Surprise!

The news came out yesterday that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, president of Iran and holocaust denier, might in fact be of Jewish descent. This should not come as a major shock if it turns out to be true, since some of the most adamant anti-Semites in history have had Jewish heritage, from Louis B. Mayer, the producer of the pro-Klan documentary Birth of a Nation, to Harold von Braunhut, the inventor of sea monkeys and member of white supremacist group Aryan Nations. Even Adolph Hitler may have been a quarter Jewish, as his grandfather was unknown but his grandmother conceived his father while living with an upper-class Jewish family in Austria.

Ryan Gosling starred in a great film about Jewish antisemitism called The Believer, based on the life of an ethnically Jewish neo-Nazi. As we have seen in anti-gay pastors who turn out to be homosexual or segregationist politicians who actually have African-American relatives, The Believer demonstrated that the most common source of vitriolic hate speech is in fact self-hatred. Like homophobia among gays, Jewish anti-Semitism comes from a desperate desire to assimilate in a culture that distrusts and discriminates those who are different.

Links:
1.Ahmadinejad's Jewish Past on the Telegraph.co.uk
2. Jewish anti-Semitism on the SPLC Intelligence Report website

PS: While I'm at it, here's a BBC report on how Ahmadinejad may have been one of the terrorists who took Americans hostage in the 1979 capture of the US Embassy in Tehran.

This American Life

I've been listening to a lot of This American Life lately, ever since I watched the first season of the HBO TV show. For those who don't know, This American Life is a documentary show on public radio about- what else?- life in America. They have a lot of famous left-wing authors and journalists doing segments for them, from Sarah Vowell to Chuck Klosterman, and they're generally pretty good. However, my favorite segments are the ones where the liberal employees of public radio try to make sense of, and often end up empathizing with, right-wing Christian America. Here are two of the best shows, available for free at NPR.com:

My personal favorite show, called "Pray," first aired in the late 90s but is still relevant today. It explores how Christians and non-Christians speak in different dialects and often live in radically different worlds. Also, it features the always entertaining Pastor Ted Haggard, notorious for preaching a clean Christian life by day and sleeping with a male prostitute while smoking meth by night.

I have a soft spot for ol' Teddy H, as would anybody who watched him deal with his world collapse under him in Alexandra Pelosi's documentary The Trials of Ted Haggard. His 2006 confession to his congregation included some of the truly Christian statements I have ever heard from an evangelical pastor. For example: "Please forgive my accuser...actually, thank God for him. I am trusting that his actions will make me, my wife and family, and ultimately all of you, stronger. He didn’t violate you; I did."

The second and more recent show that I feel is worth sharing, "Heretics," details the life of a Pentecostal preacher who abandoned his belief in Hell and the idea that only Christians are going to be saved. Far from abandoning these ideas just to gain popularity, Rev. Carlton Pearson actually saw himself cut off from the evangelical community and his followers ostracized by their communities. He claims that his decision was based in a combination of deep, scholarly study of the Bible and divine revelation about the true nature of a loving God.

The Founding Fathers and the Musclemen

When interviewed in 2008, presidential candidate John McCain said that "the number one issue people should make [in the] selection of the President of the United States is, Will this person carry on in the Judeo-Christian principled tradition that has made this nation the greatest experiment in the history of mankind?" (1) McCain also claimed that he would be uncomfortable with a non-Christian president because of his belief that this government was founded on Christian principles. Exactly how true that belief is, however, is open to debate. While it is undeniable that there is mention of a deity on our money and in many of the founding documents of this nation, there is no evidence of anything specifically promoting Christianity or demonizing Islam.

The often-cited proofs for America being a Christian nation, from the Creator mentioned in the constitution to the God that we trust in on our money, actually have nothing to do with Christianity. They are instead instances of Ceremonial Deism, a legal concept stating that all cases of the word "God" used by the American government refer not to any specific deity and are only there for purposes of custom. (2) The phrase "in God We Trust," a late addition to our currency first added to coins during the Civil War and later mandated by Congress during the 1950s, has no mention of which God we should trust in or even whether that God is monotheistic or one of many.

While it is true that many of the founding fathers were Deists, the vast majority of them were Christians of some denomination or another. Over 57% of the men who signed the Declaration of Independence were Episcopalians, while less than 4% of them were Unitarians (3). They may have disagreed privately about matters of faith, but they publicly agreed to keep religion out of State affairs when they approved the Bill or Rights guaranteeing "that Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof." There is no mention of God or Religion in the entire Constitution, save for the use of the phrase "Anno Domino," which means "in the Year of Our Lord."


The decision to exclude Christ from the Constitution was not based in forgetfulness, but nor was it grounded in any sort of anti-religious bias. Instead, the majority of statesmen in the 18th Century saw religion as a private affair, one which should not overlap with public activities such as science or politics. When Benjamin Franklin suggested that each meeting of the Constitutional Convention begin with a prayer, Alexander Hamilton famously replied that they had no need of "foreign aid."

Thomas Jefferson, who wrote that all Americans are "endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights," was as far from a Christian as was possible at the time. Jefferson famously created his own version of the Gospels with all the miracles edited out. In fact, the first Muslim senator in the US was sworn in to office using Jefferson's copy of the Koran, which the author of the Declaration learned Arabic in order to read.

