Determinism in Christianity

I'm trying to formulate this as a question for Dale Allison, though I as yet have no question, merely a more successful explanation of the apocalyptic mode of conceptualization. I don't assume I have anything to learn from Allison, but any engagement has already proven helpful for clarifying. What should I ask him: "Why, specifically and in detail, don't you abandon your view and adopt my superior view instead?"

Chapter drafts about Mr. Historical Jesus' interpretation of Jewish apocalyptic:

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/crosstalk2/files/HELL.PDF (case-sensitive)

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/crosstalk2/files/IdeologyandApocalyptic.pdf

In Ideology and Apocalyptic, Allison quotes his passage from the book Apocalyptic Jesus:

"... a Jesus who proclaimed the nearness of the end in the first century must have been a real human being. This is no small point. Docetism may have been condemned long ago as a heresy, but it has never gone away. Much of the popular Christianity I have known seems to think that Jesus was at least three fourths divinity, no more than one quarter human being. If we go back to the ancient church, it wasn’t much better. The theologians who confessed Jesus’ true humanity balked at the implications. . . . Here is one point at which the Fathers failed us."

In Ideology and Apocalyptic, Allison writes:

"... Jesus' eschatological convictions belong to mythology, even though such a thought is foreign to the way in which own mind looked at the last things. He surely construed his eschatological expectations pretty much as most pre-moderns have construed Genesis 1-3, that is, more or less literally.108 [108: See Allison, Jesus of Nazareth, pp. 152-69.] But just as the mythological character of Genesis does not bar us from interpreting and even appropriating the text, so too is it with the old eschatological expectations. In fact, I take much of biblical eschatology to be akin to Platonism; both are mythological ways of directing us beyond this world, a larger reality about which we cannot speak literally because it transcends our mundane minds, which have after all evolved in order to interact with the material world around us.109 [109: See further George Tyrrell, Christianity at the Cross-roads (London/New York: Longmans, Green and Co., 1913). I find myself in essential agreement. This in turn means that, in the end, I am close to where Dodd was, the big difference being that I regard my interpretation as my interpretation, not that of Jesus.] I would also assert that "the idea embodied in the Eschatology of Jesus--the embodiment belonging to its own day--is that of the ultimate triumph of God."110 [110: Jackson, Eschatology, p. 350.]

In saying "I regard my interpretation as my interpretation, not that of Jesus", Allison asserts that the Historical Jesus was a mistaken and deluded man who foolishly interpreted the apocalypse idea literally and taught that he was the messiah of that literal apocalypse, while Allison himself holds a sane, wise, and sober interpretation of the apocalypse idea as having its real meaning in the realm of Platonism.

For Allison, what the apocalypse idea is really all about is a Platonism-type philosophical concept that God will ultimately triumph, not that the apocalypse will occur soon and is near in time.

I contrast, I present this truly sane, wise, and sober interpretation: Jesus is an entirely mythic representation of the specific metaphysical experience and conceptual realization which Hellenistic mystery-religion initiates and Jewish mystics underwent subsequent to ingesting the sacred food and mixed wine of the ritual meals that were standard and ubiquitous in the Hellenistic world.

All the ideas swirling around the notion of "apocalyptic change of cosmic rulership" make perfect sense and do not involve any confusion and mistakenness on the part of Jesus, or rather, on the part of the skilled and crafty mystic mythmakers who constructed the symbolic two-state, meaning-flipping figure of Jesus so cleverly. The confusion is entirely on the part of the uninitiated scholars. Dale Allison is the teacher who has a mistaken interpretation of the idea of apocalypse.

Mr. Historical Jesus was completely correct: the end of time is as near as an uninitiated, unregenerated follower's last supper before taking up the cross and thereby entering tonight into the secret kingdom of God, of which Jesus is king -- king of the metaphysical puppets, king of the enlightened, king of "the Jews", the elect who were predestined to realize in the mystic altered state that there is no free will and no egoic moral agent to be the impure carrier of moral sin and guilt.

All myth-religion of the Hellenistic era is ultimately and essentially variations on these same themes. These type of ideas were standard in that era; Christianity in its best form is a two-state play of signifiers that may be more sophisticated and brilliant than even ancient Greek tragedy/myth/religion and Jewish myth-religion.

This same tragi-comic two-state meaning-shifting was present in Greek and Jewish religion, and from what I have seen, Christianity brought together the cleverest of the Jewish and Hellenistic systems of meaning-flipping.

There was a certain boring similarity among the various Hellenistic mystery-religions; they were too obviously equivalent, while the Jews were admired for contributing a distinctive version that was mechanically equivalent but stood apart in that it utterly reveled in the two-state flipping, which required hyper-literalizing the surface, lower level of the mythic symbol-system as pseudo-history.

Jewish religion was essentially a form of Hellenistic mystery-religion that was entirely and determinedly translated into quasi-literal history while retaining the consciousness that it was essentially an equivalent two-phase meaning-flipping system pivoting around the ritual consumption of special food and drink.

It's as though there were 15 new mystery-religions including the most synthetic of all, Sarapis, and bored heirophantic mystics sat around dreaming up a new twist on the core engine, and translated the system into pseudo-history. Instead of "the uninitiated and the initiated", this would become two nations, such as "the Jews and the Israelites", "the Jews and the Gentiles", "the Jews and the Greeks", and so on.

Of course the symbolic integrity of using contrasting nations to represent the uninitatied and the initiated is challenged by the proposal that some Gentiles may be saved -- but these kind of "flaws" in the system were cleverly integrated into the system. Dale Allison fails to recognize the humor present when the scriptures pretend to "struggle" with these "problems" such as the "problem" that Jesus' prophecy of the end -- taken literally -- was obviously false.

To the mystic-myth craftsmen, there are no serious problems, since the whole system is just an artificial meaning-puzzle.

Similarly, there is a comical parody of intellectual struggle when the Paul character "struggles" to nail down the specifics about when the living will ascend into the kingdom of God, versus when the already bodily dead will ascend -- these subtle problems are intended to be ludicrous and comical, mocking and making light of the absurdity that results when this synthetic hyper-historicized version of the core mystery-religion is taken at its word by the uninitiated.

Dale Allison holds that:

o Jesus and the other New Testament figures existed.

o Jesus believed and taught that there would be a literal apocalyptic transformation of the world and its rulership, and it would happen soon.

o Jesus was mistaken that an apocalyptic transformation would happen soon; he thought that a certain kind of intense and sudden political transformation of the world would happen, but that kind of transformation didn't happen.

o The OT and NT were written as serious history mixed with serious supernatural religion.

I hold that:

o All the figures in the New Testament are purely and essentially mythic, metaphorical, allegorical figures, with incidental exceptions such as the Roman rulers.

o The Jesus figure was crafted as a focal point representing various aspects of what the mystic-state initiate experiences in the standard Jewish mystic initiation-feasts and Hellenistic mystery-religions centered around eating sacred food and drinking mixed wine.

o The OT and NT were written as ironic tragi-comedy phrased as a clever puzzle designed to flip between two matrixes of meaning, based on systematic double-entendre as was used in Greek Attic tragedy.

o The Jesus figure was successfully crafted to support both meaning-matrixes, so that the words attributed to him could be taken two ways: a literal political apocalypse, or a mystic-experiencing apocalypse based on a thoroughgoing specific transformation of the initiate's mental worldmodel from the specific egoic mental worldmodel to the specific transcendent mental worldmodel regarding space, time, self, and control.

The designers of this apocalyptic Jesus figure were in full command of their craft, and meant to craft and succeeded at crafting a figure that preached literal apocalypse in an ambiguous way designed to flip between a distinct coherent literalist meaning and a distinct coherent allegorical meaning.

The allegorical meaning was not vague or ethereal or subtle, but rather, totally specific, consistent, and conceptually tangible: all the concepts or elements such as "judgement", "kingdom of God", "evil", "good", "perdition", "death", and "life" form a metaphor-system coherently describing the transformation during the intense mystic altered state from the ego-delusion centered mental worldmodel, based on the goat-like freewill assumption, to the transcendent-centered mental worldmodel, based on the sheep-like experience and realization of no-free-will.

For example, in the lower, pre-initiation meaning-matrix, freewill moral agency is assumed, so "sin", "good", and "evil" are taken to mean a certain axis that throughout assumes the freewill worldmodel. In the higher meaning-matrix which the initiates have, no-free-will is taken as axiomatic, so "sin", "good", and "evil" are redefined in concert. Being free of sin means being free from the freewill moral agency delusion, good means believing there is no free will, and evil means the worldmodel based on the freewill assumption.

In the kingdom of God, we're slaves or puppets of God, controlled by some invisible "father" who/that is utterly hidden and transcendent. Because the initiated mind considers everyone to be a puppet, all egoic guilt assumption is taken away. In a particular, specifiable sense, deluded people are guilty of assuming guilt-culpability, guilty of assuming they have free-will primary sovereign control.

The crucifixion is purely a metaphor for how the mind during initiation puts an end to the delusion of personal sovereign control over the mind's own thoughts. The expression represented in Jesus' face is the expression of the knowledge that there is no free will.

