Reality 101 (part 2)

Religion

“In the spiritual vacuum that exists in the United States, the Christian right is well-positioned to argue that its menagerie of fears and chauvinisms—piled into a box labeled ‘moral values’—constitutes a serious moral narrative. It doesn’t, but the Religious Right’s contribution to the denigration of Christianity will continue unabated until other Christian communities come up with a compelling alternative.” -Rick Mercier, If You Read the Gospels, the Religious Right is Most Often Wrong

Social disruption—often resulting from the threat or actuality of physical destruction and/or economic loss—and despair, in general, easily lead to domination by ideological extremists and a retreat to the lowest common denominator. In such a situation, followers of monotheistic religions tend to project their own, suppressed “dark side” onto easily discernable “others,” such as followers of another religion, another ideology, or “foreigners” in general.

People and groups with common interests will naturally conspire, or “breathe together.” Priestly, political, and economic castes do so often, using the lowest common denominator of religion to direct popular discontent away from themselves and onto “foreign” groups. This explains much of recorded history.

Jesus Christ said that this Piscean Age would end as it had begun. Within a century of his death, St. Paul’s written transmission of Christ’s teachings were interpreted literally by the Galatians in modern-day central Europe, to his consternation. Roman emperor Constantine was a Mithraist, a popular religion among Roman soldiers of the later empire, and the main rival to Christianity in the first three centuries AD, though the two religions have many similarities. As his empire began to break apart, Constantine converted to Christianity and actively supported the Galatians, which served to unite Europe, but led to the persecution of any Christian cults that didn’t adhere to the dogma of the new, Roman Catholic church, such as the Gnostics and the Essenes (ironically, the cult of Joseph, Mary and Jesus), and all non-Christians. What followed was a thousand-year period known as the Middle/Dark Ages.

Fundamentalists loudly praise Jesus and condemn those whom they consider ungodly, projecting their collective shadow-psyche onto those they consider the enemies of God—rather than practice introspection—and doing what they can to hasten the Apocalypse, in the hope that they will live to see Jesus descend out of the sky, and be “raptured” bodily to a physical location called Heaven, as foretold in the Book of Revelation.

The thing is, though, that the Book of Revelation was interpreted very differently in the first century AD. Take Revelation 17:9-14, for example: “The seven heads are seven mountains on which the woman is seated; also, they are seven kings, of whom five have fallen, one is living, and the other has not yet come; and when he comes, he must remain only a little while. As for the beast that was and is not, it is an eighth but it belongs to the seven, and it goes to destruction. And the ten horns that you saw are ten kings who have not yet received a kingdom, but they are to receive authority as kings for one hour, together with the beast. These are united in yielding their power and authority to the beast; they will make war on the Lamb, and the Lamb will conquer them.”

Nearly every New Testament scholar agrees that Revelation was written during the reign of Domitian, the “beast from the sea,” around AD 95-96. The “seven mountains” represent the seven hills of Rome. The woman is the city of Rome, here depicted as the persecutor of Christians. The “seven kings” refer to the emperors of Rome. The “five fallen” refer to the five emperors who had died since the time of Jesus: Augustus (29 BC-AD 14), Tiberius (14-37), Gaius (37-41), Claudius (41-54), and Nero (54-68). “One has a wound” refers to the emperor Nero, who died in 68, but whom contemporary legend had it would return from the dead to continue persecuting Christians. Thus, the beast has a head that has recovered from a mortal wound. The head “who is” refers to Vespasian (69-79) and the one that is “not yet”. refers to Titus (79-81). The head that “was but is not” refers to an eighth emperor, Domitian.

In a technique that was common in apocalyptic literature, Revelation was written as though Vespasian were still alive, and it were forecasting the terrible things that would occur under Domitian. Portraying the emperor and his provincial authorities as “beasts” and henchmen of the dragon Satan, the author called on Christians to refuse to take part in the emperor’s cult, even if it meant martyrdom. Christ’s thousand-year reign was here seen to have begun with his resurrection.

