Christianity Uncovered
"If I were to suggest a single empowering word loaded with expressive power, it would be a word that currently sits atop society's list of negatively charged taboos, a word that females since the Christian Inquisition have been indoctrinated to despise and vilify: that word would be cunt. The English word cunt, which history implies originally had positive connotations and which was even used as a term of endearment during Chaucer's time, appears to have derived from the Germanic kunton. The German prefix ku- simply suggests an unfilled or nonsolid place, whereas the Greek kyklos or ku klux means circle.Ku, by the way, was also the name for the famous nightclub in Ibiza. To me, dancing is an ecstatic meditation that encourages the centering of one's Ki or Danjun, about 9 cm below the navel. In ancient cultures, before written languages, Ku was used to express gnowledge through femininity and wisdom. Mayan cosmology, for example, suggests that the Ku were the nine interconnected and interacting aspects of creation. In the pre-Aryan cultures of Central Asia, such as that of the Naga, ku- was the prefix of such terms as Kundalini, the "serpentine power of life"; Kunti, who was Arjuna's mother; Kuntis, a people of ancient India; and later, Kuan-Yin, the female logos and unperceived side of the manifested universe.
How did the prefix ku get to Gernany? Like the biblical Abraham, who traveled west from south-central Asia's Pakistan region (Jos 24:2-3), many groups journeyed west. One of these is said to be the Goddess-oriented Tuatha de Danann, the pre-Celtic Light-Bringers, who were known as the fifth group of inhabitants of Ireland. The Tuatha de Danann honored the goddess Danu and appear to have settled for a while in Greece before going north through Germania and then across the English Channel to the Emerald Isle. With them traveled many words and the roots for new ones.
In the Asian homeland of the Tuatha de Danann, there was Kunti Devi, the feminine essence of earth; the mother Kunti; and other personalities, such as Kundah, Cunti, Cunda, etc., suggesting that the root of the term cunt was a title of respect.
Many understand that people's greatest fear is the fear of their own power or light. Without the recognition of the feminine, centrifugal aspect of nature as a unique natural quality of its own, not merely a byproduct of the centripetal male, an enlightened, ontosophical society is impossible. Letting go of indoctrinated taboos and accepting the empowering vibration of words such as cunt, currently regarded as taboo or derogatory, would bring us closer to a birthing of human beingness on this Earth."
In the first century of the Common Era (CE), a traveling sage taught among the people in the Middle East. He performed numerous works and miracles. He healed the lame and the paralyzed, raised the dead, and cast away evil spirits. This prophet taught a way of salvation and the laws of the only true god. This prophet was said to have been born of a virgin, and it was said that he had walked on the Sea of Erythra (the Red Sea). He was esteemed by many as the Son of God, although he claimed to be only a son of man. He was arrested for inciting the people, and after his death, it was alleged that he had risen from the dead, walked with his followers, and then ascended to heaven.
We all know who this was, right? Of course we do. His name was Apollonius, and his story is found in Apollonius of Tyana, by Philostratus. However, some who are predisposed to a particular religion and its theo-beliefs may have thought the person referred to in the above narrative was someone else.
Religion and its theo-beliefs, for those caught up in that groupthink, are difficult to recognize as something discordant in our lives, let alone as a barrier that obscures the truth of who we are from ourselves and prevents the uncovering of our light. Those of religious faith typically cling unquestioningly and tightly to their beliefs, which are usually reinforced through repetition of selected Bible stories, which they come to believe as if they had actually observed them firsthand. These believers have bought into a view that humanity is inherently inferior, yet through religion, their sinful nature can be redeemed if they follow its continually reinterpreted myths. The reward for supporting their legally protected superstition is a promise of eternal life. However, is that really the truth?
If one's roots or foundations are permeated in falsity, then even common sense suggests that one's life will be equally as false. For truth is not an invention, and truth is not a consensus reality born from a fixation with self-authenticating holy books devised by our flat-earth ancestors. Truth is not a thing to be discovered, but a reality to be uncovered. There is no liberation until false beliefs are confronted forthrightly and dissolved.
For me, the undoing of religious barriers and subsequent indubitable spiritual breakthrough came by way of a continuum of the transformational events that are being presented throughout this discourse. The first to occur consciously happened when I was eight years of age, a few days after an irascible cousin announced to the neighborhood that my dad was not my biological father, which I had not known until this paradigm-shifting announcement. This was a traumatic revelation, but it was nothing compared with the words uttered by my third-grade parochial school teacher, Sister Rose Kathleen, later that week. She said, reading from Deuteronomy 23:2 during daily Bible study, "No bastard shall enter the assembly of the Lord, not even to the tenth generation." ("Non ingredietur mamzer hoc est de scorto natus in ecclesiam Domini usque ad decimam generationem."). The newer translated versions of this law, which penalizes children for their parents' indiscretions, smooth out the wording; for example, the New American Bible now says: "No child of an incestuous union," an expedient shift in meaning, considering that finding a nonbastard child today is somewhat like seeing someone who doesn't have a tattoo.
So what does a little child do when they has been denied something, especially being included in the congregation of the Lord? Some pursue it! At least, I did. Therefore, for the next two dozen years, I was a major consumer of religious material, looking for a backdoor into heaven. After all, I felt that I had no choice, for no one, not even God, was going to save a bastard child. I had to find a way to save myself, which is fundamentally contrary to Christian beliefs. The New-Age idea advanced by moderates is that God the Father changed, and now we can be saved through Jesus, the Son. This idea merely fortified my quest for something more changeless, a more enduring truth.
Along that way towards something true and unchanging, I have collected and read fifty-three different translations and versions of the Bible while looking for my loophole to heaven. How amazing it is that so many people believe that there is only one version of the Bible, especially considering the tenets, for example in Matthew 5:18, which suggests that "not one letter shall be changed." Each Abrahamic sect (Christian, Muslim, and Jew) claims that its version is the correct version, just as each says that its god and only its god created the universe, thus insinuating that all other religions are both wrong and incomplete.
There are more than a hundred New Testament versions in English alone, all of which were translated from one of two sources. This first source is called the Textus Receptus, manuscripts from a Byzantine text base. Most of the seventeenth-century King James Version uses this source, with a sprinkling of the Latin Vulgate. The other source is known as the Alexandrian text base, which includes the Codex Sinaiticus and the Codex Vaticanus, which were compiled in the fourth century. All original versions have been lost or destroyed. Can you imagine? The literature about the most valuable thing in your life consists of thousands of copies transcribed by thousands of scribes without one original or close-to-original copy left. This is even more suspicious considering what was once conveyed to me by the Religious Studies Department at Montana State University, that of the over 200,000 early manuscripts after the fourth century, no two are identical in content.
Over the years, the persistence of that little eight-year-old paid off, and I uncovered a door, not so much through a study of the texts, but moreso through what remained after I thoroughly reviewed the contents of the texts. Like the Eastern philosophy of neti-neti, that is, understanding what is, through uncovering what is not, what the texts did not say put a different perspective on what they did say. The philosophical nature of neti-neti served as my constant companion.
A religion's set of beliefs stands between you and your direct experience of the source of who we are, a source that is not a personal deity or deita (female gender) outside us. Theism is not even a proper theory. Theism (or a belief in a god) is not a theory in any sense of the term. God is a belief based on faith. Neither faith nor belief rests on logical proof, material evidence, or common sense.
Being a good person of faith in a theo-belief system does not bring one closer to the source. Source is not a patriarch or matriarch who only loves those faithfully obedient to its authority, as proselytized by various self-appointed religious agents who claim to have an exclusive on the moral path to a heaven. Source does not need our love or attention. Only that which sees itself as lacking has needs. Theism, as will be shown clearly, is a human construct, an invented belief system that keeps its faithful followers separated from the reality of source.
