Communion Insights - The Price Paid

A friend's mentor in the faith told him to ask God for a new insight on the Communion every time.  Since my friend told me this, I've done so.

Today, Jesus told me that the bread is the price of my purchase from my master.

Satan wanted Jesus to worship him, and in exchange Jesus would receive a gift: the entire world.  Jesus did not dispute that the world was Satan's to give!  He would rather die than worship Satan.  So instead of giving Satan worship, He allowed His body to be taken away.

A body is strength.  A body has the ability to change the world.  Jesus, adopted son of a house-builder, certainly had a strong body, but that wasn't how He changed the world.  With His muscles, He could probably have been a great warrior, if so trained, but that wasn't how He changed the world.  Instead, He changed the world by allowing His body to be publicly drained of strength and suffocated by fatigue and killed in the place of a murderer and insurrectionist against Israel's submission to Rome.

But the trick is that He died once to free all who chose freedom.

I was born into the slavery of sin.  My heritage was weakness, my lineage was fallibility, and my master was Satan.

The price for me, one body traded for another, was paid by Jesus.  He came into the place I was enslaved, this cruel world, and asked me if I wanted to be free.  I said yes.  The eldest son traded Himself for my slave-price, and I was washed clean by the blood of the Anointed One and adopted as a son of the house of Heaven.

I am ever grateful.

This world is lost.

The church denominations that idolize Jesus The Man have fallen to the temptation Satan used on Jesus: to try to save this world. Jesus came to save the people of the world from the world; He turned down rulership of the world and embraced the Cross.

The proof that He was right to do so is that every attempt man has made to bring Heaven to Earth has resulted in more and more perfect simulations of Hell: the guillotine, gulags, weaponized starvation, work camps, death experimentation and extinction camps, governments holding their own people hostage to extract concessions from free countries, and the slanderous denunciation of law, truth, and justice, calling all good things the sources of evil.

Logos - God as Thought

Words represent concepts and/or impressions of things.  Words, originally, are attempts to transmit those concepts and/or impressions (or, thoughts and/or feelings) from one mind to another.

We use short or few words to convey identity, and long or many words to convey functionality.  I can say my cat's nose is moist, or I can say his nose is wetter than usual, dripping nasal liquids and causing him to sneeze.  The more words, the more functional a simulation is conveyed from one mind to another.  Those in the veterinary field are trained in the most simulative words to convey the condition of my cat's nose to another, so that they can treat the cat's condition together.

Computers are simulation machines.  You can tell one to compute 2+2, and if that math problem is meaningful to it, if it simulates a mind performing math by accurate rules, it will say 4.  If you have enough words of description in the appropriate programming language on the appropriate machine, it may even simulate a cat.

Jesus is the Logos, the Word of God.  The Son is infinite and almighty God, as is the Father.  This much is canon.  Jesus said that by knowing Him, we know the Father.

I speculate about theology, and everything beyond this point is speculation:

An infinitely accurate description of God would be indistinguishable from God.  It would be as active and powerful.  It would not be content to be a cold description, but would try to fulfill God's purposes.  And, being as infinite as God, it would fulfill them.

Thoughts on the Cross

Thoughts inspired by my church's reading of the Good Friday account in John 18 and 19:

• Jesus' death sentence was for blasphemy. It was a false accusation, but He accepted the sentence for His friends, who each in their own sins had committed that blasphemy, had declared themselves to be more intelligent than infinite God through their defiance of His laws.  Our pride is our death sentence, and Jesus has taken it for us, if we choose to be His friend.
• “Shall I crucify your king?” Pilate asked. “We have no king but Caesar,” the chief priests answered.  In doing so, they, the highest religious authorities of Jacob's line, broke the covenant and ended the Levite priesthood. Then, upon Jesus' death, the inner veil of the Temple was torn, showing that God had accepted His sacrifice, that the age of the priesthood of Melchizedek had come, to offer forgiveness to all the Jews and gentiles.
• Pilate crucified Jesus with the sign "King of the Jews" in the languages of the people (Aramaic), of the Empire (Latin), and of the world (Greek). He was the appointed authority of the Empire of Rome, the hand of the Emperor of mankind, and he recognized what the priests refused to. In doing so, he declared who the world system would forever oppose: the King of the next world.

