A Hippiecritical Analysis of the '60s
America
was breaking loose from something then. Was it
traditional morality or just the church? Or both? Was it
God and country — “Hell, no, we won’t
go”? Or was it the materialistic American dream? It’s
not so clear to me now what it was all about. Maybe it is
to you. It seemed to be “all of the above” then,
and quite a bit more.
Even the Establishment played a part: outlawing prayer
in school and banning the Bible from classrooms was certainly
revolutionary. Golly, God was repudiated right here in the
USA in A.D. nineteen hundred sixty-three. We got the message.
Like many, it wasn’t that I didn’t believe
in God, but that I wouldn’t. I would not believe in
the God to whom anything I did didn’t matter, only
what I believed. If church on Sunday defined my worth to
Him, something was wrong with Him, not me. I would not believe
in the God who threw good people into hell for the crime
of never having heard of Him. I didn’t need, want,
or read the Bible anymore. I had a new map of my own for
my life.
The slogans of the Sixties became my signposts. They were
the words we lived by, rather than the daily devotionals
of our parents. We rejected anything old, as if age somehow
made things less true. And our slogans have yet to die:
- You can’t legislate morality.
- There are no absolutes.
- Do your own thing.
- Truth is relative.
And you couldn’t legislate morality; because it felt
so good, we were going to do it. What law could stand in the
way of feeling good? Didn’t they prove that one with
Prohibition? And that was just over alcohol. There were no
more absolutes, so we could do our own thing. Objective truth?
You mean a truth outside the boundaries of our own experiences
and feelings? A truth that might limit us? Come on, truth
is relative. What’s true for you might not be true for
me. It was our freedom that was absolute.
We didn’t want anyone preaching to us about sin,
telling us how to run our lives. And all these things gave
us good reason for even denying God’s existence. The
Ten Commandments had too many don’ts, and we rejected
those don’ts as soon as all the spankings stopped.
(Thank you Dr. Spock!) After all, we knew more about life
than our moms and pops did. They were so uptight, while
we exulted in our freedom. And in our newfound freedom we
saw it as our prerogative and sacred duty to “Question
Authority.”
Forty Years Later
So now, forty years later, what do we say about what we
said then? Did our slogans have the power to change the
world like we thought? Let’s look them over:
There are no absolutes. Was that not an absolute statement
itself? And if there are no rights and wrongs, can we be
sure about that?
There
is no objective truth. Sounds like a judgment based on some
larger view of reality, a truth independent of one’s
subjective views. You know, an objective truth.
Truth is relative. Or is that only relatively true? How
can we be sure?
Question authority. Why?
And one slogan died just a few years later: “Don’t
trust anybody over thirty?” Or maybe it didn’t.
Maybe those who came after us didn’t trust us, either.
After all, what goes around comes around, or as the old
saying goes, “As we sow, so we reap.”
So, Does God Exist Only if We Say So?
We have learned in the last forty years that only fools
would say in their hearts, “There is no God,”
meaning we lived as if there were no God, no accountability
for our actions.
We were so foolish and disobedient. We were misled by
others and became slaves to many wicked desires and evil
pleasures. Our lives were full of evil and envy. We hated
others, and they hated us. Is it just religious dogma
to say that there is a God who made all this? But is it
merely the dogma of another religion to exclude God from
the big picture?
Who can prove there is a God? But who can prove there
is no God? Which side would you want to err on c" the one
who says there is a God or the one who says there is no
God? I guess if we said the latter, we would be more accountable,
or would we? Will anyone be able to defend himself for his
suppression of the knowledge of right and wrong? Suppression
is the conscious and voluntary forgetting of your Creator,
and the conscious putting away of the restraints that knowing
places on you. For many, their conscious choice goes beyond
suppression of what they know is right to repression. If
we continue to suppress our conscience, we go through regression
to a state of repression, which means that it becomes unconscious
and involuntary (see box below for definitions). It overwrites
what’s there, which then can never be recovered. Suppression
eventually leads to repression. It is like going over the
waterfall, in your heart.
But Can God Blame Us for Hating Him?
God is good, we had always heard, but when you see what
those who claim to know God have done and still do, it’s
hard to believe in their God. As Nietzsche said, “I’d
believe in your Redeemer, if you looked more redeemed.”
