I’m going to address the excellent questions {{jon}} has posed on his blog, Jon’s New Age Wanderings, “here”.

Question #1, “Is abortion OK and if not, why not?”

I really laid into one little lady who called looking for donations for her cause, which happened to be this one.

I pounded her into the ground, ROYALLY, for her presumptuousness in phrasing the question, “are you for abortion or are you pro life?” I mean it; I let her have it. I psychologically gutted her from the inside out, without one feeling of regret or remorse. And would do it again in a heartbeat. I refuse to feed such deceit as she was pandering and begging for my help to support. When I hung up on her, she was in tears and I was thinking ‘good riddance’.

“Pro-life my ass”, I thought, “she didn’t even so much as express any respect for it.”

It may be helpful if I shared that there is a BIG difference between our dust and the Life which animates it. A lot of blathering from bleeding hearts could be avoided if we distinguished Life, from the form it takes. Birth/death have NOTHING to do with Life except for being experiences of it.

If our Soul becomes unable to express itself through one “body” of form, either due to dissolution of the form or due to personality blocking it, it will find another form to express Itself through.

In short, I found the young lady’s attitude and understanding to be that of valuing and giving more meaning to dust, then to the Life that animates the dust. Where she imagined herself to be serving Love of Life, she is actually serving fear of death. So simply the phrasing of her question indicated she was coming from a place of self deceit. And it was just her plain *luck* that she called me, right in the middle of when I was cooking dinner.

The question of abortion is an individual decision, a choice made by the woman who is pregnant. It’s known as Liberty. And like I said to the little lady, “You have NO RIGHT to infringe upon anyone else’s Liberty, just because you’ve got emotional problems dealing with it. No one granted you a mortgage on their life. How DARE you think to suck the Liberty from others people’s lives in order to feed your own reality and then blather on about ‘love’ at the same time? ”

For factors in making this decision, let’s look at the depravity of our Society.

Why does the word “bastard” even exist?

Not all cultures see children in this same Light. And because of this, “Motherhood” is revered and supported.

LIKE IT ISN’T IN OURS.

Continued from The Urantia:  (the underlines are my addition) 

“Some day a reformation in the Christian church may strike deep enough to get back to the unadulterated religious teachings of Jesus.  You may preach a religion about Jesus but, perforce, you must live the religion of Jesus.  In enthusiasm of Pentecost, Peter unintentionally inaugurated a new religion, the religion of the risen and glorified Christ.  The Apostle Paul later on transformed this new gospel into Christianity, a religion embodying his own theologic views and portraying his own personal experience with the Jesus of the Damascus road.   

The gospel of the kingdom is founded on the personal religious experience of the Jesus of Galilee; Christianity is founded almost exclusively on the personal religious experience of the Apostle Paul.  Almost the whole of the New Testament is devoted, not to the portrayal of the significant and inspiring religious life of Jesus, but to a discussion of Paul’s religious experience and to a portrayal of his personal religious convictions. 

Jesus’ life in the flesh portrays a transcendent religious growth from the early ideas of primitive awe and human reverence up through years of personal spiritual communion until he arrived at that advanced and exalted status of the consciousness of his oneness with the Universe.  In one short life, he traversed the experience of religious spiritual progression.  Jesus progressed from a purely human consciousness to the sublime heights of realization of his divine nature.  He progressed from humble human to the consciousness of achieved divinity.  And this progressing ascent from the human to the divine was an exclusively mortal achievement.  And when he had thus attained divinity, he was still the same human Jesus, the Son of Man as well as the Son of God. 

The greatest mistake was made in that, while the human Jesus was recognized as having a religion, the divine Jesus (Christ) almost overnight became a religion.  Paul’s Christianity made sure of the adoration of the divine Christ, but it almost wholly lost sight of the struggling and valiant human Jesus from Galilee, who, by the valor of his personal religious faith and heroism of his indwelling Spiritual Presence, ascended from the lowly levels of humanity to becoming one with divinity, thus revealing the way all mortals ascend from humanity to divinity.   

Jesus blessed the poor because they were usually sincere and pious; he condemned the rich because they were usually wanton and irreligious.  He would equally condemn the irreligious pauper and commend the consecrated and worshipful man of wealth. 

