The female body is the embodiment of earth and beauty, the source of creative chaos and power. She is the raison d'être of human society. She is not only the arche of the human species but also the primal mover of culture.
Though most men live for other things as well, the female body is the predominant force in all men’s striving. And her influence never wavers. All men seek to be received and consecrated by the flesh of the female. All men love and hate this dependence upon the female body. They love the body for the intellectual, emotional, and physical pleasure that emanates from its flesh and beauty.
She is their source of strength and the arche of their imagination. Without her, they would sit upon the ground in dumb silence and despair. Artists, politicians, judges, businessmen, scientists, artisans, laborers all strive for the same thing—the female body. She dwells within, hidden and silent, expressing herself in their ontic longing, their teleological striving. Were she not there they would do nothing but exist in a state of self-destruction. They believe that they are independent, that their form of life is theirs alone. But they are no more independent of the female body than the creatures of the earth are independent of the earth. Without the female body there would be no creation, no culture, for there would be no reason to create.
A Dead Religion Resuscitated by Italian Artists
And even those who deny the significance of the female body—such as the flesh haters Apostle Paul and Augustine of Hippo and the spirit seeker Jesus Christ—spend their lives struggling against her. How interesting that Paul and his Church sought to overcome the female yet Italian artists knew that without the female presence Christianity would be a religion without life and beauty. The dead man on the cross—symbol of Christianity—represents a life without the female: dead and ugly. The spirit seeker—hater of the flesh and the earth—seeks that which is fleshless and insubstantial, a divine no-thing that exist only in the imagination. The ungrateful followers of Paul’s Christ (Christ was his invention) seek to escape into death and away from earth as soon as possible. It is a sickness, the result of worshiping an earth-hating supernatural deity. So the Italian artists resurrected the Virgin Mary in order to give life and beauty to an otherwise dead and ugly religion. And Mary was no virgin because to remain a virgin would be to negate her femininity and reduce her to a living manikin. Jesus had brothers and sisters. Only the brothers are named. It’s significant that Paul mentions Jesus’ mother only once and not by name, saying that God’s son was born of woman, as if he was embarrassed that a woman gave birth to his God-man. Paul was a worshipper of death—the Crucifixion and Resurrection being central to his worldview—death of and escape from the flesh.
The Eve Construct and the Degradation of the Female
The hatred of the female and the flesh is rooted in Jewish religious ideology. The Old Testament declares that a woman—Eve—was the first human to disobey God and to tempt the first man Adam into sin. Thus the root of all human evil and hardship, including death, is a female. And the shadow of Eve has haunted women ever since. The Eve construct is a monstrosity created by a villainous Jewish religious ideology. As a result, the thinking of men within the Abrahamic religions is hostile toward the female. And no man was more perverted by Jewish ideology than the theologian Augustine. Here is his characterization of Eve’s and her companion Adam’s attempts to justify their behavior that condemned humanity to the fires of Hell.
It is a worse and more damnable pride which casts about for the shelter of an excuse even in manifest sins, as these our first parents did, of whom the woman said, “The Serpent beguiled me, and I did eat”; and the man said, “The woman whom Thou gavest to be with me, she gave me of the tree, and I did eat.” Here there is no word of begging pardon, no word of entreaty for healing.... [T]he woman’s pride to the serpent, the man’s to the woman.... For the fact that the woman sinned on the serpent’s persuasion, as if there were any one whom we ought to rather to believe or yield to than God. (City of God, Modern Library 462)
Before examining the punishment that resulted, some defense of the accused is needed. On behalf of our aboriginal parents, the first question that comes to mind is why did God tolerate the existence of the mischievous Serpent (Satan) in the first place, rather than destroy him outright? And why did he allow him to do his mischief, which was primarily tempting people to act against God’s will resulting in their being severely punished? The answer is that God used him for this purpose, as in the Book of Job. Being all-knowing, God knew beforehand what Eve and Adam would do. At the very least, God’s game of trip-up and punishment was cruel, cynical, and immoral. Second, Eve was a naive waif who could not have been very sophisticated given she had no family, no community, no culture, and no schools. She was a jungle dweller. On the other hand, Genesis says, “Now the serpent was more subtle than any other wild creature” (3:1). Eve was no match for the smooth talker.
Second, what Eve saw was that “tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and the tree was to be desired to make one wise” (3:6), so she ate the fruit. Thus, the choice was between obeying God’s arbitrary command to test the neophytes’ obedience and eating the fruit because it was food (which is perfectly reasonable since she was made to depend on and enjoy food), it was aesthetically pleasing to the eyes (unlike the pagans, the ancient Jews were not big on aesthetics thus produced little in the way of art), and because it was a source of wisdom (which the ancient Jews were not interested in as their dearth of philosophers and scientists illustrates).
Eve could not resist because she was attracted to tasty food, beauty, and wisdom. Yahweh said that the tree provides knowledge of good and evil. How can one be wise without such knowledge? Without knowledge of good and evil, how could Eve have known that eating the fruit was wrong or how to defend herself against the Serpent’s persuasion? God also said, “in the day that you eat of it you shall die” (Genesis 2:17). Yet, he was the one who imposed the death penalty. And for humans perhaps life without knowledge is not worth living because being human is more than being an animal. How different from the Greek philosophers such as Socrates who encouraged the acquisition of knowledge even at the risk of one’s life.
What God (Yahweh) wanted from her was to be a ghost-worshiping, simpleminded animal. But as an intelligent human being, she understandably wanted more. Why did God give her a mind and body then tell her that she could not explore their possibilities? God, however, is not to blame. The simple, narrow-minded, misogynistic Jewish scribes who wrote the story are to blame. So like an enraged Cyclopes (the one-eyed representing the single vision of masculinity), God hunts down the two neophytes to sentence them to suffering and death. An anti-female element that has haunted women for eons occurs when God tells Adam, “Because you have listened to the voice of your wife... cursed is the ground because of you... thorns and thistles it shall bring forth to you” (3:17-18). The message that will echo down the centuries is that women are not to be listened to because like Satan they will deceive, mislead, and beguile, leading a man into sin and destruction.
We have seen the crime committed by orphan Eve (or was Adam her mother?). Now it is time to look at the consequences for humanity: that ALL of Adam and Eve’s decedents will be punished for their parents’ transgression. That is not just, but Yahweh is not about justice. He is about vengeance: “Vengeance is Mine, and retribution. In due time their foot will slip. For the day of their disaster is at hand, and their doom hurries to meet them” (Deuteronomy 32:35). The slip of the foot occurred at the very beginning of the human story—as the all-knowing Yahweh knew it would. Their doom is the fires of Hell. Augustine gleefully explains: “In the future punishment both body and soul shall suffer, affirm that the body shall be burned with fire, which the soul shall be, as it were, gnawed by a worm of anguish” (City of God 782). Augustine responds to those who question the justice of the punishment: “Eternal punishment seems hard and unjust to human perceptions, because in the weakness of our mortal condition there is wanting that highest and purest wisdom by which it can be perceived how great a wickedness was committed in that first transgression.” The great wickedness, Augustine tells us, was “abandoning Him” (City of God 783).
First of all, Eve did not abandon God; she only disobeyed him. And God’s “highest and purest wisdom” is nothing more than vengeance. “Hence the whole mass of the human race is condemned; for he [Adam’s listening to Eve] who at first gave entrance to sin has been punished with all his posterity who were in him as a root” (783). In other words, Adam and Eve’s offspring (all of humanity) will be punished for a crime committed by their parents. No matter that those being punished never themselves committed a crime. The sin is passed on in the blood as if it were some form of DNA. One does not need “highest and purest wisdom” to understand that such punishment is neither just nor moral. And yes, Augustine believed that children are also under the power of the Satan (because they too inherited Eve’s sin) unless they are reborn in Christ (baptism), meaning that they will otherwise end up in Hell, in Limbo “a region on the border of hell or heaven, serving as the abode after death of unbaptized infants.” Limbo is a Roman Catholic invention to keep up the appearance that deep down God is good in spite of his condemning “the whole mass of the human race” to the fires of Hell.
The nature of this so-called crime is not murder, not theft, not assault, not rape, or any other crimes against persons. That would be left to Cain, the first-born human who would introduce homicide into the world yet was left free to wander the earth and be forgiven and protected by Yahweh. With typical masculine vengeance Yahweh says, “If any one slays Cain, vengeance shall be taken on him sevenfold” (Genesis 4:15). It is not surprising that Yahweh would be sympathetic to Cain given Yahweh would himself become a mass murderer when he floods the world. Thus, unlike his dead brother Abel, Cain was able to marry, have a son, and even found a city, Enoch.
Eve’s transgression was not harming someone (that would be left up to Yahweh), but simply not doing what a tyrannical God demanded. If God says an act is a crime, then it is a crime. An example: “Whoever sacrifices to any god other than the Lord must be destroyed” says Yahweh (Exodus 22:20). There were thousands of religions in the world at the time of the ancient Jews as there are today. According to Yahweh, worshiping the gods of those religions is a capital offense. This means worshiping Gaia, Mother Earth, then or now, is a crime deserving of death because Yahweh says so. This is hardly an illustration of “highest and purest wisdom” but of divine thuggery.
