Abstract

© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Friday, 25 July 2008

I believe religious duties consist in doing justice, loving mercy and endeavouring to make our fellow citizens happy. My own mind is my church, and to do good is my religion.

Thomas Paine

The God of the Believers

The affirmation of God… speaks proudly of man’s appraisal of his own condition—of his perfection and weakness, of his ideals and failures, of his hopes and fears.

Patrick Masterson, Atheism and Alienation

The believer conceives of God as a superhuman being. Though He is above Nature in this definition, and above humanity, believers say He exists in a way that lets Him manipulate Nature, for He is conceived of as its Creator. Thus the God of the believers is constructed in their heads as having a set of features or properties—omnipotence, omniscience, omnipresence and omnibenevolence—and with these characteristics this God can alter reality. But in so doing, in altering reality, He is leaving footprints, a spoor, signs of His presence and activity. The features that characterize God, that define Him in the minds of believers, necessitate His leaving a trail in the natural world, and any such trail can be observed.

As the conception of God, for believers, is that He is supernatural, He cannot Himself be observed by natural means, but His footprints, necessarily left when He interferes in reality, can be seen, and from them the existence of God inferred. The existence of God is therefore inseparable from the existence of signs of His presence in reality. If there are no such signs, either God does not exist to make them, or He might exist but has no effect on the world or consequences for it, and, so far as the world is concerned, He does not exist. No footprints of this God have been found. The God of the believers, does not exist as far as the world, and we humans in it are concerned.

That disposes of the God of the believers, but they might have misapprehended the nature of God, giving Him impossible and unrealisable characteristics. Maybe in error, they built God into an impossible and therefore undetectable being, so that we have missed entirely a wholly comprehendable and possible concept of Him.

That people may exist, organized for action in history, as a force to achieve a historical destiny, what is required—that they discern God, or own themselves to be His people? What is it that alienates man from himself—the confession of God’s presence in history and in man’s consciousness, or the suppression of Him from history, and the repression of Him from consciousness?

J Courtney Murray, The Problem of God

Or are these questions meaningless because they refer to a meaningless and impossible God, but once God is restored to His original form, then there is no need of any special act to suppress or discern Him at all? He is perfectly acceptable as He is, except to people who have got too used to an impossible God and cannot let go of it.

The great religions of the world all conceive of god as benevolent towards human beings, yet their history sets humanity at odds with itself, inspires people to hatred of each other, to distrust and to warfare. They teach a universal god, but in practice each religion has its own separate god, and these gods inspire mutual antagonism because the gods are mutually exclusive. Is God universal? Or is there a family of gods that hate each other? If there is a family of them, why does each of them claim to be universal? Are even the gods deluded? What is the truth, and how did the situation arise historically?

A Brief History of God

Humanity evolved from a common ancestor with the apes, and the apes evolved as a type of monkey that got too big to walk on branches so it swung by its arms beneath them. Some apes were mainly solitary animals, living in family groups and no more, while some became social and lived in groups bigger than a family group. Gorillas are solitary and chimps and bonobos social. Humans developed as a social ape like the chimps and bonobos.

Social animals benefit individually from living in groups and helping each other. They make friends, share food, groom each other, and help each other fight off predators. They are better off than their cousins who do it all alone. But troops of animals have to cohere together. They have to bond. Individuals in the group have to give up a little of their freedom to help others in the group, and enjoy the same favours in return. In particular, they have to agree on a leader whom the others will obey if the group is not to splinter and fail, especially under stress, such as a predator attack. The rest of the group have to follow the leader or be expelled for disobedience. Then they have to live alone or hope to join another band of animals, both difficult prospects.

Accepting and being willing to follow a chief or a king became necessary for the primitive groups of proto humans. The human animal was social before it became human as we know it, conscious and thinking. Sociality became at least partly instinctive. Few people indeed would be happy to live apart from society, however romantic it might sound to be Robinson Crusoe. For a long time they accepted as natural that they had to follow the dominant animal—indeed, a dominant class, because the dominant male surrounded himself with a dominating elite—to benefit from the security offered by the group, and in so doing they were no longer entirely free to do as they wished. They were free to forage, to mate among similarly ranked animals in the hierarchy, and to seek favours from more senior animals, but they were obliged to share food when it was scarce, yield a mate to a dominant animal if it took a fancy to her, and help to defend the troop when it was endangered, particularly, in such a circumstance, responding to the call of the leader, and following his strategy. The leader was the chief and he set the rules.

