Charles-François Dupuis shared the truth with us over 200 years ago

 

The Origin of All Religious Worship - Charles-François Dupuis (1795)

 

            One of the very best things about books is that they can transport a reader anywhere and to any time.  Most people love old fiction works specifically for this reason.  I adore older non-fiction books, especially ones that deal with deep exploration of a given subject.  I especially enjoy finding and reading the old books used as references for the more modern works I read.  I have read widely in comparative religion and mythology over the past decade.  There are few seminal works, and Dupuis’ “The Origin of All Religious Worship” is one such masterwork.  It has taken me months to digest it all.

            People remember the French Revolution alongside the American one as a battle to usurp monarchy and instill democracy.  While this is technically correct, what they were fighting against was the power that the European monarchies and the Roman Catholic Church had consolidated in the 1500-1700’s.  For centuries, the super-rich aristocracy and the super-rich Papacy joined teams to control nations and to plunder their wealth for themselves. The scientific method along with obsessive rationality led French leaders to denounce the church, the evils they commit under the guise of “religion,” and everything they teach.  In order to have evidence against the church, to fight the centuries of lies and obfuscation, geniuses like Dupuis sought to study just why the church acts as it does, and where they got their theological ideas.  Before the modern study of comparative religion and mythology, Dupuis set out to explore the historical past of religious worship.  What follows in this book is a detailed excoriation detailing why everything taught by all priests from all religions is sadistic and willful untruth seeking to blind the eyes of the people.  It is awesome.

            Since truly ancient times, the only real concern of humanity has been to study the heavens.  Once the ancient humans understood that the seasons were cyclical, that around the same time each year the days would get longer, signaling the return of spring and summer, they began to understand the world around them and their place in it.  There was a large, overarching pattern to the world and humans lived in harmony with it.  One hundred thousand years ago, there was no thought of “rational” versus “spiritual,” or of “natural” versus “supernatural.”  These are all recent inventions.  The world of ancient humans was equal parts what they saw and experienced, what they dreamed, and what they imagined. 

Dupuis goes back as far as recorded history lets him, considering he lived in the late 1700’s.  While there existed civilizations before the ancient Egyptians, their culture amalgamated and absorbed the wisdom of all the previous millennia.  Ancient man would describe what they saw in the heavens through allusion, metaphor, and anthropomorphism.  They saw patterns in the stars, which, to their eye, never changed.  These became the constellations.  Initially meant purely as a visual code to describe the locations of the stars, the constellations helped mark the passage of the year.  The Sun would rise in the sky in front of a different constellation every month for a year, and then repeat itself.  During parts of the year, the daylight hours grew compared to the nighttime hours, and at the opposite end of the year, the nighttime hours grew while the daylight shrank.  At two specific points each year, the ancient sages noted that the hours of day and night were equal.  These are now referred to as the Spring and Autumnal Equinoxes.

The Spring equinox seemed a perfect time for ancient humanity to designate as the beginning of the yearly cycle.  It marks the day that the warmth and life-giving properties of the Sun start to increase in influence over the Earth (at least for the people in the Northern Hemisphere.  Throughout much of human history, most of our species has lived above the equator.  This includes the ancient cultures of Egypt, India, China, and Mesopotamia.  It is because of this that astrology and such things are north-biased.  The stars that are visible from the southern hemisphere are different from those that make up what most humans call the Zodiac and were one of the reasons ancient sea-faring humans understood the Earth is a sphere.)  Fall and Winter were times where the Sun’s living force diminished.  In Spring and Summer the Sun’s energies were in full power. 

Our recent ancestors did not know of the procession of the stars, something that occurs because our Earth is not only rotating, but also wobbling in space.  Our ancient forebears knew better.  Before around 14,000 years ago, the Spring equinox Sun would rise in the constellation of Taurus, or the Bull, and the Egyptians would sacrifice the apis Bull on that date, signaling the new year.   For the past few thousands of years, the Spring Sun rises in Aries, or the Ram.  On the Spring Equinox, Christians celebrate the death and resurrection of Christ, a stand-in for the Sun in its yearly journey.  Ancient Hebrews would sacrifice lambs, and the Christ is symbolized by the ‘Lamb” for this very reason.  In a few thousand years, the Spring Sun will rise in Aquarius and humanity’s gods will be altered to match.  Each human culture shared this information through their myths and legends.  Ancient stories of Heracles/Hercules were poetic representations of the Sun’s path through the constellations each year.   Each of his Labors correspond to a different constellation.  Dupuis describes this in depth, even explaining how the ancient poets included stars adjacent to the constellation in the epics, disguised but understandable to those with astronomical knowledge. 

Other of our collective human myths are analyzed by Dupuis, each one shown to be a poetic and allusion-filled description of the path of our Sun as it rises in front of a different constellation each month.  From the ancient Vedas of East Asia, to the Osiris myths of Egypt, to the Dionysian myths of the Mediterranean, to the Zoroastrian founding myths, all are shown to be, at their core, astronomical in nature.  He shows how every religion’s main stories come from an attempt to explain the workings of the Heavens, with each god, all the way up to Jesus, being a stand-in for our beneficent and all-powerful Sun, the true life-giver of our world.

