AW! Epistles
From Nigel
Abstract
Sunday, 13 February 2005
AskWhy! on The Secret Testament Revealed—Christianity Revealed. Is Dr Magee the author of these texts, if so how do I contact him as I wish to know where he is coming from.
Yes and you are already in contact with him. Hello!
What is his background
It is online at the website.
and how does he go from showing evidence that the organised church (Christian) is a fake (I have no problem with that), shows evidence for there being no historical references to Jesus Christ (although I have some interesting remarks to make here re a Slavonic text of Josephus’s work). If there is no historic Christ or Jesus, who might be the Jesus of Christian faith but with differences, where does he draw his sources for there being a real figure who was the leader of the Essenes? I say this as the Dead Sea Scrolls are far from clear and are supposedly copies of other texts. Are there other sources that convince him of the truth of a true Jesus figure? I look forward to hearing from you. Nigel.
This is puzzling because you show some familiarity with the pages online but not enough. The answers to all your questions are online, including references to the Slavonic text of Josephus, so I cannot understand why you are asking them. The Dead Sea Scrolls are clear enough and offer far more information about Judaism at the time of Jesus than we had previously, they connect importantly with other classical sources about the Essenes, and they connect significantly with the Christian testament in revealing ways. Finally, the hypothesis explains some curious features of early Christianity. The details are on the pages which I recommend you read.
Thank you for your reply. I only had a brief look at your site at first. I then read a little more after I sent the e-mail. There are many pages and I am unsure of the sources (academic… as I cannot believe that you had access to the Dead Sea Scrolls themselves, and as far as I have read there is still a state of confusion in regard to the findings at Qumran… with many scholars questioning whether the ’teacher of righteousness’ could possibly refer to Jesus due to the datings so it would be unfair to use this as a source for a historical Jesus). I have also not as yet read how you arrive at your conclusions in the wake of so many possibilities.
The relevant Dead Sea Scrolls—the sectarian documents—have been available for a long time in the bookshops. The Dead Sea Scrolls in English by Geza Vermes is published in Penguin paperbacks. Like the other books I have used to any extent, it is given in the bibliography.
The expression “many scholars” is popular with Christian apologists as a way of giving their apologies a false authority. It means nothing. How many is many? And, even if it is a lot and they are all Christian believers, what does it tell us? So forget what conclusions the scholars draw and just look critically at what they say in their scholarly examinations. I have lists of the similarities between Jesus and the early Christians as described in early Christian works like Mark’s gospel and the Essenes as described in the Scrolls and the classical authors. Christians scholars I decribe as “bent” deny that they are significant. I say it shows they are not scholars at all. No Christian can be a scholar in respect of Christianity because they refuse to be critical.
If I had the time to scour all the pages, I would. I just thought I would ask the author for a little guidance that is all, in order to speed up the process (which is perhaps reasonable under the circumstances although one does have the right to fail to respond).
I have put Google on every page, so why not use it to search for the words and phrases you are interested in? Or simply go to each folder’s index page—Christianity in this case—and the relevant pages will seem pretty obvious.
I do wonder where you are coming from though, as you describe yourself on one of the pages as a “Jewish Atheist”. I suppose in the sense of a non personal God and a Jewish morality I can see what you mean. Otherwise this does not have any meaning for me.
I can see what it means too in the sense you describe, but it is not me, and I have not described myself thus. Are you reading the right pages?
I can agree that we need a new sense of the spiritual which does not depend on the corruptions of the dogmatic “bull” put forward by the orthodox Church. Dogma is not a useful tool for spiritual development or morality and long term social stability. But how does this level with your atheist position (unless as I have already stated you rely on a more Eastern interpretation of atheism)?
Yet the word “spiritual” is a bull word! What does it mean? I suggest it means nothing, but because it means nothing and ordinary people do not understand it, anyone who uses it impresses them as being an authority on it, so must be clever and worth hearing.
However, in putting the Christians on the back foot with your theory, what do you hope to achieve, as people will believe what they want to believe,
Quite so, and convinced Christians cannot be persuaded. The website is not for convinced Christians. You might as well address a brick as talk to one. The people it is for are those who are under pressure from Christians to convert, and more so for those who have torn themselves away from Christianity, and want reassurance that they have not made a mistake. Finally, it is for any atheists and other non-believers seeking arguments to use with the Christians confronting them.
and science itdself has it’s fair share of that breed of fool?
