Archive for category Religion
The Past is a Foreign Country
Posted by Bob in Musings about Life, Religion on 11/07/2004
Today’s Western society is the first one in history to make a distinction between science and religion. When we read ancient or even Medieval documents, we often confuse their religious with their scientific beliefs.
One of the best examples of this is the transmigration of souls. Buddhism and Hinduism do NOT consider the idea that a person is reborn into another body after death to be a matter of RELIGION. It was accepted as a matter of SCIENCE.
The society in which Hinduism grew up and in which Gautama Buddha was born took it for granted that the body and the consciousness inside it were different things.
Every night their consciousness left their bodies in a dream. When they were hit in the head or desperately hungry thir minds would leave their bodies. Schizophrenics lived in different worlds from their bodies.
Every shaman left his body when he ate Holy Herbs.
Nobody knew anything about brain chemistry, hypnosis, or even dreams. If you said the brain was permanently connected to the consciousness, they would assume you had lost your mind.
But they held this as a matter of reality, a matter of science, not as a matter of religion.
Ancient people all asssumed there was a Prime Mover because they did not know about intertia or thermodynamics. To keep the universe in motion, their SCIENTISTS took it for granted that there was a Prime Mover, what we could call God.
The critical point is that this was not religion to them. This was reality. An “athiest” in any other society would be what we would call a religious person.
Anyone who wants to really study history has to go through a discipline no modern reader of history has ever done, least of all paid historians.
To understand what ancient writers are saying, you have to force yourself to put yourself in the place of people who did not see the stars we see.
Those people did not live in the same world we live in.
People who tell me they have read the classics have NOT read the classics. They have read what ancient Greeks said from their own persepctive. Those who say they have read the Early Church Fathers have NOT read the Early Church Fathers.
They have seen the stars from the point of view of a man who knows that the nearest one is a sun that is twenty-five trillion miles away, and their idea of the Church Fathers is as distant as that.
The Original Christians
I keep pointing out that there were six million Jews in the Roman Empire. This totally destroys the basis on which the Diaspora theory, Israel, and Old Testament Christianity are based.
Most of these Jews were converts. Yes, Judaism was a prosetlytizing faith. It was probably crippled by its requirement of circumcision. You can do that kind of agony to a baby, but a grown man will seldom take such pain. So Christianity with its baptism beat them out.
Actually most Jews did NOT reject Christ. The Greek Jews disappeared entirely during the centuries after Christ. They all became Christian. They WERE the original Christian Church, and it was huge.
No, the Jews in Israel did not become Christian. As Jesus himself said,
“No prophet is without honor save in his own country.”
Those are the Jews Old Testament Christianity worships.
That is the country Old Testament Christians call the Holy Land.
They are not Christians, they are Jehovists.
But less than a tenth of the Jews were in Palestine. The whole basis of Old Testament Christianity is a fraud.
Jehovism
In 1803 the original church of the Pilgrims in Plymouth, Massachusetts became a Unitarian Church.
The Pilgrims, like the Puritans who came in slightly later, were rigid Old Testament Calvinists. They talked very little about Christ’s Mercy. They concentrated on the vengeful, merciless JHWH, what we call Jehovah, of the Old Testament.
But the Pilgrim version of Jehovah didn’t just kill people wholesale as he did in the Old Testament. The Pilgrim Jehovah was merciless in sending almost everybody to Hell for eternity. Christ’s Mercy was a tiny asterisk at the end of the Old Testament.
So by 1803 the Pilgrims gave up Jesus completely and became Unitarians. To Unitarians, Jesus is just another prophet.
I seem to be only person who has noticed that Moslems are also Unitarians. “Allah” just means “God” in Arabic. They accept the Old Testament, and their Allah is Jehovah.
The Christian Maltese called their God “Allah” too.
When you concentrate so much on Jehovah, like so many fundamentalist Christians do, you begin to look at the New Testament as an asterisk on the Old Testament. Many who call themselves Christians are, in my opinion, Jehovists.
I hold to the faith of my own ancestors as my own Old Testament. Odinism was a primitive attempt to find the truth, just as the Old Testament is. The Magi were the clergy of the largest monotheistic faith of their day, Zoroastrianism. The Magi knew nothing of the Old Testament, but they accepted Christ while the Jews rejected Him. The holy book of the Magi was the Vesta.
It seems to me a natural developement that the Pilgrims became Unitarians. The Puritans also became largely Unitarian and then they became fanatical leftists. Their Christianity disappeared, but their fanaticism stayed.
My Religion is Christian or I Don’t Have One
It bothers some of my non-religious readers that I call myself a Christian.
In actual fact, I have very little faith. Most people don’t. If that were not the case, Jesus would not have talked about faith the size of a mustard seed.
But if you ask me my religious faith, such as it is, it is Christian. If it is not wholly Christian, it is nothing.
