Religion as a Political Project
Milchar
Commandments that came from god's mouth live for centuries.
It's just a small thing to do: make a god and teach him to speak the desired words.
/Dmitry Glukhovsky "Metro-2033"/
'Cuius regio, eius religio' — "Whose realm, his religion". This was stated in the peace treaty between Catholic and Lutheran German principalities after the war of the 16th century. Seemingly it was the first time in history when the priests openly declared that their religion is nothing more than an instrument of state power. But by that time it had been being such an instrument for many centuries.
Perhaps the first who came upon the idea of a purely political religion was the Egyptian pharaoh Akhenaten. Although his religious project did not last for long, it showed the way for others. Kings and pretenders to become kings started to construct new religions in order to declare themselves gods or, at least, prophets authorized to speak on behalf of gods. By now, such artificial political cults have taken over most of the world.
Judaism
Many peoples of the world have a myth about their "superiority" over other folks, or about a personal patronage of a god over them. In this regard, the Old Testament is nothing unique. The Jewish myth just got more publicity than other similar myths. And, the same way as in all such myths, after a closer look at the details, many inconsistencies and contradictions become apparent.
The Jews claim to have been slaves in Egypt, then to escape from there, to wander around the Sinai Peninsula (a desert land about 200 km wide) for 40 years subsisting themselves with god's help, to arrive at Palestine, to easily take over some cities there, and to establish their kingdom. Especially implausible in these claims are the "slaves" having weapons and knowing how to use them and how to storm walled cities. Weapons aren't like money and gold; it's not enough just to steal them. The Bronze Age weaponry was very heavy and difficult to use. An unprepared man, even a very strong one, would not have been able to fight effectively with it. Warriors of that time were trained for many years, starting from childhood.
So, the Judeo-Christian Bible starts lying already from its first chapter: the Jews in Egypt weren't slaves, some of them were trained warriors, and their mission was not an escape (40 years would have been more than enough for the Egyptians to catch them — if they wanted, and if that really was 40 years and not days). Moreover, it's even questionable that those people who moved from Egypt to Palestine identified themselves as a nation different from the Egyptians:
"But there is something even stranger: those who came with Moses from Egypt were all Egyptians from three social classes — warriors, priests and commoners. No one was identified as a Jew; seemingly Jews as an identity did not exist yet by that time. This is confirmed by Lee I. Levine (Professor of Jewish History, Hebrew University of Jerusalem), who points out that this identity is in fact the result of a very long historical process."
/"The False Testament" by Mauro Biglino/
The Jewish myth about the national origin differs from other similar myths, first of all, by its strict dogmatism. Other peoples who claimed patronage from a god kept on worshipping other gods as well, and the myth of the national origin could exist in several versions by them. The Jewish myth, however, had an officially approved "one true" version, which was written down in the book, since the very beginning.
But the existence of the "one true" canonical version does not mean that it never changed; quite the opposite! The Jewish alphabet consists of consonant letters only. In the Ancient Hebrew language, including the original text of the Old Testament, vowels weren't indicated at all. Additional symbols for vowels appeared relatively late, when most of the Old Testament had already been written. And the now canonical version of the Old Testament with vowel marks was approved only in the 9th century. It was done in order to encourage the correct reading of the sacred texts ("correct" from the viewpoint of those who marked the vowels). But the grammar of Ancient Hebrew often allowed for the same vowelless spelling of a word to have multiple readings with different meanings.
By the way, the rabbis of that time did not just approve the readings of the existing texts from the Old Testament; they were actively writing new ones. Flavius Josephus mentioned that the Jewish Bible consisted of 22 books at his time; the modern canon of the Old Testament has 39.
But for the leaders of ancient Jews even this was not enough, and then came the Talmud — two huge volumes, sized like the Encyclopedic Dictionary each. This is the book that dictates the rules: how the Jews must behave in every situation in their life. For example, a single phrase from the Bible: "Do not boil a kid in its mother's milk" — got unrolled into a complicated set of rules (the Kashrut) on how to never ever under any circumstances mix meat with milk.
The Talmud with all its rules was written in ancient times. The rabbis were thinking then that it would be enough for ever. But the progress of technology creates new things that aren't mentioned in the Talmud. Although the rabbis have not started writing a third volume yet, they lead endless discussions on how the Jews should use the recent inventions of civilization by the "right" way. It looks even hilarious: the people that have made a significant contribution into the intellectual achievements of humanity view themselves in their religion as a kind of retarded kids who need rules of good behavior for every situation.
