showing that God doesn’t exist

Existentialism isn’t so atheistic that it wears itself out showing that God doesn’t exist. Rather, it declares that even if God did exist, that would change nothing    –    Jean Paul Sartre

The earliest known evidence for Christianity…

Just as the Old Testament chronicles the story of the Israelites in the millennium or so leading up to the birth of Jesus Christ, the New Testament records Jesus’s life, from his birth and teachings to his death and later resurrection, a narrative that forms the fundamental basis of Christianity. Beginning around A.D. 70, about four decades after Jesus’s crucifixion (according to the Bible), four anonymously written chronicles of his life emerged that would become central documents in the Christian faith. Named for Jesus’s most devoted earthly disciples, or apostles — Matthew, Mark, Luke and John — the four canonical Gospels were traditionally thought to be eyewitness accounts of Jesus’s life, death and resurrection.

But for more than a century, scholars have generally agreed that the Gospels, like many of the books of the New Testament, were not actually written by the people to whom they are attributed. In fact, it seems clear that the stories that form the basis of Christianity were first communicated orally, and passed down from generation to generation, before they were collected and written down.

“Names are attached to the titles of the Gospels (‘the Gospel according to Matthew’),” writes Bible scholar Bart Ehrman in his book “Jesus, Interrupted”. “But these titles are later additions to the Gospels, provided by editors and scribes to inform readers who the editors thought were the authorities behind the different versions.”

Traditionally, 13 of the 27 books of the New Testament were attributed to Paul the Apostle, who famously converted to Christianity after meeting Jesus on the road to Damascus and wrote a series of letters that helped spread the faith throughout the Mediterranean world. But scholars now agree on the authenticity of only seven of Paul’s epistles: Romans, 1 and 2 Corinthians, Galatians, Philippians, 1 Thessalonians, Philemon. These are believed to have been written between A.D. 50-60, making them the earliest known evidence for Christianity. Authors of the later epistles may have been followers of Paul, who used his name to lend authenticity to the works.

Sarah Pruitt – Who Wrote the Bible?

It must reach a climax

The universe cannot slide into stasis. It must reach a climax and then begin again. The universe is orgasmic, not “happy”, not “tranquil”. Its job is to achieve peaks, not plateaus and flatlines. If you have peaks, you necessarily have troughs. This really is a rollercoaster ride. It’s inevitable. It’s built into reality. Existence is made of sinusoids, the archetypal rollercoasters, permanently cycling between peaks and troughs. If God is the ultimate peak (zero mental entropy), the Big Bang is the ultimate trough (maximum mental entropy). Do you have the courage and fortitude to be a God? Remember, it’s a rollercoaster ride. You must be ready for the troughs. There are as many snakes as ladders. Everyone’s trying to drag you down. 

 
Thomas Stark – The Stairway to Consciousness: The Birth of Self-Awareness from Unconscious Archetypes 

Deity

The deity of one’s worship is a function of one’s own state of mind. But it also is a product of one’s culture. Catholic nuns do not have visions of the Buddha, nor do Buddhist nuns have visions of Christ. Ineluctably, the image of any god beheld — whether interpreted as beheld in heaven or as beheld at chakra 6 — will be of a local ethnic idea historically conditioned, a metaphor, therefore, and thus to be recognized as transparent to transcendence. 

Joseph Campbell – The inner reaches of outer space  

You shall not eat it, nor shall you touch it…

John Milton sold his publisher the copyright of Paradise Lost for the sum of five pounds. His great work dramatizes the oldest story in the Bible, whose principal characters we know only too well: God, Adam, Eve, Satan in the form of a talking snake — and an apple. Except, of course, that Genesis never names the apple but simply refers to “the fruit.” To quote from the King James Bible: 

And the woman said to the serpent, “We may eat the fruit of the trees of the garden; but of the fruit of the tree which is in the midst of the garden, God has said, ‘You shall not eat it, nor shall you touch it, lest you die.'” 

