Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do

We all, at least those with any exposure to Christianity at all, know those words by heart. We know who said them, and under what circumstances. And we believe we know what He meant, when he said them.

I've come to think we have really missed it on this one, over all the centuries of this religion. Recurring as a central theme in so many of my meditations, thoughts, and studies for a good long while now, has been a core concept related to His words, the words themselves, and when He spoke them. And I've struggled with how to ever try to convey to others just what has seemed to emerge for me, as a central truth very different from what I, and the rest of us, have ever been taught about that.

Some years ago, I had read, and adopted as one on my little guides to wisdom nuggets, that "pride never recognizes itself; if it did, it would immediately commit suicide by common sense." And I had come to see how that had been true in me and others, both through life experiences, as well as through studies in Psychology and theology. 

Then, I began to experience, in one context after another, in how many ways we commonly really do not recognize something in what we do, what we way, how we are. Our view of ourselves is rarely clear, and seriously skewed with reality when we really start breaking it down and looking at it.

In the matter of hypocrisy, it is easy, it seems, to see and point out the hypocrisy in others, ourselves, not so much so. As I studied hypocrisy in various contexts, religion, the bible, philosophy, and psychology, that central theme emerged, again and again. We know not what we (really) do.

In philosophy and logic, the examination of the various forms of what are called "fallacies of logic," and then on into psychology, and what are called such as "Ego Defenses" there is was, again and again. We don't even recognize our most blatant hypocrisies, because we don't even really know what hypocrisy IS! We not only know not what we do, we don't even know what it is we THINK we don't do!

In the matter of idolatry, I owe a great debt to Paul Ramsey, in his Basic Christian Ethics, for his carefully thought out description of just what idolatry actually, but more importantly, the mental "process" humans go through in creating and holding an idolatry. Again, we not only know not what we do, we don't even know what it is we THINK we don't do!

In everyday life around us, i am not alone in wondering at times how it can be most everybody agrees bullying is 'wrong', and yet there is so much bullying. And that it doesn't take much observation to see that many of those that insist most strongly that they hate bullying, believe bullying is wrong, are actually bullying others, even often, in the course of their daily interactions with others! And once again, when I delve into why that is, why such hypocrisy about bullying, I find at the core of it, they don't recognize what they do as being bullies, and yes, again, because they really don't even know what bullying IS! Again, we not just know not what we do, we don't even know what it is we THINK we don't do IS!

At the core of all this, and so much more, this central theme, central truth, as it seems to keep making its way into my considerations on any matter.

When Jesus uttered those words as He hung on the cross, "Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do," it wasn't just about, as our common Christian beliefs have taught us, His just forgiving those that were murdering Him, for not recognizing they were killing the Son of God, even though they didn't know what they did, never repented or asked forgiveness. No, that was not what he meant at all.

If He came here to die on the cross for the Sin of the world, then those words meant something much more, far greater, than forgiveness of those few that were participating in his murder,

In those words, His mission was accomplished. NONE of us really know what we do! 

"It is finished."

On Internet Media Ad Watching - Seeking What's Really Going on

I know most people would prefer all those ads on every page they pull up on the Internet, and such ads  presented as 'suggested posts' on their social networking sites would just go away, and many use ad-blockers to avoid them. But for me, I've learned to use noticing them, and even clicking on to take a closer look, at some of those ads, as a way of keeping a finger on the pulse of what is really going on out in the world. Some relates to politics, some to social justice issues, some to just the general direction public interests are trending, and many are readily recognizable as scams luring in naive victims. 

Those that intrigue me most, draw me into looking closer, to see what they are really about, what is really going on, are both those I recognize as high scam potential, and then, those that are clearly not what they seem, are presenting as, but are actually something very different. Sometimes I suspect the two types are working together, the scam ads seeking what technique work best to draw people in, what are people most often vulnerable to, what they will readily "buy into," and those I will call political-social agenda propaganda intended to subtly influence 'public perception and opinion' under the guise of advertising some product or service. Knowing what many people will "buy into" is a tremendously useful tool in determining how to effectively present political, social, or religious propaganda.

