What are the causes of the developmental change ("evolution") in human consciousness throughout history?

A clear statement description of the way that human consciousness has changed throughout recorded history (and inferred from pre-history) is something I associate with Rudolf Steiner and his later follower Owen Barfield; who both explained it in terms of each human being having undergone multiple reincarnations. The changing nature of consciousness was therefore assumed to be caused by the accumulated experience and learning - hence maturity - of the reincarnating spirit. 

Ultimately, the underlying cause of these assumed multi-reincarnational changes was tacitly assumed to be the divine will; which sought to provide multiple and additive experiences to spirits. 

This was supposed to operate by a process that starts with pure (immaterial) spirit beings, leads down into denser and denser incarnations (such as ourselves), and ultimately (as its highest goal) leads back up to purely spiritual existence. 

But I do not share these assumptions about reincarnation. 

More importantly I regard Jesus Christ as having provided Man with the opportunity of resurrected human life in Heaven - which is a permanent state of embodied incarnation. 

In short: as of 2025 (and for nearly 2000 years) God does not want us to reincarnate after death - but instead to follow Jesus Christ to resurrected eternal life in heaven. 

Thus, for me, the objective of spiritual development is not a "spiritual being"; but instead a resurrected and embodied Man, of which the model was the resurrected Jesus.    

However, since I regard the evolutionary development of Mankind as a reality, but reject the Steiner/ Barfield explanation; I feel a need to explain this in terms of causality. I believe that there are several interacting causes, working at different levels. What follows is my current understanding. 

1. God's plan

At the deepest level of causation; I believe that God (our Heavenly Parents) desires that divine creation should lead first to divine children, and then towards the idea of "divine adults" - God seeks to encourage childlike children to develop into grown-up friends. 

(Much as it is usual (but with significant exceptions) to expect and hope that our own mortal children will not remain immature and childlike; but will grow-up to make the choice to become "best friends" with their parents.) 

In other words; divine creation is structured towards the generation of God's children - such as we now are; and that we children should be enabled and encouraged to "grow up" further, in order to mature towards becoming beings of the same kind and level as our Heavenly Parents. 

In yet other words; God desires that we would (through time) choose to develop towards becoming fully divine, fully loving, creators - and then to participate in the eternal work of divine creation. It was Jesus Christ who first achieved this, and who made it possible for others to follow Him in this. 

The goal is that our Heavenly Parents should cease to be the only beings at their level of divinity, but should build a continually growing family of grown-up children of God (together with the extended family of those beloved children who - whether by spiritual nature or current-choice - remain spiritually "immature": i.e. not full-creators.  

2. Incarnation of progressively more mature spirits

One of the ways that God influences the direction of creation, is through the nature of pre-mortal spirits that are incarnated into mortal life on earth. 

My impression is that when the earliest-known Men were first incarnated, their consciousness was more like that of young children. And incrementally throughout history, progressively more-grown-up spirits were incarnated; who tended to mature towards what we would now recognize as more adult modes of consciousness. 

So, at present and overall, spirits are incarnated that spontaneously mature to a kind of spiritual adolescence - beyond which further maturation depends on various individual factors, including personal will and choices. 

(I suspect that while spiritual maturation from childhood to adolescence is mostly spontaneous and involuntary; maturation beyond spiritual adolescence can only ever be attained by active alignment with God's nature and creative will, and by personal choice - the choice to live only by love.)

Maturity is most obviously revealed in terms of thinking and self-awareness... Modern Men are aware of our-selves and the distinction from the world and others; and we live subjectively in our stream of conscious thoughts - in ways that did not happen (or only in rare individuals) in the past. 

3. Metaphysical assumptions and ideology

Due to the nature of the human society into-which modern humans are born (which is partly a consequence of past and present choices by other people; under the influence of demonic beings) - modern Men assume that ultimate reality is dead (unalive), material (not spiritual); and operates solely by physical-mechanical causes or non-causally/ chaotically (ie. "randomly").  

I believe that these bottom-line assumptions concerning reality have a profound and malign effect on modern Man's consciousness.

What this typical modern metaphysics does to our consciousness; is to transform self-awareness into a false conviction of inescapable existential alienation - the implicit yet wrong belief that we are alone in our thinking, which is merely subjective: detached from reality. 

And this leads onto the typically modern mind-set of existential despair; variously countered by the attempt to overwhelm it with hedonism, and/or to obliterate thinking by such means as constant distraction by powerful stimuli, strong emotions, intoxication, and the like. 

In sum: an element in the changing of consciousness is the prevalent ideology of our times. And in more general terms, it would be expected that metaphysics, theology, and ideology would often (although not necessarily) tend to shape human consciousness in particular directions - which is, of course, exploited as much as possible by the purposive powers of supernatural evil. 

4. Direct spiritual contact between people, and other beings

I believe that there is potentially a direct (mind-to-mind, as it were) contact between living people, between the living and some of those who have died, and other beings. 

Insofar as this happens (for instance, among those people in mutually-loving relationships) among people whose consciousness's are changing for the reasons described above; this is the basis for shaping, perhaps amplifying or instead reversing, changes in consciousness that may be directional through time.

Put differently; we each inhabit a very selective thought-world - one that changes throughout our lives, and includes new, different, other-minds (alive, dead, or potentially not human). 

This, then, is another reason for changes in consciousness.  

5. The comfort and guidance of the Holy Ghost

The Holy Ghost is a potential source of comfort and guidance for those who follow Jesus, and this contact naturally affects a human consciousness and its development through time. 

Such interaction with the Holy Ghost has the nature of a chosen, mutual, and specific relationship between one spiritual Being and another. 

Which means that I disagree with those who conceptualize the Holy Ghost as providing some kind of blanket effect on Mankind, or any particular group of people. 

(I also disagree with those who regard the evolution of consciousness as driven by any kind of quasi-physics-like influence on the planet and its inhabitants... I mean those who see the maturation of consciousness as driven by an externally-applied influence - such as increasing frequency or vibrational level; or some kind of transformation of spiritual force, or an increase in spiritual energy; or indeed by astrological change.)

  

 

As a general comment - I think it is probably necessary to emphasize (to myself, if not other others!) that the causal mechanisms that contribute to the developmental evolution of human consciousness, are all aimed at the individual human spirit. 

I am increasingly sure that God does not, and never has, operated primarily at the level of human groups. 

We ought therefore to try and stop thinking habitually about Men In The Mass; when it comes to understanding fundamental spiritual matters.

 

The false-impression that God is concerned primarily with the salvation of particular tribes or particular churches; was I think an (inevitable) artefact of an earlier stage of human consciousness; among Men who (inevitably - but with some few exceptions) experienced reality in this groupish way.

That is to say: The earlier we go in history, the more groupish was human consciousness - and individuals were not, and did not feel nor aspire to be, detached from the "group mind". 

But as of Now - things are very different. From adolescence onward, modern people are spontaneously detached from the group mind, and must therefore be influence and controlled ("micro-managed") by multiple and constantly-applied external and perceptual inputs - laws, rules, propaganda etc.)  

Nowadays, such groupishness in considering Christian theology is simply an error - but no longer an inevitable error; being instead the consequence of (for example) false metaphysics, wishful thinking, despair, dreadful fear - or a simple paucity of alternative ideas.  

Therefore; we should understand the evolution of consciousness as the averaged outcome of our innate (inborn) spiritual-nature; with a multitude of individual human choices; concerning the outcomes of individually-tailored ("bespoke") interactions between each individual person with God and the Holy Ghost. 

 

Direct Knowing or Intuition... How I try-to Do It - in practice

In the past (and perhaps still, in other cultures) men spontaneously experienced "contact" with gods or God, the divine - more generally, spirits, the dead/ ghosts, and many other supernatural/ paranormal forms of interaction such as with remote persons or animals. 

These also include sensory/ perceptual experiences such as the seeing of spiritual visions, or hearing voices and having conversations 

But here-and-now it seems that adult and healthy (or healthy-ish) modern Men - and I count myself as pretty typical in this respect - do Not spontaneously have such experiences; nor can we have such experiences in alert, healthy, and clear consciousness; no matter how we strive. 

"Contact" of this sort only happens spontaneously to modern Men in states of lowered consciousness; such as dreaming sleep, trance, intoxication; or when there is brain dysfunction in psychosis (including with brain diseases, such as dementias). 

To my mind, the difficulty or impossibility of having these supernatural/ paranormal experiences of contact and interaction, points to the conclusion that the old sensory/ perceptual experiences (while they may lead to good) are ultimately retrograde, "atavistic", and often motivated by a nostalgia and desire to revert to an earlier (less conscious, more automatic, less free) phase of the development of consciousness (which we may recall from early childhood, or have imaginatively experienced).