If the founding fathers of this country could not agree on religious principles to found this country upon, then what exactly was it that united them? In my mind, one need look no further than the two illustration on the back of a one-dollar bill to find the answer. Taken together, these two circles are called the "Great Seal of the United States," considered by conspiracy theorists to be proof that the Freemasons control the United States. Designed by Jefferson, Adams, and Franklin, these illustrations show less of an occult influence and more of a deep faith in the country that they have founded.


The circle to the left shows an uncapped pyramid with 13 steps, representing the 13 colonies ant the amount of work still to be done on the unfinished country. They eye above they pyramid, known as the "Eye of Providence," represents enlightenment or divine providence. Above the pyramid is the phrase "Annuit Coeptis," which means "He blesses our Undertakings," while the Latin banner on the botton reads "a new order for the Ages." Both of these phrases tell us that the founders believed that their new Country was destined to last, and that it would perhaps become the model for future governments. The illustration on the right is of an Eagle holding an olive branch and 13 arrows, representing how our country is united in war and in peace, and was inspired by the similar symbolism used by the Iroquois League that inspired much of the Democratic system (4).

When John Adams signed the Treaty of Tripoli in 1797, ending the Barbary war with African Muslim nations such as Libya and Morocco, he remarked that "the Government of the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian religion" and that "it has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion, or tranquility, of Musselmen [Muslims]." (5) What unites the American people today is the same as what united the founding fathers over 200 years ago- a sense of confidence in the individual, a desire for freedom from foreign countries, and a quest for internal unity. None of these are particularly Christian concepts, nor are any of them antithetical to Islam.

Links:
1. John McCain on Beliefnet.com, on how he admires "the Islam."
2. Ceremonial Deism on Wikipedia
3. The Religion of the Founding Fathers on the awesome Adherents.com
4. All about the Great Seal on Goddrinksbeer.com
5. Our Godless Constitution on thenation.com

The Mathematics of Faith

Since the early days of Western philosophy, writers have attempted to devise numerous arguments for the existence of God. These range from the simple, like the Cosmological argument that there must have been a creator at the beginning of time, to more complex theories such as St. Anselm's Ontological Argument (which I will delve into in a later post). While the majority of these arguments center the debate on whether God exists or not, the focus was shifted in the late 17th Century to the question of whether we should practice religion and not whether it is true. The reason for this shift was an idea coined by French mathematician and theologian Blaise Pascal in his 1670 book Pensees ("thoughts"). In an theory popularly called "Pascal's Wager," the mathematician argues that belief or disbelief in God can be compared in mathematical terms.

"We are then incapable of knowing either what He [God] is or if He is ... Which will you choose then? Let us weigh the gain and the loss in wagering that God is. Let us estimate these two chances. If you gain, you gain all; if you lose, you lose nothing."(1)

The premise of Pascal's wager is that we do not and can not know if God exists, but we still have to decide whether or not to follow Christianity. Pascal divides people into two categories- those who act as if God exists and Christianity is the one true faith and those who do not- and then considers the consequences of of their actions. If God does not exist, according to Pascal, then the nonbeliever gains nothing when he dies and the Christian loses nothing except for a few wasted Sundays. However, if God does exist and the Christian faith is correct, then the Christian gains eternal life in Paradise and the nonbeliever suffers in hell for eternity.

Pascal argues that the nonbeliever has nothing to gain and everything to lose from his lack of faith, while the Christian has little to lose and everything to gain. Furthermore, Pascal claims, there are many benefits to religious practice regardless the what may come after death- the Christian gains moral foundations and a sense of community, whereas the nonbeliever is socially outcast and has no way to prove that he or she is right.

Pascal's Wager may have helped in the conversion of many Christians and did serve to influence the pragmatist philosophies of William James and John Dewey, but it has no place in a modern multicultural society. Despite his brilliance as a mathematician, there are a number of variables in this equation that Pascal simply did not consider. First of all, the wager assumes that God rewards people based their pretense of faith and not on the depth of their love for the divine, if God even rewards at all. Pascal also completely disregards the less quantifiable but more philosophically important issue of the desire for truth. While we may never be able to know for certain whether or not God exists, we have been able to discern many facts about the historical authenticity of the Bible and may some day have definitive knowledge about the life of the historical Jesus.

Finally, Pascal's Wager is only valid if a person must chose between one religion or complete disbelief, and does not work so easily if there are a number of competing religions to chose from. In fact, Pascal was not the first to devise such a calculation for faith- Muslim theologian al-Juwayni wrote a similar argument in 1085, nearly 600 years before Pascal! (2)

A more fitting equation would be one that takes into account all religions and judges them based on the costs and benefits of each. The four variables in comparing religions, at least as far as applying Pascal's Wager is concerned, are: which religion has the best possible reward, which requires the least amount of active investment in terms of time and belief, which religion has the most proof for its validity, and which religion has the worst possible consequences for disbelief. Bear in mind that none of these factors take into account which religion is the most ethical or which fits best with an individual's lifestyle. Those factors are more subjective and less quantifiable, whereas this is intended to be a more straightforward cost-benefit analysis of the world's major religions.


