Howdy. Once again, long-time no-write, but, things have been busier than ever. Saw this last night, “How to Fake a Moon Landing”, prominently displayed on the top of the shelf at my local library, in the children’s section, right next to all the books on the solar system. Had to throw this up on the ol’ blog. I mean, what does this say about the overall state of affairs, when children’s authors can get a book like this published? It means yes, you and I live in a world where more and more people are indeed questioning the veracity of the Apollo Moon missions. This book aims to catch kids young, and (using comic strip explanations) debunk those “crazy conspiracy theories about the faked moon landings” before they get a little older and find themselves watching entertaining videos on youtube of the astro-nots bouncing up and down on their cables, set to polka music.
This really does just crack me up. Damage-control mode, is what it is… “Watch out for those kooky ‘science-deniers’ kids… They’re crazy and they’ll brainwash you into becoming a backwards, science-denying hater of the government and all scientific progress!!”
I keep bumping into examples like this recently, and it really does strike me as ironic, and a little funny, but a little embarrassing too. Some of the BEST compilations I have encountered of Bible verses describing a Flat Earth, have been put together not by Biblical scholars or theologians, but by Atheists! And the thing is, I very much now have to agree with them, in that, whatever what one might want to believe about the true nature of the Universe, it’s pretty inescapable to see what the Bible itself actually does say…
In the end, it’s really an issue of neither side wanting to end up with egg on their face. One side inevitably will. Most people believe that it’s been soundly decided and proved. But has it really…? (After all, the same folks will tell you that Darwinian Evolution has been soundly decided, and proven as “unquestionable scientific fact”…) Either the Bible was wrong, and Christianity has simply been trying to sweep all these “scientifically ignorant” claims of the Bible under the rug for the last several hundred years, OR… The Bible is right, has always been right, and a good deal of what you’ve been told your whole life is simply a ridiculous lie…
The creationist crowd is in a tithy lately. First there was “Cosmos” — on Fox, no less! — giving short shrift to everything they hold dear. Then, adding insult to injury, for those paying close attention, long-awaited evidence of the Big Bang arrived. It’s been a rough few weeks.
But really, if you’re a biblical literalist, it’s been a rough few centuries, or millennia, actually. You see, according to the Bible, the earth is both stationary and flat. Most pointedly, there are at least two passages in which a single point is visible to the whole world (Daniel 4:10-11 and Revelation 1:7), and one (Matthew 4:8) in which the whole world can be seen from a single point — an obvious impossibility unless the earth is flat.
Although the Catholic Church had forced Galileo to recant his work questioning the immobile earth in 1632 — and only pardoned him in 1992 — they did so in part because they were certain the earth was a globe: a globe around which the sun, moon and all other heavenly bodies revolved. Such was the Ptolemaic system, which had dominated Western views for more than a millennium. And yet, the Bible itself reflects a radically different view of the cosmos, one shared by the ancient Egyptians and Babylonians, in which the earth is both stationary and flat. And there is a wide range of scriptural passages to prove it.
The late Robert Schadewald made this point conclusively in “The Flat-Earth Bible,” an article posted on the Web back in 1995. Schadewald was a former board member and president of the National Center for Science Education, a leader in the fight against creationism and other forms of pseudo-science being pushed into schools. But he was as much an enthusiastic student of fringe or “alternative” science as a source of endless fascination as he was a critic of swallowing it whole.
“When I first became interested in the flat-earthers in the early 1970s, I was surprised to learn that flat-earthism in the English-speaking world is and always has been entirely based upon the Bible,” Schadewald begins his piece. Easily the most influential work is “Zetetic Astronomy, Earth Not a Globe,” by Samuel Birley Rowbotham. Its first, 16-page pamphlet edition, in 1849, predated Darwin’s “On the Origin of Species” by a decade.
“The Biblical cosmology is never explicitly stated, so it must be pieced together from scattered passages,” Schadewald explains. But he starts with the much more direct, explicit Bible statements about an immobile, geocentric earth. It’s a logical starting point, since he notes, “The flat-earth view is geocentricity with further restrictions.” There are hundreds of such passages, according to geocentrist James N. Hanson, who spoke to Schadewald at the 1984 National Bible-Science Conference in Cleveland, but these are “a few obvious texts” that Schadewald chose to cite:
1 Chronicles 16:30: “He has fixed the earth firm, immovable.”
Psalm 93:1: “Thou hast fixed the earth immovable and firm …”
Psalm 96:10: “He has fixed the earth firm, immovable …”
Psalm 104:5: “Thou didst fix the earth on its foundation so that it never can be shaken.”
Isaiah 45:18: “…who made the earth and fashioned it, and himself fixed it fast …”
It’s remarkable enough that most of today’s creationists, wedded to biblical literalism andinerrancy, rarely mention such passages, particularly given the history of Copernicus, Kepler and Galileo. But then there are these, as well:
Daniel 4:10-11: [Nebuchadnezzar] “saw a tree of great height at the centre of the earth … reaching with its top to the sky and visible to the earth’s farthest bounds.”
Matthew 4:8: “Once again, the devil took him to a very high mountain, and showed him all the kingdoms of the world [cosmos] in their glory.”
Revelation 1:7: “Behold, he is coming with the clouds! Every eye shall see him …”
A single point cannot see to or be seen from everywhere on a globe at once. For these words to be literally true, the earth must be flat, end of story.
These are only a few passages, of course. To really comprehend the Bible’s flat-earth cosmology, you have to know what you’re looking for — the other elements of the flat-earth world. That’s why Schadewald noted, “As neighbors, the ancient Hebrews had the Egyptians to the southwest and the Babylonians to the northeast. Both civilizations had flat-earth cosmologies. The Biblical cosmology closely parallels the Sumero-Babylonian cosmology, and it may also draw upon Egyptian cosmology.” He went on to document what he meant. In addition to the passages above, he cited passages concerning the nature of the heavens, the order of creation, and the diminutive nature of the sun, moon and stars. All are relevant to the claim of a flat earth, because all are parts of a coherent flat-earth worldview similar to that of Egypt and Babylon’s: The earth is flat; the heavens are a solid dome, fashioned of metal; the sun, moon and stars are relatively small object inside the dome of heaven. As for the order of creation, Schadewald wrote:
The Genesis creation story provides the first key to the Hebrew cosmology. The orderof creation makes no sense from a conventional perspective but is perfectly logical from a flat-earth viewpoint. The earth was created on the first day, and it was “without form and void (Genesis 1:2).” On the second day, a vault the “firmament” of the King James version was created to divide the waters, some being above and some below the vault. Only on the fourth day were the sun, moon, and stars created, and they were placed “in” (not “above”) the vault.