“Fruit” is also the word Milton employs in the poem’s sonorous opening lines: 

Of Mans First Disobedience, and the Fruit 

Of that Forbidden Tree, whose mortal taste 

Brought Death into the World, and all our woe 

But in the course of his over-10,000-line poem, Milton names the fruit twice, explicitly calling it an apple. So how did the apple become the guilty fruit that brought death into this world and all our woe? 

The short and unexpected answer is: a Latin pun. 

In order to explain, we have to go all the way back to the fourth century A.D., when Pope Damasus ordered his leading scholar of scripture, Jerome, to translate the Hebrew Bible into Latin. Jerome’s path-breaking, 15-year project, which resulted in the canonical Vulgate, used the Latin spoken by the common man. As it turned out, the Latin words for evil and apple are the same: malus. 

In the Hebrew Bible, a generic term, peri, is used for the fruit hanging from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, explains Robert Appelbaum, who discusses the biblical provenance of the apple in his book Aguecheek’s Beef, Belch’s Hiccup, and Other Gastronomic Interjections. 

“Peri could be absolutely any fruit,” he says. “Rabbinic commentators variously characterized it as a fig, a pomegranate, a grape, an apricot, a citron, or even wheat. Some commentators even thought of the forbidden fruit as a kind of wine, intoxicating to drink.” 

When Jerome was translating the “Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil,” the word malus snaked in. A brilliant but controversial theologian, Jerome was known for his hot temper, but he obviously also had a rather cool sense of humour. 

“Jerome had several options,” says Appelbaum, a professor of English literature at Sweden’s Uppsala University. “But he hit upon the idea of translating peri as malus, which in Latin has two very different meanings. As an adjective, malus means bad or evil. As a noun it seems to mean an apple, in our own sense of the word, coming from the very common tree now known officially as the Malus pumila. So Jerome came up with a very good pun.” 

Nina Martyris – Paradise Lost: How The Apple Became The Forbidden Fruit 

return to absolute innocence

Tantra is the natural way to God, the normal way to God. The object is to become so completely instinctual, so mindless, that we merge with ultimate nature – that the woman disappears and becomes a door for the ultimate, the man disappears and becomes a door for the ultimate. This is the tantric definition of our sexuality: the return to absolute innocence, absolute oneness. The greatest sexual thrill of all is not a search for thrills, but a silent waiting – utterly relaxed, utterly mindless. One is conscious, conscious only of being conscious. One is consciousness. One is contented but there is no content to it. And then there is great beauty, great benediction   –   Osho 

Do not delude yourself

Do not lose yourself completely to man or God. Do not delude yourself. You cannot afford to believe in illusion – for the sake of your happiness and for the sake of your art. 

Susan Vreeland – Passion of Artemisia 

Thoughts for a cold Sunday morning

“No sight so sad as that of a naughty child,” he began, “especially a naughty little girl. Do you know where the wicked go after death?”

“They go to hell,” was my ready and orthodox answer.

“And what is hell? Can you tell me that?”

“A pit full of fire.”

“And should you like to fall into that pit, and to be burning there for ever?”

“No, sir.”

“What must you do to avoid it?”

I deliberated a moment: my answer, when it did come was objectionable: “I must keep in good health and not die.”

Charlotte Brontë – Jane Eyre

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When his life was ruined, his family killed, his farm destroyed, Job knelt down on the ground and yelled up to the heavens, “Why god? Why me?” and the thundering voice of God answered, There’s just something about you that pisses me off.

Stephen King – Storm of the Century

Children of Satan

Consequently, if you believe God made Satan, you must realize that all Satan’s power comes from God and so that Satan is simply God’s child, and that we are God’s children also. There are no children of Satan, really.

Anne Rice – Interview with the Vampire

worshipped both a goddess and a god

When Wicca, which is a neo-Pagan mystery religion, was established in the 1940s and ‘50s, they worshipped both a goddess and a god. They were personified. Often, the goddess would be the maiden mother and crone, associated with the moon. The god would be a horned god, more associated with someone like, say, Cernunnos, who was a horned deity, or Herne the Hunter in Britain.