It’s a couple days after the Ides of March, which would really have been the logical day to put this out, but I’ve been a bit tied up this week with family matters. I considered releasing it on a Sunday but felt that would be overly cheeky. I wrote the first three chapters of this series several months ago, and I suspect that many of you won’t have read them yet. Without them you’ll probably be a bit lost with this essay.
Mar 17, 2023·edited Mar 17, 2023Liked by John Carter
I feel much the same about Christianity, as I was first raised Lutheran and then after my mother became "born-again", a series of evangelical churches, one verging on a cult. I walked away at 14, alienated from the sheep-like adults and their petty tyrant children (who weren't also sheep.)
I agree too, much of what ails America is a spiritual sickness. Dropped in a meaningless void is not a recipe for mental health. Nothing about modernity is designed for health, physical or mental. Maybe your notion about Caesar has merit. I have wondered at times, will something wholly new be birthed in the America's. Not wholly new, necessarily, but something distinctly America? On that I wonder about the European magical traditions, folk magic here, and something birthed out of the land.
If the hypothesis is true, then it could help to realign the Christian spiritual tradition with the full breadth of the European story, without requiring belief in fairy tales that too many find unconvincing. Whether that on its own is sufficient I doubt - a real Christian spiritual revival will take quite a bit more, I think. But I think whatever comes next needs to somehow unify the modern with the most ancient, without discarding or doing disservice to that which has happened between.
If there is a "second religiosity" in the late decline and chaos of America and Western Civilization, it is most likely it will lean Christian, as that is what is known, in which case your recreating the Christ myth has merit. If there is any truth to my notion of a religion for the America's, that is probably much further down the line, and would likely come after the birth of a wholly new civilization.
Akshully, the Mormon thing was based in England initially. The Jews told Cromwell all the stuff about the lost tribe of Israel in America and so on which were then picked up by Joseph Smith and codified centuries later. Seems that there was a strand of proto-Mormon thinking in the colonies for several centuries.
For me, the Gospel of Mark reads like somebody's college lecture notes. Matthew and Luke have more coherent narratives.
The portion of the Bible I find to be most verifiably miraculous is the Law of Moses itself. The Law contains a recipe for something very akin to anarcho-capitalism. No jails. No standing armies. The only stated duties of the paid bureaucrats (the Levites) were ceremonial and enforcing some public health regulations.
The Law includes a welfare system which isn't dysgenic. Indeed, there is more Darwinism in the Old Testament than there is in our modern universities. The Biblical welfare system gives recipients plenty of incentive to get their acts back together. Ditto for property criminals.
The Law has some very interesting rules against rent-seeking, including some subtle points which Henry George and his followers miss bigly. The Jubilee law ensures a large supply of rednecks with a stake in protecting the nation. I vaguely recall a passage in Jeremiah indicating that the rich were holding onto their estates vs. ceding back rented land back to the people. You cannot stave off empires with professional soldiers. Judah fell. (And we are falling in part for a similar reason. Nixon changed farm policy in ways that did in most small family farms. We lack a sufficient number of rednecks to be a militia backed republic.)
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There are few historical examples of societies which successfully mixed civilization and something resembling anarcho-capitalism. David Friedman cites Viking Iceland. Murray Rothbard cited medieval Ireland prior to conquest by the English. Both of these examples were islands. Israel during the time of the Book of Judges was surrounded by other nations.
I don't really dispute that the Mosaic law worked for the Israelites, at least for a time. Yet they were relative latecomers - our ancestors were building advanced, highly functional civilizations long before the Bible was written.
But how much freedom did those functional civilizations in the Middle East have? Lot's of god-emperors in my readings of ancient history.
Yes, the Greeks had republics and other forms of accountable government. And the ancient Germanic people had a degree of democracy -- at least before they got too civilized.
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I find it interesting to see the prices some cultures pay for making mods to the Law. The Law calls for land to be passed down by male line, with the eldest getting a double share.
Medieval Europe often gave the eldest the entire share. This was core to feudalism.
If land inheritance goes to both sons and daughters, then you get married couples owning disconnected pieces of land. I vaguely recall that some of the American Indians have trouble with this, with pieces of land being owned by too many people for anyone to do anything. I believe Haiti has the same problem. I've also seen it written that parts of the Islamic world practice cousin marriage to a great extent in order to keep property together.
Then, of course, we have the practice of letting land be simply bought and sold outright. This has great flexibility, but it has also led to a rather fractured society, and many people are landless while billionaires like Bill Gates get to invest in land in great quantity.
The Middle Eastern civilizations have very little to do with Europe - the Persians and Hittites, I suppose, being exceptions. By and large, the Greeks, Germans, Scythians, Gauls, Celts, Scandinavians, and Romans were all fiercely independent, freedom-loving peoples.
Then of course there's Russell Gmirkin's research, which demonstrates that the Hebrew Bible was likely forged in Alexandria and is based almost entirely on Hellenistic literature, Platonic political philosophy, and Greek law. If Gmirkin is correct, all of those useful features of the Mosaic law actually came from the Greeks, and were merely filtered through the Hebrews.
Mar 18, 2023·edited Mar 18, 2023Liked by John Carter
The Persians and Hittites were of Indo-European ancestry, but the vigour of their civilization derived from the fact that their ancestors had conquered, destroyed and rebuilt older civilizations that had pioneered urban life, literacy, science, architecture and monumental art.
The only part of Europe to develop a serious civilization in antiquity, the Greeks, did so on the ruins of the pre-Indo-Europeans of the Aegean (the Myceneans and the Pelasgians). In much the same way the Indo-Europeans in India built their civilisation on the ruins of older Dravidian cities. There was clearly a creative dialectic at work between barbarism and urbanity even in very early times.
Barbarians do best when they conquer civilised people and adapt whatever is available to hand. The Mongols in Persia, the Normans in Sicily, the Goths and Lombards in northern Italy mixed barbarian vigour with the refinement and acuity of urbane and polished peoples. Barbarism looks thrilling and life-affirming on a streaming service but I'll take the Normans in Palermo over the savagery of Scandinavian hillbillies any day. Just my POV.
The Hellenes would certainly have agreed with this. Straight barbarism lacks anything of the higher developments of which the human soul is capable. But too much civilization saps the vitality necessary to reach those heights. A balance between the two is essential, but its very dynamism makes such a balancing act intrinsically unstable. In the long run the Greeks too became decadent.
Freedom loving in some ways. The Indo Europeans weren't so much into elevating kings into god-emperors.
But the Romans had a slave population of something like 40%, if memory serves. The Spartans likely higher. I've seen a 40% slave rate for the pre-Norman Saxon kingdoms as well.
Hebrew law called for liberating all male slaves every seven years. (Female slaves were basically wives.) This might explain the popularity of Judaism among lower class Greeks before the time of Jesus. (Greeks who found the man-boy love thing to be gross might also have found Judaism to be appealing.)
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The idea that the Old Testament was based on Hellenic literature contracts your earlier complaints about the alienness of Hebrew scripture to your Indo European soul. It also contradicts your complaint about the bad organization.
A better case could be made for Babylonian and Persian influences.
But before accepting even those, let's keep in mind that there is a version of the Hebrew scripture in a dead Semitic language. That would be a pretty huge retcon. Moreover, there are some later Hebrew scriptures which are not found in old Hebrew. Those are the books found in the Apocrypha. The Protestant churches removed the Apocrypha from the Bible. I think this was a mistake. The Apocryphal Wisdom of Solomon provides a very interesting bridge between Old and New Testament thought -- especially regarding the afterlife.
The Pharisees believed that death is sleep, and that there will be a resurrection of the dead. This belief differs entirely from both Greek and Egyptian notions. (I don't know what the Babylonians or Persians believed.)
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For anyone curious enough to want to see the New Testament from a very different angle, try this: think of the Law of Moses as a constitution, and Jesus as a Ron Paul type of figure. Just as we have a couple of centuries of judicial precedent separating us from our constitution, the Jews had many more few centuries of precedent, interpretation, and casuistry separating them from the Law of Moses. These are the "traditions of man" that Jesus criticized and intentionally flouted.
Also note that these precedents were preserved as an oral tradition.. Writing them down was still considered to be a blasphemous adding to the Law. This explains why Jesus took on the legal scholars of his day while simultaneously saying that not one jot or tittle of the Law will fail until the planet is replaced.
(Those oral traditions were later written down in the talmud.)
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I am not claiming that the view above encompasses the entirety of Jesus' message. But it was a significant part.
But it's important to realize that Jesus was not criticizing the Pharisees for obeying the Law of Moses. He was criticizing them for warping the Law.
A little correction about "the Romans had a slave population of something like 40%": that was pathological.
Original Res Publica was a Jeffersonian Democracy (duh! Ol' Tommy copycat it!), it was the Yanke...I mean the Second Worl...sorry, the Second Punic war that broke the yeom...i mean the roman small landowner back through a mix of longer draft and immigrat...sorry slave imports.
