Aristotle’s Prime Mover evokes motion, not some big Jew in the sky. The commonly accepted model of the beginning of our universe, often referred to as the “Big Bang,” suggests that it began between 15 and 18 billion years ago in an infinitely compact and singular state, enclosing a space even smaller than an atomic particle. If Aristotle were alive today, he would say the Prime Mover caused the Big Bang, not the tribal war god of ancient Israel. According to Aristotle the Prime Mover is the Prefect First Cause responsible for moving objects, which, in turn, move other objects: The Prime Mover is always at absolute rest, beyond time and space, motionless and changeless in perfection, omniscient and eternal, everywhere and nowhere.
Aristotle perceived God through motion. To my knowledge, he never claimed he understood or spoke to God. He was no different than the rest of humanity, pathetic creatures trapped in time and space, really, having only intuitive awareness of the Unknowable.
The conquests of Alexander, Aristotle’s pupil, brought Jews on the world stage. They brought with them, in contrast to the Prime Mover, Yahweh, the fiendish god of Jews, a kind of divine superiority soothing to their macerated egos because he chose them as his very own and set them above their betters, and they also brought with them their cunning in peddling their superstitions to cheat the unwary.
In the centuries between Aristotle and Constantine, the horrible Jewish god was to "make folly of the wisdom of this world," thus negating all learning, all culture, and repudiating reason itself. Yahweh and the radicals of an initially obscure Jewish sect promised to envy and malice that the rich and powerful would be tortured in Hell forever and forever, if they did not empty their pockets to the profit of ranting priests. To the dregs of the Empire that was Roman only in name, Christianity was what liquor is to alcoholics.
With Irenaeus the persecution of Gnostics and fierce, ecclesiastical intolerance to any other personal religious beliefs became the driving force of Christianity. Though Marcion (140 ce) sought to dump the Old Testament from Christianity because he felt Yahweh was incompatible with the Loving Father proclaimed by Jesus, he still attributed to Yahweh the status of a lesser, creative god, so there was some credence to Irenaeus’s charge of dualism.
If Marcion were alive today, I suspect he’d call Yahweh a gruesome Jewish fairytale and be done with it, thus avoiding Irenaeus’s complaints. Valentinus, on the other hand speaks of a God who is:
“(Root) of the All, the (Ineffable One who) dwells in the Monad (He dwells alone) in silence . . .since, after all (he was) a Monad, and no one was before him. . .”
A Valentinian Exposition ww.19-23, in NHL 436
Elaine Pagels writes in The Gnostic Gospels that according to a third Valentinian text, the Interpretation of Knowledge, Christ taught that “Your Father, who is in heaven, is one. No dualism in Valentinus. His concept of God was much like Aristotle’s Prime Mover, i.e., a Prefect God who does not play favorites.
If Constantine had not had his vision at Malvian Bridge (312 ce), Mithraism, not Christianity, might well have become the official religion of the Roman Empire. Based on the Iranian god of the sun, justice, contract and war, Mithraism was more popular than Christianity at the time. But Christianity prevailed, and it’s no coincidence that the brand of Christianity that the Fathers put over was one which lugged with it the "Old Testament" and identified Yahweh, the big Jew up in the sky, as the Christian god, or that the first concern of the fathers, as soon as they got their hands on governmental power, was to exterminate the Marconists, the Manichaeans, and all the other Christian sects that refused to accept as their god the fiend of the "Old Testament.”
The slaughter went on well into the Middle Ages. In 1209 Pope Innocence III sicced an army of some thirty thousand knights and foot soldiers on the Languedoc—the mountainous northeastern foothills of the Pyrenees in what is now southern France. These Christian soldiers put a whole population to the sword in what became known as Albigensian Crusade. The extermination was so vast and terrible that it may well constitute the first case of “genocide” in modern Europeans history. What awful crime had these peaceful Cathars committed? The heresy of dualism: they believed in a good god of love, and an evil one of the material world.
By the time of the Reformation, Gnostics were either exterminated or driven into hiding. The Protestant Churches, however, proved to be just as intolerant as the Catholic when it came to blind faith as opposed to inner revelation.
An increasing number of "Fundamental Christians" have recently felt the need to defend Christianity by trashing anyone who speaks out in any way against the Bible. What it all boils down to, folks, is not exclusively religious or political augments but who’s in charge, and it’s the same old crowd. You can see them every Sunday morning on one-eyed Jew, screaming “God of Israel!” again and again, till they’re blue in the face.
-Z-