Salvation is not begged or bought;
Too long this selfish hope sufficed;
Too long man reeked with lawless thought,
And leaned upon a tortured Christ.
ELLA WHEELER WILCOX
Before we attribute authority to anyone we should ask this question: What does he know of his subject? Thus far, no one has asked this question of Christ; no one has pronounced Him ignorant, and this because no one has had sufficient knowledge to see the errors in His teachings. Yet this will be the basis of our proof that this God and Savior is but a creation of an ignorant priesthood. Those priestly scribes were ignorant of Causation and Creation, Evolution and the origin of qualities and so they made their creature likewise. They were ignorant even of the meaning of Genesis and so made their Son of God believe in its literal word; in fact, His whole salvation purpose is based on that literalism.
According to these literalists Christ was the Creator of the world, yet he accepted the absurd account of creation as given in Genesis. He believed in a historical Noe, a Moses, a David, a Solomon and even a Jonah for it was he who told us the fish was a whale. He believed in a historical Adam, his sin and his fall. But Adam was not a man; therefore it wasn’t man that sinned. And if man didn’t sin he is not lost. And if he is not lost he does not need a Savior. Thus Christ’s whole salvation mission was based on a misunderstanding of Genesis. In fact, the entire New Testament is based on a misinterpretation of the Old Testament.
One would think that the Creator of the world would know the origin and genesis of qualities and therefore of love, and yet we have such proof of Christ’s ignorance of these fundamentals as this: “God is love.” “For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son that whosoever believeth in him should not perish but have everlasting life.”1
No greater number of didactic fallacies were ever strung together in one short sentence. God does not love the world; God does not give the world anything; he has no “only begotten son,” belief will not save anyone, and there is no such thing as everlasting life.
God is not even the source of love, but only of life; love is not a gift but a slow and painful product of evolutionary life—very recent at that. Nowhere in all creation is there any evidence of it save in man. True, we find it dawning in the animal mother but that only proves its biologic and evolutionary origin. A Christ would know these things but as his creators did not, they made him as ignorant as themselves. Thus no further proof of Christ’s human and syncritic origin is needed than this statement for it is not that of a divinely wise being but only a later expression of an ancient Hebrew fallacy—moral perfection on the wrong end of Being. The gospelists, accepting this, put it into the mouth of their creation, and for two thousand years Western man has not had sufficient knowledge of Reality to know that it is false. He still accepts it; his moral guides still cite it as Christ’s unique discovery. “Upon his lips Abba meant more than any name for God ever meant before. So purely and ardently did it issue from the depths of his own experience as to communicate itself to his disciples and through them to others in such a vivid reality as to make a new and transforming epoch in the life of the human spirit. This is originality. By this token Divine Fatherhood may be rightly regarded as a discovery, and Jesus as the discoverer.”—Dr. F. N. Buckham. In other words, Jesus was the discoverer of the greatest error in all human thought; by implanting it firmly in the racial mind he was guilty of the greatest deception in all human history. If this be originality, it resulted in the complete destruction of the ancient wisdom-knowledge of Reality. Such teaching has robbed man of all knowledge of Causation, the reason for disasters, the source of truth, the origin of qualities and the purpose of his own being. Had this Christ lived a few years longer, how would He have accounted for the destruction of Pompeii and Herculaneum? Was this too a “token” of “Divine Fatherhood”? For millions of years these violent forces have destroyed both life and property, but instead of drawing the logical conclusion our teachers but repeat the words of this ignorant Christ after him. Elsewhere we said that poets know more than priests and now it seems they know more than Christs also—a logical deduction since Christs are priest-creations. Poets make no claim to omniscience, yet having looked on nature they know their “Father’s” nature:
Cry against your day as men have forever done, believing it the worst —believing themselves to inherit the age of darkness after the age of the sun.
I say all days are evil, since first the spirit moved on the waters. The bomb, the gun were fashioned in chaos; so indeed were the breasts of desire, and the beauty of beasts that, born to terror run like music round creation’s wheel of fire.
