What the world needs now is a lot of lightning and lopped off heads

The day before yesterday, something interesting on Reddit, about female power, which was taken down by the moderation pansies, reminded me of a poem that fell out of me moments before a monthly Key West Poetry Guild reading began in maybe 2017.

Bi Polar

the world's favorite

mood disorder

the cause of all

human ails,

including wars,

if the demons aren't counted

bi polar disorder,

the destruction of the

south pole,

the feminine,

the north pole,

he ain't been

right in the head

since she's been gone

As I observe current and high-ranking elected and former elected officials pretend it is perfectly normal for them to have classified documents in their homes ...

As I observe President Biden and former President Trump and the US Military try to explain and excuse foreign objects flying over America unhindered, and they shot down two small ones they cannot explain what they are ...

As I observe the American right claim they are closer to God than Jesus ...

As I observe the American left gather in circles and sit down and hold hands, chanting, "Where in the fuck are we? Where in the fuck are we?"

As I observe World War III developing all around Chernobyl ...

As I observe the North Pole and Earth's axis have shifted ...

As I watch glaciers melt...

This is in Poetic Outlaws today

Poetry as Insurgent Art [I am signaling you through the flames]

By: Lawrence Ferlinghetti

Poetic Outlaws

I am signaling you through the flames.

The North Pole is not where it used to be.

Manifest Destiny is no longer manifest.

Civilization self-destructs.

Nemesis is knocking at the door.

What are poets for, in such an age?

What is the use of poetry?

The state of the world calls out for poetry to save it.

If you would be a poet, create works capable of answering the challenge of apocalyptic times, even if this meaning sounds apocalyptic.

You are Whitman, you are Poe, you are Mark Twain, you are Emily Dickinson and Edna St. Vincent Millay, you are Neruda and Mayakovsky and Pasolini, you are an American or a non-American, you can conquer the conquerors with words...

I posted this comment:

Sloan Bashinsky 

As my mind rummaged this post, 

I wondered if SNAFU without notice became FUBAR? 

II it matters anymore what poets, songwriters, musicians and painters express?

So what?

The Muse must not be hushed, 

She must not be hushed.

I also thought about two poets, whose musings I had put onto my blog a few years ago:

Empress:

This existence must be enthralling to the types who'd trade nature for shiny beads, time for things and stuff that which they could use to make their neighbor jealous. I feel horribly if I FEEL someone envious of any aspect of my life, it hurts me for them. Jesus having a despairing moment was not that he would be delivered from this penance but that it would require such pain for release. Unwavering but entirely every bit as bored as Bowie had to have been when the Five Years had come and gone and wretched,small-hearted humans littered the planet, still. Life On Mars. "Well who are you to pronounce your fellow man as small minded, looking only for others to tell them how to live, what is acceptable, admirable, to be held in high esteem?" A person with a brain and a heart, too "pretty" to work in any field where there would be any human interaction as that causes both envy and harassment, glory be, one day I'll be plain enough to get on at Wal Mart, then can know a semblance of security in this existence called a life. Yay.

Why do I not write and share? Because I am full of rage and hurt. FULL OF IT. And not even slightly in the mood to be told that I am full of it, need to get over myself, have a chip on my shoulder and yadda, yadda, yadda.

If I am wrong, no one has ever even come close to convincing me, this life is hell and I'm to make it out with as much integrity as possible. A sentence.

I understand you derive a genuine sense of having helped people who so desperately need it, in dedicating so much of your life to the homeless. I respect it, I am clearly not nearly as GOOD as you. While most sins don't tempt me, I feel energies and it's too much for me to be around. I left my husband and stayed at a women's shelter when pregnant with our daughter, decades ago. I had as much in common with those women as I do a talking slab of meat, it felt. How to help others when I myself have never been helped and could use aplenty. Upon rising to a station of being able to help, how would this best be accomplished as feeding methheads and giving them a roof over their heads is not going to fix that they are spiritually broken and looking to work no harder on themselves than "finding Jesus" and praising him, amen. 

I'll hush now. Rant mode activated.

This plank in my eye, I can barely see.

Sloan

Jesus, Empress - did you train under Kali, who likes to collect men's heads?

