Let's talk about SIN and SALVATION PART 2

Today it’s not so popular to talk about sin. For obvious reasons. People don’t like the burden that they feel that it places on their shoulders. They don’t like the thought of being judged. Yet, if we pay attention, can’t we see that reality judges us all the time? Some people get away with sinning, but I would say that most don’t. Some consequences are obvious: Thieves get caught. Liars get exposed. But often the fear of getting caught or exposed is a punishment in itself. And at least from my experience, sexual immorality drains us mentally and damages our relation to other people. But we seldom see such less obvious consequences. Many instead get angry. They think that religion wants to hinder them from enjoying life for no good reason. Actually I understand this. I think that people forcing religious morals on others has done more damage when it comes to this than anything else. 

I’ve gained a gained a clearer perspective on my own past and present sinfulness lately. One that does not excuse, but explains. And this is important. Explanations. Because when we can explain something we can understand it. We can find acceptance and forgive ourselves. We can start thinking constructively about our situation and look for the best ways of handling it. But before we have diagnosed the problem, we are in the dark. Everything seems chaotic, overwhelming and it seems impossible to get a handle on it.

In some strange way, I thought that all of what I was doing back in “the good old days” was somehow justifiable. I think that this is the case for most people, even though I believe that there are some truly evil people in the world as well. And yet, as I said in the first post, somehow I can’t get away from the feeling that we are somehow still responsible for our actions. Even though we can truly say that, at the time, we didn’t know any better. 

This is a moral problem that I think deserves to be taken seriously. Stated clearly, the problem is as follows: “Basically everyone seem to find justifications for their actions inside their heads. This means that everyone seem to believe that what they are doing is right, no matter how wrong it is. And yet, we seem to be morally responsible for our actions.”

In one sense, as I said in the beginning, moral responsibility hits us directly through the consequences of our actions and the characters that we develop through our choices. But there seems to be something that goes beyond this. Maybe it’s something like this: If God exists, which he does, and he seems to have woven some sort of moral into the fabric of reality, going against this moral might also impact our relationship with God somehow. 

Until I started thinking in the terms of moral responsibility, I was blind to all of my problems. Because I just let go and allowed my impulses to rule me, while thinking that I was making a free choice. 

The change in perspective came with my belief in God. And here is the thing that I find interesting. Before I started believing in God and consequently that there was such a thing as right and wrong, I was not aware that I wasn’t really making conscious choices at all. I thought that I was free when I followed my impulses. It was first when I started to resist my impulses that I realized that they were controlling me.

What I wonder about is where we should cut ourselves some slack and say that “we’re only human” or “I didn’t know any better at the time” and when we should be more harsh with ourselves. How guilty should we feel? Until we start taking faith seriously, we are in the grip of the ways of the world. The world tells us that a lot of things are okay that goes against our faith. And if we engage in everything that the world tells us is okay, and even many things that our cultures encourage, we are going to become corrupted. 

The Bible does say that the truth is written into our hearts. And while this may be true, we may go through our whole lives without learning to really listen. How much blame can be put on our shoulders, if we’ve been taught the wrong things our whole lives and never been given any real reasons to question our beliefs? 

Many questions come to mind when I ponder this. Are we allowed to factor in our own needs when we ponder God’s demands? Should we always stay on the safe side when it comes to issues that God, according to some people, may have a problem with? Obviously, if our choices may send us to hell, the most reasonable course of action would be to abstain from anything that may send us there. No matter how far fetched it seems. But what if this is not how God wants us to live our lives? Can we really have a loving relationship with God if we live this way? Is this what a good relationship with a parent would look like? You abstaining from most things that you enjoy out of fear of punishment, even if you yourself can’t find any good reason why?

The world is, for example, full of people that are saying that Christian rock is sinful music. I personally love bands like Skillet, Rebecca st. James, The Letter Black and Éowyn. And I feel that listening to them actually helps me become a better person. The lyrics are uplifting, encouraging and they have gotten me through many tough times.