In fact, there is little to no difference between the Gracchi and US Free Landers.
"The idea that the Old Testament was based on Hellenic literature contracts your earlier complaints about the alienness of Hebrew scripture to your Indo European soul. It also contradicts your complaint about the bad organization."
Not really. There's the aesthetic component, which is a large part of why I was unmoved by the OT. If Gmirkin is right, and it's largely a pastiche of previous sources passed off as a translation, there's no reason the pastiche should be as good as the original. They usually aren't. It's also getting filtered through a foreign sensibility, and will therefore carry that stamp regardless of the ultimate origin.
I'm not sure where I complained about bad organization? (Which I'm interpreting to mean social organization, let me know if I misunderstood).
By organization, I mean how the text is very disorganized, not how society was organized. The Old Testament does feel like some committee stapled scraps of surviving texts together -- like would happen after a catastrophic die-off, an enslavement, or a sacking of the library.
BTW, an Anglican church is a terrible place to pick up an appreciation of the Law of Moses. The Old Testament readings in the Book of Common Prayer focus on prophecies relating to the New, and the New Testament readings emphasize separation from the Old.
As a teenager, I got better lessons in Old Testament Law reading Robert Heinlein's science fiction than I got in church.
Well, the order of service was pretty inspiring before they dumbed down the prayer book in the 1970s. And the early Anglican church did a good job of translating Latin hymns into English.; there are still some really good hymns in the Episcopal hymnal, hymns with proper voice leading. But, alas, most Episcopal churches have shrunk down to they point where they cannot form a choir of people capable of singing in four part harmony.
According to Garrison Keillor, the Roman Catholic Church did a terrible rush job when they switched from Latin to local languages, and from choir to congregational singing. My brief experience with modern Catholicism (attending a funeral) matched Keillor's description: truly monotonous melodies that are easy to sing, but who wants to?
I attended a Latin mass once, and found it to be a very different experience from what I'm used to - quite engaging and inspiring, in fact. A real contrast with the dull plodding of the modern service. It's entirely possible that my sour evaluation of the church as a child was largely due to the absence of anything numinous in the liturgy or ritual.
Mar 18, 2023·edited Mar 18, 2023Liked by John Carter
The tawdry origins of the Henrician reformation are not a serious objection of any sort. Nothing venerable or useful in this world ever developed from pristine or grand sources. Nothing. The embarrassing, conflicted or absurd sources of our institutions and beliefs is less important than what we do with them (a point one could make in regard to both OT and NT). The Anglicans pioneered a civilised and humane established religion that served the English exceptionally well. The Anglicans of the 17th c. did more than anyone on the planet to give us the scientific revolution.
They did much good with it, yes, but I have to admit that as a child, finding that the origin of the Anglican church was the king's desire for a divorce was less than inspiring.
Fair enough, but the Tudor era was amazing. The depth of culture, ambition, and achievement of Renaissance England takes your breath away. The upstarts of the newly empowered Tudor elite showed us all how it should be done.
I'll not make any apologies for the fierce pride I take in my Anglo heritage. The England of the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, and the industrial age created the modern world.
I suspect that if it was not for the total collapse of morale following the wars of the 20th century and the resulting crumbling of the empire, I would not be so critical of the Anglican church. But the church I was born into was not the church of the 19th century.
The laws in the Torah differ greatly from Islamic law..
The Jews of New Testament times had built up a huge body of precedents and traditions by the time Jesus taught. These, not the Torah itself, were what Jesus was criticizing. See my inner comment above.
Nah, the Mitzahs and Sharia are virtually identical.
Paul preached quite vehemently against the law and so does Mark's Jesus. Matthew the Judaizer's Jesus preaches fulfillment of the law not rejection later on. I can see why you would get confused.
A lot of the reason for the Bible being boring is the modern translations sperg out on precision and is mealy-mouthed so as not to offend, murdering the transcendence and flow of the text. There's also a lot of symbolism and nuance in the text that is ignored because the Priests feel the need to dumb down the more mystic aspects and often don't understand it themselves. A good Priest could spend years going into the nuances of the story of Jonah, but they are mostly, simply put, boring uninterested people.
I get it, and will just add that any Christian group whose first reaction to a priestess is not laughter and derision has zero connection with the Christianity of the ancient world, let alone 100 years ago.
It's certainly possible that poor translation is at fault, although I find that tends to affect lyrical poetry more than prose. Still, the simple truth is I never felt particularly moved by the any of the bible stories, at a deep emotional level; whereas by contrast, I found many of the myths to be quite affecting.
In its written form Greek myth functions as an instrument for some kind of intuitive engagement with psychic experience. It is imaginative literature that offers insightful anecdotes about the psyche. The gods are the personification of particular personality types and for this reason have considerable resonance. And all personae (masks) derive from libidinal forces that exist within us all., hence their relevance and immediacy.
The Bible, on the other hand, tends to be vastly more elliptical (many of the parables have complicated allegories that are no longer properly understood) and cannot function in the same way. Much of the Bible was written to be apocryphal and is stuffed with word-play, possibly acrostics and mnemonic devices. Quite a few serious readers (Newton above all) have been convinced that much of the Bible is polysemic (multiple meanings) some of which were written for esoteric exposition. I find this persusive, though many would not.
Genesis & Exodus have some cracking good stories. The Gospels are fascinating, as is Acts; I had a hard time with Paul's letters as a teen, but have come back to them as an adult.
As always, the quality of translation varies widely; I had a college friend who learned classical Greek (i.e., the Greek of the Roman era) specifically so he could read the New Testament in the original.
I shared much the same feelings about bible. I grew up as an atheist. And was an atheist and a sceptic until my 30s.
Now I chose to believe in God. In higher force. and i also believe the Truth is accessible to each one from within. Truth can be found in many places. Including in Holy books. But they are not the source of it .
When I started being spiritual and looked at religions from a fresh perspective. There are tidbits of wisdom which could be found in Bible .
But the real gist is old testament ( torah basically). If you are jewish and read it as they do( and they do read, on chapter every week , completing in a year. And next year again) - its a very profound layer of identity and culture.
I have some Jewish blood. But not a lot. And its not my identity.
So I passed on that. i passed on other organized religions as well. Currently spiritually i am closer to vedic dzen Buddhism than to anything else.
I've said it before and I'll say it again, I'm sold. My only concern is that my Christian brothers and sisters might be more discomforted by this than my atheism.
True or not, it changes how I relate to it. Perhaps it changes how I relate most because it is at least plausible. I don't find the traditional narrative plausible. Not to say it isn't true, I just don't connect with it at all, perhaps for similar reasons as those you outlined.
Yes, it's the plausibilty that caught my attention as well. The other 'historical Jesus' hypotheses always struck me as unconvincing. If he was nothing but a charismatic street preacher, well those were a dime a dozen in those days, so why should a world religion have emerged from him?
Fascinating take on this theme, and extremely well written! I do think there's some great stuff in Psalms and Ecclesiastes (including ideas that seem to contradict traditional dogmas rooted in other parts of the Old Testament), and Paul is an incredible thinker and writer; but there is plenty of chaff among all those pages of scripture, especially in the Torah portion. The Gnostic idea about the OT god being a demon masquerading as the real God adds an interesting twist, though sometimes I wonder (half seriously) whether the Gnostics were demonically controlled opposition (their teachings seem to have been influential with some sketchy New Age/Human Potential types, and they seem to have attracted a similar crowd back in their own day). That said, I find myself going back to some of the ideas in the New Testament, including the gospels and Revelation, and thinking there are some deep insights about evil there, including strong indications that the devil is the god of this world, that demons routinely subvert good religious movements and turn them towards evil, that humans and their leaders are often the useful idiots of dark spiritual powers (including many religious leaders who have a reputation for being "godly"), etc. I'm still not sure what to make of that. Much of it rings true, but not in the way it is traditionally taught and understood in the church.
Anyway, you (and Rolo Slavskiyy and LP Koch) have given me some good food for thought! Thanks for that!
Yes, some of the psalms are quite lyrical, I agree. Although I find others rather beastly.
I think there's no question that the God of the OT and the NT are not the same entity. Indeed there's some suggestion that the OT God is itself several different entities throughout, El, Elohim, and YWHW being seemingly quite distinct.
Mar 18, 2023·edited Mar 18, 2023Liked by John Carter
The OT god-image was constructed over time incorporating influences from the various constituent elements of the Israelite federation. Some tribes were of Mesopotamian origin, others Canaanite and one most likely Egyptian. The NT god-image was constructed under wildly different social and cultural conditions.
Hellenistic civilisation was not about making the ancient world Greek, it was about incorporating North African and Asian cultures (Judaic and Indo-Iranian) into a Graeco-Roman imperium whose literate classes had only a confused and contradictory understanding of the peoples they had conquered.
The distinction between 'good' or 'bad' gods is a very modern one. Gods and demi-gods (angels) were rated by their power, not how nice or approachable or civil they were. Ancient peoples differentiated between those that were useful and those that weren't. Even the useful tutelary deities had extremely violent or erratic aspects. And religion was not about edification or logical consistency, but the regulation of conduct. Cult practice is beside the point, behaviour was/is all.
