AW! Epistles
From Rik E
Abstract
Monday, 09 August 2004
Comment on your article on Christians and Pagans.
Thanks for your article. I’ve learned from it, and I do think you are right, in a way. I do think the Christians destroyed a lot of old classical writing. But I also think they were very critical about this and did preserve important books. For exampel some very important tragedies of Sophocles and Aeschylus were preserved, but not one single satireplay was; while we know most tragedies ended with a satireplay. I think the Christians found these plays obscure and burned them. We still know all the works of Ovidius, although some of it is erotic and (for that time) allmost pornographic; but there is hardly any Latin literature from the 2nd and 3rd century left. It is possible that it was all pornographic.
Do understand this Mike—Greek philosophy is idealistic and tragic, like Christianity is idealistic and tragic, but Roman philosophy is materialistic and anti-tragic (read Lucretius, whose philosophy is based on Democritus and Epicurus). A pure materialistic philosophy can only conclude that avoiding of pain and looking for pleasure are the only drives or motives in our life. This way of thinking leads to the conclusion that lust is the most preasurable thing in life. Moreover the Romans knew slavery and hierarchy; an organisation of life Christians do not allow. Put those two together and ask yourself why Latin literature from the 2nd and 3rd century was lost; answer—it was obscure, too obscure.
It’s treu—the Christians, espessially th Katholic destroyed a lot of classic writing, also Christian writings they call heresies. You will not find a sensible word on Arianism in Katholic writing. But if you are interested in the “heretical” doctrine of the “Arianist”, please read the lettre of Auxentius who defends Wulfila’s “Arianistic” exegese of the New Testament (you’ll find it on th internet). And if you want to know more about Wulfila’s exegese of the gospel of John look for Skeireins (meaning—“clear sky”).
Yes—Christians destroyed classic culture, but not all of it, and what was destroyed was probably not destroyed without reason. Obscure or pornographic literature does not belong in public libraries.
Yes—Christians have made a lot of enemies and has killed a lot of people, but it also has united a lot of people and it still does, and all Europeans and Americans live by Christian standards, even you, though you say your work is anti-Christian (which I don’t think it is—a treu Christian wants to know the truth! because Christ = Truth! I’m a treu Christian and I ame like you—I do not want to believe in lies).
No—a lot of books were preserved, even books that were forbidden, like those of Origenes. Some are preserved because they were forbidden like the Gnostic writings of Nag Hammadi.
No—there is a secret history of Christianity you will not find in English/American literature or translations. This history goes from Wulfila to Germany (where he preached for 7 years; see—Auxentius), to Meister Eckhart and his “anti-Katholic” explanation of the mystery of the Holy Trinity, to the Netherlands where the Frisian wrote there history, that goes back to the time of Alexander the Great. The Frisian believed in the teachings of Christ but knew He was not understood and because He was not understood there came a lot of faulse prophets and poeple didn’t know what to believe in. But this sitiation will end at the end of the 19th century. Then the faulse prophets will disappeare.
Yes—I’m still waiting for this end of the 19th century; and I think your work like that of so many others (including myself) bring this turn of the century more nearby. We doen’t need no more faulse prophets!
I am glad you enjoyed the pages, and concede that Christians were destroyers of books and culture. You find some exceptions and some excuses, and that is fair enough. It is far harder to make any absolute case than to argue the general case. Indeed, I say that the Christians did deliberately preserve some books for didactic reasons, so that the clergy could be taught Latin and Greek. The excuses seem to be that the books destroyed were pornographic but then any books that counter Christian bigotry would have been considered pornographic. The genuinely pornographic ones could not have been admitted into the canon of preserved books because Christianity inherited the general prudishness of the Jews and the particular objections to sexuality of the Essenes, who were practising to be angels and so rejected all lust. Sexuality is an important thing in life, as important as eating, drinking and sleeping, but Christianity introduced the unnatural taboo against it that still remains in the western world, polarizing it between those who still reject sex as wicked and those who, as a consequence of years of sexual suppression, are obsessed with it. It is arguable that the whole of human development in the west would have been healthier without the Christian obsession with human sexuality.