Then change and motion in Nature were explained by intent—everything had a spirit, and the spirit had an intent, a natural purpose. But just as people in social groups had leaders, the spirits had leaders too, and these became gods too—nature gods. Humans had settled down to agricultural lives, and the seasonal cycle had become important for knowing when was the right time of year to sow the life giving seed saved from the previous year. Each year vegetation was born from the seed, grew, ripened for harvest, then died. Between death and new life was a harsh period not easily conducive to life, the hot summer or the freezing winter, according to where you were. The host of vegetation spirits had a leader, the vegetation god, and the life of the god explained the vegetative cycle.

The vegetation god’s life cycle was also paralleled by the path of the sun through the heavens, and the relation of the two cannot have been long missed once humans began to speculate on these things. The endless repetition of essentially similar natural events in a cycle impressed on poor mortal mankind that the gods of Nature had ordered the world, and the nature of society was also ordered, a notion that is still standard religious fare. But note that in the early stages of speculation about the world, essentially all of it seems to have been considered sacred. Everything had its spirit, and the whole of the year was prescribed by the work of gods and spirits. The very countryside was a vision of the divine, and particularly awe inspiring and beautiful spots had their own shrine or simple altar, perhaps merely a stone, for the visitor to pour on a little oil, or wine, or break a crust of bread, or sprinkle a little salt, as a token of gratitude to the local spirit or God.

As consciousness developed and humans settled into an agricultural existence, they had to commandeer territory, live in permanent villages then towns, and the chief’s rules became the law, and he became the king. Now the king was having trouble in keeping the social group in order. It was getting bigger and more diffuse. He required more allies and better ones, and among them was the shaman, a man who knew more than most and pretended he knew more than that. The people, already in awe of the king, had it explained by the shaman or priests, as being special powers derived from tribal ancestors, spirits who watched over them all. These were the first ancestor myths, and any memorable king became a powerful ancestor to later generations and eventually one became a tribal father, the mythical founder of the tribe.

Subsequent kings referred back to this father for their authority, and the custom of the tribe was to acknowledge it by ritual, so that eventually the father became the tribal god. Naturally, the God had all the powers of the king and more, and guided the tribe through his favoured sons, the king, and his priesthood. The rituals were explained in their myths as coming from the tribal father and god, and these together with the tribes own preferred customs, rites of passage, styles of clothing, cooking, working, building, merrymaking and decorating became the tribal culture. All of it was the gift of the tribal god.

Let tribes coalesce into cities, nations and empires, and each time a culture would emerge, either that of a dominant tribe, perhaps a conqueror, or that of the most civilized tribe, even though conquered, because the conquerors could see the advantages of it, or naturally various hybridizations as the cultures mixed. The prevalent culture of this imperium was tending towards a universal one, and its supernatural leader towards a universal god.

Now all of this is highly simplified being based on what went in and what came out socially—that we began with leaders of tribes of apes and ended up with emperors, and that at some stage the group set up a supernatural leader called their god, but some such scheme must have happened. The concept of supernatural power encompassed more than the power of a leader in a social group. The concept of supernatural powers explained, however inadequately, many inexplicable things in early societies, things we now know are perfectly natural.

Society and the Imperial God

At each stage of social development, the people looked to a god who favoured them as a people—a god who stood for the people and their culture, often being their founding father! The god was the mythical identity of the group, a metaphor for the group. Each society had a god standing for it, and assisting it supernaturally—notionally. Eventually the reality of the first sense, that the god was the society, was forgotten in the dominance of the second, that God was a supernatural being guiding the society. The reality, of the metaphor of the tribe as its god, became an imagined independently existing superbeing which took on natural attributes, especially those of the sun, to make them even more superhuman! God existed in the group as its social identity, the supernatural simply being a delusion fostered by the clever men in the group to preserve its social cohesion among the less intelligent of its members.

