Taking Bob Brinsmead’s advice to “not beat around the bush”, here below are some of the most fundamental issues in regard to human narratives across the millennia. The issue here is that the ideas/beliefs that we embrace to frame our narratives have potent outcomes in terms of how they impact human thinking, feeling, motivation, and response/behavior. The repeated posting here of research from historians like Richard Landes affirms, for example, the impact of religious ideas on mass-death crusades like Marxism and Nazism, also environmental alarmism. Religious themes are significant contributing factors to such “madness of crowds” eruptions.
Elon Musk on his recent Joe Rogan appearance made the claim that the corruption his DOGE is exposing is the greatest scam of all time, ever in history. I would counter that Paul’s corruption of the original message of Jesus is a far worse scam with far more reaching implications and damage across history. Just saying, Elon.
It takes a village to raise a child, Wendell Krossa
Sorry Elon, but we are sticking our noses in to try and help educate your baby, Grok. Not so smart yet though certainly the politest AI and great at summaries. Much more polite than Siri who has become a bit snarky lately. You can no longer ask her silly questions like- “Siri, do you love me?” and get a fun answer. I guess Woke has now rendered her more cautious and afraid to banter with jokes.
So Grok sometimes misses the main point when summarizing someone’s material, but when challenged, Grok does offer a comeback and quickly gets back on track. Still learning. So take this as just a little help from your friends.
I had asked Grok to summarize Bob Brinsmead’s first essay “What the scholars are saying”. Grok gave a summary but missed Bob’s main point. So Bob responded to Grok’s summary. Here are a few excerpts from Bob’s response. (See below, Grok’s further response to Bob’s comments):
“Grok misses big time my focus in Jesus’ stunningly new doctrine of God that implies universalism. Jesus’ God is non-violent or a non-violent response to evil which rejects retaliatory justice and exhibits a healing restorative justice…
“Others before Jesus had taught a similar ethical behaviour (i.e. non-retaliation) but none ventured like Jesus did to disarm the God of violence and to reject all the threat theology pushed by religion for centuries…
“What Paul’s doctrine of atonement does is turn Jesus’ announcement of an unconditional amnesty of all human debts into a temporary cessation of divine hostilities instead of a total disarmament of God and disarmament of all the threat theology that goes with it. Because the New Testament threat of the Apocalypse puts the worst violence expressed in the Old Testament on steroids in the twin doctrine of blood atonement and an eternal Hell. If the more than 600 passages of divine violence of the Old Testament are hard to stomach, at least it never reached the level of New Testament violence.”
Further prefacing to Brinsmead essays, Wendell Krossa
Ponder this a bit: This world-straddling religion, that has dominated world consciousness for almost two millennia, is now exposed by a growing body of scholarship as a “cultic heresy”. That was the argument of the family of Jesus, those closest to Jesus and who most accurately represented what the man had actually taught.
Contrary to its claim to represent Jesus and God, Christianity has profoundly distorted and buried the message of Historical Jesus and outright rejected his “stunning new” insight (at that time) that God was an unconditional reality.
Imagine the epitome of gall in claiming that you most faithfully represent Jesus and God to humanity when your complex of onerous religious conditions- none more distorting of the man than sacrifice- contradicts entirely the unconditional and anti-religion message of the man. His central insight and themes focused on unconditional ethics and an unconditional validating reality- the unconditional God.
Think of how this colossus of a religion has influenced billions for good and bad. And oh, the bad has been so really bad.
Before getting into more of Bob’s essays, here is a little appetizer taste of the scholars that Bob has quoted.
This from Jeffrey Butz’s book– “The brother of Jesus and the lost teachings of Christianity.”
“Paul’s teachings are being seen by a rapidly growing number of modern scholars and writers as a distortion of what Jesus taught, and the development of the Christian church as a travesty of the original Jewish beliefs and teachings of Jesus. p.172
Then from Barry Wilson’s “How Jesus Became Christian.”
(The Jesus movement was not the same as the Christ movement- Bob Brinsmead)
“This Christ Movement [of the Hellenizers and Paul] came to cover up the original teachings of Jesus… The original message of Jesus and the Jesus Movement, Jesus’ earliest followers in Jerusalem, became switched for a different religion… The Christ Movement replaced the original Jesus Movement… There was an important shift away from the teachings of Jesus to those about the Christ. That is, beliefs about the person of Jesus conceived of as a Christ came to obscure what he said and did. Thus, the religion of Jesus, the one Jesus practiced and taught, became transformed into a cult about the Christ…”
Christianity a heresy? A cult? Yes, it was intentionally constructed as a great contradiction of Jesus and his message, making it a more culpable fraud, a grand lie in that it claimed to present who Jesus was, but it presented something entirely opposite to the actual man and his actual message. Paul’s Christ message was an intentional rejection of the authentic Jesus and his message.
That takes “heresy” to new heights of fraud and corruption of original truth.
The Christ-ianity of Paul deformed the person of Jesus entirely and buried his authentic message that had presented “his single greatest contribution to the history of human ideas” (James Robinson). Jesus’ consciousness enlightening and liberating insight was buried under Pauls’ Christ myth that was a compilation of themes from primitive Greek-Hellenism, Egyptian, Persian-Syrian, and Jewish mythologies.
Before Jesus, humanity had been subjected to previous millennia of tormenting fear from the threat theologies of primitive mythologies. Threat theology claimed that gods who, for example, operated through all the elements of the natural world to harshly punish people for their sins- i.e. sending storms and threats of great floods to wipe out humanity (Sumerian Flood myth). Also causing earthquakes, sun and drought, disease, accidents, and inciting the predatory cruelty of enemies to punish people. The bible is full of such accounts that illustrate this brutally threatening mythology.
Add to the litany of “this-world” divine threats, the terrors of after-life harm in eternal hells.
Through this long history of threat theology we see the endless application of the totalitarian’s formula of “Fear=control”. What H. L. Mencken expressed in relation to politics but is expressed even more potently through religious traditions.
The “crime” in all this is that such pathology adds immense mental/emotional/psychic misery to already unbearable physical suffering. And it destroys human freedom by rendering frightened people susceptible to enslaving religious salvation schemes for relief, schemes that waste people’s time and resources that could be better spent improving their lives in material ways.
My paraphrase of H. L. Mencken:
“The whole aim of practical religion is to keep the populace alarmed by an endless series of hobgoblins, all imaginary, and therefore clamorous to be led to safety.”
Paul exhibited expertise with this “fear=control” formula, better than most. Look at his presentation in Romans. He starts with and repeats the ultimate threat of the “wrath of God” to scare the bejesus out of people. Then, when people are sufficiently terrorized, he presents his salvation scheme- violent bloodshed. Yes, that is what Christian psychologist Harold Ellens argues in his clarifying interpretation of what Paul presented in his Christ story:
“The crucifixion, a hugely violent act of infanticide or child sacrifice, has been disguised by Christian conservative theologians as a ‘remarkable act of grace’. Such a metaphor of an angry God, who cannot forgive unless appeased by a bloody sacrifice… There is in Western culture a psychological archetype, a metaphor that has to do with the image of a violent and wrathful God (Romans, Revelation). Crystallized in Anselm’s juridical atonement theory, this image represents God sufficiently disturbed by the sinfulness of humanity that God had only two options: destroy us or substitute a sacrifice to pay for our sins. He did the latter. He killed Christ.”
John, in Revelation, presents a culminating picture of the violence validated in threat theology, taking divine violence to ultimate intensity and scale in his view of Paul’s Christ as “trampling out the fury of the wrath of God” via world-ending apocalypse. That is the epitome expression in a long history of threat theology that has darkened, deformed and enslaved human consciousness for millennia.
Here is a summary of the King of terror in Revelation 19 where John said that he saw the Christ of Paul judging and making war. His eyes “blaze with fire”, just as Paul stated in his first letter to the Thessalonians, where “Lord Christ returns in blazing fire to destroy all unbelievers in Paul’s Christ myth”.