King Pentheus wrongly assumes he is a greater sovereign than Dionysus, but he ends up suspended from the world-tree like a puppet dangling at the mercy of the puppeteer. So is Jesus, as symbol of transcendent knowledge about no-free-will, allegorized as the king of the puppets of God -- king of the ego-transcendent minds -- the king of the Jews, where "Jew" here means "initiate" or "mind that has experienced the sense of no-free-will and conceptually grasped the principle of no-free-will".

Peter cries out to Mary Magdalene: surely Jesus didn't assert no-free-will; no moral system could be based on that! Jesus did teach a still-workable ethics for the "Jews", who have renounced and crucified their freewill worldmodel: how hard can it be? Love God, love your neighbor.

The "death/life" polarity is designed by the writers to flip from meaning literal bodily death versus literal continuation of life, to meaning the uniniated person's liability to undergo mystic death and rebirth when eventually initiated. The mind that has undergone mystic death has permanently died that type of death and won't die that death any more; their life (transcendent mental model) is no longer subject to that death.

A classic effect in the intense mystic altered state is the sense of time stoppage, the loss of the sense of free will, the loss of the sense of separate-self, and the loss of the sense of self-control. The end of time *is* near, as soon as the nearest meal of sacred food and mixed wine. The last supper is the last meal the initiation candidates will ever eat while living within the egoic mental worldmodel.

Their next meal, as Jesus' next cup of mixed wine, will be in the kingdom of God. The sacred meal shifts the center of control-attribution in the mind from the ego to the transcendent, from the Ground of Being that is the cosmos, or a compassionate transcendent controller thereof.

This is a plain, specific, sane, meaningful explanation, in contrast to the vague "mythical misunderstanding" Dale Allison attributes to the Jesus who he totally misreads as a literal, serious-thinking historical figure.

I am particularly interested in more detail about Allison's belief that his seminary students' very popular "Docetism" is "a lie" and "misinformed". His insight-hungry seminary students, dead-serious inquirers, are reading Earl Doherty's book The Jesus Puzzle hidden underneath their course textbooks, and he misunderstands this as "Docetism", which would have an appearance of Jesus literally moving about and making utterances just like the holographic doctor in the Star Trek television series.

Conventional thinking might be startled by the view I've pulled together, but what's really crazy and incoherent is the historical Jesus scholars.

The entire "historical Jesus" mode of thinking inherently locks one into a stance toward the scriptures that falls right into the trap that the scriptures were designed to be, as a clever meaning-flipping system like Greek tragedy, where the meaning pivots on reconnecting all the elements during the intense mystic altered state precipitated by the world-shattering oral teaching that occurred during the sacred meals of the Jews, the mystery religions, the symposium philosophy parties, and the agape meals of the earliest Christians.

To understand the Hellenistic religions, you have to think like the Hellenists. How did the Hellenists think? Hellenists thought in terms of 2-stage meaning flipping, no-free-will, cosmic determinism, and the distinction between the initiates, who have understanding, and the uninitiated, who don't have understanding.

The key to successful interpretation is the spirit of tragicomic irony; to read the seriousness of the scriptures seriously is to fall into the trap which the scriptures were designed to set. Without comic irony, the scriptures remain read in the low mode of the uninitiated: serious supernaturalism.

However, equally necessary is understanding that eating the divine flesh causes the experience of no-free-will and loosens the mind's cognitive associations to enable the mental worldmodel to transform from a system based on the animalistic freewill assumption to a system based on the no-free-will axiom.

This is why the Eucharist is the absolute center of the liturgy and the central pivot-point leading to Jesus' crucifixion, when while eating and drinking at the last supper, Jesus commissions Judas to betray him. That this perfectly coherent and elegant explanation seems crazy exactly indicates how truly crazy the scholarly world has become under the darkness of uninspired literalist interpretation.

Contra Allison, Mr. Historical Jesus was not confused, or crazy, or incorrect, and despite his nonexistence, could teach Allison a thing or three about the Platonistic experience of apocalyptic. Repent, for the day of judgment is indeed very near, and could even happen on this very night.

So what do you think -- is my question ready to post to the Allison Seminar?

Seminar with Dale Allison:

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Allison-Seminar

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/crosstalk2/message/12924

Related books:

The Apocalyptic Jesus: A Debate

Dale C. Allison, Marcus J. Borg, John Dominic Crossan, Stephen J. Patterson, Robert J. Miller

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0944344895

Jesus of Nazareth: Millenarian Prophet

Dale Allison

Jan. 1999

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0800631447

Jesus: Apocalyptic Prophet of the New Millennium

Bart Ehrman

Sep. 1999

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/019512474X

Book list: kingdom of God, apocalypse, Revelation, eschatology

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/listmania/list-browse/-/7BYCVM3BJX05/103-0184603-8834266

University lecture course about Historical Jesus as apocalyptic prophet by Bart Ehman

http://www.teach12.com/ttc/assets/coursedescriptions/643.asp - "Why do the earliest sources at our disposal, including the Gospel of Mark, portray Jesus as a Jewish apocalypticist, one who anticipated that God was soon going to intervene in the course of history to overthrow the forces of evil and establish his good Kingdom here on earth? How close is this portrayal to life? Did Jesus proclaim a coming Kingdom? How are his references to the coming of the "Son of Man" to be understood in light of the best historical analysis and evidence we can muster? ... how do Jesus’ ethical teachings, his own activities, and the events of his final days fit into this analysis? Why did Jesus go to Jerusalem at Passover, and what did he plan to do once he got there? What was the situation he found? What were the intentions of those he met there, including the Roman procurator Pontius Pilate, the Temple hierarchy, and the other Jewish authorities?" Lectures include Jesus and Roman Rule, Jesus the Apocalyptic Prophet, The Apocalyptic Teachings of Jesus, Other Teachings of Jesus in their Apocalyptic Context, The Deeds of Jesus in their Apocalyptic Context, The Prophet of the New Millennium.

Buddhism = no-sep-self; Christianity = no-free-will

Buddhism, at least American Buddhism, puts the accent on no-separate-self, while Christianity puts the accent on no-free-will. I read the Crucifixion (the king willingly sacrificed, with heart-pierced) as a symbolic portrayal of the principle of no-free-will. This shows how poorly we understand the meaning of Christianity -- how far 20th-Century mysticism was from understanding Greco-Roman religion -- and how distinctive my approach is compared to the conventional 20th-Century conception of mysticism.

We couldn't understand Christianity or Greco-Roman religion, because we always equated mysticism with the no-separate-self realization, and failed to also equate it with the concomitant no-free-will realization. So instead we thought of Buddhism as mystical (it being "no-separate-self") while we thought of Christianity as empty literalism without mysticism (because we didn't recognize the "no-free-will" type of mysticism in Christianity).

Christianity lacked a "no-separate-self" emphasis, so we thought it lacked mysticism.

While all conventional writers about mysticism, particularly Boomer post-Christian American Buddhists who came up through LSD, equated mysticism such as Buddhist meditation, with no-separate-self, but I, instead, came up through a cybernetics perspective like Paul's self-control struggles described in the Christian canon -- that self-control cybernetics emphasis resonates with Greco-Roman religion, which emphasized no-free-will rather than no-separate-self.

In this sense, I'm an alien among 20th-Century mystics not because I'm Christian while they are Buddhist, but more to the point, I put the accent on no-free-will, like the Greco-Romans, rather than on no-separate-self, like the Buddhists.

As a mystic, I don't simply come from "the Christian tradition"; my trajectory started in conventional Literalist Christianity and some Literalist Judaism, and then went through American Buddhism (Watts and Wilber) where enlightenment *in terms of no-separate-self* was explicitly presented.

I did gain a kind of satori enlightenment breakthrough while ignoring the Christian framework and immersed in the Watts/Wilber Eastern Religion framework, but the really odd and unusual thing is that my satori amounted to a Greco-Roman insight about no-free-will, which wasn't explicitly or consciously presented or intended by Watts or Wilber.

They handed me the Eastern insight (no-separate-self) explicitly on a platter, but knew nothing of the Western insight (no-free-will) so that they set up a situation where the only kind of breakthrough or mental-model transformation left for me to discover and create was the Western insight, wholly missing from their writings and thought. Wilber knows nothing of Greco-Roman religion, because he knows nothing (or comparatively nothing) about no-free-will, compared to what he knows about no-separate-self.

So what then did I have while reading Watts -- satori, or Gnostic salvation? It was Gnostic 'no-free-will' salvation built up in the fashion of a Zen satori 'no-separate-self' realization. Only after that strange hybrid salvation/satori did I then return to evaluating the Christian framework and start the long problem (1/88 to 11/01) of learning to recognize the no-free-will "saving Gospel" message encoded in the Christian symbology.

Here is where the "no historical Jesus" emphasis is crucial or highly pragmatic. What took me so long to make my way back to the Greco-Roman way of thinking was the firmly entrenched official Literalist version of Christianity. The problem isn't just Literalism about Jesus' historical existence, it's the whole Literalist mode of thinking about all elements of Christianity, extending from there out to the official Western conception of other religions as well.

The most effective way to overthrow the chronically habitual Literalist paradigm of thinking about Christianity is to go to the heart of the matter and overthrow the assumption of a historical Jesus.

