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 Messianics is the study of Jesus as The Word. Messianics seeks to understand how we are to think and act by seeking to understand the teachings of Scripture. To think as God thinks is to think morally, coherently and logically. When we are immoral, we do not think as God thinks. It is God who created reality. This includes thought or what constitutes logical thought. To think analytically is to think according to how reality was created. To not think as God directs is to lose contact with reality. The Mind of God is logical, not because God is encumbered with logic but because God created reality as logic. He did this so we could be logical. It is by thinking coherently and analytically that we understand His Creation. 

God created reality logically, to give mankind a path to Him. God is not limited by logic. God limited us through the logic of His Creation, so we could be guided by Him and to Him by His Creation. The Creation is not God, reality is not God, logic is not God, morality is not God. Mankind was given these things so that we might know His thought through His Creation.

We cannot understand God nor fully know God. Logic gives us insight into the Mind of God but on a human scale. Through logic and reason, we can know what God has given us to know. The Mind of God is the logic or analytical truth God used in His Creation to make His Creation a reflection of who He is vis a vis his Creation according to our level of understanding. If one adheres to logic, one arrives at the Mind of God. If we think logically, we arrive at the paradigm that reflects the thinking of God. Logic is not the essence of God; it is the information God provides man. We understand reality as the Truth written in our hearts, so that no one is ignorant, and we are without excuse. 

The power of the market is that it forces us to think logically. Business requires us to put a value on our time. These values are arbitrary but require us to think in logical terms. If we put a value on our time, it is not difficult to see an hour spent in non-productive activity, wastes time in a way that can be measured against what could have been done. 

Logic leads to entrepreneurism. Conservatives are conservative because we are guided by economics. Liberals prefer politics. Christians reject the politics of the state. 

The innovations of the West, with a focus on capitalism and empirical science and logical thought all help us to understand God better.

No doubt you have your own idea what the problem is, we face. For Messianics the problem is liberalism. We have all heard countless people explain what they think constitutes the central issue. Everyone has their own idea as to the source of human misery.

Messianics postulates the problem of liberalism has two faces. The first issue is that liberals want freedom but do not have the means to achieve it. The second problem derived from the first is that unable to achieve freedom using their own abilities, they are driven to exploit others for their agenda.

The child growing up will find physical reality obvious. Nothing is more real for a child than physical reality. Over time many children will seek to avoid reality and se it as the source of their pain. The most serious liberals become drug addicts, some become insane. All attempt to transfer the cost of reality onto others. This is why liberals are always socialists.

There is a concerted and protracted attack on faith. The enemy rationalizes the attack as a rejection of belief in things with no evidence. In other words, the enemy tell us faith is hopeless. There is nothing which is worthy of faith. Their attacks imply apathy is the proper emotional response to reality. 

Faith is trust. Our detractors tell us trust is based on an empty hope. If physical things are all that exist, then faith in non-material things would not make sense. Of course, this rationalization of atheists is only true given their reality. If the atheist reality is true then the proper response would be apathy. This argument is how they convince the weak and vulnerable. Everything they say is totally true only if one is a liberal. There is nothing to have faith in and nothing which atheists ought to trust if their world view is true. They do not tell their victims this. The qualification is never alluded to. 

If faith is abandoned and trust expunged, what do we have left? Atheists argue that without faith we have knowing. This condition sounds oddly like the condition of a computer or robot. Is the object of Satan to make us fleshy robots? We ought to look more closely at the implications of the world view of atheists. If we know but have no faith, then knowledge itself is uncertain. If I know the sun will come up tomorrow without any doubt or qualification, I have absolute faith. But what could this faith qua knowledge be based on? Not observation, not experience. No number of sunrises guarantees one more.

Faith only exists to the degree there is absolute certainty. Granted, observation will not produce certainty but the knowledge it does produce is provisional not absolute. 