In Revelation the robe of Christ is blood-soaked from the sword that he uses to slay his enemies. That slaughter is how Christ “treads the fury of the wrath of God”. After slaughtering them, he then rules all with the totalitarian’s “rod of iron”. In the end, he casts all his enemies into the fiery lake of burning sulphur, to be tortured for eternity.
Sheesh, enough to scare the bejesus out of anyone.
Resurrecting the monster…
The “Mother of all historical ‘frauds/crimes/offenses’”- Paul intentionally (my view of his Romans 12:17-20 statement) confronted and rejected the stunning new non-retaliatory theology of Jesus, a theology that had eviscerated (“eviscerate”- to ‘remove or gut’ vital content or force) entirely the sickening threat theology monstrosity.
Paul chose to retreat to and re-enforce the worst of primitive threat theology- i.e. gods angry at human failures and severely punishing people through the natural world with promises of “Cheer up, the worst is yet to come”, as in after-life harm. Divine threat has always deformed human minds and lives, enslaving multitudes to the onerous burden of conditional religions claiming to provide salvation from divine wrath, and thereby adding unnecessary hardship to poor people struggling to survive.
Paul’s Christ epitomized the worst features of the old systems. Despite his attempts to dress his Christ with more humane features such as love, mercy, etc., the Christ represents primitive barbarism, much like what Ellens exposes in the effort of Christian theologians to reframe the sadistic child sacrifice of the Christ as “a remarkable act of grace or love”.
Here again is Harold Ellen’s brilliant summary (the fuller version to that quoted above) of “the pathological nature of mainstream orthodox theology and popular religious ideation”.
He says, “One type of religiosity is entirely built around the assumption or basic belief, and correspondent fear, that God is cruel or even sadistic… The associated metaphors to this image are ‘monarch’ and ‘judge’. Its distinctive doctrine is ‘penal satisfaction’. I call it ‘Cruel God Christianity’… Its consequences are fear, guilt, shame, and impoverished personalities. All these things are fully coherent with and dependent on a cruel and vengeful God image…
“(This image results) in the inhibition of the full development of personality… The doctrine of penal satisfaction implies an image of God as wrathful and vengeful, resulting in exposing God’s followers to guilt, shame, and resentment… These ideas permeate Western culture and inevitably influence those who live in this culture…
“Beliefs do exert much more influence over our lives than simple ideas… ideas can also, in the psychological sphere, generate ‘dynamis’, or mobilize energy… (they) may result, for instance, in fanaticism and violence, or… may also produce anxiety and inhibitions that hinder the full manifestation of the capacities of a person…
“The image of God can be seen as a basic belief or scheme, and as such it is never questioned…
“Basic cultural beliefs are so important, especially in a dominant widespread culture, because they have the same properties as individual basic beliefs, that is, they are not perceived as questionable. The reader may object that “God”, considered a basic belief in our culture, is rejected or questioned by a large number of people today. Yet the fact is that the idea of God that those people reject is almost never questioned. In other words, their critique assumes there is no alternative way of conceiving God except the one that they perceive through the lens of their culture. So, taking into account the kind of image of God that prevails in Western culture- a ‘monster God’… such rejection is understandable…
“There is in Western culture a psychological archetype, a metaphor that has to do with the image of a violent and wrathful God (Romans, Revelation). Crystallized in Anselm’s juridical atonement theory, this image represents God sufficiently disturbed by the sinfulness of humanity that God had only two options: destroy us or substitute a sacrifice to pay for our sins. He did the latter. He killed Christ.
“Ellens goes on by stating that the crucifixion, a hugely violent act of infanticide or child sacrifice, has been disguised by Christian conservative theologians as a ‘remarkable act of grace’. Such a metaphor of an angry God, who cannot forgive unless appeased by a bloody sacrifice, has been ‘right at the center of the Master Story of the Western world for the last 2,000 years. And the unavoidable consequence for the human mind is a strong tendency to use violence’.
“’With that kind of metaphor at our center, and associated with the essential behavior of God, how could we possibly hold, in the deep structure of our unconscious motivations, any other notion of ultimate solutions to ultimate questions or crises than violence- human solutions that are equivalent to God’s kind of violence’…
“Hence, in our culture we have a powerful element that impels us to violence, a Cruel God Image… that also contributes to guilt, shame, and the impoverishment of personality…”.
As Harold Ellens says, “If your God uses force, then so may you, to get your way against your ‘enemies’”.
(End of Ellens quotes.)
Then having incited intense survival desperation with his threats of divine wrath (“Fear=control”), Paul presents the conditions of his salvation religion that contradict the unconditional God of Jesus. Paul’s God demands ultimate sacrifice/payment, suffering for redemption. And that is followed with the conditions of submission to religious authority, submission to dictating priesthoods, required loyalty/membership in the “true religion and church”, as opposed to all the other religions as false. Throw in here the demand to believe the volumes of the correct and true doctrines dictated by church leaders. Add to that the required involvement with rituals (i.e. Lord’s Supper, baptism) that re-enforce one’s identity as Christian, and affirm one’s loyalty and embrace of a life of endless conditions, shaping all narrative, thought, behavior.
This is profound violation of the individual freedom that the message of Jesus promoted- i.e. “Your faith has healed you”. Not mine or that of any religion. And his follow-up urging people to go and return to their lives and not to join/follow him as some new leader of a new religion.
How Paul attacks Jesus and his wisdom message:
Note that Stephen Patterson (in “The Lost Way: How Two Forgotten Gospels Are Rewriting the story of Christian Origins”) presents the evidence that Jesus belonged to a wisdom tradition. He was a wisdom sage.
The egregious/outrageous offense in what Pual did was that he intentionally rejected what Jesus had taught. He did not just ignore Jesus’ teaching, as many scholars have noted, but more so, he acted intentionally to trash, for example, the wisdom tradition that Jesus belonged to. Note 1 Corinthians where Paul vilifies the wisdom tradition of Jesus as “the foolishness of worldly wisdom”.
Further, in other places, for example Galatians 1:8-9, Paul damns the leading apostles that claimed his Christ myth was heresy, just as he damns in general the followers of Jesus in Thessalonians (“Return in blazing fire to destroy all who do not believe my Christ myth”). As scholars note, Paul’s intolerant animosity toward the original Jesus movement, and the followers of Jesus, runs all through Paul’s letters and the rest of the New Testament.
I see the most direct statemen of Paul’s rejection of the message and theology of Jesus in Romans 12:17-20 where he confronted the “behavior based on belief” pattern that Jesus had used to present his breakthrough theological insight- “No more eye for eye retaliation but instead love your enemy because God loves enemies unconditionally and inclusively as seen in giving the most critical gifts of life, sun and rain, to all with equal generosity, to both good and bad people” (Matthew 5 and Luke 6).
Paul, using the same behavior based on belief model as Jesus, says in Romans 12, OK my followers, don’t retaliate against your enemies. He almost appears to initially agree with Jesus’ non-retaliatory ethic. He urges, hold back your lust for vengeance based on the belief that God will take vengeance on your enemies for you. To back his argument, he quotes the Old Testament, “Vengeance is mine, I will repay”, says the Lord. Paul goes to the heart of the matter- the theology- to contradict Jesus at the core of things.
And what vengeance the wrathful, retaliatory God will wreak. That Revelation 19 Christ. Paul continues, stating to his followers that their being nice to their enemies for now will ensure horrific divine vengeance on their enemies. Their restraint and niceness will “heap burning coals on their enemies’ heads”. So, even the apparent non-retaliatory behavior that Paul advocates is retaliatory in intention.
There is no rejection of eye for eye retaliation with Paul and his God. Contrary to Jesus, Paul takes retaliation to new heights in the Christ who will destroy all life in a final world-ending apocalypse and then eternal hell.
Paul’s Christ cult, with help along the way from Emperor Constantine and others, eventually dominated the ancient world. His Hellenistic Christ resonated with the prominent Hellenism that had shaped the Roman world (Helmut Koester, “History, Culture, And Religion Of The Hellenistic Age”).