But if I could actually get tortured for all eternity for listening to them, I might consider listening only to psalms and classical music that came before Beethoven. Because apparently many people at Beethoven’s time were worried what effect his music might have on people. So better not listen to Beethoven, just to be on the safe side. 

To me, this line of reasoning becomes silly. When someone can point to a Bible verse that tells me, in clear language, that I cannot listen to rock music, I’ll stop listening to Christian rock. 

I think that there is an argument to be made for viewing sin as something that corrupts. So if something does not seem to corrupt us, or cause corruption in general, I think chances are low that it actually is sin. And I have yet to find something that the Bible clearly warns against, that doesn’t corrupt us eventually. Ultimately, I believe that this is between us, our conscience and God. No other human can decide for us if something is a sin or not. If something is having a corrupting influence on us or not.

I would here like to offer a small warning from my own life. I used to live a life that was slowly numbing my emotions, while I was slowly becoming weak, cowardly and irresponsible. I lived without realizing this for many years. This is why sin can be so insidious. We don’t see how it affects us until we have an honest look at ourselves.

Consider the small example above, when you examine your own life and what effect your actions and lifestyle have on you and your character. Just because you manage to tell yourself and others that everything is okay it doesn’t mean that it is. And the consequences are there whether you believe in them or not. I believe that you have the absolute right to do whatever you please with your life. But life is full of traps that are allowed and encouraged by society. Traps that are often hard to spot when you don’t see yourself, your actions and their consequences clearly. Which you almost never do. And somewhere down the line you will have to reap what you sow. 

I do however believe that the more we take these questions seriously and the more honest we are with ourselves, the better our chances are. And ultimately, this really is between you, yourself and God. I don’t wish to tell anyone what is right or wrong, except when it comes to the really obvious, such as killing or stealing. I’m still figuring this out myself. 

Neither do I want to claim that I know the ultimate consequences of our actions. I do however want to encourage anyone reading this to take the question of right and wrong seriously. And to not be too hasty with the conclusions that this deliberation leads to. There is so much potential for wishful thinking here. I know. Because I’ve fooled myself countless times and had to deal with the consequences.

TO PART 1

Photos:

Thunder: Johannes Plenio on Unsplash

Church: Souris on Unsplash

Let's talk about SIN and SALVATION PART 1

Some people say that we all do our best from where we’re at. Others say that we’re all sinners, deserving God’s judgment and that everyone that isn’t the right type of Christian will go to hell. 

These are of course two extremes, but people seem to lean quite heavily towards one of the two sides. I find both views to be too simple for such a complex problem as sin. And both are deeply problematic for many other, more or less obvious reasons.

In this post I want to call for an open conversation and some afterthought, without giving any definite answers. Because there are so many opinions on these difficult subjects and so little nuance. 

So let’s get into it.

The first view seems kind and forgiving on the surface. We already live with a lot of shame and guilt in today’s world, so if we can find a solid argument that leads to the conclusion that we are good just the way we are, this seems like a good thing. But it also seems to negate free will and moral responsibility. Taken to its extreme, this view also seems to imply that if I decide to live a life of lying, cheating, stealing and murder it’s not really my fault, because from where I am it’s the best that I can do.

Some are willing to live with these consequences. But I am not. I believe that free will and moral responsibility is what separates us from animals. I also know that no matter if we believe in free will or not, we live as if we have such a will. Our whole existence, from the individual to the whole global collective, relies on us being responsible for our own actions.

On the other hand, the second view seems incredibly harsh. And it seems to add an element of arbitrariness to something as important as the eternal destiny of our souls. To be clear, what we’re talking about here is the possibility of being tortured forever. If this is the truth, we have no other choice than to accept it and do our best to avoid such a fate. And I would not want to be someone that leads people astray with regards to this. Both for other people’s and my own sake. But our beliefs determine both what world we experience and how we perceive God. So I think that this question deserves some rather serious deliberation before we decide on what to believe. 

