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Reason and Myth
 

One can’t imagine the effect of a movie like Zeitgeist * is having on true believers. The triumph of the theory of evolution is one thing. It never seems to strike the literalists as fatal. Perhaps they think heathen nonbelievers have been hiding dinosaur bones all over the world to discredit religion. Besides, the rising doubt that Jesus ever existed must be disturbing to adherents who are sincerely interested in the truth. On one site which professed to debunk the movie, they were offering a piddly $250 to anyone who could show up any of the movie’s vaulted claims that Christ was indeed a ‘Son God.’ How sad.

We’ll forget the difficulty with Jesus’ historicity for the moment, however, if we look at a symptomatic Sun God from 3000 BC Egypt – Horus –  we find him born on December 25th of a virgin mother who had an annunciation from an angel of God. The virgin birth was accompanied by a bright star in the east which led three kings to his adoration. He was a teacher at the age of 12, baptized by a holy man, crucified, lay dead three days and was resurrected. That’s a hell of a truckload of similarities to Christianity. In fact, dozens of virgin-conceived crucified-saviors can be found from antiquity. Many of them are born on December 25th, the Winter Solstice. These are Sun Gods, The Light of the Ages and The Son of God. A sun religion is depicted with crosses – the cross dividing the Zodiac into the 12 constellations with the number 12 being in prominence, as in the 12 apostles. With Christ, the passing of an age occurs with the procession of the equinoxes. Christ heralds the coming of the Age of Pisces, – the two fish  – 1 AD to 2150. After Pisces comes the Age of Aquarius. The symbol of fish in the New Testament is ample. Christ’s first followers are fishermen, he miraculously feeds huge crowds with two fish and so forth.

Parallels in the global myths are revealing. No proof of any supernatural reality exists of course but the need in humankind to create myths seems paramount. After 9/11, the world awoke from its modern religious stupor. The terrorists weren’t godless Marxists out to enslave us in a happy worker’s industrial gulag, but fourth century religious zealots who were ready to collapse each brick from every high-rise and bring down Western Civilization itself, returning us to living in tents, a habitat that only old school environmentalists could drool about.

You might be surprised, but some of this occurred by design. Academic philosophy in a pathetic attempt to save supernatural reality turned its back on rationality. This occurred post David Hume after a wedge had been driven by him between nature and reason. Reason was soon considered an epistemological device no better than instinct, intuition or even faith. By disallowing inductive knowledge as valid, human reason was greatly restricted from many areas; ethical, metaphysical, political, etc. The path this restriction took was through Kant, Hegel, the three American Pragmatists, English Positivists, Continental Philosophers, notably the Phenomenologists, and especially, the English Analysts.

From that event over time, religion philosophically gained equal footing with reason, particularly in regards to issues of morality, faith and tradition. This incrementally allowed the resurgence of worldwide theology and fundamentalism. The religionists quite aware of the declaration by many philosophers that reason and faith were two different, yet compatible ways of seeing reality and seeking truth, wasted no time. Nietzsche’s haunting foreboding, “God is dead!” turned out to be premature. Always the academic philosophers embraced the criticism of reason, a distrust of open societies and disdain for sensual inductive knowledge. Plato has long been their romantic favorite, the idealist who first envisioned the philosophers in charge–the masses obliged to become beholding to these self-preoccupied elitists. They saw no conflict of interest.

This drama, like the Sun God one, appears to be one thing and yet is actually another: the Christ Myth endorses a platonic scorn of rational selfishness, individualism, science and pluralistic societies. Many of today’s thinkers accept the Christ Myth as characteristic of a Sun God phenomena, then embrace Christianity’s platitudes about morals, many of these bromides aren’t based in reason at all, but rather in tradition. Most are quite indefensible from any rational point of view.

The great global Military Industrial Complex stands poised to strip away our legal rights to habeas corpus. Governments throughout the world are preparing to drastically expand their roles in their economies. Western Civilization is at a crossroads. The Left and Right’s fusillade is in zenith. It’s the age, not of Aquarius, but of the Irrational. Wishful thinking, deceptive paper money, malevolent state-run capitalism and universal equalitarianism stand before us at the precipice of our doom, and damn, not a Hobbit in sight to save us from the land of Mordor.

* Both the original Zeitgeist and Zeitgeist Addendum are Switch/No-Switch movies which take fascinating and interesting points of view and turn them into outlandish and irrational conspiracies. The Switch/No-Switch is like explaining a phenomena such as how the Federal Reserve manipulates debt to print money and set monetary policy for its own advantage – a viable theory worthy of consideration – and then covertly switches the theme to argue that a resource-based economy makes slaves of us all and a robotic technocracy would solve the problems. Could you imagine civilized man without a work ethic? Resources produced entirely with robots? A society without consumer restrictions? It would produce worse hedonistic monsters than the current consumer society has. What are they thinking? And what about their spooky  Venus Fly Trap project? Perhaps it was supposed to be a utopian lark and I missed the point? One friend said to me, “What about TWC #7? That can’t be explained away.” Would you like some False Flags and Black Opts with that conspiracy? Some things even George Bush Junior can’t pull off. I mean either he’s a genius or an idiot. I shall leave it for others to decide. The National Institute of Standards and Technology  investigators believe a combination of intense fire and severe structural damage contributed to the collapse of TWC #7.

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