With a scepter. And perhaps a beard. But Jesus told us none of this! He said that “God is Spirit, and those who worship Him must worship in spirit and truth” (JN 4:24). God has no human failings, and God never takes a body. My preferred definition after a lifetime of study is that God is “an infinitely powerful energy-like potentiality without size or form, alive in the sense that your mind is alive, highly emotional and therefore probably self-aware.” Mikey Morgan, who is the highest-level recently-dead being of whom I am aware, insists simply that God is “the unity of pure love and all that exists.” Quantum physicist Max Planck said that what we experience as human consciousness – he called it “mind” – is the source of everything. But no matter how we might end up defining the Source, it is clear that God is not just a bigger and more powerful version of fallible us!
Sin is a human word. It has nothing to do with God, and we know now that after our deaths we will judge ourselves based upon whether what we have done in life was loving or unloving. In any event, Jesus made a point of replacing the entire Old Testament, including its human notion of Sin, with God’s new Law of Love. He said, “‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.’ This is the great and foremost commandment. The second is like it, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ On these two commandments depend the whole Law and the Prophets” (MT 22:37-40). “The Law and the Prophets” was what the Jews of Jesus’s day called all the Old Testament books with their laws and rules. Jesus also specifically told His followers not to package His teachings in their old religion. He said, “But no one puts a patch of unshrunk cloth on an old garment; for the patch pulls away from the garment, and a worse tear results. Nor do people put new wine into old wineskins; otherwise the wineskins burst, and the wine pours out and the wineskins are ruined; but they put new wine into fresh wineskins, and both are preserved” (MT 9:16-17). Jesus has much to say about “sin,” but little of what He says jibes with the Christian black-and-white notion of sinning. If you have a pair of scissors handy, you can vastly improve your Christian Bible by cutting away the entire wineskin of the Old and most of the New Testaments, and from now on you can read just the true Gospels wine of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.
The insistence among Christians on believing that God judges us is especially ridiculous, when Jesus tells us flat-out in the Christian Gospels that simply is not true! Of course, He had to hedge the way He said it because those Temple guards were always listening. To preach against Jewish beliefs was a capital crime, so one of the things that He sometimes did was to give His followers truths over days of time. One day He said, “For not even the Father judges anyone, but He has given all judgment to the Son, so that all will honor the Son even as they honor the Father” (JN 5:22-23). Then after He got that revelation past the guards, on a different day and with different guards present He said, “If anyone hears My sayings and does not keep them, I do not judge him; for I did not come to judge the world, but to save the world” (JN 12:47). Of course, since He has already told us that God never judges us, Jesus could not have come to save us from God’s judgment. What He came to save us from was the desperate spiritual ignorance that is still the greatest threat that humankind faces.
No they don’t. Not only are they sin-based and therefore of human and not divine origin, but Jesus in the Gospels specifically threw out the entire Old Testament rules and replaced them with God’s law of love. He said, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.’ This is the great and foremost commandment. The second is like it, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ On these two commandments depend the whole Law and the Prophets” (MT 22:37-40). “The Law and the Prophets” was what the Jews of His day called all the Old Testament books. Jesus also specifically told His followers not to package His teachings in their old religion! He said, “But no one puts a patch of unshrunk cloth on an old garment; for the patch pulls away from the garment, and a worse tear results. Nor do people put new wine into old wineskins; otherwise the wineskins burst, and the wine pours out and the wineskins are ruined; but they put new wine into fresh wineskins, and both are preserved” (MT 9:16-17). If you have a pair of scissors handy, you can vastly improve your Christian Bible by cutting away the entire wineskin of the Old and most of the New Testaments, and then from now on you can read just the true Gospels wine.
Devout Christians are appallingly closed-minded about the possibility that God might ever want to give us new revelation. Over the past two thousand years we have seen major advancements in every area of human life and culture, but still we require that God remain stuck two millennia into the past? Who are we to deny God the right to continue to reveal greater truths to His people as our understanding progresses? As Jesus says, “Ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives, and he who seeks finds, and to him who knocks it will be opened” (MT 7:7-8).