A New Target

 

Target is now in the sights of the right, joining Bud Light. And the LA Dodgers, North Face, Miller Lite, and others every day now. Having realized their power, the anti-woke have woken up. Boycotts will spread.

Aside from any possible backlash from the normies, why did Target think it would be profitable to carry and devote a large amount of floor space to a line of trans clothes for children? How many trans people do you know? How many do you see walking down the streets? Surely the trans market is miniscule. How many of those items are they likely to sell? 

And yet, they are not prepared even now in the face of collapsing sales to pull the stock. They have only moved it, in some stores, to a less prominent position. 

How big is the trans market for light beer? Yet Budweiser seems prepared to lose billions rather than disavow Mulvaney.

And as for the LA Dodgers: Mulvaney made a thing in his Bud Light ad about trans people being totally uninterested in sports. So how mad is it for the Dodgers to insist, even in the face of popular backlash, on honouring the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence at centre field? How big is their trans fan base really?

I think that last example holds the key. It is not about the trans. The trans are just the visible symbols, the flagbearers. The Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence are not being honoured because they are trans, but because they mock Christianity. People want to buy trans clothes at Target not because they are trans, or their babies trans, but to show defiance of Christian morality. That is the big market: those who want to reject morality. As a good many people always want to do. Morality means not getting to do what you want.

This is what “woke” means. People seem to have trouble defining the term, but it makes sense as a gnostic reference. To gnostics, morality is for the ignorant masses. They are as if asleep. Superior people, the awakened or enlightened, see beyond that, see that morality is just a way to keep the deplorables in check. As superior beings, they themselves are radically free to do whatever they want. And declaring their freedom from morality declares their superiority as well.

This gnostic concept has infected the great monotheisms from their beginning. Before that, it seems to have infected Classical paganism’s “mystery religions.” The same tendency exists in Hinduism and Buddhism as Tantra. In China, it is represented by Taoism, the undercurrent pulling against Confucian morality. It is also the fundamental concept behind fascism and Nazism. 

Put more simply, and accurately, it is Satanism. As Aleister Crowley put it, “"Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law."

Let us hope the good people are now rising up against it.

Moderation as a Moral Value

 

Friend Xerxes has his own definition of sin: “I define sin as taking something good, beneficial, healthy, and pushing it to an extreme. Too much, or too little.” Life, then, is a matter of balancing opposites. 

Carl Jung believed in something similar. He credited the concept to Gnosticism. It is also perhaps reflected in the yin-yang symbol familiar in the Far East.

This is not the Christian idea, and it does not work.

For balance itself, being a value, must be balanced by its opposite. Moderation must not be pushed to an extreme, or one is immoderate. One must be only half-balanced. And “the good” must not be pursued, but must be balanced by evil, or – or evil happens? Too much good is not good?

In other words, the concept produces immediate self-contradictions.

And can we hold that there is such a thing as too little rape and murder? What amount of each would be just enough? By what standard can we judge this, or anything, if there are no absolute values?

Christianity holds, instead, along with ancient Greek thought, that there are absolute values: one cannot have too much good, too much truth, or too much beauty.

Jordan Peterson and the Culture Hero

Jordan Peterson’s basic premise as a psychologist seems to be that life is a struggle between order and chaos: the subtitle of his recent book is “An Antidote to Chaos.” “Peterson’s big, unifying idea is that chaos and order, along with the processes that mediate the two, are the ‘primal constituents’ of ‘the world of experience’” (Dan Blazer, American Journal of Psychiatry).

This does not ring true to me.

Properly speaking, there is no such thing as chaos. Where man is not, God is. Any randomness is only apparent.

Accordingly, the struggle against chaos cannot be the core concern in life. Rather, in struggling against “chaos,” we may only be trying to impose our own will in preference to that of God.

And here again I find in Peterson disturbing echoes of Fascism. This would be Hitler’s “triumph of the will.”

Nor is there, in principle, any moral reason to prefer “order” over “chaos.” Why? Because it is tidier?