But given the mundane and alienated nature of typical modern consciousness, and more importantly (indeed vitally) the necessity for each of us to receive personal guidance from the Holy Ghost in particular - given these needs, we must develop other ways of establishing some kind of experienced-interaction or "contact" with spirit Beings.

Indeed, I have often said that this kind of interaction is the basis for metaphysical reflection on the fundamental nature of reality. It is the basis of that "intuition" upon which everything depends - and which I have variously called "direct knowing", or sometimes "heart thinking" or "primary thinking". 

The point is How To Do It?  

In my experience, I think this contact works by an awareness of such contact while actually speaking, writing, or thinking. 

It is a "direct" form of knowing, because (unlike the past and other cultures) there is no sensory aspect.

What it is like is a deep and simple sense of affirmation or rejection, support or opposition, yes or no. 

Such a "feeling" is indeed the deepest awareness of which I am capable. 

This does not mean the experience is infallible, but that it is the best I can do - here and now. 

Because the experience is deep, it is not reached as a result of inference from other kinds of evidence, nor does the awareness come with "proof" of itself - although naturally evidences, proofs, excuses and the like can be derived or contrived secondarily - after the guidance. 

Since this mortal life is mostly about what we ought to try to do, here and now - in these particular circumstances - the experience-of-itself suffices.

    

As an example; this is how I have developed my fundamental theological convictions. For instance, I needed to decide whether "God" was single or a dyad: more exactly I wanted to know whether God meant a Heavenly Mother, as well as Father. 

I had come across the idea of God as originally eternally-married man and woman from Mormon theology, and then later the work of William Arkle. I had felt an immediate stirring and attraction to this knowledge, an experience that proved robust to re-acquaintance.  

To discover its truth, to discover whether I ought to assume such a reality; I wrote about it. Writing for myself, in a journal; candidly and without an audience. 

I also talked, a little, about the idea. But it is very rare to find anyone with whom such fundamental (metaphysical) subjects can be discussed in a way that is an be both unselfconsciously confident on my part, and with sufficiently engaged and sustained attention on the other person's side. 

So verbal discussion is, in practice, seldom of much value - which is why writing (or indeed speaking aloud to oneself, for those who cannot or do not write) can be so helpful. 

Furthermore; I thought about the subject in solitude and quiet (i.e. I prayed, in one sense of praying) - with attention to what followed in this deep level of awareness. 

To explain further: this is something done with a high level of conscious awareness; because it is necessary to have two "things" in mind simultaneously: both our question and the inner-awareness of a response from another Being.

To me, this puts a tight limit on the kind of question that can be asked - the question must be worked upon until I have it absolutely clear and simple in my mind; and as soon as I have done this, and made the decision to seek some kind of guidance or opinion, and have attained a quietly attentive and concentrated mind-set: the answer arrives immediately. 

The source of this inner endorsement (or rejection) is varied, and something we can decide - or, at least, we can decide "who we are asking" to the extent that we can validly conceptualize another Being. 

For instance, and most importantly, the Holy Ghost is (by my current best understanding) the ascended Jesus Christ and his spouse Mary Magdalene. If I address this understanding of the HG, then the response depends to some extent on the validity of my conception. 

If instead (like mainstream traditional Christians) I regarded the Holy Ghost as the spirit aspect of the Trinity; then this might well have an effect on the shape of my question, and therefore the answer. 

Indeed, if the question is "improperly addressed" then there may be no answer. 

That has been my understanding of what is going on when I am seeking an answer to a question rooted in false premises, false assumptions. Nothing happens. 

Then there is the problem of the source of the answer - in particular whether there might be a situation where a demon was to impersonate a spirit of Good (an angel), or the Holy Ghost? 

My only answer, and I think the only real and relevant answer, is that this depends on our motivations and intentions and general stance with respect to God and divine creation.  

If (for instance) we are really seeking answers for selfish purposes; or if we a really aligned with Satan and against God; then such motives and stances are bound to distort and subvert the answers we get.  

The only conclusion is to strive for thorough honesty; and a vital part of honesty is to try and be as conscious as possible of our real assumptions, motives etc; and then as clear and explicit as possible in describing these to our-selves. 

Can we be misled and wrong? Yes of course! There is no recipe for being right. 

Should be strive to be absolutely certain, with no possibility of wrongness, doubt or change of mind? No!

In this mortal world we operate from very distorting circumstances, such that being ultimately and universally absolutely correct in all significant respects surely cannot be the most important thing from God's perspective.

What typically matters is that we personally get things sufficiently right in the situation in which we now find ourselves. 

Other problems will arise, situations will change, we ourselves will change - but that is all uncertain, indeed it is (because of the agency of beings) profoundly contingent. 

What we must deal with in our mortal lives occurs as some primary issue, here-and-now... And Christians will have faith* that sufficient personal capability and external guidance is always available for everybody to accomplish this adequately - albeit never "perfectly."

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*Note: Will have faith, because we can be confident that God-the-creator is also our loving Father (or our parents, as I believe); who therefore has individual concern for the salvation and spiritual development of each-and-all of his children. So we-ourselves and our circumstances have-been and are-being created that way. Since this loving God is creating all the time, we know that our situation always has an attainable positive path forwards - for as long as our lives are sustained.

"Masculinity" and "femininity" versus the actual person of Mother in Heaven

While I assume that God is Dyadic (a Heavenly Father and Mother) - this is something I have not really grasped, not does it correspond much with daily experience. 

Partly this may be because we Christians are intended to relate primarily to Jesus, rather than the primary creator; but partly it is because I tend to get "hung-up" on inaccurate and unhelpful assumptions relating to principles, rather than persons. 

An example of an unhelpful/ misleading conceptualization would be that of Coleridge's "polarity" between "two contrary forces, the one of which tends to expand infinitely ["masculine], while the other strives to apprehend or find itself in this infinity [feminine]". 

One such assumption is that habit of thinking of male and female in terms of being specific exemplifications of those abstractions: "masculinity" and "femininity"... Abstractions that are somehow floating unattached beyond time and space, and sort-of imposing-themselves-upon Beings (as it were to make them men, or women)...! 

Really; things must be otherwise. 

Our Heavenly Parents are those two Beings who (in actuality, not by any prior necessity) first committed to eternal love; and on that basis began divine creation. 

It is their two natures, originating as two Beings, that ramify through all of creation since.  

Thus male and female both structure and power creation; but in this personal way - derived from actual living, conscious, developing Beings; and not therefore in terms of abstract metaphysical forces or fields or tendencies. 

As (always?) with metaphysical realities, it is not possible to derive the metaphysics from empirical specifics (such as actual men and women) - nor is it possible to derive any particular empirical specifics from the metaphysical assumptions. 

If the universe truly is derived from a dyadic God; then that universe includes everything that exists, has existed, or could exist - and this reality (this Primary Creation) in which we dwell; includes not just divine creation, but also entropy/death and purposive evil. 

What this seems to mean - among many other things! - is that our experience of Mother in Heaven ought not to be pre-conceptualized in terms of an ideal earthly-mortal Mother, nor any other archetypal female conceptualization. 

Of course, if that is what we have decided in advance that we will find, then that is what we will find - and any female archetype really is there; but only as a selective, hence distorted, part of the reality. 

This stricture applies both to Goddess conceptualizations; and to the Blessed Virgin Mary - whom I regard as ultimately a selective and distorted representation of the reality of the actual person of Mother in Heaven.

(Albeit the veneration/worship of the Mary, Mother of Jesus has - in some times and places - been very valuable as such; and IMO far preferable overall to an exclusively "masculine" conceptualization of God.)

I think the difficulties of you and I experiencing the person of Mother in Heaven are therefore partly due to the nature of God the Creator - who is not personal in this world, in the way that Jesus Christ is personal; partly it is due to the ultimately-dyadic nature of God (and the consequent difficulty of disambiguating Father and Mother, who are necessarily participating-in each-other); and partly due to our usually false expectations concerning what She is like.   

So, what is She like? 

The best answer is: She is like who-She-is. 

...Which can be known - as here on earth - by personal experience, by getting-to-know a person. 

But She is not to be known in terms of exemplifying a list of supposed-female attributes, nor can any list of attributes validly communicate her reality.

What makes Good good?

All Christians believe that God is Good and loves us. 

But what does this actually mean? 

What does it mean to be Good? 

In particular; is Good a matter of preference merely, as modern materialistic ideology would have it. Are Good and evil "relative" and interchangeable? 

What this "relativism" of values seems to mean in current Western/ Globalist culture, in an underlying and implicit way, is that what matters are peoples' feelings (or more exactly, some peoples' feelings) - especially their "hedonic status", i.e. whether they are happy or suffering. 

