Christian God theme debunked.

And yet he's able to walk through locked doors, change form, be seen by some and not by others, appear to 500 people at the same time, disapear, fly, and appear inside Saul.

 

yeah, and your problem with that is....

he also clearly said that WE could/would do even greater feats if you but believe.
So again, what's the problem?


don't get stuck in magical thinking, remember matter is mostly empty space


p.s. the appearing to over 500 hundred at one time wasn't 500 people in 500 different places, they were all at the same place, at least in the context in which it is recorded. Remember the dude was kinda popular, almost as much as Justin Bieber.
Think of a concert or something similar

huh you mean like in his stomach or spleen or something?

 

Comparing Jesus to Justin Bieber. If he is in heaven and is bothering to pay attention to your thoughts I bet he's sighing with disdain right about now

 

Well, I could have said the Beatles, but I think that comparison has been made already.

 

This is just a straw man argument, it is not God's problem we are talking about it is mankind's problem and God and Jesus are helping us with it.

 

You're right about it being a problem. I don't think you understand what it says about the biblical version of God that his creation plan had gone so wrong that the only way to fix it was to hang a guy on a cross. Voodoo? You bet!

 

I don't think the effects of his own thinking are understood.
Supposedly it was the result of free will. I asked how the will was free if you had to pay for the use of it but got no response.

He is also right about it being our problem, our problem being our tendency to want to punish someone or something to satisfy our own verdicts. Once the accusation is made someone must pay. It does not matter if the accusation is true of not. Either the accused pays or the accuser pays for making false accusation. The bloodthirsty or those who feel strongly impassioned about guilt settle for no less than blood.

Not everyone who says to me lord lord will enter the kingdom of heaven but those who do the will of the father. I desire mercy not sacrifice and this mercy pays the ransom, not blood, that those claiming guilt demand of the the innocent.
Our debt is to each other, not to god. No one usurps the power of god. No one can overturn his verdict that he loves the world so much, but we can change our minds about the world and our brothers. It is stated clearly that forgiveness comes to those who forgive and through no other mechanism. That which you do not forgive will not be forgiven you, not even "original " sin.

Notice how our friend has not answered the question you found so perfect.
He absolutely must condemn to justify his unwillingness to forgive for if he did his whole belief system would swept away, like a house built on sand.

 

I can recall that when I was young, I didn't question the idea that Jesus had to be sacrificed as per God's plan for the redemption of humans. Every Sunday I had to go to a place where that thought-seed was planted, watered, and fertilized. And I recall thinking that Jesus' suffering had to be extremely extreme because he was taking on the sins of everyone in the world. I also recall that part of the reason I didn't question the appropriateness of such a scenario was because somewhere in the back of my young mind--in that closet where I stashed those things I didn't want to look at or think about--was the fear of drawing the attention or ire of the being who would make such a plan. Plus, I didn't want to offend the son of this God who agreed to play his part in this whole mess.

The whole thing caused me feel pretty small and selfish. I felt selfish because if someone had approached me back then and made the proposition that if I would agree to have a finger cut off, the rest of the world would be saved from their sin, I would have ran for the nearest exit. In fact, I would have gladly trampled anyone in front of me on my way to that exist door. I knew damn well how I measured up against a guy who agreed to have his whole body cut off in order to save the world. The only way for me to escape the fear of God and the guilt from Jesus was to join the collective in their effort to appease the god who ran the show.

 

That's your private religion; you still had to be baptized, go to school with whatever ethnic composition it had, had to buy a Mother's day gift more or less annually, and make amends by going to the odd funeral or wedding.

 

And we have the case of Ukr-Cdn responding to me by calling me a fool. I thought there was some scripture about the danger of suffering Hell-fire when you call another man a fool. If that's true, then what a fool he was.

 

You'd have to ask him.

 

No, like in his big toe, right after he stubbed it and suffered brain damage.

 

NG wrote:

Storch responded:

NG wrote:

And Storch responded:

Perhaps I can answer this again in a way that will clear up what might seem to be a contradiction---why was it needed, why was it a benefit to the people, what was the message, and did it turn the sin counter back to zero? I hope through this answer I won’t shake anyone’s beliefs in a bad way---but it won’t go any further than Indy Hippy went with his post on specific Biblical problems, and I think I will provide a way that still allows for the Christian to continue with their beliefs.

