Lies That Kill: The Words of God

what can and cannot be scripture?

Frederick Douglass told in his Narrative how his condition as a slave became worse when his master underwent a religious conversion that allowed him to justify slavery as the punishment of the children of Ham. Mark Twain described his mother as a genuinely good person, whose soft heart pitied even Satan, but who had no doubt about the legitimacy of slavery, because in years of living in antebellum Missouri she had never heard any sermon opposing slavery, but only countless sermons preaching that slavery was God's will.

Religion is an insult to human dignity. Without it you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things.
But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion.
― Steven Weinberg

Thus begins my series on Subversive Scripture Studies with the question of why does it matter? Isn’t it enough to decide whether we believe or don’t believe in a scripture? Why do we need to analyze it? If it makes us or other people happy, isn’t it harmless?

The greatest challenge for empire is how to get good people to do bad things. If bad people do bad things for their own reasons, that doesn’t serve the empire. The greatest tool of the empire is the power of a story. Without a story, any would-be ruler has to do their own dirty work.

Money is the most successful story ever told, as Yuval Harari has said and I agree with him. Nations are another powerful story. But scriptures are the greatest stories of all, where the ruling class is divinely ordained by God and the hierarchy is self-maintaining because any challenge is to contradict God.

Charles Eisenstein has a recent post on Horror and the process of compassion. In it, he asks how children grow up to commit atrocities:

On the Zionist side, we ask about the conditions that turned that cute little sweetie-pie into a torturer and murderer, and, pulling one thread of many, we see historical conditions of persecution and genocide and expulsion that leave Jews feeling unwelcome and unsafe. …

On the Palestinian side, we ask about the conditions that turned that angelic little toddler into a terrorist celebrating his cruel murders. We see decades of humiliation of his people, their expulsion from their ancestral homes, the continued theft of their land, their crushing economic deprivation, and the extinction of hope that it will ever change.

In his comment thread, I’ve challenged the narrative of Palestinian terrorists celebrating cruel murders. But here I’d like to look at the motivations. For Palestinians, he cites ongoing humiliation, expulsion from homes, land theft, crushing economic deprivation and no hope it will ever change.

For Israelis, it’s a story. One they’ve been told about their ancestors that makes them ‘feel’ unwelcome and unsafe. Poor wittle sweet’ums! Are you torturing and murdering because you think people don’t like you? Let’s get you some therapy. You’re going to need it when all those ghosts come back to haunt you.

I can’t keep the sarcasm out of my voice. It is ridiculous to say that a story that makes the person with the gun feel unwelcome and unsafe is equivalent to people fighting back against an ongoing generational genocide. If you have the courage to bear witness, here’s the video with the photo of the beautiful three year old girl killed by shrapnel at 1:20.

Egyptian comedian Bassam Youssef says that “Israel always victimizes itself and I have never seen a victim putting their oppressor under siege and bombing them 24/7. Israel wants you to believe that they are the victim. Dealing with Israel is like being in a relationship with a narcissistic psychopath; he fucks you up and then he makes you think it’s your fault.” [23:20]

So we are all getting a crash course in what it means to be in a relationship with a narcissist, and our sanity rests on finally coming to grips with and calling out the manipulation and control.

The soldiers are puppets. The stories are the strings by which the puppetmasters control them and us, enacting their narrative. Finding out the truth cuts the strings that manipulate you, the scripture that conscripts you. To change the violence, change the story. Tell the truth. The God’s honest truth. And scripture is the place to start.

---

First, I’ll define scripture. Second, I’ll look at the two forms of authority. Third, I’ll ask the question that should precede every other. Then I’ll look at the rules by which the potential Words of God can be eliminated or entertained, rules that differ with the directness of their claim to be divine authority. I’ll end with why this analysis is important, and why we shouldn’t throw out the idea of scripture with the imperial bathwater.

what is scripture?

Scripture is a document claimed to be written by divine authority, either as a found object or transcribed as a channeled text or spoken by someone who is divine.

Divine authority means ultimate reality, Truth or knowledge without human interpretation.

what counts as authority?

There are two forms of authority, external and internal. External authority is culturally dependent. It’s intergenerational from parents and long-ago ancestors, and sanctioned by a hierarchical structure. It actively discourages questioning, reason and logic, and encourages obedience, humility, acceptance and faith. It gives others the authorship over Reality and makes the self into a mere follower, an empty vessel to be filled. It presumes that God spoke to the deserving few in ages past, but no longer does, either because there’s nothing more to say or no one worth saying it to.

Internal authority comes from two places: the left, masculine side of the brain with reason and logic and the right, feminine side of the brain with intuition and feeling. Last time I checked, both sides of the brain were equally represented in both genders. To check a scripture for its resonance with internal authority requires both logic and intuition in a constant back-and-forth flow.

