The Last Months of Jesus?

Just watched "The Last Days of Jesus" on PBS, a piece of tabloid propaganda by radical Jewish biblical conspiracy theorist Simcha Jacobovici, who sets out in every single thing he creates to "prove" that literally everything about Judaism is true and literally everything about Christianity is fake. He is willing to spin total yarns to "prove" even the most outlandish things to say some Jewish story absolutely happened exactly as it is written, and will go to the same lengths in the opposite direction to paint Jesus as a scheming political opportunist who had children, founded a dynasty in France, died, and rotted in a tomb. It is co-produced by biblical conspiracy theorist James Tabor, who has worked with Jacobovici and naytheist James Cameron before in the past on fantastical tales of biblical revisionism.

The story, like most of the yarns he spins, appears convincing if you don't think about it, but when you apply even the slightest bit of scrutiny it falls apart.

Just one example dismantles the entire central thesis of the program - that Jesus was colluding with Herod Antipas, Pontius Pilate, and Praetoria Prefect Sejanus, in an attempted coup against Tiberius to put Sejanus on the throne of Rome and Herod on the throne of Judea, and to remove Caiaphas from the position as head priest with Jesus taking his place (I kid ye not, that conspiracy theory the central thesis of the program). Allegedly it makes no sense for Jesus to be arrested, tried, and executed in a couple days. That never, ever happened, we are told. It had to take place over six months, because news has to travel across the Mediterranean that Sejaus was executed for treason, which caused Pilate and Antipas to waiver in their scheme. Ten minutes later we are told that Sejanus is arrested, tried for treason, and executed in a single day, as if they hadn't just went to great lengths to explain that these single day show trials never happened and could never happen and that the Gospel accounts had to be wrong.

It also says that the Gospel writers never mentioned Sejanus because "it was extremely dangerous at the time to do so", despite the fact that we know Sejanus existed because at least six contemporaries of the Gospel writers wrote about him. The more likely explanation as to why the Gospel writers don't mention him is because they had no idea who he was because why would they?

The film also includes bull face lies that Jesus was a follower of John the Baptist (he was not), that he took over John the Baptist's movement when John was executed (clearly he did not), that Jesus had no reason to dislike the Pharisees because they all believed in the same things (which they did not), that John the Baptist sprinkled water on people's heads instead of immersing them in water, that first century Jews believed there would be two messiahs* - one a political ruler and one the chief priest.

The film also lies about the Last Supper and even the purpose behind Christianity. They say Jesus wanted us to remember his death, and that this was the foundation of Christianity, when, in truth, it is his resurrection and conquest of death that is the central point of the religion. If Jesus died and rotted in a tomb Christianity would be meaningless and Jesus, who said he would rise again and rise us to eternal life as well, would be a liar. The resurrection IS Christianity. It is the singular event that proves Jesus is who he says he is and that he can free us from sin and death.


*I should point out that the word “messiah” has two different meanings within Judaism, and the producers of this film are suggesting otherwise. The “normal” messiah was any high priest or king who was anointed with holy oil, and even included the gentile Cyrus the Great, who ordered the reconstruction of the Temple in Jerusalem. The Messiah as we know it today, who will appear at the End of Days, descend from the line of David, free the Jews, and preside over the millennial reign was one man who would quite literally appear a the End of Days. There were not going to be two men ruling at the same time, one a priest and one a king, there was just one final liberator of the Jewish people. The confusion arises among people who don't know that the one word can be used in two different ways in two different contexts. The producers of this program are deliberately misleading the public (James Tabor has even written a book offering a different misrepresentation, where Jesus is the king and John the Baptist is the priest!).

Hitler versus Christianity

I've already mentioned that Adolf Hitler was not a Christian. Nor was he an atheist. In fact, he tried to eradicate both Christianity and atheism.

Forgiving Hitler

Forgiveness is the central teaching of Jesus Christ. It is the very heart of the Gospel, and sets Christianity apart from all other religions. Other religions are about rituals or self-perfection. Christianity certainly forces us to look at ourselves and our own flaws, and to improve ourselves, but it does so through forgiving others. We transcend the ego not by reciting a mantra or sitting in silence, but by acting in the world.



Still, people have conflicting problems with forgiveness. There are those people who reject God because they think everyone should be forgiven for everything and Hell should not exist, and there are people on the other end of the spectrum who reject God because of God's forgiveness, believing Hell should be a prison for which all the people they despise are locked away forever. It's just like this pillow which some people dislike for being too firm and other people dislike for not being firm enough.







jezuzfreek777 takes some time to talk about God's limitless love for us and his limitless forgiveness. It is a very good, short video that I highly recommend.

Jesse Duplantis: "Jesus Wants You To Buy Me A Jet"

Jesse Duplantis is a preacher of the "prosperity gospel", which is pretty much the opposite of what Jesus taught. Remember what Jesus actually said:



● "These things I have told you, that in me you might have peace. In the world you will have to suffer, but cheer up, I have overcome the world."
(John 16:33)



● "Sell all that you have and distribute it to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come and follow me." Hearing this the rich young man was deeply troubled and he left. Jesus saw this and said "How hard is it for the rich to enter the kingdom of God! It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God."

(Luke 18:22-25)


The prosperity gospel states that if you pray a whole lot or something then God will give you money and Rolexs and $54 million jets. Mysteriously it only seems to work for the preachers, not the people who attend their seminars, which look more like pep talks than church.



In contrast, Jesus and the Apostles all lived difficult lives, survived through charity, and died violent deaths. The Apostle Paul speaks time and again how he's basically a poor nomad who is constantly being chased out of towns, beaten, starved, and exposed to the elements. He certainly didn't own a jet, or it's first century equivalent, like Caligula had two giant yachts because he didn't want to have orgies with the commoners crossing the Mediterranean. The early church in Jerusalem was sustained by everyone selling their possessions.



Now, 2018, Jesse Duplantis, the serpent, who has already been granted three jets by his gullible audience, "believes" for a brand new jet. He "burned them up for the Lord Jesus Christ", whatever that means. It's clear it doesn't mean the planes have ceased functioning, because he's still flying around in all three. Well now he needs a new one. And not just any jet, a $54 Dassault Falcon 7X, which Jesus specifically told him to get by name. This jet can go anywhere in the world without needing to refuel, because fuel is so expensive (more expensive than a new jet), especially when you own a "fuel farm", which I guess works like a dairy farm only with milking dinosaurs to get oil instead of cows.





From the Google cache of the Washington Times (fuck your ad blocker ban):

Televangelists Kenneth Copeland and Jesse Duplantis defended their use of private jets as a luxury means of travel, arguing that commercial planes are full of “a bunch of demons” that will bog down their busy schedules with prayer requests.



In a Dec. 29 segment of Mr. Copeland’s “Believer’s Voice of Victory” television program, Mr. Duplantis recalled a story where he was on a plane and had to unbuckle his seat belt to speak to God, The Blaze reported.



“You couldn’t have done that over an airline,” added Mr. Copeland. “Stand up and say, ‘What did you say, Lord?’”



“No, sir, no way,” Mr. Duplantis agreed.

"You can't get there from here!" This is the era of fucking Youtube. Astronauts can livestream from space, you don't need a jet to reach an audience physically. I think Jesus would appreciate that, the ability to reach people all over the world instantly.



Kenneth Copeland even says "We're in show business." That's why they need private jets. They're not in the business of saving souls, they're in "show business," which is worse than hooking when it comes to degeneracy.


As if that's not bad enough these Sadducees need to get up in airplanes and stand up and wave their arms to talk to God. God lives way up on the Moon and he can't hear you if you're stuck on the ground. You need to get up in a private jet, in a $50,000 suit with a $20,000 watch, and shout really loud because God is really old so he's hard of hearing.