Regarding the heavens, he noted that the word “firmament” is translated from the Hebrew word raqiya, meaning the “visible vault of the sky,” and coming from riqqua, “beaten out.” “A good craftsman could beat a lump of cast brass into a thin bowl,” Schadewald pointed out. “Thus, Elihu asks Job, ‘Can you beat out [raqa] the vault of the skies, as he does, hard as a mirror of cast metal (Job 37:18)?’” He went on to cite a number of passages supporting the view that the vault of heaven is “a solid, physical object” and thus “a tremendous feat of engineering,” as well as passages from Isaiah [40:22], Job [22:12, 14], and Ezekiel [1:22-26, 10:1], which “complete the picture of the sky as a lofty, physical dome,” not merely an illusion that looks like a dome.
Regarding celestial bodies, Schadewald first noted, “They had to be small to fit inside the vault of heaven,” but added, “Small size is also implied by Joshua 10:12, which says that the sun stood still ‘in Gibeon’ and the moon ‘in the Vale of Aijalon.’” He then cited a number of passages presenting celestial bodies as “exotic living beings,” somewhat similar to how various polytheist religions represent them. And, of course, stars can fall from the skies (Daniel 8:10, Matthew 24:29, Revelation 6:13-16).
While the Bible itself contains no explicit cosmological description, the Book of Enoch, a highly regarded source that influenced the Bible, does. Schadewald pointed out that Jude 14- 15 quotes 1 Enoch 1:9, attributes prophecy to Enoch, and thus “confers inspired status upon the book.” He went on to say:
Unlike the canonical books of the Bible, which (in my view) were never meant to teach science, sections of 1 Enoch were intended to describe the natural world. The narrator sometimes sounds like a 2nd century B.C. Carl Sagan explaining the heavens and earth to the admiring masses. The Enochian cosmology is precisely the flat-earth cosmology previously derived from the canonical books.
This includes trips to the ends of the earth, a detailed description of solar and lunar motion, including six openings in heaven for them to emerge from when they rise and another six to pass into when they set, according to the season, and more information about stars, including their punishment for transgressions.
Some might be inclined to think that Schadewald was overstating his case. That’s understandable. Skepticism is good. So they should consider what a true believer had to say. In “Earth Not a Globe,” Rowbotham first presented a series of secular arguments on a wide range of specific issues, but in the end he resorted to wide-ranging, detailed arguments from scripture, in which moral, religious and physical arguments were all jumbled together with extensive quotations from the Bible.
At one point, for example, Rowbotham cited more than two dozen passages, such asPsalm 103, 11, “For as the Heaven is high above the Earth,” to argue that “If the Earth is a globe revolving at the rate above a thousand miles an hour all this language of scripture is necessarily fallacious.” “Up” and “down” are meaningless, he argued, if the place you point to as “up above” you is millions of miles away by the time you’re finished speaking. This may seem like a bizarre position, but it actually accurately reflects a consistent, literal-minded, stationary geocentric worldview — if not an exclusively flat-earth perspective. It simply shows how much scriptural evidence one can find, depending on the set of assumptions one begins with — which in turn shows just how difficult, if not impossible, it is to change the minds of true believers.
In another passage, Rowbotham argued about the nature of celestial bodies, further illustrating how his viewpoint produces a proliferation of scriptural support. First, he rejected the notion that the moon shines with reflected light, quoting Genesis 1, 16-17,“He made the Stars also; and God set them in the firmament to give light upon the earth,”and 10 other passages, before concluding, “Nothing is here said, nor is it said in any other part of Scripture, that the sun only is a great light, and that the moon only shines by reflection.” Then he argued that stars are not sunlike objects vast distances away, but rather are lights in the sky created to give light to the earth at night. These clearly mattered to him because of the entire worldview they are part of — precisely the point that Schadewald made.
Not incidentally, in making his point about the stars, Rowbotham misrepresented the scientific view by claiming, for example, “[T]he modern system of astronomy teaches that this earth cannot possibly receive light from the Stars, because of their supposed great distance from it.” Here, and throughout his argument, he confuses the matter of starlightreaching the earth, so that we can see the stars, with the matter of starlight illuminatingthe earth, so that we can see other objects by the light of the stars. The two are entirely different matters, but Rowbotham, for all his careful attention to words when it suits him, never seems to notice. In the end, however, he makes a claim so wild, it seems to make everything else irrelevant. He says that travelers report that in many other parts of the world, starlight is “sufficiently intense to enable them to read and write.” Yet, the confusion of terms in his argument is vital to setting the tone for this final, preposterous assertion — all of it, firmly rooted in scripture as he reads it.
Again, this may seem far removed from the idea of a flat earth. But for Rowbotham, our inability to see the connection is but further proof of how little we understand. And he had a point. The world as he envisions it is so radically different than our own that we find it difficult, if not impossible, to imagine what he takes for granted. But if the earth is flat, covered by a physical dome that contains the stars, then the descriptions he offers do make sense — and for Rowbotham, reading the Bible as he did, it’s impossible to separate one part of that cosmology from any of the others.
Rowbotham also made a further argument about the stars that goes to the subject of moral confusion and relativism — neatly anticipating the anti-Darwinians who would follow him. If, he argued, the stars are “not simply lights, as the scriptures affirm them to be, but magnificent worlds,” then there arise all sorts of theological conundrums — Are the worlds inhabited? If so, have the first parents be tempted? Have they fallen? Been redeemed? Does each world have a separate redeemer? Or is Christ the redeemer for every world? If so, was his suffering on earth sufficient for all the other worlds? And what of Adam’s fall? Did it implicate the inhabitants of all other worlds? “The Christian philosopher must be confounded!” Rowbotham exclaimed. “If his religion be to him a living reality, he will turn with loathing or spurn with indignation and disgust, as he would a poisonous reptile, a system of astronomy which creates in his mind so much confusion and uncertainty!” What a relief, then, to know that it’s all garbage, that earth is the only world ever created! How strikingly similar, then, his rejection of secular astronomy was to the creationists’ rejection of secular biology.
