Divine Order

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Divine Order

• God as Absolute Good

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Church Set-Up Project

• Small Group Reports

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Discussion of Small Group Activity Design a
Church
Meeting Room, Silent Unity of United Kingdom
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Crossroads

• Daily Word - Wednesday, September 6, 2006
• Wherever my path may lead, God is my constant
  companion.
• There may be a time in my life's journey when I
  come to a crossroads, an intersection where two
  or more paths are before me. With each path
  leading in a different direction, it's up to me
  to choose which one I take. I may not know what
  adventures lie in store for me along any given
  way, but I can be sure that God will be my
  constant companion.
• I give thanks that whichever path I choose to
  take will present opportunities to meet wonderful
  friends and loving companions. There will be
  lessons to be learned and beautiful discoveries
  to be made.
• As I listen to the still, small voice of God
  within my heart, I step forth with confidence and
  trust.
• "Teach me your way, O Lord, that I may walk in
  your truth give me an undivided heart to revere
  your name."
• Psalm 8611

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THE ROAD NOT TAKEN

• Two roads diverged
• in a yellow wood,
• And sorry I could not travel both
• And be one traveler, long I stood
• And looked down one as far as I could
• To where it bent in the undergrowth.

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The Road

• Then took the other,
• as just as fair,And having perhaps the better
  claim,Because it was grassy and wanted
  wearThough as for that the passing thereHad
  worn them really about the same.

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Not taken

• And both that morning equally layIn leaves no
  step had trodden black.Oh, I kept the first for
  another day!Yet knowing how way leads on to
  way,I doubted if I should ever come back.

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has made all the difference.

• I shall be telling this with a sighSomewhere
  ages and ages henceTwo roads diverged in a
  wood, and I
• I took the one less traveled by,And that has
  made all the difference.

Robert Frost
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The Gospel According to Yogi

• Or, as the great mystic
• Yogi Berra
• Once said

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• When you come to a fork in the
• road, take it.

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Not everybody does

• There are other options
• Stay at the crossroads.
• Turn around.
• Cut through the woods.
• (Beam me up, Scotty?)

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Question

• Is the Journey
• Optional,
• or
• Mandatory?

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Comments?

• This is a course in miracles. It is a required
  course. Only the time you take it is voluntary.
• Free will does not mean that you can establish
  the curriculum. It means only that you can elect
  what you want to take at a given time.
• A.C.I.M.

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• Arent we really asking the most fundamental
  question of all
• Whats life all about?

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• In his dialogue Timaeus, Plato shows a debt to
  earlier Greek thought as he forms his own theory
  of spiritual growth.
• Drawing on ideas from the Pythagoreans and the
  Elusian mystery cult, Plato describes a
  pre-existent soul which lived among the stars
  until plummeting through various intervening
  planes of existence to crash land upon the earth
  where it was united with a body.

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• During its fall from grace, the soul took on
  attributes and characteristics of the various
  lower levels en route this material world.

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• Like a high-flying bird somehow forced to earth,
  the task of the soul according to Plato is to
  learn how to fly and reclaim its rightful place
  in the realm of spiritual perfection.

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• This, of course, is the antecedent of virtually
  all notions of soul-growth as a path to reunion
  with the Divine.

In Hebrew thought, the story of Adam was simply a
way of explaining how things got the way they
are.
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The Fall

• When Christian philosophers and theologians
  looked back through the Christ-event to
  reinterpret the Adam-legend, Genesis became the
  entry point in human history for all sin and
  Adam's disobedience became the Fall which
  brought the curse of sin-death-judgment upon all
  humankind.

(Why not? Its a myth, anyway)
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• In doing so they brought Platonic imagery in
  synch with Hebrew mythology. The result was a
  Christianized Neo-Platonism which accepted the
  fall of humanity.

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• The part about our exalted status in pre-existent
  communion with Divine Mind became a subject of
  controversy.
• Origen said yes others were not so certain about
  pre-existence.

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• However, most agreed that we fell from a higher
  state to our present condition of spiritual
  disrepair.