From this point of view, where one wants to gain Gnosis fastest and that requires overthrowing Literalist thinking about Christianity the fastest, it's irrelevant whether some outstanding individual Jesus existed, but what matters most is to resolve to assume he didn't exist, as a pragmatic technique of radically rejecting conventional thinking about the meaning of Christianity.

The more thoroughly and radically I rejected Literalist Christianity, the better I was able to think in the Greco-Roman mode, until I finally recognized the Crucifixion as a perfect symbol of becoming conscious of no-free-will.

My no-free-will, Western-religion Gnosis crystallized by reading Alan Watts' (and Ken Wilber's) no-separate-self, Eastern-religion enlightenment writings. They meant to teach me the Eastern principle of no-separate-self, and what struck me instead was that their doctrines implied, subtly and logically, their unspoken necessary doctrine of no-free-will.

You can deliberately search Watts and Wilber for coverage of no-free-will, especially as reflected in Greco-Roman religion, and come up practically empty-handed. *That* is the essence of what *difference* I bring to the table.

How is my treatment of mysticism unique and distinctive? I, like Greco-Roman religion, put the accent on no-free-will. I took no-separate-self for granted as a starting point, thanks to American 60s-born Buddhism such as reflected by the unconscious lopsided emphasis of Watts and Wilber, and had to solve the problem of recognizing the no-separate-self/no-free-will connection.

*That* was my big discovery that is missing from 20th-Century scholarship and theory of religious experiencing: to realize that the experience and insight of 'no-separate-self' is tantamount to the experience and insight of 'no-free-will'.

This helps clear up the puzzling question of where entheogens sit in my thinking and why they keep flipping between seeming primary and secondary. Buddhist no-separate-self was a given in our culture, and entheogens were a given in our culture. Then what was the missing link, for a viable rational theory of mystic knowledge? Entheogens weren't a missing link in this sense; our culture had entheogens and connected them with religion fairly well.

What was missing, as far as the goal of some breakthrough into a 20th-Century complete model of transcendent knowledge, was the no-free-will realization, which was central to Greco-Roman religion.

So for making some theoretical connections, I emphasize entheogens. But for the key revelation about the nature of mystic knowledge, I don't treat entheogens as something to be emphasized -- instead, they are simply a given, something to be *utilized*.

*Given* the no-separate-self principle, *given* that the truth in each religion is the mystic rather than the literalist interpretation, and *given* that entheogens have always been routinely used as the main inspiration technique by the mystics, *then* what revelation yet awaits us? The no-free-will revelation -- *that* was the missing link, the Great Discovery.

As far as communicating a theory of metaphysical revelation and enlightenment, revealing the entheogen origin of religions *isn't* very important (no-free-will is the key, instead). But as far as putting forth a new theory of religious techniques and insights and myth, the historical role of entheogens *is* very important.

Recognizing the entheogen basis of religions is a valuable project or achievement, but more important is recognizing that the 'no-separate-self' insight is an incomplete conception of mystic insight and the great missing link, greater even than entheogens, is the 'no-free-will' insite.

It is radical to espouse the entheogen theory of the origin of religions, but starting with 20th-Century theory of religion, and it is radical to espouse mystic Christianity and refute the existence of an individual historical Jesus, but what is *even more* radical -- the penultimate radical thing in today's religious climate and dominant religious paradigm -- is the 'no-free-will' principle, which is the spear that finally permanently kills ego and ends the round of rebirths into the egoic bodymind.

The universal mistake of the Western world now is considering enlightenment a matter of awakening to no-separate-self, while remaining asleep in the free-will assumption.

The expression "no-free-will" here is shorthand that includes various mystery-religion interpretations regarding salvation from the no-free-will situation we awaken to, per Luther Martin's book Hellenistic Religions. The expression "no-free-will" here means experiencing and awakening to the plausibility, coherence, and ramifications of timeless block-universe determinism, and in some sense rising in consciousness with respect to that determinism.

No wonder we didn't understand Greco-Roman religion: we lost the "Western religion" knowledge and recognition of no-free-will, even if we had some "Eastern religion" understanding of no-separate-self. Only by making the connection between entheogens, no-free-will, and Greco-Roman religion, can we finally understand Christianity and the meaning of the Crucifixion and what it means to "sacrifice the lower self, the child-self".

Now we understand what the lower self is as conceived in Greco-Roman religion-myth -- the 'free will' assumption. The Eastern Religion paradigm would instead emphasize that the lower self is the 'separate-self' assumption.

For a complete theory of mystic enlightenment and Gnosis, we must integrate East and West, which doesn't mean, per Wilber, that we must integrate science (and psychological development) with Eastern enlightenment -- rather, we must integrate no-free-will mysticism with no-separate-self mysticism.

Buddhist enlightenment is about no-separate-self. Christian salvation/gnosis/perfection is about no-free-will. These two conceptual systems or ways of talking are equivalent; 'enlightenment' is tantamount to 'salvation', and the 'no-separate-self' realization is tantamount to the 'no-free-will' realization. We lack understanding of 'no-separate-self' to the extent that we fail to recognize the logical connection between 'no-separate-self' and 'no-free-will'.

The Deterministic Kingdom (block-universe mystery revelation)

This is another summary of my explanation of Christianity in terms of hidden determinism.

My Nov. 14 2001 breakthrough finally fully connected my 1988 core theory of ego death and transcendence of self-control cybernetics to Christian symbolism. Christianity has been interpreted many ways, but here is the simplest and best, a metaphysical yardstick of inspired holiness by which to judge other interpretations.

1/11/1988 was my core philosophy breakthrough: the concept of block-universe determinism. It's taken many years to find how the Christian mystery connects to this core worldmodel. I succeeded in the week around 11/14/2001, when considering the long history of the idea of determinism. My fluency with Christian symbolism was increased a thousandfold when I rejected the idea of a historical Jesus, around a year prior.

Entheogens bring the mystic altered state, which reveals timeless determinism. God descended in the flesh, or the saving flesh of God, refers to the entheogen and oneself as a vehicle for the Christ experience, well allegorized as the crucifixion story or stories. The Cross is a frozen-spacetime symbol equivalent to other mythic figures such as Wotan affixed to a tree, Dionysus as pillar, and Prometheus chained to a rock. But the Cross is a superior symbol because it specifically represents something mystically experienced about kingship or sovereignty: the experience of ourselves losing the sense of sovereign agency. Kali dancing on the lower self is comparable, though again a symbol of deliberately rejected kingship is arguably clearer and more specific than other equivalent symbols. Christianity is framed as a hidden mystery that is revealed by the Holy Spirit.

Beyond the Theology of Justification and Problem of Evil

It was exciting to discover how very central the theology of justification and the unfree will is in the history of theology, and how problematic the problem of evil (given God's omnipotence) is, but such Protestant theology really only possesses a binity, leaving out the Holy Spirit that is required for trinity. But what theology of the Holy Spirit results? The Pentecostal conceptualization of the Holy Spirit as speaking in tongues and healing is the most pathetic and irrelevant paradigm of mystical experiencing. Philosophizing about time and the origin of our thoughts while reading about entheogens is much more to the point, more true to the Spirit.

Block-universe determinism vs. conventional moving-time determinism with a not-yet-closed future:

My "determinism" has a completely different conceptual basis than the standard conception of determinism. Timeless, block-universe determinism as I define it, or tenseless-time determinism, effectively postulates that there is a single future which already timelessly exists. Conventional determinism inadvertantly postulates a future which is yet open -- it too much conceives time as really flowing.

Perceiving timeless determinism is the revelation of the hidden Kingdom of God. The most important key concept is to picture the cross as representing the mental rejection of sovereignty as a controller-agent, which means rejection of the egoic assumption of free will. The egoic assumption of free will is natural, naive, animalish, goatish, childish. Determinism is the hidden secret of the kingdom. Early Christianity was concerned with this kind of experiential realization. Mystery religions were essentially about experiencing and somehow transcending determinism/fate/heimarmene. Demons believe in free will and the kind of moral thinking based on the animalistic assumption of freewill -- that's why demons are depicted in animal form. Angels do not believe in free will; they believe that the Ground is responsible for creating every thought and act of the creature.

2-level Christianity:

Christianity was originally designed as a 2-level system with Literalism, supernaturalism, and free-will morality at the lower level, and mysticism, rationality, and determinism at the higher level. Exclusivism, torment, and most other objectionable features of Christianity are part of the lower level of Christianity. Higher Christianity has only one objectionable point: on the hidden metaphysical level, there is no free will; we cannot change our own future, which already timelessly exists. In that sense, we are helpless puppets of God or of the Ground of Being. All praise and blame rises up from ego to point instead to the Ground and its possible controller, of which the Jesus figure is the avatar.

Original, mystical, experiential Christianity: I have found a dozen books about the original, mystical, experiential Christianity. I will probably upload my book list as a Web page. I am inclined to continue focusing on Christian symbolism and connecting it to block-universe determinism. I am also reviewing other religions but my core theory came from Zen already, and other religions aren't framed as hidden mysteries of interpretation, and Christian symbolism needs the most work to make sense of it as a simple but double-entendre encoded system of rational enlightenment. I might only study other religions enough to postulate generalizations, such as that religions have two levels: lower freewill moralism, and higher determinism which requires full sacrifice of the egoic self identification. The mystery of Christian revelation is now solved, right when Christianity may be in its greatest decline.