This is but part of a larger family resemblance, as Schadewald explains in “The Evolution of Bible-Science,” a chapter he contributed to the 1984 volume, “Scientists Confront Creationism“ (adapted version here). In his introduction, Schadewald wrote:
“For two thousand years, various groups of dogmatists have tried to force the universe to fit their interpretation of Scripture. They have judged and rejected evidence and explanations according to the standard of their own religious beliefs. On scriptural grounds, some have rejected (and continue to reject) the sphericity of the earth, the Copernican system, and the evolution of life on earth. In the last two centuries, flat-earthers, geocentrists, and creationists have adopted a label for their dogmas: Bible-science.”
It’s obvious why creationists would not want to be associated with flat-earthers, but it’s not at all obvious why we should let them get away with it, given how similar their arguments, assumptions and purposes are. In discussing the internal divisions of Bible science, Shadewald wrote:
“Though flat-earthism is as well-supported scripturally and scientifically as creationism, the creationists plainly do not want to be associated with flat-earthers….
“[Y]oung-earth creationism closely resembles the flat-earth movement. In fact, young-earth creationism, geocentrism, and flat-earthism are respectively the liberal, moderate, and conservative branches of the Bible-science tree. The intense hostility expressed by the scientific creationists toward the flat-earthers does not extend to modern geocentrists, who hover on the edge of respectability among creationists. Indeed, though the Bible is, from Genesis to Revelation, a flat-earth book, the geocentrists have combined forces with liberal creationists to cast the flat-earthers into outer darkness.”
And, indeed, the similarities are much more basic than the differences, as he quickly went on to note. In an earlier, 1981 article, he explained more fully:
“Despite their internecine warfare, Bible-Scientists are in broad agreement on a number of issues. They agree on the usefulness of the Bible as a scientific text, the weakness of mere theories, the duplicity of conventional scientists, and the impossibility of reconciling conventional science with the Bible. The creation and flat-earth movements have similar foundations and histories, and both have used similar strategies to propagate their beliefs. Indeed, both believe they are battling the same behind-the-scenes opponent.”
Today, more than 30 years after Shadewald wrote those words, belief in the “weakness of mere theories” and “the duplicity of conventional scientists” now extend well beyond Bible science, into the far reaches of the culture war as conservatives see it, including the field of global warming, where conservatives openly parade their contempt for scientific theories, and their suspicion (if not conviction) that scientists are involved in an elaborate deception (“climategate,” anyone?). In this same article, Shadewald quoted Rowbotham:
“Let the practise of theorising be abandoned as one oppressive to the reasoning powers, fatal to the full development of truth, and, in every sense, inimical to the solid progress of sound philosophy.”
And he went on to say:
Charles K. Johnson, president of the Flat Earth Society, is absolutely vehement about scientific dishonesty. He regularly calls scientists “liars” and “demented dope fiends” and claims that the entire space program is a “carnie game.”
With these sorts of venomous sentiments now infusing not just Bible scientists, but the wider conservative audience for global warming denialism, birtherism, groundless claims of “death panels” and massive voter fraud, etc., it seems high time that progressives stop playing defense and start going on offense. Asking Christian conservatives to defend flat-earthism any time they open their mouths would be an excellent place to start. The Bible, after all, is far, far clearer in supporting a flat earth than it is in opposing abortion, much less birth control.
So, thank you, Atheists. Nice work! A fair enough challenge indeed. Unfortunately, science might not be coming down on the side we’ve all long assumed after all…
Virtually anyone who has spent any time at all looking into the secret societies behind the panorama of conspiratorial activity within this country and around the world, has undoubtedly become familiar with Freemasonry, and in turn, with the infamous “G” so often incorporated into the square and compass logo.
Cursory explanations delve into the notion of the Freemasonic “god”, or “Grand Architect”, (who they ultimately point to as being Lucifer, of course), while the G is also said to represent the so-called “Generative Principle”, as explained here:
“It conceives of the divine nature as residing in man, and that it is especially active and expressive in the sexual passion; and that the gratification of this passion is pleasing to the deity and is the duty of the Mason. It aims to make passion, therefore, sacred by making its gratification a moral and religious duty. On its theological side, Freemasonry is a sort of Pantheism, the deity being the generative principle, the reproductive power which pervades all animated nature. And as this power inheres in man, it is viewed as “incarnate in humanity in toto,” thus establishing man’s union and unity with the divine nature.” (excerpt from this exposition on the meanings of Masonry)
Now, so far all this is fairly old news. But what has been really persistent in my inquiries towards the possibility of true enclosed, Flat Earth, (and the subsequent realization that heliocentricism is itself a component of the broader Evolutionary lie) is that the more I think about it all, the more it very much seems to me that perhaps this whole “NASA paradigm”, if we can call it that, in many ways has served to essentially indoctrinate the masses not just with lies, but lies that are actually materialistic, “scientistic” versions of ancient Occultic, Luciferian doctrines.
And the subject of Freemasonry is itself a perfect example of helping us comprehend this, because we can look at the layers/levels/”degrees” of Masonry itself, and recognize how the lower, entry-level degrees are indeed quite oblivious to the hardened Satanic belief system propelling the entire thing. At the lower levels, they sincerely do just believe they are part of some kind of altruistic charitable Fraternity, and yet at the same time in those stages they are being presented with shallow, “hollowed out” explanations of the symbolism and rituals, which if they continue to “progress” in the Brotherhood they will become privy to the “deeper” meanings, etc.
Now, if we can fairly easily recognize Darwinian Evolution to be a repackaged Luciferian doctrine, masked in the guise of humanistic science, then when pondering the false cosmology of Copernicanism, I now have to say that the “theory of Gravity” does also seem to actually be another one of these ancient mystical concepts that has been repackaged and re-introduced to the masses as “scientific fact”.
