How Much for Your Platform?

Watching Donald Trump play Sink or Swim is fun for me. He has told so many lies, abused so many women, created so many racist sycophants, that to me, he deserves to drown. However, as of today, he has managed to hire attorneys who will never get paid and who propose specious theories to politically and financially prejudiced judges, that to me, suggests he might just swim.

Mammon is a concept that appears in our Bible. Mammon appears in Edmund Spencer’s “Fairie Queene” poem. Mammon appears to be the emblem for the collective greed of all humans who have occupied this earth, who presently do occupy this earth and, if Donald Trump or anyone like him, is ever in control of human destiny, will occupy this earth, the solar system, every universe and every reality of which human beings are now aware.

That is the extent to which human mendacity has created a wicked Tower of Babel from which we can never reach God, if we define God as the loving creator of all we have known, do know and will know.

Mammon is Greed; human greed; childish, selfish greed.

Greed controls our lives. We like to think that a comfortable retirement is the end goal of having lived an admirable life. But we still fear death.

That fear of death is driving force behind all we do, all we know and is behind all we are in spirit.

Jesus Christ or the tradition a Jewish agitator created in the political state that the Romans created, tells us all we need to know about escaping from death. From him or from the stories told by people who knew him, we learn that we cannot serve two masters – our loving creator versus our common greed.

Our dilemma is that we have created a system which attempts to do both. Call that system the Anti-Christ. We have taken literature from a unique religious tradition and transformed it into a new, human-made religion which attests to the idea that a book containing that literature, was in fact written by the loving creator and contains no topic that could ever be discussed in any form without resulting in what we fear most – Death.

Today, much of the world celebrates the myth of a human being who escaped Death. Many of the celebrants firmly believe that whatever they themselves perceive to exist in the Bible, gives then the divine authority to represent that Creator’s will on earth.

That perception has resulted in Mammon becoming the force that drives our human spiritual, political and personal lives. Mammon gives us the imagined right to love things and to use other human beings, even to the point of murder, for our greedy needs.

Under Mammon’s authority that Mammon grants to states, entire countries now have the authority to commit the genocide of entire human communities. Under Mammon’s authority, humans have built an electronic Tower of Babel that may never reach the level of divine wisdom since it allows humans to murder to promote human Greed.

How much is an Internet platform worth? Only Mammon knows.

That ends my Easter blog for today. As the Christ figure was heard to say to his understanding of God, as Mammon was orchestrating Christ’s own death by Roman Crucifixion, “May thy will, not my will be done.”

May we have the wisdom to recognize the will of God for his creation and to then do the will of that loving creator.

Amen

Easter Sunday 2008

Easter Sunday 2008

Last Sunday, a blond, blue-eyed youth came to my door and knocked. He shyly handed me a brochure which he said was an invitation to come to his church on Easter Sunday. He said I would learn how Jesus Christ had sacrificed himself for me. Religiously addicted as I am, I did not reply, “Didn’t you get that wrong? Didn’t God the Father sacrifice his only begotten Son so that I could have eternal life?” I didn’t ask that of the youth since the label on his invitation clearly identified his church as “Fundamentalist”.

Instead, I politely answered, “I’m Buddhist. I don’t think I care to come.” The youth thanked me and left my front porch. I closed the door and returned to whatever task I had been doing.

Today, a week later, I awoke with a start. I was confused about the date, and afraid that I had missed my Monday morning appointment with my acupuncturist. After a sip of coffee, I realized that not only was it really Sunday, but that it was and is Easter Sunday 2008. My thoughts of course turned to images from my past when I had gone to church on Easter.

At one point, I was even counting the minutes I had left for preparing to go to church this very morning. Then I recalled my addiction – Religion; my drug of choice. For me, Religion is such a powerful substance that I dare not drink even one drop of it. Yet, here I am – at my computer, writing about Religion.

At this point, I might write about my strong belief that Fundamentalists are not Christians. I even planned a missive about the strange alteration in the Apostle’s Creed that the youth had shared with me – the idea that Christ was aware of his personal sacrifice on the cross rather than the idea that a loving God sacrificed his only “begotten” son. Punch up the screen-in-screen image of Abraham and Issac. Put on a Leonord Cohen LP album. Light up a cigarette. Later, we’ll join hands and sing “There is a Balm in Gilead”. No, that was at Christmas.

All of these things are remnants of my religious past. I haven’t been to a church service in many years. The Fundamentalists ruined church for me. Fundamentalists have brought back the guilt, hatred and divisiveness that once guided even the orthodoxy of the Vatican.