Theo-beliefs disengage us from a conscious connection with source reality, a connection that comes through the letting go of theo-beliefs, not the clinging to them. Theo-beliefs do not liberate us from suffering; they contribute to suffering. The realization of our eternal self happens when we realize the illusion of our perceived external self. That which is external, each manifestation of our perceptions, is a simulation or holographic projection. By releasing our bondage to beliefs, our sapiential mind is uncovered and assumes its position as sovereign master of soulestial expression, instead of being always almost satisfied in an existence of diversions to which the ego-and its sciential mind-gives meaning.
Many consider Thomas Paine to be the most eminent of America's founding fathers. He once said,
It has often been said that anything may be proved from the Bible; but before anything can be admitted as proved by the Bible, the Bible itself must be proved to be true; for if the Bible be not true, or the truth of it be doubtful, it ceases to have authority and cannot be admitted as proof of anything.
However, only in recent centuries have we begun to discern the holy books of our theo-belief systems critically, rather than deliberating on them solely for display and devotion. Devotional reading is not Bible study. Bible study is engaging in the activity of asking the same questions that we normally ask of other books. We commonly inquire: Who wrote this? When was it written? Why was it written? Where was it written? For what purpose was it written? Many of us ask ourselves these questions every time we pick up a secular book. However, such questioning, especially in an environment of hope, fear, and faith-driven moderatism or conservatism, is viewed as a threat.
Muslims, for example, unquestioningly accept the Shahada, that is, that there is no god but Allah, and Muhammad is his messenger. To understand the dynamics of that, simply ask a Muslim why he believes in the Qur'an, and he will say, "Because the Qur'an is the infallible words of Allah written by his prophet Muhammad." If you continue the inquiry and request that he divulge how he knows that Muhammad is Allah's prophet, the Muslim will, without the slightest pondering, respond that he knows that Muhammad is Allah's prophet because it says so right in the Qur'an. This is a faith-driven circular reasoning common to all three Abrahamic religions and their hundreds of denominations.
Today's Judaism, Christianity, and Islam all sprang from the same germ: the story of Abraham, an Aryan migrant, who was probably from south central Asia in what is now Pakistan (see Jos. 24:2-3). Abraham (meaning multitude) appears to have fancied himself as Brahma (the root meaning of which is to expand). The similarities between Abraham and Brahma, the Hindu god born from Vishnu's navel, are striking. For example, Brahma's consort was his sister Sara, and Abraham's wife was his sister Sarah (Gen. 20:12). It was through Sarah's mendacity that Abraham's first son, Ishmael, father of the Arabs, was swindled out of his inheritance, a fraud being perpetuated today by Sarah's descendants upon the Palestinian people.
Muhammad (570-632 CE), the Abrahamic teacher who, prompted by persecutions upon Arabs, such as those continued by Pope Gregory (540-604 CE), the Father of the Dark Ages, invented the Arab version of monotheism. Interestingly, this new religion supplied the pedophile prophet with many attractive wives, the youngest of whom was a nine-year-old. However, as I don't wish to be detained by the Mutawa-the Islamic religious police-and I don't fancy having a fatwa issued regarding me as it was for Salman Rushdie, perhaps readers here can unravel for themselves the Qur'an's self-authenticating meaning, and I'll unriddle Christianity. For when Christianity falls, and it will, the other Abrahamic religions will soon follow.
Let's broach this subject with a question. Who is the most important figure in what is commonly known as Christianity? If you use the same answer that most may have thought in the beginning of this third chapter, then we have a lot of work to do on these beliefs. Also, keep in mind as this subject begins that the terms Christ and Christian, as will be shown, were used hundreds of years before the Common Era. Thus I often refer to the Christianity alluded to in the New Testament as neo-Christianity. Neo-Christianity (today's Christianity) is synonymous with Orthodox Christianity. Orthodoxy literally means "a growing belief or opinion."
The most important figure in what Westerners understand as Christianity was the mass murderer, Saul/Paul of Tarsus. According to eminent theologians, such as Robert Eisenman, the Essenes called this self-ordained apostle of the Gentiles "the Spouter of Lies." Among scholars, the Biblical Jesus/Yeshua usually appears in about the fourteenth place in importance. Was he an actual historical figure? Even Paul did not appear to believe that Jesus was an historical figure; for example, see Hebrews 8:4. That is to say, Paul never identified Jesus apart from an entirely mystical setting. Without Paul and several other Church fathers and aristocrats, Christianity, as known today, would not exist.
Today's Christianity, including Catholicism and every other religious sect that uses, in whole or in part, the so-called Christian Scripture, was woven from a hybrid of Pauline doctrines, a few historical facts, and various fabrications. Several early Christ sects, for example, the Sevrians, Encratites, Ebonites, Naassenes, Nazarenes, etc., rejected Paul's epistles. Strictly speaking, Catholics do not consider themselves Christians. In the 1970s, I raised the point of Catholics' not being Christians with Vatican officials in reference to Gentiles, specifically Matthew 10:5 and Acts 10:28: that they cannot personally know Jesus.
The Vatican replied that the Roman Catholic Church is not a Christian church, but the "One, True, Apostolic Church" and as such, can legitimately know Jesus through the apostles. In other words, technically speaking, only Jews can be Orthodox Christians.
That Orthodox Church, which formed as an offshoot of Paul's ministry, had no gospels that referenced an historical Jesus. The canonical gospels (Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John) were contrived later, three of them no earlier than the second century. All tacitly supported the myths espoused by Paul. The Pauline letters or epistles presented no knowledge of the four canonical gospels. Even in the Dead Sea Scrolls, compiled when today's Christianity was allegedly taking form, an historical Jesus is literally missing, as it was from all other pre-95 CE records. What does this mean? How did this neo-Christianity crop up, apparently without a personal founder, and then claim that a personal founder existed? The answer is not very difficult; it even has some interesting twists.
There remains sufficient evidence to discern the deliberate fabrication perpetrated by the early neo-Christian movement for the idea of a Christ and a new belief system that benefited its creators' agendas. People such as Theophilus, the patron saint of arson, and various Christian mobs did their best to destroy as much of the preserved wisdom as they could. Like today's fundamentalists, the early neo-Christians had little tolerance for anything not within the narrow predetermined view of the zealous pre-Nicene Church fathers.
The prototype of a personified Christ was developed by Paul's followers and aristocratic admirers from the Talmud stories of Yeshua Ben Stada, the locally notorious Yeshua [Jesus] the Notzri [Nazarite]. This Jesus, born in 7 BCE during a Jupiter-Saturn conjunction, had a stepfather known as Joseph and a mother named Mary. On the eve of Passover in 28 CE, he was convicted of sedition by Pontius Pilate and subsequently hanged. His hanging was not the planned means of death, but proceeded because those who were to stone him were late. Since the end of the day was near, which would have postponed his burial until after Passover, the soldiers allowed the alternative death by hanging. Following his death, his followers dubbed him the Passover Lamb.
A Nazarite or Notzri, meaning consecrated, was a Jew who took the ascetic vow described in Numbers 6:1-21. Among famous Nazarites was James the Just, whom the Ebionites revered as the legitimate apostolic successor of the Nazarites. Jesus the Nazarite (not of Nazareth or Galilee) is probably the same Jesus whose sayings were collected by Didymos Judas Thomas in the apocryphal Gospel of Thomas. This Gnostic or cardio-centric gospel of "secret sayings that the living Jesus spoke" appears to have been compiled in response to Paul's new cerebro-centric religion. Both the Gospel of Thomas and the Epistles of Paul predate the canonical gospels by at least a generation. Neither the Gospel of Thomas nor the Q source contained a crucifixion, the concept of Jesus dying for the sins of others; a resurrection; or a personified Christ. Thus they conveyed nothing that would support the divinity of Jesus, which later became one of the core beliefs of the new Christianity.
