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“The Parable of the Frogs: ‘Hell is Truth Seen Too Late’"

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 “The Parable of the Frogs: ‘Hell is Truth Seen Too Late’”
by Morris Berman

    “One who knows “enough is enough” always has enough.”
    – Tao Te Ching

“What does it take to produce large-scale social change?
 
Most historians, if you catch them in an honest moment, will admit that the popular levers of social change, such as education or legislation, are bogus; they don’t really amount to very much.
 
What does make a difference– and then only potentially– is massive systemic breakdown, such as occurred in the United States in the fall of 2008.
 
It was the greatest market crash since 1929, leading to widespread unemployment (something like 18% of the population, in real– as opposed to official– statistics*) and the loss of billions of dollars in retirement savings. In fact, the crash  wiped out $11.1 trillion in household wealth, and this is not counting the several trillion lost in stock market investments.
 
It had been many decades since the middle class found itself in soup kitchens, and yet there they were. In the face of all this, however, very little seems to have changed.
 
Americans are still committed to the dream of unlimited abundance as a “reasonable” goal, when in reality it is (and always has been) the dream of an addict.  President Obama’s provided upwards of $23 trillion bailout and stimulus plan funneled money into the very banking establishment that gave us the disaster; it rescued the wealthy, not those who really needed the money.
 
And while he could have appointed economic advisers such as Paul Krugman and Joseph Stiglitz (both Nobel laureates), who would have attempted to put the nation on a different economic path, he chose instead two traditional neoliberal ideologues, Timothy Geithner and Lawrence Summers, who believe in the very policies that led to the crash. “Change we can believe in” never sounded more hollow.

The metaphor of addiction is extremely relevant to situations such as these, because addicts always seek to maximize their intake (or behavior) rather than optimize it, even though the former leads to self-destruction.

 
In the face of what seems to be biologically driven activity, reason doesn’t have much of a chance. An experiment with frogs some years ago demonstrated this quite clearly. They were wired up with electrodes in the pleasure center of the brain, and could stimulate that center– i.e., create a “rush”– by pressing a metal bar.
 
Not only did the frogs keep pressing the bar over and over again, but they didn’t stop even when their legs were cut off with a pair of shears! And if you are going to object that human beings are not frogs, then you probably haven’t been reading the daily newspapers, or observing the behavior of the people around you.

There are, of course, a few intelligent frogs around, ones who struggle to point out the difference between optima and maxima. One such was the anthropologist Gregory Bateson, perhaps most famous for having been married to Margaret Mead.

 
For Bateson, the issue was an ethical one. As he himself put it, “the ethics of optima and the ethics of maxima are totally different ethical systems.” The ethics of maxima knows only one rule: more. More is better, in this scheme of things; words such as “limits” or “enough” are either foolish or meaningless.  Clearly, the “American Dream” is a system of maxima, of indefinite expansion.

But what if the reality of all social systems is that they are homeostatic, which is to say, designed to stay in balance?

 
In that case, said Bateson, the attempt to maximize any single variable (for example, wealth) will eventually push the system into runaway, such that it will destroy itself. To take a physiological analogy, we recognize that the human body needs only so much calcium per day. We do not say, “The more calcium I ingest, the better off I’ll be,” because we recognize that past a certain point any chemical element becomes toxic to an organism.
 
Yet we seem to be unable to extend this insight to the social or economic realm. 
 
We do not say, for example, “That company is making too much profit,” or “That individual (Bill Gates, Carlos Slim) has too much money for one person,” or “The Gross Domestic Product is spinning out of control.”
 
Rather than being interested in balance, in stability, we are fascinated by asymptotes– frogs at the bar of pleasure, even while our legs are being cut off. We don’t get it, that if you fight the ecology of a system, you lose, especially when you “win.”

Maximizing a single variable, wrote Bateson, can seem like an ingenious adaptation, but over time it typically turns into pathology. The saber teeth of a tiger may have had short-range survival value, but this development weakened its flexibility in other situations that proved to be crucial. The “favored” species became so “favored” that it destroyed its own ecological niche, and disappeared. A gain at one level became a calamity at another.