Buddhism is as easily one of the worst religions to practice as far as Pascal's Wager is concerned. In all sects, it requires a good deal of time spent in practice for what could be a very negligible reward. If a person is not a Buddhist, the worst that could happen is that they may be reincarnated temporarily into one of the many Hells or as a hungry ghost, while an otherwise ethical person is more likely to be reborn as a human or even a divine being. On the other hand, the long-term gains from practicing Buddhism, other than possible peace of mind while alive on earth, is a form of extinction known as nirvana- at best a zero-sum game since there is no self to experience the nothingness.

Hinduism is likewise far from the best option, since it has great rewards but very little in the way of punishments. Most Hindus believe that nonbelievers will simply reincarnate when they die, with the more virtuous being reborn as upper-caste Indians and the less ethical becoming lower life forms. Believers, on the other hand, escape the cycle of death and rebirth and unite with the Godhead, a form of liberation from individuality called Moksha. The worst that could happen if one is not a Hindu is that one lives forever- the goal for many other religions- while even a nonbeliever can attain the reward of Moksha since Hindus believe that all gods lead to the one divine being, Brahman. Even an atheist can attain Moksha, since the key to escaping from the cycle of rebirth is to think of God constantly as many atheist clearly do.

Judaism offers questionable rewards for faith and even more questionable historical authenticity. Some claim that there will be a bodily resurrection of all believing Jews while others claim that the Jewish Bible only supports the idea that the Kingdom of Israel will be resurrected and that the dead, Jew and Gentile alike, dwell in an underworld limbo known as Sheol. (3) A nonbelieving Jew might not be resurrected when the Kingdom of God is restored, but gentiles have little incentive to follow Judaism if personal reward is their primary motivation.

Since Mohamed was undoubtedly a real person, Islam has a much more concrete basis for its claims of historical authenticity, but the validity of its religious dogma is still up for debate. Like Christians, Muslims believe in a paradisaical heaven called Jannah for the faithful and a fiery hell for nonbelievers called Jahannam. However, the Muslims do not define "believers" as strictly as their Christian cousins, who insist that the only way to God is though Jesus. Though the practice of Islam is the best religion, the Koran states that Christians and Jews (as well as, on occasion, Mandeans, Zoroastrians, and Hindus) are "People of the Book" and therefore count as believers. (4) There is, therefore, no need to follow Islam specifically when other religions of the Book offer much more strict guidelines to attain paradise.

Christianity offers perhaps the most specific prerequisites for eternal life- belief in Jesus, among other things- as well as, in general, the most intense system of rewards and punishments of all the world's major religions. However, there are sectarian differences within Christianity that often claim that one Church is supreme and that followers of the other denominations are not guaranteed to be saved. The Catholic Church often insists that it alone is the way to God, while many Protestants consider Catholics idolaters and not true Christians. Lutherans, Methodists, Anglicans, and many other denominations generally take an ecumenical approach and believe that all Christian faiths are valid (though some are more valid than others), while other denominations argue that the time of baptism or the luck one has in life are determining factors in whether or not one is truly faithful.


The Jehovah's Witnesses believe that only 144,000 people will be allowed into God's earthly heaven, despite there being over a million Witnesses alive today. The slim chance of being one of these 144,000 becomes even less tempting when one takes into account all the sacrifices that a Witness must make, such as never having a birthday party or being able to accept blood transfusions. (4) The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, another sect with numerous additional guidelines, allows believers to gain their own heaven and become gods themselves, but is also perhaps the easiest religion to dispute the validity of.

Reverend Sun Myung Moon must not have taken Pascal's Wager into account when he created (or was divinely gifted with) the doctrines of the Unification Church, which holds that all people, believers and nonbelievers, will go to Heaven eventually regardless of what they did in life. Even if one is cast into Hell, according to Moon, a person can always convert to the true faith and be saved. (5)

Sikhism, the fifth-largest religion in the world, has a very similar metaphysical framework to the reincarnation and unification with the divine seen in Hinduism, but in fact actively preaches against believing in God for the sake of possible rewards. “As long as the mind is filled with the desire for heaven, he does not reach God," claims Guru Granth Sahib, the holy scripture of the Sikhs. The majority of ancient Romans, on the other hand, worshiped only the gods who could help them overcome whatever trial they were facing, practicing religion solely for the rewards and punishments involved.

We have hopefully grown as a species since the time of the Roman empire, in terms of morality if not of our understanding of religion. Pascal's Wager appeals to the gambler in us, but it does not succeed as a theological argument, which should be targeted more to our ethical and intellectual side and less to our selfish inclinations. When trying to decide which religion one should follow, the best course is to judge which one seems to be the most ethical and contradicts itself the least. Many religions offer great promises, but the do not serve to make a person more wise or help them make any beneficial changes to the world. Likewise, a number of religious philosophies offer little in the way of threats to nonbelievers but can serve to greatly improve a person's lifestyle and sense of morality.

Failing that, I would recommend the seeker take up Hinduism. With over 330 million gods, the odds are that at least one of those deities is right for you.

