The Gospel According to Judas - A Handbook on Life

> From this.

We all have our own points of view. I was shown this quite graphically once. I was staring at page one of this old Bible I had, the Book of Genesis, with the “Let there be light” and all on it. I forget how it came to be, but, gazing at that one page, I was privy to how that single page qualitatively changed — when seen through this and that other person’s view, personages from throughout history. I got to see the world from other people’s eyes, as close to literally as one possibly might figure you can. I would bet you never really thought about it, and neither did I, before this. We look at the world, and a printed page is a printed page is a printed page. Except I found out that people’s experiences are indeed personal, each one of us our own. We surely have specific eyes that view the world, each viewpoint especially just, singly for each one of us.

Albert Einstein had something like an Earl Grey flavor type of filter — yes, like an Instagram filter these were. But founded, as if each filter were a natural seeing, if special. Vincent van Gogh had something like a margarita. I saw my own, from times back, and that was like lemonade. (I regretted looking through Hitler’s, similar to Albert’s, but with a strange sticky coldness that I have come to know as the sensation of a personal evil.) The best may have been Leonardo da Vinci’s, who was, as Vincent put it, “stingy with his stuff.” It was like the hint of looking at the original Declaration of Independence, that Bible page.

The most curious was Jesus Christ’s. I couldn’t hold onto even a fraction of his point of view. Every time I looked through it, it flowed around and through whatever sigil I was looking at. It was the opposite of madness, a supreme Reason did it seem to portend: Order opposed to Chaos, however much it was in motion — that I could not fully wrap my mind around, but comprehended was present. There was so much of it, shifting in my eye, ungraspable like dense but transparent smoke. It meant one thing: he really is infinite. He really is the Son of God. Fancy that.

> From this.

I read once that one might wonder if just the fact that God knows exactly what we will do removes us from true free will. This is absurd. This is not a toy world (that reality’s not kid stuff could also be an explanation why there are such things as pain), a world which only has a freedom within tiny limits. Why did God create creatures that are capable of doing wrong? Reminds me of U2 lyrics: “Don’t believe the Devil / I don’t believe his book / But the truth is not the same / Without the lies he made up”. We derive significant meaning to this life because we have that freedom: when given the choice to do wrong, to do right instead. God is great enough to have given real free will to His creations: to inflict injury or permanent death, or to use it for the cause of good.

Even were this world completely deterministic, we could still be blessed with real, free will: just suppose, what if God knew what you would choose of your own free will and determined everything to that? That solves predestination and free will both together as compatible, don’t you think? Quite the opposite of where we started, in this little blip. And I’m not even being serious.

> From this.

And now for something completely relevant:

Can God make a rock He can’t lift? No, He can.

(The question has always been of a light, mocking spirit, meant to make fun of the faith. If a believer tries to answer in all seriousness, then the questioner has won, for the believer mistakes the spirit of the question entirely. Why shouldn’t there be a quippy response to such tongue-in-cheekness? If the believer ignores the question, the questioner has again won, for the believer is admitting there is no proper answer. This answer I give, and let it be all I’ll say on the subject, this answer is in the same spirit as the question, and pokes back tit for tat.)

> From this.

I took the first printout of the original document of true love, and on March 1, 2013, at about 10pm EST, I put on some blood red lipstick and I kissed it, then I crumpled it up and threw it away outside, in the apartment garbage. For as you know, Philip K. Dick saw God in the trash layer of the universe, after all. Where else could I petition Him better? I had made a second printout to keep for posterity, and I kissed that after I had kissed the original document, and then I laminated it (badly — there were creases in the plastic on the reverse side; oh, well). I also have tucked away the tube of lipstick I used to kiss. I wonder what will become of such things.

I was told to do this ritual by the Lord, so let it be said of me, “He is an unprofitable servant. He only did what he was told.” Such is my greatest desire, actually, that I may be called so, a true servant of the Lord this would be. Scripture says as much. So this is my letter to the world, that never wrote to me, except that one time I did get this eviction notice… but that’s another story entirely. I must say, the more the penmanship of the world resembles a typewriter, the deeper in trouble you tend to be.

> From this.

You know, I thought of what I would ask for if God asked me like He did Solomon what I desired above all else. Solomon asked for wisdom when God appeared to him in a dream. It is a commendable choice, not to ask for riches or even for a long life; God gave him riches also because He so loved that Solomon chose what he did. I, not being a king and so not requiring the greatest of wisdom therefore, would instead ask for humility. (Note that pride is the worst sin, but that doesn’t mean humility is the greatest virtue; it doesn’t work like that: love is the greatest virtue.) I have my reasons for my pick.

My choice comes from the experience of my life. It can be seen to be because all the problems in my life seemed to come from the lack of humility. I thought on more than one occasion that I could literally take on the world. I have thought I was bigger than Jesus. Seriously, I thought that. Harder, better, faster, stronger than Jesus of Nazareth. When he became Jesus Christ to me, that flew out the window. That required me kicking my own ass, so to speak, for thinking as I did about my comparing myself to our Lord. Blessed be his name. Also factoring in my choice, I thought it would be really neat being humble. I would think it a really cool thing to be like so humble that God would not be offended at my presence before him. Just cool beans. Yeah, parts of me are still a child.

> From this.

To believe that Judas volunteered is to acknowledge that the evangelists who wrote the Gospels changed the actual story substantively, at least partly from not knowing the actual story, and we cannot gloss over these changes. But if you think about it, this must have happened. Anyone who thinks that the Bible is absolutely coherent and consistent is working a special sort of schizophrenia. Really? It is the Jews’ fault that our Lord got crucified by the Romans? They cry, “his blood be on us and our children”? Really? And we know that the Barabbas story is almost definitely untrue, that no one was ever set free because the Jews wanted it on their holy day. The scriptures are peppered with such errors, whether they are blatant fabrications or just honest or copying mistakes.

The gospels, you realize, don’t agree how certain things happened, or in what order, so if we try to reconcile all their inconsistencies, we then create a new gospel, which certainly didn’t happen in any way that we make out. For my part, the information about Judas being innocent of history’s charges came from On High. Any attack on that idea, within the HALOSPACE, has only come from the forces of evil. Only from the darkness do I get fuel for my doubts; all light that shines upon the matter only reconfirms Judas’ lack of culpability. I still wait for a revision of it, when I’ll be told that the mainstream view is actually correct; hasn’t happened yet, and it looks like it never will. I only seem to get further confirmation of this minority report. When is it irrational not to believe the incredible? What would they say, “Two billion Christians can’t be wrong”? Except when all they’ve ever known are stories, that they mistake for history.

> From this.

Love is what unfolds from the desire of the heart. The rose that blooms even when the world is shrouded in snow — the kiss of immortality. It is the eagle feather which is held in solemn trust, for to call upon the Creator… Behold what presses you on in the darkest of the ways, through to the other side. It is the end of the journey, when home is found again, sometimes at a new place — for home can be known in many ways. Love is to know what is right. Do you wonder what love might be, and what love might be to you? Why do you seek after something that you can find in simplest terms, within your very grasp?

Love is everything you think it is. It can hurt you and blind you, it can make you despair, and it can frustrate your every thought and movement. But if it is love, you will find that all of whatever you have been put through is worth it. Well worth it. And what is more: you will have an idea why all of this, all you touch and all you see, is the way it is. Maybe to scry where you are drawn in the great blueprint the Builder meticulously inscribed, checked and double-checked, and to know you are not no one: you have a place, and you have a purpose. For this is love: where heaven touches down to earth, through the heart, through our intentions, and through our very hands: no one else’s, for our footsteps are the only paths that love may follow. No one else’s.