The Question of Faith

What is faith?  The Apostle Paul says, in Hebrews 11:1 “Now faith is being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see.”  The more I read Paul, the more I hear him resemble the preachers of today – sometimes truthful in spite of himself, and often not truthful.  I have heard some call Paul one of the first Christian mystics, but I disagree.  If anything, I see him more and more as what we have today – a Stage Two fundamentalist who somehow manages to still preach Truth sometimes, without being conscious of what exactly he is expressing, often interpreting through the filter of his ego and his religious beliefs.  Paul, like the author of the Gospel of John, is a kind of Christian “salesman,” which as I have stated before, proves it is not Truth he is selling, but an idea of who Jesus of Nazareth is.

Why was Paul, like the author of the Gospel of John, trying to convince anyone of anything? Because they, like modern-day preachers, confused the idea of who Jesus supposedly is with the Truth reflected in his message.  They were preoccupied with the cup which carries the life-giving water, and not the water itself.  This is the misguided search for the “holy grail.” Why are we searching for the grail at all, when it is the water within that matters? This is the same problem modern Christians have today, and we can thank Paul and the author of the Gospel of John most of all for this theology of the lie.  This theology is idolatry, nothing more. To worship the carrier of Truth, the cup, and not Truth itself is idolatry.  That is why traditional Christianity is idolatry.  Truth is not something to be convinced of, but shared.  The only thing one can be “convinced of” is the lie.

Paul’s use of the word “hope” reveal his awareness, as “hope” is a division, a separation, like belief, between ourselves and God, Truth.  I like the portion of the scripture which says faith is certainty in what we cannot see.  That is the part of the scripture Paul got correct.  Certainty in what we cannot see is knowing we are of Love, Truth within ourselves.  Faith is everything because if we truly had it, we would understand we do not need all of these crutches of morality, laws, rules, and all of the constructs of the ego, as we explored in our last journey.  The awareness we do not need these crutches is what it means to live “under grace,” and not “under law.”  We live under law because we instead choose to live in total fear, unable to trust each other or ourselves.  This is why Jesus critisized the faithlessness of those around him.  He could see they wanted “proof,” which could never be provided since Truth can never be “proven,” only shared.  The very fact they demanded proof revealed their faithlessness and their lack of awareness of Truth.  To demand proof is to demand the lie because what can be proven is never Truth, but only fact, the divided, that which is not Truth.  Faith is not “hope, but true awareness of that which cannot be proven or seen, that which is God, Truth, Love.  Just as faith is not hope, it is also not belief, but awareness of Truth.  By this definition, we can see how faithless we truly are, no different than those in Jesus’ time.

This is why I heavily question the literal “miracles” of Jesus.  The problem I have with them is the fact they very easily serve an agenda of “proving” who Jesus was, as the exclusive messiah, the only begotten son of God.  As we have said before, Truth can never and need never be proven.  The only thing which need be “proven” is the lie, that which is divided, that which distinguishes some limited entity as being exclusive to Truth, which can never be the case.  No person, place, thing, or any other object can ever be the exclusive beholder of Truth, and to believe so is the definition of idolatry.

So, there are only two possible reasons for inclusion of the “miracles” of Jesus in the gospels.  One is the possibility the miracles are in themselves parables, illustrating how Jesus gave “sight to the blind,” and “raised the dead” with his amazing witness to Truth.  In other words, the stories were never literal, factual accounts, but instead symbolic, metaphoric representations of how Jesus “healed” others, not literally, but spiritually, through his acting from a point of Love, Truth.  The other interpretation of the miracles is to see them as literal, factual accounts, whose only purpose would be to “prove” he was the exclusive son of God, with exclusive divine, messianic claims.  If the accounts were intended to be interpreted as literal, then we can be sure they were not factual, and created by the gospel writers to “prove” who Jesus was to their non-believing Jewish contemporaries.

As we have discovered before, Truth cannot and need not be “proven.” Only the lie needs to be justified and “proven.”  The preoccupation with who Jesus is or is not is nothing more than a game of the ego, and is completely irrelevant to Truth.   We can either continue playing games, searching for the “holy grail,” or get serious and instead seek the life-giving waters of Love, Truth, God….

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