The god united the group, but simultaneously divided every group from its neighbours. The worshippers of Yehouah wanted nothing to do with worshippers of Molech or Kemosh, the bible tells us. When the groups were tribes of hundreds only, it scarcely mattered, but in the imperial age, with the world shrunken to tribal dimensions, with tribes of billions, it matters. Without a truly universal God, major conflicts are inevitable and potential casualties uncountable, yet the universal god cannot be a supernatural one. Such gods are deluded conceptions of primitive tribal people. In reality, God is the tribe, and, in the global world, God is humanity as a whole.

Reconciliation of the person with divine Nature was what spirituality was, an acceptance of the divinity of Nature. Most people believed Nature was divine, and was motivated by spirits and gods. Paradoxically, not only the leader of the tribe had become supernatural but so too had Nature. In the age of imperialism, the tribal leader had grown so large, and received so many natural attributes, solar ones, storm ones, and fertility ones, that the universal God had become a god of all things. The gods of Assyria and Babylon had become such universal gods, but the first with a developed theology was the Persian God Ahuramazda, the god of the prophet Zoroaster.

This religion had an immense influence on the western world, but one that has not been recognized, largely because the west could not in Victorian times contemplate being influenced by people with brown skins. The influences that were acceptable were those of the Jews and Greeks, both considered to be white races. Iranians might have been Aryans but they were brown nevertheless, and hardly distinguishable to Europeans from their Moslem Arab neighbours. The same attitude prevails in Washington still. But the Persians and Greeks were closely related Aryan tribes, as the Greek myths suggest.

The Persians had built a huge empire from the remnants of their predecessors. They had incorporated the most creative Greeks, those of the mainland, into their empire, and they had invented Judaism as a religion, based on Zoroastrianism, to unite their conquered peoples, establishing a prominent temple for them in Jerusalem. Intelligent Greeks were not much interested in religion, but they were immensely impressed by the imperial Persian theological system which aimed to explain all in one the whole of existence. The Greeks took many ideas from the Persians and the Babylonians, the advanced culture they had conquered, and treated them philosophically, while the Jews had many of the same ideas by quite a different route, the purely religious one. So, both western influences were previously influenced by Persia, and these comprise the unrecognized Persian influence on the west.

Persians spoke of arta, or order and truth, as a dominating principle, and the Greek philosophers took up the idea of an ordered world—the cosmos. Nature plainly has an order in it. The spirits of mountains, trees, and rivers as they had been understood, were subject to an abstract order, and the philosophers made them into laws put into place by God. But were the gods in command of that order, or were they subject to it themselves? The speculating philosophers had already decided on monotheism but some went further, claiming that the natural order subjected even the gods, or God, and going further still, some claimed God was no more than the natural order of the cosmos. God had lost His soul. The logical final stage of this evolution was to lose God all together—the order of nature was not a God, and was not supernatural in any way. It was entirely natural and explicable in its own terms. Nature was by definition natural. It was simply how things were, what existed, and the way in which they quite naturally came to exist.

Some Greeks got that far over 2000 years ago, but many people today still cannot get that far. Parental and social conditioning have kept people holding on to primitive beliefs in the imperial gods of the last two millennia—essentially a tribal god magnified to suit an imperial culture. These people still teach that their god is the God and Creator of the universe—a tribal god! The morality of this primitive god, however large he seems, magnified to suit the western empire, remains primitive.

Christ and AntiChristianity

People kow-tow to a god that is merely an imaginary tribal chief or oriental potentate. As the king of our tribe, everyone is obliged to honour and worship this imaginary father, in the west, the God of the Jews and the Christians. Not to do so is to threaten the foundation of our society, yet the worshippers happily support death and destruction to others without a qualm. Yet God is society. He is the people. And the man these Christians claim is their God said so! Now that the tribe is global, the practical dictums of Christ are essential. God is the human race, and everyone has to be treated as God. The supernatural God is finished.

Two thousand years ago, this ultimate stage was already clear, and it was clearest to a man who was one of a small nation of people in the Levant that had suffered for 600 years at the hands of rival imperialisms. The Jews had been ruled successively by the Egyptians, the Assyrians, the Babylonians, and the Persians. They had had an imperial god pressed on to them by the Persians, and had accepted it as their own. Then the Greeks and the Romans successively replaced the Persians. Indeed, in the Jewish myths rewritten in the time of the Egyptian Greek Ptolemies, already God was being depicted as a practical unifying principle in uniting the diverse tribes of the Israelites into one people. Believers never see the practical lessons of myths because they are so dazzled by the supernatural glory they expect.

