First Offence

Einstein was a fervent and firm believer in destiny. He didn’t exactly call it ‘destiny’, though. He called it causality.

causality

kɔːˈzalɪti/

noun

1. the relationship between cause and effect.
2. the principle that everything has a cause.

                      “In human freedom in the philosophical sense I am definitely a

   disbeliever. Everybody acts not only under external compulsion but also

   in accordance with inner necessity. Schopenhauer’s saying, that “a man can

   do as he will, but not will as he will,” has been an inspiration to me since my

   youth up, and a continual consolation and unfailing well-spring of patience

   in the face of the hardships of life, my own and others’. This feeling mercifully

   mitigates the sense of responsibility which so easily becomes paralysing, and

   it prevents us from taking ourselves and other people too seriously; it conduces

   to a view of life in which humour, above all, has its due place.”

            — From the book “The World As I See It”, by Albert Einstein.

   To explain it simply: what you do and what you are is all directly the result of what has happened to you. You can do exactly what you want to, but what you want to do is not up to you.

   For me the jury is still out on this. It makes perfect sense and I realize that it is illogical to argue with the theory Einstein believes in. But maybe we shouldn’t always rely on logic.

   That being said, in this statement of Einstein I have found a profound truth. What you do does depend on other factors outside of yourself. Whether it is completely, as he believed, or only partly I cannot say. One thing I can say, and this I have seen from experience, is that people’s behavior is a result of other’s behavior toward them.

   Abused people often abuse or have greater empathy for the abuse of others. People who suffer often inflict suffering on others or they fight all the more fervently against suffering. It is because of what has happened in the past that people do what they do now. So now I am myself wrestling with a question:

   If no one ever committed evil, then it stands to reason that “evil” would not exist. This has three simple conclusions. Either “evil” originates from outside of humans and we are inherently  good or evil is an inherent feature that we are born with or, that “evil” does not exist and we have simply chosen to demarcate anything that we find disagreeable with ourselves as evil.

   If you agree with Einstein’s principle of cause and effect applying to all behavior then right and wrong does not exist and people cannot justly be punished for a crime, because the crime is the effect of a previous cause. Punishing crime, under these beliefs, would be the same as punishing someone for being a certain race or for having an accent. It was not the person who decided these things, it was “ordained” by the laws of cause and effect that he or she would be this way.

   In my opinion I completely agree with the punishment of crimes. People do not truly have 100% control of what they do. However, I do believe that as humans have the ability to realize what causes them to act in a certain way it is the responsibility of those who can see why others are doing what they’re doing and try to exterminate the root. This would still mean that we’d have to arrest people who are a danger to society. Yet instead of having their problems worsened by deepening their psychological wounds and making them an outcast of society, we treat as if they are diseased. Jailors and wardens should have the same responsibility as nurses and doctors. They are treating illnesses of the mind, soul and spirit.

   For too long has the world punished the sick among them. When a very young child acts out, we know that it is because there is either an emotional or physical problem that needs attention. Children will misbehave because they don’t know how to express their needs to their caregivers; either because their caregivers are incompetent or because they simply have not yet developed the tools to cope with whatever they’re experiencing. The same is true for Universal man.

   We all have these problems. When you feel that you can’t be yourself or have your personal needs met, you rebel, you get frustrated, you become apathetic, depressed or you use drugs, music and games to suppress your thoughts of dissatisfaction. Those of us that cope with these things in ways that aren’t directly harmful to society are seen as normal, the others are seen as criminal.

   We cannot, justly, punish crime as we have punished it in the past. We must treat and “punish” the first offence. Only after we have healed the wounds of our society and eradicated hatred and bitterness at it’s root (which is fear) will we have a truly just society.

   With love

   The Red Guitar

My Delusion

My personal delusion is one you might be familiar with. His name is Jesus.