The crucifixion ties back to the Golden Age---a universal concept that we might assume to be nothing more than a nostalgic fantasy of how things might have been. But these myths share so many common motifs from one culture to the next, and tend to hark back so heavily to philosophies, concepts, and cosmologies of a forgotten indigenous past that are clearly both abstract and blatant references to elements still found among indigenous cultures even today, that they are clearly based on memories of a collective unconscious.

There is a lot of deep World Tree symbolism that is buried within the story. Sitting up in a mountain condo---I don’t have access to my library----so I can’t give all the details----but as the story goes, the hill on which the crucifixion takes place is by name the hill where the skull of Adam was buried. This ties directly in to the motif of the World Mountain, the World Tree, The World Grave, and so forth. It is eerily similar to one of the oldest known representations of the axis mundi—an upturned tree, with its roots in the air, and a skull mounted atop it to represent the Sky Father.

The significance of the World Tree, which is also the Tree of Life, sitting atop the hill upon Adam’s skull also ties directly into the psychological significance of the Eden myth. Eden is a story that clearly plays out on three different levels: 1.) the fall from grace which represents a break from the spiritual world of the hunter-gatherer; 2.) the fall from grace as demonization of the goddess belief systems of the earlier planter cultures; And 3.) A fall from grace as transition from the innocence of a hunter-gatherer culture to the sophistication of the planter culture, symbolizing a rise of civilization, and the emergence of the early institutions (which is an early recognition that progress into the more objectivistic realities of a people faced with the group ethic, can only result in decadence).

We’ll come back to the Number 1 level, but the Number 2 and 3 levels represent a tale of the rise of the shadow-ego complex. In this case we could equate Adam with the ego, or conscious mind, and Eve (as the symbol for the Goddess culture) as the subconscious mind, with an intimate connection to the shadow, the Tree of Knowledge. It is probably more exact to look at the Tree of Knowledge as the evil contents of the shadow since, from the standpoint of a dualistic cosmology, Eve, as the subconscious would be wholly equated with the shadow, fitting the emerging gender relations of the dominant masculine and the subservient feminine in early Hebraic culture (and such an emerging relation between genders fits a rising ego-shadow complex, which would have spurred a masculine reaction (representing a rising objectivism) against the previous feminine dominance (representing an older subjectivism) of the Goddess cultures. The Tree of Knowledge itself (again as contents of the shadow) would represent the knowledge that makes us human, separated from God—the perceived knowledge of sin, the reality of human existence.

Adam is the dominant human character in the Eden myth. He of course represents
the rise of the masculine from the perspective of a Post-Goddess culture. This objectivistic shift to the masculine was formulated on rationalism, and represented a change from the intuition and the irrationality of feeling as represented by the subjectivistic feminine zeitgeist.

In the Eden myth it was the rise of the feminine which played the roles of early shadow development through the stories of Lilith (as Adam’s first wife in some Jewish accounts), and Eve’s eating of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge. This fits with the theory that it was actually a rise of the feminine that provided man with the transition from a hunter-gatherer lifestyle where nature and spirit provided all, to the planter culture where survival depended on fertility, and mankind’s ability to appease the Goddess and other powers over fertility and fecundity. In other words, because of the rise of the feminine dynamic, the gods and spirits no longer provided for mankind’s survival, because he had turned, through the knowledge of the Tree of Knowledge, to taking fertility into his own hands, and was now subject to the wrath of the Gods (famine, storms, droughts, and any other crisis that affected the growth and harvesting of crops, and the well-being of livestock). If rains didn’t come, if storms and other acts of god wiped out herds and crops, or if it was simply a bad year, lives were at stake, which meant that clearly the gods were unhappy. This is obvious: Adam and Eve had angered the Hebrew God.

But the rise of the feminine, in turn, gave rise to the masculine. A new group ethic was required to live in early villages. Mankind needed a way to repress his own personal feelings (the subjective) in favor of the group (an objective or outside-the-self reality). The masculine dynamic rose to meet just that need. For one thing, its focus was on the physical world, not the subjective internal world feelings as in the case of the feminine. This allowed the group ethic to evolve more fully into growing institutions in early city-states, enabling a higher level of repression of free will in order to maintain successful and amicable relations within an ever-growing group (i.e. an ever-growing objectivist reality). This repression of free will, or in other words, the repression of the individual in favor of the group, is literally the process of the rise of the ego-shadow complex: The ego acts as the bridge between the subjective and the objective worlds, while the contents of the shadow are made up of the repressed urges and actions of free will. As we grow from small children into a socialized adult, our ego tries to determine what appropriate behavior is, and attempts to deny such actions that deter socialization by repressing them into the shadow.

