The Gospel According to Judas - A Handbook on Life

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 out outside, in the apartment garbage. For Philip K. Dick saw God in the trash layer of the universe, after all. Where else could I petition Him better? Note that I was told to do this 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….

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 (also an explanation why there are such things as pain), which only has a freedom within tiny limits. God is great enough to have given real free will to His creations: to do right or wrong, inflict injury or permanent death, or to use it for the cause of good. Even were this world completely deterministic, we firstly know that small changes in initial conditions means completely different outcomes; but even disregarding that: 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? And I’m not even being serious.

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. This answer is in the same vein, and mocks back.)

We all have our own points of view. I was shown this quite graphically once. I was looking at the first page in this old Bible I had, the Book of Genesis, with the “Let there be light” and all on it. Then I was allowed to see how qualitatively changed when seen through people’s views from history. Albert Einstein had something like an Earl Grey flavor type of filter — yes, like an Instagram filter these were. Vincent van Gogh had something like fruit juice, something like lime crossed with mango. 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 coldness that I have come to know as the feeling of evil.) The best may have been Leonardo da Vinci, 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. But the most curious was Jesus Christ’s. I couldn’t hold a fraction of his point of view. There was so much of it, shifting in my eye, ungraspable like dense, transparent smoke. He really was infinite. He really is the Son of God. Fancy that.

Reality may be described by one, two, or three things: structure, information (descriptive structure), and quality (interpretive structure). Structure is existence itself, and is likened to Kant’s noumena, which cannot be directly observed. There can only be observed information, things that exist, which is like Kant’s phenomena. Quality is how anything experiences anything else, or anyone. One can describe everything, model everything, with information, but the subjective reality requires an interpretive referential. This can also be described with information. Which is just structure, in the way that can be observed. And all observations are of quality. One, two, three… infinity.

In a less analytical version of what reality is, what is real may be described as that which has true quality. And to be true means that it has natural structure. This should hold even if we apply it to that which is not exactly real-seeming. For instance, when the apostle Paul went blind, Ananias of Damascus receives divine instruction to cure him of his blindness. As these events relate to the physical world, they have quality true. That all these events join without incongruity, it means they have a natural structure. If the accounts may be believed, they are real, and in this case, that which is of the spiritual world can be said to be reality as much as the physical world. Of course, that is if you believe the accounts.

Epicurus said:

Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent.
Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent.
Is he both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil?
Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him God?

The thing about this argument is that it presumes that God has to use our logic to do things. What if He knew that evil would happen, but His purpose would be served better if He allowed it to happen than if He did not? That the most good would come about as a final result? (It is not end justifying the means — He himself does no evil.) Perhaps with the argument I used before, that we do not prefer things to go wrong, but when they do, to make of things better than if the wrong never occurred? Many questions that deny the existence of God seem merely to underestimate Him, or think that He operates in a way that is trivially understood by beings that are far inferior in wisdom and purpose. And of the point that God is willing and able to stop evil: He will, and it will be called Judgement Day. Just because He doesn’t follow your timeline doesn’t make Him incompetent. Open your mind.

Once I awoke, or was awoken, in the middle of the night. I felt so strange, when I did, that for a moment thought that I might be having a stroke. It was a vision of a dim golden space, and I was shown my relation to it: how tiny was all that I knew, and how stretched forth that dim gold space in what could be known. Surely, we cannot think that we have anything like only a little more to figure out in science. We have barely scratched the surface. We cannot even make the proteins that comprise us, and these are some of our basic building blocks. Not even all of physics is unified, not even to conceive of all of science to be unified, from pure mathematics to perhaps psychology, or anthropology, or sociology. We, in our pride, seek to know the mind of God? How, when we do not know even what is in our own?

Sex. Now that I have your attention, let’s talk about sex. According to the moral high ground, that being the Lord’s, we are not to have sex outside of marriage. Or put a different way, a lifetime commitment. Now he does seem to forgive cases that don’t make the grade at all. He was known to dine with sinners. He said of the adulterous woman, let him without sin cast the first stone, and that he did not condemn her. We will get back to this point. But for now, suffice it that the bar exists that is high, but he understands if we can’t reach it. And he said nothing about homosexuality. As it stands, after all is said, only sex within a lifetime commitment is right. But he will forgive we who fail to meet such a demanding virtue. Do your best.

There is a reason why sex should not happen outside of marriage. And why generally we shouldn’t be shooting up heroin. Let’s take the second: it was described to me once that an addict quit Mr. Brownstone because the feeling was so good that it made everything else secondary by comparison. Thus, such an ecstatic feeling — meant, in fact, for perhaps such experiences as true religious ecstasy — this became the mundane. Such pleasure was not meant for such base circumstances, see? Now we go to sex: this was meant for what, naturally, leads to a commitment that is signified by its procreative aspect. And children are meant for a lifetime. Outside of that, we are not meant to experience that kind of gratification. I understand today that such things are cheap. It doesn’t mean that we lower the standard of what is supposed to be. Some things are right. Some are not. It’s not all relative, though we must listen to context. Good is not a myth.