This post is aimed at Christians 😀

Our minds can only fathom something we’ve come into contact with. You cannot, for example, imagine a new color or create an original drawing. All you can do is use combinations of other colors or pictures that are stored as a reference in your brain. Therefore, if you’ve never seen the color red and I tell you to picture a red apple, you won’t have an idea what I’m talking about. Let’s say that you have seen red, though, but you know it by another name, for example, green, you will have a completely wrong idea of what I’m saying. The way your mind works with colors is the same it works with everything. If I tell you I love you and your whole life thus far has been riddled with bad experiences connected to those words, you will probably not know what I really mean. If, throughout your life, you have never experienced ‘true love’ (let’s assume for argument’s sake that there is such a thing) and I tell you to love someone else, you wont know how to ‘truly’ love them. In the last example, you will believe with your entire being that your love is ‘true love’, but it won’t be, because you simply do not know what that is. It’s simple neuroscience (the study of the brain).

What does this have to do with Jesus? And what exactly is my delusion about Him?

So I say Jesus, and a picture of a bearded guy with long hair pops into your head, most likely. That would be the same as the red apple example and the “I love you” example. Now imagine the same principle that applies to the idea of color and the “I love you”. It is possible for your perception to be completely wrong about what color I mean by the word ‘red’; what I mean by “I love you” and what the person Jesus is like. If then our perception differs, one, or both, of us is/are delusional (thus I call the Jesus that I know My Delusion).

 Now, the problem arises: who is right, and how do we know? For generations, people have turned to the Bible, and rightly so. It is the only account we have of this enigma that is the Christ, so naturally we would look to it for answers. Another problem arises. Just like everyone’s opinion about Jesus is different, so too is everyone’s opinion about the Bible different in ways both great and small. What or who do we turn to now?

The Catholics turn to the Pope. He is the final authority on all matters concerning Jesus, more or less. The Protestants turned to, well, arguing about it. In all fairness, I was brought up Protestant and even worked for a protestant church, so I know far more about them. Obviously there are many other sects of Christianity, but I will not pretend to know what they do in respect to these issues. I will not go into detail about the real processes that these sects used to formulate their theology, because that is besides my point. But I digress. I propose an honest and simple answer to the reality of Jesus and of the Christian faith in general. This is a revolutionary idea, which has changed the face of Christianity every time that it has been implemented:

John 16:12-13 New King James Version

12 “I (Jesus) still have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now. 13 However, when He, the Spirit of truth, has come, He will guide you into all truth; for He will not speak on His own authority, but whatever He hears He will speak; and He will tell you things to come.”

What I propose is nothing more than to take Jesus on His word. He said He’ll send the Spirit of truth. He said, in another portion of the Bible, that this would also be our Comforter and that He would not leave us on earth alone, but that we would have this Comforter to abide with us forever. Jesus never speaks about a book that will teach us the truth, even if that book has stories about Him in it. He also never speaks about a Pope that will abide with us forever to teach us all truth and comfort us. He does, however, talk about the Holy Spirit. I’m not proposing anything new. I’m simply saying, that in questions about truth, that we cannot consult a book, a person or a council of people, but that we can only consult the one entity sent to comfort us and teach us what is true: The Holy Spirit. Why must we hold on to anything else?

I say all this because the great deception of our time is that you can rely on what the Bible says. It is a deception because people think they are relying on the Bible, when in actuality they are relying on their understanding of the Bible. History will testify that trusting the Pope and the Bible have been the driving force behind some of the greatest atrocities that have ever been committed. People claim to get their authority from God and base this claim in the writings of the Bible. When they do this, they do not listen to the Holy Spirit and they interpret the Bible saying “red apple”  as something completely different. They have no possible way of knowing what God meant in the first place, because they don’t bring Him into the reckoning. It simply does not work this way. The ONLY measure for any truth, whether it comes from the Bible or not, is the Holy Spirit.

Many charismatic Protestants reading this will disagree. They maintain that whatever the Holy Spirit says to you must be confirmed by the Bible and that the Holy Spirit will never contradict the Bible. To these I pose the question – what about how Jesus blatantly contradicted the old testament laws? God is always the same, but He does not always treat us the same.

