SUMMARY
OF LEARNERS INTRO & VOCAB
“In the beginning, our Creator gave all the races of mankind the same songs and the same drums to keep in touch with Him, to keep faith. But people kept forgetting. In the fullness of time, the spiritual traditions of all the peoples – they are the same – will be united again in a great gathering of their secret leaders, [my italics], and they will gain power to remake the world.” Mohawk prophesy told by Tom Porter, from The Great American Bathroom Book, Volume III, (don’t laugh, check them out), Stevens W. Anderson, Ed., Compact Classics, Inc., Salt Lake City, Utah, 1994, p. 439.
It is obvious
that our mass religions are morally bankrupt, despite their best practitioners’
heroic devotion. The evils they forgive
themselves, more than offset their claims of validity.
Even though our spirit-lives require the nourishment of true religion, we cannot dismiss the organized kind outright – tempting as that simplification might seem – based on the trivia that it offers us, like housecats their dead vermin. Without religion, omnicide crouches in our hearts where real worship belongs.
Freethinking materialists commit the worst atrocities by
far. The scope of their evil demands
such titanic virtuosity from them, that they cannot waste time on the ‘trivial
loser’ pursuits of spirit.
Those of us more
intent on The Good, had better inspire ourselves with
a Good God. It may be irrelevant whether
that God is ‘imaginary’ or eternal from our stunted point of view. We need a role model more assertive, heroic
and benign than the vicious, envious, error-prone and man-aping creeps
currently on display as God substitutes.
Details of the Cathari religion are complex, diverse and poorly documented. According to ancient Manichaeism from which the Cathari faith sprang, an Evil Principle dominates the physical world and an equal Principle of Good seems to balance it on a non-material plane. Like oil and water in colloidal suspension, these principles interlace in cosmic contention. Every newborn child is a frail vessel animated by a spark of good and cast adrift in a black typhoon of evil. Any material object could be seen as Satan’s instrument.
The Cathari heresy evolved from the intersection of three historical phenomena, among others.
The first one dates back nearly two thousand years, from the time the Prophet Mani was crucified by dominant Zoroastrian clergy in 276 EC. Manichaeism spread from its Persian source into Central Europe, notably in Bulgaria where it turned into the Bogomil heresy around 900; until the Christian Orthodox Byzantine Empire, and then the expanding Turkish Empire (the ultimate military expression of Islam) repressed it around 1396. As peaceful Manichean congregations submitted to military conquest and forced conversion by Orthodox and Muslim fanatics, a handful of its most devout adherents sought refuge in Italy and Southern France where they converted local Catholics disenchanted by the gross materialism for which the Catholic clergy had become notorious.
The second phenomena took place prior to the European Crusades (from 989 to the 1200s). In addition to its priests’ many personal transgressions, the Catholic Church had just failed in its two-century quest to initiate the Peace of God and the Truce of God in Europe. These social movements sought to forbid combat during the numerous holy days of the Christian calendar; also to protect peasants, women, children, clergy and their property from combat; and finally, to institute church arbitration over political rivalries in order to bring their battles to a halt.
All these efforts failed, and their priestly advocates were replaced by more profit-minded church leaders. Militant nobles were permitted their massacres without religious penalty, in exchange for large sums paid to the Church; just as individual sinners were allowed to purchase forgiveness for their sins.
Many Christians sought a more honest religion elsewhere, especially among the incorruptible Cathari. In essence, the Cathari heresy was one of the first and purest expressions of Protestantism, exterminated centuries before its ultimate success (much more worldly and receptive to militarism: see Luther, Calvin, et al.).
Thirdly, Pope Urban II launched the First Crusade in 1095, to retake the Promised Land from the Muslims. Actually, he was attempting to skim the military banditry that had poisoned Europe for a millennium, and inject that venom into the heart of the threatening Islamic empire. He granted significant benefits to European warriors who swore themselves to that endeavor (notably the remission of prior sins and debts).
When these warriors gathered from all over Europe in the Langue d’Oc (at that time, a separate country in Southern France), they booked passage to the Middle East from there and bought provisions and equipment for their adventure. When survivors returned from the Crusades, they landed there and pawned their booty for more portable cash to take home.
This intensive commerce turned Langue d’Oc towns into the richest ones in Europe at the time. It was here that the Troubadour tradition and its lyrical poetry of courtly love and noble chivalry began to flourish. Religion and learning thrived, as European, Muslim, Jewish and other multi-lingual Learners brought rare texts and had them copied and studied.
