"The devil made me do it!"

(Geraldine)

If Lucifer's folly was to act in ways unintelligent, unconditioned and uncontrolled then what's to keep each of us, as individuals, from the same indiscretions? How can we be sure that our own intelligence, conditioning and controls are solidly in place, in accordance with the grand design, the Creator's will for us? Amidst all the noise and confusion, is there a reliable rule of thumb for determining God's will?

There is! But first, we must recognize just who the Father is, and that it's not enough to simply accept the Fatherhood of God. The Father is the first source and center of all reality. He is the one and only uncaused cause. And, while his dwelling place is the geographic center of Infinity he is, at the same time, omnipresent. But, there is a concurrent truth that must also be embraced.

Fatherhood implies offspring. God is first and foremost a divine parent. Our Father's children must also be recognized and loved. Any Earthly movement that has tried to rejoice in the fatherhood of God without also accepting the brotherhood and sisterhood of human kind has fallen far short of what the Father expects. Religious groups that operate as islands unto themselves have only contributed to a world of misery.

Lucifer knew that to deny the person and the will of God is to flirt with cosmic psychosis. To be fully compatible with the cosmos, God-knowing persons exercising their personal liberties must be reality centered, operate in accordance with the golden rule and at the same time make allowances for individual growth. Experiential growth is always dependant upon diminishing external restraints linked to augmenting internal restraints. Moving from the state of being controlled to self-control and self-mastery depends on these and other factors of growth.

Maintaining self-control in an unchanging, static environment is one thing; exercising self-mastery through a series of challenges in an ever-changing environment is the true test. If getting reality centered is prerequisite to intelligence, then by all means, call upon God. It would also be helpful, in this case, to further examine the evolution of the subject world and phenomena associated with its unique reality presentation.

So much of what constitutes disappointment to the Earth bound can be traced to faith problems. The tendency towards misplaced faith must be understood, and to be understood must be seen in the context of those numerous dependencies and other problems associated with growth. We begin our examination with, what has come to be known on Earth as, the dependency cycle.

Humans cycle through many things, including what they call dependence, co-dependence, independence and interdependence, to what we will now term utter-dependence. Just when they think they have achieved control, have grown out of dependency or co-dependency relationships, their horizons are broadened and their perspective changes. They are reminded of the interrelated larger family. As their much sought after independence turns into a hollow loneliness and gets traded for interdependence they move God ward. This is contrary to what the popular culture would lead them to believe. The height of maturity is achieved when, as cosmic citizens, they recognize the Creator, Controller and Upholder while realizing they are utterly and completely dependent on God as well as the things and beings of God.

Now you may be wondering, what does this have to do with, or how does this mesh with, self-control? Let me answer that with another question or two. Is a rudderless ship in control? Could an individual attempting to navigate without the benefit of rudder, charts, sextant, knowledge of atmospheric and sea conditions or familiarity with the craft truly be called its master? Or, would the graduating class of fourteen ninety two vote such a person "most likely to fall off the edge of the Earth?"

To achieve any form of mastery one must not only know where they are going, but how to get there. They must also develop a healthy respect for the obstacles, physical and psychological, along the way.

Individual humans will, as a normal part of growth, continue to experience new centricities and eccentricities not unlike the paradigm shift that took place as a result of the Copernican revolution on Earth. For example, the egocentric infant is acutely aware of the mother's revolutions about him. From his perceptual standpoint or lay-point, he is the center of infinity, but only until such time as he is challenged.

Like the child, whole societies must trade childlike perceptions for larger realities if they are to grow. The egocentric is traded for the family-centric. Geocentric planetary systems are traded for heliocentric ones and now, thanks to space telescopes orbiting Earth, great spiral galaxies are seen to be moving about some unseen universe center. The olden prophet described this center as obscured by light, and behold, from the modern Earth astronomer's viewpoint it has been revealed, the prophet was right. But there's so much more to the cosmos than astrophysics. And it takes more than three dimensional thinking to comprehend what is far more than holographic paradigm.

But, as a direct consequence of the Lucifer insurrection, the human masses have been conditioned for disbelief. Like fleas in a closed jar, humans have practiced thought under a conceptual ceiling. Once the lid is removed the fleas can't jump out of the jar due to muscle conditioning. Likewise individual humans have limited their leaps of faith as well as their flights of fancy for reasons directly traceable to an unhealthy conditioning that yields in turn a variety of cognitive distortions obscuring truth as well as fact. This holds for the wage slave, the abused spouse or even whole societies.