However, the bigger our shadow becomes, the more the ego denies the existence of shadow content, which is then projected onto the outside world which we perceive to be growing in evil and decadence.

The feminine cultures were good at empathy, feeling, and intuition. But the growing group dynamic, and the dualistic in-group/out-group duality it implied, demanded new levels of objectivism and rationalism. This inevitably led to a suppression of the feminine dynamic in favor of a masculine dynamic that was judgmental, controlling, and God-fearing. Apollo rising up to subdue Dionysus, so to speak (as Nietzsche would later point out).

This is why the Biblical Garden of Eden had a unique twist, the axis mundi as two separate trees, the Tree of Knowledge and the Tree of Life. You must understand that the axis mundi is our mortal connection to the divine. It is through the axis mundi that one travels to the divine or the spirit world, and it is through the axis mundi that the gifts of god, life, spirit, the animating force of the universe, travels to the physical world of our existence.

But this twist, which is uniquely Hebraic, was based on an understanding of a somewhat contentious relationship between man and god. The Hebrews saw life as under a God that would test man. A growing rationalism made them fearful of such a god, just as a growing ego would make one fearful of his own subconscious. In the case of a growing ego, for example, as it gains control over conscious reality, the mind becomes focused on the physical, and now sees the subconscious as the primitive irrational. It becomes less familiar with the subconscious which is our door to the numinous---the spiritual. On the outside, as man grows more rationalist, he becomes more alienated from the ways and knowledge of his ancestors which he now sees as primitive and child-like, (contradicting his own Golden Age myth, which he justifies by considering his most distant ancestors as heroes, connected with the Titans, or simply with God). Trying to follow the demands of a contentious God is just like a growing ego trying to find ways to adapt its behavior to its interpretation of what difficult authority figures want. This results in an ego-ideal founded upon guilt and shame.

In this way, the Hebrews grew ashamed of their newfound fertility powers under the Goddess that had replaced the multiplistic understanding of the universe of their ancestors in the Garden. The earthly knowledge of fertility (the spiritual knowledge of the Goddess) and therefore the sexual mystical knowledge of the axis mundi, became the Tree of Knowledge---knowledge, it could be argued, that man should not have gained. It was the mystical knowledge that in the hands of mankind, became vulgar and evil---shadow content. It especially became shadow content because it angered the ultimate authoritarian figure—their God. Of course, it is a Catch-22, wherein man is trapped in a chain of action and resulting guilt, and life becomes an Old Testament struggle where man simply can no longer go back to what was. But that is also the case of shadow development in the child as it is inevitable that a child must grow up, and his shadow must grow. This is especially true in the case of civilized man, in other words, man needed to move out of the Garden to progress and evolve, even if it meant greater shadow development.

Therefore, Old Testament man was trapped between his humanity created by Adam as a growing ego, the evil nature of the shadow created by Eve, and the struggle to achieve his ideal self---the ego-ideal, represented by the super-ego, in other words, the Tree of Life that was forever taken from man in his fall from grace.

This is all written very clearly in the Old Testament---not in actual words, but in the language of the motif and the symbolism that exists throughout the Old Testament. Especially when applied to the common symbols used through out the Middle East before and during the rise of the masculine.

The Middle East, as one of the global centers of the planter culture, emerged like everywhere else from a Goddess ruled spirituality. Mother Earth was eternal, as Father Sky changed in cycles. The vegetation cycle followed the seasons, and as the crops died and disappeared in the winter, they also returned to be reborn in the spring. Likewise, man provided the seed, women provided the ever-present womb. It made sense to have a cosmology based on an ever-living mother, and a father subject to death-rebirth. Even the sun, dipped more and more Southwards towards the winter, as if to go away, before returning North towards the summer to bring back the crops. The early focus of ritual to reflect this represented the fertility of the Goddess---to be fertilized (as the rains of father sky fertilize the womb of the earth), and then to give birth (the arrival of new crops and the offspring of livestock). But as the psychological and cultural rise of the masculine dynamic began to make its presence known, such factors as the southward movement of the sun, or the withholding of the rains (drought) became seen as an alienating dynamic, and the focus turned to pleasing the gods by seeking forgiveness. The Queen who represented the Goddess and ruled over society with her annual consort (who assured her continuing fertility) was replaced by a King who represented God, the sky father, and thus interceded on mankind’s behalf to die for the sins of his people, to reset the sins back to zero (as you wrote), so that the sun (spring and summer) will return; and that the rains will fall, so that the people will be saved.