Peterson undoubtedly gets this, or finds this, idea of order versus chaos in a common creation myth, found in many parts of the Middle East, of a struggle between a sky god and a primordial monster. This has commonly been interpreted as a struggle between form (the sky god) and matter (the monster), or spirit and matter, or order and chaos. Certainly a plausible interpretation; but there is no room for such a motif in monotheism. God creates the universe not by imposing some form on preexisting matter—for then, where did matter come from?--but “ex nihilo,” out of nothing, form and matter together. “Chaos,” in the Judeo-Christian context, is simply non- being, the void.

According to a piece in the Financial Times, Peterson goes on to identify “chaos” with “the eternal feminine.” A smaller point, but this too is surely wrong. It is nonsensical. To impose one sex or the other on chaos is a contradiction in terms: it then has some order, a distinguishing feature, and so is not chaos.

The idea that there is a cosmic battle between spirit and matter (i.e., order and chaos) is an ancient Christian heresy. It is, to be more specific, Gnosticism. The Gnostics held that the material world was depraved, and the goal was for spirit to overcome it. Monotheists, Jewish, Christian, or Muslim, hold that, because God created matter as well as form, matter too must be good, and is not to be vanquished or destroyed. Hence the resurrection of the body and the perfected new earth at the end of time.

For a Christian, the cosmic dragon battle, that between St. Michael and Lucifer, is not between order and chaos, but between good and evil.

A cosmic battle between order and chaos is a waste of a perfectly good universe.

And it seems to me the only reason anyone would embrace the concept would be as an excuse to do evil.

Harpur's The Pagan Christ: Some Notes on Details

A lot of hard work tracking down Harpur’s sources for The Pagan Christ has been done here. Unfortunately, he does not footnote.

Just want to chip in on a few where I may have something to add.

“Jesus becomes a magician or Superman figure, quite removed from the real universe in which we live.” (p. 20), Harpur complains. This statement requires the unstated assumption that Jesus was not God. Harpur does not say why he makes this assumption. Because that is, of course, what Christians believe. On that assumption, there is no objection to seeing Jesus as having powers greater than that of any ordinary man. Superman indeed.

Harpur writes (p. 28) that “Eusebius … says that the Gospels of the New Testament were really the old dramatic books of the Essenes, from pre-Christian days.” Happily, this is one of the few times he actually gives a reference. If you check it, you discover that what he says is false. Eusebius said that the texts used by the Therapeutae, a monastic group in Egypt during Christian times, were the Gospels, not something more ancient. Eusebius believed they were Christians, not Essenes.

On Buddhism, I have a wee bit of expertise. I was amazed by Harpur’s reference to the Buddha’s “transfiguration,” since this is unknown to the Buddhist scriptures. P. 32: “The Buddha had his transfiguration when he went up a Sri Lankan mountain called Pandava, or Yellow-white. ‘There the heavens opened and a great light came in full flood around him and the glory of his person shone forth with “double power.” He shone as the brightness of the Sun and the Moon.’” This, he notes, “exactly parallels the Gospel story of Jesus’s transfiguration on Mt. Tabor.”

This story of the Buddha being “transfigured” on some Mount Pandava appears nowhere in the Buddhist Canon. Nor is there even any tradition in the canon that the Buddha ever went near Sri Lanka. Note that this article in a Buddhist Sri Lankan newspaper is clearly unaware of such a tradition. If Harpur did not just make it up himself, heaven knows where it came from.

“The third commandment, according to the Buddha, is ‘commit no adultery; the law is broken by even looking at the wife of another man with lust in your mind.’” (p. 32) Third commandment? There are no “commandments” in Buddhism. Nor can this supposed quote from the Buddha be found. “Sexual immorality” is indeed, of course, prohibited, by the third article of “Right Action,” the fourth station on the Eightfold Path.

p. 33: “An encounter between the Saviour figure and the principle of evil is fully paralleled in Zoroastrian and Buddhist literature…” I’d say it is also fully paralleled in the life story of any good man. You don’t become a good man without confronting Satan.

p. 35-36, Harpur translates the Egyptian term “Amduat” as “The Book of What Is in the Duat” and claims it describes the incarnation of God as a man. Now, when he translates the rest of the title, why does he not translate the word “Duat”? Because it means “Afterlife.” And this makes his interpretation impossible.

