Church of the Churchless

Big bang stretches the mind

I’m a big bang addict. The one that created the universe, I mean. That’s the Really Big big bang. Other big bangs necessarily pale in comparison, for the original is what created everything in existence.

I’ve read countless books and articles about the big bang. I never get tired of trying to envision what can’t be envisioned with the limited human mind.

How is it possible that the entire universe was once much smaller than a sub-atomic particle? What force could end up creating one hundred billion galaxies (or more), each with an average of about one hundred billion stars, along with the precisely configured laws of nature that evolved people like you and me who now ponder the question?

I was excited when the March 2005 issue of Scientific American arrived. On the cover was a teaser: “Big Bang Bungled: 6 Common Errors about the Expanding Universe.” Inside was a fascinating piece by Charles H. Lineweaver and Tamara M. Davis, “Misconceptions About the Big Bang.”

They start off by saying, “The expansion of the universe may be the most important fact we have ever discovered about our origins. You would not be reading this article if the universe had not expanded. Human beings would not exist…Since this discovery [of the big bang], the expansion and cooling of the universe has been the unifying theme of cosmology, much as Darwinian evolution is the unifying theme of biology.”

The big bang was the moment of creation. Whether you believe in God or not, it is undeniably the moment that separates the profound Mystery of our ultimate origin from the lesser mystery of how we and the universe as a whole have evolved from that explosive beginning some fourteen billion years ago.

Understanding how creation has unfolded from the big bang doesn’t reveal the Creator. The power that lies behind the big bang is as much an enigma now as it was forty years ago. This is when evidence for the expansion of the universe was first discovered: background microwave radiation that fills the entire sky. But it makes sense to me that some clues, however subtle, about the nature of the Creator must be present in the big bang.

So far the clues I’ve discerned lead me to this succinct conclusion: Wow! And that one word, in my opinion, better conveys the nature of our source than thousands of pages of theological or metaphysical suppositions. You don’t need anything other than modern science to feel a sense of awe, even reverence, toward a creative power that is utterly beyond the capacity of the human mind to comprehend.

As I’ve written before, reality is the best religion. Scientific literature often is much more inspiring to me than religious texts because an ounce of reality is better than a pound of guesses.

That said, the Scientific American article observes that even “renowned physicists, authors of astronomy textbooks, and prominent popularizers of science have made incorrect, misleading or easily misinterpreted statements about the expansion of the universe.” In large part this is because the big bang blows the mind. Even a highly trained and intelligent mind.

Yet so many people are confident that they know a lot about the nature of God, the Creator, even though the fundamental nature of the creation—which seemingly should be much easier to discern—is still a mystery even to advanced scientists. If the big bang is so difficult to understand, it stands to reason that the power lying behind the big bang is vastly more impenetrable.

Read the Scientific American article.

Try to imagine the big bang as an explosion of space and time itself, not an exploding of matter/energy from a particular location into preexisting space and time. For it is.

Try to imagine space expanding at more than the speed of light. For it is.

Try to imagine how much of the universe is forever beyond our knowledge, light emitted from distant galaxies never being able to reach us due to the expansion of space at greater than light speed. For it is.

And after trying to imagine these and other almost unimaginable attributes of creation, try to imagine how it is possible to imagine anything about the Creator that lies unseen behind it all.

If I’m sure of anything about God, it is that imagination doesn’t lead to ultimate truth. Reality lies elsewhere: beyond the mind that imagines God and the big bang.

Reason unites, faith divides

Religious believers tend to assume that if more people had faith, the world would be so much better. Actually, it would be worse. For faith divides and reason unites. If our goal is a peaceful, harmonious, productive, safe world, reason will get us closer to what we want and faith will take us further away.

This is the central theme of Sam Harris’ excellent book, “The End of Faith,” which I’ve written about before. His opening chapter is called “Reason in Exile.” It’s a devastatingly accurate critique of faith-based religions. In other words, all religions. For a “religion” founded on reason is better termed a philosophy; going further, if founded on fact it would be a science.

Here are some excerpts from this chapter that will give you a flavor of Harris’ thesis:

While all faiths have been touched, here and there, by the spirit of ecumenicalism, the central tenet of every religious tradition is that all others are mere repositories of error or, at best, dangerously incomplete. Intolerance is thus intrinsic to every creed…religious beliefs are simply beyond the scope of rational discourse.

