would i lie to you?
now would i say something that wasn't true?

youkrst wrote: to me there is no such thing as a noble lie

The "noble lie" was coined by Plato in the Republic. But it may have been mistranslated because Plato doesn't actually condone the cynical manipulation through propaganda, but instead, inspire through "magnificent myth" (perhaps a better translation). The Church obviously corrupted the original myths for its own purposes, but it wasn't all subjugation of the masses. Even Hobbes would say that we give up certain freedoms in order to be free to pursue happiness.

inspire through "magnificent myth"

yes because the doctrine of original sin is so inspiring and what speaks inspiration better than the threat of death. who controls the myth controls the culture

we give up certain freedoms

or we have them ripped from the womb.

The offence of blasphemy was originally part of canon law. In the 17th century, blasphemy was declared a common law offence by the Court of King's Bench, punishable by the common law courts.

In 1656, the Quaker James Naylor was sentenced to flogging, branding and the piercing of his tongue by a red-hot poker by the Second Protectorate Parliament.
Common law offences

From the 16th century to the mid-19th century, blasphemy against Christianity was held as an offence against common law. Blasphemy was also used as a legal instrument to persecute atheists, Unitarians, and others. The Methodist Church[1] and the BBC[2] said it appeared to apply only to beliefs of the Church of England.

All blasphemies against God, including denying his being or providence, all contumelious reproaches of Jesus Christ, all profane scoffing at the Holy Scriptures, and exposing any part thereof to contempt or ridicule, were punishable by the temporal courts with death, imprisonment, corporal punishment and fine.

Taylor's Case[3] in 1676 was the first reported case of the common law offence of blasphemy.[4] It is unclear whether or not there were any unreported earlier cases.[5][6][7] Lord Sumner said "Taylor's case is the foundation stone of this part of the law".[8]

The report by Ventris contains the following passage:

we kindly invite you to give up certain freedoms and rights or we will fuck you up big time, which is what we are going to do anyway.

i am not a person who has trouble living the good life but many people think this stuff under the carpet is going away, it isn't.

our story has many lies in it's history, until those demons are shown for what they are we will keep falling for the same sucker play, just look at any election.

youkrst wrote:here's an idea, i got it from the bible geek podcast. so early christianity was a disparate group of various factions marcionites ebionites docetists etc etc you want to take over the movement so you simply say our guys "the church fathers" all learned from the apostles directly your guys didn't we win we have direct descent from the historical apostles shake the hand that shook the hand of the man who walked with the man of galilee voila! you have control.

Youkrst, your comments here remind me of a core idea which I have not seen adequately discussed, namely how religion evolves by natural selection.

To understand natural selection, a very good example is the Cambrian Explosion, discussed in some detail in Wonderful Life by Steven Jay Gould. Life first evolved on earth four billion years ago, and then for the next 3.5 billion years, over 80% of living planetary history, all life was microbial. Gradually, algae converted CO2 into free oxygen, until a threshold was reached, a tipping point at which multi-celled organisms could survive. That was the Cambrian Explosion.

Suddenly, new body forms evolved with enormous diversity. Among the body forms or phyla whose origin goes back to the Cambrian, some proved more adaptive. The tetrapod, or the four footed form seen among all vertebrates, was later one of the most successful, originating from the Cambrian chordates. Chordates are adaptive because they utilize their niche efficiently.

Similarly, in the PC explosion, the Microsoft Products such as Word and Excel proved the most adaptive, and outcompeted rival products which had existed at the tipping point of the emergence of the personal computer. The Cambrian Explosion is like when word processing started and we had the remarkable range of competing products such as WordPerfect, Ami Pro, and the very weird and wonderful Wang.

The reason why one competing form muscles out all the competition has a lot to do with natural efficiency and adaptivity, on the blind logic of reproductive success marked by how fecund, stable and durable a structure is. Natural selection involves a relationship between the organism and its niche, with whichever genetic line has the best fit evolving to fill the available space.