Links:

1. Pascal's Wager, on the Blog of God
2. An Atheist's Rejection of Pascal's Wager
3. The Afterlife in the Torah, on Religionfacts.org
4. 101 Strange Beliefs of Jehovah's Witnesses
5. Rev. Moon's Unification Church, on Wikipedia

Accidental Canonization

The more I study religions the more I am convinced that man never worshiped anything but himself.
-Richard Francis Burton

In his recent book Everything You Know About God Is Wrong, Russ Kick claims that the majority of atheists and agnostics surveyed are in full support of comparative religion classes taught in public school, while the most vocal opposition comes from Christians. This seems counter-intuitive, since many conservatives are constantly attempting to bridge Church and State, especially in regard to public education, but there are a number of reasons that American Christians might be against the study of religion in schools.

First, and perhaps most predominantly, many Christians (as well as Muslims and Jews) are against comparative religion because they distrust teaching any religion or mythology other than their own, especially one that might be presented on equal footing (1). Second, there is a certain amount of willful ignorance about the academic side of Christianity among many self-proclaimed Christians. This can be seen in a public distrust, not just of historians and archaeologists, but also of any recent translation of the Bible. There is a growing movement against all non-King James versions of the Bible, and especially against the more scholarly college-approved editions such as the New Revised Standard Version (2). As Miriam Fergusun, the former Governor of Texas, famously stated, "if English was good enough for Jesus, it's good enough for Texas." (3)

Comparative Religion

It is true that a greater knowledge about religion can lead to a greater certainty in one's own unbelief (for example, the more I learn about the early history of the LDS Church the less likely I am to convert to Mormonism, to pick on an easy target). However, a deeper knowledge about one's own beliefs and those of others might also lead to a more stable and enriching faith. Just as atheists with a passable knowledge of religious philosophy tend to be more secure in their convictions and argue their case better, so too do monotheists or polytheists seem to value their own tradition the more they learn about it's history or theology.

The majority of Christians will probably agree on the importance of learning about the history of their religion, but a far smaller percentage will argue for the merit of learning about other faiths. After all, the Bible implicitly states that other religions were created by the Devil (2 Corinthians 11) and explicitly says that the only way to salvation is through Christianity (John 14:6), so why should anyone care about what those heathens believe when we already know about Jesus? Well, for starters, many of those heathens are our friends and neighbors, and those that aren't are the people that we're trying to save, either spiritually or militarily. More to the point, a decent understanding of others' faiths can lead to a greater understanding of our own. This is true when theologians adopt philosophies and practices from other religious traditions, such as using Muslim or Hindu arguments for the existence of the Christian God, and equally true when determining what does not work in one's own tradition, such as when the Greek Orthodox Church discovered that they accidentally canonized a major figure from a rival religion.

The story of Barlaam and Josaphat (not to be confused with Jehosaphat, the famous jumper from the Old Testament) is thought to have been written down in the 11th Century, though they are said to have lived sometime around the 3rd Century CE. Both St. Barlaam and St. Josaphat are commemorated in the Eastern Orthodox Church on August 26th, while the Catholic Church held their feast day on the 27th of November.

12th Century Scroll of Barlaam and Josaphat

The gist of the story is that a rich Indian king had been persecuting Christianity and that an astrologer predicted that the King's son would grow up to become a Christian. The King feared this fate and kept his son Prince Josaphat inside the palace walls since birth in order to prevent him from being a religious man. However, the Prince eventually snuck out of the palace and saw the suffering of the outside world as well as a traveling Christian hermit named Barlaam. Barlaam introduced Josaphat to spirituality, and the Prince eventually left his cozy palace and became a Christian saint.

If that story sounds at all familiar, it is probably because you have had some amount of study in comparative religion. The religious scholar Wilfred C. Smith discovered that the story of Balraam and Josaphat was in fact the story of the Buddha, translated and retold over numerous centuries (4). Even the name Josaphat comes from the Sanskrit term Bodhisattva, which is what the Buddha was until his death and attainment of nirvana at the age of 80. From Bodhisattva came the Persian Bodasiv, and from that the Arabic Yudasaf, which was translated into Greek as Ioasaph and eventually as the Latin Iosaphat.

What we can learn from all this is the way in which knowledge of one religion can enlighten us about another. The Roman Catholic Church has since removed the feast day of Balraam and Josaphat from their calendar, though many fictional or mythological saints still remain both in that institution and in the Eastern Orthodox Church (5). The fact that the study of religion helped in some way to improve a tradition reinforces the central thesis of this blog: that in order to save religion, we must perform surgery upon it.

Links:
1. Atheist Teaches Religion in Public Schools, on About.com
2. God's form of government is a theocratic monarchy...therefore, it makes perfect sense that His word would be translated for the English speaking people under a monarchy, by a crazy person
3. Spanish in Texan Classrooms, by Jimmy Carter
4. Buddha Turned Into European Saint, on the Free Republic
5. St. Brigid, Pagan Goddess, on Wikipedia

Good Luck, Mr. Gorsky

40 years ago tomorrow, two men set foot on the Moon for the first time in human history, one of the most poignant achievements of mankind. While the scientific and cultural merits of the Apollo 11 Moon landing have been praised for decades, the spiritual impact of this event has yet to fully sink in.