…I hope to show that spirituality can be—indeed, must be—deeply rational, even as it elucidates the limits of reason…It is time we recognized that the only thing that permits human beings to collaborate with one another in a truly open-ended way is their willingness to have their beliefs modified by new facts. Only openness to evidence and argument will secure a common world for us.

Reasonable people can spend an evening together pleasantly conversing even if their views are widely divergent. Faith-based people can’t. True believers aren’t able to interact with non-believers in a genuinely humble and open manner. The reason is simple: they aren’t genuinely humble and open. True believers believe that only they possess the truth. They aren’t interested in opening themselves up to new ideas, new facts, new ways of looking at the world, new avenues of approaching God.

Ken Wilber, in his book “Sex, Ecology, Spirituality,” says: “It seems to be the case that the vast majority of the world’s population does not now need ways to get beyond rationality, but ways to get up to it…Thus the greatest world transformation would simply be the embrace of global reasonableness and pluralistic tolerance…Rationality is the only structure that will tolerate structures other than itself.”

It’s generally assumed that polite people don’t challenge the religious beliefs of others. If you’re at a party, making conversation with someone you’ve just met, and he says, “I worship the trolls that live under the earth because they are going to surface soon and reward those who believed in them,” most likely you’d respond with something like, “Hmmmm. That’s interesting” and look around for someone less crazy to converse with.

But a more appropriate response would be, “Trolls?! Are you kidding? That sounds ridiculous. What evidence do you have that this is true?” You’d now be engaging with your companion, sharing ideas, delving deeper into his (weird) worldview, possibly aiding him to embrace more reasonable conceptions.

I agree with Harris’ general view that religious moderation is to religious extremism as an open liquor cabinet is to alcoholism: one fosters the other. If something is dangerous, then anything which enables the danger to continue to exist is itself dangerous. Faith threatens to destroy the world. Witness 9/11. Witness the Crusades. Faith always has been a destructive force. The only difference in modern times is that faith-based people now have more power to use in trying to make others bend to their unreasonable will.

Harris says, “The very ideal of religious tolerance—born of the notion that every human being should be free to believe whatever he wants about God—is one of the principal forces driving us toward the abyss.”

Reason is the cornerstone of public discourse. It is the primary means by which we communicate our needs, ideas, and desires to other people. We don’t stand on a street corner and scream at passersby (well, some do); we engage them in a conversation of some sort: face to face, or indirectly through media such as cyberspace. When public discourse is reasonable, everyone can participate in the forum. Open minds welcome other open minds. And open minds lead to open hearts.

However, faith is the cornerstone of private belief. Faith doesn’t require reasons, nor should it. Faith is what we cling to when fear, darkness, uncertainty, and mystery threaten us. There’s nothing wrong with faith—it’s a natural human way of coping with the unknown. But it should, no it must, be a private possession that is shared only with those willing to accept it.

Most importantly, personal faith never should be used as a justification for public action. If you act not for a clear-sighted reason, but out of blind faith, make damn sure that no one else will be affected by your action. In the same fashion, I have a right to expect that the fellow automobile drivers who are on the road with me know what they’re doing; if they want to get drunk, lose their reason, and drive out of control, they should do it by themselves on their own property where no one else will get hurt.

I often hear people saying that they respect a politician because he or she brings a personal faith into the elected position. I cringe at those words. I’d much prefer that we elect reasonable people of little faith instead of faith-based people of little reason. And I have good reasons for saying so.

Feeling close to God

When do you feel close to God? By which I mean, to reality. For as I’ve noted before, if the entity we call “God” isn’t more real than anything else in the cosmos, it isn’t worth wanting—and certainly isn’t worthy of its name.

When do you feel clear, simple, pure, grounded, and most importantly, real? When does the deepest truth seem to shine forth most brilliantly, shorn of the coverings that usually dim divine light?

For me, I wish that I could say that it was during my periods of daily meditation. This is when I try to cast aside the clutter that usually fills my mind. I do my best to clear away the contents of my consciousness, assuming that what remains after everything movable has been cast out is nearer to God than the transitory thoughts, perceptions, emotions, and what not that normally occupy my attention.

