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Religion See other Religion Articles Title: The Myths Of Christian Fundamentalism The Myths Of Christian Fundamentalism By Ken Adachi Editor - Educate-Yourself.org 3-1-8 Normally, I would not expound on this subject. I don't believe in wearing your religious beliefs on your sleeve and I don't approve of trying to push your convictions upon others, however, I feel it's necessary to expose teachings -delivered within the framework of religious instruction or Biblical instruction- which are untrue and ultimately lead to harm for those who subscribe to them. I'm referring to the myths of Christian fundamentalism. A belief is not the same thing as knowledge. A belief is an idea that we are conditioned to believe is true, yet we possess no concrete way to know or prove to ourselves (or to others) that it is true. In order to accept a belief as true, you must first possess faith we are told. But all faith is blind faith by definition and that's the rub. All victims of belief manipulation are first convinced that they must possess faith in order to be 'saved'. But faith in what? Faith in whatever the preacher says is the "Word of God" while holding up one of the 650 different versions of the "Holy" Bible and declaring it to be the unchallenged written Word of God. I can get you to believe inanything, if you will first surrender your intellect and common sense and allow me to supplant them with a firm conviction in the notion of "faith." That's why preacher-propagandists spend so much effort touting the supposed virtue and desirability of possessing "faith" and will repeat well-worn Biblical mantras like "Oh ye of little faith" or "doubting Thomas" to reinforce the idea that blind acceptance-based on faith- is a good thing , while entertaining any sort of doubt (meaning questioning the validity of what's being shoved down your throat) is a bad thing . How reprehensible it is to treat people in this way, yet that is the mind wash that's being pushed upon a very large group of people in America who refer to themselves as "Christians." But are these self-described Christianstruly followers of Christ and do they emulate His example and adhere to His teachings? I don't think so. If anything, they are grossly unaware of the true teachings of Jesus Christ. They are mislead by false teachers into deception and calculated manipulation. They may refer to themselves as non-denominational, or charismatic, or evangelical Christians, but ultimately they are fundamentalist Christians and they are the most duped people on the face of the earth. . Being a fundamentalist anything is undesirable because a fundamentalist is a zealot-and zealots can be dangerous. A zealot believes in a set of acquired postulates and will go to extremes to coerce his beliefs upon others. The false postulate that the fundamentalist Christian has an obligation, or duty, or mission to "save" other people on behalf of "God" or Jesus is an affront to the free will and self-determination that every soul in God's creation is entitled to-and no one has the right to try to impose his beliefs or will upon others. I recently saw a documentary on Mormons on public television. It may have been Frontline or The American Experience, I can't remember, but it was a revealing expose of the underside of the Church of Later Day Saints and their evangelical 'mission' to brainwash young men into giving up two years of their young lives to go to a far-away place and engage in the very sort of un-welcomed coercion that I'm describing here. One disillusioned ex-missionary remarked that after two solid years of daily accosting, haranguing, and 'evangelizing', he had not succeeded in obtaining even a single convert (what a surprise!). Had this individual retained the capacity tothink for himself and not allow himself to be blindly brainwashed, he would have recognized that Jesus never engaged in 'evangelical' behavior. The people who listened to Jesus sought Him out, not the other way around. Jesus gained followers by example and the wisdom of his counsel, not by any form of coercion (if even one self-described fundamentalist Christian reading these words acquires an understanding or realization that's it's fundamentally WRONG to try and force your beliefs on others-the very core of "evangelism"- then I will have succeeded in serving humanity with this article). Evangelism, however, is not the only false postulate that Christian fundamentalists embrace. There are many destructive notions that are seeded into the fundamentalist psyche that cause him to engage in behavior or hold beliefs that lead to strife and conflict. These include the concepts of "judgment", (whether against others on the earthly plane, or the judgment that they assume they will face when they arrive at the Pearly Gates) and the concept of "sin", which carries a debt of guilt and the need to atone in some punishing way. That atonement includes the idea of burning away in Hell for eternity (or burning for a time in the halfway house, Purgatory) which is offered up to impressionable youngsters in order to scare them straight so they in turn will pass the Fear torch on to their