Alexander Hislop wants to Chant Down Babylon, and So Do I

The Two Babylons: or, the Papal Worship Proved to Be the Worship of Nimrod and His Wife – Alexander Hislop (1916)

            (Recently I came across a Reading List for a University lecture course taught by the great Sun Ra back in the day.  Fascinating stuff.  This is my review of the first book on the Sun Ra Reading List.  I hope to make it through them all this year. - RXTT)

            This one is heavy.  First, a little background.  I am the son of an Episcopal Priest.  Because of this, I grew up in church, and because of my curiosity, I was always reading the Bible, or any theology that came my way.  I wanted to know what in this collection of books (BIBLIA means a collection of separate books, hence our Bible) was the source for the seemingly infinite variety of denominations and sects that claimed to be following the teachings of Jesus the Christ.  In all my study as a youth, and in the decades since, I have never found any of what Jesus the Christ taught, preached, or espoused, to be complex.  His teachings are exceedingly basic, and applicable to all humans in all lands.  The many religions/sects/cults (they are all the same thing) that sprung up in Jesus’ wake, however, have conflated his teachings, and obscured the simple message behind walls of ritual, baroque language, and the seemingly impenetrable man-made creation of the priesthood.  The worst one seems to be the Roman Catholic Church.

            A quick history lesson: the times in which Jesus the Christ lived are estimated to be between 2,000 and 2,100 years ago.  No one can be sure. There is no record anywhere of the date of his birth, the date of his mitzvah (Jesus was a Jew, you know), or of the date of his death.  There are no Roman or old Israelite records showing Jesus specifically being tried and executed.  All we have are the words of Scripture, in which very little of Jesus’ life is actually discussed.  There is nothing in the Bible between his birth and the time he came of age, and very little between that and his rise as a prophet and leader of men.  You can find Bibles that mark all of the words claimed to be spoken by Jesus the Christ in red letters, and let me tell you, it is barely two pages of text collectively.  That is, two pages of text, out of a collection of books running thousands of pages long.

            The initial Christians, in the three to four-hundred years after his passing, maintained for the most part the teachings he gave.  People today talk constantly about Jesus’ calls to be humble, to turn the other cheek to your enemy, to not use violence, for violence is an evil method.  These are all great teachings and deeply valuable, as evident in the US Civil Rights movement of the 1960’s with Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s non-violent protest, and in India’s Revolt from the yoke of the British Empire, with Mahatma Gandhi's non-violent protest tactics.  They were also central to the early Christians.  However, if you actually read the Gospels instead of accepting your local cult leader’s (priest’s) interpretation, you will see that Jesus preached against many things which, today, are not so commonly discussed.  Jesus preached against all organized religion of any type, and the idea that any intermediary can or should come between a human and his divinity (God).  He saw first-hand the corruption Rabbinical “leaders” caused in his Jewish faith.  He saw how those people get assigned power over the rest of us, power which only leads to evil and ill.  Jesus also preached heavily for the personal dissolution of the family.  He states many times that a good person values god more than their family.  Jesus lived in a time where one’s family dictated everything about your life.  If you were born to a rich landowner, you were to be a rich landowner.  If you were born to a destitute family, you deserved it and you were going to stay destitute.  The modern ideal of a human being making something out of themselves, regardless of their familial status or where they come from, is a very recent phenomenon, and for most of human history this has not been the case.

            Jesus also preached separation from the concerns of the state.  He witnessed the corruption inherent when a powerful religion (concerned primarily with men’s souls) comingled and eventually entrenched themselves into local (Roman) politics.  What is the old saying?  “Power tends to corrupt.  Absolute power tends to corrupt absolutely.”  Jesus preached against the old codes in the Bible, stating that, as he had come to redeem the world of all sin, past and present, the old Abrahamaic and Mosaic laws of the Hebrews were null and void, and there was but one way to salvation, faith in the teachings of Jesus.  This may have been his greatest act of rebellion, and is most definitely the teaching that caused him to be executed by religions leaders using the Roman courts as their proxy.  (Many claim that Jesus was put to death for preaching to non-Jews.  In fact, many of the apostles were against Jesus teaching his lessons to non-Jews.  Jesus did not see the difference, for we are all human, and his teachings applied to all.  He began preaching to “gentiles,” the non-Jews such as Greeks, Phoenicians, Egyptians, etc. who happened to live in or near Israel.  It is easy to see how this would piss off some rich bastard priesthood/rabbis whose sole claim to power was being able to guide Hebrews to God.)

