"Nobody wants to talk about the way things are, but it's pretty
easy to see when you're viewing things from outside of the fish bowl."
"It's not a matter of what is true that counts but
a matter of what is perceived to be true." Henry Kissinger
"Like Hitler´s quote about telling a lie until it becomes the truth, and Stalin´s quote that an election is decided by those who count the votes and not by the electorate, we live effectively in smoke and mirror land."
In the reptile den these quotes are the order of the day but they never tell us this in Sunday school.
"Fidel Castro, when he was visited in his lair in the Sierra Madre a few years before coming to power, was asked by the visitor where his army was. All that could be seen were a bunch of guys swinging in hammocks. He replied that what he actually had was irrelevant. All that mattered was what the people *thought* he had."
"Life ends up being a labryinth to decode the 'lies to children' from the truth. Couple this to the infinite capacity of the human mind to believe absolutely anything rather than face the evidence and we have the recipe for another thousand years of ignorance and pain."
I have recently read accounts of the long trail that has led up to the Bible that we normally encounter. The King James Bible is the version that I experienced during my formative years of compulsory dailychapel services while at school in England. Since then I have met people who base their world view entirely on the Bible. They affirm, presumably as a result of inculcation, that the Bible is the incontrovertible word of god. The human agency required to assemble and edit such a huge body of disparate and often contradictory text is apparently irrelevant to them. This is very hard to accept at face value given the long and chequered history of various translations, and translations of translations, spanning many centuries that bring us to the present versions. Another factor which may escape the converted is that most of those who write about the history of the Bible are predisposed to venerating its sacredness.
Such partisanship is also found woven into the division between Catholic Christianity and Protestant Christianity which itself is then divided into myriad threads which have more to do with politics, geography and expediency than religious belief or piety. Protestant and Anglican biblical historians denigrate the Catholics, going so far as to ridicule and disdain the Vatican. This is easy to go along with but hardly religiously objective. There was a time when the Vatican was mostly involved with the economics of exploiting the credulity of its 'flock' by selling indulgences as though they were a commodity. Modern Catholicism is hardly any better. The disgust that this provoked was the platform for Martin Luther's list of 95 rhetorical questions nailed to the door of the church in Wittenberg in 1517. Such protest gave rise to the word Protestant. 20 years later the English King Henry VIII, for egoistical reasons connected to his political need for a male heir, renounced hegemony to the Vatican and established an independent Anglican church within his English kingdom.
This cleared the way for him to divorce and remarry, which the Pope had denied him. Ironically the title of 'Defender of the Faith' bestowed on the English monarch by the Vatican, was not simultaneously renounced by Henry, but is maintained until the present day. We are left with a tawdry understanding of circumstances. On the one hand the Vatican commercialized its spiritual role and on the other a peripheral King, (seen from the Vatican's point of view), shrugged off the authority of Christianity's foundation, the Vatican and the Pope, and assumed the role of maximum authority over his own Christian church, The Church of England.
The list of Bibles is endless. We go from the texts written in their original languages to Latin versions and from there to several translations of Latin versions. The Vatican's fury knew no bounds when translations from the Latin made their appearance and several erudite people were cruelly executed for their efforts to bring the word of god directly to the people in their own language. What use the word of god is in a foreign tongue is not dealt with. The notion of the sacrosanct word of god is completely forgotten, as the real function of organized religion became so clearly apparent. What was at stake was the privilege enjoyed by the clerics and the passive dependence of the people on self appointed middle men required to decipher religious text. Not much has changed! We still have a patriarchal mind set in religion. Father is used to address priests as well as god and the priesthood still use agricultural terms such as flock to mean congregation. (from Latin, grex meaning herd. In Judaism the term goyim meaning cattle is applied to non Jewish people). Pastor is Latin for shepherd and reappears in the English word pasture implying the passive docility of sheep. To people permanently hypnotized by the brain washing we all go through, the real meaning of these words is sublimated. To those who then ask innocently 'what's in a word?' I would say everything, as they themselves know full well when it selectively suits their agenda. Indeed the Bible's use of words is debated down to the wire to justify positions of dogma. The fact that the four gospels contradict each other so much is even more cause for endless dogmatic assertions.
