June 05, 2025

Think of this image as theology broadcast to thousands of people of a scene that never existed anywhere in real, actual, time.

In real, actual time, the tree in the middle is the only one that is real and actual. At the time I took its picture, it lived across the street from my house in Greensboro, NC, less than a mile from downtown. I asked Photoshop's version of AI (Called "Generative Fill") to give the real tree some fictional friends and the rest of the scene fell smoothly into place.

Theology does the same thing all the time. Filling in the scene with an imaginary forest of fabricated propaganda, asking listeners to "take it on faith that what is being said is so."

Theology is (As I have said before) a collection of opinions about hearsay. Or AI as it has developed throughout history.

Meister Eckhart (1260 - 1328) and a handful of truthful risk-takers like him called theology out from time to time with little to show for it other than heresy trials, Lynch mobs and burnings at the stake. Eckhart died, or was killed, before he was sentenced for heresy, but he had been found guilty of it for saying things like, "The last leave-taking is leaving God (The God of theology) for God (The God who actually is)." 

The people who created Christianity were people who had a stake in the outcome of their efforts, selling their version of the way it could have been to people who built the church as it is today out of their neediness for hope and mercy, kindness and consolation. It was propaganda. Indoctrination. Disingenuousness from the start and still going strong after all these years.

We begin dismantling the atrocity by simply realizing that there was no Garden of Eden, anywhere, ever. Only dinosaurs and then, thousands of years of "circumstances begetting circumstances," with human development coming along slowly over time. With no time ever for one man Adam and one woman Eve committing a sin worthy of hell for their millions of descendants and making the sacrificial, atoning, death of God's only son necessary for the salvation of all of those who believe it is so--making the belief in his death more important than his actual death because if we don't believe, the death is meaningless, inconsequential, and irrelevant, no?

Which leaves us with the work of understanding the world as it has developed with and around "That Which Has Always Been Called 'God'"--and how that which we experience as "God," as "Wholly Other," and "Out There," is, and always has been, the inner experience of ourselves projected outside of ourselves, to distance ourselves from the mystery of the radiance we experience as More Than Words Can Say. It is US that we cannot talk about or bring ourselves to believe that WE are!

But. The time is coming, and now is, for our realization to burst forth in a new world of overwhelming wonder that "Thou Art That"! And where we go with it. And what we do about it. Finally, at last, after all these years! May it certainly be so!