“When they came to our Land, we had the Land and they had the Bible. By the time they were done, we had the Bible and they had the Land”
Before there was an organised media, the battle for hearts and minds was very much the domain of organised religion and the Church. And so it is worth taking a moment to assess their contribution and legacy.
Before discussing the Church, it is important to separate the idea of spirituality from the idea of church. One is about a feeling inside, the other is a group of ordinary human people wearing strange clothes. The two things have very different histories, very different motivations and clearly almost diametrically opposed values.
And so, firstly, what is spirituality/religion and what is it for?
Re-ligion means to re-tie (ligion from the same root as ligament) – to tie people back to their origins. When we seek our origins and those of creation we come up with a word, God, to materialise this concept of a master of creation (always a male since the suppression and passing of pagan and Egyptian traditions amongst others). Instead of laws of creation we are offered a master of creation. This symbol of a master is foisted upon us by those who presume to know better, with the excuse that we need to simplify the concept of creation into a male symbol in order to make it understandable to the stupid ordinary masses. This is patronage whose purpose is to conceal a more sinister reason for placing a male symbol above us all. I will return to this later.
Putting the daft, white bearded concept completely to one side, various received knowledges of astronomy, geology, botany, anatomy, palaeontology and etymology tell us how we came to be here without the need to visualise omnipotent males sitting on clouds above us. This combined insight into stars, rocks, plants, creatures, fossils and even words themselves give us the story of creation. Creation can be explained with few uncertainties – big bang, planets from dust, DNA from atoms, men from microbes. Evolution is one word for it and its progress is seen to be determined under certain rules. Isaac Newton identified three, including the unbreakable rules that mass is attracted to itself and action causes equal and opposite reaction. Others are identified through experience by generations perceiving recurrent experience with open minds – what goes up comes down; what begins, ends; what goes around, comes around.
Such simple rules define the boundaries of existence – what is and isn’t possible. These forces as they operate on earth are the Laws of Nature. They are God because they cannot be broken, because they define our limits. These limits within which we must operate are symbolised in Greek and Masonic traditions as the pillars of Hercules, the limits beyond which even the strongest of us may not go. The words “Ne Plus Ultra” are usually inscribed
with this symbol, meaning “No more beyond (this)”. Away from the idea of God as a man, God is in fact Nature because it is Nature that controls whether we live or die. Environmentalists understand that to abuse nature is to lead us to extinction.
But the ordinary people have still further limits imposed upon their existence. Men who claim to be higher than other men and so assume the right to control others by defining and limiting their rights to land ownership and self-determination. And this is where the white-bearded propaganda comes back in again. If the Church can make people believe that there is one man above us all, it is only a short step to say that beneath him, there are other men who are closer to “him” and therefore above us. The clergy degrade the human soul by claiming that they are closer to God than we are. The white bearded man is the legitimation for hierarchy with the higher men claiming the greater rights.
Proclaiming God as a white man is a deception for a reason. It hides the fact that there is in fact nothing above any man except nature and that nature is equally above us all. And so the concept of one man above another dissolves, leaving no validity for hierarchies of rights.
No man is higher than any other man, but God, Monarchies and the Clergy suggest the opposite. Our mistake is to accept their superiority. To bow before a king is to accept your own inferiority. Then again, most people don’t actually believe that the king is a greater man – it just makes greater survival sense to bow than to get your head chopped off. Visiting the Church (and voting for long-since corrupted systems of government) are similar mistakes without such stringent penalties but we nevertheless demonstrate every time we do this that we are inferior beings.
God is Nature and there is no man above any other. The men of the Church have hijacked spirituality and claimed it for their own purposes, which are revealed by history.
I have nothing against the core values of Christianity. The 10 commandments are a fine place to start in formulating decent values. But the distinction must be drawn between the message and the messengers. It is not Christianity that I confront here but its assumed messengers, the Church, who have taken spirituality hostage inside their buildings that they declare to be holier than the rest of the Earth.
These are the ones whose job description is to stand up behind murderers and justify their cause as being in God’s name. They did it for General Franco as he used his fascist forces to rub out the people and the popular government during the Spanish Civil War, using Moroccans as mercenaries, and with the support of air power from Hitler while the Allies maintained “neutrality”. Amazing how common it is throughout Imperialist history to see the Priest share the same point of view as the General. Property is obviously more holy than people.
The Christian Church is the biggest killer. 90 million native Americans over 500 years, 200 million Africans over 1000 years, indigenous Australians, Chinese. Europe as well was no more immune from the barbarity of the Church until their power diminished after the thirteenth century. And all for empire, land, capital and cheap, captive labour.
Romans put Jesus’s cross on their shields as they raped and plundered their way to empire. Claiming Jesus as their spiritual guide was the original way to clear that dirty conscience and so aid restful sleep. And so the Christian tradition was hijacked to serve the ends of Imperialists. But this Church that exonerated the rape and the slaughter had as their hero the same man with a track record of resisting foreign occupation and the client Dictator Herod.
On the subject of land and property you say “It’s God’s own Earth … but this piece is mine and I don’t have to share it with anybody and if anyone trespasses I have legal recourse to troops and any means necessary”. Didn’t God want us to share it with you? I have many questions of a land-grabbing Christian. Denial is the defence of the hypocrite. Social isolation and insanity are the punishments. On Earth, that is. Judgement is visited, not in heaven, but well before death.