Finally, a leader of a Jewish sect, the Essenes, realized that a new concept of god was needed, not a supernatural one to be served like an idol, but a practical concept, a reversion to the true meaning of a god—the people it represented. The message was to return to the practical, realistic roots of religion when the god stood for the people, practically and realistically, not supernaturally and unrealistically. God was merely a metaphor for the bonding, the love, the people of a tribe enjoyed one with another.

This leader was Christ. Now, a third of the world claim to be Christian, and the God they accept as a man called Christ, 2000 years ago was showing them how religion had got it wrong. His fundamental commandments to love one another, even your enemies, and to love God as the least of your fellows, recognized that God and society were the same. Love of God was the mutual love of people within any society. The successful society would be that in which everyone loved each other. Even, then, in Roman times, it was necessary. How much more of a necessity is it now? God is the human race. We either love our fellow human beings, or we shall destroy ourselves in mutual mortal combat There is nothing supernatural beyond. Heaven is what we create on earth through mutual love, or it is hell on earth and possibly extinction through mutual hatred. You cannot kiss God’s finger but stamp on his toe! You love even the least among us as God. Secular Christianity is now a necessity.

Christ’s message was lost in a fervour to set him up as the latest of the old supernatural gods. He had realized that no god existed for people to suffer. The answer, pronounced from his own lips, was love! God wanted people to love one another—everyone! But his followers took it to mean only people who agreed that he was their saviour, and utterly contrary to what he had said, they adopted faith in his own dead body as the criterion of love. Practical love was ditched for no love, or love as a minor side effect of faith. Regretably, Christ came too soon. His followers did not get it, and those that did were ignored and scattered. The message was presented as the old God of ritual and worship, a god of love whose followers spent their time hating everyone else, and many of their own persuasion.

The myth of Christ expresses dictums for social living, which being social, are objective. One was to love each other and another was to love God, and a third was that loving God was loving each other. These principles of Christ abolished the gap between God and man.

Evangel Michael Metatron

The Gnostics saw every individual as being a little spark of God, but separated from Him. The metaphor means they were alienated from the rest of human society, and their duty was to behave in such a way that they could return. Augustine said that each of us was made for God, for society, “and our hearts are restless until they rest in thee”—in society again. Religion was to keep people loyal to the tribe, to the society represented by the god, in the global age, the global society. The concept of a supernatural god could be denied and was, but the Metatronic concept of God as society cannot honestly be denied.

The antiChristianity Paul promoted, restated and re-established ancient supernatural ideas in place of the practical reality of Christ. An abstract “faith” replaced practical love, though Paul, to seem Christian, spoke of love too. Anyone with faith was supposed to love, but as faith alone was sufficient to save, love hardly ever got a look in. Pauline antiChristianity was a “do nothing except serve the invisible idol” religion. Paul was the antiChrist.

For seven hundred years of the “do nothing” religion in the Dark Ages, nothing was done! Some Christians realized at the millennium that nothing was going to happen! No promised parousia occurred, and they were left as destitute as before with no prospects for another thousand years. So, the more intelligent and critical Christians began to look for an alternative to doing nothing. It was Catharism, and when the Church woke up to the danger to its vested interests, it murdered them en masse. Hardly what Christ taught, was it?

Having woken up, the Church became active, but not in Christ’s way with love, it became active with hatred. It saw the danger of Islam, and the danger at home, and intent on killing two birds with one stone, it launched the crusades. Until this day, unscrupulous men, often Christians, have used the external threat to arouse people to hatred and murder to deflect them from their direct concerns. Catharism continued despite the threat and so the robber barons were set on to the Cathars in a genocidal attack. To ensure none escaped and any future heresies would be nipped in the bud, the Holy Inquisiton was launched. For five hundred years it hounded, imprisoned, and tortured anyone suspected of practising the true teaching of Christ. But all this activity had also woken up many people who had lived only semiconsciously in the do nothing years, set them thinking, and gave birth, through the Renaissance, the Reformation, and the Enlightenment, to untrammelled reason.