            In other words, Jesus’ teachings amounted to a direct and absolute threat to all established powers in his world.  “Render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s” as Jesus stated so famously when asked about money and taxes.  Jesus did not care about money.  The early Christians followed his teachings, abstaining from blind obedience to families, the state or any organized religion, and not seeking to hoard riches or wealth.  They met in un-decorated rooms, and humbly prayed, quietly, as Jesus taught.  It only took three to four hundred years for these good teachings to be overrun by an organization seeking to regain their power, both religious and political, and for them to claim to be the sole and only source for true salvation.  That group of evil bastards is, according to Mr. Hislop, what is currently known as the Roman Catholic Church, home of endless nun-rapes, pedophiles, bastard children, and the most exquisite blasphemies and idolatries ever, all the while telling the millions of Christians worldwide that they are the sinners, that they are born evil, and that only through the Roman Catholic Church (RCC) and their priests can humans hope to achieve redemption.

            It is this organization, at one point so powerful that the Pope actually ruled an entire empire (Papal States - edit, thanks to !@#$#%$), that Alexander Hislop has put squarely in his sights.  His disdain for the evils of the RCC is so great that he spent a great part of his life in research, reading, learning, and understanding exactly how the RCC has managed to enslave much of the world in a deeply Pagan and un-Christian religion.  Hislop goes into extravagant detail about pretty much every single aspect of what we call today Roman Catholicism, and how it is all just a subversion of Christian tropes in service of a more ancient pagan belief, the worship of the god/godman called Baal, Cyrus, or Nimrod.  This individual, Hislop claims, was the son of Noah, the first creator of a large walled city after the Biblical Flood (Babylon), who, after his death in a violent manner, was deified as having been resurrected as the God of all Men.  His wife, Semiramis, gave birth to a son, Tammuz, in a virgin birth.  The Babylonian religion coalesced these two entities, the father and the son, as being the same person, essentially having Nimrod father himself and be reborn as Tammuz.  They also ended up worshiping Semiramis as a goddess who had a miraculous “Virgin” birth.  She became so very powerful as a goddess object of worship that Tammuz was infantilized, and both of them were portrayed just as Mary and Jesus are now portrayed, a virgin mother saint holding her sainted son, reborn of the Father.

            When the Roman Emperors’ began to attempt to control Christianity, they essentially couched the old paganism in Christian symbolism, turning the ancient festival of Saturnalia (celebrating the Virgin birth of Tammuz/Mithra) into Christmas, turning the spring festivals to Ishtar (a goddess Hislop shows to be just an inversion of the worship of Semiramis) into the High festival of Easter, supposedly commemorating Jesus’ reincarnation after his crucifixion, but celebrated with Pagan symbols such as eggs, rabbits, and other ancient stand-ins for fertility.  They declared formally that they were the only true Christian religion, that no others are valid, and that redemption and salvation do not come from faith in Jesus the Christ and following his teachings, but in endless cycles of pagan bullshit such as flagellation, contrition, the paying of tithes, suffering for suffering’s sake, and the constant reminder of the horrors that the human body of Jesus endured by the fetish of the Roman execution device of the cross.  This is essentially religious horror-porn.  Christ never mentioned any of these things as divine and in fact, actually denounced most of them.

            One of the biggest areas that Hislop explores is the method by which the Roman Catholic Church has ingrained the cardinal sin of idolatry into its very essence.  The very first of the Mosaic Commandments states thus, “I am the Lord, thy God.  Thou shall have no other gods before me.  Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image.”  Jesus, in his Gospels, states that this Commandment takes precedence above all others.  However, this is exactly the opposite of what the Roman Catholic Babylon Church has forced upon the devout.  Their houses of worship are covered in idols, images, and statues that are MEANT to be prayed to.  Instead of praying quietly to god, as commanded by Jesus, Roman Catholics are expected to supplicate to dead saints (many of them converted Pagan gods or ideas), and Mary and the priests to plead to God on their behalf.  Nowhere is Jesus mentioned.  The pagan worship of a Virgin Mother has so corrupted the Roman Catholic Church that even the Popes exclaim that Mary is the redeemer, the one who makes Jesus save us.  That is deep blasphemy.