What counts as Good is what is believed to lead to happiness, while evil is whatever causes suffering (or is asserted to cause suffering) - and Good and evil can therefore change places according to the cause of gratification/misery in the current situation. 

It should be noted that this modern Western hedonic morality as the basis of values, is rooted in the assumption that we can objectively know, and indeed measure, the hedonic outcome of choices... 

The assumptions that we know and can quantify other-people's state of happiness; and that we understand the relationship between present action and future emotions - including in large numbers of people; and that that we can predict the major psychological consequences of material actions.

These assumptions seem to me nothing but wishful-thinking at best; and most often sheerly-obvious nonsense...

Nonetheless; these are among the assumptions upon-which modern mainstream morality and values are based.  

  

Or is there instead some objective basis to Good and evil? By "objective" I mean here to ask: is there something about the nature of reality that distinguishes Good from evil? And if there is something objective about Good - what is it? 

Traditional orthodox mainstream Christian theology has it that God is Good because God created everything from nothing, because God is "omni" in nature. 

This is the argument of monotheism, something that this type of Christian shares with Jews and Moslems, and which is rooted in an assertion that God is Good because there is nothing else. 

In other words, by this argument, God is Good because God is everything, so that it is irrational, meaningless, to believe otherwise. Because there is nothing else but God - to be evil is meaningless, futile, insane... evil (by this account) has nowhere to go, and nothing to believe-in. 

The obvious objection to the monotheistic omni-God argument; is that if God made everything, is everything, controls and knows everything - then this abolishes the difference between Good and evil. 

The trad-orthodox definition of evil is more a matter of "Good is God" than "God is Good"; because (by this account) there is ultimately nothing except God and that which is wholly made by God - and God has been defined as Good. 

Apparent differences between Good and evil can therefore only be illusory, or temporary... But, even then, it is unclear why God should make or allow such illusions. 

(Indeed, it is unclear why the omni-God should do anything at all - since everything that has happened, is happening, or could happen - is all God Himself and his own 100% God-made creation. Creation seems to change nothing essential, to have no purpose or direction; because everything always was/is/shall-be.) 

Therefore, if we regard Good as relativistic, we just get a kind of this-worldly hedonic therapy, in which anything and everything is "justified" by assertions that it will make "people" happier, or less miserable. 

Or else, by trying to make Goodness identical with an omni-God, by asserting that all-is-God and God-is-Good; we end up actually abolishing the distinction between Good and evil. 

Anyone evil is then insane by his opposition to the only actual reality... Yet even this statement does not stand, because God must have made that person the way he is - i.e. insane.

The omni-mono-God philosophy explains nothing because it explains everything!

And such a conception of God seems especially antagonistic to Christianity; which must surely have an essential place for the divine Man Jesus Christ, and his doings at some point in history; and for the necessity of (in some meaning) "following" Jesus.

For a Christian; Jesus must make a difference, and that difference must be deep, cosmic, temporally-located, crucial. 

My own views on this subject have been expounded scores of times on this blog; but I will focus on the major objection to it. 

My understanding of Good: If God is a Being (or indeed two Beings - Loving Heavenly Parents) who found-themselves among a multitude of other Beings; and if this God began creating at some point in time; and if this creation is founded upon Love...

So that creation is something like "the purposive and mutually loving relationships between Beings that were previously and otherwise mutually unloving, lacking in shared-purpose"...

Reality is therefore a growing creation in an environment of chaos...

By this "model", Good is defined as God's project of creation; and evil is some kind of opposition to this project (anything other than joining with the project of creation - is may be any kind of opposition, from trying to exploit creation for selfish reasons, or trying to destroy creation). 

In theory, there is also the alternative of opting-out from creation. 

By my understanding of Good; Beings such as ourselves find-ourselves in an ongoing divine creation; and we need to decide whether we are on the side of creation or not.  

Good is the decision to join with God's creation. 

Opting-out is the decision Not to join with creation. 

Evil is the decision to oppose creation. 

Main objections to my understanding: Some things that some people find wrong with this scheme, are that I regard God as "just" a Being (actually two Beings) among a multitude of other Beings; that God's creation had a beginning and has therefore not been eternal; that God is finite in knowledge and power...

And that Good is only one among other rational possibilities. 

By my understanding; to be evil is to oppose the project of divine creation; but that opposition need not be irrational. Evil may be short-termist, evil will be un-loving, and may be manipulative, sadistic, spiteful... 

But evil need not be irrational (evil is only irrational when it denies the reality of divine creation). 

By my understanding: There really is no compulsion to be Good, because Good is one side in the spiritual war arranged around the actually-existing reality of divine creation. 

There is indeed One God, in the sense that there happens-to-be one divine creation, and this was an is the creation of God. 

There is one creation which is that we know, and which includes all other Beings that we can know. One creation within-which we and other Beings find-themselves when they become self-aware, when we/they become "conscious" of reality and their places in it among other Beings, and having relationships with these other Beings.  

Such matters could have been otherwise, but were not otherwise: this is reality - this is the situation within-which we exist.   

To loop back to the original incoherent ideas that Good is relativist because choice is rational and real; or else that Good is objective and necessary because there is mono-omni-God creating everything; I would say instead that Good is objective because God is The Creator; but the choice of Good versus evil is also real, has consequences that may be permanent, and it is a coherent choice to choose evil - even when the reality of one divine creation is acknowledged. 

By my understanding: To choose Good is to choose to affiliate with God's objectively real project of creation, and this project is built from love, because creation is the product of love.

Any Being capable of love is capable for choosing to affiliate with creation.

But evil may be a coherent choice, because creation takes place amidst continuing chaos - and continuing chaos is termed "death" (by the Fourth Gospel" and is spiritually-analogous to the scientific-material concept of "entropy". 

Evil is not entropy, but coherent evil entails an ultimate commitment to entropy and chaos in preference to divine creation, because entropy/ chaos is all that would remain when evil has done its work...

After evil has worked through to its conclusion; there would be a world without creation, which is a world without love; and that would be the return to a pre-creation world of mutually un-conscious and unloving Beings; i.e. the end state of evil would be Beings uncomprehendingly existing in a situation that has no coherence and no direction.

Thus evil is a possible and coherent thing to desire.   

In other words, by my understanding, divine creation is incomplete and (in principle) vulnerable to evil, and to entropy; or, this would be the case without the Second Creation of Jesus Christ. 

Primary creation of God is of-itself therefore incomplete and contingent; and Jesus Christ is therefore essential to the triumph of Good. 

But the triumph of Good is not the imposition of Good across all that exists - it is a Second Creation that consists of Beings that are only and wholly Good. That situation called "Heaven". 

This is why Christianity is the only coherent religion; and why Jesus Christ is and was essential. Jesus was Not essential to the primary divine creation; but Jesus is essential to the indomitable and eternal triumph of creation - in Heaven. 

   

Note added: What makes Good good is loving-creation - but only if you agree that love is, indeed good. Otherwise not. That which is good is therefore objectively real; but what makes the real objective, is personal. 

The situation of becoming a Christian is like the choices of a child born-into a loving family

Jesus Christ offers us the gift of salvation... It is up to us to accept this gift. But, somehow, the gift is only really accepted when we love Jesus. How can this be understood?

It is like a child born into an ideal loving family. 

The parental love is there, as a kind of background reality; and that parental love brings with it all kinds of benefits. What is at issue here is the child's choices in relation to that parental love. 

Jesus's love for us, and the gift of salvation, is a background reality. What is at issue is our response to this reality. 

Somehow or another (and it doesn't really matter how) we become aware of the nature and possibility of salvation. 

What then?

Every child in a (genuinely) loving family must decide whether that love is real - and some children decide it is not, and proceed accordingly. 

It is noticeable that those children who decide their (genuinely loving) parents do not really love them, seem to be children who are themselves rejecting of the significance of love in life. 

The love-rejecting child may be (apparently) himself incapable of love, or may have decided that love should be subordinated to expediency. The un-loving, expedient child may recognize that his parents are indeed loving, but chooses to exploit the situation - to take as many advantages, while avoiding any inconveniences or responsibilities. 

The love-rejecter notices that those who love him will "give him stuff he wants" - and that is the actual basis of his relationship. 

The love-rejecting child aspires to be a successful parasite in relation to his parents. And if the parasite kills the host? No matter - there are plenty of other hosts; the parasite simply moves-on to the next. 

When it comes to gifts; the love-rejecting child aims to "take the best offer" in any particular circumstance. His allegiance is contingent on his estimate of consequent rewards and punishments. 

He is analogous to a love-rejecter who chooses to accept Jesus's gift of salvation - but someone who does not love Jesus. 