And now I haven’t even discussed the problem that is solved by the first view. Namely that we often don’t understand what we do when we do it, or that we may be engaged in something morally questionable. Or the corrupting influence that our culture today clearly has on us. 

I will elaborate on this in the second post. For now, it will suffice for me to say that I believe it to be irresponsible and cowardly to blame all our actions on society. But I also think that it’s too harsh to blame ourselves completely, when, as I said, we’re exposed to so much corruption on a daily basis.

The way out of judgment, according to the view that we are discussing, is to accept Jesus as our lord and savior. But who wouldn’t do that, if they understood that this is what is required to be saved? I guess that it’s possible to reject this offer out of pride. But no one in their right mind, knowing fully what they rejected, would make such a decision.

I believe that there has to be a middle way somewhere. I’ve been struggling with some mental issues throughout my life. Issues that I’ve gained a clearer perspective on the past few years. This means that I so well know how difficult self-control can be. 

It’s easier to see how helpless we are in the face of our own psyches when we’re struggling with minds that turn against us. But I believe that this is more or less true for all of us. Illness or not, we all seem to be a little bit sick. If we try to stand on our own and make ourselves the final authority of our lives, we will be victims of forces beyond our control. Forces in the world and inside ourselves. Our animal nature will persuade us of all kinds of things all on its own, while our thoughts provide us with the reasons that give us the illusion of choice. Then we have the world with its morals and temptations. This seems to be the foundation of sin. And seen in this light, sin does seem more like a failure than a free choice.

But there has to be some choice somewhere. As I said before, free will and moral responsibility seem to be woven into what it means to be human and without them we are reduced to thinking animals. So, where does this leave us? 

Let’s look at what I think that the second view gets right. Even if I have free will and am responsible for my actions, I seem unable to do this all on my own. 

I will present the line of reasoning that is soon to follow in a very condensed form here. It has almost twenty years of struggles, experiences and thinking back and forth behind it. A journey that it would take several books to describe. But this is where I’ve landed. 

My line of reasoning is as follows: The Bible expresses a truth about God and reality that cannot be found anywhere else but the Bible. If it is so, then the death and resurrection of Jesus and what it means for us must also be true. Because this is the absolute focal point of the Bible. It cannot be grasped with the intellect. I do think that there is a whole conversation to be had about the validity of the theology that has grown out of the churches since this event. But the Bible is clear about that everything in it points towards the death and resurrection of Jesus and what it means for us. So I cannot believe that the message of the Bible is inspired by God and then reject what Jesus’ death and resurrection means for us. And I cannot allow my petty, faulty, often arrogant intellect get in the way of this, just because it cannot be understood on an intellectual level.

The interesting thing is that the more I ponder this, the more I seem to get confirmations that it’s written into my heart. Just like the Bible says. It feels more and more real. 

So we seem to need Jesus for our salvation and atonement for our sins. We need to cultivate a relationship with the Holy Spirit so that we have a friend that is always with us and guides us. And we of course need to have the correct beliefs about God and cultivate our relationship with him. Because if we don’t know what we are aiming for, we are bound to miss the mark. Without this foundation everything else crumbles, both on an individual and collective level. We exist to love and worship God. All other gifts from God pale in comparison with this relationship.

Finally, we need a moral system to guide us. To me at least, the best system that I’ve found is the Bible. It shows us how to act in a dangerous world so that we don’t get swept away by the usual storms that surround us. And if a big storm comes, which it will, it gives us the best possible conditions to survive it. The Bible requires us to grow up and take responsibility. To abstain from things that are bad for us and do what’s good for us.

The proof is in the pudding. Societies that reject God always crumble sooner or later. It might look good for a while. Everyone seems free, happy etcetera. But left to their own, our animal natures soon takes over and it’s survival of the fittest from then on. The strongest, brightest and most ruthless win while the rest of the world suffers and falls apart. And if this continues long enough, there are no winners left at all.