Jesus led men to feel at home in the world; he delivered them from slavery of taboo and taught that the world was not fundamentally evil.  He did not long to escape from his earthly life; he mastered a technique while in the flesh.  He attainted an idealistic religious life in the very midst of a realistic world.    Jesus did not share Paul’s pessimistic view of humankind.   The Master looked upon men as sons of God and foresaw a magnificent and eternal future.   He was not a moral skeptic; he viewed man positively, not negatively.  He saw most men as weak rather then wicked, more distraught then depraved.  But no matter what their status, they were all God’s children and his brethren. 

He taught men to place a high value upon themselves in time and in eternity. 

He offered no rules for social advancement; his was a religious mission, and religion is an exclusively individual experience.   

Personal, spiritual religious experience is an efficient solvent for most mortal difficulties; it is an effective sorter, evaluator, and adjuster of all problems.  Religion does not remove or destroy human troubles, but it does dissolve, absorb, illuminate, and transcend them.  True religion unifies the personality enabling effective adjustment to all requirements.   Religious faith – the positive leading of the indwelling divine Presence – unfailingly enables the God–knowing man to bridge the gulf existing between intellectual logic and positive affirmations of the soul. 

There are just three elements in universal reality: fact, idea, and relation.  The religious consciousness identifies these realities as science, philosophy, and truth.  Philosophy would be inclined to view these activities as reason, wisdom, and faith – physical reality, intellectual reality, and spiritual reality.  We are in the habit of designating these realities as thing, meaning, and value. 

The progressive comprehension of reality is the equivalent of approaching God.  The finding of God, the consciousness of identity with reality; is the equivalent of the experience of self-completion. —- self-entirety, self-totality.  The experiencing of total reality is the full realization of God, the finality of the God-knowing experience. 

The full summation of human life is the knowledge that man is educated by fact, ennobled by wisdom, and saved – justified – by religious faith.  

Physical certainty consists in the logic of science; moral certainty, in the wisdom of philosophy; spiritual certainty, in the truth of genuine religious experience.  

The mind of man can attain high levels of spiritual insight and corresponding spheres of divinity of values because it is not wholly material.  There is a Spirit nucleus in the mind of man – the Divine Presence.  There are three separate evidences of the Spirit indwelling the human mind.  

1. Humanitarian fellowship – love.  The purely animal mind may be gregarious for self-protection, but only the spirit-indwelt intellect is unselfishly altruistic and unconditionally loving.
     
2. Interpretation of the universe – wisdom.  Only the spirit-indwelt mind can comprehend that the universe is friendly to the individual.
3.  Spiritual evaluation of life – worship.   Only the spirit-indwelt man can realize the divine Presence and seek to attain a fuller experience in and with this foretaste of divinity.

 The human mind does not create real values; human experience does not yield universe insight.  Concerning insight, the recognition of moral values and the discernment of spiritual meanings, all that the human mind can do is to discover, recognize, interpret, and choose.  

Unless a divine lover lived in man, he could not unselfishly and spiritually love.  Unless an interpreter lived in the mind of man, man could not truly realize the unity of the universe.  Unless an evaluator lived in man, he could not possibly appraise moral values and recognize spiritual meanings.  And this lover hails from the very source of infinite love; this interpreter is a part of Universe Unity; this evaluator is the child of the Center and Source of all absolute values of divine and eternal reality. 

True religious worship is not a futile monologue of self-deception.  Worship is a personal communion with that which is divinely real, with that which is the very source of reality.  Man aspires by worship to be better and thereby eventually attains the best.  

The projections of the human intellect may indeed originate false gods – gods in man’s image – but the true God-consciousness does not have such an origin.  The God-consciousness is resident in the indwelling Spirit. 

Some men’s lives are too great and noble to descend to the low level of being merely successful.  The animal must adapt itself to the environment, but the religious man transcends his environment and in his way escapes the limitations of the present material world through this insight of divine love.  This concept of love generates in the soul of man that is super-animal effort to find truth, beauty, and goodness; and when he does find them, he is glorified in their embrace; he is consumed with the desire to live them. 

