Contempt

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

Page 132 of 253 · 20 per page

• From Another Country (1962)

  “What’s it about?” “My novel’s about Brooklyn.” “The tree? Or the kids or the murderers or the junkies?” Vivaldo swallowed. “All of them.” “That’s quite an assignment. And if you don’t mind my saying so, it sounds just a little bit old-fashioned.” He put his hand before his mouth and burped. “Brooklyn’s been done. And done.” No it hasn’t, Vivaldo thought. “You mean,” he said, with a smile, “that it doesn’t have any TV possibilities?” “It might have, who knows?” He looked at Vivaldo with friendly interest. “You really have a sneer in your voice when you say TV, you know that? What are you so afraid of?” He tapped Vivaldo on the chest. “Art doesn’t exist in a vacuum; it isn’t just for you and your handful of friends. Christ, if you knew how sick I am of this sensitive-young-man horseshit!” “I’m sick of it, too,” said Vivaldo. “I don’t think of myself as a sensitive young man.” “No? You sound like one and you act like one. You look down your nose at everybody. Yes,” he insisted, for Vivaldo looked at him in some surprise, “you think that most people are shit and you’d rather die than get yourself dirtied up in any of the popular arts.” Then he gave Vivaldo a deliberate, insolent once-over. “And here you are, in your best suit, and I bet you live in some dingy, ice-water apartment and you can’t even take your girl out to a night club.” His voice dropped. “The colored girl, Miss Scott, you see I do remember names, she’s your girl, isn’t she? That’s why you got pissed off at me. Man, you’re too touchy.” “I thought you were too free.” “I bet you wouldn’t have felt that if she were a white girl.” “I’d have felt that about any girl who happened to be with me.” But he wondered if Ellis were right. And he realized that he would never know, there would never be any way for him to know. He felt that Ellis had treated Ida with a subtle lack of respect. But he had spoken to her in the only way he could, and it was the way he spoke to everyone. All of the people in Ellis’ world approached each other under cover of a manner designed to hide whatever they might really be feeling, about each other or about themselves. When confronted with Ida, who was so visibly rejected from the only world they knew, this manner was forced to become relatively personal, self-conscious, and tense. It became entangled with an effort to avoid being called into judgment; with a fear that their spiritual and social promissory notes might suddenly be called up. By being pressed into the service of an impulse that was real, the manner revealed itself as totally false and because it was false, it was sinister.

• From Deceptions and Myths of the Bible (1975)

  “The Church of Rome defended by violence the empire which she had acquired by fraud.”2 The Dark and Middle AgesAnd now that Christianity is firmly established, what do we find? “The kingdom of heaven upon earth”? On the contrary, a moral and intellectual degradation unparalleled in human history. According to Lecky, “The two centuries after Constantine are uniformly represented by the Fathers as periods of general and scandalous vice.” And the following two were no better. Bishop Gregory of Tours wrote an account of them and it is one of the darkest pictures in all history. On reading it, Gibbon remarked: “It would be difficult to find anywhere more vice or less virtue.” As for the fifth century, Salvianus, a priestly historian, had this to say: “Besides a very few who avoid evil, what is almost the whole body of Christians but a sink of iniquity? How many in the church will you find that are not drunkards, or adulterers, or fornicators, or gamblers, or robbers, or murderers—or all together?” And we are told Christianity uplifted the race, rid the world of pagan sin and paved the way for true civilization. This too is Catholic scholarship. According to this, the saved and sanctified Christians were not responsible for these wretched conditions; they were the result of the invasion of the barbarians and their destruction of the Roman Empire. Only after this, they say, did morality and learning sink to abysmal depths. They do not tell us these “awful barbarians” were also Christians. A hundred years before the invasion Bishop Ulfilas had given them a Gothic Bible, and they had embraced the faith.3 It was not then a case of barbarous pagans against civilized Christians, but barbarous Christians against semicivilized Christians. And of the two, the former were the more morally decent. Immorality is a civilized vice, and the higher the civilization, the more depraved its vicious-ness. Tacitus, in his book The Morals of the Germans , shamed the Romans by holding up to them the superior morals of their invaders. Hodglein, in his history, Italy and Her Invaders , called these Vandals “an army of Puritans”; and so did Salvianus. The latter also said that the invaders were scandalized by the moral indecencies of Christian Carthage. And here for once Catholic scholarship concurs, “Crimes of all kinds made Africa one of the most wretched provinces in the world.” Catholic Encyclopedia . Dean Milman, a Protestant historian, admits that “Christianity has given to barbarism hardly more than its superstition, and its hatred of heretics and unbelievers. Throughout assassinations, parricides and fratricides intermingle with adultery and rape.” After examining the morals of Italy under the Ostrogoths, he implies that those of pagan Rome were better than those of Christian Rome.

• From Deceptions and Myths of the Bible (1975)