You are either the sole author of your self OR you are the Word of God and God is your author. If you are your author, every decision that you make is a random blip in the grand lottery of whether you live another day, a lottery you’ll eventually lose. There is no meaning in life, only comfort, pleasure, survival. This is the default against which any scripture stands or falls.

If you are the Word of God, the Truth lies within You. It just needs to be re-membered rather than its current state of being dis-membered. You can subject it to any tests of logic and personal experience; everything you need is within your reach. It doesn’t require your belief in order to be true. You are the ultimate authority on who is your author. Ask and be willing to hear the answer.

what is my true relationship to you?

This is the most important question there is and there are only two answers: the ego-self that’s better or worse than you or the whole Self that’s morally equal to you, whoever you are. If there’s anyone in the world I think I’m better than—Hitler, Jeffrey Dahlmer or your garden variety psychopath, then I’ve rejected the possibility of being One. I’ve established a hierarchy of better and worse people, and the more people I can show to be bad, the better I am by comparison.

Neither of these assume a Reality outside our human experience but they eliminate their opposite as ultimate Reality. If we are separate and competitive ego-selves, there is either no God or a God who is capricious and cruel, favoring some over others. There cannot be any other kind of God—a God of Love is impossible. What God of Love would create death?

To consider that we might be One, I give forward the benefit of the doubt that everyone’s doing the best they can and I would do no better in their shoes. It doesn’t mean that we are One but it removes the obstacle to that realization. It doesn’t mean there is a God but a God of Love becomes possible. What God might be depends first on who I am in relationship to you.

delineating the layers

Now let’s look at scripture. A scripture can never be proven authentic, it can only be considered possible or ruled out. There are different rules for eliminating scriptures, depending on their claims to authenticity:

1. First-person Words of God—A document or object claimed as appearing without the intervention of any person. Examples are the tablets of the Ten Commandments and the Urantia book. While potentially the most powerful, these are also the most fragile—a chisel-scratch on the stone or a missed punctuation mark would invalidate the claim. And all the rules below also need to apply. It needs to make sense, there needs to be a reason that God would, out of all possible messages, choose this one to self-publish.

2. Second-person Words of God—An original language document dictated from an inner voice, such as the Arabic Qur’an or A Course in Miracles, or a first-hand account of a vision. Is it written the same way as the transcriber’s personal style or does it have a form they don’t seem capable of? Does it elevate the transcriber as a person of great status? If it contradicts itself or what you know to be true from history, geography, biography or logic, it has to be eliminated or taken with a grain of salt. If it contradicts your inner Truth on the equality of people, it has to be rejected.

3. Third-person+ Words of God—reported accounts of the sayings and events of someone claimed to be divine, like the hypothetical Q gospel that pre-dates the written Greek. A compilation of accounts, such as the Gospels of Mark and Thomas, the Sanskrit Vedas or the Hebrew books of the prophets. Redacted versions, such as the Gospels of Matthew, Luke and John, or the Hebrew Torah. Edited versions, such as the Nicene canon, that selected which texts to include and which to exclude.  A translation of a text, such as the King James Bible or the Tao Te Ching.

At each level of remove, there are more agendas to consider involved with politics, power and money. And there’s more human interpretation that can, paradoxically, lead back to the Truth even if a text was corrupt at its origin. It can be a mix of lies and truth that has important clues both about the inner workings of power and the outlying possibilities of Ultimate Reality.

And as Guy Duperreault points out, guilt over sex and the body is a key factor in religions. He quotes William Blake that:

All Bibles or sacred codes have been the causes of the following Errors:

1. That Man has two real existing principles, Viz: a Body & a Soul.

2. That Energy, calld Evil, is alone from the Body; & that Reason, calld Good, is alone from the Soul.

3. That God will torment Man in Eternity for following his Energies.

So violence against others is condoned and necessary in order to be a good person but consensual sex, with an emphasis on the sensual, is condemned and makes a person bad. Morality is subservient to religion and ethics requires proper nouns before it can distinguish right from wrong. Everything is upside-down and inside-out.

---

As I go through different examples in this series, I’ll be referring back to these rules. In the meantime, here’s Empire & Religion and one of my earliest videos on The Demonization and Demonetization of Disinformation:

Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by the rulers as useful. —Lucius Annaeus Seneca. In this episode, I’ll ask if Judeo-Christian scriptures are a 2000 yr psyops by and for empire. I'll look at why that question matters and why religion vs. no religion is a false dichotomy. And I’ll end with a conversation with a Hasidic Rabbi regarding Hebrew scriptures.

Thinking of disinformation as short for dissenting information, I delve into the meaning of the word radical, the origin of demons, the fallacies of rhetoric, the rules for critical thinking, and the question of ultimate reality. I ask whether our minds exist in the world or the world exists in our mind, and how meditation is a connection the empire can't take away.