We used to be atheists, and we hated a God who didn’t
exist. We thought God was the God of the Crusades and the
Inquisitions. We thought He was the God of Martin Luther
who had 100,000 peasants slaughtered and called for violence
against everyone who didn’t believe in him. We thought
He was the divided God of all the denominational debates:
the Roman Catholic, Greek Orthodox, Reformed, Lutheran and
Anglican denominations, ad nauseam. He must be some kind
of denominational God with a host of denominational Christs
— one for each denomination. So who was it who said,
“Can Christ be divided?”
Must have been some no account who didn’t know how
important warring groups of believers in Christ were. Each
one of these denominations have their own particular slant
on the Bible. And who in the future, as in the past, will
once again kill heretics? In the past, it was always those
with the “right doctrine” that killed those
with the “wrong doctrine.” It’s never
been the other way around. They say history repeats itself
if we don’t learn anything from it.
In the first century, the Jews were killing the Christians
for worshipping the heretic they’d put to death and
saying He was alive. They just couldn’t understand
it. From the fourth century on, the Christians have killed
the Jews for not worshipping Him. They couldn’t understand
the Jews, either. Nobody seemed to learn that persecution
was wrong, but just kept spitefully doing to others what
had been done to them. No wonder we turn
ed
to eastern religion!
God could hardly blame us for hating Him, could He? Just
as it says about people who claimed to be His holy people,
His chosen ones, “Because of you, My name is blasphemed
among the nations.”
In light of their history, would not the apostle Paul
say the same thing about Christianity, were he writing today?
Perhaps what was written long ago by Isaiah the prophet
might also apply: “All day long I have stretched out
my hand to a disobedient and contrary people.”
If there was a God, we would hope that He really was not
the God of the bloody and horrible history of religious
wars and persecutions. And that all the wealth and power
gathered by those professing belief in Him did not really
represent Him at all. He said, “I was found by those
who did not seek Me, and I was made manifest [known] to
those who did not ask for Me.”
There had to be a way back to the Garden. All we knew
was the path it wasn’t on.
The Question of Evil
Though we denied the existence of right and wrong, and
good and evil, we wondered why we still got mad at the people
who broke their promises to us. What was that burning inside
of us? Somehow we instinctively knew what was good and what
was bad, and we were the judge to decide which one we would
obey. And when we were at the receiving end of someone’s
evil choice, it affected us. It hurt. We lost something.
Actually, it was taken from us — stolen.
And we said, “If He is such a loving God, why is
there so much evil in the world?”
The mother tells her son to clean up his room. He decides
later not to clean it. Soon it is a disgusting mess. Was
the mother wrong to tell her son to clean it? You judge
whose fault the mess is. Or was she wrong to bring him into
the world, knowing that one day the room would be a mess?
Was it love or hate that caused her to conceive her children?
Would it have been better that she aborted him? How about
you and me, would it have been better?
Men and women have the freedom to choose what is right
and what is wrong, and they do every day. Some choose good,
and some evil. And many somehow can’t see what is
wrong with them, how the evil they did hurt others very
badly? but somehow they can see very vividly what is wrong
with everyone else, especially how the selfish actions others
do hurts them.
Maybe we ought to acknowledge that God created us with
a free will, not as robots or zombies. But why did He do
such a thing? Maybe He created free will to test all men.
Would it have been better that I had been created a zombie?
All we have ever heard of the afterlife is heaven and hell.
We couldn’t really understand this. We are coming
to see that man can pass the test. We have learned that
God gave man a conscience in order that he would do what
it says is right and avoid doing what it says is wrong,
and have learned that this has great, eternal consequences.
And that true freedom can only be maintained by the free
choice of the right and not the wrong. For choosing the
wrong sweeps a man further down the river of no return.
Choosing the right preserves that thing deep within every
man and woman that is like God.
Nevertheless, all mankind must still die once. That was
decided in the Garden as the way for men and women, if they
could, to pay the price for the wrongs they had done others.
But it is not already decided which men must die twice.
