Monotheism has always been a failure but in the US it seems to reach new peaks of hopeless stupidity…
post-theism need not be atheism…
The ancient Israelites pointed to IHVH as the unspoken god reference. Looking backward at the abuse of god-gibberish we can see why…
Category: religion
Losing their religion: why US churches are on the decline
As the US adjusts to an increasingly non-religious population, thousands of churches are closing each year – probably accelerated by Covid
Source: Losing their religion: why US churches are on the decline | US news | The Guardian
Reposts: …//Christianity and the Roman Emperors + The Triadic savior supermeme
Update: One should cite the works of Eisenman here: a link to his work and many others: http://www.earlychristianwritings.com/jesus/roberteisenman.html
Christianity and the Roman Emperors + The Triadic savior supermeme
Two posts collated, from redfortyeight.com
I zipped through these books at high speed, and found them very compelling, but am unable to assess such a complex mass of similar yet distinct perspectives and datasets. I will have to read them again, along with still more books in the related literature.
Creating Christianity: A Weapon of Ancient Rome: Davis
Creating Christ: How Roman Emperors invented Christianity: Valiant, et a.
Caesar’s Messiah: The Roman Conspiracy to Invent Jesus: Atwill
The Jesus Cult: 2000 Years of the Last Days: Conner
Paulianity: Identifying Christianity’s False Apostle : Farrell
and this:
Operation Messiah: St. Paul, Roman intelligence and the birth of Christianity: Thijs Voskuilen, Rose Mary Sheldon.
These books provide an acute expose of the emergence of Christianity but they are not mutually consistent, leaving the critique up in the air. Further, they don’t understand the issues of occult action open to such figures as John the Baptist, ‘Jesus’, and Paul. A group og such men could have just as well have exploited the Romans to promote their new religion as the other way around. Note that Paul clearly stated he was somehow in contact with Jesus in some sense. No secular humanist critique can figure this out (although I can’t either, but spirit contact with dead figures is not simply superstition).
Update: I am restoring the original full post here after deleting the passage at the end in bold face See post to follow. I cannot quite delineate the Gurdjieff situation, but I have heard it said in sufi circles that Gurdjieff et al. replicated the triadic operation in the twentieth century, but it is hard to fully document this. The world of Gurdjieff is not a gang of saintly figures, and one might do will to be wary of the original Christological school: it was so full of disinformation, and outright deceptions as to be untrustworthy. But the critics in the books cited are suggesting the Roman Emperors concocted the gospels themselves whole cloth. They go too far, and the firsts book cautions this view….If the early Christological figures to graft their corpus onto Roman thinking and not the other way around they perpetrated their own fraud.
These issues are such a hopeless mess that I would recommend moving away from the whole quagmire.
———–We will insert another post commenting on this:
The triadic savior supermeme….
https://redfortyeight.com/2022/12/19/christianity-and-the-roman-emperors-2/
These critiques of Christianity are essential and important but in my experience it is easy to miss something. Secular humanism needs its critique, but the object is not to turn everyone into Flatlanders. Christians don’t understand their own religion, but secular humanists don’t understand it either….
For example, the work of Gurdjieff in his All and Everything with their Sufistic/gnostic angle discuss the larger phase of emergent Christianity (in Axial Age parallel with much else, e.g Buddhism/Mahayana) rightly pointing to the mysterious triadic coordination of three savior memes: John the Baptist, Jesus, and Paul, and their mutual ‘communication’. This ancient legacy (about which I know almost nothing) resurfaces in the Christian generative moment. This larger operation whose exact significance has never been clarified (best of luck with Gurdjieffian mystification) was the larger generator of the strange mystery cult whose unknown inner meaning disgorged its strange cultural exoteric outcome as Pauline Christianity and with an unknown relation to what we suspect is the Roman Emperor cooptation of the ‘what was all that’ that came before, apparently. The source ‘savior’ types probably thought the coopted Christianity a useful disguised outcome for their obscure operations which never reached the public. Ironically the Roman emperors provided a massive propaganda boost for the ‘lost cult’ soon the world of the Popes, and finally Constantine. So it would seem the early Christian group outsmarted Rome, not the other way around.