To top it off they say that airplanes are "tubes filled with demons." Well, if you really are a man of God then exorcise the demons. That's one of the powers the Holy Spirit should have given you if you are legit. No, commercial airlines are not filled with demons, they're filled with regular people who watch your show and pay for your extravagant lifestyle.





No, those airplanes are not filled with demons, these fake preachers are. These are serpents from Hell taking advantage of the poor, the sick, and the despondent. And if there is a God and a Hell these two will burn in the lake of fire.

Healing the Centurion's Servant

Jesus heals the servant of a Roman Centurion with but a command, from the 1977 mini-series Jesus of Nazareth.

Why Does the Bible Mention Unicorns?

I've written about things like dragons and gods before. I was thinking about unicorns and lo and behold found a video on unicorns in the Bible. This video explains what exactly the Bible means when it talks about unicorns, refuting all objections naytheists like to bring up.

God and the Bogey Man

Most people don't understand God. The idea of God within the minds of most people is some super version of the ego (not Freud's super-ego, just the regular ego super-sized). They project their own values onto God, judging reality based on their own preferences. Since reality does not conform to their own preferences, and morality is egocentric, that means God must be an asshole for causing reality to deviate from egocentric morality. If God was good then God would be like Superman.



Super God would automatically intervene in every instance where reality deviates from the preferences of the individual. Super God is the ultimate incarnation of the nanny state. Super God negates all free will because free will implies a freedom to harm others, and if God conformed to individual preferences of egocentric morality then we couldn't have something like that, could we? That's why the robots need to imprison us, because humans are too irresponsible to take care of themselves.






This mistaken view of God as Superman, or Super God, can lead to one of two conclusions for people: atheism, in the form of the problem of evil, or misotheism, the hatred of God.



I've spoken about the problem of evil, or as I call it the non-problem of evil, because I just don't see what the problem is. The real problem is lack of wisdom and maturity (and perhaps imagination) on the part of the person assuming the problem.



We can see a good example of how the idea of God as Superman leads to atheism in Michael Drosnin's book The Bible Code. Michael Drosnin is speaking with an Israeli mathematician who originally discovered the code Eliyahu Rips. Assuming the code exists, Rips believes that the author is God, while Drosnin does not. Rips is an Orthodox Jew and believes in the God of the Torah. Drosnin is an atheist because he believes in Super God.



"For me, it was not that simple. I had proof there was a code, but not proof there was a God. If the Bible code came from an all-powerful God, he would not need to tell us the future. He could change it himself. The code seemed, instead, to be from someone good, but not all-powerful, who wanted to warn us of a terrible danger so we could prevent it ourselves." (P. 87)



That's a pretty powerful theological assumption underpinning Drosnin's desire to write God out of the picture.



For Michael Drosnin one could just as easily call the problem of evil "the problem of laziness." "If God exists then he could do things for me, so why should I have to? Since I have to do these things, therefore God doesn't exist." Michael Drosnin basically says the exact same thing "If the Bible code came from an all-powerful God, he would not need to tell us the future. He could change it himself." You can almost hear the author whinging: "But I don't wanna change the future, why can't God do it for me? Because he's stinky, that's why! I have to change the future myself, so God doesn't exist, aliens did it!"



So, who is the encoder? You might as well ask, "If the teacher already knows the answer why do I have to answer the question? It must be because the teacher doesn't exist." Why do we have to do things instead of having God do everything for us? Why do we have to do things instead of having almighty government do everything for us? For our own protection why don't we let the robots sequester us away where nothing bad can ever happen to us?



If Michael Drosnin cannot get around his childish fantasy of Super God doing everything, thus freeing Michael Drosnin of all thought and responsibility, what hope does he have of accepting God as the author of the code (assuming the code exists)?



The solution to the problem of evil is called theodicy. People have been writing theodicy for thousands of years, beginning perhaps with the Book of Job. God in Job gives us a sort of non-answer, basically saying Who are we to demand answers from God? Where we there when God created the world? Can we comprehend things from God's perspective from our vantage point here on Earth in these finite bodies?



This makes sense on one level, because just as a dog cannot comprehend why a human might do seemingly cruel things, like a vet performing an operation or something, from the wiser perspective of the human the operation makes perfect sense. The human has the dog's best interests in mind when performing the operation that will cause pain and discomfort because it corrects some life-threatening problem that the dog was facing. The little pain the human induces is better than the alternative, which is much greater suffering and death. We might not understand the purpose of suffering, from our limited, finite perspectives, but an omniscient God does, and sees that it is for the best.



That might make sense on one level, but it doesn't really like a satisfying answer, because we could basically say the same thing about anything. Why does anything exist instead of nothing? Why the sky blue? Why is gravity the weakest of the fundamental forces? Literally any question can be answered with "That's for God to know and don't ask questions, mortal." Philosophy vanishes at that point (and leaves me with nothing to do). That's why theodicy evolved beyond the Book of Job, not because the answer is distasteful, but because it's boring.



The existence of God was taken as given only until maybe the seventeenth century. People suffered deeply, but they didn't question the existence of God. They had a more mature view of God. The idea of Super God hadn't been invented yet. People pursued theodicy as philosophy, as love of wisdom, as a mystical practice, not in order to answer David Hume or Michael Drosnin. Philosophers wanted to get into the mind of God. "This is why you suffer, now what are you going to do about it?" That was the original purpose of theodicy. It's a more mature view than sitting in an armchair and trying to defend the idea that God is not Super God, because you're actually doing something with your life. You're actually progressing toward a goal, not just resting in a sense of smug self-assurance.



Jesus said "In the world you will have to suffer." John 16:33 is what I call the heart of the Gospels. "These things I have told you, that in me you might have peace. In the world you will have to suffer, but cheer up, I have overcome the world." It can't get any more simple than that. Suffering is an intrinsic part of life in this world. The Apostles not only believed that, they also believed God exists and that Jesus is God.



These weren't stupid people. Ancient people were not stupid. In a lot of ways they were smarter than people living today, because ancient people had to live side-by-side with death and privation on a daily basis. Knowing how to use a smart phone or the names of all 57 genders won't save you if the apocalypse happens and an EMP destroys all electronics, but knowing how to plant crops and make fire will. The Apostles could be transported to the modern world and in a relatively short amount of time (especially the ones who spoke Greek like Matthew and Paul, although Paul came later) they could use their skills to find jobs and survive.



On the contrary, if you were transported back to the first century you would almost certainly die of exposure or be killed by bandits in a week. Machines and other people do most of the living for you. You just need to show up at your job inserting tab A into slot B, if you have one, or maybe just sit on your ass and collect welfare and all your needs are met for you. The world has become so integrated that people have become specialised to a degree even people living two generations ago could not fathom. It's led to boredom, laziness, and a lack of wisdom and morality. Furthermore, it led to the creation of the idea of Super God.



Buddha too said in the first Noble Truth that life is full of suffering. He also said that suffering comes from desire (pride in the Christian tradition*), that there is an end to suffering, as Jesus alluded to, and we even have his solution to escaping suffering: the eightfold path. In Christianity we had hints of this path mentioned in the Gospel of Thomas and in the monastic practices of the Desert Fathers, but those teachings were lost for a millennium due to the meddling of Athanasius of Alexandria.



*As a side note, nowhere in Buddhism, not even its most advanced teachings found in Tibet, explains the origin of suffering as far as I can tell. Christianity does mention the origin of suffering, and, unlike the new age spiritualist teachings, Christianity makes recourse to known human psychology rather than assuming the potential motives of omnipotent, omniscient, eternal, indestructible beings. Suffering, in Christianity, arose out of pride, which is a specific desire, the desire to be special. God loves us all equally, but Lucifer wanted special love, thinking himself better than the rest of creation. Since God refused him special love he decided to poison creation by introducing pride into the hearts of humans and angels, leading to the war in Heaven and the fall of man.



