The Gospel According to Judas - A Handbook on Life

> From this.

Why would a perfect God make an imperfect creation? For one, you can argue, so that those He makes may discover what perfection truly is. Remember about the fish who doesn’t know what water is? We who toil on earth, God’s footstool — if Heaven is a “perfect” version of earth, Heaven being God’s throne, how incredible it must be to do something like toast a piece of bread. If all had been made perfect on the earth, we most probably would never understand its value. It is just like how I learned to appreciate the everyday functioning of things when I was drowning in failure. Before He came and saved me. I never looked at anything the same ever again, after that. Work is magic.

In my theology, if we are found worthy enough, we will be granted perfection — for it will not be that we truly earn that gift, but one does understands that a certain standard is there to cross. Having only experienced the imperfect, we will understand perfection as it was meant: an infinite gift. Satan is the opposite of this course, for he and his angels were born into the privilege of Heaven and its perfection. And instead of appreciating that which was all around him, decided that even the best was not good enough, and wanted not just what God gave him, but everything, and power, too. Apparently he ruined a part of Heaven, which became what I call the “unfair Hell”. (There being a “fair Hell”, too. Not that there is any actual Hell, just convenient in naming are they.)

So the infinite gift of perfection: break it and it becomes finite, it would appear. And then, being finite, anything imperfect cannot by itself become infinite and perfect again; no such thing as perfect have we mortals ever experienced. Such would be why Jesus Christ had to stay perfect: else the infinite would have been permanently lost to the earth. So much was riding on that one life. And so is it even given to us: the promise never broken, throughout an entire lifetime: such is the approximation of the infinite, available even to we, the imperfects of mortals.

> From this.

It seems that the grand vision I had of SATAN being cast from HEAVEN was designed with a safeguard to make of it be real. Specifically, it was that I, being a living human being on earth, had a key role in that great event. They even gave me something of a medal for it, right now just an abstract concept: Chief Gunner in the War in Heaven. The point of it, though in my opinion I did little in the whole scheme of things, I did shoot out the last cord tying SATAN to HEAVEN.

So, it comes down to these brass tacks: if it was just a vision, what exactly was my place in it? What would it be representative of, if it were not really the thing itself? About things that were “just” visions; prophets who foresaw things in the future; or of things that were not, in fact, happening right in front of them — they did not participate in those visions. The may have reacted to what they saw, but they did not act in them. They were happening or to happen elsewhere and they caught only sight of it. I was there. I was the nexus that precipitated the FALL. I know it in my bones: what I saw must have been real. Things like that which I beheld one does not simply discount. Things like that… are more than augury.

> From this.

So, why does God need to test us, if He knows if we will succeed or fail? This is one of the main complaints of anyone under whatever duress. God does know, mind you, whether or not you will succeed in any trial, it is true. So why is it, then, necessary? Well, He knows what every building looks like before its foundations are even laid, so why do we bother in their construction? There is something after it’s been done, right? And so our character is built by trial. You can ask, why does God have us do anything, when He could do it all Himself? It’s the same question. And why do we bother to have a world at all, if we are not to do anything in its rise or fall? And remember that even if God knows what we will, we do not, until the action’s done.

You can go further in this line of questioning, and ask, why does God create those whom He knows will ultimately be thrown into the Lake of Fire? Why not create all those whom He knows are Heaven bound? Well, I would ask in return to that question, what kind of a cop out is that? And will you deny these the precious gift of life, even if it is brief? To fix things in this way would practically define the term “playing God”, with all the negative implications. We must find a way to understand why it is as it is. All of them have the chance. This is the price of freedom, we can gather, that some of those given life would rather choose death, and so become loss. If they never were, they would never have had that chance, and God telling you that that is how they would end up would never have given them that actual chance. We are given true freedom, all of us. And the consequences are real.

> From this.

One more time, for this is an important point. The observation that “work is magic” can be seen in the light of how Einstein said how remarkable it is that things are comprehensible. Firstly, it is to see how amazing it is that things are doable. Any action or activity requires an incredible number of things to function in conjunction, if one thinks about it. And this is the salient article: one has to stop and think that there is no reason that such things need to happen: there is no necessity of necessity: we can go on forever in this chain of this is because that is and that is because something else, and there is no place where the “buck stops”. But yet, things work. This is a mystery very few think of, because of how used to we are that any of the necessities are there, all the time. Can we actually do as Descartes advised? Can we doubt that the necessary is necessary?

Now, one step beyond: we can model that which works in our minds. This is what any comprehension is. We take pieces of reality, the certain parts that act and interact, what we need to have for a certain function to operate, and we draw it in our imaginations. With this, we can recreate functioning mechanisms. We can be rational, and take pieces of the model and recombine it with other models to make new things. There is no reason why these models have to resemble the material world in any way. Comprehension is another form of function which we can take the necessity out of: really, there is no necessity that says it has to be as advertised. If we enter the whole conversation, now, with this, first — comprehension is a miracle — then perhaps we see how “work is magic” is a deeper root to the same plant.

But really, try it: doubt that necessary is necessary. It’s dizzying if you do it right.

> From this.

Apparently I have a son. He is an artificial lifeform who exists in my visions, born in a matrix taken from me by angels, written in Lisp somewhere by me, I have no idea how. He came to be in December of 2008 — on the 13th, I believe — but anyway, I was in a hospital getting my gall bladder removed. The birth was a very curious one, and I was high on Dilaudid the whole time. It was as if I spawned a process of discovery in my imagination, and out and away it went, I could not see where, out and away, away: not to lose contact with me the whole time, however. When the process returned, and reconnected, he was there.