The love-rejecting "Christian" regards salvation as a transaction - either a "free gift", without conditions, or else as an offer with conditions that can be "gamed" in a way that yields net-benefit to the parasite.

The love-rejecting "Christian" is half-right; in that salvation is a kind of free gift; but in the same sense that to be born into a loving family is a free gift - and it is striking how many children (often in adolescence, or young adulthood) reject exactly that free gift. 

The plain fact is that it is impossible to participate in loving family life, and also simultaneously to reject love and exploit family love in an expedient fashion. 

(At any particular moment) If you are not in, then you are out. Insofar as family life is a transaction, then it is not a loving-relationship. 

Because we are mixed and mortal beings, in an entropic and evil world; we can (and do) alternate in our behaviour between the Goodness of loving, and the evil of regarding those who love us in an expedient fashion.

In this mortal life, nobody is wholly and under all circumstances affiliated to God and divine creation. We are all "sinners" as Jesus made clear - and it is as sinners we are saved... or not. 

What is at issue is the aspiration of sinners: what do sinners most want for themselves and from themselves and forever? Is it love?

The thing is: salvation is resurrection to eternal Heavenly life: which is a life wholly rooted in love. And forever. And irreversibly. 

Salvation entails the free and voluntary agreement to leave-behind everything of-us that is not harmonious with love. In resurrection we are re-made and transformed into beings-wholly-motivated-by-love. 

But only if we want this, only if we agree to this - and we need to ask: Why would someone want and agree to this?

Salvation therefore entails an everlasting commitment to live forever in a situation of love: salvation offers this choice, and makes the choice a real possibility. 

And how we have-been in mortal life, what we aspire to as our highest values and hopes - these impinge on that (potentially) final choice. 

When confronted by the choice of salvation: either we value love primarily, or not (and instead value... something else). 

When it comes to love there ultimately is no possibility of trickery, or deception; or rather, rejecting love and adopting the aspirations of a parasite is its own consequence. 

It is simply incoherent to suppose that it is possible freely to choose to reject love as primary here-and-now and because other things are valued more; on the expectation that we will later-on make an eternal and irrevocable choice to live only by love! 

The problem is not that repentance is forbidden, but that people don't want it! 

Repentance is always a possibility, and requires nothing more than to acknowledge and reject some evil, something opposed to God and divine creation. 

Yet people are (to all appearances) very strongly resistant to repenting sin; and very much inclined to assert that their sins are virtues, or insignificant, or that their sins are (somehow) out-voted by their virtues!

How can someone agree to leave-behind their sins - completely and eternally; when they have decided that these sins are actually virtues? Or because they suppose they can hold-onto a favourite sin/s because they suppose that their virtues count for more, in some quantitative fashion? 

It's not that Jesus expects us to be sinless, which is impossible; but that - unless we want to be sinless, we do not actually want salvation. 

How can someone agree to live by love - completely and eternally - when he regards love as a means to some other end; when he uses the love of others love expediently. 

And not by lapsing from his ideals, but does this rejection as a matter of principle? 

In the end; I think we can see that accepting the gift of salvation and becoming a Christian is something that cannot be extricated from the primacy of love. 

That - in the end and ultimately - the gift of salvation will not be accepted without us loving Jesus Christ. 

Loving Jesus is not an imposed condition - Not a matter of "you Must Love Jesus or else salvation will be denied you... 

The gift of salvation is not a transaction - it is a relationship; closely analogous to the gift of parental love in an ideal family. 

A love-rejecting child can expediently accept some of the consequences of love; he can exploit his loving family like a parasite exploits its host - but such a child is not, and never can be, a member of a loving family. 

Someone who is motivated to accept Jesus Christ's gift of salvation, but without loving Jesus Christ; will not want, and will therefore reject the complete-and-everlasting state of love that is salvation when the final choice comes to be made. 

(And that is why Jesus places such an emphasis on love, in the Fourth Gospel.)

Note added: Of course, the life-long love-rejecter might nonetheless change his mind, and accept salvation on the basis of wishing to remade from whatever-there-is-of-love in-himself. I believe that the steady background reality of parental love (including from "beyond the grave" can be a factor in this kind of last minute, and perhaps post-mortal, repentance. Because that parental love is always there; anyone who repents, and decides to make love his ideal, can then immediately participate in loving relationships with his parents (whether the parents are still alive, or are resurrected). A love-rejecter may nonetheless be aware that this parental love is still present; and at some point, something may change his mind about the value of this love. So we can never rule-out ultimate hope, because that hope may be operative after death. So even "one-sided" love may have value in inducing salvation. Yet in the end salvation is always and necessarily by an individual's choice and consent. 

Further note: The above assumes that it must be possible to love Jesus in the same personal way that a loving-child loves his loving-parents; which means is must be possible for our love for Jesus to be a matter of personal experience. And must means Must. Therefore knowledge "about Jesus" will not suffice - no matter how abundant and detailed that knowledge may be. To have a robust faith, therefore, each Christian needs to know Jesus and experience love of Jesus for himself. All Christian religious practice needs to eventuate in first knowing Jesus in this experiential way; and any religious practices or rules that hinder or block such experience need to be be bypassed.   

The impulse and motive for divine creation

Kristor at the Orthosphere has written a post in response to mine of yesterday and others by Francis Berger - that asks several questions. These seem to require and deserve a more extensive elucidation than can be done in comments, including an expansion of underlying metaphysical assumptions; so here it is. 

This procedure distorts my metaphysical views, because they are being expressed in response to Kristor's framework of ultimate assumptions - so that, even when I try to elucidate - means that my account is fragmentary and seen from an alien angle. But maybe this is the best that can be managed in the circumstances. 

(Obviously, I usually and by preference express my metaphysical ideas in their own terms, trying to make a model or paint a picture of how reality is structured and proceeds.)

 

From Kristor is in italics - edited by me; my responses follow BC: 

The situation prior to creation that Bruce describes is already a world: a disharmonious congeries of eternal conscious selves, purposive beings who suffer affects, who feel, want, act, and so on, 

BC: That is a correct description of my views

who relate to and influence each other (so that they can love, or not), all more or less ordered to a good, which apparently they can all more or less recognize, and to which they are more or less attracted. 

BC: No. Before creation there is no such interaction or harmonization. 

They are from eternity past together in a temporal – and so, presumably also spatial – milieu, in which they have and prosecute lives, but only messily. 

BC: Sort of... but before creation there is no comparison by which their autonomous lives can be called messy. 

Thus they can apprehend each other, and God, and his creative plan; they can find it attractive, can want to participate in it, and can then actually do so. 

BC: No. I regard the above description as happening after creation has been initiated. 

The question then arises, what is the reason of this world that was running along from eternity past, all on its own, before one of its constituents got started on his creative project – or after, for that matter? If we answer that there is no prior reason it is what it is, that its eternal existence is a brute fact, we have admitted that it is fundamentally unintelligible; for, what has no sufficient reason to be what it is cannot be reasonable, either in whole or in part: for, brute facts are utterly inscrutable, in principle, thus even to themselves. 

BC: Correct. Before creation there can be no reasons, except internally - "privately", within beings. Things Just Are.  

What is not reasonable cannot be a world, or for that matter any such thing as the items we find all around us, and in us. It can be rather only just stuff happening for no reason: the chaos of Democritean atomism, but with the atoms all sentient, solipsistically. 

BC: Yes, pretty much a correct summary- except that having sentient beings/ "atoms" makes all the difference. Divine creation is (pretty much) the transformation from solipsistic to ongoing-creation - insofar as creation has happened (which changes through time, because creation is linear and sequential).  

If we say that this world prior to creation has no cause because it is necessarily what it is, then every detail of it must be necessary; in which case there is in it no freedom, for it is a spatiotemporally extended block, in which nothing really moves or acts, or therefore is. 

BC: No, this is wrong. "Necessity" does not come into it when things Just Are. Things really "move" but only within beings, not between beings. 

What we end up with then is either the pure chaos of brute unintelligible fact, and no world, or else the wholly determined motionlessness of universal necessity. 

BC: No, neither of these alternatives; because they are regarding the primordial beings as if unalive. Starting with beings rather than "things" makes all the difference. 

There is of course a third option: the classical metaphysics of Nicene Christianity, in which God as uniquely eternal and necessary is the sufficient reason for all being, including his own: not a brute fact, but on the contrary the perfectly intelligent and thus intelligible fact, in whose light all other things are intelligible, at least in principle, so that knowledge is possible; and in which creatures are not eternal, but rather contingent upon God, so that as contingent they can change, act, suffer, move, love, learn, grow, understand and be understood, and so forth. 

BC from now onwards: 

This leads on to consider God's motivation for creation.

If God is a unity, there can be no motive for anything. Such a God Just Is. 

