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I found that as I have navigated socializing with the various types of Christians that the easiest way to explain what kind of Christian or what type of Christian I am is just to say I'm at Jordan Peterson christian. This right now as of 2024 is a good way to align yourself with Christians because they appreciate in value Jordan Peterson's attempt to popularize Christianity today. Yet they also know that Jordan Peterson has points of view regarding scripture that is not of the fundamentalist variety. In other words is not a fundamentalist focus on the crates but the psychology of the stories of the bible. So in saying a Jordan Peterson Christian are a petri sodium christian, I am basically saying I am on your side to fellow christians, but I'm not necessarily dogmatic or credal in my approach to Christianity but take a similar approach to Christianity is Jordan Peterson does, as a set of cultural values and psychological symbols and stories rather than something to necessarily treat as literally true from a supernatural perspective.

Besides petersonian Christianity I am specifically defending and promoting cultural Christianity and by cultural Christianity I mean that Christianity is the ethical framework in which we move and breathe as if fish and a fish full of water Christianity is the cultural water in which we swim and breathe. A good book to prove this point is The Air We Breathe by ....

So when I speak of Christianity I am specific specifically referring to cultural Christianity the air we breathe and petersonian Christianity.

What I mean by Common sensical Christianity is the version of Christianity where we just treat Christianity with a certain degree of common sense. For example if one is reading the New Testament and gets the impression that the Lord is coming back any second, this doesn't mean one does not pursue a job or career and see such language as mythological and that there is a good case for the interpretation of preacherism for example.. the point is this, sensical Christianity looks at things in terms of common sense, when we go to the local Walmart Walmarts are not flying out of people that we call the ambulance over the police rather than exorcism. That is just playing common sense. Yet Christianity is more than just a supernatural set of ideas but it is a cultural and psychological set of ethical values. Common sensical Christianity distinguishes between supernaturalism and, sensicalism

and refer to Jordan Peterson or Petersonian Christianity what Jordan Peterson has done is combined the ideals of American conservatism capitalism and insights from Nietzsche's philosophy of healthiness over to generation and formed a coherent psychological model for the modern christian. A good example is his Bible psychology lecture series and which talks about the psychological value of the stories of the Bible which when combined with this first chapter of his book the troll rules for life, stand up straight with your shoulder back makes an itchy and argument for raising your status and not seeking a lower status which would lower your self-esteem and cause harm to yourself and those around you. Thus petersonian Christianity is in my view what most are many Christians today are functioning as rather than actually New Testament Christians which I see as an interim ethic as a specifically message geared for Jews in the first Jewish Christians in the first century who practiced the Torah and not a message necessarily completely applicable for us today. I just see Christianity as an evolutionary phenomenon as covered in the book evolution of the word by Marcus board which provides the New Testament in chronological order. When one looks at Christianity is a cultural evolution of ideas when sees that Christianity went from Jewish Christianity to more of a Germanic Christianity over time. So I see that Peterson and Christianity is a good encapsulating reference term to point to this evolutionary trajectory and our modern common sensual cultural Christianity where most Christians for example simply do not seek an exorcism to cast out a headache demon as was common in the first century but instead I've learned to interpret the concept of demons as psychological phenomenon and mental illness in things like epilepsy and the average common sensical Christian is more likely to go to the doctor. Only the extreme radical fundamentalist type Christians deny modern science and medicine. I'm not including those types in my category of Petersonian Christian or common sensical Christians.

After years of being critical of Christianity and examining Christianity through the lens of supernaturalism and positivism (or scientism), I now look at Christianity through a more cultural and civilizational lens. I have found that a very good term to describe where I'm coming from is that I am basically defending “Common Sense Christianity.” To understand what I mean by that see the book Common Sense Christianity by C. Randolph Ross.

So I'm beginning from the intellectual space of Common Sense Christianity. From that perspective, I'm less interested in the supernatural veracity and the scientific validity of Christian claims. I'm more interested in the psychological, sociological, and familial impact of the overall Christian mythos. In other words, does somebody with the basic Christian paradigm in their psyche become a better family man or woman and citizen than someone with a for example an Atheistic Nihilist and moral relativist paradigm?

Yes one's personality and upbringing and other factors play a large part in one's character; however, I would argue that in general the Common Sense Christian paradigm is a better ethical influencer than most other options.

What I've experienced in my lifetime is that the criticism and deconstruction of Christian beliefs has not been replaced by something better: it has instead produced people clinging to things like Norse mythology or Wokeism. In other words, no one has produced anything better. Churches continue to be the most popular social clubs in America for families. Christian soup kitchens and food giveaways continue to provide support and help to the poor in America. Neighborhoods full of at least the general Christian value system produce healthier neighborhoods than neighborhoods full of those adopting the worldview of atheistic nihilism and selfish hedonism, causing an increase in selfishness, greed, and crime.