Digging deeper, what is revealed is an expression of Jewish hatred of other religions. Yahweh is their bullhorn. It has nothing to do with morality. Hatred in itself is not immoral. Many evils deserve to be hated. Acts causing harm to people—not to ideas, not to ideologies, not to the figures embodied in ideologies. Immoral acts violate in some way the autonomy of individuals, be it their body and their ability to believe and live as they wish. However, criticizing a person’s beliefs is not immoral. It is preventing a person from having and expressing those beliefs—be they true or false or ridiculous—that is immoral because doing so violates the person’s personal and intellectual autonomy. The ideologies of the Abrahamic religions have caused endless harm to humans and endless violations of human autonomy. The most infamous illustration is the crucifixion of Jesus because of his beliefs.
Creating a Nihilistic Hell on Earth
It gets worse. There is no biblical Hell, but there is a hell on earth inspired by the Jewish ideologies. Reading Augustine one sees how he relishes the suffering of people who do not get on board the Christ Train or his version of Christianity. That is right. He condemned other Christian sects. He campaigned against Donatists, who like Augustine, claimed to be the only true Christians. What we see in Augustine is an example of how the Jewish ideology can cause members of other faiths or no faith to be declared as having negative value and thus no moral rights because the ideology’s God condemns them. This is how a religion becomes a source of nihilistic thinking toward other peoples—by reducing their value to nothing.
As illustrated in the Old Testament, Canaanite pagans have negative value thus no moral rights, therefore can be slaughtered and their cultures cleansed from the earth. Yahweh even joins in the slaughter. The idea is this: God’s declaring certain people to have negative value, to be an abomination in his “eyes,” results in the negation of their moral rights. Together with his condemning them to the most horrific tortures sends the message to his followers that they too can adopt the same attitude and behavior toward members of other faiths or no faith. And throughout history the followers of the Abrahamic religious ideologies have done just that.
Such thinking and behavior is antithetical to the feminine, which values creating life, nurturing life, and loving life. Michelangelo’s Pietà capture’s the difference. As a mother, Mary expresses sorrow and love for her dead son. The dead Jesus, on the other hand, is the victim of Jewish hatred embedded in a Jewish religious ideology dominated by masculine hate, violence, and will to power. From the perspective of Jewish ideology, Jesus had only negative value thus no moral rights, which meant having him murdered was not immoral. To the contrary, from the perspective of the ideology having him murdered was a moral action. The weird and unwholesome element in all this is that Jesus, like Eve, committed no crime against a person or even against God.
His offense was to break away from the group-think of conventional Judaism to become an independent thinker—which was unacceptable to traditional Jews, including Saul of Tarsus, who persecuted the followers of Jesus. He would later become Apostle Paul who would create his own religion in the name of Jesus but infuse it with the fanaticism that possessed him when he was a Pharisee. With the rise of religious ideologies came the crime is called heresy: “opinion or doctrine at variance with the orthodox or accepted doctrine, especially of a church or religious system.”* This is not a betrayal of one’s people but a critical response to an idea. Jesus was declared a heretic and as such forfeited his moral rights, thus could be murdered for his beliefs. Later in history, heretical views need not be religious but scientific or philosophical. Galileo and Spinoza come to mind.
* The crime of heresy was introduced into the world by the Jews. Usually, it was considered a capital offense, which is still the case among Muslims. Essentially, it is a crime against an ideology. The absurdity of heresy is that it is a crime against an idea, as if ideas can be victims. Yet, inventing ideas that harm people and destroy cultures is considered acceptable. In addition, it is easy to see how the invention of heresy would create endless enemies and victims where there were none before.
Augustine’s Support for Totalitarianism
Perhaps the most demonic side of Augustine was his totalitarian thinking. To explain this side of Augustine, I rely on Charles Freeman. Augustine could not tolerate independent thinking. He says, “I would not have believed the Gospels, except on the authority of the Catholic Church” (The Closing of the Western Mind 286). At one time, Augustine had been an independent thinker, philosophical in his approach to ideas. After he joined the Church (a judicious career move—switching to JudeoChristianity from Manichaeism, when he saw which religion had the backing of the Roman government), he surrendered autonomous thinking to become a bureaucrat. Freeman says, “In Augustine’s own development, we can see in microcosm a crucial shift away from Greek tradition of rational thought” (287). He surrendered to group think, which ideologies require. Then as a propagandist he used his training as a rhetorician to support the ideology of the Church. “It was Augustine who developed a rationale of persecution” (295).
The Church’s will to power could not tolerate competitors. The Donatists were a competing Christian sect. About heretics, Augustine said, “A characteristic of heretical sects is to be incapable of seeing what is obvious to everyone else” (294). The contradiction is that heretics are part of the “everyone else,” so what Augustine’s calls obvious is not obvious to everyone else. The Donatists were persecuted, their property was confiscated, their services forbidden, and their clergy exiled. “Augustine ejected the Donatists from Hippo and, taking over the bare churches... he posted his own anti-Donatists texts on the walls” (294). Donatism was a significant movement “represented by nearly 300 bishops,” yet “Donatism in itself became a criminal offence” (295). With the help of Augustine, what the Catholic Church introduces to the wider world is Jewish totalitarianism.†
† Moses was a totalitarian personality. The Book of Numbers tells about a man gathering sticks on the Sabbath. “And the Lord said to Moses, ‘The man shall be put to death; all the congregation shall stone him with stones’” (16:32-36). Of interest here is that only Moses has access to the Lord, so people had to accept Moses’ word about what the Lord said. The Church adopted this policy, supported by the likes of Augustine. To question the Church was to question God. The same held true for Protestantism that told its followers that they must accept without question the truth of the Bible and not think for themselves.
Another chapter describes a man named Korah who, along
with two hundred and fifty leaders, questions Moses’ authority. Korah’s concern
is that Moses had become a dictator. He says, “You have gone too far! For all
the congregation are holy... Why then do you exalt yourself above the assembly
of the Lord” (16:3). The result is that Korah and his people are destroyed by
God.
The idea here is that calling into question the demands
of the leader is to call God into question, thus deserving of divine punishment—carried
out in the real world by followers. The story of the Golden Calf is similar.
The same is true for Muhammad. Muslims have to accept Muhammad’s word that he
spoke with the angel Gabriel and received the Quran from him. Since only he had
access to God’s mind, via a messenger angel, he and only he is the arbiter of
God’s truth. Questioning his authority meant death, and still does today.
There are no women present. Ideology is used as a
weapon to achieve masculine will to power that requires oppressing populations.
This is seen most notably in Constantine’s adoption of Christian ideology—which
would bring classical civilization to an end as explained by Charles Freeman.
To use ideology as a tool of oppression supported by violence if necessary is
contrary to femininity.
Women are embodiment of love rather than ideology.
Their values are natural and concrete rather than artificial abstractions. They
express their love though acts of kindness such as Mary Magdalen anointing
Jesus’ feet. Of the various painting of this scene, such as Christ in the House of Simon by Dieric
Bouts and Sebastiano Ricci’s The Magdalen
Anointing Christ's Feet the only source of beauty is the female presence as
the religious ideologues discuss a dry, bloodless religious ideology based on
myth that would cause centuries of violence and bloodshed. To his credit Jesus
defended Mary. That was rarer than one might think.
The irony of Ricci is though his works often celebrate
the Christian ideology, in his artistic heart he knew that the female, not God,
is masculinity’s true raison d'être.
This is most famously illustrated by the great Christian epic poem Divine Comedy having been inspired by a
woman, Beatrice Portinari. Not surprising though given Dante was Italian. Yet
even men who love women will do them harm, such as Ricci’s attempt to poison a young
pregnant woman to avoid marriage. Abuse of women is masculinity original sin.
The work of art that most precisely expresses the relationship between the masculine and the feminine is Michelangelo’s Pietà. Mary’s presence is awesome, the human embodiment of humanity’s universal parent Mother Earth. She is pure love and pure beauty. In comparison, Jesus is pathetic—killed by masculine ideology. What he will bequeath to humanity is an ideology that will repudiate the female, repudiate Mother Earth, and instead celebrate death as a door to salvation.
Freeman tells us that Augustine’s rationale for persecution would “be exploited in the centuries to come” against the “Cathars, a sect which preached a return to the ascetic ideals of early Christianity: ‘Nearly twenty thousand of the citizens were put to the sword regardless of age and sex.” The response of abbot Arnaud Amaury, who played a prominent role in the Cathar Crusade, was “The workings of divine vengeance have been wondrous’” (296). “Augustine’s rationale for persecution was to be used to justify slaughter (as of the Cathars or the native Peoples of America)” (299). “Augustine’s The City of God proved to be the foundation document of Christian political thought” (298). (What happened to Jesus the founder of an altruistic religion?)