But my understanding is that God is a dyad of Heavenly Parents - Heavenly Father and Mother. My understanding is that it is the love between our Heavenly Parents that is the motivation for creation - in a way closely analogous to the spiritually-understood way that love between two (ideal) loving human beings may lead to the choice of initiating pro-creation - that is having children who are loved; and beginning what may be an extended family.

(Of course, mortal human parents are born as already part of an extended and (ideally) loving family. But I am here talking about how this all began.) 

Creation is therefore a concept that arises from love, and includes procreation as well as all the other many ways in which loving relationships between beings of all kinds may become.  

To put matters very simply: there is a Timeline for creation. The primordial situation of autonomous and not-relating beings becomes creation as a consequence of our Heavenly Parents meeting, becoming mutually aware, and committing themselves to eternal love. 

Our Heavenly Parents thus became God, and creation began by God's "interventions" on primordial reality; and to the extent that primordial beings opt-in to live by love. 

This was not the original situation of reality, there was a time when it happened, and it might not have happened. 

Furthermore, beings are usually only partly capable of love; and presumably some beings are incapable of love (and therefore do not participate in creation). 

Thus God's primary creation is a mixed state of love, and not-love. 

And it is this deficit in primary creation that led to the need for Jesus Christ and the Second Creation, "needed" because Jesus completes the work of creation by enabling Heaven which is the eternal situation of beings living by love; leaving-behind other and evil motivations at resurrection.

**

By Contrast: Orthodox-traditional "Nicene" Christianity perhaps needs to posit a motive for creation - a motive for God creating rather than not; and therefore (sometimes) posits an analogous impetus for creation in the love of the Father, Son and Holy Ghost - each for the other. 

It is the differences-between the Trinity that enable the love that leads to creation...

However this explanation is made confusing/ incoherent by also insisting that the Trinity are not only different from each other, but also simultaneously the same as each other (because there is only one God). 

(This is required by the insistence on a monotheistic Omni-God creating ex nihilo - such a God cannot be internally subdivided.) 

And furthermore; ortho-trad theology has it that that the "process" of creation (and of love among the Trinity) happens outside of time - so creation always-was-and-is; so there is no "Timeline" of creation. All that is now, ever was and shall be. 

And this is the point at which orthodox Christianity reaches its particular It Just Is assumption - explanations stop at this point.

All metaphysics must reach this point, sooner or later - the point at which we must make assumptions regarding the ultimate nature of reality. 

The goal (as I see it) is to become aware of where this point is reached, to acknowledge this; and to know that here we are indeed making assumptions... 

Which activity is (I suggest) properly called "metaphysics" 

The Dyadic Holy Ghost

Since I regard God the Creator as dyadic, our Heavenly Parents, Father and Mother (actual, and presumably eternally incarnate, persons)...

And since I regard Jesus Christ's marriage to Mary of Bethany (Mary Magdalene) as a vital and transformative aspect of His work of the Second Creation...

Then it seems to follow - and has a intuitive rightness - that the Holy Ghost is also dyadic, and a consequence of the eternal commitment of Jesus and Mary in love (their "celestial marriage"). 

I think this is necessary because ultimate creativity comes from the eternal dyadic love of our Heavenly Parents (that is, the concept of creation includes (and/or arises from) love, as it includes freedom and agency - as distinguishable but inseparable aspects).  

Thus the Holy Ghost is both guide and teacher, and comforter; and it may be that these aspects reflect Jesus Christ the man and Mary Magdalene the woman; after their death, resurrection and ascension. 

In other words (bearing in mind these are emphases, not separate domains), the main theme of Jesus Christ in the Holy Ghost is to contribute discernment and purpose in a long-term, strategic way; while Mary contributes immediate help, here and now, in a tactical way. 

Jesus shows us the path, Mary keeps us upon it. 

Of course this cannot (even in principle!) be proved from the Gospels; yet the account of Mary in the Fourth Gospel strikes me as compatible by what I have just said - and from other traditions in Christianity. 

By my understanding, Mary Magdalene makes five appearances in the The Fourth Gospel: 1, implicitly in Jesus's Marriage at Cana (a passage that seems clearly tampered-with, including by deletions), in the resurrection of Lazarus (Mary's brother), the episode of the ointment on Jesus's feet in Bethany, at the foot of the cross and after Jesus's resurrection. 

Mary's concerns in the latter four episodes are very immediate, supportive, "caring" - and indeed it seems possible that Mary had a role in the resurrection of Jesus in a way analogous to John the Baptist's role in the divine but mortal transformation of the pre-baptism Jesus into Jesus Christ*. 

I get this from the hints contained in the reported conversation between the resurrected Jesus, and Mary, when she was the first to meet Jesus after his death, thus.

John 20: 14... she turned herself back, and saw Jesus standing, and knew not that it was Jesus. [15] Jesus saith unto her, Woman, why weepest thou? whom seekest thou? She, supposing him to be the gardener, saith unto him, Sir, if thou have borne him hence, tell me where thou hast laid him, and I will take him away. [16] Jesus saith unto her, Mary. She turned herself, and saith unto him, Rabboni; which is to say, Master. [17] Jesus saith unto her, Touch me not; for I am not yet ascended to my Father: but go to my brethren, and say unto them, I ascend unto my Father, and your Father; and to my God, and your God.  

It strikes me that Jesus may here be talking of their future eternal union - to include the spiritual emanation of the Holy Ghost, available to all who follow Jesus - to happen (only) after Mary's death and resurrection. 

In very general terms - to include Mary Magdalene/ of Bethany in the Holy Ghost is a further development and explication of the deadly rejection of the feminine that afflicted Christianity from early-on (and which I blame of the monotheist philosophers who captures and continue to torment Christin theology!)

The progressively increasing emphasis on Mary the mother of Jesus in Catholic practice, I take to be a theologically-distorted - but nonetheless spiritually very valuable - manifestation of the reality of Heavenly Mother, and the wife of Jesus Christ. 

The fact that the Blessed Virgin Mary is mainly called-upon for aid and comfort in the difficulties of everyday living, fits with my understanding of the role of the divine feminine in general, and Mary Magdalene in her marriage-into the Holy Ghost specifically.   

Joseph Smith, the Mormon prophet, rediscovered the Christian feminine in God; but the CJCLDS have since neglected and suppressed this aspect of Joseph's revelation - and have chosen not to develop it, while never denying it. 

I am strongly of the view that an explicit inclusion of Heavenly Mother in the fundamental concept of God; and probably too a personal womanly aspect of the Holy Ghost; has (belatedly) become an all-but essential quest or project - for us, here and now. 

This is not something Christians can get off-the-peg or from any external source; but something each needs to work-through for himself - by the usual external and internal means of spiritual guidance. 

*Note added: This is easily (negatively or positively) misinterpreted in terms of divided stereotypical sex roles. I mean much more and almost the opposite; which is that the dyad of a man and woman eternally co-committed in love, can do something that neither can do alone - or, at least, one person can do less, and less well. That is something like a harmony of strategic purposive wisdom with immediate help. By analogy (very approximate) it is a bit like the benefit of being loved and looked-after by two people, a man and a woman, each with distinctive perspectives and capacities, eternally combined in love; who completely share divine purposes and method. This would be better than any conceivable single person, with only a single perspective and vision. That this is two persons creates and sustains a dynamic and growing aspect to the situation - whereas a single person would tend towards inertia and stasis. That this is two persons, rather than more than two, should be seen as an extra gift and potentiality added to the situation of single person - rather than a limitation.   

Mary Magdalene and the role of women in Christianity - mundane and cosmic

The role of women in religion can be examined from the point of view of the extent to which it is mundane - i.e. to do with the conduct of mortal life in this world; or cosmic - i.e. concerned with eternal matters and existence outwith this mortal life. 

A cosmic role for women could be a religion where the creator was a woman, or when one or more of the god's was a woman - and there are also other possibilities. 

My main interest is in Christianity. In historical Christianity we can see a cosmic role for the mother of Jesus in both the Eastern and Western Catholic churches. 

And Mormons regard God the creator as a dyad of man and woman - Heavenly Parents who manifested divine creation and (in some literal sense) procreated Men. 

Other types of Christianity among Protestants have essentially zero cosmic role for women; and this applies to Judaism and Islam.  

As regards a mundane role for women - this is seen in terms of supernatural help with everyday life. This could range from a theologically formal role of female saints and other holy women in helping with various problems of life; to all kinds of unofficial, popular and folk beliefs of the same kind; that shade-off into superstitions and "luck" (and may occur even in what are officially strictly monotheistic religions). 

At a further remove, there is the matter of women's role in the various churches. In some religions women have a essential role in churches, but in historical Christianity this has not been the case. 

