You’re right. There are three historic elements. In Hegelian terms from the biblical standpoint, Judaism is the thesis, Hellenism is the antithesis, and Christianity is the synthesis.
Actually looking it it technically Christianity is most identical to Osiris worship.
Im sure the Romans constructed it with this in mind; the Egyptians knew better than anyone how to subject great masses to masochistic hypnosis to tap their vital energy.
Polytheism is the “antithesis”. “Hell” or “Hellenism” is polytheism.
Christianity is no more polytheist or Hellenistic than Judaism. The difference between Jews and Christians appears to be long evolved tactics - both guilty of carnage due to their struggle to be the hand of God. When either has absolute power - they go insane.
Hellenism (including Osiris and Odin) represents endless warring between those who long for ultimate power = “Hell”.
Christians didn’t invent polytheism - Hellenism - or “Hell”. They just gave it a name.
I don’t know why any of you missed this point in your education (unless you are American or raised in a liberal university). It is pretty simple.
I don’t like you dude.
You know what’s pretty simple?
The pleasurable exclusive access problem needs to be solved.
The negative zero sum problem needs to be solved.
The gods failed.
Here’s the deal dude. Fuck you.
I’m doing a job to help you and you spit in my face.
If you want to defend this shit, go for it man. There are lots of beings who want to go to hell.
I’d highly recommend against it … but if that’s where your heart is set, maybe I shouldn’t get in your way.
I want to continue on my point.
Osiris worship is an African religion, and indeed West-Roman Christianity, which manifested literally as a slave religion - it’s first political form - comes into its own in the African society of the US. Black Christianity is not a slave religion - it is precisely the religion of those that have just barely escaped slavery - a means to stay out of slavery, to escape the involuntary resentments bred by captivity, and in this sense, because the people brought from Africa were formidable, their liberation gives Christianity an allure that can frankly be kingly, dignified on a level that white west roman christianity does not, to my eyes, ever attain. Orthodox christianity is a whole other matter, as it is the continuation of the particular Greek form of worship; one needs only to visit their churches in Jerusalem to know that it is not the same religion. Anyway - Jesus as Osiris, Osiris as a black man, the martyr as a rich man (Osiris has the gold, the aspect of Plouton - the church and its prerogative to own the realms gold); the proud Christian - the one who truly knows what slavery is and what is required to get rid of it;
[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1fpkdSfPzio[/youtube]
Not at all true - but you want to believe it and promote it.
Christianity inherited the Judaic inclination toward religious exclusivism and doctrinal purity, but it also sought and found evidence of a divine philosophy in the works of diverse pagan thinkers especially Plato. While Paul at times stressed the need for complete differentiation of Christianity from the deceptive ideas of pagan philosophy, on other occasions he suggested a more liberal approach quoting from pagan poets and tacitly infusing elements of stoic ethics into his Christian teachings.
Later Christian theologians in the classical era were often imbued with Greek philosophy before converting to Christianity and subsequently continued to find value in the Hellenic tradition. A syncretistic mysticism informed many early Christian thinkers as they recognized identical patterns of meaning in other philosophies and religions often applying allegorical analysis to compare biblical and pagan literatures.
They recognized that the truth is one wherever it is found for the Logos, a Greek philosophical concept with which Christ is identified in the first chapter of the Gospel of John, is all comprehensive and boundlessly creative. In the second century Justin Martyr advanced a theology that saw both Christianity and platonic philosophy as aspiring toward the same transcendent god with the Logos signifying at once the divine mind, human reason and the redemptive Christ who fulfills the Judaic and Hellenic historical traditions.
As the Greco-Roman world embraced Christianity, the classical gods were absorbed into the Christian hierarchy. The archetypal characters and properties of the classical gods were retained but were understood and subsumed in the Christian context as figures of Christ, God the Father, the Holy Spirit, the Virgin Mary, Satan, the angels and the saints.
