The Gospel According to Judas - A Handbook on Life

> From this.

There are two significant questions to any human being’s life: “What do you do?” and “Why do you do it?” The correct answers (yes, there are correct answers) are, “I serve God,” and “Because I love life.” And if you don’t believe in God, then the answers become that you serve a nobler purpose, a greater purpose than what you are, what is larger than you; and that you do it because you love life. You know what these larger things are, I need not tell you of them. Think Doctors Without Borders. One thinks that the defaults, in fact, are “I work,” and “To pay the bills.” But if the profession you follow is done to finance your existence, that does not preclude that you can serve God as well. And it doesn’t mean you can’t, or even shouldn’t love life.

Because Dostoevsky defined human as “biped, ungrateful” is exactly why you should have these two answers in your repertoire. If you don’t see all that you should be grateful for, if you truly cannot see past the things that didn’t go right, the things you couldn’t have, the love that didn’t work out, the dreams that were crushed, let me be Clarence the angel to your George Bailey. Yes, It’s a Wonderful Life. If you look, you will see that you are equipped to handle all the bad stuff that comes your way, even to make those bad things turn out good.

I understand that life doesn’t always work out. But you can find your footing if you stumble, you can get back up again when you fall. I tell you things you have heard already: the trap is only in your mind. So is any defeat. You are free, human, as long as you can still love in response to any wrong. You cannot fail if what you do, no matter what, is love. Because if you can do that, then you have won, no matter what any record book says. If you have been through some really horrible stuff: let me first say that I don’t really understand how bad those things were; but let me tell you, too, that God does.

Have you ever seen videos of children who brave things like cancer and congenital heart disease? It really puts things in perspective. You will feel like a piece of crap if you’ve just been complaining about how someone dinged your car door after looking at that kind of courage. Love life. Even the suffering is the good stuff, sometimes. (That’s called, “Count it all joy.”) And when you do love life, you will want to serve God, or serve some bigger purpose. This cannot be wrong. If you are reading this, most likely you have never known what it is like to starve. You can read and write. You have a brain. You have a heart. See what you can do with a little focus: and if and when you amaze yourself, be thankful for that, too.

> From this.

I am an annihilationist. This means I do not believe in an eternal Hell, where the wicked are punished infinitely for a finite amount of sin. That never really made sense to me. I believe that when the netherworld is tossed (with its inhabitants) into the Lake of Fire, all of them are burned so that nothing of them remains, as painful as the amount of sin they committed in life would warrant. For He told us that the wages of sin is death, not torment. I don’t know what twisted definition of death you have, because it seems to me to be meant as cessation of existence. And an eternal Hell is definitely not death. When the Lord mentioned Gehenna, that was where garbage was burnt up and nothing was left. We follow the advice of Augustine, and not the Bible, to believe in an eternal Hell. To repay one soul’s errors with the suffering of the totality of creation’s evil is the point where God ceases to be called love. For that’s what an infinite suffering means.

Simply put, the question of whether to side with good vs. evil is merely to ask if can get along with everyone else. If you consistently cause harm, consistently show complete disregard for everyone else, that answer would be no. So, you don’t want to be a part of eternity, then? OK, pay your debts and you’re history. No muss, no fuss. And about the passage in Revelation about Satan twisting in agony forever and ever? A different translation is for an age and ages that he burns — a lot, but that would be as expected for the prime evil. He has caused many lifetimes of pain, after all. But at the end, he would be no more, as well. And I know I may be wrong, but this seems like such a sensible way of God’s justice to be manifest, you know? Thus do I believe.

> From this.

I do know what many people think, and I have thought so, too, I will admit. I wrote on a blog about how in 1997 I realized that everything I had been experiencing was just psychosis; I wrote that that was winning a hardfought battle… with my mind, I suppose… Before these last set of visions, I would get somewhat blasted out of my mind, after having done drugs, then I would come down, get medicated, and I would think it was all “just a trip”. So what if none of these things happened, and I never met Albert Einstein, or Joan of Arc, or the Archangel Michael? What if it was just the dream mechanism in the mind that broke, and it was nothing more than a waking dream, and there is no reality to such things outside one’s own mind?

The thing is, I have seen things that cannot be so easily explained. More than once, I have seen the future. I have been able to predict what was about to happen. More often than not, if I try and do such prophesying, it’s wrong, but if there is a certain tone to the thought, it happens as described previous to the happening. (There is one prediction, one prophecy that I make: as of writing this, in 2013, things, worldwide — they’re about to take off. This is not the end, this is the beginning, of a grand prosperity. Fantastic things are about to happen.) I cannot discount the visions so lightly. And as everyone who has seen miraculous things will tell you, I know what I saw. (Comes with, when other people say, “Couldn’t it have been just an XXX?” to reply, “Do you think I’m an idiot?”)

