A Summation of Religious Influence on Western Civilization

History of the Bible in an abridged opinion that leaves out a lot of stuff, has a cynical tone sometimes, and is being written by a man of questionable character – James McGarrah.

First of all, churches of the Christian religion list Jesus as the Christ, or anointed one, that has always been the head of Christian churches, which separated from Jewish religion in the first century. Judaism is still looking for a Messiah, which is the prophetic role Jesus was supposed to have filled. That’s the traditional way all Christian denominations refer to Jesus since end of the first century C.E., especially after the formation of the Catholic organization by Rome in the fourth century. But it was Paul’s determination that made that doctrine, not a claim made by Jesus. Jesus formed no organization that could possibly be called a church. There was no governmental body central. There was no priestly class among his followers. He held no structured meetings. He was a Jew who was also a teacher of the Jews only because their sacred writings held that they were the chosen people of God. His purpose was to lead those who had strayed from the teachings back to a correct understanding of those teachings and counsel them in the proper service to their God. His purpose to God was to answer the Adamic question – can a human serve God perfectly without sin even into death. If successful, then God would be satisfied and allow humans to approach him in prayer without the need for a Levitical priesthood and a ritual of sacrifices because Jesus had made that propitiatory sacrifice once and for all believers for all time. It’s similar to Jeff Bezos who is sure his workers don’t need a union. They can go directly through him until retirement and collect a heavenly social security check. That, along with Medicare ensure their lives will be paradisaical. Am I wrong in my thinking here? It seems self-explanatory in the book Christians claim God sent them. I’ve read the Bible thoroughly and cover to cover three or four times, but that was years ago.

Here’s the way I remember the myth being explained over the centuries from the Hebrew written scriptures (Old Testament) through the Koine Greek ones (New Testament) – God created this world and put Adam and Eve in it. His only requirement was that they obey him perfectly by not learning the knowledge of good and bad (supposedly sin comes in an apple). That was a secret only God should know. The problem, at least for God, was that he made them “human” and therefore the insatiable, godly intellectual curiosity was part of their brain power. It’s a paradox. On a side note, he evidently made Eve pretty hot because Adam could not contain a certain part of his curiosity, which appears to me to have been lust in her nakedness, like Margot Robbie in that Wolf of Wall Street movie. This made God mad because Adam and Eve apparently liked doing the deed better than obeying him, so he kicked them out of paradise and said, “okay, go ahead and get it on, but I’m going to make you have babies. Then you’ll have to raise the little buggers and each generation will get more disobedient than you. Everybody is going to suffer big time, especially when they reach puberty. History of the next few thousand years starting with Cain and Abel – sex and violence, sex and violence, sex and violence, bad angels, incest. Sodomy, slaughter etc. etc. Big flood, kills everybody and starts over, Next few thousand years – Sex and violence again, more incest, and big-time bigamy.

So, God says, “This doesn’t work too well. These people are just too selfish and horny. I gotta try something different. I’ll make a people just for me who will do better.”

God then develops the Adamic Question – will there ever be a man strong enough in his love for me (because I’m a jealous God) to obey me perfectly throughout his life and into death? These people I make, this race called Hebrews, will have the opportunity to produce such a man called a Messiah. But first, I have to check out if that question can even be answered by the nasty little buggers. Let me tell my buddy Abraham to kill his son Isaac and see if he has the love for me to do it. I think he will be okay with the slaughter because Isaac is a teenager. Teenagers are all worthy of death.  It will be problematic because I promised old Abe that I would make a great nation out of his through Isaac’s offspring, which obviously can’t happen if he sacrifices (code word for murders) the kid. Abraham comes through for God, so God stops him and lets him butcher a perfectly innocent ram instead. Abe’s reward is a covenant, or promise, from God that this great nation will be “lifted up on wings of eagles” and be a special race organized to serve God on earth. In return, they get their own country and a bunch of other benefits – good health insurance, a retirement plan, and plenty of profit from their farms. What happens?