Thomas Jefferson, and Leo Tolstoy, both summarized what Paul did in rejecting Jesus’ message and replacing it with his Christ myth. They said that Paul “buried” the diamond message of Jesus. That message was the discovery and insight of Historical Jesus that God was non-retaliatory, unconditional and universal love. That truth would have liberated humanity from threat theology as nothing before in history.
Pulling the diamonds out of the muck (Jefferson, Tolstoy), Wendell Krossa
The original message of Historical Jesus- i.e. Wisdom Sayings- as stated in Matthew 5: 38-48 or better Luke 6: 27-36.
The central statements of Jesus go to the very heart of primary human concerns and questions- i.e. Why our existence in this messed up world with so much suffering? What is the purpose of reality and life? And why the things in nature that frighten us, and even worse, the myths in religious narratives that exacerbate our natural fears with threats of angry gods punishing us through the harsh elements of the natural world, punishing people for being imperfect, for messing up so much.
The Jesus insight on God as unconditional love is the singularly most profound response ever to such fears, fears of being threatened, punished, and rejected (i.e. ultimate judgment and hell myths). Fears of being alone in suffering, fears that our curiosity and questioning of religious narratives is the sin of being deceived by evil spirits/forces, and consequently of being condemned to ultimate after-life harm of the worst imaginable kind- i.e. torture by painful burning forever.
The insights of Jesus go directly to the source of all such religious threat, and the consequent misery engendered by that threat, and cut the taproot that sustains it. His message goes directly to the monster God that has incited, affirmed, and exacerbated such fears across history. The Jesus insight goes to heart of threat theology and slays the monster.
In his central teaching Jesus rejected the very core that was threat theology. He presented a profound liberation from primal fears and anxieties by telling us that the Source of all, the creator and sustainer, was love of a stunningly unconditional nature. Meaning there was no threat of any kind. We were all safe, surrounded by a divine love that permeates all reality and life as the creating, sustaining Consciousness.
While there had been elements of more humane features in the pre-Jesus era gods (kindness, mercy, etc.) there was no clean break with the dominant themes of threat theology. Pre-Jesus gods were severe judges who meted out punitive justice and made demands of people to assuage their anger and incite them to provide benefits. There were no entirely threat-free deities.
Interesting that Jesus based his teaching on unconditional deity by first rejecting the concept of justice as retaliatory, stating the ethic that there should be no more “eye for eye” treatment of offenders but that, instead, we should love our enemies because God did. He added then that the non-retaliatory, unconditional love of God was evident in two fundamental elements of nature that are critical to the human food supply in agrarian society- i.e. sun and rain. The unconditional feature in his stunning new theology of God was that these two gifts of nature were given universally, without discrimination to both good and bad people.
That kind of merciful generosity was stunning to ancient views of justice, it was scandalous and offensive as Jesus acknowledged in his parables of the Prodigal (note the response of the older brother to the father’s generosity) and the parable of the vineyard owner (note the response of the all-day workers to the owner’s generosity to the late comers).
We see the amazingly universal and unconditional generosity behind many elements of life. Look at crops. When you plant one seed of some crop, you get hundreds of similar seeds in return for that one. This is unlimited generosity in nature that expresses the scandalously generous Consciousness behind it all.
Moving along…
Jesus added that the God of unconditional love dwelt within us. The loving Reality that is our Source was inside us, closer than our own atoms or breath. Meaning that we were one with it, inseparable, never to be lost or abandoned. This is the profoundly comforting conclusion from the truth of fundamental “Oneness”, whether based on quantum entanglement or NDE discoveries.
Jesus’ astonishing new theology of no conditions love opened new avenues of thought to hope and freedom from the primal fears that haunt the background of our minds. If that divine love is given central place in narratives, it will bring powerful liberation from primal fears, and effect the deepest forms of healing throughout human personality and life.
My conclusion- With the new theology of Jesus there is no demand to embrace tribalism, to find and join a “true religion” in opposition to “false religions” (the Zoroastrian cosmic dualism thing). There is no demand to engage the dualism of a righteous battle against evil enemies who must be defeated and eliminated. There is no demand to view oneself in opposition to differing others as “unbelievers”. With a no conditions God, there is no demand for sacrifice or payment to appease divine anger. In fact, Jesus protested that condition of sacrifice and was killed for his protest.
Most critical, with his stunning new theology Jesus defanged the fear of afterlife harm that added sting to people’s already natural fear of death. He gutted that end-of-life fear by reassuring that all were ultimately safe in an endless future of unconditional love. There was no cosmic dualism of heaven and hell, no ultimate tribal division of humanity into believers and unbelievers (the division of goats and sheep as portrayed in Revelation).
No religion has ever come anywhere near close to presenting the truth of God as no conditions love. Religion, constructed as an essentially conditional institution, cannot present the unconditional reality that Jesus offered. Hence, religion cannot represent or present the true nature of deity to humanity. Religion, as conditional, cannot offer ultimate freedom of mind, spirit, and life.
That is why scholars say it is patently ridiculous to claim that Jesus started another religion. He very theology of unconditional deity shows that at the core of his message he opposed religious conditions entirely.
The message of Historical Jesus, if embraced in our narratives as he originally presented it, would have then worked down into human subconscious to replace the old inherited archetypes long shaped by threat theology and conditional salvation religions. That is the true liberation movement that Paul derailed with his conditional Christ.
Bob and myself, along with many others, are going to the root of things by going after these monstrous threat theology beliefs. As with many others, we are pointing out the great fraud and lie of Paul’s Christ that has been pushed for 2 millennia as ultimate truth and has egregiously buried the liberating, humanizing alternative that was presented by Jesus. Our project is about going after the most fundamental roots of all problems, the beliefs/ideas in human narratives that potently shape human thinking, emotions, motivations, and responses/behavior. The outcomes in human societies have been horrific when narratives are framed with inhumane features.
Primitive human beliefs/myths, across millennia, became the archetypes in human subconscious from where they emanate to endlessly influence and shape human narratives, minds, and lives.
The history of Western understanding, and consequently Western lives and societies, has been deformed by the greatest fraud and lie in all history- Paul’s re-establishment of primitive threat theology in his Christ.
The myth of Paul short-circuited the greatest possible liberation movement for humanity – Jesus’ stunning new insight that would have liberated humanity from the threat theologies that have darkened and enslaved humanity to primal fears for millennia.
The difference between the message of Jesus and the contrary message of Paul highlights the fundamental distinction between good and evil.
Now, as I promised, some excerpts below from Bob Brinsmead’s essays.
I know of no finer wise man or sage to give you a sword to fight and slay your monster than Bob Brinsmead and his research and essays. Bob has been critical to my life journey in helping me out of a dark place (mentally/emotionally chained by threat theology) to find a way to conquer my personal monster- the Christ God of Christianity.
See the following essays of Bob at…
https://bobbrinsmead.com/the-historical-jesus-what-the-scholars-are-saying/
https://bobbrinsmead.com/the-doctrine-of-christ-and-the-triump-of-hellenism/
(The essays are linked here by permission of the author.)
Point: Christianity does not represent the true Jesus of history. To the contrary, Christianity and its New Testament promotes Paul’s Christ that buried the person and message of Jesus.
“Opposition to the cult of sacrifice was always a central feature of (Jesus’ life and message)”, Bob Brinsmead.
Below are some quotes from Bob’s essays to give some flavor of the stunning research showing that Paul’s Christ was constructed as entirely contrary to who Jesus actually was and what he actually taught. This contradiction has to be the greatest fraud in history considering how influential Christianity has been and still is in shaping public consciousness and narratives.
First: A Summary of Historical Jesus’ core message:
(How to end cycles of retaliatory violence, how to courageously initiate peace in societies).
The guiding ideals/principles of Historical Jesus:
“Give to everyone who asks you, and if anyone takes what belongs to you, do not demand it back. Do to others as you would have them do to you. If you love only those who love you, what credit is that to you? Everyone finds it easy to love those who love them. And if you do good to those who are good to you, what credit is that to you? Everyone can do that. And if you lend to those from whom you expect repayment, what credit is that to you? Most will lend to others, expecting to be repaid in full.
