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Table of Contents:
  1. Introduction
  2. Preface
  3. Foreward
  4. Part 1: Introduction
  5. Part 2: The Problem
  6. Profit, Power and Progress
  7. Democracy
  8. Education
  9. Religion
  10. Primitive Beliefs
  11. Part 3: The Solution
  12. Earth
  13. Religion
  14. Sacredness: A New Understanding
  15. Spiritual
  16. Sacred Construct
  17. Critical Mind Shift
  18. Three Simple Rules
  19. Our Competing Sets of Survival Instincts
  20. The Foundational Relationships
  21. Relationship With Self
  22. Opportunity and Responsibility
  23. About the Author

Seven Words that can Change the World

A NaturalNews Special Report by Joseph R. Simonetta


Religion

To explain life, we have turned to two disciplines that are almost diametrically opposed, science and religion. Science is very formal and rigid in the determination of its principles and theories. A scientific theory must survive a regimen of testing and re-testing by any observers and testers at any place and produce identical results time after time before it is accepted as fact. Science is almost perverse in its methodology of testing in attempts to get its theories to break. Yet, science is a very open process that welcomes and celebrates change when new discoveries are made.

Religion, on the other hand, is an untested collection of dogmatic principles. It is derived typically from supernatural sources and that which is referred to as “divine revelation.” It’s a phenomenon that was born when “priests” and “priestesses” invented themselves, which they continue to do today. Religion does not like challenges or changes to its dogma. The alteration of a few words of so-called “revealed religion” can unravel and splinter religions into smaller groups. These in turn unravel and splinter into even smaller groups. Christianity, for example, we know from a recent survey, has approximately thirty-three thousand sects and denominations.

Evidence of religion, art, and recorded events dates back thirty to forty thousand years. There have been an estimated one hundred thousand religions. From the aforementioned survey, we know there exists about ten thousands religions today. One hundred and fifty of these have a million or more followers.

Some of the better known religions include Hinduism, which originated six thousand years ago; Judaism, four thousand years ago; Buddhism (and Confucianism and Taoism), twenty-six hundred years ago; Christianity, two thousand years ago; and Islam, fourteen hundred years ago.

We’ve worshipped everything from the sun, to the moon, to Egyptian pharaohs and Roman emperors. Then we created mythological gods in our own image. Through our history, we’ve worshipped the many gods of countless polytheistic religions. About four thousand years ago, in the Middle East, someone came up with the idea that there is just one God. Keep in mind that this was just someone’s idea. Someone like you or me. This idea marked the beginning of the western concept of what we refer to as monotheism (one God). That religion was Judaism and the God Yahweh (misspelled Jehovah in the King James Version of the Bible). About fourteen hundred years later (twenty-six hundred years ago), Buddhism (in India), Confucianism, and Taoism (both in China), belief systems with no gods, emerged as powerful religious movements in the East.

In the last forty years of the first century A.D., in the approximate years 60 to 100 (no one knows for sure), long after the events that were claimed to have occurred, the New Testament gospels Mark, Matthew, Luke, and John were created decades apart. Who wrote these stories? People theorize about the authors but no one knows who wrote these gospels. They were written anonymously by early Church teachers. Later, they were assigned to four evangelistic saints to bestow legitimacy.

What were these writers doing? Albert Einstein observed that we can’t solve our problems from the same level of thinking from which they originated. These writers boldly went to the next level. The Jewish laws had been around for two thousand years. It was time to move on, to advance and evolve. The writers were radical, progressive, and inclusive. They reached out to the gentiles. They sought to help the poor. Their followers congregated in homes. Churches (congregations) formed.

Theologians agree that the gospel authors, each with his or her own agenda and bias, created stories to match the prophecy of the Old Testament written two thousand years earlier. To embellish their stories, the writers employed the practice, common at the time, of incorporating fictional elements drawn from ancient writings of heroes and gods from pagan religions (today, we call this practice plagiarism).

In particular, they “borrowed” heavily from a rival and major religion in the Roman Empire, Mithraism, which had existed for at least seven hundred years. It originated in Persia, which is now Iran. Mithraism, based on a fictional character named Mithra, was popular in the first century with Roman soldiers and civil servants and was a competitor to Christianity for the first four centuries. The story line of Mithraism, not surprisingly, was strikingly similar to Christianity. After all, a kind of formula for these types of stories existed back then. Because there was no such thing as plagiarism, one simply used what one liked from earlier stories.

So, as the story goes, Mithra was born of a virgin. At his birth were adoring shepherds and magi kings. Kings were commonly inserted into these stories to represent royalty, signifying that the birth was important. Mithra’s birth – like numerous other supernatural heroes and gods – was celebrated on December 25, the same day the Christians adopted. What’s so special about December 25?

It’s four days after the winter solstice (December 21) when in the Northern hemisphere the sun is at its lowest point. By the December 25, it was evident to the ancients that the sun was rising again. It was a time for celebration and an auspicious day to be born (as the sun, worshipped as a god, was rising). The rising sun provided the idea for ascension. In the tale of Mithra were stories of miracles, resurrection, and ascension. The similarity in story lines made possible the easy conversion of Mithraism’s followers to Christianity.

Out of all of this a new story was created (which learned theologians agree is near totally fiction) and a new religion born—Christianity. With it came another god, “Christ,” from the Greek word Christos, an interpretation of the Hebrew word for messiah, or mashiakh, meaning the anointed one (as prophesied in the Old Testament). At some point, someone declared that these contrived stories were the divinely inspired and infallible words of god. In other words, people were led to believe that the same god that they created in their stories was responsible for the stories they created.

About fourteen hundred years ago in Mecca, the leading city of Arabia, another prophet, Mohammed, appeared. He too heard the infallible words of God. As he could not write, he had a scribe make notes of what he heard. These notes, recorded in small segments over a twenty-three-year period, were compiled in a book known as the Koran (Qur’an). Four-fifths the length of the New Testament, the Koran is considered by Muslims to be the final and infallible revelation of God’s will. Born was another religion, Islam, meaning peace and surrender or submission to God. And we got yet another god, Allah, meaning literally “The God” – not a god but the God. The one true God.

We have given these gods great powers. We say they are omnipotent, meaning that they are all-powerful; omnipresent, meaning that they exist everywhere; and omniscient, meaning that they have all learning and knowledge. These stories have caused great worldwide confusion and conflict. And wars. Sixty-six percent of our wars have been fought over these stories. We kill each other over these stories. It is the ultimate irony and a complete absurdity that we create these stories to establish examples of exemplary behavior and proper rules for living, then kill each other over them.

One does not have to be a genius to conclude that there is something absurd and fundamentally wrong here.




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