Ancient religion in Western Asia, North Africa and the Balkans grew out of fertility cults that practiced voodoo-style rites that involved spirit-possession. The gods were, quite literally, demons who possessed worshippers in trance-states. These cults got weakened and were suppressed as civilisation developed. Jungian psychiatry and neuroscience explain ancient beliefs very well.
As for the apparent demand/expectation that religion should simultaneously offer enchantment plus edification plus ethnic/tribal narcissism...everyone wants it all neatly packaged and congenial. De gustibus non est disputandum.
IMO gnosticism arose from apostatic, often denationalised, elements of the defeated peoples of Western Asia (above all Jews and Indo-Iranians) who were trying to account for the failure of their old tutelary gods to protect them from foreign subjugation in the Hellenistic era. In despair they explained the state of the world by redefining the failed gods as demonic or malefic and placing hope in a higher, extra-material, and unworldly deity more thoroughly removed from their affairs. In the ancient world the gods of neighbouring, rival, peoples had always been written off as demons, so gnosticism was an attempt to apply this approach to ancestral gods that were coming to be perceived as inadequate.
I'm not sure it's entirely true that the gods of other peoples were always seen as demonic. Very true in certain cases, eg the Roman view of the Nilotic deities or the Carthaginian Moloch. In other cases, equivalencies were drawn between native and foreign gods.
It certainly does seem to be the case that the apocalyptic messianism of 1st century Judea was driven by cope. Despite being the chosen people, they kept getting mogged by gentiles. Similar to how narcissists reconcile their inflated self-image with the conflicting evidence of their real world poor performance.
The gods of conquered/defeated people always get redefined as demons. In Western Asia the demonisation of rival gods was definitely a big thing from the Axial Age on...very evident in both ancient Iran and Israel.
I'll respond to both you and John both here. I looked in one of my books called The Gnostic Bible for a definition and it starts with this "The gnostics were religious mystics who proclaimed gnosis, knowledge, as the way to salvation. To know oneself truly allowed gnostic men and women to know god directly, without any need for the mediation of rabbis, priests, bishops, imams, or other religious officials. ... The historical roots of the gnostics reach back into the time of the Greeks, Romans, and Second Temple Jews. Some gnostics were Jewish, others Greco-Roman, and many were Christian. There were Mandaean gnostics from Irap and Iran; Manichaeans from Europs, the Middle East, North Africa, and all the way to China; Islamic gnostics in the Muslim world; and Cathars in western Europe. The heyday of their influence extends from the second century CE through the next several centuries. Their influence and their presence, some say, continue to the present day."
So the gnostics seem to be anyone taking a non-imperial, non-hierarchical approach to god (however that word is defined). What's become the official version of all religions is the god who validates the emperor, king, pope, Caesar, etc. Rather than saying the subjugated people demonized their own gods, wouldn't it make more sense that the most ruthless, violent and vicious who subjugated whole nations and races would invent a justifying theology?
I think one has to be quite careful here, not to be overly categorical. For example, in a contemporary context, the GAE neocons are a pack of vicious, bloodthirsty vampires. At the same time, organizations such as e.g. ISIS are morally repellent as well. OTOH, there are certainly some Islamic individuals and groups who have a more positive, virtuous orientation ... while at the same time, there are many within the belly of the Great Satan who do good work.
I suspect it was much the same in those times. Thus, there were certainly some gnostic groups that did good work, and others that were dangerous cults.
The first question to answer here is whether we believe empire and power over others is a good thing, if people like us are in charge. The answer to that question determines how we're going to view systems of imperialism, whether in religion or nations, and systems that reject all imperialism no matter who's in charge. I don't look at individuals as good or evil, I look at whether beliefs and systems empower some to have power over others or everyone to have power over themselves.
Indeed, precisely. One aspect worth noting is that archeological records (eg shipwrecks as a proxy to Mediterranean trade, animal bones as a proxy to per capita meat consumption) indicate that the material standard of living throughout the empire, from roughly 200 BC to 200 AD, was considerably better than either before or after. So, at least from that standpoint, there are advantages to empire.
An important factor is the quality of the people in charge, rather than the specific form of government, of course.
The standard-of-living measure, as opposed to a sovereignty scale, is always going to favor a system of slavery. It's hard to beat slavery for increasing the food, goods, infrastructure, buildings and leisure time for invention, education and the arts!
We don't need to agree about this but it's always good to get a disagreement down to its lowest common denominator. You believe the moral superiority of some gives them the right--maybe even the duty--to rule over others. I think the only human rights are the right to rule ourselves, and belong to a sovereign community with access to land so we have the practical means to provide for ourselves without taking that away from anyone else. Am I mistaken in that?
I'm excited that John has posted on this theme, close to my rebellious heart. You're on to something with the Gnostics but there's a twist. They were called demons or demon-possessed because they wouldn't say Caesar was God under the worst of tortures and, indeed, seemed impervious to it, even the children.
So if evil is defined, as I do, by causing others to cause suffering, then the Roman Empire was as evil as it gets. If the fearless Gnostic Judeans, also called the zealots, were inspiring all the other colonies to throw off the shackles of Rome, are they the controlled opposition demons? Or is the invented figure of Jesus?
Good question. I mentioned Gnstics being controlled opposition half-seriously, but with the half that was serious, I meant from a spiritual perspective (which I should have specified). As in, the demons themselves inspired Gnostics with some legit insights, but added enough noise and distortion to throw seekers slightly off course. I would say the same thing, only completely seriously instead of half, about mainline Christianity (which I guess is what the Gnostics would say about mainline Christianity too).
I suspect the story with gnosticism is more complex than all good/all bad, all demonic/all angelic. Certainly some fell into the latter category. But some very much didn't....
Yeah. When investigating Gnostisicm -- which I have admittedly not gone very deep with -- I get the same feeling that I get when sifting through different perspectives in the UFO community, where I sometimes for the life of me I can't tell whether someone is genuinely seeking the truth or whether they're a psyop. There's definitely some true insights among the Gnostics,, and even some of the flawed teachers/teachings seem to reflect some of that light from the deeper reality.
Mar 18, 2023·edited Mar 18, 2023Liked by John Carter
The psyop crowd are all over it like flies. Heterodoxies invariably attract dissidents and the authorities like to misdirect them. The UFO crap was a psyop to misdirect attention from supersensitive aerospace/avionic developments. Similarly a ####-load of the weird-tales/Fortean stuff that has filled up the underground culture was originally put out by military intelligence units eager to muddy the waters for all kinds of reasons. They recycle myths and lore, repurposing them. Where there are gurus you will find fraud or worse. Several of the people who pioneered the revival of interest in gnosticism in North America in the 20th c. were intelligence assets, one or two covert agents. One of the cults that influenced Charles Manson was a gnostic outfit with pretty obvious links to several intelligence agencies.
If you don't mind me giving advice: if you have any interest in gnosticism, it pays to read some Jung. Jung was heavily into this, but maintained a very healthy respect for science and was not carried away by metaphysics or cosmology. One good intro to Jung is this guy...a vastly superior version of Jordan Peterson. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCrk8Y2fsR5i_5c1iTR9tZpg
Staying grounded in a scientific understanding of reality is absolutely crucial to avoid getting carried away into cloud cuckooland. Not that chapel perilous is not worth exploring - I believe that it can be - but one must go in with a safety harness, so to speak.
In general on such topics, a warning sign is always those who speak with great certainty on topics they cannot possibly know anything about, spinning intricate and detailed narratives that cannot be verified. David Wilcox, for example. Where there is only uncertainty one must learn to be comfortable with ambiguity. So on the subject of UFOs, I maintain a position of - there may be something to the phenomenon, but as to its nature, I haven't a clue ... and rather suspect that no one answer is ultimately sufficient.
In another life (not literally ;-) I spent some time studying the gnostics, particularly the gospel of Philip. I wrote some part of a book called Revolutionary Mystics and How to Become One (pun intended) that put together Philip with East/ West mystical poets and A Course in Miracles, which I've studied daily for almost 20 yrs. It's 1500 pp of dense type that's a complete thought reversal, in which you prove to yourself whether the world is real and events are random, or not.
Here's the thing--I found a lot of correlation between them. What's reported about the zealots should be impossible, but it was their sworn enemy Josephus who talks about their complete disregard for pain, death, loss. He calls them demons but maybe they knew something that's been buried by the false story of Jesus, where suffering and death are the price for our sin.
I've never found anything 'evil' that can't be explained by human ambition. But nothing in this world explains children laughing at torture, as they were reported to. If I were God, that would be the ultimate proof that the world isn't as it seems, and no one can impose their power over you.