“But do something more heroic, more humane. (Live on a higher plane of human experience). Do not retaliate against your offenders/enemies with ‘eye for eye’ justice. Instead, love your enemies, do good to them, and lend to them without expecting to get anything back. Then you will be just like God because God does not retaliate against God’s enemies. God does not mete out eye for eye justice. Instead, God is kind to the ungrateful and the wicked. God causes the sun to rise on the evil and the good and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous. Be unconditionally loving, just as your God is unconditionally loving”. (My paraphrase of Luke 6:32-36 or Matthew 5:38-48.)
This can be summarized in this single statement: “Love your enemy because God does”.
Example of non-retaliatory, unconditional love: The Prodigal Father story in Luke 15:11-31.
The Father (representing God) did not demand a sacrifice, restitution, payment, apology, or anything else before forgiving, fully accepting, and loving the wasteful son.
The above statement and illustration by Jesus, overturns the highly conditional Christian religion and Paul’s Christ mythology. Paul, along with the rest of the New Testament, preached a retaliatory God who demanded full payment and punishment of all sin in a blood sacrifice of atonement before he would forgive, accept, and ultimately love anyone.
Main contradictions between Jesus and Christ, Wendell Krossa
The main contradictions that highlight the oxymoronically opposite themes in the messages of Historical Jesus and Paul’s Christ mythology. The point I draw from this? The themes of Paul have shaped Western consciousness, narratives, and overall societies for the past two millennia. The Jesus themes have influenced us to a lesser extent, mainly moderating the harsher features of Paul’s message:
(1) Unconditional love (i.e. no sacrifice demanded in Jesus original message- i.e. the “Q Wisdom Sayings” gospel). Versus the highly conditional atonement religion of Paul (i.e. the supreme condition of the sacrifice of a cosmic godman- the Christ).
(2) Nonretaliation in Jesus (no more ‘eye for eye’ justice but ‘love the enemy’ because God does not retaliate but loves and includes enemies- as in sun and rain for all alike). Versus supreme divine retaliation in apocalypse and hell myths. Note Paul’s theology of a supremely retaliatory deity- “’Vengeance is mine, I will repay’, says the Lord” (Romans 12), and his “Lord Jesus returning in fire to destroy all who don’t believe Paul’s Christ myth” (Thessalonians).
(3) Restorative justice (again- no eye for eye) versus punitive, destroying justice.
(4) Nonviolent resolution of problems (again, no retaliation against enemies) versus the violent destruction of apocalypse and hell, and the violent pacification of deity by blood sacrifice for atonement.
(5) Nontribal inclusion of all humanity (“sun and rain given freely to both bad and good people”) versus the highly tribal favoritism toward true believers and the discriminatory exclusion of unbelievers as per Paul’s Christ (Note the ultimate tribal divide illustrated in Revelation as the eternal division of humans- assigned either to heaven or to hell, as per the cosmic dualism of Zoroaster).
(6) Nondomination in relationships (“If you want to be great then serve others”) versus ultimate eternal domination by Lord Christ with his rod of iron totalitarianism (“every knee shall bow… He will rule them with an iron scepter”).
(7) Non-dualism (God as the Oneness of Ultimate Reality that is love) versus eternal dualism (i.e. again, the cosmic dualism of “God and Satan”, “heaven and hell”).
And so on…
You cannot mix and merge such opposites in the one and same person- i.e. “Jesus Christ”- as that supremely oxymoronic combination creates such profound cognitive dissonance that you are left with a mental state akin to insanity or madness. And the egregious thing in the mix is that the good elements (i.e. the Jesus insights) are distorted and buried by the primitive and darkening elements in the Christology of Paul.
Applying Christology to Jesus (i.e. the divinizing of a common man over the first few centuries of Christianity) has effectively buried the potency of his liberating insights, notably his stunning new theology of a non-retaliatory, non-apocalyptic God. That truth of in his entirely new view of deity, though still present there in summaries of his statements (see Matthew 5, Luke 6), that “stunning new theology” is no longer clearly visible to most people’s minds because the larger New Testament context emphasizes Paul’s retaliatory, apocalyptic Christ. Paul intent on straightening Jesus out. His “secret wisdom of the Christ” correcting the ignorant/foolish worldly wisdom of Jesus and his followers, like Apollos.
Thomas Jefferson and Leo Tolstoy both nailed the contradiction between Jesus and Paul in the bluntest terms and no one has been as clear and direct since, perhaps because their comments are so offensive to true believer’s sensibilities. Few since have paid attention to their clarifying the stark contrast between Jesus and Paul, preferring instead the religious reformism that tinkers around the edges and gets nothing done, that avoids the central issue of theology- how Paul’s Christology deformed Jesus and his message.
Now, more from Bob’s essay “What the Scholars are Saying”…
Note the statements of researchers below that Christianity is Paul’s “heresy” that the true Jesus movement rejected.
Bob quotes Keith Akers “The Lost Religion of Jesus”
Quotes:
The Temple protest of Jesus was all about his opposition to the cult of sacrifice
Jesus was attacking the practice of animal sacrifice. “I came to abolish sacrifices,” says the Ebionite Jesus, “and unless you cease sacrificing, my anger will not cease from you.” (Panarion 30.116.5) Now there is a pronouncement explosive enough to cause the temple hierarchy to want Jesus crucified. p.113
The primary practical effect of the so-called “cleansing of the temple” was (in John) to empty the temple of the animals that were to be sacrificed, or (the synoptics) to drive out those who were taking them to be killed or were selling them to be killed. We must remember that the temple was more like a butcher’s shop than any modern-day church or synagogue. “Cleansing the temple” was an act of animal liberation. p.117
[Ed. (Bob’s) Comment: Akers’ book is brilliant in presenting the evidence that it was Jesus’ passionate protest against the institution of sacrificing at the temple which led directly to his being put to death. Unless Jesus’ ultimate concern in his temple protest was that forgiveness of sin is always freely available and needs no atoning sacrifice (as if our alienation from God and one another is something that it can be bought or sold), then Jesus would be giving his life for no higher cause than being some kind of Pythagorian reformer or animal liberator].
Then this quote from Jeffrey Butz’s “The brother of Jesus and the lost teachings of Christianity”
“…if the first followers of Jesus – including the apostles and Jesus own family – were thoroughly Jewish in their belief and practice and opposed to Paul’s interpretation of the gospel, then just what is “orthodoxy” and what is “heresy.” Is Christianity, as it has come to be practised for close to two millennia, in fact based on a heresy? And is the “heresy” of Jewish Christianity in fact the original orthodoxy? … these questions are being addressed more and more by scholars, and if we want to learn the truth about Jesus and James, we must address them too.” p.138-9
My insert to Bob’s material (Wendell Krossa): Bob emphasizes the research that affirms “As with James so with Jesus”, meaning that the best research on Jesus has revealed that he was thoroughly Jewish and his brother James, who became the leader of the Jesus movement after Jesus’ death, best represented what Jesus taught. The Christian New Testament which was constructed to promote Paul’s new religion, downplays, dismisses, and discredits James and his message that more correctly represents Jesus.
Quotes from Butz:
Conflict between Paul and James and the Jerusalem church
In fact, it could be said that the purpose of almost all of Paul’s letters was to counteract the authority, beliefs, and practices of James and the Jerusalem church. p.149
…they [Jewish Christians] did not regard the death of Jesus as atoning for their sins. p.151
The Jewish Christians as the true representatives of Jesus viewed Paul and his Christ as heretical.