After publishing at my blog your, “Pigs in mud”,

All want the security of the well fed pig.

Horror at the baseness unrecognized.

A lifetime spent in shirt stuffing.

And pen comparison.

Is truth more palatable when honeyed?

Is a stark soulscape less so with the eyes of Monet?

May my affectations always be known and understood.

A fellow emailed me:

Most curious. I wrote this a few days ago. There is more, but I do not care to share, this was my reaction to the 3yr old boy that ICE let die in "custody". I have that in quotations marks as it is custody in name only, custody implies responsibility for the party incarcerated. But no news media organization is going to say that, they'll say custody. I guess I'm a fuckin' idiot #1 for expecting words mean something. 

Mountain Wisdom (Stanza 1) 

Mountain Wisdom Says While experience proves Hogs well fed Demand shucked corn and sweet feed While hogs and their shoats New to the lot Will be eaten alive by Hogs well fed 

(PART of Stanza 2)The hog lot is marked PIG PEN But the sign should probably read Abandon All Hope Ye Who Enter Here That's all

Empress:

I desire neither to be a well fed pig, nor to eat them, and simply want off the goddamned farm. Kali was nicer and less destructive than my Mother.

It's a mood. It never goes away but usually is bearable to where I can keep it to myself.

Sloan

The other pig poet said, when he wrote his poem, it was "well bred pig," and then something told him to change it to "well fed pig." Same day you sent your poem to me. Has to be some kind of conspiracy. My take on Kali: she's kinda a female Jesus type, don't tolerate well, stupid thinking.

Maybe she's help you with your moods.

Empress

Lopping heads and wearing them would help. Sadly, none recognize my need to rule.

Sloan

I'll send you a machete.

Empress

Where to start, then there's the mess. So irritated with my celebrity crush I could lop heads? Not quite. The authorities frown on murder as "therapy". On second thought, I'll stick to gardening.

Sloan

It's a shaman killing, spiritual lightning, rewires tangled brains, hearts, guts, gonads, etc.

Empress

That is so needed.

Sloan

yep

sloanbashinsky@yahoo.com

In but not of this world: Christianity, New Age and humanity dilemma

I posted this to my Facebook timeline and got a few nibbles.

Sloan Bashinsky

February 8, 2023

I was raised first in the Southern Baptist Church and then in the Episcopal Church and I know their views of salvation through Jesus. After decades of being turned every which a way but loose and upside down and inside out and stood before many mirrors by angels whose names are in the Bible, I concluded salvation through Jesus in the Gospels is proportionate to how someone lives and behaves as Jesus lived and taught people to live. For what kind of God would send a good behaving person to Hell simply because that person did not claim to be a Christian?

Mike

Bravo, amen

Charles

In areas of thought like this my mind frequently turns to the thief on the cross with Christ who was told " this day you will be with me in paradise". Not a Christian but a believer who had done nothing with his life except acknowledging Jesus.

Sloan Bashinsky

Perhaps the angels on my case for decades will take this up with you. Or maybe Jesus, will. Before you leave this life.

Joe

Sloan, Revelation 20:12-14 Basically provides the rationale for your argument. We'll be judged by how we live. John Wesley said it this way: "Do no harm. Do good. Stay in love with God." It happens that the best model we find is Jesus.

Sloan

Thanks. Jesus spent a great deal of time in the Gospels explaining and demonstrating how to live in sync with God. That tells me that he thought how people live is really darn important, and for the life of me I can't grok Christians insisting works have nothing to do with salvation, it's all by God's grace, which we can only get if we are Christians.

A fellow named Detriech Bonhoeffer (spelling?) spoke of what he called "cheap grace" in his book, THE COST OF DISCIPLESHIP. He talked about the expensive grace, too - the hard work, taking risks, etc. He is the German who said, "Silence in the face of Evil is itself Evil. " He was part of a group that tried to overthrow Hitler, and he got caught and was executed.

Joe

The central belief in Bonhoeffer's theology was the "imitation of Christ," that Jesus is the model of expressing belief in God as the Deity who suffers the loss of God's Creation in humankind and is willing to go to the furthest extreme of love to recover it.