C. S. Lewis had a brilliant thing to say about the non-problem of evil. He noted that the problem is based around a contradiction. If the world was as bad, even half as bad, as people who use the problem of evil believe, then there's no way the idea of a good God could have ever arisen. If the world was so filled with evil and suffering that it could prove God does not exist then no one would have ever thought up the idea of God in the first place. The only way the idea of God could exist is if the world is nowhere near as bad as the problem of evil people believe it to be.



As if the idea of Super God leading to atheism wasn't bad enough (at least there are rational atheists, and atheistic arguments aside from the problem of evil, which is a very poor argument), what's even worse is the idea of Super God leading to misotheism. Misotheism is absolute laziness. It is absolute narcissistic infantile histrionic personality disorder. And I mean that in the technical sense. People who hate God have highly unstable and exaggerated emotions, are attention-seeking, have excessive pride, an unshakable belief in one's own rightness, and at the same time an unshakable belief that their own problems are absolutely unique in the history of the world and that no one has ever suffered to anywhere near as great a degree that they have, are unwilling to accept personal responsibility and have a need to blame others for one's own mistakes, are often hypochondriacs, and often perceives relationships as more intimate than they actually are.



Hating God or being angry with God is a form of idolatry. It is replacing God with a Bogey Man of your own ego. The idea of Super God leading to atheism makes sense, because Super God doesn't exist. Self-evidently, because otherwise there would be no problem of evil. The problem of evil exists because God isn't Super God. Super God doesn't go around solving other people's problems. Not believing in something that self-evidently doesn't exist is rational. It's poor theology, but it's still rational thinking. Misotheism, on the other hand, is completely irrational. Misotheism is seeing that Super God doesn't exist and then turning around and creating an evil counterpart to Super God. Misotheism is turning God into the Bogey Man. [The evil counterpart to Super God – the Bogey Man – is technically an extreme version of dystheism, the idea that God is not entirely good. In its extreme form dystheism supposes an entirely evil deity. The hatred of God – misotheism – naturally supposes that this extreme form of dystheism is true.]



The Bogey Man is a fictional entity whose purpose is to terrorise mainly children, because, let's face it, a lot of adults are assholes. Super God as the Bogey Man is a fictional entity for histrionic people to project their anger onto for being inadequate, because histrionic people are assholes.



Super God as the Bogey Man (who I will hereafter refer to simply as the Bogey Man) would not only be less good and moral than regular God, the Bogey Man would be evil. The Bogey Man would be the antithesis of God.



The Bogey Man must suspend free will in order to intervene in all situations. People want Super God to intervene to stop criminals from committing crimes, for example. People don't ask for Super God to prevent criminals from thinking about committing crimes, but for Super God to intervene only in the act of preventing crimes. Since Super God (the Bogey Man) is also believed to be the cause of all things then that means the Bogey Man must have placed the thought to cause the crime into the mind of the criminal and then is supposed to intervene in stopping the criminal from committing the crime. The criminal is just a puppet in the Bogey Man's hands. The criminal's mind is shackled to a body that it has no control over. The Bogey Man is making the criminal commit the crime and then prevents the crime as it is happening. The Bogey Man chooses to make some people sinners, destined for Hell just to have people to send to Hell.



If the Bogey Man exists then nothing you do has any meaning, because the Bogey Man is pulling all the strings. The Bogey Man controls all your actions, causes all of your suffering (even suffering caused by your own choices, because you have no free will, which conveniently relieves you of any responsibility), and then hands out punishment or reward on fiat.



The existence of the Bogey Man is even worse than that. Not only are you being made to suffer in life and rewarded or punished at random, you don't even control your own body. At the very least your mind is locked into a body that you have no control over (in some extreme cases even your mind is controlled by the Bogey Man, freeing histrionic misotheists from responsibility even for their own thoughts). That's absolutely terrifying. At best you are a prisoner of a body you do not control. At worst even your anger itself is caused by the Bogey Man.



If the Bogey man exists not only is your life meaningless, your life is nothing but entertainment for an omnipotent sadist. That's even worse than Descartes' evil demon, who can only trick you. With Descartes' evil demon you can still realise that the world is an illusion and come to know the true God through reason. The Bogey Man directly controls you, absolutely. While it is possible to outsmart the evil demon the Bogey Man is totally unbeatable.



Super God as the Bogey Man must be evil. That's why belief that Super God actually exists leads to misotheism.



Why someone would believe in the Bogey Man I've already explained. People who believe in the Bogey Man have to believe in the Bogey Man. Not because the Bogey Man forces them to believe, but because the Bogey Man frees them from responsibility and makes their problems out to be totally unique in the history of the universe.



Of course God is not Super God, or the Bogey Man. Belief in Super God or the Bogey Man is stupid and childish. The same God who gave us reason did not intend for us to forgo its use. That line of thinking will lead us eventually to Blaise Pascal, Rene Descartes, and into using our reason and contemplation to reach a better understanding of the mind of God and the origin of and solution to suffering.

The Last Judgment

Continuing on the same theme of the non-problem of evil and theodicy, here is a homily expressing the traditional Catholic answer to the existence of suffering. The Last Judgment, leading to reward or punishment in the world to come provides justice for a life that seems unjust.

Giving Thanks versus Anger with God

Hating God or being angry with God is a form of idolatry. It is replacing God with a Bogey Man of your own ego. The idea of Super God leading to atheism makes sense, because Super God doesn't exist. Self-evidently, because otherwise there would be no problem of evil. The problem of evil exists because God isn't Super God. Super God doesn't go around solving other people's problems. Not believing in something that self-evidently doesn't exist is rational. It's poor theology, but it's still rational thinking. Misotheism, on the other hand, is completely irrational. Misotheism is seeing that Super God doesn't exist and then turning around and creating an evil counterpart to Super God. Misotheism is turning God into the Bogey Man.

The Sign and the Shroud: Part One: The Hypothesis

I'm reading the book "The Sign" by Thomas de Wesselow, and man this guy is a teenage edgelord douchebag, isn't he? He has to attack Christians and Christianity on every single page. I dare him to make a book mocking Islam.

I have a tendency to skip ahead, to read the author's conclusion first so I know what I'm getting into. Just like I don't like to pay to see a movie until after it's released and people on the Internet reveal the ending, because I'm not going to pay to see a movie with an ending I hate.

This guy writes a near 500 page book about the Shroud of Turin and the resurrection, so naturally I figure about 200 of those pages are filler and another 200 are details, so if I skim just 100 pages I'll get all the relevant details. It saves a lot of time reading multiple books. Here's his conclusions, that could have been shortened to a 20 page paper, not a 500 page book:

*The Shroud of Turin is the authentic burial shroud of Jesus. We can accurately trace its provenance back to AD 600, well before anyone had the technology or the know-how to make a forgery, so that means it's highly probable that the shroud is authentic.

*The Shroud was created by a Maillard reaction (the way bread browns when you bake it) caused by the unusually rapid decomposition of Jesus' body. We know this because the only other possible explanation is a miracle, and fuck off miracles, we're all atheists now.

*The image on the Shroud is the resurrection, even though you can't see it in normal light, and you don't notice that there's a face unless you're standing at least ten feet away from it, and the huge smoking gun of the still rotting body inside the tomb! All the "appearances" of Jesus after the "resurrection" were public displays of the Shroud.

*First century Jews had a different understanding of life after death and resurrection than we do today. They didn't believe in such childish notions, they were atheists too. They knew dead is dead, but seeing that image gave them courage to go to spread the Gospel and to face without fear the most horrific deaths anyone has had to suffer in human history.

That's his hypothesis. And except for the first part, the part actually based on history, it's total horseshit.