Well, since they are only human, they do human things that God doesn’t like (i.e. sex of all kinds and in weird positions, build statues that look like other gods and worship them, kill each other, lie, steal, and generally mess up.) God can’t destroy everybody again because He promised Noah after the flood by means of a rainbow that he wouldn’t. Besides, He was only really mad at the Israelites. All the other pagans were behaving like the idiots they were anyway. He lets the Egyptians make slaves of his people for a long time. It would kind of be like when a parent takes computers, iPhones, and TV away from naughty children. The Hebrews suffer horribly. After a while, along comes Moses, one of the good ones, and God lets him do magical tricks to prove Moses is satisfactory in his CEO position to the weak-minded Israelites and to force Pharoah’s compliance in releasing them. Moses leads them all out of Egypt. They had it made, but they screwed up again. When Moses was in an executive meeting on top of a mountain getting a bunch of rules from a bush that was on fire to help them do exactly like God wanted, they started up with the orgy activity and golden calf worship again. So, they were punished by having to wander around in the desert for another forty years before they could enter the Promised Land, and Moses didn’t even get to go because he hit a rock with a stick and made water come out of it. They didn’t die of thirst, but Moses didn’t give Yahweh credit for the water. Hence, he was fired at the border of this promised land and couldn’t enter. Moses had to turn the position of leadership over to Joshua.

Now Josh had a different corporate mission statement. God forgot to tell him that this promised land was already occupied by other people. But these people committed all kinds of debaucheries and worshipped a bunch of false gods making Him jealous. He ordered Joshua to slaughter them all, not just the men, women, and children—EVERYTHING. Goats, pigs, cows, chickens, bugs, mice, and even some dogs, I think, which Joshua and his army of Hebrews did with great joy. They were killing so well that once God stopped the earth from rotating and suspended time to let them do more of it. Also, they had a trumpet and no walls could keep them out of places. Play the right song and BOOM! down came the walls. After everything but the Jews and their possessions were dead, God separated the Jews into twelve tribes and eventually into two Kingdoms, Israel and Judah. One of the tribes came from a guy named Levi and his offspring all got ordained as Levitical priests. Their job was to approach God and ask him questions. No one else could. Adam had messed that up with Eve in the Garden. A whole bunch of laws had been sent by Him as rider to the basic ten (about six hundred more as if he were a congressman who kept adding riders to a bill) and the Jews had to obey those laws (named the Mosaic Laws after you know who) and part of them contained instructions on rituals and sacrifices by these priests so the whole nation could show their love for God only. God wouldn’t listen to anyone else. Things were okay for a while and they built a great Empire, including a Temple especially for God until God found out that some of his people had kept animals and whores and gold trinkets they were supposed to destroy when they got their land. Boy, did he get mad. For several hundred years he let them get captured and conquered by bad people like the Philistines, the Babylonians, the Romans, and others. He sent Prophets to warn them and Judges to correct them. But they were just too HUMAN. It didn’t work. They needed a Messiah. The last prophet recorded, Micah, summed things up. Micah’s message was to both Israel and Judah, addressed primarily to their two respective capitals, Samaria and Jerusalem. Its three main ideas were: their Sins; their Destruction; and their Restoration. God wanted them to know that despite all the suffering, which was their own fault by the way, he was still a good boss. Two words – Doom and Hope. Micah praised God, saying that HE “pardoneth iniquity” and “retaineth not his anger forever, because he delighteth in mercy” (Micah 7:18). God would soon send the Messiah to the Jews.

End of Old Testament.

