God is love? Not in the early Bible (video)

Wisdom Quarterly; Shalom Auslander Judeo-Christian God in Foreskin's Lament memoir

4. And the Lord said unto Moses,

"This is the land I promised you,

but you shall not enter. Psych."

5. And Moses died.

DEUTERONOMY

Please, Almighty, don't kill me.

1. When I was a child, my parents and teachers told me about a man who was very strong. They told me he could destroy the whole world. They told me he could lift mountains. They told me he could part the sea. It was important to keep the man happy. When we obeyed what the man had commanded, the man liked us. He liked us so much that he killed anyone who didn't like us. But when we didn't obey what he had commanded, he didn't like us. He hated us. Some days he hated us so much, he killed us; other days, he let other people kill us. We call these days "holidays." On Purim, we remembered how the Persians tried to kill us. On Passover, we remembered how the Egyptians tried to kill us. On Chanukah, we remembered how the Greeks tried to kill us.

—Blessed is He, we prayed.

• Buddhism and the God-Idea (PDF)
• My religious education in brief: First Christianity (all of the Abrahamic faiths) tells us, "This is sin, that is sin, and all that over there is sin. Don't do any of those! You're free to go, have fun, but remember: If you do do any them, you had better feel afraid and guilty because, you just wait, you're going to get it! Welcome to Earth. That's just the way it is. Merry Christmas, motherf----r!"

Thou shalt fear, read this book, and obey it!

As bad as these punishments could be, they were nothing compared to the punishments meted out to us by the man himself. Then there would be famines. Then there would be floods. Then there would be furious vengeance. Hitler might have killed the Jews, but this man drowned the world. This was the song we sang about him in kindergarten: "God is here, God is there, God is truly everywhere!."

 

Then snacks, and a fitful nap.

 

I was raised like a veal in the Orthodox Jewish town of Monsey, New York, where it was forbidden to eat veal together with dairy. Having eaten veal, one was forbidden to eat dairy for six hours; having eaten dairy, one was forbidden to eat veal for three hours. One was forbidden to eat pig forever, or at least until the Messiah arrived; it was then, Rabbi Napier had taught us in the fourth grade, that the wicked would be punished, the dead would be resurrected, and pigs would become kosher.

 

—Yay! I said, high-fiving my best friend, Dov.

 

—You should be so excited, said Rabbi Napier, peering with disgust over the top of his thick horn-rimmed glasses, —on the Day of God's Judgment.

 

Cut it, or you're not kosher. (GR)

The people of Monsey were terrified of God, and they taught me to be terrified of Him, too — they taught me about a woman named Sarah who would giggle, so He made her barren; about a man named Job who was sad and asked, —Why?, so God came down to the Earth, grabbed Job by the collar, and howled, —Who the f*ck do you think you are?; about a man named Moses, who escaped from Egypt, and who roamed through the desert for forty years in search of a Promised Land, and whom God killed just before he reached it—face-plant on the one-yard line—because Moses had sinned, once, forty years earlier. His crime? Hitting a rock. And so, in early autumn, when the leaves choked, turned colors, and fell to their deaths, the people of Monsey gathered together in synagogues across the town and wondered, aloud and in unison, how God was going to kill them: —Who will live and who will die, they prayed, —

• who at his predestined time and who before his time,
• who by water and who by fire, 
• who by sword, 
• who by beast, 
• who by famine, 
• who by thirst, 
• who by storm, 
• who by plague, 
• who by strangulation, and 
• who by stoning.

Then lunch, and a fitful nap.

 

Man, they had it rough. So actually I helped God.

It is Monday morning, six weeks after my wife and I learned that she is pregnant with our first child, and I am stopped at a traffic light. The kid doesn't have a chance. It's a trick. I know this God; I know how He works. The baby will be miscarried, or die during childbirth, or my wife will die during childbirth, or they'll both die during childbirth, or neither of them will die and I'll think I'm in the clear, and then on the drive home from the hospital, we'll collide head-on with a drunk driver and they'll both die later, my wife and child, in the emergency room just down the hall from the room where only minutes ago we stood so happy and alive and full of promise.

 

That would be so God. More
 
Why good Christians must side with Israel
(Corey Gil-Schuster) Want to know what Israelis and Palestinians in the Middle East think about Israel's war? Ask and I will get answers. Want to contribute? Go to gofundme.com/Ask-Project. People ask Israeli Jews, Who is Jesus to you? (Thanks, Sheldon).

A Zen Master's Guide to the Bible (video)

Ashley Wells, Amber Larson (eds), Wisdom Quarterly; Clark Strand (spiritualityhealth.com)

COMING SOON: Wisdom Quarterly investigates the gay raping perverted Bible.

A Zen Master's Guide to the Bible

Short intro to world’s first Buddhist Bible study group

In the fall of 1999, my family and I were traveling aboard a commercial airliner out of Memphis, Tennessee, when the cabin filled with smoke and the plane suddenly plunged.