  And the angel said unto her, Fear not Mary: for thou hast found favor with God. 31. And behold, thou shalt conceive in the womb, and bring forth a son, and shall call his name Jesus. (The Greek equivalent of Joshua— savior.) 32. He shall be great, and shall be called the Son of the Highest; and the Lord God shall give unto him the throne of his father David; 33. And he shall reign over the house of Jacob for ever; and of his kingdom there shall be no end. The same Old Testament promises. Were they intended literally, they would be as false as those given to Jacob and David, for Jesus never reigned over the house of Jacob or sat on David’s throne. Is it possible Gabriel was so mistaken? Not when you understand it: the house of Jacob is the world, and over it reigns the planetary Logos, and of its kingdom “there shall be no end,” at least for us. You see such statements make no sense when applied to man, the epigenetic; they are, as stated, applicable only to the planet, that is, the genetic. It is this the Creator is interested in, not a peasant girl in Galilee. To see it otherwise is to be guilty of the most benighted anthropomorphism. The Old Testament’s “angel of the Lord” now has a name, Gabriel, and the planetary genetic is now “the Holy Ghost,” verse 35. And how did he get into the New Testament? We did not find him in the Old. He got in by way of Persia and for a time contested Christianity, see page 452. As for Gabriel, he is the Hebrew Hermes, the messenger of the gods, and so he announced to the female aspect, which is matter, that from its virgin womb a physical sun should be born, here the planetary embryo on the sixth plane, as yet invisible. 34. Then said Mary unto the angel, How shall this be, seeing I know not a man? The problem should not be difficult by this time; it is but the mother of Isaac, Samson and Samuel, all skeptical of barren, or virgin, space producing a sun. How shocking to say that this “virgin Mary” and Jonah’s whale are one and the same. 35. And the angel answered and said unto her, The Holy Ghost shall come upon thee, and the power of the Highest shall overshadow thee: therefore also that holy thing which shall be born of thee shall be called the Son of God (“Dr.” Luke, Chap. 1). If today a doctor reported a pregnancy in this manner, what would we think of him? The “good doctor” seems a bit confused and also contradictory. According to him Joseph had no part in this supernatural affair; it was the Holy Ghost. Yet later we learn that Jesus was of David’s line because Joseph was David’s descendant. How can this be when Joseph had no part in it?

• From Deceptions and Myths of the Bible (1975)

  That we may see this let us consider the Hindu Trinity: Brahma, Vishnu, and Siva—Creator, Preserver and Destroyer. But of what? Why, of the world, of course, hence cosmology, not religion. Brahma creates the substance of the world, Vishnu preserves it for billions of years, but finally Siva destroys it through radiation. If you would see all three at once you have only to look at the sun, the earth and the moon, the three stages in the cosmic process. Now compare this with the Christian Trinity. In his metaphysical incompetency Western man turns to his semi-Oriental Bible for his spiritual knowledge, but if this be the source of it, there should be no doctrine of the Trinity or belief in it, for this does not come from the Bible; indeed the word Trinity does not appear in the Bible, at least in the original. The nearest approach to it is the reference in John’s gospel to “three witnesses in heaven,” and all authorities today pronounce this an interpolation as late as the ninth century. How then did it get into the creeds? The doctrine of the Trinity is a wholly pagan concept, taken over by triumphant Christianity without its authors’ understanding of it. One of the chief contenders with early Christianity was Mithraism, the religion of the Persians. This had a Trinity, and in their efforts to win the Mithraists over to Christianity the Founding Fathers incorporated this pagan Trinity in their faith. Thus the Athanasian Creed is but an ecclesiastical attempt to harmonize Jewish monotheism with pagan polytheism. Originally the Trinity was part of ancient cosmology; it was only in the Zodiacal Night that it became religionized. The Christian Fathers took the pagans’ concept literally and on it founded the most spiritually illiterate Faith in all the annals of religious fanaticism. All others have some relic of the wisdom-knowledge in them; Christianity not only lacks it, it destroyed it. By the time this creed was written, all knowledge of Causation and Creation was lost, and so these creed makers knew no more about cosmogenesis than little children know about biogenesis. Over the one little word filioque , son, the Pope of Rome, Leo IX, and the patriarch of Constantinople, Michael Ceru-larius, excommunicated each other. And neither knew what he was talking about. This mutual excommunication occurred in 1054 and it took the Church 911 years to revoke it, in 1965. That is its pace and tardy reform. Only when the more enlightened laity makes of it an anachronism does it hasten to reform, hence the recent Ecumenical Council. Another “gathering” of the “ecclesia,” but how different from the first—some twenty-five hundred lords and princes of the Church in which “Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these.” And what was the purpose thereof? To discuss the great fundamentals, Causation, Creation, Truth, Reality? No, for of these they know nothing. And in what were “the sweeping changes” wrought? Poverty, ignorance, commercialism, communism, birth control?

• From Cult: A Love Story: Ten Years Inside a Canadian Cult and the Subsequent Long Road of Recovery (2013)

  In order to appear extraordinary and deeply in God’s favour, Limori cultivated an image of wealth and status. Her clothes have long been custom made by Susan. She wears jewelry that may not be the most expensive around, but is dramatic and eye catching, especially when paired with her wardrobe and charisma. The suite she had added for herself at Wolf’s Den was eye-poppingly lavish the one time I saw it: elegant, dark wood furniture upholstered in white, white area rugs, porcelain vases decorating the mantels, floor-to-ceiling picture windows that looked out on the lake, Gayle’s beautiful and arresting art hanging on the walls. When I walked through the door into the suite for the first and last time, it was as though I had been transported in a time machine to how I imagine an elegant hotel in 1920s Paris would look and feel. All this, in the middle of the Canadian wilderness. And, as I’ve previously mentioned, Wolf’s Den was not Limori’s home year-round. She took to travelling extensively in the mid-1990s and then to staying for months at a time in Hawaii and Arizona. Each home she rented and occupied would be furnished and outfitted to the standard she was used to, i.e., to that befitting a queen. She travelled first class when she flew, partly because of her self-appointed status and partly because of her girth; she would be hard pressed to fit into a coach seat on an airplane. So where did the money for all this lavish and expensive fluffery come from? Well, for starters she often used her charm to finagle fantastic deals on what she purchased from a storeowner or, even better, to get the storeowner to gift her the purchase outright. Limori always attributed these types of gifts to the fact that people recognized her as the right hand of God. Second, she always carried quite a bit of debt in order to live her lifestyle. She complained frequently about the debt but always followed up with, “God will make sure that the bills get paid. I’m just doing what he tells me to do. I don’t want to do all this travelling to Monte Carlo and Hawaii, but He insists, so I go.” And, as with most gurus, Limori’s disciples played a large part in keeping her in the style to which she wanted to become accustomed. I was never flush with money during the time I knew Limori, so I was never subjected to much mandatory donating to her cause, except for chipping in for things like the Wolf’s Den mortgage and the fees for workshops. But I have heard stories from others. For example, Gayle was coerced into giving Limori fifty thousand dollars, some of which was the widow’s benefits she received when her husband died. It is important to note that Limori always kept these types of financial transactions and gifts secret from those not directly involved.