The Provencal (another name for this region and its language) nobility was weakened by massive military drafts and casualties during the Crusades, and by the rise of a prosperous merchant middle class, centuries before it would reappear in the rest of Europe. Many remaining nobles (men and women) took up the Cathari religion and became Perfecti.
The Pope was not very amused when he discovered that most of the Catholic churches were empty (and therefore not profit centers), in the richest province in Europe, while the Cathari were venerated everywhere they went. After a few failed attempts at peaceful debate and reconversion, he cast his poisoned barb of Crusader fury into the Langue D’Oc: the only time a Crusade was launched against a Catholic territory.
Since he was waging a war against heresy, he needed an intelligence-gathering agency that would guide the Crusader army, hunt down heretics, exterminate and replace them. This handpicked Gestapo would consist of the Franciscan and Dominican Orders, and their leadership of this Crusade would be the first trial run of the Inquisition.
Cathari priests were called Perfecti. There were male and female perfecti, with
separate but equal orders and disciplines: an unimaginable phenomenon at that
time in history. They elected
promising young candidates into their collegium after a rigorous apprenticeship
under a senior sponsor. Those holy
partners wandered the countryside in pairs; they rested at humble hostels
deeded to their fellowship by grateful deathbed bequests. They needed these houses to secure a room in
which to pray alone the Lord’s Prayer, in obedience to Jesus’ instruction in
Matthew 6 of the Bible. Otherwise, they
wouldn’t have needed their own housing; any barn corner, door entrance or
trailside would have sufficed them.
These were God’s tough guys.
Imitating the
life Christ prescribed in the Books of Matthew, Luke and elsewhere in the
Bible, they abstained from power, swearing, lies, wealth, sex and all meat but
fish. In perfect obedience to His words,
they never owned at the same time more than two coins, one cloak and one
pair of shoes.
They despised the
cross for the naked torture rack it was, helped the laity with chores and problems,
healed and gave counsel when invited to do so, and relied on the Lord’s Prayer
and Jesus’ exact words for spiritual sustenance. No dismissal or man-spoken substitution of
His Words was allowed, unlike those our Christian churches indulge in routinely.
Lay people were
called Credentes (believers). They were free to marry and tend to
their worldly business without interference from the collegium. They received the Consolamentum from Perfecti
on their deathbed and accepted the Endura death fast to seal their conversion into Perfecti: a quicker and less painful
death than most “natural” ones in those days, as well as even crueler
ones, for the most part, that we endure today.
I suspect that
the consolamentum included detailed
instruction on how to go straight to Heaven.
Perfecti recited it to deathbed Credentes,
in the same way Buddhist monks recite elements of the Tibetan Book of the Dead to those in their care who are dying.
I believe that Perfecti taught that Christ offered
Himself as a reincarnation way station and escape hatch to Heaven. In so doing, He gave us God’s ‘Get out of
Jail Free’ card: the only practical escape from the Wheel of Desire and Death.
Of course, anyone
could graduate to Heaven by becoming fully Christ-like. Good luck trying that. Could we attempt it through an infinite
series of painful reincarnations? Here
we are: the graduates of a long series of painful reincarnations and two
thousand years of weapon Christianity.
Who dare presume themselves any closer to succeeding at this task?
Christ Himself
said we could move mountains if we had but a little faith. Yet no one, not the Pope, or his Saints, or
any born-again-through-the-mouth Christian – certified by religious hierarchs
just as corrupt as us if not more so – none can shift so much as a grain
of sand in this manner; not me, not you, not anyone besides Christ, in all the
history of Christianity.
Christ said that
any man who looks upon a woman commits adultery. Had he concluded that we were all in a
permanent state of sin? According to His
prescription, nobody on Earth has had any real faith since He left. No-one is likely to achieve Heaven in this
lifetime, whether on their own or through the mediation of some self-proclaimed
bureaucracy of fellow-sinners. Nor is
there any valid verbal or behavioral contract we can strike with Christ’s
so-called earthly representatives in this lifetime; no matter what hokum these
self-proclaimed, self-certified, self-serving hucksters may dare sell us.
It is obvious
they are as hopelessly mired in this hellish world as we are. How could they be expected to pull us from
this muck? None of them can quote
coherently from His words when they start laying their power trips on
us. They wind up twisting Bible verse
and improvising as they go, since Jesus had nothing to say about their con
games.
