The Space-Time Gospel

The Bible as we have it is a space-time gospel. A teaching or message conveyed in the only way in could and remain coherent and intelligible, in a space-time context. But God exists beyond space and time. So the Gospel is a story and not a myth in the sense of being untrue but truer because nothing of meaning for us is situated beyond space and time. And meaning is everything.

There is no afterlife. 

There is no 'God' that we can comprehend directly. We approach God through parallelism or participation. His projection in creation, including us. Genuine religions embody or convey this truth, grounded in our common humanity and an acceptance of mortality and the insult it conveys to us individually. The insult is resolved through community. Beyond that, scale is a problem. 

Beyond what we can embrace at an emotional and familial level, scale is an adversary. A challenge. At scale tribal instincts betray us. Religions or 'true' philosophies are technologies to try to deal with the problems of scale that keep us slaughtering one another like idiots. Then these systems have visibly failed. Love, lacking a better word, binds us together. 

Socialism is everything that is good in us. Because it can conquer predatory instincts, primal fears and the drives to domination that deny our common humanity and our existence within the limits of the natural world. One way to deal with this is to lie about it. Tell people we can survive the natural world which we can't. Not as a matter of individual consciousness.

The Space-Time Gospel is fine. Maybe it should be known as such because we see how human 'success' is infested with failure through misunderstanding. By lies and self-seeking as fear encroaches on and frustrates the sustainable social instincts that might enable us to exist at scale, within and alongside larger communities, without needless and heedless slaughter. 

This is the 'logos' of Christ, a true teaching that demands an ethics and morality based on behaviors. Judgments of character are beyond us. Since, life in creation is circumstantial and in that way individually relative, though not relative at a social scale, the only level at which justice can be realized, based as it is on a commonality of humanity and a love of creation. 

The best we can do is discipline -- structures and standards even down to etiquette -- informed by insight or revelation which has ineffable aspects to it in the way of beauty and art. Which, if they could be captured or contained, stripped of mystery and its acceptance of human limitation and inadequacy, wouldn't be true or beautiful. The logos, Christ, is intelligibility.

And, it or He only exists at social scale. Christianity is form of socialism. Everything good is a form of socialism, an extension of family.