Riffin' On Respectin' my Authoritay

‘Jesus answered, “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.” John 14:6

How a dick interprets this (and they have…this billboard is up all over the Midwest to this day): You need to worship Jesus and Jesus alone. If you are in a non-Christian tradition, you can not come to the Father.

How a holy/sensible/circa 2022…normal person interprets this: Good, in the general sense, is in direct service to Christ; every person on Earth is bound by the structure of existence itself to seek pleasure, which is only reliably provided by acting good/righteously…meaning that all people are in service of Christ whether or not they are aware of His existence, and we should assume this about the animals and plants too! Meaning...we are saved. Salvation is inevitable.

‘Then Jesus came to them and said, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me.” Matthew 28:18

Taken as a stand-alone line, divorced from the larger context of Matthew 28, which I am currently too lazy to look into at the moment, this sentiment simply means that the heart of Life is good…that there’s an inherent rhyme and reason to how phenomena unfolds and it’s not only in service entirely to God…it communicates who God is and conditions people into…their destiny…their pre-destined self-actualization.

Cynicism is the poison. The world falls into place far easier than it derails.

You, for all practical purposes, at any given time in the history of civilization, would have to be more than a little bit whacky to say that all of the authority on Earth is of Christ. And obviously you are sooooo right.

But even in the midst of that…interlopers in Odysseus’ palace.

(When Odysseus went away for many much years to fight the Trojan War, a bunch of “suitors” started hanging in his court, eating his food and trying to make relations with his wife. Especially after he was taken for lost at sea after the War, these suitors presumed he was long dead. By the end of the Odyssey he makes it home, however, and hurls a javelin through their various chests.)

Now let’s think about where we see false authority…we’ve already labeled it as false authority when we do, and it usually wasn’t us, the perceiver, the experiencer of the thought, who actually does as much. We are responding to something our unconscious is suggesting. Our conscious brain is expected to be able to explain why with some real conviction/authority our unconscious is suggesting as much.

Authority is inherently holy…every time it has manifested ever..it’s the structure of authority itself.

The heart of life is good. Jesus was communicating as much in Matthew 28:18. But if you lose sight of the strong conviction that it really is, you lose your ability to recondition the world/surface level for the better…to be the agent that helps ensure that not only the hear of life is good, but the surface level as well.

It turns out that if you agree that God is good, you’re also agreeing that secular good is God. If we’re hardwired as creatures to seek rewards and avoid suffering… it’s pretty matter of fact that life is about drawing the good of us to the surface level.

The happiest of us tend to deliberately participate. What the Buddhists regard as the Bodhisattva vows map the psychological disposition Humans are born with. We are going to have to do that regardless... the same is true of Christ and his curriculum because all authority really is His.

At some level, Cricket's character arc on It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia reflects the tone that Western religion has regarded existence itself with. Life is a rough and random lot, speaking of Lot, even though he was chosen to be saved God still kills his wife on the escape route, and then there's Job who was plagued with devastation...Cricket is but another poor soul meaning well but ultimately getting preyed on by vultures because life itself hates life and those who are living it.