True. There are still scientists who are Christians. How they manage it I know not. They must have split personalities. The two views are incompatible to anyone honest.
A seeker of truth should seek it wherever it lies… not just attack a wounded and dying institution. A man of courage might find some problems with the current establishment and actually make an attack which could help make a difference.
Monsters are thought to have the character of being merciless, especially when wounded. Any hero would sensibly make sure the monster is despatched before taking any further risks. The trouble is that this monster is far from wounded. It has, for example taken over the USA, and, in the UK through Tony Blair, it is castrating the Parliamentary and cabinet systems. As for the seeker of truth, he cannot simply be eclectic. His choices muct have criteria of truth with them or he is doing nothing different from the churches. For Christians, truth is whatever they say it is.
In trying to put forward a case of a “unpleasant militant” not deserving of the (in some cases) profound teachings of the positive aspect of what might have been the words of “some” wise man of the day (the more liberal interpretations of the words attributed to Christ e.g. Gnostism), you appear to be prepared to aggressively shatter the beliefs of a lot of people, offer no comfort and provide scathing responses to their criticisms of your view point.
If people have beliefs that are lies then what do they gain? Truth is more important than any belief based on falsehood. Why should anyone be distressed that their beliefs are shown to be false? They should rejoice that they have the chance to find something true to believe. When people have been brought up since infancy with supernatural concepts at the heart of their world view, they will inevitably feel some loss that they have gone, but they can then look for a world view based on truth and reality. This website has links to Adelphiasophism for them to explore, though I doubt that anyone hooked on the fraud of eternal life will enjoy a practical outlook that says we should be the saviours, not the ones expecting to be saved.
I am always happy to speak and discuss rationally with people, I have no axe to grind in respect of Christianity as I am also appalled at what has been done in that name, but would not like to go into too much depth with some of your views for want of incurring any unpleasanteries (although I have no fear of these, but I have enough battles on at the moment- with the establishment- and I have been scouring sites trying to find fellow crusaders not more persons to do battle with).
It is too coy for me to understand.
Needless to say one can paint so many pictures of Jesus with the sketchy information that we have to date. Many refuse to accept that there was any evidence at all for a real Jesus.
Well, that is what many Christians want us to believe rather than the truth that Jesus can quite well be described by the normal methods of history, the time and place, the local and geo-politics of the time, the documents and their evolution, and archaeology we have bearing on these issues, and the motives later people had to distort them. From all this a historically convincing Jesus can be drawn by educated interpolation. It is true that other pictures can be drawn too, but they are only partial ones that use only part of the data. There is little room for honest disagreement over the most probable Jesus—the one that fits into the broad picture without looking absurd. Christians, like to argue that so many different pictures of Jesus have been painted that the Christian might as well accept the Christian picture. It is a ploy. The Christian picture is probably the most absurd one of them all.
I am unsure of your motives in what I have read so far. I think we all need to consider what impact we might have when making an “infallible case” for something so open to interpretation. The application of empiricism can only have limited value here.
Is your implication by the quizzical marks that the “infallible case” is my own description? Infallible is a Christian word disliked by realists who accept that all cases are hypotheses subject to further evidence and therefore not infallible.
Finally, I would like to ask, have you applied the same sort of scrutiny to other aspects of life, for example science? I and a small number of brave people have found a delicately balanced “house of cards” in many cases. I ask this as I feel that you might have fallen foul of the old problem of failing to look closer to home for life’s (or one’s) problems. In putting your faith in science and technology (I do remember a sentence which was a gross generalisation and in fact quite wrong… the point that you make about science and technology being the solver of so many problems… I could write a book on that fallacy… there was also a suggestion that science underpinned technology… there are far too many cases to tell which show that science and technology work independently of one another… mainly because science can be used to hold back technological progress by being dogmatic… look into the Wright Brothers and more recently the cure for stomach ulcers, just two examples—and I could give you many more but might run the risk of being called something foul—which show that there is a degree of the old “High Priest” behaviour exhibitted in the religion of science… .however this phenomenon is well known in political and sociological circles).
