Haiti: Passing the Black Jack

Lisa Miller, in her discussion in Newsweek, writes in response to the comments about Haiti from Pat Robertson, in which he accuses the Haitians of a pact with the Devil, and the latest natural disaster as simply due them as a result of that particular "sin." She speaks of "the frustrating theology of suffering," and brings up both Bart Ehrman and Rabbi Harold Kushner as voices to counter these now infamous statements of Robertson. The comments from these two authors however mostly merely blunt the issue without really resolving it.

We will have to be more drastic, as it cannot be resolved as long as you remain stuck in the notion that God is both the creator of the world, and all good, all powerful, but at the same time either powerless to stop evil, or, alternatively, he has his bad days, when he is a vengeful God. Or, if you would have it in the fundamentalist model of Pat Robertson, you end up in a complete dualism of God and the Devil, who are at war with one another at the expense of the people, and if anyone makes a pact with the Devil, God will be out to kill him or her. This is the Faustian problem in its many variations. And of course that notion is brought out in the Judeo-Christian world as early as the Adam and Eve story, in which the ontological sin ends up being blamed on Eve and the snake, and God in the process is made into the heavy, who throws them out of paradise.

Supposedly, we've been stuck ever since, until - according to Christian theology at least - God sent up Jesus as a blood sacrifice for our malfeasance, which washed away our sins. This model ends up as a vicarious salvation, which cancels out our sins, and particularly the original sin, and leaves us all good and guilty (Look what Jesus did for you! Now are you going to eat your spinach or not?!), so we can be cajoled into tithing to the Christian churches for life, while we wait for the second coming. That's how society pays the salaries for Pat Roberts and the like, who mostly just repeat the dogma, to reinforce it and make sure we really believe it. In that model anyone not professing to believe like the fundamentalists, has de facto chosen the wrong ballot, the Devil, and must suffer the consequences. Then, when someone like Carlton Pearson takes even the first step outside this model, and realizes that Jesus was preaching love and inclusion, not hate and exclusion, he ends up being thrown out of the fundamentalist camp. For apparently "we" just hate the idea of love and inclusion, perhaps for the simple reason that we then left with no one else to blame.

It is all so convenient, if I just have to believe one way and my troubles are over, and everyone else is bad. Very apparently then, the vicarious salvation through Jesus was not enough, for there still seems to be a need to also blame everyone else, who do not believe the story, just so as to make it really clear who are the good guys ("us," who go to Heaven). In other words, this God, while being praised as all powerful and all loving also appears to be too stupid to know what's in the hearts of his children, so they need to make a lot of noise, and pass the blame to everyone else. It's a game of Black Jack, and it's a game of judgment, for the bad people are always out there, they're not me. Thus I don't have to take responsibility for anything, except pointing fingers. The absurdity of this whole model was probably best shown in Tom Lehrer's famous song, "National Brotherhood Week."

An alternative within the Christian tradition is thankfully present these days from Bishop Carlton Pearson with his Gospel of Inclusion, which represents the radical notion that God loves all his children equally, and doesn't play favorites. This is a major step, but it does not all the way resolve the odious "theology of sin and suffering," as we are still left with a supposedly loving God, who lets presumably his "only son," Jesus (so what are we, step children, as Paul would have it?), be gruesomely murdered on the Cross for our supposed sins. Presumably, that was the same Jesus who in his ministry did nothing but preach forgiveness of sins, and whose own teaching says nothing to promote sacrificial slaughter, let alone the vicariously salvific value of crucifixion. Those interpretations of his life and teaching all date from after his death, with Paul and Peter leading the parade for a belief system, which gradually became "Christianity," in which his teaching was made suitable for the Roman Emperor, and which very early made it its business to suppress any beliefs that were at variance with its own.

Jesus of course stood for the notion that the truth needs no defense, and that all that's needed is the forgiveness of sins, and to love our brothers like ourselves, and God above all. It's this "loving our brothers like ourselves" which Christianity, or any religion have the most problems with, again, quite in the spirit of Tom Lehrer's song, unless we fully and completely understand that ALL God's children are equal. Which is so evidently untrue, when we trust our body's eyes. Yet in the original teaching of Jesus, such as we find it in the Thomas Gospel, parts of which survived in the canonical Gospels accounts that became included in the New Testament, the emphasis is on the Kingdom as an ever present reality, which we merely do not perceive as long as we remain preoccupied with the things of the world. The world of the senses is thus a distraction from the world of the spirit, and of course all of our problems in this physical world which we mistake for our reality, have a way of securing our attention in the world, very unlike Jesus, who was in the world, but clearly not of it, and whose teaching consisted of asking us to follow him, to a Kingdom not of this world. Once we can fathom this, then the people in Haïti are simply our brothers, and we can address their needs on the basis of love, to the best of our abilities. No need to find fault or judge.

