Unbelievers imagine love exists; believers know it does

Love does not exist except in the imagination. How we define it and then expect others to deliver that definition is in the realm of the imagination. It has never existed at all. No one can define what it is exactly, except poets and stargazers using their romantic and whimsical lyricism. Such philosophical muses and mysticism that relies on bucket loads of abstract words to define other abstract words is what professional theorists, like Foucault, use as part of their philosophical construction of meaning.

In a pivotal phrase in a discourse on origins of things like power and knowledge from Power/Knowledge p131 he says for example:
‘Truth isn’t outside power. …Truth is a thing of this world; it is produced only by virtue of multiple forms of constraint. And it induces regular effects of power. Each society has its regime of truth, its ‘general politics’ of truth; that is, the types of discourse which it accepts and makes function as true, the mechanisms and instances which enable one to distinguish true and false statements, the means by which each is sanctioned…the status of those who are charged with saying what counts as true.”

Using abstract words like 'outside power' to argue perhaps that human consciousness is not subject to anything outside of its own imagination may seem an authoritative argument for the origin of truth, as part of an Open University module, but in reality it is nothing but an atheistic discourse for atheists, for people who have 'internalised' reality using a set of clapped out hand-me-downs from other people who waffled eloquently.

For example, take this line from one of Socrates many muses:

“When desire, having rejected reason and over powered judgement which leads to right, is set in the direction of the pleasure which beauty can inspire, and when again under the influence of its kindred desires it is moved with violent motion towards the beauty of corporeal forms, it acquires a surname from this very violent motion, and is called love.”

How do we translate these little expression of something that does not exist? Is he saying that love derives its power from desire that should not listen to reason or judgement and is therefore right? The premise he uses is that desire exists in some quantifiable form and the curious logic that follows leads to the conclusion that desire is right if the motion is violent enough to expel reason and judgement. So, if I was to love like this I would be right if I rejected reason and judgement and let desire, inspired by beauty, to move me violently to set myself in the direction of pleasure? Isn’t this a recipe for rape? Whichever way you look at it, this pleasure centred grasping of love is about as reasonable as imagining laws to justify carpet bombing a city full of innocent people because their ideology and religion is obnoxious to you. The reason it is laden with unreason is because the logic Socrates used in this one sentence to define love is totally bound up in trying to understand something that does not reveal itself through things like beauty, desire, corporeal forms, violent motion.

All these things are not going to help people to understand love. If beauty is the essential inspiration for the experience of love, for the transition from desire to love, then what of ugliness? This is part of nature too. Ugliness also exists in the world and in many guises, in hatred, in pride, in jealousy, in selfishness. Do these also inspire Socrates to love, or are they expunged from his version of reality? And if they are expunged, then one must expunge the people who carry and show these traits because it is they who bring these things into the world. So his love will exclude a lot of people and if everyone excluded a lot of people on these grounds, love would not spread very far. In fact love wouldn’t spread at all. Unless of course beauty is in all things, in attractive looking bodies, in attractive looking material, in attractive looking dust, as well as in things like murder, treason, hatred, jealousy, deceit, selfishness, pride and anger. But he talks of ‘beauty’ that gives ‘pleasure’ that is born out of ‘desire’ and so to avoid the paradox, the double speak, the confusion that threw Adam when God said one thing and the Serpent said another, Socrates would need also to talk of ‘murder’ that gives ‘pleasure’ that is born out of ‘desire’. From here, he would have great difficulty to show whether love was good or not.

The words that Socrates used, if you place them in any order in his statement about love, have no meaning other than the ones trapped in his mind at the moment of writing, which for students that treat his writings as some kind of canon in the development of thought alarmingly equates to the emperor's new clothes. Lecturers throughout the world who teach on the subject of philosophy and reason often give academic status to stargazers like this one. Stargazers' imagined truths about love, who for centuries have wrestled with its constraints and demands as if it were a God, has produced a mega-narrative that teachers quote from as if it were the absolute canon, a foolproof benchmark for social development and political science. It is but the fantasy of people devoid of God's Spirit.

If Socrates’ writings are construed by academics as some kind of benchmark in the development of philosophical enquiry into the nature of things that their students will find edifying I’m afraid they’re going to be more confused than he was. The methodology behind reinforcing ideas by cross referencing within the narrow field of a canonised selection of scripture emanating from one or two people’s imagination based on quantity is how indoctrination is mastered. The Jews had indoctrinated themselves with ideas about God and love that were not only entirely at odds with His Son but portrayed a cruel and unmerciful God of their imagination.

When Jesus came on the scene and started talking about the love of God He was immediately branded a heretic and a brigand. The reason for a wholesale rejection of His teaching about love that culminated in His humiliation was not only caused by the sin of corporate unbelief but by centuries of indoctrination by cross referencing within a canon of scripture deemed unquestionably authoritative as a definition of love and therefore of (God).

For only God can communicate love. The human race is incapable of communicating something that exists only as an idea in the imagination as 'they' clearly demonstrated when they hammered nails into His healing hands that had touched those they cursed and into His feet that had trodden hundreds of miles with messages of love and forgiveness.

Neither have I experienced love from those who confess it toward me, both inside and outside the church, for they too are incapable, as I am, to express something for which we have no pattern or blueprint, no form or definition, no example or standard by which to measure its height, breadth and depth other than in the life of a man who came to show it in all its fullness - Jesus Christ. No wonder 'they' wanted to kill Him. He was a light among men that exposed the substratum of lies upon which they had built their cultural edifices.

