Cleaning out the Augean Stables
A modern labour
Clean out thirty years of accumulated dung from thousands of immortal cattle in just one day. Mission impossible? Being a superhero, the cunning demi-god Heracles just diverts the course of the rivers Alpheius and Peneius and flushes it all away in a day. That’s the myth.
Unfortunately, the Christian theological dung which has accumulated over the course of almost two millennia is no myth and it won’t be flushed away in a day. It would take the Herculean efforts of many, many labourers over many, many days to clean out these stables — a shovelful at a time.
Mission impossible? Well, there’s good news and bad news. The good news is that increasing numbers of Christians are finally coming to recognise that their cherished teachings are drawn from ancient myths about virgin mothers and demi-gods just like Heracles. The bad news is that while many no longer believe the teachings, they continue to believe the assertion that they are all based on the Bible, so they exit Christianity throwing the baby out with the bathwater as they go.
Future articles I hope to write for Illumination will examine the texts and concepts that have been mistranslated, misunderstood, stripped of all cultural and linguistic context, and then fabricated into teachings which have been used to justify the spiritual enslavement and bodily destruction of millions for centuries. This is particularly so in the case of the “deity” teaching which gave rise to the charge of “deicide” against the entire Jewish people, a charge with monumental consequences. So, if fate does not intervene, future articles will demonstrate that teachings such as the Virgin Conception/Birth, the Miraculous Incarnation, and the Trinity are not based on the books of the Bible. This approach will sever the link between the texts and the teachings and negate attempts to use the Bible as justification for oppressive, discriminatory, predatory and, certainly in the past, murderous behaviour. That’s the plan. But we all know what they say about plans.
Note
Whether Jesus existed or not, whether God exists or not, and whether the texts in the books are wholly true, partly true, or not true at all is irrelevant. The only relevant issue is the way in which the texts in these books have been weaponised.
