The Real Terror of Religion and its Ultimate Victims of Abuse

The Real Terror of Religion and its Ultimate Victims of Abuse

There is a scene on the telly of Muslims in Paris wanting to crowd into the local mosque for comfort and those outside talking to the cameras about “they are not like those who kill (the terrorists) and that Islam is a beautiful religion of peace.”

I dare say most people on the inside of the religion bubble see it as something good and part of the social glue of family and community.

But the truth is that for the three main monotheistic religions of the mean little desert god by various local names, these religions all began in violence under generals Moses, Constantine or Mohammed.

What do you mean Constantine created Christianity? Yes Christ the state sponsored myth and deity of a dying dysfunctional Roman Empire needed one last push of unity that the Emperor/God Constantine needed to stay insanely in power. It has little to do with a person named Jesus who may or may not have existed in historical myth. 

His, the Emperor/God Constantine's giving deeds to basilicas to bishops throughout his empire to collect taxes and recruit soldiers and dispense Sharia Law in those very same structures was the stuff labeled Christ-ianity to carry out his noble cause of gluing the mess of his dying empire back together again one last time. (...all the king's horses and all the king's men could not put ...)

I dare say that secret ceremonies in his special Christian Army units still practiced worship of secret Army deities while the secret ceremonies of the bishops carried on secret ceremonies of debauchery with the rank and file etc.

That Charlemagne killed all his conquered people with death by beheading for not submitting to the Christian faith and its church spies. That Islam was offered all throughout  the Middle East and Asia at the point of a sword at the head of conquering armies.

That Moses took what he wanted in terms of land and slaughtered people in the old fashioned way, the Egyptian way.

That people in times of personal or national crisis turn to the old gods for comfort. Today is no different than back then.

I especially feel sorry for those minorities that are not welcome in the Catholic Christian Sect, intelligent women or gay men and women or the discarded children of clergy rape, of power's pleasure. 

I feel sorry for people waiting around for stale crumbs from the old closeted gay master’s tables. Better a kick in the gut than a pat on the back from that human trash running that particular organization into the ground.

As Auntie Mame says in the movie at least. “Life is a feast and most poor sons of bitches are starving to death.”

Religion is poison. Toxic to the human race. 

Religion is for Terrorists. 

(or losers)

.

All religion is politics. All religion is local.

Judaism, Christianity, Islam are not religions so much as political parties. Their founders - Moses, Constantine and Mohammed were all generals.  Politics and war came first in the founding of these ideologies.


If an outer space alien could communicate with me in English, a language I am a master of, and ask the 64 trillion dollar question about what is all this religious strife on planet Earth about, well here goes.


Do Jews, Christians and Muslims worship the same abstract idol and or God? NO!


Definitely not!


A Muslim’s mother’s beef stew is not the same as a Christian’s mother’s beef stew.  


Only momma knew how to cook beef stew. 


For you to compare my mother’s beef stew to your mother’s beef stew is an insult to my mother and to me. 


And there you have modern religion; same as ancient religion.


All religion is local – just like politics.  All belief in God is local as well.


That’s the point with ancient paganism when it went up against the corrupted form of Judaism aka as Christianity.  They were going up against the abstract of One God in One Temple in Jerusalem.  There were no annex temples in the ancient holy land.  God had no vacation homes.


The Jews had one God and he along with his consort Asherah were worshipped in the great temple of Solomon until the Babylonian captivity. 


When the Jews did come back from Babylon, along with their Babylonian concubines, they rebuilt the mud hut, the great temple of Solomon.  They discarded Asherah.  The feminine side of their god disappeared.  God evolved, he then had a male side only.  Christianity is based on Judaism and Islam is framed on these two previous male only gods/politick/religions.  


Of course the Jewish god only talks Hebrew.  The Christian god only talks Aramaic, Greek and Latin.  And the Muslim god only understands Arabic.  One idea.  Three different gods.  E Pluribus Unum?  Hardly.


So when the Roman Nazis come along and could not impose Roman politics onto Jerusalem, they destroyed the Temple.  The genie was out of the bottle.  Because once you remove the geography of the abstract Jewish god, anybody including the Christians or the Muslims can add on their mom’s recipe for beef stew to the traveling ghost of a concept of one God in that god’s diaspora.


Yahweh was destroyed in 70 A.D./C.E..  All the kings horses and all the kings men could not put Yahweh back together again or at least serve the same beef stew ever again.


While the Jews, as the object of their inspirations and prayers, point back to a temple god of two thousand years ago, the Christians point back to general Constantine’s mom’s beef stew recipe, the Nicenian  heresy, and the Muslims look to the Kaaba.
 