Sloan Bashinsky

What I recall of Bonhoeffer was he was not impressed with mainstream Christendom. Looks to me Jesus in the Gospels manifested the Christ in human form, and the religion that claims him today doesn't know him very well. I summarized in my post here some of what I don't hear said much, if at all, in Christian churches and on Facebook about Jesus in the Gospels.

What I view as part of New Age perspective gets a lot of air time at a Reddit spirituality group, where everyone uses a fake name - I'm Puzzleheaded.

Posted by JustMe

February 8, 2023 

 

If the Universe is energy, and we are all unique, that means everyone is their own unique frequency.

Go meditate, go journal, do what you love, and re-connect with your Soul’s essence.
Get rid of the static and the noise in your channel. Clear out everything that isn’t you.
Being in your divine presence is enough to inspire others into doing the same.
I’m here to help ☺️.
Much love 🙏🏼.

Puzzleheaded

Genius is pain

JustMe

Doesn’t have to be 🤷‍♂️

Puzzleheaded

Tell that to John Lennon:

Genius is pain lyrics

i resent performing for you fuckers!

tell me, what do you know?

a lot of faggot middle-class kids

wearing long hair and trendy clothes.

look, i'm not your fucking parents

and i'm sick of uptight hippies coming knocking at me door

with a fucking peace symbol

get this, got that i don't owe you fuckers anything.

and all i've got to say is "fuck you!"

the sky is blue.

and mick jagger

i think that mick's a joke with all his stupid faggot dancing

i always did.

wiggling his ass, you know, its just a lot of bullshit.

and where does he come off saying all those tarty things about the beatles?

when every fucking thing we ever did

mick tried to copy

and you know we even wrote his second fucking record for him

no, the stones aren't in the same fucking class as the beatles, either music-wise or power-wise;

they never ever were.

pardon me sir.

paul said he hated yoko

tell me, why should yoko have to take that kind of shit -

shit from those fucking sons of bitches?

george said she gave off evil vibes

i should have beat the fucking shit right out of him,

him with his fucking hari krishna.

me auntie she tore up me fucking poems

she just threw the bastards out.

i can't forgive her 'cause she didn't treat me like a fucking genius.

look, you bastards, i'm a genius!

like shakespeare and beethoven and van gogh.

don't you dare criticize my work!

"don't worry kyoko" is one of the fucking best rock and roll records ever made!

i'm a fucking artist!

i'm sensitive as shit!

i throw up before i go on stage!

i could make a guitar speak!

if i could be a fisherman, i would,

but i can't because i'm a fucking genius!

i was the walrus -

paul wasn't the walrus!

i was just saying that to be nice, but i was actually the walrus!

you know that rubbish he's been singing?

eastman was an animal!

a fucking stupid middle-class pig!

i won't let fucking animals like that near me!

yoko is a supreme intellectual!

i'll tell you why nobody likes her music

it's because she's a woman,

and she's oriental, that's why!

where are you mother?

they're trying to crucify me!

genius is pain,

genius is pain,

genius is pain,

genius is pain

genius is pain!!!

AAAAAAAAHHHHH!!! OHHHHH!!

genius is pain,

genius is pain!!

OHHHHAAAHHH!!! OOOOOAAAAAAHHHH!!!!!!

AAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHH!!!! AAAAAAAAAAAHHHH!!

GENIUS IS PAIN!!!!

OOOOOOOOO!!! AAAAHHH!! AAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHH!!!!

PAIN!!!!! GENIUS!!!!!!

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHH!!!!! AAAAHHH!!

AAAAAAAAAHHHHHHH!!! AAAHHH!!

PAIN!!!!!! GENIUS!!!!!!

PAIN!!!!! AAAHH!!!!!

PAIN!!!! GENIUS!!!!! yoko!!!! mother!!!!

etc. etc.

JustMe

Lol, but John Lennon was also a pretentious prick.

He can believe what he wants. I’m my own frequency 😉.

Puzzleheaded

Agreed, each of us is on our own frequency, and Lennon may have been a prick - I don't know if he was or wasn't. But he knew the Beatles and he knew Jagger, which I didn't, so I have no standing to disagree with what he said about them. He demonstrated in his song a slice of life on planet Earth, which just about every song written does. And every poem. And every novel. And every TV and radio broadcast. And every podcast.