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• To make the scheme work, early Christian thinkers
  supposed that humanity was created in a kind of
  perfection and chose to reject God's
  companionship through an act of defiance in Eden.

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• Thats not what the biblical story actually
  says, but it was close enough to make the case
  for Neo-Platonism plausible.

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• That was important, because the fledgling
  Christian church desperately needed intellectual
  respectability if she were to reach beyond her
  natural constituency (lower classes, slaves and
  women) and embrace educated members of
  Hellenistic society.

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• Myths about our first parents in the Garden of
  Eden were converted to historical events for an
  antiquity-conscious Roman audience.

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• Ironically, the Platonic concept of a "fall,"
  which has never been a central part of Jewish
  thought, survived the downfall of Christian
  Platonism.
• So did the dichotomy between matter and spirit,
  body and soul.

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Preserving the worst

• While rejecting Origenist tendencies toward a
  Christian monismwhich worked from a Platonist
  base but went far beyond crude dualisms into a
  vision of the underlying onenessliteralists
  managed to preserve some of the worst ingredients
  in the Neo-Platonist worldview.

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They threw out the baby and drank the bathwater.

• Instead of moving
• toward unity with God,
• which was the goal of
• Alexandrian Christianity,
• the Western church adopted an eschatology which
  proclaimed our worthlessness and inability to
  approach the Divine.
• Well, at least youd figure things couldnt get
  any worse

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Then things got worse

• Many churchmenmonks and ascetics as they
  wereunhesitatingly identified the the Original
  Sin as sexuality, a conclusion which baffles
  Jewish scholars to this day.

(Although it makes for great visuals)
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Original sinner

• Zealously negative thinking allowed some Church
  fathers to find sexual travesty in a story of
  simple disobedience.
• One might ask Where is the sexual crime in
  Eden?

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• The pivotal concept on which all else turns is
  the "Fall" from unity with God.
• As stated said earlier, Creation centered
  theology presents an alternative to the
  non-biblical, fall-redemption model.

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• Unless creation is understood in its narrowest
  sense, i.e., a one-time event which happened
  fifteen billion years ago
• Then God's creative activity must be ongoing and
  evident today.

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Divine Order

• This process, by which we are slowly-but-surely
  growing back to awareness of our rightful place
  as Individualities within God's unified Presence
  and Power, has been called many things.
• Unity people tend to call it Divine Order.

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Divine Order
God as Absolute Good
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• Simply put, Divine Order means the first law of
  the Universe.

Problem If the Order is Divine
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Divine Order
Why do bad things happen to good people?
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Life is good

• Certainly, some unpleasant events build
  character, have educational value, or can be seen
  as opportunities for spiritual growth.

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But bad things do happen to people.

• Some situations are so heart-breaking that it
  would be offensive to call the results a
  disguised good.

(1929-1945)
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• In March of 1945, nine months after she was
  arrested, Anne Frank died of typhus at
  Bergen-Belsen. She was fifteen years old.
• Her diary has been translated into 67 languages
  and is one of the most widely read books in the
  world.

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Question Does that good result make her
suffering good ?
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Lets ask the hard questions..

• If there is such a thing as Divine Order, how
  does it interact with free will?

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In fact, how does Divine Orderexplain the
Nazis?
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(Dont despair It will! )
But lets continue with
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Hitler Everybodys favorite example of
evil

• The Nazi death camps were certainly the classic
  example of places where the light of God's
  goodness grew terribly dim.

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• For example, Jewish psychiatrist Viktor Frankl
  describes what morning was like for him at
  Auschwitz

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• The most ghastly moment of the twenty-four
  hours of camp life was the awakening, when, at a
  still nocturnal hour, the three shrill blows of a
  whistle tore us pitilessly from our exhausted
  sleep and from the longings in our dreams.

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• We then began the tussle with our wet shoes,
  into which we could scarcely force our feet,
  which were sore and swollen with edema. And there
  were the usual moans and groans about petty
  troubles, such as the snapping of wires which
  replaced shoelaces.