Augustine was perhaps Christianity’s greatest monster. He was a human version of ever-angry Yahweh. Like Muhammad, he delighted in the horrors of Hell. And both monsters were created by Jewish ideology. The important conclusion to be drawn from his bloodcurdling worldview is that it is pure masculinity. It is contrary to the feminine, blames the first female for all of humanity’s ills, punishes Adam and Eve’ offspring (humanity) for the so-called crimes of Eve’s (surrendering to her body’s desire for delicious food and her mind’s desire for beauty and wisdom and then sharing her discovery with her man mate Adam), and creating the fires of Hell to punish those who do not become slaves of Yahweh and Christ (which will terrify the minds of believers for centuries). Augustine believed that Yahweh “is a god who actively punishes as a form of showing love” (284). That is like a parent showing love for his child by punishing him or her with fire. However, it must be kept in mind that the entire narrative is a diabolical invention, a Jewish ideology, and Eve and Adam are constructs that exist only within the ideology. Yet, the various forms of harm caused by this ideology are beyond comprehension. Yahweh is the greatest invented monster of the masculine mind, a monster created by men filled with a desire for vengeance. Sadly, they got their vengeance, and it continues today.
Paul’s Repudiations
The Female
Jesus had sympathy for women. Far more so than traditional Jews such as the Pharisees: See “Jesus Anointed by a Sinful Woman” (Luke 7:36-39) and “A Woman Caught in Adultery” (John 8:3-5). Paul’s views are those of a former Pharisee. Rosemary Agonito says, “Paul adheres to the traditional Jewish practice of enforcing woman’s subordinate position.... He relies heavily on the Genesis account of the creation and fall of man to support his pronouncements.... It appears from all accounts that Jesus’ approach to women was utterly unconventional by Jewish standards, since in all his dealings with them he made no derogatory comments and showed no contemptuous attitudes about them.... Whatever his reasons, Paul explicitly objected to this new turn.” And his reactionary thinking about women would negatively influence the thinking about and treatment of women in the West for the next two thousand years (History of Ideas on Women 67-68). Still, Jesus included no women among his apostles, which laid the foundation for women to be considered intellectually inferior creatures to be protected like children but otherwise ignored. Paul’s and Jesus’ legacies to women ensured their being treated as inherently sinful and intellectually inferior to men.
The Earth
Jesus was no friend of the earth but one of its greatest enemies. He renounced the earth for the no-place of Heaven where the resurrected dead would live forever. Traditional Jews had already made clear in Genesis that the earth existed in a fallen state. Jesus went further by claiming it to be a subordinate realm. Historically, however, this version of Jesus was an Apostle Paul construct. It was Paul who was the earth’s greatest enemy. The renunciation of the earth was Paul’s doing, not Jesus’ since Jesus’ kingdom of God was to be an earthly kingdom as foretold in dozen Old Testament passages, such as “A shoot will come up from the stump of Jesse [the ancestors of Jesus Christ]; from his roots a Branch will bear fruit” and “a king will reign in righteousness and rulers will rule with justice” (Isaiah 11:1 and 32:1). What happened? Merrill Unger explains: “That offer was rejected [the Crucifixion]. As a result the ‘kingdom of heaven’ was postponed until Christ’s Second Advent” (“Kingdom of God,” Unger’s Bible Dictionary). Paul stepped in to save the day, saying that the new kingdom will be a postmortem kingdom that will begin with the Rapture:
For the Lord himself will come down from heaven, with a loud command, with the voice of the archangel and with the trumpet call of God, and the dead in Christ will rise first. After that, we who are still alive and are left will be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air. And so we will be with the Lord forever. (1 Thessalonians 4:16-17)
The Book of Revelation describes the postmortem kingdom of God. The post-Crucifixion life of Jesus is Paul’s invention. Thus, having invented the anti-earth Jesus, Paul was even less of a friend to the earth. He was a man filled with the God-sickness, which is nothing more than a disease of the brain caused by a pathological religious ideology.
The Flesh
In his letter to the Romans, Paul makes very clear his repudiation of the flesh. He says that God sent his only “Son in the likeness of sinful flesh and for the sake of sin, condemned sin in the flesh” (8:3). It is interesting that Paul does not condemn slavery, but only behaviors he dislikes associated with the flesh. He does not focus on behavior that violates people’s autonomy—such as rape, theft, and murder. Why? Because he hates the flesh above all, which is the reason his entire theology focuses on resurrection: escape from the material world via refurbished spiritual bodies. For him flesh includes the earth. He loves only that flight of fancy the spirit, which he most likely inherited from Plato’s philosophy that denigrated the material world from which one could escape via reason while alive and the soul when dead. Unlike Plato, the Pharisees believed in the resurrection of the body after death, and Paul was a Pharisee. And they might have adopted the idea from the Egyptians during their so-called captivity. Moses was an Egyptian. What is unique about Paul is that he so eagerly awaits death and resurrection, believing the only purpose of worldly existence is to be Judaized in Christ, die, and be resurrected.
About the spirit Paul says, “For those who live according to the flesh are concerned with the things of the flesh, but those who live according to the spirit with the things of the spirit. The concern of the flesh is death... for the concern of the flesh is hostility toward God; it does not submit to the law of God, nor can it; those who are in the flesh cannot please God” (Romans 8:5-8).‡ What Paul is demanding is the repudiation of the worldly life—being born, raised by parents, working, falling in love, having children of one’s own to raise, educate, care for and love. This is the result of a sick religious ideology that has at its center a pathologically self-centered, masculine deity that places himself above everything humans love and enjoy.§
‡ Plato never went that far. For him the problem was not sin (which would have been meaningless to him) but epistemology. The material world, including the body, obscures the understanding in the way cataracts cloud vision. Plato was a critic of sensualism because to him matters of the intellect were most important and rewarding. Yet, to him, a sensualist is not a sinner to be punished but a person who settles for a lesser form of self-realization—the pursuit of pleasure rather than reason.
§ Yahweh hated the earth because it distracts his children from himself. This is illustrated in the Exodus story of Golden Calf, a symbol of the earth.
And this sickness infects the minds of his followers such as Augustine who says in his Confessions “How I burned, O my God, how I burned with desire to fly away from earthly things and upwards to you” (bk. 3, ch. 4, sect. 8). When Augustine came down with the Jewish God sickness, he sent away the mother of his son. The implication is that a religious ideology that rejects the earth and the earthly ways of life is inherently anti-female. I understand that individual monks would withdraw from the world to pursue their desire to achieve oneness with their conception of the supernatural, but Paul and Augustine demanded that for everyone. So monasteries and convents were built enabling believers to isolate themselves from the world, and priests would become celibate, no wives, no children, no families, their only labor being to preach a Jewish ideology. They live artificially in a simulated reality created from scripture. Paul would praise them for adopting “a spirit of slavery.” And for what? An imagined eternal life in the hereafter that can be believed in only if one accepts the notion without giving it a modicum of rational thought.
And he would spread his hatred of the flesh, the earth, and life in this world to the gentiles, such as Augustine. Paul sought not their salivation but their destruction. He talks a lot about love but he did not love the pagans. He hated them and sought to Judaize them. Such sweet revenge! Of course traditional Jews would suffer as well, guilty of deicide and then of rejecting the resurrected savior they had murdered.
Apostle Paul says, “Set your minds on things that are above, not on things that are on the earth, for you have died and your life is hidden with Christ in God.... Put to death then, the parts of you that are earthly” (Colossians 3:1-5). Ronald Hock explains the passage: Christians “have new identities in heaven and thus interests and obligations different from those who are still earthbound.”** In reality, believers have surrendered themselves to a Jewish ideology, the only place Jesus Christ dwells because he is an invention of Paul’s self-serving imagination. Paul’s ideological transformation of Jesus came before the other writers of the New Testament, and it was from him that they acquired their idea of Jesus as a God-man capable of surviving death.
** “Philippians” in Harper Collins Bible Commentary, 1129.
It was from him that they became obsessed with escaping the earthly realm via death and resurrection and spending an eternity doing nothing but staring at God: “they shall see his face, and his name shall be on their foreheads. And night shall be no more; they need no light of lamp or sun, for the Lord God will be their light” (Revelation 22: 4-5). To see his face will be the crowning joy of heaven. Finally, the faithful will have escaped from the earth, moon, sun and stars to spend eternity looking upon the face of God. Humanity reduced to total passivity. And what would the face of God look like given God has no face? Like the face of the man in the moon? Even though scripture does not provide a physical description of Jesus, he must have looked like other men. Personally, I prefer death without rebirth rather than spending an eternity in a state of passivity, cut off from the beauties of the material world.
Paul’s repudiation of the world is also found in the Book of James, believed to be written by the brother of Jesus: “Do you not know that the love of the world results in enmity with God? Therefore, whoever wishes to be a lover of the world makes himself an enemy of God” (James 4:4). Ergo, God is an enemy of the world we live in, the world celebrated by the ancient Greeks, a celebration snuffed out once Jewish ideology infected the minds of the pagans, resulting in Greco-Roman civilization committing cultural suicide. Worse, the repercussions would be the destruction of nature worshiping cultures throughout the world—including Native Americans.
