On the way in this morning I stopped to look at a few pictures of deep space. These pictures were taken by telescopes like Hubble, Spitzer … There are billions of stars and galaxies out there, even though many of them appear simply as points of light. So where are we in this mixture. In the poetic book of Job, he reportedly said that, he came naked into this world and that he would return to the Earth (womb)!
What other types of life forms are existent? Frankly, we have observed other civilizations if you will, microscopic organizations, given the use of microscopes. And even though many of the microscopic beings are not readily visible to the human eye, enzymes, bacteria …, they still exist. So is it any wonder that in the bible there is a scripture that is written:
The fool hath said in his heart that there is no God!I would add that the fool believes that God can be nothing other than what we have taught to believe that God is! I am convinced that there (IT) can be other than what we have been taught, and that we ought to be searching for what is real, as opposed to simply trying to bolster a tradition. I have proposed that we create new and updated sacred texts of the kind that rely more on empirical observation ...
What is Solomon (me) referring to, uniformitarianism, pantheism ...? Ironically, most individuals believed at one time that the Earth and the heavens were all that existed, and clearly these individuals were wrong. Galileo tried to educate the church as well as the people, and he was punished for venturing to do so. It takes time and effort to move individuals beyond their comfortable paradigms. However, Jesus and other great individuals not necessarily Christian, proved that we must do just that.
How could a 12 year old sit and challenge the doctors of the law and their conclusions their absolutism? I wish that the writers had been clearer with respect to the specifics of his inquiry. I suspect that he was challenging them about their religious ideas. He was probably perceived as a young upstart who knew nothing. I can recall one of my former Bishops, who when referring to young preachers said: You can take all that you know, put it in a mosquitoes brain and it would fly backwards.
Similar to Jesus and the young clerics who sit under ministries of the type that I just mentioned, and there are many, the same attitudes are often by members of the avant-garde. Why is truth revealed on an elongated basis? Frankly, I suspect that it does not have to be. It would appear to be that the reason for it is that it takes time for human intellectual evolvement to take.
Why? Humans hear of a new idea. The idea has to be parsed. At time, the idea, whether true or not becomes as accepted and becomes part and part of a particular group’s cultural ethos. Once the idea becomes entrenched that’s it, forget it! Why? Then it becomes the Law, the truth or what can also become construed as sacred.
In the Apostolic Church that I grew up in, I can recall a significant but monumental event that took place that will explain what I mean. The members of our church believed that God spoke to his people. However, rather than say, God spoke to me or told me, …, occasionally, members of the church would employ a euphemism, and instead say, “something told me”.
Well, one Thursday night I was a Thursday night service, and still a teenager, when a proclamation was made that from now on, no one is to say, especially when testifying or preaching that “something told me …”, instead the person was to say, “God told me”.
The new proclamation became part of church policy and was practiced for as long as I could remember afterward. Ah, don’t pick on the church that I grew up, for I tell you, these folks were sincere. Unlike many churches today where you simply join the church, join a committee, work on an auxiliary, swear, curse (even in the church), shack-up …, these folks were pious.
You never heard a curse word emanate from their mouths, they never went to see a movie, drank any alcoholic beverages, wore revealing clothes … In fact, even before that, you could go to church for all of your life, however, up and until you were baptized by water and by the Holy Spirit, you were still not considered to be born again.
In many of today’s churches nothing is required except to join the church and to sing songs, waive your hands in the air like you don’t care… The second reason that you shouldn’t pick on my childhood church or the people in it (before you laugh), is because the people in my church simply engaged in the same practice as many of our biblical writers.
They wrote something and said: GOD TOLD ME!And just as it was done in my childhood church, the same as in many fundamentalist churches in America today, often what well intended people conjectured THAT GOD TOLD THEM, was oftentimes something that they simply felt strong about or believed!
Again, for a myriad of reasons, we need to be careful about what we refer to as sacred, particularly, when neither the author nor the text itself can be tested against anything other than him or what they have written! If the truth will make you free, my aim is to continue to pursue (IT)and to help to free others so that they can seek after all that is true real. The end result is that they will be free to seek new methods of discovery, other than an overreliance on often unproven texts.
The latter will require a new way of thinking about what is real, what was once considered sacred and how to go about establishing a new paradigm or method of determining what is real and what is not!
Rev. C. Solomon
Not finished ….
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