—————–original post:
I zipped through these books at high speed, and found them very compelling, but am unable to assess such a complex mass of similar yet distinct perspectives and datasets. I will have to read them a…
Source: Christianity and the Roman Emperors – 1848+: The End(s) of History
I zipped through these books at high speed, and found them very compelling, but am unable to assess such a complex mass of similar yet distinct perspectives and datasets. I will have to read them again, along with still more books in the related literature.
Tweet
two more:
The Jesus Cult: 2000 Years of the Last Days: Conner
Paulianity: Identifying Christianity’s False Apostle : Farrell
and this:
Operation Messiah: St. Paul, Roman intelligence and the birth of Christianity: Thijs Voskuilen, Rose Mary Sheldon.
These books provide an acute expose of the emergence of Christianity but they are not mutually consistent, leaving the critique up in the air. Further, they don’t understand the issues of occult action open to such figures as John the Baptist, ‘Jesus’, and Paul. A group og such men could have just as well have exploited the Romans to promote their new religion as the other way around. Note that Paul clearly stated he was somehow in contact with Jesus in some sense. No secular humanist critique can figure this out (although I can’t either, but spirit contact with dead figures is not simply superstition).
Update: I am restoring the original full post here after deleting the passage at the end in bold face See post to follow. I cannot quite delineate the Gurdjieff situation, but I have heard it said in sufi circles that Gurdjieff et al. replicated the triadic operation in the twentieth century, but it is hard to fully document this. The world of Gurdjieff is not a gang of saintly figures, and one might do will to be wary of the original Christological school: it was so full of disinformation, and outright deceptions as to be untrustworthy. But the critics in the books cited are suggesting the Roman Emperors concocted the gospels themselves whole cloth. They go too far, and the firsts book cautions this view….If the early Christological figures to graft their corpus onto Roman thinking and not the other way around they perpetrated their own fraud.
These issues are such a hopeless mess that I would recommend moving away from the whole quagmire.
———–We will insert another post commenting on this:
The triadic savior supermeme….
https://redfortyeight.com/2022/12/19/christianity-and-the-roman-emperors-2/
These critiques of Christianity are essential and important but in my experience it is easy to miss something. Secular humanism needs its critique, but the object is not to turn everyone into Flatlanders. Christians don’t understand their own religion, but secular humanists don’t understand it either….
For example, the work of Gurdjieff in his All and Everything with their Sufistic/gnostic angle discuss the larger phase of emergent Christianity (in Axial Age parallel with much else, e.g Buddhism/Mahayana) rightly pointing to the mysterious triadic coordination of three savior memes: John the Baptist, Jesus, and Paul, and their mutual ‘communication’. This ancient legacy (about which I know almost nothing) resurfaces in the Christian generative moment. This larger operation whose exact significance has never been clarified (best of luck with Gurdjieffian mystification) was the larger generator of the strange mystery cult whose unknown inner meaning disgorged its strange cultural exoteric outcome as Pauline Christianity and with an unknown relation to what we suspect is the Roman Emperor cooptation of the ‘what was all that’ that came before, apparently. The source ‘savior’ types probably thought the coopted Christianity a useful disguised outcome for their obscure operations which never reached the public. Ironically the Roman emperors provided a massive propaganda boost for the ‘lost cult’ soon the world of the Popes, and finally Constantine. So it would seem the early Christian group outsmarted Rome, not the other way around.
—————–original post:
I zipped through these books at high speed, and found them very compelling, but am unable to assess such a complex mass of similar yet distinct perspectives and datasets. I will have to read them a…
Source: Christianity and the Roman Emperors – 1848+: The End(s) of History
I zipped through these books at high speed, and found them very compelling, but am unable to assess such a complex mass of similar yet distinct perspectives and datasets. I will have to read them again, along with still more books in the related literature.
Tweet
Authors suggest Paul was a Roman spy
“Operation Messiah: St. Paul, Roman intelligence and the birth of Christianity.” By Thijs Voskuilen and Rose Mary Sheldon.
We listed three books on Christology and Rome today scroll down. Here is another for the list….
Source: Authors suggest Paul was a Roman spy | by Jay Brodell | Dec, 2022 | Medium
Christianity and the Roman Emperors
I zipped through these books at high speed, and found them very compelling, but am unable to assess such a complex mass of similar yet distinct perspectives and datasets. I will have to read them again, along with still more books in the related literature. But as the saying goe
Tweet
Creating Christianity: A Weapon of Ancient Rome: Davis
Creating Christ: How Roman Emperors invented Christianity: Valiant, et a.