And if we remove the childish invective and the second half of the book that's a retelling of the New Testament with the Shroud inserted into the place of Jesus, we can trim this down to a nice scientific paper and submit it for peer review. But it's not. He has to go on and on and on for 470 more pages (the pictures are all beautiful, but as the citation page in the front of the book attests, none of them are the author's own work).

I tried to read the first page and it took about 30 minutes because every other sentence I had to stop to write a refutation, not of the author's opinions on religion, he can believe what he wants, but the blatant historical lies he tells. On the very first page, in one sentence, he tells two blatant lies about early Christianity:

*The author states that Constantine made Christianity the state religion of Rome in 325. That's false. Theodosius made Christianity the state religion of Rome in 380, 43 years after Constantine had died. Theodosius also never made it state policy to destroy pagan temples, although he didn't stop anyone who did destroy them.

*The author states that a Christian mob burnt down the Library of Alexandria because it was pagan, condemning the West to centuries of ignorance. That's not even false, that's a lie. The Library of Alexandria burnt down centuries before the reign of Theodosius (or Constantine, who the author conflates with Theodosius), possibly by Julius Caesar in 48 BC. Under the reign of Theodosius the Serapeum of Alexandria, a temple that had a collection of books, as temples often do, was burnt down by a political mob, that just so happened to be composed mostly of Christians, for political reasons. Alexandria was a hotbed of mob violence. Two political factions were going at it, the losing side sought refuge in the Serapeum, and the winning side burnt it down because it was a convenient way to eliminate their rivals.

This man has a PhD in art history, mind you. One would think (hope) that such a degree would require passing at least one actual history course. Anyone who has taken an introductory course in the late Roman Empire or early modern Europe knows these statements are false, so the only way a PhD history scholar could get these facts wrong is by deliberately telling lies.

Two pages later the author has to take yet another shot at Christianity and all other forms of belief other than atheistic materialism:

"The traditional notion of a flesh-and-blood resurrection remained unquestioned in Christendom for more than a millennium and a half. In retrospect, it is rather astonishing that such an improbable dogma could have dominated the minds of so many for such a long time. It stands as testimony to the imperialistic power of the Church and its sustained stranglehold on intellectual endeavor, a grip that only began to loosen during the period of the Renaissance and the Reformation. Even then, it was another 200 years before religious skeptics began to challenge the very basis of Christian faith, reviving voices that had been silenced since antiquity." (pages 5-6)

Here's an accurate artistic depiction of the author:



The author, a couple paragraphs later, talks about how the works of Celsus and Porphyry were destroyed in great book burnings by evil Christians who did things for the evulz.

No. Pretend to be the historian your degree says you are. Books are made of paper, papyrus, parchment, and other perishable materials. 99% of everything that has ever been written has rotted away to dust and is lost. Some roving mob of evil Christians didn't have to go around burning books, those books are lost all on their own because of the ravages of time. We don't have any first hand accounts of the life of Alexander the Great, only third hand commentaries by people living 400 years later, not because someone was trying to erase him from history, but because books rot. If you want a book to survive it has to consistently be a best seller (or its pre-modern equivalent) for millennia. The only way books survive is because enough people thought they were interesting or significant enough to make copies, and then generations later people made copies of the copies, and that's why we have the works of Aristotle and Homer and the Gospels, because enough people thought they were interesting or important enough to preserve. Most books were not copied down because most books are crap to begin with. If, in 1,000 years, Thomas de Edgelord's masterpiece has been lost to history it's not because evil Christians burnt all his books, it's because his books are just crap and no one saw it necessary to print new copies. It's as simple as that. There's no need to resort to malice as an explanation when laziness will suffice.

De Wesslow's treatment of the Shroud from an artistic point of view is tremendous. He points out why the image on the Shroud is inartistic. No artist would have made an image like the image on the Shroud, putting the blood on the cloth first and then putting the image on top, using multiple different perspectives on the front and the back, depicting anatomy the way it would have been totally unknown by medieval and Renaissance artists, creating an image so faint that no one can see it up close in normal lighting and that only takes on its true greatness in photographic negative. The Shroud betrays itself as anything other than an artistic work. Pointing out why the Shroud cannot be a forgery de Wesslow's work is very good. The problem comes when he tries to mischaracterise Christianity. It's just like Richard Dawkins. Dawkins might be a brilliant biologist, but he's a piss-poor philosopher who does nothing but rehash arguments that have been refuted millennia ago.

I've written about this before when talking about the religious views of ancient people. Ancient people were not stupid. Ancient people were not stupid. Did the Greeks really believe the gods were people who sat on Mount Olympos doing all the crazy stuff in the myths? Probably very few did, but most were smart enough to see the truth of the stories. They were written as a way to get a point across about very complicated subjects in way that was easy to assimilate and remember. The gods are so obviously anthropomorphized versions of abstract qualities. Aries is unchecked rage and Athena is the rational mind that takes over in warfare, the two primary ways in which people fight. These are psychological qualities that are represented as people as a form of shorthand.

Ancient people knew a dead body is dead. They knew that better than we do, isolated as we are from the reality of death. First century Jews would not see a stain on a cloth and believe that the rotting dead body right next to that stain had miraculously risen and was immortal, and believe it so strongly that they were willing to be crucified, beheaded, tortured, burnt alive. No one is so stupid to believe in a risen Christ when they can see the rotting corpse just because they found a stain on a cloth.

And the author arrives at this conclusion by cherry picking the Gospels, which he will decry as unhistorical in one breath and then a sentence later quote mine for his retelling of history. Which is it? Are the Gospels unreliable or are they the very corner stone of his thesis? Both can't be true. De Wesslow spends two thirds of the book rewriting the Gospels in contortionist fashion to insert the Shroud in the place of the risen Christ, because we're all atheists now, we know miracles are fake.

Coming soon: Part Two: The Science

The Life of Jesus: The Three Kings

Ye may remember from The Life of Jesus how astronomer Michael Molnar was able to determine that Jesus was born on 17 April 6 BC using ancient Roman coins depicting the star pattern at the time. A conjunction of all the planets, especially Jupiter and the Sun in the constellation Aries, prompted the wise men from the Bible to go looking for the infant Jesus. Molnar, along with Egyptologist Bob Brier, reason that the wise men, or magi, were Parthian astrologers, and their skulls may have been discovered by Constantine's mother Helena and they may be kept in the Cologne Cathedral.

The Crossing of the Red Sea

Hurricane Irma's incredible power drew all the water from this beach at Long Island in the Bahamas, leaving behind only dry land.



In the story of the Exodus, Moses raises his staff and the Red Sea (Yam Suph, sometimes translated as the Sea of Reeds) empties of its water. God caused the sea to recede with a powerful east wind (Ex. 14:21). The water was piled up in a great wall to the side of the dry land, and this phenomenon lasted long enough for allegedly 600,000 Israelites to cross. When the Egyptians followed in their chariots the wind stopped and the sea returned, drowning them.



This is exactly what was seen at the Bahamas, minus the drowning Egyptians. Hurricane Irma's powerful winds and low pressure caused a huge bulge of water in the center of the storm, draining the beach, and the beach was dry for many hours, apparently. When the hurricane hit land the huge storm surge caused tremendous waves to crash on shore and caused massive flooding.



The mechanism exists for a powerful wind (hurricane or other storm) to drain a shallow body of water long enough for people to cross, and for huge waves to arrive to drown masses of people. The narrative account exists that says that just such an event happened somewhere in Egypt over 3,000 years ago during the Exodus. You could argue that such an occurrence was purely natural, and that it was one hell of a coincidence, or maybe it really was a miracle, but the crossing of the sea is definitely plausible. We can't prove that it happened, but it definitely could have happened, and this is what it would have looked like.

Do We Want Eternal Life?

