The History of Religion

On History

Twelve Apostles took the teachings of Christ to the people and formed the early Christian Church.   The simple message of ‘do unto others as you would have done to you, love God and your neighbors,’ spread like a prairie fire across the Mediterranean.  It upset the powers that were.  It under-minded their ability to control people by way of religion.  First the Jews and then the Romans persecuted the early Christians.  They tried to destroy the rising religion.  By the year 300 it had gotten too imbedded into the culture to contain.  So Constantine I issued the edict of toleration in 313.  He made religious tolerance a law.  That was for ALL religions.  Though, he claimed he’d had a vision of a cross in the sky before riding into a successful battle.  It was with the symbol of the cross that he retook Rome and claimed his empire.  Despite claims he converted to Christianity, there is a lot of evidence that he still held true to his pagan beliefs.  He certainly didn’t practice Christianity primarily as the Arch of Constantine is decorated with images of the pagan goddess Victoria.  Sacrifices were made to the gods like Diana, Hercules and Apollo on its dedication, which took place after his conversion.  There is no Christian symbolism on the Arch.  His coinage continued to carry the symbols of the sun god, long after his supposed conversion to Christianity.  When he dedicated his new city Constantinople he did so wearing the Apollonian sun-rayed Diadem.  The sign of the cross was not present.  However, despite this, in the year 325 Constantine called together the First Council of Nicaea.  It was the first in a series of councils which sought to define and contain the theology of the faith.  Constantine set out to establish orthodoxy to unite his empire, to eliminate debate and dissention.  The Romans sought to control Christianity and to use it as a tool to bring the two halves of their empire back together and to once again control the people by way of religion.  They organized it to resemble the Roman army; with Cardinals as generals and the Pope as Emperor.  They rejected books and teachings that were not in line with their intents.  Books that suggested the way to find God started from within the individual first and grew outwardly were thrown out.  Certain apocryphal teachings of Jesus Christ were rejected for not being in-line with the Roman structure.

There’s a popular theory that suggests that the early pagan gods were actually demons who revealed themselves to man and attained power through worship and veneration.  They demanded blood rituals for it gave them more essence and strength.

So, a pagan steered the Church in his desired direction.  Christianity in its purest form was meant to end the worship of these demonic forces, and it did in the beginning.  Overall it succeeded because not very many people today worship the pagan pantheon.  However, behind the scenes the Roman controlled Catholic Church made the Pope the true king of Europe for nearly two thousand years. Power and greed ruled the world.  Many dark and sinister things were done in the name of the Catholic Church.  We call it the Dark Ages.  The suppression of mankind took place under early Christian rule.  Witch trials and Crusades, acts of sadistic torture, as well as countless other examples of evil deeds were done under the guise of Christianity.  Heretics were burned at the stake.  What part of Jesus Christ’s personality did they take that from?  What part suggested it was okay to burn someone alive if they didn’t believe.  “Oh, you don’t agree with me?  Well, then you can just burn to death!”

The Bible is a series of books brought together.  It’s what the word means.  The Bible was brought together by the Romans.  The books they kept were very good books, written with good intention, full of beautiful metaphors, and crafty symbolism but they presented only a glimpse of all the teachings of Christ and the ideas that had come about after his death.  Gnostic Christians held to a different interpretation of Christ’s teachings all together.  They said you didn’t need a priest to find God.  They believed in reincarnation.  This wouldn’t do for the Romans who needed the individual to need the church in order to find salvation.   Tithe! Tithe!  Tithe, or you are going to be tortured for eternity in HELL!  Rule by fear!  What is fear but a negative emotion?  Negative emotions have a lower frequency.  They come from the evil side of the universe.  Love and compassion vibrate with the highest of frequencies and can only lift us upward.

Martin Luther as well as a few others brought about the Reformation, because they knew instinctively that something wasn’t quite right with the way the religion was being conducted.  They brought about the Protestant Reformation that would divide Europe and become deeply entangled with political struggles for centuries.  The Renaissance brought about even more change and the light was brought back out to once again shine away some of the darkness that had entrenched itself into the culture.  Because there was enough of the truth out there to do that; but just enough to keep darkness lurking in the shadows, waiting for a chance to take back some of the control.  The Age of Enlightenment and the Scientific Revolution further pushed us onward toward the light.  But the old guard fought against this with all its might.  Science is from the devil!   Wars were fought to bring the wicked back to the fold. 

But as long as fear remains as part of the faith (directly, the fear of sinning and being punished for breaking the laws of the church, and ultimately going to hell), then the darkness has a foothold in the church.  Men created those laws.  People don’t need them.  A recent study at Yale showed that babies are born with the ability to know right from wrong.  It’s not taught, it’s instinctual.  Why is that?

I had a very interesting conversation on Facebook with a friend that went on for a couple of days.  He posted something I found very interesting.  It was the genealogical list of names from Adam to Noah, translated into English from their Hebrew roots. 

Adam – Man

Seth – Appointed
Enosh – Mortal
Kenan – Sorrow
Mahalalel – The Blessed God
Jared – Shall come down
Enoch – Teaching
Methuselah – His death shall bring
Lamech – The Despairing
Noah – Rest, or comfort.