After all, “Gravity” is not merely taught to be the pulling force produced by humongous collections of mass, such as stars/planets/moons etc., but it is also the very force which is alleged to have pulled all these celestial bodies together in the first place! According to the Big Bang, from the original “Singularity” sprang forth all the physical matter that is now still constantly being flung outward in every direction in an ever-expanding universe. But, that matter from the singularity then had to begin forming all the “elementary particles”, as described in such insanely convoluted manners as the following:
“In the most common models the universe was filled homogeneously and isotropically with a very high energy density and huge temperatures and pressures and was very rapidly expanding and cooling. Approximately 10−37 seconds into the expansion, a phase transition caused a cosmic inflation, during which the universe grew exponentially. After inflation stopped, the universe consisted of a quark–gluon plasma, as well as all other elementary particles. Temperatures were so high that the random motions of particles were at relativistic speeds, and particle–antiparticle pairs of all kinds were being continuously created and destroyed in collisions. At some point an unknown reaction called baryogenesis violated the conservation of baryon number, leading to a very small excess of quarks and leptons over antiquarks and antileptons—of the order of one part in 30 million. This resulted in the predominance of matter over antimatter in the present universe.”
Of course, this is pure nonsense, but throw in enough impressive-sounding words, and you can make it appear quite scientific indeed. First the “elementary particles” somehow are formed in all the heat, from an explosion which occurs for who-knows-what reason. Then those particles somehow form into atoms, then the atoms into the various periodic elements, and then the elements into molecules, and so on, and so forth…
Evolution is without question a mystical belief system at it’s core (which I have written about before), and so now in the context of Flat Earth research and the knowledge that NASA is basically a Freemasonic institution, it’s interesting, don’t you think, to ponder that ol’ “G” in the middle of the square/compass, in light of how Evolution and “Gravity” are more or less watered-down, “materialized” versions of what are really mystical, occult precepts.
This whole idea is one that I am actually exploring on a number of fronts here, as I do also suspect that the entire subject of the “planets” is again, another example of this same thing, but that will probably have to wait until another post. I do think I’m barely scratching the surface here, if indeed there is anything to these kinds of observations at all, and so I think it will be interesting to see what all might come out of it over time. If we have that much time left for such secondary speculations, I suppose…
In this video I explore how both Darwinian Evolution, and the Copernican heliocentric model, originated not from the application of the modern scientific method but instead from the ancient Mystery School traditions and pagan mysticism, specifically as evidenced through the figure of Pythagoras himself. In essence, heliocentric cosmology is an ancient satanic counterfeit to the true, Biblical, flat/enclosed Earth (just as Evolution is a Satanic counterfeit to God’s act of Creation…)
The theme which unites ancient Sumeria to Darwinian scientific humanism, Big Bang assumptions, Luciferian Theosophy, liberal theology, occult New Age mysticism and all other anti-Christian but specifically anti-creation ex nihilo movements is the myth of evolution.
The myth of evolution stretches back to antiquity where it is closely connected to the idea that man is a being who though presently limited in time and space is nevertheless capable of achieving a great leap of being and evolving into a much more powerful god-like being in the future. Thus in the Epic of Gilgamesh, an epic poem from Babylonia (ancient Sumeria) Gilgamesh describes himself as two-parts god and one-part man as the result of the evolution of his being.
Long before Darwin, Greek nature philosophers (600–100BC) were teaching primitive evolutionary conceptions, abiogenesis, natural selection, transmigration, reincarnation and vast ages together with many other modern assumptions. The fragments of Anaximander (c. 610–546 BC) show that he taught that ‘humans originally resembled another type of animal, namely fish’ while Democritus (c.460–370BC) taught that primitive people began to speak with ‘confused’ and ‘unintelligible’ sounds but ‘gradually they articulated words.’
The Greek Atomist Epicurus (341–270BC), the father of contemporary materialism and many of its’ modern assumptions, taught that there was no need of a God or gods, for the Universe came about by a chance movement of atoms. (Evolution: An Ancient Pagan Idea, Paul James Griffith, creation.com)
Darwinism affirms the claim made by Epicurus that living beings created themselves, making Darwinism a modern Gnostic myth, said Dr. Wolfgang Smith, physicist and mathematics professor at Oregon State University:
“…As a scientific theory, Darwinism would have been jettisoned long ago. The point, however, is that the doctrine of evolution has swept the world, not on the strength of its scientific merits, but precisely in its capacity as a Gnostic myth. It affirms, in effect, that living things created themselves, which is in essence a metaphysical claim….Thus…evolutionism is a metaphysical doctrine decked out in scientific garb….it is a scientistic myth. And the myth is Gnostic, because it implicitly denies the transcendent origin of being; for indeed, only after the living creature has been speculatively reduced to an aggregate of particles does Darwinist transformism become conceivable. Darwinism, therefore, continues the ancient Gnostic practice of deprecating ‘God the Father Almighty, Creator of Heaven and earth.’ It perpetuates…the venerable Gnostic tradition of ‘Jehovah bashing.'” (From Old Gnosticism to New Age I, Alan Morrison, SCP Journal Vol. 28:4-29:1, 2005, pp. 30-31)
With respect to long ages, Plato and many other Greek philosophers taught that the present Universe came about millions of years ago. Writing in the fourth century AD, Lactantius said:
“Plato and many others of the philosophers, since they were ignorant of the origin of all things, and of that primal period at which the world was made, said that many thousands of ages had passed since this beautiful arrangement of the world was completed … .“ (ibid)
After the Greeks, the Roman naturalist Pliny the Elder (AD23–79) said we are so subject to chance,
“….that Chance herself takes the place of God; she proves that God is uncertain.” (ibid)
Greek and Roman philosophers received these ideas from ancient Sumerians (Babylonians), Egyptians and Hindus, whose nature philosophies extended back centuries before Greek and Roman civilization. For example, one Hindu belief was that Brahman (the Void or Universe) spontaneously generated itself (the modern theory of abiogenesis) as something like a seed or singularity about 4.3 billion years ago and then evolved under its’ own power by which it expanded and formed all that exists:
“These Hindus believed in an eternal Universe that had cycles of rebirth, destruction and dormancy, known as ‘kalpas’, rather like oscillating big bang theories. We also read in the Hindu Bhagavad Gita that the god Krishna says, ‘I am the source from which all creatures evolve.” (ibid, Griffith)
In India the doctrine of evolution/reincarnation/karma was thoroughly established from ancient times. It was expounded first in the Upanishads (c. 1000 BC – AD 4), the philosophical-mystic texts held to be the essence of the Vedas.
