Historicity of Jesus - 2

[dhu]

EXCERPT:



Feeding the Cuckoo



This episode reveals that otherwise right thinking people are allowing themselves be blindfolded with the label of ‘hinduism’, a cuckoo in the nest, placed by mleccha westerners.



The cuckoo child is growing and displacing the original progeny of this land, starving it and stifling it. Originally it looked similar to bharatiya samskriti, now it is starting to resemble its parent.



bharateeyas, blinded to consider it as the original progeny of this land, are striving hard to feed this imposter, while it cries voraciously for more and more.

[acharya]

http://www.amazon.com/tag/religion/forum...LAXF1NI2WN

[size="7"]

Prove Christianity is a lie.[/size]





I wouldn't call Christianity a lie- I would call it a myth.



As a student of religion (and an atheist), I see no harm in treating Christianity as a myth. Christ's teachings are as resonant and important today as they were 2,000 years ago. As a teacher and an advocate for social justice I think Jesus was without peer. I think Jesus' transformation into Christ was a product of several things- the respect of his followers, his traumatic death, the power of his teaching, and the Greco-Roman habit of turning great men into deities (let's not forget that the church languished as a Jewish sect but exploded when it was adopted by gentiles).



To call it a 'lie', you have to presuppose deliberately dishonest words and actions on the part of Jesus' followers. But who's to say how watching your teacher (a person for whom you left your family and your possessions) die in such a terrible way would affect you? Perhaps you would have visions concerning him? Maybe you would look to your people's scriptures to see if there were references to him and his death? You might even find yourself looking for a way to rationalize what happened, and you might come to believe that he had been truly exceptional- maybe even a god.



I think Jesus' becoming Christ is understandable under these circumstances.



[size="6"]

Benjamin Kenon says: "I think Jesus' transformation into Christ was a product of several things- the respect of his followers, his traumatic death, the power of his teaching, and the Greco-Roman habit of turning great men into deities."



Except that 'Jesus' never existed. He is fully fictional.[/size]



Initiation by baptism, communion with the God through a holy meal that represented the flesh of the dead God, the Holy Spirit, monotheism, and immortality of the soul were all core beliefs of many ancient faiths. They were simply part of ancient Mediterranean culture.Christianity also borrowed elements of Jesus' mythology: the virgin birth, the miracles (including turning water into wine, walking on water, and especially healing the sick) were all common elements of pre-Christian Pagan religions. Mithras had 'em. So did Dionysus, Attis, Osiris, and Orpheus. And more. And they had them centuries before Christianity.

[ramana]

So it was a packaged religion to ensure appeal to the Greco-Roman mileu of the ancient Mediterranean.

The fact that there are so many commonalities or coincidences(atleast 7 is listed below) with ancient religions and practices shows its a man-made dogma.

1)Initiation by baptism, 2)communion with the God through a holy meal that represented the flesh of the dead God, 3)the Holy Spirit, 4)monotheism, and 5)immortality of the soul were all core beliefs of many ancient faiths. They were simply part of ancient Mediterranean culture.Christianity also borrowed elements of Jesus' mythology: 6)the virgin birth, 7)the miracles (including turning water into wine, walking on water, and especially healing the sick) were all common elements of pre-Christian Pagan religions. Mithras had 'em. So did Dionysus, Attis, Osiris, and Orpheus. And more. And they had them centuries before Christianity.

Muhammed was atleast clear in reducing the commonalaties!

[dhu]

satyabhashnam



Hmmm.. Mythical God told Abraham to murder his son but he heard whispering that told him, r u crazy. He termed it Satan. V call it conscience!

[dhu]

were all common elements of pre-Christian Pagan religions. Mithras had 'em. So did Dionysus, Attis, Osiris, and Orpheus.

this is the modernist position: that christianity is just another false heathen "religion." Nothing will be gained by Hindus by following these types of uber-western critics: the Dawkins and Hitchens. The ones who are stridently anti-islam, e.g. the spencers and splenglers, are likewise a dead end.

[acharya]

[G.Subramaniam]

Are you accusing Hinduism Today of being cuckoos ?

[ramana]

Brihaspati wrote in BRF:

Why is Christianity preparing the ground for Jihadi takeover



Significantly unnoticed events have taken place over the last last few months : at MIT a conference was organized by one Omar Khalidi, a staff member of MIT, who advocates separate laws for Muslims such as polygamy etc, different constituencies for Muslims to elect Muslim lawmakers, apparently has issues with Christian nature of USA and is known even by Muslim scholars as someone who selects his data to paint a picture that suits Islamic agenda. Some people are of opinion he is what one can call ‘soft’ jihadi. Moorthy Muthuswamy has studied Khalidi for his apparent influence on political parties within India with an obvious agenda of creating a separate state for Muslims within India. This fits in with perhaps a perception among a section of Jihadis and their backers that for the next stage of Islamist expansion, resources needed can be gleaned from non-Muslims in India since the Pakistan experiment has failed to provide the resources on its own.



Now why this consistent pattern of western support for elements that bring on Islamic Jihad on non-Muslim civilizations? Maybe the key lies in a fundamental weakness of Christianity towards Islam -specifically to the Arabic Sunni sect of Islam. The problem in fact can be traced back to this weakness after we eliminate all other potential reasons.



It appears that both Islam and Christianity had been in competition over the Judaic legacy and therefore each in its own way saw Judaism proper or the community of Jews as an obstacle to this ideological supremacy. However, ideologically they cannot go too far away from each other in the fundamentals because of this root foundation in Judaism. The conflicts between Christendom and Islam in the historical period basically starts over this claim of sole legacy and takes the form of imperialist conflict – because, both the proselytizing versions of Judaism emerged out of a practical imperialist need for expansion.



