Important cave notions

The Cave represents the dream descent into the unconscious, where that which is repressed and ignored will come to be seen in full light.
The price of admission is a reversal of normal conduct and ideas associated with waking life.
The cave often contains the dead and sometimes spirit animals. The animals give strength and the dead often mock the heroes who have become 'as weak as they.'
The cave is ubiquitous in popular literature and cinema, but exists in the bible generally as temporary blindness and a few times as a pit that leads to hell.
What is in the cave is not just darkness, however, there is also a treasure, a golden light that symbolizes the effulgence of a forgotten sun. Sometimes it is in the form of knowledge of the future, sometimes it is the ability to shut up this underworld as with Jesus' keys and Luke's repression of his own dark side. If these hordes of the subconscious can be mastered, stolen or understood (if the horde is intellectual knowledge), then the hero can ascend back to the surface, or emerge from the bottom of the cave (as it is with Dante, being shit out by the devil) and use this hidden treasure of the deep to redefine and reestablish life on the surface, or waking life.
For more information, please look at my blog on Etruscan divination, where I have explored some of these notions of Frye's in more detail, within the context of how the Etruscans saw the future.

And now the let down...

Okay, up till now Jesus talks about giving aid to the poor and the maimed and the weak, how money gets you nowhere and how it is best to be a pacifist, even saying that "him that taketh away thy cloak, forbid him not to take thy coat also" (Luke 6:29).
So what in the hell is Jesus talking about in Luke 19? It seems to be a complete reversal of all this.
In Luke 19: 11 this disturbing story starts. He tells a parable supposedly reflecting how the apostles are to behave in Jesus absence in the time between his death and the coming of the kingdom.
A man is appointed ruler over a kingdom. "He called his ten servants and delivered them ten pounds, and said unto them, 'Occupy till I come.' But his citizens hated him" Okay so the king returns later and "he commanded these servants to be called unto him, to whom he had given the money, so that he might know how much every an had gained by trading." The first two servants present more money and are rewarded with land accordingly. The last servant presents the same pound that was given to him, explaining that he was fearful of losing it for the lord of the kingdom is and austere man, who "takest up what thou not layest down and reapest that thou did not sow" (Luke 19:21). The king calls the servant wicked saying that the servant should have at least given it to the bank that the master could have made money by usury (lending with interest something forbidden in Europe later on and associated with the Jews).
Then it gets ugly. The master "said unto them that stood by, 'take from him the pound, and give it to him that hath ten pounds... For I say unto you, that unto every one which hath shall be given and from him that hath not, even that he hath shall be taken away from him. But those my enemies which would not that I should reign over them, bring hither, and slay them before me" (Luke 19: 27).
This isn't turning the other cheek! This isn't letting someone steal your cloak and coat. This is so extremely the opposite that it is more the insane than the first exaggerations. The king (supposedly a metaphor for Christ) demands that his servants make money for him, 'reaping what he did not sow,' and then takes the last pound from the servant, suggesting that he be slain even though he rightfully returned the pound, just not with interest.
Is this the beginning of venture capitalism? The justification that the lords of wall street make so much lucre off the products of the labor of others? Or is this just another superlative statement about the importance of this Christ character, that even though he tells you to be a pacifist, if anyone wont accept a tyrant who rules in Christ's name that you should put him to the sword?
I don't understand it. I think the trading story is just a metaphor for how devoutly everyone on earth should serve this person, but this I find troubling as well.

