by
John Kaminski
8-3-5
from
Rense Website
Once you base your whole life
striving on a desperate lie, and try to implement that lie, you
instrument your own undoing.
- Ernest Becker
The Denial of Death
It’s like taking candy away from a baby.
The candy’s no good for the kid, but it will take him many years and
much learning to realize the favor you did for him. In the meantime
he’ll whine about how mean you were and how wrong it was to do that.
But when he’s a healthy adult, because of the very thing you took
away, he may actually develop the judgment and wisdom to thank you
for what you did. In any case, he’ll be much healthier.
So too with beliefs.
If you believe in magic, that some special
phrase will keep you safe from harm in all situations and even
immunize you from death, you can’t help but fail to perceive the
true reality of the world before your eyes - that all things must
pass, even though subtle aspects of us may journey onward through
our offspring.
It’s a beautiful system when you think about it, one that governs
every living thing in the known universe. And every living thing is
more than satisfied with it - in fact, prospers in its vital joy
because of it - except one. Us.
Humans, normally very discerning in every aspect of their infinitely
varied lives, possess absolutely no standards at all when it comes
to one subject - death. It is often said that instinct is stronger
than reason, and in all the realms of human endeavor, nowhere is
this more evident than in the amusingly inventive strategies humans
develop to pretend they don’t really die.
The second most common human trait after survival is the urge to
prosper and be secure, so it should come as no surprise that, very
early on in our history, perceptive and enterprising people, upon
recognizing this universal human need to deny that we die, rushed to
develop and market products that satisfied the public demand to
alleviate this fear. Every culture ever known to man left
significant traces of this spiritual commerce.
You know the argument. Can we live our lives and accept that nothing
follows? Or must we deceive ourselves and invent, with the power of
our infinite imaginations, a way past this daunting wall of
mortality. Well, the answer’s in, and the human species has clearly
opted for the improvable hope.
But exactly what is the price of this
willful self-deception?
This is no attempt to demean many thousands of years of honest
effort by sincere people to distill lessons essential to healthy
living into practical codes of conduct that reinforce the cause of
harmony and provide useful paths to peace of mind. But given the
nature of our affliction, of the terror of death we all have that
needs to be repressed for our own tranquility, it is not difficult
to understand how those who wield these secret formulas for
happiness might just be tempted to exploit them for their own
selfish purposes. It’s called the temptation of power, and I don’t
think I need to explain it to you.
Furthermore, given that this problem has a higher priority than any
other we face in our entire lives, and also that to each of us, the
effectiveness of the cure is far more important than the actual
legitimacy of the method, this leaves us - as we know from history -
with a situation ripe for exploitation.
Lastly, there is the little matter of actually knowing the secrets
of the universe. This we consign to the province of priests, and we
pay them to make us happy, to make up a story that ties up all these
loose, bleak ends which we don’t want to think about. But what if
these beliefs hurt us in ways we don’t realize. Even as they may
make us comfortable with simple tales that magically explain
everything,
-
do we really understand what the concepts of
communion
and resurrection really mean in terms of how we relate to our
neighbors and our world?
-
what is the danger when logic is subsumed
by the magic of religious belief?
First, we must understand the process by which people think.
There is alluring evidence that ancient cultures actually possessed
much more realistic religions than our own contemporary society. And
they were developed by studying the sky. During the day, it was
obvious that all life depended on the beneficent properties of the
Sun. And during the fearful night, humans studied the stars for
their cues to survival, and projected their own thoughts onto these
phenomena. These two things form the basis of all existing
religions, according to
Acharya S.
How do people think?
We anthropomorphize everything. It is how we
learned to understand things. We talk to our plants and our stuffed
animals. We give them names. Thus is it has always been, with all
perceived phenomena. This is how stars became people, or at least
animals. From Amun Ra, piloting his boat of heaven across the sky
all those centuries ago, to the Great Bear, whom we still see every
night.
