Nomad's Asking

By Tristam Joseph

A wandering wayfarer in creation’s wasteland, seeking answers, encounters diversity’s proponents commenting with their opinions on where humans came from, why they are here, and what happens to them after death. God has sent many prophets with messages to answer people’s questions, but they are willfully misunderstood as incompatible with human ways for living and conceals things they want to know. Each proponent claims to be a protagonist privileged to possess the only reliable source of truth, never admitting all truth changes, being subject to erosion by time. What can a nomad in the wilderness hope to be lasting?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Tristam Joseph
• Release date: Sep 11, 2019
• ISBN: 9780961927226

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Nomad’s Asking

Tristam Joseph

Smashwords Edition

Text Copyright 2019

All Rights Reserved

ISBN 978-0-9619272-2-6

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Nomad’s Asking

Nomad: Created to lack essential understanding with questions never answered, bearing innate callings to search out my Creator, I am a species scattered throughout this wasteland, searching to discover a Supreme Being, exercising my reason as needed if One never appears.

Minerva: Your Creator limits reason’s ability to develop wisdom, sending you more than is needed, reaching out with His essential message for making your existence complete, selecting humans to be prophets for its delivery, assuring the Creator-God transcends His cosmos to safe-guard its goodness and beauty bearing His love. God’s prophets direct people to consider only pure thoughts and virtuous deeds for expounding His commands, acknowledging His power and righteousness, and witnessing to the goodness of His Words responsible for developing Creation’s humans from innocent beasts He breathed souls into. God’s Words existed before the cosmos, its heaven and earth, before everything’s beginnings. His commands are greater than any other, beyond all ours developed as holy, superior to any conceived by our learning. Prophets teach us to gain and live by God’s truth, knowledge to understand His Creation’s goodness and appreciate its beauty.

Anónima: God assigns me to send His messages through prophets He chooses. I obey Him, having done His Will, but no messengers have proven successful in seeing His Will be done, with no one accepting to exist by mandates for joy in a Creation filled with His love, beauty and goodness. Humans instead chose to life by truths they create.

Muggins: I don’t need some prophet to know myself, defining what I should be, ordering me to deny what my will chooses to do. Prophets come and go, each with their own convictions, thinking they are scholars equipped to create their own wisdom, philosophers claiming sagacity invented by themselves.

Pyrrho: Why are we here if prophets tell us to abstain from things of the world, life as humans have developed for their existence, practices our makeup commits us to follow? Is it some punishment our Creator destines us to suffer?

Anónima: Respecting God’s pleasure and wisdom that reflect His goodness incorporated in Creation, humans cannot speculate He destines them for wrath, cursing them for thoughts and deeds they will and deliver.

Minerva: Prophets are not sent to deny the world. God sends them to show us how to accept our existence here, teaching us to pray for understanding how He defines each one of us and His will for us.

Muggins: Does this safe-guarding God redeem His people as well, knowing He trashes their existence with death? Can anyone trust His prophets making claims to be the Savior, seeing our destruction conflicts with proclamations of His goodness?

Minerva: He treats everyone the same, coming to all humans with messages they can understand, differing only in dialects they comprehend.

Schaman: God should create humans to speak with a single language, and maybe He did until He forced a scrambling of their tongues, isolating them into a diversity precluding bonds of unity and cooperation. Dispersed humans, secluded in islands of their own, create unique doctrines and dogmas, committing all to be litigious, and they appoint priests and legal experts to examine every case of seditious violation and justify punishments to satisfy noncompliance, declaring justice a human right authorized by reason.

Pyrrho: Litigious people never live without conflict, developing decrees to attack others, tolerating no one and nothing, exercising reason to distrust everything, giving humans a formula for turmoil, instigating discord with its use.

Muggins: Any God transcending Creation but only through messengers He chooses, selects humans He authorizes and trusts to be effective, thinking they will comprehend and obey His Words. To be effective He should appear in person.

Minerva: If people can't recognize God’s messages by listening to what’s inherently intuitive in their soul, He sends His Word in flesh, appearing in substance as proxies called prophets. God never stops sending oracles, knowing they will be challenged by learned scholars, reasoning theology must be applied for peoples’ understanding, using doctrines conceived from messages He sent previously, imbedded in religions scribes and scholars engender, synthesizing faith and reason, involving human intellectual participation, acting as God invites everyone to maintain an indissoluble connection with their transcendent Supreme Being.

