The Devil's Gateway Ch. 02

"Another book, 'God, The Failed Hypothesis', by physicist Victor J. Stenger, has a very biting comment on the god of the bible and what we're expected to believe about it: 'What is amazing is that in this sophisticated modern age so many still cling to primitive, archaic images from the childhood of humanity.'

" '...the childhood of humanity'. Let's take a break, then we'll go into some more."

To say we were in rapt attention, if at times somewhat overwhelmed by it all, is putting it mildly. Out in the hall, we were all abuzz about this, that, and everything else Liv had said. For sure, none of us regretted coming to these classes. Rather, we wished that there were more of them.

"We have to get them to come to the club. Jabs will love talking with Liv, and everyone will love her and Paula too," Mary said.

"We'll talk to them after class," Ariel promised.

* * * *

"Before I get into Dr. Stenger's book as I said before the break, let me throw a couple of more tidbits from Michael Biagent's book, The Jesus Papers. As I said, he has some interesting dates, and I'll give you a few of them in a minute, but first, Annie, if you'll do some honors again, and yes, you too, Rachel. Let's look for the Gospel of Mark, chapter 14, verses 51 and 52. When you find them, please read them, and Rachel, as usual, check us out."

When they had it, Annie read, and Rachel confirmed it as the same in the New Revised Standard Version.

"Oh, my! I've never heard that one preached in church, and neither has Paula. Has anyone heard that read in church?" No one said yes; we all shook our heads. "Never even heard of it, huh?" Again, we hadn't.

"Here's a book about Lost Scriptures, which includes the Lost Gospel of Mark, just so you don't think that Mr. Biagent pulled his thing out of his hat. Annie, would you read it please, just the highlighted parts on page 88."

When she had read it, some of us gasped. The inference was plain, but was it true?

"That's without a doubt referring to the same youth in our regular bible, and in both, he runs away naked because they reached and grabbed his cloak to stop him. He had nothing underneath whatsoever. That is strange.

"Now this letter wherein Clement, a bishop of Alexandria is said to tell a Theodosius about this secret gospel, and that a person, Carpocrates by name, stole a copy, or the original of it. Now Carpocrates is a historical person who started a religion said to have much sex to it. Carpocrates' religion had sex rituals in it that was supposedly due to what Jesus taught others. His son did him a few better, and apparently was more licentious than his father was.

"You'll find Carpocrates on the Internet. Some of what he had to suggest is interesting. I point you to it only because it will show you that there were many different beliefs in what Jesus taught.

"But going back to it, this secret gospel says that the young man was dead, and that Jesus raised him from his tomb. Was this man Lazarus, or maybe someone else he was supposed to have raised? The Secret Gospel also says that Jesus stayed the night with this youth, who, incidentally, as you heard, was wearing a linen cover only, but was naked underneath just as in our regular gospel of Mark. As you further heard, it reports that when Jesus got up, an assumption since Jesus' name isn't used here, he returned to the other side fo the Jordan. The homoerotic thing was that Jesus is said to have taught this youth '...the mysteries of the Kingdom of God.' What was supposed to be in The Secret Gospel of Mark was the rituals of sex, and by implication, that Jesus had no objection to men having sex with other men. Is it true? Is any of it true, and I do mean any of it? We have no idea, not of a certainty.

"Clement is historical, but we don't know about this Theodosius. The gospel was said to be discovered by Morton Smith, a very reputable scholar before this came up, as well as the letter which he said he photographed. They're supposed to be in Mar Saba, a famous Greek monastery. What's the truth? I have no idea, but it's all very interesting.

"One other thing that I'll cover is Mary Magdalene. In this day, many women scholars are bitching about how Mary Magdalene was marginalized by the church, or written out, if you will. Some gospels mention her as being the one who found Jesus gone, others vary including excluding her. All of the gospels are different, but as some say, it takes nothing away from the principal message. I beg to differ with them for it goes to veracity as to being the word of god, especially to those who say the bible is inerrant.

"For us, what I do wish to point out specifically is how we can have that tunnel vision and miss seeing things. Remember 'The range of what you think and do is limited by what you fail to notice.'? What I want you to see is, yes, the veracity part, but even more, many of these women are super intelligent. Reading some of their books just about made me want to do what I could to help them, they're so convincing.