            I have not even scratched the surface of what Hislop exposes.  In the Gospels, Jesus states that we are all to confess our sins to each other, including religious leaders.  This keeps everyone humble, and human, and understanding of our failings, and better able to accept the faults of others (a very Christian thing to do), but the Roman Catholic Church does not follow Jesus’ teachings on this.  They demand that all subjects confess their sins to a Priest, who remains anonymous, and then the priest will give them some rote bullshit to do to be “absolved,” such as reciting countless prayers to Mary (more blasphemy). Never, ever, do the Priests confess their sins to the people in their care.  In fact, when the people come out and inform authorities that many of the Roman Catholic priests/monks/nuns are pedophiles, rapists, abusers, inveterate drunks, gamblers, and all-around professional sinners, there is never any accountability!   Rapist pedophile priests are slightly chastised and sent to a different parish, where their evil can continue unabated.  Recently a comprehensive list of priests accused of credible sexual rape and abuse, has been published.  It runs over THREE THOUSAND NAMES LONG.  None of these assholes will be jailed.  None will even be prosecuted in court.  The Roman Catholic Church treats their priest’s crimes as “sins” to be dealt with internally, regardless of the horror and trauma they cause to countless generations of people.  This has been the case for hundreds of years.  If anyone does come to trial, it is always some ancient old priest who raped kids for decades, but now looks so feeble and old that people feel pity for the rapist!

            Religion is, to me, the last great superstition left in humanity.  It is the single largest source of pain, suffering, and outright evil in the world.  The biggest crimes against humanity have been done in the name of religion, or attempting to stop one specific religion.  It is all a crock of shit.  As soon as we all rid ourselves of the idea that cryptic and debased belief systems are truth and the key to happiness once we are dead, then humanity will reach a deeper closeness with the true teachings that Jesus the Christ died to impart.  Mr. Hislop, as a Christian in the late 1800’s and early 1900’s, is a devout believer in Jesus.  He deeply believes that Jesus and his sacrifice were, as Jesus stated, the final redemption of mankind, and that no other redemption is required, which is the exact opposite of what the Roman Catholic Church preaches.  I do not feel this way.  I do not “believe” in anything.  I am purely a human being, living my life as best I see fit, and trying my hardest to help others when I can, and not hurt others when I am able to stop myself from doing so.  I have had many people in my life, people very close to me, tell me that in my day to day living, I am the closest thing to a Christian they know.  I take it as a compliment.  Jesus was a REBEL.  Jesus knew his teachings were important enough to die for.  Jesus whupped some money-lender ass when they defiled his father’s house. 

            This is not an easy book to read.  The work is dense, and Mr. Hislop gives you everything he can find to prove his point.  There are so many examples, so many unavoidable truths within, that I can see why this book is not more widely known.  The Wizard of Oz does NOT want you to see how he makes the magic happen.

(EDITED for clarity - 2/5/2020 - RXTT)

(This book can be downloaded as a PDF here: http://www.ldolphin.org/PDFs/The_Two_Babylons-Alexander_Hislop.pdf )

Humanity Owes Our Females a Huge Debt

The Gender of Debt: The Last 50,000 Years – Mariano Pavanello (2019)

When I began this book review journey, my wife asked me what I hoped to be a good end-result for this endeavor.  I told her that I wished to create a resource, a website that readers could use to find interesting books to read, and that it would be awesome if writers thought enough of my commentary to seek me out so I could provide a review of their work.  I specifically considered writers of science books, science history, and other such work to be ones I would love to collaborate with and provide reviews of their writing.  Through hard work and diligence, this has indeed come to pass.  I am contacted regularly by book publishers and authors with requests to review their work, which is extremely satisfying.  However, receiving an email from a renowned anthropologist asking if I would consider reviewing their book on my site was a tremendous thrill.  Reading the work, and understanding the implications this book could have on our understanding of human social development, is a privilege.