Muggins: You acknowledge His Word incarnated must come in many dialects, transformed to each audience’s liking.

Pyrrho: Their likings change so often that God must revise His messages for acceptance by human’s fickle thoughts and reason.

Minerva: Time doesn’t nourish growth and progress for people’s mindful endeavors and destroys memories of prophets delivering God's message, its good intentions being forgotten, its truth being lost. Essential features reported by each new prophet include piety with reverence for Creation’s goodness, renunciation of all distortion for God’s truth, acceptance of harmony He dictates for human existence, and repudiation of trust in holy wars, combat believed to please God's will with scholarly development of religious doctrines and dogmas to satisfy His pleasure.

Muggins: Time becomes my savior, wiping away memories, allowing me to continue a chase for happiness and ignore divine truths barring my way.

Minerva: God directs prophets’ appearances, confronting us with His truths, arousing provisions He deposits in our souls before any can be sensed and manipulated by reason, and His messages continue coming until people concede their need to believe in God and acknowledge importance for doing what He asks them to do.

Azusa: New prophets arrive, authorized to deliver God's message and cleanse people's perceptions, modifying their settled superstitions by confronting them with His epistles, preserving them as verities claimed to be more than footnotes, but they eventually become dogmas tarnishing all His truths. Prophets teach us to gain and live by wisdom, providing knowledge to understand God's goodness with openness to appreciate Creation’s beauty, precluding any need to sacrifice by practicing destruction of His Creation by following human ignorance’s inclination to kill and destroy.

Muggins: Can reason explain how God’s followers believe He is in control, justifying claims He makes us do it, the bad with the good?

Pyrrho: People follow many gods of wisdom honoring both war and peace, human achievements in arts and music, efforts to study Creation’s mysteries, means for commerce to provide their wants and desires beyond God’s provisions promised for human needs, gods showing them how to become themselves, to disciple themselves and develop their own wisdom, deferring to no one else’s, all others being superstition, the bane of ignorance. These gods include idols promoting both the bad and the good.

Muggins: I need no prophet’s guidance to change my ways, for redefining me to better myself, for advising me on all I must do. Prophets come and go, each with their own convictions, with some thinking they are more than philosophers creating their own wisdom or receiving it from some god or goddess.

Pyrrho: Never seek permission to redefine yourself, to free oneself from any authority; seize essential desires and wants to make life worthwhile. Praying to God or any deity forces people to accept themselves, conscripted by their Maker’s standards to suffer wretched insignificance.

Minerva: Life without desire or wants is never an existence of nothingness forcing a person to be redefined. Beings brought into existence by God lack nothing, are complete, have no needs and should be conscious of no wants. If non-being is nothingness for humans forgetting they are created by God who provides all their needs and defines who they are, they will live with nothingness, a void never supporting His plans for them. We need reminders to never forget His message.

Azusa: Prophets advise people to consider only pure thoughts and virtuous deeds, to hear and obey God's commands, to acknowledge His power and righteousness by witnessing to His Word’s goodness responsible for creating humans by breathing souls into beasts. His Words with Him before the heavens began, before the world and all its life, voicing commands greater than any other, superior to all decrees, we must honor, surpassing any we conceive by reason.

Muggins: Obedience to your God’s commands could never change our life’s tragedies, sprinkled with joy for His amusement in watching His puppets search for happiness.

Schaman: Why are we here as mortals, directed by a Supreme Being’s prophets telling us to abstain from things of the world, with life condemning us to suffer from practices our inherent makeup commits us to follow? Is it some punishment a God creates us to endure?

Muggins: Prophets appear and attract followers by convincing people they will die for them, giving up their lives to save others, but where does that come from, sacrificing oneself for another, perhaps believing life has little value and destroying it hardly matters, but a prophet's words must promise something different; anything would be better.

Pyrrho: Prophets’ contemptible regard for the world convinces people to abstain from being involved, detesting worldly life enough to consider escape, contemplating freedom through suicide, dying for only themselves, considering their sacrifice an escape for others to follow.