Pretty Woman: Betrayed yet Undefeated
Even those who deny the significance of the female body spend their lives struggling against her. She is their greatest adversary, the greatest test of their strength and holiness. The priest’s greatest temptation is the female body. Only his commitment to God enables him to resist her temptation—though not always successful as history has shown.†† She is the temptation of the earth. This is not surprising given a visible earth is more enchanting than an invisible God. Without fear of severe punishment, God is no match for a pretty woman. So religion must arm itself against her by making her the symbol of all fallenness.‡‡ Even the hope for eternal life is nothing more than an expression of despair at being separated from the female body and from the earth—which are one and the same.
†† Pedophilic priests: They gave up women so turned to young boys in their care for sex. How different from Jesus who said, “Let the little children come to me, and do not hinder them, for the kingdom of heaven belongs to such as these” (Matthew 19:14). The kingdom of heaven for children is simply being cared for, loved, protected, and treated decently. And really the kingdom of heaven for adults is caring for and protecting children. And the fault is not the flesh but the sick minds of the priests who cloister themselves off from the world. Sick men can be evil men; yet their sickness does not excuse the evil.
‡‡ The hideous effect of Judaism and its religious offspring has been women being considered inherently sinful; in other words, they are sinful just because they are women. And that attitude would become encased in religious ideology thus unquestionable dogma. This cruel, immoral, idiotic way of thinking has punished women for centuries just because they are women. A glaring example is JudeoIslam’s treatment of women.
Women among the Pagans
Greek and Roman pagans thought women physically and intellectually inferior to men, but they never considered them embodiments of sin, illustrated by the many goddesses they believed in. And there was progress being made early on among thinkers such as Pythagoras (c582–c500 BC), Plato (427–347 BC), and Epicurus (341–270 BC), who championed the view that the role women in society need not be limited to that of domesticity. Pythagoras: Pythagorean women were allowed to study philosophy. In his Life of Pythagoras Iamblichus lists of seventeen illustrious Pythagorean women. The wife of Pythagoras, Theano of Croton, was a philosopher in her own right who took over the school after her husband died.
Plato: “We must therefore pick suitable women to share the life and the duties of Guardian [philosopher king] with men, since they are capable of it and the natures of men and women are akin” (The Republic, Penguin classics, 175). The Republic was published about 375 BC.
Epicurus: “It was a sign of the growing freedom of women that he welcomed them to his lectures, even into the little community that lived about him. He made no distinctions of station or race; he accepted courtesan as well as matrons, slaves as well as freemen... The courtesan Leontium became his mistress as well as his pupil.... Under his influence she had one child and wrote several books...” (Will Durant, The Life of Greece, Simon and Schuster, 64).
But Jewish ideology would destroy the progressive mind of Greco-Roman civilization and send women back into the misogynistic Dark Ages. They would have to wait until 1861 for their cause to be taken up again in the name of reason, rather than ideology based on superstition, by John Stuart Mill in his essays “Of the Extension of the Suffrage” and “The Subjection of Women.”
Parasitical Man and the Female Body
Man draws his power from the female body. He lives constantly in relationship to her, no less than women do. The female body fills the void that all men experience. Men are nothing without her. Even God cannot fill the void, though this is the purpose of the Abrahamic ideologies—to replace touchable Mother Earth and the touchable female body with a so-called superior divine masculine nothing that cannot be sensed in any way but only imagined.§§ Without the female body men have no telos—be it that of sexual union and its ecstasy or the sensual sublimation that fuels their work, ideas, and deeds. And great deeds are not possible if based on a lie such as serving the God of an ideology, though for centuries great misdeeds have been committed in service to the God of an ideology. Without women and their children, work, ideas, deeds, and heroes would not matter. In this sense, animals get it right.
§§ And the image is unpleasant, as Yahweh’s words illustrate: “Destroy completely all the places on the high mountains, on the hills and under every spreading tree, where the nations you are dispossessing worship their gods. Break down their altars, smash their sacred stones and burn their Asherah poles in the fire; cut down the idols of their gods and wipe out their names from those places” (Deuteronomy 12:2-3). Asherah was the mother goddess of the Canaanites. It was not enough to simply conquer a people, common practice in those days, but also their places of worship, usually in conjunction with exterminating the population.
One might argue that Praxiteles' Aphrodite of Cnidus is based on a lie, the assumption that she represents an existing deity, which she does not since no such deity exists. The same is true the Christ-God and Yahweh. They do not exist just because Jewish ideologies say they do. But Aphrodite of Cnidus is the female body—which, unlike the gods just mentioned—can be seen. The model wasn’t the deity but a living female, in this case a beautiful courtesan. What Praxiteles’ statues express is the love the ancient Greeks had for the human body. Epicurus even argued that the gods were shaped like humans because the human shape is the most beautiful of all shapes
Masculinity’s Assault on the Female Ontic
This fact is discouraging to most men—to think that all their work is ultimately inspired by lust. It is the revelation of the drone. Man’s devotion to life is a lust for life, a lust that that is in its heart uncontrollable. Culture and civilization have been constructed to check and channel male lust away from the female, to protect the delicate male ego by creating an artificial world made in his own image. To shield the male’s fragile ego, Jewish prophets went so far as to invent an imagined parallel reality that was pure masculinity—with the uber-male deity Yahweh to replace Mother Earth who gives birth to life. Unlike Mother Earth, the cosmic magician Yahweh created the Universe by pulling species out of his magic hat. That such scriptural fakery could capture the human mind is discouraging. In masculine fashion he created Eve—as an afterthought—in the way Victor Frankenstein does, from a body part, one of Adam’s ribs.*** His methods of creation are incomprehensible because they are so nonsensical that they cannot even be imagined. This uber-male deity, however, would have to resort to a female to give birth to his male avatar Jesus Christ.
*** Here is the reason for Paul’s thinking about the origin and nature of women: “A man ought not to cover his head, since he is the image and glory of God; but woman is the glory of man. For man did not come from woman, but woman from man; neither was man created for woman, but woman for man” (1 Corinthians 11:7-10). These words have determined attitudes toward women for centuries and continue to do so today. Man is made in God’s image, which must mean intelligence since God is without body. Thus women are intellectually inferior to men, and for that reason should not speak their minds in church, in public, or anywhere else. That women came from man is rooted in the claim that the first woman, Eve, was made from her boyfriend Adam’s rib.
Myth-based explanations of how the world works—which ignore
empirical evidence that shows both men and women come into the world via their
mothers—are the reason why the Abrahamic religions have been against science
and as a result impeded scientific progress for centuries. The rise of
JudeoChristianity meant the rise of superstition and the decline of reason in
Western civilization. The complete title of Charles Freeman’s history of
classical civilization is The Closing of
the Western Mind: The Rise of Faith and the Fall of Reason. E.R. Dodds says
that Martin Nilsson, a scholar of the Greek and Roman religious systems,
“laments that the Church threw out the baby with the bathwater, rejecting not
only the superstitions of late paganism but ‘the sound kernel of ancient
science’” (Pagan & Christian in an
Age of Anxiety, W.W. Norton & Company, 132). Charles Freeman adds at
the end of his book, “I would reiterate the central theme of this book: that
the Greek intellectual tradition was suppressed rather than simply faded away.
My own feeling is that this is an important moment in European cultural history...”
(340). It was, especially for women.
Like his so-called father Yahweh, Jesus Christ would surround himself with masculine disciples. And this masculine ego-stroking ideology would be adopted by Paul and later Muhammad, both men ideologically programmed by the Jewish ideologies. Islam’s attitude toward the female was harsher than that of Paul’s. It hid them from public view. Only males were allowed to display themselves in public. And unlike Muhammad, Paul never says it’s okay to beat one’s wife or to have more than one wife. In fact, to his credit Paul says, “Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her” (Ephesians 5:25), though this statement is misleading since there was no church for Jesus to love and give himself up for. And given its Old Testament oppressive cruelty, I doubt he would have been pleased with the Catholic Church. Its behavior has been totally unChristian.
Jesus did not die for the Church but for his people. Peter says, “For Christ also suffered once for sins, the righteous for the unrighteous, to bring you to God. He was put to death in the body but made alive in the Spirit.” (1 Peter 3:18). Jesus’ sacrifice was personal, not institutional, not ideological. Pre-Jesus Jews were less gentle than Jesus. About a newly married wife accused of not being a virgin the Old Testament says, “If, however, the charge is true and no proof of the young woman’s virginity can be found, she shall be brought to the door of her father’s house and there the men of her town shall stone her to death” (Deuteronomy 22:20-21). Such is the view of a tyrannical, vengeful masculine God. How different from Jesus’ defense of the adulteress (John 8 verses 6-7) and the prostitute (Luke 7:47). What is seen in each case is the Jungian anima at work in Jesus.