Enlightenment as coerced sacrifice of delusion of free will: To enter Heaven (the kingdom of God), or higher mystical religion, the price is freewill or rather the belief in such. The core insight of the Christian mystical experience is that a truly sovereign God (that which controls my destiny) in a rationally coherent block-universe deterministic world has total control over my every thought and action, and could sacrifice me and make me willing to sacrifice myself as a control agent, but provides the idea of a sufficient and life-preserving substitute sacrifice instead.

Indirect authorship: A major though peripheral idea is indirect but fully responsible authorship: God programs the fractal that is this virtual-reality universe, and the fractal includes my every thought and action. God didn't *directly* author my every thought and act, but he, not I, created the fractal that fully comprises my every thought and act.

The Christ experience is the frozen spacetime death of control agency and recovery of control agency. The experiential plotline is the story of sacred eating, self-betrayal, egoic agency on trial, humiliation, and deliberate sacrifice of the pretense of metaphysical control-sovereignty. Such sacrifice is also describable as I, in Christ-consciousness (puppethood awareness), successfully and completely exorcized my demon of free-will delusion.

The Trinity: what do the Christ experience, God the puppetmaster, and the Holy Spirit have in common? They are not-me, not-ego; they work together to kill the egoic worldmodel and raise up the mind to enlightenment.

This is a really simple system, comically simple, though experiencing determinism and desperately praying for recovery of the illusion of controllership is not so comical -- it's a tragic drama. The core concept, ego death by perceiving the idea of block-universe determinism, is frighteningly simple and the only real mystery is how the lower, animal mind of such a smart animal is kept blind to these ideas during workaday consciousness.

Is block universe determinism and such an experiential insight of ego death *true*? That's not really what matters. That this kind of ego death worldmodel is a "potential" that resides within the mind, whether you consider that a positive potential or a potential disastrous malfunction. It's the potential for a breathtaking glorious self-defeat of our accustomed, freewillist mode of thinking.

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/egodeath -- you can see my postings centered around Nov. 14, 2001.

God as mysterious shadowy controller figure in booth

>>... training for how to relate to the Good, the Source of True Virtue, the essentially hidden but now known uncontrollable transcendent controller.

A good metaphor is that during enlightenment, you see for the first time that your own control-thoughts have covertly been controlled by a shadowy figure in a booth. You now see your relation to that mysterious figure, but know nothing at all about the figure -- not even whether it is conscious, whether it is a machine, whether it has good or harmful intentions -- that is God, that is Isis, that is the hidden though intuited uncontrollable transcendent controller that gives you, as a secondary locus of controllership, your control-thoughts.

Seeing this shadowy figure and your relationship to it (as lower control locus to higher) does not give you, as lower controller, the power of the higher controller. Thus the Jewish religion talks about seeing the throne of god and the kingship of god, but rarely about uniting with God or seeing the face of God.

You ascend to see the thone of God, or of the mysterious hidden JHVH -- we see *that* JHVH exists, but don't really know anything more than that -- we are left with a helpless doubt about this figure upon whom we depend, a doubt that is comically elicited by Jack Miles' book God.

Reconciling yourself as control agent with the transcendent controller is like loving and counting on a shadowy figure in a booth, where you don't even know if the figure is conscious or human or personal, but it has your life and control-thoughts in its hands. Is it any wonder people trust in the effeminate, compassionate, motherly Jesus figure instead, and are alienated from God?

The Jewish scriptures are the first to admit that God is comically untrustworthy, mysterious, and possibly inept or even insane -- yet we have no choice but to beseech, count on, depend on, and finally "love" that mysterious higher controller. Does Buddha love the Ground of Being?

God: A Biography

Jack Miles

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0679743685

A "shadowy controller agent" is even more mysterious -- what's 'agent' supposed to mean -- is it conscious, is it personal? Is it some creepy Philip K. Dickian android of uncertain metaphysical status? What is this weirdo transcendent controller *thing*, monstrously ambiguous and hidden, upon whose strings I am made to dance and think and feel?

IT even controls my emotions -- even my feelings are not my own! I lost my thought ownership to it, then my control-thoughts, and now even my feelings are not my own -- IT has taken them over; I sense its too-close creepy presence, like an alien spouse I suddenly find myself physically entangled with, my other half, perhaps my "genius" or "Holy Guardian Angel" or alien higher self (as opposed to my transcendent revised self-concept).

Marriage to a remote yet near spouse may be a metaphor for discovering your every feeling and thought to be under the control of another. One person can act as legal agent for another. Jesus is God's legal agent on earth, and in enlightenment, we become such agents of God (adopted sons).

Job continues to revere God -- that is, depend on and acknowledge God as the mysterious logically intuited uncontrollable transcendent controller -- even though all sorts of effectively random and meaningless good and bad things are done to Job.

Even when Job curses the day he was born and hates the life he is given, he, being a God revering, God loving man of truth, cannot but continue to "love" and "trust" God -- because he has no other option; Job knows he can't count on himself as a primary controller and originator of his own fate and destiny.

So the story of Job, like the other Hebrew scriptures, is a coherent and not so complicated or unfathomable working-out of the strange aspects of our relationship with the uncontrollable transcendent controller. We dance on JHVH's strings so would be foolish and comical to shake a fist at our puppetmaster. Even when we hate and curse the puppetmaster, we still -- knowing the truth of our cybernetic relationship to the puppetmaster -- "love" and "worship" the puppetmaster in some sense.

Of course from the higher point of view, this "love" is injected into us by the puppetmaster so that it is him in the guise of us, worshipping or loving him. From the dead wooden puppet's point of view, the puppet is morally obliged to "love" god and neighbor-puppet, but the only way a dead man is going to walk or love is if his controller makes him walk or love.

Animator and animated figure is another equivalent metaphor. I yell at my animated figure I drew, "love me!" "worship me!" If he doesn't, shall I get mad at him? Now I create an android with a radioactive randomizer and program him to try to love me, amidst other programs. This puts only a little distance between me and the android; I remain his creator and if he is buggy, it just shows that I'm the lousy coder.

A creator god that tells his creatures to love him as genuine freewill agents or primary controllers, must be an incredibly deluded and confused god; an egoic-thinking god -- this is one way to set up a Gnostic two-gods system.

When the puppet is awakened to its real status, from the puppet's point of view, it suddenly has big-time powerful company "sharing its bed", closer than close. Suddenly you are informed "by an advisor you cannot but trust" (E. Indian or Gnostic myth) that you are the son of a powerful king and he loves you very much and has chosen to reveal himself to you and get fully involved in your life, your innermost life.

A bit way too close for comfort -- like "congratulations, you are now pregnant". Being raped and made pregnant by Zeus or by the Holy Spirit of God is this apt analogy -- you foolishly wanted to unite with God like going out on a date, but suddenly, instead, it's a rape/rapture situation, when he takes over your mind, your feelings, your control-thoughts entirely, practically taking over and wiping out your very being. You can see the face of your lover (God) only if you give up your very being.

Those are examples of some of the many mythic themes that need to be mapped to the core theory of cybernetic transcendence.

You wake up lost in an empty town

Wondering why no one else is around

Look up to see a giant boy

You've just become his brand new toy

And no escape, no place to hide

Here where time and space collide

-- "The Twilight Zone", from the album 2112

I saw Eraserhead and later read analyses on the Web, but don't remember a shadowy controller figure in the booth. I invented the idea the past couple days.

No-free-will fits with Christian sayings/allegories

In favor of the central importance of the no-free-will principle is its natural, easy, satisfying fit with some of the characteristic Christian sayings.

"Upon hearing this, many of his disciples quit following him." 'This' = the principle of no-free-will.

Mary Magdalene told the disciples the things that Jesus had told her, and they were surprised. Peter didn't believe it, but she said "Do you think I'm making this up?" It is enticing as a theorist to surmise on what principles may have been in the list of Jesus' points that were torn out from the Gospel of Mary Magdalene.

These would have to be simple points, shocking and surprising points that contradict what people assume a divine teacher would teach. No-free-will fits the bill: it is a *simple*, easily named principle, fitting powerfully and unassailably with other simple principles such as that the future already exists as a single, timelessly fixed scenario and stream of one's future thoughts.

When you seek, you will find. When you find, you will be surprised, shocked, disappointed, alarmed. What you find is no-free-will, together with related simple principles (preexistent frozen future including the frozenness and preexistence of your own future thoughts).

The rich man asked Jesus what he must do to get into the kingdom of God. Jesus told him to get rid of his wealth. The rich man was very disappointed at hearing this, and went away. This "wealth" maps easily as a metaphor for "the delusion of possessing the power of individual free will" -- "free will", in short. The freewillist asked the sage what he must do to become enlightened. The sage told him, "renounce and repudiate your delusion of possessing free will". The freewillist was disappointed by this, and went away.

A camel could pass through the eye of a needle easier than a person rich in the freewill delusion could enter into the kingdom of heaven. Wealth is a metaphor for the freewill delusion, and doesn't mean literal wealth.

If thy bodily member prevents entering the kingdom of heaven, get rid of it. What member prevents entering the kingdom of heaven? The freewill assumption.

Attis' self-emasculation is a metaphor for repudiating the freewill assumption.

