Yesterday, there was a news item that caught my eye: Oxford Scientist Launches Sharp Critique of Religion It seems that Richard Dawkins, author of the Blind Watchmaker, has launched a new salvo against "true believers."

Dawkins is right. Even if I do not agree with his ideas that promote existence as solely the consequence of the "accidental mechanicalness of the universe," I have to say that he has zeroed in on the crucial element of religion - or cult - as it is known in our day: that it is a virus, and a deadly one at that. Dawkins points out rather succinctly that religion is a societal norm that stems from children’s psychological tendencies. “It is their unique obedience that makes them vulnerable to viruses and worms,” Dawkins said.

Their unique obedience. Religion is a form of coercing obedience a la Machiavelli.

Regarding the uses of religion for political control, one should always keep in mind, when reading Machiavelli, that he was writing his little book based on what he observed as the common practices of the various "princes" of his time. He could see what worked and what didn't, and he assembled the methods in his book based on historical precedent.

Some experts propose that Machiavelli's book wasn't so much "advice" as it was satirical commentary on the corruption of the rich and powerful.

Things certainly have not changed a bit since his day.

When we consider the idea that our history as presented by Judaism in the Old Testament, and Christianity as presented by the New Testament, not to mention the history of the development of Christianity right up to the Middle Ages, is completely bogus, we are certainly put off by the seeming impossibility of propagating and maintaining such a huge deception.

Hans Conzelmann, Professor of New Testament Studies at Tottingen admitted that the Christian community continues to exist because the conclusions of the critical study of the Bible are largely withheld from them.

Joachim Kahl, a graduate in theology of Phillips University, Marburg, noted that "The ignorance of most Christians is largely due to the scanty information provided by theologians and ecclesiastical historians, who know two ways of concealing the scandalous facts of their books. They either twist reality into its exact opposite or conceal it."

Dr. Johannes Lehman, co-translator of a modern edition of the Bible remarked: "The evangelists are interpreters, not biographers; they have not illuminated what had grown dark with the passage of generations, but obscured what was still light. They have not written history, but made history. They did not want to report, but to justify."

The "original texts" that are so often referred to in theological hairsplitting do not exist. What does exist are transcripts that originated between the fourth and tenth centuries. And these are transcripts of transcripts, some fifteen hundred of them, and not one of them agrees with another. More than eighty thousand variations have been counted. There does not exist a single page of the "original texts" without contradictions. The most prominent of them, the Codex Sinaiticus, has been found to contain sixteen thousand corrections, which can be traced back to seven correctors. These correctors made their "corrections" because each one understood the verses differently and they transformed the functions according to what they perceived to be the needs of the time.

Dr. Robert Kehl of Zurich writes: "Frequently the same passage has been 'corrected' by one corrector in one sense and immediately 'recorrected' in the opposite sense by another, depending entirely on which dogmatic view had to be defended in the relevant school. At all events, a completely chaotic text and irremediable confusion has already arisen owing to individual 'corrections,' but even more so to deliberate ones."

Father Jean Schorer, for many years spiritual adviser to the Cathedral of Saint-Pierre, Geneva, concluded that the theory of the divine inspiration of the Bible is in such contradiction with the most basic, elementary knowledge base of normal human reason, and is so obviously refuted by the Bible itself, that only ignorant persons would defend it, while only people completely devoid of any kind of culture would believe it.

Dr. Robert Kehl writes in Die Religion des modernen Menschen:

Let us just say that in examining this process of the development of the "Holy Scriptures" and Christianity itself, we find nothing of the "Holy Ghost" in there. That's the plain fact. And a lot of people in the "business" of religion know it.

Nevertheless, our institutions of higher learning generally have a special faculty allotment for the teaching of theology, financed by the taxpayer, whether Christian or Jew.

One assumes that the students who study this theology are also given exposure to other studies, such as math, languages, science, and so forth. The question then becomes: what kind of strange distortion, what incomprehensible corruption takes place in the minds of human beings, so that they so completely separate their academic knowledge from what they hear preached at them from the pulpit? What kind of brainwashing can so effectively cause the simplest of facts to be forgotten?