Dilys Bennet Laing
Why did Christ not know this also? Because either his creators were ignorant of it or they did not want the truth revealed— truth and priests are not concomitant. And so they put still more false words into his mouth: “He that loveth me shall be loved of my Father,” “Father forgive them for they know not what they do,” and so on. The only father of Christ or man is a natural principle, and this is not conscious of what it creates. How then can it forgive man for his sins? Having made man savage and ignorant, how can it hold him guilty? Had this metaphysically ignorant Christ possessed any knowledge of Causation, his prayer would read in reverse—Man, forgive God, for he knows not what he does. All life attests this tragic fact, and so the question is not, Will God forgive man for his sins? but can man forgive God for his cruelty? That man caused his own suffering through an “original sin” is a perversion of the truth. That “sin” was God’s—the creation of matter, the source of evil. But God does not suffer for his sins; he lets man do it. Yet where does Christ show his awareness of this fact? Where a word of pity for man’s martyrdom? There is none, yet this is the basis of his wish, the brotherhood of man. Only when the individual sees blind, suffering humanity as the victim of a cause that knows not love and mercy will sympathy awaken. Only when all see this cosmic plight of man will they do unto others as they would be done by. This is the source of divine compassion and it is human, not theistic. This “the Son of God” did not know, and so he taught the opposite.
No other teacher was guilty of such misguidance. Buddha, or his creators, saw quite clearly the true nature of God and stood aghast at its cruelty. “If God,” said he, “permits such misery to exist he cannot be good, and if he is powerless to prevent it, he cannot be God.” Nowhere in Christ’s words do we find such recognition of fact or accusation of Cause. Like Michael in Jude, he “durst not bring against him a railing accusation.”
There is a story told of a heavenly messenger sent by God to bring report of man. Filled with zeal and prejudice against this mortal rebel, he came to earth, but there he learned a shocking truth—that man is God’s moral superior, and filled with zeal for man and prejudice against God, he too became a rebel—and “I do well to be angry,” said another of his kind. Now if the Gospels are literally true, Christ was also a messenger from God to man, but instead of recognizing the suffering of man and the cruel indifference of God, he widened the gulf between them: “None is good save one, that is God,” while we are sinners, all; the things of man are as nothing compared to the things of God, and so we must “render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and unto God the things that are God’s.” The implication is, of course, that the things of Caesar (man) are vile and evil, whereas the things of God are divine and holy. Had this “Son of God” known His Father’s nature he would have realized that, morally at least, the things of Caesar are incalculably superior to the things of God. But having learned of God from Hebrew theology, man was to him a helpless creature wholly dependent upon a God of love for everything—with prayer as the logistic key. He has but to ask this loving God for peace, justice, health and prosperity and they will be given him. If these things come from God, and prayer be the modest price thereof, why is the world so devoid of them? Because we do not pray enough? No, but because in that vast preponderance of time not spent in prayer, we let their vicious opposite grow up in our hearts, and there they become the disposing factors in our lives, and neither prayers below nor God above can overrule them. It is for us to create these things, not beg them from alleged divinity. For thousands of years we have been begging this divinity for peace, and only now are we realizing that we ourselves must establish it, hence the United Nations.
Had Christ known the nature of Reality he would not have taught the love of God for man or its reverse. Yet the Gospels have him say: “And thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind, and with all thy strength: this is the first commandment” (Mark 12:30). It is not the first of an enlightened Christ but only of a priesthood that needed it professionally. God being but the ruthless creative power, man has no right to love it, since from it spring all his pain and suffering, his savagery and war. If he would escape from these he must not only cease pretending to love it but oppose and conquer it. Mythologically man rebelled against this one—to become human; he must now rebel against it mentally and morally to become divine. And this he is doing, all unknowingly because of religion. His search for truth, his hope for peace, his efforts towards law and order, what are they but human efforts to overcome this primal savagery within himself? This being the case, why should he love it? The truth is he doesn’t but only pretends to. This results in hypocrisy, and then our teachers wonder why we are hypocrites one toward the other.
Were honest opinion allowed for just one day, they would learn a most shocking truth—there’s not a man among us that would not, if he dared, denounce this ruthless power for the suffering it has caused him. Whether the Church knows this or not, it is the truth; I do but make articulate the latent thought of millions. No man loves God, and any man who says he does is “a liar and the truth is not in him.” You cannot love what you do not know, and no man knows the God of religion. Why then poison your soul, and the group-soul too, with words you know are lies? The least you might do for the human cause is to be honest with yourself; that done, “thou canst not then be false to any man.”