Be not discouraged; human evolution is still in progress; revelation will not fail. 

The great challenge to modern man is to achieve better communications with the divine Presence that dwells within him.  Man’s greatest adventure in the flesh is the well balanced and sane effort to advance the borders of self consciousness out through the dim realms of embryonic soul-consciousness in a wholehearted effort to reach the borderland of spirit-consciousness – contact with the divine Presence.  Such an experience constitutes God-consciousness, an experience mightily confirmative of the pre-existent truth of the religious experience of knowing God.  Such spirit-consciousness is the equivalent of the knowledge of the actuality of sonship with God.  Otherwise, the assurance of sonship is the experience of faith. 

God-consciousness is equivalent to the integration of the self with the Universe, and on its highest levels of spiritual reality.” 

This journey of man getting to know God and God getting to know man, takes place in 12 stages.  Just as any seed requires different radiations of the sun to come to full expression, spring, summer, and fall, so does Man.  Each of these 12 (radiations/gates) cover approximately 2400-2500 years; the sum total of which equals a full progression of the ages, coming full circle, every 25,000 to 26,000 years.  It’s one of these events that keeps being discussed concerning the year 2012.  It is a time of Completion.

What follows are the 12 steps, the 12 gates we pass through in dancing the dream awake.  

Over the past couple of weeks I was drawn to one of my books.  As happens all the time, I’ve read it and re-read it, over and over.  Like the information was some sort of pinball that had to rattle around inside my mind for a while before I knew what to make of it.
 

Make of it…what am I going to give physical birth to this time?  Talk about Creative.  Somebody ‘upstairs’ must have me confused with a rabbit.  

I don’t even ask what’s about to come out of me at this point.  I’ve learned better.  Asking only increases any anxieties I may have or feel.  So I don’t ask.  I make like a leaf floating down the river, trusting the current will take me wherever I need to go.
 

I begin by quoting from the Urantia:

“Christainity has indeed done a great service for this world but what is now most needed is Jesus.  The world needs to see Jesus living again on earth in the experience of spirit-born mortals who effectively reveal the Master to all men.  Christianity must go forward from where we find ourselves.  Modern culture must become spiritually baptized with a new revelation of Jesus’ life and illuminated with a new understanding of his gospel.  And when Jesus becomes thus lifted up, he will draw all men to himself.  Religion is only an exalted humanism until it is made divine by the discovery of the reality of Spirit in personal experience.  

‘The Kingdom of God is within you’ was probably the greatest pronouncement Jesus ever made, next to the declaration that his Father is a living and loving Spirit.

It is not the first mile of compulsion, duty, or convention that will transform man and his world, but rather the second mile of free service and liberty loving devotion that betokens the Jesusonian reaching forth to grasp his brother in love.  Christianity even now goes the first mile, but mankind languishes and stumbles along in moral darkness because there are so few genuine second milers – so few professed followers of Jesus who really live and love as he taught his disciples to live and love and serve.

The call to the adventure of building a new and transformed human society by means of the spiritual rebirth of Jesus’ brotherhood of the kingdom should thrill all who believe in him as men have not been stirred since the days when they walked about on earth as his companions in the flesh.

No social system or political regime which denies the reality of Spirit can contribute in any constructive and lasting manner to the advancement of human civilization.  But Christianity, as it is subdivided and secularized today, presents the greatest single obstacle to its further advancement.

Ecclesiasticism is at once and forever incompatible with that living faith, growing Spirit, and firsthand experience of Jesus in the brotherhood of man, in the spiritual association of the kingdom of heaven. The praiseworthy desire to preserve traditions of past achievement often leads to the defense of outgrown systems of worship. The well meant desire to foster ancient thought systems effectively prevents the sponsoring of new and adequate means and methods designed to satisfy the spiritual longings of the expanding and advancing minds of modern men.  Likewise, the Christian churches of the twentieth century stand as great, but wholly unconscious, obstacles to the immediate advancement of the real gospel. – the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth.

Many earnest persons who would gladly yield loyalty to the Christ of the gospel find it very difficult enthusiastically to support a church which exhibits so little of the Spirit of his life and teachings, and which they have erroneously taught he founded.  Jesus did not found the so-called Christian church.