Mariano Pavanello’s aim with The Gender of Debt is to shed some light on the erroneous assumptions that many anthropologists still hold in regards to the role of labor sharing in early humans, and the motivations that drove the specializations of hunting and food gathering into a sexual division that we still take for granted today.  He seeks to correct the social debt that human males owe to human females, a debt which is never acknowledged in our patriarchal society.

It is currently assumed that what drove humans to develop the society and culture we see around us today was the increase in meat provided by the male hunters of early tribes.  Meat is highly nutritious and full of energy.  The idea was that, as this great resource requires a large expenditure of effort and energy, and came fraught with danger, the risks associated with hunting became more and more a male dominated pursuit, leaving women to tend the camps, care for children and elderly, and gather up other food items such as plants, tubers, honey, and other such food sources as could be collected not too far from their camps.  This, they assume, is what drove the push to patriarchy and male control over women.  Mr. Pavanello goes into great detail explaining why previous researchers and scientists drew these conclusions, and then adroitly points out why these assumptions are dead wrong.  The complexities of human social order do not fall so neatly into the categories our assumptions place them in.

One of the most interesting chapters in this book delves into the scientific literature to explore exactly what we know about how tribal people throughout the world manage to subsist.  Various charts are used to explain the variations between the amount of labor that goes into hunting and the amount of labor that goes into food gathering.  What the data shows, and what is not present in the modern conversation about early man, is that, for the most part, the food gathering side is the crucial one.  It is the side that allows for all other functions of humanity to continue, including long, arduous hunting excursions. Many groups could survive on just food gathering alone, but no one could survive on just hunting alone.  In fact, without the steady, constant work of the food gatherers the hunters would have no sustenance to support their physical work.

Mr. Pavanello posits that, because the hunters realized how much they depended on the gatherers, they began to implement cultural methods by which they would control the females, assuring the hunters of constant food, constant care for their children, and autonomy in the hunting process.  This was not done by coercion or force necessarily, but by the strict codes of societal control, such as food sharing, child care, daughter exchange for marriages, etc.  Most tribal cultures share all food items as a rule.  The gatherers will share their supplies with all in the tribe, while the hunters would divide up the kill for all people to share.  This reciprocity is integral to understanding early human cultures.  It is because of this system that humans thrived in a manner that our Neanderthal and other relative species could not.  Assuring communal survival through food sharing allowed humans to develop free time, to eventually come up with higher social structures such as religion, markets, etc.

What is evident throughout this book is that humanity indeed owes a huge debt of gratitude to the females of our species, for without their abilities, knowledge, and wisdom we humans would have stayed tribal peoples, never developing the complexity and intricacy of our modern human society.  I hope more people read this book, or at least study its conclusions, so that as a society we all accept, understand, and appreciate the achievements of the female of our species, instead of solely focusing on the achievements of male humans in our history.  

This is quite a dense treatise, and explores far more data and ideas than I could possibly cover in this review.  I hope it is a touchstone for scientists and social anthropologists to view the human condition through a new spectrum.  The debt humanity owes to our females is over 50,000 years old, and needs to be addressed sooner than later.  We are all one humanity, with shared goals and shared credit for our successes. 

(This book can be purchased here: Cambridge Scholars Publishing )

Lucretius, and the man who saved his work from oblivion, sparked our modern world

The Swerve: How the World Became Modern – Stephen Greenblatt (2011)

            The intellectual progress of humanity is never smooth, and quite often fraught with violence, pride in ignorance, and just plain old bad luck.  Sometimes an artifact from long ago is rediscovered, or translated, and then becomes a touchstone for a whole world of new thoughts and ideas.  This book is about one such re-discovery.  There are few writings from antiquity that have shaped and informed the modern world we all live in quite like the work On the Nature of Things (De Rerum Natura in its OG Latin form) by the Roman poet and philosopher Lucretius.  Stephen Greenblatt does an amazing job of uncovering not only the history of Lucretius himself and his seminal work, but also the history and life of the sometime Papal Secretary, and lifelong lover of literature and antiquities, Poggio Bracciolini who through his diligent exploration unearthed a 400 year old handmade copy of Lucretius’ masterpiece and shared it with the world.

