The phrase “you must be born again”, along with the question, “Are you born again?” are surprisingly offensive to some who see such statements as badges of ignorance, intolerance, self-righteousness and a lot of other things that give them an excuse not to think about the process or its meaning.
Catholic Fundamentalists try to replace Iron Age words with descriptions more meaningful to those living in our Age of Electron Transfer. Instead of using the phrase “born again”, we think of the same process as erasing from ourselves the old operating systems and downloading The Program and The New Operating Instructions.
As we download more of The Program, we become aware that billions throughout the ages have done so before us. As we learn about them, we find similar pathways, like The Confessions of St. Augustine, that lead us from our vain concerns about programmed entities to think about He Who programmed them.
And, as we look at any single program, for instance, a butterfly, we see some of the thousands of subsidiary programs that have been compiled to produce the program we contemplate. We are struck with the sheer, overwhelming genius of The Programmer and His brilliant assistants, the angels who actually set up the universe in which the butterfly was downloaded.
Looking around the world, we see so many programs that it’s almost impossible to imagine a programmer with the power to program it all. That’s because we haven’t erased enough of our Vanity Program, which doesn’t want to take its rightful place as being so incredibly inferior to He Who programmed everything we sense. The more we understand the power of The Programmer, the less impressed we are with our own abilities. Vanity resents being upstaged, so the greater we think God is, the more we are automatically disliked by those more mired in vanity.
Rather than using the phrase “born again”, we may want to say, “It’s vitally important to erase and over-write the Program of Self-Love with the “Love God and Your Neighbor Program.”
