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apollaI am having what I believe might be termed a 'crisis of faith'. Actually, that's not quite accurate or right. I'm having a crisis of religion. I don't just mean your usual common or garden 'Catholicism Sucks'. I don't mean 'oh woe is me!'. I mean an absolute breakdown of nearly everything we have all been led to believe here in the Christian West since, pretty much, the guy who came to save us all got nailed to a board.
I don't mean that I don't believe in God, nor in Jesus. I don't mean that I no longer believe in the basics. I mean that the more I read, the more I think and the more I study certain things, the more certain I become that we have been lied to, most grievously, for centuries. The bedrock of unholy mother church, the Bible itself, was cobbled together by Roman politicians looking to use Jesus for their own ends.
If I am to believe the Dead Sea Scrolls, if I am to believe the fragments of gospels rejected for inclusion back in the 4th Century, if I am to believe the copies of documents people went to great lengths to hide from the inquisitors... if I am to believe it all, then I then have to reconcile myself to the fact that it is all wrong.
We're to believe that AD 1 was when Jesus was born? Well, there's apparently actual documentation that proves he was born in 7 BC. Which is fine, right? Apparently there are enough extant documents to calculate, and also take into account the very different customs of those people in that time, his exact birthday. 1st March 7 BC, if you want to send him a card.
Not the 25th of December. That was a Constantine thing, designed to help people forget that Jesus was OMGAJEW and take in the old male-orientated Mithras festival.
Yes, ladies and gentlemen, we live in a world created by a Roman emperor. A Roman emperor who doesn't even have his own Richard Burton movie. Moreover, even the lies he actively created and propagated rather pale in comparison to a document called the Donation of Constantine which apparently says he gives Rome and all her powers to... you may have guessed, the Pope and his cronies. This is a document written three or four hundred years after the death of Constantine, so I'm not sure it's actually what he would've wanted.
There's so much more, and the fact is, I don't know. The stuff I'm reading is probably psuedohistory at best, and yet... and yet... and yet I find some of it sliding into place in my head like bits of a puzzle. I don't know who this writer is, I don't know if he has an agenda (besides subtly slagging off The Da Vinci Code wherever possible). I don't know.
However, I do have a fairly good idea of Rome when she was an empire and not just a city full of rubble and pickpockets. I know the things those emperors and would-be-emperors did, would've done and didn't do in order to retain their power. Believe in Christianity? Constantine was a Roman Emperor and would've pretended to believe that the sky was pink and the Colosseum was a bicycle if he thought he'd retain or gain power by it. That's what they did. They were ruthless bastards in a ruthless bastard world.
I don't trust this writer. I don't trust the Church. I do trust what I've learned about Rome over the years. Believe that we've been lied to all these years and centuries? Course I do. I've always know the Catholic Church was a stinking quagmire of lies, deception, murder, lust, gluttony and all the rest... I just didn't realise that they've been lying and omitting things from the very beginning.
Because if Mary Magdalene was Jesus' wife. If she was blessed and wondrous and herself great, then I can already feel more affinity with my own faith. Catholicism has been male-dominated since the start, no thanks to the woman-hating Romans. Seriously man, the ancient Greeks gave women more freedom than the Romans! The people who began the church that came to dominate the world (and at this point, I mean all of you, protestants too), were people who did not want women in any position of power. Except the mummy. She was allowed because mothers aren't really women are they? If Mary Magdalene was most beloved of Jesus, if she was the one who knew the All, then that's important to me. No longer is my faith dominated by this male nonsense. It is both, it is man and woman equal, and thank the Lord for that. If Jesus were married to Mary Magdalene, he still lived a life without sin... unless it's sinful to have sex with your own wife. If so, most of the planet is damned to hell. If life is the reason we're here, then creating it must be a pretty big part of that. And didn't He say so himself?
It's at this point that my brain starts to go all pretzel-shaped, as I try to get my head around the different sects during Jesus' own lifetime, then the Christian sects that sprang up believing slightly different versions of the story, the thousands slaughtered in the name of the Church (now that is historical fact. The Roman Catholic Church is drenched in blood).
I do not think I want any part of it. Not of God, never of God. Him and Me are going to be just fine. I no longer want the religion that has been built up. It took until the Sixties for Mary Magdalene to be formally made a saint. Regardless of whether you believe she was a whore or the demons were actually part of the sect to guard the girls until they were taken to be married (in which cases Jesus casting them out is a pretty good indication of what happened next), regardless of doctrine, dogma and teh rest, I know I believe in God. I've felt him there, I've always known. It's not Him I doubt or question. It's not Jesus doing this, it's the connivers, the schemers who took his message, took the truth and made their own Truth out of it.
I think it's a sham and a lie, and we're all living with the consequences. You'll get your Christmas cards in March, just before the Easter celebrations that were stolen from the Celts to distance the Resurrection from Passover, lest we remember Jesus was himself Jewish. Shock news there, non?
***
In other news, I received the promo EP for a band called Thenewno2 in the post on Friday. It's really very good, and the singer sounds a lot like someone I like. Google for them and you'll see why.