The idea that the soul reincarnates is intricately linked to karma, the idea that jiva-atmas (souls) pass from one plane of existence to another and carry with them samskaras (impressions) from former states of being. These karmic impressions on the soul are taken to the next life and result in a causally-determined state of being. In some schools of Hinduism liberation from the cycle of death and rebirth (samsara), is considered the ultimate goal of earthly existence. This is known as Moksha in Hinduism or nirvana in Buddhism. Other traditions assert that liberation from samsara is merely the beginning of real spiritual life and beyond nirvana, activities continue, but are no longer of a worldly nature. Both sides agree on the phenomenon of evolution/reincarnation.
In its modern version Darwinian evolution describes the progress (or transmigration) of energy as it emerged out of spontaneously generated matter (chemicals) and its successive incarnations within the bodies of different kinds of nonlife-bearing and life-bearing beings over the course of millions and billions of years. Its counterpart, spiritual evolution, bespeaks the progress of spirit or divine spark as it reincarnates within the bodies of different beings over the course of millions and billions of years. In the words of Emergent Church leader Rob Bell, evolution is energy,
“…. a spark, an electricity that everything is plugged into. The Greeks called it zoe, the mystics call it ‘Spirit,’ and Obi-Wan called it ‘the Force’…..This energy, spark, and electricity that pulses through all of creation sustains it, fuels it, and keeps it growing. Growing, evolving, reproducing…” (Love Wins, pp. 144-145)
For Mystery Religion initiates and adepts evolution spiritually transforms man into superman:
“….the evolution of man into superman — was always the purpose of the ancient Mysteries, and the real purpose of modern Masonry is not the social and charitable purposes to which so much attention is paid, but the expediting of the spiritual evolution of those who aspire to perfect their own nature and transform it into a more god-like quality. And this is a definite science, a royal art, which it is possible for each of us to put into practice…” (The Meaning of Masonry, W.L. Wilmhurst, p. 47)
Evolution is an animated energy, serpent power or force which may or may not be divine depending on whether it is of the ‘secular’ Darwinian school of thought or of its’ spiritually pantheist counterpart. In either case, this energy usually emanates from an impersonal substance which from antiquity has been known variously as the Void, Chaos, Ground of Being, and Brahman for example. (all of the above borrowed from here.)
The Cult of Pythagoras…
Just as the Gnostic mythical concept of Evolution can be demonstrated to have originated LONG before Darwin, the mythological concept of helio-centric universe can also be shown to have arisen long before individuals such as Copernicus were credited with popularizing it.
The Gnostic origins of a non-stationary Earth take us back to the figures of Philolaus and Pythagoras. Most sources credit Philolaus as the one who came up with the model of the Earth, Sun, Moon all rotating around “central fire” in the universe, while others claim that Pythagoras held to this idea even before his student Philolaus. Either way, what is absolutely undeniable is the extremely Gnostic and esoteric footing on which both these men stood. To most of us average folks, Pythagoras is presented in school as the ancient Greek mathematician who gave us basic proofs such as the famous “Pythagorean theorem” regarding triangles (A squared plus B squared equals C squared).
To occult adepts however, Pythagoras is understood to be one of the most revered of ancient mystics and Mystery School teachers. Said to have been consecrated to the god Apollo even before his birth, Pythagoras was reared under the tutelage of teachers such as Thales and Anazimander at Miletus, but as a young man found himself unsatisfied by their seemingly disparate and contradictory forms of Gnosticism. He set out to find a more “synthesized” universal Truth, and allegedly traveled through most of the great civilizations at the time, visiting the priests of various Mystery Schools in places like Egypt, Babylon and Chaldea.
He basically combined all the Occult knowledge he could gather from the world at that time, and then eventually settled in Croton, Greece, where he started his own Mystery School, and developed a system of initiations and degrees, training through aestheticism, the majority of which was embedded within a complex code of numerical values and derivations. Thus, a vast amount of the concepts found in Occult Numerology and ‘Sacred Geometry’ which have filtered down through the centuries to our own time can be traced back to Pythagoras himself.
Freemason Albert Pike says in “Morals and Dogma”:
“Pythagoras refused the title of Sage, which means ‘One who knows’. He invented and applied to himself that of Philosopher, signifying one who is fond of or studies things secret or occult. The astronomy of which he was taught was astrology: his science of numbers was based on Kabalistic principles. Everything is veiled in numbers.“
And truly, the further one might look into the beliefs and pursuits of individuals such as Pythagoras and Philolaus, the more it becomes plain that these were not simply individuals preoccupied with a rational and scientific analysis of the natural world, as our secular education system to often portrays them. Indeed, Pythagoras is revered by Plato and all the famous Greek Philosophers who came after him, and in that light we can understand just how pervasively Gnostic all of Greek “Philosophy” truly is, how it was seeded and guided not simply by the imaginations and musings of speculative men, but by the doctrines of Demons as they were passed down through Mystery tradition and ancient secret societies.
Is it any wonder that occult brotherhoods such as the Freemasons have such a high regard for Pythagoras? Is it at all surprising to discover that his mathematical codes and numerological interpretations of the universe such as the “tetractys” are interwoven throughout Kabbalistic and Masonic symbolism?
And so from afar, when we step back and consider that neither Darwinian Evolution and Copernican Cosmology are not based on authentic scientific observation and experimentation, but rather on presupposed philosophical assumptions, it should also come as no real surprise that the ideological roots of both assumptions are practically the same. This only makes sense, really, because there is a rather obvious interdependence between the two. Darwinian Evolution really can’t even be conceived of outside of a massive, ever-expanding, self-creating Universe. A recognized geocentric cosmology would reveal the true absurdity of Evolution’s basic premises. At the same time, the limitless expanse of the Copernican Cosmos are offered as the last great challenge for humans to conquer in their Evolution as a species, and so, their is an undeniable symbiotic relationship between these two assumptive maxims which we are all inculcated with from the earliest age.