            Lucretius did not create the ideas espoused in his poem.  He was a Roman citizen at a time when the Empire was in decline, and many thinkers were looking back to the golden age of Greek thought and ideas to try and gain some sort of insight that would bring back the glory of Rome.  Lucretius was interested in the work of a specific Greek philosopher, Epicurus, who lived and created a school of philosophy nearly 300 years earlier.  This philosophy, known as Epicurianism, is central to the ideas of Lucretius, and forms a base for him to explore the nature of reality, life, and the universe at large.  Democritus’ idea, atomism, is that all matter in the universe is reducible to tiny non-reducible parts called atoms, and that because of this all matter is similar across the Universe.  Epicurus started his explorations at the age of 12 when his teachers could not explain to him the meaning of chaos.  He took the atomist idea and ran with it, positing that everything, planets, stars, the Sun, us, etc., were all a part of the natural order of things, and that the same principles that govern life and change on Earth do so in the heavens.  Because of this, he stated that pleasure, derived without hurting anyone or anything else, is the highest goal of life.  Epicurus denied the immortality of the soul, seeing it as just another part of the living organism, which dissipates at the time of death.  There is no afterlife, and yet one should not fear death.  “Death is nothing to us, for that which is dissolved I without sensation, and that which lacks sensation is nothing to us.”

            Consider this, using pure thought and reason, and before any scientific method of empirical experimentation was even conceived of, Lucretius had taken the starting point of Epicurus’ philosophy, and intuited some deep truths that, to modern, post-Enlightenment minds, come off like predictions of the advancements of science in the past 2,000 years.  As listed in this book by Mr. Greenblatt, here are some of the elements of the Lucretian challenge put forth in On the Order of Things, as stated by the author, Peter Greenblatt:

·         Everything is made of invisible particles (There are no non-natural forces or deities creating existence)

·         The elementary particles of matter – “the seeds of things” – are eternal (Neither destruction nor creation have the upper hand.  Everything is in a constant state of change and mutation of form.  The philosopher George Santayana called this idea, “the greatest thought that mankind has ever hit upon.”)

·         The elementary particles are infinite in number but limited in shape and size (Lucretius intuited that there is a hidden code of matter, and a specific set of rules by which they combine into the substances of our existence.  He could not have known about molecular chemistry, or genetics, or any other such thing, but his reasoning told him it had to be true.  Amazing!)

·         All particles are in motion in an infinite void (Every high school science student learns this as part of physics.  Einstein understood this as well and it was the basis for his Special Relativity.)

·         The universe has no creator or designer (There is no purpose or end-goal for the existence of the universe, only ceaseless creation and destruction.  This is a very similar concept to that of the endless cycles of time in many Eastern religions)

·         Everything comes into being as a result of a “Swerve” (If particles all moved in one straight line there would be no interactions between them.  Lucretius stated that “at absolutely unpredictable times and places they deflect slightly from their straight course.”  He was thinking of a minimally slight adjustment, enough to cause an infinite variety of combinations.)

·         The “Swerve”: is the source of human free will (if all motion were one pre-determined chain of events, there would be no room for free will, with cause following cause for eternity.)

·         Nature ceaselessly experiments (There is no single moment of creation nor an end to creation)

·         The universe was not created for or about humans (There were forms of life before humans, which no longer exist, and there will be forms of life after humans cease to exist.)

·         Humans are not unique (We are made of the same stuff as all other life and non-life.  We can find many life-forms that share traits we consider human, such as compassion, altruism, regret, and love.  As Lucretius states, a calf recognizes its mother cow just like a baby human recognizes her mother.)

·         Human society began not in a Gold Age of tranquility and plenty, but in a primitive battle for survival (Lucretius understood that life is harsh, and was especially so to early humans who had no tools, no medicines, no social organization, and no language.)

·         The soul dies (The human soul, or any other living thing’s soul, is as much a part of the body as the eyes, and also dissipates upon death.)

·         There is no afterlife (the afterlife has been a consolation and a torment to many humans.  However, once it is grasped that the soul dies alongside the body, one can grasp that there are no posthumous punishments to worry about, nor any rewards to be expected.  Life on this Earth is all we humans have.)

·         Death is nothing to us (Once the body and soul die, there will be neither pleasure nor pain, longing nor fear.  “You will not care, because you will not exist.”)