Eternal life is feared and rejected by some because it is thought to be nothing more than a continuation of this life of struggle. Some (including Bob Couttie) suggest that a life of infinite duration would become boring or monotonous. My old teacher once pointed out that such an idea is preposterous. With infinite time on one's hands one could accomplish an infinite number of tasks. As he said, he would read an infinite number of books and then write an infinite number of books, and still have infinite time to do infinitely more things. Some, like poor old Bob again, suggest that a life of infinite duration would lead to infinite procrastination. Since we always have infinite time in which to accomplish some task we would see no hurry and so put off doing it forever.



It is suggested in this homily by Fr. Matthias that many people reject Christianity out of fear or revulsion to the idea of this life everlasting.



However, these people are all mistaken. Eternal life is not merely a continuation of this life indefinitely into the future. Eternity is not an infinite duration of time, eternity sits outside of time completely. Eternal life is life without time.



A timeless condition is attested to in the near death experience and in people who have experienced nirvikalpa samadhi. It is your true nature, your original face, the face you had before your parents were born. It is the state we will all experience following the resurrection.

Forgiveness

Richard Smoley, from the last video, looks at the topic of radical forgiveness. Forgiveness is a key topic within Christianity, and it is the practice at the heart of A Course in Miracles. The idea behind forgiveness is that one does it for one's self. You don't forgive the other person to give the other person something, you forgive the other person because you have created an image of the other person in your mind that is eating away at your peace. To cure your own distress you must cure that mental impression.



At the same time forgiveness does not mean to become a doormat. Remember, Jesus overturned the tables at the temple and he whipped the money changers. Jesus instructed his followers to "Sell your cloak to buy a sword." You shouldn't leave yourself defenseless, nor should you let someone off the hook who is abusing you. We are instructed multiple times to avoid toxic people.

The Mystery Of The Shemitah

Jonathan Cahn explains what he calls "The Mystery Of The Shemitah" for 77 minutes. Basically, there's this Biblical injunction that every 7th year the Jews were supposed to stop working and erase all debts (I'm still wondering what they were supposed to eat), but the Jews always defy God's comands, so they ignored this injunction for 490 years. As a result the Babylonians came in and destroyed Jerusalem and sent the Jews into exile for 70 years - one year for every sabbath year ("shemitah") they had ignored. At the end of 70 years the Persians come in and wipe out the Babylonians and the Persian king Cyrus rebuilds Jerusalem and puts the Jews back in their homeland.



Rabbi Cahn says the same rule applies to the United States, because the US was unique in that it was the only modern state that was founded on the principles of God's word, in effect setting up a new covenant like the one the Jews had thousands of years ago.



1870 - shemitah year - the US surpasses Britain as the largest economy on the planet

1917 - shemitah year - the US becomes a superpower

1945 - shemitah year - a new financial world order is established based on the US dollar



As long as the US (this rule only applies to the US and Israel) stays right with God then every seventh year will be a blessing, but if the US defies God then every seventh year will be a curse.



1973 - shemitah year - the US legalises abortion, defying God

2001 - shemitah year - 9/11, the symbol of America's economic might - the World Trade Center, which was built in 1973 - is destroyed, followed by a huge financial collapse of the stock market

2008 - shemitah year - the Great Recession starts, the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression (which also started on a shemitah year)



What happens next? I don't know. The last shemitah year was September 2014 to September 2015, which passed, and while there weren't any further economic disasters or terror attacks, the Supreme Court did deem itself infinite power over all aspects of everyone's lives allegedly to protect the "rights" of maybe one tenth of seven tenths of one percent of the population, but really it was a naked power grab that followed 30 years of public indoctrination to move the overton window.



Is there anything to this? I don't know. This might all just be coincidence. It is an interesting hypothesis, and it is an interesting lecture.

Judging Judgment

Twice this past week I've read, in two different books, that judgment gives you power over people, or at least it gives you the illusion of power, and that's why you should never do it. I don't believe either of those statements.



First off, Jesus commands us to judge. Idiots, or lazy people, or narcissists, or sybarites read "Judge not..." and then black out the rest of the chapter because they satisfied their craven desire to avoid judgment. But if you actually read it, and you're not using one of the modern pussy "translations", what Jesus is telling us is not to judge others by a different standard than the one we use to judge ourselves. He flat out says "Don't be a hypocrite" (a Greek word that only a Greek-speaking audience would understand, indicating that Greek was Jesus' native language, which makes perfect sense since it was the official language of the whole eastern Mediterranean for the previous three hundred years and the language spoken in all the big cities where Jesus worked), not "Don't judge anyone under any circumstances ever".



Later in Matthew Jesus says if you see your brother trespass against you tell him so he can correct his action.



Then we have in John where Jesus says to "Judge righteously".



And Paul continues reasserting the need for right judgment by rebuking the Corinthians for not judging one of their own who had sinned.



It becomes a matter of who am I going to believe, Jesus or some pop culture writer? Not that difficult a choice.



The whole idea of not judging comes from the perverted anything goes "If it feels good do it" mentality that poisoned a generation in the 60s and has been used to brainwash children in the schools for the past 30 years. And the people who say not to judge almost always do so ironically, because they are judging while they admonish judging! The statement is self-defeating, like the assertion that Absolute Truth does not exist. If you judge people for judging then you are the very thing you allege (it's a lie) to despise, which is itself a judgment and is itself what Jesus rebuked in the part of the verse you blacked out!



And second, I don't think judging others puts you in a position of power, at least perceived, over that person. Not if you're using right judgment as you are commanded to. If you're judging everyone, including yourself, by the same standard then how does that put you in a position of power? You are also among the group being judged, and the standard of judgment is not based on your own caprice but on what is True.



I know I fall short of the standards by which I judge. Does that mean I'm placing myself in a position of power over myself? Does that even make sense? How can I have power over myself other than through willed action? In order to exert power there must be a self and an other, but if there is just a self then there can be no exertion of power, and no relationship of any kind.



If you see someone with an untied shoe and you say "Your shoe's untied," you don't have power over that person, you just have a different perspective, and you're using that perspective to help that person. That's compassion, not power. You would want the other person to do the same for you. That's right judgment. If you're doing something stupid and self-destructive you would want, at least subconsciously, someone to tell you, just as you would tell someone who you see doing something self-destructive, out of compassion, not power.



People today have the wrong view of sin. Sin is not about angering God or about anyone holding power over anyone else, it's natural law. If you do this, you will get this. If you try to unbalance the universe the universe will take steps to rebalance itself. And you can never win. Sin should be thought of like causality. If you smoke heroin you destroy your body and have to face the physical consequences regardless of whether you're a good person or not (unless you're Keith Richards, then your body is indestructible); if you rape children you destroy your soul and you face the metaphysical consequences. I picked a particularly obvious example, but it gets subtler than that. Sin says that actions (and thoughts) have consequences because the mind works in a certain way and garbage accumulates over a lifetime and there's no way to escape that no matter how good we are at ignoring it or rationalising it away. At death we are exposed to the clear light of Absolute Reality, and it becomes impossible to lie to ourselves. Beliefs go out the window and then the shadow has free reign to torment you mercilessly.



It's true from an Absolute perspective to say not to judge, but that's because 1. from the perspective of the Absolute NOTHING is happening, there is no manifestation, so there is literally nothing to judge, and 2. the people who say not to judge aren't speaking about the Absolute, they're sybarites who don't want to feel bad about smoking crack and having lots of anonymous sex. 1 out of 1,000 people who say not to judge even believe in the Absolute. The other 999 are materialists who believe that when you die you rot, in which case judging still wouldn't be wrong because there would be no truth at all. Not only would judging not be wrong, if you took the view of the materialists to its logical conclusion, but absolutely nothing would be wrong, including raping and murdering the person who told you not to judge just for the lulz, and furthermore there would be no free will so it wouldn't even make sense to speak of right and wrong anyway.