Both are designed to shape our perceptions of human origin, and human destiny alike. What is so interesting about looking at the example of Pythagoras, and the whole of ‘Greek Philosophy’ really, is that it could almost be said to be the first example of Esoteric/Occult knowledge being taken and formulated in such a way so that the “uninitiated” were still being given a version of the teaching on a level which was merely mechanical and non-spiritual. Greek Gnosticism is really where the ideological division between matter/spirit started, the false division between physical/ethereal, mechanical/mythical, scientific/religious… It’s actually a basic tenet OF Gnosticism, which pits the material against the spiritual, rejecting the Biblical concept of hell/hades and replacing it with the physical reality itself. So indeed, Gnosticism contains an Esoteric and exoteric exposition for everything, which has more or less been the template for all Occulted information ever since.
I believe this very much applies to our own time, where these Gnostic doctrines have been quite meticulously repackaged into forms which genuinely believe themselves to be wholly materialistic, empirical and scientific. So many adherents of Evolution today are staunchly materialistic in their worldview, completely oblivious to the fact that their beliefs stem from intensely religious and mythological beginnings. Currently we can see philosophies at the core of Evolutionary theory propelling the agendas of things like Transhumanism and the constant re-brandings of the New Age movement. The teachings of the Occult realm have always sought to pervert the Created order of the world, and obscure the true identity of it’s Creator. As Blavatsky said:
It is from this sobering perspective that I am unable to sympathize with the notion that the Flat Earth debate is a “distraction”, a complaint I have now heard countless times from various individuals who seem convinced that there is nothing of substance to the sudden ignition of this online discussion, and view it all as some intentional diversion from the Enemy himself. I concede that indeed it could be a distraction, in the sense that anything can be turned into a distraction, if it becomes the sole focus, eclipsing the Gospel of Salvation itself. However, I would say that it could only be reduced to the inevitably of a distraction, if such investigations were indeed shown to be utterly and entirely unsubstantiated. If the Flat Earth claims are instead shown to have real merit however, then it would make about as much sense to dismiss it from the Christian standpoint as it would to casually ignore the debate surrounding the theory of Evolution. If Evolution is not “scientific fact”, but only a horrific, Satanic lie, being propagated since ancient times, and now in every official institution of our modern world, then the subject itself is not a “distraction”, because it is a lie from the pit of hell, intended to lead men and women away from their Creator. The question of the Earth, and the Cosmology of the universe as a whole, is no different, because it cannot hardly be separated from the other question. It is all, quite plainly, surrounding the question of origins, and destiny…
A large amount of retrospection has already been given to the many memes and concepts present within the movie “Interstellar”, one of the best I’ve read being the one done over on Jay’s Analysis, so I’m not sure just how much fresh insight I might have to add to the conversation, but then again, I believe that much like “2001: A Space Odyssey” which has already been compared/contrasted a great against Interstellar (and deservedly so I would say), this movie is one that will be dissected and pondered for many years to come. Insert prerequisite spoiler alert here. (but honestly, if you haven’t seen Interstellar by now, I’m guessing you probably weren’t planning to…) Rather than going down all the “wormholes” of discussing the many specific scientific questions touched upon in the film, such as relativity, interdimensional travel, quantum theory, transcending space/time, artificial intelligence, etc. (all of which are super fun, but probably already covered elsewhere far better than I can here) I simply wanted to step back and see if I could distill a fairly simplistic concept which I honestly felt was a rather new one, or at least one articulated in a new or more blatant fashion. One of the best reviews/”decryptions” of this film I’ve yet read is from Jay’s Analysis, where he asserts that the main point of the film is that defeating death and transcending the material world will ultimately be accomplished by way of man working symbiotically with A.I. He says:
The end of the universe and entrance to the Tesseract appears to have a lattice structure which TARS explains was “created” by “them” to give a fixed point in space and time to reveal these truths. In other words, the matrix-like structure of the universe is meant to be transcended (so the film’s worldview is saying) through an evolved, emergent deus ex machina. Readers may disagree, but I believe this is the best analysis of the worldview presented, as the film consistently upholds the Darwinian perspective. On this view, it is only natural to expect the means by which man might transcend his final frontiers is artificial intelligence and transhumanism.
Now, I find these observations fascinating, and I’m quite inclined to agree with him, but for me, what was most significant about the film’s message as a whole, regardless of whatever combination of specific technologies/theories are portrayed as making this possible, was in the simple fact that they actually reveal who “They” are! This was a drastic difference in my view, from say, the premise of “2001: A Space Odyssey”, where the infamous “obelisk” (which many have astutely pointed out is alluded to in Interstellar by the shapes of the A.I. robots…) is found by humanity, but the builders of the Obelisk remain a mystery. We never learn exactly who “They” are. Some advanced alien race, we are left to assume. Similarly, the movie “Contact” (which also starred Mathew McConaughey, interestingly enough) ended with the scientist (Jodie Foster) traveling through space through a network of wormholes, (which “They” built), but again, we never see “Them”, or learn much about them, beyond that they are looking out for humanity and trying to give their little brothers in the universe a helping hand in catching up with them… Interstellar I thought was quite unique in that it starts out by incorporating several instances of what would typically be categorized as “paranormal activity”, and then weaves the storyline along until we learn that Cooper (the Dad) is the one causing these phenomena, in his attempts to communicate with his daughter from his own vantage point in the “fifth dimensional matrix” after falling into the black hole. So essentially, what you wind up with at the end is a form of scientifically-garbed Necromancy…(!) Under the premise that gravity itself is a force which transcends all the dimensions, the idea is that what might be perceived as “ghosts” or “spirits” from our own 3-dimensional plane, are simply just “intelligences” existing within a higher dimensional framework. Okay, nothing really new there. But when added to the expanded concepts of relativity, and the inherent assumptions of the Evolutionist’s underlying philosophical belief in “progress”, all the pieces are put into place towards which a new lens for interpreting who “They” could be, is provided. “They” are “Us”. This is portrayed in many ways, on many levels, throughout the film, but one of the most central is shown by way of a “being” that Dr. Brand (Anne Hathaway) sees as the crew first flies through the wormhole on their way across the universe. Time and space are bending/whirling, and everyone is having their little “acid trip moment”, and in the middle of this Dr. Brand turns her head and sees a strange “hand” reaching out towards here, a person-shaped “ripple” in the fabric of space/time. She reaches out and touches it, saying “first contact” (or something like that) just before they pop out on the other side of the wormhole. Of course, later in the movie we see that