It is this idea that is the basis for the main thrust of this work.  Charles-François Dupuis had grand goals when he set out to write this book.  He wanted to provide clear and irrefutable evidence that the many man-made religions and cults that exist in our history took as their basis either a willful or an ignorant misunderstanding of what the ancient poets wrote in the legends.  The genius of our ancient sages lay in the ability to describe the world around them in a way that could be transmitted and repeated by oral means.  These stories eventually became codified by scribes writing in clay or papyrus. 

Dupuis points out one thing that corrupts ancient wisdom.  As long as there have been humans, there have been some among us who seek to increase their wealth and/or power by using our collective knowledge to control and train the rest of us.  These are the sacerdotal classes; whether shamans, rabbis, magi, or priests, and their sole reason for existence is to create the illusion that they are the only ones capable to providing a lowly human with the divine truths.  Before priests, all humans were equally informed and aware of these universal truths.  The Sun provides warmth and life.  The Earth completes a full cycle every year.  Winter is followed by spring is followed by summer, etc.  We are all part of the whole.  The sun is divine.  We, like all life, contain a piece of the divine within us, and when we die, that energy will dissolve back into the universe.  This used to be basic wisdom, sacred wisdom, showing the interconnectedness of everything in creation.  The ancients did not differentiate between good things and bad things.  Anything and everything could be either, at any time, depending on how and who was utilizing it.  Our living spark comes from the Sun and returns to the Sun after death.

Before priests and the sacerdotal classes could use the old wisdom to control the people something else had to happen.  This is something that is hard to pin down, but Dupuis has done a masterful job of it.  The ancient oral wisdom, allegories meant to provide information about the heavens and the yearly cycles began then to be interpreted in non-allegorical ways.  Instead of understanding that the heroes of myth, Osiris, Heracles, were stand-ins for the mighty and all-powerful Sun, “wise men” began to postulate that they were real, actual people, humans who had lived and been so inspired as to become like gods themselves.  A second and critical jump was the dogmatic assertion that, since the Sun/God was all good, there are things in the universe that are all-bad.  They created polar enemies, Ormuzd and Ahriman, Jehovah and Satan, to foster the lie that the universe is a constant battle between that which is good, and that which is evil.  Of course, the priests/rabbis/cult leaders/shamans/gurus were the only ones among us all to know the “true path” to divinity, and to avoid eternal damnation.  It is the oldest grift in the world, to demand that someone behave as you ask in life, while promising riches and peace in death, promises they know they cannot deliver.  In this manner, all form of religion manages to leech the wealth and riches of the populace, continuing to this very day.  Most religions seem to think the living Earth is a pit of despair, abounding in horrors, and that the only true life is the “eternal” life that they promise after death.  This is a sick and twisted view, directly opposite of the wisdom our ancient ancestors tried to impart.

One of the beautiful things about this book is how Dupuis shows respect and admiration for the ancient sage poets that initially composed the solar myths we have all worshipped and fed off of for millennia. Their ability to describe, in poetic form, the passage of our Sun around the zodiac, is just one of the many bits of knowledge the ancients wished to pass down.  Many secret societies teach how to read these old myths, how to understand the scientific and natural wisdom the ancients hoped to pass on.  This was something of the reason why the Templars, Freemasons, and other such societies are viewed as a threat by the church. Who knows how much more the ancients knew?  Modern humans, Homo Sapiens Sapiens, have been around for somewhat over 100,000 years.  The genus Homo Sapiens itself, has been around for over 1,000,000 years.  The ancients seemed to understand this, many of them describing the great circumnavigations, whether labeled ages or Vedas that the world lives through, each covering tens of thousands of our years.  This was not idle fiction.  They wrote about it to share it with us, thousands of years later, the cyclical nature of existence.  It is Dupuis contention that these legends and myths have everything to offer us today, if only they could be divorced from the religions formed to use the ancient wisdom to take advantage of us, keeping them rich, fat, and comfortable, while they preach abstinence, austerity, and forgiveness.

This work was completed around the time when modern humans started to ignore myth and legend to instead focus on industrial and material matters.  The American Revolution had helped overthrow the ancient and false idea of the Divine Right of kings, and the French revolution tried to free the nation from the king and the powers of the Roman Catholic Church.  The Church has engaged in mass murder and genocide in France many times, seeking to exterminate any enclaves of what they termed “heretics.”  These were the initial freethinkers, dangerous to the status quo of a massive church, wealthier and more powerful than any single nation on Earth.  Dupuis stood for all of us when he wrote this work.  The Church has killed writers and philosophers for far less.