Love is not the solvent for man’s sins nor yet his savagery, therefore not even on the human plane are Christ’s precepts those of wisdom—”Love thy neighbor as thyself.” You cannot love your neighbor as thyself nor should you try. The error here lies in the word—not love but good will, and unemotional good will comes not from love but from enlightenment. This is the solvent of our social ills and Christ ignored it. He gave us the goal, peace and brotherhood, but He did not tell us how to solve the moral, social and economic problems that prevent its attainment; He did not tell us we are still far down the ladder of Evolution and therefore ignorant; He made no mention of the savage God-forces here man has to contend with; on the contrary He offered only the faith of childlike innocence and trust in the supernatural. He was guilty therefore of misdirection of human energies.
A humanity, ignorant of the cause, turned these savage God-forces upon itself, the result, fraternal war and conquest. A genuine Savior would have taught primitive man that his enemy was not his equally needy brother, but his ruthless, warlike Father—nature, if you prefer it. This Savior, on the contrary, taught him this Father alone was good and therefore should be loved and worshiped. And now, considering the time we’ve wasted on war and worship, it’s little wonder we’re still savage. It’s time man learned he has no time to waste on God, or energies to waste on war. He needs them both in the all-important project Civilization. This implies love and justice, peace and brotherhood, and man alone can create them.
And now what has this world Savior to say about these things? The very opposite. Instead of revealing to us our purpose in Creation and responsibility for our world conditions, He tells us to “take no thought” for anything, “for your heavenly father knoweth your need before ye ask him”—a perfect example of that “false security” under which we have lived. The statement has no literal significance whatsoever. Refuse to take thought for your own welfare and this “heavenly father” will let you starve. Take no thought for health and hygiene and you die of this “heavenly father’s” murderous parasites. Take no thought for economic justice and you become an industrial slave. Take no thought for political justice and you have a world at war. Caring for these things is precisely our business, and in the present state of the world we see the result of leaving them to God—prayers for peace and incessant wars; wrong on the throne and right on the cross; the virtuous impoverished, the vicious enriched; our benefactors toiling alone, while the wealthy parasites loaf and play—this is “divine providence.” What we need is a little human providence: knowledge and intelligence to right these God-ordained wrongs, and a sense of values that will help our benefactors help us. In these things God is helpless, and God’s extremity is man’s opportunity.
Whatever God does for any individual is done between conception and physical maturity—body-building; thereafter he rests, just as He did after He built His own body, the earth. Anything subsequent that seems from this source lies in the category of psychic phenomena. In evolution we build our own protective powers; they are not, therefore, cosmic and prehuman. What then does the quoted statement mean?
It does not take great wisdom to understand this statement; therefore our misunderstanding of it reveals our lack of wisdom. Here, as elsewhere, it is the Creator speaking, and this Creator brought with it all things whatsoever this world would need. In this story Jesus is this Creator and he is assuring the world that its needs are known; therefore about the world and its needs we do not have to worry—”Qui plantavit curabit” He who planted it will take care of it—but think not this applies to man. He has made his own world, human society, with new and specific needs the Creator knows not of; therefore man and man alone can supply them. This is the vital truth this Christ obscured, i.e., his creators obscured. Their need was a weak, subservient humanity dependent on them for “all this and heaven too.”
In spite of our science their teaching is still with us. To illustrate this we quote from a religious notice in one of our metropolitan papers. Speaking of Christ and his salvation, it says: “It means simply that God comes down and does everything that needs to be done. He has to, because we are helpless— because the very effort to save ourselves by our own ‘good works’ is blasphemy, idolatry, arrogance, presumption, the very essence of sin.” If Christ taught such things, He was a saboteur of His Father’s actual plan—Evolution. And there is no “if” about it; He did teach it. We, the creators of reason, morality and someday divinity, can do nothing, nor do we need to since God knows our needs before we ask Him. Thus He led the race from nature’s order to human chaos, diverted the mind from Reality, and wasted two thousand years on a false salvation. If such a teacher actually lived and led the race so far astray, then Mani was right—”he was a demon”; he was in fact the Antichrist. To spare him this, we say instead, he was the instrument of ecclesiasticism. It was this and this alone that needed the false theology and philosophy.