• From Deceptions and Myths of the Bible (1975)

  The former idea came from the Latin Vulgate and reads as follows: “Cumque descenderet Moyses de monte Sinai, tenebat duas tabulas testimonii, et ignorabat quod cornuta esset facies sua ex consortio sermonis Domini “Translated this means: “And when Moses came down from Mount Sinai, he held two tables of the testimony, and he did not know that his face was horned from conversation with the Lord.” Modern scholars believe it should read rays rather than horns , but that is because they don’t know Moses. It is also why they can’t translate properly. Every attempt they make but robs the Bible of its true meaning. Horns are mythological accessories, and in no sense peculiar to the Hebrew Moses. Many mythical beings had them, among which was Bacchus, called by some “the horned child,” and by others, “Zagreus son of Zeus,” and Koré, or Persephone. Thus in the Dionysiacs we read: A Dragon-Bridegroom coiled in love-inspiring fold . . . Glided to dark Kore’s maiden couch . . . Thus by the alliance with the Dragon of Aether, The womb of Persephone became alive with fruit, Bearing Zagreus, the Horned Child. Moses is the earth, the horned beast of Revelation; he is Aries, the genetic Ram; he is Pan, the goatlike Aries on earth; he is Phallus Erectus, or the serpentine force thereof in Evolution. Thus the Vulgate is right and the rest are wrong. As one saved from water, Moses is what was saved after the Deluge. As such he is identical with the slimy dragon that Apollo discovered after the flood dried up. And this dragon is the devil of scripture, and its devil and its Moses are one. Both have horns and this is what the key word horns is trying to tell us. Like all the other Bible heroes, Moses is but a personification of the creative power, particularly its violent aspect. His milder brother, Aaron, like Abel, is the genetic consciousness; the word Aaron itself means “to conceive,” and it is he who does the prolific conceiving later on. It is this that eventually reveals the meaning and purpose of the earth, and so Aaron becomes a mouthpiece for its mindless partner, as did Joseph for Pharaoh, the one involutionary, the other evolutionary. Miriam, their sister, stricken with leprosy represents matter afflicted with disintegration. Were it otherwise, why did not these two miracle-workers cure her? The answer is, their miracles were the miracles of Creation, not man. Just here we wonder if the name Miriam derives from Meriram, chief of the Turbulents, see page 108. Moses’ serpentlike rod is the Hebrew Caduceus, symbol of the creative power, and wherever it strikes the earth a miracle is wrought. But so was it with Mises, and also Abaris, a high priest of Apollo. According to Pindar, Apollo gave this great one an arrow with which to work miracles. Why do we not believe these stories also?

• From Deceptions and Myths of the Bible (1975)

  As long as the Israelites remained in the flesh and followed the law of the body and the jungle, they pleased God immensely; as soon as they turned to pacific ways his wrath was kindled against them. Attributing punishment for their acts to God, however, is but more ignorance of Evolution and its constructs. It is only man’s own moral sense that condemns the evil doers, and only when this legally or psychologically catches up with them are they punished. This it is that sees in secret and rewards openly, but Paul, like his forebears, attributed it to God. 19. For the wisdom of this world is foolishness with God: For it is written, He taketh the wise in their own craftiness (1 Cor. 3). The wise here are not wise or they would not set in motion the punitive laws in nature. Its subtle law (cause and effect), operating on the psychic and mental planes, was just too deep for Paul. As the ignorant saints have always done, he interpreted it as detection and punishment by divine Omniscience. Paul understood Hebrew and Greek but apparently he did not understand Latin—Demon est deus inversus . If he had he would have known that a fallen God becomes a devil, and that it was this that was bedeviling him. 18. For I know that in me (that is, in my flesh), dwelleth no good thing: for to will is present in me; but how to perform that which is good I find not. 19. For the good that I would I do not: but the evil which I would not, that I do (Rom. 7). And so said Ovid before him: “I see and approve the better things of life, the worse things I follow.” 23. But I see another law in my members, warring against the law of my mind, and bringing me into captivity to the law of sin which is in my members. The perplexed saint did not realize that this law in his members was the very God that he thought so good—the Creative Principle with its constructs—desire, lust, passion, greed—at war with his own human morality, the genetic versus the epigenetic. The trouble with Paul was that he had too much of the genetic in him and not enough of the epigenetic. He was not one of those “lukewarm” fellows of Laodicea; he belonged to Pergamos —or is it Pergonos?—the per standing for perversion, the “thorn” in his flesh. 20. Now if I do that I would not, it is no more I that do it, but sin that dwelleth in me (Rom. 7). Very well, if it was not he, why not learn who it really was and stop agonizing about it? Since it was not the epigenetic Paul, it was the genetic God. As Whitman said: It was not I that sinned the sin; The wretched body dragged me in. And so said the Hindu seers: “Desire does it. I do not do it.

