Christianity
A Very Short History and Philosophy of Christianity
Abstract
© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Saturday, 23 June 2012
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
Persians, Jews, Greeks
The Greek defeats of the Persians of Darius and Xerxes are considered to have preserved the west from orientalism. Within two centuries Alexander led the Macedonian armies that overthrew the once mighty shahs and brought the whole of Persia within the Hellenistic fold. A double victory, it seems. Yet the Victorian historian, J A Froude[†]The Philosophy of Christianity, J A Froude, The Leader (1851) points out that Alexander’s generals were themselves orientalized. Along with the soldiers of the conquering armies, Alexander’s generals took oriental wives and adopted oriental dress—Alexander himself being at the forefront, for he knew that his vast empire could not be kept subjugated by force of arms. He had, after all been taught by the wisest man of his day, and perhaps ever, Aristotle. Alexander was no rude soldier!
Hellenization is a word that implies the cultural victory and hegemony of Greece, but really it was a cultural mingling of Greek and oriental. Thus Greek became the language of the ruling class, but Aramaic (called Assyrian by many in the east) remained, as it was, the language of whole swaths of the Ancient Near east, the former Persian empire. In their 200 years of rule, the Persians had left a deep impression, albeit one that is rarely acknowledged. Froude was one of those who did acknowledge it. The Persians taught the Jews their religion, and introduced to the Greeks novelties of thought that inspired the fruitful speculation that led to philosophy. Zionists today fear above all that evidence exists somewhere in Iran or Iraq that will prove once and for all, that the Jewish “return” was an Achæmenid Persian policy, and not God’s will. The supposed divine basis for their annexation of Palestine will then disappear from reality into Fantasy Land where it belongs, and the loving Christian God will have a chance Himself of being saved from the Zionist ogre resurrected from the Jewish scriptures.
Persian religion also featured the dualism that had in distant times been one of the beginnings of categorization and therefore logical thought. Early humans had noticed that many things had their opposites, and that came down to the Persians as two opposing, almost equal, gods—Ahuramazda who was the creator and Angra Mainyu (Ahriman) who was the spoiler. Ahuramazda aimed to make a perfect world, but his opposite tried to do everything he could to spoil it. One was the Good God and the other was the Wicked God. The sole difference in the power of the two of them was that the creator god could look ahead and so could plan to achieve his intentions, whereas the Wicked God could not create because he could not look ahead, and was confined to spoiling the creations of the Good God. Like Prometheus, Ahuramazda had foresight, but Ahriman was like Epimetheus, he lacked it. Nevertheless, the pure and perfect creation of Ahuramazda ended up being spoiled by the evil spirit, a problem that human beings would have to contend with until the end of time—the end of historic time, that is—the end of the material world, but other eras had existed, in the Persian scheme, and would exist yet.
These ideas and others in the extensive Persian cosmology flooded west with the formation of the Persian empire, and set on the boil a cauldron of new thinking for the next seven hundred years. Eventually, two great rivals emerged—Catholicism, from an admixture of Hellenism and Judaism, and Manichæism, from an admixture of Hellenism and Persian Dualism via Gnosticism. Not that they were such clearly cut hybrids, but these were broadly their chief components. And, in fact, they blended together to a considerable extent at the end under the massive influence of Augustine of Hippo, who began as a Manichee but converted to Christianity to become the greatest Christian theologian for almost a thousand years.
The Dualism in Genesis
The Jews who had begun in the fourth century BC with a type of diluted Zoroastrianism taught them by their Persians masters, once freed of Persian and Seleucid domination, backed the Hasmonæans whose objectives were predominantly nationalistic albeit veiled in religion. Along with this they wanted their national religion to be purely good, and so reduced the wicked god to a mere tempter under the direction of God. The trouble then was that of theodicy—why was there evil in the world? A good God ought not to be a creator or promoter of wickedness. God had made a perfect world, so what had spoiled it if not a wicked spirit? The answer was a reversion to perhaps an older hypothesis, that the first human being had done it. He had sinned, had disobeyed God, and so had tainted the perfection of creation with sin. Adam sinned and his sin polluted perfection.