How does this happen?

It is literally staggering to a logical, intelligent human being, that the fairy tale of the Bible - as God's word - has endured so long. There is nothing to which we can compare this in the entire seven thousand years of human history of which we are aware. Calling it all a "pack of lies" seems rather harsh, but it is increasingly evident that it is certainly intentionally misleading. And, in that case, what shall we call it?

Naturally, all of these problems have led to many interesting theological solutions. It is amazing how creative true believers can be when faced with facts that this or that idea they have held for a long time is no longer tenable.

Christian theologians claim that the teachings of Jesus (which is the established religious dogma), are unconditionally valid. Rudolf Augstein asks: "...With what right do the Christian churches refer to a Jesus who did not exist in the form they claim, to doctrines which he did not teach, to an absolute authority which he did not confer, and to a filiation with God which he never laid claim to?" [Jesus Menschensohn, Munich, 1972]

When we step back from the situation, the one thing that we see is that prophecy is at the center of the Judeo-Christian-Islamic tradition. The prophets of these religions claimed to be in direct contact with the Creator of the Universe, and this creator seems to have been singularly "personal" in the sense of having personal traits, whims, likes and dislikes. His prophets are, naturally, privileged messengers, receiving his divine revelations and these revelations divide mankind into those who believe them and those who don't. Naturally, those who don't are damned.

It seems that all "primitive" or preliterate cultures had some form of codified communication between spirits and the living. This phenomenon seems to be universal in the ancient world, and only came under condemnation with the inception of monotheism around 1000 BC.

When Yahweh spoke through his channels, they were called prophets and the activity was "divine inspiration". When anybody else did it, it was necromancy or demonic possession, or even just out and out deception. This was because, obviously, since Jehovah/Yahweh was declared to be the only god, those other "gods" did not exist, therefore, anyone who claimed to be channeling them was lying. Of course that begs the question as to why people were put to death for lying about communicating with gods that were claimed not to exist? And, if they did actually exist, and were actually communicating, as Yahweh was also, then what status does that suggest about Yahweh, since he was the one who claimed to be the only god and that this was true simply because Yahweh said so via channeling? Most curious.

In the sixth century BC the Thracian Dionysiac cults were known to be using shamans as trance channels to communicate with the spirits, or what were then known as theoi or gods: discarnate immortal beings with superhuman powers. Some scholars suggest that rationalist philosophy was born out of the Dionysiac, Orphic, and Eleusinian mystery cults devoted to the channeling of these gods; certainly much ancient Greek philosophy, especially that of Pythagoras, Heraclitus, and Plato, was saturated with these mysteries.

This brings up the question, of course, as to how "channeled" information could have been the basis of the Rationalist philosophy that there was nothing to channel? Could it be merely a progression of the idea of Yahweh/Jehovah that there was only one god, and he was it? Just another step in stripping away any real knowledge of our reality from the lives of human beings?

In Plato's Theagetes Socrates confesses, "By the favour of the Gods, I have since my childhood been attended by a semi-divine being whose voice from time to time dissuades me from some undertaking, but never directs me what I am to do."

The Greek oracles at Dodona and Delphi and other sites would prophesy by sinking into a trance during which they were possessed by discarnate spirits; some of the famous ones by a single spirit, or what we would today call a "spirit-guide". Oracles often lived in caves and thought of the spirits they channeled as coming up to them from the underworld through fissures in the rock.

The most interesting item of all is the fact that Pythagoras used something like a Ouija board as early as 540 BC: a "mystic table" on wheels moved around and pointed toward signs that were then interpreted by the philosopher himself, or his pupil Philolaus. Even down to the present day, the mysteries of the Pythagoreans are subjects of intense interest to scientists and mystics alike. And here there seems to be evidence that the advanced knowledge of Pythagoras may have been obtained via a Ouija board!

