Hubble Space Telescope finds God

Actually it is galaxy cluster SDSS J1038+8949, the edges of the face and the smile are caused by gravitational lensing... but I hope it made you smile nonetheless.

Because it can't always be about politics.

Justice

Human nature is timeless, and its study brings wisdom 

The Greeks knew it but left the knowledge pasted inside the pages of philosophy.  The founding fathers knew it and crafted a system of government based upon a keen insight into man's fallen nature.



The works of William Shakespeare are a goldmine of human nature on display:  Love and hate, lust, greed, anger, abuse of power...  it's all there.

Justice and Mercy 

In The Bard's play, Measure for Measure, Claudio is condemned to die for knocking up his betrothed before the nuptials.  In act II, Isabella, Claudio's holy and virginal sister, pleads for mercy to Angelo the magistrate. 

Angelo rightly reminds her that True Justice lies not in some sappy sentimentality or misguided empathy.  True Justice, God's Justice, Nature's Justice, is blind to emotional appeals and always balances the scales.

Isabella:  Yet show some pity.

Angelo:  I show it most of all when I show justice; 
For then I pity those I do not know,
Which a dismiss'd offense would after gall;
And do him right that, answering one foul wrong, Lives not to act another. 
Be satisfied; Your brother dies to-morrow; be content.

That last line sounds callous, but the deeper meaning is that each of us should be satisfied when justice is done, even when it is done against us, for that is the cosmic order. Adam Smith, who no doubt was familiar with Shakespeare, summed it up succintly:   

"Mercy to the guilty is cruelty to the innocent."

 Abuse of Power

Counterpoised against a righteous exercise of justice is abuse of power.  Isabella laments how men harshly wield the power lent to them by God:

O, it is excellent to have a giant's strength;
but it is tyrannous to use it like a giant.

Abuse of power is timeless...

Could great men thunder
As Jove himself does, Jove would ne'er be quiet,
For every pelting, petty officer
Would use his heaven for thunder.
Nothing but thunder!

She reminds us that God loans power and authority to man so that we may model our societies upon His justice.  But "proud man..."

Drest in a little brief authority,
Most ignorant of what he 's most assured,
His glassy essence, like an angry ape,
Plays such fantastic tricks before high heaven
As make the angels weep
who, with our spleens,
Would all themselves laugh mortal.

So it's not just an abuse of power and authority man engages in, but a usurpation of God's gifts that are loaned to us.  We forget we are "dust and to dust we will return."  Flush with pride and earthly arrogance, we forget we are fit for eternity, and we end up as angry apes who make the angels weep.  Were the angels mere earthly creatures like us, they would spare the pity and simply laugh derisively at us. 

* - Jove:  King of the Gods in Roman mythology, god of sky and thunder

Nietzsche is Dead, Jesus Lives

A common mistake I hear people make is to say Jesus was not judgmental...

He stopped the stoning of the woman caught in adultery, he blessed the woman at the well who had so many husbands, and he ate and and drank with tax collectors and sinners.

Yes, he did all those things, and he did them out of love and mercy in order to get people to repent and change their ways.  The New Testament is full of stories of him forgiving; outraging the Pharisaically-minded by giving away forgiveness.  Giving it away!  But such episodes invariably end with some command of repentance such as "go and sin no more."  So he was judgmental, but he preached repentance, a sorrow for past sins and a firm resolve to not return to them.

A philosopher names Jesus...

Religious liberals have been raving for decades about conservative Christians who think they have the market cornered, and I can understand their anger.  To paraphrase Abraham Lincoln, God is not on anybody's "side."  We mortals hope and pray that we are on his side.  A smaller subset of religious progressives take it even further:

“The ‘death of God’ is a metaphor. We needed to redefine Christianity as a possibility without the presence of God.” The “possibility” here is a moral, not a transcendent one. (Death of a Theologian)

There are some who would strip Jesus of his divinity and make him a wisdom guru as they perform a Jeffersonian excision of his miracles from the gospel narratives.  What that leaves them with is a stern, crusading progressive-era morality of social justice with which to beat conservatives over the heads in a nice turn of vengeful religious zealotry devoid of all the superstition.

The Death of God Theology

They all agreed that the traditional God of the Biblical tradition was no longer credible. Hamilton believed that Christians should forget about the hope of heaven, instead concentrate on understanding this world and doing good in it, thus presumably following the moral teachings of Jesus.

He understood the death of God as a cosmic process of God’s emptying himself into the world he created; an ancient Christian term for this has been the kenosis of God, his voluntary humiliation in order to redeem the fallen world. Altizer saw the culminating of the kenosisin the crucifixion of Jesus—at which point God merges with the natural world and no longer confronts it as a transcendent being. (Death of a Theologian)

"Their god is God" -- Pharoah, The Ten Commandments

Andrew Sullivan longs for a simpler, more spiritual Christianity in this age of corrupt hierarchies and the politicization of everything. I can sympathize, but Father Robert Barron provides a rebuttal to Sullivan's sighing for a gauzy, more nebulous Christianity. 

Barron zoomed in on Sullivan's favorable mention of Thomas Jefferson's Gospel edits that removed all mention of the supernatural:

Deepak Chopra and Eckhart Tolle, to give just two examples among many, present Jesus, not as the God-man risen from the dead, but rather as a New Age guru.

The first problem with this type of theorizing is that it has little to do with the New Testament. As Jefferson's Bible makes clear, the excision of references to the miraculous, to the resurrection, and to the divinity of Jesus delivers to us mere fragments of the Gospels.

Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John were massively interested in the miracles and exorcisms of Jesus and they were positively obsessed with his dying and rising. The Gospels have been accurately characterized as "passion narratives with long introductions."

Further, the earliest Christian texts that we have are the epistles of St. Paul, and in those letters that St. Paul wrote to the communities he founded, there are but a tiny handful of references to the teaching of Jesus. What clearly preoccupied Paul was not the moral doctrine of Jesus, but the resurrection of Jesus from the dead. (Andrew Sullivan's Non-Threatening Jesus)

I Believe

Jack Camwell mocked my belief in Satan, but yes, I really believe he is "The God of this World." Both the Old Testament and New Testament contain too many accounts of him, including him speaking, to just discount it as a silly superstition or mental illness.  It's a complete package.  Good and Evil.  Divine and Mortal.  Practical and Mysterious.

Strip it of the evil, the divine, and the mysterious, and all you have left is a sterile, didactic set of ambiguous rules that men use to torment one another with.