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Journal of the Cornered Citizen
We see the one in the many,
The many in the one,
And the one itself.
Allow me to explain the uses of this quote. I will use music as the example. However, any concept can be used in place of the one.
We see the music in the many,
The many who use the music,
And the music itself.
Evil’s only power is in the imaginations, interpretations, propagations, and, unfortunately, the actions of people. Evil is one concept among many. I do not want it to overshadow the theme of this journal. Love and reason are central to the theme.
First the world was of one land. Titanic forces were at hand.
Then came Life and the beginnings of (1AI)Life’s music.
And here we are, the singing achievement of Evolution thus far.
We are the embodiment of Evolution.
Oceans! Rivers! Lakes! Streams!
Water!!
That great, mysterious compound of Life.
From which it came, none can say.
As for its gift to us, water lends health and clarity of mind.
I am human. You are human.
This is our bond.
I will not be bound by unreasonable concepts.
I will be Free!
The music will never drain from me in anything but death.
So long as I live and breath, I will sing.
Desert Flower
Did you think you were the only one?
My mind is just beginning to open. It is like a flower blooming in the desert, after a hard rain.
Once its pedals open and it sees the wonder of the stars, the clouds, and the heavens above, it feels, set apart from the rest of the world. But what is the next thing that it sees?
It looks upon the ground from which it grows and discovers other flowers like itself. Some who have come before. Some who have come after. And it knows it is not alone. It knows it is not the only one.
First one pedal and then two, three and then four.
New realizations with each one. New awareness blooming.
The possibilities seem endless.
Just as the plant grows to the sun, humans grow to awareness.
Here, if nowhere else, a person can sing his or her song for the whole World to hear.
Life is the greatest gift I can imagine—in any form.
The Creator exists
Knowing the Divine Being exists, what do we know?
The Evolution of Thought
Religion, psychology, philosophy, business, natural science, and so forth are all ways of thinking. The Holy Bible and other religious texts, for example, began with a sense. It was not a sense isolated to one life-form. It is a sense that all of Life feels.
As time and evolution allowed, that sense became a thought. And the life-form that came to be called human began to express thoughts of the divine being with senses, gestures and sounds, symbols, pictures, word of mouth, writing, music, and so forth. The expressions were passed on from generation to generation.
People came to sense, see, hear, read, and comprehend the expressions that evolved from thoughts of the divine being. They came to understand what had been done and, therefore, knew what they must do—walk the path. As each person walks the path, it becomes more developed. They add their own insights and discoveries as they walk along.
Imagine the first human being to realize he or she had the power of reason. What an amazing concept that must have been—a concept for which the implications have not yet been fully realized. With the power of human reason, a person can use philosophical, psychological, scientific, and religious reasonings to draw realistic perceptions of the times in which he or she actually lives. Through time and the evolution of thought, people have furthered many of the paths we walk today.
With all things we are interested in, we seek to make them come alive. We like to feel the things we do. We breathe life into the things we do. The fact that thought evolves at a considerably faster rate than physical forms do makes it possible to trace the evolution of thought—throughout history—beyond a reasonable doubt.
Creation and Evolution: Hand in Hand
I sense the force that created and guides existence. I call the force the Creator. The Creator knows every step every life-form has taken from the very beginning. The proof of the force that guides existence is all around us. In fact, it is in our very genes.
We have too much in common with other life-forms on this planet not to be related to them. Deviation of species, for example, is not an occurrence isolated to human beings of different geographical locations. Live birth and breast-feeding are not traits unique to humans alone. All life-forms intake energy and expel waste. Though I can understand humans better than any other life-form I have encountered, we are not the only life-forms that can communicate.
I write this in an attempt to express the sense of the divine being and that all is related through the divine being. Anything a person can write about the Creator is, at best, incomplete. And, at worst, manipulative.
The sense of the Creator and my respect for all Life as a result of that sense has lead me to question the path of knowledge that deals with the divine being—religion. I question Christianity because it is the religion I am most familiar with. If I were familiar with any other religion, I would be questioning it, as well.