I am so glad I found this book.  It came at the right time, which is one of the magical things about books.  Sometimes, the exact book you need to read will come into your life.  Twenty years ago I would not have managed to complete this book, much less grok the immensity of its scope.  Dupuis truly is one of the greats, a hero to freethinkers and a bright guidepost to anyone seeking understanding of our deep mythical past.

(This book can be downloaded as a PDF here: http://iapsop.com/ssoc/1872__dupuis___origin_of_all_religious_worship.pdf )

C.F. Volney Shared the Truth With Us Over Two Centuries Ago

 

The Ruins: Or, Meditation on the Revolution of Empires and the Law of Nature – C.F. Volney (1890)

SUN RA Reading List

            Every once in a while I come across a book that not only explores specific topics I am very interested in, but whose author has already processed the information available and reached conclusions that mirror my very own, even if it is an author writing almost a century before I was born.  I love the magic of literature!  Such is the case with Constantin-Francois Chassebeuf De Volney’s The Ruins, a dense and insightful work.

            Count Volney was a lifelong learner, seeking to find the truth.  He spent his youth learning classic languages, reading, and studying.  Once he entered adulthood, he learned Arabic and proceeded to travel to the parts of the world which, at the time, were forgotten and ignored.  He gazed upon the ancient marvels, mostly covered by desert sands, and thought hard about the cultures and people that created such wonders.  It led him to insights that are as valuable today as ever.

            Volney’s journey began in the Ottoman Empire, through areas that are now Syria and Egypt.  Everywhere he went he saw desolation, ruin, and human suffering.  He noted people living barely better than ancient tribal man did.  Upon exploring the ancient sepulchers of Egypt, a revelation occurred, and he asked himself questions that led to the creation of this work. 

“How has so much glory been eclipsed?” 

“How have so many labors been annihilated?”

            Volney asked himself how the works of man perish, empires vanish, and cultures and empires become lost into the mists of time.  Every ancient kingdom and culture he had studied was gone, with many of them forgotten by the world at large.  One large thought that occurred to him, living in the time of Christian nations, was that every one of these ancient and magnificent empires were peopled with what his contemporaries would describe as heretics, infidels, heathens of the worst type.  None of them followed the tenets of Christianity, yet their splendor outshone modern Christian nations.  It made little sense to him that, in the same lands that heathens created high culture and architecture, modern Muslims, Christians and Hebrews barely eked a subsistence. 

            Volney then spends time remembering his France, and Europe, which at the time considered themselves the heights of culture and sophistication.  He remembered the beauty of Parisian streets, and then thought about the far future, where the wonders of his age would be but dust-filled ruins, and all the beauty would be lost forever.  This is a sobering thought, and something that most people never consider.  Most people live their lives as if the present world will remain unchanging for all time, and are then shocked when the changes come.

            The bulk of The Ruins proceeds like a conversation between Volney himself, and an apparition that speaks to him, which Volney calls the Genius, as he gazes on the destroyed temples and buildings of ancient cultures.  This Genius hears Volney’s anguish about humanity’s past and proceeds to explain exactly how man has fallen low and the reasons why.   The Genius patiently explains the ancient history of humanity, the rise from base animal nature to consciousness.   He talks about how humanity first understood the world, Nature, as a thing external to himself.  He then proceeds to detail how this leads to every single theological idea we are all still fighting and killing each other over.

            Each chapter title describes the contents therein, such as The Primitive State of Man, The Sources of Evil in Society, The Origin of Government and Laws, The General Causes of the Revolutions and Ruins of Ancient States, to The Lessons of Times Past Repeated on The Present.  These topics are explored as the Genius describes the development of humanity.

            The second half of The Ruins is even more mind-blowing, as the Genius lifts Volney up and away, to heights where he can see the whole Earth both past and future.  He describes the various religious groups and sects gathering from all the world to listen to the Genius.  The Genius proceeds to question each group as to their beliefs.  It points out the many ways that the core beliefs of each religion get quickly buried under dogma, priesthoods, and the endless bickering of mortal man.  Each religion ends up in actuality directly opposite of the tenets they claim to preach.  One example, which applies to most religions, is this – God is unknowable, and all encompassing.  Instead of acting upon this Truth, every single Religion constantly seeks to tell their followers exactly what “god” is thinking, what “god” likes, what “god” does not like, etc., all in an effort to control the people.  They seek to diminish their “all-knowing” god with every proclamation and decree of dogma their followers must subscribe to, or else the “god” will send them to hell for eternal punishment.

            After doing so, the Genius then starts to get to basics, asking how the humans determine truth, and how, most of their religious beliefs are not based on truth but on human extrapolation and assumptions, all leading down a path away from the actual truth.  The way that religions warp their initial truths is near universal, especially once a governing power sees how easily religion can be used to control the actions of the populace.  The initial, ancient human “religions” were nothing more than the then-current descriptions of the natural world around them, especially the heavens which were cyclical, and whose close study allowed early humans to understand the coming of the seasons, the path of our Sun through the sky, and the cycles that are created.  These ancient humans did not have telescopes or scientific instruments as we possess today, but their observations alone were invaluable.  These observations, written in the poetic language of their time, were then misinterpreted by later generations who read their symbolism and, like simple-mined folk everywhere, took them literally.  This section of The Ruins is perfect for a student of comparative religion like myself.