The conflict therefore took the form of war for territory and control of productive economies and trade routes of others. To maintain the drive for this imperialist expansion, each side needed to identify the other side as “alien” and the “devil”. The peculiarity of common origins and memes however forced them to find racial divide as an identifier of alien-ness and the enemy.



To date there has been no solid, logical refutation of Islam by Christianity except the claim that Islamics do not recognize Jesus as the sole way to salvation. Even this is problematic because Islam places Jesus as one of the principal prophets and reserves a special role for Jesus in the “end-times”. So the Christian-Islam conflict has taken the loose and weaker basis of “race” rather than any concrete and profound difference in ideology.



It is this theoretical confusion that is clearly indicated in the responses that Christian dominated wW gives to Islamic moves. Contrary to the propaganda that West’s reaction to Islamism is purely determined by economic motives, it is actually Christianity’s secret attraction for what it perhaps considers the “purity” of the Sunni Arabic extension of Judaism. For example the West has studiously cultivated the Arabs since using them as tools against the competitors of the British – the Ottomans. But there would be no reason to continue preferring them over and above the Iranians long after Ottomans have been finished, and both Arabia and Iran sit over oil wealth. Not that the west does not dip to deal with Iran when needed – as in the Contra-hostage deal.



Where does this put Christianity and Islam in the eyes of other non-revealed-tradition cultures?



In UK, judicial and executive systems enforce the law strictly when it comes to the case of say liquidation of the “holy cow” of a Hindu temple because, reasonably – the cow was diseased. However the same country and system finds desecration of its prized memorial by a Muslim as not being driven by religious hatred and has allowed a symbolic violent form of expression of hatred in Islam – the throwing of the shoe (typically symbolically used against the devil), as a legitimate form of public expression.



In the USA, the California text book controversy showed that the administration and system would be reluctant to withdraw protection to attempts to represent the non-Muslim past of India in a way that suits the Islamic agenda aginst Hindus. The same system finds a Chief Minister of an Indian state known for his strong Hindu affiliations persona non grata even though he has not yet been convicted on the charges of complicity in Hindu-Muslim violence – the main excuse given to refuse him visas. However the same administration has no problem with Omar Kahlidi’s claims which as Muthuswamy points out are based on dubious scholarship. So the “Hindu” fall foul of freedom of expression but Islamist views do not. In India, the Christian proselytizers are not known to target the Indian Muslim communities for conversion, but Hindus. Indian Christians are also not seen as active protesters against Jihadi activities or statements by various sections of Islamists.



All this shows up as a secret attraction and weakness towards the Sunni-Wahabi form of Islam within Christianity of the west to the Hindus, among whom the mistrust of Christian missionaries and their motives have been increasing. Moreover the gradually increasing intervention of western states in favour of protecting the primary propaganda mechanisms of Islamists, and prevention of movements or expressions of ideological criticisms of Islam, is bound to alarm Hindus or Buddhists across South Asia.



If Christianity cannot resolve this fundamental dilemma, it will not be too distant a day, when the Azaan will be heard from Westminster Abbey, the British Monarch may well come out of his Zenana Harem to attend Friday Prayers where the Khutba will be read extolling a new Caliph in the middle East, and the USA rechristens itself the United American Emirates.



Yes, absurd perhaps – but just imagine it for a moment and decide!

One fake will take over the other fake.

[ramana]

Muhammad's mission was to revive the old control of the known world(goal of the Middle East orders) mission that the Church forgot once the Roman Emperor converted. Their logic was why bother controlling the world, when the Roman Emperor serves the Church and thru him they can control the world. In other words the Church became Europeanized(Greco-Roman)from its Near Eastern roots.



What Muhammad saw was that the original mission focus was lost and created a new order(Islam) to return to direct control. This mission focus is still with the Sunni-Wahabi Islamists. Its this return to core mission(periodic reset)

which energizes the periodical revival of Islam.



The Reformation and Enlightenment have

cut off this return to core mission for Christianity. This is what is causing the angst in Western societies the transplanting of Near Eastern core valsues on freedom loving individualistic people. The whole saga of Reformation->Enlightenment-> Positivism->Modernism->post-Modernism are ways to throw away this blanket of NE Core values and return to 'pagan' roots.



We see this periodic reset in the X-tian cults that spawn in America - Baptists, etc.



This is what makes the fundoo West have a soft corner for the Sunni-Wahabis.

[acharya]

ramana wrote:

Muhammad's mission was to revive the old control of the known world(goal of the Middle East orders) mission that the Church forgot once the Roman Emperor converted. Their logic was why bother controlling the world, when the Roman Emperor serves the Church and thru him they can control the world. In other words the Church became Europeanized(Greco-Roman)from its Near Eastern roots.



What Muhammad saw was that the original mission focus was lost and created a new order(Islam) to return to direct control. This mission focus is still with the Sunni-Wahabi Islamists. Its this return to core mission(periodic reset)

which energizes the periodical revival of Islam.



The Reformation and Enlightenment have

cut off this return to core mission for Christianity. This is what is causing the angst in Western societies the transplanting of Near Eastern core valsues on freedom loving individualistic people. The whole saga of Reformation->Enlightenment-> Positivism->Modernism->post-Modernism are ways to throw away this blanket of NE Core values and return to 'pagan' roots.



We see this periodic reset in the X-tian cults that spawn in America - Baptists, etc.



This is what makes the fundoo West have a soft corner for the Sunni-Wahabis.