“Wherever slave morality gains predominance the language reveals a tendency to bring the words “good” and “stupid” into closer proximity. A final basic difference: the longing for freedom, the instinct for happiness, and the refinements of the feeling for freedom belong just as necessarily to slave morality and morals as art and enthusiasm in reverence and in devotion are the regular symptoms of an aristocratic way of thinking and valuing. From this we can without further ado understand why love as passion - which is our European specialty - must clearly have a noble origin: as is well known, its invention belongs to the Provencal knightly poets, those splendidly inventive men of the “gay saber” [gay science] to whom Europe owes so much - almost its very self…”
“Hence we can understand without further detail why love as a passion it is our European specialty must absolutely be of noble origin; as is well known, its invention is due to the Provencal poet-cavaliers, those brilliant, ingenious men of the et gai saber,” to whom Europe owes so much, and almost owes itself." -N
Why does one translation give “Provencal knightly poets” and the other “poet-cavaliers”
Anyways… These men were white Christians… Christianity definitely reaches its peak in white Christian men… especially in ways of “reverence” and “devotion.”
Of course, this sort of begs the question, were these men really Christians in the strict sense? Is this refined, poetic Christianity the real Christianity while what we see practiced in the churches by the mouth breathing masses just “masochistic hypnosis”?
I still say that Christ even in his more refined formulations (“The Burning Babe”) is just a desire for Eros. At that point, when the poet starts identify Christ with Eros, the whole artifice of scriptural Christianity falls apart with all its ridiculous rules, hypocrisies, and punishments.
Christianity taken literally and followed strictly IS NOT A TRUE RELIGION.
“All this is what the word Dionysus signifies: I know of no higher symbolism than this Greek symbolism, this symbolism of the Dionysian phenomenon. In it the profoundest instinct of life, the instinct that guarantees the future of life and life eternal, is understood religiously,—the road to life itself, procreation, is pronounced holy, … It was only Christianity which, with its fundamental resentment against life, made something impure out of sexuality: it flung filth at the very basis, the very first condition of our life.”
Christianity does not REVERE life thus it can’t arouse true religious feelings.
But indeed these men were not Christians. If we read their writing there is not a trace of christianity in it.
What they did essentially, as Ive discussed a decade ago when I began reading these texts, is to replace the Holy Virgin, i.e. the metaphysical female ideal, with the Maiden in the Tower;
still a virgin and still exalted, but now exalted by human means (the powers of aristocracy) and not destined to be a virgin forever; thus her virginity is restored as a value.
The French language and culture seem to have emerged from this change; Dante was also an exponent of it, but a horrible, regressive one, creating out of his resentment over Beatrice his spectacular notions of hell, plunging generations of Europeans into dread.
Youve mentioned this before, Eros as the true meaning of the (golden) cross - Ive never heard it elsewhere.
Ive certainly heard of the expression about the cross, offered to first catholics, something like ‘this symbol is more ancient than you realize’, suggesting it carries a much different meaning.
If you would like to elaborate on this aspect, I would be glad to read more.
Im pleased to find your agreement here.
Exactly, exactly. It only doubts, fears; its best quality may be that it trained men in speculating, because there is no truth in it, and yet truth was sought in it for many centuries; men learned to fine-tooth-comb their beliefs for a trace of truth - a certain finesse was learned - though really this too is too much praise. An astonishing crudeness was also learned, and crudeness is much harder to lose than refinement.
Bottom line: what is there to revere in a sacrifice of a supposed god-man to wretched humans? There is only the horror of wanton and distasteful injustice, the violation of the great to amend the bad. Which was obviously ineffective, as human cruelty was never as arrogant and successful as it was in under christian dominion. Nothing stands in the way of the christian murderer, he has no notion of decency - he only knows to sacrifice the beautiful to ‘clear away its sins’ - i.e. its loftiness, its health.
The way people in this thread are perfectly content with ignoring all the atrocities inspired by their faith speaks volumes. It is a godless hypnosis, the lack of self-critical powers in the christians here has eliminated the last bit of doubt there was in me about that. And these are fine people otherwise - as I said, the decent christian is decent in spite of his christianity. In as far as he is christian, he is thoroughly indecent, dishonest, unsound.