My love for, and disappointment with, the Book of Luke

The book of Luke has surprised me quite a bit. At first I was blown away, thinking, wow, this stuff is awesome!
And not just the obvious, moral overtones that are generally the most clearly defined basis for modern ethics (not that the Christians can claim these morals as their own, though I have met individuals that do). Really, I found allot of support for the gnostic notions I mentioned at the very beginning of my blog. And this has delighted me. You see, I have always found dogmatic 'youre going to hell' Christians to be loathsome at best, and in the Bible belt of California, I often argued with them from my scant knowledge of the scripture they claim inerrant. But now, in the book of Luke, I have an entire arsenal at my command!
Check it out.
As concerns the gnostic belief that Jesus was an 'enlightened' human being, as opposed to an incarnation of God, Luke is pretty damn clear. Jesus never calls himself 'son of God' only 'son of man' something like ten or fifteen times.
Demons, however, are all about calling him the son of God. So are those who mock him as he suffers. They ask him if he is the son of God and Jesus says 'ye yourselves say it.' Do Christians, in their rather Greek insistence that their savior is God incarnate, put more faith in the words of demons and murderers than the words of the Christ himself? What the hell?
There is one source that is less dismissible, however, and that is God himself. When Jesus is baptized, God comes down in form of a dove (another example of cross culturation with Greek ideas) and he says that Jesus is "my beloved son, in thee I am most pleased" (Luke 3:21) But wait! Hold thy tongues, thou vile dogmatists! Luke gives us a very important qualifier right afterward, and it is probably the only example of an interesting genealogy.
Okay, so I skimmed it like I did all the others, but at the end of Jesus' supposed lineage is this: "...which was the son of Enos, which was the son of Seth, which was the son of Adam, which was the son of God" (Luke 3:38).
Kapow!
Adam is the son of God because God created him. He had no father other than God. And was Adam perfect like Christ? Was he intelligent and well spoken and pure in the eyes of the lord? Fuck no! He was a putz! He ate the forbidden fruit and doomed mankind to a frightful life of knowledge, shame and death! He is not the son of God because he is perfect, or a Herculean incarnation of divine power, he is the son of God because he is a human being.

Further more, he points to the path of realization in all humans, not the normal your-all-gonna-burn attitude Christians today are so famous for. Jesus says that while humility is good, "everyone that is perfect shall be as his master" (Luke 6) because those who rule themselves need no law. "He hath come to redeem us from the curse of the law" (Galatians 3:13). This echoes the gnostic gospel Thomas pretty clearly but not as much as when Jesus says, "for behold the kingdom of God is within you" (Luke 17:20).
And as for a general distrust for the establishment, the book of Luke is rich. First, the Pharisees are railed against constantly, so that you get the picture of them not much different from Mel Gibson's the Passion: horrible men with claw like fingers and scowling faces. Christ rails against money and exploitation by the rich everywhere. Encouraging charity and coming down very clearly on the issue of money: "ye cannot serve God and mammon." But he also states some pretty Buddhist reasons. He likens mental riches ("the riches of heaven") with a house that is built on a rock, whereas status and wealth are as a house that falls at the first sign of in-climate weather.
And what gets Jesus killed? Well its not until he hits the Pharisees in the pocket book (kicking the money changers out of the temple) that the Pharisees take the gloves off. But he spends allot of time generally pissing off the establishment before this. Remember, the gnostics revered personal experience of the divine, not what a church or any congregation of the unwashed masses proclaim, for we see in the book of Luke, they are often wrong.
Some of these things are just manners of rule breaking. Jesus is the ultimate rebel, he suggests that foreigners are better neighbors than than rabbis can be (the good Samaritan), and he allows his disciples to have corn on the sabbath.
What? On the Sabbath?! Yes. They were hungry, and in Luke Jesus tells the Pharisees that this is okay because he "is the lord of the Sabbath." But in Mark 2:27, he has a more humanistic approach, saying "the sabbath was created for man, not man for the sabbath." This implies that the whole of God's laws are not something to be followed for fear of reprisal but because the law is good for people to live by. You know -supposedly.
But the one who possesses experiential, emotional knowledge is always more committed than those who simply obey, for when a blind man shouts out to the Christ to be healed, the followers hush him and rebuke him as a sinner. But the man wails and screams to be cured, and of course Jesus is committed to lifting the man's affliction, in one of many Asclepius-like healings. Another note about the importance experiential knowledge: Jesus usually tells those he has healed that their own faith, not his divinity, is responsible for their miraculous recovery.
I would like to get to where Luke really lets me down, but Ive taken way too much time on this one, for now lets just say it has to do with the social contract. And we'll get to that next time.

The Slave: on a more positive note concerning Judaism

On a more positive note concerning Judaism.
I know I have sort of blasted the Hebrew god as a character, and am aligning myself with a gnostic interpretation that calls him a devil. But that is not to say I find Judaism abhorrent. I have nothing against peaceful, informed and heartfelt individuals going over their culture's ancient texts, philosophies, meditating, praying -on the contrary, I think the way Jacob lives his life is usually something to be encouraged and greatly envied.
His attitudes supply him with a wealth of emotional resources with which to deal with despair, celebrate in the face of cruel fate, comfort those who are downtrodden, and generally live abundantly as whoever wrote the part in Ecclesiastes where it says "my cup runneth over." He says this because this state is a kind of over abundance of spiritual energy, of spiritual wealth, elation of the heart,intensity. Some Anthropologists refer to a kind of boiling over when they speak of the trancing of shaman in so called 'primitive' cultures, and I think this is the same thing.

