It is easy to lose perspective on Judeo-Christianity. The eonic models suggest some fairly obvious answers behind the fog of theological confusion: the world of pagan polytheism inherited from earlier age periods had created confusion in its proliferation and decay. The Israelite initiative and this is not something that Jews or Christians have any right to in their despoiling of the original mysterious eonic transition’s strange meta-theology of IHVH. Some early gnostic profundity lurks in the record such as it is. The crystallization in a religion of ‘god’ is little more that polytheism stripped of its superstitions for one final superstition, the one god to replace huge pantheons. We should note that monotheism is born twice, in proto-Israelitism and Zoroastrianism. A close study of the history shows the amazing way the Exile phase transported Israelites to Persia, there to see the blending of the two. After the Exile the Jewish legacy incorporated a great deal of Zoroastrian theology and carried the day because perhaps it was a revolutionary movement where Zoroastrianism had become implicated in politics and empire. We don’t see the Jews in this way so much now but the strange interaction of Israelites and the mighty Egypt is a tale so classic we can lose sight of its ‘obvious’ implications. The whole case is a classic case of a frontier effect, as per the eonic model, as the new era in the decline if the Egyptian/Mesopotamian classic civilizations in the period from ca. 3000 BCE passed into a new era tokened by transition effects in China, India, Persia, Canaan and Greece (later, Rome, a poor continuation of the Greek). This early Israelitism is lost to us now but we can deduce at least something from the remarkable legacy of the Prophets who are creatures of the eonic effect, the exact fact base being unclear. This whatever it was soon degenerated into the cultic monotheism that spawns ‘Judaism’ and then Christianity. Again, on one level the effect is transparent and a new universal religion in parallel to Buddhism (et al) appears that slowly but surely transforms paganism/polytheism and much else. But the result is incomplete and its obsessive reduction of pagan pantheons to the ‘pantheism’ of one male god is a pretty strange kettle of fish. The idea of a cosmic god would have made a good hypothesis, but instead it is turned into a blugdeon of social control, enforced belief, and the mind-crippling tactics of ‘faith’. The issue is not theism versus atheism, but a strange ‘atheism’ in quotation marks that shows the natural metaphysical ‘raw state’ of ‘cosmic figuring as god thoughts rise and fall on the tides of metaphysical wondering, well codified by the essential Kant.
The same phenomenon is now occurring to monotheism that happened to polytheism and we are now moving beyond the ‘one god’ legacies. Note that in terms of the eonic effect and its model, the early phase of Israelitism is part of the macro action of the eonic sequence while the period of the Exile shows a cut-off as the action passes from system action to free action. A treacherous issue of ‘teleology’ lurks to confuse further. Note that teleology would be quite different because system directionality default so human action. If you are confused that something some thought ‘revelation’ the reason lies here: the mysterious starting point is taken up by human cultural minds and turned into something that will be a distortion. This fate is shared by Judaism and Christianity both. Judaism rapidly turns into the fallacies of the Chosen people (the original idea was simply that the eonic macrosequence will focalize on a particular zone and region in Canann as a frontier effect), etc, while Christianity is overtaken by something that is now hard to fathom given the obscurity of the fact base. But again at a high level the whole operation is more or less clear: create a universal religion from the Judiac and other inputs, including the Zoroastrian aspects in Judaism, and some suspicious Indic factors lurking in the background. (note that Indic traditions often claim that ‘Jesus’ after his bogus crucifiction/resurrection escaped to India, a wave of the hand here). We are not even clear if ‘Jesus’ even existed or whether some lost figure as a gnostic somewho lurks behind the made up history of this set of ‘Jesus hallucinations’.
The results were hopelessly flawed in Judaism and Christianity and we had best see the future on its way once again. But to a long view the action of Christianity is clear enough. That said, secular humanism is a rabbit from a hat, a not very adequate pastiche of modernist themes. The result is that many step back into theology to find concepts adequate to real human psychology, etc… But the traditions however beguiling with concepts of soul and self will prove equally insufficient. The modern age must move to a real psychology of man that isn’t some horrendous clone of Darwinism, capitalist ideology, and ‘dish water’ psychologies from behaviorism to etc…The Buddhist legacy is already showing a strong influence even as it too undergoes the epochal shift we have seen in each case.
The fate of monotheism in the modern world
Published
1848+: The End(s) of History 