In this period, theologians made every excuse to keep the sacred separated from the secular, reason from faith and God from the people, all reversions to the supernatural ideas of religion that had preceded Christianity.

Secular Christianity vs AntiChristianity

Christ had taken religion right back to its origins when God was the people in a real sense, and only above them in an imaginary sense—that of being a totemic leader. God is really a comfort in distress when He is your concerned and compassionate neighbour. You both recognize it in having the same God. Man finds…

…his identity, meaning and purpose, both as an individual and as a member of society in terms of a sacred world view.

P Masterson

The sacred world view today exclusively means belief in a supernatural god, but it became it from the practicalities of tribal belief. Then the sacred world view was God, Nature and Society, in which Nature and Society were no less sacred than God, because, in practice, they were God. As long as the tribal culture was secure then God was. God was immanent in the tribe, is immanent in society. This world view rejects God as being transcendent, the core trouble with religion. Transcendence takes God out of the real world into the supernatural, into imagination. It makes a practical God into a figment of the mind.

Modern antiChristians will argue the opposite, and claim Christ repeatedly spoke of a transcendental God. But Christ was, like anyone, bound by the convictions of his day, and spoke in the terms appropriate to his time, yet we have to distinguish between the conventions any thinker uses, and even what he seemed to think he meant, and the logical outcome of his principles and method. Despite speaking conventionally for an Essene, his teaching cast off conventional shackles, and showed the revolutionary way forward. He proclaimed a new society, a thoroughly unconventional global society, but in conventional terms, and he proclaimed love as his method. Even the antiChrist, Paul, had to proclaim it too, to pretend to be a Christian, but dug its foundations away, and replaced it with more of what had gone before—mysticism and ritual.

Christ had removed the distinction between Jew and Greek. They can be understood as being antagonistic cultures, but even warring cultures could be reconciled in a new global culture, a new God, in which Jew and Greek undertook to love others as if they were God Himself. In establishing faith, Paul immediately asserted a new distinction between people, and a basis for new antagonism, with no practical value. Belief alienates man from man, the believers’ tribe from the unbelievers’ tribe, with nothing to aleviate the antagonism. Faith in practice replaces love as the prime purpose of Christianity turning it into antiChristianity. Faith in Christ simply made Christ into a supernatural god with no substance behind him, because the substance just became a slogan. The faithful liked to talk the talk but refused to walk the walk, or, in most cases, never got to realise there was more to Christ than faith anyway.

Now it is clear that supernatural gods were always a fancy, and they must now be abandoned and replaced by practical love. The antiChristianity that Christianity became has to be ditched for secular Christianity. Christians must practise what Christ preached, and do what he did. They must be Christs not Christians! Christ proclaimed the kingdom of God, and he meant the kingdom of the real, practical God, the global society, achieved when people act as Christs. God is the least among us. He is our enemy, the type of people we hate most. Yet Christ said love them. He did not say love only the famous, the rich, and the arrogant, and aim to be like them. He said love the least, the poor and the humble, and aim to be like them. God is Everyman, and that means us. We treat fellow human beings like God.

AntiChristians treat other human beings like the Devil. So, they are easy to detect. The transcendence of God is their mistake. They have been taken in by the attempts of professional Christians to make the transcendental God, the imaginary God, into an objective one, and in so doing they make it in their own image. But what realistically can the antiChristian do, when they already hate their neighbour? No human can be perfect, but this is gross imperfection. They have to try. If they cannot love, then at least they must not hate, and especially must not act on their hatred. Even Christ had to take an initial step!

In practice, loving someone you do not know, is being kind to them, being concerned and caring. It positively is not harming them! It is being the Good Samaritan.

Descartes’s Trick

When Descartes says, “Cogito ergo sum”, we can follow him. The only view we have is a subjective one. If anyone comes to imagine God in their thought, then that might be their own god. But having established self and a subjective god from the act of thinking, how can they relate to reality? How does anyone transcend the purely subjective? Descartes claimed to do it, establishing his god as the God of all, but it was a trick. Effectively using the flawed ontological argument for God, that his subjective idea of a God necessarily exists, he invented a transcendental God, one that transcends the self and subjectivity, becoming objective, other and therefore real.

