I found your site on technorati and read a few of your other posts. Keep up the good work. I just added your RSS feed to my Google News Reader. Looking forward to reading more from you.

Call me nuts, I’m use to it.

blessings

J

Every circumstance provides you with the opportunity to learn to love or to learn to forgive.

Stopping to help somebody can be used as an opportunity to express your love, but not because you are afraid of what will happen if you don’t stop, but because you genuinely want to provide what this person temporarily is unable to provide for himself.

When I say that nothing physical matters, it is in reference to eternity. Nothing that happens here, has any eternal effect. Meanwhile, while we interact here, we get cold and so we put on a coat, we get hungry and then eat food and we generally stop when we see that somebody may need help. While you perceive your world as physical, it is best to do what you feel is best, when a situation presents itself to you.

Meanwhile, if you choose not to stop, there is no condemnation from God. If any guilt or remorse were to surface, this would be of your own making and then the Holy spirit would work with you to help you forgive yourself for what you felt guilty about.

The best choice always is to react out of love and to set aside any fear, guilt or attack thoughts. Be forgiving and be loving in whatever you do, or choose not to do, and know that the The Holy Spirit will work perfectly with you, within your situation.

So our choice is this, obey the rules laid down by God…and maybe, just maybe if you found the right set of rules to obey, then obey them to the letter…every day, then maybe he’ll love you enough to not commit you to eternal torture, otherwise, even if you followed the rules to the letter…but they were the wrong rules, you will be tortured endlessly for all eternity.

Our God appears to be one where he has created a maze with 1000 exits, where only 1 leads to heaven and 999 lead to hell…even though many clearly appear to lead to heaven.

Stepping back from this line of thinking, before we even begin to look at what a God of love would do, let’s look at what a person of love would do.

Imagine you had 10 children that you loved with all your heart and you had a wonderful inheritance for them. What kind of maze would you build in order for them to receive their inheritance and how many misleading traps would you allow? How many of your children would allow to be shot, stabbed, starve, drown, or burned as they attempted to reach their inheritance? How little effort would you use to guide them and how many conflicting beliefs and ideas would you allow then to follow…most leading to certain death?

I would hope you would not do or could not even fathom to do such a thing to your children…and if you did, there is no way you could ever, ever convince anyone you loved them.

To truly fathom a God of Love, we must change many of the things we think are part of his creation. For a moment, imagine our God of Love did not create a hell and so there is no threat to control your obedience to him. What would this mean? This would mean that God would only receive your love if he was truly loveable…and not because you had no other choice. Does the God we have written about in ages past, truly deserve our heart felt love because of all the beautiful and wonderful things he is reported to have done? Absolutely not…and that’s why these stories have to include the threat of hell, but a God who truly loves and never performed the atrocities written about him, would be an entity we could love.

For there to be a loving god, there is no hell and there is no controlling, angry, vengeful God. If all you do is to read the previous paragraphs closely to see the insanity of the idea of saying that a loving God would create a condition where you could be endlessly tortured, then you will have stepped closer to seeing a truly loving God.

Our life here is not the result of Satan tempting Adam or Eve, followed by God inflicting his judgement on all who were born since that time. Our life here is simply the result of us, Gods children, having chosen to attempt to do things separate from our creator and father. Everything that happens here is of our own making and has nothing to do with a war in heaven or any other crazy notion.

Our creator and father is a God of love. He created us as spiritual beings an eternity ago and we spent an eternity with him. Somewhere within this, we had a thought to do something separate, but that is not possible, so this non-spiritual or dream-like existence came into being.

We are now experiencing everything heaven is not because we are experiencing what we think it would be like if we had separated ourselves from God…but this is all in our minds and nothing that happens here has any eternal effect. God knows our spirits are safe and are right where they always have been, but we appear to be sleeping to him since we are no longer communicating with him as we always had. He immediately spoke to us and we call this voice the Holy Spirit. What he spoke in one word was all we would need to know to wake up and join with him again. We just need to be quiet and listen.

Meanwhile, nothing that happens here can ever separate us from God…because that is simply not possible. We can believe we are separate and we can dream we are separate and we can ignore our creator, but we can never truly separate ourselves from God and his love.

Jesus’ mission was to show us a God of love and to demonstrate that nothing that happens here has any effect on your spirit. His forgiveness while on the cross demonstrates Gods real view of us as simply not knowing any better…and we are simply treated by our loving God as handicapped children who do not know any better. He was never mad or angry and just wants to help us restore our memory of him and of ourselves.

When Jesus arose, he demonstrated that the body is not who you are. The body is not your beginning or your end, but simply a device you use while here. His resurrection demonstrated that nothing that happens here matters since nothing that happens here has any eternal effect…and only things that are eternal are real since all physical things eventually fade away…as does any bad dream.

Hell is separation from God, which is impossible. God created us as a part of him and what he created cannot be undone, but we can attempt to think we can separate from him…and this line of thinking is what lead us to this manifestation of images and thoughts and projections that appear to us as though we had separated from him, but we have not. We can say this existance here is hell, but that is not correct since Hell cannot truly exist, so the closest you can say is that life in this physical reality is a shadowy reflection of what hell would be like if it could exist…but this is simply an imagined thought that we will eventually awaken from.