I say we as Christians must return to the only source of stability we have in our faith. We can only trust that God, through the Holy Spirit, will lead us into all truth, just as Jesus promised us. If He leads us to read Bible, then so be it. If He leads us to the ends of the earth and beyond all reasoning, let us trust that He is leading us to green pastures. Let us not be afraid to be deceived. Our God is a greater shepherd than Lucifer is a deceiver and our God has infinitely more love than the Devil has hate.

That’s all for this week. I will leave you with this:

Jesus reassures us that we need not fear deception or the devil when He says in John 10:25-29

 Jesus answered them, “I told you, and you do not believe. The works that I do in My Father’s name, they bear witness of Me.  But you do not believe, because you are not of My sheep, as I said to you. My sheep hear My voice, and I know them, and they follow Me. And I give them eternal life, and they shall never perish; neither shall anyone snatch them out of My hand. My Father, who has given them to Me, is greater than all; and no one is able to snatch them out of My Father’s hand. 

Feel free to leave a comment, I’d love to hear from you. Share this if you like what you read

With love

The Red Guitar

“Logic” – the funny thing is…

Man asked, “How can one say ‘Wrong’ and another ‘Right’ and both ‘know’ that they are correct? How is it possible that one swears ‘Yes’ and another ‘No’, that one argues ‘through God’ and another ‘through Evolution‘?”

“Who do I trust?”
The answer, I believe, is rather quite ironic.

Logic: a proper or reasonable way of thinking about or understanding something
Proper: correct according to social or moral rules
Reasonable: fair and sensible (definitions from Merriam-Webster on-line dictionary)

I hazard to  guess that most of us ‘trust’ no one completely, with questions like these. We trust more in our own common sense.  We trust logic.

In using logic, we protect ourselves. This is built in to us. We get burnt once, find seared flesh rather uncomfortable and logic makes us be careful. It’s a flawless system! The problem with it, quite illogically, is that we don’t really give a shit what logic says in many circumstances. That is why we ride bicycles, drive cars, fly planes, have rockets, make wars, fall in love, live...
None of these make true logical sense, thus, we don’t trust anything to guide us. We kinda just do.

Or do we?
Why do we give to charity? Why do we cry when we see people being abused and children suffer? Why do we dedicate our lives to illogical causes like Art or Mathematics? These things add no inherent value to the odds of our survival. On the contrary, they rob us of time, energy and resources.
Something in us is driving us. Those of us that do our best to follow that something (sometimes affectionately referred to as our Heart) have found something that transcends logic (or at least my logic) and feels divine.

Returning to the first hazardous statement I made about logic, I believe that if we understood truly what logic was, we would be far less hasty to swear allegiance to it-

Logic: a proper or reasonable way of thinking about or understanding something
Proper: correct according to social or moral rules
Reasonable: fair and sensible

 So if logic is a proper or reasonable way of thinking etc.  and what is ‘proper’ and ‘reasonable’ is very greatly up to opinion, logically, logic is also up to opinion.

An easy way to explain it is this. Let’s say I teach my children that ice-cream is extremely poisonous. Eventually they’ll be out and about in the world and somewhere, someone insists on them having ice-cream. They’ll respond with foam-at-the-mouth, blind rage and murder everyone in a 5 metre radius. Well, maybe not that extreme, but at the very least they’ll miss out on something cool, because the reference in their mind was from a crooked source. It’ll be the same as me asking you to have a cup of cyanide with me.
Do you know, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that cyanide is what everyone says it is? Or has someone been lying and someone else just been blindly believing everything false about the bloody ice-cream?!

One man spends his entire life trying to convince people that there is a God. Another man spends his entire life trying to convince people that God is a lie. Each man perceives the world in a completely different way. They’ve heard different stories, they’ve had different experiences. To them, what they believe is as real as life itself.
Hell, what if the Preacher and the Atheist are both wrong, and we don’t even exist and when we die, we wake up to what reality really is?

“Logic” – the funny thing is that we who live and think like we in the West do, believe our logic is indisputably true. In reality (if such a thing even exists) we merely think the way we’ve been taught to think and ‘truth’  means what someone else decided it’s going to mean.

With love
The Red Guitar