Unli sex: the foundation of Islam

Women wearing the burqa. This garment is not mentioned anywhere in the Qu’ran yet is imposed as a part of Idslamic tradition.

Unlimited sex after death: the foundation of Islam.

The basis of the patriarchy is nowhere better seen today than in Islam. This is not because this cult is intrinsically worse than the other Abrahamic ones, but largely because while the most rabid excesses of the others have become marginalised, in Islam the most obnoxious form is mainstream today.

This is a very dangerous situation because the aim of this form, Salafism, sometimes called ‘Wahabbism’, is the destruction of all civilisation other than the Islamic and the return of the world to the conditions that obtained in the Caliphate a thousand years ago. To this end Islamic forces are rampaging across the globe killing, raping and razing to the ground everything that they find.

Yet we know that people are essentially altruistic. So how is it possible for a cult to motivate them to such focussed evil as it does?

This is what really motivates the jihadist — the promise of a Hugh Hefner-like afterlife, his every sexual urge attended to by perpetual virgins. Frankly he’d be better off blowing a wad in Pattaya

The answer is in the control of sex.

When we researched Why Men Made God we spent a lot of time looking at extant and recently recorded matriarchies. We were struck by how peaceable they were and how calm and pleasant the men were. In these matriarchies the supply of sex is determined by women. Yet it appears that there is enough to satisfy the men and very little friction takes place between them, if any. This compares well to study of bonobos, Pan paniscus, our closest relatives, who also organise in matriarchal groups. The males are contented and non-aggressive.

This shows us the key to the patriarchy’s power. By restricting the supply of sex, it causes competition and violence between men. It can then direct this violence to its own ends — typically conquest and destruction.

To do this, the patriarchy first removed women’s control over their own sexuality and reproduction. This remains the case today. Witness how in the Christian cults, any form of birth control — other than abstinence — is condemned. Look at how the Catholic and various Evangelistic cults try to influence politicians to deny women their basic rights over their own bodies. Look at how sex, in these cults, is condemned as a pleasure. This is happening for a reason, and that reason is social control.

And if you think that is bad, it’s nothing compared to the hideous conditions imposed under Islam. In this cult, high-status men can have up to four wives. There is, generally, a slightly higher number of girl births (53% in favour of girls); but if high-status men can have four wives, this clearly means that low status men struggle to find one. Add to this the concubine system in which high-status men may keep as many female sex slaves as they like in addition to their official wives and it should be clear that for ordinary men there are very few women who might possibly be available. This has been exacerbated for certainly decades and probably far longer, by the practices of aborting female children or killing the newborns.

The inaccessibility of sex is further reinforced by the Islamic customs of making women invisible. Their faces and bodies are covered completely, so that men are denied even the pleasure of seeing them. The lengths to which Islamic ‘authorities’ go in this is ludicrous and would be laughable were it not real. For example, Salman Rushdie recounts how Islamic clerics had decided that it was unacceptable for a woman to wear stockings even under a burqah, since the sound of her thighs rubbing together would inflame men. Everything in Islam is about sex, yet nobody is getting any.

The natural consequence of this should be that men would have sex with each other, but Islam is wise to this and so sex between men is punishable by death. It happens anyway throughout the Islamic world, but the cult does its best to stamp it out, at least in public, and for those who don’t matter.

Then, Islam attempts to eliminate male pleasure in sex using a barbarous procedure called circumcision which removes over half the sensitive parts of the penis. The specific reason for this is to reduce sexual pleasure. This is also practised in Judaism and in the more backward parts of the USA, for exactly the same reasons: the reduction of male pleasure in sex. At the same time Islam in particular sanctions Female Genital Mutilation which removes all pleasure in sex from women.

Why is this happening? The answer is simple: denying men any sexual release makes them more violent. This is why boxers refrain from sexual release prior to a fight. It makes them more aggressive. Islam needs violent, aggressive men to conquer the world, so it uses the same trick.

The other side of this vile equation comes, of course, in the afterlife. There is no trickery more sickening than the religious promise of reward after death, but this is far more vile than anything Christians ever came up with.

In Islam, the only assured way to enter Heaven is by dying in jihad, which means being killed in holy war. There are conditions to this: principally, one must not be killed by a woman. Furthermore, self-sacrifice, as practised by suicide bombers, is the ultimate, highest form of such a death and guarantees instant access to Heaven. To quote the excellent film Four Lions, a suicide bomber is ‘in Heaven before his head hits the ceiling.’

