reply to post by jackflap
First JackFlap I understand that people’s religious and spiritual beliefs are important to them. In many ways though those are very much like a good
bit of the subject matter of this thread, full of conjecture and often requires people to believe simply because they want to believe and more or less
on faith alone.
The difference between most of the subject matter of this thread which is highly speculative and the crux of religion which is highly speculative is
one deals with the potential of imminent danger to the mortal body, one deals with the possible dangers to what most hope is in fact the immortal
soul.
That there is a God and or and an immortal soul are things we have to take purely on faith.
But we do know for certain that our mortal physical existence is as real as anything can get.
Right now we face a physical world that is in crisis, an age’s old system of scarcity and deprivation has let to an inequitable system where
suffering in one form or other is almost mandatory for most people.
Yet the sad truth is that there really is no scarcity of resources that would in fact alleviate so much of the suffering that has plagued humankind
for millennia.
Simply put a handful of powerful oligarchs have conspired and acted to control most of the world’s vital resources and use their control of them to
virtually enslave us all to a world of corruption, despair, deprivation, war, violence and indifference and humanity as a collective entity suffers to
a point of imminent collapse for that.
We have a word for this system of artificial scarcity, hording and rationing and it’s called the economy!
As one might guess words like economy class and economy saver and economy plan are meant to denote less of something.
So at the very heart of our system, our world wide system is in fact the notion that people need to get by and suffer with less and to have less even
though there is no real reason for them to have to. Abundant technology, abundant resources and abundant distribution systems logistically make this
entirely unnecessary.
Yet the principle of economy is to conserve and horde and dole out less and progressively condition people to get by with less.
We see this happening in America right now, once a land of opportunity and plenty where suddenly there are no opportunities and while there is still
plenty of everything to be had fewer and fewer people actually are in a situation where they can obtain those things.
Earlier in the thread we discussed in depth the possibility that the exorbitant cost of bread and circuses and maintaining a military based empire was
bankrupting the Roman Empire of all its resources.
That they likely conspired to create a new system that offered the promise of eternal salvation and a better life after this one in exchange for a
better life in this known mortal existence solely for the sake of economy.
So Rome’s principals could keep on conquering the world through deception cheaply and using deception and creating divisions amongst various nations
and religions and ethnicities to fight one another eliminate one another and keep creating a larger and larger homogenous and easier to manage and
cheaper to manage mass of humanity in that process.
So let’s take a moment to talk about economy of religion.
The Roman Parthenon of Gods was extensive it included basically every God worshipped by both the Romans and all of the people’s it conquered. Had
Rome not employed this system of honoring the Gods of the conquered we would have never heard of Yahweh or Jesus Christ.
Yet each God required its own temples, its own priests, its own laity and worshipers. It was a huge apparatus to maintain, many choices, many
freedoms, a big cost to provide.
Let’s talk about the Power of religion a moment. The priests of Bacchus had to compete with the priests of Venus who had to compete with the priests
of Zeus who had to compete with the priests of Ceres and so on and so forth for congregants and offerings and donations.
So not only was it an expensive slate of options to provide people it was also very limiting for greater power and control for any one individual sect
or priestly class that had to compete for limited resources and worshipers with so many other sects and priestly classes.
Caesar himself reserved the title of Pontificus Maximus, Rome’s chief and high priest and could in essence be the supreme mortal religious authority
in that fashion but clearly having to be the supreme religious authority for dozens and dozens of different gods and sects must have been a daunting
task to say the least.
Economy more than anything is about streamlining things, eliminating overlapping areas of management and facilities and limiting choices and options.
Want a boarding pass on your South West Airlines flight? Forget about it! Cheap fare you get a number at the airport and fight for a space on the
plane once it’s been called.
That’s what economy is all about limiting choices and services and the artificial scarcity paradigm that makes up our economy is all about limiting
choices and services and getting people to pay more and more for them while giving them fewer and fewer choices and less and less service to maximize
profit.
When you call your Bank do you initially get to talk to a human being or a machine? Does the machine that answers the call then transfer you to
another machine before finally 10 or 15 minutes later you get to talk to a human being?
That’s called maximizing profit through economy fewer employees, fewer costs, less service, more profit. More power!
Now as we go back through antiquity there were literally hundreds if not thousands of deities that were worshipped all over the world and worshipped
in places that no one had ever heard of the Middle East or a Spartan harsh dessert God named Yahweh.
Whether it was the Norsemen or the Britons, the Aztec or the Maya, the Indians, or the Egyptians, the Africans or the Persians, the Indians, or the
Japanese or Aborigines, or the Pacific Islanders or the Chinese they all had Gods that by and large predated any recorded reference of Yahweh.
Nor did Yahweh take any time to communicate with them or make his presence known.
It was Rome and Rome’s various armies and its allies the Jews that Rome dispersed along with them selves throughout the world to basically force the
knowledge of this God Yahweh on the rest of the world.
If that was Yahweh’s plan it was brutally inefficient and led to the violent and sometimes exceptionally cruel deaths of millions upon millions.
Why would he do that if in fact he was the sole creator of everyone and everything? Why just present yourself to one group of nomadic dessert tribes
who lacked the ability and means to travel the entire world at that present time themselves?
Why pick those people of all the others you had created to be the only ones to communicate with? Why then rely on a dominant and violent empire like
Rome to actually make spreading your glory possible?
When you look at the sheer number of Gods in antiquity and further consider that the Hebrews still will not name their God(s) and never have and write
it like: G-d and refer to him as our lord, then what you have is a statistical anomaly as far as that one God out of all the thousands being the one
and only true McCoy.
When you consider for the most part it had to be thrust on people all over the world violently by men and men seeking riches and glory and dominance
and power then you are really, really banking on a tremendous long shot in my opinion.
Now lets go a step further, if when you were a child you grew up in a multi-God household where one God wasn’t put to you as being the only true God
and all powerful and all seeing from basically the moment of your birth on by a system of governance and control that grew out of the economy of
religion.
Lets say your parents and priests and government officials told you all about the legends of the Nordic Gods and the Roman Gods and the Hindu Gods and
the Aztec Gods and the Egyptian Gods and the Grecian Gods and so on and so forth and told you that they were all real and you should know about them
all and you should pick one or a few as your patron in life.
Would you have really picked Yahweh, I myself loved Norse Mythology, I liked Egyptian Mythology and Greek and Roman Mythology too, and as a small boy
who wasn’t forced into religion I often lamented that these very colorful Gods weren’t real.
But if they weren’t real why then was Yahweh real.
Honestly if there was a Temple to Bacchus and an orgy going on, that’s where I would likely be right now!
Rome began conquering the world through its famous entreaty “Rome offers you war or peace it matters not to Rome which you decide”
Rome always offered a two sided coin, you could have with onions or without but you were having a burger one way or another as far as they were
concerned.
So what we see is a two sided coin once again. Yahweh or Lucifer, Good or Evil, yet the truth is a lot more people have died in Yahweh’s name than
Lucifer’s.
English men killed for God and Country, Arabs shout God is great as they rush into battle.
What I see is nothing but a two sided coin, limited choices, a choice that literally even boils down to you believe in God or you don’t. You are
going to hell or you aren’t.
(continued on next page)
[edit on 17/3/10 by ProtoplasmicTraveler]