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The Exegesis: We Gotta Get Out of This Place
Monday, May 26, 2008
The more I read about the ancient "pagan" world and its practices and beliefs, the more I think that the difference between Christianity and "paganism" is purely a question of politics. Even a casual reading of the actual practices of the Isis cults or Mithraism would hit familiar notes with any modern Christian. Certainly Muslims and orthodox Jews think all of Christianity is nothing but paganism in fancy dress, and they're not shy about saying so.
This isn't a question of Catholic vs. Protestant vs. Orthodox, either. The denominations are fundamentally identical beneath all the trappings. And at its core, Christianity is simply a corporatized manifestation of an impossibly ancient theology. The early church fathers knew this, and it's a good bet that most of today's church fathers do as well. The smart ones, at least.
In order to understand the practices of the corporate church, you need to look at the "Crisis of the Third Century" when Rome's imperial expansion began to backfire. You had hundreds if not thousands of different tribes and varying sects and dialects within Rome's bulging borders. A look at Lebanon in the 1980s will show you what a recipe for disaster that can be. There was a distinct move towards an all-encompassing civic religion in order to keep the peace. Aurelian (aka "Hand on Sword") hammered together a prototype of the Roman Church with his new monotheistic Solar religion, but the masses of Jews and Christians and Gnostics presented a challenge to Solar theology. And the need to create a self-policing, totalitarian form of worship was ill-suited to the symbolicist and elitist nature of Solar religion itself.
As we see in the Islamic world, Fundamentalism (in all its forms) is inherently totalitarian and authoritarian. And so a strongman like Constantine (or, more accurately, his handlers) would naturally seek out the most literalist and oppressive sect in the Empire to establish a more efficient form of imperial policing. And he found it right at home. From then on it was simply a matter of systematically crushing its rivals until a later emperor could lift the pretense of tolerance towards all religions and put in place an authoritarian state cult whose primacy was mandated by law.
It worked well in some aspects, but the perpetually anti-intellectual and inhumane nature of the so-called "orthodox" would destroy Western European culture, science, art and economic prosperity for almost a millennium, and reduce an entire continent to penury and disease. Though authoritarian conservatives are constantly claiming otherwise, it wouldn't be until the Renaissance, when the so-called "pagan" systems of thought were revived that Europe would become the economic, military and scientific powerhouse of the past five centuries or so.
We no longer are ruled by any church, per se. The division wracking Western Culture now is between bottom-drawer Fundamentalism (whether Christian or Islamic) and technocratic atheism. You'll see no real alternative presented to this dichotomy in the media, and don't think for an instant that that is not by design. There seems to be a plan to steer the plebes towards some form of snake-handling or other (my recent road trip through the heart of Pennsylvania drove that fact home) and the cognitive elite towards an inhumane scientism. It keeps people from mingling and makes for great media, to boot.
But I'm not sure this plan is working. People in both the religious and secular worlds sense something is profoundly screwed up in our present understanding of religion and spirituality. Kids are abandoning the Chuck E Cheese-type Evangelical churches they were raised in in droves, and even the Republican Party is having trouble managing the excesses of its Evangelical subsidiaries. Hating gays might work when credit is easy and gas is cheap, but now that the locus of economic power is moving eastward, it doesn't help keep the repo man away.
It's my deepest conviction that this false dichotomy shoved down our throats by the media puppets is killing our souls- and Western Cuture, to boot. And the preservation and progress of Western Culture is my ultimate concern in all of my work. Our culture is the expression of our collective soul, and the rank stupidity being pumped out by our media and our churches is eviscerating our reputation in the world, as is the political, economic and military activity that grows out of it.
As tempting as it is to blame all of this on the Illuminati or whomever, it's also self-defeating. Most of the conspiracy theory we see out there exists to absolve its adherents of responsibility. Worse, I suspect a lot of it is psyop bullshit and a lot of it is being pumped onto the net by agencies hostile to the well-being of liberal democracy. And there's no paradox greater than an Evangelical or Fundamentalist complaining about totalitarianism or authoritarianism, since they worship totalizing authority. They seem to be mainly upset that liberals are standing in the way of their blissful theocracy, and subsequently blame them for all of the world's ills. It's been going on for centuries.