After a lifetime of sexual frustration the Muslim man looks forward to his fantasy playground after death — but only if he dies killing infidels

This Heaven is not the vague place of lights and music that Christians believe in. The Muslim version is very specific. In this Heaven the newly dead warrior is welcomed be 72 girls who are indescribably more beautiful and sensuous than any human woman and who, in addition, have a virginity that is renewed every day.

These girls, these celestial purveyors of sexual pleasure, are called ‘houris’. Now it has somewhat been lost by usage, but the correct pronunciation of the English word ‘whore’ is ‘hoor’ to rhyme with moor and poor, and not with door and floor. (A hoe is what you use to weed your lettuces.) This word is derived directly from the Arabic houri, and means the same thing — a female purveyor of sexual pleasure: a sex slave. Let’s be blunt: a courtesan.

So let us look at what is happening here. In Islam, women are reduced first to property that may be bought and sold, as is the case in other patriarchal religions. They are then completely hidden, in life, from all men except their fathers or the high status men to whom they are sold. Their hymens are made the measure of their property value and a woman who comes to the marriage bed with hers not intact may be stoned to death. There is a whole industry of hymen repair in countries where this abomination is the case and in Indonesia girls who wish to go to university and many other areas of life are obliged to undergo an examination to establish that they are ‘intact’. While this abuse may make the stomach heave, apparently it is all right because it is for ‘religious reasons’.

As a result of this, and the fact that half the sensitivity of the man’s penis has been removed, the principal reward of sex — for those men for whom it actually happens at all — is the forcible removal of a woman’s virginity. This is why Female Genital Mutilation exists — so that men whose genitals have already been mutilated may enjoy the tightness of the closed vagina — until, of course, motherhood fixes that.

Remember that the real meaning of ‘virgin’ is ‘unmarried woman’ which translates roughly into ‘a woman who has not yet given birth’. Having a child of course changes a woman, but in Islamic culture, the man’s sexual delight may only come from a virgin (in the sense of never having given birth). This was why the Ottoman Emperors’ concubines, were they so careless as to fall pregnant, would usually find themselves at the bottom of the Bosphorus; their sexual quality expired, they had no further use.

In this culture, a woman is not understood to have pleasure in sex and instead it is her duty. We see something similar in attitudes in the more benighted parts of that most benighted of developed nations, the USA, where ignorance about sex is staggering.

For Muslim men the pleasure of a woman is all in the taking her virginity. Once a mother — and having acquired the power that a mother has even in a vicious patriarchy — a woman becomes valueless as a sexual partner and men will take another wife or a concubine. This is why the houris are perpetual virgins. The taking of virginity is the ultimate sexual reward in the patriarchal cults and nowhere more so than in Islam. Rape, the forcible entry into a suffering woman, replicates what they believe to be the first act of sex, the loss of female virginity. Pain and suffering on the part of the woman are seen as intrinsic to sex and without it, sex is unsatisfying.

It is also why Islam approves of child brides — the suffering of a girl child penetrated for the first time is so much greater, and her opening is so much tighter. That permanent damage may ensue is irrelevant, since the ‘prophet’ Mohammed married his last wife when she was six and raped her at nine. Just in this month a law proscribing child marriages and forced marriages (of women) was blocked in Pakistan because it was ‘blasphemous’ and ‘anti-Islamic’. We need little more proof of the hideous misogyny of this ghastly cult than this.

So we have, in Islam, a refinement of the Abrhamic patriarchal mind-control systems. While many of the techniques used, such as male genital mutilation occur in other cults, nowhere esle do we see the full panoply, the distillation of control over sex into a method that makes ordinary men into rapists and murderers. While it is true that not all Muslim men are prey to this, the poorer, less well-educated and more religious the culture they come from, the more likely they are to be. Yet even here we must be wary: as Maajid Nawaz has pointed out, in the 1990s in the UK the choice amongst young Muslim men was not whether to become a religious fundamentalist but which flavour one should immerse oneself in. Unfortunately, for these people — principally men — Islam has become a badge of ethnicity, a common shield and buckler against the persecution perpetrated by a white, southern English elite*.

The West would do well to note this. Bleeding-heart regressive ‘liberals’ in particular have to understand that there is no ‘intersection’, no common ground between defending the rights of women and Islam. You cannot say you defend women while protecting a cult that overtly, deliberately and systematically abuses them.

