8/4/24
Jesus' kingdom of God story may be indispensable to joyful abundant life.
Warning: Everything but what moves you to discipleship of Jesus is destructive of your health. jesianity.info/search/label/Jesus
Lightly edited transcript:
It may be that heaven on earth requires living a lie that is perfectly aligned with the truth, the essential truth.
We humanoids have made it this far because of stories, aboriginal tribes. They have embedded and transmitted forward reality, essential truths, into their stories, not knowing that there's a difference, between story and Truth.
I believe it may be George Vailant in Spiritual Evolution describes that. But it has been established that aboriginal tribes in Australia were able to survive horrible drought. It was a terrible drought when the scientifically advanced English colonists, those barbarians, perished because they couldn't find water. The aboriginal tribes had woven the truth of water and where it existed in the countryside into their stories.
And I suspect, though this is an idea I'll have to explore because it's new to me, that so-called advanced civilizations, of which I am a victim, we don't live stories, we live the truth. And I suspect that that is ridiculous. Liberals live the story that if you are educated, you have the best life. Well, this jd Vance guy is educated. Ted Cruz is educated. Hillary Clinton is educated. Condoleezza Rice's educated. Madeline Albright is educated. Barack Obama is educated. These horrible gargoyles are educated, but the story persists.
And when I said lie, I meant story.
The best scholarship I know is that Jesus and enlightened Jews of their time knew that they didn't know what the truth was. They didn't know what the truth was about God. But that optimal life depended upon having a story that was the best approximation of what seemed to be reality, what seemed to work, what seemed to produce the kind of world that they would want to have by doing it through story.
And this is what the best art, true art, does. It materializes, it manifests. It's the best that the artist can work out at the time in terms of what the optimal truth of something is, be it the vase in front of them or the countryside or the person or the situation.
We disparage it. We educated. We enlightened in this culture, which are anything but. We disparage it. We teach stories, denying to ourselves that we live them.
This comes to mind, thank goodness, due to a divine encounter on the side of the road several days ago. Richard, not his real name, flagged me down on the side of the road. Do you have a minute, in this isolated area?
It was among the most promising encounters I've ever had. Rather, what I think I saw was one of the most promising souls for the world that I've personally encountered.
He was recently self-exited along with his young family from the Mennonite or maybe it was Amish. One of those. He was recently self-exited along with his young family from the Mennonite or maybe it was Amish. That came out later in our dialogue. He brought it out,
and he gave me his handout, one page printed both sides, which I've only read in cursory fashion. I'll probably read it more. But it was all, it was 80%, as I recall, quotes from the four canonical Gospels attributed to Jesus, or passages attributed to Jesus. And it seemed to be 100% woven around that.
And either it told or it reminded me that Jesus was, his teaching was essentially a story. God is going to come back. The Son of Man is going to come back and take charge of things.
And although Jrsus didn't say it this way, I wish he had, but I think it is. What he said, that what people are doing now is qualifying themselves. They're either qualifying for the kingdom, or they're qualifying to be burned up as offensive dead refuse.
Fear was an apparent object, an apparent purpose of what he was saying. Watch, be watchful. The hour will come when you don't know. But if someone lived the entire story of Jesus, if you make of yourself what I have made of myself, paraphrasing Jesus loosely, and you're a child of God, then you'll have the best life for eternity, and presumably the best life now. Because my joy, Jesus speaking here, will be fulfilled in you. My abundant life will be had by you now, and then for eternity.
It's that and then that has been lost. We don't want to adjust to that now. But everything I know in psychology, everything I know in historical wisdom, says that Jesus' instructions that we are wise, if we imagine an infinitely loving, infinitely knowledgeable, infinitely forgiving, but not truth-ignoring father, and live in loving service to that father, with little edges of fear.
what black diamond skier is likely to survive. If they don't have, if they don't maintain an edge of fear, they do the skiing because they find it joyful. But they don't survive if they don't, if they lose a healthy edge of fear.
So a point in all this, James, is you have been very concerned about the, the horrors of the myths and stories of religion, most particularly Christianity.
But is the problem that they are myths and stories? Or the problem that they are not aligned with the truth? The truth of how we're engineered as human beings and where optimal gratification comes from. And where optimal existence for... The collective is likely to come from. problems like Gene Roddenberry was trying to work out. And Tolkien was trying to work out. And Tolstoy was trying to work out.
And the risk of stories is tremendous. Because as we can see through history, what generally proliferates are stories, that are misaligned with reality of collective health and individual health, and rather the stories that get hijacked by the unhealthy, by the sick, by the greedy, for their own selfish interests.
It may be that we can't throw the baby out with the bathwater, baby being a story that is near perfectly aligned with the truth, the story that Jesus lived and gave us.
We're not designed to be able to do that. We're not able to live any sort of optimal life without a story. We're not able to live any sort of optimal life without a story.
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