Your God says thou shalt not kill, so you say “thou shalt not kill except in defence of my property / except if someone else does it for me / except if they’re a communist / refuse to be like us / take drugs / listen to music etc.” God didn’t make any of these exceptions.
Love thy neighbour blah blah commandment over-ride etc etc all shot out of the water. The Church have this ongoing headache trying to forge the uneasy alliance between spirituality and killing people for money and you’ll hear them … “This Command meant…”. No it didn’t.
Christians deflect responsibility for the corruption of the soul brought about by their own hypocrisy. They assert (without evidence, substance, reference or reason) a move away from Christian values as the problem. No evidence? No reference? No reason? No time for you mate.
The historical alliance of Christianity with Imperialism’s legalised crime of ownership was the sell-out on God to save the Clergy. The Romans were having a few problems with the moral strength of the Christian movement – even killing its leader, who was supposed to be the son of God himself, didn’t solve the problem. It was the Emperor Diocletian who first put Christians outside the law, executing them, confiscating Church property, destroying its books. The persecution failed – what is repressed returns in everything from sexuality to land claims. Galerius issued an edict of tolerance in 317 AD. The initial Roman approach to Christianity had failed. And so, in the time-honoured tradition, If you can’t beat ’em, steal ’em. The Romans decided to make Christianity their own property. And so it was that in 337 AD the Roman emperor of the time, Constantine, converted to Christianity on his deathbed. And so the take-over of the Christian religion and the appearance of that odd hybrid, the Roman Catholic. Jesus didn’t die for our sins, Jesus died because the Romans killed him. They did so with the assistance of their client dictator Herod, his corrupt judicial system under Pontius Pilate and the masses confused into ignorance by State misinformation and propaganda. Same as the trimillenial ever.
The Coptic Ethiopian church is the oldest Christian church. The Roman Imperialists, having crucified Jesus 300 years earlier, then claimed Christianity under Constantine. They killed off the dissenting Coptic Ethiopians, hijacked the ideas of Jesus, rewrote the bible (removing 18 books in the process) and set up the Roman Catholic church and the Vatican. This historical connections between Italy and Ethiopia was taken up once more in the twentieth century by Mussolini in his war against Abyssinia (Ethiopia).
There are constant contradictions between Imperialist action (murder and stealing) and Imperialist Christian belief (thou shalt not kill, steal etc). On the one hand we have Jesus proclaiming against hierarchy and that all men are equal under God and on the other we have St Paul preaching to slaves on the value of obedience (not liberation). Christianity becomes the respectable face of the rapacious killers and their subsequent regimes of subjugation and bizarre contradiction. The Clergy must adapt the values of their flock to the legitimacy of this sell-out. What’s this got to do with spirituality? Well, it’s more to do with property really.y.
This Roman version of God almost disappeared from history in the 5th century when Rome was sacked by the Goths and the Vandals. But for a plea of clemency on the grounds of morality, the Roman Catholic Church would have been put to the sword with the rest of the Romans. The naive acceptance of this argument by the Barbarians meant that, unfortunately, the Roman Catholic tradition persisted. Unfortunately? The Church-inspired Crusades to control Jerusalem in the 12th century not only led to the needless loss of hundreds of thousands of lives along with the inevitable ripping apart of the social fabric back home, but also led to the Church’s control over the domains of the European princes and further subjugation of free thought via the torturous practices of the Inquisitions. The Church was not above burning people for challenging their ideas. It wasn’t until the 13th century that Frederick 2nd of Sicily encouraged the other European Princes to rebel against the power of the Church. Frederick ascribed church corruption to its excessive power and wealth and recommended confiscation of church property for the good of the Church! The Church have remained the junior partner to more powerful corrupt interests ever since.
This centuries-old sell-out on God may have been a temporary and necessary survival strategy at the time (a get-rich-quick policy it may also have been), but centuries later it still looks like God’s official Fan Club is taking his name in vain. And they never set the record straight with their followers on the subject of land deals either, nor the burning of local female herbalists who they called witches for daring to supply before death what the Church could only pretend to offer after.
Land grab. Gang War. Choose your partners. Stake your claim. All went down. Did the Church ally with the strong who wanted the land or the weak who owned it? Will the meek inherit the Earth because of the Church or in spite of them? Choose your partners. The Church did. History is their undoing.
It is the Church who must confess and pray for forgiveness. History tells us that it is they who have sinned and taken their own Lord’s name in vain across the entire planet (slashing, burning and stealing as they went). It is not their “flock” but the Church itself that must make reparation, put it all back. They must carry the weight of their responsibility. It is they who bear the cross.
The Church must end their relationship with the Imperialist tradition. This is starting to happen in Latin America as the Brazilian Bishops speak out against American support for the Military junta. But don’t believe that the Church saw the light. The Second World War saw middle-class people see through the hypocrisy and desert the Church by the million. The Church was forced to shift its constituency to the poor and was thus forced to see their point of view for the first time. But this is still not true everywhere.
Christian values are a convenient cloak for the devil. To allow the world to clearly see the sin of murderous dispossession to acquire property, the Church must desert the devil, leaving him unmasked to face judgement. The Pope must tell white supremacists that they have no claim to God.
In modern times with the influence of the Church in decline, Big business still has the need to see itself in a positive light. And for the Public to take a similar view. Public Relations preach the new Gospel according to St Mammon – the doer of good things, the saviour of mankind.