Needless to say, no imaginary object can be made real by imagination, whatever powers one gives to it, and that includes imagining it to have the powers of a god. However one can test one’s subjective impressions by consulting other people that one perceives to exist alongside you—in society. Is it possible to agree on what one has observed? When a large number of people agree under different circumstances—in other words when they test their impressions as carefully and as widely as possible—and agree upon what they have seen, then it can be considered pro tem as an objective reality.

But the group could and did agree on imaginary things. Primitive societies agreed that an ancient tribal father lived on as a spirit to guide the tribe, thus becoming its god. The whole of primitive culture depended on agreement on how things happened or were done, and what it was—partly reality and partly an agreed mythology—that explained it. Only in the last few centuries has the arbitrary nature of the explanations including god been realised. Science insists on the testability of beliefs in the agreed reality, not accepting them merely in the imagination. When different opinions arise, they can be tested separately, and even the people that hold them can be tested to ensure that they are not imagining something others cannot see. Ultimately, what really transcends the subjective self is the objective other that comes out of the agreed observations of society. It is society, not God, that transcends the self and leads to objective reality.

Descartes established self and subjectivity as basic being, but used a device to transfer basic being to an imaginary superbeing, God. Eliminate the trick and it is clear that the transcendence from self is not to god but to society. Baruch Spinoza, a Dutch Jew from Amsterdam and an admirable mind, admired Descartes’, and also wondered how he could get to objective reality from subjective appearance. But he used the same trick. If God does not exist, then His essence does not include existence, so He must exist. Reality necessitated the absolute existence of God. It is no different in its arbitrariness from Descartes, but he did see at the same time the links between God, man and society.

Society equates with God even in Descartes’ and Spinoza’s reasoning, properly considered. It is not God but society, nowadays the human race as a whole, that transcends self, becoming the first principle of philosophical thought. Primacy of objective thought necessarily is the group not an imaginary god. So, what Descartes saw as divine order, a result of God’s will, is actually the social imperatives of the group, of society, for it to remain stable. Descartes, having established his imagined God as being in control of everything including his self, concluded that anything he thought sufficiently clearly had to be true, thereby debasing truth as self, as subjectivity. But when God is the group, and truth is only possible by testing against reality, and agreeing on the outcome, then truth is objectively established.

Jean Paul Sartre saw Descartes had reasoned falsely, and that humanity established truth not God. Truth is social truth, but it is not arbitrary because of its necessity to match reality. Truth is not divine, it is humanistic and socialistic. One might try to argue as postmodernists do that a group could have a false idea of reality, but that is only possible at the fringes of it. If any individual has a false idea of reality, then before long there will be dire consequences. A drug addict or lunatic might think they can fly, but let them try and reality will expose the false belief. We cannot have evolved to the stage we are in without us all having a good idea of reality bred into us.

Kant realised that we saw order in the world because our brains reflect the world in which we live. He said we have mental categories for things, and we mentally categorize our experiences. Inasmuch as it is so, it is because of evolution. Over millions of years of evolution, our brains have adapted to reflect reality closely. Similarly, in the years we have adapted to be a social animal, our brains and social behaviour have adapted to it, so that we have an instinct for proper behaviour in society. We call it morality. The only false ideas of reality we can safely have are those that have no particular consequences for ill, and among them is the idea of God. We had a false idea of what god was, but there was a truth behind it that preserved god as a social belief. The truth was that God was society, and so belief in a transcendent God, though false, helped preserve primitive societies.

Descartes could have been much more revolutionary than he was, but by upholding the primacy of the imaginary God, fearing for his life otherwise, he failed to carry forward his thoughts honestly, and missed a trick:

Descartes, at the price of considerable ambiguity and even inconsistency, remained faithful to a theological viewpoint.

P Masterson

This failure left the subjective human being alienated in truth from reality. The person had to choose between selfishness or a false god. For many, Descartes, perhaps, included, God had become a habit which continued as it was, but for others, there was only a void. Many, god or no god, could only get the sense of the subjective, and selfish attitudes could grow unchecked and unbalanced. A few filled the void with new ideas of humanism and socialism but worked out on the hoof, so to speak, with God still looming large. Now they can be seen to have been more correct, in that God is a metaphor for human society.