Climb out of the Rabbit Hole of Wrongness, John, before it's too late! Seriously, it sounds like you did not have the best experiences with Christianity as a child, and I'm sorry about that. If the spirit ever moves you to investigate traditional Catholicism, you'll find a very different atmosphere, in fact, I almost dare to say a different Faith. Much of what calls itself Christianity these days simply is not. The test is simple, do they stand for the fullness of Christ's teachings? Many churches are stuck in meek and winsome stances. That is NOT the Christianity of the martyrs, the Crusaders, and the saints, nor of Christ Himself. Forget about dumb internet revisionist theories. Embrace your Catholic heritage and go forth and conquer in His Name!
I quite like a great deal about the Catholic church, which is superior in almost every way to the various. Protestant schisms. At the same time however, I just can't take the founding story at face value.
As to my early experiences, I don't know that I'd characterize them as horrible. I was simply bored and unmoved, but I certainly wasn't abused or anything.
You've every right to your opinion, of course, but there's so much evidence for the historical existence of Jesus. If you don't like Josephus, how about Tacitus? Pliny? How about the Shroud of Turin and the Holy Face of Manoppello? If you want to get even more scientific, Eucharistic miracles still occur regularly, the blood has been rigorously tested, and it's always the same blood type. Christ not only lived, he still lives and dies in the Holy Eucharist every day. I would recommend anyone to look into the Shroud and Eucharistic miracles for stunning proof that Christ is real, if needed. As He said, paraphrasing, "I do these miracles so that you may believe I have power on Earth to forgive sins!"
Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1911). A portion of his "Ballad of the White Horse." A song I sing to my wife in the evening. I'm a Priest of the Christian Faith. The song of Wessex keeps me at it :). Love the stack, wish I were affluent enough to contribute.
Ah, that's a Chesterton poem. Excellent stuff. Thank you very much for sharing it.
And thank you for your kind words. I'm glad you enjoy my stack, and hope the subject matter of today's essay wasn't troubling to you given your vocation.
Carotta isn't wrong, from my research and Joe's, that the God of the NT is Caesar (and the God of the OT is Pharaoh, about which I'll be publishing more.) But the Caesar at the time it was written was Vespasian and his son Titus who brutally breached the siege of Jerusalem, after the Judeans had taken it back for three years. But the author of the gospels, and who I think Jesus represents, is Josephus, a craven coward who betrayed his own people and saved his skin by telling Vespasian that he was the Messiah and would become Caesar. When that came true some years later, Vespasian made him his son, in other words, the son of God. Josephus wrote the gospel of Mark, and Joe has a lot of detail on this, to whitewash his shameful role and turn himself into the hero while turning the actual heroes--Judas the Sicariot, leader of the zealots--into Satan and his demons.
I'm an admirer of Julius Caesar, especially from reading Michael Parenti's excellent book on him. Don't sully his name by comparing him to Jesus.
I keep an eye out for aesthetic images, and when I see something I like, I do an image search, identify the artist, and collect their work if I like the rest of it. I'll also just trawl through Artstation or similar sites from time to time.
So you know ;) I pull on the Atwill thread in chapter 3. Suffice to say, that's a part of the story for sure. The Flavians are, I suspect, responsible for the conversion of the imperial cult to the church. Probably because they wanted to pacify Judea.
And yeah Josephus was a worm.
The mythical figure of Jesus doesn't bother me much, but obviously I greatly prefer Caesar. Arguably that man was one of the greatest, if not the greatest, human beings to ever live. That he's remembered purely as a cynical dictator is a great injustice, one that has, I think, given our culture schizophrenia.
Josephus was a survivor. A few years ago I read Flavio Barbiero's The Secret Society of Moses, a bizarre work that claims Josephus started the Catholic church as an employment scheme for his band of relatives when they relocated to Rome. A Da Vinci Code wind up IMHO, but interesting.
My guess is that there were mystery cults aplenty across the ancient world and that there were probably one or two within Judea that used local content, possibly mingling it with Egyptian elements. Our cultures and religions have been formed by garbled and incomplete accounts of suppressed experiences and histories.
It seems to me that many of these attempts to construct an alternative set of religious ideas about the world and our place in it falter, because we can't believe something literally, unless we actually sincerely believe it literally. Things like the people trying on pagan ideas devolve into a larp.
If I want to construct a religion, I should probably begin with things I actually believe are true. You and I have exactly as much right to construct our own religion as anyone else, however much right that ends up being. Pretty much all relgions seem manmade to me. We each have a right to our own minds, and a right to assert what we believe to be true about the world, that should supersede anyone elses "official truth" and claims of authority.
Stories and mythology are much looser, because we're free to arrange things to express something we think is true and important in metaphor. Keeping metaphor and reality straight, though, is important.
I'm entirely onboard with not grovelling. Grovelling is for the whipped slaves of bronze-age oriental god-kings, whose godhood peaked at piling up rocks and killing each other in inventively cruel ways. (Another reason to detest the servility in common religions: The impulse may be natural, but it's munged up in master-slave dominance-deference instincts that are beneath the dignity of free men.)
Mar 21, 2023·edited Mar 21, 2023Liked by John Carter
The whole series has been interesting. Thanks John. Yes, it's okay to mock and question too.
I am still of the view that GOD (Almighty) has nothing to do with religion and has been gravely misrepresented by religious groups, who are in fact political parties of old with priests who joined hands with politicians (as in before democracy/communism/tribalism or whatever adherence to tradition as a moral authority or hierarchy) that represented groups of like-minded sheep.
I am still in complete awe by what has been created when one looks at what we call planet Earth and the rest of the cosmos that surrounds us. I know, I will die with that in me.
I do not believe that human beings could have created this and nor do I believe in the scientific hypothesis about creation either.
So stuff religions and politicians and scientists and the royalty/monarchs who claim nature their right of ownership.
There has to be an Almighty power who created this realm with all the complications and intricacies.
We need to be grateful for what we have, no matter how little. We must accept that we are all insignificant in the greater scheme of things no matter if we don't agree that there are lesser and greater beings.
We need to stop though these other creatures who appear as human beings with whom we share this planet from experimenting on us with their evil creations.
Certainly, there is a God, and He created the cosmos, and creates it anew at every moment, out of the same stuff from which He is made. At least, this is my view.
So far as insignificance, humility is a necessary antidote to hubris. Yet I do not think we are as insignificant as all that. There is something quite magical in little bits of the cosmos that wake up enough to hold reflections of the cosmos within them. We may be physically small and weak, but our role is out of all proportion to our material scale.
Just read all four parts in one sitting, but I knew this last part was gonna hit different after reading the first few sentences. Great stuff, lots of food for thought!
I believe Thomas Jefferson grappled with the same thoughts re: the Bible & Christianity. He recognized the inherent value of Christian morality towards western civilization, and he a Deist (kind of a milquetoast agnostic) even issued a translation of the Bible aimed at the native American tribes, that dispensed with the pap of the Old Testament, streamlined the new testament, and attempted to present the character of Jesus in a relatable fashion for his intended audience.
There's a long tradition of this form of adaptive syncretism. For example, when the pagan Germanic peoples were being converted, Christ was depicted as a muscular warrior against Satan, rather than a meek lamb being led to the slaughter. One must know one's audience.
I feel much the same about Christianity, as I was first raised Lutheran and then after my mother became "born-again", a series of evangelical churches, one verging on a cult. I walked away at 14, alienated from the sheep-like adults and their petty tyrant children (who weren't also sheep.)
I agree too, much of what ails America is a spiritual sickness. Dropped in a meaningless void is not a recipe for mental health. Nothing about modernity is designed for health, physical or mental. Maybe your notion about Caesar has merit. I have wondered at times, will something wholly new be birthed in the America's. Not wholly new, necessarily, but something distinctly America? On that I wonder about the European magical traditions, folk magic here, and something birthed out of the land.
If the hypothesis is true, then it could help to realign the Christian spiritual tradition with the full breadth of the European story, without requiring belief in fairy tales that too many find unconvincing. Whether that on its own is sufficient I doubt - a real Christian spiritual revival will take quite a bit more, I think. But I think whatever comes next needs to somehow unify the modern with the most ancient, without discarding or doing disservice to that which has happened between.
If there is a "second religiosity" in the late decline and chaos of America and Western Civilization, it is most likely it will lean Christian, as that is what is known, in which case your recreating the Christ myth has merit. If there is any truth to my notion of a religion for the America's, that is probably much further down the line, and would likely come after the birth of a wholly new civilization.
I think the Mormons were basically trying to do exactly that - reinvent to reinvent Christianity for America.
Akshully, the Mormon thing was based in England initially. The Jews told Cromwell all the stuff about the lost tribe of Israel in America and so on which were then picked up by Joseph Smith and codified centuries later. Seems that there was a strand of proto-Mormon thinking in the colonies for several centuries.
For me, the Gospel of Mark reads like somebody's college lecture notes. Matthew and Luke have more coherent narratives.
The portion of the Bible I find to be most verifiably miraculous is the Law of Moses itself. The Law contains a recipe for something very akin to anarcho-capitalism. No jails. No standing armies. The only stated duties of the paid bureaucrats (the Levites) were ceremonial and enforcing some public health regulations.