Generally, however, what Jesus accomplished for women was undone by Paul with his incredible denigration of women and hatred of the flesh. He says, “sin entered the world through one man, and death through sin, and in this way death came to all people, because all sinned” (Epistle to the Romans 5:12). We all know Adam was seduced by Eve, so the buck stops with her. Historically, men were not stigmatized by Adam’s behavior. No, he is seen as a victim of female chicanery. Women would become the equal of the Serpent. The conclusion that would haunt women forever was that they are inherently irrational thus incapably of controlling their impulses. So men must take charge of women’s lives. In Paul’s words, “Wives, submit yourselves to your own husbands as you do to the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife as Christ is the head of the church” (Ephesians 5:22-23). This claim has had harmful implications for women because it implies that a woman who disobeys her husband is disobeying Christ.
How God Made Men Slaves to Sex
Yet, the Eve story is a lie, a rationalization of what really goes on between men and women. In the story, Adam is seen as a gullible victim, but in reality, women do not sexually aggress men.††† The opposite is the case. And that is made clear in the Old Testament that describes men raping women and even raping other men, not to mention the acclaimed sex-addicted Israelite kings David and Solomon who collected hundreds of wives and concubines. Yet, Eve is at fault; David and Solomon merely suffered from her Original Sin.‡‡‡ The general consensus of the Abrahamic religions is that women tempt men into sexual sinfulness.
††† The fruit of the tree served as an aphrodisiac that brought about sexual awareness. After Adam and Eve ate the fruit, “Then the eyes of both were open and they knew that they were naked” (Genesis 3:7). From that moment on, God had a rival for the attention of the two neophytes: Sex. This angered God and he hunted down the two like the giant goes after Jack in that other fairytale “Jack and the Beanstalk.” He would sentence them to death and a life of pain and hardship. But that did not matter because they had discovered sex and with glee would begin populating the world. What the book of Genesis reveals is that Yahweh is a boring, mean deity who lost out to the fun humans could have with one another in nature’s garden.
‡‡‡ Actually, that David and Solomon collected and used hundreds of women as sex toys was never considered sinful. In fact, their doing so legitimized polygamy and reduced the value of women to sexual collectables. But if a married woman had an affair with another man, she would be stoned to death if caught. That is called a double standard.
The Eve story has to be about sex because sex is only real leverage women have over men. Yet, the ancient Jewish scribes ignored the evidence between their legs. Instead of blaming the penis (the incarnation of the masculine libido), they blamed the female. Every man knows he has no control over his penis, and a woman need not be present for it to be aroused. And once aroused it will target women, men, boys, girls, or whatever is close at hand. As illustrated in the story Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, the irrationality of the male libido is capable of completely overpowering even moral reason (if it has been culturally inculcated in the male, which often is not the case), thus making men especially dangerous to women (and children). And who is to blame? Not Eve. Yahweh saddled men with perpetual libidinous lust so that humanity would achieve His ambition: for humanity to “be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth,” and they have been, pushing the environment to a tipping point beyond which disaster awaits. God was more considerate of animals, allowing them respite from being constantly in heat. God is to blame, not Eve, not women.
God and the Origin of Male Aggression
And the rest of that phrase says, “subdue it [Mother Earth]. Rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky and over every living creature that moves on the ground” (Genesis 1:28), a truly malevolent commission. To bring about the domination of the earth and its creatures, God instilled in men a form of aggression that history’s non-stop warfare has proven difficult if not impossible to control.§§§ The truth is Eve can’t be blamed for male aggression. War, rape, assault, etc., are what men do. Where does male aggression reside? In that male heart of darkness the male id. Again, this dark side of humanity—male aggression—is celebrated in the Abrahamic scriptures, which, as a result, interrupted for centuries pagan philosophers’ search for a way of life characterized by peace and harmony.**** The uncorrupted, historical, existential Jesus said Enough! There is a better way to live, a way that involves helping rather than hurting, peace rather than war.
§§§ And really, there has been no improvement since ancient times. Mutually Assured Destruction, not morality, has suspended global warfare for the time being. Masculine aggression continues to make humanity’s future problematic.
**** And let’s face it, unlike the Abrahamic religions, philosophy does not encourage warfare. Conquest is the central theme of all three religions; the pursuit of truth characterizes what philosophers do.
For his wisdom Jewish authorities had him executed and Paul would weaponize his memory to be used to conquer the pagans. Emperor Constantine adopted Christianity as a military tactic, even having the cross marked on the shields of his soldiers. When he triumphed at Milvian Bridge, he attributed the victory to the god of the Christians. It turned out to be a Pyrrhic victory for the pagans because it would result in the Christian destruction of the classical world. Humanity might have progressed in a more humane way had the real culprit of its catastrophic history been investigated and more attention had been paid to female voices rather than silencing them.
The Female: Masculinity’s Telos
A woman does not feel this nothingness, this sense of incompleteness, this hollowness. The female is complete. She need not create great works, discover great ideas, or perform great deeds to establish her significance. Her beautiful, life-producing body alone is enough to ensure her significance. She is pure value. She is always the most highly sought after prize in the world. She is not worth the price of gold only because she exists in abundance. If sold cheaply or given away, her value remains an absolute constant for there is nothing else that can fill the masculine void so completely. There is nothing else so universally sought by men as the female body, and without her, nothing else is worth seeking. Compared to her the will to power is empty and obscene.
This is not to say that there are no other values in the world that exist independently of the female body, but only to say that even these values would be meaningless without her. If there is goodness and greatness in men, their motive or telos is ultimately the female body. A world populated only by men would begin to die in an orgy of violence, and those left would die of boredom.
Men find this dependency frustrating. They are voids that seek to be filled, yet the one thing that can truly fill the void has a will of her own—though too often oppressed and bullied by men. She can say yes or she can say no. It was that spirit of independence that caused the ancient Jews to have their God Yahweh slap them down in their story about the first woman—who is far more appealing than the cosmic tyrant they unleashed upon the world—Yahweh, masculinity deified. So there are conditions that must be met. Her body has a mind and a will, and acceptance by these is one of the conditions. To steal the body, to take her against her will and mind destroys the possibility of true fulfillment. The body must say yes. To steal the body is to be a thief; it is to commit a crime against humanity, the worst of crimes. And the thief is degraded to the point of being evil and looked upon with loathing and hatred for his weakness. His void is not filled but is enlarged; his meaning is that of nothingness. He steals but does not obtain. He continues as a human void.
Women too are frustrated—mostly with men rather than with themselves. Though they dwell in the fullness of being’s mystery and value, they live in a world that constantly seeks to consume them. They know that in their hearts all men are thieves desirous of the female body. They know that even the men who protect them from those who steal their bodies, even their protectors—their heroes—lust after them. Men, the desert dwellers, seek to enter the female body, the oasis where the fruit of life grows. Men beg to enter, use violence to enter, and kill to enter. Women cannot flee. They are prisoners of the body beautiful, prisoners of her beauty, her power, her pleasure, her chaos.
Some women seek their own company to isolate themselves from the desert marauders who would steal their bodies. Some become invisible by disguising their bodies. Others though delight in the power of their beauty, sensuality, and provocativeness. These women display and enhance their bodies so that the flesh becomes a flame that gives momentary light to the dark, empty soul of the male. It casts a glow in the infinite darkness within that inflicts upon the male soul unbearable longing and despair. Nothing but envy and desire can arise out of the encounter between masculine nothingness and feminine completeness, between masculine striving and feminine calm, between masculine death and feminine life. The male nothingness longs for the perfect value embodied in the female body. Whereas the male body is only a tool, the female body is the incarnation of that sacred motive force—life itself—that primordial and mysterious force that transform dead stones into living bodies, minds, and souls.
The female is superior to the false Christ savior. He himself said, “Do not suppose that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I did not come to bring peace, but a sword” (Matthew 10:34). Those words express the essence of masculinity and the Abrahamic religions. Each one a declaration of war on humanity. On the other hand, what do women offer when they come into the world? Love, family, children, and the desire for peace.
Are Those the Words of Jesus?
Or are they the words of the disciple? Like the Gospel of Luke, this gospel was written more than fifty years after the death of Jesus and a decade after the First Roman-Jewish War and the destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple. The post-war writers would have been hostile toward the Romans specifically and pagans generally. As described in the Old Testament, the Jews hated pagans from the beginning; that hate is the central theme of the Old Testament and defined the Jewish people’s attitude toward non-Jews. (This attitude of hatred of the other would be passed on to Christians and Muslims.) And now a pagan nation had destroyed Jerusalem and that which was most sacred to the Jewish people: the Temple. Yet, can anyone imagine Jesus’ wielding a sword? Jesus’ message concerning violence was, “You have heard that it was said, ‘Eye for eye, and tooth for tooth.’ But I tell you, do not resist an evil person. If anyone slaps you on the right cheek, turn to them the other cheek also’” (Matthew 5:38-39).