As demonstration of what I'm talking about here, consider the political/social propaganda presented in the appearance of such ads with lead-in banners stating as if an assumed 'fact,' that "due to changes Obama has made in "policies" related to "qualifying" for some form of "benefit" under some government program or government regulated industry, YOU TOO may now qualify for something for nothing, at government (TAX PAYER) expense!  
The "service" offered is usually along the line of helping you apply and qualify for some actual "government program," but the ease of qualifying and/or the huge financial benefit you might gain is extremely exaggerated, supporting the popular propaganda toward convincing people Obama is taking more and more of YOUR tax dollars to GIVE them to unworthy and undeserving others.

Common themes among such ads:
"Changes" Obama has made so as to make it 'easier than ever to qualify' for even greater than ever dollar amounts in disability benefits, welfare benefits of many kinds, student grants of  'free money' for college even if your income is as high as $80,000, as one such ad claims, and absurdly misrepresented and outright false assertions of how much a home buyer "underwater" on their mortgage can get knocked off the capital amount of their mortgage loan under a refinance, topped with an alluring dollop of sweet frosting of extremely low interest rates and monthly payments. 

Key is that most such "changes" attributed the Obama, that "assume" it is easier than ever before to cash in on generous government benefits, something for nothing at tax payer expense,  are either entirely false, there have been no changes in that program under the present administration, or, any changes or new regulations and policies enacted are far from being the easy gravy train the ad presents as an "assumed fact" before jumping into how YOU can take advantage of the new opportunity for "free booty from the government," that isn't actually there. 

In closer examination, with application of careful reasoning and actual sound facts, discrediting the claims in these ads, and seeing them as often nothing more than a venue for advancing a childishly simplistic propaganda, doesn't take much real cognitive effort or mental challenge. Sometimes it doesn't even take that to see through them if you are open, not already closed in your own opinion on the matter, for the claims are so obviously absurd. And certainly, anyone thinking to actually follow up on their offers are sure to find they've fallen for a scam, followed a false lead, a phony 'come-on.'  

But when what they are advancing seems to support things their target audiences already believe, WANT to believe, those people will simply accept the headline banner as if a true fact, that further reinforces their perception of the validity of their own already held opinion. 

Since it is unlikely, it seems to me, for average individuals, not matter how strongly they hold any political of social position, the question arises, then, just "who" IS creating these "pseudo-businesses" and running ads for them? 

The answer to that seems pretty evident to me. But I'll leave you to arrive at your own conclusions.

Walking the Between, Ever Seeking Center

It has come to seem to me how much it is that finding balance, in my own life, in dealing with others around me and that I encounter in daily life, and in so many of our political and social justice issues, can feel so much like walking a thin high-wire, a narrow and shaky walk-bridge, sometimes a fragile string across a deep chasm that falls away into spans of jagged rocks far below.

Some years ago, the accumulated residual effects of events and experiences over the course of my life broke free from the closed doors behind which I had carefully, and to standards of expectations in our society, dutifully, kept them hidden away, some even from my own awareness, in a crisis triggered by a number to tragic, traumatic, and unexpected event my own and lives of others close to me, for which I had at the time absolutely no point of reference for understanding what was happening to me. It would take some years to work through not only that crisis event itself, my fears at times I was sinking into some strange kind of madness, but learn as well about what it actually was I had experienced. 

I learned such a life crisis event has been called by different names at different times and in different cultures and religions and different disciplines...Spiritual Emergency (as that word applies in both meanings), coming into Cosmic Consciousness, Shamanic call, the Ascent to Carmel, the venture into the inner depths of the Interior Castle, Spiritual call to Quest, positive psychological dis-integration/re-integration, individuation crisis, the transforming crisis of the new birth, into a new creation. Christian and non-Christian, civilized and pagan, religious and secular, such a thing has been called by so many names, attributed to so many sources and causes, yet all describe, for any that have passed through it, something that is essentially the same.the place into which I found myself thrown, abruptly, unexpectedly, even traumatically, was a place and state I came to call "walking the between." 

