The Pope Must Be Crazy

Spread the news, the Pope has just saved us all!  They say that all good things come in threes so perhaps this might be the explanation for the Third Secret of Fatima.  This is pretty wonderful news and yet at the same time strange – very strange.

First the Vatican goes on television to proclaim that extraterrestrials are real.  How would they know unless they’ve met some already? Then, they openly declare that  “Christians will eventually need to reevaluate their faith and come to a new understanding of the Bible.”  Of course, I’ve been saying that all along (see my previous posts), but for the Vatican to say that publicly. WOW! To top it all off, the Pope has declared that God has already saved everyone, and not just the Catholics.  Everyone, even the atheists!

Not to digress, but how can the Vatican spend a billion or so on their latest new toy (a telescope dubbed Lucifer), instead of using that money to help the homeless people of the world?  What’s the telescope for anyway?  Who or what are they expecting to see in the heavens that’s worth a billion dollars to catch a glimpse of?  Could they be anticipating the Second Coming (of Lucifer, that is)?

Maybe, the explanation for all of this strangeness is that the Vatican is going Hollywood.  If so, perhaps they’ll do a sequel of “The Gods Must Be Crazy.”  They certainly have the money (trillions of dollars in the church coffers) to produce any movie they want, or to eradicate world-wide starvation for that matter.  So what if it sounds like the Pope is off his rocker.  Like they say in Hollywood, there’s no such thing as bad press.

 

Poor God

Poor God.  He gets blamed for everything.  Every time there is a natural disaster, people want to know why God didn’t prevent it.  In other words, why does He supposedly allow bad things to happen to good people.

Well for starters, he’s not a he; he’s not a she either and arguably not even an “it”.  God is simply the universal life force that permeates all of Creation. When people talk about God, they are usually referring to something that they think exists outside of themselves (like our Father who art in heaven, for example).  In reality, God exists everywhere and in everything. That’s why Jesus said that the Kingdom of God is within, inasmuch as the Kingdom of God is literally a kingdom of consciousness.

As Max Planck, the German physicist who originated quantum theory, said, “…there is no such thing as matter.”  That’s because everything is consciousness, even that which we call matter.  Most neurobiologists have stated that physics cannot  explain consciousness.  That’s not surprising because physics cannot observe what exists beyond space and time (the Cosmic Mind).

From God’s perspective, assuming that He can even have a perspective, Creation is perfect since it is self-generating and self-renewing.  It’s a circle of life, with no beginning and no end.  As for death, it is simply the end of the illusion we call life and the beginning of the remainder of eternity.  There are no “bad things happening” to anybody, only things that are necessary for the renewal of life.

We all have a need to belong to something greater than ourselves and to understand why we exist.  Towards that end, I believe that it is possible for anyone to have their own unique relationship with God.  Since God is within, our bodies form the altar from which we can connect to him.  A church and a religion are not required…and never intended.

“Our reality is an expression of a deeper order of existence that exists beyond space and time.”  -Michael Talbot

From I-God to the Missing Link

Filmmakers sometimes make multiple endings to their movies.  Then they test market one of the endings to see if the audience likes it.  Based on the responses they get, they might possibly substitute in one of the other endings.  Well, with respect to my last post “So Who Created God?,” I’ll give you a chance for an alternative ending.  Maybe one of these will fit better with your own perspective.

Alternative ending #1

Fast forward to today.  Our daughter is now in college and recently won an award for an innovative software application.  She calls it I-God.  It’s for people who are in need for a more direct relationship with God.  You just click a button and talk to God!

P.S. She doesn’t ask (or care) anymore who created God.