Last summer, I watched and waited in St. Peter’s Square while my three adult children climbed the cupola at San Pietro. They returned to the square with stories of an obscure passageway that led them down from the cupola and directly into the upper balcony of the basilica, which they would have otherwise seen only after having stood in line for hours. Their gleaming eyes had transformed them into my little children again. They were the three kids we used to dress up on Easter Sunday, who waited by the same front door,  excited about going to Sunday School, but equally sorry not to be left at home with their Easter Sunday baskets of goodies.

Today, it occurs to me that when my children had descended from the cupola and down into the square, those gleams in their eyes were ones which come after a moment of discovery. In a few moments in Rome, on a hot, sunny summer day, my children had discovered a perspective on the world in which they live.

They had discovered that the trappings of the church, as miraculous as they are, run parallel with Disneyland (another commercial wonderland that also panders to the yearnings of the human spirit). Both the Christian church and Walt Disney’s people are selling humanity on the need to be open to change. For Christians, this openness involves a change of heart. For Capitalists, it involves a willingness to change the commercial entertainment experience so that it best elicits a specific behavioral response for which people will pay money and agree to stand in line for hours to experience. Both are selling the enhancement of the human experience. Both are selling a Religious Experience.

Finally, I suppose that if I myself had been open to change last Sunday, I would have recognized that somewhere within the spirit of the youth who handed me that invitation, I could have taken the time to find the Christos, the eternal element that makes us spiritually divine and immortal. But, I would have needed to take a risky chance that he would have recognized the same Christos in me. I was fearful of taking that chance. The fear I felt that morning is the unwanted spiritual “gift” that organized religion has given to me. It is a fear of being open. And that fear, I feel is not a Christian gift.

 

James M. Kemp   

 

 

The Birth of God; The Death of Self

As Christians, we don’t really celebrate the birth of Jesus Christ on Christmas as much as we celebrate the birth of the Trinity. Our Christian doctrine of the Trinity states that Jesus Christ alone is not God; that God the Father alone is not God ; and that God the Holy Spirit alone is not God. We find the Triune God at the center of that triangle.

Jesus of Nazareth told his followers about the Kingdom of God. He said that the Kingdom is at hand, and that the Kingdom us within us. He said that in order to experience the Kingdom, we must first be reborn as little children – full of joy, full of wonder and full of acceptance.

I say that once we are reborn as little children, we will be able to find the specific cross that God has designed for each of us. And in it, we will rejoice. In joyfulness, we will carry our crosses down the streets of sorrow. We will see the brokenness in others. We will see the brokenness in ourselves. With each step we take, we will look for God’s grace. Each time we experience God’s grace, we will see a broken piece of ourselves fall onto the street, to be replaced with an acceptance of the Presence of Christ; an acceptance of the original divine spark in each other that the Creator first breathed into Adam.

I say that finally, we will reach that place that Jesus of Nazareth reached; that place where we will finally be empty of Self and filled with the unconditional love of God and for each other.

I say that at Christmas, we do not celebrate the birth of Jesus Christ in a manger. Jesus Christ was born on a cross on Golgotha. I say that at Christmas, we celebrate the birth of the Triune God in human form; a God that loves us so much, He came down to experience what we experience; and a God who now offers us forgiveness of our selfish brokenness and a reciprocal state of Grace through our belief in the teachings of Jesus.

Let it be. 

Connectedness

Lately, I have been obsessing about our small world. I have always enjoyed sharing “small World” stories with the people I meet.

Most recently, I received a message on Facebook from Cheryl Black. She wanted to know if other Burlingtonians (Iowa) were living in Oregon (me). I responded with, “Right now, my wife and I are shopping for a printer cartridge at the Commercial Street Wal-mart in Salem, Oregon.” In short, I live about 33 miles from Cheryl.

Later, I found an old Easter photo of our Sunday school class at Grace United Methodist in Burlington, Iowa. We were all about 6 or 7 and dressed up for Easter. I recognized some of the children in the photo; but not all. So, I posted it on my Facebook page.

Next, my friend Patty from Cedar Rapids posted a photo of my confirmation class at St. Luke’s United Church of Christ in Burlington. She had posted it to a group of graduates from Burlington High School so that I could not respond to it. Then, I joined the group and found many old classmates.

Last night, I awoke in the middle of the night thinking about connections. From Iowa Wesleyan alumni books, I had known that Cheryl was married to Al Krug. Al was an Iowa Wesleyan graduate who went on to become the supervisor of the juvenile department on the Corvallis, Oregon police force.