The fact is Christianity is here to stay. In my own hometown where I live there are Christian churches everywhere, not Wokeism assemblies or Norse pagan clubs. I did meet one practicing Norse Pagan at my gym in 2024, and we had an interesting conversation, but he is an outlier and an extreme minority. So I'm more interested in practical Cultural Christianity or Common Sense Christianity even if that means looking at Christianity through a psychological lens as Jordan Peterson does. Even if that means seeing Christ as an avatar of a set of ideas, ideals, and ethical values. I'm interested in the ethical framework and practical outcomes of encultured Christianity more than I am the scientific veracity of any particular “Creedal claim.”

You are always going to have fanatic extremists. You're going to have your holy roller fundamentalist Christian types, they are never going to go away. But there's always going to be a moderate middle commonsensical Christianity as well. I would rather have a commonsensical “Christian moderate/middle” and a few extremists than a destructive Marxist Nihilist moderate/middle and a few of their extremes.

I also realized that Christianity is more than just the New Testament, but it was an ongoing developmental historical value system and cultural identity which evolved over the last 2,000 years: which included the influence of my own Germanic ancestors (see the book The Germanization of Medieval Christianity by James C. Russell). So for me Christianity is more than a “belief system” but is a religion that my own Indo-European Germanic ancestors chose as their religious identity around the year 1000 forward; so that moving forward as a people and a culture my Germanic and Scandinavian ancestors chose Christianity over Norse Paganism. This process of influencing was not one-sided, as my Norse Pagan ancestors with their heroic masculine value system of a warrior’s valor transferred into the culture of Christianity which produced what is known and felt today as Cultural Christianity or Common Sense Christianity. For more details see my series of posts on the subject at this link: Indo-European Christianity.

I now see Christianity as a particular cultural value system at this point. Those core values are:

Common Sense Christianity is basically a psychological representation of biological life in a healthy productive state of growth. Cultural Christianity is basically a familial pyramid representing the family through a conceptualization of a “heavenly family”: with a Father God, Mother Mary, Noble Son (Christ) and the Body of Christians (as the womb of creation birthing the Good Society): that is Christians acts as the creation or birth of a value system producing healthy societies; that are civil and harmonious and ethical.

Culture Christianity for me is this familial pyramid with Father God and Mother Mary at the top of the pyramid framing the Christian's psychology; so that from the top down, this heavenly familial ideal, forms an ideal family resulting in good parents who raise good children which produces good cities and countries. As Common Sense Christianity generates civilized, just, individuals through families: based on the biological process of heterosexual male and females producing children and raising those children with the commonsensical Christian value system.

 So if this is what the Core of Christianity is (God→ Family → Healthy Society), and I think it is, then that which is “anti-Christian” is anything seeking to attack this biologically grounded pyramidal structure. What I have seen in my own lifetime is that the anti-Christian segments among the media propagate an anti-biology, anti-herosexual, mysandrous (hatred of men), anti-family nihilistic cultish agenda; causing a deterioration of biological gender roles and the family unit and the absence of fathers in homes raising sons with healthy masculine traits and daughters without “daddy issues,” leading to a collapse of the civilization pyramid mentioned above of God→ Family → Healthy Society. One does not even need to literally believe in God to appreciate the psychological conceptualization of the pyramid with the heavenly father and mother atop the pyramid as the ideal model for the production and growth of healthy families producing healthy societies.

So for me, all the atheistic arguments against Christianity have basically lost their potency. I have seen Atheism act as a segway down the road to Nihilism, man-hating 4th Wave Feminism, and Modern-Marxism gaining greater ground. So that as Jordan Peterson argues, the “idea of God” is as much a functional concept as a metaphysical assertion. In my own research I have learned that the very idea of God as the sunlight “sky father” goes back to my Indo-European ancestors. This early conceptualization of God acted at the very least as a functional model for my Indo-European forefathers and their families. Meanwhile, the Jewish People maintained social cohesion as an ethical family over centuries and have passed on those cultural values into Judaism; as Christianity was basically a synthesis of the best of Judaism and the best of Indo-European spirituality.

Cultural Christianity is therefore not about any particular set of beliefs or even “going to church” every Sunday. It is about psychology, cultural ideals, mythological structures, and a value system. Cultural Christianity at its core an ethic of civility, of friendship, of racial unity, of having a meaning in life and hope in a higher cause greater than one self. When I look at Christianity this way, I wonder why or how anyone who cares about family stability and civilizational functionality would be against Common Sense Christianity?

This is a project of love and  a hobby. The following are my thoughts put into essays and blog posts and near book length arguments, as I grew from agnostic-atheist to more pragmatic-doer-of-the-word. Note that I have no editors and so much of this work is constantly being edited by myself.  Thus, words in blue designate areas I have not yet edited and may not make much sense or have many typos and  crazy grammatical mistakes and contain ideas I could have even written tens years ago and changed my mind about; and so I could delete the words in blue entirely when I get to proof reading such sections and editing them. In short, words in BLUE are the first rough draft version and will be edited and possibly even deleted.

At some point in my philosophical journey I began to realize that most of the anti-Christian types among some atheists were former Fundamentalists. You just don't find hardly any worldview-atheists trying to destroy religion and even the idea of being Christ-like coming from former members of the more liberal churches like The United Church of Christ, Episcopalian Church, or the Unitarian Universalist Church, etc. I am not saying that all atheists who activists in rejecting religion publically come from a Fundamentalist background. Some atheists are not reacting to religious Fundamentalism at all and grew up in a secular household. I am only saying that based on what I see and what I know the most anti-Christian among atheists tends to be those who grew up in or spent much time in a Fundamentalist Church.