p. 37: “The heretics were simply the losing side” (in the development of Christian doctrine.) (See also p. 172). Harpur fails to consider the most common reason why one side loses an argument: because its reasoning is shown to be wrong, or the evidence to be against it. Omit this possibility, and you are left with large-scale conspiracy theories. Kind of like saying the flat-earthers or the heliocentrists were simply “the losing side” in a scientific argument. Can’t you see how they’ve been suppressed?

p. 46: Harpur laments that “the centrality of the crucifix…had unconsciously fostered a belief that ‘suffering is good for you.’” Hardly unconsciously. This is very consciously the reason that the Trullian Council urged its use. The idea of redemptive suffering is at the very heart of Christianity: “Take up your cross and follow me.” Does Harpur think that, by stripping suffering of any meaning, he will reduce suffering?


P. 52: "One fifth-century pope even exulted. 'What profit hath not this fable brought us." Odd that a Fifth-century pope is quoted in Elizabethan English. Apparently there is a reason for this. Tektonics has tracked this one down; I can't bear not to mention it. It was said by a character in a 16th Century English anti-Catholic play.

P. 55: "Gibbon testifies ... to the 'vulgar forgery' of the deliberate insertion of two admittedly spurious passages regarding Jesus Christ into the text of the Jewish historian Josephus." Admittedly spurious? Most modern historians accept the passages as primarily genuine. Gibbon, an extremely anti-Christian writer, tried to clam Christianity was responsible for the decline and fall of the Roman Empire. Not a very plausible thesis, since the Roman Empire existed for only a few years before Christianity appeared, and survived for over a thousand years with Christianity as the official state religion. We should all have such a decline and fall.

P. 59: quoting Higgins: "We know that later in one batch all the Fathers of the Church and all the Gospels were 'corrected,' that is, corrupted by the united exertions of the Roman See, Lanfranc, who became the Archbishop of Canterbury in 1070, and the Benedictine monks of St. Maur." Another conspiracy theory, and an impossible one. We have editions of the Gospels and the Church Fathers from before 1070. And the Pope and the Archbishop of Canterbury would never have been able to corrupt the versions preserved in the Eastern and Coptic Churches, well outside their control.

P. 59: "in the year 506 at Constantinople, by order of the Emperor Anastasius, 'the holy Gospels, being written by illiterate Evangelists, were censured and corrected.'" Harpur fails to mention that this attempt to alter the Gospels failed. The fact that it failed illustrates the virtual impossibility of pulling such a thing off.

Harpur quotes, without further comment, Kuhn’s lament, “Priceless in value would be that same Gospel of the Egyptians if Christian fury had not destroyed it.” (p. 60) Good news. We have the Gospel of the Egyptians in our possession, and it can be read in English translation online. It was found at Nag Hammadi way back in 1945. Preserved there by Christian monks. Christian fury or not.

This shows how weak Harpur's research is, and how obsolete Harpur’s sources are.


p. 63: "Apparently, you can be a good theologian while acting out the worst kind of violence." You can also be a good man. Harpur is expressing the contemporary superstition against "violence." Also responsible for "the worst kind of violence": Churchill, Lincoln, Washington, and Joan of Arc.

P. 64: "The Church's initial attempts to blame obvious similarities between Christian doctrines and the Pagan originals on the work of the devil struck me at first as too outlandish to be believed." Leaving aside whether the Church ever did this, or whether there are such similarities, Harpur reveals here that he does not believe in the devil, a priori, as an article of faith--it is "too outlandish to be believed." Yet the existence of the devil is a part of Christian dogma, and is clearly the teaching of the Gospels.

p. 92: Harpur sees significance in the ox and the ass both being at Jesus’s birth, because “both these animals are in a way asexual, or crossovers, which suggests that ultimately the Christ in us is a melding of the male and female principles.” Irrelevant for two reasons. First, the Bible says nothing about an ox and an ass being present at Bethlehem. Second, while an ox is a castrated bull, there is nothing asexual about an ass. Instead, the ass was proverbial in the ancient world for sexual randiness. Perhaps Harpur is thinking of a mule.

p. 107: Harpur speaks of his symbolic interpretation as “in stark contrast to millions of ultra-conservative Christians, who seem so often to view reason as ‘a tool of the devil’ and pride themselves on acting on ‘faith alone.’” This is a straw man, in that the great majority of Christians do not believe this. One gets pretty sick of seeing it used, erroneously, as a criticism of Christianity. Whether fair or not, this is a criticism of Martin Luther, not Christianity. Here is the Catechism of the Catholic Church: “human reason is, strictly speaking, truly capable by its own natural power and light of attaining to a true and certain knowledge of the one personal God” (para 37).