I'd rather call
today's mass consumption Christians, Paulist-Johnist-Augustins rather than real
Christians, since they pay more heed to the words of mere men than to the word
of God spoken by Jesus. Compared to
glorious Christ – Paul, any preacher or saint you can name, you, me and anyone
else – we are one and the same miserable sinner.
For example, Jesus
forbade us to pray in public and in church.
According to Him, we should pray the Lord's Prayer all alone in a closet
(Matthew 6-6). Yet these ministers
insist that we must pray man-made texts with them in crowds filling man-made
churches, in order to ‘confirm’ our devotion (as man-interpreted) to
Christ.
The text Jesus recommends for prayer is short, simple and exquisitely sweet; it has nothing to do with current church catechisms and begging to God in church (for personal gain), no matter how much ‘official sanction’ surrounds them. Current Christian doctrine dismisses Christ’s words as irrelevant, and substitutes needless and perhaps misleading complications. Two thousand years of murder and sacrilege committed in their name, confirm their spiritual void.
I’ve asked about that at various “Christian Doctrine” web pages on the Net. Those webmasters who bothered to answer me were proud of their dismissal of the words of Jesus, and treated me as if I were mad (or an imp from Hell) to question them about it. They got all huffy, authoritarian and dismissive when I dared suggest that their precious doctrine had two-thousand years of bloody failure to account for, and required repentance, reinterpretation and radical transformation based on prayer more obedient to Christ.
Perfect obedience did not seem required of them, nor
acceptance without compromise of His words.
They considered themselves authorized to play word games with the Word
of God, based on two thousand years of defying Jesus’ direct instruction.
Two alternatives
remain for true Christians: either Jesus’ teachings are perfect and our
interpretation of them is faulty, or current doctrine is perfect and
Jesus’ teachings are faulty. Otherwise,
true Christianity would have become universal on Earth by now. I was
told Jesus’ teachings do not need to become universal. They would rather there were lots of lost
souls, out there, that they could condemn to eternal hellfire. I reject their lies in fancy dress and their
2,000 years of failed doctrine.
Jesus loves
everyone; that is His supreme glory. He
does not triage acceptable souls; He leaves that cosmic choice to each soul on
its own.
I try to shun that
which Jesus forbids, especially when His instruction is so easy to obey. And I will never obey mere mortals who preach
that I disobey Jesus in order to follow their version of ‘Christianity.’
Call me a “closet
Christian.” And somebody go fire
up the Inquisition, since those pesky Cathari have come back to life
spontaneously!
What’s more, there
are no ‘religious’ means to achieve political justice, notwithstanding
Liberation Theology and other feeble attempts by clerical meliorists to perk up
certain peace technologies without confronting weapon mentality. There has never been, in written history, a
government in a state of religious Grace, a miraculous religion or an ethically
valid permanent institution―no matter how absolute the self-proclaimed
power of any Church: Jewish, Islamic, Protestant, Catholic or otherwise, before
and since. The more powerful the
influence of mass religionists on politics and government; the more bigoted,
ignorant, reactionary and violent their results.
It appears we may
serve Mammon or God in this lifetime, but not both simultaneously.
The Council of Nicaea (Iznik, Turkey) was held in 325 CE. Narrow-minded fundamentalists had recently ‘converted’ from persecuting real Christians with Gestapo-like tactics in the name of official Paganism. The highest-ranking among them assembled at Nicaea, rejected reincarnation and expunged all mention of it from the Bible. Then they started persecuting real Christians in the name of official Christianity. They have never stopped, since.
“It was only thanks to the contested and late inclusion in the New Testament of the Book of Revelation that governments and the administrators of formal religion were able to gain control over Christ’s language. Rome pushed hard for inclusion. Constantinople and the Church in the east were strongly opposed. This 4th Century argument was almost a rehearsal for the subsequent dispute of idolatry, which began in earnest with Damascus’s (sic) election as Pope in 361 and dragged on until 841, when the iconoclastic struggle ended with virtual victory for Rome’s position in favor of idol worship….
…
“Once the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, the Seven Seals and the whores of Babylon, along with a false and facile division of the world into good and evil, had been given equal footing in the New Testament with the Sermon on the Mount, it was hardly surprising that the Christian language had been undermined to the point where it was a malleable as any old moon cult. In fact, more malleable. Pagan cults were often difficult for those in power to deform or manipulate because they combined strict public ritual with a narrow set of ironclad rules. Paul and his Epistles are often blamed for Christianity’s strange tangents. But his contributions were merely politics and policy.