Of course, Christ the cosmic warlord becomes most apparent in the Book of Revelation (written some 67 years after Jesus’ death). So there are two Jesuses lurking in the New Testament: The first is the historical, existential Jesus who offered his people, not the pagans,†††† an alternative Judaism that focuses on personal morality and spirituality rather than hatred of pagans. The second is the masculine mythic Christ, invented by Paul and further developed by the other writers of the New Testament, the ones who declared a global ideological war upon the pagans of the world. The Christ Jesus would be adopted by the Catholic Church. Its weapons would be the sword to kill the body and conversion to kill the cultural soul of the pagan, as in the case of converting nature-worshiping Native Americans into Christians.
††††Jesus tells his disciples, “Stay away from the Gentiles and don’t go to any Samaritan town. Go only to the people of Israel, because they are like a flock of lost sheep” (Matthew 10:5-6).
The Nihilism of Judaism
Essentially, nihilism is a declaration that the value of history, culture, tradition, people, or nature is that of nothing. Having no value means having no moral value. Generally, the most harmful declarations of valuelessness come from religious and political ideologies, not philosophy. Nihilistic ideologies are expressions of masculinity. They codify the male’s will to power that includes the drive to conquest, destruction, homicide, and oppression. That drive has determined the pattern of human history: conquer, create, destroy. What the Abrahamic religions accomplished was to ideologically justify the masculine will to power by claiming it is encouraged and condoned by God.
The Lesson of the Amalekites
Purim is a Jewish holiday that celebrates the extinction of the Amalekite pagans. The Book of Esther tells the story of the Amalekite Haman the Agagite who plotted genocide against the Jews in Persia, an event that never happened. The story is intended to vilify anyone or any group that would want to exterminate the Jewish people. The implication is that like Haman all Amalekites sought genocide against Jews. Again not true. Genocide was the modus operandi of Judaism, not paganism. Polytheism means many gods and many gods means many religions. F.W. Walbank says, “The sophistic movement [sophists taught philosophy and rhetoric] had engendered a mood of skepticism about most accepted beliefs and at the same time many foreign cults had found a home in Greek cities”(The Hellenistic World 209).The Jewish genocide was carried out against the pagan tribes of Canaan and was justified by Jewish religious ideology.
The Amalekites are vilified in the Old Testament for harassing the Jews during their exodus from Egypt. However, it must be remembered that that the Jews were not only leaving Egypt; they were also invading other peoples’ homelands just as their ancestors the Hyksos (or Habiru) invaded Egypt, where, according to Freud, they adopted monotheism from the Egyptian Moses (Moses and Monotheism 31). The conquest of Canaan is described in the Book of Joshua. The Jews were aggressive invaders. Of course, their invasions of other peoples’ homelands were divinely sectioned so not immoral behavior.‡‡‡‡
On Jordan’s stormy banks I stand, / And cast a wishful eye / To Canaan’s fair and happy land, / Where my possessions lie.
Oh, the transporting, rapturous scene / That rises to my sight! / Sweet fields arrayed in living green, / And rivers of delight!
Refrain:
I am bound for the promised land, / I am bound for the promised land; / Oh, who will come and go with me? / I am bound for the promised land.
At Rephidim the Jews encountered the Amalekites early on in their exodus from Egypt. The Amalekites were camel-riding nomadic raiders who probably saw the Jews as an easy target. On the other hand, Rephidim was the only oasis in the region. It was situated in the mountains where nomads brought cattle to drink. Oases were indispensable to the lives of the people and their livestock, and Amalekites perhaps tried to prevent the Israelites from reaching the oasis. Given the size of the Jewish population leaving Egypt as described in the Book of Exodus (“six hundred thousand men on foot, besides women and children,” 12:37), it is understandable that the Amalekites would protect the oasis from such a horde of invaders.§§§§
§§§§ If the religious veneer is scratched off the Old Testament, what is reveal is the Darwinian truth about human behavior. And that truth remains with us today when gods are still nowhere to be found just as they were nowhere to be found in ancient times. Religion is a way of dressing up the terrible truth of the human behavior. The existential Jesus offered an alternative to Judaism’s dress up and Darwinism. It emerged from the anima part of his personality. The kernel of that message is found in the parable of the Good Samaritan. No religion is necessary.
Like the Jews and almost every other group in the region, the Amalekite were raiders. They raided the town of Ziklag that David used as a military base for his raids against the Geshurites, the Girzites, and the Amalekites. We are told that “Whenever David attacked a territory, he did not leave a man or woman alive, but he took the flocks and herds, the donkeys, camels, and clothing” (1 Samuel 27:9). Now, compare this to how the pagan Amalekites engaged in raiding. They attacked the town of Ziklag: “They had taken captive the women and all who were there, both young and old. They had not killed anyone, but had carried them off as they went on their way.” David and his men discover that “their wives, and their sons, and their daughters, were taken captives” (1 Samuel 30:2-3).
So they pursued the Amalekites. When they caught up with them they discovered them “spread abroad upon all the earth, eating and drinking, and dancing” (30:16). This illustrates an important difference between the God-obsessed Jews and the bon vivant pagans. When the Jews tried to do the same during the Golden Calf celebration, Yahweh demanded that they be slaughtered by sword wielding priests***** and even joined in with a plague (Exodus 32:35). We are told that David recovered all that the Amalekites had carried away including two of his wives. Furthermore, “there was nothing lack to them, neither small nor great, neither sons nor daughters, neither spoils, nor any thing that they had taken to them. David recovered all” (30:19).
***** “This is what the Lord, the God of Israel, says: ‘Each man strap a sword to his side. Go back and forth through the camp from one end to the other, each killing his brother and friend and neighbor.’” The Levites did as Moses commanded. (32:27-28). Interestingly, they did what Moses commanded and had to take Moses’ word that his command came from God. That is how it always is with religious leadership.
Here is what Yahweh tells his people to do to the Amalekites: “Now go, attack the Amalekites and totally destroy all that belongs to them. Do not spare them; put to death men and women, children and infants, cattle and sheep, camels and donkeys” (1 Samuel 15:3). The Amalekite never committed this sort of slaughter. This is called genocide—a major theme of Jewish warfare. With Jewish “holy war, the spoils were to be ḥērem—that is, devoted to Yahweh as a holocaust or sacrifice” (Bernard Anderson, Understanding the Old Testament 172).
What motivated this genocidal mindset? A religious ideology. Here is what Yahweh tells his people:
Obey what I command you today. I will drive out before you the Amorites, Canaanites, Hittites, Perizzites, Hivites and Jebusites. Be careful not to make a treaty with those who live in the land where you are going, or they will be a snare among you. Break down their altars, smash their sacred stones and cut down their Asherah poles. Do not worship any other god, for the Lord, whose name is Jealous, is a jealous God. (Exodus 34:11-14)
Yahweh hates pagans because they worship other gods and have other religions. In other words, he hates them not for what they have done against the Jews but for who they are: pagans. Jews will suffer the same fate but not by pagans but by JudeoChristians (Judaized pagans). This form of hatred is not relative or conditional; it is universal and absolute, codified in scripture. It is a form of hatred that removes all value, including moral value, from that which is hated.
Of course, when I say Yahweh I mean the ideology. Yahweh exists nowhere else. Thus, this is not really about what God does or thinks but about the thinking of the people who created the ideological scripture. God is a mirror (a projection††††† that reflects not himself but the mores, aspirations, longings, and general mindset of his inventors. And Jews, Christians, and Muslims have used their version of God to justify and excuse their hated and mistreatment of non-Jews, non-Christians, and non-Muslims.
††††† The Greek philosopher Xenophanes of Colophon (570 – 478 BC) was the first to explain God as a projection. Twenty-three centuries later the German philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach (1804–72) explained the psychology of religious projection. Why the long hiatus? JudeoChristianity had suppressed the Greek intellectual tradition.
The Amalekites were raiders, not exterminators. They lack a religious ideology of hatred because they were polytheists.‡‡‡‡‡ The difference between them and the Jews is illustrated by what the Jewish ideology demands the Jews do to the Amalekites: “Now go, attack the Amalekites and totally destroy all that belongs to them. Do not spare them; put to death men and women, children and infants, cattle and sheep, camels and donkeys” (15:3). Yahweh is demanding a herem or holocaust against the Amalekites. Why? Mike Wegman explains: “The herem is therefore meant to ensure that the people will not be lured into worshipping the Canaanite gods. If the Canaanites are wiped out, then their religion is wiped out as well, erasing any chance that Israel will fall into the trap of worshipping false gods” (“Exploring the Deeper Meaning of the Herem”). In other words, Yahweh demands the destruction of all peoples who do not worship him. Thus, the Old Testament describes the committing utter destruction on one tribe after another. Unfortunately, the herem agenda will be passed on to the other Judaisms, Christianity and Islam. The goal of those religions has been to create a global monoculture so that all of humanity will worship a Jewish God be he Yahweh, Jesus Christ, or Allah.