Religion is genetically the same. The unification of the Mediterranean Region by the Roman Empire produced a new religious context that is comparable in structure to the new evolutionary context enabled by the rise of oxygen before the Cambrian Period. The old cultures of separate mythologies were thrown into contact, forcing the evolution of a shared belief system. The question of which formulation would prove most adaptive tells us as much about the context of the niche as about orthodox Christianity, the successful chordate equivalent.

The Roman Empire produced a new cultural domination of urbanity, with the power of cities in trade leading to the emergence of both polished elites and illiterate proletariats. In this new mass context, the successful religion would be the one that best spoke to the emotional and organizational needs of the emerging society. That religion was Christianity. Why?

Christianity alleges the presence of God in Christ, as a material event in history. This teaching, with its beliefs in redemption through acceptance, its claims of direct apostolic transmission, and its powerful ritual appropriation of old solstice and equinox religious festivals, provided a simple ethical message and structure that was both sufficiently inclusive to be popular and loyal enough to be allowed. The transformation of the previous imperial cult of the invincible sun into the cult of Jesus Christ humanized the previous myths in support of stable political order.

This evolutionary framework of mass stable appeal helps to explain why the truth of Christian claims was secondary to their utility. The story of the Historical Jesus enabled a simple universal church social structure, whereas the rival Mythical Jesus ideas were only relevant to a small intellectual elite. In this adaptive context, the story with the greatest social relevance would inevitably triumph, and complaints about evidence could easily be brushed aside by magical fervour.

Despite this blunt adaptive logic of social traction, the remarkable advanced nature of Christianity in its messianic ideas suggests the old message has resources for renewal today. The basic idea of a long period of time between the proclamation of the message and its success, with a whole age between the initial political reaction of elimination by crucifixion and achievement of power as king of the world, rests on the explicit claim in Matthew 24-25 of relevance to the whole inhabited earth.

My thinking on this long term global strategic aspect of the Christian message is that the original inventors of Jesus could see that the time was not ready for the message of universal love to become state policy. That is why the messianic prophecy was shifted from king to servant, from failure under Rome to prediction of eventual global success, from earlier hopes of military victory over Rome to a plan for a long march through the institutions with a thousand years as a day. The universal message of the cross has percolated religiously through culture, pointing towards a next Aquarian tipping point, where ideas such as the Beatitudes and Last Judgement, centred on salvation through works of mercy, could achieve planetary rule.

That's an interesting idea, Robert, that Christianity emerged during a sort of Cambrian explosion of mystery cults. I'm reading E.O. Wilson's The Social Conquest of Earth, wherein the author makes the following observation of early man.

Along with fireside campsites came division of labor. It was spring-loaded: an existing predisposition within groups to self-organize by dominance hierarchies already existed. There were in addition earlier differences between males and females and between young and old. Further, within each subgroup there existed variations in leadership ability, as well as in the proneness to remain at the campsite. The inevitable result emerging quickly out of all these preadaptations was a complex division of labor.

We can see organized religion as a natural outcome of the earlier mystery cults, as our social groups became larger and more complex, guided by these same tendencies to "self-organize by dominance hierarchies." Indeed, now in some western countries, we are seeing many abandoning organized religion, even by those who consider themselves to be spiritual. This sort of follows the disintegration of social unity. We are becoming more fragmented and less socially cohesive and less reliant on on moral authoritarianism. It follows that organized religion would also be in decline. This could be a temporary trend, prevalent only in developed nations, or we may be entering a new post-religion phase of humanity where secular values are replacing the religious. But it seems to me that we need to have shared values and shared sense of community to thrive. How to do it without the mystical appeal of religion remains the question of the day.

Notice in Paul Gaughin's famous painting—Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?—no one is paying attention to the blue religious statue.

I was thinking about Robert's Post today on a long drive to a bicycle swap meet. Missed my turn, in fact. This comparison between evolution proper and culture change is always interesting to think about and allows for many different viewpoints.

I bet evolution is a favorite of libertarians, or it should be. Here is a biological meritocracy run as a free market, where nothing matters but whether the living thing can make it in the environment. If it can't, then it's down with you, plant or animal, no matter what fancy mutation you might throw out. An uncompromising system, worthy of Tennyson's depiction of "nature red in tooth and claw." It isn't really surprising that social Darwinism caught on with such an imprimatur from science, which around this time was growing fast in respect.