Humans have been curious about the nature of the moon since the dawn of religion at least 70 thousand years ago. We have come to understand this celestial body in a number of ways: as a goddess of witchcraft to the ancient Greeks and Celts; to Chinese astronomers, as a reflective orb made of silver; and as a watery planet filled with various flora and fauna to Americans in the 1830s (1). Today, scientists are fairly confident in the theory that the Moon was formed some 4.5 billion years ago as the result of a Mars-sized body of rock colliding with the Earth. Across cultures there is a day of the week named after this satellite, always coming between the day of the Sun and the Day of Mars (Tuesday in English, after the Norse war-god Tyr who represents that planet), and from the root moon comes the words month and menstruation.


In occult practices across the world, the path to the Moon has been considered a journey of extreme importance, albeit a more metaphorical one than that undertaken by Armstrong and Aldrin. The Kabbalistic tradition describes ten spheres of existence, called the Sephirot, which represent the ten stages between God and Man. It is the goal of the Kabbalist to climb these spheres in order to understand God more completely. Each of the Sephirot correspond to one of the planets in the Ptolmic model of the universe, with the lowest being Malkuth, relating to the Earth, and the next being Yesod, represented by the Moon. The transition from Malkuth to Yesod represents the transition from base matter to a more spiritual state of being, a connection with the unconscious mind and an awareness of the higher powers in the world.

The moon represents the unconscious in nearly all religious traditions, both popular and esoteric, from the goddesses Diana and Hecate to the Shinto deity Tsuki-Yomi. The psychologist Carl Jung interpreted the alchemist's search for silver, as symbolized by the Moon, as a quest to understand the unconscious and feminine aspects of one's self. Similarly, the 18th major Arcana in a Tarot Deck, the Moon, is said to signify intuition, dreams, and life after death. Tarot cartomancers associate the Moon with Qof, a letter in the Hebrew alphabet that also means "the back of the head," and thus can be associated with the unconscious mind.


Like the Kabbalists and their Sephirot, Indian mystics consider the journey from the earth to the Moon to be the first step in spiritual progress. The root chakra, Muladhara, is said to contain the energies relating to instinct and the most basic conditions of human awareness, while the chakra above it, Svadhisthana (aka. the Moon Chakra), is said to empower a person's creativity, sexuality, and emotional well-being. In all of these traditions, reaching "the moon" represents a contact with one's own intuition and spirituality, something that many of the astronauts of the Apollo missions claim to have experienced.

There is a popular urban legend which states that Neil Armstrong heard sounds in a strange language while on the Moon, and that after returning to earth he realized what he had heard was in fact the Muslim call to Prayer and subsequently converted to Islam (2). While this story has about as much truth to it as the belief that Nixon hoaxed the Moon landings, there were other astronauts who equate their space travels with nothing short of a spiritual experience. Apollo 17 Captain Eugene Cernan said that viewing the Earth from the Moon was "like standing on God's front porch." Jim Irwin of Apollo 15 became a minister after returning to Earth, while Apollo 12's Alan Bean dedicated the rest of his life to detailing his experience in paintings. Buzz Aldrin famously took communion on the surface of the Moon (3). Most remarkably, Apollo 14 astronaut Dr. Edgar Mitchell, the sixth man to have walked on the Moon, claims to have had a transcendental experience while on the return trip to earth and founded the Institute of Noetic Sciences, a research center for the understanding of meditation and psychic abilities (4).

The Apollo 11 Astronauts in quarantine due to the 1969 Extraterrestrial Exposure Law (5).

The Moon landing unified people across the planet as a distinctly human, and not just American, achievement. However, the primary initiative for lunar travel stemmed from our conflict with the Soviet Union, and as soon as that cooled down, the incentive to send men to the moon also waned. The last time mankind has set foot on the Moon was December 14th, 1972- nearly 37 years ago. Although NASA plans to return humanity to the Moon by 2018, this is low on the list of priories for a nation currently battling two wars and an economic collapse and which has shifted its position on the importance of science dramatically since 1972. That said, I believe that the American people can be swayed to supporting the space program again if we phrase the debate in terms of social and spiritual implications and not just scientific ones. Regardless of one's religious background, we should all agree that the Moon landing represents the actualization of one of mankind's oldest and most unattainable desires: to travel to the Heavens and touch the unknown.

Links:
1. The Great Moon Hoax of 1935, on Wikipedia
2. Neil Armstrong Converts to Islam, on WikiIslam
3. Astronauts After the Moon Landings, on CNN.com
4. Dr. Edgar Mitchell's Spiritual Conversion, on Hinduism Today
5. The Extra-Terrestrial Exposure Law, again on Wikipedia

God and the Void: A Meditation

God is the creator of the universe, the Supreme Being and the ultimate authority. The nature of this deity was most succinctly described by the Catholic theologian Saint Anselm, who wrote that God is “that than which nothing greater can be conceived.” This means that God is the greatest thing imaginable, and to place limits on It would then make It not God. When we take this definition, there is no reason for God to have created angels, let alone Devils, since God needs no messengers if It is omnipresent and does not deed an army to fight for It if It is truly omnipotent. An omniscient being can watch over mankind better than any angel could, no matter how powerful the angel might be, and a God who can do anything has no need for a single angel and especially not for the multitude of heavenly hosts. Furthermore, no perfect being would create angels capable of falling unless It planned for them to fall from the beginning.

