12/11/05 2:04 PM The natural evil of the human species is now apparent to me. The solution to this evil comes through a recognition of the Son of God, the idea of a natural man who was morally perfect and never sinned. That life finds resonance in the human psyche for we all know that such a life is possible, for we are called to that life ourselves, even at this very instant.

Once that recognition is made there is a call to join the church. It is in the church that we find our only hope for salvation as a species, ourselves included. It is in the church that we join with others who wish to embody the Son of God from this moment on in a joint effort to strengthen each other and to reve up (like an engine), as it were, to face and overcome the evil onslaught of the natural world in a united strength, where it is natural to accept violations of the moral law in polite society (and all that that portends for the entire society and its individuals). In other words: we pledge joint allegiance to the moral law above all else.

The three difficulties are treated. immediate justification, experience gives the integrity of the good disposition, justice is established by the anticipated and potential cross that is taken on in the person of the good disposition.

How to organize the church. A church can require a belief in a dogma, but then foregoes the claim to universal church. Some people could conceivably be as righteous as Jesus and still not be able to believe the dogma, and they would be excluded from this dogmatic church. The universal church may have a dogma, but its acceptance cannot be considered as requisite for pleasing God, and thus can be accepted ritualistically in a show of solidarity, like church kids singing “we are marching to Pretoria, Hurrah!” for they don’t even know where Pretoria or what it is.

And so it is not necessary for there ever to be a time in which a church did not have a dogma, but it is necessary for any one of any number of otherwise good churches to claim to be universal that the moral law alone be requisite in that church. And so church A and B exists and A has 100, 000 members and B has billions, and only A can claim to be the universal church, for it alone, let us say, requires no belief in a dogma. They both may be identical with respect to moral behavior, but in B, per this example, a belief in a dogma is required for membership. Both are legitimate Christian churches, but only A is universal, and not B.

2:19 PM Now I turn my attention to the dogmatic church, or dogmatic congregation, and wonder how one can develop a belief in the dogmatic, i.e., be convinced that they are true?


3:53 PM I must believe that God has made his will known in a very simple way. And that would have to be the moral law within our own rational personalities (as attested to by Genesis 3:22), namely that he is pleased only with a dedication to righteousness as presupposed by Jesus (per John 5 where Jesus subjugates the scriptural statute law to the moral law). This belief is what every man will derive from himself, from his own reasoning and prior to any instruction on the part of a dogma or faith. This is the true religion which wells up in each person upon a prompt to consider it. It was first proclaims publicly by Jesus.

Now Jesus goes further than merely to announce this religion (which everyone can derive themselves), but also to establish a church as a rallying point for the union of all who are determined to be righteous. In this church they unify and consolidate strength and encourage a return to the world better armed to withstand the onslaught of the natural world in its inherent evil, i.e., the very willingness to occasionally violate the moral law and be less than righteous.

This is the invisible church. The visible church is organized by men and can reflect this invisible church in varying ways. There can be many visible churches and all very good and morally reflective of the church Jesus established, and may endure in such division to the end of time, but none may claim the title of universal church as long as anything whatsoever (beyond personal righteousness), i.e., a dogma, is required as a confessed belief in order to be pleasing to God. A universal church may possess dogma, but it can only be taken as ritualistic, and not as binding on the conscience of man. For it is abhorrent that a man be forced to admit as true what he cannot in conscience know to be true, e.g., that Jesus was resurrected from the dead, or was born of a virgin.

And so that is pretty much the gist, I think, of the matter.

Now the Paulian or Peterian evangelist can enter the scene and make his case. It is impossible for a man to become pleasing to God, i.e., have the good disposition, except by a miracle, e.g., Zachaeus and the righteous gentiles. But you don’t have to merely hope that you can have this miracle yourself, Jesus died and resurrected in order to assure you of this miracle, and it is yours by believing that he did die an atoning death and was resurrected into new life. By virtue of this faith you are content or at peace in the awareness that you do not have to be perfect in order to please God with a good disposition, you merely have to do the best that you can, and because of this striving, imperfect though it may be, God dispenses with your sin. The logic is like this: justice must be served and so the evil disposition must be punished, and this is accomplished for the believer in this manner: Jesus and the believer become a binity* known as the Christ, Jesus rightly so and the believer by grace so; and so on the cross innocent Jesus suffers the torment due the guilty believer just as in the resurrection the now innocent believer now carries his own cross (earthly tribulations) for the sake of that same Christ. And so all that is required is simply one’s very best in accordance with one’s best understanding of what is good and evil in this world, what is medicine and poison, what uplifts and what downcast. The promised experience (which will always be subjective, according to Kant) is the Abba/Daddy consciousness. [This seems reasonable, for it is only in the Pauline conception that we have the first understanding of God’s love for the world. Which may have affected John’s conception. Nowhere else does the idea arise of a love on the part of God for the human species.]

[* A left and right hand together constitute a binity, as do the left and right ears, and other examples of what Kant called “incongruent counterparts.”]

[btw I think the glossomina, or whatever it is called (speaking in tongues), should be presented to the Muslims as a rejection of the claim of 99 names, and that the Holy Spirit allows some Christians to pronounce these additional names, which are intelligible only to the angels, and those so gifted who can hint at them. Knowing these names does not make some dearer in the eyes of God, for they are merely his servants.]


4:40 PM What the Muslims ought to do to spite the Christian believers is to convert to Jesusian Christianity and by step Traditional Christianity altogether. That would be a marvelous contribution to the world. Essentially they would become Unitarian-Universalists. They might almost become Episcopalians.