My religious conviction is summed up by the great Christian writer, C.S. Lewis:
“Either Jesus is God, or He was a madman.”
When You Can’t Dodge
Posted by Bob in How Things Work, Religion on 10/09/2004
I have gotten a couple of complaints about my support for embryonic cell research. I expect a lot more.
My boss John Ashbrook had a solid pro-life voting record. Since he was running for the Senate in 1982, a lot of people urged him to take the lead in outlawing in vitro ferilization.
In vitro fertilization had all the same cliches attached to it that embryonic stem cell research has today. You saved life by destroying life. You created life to be destroyed, the whole thing.
It was a natural. John could have used it the way Bush is using embryonic stem cell research. The pro-life pros would have gone wild with gratitude at a new cause to champion.
But that is one reason Bush is president and John Ashbrook never made it beyond congress. It never occurred to John to lead a fight to outlaw in vitro fertilization. In vitro would allow people who desperately wanted children to have them. It has allowed people to live, probably more like 50,000 by now.
The pro-lifers said those who wanted children could just adopt third-world children. That’s what they’re pushing today.
It never even occurred to John Ashbrook to do what Bush is doing. There were many instances like this that showed that John Ashbrook was not qualified for higher office.
People want sociopaths in higher offices, people incapable of genuine feelings of guilt.
If you face an issue like in vitro fertilization, you can’t just say how ignorant the person is who disagrees with you. You have to choose. Nobody answers me on in vitro because it makes the whole argument too difficult.
I never had the option of just pointing and condemning. I had to make decisions.
And I had to live with them.
And, worst of all, I am not a sociopath.
Nothing is More Provincial Than Universalism
You are not supposed to say “the Roman Catholic Church”. You are supposed to say “the Catholic Church”.
Nobody worries about that nowadays because Catholics are fair game for anybody today just like white Southerners are.
Methodists and Presbyterians and Lutherans and Baptists call themselves “catholic,” with the small “c,” because they are open to all mankind.
Communists and liberals and conservatives claim to be catholic too.
Go to a Catholic or a Baptist or a Presbyterian Church and try to take communion. To take communion in a Catholic Church takes a year in catachmen classes.
Anybody can become a Baptist or a Presbyterian once they take the classes and prove to the preacher that they BELIEVE.
In the real world a person cannot change his real beliefs any more than he can change the color of his skin.
Universalists say that if everybody believed what they believe, human conflict would cease. Meanwhile in the world I live in, millions of people are slaughtered by one universalist faith like Communism because they adhere to another universalist faith like Christianity.
Meanwhile us provincials, us racists and nativists and nationalists, can live together in peace.
Us provincialists and racists and nationalists say awful things like. “Stay out of our country, stay away from intermarriage with us, and you can live in your own lands.”
But for univeralists, no one else has any lands of their own. By definition the universalist wants it all. For the universalist there is no “you,” there is no “us.”
So naturally Christians have always killed Christians without mercy. Naturally a true disciple of Allah has no mercy. No advocate of True Communism can afford to allow an enemy of his faith to live.
Every universalist says he comes to bring peace to everyone of every race and nation. And once everyone of every race and nation is a True Believer, there will be peace.
In the meantime, things will be a little rough.
Simple as Brown and White
Posted by Bob in How Things Work, Religion on 08/10/2004
An old right-winger wrote me that the big question in politics is Socialism. A lot of old-timers are still stuck in that time warp.
This was my reply:
Maybe it is because I was an economics professor, but I don’t take economics as seriously as other people do.
I think white people tend towards capitalism for the same reason the Chinese invent things and do nothing with them while we make revolutions from gunpowder and the printing press.
We make the printing press work. We get gunpowder and we end up on the moon. The free market is just something else that we make work.
You are pointing at economic ideas while America is turning brown. It doesn’t matter what economic or political theory a brown country says it believes in, a brown country will be a tyranny and it will live in poverty the minute there are not enough white countries and white people to pull it out.
Simplistic isn’t it? Simplistic like supply and demand.
Bob, the Devil, and Screwtape
Someone else wrote me that the Bible was the key to America’s salvation. This often goes with quotes from the Old Testament about saving the People of Israel.
That use of God gives me the chills.
This was my reply:
I believe in God, the Father Almighty, maker of heaven and earth, and in Jesus Christ, His Only begotten Son, who was born of the Virgin Mary, suffered unto Pontius Pilate, was crucified dead and buried.
On the third day He arose from the grave and ascended into heaven whence He shall come to judge the quick and the dead.
I believe in the holy spirit, the catholic church, the communion of saints and the life everlasting.
Amen.
The Amen means that that and that ALONE, is what I must try to believe in. It is the ONLY religion I believe in, and mostly I don’t believe in that. I try to have faith the size of a mustard seed, and it is not easy for me.
CS Lewis warned against “Christianity AND …” The second you begin to use God for a political theory, the Senior Demon Screwtape told his nephew Wormwood in letters straight from Hell, you have diverted it, done away with it.