Somewhere around four hundred years or so after the last book in the Hebrew scriptures is written, a teacher appears in Galilee (i.e. around 30 CE) and begins bringing some new information about what God expects of the Jews, but more than that, how the Jews should behave toward each other and toward the people of other nations. It was the Golden Rule that he borrowed from Confucius written about 400 years earlier. At the time, the Jews who had been screwing up royally and had been enslaved by other nations because of it were under the yoke of the Roman Empire. This wasn’t unusual because Rome had conquered most of the world. But the teacher had a revolutionary message of hope, which attracted a few loyal followers and other sort of loyal followers who were poor and miserable and unhappy with their lives. The teacher’s name was Jesus, and he was a Jew who had been born to a couple that both descended from the ancient line of King David, Joseph and Mary. Better than that, Mary had evidently gone nightclubbing after her engagement and maybe slipped up a little by getting pregnant. She told Joseph she was still a virgin and apparently, he bought it. So, some of his followers researched the ancient prophecies and decided that God must have had his way with her—similar to Zeus and Leda. Jesus became the foretold Messiah. This did two things. First, it made the Jewish priests, Pharisees and Sadducees, (AKA 1^st century Republican politicians) very angry because they stole a lot of cash and stuff by bullshitting the common people. Jesus and his followers were getting popular and questioning the priests’ control and the status quo. Kind of like what is happening in the United States in the 21^st century. The poor people are beginning to get pissed at guys like Elon Musk today, except that issue is all about who has got all the money. Anyway, Jesus has no fear because he knows these powerful dudes are hypocrites and not serving God like they should be. God has Jesus’ back, sort of. The second thing that was necessary for Jesus to be the Messiah was the creation of a myth about his life and abilities. Some of his followers began doing that, especially to attract the weaker minded and more fearful Jews. They followed a pattern that has proven to be true about all heroes in ancient texts. They didn’t know it was a pattern, but a guy named Joseph Campbell figured it out two thousand years later by studying history from all ancient cultures that had myths about heroes. They attributed most of these things to Jesus and even added that virgin birth and a bunch of miracles like walking on water and healing the sick and even raising the dead.

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All of a sudden, Jesus became like Neo in the Matrix. He was the ONE to free all the Jews from the tyranny of Rome and the Pharisees, but they misunderstood what being free meant to Jesus, or so the story goes. Jesus was referring to the freedom of floating off somewhere AFTER you die. This vision may have been due to consuming a few mushrooms during his forty days in the wilderness. No one knows for sure.

The Pharisees went to their Roman masters (a Corporation that ran everything, really) and began planting rumors that Jesus had intentions of doing liberal things like feeding the poor and making ordinary citizens grumpy about being slaves to the Roman empire. They said Jesus fomented revolutionary ideas like compassion and freedom and empathy, and they wanted Jesus arrested and out of the way so their propaganda could continue enriching them. The head Roman CEO was afraid that if the corporations killed Jesus, the people would ask too many questions. He came up with a plan to let the people themselves do the dirty work. At a big public holiday, the Roman boss had the people vote on two prisoners, one was Jesus, and the other was a guy kind of like Donald Trump—a pussy-grabbing thief and all-around nasty fellow named Barabbas. The Jews had always been noted for voting against their own best interest. They elected to free Barabbas and execute Jesus. The Roman leader, Pontius Pilate, was very pleased because his plan had worked. Jesus would be hung on a pole to die a horrible death. The poor Jews would get blamed for forever.

Jesus was, executed that is. What no one understood was the fact that this was his plan all along, or at least his father’s plan. See, GOD was his father and Jesus was also GOD—don’t get me started on that one. His body was entombed in a cave behind a big rock for three days. On the third day, a couple of women brought some flowers to the tomb, and WOW! The rock had been moved and the body had disappeared. They ran away and on the road they met a stranger who looked exactly like Jesus. The two women started a rumor that this dead Messiah wasn’t dead. More magic to help fulfill those old prophecies. The Twelve apostles—actually ten because Judas, the Roman tattletale, had already hung himself out of guilt and Thomas doubted everything all the time anyway—got the message from the women. Jesus came as a ghost to Thomas and said, “You can’t doubt me now, dumb ass. Go spread the word.” All the Apostles did just that and the followers among the Jews began to become more and more. After a short time, Jesus/God thought that his little story was such a good thing that it should be shared with the whole known world, even the Gentiles (non-Jews). He rode a blinding flash of light down from heaven and knocked a guy named Saul of Tarsus off his Ass and onto his ass. This guy Saul was a piece of work. First of all, he was a lawyer. As if that wasn’t bad enough, he persecuted his fellow Jews who were following the Way (the teachings of Jesus) horribly. The lit up ghost of Jesus/God’s light blinded him. Jesus warned him, “Don’t mess with my bro’s and ho’s anymore, dude. And go out among the pagan Gentiles and invite them into the club. Do this and you will see again. By the way, your name is Paul now.”