Minerva: Prophets bringing wisdom for enlightenment authorize me to be an oracle brimming with knowledge to understand God's goodness and appreciate Creation’s beauty, never by sacrificing myself to convictions of ignorance, primitive human practices of killing and destroying, believing this is God’s will. How could our Creator expect us to destroy what He makes? Humankind’s purpose is to protect and maintain God’s Creation and prophets confirm people are to be His stewards by exercising constructive thoughts, words and deeds. God sends out prophets with messages declaring His truth’s wisdom, knowing some will proclaim they originate from human wisdom, from people longing to be philosophers and worshipped as gods. In fact, some will come to call me a philosopher, but I am only a common person chosen by God to understand His message.

Muggins: Can anyone trust God’s messages, hearing them over and over, while never accepting truths developed by humans from scientific or philosophical conclusions, knowing they will all change, lasting but moments after they are believed? We must assume His messages also change, realizing this is what people expect.

Minerva: Humans mutilate God's truths and He assigns new prophets to remind all His eternal verities. People tinkering with His truths are responsible for their changes, developing dogmas purported to be heard from the Holy Spirit, convicting them their imaginations are acceptable, convincing them to create doctrines to insure protection against evil beings and forces battling against their purity, waging conflicts to destroy the truth of God's light and establish supremacy for darkness to reign.

Schaman: How do we know what prophets say except by scribes’ recordings of their words, testifying to them as expressions of God's eternal truths, making discernment essential to evaluate the reliability of their writings, faithfully coming from Him and never expressions of a person's will.

Muggins: Prophets have so much to say that only a fraction is recorded, and most will be from a hearer’s memory, varying with each one's recollection of what was said, resulting in differences contesting their authenticity, causing many to be ignored as toothless forgeries.

Minerva: Trust prophets’ words not only by what they write but by their agreement with eternal truths, consistent with expectations from God. His truths, unwritten but persisting unchanged in oral traditions, should never be ignored as some religion's canon.

Nomad: Who can we trust to know eternal truths I seek?

Muggins: Never prophets, each bearing different versions of eternal truths.

Pyrrho: Competing prophets, hearing of others proclaimed to be messiahs and trusted to be most superior, destroy rivals claiming to be greater and profit from their demise. Following examples of prior messiahs, subsequent self-anointed ones choose martyrdom to prove their authenticity, sacrificing themselves to establish their credentials, or perhaps they select a form of suicide to disguise disenchantment with their God's Creation.

Schaman: Some call their prophet Messiah, coming as a warrior to free ones needing a conqueror, promising to disentangle people from problems they create, battling to satisfy their wants and desires. Do Messiahs chosen to deliver your God’s messages remain to solve people’s problems?

Minerva: True prophets don’t repeat what has failed, with all failures discarded into urns for pagan beliefs, mythological and philosophical trash develop by ones eventually determined to be false prophets.

Piety: True prophets proclaim, God is in touch with us through His messenger, the Holy Spirit, with our Creator telling us: My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness. We claim our God is most powerful but never to battle for us as a Messiah made prefect without weakness.

Muggins: Speaking your God’s Word equips anyone to be a prophet, delivering messages claimed to be His, confounding humans to choose. How many intermediaries does any God need to preach His message?

Schaman: People redefining themselves to believe they are ones to herald a God’s message, trusting their wisdom to report whatever they think, dismiss other prophet’s messages. As before, future prophets bearing and conveying God's message will be betrayed by others close to them, responding to ego’s demands, aggrandizing themselves to seek a coveted place in the sun, defending this as their moment.

Minerva: People coming as false prophets demean human virtues, but they cannot dismantle God’s message. Betrayal by them can trample His true messengers, chosen and named by Him, coming with a myriad of titles, bearing His messages conveying eternal truths, speaking to people's conscience. His message endures, conveying purpose for humans to know His truths and live with righteousness, to acknowledge He creates people to have dominion as stewards of the world, to exist in wholeness true to His plan, obedient to His will and be assured of immortality. We serve Him only by good thoughts, words and deeds.

Muggins: What about prophets telling humans: Since God's Word created them and all His achievements are good, you are His children and nothing He makes is bad, and being His sons, you can mature to deification, making you another God. Are they false prophets?

Azusa: True prophets report God’s revelation, telling people: In the beginning was the Word, the Word was with God, and the Word was God, translated for human understanding that all things were made by Him, and without Him nothing could be created. Prophets continue teaching this truth in many ways because people never accept verities unless created by human reason.