"The flesh" and "the law" and "the Jews" and "the weak foundation of sand" -- indeed the lower/negative/inferior half of all the dipole contrasts in religion -- is the freewill assumption and the entire egoic mental worldmodel that is constructed around the false center (central pillar) of the freewill assumption.

How do you pull the temple crashing down, destroying those idolaters who refuse to follow the true God? Pull away the central pillar, which is the freewill delusion. Or push apart the twin pillars holding up the roof, which are the freewill assumption and the separate-self assumption, or the "open, non-existent future" assumption or "flowing time" assumption.

Jesus spoke in parables so that many people would be protected and prevented from understanding him. He protected and separated the deluded freewill goats from the enlightened no-free-will sheep. He is the shepherd leading his flock of no-free-will sheep, separating out and turning away the deluded willful, self-willed goats.

Satan is a modification of Pan the goat. Satan is the man that is like a goat. A goat is self-willed compared to a sheep, which is docile, obedient, not self-willed. Satan is the personification of the freewill delusion. Freewillists are worshippers and followers of Satan. The real meaning of Satanism and devil-worship is the free-will assumption.

Moralist puritans, even though preaching a veneer of determinism doctrine, are satanic devil-worshippers throughout the bulk and core of their thinking. They preach the sheep doctrine of no-free-will, but their thinking is untransformed and remains goat-thinking, filled with the cognitive structures that imply freewill.

One could deliberately and pointedly emphasize the no-free-will principle to sort out thinkers into two groups. There is no simpler sorting mechanism for reality-tunnels or worldmodels than the principle of no-free-will; it's the fulcrum or lever or key that leads all the related principles to fall immediately and easily into place.

Where I go, you cannot follow. I = no-free-will worldmodel; you = freewill thinking.

If you are *really* a follower of me, take up your cross. To be aligned with divinity and basic rational coherence, the mind must repudiate the freewill assumption. When the mind sacrifices its natural freewill assumption as a false center of control and existence (a false pole star), the sacrificed lower self inherently takes away the attribution of guilt and moral agency to one's egoic self.

The lower and higher mind becomes the sacrificer, the lower mind (its control-dominance) is what is sacrificed, and the sacrifice of the lower mind cleanses the mind of moral impurity and rebellion against truth. This is the key to making sense of doctrines of Jesus as the lamb who takes on and takes away the sins of the world.

The lower mind thinks that sin/Evil is doing immoral actions and Good is doing moral actions. In contrast, transcendent thinking is based around a very different way of dividing things: sin/Evil is the assumption of freewill, and Good is the assumption of no-free-will.

When Adam and Eve's eyes were opened and they "understood good and evil" this would mean either that they started thinking in terms of the lower conception of good versus evil as freewill thinking (egoic moral thinking) divides them up, or that they started thinking of good versus evil as transcendent thinking (transcendent thinking about moral agency) divides them up. Good is a metaphor for no-free-will, and Evil is a metaphor for freewill thinking.

Original sin is True. Nothing in the scriptures is true (when read literally), but everything in the scriptures is True (when comprehended metaphysically and transcendently and metaphorically). Everyone begins life as a freewillist, and when becoming an adult, later becomes a no-free-willist (though retaining freewill thinking as a practical illusion of convention).

The scales fell from his eyes. Their eyes were opened and they understood the things of the scriptures. Rationalists fail to understand the scriptures when they simply repudiate the literalist reading. To reject the lower reading of the scriptures is a *long* way from comprehending the higher reading of the scriptures.

We have been purchased and ransomed and bought from the enemy-Devil by God/Jesus. We were slaves of sin and the devil (freewill delusion) and are now slaves of God, or are returned to freedom by being repurchased by our rightful owner. This is the meaning of the terms apolytrosis or ransom, redeemed, redemption. The higher sacrament is the sacrament of apolytrosis, through which God buys us from the Devil (using the metaphors from the era of divine kings and enslavement of captives).

The person is passive here: I was a slave of sin/devil/delusion, but I have been ransomed and purchased and set free by the divine actor. Not "I purchased my freedom", but "the divine Other purchased me from the enemy slaveholder and made me a freedman". Christianity is not about literal freeing of slaves or about affirming free will. A concern with mundane slavehood falls outside the scope of the truly religious realm.

Freedom from slavery can only be a metaphor for religious enlightenment, not the central concern of religion proper. Literal slavery falls into the category of mundane ethics, not religion proper. If we insist on mixing together mundane morality and religion proper, religious meaning becomes confused and lost; these must be, per Integral Theory, retained as distinct subjects which may comment on each other but cannot be identified and conflated with each other.

Christianity came straight out of Hellenistic thinking during the era when cosmic determinism was the hottest topic of debate. Christianity is a religion that is all about cosmic determinism and how the mind works in switching from freewill thinking to nofreewill thinking during entheogenic initiation -- that is why the Christian scriptures "open" and immediately make full rational sense when mapped to the principle of no-free-will.

The scriptures either mean no-free-will and its concomitant basic principles (frozen future, no separate-self, illusory flow of time), or they mean fog, haze, magic, confusion, supernaturalism, a jumble of moralism and religious-styled mundane ethics. It is easier to make full sense of the scriptures by this interpretive principle as a central key principle than by placing any other principle, such as mood, moralism, or happiness as the central principle of interpretation.

Consistent no-free-will Christian sites

I am reposting this, because it never showed up, because Yahoo has been delaying/losing posts. I made a couple fixes.

The Web is swamped with Evangelicals who carelessly assert freewill as though it's matter-of-fact, unproblematic, and not an issue of the highest dissention among Christian theologians. It was harder to find Reformed thinkers on the Web, and harder still to find thinkers who consistently reject free will throughout their theology. The hallmark of such consistency is to redefine the very concepts of salvation, guilt, forgiveness, and punishment.

Search terms:

satan "free will" puppet

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=satan+%22free+will%22+puppet

Free Will Is 'Lawlessness'

http://www.iconbusters.com/iconbusters/freewill/fw-introduction.htm

This is probably a fine example of true Reformed thinking. It emphatically officially rejects freewill, but probably otherwise retains freewillist thinking such as warranted punishment of moral agents in hell for rejecting Jesus.

_______________

Concordant.org -- Adolph E. Knoch's writings at the Concordant.org site puts forth a true rarity -- consistent rejection of free will -- so I am providing a page or two of excerpts. That may seem excessive, but note how unusual and extreme this position is, and how rarely the official rejecters of freewill (Reform theologians) directly and boldly address these issues. The author essentially says that Satan is the freewill delusion and Satan, but not sinners, will be cast into the lake of fire.

Knoch believes in universal salvation after everyone is resurrected and judged. This is essentially consistent with the higher Christian, mystic or Gnostic view that heaven is something some people enter through awareness and knowledge in this life. Putting these ideas together, I'd say that the Elect are only those people who are predestined during life to fully realize no-free-will and sacrifice their freewill self-concept and way of thinking (that's the real, higher meaning of "salvation"); and metaphorically speaking, the sins of all souls will be (logically must be) cancelled in the last judgment, after the resurrection, because all are puppets and all puppets are guiltless.

Political note -- all puppets are *equally* guiltless and all attain salvation by their transcendent puppetmaster, *not* through intermediate worldly authorities.

http://www.concordant.org/expohtml/TheProblemOfEvil/evil012.html --

Excerpts:

Man has a "free will," we are told, and many are ready to defend the error. But where are the men who will fight for the "free will" of God?

In Romans 2:18 God's will is recognized as the will which needs no further specification. The Jew knew the will because he had the divine oracles. The coming kingdom is briefly characterized as the time when men will not do their own will, but the Father's.

the will of a man, either Jew or gentile, is the compounded effect of complex causes, over none of which he has any control. Men do not really make up their minds. They are made up for them.

Happy is the man who has so harmonized himself with the will of God that he may speak of it as his own! So it was with our Lord, for the spirit world could not influence Him, His flesh was holy, and His comprehension perfect.

Great is the cry against making puppets, mere automatons, out of men. At all hazards, we are told, we must maintain human individuality and the godlike attribute of free will. What is the meaning of this? It is nothing less than the revolt of the creature against the Creator, the desire to be as God, even though it is always presented under the guise of religion. It is nowhere to be found in the Scriptures, but it is the basis of most interpretations of the Bible.

In their proud repudiation of the position of puppets men are acting merely as phonographs, for they repeat a well-worn record made by the spirit that is operating in the sons of Stubbornness before man imagined he had a free will, in the garden of Eden. "You shall be as God." I repeat. He provides the record and he turns the handle and a man speaks. What a wonderful little god he is! He would really deceive himself much easier and play the part much better if he appeared as a puppet. Some of them are very convincing. Have you ever inquired whence man obtained this self- determination of which he is so proud? Have you ever pictured where it would land him if it were really allowed to run amuck? He is jerked about by invisible strings, by unseen hands, just as really as if he were a puppet in a Punch and Judy show.

He is merely a creature trying to convince himself that he is a creator. He has nothing that was not given him. He does nothing except under the force of an external or inherited stimulus. All that ails him is that he is ignorant. He is like many who drive automobiles in these days. They touch this button or shift that lever and it goes--or doesn't. They are quite exhilarated by the sense of power imparted by the speeding machine. But if the gasoline is exhausted on a lonely road, and they have to push the heavy car, or are unable to do so, the sense of power is replaced by a sad sense of impotence.