The Beginning of Things
The
trouble, and the way everyone has to deal with it, began
long ago. So, did you know that it is appointed for a man
to suffer death once, but not twice? But there is a second
death, which is eternal, and between the two deaths is a
judgment. From it some will go on to a second, unending
life, and others to a second, unending death. It all depends
on the choices each person makes. The judgment will be entirely
fair and impartial. A person would only die twice if his
conscience went into repression, after suppressing the truth
continually in his life.
Mankind got into this state — of having to make
the right choices — by not listening. He was meant
to eat of the tree of life first. In the Garden of Eden,
a severe warning was given before the fall:
And the Sovereign God commanded the man, saying, “Of
every tree of the garden you may freely eat; but of the
tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat,
for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die.”
(Genesis 2:16-17)
How many times did Eve go to that tree and ponder that
warning? We don’t know, but we know her desire grew
and grew. What was this thing called death? Why shouldn’t
she gain that knowledge? She didn’t tell her husband,
not until the churning within her had given birth to action.
For the evil one appeared to her, immediately sensing the
same thing in her that was full blown in him. He knew how
to fan that desire into flame. It’s burning still.
That’s where sin comes from — it starts with
a desire. It’s not sin to have a desire, and many
desires are good, but once an evil desire is conceived —
and the thought is welcomed, considered, and allowed by
our choice to reach the emotions — it brings forth
sin, and sin brings forth death. Death entered the world
when they ate the forbidden fruit.
They had chosen disobedience. In response, God did set
in effect a great plan of redemption. You’ve heard
of the broad outlines of it most of your life, though, like
Nietzsche, you haven’t seen enough redemption to convince
you of its existence. At the same time, God set in motion
another way, for the great mass of humanity that would never
hear of Messiah, to avoid the second death. If they stayed
on this path, they would remain worthy of the second life.
This path is the natural law, the law of conscience by
which the motivation of man’s choices will be judged.
For men and women were no longer innocent, but now had the
full knowledge of good and evil. This natural law is tied
up with the most general, fundamental law in all science,
the one encompassing all of creation and all of life. It
is also the law presiding over death.
The Second Law of Thermodynamics
After the fall of man, in the Garden of Eden, God put
into effect a law of conscience — the knowledge of
good and evil. Eve had, in a sense, attained the knowledge
she desired. It came at a great cost. This law of conscience
can be compared with the second law of thermodynamics, which
states that whenever energy is expended, it always tends
to flow from a more concentrated to a less concentrated
place.
Turn the heat off the hot frying pan. Its heat flows into
the cooler air around it. With the cooling of the pan, an
increase in entropy is taking place, which means the amount
of energy to do something useful, like frying an egg, is
decreasing. The reverse never happens — the air
never surrenders what heat it does have to make the hot
frying pan hotter.
Nor will the children’s room ever spontaneously
become clean. Johnnie will have to clean it, expending effort
to do so. If he doesn’t, his life in the room will
soon make it a pig-pen. In fact, he will not ever be able
to stop cleaning it, as long as he is using it, unless he
is content to live in a mess. Shall we lock the doo
r
and let no one in? It would soon become dusty, musty, and
moldy. Decay is in the air. Decay is everywhere, and must
be resisted by everyone in every way. And in the end, decay
wins: we die.
So, is life futile, without point? No! The struggle against
(or acceptance of) that decay determines our eternal destiny!
That’s what it’s all about — this thing
called life. Of course, it is not about our rooms, it’s
about our consciences. How hard it is to maintain a good
conscience in the face of the many temptations of life!
It’s comparable to the struggle necessary to have
a healthy life. It takes exercise, drinking water, and eating
good food in the face of all the temptations to do the opposite.
This first life will end, no matter how well we live it.
The second life (or second death) will never end, according
to the condition, not of our bodies at the end of our life,
but of our consciences.
Just do nothing to maintain your car, home, or room, and
everything deteriorates, collapses, breaks down, and wears
out. And that is how the second law of thermodynamics applies
to every realm of life — physical, social, emotional,
mental, and spiritual. We have to maintain what is good
in the face of temptation, suffering, decay, even the death
of our loved ones. We have to never let go of the truth
we instinctively know, even when everyone else around us
does.
