Scratching your back with an assault rifle

Turning to the Christian bible for comfort is like scratching your back with an assault rifle. If you hold it just right you might be able to reach your itch but that's not what it was designed for. It remains a weapon of war.

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If a person requires regular or frequent consultation with their pastor they should find another one. Jesus got his point across to uneducated people in minutes without a handbook to refer to. If your pastor can't do that they obviously don't have a clue as to what Jesus was on about.

Anyone who points a person to Paul or John, the self-proclaimed apostle and the self-proclaimed prophet in the New Testament, for insight into anything other than Paul's or John's own imagination and character is misdirecting them, whether knowingly so or not.

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Paul, who wrote most of the New Testament, and the later John, the writer of Revelation, were self-aggrandising 1st century fantasists who sought elevated status for themselves within a cult of worship and who made careers out of dispensing false wisdom, in each case off the back of claiming a "vision" of a dead man in order to hijack his reputation and spuriously claim divine authority. Neither Paul nor John ever met, saw or heard the human Jesus.

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Unless a person were predisposed to believe it, nothing in Paul's or John's output would be taken seriously. Imagine if today a bloke walked into a pub and said he had had a "vision" of a dead guy so now everyone should brown-nose the government and suffer in silence for the rest of their lives so everything would be great when they die.

Imagine if someone else came in another night claiming to have had a more recent vision of the same dead bloke and started raving about beasts and afterlives and torment and the world coming to an end when the dead bloke came back.

It is no great surprise that church-based Christianity only really took off when the emperor Constantine enforced his own militarily backed version of it.

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According to the gospels, not long before Jesus died he gathered his chums and told them he knew his number was going to be up soon. He reassured them he had said everything there was to say, that his message really was that simple, and he warned them that after he had died there would inevitably be the odd person appearing out of the woodwork and trying to complicate things in his name but no one should be fooled.

Understandably, perhaps, for such superstitious times, Jesus' pals needed further convincing that he would be gone for good so he comes up with the surest and most reliable thing he can think of and tells them that if the sun still comes up, if the world is still turning, anyone claiming to have seen him or claiming he said anything but that which they themselves had already heard him say would be lying. End of.

In a masterpiece of self-serving spin, John the prophet reimagined this insistence by Jesus that he would be just as dead as anyone else and would never ever be back into a "second coming" for everyone to wait for, one that would bring about the end of the world. It was obviously a lot easier to make stuff like that up while no one had the gospels to hand in which they could read the reports of what Jesus had actually said.

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At this point you can either believe Jesus or you can believe Paul and John. You can't believe both. Of course, if you don't believe Jesus then you can't really believe Paul and John either, because if Jesus was telling fibs at any time he can't possibly be the supernaturally perfect being Paul and John insist he was to justify anyone taking any notice whatsoever of what they say.

Thus it is that both logic and biology have it that the chap who said he would be staying dead after his execution was telling the truth and the two chaps who said he had appeared to them after he had died were fibbing for their own purposes.

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If you read the New Testament as you would a regular book, by the time you have read the four gospels one after the other you know that all the books that follow can be dismissed. Not only will you have just read four accounts of Jesus having told his disciples he hadn't forgotten to mention anything, you will also have identified the character of Jesus the person, will have seen through the fantasy elements and will probably have recognised what it was the Romans' started their official church to hide.

The Roman Christianity rolled out by Constantine was designed specifically to prevent people noticing that the "God" of which Jesus spoke, the Jewish one who had inspired all the key biblical characters from Abraham to Jesus to defy the status quo, the God that had given them the courage to do whatever it is they are remembered for was their conscience.

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The key to understanding the Old Testament and the gospels, the Jewish story, is to look not at whatever standout action it was the biblical heroes took but instead to notice that immediately beforehand they each went off alone into the wilderness, up mountains or for a stroll in the garden, anywhere they were free from human distraction. There they stayed for as long as it took them to be certain that they knew in their own heart that they should do whatever it was they were considering, regardless of what anyone else on earth might think, say or do.

So, unlike regular pastors, I always and only advise a person to do the same thing, to find as natural a spot as is convenient for some uninfluenced private thought and to look to their own conscience for "God's" guidance. You won't find it anywhere else.

To make it easier for folk to know what to feel for I use the secular analogy of us each having our own bear inside us. It can't tell us what to do but it can growl if we are going wrong. If your bear is chilled just get on and enjoy being yourself. If your bear is growling work out what you personally are doing or not doing that is making it growl and change your ways.

Any advisor who directs a person seeking personal guidance to focus their thoughts upon the detail of what anyone else was inspired by their God / conscience to do in their own particular circumstance, especially if it happened in a distant land somewhen in the blur of ancient history, is simply distracting from their own ignorance to pretend a superior wisdom.

In combination with using selective quotation from a collection of wildly different and frequently conflicting books conveniently bound together as if they are one contiguous work to confuse a person, to feed their self-doubt and so foster a perpetual reliance upon their advisor, I think the modern word for the practice is gaslighting.