The Law includes a welfare system which isn't dysgenic. Indeed, there is more Darwinism in the Old Testament than there is in our modern universities. The Biblical welfare system gives recipients plenty of incentive to get their acts back together. Ditto for property criminals.
The Law has some very interesting rules against rent-seeking, including some subtle points which Henry George and his followers miss bigly. The Jubilee law ensures a large supply of rednecks with a stake in protecting the nation. I vaguely recall a passage in Jeremiah indicating that the rich were holding onto their estates vs. ceding back rented land back to the people. You cannot stave off empires with professional soldiers. Judah fell. (And we are falling in part for a similar reason. Nixon changed farm policy in ways that did in most small family farms. We lack a sufficient number of rednecks to be a militia backed republic.)
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There are few historical examples of societies which successfully mixed civilization and something resembling anarcho-capitalism. David Friedman cites Viking Iceland. Murray Rothbard cited medieval Ireland prior to conquest by the English. Both of these examples were islands. Israel during the time of the Book of Judges was surrounded by other nations.
I don't really dispute that the Mosaic law worked for the Israelites, at least for a time. Yet they were relative latecomers - our ancestors were building advanced, highly functional civilizations long before the Bible was written.
But how much freedom did those functional civilizations in the Middle East have? Lot's of god-emperors in my readings of ancient history.
Yes, the Greeks had republics and other forms of accountable government. And the ancient Germanic people had a degree of democracy -- at least before they got too civilized.
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I find it interesting to see the prices some cultures pay for making mods to the Law. The Law calls for land to be passed down by male line, with the eldest getting a double share.
Medieval Europe often gave the eldest the entire share. This was core to feudalism.
If land inheritance goes to both sons and daughters, then you get married couples owning disconnected pieces of land. I vaguely recall that some of the American Indians have trouble with this, with pieces of land being owned by too many people for anyone to do anything. I believe Haiti has the same problem. I've also seen it written that parts of the Islamic world practice cousin marriage to a great extent in order to keep property together.
Then, of course, we have the practice of letting land be simply bought and sold outright. This has great flexibility, but it has also led to a rather fractured society, and many people are landless while billionaires like Bill Gates get to invest in land in great quantity.
The Middle Eastern civilizations have very little to do with Europe - the Persians and Hittites, I suppose, being exceptions. By and large, the Greeks, Germans, Scythians, Gauls, Celts, Scandinavians, and Romans were all fiercely independent, freedom-loving peoples.
Then of course there's Russell Gmirkin's research, which demonstrates that the Hebrew Bible was likely forged in Alexandria and is based almost entirely on Hellenistic literature, Platonic political philosophy, and Greek law. If Gmirkin is correct, all of those useful features of the Mosaic law actually came from the Greeks, and were merely filtered through the Hebrews.
The Persians and Hittites were of Indo-European ancestry, but the vigour of their civilization derived from the fact that their ancestors had conquered, destroyed and rebuilt older civilizations that had pioneered urban life, literacy, science, architecture and monumental art.
The only part of Europe to develop a serious civilization in antiquity, the Greeks, did so on the ruins of the pre-Indo-Europeans of the Aegean (the Myceneans and the Pelasgians). In much the same way the Indo-Europeans in India built their civilisation on the ruins of older Dravidian cities. There was clearly a creative dialectic at work between barbarism and urbanity even in very early times.
Barbarians do best when they conquer civilised people and adapt whatever is available to hand. The Mongols in Persia, the Normans in Sicily, the Goths and Lombards in northern Italy mixed barbarian vigour with the refinement and acuity of urbane and polished peoples. Barbarism looks thrilling and life-affirming on a streaming service but I'll take the Normans in Palermo over the savagery of Scandinavian hillbillies any day. Just my POV.
The Hellenes would certainly have agreed with this. Straight barbarism lacks anything of the higher developments of which the human soul is capable. But too much civilization saps the vitality necessary to reach those heights. A balance between the two is essential, but its very dynamism makes such a balancing act intrinsically unstable. In the long run the Greeks too became decadent.
Freedom loving in some ways. The Indo Europeans weren't so much into elevating kings into god-emperors.
But the Romans had a slave population of something like 40%, if memory serves. The Spartans likely higher. I've seen a 40% slave rate for the pre-Norman Saxon kingdoms as well.
Hebrew law called for liberating all male slaves every seven years. (Female slaves were basically wives.) This might explain the popularity of Judaism among lower class Greeks before the time of Jesus. (Greeks who found the man-boy love thing to be gross might also have found Judaism to be appealing.)
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The idea that the Old Testament was based on Hellenic literature contracts your earlier complaints about the alienness of Hebrew scripture to your Indo European soul. It also contradicts your complaint about the bad organization.
A better case could be made for Babylonian and Persian influences.
But before accepting even those, let's keep in mind that there is a version of the Hebrew scripture in a dead Semitic language. That would be a pretty huge retcon. Moreover, there are some later Hebrew scriptures which are not found in old Hebrew. Those are the books found in the Apocrypha. The Protestant churches removed the Apocrypha from the Bible. I think this was a mistake. The Apocryphal Wisdom of Solomon provides a very interesting bridge between Old and New Testament thought -- especially regarding the afterlife.
The Pharisees believed that death is sleep, and that there will be a resurrection of the dead. This belief differs entirely from both Greek and Egyptian notions. (I don't know what the Babylonians or Persians believed.)
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For anyone curious enough to want to see the New Testament from a very different angle, try this: think of the Law of Moses as a constitution, and Jesus as a Ron Paul type of figure. Just as we have a couple of centuries of judicial precedent separating us from our constitution, the Jews had many more few centuries of precedent, interpretation, and casuistry separating them from the Law of Moses. These are the "traditions of man" that Jesus criticized and intentionally flouted.
Also note that these precedents were preserved as an oral tradition.. Writing them down was still considered to be a blasphemous adding to the Law. This explains why Jesus took on the legal scholars of his day while simultaneously saying that not one jot or tittle of the Law will fail until the planet is replaced.
(Those oral traditions were later written down in the talmud.)
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I am not claiming that the view above encompasses the entirety of Jesus' message. But it was a significant part.
But it's important to realize that Jesus was not criticizing the Pharisees for obeying the Law of Moses. He was criticizing them for warping the Law.
A little correction about "the Romans had a slave population of something like 40%": that was pathological.
Original Res Publica was a Jeffersonian Democracy (duh! Ol' Tommy copycat it!), it was the Yanke...I mean the Second Worl...sorry, the Second Punic war that broke the yeom...i mean the roman small landowner back through a mix of longer draft and immigrat...sorry slave imports.
In fact, there is little to no difference between the Gracchi and US Free Landers.
So no, there is nothing new in Levitical law and Ancient Law: Michael Hudson is an ignorant, you Anglos should read https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debt:_The_First_5000_Years
Well played.
"Debt" was a fascinating read, by the way.
"The idea that the Old Testament was based on Hellenic literature contracts your earlier complaints about the alienness of Hebrew scripture to your Indo European soul. It also contradicts your complaint about the bad organization."
Not really. There's the aesthetic component, which is a large part of why I was unmoved by the OT. If Gmirkin is right, and it's largely a pastiche of previous sources passed off as a translation, there's no reason the pastiche should be as good as the original. They usually aren't. It's also getting filtered through a foreign sensibility, and will therefore carry that stamp regardless of the ultimate origin.
I'm not sure where I complained about bad organization? (Which I'm interpreting to mean social organization, let me know if I misunderstood).
By organization, I mean how the text is very disorganized, not how society was organized. The Old Testament does feel like some committee stapled scraps of surviving texts together -- like would happen after a catastrophic die-off, an enslavement, or a sacking of the library.
BTW, an Anglican church is a terrible place to pick up an appreciation of the Law of Moses. The Old Testament readings in the Book of Common Prayer focus on prophecies relating to the New, and the New Testament readings emphasize separation from the Old.
As a teenager, I got better lessons in Old Testament Law reading Robert Heinlein's science fiction than I got in church.
The Anglican church fails to inspire in many ways, not the least being its tawdry founding.
Well, the order of service was pretty inspiring before they dumbed down the prayer book in the 1970s. And the early Anglican church did a good job of translating Latin hymns into English.; there are still some really good hymns in the Episcopal hymnal, hymns with proper voice leading. But, alas, most Episcopal churches have shrunk down to they point where they cannot form a choir of people capable of singing in four part harmony.
According to Garrison Keillor, the Roman Catholic Church did a terrible rush job when they switched from Latin to local languages, and from choir to congregational singing. My brief experience with modern Catholicism (attending a funeral) matched Keillor's description: truly monotonous melodies that are easy to sing, but who wants to?
I attended a Latin mass once, and found it to be a very different experience from what I'm used to - quite engaging and inspiring, in fact. A real contrast with the dull plodding of the modern service. It's entirely possible that my sour evaluation of the church as a child was largely due to the absence of anything numinous in the liturgy or ritual.