The story of present-day Christianity is part of a larger mythology. The evidence suggests that the actual principle of Christ grew out of Memphite philosophy-literally, the Krst, the anointed ones, like the Risen Horus/Apis. Then in the fifth century BCE, the word Christos, referring to an "awakened one," crept into Greek subculture, and this word can be found in the works of classical writers, such as Aeschylus and Herodotus, the father of history. Curiously, this was the same time in which Siddhartha Buddha, the light of Asia, realized that religion is a man-made fabrication and a direct result or consequence of the desire for things to be other than what they are. According to recent research, many ideas in the New Testament were lifted from Buddhism.
In the third century BCE, through Ptolemy Soter, a lover of all things Egyptian, a bearded, long-haired Greek image was merged with Egypt's mystical Krst philosophy. This image, Sarapis, would become Christendom's representative portrait of their Jesus/Yeshua. If there was an historical Jesus/Yeshua as presented in the gospels, he would have had short hair and a close-cut beard, as was the custom of the Jews and the command of Paul. For example, 1 Cor. 11:14 suggests that long hair brings shame to a man. More similar to the Sarapis model was the link that Jesus/Yeshua was a Nazarite, like the Old Testament Samson. Members of the religious sect of Nazarites were said not to cut their hair. In addition to their unkempt hair, the Nazarites also vowed to abstain from the manufacture or consumption of intoxicating beverages and from contact with the sick or corpses. Jesus/Yeshua being a Nazarite does not harmonize well with certain fabricated gospel tales, such as the ritual consumption of wine and the raising of the sick and dead, which were woven into the canonized version of the myth. This reminds me of the fanciful story of Mason Weems, invented after the death of George Washington, about George Washington and the cherry tree. Weems fabricated this story to broaden the character of America's first president and to make him seem more appealing.
The Jesus Christ myth was interwoven from many sources, including the Egypto-Greek Sarapis, whose devotees, according to Hadrian, called themselves Christians and bishops of Christ. Sarapians had temples in most of the major cities of the time, including Alexandria, Rome, and even Bithynia, where Pliny the Younger was governor at the beginning of the second century CE. Under Trajan (who was married to Pompeia Piso), Hadrian was governor of Syria. As every Bible hobbyist should know, as per Matthew 4:24, Jesus' fame was said to reach throughout all of Syria, yet the evidence shows that no one there knew Jesus' followers as Christians until well into the second century. Why was that?
Gnosticism, the original form of Christianity, arose from a Greco-Egyptian philosophical fusion, as mentioned above. Gnosticism was an important part of the neo-Christian construct. Gnosis was not an outgrowth of neo-Christianity, as revisionists suggest. Today's Christian persuasions are a product of Gnostic Christianity, not the other way around. We could say that Christianity was built on the DNA of Gnosticism. This neo-Christian fabrication from Gnosis and Krst, from gnowledge and the Anointed One, can also be substantiated through the Book of Enoch, from which over a hundred phrases were introduced into the New Testament. Enoch was written before 170 BCE, and several Aramaic copies were purportedly found among the Dead Sea fragments of the Gnostic gospels from Qumran. These Gnostics, from the time of the Julian clan of emperors, maintained that Christ was not a man in human form, as claimed in the gospels, but an individual goal of an initiate to realize a Christ Consciousness, the Logos. The Logos represents a mystical rebirth without sexual union, an awakening to a reality beyond duality, a palingenesis from the dream of perception. Duality is inherently a sexual reality, in which consciousness is fragmented. Christ Consciousness is an unfragmented consciousness, in which there is neither hope nor fear. The Jesus as defined in the gospels could not have been a Christ.
Neither Paul nor his followers could grasp gnosis, that is, to gnow themselves through the heart of essence. Like many today, frozen in their conceptual experiences, Paul needed a more physical, hope-driven, fear-based path. The ignorant respond to hope and fear. Thus, from the expectations infused through the Pauline church, the concept of a personified Christ grew and entered the groupthink of the anti-Gnostic Paulines and those, like the Roman aristocrats, who wished to exploit it.
Before 95 CE, when history suggests that Apollonius died and rose from the dead, there is no mention of a personified Christ or the four gospels. There is no known contemporary scriptural record of the life and times of Jesus/Yeshua. For neo-Christians, so fond of quoting Bible babble, what wasn't said in the first century that which is curiously missing, is as interesting as the fabrications and contradictions of what was said then. For example, in the writings of Clement Romanus, the Pauline bishop of Rome circa 95 CE, there is not even a tinge of gospel references. Yet Luke 1:1-2 specifically implies that many eyewitness followers had already been writing. Adding to the intrigue, Clement, whom Tertullian and Jerome suggest was the direct successor of Peter, was also said to be a Flavian, that is, a relative of the men who were then the emperors of the Rome.
Sciolistic Christians vaunt that the historian Josephus, in two remarks that have been taken out of context, verifies that Jesus/Yeshua existed. Today, however, even conservative scholars agree that those quotations from chapters 18 and 20 of the Jewish Antiquities, a history of the Jews, were later Christian interpolations. Such conclusions are consistent with Origen, an ante-Nicene father, who in the third century CE indicated that such a declaration from Josephus of a Jesus Christ did not exist in his copy of the Jewish Antiquities. Furthermore, no one else before the fourth century CE ever mentioned such an important reference from this often-cited source. Another claim by neo-Christians as to Jesus Christ's historicity comes fromTacitus' Annals 15.44, the comment of how Emperor Nero persecuted Christians after Rome's fire of 64 CE was actually about Gnostic Christians, worshipers of Sarapis, not followers of Jesus or Paul. It was these Christians, the original Christians, whom the author of the second-century Gospel of Matthew called false Christians. Neo-Christians appropriated the name Christianity, as they lifted terms from most of the cultures that they absorbed.
Considering a set of all knowledge for that period, not a single Jewish, Roman, or Greek historian, scribe, or writer mentions before 95 CE the Jesus Christ depicted in the gospels. There are no artifacts, no works of carpentry, and no physical evidence that a Jesus Christ ever existed. For such a famous person, professed to have been known far and wide, it is notable that there is not a single word of him from Pliny the Elder, Seneca, Gaius Petronius, the Syrian Mara, Philo Judaeus, Pausanias (who traveled throughout Syria), Theon of Smyrna, Thallus of Samaria, Silius (Consul of Asia Minor), or the Syrian-born Lucianus.
However, the word scribe(s) is mentioned at least sixty-six times in the New Testament. Thus, repeatedly, what was not mentioned says much regarding the history of the invention of present-day Christianity. For instance, why was the capital of Galilee, Sepphoris, known as the ornament of Galilee, just four miles down the hill from the archeological site of Nazareth, not alluded to in the Gospels, although they all mention Nazareth? Could it be that the authors of the gospels were unaware that the city existed because Rome leveled it during the Jewish Revolt of 66-71 CE, some forty years after the Talmud's Jesus was hanged for sedition? It is unlikely that Nazarites lived in Galilee, but were instead Jerusalemites.
So far, I have presented an abridged review of what was not said. Now comes a summary of what was disclosed: the refashioning of Gnostic mythology into a religion that advocated slavery, dependency, ignorance, and submissive obedience. This new religion was never a threat to Rome, but rather, it was one through which its adherents, servants of Rome's ruling class, were morally obligated to suffer meekly what Caesar wished or, as Titus 2:9 says, to please their masters in all things. Christianity is a pro-Roman religion. Did not Paul say that Roman magistrates were only a threat to evildoers or that the man who rebels against his master is opposing God's will? What Roman would want to persecute the philosophy that said that tax collectors are God's ministers (Romans 13:6)? It was the Jewish zealots and Gnostic Christians who threatened Rome, not the anti-Gnostic Paulines and neo-Christians.