There is only one source of certainty and that is logic. If logic told me the sun must rise tomorrow, then I would have absolute knowledge about this event. I would have faith. I would not be apathetic about the future, at least not so far as the behaviour of the sun was concerned.

Atheists tell us faith is not warranted. They claim to have knowledge. How do we have knowledge of other people? When it comes to the motives and intentions of others, knowledge is not possible. There is no other quality we can have regards the motivations of others but trust or its absence.

There is then another aspect to the teachings of atheists we have not explored. We know it is never a good idea to trust others completely. It is however not possible to mistrust others totally and still have a working relationship with them. 

We can have reasonable trust in physical events. We are more certain the sun will rise than we will get the benefits we worked so hard to obtain, from the one who promised them.

People come with qualifications and warnings, but technology is reliable. One gets back what one expected to obtain on account of the structure of the technology used. So, the enemy is telling us that faith in other beings is foolhardy. We are being told not to trust anyone. Trust that which is composed of matter not that has the substance of the Creator.

The conclusion is that the being who created us is deceitful whereas physical matter is governed by laws that can be relied on with confidence.

This even extends to proofs of God. According to the thinking of atheists the physical world is the only reliable meta-truth. Therefore, if God is to have relevance He has to be validated by reality. They do not understand how absurd their thinking is. However, their commitment to the absolute trustworthiness of physical existence leaves them with nothing more than a reliance on synthetic truths. A disastrous situation to be put in but they are oblivious to the weakness of their position. How can they claim they reject faith when they have no path left to absolute knowledge? The world view of atheists is predicated on an absence of absolutes particularly absolute truths. Is anything more contrary or contradictory as claiming absolute knowledge about a reality that can only produce contingent facts and increased probabilities? 

How can we prove anything beyond reasonable doubt using synthetic statements? This goes double for proofs of God. How do we prove the existence of an absolute using qualified positions? Virtually all of the knowable truths or facts the atheists claim to possess are dependent on a specific perspective. If we lived in certain locations in space, we would not experience gravity, days would not exist or be totally different. There is no guarantee the laws of physics are necessarily universal in all times and places and positions. Even if the physical laws we rely on are valid they still represent only a certain way of understanding things.

The naïve realism of atheists is in fact only as valid as their level of naivety. This course intends to look at the naïve realism of atheists from a realistic perspective. What is realistic is what has no inconsistencies. In the Messianic framework or way of thinking, a realistic theory is one that assume reality is all of one part. Inconsistencies and self-refuting arguments are fallacious by definition. If we can discern even one self-refuting position in a way of thinking, that way of thinking must be discarded.

Thus, the idea that reality is as we observe it or that truth can be extracted from an observation of what we think is real, is inherently flawed. We will discover the only feasible and valid basis for truth is logic. We cannot observe truth and we cannot observe what is real. Our observations are according to the understanding of secularists, are composed of electrical impulses. Messianic Realists believe reality is composed of the ideas that communicate it. The more bizarre and irrational the idea the less realistic it is. Our mission is not just to understand reality, we desire to understand it in such a way that we can make use of it. We desire to learn how to think realistically.

Reality is that which makes logical sense. Reality is composed of ideas that substantiate each other. There is logically and empirically not method by which physical reality can be verified or substantiated. We must and do strive for confirmation of our assumptions through circular reasoning. There is no other path to verification that is absolute. Every other option is problematical because it is partial and open to dispute. Logical methods ensure our ideas are compatible and form a single coherent framework. It is our contention that a coherent position has value. Indeed, a coherent reality is all we have. No other option, including the empirical, synthetic truth option, can be substantiated without an element of subjectivity. 

All value can be given an economic number measured in what is called a currency. Truth is in this specific sense, a viable business. Truth is ultimately reflected in a prosperous economy. So messianic realists are seekers after business opportunities.

If empiricists establish the validity of their truth by repeated testing Messianic Realists establish truth by its ability to produce economic value.