The Sun became Krishna. The moon Inanna. Their setting and
disappearance created new gods reborn daily, or monthly or yearly.
They all got names, different ones, depending on where you lived. Osiris. Tammuz. Orpheus. Mithra. Millions of names. Millennia
passed. One day, after thousands of years of war and peace, of
fighting and loving, of civilizations rising and falling, suddenly,
after a Roman conclave of regional movers and shakers, the approved
deity’s name became Jesus. And
he was still the Sun, and his
disciples were the stars (the twelve signs of the Zodiac, actually).
Or so Acharya says, and I believe her. Why? Because it’s logical.
It’s actual history. And though still myth, it is empirical rather
than manipulative, a causative explanation rather than the magic
trick of some unfathomable man who showed up one day and claimed he
was God to people who wrote it all down and put it in a book called
the Bible.
That’s the short version. The long version is two thousand years of
suppressed scholarship, kept secret because it simply didn’t gibe
with the propaganda organized religions produce to attract and
addict adherents to their own particular interpretation of cosmic
events and everyday life. But this more scientific explanation has
always been out there, and reasonable, thinking people, who aren’t
blinded by their own fear and cowed by their own self-inflicted
spiritual gurus, have always known about it.
And Acharya S. has gathered it, folded it neatly and logically into
two encyclopedic volumes of scholarly excellence. These are titled
"
The Christ Conspiracy: The Greatest Story Ever Sold" (1999) and
"Suns of God: Krishna, Buddha and Christ Unveiled"
(2004).
Look at the world today. Endless wars, festering hatreds, a
multitude of government lies telling us the world is one way when we
suspect that’s not really the way it is. We should listen to our own
voices and not blindly accept the smug statements of "authority"
figures. How did we learn to do that? Guess. Just take a wild guess.
This story is not about taking your God away. Only an idiot would
insist that men created the sunset, the orbits of the planets, or
baby drool. This story is about analyzing the terminology you use to
explain the way you see your life and the universe. And most of all,
it is about the lies we have been told to keep us in our mental
chains while those who control us - our preachers, priests,
rabbis,
mullahs, lamas and other assorted "holy" men - reinforce
fear, abet
slaughter, and profit mightily from the conspicuous lies that they
promote as sacred gospel.
Sorry to be so blunt. You need to pay attention to this. The future
of human society depends on your understanding what you are reading
at this moment, and even that is kind of an understatement.
To our contemporary Christianized Western minds, the most
astonishing thing Acharya S. proves beyond doubt in her two
scholarly tomes is that the much-revered personality known as Jesus
Christ is a completely contrived fictional character, and that
Christianity has no substance whatsoever that was not stolen -
created whole cloth out of pagan myths and traditions - from many of
the world’s more ancient religions.
How does she prove this?
* By telling you about the many
other "saviors" who existed prior to the creation of
Jesus, many
of whom were born in late December of virgin mothers and were of
divine origin, most of whom performed miracles, held high
morals, healed the sick, were the catalysts for salvation, were
called "Savior" or "Redeemer," and were crucified; whose legends
all contain elements that were later plagiarized by unscrupulous
Roman plutocrats when they got together to construct the Jesus
myth as a method to usurp and unify preexisting creeds to better
control their diverse and obstreperous masses.
* By analyzing all the contributions of known writers of that
ancient time, through decades of study of the works of skeptical
historians who have been researching this hoax for centuries,
and observing that virtually none of these early historians ever
mentions Christ or Christians, except for the works of a special
few, and deeper analysis reveals these works to have been
tinkered with, or outright fabricated, for the benefit of the
manipulative politicians who created the most powerful mind-lock
human society has ever known.
* And by providing a detailed and accurate portrait of the
actual evolution of religious myth, with a clear explanation of
how all messiahs are merely anthropomorphic representations of
the Sun, and how all the other mythological supporting
characters, particularly when they are described in groups of
12, are merely personalities projected onto the stars.