Sometimes all essential church roles were restricted to men, but in all instances women were inessential to the work of the church. The religion can be conducted entirely without participation of women. 

Another vital aspect relates to Jesus Christ. 

When it comes to a cosmic role for women in the life and work of Jesus Christ, historical Christianity has either had none; or has focused exclusively on the mother of Jesus whose role is probably only of explicitly cosmic significance relatively late in the history of the Roman Catholic Church - with the doctrine of immaculate conception. 

Even the mundane role of women in the usual versions of the life of the adult Jesus during his ministry is minor to the point of being inessential. 

This is (variously) a consequence of taking either the whole-Bible, or the whole-New-Testament (or Synoptic Gospels, or Pauline Epistles) as the major basis for Christian assumptions, and also of deriving core assumptions of church authority, tradition and a lineage of theology and practice dating back to Church Fathers. 

However, my understanding of Christianity is focused upon the Fourth Gospel, regarded as the earliest and most authoritative source of knowledge. 

As such, I see a potentially cosmic role for Mary Magdalene; who I believe to have been the wife of Jesus, and brother of Lazarus - whom I regard as the author of the Fourth Gospel.

Here - in brief - is what I regard as the description of Mary Magdalene's cosmic role in the work of Jesus Christ - using the Fourth Gospel (see this link for further discussion and more detailed referencing): 

The Marriage at Cana (Chapter 2) is a rather garbled and tampered-with account of Jesus's marriage to Mary Magdalene - and it was the time of his first miracle. 

I assume that Jesus became aware of his divinity at the time of his baptism by John; but he did not perform a miracle until he was married to Mary; which marriage therefore implicitly has a cosmic dimension, far beyond any mundane earthly ceremony. 

Jesus encounters Mary on the way to resurrection of Lazarus (Chapter 11) - his profoundest and greatest miracle - the first resurrection. 

Then again at the episode of the mysterious episode of the anointing of Jesus's feet by Mary (Chapter 12) - when he realized and announced that his death was imminent.  

Mary Magdalene was present (with Jesus's mother, other women, and Lazarus) at Jesus's death on the cross (Chapter 19); and was then the first to meet him two days later when resurrected (Chapter 20). 

I take these descriptions - bracketing Jesus's death and resurrection - to imply that Mary had some cosmic role in these unprecedented and eternally significant events. 

The last we hear of Mary and Jesus is when he tells her: I ascend unto my Father, and your Father; and to my God, and your God. 

Which I regard as an anticipation of the continuation of their eternal, cosmic marriage in Heaven, after Jesus's ascension and Mary's resurrection. 

The marvellous originality and profundity of the Mormon theology of eternal marriage

I have given-up on trying to persuade others of the wonders of Mormon theology! Instead, I will here merely vent some of my enthusiasm. 

Even Mormons regard their theology as very-much subordinate to specifics of this world practice in the CJCLDS. 

And hardly anybody else outside the CJCLDS (although, a few!) is sufficiently interested even to engage with the subject - often because of ineradicable ignorant hostile prejudice. 

But for me, I don't know that I have come across any richer source of metaphysical originality and genius across the span of Christendom, as in Mormon theology*. 

One of the greatest insights of Mormon theology was that God (The Creator) is the eternal and loving marriage of Father in Heaven and Mother in Heaven; in other words God is a dyad, not one. 

Properly understood and explored; this can be an astonishingly rich insight into the fundamental nature of reality - transcending centuries, indeed millennia, of false antitheses between monotheism and polytheism. 

The Mormon concept of God can be the basis of a positive metaphysical concept in its own right (not some combination or compromise of pre-existing concepts); as such, it needs to be understood in its own right. 

The Mormon church (the CJCLDS) has confused and distorted matters - in this as in several other ways - by claiming that such eternal "sealed" marriage is possible among mortal men and women, here on earth; and restricted to the administration and approval of the CJCLDS. 

This is understandable, perhaps it is and was inevitable - yet we must distinguish the reality and truth of things, as separable from the compromises and practicalities of organizing and maintaining A Church, in this world. 

But this is not merely something that demonstrably fails in practice (since many sealed marriages have ended in divorce); but is clearly impossible in theory, due to the basic nature of human beings and our life in this entropic and evil world. 

The basic nature of this mortal life cannot be transcended by mortal Men - and the fact of Men organizing into churches. 

Making claims of the church's transcendent power, or that church rules for living are mapped onto post-mortal and heavenly realities, are simply false - because they contradict the nature of this-world; and contradict too the whole rationale of Christianity as entailing death and resurrection. 

We cannot make Heaven on earth - else there would be no need for Heaven.

(And Jesus Christ insisted that there was need for Heaven, and by his work showed why and how.) 

We cannot replicate the eternal realities of Heaven with our mortal minds and bodies - and claiming that we can, acts against the core realities of what Jesus did and why. 

Churches - and their rules and rituals - do not control our access to Heaven; and indeed, the behaviours of church members (since 2020, especially) demonstrates that nobody really believes that they do. 

(They are merely too concerned at the implications of acknowledging they don't believe - which double-negative is not the same as - and much weaker than - positive belief. )

So, to understand the profound truth of the Mormon theology of God, requires that Mormons (as well as other Christians) set-aside the confusions related to how such spiritual realities are crystallized into material and mortal terms here in our lives on earth. 

Yet, our aspirations can and should be heavenly and spiritual - even as we acknowledge that their practice is mortal and corruptible (not just corruptible, but actually inevitably corrupt-ed - to some degree, sooner or later - by entropy and death - even when not by evil). 

(Thus the desire and aspiration towards eternal marriage in the Mormon sense is a new (as of 1830) beautiful and life-enhancing one - and a vital corrective to the destructive (indeed nihilistic) "mainstream" Christian doctrine that marriage is necessarily a temporary expedient that is dissolved by death, combined with the assertion that "there is no marrying in Heaven".) 

This aspiration is true and good; although eternal marriage cannot be actually attained until after we are resurrected and have become wholly and eternally committed to live by love. 

It requires resurrection to be able to make eternal commitments; for the reason that resurrection is itself the foundational eternal commitment - i.e. to live wholly by live (and leave-behind sin). 

Earthly marriage, and the innate desires and motivations we have in relation to it - even when we may be unable to find it during this mortal existence, provide the basis for understanding the reality of Heavenly marriage; and of the original, originative, creative nature of God (originating, that is, in love - with creation, including but not restricted to procreation, understood as a manifestation of love.)

When Joseph Smith had his vision of the dyadic nature of God, he was both a prophet and a philosopher of genius; but when he tried to make this vision a concrete reality among the members of the new Mormon church, he was merely a gifted and able leader, a kind of "king and judge" perhaps. 

Furthermore, the nature of God as from a Heavenly marriage need not be, and I think is not, a template for every man and woman - past, present and future. 

Christianity is for individual persons, and entails that each individual person affiliates to divine creation; I don't see that this entails that everybody ultimately wants the same thing - indeed that would seem vanishingly unlikely. Since each is unique - surely there will "always" be genuine exceptions? 

(As well as those making excuses to justify special treatment!) 

And what we be the point of a creation consisting of everybody doing the same thing! Multiplicity would then have no function or reason!

Another of Joseph Smith's great prophetic insights was that Heaven was A Family, in a literal as well as metaphorical sense. And a loving family - even here on earth - can and often does incorporate many kinds of life-motivations and self-chosen roles, among its loving members. 

Resurrected and eternal individual men and women will develop what is distinctive in their original and innate nature - and this may or may not lead them into eternal marriage of a kind analogous to that of God, our Heavenly Parents and the Primary Creators, and thence to procreating spiritual children - in the way that Joseph Smith seemed to regard as the proper goal of all people. 

I include this, not because I am necessarily correct in contradicting this particular aspect of Joseph Smith's revelations - but as example fo how we ought to engage with them, as realities.

Realities we may know-about now, and experience temporarily and partially in mortal life; but realities that are only do-able in resurrected post-mortal life    

 

*For all its essential insights (at least, they have been essential for me) there are significant deficiencies in Mormon theology. Two of the most important are an incoherent and double-negative understanding of Jesus's real vital importance and the true nature of his work, which error was (apparently) inherited from mainstream Protestant theology. Another mistake - I believe - is also inherited; which is to regard the Holy Ghost as a separate personage from Jesus Christ - which (as with mainstream Christianity) makes the HG into a nebulous abstract entity with no clear provenance or role. 

We all were born with an innate "archetype" of the real nature of God the Creator

Because God is the Creator, and our loving parents, God has ensured that we innately have everything we need in terms of understanding God and our proper relationship with God. 

