”. Powerful words to make a statement about the then current injustice and unfairness of it all. Those words have lasted in my memory to this day and remind me of the power of simple actions to move governments from the wrong column of history and in to the correct wave energy of human history.

Enough of Philly tales. As this year ends I have two religious belief systems in mind that the world of Christianity, perhaps a dying and or going through a dramatic metamorphosis belief system, might consider in the future shaping of anything to be labelled Christian or Christ-like.

I am mindful of the Quakers and their beliefs and also of the dissident St. Mary’s in Exile Congregation in Brisbane Australia – two places I think I could visit in a service or meeting and where my eccentric at present and eclectic agnostic search for a new meaning or definition of God would be tolerated.

Have a happy and safe new year.

I am a Modern Christian

There’s an awful lot of bullshit about religion out there these days. There is an awful lot of people playing “GOD” in the name of jesus.

There are news sites that promote both the pro’s and con’s of abortion, distorting the whole birth control individual choice issue that can prevent pregnancy and therefore veto Abortion before there is a need for such.

There are a lot of tax free and tax reduced Hate non-profit groups that want to dictate what love, commitment or union is. There is an awful lot of fatigue out there over truth, debate, what passes for truth, what passes for debate. ETC.

A thousand, a million, a hundred million cookie cutter Christians, without heart, without the true spirit of Jesus in their heart, are not worth one true Good Samaritan pictured above.

Let me back up here. I started this blog to inform others of my mere “one” individual point of view about my interface with what I now consider “the insanity of monkeys (which is) - religion”.

I have evolved in this short period in a Darwinian sense (no, I do not believe Darwin to be “satan” whoever or what ever that is except the evil in the hearts of individuals, one or collectively in a group of people, as in an exponential growth of evil).

Darwin was only a man - he made a series of observations and calculated guesses about what was the mystery of it all. He did not write a bible. Thank the proverbial concept of God for that! He is the father of modern scientific methodology as this ignorant uneducated individual understands it.

He, Darwin, did tread on centuries of ignorance and superstition that we as local and or global cultures still cling to. Such is life.

With age comes a certain amount of experience and sometimes wisdom. As such I am a Christian.

I am a Christian who believes and or tries to follow the alleged teachings of Jesus, the alleged messiah and or alleged anointed one – “Christ”.

Of course this whole messiah/Christ thing is a Jewish thing. Somehow the Jewish thing got transplanted to another planet along the timeline to Rome – the mother of, and pig, civilization of the western ancient world.

Somewhere along the timeline, the teachings of my teacher Jesus got caught up in the Political Correctness of the Mother/Pig of nations, of Rome and the Roman Empire.

Somewhere along the timeline the teachings of Jesus got inserted into the anti-Semitic synoptic gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke and into the very Gay (I say it in a good sense of Gay Eye for the Straight Guy) Gospel of John.

I believe in a modern streamlined Jesus. I believe in the social, civil disobedient, pro-people philosophy agenda of an obscure Rabbi from Galilee.

While I believe Jesus’ message is divine, it is the internal Gnostic sense of divine within Jesus of Nazareth that evokes peace and harmony within my spirit and soul when looking out at my present social, political, economic, spiritual landscape.

I seek to define and refine that same divine spark within me that Jesus did within in his time – and dared to share insight with us in the shards of his words so powerful that they reach out to us today two thousand years later.

Jesus and his view of the world and its future and or its evolution to a new and distant place goes beyond the personal gods of Abraham, Moses and Mohammed.

I do not worship Jesus as a god. He was divinely human. He was perhaps first among equals in the ancient world. He is teacher and a path guider for all those modern generic “organized” and “fundamentalist” religious who still cling to fourth century superstitions in line with the political correctness of an ancient and dead Roman Empire.

The collective pathway to truth of religions from the past blends into the modern pathway and spiritual search of individuals to the divine - I am a modern Christian.

“He who has ears let him hear!”

Have a nice day.

Of gods, Monsters and Intelligent Design?

I don’t know what to make of all the fake science that is trying to get endorsed or believed these days.

Intelligent Design is supposed to tell us that the universe is not a random chaotic thing, which it is. They would have you believe that there is an intelligent design (by God) to the whole mess. The Vatican and or its German speaking surrogates such as Cardinal Schoenborn of Vienna back Intelligent Design.

There is supposed to be some international meeting of minds or conference on Darwin sponsored by the Vatican on the calendar right about now. Don’t hold your breath expecting any intelligent outcome or pronouncements. One critic, the former head of the Vatican Observatory Father George V. Coyne, a real scientist, got fired over his views about real rational science, which is opposed to fake science or Intelligent Design. I don’t think he was invited to this Darwin Conference thing.

The whole folly comes within the realm of Voltaire from his book Candide and the philosophical falsity that this world is “le meilleur des mondes possibles” – the best of all possible worlds. Délusion. Délusion. Délusion.

If the earth is of an intelligent design then why did the Intelligent Designer waste hundreds of millions of years on the Dinosaur Project ???

The Creationist theory will tell you that the Bible, being the exact and perfect world of God, proves that science is wrong in determining the age of the earth. They will tell you that all physical evidence must fit into the five thousand year old timeframe of the Bible. That is why if you stop off at some GOP endorsed Creationist Museum, you will see our ancestors, as cave men and women, living in harmony with the dinosaur things.