A few years ago, two American scholars of the intelligent frog variety began to understand this line of reasoning and to conclude from it that Adam Smith, with his theory of the “invisible hand,” was wrong. An early (much milder) version of Gordon Gekko, with his eulogy of greed (in Oliver Stone’s 1987 film, “Wall Street”), Smith argued that the collective result of individual self-interest was the prosperity of the whole.

 
But the economist Robert Frank, writing in the New York Times (12 July 2009), argued that “traits that help individuals are harmful to larger groups. “For instance,” he went on, “a mutation for larger antlers served the reproductive interests of an individual male elk, because it helped him prevail in battles with other males for access to mates.
 
But as this mutation spread, it started an arms race that made life more hazardous for male elk over all. The antlers of male elk can now span five feet or more. And despite their utility in battle, they often become a fatal handicap when predators pursue males into dense woods.”

In the case of the market, said Frank, individual reward structures undermine the invisible hand. “To make their funds more attractive to investors,” he wrote, “money managers create complex securities that impose serious, if often well-camouflaged, risks on society.  But when all managers take such steps, they are mutually offsetting. No one benefits, yet the risk of financial crises rises sharply.”

Similarly, U.S. Appeals Court Judge Richard Posner, in “A Failure of Capitalism,” pointed out that the crash of 2008 was brought about by individual actions that were actually quite rational: bankers and investors pursuing their own interests. Reckless behavior was quite consistent, he said, with being well informed about the risks involved in the context of an economic bubble, and so a great many money managers took those risks. The problem is that what was rational on the individual level was irrational on the collective level, thus leading to a systemic collapse.

We are thus led, quite naturally, from a consideration of optima vs. maxima to the question of individual vs. collective behavior. Which brings me to one of the twentieth century’s most intelligent frogs, the biologist Garrett Hardin, who posed the dilemma in a famous essay entitled “The Tragedy of the Commons” (1968).

 
Consider, said Hardin, the example of a pasture shared by local herders. They all understand that the commons belongs to no one in particular, but supports the well-being of all and is the responsibility of all. One day, however, one of the herders puts an additional animal out to graze, with the result that he increases his yield. As a result, the pasture is slightly degraded.
 
Meanwhile, other herders come to the same conclusion, and as each makes the rational decision to take advantage of the situation for personal gain, the net result is the overgrazing, and ultimately the destruction, of the common area. In a word, the system favors selfish individuals over those with greater foresight and restraint. Or as Hardin put it, “Freedom in a commons brings ruin to all.” Frogs, in a word, are not to be trusted.

How, then, can excess be curbed in a free democratic system?

 
For we can be sure that the intelligent frogs, who are really quite exceptional, are not going to be listened to, and certainly have no power to enforce their insights. True, there are certain countries– the Scandinavian nations come to mind– where for some reason the concentration of intelligent frogs is unusually high, resulting in decisions designed to protect the commons.
 
But on a world scale, this is not very typical. More typical, and (sad to say) a model for many other countries, is the United States, where proposed “changes” are in fact cosmetic, and where the reality is business as usual. In the context of 315 million highly addicted frogs, the voices of the smart ones– Bateson, Frank, Posner, Hardin, et al.– aren’t going to have much impact or, truth be told, even get heard.

Of course, authoritarian systems don’t have these problems, which is a good indicator of how things will probably develop. Under the name of “harmony,” for example, China regulates its citizens for what it perceives to be the common good. Hence the famous one-child policy, introduced in 1979, supposedly prevented more than 300 million births over the next twenty-nine years in a country that was threatened by its own population density. In the case of the United States, the imposition of rules and limits on individual behavior to protect the commons is not, at present, a realistic prospect; the population is simply not having it. But how much longer before this freedom of choice is regarded as an impossible luxury? 

 
In fact, no crystal ball is required to predict the future here. The tragedy of the commons– what Hardin called “the remorseless working of things”– is that a society such as that of the United States won’t undertake serious changes even when it is sitting on the edge of an abyss. It has to actually be in the abyss before it will entertain such changes; i.e., it has to be faced with no choice at all.  It seems unlikely now, but things are probably moving faster than we realize. In terms of population, energy, food, resources, water, social inequality, public health, and environmental degradation, a crunch of the type I am referring to may be much sooner than later.