I think of cultural evolution as most different for the input of our consciousness. This gives an ability to initiate, direct, and disrupt that doesn't exist in the natural world. It would take the involvement of a god in physical evolution to match what we do in our own sphere. Of course, if we're at all god-like, we're far from all-seeing and even rather pathetic in our ability to understand the consequences of what we do.

Whether it's biology or culture, there's never stability, only what we might in our judgment say is less instability. What happened when Christian orthodoxy took charge looks like an end to the fecundity of religions that had existed for several hundred years. How it happened, though, wasn't altogether natural, but had a lot to do with political formation by the Church. I'm not a single-factor guy, and the inherently appealing aspects of Christianity that Robert mentions were important, but the Church also locked down its position by banning competitors and changing the genome, if you will, by trying to eliminate all contrary writings. It almost succeeded.

Robert's ambition of recapturing the lost beginnings of the faith brings out a recursiveness in cultural evolution that also doesn't seem to be present on the biological side. I've read where someone has identified evolution undoing itself in a particular instance, but it generally seems that once a form is on the heap, it stays there. It's open to question whether culture really ever becomes extinct. It may always be a part of us, and it can even be brought back to life just by someone like Robert thinking about it. He has already done what he proposes can happen, since the size of the movement isn't the crucial thing. Talk about god-like power.

Of course, we can also look at those thousands of extinct species in the Burgess Shale and wonder whether their being on the heap really means that they were dead ends. The capabilities they had were passed on, in a sense; they contributed. But we can't bring them back to life as we can our cultural past.

DWill wrote:I was thinking about Robert's Post today on a long drive to a bicycle swap meet. Missed my turn, in fact. This comparison between evolution proper and culture change is always interesting to think about and allows for many different viewpoints.

I have been meaning to get back to this thread. In response to youkrst’s opening postulation that claims of direct apostolic link were a source of church power, I offered some comments about how Christianity can be understood against evolutionary principles. My view is that Darwinian evolution theory is simply a logical explanation of the operation of material causality in living systems. Human culture is a living system, so it naturally obeys the laws of evolution.

That is the big picture, but obviously the relation between memetic and genetic evolution is not so direct. Culture can be defined as evolving through memes, understood as cultural units. But memes have nowhere the stability of genes, so it is not possible to describe a simple memetic tree in the way that Darwin drew the tree of life to describe physical evolution based on the fossil record, a causal structure later understood genetically.

And yet even if memes can blend, go dormant, explode, and undergo other remarkable changes that are not available to genes, they are still restricted to physical causality, and still operate as the units of cultural evolution, so have important similarities, more than just analogies, with genetic evolution. Especially if we see the idea of an Anointed Saviour as a central meme.

Here is how I described early Christian memetic evolution some years ago:
http://www.booktalk.org/post55245.html#p55245

Consider the origins of Christianity. The mythicist view is that the Gospels are a fiction that was written in Alexandria with the conscious express purpose of establishing a new religion by inventing a mythical saviour who would press all the buttons needed for mass appeal. Christians maintain that the gospels were written between 70 and 100 AD, but there is no real evidence that they existed before the second or perhaps even the third century.

It is easy to imagine an evolutionary memetic process akin to ‘Chinese whispers’ which turned an original work of fiction into a dogma. A good example of Chinese whispers is the story from the First World War, where an order from the front was passed by word of mouth to the rear, and “We’re going to advance, send us reinforcements” was eventually transmitted as “We’re going to a dance, send us three and fourpence.” People’s hearing and memory and desires are flawed, giving great potential for hearing whatever you want to hear, rather than what is actually said.

In the Christian example, we have to look to the psychology of belief to explain how the Christ meme became the Christian dogma. This psychology is well captured in one of the famous “proofs” of the existence of God – that if we can imagine a perfect being, then a real one is better than an imaginary one so a real one must exist. (I kid you not, this is one of the main pieces of “logic” of St Thomas Aquinas). Anyway, exactly the same psychological logic applies to Jesus, that if we can imagine a perfect messiah, then a real messiah is so much better and therefore exists.