·         All organized religions are superstitious delusions (Humans become enslaved to their own dreams.  They experience sequences of misfortune and feel that they are being punished by some deity.  They feel awe and wonder while gazing at the sky above and assign that beauty to some magical being that must have created it, regardless of the natural explanations for such phenomena.

·         Religions are invariably cruel (They promise hope and love but their deep underlying structure is cruelty.  “The quintessential element of religion – and the clearest manifestation of the perversity that lies at its core – is the sacrifice of a child by a parent.”  Lucretius was writing this nearly 60 years before the currently prominent sacrifice myth began.  He was aware of Hebraic myths such as Abraham almost gutting Issac cuz some voice in his head told him to, and would have understood the prominent display of images and statues of a bloody, murdered son.)

·         There are no Angels, Demons, or ghosts (All are entirely unreal and best forgotten.)

·         The highest goal of human life is the enhancement of pleasure and the reduction of pain (Lucretius believed that there is no higher purpose than the facilitation of the pursuit of happiness for oneself and one’s fellow creatures, and this includes all living things.  “All other claims, such as service to the state, glorification of gods or a ruler, and the arduous pursuit of virtue through self-sacrifice, are secondary, misguided, or fraudulent.” as paraphrased by Mr. Greenblatt.)

·         The greatest obstacle to pleasure is not pain; it is delusion (Lucretius believed the principal enemies of human happiness are inordinate desire and gnawing fear.  Our ability to imagine the infinite, whether infinite pain, infinite sorrow, or infinite joy, keeps us from accepting or enjoying the finite pleasures, rising up from finite sorrows, and controlling the desire for infinite joy.)

·         Understanding the nature of things generates deep wonder (For Lucretius, humans engage in many poisonous beliefs that prevent us from enjoying the wonder of the world around us, including the idea of an eternal soul that will be punished or rewarded indefinitely.  This keeps humans from living in the now, and lets them accept the wrongs and horrors of life as just a way-station into the next world.  This is deep poison, and keeps us from doing our best to increase happiness worldwide, and reduce pain worldwide.  It is the source of much of the evil in the world)

          For hundreds of years, Lucretius works were forgotten, until the world changed and people started exploring the old Greek masters again.  Due to the inherent bias in christian researchers, they praised any philosopher whose ideas seemed to correlate to the tenets of christianity while excoriating or outright destroying the works of any philosopher who held what they believed to be “pagan” or non–christian ideas.  Because of this, Democritus, Epicurus, and Lucretius were consigned to the “pagan” pile, and their ideas and works ridiculed outright as part of Catholic dogma.  Ironically, it took a bibliophile like Poggio Bracciolini to travel to remote monasteries to rediscover these old works.  The masses in the intervening centuries had become dumb as rocks and highly illiterate.  The monk copyists in these secluded monasteries would copy old works, many times purely by eye, as they could not actually read old Greek or Latin.  Poggio’s discovery of On the Nature of Things, and his subsequent dissemination of the work, occurred before the invention of the printing press.  Once that was invented, copies of Lucretius spread far and wide, influencing many of the thinkers, artists, and writers that led what is now called the Renaissance.  These same writers went on to influence the Enlightenment, and through that, the modern world we all share. 

          This book is a great treasure, and should be read by anyone who wishes to understand the underpinnings of our world, and the many ways in which the enemies of free thought and free ideas fight and kill to keep their lies alive in the minds and hearts of the masses.  We currently live in a world where too many factions are seeking to distract humanity back into religious factions of “US” versus “THEM.”  If it is not one religion against another, it is upper classes against the poor ones, citizens against immigrants, or civilized people against uncivilized “animals.”  Every one of these con-artists, and they are ALL con-artists, seeks to force us to see the world in the manner they prescribe, for their own ends.  It is such a joy to find heroes in the past that help me fight the near-endless waves of stupidity and evil that seek to keep humanity under control.  Those who fight ideas do so because they KNOW these ideas shatter their bullshit lies.  Long live the life of the mind.  Lucretius was one bad mo-fo.

(To read On The Nature of Things - Lucretius (translated by William Ellery Leonard) click here: http://classics.mit.edu/Carus/nature_things.html) 

(To purchase The Swerve - Peter Greenblatt, click here: THE SWERVE )