Blind Man's (Religious) Bluff

From The Deepening Darkness, Patriarchy, Resistance, & Democracy's Future by Carol Gilligan and David A. J. Richards (Cambridge University Press, 2009), we are given this quote on page 106 attributed to Augustine:

"If God had wanted Adam to have a partner in scintillating conversation he would have created another man; the fact that God created a woman showed that he had in mind the survival of the human race." (From his Confessions)

In other words, the only value of a woman is to have babies and no mind is needed for that little chore. Was he a misogynist?

Many of these ideas were finalized as proper, or where deemed appropriate, canonical, after the Council of Nicaea and the next two centuries. It took that long to formalize most of the beliefs that were deemed proper—about five hundred years after Jesus' death. You see, Jesus wasn't said to give any rules for any church, or what rituals to follow other than by his disciples such as the Passover meal. All the rest was made up, mostly by these church fathers and the egotistical, power hungry popes.

Jesus had two commandments, or so they say, and that was to love God with all you... (this is mistranslated according to Joel Hoffman in his book, And God Said, and should be rendered: "...love the Lord your God with all your mind and body..." (Page 123), as well as to love your neighbor as yourself. No mass, no vestments, no incense.

The biggest things that I took from learning about all of this was that almost none of these church fathers read the known scriptures objectively, and didn't see all of the errors that I have pointed out in my essays. They were too busy fighting each other for dominance and position theologically, as well as posturing for primacy, and fighting Gnostics. So much was obviously wrong in how they saw things, what they willy-nilly came up with that they said had to be simply because they thought it was so.

No wonder that I never heard anything about the Church Fathers, that none of the preachers spoke of them. They would have had to face the fact that the final "church" that was created was a literal creation without substance.

The lynchpin that Jesus hooked onto from the book of Daniel, or so they put in his mouth if not really spoken of by Jesus, never came to pass—he, Jesus, never returned as he was supposed to have declared he would about five different times. This the early church never looked at.

What the early church did do was to substitute belief and faith in an obvious lie for the lack of the fact that it never occurred as stated—Jesus never came back as he said he would, or as Paul believed he would.

Worse, for about fifteen hundred years, anywhere the church ruled, people were forced to believe in what they were told to believe. Even the schismatic Protestant movement never questioned the scriptures objectively, nor spoke of the fact that Jesus' return had never happened as he was supposed to have stated that he would. Every book in the Protestant bible is exactly as in the Catholic bible.

Yes, they didn't use all of the books of the Catholic bible, but they had no original or different books. They only shook off some of the rituals of Catholicism. To make matters worse, they also adopted the right to "coerce" those in their purview to accept their new teachings, few though they were. Even wars were fought between Catholic and Protestant believers.

All for a church that was "created" out of almost whole cloth.

And now those that still adhere to the false teachings of those churches are still trying to coerce the public in our United States and say that same-sex marriage is not to be allowed because if it against their created-by-men belief in a bible that is error filled. They are continuing the same mistakes that the early church fathers committed in trying to force their own ideas of what God is supposed to be, and what God is supposed to want for us all, and their god of the bible is wholly man-made.

Putting belief aside, there is none that can refute these words. That being the case, there is no reason why any should say that there is a god that prohibits same-sex marriage, or love between two women being wrong. In the days of old as I've stated here, they fought over personal ideas of what God was and what God was to be. Today they fight over whether evolution is true, some even that the world is not spherical but flat, or that the world is only six to then thousand years old because that's what they think the bible says.

The Fundamentalists are making the same errors as those early church fathers: they're not looking at whether or not the scriptures they are true or if they have errors in them, they just blindly believe and try to make everyone else believe without checking them out objectively.

Some things never change. It's still blind men, though willfully so, trying to coerce others to follow their blind lead. If they're so blinded, what does that say about other religions. Extrapolate that for yourselves.

As the words that Jesus is supposed to have said: "And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free." (Gospel according to John, chapter 8, verse 32) This can be so if you will accept facts and refuse to believe what is told that is not fact.

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From the book, "And God Said" by Dr. Joel M. Hoffman (Thomas Dunne books, St. Martin's Press, 2010) wherein he talks about the difficulty of translating Hebrew scriptures into English, we are told in part: "...Hebrew goes something like this: The language was spoken in and around Jerusalem during the first millennium B.C. and for the first seventy years of the first millennium A.D. ... Aramaic and other languages quickly replaced Hebrew as the spoken language of the Jews." (Page 26)

Previously he had also said (page 19): "If we have a guess about what an ancient Hebrew word means, in the end it will always be a guess. Hopefully it will be an educated guess—one in which we have a lot of confidence, and that is almost certainly correct—but as with any other endeavor, it's hard to know with any absolute certainty that we have not made a mistake."

* * * *

Lynchpins! Out of a people whose leaders were desperate to hold together their sense of being a people unto themselves and not fall into the oblivion that is the fate of extinction as so many other peoples have succumbed, they created a religion.

Out of that religion came a zealousness that soon had them again needing a lynchpin to hold them together came the book of Daniel and the new idea of a resurrection to give the Jews a new hope for something special to keep them together—they were god's chosen people, weren't they? And he would not forget or forsake them, would he? Of course not. But what the Seleucid rule couldn't force on them, the Romans did, and they were dispersed once and for all.

Out of that came a new person who was thrust into the mix though he was dead, and they conflated him with the resurrection promised by the book of Daniel. They hooked him, Jesus, to Daniel and the resurrection of the dead, but it went awry. He promised many times to return before his generation was out. That didn't happen.

Not to be deterred, a new group of Jews took up the call for the modified religion of the Jews, and kept the lynchpin of the resurrection, but altered it to come sometime in the future, never mind what Jesus promised—yet what else he supposedly promised was used to create a new religion based on salvation and their altered promise of a resurrection.

Now the lies have come home to roost in our day and on our society. Will their enforced "kindness" and "coercion" where needed continue to rule our society? They can't burn us "heretics" here, but...

* * * *

Patriarchy is alive and well in most of our Christian churches, as well as in other religions. The bastion of equality has been America, then Europe joined in too, and maybe surpassed us in so many ways. This month, April, 2015, our Supreme Court is to take up whether we are really equal, at least enough to marry whatever person we say we love regardless of what the bigoted churches and politicians say. Only the truth of the lies coming to the fore can alter their misguided ways.

Fundamentalists, many of them politicians, and even Supreme Court justices, are still blind to the errors of their belief and continue to try to bluff and bluster their beliefs onto the rest of us.

May the Supreme Court choose to follow the Constitution and vote that all are equal under the law, and marriage is a lawful contract insofar as our Constitution goes. Our Constitution is not a religious pact, but in fact calls for the separation of religion from state.

Peace, and much love to those who would love no matter the gender of the one that is loved.

w

PS: "Belongingness is mattering to someone to someone who matters to you." (From Evolving God, by Barbara J. King, Doubleday, 2007) It is the heart that dictates who matters to you enough to want to be with forever, not the churches, and not the state.