If the believer's will is subconsciously formed by the operation of the holy spirit, through contact with the Scriptures, his will is no more his own than is that of the unbeliever. It is God Who is operating in him to will. O, the blessedness of this condition! Puppet? No, but prophet! Slavery? No, but liberty! Misery? No, but happiness! Only thus are we normal creatures in harmony with our Creator.

http://www.concordant.org/expohtml/TheProblemOfEvil/evil020.html --

Excerpts:

The case of Satan has some points peculiar to the arch enemy, but it is the same in principle as that of Pharaoh and all of God's opponents. The differences are in degree and detail, not in essence. If God Himself encouraged Pharaoh to oppose His revealed will, we are under no necessity of seeking to invent some new god to be His adversary. Pharaoh carried out God's larger purpose while opposing His apparent determination. So Satan is His instrument for producing the necessary alienation which is the only possible basis of the universal reconciliation.

Satan has no more free will than Pharaoh had. Freedom, in the creature, does not consist in absolute independence of environment, but in accordance with it. God alone originates action. Place, time, and circumstance control His creatures. In reality, they have as little to say about the course of their existence as they had about their creation. But consciously, within the limitations of their own experience, they are allowed the same liberty as Pharaoh had. They may sit upon the throne of their own diminutive personality and fondly dream that they have excluded God from their domain. Of such the chief is Satan, adversary of Christ and slanderer of God.

If judgment were what men think it is, mere punishment for misbehavior, it would be somewhat difficult to see clearly just why Satan should suffer in the lake of fire for having played his part according to the underlying purpose of God. But God's judgment is never such an exhibition of puerile impotence. It sets matters right [universal salvation, which logically shows God's justice and appropriately affirms his omnipotent sovereignty - mh]. During the eons, it will deal with all in accord with His revealed will, and in such a fashion that this will coincide with His underlying purpose at the consummation.

Systematic transcendent inconsistent; good-true & evil-false

Systematic transcendent playful inconsistency: the damned/evil/lost have free will and misuse it. The saved/Good/blessed have no free will. If we are saved, it's credited only to God; He is so good and merciful. If we are damned, it's credited only to our own guilt: we are bad moral agents that justly deserve punishment.

I say free will is an impossibly confused notion, but Augustine says we had it then lost it -- a proposition which I initially stupidly recoiled from but which I now play with as a game. Religion is typically an impossible combination of freewillist morality for the children and no-free-will enlightenment for the adults.

We are two-phase creatures, mortals destined to be twice-born; every person exists as a child, thinking as a child, then transforms into an adult -- if following the same religion as a child and adult, the religion must reveal a higher layer for the adult, and therefore must contain two parts or phases that are no more "incompatible logic" than a child and adult are "incompatible logic".

This Augustinian game of perfect, studied inconsistency happens by aligning two different polarities: the freewillist/no-free-willist ways of thinking, and the good/evil polarity of mundane actions. Lower, moral religionists think in terms of good mundane moral actions and evil mundane moral actions, such as chastity and murder. Higher, esoteric religionists think in terms of truth (no-free-will, sheep) and falsity (free will, goat).

What happens when you weld together the lower moral polarity of ordinary good and evil with the higher polarity that distinguishes between metaphysical truth and falsity, light and dark? You end up with something as skewed and contradictory and asymmetrical as Augustinianism, a systematic asymmetrical system of religious morality, with no-free-will being grouped with Good and enlightenment, and free will grouped with Evil and delusion.

That's how the lower and higher are grouped in Pagels' book The Gnostic Paul.

Asymmetrical models of freewill; 'good/evil' meaning-flipping

I'm going to have to systematically review the official theologies more to pin down these eels.

The essence of the Augustinian hybrid freewill model was the standard for Reformed theology. The Catholic church backed away from it after Augustine, probably wanting something more hazy and noncommittal. Philo seems to have earlier espoused the same general sort of asymmetric model, so perhaps it was a standard Hellenistic system.

In the Christian meaning-flipping system, the egoic conception of good and evil gives way to the transcendent conception of good and evil. It is interesting to create a hybrid system, to sort of have it both ways. This hybrid seems to be the official theology that the Catholic and Protestant theologians like to flirt with -- it's sort of a natural conclusion, the simplest hybrid. Philo earlier appears to embrace it.

Egoic conception of good and evil: freewill moral agency is real. You should do good actions and not do evil actions. You deserve praise and punishment for your moral or immoral actions.

Transcendent conception of good and evil: Good is knowing the truth about moral agency, which is that there is no metaphysically free will and that freewill moral agency is an illusion and a mere convention. Evil is the deluded assumption that each person is a prime mover and metaphysically free agent able to choose and determine their own destiny. The Ground of Being or the uncontrollable transcendent controller is the real owner of first-order praise and blame.

The hybrid system is that the person is genuinely morally responsible, as a simply genuine self-determining ethical agent, for the evil they do, and for any delusion they may have about their nature and relationship to the transcendent. But any good that they do is not their own, but given to them or injected into them by the transcendent.

It is hard to coherently spell out the asymmetrical model in sentences, because it is so incoherent. But here is what the theologians are attempting to do in grouping concepts:

Good (owned by God first and you only second)

No-free-will

Grace forces doing good

___________

Evil

Freewill

Unable to do good, only morally able to do evil

If you do evil, it is entirely and genuinely your responsibility. If you do good, you cannot take any credit at all; God made you do it.

Another orthodox garbled doctrine is:

"There is no free will, yet you are genuinely morally responsible for your evil, and any good you do is entirely God's doing. This appears to be self-contradictory impossible nonsense, yet it is true -- how it can be true is a mystery beyond the grasp of our evil fallen sinful minds."

The above, and its variants, is monstrous logic; only rejecting it can allow enlightenment and spiritual salvation.

Determinist perspective on heresy

In Amsterdam, you can walk into any smartshop and buy psychoactive mushrooms (dried or fresh) and other entheogenic plants, at a low price -- and you can select from several varieties. You can walk into any coffeeshop and buy cannabis, picking from a menu of buds or hash. There may be bonbons or spacecakes as well -- edible strong cannabis that produces a more long-lasting, entheogenic effect.

Several smartshops and coffeeshops have Internet connections as well, so you can sit and exchange philosophy postings while snacking on mushrooms and smoking a mixture of cannabis and other entheogens, while the screen wavers in your mind.

Amsterdam has a particularly interesting history of Christianity/politics. They were ruled by Spain but around 1550, underwent the Alteration to become fiercely Protestant. I'm studying the relation between Reform theology and politics. I'm reading between the lines, this place reeks of heresy -- Protestantism was a heresy and the Roman Catholic church was in war against this Dutch Reform Protestantism -- I think this is the home of the Prebyterians.

Reform Theology is designed to be the opposite of Catholic theology. Catholic theology never planned far ahead, and it just defined itself in reaction to all the heresies in order to gain power. What's funny is that they have unwittingly let themselves be maneuvered into a position that is metaphysically very weak and tenuous -- bound to collapse in the light of actual genuine Holy Spirit experiencing. In the court of the Holy Spirit, the later, anti-Augustine Catholic theology is revealed as false egoic theology.

Reformed Theology is a heresy in light of the Catholic profit-driven spirituality. There is a secret, the Holy Spirit is revealing, about Protestant theology. We are born as sinners -- but only in the sense that Adam's sin is "imputed" to us and is not really ours as moral agents. Moral agency is metaphysically as false as the ego, which is the moral agent. We are given virtual sin.

Determinism (transcendent fixity of the future) condemns The Church of Metaphysical Freedom -- the church of the lie, the illusion, the delusion, the short-sight of naive animal thinking. The Protestants found an escape from the moral delusion fostered by The Church of the Catholic Lie. The Church of The Ego-Illusion-Taken-as-Real.

Reformed Theology is true in that it's the official Rome-resisting ego-denying metaphysical system. It's fascinating to imagine the Protestants in Holland abandoning orthodox religion entirely, and coming up with whatever theology is necessary to utterly deny and undermine Roman Catholocism -- and especially their decision to buy political freedom by abandoning the childish delusion of metaphysical freedom.

Imagine:

We are people who want to escape from Rome's rulership over us. How can we use our practical brains to outsmart them and manuever out from their octopus hierarchy of dominion over the land? Undermine their very theology -- discover the theology that is poison to the profit-driven "buy your way to heaven" Catholic theology that gathered and now sells salvation through their hierarchical franchise: that system strives to claim a monopoly on salvation.

Church of Mary Magdalene heresies are also interesting. I'd like to know more of the secret political roots of the Dutch Reformation. The Protestant Reformationists removed the Catholic art and re- designed the churches as Protestant churches.

Religion is best defined as one's attitude toward that which controls one's destiny.

The Protestants purchased political freedom by making a willing sacrifice of egoic metaphysical freedom. That is, they changed from a freewillist religion of egoic moral agency and its reward and punishment, to a determinist religion of non-ego. That's quite a change -- but could be seen as a continuation of the underground pagan religion -- which had no belief in egoic metaphysical freedom/power, but was amoral in practice.