Christianity
The Judeo-Christian Bible can count as the most edited book in the world. Differences between its versions can be found not only between different denominations, but also between local churches that formally belong to the same denomination. This cannot be explained solely by inaccuracies in translations into other languages; the meaning differs too much for it to happen accidentally. The Ethiopian Bible is particularly noteworthy in this sense: the chapters are named the same as in the Eastern Orthodox Bible, but the content differs sometimes in more than a half of the chapter (although the Ethiopian church is internationally recognized as Eastern Orthodox). These differences can be found not just in the New, but even in the Old Testament. The Ethiopian Bible demonstrates: how much a sacred book can be redacted without being noticed by the followers of that religion.
What was the original text of the Christian Bible? Probably nobody will ever be able to know it. The so called "Sinai manuscript", which is claimed by mainstream historians to be the oldest copy of the Bible, was found under suspicious circumstances. It's believed that the German scholar Konstantin von Tischendorf found ancient parchments with the text of the Bible in a heap of garbage at the St. Catherine's monastery on Sinai in 1844, while the monks were planning to burn them. Oh, Christians can believe in any nonsense, even that Christian monks would have wanted to burn down the ancient parchments with their Bible. Parchment is, in fact, a very expensive material; palimpsests (erasing the old text on a parchment to write something new on it) were made for a reason.
Anyway, it does not matter much even for Christians: what actually was written in the original text of their Bible. Christianity would never become what it is now, if the politicians of the crumbling Roman Empire did not use it to create an ideology that should have, by their plan, put the Empire together again. The Christian creed was originally written by the Roman emperor Constantine, who had not even been baptized yet by that time, and who was actually the High priest of the Pagan gods of Rome. For purely political goals, Constantine wanted to establish a single Christian church instead of multiple sects that were cursing each other for disagreements in interpretations of the biblical texts. And then this church propagated its beliefs using the state power and mercenaries that converted into Christianity for money.
Mainstream historians claim that nearly all people of the Roman Empire converted into Christianity by the time of the split into the Western and the Eastern empire. However, many facts point out that Christianity used to spread mainly in the Asian and African provinces, while the peoples of the European parts of the empire met it unenthusiastically at best.
First of all, it can be seen from the original organization of the church: there was only one patriarch in the West (the pope of Rome) and four in the East (in Constantinople, Antioch, Jerusalem and Alexandria), and even Greece and most of the Balkans belonged to the pope's realm. I.e. if the patriarchates were established to cover an approximately the same number of believers each, it turns out that there were more Christians in Palestine alone (the Jerusalem patriarchate) than in the entire Western Roman Empire (though even in Palestine not everybody was Christian).
This is confirmed by the composition of participants of the ecumenical councils:
• Nicaea, under Constantine: ca. 300 total, nearly all from the East, mere 1 or 2 participants from Italy, Spain and Gaul.
• Constantinople, under Theodosius I: ca. 150 total, all from the East, nobody from Italy, Spain or Gaul.
• 1st in Ephesus, under Theodosius II: ca. 200 total, all from the Eastern Roman Empire; from the West only the pope was invited but did not come.
• Chalcedon, under Marcian: ca. 130 total, nearly all from the Eastern Roman Empire and only 2 from the Western.
(This had nothing to do with the schism that would happen much later; the church was still united by that time, and I've selected the councils that are recognized both by the Western and the Eastern churches.)
The list of heresies condemned by the council of Constantinople is also of much interest, especially regarding their localization:
• Anomoeanism: in the East, mostly Alexandria and Antioch;
• Apollinarianism: in Syria;
• Macedonianism: in the East, mostly in Egypt;
• Marcellianism: in Asia Minor;
• Omoeusianism: in Asia Minor;
• Savellianism: in Egypt and North Africa;
• Photinianism: in the Balkans.
The existence of heresies is by itself telling: they are invented by those who really believe in Christianity, not by those who are forced into church with a stick.
We now have evidence that Christianity was nearly absent in the Western part of the Roman Empire by the time of the accession of Theodosius, and that Theodosius split the Empire into the Christian (Eastern) and Pagan (Western) parts. Also, knowing the great interest of the Ancient Greeks in philosophy, the absence of any heresies in Greece by that time tells us that Christianity was not widespread there either.
This explains also why the Western Roman Empire collapsed shortly after that, while the Eastern existed for much longer. What was actually the Western Roman Empire:
• a vast majority of the population were Pagans;
• the emperor's court and the army were 100% Christians;
• when not fighting any barbarians, that army was enforcing Christianity with a sword onto the population.
It's no wonder that, in such a situation, people would better welcome any Vandals or Huns coming, merely for them not being Christians at least.