Perhaps God created the angels, not to work for It, but to adore It in Its full splendor. The human mind cannot comprehend an infinite being in its entirety. The idea of something that can be anywhere, do anything, know everything, and exist outside of time is too great for us to conceive. Our brains are limited by what we can imagine and what we have previously seen, but an angelic mind might be much greater than our own. In order to comprehend omnipotence as a whole, however, one must be omniscient, since to understand infinity requires a mind to have infinite understanding. If angels are omniscient, then they could never sin, since they would always know the right action to take and see the outcome of their future actions. Lucifer could never have made a mistake if he was omniscient, and would have known both the outcome of his actions and the potential error of his ways. While knowledge does not mean the same thing as righteousness, perfect knowledge implies a complete understanding of the situation.

If something knew every side to a situation, then that entity would always choose the action which was the most beneficial in the long run, because infinite knowledge implies infinite rationality. There is no way to believe in both fallen angels and omniscient angels unless the angels knew that falling from God’s grace was the right thing to do, which implies that God would be unjust and therefore not omniscient. If God is omnipotent but some angels still became devils, then those devils would not have fallen so much as changed their responsibilities while working for the same boss. Angels might have a greater capacity for understanding than humans, but they cannot be omniscient if any of them have fallen. We can conclude, as St. Thomas did, that angels may know the divine better than mortals but are never able to conceive It in Its entirety.

If God is truly infinite, then it might have aspects of Itself which are both good and evil. The Zoroastrians believed that there were two equal and independent gods, the good deity called Ahura Mazda and the evil deity Ahriman, which formed at the same time and are forever at war with each other for supremacy. The good God created angels to fight in his army and the evil God created the Devils to fight for him. Leaving alone the issue of two entities spontaneously appearing without being in any way contingent upon the other, to have two equal Gods makes the question of good and evil a relativistic one. The evil God would only be called malevolent because it is on the other side of the war, not because it is actually against the created order of the universe. Both Gods are limited in power, since they can not defeat the other, and neither is omniscient or omnipresent if they are separate from each other. If the two Gods existed in the same place, knew the same things, and had total control over the other, then they would both be omnipotent but would also be indistinguishable from the other. Two entities which exist in the same place and have the same mind are by definition indistinct, and thus are in essence the same thing. If we apply this reasoning to God and the Devil, we must conclude that an omnipresent and omnipotent God exists even in the mind of the Devil and must have total power over him. If God is just and God can control the Devil, then the Devil’s actions must either be approved of by God or God must not be omnipresent. Evil angels must either be completely independent from an infinitely benevolent God or that God must be at least partly evil.

Angels have been described as aspects of God, the ways in which we can come to know different parts of the singular divine being. As aspects of one being, angels would have no independent will, but be more like the separate fingers of one hand. If this is true, and some angels have fallen, this would imply that many aspects of God were evil or faulty to begin with. Perhaps Lucifer was the aspect of God’s pride, which was created only to be discarded so that God could purify Itself of Its own inequities. This would explain the creation of devils of lust and wrath and so on. However, for God to have had such aspects it must have either been imperfect to begin with or such aspects must have been part of its initial perfection. If God was imperfect and is working towards perfection, this not only changes the idea of God as a timeless being (since it would then be subject to change), but also means that something greater than God could exist which was perfect to begin with. On the other hand, if aspects such as Pride and Wrath were part of its original perfection, then God would either not have shed them off or is becoming less perfect. There is no known reason for God to want to become less perfect, not to mention that God would no longer be that than which nothing greater can be conceived if it started to become less than perfect. A God who became less than infinite and thus subject to change might no longer be God, in the same way that a stone that God could not move would limit Its omnipotence.

The only way that an angel could have actually fallen from God’s grace is if it was given independence from God and sinned in a place where God had no power. The Kabalistic mystic Isaac Luria conceived of an idea called Tsimtsum, or “contraction”, which means that the universe was created when God limited himself. According to Luria, the infinite aspect of God known as Ain Sof withdrew into itself in order to make room for the universe, creating a Void where God’s infinity did not expand to. In this Void, God sent out the Sephirot, or “vessels”, containing Its numerous aspects. Unfortunately, Luria claims that these vessels broke during the creation of the world, leaving us with our imperfect universe. The different aspects of God are now unbalanced, both within our souls and in the world as a whole. Evil occurs in the universe when one Sephirah is preferred over another, such as having too much mercy or too much intellectualism. If we replace the word “Sephirot” with that of “angels”, we can finally see a conceivable explanation for an omnipotent God would have created angels in the first place.