"But, what they're after is inclusion in the mainstream churches, to be more a part of them, and to have women get their due as they feel should have been given to Mary Magdalene's position with Jesus. As the gospels tell it, Mary may indeed have had a more than respectable place in Jesus' life, if anything that they say about Jesus is true. More, there's a gospel said to be the Gospel of Mary Magdalene that was ignored by the church when it began to form. Worse, in the story line when compared to the gospels, Peter and his brother Andrew are very much at odds also in the Gospel of Mary Magdalene, so the story lines do meld to make Mary's gospel believable.

"If Jesus had a provenance that better supported him as he is now perceived other than the foundation of the Old Testament, it those women would make a lot of sense, but they do fail to notice that lack of foundational proof. Some, though, may have a purely feminist agenda of not liking being excluded when they feel they shouldn't be. Others may simply see it as advertised, yet fail to notice the lack of foundation for the New Testament. The violation of Dr. Laing's little saying of failing to notice limiting one's range of seeing or doing.

"Many of those women are true scholars but I think that a book by Barbara King, Evolving God, wherein she said we want to belong, that belongingness is one thing we need and seek, comes into play here. As Ms. King says, these women can also be said to be wanting to belong.

"As intelligent as they are, I wish that they had not limited their scholarship, and looked deeper and seen the falsity of the scriptures, that there is no foundation, just a Zeitgeist. If they did see, then they looked past the elephant and walked around it, but for most, I don't think they walked around any elephant, I think they simply limited themselves to that wanting to be included. That didn't paying attention to the falsity as being of greater significance than just their myopic view of focusing on Mary Magdalene. I truly do wish that they'd put all of that intelligence to work on the whole of it all, and expose it for what it is, for how it was all cobbled by men from the start.

"As I said, there are a multitude of books about her now, but I ask you again, is all of this scholarship worth anything since it's all probably false from the beginnings of the Jews? Their books are interesting, and some of what they say may be true, and I enjoyed reading about it. However, if you're looking for the truth, does it really matter? Personally, I don't think so, then again, I'm not here to point out any feminist view, just looking for truth if I can find it, and exposing the lies that keep us from it.

"As I said, they're wanting to belong, to end the patriarchy and be included, but what they want to be included in is a lie, and as such, they are doing a disservice to other women, namely you and I, who are all lesbians. Again, I think that it just hasn't been thought of by them, at least I hope that's what it is."

She paused a moment again, catching her breath, and maybe wondering if any of us would have any questions. There were no questions.

"Now for some of Biagent's tidbits.

"And wouldn't you know, the first one is about this bishop Clement in 195 A.D. about the Secret Gospel of Mark.

"The second is in 197 A.D. wherein it says Tertullian—you remember him, don't you? The one who branded us as the devil's gateway—converting to Christianity. My, the heresy hunter becomes a Christian. They fit perfectly, don't they? What with both being such misogynists and patriarchic.

"Somewhere between 366 and 384 A.D., pope Damasus 1 declared Rome the Apostolic See, or the overlord of all of Christianity. That was tried earlier in about 257, remember?

"And of course, in 386, as I mentioned before, Priscillian, the bishop of Avila in Spain was executed for heresy. Who knows how many others not worthy of mention were executed before him by the church.

"Let's say that everything is A.D. from now on, and skip that, okay? Anyway, about 401 to 417, pope Innocent 1 reiterated that Rome has supreme authority over all Christians.

"However, between 440 and 461, pope Leo 1 said Rome's primacy was based on the inherited authority of the apostle Peter. Somewhere along the line, in order to divert the obvious questions that others had to raise or think, they felt they should justify their pope-ship. The pope is the mystical embodiment of Peter," she smiled wryly. "Now we know where they got this pope business. They were making sure that this new Zeitgeist they were building stuck. It kind of reminds us of the Zeitgeist the Jews built from the return of some from Babylon, to Ezra, to the time of the Maccabees.