The Salafist form of Islam, which Saudi Arabia has been financially supporting for decades, makes ordinary men into murdering, raping monsters, while turning women into chattels. If there is one consolation in the predicament the world now finds itself in, it is that plummeting oil prices should limit the power of this most noxious of regimes to export its evil, and with some luck may even lead to its destruction.

Nevertheless, there are, today, millions of Muslim men all over the world who literally and sincerely believe that the only hope they ever might have of enjoying sexual pleasure lies in dying while killing infidels and destroying all culture but the depraved one that spawned them. The free world needs to take stock and defend itself. It is all very well to be generous; but when the wolf at the door fully intends to destroy you, it is sheer foolhardiness to welcome him in.

* It is noteworthy that Scottish Muslims appear far less likely to follow this path than English ones; I suspect this is at least in part because they make their common cause with other Scots against the English ruling elite, whereas in England this is not available.

Rod Fleming on Google+

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Drinking rum with Bowie’s ghost

I am drinking rum with a ghost. He’s sitting over there with all my memories beside him. He wrote the soundtrack to my life and now he’s gone. Now he’s just a ghost, a phantom. A collection of sounds and images, words and memories. But the real artist that he was has gone.

He was the starman and we are all stardust. Now his physical form has returned to the dust that he came from, the Mother Earth, waiting to be recycled. But his ghost lingers on in the words of his songs, the many songs I know so well that I won’t be able to sing again without crying. Goodbye David Bowie, you gave me something I can never repay. You gave to us all.

David Bowie was perhaps the greatest artist of the late 20th century. It’s hard to think of a greater. Very early in his career he realised that gallery art was dead, defunct, a bauble of the privileged elite; not the medium for a creative talent such as his. He was not about to sell the jewels of that creativity to the dry grasping hands of the Saatchis or the horrors whom they procure for. He would not be pimped out by shysters and charlatans to become the whore of the privileged elite.

In an era when gallery art became completely worthless, David Bowie towered. When art became the equivalent of Facebook warriors posting trite motivational slogans — ‘YOLO’ and ‘Eat the rich’, he never lost sight of what art actually is. He never succumbed to the cult of the mawkish visual pun that has become the standard of gallery art today.

Over twenty years ago, that great writer and educator Camille Paglia observed that gallery art was redundant; she proposed cinema as its contemporary successor but the fact is that cinema is corrupted by another disease, split between crass commercialism and obscurantism. There is no contemporary director able to rise above this dilemma; all are impaled on one or other of its horns. There will be no more Casablancas.

Bowie never made either of those mistakes. He avoided the dilemma, both in his music and his cinematic outings. He was not George Lucas, nor was he some art house director whose turgid oeuvre would be fawned over by the same pseudo-intellectuals who drool over Turner prize nominees. Bowie was real. Bowie was true. Bowie was never compromised, nor did he compromise, even in the dark parts of his life. He remained himself and did not give up and in doing so was an inspiration to so many. Bowie said we could be heroes and he was right; and the greatest surprise of all, perhaps, was that this hero, this giant, was such a sweet, gentle, unassuming and private man.

What we knew was not the man behind David Bowie; he was a performance artist and what we saw was what he wanted us to see. David Bowie was a work of art, an artistic conception. Right from the moment when he killed off Ziggy Stardust, Bowie masterfully directed the production of his own life, up to and including his last album and the supporting videos, which we now can see, with the chill of reality, were a dying man’s paean. Not a word did he say in public and nobody outside his immediate family knew that he was a cancer victim whose days were numbered. It is only now, after his death, that we see the last of the facets of this most surprising and multifaceted artist.
David Bowie took art, dragged it out of the navel-gazing mire of the gallery, and made it into something relevant. He proved that great and gallery do not go together. He proved that to be a significant artist in our era meant walking away from the ghastly introspection of the art school, the grasping clutches of Saatchis and their likes. He proved that to be an artist you had to be real. I owe him greatly for that. We all do.

There will not again be his like, not in our lifetimes, anyway. David Bowie was a product of the most surprising and exciting cultural revolution of the 20th century, the 1960s. That astonishing era was itself the product of other massive social initiatives, which the forces of regression have ever since tried to suppress. The moralising ayatollahs of state and church that seek absolute control over the minutiae of life have fought hard to get the genie of freedom back in its bottle and they have largely succeeded. There seems no hope now, at least in the West, for another explosion like that which projected David Bowie onto the world stage.