Christianity is seriously confronted with the doom embodied in one of its own slogans: ‘A house divided against itself cannot stand.’   The living Jesus is the only hope of a possible Unification of Christianity.  The true church – the Jesus brotherhood – is invisible, spiritual, and is characterized by Unity, not necessarily uniformity.  Uniformity is the earmark of the physical world of mechanistic nature.  Spiritual Unity is the fruit of faith union.  The visible church should refuse longer to handicap the progress of the invisible and spiritual brotherhood of the kingdom of God.  This brotherhood is destined to become a living organism in contrast to an institutionalized social organization. 

There is no excuse for the involvement of the church in commerce and politics; such unholy alliances are a flagrant betrayal of the Master.  And the genuine lovers of truth will be slow to forget that this power institutionalized church has often dared to smother newborn faith and persecute truth bearers who chanced to appear in unorthodox raiment.

It is all too true that such a church would not have survived unless there had been men in the world who preferred such a style of worship.  Many spiritually indolent souls crave an ancient and authoritative religion of ritual and sacred traditions.  But in the brotherhood of Jesus, there is no place for sectarian rivalry, group bitterness, nor assertions of moral superiority and spiritual infallibility.

Most throughout the world do not understand that there is a religion of Jesus separate, and somewhat apart, from Christianity, which has more and more become a religion about Jesus.

If Christianity could only grasp more of Jesus’ teachings, it could do so much more in helping modern man to solve his new and increasingly complex problems.

Christianity suffers under a great handicap because it has become identified in the minds of all the world as part of the social system, the industrial life, and the moral standards of Western civilization; and thus has Christianity unwittingly seemed to sponsor a society which staggers under the guilt of tolerating science without idealism, politics without principles, wealth without work, pleasure without restraint, knowledge without character, power without conscience, and industry without morality. 

The hope of modern Christianity is that it should cease to sponsor the social systems and industrial policies of Western civilization while it humbly bows itself before the cross it so valiantly extols, there to learn anew. From Jesus of Nazareth the greatest truths mortal man can ever hear – the living gospel of the fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man.”

One day I was playing a game.  I asked myself, “If I was God, how would I expand my Kingdom?”  As I sat in contemplation an idea came to me and on its heels a story.

This is that story. 

It’s about Value and it’s about Meaning. 

Those of us born with sight have a certain value for it.  Most often we don’t even think about it.  We take it for granted.  Like having two arms and two legs.  We Value being able to see but it’s subliminal most of the time. 

But a man born blind has a different value for sight.  It’s not something taken for granted.  The value he gives it is expanded, it is greater then what a sighted person would give it on a day-to-day basis. He feels its lack but cannot really miss it, for he never had it. His Value for it is made greater through it’s lack. 

Now imagine a man born with sight that loses it.  This man KNOWS what he’s missing.  The Value to Him becomes even greater for the fact that he had it. 

Taking it a step further, let’s say this man was miraculously healed and could see again. How much greater is his Value of it, since he spent so much time missing it?   

How much greater his appreciation for it?  His feelings of Gratitude?  How much does he Value it now? 

To “value” means to Love.  Expanding the Kingdom is adding greater meaning to it. 

Instead of cursing ourselves for being blind..

Imagine the day when we will all see!

The following link is to an article from the business week section of msn.   It’s titled “the coming consumer crunch”.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/21838083/

My President made a rather tacky comment in addressing a bereaved parent, from my perspective.  He said something along the lines of “if we have Faith”.

So I’m dropping a guantlet.    One of my mittens.

On the mattter of Faith, there is a concept called “forgiveness”.

It goes something like this: 

Our Father, who art in Heaven,
Hallowed be thy name.
Thy Kingdom come,
Thy Will Be done.
On earth as it is in Heaven.

Give us this day our daily bread.
And Forgive us our Debts,
As we Forgive those debted to us.

I highly recommend the recent bankruptcy laws be rescinded.  And our attitude changed in regards to Forgiveness.

Forgiveness of Consumer Debt, across the board…a matter of Faith in Action.

Paid for by the banks, whose usury has been fueling it.