this “being” is really Cooper, on his way back through the wormhole, after falling into the black hole “Gargantua” and have his whole interdimensional poltergeist “conversation” with his daughter in the bookshelf tesseract “place”. The “transcendended” Cooper was the “ghost”. This whole sequence, I believe, really encapsulates so much of what could be referred to as “speculative Luciferianism”. Occultism essentially is a belief system which opens itself to the idea of interacting with beings of a higher dimensional existence with the hopes of that interaction being that which gives us the keys to “unlock” our next stage of development, or conquer whatever existential problems we are facing, or whatever. As in the film, embracing the “paranormal” and the intelligences trying to communicate from the “other side” is viewed as ultimately profitable, and something not to be feared, for in the end, the only “beings” out there who might communicate us are really just some more highly-evolved versions of our own selves. In this type of cosmology, concepts like “angels” and “demons” are antiquated and silly, because it is believed that of course human beings are both good and bad, (as represented by characters like Dr. Mann in the film) and so naturally, there are going to be “bumps along the way” in the broader progression of human evolution. Sure, there might be “scary” moments or “confrontational” individuals, but hey, that’s just human history unfolding. One of the messages of the film is that by pressing onward, and being willing to personally cross over the “event horizon”, we will eventually learn the secrets behind all these “weird” anomalies, we will “solve gravity”, transcend 3-dimensional space/time, and even defeat death, with a great cry of “Eureka”! In essence, we will become “gods”, and this quite possibly with the help of our own god-like selves from the future, or advanced A.I.’s who have somehow “uploaded” into the ether of the universe itself, digital “spirits” who can navigate through higher dimensions the same way people can, and all whom have most likely figured out ways of communicating through time/space by manipulating things like gravity…(!) So…. Who (according to this Gnostic storyline) are “They”? “They” are US! We are the angels. We are the demons. We are the “aliens”. We are gods. We, as both a species and as individuals, don’t just survive, but we evolve, destined for an existence that goes beyond “this little patch of dirt we call Earth”… This is just, fascinating. A very robust cohesion of ancient Gnostic/occult philosophy, and 21st-century scientism and Evolutionary theory. It really is all a part of the same big Lie, which goes all the way back to the serpent in the Garden.
“You will not certainly die, your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God”… (from Genesis 3:4,5)
Yesterday I was asked by someone to “extrapolate” on some things I said about how Evolution is itself a religious belief system, and beyond this that all such complaints made by atheists about how the existence “religion” infringes upon their ability to live short, happy lives without being laden with things like fictional religious guilt are ultimately nonsensical, because from the perspective of scientific naturalism inherent to traditional Evolution, there really is no such things as “pain”, or “happiness”, or even true free will.
One of the things that is so confounding about these kinds of dialogues, is that time and again, the Evolutionist will demand that the person believing in the Bible (or any other religion, but for the most part it’s usually about challenging the Bible…) “prove” to them the truthfulness of the Bible, from within the constraints of their own pre-supposed naturalistic worldview. Scientific naturalism is always inserted at the beginning of the entire matter, and assumed to be fact a priori, completely ignoring the obvious fact that to do this is to just assume the conclusion of the matter before the questions are even asked. It basically goes, “Science tells us that there is nothing but the physical world, so HA, there is no such thing as imaginary fairy-tail nonsense such as that which is in your absurd Bible!”
Of course, by definition, that which is supernatural does not fit into the category of that which is “natural”, and so really this is just a tired application of circular reasoning, a merry-go-round that seemingly some people almost don’t know how, or just don’t want to, get off. But what I find even MORE fascinating, is how this very same pre-determined, purely naturalistic cosmology, while being vigorously applied as the big stick with which to whack away at God like some piñata, in fact isn’t something that I have found too many proponents of Evolution wanting to delve too deeply into when it comes to fully contemplating what the ramifications would then truly be for, well, everything, starting with themselves…
Because what does Evolution essentially declare? It asserts many things, the first of which is that many, many, billions of years ago, everything was compacted into an infinitesimally small point (but we don’t know how that came to be there), and then the point suddenly blew up, flinging all of it’s compacted “stuff” outward in every direction. Then, the flying, spiraling “stuff”, began to mysteriously organize itself. Somehow, the “stuff”, allegedly first in the form of hydrogen atoms, unconsciously decided upon a fairly complex set of physical laws that it would obey, as it went about the task of rearranging itself on the atomic and subatomic levels, eventually giving birth to the rest of the elements in our periodic table. The newly-formed spectrum of periodic elements then eventually started combining in a variety of ways to create molecules and gas clouds and massive spinning boulders comprised of different minerals and such. Some of the swirling gases then started clumping together into monstrous pockets, which then lit themselves on fire, and the stars began to light the universe.
If you have been blessed with a solid public school education, then you probably already know how the rest goes. The hurling, whirling boulders (self-sculpting into spheroids) started hitching rides on the gravitational pulls of some of these gas-torches. Some of them even figured out a way to start spinning in the completely opposite direction.(!?) One particular spheroid landed in a most fortuitous track around what we now call our “sun”, where it never got too close to get cooked, and never got too far away to be frozen solid. This cozy little spot made for a very ideal oven-of-life indeed. Throw in a few more billion years, add a sprinkling of some more minerals and elements floating in from space, then let it bake. (The recipe allows for adding/subtracting a few billion years of course, to get it just right) And then, eventually, inevitably, miraculously, mysteriously, mystically, the first cell was born. Complete with a genetic code enabling it to replicate itself, feed itself, and grow into some kind of pan-primordial-ocean algae. Being algae is boring of course, so (add another several million more times around the sun) and the algae is now swimming around with flagellum and even little fins. The once “simple” code of that first cell has now managed to piece together billions of new sequences of coded proteins, building all kinds of new cell types, which keep on, again and again, growing within organisms in just the right formations to eventually form things like scales, and gills, and eyeballs, and even cells capable of bioluminescence…
So of course, the more millions of years are added to the equation, the more the codes continually rewrite and upgrade themselves. Fish crawl onto land. The land-fish become reptiles and birds. The “accidental” self-writing code never stops, giving hummingbirds the ability to hover and bats the ability to use echolocation. One branch, called “mammals” get bigger, and fatter, and some of them less hairy over time, until…. VOILA… Here we are! And that, in a nutshell, is the mythology “science” of Evolution. It’s so simple! DIRT (all the “stuff”…) + TIME (remember, lots of time…) + MATH (and don’t ask us where the math comes from…) Dirt + Time + Math = Everything.