The first canonical gospel, the Gospel According to Mark, began to appear in Rome after 95 CE; however, it was probably drafted following the First Jewish Revolt (70 CE). Contrary to allegations of Papias, as reported by Eusebius in the fourth century, this gospel is clearly Roman in origin and intention. Besides the use of Latin-rooted words not found in other canonical texts, it also does not refer to Jewish law. Authorship points to members of the aristocratic Piso family, who according to genealogists were descendants of Herod the Great and intermarried with the Flavians. These members of the Piso family were the forefathers of Marcus Aurelius, Constantine, and Charlemagne. The Pisos had strong ties to Syria in the first and second centuries, when anti-slavery sentiments began to grow from the First Jewish Revolt. They had firm reasons to introduce a new theo-ideology that encouraged passive servility, thereby suppressing another costly servile war similar to the Spartacus slave insurrection. The womb of the birth of Christianity was Rome, not Judea. The Gospel According to Mark was unknown before 95 CE apparently because of a contention between the Pisos and the Emperor Domitian, who ruled between 81 and 96 CE.
Following Mark came the Gospel According to Matthew, which was probably compiled by Ignatius, a Pauline bishop of Antioch, a town in Syria, about 102 CE. Ignatius appears to have harmonized his gospel using some six hundred of Mark's 661 verses. Considering the numerous references to money, he may have also used the Ebionites' Hebrew Gospel of Matthew as a source, the writer of which was said to have been a tax collector. Other players in Ignatius' story include the Gospel of Thomas, the Gnostic text of sayings, which may have been a source for the Hebrew Matthew. Like the Gospel of Thomas, the Hebrew Gospel of Matthew is purported not to have contained a virgin birth or resurrection story. Then, along with oral traditions, the copyist of the canonized Matthew comported his story with the Old Covenant, contriving citations that verified scriptural prophecy to address various questions of the times. To me, his genealogy is more amusing than reconciling. For instance, of the four women mentioned, Ruth was repurchased, Tamar was a prostitute, Rahab was a harlot, and Bath-Sheba was an adulteress. I recall pondering whether the Biblical Jesus/Yeshua was a bastard like me. Matthew's encouragement of sexlessness is also amusing; for example Mt. 19:12 suggests that blessed is the man who has been castrated, but even more blessed is he who cuts it off himself.
In the 1980s, a biennial gathering of Biblical scholars called the Jesus Seminar concluded that only the word father could be traced to Matthew's so-called Sermon on the Mount. The greater part of the sermon consisted of words placed in Jesus' mouth by others long after he was dead. During that same period in the 1980s, over a hundred Bible scholars at another seminar agreed that Jesus never promised to return and that he never had any intention of starting a religion. Commenting on these scholars' conclusions, the Jesuit Rev. Edward Beutner said, "These are not maverick scholars; they take a very careful approach to how sayings were transmitted and evolved in the Bible texts."
Unlike the Epistles of Paul or the Gospel According to Mark, which say nothing about Jesus/Yeshua's birth, the Gospel According to Matthew and the Gospel According to Luke, which followed Matthew, constructed the virgin birth in their attempt to corroborate that their Jesus/Yeshua fulfilled Jewish prophecies about a messiah, for example Isaiah 7:14, Hosea 11:1, Micah 5:2, and Luke 24:24.
The third of the synoptic gospels is my favorite. The Lucan discourses, that is, Luke and Acts, were probably authored by a well-educated, effeminate physician from Greece during the second century. These books, having the most extensive vocabulary of any in the New Testament, were obviously written through a healer's eyes, but also from the point of view of an effeminate or homosexual life. Luke is a girl's gospel; Luke is the only Biblical author to describe women's inner life. There are women everywhere in Luke-Elizabeth, Herodias, Anna, Mary, Joanna, Susanna, Jairus' daughter, the Queen of the South, the Widow of Nain, Simon's mother-in-law, the crippled woman, a hemorrhaging woman, the widow of Zarephath, women who prepare spices, women in parables, a wailing woman, women grinding grain, and at least five women at the tomb.
Although Luke and Matthew both use Mark as a source, and the author of Luke probably read Matthew's compilation while in Antioch, these two evangelists' accounts contradict each other in many ways. To name an example:
Matthew 1:16 Joseph's father was Jacob.
Luke 3:23 Joseph's father was Heli.
According to the theory of the virgin birth, Joseph was not the father of Jesus, so who cares whether Joseph was a descendant of King David? Some Christian priests would have their faithful believe that the Luke genealogy was of Mary, that Heli was Mary's father; however, Luke 3:23-24 actually negates such a claim.
Matthew 1:20 An angel appears to Joseph.
Luke 1:38 An angel appears to Mary.
Matthew 2:11 Jesus was born in a house.
Luke 2:7 Jesus was born in a manger.
Matthew 2:14 Mary and Joseph took Jesus to Egypt.
Luke 2:22 Mary and Joseph took Jesus to Jerusalem.
Most Christmas season reenactments use Luke's manger, but Matthew's escape to Egypt.
Matthew 28:2 An angel
Luke 24:4 Two men in dazzling garments
John was the last of the canonical gospels. Theophilus of Antioch appears to be the first person to mention its existence as a gospel (during the later half of the second century). However, the Rylands Papyrus, which could be part of a copy of John, has been paleographically dated to 150 CE, fifteen years after the Bar Cochba revolt. John's gospel resonates more with the Jesus of the Talmud than the Jesus in the synoptic gospels. For example, John has his Jesus dying on the eve of Passover, as the slaughtered lamb, not following the Passover meal as the Jesus of Matthew and Luke. Actually the documentation of the time points to the so-called crucifixion as actually a fabricated cruci-fiction, invented along with the resurrection story after 95 CE. Rabbinic law called for criminals to be stoned, not to undergo a Roman-style crucifixion, although hanging was acceptable for lesser offenses. Jesus was killed "by hanging him on a tree" (Acts 5:30 & 10:39); Jesus was "hung on a tree" Galatians 3:13; his "body [was] on the tree" 1 Peter 2:24.
The so-called Evangelist John and the John who authored of the Book of Revelation were surely two different persons. Unlike the Gospel According to John, written in traditional Greek style, the Apocalypse (Revelation) is characteristically Semitic. The Apocalypse is said to have been written while John was in exile on Patmos, one of the Dodecanese Islands about a hundred kilometers southwest of the city of Ephesus.
Although evidence shows that the New Testament is a subterfuge of zealously crafted myths, letters, and sayings, the last entry is somewhat different. The Apocalypse or Revelation of John reportedly was admitted into the canon of the New Testament in the late fourth century by one vote. That one vote margin of acceptance is said to have been attained only after the addition of the first three verses, which is quite humorous, considering that the last verses of Revelation say, "No man shall add unto these pages."
The Apocalypse might be considered a quite informative, multilayered prophetic disclosure. That is not to say that the Apocalypse predicts future calamities for humanity, but rather appears to reveal intrahuman animating principles written through subconscious symbolism, woven together with the messianic events associated with the forty-two-month Bar Cochba revolt. The Bar Cochba revolt occurred circa 135 CE, when Jewish towns and temples became Gentile, as per Rev. 11:2 & 13:5.
Coming to terms with the Apocalypse or the Book of Revelation was one of my tremendums or direct transformational experiences that dissolved another layer of beliefs into which I had been indoctrinated during childhood. I came to terms with that book in Bozeman, Montana, in 1983 after a discussion on anti-Christs and the predictions of apocalyptic catastrophes with a friend, who had been traumatized by a group of Russellites. Russellites are followers of Charles Taze Russell, who like to be called Jehovah's Witnesses. I was saddened by being unable to answer her questions, so in my empathy, I withdrew to a windowless bathroom and cried. Then, as my supplication diminished into surrender, I realized that the story of John's Revelation was dreamlike in composition.