Now, if you look closely at this part of Genesis, you find that Adam is tempted to sin by his female companion, Eve, and she, in turn, was tempted by a serpent. What was this “serpent”? It was not a snake. God’s punishment was that it should become a snake. The traditional Christian explanation is that the serpent was Satan, the Jewish tempter, an angel, one of God’s assistants, the reduced form of Ahriman the Persian wicked spirit. Actually, therefore, we find that the story in the Jewish scriptures is a disguised version of the original Persian tale in which the Persian wicked spirit spoils the perfection of humanity, and so of the original creation.
Disease, decay and death, famine and drought, storm and earthquake, carnage and disaster entered God’s perfect creation which consequently vanished, and the Garden of Eden was no more. Extending the metaphor, mankind was evicted, and had to fend for himself, and herself, in a world now under the control of the wicked spirit, the serpent, Satan—Ahriman of old—and he would remain in control until the good God incarnated within His own creation to purify it, or so Christian philosophy has it.
God Had a Plan
Yet despite this “once and for all” act of sacrifice by God Himself, the shepherds of the imperial Roman religion thought it politically wise to keep the flocks constantly in attendance to remind them of the boons they were receiving, inventing a variety of rituals for occasions meant to be marked as significant from birth to death to the individual person so that the Church knew precisely what each one of them was up to—an early form of public surveillance—they were termed “sacraments”. Christians were to believe that God had generously saved them from His own curse, by His own sacrificial death at their hands, but even so they had to submit to perpetual domination by the clergy, requiring continual attendance in church to receive this or that sacrament to be sure of salvation at all! Thus Christian sheep were cleverly confined to the Catholic fold by their own desire. Now Protestant pastors use the same methods.
In preparation for all of this, God had arranged to be born of a virgin, so, as pure and unsullied by anything as unangelic as sex, had lived a pure and exemplary life, which the Holy Ghost ensured was recorded in the gospels, then, although pure and innocent, had been traitorously betrayed by His Chosen Ones, the Jews, to be crucified in His act of final atonement by the Roman rulers of God’s land for whom he happened to be a political threat. Thereby, God redeemed the whole human race, whom God had cursed, from the sin of Adam. Yet this all encompassing curse and punishment was not accompanied in God’s Christian plan by an all encompassing forgiveness.
The plan was not balanced fairly. It was unjust! Only those who were willing to believe in God’s plan—unfair as it was—were to be saved. God was hardly being a model of justice in applying this plan. He had unfairly condemned children for their parents’ transgressions, then would only absolve those among them who yielded to coercion, namely those who admitted to sins that were not of their own choosing but had been assigned to them by God Himself as His punishment for their parents—original sin—and then called upon God in his incarnated form to save them from these sins he had pinned on to them.
Examined dispassionately, this plan looks to be more the work of the devil than a good God, and at one time many pious people deduced just that! Here was no good God at all. It was the ruler of this material world, the Demiurgos, another manifestation of the wicked spirit. Like the Jewish Satan, he was a lesser god or an angel, a mere agent of God but one who dementedly thought he was great in his own right. Those who believed this are called Gnostics. Mainstream Christianity saw off these heretics by might and cunning when it became the imperial religion of Rome, and subsequently could no longer be troubled by them.
What is Death?
The mainstream accepted that the incarnated God, Christ, rose bodily from the dead after the crucifixion, and appeared to a few selected disciples in that wounded body as if to confirm the reality of the miracle. Yet here was a difficulty. Now that God had defied death, He was trapped in His human body forever. The point of the rising from death was as a demonstration that Christians could defy death. But neither Christ nor any others raised from death as those saints were in Matthew, nor any of his disciples, seemed able to stay alive as promised. Christians illogically take pride in imagining that all early Christians, like modern day Moslems, felt a desire to suffer a martyr’s death, and some did. So what happened to the promised immortality?
Apparently, it turned out not to be bodily, fleshly, material immortality but spiritual immortality, a type of immortality that looks all the world like common death, but really, Christians tell us, is the preservation of a part of us believed to be spiritual, not material at all. It is called “the soul”. The bodily resurrection of Christ was not therefore what it seemed, for it was no demonstration of what the Christian can expect. It was “a conjuring trick with bones”, as an eminent Bishop of Durham once put it. If the resurrection of Christ was not to show people that they were to be likewise resurrected, this miracle had no purpose. It was, in short, a trick indeed.