Yes, the visions started while I was on drugs. Not this last time though; when they took me over this time, I was on nothing. Not even cold medicine. And what do these visions of Jesus Christ and His angels do to me? They make me live a better life, they make me believe. So you can explain it as me having hallucinations that act just like Jesus and His angels should act, doing what they should be doing, to help me be like a saint is supposed to be, and then to say, “but they’re not real” — when does it become irrational not to believe? Because I passed that point some while back. If you say that such things are not possible, I ask you, how on earth have you come to know all things with such certainty? And, why are you not going around in a van solving crimes?

> From this.

Atheists, and perhaps some other groups, believe that ultimately, there is no purpose to the world except that we give meaning to it. Well intentioned, very rational, but it also touches the height of arrogance. To think that there is no purpose to such beauty, on the grandest scales, except what human beings tag it, with our crude implements of language, music, art, etc.: seriously, that’s the best that can be made of these incredible vistas? Or is it even otherwise, that skeptics are humbled by the magnificence of the great things of the universe? To those who have eyes to see, it is exactly like the hypothesis that there must be other life in the universe because of the sheer number of other worlds that must be out there. There is so much beauty that there must be a greater purpose.

A lot of argument by materialists (those who only believe in what they can physically touch) boils down to one possibility: things may be this way because they have to be this way. There might be no other way it could work. This line of reasoning also accounts for the thought that there might be other universes, with other laws of physics, just that this one is the one where things work enough for us to observe that it does. It then may come down to a variation of the Anthropic Principle: things work this way because we cannot conceive of any other way they would work. But let me tell you, I’ve glimpsed Heaven, and it doesn’t have to work this way. There is infinite possibility in material, that which we might have difficulty in visualizing because they only work by a certain means here. There are different ideas of physics than we can conceive of because our brains just don’t go in that direction, so we rather can’t even think of conceiving them.

It comes down to taking things for granted. Again. And to think that all that you see is all there is. We do not think that there is a greater purpose, a Heaven to this earth, because we ignore that which evinces such a purpose. Can you conceive that all you see might not be all there is? One believes in the existence of Africa because it fits in the framework of logic that lets us conceive of its existence without our having to go there. The spiritual world is different, indeed: there seems to be no grand framework that governs what goes on, where you can go, who you can talk to, and how any of these things happen. The thing is, it can’t be made sense of the way things make sense in the material world. That is the flaw in trying to find its governing dynamics. One might think, however, given the sheer number of people who have experienced this other, that one might give a second thought to dismissing it offhand.

I say it is possible to touch this unseen world for yourself, and to see that it is real, after all. Because there are people who have gone there and come back, and for all the different types of visions they have seen, we all have the same commonality that we are human beings, every one of us, who can only express things in terms of our 5 basic senses. Let us then say this entire book is a method by which God is reaching out into the earth, which it is. Can you conceive of a logic by which all that is spoken of here is true? For surely all of it is to the best of my recollection that which was real, to me. And if you do let in that possibility, you then touch the unseen world thereby (or it touches you, same difference). See if that makes any difference, any at all, in your life.

> From this.

The Church of the Subgenius is a tongue-in-cheek religion that may or may not be serious. They correctly point out that when some off color group does arise that is serious, they’re at a high risk for elimination. With prejudice. A bunch of Subgenius related themes have presented themselves in my visions, the primary being that on several occasions did I meet J. R. “Bob” Dobbs (and also have I occasioned to meet the anti-Bob). I once concluded since he was an imaginary entity, he was the only real thing that I was seeing in my visions (the rest being figments of fantasy, since they were representative of things in the real world in some way — that is prime Subgenius logic).

He is foremost a prophet of God, a truly fascinating character. No nonsense, great sense of humor. I once asked him, in all honesty, “Why do you do what you do?” And he really had to put his mind to it. Being a rather perfect servant of God, I don’t think it ever entered his mind to ask. Finally, he answered, “I’m a good guy.” That was it: because he was one of the good guys; this was his raison-d’etre. Simple, noble. That would be Bob. Like Albert Einstein, I performed an unnecessary conversion on him to Christianity. I actually sold the greatest salesman in the world on Jesus. Or you know, maybe not, could’ve been that he was always a believer. Sometimes you wonder what’s actually going through his head. I imagine something divine.