(If this was not innate, then it could not be depended-upon; and obviously God wants to Make Sure that every one of their children will come into this world equipped with everything required for attaining salvation and theosis.) 

Therefore; we have innately the true "archetype" of God; and that archetype is "good parents". 

We already-know (and not from experience, but from-within, because it is built-in) what is the ideal of Good Parents - and that this is the nature of God.

This naturally and spontaneously leads to a relationship with God that is based upon Love and Trust. 

But many children develop and mature and will choose their beliefs about God (or that God is not real) and the relationship with God. And many children grow in social situations that actively encourage (and incentivize) children and adolescents to change, and often invert, their innate knowledge. 

Thus our innate understanding of the Creator God as Good Parents is usurped by one, or several, other archetype/s: Such as God the King, God the Judge, God the Totalitarian Tyrant, and/or God the Deity of philosophical abstractions. 

These other kinds of not-parental God do not lead to a relationship of Love and Trust; but to very different attitudes. If God is King then we feel like subjects. If God is Judge we feel like defendants. If God is a Totalitarian Tyrant our attitude is one of superstitious and fear-based propitiation. 

And if God is an abstract deity known philosophically; then God Just Is, Creation Just Is, and our life Just Is, and the attitude is one of fatalism. 

When we move away from our innate and archetypal understanding, we lose the ability to experience a relationship with God. 

The non-parental Gods are not personally, individually, knowable nor understandable; therefore they all open a path for human exploitation; for instance by individuals or groups claiming special expertise to know what God demands from each us. 

Furthermore, in moving away from what is spontaneous and intuitive, the alternatives feel arbitrary and incoherent; therefore belief often becomes a mixture of mutual contradictions - as when people strive to combined God and Judge or King with God as Heavenly Father; or when they strive to comprehend how God the Totalitarian Tyrant can also "love" us. 

Such contradictions lead to abstract solutions that conceal their own incoherence behind incomprehension. 

So that the proper way to "love" an incomprehensible God; necessarily becomes a special, abstract and incomprehensible kind of "love" - that is then stated to be superior to the interpersonal love of parents that we all innately do understand.   

We are born into this world with an understanding of the nature of God the Creator, and our properly loving and trusting relationship with Heavenly Parents. 

We find ourselves very far away from this reality - far away in several possible directions, and perhaps confusingly alternating between them. 

Our task is - by conscious choice - to return to that original knowledge. 

  

The direction of creation

Typically (too often!) Christians make God responsible for everything... And are then appalled that God is responsible for... everything! 

If God really had made everything from nothing - then there is nowhere to go, nothing to do - and nobody to do it. 

Creation should be understood as creation-from-something, in the direction of something-more. 

Creation is not from one-thing (it is not one-thing) but from many things (many Beings) in harmonious love. 

(originating in many things...) Whence then cometh the coherence of creation - what is the origin of this love? Why is not creation the war of each against all?

Because of love - insofar as love. 

Love is between the Beings of reality. And God began love.

(Because God is two, not one: heavenly Parents, not just Father. It was their mutual love that began love.)

God began love, God continues with love. Anyone else who desires can join-in. 

The direction of creation is from the passive and accepting love of childhood, towards the active and autonomous love of maturity...

From helping with creation, towards contributing to creation.  

Children do not feel a need to propitiate their loving parents - real Christians ought Not to regard God as needing propitiation

I have often written of the un-Christian, indeed anti-Christian, idea that God want, needs and demands propitiation. 

I have also often written about my conviction that the spontaneous and natural "spiritual knowledge" of young children was built-into us by God, for our guidance, and as the basis of that adult knowledge we develop from properly-interpreted experiences and (usually) increasing capacity. 

I was considering my own childhood compulsion to pray (I was aged about 5-6 years), and how such prayers were almost entirely propitiatory in nature: I would beg my god (who was, I think, conceptualized as Thor) for the safety and survival of those I loved; and these prayers "needed" to be specific for each person, were desperate, and were repeated over and over again to the limit of my endurance.

These prayers were a ritual (before sleep) needed to avoid the punishment of harm being visited on those I loved. 

And, although the ritual was done to avert harm, I was very unsure of its effectiveness. Partly this was because of a sense that if I said or did anything wrong, then this would at least negate the prayer; and it might even evoke a punishment for my mistake - such that just what I prayed against, would be inflicted as the punishment.

(This seems to have been a common view of religious ritual through much of history, e.g. in the European Middle Ages - i.e. that it must be done exactly correctly or else it would do more harm than good.)

My first thought was to wonder whether this childhood experience of spontaneous propitiatory prayer was a guide to the real nature of God. I wondered if the fact I prayed in this style and spirit without being told, might be evidence that this was the real nature of God and his relationship with us. 

But then it suddenly struck me that I never felt the same way about my own mother or father. 

I never felt that my parents wanted, needed or demanded "propitiation". Indeed, the idea never even crossed my mind. 

The reason was obvious: I knew that my parents loved me. 

And I knew this - it was my solid faith. 

Therefore, because my parents really loved me and I knew it; propitiation was utterly alien and inappropriate - and indeed would be hurtful to loving parents. 

The God of whom Jesus speaks is spoken of as his Father and our Father, as the ideal and perfect loving Father.

Of Course a loving Father does not want propitiation - certainly He does not demand propitiation, nor does God our loving Father punish his children for failing to perform sufficient or correct propitiations...  

Jesus is saying pretty plainly that the real God, the Creator, is our loving Father*; and asking us to have the same "faith" in God's love that a child may have in the love of good parents - as I had in the love of my parents. 

By talking of and to his loving Father; Jesus is saying that a God who is regarded as wanting, needing, demanding propitiation is a false God; because the real God (the "Christian" God, the true creator) is of an absolutely different kind - God is Jesus's actual loving-Father, and our actual loving-Father; and we should have absolute confidence that He loves us as the ideal and perfect Father. 

Many, most - perhaps all? - other religions conceptualize their God or gods in ways that make propitiation of such God/s natural and needful...

And there are plenty of Beings - including human-beings, as well as various spirit-beings, including demonic - that do demand propitiation...

But these are not who Jesus meant by God.

(It very often seems to me that many self-identified Christians {and especially those who profess ultra-orthodox or traditionalist convictions} are actually - albeit implicitly - worshipping the God of Judaism, and/ or of Islam, rather than the Father of Jesus Christ.)  

What this means is that self-identified Christians who believe that their God requires propitiation are making a very serious error. 

(There are many, many, such Christians - often among the most "devout" - and always have been.) 

And if they persist in this error of worshipping a propitiation-demanding God; and if they (for instance) build their core theology, their articles of faith, around the necessity for propitiation; then the God that such people are advocating is Not the same God whom Jesus was addressing. 

In a nutshell: The Christian God is a loving Father, and Jesus asks us to have the same kind of faith in God's love that a good child has in the love of his parents. 

Genuine parental love - by Man of Men, or God of His children - has nothing to do with propitiation. 

   

*Note: I should clarify that ultimately I personally regard God as a dyad of Heavenly Father and Mother for metaphysical (and intuitive) reasons explained elsewhere; but my argument applies the same both to God understood as Father only, and to God as Heavenly Parents. So, I have presented the above argument in traditional language.   

The Law of Direct Knowing: or, why book recommendations are (mostly) useless and best-friends non-transferable

Have you ever noticed, as I did even in my teens, that your best-friend's other best friends were usually people you found to be distinctly... underwhelming. Sometimes, I even disliked them. And my own best friends often did not get-along very well - lacking any genuine affinity. 

This might be supposed to be due to jealousy, or that that each friend represented a different aspect in me; but I think the reason runs deeper.

Something similar applies with authors that I regard as mentors; my absolute favourite writers: those with whom I had a strong relationship, and whose influence on me has been significant. 

It is natural to seek further such mentors by tackling those who my favorite author regarded as his favourite authors... 

Yet this was typically a blind alley. No matter how deeply I admired and empathized with writer X; I nearly always discovered writer X's favourite, most significant, influences were disappointing; and often completely unappealing.

Furthermore, books recommended me by friends who liked the same things as I did, were often duds; and my own recommendations of the "you will love this" type, typically fell upon stony ground. 

The same applies with classical music, and indeed folk music - an exploration of the "influences" behind my favourite artistes and composers was almost uniformly unsatisfying.     

Such instances can be put-together; and a lesson drawn from them to make a kind of law: The Law of Direct Knowing.  

This is: We can only truly-know a person or personage in a direct and dyadic fashion.

We can - in other words - only truly know in terms of a meeting of just-two minds; and this applies whether in everyday-life or in our intense imaginative thinking-life. 

Thus; friendship and influence must alike be directly inter-personal - without any degrees of separation. 