I will end this post here. But I hope that you will come back and read my next post on Wednesday, where I try to tie this all together. 

TO PART 2

Photos:

Thunder: Johannes Plenio on Unsplash

Church: Souris on Unsplash

Salvation by faith?

Yes, this is what many seem to believe that the Bible proclaims. Just believe in God and Jesus? Is it really that simple? And that arbitrary? And above all, what about those that cannot force themselves to believe the right things? 

First, I don’t want this post to be perceived as a declaration of beliefs, but rather some reflections upon beliefs and what one can deduce from them.

Let me begin by posing a couple of questions: If I say that I believe, but I don’t let it show in my actions one bit, do I truly believe? That is to say: If I don’t act as if God is watching me, do I truly believe that he is? And if I don’t allow my faith to transform me, do I truly believe? If I think that I need to lie and deceive others to get what I want or to avoid what I don’t want, do I truly believe? If I put my faith in Jesus, but don’t, in all my brokenness, with all my weaknesses and faults, strive to follow him as best I can, do I truly believe in him? 

If I look at my own life through the lense of this reasoning, I can easily see that I often fall short of it. I can see that I have faith sometimes. But I can also see that there are many times that I don’t. 

I took a course in New Testament Greek a few years ago, but never finished it. So I’m hardly qualified to talk about translations. But I remember that the original word in greek for faith is “pistis”. As may of you know, words that on the surface seem to be the same, can have very different meanings to those that use them.

I haven’t read anything more about this word than the translation, but I still believe that the full meaning of it must be something in line with the reasoning in this post. Of course, I write this with the awareness that religion during biblical times, was a natural part of people’s lives in a whole different way than it is today. But there are still numerous examples of people living as if it was no more than mere fantasy. And of people that had a hard time believing that it could actually have a tangible influence on their lives and shape the events in them. Even after having seen miracles, many couldn’t believe that something beyond ordinary reality was happening, as is perhaps best exemplified through Doubting Thomas. 

In other words, it can hardly be enough to just say: “I believe in God and I believe in Jesus Christ as my lord and savior.” But many protestants take it to mean just that, while catholics put more emphasis on the actions. None of this seems to fit neatly with either the message of the Bible or with how reality works. And I believe that the missing component is that we show what we believe through our words, actions and attitudes. If our words, actions and attitudes don’t fit with what we say that we believe, we may have to ask ourselves how strong our faith is. And if the honest answer is one that we don’t like, the best response is probably not to judge ourselves. I would say that the best response would be to seriously ask ourselves the question: “What can I do to make my faith stronger?” I think that the answer to that question has to do with two things: How we strengthen our connection with God and what kinds of persons we choose to be in our day-to-day lives. 

Photo by Timothy Eberly on Unsplash

My spiritual awakening part 8

During our conversation by the mailboxes, Jessica asked me if I wanted to come over for coffee some day. So the next day, I wrote a message on Facebook, asking her if I could take her up on the offer. And a few days later, we were having coffee at her house. 

We ended up talking for several hours. It turned out that we did not just share many spiritual views. We also had many copies of the same books in our bookshelves, we were both vegan, not particularly fond of political correctness, we both came from Värmland originally, had jews among our close ancestors, had lived in Gothenburg at the same time, had backgrounds in the metal subcultures and we shared many other similar life experiences. 

It feels good looking back at this now. We’ve been together for almost four years now and gone through much together. We’ve struggled and had conflicts, like most couples do, but we’ve never lost the respect for each other and we’ve never resorted to petty stuff, such as name-calling. But even so, it’s easy to forget these beautiful moments, when things get tough, the miracles stop (yeah, real miracles! - I’ll get to that later) stop happening and the struggles of everyday life kick in. It’s easy to focus on the bad rather than the good, thereby holding on to the painful memories, while allowing the joyful ones to fade. This is what I, sadly, to a large degree did for a long time. And I did so while Jessica shut her eyes to everything that was not working, while only seeing the good.