• From Deceptions and Myths of the Bible (1975)

  And I will give unto thee the keys of the kingdom of heaven: and whatsoever thou shalt bind on earth shall be bound in heaven: and whatsoever thou shalt loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven (Matt. 16). Thus the Catholic Church is founded on Peter whom, four verses later, Jesus openly calls Satan. 23. But he turned, and said unto Peter, Get thee behind me, Satan: thou art an offence unto me . . . Thus if the Catholic Church is founded on Peter, it is founded on Satan—a fact we have long suspected. Satan means matter, and so does Peter the rock; therefore the two are one. Peter is but the New Testament Esau who founded, or rather was, the city called Petra, rock, and also édom, atom, earth. This it is that binds and looses according to its laws—St. Peter’s keys— and what it binds and looses is the Life Principle. The seven churches of Revelation are an outline of this. This binding and loosing Peter is also the New Testament Pharaoh; he too bound and loosed the life force. Moses’ warfare with him represents this, and Paul’s quarrel with Peter has the same meaning, cosmologically. As this binding and loosing is of nature, that of the Church is utterly false and pretentious. And this includes its blessings and its cursings; its excommunication, so dreaded by its people, has no moral or spiritual effect whatever; its results are political and social only and so but another means to power. And such also is Peter. Aside from its cosmological meaning, Peter’s story is the veriest nonsense—one mortal man endowed with the power over all humanity for all eternity; we thought that only God had this authority. In things religious, Catholics are indeed credulous but can they be so credulous as to believe that pre-Christian sages like Pythagoras, Plato, Socrates, and even Buddha require this ignorant Jewish fisherman to bind and loose their souls? And what of those pre-Christian Initiates from whom these ignorant religionists got their knowledge? Are they too bound and loosed by Peter? No, and neither are we. Such a man as Peter never existed; what then of the Catholic claim that he founded the Papacy of Rome? It is one with Romulus founding Rome itself; thus Peter is but an eponym. Yet the Catholic Encyclopedia says his founding of the Roman bishopric is “among the best ascertained facts of history,” and “no scholar now dares contradict it.” This is just a sample of Catholic scholarship. With its capacity for intellectual dishonesty, anything can be proved. And if no scholar dares contradict it, it is only because no scholar has sufficient knowledge to do so, thanks to two thousand years of Catholic scholarship.

• From Deceptions and Myths of the Bible (1975)

  And Pharaoh rose up in the night, he, and all his servants, and all the Egyptians; and there was a great cry in Egypt; for there was not a house where there was not one dead. 31. And he called for Moses and Aaron by night, and said, Rise up, and get ye forth from among my people, both ye and the children of Israel; and go, serve the Lord as ye have said. Thus stands the record, and upon that record religion must stand or fall, for if it be literally true and historical, this monster should be damned instead of worshiped; and if it be but mythology, the Bible’s religious authority is gone forever. The latter, we claim, is its true nature. That the race can read it, believe it, and still worship its monstrous God is an index of our intelligence, our knowledge of Causation, Reality, Truth. It is that of the child and the savage, yet this is the intelligence that is running our world; this is the intelligence that sustains our religion, nationalism, commercialism—and the giving away of countries on the words of a myth. These are not the fruits of wisdom and understanding but of incredible ignorance. Do you wonder then that we have war and oppression, crime and corruption? What would you expect of beings still in the God-worshiping stage? The destruction of the firstborn was the final touch; the broken Pharaoh was willing now to let the people go. Had this been history they would have been driven out or put in a ghetto. But what were these firstborn, and what the destruction? Literally, it should be the lastborn, final elements in the atomic table, but it all depends on what the mythologist was thinking about. Perhaps he knew that these last and heaviest elements were the first to be afflicted with disintegration and radiation. Our scientists are well aware of this process but they are not fully aware of its biologic significance, namely, that through disintegration and radiation creative intelligence becomes free from matter to create biologic forms, and atomic energy free to become biotic energy. As such it becomes vital enough to warrant a place in creation mythology; as history it does not. The ancients were well aware of the significance of this process but a mythologist could not say so in plain words, and so he made an allegory out of it. And the priestly scribe gave it a name; he called it “circumcision”—the removal through radiation of the genetic’s obstruction, namely, physical matter; and ridiculous as the terminology is, this is the place for it, Exodus, not Genesis. To quote the Kabbalah again: “The spirit clothes itself to come down and unclothes itself to go up.” And so all the elements going out must be circumcised (chapter 12). Later we will find them clothing themselves in flesh and again the priest has a strange and wonderful name for it.

• From Deceptions and Myths of the Bible (1975)

  To quote him directly: “Under the Ostrogothic kingdom the manners in Italy might seem to revert to the dignified austerity of the old Roman Republic.” The Vandals were ignorant and hence destructive but the Church has put upon them far too much blame for the havoc she herself had wrought. As Draper said: “It was not the Goths, nor the Vandals, nor the Normans, nor the Saracen, but the popes and their nephews who produced the dilapidation of Rome.” This was Christian Rome. As for Christian Greece: Eternal summer gilds thee yet, But all, except thy sun, has set. Byron, Don Juan , Canto HI Nor was it pagan sin that destroyed the Roman Empire; since it was thoroughly Christianized by the fifth century, the claim that its fall was due to the enervating influence of Christianity would be more logical; in fact, it was the natural result of Augustine’s City of God—take no thought for this world, prepare for the next. Such was the Christian teaching. When Celsus reproved the Christians for not helping the pagans defend the Empire, Origen replied, “We defend it with our prayers.” And so it fell, and with it, a thousand years of darkness. The nadir of this Christian night was around the seventh, eighth and ninth centuries, practically a blank page in European history. Nothing was done of any consequence, yet this period was most prolific in the production of saints. From this we can see where the saints come from—out of the night of ignorance, fear and superstition, the three grey hags with the single eye, the eye of faith. With this all Christendom saw Reality inverted: truth was error, right was wrong, and science of the devil. During this “Reign of Thartac,” education was frowned upon. As Compayre said, “Once the pagan schools were closed Christianity did not open others, and after the fourth century a profound night enveloped humanity. The labor of the Greeks and Romans was as though it had never been.” The only effort to restore education was made by those barbarians the Church claims to have civilized. Theodoric the Goth brought to his court all the artists and scholars of his day, and his daughter Amalasuntha carried on the work after his death. Charlemagne tried to reestablish general education because, as he said, “the study of letters is well-nigh extinguished through the neglect of our ancestors.” But “the monks and bishops resisted the pressure of Charlemagne and closed nearly the whole of the schools as soon as he was dead.” Bishop Brown in The Bankruptcy of Christian Super-naturalism , p. 102. It is the proud boast of the Catholic Church that its “monks and bishops” kept alive the light of learning throughout this night. It did, but it also kept it to itself and for the very good reason that this light was also a means to power. For the same reason it kept it from the masses; these could neither read nor write.