            One of the coolest anecdotes about The Ruins is that, as the original is in French, the English translation came from the hand of Thomas Jefferson, that eminent Freethinker and U.S.A. “Founding Father.”  He managed to translate around 4/5 of it, and it must have been truly a dangerous proposition to do so.  In the late 1700’s the Roman Catholic Church still controlled much of the western world’s religious ideas, and to have this book available in English must have been a threat.  Parts of it were left untranslated for this very reason.  For every truth any religion claims, they force upon their followers a thousand lies.  These lies take over, and force the various Christian factions to war against each other, or the various Muslim factions to war against each other.  They especially force one Religion to fight against the others, as all of them claim they are the One True Faith, instead of recognizing that the core tenets and foundations of all religious belief are simple, common to all, and universal in every sense.  I highly recommend this book.

(This book can be read or downloaded for free here: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/1397/1397-h/1397-h.htm )

Humanity Creates Gods and Demons Alike

 

Demonology and Devil-Lore – Moncure Daniel Conway (1879)

           

            For someone like me who loves to read older books the Project Gutenberg website is a gold mine.  It allows me to discover thinkers and writers otherwise lost to me.  Sometimes I have heard mention of the authors or their works.  Oftentimes I have not.  Either way I love digging through their archives.  This is how I came across Moncure Daniel Conway’s “Demonology and Devil-Lore,” an amazingly rich book that has captured my mind for the past weeks.  This book traces the development of the demons and devils that have plagued human religious thought since before the advent of writing.  In doing so, it explores much of our past, our collective fears, and the many ways that gods become demons as one culture/religion usurps another.

            Initially, humanity feared everything.  Mother Nature was brutal, harsh, unsparing, and sought to destroy early man at every turn.  Humanity sought to placate Nature, even before we invented gods.  The tribe reinforced personal rites and superstitions.  In this ancient estimation of Nature, there was no “Good” or “Evil” as we think of them today.  The earliest revelation of humanity was the knowledge that to stay alive means killing other living things.  Primitive man saw evidence of this constantly.  There was no favored species.  All things suffered the wrath of a hurricane, or a wildfire, or a volcano's eruption.  All creatures had to kill to stay alive.  Conway shows how this initial metaphysical idea is found in the early passages of Genesis, in the parable of man gaining the knowledge of Good and Evil.  Before humans had that knowledge, they existed in the state I described above.  It was a huge metaphysical leap for early humans to understand that some things can be seen as only Good and some seen as only Evil.  From there, it was a small step to imagine that offerings or sacrifices would appease the Evil and please the Good.  It was in this stage of humanity that we began to codify specific things as Demons.

            Conway describes Demons as initially being personifications of destructive force in the world around us.  They were the flip-side of the wonder that humans felt when they looked at the beautiful Earth and the heavens above.  The very earliest religious texts we have, the Vedas of Southeast Asia, speak in simple terms of how the Creator brought forth all that is good and all that is evil.  The Creator brought forth all that is joyful as well as all that is painful.  It took a long time, and a period of intellectual maturation, for humanity to split evil from the Creator, and to assign the source of evil to an entirely malicious entity.  Zoroastrian belief, a very ancient religion, shows the next step.  In Zoroastrian thought, there are two equal and opposing forces created at the beginning of time.  Light eternally battles Darkness.  Good eternally battles Evil.  Only later did these personifications receive proper names, and humans given their role in the entire process, which is to strive for Good to defeat eventually the forces of Evil in the world, creating everlasting peace and harmony.  This is the next level of theological thought humans achieved.

            Once humans saw the Universe around them as a battleground between the forces of Light and the forces of Darkness, as stated in the text by Conway, “Man found that in the earth good things came with difficulty, while thorns and weeds sprang up everywhere.  The Evil powers seemed to be the strongest.”  Even the greatest deity, the Sun itself, could burn you, kill you, and wither your life away.  The whole world was divided into realms controlled by individual malicious entities, whence came storm gods, water gods, mountain gods, etc.  Early sacrifices and offerings were not given to the “good” spirits” but to the “bad” ones.  It was the bad spirits that needed placating, whether this was in the form of an offering meant to keep evil away, or a sacrifice intended to send evil to an enemy instead of one’s family/tribe.  One tribe’s gods became another tribe’s demons.  This has continued until the present day.