Tissot, The Magnificat.

p. 125: Harpur argues that Mary could not possibly have composed the Magnificat, as the Bible claims she did, because she was an “untutored girl.” Anyone familiar with the Arab tradition of extemporaneous poetry might doubt that, but why does Harpur assume Mary was “untutored”? There is nothing in the Bible to say so. Perhaps he is confusing her with Shakespeare?

p. 131 – Harpur argues that the gospels contradict one another, because some say the Sanhedrin turned against Jesus because he cleared the Temple, while John says they turned against Jesus because he raised Lazarus from the dead.

By this argument, the Second World War did not really happen. Because some histories say Hitler invaded Poland because he wanted land, while others say he invaded Poland because he wanted slave labour.

Either case, reading minds is an iffy business.

The raising of Lazarus. Greek.

p. 132: Harpur argues that the story of Lazarus cannot be true because it is mentioned in only one Gospel. How, he argues, could anything so “spectacular” be “thoroughly overlooked” by the other three evangelists? Yet the other gospels also attest to Jesus raising people from the dead; the Book of Acts attests to Peter doing the same. Harpur’s only point seems to be that they do not refer to Lazarus specifically. John says Jesus performed so many miracles it is impossible to list them all.

p. 132: Harpur argues that the events claimed in the Gospels to have taken place on the night Jesus died cannot have been historical, because they were spectacular, yet are not reported by other ancient chroniclers. “The graves were opened; and many bodies of the saints which slept arose, and came out of the graves after his resurrection, and went into the holy city and appeared to many.” He makes the same point on page 149.

But then, how many is “many”? What number would be necessary to force a mention in all ancient chroniclers?

Consider, for comparison, these two much more recent tidbits of news.

Did you know that at least 30,000 people witnessed the sun dancing in the sky, changing colours, and moving in zigzags in Fatima, Portugal, in 1917? You’d think 30,000 witnessing a miracle would be “many,” wouldn’t you? That’s probably more than even lived in Jerusalem in the First Century AD. Yet is it in the history books you read at school? Check out the Wikipedia entry here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miracle_of_the_Sun.

Onlookers watching the sun dance at Fatima.

How about the image of a radiant woman on top of a church, seen by an estimated 250,000 people in Zeitoun Egypt over a period of years, in the 60's? You’d think 250,000 witnesses was “many,” wouldn’t you? Probably more than the population of all Palestine in the First Century AD. But I bet you never heard about it, did you? Check out the Wikipedia entry here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Our_Lady_of_Zeitoun

Photograph of Zeitoun apparition.

People tend to overlook and screen out experiences and reports that do not conform to their expectations or to the narrative of the world they are used to. To cite an obvious example of the same effect, we tend to screen out and dismiss our dreams, so that we soon forget all about them. They do not fit in our waking experiences, our waking narrative.

P. 159: Harpur cites such other “world saviours” as “Yehoshua ben Pandera.” Which is, in fact, another name for Jesus. Can he not be aware of this? But he tops this with his citation of “Beddru of Japan,” a name unpronounceable in Japanese, and “Deva Tat of Thailand,” actually a local name for the Buddha. So much for scholarship.

p. 178: Harpur laments “The Church’s deplorable record of persecutions, wars, and other atrocities,” which, he says on p. 186, “culminated in the Holocaust.” This is darkly ironic, since the real culprit was his own preferred faith, the Darwinian Theory of Evolution. Hitler was a Social Darwinist, and killed the Jews for this reason. On the very same page, Harpur offers the section header “Our Responsibility for our Own Evolution.” Indeed. This, precisely, was Hitler’s agenda in Mein Kampf.

Peter walks on water, following Jesus.

p. 182: Harpur singles out Jesus’s feat of walking on water as impossible to read literally because it is “wholly beyond our emulation.” This too is ironic, since Peter immediately emulates it in the Gospel account.