There's got to be a way out of this mess. Symbol and Synchronicity and the Collective Unconscious are not ends unto themselves, they are the signposts pointing towards a new understanding of the Universe really works. Revelation is an ongoing process, but its language is symbolic, not literal.
By the same token, I don't talk about ancient astronaut theory for the hell of it, I do so because I think it might explain some basic truths about the human condition. Or it might not. But if we can't figure out where we came from, all the Synchromysticism on the planet can't help us.
Science and spirit were not antithetical to many of history's greatest minds, though certainly the dumbed-down expressions that you see of them in the media certainly are. I know a lot of people who work (or worked) in the media and they're as filled with despair as you and I. The good news is that I don't think conscious human activity is the greatest power on Earth, and I don't necessarily believe that all power structures are inherently evil, either. And most importantly, I don't think religion automatically means bowing and scraping before some invisible megalomaniac.
I don't think people who care about something other than materialism need to be at odds all the time. Maybe the Third Way has been co-opted, but there's surely a Fourth, Fifth, Sixth and Seventh Way out there.
Posted by Christopher Loring Knowles at 12:03 AM
Labels: Ancient Astronauts, Culture, Politics
5 comments:
zupakomputer said...
What the problem is, is that there's people with power-over other people, in some way or another - that they are able to hide because of what they are using to have that abusive effect, and they aren't capable of thinking of nor understanding the likes of what you wrote in the article there.
To me, I agree with it, and it has always seemed really obvious. But the people who have controlled my life (family mostly, and to some extent just the type of area I had to grow up in), not only are completely unable to understand any of that, they also believe that they are above having to comprehend such things; they think that they are secretly knowlegable about the 'real truth', where reason and logic and a healthy soul mean absolutely nothing, and are choices made by duped dogoders who will finish last.
And they actively try to eradicate anyone who thinks clearly and intelligently.
It's a real active and physically threatening hatred towards anything that states clearly How Things Are.
I think a lot of people in the world have all that to deal with too - consider for example the many people still forced into arranged marriages.
Things like logic, reason, non-destructive healthy freedom aren't just not part of their lives, they aren't even allowed to think that those things should be part of their life.
I also agree that there is very much a real Western culture, and it is a very good benevolent one; and it is very much under threat precisely because it at core does away with all the badly restrictive false-traditions, which aren't traditions at all and certainly aren't about culture; they are about stunting growth and making the soul as sick and restricted as possible.
10:23 AM
![[image]](../../../../Desktop/Articles/The%20Exegesis%20-%20We%20Gotta%20Get%20Out%20of%20This%20Place_Images/The%20Exegesis%20-%20We%20Gotta%20Get%20Out%20of%20This%20Place_1.png) Bokyung said...
Great post. I think a number of the other numbers have already been co-opted too...or at least there's been the attempt. For example, B.C. apparently (I haven't checked this yet, but my Canadian friend told me about it earlier today) just passed the "carbon" tax...and all those "Greenies" have accepted it "no problem" because of course, Global Warming is a "human" problem and we all love Mother Earth (me too!) so we gotta pay the bills for our carbon footprints...
And of course, don't you think a lot of the OVERT paganism (not the paganisms of Christianity that you've outted a number of times) are also "targeted"???
In my little conspiratorially-wracked mind, I envision a big computer somewhere in the dark cthonic recesses running scenarios on how to "deal with" all of the variables...to work things out for the advantage of the truly mad...
Meanwhile, I'm trying to bring myself into further awareness...in the hopes that dealing with my little field will have a positive effect on the BIG field...
Peace
10:37 AM /a>
Anonymous said...
"It seems to me that the nature of the ultimate revolution with which we are now faced is precisely this: That we are in process of developing a whole series of techniques which will enable the controlling oligarchy [read: Illuminati or New World Order, etc, for Huxley was an MI6 and Tavistock agent] who have always existed and presumably will always exist [N.B.: have always and wil always] to get people to love their servitude."