There is some ego transcendence that's innate to the Reformation. I wonder if any of them were theoretically inspired about cybernetic self-control by enlightened plant teachers. Enlightenment has a price: you have to be willing to uphold practical moral agency and political freedom, while breaking away from the assumption of metaphysical freedom. You have to sacrifice belief in fantasies such as egoic metaphysical freedom, to get enlightenment.

The Protestants found the metaphysical system that was held by the mystery religions, but not the *experience* that was packaged together with that metphysical system.

I would like a book about the History of Determinism. To help fill in the timeline, Suzanne Bobzien's Stoic Determinism book is forthcoming in paperback in November.

The egoic mentality is freewillist mentality. Here's what divides my followers from the wolves. This system pairs and equates "ego" with "freewill". To transcend ego, transcend freewill in theory and in practice.

The New Age is false not for the reasons that fundamentalist Protestants such as Dave Hunt identifies. The New Age is a false religion built on metaphysical sand -- the doctrine of freewill. Is this a false portrayal? Even "Protestant" is too vague a term. More specifically, they protest against the doctrine of freewillism.

From the metaphysical point of view, the heretics are those who take the genuine sacraments instead of the corporate-church placebo sacraments. These religious rebels rediscover the ancient pagan knowledge -- practical freedom is true, metaphysical freedom is false.

That's the heart of the heresy, that the will is determined.

What is the heresy? The heresy is the pagan doctrine of determinism (fixed-future fatedness). Determinism is the heresy. Freewillism is the religion of ... there are many competing religions flying different banners. But the pillar of truth, the heart of the matter, is ... Protestants protest against the metphysical doctrine of official ruling religion. Protestants say "No, Rome, you are wrong. The will is determined. Rome says, "No, you must agree that the will is free, and that we can sell it clearance (though our coercive monopoly franchise) of its moral sins."

Enlightenment is that we are practically but not metaphysically free, and admitting that we have as much reason to believe in metaphysical free will as we have to accepting a pregant girl's virginity as a miracle.

There are several kinds of freedom. The heresy is the pair of ideas: we demand full soverign freedom, and we deny freewill.

Any church based on the assumption of freewill is not the church of Jesus, but th.. here is a lie detector: ask the Jesus figure, are we metaphysically free? Or are we just "free from the satanic lie"?

Metaphysical freedom is false. Practical freedom is true. Political/social freedom is good. This set of ideas is the heresy, but the heart of the heresy is metaphysically free moral agency. The latter idea loops around and poisons itself. The assumption of personal freedom, sooner or later bites itself and dies.

On Judgement day, the satanic mental model is cast down and trampled upon. Satanic egoic freewillism.

There are many candidates for what The Heart of Heresies are. But the one to most surely and quickly undermine the Corporate State Church, is the determinism that is seen in the heretical mental state of loose cognition. The worldly church says "you may not eat the plants that give loosecog, because loosecog disproves the foundation of our corporate official doctrine.

In the case of the Protestants, they were compelled to buy political freedom by sacrificing their inner child -- belief in egoic freewillist metaphysical freedom/power. Egoic freewillism. Transcendent necessityism or preexistent-future-ism, or truly conceived, Fatalism. However, like the term "psychedelic", the street-connotations of "Fatalism" overwhelm the … [finish sentence]

The protestant revolution is the revolution of the determinists against the goats/donkeys.

Ego is freewillism is the heart of the official antichrist church. The true Jesus is determinist. The false Jesus is freewillist; that self died on the cross during the heretical experience, loosecog.

"Catholic" is just a code-name for freewillist.

Which kind of freedom did Jesus preach? The answer might surprise. Can we interpret Jesus's words to make them preach the lie of metaphysical freedom?

Please tell me Mr. Jesus: are we metaphysically free? I maintain that the devil says yes; we are metaphysically free.

We need to clearly differentiate two opposite planes -- the practical plane vs. the metaphysical plane.

Ask the Holy Spirit: What is the nature of our freedom? It answers "future fixity; preexistence of the future, fatedness of all your thoughts. The wonder of practical freedom married with metaphysical determinism. " The marriage of the below and the above: freewillism and determinism, respectively.

The mysteries are a journey of the childish freewillist mind, its coming of age into becoming married. In the mystic marriage, I maintain that the "below" is freewillist thinking. The "above" is deterministic. The transcendent.

The child is the freewillist. The adult is the determinist. The judgement of the highest court, the court of the Holy Spirit, is that we are practically free but metaphysically unfree. That's the devouring half of the Holy Mother Spirit (the spirit that left Rome) - - determinism kills ego in its innermost heart. Freewillism is the heart of the egoic system. That's what dies when ego dies: freewillism; metaphysical freedom -- the child -- dies. But it is still present as a resource, this lie of metaphysical freedom. Like in the Eleusinian mysteries -- The child returns to the land of the living, in a ghostly form. We still have the mental structures of animal delusion -- freewillist thinking.

Heaven is metaphysically deterministic. We have no sins other that a vague "imputed" sin of Adam. We are angels: lacking metaphysical freedom. Adulthood: sober determinism.

The unitiated? We let them assume freewill, personal power.

Jesus is the sacrificial child that best serves the sacrificial purpose as vicarious sacrifice. Jesus may be dead, or never-existent as man, but the Holy Spirit lives, to judge and pronounce a sentence of death to any religion of freewillism. The judgement of the Holy Spirit is a higher court than that of man. In Greek times, was invented a lie-based legal system that flew in the face of the mysteries. (book: Myth and Tragedy in Ancient Greece.) It was a legal system based on a known-false premise: freewillism, as a concomitant of egoic moral agency. Egoic moral agency is by definition a freewillist system.

Jesus, the sacrificial child that best serves its sacrificial purpose as vicarious sacrifice, may be dead, but the Holy Spirit lives, to judge and pronounce condemnation of the ego, to condemn the assumption of metaphysical freedom.

"Because of this point, many quit following him." Would you like to enter heaven? Pick up your cross and get ready to sacrifice your child: the belief in freewill. The demon-child is freewillist thinking. The transcendent mind is crushing the devil. Those who claim black is white and up is down would claim that the devil is determinism, but the heretics claim that the devil figure represents freewill.

What must I do to be saved?

Kill your child, which is freewill. The antichrist is identifiable: he's freewillist. The obedient, the sheep, the willing sacrifice is the mind that gives up the freewillist mental model of self and world.

The Messianic Secret of dependence on determinism

The Messianic Secret is revealed after eating the sacred visionary food given by the godman.

The Jesus figure represents determinism & our relationship to it, and represents visionary plants and the experiences they give, including the experience of no-free-will/no-separate-self.

Lamb secret revealed w/o disciples understanding

Entire books have been read trying, with no success at all, to make sense of The Messianic Secret. Why does Jesus seek to keep it a secret that he considers himself rebel messiah against Rome, when the crowds plainly know as much? Such chronically Literalist approaches can never make sense of such riddles because they take such riddles for literal stories or reports.

The followers of Jesus didn't understand his parables, riddles, and double-entendres, until the Cross, resurrection, and day of pentecost. The messianic secret was not that he had to keep quiet that he was leader of a rebellion against the Roman Empire; the hidden secret about sovereignty that is not understood until the cross is the secret hiding in our own mind and will -- the secret that our thoughts are not originated or controlled or created by us as self-creating agents, but are given to us as part of the frozen timeless ground of all that exists, all thoughts and personal acts of will.

I continue to get more confirmation of my principle that solving old problems is an all-or-nothing wholesale affair.

It seems little known that the disciples' Holy Spirit's Day, Pentecost, occurs on the day of the giving of the gift of the Law to Moses.

Known as Whitsunday, Shavous, Shabuoth, Shavuoth, Shavuot, Pentecost, Feast of Weeks.

From Greek pentkostos, fiftieth. The fiftieth day (seven weeks) after the second day of the Passover, also, the Feast of (7) Weeks. At this festival an offering of the first fruits of the harvest was made. Commemorative of the gift of the law on the fiftieth day after the departure from Egypt.

Summary of the 2 days:

1. Passover, Easter

Abraham's willingness to sacrifice his child

Pass-over and exodus from captivity in Egypt

Jesus' Crucifixion

2. Feast of (7) Weeks, Pentecost

Giving of the gift of the Law to Moses

Offering of first fruits of the harvest

Descent of the Holy Spirit on the disciples

All of these tie into political stories and allegorically convey mystic-state phenomena. Understanding the Law means appreciating how Reason is silent about Ought and comprehending that guidelines of Ought can only be obtained "miraculously" or transcendently.

The "child sacrificed" is the mind's lower, primitive worldmodel that is initially formed around the false notion of free will.

Mystic-state exegesis of the "pass-over": One's relation to God is that of puppet to puppetmaster. One is a puppet in the hands of God. To perfectly demonstrate right comprehension of this, one needs to perfectly transgress one's accustomed self-control. That would be harmful. How to escape the harm? by imagining another doing such perfect self-transgression to the death, and identify with him.

Who, or what creature, is able to deny their own will so perfectly? The obedient, docile, will-less lamb as opposed to the willful goat. The lamb is a perfect substitute sacrifice to let me symbolically demonstrate that I need to perfectly transgress my accustomed self- control to demonstrate the puppet relationship of my self-command relative to God's timeless kingdom/kingship.

