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Dethroning the Gods of the Religions, p. 5 In
modern times this racial or nationalist narcissism and the imperialist
mythology to which it gives rise exists to one degree or another among
the Japanese, Chinese, Arabs, Russians, Germans, Americans and others
and it is by no means the prerogative of the Jews. Wherever it appears,
its effects have been without exception disastrous, and the millennial
Jewish version of it is qualitatively no different from those of other
peoples merely because it has been dressed up in the garments of religion
[8]. Judaism
would have remained an insignificant tribal cult had it not been annexed
by Christianity and thus by Europe and it was in this manner that it
entered onto the world stage and achieved the status of a “great”
or “world” religion. The historical vehicle for this development
was the Roman Empire which had already realized the unification of the
European tribal states under a single form of government centered in
Rome. Once
Christianity had been adopted as the official religion of the Roman
Empire in the 4th Century C.E. under the emperor Constantine the conditions
for the Judaization of Europe had been established, a process that reached
its ultimate term of completion with the Protestant Reformation when
the Bible for the first time became directly accessible to the masses
and no longer mediated through the Latin church. A
careful examination of the gospel texts suggests that the God of the
Nazarene is a distinct condition of reality from the God of the Jews,
which belongs to a class of entities we have identified in the foregoing.
But the identification of the two resulted in the immediate destruction
of the revolutionary teachings of the Nazarene and thereafter European
humanity fell under the influence of yet another symbiotic authoritarian
force from which came the profound retardation of the European peoples
and the disaster of the so-called Middle Ages. The author of this crime
was Paul of Tarsus and the ultimate consequences of his teachings were
enacted into canon law by the early Councils of the Church starting
with that of Ephesus in 326 CE. For
the Nazarene, the Way was to love God by the total release of the body,
mind and heart into the condition of God, then to see, feel and release
all beings (not merely those in one’s tribe) into that very condition
through love. While this writer does not by any means endorse the teaching
of the Nazarene in its totality, the foregoing could be said to be an
adequate summary of its most important elements free of all dogmatic
and cultic superimpositions. Moreover, he explicitly taught that the
realization that was true in his own case was duplicable in its entirety
by all who engaged it sincerely. Not so, according to Paul. The
new Pauline Way is principally a matter of the saving power of belief
in a unique, unrepeatable event, the death and resurrection of Jesus
who Paul eventually coverts into a hypostatic aspect of the one and
only God of the Jews. The sole efficacy of the Way taught by Jesus was
not his teaching-message nor the demonstration of his life, but his
death and resurrection. The Way is not transformation of the body-mind
and the world by the force of love but belief in the vicarious sacrifice
of Jesus for the sins of the world. No human is qualified to practice
the Way because man’s inherent and inescapable corruption requires
that the only possibility open to so wretched a condition is the ransom
or the substitution of the death of Jesus for everyone before “the
Father”. And therefore the only guarantee left for man was the
guidance of the Church and of the Bible to the alleged evidence of this
one and only saving event [10].
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