And therein lies the real sadness, the real reason I am drinking with his ghost. It’s not just David Bowie who has gone, it’s the ideal that he, without ever meaning to, represented: of the truly free, independent artist who could make a whole generation laugh and cry with him. Of the dream that an ordinary, weird-looking kid could spit in the eye of the rich and the greedy and make them dance to his tune. Of the notion that maybe, just maybe, we could smash through the chains and shackles that the patriarchy placed on us, of the soul-destroying conformity it demands, of the grey ugliness that it imposes. Of the notion that we all could be heroes.

When I finish this bottle of rum, the ghost will take his leave. I will never see him again. All I’ll be left with is the echoes and flickering images he left. Goodbye, David Bowie. So many of us loved you. You were our hero, not just for one day.

Rod Fleming on Google+

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Syncretisation and the Jesus Myth

triple crosses

In an oral culture — one that is not written down — mythology evolves in an organic manner as it is passed from storyteller to storyteller. The Jesus myth was created in exactly this way, pasted together from earlier sources. This process is called ‘syncretisation.’

There is no fixed record of an oral tradition, by definition. This is difficult for us to grasp sometimes because we are so used to having a written standard by which tales can be measured. In an oral culture or tradition, this is not available so instead, myths grow and develop to reflect the lived experiences and cultures of the people telling them. It was only when writing was invented that these traditions could be codified and by that time, they have been evolving for many thousands of years. This means that there are many versions of the same myth, as different peoples have carried it forward.

The result of this is that we cannot say that, because detail differences exist between two similar myths, they are different or have different origins. In fact the strong likelihood is that they are indeed the very same but have organically evolved differences through generations of storytelling. What we have to do is to look at the threads of commonality, the points of similarity. This is exactly as a biologist does when trying to identify an unknown species; in biology, the traditional method is called ‘Linnaean Taxonomy’ where we find points of reference that allow us to identify to which other species our subject is related. We do something very similar in mythology.

This is the reality of mythology and all mythologists and serious historians recognise the influence of syncretisation.

Religious apologists, especially fundamentalist Christians, are horrified by this and attempt to deny it, but it is not necessary to take their point of view seriously. Their protestations, which verge on the ridiculous, that the detail differences between the Jesus myth and earlier ones are simply a rhetorical device used to confuse the argument. These people have no interest in the truth, only in promulgating a cult belief for which there is no evidence. They represent a vested interest: religious control over society and the continuing flow of money into their own coffers.

So let’s look at the original source from which the Jesus myth was syncretised.

Writing was invented by the Sumerians, some 6500 years ago, and in the material they left there are already a number of myths that are clearly syncretised from an original common source. The best known and most complete of these are those of Inanna.

Inanna is an anthropomorphic deity, which is to say she had a human form — superhuman in fact. Previous deities were the Mother Sea, Nammu to the Sumerians and the Mother Earth, Ki. These were distant and remote and could not be communicated with directly. We call these transcendent deities; Inanna on the other hand has a human form and lives, at least partly, amongst humans.

So here we have the first obvious point of commonality between Inanna and Jesus: they are both anthropomorphic — that is, human form — iterations of a transcendent or non-human deity.

On commonality, however, is not enough to prove the relationship. When we look into the myth of Inanna, however, we find many more. The most significant of these is the story of Inanna’s descent into the Underworld, which we discuss in some detail in Why Men Made God.

In this, Inanna decides to enter the Underworld, or in other words, to die. She puts on her finest clothes and jewellery and, accompanied by a servant, goes to the Palace Ganzer, the entrance to this dread place. There she hammers on the door until it is opened.

The doorward demands to know who desires entrance and why and Inanna says she has come to visit her sister, Ereshkigal. This information is relayed to Ereshkigal who, though deeply troubled by it, commands that Inanna should be allowed to enter. However, at each of the seven gates she must pass through, an item of her clothing and jewellery is to be removed.

Inanna explains to her servant that she will enter the Underworld. The servant must wait for three days, and then seek help. She is to ask for this from three other deities but only one, Inanna’s uncle Enki, the Lord of Wisdom and Sweet Water, will help.

Inanna enters the dread Underworld and at each gate an item of finery is removed so that she is naked when she appears before Ereshkigal. Inanna then does something strange: she causes Ereshkigal to rise from her throne and sits there herself.

The Anuna, the judges, see this and judge her; they look at her ‘with the look of death’ and Inanna dies. Her body is hung on a hook on the wall to rot.

Inanna’s servant waits the prerequisite three days, lamenting and ‘lacerating her eyes and buttocks’ and then sets off for help. As Inanna has predicted, the first two deities that she visits refuse to help, saying that no-one may recover from death and that this is all Inanna’s fault; she must bear the consequences.

