Blind faith is belief grounded in denial – the trick is to have faith while refusing to live in denial!
No love of, by or for God-Allah or Jesus Christ can ever nullify our ordinary, unconditional impersonal moral relationship with ourselves and each other as ordained by the source of all being!
The Christian-Muslim Problem In The World Of Today.
Christian Or Muslim, It Is Not About Us! As modern Christians and Muslims, we have been trained to expect that the moral relationship we owe to ourselves and each other as human beings is real only if we can enjoy it as something experienced by others for it being extended by them to us personally as Christians or Muslims (as the world’s way of assuring us that we are important and matter – that we have a right to feel good about ourselves in the world).
For obvious reasons, we do not get this kind of personal experience from others very often. We never have. So what we do is what we have always done in the past stretching back some 2000 years, which is to project our faith in it, our need for it, our love of it, and our getting of it (all to feel whole in the world) onto our inventions of a personalized God-Allah and/or Jesus Christ – all of which are radical forms of abject human denial in the extreme.
In effect, what this means is that as Christians and Muslims in the image of God we have never really believed that an ordinary, unconditional moral relationship, personal or otherwise, even exists between ourselves and other human beings as ordained by God!
The Truth We Refuse To Embrace.
The truth is that the moral relationship we owe to ourselves and each other becomes real, not when it is experienced by others as something bestowed from them upon us as Christians or Muslims personally, but only when we have the experience of unconditionally extending it outward from ourselves to others in good faith, which means regardless of the beliefs and/or actions of others, in other words, impersonally.
If we have indeed received it personally fine, the reality of it works like a loop of personal reciprocity from one to another, but not necessarily between the same people originally. If we haven’t received it personally, however, we must then unconditionally extend it anyway impersonally. The reason is that as part of our nature as human beings, the impersonal moral relationship we owe to ourselves and each other is unconditionally ordained to be so by the source of all being. Period! No excuses! No alibis! No scapegoating!
By the same token, however, we MUST also demand of others that they acknowledge and abide by the same impersonal standard for the same reason, which is – once again - the impersonal moral relationship we owe to ourselves and each other is unconditionally ordained to be so by the source of all being. Period! No excuses! No alibis! No scapegoating!
Accordingly, it is impersonal acceptance and accord, which is the agreeable giving away to others of our ordinary moral relationship to ourselves and one another, and not denial, which is the exclusionary and gratuitous projection of the whole process onto some imagined and personalized relationship with an abstract mental construct up in the sky, that makes us feel legitimately wanted, important, secure and purposeful in the world, thereby allowing us to rightfully have a good opinion of ourselves in the world.
The truth, after all, is in the impersonal process, not in some personal payoff!
Obama Should Have Said Last Week What Bush Should Have Said On 9/11/01!
“I pray to Jesus every night,” Barak Obama was quoted recently as saying in response to a rumor that he is a Muslim.
For reasons that will become clear shortly, what he should have added, I believe, is the following: “…but that doesn’t relieve me of my ordinary impersonal and unconditional moral relationship to myself and to you, my people, as ordained by God!”
Why I Believe Obama Should Have Said This!
The politician who can passionately invoke the inalienable truth of this feeling in good faith will start a world movement that will revolutionize the human experience for all time to come. In so doing, all religious fundamentalism and the wanton terror it so lovingly imposes on the world in the name of the divine will soon disappear from the scene.
In addition to this, the all-too-lethal, self-serving mediocrity of the present-day military-industrial-political-religious-educational-media complex that now seeks to snuff out the natural life inherent in every thing and being that dwells in the world will also be driven out of existence. As a sorely needed added bonus, the earth will be cleansed as well.
So What Are We Really Talking About Here?
Genesis is wrong! God is no isolated, separate and apart, discret "thing" in and of itself, but rather the truth of all potentiality - all possibilities - in and as The Indeterminate (i.e. impersonal) One, which is, in part, the world of all things and being as the fullness of God in the here and now. Accordingly, the caring of the Divine in the world is impersonal. Moreover, humankind are not given personal dominion over the earth! “The earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof; the world, and they that dwell therein.” --Psalm 24:1
What is that ordinary, impersonal and unconditional moral relationship we humans all have with ourselves and each other as ordained by God? It is two-fold:
It is to (1) always love and respect one’s self so that one only lives impersonally, which is to say ecumenically in mutual, interdependent freedom with others, from one’s own heart and mind as informed by God’s impersonal truth, which dwells within, not according to somebody else’s self-serving personal fears or ambitions conjured up only for the purpose of aggrandizing their own economic, political and/or religious power, profit and privilege at the expense of everybody, and everything, else, even as we …
(2) simultaneously love and respect each other enough to really listen in good faith to how people feel, are slow to anger and quick to cooperate and show appreciation and gratitude for the gift of all things and being as All in All and All as All in and as God’s presence and truth in God’s world.
As always, in everlasting peace, joy happiness and prosperity, good luck to us all.
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