Ramana ji,



I do not think Christianity existed as a Socio-political ideology (akin to Islam OR modern Church) until few decades prior to conversion of Constantine. Hence, the loss of focus by early christians, seem to be a far-fetched assumption (IMHO). Western Christianity (Catholic Church and later ramifications which happened to the west of Danube River Basin) is political successor of Western Roman Empire. The Christianity was altered to suit the political objectives of Rome, and not vice-versa.



Out of three religions, Islam indeed is the most perfected and "civilized" religion. The geopolitical objective of people from Tigris-Euphrates basin and Mediterranean sea is to act as "middle-men" between East and West. The only other powers which controlled this region are Persians and Romans (eastern romans with support of west). Both of these powers are alien to the Tigris-Jordan Doab.



For some years prior to Islam, the control of Western Empire on this region had vanished and the empire was formally divided. The eastern empire and the churches it produced (Greek, Russian, Syrian, Armenian, Georgian etc) have no sympathies of any Islam, Shia or Sunni. However, neither they had balls to snatch the region away from Islamic control. Islam was backed up by skilled manpower from central asia (Turks), whereas the population dynamics of natives of anatolia and Canaan was static. It was only after massive invasion from west (first crusade) that the region came under "western dominion" for 100 years before loosing it to Saladin.



The geopolitical "need" of western Europe to be in touch with Asia (India and China) is so huge that they can pay any price to keep their contact robust.



Hence, when we look at Muhammad as a policy-maker, his primary need was to consolidate the region between Tigris-Euphrates and Jordan river (including arabian peninsula). This was never the need of Jews nor was it the need of Christians simply because their socio-political character is smaller than that of Islam. Hence, Muhammad accommodated all those people in this region as "Ahl-e-Kitab" (People of Book). he was immensely lucky because Persians and Byzantines were exhausted after fighting each other. For Tigris-Jordan Doab region, both Anatolia and Persia are adversaries. For latter two, this region is the pivot.



As of the west's soft-corner for Sunni Islam, it has more to do with victory in world-war-1 and subsequent sell-out of Sunni elite to western interests. If something like Iran happens in Tigris-Jordan doab, all the bonhomie between fundoo west and Sunni Islam will vanish and next crusades will be called upon.



When India manages to unify itself and Persia is Deislamized (or total and fundamental disconnect from Sunni-wahabi type of Islam) I won't mind Islam controlling region between Tigris and . West's control over that region has been more detrimental to India than Islam's control. Check the timeline. Ever since "West" lost control over anatolia, syria and levant, coincides with Yashodharma's final defeat of White-Hunas. Ever since then, up to 1200's, India was free from any foreign invasions. The arabs were defeated conclusively and thrown out (even out of sindh which was ruled by Sumra Rajputs).



West's occupation of jerusalem in first crusade coincides with Ghurid invasions on India. From later 1500s when Byzantium was conquered by Turks, India too witnessed a stable geopolitical environment free from any central asian invasion (partly because invaders themselves were settled firmly in North India and did not give scope for any other foreign entity to make inroads). The reasons for these coincidental occurrences could be effect of "pax-islamica" on central and western asia which causes the tribes to move en masse for a cause (of islam in danger). Or climatic changes (as brihaspati ji pointed out). could be both.



Jews have suffered more under Christian occupation than under Islamic one. Hence, if modern state of Israel enters into a regional peace-keeping alliance with other powers of this region without influence of the west, this will tremendously contribute towards world-peace. It is necessary for Israel to form such alliance before the post WW2 baby-boomer generation dies out. After the newer generations take over the administration of the "west" the sympathy which Israel and Jews have will start diminishing exponentially.

[ramana]

He has to look at the history and not just in Indian terms.

[dhu]

Constantine's role was more to operationalize the true doctrine. It is like Brzenski operationalizing the Orientalist conceits which were rampant but rather haphazard over previous eras. Natives have quite artfully deconstructed British Orientalism via Said and Pannikar, but their voices are quite muffled against the American successor whose cloak itself is a burden and who have their own batch of anti-Orientalists.



There was a progression in Normativism leading up to Christianity. We need to make the connections between Greek- Roman transfer and Brit-American transfer. Persia is quite a naturally situated power in the ME, but not so lunar Greece and the Roman successors. Now these Gurwas have even hatched a pendulum theory about euro ascendancy in the pre-greco-roman era.

[Husky]

[quote name='acharya' date='05 May 2010 - 06:12 AM' timestamp='1273019682' post='106235']Ramana ji,



I do not think Christianity existed as a Socio-political ideology (akin to Islam OR modern Church) until few decades prior to conversion of Constantine. Hence, the loss of focus by early christians, seem to be a far-fetched assumption (IMHO). Western Christianity (Catholic Church and later ramifications which happened to the west of Danube River Basin) is political successor of Western Roman Empire. The Christianity was altered to suit the political objectives of Rome, and not vice-versa.[/quote]To declare the alleged 'brand of' christianism from Constantine's reign onward to be the "actual origin" of the woes that christianism has inflicted on the world is that same ongoing self-delusion/Indian apologetics for christianism as finding the Missionaries/the Church/the Evangelists/the Pope/Vatican/subcult X of christianism/Pauline christianism are "to blame" (versus christianism/non-existent jeebus itself which is always kept innocent). It is "but the socio-political ideology aspect that it has gained since then" that is now to be held responsible? Grand self-delusion.



To charge uniquely "christianism from Constantine on" is like, in the Indian case, charging just "christianism from Sonia onwards" for the same. As if christianism prior to Sonia had never terrorised and never attempted absolute power and christoterror.