And it’s true that you keep memories alive by thinking about them. So if the past is considered to be part of reality, I guess that in a very provable way, you actually do create your reality by what you think about. I guess this would be true about the future as well. If you think about all the good things that might happen, you live in more positive expectations, thereby creating a positive future in the now, independent on what will actually transpire in the future.

My spiritual awakening part 7

Back to my time at the university. After having tried a few different courses, I decided to major in Religious Studies. I had realized that if all of this spiritual stuff was real, which I absolutely believed, then I wanted to dedicate as much time and energy as possible to it, so if I could dedicate my education to it, this was what I was going to do.

In my spiritual search I had started to become drawn to the the occult (the type that wants to be a force for good), so I decided to specialize in Western Esotericism. For quite a while, I even wanted to become a professor. But towards the end I got disillusioned with the whole academia, plus that a few things happened that made me just want to get away from everything. So instead I sold my apartment and moved to a village called Fåglavik, outside of Herrljunga.  

This was where I went through what you could call a second awakening. I moved in next door to the woman that is now my wife. We met by the mailboxes two weeks after I moved in. I was picking up my mail and she came home from the grocery store. I introduced myself and we ended up talking for, as I recall it, about half an hour. It was a pretty long time anyway. She told me that she had a partner that she was living with and I remember thinking: too bad. She was cute. 

I also picked up on when she told me that she liked the energies in Fåglavik. This made me wonder if she had an interest in spirituality or if it was just a figure of speech. 

Little did I know that this meeting would be the beginning of my real spiritual awakening, or that I through meeting Jessica, would learn just how much other people affect how you evolve as a person.

My spiritual awakening part 6

When I first went from atheist/Laveyean satanist, to a believer in God, I was pretty alone with this. I started buying books on religion and spirituality. Any books on these themes really, since I didn’t know exactly what I was looking for. So I started ploughing through anything from purely academic books to books written by Eastern mystics.

I had been living in a very deep unconsciousness when I started to wake up. As I said in an earlier post, I was still partying pretty hard. And I was also largely hanging around with the same friends.

I also had tons of other patterns and other issues that stemmed from this unconsciousness. Actually, I believe that a part of my life’s journey, is to learn how to deal with all of the problems that one causes for oneself. 

One major thing that I did, that I didn’t realize quite recently, was that I pushed down my emotions to the point where I felt kind of shut off and probably acquired some kind of world record in bodily tensions, which in turn messed up my back. I think that this started when my mother, whom I was living with and was very close to, died when I was 13. This messed me up pretty bad. The adults around me at the time did the best they could from where they were, but they honestly didn’t handle the situation very good. Basically they wanted to change a lot of thing in my life, where I still to this day believe that it would have been better, if they would have as much as possible allowed me to continue living as I did with my mother.

A teenager cannot be expected to get a grip on things and start making conscious choices in the face of a tragedy. But honestly, I allowed it, together with the bullying that I also went through in my teens, to continue affecting me through my adult life. I turn 40 this year and I still haven’t let go of the pain. I know it’s a bit of a cliché, but I can feel it as a lump in my chest. Like a heavy, physical lump, pulling me downwards. 

I’ve noticed that a disproportionally large amount of people that are waking up, carry different kinds of traumas from the past. Often from their childhoods and teens. And even though it wasn’t our faults, it’s our responsibility to fix it. Fair or not, no one else is going to do it for us. And the ones that will suffer the most if we refuse are we.

My spiritual awakening part 5

While I was writing this, another memory came up. When I was six years old, one of my classmates asked me if I believed in God. I said no, whereupon he said that he did. This memory stuck with me. My thoughts were already back then something along the lines of “no evidence = no God”, even if I didn’t use those words. 

This shaped my beliefs until I had my initial awakening at 23. 

Obviously, my this awakening left me with a lot of doubts, even though I didn’t recognize them as such. I knew that I had found something precious that I needed to hold on to, but it was resting on a pretty shaky foundation.