In Shakespeare’s “Two Gentlemen of Verona,” the character Valentine is confronted by an outlaw, who asks him if he is content “To make a virtue of necessity/And live, as we do, in this wilderness?”  That may prove to be the only “choice” we have.  As Thomas Hobbes put it a few decades after Shakespeare, “Hell is truth seen too late.”

*These data are easily manipulated by the government to make things look better than they actually are.  For example, individuals collecting unemployment insurance for a few months are officially unemployed, but once that support dries up they are no longer among the statistics of the unemployed even though they are still out of work.
 
In addition, the millions of Americans who are underemployed, who work only a few hours per week, are included in the ranks of the employed. Between 2006 and 2009, 20% of American workers were laid off; 50 million live in real poverty, and many more in a category called “near poverty.” Joseph Stiglitz has a good discussion of this in “Freefall” (New York: W.W. Norton, 2010).
Morris Berman’s latest book is “Why America Failed.”


Source: http://coyoteprime-runningcauseicantfly.blogspot.com/2017/11/the-parable-of-frogs-hell-is-truth-seen.html


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    • allendaves

      123’s of true Christianity v popular & damnable heresies

      #1 “ANOTHER JESUS”:
      -“ONE” not triune: Mark 12:28…Which is the first commandment of all? 29. …Hear, O Israel; THE LORD OUR GOD IS ONE LORD: 30. And ………..this is the first commandment….. 31. And the second is….. IF YOU CAN’T GET THIS “FIRST OF ALL COMMANDMENTS” RIGHT, ALL THE REST OF YOUR “FAITH” AND PREACHING ON LOVE & SIN IS MOOT….. (NOTE: And yes, the specific Greek and Hebrew words used also and only define one person contrary to the ridiculous obfuscation attempts of some!?!)
      PART 4 & 5 HOW MANY GODS ARE THERE FOR THE ONE GOD TO TALK TO?? Who was Jesus praying to??!?…. The real question should be … How does having multiple different persons keep this one God/being/entity from praying to himself?! (The trinitarian “schizophrenic” “god-head”) The Trinitarians want to have their cake and eat it too as the saying goes. On the one hand they need to say they only worship one indivisible God being/ entity but on the other hand they feel the need for some reason to keep Jesus or God from praying and talking to himself by dividing him up into different persons!?! It never occurs to them that that since there is only one indivisible God to pray too and Jesus is that indivisible God come in the flesh that he would need to talk to himself as to show us how to live, suffer, pray and die for our/ flesh) benefit not his!?!….. So while Trinitarians are quick to complain that God was not talking to himself at Christ baptism or in Gen “let us” they ignore the logical demands of their own theology! If Jesus is the ONE GOD in flesh and the Father is the SAME ONE GOD in heaven then Trinitarianism demands THE ONE GOD is talking to HIMSELF! Claiming that God is multiple different persons as the reason for why God is not talking to himself (because God is three different “selfs”) only demonstrates that what they really worship is in fact not a ONE GOD who talks to himself but three different god “selfs”/ and they all talk to each other! When they speak about who God was talking and praying to, they are quick to say “the other person, NOT HIMSELF!” But if you ask them how many gods do they pray to then they will say “ONLY ONE”!?! They expect you to believe that those three different persons are THE ONE GOD-BEING” which is like calling three different cars “THE ONE VEHICLE” (text book examples of prov 26:12)

      -PART 5 Echad, Echad, my God, God is Echad!….:The Greek word pros in Jn 1:1 does not demand nor demonstrate multiple different persons because:

      1. The definitions (without forced conclusions stuffed in) are just as equally valid as reference to parts of the same person (modalisim) Your head and your right arm have close relationship to each other; can be facing, towards, relating to, moving to, in the direction of, to, unto, looking to; even at home with, a living union, in the presence of, a common ground, closeness They are still both distinct and different from each other and yet they are of both the same person. Ironically the scriptures use the very same terms to describe father and son.