To get out of all of that alphabet soup would require living in a remote cave without internet, cell phone service, radio, TV. In that isolated container, in time, I suppose anyone would become fully acquainted with the noise inside, and if the retreat was allowed to run its full course, by someone bringing the internal pilgrim food and water on a regular enough basis to keep the plilgrim alive. That pilgrim might eventually work though enough internal noise and programming to connect with enough of his/her soul to make it difference in the pilgrim's personal soul evolution.

But a time would come when that pilgrim had to return to society and see what there is left to deal with all around and inside. The awful fact is, humanity is in serious difficulty, and the realms around humanity feel that and reflect it back to humanity. Getting up each morning and doing that day is required, even living in a cave. The spiritual path is a long grind. It gets increasingly difficult. I have read and heard a few times, better not to begin the spiritual path, than to begin and then try to get out of it.

You seem well-meaning, trying to offer help, encouragement. That is good. But it is not so easy as you seem to suggest, because so much of what any person struggles with is rooted in something or somethings of which he/she is unaware. Soul wounding. Programing. Demonic interference. Lennon's song is a cry for help. It also is something I imagine a lot of people wish he had not published.

A COURSE IN MIRACLES was provided from another realm to give human beings a chance to live in the noise and use it to evolve themselves, simply by letting the noise have its way with them and they do their best not to react, no try to figure it out, but to simply sit in the discomfort of anything that punches their buttons. Do that for a year, and a different person emerges. I cannot day I pulled that off, but it is a way to get from here to there. All by our lonesome. And, it's not much fun. It's not uplifting. It's really hard work. And it's not a new approach. It was taught by Buddha, and by Jesus, and by others.

JustMe

My friend, it’s a lot of words. The spiritual path may not be easy, but if you’re always following the road without but never the road within, you can never truly find Heaven within you.

The world is a dark and scary place, but all of that out there starts in here (if you catch my drift).

Lennon, Jagger, Dylan, and all these guys made deals with the devil. Dylan said it himself.

In exchange for wealth, they sold their souls. And they paid the price.

Nobody can truly be happy when they’ve sold their soul to an industry. There is no freedom, there is no true innerstanding. Life is only what is given’ to you, rather than what one creates.

I believe in you friend to take the inner path. It is not easy, at all. But from experience, it’s oh so rewarding.

Puzzleheaded

I started on the inner path in early 1986, and the next year angels showed up and, in phases, stood me in front of mirrors looking at me. I wrote books about it, and tried to assist other people with it, even as I continued to deal with my own stuff, as it was called back then. I'm not impressed with Lennon or Jagger, although I have liked some of their music. I'm 80 years old. I've been lots of places internally and externally, often could be described as stranger than fiction, but I became accustomed to it, mostly. The tough grind, like being under a waterwheel grindstone inside a blacksmith forge on his anvil under his hammer and being struck my lightning and tsunamis and volcanoes and earthquakes and avalanches and more. Not so intense for some time, but the internal grinding is relentless. My G.I. tract is used like a sewage treatment plant to process my own and outside spirit shit. I was not turned into a monk in a monastery or a cave. I was sent into the world. I was put with different gifted women, who accelerated me and ripped my heart to shreds, too. No women for a while, don't expect to that to happen again. It's not all inside word, and it's not all outside work. It's both, back and forth, and at same time. This may sound like throwing spaghetti at a wall, but living it is something very different.  

Meanwhile, the NOISE caused by human beings on planet Earth suggests, under as above, so below, as below, so above, there is a great deal of discord and disturbance and not much harmony.

JustMe

Yup. Let’s hope harmony is on the horizon 🙏🏼.

Puzzleheaded

Not any time soon, absent a miracle or the sudden disappearance of humanity from Earth.