He also pointed out to Wormwood that it made not the slightest bit of difference what the “AND” referred to. It can be an obsession with fighting poverty, but it can also be an obsession with fighting evolution.
God is not a politician. Satan is not a politician.
Screwtape, the practicing professional in damning souls, said that all that mattered was getting people off of concentrating on Christ and salvation and making them think about “the Crisis” (He specifically mentioned on great line, “Christianity and the Crisis”). Get them thinking that True Religion is about social policies like abortion or evolution or the poor.
To damn souls, said the successful old professional Screwtape, you just need to get people off of seeing Christ as a means to Salvation, and as a means to something else that they think is Good. Anything else will do.
Screwtape told Wormwood that in order to damn people, you need to make them think they have mastered salvation, and can now go on to more relevant stuff. What the “relevant” stuff is makes no difference at all.
Screwtape pointed out that the sin of gluttony has nothing to do with overeating. Jesus Christ was not a dietitian. As an example, Screwtape pointed to a very thin woman who was on the path to damnation through gluttony. She was obsessed with eating very little, and made unreasonable demands on people, especially overworked waitresses, to cater to her exact diet.
Today’s vegetarian fanatics will fit very nicely into the place Screwtape has prepared for them. Gluttony is OBSESSION with food. It doesn’t matter what form the obsession takes.
An obsession with using God in politics is a fine wide road to seeing Screwtape up front and personal. He doesn’t care what the politics happen to be, and the damned won’t either when the time comes. The obsessive pro-lifers and the socialists will be right there together.
The only thing I use God for is salvation. Jesus said stick to the Golden Rule and worry about your own soul. If the High Priest demands more, I will let the High Priest follow his Law and his scriptures where they lead him.
I am the grandson of a Methodist circuit rider. My first ancestor in America was the Reverend Alexander Whitaker, the son of a Cambridge professor. He was the first Anglican clergyman in America, arriving at Jamestown in 1609 “to convert the savage Indians.” He baptized Pocahontas and wrote the first book in English in America.
His book, Whitaker’s Good Newes From Virginia, is online and it is twenty thousand words long. It contains long quotes in Latin, Greek and Hebrew, all of which he had mastered. He was a very literate man, which becomes relevant below.
The Reverend Alexander Whitaker died in Jamestown before the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock.
But as soon as the Methodist Church arrived in America, my literate ancestors left the Anglican Church and became Methodists.
John Wesley, the founder of the real Methodist Church, lived and died a High Church Anglican. In his Anglican church, the Nicene Creed was what adults use. The Apostles’ Creed, which I recite above, is what children recite in the Catholic, Orthodox, and Anglican churches.
My literate ancestors knew that, and they chose to be Methodists.
Most Methodists were the coal miners, the frontiersmen, the people the Established Church ignored. Many of them never heard of Christ until Wesley came to them. My VERY literate ancestors joined his church. We are the children’s church, the catholic church.
We knew that, too.
Wesley went out to the people the High Priests would not touch. So did Jesus.
And when Jesus spoke of the Kingdom, He never pointed to the High Priest. He pointed to the children.
All this religion stuff embarrasses the mainline preachers. So they got together recently and declared that Christianity is all about helping poor people. This is a line that was old two thousand years ago.
Some people tried that line out on Jesus. He replied, “The poor we have always with us.” He then explained that He was on this earth about salvation. His concern was not about Liberation or abolishing poverty. He was more worried about what greed did to the rich man’s soul than about social conditions.
Jesus did not just minister to the poor. He ate with the rich tax-gatherers.
That embarrasses the High Priests of today exactly the same way it embarrassed the High Priests who spoke to Jesus. For today’s leftists clergy the rich to are The Enemy. Today’s mainline clergy wants to be “relevant” to THIS world and stop talking about a theoretical Other World they don’t believe in anyway. The High Priests love the Old Testament because it talks about history and social conditions and other “relevant” things a lot.
For the old High Priests, Jesus was monomaniacal and just plain silly. For the new High Priests, Jesus IS monomaniacal and just plain silly.
What Jesus did not say was “read the scriptures to attain salvation.” What Jesus did not say was “Praise God” in the old heathen way. He said LOVE God. The God of Jesus knows who He is. He needs no reminders from down here.
God is not a dietitian. God is not a cosmologist. God is not obsessed with THIS life. A person who thinks God is about the six-day creation or taking care of one’s body or changing social conditions make great fuel for Screwtape.
Jews kept reminding Jesus that the Old Testament Messiah would come to save the Jewish nation. Every time they brought that up Jesus said, in every way he could, that “My Kingdom is not of this earth.”
For those who want to show how “relevant” Christianity is, the Old Testament Messiah is very useful. He came to save Family Values. He came to save America.
And Screwtape says, “That will do just fine.”




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