Another prominent detail about the Western Roman Empire is that it was only nominally "Roman", since its capital was not Rome! Christian officials were afraid to walk in the streets of Rome then, because many people in the city were still secretly Pagan and could well kill those who had been destroying their temples. Therefore the capital of the empire was moved to Ravenna, a small town at the Adriatic coast, as near as possible to the more christianized Eastern Roman empire, in case if it would be needed to escape…
And even in the kingdoms that formed on the ruins of the Western Roman Empire, Christianity was not a universal religion. As Uwe Topper noticed in his book "The Great Deception: the Fictitious History of Europe", the artefacts and texts that are claimed by mainstream historians to originate from Spain before the Arab conquest often appear to be forged after the Reconquista. According to Topper, such fakes can be exposed by wrong weekdays in the dates from the 6th and 7th centuries; it seems that they were fabricated by the same group of scammers, who made a mistake in the calculation of weekdays.
This is how Christianity appears to be the most prominent example of a religion artificially created for political aims. Without the active intervention of Constantine and his successors it would have remained a bunch of sects. And later, Christianity have been always spreading with the state and military power, while all stories of mass voluntary conversion into Christianity appear to be lies made up by the church long after the events.
Islam
There are many signs showing that Muhammed himself did not believe much in what he was preaching; instead, he was constructing a new religion purely for political aims. First of all, it's the idea about admissibility of Judaism and Christianity. It looks like Islam was created to cover the territory that was not reached by Christianity.
To some extent, it could be dictated by the political situation in Arabia by that time. It had much Jewish population then, and some of them believed that Muhammed was that one Messiah that the Old Testament had been saying about. In the beginning of Muhammed's activity in Mecca, he had no more than about 20 followers and was not taken much seriously then. But after moving to Medina, he managed to convert the Jewish community there, and so the first real Muslim community arose. This, however, required from Muhammed's religion to be sufficiently similar to Judaism.
It's also known that Muhammed changed some ideas in his religion already during his missionary activity. As the religious studies scholar Alexander Blecher wrote in his blog:
"In the pre-Islamic Arab religion Allah was a typical deus otiosus, the creator of the universe who only supervises his creation and very rarely intervenes in its everyday life. Direct control over the world was delegated to his three daughters, and it was them who were worshipped the most. Their names were: Al-Uzza, Manat and Al-Lat.
According to some hadiths, Muhammed was originally thinking to include veneration of the Three Sisters into the new religion. It was when he still hoped to reach an agreement with the Quraysh, a wealthy tribe that had been giving special respect to them. But when all attempts of an agreement failed, he deleted any references to the goddesses from the Koran, and said that it had been Satan who tempted him to mention them before. Instead, the following was written in the Koran: «Do you have sons, but attribute to Him only daughters? It would be unjust», and the cult of the Sisters fell under brutal persecution. The main temple of Al-Lat in Taif was destroyed, and the images and symbols of the Sisters were thrown away from the Kaaba." [1]
After Muhammed's death his followers assembled the recordings of his preaches into a single book. And then it turned into politics and nothing but politics. As John Gilchrist mentioned in his book "Koran, the sacred book of Muslims": people believe that the Koran in its present form is an exact original recording of Muhammed's ideas, and that not even a single letter in its text has been lost or altered. However, such confidence in the accuracy of the book that was pieced together from various sources, gathered by different followers of Muhammed, is rather questionable. Moreover, as further studies show, some parts of the text were lost, some were deleted later, and some existed in several contradicting versions. There is even some written evidence that many verses and even entire suras are omitted from the standard version of the Koran.
Linguists that study the classical Arabic language notice also that different parts of the Koran are written in dissimilar styles and, therefore, cannot be attributed to the same author. This is yet another evidence that any artificially created religion inevitably includes falsifications, both of texts and of material artefacts — such as the Black stone in the Kaaba.
Sources from different times widely disagree on the appearance and size of the Black stone. Now its size is actually kept secret; pilgrims can only see one face of it, sized about 20×16 cm, through a special tiny window. The oldest descriptions, dated to the 10th century, say that the stone was not that big and its size was about 46 cm (in the present-day measurement units). But an anonymous pilgrim from the 17th century witnessed that the size of the stone was about 140×122 cm back then. Ali-Bey in the 18th century estimated its size as 110 cm, while Muhammed-Ali Pasha in the 19th century claimed that the size of the stone was 76×46 cm. Seemingly there is a quarry in Mecca where new black stones are mined when an old one gets stolen...