JustMe

Lol why so unhappy

Puzzleheaded

I can't imagine anyone being particularly happy, who lived in my skin. There are bright moments, but mostly it's a trough grind physically, mentally, emotionally and spiritually. However, how I feel at any given moment doesn't change what is going on in plain view in humanity. Some people are changing, evolving, moving forward. The species is not doing that, and that is something those moving forward have to live and cope with, and use to evolve their own souls. Consider Jesus in the Gospels, surrounded by asleep, even dead, people. Living in and engaging that soup was part of his own soul's growth. Was he happy about it, and about what he knew lay before him? Not based on what he reportedly said about it in the Gospels. But it was his to do, and he undertook it, knowing very few people would get what he really was about. Look at mainstream Christianity today. Does it appear to have gotten what Jesus was really about?

JustMe

Absolutely not, which is why those who truly understand Jesus’s message will separate themselves from the rest. This is a task I undertook myself.

I can only imagine what you’ve been through, but hopefully what I share here helps:

The mind is all there is. The past is nothing more than an illusion; an experience to create attachments from. There will be a time where death will come. If you can do the work now to heal from past wounds and to die from all the old hurts of an old self, then there will no longer be anything to hold you back from living in your highest potential.

The road to healing is scary, and potentially years long… but you’ve got nowhere else to be, and nothing else to lose.

I wish you strength, friend 🧡. And just know if nobody else believes in you, then at the very least I do 🙏🏼.

Puzzleheaded

I don't think you can imagine what I've been through, as I've only known a few people who experienced something similar, at the hands of angels mentioned in the Bible. Before the angels started in on me in earnest, I had some pretty intensive hands-on psychospiritual training by very respected people. Yet, eventually something came up out of me, which was beyond their experience and range, and some of them told me that, and others didn't. What the angels later dug up out of me often was terrifying. Before and after that, a few people   came to me, who were not getting help elsewhere. It's been over twenty years since I did that kind of work. Mostly today, my work is what I say in a podcast and write online and tell people sometimes. I'm 80 years old, my star has mostly run its course. It's pretty well laid out in my writings and the podcast at Torrent and internet archives/libraries, free and no solicit nothing. 

 

JustMe

Stick to the middle way and trust your path friend. Wishing you well 😌🙏🏼.

Puzzleheaded

Thanks. Except for my metaphysical experiences and views, I live a pretty tame life. 

 

sloanbasahinsky@yahoo.com

Alabama Supreme Court Chief Justice candidate not blind enough to suit me

 

This showed up in my email account yesterday:

Sloan, On Monday March 6, I kick off my campaign for Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. I would be honored to have your support at our event Monday at lunch time in Birmingham.  I am running for Chief because I firmly believe we have to push the energy and resources to the trial courts. My 17 years of experience make me uniquely qualified to guide that much needed massive cultural transformation. My website contains an outline of my objectives: www.sarahstewartforchiefjustice.com as well as other information regarding qualifications and my judicial values.  Please share this invitation with anyone you think would interested. I hope to see you there - and bring a friend!  Justice Sarah Stewart

Sarah Stewart for Chief Justice | 2029B Airport Blvd, #212, Mobile, AL 36606

sarahstewartforchiefjustice.com Unsubscribe sloanbashinsky@yahoo.com Update Profile | Constant Contact Data Notice Sent by info@sarahstewartforchiefjustice.com

At Justice Stewart's suggestion, I decided to look at her website, but there was no hyperlink for it in her advertisement, so copied and pasted sarahstewartforchiefjustice.com into my search bar and clicked Enter and her website came up. 

Some excerpts:

Judicial Values

Alabamians know they can count on Supreme Court Justice Sarah Stewart to strictly construe the law, never legislate from the bench, and enforce the law justly.

 

“I am humbled by and take seriously the faith Alabama citizens placed in me by electing me to the trial court bench three times and then to the highest court in our State in 2018. I work daily to ensure the law is applied justly and consistently.  I have done my best to serve Alabama with honor and integrity and hope to have the privilege to continue to serve in the role as Chief Justice.”

 

“It is important for a justice to have strongly developed judicial values. My record reflects my conservative approach to dispensing justice impartially, ensuring Alabama’s body of jurisprudence evolves in strict accordance with conservative principles. My work as a Justice speaks for itself - I will never legislate from the bench and I will always fiercely defend your constitutional rights.”