This, not the debunking of the Jesus
myth, is the overarching value of the book, and makes Acharya, in my
sincere estimation, the ranking religious philosopher of our age,
simply because she cuts through the sanctimonious crap and deals
empirically and forthrightly with the facts.
But more than that, in this age of deliberate disinformation and
mass mind control, the works of Acharya provide those who wish to
think deeply about the nature of the human condition with a
startling survey of priestly misbehavior and deliberate deception,
which is what religion really is - a magic show that exploits
people’s need for answers to unanswerable questions.
As such, her works furnish us with an essential tool to help us
understand why we are powerless against an onslaught of facile mass
media that keep telling us things we know are not true. What the
state does the church first perfected with threats, violence, and
forcing us to believe in our inmost hearts things that were never
true.
But it’s the Jesus argument that gets everybody’s attention.
Or, as Acharya puts it,
" ... there is no evidence for the
historicity of the Christian founder, that the earliest
Christian proponents were as a whole either utterly credulous or
astoundingly deceitful, and that said ’defenders of the faith’
were compelled under incessant charges of fraud to admit that
Christianity was a rehash of older religions."
Let’s start with legendary figures of
far greater antiquity whose attributes appear to uncannily resemble
the much later legend known as Jesus Christ.
"The Jesus story incorporated
elements from the tales of other deities recorded in this
widespread area of the ancient world, including several of the
following world saviors, most or all of whom predate the
Christian myth," Acharya writes.
These include (and I’ll edit this list,
because it’s very long)
-
Adad and Marduk of Assyria
-
Adonis, Aesclepius, Apollo,
Dionysus, Heracles, and Zeus of Greece
-
Alcides of Thebes, divine
redeemer born of a virgin around 1200 BCE
-
Attis of Phyrgia
-
Bal or Bel of
Babylon/Phoenicia
-
Buddha and Krishna of India
-
Hermes of Egypt/Greece
-
Hesus of the Druids
-
Horus, Osiris, and Serapis
of Egypt
-
Indra of Tibet/India
-
Ieo of China
-
Issa of Arabia, born of the
Virgin Mary in 400 BCE
-
Jupiter/Jove of Rome
-
Mithra of Persia/India
-
Odin/Wodin/Woden/Wotan of
Scandinavia
-
Prometheus of
Caucasus/Greece
-
Quetzalcoatl of Mexico
-
Salivahana of southern
India, "who was a divine child, born of a virgin, and
son of a carpenter"
-
Tammuz of Syria, the savior
god worshipped in Jerusalem
-
Thor of the Gauls
-
Zoroaster of Persia
Attis of Phrygia was born on December 25
of the Virgin Nana, and considered the savior who was slain for the
salvation of mankind. His body as bread was eaten by his
worshippers. He was crucified on a tree, descended into the
underworld and was resurrected annually on March 25 as the "most
high god," many centuries before Christianity was invented.
Buddha was born on December 25 of the virgin Maya, and his birth was
accompanied by a special star, wise men and angels. He was baptized
in water with the holy ghost present. He was resurrected and will
return in the "latter days" to judge all men. His legends extend
back more than a thousand years before Christ.
The Greek god of wine was actually a savior (as any drinker will
tell you). Dionysus, born of a virgin, who rode in a triumphal
procession on an ass, is considered by some scholars as the
prototype of Christ.
The real model for all saviors, according to Acharya, was the
Egyptian god Osiris. Quoting Barbara Walker, from "The Women’s
Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets":
Of all the savior gods worshipped at the beginning of the Christian
era, Osiris may have contributed more details to the evolving
Christ
figure than any other. Already very old in Egypt, Osiris was
identified with nearly every other Egyptian god and was on the way
to absorbing them all. He had well over 200 divine names.
He was called the Lord of Lords,
King of
Kings, God of Gods. He was the Resurrection and the Life, the Good
Shepherd, Eternity and Everlastingness, "the god who made men and
women to be born again." (Sir Wallis) Budge (once the preeminent
Egyptologist) says,
"From first to last, Osiris was to the Egyptians
the god-man who suffered, and died, and rose again, and reigned
eternally in heaven. They believed that they would inherit eternal
life, just as he had done ...