This struggle was given mankind by God in hope that through
it men and women would retain the worth they were made with.
Apart from the effort that struggle requires, the moral
nature of men and women decays. It is as inevitable as the
decay of their bodies. Human beings can’t keep suppressing
their conscience — if they do, the energy of their
life dissipates, and so does their worth. As the entropy
of their life increases, the amount of energy to do what
is right and turn away from wrong decreases. Eventually,
nothing of value is left. Repression has taken place. And
the lake of fire is where all that is the worthless will
be burned, those of no account to their Creator. The reason
for this judgment was they made themselves of “no
account.” They were not born that way.
Instead, when you do wrong, you have to admit it, “I
was wrong, I don’t want to do it again.” This
admission does not release you for paying for your sin in
the first death, but it is the only way to maintain the
integrity of your conscience after you have not listened
to it. Otherwise decay rules your soul and not just your
body. It is the undisputed master of your body. In the fall,
the second law of thermodynamics rules all. But it is our
choices that determine whether it takes our souls along
with it. The wages of sin is still death. The first death
awaits even those who struggle to maintain their conscience.
There is no way else for them to deal with their sins other
than to pay for them in death. Those who have made themselves
worthless will not be able to pay.
Men
must live by this second law to maintain their conscience.
No one can lead a perfect life, but still they can maintain
their conscience and do good. Not all men are as evil as
they can be, but some are. They are evil as they can be.
For example, Alexander the Great was probably as evil as
he could be, controlled by his desires. Other people in
history and on Earth today have almost reached their full
potential of evil, but no one has reached their full potential
of doing good in the world. No natural man ever has. No
one is as good as they could be. They have fallen short.
Every man has fallen short of the glory of God. So, not
all men are as evil as they could be, and no one is as good
as he could be. But all have sinned to one degree or another.
We see that all men have sinned and the wages of sin is
death. All men have sinned and have fallen short —
but some have fallen shorter than others. It is just according
to how God judges what short means, and long, in the judgment
of man. It all gets down to the motive, either good or bad,
which is eventually revealed in our deeds:
God “will render to each one according to his deeds”:
eternal life to those who by patient continuance in doing
good seek for glory, honor, and immortality; but to those
who are self-seeking and do not obey the truth, but obey
unrighteousness -- indignation and wrath, tribulation and
anguish, on every soul of man who does evil, of the Jew
first and also of the Greek; but glory, honor, and peace
to everyone who works what is good, to the Jew first and
also to the Greek.”
Back to the Garden
So, where is the road home, back to the garden? How do
we get there from here? There is a way back to Eden. God
has made it, but it is not through the Christian crusades
and their inquisitions, not through the lifeless churches
with their dead doctrines and decrees. The Holy Spirit was
certainly not passed on through Martin Luther in Germany,
the great slaughterer of the peasants. The way back is through
the restoration of His true Body — the Community as
it was in the beginning. That is happening right now. Once
again, all those who believe are together and share all
things in common. The first ones, the early church, maintained
this life for a while. The purity of the Body that was on
the Earth 2,000 years ago was so great that it was said,
“it turned the world upside down.”
Then decay overtook them, too, and the proof of it is
Christian history. They did not maintain the practice of
the truth. They stopped expending the effort to live their
holy, set-apart life by His grace. Their relationship
with God ended, and soon after, their life of love and care
ended also. The aftermath was what we know of Christian
history — the horrible fruit of rebellious children
never cleaning their room again. It was not God’s
fault.
Now, all who can hear His voice can return to the Garden.
If you have never encountered anyone from one of the communities
of those who are being restored, then only the witness of
creation can tell you of the Creator. But what are you reading
now, at this moment? You no longer have to believe in God
only through creation, but now you can believe through the
voice of the Creator — through the Word of our Master
Yahshua who speaks into your heart through His people. That
is, you can hear if you are of the truth and are willing
to do His will. These are two things you must judge about
yourself.
Pilate therefore said to Him, “Are You a king then?”
Yahshua answered, “You say rightly that I am a king.
For this cause I was born, and for this cause I have come
into the world, that I should bear witness to the truth.
