🌈 About Me

My name is Jonathan Caleb Helms. I’m an amateur linguist, musician, biochemist and philosopher. My language is hyperbolic, irreverent, dramatic, and self-expressive. I love to laugh and make others laugh. I care greatly about the political climate in the USA and its relationship with Christianity.

21 June 2024 It’s hard for me to watch these Christians like Paula White (who just said that Jesus told her that Trump should be president) and all the MAGA Christian Nationalists and NOT think to myself, “These people are not hearing from God, they’re literally worshipping and communing with Satan”. I’ve asked myself thousands of times “Can Christianity include that which is Anti-Christ?” Why is it that whenever you hear things like “Jesus Christ is Lord of this great nation” it’s immediately followed by conspiracy theories and right-wing propaganda?

25 June 2024 One of the best ways for people to lose trust in a group is for that group to obtain power and publicly demonstrate their total lack of competency. I still have hope that the people of the world can be persuaded by public displays of incompetency.

27 June 2024 What do you do when the God they worship looks a lot like the Devil I’m against?

19 July 2024 What if the apocalypse/end of the world is always just about to happen, but someone somewhere is always preventing it? Second after second. Maybe that’s how OCD starts. Gotta be careful of that!

14 August 2024 Today is the day I realized I’ve lost both my parents to MAGA. I opened up to my mom for the first time in a long time about how much it hurts me that my sexuality is being used as a political talking point and the evangelical church is going along with it. I feel like we’re worshiping two entirely different gods. She began to justify their stance on LGBT people by saying that LGBT people are groomers, pedophiles, and perverts. And that if I hadn’t been raised right, I would be just like them. Now, this is not the first time my mom and dad have said that they think that being gay is worse than being a pedophile. After all, my mom was raised by one. Not gay people though. Just pedos. And she believes that the same demon that was in my grandfather who molested her when she was a little girl is also now in me. And there’s nothing I can do to change her mind.

There was a time when she had compassion for my situation. There was a time when she would listen when I talked about the abuse I suffered in the hands of the church. But now, she has been totally and completely brainwashed by right-wing MAGA media (and also my dad). And she’s totally lost that compassion. I don’t know what to think other than to mourn. This is what it feels like when hope dies. For my own safety, I have to remember that they are not the parents I once had. They do not care. They’re not who I think they are. And I put myself in danger every time I have a conversation with her. I hope and pray this doesn’t last forever and that one day she’ll see how much her ideology has wounded me. But that kind of hope poisons the soul. So for right now, I’m going to have to learn how to live with them and stop myself from initiating conversations with them. Because as far as I’m concerned, I’ve lost my parents.

27 January 2025

Is God Good? Wrestling with hope vs. reality.

“We really don’t want to (and take great steps not to) acknowledge any possibility that the Judeo-Christian God might just have a shadow side.”

I wrestle a lot with some of the commandments Yahweh gives to Moses. Some of them are brutal. And I feel like some of them were evil. But then Yahweh describes himself in Ex.34:6- "The Lord then passed in front of him and called out, “I, the Lord, am a God who is full of compassion and pity, who is not easily angered and who shows great love and faithfulness. 7 I keep my promise for thousands of generations and forgive evil and sin" and it's like Yeah! Great! I love that God! But it just seems like Yahweh's gaslighting Moses into thinking of himself as "good" after displaying characteristics of a narcissistic, egomaniacal... demon! He then immediately goes on to say “… but I will not fail to punish children and grandchildren to the third and fourth generation for the sins of their parents.” That’s not the God of Goodness, that’s a Demon of Evil.

And that brings me back to Jung's belief (as I interpret it in “Answer to Job”) that the Torah is the story of God growing up. Of the maturation of Yahweh. I fundamentally disagree with this because this dichotomy is all throughout the Hebrew scriptures as well (and there’s a bit of antisemitism in the sentiment that WE “Christians” got God right, but those Jews didn’t fully understand God)* I really take offense to this, but anyway, he has a good point in that we’re getting two sides of Yahweh mixed up in all the scriptures. One evil and one good. Are they two sides of the same coin?

Were the ancients, just like us, trying to make sense of an inherently unjust, uncaring, amoral reality by projecting the evil they saw all around them onto God? Jesus Christ does little to shift the balance. He, too, is a mixed bag of goodness and evil. Some of what Jesus says cannot be supported by someone with moral character without justifying, changing, editing, or explaining away his more provocative statements. Even now in the 2,000th year after the supposed Messiah came to save us, we’re still asking the question “Is God Good?” We’re still wrestling with reality and hope. Maybe that’s what we call Faith.

But Faithfulness goes beyond that dichotomy and says, “Go do good”. Faithfulness compels us to do and be the goodness that we desire our God to exemplify. And it’s that faithfulness that I cling to, and that which Jesus Christ (for all His flaws) represents to me. Faithfulness to a God who (against all evidence) I believe is Good, and on our side. Through Christ (in all his forms) I see the goodness in reality. I don’t need a God to make sense of the evil in the world. The world is evil enough as it is. But it’s also Good. So good. And it’s for that goodness I will fight, even to death and beyond.

UMT

Universal Metabolism Theory.

This is something I’ve been working on for a few months. I’ve used ChatGPT to explain it as follows: