Christianity
Jesus Cults Ancient and Modern
Abstract
© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Thursday, May 10, 2001
Meal Ticket
The Christian religion began as a tiny cult within the Roman Empire which captured the imaginations of some of the poor and disadvantaged of the time and was spotted by certain men as a reliable meal ticket.
Two thousand years have passed but nothing fundamental has changed. The great edifices of the established churches naturally remain but new “churches” or cults spring up with astonishing regularity especially in the United States and some of them have done extremely well for themselves and their bishops or evangelists—the smart guys who realise there is plenty in it for them!
Since the sixties successive generations of youth have arisen who rejected authority and hierarchy socially, politically and even in terms of religion. They were disillusioned with the establishment in general but those who had been brought up to be Christians or sought a spiritual outlet in what they saw as an increasingly materialistic world also rejected orthodox Christianity. Orthodox priests and ministers supported the values that young people questioned.
The result was the growth of a vast shopping mall of alternative cults, some derived from eastern religions but others being various types of—generally fundamentalist—Christianity. Much of it was based on the rejection of large organisations in favour of small ones so that large churches were rejected in favour of house churches aiming to revive the feeling of fellowship which they believed existed among the first Christians. But these small independent organisations had no safeguards built into them that the larger churches had developed over the millennia to prevent heresy and abuse. The result was heresy and abuse!
Characteristics
A key characteristic of these cults is that they are built on the cult of personality of some charismatic leader, almost invariably male, who uses the childish naïvety of his followers to boost his own ego, status and lifestyle. The characteristics can be summarised as follows:
- The cult has a charming and charismatic leader usually a man.
- The leader sets up a hierarchy of close associates of similar personality and inclinations and uses it to demand total obedience from members—victims is a better word—through heavy punishments often with a strong psychological element.
- Members become obsessed by the cult. It becomes the most important thing in their lives. They believe they are part of a genuinely loving Christian community—unlike all the others—which is destined to bring in God’s kingdom! Often they are seeking an escape from drug addiction , parental abuse or inability to cope—the problems which a genuine church would seek to help them with.
- Members leave their families and might give up their jobs to devote their lives to the cult.
- However, members usually have to prove their dedication by giving almost all their money and possessions and much of their expertise and time to the cult. Sometimes they pursue careers to help the cult, giving their expertise and their earnings willingly to the organisation. The leader will benefit most plainly from this but communal money is often spent on large country houses or even guns and poisons since they often have an eschatological outlook.
- Members are encouraged to use peer pressure on others to conform strictly.
- Personal relationships are governed by the leader of the cult on the basis of the excessive authority he is granted based on his messianic or prophetic pretensions. He decides who will be friends with whom and who will have sexual relations with whom and often especially with him—a great honour.
- Familiar Christian teaching and morality—service to others, forgiveness, obedience to the will of God, charity and generosity, submission to Jesus as the controlling spirit of one’s life—is the usual basis of the cult but suitably distorted in favour of the charismatic leadership.
- Primitive Christian practices such as speaking in tongues and falling down in the spirit are used to artificially induce intense emotion among the congregation—often highly suggestible people—which tends to leave them emotionally dependent on the leaders.
Christianity the Model
Now it is immediately clear why people brought up in a Christian tradition are particularly susceptible to such cults. It is because Christianity itself is the model for them. Orthodox Christian parents are amazed and distressed when their children get possessed by a charismatic cult today but Pagan parents were surely equally distressed by their children when they took to the new eastern cult of this man Jesus they called Christ.
Christians do not question their myths and believe that all Pagans were children of the devil, but really they were simply normal people, mainly pious in terms of their own religious beliefs, doing what they had always done. For them it was the strangers beguiling their daughters who were evil and, when the parallels are drawn with today’s charismatic cults, it is easy to see they were right.