This we find epitomized in that perversive parable of “the prodigal son.” In this, Christ likens man to a rebel, a sinner and a fool who separates himself from his righteous father, only to repent, return and be forgiven—proof positive of his ignorant priestly origin, for no real Christ would draw such a parallel, for none exists. You cannot compare things unlike in nature. The human father and son are comparable, both being moral, self-conscious beings; the cosmic Father and Son are comparable, both being nonmoral, unconscious principles, but the human and cosmic pairs are wholly dissimilar. A Christ would know this also; he would know too that the cosmic Father and Son ran away together and that both fell into materiality. He would know that this was the “original sin” and that all others are but the results thereof. Had Christ known and taught these things, Christianity would never have got started, for the most ignorant would have seen that the sins of man are but the sins of God in man, and that man, instead of a thing apart and despised of God, is the best part of God, the only part that knows what love or mercy is. As it is through man this fallen God regains his kingdom, then instead of God being man’s redeemer, man is actually God’s redeemer. This is the “atonement,” and man is the atoner; in other words, Evolution alone can atone for the “sin” of Involution—the creation of matter, the source of evil. Where then is the worth of this perverted parable? The occult key to it lies in the word sun, not son. When Apollo, the sun, was banished, he fed the flocks of King Admetus. This is the real prodigal, wasting its substance and reducing itself to the swine of scripture—the planets. This eventually returns to its father, the Absolute. But where is the preacher who knows such things?
In their literal interpretation, our preachers tell us we are the prodigal while they are the virtuous son at home. The fact is, they are the prodigal, the renegade from Reality, living on the husks of truth—literal mythology. It is for them to return to this source of Truth and be forgiven, not by God but by humanity.
This Christ admonished us to do the will of God, but apparently he did not know what the will of God is or where it manifests. To him it is in some far off-place called Heaven. “Our Father who art in heaven,” and “thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.”
The will of God is the way of nature, “red in tooth and claw with ravine.” 2 If Christ did not know this he was less wise than philosophers also, John Stuart Mill for one. “. . . if imitation of the Creator’s will as revealed in nature were applied as a rule of action in this case, the most atrocious enormities of the worst men would be more than justified by the apparent intention of Providence that throughout all animate nature the strong should prey upon the weak.” And again, “Not even on the most distorted and contrasted theory of good which ever was framed by religious or philosophic fanaticism can the government of Nature be made to resemble the work of a being at once good and omnipotent.” And yet again: “If we are not obliged to believe the animal creation to be the work of a demon, it is because we need not suppose it to have been made by a Being in infinite power.” 3 And so thought Buddha: “If God permits such misery to exist He cannot be good, and if He is powerless to prevent it, He cannot be God.” “Are God and Nature then at strife, that Nature lends such evil dreams?” Tennyson.4 No, it is only Nature and man’s false God-concept that are at strife. To kill or be killed is Nature’s law and therefore the will of God. As long as man is ignorant of this violent will he will remain a victim of it. Thus far he has consistently misinterpreted it. Feeling its impelling urge within him he thinks it a call from heaven and so sets out to make hell on earth. “God wills it! God wills it!” was the cry of every mass murderer on record. And he was right: God wills anything man is foolish enough to do. In our burning cities and starving nations we see what we can do under his will, and we will keep on doing them until we see that it is our will, not God’s, that must put a stop to them. In things moral and social the genetic God of nature has no will for us; what we mistake for such is our own desire for the moral epigenetic’s domination. Here the will of God for man is but the will of man for man acting upon God principles:
A will that wills above the will of each,
Yet but the will of all conjunctively.
If we would see it realized we must build our own moral world and live in it. We see then that man’s task is the very opposite of that taught by Christ and Christianity—not “to do the will of God” but to get as far away from it as possible. This is “Free will”—the moral epigenetic’s complete freedom from the domination of genetic energy and instincts.
