Keith Cleversley and His Pea Brain

Archive for the ‘Delusions of Religion’ Category

Introduction

As is my mantra: In order to understand the ancient past, I feel it’s critical to do our absolute best to put ourselves in the mind of ancient humans and the world around them when engaging in these topics. It’s truly not easy to comprehend a world where nature itself was the only supermarket, the only pharmacy, the only armory, as well as a giver and taker of life at will.  It’s difficult to imagine what it must have been like to see a plant sprout up from the ground and bear beautiful flowers or delicious fruit, to eventually see it decay and slowly melt back into the ground.

In our mutual distant past, religion wasn’t a choice of different systems; it was as intrinsic to live and survival as was eating and breathing.  There was no science to explain the world around our early ancestors; for that, they looked to clues and explanations that the world around them provided.  This could have come in any form; from a thunderstorm, to a trek into a deep cave, to a plant that may have induced an otherworldly experience lush with otherworldly beings.

Instead of weighing down the narrative with mountains of interspersed references, I’ve provided an Endnotes section instead to allow it to read like a story rather than a research document.  Read the rest of this entry »

Uncovering the use of entheogens in Early Christianity has been the subject of my research for quite some time now. The more I dig, the more pieces I put together, the more scholars, researchers, and authors I speak with; the more obvious it becomes that there’s an entire portion of Early Christianity has been systematically deleted, especially when it comes to the use of these psychoactive substances as sacraments early on in the history of this and other religious systems that arose.

The Vatican has been known to stop at nothing to protect the timeline it needs to remain valid in order to maintain its control over the masses.  And don’t be fooled; the Catholic Church and the Vatican are far more powerful than any corporation, partly because they are not bound to the same transparency that other multi-billion dollar business are subject to.  It’s no secret that the Church is responsible for the complete destruction of key relevant historical people, cultures, and documents in order to protect their version of religious history. The suppression of this kind of evidence is no exception.

That being said, let me weave a curious little tale, constructed from factual evidence Read the rest of this entry »

It’s a hefty charge, but there is no argument that the Roman Catholic Church has killed more people and consciously destroyed more cultures than any of the most heinous villains in all of history.  And perhaps most amazing is that the Church makes no attempt to deny it; they simply state that they are “acting on God’s behalf” and that we, as mere sinning humans, couldn’t possibly fathom the great wisdom of the Christian God. As a result they say they’re justified in every killing, in every destruction of entire cultures and civilizations such as the Mayans.

So, instead of making an attempt to argue the validity of such universally agreed despondent acts; I instead point some of them out every once in a while, allowing readers to arrive at their own conclusions.  This vivid example of the Early Church’s attempt to wipe an entire civilization from the face of the Earth comes to us courtesy of a Spanish Roman Bishop and inquisitor by the name of Diego de Landa. Read the rest of this entry »

“What is now needed is not yet more data (though more data are always welcomed), but rather a radical re-thinking of what we already know.  That is not to say that each and every question can now be answered; we do not have to explain everything in order to explain something.” – David Lewis-Williams, “The Mind of the Cave”

Travel with me to a Paleolithic cave such as Chauvet, Altamira, or a rock shelter in Round Valley, California.  Then, imagine you’re an ancient shaman on a vision quest in an altered state of consciousness.  You’re in winding passages that trail off into the darkness, some too small to explore, you find precipices that seem to reach deep into another world, and as the trance state starts to take a firmer hold, rock walls become animated as visions of animal and geometric forms project themselves onto solid, impassable rock, and shadows dance from flickering firelight.

Read the rest of this entry »

Titus 1:2: “In hope of eternal life, which God, that cannot lie, promised before the world began;”

The Breaker of Promises

This post is in response to the comment by metalpants on my “Be a Good Christian: Kill Your Children?“ article, which stated:

“You seemed to have forgotten to mention the fact that God kept all His promises given to His children, all the miracles, all the undeserving mercies, and just about every good thing that God has ever done for us… Including creating us just so that we could experience life and giving us the freedom to choose what we want to follow. He didn’t need us… At all. He can live along just fine without us. But He wanted to share the wonders of life with us just out of love. Perhaps you need some more studying to do cause you’re unable to explain how such an “evil” God is also capable of being so loving and merciful. When you look up stuff on Satan you’ll always find evil. Never good. Never love. Always selfishness and malice. But how can God be evil and good at the same time?”

Honestly, I think the sentiment is quite lovely…if only it were true. Read the rest of this entry »

Was Jesus married?

Perhaps.

Did the Jesus of the Bible revolutionize the role of women?

Without question.

The question to me isn’t whether or not Jesus was married, it’s why the Church has completely manufactured a completely different reality in relation to the teachings that can be found in the Bible in relation to women.  If I were a woman, I feel like I’d be angry enough to confront anyone with an ear in the Church, especially those who still believe that women are second-class citizens in the eyes of the God of the Bible.  In fact, feeding the fire of the debate in relation to whether or not Jesus had a wife only takes the attention away from the truth about how Jesus truly seems to have revolutionized the role of women in both society and the Church. Read the rest of this entry »

The comment I’ve received more often than any other on my blog is that if I only “knew the love of God,” that I wouldn’t be “so lost” or “spending so much time writing that nonsense” in relation to what’s contained within these pages.  In the past, I’ve just deleted these comments for the simple reason that those who take the time to write something as assumptive as that couldn’t possibly hear anything I might have to say on the topic.  But, as it goes in my internal world, I couldn’t help responding because, always giving others the benefit of the doubt; perhaps it’s me who’s being assumptive by simply pressing the “Delete” button.

In short:  I, beyond any shadow of a doubt in my mind, have personally touched the Hand of God.  I have seen the Divine, Read the rest of this entry »

One True Christianity: Please Stand Up

Is the New Testament a compendium of the only 27 books of Gospels, Acts, Epistles, and Revelation that was written in its entirety soon after Christ’s death?  Is the Christianity of today the same Christianity that existed at the time of Jesus Christ, and is it the only form of Christianity that existed?

Ask the majority of Christians and they will say yes.  Ask if most think that these 27 books are all there ever was on the subject of the teachings of Jesus Christ and most will say yes again.

The truth (as is far more often the case than not with the Roman Catholic Church) is far more plausible and sensible than what is purported to be the “true story” of the origins of the New Testament canon put out by the early orthodoxy.  The truth is that early Christians couldn’t even agree what it meant to be a Christian during the first and second centuries. Read the rest of this entry »

The Bottom Line

The Catholic Church has done its best to eradicate any connection to its own mysticism-based roots for reasons still not entirely agreed-upon.  Unfortunately for Catholic Church, evidence in direct contradiction to the repressive dogma they’ve peddled for centuries is mounting, and radical re-visitations of existing and sometimes exalted works are coming to light.  For me, one of the most personally compelling examples is The Great Canterbury Psalter (also called the Anglo-Catalan Psalter), which is a beacon for the Catholic Church. Read the rest of this entry »

Rarely have I felt as though I’m banging my head against a wall more than when engaging in discussion with Christians in relation to Bible as a source of morality.  I’ve constructed detailed arguments (See “The True Christian Job Description” for more), I’ve read the Bible in several translated versions so I’m as clear as I can be, I’ve used both analogy and statistics to make things more obvious, I’ve put examples into a personal context, I’ve framed them in every rational way imaginable, but no matter how factual my arguments have been, I get the same result: Flat out denial or anger of the facts I present, and on the rare occasion; threats.

Read the rest of this entry »