The third, Enki, however, is prepared to assist his niece. He takes the dirt from under his fingernails and creates two tiny spirits. He tells them to enter the Underworld in secret and go to the royal chamber where they will find Ereshkigal in agony. They are to say that they will relieve her pain if she will release Inanna. They are to ask for nothing else. Enki tells them that Ereshkigal will at first refuse and offer many other things and great riches but they are to refuse until she agrees. They are then to use two magical devices Enki gives them, the life-giving plant and the life-giving water, and to place these on Inanna and in her mouth; she will then come back to life.

The two spirits set off and find everything as Enki has predicted: Ereshkigal is writing on the floor of her chamber, her hair ‘like leeks’ and in agony. At first she refuses to release Inanna but eventually she gives up; she agrees and the spirits give the life-giving water and plant to Inanna, who is brought back to life and, in the company of the demonic guardians of the Underworld, rises up to life. However, there is a catch: Inanna may only spend 6 months of the year in the world above, and the other six months in the Underworld.

So let’s deconstruct this a bit. You recall that I said the Goddess Earth was called ‘Ki’. Ereshkigal means ‘Lady of the Goddess Earth’. In other words, she is the anthropomorphic representation of the older Goddess, the Earth.

This tale comes from the temperate zone, where the year has seasons. So, half the year is plentiful and crops will grow, and half the year they will not. Sumer even then, though not as arid as today — it lies in what is not Iraq — had a long dry season when the ground was parched. The reference to Inanna spending 6 months underground and 6 above is directly related to this.

Inanna and Ereshkigal are actually two facets of the same Goddess, the Earth, one, Inanna in her bountiful summer and the other, Ereshkigal in winter. This is why Inanna becomes Ereshkigal and sits on her throne, and then is reborn from herself. The goddess of light dies to become the goddess of darkness, and then is reborn from herself. The reference to Inanna being divested of her finery is a metaphor for the dying back of the vegetation as the year cycle progresses. Then she dies and goes under the ground — the Underworld. But next spring she will be reborn.

Ereshkigal’s agony is the suffering of giving birth, as she brings Inanna once again into life. Then Inanna goes up out of the Underworld. To the Sumerians, the living world sand heaven were the same place: deities and many other spirits inhabited the same physical space as humans, but were invisible. Inanna is ‘the Queen of Heaven’ but she lives on Earth. So when she rises from the Underworld, she is rising into Heaven, as the Sumerians understood it.

We know from the surviving mythology and the artefacts left behind that prior to the establishment of patriarchal rule in Sumer in the third millennium BCE, a matriarchy was in operation. We have clues as to how this was run from surviving, later texts and these show a slow and deliberate divestment of powers from women and the Goddess to men and gods. So we should not be surprised that a myth that originally featured a woman should have been altered to make the central character a man.

To establish a chain of syncretisation we need to find several points of commonality between the two tales and preferably other myths which also show similarities. Compare this with another famous Biblical myth, that of Noah and the Flood. This is a straight copy of the Sumerian tale of Atrahasis, with only a few names and details changed. This is not so much syncretisation as direct plagiarism. The Jesus myth is a far more subtle case.

So what are the points of commonality? Well in the first place, the main character is an anthropomorphic version of a transcendent deity. Inanna is the human form of the Earth Mother, while Jesus is the human form of the Sky father. This is a strong correlation.

Then, the core issue is that the central character dies and then is reborn. This places both the original and its derivative, the Jesus myth, into the category of ‘dying and rising deities’ stories, of which there are a very great many from all over the world. As we explained in Why Men Made God the annual regeneration of the Goddess, the Earth, was and remains central to the survival of human life in the temperate zones and these tales are expressions of this.

Both Inanna and Christ are hung on a high place for their bodies to corrupt. For Inanna this was a hook on the wall and for Jesus a stake called a ‘crucifix’. (The Romans did not kill people on crosses at this time; they invented this form of execution later to mock Christians. We shall discuss that another article.)

Then, both Inanna and Jesus physically enter the Underworld, which is a metaphor for the reality of death. For a Sumerian this was literally the earth beneath our feet so the Palace Ganzer, where Inanna dies and is reborn, is under the ground. This is because inside the Earth, under the ground in this understanding, is within the Goddess’ body, inside her womb.