Thus, I maintain; the best christianity Ive found among black Americans. That doesn’t mean it is truly something I value, but it is least offensive to me of all the forms of western-Christianity. The title “kingly” was as reference to dr. King, by the way, who is one of those pastor types that I have a sincere respect for. I once talked to the pastor of Savannah’s first black baptist church after having been beaten and robbed in the ghetto that night, and he was a strong, sound man. He asked me if I didn’t want to accept Jesus Christ as my personal lord and savior, to which I told him I have my own gods, which he genuinely seemed to respect. He is by far the most sincere and respectable genuine christian, qua his christianity, that Ive encountered.
The most tell-tale sign of Christianity’s less-than-godliness is that it asks for your soul.
It literally asks you to sell your soul in exchange for the pleasure of paradise. It is thus clear what sort of practice it really is, what kind of beings it really serves. I won’t speak the names and titles of these beings.
And now then it also occurs to me why for a slave such a request might actually be redeeming; someone raised out of 300 years of slavery, asked to surrender his soul to Jesus, might figure; well blimey, I wasn’t aware I had a soul. Take it if you can find it! And by that offering, he births himself a life of the soul.
Interesting.
What then of Orthodox Christianity?
It appears to me as a form of Zeus worship - it is very patriarchal and impressively so, the orthodox priests that shooed me away in their temple when I was standing in their path were actually ferocious men.
I do believe that, of all the many divine mysteries that took place in Greece, there is one that relates to the christian faith; I do not believe that the Roman Empire, i.e. the Catholic Church has access to Greek (or Hebrew) mysteries - it rather feeds on very old savage magics of eating flesh and drinking blood of a sacrificed man -
It is hard to believe that it took hold so widely, but then the Romans weren’t nearly, as people, as formidable as the Greeks were - they had no original thoughts, no philosophers, no advances in science - they were a machine, the justification of which is almost solely in the stone forms that they built. It is no wonder that their adopted religion is a stone edifice, not a spiritual one.
A catacomb.
A note though on the ancient Republican religion of Rome - I do not want to offend their gods, I do not want to offend Quirinus, or Mars.
I have immense respect for the legacy of the wolf.
All in all the most interesting aspect of Rome to me is its origins, which are shrouded, especially how the Etruscans led up to the Romans. The Etruscans were almost like Lord of the Ring creatures, from what we see in their burial mounds. Highly peculiar, and extremely different from other indigenous European cultures. Almost unearthly.
At the same time the area of Latium was simply the richest, most blessed piece of Europe in the physical sense.
Still - the myth of Romulus and Remus coupled with the history of the Etruscans is the strangest thing, and it is strange indeed that such a deeply odd culture led up to the universalization of standards.
==
Back to the main point, with what Perpetualburn now brings in;
Christianity has no original form of reverence, and it is Mary who serves in stead of the negated god (almost everything in christian myth is sub-human) as an object of quite natural affection - such a brave mother – and consequently, Mary is then exalted into being an object of true reverence by the Troubadours and their spiritual lineage, the French liberalism of secular self-love and Eros, as she is transposed unto the most prized and unattainable women of the world - a restoration of Helen of Troy fashioned out of Mary, a reason to be valorous, to not turn the other cheek, to be manly in the shadow of the papal restrictions.
A retrieval of the feminine grace, as well - something the Romans with the exception of Caesar lacked entirely, something wholly natural to the Greeks, and evidently something to do with efficient, actionable spiritual knowledge.
Christianity is still very alive to me as spirit but not as an institution. Friedrich Nietzsche’s criticism of Christianity is profound, but it doesn’t exhaust it’s unsearchable archetypal riches.
He saw the shadow side that the conventional church had repressed. He approached non-duality with his amor fati. But he didn’t see it in the Cross of Christ who unites in one person the criminal and the King.
As for Mary, there is her revolutionary praise-poem exalting the bottom-runger over the 1%:
Thus she envisions God as the God of history behind the revolutions which reverse the hierarchies of civilizations.
Nietzsche’s criticism of Christianity was certainly not exhaustive, and on the flip side his exploration of Greek myths was far from complete… I wish he focused more on deconstructing Christ the god-archetype… Nevertheless, I think he most definitely did feel to the bottom of Christ the god archetype and rightly opposed it to Dionysus… That was certainly not short-sited.
