Journal of March 27, 2005

Sunday, March 27, 2005 2:09 PM

I am convinced that we are witnessing the final struggle for the domination of the world, between the Free Man and the Slave Man. The Christians are ideally suited to be the spearhead in this struggle, for we are free men, having been set free from sin by the Lord and from the law by his disciples, for we are gentiles. Luther got this all started when he broke with Roman and discarded ecclesiastical law and stuck with scriptural law. But he failed, perhaps, to realize that the glory of Paul's very teaching lies in its capacity for good in a man who simply had no law at all and in its place has a dedication to the three great loves. But now this needs to be taken seriously, and it is here that the present homosexual question arises with extreme and marvelous timing. I appeal in support to Immanuel Kant, no friend of much of Christianity, who noted that the gentile converts were "subject to no law at all." If this is true, then this means that we gentile Christians are the renewal of Adam in his perfection, before any command was given to him, i.e., an utterly free man. This was the express teaching of Paul: I am now at this moment in the perfection of Christ, only I have come to this perfection as a man of sin, while Jesus never sinned at all.

Now we are faced with this fact. We are unable to approach the Muslims, for example, as the champion of the free men, for we find ourselves restrained by scriptural law. For we have sought to follow Peter rather than Paul. There is nothing wrong with that, but it is a denial of birthright of liberty which belonged to Paul's charge. If a homosexual follows Peter's direction he will give up his homosexuality; if he follows Paul's direction, he will simply serve Christ as a homosexual, and without needing to be anything other than called. The correspondence of this whole matter with the left hand shows us that homosexuality is a red herring in our midst. We follow Paul and so we follow as free men who are apart from all law and instead have put on Christ to represent him in his perfection in our respective condition. We are the “lawless” ones who have only Christ in view, peering from behind Paul before us, just as others, those who have to give up homosexuality in order to be pleasing to God, see Christ over the shoulder of Peter, who is in front of them.

We must set the Christian free to be the champion of the Free Man. But as long as the Christian clings to his scripture as opposed to the scripture of the Muslim, then it is only a shouting match as to who has the story straight, for we are then as much a slave to our scripture as they are to theirs, and there is no one to champion Free Man.

It is such an easy matter to accomplish the reformation, all we must do is to rid ourselves of an otherwise inane injunction against homosexual contact, much as though it were some how sinister (like left handedness was considered at a one time).

The best way to approach the problem of convincing the world of the authenticity of the Free Man, the one who declares it in utter faith, is in two steps. First we must consider the matter as we would before we were influenced by religion, and then secondly whether the scriptures themselves tell us that we are utterly free, or are there certain reservations, such that we are not free after all?

In this endeavor we are looking at the scripture as a law book, as (I guess) Luther would have us look at it, and while we are searching about there for the laws we find that we are not actually bound by any law at all (Acts 15 as interpreted by Paul). And so now, at least for the sake of argument, we are going to look at the matter before being given any law. There we find homosexual behavior to be marvelous as a tool of population control, looking to a world in which there can be utter delight in the intimacies of two persons, and thus so much less tension in the world, and at the same time an intimacy which does not lead to children, and this without the least recourse to abortion or contraceptive or drugs or surgery or even self restrain for a few days. We would of course be amazed that such help could be ours in time of need. And of course, if times called for more children to be born to succor the old, then the homosexual would be encouraged to sacrifice himself for the common good and seek to have children.

Now when we bring in the lens of Paul in his writings we find strong suggestion that he is prescribing or announcing a law (against homosexuality) which cannot be derived from the three loves and so is an extra. If this is true, then Kant and I both are wrong, and there never was a gentile Christian at all, but merely a modified Peterian in the gentile guise.

But this is so easy to explain and to make it accord with pure reason that we can only wonder at the source of our fear that would have kept us from it for so long. Paul obviously saw men who ought to be using their sexual drives for more children (given the high infant mortality rate of his time) and so were demonic in their contempt for the law of nature and the moral law both, beings taking delight in the violation of law. It no longer even matters why he saw things as he did, for he saw the stars revolving around the earth, because by his own interpretation of the edict of Jerusalem he had relieved the gentile of all allegiance to law of any kind (the "idol food" contradiction in scripture) and whatsoever. The Christians have an obligation to proclaim this as a fact in order then to take on Islam. For then the contrast will be stark. The Free Man against the Slave Man.

The gentile Christian is as free to even promote homosexuality as he would to promote left handedness if it were possible that either could be beneficial to the human race. To use a silly example, suppose some demon threatened the earth unless a certain percentage of the population used their left hands for writing and swearing. Then, since morally it is all one and the same, we could encourage right handed people to serve by voluntarily becoming left handed in order that we would not have to draft so many right handers for the necessary duty.

If this could ever happen, and I wait upon the good pleasure of God (perhaps Jesus came when he did in order that Paul might do what he did, i.e., travel easily in many places on Roman communications), then I think we have a perfect foil for Islam, for we can void now entirely the mutual and futile castigation of each other's scripture, for now we can speak of the revelation through Paul which has a validation in his very life and experience. He declared that he had become perfect in Christ, only unlike Christ he had come there through a moral blindness which clouded his vision in his zeal for the way of law. Christ set him free to see clearly and he had followed him and was counted by him as a friend. And he declared that since he, the enemy of Christ, had become the friend of Christ, this was proof that he would do the same of all who had not hidden from Christ but who had simply never heard his call before. "If I, his enemy, has been made his friend, how much more will he do for you who are not his enemy, but merely a stranger."