When I was a freshman at Iowa Wesleyan, I hung out with a group of people. We called ourselves “the artsy craftsies” because most of us were into music, art, and theater. Al hung out with buddies from New Jersey. His group called us “the artsy fartsies”. We called his group “the animals”. When our groups passed each at IWC, I imagine one might hear growls. I recall that Al’s group stuffed George Grunther (another artsy fartsy0 into his own waste basket one day. One member of that group later went to prison.

So, when it became time for me to do my functional teaching practicum in 2000 at Western Oregon University, I chose to do it at the Oregon State Adult Transition Program in Corvallis. I also did my academic practicum at Westernview Middle School in Corvallis.

Did I know that Al and Cheryl lived in Corvallis? Yes. Did I attempt to contact them? No.

So here I sit, 33 miles from Corvallis, typing away about connectedness with no real desire to connect. But, my thoughts went back to childhood connections which only begin to explain why and how I became the adult that I became.

Coincidentally, one of my artsy fartsy friends at IWC was John E. Butler. John and I left IWC to attend Western Illinois University in Macomb. With degrees from WIU, we both taught at local schools in Illinois.

In 1976, John moved to Los Angeles with some other WIU friends. My wife and I drove to LA that summer before our marriage to get the approval of her parents who lived in Santa Barbara. While we were in LA, John had arranged for us to be extras in the 1976 remake of King Kong at the MGM lot in Culver City. We also saw “Equus” at the Huntington Hartford, and we went to a Ray Charles concert at the Fox Arlington Theater in Santa Barbara.

Joyce and I returned to Illinois that fall and got married. We stayed in the small town of Alexis where I taught at the high school and Joyce commuted to a factory in Galesburg, Illinois. We still maintained contact with John.

In 1983, we moved to Coos Bay, Oregon where I was working as a claims adjuster for GAB Business Services. From that time until today, we have kept in contact with John and spent many happy hours together, in LA, NYC, San Francisco and Coos Bay.

In 2006, Joyce and I flew into LA from Rome. John had tickets to see David Hyde Pierce in “Curtains”. On the way to the theater, we stopped for a nosh at an Irish pub in downtown LA. There was a live trivia game there which had already started. The three of us asked to play the game. The moderator agreed. We registered as The Brain Dead Poster Children, a title that I and some adjuster buddies had used in a bar in Denver many years earlier. The three of us came in second and won a gift certificate for $50.

In 2011, Joyce and I bought a short sale house in Salem. in 2012, coincidentally, John decided to retire. He moved to Portland about 45 miles up the road. He just came down to Salem to celebrate Thanksgiving with us. That was when I told him that “Big Al” Krug lived and worked in Corvallis.

How do I know Cheryl? We went to school together in Burlington. I can recall teasing her about her name. So, perhaps she is not so interested in seeing me again. But here’s another angle, when Cheryl and I were in the 8th grade at Horace Mann Junior High, we were in a general science class being taught by Lew Miller. This was about the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis so many of our male teachers in the National Guard were called up to active duty. The school had to hire subs. Our sub was Mr. Moe.

When Lew Miller returned to teaching, he announced he would be moving to Corvallis, Oregon. That summer of 1962, my family and I drove to the Seattle World’s Fair (as did my wife and her family before we knew each other). We also drove down 99W to a coastal resort owned  by my cousin from Mt. Pleasant, Iowa where IWC is located. As we drove through the Willamette Valley I think we must have passed through Corvallis. Did I see Lew Miller? Of course not. I never heard of him again.

The science teacher in the room next to ours was Mr. Schiller. His wife was my sixth grade teacher at Perkins Elementary in Burlington. In 2009, I made contact with Mrs. Schiller. The Schillers took me  out to dinner when they were traveling up the coast that spring.

One of the big athletic stars at Horace Mann was Chip Osborne. Chip’s dad was our PE coach and head football coach. Yes, I was big enough to play tackle or guard in the 8th grade. Chip was in Mr. Moe’s science class with me and Cheryl.

So, as I was looking at this old Sunday School photo, who can you see in the back row, peeking out shyly? Chip Osborne.

All of this makes me think more and more about the strange connections I have experienced in my life. I will write more about them later.

The Original Storyteller

Storyteller

                                                                        By James M. Kemp, 9/23/2013

Not long after the Bible’s creation story and the expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden, the first human family has already moved into an Age of Specialization. Two sons of the first couple each have an area of specialization related to the necessity of providing food. One son is a farmer. One son is a rancher. One tills the soil. One herds the sheep.