The deadly and psychoactive ergot infects the dough; to avoid bodily death and to avoid harm during control-transgressive ego death, we display the blood of the sacrificed lamb, the perfect will-denying creature that is transgressed as our representative. This way we can have both: continued life and safety preserved into the future, and fully right relation to the puppetmaster.

Both life and righteousness belong to those who are represented by the will-less lamb, the sacrifice of which represents our fully understanding self-sacrifice of our own self-command. No actual lamb is needed, only the idea and understanding of it.

Christianity's Integration of Freewill Ethics

Delicateness of personal adherence to ethics, struggle to preserve social stability, Jewish-Christianity was the best religious system for emphasizing and popularizing virtual freewill ethics

Christianity was chosen for the Roman Empire because like Judaism, it integrated and emphasized logically illegitimate but socially useful and popular freewill ethics. Just as Plato "solved" the problem of reconciling the naive perception of change with the higher perception of unchangingness, so did Christianity, in a fully systematically integrated way, "solve" the problem of reconciling adherence to freewill ethics with metaphysical transcendent truth.

Plato's solution to integrating appearance and reality was to describe them as lower and higher -- lower appearance vs. higher reality. The Jewish-Christian religion's solution to integrating freewill ethics with no-free-will truth was to treat them as lower and higher levels of meaning, or pre- vs. post-enlightenment phases of understanding. The Hellenistic world seemed to think of the no-free-will truth as highly dangerous and almost as liable to lead to societal instability as to stability.

Although Plato looked to the experience of "mystic rescue from ego death by the Divine" as the model of the Good, pure Virtue, and true naturally-discovered Ethics, a model to then be applied to society, still people wanted a broader basis for social and political stability than that.

That metaphysically-based system of Ethics is too debatable; it needed to be supplemented by the *other* sort of "naturally discovered" ethics, which is that of the naive child who takes freewill moral agency to be unproblematic.

The power mongers in Rome wanted the stablest possible basis for societal adherence to ethics -- they did this by combining naive freewill ethics with the ethics of the Good, encountered by the experience of being rescued from helplessness by the Divine during entheogenic ego death and rebirth. The mode of thinking of freewill ethics is metaphysically and logically incoherent, but practically viable and useful -- it has a certain natural, instinctive stability.

Why did Constantine and Eusebius pick Christianity, out of all the religions (the were all entheogenic initiatory mystery religions), as a starting point for fabricating a single mandatory religion? Ethics had no real basis, yet to have a stable society, which the power-mongers wanted, people needed to adhere to acting as though ethics had some basis, as opposed to the natural law of dog-eat-dog.

The power mongers didn't take ethics seriously, except knowing that submission to ethics is required for a stable power structure and political order. The Jews emphasized sin, morality, ethics -- although this was a clever meaning-flipping double-entendre when properly understood, Rome nevertheless liked the lower meaning of sin and morality, as something that people could use to adhere to ethics and getting along.

Women also may have liked proto-Christianity not for its moralism, but rather, for its strong promotion of ethics: "be helpful to those in need". The other religions (all of them metaphysically-centered mystery religions) did not have that emphasis on ethics; their myths and metaphysical meaning was neither expressed in terms of, nor centered around, ethics ("be helpful to those in need").

The power-mongers picked Christianity because it was somewhat popular, and because it, to a much greater extent than the other mystery religions, made ethics *integral* -- Christianity picked up that integral emphasis on ethics, that deep mythic incorporation of ethics language, from Judaism. That mystery-religion oriented ethics scheme involved a meaning-flipping double-entendre based on contrasting freewill moral thinking with transcendent thinking about moral agency.

Deluded egos, as in the minds of children, think in simple absolute terms of good and bad, within a naive framework based on the deluded assumption of freewill moral agency. The meaning of "good" and "bad" (or "evil") flips drastically and catastrophically (a homeostatic state shift) during enlightenment when metaphysical freewill is recognized as a delusion. Then, the meaning of "good" switches to "knowing no-free-will", and "bad" or "evil" switches to "ignorant belief in freewill and freewill moral agency; thinking that one can set one's own fate and ultimately originate one's own control-thoughts".

Compare egoic moral thinking and transcendent moral thinking to Nietzsche's "slave morality" and "master morality". The power-mongers believed in the "natural law" of might-makes-right; that there is no substance to ethics, there is only power. But they needed the lower society to take ethics as binding and substantial.

The Jewish thinking about ethics included the clever meaning-flipping contrast between reading "good and evil" as "naive absolute freewill ethics fit for children" vs. "knowing the truth about metaphysical freewill moral agency vs. ignorance of it". The power mongers liked how the higher reading of Jewish myth acknowledged the metaphysical truth of no-free-will while providing, stronger than other religions, a robust and forcefully emphatic put-on of naive absolute freewill ethics.

When the Hellenistic world uttered 'good' and 'bad', it was always in heavy quote marks, knowing that ethics has no more real basis than the arbitrary choice of Isis to restore stable self-control to the mystic initiate she calls to knowledge of truth. Truth is the realization that free-will moral agency is a conventional illusion arising from the naive, confused mind.

"Clueless apostles" = uninitiated Christians

>>The New Testament is about everyone (the Disciples, plus the multitudes) not being able to see and understand what it was that was happening around them and the teachings being given. Supposedly, no one really knew what was going on or understood what was being expressed until Jesus's resurrection.

"Before the resurrection" means "before one's initiation". "After Jesus' resurrection" means "after one's initiation and enlightenment". Beginners at Christianity are lower Christians who fail to understand Jesus. After their initiation they become mature, perfected, completed Christians, who understand Jesus.

The originally clueless apostles, followers of Jesus, represent the uninitiated Christian. Only after the Holy Spirit descends at Pentecost do Jesus' disciples -- that's us, after initiation -- understand Jesus. We when uninitiated are the clueless followers of Jesus who fail to understand him; we claim to follow him but are unable to follow him.

Jesus is the prince of timeless determinism

Kenny wrote:

>One of the most basic beliefs in my Christian faith is that I am inherently evil and deserve to go to hell. And no one else is any different. Christians ...believe that God, as a loving Father, did not wish to see us get what we deserve, but, being a just Judge, had to fulfill the requirement of justice. In order to institute justice without punishing His children in a way He could not stand to (sending ALL of us to hell), He determined that it was necessary for someone to pay for our sin for us, since we could not pay our own debt. This is what we believe Jesus did on the cross.

>Since God gave us free will, we have the choice to accept what He has done for us and receive the reward which rightfully belongs to Christ, but which He has freely given us, or to reject His sacrifice and get what we deserve. Choose well.

> "We are all slaves. Freedom is merely the right to chose your master."

Free will is a delusion that confers upon us our seemingly separate existence. This delusion is the gift of apparent sovereignty. Christians who believe in free will also believe in the kind of guilt transferral you describe, and believe in our genuine moral responsibility. Christians who deny free will must also deny our genuine moral responsibility, such that all responsibility reverts to where it really resides, God -- represented by the Jesus figure.

The true essence of Christianity is a 2-level system involving a transformation from lower Christianity which apparently supports our personal sovereign power as moral agents who have free will, to higher Christianity which reveals we don't have free will, so that our supposed guilt is now attributed to (or "given over to") God.

These two levels of understanding are logically mutually exclusive. If you try to force them together, chaos results that only a child or animal -- or demon -- can accept. To cast out that demon, you must sort out the scriptures into distinct lower and higher systems of meaning. Thus the idea "Many think they are my followers, but they are actually followers of the devil."

The lost are those who are predestined to believe the satanic (fit only for animals and children) delusion of free will. The elect are those who are predestined to mature past that childish way of thinking and discover that there is no free will. Demons think they have free will. Saints and angels know that there is no free will.

Those who know there is no free will have left the domain of the devil and have entered the kingdom of God. Accepting Jesus' sacrifice means accepting the principle of determinism and willingly sacrificing your freewill ego delusion on the spacetime cross. The Holy Spirit residing in the eucharist provides this timeless perspective on time, which reveals our personal sovereign power over our thoughts to be an illusion. Time and perceiving the illusory nature of time is crucial; it is the spear that pierces the liver/heart, which Hellenism mythically understood to be the organ of the will.

Our future acts and thoughts and movements of the will are timelessly frozen into the spacetime block. The assumption of freewill is the assumption that we have the power to create our own future, but instead, God has forever, timelessly already put our acts at all points in time into place. When we comprehend this we ascend to heaven and are crowned in Christ, co-ruling with God in his deterministic kingdom.

It is demonic pride to think that you are evil in the sense of possessing genuine moral culpability as a freewill agent. The true sense in which you are evil and a worshipper of the devil and are possessed by a demon, is that you reject Jesus, who is the prince or principle of timeless determinism. To lower Christians, "sin" means doing bad things or rejecting a supernatural person, Jesus. To higher Christians, "sin" means assuming that you have free will. To assume that we have free will is to be deluded and thus to worship the devil.

Reject free will, reject the devil; accept Jesus Christ as your savior, accept the principle of determinism -- and thereupon, enter the eternal deterministic kingdom of God. Jesus is the only way to be saved; the principle of timeless determinism and rejection of free will is the only way to enter the kingdom of Heaven. Deterministic Buddhists follow Jesus and are saved; they were predestined to enter the kingdom of Heaven, which arrives when the illusion of time ends.

Home (theory of the ego death and rebirth experience)