The Slave

The Slave was amazing. And its pretty clear to me why Singer chose to call it that.
You see, many times throughout the book Jacob is so beautiful, so happy, so alive. Often times, reading about him rising in the morning to wash his hands and thank God, I felt drawn back to times in my life, among the mountains, sleeping in crumbly shelters, rising to see "God's hand shown clearly in the red fire of the sun rise," and I feel that haunting sens of the ascetic's connection to the divine. Living with so little, with the mind so fixed upon the concept of goodness, the will of the world, the soul of the world.
But his attachment to tradition, the way he cant pray without washing his hands, the way he makes Rachel wash herself in the river when it is snowing out in the mountains (modern science: menstrual blood is not that fowl and shouldn't stop you from having fun).
His greatest slavery is the one that does him no good. It is his slavery to what the community thinks. Though the Jewish community is portrayed as a wholesome one, it is also full of depravity, so who cares what they think? Yet, from the time Jacob is ransomed he starts making the wrong choices, starting out with leaving Wanda all alone with no explanation.
This is the true sense that Jacob enslaves himself, because he lets tradition and hypocrites defile and distract him from the most important thing, his love, the same thing that animates his holy life, because all that he links to sensuality for obvious reasons.
The mythical parts in this book are truly amazing. Singer speaks of ways in which characters just 'know', not 'think' that there are werewolves on the side of the road, they 'know' that there are hobgoblins, witches and elflock tying demons. In this way the power of the human mind is shown to bring reality to that which is mythical. They have real effects. The mythic element stays like this, sublimated to the plot and not really effecting it greatly until the end.
In the end, the mythic, or romantic force, comes to a head. Jacob's body is felicitously buried right where Sarah's body was interred -the God of Jacob has shown his hand in the world, and shows that their love was ordained, justified and held sacred by the all mighty, who judges all things correctly.
And in this case, he certainly dose.
At least, that's what I think.

God's answer to Job

Obviously, Job gets it pretty bad, through no fault of his own. We are told that God considers him perfect in every way. But God lets the devil have reign over him. What follows is the troubling story of a suffering man, a man afflicted by the loss of his children, his cattle, his slaves, and if it weren't enough to just deprive him of all the trappings of a wealthy, land owning patriarch, (boo hoo), the devil gives him some form of chronic chicken pox.
Then a bunch of dudes with silly names, like Bildad, Zophar and Whirlygig, sit down and talk a bunch of smack on the poor man as he lay there, covered in boils.
Now, Job is being a whiny bastard, this is true. But his friends are worse, because instead of comforting him, they accuse him of wrong doing.
When God comes in the whirlwind he is thoroughly pissed.
He explains that everyone is wrong.
The friends are wrong because they blame the faultless, seeking to impose feeble human reason on the inexplicable universe, although a bet is really a rather shockingly human reason to do something stupid, like strip naked in a party, or jump a bike off a roof into a pool.
Anyway, God dosn't stop there. He has to answer all this repetitive wailing of Job's that seems to finally have got his attention like the mob of rapists outside Lot's hut.
He tells Job not to be such a whimp.
That's it.
He doesn't give him a reason why, because in this story God is a metaphor for that which we have no control over. The will of the universe. You, know, the blind fate(or ego maniacal, in this case) that casts a shadow on the evil and the good alike.
Everybody burns.
So in a way, the answer is what we get from any good father when we fall off our bike and sniffle: "I don't wanna do it anym-m-m-more!"
The answer is to stop being so damn worthless and learn to take a few cuffs every now and then.
Oh yea, and then Job gets a greater number of shit back then he lost in the tragedies. Whatever.