      2. Ironically and most hypocritically, the trinitarians are trying to appeal to the anthropomorphisms (they claim this passage implies) to demonstrate different persons while at the same time denying the very anthropomorphisms that God himself specifically in scriptures uses to define the son and the son’s relationship to the father. Apparently only the literal anthropomorphisms that trintiarins “see’ exist while the one’s that God himself uses should not be taken too literal or too anthropomorphic or seriously. Is the face anthropomorphic and or literal face or just some metaphor? Either way the problem for trinitarians still exist and simply does not cease with linguistic distractions. There are many different types of faces; face of a clock; face of a mirror; face of one’s palm. Further, the face of one’s palm would be totally consistent with the anthropomorphism that God uses when discussing his own right arm as the son! So either way, a literal and or anthropomorphic face or a metaphorical face in close relationship only leaves the trinitarinas peddling an empty argument hoping no one notices the fact that this argument is nothing more then delusional smoke and mirrors for “the faithful” and for everyone else, well, just “never mind that man behind the curtain”.

      3. You cant appeal to your own desired and or preconceived conclusions as evidence that your methodology in arriving at your conclusions are valid. [ie the use of Jn 1:18 et al as proof that Jn1:1 supports different persons in Jn1:18 et al or visa versa ] How difficult can they make these simple things? The God in heaven is a he but cannot be known except by the he who is the same God in flesh! So why can’t they be the same he again? It should not be difficult to understand since:

      A. The same God who is in heaven is on earth and the difference need only be of circumstance which at least we know that much to be factually true [spirit only v spirit in human flesh] There is no further need or demand for different individual persons since all the different he’s are in fact the same HE!. Trying to claim that God is multiple different “He(s)” who make up the one being either leaves your God to be a “it” that consist of different he(s) or a“God being” who is a he while simultaneously consisting of different individual he(s) [Father-he; Son=he; Holy Spirit=he].

      B. If you find no difficulty in accepting that God is a he that consist of father son and holy spirit also referred to each as a different he and yet all the same he then what is the point to claiming different persons again? How is the multitude of hes who are all the same he show or demand different persons rather than different circumstances of the same person who is in fact “HE”?

      In any case, the trinitarian inconsistency and or incoherence will never be resolved by simply chalking it all up to “how great thou art” unless you willingly and blindly “drink the cool aid” calling it “faith”. True faith is in the words of God (including the specific anthropomorphism God himself uses) not in wild created imaginations of three different persons with different minds, locations and instructions for each other that is somehow not a pantheon of three gods who are only “one in terms of purpose not one god!….To deny the father is to deny the son because they are one and the same person that came in the flesh! Trinitarians confess & preach literally …”ANOTHER JESUS” 2 Cor 11:4

      -JOHN 14: 8-20 ….[Note Isaiah 9:6. For unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given: …: and his name shall be called Wonderful, Counseller, … the everlasting Father] ….The son, father/Holy Spirit are all the same person, NOT like two different persons working together even as “one flesh” ….The “oneness” between Christ and the father is not comparable to a man & his wife, for only a fool would say “When you have seen me you have seen my wife, how sayest thou then, Shew us your wife?” Notice they asked to see THE FATHER and the response was Jn 14:9 ..“HAVE I BEEN SO LONG time with you, and yet hast THOU NOT KNOW ME, Philip…..Now image some fool trying to claim that statement if you asked to see his wife!?!!? You want to see the FATHER but have I been with you but you don’t know me!?!?!
      Jn 14 continued….…………..17. Even THE SPIRIT OF TRUTH; (Jn 14:6 I AM the way, THE TRUTH,) whom the world cannot receive, .. for HE DEWLLETH WITH YOU, (present tense/standing next to them in the flesh) and SHALL BE IN YOU… (future tense “In them”) 18. I will not leave you comfortless: I WILL COME TO YOU (future tense “In them”) Jesus himself here makes the point that the same person who was the HOLY SPIRIT that would come was standing next to them but lets them know “I will come to you again to be Inside of you”