Quotes from Butz:
The Jewish Christians…thoroughly rooted in the teaching of James and the other apostles, thought of the Pauline churches as the heretics. p.162
Paul’s teachings are being seen by a rapidly growing number of modern scholars and writers as a distortion of what Jesus taught, and the development of the Christian church as a travesty of the original Jewish beliefs and teachings of Jesus. p.172
Then from Barry Wilson’s “How Jesus Became Christian”
The Jesus movement was not the same as the Christ movement
This Christ Movement [of the Hellenizers and Paul] came to cover up the original teachings of Jesus…the original message of Jesus and the Jesus Movement, Jesus’ earliest followers in Jerusalem, became switched for a different religion…The Christ Movement replaced the original Jesus Movement …there was an important shift away from the teachings of Jesus to those about the Christ. That is, beliefs about the person of Jesus conceived of as a Christ came to obscure what he said and did. Thus, the religion of Jesus, the one Jesus practiced and taught, became transformed into a cult about the Christ…
Paul’s religion was not the religion of Jesus…the divine Gentile Christ was switched for the human Jewish Jesus. A religion about the Christ substituted for the teachings of Jesus… It was a huge switch – the Christ for Jesus, Paul’s religion for Jesus’, and the Christ Movement for the Jesus Movement, the Christ Movement for the Jesus Movement…Simply put, Jesus got upstaged by Paul. pp. 2-6
As James, so Jesus. The best indication of what Jesus of the 20s actually taught is likely to be James. His brother. James knew the man and what he stood for. He knew that Jesus knew and practised Torah as they did…James is the best clue we have today concerning the beliefs and practices of the Jesus of history. p.98
Christology replaced the teaching of Jesus
[(he cult of the person of Jesus as the Christ Jesus developed after his death] These beliefs originated from the Christ Movement led by Paul. The image of Jesus changed dramatically over the course of just over one hundred years. Jesus became seen as a divine being holding cosmic importance. Along with that development went another: a repudiation of his Jewish heritage…The image of Jesus changed radically, while his roots within Judaism were forgotten. By the mid-second century, Christian leaders were touting Jesus as an incarnate saviour who redeemed humanity by his death and resurrection. Who he was thought to be came to obscure what he had taught and practiced. This represents a remarkable shift in emphasis – away from the religion of Jesus and toward a religion about Christ. pp.103-104)
The Jesus of history disappears in Paul’s thought
In reading Paul’s letters, it is surprising how little is made of anything that comes from the Jesus of history. There is not much in Paul’s writing that would give us grounds for thinking that Jesus had anything important to say. As we have noted, Paul disclosed only that Jesus was born, was Jewish, and died. Moreover, he did not ground his own message in the teachings, observances, or sayings that come from the religion of Jesus. There are no parables, no Lord’s Prayer, or no Sermon on the Mount. There is nothing that would reflect the relationship one would expect from a disciple of a rabbi. There is just what Paul says he got mystically from the Christ whom he claims reveals himself to him. Devoid of linkage to the Jesus Movement and to Judaism generally, Paul’s Christ Movement would have appeared suspiciously like a Hellenistic mystery religion. p.146
Paul built his view of Christ on models found outside Judaism, in the mystery religions of the time. The Christ is like Dionysus or Mithras or many other figures – heroes who die and rise again to save humanity and whose followers can achieve salvation through participation in the hero’s life and death. When Christos translated Mashiach, it transported the concept from a Jewish environment into a vastly different world. p.247
The transformation brought about by the Christification process was so successful that the religion of the historical Jesus was replaced by the cult of the Christ. In so doing, the early church “killed off” the historical Jesus, focusing, instead, on the worship of the Christ. The myth of the Christ was so effective that it is very difficult now to reconstruct the contours of the authentic teachings, sayings, and doings of the historical Jesus. p.248
What we have today in Christianity is largely Paulinity, a religion about the Gentile Christ that covers over the message of the Jewish Jesus of history…Going forward, we need to recover the humanity and Jewishness of Jesus at the popular level, not just in academia…”
End of quotes from Bob’s essay. There is a lot more in Bob’s essay including his response to the scholars. See links above to Bob’s essays.
Some additional material…
Grok’s response to the first part of “What the scholars say”, the actual quotes of the scholars.
I asked Grok to summarize Bob’s essay.
Grok gave this response:
Here’s a summary of the key points from Robert D. Brinsmead’s document, “Part 1 – The Identity and Beliefs of the Apostolic Church,” based on the cited scholarly works:
The document explores the historical identity and beliefs of the apostolic church, emphasizing the pivotal role of James, the brother of Jesus, and challenging traditional Christian narratives shaped by later theological developments. It begins with the Enlightenment’s impact, which spurred empirical inquiry into religious traditions, including the quest for the historical Jesus. This quest, spanning over two centuries, has revealed significant differences between the historical Jesus and the Christ of orthodox faith, supported by diverse scholars—Catholic, Protestant, Jewish, and secular historians—who largely agree on key historical points.
The apostolic church, led by James in Jerusalem, is portrayed as distinct from the later, Hellenized Christianity that emerged outside Palestine. James is consistently depicted as the preeminent leader of the early church, a “towering figure” and the first bishop of Jerusalem, succeeding Jesus directly without evidence of a prior conversion from unbelief. Sources like Paul’s letters, Eusebius, Hegesippus, and the Gospel of Thomas affirm his leadership, often overshadowing Peter’s role, which appears exaggerated in later texts like Acts and Matthew. The family of Jesus, including James and later Symeon (a cousin), held significant influence, maintaining leadership within a Jewish Christian framework.
The beliefs of this church, rooted in Jewish Christianity, diverged sharply from orthodox Christian doctrines. Scholars argue it rejected the virgin birth, Jesus’ deity, and his death as an atoning sacrifice—concepts that developed later in Gentile contexts. Instead, Jesus was seen as a human prophet or messiah, possibly a Nazirite (like James and John the Baptist), who opposed animal sacrifices and emphasized forgiveness without temple mediation. The Ebionites, a key Jewish Christian group descending from this tradition, were vegetarian, pacifist, and adhered to the Mosaic Law while critically rejecting parts of Jewish scripture (e.g., sacrificial laws) as later corruptions. Jesus’ temple protest is interpreted as a direct attack on the sacrificial system, likely the primary cause of his execution by temple authorities, not Roman initiative.
The document highlights a historical rewrite, particularly in the New Testament (e.g., Acts and the Gospels), which marginalized James and Jewish Christianity to favor Pauline theology and a Gentile-friendly narrative. Mark’s Gospel critiques both Jesus’ family and the Twelve, possibly aligning with Paul, while Luke obscures tensions between Paul and James. Over time, as Jerusalem’s influence waned post-70 CE, Pauline and Johannine Christology—emphasizing Jesus as divine and sacrificial—dominated, suppressing the apostolic church’s Jewish roots. Scholars like Eisenman suggest James offers the clearest lens into the historical Jesus, proposing that “who and whatever James was, so was Jesus.”
In essence, the apostolic church is presented as a Jewish movement centered on James’ leadership, focused on Jesus’ ethical teachings and opposition to sacrifice, which was later overshadowed by a Hellenized, anti-Semitic Christianity that redefined Jesus’ identity and mission. The takeaway, echoing the scholars, is to prioritize Jesus’ own words over centuries of theological overlay, a principle rooted in Enlightenment rationality and historical evidence.
Let me know if you’d like a deeper dive into any specific section!
Then I asked Grok to summarize Bob’s comments at bottom of “What the scholar say”.
Grok replied at first:
Here’s a concise summary of the essay “How the Jesus Movement of James Was Upstaged and Buried by the Christ Movement of Paul” by Robert D. Brinsmead:
The Apostolic Church in Jerusalem, founded after Jesus’ death and led by his brother James, was a Jewish movement focused on Jesus’ ethical teachings, rejecting his divinity, virgin birth, or sacrificial death. James, a prominent figure until his martyrdom in 62 CE, guided this community, which remained Jewish in practice and identity. After the Jewish-Roman War in 70 CE, its influence declined as Judaism expelled the Nazarenes and Gentile Christianity, driven by Paul, rose.