Trying to recreate how this meme may have evolved, the religious scholars of Alexandria had a strong agenda to imagine a better world than the Roman Empire. We can imagine their original thought processes, building on the prophecies of the Old Testament. Starting from ‘if only we had a messiah, this is what he would have been like’, the oral transmission of these messianic stories occurred over centuries before they found their final form. Conceivably, the first tellers meant the stories as myth. However, it is well known that a tale improves in the telling. As hearers tell a good story to others, they steadily embroider it. A very useful first embroidery, when you have a political agenda, is that the fantasy you heard is an actual story of events. If, as stated in John 20:31 the agenda is that “these are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God” then clearly the agenda is not to provide an accurate record of events, but rather whatever will be most conducive to spreading belief.

So the idea of the meme as an evolving and mutating idea is very helpful to interpret the origins of Christianity. A key point is that in an oral culture, the weight of moral stories is increased by falsely claiming that invented fictions are historically based. This would go through several stages, each of which could last decades as the view of a community –
1. I know its false;
2. I heard that it is false;
3. I don’t know if its true or false;
4. It may be true;
5. It is probably true
6. It is definitely true
7. If you so much as ask if it is true you are a heretic and blasphemer and will go to hell.

This last dogmatic imperial phase is expressed in the Bible, with the statement at 1 John 4:2 “This is how you can recognize the Spirit of God: Every spirit that acknowledges that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is from God. Every spirit that does not acknowledge Jesus is not from God but is the spirit of the antichrist.”

So the Christian meme became that belief in the story of the incarnation was a test of faith. Pagans such as Celsus regarded this Christian method with contempt, as there was no historical evidence that Jesus lived. However, history shows that this meme of the Word made Flesh proved more powerful than pagan logic, and produced the Dark Ages. This meme of blind faith is only now unravelling at the popular level.

DWill wrote: I bet evolution is a favorite of libertarians, or it should be. Here is a biological meritocracy run as a free market, where nothing matters but whether the living thing can make it in the environment. If it can't, then it's down with you, plant or animal, no matter what fancy mutation you might throw out. An uncompromising system, worthy of Tennyson's depiction of "nature red in tooth and claw." It isn't really surprising that social Darwinism caught on with such an imprimatur from science, which around this time was growing fast in respect.

Markets are adaptive evolutionary systems, so yes there is a strong intersection between market theory and biological evolution theory. However, Spencer’s Social Darwinism and its Nazi degradation is a bad misunderstanding of evolutionary theory. It assumes that fittest means strongest, whereas that is just false. Too much armour or too much aggression can be extinctive. I find the core Christian ideas of love to be supremely evolutionary, in terms of explaining how culture must evolve in order to sustain human life on our planet. Jesus’ main idea that the meek shall inherit the earth strikes me as supremely Darwinian, as a prescient explanation of the transformative cultural change required to adapt to global civilization.

DWill wrote: I think of cultural evolution as most different for the input of our consciousness. This gives an ability to initiate, direct, and disrupt that doesn't exist in the natural world. It would take the involvement of a god in physical evolution to match what we do in our own sphere. Of course, if we're at all god-like, we're far from all-seeing and even rather pathetic in our ability to understand the consequences of what we do.

Any talk of involvement of a god is confusing since it throws a magical factor into what should be approached as a consequentialist causal framework. Just because the evolution of consciousness is supremely complex does not at all mean that it defies evolutionary principles. As is frequently seen, a maladaptive trait can be successful for a while, but its maladaptivity will eventually catch up with it. I think consciousness is highly adaptive, but we need to reconcile spirit and nature if we are to prevent human extinction. Consciousness has certainly changed some evolutionary rules through its ability to deliberately construct its own environment, but we should not get carried away by our own abilities to imagine we are above natural evolution.

DWill wrote:
Whether it's biology or culture, there's never stability, only what we might in our judgment say is less instability.