The Bible is a flawed document. The bible is a human document. The New Testament is a committee written document. Jesus changes from a human being to a god in the time frame of three hundred years. Jesus’ words, wisdom, divine inspiration and divine mission have been subordinated to politics since his death almost two thousand years ago.

Did he rise from the dead ? Definitely. As a Christian I believe that. God can do anything including raise the dead. To believe in Jesus is to believe in the higher powers of an evolved, evolving species called man. I have faith in the non-tangible abilities and powers of God and his servant Jesus.

These religious screamers call faith, faith, faith. I do not think they believe or have faith. They need an exact user manual for life – a rule book. If anything, the day to day struggle of Jesus to get imperfect people to listen to his more perfect evolved message for the human race seems at times to have been wasted on many deaf human ears.

So too the flaws of the Old Testament are obvious. The Hebrew Testament does not get written or fully consolidated until after the Babylonian captivity. Along the way to consolidation several non-communicating committees manage to lose ten tribes and the Ark of the Covenant.

Tangible things such as fake relics like the Shroud of Turin or a Jesus Ossuary - speaks of non-faith in the original person and the true message of the teacher of Jesus.

What I have found or sensed along the way of this study of my own beliefs is the negatuve reception or reaction of others to the Gnostic concept of a divine spark within. Negative belief too in the possiblility of Jesus as a bearer or in his own recognition of that divinity. The role of bearer and of recognition connotes great responsibility to go forward in life as bearer of the light of God within and with that light to be given freely to others. Few of us now or in the generations past have come close to the ideal of Jesus as evolved enlightened being and creation of God.

There is hope - the human race continues and “Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?”…(W.B.Yeats)

The problem with the Gnostic belief approach is that 99.9% of humanity do not seem to want responsibility. They want to be sheep and they want to be led. As such, the P.T.Barnum types in the Vatican and the far right fundamentalists need road shows, conferences, freak shows, museums, literal interpretation of myths - tangible proof of their so-called faith – which is not faith but seems so much more like superstition.

The show goes on.

Popcorn! Peanuts! Cotton Candy!

The Wandering Jew - NO - The Wandering Catholic!

Suddenly, Bishop Richard Williamson's apology to who(m)ever is not good enough?

I think that he has done a great deal considering his limited - very limited historic matrix - half or three quarters of an apology is better than none.

Perhaps the front line hierarchy in the Armani clad red silk Cardinal and white Papal robes might consider opening their own personal hearts in a similar manner to the Jews and the Shoah as they suddenly are asking an aged catholic dinosaur to do!

Vatican rejects Holocaust-denying bishop's apology

Like for the survivors of the Shoah and Nazi Holocaust, the everyday grind of life goes on.

So too in the Catholic sect of Christianity, life goes on and here are some narrower or is it futuristic views of that vision?

Some collateral follow-up on I hope a lighter side to show all sorts of sides to a church in a constant state of flux, looking for a stable mission and or mission statement after Vatican II.

Rather than be considered as a person doing a witch hunt on Richard Williamson and his anit-Semitic views, he is a gift that keeps giving to me in terms of the tangents and the bits and pieces of the so-called Traditionalist movement in the RC church that I find in further research on the Internet.

I call it Medieval Revivalism as opposed to Traditionalist and or anti-Modernist, like Pius X, who was not saying anything correct in using the word Modern, pro-or-con, in their temporary selfish me comfort philosophy.

Apparently there are all sorts of break away groups in and out of papal favor and or approval - in and out of “union with Rome”.

An interesting article about two brothers who studied under Richard Williamson who in their youth got a full dose of vitriol against Jews and Women when they studied in a SSPX seminary.

Bishop's vexing beliefs have deep roots

Oppenheimer, the seminarian with the Jewish sounding name who was belittled by crazy Dick Williamson in the seminary appears briefly in one of these videos showing his small sect doing the Latin Mass thing. The Canons Regular of the New Jerusalem was founded none other than by Archbishop Raymond Burke, the next pope, the future “Pius XIII“ (?), now head of the Vatican Supreme Court.



In retrospect, the French video shows in an odd way how the exact rubrics of a Council of Trent (anti-Protestant) Tridentine (not a chewing gum) Latin Mass.



In a way, nostalgia for the Latin Mass fits into the original Modernist critique of devotional reflection as something close to conveniently looking into a mirror or a well, seeing ourselves and calling it God and or Jesus. (a Gnostic view?)

In a way, nostalgia for the Latin Mass is nothing more than liking your grandmom’s fudge brownies better than your mum’s. The physical requirements for a Latin mass are more like staged Opera different than the performance of rap music and or fast food at Mickey D’s as many have called the new mass etc.

All in all, with so many wanting its own particular approach to the divine in all these spoiled RC splinter groups merely confirms my belief in the ultimate success of the Protestant Reformation was in the desire for all to reach God in an easier fashion than previously allowed under the monolith of the medieval church.

To each, his own. God save our constitutionally guaranteed “religious liberty” in the USA.

God Bless us all - each and every one!