Like anyone faced with the inexplicable behaviour of their loved ones, these people were distressed… distressed by Christian teaching, and Paul was the leader of the charismatic cult which had obsessed their children and friends. The evidence is in Acts and Paul’s letters and, if they are not clear enough for the sceptical reader, a look at some of the apocryphal works is persuasive.
For Paul, as for the Essenes, chastity was an absolute virtue, though—if it is not an insertion—he seems to make the merest allowance for marriage as a poor second. In The Acts of Philip we also get chastity praised when a woman says,
It were better I never married
and Philip replies:
You are right. Chastity is especially dear to God.
The men of the city of Icomium feared they would have no wives because their womenfolk were listening to Paul’s message. In The Acts of Paul and Thecla it is paraphrased as:
There is for you a resurrection in no other way, unless you remain chaste, and pullute not the flesh, but keep it chaste.
Paul was telling gentile maidens that they would not be saved unless they gave up sex.
The citizens of Icomium had the entirely sensible view that:
The resurrection of which this man speaks takes place in the children which we have.
Nevertheless, the virgin, Thecla, is amongst those captivated by Paul’s sermons on chastity and, after suffering various hardships and miraculous escapes, she dressed as a man to follow Paul and lived in a cave offering cures. Driven out by jealous physicians, she went seeking Paul to Rome but found he was dead. She died too and was buried two or three stadia only from Paul.
Isn’t Thecla’s behaviour that of the young people captivated by modern charismatics? She will not listen to her friends and family, leaves them, gives up everything for her hero, follows him wherever he goes. Paul finished up a rich man, the companion of governors and kings. Thecla finished up poor and forgotten. Standard cultish behaviour?
No modern Christian will be able to see it that way.
Evangelical Charismatics
The Bishop of Oxford once said that Western Europe is a “post-Christian society”. In England, although most people say they believe in God, less than 2.5 percent of the population goes to church on Sundays. The Church of England may appear to be moribund, but Antony Storr has said that Christianity is expanding faster than ever. The variety of Christianity sweeping the world is not one that will appeal to rational people, for it is based upon miracles, mystical experiences, belief in direct divine intervention, talking in tongues, healing the sick and even raising the dead—the standard trappings of revivalism throughout history.
These new Christians are Evangelical Charismatics. Evangelicals might now be as many as 30 per cent of the world’s Christians. Founded in 1974 by Roger Forster is Ichthus. The fish—ichthus in Greek—was the earliest Christian symbol. It symbolized Christ because the initial letters are “I” for Iesous, “Ch” for Christos, “Th” and “U” for Theou Uios or Son of God, and “S” for Soter or Saviour. Ichthus organises the march for Jesus which involves millions of people in the world.
Drama is an integral feature of Evangelical Chrarismatic Christianity. Its protagonists are expert at crowd manipulation. In a service, four hymns were sung in succession, including When I Survey the Wondrous Cross and ending with Be Still for the Presence of the Lord, inducing a feeling of tenderness, gentleness and peace. The faithful nestle on the tender breast of the Lord. Minutes later, the congregation was being harangued about the evils of satanic child abuse, encouraged to exorcise the devil and heap curses on the heads of the abusers. Such services may be an exciting alternative to the repetitive tedium of the Church of England but they bear a sinister resemblance to Hitler’s mass meetings at which sentimental affirmations of old-fashioned friendship and unity were succeeded by poisonous imprecations against the Jews. Simplistic divisions into black and white, or “them” and “us”, always have an irresistible appeal to the masses notably in periods of social stress.
So, the growth of this demagogic Christianity might be promoted by the horrors of the modern world such as the growth of population, the threat of nuclear destruction, fears of global warming, the insecurity of unemployment, the dangers of aids, and so on. Boredom with conventional Christianity is probably equally to blame. It remains to be seen whether fears of the millennium also had anything to do with this phenomenon.
New religions movements, whether Christian or not, seem fashinable at present. About 600 are said to exist in the UK and about 2000 in the US, and that in a country with a far higher proportion of the population regularly going to church. Of course, it is not a modern phenomenon, and only Christians cannot see their own religion as an ancient example, albeit one of remarkable adaptability.