John’s Revelation altered the nature of the Christian ethic. It blew the Christian message so wide open that any extreme action, good or evil, could be justified – self-sacrifice, martyrdom, purity, devotion and concern for others had no greater purchase in Christ’s official Testament than did racism, violence or absolutism of any sort. Whoever wrote John’s text was consciously or unconsciously in the service of organized authority.
…
“Thousands of theologians would later contribute to the capture, binding and disarming of the original Christian language. Saint Augustine first among them. Perhaps the most effective method they found was the maintenance of the Bible in Latin, so that the original simple oral message could only be received in the form of an authorized interpretation by a priest. Even so, the real victory of official complexity over simple free language was already long over, having taken less than four hundred years from when Christ first preached.” John Ralston Saul, Voltaire’s Bastards: The Dictatorship of Reason in the West, Vintage Press, A Division of Random House, 1991, pp. 542-543.
They doled out one scrawny lifetime for each of us. During the course of it, we were supposed to
accomplish the mission impossible of achieving personal salvation under the
lash of their clueless incompetence. They
deliberately misinterpreted Christ’s words in a manner as meaningless as it was
redundant.
I wouldn’t
entrust them or a hundred generations of their successors with a used Kleenex,
much less my immortal soul.
Yet the holiness
of their vocation remains, through their historic preservation of the
Word of God—regardless of their misinterpretation of such. A proper reinterpretation of the Word of God
they preserved with such devotion, would restore them to full holiness.
Their arbitrary misinterpretation made blasphemy commonplace, murder routine and sacrilege inevitable. Anticipating public defiance against their aberration of Christian values, they consigned most immortal souls to a five pitchfork Hell to which a loving God wouldn’t have confined Beelzebub himself.
By means of well-coached moral gymnastics of
self-perfection, they sought to ‘save’ only themselves and their most slavish
minions. Since they couldn’t imagine a
realistic heaven, their default option of Hell had to be pretty bad: a
collage of psychobabble nightmares lovingly narrated by weapon mentors. It had to become that, to be marginally worse
than their fully hellish WeaponWorld.
Our ultimate
revelation may be the transcendent way the best among them may actualize their
fondest dreams of devotion, once they grasp what is written below.
Our Father realized that the mission impossible of personal salvation had turned into a cruel punishment for most of us. We were too weak to take the high road and had never gotten enough help from His Prophets. Over and over again, we missed golden opportunities for personal salvation. With each reincarnation, our task became more difficult, not less so.
So He sent his only Son to Earth, to show us the only
other way out: Himself, and the last acceptable prayer: the Lord’s Prayer.
Christ’s disciples got it wrong; they got almost everything wrong: one of Christ’s most insistent teachings.
Weapon hierarchs,
like the apostle Paul, John of Revelation, St. Augustine and their wacko
supporters, have compounded this error ever since. They’ve confabulated the obvious dead-end lie
of real-world salvation through a dubious, hierarch-mediated verbal
contract in this lifetime; followed by some Gott-Mit-Uns nightmare end-of-the-world. Ruled by a Loving God? Get real!
That eerily
resembles what concentration camp inductees must have had to face. “Take the line to the right if I think you’ll
work out alright, or the one to the left if I deem you
too feeble for my purpose.” No
self-respecting God would sully Himself so.
The outcome? Two thousand years of Christian-mediated
brutality and hypocrisy, administered by so-called “Christian”
authorities.
Don't tell me
about Islam, either. Once Muslims stop
killing each other as Sunni and Shia sectarians or because they come from
different tribes, be sure and get back to me, won’t you? In the meantime, all Muslims subsist
on the knife-edge of Allah's mercy.
Those who disobey Him shamelessly have nothing to teach me about
Him.
Once we have come
together to build God’s House of Peace, we may discuss the relative merits of
each religion. Until then …
The Perfecti got a much clearer personal
message through to a few lucky Credentes,
in absolute defiance of weapon Christianity.
Its fanatics burned them alive and stamped out their teachings just as
quickly, for no better reason than to mislead everyone into the
religious dead-end discussed above.
Here below, and
in strict accordance with my current belief, I direct this message freely and
clearly to you.
We may
reincarnate into Jesus’ life, all of us. We may take His path after we
die; assuming we do reincarnate and this mechanism applies. If not, you are on your own.