God is love. God is peace. God is eternal bliss and connection.

When looking at God in the Old testament or Jesus in the New Testament, regardless of what they were recorded to have said or done, I know that they were not above following the spirit of their own teachings. If you think of it, if somebody is telling you to be peaceful, forgiving and kind to all, but they don’t do these things themselves, what meaning does it really have? Instead of being viewed as guidance from a loving friend, their message becomes one of demands from a tyrant. This is the way both God and Jesus are often portrayed where others have altered what they were reported to have done or said.

In many cases, you can read what Jesus is saying and the spirit of the words are in agreement with his teachings of love and forgiveness and then suddenly the last paragraph or two concludes with a threat, or in some cases, the whole story is a threat. My favorite example is where Jesus is asked about how many times you should forgive in Matt 8:21 & 22. He makes a clear reference that you should just always forgive (77 times as compared to 7) and he doesn’t say the person has to have even asked for it or deserved it…he just said to forgive…but the chapter then concludes that if you don’t forgive, God will not forgive you and you will be tortured as stated in Matt 8:32-35. Jesus could not have said that last part. It contradicts the spirit of the love and forgiveness in the first part.

I don’t think any of the alterations to the Gospel stories were done maliciously. You have to remember that almost all early Christians were Jewish and there is no way that their personal view of how Jesus should have acted, could not have strayed too far from how they believed the God of the Old Testament was reported to have acted.

There was a day where Jesus woke up killed a tree and ransacked the temple as reported in Mark 11: 12-26. The story is written that he had justified anger because this is how the old testament God acts…but anger is simply the result of not being centered and regardless of how things were written, Jesus was human too and it’s very possible that if the story is true, he just had a bad day. There is no justifying his actions. Bad behavior is never justified. If the story is true, I know he later felt that his actions were not the better thing to have done. The concept that he was somehow totally perfect is an error in thinking. How could we ever aspire to be like him if he was literally God in a human body. He was human like you and I and he had faults, like you and I, but he made the better choices throughout most his life and that allowed him to be open for God to work through him in ways never before manifested. He said he was the Son of God. We are also the sons of God. He said the father and him are one. We are also one with the father…or at least we could be if we are open to accept this undoing of the separation that occurred between us and our creator.

It’s interesting that you mention Jesus’ interaction with Judas because Jesus later says directly through ‘A Course in Miracles’ that he could not have seen Judas’s actions as a betrayal unless he felt he could be betrayed…and if you truly love people as Jesus did, nobody can betray you or disappoint you because you can only see their actions as mistakes and cries for help, but never as an attack on you. In order for Jesus to feel betrayed and to have called Judas a traitor, Jesus would have lied when he said in Matthew 5:44:

• “Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you.”

Instead, with respect to Judas, Jesus says in ‘A Course in Miracles’ (T-6.I.15):

• These are some of the examples of upside-down thinking in the New Testament, although its gospel is really only the message of love. If the Apostles had not felt guilty, they never could have quoted me as saying, “I come not to bring peace but a sword.” This is clearly the opposite of everything I taught. Nor could they have described my reactions to Judas as they did, if they had really understood me. I could not have said, “Betrayest thou the Son of Man with a kiss?” unless I believed in betrayal. The whole message of the crucifixion was simply that I did not. The “punishment” I was said to have called forth upon Judas was a similar mistake. Judas was my brother and a Son of God, as much a part of the Sonship as myself. Was it likely that I would condemn him when I was ready to demonstrate that condemnation is impossible?

Jesus clearly states that his disciples did not fully understand him….and this should not come as any major surprise if you consider that we are still struggling 2000 years later with the concept that God could love unconditionally. We believe in punishment and will inevitably work these concepts into the things we write and into the stories we tell…because we think we are being helpful in using threats to motivate people. It’s hard to imagine that love could be strong enough a motivation…so we take the stoires of love and interject a little fear here and there, just to make sure the point gets acrosss…but in doing so, the entire point of love is lost. Thus, the seeds of religion are born and all questions are answered with impossible concepts…that our loving God has enemies…that there is war in heaven and that God has the right to kill in order to protect the ones he loves.

When looking at what Jesus was reported to have said, consider first that his mission was a spiritual one and anything that focuses on physical things or physical events were either added, embellished or simply doesn’t matter. Jesus was here to make a spiritual change and had nothing to do with anything physical…no earthly kingdom…not then or any time to come. He came to open a door for our spirits to once again connect to God and the last thing he or God wants is for us to spend an eternity trapped here in bodies. They both want us home.

To sum things up…Jesus is our true brother and taught about the spirit of love and forgiveness. Any of the words written that he said that do not agree with the spirit of love and forgiveness are either not his words or they are misconceptions of what he was thought to have meant.

A final thought…would Jesus, after having embraced the forgiveness of his persecutors while hanging on the cross, later decide to return to the earth and kill millions and billions of people who simply did not know who he was? Religion teaches us many things about what we have to do, yet religion also makes God and Jesus exempt from practicing the spirit of their own teachings. That is not possible. God is either a God of fear or a God of love. He cannot be both or swap back and forth. Absolute love casts out all fear…so is God love or is God the fear that love cast out? He can only always be just one of these things.