Normally, to decipher one's own dreams is formidable enough, yet interpreting the vision of this eighteen-hundred-year-ago dead guy was not that difficult. I simply put myself in his sandals, that is, into the first half of the second century CE, when Ephesus was the capital of the Roman province of Asia Minor, which historians say was founded by Ionian settlers in the eleventh century BCE.
As a center of mysticism, Ephesus was famous for its great metaphysical colleges, where Gnostic and Platonic philosophies like the Logos were expounded and where priests at the Temple of Diana were said to recite the mystic words Aki Kataki Haix Tetrax Damnameneus Aision. Even Apollonius of Tyana, the ardent Pythagorean, had an esoteric school in cosmopolitan Ephesus. One could imagine this city as something like present-day New-Age towns of Sedona, Santa Fe, or Tepoztlan, where a variety of philosophies converge, but in Ephesus, perhaps this occurred on a grander scale.
Serpent or Kundalini worship is prevalent in the records of the era. There were Naasenians, a serpent-worshipping Gnostic sect, the Ophis-Christos, the Serpent Christ, the Nabians and Nabatheans, a sect almost identical with the Sabeans, whose secret rite of baptism, according to the 1918 Theosophical Glossary, was taught by the Buddhist Boodhasp. In fact, Buddhists and Nagas, or Tibeto-Burmese wise men, had already been traveling into the area for a few hundred years along the Egypt-India trade route.
Naga, meaning wise serpent, is one of the few words that span both centuries and continents. For instance, Nargals were Chaldean chiefs of the Magi, and Naguals were and are brujos of some tribes of Mexican Indians, dating back at least to Quetzlcoatl, the Plumed Serpent. The Nagualist community, at least until a few years ago, had an annual gathering at Lake Catemaca, where intimate discussions of duality's multifaceted reality were held.
Ephesus was indeed a happening place. John must have had a grand time there. At least he probably did before the ante-Nicene Fathers may have instigated his arrest and exile. Polycarp of Smyrna and perhaps Irenaeus were irritated by any dialogues with Gnostic sages or spiritual travelers, like the Buddhists or Tantrics. Just imagine the likes of today's faith-driven evangelists hearing of John learning how to raise Kundalini, unsealing the chakras, and discussing the old-style spiritual vortices count. The Kundalini vortices were described as petaled flowers. In the old-style, the first six chakra flowers, or energy wheels, had petals that added up to one hundred and forty-four. When those were combined with the thousand-petal lotus of the crown chakra, it was endearingly called the 144,000, a number known to readers of the Bible as the number of the elect (those who shall be saved because their names are written in the Book of Life).
Once the circumstances of John's life before the Revelation narrative can be seen, the Apocalypse is no longer viewed as a scripture of eschatology (end times). When viewed as a dream-inspired discourse, the clarity of the symbolism, interlaced with the ominous Bar Cochba period, the Book of Revelation is a guide for personal awakening through the Tantric practice of Kundalini.
In the Kundalini model of Revelation, the seven churches denote the seven chakras that are associated with the seven human endocrine glands. The seven seals, angels, candlesticks, head and crown, lamps, mountains, spirits, etc., have to do with the various levels in our continuum of awakening. In Tantric philosophy, the chakras are commonly discussed as being sealed or unopened. The mark of the beast represents the ego expressing itself through the physicalness of the hands or the mental activity of the forehead. This is to say, 666 on the hands symbolizes a physical self-centeredness, whereas the 666 on the forehead symbolizes a mental self-absorption. These are common Buddhist/Gnostic ideas, filtered through dream metaphor. If the ante-Nicene or subsequent church fathers had any idea of the Gnostic nature of John's vatical writing, it would have been consigned to the flames, like the other compositions that they felt threatened their neo-Christian viewpoints.
Any relationship of the Book of Revelation with an anti-Christ is in regards to those like Bar Cochba, the Jews' messiah and "prince of Israel," whom the new Christian leadership rejected as the their "messiah returned." To the neo-Christian leadership at the time, Bar Cochba was an anti-Christ. As for the false Christ of Matthew 24:24, that, as noted above, seems to be in connection with the Gnostic Christ, whose followers Hadrian (71-138 CE) called "bishops of Christ" in his letter to the Consul Servianus. A false Christ or anti-Christ was anyone at that time not chained to the new orthodoxy. Where and when the author of the Gospel According to John has his Jesus say, "I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the father except by me" is in response to the Bar Cochba period.
The Gospel According to John commences with, "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He [Jesus] was with God in the beginning." Although some argue that this was a later, fourth century interpolation, the idea of the Word or Logos is not a Christian conception. The Western idea of Logos can be found among the fifth century BCE writings of Heraclitus of Ephesus. At the time of the Jewish Messiah's revolt (132 -135 CE), Buddhists were known to be traveling the region, and those visitors would surely have been queried about the Logos or inherent order in the universe. In response, they would have presented the principle of Sabda, the Unmanifested Logos. Pinda Kacha, Sabda Sacha - the Body is Perishable, the Word is Eternal. From a different perspective, the Hindu, in accordance with Sabda Brahman, would say, "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with Brahman, and the Word was Brahman." Or the Tibetans of the time may have said, "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with Padmapani (the first divine ancestor of the Tibetans), and the Word (the Unmanifested) was with Padmapani (the manifested). The author of John however, wanted his Jesus, his messiah, to be the first manifested from the Unmanifested, so that his fellow faithful would not follow the followers of Simon Bar Cochba, the Prince of Israel.
In addition to the influences of Eastern and the Greco-Egyptian Sarapic philosophies, neo-Christianity integrated other cults into its new myth as well, just as Romans meshed the beliefs of those they subjugated. The Christmas story, for instance, is closely related to Mithraism, which Plutarch said was practiced in Asia Minor during the first century BCE. Mithras, who was also called Chrestos, was born of a virgin in a cave at the winter solstice, and his birth was celebrated during the festival of Dies Natalis Solis Invictos. The tradition of giving Christmas gifts appears to have been partially adapted from the Pasque Epiphany, the goddess cult of Bari. On the other hand, Easter and the resurrection story are another neo-Christian modification, in this case an appropriation of the spring Eostar celebration of the death of Attis, who, three days following Black Friday, was resurrected. Attis, the savior, was often represented with a shepherd's staff. One traditional theme of the Attis cult is said to have been "as our Lord was saved, so we shall be saved." Salvation is, ironically, a belief that leads to disempowerment because it places the idea of redemption outside the self.
The cult of Attis, whose priests were called Gallaens, strongly influenced the invention of modern Christianity. In fact, the Vatican, named for mons vaticanus or Vatican Hill, which antedates Christianity, was the place of worship of Cybele, and her fertility rites with her youthful lover Attis were performed on Vatican Hill. In other words, Vatican City sits atop the most sacred place of the Phrygian religion.
Today's Christianity, the Christianity founded in the second century CE, did not arise from the teachings of an historic Jesus/Yeshua. In fact, many contemporary scholars suggest that the majority of the words attributed to Jesus/Yeshua in the gospels could not possibly have been said by him, even if he did exist. Neo-Christianity was formed through the schemes of Roman aristocrats, along with the ante-Nicene and latter Church fathers, who rejected gnowledge, Gnothi Seauton, that is, to "gnow thyself." Instead, they opted for a conditional cerebral process dependent upon, and serving, the human ego, that is, to "know thyself". The salvation cults that make up neo-Christianity, whose hideous cross became their symbol in the third century CE, was designed to perpetuate control of the masses. Christianity is a religion that separates us from our direct experience with the source of who we are. Christianity is a religion contrary to gnosis and understanding through sapience, in that it neither contains, nor points to authentic love, through which our true mystery is understood.