What you do
during this lifetime is your business and no one else’s—especially not the
fundamentalists’ and religious bureaucrats’.
We should always have known that to be the case. I suggest you follow your favorite religion’s
best advice. This might ease your
tormented conscience, on the other side.
Walking around
and seeing ourselves through Jesus’ eyeballs, we’ll be soooo
sorry for every wrong we’ve committed during this life and past
ones. We’ll be infinitely grateful for
any act of grace we’ve accrued. Being
pious and kind in this lifetime would be the best preparation for the
after-death experience. Those who bang
things up during this lifetime are going to have a worse experience of it. This I assure you.
The five rules of
Islam, carried out in good faith and without bloody hands, would make excellent
preparation for this supreme challenge.
So would any other pious lifestyle that valid religion would
encourage.
Let’s say that
you and I chose to disagree about our definitions of God. You’d stand on point A along this line of
reasoning, (for example, “God does not exist.”) In this example, I would defend point B to the
death, (“God is the clay figurine on my house altar”—just kidding).
Since God is
infinite (or as close to it as we can tell, since responsible for everything in
a very big universe and beyond), the God-definition line stretches out to
infinity. As it stretches out, the gap
between your point A and mine B shrinks to nothing, and our two points tend to
merge, no matter how different they may appear to be.
We use spritzing
brain-fat synapses to grasp our limited understanding of God, guttural
human-meat grunts to convey it, and stylized black stains on chewed-up and
desiccated plant fiber or digital pointillism to memorialize it.
No wonder our
words are equally valid and meaningless.
We might as well grunt exactly the same noise – or write the exact
opposite of what we just said – for all the accuracy and truth they might
reveal about the perfection, omnipotence and infinity that is God.
So everyone’s
definition of God would be equally true and equally blessed by God—and equally
false and cursed with inadequacy.
Millennial texts, like the Bible, the Vedas and the Qran, are
written confirmations and memory amplifications of this perfect absurdity;
atheism, its ultimate simplification.
Argumentation about this topic should no longer call for brutality.
Sure thing, dude.
The Perfecti lived such holy lives, they
were revered everywhere they went.
Don’t ask me if I could imitate their saintly lifestyle; I’d fail
miserably. I am no saint, never have
been and never will be. I merely tried
to guess the lost script of the Consolamentum.
You’re welcome to play the same guessing game.
Their
collegium grew rich from grateful deathbed bequests, yet remained
steadfast. According to Inquisitorial
documents, many Perfecti gave
themselves away during their final torture sessions, by rejecting their tormentors’ invitation to
swear or otherwise taint their souls.
That might have spared them from being burned alive by weapon
Christians.
There lingers the
sickly-sweet stench of weapon panic and its lies, and the intoxicating
fragrance of God’s Truth. Each
unmistakable. No matter how long the
former may have sickened us, the latter will restore us sooner or later.
Today’s Chosen
Few should abandon traditional religions and their mystical dead
ends. They may revive itinerant Cathari
communities and restore a superior Tao.
It would please me to receive an honest Consolamentum on my deathbed.
Check this out if
religion is your calling.
A short first
stop would be The End of the World by Otto Friedrich. His chapter on “The Birth of the Inquisition”
gives you some idea of the historical and theological convolutions that
entangled the Cathari. Zoë Oldenbourg’s books (available in translation
from French to English) offer more useful information on this topic.
Such subtleties
are incidental to Learner purposes.
Genuine Perfecti should
organize themselves into itinerant orders, in strict and clear-cut obedience to
the Word of Christ. They would heed His
straightforward instruction from the Book of Matthew, and in so doing, serve as useful role models for the
peace religions we require.
Expect equivalent
miracles to emerge from other world religions.
Their best adherents have approached similar ideals of devotion, with
greater or lesser success. Every
religion has conceived and aborted one or more superior heresies, for example:
Orphism, the Essenes, the Sufi, Jain, Gnosis, Quakers, the Therapeutae and Buddhism’s ‘vehicles.’ No doubt every religion has promoted some
peaceful offshoot more profound than the gangrenous stumps we drag
behind us today. We have merely to
revive the best of them and use them to replace current ones, by definition,
the sickest.
After all, would
you rather – of your own volition – that one of the worst weapon mentors
in history served as our children’s chaplain?
Even if their survival required a million times less weapon mentality
than he wants?
LEARNERS: On the Move from WeaponWorld to PeaceWorld