• From Deceptions and Myths of the Bible (1975)

  When they (the wise men)3 had heard the king, they departed; and, lo, the star, which they saw in the east, went before them, till it came and stood over where the young child was (Matt., Chap. 2). This is the mysterious “Star of Bethlehem,” over which even our scientists argue and guess. Because it’s in the Bible, they must find an explanation. This well illustrates the plight of those who accept absurd hypotheses then wrestle with their absurd deductions. Why not recognize it for another of those unprovables and throw it out? Had such a phenomenon actually occurred two thousand years ago, it would have been recorded by someone, the great Ptolemy, for instance. It was before his time, but had it been real no doubt he would have mentioned it. The reason he did not was because there was no such phenomenon. It was a star all right but that one seen crystal clear in Maia’s womb, namely a nascent sun in the womb of space. Thus as we said, “out of the womb of time and space a sun is born.” Here it was a star in the true etymological sense, an astral entity. If our world in its solar stage, the time might be some trillion years B.C.— B(efore) (the) C(onfusion). Little wonder then it’s been a mystery. “Such stories as these echo from the dim horizon of all religions, invest the birth and infancy of the spiritually elect with wonder. Legend and symbol, memory and devotion combine to weave the fabric of them, and it is beyond our power to disentangle their strangely colored strands and find the fact.” Atkins.4 The fact is not at all difficult to find when the fact is known, namely, the creative process. This is the basis of all mythology, all metaphysics, and all religion, that is the philosophy thereof. Long before religion existed, man learned from nature the facts of Reality and put them into a form of narrative known as mythology. In this the impersonal forces were personified, they were given names, they became gods, and devils, heroes and saviors. As the natural facts underlying them were forgotten, the personifications became the realities, endowed with moral instead of creative qualities. And here mythology became theology. Thus belief in theology and religion is due to ignorance of fiction as well as fact. And yet we have such statements as this: “For theology is a science—the Queen of Sciences; it is the science of objective revelation, which has come to the rescue of reason.” Reverend M. O’Connor. Come to bedevil reason would be more correct. Would you call the Gospels science? Would you call the following rational? 13.

• From Deceptions and Myths of the Bible (1975)

  Now Nimrod on hearing of this wonder child sent soldiers to kidnap him but God blinded them with a cloud of darkness. This so frightened Nimrod he fled to the land of Babel. (So Babel was a land, not just a tower, and that’s what we made it—earth.) When first we meet with the scriptural Abraham he is called Abram, and according to our “best authorities” the word means “lifted up,” “exalted.” The “up” and “exalted,” however, do not refer to his human position but to his planetary position—the highest planes in Involution. But where did the word itself come from? Is it Hebrew, or is it, like their history, borrowed mythology? In our Preface we said the Hebrews got many of their religious ideas from India, not God, and here we have some proof of this. Abram is but the Hindu Brama, with the a as prefix instead of suffix; and Brama was the original name of the Hindu Creator. Later the letter h was added, thus making it Brahma. So with Abram; it also acquired an h and became Abraham. To see the source of this more clearly, we have only to write down the Hindu name of Brahma’s source, namely, Vzrabrahm . In Persia the name was originally Abriman, which also acquired an h and became Ahriman—an “evil deity; the ruler over the kingdom of darkness.” the Babylonians also had their Abraham, only they spelt it Abarama. He was a farmer and mythologically contemporary with the Hebrew Abraham. Commenting on this, one of our “great Bible students” had this to say: “The Patriarch of Ur about whom we are studying probably was related to the farmer who lived near Babylon. At any rate they were not the same person, because they had different fathers, and the farmer was not a monotheist. But family names persisted in the ancient days among Semites, and we may suppose that a near descendant of this farmer became a monotheist, moved to Haran, and then went on to Canaan.” Thus do the credulous account for parallel myths. The Moslems also claim Abraham as their “spiritual father,” but to them he is Ibrahim. He it was who produced the Kaaba, the sacred stone at Mecca, a relic of a myth about that stone called Earth. And Abram’s father was Terah, so like the Latin terra , also earth. Now to form an earth every Creator, except the Jews’ and Christians’, must have a female consort, matter. In the Greek myth the Creator marries his sister, shocking indeed; in the Hebrew he marries his half-sister, which is quite all right. To our Bible students these little touches are called “Jewish refinements.” Here the consort was Sarai, and as with Abram and Brama, an h was added and she became Sarah. But it so happens that Brahma had another name, Ishvara, and his wife was Shri.