By the time the Romans had conquered Greece, the rationalist movement was turning against spirit-channeling. Cicero, the Roman rationalist whom the early Church Fathers highly revered, railed against spirit-channeling or necromancy on the grounds that it involved ghastly pagan rituals. Greek Rationalism and Monotheism did a pas de deaux for a bit, but, actually, rationalism extended the argument to the idea that there is no god, there are no spirits, nothing survives the death of the physical body, so there is really nobody for us to talk to on the "other side," so why bother?

Rationalism was useful to Monotheism as long as it helped to overthrow the pagan cults, but as soon as Christianity was established, rationalism became heresy. Science was "revived" in the Renaissance and took the view that the whole religious thing was a con game, and that's pretty much the current mainstream scientific opinion of the phenomenon today. And certainly, it seems that science is correct on this point. But even Richard Dawkins concedes that there is a sort of religious quality that characterizes scientific phenomena. “The sense of transcendence is something that is shared by those who don’t call themselves religious,” Dawkins says. But of course, Dawkins does not go beyond speculations about the MATERIAL world. For him, there is nothing to consider except what existed AFTER the Big Bang. Other scientists in other disciplines, DO consider the issues of what happened BEFORE the Big Bang and what may be happening that we cannot perceive from our own reality. Another item in yesterday's news: Professor ponders parallel worlds;

In other words, the Pagans may definitely have been onto something. There are serious ramifications to this idea of parallel universes that we will come back to eventually, but for now, let's try to stay the course here and proceed somewhat chronologically. After all, chronology is what we are trying to understand!

The Christian religion, and its New Age offshoots, is the chief proponent of the many End of the World scenarios with which we are most familiar. Scenarios about the end times originate mostly in the body of apocalyptic, eschatological writings of the New and Old Testaments. It is in the final book, Revelation, that most striking and symbolic representations about the end of the world are said by many to be depicted.

It is a difficult work to comprehend. Probably no other piece of writing in history has been examined more thoroughly and interpreted more widely. It is the end-of-the world legend, a doomsday tale on moldy bread with virtual reality special effects in abundance. It is the inspirational fountainhead for mad prophets, spittle spewing pulpit-pounders, apocalyptic Enochian magicians, fanatical true believers, grade-B movie makers, and knaves and snake-oil salesmen of every form and sort.

Does this mean that we can just discard Revelation and the other prophecies altogether? It would be nice to think so, but as we have already noted, even though the Official Culture is always stepping in to do damage control, they do it oh, so carefully! While the above is a rather accurate in terms of the many and varied interpretations that have been given to this Mother of all End Time Prophecies, there is no point in throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Anybody with eyes and ears and two firing neurons can see that there is something amiss in our world, in our reality, and once that is seen, and once the questions are asked, which then leads to research, we come to the idea that something is really going to happen! Of course, that does NOT indicate that following one or another religion is going to mitigate anything that occurs in the natural world according to scientific principles.

What seems to be true is that the writers of both the Old and New Testaments couldn't just toss out the oral traditions. With an awareness of how history can by mythicized and then historicized, and any combination thereof, we can look at the scriptures with a different eye. We can theorize that there must have been a real person around whom the legend of Jesus - the mythicized history - was wrapped. We can theorize that he was teaching something important and dramatic for it to have made such an impact. We can also theorize that this "impact" was seen - at some point - as a useful political tool. This highlights the fact that, regarding the very nature of our reality in scientific terms and our current day observations, as well as a broad historical review, whatever he was really doing and saying, it was most certainly twisted, corrupted, and emphases shifted in fairly predictable ways.

Early Christians are said to have believed that the end of the world and the reappearance of their Messiah were imminent. We are told that, from the earliest days of the organized church, anticipation of the millennium - the thousand-year reign of the returned Christ - was in conflict with ecclesiastical policies that were growing apace in the new church hierarchy.

