In the preceding post, I’ve described George’s design for the simulation, his assumption of a role in the game, and his death in the game leading to an undoing of the relationship, allowing everyone to get off the planet and reach the Sanctuary, the new Earth.

Problems with this narrative: he wrote it. George designed this code. And if he’s the all powerful one, and there’s none more powerful than him, and Joshua is him in a player’s guise, then what does he accomplish by his death and resurrection?

This presupposes a power that is more powerful than George, or laws in the universe that are beyond those that George himself designed.

I’ve posited an assistant, Sam, who he gives authority to, who takes control of the simulation; this is the authority that kills Joshua, and against whom the resurrection triumphs.

The idea is a propitiation – that George wants to destroy the players and leave them all on a dying earth, but his avatar Joshua steps into the gap, and atones for them, and he’s forced to concede, and admit everyone to Sanctuary.

It requires one of a few choices:

• George is crazy. This is a split personality, because he’s using an extension of his own personality to keep himself from destroying the game.
• There’s another designer, implying that George does not have complete control.

Those who, like me, follow Christian theology and heresies, realize that we’re in a quandary here.

Conventional theology, i.e. DA Carson, would say that God created a world and its people, and they decided to create such evil, that if he ignored it, he could not be just, and he would destroy everyone. Jesus came and died and beat God, prevented him from destroying everyone because he took all the punishment onto himself.

This means that George is the villain. This theology is schizophrenic. It’s not me.

It requires an evil creator/judge/punisher god, or it requires an incompletely powerful god, who is opposed by a devil who has the upper hand.

If there is a devil, the Sam character would be the one defeated by the Resurrection.

God cannot be all powerful and all good. It’s a paradox.

Chesterton’s idea that original sin, that human nature is in itself wrong, unnatural, that our mix of shame and pride is not our true being, is anti-human, anti-life.

I can’t come up with a solution to this problem. I feel like scriptures represent true text, and correspond to fundamental properties of the world. However, as a writer, I can’t make this story make sense.

There’s something missing. There are essential texts which have been omitted from the current scriptures that we possess that reconcile the paradoxes. And the orthodox canon of scripture which we possess obscures or omits essential texts; it did so in the service of a political agenda, to silence dissenters, to maintain its own logical coherence in a time of competing theologies.

Yet the manichean view that Jesus wasn’t truly killed and/or wasn’t truly human flies in the face of everything I’ve been taught, that this is an earthy religion, one which embraces humanity in its flaws, and takes on humility in order to demonstrate the appropriate values of godliness.

I awoke in the middle of the night with the solution, drawn from Grant Morrison’s Invisibles. We can’t understand the conflict because we can only see in three- four dimensions. If we could see into twelve, then we would have full understanding.

Additionally, like the Invisibles, the inner church and the outer church are one. Satan works for Good, as depicted in Job, and ultimately will be cast down into the pit. You could describe Satan’s weak roller in the scriptures thus- he’s a punisher, a tempter, the Lord of the air and the earth.

The biblical narrative requires Satan minimally, and the vengeful statements of God are echoed by Jesus.

The individuals only survive when they discover their archetype- this allows them to view and understand their own place in the world. Saul- Paul- activation of an archetype. Old Testament, Saul from hero to dirty old man grasping for power.