However, there is one person missing from this story of Cain and Abel, a story of the first act of fratricide. The missing person is the narrator; the original maker of this myth, whom we must assume we are hearing from the depths of time. This first narrator is the first person to attempt to explain to a community what truths about their common history give meaning to their common experience of each other.

The narrator of the Cain and Abel story suggests that in the present tense of the story, there already are other families and perhaps even other tribes present on the Earth. In fact as his punishment for killing his brother Abel, the storyteller says that the creator, Yahweh placed a mark on Cain to protect Cain from future acts of vengeance by others. Yahweh even prescribes a punishment for those who would do harm to Cain.

The narrator of this story, however, must not be the tribal god, Yahweh himself. If Yahweh were telling the story, he would have perhaps used the first person plural or the Royal “We” as Yahweh seems to do in the creation story earlier in Genesis – i.e. – “We created man in our own image.”

The narrator of this story is the archetypal storyteller; the person whose wise tale had attracted the attention of an entire community that not only needed to understand the moral basis for human interaction with other humans, but also the moral basis for interaction with a divine creator of all things. The need to placate that creator with offerings of valued chattel provides the subject upon which the human conflict dramatically emerges in the myth’s plot.

Scholars suggest that this written product of a common oral tradition may have first been scripted along with many of the biblical stories near the time of Solomon’s temple. This early writing down of these wise tales of common cultural interest may have taken the form of a text or scroll now referred to as “J”.

As such, this theoretical” Book of J” has been added to from other sources including the “second giving” of the law (“Deuteronomy”) after the Babylonian Diaspora and during the time of the second or restored temple.

Thus, what we have received in the Christian canon is a retelling of the original oral tradition. In the retelling and perhaps even in the re-retelling (redaction for political purposes), some things have been left out of the story. We do not know exactly what form the “Mark of Cain” took. We do not know exactly what was said between the two brothers prior to this mythical first fratricide. It certainly was not a line from “Oklahoma” such as “Oh, the cowman and the farmer should be friends!”

What we do have is a divine directive that brothers (in particular sons of Adam and Eve), should not kill each other, and that the personal deity of this family still loves each of them to the point of marking the body of the offending family member as a sign of divine protection.

Do we all still carry the Mark of Cain?

The characters in the 1931 film “M” use a common mark to identify a child-killer by highlighting in chalk the letter M, commonly found on the human palm.

We all have an “M” on the palms of our hands. We are all capable of committing murder. We are all protected from being murdered.

If the story of Cain and Abel could be researched to the point of proving it to be historically factual, would it illustrate any more Truth about the human condition than it does as a product of human myth making?

Developmental Spirituality

Neo-Nestorian Christianity

By James M. Kemp, 9/24/2013

            The American Fundamentalists have succeeded in the past 30 to 40 years in co-opting an entire traditional religious group – the mainstream American Christian churches. Like Harold Bloom, I suspect that this Fundamentalist religion is not really a Christian movement at all. That movement requires believers to profess a faith in the inerrancy of the “received” Bible. In the 2000 year history of Christianity, no Christian has been required to believe in such a doctrine until the 1907 creation of Fundamentalist principles by certain Christian denominations. Typically, there are ten principles forming a new orthodoxy required of Fundamentalist believers.

Since 1907, America has experienced a religious war similar to the warfare waged around the world by fundamentalist adherents of other major world religions. It might be said that America’s religious war was less bloody than in other places, but human institutions that promote slavery, church bombings and covert operations such as Pat Robertson’s “Operation Blessing”, point to bloodletting by American Fundamentalists attempting to use their manmade religious doctrines to justify the raising of funds by engaging in the murders of innocent people.

Today, since American Fundamentalists have redefined the term “Christian”, I am looking for a new term to define my belief that Jesus Christ was the son of God just as all people are the sons and daughters of God. The issue of Jesus having been the only begotten son of God is a matter over which wars have been fought. Since we are told in Genesis that fratricide was the first sin of one human being against another human being, the entire issue of religious warfare seems immoral and even oxymoronic to me. I fear that those who have promoted this sin have a special place in hell (or in some such evil state of being) for eternity.

I researched the term “Christophile” and find it is the name of a music group on one hand. On the other hand, the Urban Dictionary states that the common usage of the term refers to Bible thumpers (perhaps the very self-righteous Pharisees whom Jesus of Nazareth said we should not emulate and who today take the form of the same American Fundamentalists who say their prayers in public and wear their faith on their sleeves).

I have expressed my interest in reconciling Christianity and Buddhism. I have an interest in an early church heresy called Nestorianism. Nestorians believed that Jesus was of two different natures – one human and one divine. The Nestorian version of Christianity once grew to be a major religion of China during the Mongol dynasties.