Where did you get the idea that Christians did not allow slavery or hierarchies. Look at any Christian organization, bar an odd exception and you find hierarchies, and Christianity, unlike the Roman religious philosophies, never opposed slavery until the time of Wilberforce, and he had a hard struggle to do it. The Americans, despite their pretended Christian piety, still live the legacy of their own slave system that only officially went 140 years ago. Where were the real Christians? (Christians are always right because only some of them are real ones.)
I have a different view from you on what people should be allowed to read too. Obscure and pornographic—who decides? Censorship usually only suits a particular group of people, and with an excuse like yours, once in power, they will censor everything they do not like. Christians did that. People can be united by ideas that are wrong. In my opinion, Christianity has done that too, but principally it has united people with right wing and generally unpleasant views, leading to the oppression of people who chose not to accept the lies Christians call truth. Then you say we live by Christian standards, but why don’t Christians live by Christian standards.
Christians standards are not standards at all. They change according to how Christians choose to interpret them. Thou shalt not kill unless it is an Arab, in which case thou shalt torture and humiliate them before thou shalt kill them! The first Christians in the bible were communists but what applies to Arabs now applied to communists until recently.
Christians are hypocrites. You admit it has done nothing that is extraordinary. It has killed many people, and continues to do so, so where is its morality, and how has it made people different from how they were? Such principles as it now holds, it took from the Roman lifestyle philosophies like the Stoics and the Epicureans.
You say a true Christian wants to know the truth, and that is fair enough, except that all the Christians who write to me could not recognize what is true if it was stuck on the end of their noses. For Christians, truth is lies. So, if you say you do not want to believe in lies, I cannot see how you can be a Christian.
Some books, you say, were preserved by being forbidden, like the Nag Hammadi books. You are saying that because they books were hidden and survived, the Christians have the credit for preserving them. That is so obtuse, it is a lie itself. The intention of the Christians was that they were not to be preserved. Chance only allowed them to be.
Anyway, thanks for the tips on reading Auxentius and Wulfila on the net. I’ll take a look via Google when I get time.
Thanks for your lonf reaction. Sure I do agree, Christians have this creasy fear of sexuality and they preach all kinds of things that are against the laws of nature, that is true; but that is because they do not understand the real massage. The name “Christianity” is used for something Christ Himself would not allow. But that is history. History is like living in a dream, a nightmare, you can’t get out. I think there is only one way to defend the argument to go to war and that is to preserve peace, and you preserve peace by talking to people and show them your arguments. The Dutch philosopher Cusanus wrote about this in the 16th century; he called this “tolerare”: tolerate, not by not arguing withe the other about theological issues, but by arguing and listening and understanding and arguing again. “Tol” in the word tolerate means “tax”, toleration costs afford and interest. Is there any afford or interest towards the Arabs at this moment? No, so is this war a Christian war and is president Bush a Christian president? No, he is a brutal barbarian who does not want to talk, and Arabs and Israëlians and Palestine are just the same, while true Christians say—you have got to talk, because the real disagreement is in the Word and Christ is the Word.
This is all well and good. It is a very popular argument by Christians. Those who say they are Christians but do things like kill people are immediately disowned by the REAL Christians. Only in their heads and their private letters, though. Where are all the Christian missionaries and evangelists who will stand up and shout out at the killers calling themselves Jesus? Supposed real Christians will not raise anything louder than a murmur against the evil people who use Christianity for a cover. That is why I say repeatedly that Christianity in practice is meaningless, and does nothing for anyone except confuse them. Christians are outright liars but have somehow got a reputation for honesty. It is a joke, and I shall not have any respect for Christians until they start being it.
However this Word of Christ was never understood. . Even priest did not understand and started to tell stupid things about Christ, things you can not know but only believe, like a life after death and punnishment in hell. Christ himself never talked about this.
Well, I really do not get you here. Christ spoke often about punishment in hell. Try Mark 9:43-47, but Matthew uses it even more. And if this word has indeed been misunderstood, I come back to the point I made above. Where are the amassed ranks of the true Christians converting the liars to the true word? they are nowhere to be seen.
