bullshit stories in the bible.
There is too much evidence proving the bible is a historical account of real events.
Noah's Ark: Found!
Red Sea Crossing: Found!
Mountain onto which God descended: Found!
Ark of the Covenant: Found!
Historical fact of the bible is not contested but dates are. For instance, when did Moses live? Current theory states 1400BC, but I can show hebraic worship of ShangDi in China going back to at least 2500BC.
Repent!
Lol
MICHAEL TOMS: I want to get back to the interpretation of myth, and especially relative to Christianity. What is your experience with people from the established religions? How do you convey to them that it is possible to look at the Bible from a symbolic point of view?
JOSEPH CAMPBELL: I taught a course at Sarah Lawrence College on comparative mythology for thirty-eight years. I taught young people of every available creed. More than fifty percent of my students from the New York area were Jewish; many were Christians – Protestant, Catholic; there were Mormons and Zoroastrians and Buddhists. There wasn’t much of a problem with the Buddhists, but all the others were somewhat stuck in their provincial traditions.
It was the simplest thing; all I did was to point out the parallels and identities all over the place. You see, when there is a motif – such as that of the virgin birth – which occurs in American Indian mythologies, in Greek mythology, and so on, it becomes obvious that the virgin birth could not have referred to a historical event. It’s a spiritual event that’s referred to – even in the Christian tradition. One after another, these motifs became spiritualized instead of historicized. And the interesting thing is that instead of the person losing her religion, she gained it. It became a religion instead of a misleading theory.
TOMS: How can a theologian in a seminary present a course in comparative religion and still hold fast to literal interpretations?
CAMPBELL: This is the most baffling mystery of my experience. Because I know, from associating with my colleagues, that a great many of these gentlemen become firm. "Ours is finally different. It’s a fact!"
TOMS: You mentioned the Flood. Like the Virgin Birth, it also is a motif that runs through all cultures.
CAMPBELL: Yes. There are very few cultures that don’t have a Flood motif. That’s a basic idea: the dissolution of the world which takes place every night when we go into the flood of our own unconscious. It’s the analogue of the mythological Flood: at the end of the cycle, there’s a flood. The American Indians have lots of Flood stories.
It was thought when the diggings in the Tigris-Euphrates Valley were proceeding that evidence of the Biblical flood could be located – at least a flood universal to that area. And there were flood levels found in several cities. But they were not the same flood level; they were local floods. There’s no cosmic flood; the Flood motif is a mythological idea. The whole notion that all originates from water, and all is going back to water, gives you a cycle: out of water, back to water, out of water, back to water; and each new cosmic aeon, each new world-age, is, as it were, a creation out of water and a dissolution into water. So it’s a mythological motif. This is exactly the point that Thomas Mann makes very well in the first part of Joseph and His Brothers: the archetypal Flood is a mythological, a psychological flood, and when local floods occur they become identified with it. Do you understand? We have experienced The Flood. The Flood is a mythological principle, and when a flood occurred, we understood the sense of the image.
TOMS: What does contemporary religion have to do with the adventure?
CAMPBELL: I think contemporary religion is in a very bad spot. And I think it is because it has taken the symbols as the referents. Religion is the constellation of metaphors, and the metaphor points to connotations that are of the spirit, not of history, as I said before. And in our religions, we’re accenting the historical image that carries the message, but we stay with the image.
TOMS: The literal interpretation, in other words...
CAMPBELL: Yes, and you lose these messages. The thing about Jesus is not that he died and was resurrected, but that his death and resurrection must tell us something about our own spirit.
TOMS: Why do you think we tend to a literal interpretation of Christ in myth?
CAMPBELL: I think it’s the result of a strong institutional emphasis in our religions in the West, and a fear of the mystical experience. In fact, the experience of the divine within you is regarded as blasphemy. I remember having given a lecture once on this problem of becoming transparent to transcendence, so that your life becomes a transparency through which light shines. I spoke of it as "the god in you, coming out through your life." A couple of months later, I met a young woman at another talk who had happened to be present at the first one; and she told me that when I had said "The Christ in you asks you to live," a priest sitting next to her had said, "That’s blasphemy!" So, in institutional religion, all the spirit is out there somewhere, not in you.
But what’s the meaning of the saying, "The kingdom of heaven is within you," if you can’t say, "It’s within me"? Then who’s in heaven?
TOMS: And, "I and the Father are one."
CAMPBELL: All of that. Jesus was crucified because he said, "I and the Father are one." Well, the ultimate mystical experience is of one’s identity with the divine power. That’s the sense of the Chandogya Upanishad saying which says "You are It." That divinity which you seek outside, and which you first become aware of because you recognize it outside, is actually your inmost being. Now, it’s not a nice thing to say, but it’s not good for institutions if people find that it’s all within themselves. So there may be some point there about our particular situation in the West where religious institutions have been able to dominate a society.
~~~
So here is one interpretation of what the number 666 means. Ponder it if you dare.
"This calls for wisdom. If anyone has insight, let him calculate the number of the beast, for it is man's number. His number is 666." - Rev 13:18
6 is the number of man as a manifested physical being, the beast. 3 is the number of divinity, mans truest inner nature.
666 therefore is the human being in the fullest sense... the completed man... The Christ ( which literally means "the
anointed one" ).
Those who have a negative view of human beings and the material world ( like the compilers of the bible, as we know it in its
present form.... having a negative view of the world of people and things because they themselves were/are no-doubt filled
with self-loathing ) see this as representing a man ( lowly beast ) trying to be like God... the anti-christ in other words.
To the wise however it represents man's true divine nature which includes, but also goes beyond, the physical material realm
( which they don't regard as a bad place, nor do they consider natural functions, like sex, as bad either ).
To suggest, as Joseph Campbell pointed out, that man's true nature is of divinity, is one of the greatest blasphemies in Christianity
and similar organized religions... I mean what need would people have for priests to control them and act as intermediaries
between them and God if God is already within them?
It is the greatest blasphemy but it is also the message Jesus gave... it is what he represents ( whether he actually existed
historically or is a mythological figure ).
According to gematria the name of Jesus in Hebrew = 666. And Jesus, "Son of Man", represents not a Divine Being
separate from us that we must worship from afar, but a potential which exists right here and now in all of us.
Amen
Om
and pass the kaneh bosum
* ( the main ingredient of the holy anointing oil of Hebrew Kings )
Don't believe any of this of course... but ignore it at your peril... lol
at least I hope you were entertained.
* kaneh bosum goes by different names today... "cannabis" for example...
That's right Jesus and the apostles and many of the prophets before them were pot heads!
/edit
Kaneh Bosm: Cannabis in the Old Testament/edit 2
And if you were enlightened or entertained give me a Bitcoin for Christ's sake!
1726PnQjRDmhVRcL2K8N4TFM9x8eCRYMV7