Hinduism, which absorbed all local gods as it evolved as a political entity, let the local deities stand and evolve too along side the poltical “religion” etc..  Ironically, here is a quote from what appears to be a polytheistic culture about the weird unrealistic concept of a one god – a one size fits all deity.  


Why are there so many Gods in Hinduism?

God is one. There is only one Real and True God who does not have any form or a name. It can neither be described, thought of or conceived through human faculties. But since we are so many, each one of us conceives God according to our attitude, view points and state of life -- just as a woman can be looked upon differently by different people: mother, by her children; wife, by her husband; sister, by her sisters; daughter, by her parents; granddaughter, by her grandparents; sister-in-law, by her husband's brother, etc. The woman is one and the same, but she is viewed differently by each one of her relatives. Similarly, we look upon the same God in many ways.

I believe most Hindu’s are vegetarians.  I therefore probably cannot compare their politics/religion with my mom’s one true authentic recipe for beef stew.

 

Whatever. 

In most ancient cultures, the heart was the center of intellect and intuition.  In their hearts, Jews, Christians and Muslims perhaps understand and commune with the same God. But using a scientific metaphor – language, words, geography  – in other words, a form of gravity is introduced into the equation  – which confuses the perfection of the human heart with the questions and imperfections of the human brain with its tags and labels.

If man is both part beast and part angel, the question of - do Muslims and Christians worship the same God? – who is asking the question - why - and in what force of gravity present? 

Trajan's Demonization of the Jews

The Roman emperor Trajan was mucking about in Mesopotamia trying to annex Armenia. Then, like now, trying to win an impossible winnable land war in Asia. His army garrisoned in small numbers, left behind to protect his conquests, got attacked by Jewish rebels, remnants of the diaspora after the fall of Jerusalem in 70 C.E.. No doubt Trajan was trying like Alexander to find an easy profitable land route to India and China. Greed is responsible for more human misery than can calculated in heaven or on earth.

Word got through the grapevine about the Romans stretched out too thin in the vastness of the middle east. Other discontent spilled over into rebellion in places such as Cyrene (in Libya), Cyprus, Egypt, Mesopotamia (parts of present day Syria, Turkey, Iraq) and Lod in present day Israel.

Recorded history (by the Romans) puts a name on this people's social revolution across north Africa and the middle east as the Kitos (Quietus) war (115-117 C.E.) after the Roman general Lusious Quietus who successful put down these various revolts with much death and bloodshed. Quietus (Kitos) in essence got stuck cleaning up the mess Trajan brought about by his mismanagement. Hadrian, Trajan's successor, executed Quietus. Assasinate the assasin is the number one rule of power.

The revolt spread from Libya to Alexandria and toward Judea. Jews were no doubt part of this social upheaval. They get the blame both in Roman and later Christian histories. Demonization propaganda that got quoted over and over again by later historians.

In my own opinion perhaps some Jews were ringleaders or on the vanguard of revolt against the Romans. I do think that the populations in general in these far flung Roman colonies rose up, not in solidarity with any Jewish agenda but rather rose up, against official corruption and desperate living conditions. In other words mismanagement and corruption were probably the cause of Trajan's f*ck up war in the middle east.

The Jews got the lion's share of blame in these histories. Things quieted down after the Roman slaughters to enforce Roman law and order. It is remarkable that a people with such a minority position in population outside of Palestine throughout history have been able to acquire such a bad rep for starting trouble. Convenient scapegoats through the ages no doubt framed through some other point of view or agenda.

No doubt the demonization of the Jews in early second century Pax Romana in the Mediterranean world was fresh on the minds of the writing committees that pieced together the four gospels from 120 through 150 C.E..

The gospels of the small Christian sect had to distinguish itself from the Jewish community in general given that Jesus was a Jew and his original teachings and connotations were extremely Jewish beside being revolutionarily human and humane.

“What me Jewish? No way! I am Christian. Not Jewish. Let me explain the difference. Read this.”

Indeed the four gospels were no doubt part of a paper propaganda war of gentile Christians to separate themselves from the source of their faith with is Judaism. Survival of Christianity in light of the recent failures of the Roman state blamed on the Jewish troublemakers made a separation between Judaism and Christianity a priority in the newly revised Christian agenda.

Once that break occurred, the Myth of Jesus, which was the story of a human Jesus got morphed into mainstream pagan Roman culture. If you want respect as a religion you need a god and eventually that is what happened to Jesus in the next phase of Christianity which I label the Christ Myth.

the found spirit within

(image above – Spirit Within Me, Oleg Zhivetin)


I remember seeing a few seconds on TV once how John Paul II had gotten into his private prayer as he was focused in on the God of his religion. Anybody looking at him might marvel and wonder if his religion is a true way, a one pathway to perfection.