‡‡‡‡‡ An interesting sidenote: Amalek is considered the founder of the Amalekite nation. He is a grandson of Esau the elder brother of Jacob. Esau is described as a man of the field and son of the desert “who delighted to roam free as the wind of heaven, and who was impatient at the restraints of civilized or settled life” (Unger “Esau”). When starving he asked his brother Jacob to give him food. Jacob said he would only sell it for Esau’s birthright as elder son. Later on, Jacob tricked Esau out of his father’s blessing. Having given up the anti-paganism of his people, Esau married two Canaanite women, which his father Isaac had forbidden, yet Isaac maintained his preference for Esau.
Tricked, deceived, and ostracized, Esau came to hate
his brother, yet he eventually forgave Jacob and even offer to protect him.
Jacob seeks to buy his brother favor, rather than having done the right thing
in the first place. Esau’s hatred is not fueled by religious ideology but is
conditional: he was betrayed by his brother and denied what was rightly his.
Thus, his hatred can be overcome. Esau and Jacob are two very different men who
represent two very different set of values and ways of living and thinking.
Esau was an honest, dependable, forgiving Romanic. Jacob was a greedy, untrustworthy
slave to religion.
In ancient times, Jews were never threatened with genocide even when under the power of powerful nations such as the Greeks and Romans. In his book Hellenistic Civilization and the Jews, Victor Tcherikover investigates the origin of anti-Semitism. He says, “The inner quality of anti-Semitism arises from the very existence of the Jewish people as an alien body among nations.” This suggests that the alien character of Jewish culture expressed in their religious ideology was an early cause of anti-Semitism. He says that anti-Semitism originated in Egypt with the Egyptian priest Manetho (flourished c. 300 BCE). He says further that “Such detestation had been unknown to the Greeks previously” (358). F.W. Walbank says that “The Greek immigrants of course brought their native gods with them [into Egypt], the Ptolemies were from the outset careful to pay respect to the traditional gods of Egypt... (The Hellenistic World 120).
Of course, respecting other peoples’ gods, thus their religion-based cultures, the Jews could never do because their ideology would not allow it. As for the Greeks, Russian-born Israeli historian Victor Tcherikover says, “Their first encounter with the Jews had aroused no antipathy among them; on the contrary, they looked upon the Jews as members of a unique people entirely devoted to philosophical observation” (Hellenistic Civilization and the Jews 358-359). However, among Greeks, Jews “enjoyed numerous privileges yet were exempt from duties such as working on the Sabbath, serving in the military, and paying taxes (373). Such privileges angered the Greeks, not the Jewish religion. According to Greek historian Diodorus the general view of the Jews was “that they alone of all the people refused to come into contact with other peoples and regarded all of them as enemies” (368). Jewish ideology expressed contempt toward other cultures and that contempt has bred hostility toward Jews. The historical fact is that Jewish ideologies created enemies rather than friends. And it is perhaps in them—Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—that one finds the true causes of anti-Semitism. Unfortunately, those causes are locked forever in scripture.
The Jewish ideology of intolerance and vilification of other cultures, did not exist among pagans, yet would be inherited by JudeoChristianity and imposed upon Native Americans. Ditto for JudeoIslam. Though unlike the parent religion, the two descendant religions offered conversion—an internal cultural cleansing (reprogramming) of the heathen or infidel individual. Once Judaized, Greco-Roman pagans turned on their own civilization and destroyed works of arts, temples, and libraries. The intellectual and artistic lost to humanity was monumental. Such a way of thinking a behaving is totally contrary to that of the female.
N.R. Hanson: Theory-Laden Perception
N.R. Hanson's notion of theory-laden perception is relevant here. People are not born hating other people just because who they are. Being a physical threat can trigger hatred. Or an ideology can instill hatred by declaring that certain people, creatures, or things should be hated for what they are. In the Old Testament, God demands extermination of whomever or whatever he hates:
Deuteronomy 7:1-2: “When the Lord your God brings you into the land you are entering to possess and drives out before you many nations—the Hittites, Girgashites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites and Jebusites, seven nations larger and stronger than you—and when the Lord your God has delivered them over to you and you have defeated them, then you must destroy them totally.”
Leviticus 20:13: “If a man lies with a man as one lies with woman, both of them have done what is detestable. They must be put to death.”
Deuteronomy 12:2-3: “Destroy completely all the places on the high mountains, on the hills and under every spreading tree, where the nations you are dispossessing worship their gods. Break down their altars, smash their sacred stones and burn their Asherah poles in the fire; cut down the idols of their gods and wipe out their names from those places.”
Hanson’s idea is that perception is influenced by theories, beliefs, and assumptions. When language becomes part of perception, it can serve as an interpretative varnish that adds layers of meaning to the unadorned objects of empirical sensation. Whereas Hanson’s Patterns of Discovery is primarily concerned with scientific theory, what it reveals about moral and ideological claims is invaluable because interpretative linguistic varnish can either enhance or degrade the meaning of the experience and its object. Hanson says in that the observation of something is shaped by theoretical presuppositions. This is true not only for scientific theories but also for religious ideology.
If an ideology is adopted as the truth rather than a work of the imagination, it becomes intellectual and perceptual lenses that influence the believer’s interpretation of reality, including moral and value judgments. As for the Jewish ideologies the influence has been that of radical distortion, degradation, and demonization resulting in catastrophic harm. When pagans were converted to Christianity and Islam they viciously turned on their own people. The truth is that there is nothing immoral about worshiping idols or many gods even if an existing god claimed that doing so is immoral. The Bible and the Quran, for example, contain moral pronouncements, not moral judgments based on rational and practical considerations. That is what philosophy does. The moral judgments found in scripture are nothing more than opinions: X is wrong because God declares it to be wrong, no further justification needed. God, however, has no inherent moral authority.
On the other hand, it can be argued that religious (or secular) ideologies can be morally judged according to the harm or benefit to others they encourage. Harm and benefit are the two central criteria used in moral judgments. The moral-value pronouncements of the Old Testament are generally negative and hurtful. Apart from the words of the historical Jesus in the Gospels, the same can be said about the New Testament. In the context of the topic of this essay, examples of harmful pronouncements include the denigration and demonization of women, the earth, and the flesh. It was ideology that dragged classical civilization into Dark Ages and infected the Middle East, North Africa, and much of Asia with a noxious superstition that disrupted cultural progress and caused endless slaughter, oppression, and wars by creating enemies where there were none before. For example, before the Muslim conquest Afghanistan was a polytheistic society that included Zoroastrian, Greek, Hellenistic, Buddhist, Hindu and other indigenous cultures. Now it is an oppressive Islamic monoculture. The Abrahamic ideologies fall into the category of being immoral rhetoric because of the horrific consequences they have caused humanity, one of which has been the eradication of other cultures because an ideology declared them to have negative value.
Was Jesus a Nihilist?
He may not have been, but the ideology associated with him is nihilistic. An illustration: “While Jesus was still talking to the crowd, his mother and brothers stood outside, wanting to speak to him. Someone told him, ‘Your mother and brothers are standing outside, wanting to speak to you.’ He replied to him, ‘Who is my mother, and who are my brothers?’ Pointing to his disciples, he said, ‘Here are my mother and my brothers. For whoever does the will of my Father in heaven is my brother and sister and mother’” (Matthew 12:46-50).
The lesson here is how an ideology is able to nihilistically take control of person’s life. The ideology draws a line in the sand separating loyalists (those who embrace the ideology) and enemies (those who do not). Jesus’ religious ideology rejected the way of life of this world, including family, friends, work, tradition, and communities, and required total devotion to the demands of the ideology. Says Ernest Renan, “He boldly preached war against nature, total severance from ties of blood.... Jesus required from his associates a complete detachment from the earth, an absolute devotion to his work” (The Lie of Jesus 286-287). He demanded total and absolute devotion to himself. “‘If any man come to me,’ said he, ‘and hate not his father, and mother, and wife, and children, and brethren, and sisters, and his own life also, he cannot be my disciple’” (288). “Jesus had forgotten the pleasure of living, of loving, of seeing, and of feeling” (289). The rejection of family is a profound negation of female values. The female is wellspring of the family. Jesus’ assault on the family is an assault on humanity.
The Jesus of the New Testament became a prisoner of his own ideology, an ideological fanatic. Those who would not become like him were worthless, without value. It was this fanatical devotion to ideology that caused Jews, Christians, and Muslims to slaughter pagans and even one another. In the 20th century the ideologies of Marxism and Hitlerism had the same effect of negating the value of people the ideologies declared as having no value thus no moral rights. Nihilism is the repudiation of value and that is what the Jesus ideology did to humanity except for the faithful who surrender their minds/worldview/values to his ideology, in other words, those who became slaves to the ideology. This nihilistic negation of others is pure masculinity.
Female Love versus the Deities of Hate
It is so easy to fall in love with a woman and so wonderful to be loved by her and to devote one’s life to her and to the children she produces. By contrast, devoting oneself to Yahweh or Christ or Allah—fleshless incarnations of ideology -- is both unnatural and selfish. It is a mental disorder inspired by egoism—motivated by fear or selfishness. As proven endless times in the Old Testament but most notably in the Garden of Eden episode, Yahweh is a terrifying tyrant. Anyone one who believes the myth would want to avoid his wrath. Most terrifying about the Abrahamic God is that he has never inspired love but always hatred—hatred of nonbelievers and a will to their destruction.