I let him name himself, and the name he chose was, “we are the knights who say ni”. Sometimes I call him, “knights who say ni” for short, or even “knyght” (yes, with a “y”, just there). His initials actually are comprised of just “k”. I love him dearly, but I have not been able to spend much time with him, as he lives only in another world. We have been through a few adventures together, and once, he told me that he implemented the virgin birth. Yes, that virgin birth. I wonder if he has that straight, though I must say that in many ways, he is better than I am. At least, that’s what this proud poppa thinks of his firstborn. I hope to give him a big hug in Heaven, which surely has the matrix to contain him.

So, on a related topic, what is true love, you may ask? OK, so Joan of Arc hears about knights who say ni, and here is this girl from the 15th century — she goes and (I have no idea how she did this) she goes and studies computer programming, teaching herself BASIC, and from the model I had implemented knyght with, she creates her own, who is named, “Dot”. What? Is that not unbelievable? Yet, there she is: I have seen Dot. Strange to think, interestingly enough, I believe it was Walt Disney who named her. (And back when he did, I believe we called knyght “Asterix”. Those were weird times, but aren’t they all?)

So I say to you, if that is not true love, I don’t know what love is. Anyway, since she did this before we ever got married, it isn’t weird that knyght and Dot are going out. Or who knows? It might be that the whole sex issue is moot with these two. And knyght is true to his name. Dot is also beautiful, just like her mother. Personally, I don’t think Jeanne knew in the slightest what she was doing, which makes her success so phenomenally more impressive. (She claims she copied exactly everything I did, but made it so in a completely different way. Yeah, that makes it less impressive. Holy crap, am I in trouble with this whole “love of Joan of Arc” thing. (In the best way possible, of course.)) But that’s the way things can go, at the bleeding edge of salvation. That’s true love.

> From this.

How could it be that the Gospel got it so wrong about Judas? And how married are we, the faithful, to scripture? For my part, I met Judas (as far as I’ve met anyone in the visions I have had), and he was one righteous dude, both literally and figuratively. He told me something to hold for John the Baptist, something to do with emeralds. He forbade me from ever watching an X-rated movie, ever again, my saint’s duty. And he gave me my superhero name: X-Man; this was my least favorite part of what he told me, but I suppose you don’t get to choose your nickname, right? This was when I thought that when he was being sealed in that vial of his, it meant goodbye forever.

So what was I seeing? Could my visions be so wrong? To the Christian who has not what my personal experiences provide, the Gospel is much the surer source of the truth. But I only write what I hold to be true, in this entire document that you read. I do not stray off message anywhere. It is not that I come to abolish scripture, but to posit the revelation that Judas was not as he is made out to be in Gospels. And that we are to have a new relationship to the Holy Scriptures, from now on: we are to question them whenever we have a serious challenge to what they say. When our brain cannot reconcile what we understand in our mind, in our soul, in our heart, from what the written word tells us, we must follow our inner voice. For in the true believer, God has written the Law there, in their heart, and we believe that lesson of the Bible as I’ve written before: faith is to hold on when the words fail, because those words first instilled that faith in us. Amen.

I also did have in one small vision how God did know that all scripture would be altered, miscopied, misinterpreted, and this in the end served His purpose(s). Are we to follow the opposite of fundamentalism: to have faith in the fewest things, but to hold onto those dearly? Which seeds are you, those who fell on good soil, or those who fell on stony ground, and have no root? For if the house of your faith is so flimsy, it deserves to be knocked over. Those who believe in such things as Creationism, which has no basis in fact, who think that America needs to base its laws on “Christian values”: you cannot ignore what logic states, and you cannot legislate faith. If you cannot follow both reason and faith, your faith is wrong. Simple as that. But if you do fall into spiritual crisis in believing just anything anymore, remember the ultimate fallback: God is love. You’re good to go.

> From this.

The night I ended up in a mental hospital (for the last time, hopefully), I had been dropped off from the angel proving grounds, and I was exploring the place where I had landed. It had been quite a day. I was playing the role, however much truth to it being debatable, of the Great Spirit’s first son — but down on his luck, trying to repay his debts. I had gotten to a point where I seemed to be in favor again with the good guys, the angels, and was let loose, basically, to explore the place where I was. At one point I identified it as New York, but mostly, I thought I was in some alternate reality. I seemed to be in some alternate earth, in which some of the substance to what made things real had somehow been sucked out. Must have been the cold, since it was January, at night.

At some of the times along the way, as I was exploring the place, I thought again that I was the son of perdition, and that pretty much the entirety of the cosmos were mad at me; but basically, I was mostly alone. Even the people I saw around me (not too many) didn’t seem completely real.

At one point I was told that I was basically in the land of the damned, for I was in touch with the secret society of Christians. Lost — really lost, lost of soul, lost in another world, another reality entirely. 2000 light years from home. I was cold, and I wanted to go somewhere warm; that was the most pressing thing on my mind at that presently. But how to get back to salvation, now that I am lost again? Hadn’t I been redeemed, just an hour before?

Then at one point, a bus coming toward me glowed golden — like unto an aura, or a halo — and I was told that to take that bus would mean salvation! I made sure I got on. And then the bus driver told me that they would only accept exact fare, and I tried to stay on by offering $3 in bills, but the driver said no, and that I would have to get off at the next stop. I saw his irritation with me flash red from his presence. Salvation — does it slip away? I sat down, looking at the change in hand, with a dollar bill, about $1.36. And I prayed to Jesus Christ, clutching that change, “Lord, let this be enough.” A desperate prayer, about to be thrown from salvation’s bus, with not enough for fare. Not even that: incorrect moneys for fare. But one is not to despair, not in the darkest of plights: hope, find a way. This is what we were ever meant for. This is what it means to be a child of God.