 To be walking the between, between what is real and what is not, what is true and what is false, what is right and what is wrong, the seen and the unseen, what is my own point of view and that of another, was at first disorienting, at times  frightening, but I came to realize that was for that I had reached the point in my life when for the first time, that I was really walking, going anywhere, at all! It was as the point at which the child has peddled along merrily on the bicycle under the trust that the grown-up holding onto the bike, and the training wheels that lent a sense of more security that in fact they ever did, suddenly realizes the training wheel came of and the adult had quietly let go and stepped back, actually quite some distance back along the road. At which point of course, the sudden realization he/she is really on their own, without some outside other force to keep them upright, protect them from falling, usually results in the child's becoming distracted and afraid, promptly loosing control and crashing the bike. Like the child on the bike eventually learns to get the bike up and going again, to keep it balanced, and peddle away on his/her own, I eventually regained balance and was able to move forward confident that I really could move on without the illusions of outside supports and guidance I had once relied upon. I learned that while that event had seemed strange and unknown, it was of a nature of event many have experienced across the spans of time and distance and cultures, but that does seem to be occurring much more frequently to a great many more people than has been typical in past eras. 

As I sought to orient myself, my new and strange experience, I learned that I had entered a circle in which I stood in some pretty good company. Names of "great" men and women that are now famous, that in relating their own life stories, spoke and wrote of such a point, a time in their lives, at which "everything changed." Inside our became outside in, and upside down became right side up. Tolstoy's transition at that point was from a common hack writer of pulp fiction, to such a work as War and Peace. Jung found himself rejecting the promising future as Freud's star and primary pupil and heir apparent, to pursue a course of understanding human nature, thought, and behavior, that included, to his old mentor's dismay and very deep and bitter disappointment, a Spiritual aspect as well as Freud's purely atheistic 3 part model, of Superego, Ego, and Id, that was over-arching even those 3 element of the human psyche. 

But also, those that may have lived more quietly, never doing anything that brought them into the notice of history, for whom this at first disorienting and disturbing process transformed their lives toward way they made difference in place, in whatever circumstances of life they were. That, as Paul wrote of it, served in whatever position they were when called, to affect their own little place in the world, and greater scheme of things. 

In this present world, as there seems coming upon us a time of new awakening, has the opening up of access, through various communications channels, to all manner of information, knowledge of events throughout the world, it may be that greatest effect has been that of communication with one another, other people, and their thoughts, and ideas, with barriers of time and place removed. Those awakening in place have for centuries found themselves most often alone, walking quietly among those with which they lived their daily lives, being in their world, but not of their world. Walking the between. Being seen, yet unseen, for in so many places and times of the past, and yes, in some even today, those recognized as being 'different' in such ways, were, by that recognition, perceived as threats, placed into real danger of their lives. Only now, can we span time and distance, to find one another, these that walk the between. 

And I have come to wonder, is it the whole of our society, no, the whole of humanity, that is coming to this point of crisis, this place of walking the between, of ever seeking center, the balance points, in so many issues we face in our reality in this new and changing world? Could this be, even, that prophesied, on more than one culture and era of time, the coming of the Light? The 'second coming of Christ' that would be as the lightening cometh from the east and spreadeth to the west?

At What Cost Truth? Ignorance as Denial

Someone expressed curiosity at the phrase found in my profile, of the determination to seek truth, "cost what it will."
How would truth COST anything, they wanted to know. Isn't truth always better, doesn't truth set us free?

