Dana Owens

Reading the Bible through the lens of Emanuel Swedenborg, I believed I was beginning to understand the book for the first time. After many years, I suddenly felt that my life-long thirst for seeking truth about life, and my life in particular, had disappeared. My mind was at peace for the first time and with a degree of understanding about life, the world, and myself.

Both Isaiah and Luke intentionally use the word “mercy” as the essential nature of God. The Hebrew word for mercy is racham, which means “to love or to have compassion.” In Greek, the word for mercy is oikkos, which also means “to pity or to have compassion on.”

When our ancestors began to make metal weapons around 3,300 B.C., their main target was no longer forces in nature, but other humans. Ever since, humanity has never been free of wars and thus, the pain, sadness, and sorrow caused by wars fills our history.

How could God, who loves humans, stay angry forever and the condemnation was final until the sacrificial death of Jesus?

In my experience, having and raising a child requires almost unconditional sacrifice of the mother as the one who would carry the child in her womb for nine months and then breastfeed the child for many months after.

For us, it is natural to only believe in physical reality because we are born into such a condition. But according to Swedenborg, the first humans were endowed with the ability of perceiving and experiencing spiritual reality as well as physical reality.