I feel that I also need to mention that from my early twenties, I experimented a lot with psychedelics, and not in a very responsible way (sorry for messing up the timeline here). And I started to have what I would call spiritual experiences. At the time, I had no idea that there was a spiritual culture around them. Thich is quite interesting, since I had no prior knowledge that could shape my experiences and I was very anti when it came to religion and spirituality in general. And actually, even before I got robbed, I had started looking into Buddhism a bit, as a consequence of the things that I started experiencing. Since there was no God in most Buddhist teachings, this was a pill that was a little bit easier to swallow, for someone that had called religious people idiots for most of my life. 

My spiritual awakening part 4

I forgot to mention two of important things in the previous post. One of those was that I cannot really remember my thought processes at this time, except for what I’ve just mentioned. But one thing that I do remember, is the other one. You see, I took out one week’s vacation from the post terminal that I was working at when this happened. I just wanted to take a week to myself and think things through. 

The first day of my vacation I was in central Gothenburg and I wanted to find a book to read. I went into the bookstore and my eyes immediately fell on Tomorrow’s God by Neale Donals Walsh. I did have a feeling that I was guided to it, but then I knew next to nothing about what I know today, so I didn’t think much of it. After a while, I didn’t think much of it, even though the book gave me some real food for thought and seemed like just the book I needed to read. Today I don’t believe that everything that is said in it comes from God. Because now I have some experience of hearing the voice of God myself, and I know that it’s often hard to distinguish from one’s own thoughts. 

Now I have lots of experience of being guided to books, movies and documentaries. I believe that God speaks to us all the time. We are just too occupied with thoughts about the past or the future to notice it. So for most of us, myself included, it’s just when God hits us in the face with a message that we actually take notice. I think that the robbery that I told you about in the first post in this series was such a message.

My spiritual awakening part 3

Just because I found meaning didn’t mean that my old patterns were gone of course. And among other things, I had developed the habit of lying to myself and others. Even though I wanted to be a force for good in the world, I was excellent at making myself believe my justifications for bad, destructive behaviour. But even then, I started to remove the worst stuff from my life.

I went back and forth for a bit, basically between living quite clean and partying quite hard. I tried some yoga and picked up a meditation practice. I don’t remember the exact times for everything. But somewhere around 26 I stopped smoking, started working out and went to the university. 

It’s interesting to look back at these things now. To see where I’ve made major decisions that have affected my life in a positive manner. And you can say what you want about the university (you learn a lot of nonsense there), but my time there taught me how to think in a different manner, to understand texts better and to sharpen my speech. I wouldn’t recommend anyone to get into the debt that I am in to get these skills. But I had fun and it changed me quite a lot in a positive way. It was an experience that both boosted my confidence and humbled me. It boosted my confidence to see that I did quite well in an academic setting and humbled me because I was constantly around loads of people that were smarter than me. And again it boosted my confidence, because I got to see how these same smart people could come to really stupid conclusions, when these conclusions were too shaped by their opinions. 

A little further down the road, I realized that my own opinions often skewed my perceptions of the world. It’s always easier to see these things in others than in oneself. 

An important lesson here, is that accurate thinking is very dependent on one’s ability to free oneself from one’s subjective opinions and views of the world. 

My spiritual awakening part 2

Before this event that set me off on my spiritual journey, I was a nihilist. I was into Laveyean satanism (basically ego-affirming atheism, at least on the surface) and I believed that life was completely pointless. You live and you die and when you die nothing matters anymore. I didn’t really care if I died tomorrow or in a hundred years and basically felt that I might as well grab hold of whatever little pleasure that came my way while I was still alive. Not that it was right or wrong. It just seemed like the thing that came most naturally when I just let myself go.