Well, yes, in the end of it, truth does set us free. The problem is often that it may not not a truth or a freedom we really wanted to find. We are attached to our delusions for a variety of reasons, and will even fight to defend the illusions that allow us to continue in them, because our delusions are woven into the very fabric of our sense of reality, and our place within that reality, even our very sense of personal identity. When a delusion falls, our sense of reality and sense of personal identity, and feeling safe in our perceived reality is threatened, and can, often does, come unraveled. Even more threatening is the risk that as a delusion falls away and a truth revealed, relationships with others that are important to us may be damaged or even destroyed, as others are not yet ready to see what we see, accept what we have been brought to accept.
It is here we can come our attachments to the world we hadn't realized we have. When we are brought up against 'the way it is' and 'that how everyone else thinks.' And that's what everyone else expects US to be and think, too. When we experience a truth revealed, trying to bring that truth from revealed to realized can be the harder part, that of having recognized a truth to begin with. Pressures to conform to how everybody else, the world, thinks, and would have us think, can easily press us to find ways to reject, deny, that we know what we now know, to pretend we don't. But a truth about truth. Once revealed, once known, we can never really hide it from ourselves, we can never un-know what we know. We will try to, but any seeming success in it is just that, seeming. Illusory, delusion. We may put a truth we know out of sight, but we will never be able to truly put it out of mind. It will always be there, somewhere in the shadows of our mind, lurking, waiting to jump out at us, maybe to bite us, at the most uncomfortable and inconvenient times. 

We may find ourselves unable to continue under a pretense of belief. Even if we are willing to try, to go along to get along, we can only maintian the facade to a limited extent for a little while, before it wears thin on ourself and those around us. At times, however, pretense may be the only way we can find to survive. When that is so, we may find that there are some truths so important that they rise above the importance of truth in some other sense. While an ego defense may serve only to protect some non-essential part of the ego, there are times when the defense is in truth protecting something more important. It can serve to protect the well being and even very life of not only ourself but
others around us.

"If our mind were to have tricked us into believing that we don't know something that we really do know but don't want to know that we know, how would we go about knowing that our mind has tricked us into believing that we don't know something that we really do know but don't want to know we know so that we can know we know whatever it is?"

Actually, that is exactly what our minds do, all of us have at least some measure of this going on in our beliefs systems. When we know things we don't want to know, or consciously acknowledge even to ourself that we know, it creates what is called 'cognitive dissonance'  which our mind must attempt to deal with in any way it can. Since at some level we really do know what we don't want to know, and it takes a lot of mental energy to keep all those inconsistencies locked away from our consciousess, this is a primary source of our anxieties and depressions.

Freud presented this conflict as being between the ID's selfish urges and desires and restraining internal moral guide of the Superego.
The Ego, whose job is to mediate between the desires of the ID and the demands and restraints of the Superego, when unable to construct an acceptable compromise between the two, uses devices call 'ego defenses' to protect itself from the unresolved conflict. Ego defenses serve to effectively place a wall of ignorance, denial, between the conflicting beliefs to allow us to continue to hold both while not being able to lay them out side by side in order to reveal and recognize the inconsistencies.

This internal state of conflict arises when our mind encounters conflict between two or more of our beliefs, or between professed belief and a conflicting reality, which is most often manifested in inconsistencies between what we would say we believe, and what we would say we believe at some other time and/or when our behaviors/actions are inconsistent and/or incompatable with our professed beliefs.

We may encounter inconsistencies between what we believe to be true about ourselves and what our actual behaviors and real choices would reveal. One may believe one's self to have a high moral standard, while at odds with that belief, engaging in behaviors that violate one's own view of morality. We hold conflicting beliefs when we would believe two or more different beliefs, that, when examined individually, simply cannot be equally held at once. These are things that if you believe this, you can't also believe that, and vice versa.

A common source of these internal conflicts involve things we are taught to believe as true, to accept as true, often under pressure of negative response and even risk of rejection by individuals or social groups important to us, but which our personal experience and observations about reality would discredit. These beliefs are often passed on through a social group or even down generations in the the form of succinct, pithy sounding wisdom sayings, until they have become part of a social group's traditional folk wisdom lore.