      -The whole point to Gal 3:20.a mediator is NOT A MEDIATOR OF ONE, (HEIS) but GOD IS ONE. (HEIS) again, point blank, identifies the number of persons of God! The “but” points out the contrast between multiple persons in a mediation party v the “one” of God. God is not like a mediation party with multiple different persons. …..”the express image of his person” ( the person of God; singular not plural) Any attempt to lay claim otherwise is willful ignorance and delusional nonsense

      -Like a thief in your house caught stealing your things insisting he was not there stealing “I CONFESS I am NOT stealing”. You just do not “properly understand” what he is doing/saying. Further, since you never had a “proper understanding” of what he is doing/saying you have no business accusing him since you do not even know what you are talking about in the first place. It is with and in your own ignorance that you base your “false accusations” & “ad homonym attacks” against him…… Ridiculous of course it is ……2Thess 2:11; Titus 1:16; 2Tim 3:5; TRINITARIANS CONFESS JESUS /THEY ARE NOT POLYTHEIST BUT ARE MONOTHEIST LIKE A LIAR & THIEF WHO “CONFESS” THEY DO NOT LIE OR STEAL The simple fact is that just because you confess or deny that you are in an adulterous relationship and denounce all forms of adultery has nothing to do with whether or not it is in fact adulterous! .. …A rose by any other name is still just a rose AND calling it a water lily does not change the definition of what a water Lilly or a rose is either!…

      -This should have given you a hint, harking back to Satan in The garden…God said you will die…Satan comes along and states no you will be more WISE……Today .God said He is one; but Satan’s children come along and say no three is more WISE and humble in the face of God’s grandeur only “a mystery” that can be understood “in faith”. God uses head and right arm to explain the distinctions between father and son.. However, the Trinitarian heretics say to the effect: “NO, that is just a figure of speech, or that is not what God really means. What God is really saying is that God is three different persons”. Fools, hypocrites and blind guides, God said he was One and by your traditions have taken the words of God and made them of no effect, refashioning God into the image of your vain imaginations!
      You can download the complete FREE book from
      https://www.scribd.com/doc/305367608/The-Trinity-Heresy
      OR
      https://www.academia.edu/23463667/THE_TRINITY_HERESY
      OR
      http://www.globethics.net/gtl/10920799

      #2 “ANOTHER GOSPEL”:
      -If you ask most people what the Good news or Gospel is they will probably tell you about the virgin birth or Christ death burial and resurrection. This would be rather humorous if it was not so sad considering that for the three and half years of Christ ministry he does not mention hardly ever. However, Christ does spend a lot of time preaching out of the OT scriptures. Now imagine given a report or manual to read and understand, that makes reference to and even quotes other source material and then ignoring that source material when it comes to defining the context and meanings of words in the report or manual you are trying to make sense of. If that seems dysfunctional that is because it is. This is, however, what most people are doing when it comes to understanding sound NT doctrine and or even what the Gospel message of Jesus was. The mystery of the gospel was not the death, burial and resurrection although it is part of it. In fact, death, burial and resurrection was the sign, the only sign, that Jesus gave to validate that the gospel message he was preaching all that time was true……and yet most deny it!?!?!