But I know the love of Christ and it is a sad thing to know Him fully in a world that does not know anything at all about love. It does not know because it worships the scriptures of men. Atheists worship their sages and intellectuals, Christians their Bible, Muslims their Koran, but few of them know the love of Christ.

"Father, I want those you have given me to be with me where I am, and to see my glory, the glory you have given me because you loved me before the creation of the world" Jesus prayed.

In this short age of man love is as elusive as meaning because the words that cultures have used for eons have no authority to identify what is truth; imagination has no authority other than to do good and do evil in equal measure.

Read Jesus' words, I implore you, before you die in your sin.

Authority and Christ, the abuse of law

The reason for the emphasis on authority in relation to Jesus Christ is very clear in my mind on this blog but perhaps not clear for those who have some alternative ideas about how authority works in history.

The political driving force behind the rise and fall of civilisations centres on the use of authority and its usage relies on a strong legal narrative that imbues human will with god-like powers to decide who dies and who lives. ‘It is right that some should die for the benefit of the greater number,’ gives a flavour of the kind of reasoning that infects the political process of legally endorsing the authority of tribal or State violence.

Jesus Christ came to show that the authority of political systems relying on this kind of moral philosophy is responsible for inbreeding and multiplying the very attitudes and ideas that undermine its own survival.

The presence of war in the world is a testimony of the abject failure of the human will to exercise responsibility and care for itself and others. Sin is the cause. The solution is not within the grasp of any human power, whether or not regulated by law, for it is the law that divides the human will against itself by sanctifying the wholesale slaughter of its own kind. Regardless of the boasting rhetoric of high culture, the verbosity of academia that makes it all look so shiny and successful, the freak show of human power is but a glitch in eternity.

Authority is a serious problem for those who don’t understand its purpose and even many Christians have been sucked into the most common of all fallacies about secular authority being part of God’s rule and authority.

At the end of the day, there are two types of authority. One is man-made and it is about legalising evil. The other is CHRIST-made and it is about stripping the authority of those who believe they can legalise evil. The former is an aggressive authority that dominates by force and its three dimensional form restricts it to a finite history. The latter is a passive authority that dominates by meekness and its spiritual form goes well beyond the small-minded world of materialism. The weapon of the first type is a physical implement and the second type a spiritual implement that cause death and life respectively. The one personified as a murderer by Christ is the same one who tempted Him, with the small mindedness of materialism, to dump his spiritual power of obedience to the truth for the tantalising offer of earthly obedience to sneering lies and innuendo. War is a manifestation of the mind of satan that has inspired lies and murder since the beginning.

The question of authority is also a question about the nature and character of mankind therefore, which is answered by its long history of bloodshed, bloodshed caused by both religious and secular hierarchies sometimes working together, sometimes independently, but in a unified attitude toward the purpose of ‘authority’. The kingdoms they form, using geographical, economic, intellectual, ideological or national boundaries rely on authority in a brutish way and this way has no mandate from heaven – even if it were sought with loud prayers and fasting.

The Kingdom of Jesus Christ is an eternal Kingdom that does not advance by violent means other than by the spoken Word and by the Spirit of God who reveals the meaning of the spoken Word. The Word that became flesh and dwells among us today is able to teach their meanings to those whose sin has been removed. Words that are inherently inclined to violate the minds of those who rely on the mediating authority of their laws and conventions to justify their violence are still just words. If a knife or a gun, or a hanging rope or wooden cross, is all that underpins the authority of the human race to improve itself then I have pity for those who have lived their lives by such a loathsome understanding of authority.

Christ wants to rule in the church first....

Postmodern skepticism among members of a large floating church would be overcome swiftly if church hierarchies disengage themselves from the blatant lie suggested by the canon that all the instances of the Old Testament portrayal of God is a true and accurate description of the nature and character of God. Until stubborn men and women within these hierarchies stop pushing an insulting theology of retrofitting the life of Christ like candy floss to a sinful scripture about killing and stoning people for their sin, the floating church of disillusioned and disappointed Christians will continue to drift around looking for the reality of Jesus in the church.
For over 33 years, in my journey through churches of all kinds, Anglican Charismatic, Pentecostal Free Church, Pentecostal House Churches, Evangelical Missions where I have prayed and worked with Spirit filled Christians I have had many confide in me their confusion about the nature and character of God that is linked with an uncertainty and wariness of the Old Testament being so closely unified with Christ.
Moreover, I have observed a general 'head in the sand' attitude by everyone toward the very very serious problem of Jesus being retrofitted to the Old Testament. 'Nasty stuff in the Old Testament but let's talk about Jesus today... .. and everything will be alright' typifies the way leaders opt out of facing up to the dire offence to Christ that the Old Testament causes by exisitng as Holy Writ. Everything will never be alright until the canonised appendage of sinner's lives, that suggests Jesus endorses everything they said and did when they used God's name, is weighed and tested at a judgement seat that has only One Person sitting on it.
It is time to stop this nonsense of trying to uphold a tradition of blending old and new wine into one Holy script simply because of its long history. It is time to accept that Constantine, favoured as a holy relic of Rome's hijack of the church, was nothing but a bloodlusting warrior whose dream about Jesus giving him victory in battle was nothing but a worship of the Roman god of war - Satan himself. The destroyer and liar from the beginning.
God has never instructed any man to kill his neighbour - this is a lie from the pit. Unless of course you live out of the Old Testament because, like Constantine, you believe Christ is a God of war and destruction.