There Is No Such Thing As 'Godless'

Some say our nation has become Godless.

I want to know how anyone, most especially a Believer, can make any such assertion.

It’s the equivalent of an atheist scientist saying that energy does not exist.

No, you say, that’s not true, it’s nothing at all like what we’re trying to say.

How is it not the same?

In order for a Believer to make such a statement, said Believer is negating the most elementary fundamental core of their Faith.

There is not one – not one – particle of our world that is Godless.

There is not one – not one – particle of our world that is not energy.

Denying God does not make God less real.

Denying energy does not make energy less real.

What has no beginning and no end, can be neither created nor destroyed, is the Alpha and the Omega, is omnipresent, omniscient, omnipotent … ?

Some will answer ‘God’.

Some will answer ‘energy’.

Guess what.

Both are right.

So tell me what is the difference.

God is everywhere, in all things, at all times, knows all, guides all, rules all.

So is/does energy.

As our sciences figure things out, the interconnectedness of all things comes closer and closer to being proven with cold hard facts, people. Every new discovery carries us another step along the path of knowledge, and they’re all leading toward something that many (perhaps all, deep down) already know intuitively.

As the world in which we live in becomes more defined, more understood, that there is a method to its madness seems to become ever more clear.

Maybe it is true after all that things don’t ‘just happen’ at random.

Maybe there really is a guiding force at work, an underlying Law which we cannot alter, to which we are immutably bound body, mind, and spirit.

Whatever we choose to call it, be it God or PHI, it’s one and the same – and has been around for much longer than mankind has been around to label it, and will be around for much longer than we, as individuals and as a species, will be.

For Believers, the above statement is acknowledgement of God the Creator, Ruler of Heaven and Earth, validates the Power of Prayer, and holds the promise of life eternal. God is All. All is God. God set everything in motion and will continue to control its direction.

For others, it represents the constant movement of energy, the changing from one form to another of said energy in terms of its presence, usage, release, dispersal, storage, reformation, and re-use in yet another form, be it body, mind, or spirit. PHI is All. All is energy, PHI, the motion of all things and the Law by which all things abide.

Again, tell me the difference.

We are all on the same page here, whether we acknowledge it or not. Our labels are just different.

Me, I prefer to believe in God but have no reason to quarrel with those who might refer to His works by whatever label they choose.

Likewise, those who do not believe in God are in no way a threat to Him nor to those of us who do believe. That they can see and appreciate the intricacies of our world; that they actively seek and find the balance in all of it as they make their advances is to our benefit as well as to theirs.

It is truly a wonderment to me to realize that I am a part of such an amazing world, that the energy that is me belongs to that world and always will in one way or another, that it always has.

Sometimes I can’t help but feel oh so small and insignificant, and I am right to feel that way. Like a single atom of a cell of a single strand of my hair – so infinitely small that I myself am unaware of that individual atom – yet in a sense I am aware because it is a part of me – just so, even more so, am I that atom in the immensity of our world. I can no more change the Will of God than a single atom of my body can change the course of my individual life; I can no more affect the unfolding of the Universe than I can control the behaviors of even one other soul on the face of our planet. I have only my own small life to live as I choose to live it, as best I can, for good or for ill. My choices contribute to the balance of the whole in only a very small way, too small for me to understand. Yet my choices are all I have.

Likewise, mankind cannot change the course of PHI, of the energy which is our world. It is inexorable. It cannot be altered in its course, certainly not by us. We as a species have only our own small life to live as we choose to live it, as best we can, for good or for ill. Our choices contribute to the balance of the whole in only a very small way, too small for us to understand. Yet our choices are all we have.

For good or for ill, I am all I have. For good or for ill, we are all we have.

If we are so small, so insignificant, what then is our purpose?

I don’t know.

None of us knows.

Yet that there is a reason for all things we know, each and all of us, in the hearts and the souls of us.

As we discover more and more about the interconnectedness of the world in which we live in, maybe we’ll come to understand the importance of our individual and united contributions to that connection. Perhaps we are more vital than we imagine to the keeping of the overall balance, for good or for ill.

Just in case, might it not behoove us to use our energies in support of the good, and harm none?

Remember how I likened myself to a single atom of a single cell of my own body? Think what happens when an infection sets in; perhaps beginning with one cell that infection can and will spread harm throughout the body.

Still, every particle is a part of All, for good or for ill. The energy may seem to morph itself into something harmful for a time; yet that same energy may at another time be part of a powerful good. Is that not largely how the saints of Christendom have come about?

Me, I don’t believe in saints. I believe in the good and the ill in people, and the balance that must be kept one way or another in the bigger picture.

And I believe that God, the Holy Trinity, is the Who part of the age-old quest to identify Who What When Where How and Why of every last thing mankind has ever encountered or will ever encounter.

For that matter, God is all of the other parts, too.

You see, science will more easily come to terms with the What When Where and How than it will comprehend the importance of Who and Why, although those are indeed the most important of the whole.

Getting back around to my original point here, there is no such thing as any part of our world being ‘Godless’.