Frye's Cave and the Etruscan divination

Okay, so last night I attended a lecture by an archaeologist on Etruscan divination.
And some of what I heard fits quite well with Frye's talk of the cave.
Now, the cave is more metaphorical than, say, the garden or the mountain. The cave, says Frye, is often a dream state, a descent into the underworld, where the dead mock the hero for being "as weak as we" (Isaiah 14:10). The cave can also be under water. Frye basically equates the land of shades, the cave as any subconscious state where something is lost, cannot be seen, and he mentions the story where the fish is cut open and the king finds his long lost (and I think demon-controlling) ring. This journey is started by a call (as most journeys) but the source is not known until the hero plumbs the depths. He is apparently helped by grateful dead people (like Jerry Garcia) as well as spirit animals who guide the way. This visit to the cave shows something repressed and forgotten, something that will rise to the surface, just as the repressed proletariat eventually always strike out. And Frye takes this political model a bit further, saying that the realm of the cave has no hierarchy, and things here are even reversed, often in social terms as when Ahab becomes friends with the native whom he never would have befriended in real/ normal life. Sound familiar? "and the last shall be made first" or how about "blessed are the poor, for theirs is the kingdom and the glory" -hmn?!!!?
Any how, the cave and the dead often reveal the future. Now, the Etruscans had some parallels here that are worthy of note, because as the woman leading the lecture last night showed, there are parallels across the globe.
First off, things are reversed in the underworld, as in a mirror. ANd guess what the Etruscans used for divination. Dunt dunt duh! A mirror, fools! Also the liver of a sacrificial beast but only because livers are shiny and, yes you got it, reflective. So things in the cave are a backward reflection. But there are other parallels about this practice of telling the future, too. For instance, the knowledge of the future, like all true knowledge, and I agree emphatically with this point, comes from the earth. And the best Etruscan prophet was born out of the dirt! Other prophets walked without shoes that their toes could be closer to the source of all true wisdom.
They also believed that the future telling knowledge sprang from the dead. In one of their divination mirrors showing the practice of divination, the one holding the mirror for the prophet is labeled as a shade, or a soul. Sometimes it is Cupid holding the mirror, and the lecturer pointed out -who is Cupid's wife? Psyche! The spirit, the soul and the dead shade that continues to exist in the underworld where it can offer up prophecy and truth. Note: the lecturer also states that the voice of prophecy is often depicted as a disembodied or severed head (a dead person a voice that comes from no where).

wisdom

So far in the Bible, I'm finding how much I dislike this God character. And if this is the case for you I do not think this excludes you from the kind of emotional wisdom spirituality can bring, just perhaps that some metaphors for this 'higher' being just dont work anymore. So create new ones, that's what I was trying to accomplish in calling God a she, because we ought to have divine fathers and mothers. That's what Blaked did, and I think that this is the true experience of wisdom. An Apothiosis that makes us a twin, the original meaning of Thomas' name, even of the creator, because we were made in it's image, endowed with the ability to create. Only when one can expand their imagination with basic knowledge of the true, can one experience knowledge, which is, I think, wisdom and gnosis. With the bible we are forced to imagine many things, like what Essau felt when he simply hugged his brother, or Joseph in the pit, or Abraham when he was dragging his son up a mountain to his doom. Knowledge, like the experience of reading the Bible, is more about the imaginitave process than some silly list of moral prohibitions.

Roberto's blog

Roberto's talk on the miserer was beautiful. I fully understand this feeling of being moved by something outside the self, though very much a part of it, and have tried to express it in writing since I as first 'visited' by it, though my representations have always been poor when held in comparison to the experience. But sometimes reading a passage later on has brought it back to me in some degree, that priceless feeling of being moved beyond the confines of the shallow self, into a greater picture, the vein of the sacrosanct I spoke of in my last blog, the animating force, the light that exists within all things, even those things we perceive to be dead, rocks, buildings of brick, the half and half creamer that runs in tiny mystical rivulets into our iced americanos, to be absorbed into the whole so that, after only a few beautiful moments we have a homogenous solution -we can no longer tell the difference between what was once two distinctly separate fluids. This is the spiritual experience that I live for, though often fall short of, getting caught up worrying about the car that ran a stop sign and almost knocked me off my bike, or the girl who keeps stopping in front of me in the grocery store, but cant here me say 'excuse me' because she's listening to her i-pod.
The point s, that the experience Roberto is talking about is so essential to maintaining our sanity, our very existence as emotionally charged human beings, that we ought to let it move us this way even if we are in a meeting. This experience is, after all, what all art strives to create! That means letting ourselves cry even if we have to explain ourselves to people. I loathe having to explain any intense experience while I am still in it, especially to those who require explanation, and I probably would have suppressed such visceral emotional explosions, had they occured in public.
Roberto didn't.
Thank you, Roberto, for allowing yourself to be moved to such a degree, not caring if someone thought you were crazy or a weepy little bitch, and that takes a bravery that should inspire us all.

