2/4/06 1:46 PM Reflections on a Lazy Sabbath Afternoon.

First of all: Jesus said: those who are not against us are for us. The interpretation: if unhindered, the gospel will swell and encompass all people. And so by virtue of merely no hindering the gospel you are working for its spread. And so by shear inadvertence these people are in fact working for Christ, but unknown to them. They will wear a negative medallion, the Non-Hindering. Some may be also invited to the feast table of Christ, but it will be those who are in addition to not hindering, actively hoping it will succeed, and then . . .

Let’s see: those who hinder not simply as honest men are one thing. And they work for the kingdom. I wonder if we can say that in addition these are people who hope the gospel will succeed.

Gotama would not be one of these, for he would consider the gospel to be another human trance to avoid seeing the reality of existence and the disinterested hope in the reality of nonexistence, or however one expresses it.


Gotama would let the gospel pass unhindered with a sorrowful expression, i.e., these well meaning and good doing people are simply walking with everyone else into a trance of their own making, or the making of a bored (Mormon like) god.

He would not hinder it and thus he would be for the gospel, i.e., then in a practical, though unintended way. In a sense he might be said to be for it, to the extent the gospel helped people to become comfortable with all that existence has to promise.

Gotama will be among those with the medallion of “non-hindering” (for gotama hindered nothing, but opened himself as the hand to the butterfly).

The foundational story of the trance is the factuality of Mohammed having actually encountered a messenger from God himself and having then faithfully reported all that he was told. Here we shall not be interested in the revelation itself, but in this foundational story. [The objection that the Koran is itself a miracle as evidenced by its numerology or predictive value is treated under the topic of demonic aspects of a trance.]

Now we know that it is no more possible to tell that a being is an infinite being, God, than we can distinguish by looking between an extremely long, but finite line and an infinite line. I may tell that a vision before my eyes depicts the supernatural, but I cannot tell in that way that they depict the infinite. Two visions might be compared in power necessary to produce a given effect, but that would be merely comparative and would not provide an intuition, if you will, of the infinite, the infinite of anything.

Now a counter story can be introduced here to begin. the purpose of this is to follow Kant’s advice that a person can be quickly awakened from his trance or dogma when he is given an alternative story which is equally valid as a dogma.

Joseph Smith reports an encounter with God himself which very closely parallels the story of Mohammed, except that it does a more credible job, by holding on to more of the bible which Mohammed had to dispense with and degenerate. In a word: Smith has a more compelling story than that of Mohammed, although it so close to Mohammed as to seem almost a copy, which it might very well me.

Now the Christian does not here pick any favorites between the Mormon and the Muslim, for both are blind trances to him and he places no value on either. A plague on both your houses. And so he is an excellent judge of this situation, and this is how he judges: you both report very, very similar circumstances surrounding your authentication of the divinity of your revelation, so much so that either on its own would be compelling. And yet we know that one of you is fraudulent or, to speak with civility, totally false. But the thing is, we can’t tell which is which. We can’t tell which is the false story (accommodating also here the possibility of hallucination). We know that it is impossible for both revelations to be true, but it is equally impossible to tell which is untrue.

The upshot is that neither the Mormon or the Muslim can himself tell whether he himself is perhaps after all caught in a trance. This is the opening that the Christian evangelist wishes to accomplish at this stage of the game.

[And I guess it is a sort of game. We play a game, and if we win, the other side has to give in and join up. And vice-versa. And we can keep playing as long as we can answer all the objections of the other side, including showing that the particular objection is baseless.]


Now we are ready to introduce the Christian trance, if you will, and then show that it is not a trance for it can be verified in experience, but which we will discuss later.

Here is the general concept of the Christian (and actually this is a “believing” Christian, but more of that later). The Christian is a person who joins Christ in his life and his death and then in his resurrection. It is accomplished on a spiritual plane which can be given a visible and physical representation. We now turn to the “binity” of Christ.

A multinity is a group of absolutely identical things which are nonetheless different. The two hands make a multinity, and indeed, since they are two, they can be called a binity. Let God take the concept of hand and create just a hand. Thorough investigation will show indeed that this is a perfect archetype of hand. Now let God create a hand, and let it be a different hand. Again the investigation of this hands certifies that it is a perfect hand, an archetype of hand. And now let the two hands be considered together and a glove created for one, it will be found that the other cannot wear that glove, even though the glove be the archetype of the idea of glove in the mind of God.

Accordingly we take the spirit of Christ and find an archetype in Jesus and then another archetype in his follower who accepts him as lord and savior. In this way then,, as Jesus lived and died for the sake of his follower, his follower now lives and dies for the sake of Christ, the Holy Spirit moving Jesus. and the logic continues, now in the same way that Jesus was resurrected, the follower shall rise and shall never die.