            For example, one of the earliest names for the glory of the Sun was Baal.  Once sun-worship became outdated, and prayers to the Sun forbidden, the god Baal was converted into the demon Baal-zebub, a personification of the power of the Sun to rot things, and bring forth clouds of maggots and flies.  In the interim, Baal-zebub combined both of these traits.   As most old religions, including the Hebrew faith, did not have a need for an Evil One, their gods embodied both Good and Evil traits, such as the Jehovah of the Old Testament who not only saves the Jews, but kills thousands of first-born children, drowns Pharaoh’s army in the Red Sea, destroys whole cities (Sodom, Gomorrah), etc. The Hebrew Jehovah is an old god, raised to primacy by the Hebrews from a pantheon of pre-existing deities.

            Conway discusses how early humans saw the world as haunted by demons way before they assigned specific moral qualities to those very demons.  Early demons behaved like a ravenous tiger, who kills and eats because it is in his nature, not because he is “bad.”  They were not judged in the manner that modern Christians seek to judge what they see as demons.  Instead, these demons were appeased, praised, and sacrificed to but never ignored.  The history of humanity shows evidence that one generation’s gods become degraded until they are seen as the next generation’s demons. 

            For example, In the Old Testament the Hebrews are spoken of as setting an offering to a deity named Azazel (meaning “Strength of God”) as well as to Jehovah.  Jehovah was just one of a pantheon of gods back then.  Only through endless repetition and the “refinement” of religion by priests did Jehovah become THE GOD, the one and only that exists (at least for the Hebrews.)  As time passed, Azazel was seen as a powerful Demon, an enemy of Jehovah.  In fact, the Hebrew myths mention four arch-demons, Azazel, Samael, Asael, and Maccathiel, which originally represented four aspects of the divine Creator.  As stated above, Azazel was the “strength of god,” Samael meant “the left hand of god,” Asael was god’s reproductive force, and Maccathiel was god’s retributive power.   For the past few thousand years, these four have been seen as some of the mightiest of demons.  This is how gods, or the personifications of a god, degrade and eventually turn into demons.

            Conway explores so much that it is difficult to discuss it all.  One of the critical points he makes is the difference between the idea of Demons, and the idea of a Devil.  Demons are the personification of malevolent forces that assail humans and animals alike.  They are not moral, and they are countered by proper sacrifice or incantation.  Conway details the earliest demons, those of Hunger, Heat, Cold, the Elements, and Animals, as those were the very first deep fears in early man.  As we developed socially and intellectually, the demons became more specific, such as those of Illusion, Darkness, Disease, and Death itself.  Conway explores each type and their development in their own chapter.  Very cool.

The Devil however, is a much later development in the theological life of humanity.  The Devil is specifically an adversary to the Creator, who actively seeks to undermine and destroy the Creator’s good work (i.e. the divine soul of humans).  In many cases, humans ascribe the Devil more power than that of the Creator, at least on Earth itself.  Once the idea of a Devil was loosed upon the world, humans began to imagine the world itself as a fully evil, sinful, corrupt place.  The Earth and everything on it, ruled by the Devil himself, exists solely to test whether humans can survive with their divine souls intact.  If successful, when they die, they end up joining all that is good in heaven and leaving behind the carnal, sinful world of flesh and bone.  Many humans today live in this theological world.  From this came the idea that detachment from worldly pleasures is a good thing, instead of worldly pleasures being something gifted to us by the Creator.  All the good and beautiful in the world, from food to sex to beauty itself, is a temptation used by the devil to corrupt our souls.  Once the Devil was in charge of the Earth, his powers grew exponentially, until every manner of bad luck and evil was blamed on Satan himself.

            Moncure Daniel Conway details everything he discusses.  He delves into the way that spiritual/religious beliefs of the populace tend to help everyone get along, and provide them with purpose and meaning, until a priest/sacerdotal group decides to take over and dictate what the tribe/group is supposed to believe.  This has occurred through all of our time on this planet.  Whether it was the shaman who relied on handouts from the village to procure his services, the rabbi who dictated who was Hebrew and worthy of Jehovah and who was not, or the priest that “explained” exactly what the Bible stated whether or not the congregation felt or believed otherwise.  Those same people gained incredible power, luxury, and prestige from their subjugation of our collective human beliefs.  They still sit in the lap of luxury, castigating us for being sinners; all the while, they commit the most heinous acts of torture, sexual abuse, outright theft, and moral degradation imaginable.  They claim to know who the demons and the Devils are, always hiding their own flawed humanity behind the veil of organized religion.  Conway hated those bastards so much.  I am eternally thankful that I found this book and this author, another intellectual hero to add to my ever-growing list.  I highly recommend this book to anyone seeking to understand how humans have created their gods and demons, and how we continue to do so today.

(This book can be downloaded here: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/40686 )

A Deep Dive Into Humanity's Progress Towards Freedom of Thought and True Liberty

 

A History of Freedom of Thought – J.B. Bury (1914)

            Sometimes a book magically appears to feed your mind.  This is one such book.  After absorbing the latest entry off of Sun Ra’s Reading List (The Loom of Language – Frederick Bodmer) I found this comprehensive yet succinct treatise on the history of humanity’s desire for freedom of thought, where it arose, and the many ways that our societies and governments have tolerated or crushed those seeking the right to believe and discuss what they want.  J.B. Bury’s book should be required reading in any High School history classroom.