Religions as overgrown fandoms

I've come to see many religions as overgrown fandoms.  People join or stay for similar reasons:

• because they want to be entertained / have something to do
• because they're friends or family of someone in the fandom / religion
• because they believe in the worldview / optimism / pessimism of the canon, the original teacher, or the source documents behind the rituals / fandom activities
• because it reinforces something they already enjoy / believe
• because it introduces them to something amazing
• because they like the art
• because they like the music
• because they like the other fans / adherents.
• because they see an opportunity to be recognized for their skill at embodying what it's about
• because they want to keep power out of the wrong hands
• because they want power
• because they want money, sex, or other benefits
• because they want friends
• because they want to correct other people
• because they see the world as a failure and that fandom / religion as a way to escape or fix it
• because they see themselves as a failure and that fandom / religion as a way to escape or fix themselves
• because they see other people as failures and that fandom / religion as a way to escape or fix them

Fandoms are only recognized as not worth killing people over because they're about fiction, entertainment. Yet people lie, cheat, steal, dox, and commit other wounds against other people up to the very edge of death, and use the language of threats and violence in arguments all the time.  Fandoms are about our core passions, and it shows.

The paradigms are identical.  The instincts are identical.  The failure isn't in religion or in fandom, but how we use it to express our fundamentally flawed humanity.

Religions have claims of worldview accuracy.  Even Atheism claims that there is no God, or were there to be one, the sorry state of His creation proves Him unworthy to rule it.  They are about very big, eternal, weighty things that, in their adherents' minds, surpass the laws and taboos against killing others or themselves.  I as a Christian have grown up expecting that there will come a day I will be asked to choose between my life and my faith, and on that day, it will be my welcome duty to be slain by another's hand and go to meet my God.

A Bible Without Speedbumps: The ESV Reader's Bible

I have long sought (and agitated for) a Bible without verse numbers and footnotes.  My prayers have finally been answered.

Crossway has released the ESV Reader's Bible, a small hardback edition with no speedbumps.  There are no section summaries, no verse numbers, no footnotes.  The chapter numbers are present, but in an unobtrusive way. It is incredible for interpretive reading: I just read what's there, and the flow carries me.

It restores the flow, which is something that I, as a reader, had been missing. It is everything I hoped it would be.

It would just figure that since I first dreamt of such a Bible, I've since fallen in love with the flow of the Holman Christian Standard Bible, doesn't it?

Power, corrupted

A god with infinite power is driven by something. God help us if it isn't love.
The atheist believes in power granted temporarily in an eddy of entropy, to be gathered back to nothingness as nothing usable. All power eventually gathered back into the hands of unchangable, unchanging weakness. This is the folly of America's war on poverty: she gives power to the powerless, who spend it on weakness, and return it to her, diminished. This is the metaphor of master and bondservant, that the master gives something to be grown and prospered, and by it both servant and master are enriched. This is the blasphemy of communism, that the government is the god, the sun, which burns out trying to prove its love, saying, "rely on me for life, I will gather you unto me and feed and shelter you," when she cannot forever. This is the rebellion, that a finite thinker believes himself to be smarter than Logos, more caring than Love, and through these, to be more worthy of His great might that never fails than He whose it has been forever.

A bit of MBTI

A quickie web quiz told me INFP, and the things other INFPs have posted feel right.

So.

I just figured out something important.  When my boss tells me to work, she doesn't want me to experience work, she wants me to do work.

I'm 35 and I just figured this out.  This kind of thing is why I'm not an INTP like so many of my Asperger's brethren.