I emailed back, wondering if a person would receive or see it?

sloan bashinsky <sloanbashinsky@yahoo.com>

To: Sarah Stewart for Chief Justice info@sarahstewartforchiefjustice.com>

Sent: Wednesday, February 8, 2023 at 10:24:43 AM CST

Subject: Re: You're Invited: Campaign Kickoff Party

Thanks for the invite, Justice Stewart. 

I frequently see Warren Lightfoot at the Birmingham Duplicate Bridge Club. 

The only Alabama Supreme Court Justice I knew personally was Sam Beatty - earlier in time he was my favorite law school professor at the University of Alabama School of Law. 

After graduating, I clerked for Hon. U.S. District Judge Clarence W. Allgood, in Birmingham.

I practiced law in Birmingham for 12 years. Afterward, I got many chances to offer legal advice, for which I was paid nothing, nor did I ask or expect to be paid. 

In 2003, Fate, or God, steered me into local politics in Key West and the Florida Keys, where I ran many times for public office, as an Independent, and never came close to getting elected. My out of the box views were not well received by the left nor by the right.

I kept telling them their political parties were secular religions, cults, and they needed to start trying to do what God wanted, instead of what they wanted; and to do that, they needed to be hearing directly from God, and not from their family, friends, political cronies, lawyers, ministers, etc.

All sorts of red flags popped up when I read on your website that you support conservative values. That caused me to think your conservative values trump everything, and you are not emotionally, mentally and spiritually detached and independent, which I think is critical to being a judge.

Sloan Bashinsky, J.D., LLM (Taxation)

I copied my email to some lawyers and humans I know, and received this back from a lady lawyer, who had worked in the U.S. Department of Justice when Bill Barr was President Donald Trump's Attorney General.

You all elect the Chief Judge? That’s insane - how many are running? 

I replied:

Don't know how many.

Yep, it's crazy. I think all Supreme Court judges should be appointed by judges.

Years ago, Republican Roy Moore got elected to be Chief Justice twice. At Alabama's law school Moore had been dubbed "Fruitcake" by the criminal law professor, Clinton McGhee. After graduating from Alabama's law school, McGhee went into the Army and prosecuted Nazis at Nuremberg. 

Moore is is a religious fanatic. There were accusations that, in his 20s and 30s, he hit on and pressured teenage girls. After he was elected the first time, he tacked the 10 Commandments on a wall in the Alabama Supreme Court building in Montgomery. A federal court removed him from office. He got elected again and started his religious stuff in the Supreme Court building again, and that time the other Supreme Court justices remove him.

Moore ran for Jeff Sessions' empty Senate seat after Sessions became Trump's AG. That's when Moore's love of teen age girls made the headlines, with the girls, by then women, outing him. Alabama's other Senator, also Republican, said there was too much smoke fo there not to be fire, and Trump tried to get Moore to bow out, but he wouldn't. Shelby led a revolt than resulted in around 20,000 Republican write-in votes for people not on the ballot.

That was about the margin of victory for the Democrat Doug Jones, who as the US Attorney in Birmingham had prosecuted and convicted several Atlanta Klansmen for bombing the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, and killing a bunch of black men and women and children, while they worshipped God. 

Moore was the darling of the Alabama redneck and evangelical Republicans. I think this lady Chief Justice candidate is a their darling, too. I will be surprised to hear from her, but if I do, I will let you and some other people know.

Hope you and your hubby are doing well.

Sloan

slooanbashinsky@yahoo.com

Looks to me that Christianity is a mere shadow of what Jesus in the Gospels was about

I attended a private Presbyterian high school, where I heard plenty about the Calvin views of salvation and predestination and the Elect, of which the founder of the school said he believed he was a member. He also said, he and his wife of 60 years had sexual intercourse three times, twice to have children, once for pleasure, and he had regretted the third time ever since. I wondered if his wife had any regrets?

This below was in my Facebook feed this morning. I can't help wonder who, or what, sanctioned "official"?

The Official C.S. Lewis Group (Facebook)

George 

A bit lengthy but helpful in elucidating Lewis’s view on predestination and free-will. 