my words fly up to heaven my thoughts remain below

Today the great house lays in ruble. Organized religion has lost almost all credence to scrutinizing eyes and man wanders without guidance as Cain wanders the land of nod, longing for death but never to meet it for his enemies fear him and the blasphemous mark upon his forehead.
But so what if the house has burned? I too was there, fanning its flames according to the light bringer's will, watching its dominion of hegemony turn to ash and ruin.
And this whole topic reminds me of something Dr. Sexson said that, despite my admiration, I had to disagree with.
He said that most of us are 'untrained' in spirituality, that like the Israelites, we are in a strange land (Babylon) and cannot offer our best up to our Gods because we do not know where to find them.
In the book of Thomas, as I have already shown, Jesus says to his disciples that (and I'm paraphrasing here) "the kingdom of heaven is not some place I can point to, rather it is all about you and you do not see it."
As we wander in our expulsion from all the traditional kingdoms, here in the land of Babylon, or Nod, there is confusion and pain, but let it never be said that we are not initiated into the mysteries, its only that, as modern, secular Americans, we have had to initiate ourselves.
I HAVE been, for a few moments at a time, in very close companionship with god. And though she is yet to take me as Yahwey took Enoch, I await that moment and set aside time for this invocation nearly every day.
I have seen the kingdom swirling in blood red clouds of a shivering winter sunset, among the veiny tomatoes of my fruitful garden, plowed by the sweat of brow, or in the hidden cave on Frog rock, adorned with crystals, dank, cool atmosphere, circling bats and the childish drawings of the elders etched in crayon upon the cave walls.
Here, as everywhere the mind resides, the self can be absorbed into the stream, that vein of the sacrosanct.
It isn't the nation, the tradition, or the real estate people fight and die over, but the mind upon which all spiritual matters are hinged. Buddha, another light bearer, said to do away with all mindless tradition, and this is why I rejoice in great house's destruction. It only meant the tyranny of an initiated few anyway. Even the Bible says we do not need any training, but Jesus proclaims uninformed children to be the very basis of the kingdom, 'suffer the children to come unto me.' ANd in Exodus 20:25 it says "And if thou wilt make me an altar of stone, thou shalt not build it of hewn stone: for if thou lift up thy tool upon it, thou hast polluted it."
All the travails of the traditional ways were perhaps useful tools to receive divine inspiration, but not without the proper mindset behind it. This is no new finding.
Sexson spoke of this as the mental maneuver required to make the genealogies, "hum, glow with life!" And in classes past, as the ecstatic experience of taking normal life, lead, and seducing from it its inner gold.
Again, I leave you with a quote from Infernal Metal band Behemoth.
"Be it not so!
Thou shall see me not in agony
failure was and is no option
'tis my undying self
the ever wandering son ov the morn
abandoned, yet never to be conquered

I nevermourn, I never look back
as long as Thy phosphoric rays
grant me more pleasure than pain
I, who is evil can receive no good
though I still crave, I'm yearning for
Thy healing touch ov grace...

pain is timeless
when I question the laws ov god
drowned in everlasting confusion
caress my hate against the mob

be it not so!
Thou shall see me not in agony
failure was and is no option
'tis my undying self
the ever wandering son ov the morn
abandoned, yet never to be conquered
the opponent!
my life's work is complete..."

So let the kingdom be dragged forever down to the earth, void of shame, let us not mend the rocks, nor loathe our inadequacies. Rather let us find the vein of sanctity flowing through all things, and through this allow the most mundane to be lifted on high.
"My words fly up to heaven, my thoughts remain below" -Claudius

Death Metal is Awesome!

Sitting here, thinking about this culture of degradation, the prison system, the way men and women are coerced into comidifying themselves, either as sex objects or as beasts of burden according to gender preconceptions... And I wonder, is our current culture of patriarchy very similar to the one of the old testament, the one in which Lynda spoke about, where even men are women, that is to say, property?
To an extent I think this is true. One of the things that anarchist philosophers stress is that when we put ourselves over someone else, we necessarily give credence to a hierarchy that puts us eternally below another. The class system of the Israelite' is obvious, especially in Exodus, when the rules of slavery are exemplified. Hebrews come before all non-Hebrews, men come before women, and fathers before all these, with men of property always the greatest of these (for as exodus says "a man is his money") and God, or the supposed mouthpieces for this invisible character, always at the topmost, meeting out the rape he sees appropriate for all his underlings.
So here I am, thinking about class structure and rocking out to some death metal and as I segway with my eternally infernal attitude into my next blog, I would like to show you some of these lyrics by a band called Behemoth, which are really much more Gnostic than Satanist.
"I the sun ov man
The offspring ov the stellar race
My halo fallen and crushed upon the earth
That i may bring balance to this world

I son ov perdition
From sheer nothingness transgressed
Unto the highest self - to utmost freedom
To explore the starry nature ov my rage

I pulse ov existence
The law ov nature undenied
I hold the torch ov Heraclites
So i can shake the earth and move the suns