Unfortunately, my best efforts usually leave me unsatisfied. A Zen Buddhist likely would say that this is because I am making an effort to become something else rather than simply being what I already am. I couldn’t disagree. Yet my philosophical agreement that what I seek is nearer to me than I am to myself doesn’t bridge the gap (even if it is illusory) that I feel between me and what I long for during meditation.

I feel closest to the ultimate reality that I call “God” during my nighttime dog walks. A few days ago the moon was almost full. The sky was clear. The air was crisp. Serena and I walked down the path to the creek, across two small bridges, and up to the trail that leads to Spring Lake.

For several hundred yards no houselights were visible. No human sounds were heard. There was just me, the forest, a dog bounding somewhere up ahead, and whatever created me, the forest, and a dog bounding somewhere up ahead. I sensed that whatever more than anything else, even though it wasn’t visible, audible, touchable, smellable, tasteable.

Whatever was all around me that night, especially when I left the forest and stepped out onto the banks of Spring Lake. Even through my middle-aged eyes, the stars were crisp white lights. I now could see manmade illumination from several houses. I looked away. The natural lights in the heavens were so much more appealing.

This is so perfect. It wasn’t a thought. More of a knowing. A certainty. Always has been, always will be. No worries. No effort. It is. I am. Nothing could be simpler.

I’m pretty sure that meditation, looking within, should be just as easy as gazing skyward on the shore of Spring Lake, looking without. For some reason it is easier to do the latter than the former, probably because the darkness within seems less real than the darkness without. Also, it lacks stars and a moon.

Nature appears more natural to me when perceived outwardly with my physical eyes; the eye of consciousness that looks inside seems to gaze only upon my personal creations—thoughts, imaginings, memories, emotions—and not the universal Creation, much less the Creator.

I can only speak for myself, not for others. You may feel closest to God, or whatever other term you use to describe the Really Real, in an entirely different setting or circumstance. Fine. I’m merely suggesting that whatever that setting or circumstance is, cultivate it. It’s precious. Maybe the most precious thing you’ll ever have. Take care of it. Nurture it. Let it become your guide to God.

I readily confess to being an iconoclast, for I don’t believe that any particular religion, theology, belief system, or spiritual path can encompass what is universal. The whole can’t be encompassed by any part. Yet since each part is connected to the whole, there is a way to move from partness to wholeness, from many to one, from confusion to clarity.

My strong intuition is that this is a natural way, not a manmade way. We miss the way when we look for signs posted by humans: books, verbal descriptions, conceptualizations. Signposts leading to God are, I’m pretty sure, much more likely to be discerned in the nature that is independent of Homo sapiens than in the idiosyncratic creations of a single species.

On a daytime walk around the lake today I was struck by how much more appealing it was to look upon the natural environment rather than the manmade environment. Nature is, well, so wonderfully natural. Flowing. Diverse. Creative. Calming. What people make tends toward the opposites: Linear. Similar. Repetitive. Jarring.

As an experiment I took one photo facing toward the natural side of the lake, then turned and took a photo in the other residential direction.

I preferred this

Over that.

And this

Over that.

Sitting on the dock, gazing at the surface of the lake, it struck me that nature is lawful and regular. Yet not rigid and rote. The patterns of nature are ever-changing and fluid, while the patterns of humankind tend to become set in stone, petrified. We people think that we know what’s going on, while what’s really going on escapes our notice because we’re so busy thinking and knowing.

I aspire to be a lot more like water.

Reality is shades of gray

Isn’t it interesting how much we like to divide reality into halves?

Black and white, liberal and conservative, rich and poor, red states and blue states, pro-life and pro-choice, masculine and feminine, heaven and hell. Can it really be that there are only two choices in so many areas of existence?

No. Life in all of its complex, mystifying, aggravating variety is truly shades of gray, not black and white.

Diane Ackerman, naturalist and poet, speaks of our fondness for artificial “twosies” in her book “An Alchemy of Mind.” She is addressing the question of whether nature or nurture explains our personalities:

Even to ask that question implies a dichotomy nature doesn’t pose. Only we pose it. It’s easier for our brain to handle alternatives, to divide every issue into extremes, which requires less brainwork to fathom and less time to evaluate…life rarely offers clear alternatives. Most of life sprawls on a continuum of possibilities, compromises, extenuating circumstances…most of anything falls between opposite poles, every idea or feeling includes gradations.