> From this, and this.

I have seen snakes in the fire. No, this is not a portent of doom. It was in a commercial on TV, the view from the top of a fire a few feet wide. I think it was actually a commercial for charcoal; now I don’t remember. There was a grill and it was the charcoal that was in flames — nothing weird, but interesting to display a screenful of fire as the central image for your product. But it happened to be the case that I was coming back into the real world from a little stint in a mental institution. So, a little tweaked, would we? (Ahem. Kidding around.) The licking of the flames looked like snakes writhing. Snakes made of the flickering plasma-like sliptwisting of fire in curving fluctuation. Nothing much really came of that vision, just a really cool thing to witness.

Also, while we’re on the subject, I saw once when I looked at one of van Gogh’s self-portraits, the yellows and oranges: it looked like that paint was on fire. There are other things I have seen, too, but these two stand out as the more or less hallucinatory side of this experience (which I call life). And people may think of madness as being dark, but I found that the opposite was much rather the case: things being supernaturally bright was more of the indicator of insanity. So anyway, there were other things which may not have been so flashy as these two in aspects of fire, but some of the more subdued ones — those may have portended things of quite the deeper scope.

(In which I have sometimes found myself walking through a dream, day through day. I do not know if you would call it all madness, though I know that there were things I have been through that would most definitely qualify. Sometimes to feel like that song:

i am superman, and i know what’s happening
i am superman, and i can do anything…

I’ve had that feeling, I don’t know whether it is so very good or so very bad, that I am a hero upon the world, who does great things in the service of humanity. I know it is not just a dream, these visions of mine; I know it is not just a passing madness, that flows into the backwaters of time, never to be questioned or rationalized. I think madness has not the poetry that I have witnessed, the verse of musical meanings that have sewn in me such hope, that I will never wear a mind without the fabric so intimate with love, intrinsic in the thread. There is a light. Try to walk in it. That is what my visions say.)

> From this.

There is so much you take for granted, that if you wrote them down, surely they would fill all the books in the world. What I take for granted, they would fill a few less, because I have pondered such a thing as not to take the barest functioning of anything for granted. (Work is magic, remember?) The reason for that being one of those cases of where the curse is the blessing; but that sidenote notwithstanding, just like a fish doesn’t know what water is, you generally don’t understand just how much you should really, really be thankful for. For example, we can take just one of our senses, and just one aspect of that sense: seeing color.

In The Color Purple is written how God gave us the delight of the eponymous color purple, and well should we be in wonderment about such a thing. But take the least of all colors, if any can be said to be; perhaps beige: and see how fantastic it is that we can have light that has an emotion (such is color), and that we can experience it. The fact that there are three primary colors that must mix in a particular way to give you that particular shade. That there is a medium through which that color, over there, can travel the distance to meet your eyes. How your eyes can perceive color at all, and that we sense its particularity by countless firings of neurons that make up conscious thought. That light travels and is not stationary. That distance is traversable. That time ticks forward to let things happen… Do you yet see that there are numberless things that make up the least of any experience?

When we try to examine why things are as they are, in the noble pursuits of science, we try and take one by one thing less as an assumption. We try and explain why something happens, and we take one less thing for granted. (We cannot explain yet why it is we can explain things, however. More on that later.) If you are careful in the chain you follow, you can always, at any level, ask why a certain thing is a certain way instead of some other way. It appears that such lines of questioning can be infinite. So, what does it mean, then, to ask indeed, “What if it keeps going?” I say, if it does keep going, and going, then ultimately, what we have is a transcendent phenomenon; and only if it ever does stop dead in that chain of “why” somewhere, is the universe, is creation, ultimately meaningless. And seeing all these reasons, that go on and on and on: we take all but an infinitesimal of them as given, as part of the system, not brought to mind… and there is a reason for that.

With even worlds enough and time, we will never be able to answer it all, especially if it is true that we can always ask why. This is not to say that science is without use; on the contrary, this means science will always be of use. Always to discover why something is as it is, if there always is a reason. But it speaks instead of more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy… We have the barest toehold on what things are, why things are, how they came to be and how their future will progress. And we cannot but take the sum of the great masses of reasons for granted, except for the shallowest of scratches: for we are mere mortal frailty, none of us capable of gathering to mind the sublime coherence of all rationale, dive the timeless depths of meaning held in even a single color, unreflected — the most normal thing in the world.