Constantine was merely the consequence of christianism gaining power. *

1. Christianism had certainly been trying the same before. For example, it had attempted to gain imperial power (which meant it could use that power to stifle everything else) in Diocletian's time too. ADDED: via emperor Diocletian's converted wife and daughter, see 2 posts down.

Helena was a foot in the door as much as Sonia and her brood are in India. And Helena was very much a believer in christianism. Ignorant and dangerous and willing to do anything for it. Like all christians ambitious for christianism's sake are.

The church worked with Constantine like the church worked with his mother Helena. (And of course Helena worked with Constantine.) Same as the church had tried under Diocletian (but in that earlier situation christianism was too forward and ambitious and overshot itself.)

Christianism is the one purpose that drove them all. They did it for the jeebus lie. They were false, they murdered, they lied, they conspired, they did all that and more. But they did it for christianism. They *believed* the jeebus lie. Even while playing cryptochristist (as Constantine did for a time).



* "Constantine was merely the consequence of christianism gaining power."

Hmmm. Need an analogy. Like Julian is the human embodiment of Hellenismos (Hellenismos' natural anti-body - brilliant, indomitable, powers of regeneration - when an unsubverted Hellenismos is faced with prolonged christianism), Constantine is the embodiment of christianism: i.e. the absolute monarch when it is a christian is a bloody tyrant. Absolute power (= in a sense what the foremost seat of the Roman Empire meant) when in christian hands is universal tyranny and the end of life as heathens know and value it.



If Constantine had not been, or had not succeeded, christianism would have tried again. And again - until it produced another constantine for its cause - unless christianism were itself to be destroyed.



People should read how christians (=embodied christianism) of the empire thought about their religion and where it was meant to be. And read about how the conscious and alert GrecoRomans thought about the sort of fundamental threat christianism posed.

The christians (=christianism): aimed for christian jihad of the known world. To convert the Dar-ul-harb of Rome into a christian theocracy: "Rome for christ (or we'll burn it to the ground. If jeebus can't have it, then no one can!)"

In time, the GrecoRomans realised this.

Indians have had more time to think and ponder on it, more examples of christian total war staring them in the face, and then they - wait for it - come to the profound conclusion that it wasn't actually "true christianism", it was "(post) Constantine christianism" which "wasn't really (representative of) the 'true christianism'". tanding ovation: <img src='http://www.india-forum.com/forums/public/style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/blink.gif' class='bbc_emoticon' alt=':blink:' />





2. Christian terrorism and intolerance was there from the first. Before Constantine and his gaining power, christianism was famous for terrorising the Hellenes of the empire. Christians regularly vandalised and burnt temples to the Olympic Gods (and temples of other Gods in the Mediterranean/Levant). Just as christians in India and Korea have done since even before gaining political power in S Korea/India.

Christians screeched putrid lies about the Gods of the empire to taunt the pluralistic and (overly) tolerant GrecoRomans before christians had the political power to do so with impunity. (IIRC Roman courts at times dismissed all the false MF Hussein/Doniger-like anti-Hellenistic foul-mouthedness of christians with the usual laissez-faire old Roman statement "The Gods may defend themselves".) Same as in India where the christians have since the start been speaking and publishing anti-Hindu lies - pamphlets, books and more fictions.

The Traditionalists of the empire slowly learnt to loathe and hate christianism and christians for their utter intolerance and consequent incorrigible destructiveness. This was WELL BEFORE christianism ever got political power.



The angelsk-speaking Indian (would-be) 'intellectuals' - BR was it? - will never learn from history. (And they would keep others ignorant too with their pontifications on "ignore history as it really had happened; let's pretend what I say holds true. We will 'explain' it all with a socio-political model/reasoning. We're not laughable communitwits to resort to inferior socio-economic explanations for everything.")

Where was I. Oh yes. In a huff.

Indians will never learn from history. Then live to learn it first-hand.





Christianism is about its ideology ("religion") - not to be disguised and excused under terms like "socio/politics" and (unmotivated/random) "imperialism". The history of christianism is explained by the ideology. People should stop ignoring its central and defining characteristic, as if the elephant in the living room will magically disappear if we go about it as if it wasn't there.

The politics is a consequence of the religion. Need to stop excusing it. Need to stop creating delusions about it and deluding others with it.



Fortunately, there exist historians (e.g. DE, EN, FR) - scholars, not armchair pontificators - who have written books on what *actually* happened. It's known history after all: there are *first-hand* ancient sources they can work with, as opposed to hypotheses and hand-waving on "what could have been, therefore it maybe was?" type conjecture. But to read those works with equanimity, one would need to let go of pet theories on christianism ("It was Paul!" "No no no, dude, I've figured it out: it was Constantine! See, my copy of Da Da Vinci code says - when you hold it against the moonlight in this angle, while standing on one leg and squinting until you're permanently immune to all useful history books...") - theories that are successful in one thing: not presenting history, but letting christianism off the hook for christianism's bloody, relentless history.



Bah. How long will the self-and-mass-delusion go on for.

[ramana]

Another way of saying it is the Exodus was the Pharonic way of getting rid of their potential regime changers.



What was achieved by co-opting Constantine was what was tried in the 18th dynasty In Egypt but didnt get any further. The early attempt was unsuccessful due to lack of critical mass of 'belivers' due to various reasons. Rome didnt have that problem.

[Husky]

For context on the references to Diocletian, here's a reminder:

http://freetruth.50webs.org/B3b.htm#Diocletian

The Diocletian persecution of 303-305CE - under Emperor Diocletian



Diocletian (284-305) was the ablest and finest Roman Emperor since Hadrian, and he allowed remarkable freedom to Christians for nearly twenty years. They were permitted to build a large church near his palace at Nicomedia, and his wife and daughter joined the [Christian] sect.