See http://www.tektonics.org/harpur01.html for much more. I think it is fair to say that Harpur is wrong in almost every detail of his claims.

Harpur's The Pagan Christ: If Christianity is True, All Other Religions Must be False

Moses and the Ten Commandments - Rembrandt

Harpur begins his third chapter with a quotation from St. Augustine that, he claims, “utterly refutes the traditional view that Christianity … virtually fell from the skies as a radically new, unique, all-surpassing religion.” (p. 28)

Whose traditional view is this? It is not the Christian teaching. Has Harpur never heard of the Old Testament? In the words of the Catechism of the Catholic Church, "At all times and in every race, anyone who fears God and does what is right has been acceptable to him" (CCC, para. 781).

Christianity has never taught that the teachings of Christianity are essentially new or unique. They are all supposed to already be in the Old Testament. And the Old Testament, in turn, says that the full truth was already in the religion of Melchizedek, before Abraham, father of both the Jews and the Muslims. Adam, the first man, already knew the truth. It must be so, as Truth does not change.

What is unique and new in Christianity is the historical appearance of the person of the Christ, his death and resurrection.

Egyptian souls being judged

Harpur writes “The Ten Commandments … are all anticipated in the teachings from the Hall of Judgement” (an Egyptian text) – p.24. (You can see the actual text in translation online here.)

Exactly. Morality is binding on all. Christians point out that “The Golden Rule” is found in all religions. Good and evil are absolute quantities, not something up for grabs. Accordingly, there cannot have been anything new about the substance of the Ten Commandments. There was not a time before Moses when murdering others, stealing, and lying, were okay.



Harpur cites such figures as Eusebius, Justin Martyr, and Origen “conceding” that Christianity was essentially the same as paganism. P. 29: “Celsus, a famous pagan philosopher with whom Origen waged a well-known debate, said ‘The Christian religion contains nothing …new.’ For this, Origen had no rebuttal.”

He misrepresents this debate utterly. In fact, overall, Celsus was arguing that Christianity was different from Greek traditions, while Origen was arguing they were in conformity—the opposite of Harpur’s claim.

In general, the pagan Romans objected to Christianity as an innovation. Rightly, they held that there could be nothing new in religion: Truth does not change. The job of the early Church, therefore, was not to show that Christianity was different from Paganism; this would have implied that it was false. Their job was to show that there was nothing in Christianity that was not clearly prefigured in the Old Testament and/or the pagan religion of Greece.

No surprise, then, to find them “conceding,” indeed eagerly pointing out, similarities. As Origen himself puts it, in the passage Harpur refers to, “It is not … matter of surprise that the same God should have sown in the hearts of all men those truths which He taught by the prophets and the Saviour, in order that at the divine judgment every man may be without excuse, having the requirements of the law written upon his heart…"

Cortez

This is the obvious reason why Harpur almost never cites his sources. When you go to them, they usually say the opposite of what he claims.


On p. 29-30, Harpur writes of Cortez “complaining” that the Aztec religion was too similar to Christianity, and of Abbe Huc being “filled with consternation” at the similarities between Turkmen religion and Catholicism. As other sites have pointed out, there seems to be no source in Cortez’s known writings for the Cortez quote, while the similarities between Tatar and Catholic traditions could easily be explained by earlier Christian missionary activity. But let’s allow all this. For now, what I want to point out is that Harpur’s claim that such similarities would upset the Westerners is absurd. One is not upset, in a foreign land, by memories of home. And would Christians complain about others being too Christian?

They would of course be delighted. Christian missionaries have always sought out such parallels, and used them as an opening to introduce more Christian ideas, right from St. Paul referring to the Tomb of the Unknown God on the Areopagus, and identifying it with the god of whom he was about to speak. (Acts 17: 22-31). The initial tendency in the development of the discipline of Comparative Religion, developing as it did among Christian missionaries, has always been to seek out, and indeed to exaggerate, any similarities with Christianity.

P. 28: “Even the second-century theologian and historian Justin Martyr conceded as much when he wrote that whatever things were rightly said among the ancients ‘are now the property of Christians!” There is no concession here. This word “conceded” and the ending exclamation mark are ridiculous. If Christianity is true, it follows that anything else that is true is compatible with Christianity, and that Christianity is compatible with anything else that is true.