Empiricism claims truth is objective. That is an analytical claim. It is not backed up or verified empirically. Objectivity makes verification of objectivity impossible. This is absurd.  How can we subscribe to ideas that invalidate themselves? The really strange fact is that the more naïve one is the more reality appears to exist. If we are children, we never doubt things are as real as they seem. We may see a stick bend when put in water and see lights when hit on the head, but these can easily passed off as anomalies. But the more educated we become the more we discover this reality is not what it seems. What looks solid is empty space and what is through to be a thing is just a force without any source.

The question then becomes one of what do we have but faith? When we are told all there is, is a reality that is as ephemeral as mist and as perceptible as an invisible force what is this faith based on? At what point does this naïve realism vanish. If we still believe invisible force fields impacting on other forces creates everything we see then where is objectivity and what is it really based on? Is there anything but faith? It seems not.

The Pathways War is the secular worlds attack on The Way of Christ, a way that leads to the destruction of the state. There is a right way and a wrong way to live. There are two paths. One path leads to destruction and the other to eternal life. We cannot walk both paths at once.

The Way of Christ is the path of Christ. As Christians we pick up our cross and follow him. Our cross is our purpose or our mission. Our mission defines us. Missions are an expression of our faith. Without faith there are no missions and with missions comes faith. The two are inseparable. We cannot have missions without faith and with faith missions become unavoidable. Missions is how a Christian does works of faith. It is our mission that defines our walk with Christ.

Faith can be measured by the impact we have through our mission. The difference between an effective mission and a failed mission is the faith with which they are done.

Faith is the battleground on which The Holy War is fought. Missions are the engagements. Institutions must be transformed into missions if faith is to prevail.

A profit orientated institution operates without faith. Hierarchies of power exist to control subjects because no one is trusted, there is no faith. Without faith in each other how can it be claimed Christians have faith in God? Without faith in the people of God we cannot claim to have faith in the one we serve.

If we lack faith in our fellow man, how can we even claim to serve the one who died to save us from the sin of fear and distrust?

The Pathways War is a war for a way that is lived through faith and missions. It is a war against a way of life governed by the state. The vehicle used to transform the state is the mission. Missions turn the state into a mission and the institutions of the state into the way of faith.

Messianics specializes in teaching The Way of Christ to those who would separate from the state. Our works of faith are performed as a mission to help those on the right to live in faith.  

Truth comes in three flavors. Logical thought is divided into three component parts or departments: politics, economics and religion. One area of reality as logic cannot be reformed or divorced from the others. Another way of looking at this is to realize if reality is logical then developing our understanding in one area will impact how we think about things elsewhere. This is the reason why reform movements have failed, and progress has always come in fits and starts. Dreamers fantasize in compartments when everything is connected.

More importantly, our reforms cannot be based on pathos or opinion. There has to be validation. Man is not able to be objective. We must be held accountable by our peers. This is the power of the church if and when properly established. 

Economics is about exchanges. For a transaction to take place a unit of account or some form of determining value in a quantifiable and recordable way, has to exist. That is, the transaction has to be conceptualized in a symbolic way so it can be recorded. There are epistemological and metaphysical reasons for this which will be explained in the course.

Politics is about organization. Mostly we think of politics as relating to government, but it covers the administrative structure of all our social relations. Liberal politics is based on two propositions: might makes right and the end justifies the means. These are intrinsic to the liberal conception of reality. Once you understand this you will understand why liberal social policy is always socially destructive.

Religion is about our principles and values. It is of necessary about law and regulation though this is often put into the political arena. Politicians make laws but the laws they make reflect their religion. Indeed, without a belief system laws would not make much sense. For liberals’ law is based on opinion, that is, the law of liberals is opinion codified into legal statutes. But the root of all liberal law is emotion. This is why liberal law is always ad hoc, piece meal and divisive.