History is littered with horror stories like that of Thomas Schucker, a Swiss Anabaptist who was divinely guided to cut off his brother’s head, and did so in front of a congregation which included his mother and father. To do this in public, Schucker had charismatic powers of a high order. In Uganda, hundreds of believers submitted themselves to charismatic leaders who murdered them. All these things reflect the roots of Christianity. The sanity of most Christians is a tribute to the sanity of nature, not to the sanity of Christianity’s underlying principles.
Today people are in a better position than ever to appreciate and experience mystical impressions. No one can doubt that there are subliminal mental processes going on all the time of which we get only intermittent indications whilst dreaming or in a state of reverie. Modern techniques can make these processes more conscious and, in some subjects, can induce hallucinations and transcendental experiences resembling those of the mystics.
Research into the cerebral bases of mystical and ecstatic experience, has shown that it can be generated artificially, with little apparent risk, though long term effects are plainly not yet known. Enter a soundproof, darkened room wearing a helmet through which electromagnetic currents are directed to various parts of the brain. One can be transported to one’s early childhood and recapture the sense of wonder of it all. One can experience the life of others in widely differing situations as if it were real, or as real as a non-lucid dream, at least.
Comets
In former times comets were considered as harbingers of ill fortune. A comet preceded the death of Julius Caesar, and another, in 1066, that of Harold of England and the arrival of his successor, William of Normandy. Halley’s Comet often disturbed the peace. In 1456 it was blamed for earthquakes, plague and a mysterious red rain. Pope Callixtus excommunicated it as an instrument of the devil but it seems the devil was not impressed by the Pope. In 1835, Halley was blamed for a fire that razed New York, and also for the loss of the Alamo.
In 1910, when it was announced that the earth was to pass through the poisonous cyanogen gas of Halley’s comet’s “tail”, people committed suicide. Some people in Oklahoma sacrificed a virgin, it was said. Comets presaged both the English and French civil wars and although some French vintners believed they helped produce grapes with a higher sugar content, usually they left a bitter aftertaste.
In the even more bizarre world of today 39 members of the Heaven’s Gate cult in San Diego looked upon the comet now departing the sun, comet Hale-Bopp, as the herald of a new life. To make sure they entered it they joyously abandoned their existence in this life and were found poisoned in a mass suicide which is becoming only too familiar.
Victor Clube, the Oxford astronomer and historian of cometary calamities, says:
All these things show we are getting more uncertain. 20 or 30 years ago we weren’t having the incidence of these events that we are having now, but you can bet we will have many more of them if people begin to think the end of the world is coming. And the appearance of a comet in the sky does, in an irrational way, excite this kind of thinking. What happens when society gets more and more unhinged is that you get more and more mad people. America is particularly prone to it. We in Britain seem to have had it trained out of us, but we have been quite nuts ourselves in the past.
On the scales of time and space of the comet we are insignificant little motes in the grandeur of the universe, but whatever view of God or nature you have chosen to adopt, it must be sad that whole groups of apparently prosperous people can decide to jettison the only certain life that they have for pie in the sky elsewhere.
Christian Belief
For the Heaven’s Gate sect the comet was the ultimate sign of the times. It signified the end of the world for the believers. For anyone who has looked through this website or read The Hidden Jesus or The Mystery of Barabbas, the phenomenon will be only too familiar. That the signs of the times told of the end of the world was the belief of the Essenes at the time of Jesus and it was the belief of the first Christians who adopted much of Essene philosophy. Not that Essenes or early Christians believed that they had to take their own lives to meet their God. Quite the opposite. They thought that God was coming to meet them with a host of angels from heaven to cleanse the wicked world. Everyone would die except for the saved, the perfectly holy people—the Essenes initially, then the Christians.