I know myself what happens when you grow up in a dogmatic and rigid faith tradition. It puts you on the defensive and leary of all things “spiritual” for the rest of your life. Scientific physicalism becomes not just the most probable position in your mind but it also acts as a protective shield from ever being bamboozled again. Coming out of the Mormon church I can see now that the biblical literalism of my former Mormonism and the focus on feelings prove something true even if it's demonstrable false led to me eventually becoming an anti-religion kind of atheist (although I always called myself an agnostic).

Once I stopped looking at Mormonism and Christianity through the Fundamentalist lens and supporting that lens through faith in feelings, and started looking at it through a scientific lens, the whole thing fell apart like a house of cards. For several years all I could see was the “bad” stuff in the Bible and with spirituality and religion. Rejecting it became a safety strategy.  

So what I did for several years was that I first analyzed Mormonism and then the Bible from a historical and scientific point of view from a skeptical debunking position, and completely rejected both on every level. Just as I was taught that you can only read the Bible as if it's a science manual and all the stories were literal historical facts, I continued to read the Bible that way as a skeptic and when science showed that the stories were not scientifically validated, I thought that was enough of a reason to reject the Bible wholesale.

However there were always moments of reconciliation in my mind with the Bible after reading a more theologically Progressive Christian or a biblical scholar who got me to see past both the Fundamentalist and the atheist lenses that both demanded I take the Bible literally or it is bullshit. I instead began to look at the Bible through a first-century lens. Once I began to look at the Bible from a person living in the first century and started to examine the Christian Ethos by comparing it to the other ethical systems and religions of the time, I began to more appreciative of the New Testament stories and began to realize the indisputable fact that I was at the very least a Cultural Christian even if I did believe in the Bible stories literally.

I began to see that I was not in my daily life acting out the Greco-Roman ethic or the ethics of the Spartans or the Vikings, but was acting out the Judeo-Christian ethic. So of course, when I looked at the New Testament language from a 21st century scientific lens I found much to condemn, criticize and reject; but when I took the time to analyze the context of the New Testament verses and get down to the "spirit of the message" underlying the words, and treated the Bible like a library not a single book, I began to be moved and inspired by the evolving ideas and the growing inspiration of these authors: as they continually updated their hyperlinked symbolic philosophy with new innovative ideas and stories document by document; that led their listeners and readers toward greater psychological health and virtue-centeredness.  

I have seen Neil deGrasse Tyson in interviews argue against Christian Fundamentalism saying things like taking literally exorcising demons is no longer reasonable when we know today that person likely had epilepsy. Yet Neil deGrasse Tyson does not like being called an atheist because he simultaneously appreciates Christian art and Christian culture and even Christian language like saying Godspeed.

I have come to realize that the symbols and stories of the New Testament are worth holding onto as they convey an aspect of our humanity that evolved to its highest capacity of compassion and egalitarianism; despite our selfish drive to survive, the New Testament authors developed a higher consciousness and the personality of the Christ is a projection of humanity's own higher humanity that is capable of moving beyond its survival instincts and egoic mind (as Tolle puts it): and instead love others as oneself and spread positive emotional contagion through stories and by modelling a Jewish Rabbi the lives of early Christ-imitators changed the world as we know it.

My layman's studies of biblical scholarship for over ten years has led me to conclude that the New Testament is not about reciting magic words or believing in the right propositions and sustaining the right creed over other creeds, but it is about loving relationships. Let me repeat that, the New Testament is about loving relationships.

The core themes of the New Testament is that we have a nature that is often selfish with proclivity toward vice, but that when we put on the Christ ideal and seek to be Christ-like, it is as if we become a new divine species.

The New Testament uses agricultural language of seeds planting to grow trees and harvesting and yeast mixed into dough to grow bread. At the heart of these metaphors is the symbolism of the genome of God and his celestial politics being implanted into humanity like a seed into good soil that grows into an abundant new garden of loving relationships and a just society.

However, much of these metaphors and analogies and symbols are lost on the modern person who drives cars and gets his food from the grocery store. What I began to do is take my study of psychology and use it to frame the New Testament metaphors in a language that modern people can understand. I began to see that when you frame the New Testament symbols and stories in the language of say NLP (neuro-linguistic programming) and Daniel Goleman's Emotional Intelligence (where he talks about emotional contagion), and Dr. Paul Dobransky's MindOS (that means the human mind and it's Operating System), then the New Testament all of a sudden becomes practically useful as a rational philosophical psychology: using stories and symbols to generate an ethical individual with a more centered psyche; who is more motivated to generate a just society united around loving relationships.

The core themes of the New Testament are:

Even when I was an atheist I did not realize that I was still operating with these biblical themes bubbling up from my unconscious. Even though, like most people, I do not think that negative emotions are caused by an impure spirit, I still use similar language like that person has skeletons in their closet or their inner demons are coming forth; and Eckhart Tolle's concept of the pain body has great explanatory power for understanding psychological traumas and pent-up negative emotional energy. In other words, there is a psychological truth to these metaphors.