As with many of the ideas we consider modern, the acceptance of freedom of thought and speech began in the ancient city-states that eventually coalesced into what we today call Greece.  There are several reasons why this area of the world was conducive to the exploration of ideas and the questioning of established thought.  One of the most important is that the people of Greece did not answer to an unimpeachable higher authority.  Greece did not have a “bible” that purported to be the very word of their gods.  Instead, they understood, as a culture and society, that religious thoughts and ideas are both personal and ever-changing.  The rise of Philosophy and Science (Natural Philosophy) in Greece resulted from this openness to ideas.  As the Greeks did not have to force their views and experiences to match what some holy book said, they were free to explore both the internal nature of humanity and the external natural world around them.  This freedom came at a price, for while the powerful in Greece did not punish blasphemy or heresy, they did punish anyone who they felt was “corrupting” the minds of others, especially young people.  Instead of punishing someone for blasphemy, they instead punished him or her for impiety (meaning they were rude to the religious thoughts that the State considered correct).  In this manner they railroaded Socrates.  Socrates crime was that he asked too many questions, not only about religion, but also about how religion is used by the state to enforce its own agendas.  They executed this great man for a purely bullshit crime, that of “failing to acknowledge the gods that the city acknowledges" and "introducing new deities.”  Pathetic.

Even through suppression, the ideals of Greece and freedom of thought continued in Rome, which sought to base its better qualities on the previous Greek civilization they so admired.  Rome was a different monster though.  The powerful in Rome were mostly irreligious but they would display outward signs of piety in order to rise in their respective fields.  They saw religion as mainly a means of controlling the subordinate population, who they believed too dumb to be good, moral people without the guidance of religion and priests.  Because of this, they allowed free speech and free thought, as long as it did not impede with the powerful Roman’s control of their compatriots.  The moment anyone sought to teach the so-called ignorant masses about this, they were suppressed.  A great example of this is the rise of the Christian church.

People forget that, for the first hundred or so years, the Jewish sect called Christianity was strictly an apocalyptic cult. They saw the world as ending imminently and that Jesus would be back to whup that sinner ass.  While there were many such end-times cults around the Roman Empire, the reason the Christian cult was perceived as a threat was that they were the first to proselytize widely.  While the Hebrew religion also taught that there was one god, and that other gods were false, they did not seek to spread their religion.  Hebrews were born to other Hebrews.  They did not seek to convert anyone.  This reduced the level of threat felt by the Romans, as they knew they could out-breed anyone.  However, the Christian sect that spawned off Judaism actively sought converts of all types, both Jewish and gentile.  (This is one of the reasons that Jesus was killed by the tag-team of Roman government and rabbinical leadership.  Romans did not like that Jesus preached ending subservience to the state, and the rabbis did not appreciate that Jesus taught non-Jews what was seen as purely Jewish wisdom.  Neither liked that Jesus preached that loyalty to state and family and established religion was a sin if it came between one’s loyalties to god.- RXTT)

So, Jesus was executed.  For the next few hundred years there was very little persecution of Christians, until a Roman emperor sought to make an example of them as he tried to force the old Roman religion down everyone’s throats as the officially sanctioned state religion.  Just a century later, a Roman emperor proclaimed himself a Christian, ending the persecutions, but beginning the rise of state-sanctioned Christianity, and the Holy Roman Catholic Church.  In what seems ironic, but is merely stupid, the very same Christianity became the state’s tool by which to control the populace, and bring to an almost complete halt the advancement of freethought, science, and philosophy.  For hundreds and hundreds of years, much of Europe became a stagnant, ignorant cesspool of political/religious tyranny.  Any idea or thought that seemed to contradict the supposedly correct and inviolable contents of the Bible was suppressed in the most violent manner.  Christian states and the Roman Catholic Church murdered and tortured hundreds of thousands of people in the name of their religion.  The Holy Inquisition, which took place throughout Europe, even though we are taught it was a Spanish thing, brought the most gruesome and sadistic terror that the world had yet to see.  Not only were non-believers targeted but anyone who espoused Christian beliefs different from what Rome proclaimed as true was at risk.  Whole populations of people were exterminated because the local leaders had different views on the “truths” forced upon them by the Roman Catholic Church.  It was genocide on a continental level.

Luckily the Greek ideals of freethought and philosophy were kept alive in the Ottoman empire.  The modern world owes so much to the Muslims that preserved the Greek writers and continued to advance the sciences of Astronomy, Mathematics, and Philosophy.  It was their translations that made their way into Europe in the mid 1400’s and sparked up the rebirth of rationalism and enlightenment we now call the Renaissance.  The inevitable breakup of monolithic Catholicism during the Reformation helped a bit, but mainly just ushered a new era where Protestant Christians murdered and brutalized Catholic Christians, just as they had been brutalized initially.  Shit don’t change.  It stays shit.  People were now executed for being Papists.  When a Catholic took over a country, like what happened in England under Bloody Mary, the persecutions and murder of Protestants began again.