Some claim Osiris lived up to 22,000 years ago.
Acharya writes:
As Col. James Churchward naively
exclaims, "The teachings of Osiris and Jesus are wonderfully
alike. Many passages are identically the same, word for word."
Acharya also exhaustively compares the
details of Krishna and Mithra, as well as Prometheus,
Quetzalcoatl,
and Serapis. The reader soon begins to realize that all these
stories the same.
Conclusion?
It is evident that
Jesus Christ is a mythical character based on
these various ubiquitous godmen and universal saviors who were part
of the ancient world for thousands of years prior to the Christian
era.
Now, once you realize that, you know you have to prepare for the
onslaught of true believers, who, when you mention that Jesus
was a
fictional character, are going to come at you with every verbal
weapon they have retained during their misguided and propagandized
lives.
The Bible is not a valid historical document. It is work of
political and philosophical propaganda, designed to deceive and
control, and take advantage of people’s need to have answers to
questions that really have no answers, as far as human perception is
concerned.
Often, fundamentalist Christians try to cite classical historical
sources to buttress their unshakable belief that Jesus resurrected
and (according to
George Bush
and the neocons) will return one day
to blow up Jerusalem and lead his followers to a pleasant
destination in the sky.
This may be the most valuable aspect of Acharya’s work. She
considers the name of every known historian of the period and
explains why what Christian fanatics insist they said can’t possibly
be accurate.
Using thousands of footnotes from serious scholars over the many
centuries, Acharya deftly explains all the revisions, interpolations
and forgeries that allow some of the diehard faithful to argue that
there actually is historical evidence of the existence of Jesus -
when in fact there is not.
All the great first century historians - Pliny the Elder and
Younger, Suetonius, Dio Chrysostom, Livy,
Petronius, Plutarch,
Seneca and many others whose works are still extant - never make any
mention of the founder of Christianity.
Even though he lived in Jerusalem during the time Jesus was supposed
to have existed, the well-known Jewish philosopher Philo Judaeus of
Alexandria never mentions Christ or Christianity
even once.
Acharya
quotes religious scholar John Remsburg about Philo:
He was there when the crucifixion
with its attendant earthquake, supernatural darkness, and
resurrection of the dead took place, and in the presence of many
witnesses ascended into heaven. These marvelous events which
must have filled the world with amazement, had they really
occurred, were unknown to him.
The well-traveled Philo had pleaded
the Jewish cause in Rome, knew of Pilate, the Essenes and the
Therapeuts, yet never once mentioned Jesus or Christians.
As Acharya surmised:
"One would think that if ... Jesus
had suddenly appeared in Philo’s homeland, during his life, when
he was a sentient adult, Philo would not only have noticed but
would have jumped for joy, and written reams about the glorious
event, seeing the promises and prophecies of Israel fulfilled.
It could not be more obvious that nothing of the sort happened
during Philo’s lifetime."
But most Christian apologists don’t even
know about Philo. The one historian they most often use to
legitimize their claims that Jesus Christ was an actual historical
personage is
Flavius Josephus. And Acharya devotes a considerable
amount of space demolishing those claims.
Josephus (37-95 CE) is the most famous Jewish historian of the time.
Acharya writes:
... in the entire work of Josephus,
which constitute many volumes of great detail encompassing
centuries of history, there is no mention of Paul or the
Christians, and there are only two brief paragraphs that purport
to relate to Jesus. Although much has been made of these
"references," they have been dismissed by scholars and Christian
apologists alike as forgeries ...
Many scholars investigating the matter
believe that single mention of Jesus in all of the works Josephus
was forged - interpolated - centuries later by an unscrupulous
Christian named Bishop Eusebius.