Meh… Another HUGE red flag with Christianity is that Jesus has no real love interest… He has no wife… He has no QUEEN… What kind of heaven is this that has no proper queen?
Regarding the LACK of reverence to life in Christianity (AND Judaism) is it’s stubborn insistence on monogamy in some cases or more specifically the Noahide law against adultery… Zeus would not approve of this “law”
What is the good of uniting the criminal with the king? It just flows seamlessly into the criminal efforts of the church, into the idea that you can brutally murder whole continents out of some virtuous ideal. I agree that christianity did this, but I think of it as rather the most unsound and unclean thing that mankind ever did than as something good.
The point about love interest is I believe getting to the core of things. Many christian occultists attribute to him a love affair with Mary Magdalene, who acts as a priestess of Isis/Venus. That narrative including John the Baptist is actually quite magically potent and contains elements of heathen polytheism, preserving/rescuing the idea of a sexual goddess, without which obviously a culture is completely barren, as mainline christian culture is.
This makes no sense to me though - how can a man be monogamous without a woman?
Im shocked that you think Judaism lacks reverence for life - what on earth are people reading that they take for judaism?
Of course none of what has existed around the mediterranean approaches the splendor of the Homeric Greeks. But that doesn’t mean Judaism isn’t seething with lust for life - ! What the heck man.
By the way interesting thing that the christians did in translating the Torah -
So it begins with a god name ending in a feminine plural form. Elohim. We might translate this as goddesses. 1:1: In the beginning the Goddesses created the heaven and the earth.
But yeah so the christians figured ok well, the creator is obviously a man so the fact that this has a feminine extension obviously means that its plural form really is meant to be singular. So they argued: its says feminine plural, so naturally they mean masculine singular.
OK THEN…
thus christianity was born. And monotheism.
Felix, I assume you have read the Antichrist then and find it lacking in analysis of the Christ type - I find it quite thorough personally, but nothing one man writes about another man can ever be wholly exhaustive, certainly not about a figure who likely consists of more than just one man.
By the way Perpetual - there is this problem of absolutization; it is obviously the case that the Jews have inhibited themselves in many ways. Like not eating pork, to name one thing. But the conclusion that they lack reverence and lust for life, coming from the modern world, is unsound - the Jews revere life much more than our own very flaccid, decadent and anhedonic culture does, in much deeper, profound and intensive ways, despite not eating pork.
I realize most of the more life affirming pledges that the Jews have written to their gods aren’t popularized, I have books of them which are astonishing, they’re from my grandfathers heritage, I had to fight hard to obtain them from a wicked relative - in any case. The Jews know how to enjoy themselves and revere life - Le Chaim!
I meant that Judaism strictly forbids the sort of "adultery’ you see in the Greek myths. Any criticism I level against judasim deals with the strict obedience practiced by Rabbis and “serious” Jews… the obsession with keeping hundreds of commandments… All of that I find completely antithetical to Nietzsche and his Promethean “active sin”… A more esoteric Judasim might not be so rigid (and stupid).
There’s this… I haven’t read it yet though
“All of that I find completely antithetical to Nietzsche and his Promethean “active sin”…”
You’re goddamn right. I’ve been sinning against the father long as I can remember, bro.
Yes I’ve read it. And when I did it bowled me over. No doubt there’s much truth in his analysis of the church. On the other hand he presents the church as if it had a homogeneous character. Look at the divide of the liberal main line churches and the Evangelical churches today and tell me they have a single character. They worship two different Christs who are locked in conflict with one another.
Also I can’t agree with him on compassion which is as natural in the mammalian species as aggression and just as valuable in terms of the survival of a species. Yes primates are predators. But they also show love and sacrifice towards their young. Compassion can be life-giving biologically psychologically and spiritually.
Nietzsche criticized Christianity from a hyper masculine perspective. His own relationship with his anima seem to suck. A sick individual, he saw this sickness of the church with clarity. If there were anything higher or better within the church, Friedrich Nietzsche was in no spiritual condition to have eyes for it. These are just my random thoughts at the moment. It’s been a while since I read the book.
R u saying Nietzsche hath not eyes for it?