Archive for the ‘Religion’ Category
Taking off from, and expanding on, a number of ideas found in the works of Timothy Freke & Peter Gandy, I’ll be posting a number of concepts and theories for consideration.
Freke & Gandy have done an excellent job in their books “The Jesus Mysteries” and “Jesus and the Lost Goddess,” but, as we have found again and again, without both the scientific background of cosmic catastrophe we have uncovered via hints from the Cassiopaeans, and the more esoteric background concerning hyperdimensional realities, again, via explication by the Cs, most of what gets written about these matters tends to not cover some of the most essential issues. I hope to bridge these gaps here.
So, let us begin.
For thousands of years, human beings have grappled with the Mystery of Life. The legends tell us that during a Golden Age, mankind KNEW the secrets and lived a blessed life in communion with the gods until some terrible thing happened and the gods withdrew leaving man in darkness, more or less. This may be an allegorical myth AND a literal description of cosmic events. As above, so below. I’ve covered another aspect of this in the upcoming issue of the Dot Connector so those interested in the topic will want to get this issue.
Over 2,000 years ago, there was, at the time, a wide ranging Gnostic tradition that flourished among all the cultures of the ancient world. These cosmopolitan Pagan civilizations had been trading, conquering and synthesizing with each other for centuries. Plato had described the peoples of the Mediterranean as “frogs around a small pond.” Then, along came Alexander the Great who transformed that world into essentially one culture.
The Gnostic tradition had a common mystical philosophy and they all were trying to go beyond literal religions. Among some Jewish Gnostics, a school of thought began to form in Alexandria, Egypt, and it is they who synthesized the Jewish and Pagan mythology, producing rather distinctive variations on the more ancient forms.
This approach was, from the beginning, contaminated by certain elements that allowed it to be easily distorted. Those familiar with Ponerology can understand those elements as the work of schizoidal psychopaths. Those elements were present in the Jewish literature – a schizoidal take on writing history after the model of Herodotus – and this was blended with the purer, Pagan Gnosticism. This hybrid form eventually came to be known as Christianity.
Under the influence of the cosmopolitan Greek world, certain Jewish mystics sought to find greater depth in the Jewish “history” that had been produced. As an aside, there are those who say that this literature was produced to be intentionally initiatory, but the facts do not support that thesis. The allegedly historical Israel was created to support the agenda of a religious priesthood-clique seeking power and it was necessary to gather support from the masses and thus, the fake history of Israel was produced from many tribal tales and legends, genealogies created and added in order to show that a very disparate group were really “one”, and voila! Instant ancient history leading all the way back to god himself!
Getting back to the Jewish mystics who aspired to Gnosis, the Jewish Gnostics pored over their “history,” declared it to be mystical allegory, and claimed to be inheritors of secret mystical teachings passed down from their own great Gnostic master, Moses. They actually went further than that: they claimed that the great Pagan philosophers had originally received their wisdom from Moses and that all other intellectual advances were thanks to the Jews. This view has come under increasing criticism as more and more researchers discover that things were actually the other way around: the Jews borrowed many myths from other cultures, re-worked them as history which they saw as doing things one better than the originals.
However, in a world that came to be dominated by this Jewish version of history, many things are obscured and incomprehensible due to the simple fact that this single element – that the Jews stole the history of others and claimed to have it all first – is not factored into our view of our past.
It is not likely that these early Jewish Gnostics realized that the slow-acting poison of schizoidia was already incorporated into the history that they now proposed to study as allegory. Of course it was very much allegory because it originated as the myths of other peoples!
So, in their re-working and re-combining of the Pagan and Jewish materials, these Alexandrian Jewish Gnostics did not realize that they had included the poison of the schizoid in their system – they were simply trying to explore reality in a particular context and were just trying to “get closer to god,” so to say, in a context that was acceptable to their social milieu.
At the beginning, they were not known as Christians; they were probably known as the Therapeutae and the Essenes which the Jewish Gnostic, Philo, described as two branches of a single school of philosophy. They honored not only their alleged own master, Moses, they also followed the great Pagan philosopher, Pythagoras whose disciples had set up communities throughout the Pagan world. The Jewish historian, Josephus, tells us that the Essenes were comparable to the Pythagoreans. Philo, the Jewish Gnostic, was known as “the Pythagorean.” He describes the Therapeutae as practicing a contemplative life which is also what the Pythagoreans did. He tells us that their wisdom came from Greece. The Greeks, of course, said that it came from Egypt. If one has studied the works of Iman Wilkens, (Where Troy Once Stood), one might be aware that the land called Egypt was originally located in Northwst France and it was only after the conquest of Alexander the Great that the land we now know as Egypt was called Egypt. So, when one reads of ancient Egyptian mysteries, one must be very careful to consider exactly what this may mean.