This being said, there are two realities or two conceptions of truth. These two realities are based on two axioms. In the first case or reality there exists the axiom, God Exists. This conception of reality views truth as absolute. If God exists, He is the highest and most perfect conception. To discover truth we must discover God and to understand reality we must understand how God thinks as the author of this reality. Seeking truth is an exercise in analytical reasoning. The axiom, God Exists could be interpreted to mean, Truth Exists. In this reality truth is an absolute. Analytical truth is logical truth. In this scheme of things reality is logical, it is composed of information transmitted as a body of knowledge to another sentient being. The purpose of man is to understand the truth, to unravel the implications and nuances of all the information out of which reality is composed. Our purpose as sentient beings is to figure out how all the pieces of information fit together.

If we wish to assemble all truth into a coherent whole so that reality can be understood we need to have as the foundational truth, God Exists. 

Christians claim or understand that God is a living spirit. What does this mean precisely? We cannot deny this assertion is true because we cannot define God in a way that would make the claim, God is living spirit inapplicable or nonsensical. But how do we define God as a living spirit in a way that it defines only God? We attempt to make God and living spirit synonyms without knowing what either is apart from the consilience of one with the other.

Is there a dead spirit? What is spirit? The name only makes sense when contrasted to flesh. We are not flesh and blood but spirit. Most people think this means we are flesh and blood, but something called a spirit also exists in us. This type of thinking not only confounded Descartes and turned him into a dualist, it gave atheists the ammunition they needed to shoot down every statement and claim relating to God, which they dismiss with the single word, supernatural.

If we are flesh and blood, the spirit turns into an untidy and incompatible add-on. 

Few Christians react to atheists claim the spirit and God are both supernatural elements. For the most part Christians and atheists are in tacit agreement. If we are not just our bodies then surely God is a living spirit and we are spirit also as well as being flesh and blood. 

The Bible references flesh and blood in four places, the most memorable is when Jesus tells us we fight not flesh and blood but principalities and powers. This is generally assumed to mean we fight ideas or offices not individuals. It does not suggest flesh and blood creatures do not exist.

Jesus uses this same expression when he tells Peter it is upon this rock he will build his church. Protestants agree this rock is Jesus though Catholics have a different opinion. However, Jesus does say: for flesh and blood hath not revealed it unto thee, but my Father which is in heaven. And I say also unto thee, That thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church;

It is plain that God reveals Jesus is the Savior. This not only means God is the source of Peter’s insight but that the physical body of Peter was not the source of this information. We could understand Jesus to be saying that this reality of the non-corporeal self is what the church is built on. Or to make the situation clearer. Man is not flesh and blood and it is not flesh and blood that builds the church.To put it another way, it is upon the truth that flesh and blood cannot reveal the truth of Jesus that serves as the foundation for the church. It is not the flesh and blood of Peter but the spirit both as God and as the recipient of the divine wisdom upon which the church is built.

In 1 Cor. 15:50 This situation is accentuated when we are told that flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom; corruption cannot inherit incorruption. Does this mean we must die to be saved; does it mean we have to get rid of this mortal coil to be saved? The explanation is clearly flawed. People are taken up into heaven without dying, both in the past and in the future. Are we not heirs to his kingdom upon repentance and baptism?

And in Gal. 1:14 Paul tells us he did not confer with flesh and blood. 

It does not take much imagination to view the flesh as corruption and the sprit as incorruption with a translation taking place at death. However, despite this being suggested in the versus following the passage in 1 Cor. We are clearly told we will not all sleep, but we will all be changed and further down, we are told that the sting of death is sin and the strength of sin is the law.

Clearly the flesh is not transformed into spirit nor does it seem we lose the fleshy carcass to reveal a hidden spirit body. The body is not a spirit carrier. You are not as Jesus, 100% man and God.

