Transactionalism
Believing that sin is moral failure traps one into transactional beliefs.
I don’t identify as a Christian, but rather as an objective analyst juxtaposing claims and incongruences against the rational axiom of how beliefs work. The Bible truthfully documents how furiously fucked up fast life becomes when we humans don’t believe in ourselves. It’s instantaneous — snap! It should be retitled, “The Book of Beliefs” or “The Lies We Believe” since people believe the lies they were told about it.
Jesus performed miracles large and small.
The top of what Jesus said was 1) Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. 2) Love your neighbors as yourself. (Leviticus 19:9–18. Note that no belief is required, just action.)
There’s no hierarchy for miracles. All were such flabbergasting, never-seen-before events; miracles temporarily suspend the laws of physics.
My first thought upon discerning what miracles have in common with each other was the dichotomy separating science from religion is arbitrary. Both are describing the same thing, both are belief systems, both use language specific to their respective beliefs, both have a hierarchy in which sits the top representative of their respective modalities.
At the top of religion’s hierarchy is a belief system about an invisible being called God. At the top of science’s hierarchy is a belief about an invisible force called Gravity. Each hierarchy claims to know it all works. “Do this, don’t do that,” from Religion, and “E=mc2”, Einstein’s Theory of Relativity, from Science. Both are describing what one side labels God, and the other side labels as the primary force in the Universe, including Earth. Both have beliefs at their core.
All beliefs are binary in respect to how we interpret what we can’t even see, and go to war over what we do see.
The Catholic Church is responsible for starting the war on science. It began with Galileo having to defend his logical, rational explanation for the Church’s belief that the Universe revolved around the Earth which God made. How dare someone go against beliefs over 1,200 years old.
All beliefs work in the same way: they agnostically self-reinforce instantaneously, creating feelings, thoughts, and actions which themselves create even more of the same.
We sow and reap by our beliefs. We manifest invisible things, hoped for or feared. Anything is possible, we tend to assume only good things, and that we have to work at it. This is one of the most ancient beliefs we are born into (“The Biology of Belief”). It cleverly blinds us to our divine power to co-create reality—a quantum state—and self-reinforces that quantum state instantaneously.
Disbeliefs work the exact same way as beliefs: they agnostically self-reinforce instantaneously, creating feelings, thoughts, and actions which themselves create even more of the same.
This is the intrapersonal root of transactionalism. I articulate it as
Perform an action in order to achieve/receive what you already are/have.
Quantum physics states that all things are in a restful state of probability, which is another way of saying that all things are possible; the good, the bad, the ugly, the beautiful—agnosticism—all that matters/manifests is what one hopes/fears.
Because most don’t believe that to be the case, they manifest accordingly and don’t recognize it. I didn’t understand it until I sat down to figure out how beliefs work.
Dues ex machina
The primary misbelief is ‘there must be a way to trigger God’s blessings’. The primary trigger is and always has been ‘be morally pure as possible’. Being morally virtuous in order to receive God’s blessings is conditional love. It renders God as transactional in nature: If I do this, God will do that. Deus ex machina.
The temptations of Jesus demonstrates that scripture is not transactional. Satan knows scripture better than you and on par with Jesus and his fellow Rabbis. The difference between Jesus’ interpretation and Satan’s boils down to ‘do unto others as you would have them do unto you’. As you do it unto the least of among you, you reveal what you think about who or what God is. Satan’s interpretation is transactional: perform an action in order to receive what is already yours; basically do what I tell you to do.
Quoting scripture in order to manipulate another person to conform to your beliefs is just as evil as doing nothing while your neighbor suffers. See: Jesus heals the paralytic at Capernaum.
Believing that Jesus lived a sinless life is a transactional belief about God. Believing that sin is moral failure traps one into a transactional belief about God. Obedience is by its very nature transactional. It naturally manifest misery. It’s right there: the wages of sin is death.
That came straight from Genesis where that all loving God who created good and evil, or at least the knowledge of it, warned the first humans that if they ate the fruit that they would die. Right there fear is introduced. Oh, but God is love blah, blah, blah, as if we don’t have to do a single thing but just believe in God, Jesus, or Willy Wonka and everything works out fine.
Bullshit.
Turns out that the lying snake told the truth: you won’t die. Eve believed, ate the fruit, shared it with Adam and neither died, physically. But look at what happened: Eve felt naked and afraid. She physically manifested the lie that she believed. She believed she wouldn’t die physically. And she didn’t.
Genesis 3 became the blueprint, the business model of fear that has been continually used for thousands of years. The worst part about this is that the model is encoded in DNA (“The Biology of Belief”) and passed down every other generation for hundreds and thousands of years.
Everyone physically manifests whatever it is they believe. All things are possible, the good, the bad, and evil.
Belief
Miracles are merely the physical manifestation of what Love does. The most morally virtuous person cannot manifest miracles because morality — by its very transactional nature — cannot perform miracles. Miracles are manifestation of beliefs.