Caesar’s Messiah: The Roman Conspiracy to Invent Jesus: Atwill
two more:
The Jesus Cult: 2000 Years of the Last Days: Conner
Paulianity: Identifying Christianity’s False Apostle : Farrell
Creating Christ: How Roman Emperors Invented Christianity eBook : Valliant, James S., Fahy, C. W.: Books
I am speedreading a whole set of books like this one cited. Correct assessment is difficult, but there is at a minimum a component of history here relevant to the complex, almost unknowable history of Christianity’s beginnings…
Exhaustively annotated and illustrated, this explosive work of history unearths clues that finally demonstrate the truth about one of the world’s great religions: that it was born out of the conflict between the Romans and messianic Jews who fought a bitter war with each other during the 1st Century. The Romans employed a tactic they routinely used to conquer and absorb other nations: they grafted their imperial rule onto the religion of the conquered. After 30 years of research, authors James S. Valliant and C.W. Fahy present irrefutable archaeological and textual evidence that proves Christianity was created by Roman Caesars in this book that breaks new ground in Christian scholarship and is destined to change the way the world looks at ancient religions forever.Inherited from a long-past era of tyranny, war and deliberate religious fraud, could Christianity have been created for an entirely different purpose than we have been lead to believe? Praised by scholars like Dead Sea Scrolls translator Robert Eisenman (James the Brother of Jesus), this exhaustive synthesis of historical detective work integrates all of the ancient sources about the earliest Christians and reveals new archaeological evidence for the first time. And, despite the fable presented in current bestsellers like Bill O’Reilly’s Killing Jesus, the evidence presented in Creating Christ is irrefutable: Christianity was invented by Roman Emperors.
Stop pulling my leg…//As Religious Institutions Decline, the Left Loses Out. We Can Change That.
Updated: This claim is open to strong challenge but even if it is true there is zero chance of being able to reverse decline of religion affiliation. How would anyone do anything here? Make believing in the Resurrection a leftist cause? All in all Christianity has been a destructive and controlling legacy. The world has to move on…I am a student of multiple religions but the idea I would go to a Church community for leftist support is ridiculous. The case of Martin Luther King is misleading here. He was not a conventional Christian but a student of Hegel and Tillich, a lot like my Dad,a preacher who was not a theist, as far as I could tell, but, who knows. The point here is this essay at Jacobin could never replicate with, evidently Rev. Barber, the sourceof this perspective, what King did, and the communities referred to were slave communities that passed through abolition into a fascinating brand of Christianity, but one that is unique and transient, and really a great case of singing from the Protestant hymnal, but weak on theology, as are all Christianities. When I critiqued historical materialism of the Marx canon I knew ahead of time I would be writing this post: the Christians would steal a march on the wicked Marx. So, one should be clear, Marx sounded a secular note, and he was right to do so but his canon turned out to be flawed, and purveyed a brittle brand of materialist philosophy. So what it can be upgraded, but one thing that is not possible is for the left to step backward into god beliefs enforced by religious dogmas of the Christian church. If you don’t see why you don’t deserve to be a leftist/activist leader. The suggestions in this essay will lead in the end to religious war and in case you think we haven’t enough of that go read the history of the Reformation, one of the most violent and unending conflicts in history, and it went on and on and on until everyone just go tired of it.
This kind of essay at Jacobin is dangerous because it implies that religious entities should control the left, and therefore what about those don’t buy it? They will be Christian heretics and all parties will get into a fight and the implication is that leftists will go to hell, etc…
So, I would strongly suggest, NEVER try to force a secular humanist into a retrograde Christian post. The gesture is violent and will be met promptly with, stare down my gun barrel.
Christianity cannot serve us now. Jesus was not/is not your personal savior. The Christianiy theology was a fraud and our knowledge of Jesus in any case is essentially zero
The decline of religious affiliation in the United States has harmed the Left more than the Right. It has also produced millions of spiritual-but-not-religious Americans who are lonely and hungry for a nourishing community. We should organize them.
Source: As Religious Institutions Decline, the Left Loses Out. We Can Change That.
1848+: The End(s) of History 