“Man is appointed mortal sorrow.  The Blessed God shall come down teaching.  His death shall bring the despairing rest, or comfort.”

I thought about that and how the writers of the ancient books were very clever and perhaps there was some ancient magic or mysticism or true prophecy written into the bible.  Certainly there were wonderful metaphors written therein.  Then he went on to post that Moses wrote the Torah and how he had written it three thousand years ahead of Christ’s birth.   It was the statement about Moses having written the Torah that struck me and took my mind from the original thought.  So I asked him why we believe Moses wrote the Torah himself.   He explained that the first book of Moses is called Genesis.  But my argument is that Tom Sawyer wasn’t written by Tom Sawyer.  And Moses didn’t make it to the promise land.  His people did, but he himself died in the desert.  So when would he have had time to write the Torah?  They were moving around the desert.  Maybe he did it at night in his tent?  I guess he might have.  But that led to a much broader conversation about the literal interpretation of the Bible as opposed to a metaphoric one.  He claimed at first that he did take the Bible completely literally.  That surprised me.  I asked him about Noah’s Ark.  I explained that there are over five thousand different species of mammals alone on the earth.  Did he really think Noah saved every living animal that exists today on a giant boat?  That story existed before the Bible in several cultures, suggesting that something did happen.  The problem is the stories vary to fit into the culture telling it.  The Epic of Gilgamesh tells of Gilgamesh building a boat to save all the animals in Mesopotamia. It is an older account of Noah’s flood.  So we believe the newer version of the story, told even further from the original event?  Hasn’t anyone ever played telephone before?  You know how that turns out, right?

The fact that so many cultures have a flood story suggests to me that there was a civilization on earth before the end of the Ice Age.  It was global and advanced.  Then something happened that changed the landscape of the earth in a very small amount of time.  In 1901, they discovered a solidly frozen mammoth in Siberia with remnants of fresh summer flowers and vegetation in its stomach.  Like it went from a summer day to a deep freeze in a matter of minutes.  One theory is that a comet or meteor crashed into the ice sheets over the Hudson Bay and shook the earth off its previous axis.   It was a great apocalypse. The sea faring, global civilization lived off the ocean and most of their cities were along the coastlines. Off of Japan and India there are ruins of enormous structures that were not exposed above the ocean since the end of the Ice Age.  There are supposedly ruins beneath the Caribbean Sea as well.  These were all inundated and submerged in a matter of days if not instantly by tidal waves hundreds of feet tall.  The few people who managed to survive went to higher ground, some on boats, and waited out the shifting and settling of the earth.  They had to learn to survive again.  They’d lost everything.  They were relegated to living off the land and hunting and gathering again.  They told the stories to their children’s children and the story changed to fit the culture telling it.  New civilizations came to be.  The stories came down to the Hebrews and someone, maybe Moses wrote it down as Noah’s Ark among the other creation stories.

There are several other, older versions of Bible stories in Samaria and Egypt as well.  It is important to understand that men wrote the books of the Bible.  They could have been channeling the collective consciousness of the universe but they were interpreting this knowledge through their very limited and superstitious human brains.  It is why when you look close enough you’ll see the inconsistencies and why people over the centuries have had to adjust and interpret the Bible to fit their dogma.   “Well, what Paul is actually saying here is…” (add some preacher’s ideas.)

I think it’s possible for the Bible to be a place of solace and peace, to help guide lives, because people are seeking God in the pages.  But God, if you believe in God, is everything in the universe, and if you believe the theories, the multiverse as well is all part of a larger system that we too are part of, down to the strings that connect everything at the smallest scale of our universe.  They are all God.  So if you seek God anywhere you will find Him, or It, because He’s already there.  Some find God in nature.  It’s why religions can act as divine roads, because if you seek you will find.  It doesn’t matter what religion it is.  Some are more restrictive than others, however, but somewhere there will be a glimmer of truth behind it, just obscured by superstitious dogma and human folly.  But if you seek God because you are afraid to die and end up in hell, then you are heading the wrong direction. 

This is where we always say you have to have faith.  But what exactly are you basing your faith on?  That’s an important question.  If you base all your faith on the Bible, the one put together by a pagan Emperor, then what are you basing your faith really on?  Sand?  You can be shown that God didn’t personally write the Bible.  We know the stories come from older stories and have been changed to fit a larger story line.  What’s wrong with trusting God is everything and everywhere and that by vibrating with a higher frequency and radiating love, that we are serving His will, which is harmony?  Being positive and giving to others, showing compassion and not promoting fear and hate is walking with God.  Why do people need to take the Bible literally?  It’s like a life-preserver for most; they cling to it to stay afloat spiritually.  But I’d suggest learning to swim would be a better way.

I once had a conversation with a guy who was studying to become a preacher.  I asked him about the dinosaurs and the age of the earth.   He believed the earth was only four thousand years old and that the devil put those dinosaur bones out in the desert to fool mankind.   He needed to believe that or his whole faith would collapse.  That’s fragile faith.  There’s a lot more going on in the universe than we will ever really know.  Keep that in mind.  So making your faith brittle and stiff, restrictive, leaves it easily to be broken by the next new discovery.