It’s liberating to stop putting ourselves—and others—into simplistic pigeonholes. Am I a believer or a non-believer? Actually, both. Am I for or against abortion? Indeed, for and against. Am I a supporter or a critic of the Iraq invasion? All of the above.

And so it goes. Virtually every question I can think to ask myself defies a dualistic conceptualization. Do I believe in fate or free will? Yes and yes. Do I have faith in religion or in science? Absolutely.

White is part of black is part of white.
Shades of gray.
Neither this nor that.
It’s the something else I crave.

Creationism is blasphemy

Gosh, there are still five hours until Sunday, and I feel the spirit moving me to write the Church of the Churchless equivalent of a “fire and brimstone” sermon. Reading a New York Times article, “An evolution in teaching: Fear of religious fundamentalists keeps the topic out of the classroom,” via the Portland Oregonian yesterday got me incensed about how ungodly a blind belief in creationism is.

Brothers and sisters, I call upon you to open your hearts and minds to God. Cast out the evil of creationism. Vow that you will never allow the wiles of devilish ignorance to turn you from the Almighty Truth. Worship the Creator who made heaven and earth, not the blasphemous creed of creationism.

Look around you and marvel. God is not obvious, but God’s works are. Until we are able to behold the Creator’s countenance directly, gazing upon the face of Creation is how we can best discern God’s qualities. Do not turn away from the immediate truths of this physical reality, for this will distance you from the greater truths of spiritual reality.

There are those who would substitute the insubstantial beliefs of man for the unchanging Truth of God. Do not trust these creationists. They elevate their subjective interpretation of a few words in a book over the objective evidence of the actual Creation. The delicious fruits of God’s majesty stand directly before them, yet they cast their eyes down to discredited notions from unreliable texts.

Evolution is the Creator’s will. Creationism is mankind’s imagination. Whenever you deny the evident facts of science and embrace a mere belief, you worship a false idol. God will not be mocked. The truth will win out. It is our sacred duty to fight on behalf of the Almighty. Take up your God-given arms of crisp reason and clear perception; do not let our children be deceived by the anti-God of creationism.

I read in the newspaper yesterday that teachers are avoiding the topic of evolution, “fearing protests from religious fundamentalists in their communities.” Fundamentalists they may be, but religious they are not. They are blasphemers, God-deniers, dangerous humanists. They seek to blind our children’s eyes to the glory of God’s creation. They want to confuse students with purely human conjecture instead of allowing them to know the truth of how the Creator willed creation to be.

My friends, we are becoming a Godless country. Americans are much more likely than people in other nations to accept the heresy of creationism. The United States is last, dead last, in a ranking of how knowledgeable citizens in twenty-one countries are about evolution. We should be #1 in knowing God’s reality. Instead, creationists are succeeding in keeping Americans ignorant of the power and glory that manifests as evolution.

From the One came many. All living beings are relatives of the same Common Ancestor. There is a direction to life: Upward. We can begin to discern the nature of the Creator through the laws of creation.

This is the truth. Stand firm and do not let the devilish forces of superstition and ignorance into people’s minds. Crush the malevolent seeds of creationism before they sprout. Face toward the light and shun darkness.

Above all, protect the children:

The paradox of prayer

I’ve been pondering the paradox of prayer recently. For as churchless and non-religious as I am, the urge to pray still arises in me when I’m faced with a difficult situation. Laurel is going to have surgery next Wednesday. I want it to go well. The thought, “Perhaps a prayer for a successful operation is in order” arises. But then I ask myself, “Why do I want to pray?”

Considering this question leads me straight into paradox. I’m assuming that whatever being I pray to—let’s call this entity “God” for lack of a better name—can hear my spoken or silent thoughts. Otherwise, what is the point in praying? But if God can hear me when I’m praying, it certainly seems that God also should be able to hear me the rest of the time.

What I picture God “hearing” includes more than the words that I speak to myself in my head. It also includes my non-verbal emotions, intentions, and desires. Indeed, everything that is projected from the psyche of the being that I call “Me.” I presume that a God capable of changing the course of worldly events is capable of knowing all about the world in which those events occur. Which includes the inner world of me and Laurel.

So the God I’m praying to must already know what I’m praying for. Indeed, God must be more intimately acquainted with what I desire, and need, (the two clearly not being identical) than I am myself. For I can deceive myself, but I don’t believe that I can deceive an omniscient Supreme Being or Consciousness. Where, then, is the need for prayer if God already knows what I desire for myself and others?