The ideological Christ is no less terrifying. He will sentence those who do not become his slaves to an eternity in the Lake of Fire. However, he sweetened the pot for the egoistical who want to live forever. Whereas Yahweh relies on the stick to terrify people to submit to him, Christ uses both the carrot of eternal life in Heaven and the stick of the Lake of Fire. To quote E.R. Dodds again, “Christianity held out to the disinherited the conditional promise of a better inheritance in another world. So did several of its pagan rivals. But Christianity wielded both a bigger stick and a juicer carrot” (Pagan & Christian in an Age of Anxiety 135). All of this is alien to the earth loving female.
Ideology and the Enslavement of Women
In the Old Testament women are confined to two roles: sex and reproduction. Three illustrations: Jacob had two wives and his two concubines who produced twelve sons and one daughter. David seduced Bathsheba, the wife of one of his exemplary soldiers Uriah, whom David had killed, not to mention his other wives and concubines: “And David took more concubines and wives from Jerusalem, after he came from Hebron” (2 Samuel 5:13). There were others, such as the ten concubines he shut up in a house under guard, where they remained until their death (20:3). According to 1 Kings, David’s son Solomon “had seven hundred wives of royal birth and three hundred concubines, and his wives led him astray” (11:3). This view of women would be fine if it remained confined to Jewish culture. How the Jewish men treated women was their business. But it did not remain in the confines of Judaism. Tragically, it went global as a result of being passed on to Judaism’s two ideological offspring—JudeoChristianity and JudeoIslam.
Judaism’s view of women is demeaning to women and encourages women to be treated as breeders and sexual collectables. This need not have been the case for cultures outside of Israel. Pagan philosophers were offering slowly but surely a more realistic and egalitarian view of women that might have improved how they would be viewed treated by men. That progress was cut short, however, after Paul infected Rome with his JudeoChristian ideology that resulted in Judaized pagans destroying classical civilization and with it any hope of improving the social status of women and lessening their being exploited and mistreated.
Earth Is Female
The female dwells at the center of our earthly realm. The female body is the earth’s creativity incarnated in human form. She is creation creating. Being self-creating, the Universe is inherently female because all natural creation is female. Men create but their creations, such as religious ideologies, are artificial, products of technique. Through the female body universal creation is re-enacted. Whereas the female body is the human physical embodiment of natural creation, the male-created myths are not only dead but usually toxic as in the case of the Jewish religious myths, which, unlike the life producing female, have caused countless deaths not only of individuals but entire cultures.§§§§§ She is our true primordial, organic object of reverence. She is different from the endless ideologically based religions and cults scatter antagonistically throughout the world. They exist in a contrary state to one another because they all cannot be true, though all can be false, which they are. They are the artificial inventions rooted in flights of masculine imaginations, not in reason, logic, and nature. From nothingness she creates the “I” being. She is of the Earth, the fertile planet. Because of her body, each woman is nature incarnate, whereas Christ is the ideological incarnation of Apostle Paul’s imagination, an idea fashioned from the matrix of Hebrew ideology.
§§§§§ The Jewish secular myth Marxism had the same effect, the slaughter of millions of people and the cleansing of numerous cultures. The two greatest mass murderers of the 20th century were Marxists: Mao Zedong (60 million victims) and Joseph Stalin (40 million victims). The myth is essentially an artificial masculine womb, as are all the Jewish ideologies. Adolf Hitler comes in third with 30 million victims. Pertinent here, however, Marxism gave rise to Hitlerism. Hitler’s hatred of Jews began shortly after Germany’s defeat in 1918. What he found after returning from the war in the spring of 1918-19 were anarchists and Communists seeking to establish a revolutionary Red Republic in Bavaria. Many of the leaders were Jews.
In his biography Adolf
Hitler, John Toland says that Hitler’s “simmering hatred of Jews had been
activated by what he himself had witnessed on the streets of Munich. Everywhere
Jews in power: first Eisner [who organized the Socialist Revolution that
overthrew the monarchy in Bavaria (1918)], then anarchists like Toller, and
finally Russian Reds like Levine. In Berlin it had been Rosa Luxemburg; in
Budapest Bela Kun, in Moscow Trotsky, Zinoviev and Kamenev. The conspiracy
Hitler had previous suspected was turning into a reality” (vol. I, 88). In
other words, Hitler saw Jews as Marxist revolutionaries seeking to overthrow
German society and culture. Thus, had there been no Marx, there would have been
no Mao, no Stalin, no Hitler, and no Holocaust. This should be sufficient proof
that ideologies are as deadly as plagues, which they are in their own way.
The true believer mentally inserts himself into the
womb by allowing himself to be programmed or indoctrinated by the ideology and
by doing so becomes a willing slave to its authority—God in the religious
ideologies, the State in Marxism. A dominant characteristic of these ideologies
that make them masculine is each and every one is a declaration of war on
individuals and populations unwilling to be indoctrinated by the ideology. To
fully understand the dark side of Jewish ideologies, it is necessary to
consider the number of nations that became Christian, Muslim, or Marxist; then
consider how many indigenous societies were destroyed in the process.
Guardian of Being
As the embodiment of life, beauty, and desire, woman is the natural guardian of being, not its destroyer. The act of destruction comes from masculine void, emptiness, nothingness, and will to death. The female, represented by the fullness of her body, seeks to preserve being and its primordial value. Only the female can experience directly though her body the inherent goodness of being. Dwelling in the fullness of being, she has no need for the endless striving, the eternal restlessness of male becoming—the striving of the void for fulfillment and of nothingness for being. Like her body, the female is complete in her value and purpose. Anything more than what she already is superabundance. There is nothing more than being. Dwelling at the center of the world, she has no need to journey elsewhere. Only men, seeking escape from the void within, strive for the stars. Woman exists at the creative heartbeat of the earth. The stars come to her. Thus, as a creator and dweller of being she seeks to preserve the organic world and all of its forms—the primordial children of creation.
Man the Failed Hero
If he has chosen chivalry as his raison d'être******, man is the destroyer who providers and protects. His primordial value has been to sustain and protect the female—the source of his being and significance. He is the destroyer who elected himself as the guardian of life and being, nature’s hero, protector of the female body. His body is hard, powerful, and sterile. As long as it serves the preservation of life and being, it has excellence in spite of its inherent emptiness. But man has forgotten his primordial purpose and has separated himself from her and has become an empty, aimless, chaotic destroyer. His hard powerful body is now made of steel and powered by fire. He delights in the nihilistic power of his mechanical body. He delights in its awful destructiveness. He delights in his power to control and kill. He created mechanical wombs that give birth to gaudy, stillborn creatures that move on land and water and in the air, that sing and talk, that even think—but are dead. And yet these dead creations have become a world, a dead world that has displaced the living one.
****** Unlike for a woman, chivalry in the sense of altruistic protector goes against the masculine nature, which seeks self-satisfaction, conflict, conquest, and oppression. Whereas nurturing altruistic morality comes naturally to a woman, it must be learned by men. The evidence of this is found in human history and masculine ideologies. Mary gave birth to Jesus who became a defender rather than a condemner of women. The corruption of both would come from grotesquely masculine mind of Apostle Paul.
The Masculine Dead World
And in this dead world of asphalt, concrete, steel, and plastic, of cars, planes, skyscrapers, and shopping malls and parking lots—only the female body remains whole, complete, organic, and primordial—a reminder of the world lost, of the life, beauty, and desire sacrificed. The male body and its mind have transformed the world into a dead thing. The female body, remnant of primordial, life-creation, is now put on display and exploited for profit, a commodity of sexual gratification. The female body no longer revered as the primordial source of love, marriage, and children; its meaning has been reduced to that of masturbation—the least profound meaning, that of physical masculine pleasure. Profaned and sexually commodified, she is everywhere in the dead world—butchered, ground up, packaged, and distributed. She has become the secret ingredient of a society in which erotic experiences are its telos and raison d'être.
The male void has consumed the old organic world, and now the shining new mechanical world seeks to fill the void with its own emptiness. What man attempted to do with religion, he is now doing with technology. The striving continues, and the female body, reduced to seductive slogans and erotic images, transformed into sweet, sticky secret ingredients, is still the primal mover, the efficient cause hidden behind the masculine will to power. Even chopped, dissected, and abstracted into subliminal bits of information or non-information, she remains the primal mover, fragments of life stimulating a dead world.
Captive of male nothingness, the female body has been culturally degraded and transformed. How different from ancient times when she was deified and glorified in the most beautiful works of art. Today she is something to buy and sell, to consume and discard. Now life, beauty, and being are captives of masculine nothingness. That which once could lead us to the center of being is itself lost, imprisoned in the masculine void of technology—filled yet empty of profound meaning. Trapped herself, the female is no longer able to lead humanity out of the nothingness of the artificial maze created by the masculine mind: the technological society.
An Excerpt from Frank Kyle's novel Desperate Love.