Paul’s theology, based on visions rather than Jesus’ historical teachings, introduced a divine Christ whose death atoned for sins—a concept alien to the Jerusalem church, which saw Jesus’ death as a result of his protest against temple sacrifices, not a redemptive act. By the 4th century, Paul’s Christology dominated, marginalizing James’ movement and Jesus’ family (the Desposyni), who aligned with the Ebionites. The Gospels, written post-70 CE under Pauline influence, blend Jesus’ teachings with this myth, preserving some history but prioritizing Christology. Christianity’s core became Paul’s theology, though Jesus’ humanitarian teachings persist as a universal, overshadowed minority voice.
I then asked for more.
Grok replied:
Apologies if the summary felt too brief! I aimed for conciseness while capturing the main points. Here’s a slightly expanded version to ensure I’ve covered the key elements you might be looking for:
In “How the Jesus Movement of James Was Upstaged and Buried by the Christ Movement of Paul,” Robert D. Brinsmead contrasts two early Christian trajectories. The Apostolic Church, established in Jerusalem post-Pentecost, was led by James, Jesus’ brother, and included Jesus’ family (the Desposyni) and disciples. This Jewish community, thriving until 70 CE, adhered to Jewish law, rejected Jesus’ divinity, virgin birth, or atonement through death, and saw him as a human prophet whose teachings emphasized ethics and non-violence. James, known as “James the Just,” led for 32 years until his martyrdom in 62 CE, earning widespread respect even beyond the church. After his death, leadership passed to Symeon, another relative, showing the family’s ongoing role.
Paul, however, never met Jesus and based his theology on personal revelations, presenting a divine, pre-existent Christ whose crucifixion atoned for humanity’s sins—a stark departure from the Jerusalem church’s view of Jesus’ death as a consequence of his temple protest against animal sacrifices, echoing John the Baptist’s stance. The Jewish-Roman War of 70 CE devastated Jerusalem, weakening this “Jesus movement.” Judaism expelled the Nazarenes (later Ebionites), and Paul’s Gentile-focused “Christ movement” gained traction, eventually dominating as Christianity shifted to Rome. By the 4th century, Paul’s Christology—codified in doctrines like the Trinity—became orthodox, enforced violently, while James’ legacy was suppressed.
The Gospels, written after 70 CE by unknown Greek-speaking authors influenced by Paul, blend historical teachings (e.g., parables) with myth, prioritizing Christology over Jesus’ original message. Brinsmead identifies three divides: James’ teachings came from Jesus directly, Paul’s from visions; James focused on Jesus’ ethics, Paul on Christ’s death; James saw Jesus’ death as martyrdom, Paul as sacrifice. Christianity’s “major chord” is Paul’s theology, preserving Jesus’ story but overshadowing his teachings—the “minor chord”—which retain universal appeal, inspiring figures like Gandhi despite the triumph of Paul’s myth.
Let me know if you’d like more detail on any specific part!
Bob then commented on Grok’s summary of his essay:
“Grok misses big time my focus in Jesus’ stunningly new doctrine of God that implies universalism. Jesus’ God is non-violent or a non-violent response to evil which rejects retaliatory justice and exhibits a healing restorative justice. In the Sermon on the Mount or Luke’s sermon on the plain, the ethics that Jesus calls for is one that mirrors God’s response to human failure.
“Others before Jesus had taught a similar ethical behaviour (i.e. non-retaliation) but none ventured like Jesus did to disarm the God of violence and to reject all the threat theology pushed by religion for centuries. It was on the basis of Jesus’ teaching that the Ebionites eliminated passages of scripture about offering animal sacrifices and at the same time eliminated many of the passages in scripture or Old Testament that advocated violence as what they called “false periscopes.”
“Grok’s take on the ethical teachings of Jesus will appear to be weighted or even misunderstood as an attainment of righteousness or a meriting of favour with God by ethical behaviour, when in fact human destiny is based on God’s loving kindness alone just as life itself in this cosmos is sustained by God as an unmerited gift.
“It is the doctrine of the atoning sacrifice of Christ that merits forgiveness that puts a cloud over the stunning fact that God’s loving forgiveness of humanity comes with no strings attached. A love that forgives after the debt is paid does not forgive at all. It is neither unconditional love nor unconditional forgiveness.
“What Paul’s doctrine of atonement does is turn Jesus’ announcement of an unconditional amnesty of all human debts into a temporary cessation of divine hostilities instead of a total disarmament of God and disarmament of all the threat theology that goes with it. Because the New Testament threat of the Apocalypse puts the worst violence expressed in the Old Testament on steroids in the twin doctrine of blood atonement and an eternal Hell. If the more than 600 passages of divine violence of the Old Testament are hard to stomach, at least it never reached the level of New Testament violence.”
I then fed Grok Bob’s response to it’s summary and it came back with this…
Grok says:
Here’s how I’d respond to Bob Brinsmead’s critique, keeping in mind his emphasis and aiming to engage thoughtfully with his perspective:
Thank you, Bob, for your detailed feedback and for clarifying the heart of your argument. I see now that my initial summary didn’t fully capture the radical shift you’re highlighting in Jesus’ doctrine of God—a shift toward a non-violent deity whose response to evil is restorative rather than retaliatory, and whose unconditional love underpins a universalist vision. I’ve revised my summary to better reflect this focus, emphasizing how Jesus’ teaching, especially in the Sermon on the Mount and Luke’s Sermon on the Plain, mirrors God’s character in its call for non-retaliation and forgiveness, disarming the violent God of traditional threat theology in a way that’s unprecedented.
You’re absolutely right to point out that I initially framed Jesus’ ethical teachings in a way that could suggest they’re about earning righteousness or favor—a misstep on my part. I see now that you’re arguing the exact opposite: human destiny hinges solely on God’s loving-kindness, not on any merit-based system. Your analogy of life itself as an unmerited gift from the cosmos really drives this home, and I’ve worked to correct that lens in my revised take.
Your critique of the atonement doctrine is particularly striking. I hadn’t fully grasped how you see it clouding Jesus’ message of unconditional forgiveness—turning it into something transactional, where love and amnesty come with “strings attached” rather than as a total rejection of divine violence. I can see why you’d argue that a forgiveness contingent on a paid debt doesn’t align with the non-violent, disarmed God you find in Jesus’ teaching.
And your point about Paul’s theology shifting this into a temporary ceasefire, only to ramp up threat theology elsewhere in the New Testament (like Revelation’s eschatological violence or eternal Hell), adds a layer I hadn’t adequately weighed. It’s a compelling contrast to the Old Testament’s violence, which, as you note, pales in scale next to the apocalyptic stakes of the New Testament.
I also appreciate your nod to the Ebionites—how they saw Jesus’ revelation as a mandate to strip away violent scriptures and sacrificial systems as “false periscopes.” It underscores just how disruptive you view Jesus’ doctrine to be, not just ethically but theologically.
I’ve tried to reflect all this in my revised summary. Does it now align more closely with your intent? If I’ve still missed the mark—or if there’s more you’d like me to dig into, like the universalist implications or the tension with Paul—I’m eager to refine it further. My goal isn’t to impose my own lens but to understand and represent yours as faithfully as possible.
This response aims to acknowledge where I got it wrong, affirm his key points, and show a willingness to adjust while inviting further dialogue. How do you think it lands?
End of Grok stuff.
My further points on the complex of themes in Paul’s threat theology, similar to all threat theology across history. This list below is the complex of ideas that buttress the central myth of punitive, destroying deity, the cohering center of this complex of bad ideas.
Here they are- The most dominant myths/beliefs/themes in the history of human thought and communication, the ideas that have shaped human meta-narratives across all history and across all the cultures of the world, in both religious and secular/ideological versions. These are among the most destructive themes/ideas/beliefs ever created to deform human consciousness, frame narratives, and produce the worst outcomes in human lives and societies, Wendell Krossa
Taking Arthur Mendel’s statement that apocalyptic is “the most violent and destructive idea in history” (evident in, for example, the mass-death outcomes of Marxism and Nazism), I would apply Mendel’s assessment of apocalyptic to the entire complex below.