But if no such being exists as the God of these false Gospels, to whom did Jesus pray—in the garden of Gethsemane, for instance? No one; the prayer is a pure invention, the work of priestly-minded mythologists who wrote the rough, hard facts of Esau with the smooth, sly hand of Jacob. The garden of Gethsemane is one with the garden of Eden, and Jesus another Adam. As both are the Creative Principle, what need is there of another? And what greater prayer-answering power is there than the “Word,” the Creator of the world? If greater power exists why did it not answer then? Why does it not answer now? The whole world is praying that wars may cease, but now as then there is no answer. A Christ would know the reason why, and so not waste his words on mindless space. If this Christ did not, he was again less wise than poets.
And that inverted bowl we call the sky,
Whereunder crawling cooped we live and die,
Lift not thy hand to it for help—for it
Rolls impotently on as thou or I.
Omar Khayyam
What the Gospels present us with is a Son of God who believed in all the human fallacies of the preceding five thousand years. And this is the key to His origin and genesis—a priesthood which also believed in them. This is why he did not and could not give us any knowledge other than that of his day and generation. And yet what an opportunity was here! The Logos, the Word, the Creator. Could not such a being have cleared up the mysteries that have plagued us ever since? Could he not have solved even “the riddle of the universe”? Were his contemporaries so dumb and incurious they did not ask? Not entirely; one did ask but got no answer. “What is truth?” said Pilate, but the Christ-makers, themselves not knowing, hustled Pilate off before Omniscience could answer. Very clever but not knowledgeable. He might at least have told the Roman where to look for truth—in the book of life, not a book of lies.
So what is truth? To answer that we must know its source, Reality, and this the scriptures falsified. Reality, for us, is the world and all that it contains. As this includes its physical content, its genetic consciousness, the forms this created, and their consciousness, it is all in all. Reality in any broader sense is but this in multiple—the cosmos. Thus Reality is both quantitative and qualitative, objective and subjective. The human qualitative and subjective are our creations; the quantitative and objective were created for us. Our senses were made to contact and learn from the external Reality; they are the intelligizers of our consciousness, personal and racial. Our consciousness is thus the subjective part of objective Reality and right only to the extent of our experience with it. A given truth is a conceptual correlate of some aspect of Reality, objective or subjective. This aspect constitutes a fact, and knowledge consists of our awareness of it. Hence the criterion of truth is the amount of truth one has in himself, and because of that one man can be right though three billion declare he is wrong. It depends on how much his consciousness has learned from and conformed to Reality, which includes the wisdom content of the planetary group-soul. We see then that God is not Truth; God is Reality, Truth, man’s knowledge of it. This being so, calling the scriptures “the word of Gòd” is no guarantee of their truth.
Since Truth comes from Reality these two should fit together like the edges of a torn sheet of paper. Today they do not because religion inverted one of them, hence the inharmony. Herein lies our reason for stressing the need of a “reorientation of the mind with Reality.” As of now it is oriented to nonreality, hence the warfare ‘twixt creed and fact. Set this straight that the mind may not be confused by the variance in the facts of Reality it sees and the concepts of Reality it is taught. Concepts and percepts should also fit together; when they do not one of them is wrong. And this is the wrong of the scriptures.
Of the cosmic “facts of life” their creators knew nothing and so they could not make their creation know more. Aware of this they blinded us with miracles instead of facts. And what good were they to subsequent millions save to deceive them? Miraculous powers are not transmissible, nor are they possible to natural man, but knowledge of germs and therapeutic drugs is. So instead of miraculously healing a few to prove his divinity this Christ might have shown his humanity by teaching the ignorant the cause and cure of disease. Had he done so, a hundred million of his deluded followers would not have died of plague and pestilence. And if God is love, why should these even exist?
However, there is more to religion than knowledge. Religion is a duality—philosophy to enlighten the mind, and morality to civilize the soul. Christ gave us the latter but it is no more his than his philosophy. It came not from him nor from his God; it is from man and from man came Christ’s. It antedates him by untold millenia, and even in his day Hillel taught the same fine precepts: “Judge not thy neighbor until thou hast been in his place.” “Do not do unto others what thou wouldst not they should do unto thee; this is the whole of the law—the rest is only commentary.” And so taught Socrates and Plato, Buddha and Confucius. “The doctrine of our master (Confucius) consists in having an invariable correctness of heart, and in doing towards others as we would that they should do to us.” “Socrates and Plato are far superior to the Jewish moralists.” And “let us add that no modern theology has taught higher and purer moral notions than those of Aeschylus and his school.” Professor Ma-haffy, D.D. “In reading Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius or Seneca, I often believe myself hearing the sage of Nazareth. The dignity of man, the all surpassing value of virtue, the independence and fortitude of the righteous man, the superior value of spiritual qualities as compared to all worldly goods, the sacrifice of selfish enjoyments and of life for the sake of virtue and truth—all these ideals, so worthy of reverence, we find in the one as well as in the other. The striking resemblance between the Christian and the Stoic doctrine . . . cannot escape being noticed by all.” Staeudlin, in his History of Moral Philosophy.