I divine iconoclast
Injecting chaos into my veins
With life accepted
With pain resurrected
Is the embrace ov god in man profound

The joy ov a dawn
The ecstasy ov dusk
Nourished have i this karmic flow
Where great above meets great below
Let it be written!
Let it be done!"
Here we see a few examples of Biblical hyperbole, the reason for the fall, the narcissism originally thought consecrated for the demiurge only, and the importance of words. He says "let it be written, let it be done" just as God said "let there be water, and there was water" because to believe something, to form that belief into words and speak it aloud is to "shake the earth and move the suns." The belief,once expressed becomes reality.
So as concerns the oppression of human beings everywhere based on supposedly non-existent class distinctions, sex, race, nationality and especially that filthy filthy lucre, I say this.
Let gather the ravens, and may justice run down as waters and righteousness as an unfailing stream. Let the manacles be lifted from protagonists everywhere. Let it be written! Let it be done!

Responses

I like that others are also seeing the hypocrisy of this Yahwey dude, who, at least morally speaking, is not very righteous. Trish's statement that God is an "ass hat" I found to be both accurate and poignant. In the blog before this one she talks about different groups in modern times likening themselves to peoples in the bible and I cant help but remember the first time I read Exodus as an adult.
I was doing a weekend in jail for, well something some religions consider to be a SACRED activity (in my belief, far from a profane one) and I think I will leave it at that... But there I was, in North Dakota, a waste land of dust half the year and ice the other half, with nothing more than a narrow strip of sky to see through the tiny one window, a television (probably to ensure complacency), and a bible. The bible was the only printed material available that I could call literature so I picked it up and turned to genesis. What I saw in Pharao I saw in what the American Justice system has become. Now 2.3 million are behind bars since harsher sentencing begun back in the eighties, and if you don't believe me here's an article from the Washington post: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/story/2008/02/28/ST2008022803016.html
I started looking around me at the fuckups and misfits behind these bars, and in the three days I sat there, meditating and reading the bible, I came to see these people as MY people. And I spoke aloud for Pharao (or the military industrial complex)to let my people go. I thought God was actually quite awesome (modern usage) for the whole first half of the book, before all the bureaucratic mumbo jumbo in the second half, and some of those passages really affected me.

Anarchy!

"The Bible, which is a very interesting and here and there very profound book when considered as one of the oldest surviving manifestations of human wisdom and fancy, expresses this truth very naively in its myth of original sin. Jehovah, who of all the good gods adored by men was certainly the most jealous, the most vain, the most ferocious, the most unjust, the most bloodthirsty, the most despotic, and the most hostile to human dignity and liberty - Jehovah had just created Adam and Eve, to satisfy we know not what caprice; no doubt to while away his time, which must weigh heavy on his hands in his eternal egoistic solitude, or that he might have some new slaves. He generously placed at their disposal the whole earth, with all its fruits and animals, and set but a single limit to this complete enjoyment. He expressly forbade them from touching the fruit of the tree of knowledge. He wished, therefore, that man, destitute of all understanding of himself, should remain an eternal beast, ever on all-fours before the eternal God, his creator and his master. But here steps in Satan, the eternal rebel, the first freethinker and the emancipator of worlds. He makes man ashamed of his bestial ignorance and obedience; he emancipates him, stamps upon his brow the seal of liberty and humanity, in urging him to disobey and eat of the fruit of knowledge." -Michael Bakunin

Bakunin seems to have a point here. God isn’t very kind to his followers, not at all, at least not at first. Later however the desert God of law and punishment suddenly becomes a god of forgiveness and compassion. The difference is astounding enough to suggest that the two are different people, which is exactly what I am suggesting, and I think this claim has literary merit, even with the Gnostic gospels aside.
Ive been spending allot of time on the heretical texts and the new testament, so I will return to Genesis. This time, Sodom and Gomorah.

To illustrate the strangeness of this story better, we have a video.
Please go to this link, before continuing. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bar3GOzDNzg&NR=1 (It’s funny, trust me.)

Plotz has a problem with this story, much like mine. He says, “to my modern eyes, though perhaps not to the Bible’s authors, collective punishment is the great moral conundrum of the Torah… and God is always on the wrong side of the question” (Plotz 14). He even goes so far as to say, just as I am, that this makes God look like a villain. The whole story, at least when looking at it from a moral point of view, is actually quite ridiculous, because of a few reasons. 1) As Plotz says “what about the children” God kills them, he has no mercy, 2) the only “good” man in the city offers his daughter up to be raped because he believes homosexuality to be a pretty grevious afront to God, and 3) God, who’s widely refuted to be the cool headed guy who has planned everything since before creation, angers quickly enough that a mere mortal man has to remind him that there may be innocent people in the city, and God, the supposedly perfect diety, forgets to continue his search for righteous because of one mob of rapists –why doesn’t he destroy L.A.?