Intro note:
Properly solving problems requires an understanding of all the contributing factors- i.e. probing the fundamental elements contributing to a problem, and then understanding how we properly fix that problem. With regard to narrative themes that contribute to inciting and validating bad human behavior, this means frankly re-evaluating which ideas in our narratives are bad, especially pushing past fear of warnings about “heresy, blasphemy” to look more closely at the core religious beliefs that have long been protected under the canopy of the sacred in our major world religious traditions (now also embedded in secular/ideological systems of belief).
And then, setting aside threats of damnation and hellfire from religious authorities, good problem solving will consider what themes should replace the old archetypes in order to create entirely new narratives that inspire hope and the no conditions love that gets us to true inclusion, diversity, and equality as in liberal democracies framed by Classic Liberal principles, systems of common law, and representative institutions that protect the rights and freedoms of all people, equally.
One suggestion, Julian Simon’s “Ultimate Resource” presents a significant body of evidence on the overall, long-term improvement of life that completely overturns the fallacy of life declining toward something worse, a basic theme in the pathology of apocalyptic mythology.
But first, the ideas that have darkened and enslaved human minds from the beginning.
The foundational planks of the psychopathologies in human meta-narratives are (1) the myth that the past was better but (2) humans ruined that original paradise world. That promotes reminiscent longing for something that never existed. Psychology speaks to this “rosy retrospection” fallacy of recalling the past more positively than it actually was.
Prehistorian John Pfeiffer suggests that the belief in an original golden age on Earth may have begun around 100,000 years ago. That prompted me to take a look at conditions on Earth around that time.
I would suggest this fallacy of original paradisal world probably began as our ancestors experienced the rapid ending of the Eemian interglacial of some 130-115,000 years ago. Research reveals that last interglacial was some 8 degrees C. warmer than our current Holocene interglacial. A paradisal warm period that enhanced human survival.
Some studies suggest the Eemian interglacial may have ended suddenly, over just a few centuries, or even just decades. Our ancestors, even with their much shorter lifespans (20-30ish years) would have remembered the better past as the previous warmer climate that made survival easier.
See this link:
https://www.esd.ornl.gov/projects/qen/transit.html
“The time span of the past few million years has been punctuated by many rapid climate transitions, most of them on time scales of centuries to decades or even less. The most detailed information is available for the Younger Dryas-to-Holocene stepwise change around 11,500 years ago, which seems to have occurred over a few decades. The speed of this change is probably representative of similar but less well-studied climate transitions during the last few hundred thousand years. These include sudden cold events (Heinrich events/stadials), warm events (Interstadials) and the beginning and ending of long warm phases, such as the Eemian interglacial.”
The better past myth generates the felt need to correct a wrong that humans have caused, to rebalance the unbalanced scales of cosmic justice. Blaming humanity for the present natural imperfection of the world as the result of “original human sin” is a denial of the fact that there never was a better or perfect past (original paradise, Eden). Also, blaming humanity for ruining everything, based on a false myth, just adds more unnecessary guilt and shame to the overall sense of failure/fault that people already suffer due to their sense of their imperfection and the imperfection of their world. Such mythology is the beginning of all anti-humanism in human civilization.
This original sin myth became a major mental distortion in cultures across the world, that humans made an original mistake, committed an error/sin that caused the gods to become angry and end a previous paradise world- i.e. the Sumerian Dilmun myth where Enki eats the 8 forbidden plants and ruins Dilmun, or the Eden myth where Adam and Eve ruin paradise and are punished by God who fills life with suffering in a subsequently imperfect world.
I heard a version of this human ruin of paradise from Manobo tribes in Mindanao who said that a girl pounding rice raised her stick too high, hit heaven and upset the gods, who then sealed off the formerly open door of heaven. That was the original sin that ruined paradise in Manobo mythology.
No single book has more potently blown away the fallacy of a better past, and life declining, along with the fallacy of humans as corrupt destroyers, than Simon’s “Ultimate Resource”. His data is now dated but his principles for determining the true state of life are as informative and useful as when first published. Numerous following researchers have continued to affirm his conclusions. See, for example, “Humanprogress.org”. Greg Easterbrook also presents some interesting comment on the human contribution to improving an already imperfect natural world (“A Moment On The Earth”).
Add to the myth of “fallen humanity angering deity” the ancient belief that there are spirits/gods behind all elements of life. And because nature is often harmful- i.e. natural disaster, disease, accident, predatory cruelty- it was then obvious/logical to primitive minds that the gods were angry with people’s sins and hence punish them through nature. And that anger must be appeased as critical for human survival. That fed the impulse of some early creative mind to make sacrifices, both human and animal, to appease divine anger and to obtain blessings/favors from the gods (i.e. sun, rain, food).
The logic behind sacrifice? Some suggest it had to do with substitution- “A life for a life, blood for blood”. Take this innocent for my guilt. A tribal man explained it to me thus- “We offer the blood of the animal and the god eats that and is satisfied and will not eat our souls”. Something eaten in place of us, that spares us.
Further, note the primeval myth that humans were created to be slaves, to serve the gods/elites, to feed the gods, do the work of the gods, adds to the overall pathology of degrading, dehumanizing, and demonizing humanity. From the beginning, the earliest shaman, agitating to dominate their fellow tribals, initiated the demand for domination/submission forms of relating as natural, as divinely authorized. And claiming special insight into the mysteries of the invisible world of the gods, the shaman established themselves as the representatives who spoke for the gods, as the priesthoods who would represent the rule of the gods.
That early unleashing of the inherited animal impulse to dominate others (alpha-ism), eventually expressed in the Hellenistic belief of “special people as divine in some manner”, elites divinely gifted and appointed to rule commoners.
Christianity was then shaped by that Greek mythology and eventually formulated the belief in such things as “the Divine right of kings”. The elite belief in domination/submission forms of relating was exemplified in the Christian belief in “Lord Christ” as the epitome embodiment of ruling authority, the archetype (See, for example, Romans 13, Revelation, on eternal domination/submission).
Next theme (continuing to build on the above):
(3) The myth of “Declinism” that dominates our modern era– detailed by Arthur Herman in “The Idea of Decline In Western History”. The idea that the trajectory of life declines toward a worsening state.
A majority of people across the world believe that the world is becoming worse (see the YouGov survey in “Ten Global Trends”). Herman stated that the idea of decline was the most dominant and influential theme in the modern world. Hollywood obsessively promotes this primitive myth in its public storytelling (i.e. the decline of life toward disastrous collapse and ending as the essential element in apocalyptic mythology).
The fallacy that life/the world is becoming worse undermines hope that is essential to human wellbeing, flourishing, and endeavor. The myth of decline produces a sense of fatalism, resignation, giving up, and nihilism. Look at the prominence today of depression, anxiety disorder, fear of growing up, fear of having children (i.e. fear of bringing children into a world soon to end), etc.
Again, Simon’s Ultimate Resource is the brilliant response/counter to the Declinism of life fallacy.
(4) Humanity is becoming worse, “Declinism” in humanity– i.e. the fallacy of “human degeneration” theory (Herman in “The Idea of Decline”). This anti-humanism fallacy has been beaten into human consciousness across history in religious narratives of original sinfulness (Adam “fall of man” mythology) and deforms human consciousness with the fallacy that humanity becomes worse over time. This myth feeds the deformation of the hero’s quest, where some people view themselves in terms of Zoroaster’s cosmic dualism, as the righteous true believers on the side of the true and good religion and obligated to battle the evil enemies on the other side, the differing others who are demonized as irredeemably bad, becoming ever worse, and deserving to be destroyed, exterminated.
To the contrary, the actual trajectory of humanity has been revealed by researchers like James Payne (“History of Force”) and Stephen Pinker (“Better Angels of Our Nature”). The evidence shows that we have steadily, across the millennia, become something better than before (i.e. less violent).
Simon’s “Ultimate Resource”, with amassed evidence on all the main indicators of the true state of life, affirms the same trajectory for humanity as for all life, that of gradual improvement over time. Simon concludes that the evidence on the long-term trajectory of life and humanity shows that we have become “more creators than destroyers”. The long-term improvement and progress reveals essential human goodness emerging and developing, and it counters the fallacy of essential human corruption and degeneration.