Over time, events convinced many Christians that this interpretation must be in error, and several other interpretations evolved over the centuries. While the “symbolic history” view was adopted by the medieval church, literalist interpretations emerged throughout the Dark Ages. Some began to believe that ongoing events were fulfilling “predictions” in the Book of Revelation, and the “continuous history” interpretation of Revelation gained traction.

In early 19th century Britain and America, Protestant theology gave birth to the view that Revelation was predicting contemporary events that had become popular through the “continuous history” view. Exponents of this interpretation began to look at the past history of Christianity from the New Testament through the Dark Ages, and up to the 19th century, in a different light. In the old view, Christ’s reign was AD 33-1033. The new view began to argue that none of the events described in the Book of Revelation, after chapters 1-3 (John’s vision and the letters to the seven churches in Asia), had happened yet. All the events of Revelation 4-22 were instead considered to be predictions of future events that would come to pass as the Apocalypse approached. This interpretation sees Revelation as a prediction of “future history.” This overall scheme of interpretation is often referred to as “Bible prophecy,” which involves linking various passages from different books in the Bible to form a composite that fits current and future expectations.

As this mode of interpretation became popular, so did pre-millenialism, the idea that the thousand-year reign of Christ will be a literal event that cannot occur until after Christ returns. Several different versions of this interpretation have been put forth.

Outside of the mainstream, James Morgan Pryse, a gnostic, saw Revelation as an Occidental version of the theory of the seven chakras. He wrote, “…the Apocalypse is a manual of spiritual development and not, as conventionally interpreted, a cryptic history or prophecy.” There is also an interpretation that Revelation describes a spiritual battle that took place while Jesus was on the cross and in the tomb. These interpretations are not mutually exclusive, and may both be accurate. The Apocalypse—that is to say, spiritual development—is something that must be accomplished by everyone, individually. However, mass belief in a literal Apocalypse, fostered by an unholy alliance of religious and political leaders, may well manifest a self-fulfilling prophecy that initiates a second Dark Ages, on a global scale.

Allegory

“A talent for speaking differently, rather than for arguing well, is the chief instrument of cultural change.” -Richard Rorty

It amazes me how people, having realized that they are mortal (around the age of five, in my case), go on to spend their entire lives pretending that they haven’t realized it, and use all their energies to distract themselves from this ultimate truth. Consider what happens when, convinced they are about to die, people see their whole lives flash before them, full of depth and detail, in an impossibly short instant. For that split-second, they experience pure Awareness, of which spacetime is a subset, a stepped-down, lower-order reality in which the universe is constantly born and dying. From this perspective, the beginning and end of the universe, Alpha and Omega, are simultaneous, mutually implicit and dependent.

A Zen master once advised his disciple to meditate “as though your hair were on fire” because, during such intense moments, one is shocked out of conventional perception and cognition, and into a state of heightened awareness, a zone of timelessness where hours can pass in a moment, and one can see one’s entire life as a kind of hologram; can “see the world in a grain of sand, and hold eternity in an hour.”

Again, I am amazed that so few followers of monotheistic religions bother to investigate other religions. Can people honestly believe that, among all the different traditions, theirs is the only true one? Are they afraid to open their minds to other teachings, lest they be damned? Meanwhile, how can atheists and agnostics dismiss out of hand the words of so many saints, going back many thousands of years? Different religions say different things, all claiming to be the truth, based on the culture from which they emerged, but Truth is one, and easily discerned by comparing different traditions. Books such as The Power of Myth, Zen in the Bible, Jesus and the Buddha, and dozens more make this obvious.

Everyone sees the world through the filter of their own experiences which, especially during the formative years, create dispositions that affect how later experiences are interpreted. Our minds make us see and act as we do. Many of the people who were raised in Christian cultures, seeing all the evil done in Christ’s name, not to mention the logical contradictions both within the Bible and between the Bible and observable reality, throw out the baby with the bathwater. But suppose the essence of the teachings has been obscured by mistranslation and misinterpretation, both inadvertent and in the service of temporal authorities?