Most of today's Christians believe that their religion is one of love. Nevertheless, their scripture says that Jesus came with a sword to bring dissension, as in Matthew 10:34 and Luke 14:26. Their scripture says, "Abandon your family" (Matthew 19:24; Luke 14:26). Their Jesus not only promotes slavery, but also instructs how slaves should be punished, as in Luke 12:47-48. In fact, the idea that their God is love was not introduced until the late second century apology of 1 John, specifically 4:8 and 4:16. However, neo-Christians do aspire to agape love, a love described in the first letter to the Corinthians. For example, "Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things" (1 Cor. 13:7). However, the love depicted in that description is not authentic love. Bearing, believing, hoping and enduring are not love. Those are conditions based on object-ive indoctrination, not on unconditional love. In other words, Christendom's great chapter on love is merely a discourse on past limitations and future hopes, a love that strives to sustain conditions of conflict, separation, and limitation. Conditional love is born of belief, and as such, it can only be experienced through the conditions of those beliefs. If we ponder that, it is rather amusing. Their god, as other gods, is clearly a conditional god.
Today's Christianity, as a whole, is quite amusing, that is, from a full-spectrum-consciousness point of view. I often ask Christians why they go to church. This is both a joke and a superb litmus test for estimating someone's self-built barriers to love. Why do Christians go to church? Because they have faith. Get it? Faith is the unquestioning acceptance of something in the absence of reason. Hebrews 11:1 says that faith is a thing that is hoped for without evidence that it exists. Faith is an unsupported belief. Faith is a hope, a belief in an expectation that arises from the perception of lack. Beliefs, especially religious beliefs, are hilarious because they are not true and could not possibly be true. If something were true, we would not have to believe it. said, "It is always better to have no ideas than false ones; to believe nothing, than to believe what is wrong."
There is humor woven throughout Judeo-Christian literature. In Genesis, the Elohim (a plural for God) create "male and female" in Gen. 1:26-27. Then in Gen. 2:21-25, the second creation story, the into a profound sleep to make out of him a faithful, subservient companion called Eve. This Eve was not "created" or equal, as the female in the first creation story. The deeper comedy, however, is that nowhere does it say that they ever woke Adam up. Perhaps this ties in with the Awakened Ones, the Bodhisattvas of the East, who have been suggesting through recorded history that we wake up. Interestingly, the events of the two Abrahamic creation stories do accommodate a different explanation of how the serpent got into the Garden of Eden in chapter two of the Book of Genesis. It never did; for what happened after Adam was put into a deep sleep is just a dream. Even the "no boundary" quantum theory could support that view; that is to say, if there is no time, how could there have been a creation, except in our brains, which are, as neuroscientists say, what connects us with the perceived universe?
The concept of a created man and a "made" woman "fashioned out of a rib" in chapter two of Genesis repeats over and over in the literature of the Abrahamic religions. The sons of the Elohim took the daughters of men as they chose (Gen. 6:2). The woman's husband shall rule over her (Gen. 3:16). The didactics are not limited to the Old Law and the impositions of the God of Jacob. In Ephesians 5:22, wives are instructed to submit to their husbands; in 1 Cor. 11:9, we learn that woman was made for man. Again, in Col. 3:18 and Titus 2:11-12, "let women learn in silence and be completely submissive, for no woman shall be permitted to teach or have authority over men." The Malleus Maleficarum, a fifteenth-century Catholic text, summed up women by saying that women, being formed from man's rib, are only imperfect animals, whereas man belongs to the privileged sex from whose midst Christ emerged. And to give equal time to the Protestants, Martin Luther, in the sixteenth century, reportedly said, "Girls begin to talk and to stand on their feet sooner than boys because weeds always grow up more quickly than good crops." However, my favorite Martin Luther quotation is: "Reason should be destroyed in all Christians." Hey! That makes sense, for without reason, no one would challenge his hollow, faith-based reality.
Perhaps that last quotation, about destroying reason, explains why today's roughly 500 million Christian women concede to the loathsome view of them taken by their Bible and Christian leadership. In the early twentieth century, they seemed to have displayed enough reason to effect an emancipation through women's suffrage. They questioned political authority, but why not religious authority? Do women honestly feel that they can play "pick-and-chose" with these theo-beliefs by saying yes, I like that verse, it's true, or no, that verse is no longer relevant? Do they really feel that they can change their god into a more loving god/goddess version, and somehow that will make the reality of their ridiculous and intolerant religion, and their submission to it, more palatable? Why do they give patronage to a reality that demands its adherents to be unquestioningly attached to beliefs through faith, thus the nonacceptance of truth, honesty, or a life that pivots upon unconditional love? If they would simply allow the Bible to speak for itself, they would see the intolerance that the scripture demands, and they would clearly recognize their error. Yet do Christian women ever ponder the teachings advanced by the three Abrahamic holy books? The theologian Clement of Alexandria summed up the Abrahamic teachings perfectly when he said, "Every woman should be filled with shame by the thought that she is a woman."
As mentioned above, the word woman, that is "of and for man" is a disempowering word. References from various Samarian and Mesopotamian texts suggest that the feminine entity in the first of the two Bible creation stories was Lilith. Later, Lilith was demonized by the Hebrews, and subsequently by the Christians, for leaving Adam in Eden's garden. She was labeled a dark goddess. However, when viewed in context with the whole of various creation stories, Lilith was the quintessence of femininity. The second feminine entity in chapter 2 of Genesis is Eve. Eve was a wo-man, the subservient partner of Adam, a feminine parallel to man, made out of his flesh. Lilith, on the other hand (for those who recall chapter one of this book), was a cunt, a freethought goddess without original sin, a feminine parallel to nature.
Why do people engage in such an absurdity as present-day Christianity? It does not take a degree in religious studies to see how this new Christianity got its deep grip on society. History is quite clear regarding the roots of this deception, which was firmly grounded by the end of the sixth century. Theodosian laws, for example, condemned all non-Christians, thus promoting ardent persecutions of freethinkers, deists, pantheists, polytheists, pagans, and others whose confiscated property enriched the new church. Then came the barbaric reign of Justinian, which barred anyone outside specific neo-Christian beliefs from civil service, and whose forced baptisms upon Arabs encouraged the way for the establishment of Islam. Christianity was spread through violence and now propagates its faith through the fortune raised from that violence. In the United States that is a serious felony, and their propagators are nothing less than accessory felons.
However, what has kept neo-Christians ignorant of their complicity during two millennia of treachery and crimes against humanity and nature? What is the expected value that they hope to realize by the acceptance of this unquestioning belief through faith in their scripture? Is it because of their fear of death? Is it because of hope and the anticipation of heaven? Perhaps their fear and insecurity is perceived to be reduced through the hope that the meek will inherit the earth. Maybe their fear of not being good enough is tranquilized by the hope of salvation. The truth is that today's Christianity offers no wisdom about reality or how to trigger direct, authentic experiences with the source of who we are. Christianity only desires to feed and sustain faith in its beliefs, a faith that steps between both individual and collective, and their direct experience, so that what is false continues to perpetuate itself.
There is indeed a source, which will become clear as we unveil who we are. However, before this source can be grasped, first we must uncover the false as the false, that is, what source is not. Sabdana's, those who venture beyond beliefs, call this the process of neti-neti. Through neti-neti, the true is recognized by realizing what is not false. As the false is seen, it dissolves, and the real is revealed. To paraphrase an idea known to first-century Gnostics, when you disrobe without being ashamed and take up your garments [beliefs] and place them under your feet like little children and tread on them, then you will no longer be afraid. That is the process to an unobscured heart and the source of who we are. Without fear, there is no hope; without hope, there is no fear.
Source is not a god of death, nor would source prescribe death for cursing one's parents (Lev. 20:9), death for adultery (Lev. 20:10), death for blasphemy (Lev. 24:16), death if the tokens of virginity could not be found at the time of marriage (Deut. 22:20), or death for not being good enough in God's eye (Gen. 38:7). How about death to Anamias and Sapphira for not tithing enough to the Apostles' satisfaction (Acts 5:1-10)? Neither is source interested in the perpetuation of the institution of slavery, like being subject to a master with all fear (1 Peter 2:18), obey your masters in all things (Col. 2:22), slaves both male and female, thou shalt have (Lev. 25:44), and slaves shall be submissive to their masters and please them (Titus 2:19). Christianity is a religion designed for Roman world domination, not the birthing of human beingness, or co-creating peace on earth.