Piety: People don’t need God if they wander about under illusions of self-sufficiency, never failing anyone because of sin, denying obligations to commune with any deity, never knowing about falling from grace, indifferent to knowing God, dismissing all possibility of participation in divine existence with God. Hope once lost can be regained. People can restore lost grace, returning to recognize what’s inherent in their being, the simplicity and goodness designed for them to be.

Minerva: God’s prophets testify He designed humans to be pure, made to desire and seek Him, to join Him in communion of love, but people instead follow a need for created things, choosing ways in conflict with their original goodness, resulting in anxiety, committing them to suffer with disappointments, denying them true, complete and lasting contentment. God creates humans to retain hope for salvation and rejoice in nature’s goodness, and He continues sending prophets to bring them back from chasing wants and desires for their happiness.

Muggins: People must continue to fight for inviolable rights and privileges, established and assured by reason, asserting individuality, and forget illusions of a God’s goodness and sanctity of life. Humans realize prophets keep coming to remind them of God’s directions for their lives, but they learn to manipulate them and follow their own ways.

Azusa: Prophets must renounce their will and follow the Father’s, dismissing their wants and desires, acknowledging God’s plan is greater than theirs, confessing they can never be His equal, looking to find freedom in their obedience to Him, becoming His humble servant before all humankind, and develop disdain and scorn for people chasing their favorite coveted idols.

Minerva: Prophets come with languages and understandings for engaging people to grow their conceptions of God. Human ideas of His Spirit existing in everything are not unusual for people believing in God as the Creator of everything. Even primitive people believe their Creator-God leaves His signature on everything and people are discovering what that is. And with that perpetuating belief in many gods, prophets come to tell people there is only one God creating and managing everything.

Azusa: Prophets’ arrivals attest further to God’s uncreated energy, manifesting His essence in which every existent thing partakes, and He cannot be left out or ignored with everything involved. God’s energy communicates His existence, bringing everyone to know Him. His prophets coming in different investments, appear with selflessness of humility, utter weakness and poverty, without any need for force or power but to heal and restore goodness He made for all.

Muggins: Who pays attention to anyone meek and lowly and be open to hearing what they say? Can such a person convince others without brash cries of forceful and angry words, calling for followers to recognize battles are never necessary to gain human desires and wants, convincing people that God provides everything they need? Meek and lowly prophets never satisfy human desires and wants.

Piety: God’s prophets empty themselves of their personal baggage, leaving them in apparent nothingness, but they cherish and protect the personal love given by their Creator, never being impoverished, existing with their hearts immeasurable.

Azusa: Prophets never need weapons humans employ to convince others of their convictions. They rely on hidden energy in their selflessness and humility to preach God’s Word, and some hearers discover the truth in His Word.

Muggins: Your Creator’s gift of reason shows us how to make weapons, so we must need them, tools designed to destroy what He makes.

Pyrrho: Many prophets appear, proclaiming God’s messages, but coming as warriors armed to promote their way, battling others claiming to possess His truths, arriving as long-awaited messiahs for people to worship.

Minerva: God never wants humans to worship His true prophets, messengers He sends to reveal His plans. Adoration of His prophets, forgetting who they are and why they keep coming, establishes unwarranted veneration for a person instead of for the Creator who is Lord of all. God loses communion with His created ones when people elevate prophets to someone divine. If God creates humans with innate provisions to know Him why should they replace Him with a human He sends as a prophet?

Piety: Prophets come to show God’s expectations of people, telling them to join Creation’s goodness and partake in His image, never replacing Him by some self-proclaimed god but transforming themselves into the image of the archetype He directs.

Muggins: Prophets are merely legendary figures, eventually dismissed as mythic individuals developed out of human imaginations fantasizing they were sent by some God to assist our achievements in art, science, technology and government.

Schaman: Humans call some prophets sent by God: Fortune or Chance, with His goodness and beauty recognized as fortune or chance smiling on people until they are overtaken by trouble and disaster upon experiencing unwanted misfortunes of existence and thereafter never trust the absurdities of Creation’s goodness, having thought it was made to be a paradise. Is His purpose to bring humans joy by showing them how to placate Fortune and make her smile on them?

Muggins: People believe their God continues to send prophets, and they participate in modifying His will, altering His messages and creating gods of fortune and chance to explain everything. Some prophets become philosophers to promote their ways and replace ancient gods of the vulgar masses.