When I went through this back in 2006, I had very few to talk to about it and no one that knew exactly what was going on. And even though I never lost my faith in God, I slipped back into many of my old patterns after a while. But from this point, my life was less chaotic. I would say that meaningfulness was the big thing here. I cared whether I lived or died because I believed that there was a purpose with my life. Looking back on this now, I think that this is actually very significant. Because our attitudes towards life affect how we think, feel and act in pretty profound ways. I know that this could be considered speculation, but at the same time it’s undeniable. When you suddenly feel like there is meaning to your existence, you care if you live or die and then you start caring about your actions. It follows logically that this will have an effect on your actions.

My spiritual awakening part 1

I’ve written a lot about my awakening here on the Blog. But I wanted to collect the essentials under one heading.

For me it started way back in 2006. Basically I had started to question my former atheism a while back, when I got robbed as a direct consequence of the life that I was living. The same day I had had a hunch that something was going to happen, but since I didn’t believe in intuition and only a very vague openness to anything that went outside of the five sense reality, I ignored it and soon forgot it. In the evening it knocked on the door. I opened and four guys that I didn’t know stood outside. You can fill in the rest.

Afterwards I got a very strong feeling that this was God telling me something about the life. Had I known what I know now about religious psychology, I might have been more skeptical. The psychological literature says that traumatic events and rough periods can trigger sudden changes in religious beliefs. But I’m glad that I didn’t know this, because today I know that even though I trust the research on this, nothing happens by accident. Today I know that everything is in God’s hands and that God talks to us through every single little moment in our lives.

There is something strange happening in the world. Part 2

So, what can we do? I believe that the only thing that we can do, is trust that God wants what’s best for us, and do our best to be our best, towards ourselves, each other and the world. I cannot believe in some final judgment where the saved go to heaven and sinners go to hell. There is no way for me to reconcile this with the idea of a good God. Not if God also is omnipotent. I don’t understand how an omnipotent, good god could make/let even the worst person in the history of mankind suffer forever. But I’m open to the possibility that there is something I don’t understand here.

What I do feel is important right now however, is that we do our best to be our best. Not because of some reward or punishment down the road, but because this is what God calls us to do. Because it is what is going to give us the best possible outcomes, and because there might be some hard lessons in store for us otherwise. 

I wish to interject that being our best, does not mean to be flawless. On the contrary, being our best often means to accept and embrace ourselves as flawed creatures fully. To allow ourselves to make mistakes and accept that we sometimes act against our own interests. Because this is part of being human.

So maybe, just maybe, this is not a time where God will let fire rain down on earth in a literal sense, where the saved will get to live in paradise, while sinners will face eternal suffering. Maybe this is rather the time where we really start seeing that living for our own selfish interests and instant gratifications will do nothing good for anyone. Maybe this is a time where we finally see our madness and confusion for what they are and choose to let go of them. 

And I don’t know. Maybe in the end it is as simple as letting go of fear and embracing love. But maybe things are a little more complicated than people make them as well. Maybe we don’t have to be afraid of anything. But maybe, when it comes to certain things that we need to let go of, we will find a few things that are rather difficult to do so with. Maybe things that we have made parts of our identity and that we are very defensive about. I know that this has been the case for me. And it took som pretty deep soul searching to see these things and how they affected my life and ultimately who I was as a person.

There is something strange happening in the world. Part 1

In New Age circles there is talk about “The Ascension Process”. In more biblical contexts, people are talking about “the apocalypse”, “armageddon” or “the end-times”. 

Personally, I find labels like this one problematic, since labels bring with them certain ideas and expectations, exclude others, brings some to the forefront and others to the back. 

A very common human trait seems to be that we want to know. And we don’t just want to know. We want to belong to the group that knows something that the others do not. This is of course one of the many ways that the ego tricks us and I don’t think that we can say “I don’t know” enough these days.

But I find it interesting to look at the ideas of the Ascension Process and The Apocalypse together. Because both of them have some merit. 

On the one hand, we have a huge amount of people reporting strange things happening with them, that seem to point to some magnificent revelation of us being much more than we seem, when we perceive the world through our physical bodies with our physical senses. I’m one of those people.