As the Hebraic tribes repressed the Goddess into the Shadow, Yahweh was no longer the consort of Astoreth, but was now the soul keeper of the Tree of Life. And this path to the divine—the Tree of Life—was no longer accessible except through achieving the ego-ideal. The Messiah therefore represented the achieving of this ego-ideal---an ideal that would present a return of the Tree of Life---the Messiah as Super-Ego.

Here we can turn to Indy Hippy for his very good post on the Messiah and the Bible to illustrate this:

In Indy’s writing you can see clearly that the Messiah symbolized that which was to achieve the ego-ideal, the Super-ego so to speak, or, someone acting on Earth for the Super-Ego (God). Consider for example that the complete acceptance of the Torah, represents conforming the wayward individual psyche to the ego-ideal. The problem is that the ego-ideal can never be achieved, because repression of perceived sin into the shadow does not resolve nor remove the sin (which in truth is probably not even valid sin), it simply hides the problem to fester and grow into a more subvert and sinister nature. But if the messiah achieved this conformation of the individual to the ego-ideal, then the Tree of Life would be returned.

The cross as axis mundi is, the Tree of Life. The cross is in fact a very old axis mundi symbol. It is related to the swastika, as if one was standing on the axis mundi itself (i.e. within the sacred center itself) watching the universe circle the center (this is an inherent meaning in the yin-yang and medicine wheel symbols too). It is the upturned phallus of the Sky Father inserted into the ground (inseminating the womb of Mother Earth—this is the source of the Celtic Cross). And it is the double headed axe of the Goddess on the sacrificial bulcrania altar (the skull of a bull’s head), symbolizing the same womb of the goddess (the horns as her open legs) and the up-turned phallus. (The double-headed axe signifying the testicles of the Sky Father). Notice the symbolism in the latter case, which was a very common sacrificial altar around the Mediterranean and into the Middle East for the blood sacrifice.

The significance of the skull of Adam buried in a hill (representing the first human), buried in the sacred womb (the grave as it has existed at least back into the Paleolithic and World Cave), in the hill itself (representing the World Mountain), atop which is the World Tree—the Tree of Life (the cross), hails back to the bulcrania sacrificial altar of the Goddess cults (just as much other Christian and Jewish symbolism does). This symbolic and very old motif is demonstrated over and over in the structure of cathedrals, churches (with steeples), pagodas, stupas, temples, minarets, etc.

I will continue that in the next post:

 

To continue:

But why is the blood sacrifice so critical? To examine that we have to examine the first level of the story that is played out in the Garden of Eden: 1.) The fall from grace which represents a break from the spiritual world of the hunter-gatherer. Eden was a place that was so wonderful that everything was provided by God. Life was easy, and what man needed was readily provided. Man in the Garden was not separated from God, he did not have to pray to God to communicate, he simply communicated with a God that was always present—everywhere. He spoke with the animals, and all of creation. The angels were ever-present. (You find the same motifs in older Hebraic versions of the Tower of Babel myth, which is actually more typical of a lot of the common creation myths around the world that refer to a similar fall from grace for mankind—in reaction to man’s growing arrogance (which is also a motif of ego-development similar to that of Adam, but without as much guilt and denial tacked on).