In fact, the God of the old testament is a god of cruelty, who doesn’t seem to be very benevolent or omnipresent. And this returns to the tenant of Gnosticism that the God who claimed to be creator has been trying to keep the knowledge of good and bad from us, bracketing our lives with the pains of birth and death, keeping the races from uniting in peace at the tower of Babel, aiding in the killing of entire races of people because they disagree with you or wont give you some crappy desert real estate. This God, therefore, is ultimately the evil one. The divine light I mentioned before, as being the light of all humanity is actually associated with knowledge, that which the serpent wanted to give us, denying any law that keeps us from spiritual understanding.

An interesting comparison can be done between the Devil, or ‘adversary’, of the new testament with the God of the Old testament. In one of the more moving moments of the New Testament, Jesus is tempted by the devil on a mountain. And what does the Devil offer him? Real estate! Power! Just like the God of Abraham, he offers that his seed be multiplied and he shall have dominion over his enemies, yada yada yada.
I realize that my insistence in this sort-of demonizes Jewish tradition, and for this I am sorry because I find many aspects of modern Judaism (not sexist orthodox Judaism) quite beautiful, and often quite more sensible than the zealous Christians who, under the misguidance of John, want to convert the world to their faith. I do not necessarily loathe Judaism, nor Christianity, not as philosophies anyway. Sure, I disagree with probably three quarters of the crap the God of the Old Testament does, and though I find Jesus to be a pretty righteous dude, am very disappointed with his homophobia in the book of Judas. The institutions, however, I deplore. I denounce and condemn the genocides, Inquisitions, and other atrocities committed by these fanatics, from BC to AD, and you should too, even if you are of these traditions. This is not to say that you have to abandon it, you just have to recognize the inhuman cruelties committed by those within your tradition as examples of someone taking what can often be quite beautiful metaphors about the human condition, and turning them into justifications for killing. These atrocities serve as reminders for what happens when one too readily accepts the decrees of their tradition, and those who hold power within it. Oh, and if your God comes to you and asks you to give up your only begotten son –get another god!

The serpent and the light (back to Genesis)

Now, we have said that Jesus is the l"light and the path" and that this light exists within us, all around us, and is what all things came out of. So why does the God of the old testament deny us the fruit of the tree of knowledge. In all mythology knowledge is associated with light and ignorance with darkness, so why would the God who walks in the garden, the god who later gave us the light in the form of "his only begotten son," demand that his followers live in darkness, while Lucifer translates as "bearer of light"?
The answer can be found in another tenant of gnosticism (the framework which my whole biblical interpretation will be based on)that the God of the Old Testament is a demiurge who is neither a kind god, nor the only, for he speaks of others.
Others, you say?
Yes, in Genesis God says "behold, he has become like one of us" after man has eaten the fruit and this worries him... He also says he creates man in "our image." Who is this "us" is it the royal we? Most bible thumper sites on line attribute this to God speaking with the angels, but the angels are not God's equals, they are his servants, and at this point in Genesis there is no mention of angels, they aren't mentioned until man is expelled from the garden and with this flying sword of flame and all, one has to wonder how close the angels really are to man and God, my guess is not very.
I think God is talking to the other dieties. Even the commandment "thou shalt have no other Gods before me" seems to concede the existence of others. So what happened to them?
Nietzsche says they all died of laughter when Elohim said he was the only, but gnostics believe the true benevolent deity came in the form of a serpent that man's eyes might be opened.
And as Plotts points out, it is God that lied when he said "thou wilt surely die." The serpent told the truth, "thou wilt surely not die" and then the Bible says that Eve saw, not 'wrongly believed' or 'thought,' but "saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was pleasant to the eyes, and a tree to be desired to make one wise,she took of the fruit" (Genesis 3:6).
What a list! The tree so responsible for all our pain and suffering shown so beautiful and desirable and good in so many ways! How can this be if not that the God of the Garden and the entire old testament is actually what the Zorostrians called the Druj, or "the lie" the one who seeks to keep us in darkness, turn us away from our true nature as fulfilled human beings, (and here I boldly declare a heresy) as GODS!