Harpur's Gnosticism

Funny, you don't look Egyptian...

More notes on Tom Harpur's book The Pagan Christ:

Harpur quotes Kuhn approvingly, on p. 52, explaining the truth behind the Christ myth in these terms: “by the time the descent of the Monad … from the Logos of divine intellection into the water of the human body had been ‘clarified’ and ‘simplified’ to poor mental capacity as the baptism of a man in the Jordan River, it was a delusion and a snare to uncritical thought…” This is a precise statement of Gnostic theology, using Gnostic terminology.

Harpur talks of myths as a means to prevent “gnosis” (knowledge) from “falling into unworthy hands,” and says “The principal determinant of those admitted to the meaning of the myths … was genuine zeal for the divine.” Elsewhere he quotes Higgins saying that the true Gnostic Christ “could be shared only with initiates and ‘genuinely tested and accredited competents.’” (p. 53) This idea of a secret society of Illuminati is a fundamental part of Gnosticism.

What’s wrong with it?

First, it is a conspiracy theory, and, like all large or elaborate conspiracy theories, is intrinsically improbable. Occam’s razor. How likely would it be that any given organized group of self-appointed “knowers” who say that their true teachings are secret are in possession of real superior wisdom or knowledge? Without evidence, anyone can make that claim. So long as the teachings are secret, it is without evidence.

This has been a profitable con throughout the ages. The con artist claims to be in possession of secret spiritual knowledge that he will not divulge to just anyone. Anyone who denies his claims is simply said to be out of the know. Great source of power, prestige, possibly wealth.

This is why any claim of secret knowledge is anathema.

Second: if salvation comes through “gnosis,” through special knowledge of some hidden truth, there is an obvious cosmic injustice to those who happen through no fault of their own not to have been told the truth, or indeed who may not be able intellectually to understand it. Note that Harpur, in our opening quotation, speaks of people of “poor mental capacity” being unable to grasp the spiritual truth even if it is simplified for them. He speaks of the divine as “intellection” and of the dangers of “uncritical thought.”

So what happens to the stupid, in this theology? Simple: they have no hope of salvation.

A just God would not disseminate Truth in such a way.

Ergo, “gnosis” cannot be the key to salvation.

Third, this idea of secret societies and conspiracies intrinsically violates Jesus’s second commandment, to love your neighbor. This is the same commandment violated by Cain in the Old Testament. It separates humanity into us and them, the in group and the other, based on this secret membership and this supposed secret knowledge which one is not supposed to share. That means others are damned, and you are actively helping to damn them. This is only morally justifiable if you assume those “others” who do not possess the secret key to the Truth are less than human. If, then, they are less than human, you are also free to abuse them at will in other ways as well. This gets ugly.

You actually hear some of this tone, I fear, in Harpur. “Vulgar fables for the illiterate mob” and so forth (p. 52). “People who were ‘children in intellect;’ took the grand parables and allegories of the esoteric wisdom and ‘fed them to infantile minds” (p. 150). Belief in the resurrection is “unlearned foolishness.” (p 150).  “The Logos was declared to have come as the man Jesus walking the lanes … like any peasant” (p. 150). Sounds like contempt for the unlearned, contempt for the poor, contempt for the working class. God forbid that God might come as a “peasant.”

But the idea that the ordinary people and the poor are morally superior to the educated classes (i.e., the scribes and Pharisees) is in fact part of the literal message of Jesus in the Gospel. Nobody who thinks as Harpur and the Gnostics do has accepted the Gospel teachings, even apart from the matter of the incarnation.

Fourth, the way of thinking characteristic of Gnosis has dangerous effects on one’s mental equilibrium. Once you start down the path of vast conspiracies and secret knowledge, there is no longer any way to be sure the CIA is NOT controlling your brain, or the world is not being run by lizard-like aliens who can change their shape. Nothing can be certain any longer; anything could be true. Hence Occam’s Razor. But then, the existence of a good and all-powerful God is our guarantee that this cannot be so. He would ensure that every soul had a lifeline in plain sight; he would ensure that no vast conspiracies could arise to lead anyone of good will astray. Accordingly, the existence of God, once accepted, prohibits Gnosticism from being true.