Again you are too coy for me. While Gödel has shown that complete descriptions are not possible, it does not mean that various subsets of axioms cannot be complete. The case for science ultimately is not that it is or ever can be complete, but that it is the best set of propositions and methods we have ever had for discovering what is true in the world. Science works. Nothing supernatural has ever worked that I know of. As for gross generalisations, it would be better if you cited them rather than vaguely remembering something that you paraphrase. It is again a popular ploy for Christians to gain easy victories over their opponents in the rags of webpages written for believers by paraphrasing some position quite wrongly to be able to tear it down. It is called knocking over a straw man.
As for technology working independently of science, I do not pretend that technology is a scientific deduction, but whether the technologist begins with science or not, technology nowadays almost invariably uses science and could not work without that knowledge. The two are interdependent rather than dependent. False parallels between science and religion are always drawn by religionists or crypto-religionists to persuade anyone inclined to be impressed by science that it is no better than Christianity or any other arbitrary belief at root. The difference is plain enough. Science is true. It works.
Enjoyed reading some of your stuff, but cannot go any further at this time. (oh and steer clear of the Cider, Black Sheeps Ale and Old Peculiar is best for our Northern blood… just trying to lighten the load… and I am really sorry to hear about your pancreatic problems) No offence mate.
No cider, no Old Peculiar, and not even a glass of Boddingtons. Doctors’ orders. What is left of the pancreas will not be able to take it. Christians tell me it is my punishment!
Don’t know where to start with this. I am not actually coming to you as a Christian. I am simply saying that all the research that I have done has left me exasperated. I do not wish to upset you at all, and wish you well in recovering from illness. I wished to get an insight from you and determine where you are now, and what your motive is in writing the books that you have written, as I was considering buying the books (I prefer to have a book in front of me rather than reading online). You seem to want to label me as some sort of irrational with a Christian agenda.
Where do you get that idea? All I do is explain to you what you asked. Where I am coming from, as you put it. So, I explain why I argue as I do over some of the things you raise. I am normally answering Christians but I cannot see where I implied you were one, even if you sound a bit irrational. I try to explain how some of the constructions you use are used by Christians and to what purpose. That you use these manners of speaking might suggest that you are a Christian or have been influenced by Christians, but I do not assume it.
I am simply saying that I think your conclusions are far from complete, who ever is looking at this. You are not objective, as you plainly state you are an atheist and a positivist (sorry I have not been able to find the Jewish atheist bit, I think this was a response to a critic… I will let you know if I find it). You appear to be as guilty of seeing what you want to see as anyone else. I cannot afford to get into a discussion with someone who is not open minded.
This is an example of what I was saying in the previous paragraph I wrote above. I have a view and so I am not objective, you say. Christians are always open-minded but anyone who has decided that Christianity is garbage is closed-minded. I suppose you would not wish to argue with me over whether the earth is flat because I have come to the conclusion that it is spherical. The whole point of argument based on evidence is to come to a conclusion, but the only conclusion believers allow is that Christianity is true, and the rest of us who are not Christians have closed our minds to the truth. The scientific way is to accept that the view might have to change when the evidence changes because something new is found, say, but meanwhile one takes a view based on the evidence not on what you would like it to be. And you do not have different standards for Christianity and other contrary ideas. Christians do. If you can only discuss things with people that agree with you, which is what I take it you mean by open minded, then you are not very open-minded yourself.
Spirituality is something that is very hard to define and very hard to determine using physical methods, and yet there are number of scientists out there who are doing a good job in investigating the view that we are more than the sum of our parts. Of course you would probably argue that these are not proper scientists as they are Christians or of some other religious persuasion (which is not a fact in many cases).
Well tell me who they are then, instead of being coy, a curious habit you have. What are you saying here? Spirituality is hard to define, I agree with, yet Christians and crooks of every belief and persuasion use it as if they were talking about a chair or even something as vague but well recognized as a cloud. Spirituality is so hard to define because it means nothing. It is even more non-existent than phlogiston, yet everyone with a post-mortem reward to tout has to use the word—unlike phlogiston which no longer has any purpose. To imply that knowing we are more than the sum of our parts is something that scientists do not believe unless they are somehow dissenters from the main scientific paradigm is pathetic nonsense, but something that Christians and various other believers have to spread to seem to win arguments. It is one of the straw men I have already mentioned as a Christian ploy.