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• One morning I heard someone, whom I knew to be
  brave and dignified, cry like a child because he
  finally had to go to the snowy marching grounds
  in his bare feet, as his shoes were too shrunken
  for him to wear.

Viktor Frankl
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Kindness in hell

• Even in those horrible places, people were
  sometimes able to offer each other loving help
  and reflect the faintest hint of God's goodness.

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• I remember how one day a foreman secretly gave
  me a piece of bread which I knew he must have
  saved from his breakfast ration. It was far more
  than the small piece of bread which moved me to
  tears at that time.

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• It was the human something which this man
  also gave methe word and look which accompanied
  the gift.

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• Viktor Frankl discovered the death camps could
  strip human beings of every shred of dignity,
  except one.
• Frankl decided that no one can take from people
  the power to choose the way they shall respond.

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The last freedom

• We who lived in concentration
  camps can remember the men who walked
  through the huts comforting others,
  giving away their last piece of bread. They may
  have been few in number, but they offer
  sufficient proof that everything can be taken
  from a man but one thing the last of the human
  freedomsto choose one's attitude in any given
  set of circumstances, to choose one's own way.
•   Viktor Frankl, Mans Search for Meaning

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• This freedom to respond is humanity's greatest
  blessing and challenge.
• Choose, and everything depends on the choosing.
• Respond, and the response shapes the world.

St. Elisabeth giving bread to the poor.
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Not everyone chooses wisely
Rudolph Hess
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But are people really choosing?

• What gives humans the power to choose unspeakable
  cruelty or magnificent heroism?
• Some mystical thinkers have argued that if all
  power comes from God, the answer is clear
• God-power within humanity, struggling to grow,
  empowers free choices.

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Others disagree

• Some theologians have argued that Gods absolute
  power requires His management of everything
  nothing happens except that which God wills.
• Logically, this means some people are predestined
  to be heroes, others to be Hitlers or their
  followers.

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AFTER THE BREAK..

• Well discuss free will, predestination, and
  Divine Order

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Break-time!
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Divine Order

• God as Absolute Good,
• Part 2

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Subject Free Will?

• The problem which the idea of free will
  presents is the question of whether human beings
  exercise control over their actions.
• To look at this problem requires an
  understanding of the relationship between freedom
  and causation, and whether or not the natural
  order is deterministic.

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Determinism

• Determinism is the belief that every event,
  including human behavior, is caused (determined)
  by something every experience is the result of a
  sequence of causes.
• Consequently, there is no real free will.

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DeterminismWho really chooses anything?
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Determinism Choice is an illusion

• ???????
• With Earth's first Clay
• They did the Last Man's knead,
• And then of the Last Harvest
• sow'd the Seed
•   Yea, the first Morning of Creation wrote
• What the Last Dawn of Reckoning shall read.
• 
  Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam

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Double Predestination

• In its most extreme form, Double Predestination,
  people are fore ordained through all eternity.
  Some will go to heaven, most will go to hell.
• Dont complain about fairness...Its just the
  way things are.

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John Calvin

• One of the great advocates of predestination was
  a Protestant Reformer named John Calvin.
• Considered a founder of the Presbyterian Church.

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John Calvin

• Predestination we call the eternal decree of
  God, by which He hath determined in Himself what
  He would have to become of every individual of
  mankind. For they are not all created with a
  similar destiny but eternal life is fore-
  ordained for some, and eternal damnation for
  others.

from Institutes of the Christian Religion
(1537)
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Question Does this jingle any Platonic bells?

How does his dialogue Euthyphro speak to the
issues were discussing?
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Discussion

• Predestination or Divine Order?

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Norman Vincent Peale

• Honolulu lt-----------------------------LAX

On his flight from LA to Honolulu, Dr. Peale
noted the plane kept correcting left and right.
The pilot said they drifted constantly, yet
arrived safely at Honolulu having been off course
most of the time!
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Now it gets deeper.

• Isaac Newton (1641-1727)

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Newtonian Premise

• Just as we do, early New Thought pioneers
  explained their ideas in the language of the day.
• The science of the 19th Century was grounded in
  Newtonian cause and effect.