[color="#800080"](i.e. christianism tries to insinuate itself into imperial power via the wife and daughter of the Roman Emperor Diocletian.

It would have more luck later on when it latched onto Italian barmaid Helena who became mistress to a Roman Emperor and thereby spawned that other unholy christo-terror Constantine.)[/color]



The Christian orator Lactantius, who lived at Nicomedia and was employed by the Court, tells his usual untruthful stories about the change of the Emperor's mood in his Deaths of the Persecutors, but reveals, incidentally, that the numerous Christian officials of the Court were insolent, on religious grounds, to the Emperor (making the sign of the cross at the sacrifices) and his mother, and that when Diocletian, whose life-aim was the restoration of the Empire to its old strength, ordered the destruction of their chapel, they tore down his edict and were suspected of having set fire to the palace. The Christian religion being still illicit in Roman law, Diocletian, who, though of humble origin, had a strong feeling of imperial dignity, issued a series of decrees ordering that the churches be destroyed and the copies of the Scriptures given up, and that all must offer sacrifice (burn a few grains of incense) or produce an official certificate that they had done so.

-- A Rationalist Encyclopaedia, by Joseph McCabe



Fiction: about 40,000 martyrs

Until modern times Christian literature counted a mass of martyrs under Diocletian that ran to something like 40,000, and Rome claimed a large share of these heroes.

-- A Rationalist Encyclopaedia, by Joseph McCabe



Facts: a score (20) of martyrs in the whole empire - none in Rome, and a few hundred suicidal Christians executed.

[Catholic historian] Duchesne (History of the Christian Church, 3 vols., 1904) laboriously finds about a score of genuine martyrs in the whole Empire, including three at Rome, but the leading (and strictly orthodox) Catholic authority on martyrs, the Jesuit Fr. Delehaye, supported by his colleagues, does not find a single genuine contemporary record of a martyrdom at Rome (Prof. Ehrhard, Die altchristliche Literatur, 1900, 556).

-- How Christianity Grew Out of Paganism, by Joseph McCabe



It is impossible to estimate how many were executed--these were largely zealots who demanded death--in the Empire, though the documents passed by modern experts suggest only a few hundred, but in Rome itself the apostasy was extraordinary. The Pope led the betrayal, and Diocletian's wife, Prisca (who nevertheless appears as three different lady-martyrs in the pious fiction), and daughter promptly quitted the Church. Pope Marcellinus is still "Saint and Martyr" in Catholic official literature, but the chief modern Catholic historian, Mgr. Duchesne, proves that he died in bed, and the official Papal Chronicle admits that he abjured the faith.

-- A Rationalist Encyclopaedia, by Joseph McCabe

Of course christianism had its revenge on the imperial apostates: in time, Constantine would gruesomely murder Prisca and daughter and all their kids. (Of course the faithful Constantine was quite even-handed: he did that to others besides.)



In its finally successful attempt to take over Rome, christianism would convert not just peripherals like Mrs Emperor and Ms Emperor but the Emperor itself. Helena was a christian when Constantine's dad met her. She raised Constantine a christian, so he was secured for christianism since the start.

[ramana]

Admins When I tried to save this thread for my archives, it saved only till post #296. Please consider splitting into chunks to enable saving.

Thanks,ramana

[acharya]

The big secret about secret societies

Step right up, folks, and read the one true guide to Western and Eastern esoteric societies from the Freemasons to the Rosicrucians. Relics, totems and secret handshakes revealed!

BY LAURA MILLER



Why are secret societies so secretive? The automatic assumption is that they're up to no good. At the Bohemian Grove, rich and powerful men convene to hatch plots and direct world events -- or so we're told, by people infuriated at having been excluded from the California campground. But, hey, wouldn't a corporate boardroom or a private dining suite at a pricey restaurant do just as well for that sort of high-level skulduggery -- and attract much less press? On the other hand, it's probably a lot easier to sneak a van full of hookers into a campground than into 30 Rockefeller Center or the Four Seasons.



In either case, their discretion has backfired. It may well be that the activities of the world's most notorious secret societies consist of little more than grown men cavorting in drag and performing dopey ceremonies under the influence of strong drink. Whatever -- the public will never believe it's all innocuous. Secrecy turns out to be the most effective attention-getting, fantasy-inciting trick in the book. Remember how the neighbor kid's previously unimpressive playhouse became instantly and irresistibly fascinating the moment he taped a "Keep Out" sign to the door? If a cabal of evil masterminds really wanted to keep their fiendish plans quiet, they'd cook them up in a Christian Science Reading Room and hand out fliers on street corners.



Of course, Christian Science has its own set of secret doctrines, and once protected them as fiercely as the Church of Scientology now shields its own wacky space-opera theology. Religions were the first institutions to really milk the secrecy gambit for all it was worth. Swear your acolytes to silence and make any violation of the sanctum punishable by death, as the orchestrators of the Eleusinian Mysteries and other ancient cults did, and you cloak your relics, totems and chants in an extra-thick layer of otherworldly glamour. The current presidential administration isn't the first cabal to obsess over controlling "the message," or to realize that sometimes control is the message.