John Paul’s pathway was true to him. He was surrounded by all the symbols and ritual of that religion. I believe that in a lifetime of prayer and meditation John Paul transcended all the worldliness, clutter, dogma, ritual and found his inner spirit, a piece of the universal whole, of God.

I believe that “the found spirit within” leads to rebirth after the physical death to the immortal soul. The physical body is theory on the other side of death, just as the soul is theory looking forward in time, beyond our time here.

I believe that some people can follow John Paul along his path to God and along his or her own religion, ethical and spiritual belief system. When we consciously do what is morally right over what is wrong and in recognition of a greater whole of the community, we are being spiritual, we transcend the body and touch the spirit within.

The pathway to God is a true pathway. There are many, many smaller paths that lead to that one major road to soul.

So too, Protestants, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists and a hundred other religions and sects are capable of transcending the physical and attain a communion with the spiritual realm of the universe.

People who withdraw from religion do so sometimes because it can become a road block to development of the spirit within.

People who live with the words and ritual of formal religion may also be closer to oneself and one’s inner search and in transcendence to spirit and soul.

There is not one right way to enlightenment. It is an individual choice. Whatever works for you. Because it is right for one, it may not be right for another.

Man is religion. I talk of roadblocks to spiritual development. When a group of individuals believe and follow some social spiritual pathway it might be good for a small group. The individuals involved determine the quality of any quest or its ultimate destination.

Along the timeline of history past in the west, a groupthink, a goal for political oneness has overshadowed or stifled individual effort and energy in many personal spiritual quests.

In one sense the game that came down to us as organized religion was a package deal. You denied yourself the right to individual search and individual achievement. Your reward was a charter bus tour to heaven. Individuality was an unevolved alien concept in the past.

In essence, the teacher Jesus says that salvation is salvation. It has no real sense of measurement. It just is what it is. The laborers in the vineyand getting the same wage at the end of the day is the same no matter what the effort. The important thing is join in the labor of the vineyard. The search.

I have heard of and seen the aspects of Buddhism. The search is one of inwardness to inward calm and peace. While this is not necessarily soul it would appear to be spirit and the goal of an achievement of closeness to an inner self and or inner spark. Is that spark devine?

Buddhism changes from country to country and geography to geography. Buddha as a man is treated with great respect. Only in a few instances is he confused with “God”.

We in the west have confused Jesus with God and or the universal whole. With the collapse of our religious historic base in recent decades, people do not realize how free they are politically and freedom brings responsibility and the tools to be moral and spiritual on an individual basis. To worship the idols of materialism and consumerism would seem to become blind to the pathway to inner peace and inner soul.

This is what is happening in regards to the dying, in a cycle, of organized religion. The one size fits all dogma no longer reaches out and grabs individuals as it did in the dark and medieval ages. Man is lost somehow these days. Free to seek spirit and diverted away to hell so to speak by advertisements from Hell Central ( Madison Avenue ).

Who am I to judge?

I should attempt to understand Islam more considering its vast global reach. I have a classroom textbook view of it. I don’t yet have an inner grip gut feeling for it. The group thing, the charter tour bus to heaven or Paradise is I think a take it or leave it proposition for some? In my ideal global culture everone should have options beyond a local setting. Otherwise how can it be called global?

While there may many similar aspects of Islam with Christianity, there seems to be no option for some of other pathways to seek. In other words it is a crime punishable by death in parts of the Islamic world to part with Islam. That is a concept repugnant to me in the west with our tradition and its centuries old struggle for individualism directly and indirectly since the Protestant Reformation.

The west I believe has evolved passed faith to a secular civil substitute for faith, with no forced entry upon the path to enlightenment. This opportunity for religious freedom or spiritual enrichment is more than likely been vetoed by many with a day at the Mall.

The middle-east seems to be forever locked into no choice but the “only right” choice paradigm game. The “one true religion” path. Have heard that somewhere before, haven’t I?

Seems a bit like medieval Spain and the era of the Inquisition that lasted officially over three centuries to root out Judaism and Islam. The Spanish and the RC church standing by this extreme church/state matter forever killed faith in some ways and built up a permanent roadblock to spirituality amid the increased idol need for outward ritual over inner love.

In any case the yin and the yang, the eternal differences between east and west are no doubt programmed into the genes of the greater matter of all things. Conflict may be at the core of all universal physics as a key to a treasure chest of better understanding.

The global culture at present and its reality and its future shape is way beyond my puny parochial way of seeing or looking at things. That is a good thing.

The Global Culture is. The Global Culture will be. Being part of Global culture is one thing. Being is quite another. Worth repeating - being is quite another.

peace