From the beginning there are two kinds of Christianity—socalled “Arianisme” and socalled Katholicism. The latter is very dogmatic, it believes that you can put faith in a dogma, that is a formula in wich you formulate a law in wich people should believe. When all bishops agree on this formula it is true. The Arian kind of Christianity (read Wulfila’s Skeireins and Auxentius) sais there is no word or formulation in wich you can catch the nbame of God or of His Son, any formulation is the work of men, and works of men are not enough to speak out His name. You should, like Jews do, not mention His name, because it is to big.
Not speaking big names sounds pretty trivial to me. If Arianism was right, where are they now?
However priests, like presidents, have there mouth full of God and akt like they know his wishes, they akt like they have a secret kind of knowledge an know what is best for you. I tell you—they are no Christians, like there are hardly any Christians in America; the only ones I know are black Americans and they are dead (like Simone Signoret). A true Christian does, like you yourself, believe in the Word and in the Truth, even when the truth is not as beautifull as it seams, even when it is dark and black and ununderstandable; we follow His Word, because it is treu.
You have me all wrong. I do not believe in the word because it has led to wickedness, and the man whose word you believe said that the tree is known by its fruit. A tree with rotten, foul, evil fruit must be a rotten, foul and evil tree. that is Christianity.
I kow it is hard to understand and looks like it is not scientific, but still, it is the way to get back to your roots and to the sources of our culture. President Bush doesn’t know about culture and sources; he is a fake, he thinks, like most Americans, in a materialistic, Roman way (your language is, unlike the Dutch language, very Romanistic). But I know about the roots and the early begining, and that is where my heart is.
I think you are romantic too. You have a romantic idea about Christianity, but until you people start evangelising the centres of Christianity in the world, telling them what you are telling me, then I have to think you are just wishful thinking.
I do not say living with moslims is not a problem in Holland, but at least we take this problem serious. I’ve just seen a program on television on young mislim women talking about there lives in Holland. Most of them were born here, speak our language perfectly, love our country, love our freedom, speak freely on subjects like love, sexuality, religion, hope and fear. I love that, I like to listen to them, I like to understand there problems. Quite recently there are the first Marocan films in the cinema making the problems of moslims in our society visible. Not all of us but lots of the Dutch people like to live with moslims, like with Jews and other religions, as long as they respect our laws. In every city in Holland there are churches (Katholik and Protestant), a moskee (Islamic) and a synagoge (Jewisch). Everyone is free to celebrate his own god and religion. The mayor or burgemeester of Amsterdam is a Jew, sometimes wearing a Jewish cap, even on television. Moslim women are alowed to wear shiels on there heads (unlike in France). We think this is normal and we like to see they think its normal, and we like to listen to what they have got to say. This I think is the most paradoxal about Christianity—that you can say in the name of Jesus that Christians are liers and that president Bush is a fake. Yes I like to believe that so called Christians (Katholics) destroyed (parts of) Klassical culture, and that is a shame, even if Roman literature was immoral and obscene. Arians however respected Roman culture. It were not the ’barbaric’ Goth who destroyed the liberaries, wich the Katholic and the Italian ’humanist’ (renaissance) claimed, but it were the Katholic Romans, who now wash there hands in inessence. They say the Arianistic Goths did this. I do agree the Goth wanted to destroy paganism and they destroyed Rome, but for instance Theodoric respected Latin literature and was friends with Cassius and Boëthius, the wisest men of his time. The ’barbarian’ Goth respected an tolerated Klassical culture; Katholics didn’t. The problem of Arianisme is that lots of Arians lost there way to true belief, and because they lost the way the started to believe in all kinds of wonders and miraculus things like Katholic. Arianism of protestantisme (wich is the same root) started to look more and more like Katholicism and losing its spiritual and philosophical parts. "Love the Lord your God with whole your heart, whole your soul, hole your understanding and whole your strength", that is the rule of this belief. But poeple like president Bush do not think with there heart or with there soul. They think they think with their brains and there brains teaches them to calculate things, that there is good and evil, that there are borders and that there is war and peace, dictatorship and freedom wich has to be defended, with cool calculated violence. "Love your enemies" the Bible sais, and love starts with listening—listen to your enemies and try to understand them, feel for them and think with them so you can solve the problem, that is what Cusanus said, and Erasmus and Hogo deGroot, and our queen Juliana and Beatrix and lots of others: listen, try to understand and solve the problem, that is all a true Christian can do. But where do you find true Christians nowadays.