            J.B. Bury wrote this small book in the first decade of the 20^th century, ahead of the rise of fascist totalitarian states in Europe.  These states, such as Germany, had initially provided so many of the eminent thinkers that espoused freethought, and the Liberty which is to be gained by all of us for allowing all people the right to think and voice their opinions without threat of blasphemy or sedition.  J.B. Bury warned that, although Enlightenment ideals and rational thought had become the norm in Europe in the late 1800’s, it was a tentative victory, for tyrants and idiots everywhere will always seek to shut down voices and ideas they feel are detrimental to their own personal and political agendas.  I wonder how Mr. Bury, who passed away in 1927, would have reacted to the rise of totalitarian states in Germany, Spain, Italy, Romania, etc.  I believe his heart would have broken to see humanity take such a step backwards, and to see the horrors wrought by these fascist assholes upon the world.

Nothing enrages me as much as willful ignorance.  The worst type of willful ignorance is when freedom of speech is denied in order to protect a state-sanctioned religion, for this affects everyone.  For your “beliefs” to be so fragile that you must suppress opposing views shows how truly baseless your “beliefs” are.  It also shows exactly why those “beliefs” exist, namely, for use in controlling or subjugating any and every person who chooses to believe otherwise.  This is the way of the world.  It is plain to see for anyone who chooses to study history and the rise and fall of states, religious beliefs, and state-sanctioned religions.  Anyone seeking to assert the human right of Freethought is an enemy to tyrannical states. (A minor example- this very book review blog was blocked in China about 3 months into its existence.  China does not like giving their citizens freedom to read what they want - RXTT) 

I feel this book is even more valuable today as state-sanctioned totalitarianism and tyranny are on the rise in supposedly progressive and freedom-loving nations such as the UK and the USA.  Instead of a secular government set up to protect and nourish its citizenry, allowing them to choose whatever religion they feel is right for them, or no religion if they so choose, we are sliding into quasi-religious government inflicting their personal beliefs on the entire population, regardless of personal choice.  The only way to fight this is with education, which is why the ignorant tyrants seek to control state school boards all over the United States.  When beliefs instead of facts direct the path of government, we end up eroding Liberty at its core. This is the main reason freedom of thought, and everything that comes with it, is the most important human right.

(This book can be read/downloaded for free: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/10684 )

Joseph McCabe Lets Us See the Crap Underneath the Spiritualist Religion

Is Spiritualism Based on Fraud? : The Evidence Given by Sir. A.C. Doyle and Others Drastically Explained – Joseph McCabe (1920)

           

            (EDIT - For those not aware, the Spiritualist religion was one that began in 1844 in middle america, when two young sisters fooled their family into thinking ghosts were making noises in their home.  Their older sister decided to make money off of this and spread the lies that the younger sisters could communicate with the dead and that the dead replied back.  Before that time, most people in the United States held the idea that "spirits" were more like after images of past lives, and not actually dead souls actively coming to hang out with us.  Within 20 years there were over a million adherents to this new fraud, and the "ghosts" developed more skills.  No longer were they content to "rap" or make knocking noises, but instead they moved items, played ghostly instruments, and eventually actually "appeared" as ectoplasmic ghosts. (the use of cheesecloth and phosphorus was widespread, not to mention that seances "had to" be held in near or total darkness. Believers excused all the trickery and fraudulent crap, usually by stating that true mediums had to cheat sometimes because the "skeptic" had scared off the actual spirits... PATHETIC.)

*****

              Joseph McCabe has been one of my intellectual heroes since I discovered his amazing book, The Story of ReligiousControversy.  His deeply rational and analytical mind stripped away everything the Roman Catholic Church indoctrinated him with as a Priest, and having left the church, he proceeded to prodigiously write books, pamphlets, and essays on the whole sordid history of the Roman Catholic Church, science, free-thought, and in this particular book, the ideas and claims made by the Spiritualist religion that began in the United States in the 1840’s when a trio of sisters flim-flammed everyone around them into believing that the noises they made when they cracked their toe-knuckles were actually “rapports” from the spirit world.  Between that time, and the date that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (he of Sherlock Holmes fame) and Joseph McCabe debated Spiritualism on stage, the “religion” had grown to include over a million adherents in the USA alone, each of them convinced that the dead’s “spirit” could be called upon to manifest itself, and communicate, when a “gifted” medium used his/her powers to call them forth.

