Religious Revolution
To say one isn’t religious is as meaningless as saying one isn’t scientific. Both Science and Religion exist and neither cares what you think. If you walk out of a window on the tenth floor, you are going to plummet to the ground regardless of your views on gravity. You’ve made an error of Science. You haven’t acted in terms of the world as it really is. You acted irrationally. Likewise, if you refuse to share your subjective center with anyone else and insist on seeing all other humans as objects—as actors in your play, you are a psychopath regardless of your views on the meaning of life. You’ve made an error of Religion. You haven’t acted in terms of the world as it really is. You acted irrationally.
Lord Bacon’s small shift limited Science to its proper realm where it was free to grow into the stupendous success that we see all around us today in the physical world. But we were so impressed by its success that we tried dragging it back out of its proper realm and irrationally applying its methods—disastrously—in the realms of Art and Religion.
Marx thought he could apply the scientific method to society and came up with a thousand pages of (ho)+c+(us)=p*((oc)-(u/s)) proving the value of a man is in his labor and the future can be seen with a calculator. A glorious new scientific man was introduced to the world and hundreds of millions of sons and daughters were transformed into slaves and corpses.
Freud thought he could reduce the human condition to discrete variables that could be diagnosed and treated like spider bites and today we medicate human despair with drugs while drug deaths (and suicides) are at record levels.
We need another small shift. Imagine if Science kept to the realm of Science and Art kept to the realm of Art and Religion kept to the realm of Religion. No more priests proclaiming who God wants to be president. No more scientists deciding who can participate in political discourse. No more politicians determining what values to instill in your children.
The effect of the small shift would be most revolutionary in the realm of Religion because Religion, among the three realms, is the most stunted. One of the poisonous innovations introduced into the world by Ezekiel and his scribes back in Babylon was that some men had a special ability to speak directly to “God.” Those men could write down what was said in the conversation and then that was the “Word of God” forever and ever and ever.
The earliest known scientific writing has to do with the cause of sickness. It was found in Ashur, north of Babylon, and dates to the 7th Century BC, when the school of Ezekiel was still a couple of centuries in the future.
This ancient medical text reads:
May he have eaten the bread of a person under a curse; may he have drunk the water of a person under a curse (…)! May he have drunk what a person under a curse has left.
What if Ezekiel had been in the medical field in Ashur at the time and had declared that this scientific writing was from God, and because it had been written down on two stone tablets, this was the final word on infectious diseases? Absurd, right? That’s exactly what the Old Testament is to Christians. Not even the Jews are that extreme. Their Talmud evolves over time. But for Christians, religious texts written roughly around the time the medical text above was written carry the same weight today as they did the day they were written. And those texts weren’t even written by the founder of their religion, who was still five centuries away. They were written by his avowed enemies, who had him put to death for denouncing these very writings. And then another five centuries on, John Hagee’s great-great-[…]-grandfather made the inexplicable decision to attach these primitive, hateful, racist writings to the writings of those inspired by the message of love their religion’s founder preached. Then he told everyone they were of “equal divine authority.” And everyone bought it. And they’re still buying it. They simply will not release their grasp on that barbaric Written Word even as the children of Palestine scream in terror.
No wonder our culture is so distorted and our civilization so broken. Where are the Christian theologians? Where are the Christian churches that aren’t led by heartless lunatics and swindlers? Step up, if you are out there. Take a stand against talking snakes and half demons and fish swallowing men then vomiting them up on the beach three days later still alive. Denounce poisonous concepts like Prophesy, and End Times, and Anti-Christ, and Chosen People, and Promised Land, and Holy Writ. Condemn any God that feeds on the broken bodies of children. Cut yourselves free of the Old Testament and, above all, stop being the stooges of Zion. It’s so easy to do. Just one small shift and the religious revolution will be underway and all these noxious fumes will waft away.
And what will be the fate of the Jews in your revolution? Will they be swept up along with everyone else as they were with the scientific revolution. Or has the Talmudic captivity altered them too severely?
Between 1880 and 1920, Brooklyn, New York became the heart of the Old Country, as Woody Allen put it. During that period, the Talmudic center migrated to the United States from Russia. They left behind a Russia in ruins and under the control of the Bolsheviks, who murdered the monarchy and the aristocracy, liquidated the bourgeoisie (Christian middle class) and the kulaks (well-to-do peasants), murdered the most intelligent gentiles along with their children, dynamited thousands of churches while leaving the synagogues intact, hunted down the Christian clergy and murdered them with their families, and stripped Russia of its wealth, which they sent to the heart of the Old Country. The Eastern Jews brought with them their answer to the assimilated Western Jews long settled in the United States: Talmudic Zionism. The Western Jews were overwhelmed as quickly as the WASPs.
Come the revolution, humanity will no longer view human emotions as being either “good” or “bad.” Rather, the question will be whether they are rational or irrational. Does the emotion fit the circumstances, i.e., reality? Does the willed action, for which the emotion serves as the motive force, actualize the emotion in terms of the world as it really is?
We humans here on the backside of the Scientific Revolution don’t really think about how radically the world changed when Sir Francis Bacon shifted us from explainers of the physical world to mere observers. But think how odd it would sound to us today if someone tried to convince us that the reason the sun produces light isn’t a consequence of nuclear reactions fusing hydrogen into helium or burning gases, or whatever, but, rather, the reason the sun produces light is to make the trees grow, or so that we can have daytime—to give us day and night.
It sounds silly, but, up until Bacon, that was the method of scientific inquiry; that’s how we explained the physical world around us. In fact, that’s exactly how the Bible explains it.
And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness. And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And the evening and the morning were the first day. (Genesis 1:4-5)
If nature can’t be understood without us explaining its purpose, that makes us pretty important.
After humanity emerges from the Religious Revolution, you will no longer hear people say stuff like, “At first, he was being reasonable. Then he got all emotional.”
The Resurrection of Christ is said to be the cornerstone of the Christian religion. How or why that is, I can’t imagine. To me, returning from the dead is one of the dumber things to base a religion on; it’s not even a religious question—it’s medical, but here we are: if you want to be a devout Christian, believing Jesus rose from the dead is part of the package.
Now, the only reason the Resurrection is part of the Christian package is because that’s how the story is told in the Gospels. There is no DNA evidence, no surveillance video, no contemporaneous record, no independent historical mention, no signed document by Jesus or anyone who saw Them alive after They were crucified—just the stories. Moreover, as
shows, not only were the authors of the Gospels not from Jerusalem, they weren’t even alive in 33 A.D.If Christianity contains religious truth, that truth would be found, it seems to me, in the words of Jesus, not in whether Mary was a virgin when she gave birth to Jesus, or whether Jesus came back to life after being dead for three days, or whether Jesus walked on water, or cured blindness, or turned water into wine. How does it matter to the teaching of “love thy neighbor” whether the teacher’s mother got pregnant the same way everybody else’s mother got pregnant?