In her second book, Acharya recounts the analysis of Bible expert
Dr. Nathaniel Lardner (1684-1768):
Mattathias, the father of Josephus,
must have been a witness to the miracles which are said to have
been performed by Jesus, and Josephus was born within two years
after the crucifixion, yet in all the works he says nothing
whatever about the life or death of Jesus Christ; as for the
interpolated passage it is now universally acknowledged to be a
forgery.
But perhaps the most curious episode
Acharya covers involves the Roman historian Tacitus, whose oft-cited
passage about Nero persecuting the Christians is revealed as a
fraud. And that leads to an interesting story so typical of the
questionable construction of the Christian myth.
It seems that this particular mention by Tacitus, who lived in the
first century CE, does not appear in literature until the 15th
century, because numerous scholars have noted that not even the most
ardent Christian apologists ever mentioned it until then. But that’s
not the worst part.
Perhaps the quintessential bogus reproduction of a classical source
for devious Christian purposes resides the famous passage in "The
Annals" by Tacitus that describes Nero blaming Christians for the
burning of Rome. Unfortunately for the Roman church’s propaganda
machine, numerous experts have deduced that since neither Eusebius
nor Tertullian nor any of the other devoted church fathers knew of
the existence of this passage - because they surely would have
mentioned it because it was so vividly sympathetic to their cause -
it is likely that this entire book - The Annals of Tacitus, which is
a staple of some classical libraries - is a 15th century
forgery
about a 1st century event meant to improve the nonexistent
historical veracity of the Christian church.
But the history of real religion, ah, that’s a different and happier
story. Acharya quotes Indian scholar S. B. Roy from his "Prehistoric
Lunar Astronomy":
To the ancients ... heaven was the
land of gods and mystery. The sky - the Dyaus of the Rig Veda -
was itself living. The stars were the abodes of the gods. The
shining stars were indeed themselves luminous gods. Astronomy
was the knowledge of not of heavenly bodies, but of heavenly
beings.
"Astronomical or astrotheological knowledge reaches back to the
dawn of humanity, appearing widespread and becoming highly
developed over a period of millennia,"
...Acharya writes, and after
a thorough examination of the subject, concludes:
The church fathers and other
Christian writers also acknowledged this astrotheology and
its antiquity, but denigrated it as much as possible. Why?
... the knowledge about astrotheology would reveal the
Christians’ own religion to be Pagan in virtually every
significant aspect .... the restoration of this knowledge is
not to be despaired but rejoiced.
Summation
The Christian religion - as well as its monotheistic cousins,
Judaism and Islam - are all based on primitive vestiges from a dim
past that certainly most of their adherents do not adequately
understand and doubtless many of its top officials do not
comprehend, either. These are cannibalism and child sacrifice.
The tangent to cannibalism can be clearly seen in the act of Holy
Communion, in which the faithful are urged to swallow "the body of
Christ." The example of child sacrifice occurs in the myth of "God"
supposed sending his only son into the corporeal realm only to be
tortured and murdered. This has always sounded to me like deep cover
conditioning to indoctrinate believing dupes into being willing to
die, or sending their children off to die, for their blessed
country.
I don’t know of any literature that adequately analyzes the
psychological ramifications of these two symbolically barbaric acts.
But I do know that billions of people have participated in these
crazed rituals and based their lives on the veneration of them. And
we see too clearly the results of the belief paradigm in the
senseless murder of billions over the century generated by the blind
and savage faith in this supposedly holy cause.
Though there are infinite examples, the two that initially come to
mind are the centuries of slaughter in the Western hemisphere by
Spanish conquistadores and British pioneers who regarded
different-looking fellow humans as mere animals eligible for
thoughtless extermination. And now, there are the perverse rape-murders of innocent
Iraqis by drug-addled and
uranium-poisoned
American, British and Israeli heroes. Same ballgame, different day -
every single bit of it directly attributable to this bloodthirsty
Judeo-Christian legacy.