children ( and on and on it goes in a continuous Merry-Go-Round of pulpit-inspired deception, generation after generation). At the heart of Christian fundamentalist myths is the idea that man is a lowly sinner who must be "saved" by the grace of God (or Jesus) in order to obtain salvation and buy a ticket to Heaven. This concept (which includes the myth of Original Sin) is erroneous and leads one to think of himself as being separate and detached from the Creator We are not detached from the Creator. We are part of the Creator and therefore we possess the capacity to create. It riles the Christian fundamentalist dogmatist to no end to confront the notion that his lowly, unworthy "sinner" is possessed of a divine nature and can create himself, but this is exactly what Jesus told us when he said "you can do all that I have done, and more." Is that not so? Therefore, we have a divine nature, since we have God dwelling within us at all times, whether it appears that way or not. Every single human being possess a divine nature and we are ALL sons and daughters of God-without exception. Yet, consider the rank hypocrisy of Christian clergymen everywhere who refer on one hand to their congregation as "children of God" while in the same breath declare that Jesus in the ONLY Son of God. You can't have it both ways. (By the way, Jesus never said He was the Son of God. He referred to Himself as the "Son of Man". The Roman emperor Constantine decided that Christ was the "Son of God" in 323 AD at the Council of Nicea). What we see in the mirror is a reflection of a fleshy garment which we wear while on the physical plane, but it is not the essence of who we are. We are an immortal consciousness, a Being of Light, who is temporarilyhoused in that fleshy garment while on earth to learn spiritual lessons. Besides the skin we wear, we also have other "bodies" nested within our form like layers of an onion. We have a sensual 'body' that can be so captivated by pleasurable sensations that it can lead us to addictive and obsessive behavior such as drug addiction, alcohol addiction, sex addiction, or food addiction, if allowed to run unchecked and uncontrolled by our inner consciousness. We have an emotional 'body' that can respond wildly to the stimulus of emotions and especially to the dictates of the ego unless we recognize its influence and can learn to contain it. This is the 'body' that is most manipulated by Christian preacher-propagandists who employ the use of charged emotions (the fired-up emotional delivery of the preacher, the power of music toemotionally sweep us off our feet, the powerful dynamics of group reverie (or pseudo-reverie) to suspend thinking and carry us along on a river of emotionalism) to install their Illuminati-inspired British Israel programming in their highly suggestible and pre-primed congregations. This is precisely what British Israel con artists like Benny Hinn, John Hagee, Paul & Jan Crouch, Rod Parsley, Jesse Duplantis, etc, etc., are doing with their congregants. They are using the facade of Christianity to install ideas and beliefs (E.g. Christian Zionism) that will ultimately lead to the destruction of Christianity and the imposition of the Satanic New World Order. Duped fundamentalist congregants are not going to be able to recognize or free themselves from this deception unless they begin to temper the hypnotic influence of emotionalism and start engaging their under-utilizedintellectual "body" to discern and examine more carefully what they are being taught as the indisputable "Will of God." They are being brainwashed and manipulated to serve the agenda of the New World Order and they don't know it. Thankfully, a few books have been published recently which address this issue head on and more Christian pastors-who still have their heads screwed on straight- are now beginning to publicly lambaste the deceptions being promoted by the likes of Hagee or Hinn, but much more awakening needs to take place within the ranks of congregants themselves. They are the ones who are funding and underpinning the very scaffolding upon which they will hang themselves. Ken Adachi
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#2. To: Zoroaster (#0)
That was as far as I got with the article but I have to tell you that Christian's have a duty to witness to others but no Christian--at least none that I know--believe they have a right to "impose" their beliefs or will upon others. The Bible does not teach anyone that they have a right to try to force anyone to believe anything.
Your brand of Christianity, fundamentalism, does not absord; it repluses.
I'm curious, Zoraster: is there a non-fundie 'brand' of Christianity you adhere to, and if so, what is it? It seems to me that the mainline churches became irrelevant forty ot fifty years ago because they drifted from 'fundamentalism'.
Title: Aristotle versus the Big Jew in the Sky Source: Essay by Zoroaster URL Source: [None] Published: May 14, 2005 Author: Zoroaster Post Date: 2005-05-14 08:25:42 by Zoroaster Keywords: Aristotle, versus Views: 93 Comments: 76 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-
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