The real sign of the times is that today religious fanatics in the western world are less positive. They also hate this world but don’t think it can be saved and seek solace elsewhere. For the Heaven’s Gate sect the comet was bringing with it a giant spaceship to take the believers to another world. The departure lounge was a mansion near San Diego, their ticket a handful of sleeping pills, and the exit gate was oblivion. Their ticket took their souls out of their earthly bodies allowing them to join their hosts on the Hale-Bopp space cruiser. In this again they differed from Essenes and early Christians who, though confident that they would be saved, were certain that God would resurrect them into this world, albeit a renovated, supernatural world free of sin and corruption.
Still, death, should it come, as they thought it might in fighting for God’s kingdom, would be merely a form of sleep in which the soul was liberated from its corruptible and corrupting body to roam freely—a rationalization of dreaming—until god recalled it into his kingdom. The suicide bombers of Islam also believe that death is desirable for those who believe they are promoting God’s work. Their physical bodies might be become steak tartare but their souls immediately enter into the presence of God.
The sad thing about all of this self sacrifice is that these martyrs actually believe that their souls are freed by their self destruction of the body. Now, if I were a god who had gone to the trouble of giving life to a lot of supposedly intelligent creatures for whatever reason I might have, I would not be delighted if the ingrates gave me a metaphorical up-yours by drinking a can of paraquat. Why they should think I would leave my heavenly seat to save their souls after this insult, I cannot comprehend. Nor would I be able to comprehend how the regular branch of nutters think they have to kill others that I have taken the trouble to make, to save me the trouble of killing them. These people are truly insane. If there were a Good God, He would eliminate all of these cracked pots and leave the rest of us in peace.
Souls
Less speculatively, there is not a jot of evidence that people have souls. The word simply applies to our self awareness, and most people are so self-centred that they cannot believe that the world will tootle along in their absence. The way they rationalize this is to extend the dream experience into a belief in an immortal soul which lives independently of the body. People cannot accept that they are mortal and not immortal, that they are human and not gods.
The belief is deep seated because it is a concomitant of self-consciousness, but thoughtful people have been able to reject it nonetheless. The ancient belief of the Romans and the Jews was in Hades or Sheol where departed souls groped aimlessly around forever, unconscious and unaware of God. This belief will have been arrived at by the realization that very elderly people often lost their reason and degenerated into an infantile state of unawareness. The conclusion had to be that a continuing process was being seen and untimately the soul lost its consciousness dead or alive. Thus Sheol was conceived. The soul was still immortal but like senile people, or those who join the French Foreign Legion, it forgot.
Satisfaction for saintly people was to be in this life by doing God’s work—good deeds—not by hoping for a lollipop from God after death.
Western religions, those which evolved out of post-exilic Judaism, have gone down a blind alley, encouraging absurd beliefs. A satisfying and rational religion would put the emphasis on the planet earth which succours us in this life, and would take away the excruciating selfishness which pervades our culture. Instead we think only of ourselves and merrily destroy the world in the belief that we are going to a better place.
Even this belief is an absurd extension of the original. The philosophy that the Christians adopted was that only the perfectly holy would be saved. The perfectly holy could only be a minority or “the remnant” in the Essene term, not any blaggard of a crook or confidence man who decided to call himself a Christian. Under the original rules God would not accept the majority of people in to a transcendental heaven, even if such a place existed, and would certainly not accept bogus preachers who got rich on widows pennies.
Perhaps we should try a different Belief.
The Essenes were seeking to build a heaven on earth, not in deep space or in the eleventh dimension. The truly religious should accept this as the basis of their philosophy. The greatest sin then would be to harm the earth or its balances of existence, whether directly or indirectly. We might be then poorer, like the Essenes, but more contented, accepting that God has already provided us with the stuff of heaven—or hell!—and is waiting to see what we do with it.
Christianity has blinded us to a simple truth.
Only by making the earth into heaven will we find Heaven’s gates and become gods ourselves.