Here’s another paradox: The God to whom I am praying has allowed to occur the situation that has stimulated my prayer. For example, God has permitted Laurel’s health condition to evolve to the point where she needs a hysterectomy. If God indeed is omnipotent, and, as I’m assuming, omniscient, then God has both the power and the wisdom to make happen whatever He/She/It wills.

Thus, I find myself praying to a God who has ignored my prayers (or Laurel’s prayers) up to now. For both of us fervently desire that Laurel be pain-free and healthy. Since God hasn’t intervened to make a hysterectomy unnecessary before, why should I think that God will spring into action and help us now?

It seems reasonable to assume that either God can or can’t control what happens in the cosmos (assuming, of course, that God exists). If God can, then what has happened, is happening, and will happen is all God’s will—by intention or default—not ours. Hence, there’s no reason to pray. If God can’t, then there also is no reason to pray. Either way, I come to the conclusion that there is no reason to pray.

Yet, most of us do, in one form or another. We want to feel that the Almighty hears us and cares about us. We want to have a Friend to carry us through tough times. In an extension to this post I’ll share a poem that one of Laurel’s relatives recently sent her which captures this spirit.

Paul Tillich also wrote about the paradox of prayer in a much more eloquent and profound fashion than I’m capable of. Tillich begins his short essay with a quotation from Paul:

Likewise the Spirit helps us in our weakness; for we do not know how to pray as we ought, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us with sighs too deep for words. And he who searches the hearts of men knows what is the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for the saints according to the will of God. ROMANS 8:26-27.

He concludes that the “sighing too deep for words” may very well be the truest form of prayer. I agree. A silent sigh directed toward the Ultimate is well spoken; everything else that goes by the name of prayer ignores the mystery and paradox of God.

Evil: made by man or God?

“Evil” is a word much in fashion after 9/11. Bush loves to use it, as in “we will root out the evildoers,” but if he was asked to define the term, I doubt that he’d be able to do it. This isn’t a knock on Bush, because last Thursday three philosophers spent an hour on PBS’s “Philosophy Talk” discussing the nature of evil. Even they didn’t come close to agreeing on an answer.

The two hosts of Philosophy Talk were joined by Peter van Inwagen, a philosophy professor at the University of Notre Dame. He said that there is a distinction between “radical evil” and “bad things.” Examples of radical evil are Hitler, Pol Pot, Stalin, people who are way over at the dark end of the good-bad scale. The things they do are truly horrific, not merely bad—like stealing, parking in a handicapped space, needlessly killing an animal.

It was generally agreed that natural disasters can’t be called “evil,” even the tsunami that killed over 150,000 people. Yet a man or woman who brutally killed just a few people could. The main difference between nature and humankind is that men and women supposedly have free will, while nature just acts, well, naturally. No one gets angry at tectonic plates for shifting and creating an earthquake. But if an evil genius could willfully produce a massive destructive earthquake, the outrage would be incalculable.

Free will, then, seems to be a prerequisite for evil. Absent free will we just have bad things. If a large fir tree fell on my house during a windstorm that would be a bad thing. If someone with a chain saw willfully caused the tree to fall on my house, that would be an evil deed. At least, so argues common sense and the law.

However, the philosophy talkers raised some points that blur the distinction between “natural” and “willful” disasters, especially if you believe in God. Prof. van Inwagen, a Christian, argued that even God, an omnipotent and omnipotent being, can’t know what people will do with their free will. This helps explain why God, who also is considered to be omnibenevolent, created a universe that now contains so much evident evil.

In the Christian view, the progenitors of humankind were given free will and then made bad choices. This caused a separation from God which made things even worse. Now we supposedly have been left to our own devices, which includes evil-doing, while God watches from afar, unwilling or unable to eliminate the bad stuff in our world. We made our own mess, and now we have to deal with it.

There are many problems with this theological premise. If you’ve got a high tolerance for philosophical argument, ponder the “Evil” entry in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Or as much of it as you can understand, if you’re not familiar with symbolic logic. Here’s an excerpt from the article:

What properties must something have if it is to be an appropriate object of worship, and if it is to provide reason for thinking that there is a reasonable chance that the fundamental human hopes just mentioned will be fulfilled? A natural answer is that God must be a person, and who, at the very least, is very powerful, very knowledgeable, and morally very good.