Nowadays, however, it's hard to keep even the most awesome secrets under wraps. Sooner or later, no matter how tight your security or how fearsome your lawyers, a disgruntled apostate will leak your closely guarded scripture to the Web, where, stripped of mystery, it often looks as absurd as middle-aged white guys wearing purple robes and trading funny handshakes. Somehow, the precious sacred writings always turn out to be endless, badly written tracts stuffed with woolly, incomprehensible abstractions. Christian Science and Scientology are among the very few "secret" societies whose beliefs Mark Booth doesn't promise to unveil in his new book, "The Secret History of the World: As Laid Down by the Secret Societies," but in this respect, at least, they fit right in. Booth, an editor at a British publishing house, presents his book as an alternate history of the cosmos and humankind, with the early chapters relating the creation of the world and later chapters devoted to all of crankdom's usual suspects: "Egyptian" hermeticism, Neo-Platonism, the Knights Templar, the pineal gland, alchemy, Rosicrucianism, Freemasonry -- you name it. He maintains that his version of the creation narrative, distilled from all these sources, is "a teaching common to Mystery schools and secret societies from all over the world." To have written such a comprehensive synthesis of Western and Eastern esoteric mysticism would be a formidable accomplishment indeed -- if there were any reason to think that Booth's claim were true. For what it's worth, the metaphysics can be summarized thus:



The material universe is an emanation of the cosmic mind, which began to "precipitate" (the central metaphor is of crystals forming in a solution) when the mind (i.e., God) first reflected on itself. The thought of God became more and more "dense," turning to "gas, then liquid and finally solids." Matter continued to pass through a series of stages of increasing density until it formed the Earth, living creatures and finally human beings. Humanity, in turn, continues to evolve toward the ultimate end of the entire process: the universe becoming fully aware of itself. Memorable early milestones in this saga include the stage at which the universe consisted of a "vast vegetable being" and the part where the "fish gods" came along to teach us all how to talk to plants.



From this you might conclude that "The Secret History of the World" is a truckload of drivel, and you would be right. It is a mess of a book, disjointed and rambling, rife with puzzling non sequiturs that are obviously meant to be suggestive or evocative but that more often read like the symptoms of an advanced case of Attention Deficit Disorder. The many illustrations culled from Western art ("Egyptian snake goddess with knives," "Zarathustra with rolled scroll") are largely undated and unsourced, as are most of the colorful but unenlightening anecdotes. We are informed that the 16th-century Swiss alchemist Paracelsus was "a strange, aggressive character" who "seems never to have grown a beard" -- but Booth leaves out his contributions to the world's store of knowledge. (He was the father of toxicology.)



Booth is forever intimating that he's about to explain something important to the reader and then abruptly dropping the subject. He has all the smoke and cymbals of the Great and Terrible Oz, but can rarely muster even the fake disembodied head as a crescendo. He makes a promise, for example, in the caption to a reproduction of Leonardo da Vinci's "The Last Supper" -- "It has been suggested that this painting alludes to suppressed secret doctrines regarding the feminine role in Christianity. We shall see shortly that this is true, but not in the way proposed by 'The Da Vinci Code'" -- that is never fulfilled; he never mentions the painting again.



Furthermore, much of the "information" Booth chooses to supply is either incorrect or, frankly, untrue. Some of these errors seem to be the result of simple ignorance. He has, for example, the idea that the "laws of probability" dictate that "a coin flipped in strict laboratory conditions will ... land heads up in 50 percent of cases and tails up in 50 percent of cases." (Probability only indicates that a coin is equally likely to land on either side on any single toss.) He entirely misconstrues the thought experiment known as Schrödinger's Cat -- not an uncommon confusion, it's true, but since Booth chooses to make "modern science" the villain of his secret history, complaining incessantly that it fails to understand the "deeper" philosophical issues of existence, he should at least make some effort to grasp what it does understand.



Like most writers working this particular vein of mumbo jumbo, Booth traffics in a lot of unsubstantiated stories that have been discredited by historians he dismisses as slaves to "convention." This, of course, doesn't prevent him from flaunting the credentials of academics whose ideas he likes. (Either a professorship lends credibility to a scholar's claim or it doesn't -- make up your mind.) A fringe theory about the chronology of Egyptian dynasties that seems to support the historical basis of the Bible is, Booth approvingly notes, "gaining ground even among the older generation of Egyptologists." But the fact that no Egyptologist would endorse Booth's bizarre assertion that the Great Sphinx at Giza was built around 10,000 B.C. (7,000 years earlier than it was actually built, and long before Egyptian civilization was even founded) doesn't trouble him a whit.



Some of Booth's untrue assertions (such as the claim that the writings of C.S. Lewis are rife with coded "Rosicrucian" symbolism) are clearly examples of wishful thinking. Others are rank misrepresentations: Charles Darwin did attend a couple of séances at the request of his older brother (an enthusiast), but he pronounced spiritualism to be "rubbish" and the medium in question was later proven to be a fraud. Still other errors in "The Secret History of the World" are simply baffling. Why does Booth write that Pythagoras perished in an arson attack in the city of Croton, when the Greek philosopher was instead banished and died in Metapontum?



And these are only the errors and misrepresentations I happened to spot because I have a little knowledge of the subjects in question. No doubt there are many more that will be leap out at readers with more expertise, especially in the sections on the Cabala, Hinduism and the French Revolution. Nevertheless, there is something to be learned from "The Secret History of the World" -- not about the world, certainly, or about its history, but about the things people want to believe and the rationales they invent for doing so.



Unlike the authors of most other books purporting to introduce esotericism to a lay audience, Booth hardly bothers to fabricate a facade of coherent argument in order to make "The Secret History of the World" more plausible. By contrast, that masterwork of pseudohistory, "Holy Blood, Holy Grail," by Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh and Henry Lincoln (source for the Mary Magdalene theory in "The Da Vinci Code"), is more typical of the genre and of historical conspiracy theory in general. Baigent, et al., inundate their readers with a tidal wave of obscure footnotes, uncheckable sources, faux scholarship, cherry-picked facts and ingenious sophistry. To the unsuspecting, "Holy Blood, Holy Grail" can easily pass as well-researched and even reasonable. To refute it, you have to spend all your time tracking down and disproving a bunch of trivial details without ever getting around to asking why anyone would embrace such a preposterous theory to begin with.