In what is today Turkey, a man named Montanus claimed to have experienced a vision of a heavenly New Jerusalem about to descend to the earth. Montanus and his idea was perceived as a threat to ecclesiastical authority. Hippolytus, writing in 215 AD., accused the Montanist believers of heresy, including listening to revelations from female seers. Montanism continued to spread, especially after Tertullian - the brilliant legal scholar who had been born in Carthage and converted to Christianity in 196 AD. - joined the movement. He too reported a vision of this heavenly city descending from the sky, a metaphor that has persisted for centuries.

The ubiquity of this vision is interesting for a lot of reasons, most particularly when one considers the possibility that these early Christians may have been interacting with hyperdimensional realities. While some Gnostic groups "spiritualized" the events foretold in Revelation, there were still those who insisted that this paradise was quite real and physical and could exist on earth. This idea became known as chiliasm, a form of apocalyptic vision that depicted the millennium as a physical and material period.

A Gnostic prophet named Cerinthus said that there would be an earthly kingdom of Christ, and that the flesh of human beings again inhabiting Jerusalem would be subject to desires and pleasure. He added, "The kingdom of Christ would ... consist in the satisfaction of the stomach and of even lower organs, in eating, and drinking and nuptial pleasures." One writer described Cerinthus and his followers by noting, "there was great enthusiasm among his supporters for that end..." No doubt.

Many chiliasts believed that in the millennium all manner of physical craving would be satiated, that men would find all women beautiful, and willing to partake in carnal delights. Others taught that women would bear many children, but without the pain of childbirth or even the inconvenience of sex. It can be noted that there is a thread of sexual allusions in the millennialist vision that - through the centuries - has emerged again and again.

It is fairly simple to see in the "seed" of the primitive chiliasm of the early Christian ideas the concept of Time Loops and hyperdimensional realities as well as the idea of cyclical catastrophes signaling both the end and the beginning of "worlds." However, there seems to have been something else about this early Christianity that created problems for church fathers who were busy codifying dogma and constructing a far-flung ecclesiastical empire. Since "end time fever" would not go away, it was codified as "believe in our dogmas, and you will go to heaven at the End Time. It will only happen once, and we are the agents of the god who is going to destroy everybody who does not belong to our club."

The question is: if the early Church fathers eliminated "primitive chiliasm" from Christianity, what ELSE did they eliminate? As noted, what we know as Christianity today is, according to many experts, little more than an amalgamation of many mythical representations of the dying and resurrecting god theme. More than anything, it reflects the Tammuz drama with a major overlay of the Egyptian religion of the time.

Again and again we come back to the question: "how could they do that?" It seems impossible to even conceive of such a fraud being perpetrated upon the entire Western World. But, as noted, the study of history is not static. Discoveries are made every day that expand our understanding and give us a better context in which to place the details that we already have. And very often, when we place the "written" history into the context of what science has to show us, it just simply does NOT fit. And it is then that we must begin to ask serious questions.

Instead of assuming that our forebears wouldn't lie to us, we ought to ask why it was that they believed what they did and passed it on as holy writ? We can certainly think that a parent who passes on to his or her children certain ideas that are "factual" as far as he knows, is not lying per se. He just may not know the truth. But still, the result is that lies pile on lies and our understanding of our world becomes little more than a whispered conversation passed along a line of 100 or more people, at the end of which, the final statement bears no relation whatsoever to the original one.

At this point we would like to make note of a curious series of remarks by the semi-legendary alchemist, Fulcanelli, in the first pages of his book Dwellings of the Philosophers. He tells us in his first sentences that there is a gross misconception about the Middle Ages common among scholars and laymen, produced by a written history that is not supported by the evidence.

Fulcanelli then goes on to point out that art is entirely reflective of a culture, and generally only thrives during times of peace.

As Fulcanelli points out, if that period of history had been as "dark" as it is depicted, had the people been suffering and moaning in misery of human affliction, the art would have depicted it.

But it didn't.

Something is, indeed, inexplicably amiss here. And, as Fulcanelli points out:

Fulcanelli goes on to cite more instances in which the possibility - probability - that our history has been largely fabricated looms as an ever growing specter of confusion. We have already seen how the story of an asteroid hitting the earth was "falsified" as a "historical event," i.e. Constantine's conversion by a sign from God, and we will discover, as we go along, that this problem of falsification of history is not just an occasional thing, but repeated over and over again.