But if such a being exists, then it seems initially puzzling why various evils exist. For many of the very undesirable states of affairs that the world contains are such as could be eliminated, or prevented, by a being who was only moderately powerful, while, given that humans are aware of such evils, a being only as knowledgeable as humans would be aware of their existence. Finally, even a moderately good human being, given the power to do so, would eliminate those evils. Why, then, do such undesirable states of affairs exist, if there is a being who is very powerful, very knowledgeable, and very good?

What one has here, however, is not just a puzzle, since the question can, of course, be recast as an argument for the non-existence of God. Thus if, for simplicity, we focus on a conception of God as all-powerful, all-knowing, and perfectly good, one very concise way of formulating such an argument is as follows:

1. If God exists, then God is omnipotent, omniscient, and morally perfect.
2. If God is omnipotent, then God has the power to eliminate all evil.
3. If God is omniscient, then God knows when evil exists.
4. If God is morally perfect, then God has the desire to eliminate all evil.
5. Evil exists.
6. If evil exists and God exists, then either God doesn't have the power to eliminate all evil, or doesn't know when evil exists, or doesn't have the desire to eliminate all evil.
7. Therefore, God doesn't exist.

It’s hard to refute this argument. Once we conceive of God as a person who is “very powerful, very knowledgeable, and morally very good,” it’s almost impossible to reconcile the existence of evil with the existence of such a being. This is why I strongly lean in the direction of an impersonal monistic God—One without a second. For if there truly is God and also what is not-God, then the contradictions laid out in 1-7 above are virtually inescapable.

On the Philosophy Talk program it was pointed out that even seemingly natural disasters like earthquakes can be traced back to God. For if God created the universe, He/She/It also created plate tectonics and all the other laws of nature that cause earthquakes to happen. So there is a divine intentionality behind even the “blind” destructive forces of nature, which perhaps is why they often are called “acts of God.”

My personal suspicion is that what we call “bad” and “good” happenings are just that: things that simply happen. They are caused, but the ultimate causes are difficult, if not impossible, to discern. This means that a judgmental word such as “evil” is, as several callers to the program argued, a way of rationalizing feelings of anger and of compartmentalizing people/events that we don’t understand.

Once Osama bin Laden is labeled an “evildoer,” we don’t have to try to comprehend his inner nature. We just have to try to kill him. Yet bin Laden himself calls America evil. One of the hosts of Philosophy Talk observed that half of bin Laden’s message that was released around election time was rantings and ravings, but half made pretty good sense. But if we write bin Laden off as someone qualitatively different from ourselves, evil with no hint of goodness, then he can be objectified as a Satanic thing rather than a Human person.

I don’t use the words “evil” or “bad” very often. If someone asks me about a movie that I didn’t enjoy very much, I’m much more likely to say “I didn’t like it” than “It was bad.” Not liking means that the movie scored low on my personal good scale. It lacked goodness. This is quite different from considering that it reeked with badness.

Plotinus, my favorite Greek philosopher, held that there is nothing but the Good, or God. However, the Good can manifest in an infinity of ways, from One all the way to essentially zero—just as heat ranges from absolute zero to as high as you want to go.

“Cold” isn’t the presence of something; it is the absence of heat. Similarly, my wife and I both believe, along with Plotinus, that “evil” isn’t anything real in itself; it is the absence of good.

Maybe the word itself contains a clue to its meaning. Spell it backward: LIVE. So long as we live, there will be evil. Until we are One.

Helping out the Second Coming

Yesterday I made some tongue-in-cheek recommendations on my other weblog about how to speed up the Second Coming. According to a “Christ is Coming Very Soon!” ad in our local newspaper, plummeting morality, explosion of travel and education, explosion of cults and the occult, and the New World Order are all evidence that Jesus’ return is right around the corner.

So I concluded that whatever we can do to advance immorality, travel, education, non-Christian counterfeit spirituality, and the United Nations will help bring about the Second Coming. Logically this makes sense to me, just as I’ve always thought that if it was God’s plan to have His only son, Jesus, die for our sins, why do Judas, Pontius Pilate, and the other people who fulfilled God’s will get such a bad rap?