Booth, on the other hand, can't concentrate on anything long enough to fashion a convincing lie about it, and as a result, the desperate longing lurking behind the ideas he trumpets -- and, by extension, behind much of esoteric lore -- is stripped bare. After surveying other popular writings on his theme, Booth complains that "you have only to dip into these books and web sites to see there is no guiding intelligence at work, no very great philosophical training and very little hard information" -- a pretty accurate characterization of "The Secret History of the World." Without any sort of intellectual apparatus to hamper the view, you can very clearly see the desire that drives this author.



What does Booth want to believe in, and by extension, what is the underlying emotional appeal of the "secret doctrines" he touts? He's far from unusual in his attraction to this kind of thing, as demonstrated by the success of not only "Holy Blood, Holy Grail" and "The Da Vinci Code," but also the booming interest in apocryphal gospels, religious conspiracy thrillers and such pop-Gnostic phenomena as the "Matrix" movies. The bad guy in his story isn't the orthodox churches that have long and violently suppressed heretical beliefs, but science and "militant materialists" like the author Richard Dawkins. It turns out that not everyone who objects to today's anti-theists is conventionally churched. Against the "intellectual dishonesty" of "the people who guard the consensus" Booth offers an alternative that rejects both old-fashioned faith and new-fashioned skepticism. It's not a religion, exactly, or quite a philosophy, but if offers the following comforting features:



1. You are the center of the universe. Even in the traditional Christian worldview, in which God's eye rests upon the lowly sparrow, a single soul can feel insignificant. In Booth's universe, "Nothing happens in the cosmos except to affect humanity in some way." The universe cannot attain its destiny until each human mind is reunited with the cosmic mind, and by extension, the littlest event in your own psyche has repercussions that extend throughout creation.



2. Everything has meaning. Instead of inhabiting a world of sometimes frightening randomness, every event and every molecule of matter is suffused with purpose, the purpose of elevating human consciousness to the level of the divine. Far from being alone in the universe, humanity is surrounded by intelligent spirits keenly interested in its affairs. Every work of art and architecture is packed with coded clues alluding to the secret practices that have enabled special individuals to communicate with and even master those spirits.



3. Human beings control everything. Even in cases when bad luck, laziness, disorganization and simple ineptitude might seem to explain why certain events occur (or fail to occur), the truth is that somebody, somewhere is covertly pulling the strings. The string-puller's intentions may be (in fact, quite possibly are) malevolent, but nothing happens by accident or because everybody is running around like a chicken with its head cut off. Just as everything has meaning, everything is intended, even if we don't know by whom.



4. The answers to all life's questions are known within a special club. If you're in it, you get to participate in exciting initiation ceremonies and exchange secret passwords and signs, as well as partake of the mysteries of the universe. If you're not in it, you get to participate in exciting investigations into the club's hidden influence on world affairs and exchange the results of your detective work with other fearless seekers after truth. Either way, you have the inside scoop.



5. Superpowers are attainable. According to Booth, some "adepts" in the esoteric disciplines have acquired the ability to perform such diverse feats as levitation, reading minds, visiting other people in their dreams, rearranging the molecular structure of metals, and killing a goat by staring at it for 15 minutes.



6. History never has to be boring. All major turning points in the past are orchestrated by divinely inspired geniuses who have been initiated into secret societies, communicate with spirits and are invested with superpowers. Artists and scientists achieve wonders not by virtue of unstinting hard work and devotion combined with genetic gifts, but are blessed with supernatural abilities that destine them for success. Wars and revolutions happen not as a result of tedious economic factors like excessive taxation and trade imbalances, but as part of titanic struggles between good and evil. For example, Julius Caesar invaded Britain not in search of tribute and tin in order to fund the Roman empire, but because he planned to pass himself off as the Sun god and needed to wipe out the Druids before their teachings exposed him as a sham.



7. You don't have to die. This is, of course, the killer app of religions everywhere. In Booth's vision of the esoteric philosophies, the main purpose of secret rituals and doctrine was to instruct initiates on what to expect beyond the grave in order to lessen the terror of the "after-death experience" and prepare them for reincarnation.



[Did you notice that I listed seven features? That's the sacred number of the planetary spirit beings! This can only signify that I, too, must be a secret initiate, trying to put the scientists off the scent!]



Obviously, this makes for a thrilling and entertaining cosmos. Although Booth generally misrepresents science and scientists in "The Secret History of the World," accusing them of believing that they are on the brink of figuring out "everything there is to be understood about the structure, origin and future of the cosmos" (something I've never seen any scientist claim), he does make one -- perhaps only one -- valid point. Science is inadequate to answer the "big WHY questions" that have perplexed humanity since our days as a giant vegetable.



Of course, the vast majority of scientists do not purport to answer such questions, at least not in their capacity as scientists. These are metaphysical mysteries about our own existence that scientific materialism doesn't address. Booth complains that while someone like Dawkins says he finds sufficient cause for awe in the contemplation of a purely material universe, the rest of us can't subsist on such thin philosophical gruel.



"However they deck it out with the rhetoric of mystery and wonder, theirs is a universe of blind force," Booth writes, and you don't have to believe in Isis and the philosopher's stone to see his point. Most people will still choose to believe in something "more," whether it's the ninefold path of the Buddha or the pillars of Islam or pyramid power. Chances are that whatever they choose will sound ridiculous to anyone who doesn't also believe. That's something religion has always had in common with sex: If you're not into it, it looks silly. Which explains why all the really clever people do it behind closed doors.