In psychology, there are questionaires that consist of many common 'wisdom sayings' that many people simply accept as if truth, that the test subject will be asked to rate as true or false. These lists of common sayings and folk lore wisdom are designed so as to present statements that actually negate one another, present conflicting beliefs, that are presented at some distance from one another on the list, making it less likely the subject will recognize the inconsistency than if presented along side one another. After scoring the test, the subject is presented with the result of both a numerical score reflecting the degree of inconsistency in the beliefs they chose as being true or false, and presented with the same list in a different arrangment, in which the conflicting beliefs are laid out alongside one another. 

Such lists are an excellent starting point in examining one's own beliefs system, and provide some ground work for beginning to identify one's own perculiar sets of inconsistent and incompatable beliefs. A recent example I encountered was when someone I know to also profess Evangelical Christian belief composed and publicly posted a sentimental piece about soldiers that had died fighting for their nation, and that their souls were all with God in heaven, looking down upon and over America. The irreconcilable conflict here is that according the Christian beliefs, the 'requirement' for souls of the deceased that will be in heaven with God is entirely inconsistent with having died in the service to their country. A similar source of conflict exists for many Christians in the belief in salvation as only for properly confessing/professing believerss, but at the same time also that their circle of loved ones, family and friends, which of course contains both believers and non-believers, will all be reunited in heaven after death. 

Beliefs of this nature most often become a source of anxiety when we realize they are in conflict with what we can easily know through observation of and sound reasoning about reality. When there is on the one hand a high level of social pressure to adhere to the common belief, and clearly evident, even irrefutable, evidence to the contrary in reality as we are able to observe and experience it, we are presented with a crisis in our beliefs system that has potential for either a new level of growth or a deeper level of denial and ignorance.

Ignorance is not the same thing as to be lacking in some knowledge of/about something. Absence of knowledge is innocence. Ignorance is to have chosen at some level to disregard, pretend we do not know, knowledge of something that is available and evident to us to know. The potential for cognitive dissonance when we hold conflicting beliefs or act out of different beliefs standards than we openly profess causes the mind to kick in with ego defenses to protect us from conscious awareness of the inconsistency.

While innocence (lack of knowledge) can contribute to our vulnerablity to unrecognized perils in the material world, ignorance (choosing to disregard, ignore, something we know) brings peril to our mind, heart, and soul. As  (??need script ref) points out, (need to get quote) there is less to fear from that which can destroy our body, than that which can destroy our very soul.

Using the example above, our rational mind has to know that the belief that only proper Christian believers will go to heaven after death simply is not consistent with any belief that all soldiers that die in service to their country or that all our loved ones will be reunited in heaven, presents an inconsistency in our beliefs. It is only by drawing a curtain of ignorance, a mental barrier, an 'ego-defense,'  between these opposing beliefs that we can hold both to be true at once.

The more important to us we feel any certain false belief is, the more strongly our emotional response to protect it will be. The stronger and more quickly strong negative emotion arises when a belief seems under challenge, the more likely it is that belief is false. Response to challenge will be emotional and irrational, since of course, sound reasoning would not protect a false belief. Any and all of what are often called 'fallacies of logic' and 'ego defenses' may be brought into play, even attack on the person seen as the source of the challenging information to the point of death,  as happened when Jesus confronted the religious and political establishment of his day.

Perhaps the greatest risk to the soul in this is that of hypocrisy. Hypocrisy is the opposite of being honest with ourselves, and accepting the consequences of truths we come to, but cannot allow ourselves to openly embrace. The fear of embracing truths that dismantle the illusions that facilitate our delusions is that of social rejection by others whose acceptance and approval matter to us. This is to give 'The World' the upper hand, over that of truth.