This description of life in the Garden, while somewhat idyllic, is that of the hunter-gatherer. From their perspective, God is everywhere, spirits are everywhere, everything is sacred and as long as one is reverent, respectful, and thankful for all of creation, the universe provides all that is needed. As the Native American’s say, ‘White people go to their church to pray to God, the Indian goes into his teepee to talk with God.’ The life of most hunter-gatherers is in fact one of leisure, family time, and ritual. To think otherwise is a cultural prejudice on the part of civilized man. It is also prejudiced to consider the hunter-gatherer as an unsophisticated primitive. They are extremely intelligent in regards to their environment, and what they lack in science, they already have in spirituality and heightened sensitivity to their environment. We can argue how primitive they are in regards to medicine for example. But we are then forgetting how many of our own people die in hospitals every day, while medicine people themselves heal at a high enough rate that in some cultures, their failure to heal can result in serious consequences, including exile or even death.

Civilized man wants to argue such planter understandings as, ‘what if there is no game, how do they eat?’ For one thing they locate themselves where the game is always present. But in the event catastrophe strikes the region, it has been demonstrated many times to anthropologists and missionaries and others how game can be successfully called through ritual, when game seems scarce. But the hunter-gather also has an understanding of when to eat what, and what the earth provides. Science today, is only now discovering that indigenous people have always had the best techniques of maintaining a healthy environment conducive to plentiful resources. (Today it is now an emerging science, under the scientific name of permaculture, but in reality it is just a rediscovering of indigenous ecology). But this is also based on a deep indigenous understanding that ‘everything has a cost.’ While it is a prejudice to see the indigenous as half-human primitives, it is also a prejudice to go too far the opposite direction and see him as the Noble Savage. Nonetheless, the true Noble Savage is accurate in the context of man before his fall from grace—this is a universal motif of the Golden Age.

This understanding that everything has a cost is part of the respect, and thankfulness that indigenous man has for all of creation. One of the oldest forms of the blood sacrifice is returning blood to Mother Earth upon the killing of game. Not only was this returning the vital life’s essence to the Mother, it was also an act of providing thanks to the animal and the mother, and returning life force back to the mother so that the game can be reborn. Anything that was taken from nature, was replaced with a thankful gift which helped assure that whatever was being taken would always be abundant. This is also the meaning behind the universal motif of symbolic blood in the Paleolithic and Neolithic grave—as the deceased was buried in the fetal position with blood in the grave (World Cave-Earth Womb Axis Mundi). The Axis Mundi as tree, mountain, and cave, represented a circle between the physical and the spirit world, with the tree on one side of the circle and the womb on the other side. Life was therefore eternal, reflecting the fact that indigenous mortality is generally understood as a simple passing from one state of life to another.

His cosmology reflected nature around him—multiplistic. His world was filled with different forces, dynamics, and elements, his gods and goddesses, and spirits, Then there was that all powerful life force that exists through all creation—a force of Great Mystery and life. (And in fact, typically to label the other forces as God or Goddess can lead to a misunderstanding of the pantheon from the point of an Western religion). He was not separated from his world, he did not stand above it, he was simply a part of it—and all was sacred.

As man shifted to a planter culture (helped by a shift into herding) fertility became more significant. The feminine dynamic became more important to man’s survival. This required daily work and effort to assure survival. Time spent with family and tribal relations was now spent working. With the rise of a new group ethic the value of the individual (as family member, and tribal relative) was lost to the value of a group member as worker (planter, herder, etc). With the rise of the group ethic, dualism replaced multiplicity. The change of value from individual to group ethic gave rise to a new zeitgeist of objectivism. The fall from grace was a rise of objectivism, and as the subjective lost significance, man began the process of alienation from his subconscious—his door to the sacred. The rise of the ego-shadow complex only aggravated this, reinforcing the alienation with judgment, guilt, and duality between genders.

In fact the rise of the goddess (with the rising group ethic, duality, and objectivism) presented a stark change in the human psyche with this separation of genders. In the multiplistic view of the universe gender was simply two equal parts of a whole. In my book (with the current working title of ‘The Cave, The Blossom, and The Sacred Hoop), I show how the global etymology of languages demonstrates that early man did not see a significant dominance between genders. We still see this same understanding in the modern indigenous zeitgeist. But the separation of gender in the Goddess cultures, created a split in the human mind—the emergence of the anima and animus as separate structures of the psyche, or at least as alienated between themselves. Man became split between the rational vs. the irrational, reason vs. intuition, and objective vs. the subjective. Eve became a separate individual from Adam, as two broken or split psyches.

As we have seen, the Hebraic understanding of all of these changes, with the Hebraic relation to a contentious God, was particularly conducive to a strong ego-shadow complex.