      -The “2nd coming”… “I come quickly” so “Hold fast till i come”… NOT …“in another 2000 years I might be coming soon any time now, so hold fast”!?! …those that deny the second coming of Christ in the war of AD70 (in their lifetime) are practicing a damnable heresy in denying the Lord that bought them ( 2Peter 2:1-2 ;2Tim 4:8/ you cant love an appearing you deny& the context is the 2nd coming not the first)… Mat 7:23..”I NEVER KNEW YOU” …..Mat 10:33. But whosoever shall deny me before men……..sound familiar?…. If I said I am coming to your house in this generation when these things happen but no one knows the day or hour what fool would think I might be coming in 2000 years latter!?!? ..2 Tim 4: 4. And they shall turn away their ears from the truth, and shall be TURNED UNTO FABLES. The “idea”/ doctrine that Jesus has not yet returned but “soon any day now soon” does not just make God out a liar; it is not just ridiculous but makes Christianity a mockery, A pathetic “ship of fools”!?!
      -The following example excerpt from Bertrand Russell: sometimes quoted by atheist et al and from his published work “Why I Am Not A Christian”
      Defects in Christ’s Teaching
      Having granted the excellence of these maxims, I come to certain points in which I do not believe that one can grant either the superlative wisdom or the superlative goodness of Christ as depicted in the Gospels; …. I am concerned with Christ as He appears in the Gospels, taking the Gospel narrative as it stands, and there one does find some things that do not seem to be very wise. For one thing, he certainly thought that His second coming would occur in clouds of glory before the death of all the people who were living at that time. There are a great many texts that prove that. He says, for instance, “Ye shall not have gone over the cities of Israel till the Son of Man be come.” Then he says, “There are some standing here which shall not taste death till the Son of Man comes into His kingdom”; and there are a lot of places where it is quite clear that He believed that His second coming would happen during the lifetime of many then living. That was the belief of His earlier followers, and it was the basis of a good deal of His moral teaching. When He said, “Take no thought for the morrow,” and things of that sort, it was very largely because He thought that the second coming was going to be very soon, and that all ordinary mundane affairs did not count. I have, as a matter of fact, known some Christians who did believe that the second coming was imminent. I knew a parson who frightened his congregation terribly by telling them that the second coming was very imminent indeed, but they were much consoled when they found that he was planting trees in his garden. The early Christians did really believe it, and they did abstain from such things as planting trees in their gardens, because they did accept from Christ the belief that the second coming was imminent. In that respect, clearly He was not so wise as some other people have been, and He was certainly not superlatively wise.
      https://www.scribd.com/doc/305366745/Revelation-the-First-Gospel-of-the-Kingdom
      OR
      http://www.globethics.net/gtl/5455069
      OR
      https://www.academia.edu/23464127/REVELATION_THE_FIRST_GOSPEL_OF_THE_KINGDOM
      Amazon/Barns & Nobel et al
      978-1-4907-0590-3 (SC ISBN)

      #3 GOD LOVES EVERYONE; Jesus Died for “you”…… Just “come as you are”
      Does God love you?….”Probably” NOT!….and NO Jesus did not die for everyone!?!……There is a sharp contrast between THREE groups : A. The predestined damned B. the “many” called C. The “Few” Chosen
      Predestination….its true..its all true… God does NOT love everyone:

      Prov 8: 17. I LOVE THEM THAT LOVE ME …………
      1John 5:3. For this is the love of God, that we keep his commandments:

      (1) “PREDESTINED DAMNED” who were NEVER written in the book of life ………..Rev 17: 8 WHOSE NAMES WERE NOT WRITTEN IN THE BOOK OF LIFE FROM THE FOUNDATION OF THE WORLD, …as contrasted …EPH 1: 4. According as he hath CHOSEN US in him BEFORE THE FOUNDATION OF THE WORLD

      (2) “MANY CALLED”= ONLY and ALL SAINTS (those who come to Christ) are written in the book of life … Philippians 4:3… ……Rev 21:27; (Only saints are Called and elect; Rom 1:6-7 et al) This is THE CHRUCH and ONLY these can have their names blotted out of the book of life ….….Heb 12:23 to the general assembly and CHURCH of the firstborn … WHICH ………are WRITTEN in heaven,

      (3) THE FEW CHOSEN: Those saints who were alive in group #2 who are now physically dead. They died “faithful” these are the FEW that were chosen faithful…….Rev 3:5. ……; and I
      will not BLOT OUT HIS NAME OUT OF THE BOOK OF LIFE, (Ps 69:28) …. These are the FEW that are CHOSEN and now that they have died and are saved then “once saved THEY CAN NEVER BE LOST”

      PS: “The world” that God so loved was not the Roman world nor the world of the Maya nor the world you imagined in your head that God specifically told them NOT TO LOVE!?!
      https://www.scribd.com/doc/306868420/Most-True-Christians-Go-to-Hell
      OR
      http://www.globethics.net/gtl/10920800
      OR
      https://www.academia.edu/25217564/Most_True_Christains_Go_to_Hell