The tawdry origins of the Henrician reformation are not a serious objection of any sort. Nothing venerable or useful in this world ever developed from pristine or grand sources. Nothing. The embarrassing, conflicted or absurd sources of our institutions and beliefs is less important than what we do with them (a point one could make in regard to both OT and NT). The Anglicans pioneered a civilised and humane established religion that served the English exceptionally well. The Anglicans of the 17th c. did more than anyone on the planet to give us the scientific revolution.
They did much good with it, yes, but I have to admit that as a child, finding that the origin of the Anglican church was the king's desire for a divorce was less than inspiring.
Fair enough, but the Tudor era was amazing. The depth of culture, ambition, and achievement of Renaissance England takes your breath away. The upstarts of the newly empowered Tudor elite showed us all how it should be done.
I'll not make any apologies for the fierce pride I take in my Anglo heritage. The England of the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, and the industrial age created the modern world.
I suspect that if it was not for the total collapse of morale following the wars of the 20th century and the resulting crumbling of the empire, I would not be so critical of the Anglican church. But the church I was born into was not the church of the 19th century.
Are you referring to the 613 Mitzvahs? From what I can tell it's just sharia law.
The laws in the Torah differ greatly from Islamic law..
The Jews of New Testament times had built up a huge body of precedents and traditions by the time Jesus taught. These, not the Torah itself, were what Jesus was criticizing. See my inner comment above.
Nah, the Mitzahs and Sharia are virtually identical.
Paul preached quite vehemently against the law and so does Mark's Jesus. Matthew the Judaizer's Jesus preaches fulfillment of the law not rejection later on. I can see why you would get confused.
A lot of the reason for the Bible being boring is the modern translations sperg out on precision and is mealy-mouthed so as not to offend, murdering the transcendence and flow of the text. There's also a lot of symbolism and nuance in the text that is ignored because the Priests feel the need to dumb down the more mystic aspects and often don't understand it themselves. A good Priest could spend years going into the nuances of the story of Jonah, but they are mostly, simply put, boring uninterested people.
I get it, and will just add that any Christian group whose first reaction to a priestess is not laughter and derision has zero connection with the Christianity of the ancient world, let alone 100 years ago.
It's certainly possible that poor translation is at fault, although I find that tends to affect lyrical poetry more than prose. Still, the simple truth is I never felt particularly moved by the any of the bible stories, at a deep emotional level; whereas by contrast, I found many of the myths to be quite affecting.
In its written form Greek myth functions as an instrument for some kind of intuitive engagement with psychic experience. It is imaginative literature that offers insightful anecdotes about the psyche. The gods are the personification of particular personality types and for this reason have considerable resonance. And all personae (masks) derive from libidinal forces that exist within us all., hence their relevance and immediacy.
The Bible, on the other hand, tends to be vastly more elliptical (many of the parables have complicated allegories that are no longer properly understood) and cannot function in the same way. Much of the Bible was written to be apocryphal and is stuffed with word-play, possibly acrostics and mnemonic devices. Quite a few serious readers (Newton above all) have been convinced that much of the Bible is polysemic (multiple meanings) some of which were written for esoteric exposition. I find this persusive, though many would not.
It doesn’t help that the Bible is simply horribly written. Honestly. Anyone who goes on about the sublime poetry of the Bible is talking nonsense.
Josquin, Bach, Mozart, Michelangelo, Raphael, Donne, Milton, and Eliot might disagree with you.
I'm happy for them to, to be honest. All I can say is that I never found its prose compelling. It's a personal aesthetic judgement.
However, it's also worth noting that in times past, appreciating the Bible was more or less mandatory.
Genesis & Exodus have some cracking good stories. The Gospels are fascinating, as is Acts; I had a hard time with Paul's letters as a teen, but have come back to them as an adult.
As always, the quality of translation varies widely; I had a college friend who learned classical Greek (i.e., the Greek of the Roman era) specifically so he could read the New Testament in the original.
I shared much the same feelings about bible. I grew up as an atheist. And was an atheist and a sceptic until my 30s.
Now I chose to believe in God. In higher force. and i also believe the Truth is accessible to each one from within. Truth can be found in many places. Including in Holy books. But they are not the source of it .
When I started being spiritual and looked at religions from a fresh perspective. There are tidbits of wisdom which could be found in Bible .
But the real gist is old testament ( torah basically). If you are jewish and read it as they do( and they do read, on chapter every week , completing in a year. And next year again) - its a very profound layer of identity and culture.
I have some Jewish blood. But not a lot. And its not my identity.
So I passed on that. i passed on other organized religions as well. Currently spiritually i am closer to vedic dzen Buddhism than to anything else.
I've said it before and I'll say it again, I'm sold. My only concern is that my Christian brothers and sisters might be more discomforted by this than my atheism.
What I should have put in the main text was this:
For believers, ask yourselves: if it's true, does your faith survive this? Because it should.
For non-believers, similarly: if it's true, does this change how you relate to it?
True or not, it changes how I relate to it. Perhaps it changes how I relate most because it is at least plausible. I don't find the traditional narrative plausible. Not to say it isn't true, I just don't connect with it at all, perhaps for similar reasons as those you outlined.
Yes, it's the plausibilty that caught my attention as well. The other 'historical Jesus' hypotheses always struck me as unconvincing. If he was nothing but a charismatic street preacher, well those were a dime a dozen in those days, so why should a world religion have emerged from him?
Fascinating take on this theme, and extremely well written! I do think there's some great stuff in Psalms and Ecclesiastes (including ideas that seem to contradict traditional dogmas rooted in other parts of the Old Testament), and Paul is an incredible thinker and writer; but there is plenty of chaff among all those pages of scripture, especially in the Torah portion. The Gnostic idea about the OT god being a demon masquerading as the real God adds an interesting twist, though sometimes I wonder (half seriously) whether the Gnostics were demonically controlled opposition (their teachings seem to have been influential with some sketchy New Age/Human Potential types, and they seem to have attracted a similar crowd back in their own day). That said, I find myself going back to some of the ideas in the New Testament, including the gospels and Revelation, and thinking there are some deep insights about evil there, including strong indications that the devil is the god of this world, that demons routinely subvert good religious movements and turn them towards evil, that humans and their leaders are often the useful idiots of dark spiritual powers (including many religious leaders who have a reputation for being "godly"), etc. I'm still not sure what to make of that. Much of it rings true, but not in the way it is traditionally taught and understood in the church.
Anyway, you (and Rolo Slavskiyy and LP Koch) have given me some good food for thought! Thanks for that!
Yes, some of the psalms are quite lyrical, I agree. Although I find others rather beastly.
I think there's no question that the God of the OT and the NT are not the same entity. Indeed there's some suggestion that the OT God is itself several different entities throughout, El, Elohim, and YWHW being seemingly quite distinct.
The OT god-image was constructed over time incorporating influences from the various constituent elements of the Israelite federation. Some tribes were of Mesopotamian origin, others Canaanite and one most likely Egyptian. The NT god-image was constructed under wildly different social and cultural conditions.
Hellenistic civilisation was not about making the ancient world Greek, it was about incorporating North African and Asian cultures (Judaic and Indo-Iranian) into a Graeco-Roman imperium whose literate classes had only a confused and contradictory understanding of the peoples they had conquered.
The distinction between 'good' or 'bad' gods is a very modern one. Gods and demi-gods (angels) were rated by their power, not how nice or approachable or civil they were. Ancient peoples differentiated between those that were useful and those that weren't. Even the useful tutelary deities had extremely violent or erratic aspects. And religion was not about edification or logical consistency, but the regulation of conduct. Cult practice is beside the point, behaviour was/is all.
Ancient religion in Western Asia, North Africa and the Balkans grew out of fertility cults that practiced voodoo-style rites that involved spirit-possession. The gods were, quite literally, demons who possessed worshippers in trance-states. These cults got weakened and were suppressed as civilisation developed. Jungian psychiatry and neuroscience explain ancient beliefs very well.
As for the apparent demand/expectation that religion should simultaneously offer enchantment plus edification plus ethnic/tribal narcissism...everyone wants it all neatly packaged and congenial. De gustibus non est disputandum.
IMO gnosticism arose from apostatic, often denationalised, elements of the defeated peoples of Western Asia (above all Jews and Indo-Iranians) who were trying to account for the failure of their old tutelary gods to protect them from foreign subjugation in the Hellenistic era. In despair they explained the state of the world by redefining the failed gods as demonic or malefic and placing hope in a higher, extra-material, and unworldly deity more thoroughly removed from their affairs. In the ancient world the gods of neighbouring, rival, peoples had always been written off as demons, so gnosticism was an attempt to apply this approach to ancestral gods that were coming to be perceived as inadequate.
I'm not sure it's entirely true that the gods of other peoples were always seen as demonic. Very true in certain cases, eg the Roman view of the Nilotic deities or the Carthaginian Moloch. In other cases, equivalencies were drawn between native and foreign gods.