Sharks, jellyfish and bacteria have been ecologically stable for hundreds of millions of years. Once an organism fills a stable niche it can stay stable for billions of years. Certainly nothing is forever, and humans might boil the sea, which would prove a pretty pickle for sharks which have dealt with everything else up until now.

DWill wrote: What happened when Christian orthodoxy took charge looks like an end to the fecundity of religions that had existed for several hundred years.

I think you are misusing fecundity here. It does not mean ability to change or diversify, but rather ability to reproduce. Christian orthodoxy proved the most stable, fecund and durable religious meme in planetary history, serving as the ideological framework for European conquest of the globe.

DWill wrote: How it happened, though, wasn't altogether natural, but had a lot to do with political formation by the Church.

Again you are misusing natural, since everything that happens on our planet is natural by definition, unless you postulate miracles for which there is no evidence. When speaking of cultural evolution, it is misleading to introduce the old culture/nature split, since in an evolutionary framework everything is natural. Even the fact that the church applied alienated manifest delusion as the basis of its politics does not mean that it was unnatural. Even cancer is natural, albeit deadly. In some respects the ideology of patriarchal monotheism is like a metastasizing cancer, although we can hope it contains its own curative antibodies in the story of the Second Coming.

DWill wrote: I'm not a single-factor guy, and the inherently appealing aspects of Christianity that Robert mentions were important, but the Church also locked down its position by banning competitors and changing the genome, if you will, by trying to eliminate all contrary writings. It almost succeeded.

Where religious adherents hold their faith fervently they naturally tend to intolerance, as seen in Biblical efforts to eliminate antichristian ideas. I view the appealing aspects such as love and mercy as indicating a more farsighted vision among the original founders who could see the risk of Christianity being corrupted from a framework of knowledge into a framework of belief.

DWill wrote:
Robert's ambition of recapturing the lost beginnings of the faith brings out a recursiveness in cultural evolution that also doesn't seem to be present on the biological side.

An example of recursiveness is when we use some of a previous batch to make bread or cheese. It involves deliberate intentional culturing in a way that requires manipulation of the environment. Perhaps recursive cultivation is at the core of how humans are distinct from dumb animals? It would be interesting to know if animals ever use recursive logic, as seen in plant and animal husbandry – I doubt it.

DWill wrote: I've read where someone has identified evolution undoing itself in a particular instance, but it generally seems that once a form is on the heap, it stays there.

That is the principle of cumulative adaptation. I don’t think it makes sense to say ‘undoing itself’, although external events such as asteroid hits and global warming and loss of predation can rapidly undo complex systems that took a long time to evolve. You would expect the American pronghorn antelope to gradually get slower, since humans killed off the cheetahs that kept the antelopes on their toes.

DWill wrote: It's open to question whether culture really ever becomes extinct.

Yes it does. Whenever a language dies its culture dies with it in ways that cannot be recovered. The recovery of Egypt after the Greco-Roman cultural genocide is a remarkable event, but we can hardly say that the fragments we have today constitute Egypt coming back to life. Nor can the Gnostic milieu of the Gospel production be recovered, even though we can analyse what is the most plausible content of that culture.

DWill wrote: It may always be a part of us, and it can even be brought back to life just by someone like Robert thinking about it.

Just thinking is liable to result more in fantasy than restoration. There are stories about the life of Jesus in India which involve channeling of Akashic records, a method that is entirely unscientific. But still, restoration of a culture involves a blend of art and science. Even the gospels purported to enable a resurrection of the time of Christ, when in fact they appear to be more about wishful thinking than evidential analysis.

DWill wrote: He has already done what he proposes can happen, since the size of the movement isn't the crucial thing. Talk about god-like power.

I was chatting to some people about the Bible line if you have faith as a grain of mustard seed you can say to a mountain move hence to yonder place. This reminds me of one idea about chopping a mountain down with the edge of your hand, but leaving aside any magical ideas, the main thing that it means to me is that faith is the only thing that ever really has moved mountains. Mining with high explosives and large equipment is the only thing that ever moves mountains in reality, and mining requires confidence and trust and coordination, which together equate to faith.