The churches - and all religions, but, thank God, with exceptions - have too often made the mistake of blackmailing people into joining their camp, completely oblivious to the simple truth that truth needs no defense, as Jesus taught in word and deed. It is only if we do not speak the truth that we need to expend so much effort at convincing others, because we are really in doubt ourselves, and operating from fear, holding on to a belief system which deep down we know to be at variance with the truth. Once we understand the spirit of Carlton Pearson's "Gospel of Inclusion" we must realize that we don't have to include anybody, since they already are, on the strength of the fact that we are all God's children.

The clincher then is to realize that Jesus very much spoke of the Kingdom of God as our reality, which we merely do not see in our present condition, or we would not feel the way we feel, but which is all around us, if we merely follow him, and learn to see as he sees, by practicing the forgiveness of sins, and loving our brothers like ourselves, and God above all. Would we not have a nicer experience if we treated all our brothers like ourselves, and treated every encounter as if we were meeting Jesus in that brother? That is the option which Jesus holds out to us, to live from forgiveness, love and inclusion, and to join with him in the Kingdom of Heaven. Most of us are a while away from that, but practice makes perfect. This is also why Jesus is so dismissive of our worldly relations, and emphasizes the spiritual brotherhood that flows from doing the Will of God, as in Logion 99, in other words, our reality is not who we are as bodies, our parents children, our sisters' brothers, or our brothers' sisters, nor even as parents of our own children. Who we are as brothers in spirit is only through joining with Jesus in doing God's Will, which is to forgive and to love. Not to judge. Clearly then, since we all have this propensity to judge and not forgive, we have some practice ahead. The only remaining questions is do we want to start now or later? So how long do we want to stay miserable?

As long as we stay stuck in judgment, we remain in the quandary of Logion 26, and we persist in seeing the speck in our brothers eye, and we never get around to cleaning house ourselves, forgiving our brother for what he did not do, by finally recognizing the speck in our own eyes, first, so we swallow our accusations. Likewise the Christian explanation of Jesus achieves the same quagmire, for to believe that we will be saved vicariously by someone else's sacrifice, serves to get us off the hook. It is a way of having your cake and eating it too, to sin and be forgiven magically by an external savior, and so starts the extortion by the agents of that savior. What Jesus did ask was rather to follow him in practicing doing according to the Will of the Father, and nowhere does he ask us to be perfect at it. But if we get busy practicing ourselves, we will have less and less time for judging others, and will easily be more helpful as well.

From before the formation of Christianity there were strands of Gnostic tradition where a better explanation of our ontological frame of reference was attempted, particularly in the insight that the God of Genesis, the creator God, could not possibly be an all loving and all powerful God, and was a creature of a second order. This teaching was not well understood and became suppressed by the emergence of the Pauline/Christian creed of a sacrificial, vicarious salvation. In our day and age it is making a comeback in the very profound teachings of A Course in Miracles, where one of the central tenets is that God did not create this world, and by implication that the God of Genesis is merely a projection by man, a made-up God of the second order, a creature of mythology, who bears a remarkable likeness to us, and is loving some days, and angry and fearful on others. He has friends and enemies, and he needs to be praised to remain in his good graces, and feared otherwise. Thus the Bible has become a collection of stories, which very often succeeded in nearly blotting out the memory of the real God of whom Jesus spoke, and who is all loving, because he is our source, in spirit. As long as we believe that, then the Kingdom is also deferred to something mythical, after death, because this life then is nothing but an affirmation of everything but that Kingdom not of this world, which Jesus says is our only reality.

Thus this illusion of a world, and illusion of a life, are merely the expressions of a belief system that puts my individuality central, and demotes God to a second order role, to "co-pilot," and which is the exact opposite of what Jesus advocates. This awareness is present in the Bible when a deep sleep descends on Adam, from which he apparently never wakes up. We find it in Advaita-Vendanta in the notion that the world is an illusion "Maya," and it's cause merely a play of the Godhead (Brahman), who got bored one day. But the gnostic concept as it is elaborated in A Course in Miracles, is clearer than all that, and ties in remarkably well with today's quantum physical notion of the holographic nature of this world of perception, namely that God did not create the world at all, which deprives it of any objective reality, and relegates it to purely the realm of perceptual phenomena, dreams or illusions. In Einstein's words, we are non-local beings having a local experience, or in Shakespeare's words, "All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players." Instead, the mind made it up as an expression of the belief in a separate individual reality, in which we are all in conflict, and God is relegated to second place, although the primordial fear of him never quite leaves us, and stays with us as ontological guilt, which in our insanity we try to blame on everyone else. Round and round it goes, until someone, somewhere is willing to break the cycle, and look for "another way," which invariably becomes the path to a "Kingdom not of this world."