Is the translation the bible talks about mental or paradigmatic or a physical alternation? Is death an shift in the reality one is in but achieved through consciousness transformation? Is the spirit a different life, a different conceptualization? It seems to fit the narrative better if we see the spirit not so much as a thing, but as a life that is not the life of the flesh. Imagine if you will two perspectives or ways of seeing things. Both are available to us and it is up to us to decide which way to interpret our observation. Perhaps we can liken this to two political viewpoints. Perhaps we identify more with one that the other. Perhaps we are more neutral. In this view of things picking one way retains the two paths. Choosing the other path eliminates the other option forever. One side cannot beat the other but the other side can beat the first.

But the life of the flesh is not flesh being a life. The body is not independent of the spirit. The body is a way of thinking about things as the spirit is a different way. The body has as a perspective the politics and ideas of liberalism. The ideas of liberalism have infected all of us, but it cannot eliminate the Christian world view, however. It can only weaken its influence.

The idea of body and spirit manifesting two realities would be in keeping with the Biblical view of two realities, the life of the sheep and the life of the goats. The life of the spirit is a life that does not think as flesh and blood thinks. This is more than simply thinking one has spirit or that upon death one will be a spirit. The spirit is a rejection of materialism in its entirety. 

When we live in the spirit, we live in a reality that does not share anything with liberalism. To live in the spirit is to live in reality, the reality of God, the reality that is logical and to that degree, practical.

God is a God of the living, not the dead. We who are dead in sin are dead in the flesh because it is the flesh that represents both death and sin. But it is not the body but those who conceive of themselves as flesh that is dead.

When we are dead in the flesh the ideas of liberalism have been rejected. When we sin we inhabit the flesh and are slaves to its passions.  To live in the flesh is to live outside of the reality God provides. When we reject God we see Him as supernatural and the flesh as real.

God is a living god because he is not a God of the flesh. That is, He is a God of Spirit. Life is reason and logic and conceptualizations. Matter is dead because it is not inhabited by meaning.

Rom. 12:1 I beseech you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, that ye present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable unto God, which is your reasonable service. 2 And be not conformed to this world: but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind, that ye may prove what is that good, and acceptable, and perfect, will of God. 3 For I say, through the grace given unto me, to every man that is among you, not to think of himself more highly than he ought to think; but to think soberly, according as God hath dealt to every man the measure of faith. 4 For as we have many members in one body, and all members have not the same office: 5 So we, being many, are one body in Christ, and every one members one of another.

Works do not save because works are a thing of the body. God wants mercy, not sacrifice. He wants us to serve him as spirit, not as bodies.

God has written the truth in our hearts. This is the seat of the spirit. We do not live through the law but through the spirit. The law belongs to the flesh but love to the spirit.

2 Cor. 3:2 Ye are our epistle written in our hearts, known and read of all men: 3 Forasmuch as ye are manifestly declared to be the epistle of Christ ministered by us, written not with ink, but with the Spirit of the living God; not in tables of stone, but in fleshy tables of the heart.

There is then two ways of living and understanding. The way of the flesh sees reality as physical, governed by law. In this reality spirit does not exist or if it exists is something ephemeral and other worldly. Atheists use the term supernatural to explain spirit. However, it is spirit or our concepts and understanding, that creates what we view as the physical world.

Spirit does not belong to the world of flesh and law. There is another reality composed of Truth. This truth is written on our hearts for all to read. This strongly suggests the truth is logical as it is available to all. Truth is not dependent on syntax, grammar, or culture. 

When God breathes life into the flesh he is making it real, without the breathe of life flesh is dead. Spirit is meaning. Meaning is life. Without meaning there is no life. 

If a person thinks realistically that is logically, they will arrive at a workable solution to their problem. This is predicated on rationality being logical. If reality is not logical then reason has no function. There cannot be reason or even sentience in a random universe. This is predicated on the fact that there can be no universe that is not logical.

These are not metaphysical claims. These truths are based on the structure of our thinking. Our minds cannot conceive of a nonlogical existence. An existence that had no logical foundation would be self-refuting.

Existence is logical, there is no other foundation for existence.