But on this recursive question of cultural revival, I do think it is possible to gain a much more coherent and plausible story of the evolution of Christian origins than what is provided in tradition. The emptiness of Christianity is due to its sheer implausibility. A resolutely plausible account, refusing to accept traditional assumptions, can show ethical depth in Christianity which has been concealed. For example, the ability of people to believe fantasy on mass scale is a psychological and political reality that has not been adequately studied in anthropology, which has tended to regard urban societies as more rational than agrarian ones.

DWill wrote:
Of course, we can also look at those thousands of extinct species in the Burgess Shale and wonder whether their being on the heap really means that they were dead ends. The capabilities they had were passed on, in a sense; they contributed. But we can't bring them back to life as we can our cultural past.

The failed body structures contributed by competing against the successful body structures, and neither would have evolved without the competitive arms race. Bill Gates just said this week that 90% of computer companies have failed, but portfolio investments in the sector were justified by the successes. I think it is likely there is something objectively more efficient about the body forms such as the backbone that were victorious in the Cambrian, although some scientists don’t agree. But cultural evolution can be quite different. Perhaps the supernatural myth of the Historical Jesus is an enormous historical detour, picking up on the cultural importance of imagining an anointed savior, but attributing that role to an imaginary king in the absence of a real one.

Jesus’ main idea that the meek shall inherit the earth strikes me as supremely Darwinian, as a prescient explanation of the transformative cultural change required to adapt to global civilization.

I think meekness is a fantastic attribute, but that is not the trait that percolates to the top. The market favors a different type of person, whether or not we wish it to. It's like saying you want the panda bear to inherit the Earth. What a lovely idea. But we humans have inherited it, and we cause more extinctions than a super meteor. Or if you take humans out of the picture, the other apex predators are vicious and ruthless. Why would you expect this to look any different in the economic realm?

If you want transformative cultural change, you need to stop worshipping the market.

Interbane wrote:

Jesus’ main idea that the meek shall inherit the earth strikes me as supremely Darwinian, as a prescient explanation of the transformative cultural change required to adapt to global civilization.

I think meekness is a fantastic attribute, but that is not the trait that percolates to the top. The market favors a different type of person, whether or not we wish it to. It's like saying you want the panda bear to inherit the Earth. What a lovely idea. But we humans have inherited it, and we cause more extinctions than a super meteor. Or if you take humans out of the picture, the other apex predators are vicious and ruthless. Why would you expect this to look any different in the economic realm? If you want transformative cultural change, you need to stop worshipping the market.

Hi Interbane, thanks. What your comment misses is the role of consciousness as a key factor in evolution today. We now have the ability to directly influence the direction of evolution through conscious will. A political decision to vote will directly shape the future of the world. Your point about the traits that percolate to the top reflect a traditional view of unfettered markets that ignores the new presence of intentional directionality, in Schopenhauer’s term, ‘world as will and representation’.

The Gospels present a theory of history in which the world is constructed through will. The key text, in addition to the Sermon on the Mount, is the Last Judgement at Matthew 25, where Jesus divides the saved and damned by the sole criterion of performance of works of mercy. The key tasks that Jesus lists for salvation are helping the hungry, thirsty, sick, homeless, imprisoned and poor by treating the least as kings. This is the meaning of the blessing of the meek as inheritors of the earth, an idea we can also extend to involve support for biodiversity.

Social Darwinism wrongly assumes that human society operates unconsciously by instinct, with survival of the fittest wrongly interpreted to mean survival of the strongest. Unfettered markets where the strong take what they want and the weak must submit, as Thucydides described social relations in the Melian Dialogue, are not actually a recipe for adaptation, but rather are more like a cancer threatening the health of the whole social organism. The cure for this social market cancer is the use of political power to regulate markets against explicit social goals. Such use of the state to deliver rule of law is entirely compatible with liberty, as the Austrian economist Friedrick Hayek argued in his great Nobel Prize-winning book The Constitution of Liberty which Margaret Thatcher held as her Bible.