And so the Christian acts for the sake of Christ and counts nothing as his own work, and he possesses perfect peace with God, for he is one now with Jesus through the binity of Christ which join the two into a single person, the Christian, which is the idea which moves Jesus and his follower.


The practical effect of this idea for the convert to the faith lies in this: while the pleasure of God rests only on the righteous, if the Christian will sincerely seek to do all that he can in order to lead a perfect life, then even though he will not be able to attain to a degree of factual righteousness, his sincerity counts for the deed and he is counted as a friend of Christ Jesus.

It is worth developing that the first sign, though insufficient, of determining that the Christian is not living in a trance is the correspondence of the law of right conduct with the Moral Law that Kant shows is a natural product of directed and unbiased human reason. This is quite a distinction from the Jewish and Islamic trances where there is a bundle of non-moral things which are thought to be pleasing to God. [Note: the giving to the poor is no more moral for the Muslim than paying one’s taxes is for the Christian. It is coercive in both cases, and thus not moral at all (except incidentally).]

The second and telling sign is the replication of the experience of Paul is witnessed to by countless Christians, i.e., they are becoming new persons who think differently and who are growing in a love of the Golden Rule.


Now we introduce the Muslim (as well as the Mormon) to the revelation of Paul and we find its authentication in the testimony of Paul himself, namely that the enemy of Christ was transformed into his friend. And likewise we find a certain authentication in the testimony of Paul (and Jesus) that the only way to be pleasing to God is to act according to the Golden Rule (and some he blesses by giving them a growing love of the Golden Rule, so that it becomes less burdensome, like the “righteous gentiles” of Romans 2).

And so we can now invite the Muslim to comply in one of two ways, either by becoming a non-hinderer (and earning that reward) or else to comply by becoming a fellow follower of Jesus and possess immediately the gift of eternal life without having to earn it first, merely by a sincere surrender to the Golden Rule in all that one does and a refusal to take credit for the good that will be done and a like refusal to complain about the heaviness of the cross that one is to bear for Christ.

The promise of authenticity will arise in experience, if one is granted longer life (unlike the thief on the cross), namely that one will grow in a love of the Golden Rule and a love in God who wants to save all people from their sins and put them on a new course of life, of eternal life.


Of course a foundation of the authenticity of the writings of Paul will need to be laid by reference to the thinking of scholars. I.e., these can be counted upon as certainly the dictation of the man Paul.

We can now also dismiss the Islamic take on Jesus as the workings of the trance on Mohammed, like his assurance that the mountains keep the earth from shaking. ???

Concerning now the death of Jesus this is necessary from a psychological standpoint for it is only in this extreme what humans could fathom the otherwise very inane notion that God loves them. The words could be said, but it is only when God has Jesus die that people can realize that he gave up his only son in order to invite into his kingdom those who had strayed, i.e., the human race. Only then is it conceivable that one could attain to the experience of the Abba/Father. If Jesus had been miraculously taken up to heaven before his death, then it would be possible for some, e.g., Barabbas, to doubt that God loved him. In order to convince Barabbas of this fact, Jesus has convinced all people of this fact. “I love you so much, Barabbas, that I will die in order that you might live.”

And since Jesus came to save all people from death, it was necessary that he himself die, for else Barabbas could not have believed in the love of God for him.


We might consider now for a moment the notion of a demon. A demon shall be conceived of as a supernatural being who is rational and who hates the Golden Rule. [An angel then might be conceived of as a supernatural being who does not hate the Golden Rule, and who obeys God.???] Accordingly (and this would be based on an analysis of the immorality or amorality of the Islamic message) it is easy to conceive of a demon having appeared to Mohammed and found him gullible, though with Smith, perhaps because he is more historic, the demon may be internal to the man. For there is nothing in either message which would be impossible for a demon to proclaim (as Kant points out it is conceivable that a demon might occasionally require what is a moral act, but only then to gain a greater goal, i.e., a general disrespect for the moral act, e.g., an other wise moral act might be required, the tax for the sake of the poor, as a way to avoid hell). But this is not the case with the Christian for here the supreme code of conduct is the Golden Rule, and this is the antithesis of the code of the demon. And so Paul’s revelation cannot be demonic. It may be an hallucination, but then the evidence for the validity of Paul’s declaration of experience is promised to the Christian in the course of his life. And so unlike Islam or Mormonism there is a dual validation: correspondence with the moral law of human reason and then an experience which corresponds to the promise of the gospel story.


And so the Christian shall end his presentation with an invitation to join the fellowship of the followers of Jesus. If that is declined, then ask the Muslim to at least avoid hindering the gospel in the knowledge that a world of people like Paul’s Jesus would be the greatest existence that anyone could imagine, world devoid of trance, a world of rationality and the experience of love.

An added thought. Ask the Muslim to choose between a world where he makes his own law, where as a Christian he will choose the Golden Rule and make his own way freely and accordingly, and a world like the Jewish trance where he simply does as his told in utter subjugation and abdication of liberty.