It need be reflected upon that we should be thankful for all we know and have to the labors and songs of Life. Most importantly, we should be thankful to the Creator for Life. Life is the gift. Everything else is a part of it…
Questioning Christianity
As a youth, I attended church with the beautiful gift of Life the Creator gives…
The preachers would come to tell me I was formed of dust. They would come to tell me I was a sinner and must be baptized in Jesus’ blood to redeem something that was never lost. They belittled me and the gift the Creator gives with their words. The spoke to shame and drive me to sin!
(I hold little blame in my brothers and sisters for what they did as many held a quasi-belief in what they preached. It was natural for them to do what they did. It is part of the music written in the Bible. They were persuaded by the Bible’s music to sing in the name of a manipulative version of the divine being. It is Life that allows us to play the notes so well. However, I will not have my brothers and sisters continue to suffer under the doctrines of psychological manipulation.)
A child’s mind is like a blank page with trust and love written between the lines. Humans are (2AI)natural born believers. However, it takes quite the spin of sophistry to keep a person bound to unreasonable concepts.
Now, I see why the preachers wanted to hammer the gospel into me at an early age. In a form of subversive nascent sublimation, they were implanting fear, shame, guilt, self-doubt, and so on into my unformed conscience so that it would mesh with all else I came to learn and imagine. They wanted me to be dependent upon the church for ‘salvation’ from those psychologically implanted concepts.
(As I considered this insight, a spider walked on the page and spun a bit of web. In effect, they were spinning a web of deception in an attempt to bind me to that manipulative religion.)
As a youth, I took it for granted that they might somehow know what they were doing in the name of God, yet I had my doubts.
It was Socrates, with his quest to know the truth and questioning of self-proclaimed wise men, that gave focus to my chaotic state of mind and started me on the path of truth in earnest. Though I did not fully understand why he presented himself to the courts and drank hemlock in Plato’s portrayal of his confession and execution when he could have easily left the city as his friends had urged him to do, until I read (3AI)The Closing of the American Mind by Allan Bloom.
Original Sin
In the tale of Adam and Eve, by a serpent’s twisted tongue was all of humanity cursed to live in pain. Why did God place the being that was to become a serpent in the Garden and not warn Eve it would tempt her with the fruit of knowledge? Eve, being totally innocent and unaware of the devious ways of what we call evil, had no reason to disbelieve what the serpent told her. Evil, and the knowledge thereof, was present in the World before Adam and Eve were created.
The Bible’s God created the forces that caused Adam and Eve to sin. Following this concept through, I reasoned that the Savior was sent to save humanity from God’s sin, not its own. If there is an original sin, it is God’s, not humanity’s. On the other hand, if the things we consider evil are simply acts within the laws of nature, then evil’s only power is in the imaginations, interpretations, propagations, and, unfortunately, the actions of people.
If you should falter, take truth by the hand.
Let truth be your guide.
What follows is scary stuff, so let us pray.
The Serenity Prayer
Creator grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,
The courage to change the things I can,
And the wisdom to know the difference.
As I toured an exhibit at the Library, today, I saw bleeding men, newborn babies, and lamenting women. All of them very strong emotional appeals.
With the addition of Christ, the Holy Bible has one of the strongest emotional appeals I have yet encountered. And it is used as such: Leaflets, posters, statues, word of mouth, and so on.
All depicting a man profusely bleeding for the World…
“Jesus died on the Cross for you!”
“Look how I bleed for thee…”
Jesus died for my sins? What an amazing thing.
Now, what are my sins?
What is a sin?
Who am I?
I imagined a parent using the doctrines of Christianity to subdue a child.
Though I have yet to read the Holy Bible completely, I reject it entirely as an accurate portrayal of the Creator and the Creator’s relationship with Life.
In the Holy Bible, humanity is judged as a whole.
People who had not yet been born were already damned.
In the tale of Noah, the Bible’s God destroyed all that lived on the World by flood.