 

In popular cinema, the flight crew are all over such moments -- stowing trays, returning seats to upright positions, making announcements designed to get your attention but not cause undue alarm.

 

In real life, they’re nowhere to be found. It’s easy to follow a manual when the plane seems to be winning its battle against gravity. When it loses, suddenly the term “safety belt” is exposed for the lie it always was. At that moment, you feel it all at once -- I suspect everyone feels it. That’s when you start to pray.

Zen-Daddy, are we going to die?

As it turned out, that was also when my 6-year-old daughter, Sophie, reached across the aisle to hold my hand. “Daddy, are we going to die?” she asked. I’d forgotten that young children pray to their parents in such moments. Not knowing what to say, I closed my eyes, took a deep breath, and asked the same question myself, listening to see if anyone would reply. And, indeed, I did hear a voice.

 

Speaking in a whisper, with imperturbable calmness, it said four simple words directly into my ear.

“I don’t think so.”

I'm a Black Middle Easterner in the Bible.

Bizarre as those words were, coming from the one being in all the universe who ought to have been able to answer that question with a yes or a no, they calmed me down a bit, and I actually was able to relax. So I repeated them to my daughter, who passed them along to my wife, Perdita, who reached over to hold hands with my son, Jonah, who, like his biblical namesake who slumbered at the bottom of the storm-tossed boat, remained blissfully asleep throughout the whole ordeal. And 10 minutes later, we were safely on the ground.

“I don’t think so” wasn’t an answer you’d have gotten from the God I grew up with down South -- the one with an opinion on everything political and a punishment for every liberal act. That God was certain about everything, especially when it came to homosexuals, feminists, Hindus, and the Jews. He’d have killed a planeload of ordinary sinners to get one certified Christ-killer, or saved us all to his greater glory on a whim.

I’d run as far away from that God as I could get, which turned out to be a Buddhist monastery, and even that sometimes felt too close. But a God who admitted calmly -- serenely, even -- that he didn’t know for certain whether my family and I were going to die? That was another matter entirely. [We felt the same experience watching the cartoon God of Marjane Satrapi's "Persepolis" and the man God of Alanis Morrisette's line in All I Really Want: "I am humbled by his humble nature."]

(History Channel) This is some of the literature cut out of the Bible like it never existed. Was it God's first draft, or did men know better [than the seers and composers of the very ancient Sumerian, Egyptian, Babylonian, Phoenician, and Bedouin texts, myths, and histories that became the Hebrew/Jewish and Christian Bible]?

"When Jesus was a boy, did he kill another child? Was Mary Magdalene a prostitute -- or an apostle? Did Cain [and Lot] commit incest? Will there be an apocalypse, or is this [a] trick to scare us? The answers to these questions aren't found in the Bible as we know it, but they exist in scriptures banned when powerful leaders deemed them unacceptable for reasons both political and religions. BANNED FROM THE BIBLE reveals some of these [back stories and explanations] and examines why they were "too hot for Christianity [to handle]."

It gave me the feeling that we would be taken care of either way -- that, in fact, we couldn’t lose as long as we surrendered [gave up, let go, islam, accept what is] fully to whatever came next. If God could relax enough to stay open to what the next moment would bring -- whether it brought a soft touchdown or a fireball of shrapnel -- then, God willing, so could I.

Meeting the God of My Understanding

Young bodhisattvas Jay and Sid (Mr_Walker/flickr)

That was my first experience of what the 12-step recovery movement calls “the God of my understanding.” That God wasn’t interested in theology and had a hard time telling Jains [vegetarian Indian pacifists from a teaching slightly older than Buddhism] from Jehovah’s Witnesses or jihadis [jihad= "struggle with oneself"] from Jews.

But he came when you called him -- even if he sometimes turned out to be a “she” or an “it,” and was so indefinable that, in most cases, you just gave up and let the matter slide. In relationship with that God, the emphasis was on realizing your dependence upon a power beyond the self.

Whether that power manifested in the laws of physics or in random acts of kindness mattered little, as long as you were willing to ask for help and wait for guidance, even if the help wasn’t always what you expected or the guidance turned out to be, “Relax and trust. And stay open to whatever happens next.”

Religion and Math are terrible things (Calvin & Hobbes).

That was a revelation that had eluded me for more than 20 years of Zen practice. By the time I found myself on that plane out of Memphis, I’d been a Buddhist monk, a senior editor for the largest Buddhist magazine in America, and a meditation teacher for more than a decade. But I still hadn’t learned how to live fully in the moment.

The trick is to believe in a power beyond the self, even if you couldn’t say exactly what that power was. I got on another plane the next morning, a different person than I had been the day before, although I didn’t know it yet. I should have realized that my days as a Zen teacher were over, but it took a while to grasp what had happened.

When I finally understood it, I did something very peculiar and started the world’s first Buddhist Bible study group.