Minerva: God tries to show His great mystery in many ways, and He does this by sending prophets, but people hardly understand what He tries to tell us. Eventually He sends some appearing to combine His divine attributes with human nature, to be more acceptable than any sent before, realizing that creating humans with His breath of Spirit requires more for them to exercise the divine attributes of thought and reason His creation equips them with.

Schaman: If God creates everything good, providing all our needs, why does He beget intellectuals to tell us: Dismiss the abundance of Creation’s goodness and don’t ignore the potentials of our free will; follow existence as pagans see it, survival of the fittest?

Pyrrho: The fittest never survive, afflicted and forever changing into differences never lasting.

Minerva: God creates people with inherent means to grow fitness for their spirit, implanted with their transformation into humans, unseen mysteries prophets come to uncover, nurture and cultivate for us to feed with watchful vigilance and prayer.

Piety: God is always with us, counseling all to watch and pray we don’t submit to temptation, knowing the spirit is ready but the flesh is weak and without watchful attention there will be no prayer.

Azusa: Prophets reveal our existence never ends with death of flesh, being more than mortality for everything we have been. Our end is deification, essential for personal communion with God’s goodness and love, seeing Him face-to-face, but never absorption into His divine essence or nature, understanding there is only one God, the One we can never be.

Muggins: Prophets are never honored unless their messages convey truths and with truths humans hear always changing, seers are forgotten with their verities.

Schaman: Many prophets come proclaiming they have been appointed by God, testifying to a religious experience with Him where He directs them to convey His truths, hopefully never to be compromised, never modified by theologians and philosophers who make them into human doctrines and dogmas, dismissing anything they don't create as myths. Many prophetic teachings attributed to knowledge delivered by God, transcending our existence by what may be considered intuition from One mysterious and revealing previously hidden knowledge, are rejected by intellectuals who establish beliefs for orthodox religion.

Muggins: Intellectuals grow in their acumen to understand existence, making a God’s plan futile by continuing to send prophets. He should reconsider their appearance for humans to regard them as noteworthy and important to be heard.

Piety: Prophets never show us how to investigate everything by objectively determining what goodness is, by employing scientific methods for answers and accept them as truths. Evaluations of goodness can only come from the heart, never from logical conclusions of the mind, and what comes from the heart is placed there by God, never by reason’s attempts at discovery, using intellectual powers to determine what's good and bad.

Minerva: Prophets come to enlighten all, bearing messages validated as from the God of transcendence, revealing saving knowledge from without, ensuring salvation to reunify humans with their Creator, sent to awaken His existence implanted in human souls and offer them a treasure for inclusion in their heart. His message is never to stir up people’s intellect for reasoning what their will should do.

Muggins: Prophets preach how people can find satisfying completion and true happiness, but do humans find it lasting? Impossible. Even with manipulation of these messenger’s words, fulfillment and contentment are fleeting.

Schaman: It remains for humans to understand philosophy develops theology, never needing revelations from God to guide and depend on, to know their purpose without His assistance. Theology depends on our intellect, trusting we can know God by reasoning what He must be like and expects of us. We can’t know God because He calls on us to experience Him, sending prophets for this mission, selecting unordinary ones from human masses.

Minerva: God continues sending prophets and they will be challenged by theologians, entrenched in philosophy derived from His previous messages, developing religions by synthesis of faith and reason, trusting their intellect to participate, believing this is what God wants them to do, to build on and maintain an inseparable connection with their transcendent Supreme Being.

Muggins: What does each prophet bring? New prophets sent by any God must be invariably committed to correct damage resulting from human derangements of His previous prophet’s messages. Errors introduced will be eliminated by words or armed conflicts. In either case blood will flow to destroy traitors against revelations of your God's truth brought by earlier prophets since forgotten. People believe He condones militant means if necessary, to beat His truth into their minds, exercising Divine Justice when warranted.

Azusa: God's will cannot prevail and imprint His truth in people’s hearts where paganism and polytheism persist. Prophets with His messages of beauty, love and goodness, condone harsh measures to ensure God's presence directs their lives. Their love for Him doesn't wither but many fail to remain obedient and mirror the image He bears.

Schaman: Prophets rely on militant actions employing violent words and armed conflict to promote belief in doomsdays where God's Creation is destroyed as the only