He killed newborn babies, pregnant mothers—people who had never sinned.
The Bible's God is a murderer!!
Throughout the Holy Bible, man’s vanity speaks for God. When God ‘speaks’ in the Bible, there is a corollary of humanity putting itself in God’s place, trying to bring order to what was never out of (4AI)order.
The Holy Bible is composed of 66 books that were compiled and modified over millennia. Many of the concepts presented in the Holy Bible are variations on themes presented in earlier beliefs such as Buddhism, Taoism, Ancient Egyptian religious beliefs, and Ancient Greek philosophy. Ambiguous versions of the wisdom of ages and the divine being are used to bind people to the religions that spring from the Holy Bible. (5AI)The Holy Bible is an eclectic work.
I attended church services, today, at the Salvation Army.
As I flipped through the pages while the preacher was telling us the theme of that days sermon, which I only vaguely recall, I was pondering that the Bible must have some kind of story line. I know now that the story line I was looking for is a history of the Jewish people.
While following along in the chapters the preacher read from, I realized he was interpreting them to fit his speech. His message was one of reclaiming the good in Life.
The preacher used the words written in the Bible as a moral, psychological grounds to stand on—a platform from which to speak.
If Jesus is the Son of Man or Son of God, why did he not write the Holy Bible?
The Bible is the means by which people are to understand God, supposedly. Why was it not written by His only begotten Son?
If Jesus died for our sins, why must we die for the sins of others?
If God can destroy a human being, then why not the devil?
Questions aside, I have been moved and inspired by the portrayals of Jesus as the loving Son of God who was sent from Heaven above to teach, be crucified, and raised from the dead so that we might have hope of salvation and eternal life by believing on him. Now, through reason, I see that Jesus represents alleviation from despair and a manipulative version of the divine being.
Faith and Philosophy (Creator and Truth)
In my view, Jesus and Socrates epitomize two of our highest callings—Faith and Philosophy. Socrates in his earnest desire to know the truth and questioning of self-proclaimed wise men, and Jesus in his love, humility, and forgiveness, have had a profound effect on my way of thinking. These two martyrs are not the only ones to have sacrificed for the common good and what they believed, yet, to me, they are inexorably linked in our quest for Freedom.
While reading a section of text in The Closing of the American Mind by Allan Bloom under the heading “Tocqueville on Democratic Intellectual Life” about how Callicles ridicules Socrates for being unable to defend himself in Plato’s Gorgias, I recalled that Jesus too turned the other cheek and was tried and executed for what he believed. Neither Jesus nor Socrates wrote his own story. They both had disciples who followed them around and recorded what they did and said. So firm were their beliefs that neither struck back when struck.
It crossed my mind that Socrates came before Jesus in history, so it is possible that Jesus was a quasi-Socrates. It is conceivable that a group of historically and philosophically inclined Hebrew people adapted Greek philosophy to fit into their cultural dogma. The Bible is a historical, philosophical, psychological, faith based text with God and Jesus as the central characters of which prophetic psychologists are disciples—Jesus being the psychologically prophetic disciple ‘son’ of God. One of the main themes of the Bible is sublimating the fear of evil, death, and damnation into the hope of ‘salvation’ and eternal life through Jesus Christ. Not only does Jesus promise eternal life, but he also makes it clear that no one can come to the Father except through him.
Christian biblical psychology conformed to the powers, conventions, and superstitions of the era—kings, slavery, natural disasters, and so on—while at the same time undermining the tyrannies of that era. In doing so, however, biblical psychology invented a manipulative version of the divine being that formed a strand in the web of psychological manipulation. There is wisdom in the Holy Bible, yet it can be accounted for as wisdom drawn from the experience of living and observing the human condition.
The only thing that has changed since then is how we live and—what we know. All forms of knowledge are utilized to the ends of manipulation.
Just as Christian biblical psychology attempts to bind us to its manipulative versions of reality and the divine being, so too does Capitalist psychology attempt to bind us to its manipulative versions of reality and the all mighty dollar.
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