It certainly does seem to be the case that the apocalyptic messianism of 1st century Judea was driven by cope. Despite being the chosen people, they kept getting mogged by gentiles. Similar to how narcissists reconcile their inflated self-image with the conflicting evidence of their real world poor performance.
The gods of conquered/defeated people always get redefined as demons. In Western Asia the demonisation of rival gods was definitely a big thing from the Axial Age on...very evident in both ancient Iran and Israel.
I've read that Medusa, for example, was once the goddess of a matriarchal people conquered by the forbears of the Greeks.
I'll respond to both you and John both here. I looked in one of my books called The Gnostic Bible for a definition and it starts with this "The gnostics were religious mystics who proclaimed gnosis, knowledge, as the way to salvation. To know oneself truly allowed gnostic men and women to know god directly, without any need for the mediation of rabbis, priests, bishops, imams, or other religious officials. ... The historical roots of the gnostics reach back into the time of the Greeks, Romans, and Second Temple Jews. Some gnostics were Jewish, others Greco-Roman, and many were Christian. There were Mandaean gnostics from Irap and Iran; Manichaeans from Europs, the Middle East, North Africa, and all the way to China; Islamic gnostics in the Muslim world; and Cathars in western Europe. The heyday of their influence extends from the second century CE through the next several centuries. Their influence and their presence, some say, continue to the present day."
So the gnostics seem to be anyone taking a non-imperial, non-hierarchical approach to god (however that word is defined). What's become the official version of all religions is the god who validates the emperor, king, pope, Caesar, etc. Rather than saying the subjugated people demonized their own gods, wouldn't it make more sense that the most ruthless, violent and vicious who subjugated whole nations and races would invent a justifying theology?
I think one has to be quite careful here, not to be overly categorical. For example, in a contemporary context, the GAE neocons are a pack of vicious, bloodthirsty vampires. At the same time, organizations such as e.g. ISIS are morally repellent as well. OTOH, there are certainly some Islamic individuals and groups who have a more positive, virtuous orientation ... while at the same time, there are many within the belly of the Great Satan who do good work.
I suspect it was much the same in those times. Thus, there were certainly some gnostic groups that did good work, and others that were dangerous cults.
The first question to answer here is whether we believe empire and power over others is a good thing, if people like us are in charge. The answer to that question determines how we're going to view systems of imperialism, whether in religion or nations, and systems that reject all imperialism no matter who's in charge. I don't look at individuals as good or evil, I look at whether beliefs and systems empower some to have power over others or everyone to have power over themselves.
Indeed, precisely. One aspect worth noting is that archeological records (eg shipwrecks as a proxy to Mediterranean trade, animal bones as a proxy to per capita meat consumption) indicate that the material standard of living throughout the empire, from roughly 200 BC to 200 AD, was considerably better than either before or after. So, at least from that standpoint, there are advantages to empire.
An important factor is the quality of the people in charge, rather than the specific form of government, of course.
The standard-of-living measure, as opposed to a sovereignty scale, is always going to favor a system of slavery. It's hard to beat slavery for increasing the food, goods, infrastructure, buildings and leisure time for invention, education and the arts!
We don't need to agree about this but it's always good to get a disagreement down to its lowest common denominator. You believe the moral superiority of some gives them the right--maybe even the duty--to rule over others. I think the only human rights are the right to rule ourselves, and belong to a sovereign community with access to land so we have the practical means to provide for ourselves without taking that away from anyone else. Am I mistaken in that?
Oh and here are the episodes I mentioned, further down the thread:
https://thirdparadigm.substack.com/p/jesus-is-the-og-psy-ops
https://thirdparadigm.substack.com/p/the-devil-and-naomi-wolf
I'm excited that John has posted on this theme, close to my rebellious heart. You're on to something with the Gnostics but there's a twist. They were called demons or demon-possessed because they wouldn't say Caesar was God under the worst of tortures and, indeed, seemed impervious to it, even the children.
So if evil is defined, as I do, by causing others to cause suffering, then the Roman Empire was as evil as it gets. If the fearless Gnostic Judeans, also called the zealots, were inspiring all the other colonies to throw off the shackles of Rome, are they the controlled opposition demons? Or is the invented figure of Jesus?
Good question. I mentioned Gnstics being controlled opposition half-seriously, but with the half that was serious, I meant from a spiritual perspective (which I should have specified). As in, the demons themselves inspired Gnostics with some legit insights, but added enough noise and distortion to throw seekers slightly off course. I would say the same thing, only completely seriously instead of half, about mainline Christianity (which I guess is what the Gnostics would say about mainline Christianity too).
I suspect the story with gnosticism is more complex than all good/all bad, all demonic/all angelic. Certainly some fell into the latter category. But some very much didn't....
Yeah. When investigating Gnostisicm -- which I have admittedly not gone very deep with -- I get the same feeling that I get when sifting through different perspectives in the UFO community, where I sometimes for the life of me I can't tell whether someone is genuinely seeking the truth or whether they're a psyop. There's definitely some true insights among the Gnostics,, and even some of the flawed teachers/teachings seem to reflect some of that light from the deeper reality.
The psyop crowd are all over it like flies. Heterodoxies invariably attract dissidents and the authorities like to misdirect them. The UFO crap was a psyop to misdirect attention from supersensitive aerospace/avionic developments. Similarly a ####-load of the weird-tales/Fortean stuff that has filled up the underground culture was originally put out by military intelligence units eager to muddy the waters for all kinds of reasons. They recycle myths and lore, repurposing them. Where there are gurus you will find fraud or worse. Several of the people who pioneered the revival of interest in gnosticism in North America in the 20th c. were intelligence assets, one or two covert agents. One of the cults that influenced Charles Manson was a gnostic outfit with pretty obvious links to several intelligence agencies.
If you don't mind me giving advice: if you have any interest in gnosticism, it pays to read some Jung. Jung was heavily into this, but maintained a very healthy respect for science and was not carried away by metaphysics or cosmology. One good intro to Jung is this guy...a vastly superior version of Jordan Peterson. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCrk8Y2fsR5i_5c1iTR9tZpg
Staying grounded in a scientific understanding of reality is absolutely crucial to avoid getting carried away into cloud cuckooland. Not that chapel perilous is not worth exploring - I believe that it can be - but one must go in with a safety harness, so to speak.
In general on such topics, a warning sign is always those who speak with great certainty on topics they cannot possibly know anything about, spinning intricate and detailed narratives that cannot be verified. David Wilcox, for example. Where there is only uncertainty one must learn to be comfortable with ambiguity. So on the subject of UFOs, I maintain a position of - there may be something to the phenomenon, but as to its nature, I haven't a clue ... and rather suspect that no one answer is ultimately sufficient.
In another life (not literally ;-) I spent some time studying the gnostics, particularly the gospel of Philip. I wrote some part of a book called Revolutionary Mystics and How to Become One (pun intended) that put together Philip with East/ West mystical poets and A Course in Miracles, which I've studied daily for almost 20 yrs. It's 1500 pp of dense type that's a complete thought reversal, in which you prove to yourself whether the world is real and events are random, or not.
Here's the thing--I found a lot of correlation between them. What's reported about the zealots should be impossible, but it was their sworn enemy Josephus who talks about their complete disregard for pain, death, loss. He calls them demons but maybe they knew something that's been buried by the false story of Jesus, where suffering and death are the price for our sin.
I've never found anything 'evil' that can't be explained by human ambition. But nothing in this world explains children laughing at torture, as they were reported to. If I were God, that would be the ultimate proof that the world isn't as it seems, and no one can impose their power over you.
Climb out of the Rabbit Hole of Wrongness, John, before it's too late! Seriously, it sounds like you did not have the best experiences with Christianity as a child, and I'm sorry about that. If the spirit ever moves you to investigate traditional Catholicism, you'll find a very different atmosphere, in fact, I almost dare to say a different Faith. Much of what calls itself Christianity these days simply is not. The test is simple, do they stand for the fullness of Christ's teachings? Many churches are stuck in meek and winsome stances. That is NOT the Christianity of the martyrs, the Crusaders, and the saints, nor of Christ Himself. Forget about dumb internet revisionist theories. Embrace your Catholic heritage and go forth and conquer in His Name!
I quite like a great deal about the Catholic church, which is superior in almost every way to the various. Protestant schisms. At the same time however, I just can't take the founding story at face value.
As to my early experiences, I don't know that I'd characterize them as horrible. I was simply bored and unmoved, but I certainly wasn't abused or anything.
You've every right to your opinion, of course, but there's so much evidence for the historical existence of Jesus. If you don't like Josephus, how about Tacitus? Pliny? How about the Shroud of Turin and the Holy Face of Manoppello? If you want to get even more scientific, Eucharistic miracles still occur regularly, the blood has been rigorously tested, and it's always the same blood type. Christ not only lived, he still lives and dies in the Holy Eucharist every day. I would recommend anyone to look into the Shroud and Eucharistic miracles for stunning proof that Christ is real, if needed. As He said, paraphrasing, "I do these miracles so that you may believe I have power on Earth to forgive sins!"
