I'm not a religious man.

Oftentimes I've found -at risk of offending more pious sensitivities here- that religion is an excellent way to never get to know God. I mean really come face-to-face with the universal divine essence that is the source of all movement and evolution in the cosmos. Because religion is a social mechanism, the original art project, designed to unify a societal group by providing its individuals with a homogenic and simplified definition of the Divine and our role in it.

Being religious, and sincerely believing your religion to be pragmatic Truth is like reading a poem about a mountain, and mistaking the words n the page for the mountain itself. A poem about a mountain is not the mountain, just as a text about The Truth is not The Truth.

But I suppose it was as close as a band of illiterate goat herders in the middle of nowhere could come to understanding the nuances of the Cosmos.

As a caveat, I must declare presently that I do not feel I have a full understanding of the nuances of the Cosmos. I don't believe it's within the Human capacity to do so. It's like asking an ant to understand Quantum-field Thermodynamics. Just not equipped. So, instead we tell stories, metaphors, similes, and allegories so that our tiny ant minds can grasp a teeny little piece and hopefully glean a little benefit for our lives.

Which is all fine and good, until dudes with swords or nukes mistake the metaphor for literal truth.

I digress. I make the distinction between religion and the Divine because in the name of religion, many beautiful Human urges have been suppressed. Prominently among them is our sensual urge, our pleasure-seeking instinct so rarely found in the animal world.

In a broad sense, I'm kind of a Deist. It was the philosophical viewpoint of America's Founding Fathers (look it up). They weren't Christian, otherwise they never would have devised the ideal of division between church and state, and we'd be living in a witch-burning religious monarchy now. Nope they Deists. Which, to wit, means they believed in the design of the Universe as the proof of the Divine Will. Not a book, not a bunch of stories about impossible things like living in whales or splitting oceans in half, but rather the unfolding of a flower, the coming of seasons, or mankind's basic design were to be seen as clues to what God intended for us here on Earth. For example, if an animal has sharp teeth, it must be meant to be carnivorous. If a human being has urges, they must be also a part of God's design, and therefore not evil and imperfect.

The basic Human urges of sexual pleasure and consciousness expansion are prevalent across all societies. There isn't a tribe on Earth that doesn't get horny, and there isn't a tribe on Earth that has not developed a way to escape ordinary reality as a technique in seeking communion with The Divine. They are factors so ubiquitous in Humanity that it strains the mind to imagine how a benevolent God could wire us that way and yet forbid their usage. It's like having air-conditioning and a stereo in your car, but you aren't supposed to use them or you forfeit your vehicle. HUH?

But that is the thinking behind Original Sin, and the foundation for so much dysfunctional shame and hatred in our society.

I take issue with the concept of Original SIn. The general idea is nasty enough -that we are "born cursed" because of what someone else did. This is pure bullshit and makes me think the Judeo-Christian God is some kind of caustic asshole. My own experience of God is that he's definitely not an asshole, so I choose to see things differently.

In Genesis, Original Sin occurred when Eve was told *not* to go to The Tree Of Knowledge to eat the fruit. Which the Serpent later convinced her was a good idea. She ate it, lost her animal-like ignorance of ethics and philosophy, and quickly turned Adam on with the same fruit. They became conscious of their nakedness (sexuality), and God came out from behind a bush and said "HA! BUSTED!"

The whole idea seems, to borrow a word from a friend, squirrely.

I mean, if I was an omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent God, and I sincerely wanted to avoid a Tree getting used by Humans, I feel I would have put it somewhere else, y'know, somewhere NOT in THE VERY CENTER OF THE GARDEN which I'd created as the home for those same Humans. I mean, a big, mostly empty Planet Earth, he could've put the Tree on the island of Bora-Bora. But no, he plants the Tree in the middle of the Garden, practically hangs Adam and Eve from it on a hammock, endows them with Free Will, and then says "Don't touch".

Yeah, right.

(By the way, Free WIll is the rarest substance in the Universe. Even angels don't possess Free Will. Well, according to that legend, the last angel who tried Free Will is now in a dark & roasty place.)

LUCIFER=Bringer Of Light

As such, it can be implied that Lucifer is the mythical bringer of illumination, the party responsible for our current enjoyment of consciousness & sexuality. They are congruent, if not synonymous. Consciousness and Sexuality were born of the same bite.

But what if we were TRICKED? What if the whole thing was a ploy to get us to *actually eat* of the Tree of knowledge?

(I speak metaphorically of course. I do not believe in a gigantic Mr. God with a beard sitting on a big throne in some science-fiction city orbiting thousands of miles above the Earth, nor do I believe literally the stories in Genesis or any other sacred text from anywhere in the world. But because these myths are so deeply ingrained in our conscious matrix, their examination serves as shorthand in re-programming the human mind. Myths are like an operating language for the Human experience.)

But yeah, TRICKED. because God (the real one, if any) isn't so stupid as to put a barrel of gasoline next to a fire, which is exactly what Genesis claims he did when he placed the Tree of Knowledge next to Human curiosity. So what if the whole set-up was an experiment to see what we would do? A taste test, if you will, with God playing Brand X and Serpent playing Brand Z. They tested the force of Human will and curiosity, and the result proved the subject worthy of receiving Godlike qualities of ability and perception?

This is a rare concept these days, but in the days of Gnosticism it had wider appeal. Ancient versions of Scripture attribute the creation of the Universe to a God OTHER than the one who forbade Humans the gifts of consciousness & sexuality which are inherent in the Apple. Apparently the God who made that silly rule was a minor Deity who mistakenly believes himself the Creator Of The Universe. An Idiot God, you might say. And a Gnostic path toward Divinity essentially aims to get past that petty demi-god and meet face-to-face with the real Creator who rests beyond him. I suppose that makes me also a Gnostic.

Essentially, I believe our natural drives toward spiritual ecstasy and sensual experience are a hard-won birthright. We had to prove ourselves worthy of these gifts by choosing them, and in so doing stand against a supposedly omnipotent force and embrace our own Free Will. Much as parents learn to respect their child as an individual only when they strike out on their own, only in this way could we have won the respect of God.

So for me, Sexuality and Consciousness are virtue and joy, and Divinity is not an untenable state, but a very real undercurrent present in everything that exists.

In essence, upon choosing to eat of the fruit of Knowledge, we became God's peers. No longer submissive, no longer subject, we now co-create the Universe as a team, God working great wonders through our Human capacities, and we coming ever & ever closer to an actual understanding of Divine Plan. In so doing, we create the world anew each day, and serve as a part of the engine of evolution and change in the cosmos.

(((M)))