Jesus didn’t include a single requirement to perform miracles other than that one believe that it was merely possible! How is it then, that every single religion I’ve been exposed to says that I’ve got to believe in God when Jesus said that I’ve got to only believe that it’s possible. To promote anything other than ‘Love your neighbors as yourself’ is to promote a transactional belief system focused solely on morality and its attendant physical manifestations.
The recipients of the miracles of Jesus did nothing to qualify for them. Sometimes they believed, other times they simply witnessed something far more different than they were accustomed to.
The disciples were scared to death, pun intended, to see Jesus walking on the water during a violent storm. Peter musters up enough chutzpah to try it himself and immediately sinks. He sinks because his mindset is transactional in nature. He doesn’t really believe that anything is possible due the constant presence of death and fear as promoted by both the religious leaders and the Romans. Jesus grew up in that same fear-saturated environment, where the religious authorities oppressed their fellow Jews by mandating obedience to whatever laws they put forth.
The Jews believed that obedience to laws would make them morally virtuous. And that by being morally virtuous they’d incur God’s blessings. But read Genesis 3:1–5 and it’s clear as day that God’s blessings were already theirs; they merely believed otherwise. They believed a lie and instantly they felt just like Eve felt: naked and afraid. Vulnerable. And so they doubled down so many times with the whole moral virtue=blessings that they lost sight of the real thing: love your neighbor. Moral behavior is symptomatic of love…
…and miracles are a symptom of unconditional love. Miracles are the opposite of sin. When you believe the right things about yourself, there’s no confusion about the power of belief.
Holy Honest Unbelief!
The man with the demon-possessed son has been so far past the end of hope for so long that he sobs, “Help me in my unbelief!” Jesus heals his son anyways. Wow! right?
But that isn’t what blows away the disciples. It’s the fig tree that Jesus cursed the day before that does. It was dead, withered up by its roots. Jesus was hangry, knew it wasn’t fig fruit season, and curses the tree. That’s what excites the disciples. Not the trauma of a young boy writhing on the ground in the grips of a epileptic seizure.
Nope, it’s this dead fig tree. Jesus uses it to tell the disciples that they can do what Jesus never did: say to that mountain ‘be removed and cast into the sea’.
It’s telling that Jesus illustrates the power of beliefs with the most outlandish thing possible: tell a mountain to be removed. I guesstimate that more rationalizations have been made about this statement than any other miracle associated with Jesus. Nobody really believes Lazarus was raised from the dead. I know this because if someone believed with all of their heart, they would raise the dead and we would hear about it, and that would cause more people to believe and raise the dead and perform lots of other miracles, because now that this possibility has been done by many different people outside the hierarchy, it goes viral.
Instead we have been bombarded by transactional beliefs that the one thing, that the one mountain we desperately want removed, will never happen. Transactionalists will chalk this up as being a part of God’s plan. It was a prominent transactionalist Christian who wrote on paper and gave it to me, “The reason you are deaf is because you didn’t have enough faith.” But Jesus says if one believes with all their heart, it shall be done for them. If one believes with all their heart, the laws of physics will be temporarily suspended.
Love is the source of belief. Love bears, believes, hopes, endures all things. When you concern yourself with morality, and a sinless Jesus, you will manifest misery. When you sow Love, you sow all things are possible and you manifest extraordinary things that are not possible by being morally virtuous.
Note: I’m a lifelong believer in transactional God. I prayed many times — as did numerous others — for my hearing to be restored. It never was. When I began accepting who I was, the focus shifted to becoming more of who I was born to be: insanely curious and deeply encouraging. I began to function socially better, and overall better without my hearing. Seven years after that began, I happened to discover how beliefs work. None of this would be possible if I had remained in transactional beliefs.
Having figured out how beliefs work, lots of things became crystal clear. So much so that I know I’ll spend the rest of life detailing what those things are, but time is running short because the top transactionalists are hell-bent on making every prophecy in Revelations come true. They literally believe that they can pre-empt the return of Christ. According to their interpretation of Revelations, Jesus returns to undo and repudiate everything he stood for! It’s only logical that transactionalists will participate in nuking the cities they hate to prove their point: believe like they do, or suffer the consequences.
This is exactly what the Pharisees did back then. They oppressed their fellow Jews and then blamed them for the problems that their leadership created. Their solution is the same as it ever was: do this thing like we tell you to, and all will work out. If it doesn’t work out then, clearly, you didn’t follow our instructions to a ‘T’. And then a new condition will be placed and its failure will be upon you. And once again they will make their money.
Rather than get caught up in the things I cannot control, I choose to believe that Love will win out. Love is the very thing transactionalists and Evangelicals will never promote because it is diametrically opposed to transactional morality. The chasm that Jesus describes is the chasm between shadows and their objects, between Love and Morality. If there were no separation between the two, there would be no shadow, just Love itself. However, it is one’s belief in morality that causes one to not to recognize Love’s shadow takes the form of morality, and that morality is not the real thing.
Love is.