As they do with a series of love affairs gone bad, humans oftentimes feel they can avoid the frustrations associated with misplaced faith simply by giving up. Often, upon considering their disillusionment and general skepticism, those resident on the planet at the beginning of the third millennium point to some major personal or historical event as a significant factor contributing to a so called "loss of faith." We will examine just a few of these factors.

According to much of the Western Hemisphere's conventional and contemporary wisdom, the most popular justification cited for losing faith is a once childlike enchantment with Santa Claus. Many adults as well as adolescents, for reasons not carefully considered, equate the belief in God to believing in Santa.

North American adults embracing the tradition of Santa generally acknowledge commercial embellishments by a certain beverage maker. They trace the symbol back through the ad campaign of a retail store chain, back through the Dutch tradition of Sinter Klaas (Saint Nicholas), to the fourth century and certain facts surrounding the life of the Bishop of Myra.

There, in what is now modern day Turkey was an unpretentious, kind-hearted man who took impish delight in brightening up the lives of those less fortunate. Whether it was by tossing a coin purse through an open window or leaving a goose by the front door, this man exemplified giving.

Now even some Christians object to the tradition of Santa because, after all, the Christmas season is supposed to be about the birth of Jesus. Of course, after they are seriously vested in this line of argument, they discover it was Christian society that moved the feast of Saint Nicholas from December sixth to December twenty fifth. On further investigation, they find no historical record supporting December twenty fifth as the day of incarnation.

The facts suggest that Paul, in extending the franchise, attached a tradition that was very much in vogue throughout his home province of Tarsus. That tradition was an annual celebration by the Mithraic cult. Their holiday focused on the steadily increasing daylight hours following the winter solstice, seen as heralding the triumph of the god of light over the god of darkness.

Almost overnight Jesus, as the Light of the World and the Light of Truth, displaced the Mithraic tradition much as greatly enhanced value often displaces fact. Of course this creates even greater problems for those unable to discern, or unwilling to accept, the difference.

There are those of us who are, to use the vernacular, simply hell bent, whose light of truth is refracted to the point where its spectral array is almost imperceptible. There are some whose concept of beauty is selectively filtered and so contextualized that the gift itself is never beheld. And there are others of us to whom goodness is systematically disqualified so that our own righteousness may never be challenged and our rightful inheritance is never enjoyed.

As for a benevolent Santa Clause, if, despite commercialization, the modern tradition finds its roots in the life of this good man from Myra, we submit that while the story of Santa as handed down may not be altogether factual, it is in the larger sense true. And we pray that the tradition will be sustained to the extent that it appeals to a spirit of generosity.

One can not compensate for lost truth with mere facts, especially questionable facts. For those not inclined to faith there will always be reasons aplenty to support faithlessness. To those who cultivate faith or who possess a strong faith there can still be problems. Humans who place their faith in humans and human institutions are courting disappointment. From assassinations to inquisitions, from the first examples of genocide to the twentieth century holocaust to the problem of pedophile priests and bad faith bishops, there is no shortage of man made disillusionment.

There is no reason to expect that the most basic human institutions are immune to such maladies. And this is evidenced by the erosion of civilized standards. Certain devotees of Lucifer and his values have been highly successful at redefining virtue. Mercy is rejected with increasing contempt and disdain. Some continue to choose blindness to cosmic relationships. Chruchianity continues to sell indulgences. Divorcing parents indulge their anger at the expense of their children. Powerful simpletons in government interpret freedom of religion as meaning freedom from religion.

Until such time as those embracing sin have made the full choice of their own moral bankruptcy and spiritual extinction, things will get worse, not better, for the people of Earth.

Enduring justice will always be predicated on the laws that God himself has established. Although unlimited in potential and while certainly not under the law, God is limited by his own volition as expressed through His laws, and as they pertain to the physical universe, life and interpersonal relationships. Lucifer did not have to violate the law to understand the outcome of his rebellion any more than an Earth scientist must continually retest for the presence of gravity. The results are and were clearly foreseeable in each case.