I realize I’m being a bit facetious here, but seriously, that’s what you’re left with, when all is said and done. Everything, from me to you, from the bacteria swimming in your toilet to the waves of a hurricane, is all just algorithms in the end. Matter which is (for whatever reason) organized into a dizzying array of algorithms interacting with other algorithms, all combining into larger “macro-algorithms”, off into infinity. Some of these algorithms we classify as being “biological”, but from a strictly materialistic point-of-view, the biomechanical algorithms (what we usually call “life”) are just algorithms which happen to have a different kind of internal math than the non-bio ones. When a bio-algorithm “dies”, this is merely just mechanical process of a mathematical function playing itself out. Well, either that or another algorithm of one kind or another disrupts it’s natural process of computation, and the equation becomes too depleted of it’s computational abilities to continue crunching along. That’s the Evolutionary universe. From top to bottom, and everything in between.
So again, you and I, as biomechanical algorithms, while we may perceive ourselves as having things like “memories” or “feelings”, or experience things like “pain” and “pleasure”, these too, of course, and just nothing more than variables being punched through the complicated mechanical/mathematical mish mash that are our brains and bodies. Chemical reactions, and tiny electrical currents, which interact and function as a massive algorithm to sense and interpret things like: temperature, motion, gravity, light, sonic waves. Some of these sonic waves are being produced by other biomechanical algorithms, and form patterns interpreted as “words”. The “words” are eventually interpreted by the individual algorithm, as it “grows up” (i.e. carries out it’s own equation) as having meaning behind them, and astoundingly, what is occurring all around us, all day every day, is just algorithms “talking” to other algorithms. Absorbing data inward, and then spitting data back out. Chat-bots talking to other chat-bots. Googles talking to a google of other Googles.
The assemblage of all these individual humanoid bio-algorithms interacting together, creating one big macro-algorithm, is sometimes referred to as “Society”… 😉
Okay, enough of that. You get the idea. I’ve probably now tortured the metaphor worse than a poor orange-suited soul at Git-mo. But it really was necessary to lay such groundwork, because clearly, obviously, none of us really accept this idea that in the end we are nothing but sophisticated chat bots equipped with biomechanical, bipedal vehicles to walk around in. Not even the staunchest adherents of Evolution. We all cling furiously to there being true meaning to our existence, even if that meaning is nothing more than a flash in the universal pan. And speaking of “pans”, this is the very point at which I believe so many people nowadays encounter the intrinsic theoretical/practical conflict, the cognitive dissonance, and why indeed the younger generations, reared on Darwinian milk, are increasingly now turning towards one type of mysticism, “spirituality”, or another. It’s really not surprising at all, when you only step back and recognize that what Evolution essentially embodies IS pantheism, even if on the surface it adamantly espouses full-on hatred for any form of “theism”. Practically speaking, what is being described is nonetheless a Universe which “creates itself”, a Universe that is impersonal, yet behaves like a conscious entity, a Universe that is meaningless yet somehow gives itself meaning.
So really, the person subscribing to the theory of Evolution has basically choices, either take the basic outline of a self-generating Universe that creates seemingly autonomous beings with a desire for meaning, and combine it with any one of the “mystical traditions” on the philosophical shelf (Buddhism, Hinduism, “New Age”, take your pick…) or, remain in the even more dichotomous realm of “traditional” scientific naturalism, unable to even point to anything at all as to why humans inevitably seek meaning, and that which is “good” vs. that which “bad”, talking in endless circles about the relativity of “ethics” until the philosophical merry-go-round makes you sick. These folks, who on the one hand argue up and down that we are all nothing but biomechanical algorithms bumping into one another, can’t accept the full ramifications of what it would mean to actually just totally accept this explanation and live it out to it’s fullest degree. This is why it makes a lot of sense then, to see the majority of the focus being put on just going after the other alternative explanation, (that of Creation), because if you keep yourself busy lobbing critiques at the idea of a personal, Creator God, then you’re preoccupied enough to ignore the internal contradictions of your own professed cosmology. The best defense is a good offense, after all…
“Peter-pantheism” seems as good (and catchy) a term for it as any, since I very much do see it as being akin to wanting to just stay in Neverland, never “growing up” in the sense of just stopping and admitting that like everyone else, Evolution is “religion”. It is admittedly a strange form of mysticism that is intent on denying it’s own mystical nature. It humors itself to no end, laughing at the “unscientific” beliefs of other religions, yet won’t even recognize the glaringly Unscientific claims it makes in the name of it’s own god, “Science”. It is of course really no different than any other form of pantheism in it’s practical application, because what pantheism does is just make the entire universe into “god”, and since we are all a part of this universe, we are all a part of “god”. We are declared gods unto ourselves, and this, this is what both the tenured professor of biology lecturing in some University somewhere on the evolution of humanity, and the painted swami sitting cross-legged in some ashram somewhere in India, ultimately both have completely in common…
The Christian "Minority Report" from J. Michael Bennett, Ph.D, Emeritus Producer of the Future Quake Radio Show, and Author of Two Masters and Two Gospels, Vol. 1: The Teaching of Jesus Vs. the "Leaven of the Pharisees" in Talk Radio and Cable News
Taking ownership of your life brings power to make needed changes. True freedom begins with reliance on God to guide this process and provide what you need.
EXPOSING: The Deceptions of Satan. "Satan deceiveth the whole world" (Revelation 12:9). He deceives not just a part of the world, he deceives the "whole world."
We see as through a glass darkly 