Alternative ending #2

The god of Genesis is hardly the ideal role model that most people associate with a supreme being.  He/they/it doesn’t even meet the basic requirements of some church dogma.  If you wanted a God who is omnipresent, you didn’t get it because God did not know where Adam was hiding (Genesis 3:9).  If you wanted a God who was omniscient, you didn’t get that either because otherwise God would have known in advance that the humans would eat from the Tree of Knowledge.  If you wanted a God that was omnipotent, well strike three.  If God was all-powerful, he could have created a more perfect being that could have acted the way he wanted and he would have insured that evil didn’t exist in the world.

The Bible tells us that mankind was created for one purpose – to tend to the Garden of Eden (Genesis 2:15).  Having eaten the apple from the Tree of Knowledge, man became like God, to know good and evil (Genesis 3:22).  By obtaining the knowledge of good and evil, man was awakened to his true reality.  He (man) saw that he was naked and God was clothed.  Adam was ashamed (Genesis 3:10 ) because he realized that God was the master and his slaves were naked.  Even the Ten Commandments (see specifically the Tenth Commandment), said that it was morally okay to have slaves.  Slavery runs very deep in mankind’s  history – all the way back to the god of Genesis.

So if you didn’t get a god who was omniscient, omnipresent or omnipotent, what exactly did you get?  If you’ve read some of my past posts, you probably know that I would answer that by saying the God Below God.  However, the Vatican I believe has a different theory, one that they don’t discuss in church.  You see, they’ve recently built a new, powerful telescope in Arizona named Lucifer. What or who do you suppose that they are looking for and why did they name the telescope Lucifer (of all things)?  They wouldn’t be anticipating the Second Coming, would they?

Alternative ending #3

The gods created man in his own image.  Of course, most scientists would agree that life is mostly created in Nature through DNA.  That implies that our creator(s) have DNA themselves, as for that matter do all life forms.  It’s interesting to speculate exactly where the first man (Adam, if you will) got his X and Y chromosomes from since men inherit their Y chromosome from their father and their X chromosome from their mother.  Similarly, women (who have two X chromosomes but no Y chromosome) inherit one of their X chromosomes from their mother and the other from their father.   So where do you suppose that Eve get her maternal X chromosome from?

Scientific research into mitochondrial DNA has led scientists to conclude that all living humans descended from one woman who they have labeled as Mitochondrial Eve.  Unfortunately, they have never been able to pin down the exact origins of Eve (out of Africa?) or explain where the original Eve got her chromosomes from.  The solution to this seeming paradox is that the gods of Genesis were both men and women and they genetically mixed their DNA with the DNA of then-existing earth hominids to produce a hybrid – homo sapiens sapiens (modern man).

Epilogue

In the original post, I didn’t choose alternative ending #1 because I thought that it might be inappropriate for the subject matter, although I’m sure some would disagree with that sentiment.  I didn’t choose ending #2 because I had recently posted about the Vatican and their Lucifer telescope.  As for the third ending, I felt that it was too scientific and that my conclusions rightfully required a much fuller explanation.  You see, Mitochondrial Eve was actually one of the gods of Genesis and nothing less than the so-called missing link in evolution!

So Who Created God?

When our daughter was just five years old, she told us about God and His creation.  Needless to say, we were floored.  I couldn’t have said it much better myself.  Furthermore, we were completely blown away when she added,  “So who created God?”  I guess that’s what Jesus meant by out of the mouth of babes!

Of course, the answer to that question depends on just how you define God.  If you define God based on the Bible, then you get an answer that you might not have otherwise expected. In the Bible, it’s made pretty clear that God created man.  But, which God?  Is it Yahweh, Jehovah, Elohim, El Shaddai or just plain El?  Is it all of them or perhaps even none of them?

The biblical record

So, let’s start at the beginning (Genesis).  In Genesis 1:26, it says “Then God said, ‘Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness….’” There are several points here.  First, God was obviously not alone!  Second, he didn’t create man by himself!  Furthermore, the beings that God was with had the same image and the same likeness as he did.  But how could God have any image or likeness?  Doesn’t it say in John 1:18 that no man has ever seen God?  Then how could Adam and Eve have seen and talked to God?  For that matter, how could Jacob have actually wrestled with God (Genesis 32:24-30)?