Now I think the way to approach this with the Muslim, is to enter into the thinking of his way by first proclaiming the ideal of pure reason itself, namely a person who would never violate the moral law of universal human dignity. We essentially state that the following rule is applied on behalf of all humans as humans, namely: any dictum purporting to be of God, no matter how clearly understood and sincerely recognized, can never be accepted as such at face value if it means the commission of a crime against humanity. [Essentially this means that all interpretation of God’s communication must be tempered by the moral law.]

And then, or perhaps even first, we should present the Muslim with the amazing story of the Mormons. This is such a great parallel with equal marks of validity. Then while the Muslim will want to maintain that Smith is a fraud, it won't at all be obvious. Then I think we ought to skip over Jesus entirely and go directly to Paul and present the message from his standpoint, based on his own experience. The good part of this is the validation of the message in the lives of others like Francis especially and then also in Wesley who proclaimed that what the gospel promised had been accomplished in his soul. And perhaps only then invite a comparison of the rational desirability of either the Mohammedan story or the Paulian story. I.e., which of these an unbiased bystander would choose as most beneficial to the human race, freedom or servitude.

A good model for showing the immorality of Islam is the mafia gang where the members will commit any act, criminal or otherwise, that is ordered by the Don, and then who, because (let us say) they happen to be ordered thus far only to do morally indifferent acts or also moral acts (like giving to the poor), they count themselves automatically as part of the moral majority apart from the gang. Therefore the Muslim is lost in a moral blindness which can only be overcome by the Muslim himself, namely as seeing himself as a member of a mafia gang, who does anything for hire. The Christian contrast should be stark, we are members of a gang where the members seek to do good to all people all of the time, and to encourage others to join in. Ask even the Muslim whom he would rather have as a neighbor, another Muslim who might think he were being called to kill him, or a Christian, who seeks to love the Muslim as the Christian loves himself and could never accept any communication which called for him to do otherwise than just that.

At least in the public we can call the Islamic hand by demanding that they subscribe to the universal restriction on divine revelations (as following the moral format), or admit that they are an immoral religion, i.e., a religion which conceives of God as able to demand an act which is clearly indecent in the eyes of the adherent, e.g., in slaying an entirely innocent person.* **

[* Here we can take on the Abraham question.]

[** And here, again, we present not the Christian as foil, but the gentile Christian, the true-believing Paulian. The Peterian Christian will not work. (Perhaps Paulian and Peterian would sound better politically than Gentile and Jewish. I think it might, and be less confusing.)]

The confusion of the Islamic mind may be this: they don’t see any point in God loving any thing that he has created. They need to understand the perfection that lies in the heart of the Christian, and most clearly in that of the gentile Christian. It seems that God has no need of servants, but does want friends. In an inexplicable way he wants friends, and that is only possible with free men.

This then takes us to the glory comparison where the glory of Allah is a line or circle of trained slaves, doing exactly as they are told, and all for the sake of a dollar. While that of Abba is a circle of friends who enjoy each other’s company.
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5:48 PM On Abraham again.

The three religions of the Asia Minor must answer for the apparent crime of Abraham. That man took it upon himself to accept as the voice of God a voice telling him to slay his innocent son, and he undertook actions to produce that effect. Now in no moral religion can it be permitted that anyone one could conclude that a purported guidance of God meant for him to commit such a crime, or indeed any crime.

The only mitigating circumstance that I can discern (and this logic may only hold for the Jew and the Christian) is that Abraham sincerely believed that no harm could ever possibly come to his child, no matter what he did. This belief was based on the experience of the miraculous birth of Isaac (promised by the voices) and the further promise of the voices that Isaac would be a father (and at the time of this episode Issac was still a child and incapable of having children). Thus Abraham was convinced that no harm could possibly come to Isaac, no matter what Abrham might do. In this understanding he was like the practiced, magician’s apprentice who sees what looks dangerous but knows that it is only a trick, even if he doesn’t know how it is done.*

[* The Norse tale of Balder gives us an example of this mindset of Abraham. Balder's mother got (almost) all things to promise never to hurt him and as a result Balder's friends could seriously try to harm him by casting spears and arrows at him, and these would always deflect and miss Balder.]

If the police had stopped Abraham as he took the knife in hand, they would have concluded that he were a lunatic for believing his story, and would send him to an institution for the insane. He would not go to prison for he will have been no more guilty of malice than Quixote was in taking on the windmill. Thus while it is wrong for anyone to take a voice calling for such conduct to be the voice of God, it is uderstandable how Abraham came to accept the voice as such and still not sin, for he knew" that nothing could happen to Issac (at least not until he had fathered a child).

Each religion (Christianity, Islam and Judaism) must declare in no uncertain terms that it is impossible for a divinely inspired communication to be considered to be rightly understood as long as it seems, no matter how clearly, to call for a immoral and criminal act.

Regarding the Christian faith we might proffer the following certification: it is recorded in scripture (John 5:16-18) and accept as true for all Christians that Jesus actually broke the enunciated law in order to do good (healing on the sabbath when he could have waited a little while and do it on the first day of the week). This can serve as an icon that nothing precedes the insistence upon doing good and the supremacy of the moral law over all revealed law. This is part and parcel of the Christian constitution. And it constitutes an certification and assurance to all the world on the part of the Christian faith that it is wrong for any Christian to think that God, or any agent of his, could ever command or call for what is immoral.