This writer's position is that the New Testament was written by the aristocratic Roman Piso family drawing heavily on the writings of Seneca. The motives were to establish an empire of the mind as opposed to a merely territorial one. So the Roman Empire becomes The Holy Roman Empire. The capital remains the same, Rome, and the infrastructure that had served previously simply gets adjusted to the new system. Vocabulary dating from the previous system is hardly altered. Vatican, Pontifex Maximus, oration, Vicar, catechism, codex and a string of terms like these are simply commandeered to fill new functions. The New Testament is a pastiche of myths based on previous saviour god figuresbased on the solar calendar and rooted in Middle Eastern culture from previous religions coming out of India. Christianity usurped the rituals, priests' costumes and terrain from what they subsequently condemned as paganism. The attributes of the central figure are identical to several previous analogous figures going back thousands of years.The virgin birth, the working of miracles and the resurrection after three days were all fearures found not in one but many man-god figures. Horus, Dionysius, and Krishna are three of the twenty five examples of this. The recurrence of twelve is a constant deriving from the twelve months with the Sun Son of God in the middle. To confuse the plot still further metaphorical concepts have been taken literally and have resulted in fossilised analogy being revered as historical fact. One feature remained constant and that is the role of the priesthood to hagride the collective mind and bank the proceeds. Even in modern times the Vatican Church vies with Coca Cola for being the largest financial institution in existence. Nice work if you can get it! No one ever lost money under estimating the intelligence of the public or its taste for tartly flavoured sugary drinks.
None of the above negates the fact that the Bible is replete with accumulated wisdom and is good reading for anyone regardless of their cultural background. The contentions arise when it is presented as a historically rigorous account attributed to a non-human source. Also hard to pass over is the age-old tactic of denigrating previous regimes while at the same time incorporating them as working models. That which is called pagan by Christianity is the basis of its own ritual and calendar. The pre-christian word sacrifice is derived from 'to make holy'. Its use in modern language is grotesque. To consider the Bible to be the manual of the human race is again symptomatic of a one dimensional chauvinistic stance. Does such a stance include the congruent use of the same material by the parallel religions of Judaism and Islam? Does it account for the overwhelmingly non-christian proportion of humanity found in Asia? I am careful to avoid throwing the baby out with the bath water. Altruism is a superior social model to Darwinian survival of the fittest, and Christianity's theoretical trade mark is altruism. Another minefield is that of impugning another mans beliefs, which of course are purely personal and not mete to be ridiculed. But this is akin to a smoker or drinker claiming that their vice gives them freely sought pleasure. Such an affirmation blind-sides the real effect of a compulsive vice, inculcated purposefully, in order to mind control humanity while leaving them with the illusion of free choice. As Goethe said, 'No man is more slaved than he who has been convinced that he is free'. The democratic choice between left and right is a classic example of how freedom is an illusion which allows the unencumbered passage of unannounced agendas to plough forward regardless.
While respecting another mans right to believe whatever suits him is admirable, nevertheless it is contradicted when such believers then impose their dogma on others. This occurs in education, the administration of justice, politics and the media. History is the story of several thousand years of ideas installed by imposition and fear. In truth religious doctrine relies on manipulating basic fears in order to take over peoples intellectual autonomy. It uses fear of not being loved by parental surrogates, (father figures from priest to god himself), fear of being ostracized for being independent, and fear of death, pumped up to a belief in post-mortem life everlasting! It discourages the free and creative use of the intellect, as we see by the treatment meted out to Galileo and other stars of scientific knowledge. And here it is interesting to note that it is not the science per se that comes under attack by religious conservatives. It is the erosion of their power base that sends them into panic. This was the reason for the collosal resistance by the Vatican and Anglican authorities to the divulgation of the scriptures in colloquial language. Seen from without the debating posture of the conservative elements is not acceptable. No wonder professional comedians have had a field day taking pot shots at such goings on!