The same pattern of multiple gods reoccurs in Genesis 3:21 which says, “And the Lord God said, ‘The man has now become like one of us….’”  How’s that again?  Man has become like God (one of us)?  As shocking as it may sound, Jesus actually confirmed the point that men are gods (see John 10:34).  It all comes back full circle in Psalm 82:1 which says, “God presides in the great assembly, he renders judgment among the gods.”  So it’s critical to come to an accurate understanding of who the god(s) of the Bible really were.

The Bible says that Adam (first man) was created in approximately 3750 BC (which corresponds with the beginning of the Jewish Calendar some 5,700 years ago).  Anthropology and archaeology, however, have convincingly proved that man’s roots go back much further, perhaps even hundreds of thousands of years.  Obviously, the biblical chronology is suspect, to say the least.  Beyond that, the Bible stories (the Old Testament, that is) covered a period of over 3,000 years and, during that period, it’s clear from archaeology and ancient scriptures that the Hebrews/Israelites worshipped many gods.  Even the Bible tells us that after Adam and Eve mankind worshipped different gods and it also tells us that Abraham’s father worshipped other gods; after Abraham…ditto, and so on.   Monotheism, itself, may actually have its roots in Egypt.  Sigmund Freud, for example, traces the roots of monotheism to the Akhenaton cult religion of the god Aten (see Freud’s book “Moses and Monotheism”).  According to some people’s reckoning, Akhenaten was pharaoh in Egypt during the time of Moses and thus the tie-in to monotheism.

Archaeology and the historical record

Many of the recent archaeological finds in the Holy Land show that the historical record disagrees with the Bible (e.g. see the BBC documentary “The Bible’s Buried Secrets”).  Among the discoveries is that Yahweh was also a god among the pagan Canaanites.  Yahweh, in fact, had a female consort – the goddess Asherah.  How’s that for a twist on an old story.  As for King Solomon and King David, they seem to be mostly missing from the archaeological record, as is Moses for that matter.

In Mesopotamia, ancient writings reveal that the ancients believed in a pantheon of gods (not unlike the Greeks who would come later).  Pictures of these gods can be seen on their clay tablets and they are depicted as real flesh and blood human beings, albeit from a very advanced race.  This, then, according to ancient records was the beginning of modern civilization as we know it.

The gods of Genesis

Voltaire once said that, “If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him.”  In this case, God may have existed but he was never present.  So when an advanced race of beings took over on planet Earth, mankind was in awe of their capabilities.  They truly were our creators, they just weren’t the Prime Creator.  Even if they weren’t divine, they were no less than gods to the ancients.  However, these gods of Genesis were not exactly angels (no pun intended).  They tried to keep man from knowing the secrets of the universe ( see the Genesis stories about the Tree of Knowledge and the Tree of Life).  The gods were angry and very violent.  In addition to the stories in the Bible where God slaughtered innocent women and children, ancient Indian Vedic texts talk about wars among the gods.  Ancient Irish texts refer to them similarly.  Over time, the remembrance of these gods in legends and folklore would be replaced by a desire to invent God – thus religion.  That’s not to say that God doesn’t exist, just that the gods of Genesis were not truly God.  Monotheism as we know it today is simply a myth – a way for mankind to relate to the Infinite which, as the Pascal Wager states, is infinitely incomprehensible.

Epilogue

None of this, of course, answers the question of who or what is God or my daughter’s question as to who created God.  Perhaps, it was intended that we should never know.  However, one has to ask the question as to why the general public has never been told the truth about the gods of Genesis.  Our government knows, the Vatican knows and certain members of secret societies know – but not the masses.  You see they, the masses, were created to till the garden (of Eden that is).  So, why would you ever tell them?  If you did, they might just wake up and realize that they were naked.