We can say whatever we want; it’s our right. We cannot, however, expel God from any part of His Creation.

Not one particle of our world – not one – is without God. God Is. God is the life force of all, past, present, future. God is the energy stored in inert masses to be spent when its time comes. God is All of All.

Call it God’s Will or call it Fate or call it PHI – labels are utterly meaningless and so are disputes about them.

How can people not GET that?

Short Stories,Tall Tales, and Such : Live on Kindle : Amazon

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Rua and the Brownies take on some Pesky Pixies in this book of short pieces.

*laughing*

Got that one finished and thought,'Well, this book is about ready to go now!'

Then had a horrifying thought: I had promised somebody a Tall Tale about Paul Bunyan and Babe - and it wasn't written, let alone in this book. 

So I tagged it on at the end of Rua's story since that file was already open and fomatted for this book. Hurried to get it in, and went to work getting it published.

It was only during the final on line editorial preview that I found I had put Rua's story in twice and Babe's love for salted herring and subsequent thirst was nowhere to be found.

*sigh*

So back into the book's working file I went, got it straightened out, changed the name of the file to avoid confusion, and re-submitted it.

This little book has a lot in it, truth be told.

Elves, 

the first adventures of Renegade, Rebel, Rogue, and Riley 

(and introducing Reckless and her horse Roger), 

thoughts on religion, spirituality, and mysticism, 

a bit of family history, 

some Shakespeare, 

a modern day Sass doing what Sass does, 

a couple of esoteric pieces, 

Giant Worms and Skeeters, 

some French History presented by Sass, 

a bit of an introduction to the PHI Line when Brann meets up with Danann of Perth on the Spiral ... 

and of course Rua's Pesky Pixies!

I'm finally getting a few of these projects filed into the 'Finished' folder, trying to clear my desktop for what's coming up next.

Being as I have a couple of days off from shift-work here, now's as good a time as any to get on with getting on!

And so back to editing I go ... this time I think the poetry book. I keep putting it off because I keep writing poems. That's not really a sensible reason to not get a book published when it's ready to go, you know. There are ALWAYS going to be poems coming, one after another after another. I may as well go with what I've already got, and let the new poems go into a book of their own. What the heck. 

I'm just about back 'on schedule' ... getting closer!

Anyway, look for poetry next I think. Then maybe SNARK if I can come up with enough Snarky things to go into it. I hope I can because the next books of SONG (all of the rest of them, when it comes to that) have to have bad guys in them. Seriously bad. I'm not used to writing such things but ... all I can do is the best I can do with what I have to work with at any given time. I'll give it my best shot.

Huh? What?

Before we begin, I must make it clear that my own personal Faith is based on the Holy Trinity: the Father, Jesus the Son, and the Holy Spirit. In no way is the following to be construed as anything except a part of my own journey as I seek Guidance from the One who does the Guiding. My religious education may be searched; my Faith is quite very secure. There is but One God. Each and all of us human beings are Mind, Body, and Spirit, in the likeness of God. On this my Faith stands.

I just read two articles of interest to me. The first is a blog post about a young person deeply affected by thoughts of Hell ...

The other one showed up in a related comment and has something to do with the validity of Hell. 

Both are worth looking at, but I kind of fail to grasp the real connection between the two, to be honest. 

I'm no scholar of any kind, let along a Biblical one. I've read it, and my father was a Southern Baptist Preacher, so I heard plenty about it growing up, but I'm by no means an expert.

Being as I'm an alleged 'grown up' now, and me being me, I went looking for answers in more educated minds than my own.

" Does the word hell appear in the Bible " is the question I wanted an answer to.

And I was shocked out of my Baptist-trained mind at what I found.

Look it up, my friend. That's the best advice I can give you. 

My next question was in reaction to my discoveries.

Me being me, I wanted to know where on earth Hell came from, since it didn't come from the Bible.

Here's another link that I found interesting. I've got thoughts that go along with it and might get to them here, or save them for another post, or both ...

" Development of Hell " didn't come along until Jesus had long since been born, lived, died, lived again, and went on up to Heaven. Hell was not in the vocabulary of Jesus, nor in His teaching, and most certainly not the Hell we've been raised to fear. Jesus never threatened anyone with eternal hell-fire. Ever. Not once. 

Look it up, my friend. That's the best advice I can give you.

And here I will insert an aside.

Here's a quote from the above link:

'... The Jewish Yeshua and those in the Jerusalem church, especially James, Yeshua's brother, held a traditional conception of the Messiah. The Messiah would be a man, perhaps descended from David, who would be anointed by God to rout the occupying army, the Romans, and establish an earthly kingdom ... '

I've only just this moment had the following 'ah-ha!' moment.

As a part of the research for the Mamm Books, the change-over from the Roman Empire to the future Holy Roman Empire demanded some looking into as it is pivotal to the development of the SONG series. And I connected the dots between the survival (and widespread growth) of the early 'Jesus Movement' despite Rome's best efforts to annihilate it, Rome's subsequent toleration, and finally its adoption of this tenacious Faith - which just so happened to 'coincide' with the 'fall' of the Western Roman Empire.