I've also come to see that evil is real as a socio-psychological phenomenon; and naming it as satanic is an apt description in many ways, for just as we go to the movies and enjoy watching the hero fight the villain, we name the selfish and egotistical villain the enemy for a reason.

 I had been raised on the parabolic stories of the Good Samaritan, The Prodigal Son, and The Lost Sheep, and Jesus telling religious leaders who want to stone an adulterous woman that he who is without sin should cast the first stone; causing them to drop their stones. The culture energy I swam in like a fish in a bowl was saturated by the Christian Ethos.

I see now that the reason I had rejected the Christian Ethos, I was actually swimming in, was because of:

These were good reasons to reject religion and the Bible I thought, but I did not fully appreciate how much these rejection points were because of my reading of former Fundamentalist Christians who became atheists; and was based on my own disgruntled emotional traumas as a Mormon as I was lied to by the LDS institution and manipulated and made to feel shame and mind controlled. I simply took those traumas and projected them onto the New Testament.

After reading many critics of the Bible and dozens of atheist books, I always allowed time to give a fair hearing to other voices of more rational Christians; and over time the books by Frank Viola, Marcus Borg, Brian Mclaren, Elaine Pagels and Jordan Peterson, to name a few, began to work on my anti-Christian edifice.

I began to see that my bullet point list of central rejections above were based not on the New Testament and the core message of the Christ movement, but was based on the religious dogmas that developed centuries after Jesus and Paul died.

I began to realize that I was rejecting Constantinian Christianity, Augustinianism and Luther's ideas, and the religious concepts that evolved outward from them into what Frank Viola calls Pagan Christianity in a book by that title.

Once I realized that the Heart of Christianity (a book title by Marcus Borg) is really all about, and that it acts as a Maps of Meaning (as Jordan Peterson puts it), I began to value it as a Mind OS, as a symbolic story within stories with the common themes of loving kindness and justice and fighting for the good. I began to realize that understanding biblical scholarship made it so I could be spiritual and contemplative yet also a sexual human being, I could be scientifically minded and also spiritual; all in all, I could be skeptical and A New Kind of Christian as Brian Mclaren puts it.

Yet I continue to be that person who was lied to and manipulated by dogmatic religion. I am still that person that knows how easily we can be manipulated by a charismatic leader and people changing the tone of their voice to sound more “holy,” and I can never ignore how much harm can be done in the name of religion and from dogmatic appeals to scripture. Thus I continue to have two voices in my head all of the time, one skeptical (with a fully loaded trauma powered bullshit detector that’s cocked and ready to debunk and ridicule) and one spiritually inclined (that longs for healing, connection to a large cause, and a connection with the Cosmos). It took me some time to deal with the two voices in my head. As of right now I have come close to balancing the two voices, although they also argue with each other. I sometimes call these two voices my inner skeptic and my inner hopester (sounds like "hipster," only meaning hopeful or optimistic) or my rational mind and my spiritual mind.

In the book, Did Man Create God?: Is Your Spiritual Brain at Peace with Your Thinking Brain? by David E. Comings, from the Inside Flap we read:

Some of the many important conclusions of the book are: Spirituality and reason involve distinct and separate parts of the brain and both are hard-wired and controlled in part by your genes. Spirituality played a critical role in the evolution and survival of man. A yearning to be associated with something that transcends one’s self has become a rewarding, comforting, and innate part of the human condition. ... Although reason is based on fact and spirituality is based on faith, they do not have to be mutually incompatible. … In the pre-scientific world a man-made Theory of God explained everything about the world that was unexplainable. The concept of a soul and heaven gave humans great comfort in the face of the inevitability of death. ....  Modern terrorism is not due to religious faith per se. It is due to the belief that the sacred books are the literal word of God and that one man's God is better than another's. Humans need to recognize that if man, not God, wrote the sacred books then one religion is not inherently better than any other. Such a rational spirituality can be the glue that holds mankind together in peace.

Here is a picture of the back cover of the book itself and what it says:

The book basically argues that we evolved to be spiritual and that we basically have a rational brain and a spiritual brain; and the way forward as a species is to develop a rational spirituality. The more I have studied evolutionary biology, psychology, history, and world religions, the more I agree with this. The fact is the most pleasurable or fulfilling experiences and states in life that I have had was within a “spiritual” context. I am convinced I do have a spiritual brain and now I want to balance that part of myself with my rational brain side, instead of suppressing my spiritual brain as I did in the past due to trauma, hurt, and anger.