• From Deceptions and Myths of the Bible (1975)

  When this alleged revelation was written, supposedly near the close of the first century, there may or may not have been seven churches in Asia Minor, but the number is not important; seven was chosen regardless of fact, because of its symbolic significance. Indeed we have some evidence on this point. The Alogi, who opposed the Montanists, contended there was no church in Thyatira at that time, and since then the only proof of this church’s existence is this revelation itself. Now that we understand its true nature, we see the Alogi may have been right. The seven letters to these churches, or planes, are but descriptions of and admonitions to the life thereof. As anything else they aren’t even good sense. So many practical things to be said and this mentor deals only in symbols so fantastic Western man has not been able to comprehend them in two thousand years. What he needs is cosmology, not theology. The seven spirits are the seven divisions of planetary life, and as such, stand figuratively before the throne of the planetary Logos. This latter, actually the genetic intelligence, warns, threatens and admonishes the lazy, lagging epigenetic, exactly as in Exodus, Joshua, Judges, and so on. The seven churches are identical with the seven zodiacal stages from Leo to Aquarius. And this is the mystery of Revelation 1-3. [image "image" file=Image00013.jpg] Ephesus1. Unto the angel of the church of Ephesus write; These things saith he that holdeth the seven stars in his right hand, who walketh in the midst of the seven golden candlesticks; 2. I know thy works, and thy labour, and thy patience, and how thou canst not bear them which are evil: and thou hast tried them which say they are apostles, and are not, and hast found them liars: 3. And hast borne, and hast patience, and for my name’s sake hast laboured, and hast not fainted. 4. Nevertheless I have somewhat against thee, because thou hast left thy first love. 5. Remember therefore from whence thou art fallen, and repent, and do the first works; or else I will come unto thee quickly, and will remove thy candlestick out of his place, except thou repent. 6. But this thou hast, that thou hatest the deeds of the Nicolaitans, which I also hate. 7. He that hath an ear, let him hear what the Spirit saith unto the churches; To him that overcometh will I give to eat of the tree of life, which is in the midst of the paradise of God (Chap. 2). This is the language of Genesis and its meaning is identical. What has borne with patience is the earth itself, or rather the Life Principle within it. Here in matter it has labored long and suffered much, bondage in Egypt, so to speak. If it will not awaken and remember its source and purpose, it will remain there.

• From Deceptions and Myths of the Bible (1975)

  This is how it reads: This then is what I conceive O my God when I hear thy Scriptures saying, In the beginning God made heaven and earth: and the earth was invisible and without form, and darkness was upon the deep, and not mentioning what day thou createst them; this is what I conceive, that because of the heavens—that intellectual heaven, whose intelligences know all at once, not in part, not darkly, not through a glass, but as a whole, in manifestation face to face; not this thing now, that thing anon; but (as I said) know all at once, without any succession of times; and because of the earth invisible and without form, without any succession of time, which succession presents ‘this thing now, that thing anon; because where there is no form, there is no distinction of things; it is then, on account of these two, a primitive formed and a primitive formless; this one, heaven, but the heaven of heavens; the other earth but the earth movable and without form; because of these two do I conceive did the Scriptures say without mention of days, In the beginning God created heaven and earth. For, forthwith it subjoined what earth it spoke of; and also in that the firmament is recorded to be created the second day, and called heaven, it conveys to us of which heaven he before spoke, without mention of days. And this goes on for pages, ending in rhapsodical raving. And for this the Christian world renounced Greek science and philosophy; for this all ancient learning was burned in the marketplace. If ever Disraeli’s words were applicable it is here: “It is worse than a crime; it is a mistake.” A crime may affect only a few, and for a brief period, whereas a mistake of this proportion affects the destiny of the race; it can even subvert Evolution —and did. Thus are the sins of the Christian Fathers visited upon their sons, and not just to the fourth generation, but to the present time. But for this crime the light of Greece might have burned on, from Aristarchus to Copernicus, from Aristotle to Bacon, and from Democritus to Darwin. Hero’s steam engine might have been perfected, America discovered in 492 . Why, we might now be civilized. But no, that guiding light went out and darkness was again upon the deep. Until this triumph of fanaticism, the ancient world was on its way to true enlightenment. Besides those already mentioned, it had produced such men as Pythagoras, Plato, Socrates, Aristotle, and many others. Collectively, they laid the philosophic and even scientific bases for true civilization; the Christian Church destroyed them. “The Emperor Justinian closed the doors of the Academy at Athens, and the seven philosophers, who alone represented the Neoplatonic faith, took their books and sought the hospitality of the East.” Hodges. And not until their philosophy reappeared did the darkness disappear.

• From Boys & Sex (2020)

  At first I found it inexplicable that boys used such violent words in reference to sex. Why would you be proud of being a lousy lover? If they were truly talking about sex in those situations, they might bring up pleasure, connection, finesse: they wouldn’t weaponize it. But the whole point of “locker room banter” is that it’s not actually about sex, and that, I think, is why guys were more ashamed to discuss it as openly with me as topics that were equally explicit. Those (often clearly exaggerated) stories are in truth about power: about asserting masculinity through control of women’s bodies. And that requires—demands—a denial of girls’ humanity. In mixed-sex groups, teenagers may talk about “hooking up” (which is already impersonal—if you want to make them gag, use the phrase “making love”), but when guys are on their own, it can be hard to tell if they’ve engaged in an intimate act or have just returned from a visit to a construction site. They nail, they pound, they bang, they smash, they slam, they hammer. They “hit that,” they “tap that ass,” they “tear her up,” they “destroy” her. The truth is less important than the posturing itself: using symbolic aggression toward women to bond and validate their heterosexuality. Dismissing that as “locker room banter” denies the ways that language can desensitize and abrade boys’ ability to see girls as people deserving of respect and dignity. And, in fact, by the time they are in college, athletes are three times more likely than other students to be accused of sexual misconduct or intimate partner violence. That puts such bluster in a different light.