If we regulate society with a small state that operates to deliver the goal of treating the least as Christ, then the world will be on a path to repair and peace. This vision places Christianity within a larger historical evolutionary framework, understanding patriarchal monotheism as a main symptom of the fall from grace into corruption. Restoring the stone age values of equality between the sexes and regulating the global climate in a world economy of super abundance is something that could actually be possible once we harness the massive resources available in the world oceans through new transformative technology.

The problem with conflating free markets with worship of markets is that a worshipful attitude does not actually deliver freedom. Instead, market worship is a capitalist religion that fails to see the central role of state power in supplying rule of law and a level playing field. This is where a reformed scientific Christianity should be crucial.

If the big goal of law is to treat the least as Christ, as Jesus advocates in the Gospels, then analysis should explore what policies will actually deliver that goal. One seeming paradox here is that redistribution of wealth only reduces poverty when it is part of a framework based on market incentives, promoting small and medium enterprises which enable people to make maximum use of their talents, a goal which Jesus also explicitly endorsed in Matthew 25.

My view on these topics sets Christianity within the large sweep of time, which can only be properly understood against the slow natural drivers of planetary evolution. This is a highly complex scientific topic which still is only in its birth pangs. But the raw material is there to build a coherent explanation, especially seeing the emerging great discoveries about the cyclic orbital drivers of climate change.

These natural factors which produced massive change of glaciation and sea level over the last million years have been stable as clockwork since the dawn of life. Orbital patterns are a main governing driver and shaper of evolution, from the diurnal pattern of night and day and the annual seasons up to the great changes at millennial scale.

By this orbital data, the world hit its low point on its main 21,000 year glacial cycle in 1246 AD, when perihelion crossed the December solstice. We are now at the beginning of a ten thousand year orbital upswing to a next golden age, marked by the date of perihelion which is now at 4 January.

The only reason we are not now in an ice age is that humans have been geoengineering the planet since the dawn of agriculture in the Holocene, when domestication of plants and animals added so much carbon to the air that the natural cooling seen in multiple previous ice age hundred thousand year cycles was prevented.

My core hypothesis is that the authors of Christian faith somehow intuited this deep natural pattern of slow millennial cycles, with their basic concealed idea that Christ would appear twice, first in imagination at the dawn of the Age of Pisces at the BC/AD cusp and second in power at the dawn of the Age of Aquarius which is starting now.

With modern science we can now start to put these mythological ideas onto an evidentiary empirical framework. The Gospels primed the world for the necessary evolutionary changes in society. These changes, essentially a planned mutation in consciousness, are built upon treating the least as kings, while recognizing that the fall from grace was still in its downward trajectory when the gospels were written, and a shift to an upward cultural evolutionary direction would take thousands of years.

The upward path to a new golden age has started, but the forces of delusion remain immensely strong, with potential to cause the collapse of global civilization. This apocalyptic clash between the forces of delusion and the forces of progress and peace is strikingly captured in the Biblical myth of the war in heaven between Michael and Satan, as the basis for the triumph of Christ to rule the world for the least, as the planetary recovery millennium of the Age of Aquarius.

Ancient astronomer priests from a thousand years before Christ could see that the spring point, where the sun enters the northern hemisphere, was steadily shifting against the stars, and would precess from Aries into Pisces in 21 AD. This is the entire basis for the old testament prophecies of Christ coming into the world at that time, seen in Daniel, Isaiah and others, and directly symbolised by the main Christian symbol of the chi rho cross.

This deep accurate vision of the stars as the orderly markers of history was far too complex to inform a mass movement, which emerged only as a distorted reflection of the original high wisdom, as Paul put it ‘seeing through a glass darkly’.

We now have power to reconstruct ancient thought against scientific knowledge to remove the encrusted distortions of tradition. This reconstruction is showing that Biblical history is actually vastly different from the literal stories.

The Bible must be read as allegory for a deep evolutionary truth about what human civilization must do to be saved from destruction. This rational reading is a basis for a new Christian reformation, shifting the basis of faith from belief to knowledge.