Let us assume that, in the beginning, God withdrew into Itself to make room for the creation, which was intended to be independent of Itself. God created lesser aspects of Itself called angels who could operate in the Void without filling it up again. These angels were sent out into the Void to act as the hands and eyes of God during the creation of the cosmos and were given a sort of independence from God comparable of free will. This free will and independence implies that they were not directly connected to the divine and thus were not as flawless as their creator. They became corrupted by the Void, with some becoming distressed as they began to feel cut off from God and others desiring total independence from the divine. The initial balance that God gave the angels was lost as the angels found themselves at war with each other for control over Creation in a realm where God had relinquished Its total control over. Many of the angels “cracked”, or became less perfect than how God created them. These angels could be said to have “fallen” from the initial grace in which they were created. Perhaps one of the aspects of God’s anger grew stronger than was intended when given room to expand and became the fallen angel of wrath, or maybe one of the angels of love became unbalanced and turned into a Devil of lust. These angels were created by an omnipotent God, but given room to grow in a Void where God was not, and were therefore able to grow away from God. It is possible that an omniscient God foresaw the corruption of these angels, but had to allow it in order to create a universe where creatures would have free will. Angels would then not be the messengers of an omnipresent God but instead the confused agents of a God that has fled from the universe and exists outside of creation.

St. Augustine defined evil as that in which God is not. The fall of the angels, he claimed, was a lessening in power and virtue as they became more unlike God. However, if God is fully omnipresent, then there is no place, even in the heart of the Devil, where God is not. However, it is possible that God decided to lessen Its own omniscience and omnipresence so that its creations could have free will. If God created a Void where It was not, as the Kabalistic idea of Tsimtsum states, then it is possible that the angels in the Void could have lessened in virtue and become less Godlike.

Perhaps some angels have fallen, or have become unbalanced, but this does not mean that God planned for them to be evil. Instead, the “evil” nature of some devils was a necessary consequence of the creation of a world where entities would not be wholly subject to God’s power and supervision. This does not mean that our universe is irreparable, but it does mean that it needs to be fixed. The Yezidi religion of Iraqi Kurds maintains that Satan, known to them as Melek Taus, became the king of the earth after God detached Itself from the universe. Though he had rebelled against God, Melek Taus has since repented and is considered to be once again the most powerful and just of the angels. Lucifer, fallen because of his imperfection, might likewise not be damned forever.

The early Christian theologian Tetrullian prayed for the repentance of the Devil, a view which has since been classified as heretical. According to Catholic dogma, fallen angels are unable repent because they knew the commands of God and sinned willfully, unlike humans who have to operate under faith and cannot seen the face of the divine directly. If, as we have theorized, the angels fell not in the presence of God but because of their distance from God, then maybe even Lucifer can be restored to his former glory. The way to restore the original order of the universe, as Luria teaches us, is to seek balance among the different Sephirot. Let us work towards balance between all the different angels that influence us. The spirit of Asmodeous, who represents our anger and our destructive impulses, should be kept in check by the spirit of Raphael, our loving and healing side. Likewise, the egoistic spirit of Lucifer, who was the angel of light, reason, masculinity, and pride, can only be restored to his former self when be tempered by the feminine and intuitive angel of the unconscious, Gabriel.

There is a Void between us and God, an abyss of what we can and what we cannot know. Perhaps we can never cross this Void and perceive an infinite God, but we can see hints of It in the different aspects of the divine which make up this world. The small wonders that we see every day could be hints, no matter how vague, of an infinite being. If there ever was some infinite and omnipresent entity, then every bit of love, every bit of strength, and every bit of knowledge that we have ever had would have all once been parts of its glorious whole.

Dreams about Jesus II: Electric Boogaloo!

In a dream a few years ago, Jesus called me up on the phone and asked me to help him out. "The second coming isn't going so well," he told me. I met Jesus in a cave in Jerusalem, where he was talking to a mother, her baby, and a group of middle-easterners. Jesus was lecturing the group on how the best way to envision him was not as a man dying on the cross but as a baby. As the sun began to rise outside the cave, Jesus said that the essence of Christianity is in morning (or it might have been in "mourning").

It was revealed that the reason that Jesus was having so much trouble in his second coming was an evil priest that had allied himself with the devil. Jesus, Samo Hung (Jackie Chan's foster brother from the movie Meals on Wheels), and I encountered this priest and the Devil in an airport mall. After trying to hide from the devil, a fight broke out between Jesus and the priest. We entered what Jesus called "prayer time," where our fighting skills could be improved by, for example, wishing that we worked harder in elementary school gym class or that we had remembered to bring a knife.

That's right: in the second coming, Jesus uses Kung Fu to fight alongside Samo Hung against the Devil.

The meaning of Jesus' sermon at the beginning of the dream, or at least what I remember of it, has since shaped how I view Christianity in the waking world. The material world, according to his sermon, is a mother's womb, and each of us is the child. All of the disasters and torment in the world are just birthing pains in the process of humanity being born into a higher spiritual state. Jesus is the first soul to be truly born out of this world, but we will all one day grow up to be spiritual adults like him.

This model of Christianity works particularly well with the Latin American worship of the Virgin Mary. By entering into the womb of Mary (the Catholic Church or spiritual life in itself), we can eventually be born again as lesser Christs.