There's a reason why the noble eightfold path begins with right views and moves on to right speech, right action, and right livelihood. If we just take a purely Absolute view when looking at spiritual practice (like the Course, which is 100% Absolute and ignores the relative completely), then we can say not to judge. It can be done, just as it's possible to climb a sheer cliff, but taking the steepest possible path isn't very useful if your aim is to get as many people to Absolute realisation as possible. That's why great teachers throughout history have given us morality, which is relative bodhicitta, because our minds have been trapped in the relative world for so long that we need relative practices to break down our barriers. We need to exhaust the relative mind so the clear light of Absolute awareness can shine through. Morality does not get us enlightenment, because nothing can. Nothing can take us to where we always already are. Morality serves as a means of making us more likely to see that we already are enlightened. Morality reduces the obstacles within our relative minds and the relative world.



You can say that judgment makes no sense from the Absolute perspective, but you can't build a society in the relative world based on the Absolute. Talk of judgment, sin, and morality have meaning in the relative world. They are relative practices for the relative world, because the alternative is close to impossible. We can take the Absolute view all we want, but until we are fully enlightened we are still at the mercy of our relative mind, and we will still have to deal with fear, doubt, regret, shame, etc. And until we are enlightened we still need judgment in order to overcome the relative mind.

The Life of Jesus Christ

I'm collecting, and ultimately re-editing and expanding, everything I've
written about Jesus on The Urban Mystic. This has been my intention for
a few years now, to basically write a short book called "The Life of Jesus Christ: An Urban Gospel". Currently it is 9,000 words, but I'd
like to double that over the next year. You can read it by following the link in the text or just below Page 2 News.

Integral Christ

UPDATE: Integral Christ is now available in PDF format complete with additional pictures and about three errors corrected. 



 If the crucifixion took place in 33 AD then the day was today, 3 April. The last time Holy Week took place at the same time as the first Holy Week was 1942. The next time it will happen again is 2026. If my calculations are correct Jesus was killed 2 weeks before his 39th birthday.



On such an auspicious occasion, the first in the lives of probably most people who have ever visited The Urban Mystic (though I love my septuagenarian readers just as much, probably more), I will take this time to write a very special piece about the most famous man who ever lived.



Who was Jesus Christ? I've already written about his birth, about his life, the conspiracy to kill him, the resurrection, and the possibility that he visited India during those missing 18 years. What is left to write about?



How about the ways in which we interpret Jesus.



I listened to an audio program from Integral Life that was little more than a 45 minute commercial, but it got me thinking about the way people at different developmental levels interpret Jesus and what part of his life and teaching they may focus on.



We hear about magic stage Christianity focuses on Jesus as personal savior who can miraculously alter the world. A child's view of Jesus as a superhero who is there to save you. The miraculous is the focus at this stage; it is what convinces the believer.



Mythic Christianity would focus on Jesus as the Way the Truth and the Life. Jesus prescribes behavior and you have to obey, you have to accept Jesus as your personal savior or you'll go to Hell forever. This is the Christianity of the Crusaders and most of medieval Europe and even going into the Reformation. The difference between the old Catholic church and Luther's church was the interpretation of whether Jesus' Law included belief only or if acts of charity were needed to cement one's place in Heaven.



Rational Christianity, the Christianity of Thomas Jefferson, John Locke, Rene Descartes, and Isaac Newton. We have a God who is grand designer of the universe, and while Jesus is fully divine he is also fully human. Jesus is a wisdom teacher.



There's a pluralistic Christianity would deconstruct Jesus. It would be seen as unchristlike to say Jesus is the only way to God. Belief no longer needs to have any connection with truth, if truth even exists; belief is my own feeling about something and everyone has different, equally valid beliefs.



But what is integral Christianity? Who is the integral Jesus? This question may be too large even for this massive essay. To scale it back I'll focus on a much smaller scale.



The dialogue did ask four interesting questions about what would be included in an integral version of Christianity: Do you need the virgin birth? Do you need miracles? Do you need Jesus dying on the cross? and Do you need the resurrection?



Remember, the key feature of second tier is supposed to be to integrate all of first tier. We're supposed to look at everything that has come before and work it all together. Ken Wilber's working hypothesis is that no one is entirely wrong. Every level is right about some aspect of reality in some way. What I try to do is find what works at each level and put it all together, bridging the gaps, to create a unified whole. What the people over at Integral Life seem to do is talk about the lower levels and then take whatever Green-Post Modern says and declare it the truth of everything. There seems to be a very strong Green bias in the supposedly second tier integral community. But that's a topic for a different discussion. Right now what I will attempt to do is integrate all of first tier into a second tier version of Christianity. I will start by answering the four questions presented in the dialogue.



Now, I have absolutely no idea if Mary was a virgin or not prior to Jesus' birth. Mentioned in Matthew and Luke, the virgin birth went relatively unquestioned for most of the history of Christianity. Matthew makes reference to a prophecy from Isaiah that the messiah would be born of a virgin and he sees Jesus as fulfilling that prophecy. Why did Matthew and Luke tell different versions of the same story, and why did Mark and John not mention the virgin birth at all? We can excuse Paul because his central focus was the resurrection as the singular event in history in which sin and death were overcome, but is the silence from Mark and John any indication of anything?



It is not impossible for such an event as a virgin birth to occur. It has never been observed in mammals in the wild, but scientists have been able to tinker around with mice and rabbits, and in 2007 human embryos were created this way for use in stem cell research. God can do anything that a human can do, so technically God could turn the reptilian gene on and make a fatherless Jesus as a demonstration of sovereignty over nature. The biggest problem is that the offspring of such an event is always female. Again, however, it is possible to tinker with an X chromosome in the lab and create a Y chromosome from it, since they have homologous genes. It is technically possible for a scientist today to create a male embryo from the cells of just the mother, but no one has ever done this before and it doesn't happen in nature, which really would make it a miracle par excellence.



Did it happen? We can't say. Are we required to believe it happened? Well, if we follow what Paul says then technically no. A virgin birth is not a requirement for an integral Christianity.



Do we need miracles? Surprisingly they seem to agree that events that might be considered miraculous actually do happen. There are healers who use methods such as laying on hands and other energetic methods, and not only do they produce statistically significant results, but these alternative methods are sometimes even covered by insurance, so energy healing is not something on the fringe, it is acceptable medicine. Phenomena such as ESP and psychokinesis have been demonstrated to exist with greater scrutiny than any other field of science ever. Double-blind protocol was invented to study psychic phenomena, starting with Mesmerism (a form of hypnotism). Just as ancient people would consider an airplane magic if it were somehow transported back in time, it is safe to say that they would have considered psychic powers to be a form of magic or miracles.



Richard Rose, an iconoclastic physicist and engineer as well as a mystic, certainly accepted what he called "magic," which appears to include psychic phenomena. Looking at Ken Wilber's classification of the developmental levels it is possible that Richard Rose would have been considered third tier, meaning permanently ensconced in states of transpersonal awareness. Rose would almost certainly have been considered integrally developed, and he not only accepted the existence of psychic phenomena, but also demonic possession.



A lot of miracles in the New Testament definitely could be explained through psychic phenomena, albeit at a larger scale than what is seen in a laboratory setting. Miracles can indeed be a part of integral Christianity, and if we're using the word "miracle" as a pre-scientific term to mean "psychic phenomena" then the existence of miracles is already an established fact.



