EPISODE 33; DAVID CAMERON AND THE TYRANNY OF CHRISTIANITY

Welcome to my blog which has been and will continue to be remiss in its duty to record the emergence into public light of a 60 year old author. Before diverting off into a rave about the evil of Christianity I will, however, take the time to acknowledge that there has been activity in the authorial career and that the article on Spirituality has been accepted by the journal I sent it to. With luck they will print it next August. August! Meanwhile it has gone to peer review. I admit this is hardly J.K. Rowling territory but it does mean that once every decade or so there is a response to what I send out.

When I was a teenager I loved history, much of which I first learned in the books of H.E. Marshall which with their swashbuckling narratives gave me a sense of how much of history is just that, stories. As I learned a little more I saw that history was similar to Shakespeare’s plays in that you can take the same material and interpret it in a hundred different ways. This became most evident when Mr Stacey, my A Level history teacher, so subtly taught us a Marxist Interpretation of historical events that he was reprimanded by the examining board and we were forced to take the exam again to improve our grades. Mr Stacey, to state the obvious, was not a teacher at my catholic school but at Brooke House, a small private tutorial establishment that I was sent to after my second expulsion from Wimbledon College where I had been given a very catholic version of the world.

Over the years my interest in history faded and when I read of the troubles in Ireland and the Balkan reprisals for events long past, I tended to think the less looking back the better. But having no history doesn’t work either. (As evidenced, for example, by the British forgetting Thatcher and voting for Cameron.) A couple of weeks ago a friend of mine went to London to Occupy St. Paul’s and came back in love with London’s history and determined to unveil the magical and Mithraeum History of London. As part of his quest he’s bought a number of books, one of which he thrust upon me. Initially I was disinclined to read it because quite often ‘new age’ interpretations of the past are so esoteric or so irrelevant that I can’t maintain my interest. This book, ‘Not in his Image’ by John Lash is a different matter altogether although it is synchronistic for it to come along just a few days after I wrote my piece called the Roman Catholic Church inherently abusive. Mine was an instinctive and emotional judgement, John Lash gives me reason and history to back up my armoury.

He begins with the murder of Hypatia by a Christian rabble. Hypatia (ca. AD 350–370–March 415) as I now know was a Pagan noblewoman, a neoplatonist philosopher, a mathematician, an astronomer and, possibly, the last known teacher of the Mystery Schools, who lived and died in Alexandria, Egypt.  Lash takes the murder as a dividing line between two eras, the gnostic pagan and the Christian. What is phenomenal about is book is his analysis of Christianity which he describes as ‘salvationist ideology’ with a ‘redeemer complex’.

The Redeemer Complex, Lash’s proposed term for the ideological core of the Judeo-christian-islamic religion, has four components:

Creation of the world by a father god independent of a female counterpart;

The trial and testing (conceived as historical drama) of the righteous few or ‘chosen people’;

The mission of the creator god’s son (the messiah) to save the world;

The final apocalyptic judgment delivered by father and son upon humanity.

This narrative can be called Salvationism – a totalitarian belief system that asserts divine intercession in history and imbues suffering with redemptive value. Assumes superhuman rescue of humanity from its problems and off-planet, remote-control authority on morals and divine retribution. A Salvationist way of life entails obedience rather than learning.

Key to the growth of this idea has been, according to Lash, an enactment of the victim-perpetrator bond that we recognize in families, ‘the insidious tendency for those who are harmed and betrayed to become emotionally attached and morally identified with those who harm and betray them. Implies that some victims will become perpetrators in their own right.’ The teachings of Jesus in the new testament, ‘do good to those who harm you,’ ‘the meek shall inherit the earth,’ ‘turn the other cheek’, all preached surrender to and love for the enemy, for the oppressor.

I was thinking about this point last week when chatting on-line to a Ugandan peasant from the Mkobo tribe. I was asking her what rituals or customs the tribe had around death and dying and whether they still practised them alongside Christianity. She said no and that non-christians would be shunned. This is the victim-perpetrator syndrome in action. Along came the Christian invaders who felt perfectly justified in murdering non-christians while at the same time offering the victims redemption in heaven if they followed the god of the pillagers. Mind fuck.

One of the many beauties of this book for me is its contextualisation of Christianity which because of my Christian culture and catholic education, I have not been able to adequately distance myself from enough to see it as a whole idea. A particular delight is Lash’s examination of Jesus and what a masterstroke it was (of St. paul’s ? of fate?) to graft the loving face of Jesus on to the murderous militancy of the religion which from its outset indulged in massacre and genocide to actualize its political agenda. Let me quote Lash once more on just how damaging the Salvationist creed has been.

‘Roman Christianity is not the entire problem, all Salvationist belief systems are but it is the most triumphant of perpetrators. It has conjured hell on earth, eradicated the gnostics, destroyed the Mysteries, destroyed the learning of antiquity, torn out the pagan heart of Europe, murdered midwifes and healers, abetted the Nazis, colonialized the globe, burned and hung the tribal children of the Americas, bankrolled the despoliation of nature and the pernicious deception of Third World peoples, and to hide its crimes, it cast a spell of guilt and ignorance over sixty generations’ (P248).

One of the new words/concepts generated by terrorism and the likes of Tony Blair and his doppelganger Cameron is ‘extremist’. We are often told not to condemn all Islam because ‘These people (the terrorists) hold extreme Islamist views’ and are not representative of the majority. This is both true and untrue. It is true because the majority of muslims, christians and jews, the so-called ‘moderates’ do not wish to act out their historical narrative but they do wish to preserve it and believe in it. (Or, worse perhaps, to tolerate it and not believe in it.) As Lash says, ‘There is another hard and bitter lesson to be learned from history: how good people can be accessory to evil by sharing the belief system of the perpetrators. Belief implicates those who belief, and it implicates them absolutely.’

Over the years I have been castigated when ranting about Christianity for the blaming the whole caboodle for the sins of a few (million). Vicars are well-intentioned, I’m told, and Christian values are love and peace. Yeah right. Abuse of little boys and girls is something to do with sexual abstinence, I’m told, and nothing to do with telling our children that they will suffer eternal damnation in hell if they sin against the superman or find their gods in nature or in themselves.

David Cameron, a banker’s testicle in looks and brain, exhorts the country to remember it is Christian with Christian values. What shall we do? Set a pagan mob upon him, to strip and kill him? Or hang, draw and quarter him and leave his head on a pike as a warning to others of his ilk? Sadly no, it wouldn’t be nice and it’d set a terrible example. I know, let us have discourse and intelligently, unbiasedly, examine the matter. Let us look at the evidence, let us experience it.

No? Oh well. Happy christianmass to all who sail in her.


John Lamb Lash: NOT IN HIS IMAGE: gnostic vision, sacred ecology and the future of belief.
Chelsea green Publishing, White River Junction, Vermont.