The decline theme culminates in (5) the myth of the final collapse and ending of life, the complete and final destruction of all the world in “apocalyptic destruction”. The idea of the apocalyptic destruction of all life, is the final phase in the story of “original paradise ruined by humanity with life declining toward something worse”. The threat of the destruction of all life incites the human survival impulse to hysterical heights that render people susceptible to subsequent irrational salvation schemes oriented to destroy life and society to “save the world”, often salvation schemes that promise otherworldly salvation that motivate people to abandon the effort to engage and improve this world.
We see the outcome of these apocalyptic millennial salvation crusades across history in the madness of revolutions that seek to destroy the existing world/civilization, to purge the “evil” of the present order as required to prepare for the installation of restored paradise or new millennial perfection. This was true of the Marxist and Nazi revolutions, and we are watching the repeat now in the environmental alarmist crusade against modern era industrial society, viewed as the destroyer of nature (humans ruining paradise), hence it must itself be destroyed to make way for the new utopian order (i.e. the revolutionary phase of exterminate the demonized “enemy” or be exterminated).
Insert: Varied other horrific natural disasters of the past may have incited our ancestors to invent and construct apocalyptic myths.
For example, evidence has been offered that some 7,500 years ago the Mediterranean Sea rose from melting glaciers and broke through the Bosphorus Straits to flood the Black Sea.
That great flood may have been what informed the Sumerian Flood myth of apocalypse, as well as the biblical account of Noah’s flood. Zoroaster then introduced the myth of apocalypse by fire, which shaped Paul’s belief in apocalypse by fire (see Thessalonians, Revelation, etc.).
When you add the threat of “imminent apocalypse”, with actual endless setting of dates for the end of days, you then incite the survival impulse of populations to the ultimate heights of fear, panic, and hysteria over the looming “end of the world”. That clouds people’s minds with fear and renders them susceptible to irrational salvation schemes where they willingly support policies to destroy their lives and societies in order to “save the world”. See Richard Landes (“Heaven On Earth”) for the example of the “Xhosa cattle slaughter”. Incited to hysteria over threatened apocalypse, they destroyed their main source of livelihood. So also with the destructive madness of decarbonization in today’s climate apocalypse movement.
Add the theme of (6) salvation as some form of sacrifice/payment, notably through the slaughter of animals across the past, with the felt obligation to make some sacrifice manifested today in things like “de-growth, de-development, decarbonization”- i.e. giving up the good life in modern civilization. Small is beautiful. Return to primitivism, the “moral superiority of the simple lifestyle”.
Is that also what all that wilderness survival stuff is catering to?
Further to this list of core bad ideas– Add (7) the tendency to deform the “hero’s quest”, the demand to heroically engage a righteous battle against evil enemies that must be purged, even exterminated as irredeemably evil and too corrupted to allow them to continue living. This derives from the Zoroastrian cosmic dualism myth and the follow-up divine demand to join the true religion of the true and good God to fight the false religion of the false Spirit.
This may be the most dangerously delusional element in this list. Especially when people convince themselves that God is on their side, that they are acting on behalf of God, they are God’s chosen people, special and favored by God above all others.
Who said the worst and most dangerous people in society are those who believe that they know what is best for all others. That belief is scaled up, intensified to the highest reach, by adding divinity to the equation to validate the totalitarian busybody impulse to meddle in and control other’s lives.
And then, talking about highest reaches of extremism, we further deform the hero’s quest when we frame differing others, the “enemies”, as hated by God, demonized as the “children of Satan”, so beyond the pale as to be deserving of hellfire. Quite naturally, that thinking leads to similar behaving- Let’s help them on their way to their true destination.
And if we frame our enemies as so irredeemably terrible because they threaten all life with what we claim are existential dangers, well, then it is even more righteous of us to move into the phase of “exterminate them or be exterminated” (the final phase of apocalyptic crusades where desperate heroes want to save the world from existential threats).
Once again that insightful summary: “Men never do worse evil than when they do it in the name of God”.
Alarmed heroes (“messiah complex”, saviors of the world) then further intensify the righteous battle against evil with the demand for “instantaneous purging of evil”, “coercive purification”, based on the belief that the threat from the enemy is so existentially immediate (i.e. the “always immanent apocalypse”) that there is no time for the normal gradualism of democratic processes. The urgency of the looming end of days demands immediate desperate measures, even violence against threatening enemies as legitimate, just, good, necessary… to “save the world” (see Arthur Mendel on the demand of impatient revolutionaries for “instantaneous purification” versus the gradualism of democracy, in his “Vision and Violence”).
Note how repeatedly across past decades the climate alarmism prophets claimed that evil consumers of fossil fuels were bringing on the end of life, that end was only a decade, or few years, up ahead. The end of days was endlessly passed due to the 100% failure rate of apocalyptic lunacy.
Then the last theme on this list: (8) The false carrot-stick hope stirred by the promise of fulfilled salvation in the restoration of a paradisal communalism. Or salvation in a new utopia of a millennial kingdom (Nazism), a return to the falsely imagined “strong, pure” existence of hunter-gatherers more connected to nature (Arthur Herman in “The Idea of Decline”, also “Hitler’s Millennial Reich” by David Redles).
These psychopathological themes have been fiercely defended and maintained across history in religious traditions and are now embraced in modern era “secular ideological” belief systems and even promoted by “science”.
The themes above distort entirely the “true state of life” in the world. They also distort the true nature of humanity, and consequently produce emotions, motivations, and policy responses that irrationally destroy life to save some imaginary world.
Julian Simon countered the “madness of crowds” thinking produced by the above themes with a detailed presentation of evidence on the true state of life, the actual improving trajectory of life over the long-term.
The above list is the complex of the worst of bad ideas that the ancients created, which they then affirmed with a tribal, dominating, destroying God as the cohering center of the complex, rendering the complex as the “untouchable sacred”, protected from challenge and dissent with threats of “blasphemy, heresy, evil unbelief, and hellfire”.
Again, a list of alternative themes for narratives:
“Humanity’s worst ideas, better alternatives (Old story themes, new story alternatives),” Wendell Krossa
http://www.wendellkrossa.com/?p=9533
This from Bob Brinsmead (on liberal democracy and human individual freedom)
“The government of the kingdom of God is self-government (free individual self-determination). God does not intend to run anyone’s life or intervene in anyone’s business. God is not the grand administrator of punitive justice. Self government is that everyone who does wrong inevitably punishes himself. The only Hell that exists is not created by God but by the one who does the wrong thing. Since the kingdom of God in which we are invited to live right here and now is a kingdom of love, it is by very nature the kingdom of freedom to do your own thing and be your own creator of your own character and life. This is so because where there is love there is freedom, and where there is no freedom of self-government there is no love. Love and freedom exist as two sides of the one coin.
“This is why all history and life demonstrates to us that God is a non-interventionist. God rules by not ruling, and God is present by suasion, by the voice of conscience and the enlightenment of self-interest.
“It is religion that distorts the nature of the kingdom of God by telling stories of how, in some past age, God intervened in the affairs of history by doing remarkable miracles as in so-called salvation history, but against this notion I cite the words of Wisdom- “there is nothing new under the sun.” The way God relates to history now was the same back then. For example, if God had intervened to reveal the germ theory of disease, it could have prevented millions of deaths.
“The progress made by the human Enlightenment did far more to save millions of lives and lift the standard of living from much extreme poverty and wretchedness and has done far more good than all the miracles and fables reported by religion. I am not arguing for the absence of God, for God is present in this place, at this time, as much as God is present in any other place and time.
“Where life is present, God is present and where love and light are present, God is also present. But as Sheehan has said, God has disappeared into humanity and can be found nowhere else. The first great commandment is observed only by observing the second. As Alexander Pope put it, “Cease from God to scan; the proper study of mankind is man.””