What about the crucifixion? Does integral Christianity need a crucifixion? Well, what exactly is the alternative? The dialogue brings up the swoon hypothesis. They say that people in the Gospels acted like Jesus was still alive. They say he was taken off after only six hours, his body was put in a tomb instead of left on the cross to rot like typically happens with criminals, that the herbs used to anoint the body were typically used to revive people and not to anoint the dead. People are acting like he isn't dead? Really? Only John mentions anything put on Jesus' body, and he says myrrh, aloe, and unnamed spices. Aloe is certainly used in medicine, and so is myrrh, but myrrh is also used in embalming the dead. But what about the swoon hypothesis? I have to say it is the most ridiculous alternative to crucifixion anyone has come up with. People have suggested it was a double who was crucified, some people say that the whole story was made up, some people even say that God replaced Jesus' body on the cross with Judas, but anyone who believes in the swoon hypothesis knows absolutely nothing about medicine.



Let us look at the Shroud of Turin, an object that realistically depicts what is mentioned in the Gospels. Jesus was scourged by a Roman flagrum. The man on the shroud has 120 such marks on his body. There have been people who have died from a few lashes from a regular whip back when capital punishment was legal in the West, in the British navy for example. A flagrum is about 50 times worse than a whip. A flagrum is like a whip with three strips of leather with iron barbells, nails, or broken glass tied to it, wielded by a professional killer. He had a crown of thorns placed on his head. His eye is swollen shut from the beating he received, his nose is broken. His shoulders were dislocated when he was crucified. The nails used in the crucifixion would have rendered his hands nonfunctional, not to mention the excruciating pain from putting pressure on the median nerve in the wrist. After six hours on the cross Jesus' heart would have been beating over 140 beats per minute, he would be near suffocating, dehydrated, exhausted, between 10-20% of his blood would have been lost. Then the Roman centurion thrust a spear through Jesus' side and "blood and water" poured out of the wound. This is a very telling remark from John. The heart is surrounded by a cushion of clear fluid. When the spear pierced Jesus' heart that clear fluid came out with the blood. It is doubtful that even professional executioners in the first century would have known about the existence of pericardial fluid. The fact that John mentions this is strong indication that he witnessed an actual event.



In order to complete the swoon hypothesis the Apostles would have needed to fool professional executioners that Jesus was dead. In the tomb they would have needed to treat wounds that would probably have been fatal even with modern emergency surgery. Jesus would have needed an emergency heart transplant, a blood transfusion, his shoulders would have had to been put back in place and his nose would have had to have been set. 36 hours later Jesus would have needed to roll an enormous stone away using his nonfunctional hands, overpower the guards standing outside the tomb, walk seven miles from outside Jerusalem to Emmaus, sneak into a locked room with no evidence of forced entry, and fool people including his Apostles and his own mother that he was resurrected and had conquered death and not a bloody and beaten mess who had barely escaped death. He would have had to convince people so thoroughly that 11 of the 12 Apostles would overcome their fear of the Romans and go to their death as martyrs to preach a Gospel they knew was a lie.



The swoon hypothesis is absolutely impossible. One thing is certain, the Romans were experts at killing people. If they said Jesus was dead then he was dead. He wasn't in a coma, he wasn't faking, he was absolutely dead.



The dialogue also mentions a supposed lack of documentary evidence of the crucifixion. Lack of documentary evidence? Josephus and Tacitus both say that a man named Jesus was crucified by the Romans. What do you want, a CNN video from 33 AD actually showing the nails going in?



The crucifixion is as close to an historical fact as we can get. We know from historical sources that a man named Jesus preached in Judea in the first century and he was crucified by the Romans. That is fact. If the crucifixion isn't part of integral Christianity that's just plain denying fact. That would be like integral chemistry denying the existence of atoms.



Now we come to the big one. Does integral Christianity need the resurrection? The men in the dialogue dodge produce yet another flippant response. They say something like "Well I don't care, 'he died for my sins', that doesn't mean anything to me." Not only did they dodge the question, I also suspect they enjoy sinning. I mean sinning is fun, at the time, but I suspect they don't repent afterward.



But the answer to the question is an unequivocal yes. You don't need to believe in the resurrection to practice Jesus' teachings, you don't need to believe to accept the existence of an historical Jesus, but to be a Christian the central tenant is belief in the resurrection. That is nonnegotiable. Paul says that there can be no Christianity without the resurrection and that if the resurrection did not happen we should immediately through Christianity out because it is false:



But if there be no resurrection of the dead, then is Christ not risen: And if Christ be not risen, then is our preaching vain, and your faith is also vain. Yea, and we are found false witnesses of God; because we have testified of God that he raised up Christ: whom he raised not up, if so be that the dead rise not. For if the dead rise not, then is not Christ raised: And if Christ be not raised, your faith is vain; ye are yet in your sins. (1 Cor 15:13-17)



Who am I going to believe, Paul, the inventor of Christianity, as the man who took a small following of an obscure Jewish teacher and made it a world religion everyone can belong to, or some guy in 2015 who doesn't even care about the concept of sin?



Here's what Richard Rose has to say:



"Evidently Jesus was able to come back and get his body, since the body disappeared from the grave, and later reappeared on the road to Emmaus. This does not prove that Jesus escaped physically from the grave, but could imply that the spirit of Jesus was able to simulate a body and to discard the mask at will.

"To say that a personality has found a means to travel from one dimension to another and to be seen in both is not unreasonable, although it implies a special talent. The SRF (Self Realization Fellowship) movement claims that some of its masters were avatars who had the ability to come and go between the spiritual planes and they were also reputed to have extensive creative ability. This brings us to the word illusion, for many believe this world to be one of illusion and that some liberated spirits are able to evoke the illusion at will." (The Albigen Papers, p. 84)



Rose is speaking of chapter 43 from Autobiography of a Yogi. Yogananda's guru Yukteswar Giri had died and his body was buried and then a few days later he reappeared in physical form before Yogananda to console him and teach a valuable lesson about life and death:


"Angelic guru," I said, "your body looks exactly as it did when last I wept over it in the Puri ashram."

"O yes, my new body is a perfect copy of the old one. I materialize or dematerialize this form any time at will, much more frequently than I did while on earth. By quick dematerialization, I now travel instantly by light express from planet to planet or, indeed, from astral to causal or to physical cosmos." My divine guru smiled. "Though you move about so fast these days, I had no difficulty in finding you at Bombay!" (Quote taken from the original public domain version, which I have as a text file, so I unfortunately can't say what page it came from.)



What about A Course in Miracles? If we look at the unpublished "Special Messages" section the Voice (identified as Jesus Christ) says the following about the resurrection:



My body disappeared because I had no illusion about it. The last one had gone. It was laid in the tomb, but there was nothing left to bury. It did not disintegrate because the unreal cannot die. It merely became what it always was. And that is what “rolling the stone away” means. The body disappears, and no longer hides what lies beyond. It merely ceases to interfere with vision. To roll the stone away is to see beyond the tomb, beyond death, and to understand the body’s nothingness. What is understood as nothing must disappear.

I did assume a human form with human attributes afterwards, to speak to those who were to prove the body’s worthlessness to the world. This has been much misunderstood. I came to tell them that death is illusion, and the mind that made the body can make another since form itself is an illusion. They did not understand. But now I talk to you and give you the same message. The death of an illusion means nothing. It disappears when you awaken and decide to dream no more. And you still do have the power to make this decision as I did.



Is resurrection even possible? Resurrection, not mere revival of the body. Both Richard Rose and Paramhansa Yogananda seem to think so. And you may think to yourself, sure Rose and Yogananda may, may, have had a center of gravity in third tier, but Yogananda could still have been cognitively at amber and Rose at orange, or whatever. You might say that the Course was written by Hellen Schucman subconsciously, and she might have been at orange or maybe green, who knows.