the human Jesus

Another thing about these titles of Jesus, and this time its in the cannonized texts. Mathew quotes Jesus as saying,"lessed are the peacemakers for they will be called the sons of God" Mat 5:9. Why does Jesus list these at the end of a whole group of those who will receive divine blessing, if he did not mean that they too, like him, are sons of God. This seems to concur with Thomas when he says that the light that existed before the world exists in us all. This light, is the "original face" in Buddhism, the pure state that has only been covered up with confusion and lies, with imperfect human traits.
This view of Jesus as a man encouraging people to look within themselves instead of any establishment or church is supported in the other gospels too. It is also supported by Sexson's claim that Jesus' parables go against conventional wisdom, effectively pissing of the establishment of the time. Think of the disciples who crush grain in their hands to eat on the way to a sermon -on the sabbath. When the Pharisees say that this is impermissable, Jesus replies that "that sabbath was made for man not man for the sabbath" (Mark 2:27)
This also seems to imply that humanity's purpose is not to observe the commandments, Plotts notes several figures like Jacob who are given God's blessing despite being lecherous thieving assholes, but that the commandments were given to help show man the most beautiful and rewarding way to live -akin to the eightfold noble path one must follow in Buddhism if they hope to become enlightened.
Such understanding is crucial to the meaning of Thomas' gospel.
Pagels says that the word Thomas means 'twin', and that this is significant because when Jesus calls him his twin he is saying that the inner light is capable of bringing him onto the same plane as Jesus(Pagels 57). "I am not your master" Jesus tells Thomas, "because you have drunk, nd have become drunk from the same stream which I measured out" (Pagels 47).
And just what happens when we become like Christ? We behold the kingdom of heaven -paradise. In another passage of Thomas the disciples ask where the kingdom of heaven is and Jesus replies: "It will not come by waitin g for it... rather the kingdom of the Father is spread out upon the earth, and people do not see it" (50).
It isnt the world that is impure, but our own organs of perception, which sometimes caste filth, envy, disgust and hatred upon a beautiful landsacape that only requires our acknowledgment, our blessing.
So why would someone supress Thomas and revere John? Why would someone prefer an untouchable, distant God who only once came to the earth so that we might have a nice place to live after death, instead of here and now?
To me, the answer is obvious: control. Since the dawn of time emperors and those who seek earthly power have exalted themselves to the level of gods so that their tyranny might never be questioned -John's assertion that we must submit our logic to the tennants of the church, BELIEVE, instead of KNOW. And why place heaven beyond the grave, behind the clouds where man cannot see it? So that those who suffer under this tyranny might have some comfort that maybe, if they never question, never ask for freedom, just maybe, they might be allowed peace in the hereafter.
Is anybody else pissed off yet?

gnosticism

Gnosticism- a first century Christian sect whose works and members were severely repressed and destroyed. They taught a number of things that seem to make allot of sense, but they didn't support going to an intermediary to know god and they didnt support an organization that claimed to provide this. To the fourth century Romans who formed the Niceen council, this was a threat -it undermined the whole system of the underclass seeking guidance from initiated men in robes sworn to uphold the status quo, strike fear into men's hearts, etc.
Jane Pagels' book Beyond Belief: the Gospel of Thomas describes some of these gnostic principles in Thomas' heretical, gnostic text. She says that messiah translates as "annointed one" and christos, in Greek means the same. I always thought they translated as savior and have checked her translation- wiki and other sources agree.
Now, annointed one normally meant, son of god, the chosen king of the Israelites on earth. We all probably remember that Jesus often called himself the son of man and this is true for all the gospels, it seems. This title is not "son of THE man" but rather a descendant of Adam -human. Pagels, a student of the Bible in Greek and other languages, says that while Son of god may have meant divine to the Romans, the Israelite title actually means a human vessel for God on earth, as was David (Beyond Belief 42).
Her main focus of the cannonized gospels is John, which she asserts was written with an awareness of Thomas because it has in it certain similarities not present in Mark Mathew and Luke. Both refer to Jesus as the light of mankind (40). But they differ as to what this means, while John says that Jesus is "the light of all humanity", and "God's ONLY begotten son," "Thomas teaches -that God's light shines not only in Jesus but, potentially at least, in everyone."(40, 34)
John writes that we ought to beleive and accept the cannon of the church. Thomas teaches us to use our own logic and self questing. "If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you" (32).
Now, who supports a rigid hegemony in the form of a church that would later kill, maim and torture millions in the name of the pacifist Jesus? Who makes it easy for the elite to hold a monopoly on truth and who teaches personal seeking based in reason and experience? Can you see why Thomas was supressed?