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Monday, November 30, 2015

Does God Change?

Fyodor Dostoevsky



When I spoke the other day about the Dictatorship of the Righteous, I was talking about Religion in a fundamentalist form, yet revolutionary in political form.
http://fatherdaughtertalk.blogspot.com/2015/11/the-main-theme-of-age-dictatorship-of.html

Every religion is anarchy at first: it breaks with the old norms, so is illegal and revolutionary. It is anarchic in its breaking of the old and bringing in the new.
Most religions end their revolutionary there. They may export their creed, and in that sense their missionary work is spreading religious revolution, but in the home provinces, the rule of the New Law pervades.

Religions, however, may yet be revolutionary in areas other than Faith. For example, they may be revolutionary in politics, such as those groups seeking to spread not only creed, but also political ideas, such as the Christian Dominionists and the Islamic Wahhabis.
The core of religion remains imprisoned in creed, whether for good or ill.

Thus, a new Religion is both anarchy and dictatorship, for as it breaks the old law, it establishes a new law. It both denies Law and affirms Law.

Does God change his mind, then? Is it time to move on from the old to the new? Has the established order lost the mandate of heaven?

This is even more of a question when there is religious upheaval within the same creed, such as the Protestant Reformation within Christianity. Things have changed. Has God changed?

Consider the history of events contained within the the Christian perspective of the change from the Old Covenant of Moses to the New Covenant of Jesus.
There is change.
No Christian would say God has changed his mind.

Most people would say that God had such transformations already incorporated within his infinite plan, and it is only from human imperfect understanding that it appears that the Holy has changed.

I would think God is not a list maker, nor a planner, nor an "intelligent designer", nor does he employ such folk on his staff.
God establishes the ground of being; all that would be has a chance to be.
The free will of humanity chooses among that which it may choose, and accepts that which is beyond  humanity's choice or desires.

If God choose one thing, then he might have to change.
God does not choose.
All states of being have a chance. Any state of righteousness has a chance of being immediately followed by immorality and any peaceable kingdom may be transformed into nature bloody in tooth and claw.

There is no determinism of fundamentalism.
By abolishing determinism, we do not affect the Holy.

Dostoevsky had a character once ask:
'Without God and the future life? It means everything is permitted now, one can do anything?' 

I would say that everything has a chance to be, but it is humanity's task to establish a pious moral order according to its understandings of the Holy upon that quantum field of probability.

As the determinism of the moral order disappears, the burden of choice weighs heavy upon us.

We then fly to the prison of fundamentalism to save us from our works for the Holy.

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