            The occasion that led to this book was a very public debate between Joseph McCabe, speaking for the rationalists, and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the doctor and author who gave the world Sherlock Holmes, Dr. Watson, and the idea of the innately rational mind being utilized to solve otherwise baffling crimes.  Holmes, and A.C. Doyle by extension, have always been important figures in my life, so when I found out as a young man that this seemingly strict rationalist was duped by terribly faked fairy pictures, and the séance fraternity’s long-running cons, excusing endless examples of fraud and outright criminality right until his death, I was a bit distraught.  It was not until I read up on the later lives of many scientists and people of reason that I began to see the pattern.  These rational people, as they get older and older, find comfort in the thoughtless void that is religious worship and especially, paranormal spiritualism.  Even Isaac Newton found himself frustrated by his late attempts to create truly scientific alchemy. 

            Joseph McCabe does a great job of dividing this book into various sections, each devoted to explicit examples and proof of the inherent fraud and ill-intent behind those who seek to dupe bereaved and emotionally troubled people.  He covers the initial phenomena, raps, noises, and voices, and then goes on to cover apparitions (most of them were pieces of cloth soaked in phosphorus and then waved about in a dark room), magic writing, clairvoyance, and all the other methods used by these con-artists to fool the sitter into thinking they had experienced true contact with the dead spirits. 

The lengths that these crooks did and do go to in order to fleece the suckers is VAST. Even back in 1910, there already existed companies whose secret catalogues would allow a crook to order “magic” typewriters that would type by themselves, musical instruments that would play themselves, and items of clothing and hair pieces that could be used to conceal whatever the supposed spiritualist wanted to.  The same companies that made tricks for working magicians supplied and continue to supply these fortune tellers and mystics with the tools of their corrupt trade.  As described in another book I reviewed which discusses the lies of the fortune teller business, each of these “mediums” would hoard information and newspaper clippings, sharing these with each other from city to city and state to state, allowing these mediums to seemingly grab knowledge about their sitters out of thin air.  It is all a very calculated confidence game, and they have been working out the kinks for 180 years now.  With today’s internet and connected networks, these bastards have it even easier.  (To read a more modern account of the tricks and lies these criminals use, check out The Psychic Mafia )

Whereas, back in 1900, a medium would cold-read you for a few minutes, and ask you to come back in a week, “when the spirit guides are more ready to talk,” (allowing the medium and their cronies a chance to do research on the sitter’s life, family, business, etc.) these days they can do the exact same research on a potential sucker in 15 minutes online.  Of course, the sitter is always astounded that the medium could know such information!  The scary thing is that debunkers have constantly proven these “psychics” and “mediums” to be wholesale frauds.  Many of them have gone to jail after being proven fraudulent, only to return to their same fame afterwards, suckering bereaved people and stealing their money.  Believers do not want to hear the truth.  They just want to hear what makes their thoughts seem like the truth.  Self-delusion is ugly.

I highly recommend this book, as it not only provides amazing information, but it also lists various other cool resource books on this topic.  I bet most of those are out of print, but I just love finding new books to track down.  I wonder if Mr. Joseph McCabe would be surprised to know I am reading his books 100 years later?

(This book can be read for free here: Project Gutenberg )

Hail Eris!

Principia Discordia: or, How I Found the Goddess and What I Did to Her When I Found Her – Malaclypse the Younger, Lord Omar Khayyum Ravenhurst (1965)

            HAIL ERIS!  May the Golden Apple of Discord fall upon your enemies’ feet and not yours!  Everyone reading this sentence is hereby ordained as a Discordian Pope.  As a Pope, you are entitled to the following privileges:

1.    To invoke infallibility at any time, including retroactively

2.    To completely rework the structure of the Erisian Church

3.    To baptize, bury, and marry (with the permission of the deceased in the latter two cases)

4.    To excommunicate yourself and others

5.    To de-excommunicate yourself and others

6.    To re-excommunicate yourself and others.

7.    To de-re-excommunicate (no backsies) yourself and others

8.    To perform all rites and functions deemed to be improper to a Pope of Discordia.

There you have it folks.  If that is not enough for you then you are the problem, fnord.

“In conclusion, there is no conclusion.  Things go on as they always have, getting weirder all the time” – Robert Anton Wilson

The above quote is from RAW’s introduction to the Principia Discordia.  All Hail Discordia!

            I first read this book, this greatest of all books ever written or conceived, when I was a student at the University of Houston.  It made me think and laugh, and opened my eyes to the fnords all around us.  Re-reading this, I find it even funnier and more full of wisdom than ever!  Hail Eris!  May the sacred Chao not forsake you from her milky teat.

The Sacred Chao

 

            I have always loved the absurd.  I love the irrational as well as the rational.  I love it when the twisted strands of thought form knots of pure intellectual joy!  The Principia Discordia is chock full of these things and more.  We are all very lucky to exist in a world where Eris rules all, and the gods fear her.

            As a Discordian Pope, I have started several failed religions: The Church of Letterman, The Church of the AlmightyMario, The New Atheist Church, and more.  They failed for the same reason all religions eventually fail.  They were all based on bullshit.  Discordianism, however, is providing you bullshit based on reality!  They have succeeded where others have failed!  Hail Eris!

(This book can be read online here: http://www.principiadiscordia.com/book/1.php )