Someone with a cognitive level of teal or turquoise, even someone at green, would see this is all a myth, it's impossible, the resurrection is a holdover from a mythic consciousness and it's really symbolic of our spiritual resurrection within Christ consciousness. The death of the separate self sense and the resurrection into nondual spirit as such. This also achieves the conquest of sin, because from a nondual perspective there is no sin. Nonduality transcends good and evil (unfortunately most people today misinterpret the nondual traditions and instead of transcending anything just act egotistically and think they are transcending good and evil). Sin is entirely a product of the separate self, so when we die to the separate self we are eliminating sin. And that's fine. I don't disagree with that interpretation. It is lovely symbolism and capable of producing profound spiritual experiences.



But my question is is it possible for an integral Christianity to include a bodily resurrection of Jesus? I've presented eye-witness testimony of resurrection and spiritual communication. Now let's take another look at the Shroud of Turin. I keep bringing up the Shroud because I think it is strong evidence in favor of the resurrection of Jesus Christ. If we are able to overcome the speculation that it is a forgery then we are left with what appears to me to be two possibilities: that the Shroud was formed through some unknown natural process related to the decomposition of a body that has never been seen before or since, or that the Shroud is a relic of a miracle, a physical testimony to the the ultimate event in history.



The evidence that the shroud is not a forgery is very strong. The first piece of evidence is the dating. One sample from the Shroud of Turin was taken and dated. First off, testing one sample proves nothing. Second, the sample was taken from a corner where a repair was made. The radio carbon date of the sample is off because it did not come from an original part of the cloth.



Next we have an illumination from a Hungarian manuscript the Pray Codex.



The illumination depicts a crucified man who looks like the man in the Shroud with his thumbs retracted (because the nails damaged the nerve) – medical knowledge a medieval monk would not have known. The picture also depicts the man on a cloth with a similar weave as the Shroud, and an L-shaped series of burn marks in the same place as on the Shroud. Crucially, this manuscript was made almost a century prior to the earliest date attested to by the carbon 14 testing of the Shroud. This is strong evidence against the Shroud being a medieval forgery.



Then comes the list of high improbabilities; things that no medieval artist should know or would even think about.



 ● The blood stains – which have been tested and are real human blood – have no image underneath them. That means the blood was placed on the cloth first and the image created afterward. The forger would need to know exactly where to place the blood, correctly depicting the flow of gravity around a three dimensional body, both when held vertical during the crucifixion, and then later when the body was horizontal within the tomb, and then paint over it.



 ● The forger would need to know what an authentic Roman scourging looked like to produce an accurate representation.



 ● The forger would need to know what an authentic Roman crucifixion looked like, including putting the nails in the wrists and not the palms, as was the tradition during the middle ages. The forger would have needed to know that the thumbs would retract from the injury.



 ● The forger would need to put Jerusalem pollen on the cloth to fool 20th century scientists who would conduct microchemistry on the Shroud.



 ● The forger would need to paint using an unknown medium (no paint, no dye, no pigment of any kind was ever discovered on the cloth, there are no indication of brush strokes or any application of any material) in perfect negative of an image that is almost invisible up close and does not become visible until many 40 feet away, in order to produce a positive image only after the invention of photography many centuries later.



 ● The forger would need to encode 3D information within the image so that 20th century computers could extract a full 3D life-sized image of a man.



If the Shroud is a forgery then the forger would need to be the greatest artist who has ever lived and will likely ever live, and yet the forger would have to have produced absolutely no other work during his lifetime.



Now that the idea that the Shroud is a forgery has been refuted it is up to you to decide whether the Shroud of Turin is the natural byproduct of an unknown process of decomposition that has never before or since been observed, or a genuine miracle.



Integral Christianity certainly can include a bodily resurrection. We certainly can have room for interpretation and experiences. It is possible to have visions of Christ, just like deathbed visions of relatives. I'll say this for the first time, I have had a vision of Christ. He reached through my body, touched my spine, and instantly healed a childhood injury that had filled most of my life up to that point with constant pain. No hallucination can do that, that was a genuine miracle. (Unfortunately, six years later I re-injured my back at work. I don't expect Jesus to come back and heal me every time I get hurt, that was a one off event with spiritual ramifications.) Could the Apostles have had such a vision? I certainly think Paul did. But a mere vision does not explain the empty tomb. Remember, people at different levels can interpret the empty tomb and the resurrection differently, but when reading the Gospels we must take into account the writer's original intent. We can read interpretations into the Gospels that the writers could never have imagined, about Christ consciousness and symbolism of this and that, but to know what they were talking about we must take into account their own level of development. First and second century Jews would not have a clue what you're talking about if you start speaking in postmodern terminology.



When Paul was writing his letter to the Corinthians he was not talking about some experience you can have and gee isn't that swell, but other people can interpret things their own way. The Gospel writers were not using the empty tomb as a metaphor for anything. They do not paint themselves as particularly bright within their own Gospels. Jesus has to constantly explain himself in ever more details before the Apostles finally get it in John at the Last Supper. The Gospel writers depict events that would have been embarrassing for a first century Jew. If they were writing metaphor they would not have put so many inconvenient details within the text, they would have presented Jesus as Superman.  These people were writing what they thought was the true account of real events. If Paul says that Christianity cannot exist without the resurrection, he's not talking about an experience he had on the road to Damascus, he's not using the empty tomb to talk about shunyata, they really found a tomb with no body and they explain it by saying Jesus physically rose from the dead. Without that, without the resurrection, there can be no Christianity.



So where does that leave integral Christianity? Well, I've certainly demonstrated that miracles exist, whether we use the word "miracle" or "psychic phenomena," I've shown that the crucifixion was a real historical event, and, most controversially, I have presented evidence in favor of the resurrection, and have argued that our own interpretation, while important, should not be read into the minds of the Gospel writers.



You can certainly love Jesus at any level. You can practice Jesus' teaching in the manner interpreted at any level and have that practice be appropriate for that level. However interpretations should not trump facts. Postmodernism deconstructed the world, and integralism is supposed to reconstruct it, taking what works at every level and synthesizing it into a seamless whole. It is not enough to say every level has its own interpretations, its own value structures, and just leave it at that. While true, that is not the whole picture. Our own interpretation must go hand-in-hand with the interpretations of the Gospel writers and with the facts of Jesus' life in order to complete the picture and create a truly integral Christianity. We must live the teachings of Jesus body, mind, and spirit, exercising our charity and compassion, our rationality, and our prayer and contemplation so that we too may "die daily" to our separate self as Paul did 2000 years ago.



It is Easter Sunday. Rejoice! Christ is risen!

After The Tribulation

A two hour documentary on the rapture, how the idea of a pre-tribulation rapture came about, and why it is false.

The Sealed Books

70 lead books may be the earliest Christian documents, written years before Paul's letters, the oldest of which is dated to AD 51 (just 18 years after the crucifixion). If they prove to be authentic these books will be the most significant archaeological discovery since the Dead Sea Scrolls. The books make reference to a messiah and possibly crucifixion and resurrection. Some of the books are sealed with wires, and it is speculated that they may be the sealed books referred to in Revelation.

This is where the story gets really really scary. The books were found in Jordan and smuggled into Israel and the Jordanian government wants the books back. British scientists are working with the Jordanians to recover the books.

Here's why this is scary. One word: Jahiliyyah.


It is a key Islamic doctrine that NOTHING EXISTED BEFORE ISLAM.
The Caliphate was the first state to ever erase its own history. The destruction of the giant Buddha statues in Afghanistan in 2001 was one of the most recent examples of this practice in action. Any and all artefacts that display sophisticated cultural heritage before a place was conquered by Islam must be destroyed. The Islamic authorities who control the Temple Mount in Jerusalem have conducted numerous illegal digs and have destroyed untold quantities of priceless archaeological treasures to eliminate any legitimacy the state of Israel might have.

If the Jordanians get a hold of these priceless relics any contribution to the world's understanding of history and culture in the first century will be destroyed.