[ramana]

Link:

http://www.simplyvedic.org/html/literatu...nce-3.html

The practically employed time concept of the modern historical scientist, including the archaeologist, strikingly resembles the traditional Judaeo-Christian time concept. And it strikingly differs from that of the ancient Greeks and Indians.



This observation is, of course, an extreme generalisation. In any culture, the common people may make use of various time concepts, linear and cyclical. And among the great thinkers of any given period, there may be many competing views of both cyclical and linear time. This was certainly true of the ancient Greeks. It can nevertheless be safely said that the cosmological concepts of several of the most prominent Greek thinkers involved a cyclic or episodic time similar to that found in the Puranic literature of India. For example, we find in Hesiod's Works and Days (129-23406-201) a series of ages (gold, silver, bronze, heroic, and iron) similar to the Indian yugas. In both systems, the quality of human life gets progressively worse with each passing age. In On Nature (Fragment 17) Empedocles speaks of cosmic time cycles. In Plato's dialogues there are descriptions of revolving time (Timaeus 38 a) and recurring catastrophes that destroy or nearly destroy human civilisation (Po liticus 268 d ff). Aristotle said in many places in his works that the arts and sciences had been discovered many times in the past (Metaphysics 1074 b 10, Politics 1329 b 25) In the teachings of Pythagoras, Plato, and Empedocles regarding transmigration of souls, this cyclical pattern is extended to individual psychophysical existence.



When Judaeo-Christian civilisation arose in Europe, another kind of time became prominent. This time has been characterised as linear and vectorial. Broadly speaking, this time concept involves a unique act of cosmic creation, a unique appearance of the human kind, and a unique history of salvation, culminating in a unique denouement in the form of a last judgement. The drama occurs only once. Individually, human life mirrored this process; with some exceptions, orthodox Christian theologians did not accept transmigration of the soul.



Modern historical sciences share the basic Judaeo-Christian assumptions about time. The universe we inhabit is a unique occurrence. Humans have arisen once on this planet. The history of our ancestors is regarded as a unique though un-predestined evolutionary pathway. The future pathway of our species is also unique. Although this pathway is officially unpredictable, the myths of science project a possible overcoming of death by biomedical science and mastery over the entire universe by evolving, space-travelling humans. One group, the Santa Fe Institute, sponsor of several conferences on "artificial life," predicts the transferral of human intelligence into machines and computers displaying the complex symptoms of living things (Langton 1991, p.xv) "Artificial life" thus becomes the ultimate transfiguring salvation of our species.



One is tempted to propose that the modern human evolutionary account is a Judaeo-Christian heterodoxy, which covertly retains fundamental structures of Judaeo-Christian cosmology, salvation history, and eschatology while overtly dispensing with the scriptural account of divine intervention in the origin of species, including our own.



This is similar to the case of Buddhism as Hindu heterodoxy. Dispensing with the Hindu scriptures and God concepts, Buddhism nevertheless retained basic Hindu cosmological assumptions such as cyclical time, transmigration, and karma.



Another thing the modern human evolutionary account has in common with the earlier Christian account is that humans appear after the other life forms. In Genesis, God creates the plants, animals, and birds before human beings. For strict literalists, the time interval is short - humans are created on the last of six of our present solar days. Others have taken the Genesis days as ages. For example, around the time of Darwin, European scientists with strong Christian leanings proposed that God had gradually brought into existence various species throughout the ages of geological time until the perfected earth was ready to receive human beings (Grayson 1983). In modern evolutionary accounts, anatomically modern humans retain their position as the most recent major species to occur on this planet, having evolved from preceding hominids within the past 100,000 or so years. And despite the attempts of prominent evolutionary theorists and spokespersons to counteract the tendency, even among evolution scientists, to express this appearance in teleological fashion (Gould 1977, p. 14), the idea that humans are the crowning glory of the evolutionary process still has a strong hold on the public and scientific minds. Although anatomically modern humans are given an age of about 100,000 years, modern archaeologists and anthropologists, in common with Judaeo-Christian accounts, give civilisation an age of a few thousand years, and, again in common with Judaeo-Christian accounts, place its earliest occurrence in the Middle East.



I do not here categorically assert a direct causal link between earlier Judeao-Christian ideas and those of the modern historical sciences. Demonstrating that, as Edward B. Davis (1994) points out in his review of recent works on this subject, needs much more careful documentation than has yet been provided. But the many common features of the time concepts of the two knowledge systems suggest these causal links do exist, and that it would be fruitful to trace connections in sufficient detail to satisfactorily demonstrate this.

[dhu]

Initially, Christianity was promoted in the restive provinces. As the center itself collapsed, the ideology was promoted internally. There is an exact corollary with the promotion of socialism/Communism in the East; but as the external colonial edifice collapses, the colonial gaze turns inwards and we now are witnessing domestic colonialism in the Empire. at certain points along the timeline, the external promotion becomes quasi-independent and these prevent a sound assessment.

[ramana]

[quote name='dhu' date='23 May 2010 - 06:25 PM' timestamp='1274638632' post='106538']

Initially, Christianity was promoted in the restive provinces. As the center itself collapsed, the ideology was promoted internally. There is an exact corollary with the promotion of socialism/Communism in the East; but as the external colonial edifice collapses, the colonial gaze turns inwards and we now are witnessing domestic colonialism in the Empire. at certain points along the timeline, the external promotion becomes quasi-independent and these prevent a sound assessment.

[/quote]





Brilliant analogy. Now expand on this.