The orthodox Church has certainly lost a good deal of ground in recent centuries and especially of late. Blair/Bush et al are merely using religion as a tool, as has always been the case, they are no more religious than any other crazed power seeker. The war of fundamentalists is a creation by the political powers since the fall of communism left the west with little excuse for maintaining a huge military budget (which also hides budgets within it’s walls for other purposes… that I prefer to remain coy about as I have witnessed some of the hidden agenda’s on offer), but don’t take my word for it, look at the evidence, and I mean the evidence not just some potted one sided account in a “tow the line rag”.
Apart from the bit you wish to remain coy about, I agree with you wholeheartedly. I really cannot see why Christians cannot get that their religions is being used by unscrupulous politicians in just the way it always has been, and was founded for—control.
You are clearly not wanting to replace religion with anything other than science… that would be great if we could rely on science to be a pure bastion of truth… but we cannot… we simply cannot, because of the old problems with power and greed. I should not have to give examples here because the problem is self evident to religious and atheists alike.
I do not get you. You state that it is not science that is wrong but the use of it by the powerful and greedy. That is obviously true, in my view, and it exonerates science and many scientists. Science actually brings the misuse of power out into the open instead of being hidden by figments like “spirituality” and “God”. These figments have to be taken on trust, but the value of science is all around us, and its truths can, in principle, be verified by anyone who has the interest and the resources to do it. Religion cannot.
The reason that some people become spiritual… .and many who were atheists… is because they witness/experience something that science fails to explain
Some people do, but the explanation is in psychology and our relationship with the real world not with something other. It is and always was religious bigots who claimed these experiences were signs from God, but that is what they want people to believe. No one denies that some people have these experiences. What is false is that they are “spiritual”.
(whenever people received some personal revelation of something less than material in the past the Church would accuse the individual of being “of satan”).
This is obvious rubbish. These experiences were always claimed by the church as long as the claimant did not rock the boat. As soon as the claimant preached that he or she had had some revelation contrary to dogma then they were Satanic. It is one of the examples of how the church defines its own terms. Christianity and any other religion for that matter are not objective and they do not want to be.
The truth of the matter is that mystics and others who have seen beyond the restrictions set by the mindset of power and control have always been a threat to the status quo anything is acceptable unless it points to the ability of man to develop by his /her own wits and to have his/her own mind.
Well that is true, but it does not apply to all mystical experience. The church would like them all to be within its own boundaries, and make sure they are by defining anything they disagree with as being outside them.
I would hate for there to be a replacement of one oppressive mindset with another, the rational reasoning scientific approach is an ideal and not a reality and you of all people should know that.
Anyone would hate it, but, if science is not real then why does it work? Why is this computer able to send my words to you? Is it doing it by telepathy? I know that science is real and not merely an ideal because I use it just as you do. What I cannot understand is why you think it is imaginary.
It is very possible to reach a conclusion from scientific reasoning and principles that we are more than the sum of our parts, even putting the lunatics, religious freaks and so on aside, there is something more to this world than meets the eye of the materialist. I say this not as a raving Christian fundamentalist, but as a fallen Christian who went to atheism, then trained in scientism until the witnessing of certain phenomenon made me look at things afresh.
You are open-minded? You call science scientism, and think you are open-minded, but I am closed-minded because I call it science, respect it and do not believe the ravings of madmen and the beguiling of tricksters. What did you witness that changed your mind?
I am sorry that you feel the way that you do… I agree with much of your views about the power of the Church, but that negative force moves with the times, and will possess in equal measure the Church, Science and Politics which ever one appears to be dominant at the times.
It is possible to be nihilistic, and since you seem to denigrate everything, that is what you must be.
Your view of where reason and truth lies differs greatly from mine, not due to be being immersed in religious dogma, but due to the fact that I have obviously looked in places that you have not yet, and may never due to a stance that you appear to be taking, and which is also dogmatic.