• From Deceptions and Myths of the Bible (1975)

  According to the Tell-el-Amarna tablets it was originally called Urusalim—Ur and Salem, light and peace— identical with the city of Abram and Melchizedek. But these involutionary cities never stay luminous and peaceful long; they soon become the battleground of warring Titans—the “war in heaven,” “the wars of Jehovah,” and others. This is the warfare of David, the king. But David was not only a warrior; he was also a lecher, a thief, a murderer and a bandit. Next to Joshua’s God he is, perhaps, the worst character in the scriptures. This we learn from his means of securing wives and concubines, of which he had many. His first wife was Michal, Saul’s daughter. But Saul, fearing David, and hoping to be rid of him, sent him on a dangerous mission. This was to secure for him 100 Philistine foreskins as a dowry. To the smart boy David this was child’s play, so he doubled the dowry, 200 foreskins. This not only pleased Saul but Michal also and so she married him. His second wife was Abigail, the wife of Nabal. By a lifetime of toil this man had acquired great wealth in sheep and goats. On learning of this, David blackmailed him. He demanded tribute or death. When Nabal refused, David sent 400 men to kill him, but his partner in crime saved him the trouble, “the Lord smote Nabal, that he died.” Now David sent for Abigail and made her his wife. His next conquest was even more despicable. While spying on Bathsheba at her bath, he fell in love with her. But alas she, too, was married, to Uriah, a military hero. So what to do? Why, as he did to Nabal. To this end he sent a letter to Joab his general ordering him to put Uriah in the forefront of battle that he might be killed. He was, and David married Bathsheba. In the meantime he was killing Philistines by the tens of thousands. And this is the book we compel our children to read for moral uplift. If it be history, and if God required a man to build him a holy temple, lead His “chosen people” and serve as forebear to His “only begotten son,” why should He choose a man like David? For the same reason he chose the murderous Moses and Joshua. Force and violence are His way and so He needed an agent of like nature. “God is a man of war,” and to Him David attributed all his warlike power. God is my strength and power. He teaches my hands to war. Thou hast girded me with strength to battle. Thou hast also given me the necks of mine enemies (Psalm 18). Then did I beat them as small as the dust of the earth, I did stamp them as the mire of the street, and did spread them abroad (2 Sam. 22:43).

• From Deceptions and Myths of the Bible (1975)

  Enough nails and wood from the cross were discovered to build a score of them, though Constan-tine’s mother in her day could not find the original. Washington Irving went further: concerning the wood of the cross, he said “There is enough extant to build a ship of the line.” Every church in Europe had these “holy relics”; indeed three of them had the one spear with which Longinus pierced Jesus’ side. This, by the way, caused a serious internal strife. A Sultan presented the supposedly real one to the city of Rome. The French cardinals were horrified; the original was in Paris, they said. The German cardinals ridiculed both for, as they said, everyone knows the original is in Nuremberg. Such antics seemed bad enough while we believed in the historicity of the Christ story, but when we know its purely mythical nature they take on a double meaning—dishonesty as well as credulity. And speaking of credulity, another “money-making scheme” was, and still is, the “holy places” of Palestine. Concerning these and the gullibility of pilgrims thereto, the Encyclopaedia Britan-nica has this to say: “It is a pathetic record. No site, no legend is too impossible for the unquestioning faith of these simple-minded men and women. And by comparing one record with another, we can follow the multiplication of ‘holy places’ and sometimes can even see them being shifted from one spot to another as the centuries pass. Not one of these devout souls has any shadow of suspicion that, except natural features (such as the Mount of Olives, the Jordan, Ebal, and Gerazim) and possibly a very few individual sites (such as Jacob’s well at Shechem) there was not a single spot in the whole elaborate system that could show even the flimsiest evidence of authenticity.” Thus does modern scholarship bear out our contention. Not one of these places or relics is genuine, not even Jacob’s well. They are all mythic material, now commercial material of a money-hungry Church. This is the meaning of our statement—the Church turned Golgotha into Golconda. It was for plunder this Golconda was turned into a battleground—that of the Crusades. Ostensibly the purpose was to wrest the tomb of Christ from the “unclean” hands of the infidels, but the real motivation was hungry Europe’s envy of the comparative wealth and splendor of Araby. This has long been overlaid with Christian sanctity but the contemporary Pope, Urban II, made no bones about it; in fact, it was his inducement to volunteers. In an address at Clermont he said: “The wealth of our enemies will be yours, and you will despoil them of their treasures.” This was also the motive for the plunder and exile of the wealthy Jews and Mohammedans in Spain. Several hundred thousand were killed or banished and their property confiscated by the Church. And “the Pope granted indulgences to all who carried on this pious work,” wrote Vacandard, a Catholic historian. “Pious work!” This is some more of their intellectual dishonesty.

• From Deceptions and Myths of the Bible (1975)

  All this realized, we know of nothing in all literature that needs debunking more than this so-called revelation. It is not to be taken seriously, that is religiously, because it is not what it is alleged to be—a vision of the awful majesty of God, his retribution upon wicked humanity, his promise of a new heaven and a new earth, the posthumous existence of Christ, and his preeminence in heaven. This is no part of Reality; it is but priestly “stage props.” So again, we know of nothing so deserving of the phrase, “Much ado about nothing,” spiritually. Stripped of its nonsense, it is but the creative process, the many visions, but different aspects of this, thrown together without logic or sequence, either by the author because he did not know the sequence, or by subsequent redactors who desired to hide its true meaning. The book opens with the 7 letters to the 7 churches, but as this is more apropos of subsequent “mysteries,” we will leave it with a promise of a surprise when later we return to it. Here we will begin with Chapter 4. As the book is much too long to deal with verse by verse, we will comment only on what is most relevant. 1. After this I looked, and, behold, a door was opened in heaven: and the first voice which I heard was as it were of a trumpet talking with me; which said, Come up hither, and I will shew thee things which must be hereafter. 2. And immediately I was in the spirit: and, behold, a throne was set in heaven, and one sat on the throne. 3. And he that sat was to look upon like a jasper and a sardine stone: and there was a rainbow round about the throne, in sight like unto an emerald. After learning about revelators from Ezekiel, we should know what this is—ecclesiastical deception. There are no revelators, no prophets, and no prophecies in the scriptures; there are only cunning priests religionizing cosmology. There was no door opened in heaven, and there was no voice as of a trumpet; there was only pagan imagery and symbolism. The throne is the earth itself, set up in that heaven called space; the rainbow round about it is its cosmogonical trajectory as represented by the zodiac. The precious stones are but lapidarian symbols thereof, as of the Jews. The jasper, emerald and sardine (sardonyx) stones are the gem symbols of Pisces, Gemini, and Cancer. See p. 375. 5. And out of the throne proceeded lightlings and thunderings and voices: and there were seven lamps of fire burning before the throne, which are the seven Spirits of God. The “seven Spirits of God” are the seven plane forces in Involution, and their thunder and lightning represent their violence. 6.

