Tag: mysterium

Ask a score-keeping Christian to define his belief system.

More’n likely you’ll get some sort  of recipe or formula about some kind of plan that was figured out from readin scripture. You might also hear that God has revealed such a plan to man for his eternal salvation. And that means that you better listen, cause in the mind of the score-keeper, conformity to that plan is the hinge that connects eternal happiness in God to man satisfyin that dang plan.

But if you ask a mystery-mnded Christian to define his religion, he’s liable to give ya some sort a answer that the kingdom of God is within you,  “the Father and I are one, … and so are you.”

Now ain’t that just a little bit better?

Like trying to grab and hold onto pudding, score-keeper Christians don’t seem to understand the impossibility of possessing God. Fer such folks, owning God is not distinguished from any sense of God as the source of how we experience the mysteries of living. They’re gonna tell ya that be’in religious is mechanical – like mowing the law with the correct riding mower.

By them kind a mechanical of living by creeds, score-keepers are focused on fixed ways of seeing and believing instead of the state of yer mind.

Another way of sayin it is that whatever the heck “God” is, The Almighty’s made real only by somehow owning His Almightiness …

believin imaginatively that you can and are havin a connection to Old Wrathful as a function of something called “faith.”

There’s a smarty-pants way of sayin that. Fer me one of the best smarty-pants was Mr. Alan Watts who wrote,

    ...man is frightened of this living, ungraspable mystery, and is always trying to have it securely boxed up in some philosophical, ethical, theological, or psychological formula, where its vitality is destroyed  ... 
    
    In trying to hold God in one fixed form, we exclude him from all others, and, so far as our apprehension of him is concerned, “devitalize” him in the one that we hold. We lose his immanence because we try to grasp and draw down his transcendence.

So ya got yer score-keepers and they need to figure out and promise themselves to score-keepin theologies. And that of course sinks humans to congregations in communities in which worryin about yer personal score is what it means to be .. you know … a godly human being.

Well, I’ll tell ya … Life ain’t no dang formula and it sure don’t recognize and reward score-keepin religious doofusing.

Life is spontaneous (Hey! i used a big word in a sentence without gettin my laces untied!)

God is spontaneous.

And we – whether we like it or admit it or not – are spontaneous … even when we work like the dickens to try not to be. Either conscious or unconscious we think about most of the stuff of life ebbing and flowing within our thoughts. We do it according to what smarty-pantses call our attention spans.

Then there’s our own playfulness … you know, when we listen to the whimsical nature of promptings, hunches and impulses.

Some folks are more doofus  than others cause they think those promptings, hunches and impulses are from something religious … something from outside of us … like space invaders . Score-keepers are mostly in that crowd and they don’t call the source “space invaders” … that’d be you know … supernatural … so they call it something natural … something that makes sense … like … are you ready for this? … like the “Holy Ghost.”

Well, I’ll tell ya. Score-keeping religiousizers seem ta think they have to move up the stairs of eternal climbing by pretending there’s a big Score-Keeper with a big Plan and that they got to demonstrate by cooking with the recipes of the plan … maybe cause they’re scared in their pride and want nothin to do with God being all mysterious and stuff.

Only way then is to set it in cement … believing in the formula and not the real thing.

Ain’t it more seductive to be mysteriously connected with God through yer own within kingdom than to live constantly worrying about yer score?

Ain’t it more adventuresome to live by trusting the spirit of spontaneous God and human stuff?

Ain’t it more exciting to feel them promptings, hunches and impulses … and trust em … and act on em?

Ain’t that better than fixin yer mind on “commandments” as if the score and the reward is what it means to live a good life?

Truth is … all that score-keeping ain’t justified by something solid. It’s all imagined itself and can’t be proven or established in some real way. And that’s why there ain’t nothing but weakness in all that old-time guess work about original sin.

And if ya ain’t got yer original sin, the god-talkers’d have ta leave out sin, atonement and redemption from their sermonizing. None of them concepts are now nor ever been real in a supernatural, let alone spiritual, sense. Only in the mind’s eye’s of those early Roman guessers did such weeds sprout and grow up to be noxious for the rest of us.

Now why couldn’t those scribes have added a concordance so I could look up original sin?

Once they guessed out the plan and the score sheet, the rest of us became mushrooms. And you know how mushrooms are raised … kept in the dark and thrown nothing but poop. But then only in the mind’s eyes of score-keepers who was afraid of the mystics among them could greater weeds in bigger fields be sewed and reaped.

So what ya got is yer imagined environment where a score-keeping God who is somewhere outside of humanity like maybe the moon. And it’s imagined that this invader created rules as an emperor – as if we needed such a divine emperor – with rules, wrath and punishment fer low scores.

The score-keepers got nothin.