You always have to laugh at believers who call the unbeliever dogmatic. Psychologists call it projection.
I once went on holiday with a friend, we went to the same place shared the same hotel room (different beds) and saw all the same sights, yet I thoroughly enjoyed the holiday, yet he hated it. I know this is an oversimplification, but if one dissallows the element of feelings, emotions and other intangibles, then we had the same holiday… my point… these intangibles are things that the reductionist would generally overlook in assessing an issue, can we really allow such a set of restrictions and rules to govern our lives, without some serious movement in the way the rules are set up.
Reductionist is another of the loaded words you people use against scientists. It is religion that is reductionist. It reduces everything to God. Now tell me why your friend hated the holiday even though you both enjoyed the same hotel, and saw the same things. I could probably come up with a long list of possible reasons. Doubtless they would still be reductionist to you.
Current Science’s (and I say current as many early scientists allowed for the unfathomable nature of the numinous… not just Christians, many were interested in mystical/spiritual concepts) greatest weakness is its failure to take into account the need for meaning… and that meaning is very real… because it revolves around universal truth… and unfortunately for the reductionist… that truth will not be put into a test tube… not yet anyway.
What is this universal truth that you know but cannot test? I suggest that those who know things without evidence are deluded. We are now in a world that is getting horribly like the world of the Middle Ages when Christianity dominated all life and thought. Then people were burnt alive and locked up until they died for not believing something. No evidence was necessary to prove these things, just someone’s word or even suspicion. The same has become true today under the leadership of Christians who think, as they all do, they are doing God’s will. That is insanity, and it begins with the same small disregard for evidence that you have.
Occam’s razor of today’s science would have clumsily sliced and failed to allow electricity and even electromagnetism on the menu… why? Because the early unamplified state of these items were of such small magnitude that they were not a clear and obvious force to be reckoned with (as is the case with certain areas of study at the peripheries of science today).
Where does the word “electricity” come from. It is from the Greek word for amber which could be electrically charged. You would have to go into pre-history to find a time when electricity was not an obvious force. Who is the reductionist now? You are reducing the truth to what you would like it to be. That is what religions do.
Ridicule would have sent this knowledge packing, but Science was not as corrupt then(initially by power then by power and economics) as it later became. The Professor of Theoretical Mechanics of New York University upon hearing of the heretical stories of the heavier than air flying machine test flown by the inventors, the Wright Brothers, stated (I paraphrase) “never in the future of mankind will we be able to produce a heavier than air flying machine it is an impossibilty and goes against the laws of physics”. It was argued that if the Wright Brothers had been scientists, peer review would have prevented them from progressing further, luckily they were not scientists, neither was Eddison who also did the impossible.
Again you show yourself to be a religionist. People who believe are always impressed by authority. It has something to do with them believing the stories of mystics, prophets and saints without any confirmatory proof. Science is generally disdainful of authority, because it does not matter what any guru says. What matters is whether it stands up to testing. You cite a famous story, often cited by those trying to denigrate science, when it actually shows exactly how science is not interested in authority but depends entirely ultimately on tests. In fact, this professor you cite must have been singularly stupid for a professor because, the Wright brothers were following well worn tracks. The theory was being worked out at the time of the flights. They were not the first to fly, and gliding was a fashion of the rich at the time so it was known that heavier than air flight could be sustained even without power. And models of heavier than air devices had been flown for something like fifty years when the Wright Brothers succeeded in getting the press to notice they had actually achieved flight for a human being. Why not try reading some science instead of reading a load of unbalanced and bigoted garbage.
The fallacy of progress? Mike I do not know what to say about this as I feel that we do not share any common ground as to how the world is, so I will have to remain coy here as well.
Where did it come into it? If it is a fallacy, it is because people will insist on believing religious fancy instead of practical truth. The Christians destoyed millennia of pagan progress because they foisted on to everyone their absurd “spirituality”. A thousand years of ignorance was the outcome, and it threatens us again.
I am either an irrational burk, or I have researched and seen some things that have left me feeling very different about the world than you do. I will never convince you of my experiences if you do not want to accept that anyone can see some things that another person cannot, has not or will not see.