Harpur claims that the true path for knowers is “realizing their own Christ-power within.” (p. 20). Later, he describes the essence of the true Christ myth as “To release the potential power of the Christos within.” (p. 25). He says that the goal of religion is “ultimately to deify humankind” (p. 22). Indeed, in his opening quotation, God himself, the “Monad,” is nothing more than the sum of all human souls.

This is Gnostic talk, not Christian talk.

What’s this about “power”? Is life really about gaining “power”?

Harpur’s promise here, and that of Gnosticism, is essentially the same one the serpent made to Eve in the Garden of Eden: “eat this fruit of knowledge, and you will become like gods, knowing good and evil.” Knowledge, power, self, divinity. Whether or not you accept that this is the original sin, as Christianity, Judaism, and Islam say it is, there is no way Harpur can honestly claim this is the “true” reading of the Bible. The Bible rejects it in its first story, its first myth. From the beginning.

To Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, indeed to any theist, this is a fifth, and vital, objection to Gnosticism: that it is fundamentally immoral. It is the primrose path to hellfire. It violates the first commandment.

One more element of Gnosticism that Harpur endorses: p. 21, “man is himself, in his real being, a spark of divine fire … buried in the flesh of the body.” “Buried,” he says, as if dead; elsewhere, he speaks of the spirit being “entombed” in the body. On page 45, he writes, “To be in the body was to be put—even impaled or crucified—on this cross of fleshly existence.” “The Greeks said that the body is the tomb of the soul.”

Problem number six: if the material word is a tomb for the spirit, a bad thing, a place in which the spirit is trapped, how did it come about? How could it have been created by a good and all-powerful God? Ergo, if you accept the fundamental principle of God’s existence, you cannot accept this view of the material world. The material world must be of value in itself, and it must also be redeemed. Otherwise you have an immoral God, or an impotent God, both of which Gnosticism commonly asserts. Goodbye monotheism.

This is in turn why it is necessary to assume that the Messiah really did come, or at least will come, in physical form, in history. The material world must be important, or God would not have created it. God must manifest himself there as well. It is not a question of whether God ever came in the flesh. It is a question of when he came: which report of him coming seems most probable.

Speaking of the temptations of Jesus in the desert, Harpur writes (p. 96) “Once understood in its symbolic sense, it speaks at a much deeper, cosmic level of the yin and yang of existence, the struggle to balance the polarities of life—light and dark, up and down, centrifugal and centripedal forces, hot and cold—and so on.”

This is pure Gnostic dualism. And watch out: notice that Harpur is talking, specifically, of good and evil here. As did many Gnostics, he is clearly implying that they need to be kept in balance. In other words, you should not be too moral, too good. Gnostic dualism can be used in this way to justify all kinds of moral depravity.

It is also a false justification, if you look carefully. There is no ultimate value in "balance." Even his specific examples are wrong. Scientifically speaking, there is no "balance" between and light: darkness does not exist as a real entity. It is simply a relative absence of light. It is the same with hot and cold: cold is nothing but the absence of heat. There are not two quantities here, but only one. There is no necessary balance between existence and non-existence. And there is no necessary balance between good and bad.



Harpur concludes by saying his new theology will lead to world peace and to healing the environment. It would be more likely to do the opposite. His claim that wars are usually based on religion, to begin with, is the opposite of the truth. Religion is probably the single most important way to prevent war; besides preaching against war, they offer ultimate principles to which both sides in a disagreement can appeal. Wars over religion are the exception, not the rule. Obviously, you cannot change a person’s mind by shooting at him, so wars over religion make no sense.

But to the extent that wars are based at times on religious differences, his theology opens a far greater gap between Christianity and the two other monotheistic religions, Islam and Judaism. His theology abandons monotheism for Gnostic dualism. If Jews and Muslims object to three persons in God, and to one man being divine, they are certainly going to object to several billion persons in God, and to everyone being divine.

As to the environment, it is Christianity that, among the world’s religions, takes the physical world most seriously, and we have the incarnation to thank for that. Remove it, and the physical world becomes, as Harpur calls it, a “tomb.” Not something to be tended and perfected, certainly; something to be gotten rid of.