As it happens, there are some eminent experts in the present day who have smelled the rat and who propose the exact same thing that Fulcanelli has suggested.

In addition to the falsification of events, we have the problem of falsification of chronology in order to support the false events.

When we investigate the matter, we discover that the chronology of ancient and medieval history in its present form was created and completed to a considerable extent in a series of works during the 16th and 18th centuries, beginning with J. Scaliger (1540-1609), the "founder of modern chronological science." and D. Petavius (1583-1652). Chronology is what tells us how much time has elapsed between some historical event and the present. To determine real chronology, one must be able to translate the data in the ancient documents into the terminology and units of modern time reckoning. Many historical conclusions and interpretations depend upon what dates we ascribe to the events in a given ancient document.

The accepted traditional chronology of ancient and medieval world rests on a foundation of quicksand. For example, between different versions of the dating of such important event as the foundation of Rome, there exists a divergence of 500 years. What is more, "falsification of numbers" was carried out down even to contemporary history. Alexander Polyhistor took the first steps towards filling up the five hundred years, which were wanting to bring the destruction of Troy and the origin of Rome into the chronological connection. But, was he helping, or further confusing the matter? As it happens, according to another chronology, Troy had fallen at the same time as the foundation of Rome, and not 500 years before it!

Isaac Newton devoted many years to historical and chronological studies. He made up his own tables that came to be the generally accepted timeline. A lot of people are not aware that some of the important events of Greek history were arbitrarily moved forward by him as much as 300 years, and those of the Egyptian were moved forward up to a thousand years.

Naturally, penetrating minds were able to discern the problems and as early as the sixteenth century. A.D., Professor of Salamanca University, de Arcilla, published two papers in which he stated that the whole of history earlier than the 4th c. AD, had been falsified.

In more modern times, the first serious attempt to systematize the considerable critical material, and to analyze historical paradoxes and duplicates from the standpoint of natural science was undertaken by a Russian scientist and academician, N. A. Morozov (1854-1946).

In 1994, A. T. Fomenko, a Russian Mathematician, published Empirico-statistical analysis of narrative materials and its applications to historical dating. The abstract of this book says:

Fomenko's work deserves an entire series of volumes in order to properly discuss it, and it would be impossible here except to note that mainstream historians and archaeologists are crying "Foul!" about it despite the fact that he has drawn some extraordinary conclusions and presents his thorough analyses with logical arguments and a sincere desire to get at the Truth.

As we have already noted, it is increasingly clear that the "status quo" is more important to some people than the Truth. Regarding the medieval period with which we are presently concerned, (keeping in mind that English is not Fomenko's first language) Fomenko points out that:

As noted above, it is easy to fabricate texts and documents out of nothing. Falsification and counterfeiting are as old as the hills. J. K. Huysmans wrote in Las-bas,

"Events are for a man of talent nothing but a spring-board of ideas and style, since they are all mitigated or aggravated according to the needs of a cause or according to the temperament of the writer who handles them. As far as documents which support them are concerned, it is even worse, since none of them is irreducible and all are reviewable. If they are not just apocryphal, other no less certain documents can be unearthed later which contradict them, waiting in turn to be devalued by the unearthing of yet other no less certain archives." [Huysmans, 1891, Ch II].

Fomenko is generous in suggesting that such a process of the falsification of history was something that just sort of "happened" and with no conspiratorial intent. I tend to agree with him for the most part. But there are certainly other things that strongly suggest intentional concealment of the truth. And, of course, on the part of the history of Byzantium, of which there is a great deal of documentation, we we find that falsification of the facts was as active then as it is today.

But there is something even stranger about this than the simple explanation Fomenko has given: we want to ask what kind of vacuum existed in Western Europe so that it was possible to import the history of Byzantium? Didn't they already have their own history? What was going on there while the Roman Empire and Christianity was growing in the East?

And here, in this question, we find some most interesting clues.