Rambling about Jesus and the union of the kingdoms of nature and morals.
April 16, 2012
Now I dare to presume, in this “inspired” state, to get into the thinking of a famous man, one Jesus. Kant said that it was essentially immoral to impugn the character of Jesus because Jesus simply did what we all know that we ought to do ourselves, and that we have an obligation to be just like that.
So how does this Jesus start off? He, curiously, always obeys his mother such that she never had any need to say no more than once. That was his peculiarity, his willful determination to do as he was told. To be a slave, I guess you might say. So he grows up in an environment which was unique in one respect, fear never entered into the little boy. He did not know what fear was. He was in total peace with his life. His mother told him that he had powers beyond the imagination, but he was never to utilize these until he had been told to by his daddy, Abba. His mother would guide now, and later the father, Abba, will step in and tell him what he is to do.*
[* According to this theory therefore, we could conceive of Jesus as just like any other person in the world, but with this unique talent, this capacity for always being obedient, first to his mother and then to the moral law.]
And so he will have developed in an environment of love, but then also in a comparison with his friends and neighbors, and he will have wondered that they were not happy as he. His mother (who, for the sake of the “naturalist” take on Jesus, was hit by an hallucination like that of Joan of Arc and like Joan went along with it) would have told him that people were blind to the reality of his father Abba and didn’t realize that things could be different, and so just get stuck in their misery.
[Musing. In the equations for the multi-verse system we need also to include the random factor of original obedience, that sooner or later a world will include a self correcting element, where a child happens to be reared by a lunatic (in the eyes of science) and which brings a moral compass into the world which points to a universal hope and anticipation and activity and puts the world on a different trajectory. Our universe includes that element, a chance occurrence (from the [rightly] skeptical scientific standpoint) of an extraordinarily rare, perfect obedience in a living being. A strange creature when you look at the common sort (like comparing left handers with the majority right handers, or like Kasper Hauser in a way). Maybe this is the “miracle factor” that has to be included to the equations of science. How many then of these multi-verses will have a self-correction element with regard to the moral? one in a thousand trillion to the thousand trillionth power?]
Jesus would be thinking: if they would just do as Abba tells them they would be as happy as I am. [I think of Jesus weeping before Jerusalem.]
Jesus now thinking to himself. Now I can tell them this and can show how their problems can vanish, just like magic (for this is the nature of the world with the obedience element included, but always awaiting the presence of the Righteous One, who was obedient from the word go, which is required and which is very rare among humans*). But they don’t believe me. They believe I am good and I am powerful, but they don’t believe me that they don’t need to do anything else than just simply now instantaneously start living right without fear, for then they would see the happiness that is there to be tapped. They are impressed with what they take for my miracles (not knowing the unification of the Kingdom of Nature and the Kingdom of Morals, as Kant will later tell them about), but they do not believe my words. Not even my disciples believe. They love me but they don’t get it that what they need to do is to give up Self and take up Community, i.e., love each other. But they won’t or simply can’t believe me.
[* According to my new theory (and partly suggested by Kant), there is a connection between the World of Nature and the World of Morals such that the World of Nature conforms to the will of a Righteous One, one who is ever obedient to the moral law from the word go (a notion suggested by Kant in his critique of practical reason) and to whom nature is attuned by its very make up and formation within this universe. The nearest approximation to a perfectly obedient and righteous person would be starting to be righteous as of now, but which does not have the same effect relative to the laws of nature as continuing righteous from the beginning of life. For an analogy, the conformity of nature and morals is like the freezing of water, and which cannot be anticipated by reviewing water at different temperatures above freezing.]
So what is needed then (Jesus continues) is my own death and my resurrection to tell them that if they will just give up fear they will find happiness. I will violate the laws of nature regarding the Righteous One by willing my own death (stoking the anger of the Angel of Fear resident in the hearts of men to get them to show their true stuff, the destruction of a Righteous One for gain). Now here is how it will work. I have told them what to do in order to find peace and joy now (loving neighbor = all people) and how God forgives what they have already done, and I have told them that in forgiving their sin I take that sin upon myself and I will now take the road of a sinner rightly condemned under the law (breaking the Sabbath) and will my own destruction in order for God to give the only sign* that will make you believe, my resurrection, for I will return to my friends and let them see–not to the world, for the world has rejected me–but to my friends and they then shall see that I told them the truth: that indeed all sins are forgiven, just as I said they were, for God has sent me back to you just as I promised you, and I am only sad for the suffering this meant for you, my most beloved mother and my friends, but that is over, though now the work begins, to tell the world that if they will simply give up sin and turn to the righteous way of universal, brotherly love they will find happiness, although, due to the sins of our brothers and sisters and ourselves, we will all have to carry a cross ourselves until that New Jerusalem is attained.
[* The idea then is this: Jesus forgives sins, and to show his authority to do so offers himself as the guilty one to pay for these sins. It is now up to God to ignore this by leaving him dead and thus rejecting his presumption, or else to validate Jesus’ audacity in forgiving the sins on behalf of God by raising Jesus from the dead.]
So this could be the thinking of Jesus as he finally decides what to do. It’s the only way to convince the disciples. If he can’t convince the disciples then whom is he going to convince? They loved him, but he could not convince them to give up fear and its sin and to love one another.
And so I guess he willed his own death and his own resurrection, although the latter would be the will of God (or else that’s the way the Nature is constructed, where a Righteous One can die by his own will, but cannot stay dead, and the delay in the case of Jesus’ resurrection will have been in deference to the peculiar culture from which this chance element of obedience were present, a day of rest (to give people a break)).
Now the interesting scene is in John 2 where Jesus disobeys his mother for the first time and takes command. The obedient one now becomes disobedient and denies his mother, and refuses to act as she had asked him. This is not the place, he is thinking. This is not the time. Not at a wedding; I am not to come out here. This is not right. There is to be a more formal or dramatic setting. Surely. And then his Abba speaks to him in a sign, and Jesus sees the fear which is in the faces of the servants and he realizes that it is the time, that this is the place. This was the time that Abba was setting him out on his own to take charge and bring this world back to him. It was to help the humble who may even have been the guilty. And so he told them there was nothing to fear at all, and to simply go give the guests water and it will become wine. They responded, maybe in awe of Mary who forced his hand regarding the servants.
Anyway, so we today are faced with having to raise disobedient children, for according to this theory the obedient element is highly unlikely. In a way it is like an extreme case of maybe only one person in the world being left handed, or maybe only one person being gay. It’s really like a miracle. An obedient element arose in the midst of disobedient human nature and changed the course of history and brings hope into the world. So we have to deal with the stuff we are given, our children, which is no different that the stuff given to our parents to deal with in us, and have to create an environment of fearlessness and where disobedience calls for a counterforce of some kind, and where then the story of Jesus can be presented to show what kind of people we are able to come by believing him and who are then encouraged to join that “happy band of brothers” called the band of Jesus and help him bring about the New Jerusalem for our children (and for us to, according to his promise).
And so I guess we can say that God is pleased with what this Jesus did on behalf of the world and that Jesus is exactly as God himself would be if God had happened to be a man. So there is God in the person of a father and in the person of a son, and so it is a short jump to God in the person of a Spirit which abides with and moves the members of the band of Jesus.
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