 

C. S. Lewis, 

“I take it as a first principle that we must not interpret any one part of Scripture so that it contradicts other parts: and specially we must not use an Apostle’s teaching to contradict that of Our Lord. Whatever St Paul may have meant, we must not reject the parable of the sheep and the goats (Matt. XXV. 30–46). There, you see there is nothing about Predestination or even about Faith–all depends on works. But how this is to be reconciled with St Paul’s teaching, or with other sayings of Our Lord, I frankly confess I don’t know. Even St Peter you know admits that he was stumped by the Pauline epistles (II Peter III. 16–17).

What I think is this. Everyone looking back on his own conversion must feel–and I am sure the feeling is in some sense true–‘It is not I who have done this. I did not choose Christ: He chose me. It is all free grace, wh. I have done nothing to earn.’ That is the Pauline account: and I am sure it is the only true account of every conversion from the inside. Very well. It then seems to us logical & natural to turn this personal experience into a general rule ‘All conversions depend on God’s choice’.

But this I believe is exactly what we must not do: for generalisations are legitimate only when we are dealing with matters to which our faculties are adequate. Here, we are not. How our individual experiences are in reality consistent with (a) Our idea of Divine justice, (b) The parable I’ve just quoted & lots of other passages, we don’t & can’t know: what is clear is that we can’t find a consistent formula. I think we must take a leaf out of the scientists’ book. They are quite familiar with the fact that, for example, Light has to be regarded bothas a wave in the ether and as a stream of particles. No one can make these two views consistent. Of course reality must be self-consistent: but till (if ever) we can see the consistency it is better to hold two inconsistent views than to ignore one side of the evidence.

The real inter-relation between God’s omnipotence and Man’s freedom is something we can’t find out. Looking at the Sheep & the Goats every man can be quite sure that every kind act he does will be accepted by Christ. Yet, equally, we all do feel sure that all the good in us comes from Grace. We have to leave it at that. I find the best plan is to take the Calvinist view of my own virtues and other people’s vices: and the other view of my own vices and other people’s virtues. But tho’ there is much to be puzzled about, there is nothing to be worried about. It is plain from Scripture that, in whatever sense the Pauline doctrine is true, it is not true in any sense which excludes its (apparent) opposite.” 

 

Letter to Mrs. Emily McLay Aug. 3, 1953

The Collected Letters of C. S. Lewis. Volume III: Narnia, Cambridge, and Joy 1950–1963. Ed. Walter Hooper. San Francisco: Harper San Francisco, 2007: 354-355.

Sloan Bashinsky 

 

I was raised first in the Southern Baptist Church and then in the Episcopal Church and I  know their views of salvation through Jesus. 

 

After decades of being turned every which a way but loose and upside down and inside out and stood before meany mirrors by angels whose names are in the Bible, and there were a few encounters with Jesus, based on what I saw, felt and heard, I concluded that salvation through Jesus in the Gospels is proportionate to how someone lives and behaves as he lived and taught people to live. For what kind of God would send a good behaving person to Hell, simply because that person did not claim to be a Christian? 

There are other things about Jesus in the Gospels, which I don't see discussed on Facebook, nor do I hear Christians discussing. Here are a few:

Matthew 3:11 “I [John the Baptist] baptize you with water for repentance. But after me comes one who is more powerful than I, whose sandals I am not worthy to carry. He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire.

Luke 12:49 [Jesus] “I have come to bring fire on the earth, and how I wish it were already kindled! But I have a baptism to undergo, and what constraint I am under until it is completed! Do you think I came to bring peace on earth? No, I tell you, but division. From now on there will be five in one family divided against each other, three against two and two against three. They will be divided, father against son and son against father, mother against daughter and daughter against mother, mother-in-law against daughter-in-law and daughter-in-law against mother-in-law.”

John 8:31-32

So Jesus said to the Jews who believed in him, “If you continue to obey my teaching, you are truly my followers. Then you will know the truth, and the truth will make you free.”

Elsewhere in the Gospels, Jesus said:

Many are called, but few are chosen; the road to life is difficult and the gate narrow and few enter; the work is great and the laborers are few; turn the other cheek; do good to and pray for your enemies; love your neighbor as yourself; do unto others as you would have done unto you; it is more blessed to give than to receive; take no thought for tomorrow, for each day has enough trouble of its own ...

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