There were plenty of factors at play during that whole time span. It's just my own thought patterns that lead me to say, 'God works in mysterious ways, and it is not for us to know the mind of God.'

Me being me, in the fiction I write, behind the assortment of 'barbarian' peoples who ultimately brought the Western Empire to its knees was indeed a 'conspiracy' of a sort. It was led by those who saw the 'politicizing and militarizing' of their Faith as a threat to its true and original meaning. Our fictional Characters, who historically had no reason to much like what Rome had dished out (tried to) to their people so far, weren't overly trusting of this new interpretation of the Faith they had been celebrating for centuries. 'Rome has replaced her legions with priests and her governors with bishops,' was their take on it and they wanted no part of it.

And what on God's green earth does this stuff have to do with Hell?

Nothing.

There was no such concept in the teachings of Jesus, nor in anything anywhere at the time that the foundations of the Faith of the Characters of the Mamm Books would been laid. What references there were came from belief systems to which our Characters would not have adhered in the first place and so would most surely not have been part of their Faith.

And so I have to conclude that 1) the second of the above links, while no doubt the author sincerely believes what he says, is based on absolutely zilch that makes any sense, and 2) the author of the first of the above links has been, like many generations of us, tormented by something that has no basis in reality, and 3) people need to be taking a closer look at what they 'believe'.

Pointing fingers is a pointless exercise at this point. The fabrication occurred so long ago that the statute of limitations has long expired, along with the fabricators. The effects ... those have lingered ... but there are no living feet of flesh and blood at which we can lay the blame. Just because a hundred or more generations have believed something does not necessarily make it true.

When I was a kid, the grown ups used to ask us, regarding peer pressure, 'If they all jumped off a cliff would you jump too?'

So does this mean that Hell is no longer a cuss word?

Free Will and the Right to Choose - How are we going to use them?

Before we go any further here, I need to emphasize something. 

I think that humankind has an inherent need, an instinct if you will, for a relationship with God or whatever Higher Being you believe in. Organized religions can and do meet that need and satisfy that instinct - there are enough of them out there that a person can choose whichever best suits. 

I happen to believe that there has been, is, and will only ever be One God  (Trinity or no, God is One) and that God is the SAME GOD for each and all of us - any conflicts among us on the issue are of our own making, for our own purposes, and are not of God. 

When we judge, condemn, harm one another, we are doing likewise to the bit of God that belongs to each and all of us equally by birthright ... that's the spiritual part of us, which balances the physical and intellectual parts. Harming one another in any way is counter-productive at best and an abomination when done under the guise of 'serving God'.

We've all of us got individual tempers, you can take that to the bank. How we choose to use them is up to us.

Nobody's perfect and nobody expects anybody else to be, but we should at least try to avoid harming one another as much as possible.

Call me naive and idealistic - it won't be the first time.

That having been said ...

NOW:

Here's a hypothetical situation and an equally hypothetical question:

What if, back in the day, it dawned on 'leadership' that the peace, love, and obedience taught by Jesus and His followers would provide an ideal population-mindset for the peoples said leadership wanted to dominate? Everyone, whether they had a choice in the matter or not at first, would eventually just fall into line (almost everyone) and go with it because it's mainly a matter of being Nice to everyone, except when the Boss says otherwise. Tweak it a little and you're the Boss of the whole thing with the Powers of God Almighty, get 10% of everyone's income and generations born into the mindset to provide even more ... and what if it worked like a charm for hundreds of years?

Now what if, back in the day, it dawned on someone else's leadership that this system was working pretty darned well, with generations of pliant and obedient people donating of their own free will to the 'cause' - these people born and bred into this mindset would be easy pickings (considering they were supposed to love and forgive everyone, especially those who did them wrong) so these other leaders did a little creative writing and tweaking - and brought a whole different but perhaps even more numerous population to THEIR way of thinking and believing - but the tweaking was to include the clause that you don't necessarily have to be Nice about stuff, and if someone believes differently than you do it's perfectly all right (expected even?) to do them harm if they won't agree with you - and you get bonus points for expanding the territory controlled by this mindset.

Wrap them both up in nice pretty packages, add plenty of sugar so they're easy to swallow, butter it up with the promise of eternal happiness (so your current misery or even your death doesn't really count), destroy anything left over from before, silence anything/one that might possibly cause someone to question your authority to Speak for God, and you're good to go.

Never mind that God gave humankind a free will and the right to choose. What people don't know doesn't matter.  Just keep those obedient and generous generations coming, the bigger the families the better and who cares what the brood mares think or feel or want or need; duty is duty.

Hmmm ... I could take this in any number of directions, couldn't I? Perhaps I'll explore all of those directions one of these days.

For now I'll just leave it as is for you to make of it what you will, as you choose.

You've got a mind: use it. Figure out what makes sense to you and let me know what you think. I'm not hard to find - just watch the spelling of S-H-I-E-L-A :)