“Question, Seek, Reflect, Respect.”

Let me start with a little bit of church History.   Birth of Christ 0Ad,,, he was in his 30’s at the time of the Crucifixion.    Decades passed with the growth of Christianity, always underground, many ways as a rebel alliance sort of thing.   Until Constantine, when said ruler had an epiphany and made Christianity legal in Constantinople. (now Istanbul.)   Constantine was the eastern section of the Church, Rome was a very small enclave of the same, and there were little tiffs back and forth between the two, but Constantine started the ball rolling.   It was when he called the Council of Nicea that things really took off for the Church, be it Holy Roman Catholic, or the Eastern Orthodox version.  That was a later split, around the time of the Crusades when Constantinople fell to Islam.   

But lets really look at what happened at the Council of Nicea.  Here follows my interpretation of those happenings,,, Read the links for “accepted truth”.    Fact is, they decided there were acceptable teachings, and unacceptable teachings.   They claimed divine guidance on this, but thats a subjective claim, not supported by ANY evidence.  And what did those changes do to the church?  They suddenly created a bunch of Heretics that were systematically hunted down and either reformed or destroyed.   The Gnostics were one of those sects.   So many different articles of text and script were lost in time (or buried in coffers in deep places underneath Rome).  In MY Opinion: this was a power grab.   The fact that from that point forward, the Church grew at brobdingnagian rates, commanding even kings and dictating their moves, over the next 1500+ years: It was a successful power grab.   For 1000+ years, the Church held the reins on everything, including education, all through the entirity of the ‘Dark Ages’ up to and even into the Renaissance.  There would be divisiveness and splits over that time, but the real power was always held by the Holy See since the first Council of Nicea.  

And this doesn’t even touch upon the dichotomy of the Old/New Testaments, or the several translations over the years.  From Aramaic, Roman latin, to Greek and Hebrew, back into ‘modern latin’, to English under King James (and there were at least 2 other english translations already out.), utilizing the new invention of the printing press to inform the people.  (this was also a power grab attempt: King John was under suspiscion of the Catholic Church for murdering his wife.   He wanted people to see the teachings with thier own eyes. not just the interpretations of priests: essentially robbing the priests of some power over the people.)   These translations also came with errors.  Sometimes the errors are caught and corrected, sometimes, they are not; Corrected that is.  I mention that because the original greek translation of “thou shall not suffer a witch,,,” didn’t mention any witches at all; it stated Pharmakia; Poisoner.   There are memos that recently came to light about that translation and how the translators of King James felt that, because of his standing (suspicion of murder with poison) in the Church, it would be best to change the wording.  

How many errors were never found at all?   No one truly knows.   Too many instances lost in time and repeated, by hand, in the monastic sriptoriums.    How many times was something waylaid by some scholar because they felt it was ‘not the word’?   We don’t know.   Human nature tells me this is a likely event, but there would rarely be a record of it, only discrepencies brought to light at later dates.  

There is also indications that the original Old Testament is not ‘original’, but copied from older Mythos from as far back as Sumeria.   If you really want to follow that rabbit hole, start here.   I won’t dive down that path here, but it leads to questions itself: I found that the Gnostic texts answered more than a few of those questions, and don’t need the backstory of the Sumerian Cuniform texts to stand.   Such is why I leave it for the reader to decide if they want to follow that road.

I know the argument “Word of God, received by Man; so there may be some ‘coloring’ added. ”   Ok,,, but that means that even WITH Divine guidance, its still the word of man, and the words I read in the old Testament all point in one direction: POWER over others.    Fear is STILL a weapon of control, and the fire and brimstone God of the Old Testament set the stage for priests and clergy to control the people in insidious ways.  Maybe there were some ‘laws’ that made sense; like the ‘don’t eat the swine’ sort of thing, seeing how pigs were infested with parasites that made people sick. They didn’t know the WHY, but they sure did see the effects, so wrote the ‘word from God’ to alleviate the problem.   That still makes it the word of Man.  

But here is the real question for you: What IF, the God, Yahwah, isn’t what the books claim?   What if, He (for lack of a better word) was a mistake, cast aside by his creator, still with some power, and that Creator is why ‘our God’ is a jealous God?  What if, in his creation of man ‘in his image’ he didn’t have enough power to grant life, so quite literally stole other beings of spirit, and used them for that purpose?   

For example: Using that whole Adam and Eve story.    What if, using that spirit (call it an angel if you want.) to Raise Adam, the God found that the spirit was actually stronger than himself, so to make things more tolerable, he split the spirit into two, creating Male and Female aspects, wiping its memory of its original form, and weakening the spirit to do his bidding?    THEN,,,  Later, the REAL Creator (capitalized for clarity, where I’ll use God for Yahwah) caused a plant to grow in the prison that God had created for his playtoys.   That plant was the Tree of Knowledge.   Well, God didn’t like that, so told his playtoys that to eat of it would kill them (he lied to them.   Why would an omnipotent and omniprescent God need to lie?)   One of the aspects of the Creator came to the garden and told Eve otherwise, and she and Adam found the Aspects words to be true; they didn’t die, but suddenly they SAW truth, and that truth was that their God, was a deceiver and that they were slaves to him.    When God came looking for his playtoys, he couldn’t find them so called out to them to come see him. (he is omnipotent?   Really? Glitch in the writers perspective or Freudian slip by the Divine oracle?   You decide.)   When he finds out what they did against his wishes, in anger he casts them out of his prison and curses them.   Does this sound like a Loving Forgiving God?    

Do you see why an Eight Year Old would find issue with these teachings?   Maybe they are metaphorical, or parables, or just confused translations carried through times before writing, but they don’t fit the narrative when you ask simple kid questions about them.  

These are the same questions the Gnostics were asking back before Christ was even on the scene.  And I think thats enough for tonight.  I’ll carry on with more later.