Religion projects today
Already by the 19th century it became clear that more or less educated people in Europe and America were looking for something different from the boring Christianity. This is why the ruling elites in the Western countries started to think on rebranding of the same Christian morality under a new name and in a new form. That gave a start to the so called new religious movements.
Theosophy
The decrease in popularity of Christianity in Europe stimulated interest in other religions, first of all in Paganism. The biggest threat to the church and the ruling elites was not from the already exterminated Greco-Roman, Germanic or Celtic Paganism, but from those Pagan cultures that were still alive. And the first of them was India, a wonderful oasis of Pagan culture, even largely similar to the Greco-Roman one, with amazingly beautiful art and diverse philosophy. The Christian leaders were definitely feeling that the interest in the Indian culture among educated Westerners posed a danger to the church and the existing social order. That was why their project of christianization of the Pagan ideas specially targeted India.
In the history of Theosophy one can see the rivalry between two projects: the American and the British one. The Americans started a little earlier: the first Theosophical society was founded in 1875 in New York by the American colonel Henry Olcott. Helena Blavatsky held a secondary position of corresponding secretary there. Obviously she was not content with such disrespectful attitude of the American theosophists to her as a woman. Then a group of British mystics led by the Anglican pastor Charles Leadbeater used it to win Blavatsky over to their side.
During her voyage to India, Helena Blavatsky met the British journalist Alfred Sinnett, who was writing columns on mystical topics, and he acquainted her with Leadbeater. The pastor supported her in her travelling through India and was giving hints on new people to meet and interesting places to visit. After that, Blavatsky and Leadbeater founded the Indian Theosophical society, which was then presided by Annie Besant, while Leadbeater with Blavatsky returned to London.
However, as it's been already noted, artificially created religions are always based on falsifications. Theosophy is no exception:
"In the «Isis Unveiled», Blavatsky mentions a legend about the God's Sons and the Sacred Island. The source of this she attributes to the «Book of Dzyan». She claims it to be one of the most ancient books in the world, practically impossible to date. Before Blavatsky's publication, this book was totally unknown to any scholars of ancient oriental literature, and the original of this book has not been found yet. In 1888, Indian and Tibetan experts in the Vedas and Buddhism accused Blavatsky of charlatanism and incompetence. After that, she returned to Europe and never came back to India. The sacred «Book of Dzyan», which she claimed to have found in the dungeons of a monastery in the Himalayas, was never seen by any Westerner again."
/"The Mythology of Central Asia" by Sergey Volkov/
Annie Besant was then making publicity to Jiddu Krishnamurti. He was adopted in early childhood by an English family living in India and given Christian upbringing. Besant encouraged him to go to Europe and America, where he was claiming to be an Indian guru, but actually promoted Christian ideas disguised under Indian terms.
The Americans, in their turn, decided to seize the initiative. When the painter Nicolai Roerich organized his exhibition in the USA in 1922, he was met by Louis Horch, a rich businessman and a member of the American Theosophical society. From that moment on, Horch started to fund Roerich’s travels through Asia. After the first expedition in 1923-24, Roerich began to claim that he was speaking on behalf of certain "mahatmas", and established the "Agni Yoga" (also known as the "Living ethics").
Another star of the American theosophy was Alice Bailey. A Christian fanatic in her youth, having been a preacher for some years, she married the American theosophist Foster Bailey, and then she allegedly started to receive telepathic messages from a guy she called the "Tibetan", who dictated her the books she was writing. That "Tibetan", however, was also an expert in Christian theology and did not hesitate to mix the events from the life of Jesus with chakras, mantras and Shambala. It was first Alice Bailey who introduced the concept of "New Age" as the age when all people would worship the same religion of light, goodness and so on. According to her, that religion would be, of course, monotheist and include the cult of Christ, as well as mantras and Shambala.
Charles Leadbeater, in his turn, also claimed that Buddhism does not contradict with Christianity and even converted to Buddhism during his voyage to Sri Lanka. Modern followers of Theosophy and similar doctrines also like to claim that "All religions teach the same". However, this "same" somehow always comes to be a slightly polished Christianity decorated with fake Indian flowers.
A religion without name, already comparable to Christianity by popularity
Despite getting some success, Theosophy hit its natural limits: many educated people aren't satisfied with any religion, not just with Christianity. How to make atheists follow a new religion? It's easy! Just call this religion "science" and appoint its preachers as professors. (Generally, the academy takes now over the position that was held by the church in the Middle ages — the institution entitled to judge: what is truth and what is heresy.)