• From Deceptions and Myths of the Bible (1975)

  Their present sequence is the work of a later priesthood that either ignorantly or maliciously confused them. The key to it lies not in the textual sequence, but in the planetary sequence, and so it is this we will follow. But where, you ask, is the figurative earth this time? It is Jericho instead of Egypt. The parallel is cunningly hidden by presenting Joshua’s Red Sea incident first, that is, the crossing of the Jordan. We, however, will follow the Creative process. 1. Now Jericho was straitly shut up because of the children of Israel: none went out, and none came in (as in Egypt). 2. And the Lord said unto Joshua (as he did unto Moses), See, I have given into thine hand Jericho (Egypt), and the king thereof (Pharaoh), and the mighty men of valour (his charioteers). 3. And ye shall compass the city, all ye men of war, and go round about the city once. Thus shalt thou do six days. 4. And seven priests shall bear before the ark seven trumpets of rams’ horns: . . . and the priests shall blow with the trumpets (the seven plagues of the Moses myth, and both are chemical disintegration) (Chap. 6). And for twenty-five hundred years the Jews have been blowing a ram’s horn, the shofar; I hope that they will now see that this is as mythical as all the rest. 16. And it came to pass at the seventh time, when the priests blew with the trumpets, Joshua said unto the people, Shout; for the Lord hath given you the city. 20. So the people shouted when the priests blew with the trumpets: and it came to pass, when the people heard the sound of the trumpet, and the people shouted with a great shout, that the wall fell down flat, so that the people went up into the city, every man straight before him, and they took the city. Here we have in cryptic form the long account of Egypt’s conquest, namely, the destruction of matter. We have also a fact not revealed in Exodus, that the destruction of matter is accomplished by vibration—we called it radiation, and the scientist, fission. As stated elsewhere, all the details of Creation cannot be presented in one myth, hence the many. Collectively they tell a fairly complete story, but only abysmal ignorance of the subject can look upon them as racial history. And this, we claim, the Jews have done since 400 B.C., hence their racial delusions, one of which is their right to take whatever they want. Another is that they bless all places, and now we find that they not only destroy Jericho but put a curse upon it. 17. And the city shall be accursed, even it, and all that are therein, to the Lord: only Rahab the harlot shall live, she and all that are with her in the house, because she hid the messengers that we sent (the Hebrews’ “wooden horse”).

• From Deceptions and Myths of the Bible (1975)

  These were “consecrated unto the Lord”—the Hebrew “fence” for stolen goods; “they shall come into the treasury of the Lord.” The “tabernacle of the Lord” is now “the treasury of the Lord,” the human body, on which a later priesthood built a treasury for loot; another even built a Vatican on it. That this Hebrew conquest of Jericho is a myth is proved by recent discoveries. According to Barton, the pre-Israelitish city of Jericho was so small that “the whole of it could have been put into the Colosseum at Rome.” Thus there was no great city of Jericho at that time for the Jews to take. And now comes the Red Sea parallel: the children of Israel are about to pass over a body of water again on dry land. And this passing over takes place at precisely the same time as that of Exodus. What is more, the same rites and ceremonies are repeated, though differently placed to hide the parallel. They celebrate the Passover; they are also circumcised. “And the Lord said unto Joshua, This day have I rolled away the reproach of Egypt from off you,” 5:9. The reproach of “accursed” matter. But they were circumcised in Moses’ day. This is not a second cut-off, but a tip-off that this is a wholly unrelated myth. They remove from Shittim (the Jewish concept of matter, elsewhere called dragon-dirt) and arrive at the river Jordan, the evolutionary equivalent of Jabok, over which Jacob passed in Involution. Here they tarry three days, during which the officers instruct the people. 3. And they commanded the people, saying, When ye see the ark of the covenant of the Lord your God, and the priests of the Levites bearing it, then ye shall remove from your place, and go after it (Chap. 3). The three days represent that halfway goal where, as in Peleg’s day, “the earth was divided” into Involution and Evolution. Here the genetic principle, the Levites, is awakened and begins to “pass over,” the ark, as we said, being the carrier. And now the Red Sea miracle. 13. And it shall come to pass, as soon as the soles of the feet of the priests that bear the ark of the Lord, the Lord of all the earth, shall rest in the waters of Jordan, that the waters of the Jordan shall be cut off from the waters that come down from above; and they shall stand upon an heap. Jordan is the mythic “river of life,” whose waters came “down from above,” Involution; and when they were cut off they did literally “stand upon an heap,” a heap of matter called earth. These are “the waters standing in line” that Moses saw, and later crossed. And now as in Moses’ day, the people gather stones and build a memorial, that their descendants may remember that here “the Lord of all the earth” wrought miracles for the elect of all the earth, the Jewish people.