As NG said,

The fall from grace, as I hope I showed in my previous post, clearly represented an alienating split in the psyche, we were no longer whole as individuals. For Hebraic, and in fact pretty much all of civilized man, this means that we are no longer in the presence of the gods and spirits. This means that the Blood Sacrifice was no longer simply meant to give thanks, respect, and to continue life. Man was separated from the gods, and in his physical-conscious-focused state of being, the only way to reconnect with the gods was through death. The death-rebirth of the Paleolithic reality of life, was now a death-rebirth ritual to connect to spirit. Baptism is a more ritualistic example. The blood sacrifice was more literate.

Symbolically God was now separated from man, as far away, it seemed, as the sky is high. The axis mundi as World Mountain, had to be tall, and dangerous to reach its peak, with steep cliffs, lightning and a death rebirth experience implied in its journey to the top. The World Cave was equally dangerous to get to its depths. The ziggurat at Babel had to be extremely tall. However, the blood sacrifice, because it was connected intricately to death, represented a way to span the distance between God and man without reaching the distant sky.

There is another facet of the Hebraic understanding of this fall from grace. A part of their contentious relationship with God involved the concept of the covenant. Most simply this is an agreement between God as to how he would take care of man, and what man was expected to do in return. In the Garden of Eden, man was treated as an adult. He had his responsibility in the Garden, and as long as he followed what he was to do, he could stay in the Garden and be taken care of throughout eternity. He had full access with God and all his power whenever he needed it. By breaking this covenant God needed to create a new covenant giving man less power over his own life. With each subsequent breaking of covenants, man became treated as more and more of a child—he had to be protected from the full power of God.

Consider this from the indigenous standpoint: Indigenous spirituality is not something one can take lightly. While there is no all-powerful devil waiting in the shadows to pull us into the dark side, there are a multiplicity of forces that represent all the different dynamics at work in the universe, good and bad. You could argue that all of them are inherently good—or more correctly they all have a purpose, but some of these are beneficiary while others are destructive. For example, creation precedes destruction, and destruction precedes creation—it is, for example, the explosive, creative, natural dynamic of Dionysus. But indigenous spirituality requires a level of maturity. Intention has serious consequences, and the power involved is real. When one works with the spirits directly, one does not go into a building, pray for help and promise to be good, and then step outside and do the opposite. Promises made to spirit are the most important of all to keep from the indigenous standpoint.

There is the common joke about Indians saying that White Man speaks with a forked tongue. The truth is, dishonesty and hypocrisy were considered very serious taboos in Native society. Dishonesty was one of the few things in traditional Lakota culture that could result in either death or exile. It wasn’t that tribal mores were strict, it was that people just didn’t do that. This level of respect, maturity, and individuation is grounded on a relationship with spirits that are real and present every where, and will, and do, respond to your intentions. On the other hand, in this way, man does not have the excuse of an all-powerful devil to blame. Likewise, there is no Armageddon that is mankind’s fate whereupon he must either be with God, or against God. On the contrary, Native’s know that man is destroying himself, but that is up to man himself to change, and therefore man can escape this fate. (And spirit is always there to help).

Old Testament man, based on his covenant with God no longer lived in such a powerful state with God. While his access was limited, at least until he achieved his ego-ideal, he was also protected from the wrath, and overpowering forces of God, just as a young child is allowed to get away with ‘the small things.’

In the end, the implication here is that there are cultures that are more physical-focused, and those that are more spiritual-focused. Those that are more dogmatic and judgmental represent those with a stronger shadow-ego complex. In other words, as Hegel tried to say, each culture, and each time, has its own spirit of the times (zeitgeist). (However in my opinion and experience, it is the indigenous that have retained the most of what was lost from man’s fall from grace. They live closest to the garden, and deal with the least developed shadow-ego complex).

This brings us to the last problem: was the crucifixion necessary—meant to be—and was it even an act of God? We could argue in a historicist sense that it was. But if different cultures have different zeitgeists then we must also consider who or what those people are.

In a Historicist sense, the crucifixion was obviously significant to the two major players in the crucifixion story—the Jews and the Romans. In fact, in Hegelian terms (since we are talking Historicism), one could easily see the crucifixion in terms of a Hegelian dialectic: a Roman thesis, a Jewish antithesis, which synthesized into Western culture. In other words it is a story that represented the blending of two cultures that resulted in the rise of Western culture.