      THE THIEF-BAPTISM-GRACE& THE NAME-LORD & LT

      “whosoever shall call on THE NAME OF THE LORD shall be saved”
      ………So WHAT “NAME” did you “CALL UPON”?……
      Rev 19:13. .. and HIS NAME IS called THE WORD OF GOD
      Ps 138:2. praise THY NAME … for thou hast magnified THY WORD ABOVE ALL THY NAME -
      NOTE: God placed His “THE WORD” ABOVE all of God’s various NAMEs – and Jesus NAME IS called “THE WORD” no other name saves. The MOST important name we should KNOW and CALL UPON is “THE WORD”; Not letters that spell “word” but the sayings/ doctrine/commands. It does NOT say “thy word is given a name above other names because here THY WORD is identified as the name that is placed above all other names.
      Isaiah 52:1. . 6. Therefore MY PEOPLE SHALL KNOW MY NAME: ..What NAME do you “KNOW”.?
      1Jn 2:3. And HEREBY WE DO KNOW that we KNOW HIM, if we KEEP HIS COMMANDMENTS./ Titus 1: 16. They profess that THEY KNOW God; but IN WORKS THEY DENY him…
      “AT the name OF JESUS”…..Jesus has a name that belongs to Jesus…just like the name OF GOD means a name that belongs to GOD but it is ridiculous to suggest that the letters G-O-D is that name…likewise the name OF JESUS is NOT the letters J-E-S-U-S. Why would anyone think that you could pronounce THE HIGHEST NAME OF GOD letter by letter…. (ie Judges 13:18; 2Cor 12:4 but God’s name is not as great and or “unspeakable )
      Rev 3:8 kept MY WORD, and hast not DENIED MY NAME; …
      .Jn 17:6. I have MANIFESTED THY NAME And they have KEPT THY WORD.;
      THE WORD is THE NAME above every name that saves us 1Pt 3:21 The ONE baptism(Eph 4:5) is into THE WORD ( which is also baptism in the Holy spirit Jn 6:63the words that I speak unto you, they are spirit ) ..ALL the sayings doctrines and commands….what did THE WORD that became flesh command? (Mat 28:19)…..what did THE WORD exemplify? (Mat 3:15/ Jn 4:1)………among other things…..YES .water baptism is just as essential and necessary for much a part of salvation (1Pt 3:21) as is keeping one self away from works of the flesh (Gal 5:21)….In fact obedience to the command of water baptism is specifically identified as the act of calling on the name of the Lord (Col 2:12 “……though the operation[work] of God” CAN ANY MAN BE SAVED WITHOUT GOD WORKING ON HIM?) …..THE WORD OF GOD is the name of God that men call upon OR…OR ..they DENY with their disobedience
      The scriptures tell us almost nothing about the thief’s life. However, the scriptures tell us a great deal about Christ life……Jesus had been around for 3.5 years before the cross and was Baptizing (Jn 4:1-2 in fact He instructed his disciples to do so and did many more then John the Baptist ever did) …..Those who try to appeal to the thief on the cross assume the thief had never heard of Jesus preaching and had never ever been baptized….The burden of Proof is on those who say baptism is not essential! ………..You can’t claim a logically valid “non-essentiality” doctrinal argument on ANYTHING based on what the scriptures do not say and in spite of the things it clearly does state to the opposite effect!…That is like looking at the constitutional law and then basing a argument against a constitutional principle in law based on the fact that history did not record for us what some unknown cattle thief did or did not do a 150 years ago?!?! What??..Who cares?? We know what the constitution did say 150 years ago. I don’t know of any Law school that bases its teaching on constitutional law based on what history does not tell us about unknown cattle thieves!?! ..Jesus command, preached & practiced Baptism so did the apostles ….To build one’s theology on the fact that the scriptures do not tell us ANY detail(s) of the thief’s life before the cross (we know almost absolutely nothing about the thief!!) it is quite foolish and willfully ignorant of what the scriptures do say about baptism…….so those who try to use the thief are in effect building their house on the sand of what scriptures do not say about a thief in spite of what the scriptures do specifically tell us about baptism!?!… “Their damnation is just” comes to mind…
      https://www.scribd.com/document/326686356/Thief-Cross-3D OR https://www.academia.edu/23846490/Thief_and_Cross_3D

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