Eating the Apple: Part 1
The Stubborn Fog: Man’s Archetype of God
You must eat the Apple so that you can fall.
You must keep the Commandments so that you can fail and know that you could never keep them in the first place.
You must live for a time with a dualistic perspective of black-and-white so you can fully appreciate how truly colorful this life really is.
C. B. Scott
[image error]
The Stubborn Fog: Man’s Archetype of God
When the fog first starts to clear, it takes quite a while before you can consistently stay on one course of thinking without the toxic faith sinking back in. There are a number of personal wrestling matches that will occur within your mind. The deep indoctrination is well planted in the psyche and seems impossible to root out. Yet, over time, the wonder and beauty of truth, life, love, and the diversity of ideas start to bleed through, if you will let it. Then, a new world will appear, wonderous in its spectrum of color, overwhelming, and saturating your former monochromatic world.
[image error]
My first mental wrestling match had to do with what I came to see as man’s archetype of God. The fact that the God I was raised to believe in was actually created in the minds of others. It seemed to me, the biggest hurdle to overcome was this contrived picture of God. A god who was in a book, described as vengeful one day and loving the next. A god who allowed his son to be killed for me. Even as a small child, this seemed wrong. Yet, if there is a flaw in your archetype, it is best to pound it into young minds so that they will not question it too much when they come to an age of reason.
Once we reach this age of reason and start to question this Supreme Being, we feel as if we are crazy. Our family and friends, who have their ideas of how we are supposed to think and behave, struggle to see us stray from the path. We are in good company though; Jesus dealt with the same thing. Mark 3:20-21, his family thought he was crazy, “Then he went home, and the crowd gathered again so that they could not even eat. And when his family heard it, they went out to seize him, for they were saying, He is out of his mind.”
[image error]
I think people still refuse to see what the Christ was trying to say. If he was God made flesh, why was so much of his recorded teachings centered around love? Still, we use what is called, “The Word of God” to spread hate? To make those who are different than us feel shame. To judge others and condemn them to Hell for being who they were born to be?
What if he wasn’t a son sent to die? What if he was God come to straighten out how people, books, and teachings had perverted his nature? I like to think of it that way for some reason. I also like to use reason when I think.
[image error]
If this life is one big test, it is not to see if we can be good boys and girls; it is to see if we can let go of human-made teachings and still be kind to one another. But, of course, we can’t, so we must make God the boogieman who will send us to Hell if we don’t behave.
[image error]
Next…
Join me next week as I discuss The Principle’s of God According to Man