As I have said above and on my pages onsite, no one denies people have experiences that some describe as mystical. The ones most inclined to have them have been found to be ill with malfunctions of the brain like epilepsy and schizophrenia, or have had startling dreams while consumed by a fever, guilt, or whatever. In any event, there is nothing in any mystical experience that shows it is anything to do with god, or indeed spirituality—if that means to do with non-material entities called spirits. That mystical experiences can be induced, particularly in certain subjects, by physical means or even drugs shows fairly clearly that they cannot generally be ascribed to supernatural processes. If even some are caused by natural processes of the mind and space, then there is no assurance that any others are something different.
This all comes down to belief, time and time again this is all it is about, not objective reality (and this little chestnut has by no means been cleared up as studies of consciousness show). Your belief is different from mine. Some of my belief comes from books, I have started to realise that most people get their belief system second hand, scientists included. When one tries to look at things from first principles… experience, the world looks very different. This is where I am coming from, because all the semanticising in the world will not alter truths determined by repeated experience.
Science is precisely that—repeated experience. Any individual experience can be flawed by dementia or peculiarities of any sort, but scientific testing is the process of testing such things to confirm or refute them. If you believe in your own individual experience then you ought to believe in that of accumulated experience called science, tested and confirmed by many people. To believe in a personal experience that might be a delusion while decrying properly accumulated and tested experience is to simply confirm your own irrationality.
You have clearly put in a lot of ground work. I admire and respect you for that, I expect I would learn a lot that I do not know about the origins of Judaism and Christianity. All that I have read so far though, due to the overwhelming bias against the spiritual (which differs from the theology/ scholarship), and due to other material and personal insight, has left me feeling more inclined to believe in a spiritual ’Jesus like’ figure trying to pass on truths rather than dogma.
Why has the Jesus-like thing got to be spiritual? How do you know that the Jesus-like thing is not trying its best to show you through science what is true? For that is the point. How do you know what is true? The spiritual Jesus-like thing might be an evil spirit or a twist of your own brain. If you want to believe in something arbitrary, then do so, but anything arbitrarily chosen is unlikely to be true, and as soon as you think you have a Jesus-like thing to guide you then you are verging on insanity.
There is a powerful reason why the powers that be might wish to hide a historical thinker of this nature.
As I said above, only when the original thought contradicts what is believed by the powers.
I am also concerned as to why a Church, seeking power, did not destroy in entirety the Gospels and merely re-write them to their own ends. They did not appear to totally re-write them, and in doing so left some interesting information which goes to the heart of what a reformer of spiritual truth might want to say to an all powerful corrupt Church (of his day and after). I can only assume that the Gospels were not entirely re-written, because the Church were relying on the illiteracy of the masses, in which case the spoken rules and regulations would become the “way”.
You seem to think that “the Church” was always monolithic. When the gospels were written it was not at all. Even the bible shows that there were many churches in the early apostolic age when Paul, as many Christians seem to think, was founding them. Most places he went to already had a church before he got there. The result was that no church could claim something utterly different from that claimed by the others. The ground had to be common ground because a lot of people, not all Christians—Jews knew the historical truth—knew, and the best they could do was to alter the individual stories or pericopes, or their interpretation. They could not write a new and quite different book. That is why they were stuck with a god who had been hung as a rebel. They kept quiet about it for a hundred years before the gospels began to be freely circulated, and even then, of course, among Christians.
This does appear to be the case, as more people can now interpret the texts themselves and so question the old “way”, but perhaps see that there is a deeper source of truth within.
Yes, indeed! The historical truth.
All the best and hope that everything works out well for you, health wise and materially (and I would like to say spiritually).
Well, the word “spirit” means “breath” in Latin, as you might know, and that is its origin. It meant “life”—biblically the breath God breathed into His clay figurines. When we cease to breathe, when we lose our spirit, then we die. So, I shall accept your good wishes in the proper sense. The point is that there is no need for such an obscure word. Life is a perfectly good, indeed more comprehensive, word than merely breath even if it is in Latin. Using the Latin makes an ordinary word seem profound. That is why the Church retained Latin as a sacred language for so long. It was utterly mystical to the peasants. I am surprised you do not want to lift yourself out of this slough of religious ignorance and whimsy.