In another essay, I deal with the idea that in matters of faith, the hypocrite and the atheist are but the two sides of the same coin. The coin in this matter is loss/absense in the belief in a commonly accepted god image. The difference is a matter of honesty. The Athiest openly recognizes and professes his or her disbelief, the hypocrite continues to maintain an identity image as an aparant believer before others in their faith community, lest they lose that important source of acceptance and place of belonging within a group.

Openly confronting truth when it is inconvenient or socially dangerous, even physically dangerous,  will always demand an extraordinary degree of courage. But there are situations in which, as mentioned earlier in this essay, that there can be a greater truth that is more important than openly confronting truth in some lesser defense. Perhaps in a more perfect world, this would not be so, but in our present reality, it may at time be neccessary for survival.

What is Truth?

One of the most commonly misquoted snippets of text from the Bible is this question, posed to Jesus, by Pilate, in St. John 18:38. The common  error is that of inserting the simple little word "the" so as to change this question  to "What is the truth?"

When we speak of "the truth of" some matter, or "a truth", we asign a multiplicity of meanings to this simple word, truth. Jesus's silence in response to Pilate's question attests to His having understood correctly what Pilate had asked, and Pilate's response to that silence, to turn away and announce,  "I find in Him no fault at all," attests to Pilates recognition of the significance of that response of silence.

Any less wise would have responded as most people today would, when posed that question, by going off into whatever their accepted beliefs are pertaining to "the truth", whether is be about the nature of reality or of God. For there is no adequate definition or explanation of "truth" itself.

One might attempt by saying that truth is what is, what is real, or actual. Even so, we are not defining, but demonstrating possible applications of truth. Truth is one of those ephemeral concepts that cannot be adequately defined or described, but only demonstrated by example. As such, truth takes its place alongside such concepts as love or honesty, that can only be exampled, never defined or described of themselves.

Neither can the definition and meaning of truth be reduced to that of simple fact, though that is a common confusion. The relationship of facts to truth might best be demonstrated by thinking of facts as evidence of something that may be true. Jurors in a court trial may consider various bits of factual evidence in determining whether they believe an accused committed the crime that has been charged. Yet even in this example, keep in mind truth is being exampled, not defined or described. The jurors' conclusions are what they believe to be true, not the truth itself.

Recognizing a translational inaccuracy in the text immediately preceeding that famed question posed by Pilate, helps clear up both why the question itself is so often misquoted, and meaning missed.

"To this end was I born, and for this cause came I into the world, that I should bear witness unto truth. Everyone that is of truth heareth my voice." St. John 18:37. When that word "the" is removed from the common  translation of this text, the concept of truth in and of itself is more clearly presented.

Truth is one of the qualities of God's very being. These qualities of God do not exist independently from God, they are in essence existential in/with/of God. God is truth, truth is God. In the same sense is it that God is love, and love is God. Where truth is, where love is, God is, and where God is, there also is truth and love.

Comprehending truth in this sense echoes God's revelation of Himself and His nature to Moses, in a Hebrew word for which the closest translation, though that still inadequate, as "I am that I am", the great, the entirity, of an eternal and infinite and complete "am-ness."

In comprehending this concept of truth, the signficance of Jesus' words, "everyone that is of truth (God) heareth my voice,"  takes on a deeper meaning for people of faith. To be of truth, of God, is to hear truth, hear God.
Jesus reiterated this truth in His words to the Jews, that had no understanding of the Spiritual things of which He spoke, "He that is of God heareth God's Words: ye therefore hear them not, because ye are not of God." St. John 8:47

But the finite can never fully comprehend, or embrace, the infinite, so no human mind can ever fully comprehend truth, or God. As finite beings, living in a finite material existance, the most any of us can do is seek to see, to hear, to think, as open to truth as each is able. Our connections to our material reality means God, or truth, or love, can never be comphrended directly, in a pure state, but only as we might interpret them filtered through our human senses and minds.

It is to this direction I seek in these blog entries.