To paraphrase the comedian Owen Benjamin, When Jesus Christ said: ‘This bread is my body and this wine is my blood’, that dude was clearly stating that, if you are not into metaphors, this club isn’t for you!
- The clue is in the beginning, ‘we are made in the image of God’
- This means (I believe) that when we act like God, we create God in the creation of Good. When we act the opposite of God, we oppose the Good. The effect in the world will be the same as if God is acting in the world.
- That’s why people who don’t believe in God, or saints, will still surprise their children with gifts on Christmas day. Deep down they know that to create joy, is good. The idea that Joy is brought to them by a judgemental father who sees all and knows all, while not literally true, is a metaphor that works even for the smallest children.
- Santa Clause may not be real, but if we all act as Santa would, then the net effect will be the same as if he does exist.
- God is the personification of virtue, truth, judgement, and the power of creation and destruction. The bringer of justice, at a later date. So are we, in our actions. If we seek truth, understand Good and Evil, act properly, we can create good on earth, protect the weak and punish the wicked. That is why it is important to integrate the old Testament punishing God. God is virtue. Not a 1960s libertine.
- We are fallen sinners because we have had only a taste of the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil. That’s why, as we all know from our preferred ‘one-armed economist’, we fail to be completely good. Every action has an opportunity cost, and as such, our every act contains some good and some evil (or at least, a deficit of Good in some way).
- The reason the new socialist man, the Nietzschean superman or the simple ‘yeah, but…’ postmodernist, has not been able to rid us of Christianity, is because we all know this simple fact. Utopia will never be brought about on this earth by man, or by a political idea, because of human limitation and the corruption brought about by the inadequacy of human knowledge. The all-seeing eye is divine, and not attainable by small groups of human beings. Only on aggregate. The power of total knowledge is decentralised, not concentrated. That is why we are ‘all’ made in his image. Any individual ruler has no more divine spark than another person, however much knowledge he himself may accrue, he has no greater right to exist than another.
- That is why governments can make races and genders equal under the law, but cannot eradicate racism or sexism in people’s hearts. And when they try to do so, they create resentment that fuels the very emotion they claim to want to rid us of. They have only had a nibble of the knowledge of good and evil, and the consequences of their ignorance are sinful. This is banality of evil.
- The character of Jesus was pure, and his actions so just, and his lesson so powerful, that he acts as God on earth. This completes the echo, that ‘we are made in his image’, with a concrete example.
- Jesus miracles are metaphorical, and that is their power. He reminds us of the divinity that is present in human Goodness, with a clear finger pointing to the type of ‘heaven’ we can create on earth, long after our death.
- We turn stones into bread, like Him, only by generations of agricultural effort to improve the land and build capital and society.
- We turn 2 fishes into 500, by sacrificing part of our meal to provide bait for the fisherman. This sacrifice makes fish cheaper for all, thereby reducing poverty.
- We invented coracles, canoes, boats and mighty ships, so that we may ‘walk on water’. Maritime trade is the foundation of our material wealth and progress to date.
- 2 loaves of bread can feed 500, by replication, copying and sharing. Putting copyright law to shame 2000 years ago, we see that sharing is a sacred act. Once we see a wheel’, we can all immediately grasp the concept, and make our own. This foreshadows the Bitcoin revolution, with open source, trustworthy currencies available to all, the pirate bay, the dark web, etc. (You never thought Limewire was so profound, did you?)
- When Jesus turns water into wine, he is replicating in an instant what a farmer does when he plants a vine, that turns water, sunshine and carbon into grapes for harvest and wine-making.
- If we have sought truth about the human body, we can heal the sick, as He did.
- If we can resurrect the lessons taught to us by our ancestors, and find meaning in the lives that have gone before us, then we do raise the dead. Indeed, it was the belief that Jesus is risen, and walks among us in strange, that had the power to demolish the Roman Empire from within. The dead, acting among the living.
- When Matthew quotes Jesus saying: ‘The eye is the lamp of the body. If your eyes are good, your whole body will be full of light. But if your eyes are bad, your whole body will be full of darkness.’ What I think he is telling us is that we should look for the miracles all around us, and understand the sacrifices of the many that came before us to produce such beauty and wonder as separates us from the other animals.
I believe that the foundation of libertarianism is to understand that authoritarianism is evil because to have one central ‘author’ of the Good or the True or the Just, is to deny that the spark of the divine exists in others. It is to pretend that one individual among us, has the power of the creator, despite belonging to the created class. That is the farce of monarchy as divinity. To believe in authority is to be narcissistic and totalitarian at once. To believe that the government (a man-made defence corporation) has the right of the ability to erradicate disease, by fiat, is maniacal and totalitarian. The belief in the greater authority of experts is to believe that people have not eyes to see the truth of the world around them.
Libertarianism is a Christian idea because it believes that decentralised Truth, Morality and Judgement will produce more Good in aggregate than authoritarianism.
This is where I diverge from my Muslim brothers. Islam is based partly on the idea that I outlined above, that ‘actions speak louder than words. ‘If you act pious, you will eventually become pious’, my father once told me, recently after converting to Islam.
I disagree. I know from many years as a devout sinner, that I can go through the motions, unchanged, with wickedness in my heart. I have met a few unrepentantly evil men in my time at sea in the Merchant Navy, and those men may act pious, but are ready to sin again whenever the authorities are not paying attention.
No. Motivation matters.
Do not pray in public (wokesters), do not assume perfect knowledge (epidemiologists), do not manipulate man by using the lord’s name in vain (those who claim authority over others), do not declare armageddon every 10 years (climate scientists).
Know that Good will not be achieved in this lifetime. Only after a life of sacrifice, without ego, can we hope to bring a self-correcting goodness into the hearts of every newborn human being on this earth.
We must try to bear witness to the shortcomings and sin of our actions. In this quest, no human on earth should be spared criticism (witness, if not judgement). We are all sinners, who must atone with sacrifice that lasts beyond our years.
I believe there is nothing more real.
It is a tall order, and none of us alive today will ever see our name credited for achieving such miracles. That miracle of achieving in an instant, what takes generations for man, was given only to the character of Jesus.
Jeremiah 5:21
… O foolish and senseless people, who have eyes but do not see, who have ears but do not hear.