Although some of today's Christians see their god as a loving father, the Bible clearly shows that their patriarch is a murderous, pro-slavery, vacillating, petty, racist, conditional god. They say their god is omnipotent, yet if we have "free will," how can that be? How can their god do whatever he likes, regardless of whatever we like? Why was I, and all bastard children, denied access to heaven (Deut. 23:2)? How can God's omnipotence and human free will exist at the same time? They claim that their god has causal powers, yet source, as will be shown, is causeless. Their god is outside themselves in some sort of multiple dimensionality, whereas source is dimensionless. Their god is a reflection of fear and hope, yet source's presence is changelessly in the now. Their scriptures say that sin is real; however, source's reality is one of peace; thus sin is not even considered. Their god demands worship, obedience, and prayers. Yet for those who genuinely seek peace, the notion of such attributes in a god does not exist.
The Abrahamic-rooted Christian god is, by all evidence, a supernatural concept invented and reinvented within the evolution of our ancestors. Simply looking at the progressive names for God gives an idea of how this pernicious myth developed. The first Hebrew god was Elohim, a plural word, meaning gods. In the Bible, it is used roughly 2,570 times. For example, "Elohim said, 'Let us make man in our image' " (Gen. 1:26); "Elohim said, 'Behold, man has become one of us' " (Gen 3:22)"Let us go down and confound them" (Gen 11:17); "Who will go for us?" (Isaiah 6:8). The singular of Elohim, which is El or Eloah, appears 226 and 57 times, respectively. The first time a singular god is revealed in the Bible is in Exodus 6:2-8.
Evangelical apologists come up with interesting reasons why the word god is plural hundreds of times in the Bible, for example, by suggesting that the verbs nearby are singular. What these apologists seldom care to share is that what they call the Old Testament was oral tradition until the Common Era, and it wasn't included in their canonized Bible until the tenth century CE, during the Church-sponsored Dark Ages. In other words, singular-thinking writers transcribed those singular verbs after hundreds of years of oral tradition.
Religion and its accompanying beliefs are too important for Humanity to blindly submit to in such lockstep. Could there possibly be one thing regarding what someone so intimately pivots his or her life upon that shouldn't be honestly questioned? When will we admit that truth is not created or invented; it's uncovered. If a god were true, it would have been uncovered and clearly understood in our daily lives. No Bodhisattva who has uncovered enlightenment has ever uncovered a god with it. No Bodhisattva who has uncovered enlightenment ever hid the truth from those seeking it. But because God was invented, and thus not true, god(s) can only be defined through the condition of faith. Like Christian love, the Christian god is founded on conditions. The Christian god is a cause-and-effect-driven creator, yet the source of who we are does not create, for creation implies that time-a before and an after, a past and a future, fear and hope-is real. Source is in the now, the present instant. There is no instant in time, conditions, or beliefs. Source is timeless. The time of duality is forever changing: energy, neither created nor destroyed, being manifested into something else. Quantumly speaking, creation is simply a perception of a projection. From the now's point of view, source travels no distance in no time, thus has no need of space or time. No god is required for the universe's perceived existence. Natural laws arising from the nine-planed optic matrix within which this dream continues is enough to explain the illusion of our world.
I clung to an indoctrinated monotheistic viewpoint in various forms until the summer solstice of 1999, when unexpectedly, through a fuller realization of light, came the awareness that there is no god beyond belief. In other words, understanding light is the evidence and proof that no god(s), as presented in the Abrahamic religions and defined in English language dictionaries, exist(s). By light, I am not speaking of 1 John's apology that says that the Christian "God is light, and in him is no darkness." I am also not speaking of the duality of photon particles and their waves, which are merely manifestations of the simulated, divided light projected from the still, causeless fulcrum through which duality effects its motion upon the holographic-like screen that we call reality. Understanding light exposes the source of us. From the point of view of source, there is no god(s). Like the conceptual attributes of God, there is no energy in, or of, source. Energy, as you will also see below, is a product of the perceived separation from source. When scientists stop glorifying the illusion of energy and creation, perhaps they will come to realize what light really is. Yes, in duality, E = mc2, but to realize enlightenment, we must understand that mc2 < c.
Belief in a god is one of the last barriers to awareness, and this belief is a significant obstacle to peace. The last emancipation will be a letting go of the "one-based" monotheistic philosophy of our ancestors. The idea of a supernatural Supreme Being needs to fade away onto some back walls of local museums as soon as possible, if humanity is going to take its next step in evolution. To realize that reality quickly, we must begin as soon as possible to divest religion's words from our vocabulary. Religion and its propagators use words to disempower, distract, and disconnect us from the now. By now, I mean that which is neither in the past nor in an anticipated future. We can indeed cease feeding the distraction and disempowerment of those religion-based words. Words such as faith and those associated with faith have dense vibrational patterns that limites both our sapiential and sciential capacity to discern wholly. Consequently, the use of these words suppresses our direct relationship with source. Remember, the people whom we encounter are reflections of the vibrational pattern that we radiate. By using and identifying with religious words, we maintain barriers through which our life force must filter through, so our true self is not reflected back to us because it was not clearly given or expressed from us to begin with. By using and identifying with religious words, what is presented in the mirror is the reflection of religious beliefs, the veils that cover us, not our authentic selves. For example, put a flashlight to the palm of your hand. Filtered through the hand, the light is no longer bright, but merely dim and reddish. When we present this hand to a mirror, it has no choice but to reflect back to us that very same dimness. Yet our unveiled selves are more brilliant than a thousand stars.
In 1995, at Stanford University, physicists made two particles of matter by supercharging a trillion-watt laser through a linear accelerator. If they had access to all of our sun's power in one spot, there might have been enough power to make one ounce of matter. Thus, it would take more than a thousand stars to make the physical mass of a person. Even then, we are much grander than our physical vehicles.
Identifying and letting go of the language that fosters religions' deleterious agendas is intrinsically a pro-freedom activity. In the West, freethinkers such as Thomas Paine, the father of the North American Revolution with the British, and the person who coined the term United States of America, often spoke of the insidiousness of Christian scripture. Thomas Jefferson, another U.S. founding father, said, "The day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus will be classed with other fables." Jefferson insisted, "Religion is a matter that lies solely between man and his belief." Both of these gentleman and many others have encouraged a primacy of a very high wall of separation between any religious faith and a Constitutional sectarian government. The American Revolution guerrilla leader Ethan Allen was even said to have stopped his own wedding until the presiding judge affirmed that "God" referred to Nature and not to the god of the Bible.
However, since the Joseph McCarthy Era, during the post-World War II years, Christianity has infiltrated nearly every aspect of the United States government, trimming that wall of separation into a small hedge, which now, inescapably, allows their beliefs to pollute our everyday environment with its virulent, theocratic moralistic views. These views may have all the good intentions of its faithful, yet that does not reduce the irrationality of the superstition or diminish the threat to the nation of my birth from that faith's agenda for a monotheistic, theocratic government.
The U.S. Constitution is not a body of laws that evolves at the whim of the majority. Many Christians, however, in their pursuit of a Christian theocracy, not only preach that religion plays a vital role in holding society together, but also that the nations founding fathers would have wanted God in the public square. The facts are clearly the opposite. Most of the U.S. founders had a deep disgust for Christianity and its god. Their creator, although not specifically defined, was certainly not the god of the Bible. If Charles Darwin had been born in 1709 instead of 1809, the word creator probably would not have appeared in the Declaration of Independence.