This same idea by the way was echoed over a hundred years ago in the book Human All Too Human, by the famous atheist Friedrich Nietzsche: who also talked about balancing the spiritual side of ourselves with the rational side. Here is how he puts it:

Future of science. To the man who works and searches in it, science gives much pleasure; to the man who learns its results, very little. But since all important scientific truths must eventually become everyday and commonplace, even this small amount of pleasure ceases; just as we have long ago ceased to enjoy learning the admirable multiplication tables. Now, if science produces ever less joy in itself and takes ever greater joy in casting suspicion on the comforts of metaphysics, religion, and art, then the greatest source of pleasure, to which mankind owes almost its whole humanity, is impoverished. Therefore a higher culture must give man a double brain, two brain chambers, as it were, one to experience science, and one to experience nonscience. Lying next to one another, without confusion, separable, self-contained: our health demands this. In the one domain lies the source of strength, in the other the regulator. Illusions, biases, passions must give heat; with the help of scientific knowledge, the pernicious and dangerous consequences of overheating must be prevented.

If this demand made by higher culture is not satisfied, we can almost certainly predict the further course of human development: interest in truth will cease, the less it gives pleasure; illusion, error, and fantasies, because they are linked with pleasure, will reconquer their former territory step by step; the ruin of the sciences and relapse into barbarism follow next. Mankind will have to begin to weave its cloth from the beginning again, after having, like Penelope, destroyed it in the night. But who will guarantee that we will keep finding the strength to do so?

Friedrich Nietzsche - Human, All Too Human

Section Five: Signs of Higher and Lower Culture - Aphorism # 251

Source: http://nietzsche.holtof.com/reader/friedrich-nietzsche/human-all-too-human/aphorism-251-quote_341456992.html

The nonscience being the emotional part of humanity, the ability for poetry, art, and music, and spirituality. Nietzsche here thought it was important that this transrational part of humanity have an outlet while being restrained through science.

I disagree with Nietzsche's solution in his later books about the Overhuman ideal which he presents in his book Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Instead, I think what we need is to balance the “two brain chambers, as it were, one to experience science, and one to experience nonscience” through an upgraded version of Christianity.

My solution is Christ OS. An idea I came up with after reading Mind OS by Dr. Paul Dobransky M.D. An operating system (OS) is system software that manages computer hardware and software resources …” (Source: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operating_system).

For the pronouncation of OS see https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/pronunciation/english/os 

I like Christ OS because it looks and sounds very similar to the “ Greek Χριστος (Christos) meaning ‘anointed" (Source: https://www.behindthename.com/name/christos).

As we can hear it pronounced on this website: https://www.pronouncenames.com/christos 

There is the Mac OS and a Chrome OS and Windows OS, and so Christ OS for the human psyche is intended to make us think of Christianity as a mental operating system in order to grow a healthy psyche and noble character.

Image source: https://www.webopedia.com/TERM/O/operating_system.html   

Even Thomas Jefferson used his own version of the Christ OS (operating system), which he did through his Jefferson Bible which he kept by his bedside and read it regularly. In the audiobook version by “learn out loud” we learn that Jefferson compared Jesus to other philosophers like Epicurus and that he valued the teachings of Jesus even though he acknowledges that he is a materialist (i.e. scientific naturalist) while Jesus is more spiritual. Nevertheless, what Jefferson does is find immense value in downloading the operating system of Jesus’s teachings onto his brain’s hard drive.

Like many critical Bible scholars and historians, then and now, Jefferson was aware that not all the words and deeds attributed to the historical Jesus were authentic, and that many words and actions were put onto his lips by the later Christian community. Nevertheless, Jefferson called himself a Christian while rejecting church creeds and dogmas and all the post-Constantine traditions and especially Augustine's Christianity.

A New Emerging Christ Consciousness and continuous upgrading of Christ OS software

What you see in the New Testament is a growing new consciousness. What is taking place in the ancient worldview of the first century is that unluck, disease and death was thought to be caused by impure spirits; and the Jewish God rewarded righteousness with luck, and the strong and powerful and wealthy were favored by God. The new consciousness in the New Testament is a reversal of that attitude and a more empathic view of the unlucky and less powerful.

The Christ figure turned everything on its head. He came to do battle with the impure spirits believed to be causing disease and death and he preached a God that sends rain (bad luck) on the just and the unjust; and the first will be last: that is the greedy and domineering will get what's coming to them and will be lowered in status while the loving and egalitarian will be elevated.

        

This was a huge reversal in attitude and religious philosophy that was developing within the Jewish tradition and brought to fruition in the Jesus movement.

There are key themes that accumulate to make Christ OS develop in human readers and listeners a new Christ consciousness. Here is a bullet point summary of the key themes that stick out to me:

> Reciting the Torah on one foot with saying  just the Golden rule is the whole Jewish law as all the rest is commentary.

> Love your neighbor as yourself. Genuine self-love leads to loving others; as self-healed people are healing toward others while self-hurt people hurt others. While loving God with all your heart mind and strength leads to an unconscious love of life itself. As God acts as a metaphorical symbol for the Source of Light, Love and Being; and so loving Light, Life and Being creates existential fulfillment and what logotherapy calls the will to meaning. When the human psyche is grounded in the symbolic architecture of Christ OS and one finds meaning and life acceptance (instead of life-rating as puts it), this leads to loving life and loving yourself and apply product does existential grounding and Christ OS leads to loving others.

> The parable of the Good Samaritan

> Parable of the Prodigal son

> The  parable of the Rich Man and Lazarus: which reverses the religious teaching at the time that the rich and powerful would be rewarded by God in heaven and the unlucky and downtrodden who were assumed to be on righteous would be punished in the afterlife.