Anyway, back to our Therapeutae and Pythagoreans: The Cynic school of Pagan Gnosticism called their tradition “The Way.” The Therapeutae called their tradition “The Way” also. The 4th century Christian historian, Eusebius claimed that the Therapeutae were the first followers of his “historical Jesus Christ.” The problem with this is that Philo’s description of the Therapeutae was written before the time that the historical Jesus was supposed to have lived. However, Eusebius may have been right in one sense: the Therapeutae and the Essenes may very well have created the Christian Myth of Jesus.
The Jewish Gnostics synthesized the myths from Genesis and Exodus with the works of Plato (Timaeus), and Pagan myths of the dying and resurrecting god (which were originally something else, as we will see) to create the Jesus story.
According to these Jewish Gnostics, Genesis was supposed to encode the descent of the soul into physical incarnation. The Exodus was interpreted as a myth encoding the “way back to god.” That is, the Jewish exodus from Egypt was interpreted by the Jewish Gnostics as stages of initiation and return. Combined with the Dying God myth (Moses dies before entering the Promised Land and is resurrected as Joshua), and voila! You have the most influential myth of our civilization.
Basic Structure of Exodus and the Jesus Story as Initiation Allegories as presented by Freke & Gandy:
Initiation Process Exodus Jesus Story
Purification: Crossing the Red Sea – Baptism by John
Death of the Old Self: Death of Moses – Crucifixion
Gnosis: Promised Land/Joshua – Resurrection
The next question is: what happened to the Jesus Myth as a MYTH? How did it become history?
© The Dot Connector Magazine
This article was first published in The Dot Connector Magazine, official publication of Sott.net.
When you think of Halloween, what is the first image that comes to mind? I took a little informal poll among my friends, family and associates. Guess what image came in first? Jack-o-lanterns! Bet you thought I was going to say “witches”. Well, I sure thought it would be witches, but they only came in a close second!..
When I think of Halloween, i think of grade-school art projects where we cut out silhouettes of witches to paste onto large yellow moons made of construction paper. The witch was always on a broom with her black dress flying in the wind, accompanied by a black cat sitting on the back of the broom. I wondered even then how the cat managed to stay on and why anybody would think that straddling a broomstick as a seat would be even remotely comfortable.
But, there you have it: in a significant way, Halloween is associated with witches, evil women who consort with the devil and do evil things like caging lost children to fatten them up and eat them, giving poisoned apples and setting up spinning wheels to poison abandoned or hapless princesses who are only looking for true love. Read the rest of the article »
Dan Dennett talks about how religions in many cases offer a “gold-plated excuse to stop thinking” and that people have got to stop playing the “faith card” in debates.
From The Times
Rosemary Bennett and Ruth Gledhill
Harriet Harman has backed away from a confrontation with religious leaders over who they can employ, making clear that she will not force contentious amendments to the Equality Bill through Parliament.
Ministers were astonished on Monday when the Pope said that the Bill violated “natural justice” and urged bishops to fight it. But that attack, along with the strength of opposition in the Lords and the limited time left to get Bills passed before the election, has sapped the Government’s enthusiasm to continue the fight.
Ms Harman, the Equalities Minister, has been engaged in a long dispute with churches and religious organisations over their exemption from anti-discrimination employment law, and how it affects “non-religious” posts. Read the rest of the article »
The Lost Gospel: The Book of Q & Christian Origins, by Burton Mack – A Review
What does it mean to be a PaleoChristian?
To begin to answer this question, maybe it’s best to start with another: What does it mean to be a Christian? After all, a PaleoChristian is just another sort of Christian, right?
In trying to understand anything, it’s often helpful to read up on the history of it: an exploration of the past can give us a context in which to place the object of study, and therefore understand it better. Christianity is no exception to this general rule – in fact when it comes to Christianity, an exploration of its historical roots is probably of the most critical importance, since its adherents in the Church stake their claims to eternity on events that purportedly happened in history: the Incarnation, the Crucifixion, the Resurrection, the Descent of the Holy Spirit.
Where do these notions come from? For a modern Christian they are found, and enshrined in, the New Testament. So that’s an immediate focus for historical enquiry, and a book which might be found useful in articulating the history of the earliest strands of the New Testament is Burton Mack’s “The Lost Gospel” (1993). Mack’s book could be particularly helpful because it attempts to go further back in textual history than Matthew, Mark, Luke and John – hitherto the normal starting-point for historical enquiry into Jesus and the origins of the Church.
But first a digression.
Read the rest of the article »
A reader sent the latest ALTA Report (that Webbot thing that scans the net and extracts keywords, thereby sort of “predicting” future trends) to us and it was quite interesting.