Quite so. That is my point, there are no true Christians because Christianity is a corruption. Even if there ever were any, they have long gone and something else has taken its place. That is why people have to reject Christianity, reject patriarchal religions as a whole as being made up of self-righteous warmongering gold diggers. You shall have to begin again somewhere else.
I disagree Mike, Science is not mightier than the Word. They both have there own strength. Science has the ability to enlighten things, but risks to think things are too explainable (like Darwins explanation of evolution, Adam Smith’s explenation of free market, Freuds explenation of the beginning of Religion and Marx’ interpretation of real freedom). Christianity is able to enlighten religius matters, but risks believe in unnatural things.
Religious matters do not matter to anyone except those who think they need the attention of a clergyman when they really need the attention of a psychiatrist.
Christianity has the wonderfull ability to break into the way of thinking of the other and to help him find an answer. Science does not do this. Psychiatrics make their diagnosis and give you a pill, they are not interested in solving your problems. Christ is. Christ heals. Christ reconstructs what is broken. Christ makes you feel one person again. No psychiatrist can do this. And Christ makes you understand. You can read every religious book, no matter of what religion, no matter how old, He’ll make it come alive for you, He will play with the words so you will understand them; no matter what religion—Egyptian, Babylonian, Jewish, Christian, Moslim; you will understand them all, because Christ Himself is in all these languages. He recognises Himself in these writings and explains them to you, so they are no longer strange for you. He brings you back home and lets you fly over all borders of space and time. No science can do that. That is why I say—science is usefull, but the Word is bigger than science, cause the Word brings us back home.
Well that is what you say, but my conclusion from all this is that you are among the ones needing a psychiatrist. How can an imaginary friend do all this that you imagine it does? If it does anything at all, it is purely through the psychological effect of the belief, like a placebo or a rabbit’s foot. In this long diatribe, you begin to reveal yourself to me.
I’m not against science of cause, I love documantaries on spaceflights, love experimences in space (and on earth), love medical science and love Greek philosophy; but at the same time I agree that science alone is not enough. What you need to be a complete human being is knowledge and love. Without love all knowledge is useless and does not have a purpose. Only love can reunite you with the world, with nature, with the people. Only love makes you understnd te real meaning of things. Most scientific explenations are too simple. They are nice because they are so simple, like Darwins struggle for life or Marx’ theory of class-struggle; but they are not true just because there is also something like harmony and love in nature and in men, and not all in nature and men is strive and contest (allthough you can make it this, and think that your fight is real live).
Inasmuch as there is a God at all, it is this harmony or order in nature that you speak of, and so it is nature itself. Why do we have to believe in something else utterly supernatural, and unreasonable too? Love is too impractical, as our discussion hitherto proves. You have admitted there are no Christians by asking yourself where they are. There are none because it is absurd for people to love their enemies. Mr Bush, and Donald Rumsfelt hate their enemies so much they want to have them tortured, something that Christians have traditionally been very good at doing. "Do unto others as you would be done by", is the sensible belief. It does not require love but impresses upon people that there is a reason in agreeing to a law. It is so that your own enemies will have to obey it too. No one wants to be tortured so it is sensible not to torture other people. It is practical. Love is not.
Science is too easy for me. I prefere the depts ant the hights of mystic writing, I like old books, I like dark histories, I like writings none understands. I read and ask mij Lord how should I understand this and He will answer me and I’ll understand. That’s the way it works, quite easy actually, and believe mee, no scientist can do it better than Him.
Now you sound seriously barmy. One of the tricks of religious people is to talk unadulterated crap and pretend it means something. It does not. It is crap. If you think science is too easy, I suggest that you do not understand it.
And believe me—there is no Christ who doesn’t allow you to have sex of to smoke of to drink or to have no other drugs. He does not tell you not to sinn, in fact it are the sinners He helps most. I myself smoke weed every day, and He likes this because it helps me to lose myself and to find Him; cause I know I can only find Him by losing myself, by loosing my religion. That is the way to find. And this is what the scientist can not do—lose themselfs; that is exactly why they don’t know Jesus Christ, like most socalled Christians, because the can’t lose themselves and believe in Him.
Perhaps the weed is getting to the higher reaches of your brain, Rik, and destroying them! Take care.
