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Easy answers sought to explain what humanity has feared or regarded through superstition as gods are not kind of things that allowed adepts to know themselves and their soul. The structures of power and priestly prevarications are rife even in halls of supposed fair and academic institutions. Pardon me for disagreeing with likes of Fukayama and others who would have us believe in ‘absolute’ religions of any form. As a human with ability to consciously apprehend his or her environment; we must all eschew these black and white answers that our education has expected us to regurgitate in order to get better grades.
I have attempted to open a window to view what is called PRE-history. Just before era I focus upon in this book there was a city in Anatolia or present day Turkey before Black Sea was created. Jacquetta Hawkes called it ‘precociously’ modern or advanced in her Atlas of Archaeology. This might easily be less advanced than cities that were inundated in 5500 BC alongside freshwater lake that we are now able to reach under Black Sea. That area is central to what became Iberian corporate ventures or Phoenician Brotherhood. There is a great deal we do not know and may never know about things known to ancient people and where we came from. Hopefully you will find your own creative juices flow as you travel this high road of speculative Imagineering based on current archaeology rather than accept tenured propaganda of past history as written by and for Empire-builders.
Whether or not there was a town with a well, and that town was called Nazareth in time Yeshua bar Joseph lived on earth, is really less material or important than people and things they may have learned. I do believe family of Jesus has made a great deal of good inputs to humanity over time. I think he and they deserve our respect as well as our genuine fear of elitism or power motives they have exhibited. There are no ‘easy’ answers and most we can do is hope to improve our lot by learning from our shared past or history. Learning about more than mere dates and names is required. I do honor memory of those burned at stake and there will be times you might find my invective a little over top – please excuse me if I offend any of your gentler sensitivities. Just remember genocide of Cathar ‘parfaits’ as they walked arm in arm with their children into fires set for them by Dominican ‘Hounds of Hell’.
We can (!) re-distribute ego’s needs for honor that lead to structures of Mediterranean patronage or cronyism. We do not need to read good anthropologists like John Davis in order to know what still runs everything around us. Please do not simply respond to my effort as if I am a mere and simple ‘conspiracy theorist’. Those who call me that kind of thing are often weak-willed sycophants or just thing people see when they look in mirror; if they have not studied what is possible and why things are way they are. Put another way – in words of scholar Peristiany: “The punctiliousness of honour must be referred to code of an exclusive and agonistic microsociety; that of honesty to an inclusive, egalitarian macrosociety.” Let us work together and end this ideology of gloom that insists humans can be no more than ‘beast with red cheeks’ or some other object Machiavellians and politicos merely ‘manage’ as if we are ‘money-trees’.
It should be obvious that ‘spin’ I will put to facts exists just as it does with any other writer. You may consider me a Utopian in typology of Bryan Wilson or as one who “… ‘presumes’ some divinely given principles ‘of reconstruction,… more radical than reformist alternative, but unlike revolutionist option, insists much more on role human beings must take in process’…” (2)
From an interview by Bill Moyers with scholar Paul Woodruff of University of Texas on NOW, we have a little of ancient understanding of 'representative deities' and forces in reality they knew they could not fully capture, and were in awe of beauty therein. “PAUL WOODRUFF: Yeah. When people are powerful, they-- they tend to fall into habits of acting as if they were divine. The-- cliché, of course, is power corrupts. But what-- what Greeks are noticing is that it corrupts in a very particular way. You think that you can't go wrong. You think that you can't be mistaken. You think that because you are not likely to be mistaken, you don't have to listen to other people. And those are all signs of tyranny and they're all signs of hubris. They all indicate a lack of-- of - of respect for difference between human beings and-- and gods, which is essence of reverence. BILL MOYERS: So reverence is something other than worship of God. PAUL WOODRUFF: On my view, yes. And this came to me as a surprise, actually, because I had always been taught that for ancient peoples, reverence was sacrificing appropriate number of goats or sheep or cattle or chickens or whatever so that plague will be averted or we won't have an earthquake next year or whatever. What people have called "do a deus," "I give to god, god will give back to me."
Then I-- but as I-- as I tried to translate this term and understand what it meant and why it was so important to tragic poets like Sophocles, I realized that had nothing to do with it. Oedipus and other tyrants are not in trouble because they didn't sacrifice enough chickens. It didn't have anything to do with that. It was about their attitude towards themselves and their-- their failure to realize that they were not truly godlike.” (3)
I have not read a lot of Alan Watts, because people have always told me I sound like him. I promise that even if you think that someone sounds like you or thinks as you do – this is one book that will challenge many things that we all must question. Here is one of many things said by Watts which I agree with.
“Faith is an openness and trusting attitude to truth and reality, whatever it may turn out to be. This is a risky and adventurous state of mind. Belief in religious sense, is opposite of faith - because it is a fervent wishing or hope, a compulsive clinging to idea that universe is arranged and governed in such and such a way. Belief is holding to a rock; faith is learning how to swim - and this whole universe swims in boundless space.” - Alan Watts
I am an activist for ecumenicism in the mode of Yeshua or Appolonius. This is the letter to the reader from one of my books which can be found at World-Mysteries.com. Author of Diverse Druids Columnist at The ES Press Magazine