-- Aldous Huxley (1962 speech at Berkeley)
We can sympathize with your concerns here. It is the BIG question of modern times. First a point of agreement:
You say:
By the same token, I don't talk about ancient astronaut theory for the hell of it, I do so because I think it might explain some basic truths about the human condition. Or it might not. But if we can't figure out where we came from, all the Synchromysticism on the planet can't help us.
Yes, quite right; the orgins question is fundamental. IF the ancient astronaut (or something similar) is correct, we may just be semi-automatized puppets of the these same genetic creators or their "enforcers", who are known most famously as the Illuminati. Other theories are possible as well. Who were those guys who ran the world qwide civilization called Atlantis/Lemuria and who appear in the Egyptian Pharaoh mummies (and elsewhere around thwe world) with red hair (and who also apparently had green eyes?) And where did they go? Is this THEIR system, whoever they are? the smart money, I surmise, thinks so.
A point of disagreement. You say:
As tempting as it is to blame all of this on the Illuminati or whomever, it's also self-defeating. Most of the conspiracy theory we see out there exists to absolve its adherents of responsibility. Worse, I suspect a lot of it is psyop bullshit and a lot of it is being pumped onto the net by agencies hostile to the well-being of liberal democracy. And there's no paradox greater than an Evangelical or Fundamentalist complaining about totalitarianism or authoritarianism, since they worship totalizing authority. They seem to be mainly upset that liberals are standing in the way of their blissful theocracy, and subsequently blame them for all of the world's ills. It's been going on for centuries.
The first sentence creates a huge non-sequitur with the rest. I believe it quite likely that some group like the Illuminati has always been in control of things (see Huxley's comment at the top: he knew). I does not follow we are resolved of responsibility. Otr that there is an abundance of psyop bullshit that comes with it. The latter is inevitable as the Sheep get led into their various pens. The point is that the Illuminati appear to control BOTH SIDES of the dialectic, Fundamentalist and other religions as much as atheistic scientism. (Darwinism was a product of the Freemasonic Royal Society.) The truth is inevitably the victim. However, there is an equally imposed emerging "synthesis" of both of these strands in the world right now, called the New Age. There will be the New World (New Age--Novus ordo Seclorum) Order and the One World Religion (to be based on a rehabilitated and perverted form of Gaia worship--global warming,resource scarcity, famine, peak oil, plagues (induced, likely) etc, is all part of this-- AND the micro-chip and ultimate forms of psychological and physical forms of coercion the rest of the paraphernalia of the upcoming police state. It is the coming together of capitalism (Adam Smith and Thomas Malthus worked for the East India Company, an Illuminati front group that brought us "capitalism" (the "free" society--but really "fascist" in the sense of corporatism--manifestation with supreme bondage underlying it in the hands of the banking system making us wage slaves of large global corporations)and communism (the "antithesis" put out there by Freemason and Rothschild agent Karl Marx and instantiated in the banker-funded and created Soviet Union, a state of utter political desolation). The American Revolution itslef was permeated from inception by Freemasonry.
Thye New World Order combines communism at the "bottom" (food rationing, polkice state, no more private property for the masses--this is the privitization and globalism movement which has installed China, in the words of the United Nations, as the "model government" for the 21st century) with fascism at the "top" (Mussolini's corporatism where government exists to empower large corporate interests).
Twas always so. As it was and always shall be. World without end. Amen (which is just the Egyptian sun god Amon-Ra, also spelled Amen in some variants) 3:40 PM
ian said...
As for Christianity = paganism:
http://uroboros.wordpress.com/2008/04/26/the-mosaic-effect-season-2episode-7-its-just-a-myth/
11:59 PM
True said...
I get as dismayed as anyone about the state of our world, and where it's going.
But when looking at things from a non-dual perspective, I really think all this is the love-play of the universe at work. Threats and challenges are an initiator to evolution. And the Universe, in Hir loving wisdom, never ceases to put Hir creation through the wringer.
5:24 PM
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