Roman culture represented a style of rationalism that was unique to Southern Europe. It emerged in the culture of Ancient Greece, and then heavily influenced Roman Culture. It was the true manifestation of the Apollo dynamic ruling over the erratic natural forces of Dionysus that could easily become uncontrolled if allowed to run unchecked. It too arose from a masculine rebellion against the feminine, though in this case it was Indo-European and bore the influence of environmental factors further North. This was a more pure form of rationalism in contrast to that of the Jewish culture which could be deemed as little more than an objectivism based on a contentious relationship with a God still partially alienated since the Hebraic fall from Grace. Simply put, Greek rationalism developed in an analytical manner that did not occur in Hebraic culture.

Nonetheless, Southern Europe was also influenced by the myths of the Middle East and North Africa, not only because of proximity but also because of the older Paleolithic and early Neolithic cultures that the Indo-Europeans had conquered and taken over in Southern Europe. This older culture shared the older Egyptian and Middle Eastern myths and spirituality. Both the Greeks and the Romans had a fascination with the culture and spirituality of the Middle East, and its influence can certainly be seen as influencing various Greek philosophers.

But how does God interact with humans? When we pray to heal an illness, is it always God that heals us directly? Or is it possible that God may also heal us through helping spirits and even our own spirits, which, if you believe in a soul, you would probably allow for the possibility that spiritually we are something greater than our physical selves appear to be. Then you have the possibility of a spiritual presence as a collective unconscious. There is clearly a connection between Jung’s collective unconscious and Hegel’s zeitgeist. Rupert Sheldrake has demonstrated statistical significance that suggests that different species have their own biomorphic fields that equate to a collective unconscious.

In my own experience of living in different cultures and different countries, experiencing different religious and spiritual practices, and so forth, I have found that the biggest difference between the world’s different religions is cultural, and grounded upon historical precedents. In other words, it is grounded in the cultural and historical memories, perspectives and understandings that are hidden within the collective unconscious—which is most visible at a conscious level through motifs, symbols, and the irrational language of the subconscious (just as the personal subconscious communicates to us through dreams at a conscious level).

In the end, limited by our physical existence, we cannot know how directly or indirectly God works with us. We can only conclude that God works in strange and mysterious ways. It would not be unusual to expect some kind of blending of the collective unconscious of these two separate cultural groups as these relatively alien cultures interacted with each other. The story of Jesus deals with more Greek and Indo-Eurpean motifs than it does Jewish. For example, the Star of David, as a symbol of the axis mundi at the time of his birth, connects to the cross as star (the Greek word for crucifixion and crucifix are based on the etymology of the word for star). The Indo-European and (other Northern culture) axis mundi symbolism was tied directly to the North Star, unlike cultures in more mid-latitudes that typically found more significance with the belt of Orion, and other more terrestrial reference points. There is also no precedent for a god who sacrifices himself to himself to be reborn by himself in the Middle East, though there was through out the Indo-European cultures.

On the other hand, the Jews provided a cultural context built on guilt, duality, and a history of prophecy that provided an ideal setting for the Indo-European motifs to play out. Another very significant contribution of Jewish culture was that its exclusive and very dualistic planter culture left them with a religion based heavily on a dualistic in-group out-group. This was a far more politically powerful force of integration and socialization than the traditions of Southern Europe which were still hanging on to an older multiplistic ethic (even despite the rise of the masculine and a clearly developed planter culture).

In the end, this combination of Roman and Hebraic motifs gave rise to a powerful political and philosophical dynamic that eventually became Modern Global Culture. It allowed Greek Platonic essentialism to meander down a path of rationalism to the Enlightenment, eventually giving rise to Modern Culture. Left and right we left the carcasses of dead cultures, as military conquests and colonialism swept around the world. The objectivistic rationalism that drove Western man down this path of discovery and conquest, founded in dualism, eventually led to a replacement of the church with science as our unifying myth. In the end we are simply left dead inside—though we are oblivious to this fact, and the meaninglessness of our lives, as the powers that be, continuously program us to place the abstract values of consumerism as real.