"I mentioned the genocide of the Cathars before. This was in March of 1244. They were a secretive people, but a very peaceful bunch, which made them dangerous to the Vatican. When an old Cathar woman was dying, she was sneakily interrogated by an inquisitor; it was all written down by a member of the church, and is in the archives of the Catholic church, according to Biagent. What she told them on her deathbed was used to declare all the Cathars heretics, and slaughtered them, many, it's reported, burned alive. They've never apologized for this, nor accepted publicly what they did. It was genocide.

"In line with this, and it is historical, our present pope Ratzinger, was the head of the Sacred Congregation of the Holy Office, which before that was The Congregation of the Faith until 1965. Why the change? Originally it was the office of the Inquisition, which they kept sanitizing—you might remember it better as in the Spanish Inquisition. They made it a holy office—yeah, real holy. They kept adding bleaching it, sanitizing, so it wouldn't be associated with the Inquisition in our minds.

"Now back to our time line of happenings. I said before that the first bible to be proclaimed by the Catholic church was not for everyone. Athanasius, bishop of Alexandria in 367 had done this for his bishopric of Alexandria, but at Easter of that year, he said every book that is noncanonical in Egypt was to be destroyed. No other books, no comparisons, and no questions.

"One more thing from Biagent, and it concerns the man who is popularly known as Josephus. Some of you may have heard of him. He was originally a zealot general at the time when Jerusalem and the temple were destroyed by Vespasian and his son Titus before Vespasian became emperor. He wrote several books, and he, Josephus, is one of the three to mention Jesus thus giving him some historical authenticity. Many people quote Josephus, but Biagent says that the copies of Josephus' works we have now are from medieval times. He suggests that there have probably been changes and additions from the originals. Now why do I believe that that is a very good possibility?"

I was getting to love her manner of looking around at us to emphasize a point.

"Now here's a few more tidbits: Gospel of Thomas is believed by some to be from about 90 to 100 CE. If so, that would make it at the same time as the Gospel of John.

"Mary declared a virgin by the fourth century. You can see how they were slowly modifying their Zeitgeist. It was said this was done because Isis was still worshiped by many, and pictures of Osiris suckling at her breast were extent, so now it was Mary whose picture was seen with Jesus as a babe. Co-opting?

"Pope Gregory the Great, in 591 declared Mary Magdalene a whore. Actually, she wasn't known to be a whore, but they thought she was a danger to the church—she was too revered in many parts of France and elsewhere. That was later rescinded, but much later.

"Martin Luther thought Jesus may have had a sexual life. To this day, many think Mary Magdalene was Jesus' wife, or his lover at the least.

"Celibacy began in 1100.

"Penance began in 1215. This made all the people to be even more reliant on the priests, made them go through them to get to god.

"Joseph Smith, the founder of the Mormons, thought of himself as being of Jesus' bloodline.

"Dominican priests, who railed against women, and even Mary Magdalene, had her as their patron saint. I don't know if this is true, but someday I'll have to try to verify it.

"December 25th is the birthday of Mithras. Mithras was a god whose initiation into his religion was where you bought a bull, slit it's throat, and your body was washed in that blood. It didn't take off as it was expensive to buy a bull. Washed in the blood. My, where have I heard that before?"

Again, the look she was famous for now, her eyes looking off. She had us thinking of where she had heard it before, then I remembered that one preacher who 'washed' his sins in the blood, the one caught visiting prostitutes.

"Babylonians 'baptized'. Why, I don't know.

"Ladies, I said we'd go into it some more. I intentionally left off on Dr. Stenger's little quote, 'The childhood of humanity', which referred us to believing in religion as our earliest ancestors did, and to my way of thinking, this could easily include our early Christian church. Why?

"Please allow me to throw a little physics at you, the little I learned, but that is of so much importance to me. First, I want to say that no one knows what life is. Even a Nobel winning physicist, Erwin Schrodinger, wrote a book asking what is life. It is one of the biggest questions physicists wonder about. We think we know how life may have started, how it may have grown, but its real origin, and its purpose, if any, is totally unknown. The same can be said about consciousness. We have no idea where it came from, nor why. Mind is the last thing. We think, but where do thoughts come from? We know they go through our brains, and we access them in our physicality, but what mind really is, we have no idea, as well as not knowing where it comes from.