Obviously, people are thinking in other than realistic ways. By this is meant that they do not reflect what is real with their thinking. Most people who think unrealistically will assume they are a little off course, their thinking may have added a one where they ought not to have, or perhaps it was that they did not carry the one when this was required. In any case no one thinks they are irrational or that their thinking is substantially off grid.

If they think like this they cannot be Christians. The bible makes it very clear. If a person rejects God they are technically insane, regardless of how they see reality. 

1 Cor. 1:17-21 For Christ sent me not to baptize, but to preach the gospel:

 not with wisdom of words, lest the cross of Christ should be

 made of none effect. 18 For the preaching of the cross is to them that perish foolishness; but unto us which are saved it is the power of God. For it is written, I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, and

 will bring to nothing the understanding of the prudent. Where is the wise? where is the scribe? where is the disputer of this world? hath not God made foolish the wisdom of this world? For after that in the wisdom of God the world by wisdom knew not God, it pleased God by the foolishness of preaching to save them that believe.

Over and over again the Bible makes it clear there are two camps each incompatible with the other. If God is Truth and those who disbelieve must form a different reality, what can this other reality be but unreal, or in other words a collective delusion, a dream?

These facts put atheists in a bad situation. They cannot argue there is no truth even while condemned by their reality to assume truth is relative. They cannot assert Christians are logically in error nor claim to be heirs to an absolute and incontrovertible truth, their truth being found through synthetic statements.

Yet because Christians do claim these things the two camps are intrinsically and fundamentally at odds with each other. There is no resolving this from an atheist perspective.

Atheists can ridicule and mock Christians but they cannot claim to have a  monopoly on truth. They are then to a large degree victims of their own world view. To develop this situation a bit further, remember atheists are relativists. Their objectivity is not a true objectivity. It is a statement that to know the truth ones statements must be validated by comparison to a source external to man; what atheists call the real world.

By their own terms truth must be defined by how close the artificial approaches the actual, the correlation can never be 100% because that would mean the copy was the original.

No comes the interesting part because if truth is contingent then despite the perceived flaws of Christianity it still has some minor relevance to the atheist world view. In short the atheist view of reality is of a single dimension with some ideas being more true than others but all ideas having their place on the single continuum that is Truth.

Atheists must reject the Christian view of two distinct, separate realities. They cannot admit that the war of which they are the aggressor, exists. Thus it is even as they revile and oppress they claim fealty and devotion. 

The right on the other hand must see this division, howsoever liberal they may be, as complete or risk invalidating all the stand for. We on the right to be consistent, are Christians and we subscribe to a Scripture that relentlessly drives home the idea of two warring camps at unceasing war with each other. No number of platitudes and calls for unity can hide the incontrovertible truth that the two sides are historically and philosophically at opposite sides of a great and unbridgeable gulf.

We are left with an odd situation in which one side sees unrelenting warfare and a division based on two distinct views of what truth is, faced by an opponent who because of the way they see truth believes the division is to some degree artificial and can be bridged, the two forces reconciled and the differences overcome.

However, the olive branch is a demand for capitulation. Liberals cannot see this. That is, part of the strategy for defeating the righteous is to push the agenda of the left, their reconciliation strategy.

What the left calls for is a reconciliation of the two sides. The left will cease to push atheism if the right stops talking about Jesus. The left will permit Christians to live as they choose so long as they no longer try and impose this life onto anyone else. 

However, the center of Christianity is the Great Commission. Without this there is no Christianity. 

Which brings us back to the topic of this section. Realistic Thinking is verifiable. It contains a quantifiable component. To be realistic is to be accountable and it makes us accountable for the costs we create. If we do not understand the costs we are producing we are not being realistic. A life without costs is a Dream State. Only in our fantasies do we get by without having to pay the costs of what we do or choose.

Christianity is all about being Realistic because it is all about being accountable. Christianity is the most realistic and practical practice on earth. This is because God created reality, it is God that determined how things work and by implication, what will not work. Faith is practical because only in faith can we arrive at what is real.