And I also know one other important thing in these matters. When you
live your life convinced that reality is a certain way and base your
life on it, your life will turn out to be exactly what you believe.
I believe there is a direct connection between the great Christian
lie that you will survive death if you do what the priest says, and
the everpresent reality of violence in the world.
The church teaches you to believe in the infallibility of what its
leaders say, and to follow their orders no matter what, or you will
roast in the fires of hell. History shows us, clearly, that no
matter what denomination, the church fathers have lied terribly and
caused billions of needless deaths. This lying, sanctimoniously
emulated by government leaders - be they kings or presidents - has
transferred this supernatural authority to the secular realm, and
allowed our leaders to dupe their populations into endless killing
for what our leaders said was right, but for what were ultimately
deceitful reasons because they were based on deliberate lies. Just
like the Christian religion, and its monotheistic cousins.
The population’s willingness to believe these lies relates directly
to what their holy men told them - believe this, or you will suffer
in hell for eternity.
What you believe is what you become, and this attitude engendered by
the Christian church and its maniacal monotheistic counterparts
have, with their transparent lies that have been swallowed by
millions of gullible people, lived up to the impotent threats of
their insincere promises by creating hell on earth to convince you
that they are right.
This holy mindlock has never been more obvious - nor more lethal -
than it is today, in the year 2005, in which
a despotic U.S.
president who insists he talks to God has killed and is killing
hundreds of thousands people all over the world, for reasons that
anyone with a whit of sense knows are lies.
The two voluminous, solidly referenced works of the woman known only
as Acharya S - "The Christ Conspiracy" and "Suns of God" - provide a
valuable first step for many bewildered believers who have come to
disbelieve the doubletalk of their religious leaders in detoxifying
the self-deceptive misinformation that most of us have been
bombarded with throughout our lives.
This knowledge has always been known, but it has been suppressed by
the spin machine that organized religion, conferring its corrupt
grace on tyrants for centuries, has always censored. The real
picture of our misguided Christian believer was probably best
expressed by St. Augustine himself all those long and agonizing
years ago, in this passage recounted by Acharya S:
... one of the most famed and
respected Christian doctors was St. Augustine, who "stakes his
eternal salvation" on his assertion that he preached the gospel
to "a whole nation of men and women, who had no heads, but had
their eyes in their bosoms."
Footnote
Just who exactly is
Acharya S
and
why is she so hard to find?
Really, it’s because of the persecution
she has been forced to endure because of her work. Right now, not
even her publisher knows where she is. She has gone underground
after several unpleasant incidents during the past few years, one of
which was the kidnapping of her son, a crime that was happily
resolved after some period of intense stress that may have involved
a well-known New Age guru.
A study in contradictions, Acharya S is obviously a nom de
plume for an archeologist, historian, mythologist and linguist who
has the qualifications, courage, and integrity to so professionally
and thoroughly debunk the collective religious spin machine. But to
talk to Acharya S is markedly different than reading her
work, about the like the difference between a biker chick and a
college professor, leading some to speculate if the rough-edged
radical and the creator of the meticulously argued and scholarly
tomes which bear her name are actually the same person.
Nevertheless, her two meticulously footnoted books present the lay
reader and professional historian alike with a stark assessment of
the outright lies
the Christian church has told about its namesake.
You can order the books from
http://www.adventuresunlimitedpress.com/
or find out more about Acharya at
http://truthbeknown.com/
If you read these books, it’s extremely doubtful you’ll ever go to
church again. And if you do, you must carry with you the
reverberating question:
What happens to you when you know that what
you have believed in the deepest recesses of your own heart is
false?
All this time, in the name of a bogus magic formula stolen from
others and renamed with lie upon lie, billions have been
slaughtered, and billions more about to be.
Open your eyes, for the
real God’s sake, for the beauty of this universe that gives us life,
that does not distinguish between man or beast, but gives everything
that breathes this exquisite gift, with only one, single string
attached - a string attached to everything that lives.
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