And the Devil?

God as a metaphor for society does not have to be good. Societies wanted to be good, and so their concept of a god that stood for them was a good god. But societies can be bad, and a theological dualism makes perfect sense when god is seen as society. The god standing for a bad society is Ahriman, Satan. Only clergymen of the religion of the good god ever suggested that anyone prayed to the wicked god. No one sane wants society to collapse into disorder and chaos, but the image of it was an incentive for people to support their own god, and so the society it represents.

The trouble is that societies do indeed rise and fall, and fallen societies maintain the religion of society’s god, even when its clergymen are among the most corrupt and the worst offenders in the society. Satanic society is too profitable for its elite to abandon it, so they still try to maintain it to their own advantage though most citizens suffer from their criminality. Loyalty to God is needed then by the corrupt classes even more than before.

The trouble is that the people are then being conned, for they are preserving a rotten society that has to be cut down by the roots. The roots are the ordinary suffering people, and they cut down corrupt society by revolution. From, the outset, revolution in the bible is a gross sin against God, yet it is in fact only a sin when society is good. It is a necessity when it is corrupt. Adam rebelled, the Tower of Babel was a threat to God, and Satan led the wicked angels in rebellion. All well and good providing that society is good, and so God is good, but, when society is wicked, God is wicked.

The Gnostics posed the question of whether the Jewish God was good or wicked, and the Cathars saw the Catholic religion as wicked. If people had been misled and God was wicked, the rebellion of Satan was justified. If God had lied to Adam about the fruit, then the Snake was right to tell him. And though the descendents of Noah who built the Tower of Babel were shown as rivalling God in building a tower to the sun, God just seems pevish or jealous about their skills. Was God good? If not rebellion is justified.

When society is seen in the context of God, the propaganda of the clergy that God is necessarily good is seen as false. The human instinct is to preserve society, but, when society gets unbearable, people will risk its destruction rather than tolerate perpetual injustice and suffering. Society ought never to fall to such levels, and Christ’s doctrine of love, applied in practice should ensure it never does. But when wickedness already prevails, the prospects of the wicked taking to Christ’s true doctrine are remote, and there might be no alternative but revolution. That indeed might have been Christ’s own situation. He thought a revolution was needed to remove the wicked rulers of Judaea, the temple priesthood called Sadducees and the Roman military.

Summary

The conscious realization that God is society makes it clearer to everyone where they stand, and what we are doing vis-à-vis God. Christ made it clear what we all must do subjectively to bring about an objective heaven, a kingdom of God on earth. The evolution of society shows he was right in simply advocating in practice the identity of God with society—no longer fractured but the whole of humanity once the imperial age was entered.

Then the first philosopher of the Enlightenment, Descartes, pointed to God as social humanity, but copped out to preserve a conventional supernatural god. Honestly presented, it again confirms Metatronic Christianity. We need to be Christs, each of us, to bring about the change. It means sacrificing our selves, our selfishness, for others.

The first Christians called themselves saints, perfectly holy men, those who acted like Christ. The developed Church told people all they needed to be Christians was faith, and to love God, but they were not required to love each other, and to prove they loved God by loving each other. These latter principles were what made Christs or saints. Faith only made Christians, and Christians are antiChrists. Society demands that we be saints, that we be perfect, that we be Christs!

Further Reading

• More on religious origins
• More on the death of God and secular Christianity
• More on primitive revelation

Skeptical Resources—Internet infidels | Jesus Never Existed | Steven Carr’s Website | Christianism | Early Christian Writings | God is Imaginary | “Religion Detoxification” | Our Judaio-Christian Heritage | Archaeoastronomy | No Deity | No Beliefs | Evil Bible | Bible God | ex-Christians | Jesus Police | Islamic Faith Freedom | Atheist Experience | American Atheists | Jovial Atheist | Askwhy! books
Other Resources—Early Christian Docs | Resources for Study | Traditional Bible-History | Traditional Bible World History | Traditional Bible History | about.com biblical history | Apologetics web sites | Advent Ch Fathers | Orion center links | Wikipedia | Traditional Jewish History