Jesus' Appearance - not a long-haired Renaissance prince

What did Jesus look like?  Like a medieval European potentate with long hair? Neither  Jewish nor Gentile men sported hippie hairstyles.  Here is what 1 Corinthians 11:14 says:  Does not even nature itself teach you that if a man has long hair, it is a dishonor to him?

Wikipedia has a a comprehensive analysis of this subject, and a must watch video model of what Jesus might have actually looked like:

Where is Sue?

Sue had such a wonderful blog Swedenblogian. But she did it again - a second time. She just folded her tent and left. She deleted her blog from the web. I have snippets of some of her articles - I wish I had more.

The first time she dropped out she said she had said everything she wanted to say about Swedenborg and that she wanted to do a blog on quilts. But after a while she started writing on religious topics again.

On the internet it is possible to disappear without a trace.

Where is she now?  Where are you, Sue? Rejoin the community - at least, let us know you are well - and why you turn your blog off from time to time...

Roger

Economics and Psychology in Heaven and on Earth

While it might be  right that there is probably some form of money in the lower heavens for the exchange of value, one might also speculate that even in the lower heavens the basics are all free and people trade and compete for nice to have superfluities. In the higher heavens almost everything would be free except when one trades or competes congenially for sport, something akin to a Monopoly game or a friendly softball match. In the hells of course one would need to work for even for food because hellish beings would need that level of motivation to provide use to others.

Coming back to our current planet: why do we need money here? Because people are self-centered. Would communism work our planet? No - because people want the most for themselves at the lowest cost. If possible, the imperfect beings on earth would just take what they need without doing any good for others. Why do we need capitalistic competition on planet earth? Because people would take advantage of their customers if they did not have to worry about competitors offering the same goods and services. Having said that, communism (in the generic, non-Marxist sense) does succeed on earth in a limited set of situations: (1) Within loving families where members genuinely care about other, (2) Within small committed, highly motivated religious communities such as religious orders (Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, Buddhist, Hindu, Sufi) or communes (such as the Protestant 'Twelve Tribes').

Crown of Churches

In response to this posting, here are a few thoughts:

The crown sits next to the head, while the necklace sits next to the heart. The New Church being the crown of Christendom merely means that the best understanding of Revelation and the Other World is found within the New Church. Those of us who have come to the Heavenly Doctrines from outside will testify to that. 

However, the New Church is not necessarily better and excelling in love compared to other Christian churches. As long as we do not expand the meaning of "crown" to signify that we are inherently better and less prone to evil than other Christians, it is still OK to affirm that we have a clearer and brighter light (understanding/head) than the rest of Christendom (and no thanks to us for that!).

The Jeffersonian Ideal of Church-State Separation

There is no such thing. 

The Jeffersonian ideal was to separate the federal government from any particular Christian denomination - that is not not have an established church like the Church of England in 'England and Wales'. 

It did not proscribe a broad, civil, non-dogmatic, cultural Christianity as the moral bedrock and the least common denominator of economic and political life. (Tangentially, nor did Jefferson explicitly refer to established churches in the constituent states, although he was averse to that too.) 

Coming back to cultural Christianity, I do not share C.S.Lewis' objection to it as a watered-down religion that must be relegated to the trash bin.. You see, cultural Christianity beats cultural secularism as our 'political religion' any day. Yes, we should separate particular forms of Christian dogma and praxis from political life, but the USA is a Christian nation and it is is perverse misinterpretation of the constitution to divorce our politics from a broad Christianity, or to use the IRS to ban political discourse from the pulpits. 

Jefferson was a Deist but a Deist within a profoundly Christian culture, one who created his own bowdlerized New Testament whose value we can certainly dispute but whose Christian orientation we can in no wise deny. 

In other words, let our churches practice particular forms of Christianity and let not the federal or state governments interfere with that. But let us also acknowledge a least-common-denominator Christian culture as the bedrock of our civil life in lieu of the humanist, secular value system that has usurped its place. 

And let Jews and Buddhists and Hindus and Shamanists and Baha'is and Zoroastrians and UUs and Jains and Wiccans and Sikhs and Shintoists and Daoists and Agnostics and Athesits and Sufis and Animists be welcome in our midst by Christian sufferance, and not as itsy-bitsy tails that wag the dog.

