The Three Temptations of Christ

"Where there is no vision, the people perish."

I hadn't given much thought about the archetypal nature of the three temptations the devil presented to Christ. I enjoyed reading Dostoyevsky's Brothers Karamazov too. Pelakin points out in 'Whose Bible Is It' that Dostoyevsky said of the temptations that "the whole subsequent history of mankind is, as it were, brought together into one whole, and foretold, and in them are united all the unsolved historical contradictions of human nature".

The three temptations are about food, health and political power. Maybe those sum up the necessary challenges of life that are forced options and presented to every human being.

The devil challenges Jesus to turn stones into bread, to jump from the top of the Temple and let God protect him as if he was in The Matrix, and finally says to Jesus that he will give him ruling power over all the world if he will just worship the devil.

Perhaps sex temptations are a synthetic combination of food and health drives. Its not so difficult to understand why eukaryotic life forms have such individual and collective interaction conflicts with simple explainable foundation.

Such challenges by natural gas extractors to state governments and universities may exist already. Some future governor of Alaska may look at the north Slope gas and say 'il n'y a plus!' and plea for pervasive fracking (chtonic geo-crazing).

Fracting shale formations containing natural gas after the primary gas reserves are depleted may bring Alaska's arctic slope to evolve thousands of drill holes through the permafrost and seafloor and countless millions of gallons of toxic water to surface over time.

Economic concatenations of eukaryotic life form stimulus-response quests for energy in less than optimally intelligent ways may bring future fracking to Cook Inlet.

Jesus answers the challenge of the devil's temptations with scriptural quotes reiterating reliance upon God. The ongoing Logos actualizing the world and Universe draws the rational soul to the spirit of reason. Temptations of the Devil invariably miss the mark of the good.

Americans are challenged by food and health issues-medical care is costly, and they are perennially challenged by issues of political allegiances relating to economic opportunity. In effect they are encouraged to trade their soul(s) for political inclusion required for temporal economic prosperity.

Listening to a report on the environmentally risky process of fracting shale formations to produce natural gas in Pennsylvania I was reminded a little of the story of the devil being imprisoned a thousand years in the pit....

If a day to God equals a thousand years then a thousand years might represent 365 million human-earth years-about the time that gas was being formed in those ancient sediments to be sequestered from mankind until the present. What ancient bacteria and odd life forms or viruses might be released through the emergence of millions of gallons of contaminated waters injected deep underground to increase pressure on the gas fomenting explosive flatulence trickling up to the surface of the Earth through the pipelines from the pit?

There are a variety of better ways for human culture to radically alter its methods of designing and zoning homes, insulating and heating and cooling capture without relying on wasteful fossil fuel procedures. It isn't simply a choice between communist regulatory totalitarianism and man-in-the-wilderness libertarianism that urban corporations struggle in as modern Daniel Boones of business.

It is possible for human culture to develop a rational economic order that can be revised and updated to meet environmental challenges within a democratic context-even if the present government budget and debt ceiling negotiations and U.S. transportation and energy policies make it appear improbable.

It is written that what is loosed on Earth will be loosed in heaven (if one is saved/healthy that is). It is also written that in an infinite universe anything that has a zero probability of not occurring will occur an infinite number of times.

When Jesus replies to the Tempter with answers professing right relationship with God, humanity is afforded an example of pursuit of a spiritual, sentient way of living amidst environmental challenges rather than replying with unreflective, rash submission to domination by material vicissitudes and/or sensory stimulus response loops through least creative intellectual effort.

With that example Isaac Newton was spiritually minded and pursued knowledge and rational empirical inquiry with reason rather than just replying with a plant-like sensual water-light turn in human cultural questions, (He was the British Chancellor of the Exchequer too), empirical challenges and unknowns.

Brilliant business minds working for good overall culture may find cheaper, cleaner heating, cooling and transport methods in the U.S.A. Government leaders may discover the enlightening national interest of ecospheric economic efficiency and turn toward spiritual cultural reconstruction.

Medical care for the poor in the U.S.A. provided free at government clinics and hospitals might have kept down overall health costs. So long as the middle class and the upper class could afford the world's best medical services the working poor and unemployed poor often had inadequate medical provisioning. In recent time the rising costs of medical services and downward mobility of the American middle class the past 40 years stimulated passage of a hare-brained public health insurance bill in which the elites traded the privacy souls of Americans to global corporations in return for mandatory health insurance payments from all Americans to the global rich concentrating worldly wealth.

Power, health and food remain the perennial challenges tempting to mankind. That cornucopia of temptation adversely affects social intellect, creativity, faith and moral capacity to innovate a free and ecologically rational culture with economic security for all.