"What we do know is that all matter is atoms, even stones, the oxygen we breathe, and the water we drink. We, in essence, are atoms eating and drinking other atoms. There's a lot more to be said, but not here. What I will say is something about the interior of atoms.

"We all know that we can enlarge a computer font, or if we have a picture on a computer, we can enlarge it, or zoom in on it and make it, from say, 100 percent to 150 percent. When we do the enlarging, it all becomes bigger, but everything is bigger in proportion so that if it's a picture, all in that picture is enlarged, but the spacing from one item to the next is kept in original proportion also. Do you all know what I'm talking about?"

All of us murmured agreement and nodded our heads, and as usual, wondered where Liv was taking us now.

"If you were to enlarge an atom tremendously, say from actual atomic size, to be as large as Albert Hall in England, which I understand is quite large indeed, the scientists say that the nucleus of the atom would still be as the size of a flea on the hall floor. The real good news is that if you think you're overweight, you're not—since we're all made of atoms, you're mostly space," she laughed. That broke us up.

"Yeah, I wish," she laughed lightly again.

"Don't we all?" someone else said making us all laugh even more.

"Okay, where I'm going with this is that there are particles so very tiny that they go right through us constantly. In fact, they go right through the earth, and one of these is called a neutrino. How does it do that? Simple. Everything is made of atoms, and atoms are mostly space. Keep in mind how the nucleus of an atom is compared to the atom it resides in, how tiny it is compared to the atom itself. A neutrino is also much tinier than an atom, and has no trouble negotiating its way through many atoms jammed together as in a rock, or say one of us.

"What I'm leading to is something very near and dear to me. There are said to be an octillion atoms in my bodily makeup—that's trillions and trillions of space laden atoms. When I met Paula, after while, I began to think I sensed or heard light pinging sounds. Those sounds were only heard by me, and at first, I worried on them, and thought about them a lot. After a while, though the noises became more plentiful, but I was more than comfortable with them. I sensed that the sounds were being made by neutrinos or similarly small particles trying to go through me, and couldn't do so in increasing frequency.

"Why couldn't they go through me? It could only be for one reason, and that was that my love for Paula was filling up so deeply that it was filling up all the empty space in the atoms that made me up. Maybe I should say that Paula's love of me was filling me up. Hmm, then again, maybe both. I'm not too sharp on this atomic stuff.

"Anyway, I know not if there is a god, as I said before, but if there is, it's not the one we're given in the bible as we're told. However, if there is a god or Goddess, and I think the latter if at all, until I learn the truth, Paula is my Goddess for she fills me with her love, and allows me to love her in return. Until we learn the ultimate truth, if you need to worship, may each of you find your personal Goddess, and be filled with her love as I am with Paula's love.

"There are many mysteries in the universe, and for sure, there's a distinct possibility that there are other universes. Yes, weird though it may be to think of such a thing, can anyone say why not? We can't even explain how it is that our body was made with all of its parts working together, much less the universe we live in. Each of us is a waking, walking miracle if ever there was one and there are many of us. If we don't know ourselves, how can we say we know our universe is so unique as to be the only one? This, ladies, is from scientists, physicists who are now thinking our universe may just not be the only one.

"Again, consider how we don't know what life is, what consciousness is, or where it came from, or why we are. There are so many questions to be answered, so many to wonder at, so why are we tied up by a religion that is so full of errors, and has too many different ideas about itself so as to boggle the mind? There are differences between the many religions we have in our part of the world today, but now they accommodate the differences, or mostly so, but at a time in the past when they could, they didn't accommodate each other at all. Times have changed, and they've changed with them, but only as absolutely needed to stay viable. Lesbianism isn't something they want though, since they're so patriarchic.

"We're made to love physically, and many of us didn't choose mentally, consciously, to be lesbians, we just are—we do love other women. That love isn't good enough for Catholicism or most of Protestantism, or as I understand it, Islam, but it's a holy love if any love is holy. We all have a lot to learn, but we're not going to learn what we truly need to learn from religions from the childhood of humanity as Dr. Stenger likes to put it."