Everyone who is of the truth hears My voice.” (John
18:37)
Thermodynamics
Thermo
means heat. Dynamics means energy and motion. Thermodynamics
means the study of energy in motion. The first law of thermodynamics
deals with the conservation of energy, as it changes from
one form of energy into another. Before the Fall, energy
maintained itself — it didn’t continually dissipate.
Can we even imagine such a world; one without decay or death?
When people are cold, due to the Fall, the second law
comes into play to make them warm. That is, if they stir
themselves up to take action, even to love others. The second
law deals with the motion, the action — the expenditure
of energy necessary to preserve man from the second death
— as he obeys his conscience now. For men and women
who have never heard the good news, such action is truly
now or never!
But the good news is something you have never heard from
the kind of true sent ones Messiah spoke of; men and women
not seeking their own recognition or reward, but only His.
Until you have met people living the life, you’ve
only met the compromised gospel, which is the great effort
to rack up one more convert to the list 
and
one more attendee to the service.
The good news is for all who will face the reality of
their wrong choices and desire to find forgiveness for their
guilt. This has the same cost as when the Messiah walked
the earth and called those who followed Him to forsake all,
including all of their possessions, in order to be His disciples.
We are those whose “rooms” were cleaned up by
Messiah. Now, we want to keep them clean!
This can only be done by those persuaded by the good news
they hear, and who are willing to obey the Savior, not merely
believe in Him and recite a prayer. Such “belief”
has never produced the vibrant life of togetherness and
sharing all that the first true believers enjoyed in the
Community in Jerusalem two thousand years ago.
That life is on the earth again! In our communities, life
is about more than the struggle to survive. It is about
loving with the same love that caused Messiah to forsake
all for us, even dying for our sakes, so that now, in this
life, we could have new life! Come and see!
Definitions
Suppression: voluntary inhibition of activities on the part of an individual (psychoanalysis) a conscious inhibition of impulses or ideas that are incompatible with the individual’s evaluation of himself according to his ego ideal.
Regression: a retreating, a moving backward; return to earlier levels of development; the manifestation in older individuals of more primitive levels of behavior
Repression: the forceful ejection from consciousness of impulses, memories, or experiences that are painful or shameful and generate a high level of anxiety. The essential mechanism of repression was held by certain psychologists to be unconscious and involuntary.
J.P. Chauplin, Dictionary of Psychology (Dell Publishing, 1985), pages 391, 394-395, and 456 |
In School District of Abington Township, Pennsylvania v. Schempp, 374 U.S. 203 (1963), the US Supreme Court forbid the public reading of the Bible in public schools or the recital of any public prayers.
Psalm 14:1-3 — Only fools can look at the universe and say that the heavens don’t declare the glory of God (Psalm 19:1).
Titus 3:3 in the Living Bible.
Dogma — established religious opinions without revelation. To the outside observer, dogma is a joke, having no bearing on a person’s life. So one says, “My karma ran over your dogma,” meaning no offense — or nothing substantial or essential to the person’s life is being made light of. Thomas Jefferson put it nicer when asked what his faith was, “You will know my faith by my deeds, which is the only way anyone’s faith is known.”
Psalm 8:3-5
1 Corinthians 1:10,13
1 John 1:7
Romans 10:21
Romans 10:20
Hebrews 9:27
John 5:28-29, Romans 2:6-16, Rev 20:12-15
And Hebrews 9:27
James 1:14-15
But, lest they eat and live forever in their fallen state [as genetic engineers are now striving for], God said: “Behold, the man has become like one of Us, to know good and evil. And now, lest he put out his hand and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live forever.” (Genesis 3:22)
The dictionary defines entropy as: (thermodynamics) a measure of the amount of energy in a system that is no longer available for doing work; entropy increases as matter and energy in the universe degrade to an ultimate state of inert uniformity.
Revelation 21:8
Romans 3:23 and 6:23
Romans 2:6-10, 2:12-16, and Rev 20:12-15
Acts 2:44 and 4:32
Acts 17:6 in the King James Version
1 John 1:6
1 John 1:7
Revelation 2:5
1 Corinthians 16:22 came upon them all.
John 7:17-18
Luke 14:26-33
John 8:51
Acts 5:32
Acts 2:37-47 and 4:32-37
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