Alas, I am meandering…

In the end, if you put these things together we could argue several different ways: 1.) You could argue that if God deals with man directly in all cases of intervention in human life, that he had a grand plan for all of mankind and that didn’t necessarily have to answer solely to Jewish prophecy, or cultural motifs. The argument here would be that the crucifixion was true and fundamentally correct. 2.) The same as the first argument except that any discrepancies in the written word were due solely to recording, translation, and other human errors, and therefore the crucifixion is wholly and fundamentally true. 3.) The same as the first argument except that because God works in mysterious ways, there are hidden agendas that we have no way of actually knowing how much prophecy will be fulfilled and what the longer term implications will be. 4.) That God interacts with humans on a subjective basis, based on or even through the localized collective unconscious. God had purpose for bringing the Romans and Jewish cultures together in a way that would culminate in the crucifixion and the birth of Western civilization. 5.) That the story of the crucifixion was fabricated, along with the birth of Jesus in order to solidify political control in Rome, which enabled the growth of the Roman Empire, and the rise of Western civilization, and that God had his hand through all of these changes. 6.) The same as 5 except that God had nothing to do with it, and it was all the doings of mankind that resulted in a dualistic aggressive culture that only strengthened and continued an already ancient predatory legacy of divide and conquer. And so forth…

How you believe is all up to you. But it might be interesting to note that all except the first two arguments suggest that the Jews were not the one single chosen people and that there is certainly reason for all religions and spiritualities to be true and bona fide to the people for which they were directed. That is, except for any of the last scenario which points to an atheist conclusion.

 

Their comes a point when we simply read too much into something. For instance, the story of Adam and Eve coming to see their genital areas as taboo and something that needed to be covered might be a story designed to explain how it is that our second chakra can be the site of an energy blockage. Shame can shut you down. So can anger. So can fear. In olden days, if you wanted to say that a man fucked a woman, you had to say that he "knew" her. Later in time, it was said that he "had relations" with her. Later still, you would say that he "slept" with her. And even today, it is considered obscene to say he "fucked" her.

The God of the Bible had no mate; no sex. His son, jesus had no mate; no sex (allegedly). Paul the apostle said it is better that a man not touch a woman; no sex. The father, son, and the holy ghost, but not the father, son, and the mother. Now it shouldn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that the people responsible for that kind of content had some pretty dysfunctional ideas about women and sex.

 

In the end, you are your own authority. That means that if you do not know, you may borrow someone else's understanding. And that's OK because sooner or later, you come to your own. Will it be based on juggling the events of the past in order that they fit in some cohesive manner? I don't know. Who knows? The shadow doesn't know.

 

That is right----We all have our own path----and in the end---maybe not in this life----I think we all find our own understanding of what God wants of us, after that, who knows----maybe we start over.

 

All is One. One is All. What does the finger want of the knee?

 

It is when the understanding of the universe becomes dualistic that creates this shame. Different cultures reacted against the feminine in different ways. The Hindus for example, retained an understanding of the feminine sacred, but subject to an Indo-European masculinity. The goddess was sacred but the human female was property.

Before the Bible, Yahweh was the consort of Astoreth. This was a far-ranging goddess of many names, Asher, Asherah, Astarte, Astoreth, even Aphrodite.

In my book that I referred to, I spend time looking at the oldest word in the human language---the 'c' word. I say it is the oldest, because it is found in every language family. Where it does not exist within a specific language it still usually appears in archetypically related words and roots.

You mention that at one time to lay with a woman, meant to 'know' her. The word know, or gnoss~ and so forth is deeply tied to the c word (notice the k-n, and the g-n roots). In Germanic and Norse languages you have the kunt root which even applies to knowledge of arts and crafts and abilities. But the two concepts are connected in many other languages too. This is because it is connected to the knowledge of the Goddess, and the old magic.

I certainly have trouble with shame and guilt and all the complexes that we create. But the motifs and symbols of the Bible, and much of world myth, is pretty amazing in how it mirrors the reality of the psyche, and the different ways that our humanness develops psychologically. But with good reason, our ancestors were still more in tune with their subconscious---which communicates through the language of symbol----then we are today. You could almost say that they inherently knew understood our internal selves in ways we find difficult today. I would argue that depression and mental illness is a much bigger problem today than any time in our past.

 

What if Jesus' name was Theodore? And when you heard someone praying, they'd end the prayer with, ". . . We ask it Theodore's holy name, amen."