In the Jesus myth, the hero’s body is placed under the ground in a tomb, which is then blocked with a stone; the tomb is a metaphor for the womb of the Goddess and both Inanna and Jesus are reborn from it.. Both characters are in the Earth, inside the womb of the Goddess where regeneration occurs for the three days that they are dead.

Why three days? This is one of the most ancient mythological references we know. It gives rise to the concept of ‘triplism’ and we find this all over the ancient world from triple goddesses to three-headed dogs like Cerberus, who guarded the gate of the Greek version of the underworld. It derives from natural observation. The moon has three phases of light, waning, full and waxing; the temperate Earth has three seasons of life, Spring, Summer and Autumn; and perhaps most crucially, at the solstices, there are three days when, even to an observer using a modern sextant, the sun appears to rise to the same height in the sky at midday. On the third day after the winder solstice it can be observed to begin to rise again: this is why Jesus mythical ‘birthday’ is the 25th, a date he shares with nearly all other agrarian deities that are derived from a solar-observing culture. The 25th is the first day that an observer can see the change in declination of the sun and so know for certain that spring will return.

(We should note here that our ancestors were not sun-worshippers. In all but one culture, the short-lived Amarna culture of Egypt, invented by the Pharaoh Akhenaten and rejected after his death, the sun, in all the cultures of the near east and Mediterranean, was associated with a minor deity. The sun was seen as being under the control of the Goddess Earth. The deity being worshipped was the Goddess but the sun was the indicator that she would regenerate. So monuments like Stonehenge are principally solar observatories and not sun-worshipping temples. They undoubteldly had a religious function, but the deity being celebrated would have been The Goddess.)

This three day hiatus, which also happens at the summer solstice, is the main reason why Inanna remains dead for three days and it is also why Jesus does. After their ritual rebirth from the womb of the Earth Mother, both deities rise into Heaven — which in the time that Inanna was invented was a plane contiguous with the one humans live on, but which, by the time Jesus was, had syncretised into being in the sky; but here again we have a wealth of material that clearly shows this evolution.

Once again, it should be noted that not one but three crosses are placed on Calvary for Jesus ‘execution’; simply another iteration of triplism and the Goddess mythology that informs the Jesus mythology.

Syncretism, just by these points, has already been established, but there are more commonalities. Inanna’s rebirth is facilitated by a woman. In Jesus’ myth, it is women who open his tomb and allow him to rise again. These women represent the cadre of priestesses who officiated and celebrated the regeneration of the Goddess in the early solstices. They are the midwives of the Goddess who, in the Jesus myth, perform the same role for the male deity.

The other useful tool to establish syncretism is the existence of similar myths from the same region which allow a mythological timeline to be established between the earliest that we know of to the latest. So do these exist? Can we establish such a timeline? The answer is an overwhelming ‘yes’. The Middle and Near East, the Levant and Eastern Mediterranean are replete with tales of this order from other Sumerian versions, such as that of the Goddess Sul, to the Eleusian Mystery cults, to the Greek tradition of Orpheus and Eurydice. In fact this meme is so common that is has its own name, katabasis. This is derived from the Greek and means ‘going downhill’ or ‘descending’ and mythologists use it to describe the huge number of such myths that exist. When we look at the Jesus myth in the context of these others, we begin to see that there is nothing at all remarkable or strange about it; it is just one of many variations on a theme.

Christian apologists have long been aware of the catastrophic threat that an understanding of syncretisation presents to their claims. If Jesus could be shown to be just another iteration of a standard ideography, then religious claims for him to be ‘unique’ would be completely torpedoed. This was understood as early as the first century CE when the Christian apologist Justin Martyr claimed that the earlier stories has been ‘planted be the devil’ to introduce doubt. Surely a mature and educated person must see the convenient disingenuousness of such a claim; and then perhaps remark that for Justin to say that was odd, while in other letters he was actually claiming that Jesus was ‘no different’ to earlier deities like Perseus. As ever, the apologist will use any ruse, no matter how preposterous, to press the claim for his (or, unfortunately, her) ridiculous claims.

The fact that Jesus is just another syncretised ‘dying and rising’ or ‘katabatic’ deity has been established beyond any question since the nineteenth century; but such is the power of religion to strip money from the deluded and channel it into the hands of charlatans that this fact — and it is one — is repeatedly denied. To believe in such things today is obviously to live in a state of ignorance and denial and one should ask oneself whose interests are best served by keeping so many people in such a state; the answer, of course, is the wealthy and the powerful. They invented the patriarchy and the religions that

Rod Fleming on Google+

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