Newton at age 46
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Supernatural World

• Like the Zuni and Dobouans, medieval people
  explained their world by unseen forces, some
  benign and some malicious. It never occurred to
  the vast majority of human beings that there
  could be natural laws standing behind the
  observable phenomena of the world.

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Cause Effect

• Not until Isaac Newton.
• Newton popularized the scientific method. He
  didnt originate the principles of experimental
  science, but his contribution was so important
  that one scholar calls him "the first popular
  hero of modern science."

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Newtonian Physics

• Determinism in the West is often associated
  with Newtonian physics, which depicts the
  physical matter of the universe as operating
  according to a set of fixed, knowable laws.
• The "billiard ball" hypothesis, a product of
  Newtonian physics, argues that once the initial
  conditions of the universe have been established
  the rest of the history of the universe follows
  inevitably.

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Cause Effect

• What Newton did was to show that everything
  which happens in the world has a natural cause
  and can be expressed mathematically. He
  completely stripped the physical world of its
  supernatural premise.

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Universe of Laws

• All the great discoveries of the Age of
  Enlightenment can be summarized in a single
  phrase
• This is a Universe governed by laws.
• Understand the law, fathom the mechanics of the
  Cosmos, and you can confidently predict the
  outcome.

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And it works
Newtonian physics explains how gravity functions
and how the planets wheel in their orbits.
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Without Newtonian physics

• We couldnt shoot rockets to the moon and beyond

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However

• Science has made some startling discoveries
  about atomic and sub-atomic physicsand they
  aint Newtonian.

Rutgers University, Artists Conception of
subatomic world
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• For openers There is no such thing as matter and
  energy.
• Everything is matter-and-energy.

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Quantum physics

• Just as water, ice and steam are the same
  substance in different form, so are energy and
  matter one and the same force/object. We can no
  longer speak of one without the other.

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Random factors

• But that's not all. A bigger shock was coming.
  At the heart of the Universein the sub-atomic
  microverse of which everything is composedthere
  is no such thing as law, there are only
  probabilities and tendencies.

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• Instead of the absolute certainty of classical
  Newtonian physics, science now knows that
  apparently random factors operate at the
  sub-atomic level.

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Quantum Indeterminacy

• This is the best information that quantum
  mechanics can give if the measurement is
  repeated many times, a different result is
  obtained each time, and the only thing that can
  be predicted is the probability distribution.
  This basic indeterminacy has fascinated
  philosophers over the years, but most physicists
  have got used to it.

Professor Peter Landshoff, University of
Cambridge
http//plus.maths.org/issue5/qm1/
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Sports Illustration
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Statistical Distribution Social Science Model
If the home team scores, you can predict cheering
with 100 accuracy. Thats Newtonian physics.
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Thats Quantum Indeterminacy

• However, there is no way to predict what will
  happen in any particular seat

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Applied to Metaphysics

• Human beings are intricate, complex,
  matter-energy events who possess the same kind of
  randomness found at the sub-atomic level They
  are free agents in the middle of a crowd.

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Lawor Probabilities?

• This is an open question. The Newtonian model has
  much to commend itself. It allows one to profess
  absolute faith in the outworking of Spirit.

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Lawor Probabilities?

• And the quantum approachseeing things as
  aggregate tendencies and probabilities rather
  than absolute lawseems to lend itself to
  everyday experience.
• We affirm, trust, but the result is not always
  immediately forthcoming.

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Both views are found in Unity

• There are absolutists who say
• It MUST work at all times.
• There are others who say
• It works if you work it.

Your comments are invitedthe discussion will
doubtless go on for years.
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Letter to my column asked

• Why did my dog die?

How would YOU answer?
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Mystical Vision

• God really does have everything under control,
  although the present circumstances may argue
  otherwise.

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Despite all appearances to the contrary
Faith in Divine Order assures people that the
process of life and growth continuesand God is
Absolute Good.
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Divine Order

• God as Absolute Good

Reminder
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Term Papers

• Due the last day of class, three weeks from
  today (Thursday, Dec 10).
• No papers will be accepted after 1000 am
  Friday, December 11.