So, where does that leave Jesus? He had proved he could rise up bodily from death—he defied death because death was an infirmity of the wicked material world—yet he no longer resides bodily in the world, wicked or not. Instead it emerged that he ascended all the way from death to heaven with a brief sojourn in earth for the benefit of his followers, or maybe the Holy Ghost. The brief interlude was ended with a spectacular elevation into the clouds in full view of a crowd of spectators as witnesses to its authenticity, all, as usual, his relatives and best friends. Jesus ascended into heaven then, like Enoch, without dying, and so is still, in a sense, still alive, albeit not right here on earth. “Jesus Lives”, as the popular Christian slogan announces.
The Holy Communion
But he does not live in earth in a human body, he lives here as the body of the Church, the congregation—its members. The body of Christ becomes the body of the Church by means of their continually consuming the human body and blood of their incarnated God. Each is required to eat—as often as they can tolerate but preferably never less than once a week on sundays—the ritual meal called the Eucharist or Holy Communion when they consume the actual body and blood of Christ in the apparent form of a wafer and a sip of actual wine. Protestant Christians are less inclined to believe a biscuit and a sip of wine are the flesh and blood of a God, but even so they are happy to pretend they are. For them, they are only symbolically what they purport to be, not the real thing. By God’s miraculous power, matched by the miraculous power of the human imagination, every Christian through this ritual feast is in some measure Christ himself, and in total, they add up to his full body!
Oddly enough, for a religion that purports to be the highest of its kind, it is triflingly different from what happens in some ancient and, for Christians, primitive religions. The idea of eating the totem animal in totemic forms of worship is their form of communion between the members of the tribe and the tribe’s totem animal. Protestant or Catholic, no Christians dares to nibble the communion wafers because they are peckish or to drink the communion wine because the supermarket is closed, and they mean to replace it tomorrow. These things are holy or sacred! At first these words simply meant they were reserved for a communal use, and so were not to be glibly used for profane reasons, lest the community should find its supplies missing when they wanted them.
Now, though, most Christians regard it far more seriously than that. The wafer and wine are really, in some sense, the flesh and blood of God, and so contain some retributive power that might be disastrous for the abuser of these holy items. Even the goblets or platters holding such objects are holy, for holiness transfers like magnetism or contagious disease. Superstitions like these serve to keep the congregations from misusing these sacred things, but they show that the Christian is no more sophisticated than the primitive people who invented traditions like these in prehistoric times.
No doubt the hyper pious Christian will take the Eucharistic meal everyday, if not more often, because of their desire to metamorphose their impure mortal flesh into the pure immortal flesh of Christ all the more completely, though to judge on the evidence of Christian history, there is no guarantee that all these communions stop a rogue from remaining a rogue, nor that it offers a perfect cover for rogues to act in utterly selfish and even devilish ways while convincing the sheep that, being a Christian, he is a saint nevertheless.
Blood and Immortality
Of course, proof that the magic meal did purify the body would be that pious Christians with intense faith and dedication to partaking of the body and blood of Christ ought not to die at all, but should be taken up like Christ, for that is supposed to be the aim of being a Christ—meaning acting as Christ did—and the aim of the tale of the resurrection is to show that living like Christ—perfectly—prevents death. The Christian might point to certain Catholic saints whose bodies are said to be incorruptible, and may be seen on display like mummies in revered churches. They are, nevertheless, dead, and their state of preservation is no better than that of any Egyptian or Inca mummy, dead relatives of people who had never heard of Christ or Catholicism when they mummified them.
Some cases of apparently miraculous preservation, like these, are caused by forensic procedures and preservative chemicals applied to the corpses after death, but some are evidence of poisoning, the preservative having been applied internally before death. Arsenic preserves flesh because it kills the organisms that would normally cause decay. What is more, the Christian will admit that the devil can match any miracles drawn down by any saint. So, preserved saints prove no more than any miracle the devil can imitate himself. Thus the “undead” bloodsucking vampire is said not to decay in centuries as long as it has its blood meal. There seems to be some uncanny relationship there between the Christian meal of blood and that of the children of the night—vampires.
Such is the Philosophy of Christianity. Already worn out and old when Luther found it, his having rent the tatters in pieces to stitch together a new garment, our posterity will learn to despise the miserable fabric which he produced, and which again clothes innocents in tatters.J A Froude, rephrased