Paul did as instructed. Not all the Apostles liked this because they wanted The Way to be exclusively for Jews, but they got over it. Paul became the first traveling preacher and set up a lot of congregations for many years. He gave those congregations strict rules to follow for members. If they didn’t follow them, they got kicked out. Most of the rules weren’t much fun, but Paul guaranteed that by following them correctly they would receive a big reward after death. Evidently, many of them believed it because they did follow the rules even when the Romans killed them for doing it. None of those killed reported getting a reward. After the great deadly persecutions, somewhere around the end of the first century, a guy named John wrote a story about that reward, about who got it and who didn’t and what was going to happened to those in the future that didn’t get a free trip to heaven for their troubles. The problem was that he wrote it in weird images kind of like a Federico Fellini movie—ten-headed monsters, whores on dragons, fiery pits, streets of blood, ghosts on pale horses, and other bad stuff. A lot of people didn’t get the message or made up their own stories about what it meant.

End of the Bible.

What went on after the Bible ended its story?

Enough people joined The Way, now called Christianity, that by the fourth century Roman politicians realized they could use it to control the restless populations of their conquered nations because The Way infused pacifism and obedience into its members. The Romans incorporated it into the government and encouraged people to join. A lot of pagans didn’t want to because they would have to quit partying. So, these politicians thought, let’s just stick these pagan parties into the worship rules. The pagans will like it and join. The worship of the sun god during the winter solstice was a big one on December 25. Everyone got drunk, ran around naked, and screwed their neighbors. They changed it to Jesus’ birthday party, which was easy because nobody knew when Jesus’ birthday was. Easter became a big one also. The pagans celebrated Istar, a fertility goddess among other things. They had rabbits hop around and once again everybody got laid. At the after-hours party, they hid colored eggs and ran around giggling and naked looking for them. The timing was perfect, it being a ritual of springtime. The politicians made it the celebration of Jesus’ resurrection and placed it three days after Jewish Pentecost, which just happened to be the time that Jesus got executed.

The plan worked well. Rome’s rulers created a priestly class of rich old white men who had been big donors to govern this Christian church. These guys kept the Bible secret from all the church members. When they needed to change the story, well they just did and if anyone contradicted them, they said “prove it.” Then, they killed that guy so he couldn’t. He was a heretic. These priests got richer and more powerful. After Rome fell, they became their own country and still are today, having more land and money than all but two or three other countries and Jeff Bezos.

A thousand years passes. It felt great being the one percent. They used armies from European nations under their control to conquer third world countries. Those citizens had a choice to join the Church or get slaughtered. Think Columbus and Native Americans, for example. But some of the priests were pretty good fellows. They knew that the Bible didn’t say what people were told it said. They protested and left the Church to form a new corporation called Protestantism. They read the Bible differently. As a matter of fact, they even read it differently than each other. It was only a matter of time before the Protestants broke apart, each member of the one percent building his own denomination with its own rules. The next six hundred years or so went on like the preceding fourteen hundred, but with more corporations vying for people and profits and missing the whole idea of what Jesus taught because what he taught wasn’t about power and money.

Religious war, religious wars, religious wars. Sex, incest, sodomy, theft, murder, political intrigue, Inquisitions, pederasty, racism, slavery, corruption, Joel Osteen. Jim Bakker, Pat Robertson, Kenneth Copeland, pedophiles, etc., etc., etc…

A few good preachers and priests do good deeds along the way but are completely overwhelmed by normal human behavior and the rule of idiot white males.

This is a history of western civilization until 2016, then we began moving backward in time toward the Dark Ages.