I don't mean that I don't believe in God, nor in Jesus. I don't mean that I no longer believe in the basics. I mean that the more I read, the more I think and the more I study certain things, the more certain I become that we have been lied to, most grievously, for centuries. The bedrock of unholy mother church, the Bible itself, was cobbled together by Roman politicians looking to use Jesus for their own ends.
If I am to believe the Dead Sea Scrolls, if I am to believe the fragments of gospels rejected for inclusion back in the 4th Century, if I am to believe the copies of documents people went to great lengths to hide from the inquisitors... if I am to believe it all, then I then have to reconcile myself to the fact that it is all wrong.
We're to believe that AD 1 was when Jesus was born? Well, there's apparently actual documentation that proves he was born in 7 BC. Which is fine, right? Apparently there are enough extant documents to calculate, and also take into account the very different customs of those people in that time, his exact birthday. 1st March 7 BC, if you want to send him a card.
Not the 25th of December. That was a Constantine thing, designed to help people forget that Jesus was OMGAJEW and take in the old male-orientated Mithras festival.
Yes, ladies and gentlemen, we live in a world created by a Roman emperor. A Roman emperor who doesn't even have his own Richard Burton movie. Moreover, even the lies he actively created and propagated rather pale in comparison to a document called the Donation of Constantine which apparently says he gives Rome and all her powers to... you may have guessed, the Pope and his cronies. This is a document written three or four hundred years after the death of Constantine, so I'm not sure it's actually what he would've wanted.
There's so much more, and the fact is, I don't know. The stuff I'm reading is probably psuedohistory at best, and yet... and yet... and yet I find some of it sliding into place in my head like bits of a puzzle. I don't know who this writer is, I don't know if he has an agenda (besides subtly slagging off The Da Vinci Code wherever possible). I don't know.
However, I do have a fairly good idea of Rome when she was an empire and not just a city full of rubble and pickpockets. I know the things those emperors and would-be-emperors did, would've done and didn't do in order to retain their power. Believe in Christianity? Constantine was a Roman Emperor and would've pretended to believe that the sky was pink and the Colosseum was a bicycle if he thought he'd retain or gain power by it. That's what they did. They were ruthless bastards in a ruthless bastard world.
I don't trust this writer. I don't trust the Church. I do trust what I've learned about Rome over the years. Believe that we've been lied to all these years and centuries? Course I do. I've always know the Catholic Church was a stinking quagmire of lies, deception, murder, lust, gluttony and all the rest... I just didn't realise that they've been lying and omitting things from the very beginning.
Because if Mary Magdalene was Jesus' wife. If she was blessed and wondrous and herself great, then I can already feel more affinity with my own faith. Catholicism has been male-dominated since the start, no thanks to the woman-hating Romans. Seriously man, the ancient Greeks gave women more freedom than the Romans! The people who began the church that came to dominate the world (and at this point, I mean all of you, protestants too), were people who did not want women in any position of power. Except the mummy. She was allowed because mothers aren't really women are they? If Mary Magdalene was most beloved of Jesus, if she was the one who knew the All, then that's important to me. No longer is my faith dominated by this male nonsense. It is both, it is man and woman equal, and thank the Lord for that. If Jesus were married to Mary Magdalene, he still lived a life without sin... unless it's sinful to have sex with your own wife. If so, most of the planet is damned to hell. If life is the reason we're here, then creating it must be a pretty big part of that. And didn't He say so himself?
It's at this point that my brain starts to go all pretzel-shaped, as I try to get my head around the different sects during Jesus' own lifetime, then the Christian sects that sprang up believing slightly different versions of the story, the thousands slaughtered in the name of the Church (now that is historical fact. The Roman Catholic Church is drenched in blood).
I do not think I want any part of it. Not of God, never of God. Him and Me are going to be just fine. I no longer want the religion that has been built up. It took until the Sixties for Mary Magdalene to be formally made a saint. Regardless of whether you believe she was a whore or the demons were actually part of the sect to guard the girls until they were taken to be married (in which cases Jesus casting them out is a pretty good indication of what happened next), regardless of doctrine, dogma and teh rest, I know I believe in God. I've felt him there, I've always known. It's not Him I doubt or question. It's not Jesus doing this, it's the connivers, the schemers who took his message, took the truth and made their own Truth out of it.
I think it's a sham and a lie, and we're all living with the consequences. You'll get your Christmas cards in March, just before the Easter celebrations that were stolen from the Celts to distance the Resurrection from Passover, lest we remember Jesus was himself Jewish. Shock news there, non?
***
In other news, I received the promo EP for a band called Thenewno2 in the post on Friday. It's really very good, and the singer sounds a lot like someone I like. Google for them and you'll see why.
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no subject
Date: 2006-11-19 10:12 (UTC)The thing that's getting me is this: I've always disliked the concept of religion- like Rufus says in Dogma: "you took a good idea and built a belief structure on it!". I've always disliked the idea, and I've never put everything I have into Catholicism. I've never put even a shard or two in, not really and certainly not since I turned eight. I suppose the thing that gets me now is the sheer scale and depth of the deception, because it does affect us all, in our everyday lives. If you allow it to. Me, I'm choosing to go my own way, as I always have... the Pope can hate me if he wants, cos I'm not all that keen on him either.
no subject
Date: 2006-11-21 18:50 (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-11-27 21:23 (UTC)*hugs*