Believers in the Christian origin of morals might also read Josephus’s account of the Essenes, whom he calls “the most virtuous men on earth,” and whose cult, according to Pliny, existed for ages before the time of Christ. To quote Josephus in part: “They are eminent for fidelity, and are ministers of peace; whatsoever they say is firmer than an oath, but swearing is avoided by them, and they esteem it worse than perjury.” Speaking of the vows that each must take, he says: “And before he is allowed to touch their common food he is obliged to take tremendous oaths; that in the first place, he will exercise piety towards God; and then that he will observe justice towards men; and that he will do no harm to anyone, either of his own accord or by the command of others . . . that he will keep his hands clear from theft and his soul from unlawful gain. . .”And what more did Jesus teach? Nothing, save false doctrines about God and man. The result is hypocrites and corruptionists instead of Essenes.
No, morality and wisdom came not from Christ; on the contrary, this Christ’s teaching came from the morality and wisdom of his day. Thus we may say that man himself is the moral Christ.5 Love and mercy, justice, truth are his creations; why then divide them into warring faiths in racial Saviors; why call them Christian, Jewish, Buddhist, Mohammedan? Call them human virtues and let it go at that. The sectarian divisions are the great dividers in our world; the cause of hatred, bigotry and prejudice. Ethnic divisions can live together until the sectarian enters in; the “melting pot” can fuse all isms except religious fanaticism. This endures and perpetuates the divisions. Today great effort is being made to combat “religious prejudice,” but we simply do not know how to go about it; we cannot see that the only way to rid the world of “religious prejudice” is to rid it of religion, its cause and source. The substitute? That truth that would set us free—from religion’s errors. This was the goal of all world teachers; it was only the priests who came after them that founded religions on them. These were not based on fact but fiction, the miraculous and the supernatural. So false a basis brought us little save stupefaction, chaos and war. If it ends in total extinction it will not be because we have found a power that would destroy us, but because we have not found the truth that would save us.
The ineffectuality of Christianity is due to nothing else than its God and Christ. It is the injection of these into everything that negates its moral teaching for those who need it most, the amoral and irresponsible. These want no part of them, and so, reject their associate. If then we would make morality a force in the world, we must rid it of its mythical Gods and Saviors. That done, we could spend the time we waste on them on the betterment of man. Fortunately others are aware of this. “Man makes himself, and he only makes himself completely in proportion as he desacrilizes himself and the world. The sacred is the prime obstacle to his freedom. He will become himself only when he is totally demysticized. He will not be truly free until he has killed the last god.” Mircea Eliade. “For man is the maker of all deities, inventor of all abstractions, builder of all laws, and from first to last, the measure of all things, the very meaning of the earth.” Harry A. Murray. True; for us, there is only the earth and the life upon it; why waste time then on unrealities?
During the Piscean Age we had our political, social and industrial revolutions, but they did not change us inwardly. Something is needed to change the internal content. This will not be a religious revolution but a metaphysical one—the return of the wisdom-knowledge of the cosmos. Already man is besieging this physically; he must also besiege it mentally. This will bring him that “new dimension of consciousness and right orientation with Reality” so long denied him by religion. The latter, we know, is sacred to millions, but it’s the sacred that’s blinding us. Criticism, we know, is shocking to millions, but “A shock upon our minds is long overdue.” Max Frankel.
1 These words are, of course, from the gospel writers but since these created this Christ their words are cognate and of equal authority.
2 In Memoriam LVI
3 Essays on Nature
4 In Memoriam LV.
5 Scripturally, Christ is divine consciousness, but this consciousness called itself the Son of man, implying source.