The entry in Tacitus is very likely a pious fraud. I personally don't find the shroud of Turin particularly convincing, either.
You're such a good author. I love reading your stories.
Thank you!
And slowly his hands and thoughtfully,
Fell from the lifted lyre,
And the owls moaned from the mighty trees,
Till Alfred caught it to his knees,
And smote it as in ire.
He heaved the head of the harp on high,
And swept the framework barred,
And his stroke had all the rattle and spark
Of horses flying hard.
“When God put man in a garden,
He girt him with a Sword,
And sent him forth, a free Knight
That might betray his Lord;
He brake Him and betrayed Him;
And fast and far He fell,
Till you and I may stretch our beards,
And burn our beards in hell.
But though I lie on the floor of the world,
With the seven sins for rods,
I would rather fall with Adam,
Then rise with all your gods.
What have the strong gods given?
Where have the ‘glad’ gods led?
When Guthrum sit on a hero’s throne
And asks if he is dead?
Sirs, I am but a nameless man,
A rhymester without home,
Yet since I come of the Wessex clay
And carry the cross of Rome,
I will even answer the mighty earl
That asked of Wessex men
Why they be meek and monkish folk,
And bow to the White Lord’s broken yoke;
What sign have we but blood and smoke?
Here is my answer then.
That on you has fallen the shadow,
And not upon the Name;
That though you hunt the Christian man
Like a hare on the hill-side,
The hare has still more heart to run,
Than you have heart to ride.
That though all lances split on you,
All swords be heaved in vain,
We have more lust again to lose,
Than you to win again.
Your lord sits high in the saddle,
A broken-hearted king,
But our Alfred, lost from fame,
Fallen among foes or bonds of shame,
In I know not what mean trade or name,
Has still some song to sing.
Our monks go clothed in rain and snow,
But the heart of flame therein,
But you go clothed in feasts and flames,
And all is ice within;
Nor shall all iron dooms make dumb
Men wondering ceaselessly,
If it be not better to fast for joy
Than feast for misery.
Nor monkish order only
Slides down, as field to fen,
All things achieved and chosen pass,
As the White Horse fades in the grass,
No work of Christian men.
Ere the sad gods that made your gods
Saw their sad sunrise pass,
The White Horse of the White Horse Vale,
That you have left to darken and fail,
Was cut out of the grass.
Therefore your end is on you,
Is on you and your kings,
Not for a fire in Ely fen,
Not that your gods are nine or ten,
But because it is only Christian men
Guard even heathen things."
That's beautiful. Who's it by?
Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1911). A portion of his "Ballad of the White Horse." A song I sing to my wife in the evening. I'm a Priest of the Christian Faith. The song of Wessex keeps me at it :). Love the stack, wish I were affluent enough to contribute.
Ah, that's a Chesterton poem. Excellent stuff. Thank you very much for sharing it.
And thank you for your kind words. I'm glad you enjoy my stack, and hope the subject matter of today's essay wasn't troubling to you given your vocation.
No worries. Irish whiskey + St. Patrick's day = "A poem by Chesterton is obviously the best apologia for the faith." Woof.
I had no idea it was St. Patrick's Day until I found myself in a packed bar last night. It was a nice surprise.
Where do you find all this amazing artwork, John?
We are posting along similar lines. I did this one recently showing the story of Noah to be a contract where God upholds slavery: https://thirdparadigm.substack.com/p/the-devil-and-naomi-wolf. And prior to that I did one based on a decade of my research and also of Joe Atwill's, author of Caesar's Messiah: https://thirdparadigm.substack.com/p/jesus-is-the-og-psy-ops.
Carotta isn't wrong, from my research and Joe's, that the God of the NT is Caesar (and the God of the OT is Pharaoh, about which I'll be publishing more.) But the Caesar at the time it was written was Vespasian and his son Titus who brutally breached the siege of Jerusalem, after the Judeans had taken it back for three years. But the author of the gospels, and who I think Jesus represents, is Josephus, a craven coward who betrayed his own people and saved his skin by telling Vespasian that he was the Messiah and would become Caesar. When that came true some years later, Vespasian made him his son, in other words, the son of God. Josephus wrote the gospel of Mark, and Joe has a lot of detail on this, to whitewash his shameful role and turn himself into the hero while turning the actual heroes--Judas the Sicariot, leader of the zealots--into Satan and his demons.
I'm an admirer of Julius Caesar, especially from reading Michael Parenti's excellent book on him. Don't sully his name by comparing him to Jesus.
I keep an eye out for aesthetic images, and when I see something I like, I do an image search, identify the artist, and collect their work if I like the rest of it. I'll also just trawl through Artstation or similar sites from time to time.
So you know ;) I pull on the Atwill thread in chapter 3. Suffice to say, that's a part of the story for sure. The Flavians are, I suspect, responsible for the conversion of the imperial cult to the church. Probably because they wanted to pacify Judea.
And yeah Josephus was a worm.
The mythical figure of Jesus doesn't bother me much, but obviously I greatly prefer Caesar. Arguably that man was one of the greatest, if not the greatest, human beings to ever live. That he's remembered purely as a cynical dictator is a great injustice, one that has, I think, given our culture schizophrenia.
Josephus was a survivor. A few years ago I read Flavio Barbiero's The Secret Society of Moses, a bizarre work that claims Josephus started the Catholic church as an employment scheme for his band of relatives when they relocated to Rome. A Da Vinci Code wind up IMHO, but interesting.
My guess is that there were mystery cults aplenty across the ancient world and that there were probably one or two within Judea that used local content, possibly mingling it with Egyptian elements. Our cultures and religions have been formed by garbled and incomplete accounts of suppressed experiences and histories.
Josephus was certainly very good at surviving, I will give him that. Maybe not the most ethical of men however.
This series has been one of the most interesting things I have read in a long time.
I'm glad you enjoyed it.
It seems to me that many of these attempts to construct an alternative set of religious ideas about the world and our place in it falter, because we can't believe something literally, unless we actually sincerely believe it literally. Things like the people trying on pagan ideas devolve into a larp.
If I want to construct a religion, I should probably begin with things I actually believe are true. You and I have exactly as much right to construct our own religion as anyone else, however much right that ends up being. Pretty much all relgions seem manmade to me. We each have a right to our own minds, and a right to assert what we believe to be true about the world, that should supersede anyone elses "official truth" and claims of authority.
Stories and mythology are much looser, because we're free to arrange things to express something we think is true and important in metaphor. Keeping metaphor and reality straight, though, is important.
I'm entirely onboard with not grovelling. Grovelling is for the whipped slaves of bronze-age oriental god-kings, whose godhood peaked at piling up rocks and killing each other in inventively cruel ways. (Another reason to detest the servility in common religions: The impulse may be natural, but it's munged up in master-slave dominance-deference instincts that are beneath the dignity of free men.)
The whole series has been interesting. Thanks John. Yes, it's okay to mock and question too.
I am still of the view that GOD (Almighty) has nothing to do with religion and has been gravely misrepresented by religious groups, who are in fact political parties of old with priests who joined hands with politicians (as in before democracy/communism/tribalism or whatever adherence to tradition as a moral authority or hierarchy) that represented groups of like-minded sheep.
I am still in complete awe by what has been created when one looks at what we call planet Earth and the rest of the cosmos that surrounds us. I know, I will die with that in me.
I do not believe that human beings could have created this and nor do I believe in the scientific hypothesis about creation either.
So stuff religions and politicians and scientists and the royalty/monarchs who claim nature their right of ownership.
There has to be an Almighty power who created this realm with all the complications and intricacies.
We need to be grateful for what we have, no matter how little. We must accept that we are all insignificant in the greater scheme of things no matter if we don't agree that there are lesser and greater beings.
We need to stop though these other creatures who appear as human beings with whom we share this planet from experimenting on us with their evil creations.
Certainly, there is a God, and He created the cosmos, and creates it anew at every moment, out of the same stuff from which He is made. At least, this is my view.
So far as insignificance, humility is a necessary antidote to hubris. Yet I do not think we are as insignificant as all that. There is something quite magical in little bits of the cosmos that wake up enough to hold reflections of the cosmos within them. We may be physically small and weak, but our role is out of all proportion to our material scale.
Just read all four parts in one sitting, but I knew this last part was gonna hit different after reading the first few sentences. Great stuff, lots of food for thought!
Glad you enjoyed it!
I believe Thomas Jefferson grappled with the same thoughts re: the Bible & Christianity. He recognized the inherent value of Christian morality towards western civilization, and he a Deist (kind of a milquetoast agnostic) even issued a translation of the Bible aimed at the native American tribes, that dispensed with the pap of the Old Testament, streamlined the new testament, and attempted to present the character of Jesus in a relatable fashion for his intended audience.
There's a long tradition of this form of adaptive syncretism. For example, when the pagan Germanic peoples were being converted, Christ was depicted as a muscular warrior against Satan, rather than a meek lamb being led to the slaughter. One must know one's audience.