On the other hand, we have enough biblical end-times prophecies coming true that I believe it warrants at least enough concern, that we cannot just brush it off lightly. We of course have the verse from Matthew that says “You will hear of wars and rumors of wars.” We also have several places in the Bible, where it is talked about how people are going to be in the end-times. One usch place is Timothy 3:2-4: “People will be selfish, greedy, boastful, and conceited; they will be insulting, disobedient to their parents, ungrateful, and irreligious; ³ they will be unkind, merciless, slanderers, violent, and fierce; they will hate the good; ⁴ they will be treacherous, reckless, and swollen with pride; they will love pleasure rather than God.”

I’m not saying this to condemn anyone. I don’t think people are this way because they are bad. And these are all traits that I myself wrestle with. And… I’m actually going to write something completely different here than I thought. I honestly don’t think that these traits are more prevalent today than in Jesus’ times. It’s just that we recognize them as something bad today and we actually have a bigger chance of catching a glimpse of who we really are today than in ancient times. So this could actually be a prophecy that is unequivocally positive throughout. People are as they’ve always been, but now they have a chance to see it and recognize it as something that doesn’t make either themselves or anyone else happy. 

I guess that I believe that we can’t just condemn everything that belong to the category of New Age as bad or evil, because I’ve seen how this stuff works and how it is helping me to become a better person. Besides, what has been crammed into this labe is everything from letting go of negative emotional energy, to tarot cards and astrology, to channeling and contact with spirit guides.  

What is sin?

The concept of sin comes from the greek word “hamartia”, which means “to err” or “miss the mark”. 

Now, I don’t claim to be an authority on sin (I do have a lot of first-hand experience of it though… ;)). So maybe I’m completely wrong here. But I do believe that this original meaning can tell us something that has gotten lost. And I’m not alone in this. Several teachers that go beyond traditional interpretations of the Bible have pointed this out.

Looking at the original meaning, sin seems to imply a failure to do something correctly, rather than an act of evil. And if we look at how life seems to function, I believe this way of looking at sin to be correct.

You see, from my own experience, I’ve come to believe that we always act from a place where we believe that our actions are “right”, in some sense. Even if we don’t believe that there are such things as right, wrong, good or evil, we still in a sense believe that what we do is right. Or, at least not wrong. Since we don’t believe in such a thing as right or wrong. 

Is it possible to downright do something that we know is wrong, without having some justification for our actions? Sure. But those that do it are a very small minority. And they become even fewer when you take away mentally disturbed people. 

So, the complete nihilist might feel somewhere in his or her heart that some actions are wrong. I used to be a nihilist and I can for sure say that I could feel that many of my actions were wrong. But because of my belief-system, I managed to shut my eyes to these feelings. This does not mean that I’m not responsible for my actions. It’s not an excuse. But it is an explanation. An explanation that I believe is sufficient for me not to be considered evil. Corrupt maybe. Nihilism is for sure a corrupt belief-system. Had I persevered in my nihilism, I might even have become so corrupt that I became completely deaf to my conscience. Fortunately, this is something that I will never know.

The more I analyze my actions and other people’s actions, the firmer I become in my belief that most of us are a pretty confused bunch. We don’t really understand why we do what we do, or how it affects us or other people. On top of that, we live in a very confusing world, where we are bombarded with different messages on how to think, feel and act, together with different types of appeals to our lower natures. And let’s not forget that the values (here in the West, that would be Christian values), for good and bad, that we’ve considered as facts for almost two millennia, are being questioned, with no new “truth” about right and wrong to replace them. 

So if you believe in the idea that God hates the sin but not the sinner, how could it make sense that God would judge the sinner? Isn’t sin, logically, a product of wrongful thinking that, logically, cannot be the fault of the sinner? Doesn’t the sinner engage in wrongful thinking because he or she is broken and confused and not because he or she wants to do bad things?