Atheists who grew up in a Christian society can refuse to believe in god, but they have still been indoctrinated with the Christian morality and know the main Christian concepts, such as, for example, salvation. They can be far from being inspired by the idea of salvation of the soul, but "salvation" of something else is another story. So, when British scientists said that they discovered that we have to save the Earth and climate from carbon emissions, — those atheists were the first to believe in it.
What do you have to do in order to save your soul... or whatever you've been told to save now? Surely, pray and fast. Instead of prayers, the new religion has political rallies, but fasting is still very actual: you must abstain from eating meat and become a vegan, for the climate's sake!
Also, in order to save your soul or the climate, you have to repent for your sins. And sins in the new religion are the same as in Christianity. Everything that brings pleasure and comfort is a sin; it spoils your karma (according to Theosophists) or the climate (according to British scientists).
In one aspect this new religion is even more radical than Christianity. While Christianity views man as a "vessel of sins" but believes that he can be "purified", the new "scientific" religion declares just humans and human civilization to be the evil hostile to the planet and nature.
Where such usage of science as a wrapper for religion can lead, we already begin to see. People lose trust in any science, not just about climate, because they no longer see a difference between science and propaganda. This also paves an even broader way for charlatans of all kinds.
Channelling
The concept of "Channelling" was first introduced by Alice Bailey, who called her telepathic seances with the "Tibetan" this way. But somebody, having read Bailey's books, thought: why fly so low? Why connect to those questionable Tibetans, when Space is full of civilizations way more advanced than ours? (Spiritually advanced, of course!) So a whole new religion was created from the idea of Channelling. The preachers of this religion claim to telepathically contact with extraterrestrial aliens and learn from their wisdom. This wisdom, however, sounds surprisingly similar to Christian ideas, just without mentioning Jesus and the Bible, and using words like "negative energy" instead of "sin". Even an apocalypse is, certainly, about to come, and only those who believe in the wisdom from Space can survive in it.
Interesting in Channelling is the description of aliens that are allegedly contacted. They aren't anything like those three-armed, or giant insectoid, or other monsters from the low quality sci-fi. All the civilizations from Channelling look as one of the types of aliens reported from UFO sighting cases.
Channellers also claim to know the star system where those aliens live. However, in most cases they name only the constellation, or one of the most known stars, which even people totally ignorant in astronomy heard about. For example, this is the description of aliens by the American Channeller Wendelle Stevens:
| Name | Description |
| "Lyrians" | Humanoid, dark-skinned, slimmer than humans. |
| "Vegans" | Humanoid, dark-skinned, similar to Bushmen or Hottentots but with more triangular faces. |
| "Orionians" | Generally humanoid but with some reptilian traits. Biochemistry based on copper instead of iron. Skin of varying colors, with some lubricating substance. |
| "Eridanians" | Reptoid, 2 to 2.5 m high, with crocodile-like skin, 3 fingers and 3 toes, big mouth and big ears. |
| "Zetas" | Short, slim, with big hairless heads and big eyes. |
| "Pleiadans" | Similar to white humans, wearing spacesuits, because the Earth atmosphere is not breathable for them. |
| "Bawwi" | Giant humanoids, 3 to 8 m high. |
| "Siriusians" | Several species, with different form and outlook, living on the same planet. |
| "DAL civilization" | Look indistinguishable from white humans. |
Worth noticing here are the two latter ones: the "Siriusians", which can have absolutely any form, and the "DAL", which look indistinguishable from humans. UFO sightings have already been many, and it becomes more and more difficult to declare them hallucinations or hoaxes. What if those UFO pilots make such an impressive show on Earth that it will not be possible to deny their existence anymore? For such a case, a new religion is already prepared; it teaches the same old Christian ideas, but attributes them to extraterrestrial civilizations. It's ready to meet any type of aliens that have already been observed, as well as somebody totally new (who can be declared a "Siriusian"). In addition, it provides for an opportunity to pass its agents for aliens (from the "DAL civilization") if needed.
* * *
It's clear now that the producers of new religions have realized that the old monotheist cults lack an aesthetic component. Now they push more on the beauty of visual images. This was actually advised by Hegel in his "First program of the system of German idealism": "People aren't going to express interest in our ideas until we shape them in the aesthetic form". This is why they hired Roerich to hype Theosophy, why they illustrate their climate panic narratives with images of birds and beautiful nature, and why the preaches of Channellers use artistic depictions of stars and Space. This all is being done in order to keep people under the rule of fictitious gods that, like parrots, repeat the words that the ruling elites taught them to speak.
[1] https://myrngwaur.livejournal.com/626895.html