Theodicy Redux

Oh well, it was time for the heavyweight championships of judgment this week, and the Haïtian Ambassador did a marvelously humorous job of countering Pat Robertson's fundamentalist judgment of Haïti, without really soiling himself with heavy duty argumentation, which would not have helped.

Then, for good measure, in the press it was Bart Ehrman, quoted in Newsweek, who did a nice job of putting things in perspective. He of course has stumbled upon theodicy as part of his recovery from fundamentalism, in which for the time being he has settled on atheism, as documented in his book God's Problem, which basically says that since Bart Ehrman can't figure him out, there must be no God.

On another level, the whole episode made me think again of the inspired insights of Carlton Pearson, and how he came to develop his Gospel of Inclusion, which within the Christian context is perhaps the best answer to the painful comments of Pat Robertson about Haïti, though written 10 years ago. Pearson's original inspiration came from the crisis in Ruanda years ago, but the tenor is the same. Exclusion and judgment are the opposite of the inclusion and love which Jesus represents, regardless if you follow the basically Chrisitian theology of Pearson, or you follow A Course In Miracles and the Thomas Gospel. The problem is theodicy, the question of how can a loving God do this... (fill in the blank with the latest war or natural disaster), to his people. The ultimate answer in the Course is that he doesn't, because God does not know about the world, for the world is only the out-picturing of the thought of separation, and we are God's creation, not as bodies in the world and of the world, but as spirit, and in spirit we are still one with him, but it's the reality of Heaven, which is obfuscated by this ego life, which we think is our main act, not realizing it is just a role we play while we are in denial of our true reality as God's Son.

Ultimately the cosmogony proposed by A Course In Miracles is utterly simple.  Oneness must come before two-ness, just as much as one comes before two. Thus:

Into eternity, where all is one, there crept a tiny, mad idea, at which the Son of God remembered not to laugh. In his forgetting did the thought become a serious idea, and possible of both accomplishment and real effects. Together, we can laugh them both away, and understand that time cannot intrude upon eternity. It is a joke to think that time can come to circumvent eternity, which means there is no time. (ACIM:T27.VIII.6:2-5).

So, before some clever kid in the class hollered "two," thinking it was a new idea, there was only one. We should have known right away that "two" could not possibly be such a bright idea, since "one" came first. That ontological One is the oneness of Heaven, of Eternity, in the above sense. And we can all intuitively understand that "two" is not an original idea, since it does presuppose "one," thus the oneness of Heaven is the original state, and the individuality of the separation is somehow the secondary idea, a poor substitute for Heaven.
The Thomas Gospel is full of the awareness that Heaven, the Kingdom, is a state which is omnipresent (by definition, if you followed this), which we merely do not see as long as individuality, and the physical reality of this world remain our vantage point. There are any number of the Logia of Thomas which reflect this type of thinking, and it is implicit throughout the entire collection. Logion 28 is one good example. It compares the state of ego-individuality to a drunken stupor, promising that we will know our reality again, when we recover from that drunkenness. Or, in a more gentle fashion, using the traditional analogy of the dream (remember, in the Bible Adam falls asleep, and he never wakes up), the Course puts it as follows:

    You are at home in God, dreaming of exile but perfectly capable of awakening to reality. Is it your decision to do so? You recognize from your own experience that what you see in dreams you think is real while you are asleep. Yet the instant you waken you realize that everything that seemed to happen in the dream did not happen at all. You do not think this strange, even though all the laws of what you awaken to were violated while you slept. Is it not possible that you merely shifted from one dream to another, without really waking? (ACIM:T-10.I.2)

As this becomes our frame of reference, we come to take responsibility for our nightmares, which are merely a reflection of our disastrous choice FOR individuality, and AGAINST Heaven, which however mercifully is not the great big idea (sin!!!) the ego thinks, but merely a "tiny, mad idea" which by joining with Jesus in our minds we can laugh away, and never take seriously again. That is when finally we realize that all our nightmarish experiences and those of others are merely a reflection of that one wrong choice, which we can learn to undo through forgiveness, and the more we do, the more we realize that forgiveness in every form is only forgiveness of the same old tiny, mad idea in a variety of forms, which merely seem endless, but which ultimately collapse back into the one wrong choice, and when we forgive it, which is called accepting the atonement for ourselves, we are once again free of the delusion of separation and back home in Heaven, where we belong - and as the Course points out, that decision (accepting the atonement for ourselves) is truly our only job as students of Jesus' Course.

Within this framework now, there is nothing bad that is done by God, for the true God does not even know about the world. He created us as spirit and knows us as spirit, and what we imagined in our silly nightmares he is blissfully unaware of, including the fact that we blame him for it, just as we blamed him for creating the world. When we rejoin that reality, the dream of the world will merely collapse "into the nothingness from which it came." (ACIM: M-13.1:2) Mercifully when we realize that all the "bad things" which happen to "good people," are not a punishment from God, as our guilt feelings imagine them to be, but merely the out-picturing of the one mistaken thought of the separation, then we can start forgiving like a fiend, until we're done with the whole mess and remember once again that we are no longer in the diaspora which is this world, but safely asleep, at home in Heaven with God, where all the nice children go to play. And while we learn these lessons we will let ourselves be guided to help in the world as best we can, quietly representing the choice for peace.

Let this review be then your gift to me. For this alone I need; that you will hear the words I speak, and give them to the world. You are my voice, my eyes, my feet, my hands through which I save the world. The Self from which I call to you is but your own. To Him we go together. Take your brother's hand, for this is not a way we walk alone. In him I walk with you, and you with me. Our Father wills His Son be one with Him. What lives but must not then be one with you? (ACIM:W-rV.in.9)