> Love your enemies because hate leads to accumulating dark energy and he who lives by the sword dies by the sword: as endless tit for tat exchanges of negative energy is lose-lose; instead practice spiritual jiu jitsu like doing things like handing him your undergarment along with your outer clothing they demand, so you reveal your nakedness and make them ashamed. In other words, sustain your dignity and fight back non-violently and strategically without stooping to their level.

> What you have done to the least of these you have done unto me (Jesus): In other words, revering God is not done through pagan sacrifices or Jewish rituals; but showing allegiance to the Annointed One (Christ) is manifest in how you treat others. The great person in God's Justice-Kingdom serves and helps others.

> Woe to you religious fakers who add to the Torah heavy dogmatic burdens on the people with your Tradition of the Elders, as you add more and more pious rules while neglecting the spirit of the law. You spiritual fakers and religious manipulators are going to be cast out from God's future party and will gnash your teeth in anger like snarling animals grinding your teeth in rage when you learn that your self-righteousness and holier-than-thou attitude, while thumbing your nose at others, is not rewarded by God.

> Judge not so you aren't likewise judged and don't worry about the speck of sawdust in your neighbor's eye when you have a tree branch hanging out of your eye. Forgive seventy times seven so your resentment does not fester and consume you with your own fiery anger and you end up a criminal and killed by the courts and your corpse tossed into the Jerusalem hillside without a proper burial.

> He who is without sin cast the first stone.

The last one is believed by the majority of scholars to be added in to the text and definitely does not go back to the historical Jesus. So what is happening is a new consciousness is emerging, that is being developed through the Christ figure being read about. So that even the scribes are adding notes in the margins of the New Testament scrolls which then is being copied into the original texts.

The Anointed Operating System is affecting the minds of each Christian Community and they began producing their own Epistles and Gospels which eventually becomes the Gospel of John and the Gospel of Thomas: with both speaking about the Kingdom of Heaven not as coming in the skies as a future event but as a present moment phenomenon experienced subjectively in the Here and Now among the spiritually enlightened.

So what we see with each generation of Christ OS users, is that they keep upgrading the software. Sometimes the coding does not change and new coding is not offered (like the scribal addition in John) but the words in the code is reinterpreted for the new cultural context. For example, today render unto Caesar is reinterpreted as render to the IRS (Internal Revenue Service).

What the first-century Jews thought of as impure spirits possessing people and causing them to become criminals and causing death and disease and vice, is reinterpreted by Christ OS users as what Eckhart Tolle calls a pain body! or what Progressive Christian theologian Walter Wink describes as real psychological phenomenon manifesting from corrupt power structures and the mob mentality: that acts as a kind of evil social attitude and emotional contagion that infects the psyches of many.

 Eckhart Tolle talking about being possessed by the pain body resonates with many of his readers of having a phenomenological truth to it; and psychologists diagnosing and treating mental illness and hospitals healing disease becomes the new representations of the savior figure offering help and healing.

It would be easy as modern persons in the light of modern science to look back at the worldview and mindset of the original Christ OS users and mock them and make fun of them for believing in impure spirits and using exorcism to heal instead of modern medicine. Yet, given their limited worldview and lack of scientific knowledge, they deserve credit for even trying to heal people; and they produced a Philosophy of Life which created existential meaning and community cohesion and an effective ethos through their Christ OS system: that eventually entered the mentality of thousands of converts until it brought down the Roman empire. In other words, Rome OS was defeated by Christ OS!

Christ OS co-evolved culturally with science overtime and eventually made its way into the Declaration of Independence with ideas like Nature's God endowed each human with inalienable rights to a quality of life, their freedom, and the pursuit of their own individual happiness as if they are a soul.

These ideas in the United States Constitution and Declaration of Independence are not scientific facts demonstrable in a laboratory. They are "spiritual" ideas that can be traced back to Christ OS and the New Consciousness that emerged in the minds of the writers of that memetic software called the New Testament.

Christ OS Today

Jordan Peterson has basically attempted to generate an upgraded Christ OS wherein he has attempted to merge modern biological science with the Bible in his books Maps of Meaning, 12 Rules for Life, and in his Bible Lecture Series.

Brian Mclaren has produced many books offering an upgraded Christ OS that he calls A New Kind of Christianity, that actually goes back to the Hebrew Bible for understanding and interpreting the New Testament instead of interpreting the New Testament through the lens of Augustine and Luther, etc.

The retired Episcopal Bishop John Shelby Spong has produced several books and lectures on YouTube, offering his own upgraded Christ OS, which he has called A New Christianity for a New World.

In his book Common Sense Christianity, C. Randolph Ross lays out a rational and practical way to be Christian without believing in anything anti-science or irrational.

Many other thinking Christians who value the Christ OS phenomenon but are also true to modern science and rationality have found ways to merge the spiritual with the scientific and have upgraded Christ OS.