Dreams about Jesus I

Jesus is a semi-constant figure in my dreams, showing up more than anyone else save perhaps my mother and younger brother. At times he only appears briefly and in some sort of disguise, while in other dreams he is the protagonist and I am simply observing him. I am a religiously-minded person, having received a degree in Religious Studies at the University of Oregon, but am not myself a Christian or even especially focused on the study of Christianity.

Jesus is, however, perhaps the single defining mythological/spiritual figure in the western world, and I tend to remember every dream in which he appears as carrying some sort of metaphorical weight or special significance. Jung argued that the dream-Jesus represents the "whole man," the complete personality of an individual surfacing in their subconscious, but I feel that in my case he appears more as a incarnation of a single aspect of me, the part of me that quests for meaning and depth in the world.

The first dream about Jesus that I have recorded in my notebook is from about three years ago, in which he and I were playing chess against each other. All I wrote down was that single image, with no context if there ever was any.

In other dreams, Jesus barely appears or is only symbolically present. One dream involved me jogging down the streed where my family lived when I was 16, after we had come back from England and during the time of my parent's divorce. This was where I lived during a major transitional time in my life, a period in which I began to define my current identity. While jogging, I saw a repairman working towards the top of a telephone pole. I had drawn pictures of this pole before, in a series of pastel drawings of the neighborhood that I did for an art class. The otherworldliness of this man so high above the world and the cross-like shape of the telephone pole led me to realise that this man was, at least in some form, Jesus. I turned towards him and raised my hands, palms pressed together, towards the repairman. This was not intended as a volitional prayer but one of thanks and reverence.

The next dream about Jesus revealed that Jesus was, in fact, a zombie. In Haitian Vodou, Zombies are people who are considered dead and buried in the earth for three days, only to rise again as a slave to the Voudon.

Exactly who Jesus was a slave to was unclear in the dream, but I suppose that it could be interpreted a number of different ways. Perhaps this means that, though Jesus himself died, his teachings were only buried for three days and then revived by his followers. The message and character of Jesus then became subservient to the Christains who preached the story of the resurrection, many of whom have since gone on to use Christianity to their own ends. The focus of much of Christianity is no longer on the living aspects of Jesus- his message and ethical codes- but more on following the man himself, a corpse that is not being allowed to rest.

The second coming is, in itself, a zombie story. The Book of Revelation describes people rising from their graves and fighting against the living. Though I don't consciously consider it as such, perhaps this dream was expressing the unconscious thought that Christianity is something that is still walking long past the time that it should have died, an undead monster that feasts on the brains of the living.

Every Day Is Like Bloomsday

Notes from May 29, 2008:

I am walking toward a man-made lake near my house when I notice that everything is tinted with an unnatural shade of gray. Looking up, I see that there is no sun in the sky. Two ducks fly away as I approach the lake, moving in perfect synchronicity. I wonder if I am dreaming, as I am prone to having lucid or half-lucid dreams.

There are the tricks I use to find out if I am dreaming:
1. Do I remember waking up? Yes, I do. The shower head was broken this morning, and instead of spraying it only drooled water onto my head. I remember hitting it, turning it around, wanting more pressure.

2. How did I get where I am now? I think that I got off the bus from Portland two minutes ago, but sometimes I remember things in dreams that never happened, like being diagnosed with cancer.

3. Can I turn on a light switch? Maybe. There isn't one nearby.

4. Can I read? We'll see. I have been walking towards a comic book store (and do not know why I have been walking towards a comic book store).

There is one other trick, which I always forget when I dream: staring at the back of my hand. A book I read says that we have low attention spans in our dreams. I did not remember this one.

I walk past an old man taking on a cell phone, laughing. Why am I not walking home? I must not be dreaming because I can remember what happened earlier that day. The only thing from the past 24 hours that I do not remember is my dream last night. I see light shining from behind the cloudy sky and think that I must be awake.

When I enter the comic book store, there are several people grouped around two tables playing some sort of game. The bald man behind the counter is staring at a computer screen. As I walk towards one of the display racks, a man in a baseball cap turns to me and asks what's up. He acts like he knows me, but I do not recognize him.

I look at the comics on the rack against the wall and find that I can read the titles. This proves nothing, since I have had dreams where I can read before. In those dreams, I find books and movies that never existed, that I wish really existed. One such book, The Guide to African Bug-Magic, spoke of how to turn into a fiery cockroach in order to survive the coming Christian apocalypse. I remember, as a child, wanting to sleep in one morning so that I could watch the Ninja Turtles in Space movie on VHS. In waking life, there was no such thing.

As I leave the store, the bald man behind the counter ominously says that he will see me later. That place was one of the nine pits of Hell. I have decided that some people become victims to their own imagination. It was Six O'clock on a Thursday and they were role playing, just as they did yesterday and will do tomorrow.

Nietzsche's idea of the Eternal Recurrence: every action is redone throughout eternity and we are forced to live our lives again in the exact same way after every time we die. We have no free will. We only think that we are making the same decisions that we have always been making.

I still cannot tell if this is a dream or not. I will go to sleep and dream about waking up or wake up and think about dreaming or dream about thinking about going to sleep. Some dreams have the same mundanity, the same lack of clarity, and the same small moments of beauty as everyday life.