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Human failure
& the Religions
Religions,
that is to say, the self professed prophets or God men who invent, and the
priests who enforce religion, thrive on human failure. In
ancient Mediterranean religion-speak, failure was called sin (Hebrew: chatta’ah, Greek: hamartia, both meaning
‘missing the mark’). Without
human failure, i.e. sin, religions, i.e. their inventors and enforcers, have
no power and, lacking power, cannot milk the pay-offs of power, to wit,
status, wealth (i.e. the good life, as lived and regularly demonstrated by
top religious cult officials) and so on. Consequently, the primary function
of clerics (of all religions) is to focus on, exaggerate and exploit actual
human failure, or to engineer failure (for instance, by proscribing natural
acts, such as the sex act), real or imagined. Only
the ‘failed’, i.e. the sinful (i.e. the unrighteous, in Buddhism referred to
indirectly as the ignoble, i.e. as non-Aryan, sic, the Buddha referring to
himself and his followers as noble), can or need to be saved, i.e. returned
to righteousness. Returning the unrighteous (i.e. the failed) to
righteousness (to sin-less-ness, hence to wholeness, health, holiness and so
on), or protecting the righteous (made so by Jesus’ death on the Cross and
baptism into his cult) from falling into unrighteousness, the precise details
of the latter state being decided by the cult official, is the job of the
religious cult official, and for which (protection, i.e. against the
punishment (read: hell) for failure)) he charges a high price. In
Christianity, that is to say, in the opinion of the ancient Jews and of the
Jewish Jesus described in the Synoptic Gospels, some humans were righteous
(for instance, Noah, and from whom all humans are now descended) and others
not. Jesus came to lead the unrighteous (specifically the Jewish unrighteous,
hence sinners) to righteousness, righteous individuals not needing his help. At
first, Paul, who never met Jesus and appears not to have known anything of Jesus’
actual ministry (since his primary source of knowledge was the OT), agreed.
Later he chose to disagree. For Paul, the rabid religious fanatic, had
realised that if some (and no one knew who, or how many) were sinless (hence
perfect), then his ministry could not be total, that is to say totalitarian,
absolutist. So he invented the notion because of Adam’s act of alleged
transgression sin had entered the world and that the punishment for sin was
death, neither claim being confirmed by the actual (hence hard) evidence
found in the story. The Lord God does not state that the adam sinned, nor
that he was now corrupt and that all of his offspring would be born corrupt.
And the Tree of Life, one might assume, was planted for the benefit of those
created to die. Paul’s apodictic conclusion is astonishing since death and
‘sin’ (i.e. failure) had existed in the Garden of Eden before the adam’s
alleged failure and, moreover, humans had had a new beginning from a
righteous man, namely Noah. It is probable that Paul never actually read the
original story of Adam and Eve. Paul:
“Wherefore, as by one man sin entered into the world, and death by sin; and
so death passed upon all men, for that all have sinned:” And
then, ‘along came Augustine’ (of Hippo). He deliberately mistranslates Paul’s
flat (yet capable of falsification) assertion to cement the notion that all
humans, rather than some, are sinful (i.e. corrupt) from birth, to wit, born
corrupt because Adam’s corruption is transferred during intercourse in the semen
of the male. That’s is not what Jesus had said. However, now that all rather
than some are sinful/unrighteous, i.e. failures, the Church’s mission becomes
totalitarian. Augustine was a good priest, but a liar and cheat nonetheless. Augustine:
‘From the
moment, then, when “by one man sin entered into the world, and death by sin,
and so death passed upon all men, in whom all sinned," the
entire mass of our nature was ruined beyond doubt, and fell into the
possession of its destroyer.’ Augustine:
‘The deliberate sin of the first man is the
cause of Original Sin.” Note, there is no clear evidence in the story of Adam
and Eve, found in Genesis
3:6, that the man ate the fruit which the woman gave him to deliberately
break the Lord God’s health warning, interpreted by some as a command (rather
than a (government Health
Warning). Here Augustine deliberately lied, as he had done by
deliberately misquoting Paul. Augustine: ‘From Adam has sprung one mass of sinners
and godless men, in which both Jews and Gentiles belong to one lump,
apart from the Grace of God.’ What a load of rot! However,
Augustine’s unfounded and misleading speculation, made fact (i.e. dogma) at
the Council of Carthage in A.D. 417, proved, or at least appeared to prove,
though not to Pelagius & Co, nor indeed, initially to the Pope) that all
humans are born sinful (i.e. corrupted by Adam’s sin, of which, however,
there is no mention in the Adam and Eve story), thereby giving the Christian
Church total power to save, and therefore interfere with, manipulate and
control all humans (in the interest of the clergy). The Christian Church,
recently headquartered in Italy, i.e. in Rome, turned the absolute power
given to it by Augustine into the most successful Italian
protection-cum-extortion racket of all time. By the end of the 13th
century, and just before the monasteries were abolished, the Christian Church
owned about 40% of Europe. One monastery in Southern Germany owned more than
eleven thousand farms. However,
the fact remains (and is confirmed in Genesis 1) that all living systems are
created, hence born good (i.e. fully functional) and with the ability to
remain good (i.e. fully functional). |