With this mind, I now must conclude that perhaps the best term to use in describing my religious beliefs might be “Neo-Nestorian”.

As a Neo-Nestorian Christian, I believe that Jesus of Nazareth was first of all human; that the words attributed to him by the gospel writers and by the Quelle source, do not indicate that he thought of himself as anything but a common Jew living under Roman domination. I believe that Jesus of Nazareth saw himself as a preacher, preaching against a temple cult that was a corrupt religious system condoned by the Roman Empire.

I believe that the human soul, the divine element which the creator breathed into Adam at the time of Adam’s creation, is a divine spark that exists in all human beings. I believe that the human soul is a developing entity; that the original divine spark can grow to become an enlightened state of being through the spiritual care of the soul. I believe that our relationship to God’s word can only be fully realized when we include all people in all places and of all times, whether or not these people even understand that they are participants in an evolving divine creation.

I believe in the universal principle of the Christos; that the perfect Christ is in fact that original divine spark received from the Creator. I believe that the Christos is the substance that binds reality together and is in and of all things. I believe that when we live lives where we are fully aware of our personal relationship to that divine element, we can achieve “oneness” (atonement) with that element, and that we can experience a spiritual state of awareness in which we are united with the Christos in a reality that is still being created.

I believe in the coming of the Kingdom of God. Little by little, day by day as more and more people care for their souls and come to share in the sacred process of becoming enlightened, we will see God’s house established on a mountain. We will see swords being turned into plowshares. We will see lions lying down with lambs. We will see the coming of the Cosmic Christ, the Christos that will dwell in all of us for all time and in all realities.

Finally, I believe that through this enlightenment process and through pointing out the logs in my brothers’ and sisters’ eyes, I can achieve reconciliation with them, and we will both be able to forgive each other our mutual trespasses just as Cain should have forgiven Abel.

On Reading “Zealot” by Reza Aslan

The Jesus Movement

 I am reading “Zealot”. I am surprised that the author does not cite Thomas Sheehan’s “The First Coming” since their themes and concepts are quite similar – Jesus of Nazareth came from an unsophisticated, rural community; that he developed a “zealous” philosophy that appealed to Aramaic-speaking Jews in the hinterlands of Judea; and that when he “took his show on the road” to challenge the Temple Cult in Jerusalem, he was arrested and executed for acts of sedition.

I am reading the chapter just before Saul of Tarsus makes his appearance. Aslan’s observatiions about the two groups of early Christians is particularly interesting as a language-based theory. The Jews of the Diaspora who spoke and read Greek, would carry the message of the risen Christ to the world.

The original Aramaic-speaking (and probably non-reading) Jews would primarily remain in Jerusalem and be slaughtered by the Romans in 70 AD. Their idea that Jesus of Nazareth was a faithful Jew (and like all Jewish males, a son of Yahweh); a Jew who was simply advocating the non-violent overthrow of the authorities of the Hellenized Temple Cult and of the Roman occupation forces.

Aslan also points out some interesting differences between the stories told by the gospel writers. The retelling of the scenes before the Sanhedrin and before Pontius Pilot are particularly interesting to me. They support the theory that the gospel of John is the least reliable version historically and contains early church theology that was evolving into that which would eventually become Fundamentalist Doctrine in America (as opposed to traditional Christian Doctrine). It seems to me that doctrines such as the Inerrancy Doctrine of the Fundamentalists are consistent with anti-intellectual values common in American politics.

Fundamentalists still seem to ignore the Hellenistic premise of John’s gospel – that Christ was the Logos, the original perfect Word, in the Platonic sense. They ignore the fact that the earliest gospel of Mark does not include a resurrection scene. When Fundamentalists promote the idea that the Bible was divinely dictated by the godhead, they oversimplify issues of faith to the point that scholarly research becomes their Scientific Creationism which they insist should be taught to every American child in every American schoolroom, and be paid for with public funds.

And then there’s that weird book that the church fathers nearly deleted from the Canon in the 4th century AD – the Book of Revelation.

How about this theory? Revelation was one of many books written between the second century BC and the second century AD that all purported to be eschatalogical visions of a new kingdom ruled by the godhead and by those who were faithful to the godhead, with the violent exclusion of the unfaithful.

Implicit in those visions is the possibility of an existent archetype commonly known as “blood ransom”. This archetype is present still in the mindsets of Middle Eastern cultures and explains why those cultures still insist upon annihilating each other to this very day.

“You’re unfaithful! Die!”

“No, you’re unfaithful! You die!”

“No, you.”

“No, you.”