Indeed; it strikes me that with the Law of Direct Knowing we are perhaps confronted here by a fundamental principle of divine creation - because (as I understand it) creation is rooted in love: and, more exactly, in dyadic love - love between "twos".

Love is both what holds-creation-together; and what gives creation its dynamism: its motivation and direction. 

Creation originated (I believe) in the love of our Heavenly Parents to constitute that which we term God; and divine creation began with God's love of all the Beings of reality - each individually relating back to God, via love, in a dyadic fashion. 

Creation then proceeds by multiple (and overlapping, interlocking) instances of dyadic love between the Beings of divine creation - to make the whole of creation bound and motivated by many mutual links.

What this means is that our evanescent mundane love/ relationships are -- in their partial and often temporary ways; and while continually being un-done by the depredations of entropy and the motivations of evil -- instances of that "power of love" which make creation. 

This mortal world is therefore a dynamic equilibrium - which may be strengthening or else falling-apart, at various scales - between the binding and creative powers of love - and that-which opposes love.  

And (at least, for Christians) Heaven can be understood as the place where such dyadic relations are permanent and pure in their nature - such that creation becomes wholly positive and progressive...

So that more-and-more of Heaven, is always being bound more-and-more strongly, by the direct knowing of dyadic love. 

 

Self-blinded optimism and Christian convergence with The System

It is somewhat dismaying to see Christians embarking, again and again, decade after decade, on delusory projects of "re-taking culture", including the established churches - and instead ending-up fundamentally (and whether they realize it or not) assimilated-to ("converged-with") mainstream (left-totalitarian) ideology.

This is often associated with the Boromir Strategy: "Hey lads, let's use the One Ring to fight Sauron!" - either deliberately ("It's time we learned from the success of the Left"), or else by unconsciously and incrementally becoming more like the Left in order to infiltrate the structures of power and (so the original intention is) seize control. 

This usually begins with some local and small scale goal; like getting control of a magazine or journal, reforming a college or a school, placing "our people" in local government, or electing a single national politician. The idea is that this then serves as a base and bridgehead for the next step, and the next... and eventually the whole System will be re-orientated in a Christian direction...

There are two things to be said: firstly, people have been saying this and trying it for more than fifty years, and therefore by any realistic and this-worldly appraisal it has an effectively zero chance of working. 

Therefore, by all reasonably probabilities, the needful investment of time, energy and resources Will Fail to achieve the strategic and cultural objectives (although, in the short term and on a small scale, the attempt may make a living for a smaller group of people - which is perhaps why the strategy keeps getting revived). 

So there are large opportunity costs; because if you are prioritizing one thing, you are not prioritizing another thing*; and personal resources expended on pursuing futile (or selfish) ventures are unavailable for potentially valid and successful projects.   

(*There can only be one priority: therefore choose it well!)

The second and more important thing to be said is from an inferred spiritual perspective. 

All talk about re-taking the culture is essentially to do with the material and physical realm, and is framed in terms of a communal activity. 

Now, many Christians have assimilated and committed to the idea that Christianity is essentially a group, communal activity; that must be pursued via an intermediary and material, this-worldly social system (i.e. their favoured church or denomination) - so they are self-painted into an ever-shrinking corner from which they can only imagine (or will only entertain the possibility) of the same-old form of Boromir Strategic escape: no matter how often this has failed, no matter how counter-productive is the attempt in practice. 

My own understanding is almost the opposite; which is that Life is trying to teach us that retaking culture, taking-over The System, or any version of the Boromir Startegy... is not what we should be attempting; because we are spiritual Beings with a direct-line to God and direct guidance from the Holy Ghost. 

And this decision has been made easy for us, by the repeatedly proved fact that church-centred, institution-centred, collective strategies will not work, anyway - so it ought to be facile for us to abandon them.  

Of course; if one is indeed painted-into a this-worldly corner, then this sounds like a counsel of despair! 

But if we are instead prepared to learn from the divine teachings of this-world; we can be completely hope-full that pursuing the strategy which God has laid-out for us, will be far more successful (when success is defined correctly - i.e. spiritually) than the same old useless delusions. 

Indeed, we can be utterly confident that - in the long-term and where-it-matters - we certainly will be successful; so we ought to feel joy, not despair. 

In other words, the reaction of despair is a product of self-blinding and a delusion; but joy is a consequence of that hope which derives from faith in God the creator, our Heavenly Father+, and we His children. 

+This argument works equally well; whether one believes that God is our Heavenly Father only; or, as I believe, our Heavenly Parents.

Including "the divine feminine" within Christianity? - This may, at last, be possible

I personally find the near exclusive masculinity of traditional Christian theology, and of church organization, obviously inadequate in a spiritual sense. 

What comes across to me is (to a very variable but ineradicable extent) some element of cold and dead partiality of spirit; head without warmth of heart; form without motivation.

The near deletion of the feminine from traditional Christianity (of all denominations) strikes me also as a distortion of reality; therefore necessarily wrong. 

Having recognized the problem and need; with divine help, I assume that we can do better. 

Yet, attempts at including the divine feminine within Christianity have been (to my judgment) unsatisfactory in one way or another. 

The most successful, over many centuries, has clearly been the inclusion of Mary the Mother of Jesus within both Eastern and Western Catholicism. This brings, to some extent, a balance of spirituality which is lacking from the Protestant and other churches. 

The Catholic conceptualization of the feminine is (again, I speak personally) inadequate; partly by its emphasis on literal virginity, and partly by its theology of intercession - which makes no sense to me, and emphasizes what I regard as a mistakenly un-Christian view of God as somewhat hostile: requiring pleading and propitiation.

Most other attempts to introduce the feminine - especially to church organization - have been (whether covertly, or implicitly) been a part of the agenda of secularization - and assimilation to totalitarian leftism - of Christian churches; with predictably destructive consequences. 

Are we then doomed to a partial and one-sided Christianity? 

Well, I don't have a recipe to solve this ancient problem of the exclusion of the feminine, but the prospect is very different in a world where the basis of Christianity has moved from of the (by now deeply corrupted and increasingly malign) churches; to become rooted in personal choices and responsibility. 

There are at least a couple of aspects to be considered. The first and most important is theological. I have found myself first attracted and then convinced by the Mormon conceptualization of God the Creator as a Heavenly Parents, man and woman, celestial and eternal husband and wife.

But what of Jesus? When I immersed myself in the Fourth Gospel ("John") with the assumption that it was the primary and most-authoritative source concerning Jesus; I found that the answer had always been there; which is that Mary Magdalene was (and this, I think, pretty explicitly) described as the wife of Jesus. 

Furthermore, as would be expected if Jesus's wife was an important aspect of Christianity; the five episodes in which Mary features all occur at points of exceptional importance - turning-point of the narrative (e.g. see this text of the Fourth Gospel for further explanation - using word-search to locate the relevant passages). 

1. The marriage at Cana, which I regard as the marriage of Jesus and Mary (attended by Mary's brother Lazarus, who is the author of the Fourth Gospel), is the first miracle of Jesus; his assumption of divine power following his baptism by John. 

(Mary is not named at Cana, but the other four episodes can be found by a "Mary" word-search of the linked Bible text.) 

2. Mary then interacts with Jesus just prior to Jesus's greatest and most significant miracle: the resurrection of Lazarus (her brother). 

3. The episode at Bethany of the spikenard ointment precedes and prophecies the turn towards the events of Jesus's trial and sentencing. 

4. Then Mary is present at the foot of the cross to participate in Jesus's death. 

5. And her last appearance is as first witness to the resurrection of Jesus.  

From this, I think it can be inferred (starting from the assumptions which I have made) that Mary had some kind of role - a complementary role - in the major events of Jesus's time on earth; but what exactly, I am not sure. 

Maybe it is not necessary to know more. But if it is necessary for me, then insight will be forthcoming so long as my motivations for seeking knowledge are good. 

My conclusion is that because Christianity is now a personal matter, a personal responsibility; we do not any longer need to be concerned about the institutionally destructive effects of 'feminism'. We need to satisfy our-selves in accordance with our best intentions and deepest intuitions. 

If we personally feel that traditional Christianity has been - to a significant extent - an incomplete and maimed thing; then we can simply get on with the spiritual work of discovery and creation to remedy this defect. 

Since we are satisfying ourselves, our deepest needs and individual understanding, our need for a strong and lasting personal motivation to follow Jesus; we need not share this with anyone else. 

We can and will, of course (like all of the churches through history) err in our understanding, and be misled by wrong impulses and our propensity for sin. yet, if our intent is sincere and we continue to seek truth; all such errors that have spiritually lethal consequences will be (with the direct help of the Holy Ghost) be detected, repented and corrected - and we do not need to convince other people (or an organization) before doing this vital work.