 It is only the dogmatic Fundamentalists who resist this evolving consciousness. It would be like those who subscribed to the Gospel of Mark rejecting the Gospel of John. In other words, the fact is Christ OS has had upgrades to the mental software all throughout its development which one can find in the New Testament itself.

This website then is not a traditional reading of the Bible from a particular creed or religious tradition or denomination. I will read and interpret the Bible from a scholarly perspective as Brian Mclaren explains in his writings. I will also be reading the Bible through the lens of psychology just as Carl Jung did and Jordan Peterson does.

The reader who is a Fundamentalist and follows the traditional creeds established by Constantine, Augustine, Luther, Calvin, and others, such a person may not be open to a historical and psychological reading of the New Testament. The audience for this book will be the critical thinker and science minded rationalist.

I essentially wrote this book or website for myself which at first helped me not drive down the street and cringe at every cross I saw. What I have come up with is something that works for me and may be of interest to others.

 This book/website is for those who realize that the Bible and Christianity is part of our American culture and rather than constantly complain about parts of it and reject Fundamentalism, I think there is a third alternative: which is the path of Rational Christianity.

 In this book or website I will present ways to integrate the rational with the spiritual, the historical with the phenomenological, the idealistic with the realistic.

This book can be thought of as a follow up to excellent books like The Human Faces of God by Thom Stark, and the works of John Shelby Spong and Jordan Peterson. I will be building on the theme that the Bible contains the human faces of God, which in this book will emphasis the human personalities of God.

In contrast to the version of God as an Alpha Male personality, or a Beta Male who is passive only, I present a way to interrupt the Bible as the integrating of the psyche, a balancing the feminine and masculine.

This is a psychological reading of the cross, yet maintains the traditional focus of a cross themed Christianity. I have taken the cross and merged it with personality theory to show how the Bible is about our own human personalities and the human project to integrate our natures and proclivities into a healthy center through mythology.

 I will discuss how the images of the warring tribal deity (a testosterone fueled war-god) gave way to the Book of Amos and the God of Love in the Johannine Community. We will see how the human personalities that are more controlling and conflict-prone ended up projecting their personality types onto a Divisive Deity that was knowable via the creedal dogma with the aim of Order and Conformity; and how personalities with more openness and agreeableness were able to form a unifying Apophatic Godhead and the tradition of mysticism (that sought to transcend the creeds).

 I will argue that the creedal Protestant Trinity presents images of a single dad and bachelor son who was celibate with no female representation; and thus a lack of integration for the human psyche. I will argue instead for the integration of the Divine into it's masculine and feminine representations as found in the Bible itself.

Practical Christianity is an "organic" approach to Christianity as a rooted Christ-experience that bears fruit. It begins with the subjective and ends in the creative formation of a new humanity. This approach is the pragmatic Way of Jesus without being manipulated and mind-controlled by Zookeeper type clergymen spouting systematized theological agendas in the name of so-called Orthodoxy which just means "right opinion,” as in controlled thought or thought control. I call this the Constantinian spirit which is at odds with a Christ-like spirit. The Constantinian tradition seeks to blame, shame and tame in order to cage minds and form molds based on a tradition with the controlling  "heavy yoke" of these traditions; which are akin to the Tradition of the Elders that Jesus condemned. In contrast, Practical Christianity is a focus on the core Christ-experiences, which blooms within outward into artistic expressions of Joy and Abundance. By their fruit ye shall know them.

Not “Christianity” but Christianities emanating from The Way

Unlike in Catholicism and Mormonism, where a singular leader leads all the churches, the first century “church” was not a church but multiple “assemblies” (meeting in homes, shops and underground hideaways). Hence there were Christianties. Some were pro-martyrdom, some anti-martyrdom. Some were proto-orthodox, others heterodox. They held different theological beliefs and agendas. But what they all shared in common was the Christ-experience and the moral vision of the Crucified Christ and the practical fruition of the divine Logos/Wisdom/Word in their midst, which they called The Way (or Path). Each Christ cell/group turned to the literary artists in their community to produce epistles and a gospel (after Paul died), and the New Testament is a Theatrical novelists art museum containing the creative vision of these authors as they sought to inspire and promote The Way through stories and parables using midrash (i.e. figural reading and mimesis).

Imagine several circles below and each one represents an insular Christian assembly/church community, each with a different cultural atmosphere and theological agenda and opinions.

Circle 1: Markan community

Circle 2: Matthean community

Circle 3: Luckan community

Circle 4: Johannine community

Circle 5: Jamesian community

Circle 6: Gospel of Thomas community

Circle 7: Ebonites community (See https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ebionites)

Each circle represents a Christian assembly/church meeting in someone's house or in a shop or cave, etc. Each group has their own leaders and what they focus on which often differs from the other communities and the circles above. But what they all have in common is the pragmatic way or path of Jesus. So if you take all the circles representing the communities above, in the middle of all of them is what they all have in common and what is the heart of their practice:

The Center Circle: Jesus' Practical Way (or Path)

The community led by James the Just who was  possibly the brother of Jesus did not share the theological opinions of the Thomas community.  The Thomas community did not agree with all of the theological views of the Johannine community. And on and on we can go pointing out the differences and disagreements, but what they all had in common was seeing Jesus as Lord not Caesar as Lord, and following the practical way of Jesus: his courageous confrontational nonviolent protest against religious fakes and corrupt traditions, organizations, and governments; while promoting a better way of ethical living and joyful celebration toward a vision of a Just Society.