One finds that one can increase performance or overcome obstacles by inventing mental models. I used to run up 5 floors at night, switching the lights out all the way up. I found it scary and imagined I had a crocodile chasing me. This resulted in my arriving at the top effortlessly and without puffing. It also was a clear demonstration of how to use the imagination to achieve what sports psychologists are paid to do. Religion may function in this way too and that is fine. It is when someone tells me the crocodile is real that they lose my attention. To make matters worse is when people will then debate the finer points of this imaginary crocodile as if it was real! Now we are really in cuckoo land. This is when things get seriously dangerous and anything can happen. Imagine by extension when such imaginary crocodiles are pitted against each other in competition. 'My imaginary crocodile is more real than yours'. Here we go! Hang on for the ride and keep your head down. 'Just a minute my imaginary crocodile has wings and talks to me'. 'Wow.---- But mine wrote a book'. What?...........
Belief is the death of intelligence.
http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xo7ct_george-carlin-religion
Most references to the ills of mankind are hung on America. In fact America is a
financial colony of the City of London. 'London' itself has little to do with
the British people. It just happens to be their base for the moment. The ills we
see associated with America actually apply to the rest of the world. This has
little to do with territory and everything to do with the 'Empire of the Mind'.
Globalization in the form of the black op corporate spider grip is distinct from
world wide co-operation that the well intentioned may aspire to. The model for
the machinations that we see were actually all sorted out in ancient
Mediterranean cultures a few thousand years ago. The geometry and mathematics of
the great pyramids and the deceit of the trojan horse have never been forgotten
by the black brotherhood. The composition of the abstract pyramid is made up of
fractalian smaller pyramids that form the whole. The individual is never in a
position to see the whole, being as he is completely tied up in his own
microcosm.
Unless you become more watchful in your States and check this spirit of monopoly
and thirst for exclusive privileges, you will in the end find that the most
important powers of Government have been given or bartered away, and the control
of your dearest interests have been passed into the hands of these corporations:
Andrew Jackson, farewell address, 04 March 1837
"What is the great Amercican sin? Extravagance? Vice? Graft? No; it is a kind of
half-humorous, good-natured indifference, a lack of "concentrated indignation"
as my English friend calls it, which allows extravagance and vice to flourish.
Trace most of our ills to their source, and it is found that they exist by
virtue of an easy-going, fatalistic indifference which dislikes to have its
comfort disturbed....The most shameless greed, the most sickening industrial
atrocities, the most appalling public scandals are exposed, but a half-cynical
and wholly indifferent public passes them by with hardly a shrug of the
shoulders; and they are lost in the medley of events. This is the great American
sin.": Joseph Fort Newman, Atlantic Monthly, October 1922
For in reason, all government without the consent of the governed is slavery:
Jonathan Swift : Irish author, 1667-1745
"If we could see the world before it enters our eyes it would be a mass of
wave patterns - thought fields. Through the collective mind we transform
these fields into agreed reality - the landscape we think we see all around
us. In fact, it is within us, within our minds."
From the 'Holographic Universe'.
Extrapolating from this one may better appreciate the over-riding effect of mind
control.
By controlling the perceptions of the collective mind one effectively controls
'reality'.
If those few who control the perceptions are not benign then the result will be
malign.
Such malignity or hardening of the heart is horrific but it is not a static
state. Just as the
body forms a callous it matures and falls away to reveal virgin skin. So we go
through a cycle
oft repeated through history. Knowing this the 'few' think way down line and
actually farm the process........The 'body mental' of the species however
evolves into a hitherto unseen
mutation. This is the source from which I draw my optimism in the face of evil.