A New Spiritual Community

You can't just invent your own user-friendly Messiah

That January, I posted a flier around Woodstock, New York, advertising a new kind of spiritual community called “Koans of the Bible,” after those paradoxical sayings of the ancient Zen masters [like Jesus, whom the BBC Documentary says was a Buddhist monk as does other evidence from Nicolas Notovitch, Swami Abedananda, and other researchers] that made sense only when you learned to stop making sense of them.

 

It read, in part: You are invited to participate in an ongoing study of the mystical teachings of the Bible. Participation in the group requires nothing more than a willingness to spend some time with the Bible’s more puzzling stories, parables, and sayings -- from Genesis to the book of Revelation -- reading them as a question, not an answer; cultivating openness...

Please note, however: This study group is ecumenical [welcoming of all traditions] and is, therefore, open to anyone of any religion whatsoever -- or no religion at all. These last words were meant to warn pious churchgoers that we welcomed atheists. 

After all, this was a spiritual study group, not a religious one. We weren’t out to convince anyone of anything. They could bring the God of their understanding to reading the Bible, even if that was no God at all. More

• 91-year-old American Meditation Master Ruth Denison
• Original Aramaic/Hebrew word "SIN" is mistranslated
• Sin: A History - Persian Aramaic for commercial debt?

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The Bible is definitely not cool, but it is interesting...and sexist, incestuous, racist, violent, patriarchal, elitist, and re-written as well as heavily edited by humans. The great Prof. Elaine Pagels sheds light on the lost "Gnostic Gospels," texts that help explain the big Book.

ZEN LOVE: "From one's heart extend with compassion a kind word, for that one kind word the other person may change, and you yourself may change" (Ara Sensei/michaelsaso.org).

The stories banned from the Bible (video)

Pfc. Sandoval, Ashley Wells, CC Liu, Wisdom Quarterly

(ReligionHistory) "Banned from the Bible" examines the forbidden stories in ancient gospels, how they were rediscovered, and what they might mean to the world today.
 

The new Republican Jesus

When Jesus was a boy, did he kill another child? Was Mary Magdalene a "prostitute" -- or an apostle? Did Cain commit incest? Will there be an apocalypse, or is this the JudeoChristian God's trick to scare us?

The answers to these questions aren't found in the Bible as we know it, but they exist in scriptures banned when powerful leaders deemed them unacceptable for reasons more political than religious. "Banned From the Bible" reveals some of these alternative tales and examines why they were "too hot for Christianity."

• VIDEO: "The Lost Gospels" (Biblical Mysteries Explained)

Married rabbi with wife Mary

The Life of Adam and Eve, The Book of Enoch, The Book of Jubilees, The Infancy Gospel of Thomas, The Gospel of Mary, The Apocalypse of Peter... these are just a few of the books that were intentionally left out of the official Christian Bible. 

 

The reasons for their exclusion provide astonishing insight into the concerns of Church leaders and scholars responsible for spreading the Christian faith (and the hegemony of Greco-Roman "Western" empires) around the world. It is an illuminating look at early Christian religious history.

 

(BBC) The truth is stranger than fiction. Inconvenient facts make

sense to solve a great mystery. Was Jesus once a Buddhist monk?

When Jesus was African/Middle Easterner (W)

One hundred and fifty years after the birth of St. Issa (Jesus), a man named Marcion (of Sinope) decided that a Greek or Christian Bible was needed to replace the Jewish or Hebrew Bible. Church leaders opposed Marcion's banning of the Hebrew books, but they did agree that Christianity would benefit from having a "Bible" of its own, a New Testament.

 

Jewish rebel deified as Greek god, son of Zeus

After Emperor Constantine the Great converted to Christianity in the 4th century, a serious effort was made to compile a Christian Bible, one that included both the Hebrew scriptures (Old Testament) and emerging Christian manuscripts (New Testament). It took another 40 years before a final list of New Testament books was officially canonized by the church. Many of the most popular were excluded. Upon examination today, many of these writings attempt to resolve inconsistencies and questions raised from reading the Bible.

American Hegemony and Power

Growing by invasion and force

The Monroe Doctrine is a policy of the United States introduced in1823 that stated that further efforts by European nations to colonize land or interfere with states in North or South America would be viewed as acts of aggression, requiring U.S. intervention. At the same time, the doctrine noted that the USA would neither interfere with existing European colonies nor meddle in the internal concerns of European countries. The doctrine was issued at a time when nearly all Latin American colonies of Spain and Portugal had achieved or were at the point of gaining independence from the Portuguese Empire and Spanish Empire. Peru consolidated their independence in 1824, and Bolivia would become independent in 1825, leaving only Cuba and Puerto Rico [now under de facto American control with Guantanamo and semi-statehood] under Spanish rule. The US, working in agreement with Britain, wanted to guarantee that no European power would move in. It was the USA's time to colonize the world (beginning, it seems, with Mexico and the Philippines).

(The Onion) Satirical look at things that should make the mainstream news

Occupy Movements live on (occupytogether.org)