Blessed Night, Loves 😊

I Pray All Is Well With Everyone…And Your Hearts And Minds Are Full Of Love, Joy, And Compassion…For All God’s Children…And All God’s Creation! And Since The Love Of The Living God Created Us And Sustains Our Being – Our Life Stream Being The Essence Of Love – There Is No Excuse For Us Not To Love All God’s Children And All God’s Creation; When We Learn To View Our Existence Through The Eyes Of Our Immortal Spirit And Not Through The Perceptions And Influences Of Our Worldly Temple And The Impermanent Reality That Surrounds Us! And It Is Certainly A Fact…That The Eternal Love Of The Living God May Seem Elusive To Many Of Us – Those Of Us Who Have Yet To Understand The True Nature Of Our Inner Being. But That Worldy Fact Does Not Have To Be So Forever…When We Learn To Call Upon And Connect With Our Very Own…”Mighty I AM Presence” – The “Presence Of The Eternal Living Love – That Dwells Within All Of Us! Amen…

Give Thanks And Praises For Love And Life…

And Y’all Be Love…

“God is in all things, but he is best revealed in man, especially in the morally aspiring man, and this is the meaning of the ideal of a God-man, or Christ, a Saviour whose teachings are the way, the truth, and the life. Every man’s conception of God is a measure of his own stature. He pictures God according to his comprehension, and thus it is natural that every man has a different notion of God, every one’s God being characteristic of his mental and moral caliber.

On the lowest stages of civilization, devils and gods are almost indistinguishable, but while they become properly differentiated in the onward march of mankind, we cannot fail to detect the parallelism between God and Satan which is never lost. The god of savages is a bloodthirsty chieftain; the god of sentimentalists is a good old papa; the god of the superstitious is a magician and a trickster; the god of the slave is a tyrannical master; the god of the egotist is an ego-world-soul; and the gods of the wise, of the just, of the free, of the courageous are wisdom, justice, freedom, and courage. The conception of evil in all these phases will always be the contrast to the ideal embodiment of all goodness.

Satan is at once a rebel and a tyrant. He proclaims independence, but his rule bodes oppression and slavery. He himself is represented in chains, for the liberty of sin, which is license, enthralls the mind. As Satan is a captive of his own making, so all the beings that belong to him are his prisoners. He is their torturer and destroyer. A most drastic picture of Satan which is found in the missal of Poitiers, is described by Didron as follows:

“He is chained to the mouth of hell as a dog to its kennel, and yet wields his trident sceptre as the monarch of the place which he guards. Cerberus and Pluto in one, he is yet a Cerberus of Christian art, a demon more hideous and more filled with energy than Pagan art has offered.  …This image figures the various aspects of infernal sin, by its many faces, having a face on the breast as well as on the head, a face on each shoulder and a face at each hip. How many more behind? With long ears like those of a hound, thick short horns of a bull, his legs and arms are covered with scales, and seem to issue from the mouths of the faces at his joints. He has a lion’s head with tusks, and hands like the claws of a bear. His body, open at the waist, reveals a nest of serpents darting forth and hissing. In this monster we find all the elements of a dragon, leviathan, lion, fox, viper, bear, bull, and wild boar. It is a compound of each evil quality in these animals, embodied in a human form.” Didron, Iconography II., p. 118.

While Satan is the rebel who seeks liberty for himself and oppression of others, God’s kingdom signifies the establishment of right, which insures the liberties of all. Satan promises liberty, but God gives liberty. Schleiermacher, a learned and thoughtful man but of a weak constitution, physically as well as spiritually, still bows down in submissive awe before a God whom he conceived most probably after the model of the Prussian government and defines religion as the “feeling of absolute dependence.”

…Truly if we cannot have a religion which makes us free and independent, let us discard religion! Religion must be in accord not only with morality but also with philosophy; not only with justice, but also with science; not only with order, but also with freedom. Man is dependent upon innumerable conditions of his life; yet his aspiration is not to be satisfied with the consciousness of his plight; his aspiration is to become independent and to become more and more the master of his destiny. If religion is the expression of that which constitutes the humanity of man, Schleiermacher’s definition is wrong and misleading, for religion is the very opposite. Religion is that which makes man more of a man, which develops his faculties and allows him more independence.

Monarchical Europe has generally characterized the Devil as the rebel in the universe, and in a certain sense he is. But he represents revolution only in its misguided attempts to gain liberty. Every rebellion which is not in its own nature self-destructive, is an expression of the divine spirit. Every dash for liberty is a righteous deed, and a revolutionary movement that has the power and inherent good sense to be able to stay, is of God.

Satan may be the representative of rebellion; God symbolizes liberty. Satan may promise independence by a call to arms against rules and order; God gives independence by self-control and discretion. Satan is sham freedom; in God, we find true freedom. Satan is an indispensable phase in the manifestation of God. He is the protest against God’s dispensation as a yoke and an imposition, and thus revolting against the law prepares the way to the covenant of love and spontaneous good-will.

We must only learn that independence cannot be gained by a rebellion against the constitution of the universe, or by inverting the laws of life and evolution, but by comprehending them and adapting ourselves to the world in which we live. By a recognition of the truth, which must be acquired by painstaking investigation and by accepting the truth as our maxim of conduct, man rises to the height of self-determination, of dominion over the forces of nature, of freedom. It is the truth that makes us free. 

So long as the truth is something foreign to us, we speak of obedience to the truth; but when we have learned to identify ourselves with truth, the moral ought cease to be a tyrannical power above us, and we feel ourselves as its representatives. It changes into aspirations in us. True religion is love of truth, and being such, it will not end in a feeling of dependence, but reap the fruit of truth, which is liberty, freedom, independence.”

History of the Devil, by Paul Carus, 1900

To Pass Time – Godmode