HS asked me if Jehovah knows everything.

HS also asked me to define Jehovism.

On the first point, John Calvin said both 1) God knows everything and, therefore, 2) God knew the fate of every future human being before He created them.

CS Lewis points out in his Screwtape Letters that God and Satan do not live in time the way man does. So in his theology, this simple cause-and-effect logic of Calvin would not work.

Calvin said God looks at time and knowledge the same way we do. Then he contradicted himself completely.

Calvin would have been on firmer ground if he had not gone on to JUSTIFY why God created humans to be damned.

Creating humans to spend eternity in despair and pain violates every concept of human justice. It also defied everything Jesus demanded of us.

If God used the same sense of justice Christ requires us to use, nothing would be more Satanic than creating people to be damned.

Remember, those who agree that Jehovah (JHWH) created men to be damned are the same people who object violently to the idea of creating even insensate embryos to be destroyed to help human beings. So we are forbidden to create totally unknowing embryos to be destroyed. But God’s creating humans for unending agony is just great.

So how did Calvin justify God’s creating humans to spend eternity in unimaginable agony?

He said God’s logic is not our logic. Calvin said that God does not look at reality the way we do. He said that to God Mercy means something entirely different from the mercy Christ talked about.

At the same time, Calvin’s whole theology is based on the idea that “knowledge” and “time” are exactly the same thing to God as they are to humans.

Does God see knowledge as we do? Does God see time as we do? You have to know all that in order to say whether, in OUR terms, “God knows everything.”

So Calvin said the logic of God is perfectly explicable in the case of predestination and totally opaque in the case of predestination.

Calvin was a genius. In my opinion Calvin was the greatest human theologian who ever lived. So how am I to question him?

In cases like this, I take the advice Jesus gave me. He faced the Sanhedrin, which held that God was to be explained by old men who knew the Old Testament, just as Calvin did.

Jesus said that the Kingdom of Heaven belonged to children. Children, like me, simply have no idea how the mind of God works. We have no idea whether the question, “Does God know everything?” means anything to God.

I do not know the mind of God. I don’t believe YOU know the mind of God.

Jesus gave me a tiny glimpse of God the Father, the God who was totally alien to the Old Testament experts, the men of the Sanhedrin who judged Him.

Jehovists, then and now, say that Jehovah gave theologians a total understanding of all there is to know about God the Father.

Which leads me to the definition of Jehovism. Jehovism is the Sanhedrin, the Communist theoretician, the Moslem Imam. The Jehovist’s cosmology comes from Karl Marx or Jehovah. To the Jehovist, seventy percent of the Bible is the Old Testament. To a Jehovist, every word of every Jewish prophet — if he spoke Hebrew — is as unerring as the words of Jesus.

Jehovism gets some really nasty conclusions from the Old Testament.

Jehovism says that you must kill witches.

Oops! Maybe that word meant “poisoner.”

Oh, well, these little problems happen.

Jehovists said the earth has to be the center of the universe, so they burned people who said otherwise.

Oops.

If you read the New Testament, you would have real trouble burning heretics. Jesus said specifically that he and his disciples were NOT like those who said, “You are for me or you are against me.”

It takes a lot of the vengefulness of the Old Testament to cover up the words of Jesus, but it has always been done by both Catholics and Protestants. They both burned heretics:

“You are for me or you are against me.”

Both the Catholics and the Protestants of the religious wars were committed Jehovists, so the words of Jesus were buried in the “seventy percent of the Bible” that speaks of Jehovah.

Jehovism says that God has an endless hunger for praise. Jesus never once said we should praise the Lord.

Pagan gods had a hunger for praise. Jeus demanded that we love God, that we sincerely ask for His forgiveness.

That is NOT the message of the semi-pagan JHWH of the Old Testament. He wants what every pagan god wants.

The Jews got their higher ideas of God the Father, the God of Jesus, from Zoroastriansim. The Zoroastrian Magi accepted the same Christ that the Jews rejected.

In America, the Calvinist church of the pilgrims ended up rejecting Christ and becoming Unitarian. They dropped the thirty percent of the Bible in favor of the logic of the seventy percent.

To me, the Old Testament is the story of the road from paganism. To a Jehovist, the Old Testament is, from beginning to end, the same as the words of Christ.

Calvin was obsessed with the idea that God was the tribal Jehovah of the Jews. So he and Luther cut out the last four hundred years of the Old Testament because it was written in Greek, not in Hebrew.

Jehovism is the worship of the tribal God of the Jews. It looks at God, not as the Being of whom Jesus gave us a slight glimpse in the New Testament, but as a semi-pagan being whose entire personality is described in detail in the Old Testament.

But if God is nothing but the old JHWH, why didn’t Jesus just join the Sanhedrin? Why didn’t Jesus just quote the Old Testament instead of using it as background to His parables? Why were the Magi, who were totally ignorant of “seventy percent of the Bible,” the ones who accepted the Christ?

I accept the wisdom of Odinism as my Old Testament. I accept the pursuit of knowledge as the way I can do unto others as I would have them to do unto me. I can help the lame to walk only if I know the facts about legs and the spinal cord. Knowing the entire Old Testament backwards in Hebrew will not help anyone else.

But for the Jehovist, all that really matters is knowing the Old Testament as it was written in Hebrew.

I think that’s sick.