From this perspective, reading the New Testament is not about forcing all these communities and their letters and gospels to  match each other in degree and a cyst matized way, not forming a systematic theology out of the texts that were never meant to be systemized as a library of many different authors and different communities with different personalities, agendas, and cultural contexts, etc. Nor was every jot and Tittle meant to be taken as literal. To do so is an insult to the artistic creativity of the authors and their artistic ability to use metaphor theater and art to create figural stories aimed at inspiring and motivating not writing a boring historical analysis.   Instead, the library art museum of the NT is about inspiration and motivation to live the Christ Path awaiting the Christian afterlife.

When I was a kid I was highly motivated by the Rocky movies. I never took the stories literally, but that did not stop the mythology of Rocky, the powerful fiction of the hero overcoming the odds, profoundly impacted my psyche for the good. Likewise, the NT is full of heroic epic of good vs evil, the wise sage vs the corrupt dogmatists, the evil empire vs. the noble martyrs for the vision of a just society. Reading allegorically and as figural reading and mimesis, the stories become grander than literal history, like a Rocky movie, they become mythos, inspirational, motivation, “magical”! Boring history does not move people to change their mind or develop courage and character, inspirational stories do that! Were some of the contents of the New Testament actual history, of course. But there was also a lot of embellishing and exaggeration and mythical allegorical intentions which the educated reader can see.

After playing around with different titles I settled on Practical Christianity because that summarizes my way of being Christian that bears practical fruit. For example, if you interpret the Bible literally as a Fundamentalist then you will give all your possessions away. If you are a virgin or unmarried you will remain celebate. So what practical value does that have in modern capitalist America?

1 term in phrase I like I learn from Shawn my cranie is subjective Christianity but that title doesn't clarify anything. However practical Christianity embraces the realization that the spirit Of Christianity Is presented through subjective lenses and subjective personalities and the subjecttive artistic expressions of varios authors' subjectivity in the new testament. Hence the spirit may be objective, either as supernatural or memetic mythos, but it is not manifest through objective math or lab results but threw subjective artistry, and practical fruition. subjective personalities used theit artistic talents to express subjectivemy an objective vision of a New Ea rth. the new testament It's not a single book with a system of tired theology at a library of Literary art like going to an art museum. Hence the Spirit may be objective as  as a Philosophical mythos a package of memes and dreams of justice, radical hospitality and agave love but it is practically seeded and harvested through the heroic examples of toughness in standing up to bullies and religious fakes. So by their fruits is a core.Christian theme of practical results. The goal and vision of Jesus not Caesar, is accompliu through practical efforts. there is no naval gazing and theologyizing like one sees in seminaries in the New Testament.. The new testament is actually all about practical action here in now, not sitting in your room discussing the 7 points of this or that theology or dogma. The new testament is a Practical Christianity: by they're fruits you shall know them.

I thought about the title science friendly Christianity which I like a lot but it made it sound like I was rejecting the right brain and artistic metaphorical thinking and focusing more on the deductive reductionistic side of thinking which Is what scientific thinking implies. But practical Christianity embraces metaphorical Christianity and what scholars call Midrash figural reading or meme sis As the subjective ways that the early Christine communities produced practical results.

Looking back I have always  experienced  my own version of Jesus and Christianity.  As a Mormon I experienced Mormonism through books like a time to laugh  A & J golden Kimball  and so my interpretation and version of Mormonism was was more of what  Mormons might call a liahona Mormon which is diff different than  the iron Rod Mormon types.  As I was always a liahona Mormon.  Same with Christianity  I extracted and focused on the parts of the New Testament  that fit my  personality and  inner conscience and ethic. We all have our own version of Christianity. Example Nietzsche was raised in a Lutheran home and read the Lutheran Bible a lot so he is often criticizing and condemning Lutheran Christianity.

I have found that how you feel about Christianity is often the result of the lens through which you read and interpret Christianity. If you come at Christianity through the lenses of Augustine, Luther and Calvin you're going to have it particular version of Christianity. Where is if you look at Christianity through the lens of the Church Father origen and Saint Francis of Assisi and the Episcopalian and Greek Orthodox tradition, and turn to David Bentley Hart and John Shelby Spong and Mark is bored, you're going to have a whole different perception of Christianity.

A short sample of key books and authors that has had a huge influence on what I've come to call Practical Christianity, is the following types of Christianity that I promote and endorse:

Volume 17-4 July–August 2004) https://www.westarinstitute.org/resources/the-fourth-r/is-christianity-going-anywhere-part-3/ 

Also see the article God's Garden by Jonathan Mitchell http://greater-emmanuel.org/jm/garden.htm 

Link to this introduction here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/e/2PACX-1vSWrYIIIMb_JS2PJcII_nzah7Pd__SlkXkxtnJs8MCxPoAezpP74AUvxent4pkFJ7oMuLwLiXwC5eZB/pub