In my American nation, the symbols of Christianity are being forced upon its citizens everywhere. "In God We Trust" was adopted as the new national motto and added to currency in 1956. Could there be a more irreverent homage to the portraits of Jefferson, Franklin, Lincoln and Washington than putting an invocation to the Christian god next to them on coins and currency? Every dollar I use is an advertisement for the Judeo-Christian religion. Other offensive pseudo-patriotic slogans exclaim "God Bless America" on public mass-transit vehicles and even in post offices. These signs further erode any semblance of a separation between church and state, promoting instead the propaganda of a theocratic government. The majority of the U.S. citizenry, who are inflicted with the Christian meme, not only think that the government's endorsement of their monotheistic religion is acceptable, but also that it's honorable for them to inhibit and deprive freethinkers, pantheists, atheists, spiritual nontheists, deists, polytheists, Wiccan, etc., of their liberty and full membership in this American nation. Most of these Christians even think that their majority status gives them the right to oppress and offend nonadherents to their faith.
They espouse public prayer, the election of politicians who claim that God called them, annoyingly express their "God bless"-ing of everything, and advocate an evangelical agenda to legalize what is Constitutionally illegal. They believe that it is their Christian duty and mission to indoctrinate others with the falsities to which they cling. In that process, what has become lost is the reality that the United States of America is one nation under a Constitution, not under a god and certainly not under their neo-Christian groupthink.
The fact is, "The Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded upon the Christian religion." That declaration was drafted in 1796 under George Washington, unanimously ratified by the U.S. Senate, and signed into law by President John Adams on June 10, 1797. And even though that document, less than two pages long, was read aloud in Congress without dissension and well-publicized at the time, there were no complaints, and there was no public outcry, as would be media-ted today. Before the testimonium clause is this paragraph of ratification and proclamation, published in several national newspapers of the time:
"Now be it known, That I John Adams, President of the United States of America, having seen and considered the said Treaty do, by and with the advice and consent of the Senate, accept, ratify, and confirm the same, and every clause and article thereof. And to the End that the said Treaty may be observed and performed with good Faith on the part of the United States, I have ordered the premises to be made public; And I do hereby enjoin and require all persons bearing office civil or military within the United States, and all others citizens or inhabitants thereof, faithfully to observe and fulfill the said Treaty and every clause and article thereof" (p. 383).
The people of that era knew well that Article VI of the U.S. Constitution said: "This Constitution, and the Laws of the United States which shall be made in Pursuance thereof; and all Treaties made, or which shall be made, under the Authority of the United States, shall be the supreme Law the Land." The people of that time wrote Article VI of the Constitution. Despite that indisputable event, Christian revisionists continue to media-te their faithful towards the reactionary side or the far right of even an appearance of religious neutrality. The past sixty years have shown that they have been quite successful in forcing their theo-beliefs on the common citizenry. They cleverly removed the original national motto, E Pluribus Unum, "out of many, one," which was coined by Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and John Adams, from U.S. currency and public places. They successfully proselytize that the U.S. was founded as "One Nation under [their] God" and one nation under their religion. However, the historic truth is, according to people such Herman C. Weber, DD, an expert in religious censuses and statistics, that few early Americans were members of a Christian church. In the 1933 Yearbook of American Churches, for instance, it says that just 6.9% of U.S. citizens belonged to a church in 1800. By 1850, religious membership had risen to 15.5%. By 1900, Christians had doubled their percentage to 37%. However, not until 1942 did Christian affiliation exceed 50% of the U.S. population.
Few people realize that in 1850, only about one percent of Irish-Americans attended church. But as anti-Catholic bias grew and the Anglos tormented the new Irish immigrants, the Vatican ordered all parishes to provide schools so that Irish-Americans would have a sense of community. By the late 1880s, church attendance among the Irish is said to have grown six-fold. In nineteenth-century North America, an Irishman was treated less favorably than a Negro. Hate is religions favorite fuel.
In 1954, the U.S. Congress, in direct violation of the First Amendment, began to secure the presence of Christianity's monotheistic God in government. For example, pressured by McCarthy-era hysteria and Christian groups such as the Knights of Columbus, the Pledge of Allegiance went from a patriotic oath declaring liberty and justice for all, to a religious invocation through the insertion of the words "under God." This made the Pledge of Allegiance into a Judeo-Christian prayer advocating, as the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court ruled in 2002, "an impermissible government endorsement of religion [that] sends a message to unbelievers that they are outsiders, not full members of the political community, and an accompanying message to adherents that they are insiders, favored members of the political community." What was America's response to the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court? Kill those liberal judges!
It is now time to get religion out of the state. It is time for Christians to start rendering to the United States of America what is the United States of America's, in compliance with Matthew 22:21. It is time to remove "In God We Trust" from currency, and public places. It's time to remove me, and other pro-Constitution Americans, from this "We" that these Christians promote. As long as a nation allows its government to endorse monotheism, that nation will be a divided nation, and the world as a whole will be suppressed, disempowered, and disconnected.
The United States was established through common law. On February 10, 1814, Thomas Jefferson wrote that common law is that system of law, which was introduced by the Saxons on their settlement in England . . . about the middle of the fifth century. But Christianity was not introduced till the seventh century. . . We may safely affirm that Christianity neither is, nor ever was, a part of the common law.
Christian values are not American values. Christian values are not nature's values. Christian values can never lead the world towards an era of peace.
The United States is a secular nation, a nation whose founding principles arose from freethought and deism, not evangelism and theism. The U.S. was designed to be a guiding model for the world. Yet Christians (with their legally protected and privileged superstition) fail to realize that their First Commandment is in direct opposition to the United States Constitution's First Amendment. In fact, for the most part, their Ten Commandments are everything that the U.S. Constitution is not. Christian values are inherently un-American and unnatural values. Christianity needs immediate marginalization, such as its addition to the NC-17 laws, along with cigarettes, alcohol, and pornography. That is to say, no children under 17 should be allowed in or exposed to faith-based environments. There should not be a single religious school for children in the U.S., especially tax exempt one's, that indoctrinate our youth into the ignorant and superstitious beliefs of hollowness.
Wherever we see Christians polluting our environment through burning Harry Potter books and other literature, we should gather for huge Bible collections to compost their un-American literature. Wherever we see their crosses of suffering polluting our environmental landscape, we should send letters asking for its removal. The need for suffering is a delusion. We need to employ constructive, creative tension to produce an environment that nurtures peace and the liberation from suffering.
To alter the division that has become the United States and which this theocratic agenda has perpetrated upon the world, we need to explore immediate redress. At the top of the list should be the swift reversal of the current constitutionally illegal Christianized national motto, "In God We Trust," which replaced "E Pluribus Unum." In its place could be the motto "In Love We Trust." As Christians think that their god is love, it shouldn't be too difficult to persuade them that it's in the best interest of the U.S. and the world to change the national motto to a less offensive, more inclusive wording. Whenever they hear or say "love," they can think of their god. That's much more palatable than to have pro-Constitutional Americans, many whom are not Christian, being forced to hear, say, or swear to monotheistic concepts, which Thomas Paine would say was an outrage to common sense. Fortunately, I have never had to be a witness in a courtroom. However, if I were, and if I were asked to swear to their god on their Bible, the presiding judge might declare me in contempt because of my laughter. It would be like swearing to Bobby Henderson's Flying Spaghetti Monster.
The U.S. Founding Fathers, including George Washington, abhorred the "age of Ignorance and Superstition" imposed upon humanity by Christianity. However, the time has arrived to for the U.S. to realize the ideal of Annuit coeptis, Novis ordo seclorum, by finishing the pyramid on the Great Seal, as seen on the one dollar bill, both before and after its desecration by "In God We Trust." It is time for my nation to ascend, and lead a new order beyond ignorance and superstition, into an era of human beingness, peace and love. Time for an emancipated United States of America to be first nation in history to "Trust in Love."