A Utah jury
has convicted polygamist sect leader Warren Jeffs of being an accomplice
to the rape of a 14-year-old child.
If the judge
doesn’t throw the book at Jeffs at his November sentencing, the man is
also wanted in Arizona in connection with eight felony charges that
include being an accomplice to incest and sexual misconduct with minors
in marriages involving more underage girls. Jeffs is also under federal
indictment in Utah for fleeing prosecution.
Let’s hope
Jeffs racks up enough convictions to keep him behind bars and thus away
from young girls for the rest of his life.
How do
people like Jeffs get away with perverting faith? How is it that some
are able to attract others who then permit their so-called leaders to
claim that God bestows on said head honchos the outrageous right to
dictate even the most intimate aspects of their followers’ lives?
It’s
possible, in part, because almost all of us have intermingled God and
judgment. Most people of faith – and non-believers as well – cannot
contemplate God in any other context except as some sort of Judgment
Day, where eternal damnation awaits for the slightest infraction of an
innumerable list of often contradictory rules and mandates.
While this
prospect angers some to the point of disavowing God altogether, too many
others respond with fear if not downright terror. Out of that fear, they
turn to anyone who appears confident and who then invokes their fear of
God’s judgment and damnation to manipulate, cajole or force them into
obedience.
Fearing God
is one of the deepest tragedies of human existence. It’s a lie. God is
love – unconditional love. This is love with absolutely no judgments
attached and no damnation involved.
At one point
in the history of All That Is, God may have been the kind of
vengeance-seeking, wrathful deity described in the Old Testament. But
this part of the Bible also contains numerous warnings against making
any graven image of our creator.
Why is that?
What is there about a graven image that might so offend God? Perhaps the
actual culprit is not the image so much as the property of being
graven. Anything graven, images or text, is static. It cannot change
or grow once it is engraved.
And, in an
irony to confound Creationists and Darwinists alike, God who is love
evolved. God did not remain the same as the deity at the dawn of
creation. God changed and grew more loving and keeps on growing to this
day and forever.
Is such an
assertion really all that surprising? We human beings are created in the
image of our creator. The very fact that we as a species also have
changed and evolved is a big hint about the nature of our creator. We
are not stagnant, and neither is the God who created us.
In other
words, those who still worship and/or fear a damnation deity are bowing
to a God that is no more and hasn’t existed for ages. Written biblical
texts may be only a few thousand years old, but the stories about God
that they contain are much more ancient, retained as oral traditions
from the dawn of human speech.
The more we
trust in God’s unconditional love, the less vulnerable we are to being
manipulated through fear. Imagine what this country – indeed, this world
– would be like if most of us were free of fear and full of
unconditional love, for ourselves and all those around us. There would
be fewer dictators of any kind, political or religious, and more freedom
and joy.
Sounds
absolutely crazy, doesn’t it? Still, it’s worth a try.
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