Fundamentalist movements which, regardless of the religion or culture, are virtually identical: 1. Men make the rules, women are subservient, homosexuality is intolerable; 2. All rules apply to all people; 3. The rules are communicated to the next generation, word for word; 4. History is radically and idiosyncratically denied as believers wax nostalgic for a golden age that never existed. Indeed, fundamentalism can be labeled as religious fascism, as fascism can be termed political fundamentalism.

“These men are acting out the role of ‘alpha males’ who define the boundaries of their group’s territory and the norms and behaviors that define members of their in-group… these are the characteristic behaviors of sexually dimorphous territorial animals… there is a clear separation between the in-group and the out-group. The in-group is protected; outsiders are expelled or fought.” -Davidson Loehr, The Fundamentalist Agenda

In 1910, a collection of essays titled “The Fundamentals” cited Romanism (Papal scare), socialism (Red Scare), modern philosophy (Enlightenment principles), atheism (i.e., communism), Mormonism, and spiritualism as dangers to (Protestant) Christianity. Thus the General Assembly of the northern Presbyterian Church cited five essentials to defend against liberalism: 1. the inerrancy of scripture; 2. the inerrancy of the virgin birth; 3. the physical resurrection of Christ; 4. the historical authenticity of the miracles; 5. the Atonement, or reconciliation of God and humanity through Jesus Christ.

This battle soon spilled over into politics and secular society and, since the 1980 “marriage” of the Republican Party and the Souther Baptist Coalition, has replaced its traditional enemies within its own ranks with enemies in the “liberal” vs. “conservative” political arena. But this battle isn’t about religious vs. secular, or Christian vs. atheist—it’s about modern democracy, religious freedom, and the rights of secular civil society to coexist under a constitutional government, without being taken over by fascistic moral fetishists.

If fundamentalist leaders were to read the Bible in Aramaic, the language that Jesus spoke, they would understand that when God tells Moses His name, the word He uses, ena-ena (not the individual “I” but “I-I,” or “I AM THAT I AM,” from Exodus 3:13-14), is the same word that Jesus uses in John 14:6 when he says, “I am the way, the truth, and the life. No man comes to the Father except through me.” In John 5:30, however, Jesus uses ena, the individual “I',” when he says, “By myself I can do nothing.”

In Luke 10:25-28, Jesus tells an expert in the law that he is correct when he says that, in order to inherit eternal life, one must “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind,” and to “Love your neighbor as yourself.” Jesus does not say, however, that one must believe in Jesus. Neither did Jesus disparage other religions: “Forbid him not, for he that is not against us is for us.” (Luke 9:49-50)

The Greek word Logos was mistranslated as “Word” but means “Divine Pattern,” the template, mind, or seed of God which is sent into the feminine Void to give it a pattern that we recognize as the created Cosmos. Thus, Genesis should read: In the beginning was the Logos, and the Logos was with God, and the Logos was God…with God in the beginning. Through Him all things were made; without Him nothing was made that has been made. In Him was life, and that life was the light of men. The light shines in the darkness, but the darkness has not understood it.” (John 1:1-5)

The Father is beyond time, unchangeable, eternal, and sends His seed to give birth to the Cosmos. Babylonian, Egyptian, Assyrian, and ancient American cultures ahd similar genesis allegories: the unity of God is split into Mind (Heaven) and Matter (Mater, Mother, Earth), after which mind gives pattern to matter, which had been without form, and void.

In Genesis 2:7, God sends His seed into the world by blowing His breath, or spirit, into the nostrils of the clay figurine He has fashioned out of the soil (matter), to make a being that is half material/mother and half spirit/father. The name Adam means “red earth,” a reference to the idea that God must be broken, or bleed, into matter to create life. Later, God would send His seed, holy breath, into virgin matter, Mary.

As David Teubner explains in Allegory in the Bible, ancient cultures around the world believed that the masculine, divine force has been broken into twelve fragments and scattered into the material world, where they became forgetful of their origin. Therefore God sends a son to gather the lost fragments together, as Moses gathered the twelve tribes of Israel. When the people again became forgetful, and followed the letter of the Law of Moses but not its spirit, God sent Jesus, who gathers twelve disciples and goes up on the Mount to teach them, as Moses has taught the Law from the Mount.