The USA for the Lord Jesus Christ !!  

Perfect Recipe for Mental and Physical Health

Try this out and tell me if this does not work.

1. Buy an iPOD shuffle or some other cheap MP3 player with a 'shuffle' capability.
2. Download the four gospels: Matthew, Mark, Luke and John free from this site. Free Bible Download
3. Also download Revelation from the same site.
4. Load these five books onto your iPOD shuffle or cheap MP3 player. Dedicate your player to these 5 books - let it have nothing else. Put your player in the shuffle mode.
5. Buy a cheap digital watch and walk every day for 60 minutes as briskly as you can.
6. While you do so, listen to to these 5 books in the shuffle mode. Do nothing else while you walk. If thoughts arise, do not pursue them. Listen to the recordings in a light, pleasant way without straining yourself. Do not theologize in your mind as you listen, unless theological thoughts pop up spontaneously.
7. Watch the Lord completely change your mind and your life in 90 days.

This costs little and it works miracles - and the most important miracle of all: the renewing of the mind.

Roger

Marriage, Heaven and the Gospels

First, the scripture. Then, a comment from one Swedenborgian perspective:

Matthew 22:23-33

²³ The same day came to him the Sadducees, which say that there is no resurrection, and asked him,

²⁴ Saying, Master, Moses said, If a man die, having no children, his brother shall marry his wife, and raise up seed unto his brother.

²⁵ Now there were with us seven brethren: and the first, when he had married a wife, deceased, and, having no issue, left his wife unto his brother:

²⁶ Likewise the second also, and the third, unto the seventh.

²⁷ And last of all the woman died also.

²⁸ Therefore in the resurrection whose wife shall she be of the seven? for they all had her.

²⁹ Jesus answered and said unto them, Ye do err, not knowing the scriptures, nor the power of God.

³⁰ For in the resurrection they neither marry, nor are given in marriage, but are as the angels of God in heaven.

³¹ But as touching the resurrection of the dead, have ye not read that which was spoken unto you by God, saying,

³² I am the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob? God is not the God of the dead, but of the living.

³³ And when the multitude heard this, they were astonished at his doctrine.

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When Jesus said there will be no marriage in heaven, he was referring to a very specific definition of marriage in which, according to Jewish law, which still holds for Orthodox Jews:

1. A man could divorce a woman for any reason or no reason, and still be within the bounds of ethics and morality
2. A woman could not divorce her husband. So if he left her without divorcing her, she could not marry another man.
3. Adultery was something contingent on the marital status of the woman, and not of the man. A married man could consort with a whore if he wished and would not be guilty of adultery.

In short, marriage in the halakhic, Talmudic sense meant meant that the man possessed (owned) his wife as property. This is the kind of marriage you would not have in heaven. But you would have a marriage of equals, or the conjugial love that Swedenborg mentioned.
Also marriage includes reproduction and child rearing. That is the main purpose of marriage. A permanent male-female sexual relationship that did not include child bearing and child rearing would not be marriage in the strictest sense. You might call it permanent sexual companionship or marriage' (marriage-prime), and it would be holy in its own way. 

Here’s a link outlining the difficulties of a traditional Torah marriage, which has not changed since Jesus’ day.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agunah

This also explains the Gospel’s restriction of divorce (no divorce except for infidelity) - Jewish law allowed men to divorce their wives for any reason, and it did not allow women to divorce their husbands. This law is almost identical in orthodox Judaism and in Islam today - divorce is something that men do to women, and not vice versa. If wives are their husbands’ property, then it is up to the husband to release (or not release) his property. Property does not release its owner!

So the question regarding the woman who married seven brothers, each dying after the others was - whose property will she be in the afterlife? And Jesus' answer was - no one's. Per the definition on marriage in the minds of the audience, there would be no marriage in the afterlife. Not their kind of marriage. Not even an egalitarian, earthly marriage since that implies childbearing and child rearing. We're like the angels in the afterlife. Do angels marry? Do they exist in space? In time? No, no and no. But they do have something else equivalent to marriage - let's call that marriage-prime, for want of a better word. And they ave their own equivalent of the spatial and temporal dimensions - let us call those space-prime and time-prime.

The problem is reading Jesus' words without understanding the historical context.