Well, it’s REALLY long, and most of it talks about the coming financial collapse, and the collapse of the USA which will spread around the world more or less. After talking about some of the violent revolutionary movements that won’t really do any good, as well as numerous “karmic payback” events for the pathocrats that will leave people scratching their heads, there was one part that stuck out like a glowing peacock-blue thumb:
However nasty the [agents (of the elites)] will be in their [provocation (of the riots)], the [real resistance] will be coming from a [non-violent revolutionary SOC (self organizing collective)] that will be emerging over early 2010. Some of the strategies and tactics forecast to be employed by these R-SOC’s are quite brilliant, and well worth discussing, however no need to bring up details at this point, merely suffice it to say, that the R-SOC’s will [cripple] the [control systems] using the [control systems] against themselves. As noted, abso-f*cking-lutely brilliant. Not either/or, but both/and shall suffice.
Sound like any new Church you know?? Read the rest of the article »
An interesting blog post was recently brought to my attention by one of our members:
I urge you to read it carefully because there actually is a lot of meat there to think about. But, I wish the author had some more data because his presentation leaves a lot to be desired.
For example, he doesn’t consider that the ability to dissociate/tune in to other levels of consciousness is evolutionarily stable in an environment where psychopaths do not exist. But, introduce psychopaths, and they take advantage of that in all the ways he describes. People are terrified by the psychopaths, and then the psychopaths come along and offer bogus solutions!
I doubt the guy would even be open to consider a religion based on science because “religion” has such a bad reputation. Read the rest of the article »
For those who are concerned about Health Reform in the U.S., members of the Fellowship can also opt out since it is against our religion. We believe in community support and if any member has overwhelming health issues, they should contact the Church Elders. See the following article for more details. Read the rest of the article »
As many of my readers know, I spend a LOT of time reading and writing about religion. I have some favored authors: Philip Davies, Giovanni Garbini, Niels Peter Lemche, Thomas Thompson, John Van Seters, KeithWhitelam (the Copenhagen school), certainly Mircea Eliade, Joseph Campbell, Georges Dumezil, and – the subject of today’s post – Burton Mack.
Like others who have read it, when I finished reading Mack’s “The Lost Gospel,” something broke inside me and, in my opinion, it was a good thing. Finally I saw: Duuuuuh! I had been examining religion – everything, for that matter – from inside the Western cultural mindset conditioned by my Christian upbringing.
Just so you know, “The Lost Gospel” is a very matter-of-fact book with some boring patches, so I wasn’t prepared for the effect it had on me, the sudden eye-opening, the jarring awake, the realization that even atheists in Western culture are atheists in the context of Judao-Christianity! It was the damnedest thing I’ve ever seen when my eyes opened to this contextual problem of our perception. There was a killer passage in “The Lost Gospel” that finally cut the umbilicus:
“Christians seldom assess their world by making a direct comparison with the gospel story. Instead, as with all cultures and their myths, coded formulations reduce the mythic mode to attitudes, gestures, and cliches for negotiating the everyday world. A partial list of adjectives that express Christian mentality can illustrate the point. Christians grant privilege to personal performances and events that are unique, dramatic, original, charismatic, miraculous, radical, transformational, and apocalyptic. All else is considered banal by comparison. [...] With the gospels in place, one might note, the symbols for solving critical problems are a vicarious crucifixion at the beginning and an apocalyptic destruction at the end. Both coalesce in a meditation on destructive violence and creative transformation. The Jesus of Q hardly stands a chance of being recognized within this symbolic world.” [Mack, The Lost Gospel, p. 250]
All our lives we are dominated by a sense of what is “right and true” based on the Bible. That is true even for those who claim they have rejected the Bible as the foundation of religion. Most of them are still crypto-Christians. So, in a world of Fanatical Christians and crypto-Christians where we can’t even accurately analyze where we have been and how we got there, what hope do we have of coming to any sort of objective assessment of where we are and where we need to go? Read the rest of the article »
In our confused and degraded world, where religion has lost its way (if it ever had it), there are many negative reactions to the words “religion” and “church” – understandably so. Most of the objections to organized religion can be made against science as well. Mainstream organized science is structurally just as corrupted and co-opted as mainstream organized religions. In each case there is a long, concerted effort to coerce members of their community into dogmatic attitudes. Those who do not accept the official dogma at face value, and raise uncomfortable questions are dealt with in a similar manner: attacked, ridiculed, ostracized and rendered powerless.
But, as is usually the case, we are faced with the situation of throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Just because science has been perverted, controlled, and manipulated to only serve the very narrow interests of a self serving elite, namely for applications as weapons against the rest of humanity, does not make science “bad” or unacceptable as a means to a better understanding of ourselves and our world that can be applied for completely different purposes. Read the rest of the article »
