Judgement Day

some powerful thinking here JJ..

causing me to ponder as well..

excellent..

love Brenda

Thank you Brenda! In my life, I have lived with a few variations of Christians, Jews, Muslims, and Hindus as well as being close to many Buddhists. Two things that I have learned all these religions have been infected with are hypocrisy and hatred. If religions are creations of God, gods or humans, the infection is handed down through warnings of judgment rather than teaching their children how to let go of hatred. I had to teach myself, and yet I am still not immune. The people I see around me every day manage to rekindle my prejudices and I struggle to purge my preconceived notions from my mind. I do not want them taking root, so I fight to keep the seeds of hatred from growing within my heart. Fear, greed and pride thrive on ignorance and denial. Sometimes I feel alone in my understanding of this and sometimes I am angered because I see those who do understand but turn their backs for the comforts that hatred provides when unified in high numbers.
JJ

Ouch! But I agree with everything you say. Yaweh is pretty damn brutal through out the bible and then demanding the blood sacrifice of his son.... No wonder we're all so messed up! Great thoughts!

What can we be that God is not? What can we feel that God has not? Is there anything we can create that God did not already make? And yet we are expected to harness ourselves while being so much less than the one who gave us our fallibilities... and so he sent his son to forgive us, but still cannot truly understand why we cannot achieve his greatness.
Only if he lives as a finite human, without faith or healing powers or the power to resurrect the dead, including himself, only as a sinful soul can he know how it feels to be alive. We are not God fearing, we are death fearing. We cannot love someone who hides from us. Oh to be Moses! Who else has seen God while still alive? Noah? Adam and Eve? But they had no Christ to forgive their sins. Sometimes I want to believe there is no God because I cannot forgive his cruelty. What did he know and when did he know it? Everything and forever according to his book...
JJ

Ouch! Nicely penned!

I never pull punches in my poetry, even when God's got his boxing gloves on. Besides, he's not gonna go down easy...
Thanks for commenting Willow!
JJ

I stay away from religion, politics and racism over the net ....but just wanted to say this ink makes a reader just want to sit back and ponder your message deeply. It definitely provokes thought......and I love these types of writes, as opposed to the preachy ones.

"Either God is unbelievably patient or simply unbelievable"< ------I'd offer he's unbelievably patient! ;) xo

Well you know Tara, I just gotta be me... religion, politics and racism are my lifeblood. This is why we get along so well, we never talk about those, even though I constantly think about all three. I have a multi-tasking mind...
JJ

Helluva write. What I have seen and lived definitely leads me into conflict with what I was taught

Thank you for commenting and relating!
JJ

While we were made in his image,
the choices we make are ours alone.

This is the freedom of experience.

Good write, Poet.

Interestingly, I saw a program on PBS the other night by Stephen Hawking called Genius in which he talks about and demonstrates how there is no free will. We are controlled by Determinism: Determinism is the belief that we don’t have free will and that everything in our life is pre-determined by the strict laws of the universe.  
Apparently, not even God has free will.
It was a fascinating program. It supports a theory I have often contemplated about the nature of time and space that all moments of time exist simultaneously and our consciousness passes through parallel space in a linear fashion. This is the only way that God can know what will happen. If God already knows, and we have no ability to choose our actions, we cannot be fairly judged. But if God is also bound by Determinism, then who or what is actually judging us? Surely God would be aware of Determinism and his own inability to make choices. Or maybe he doesn't believe it, just like us, God thinks he has free will. Maybe he's just in denial. Maybe he wants to send me to Hell but he can't. Maybe it is predetermined that I will go to Hell and there is no possibility of forgiveness for me. Maybe I don't care...
JJ

Yikes!!! JJ......you've written a piece with a loud powerful voice.....enjoyed and am pondering......purple luv & hugs xo :)

Exellent poem that really makes you think and a interesting group of comments to follow. Hard to fathom determinism when I feel so certain my choices are my own.