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The word "faith" is an interesting one. Faith on its own doesn't really exist. You need to "have faith in" something.

It is hypocritical to say you have faith in God if you go to any third party (person / book / etc.) for God's advice. Whether you call it God, your conscience, a bear or anything else, you already have a 24/7 direct line to your internal counsel. Trust it. You will find that if you just avoid lying, cheating, stealing or doing harm your conscience will be clear / your God will be happy and you can stop worrying what other people think or thought and can get on with being your peaceful happy self.

No one has ever been you before.

There is no book of instructions. [Po]

We are all of us enlightened

Anyone who has discovered or re-interpreted something in such a way that it is their genuine belief that it is of unselfish benefit to humankind will have a link direct to the text of it from their FB page (if they have one) and not to a site charging upfront for downloadable copies of it.

A person who says they will make you feel better about yourself but who implies your guilt for the deeds of others or uses unpleasant or upsetting imagery as a tool in any part of their process is a manipulative git, not a guru.

And, of course, no sage worth their salt goes around quoting other people.

So, please, do not go looking for spiritual advice from anyone who either derives or intends to derive income [or elevated status] from giving it. 

The longer they can keep you from discovering that you already have what you seek, and that it is only the looking for it that is preventing you from finding it, the more they earn.

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We are all of us enlightened

Unless we let some body

Convince us otherwise.

(© John Barrow (Po))

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You have not been charged for reading this message

(I'm thinking not to write) Three Films. [2012]

The first is a fiction set in a Market Town at a remote intersection of trading routes across a wild 7th Century Wiltshire landscape, a town where merchants grow rich and pay their taxes to The Club, which in return keeps order, suppressing revolt among the underclass using collective threats so fantastic no one person dares test them for emptiness.

Officers of The Club make a point of demonstrating their violent capability on any member of the underclass who fails to achieve a safe distance as they pass. Random brutality, just common enough that everybody knows someone who has been a victim of it, is considered key to keeping the underclass afraid and obedient.

Most of the first reel is taken up by showing everyday life in the town, highlighting the relationships between the merchants, the underclass and The Club. Only at the beginning of the second reel do we meet the principal character, Steve, young and unmarried, a member of the majority underclass, who devises a plan to overthrow The Club.

Carefully and as quietly as possible, Steve begins recruiting members to his Rival Club. His manifesto promises an end to random brutality and a start to the sharing of the town's wealth more equally between its citizens such that all could be proud that no one in their town need starve or want for shelter. To the underclass this would be undreamed of luxury.

By the end of the second reel, though there are still only a handful of actual members of Rival Club, there is an uncustomary excitement among the underclass as word spreads of the hope being offered them for a brighter future.

The third reel is faster paced as news of Rival Club's existence and rapidly increasing popularity reaches The Club and its officers immediately carry out a spectacularly violent and unusually brutal, even by their own standards, demonstration of their continuing authority within the town, randomly selecting men to kill and women to rape as they set fire to houses in which children still hide.

The few who joined Rival Club stand, fight and are promptly despatched by officers of The Club. Hundreds of others are killed, too, many of them while helping their families to escape the town, leaping for their lives from its walls. Steve is nowhere to be seen.

Gradually those who have escaped gather together, just out of range of the arrows that every now and then still overfly the town walls. The camera pans across a dark sea of empty eyes and blank expressions, not one person yet able to comprehend what they have all witnessed, their fleeting dream having so suddenly become a reality more terrifying than their worst nightmare.

Orphaned infants wail, the luckiest in the arms of older siblings. The newly widowed hold tight to their children or grieve their loss alone. Few men have survived to follow their loved ones to freedom. Steve stands anonymously at the edge of the crowd, unharmed.

With the sky over the poorest quarter of the town glowing red with flame and with the air still filled with the screams of those unable to escape, one young mother recognises Steve near her. Her eyes lock to his and she asks him coldly, "Now what?" Steve says nothing, turns from the small crowd and walks slowly into the darkness of the Wiltshire night.

The survivors cannot return to the town. The wild landscape is vast and as poor townspeople who have never travelled they know nothing of its geography. As their adrenaline levels begin to fall they feel cold and resign themselves to having little choice but to all walk off into the darkness together, following the footsteps Steve left in the soft ground. Roll Credits.
______

The second fiction starts on the morning after the massacre, the sun rising slowly on a dishevelled band of cold, tired and hungry people, huddled together against the wind in silence. All are traumatised by what they have seen. None are yet able to speak of it.

The story is played out like a lightly comic road movie. Steve, no fleeter of foot than average, is patently unable to shake off his univited followers so he decides to organise them into a functional, self sufficient unit, making up rules for them as problems arise, often having to revise them later on when circumstance has changed.

It isn’t long before followers begin to realise Steve is just leading them round in circles and start openly questioning his wisdom. Each time a challenge to his authority arises, the camera follows Steve as he disappears off for a think before returning with a masterful piece of spin to keep his followers on side regardless of what has happened. As the challenges become greater, so Steve’s spin becomes more fantastic to counter them.

Steve’s masterplan is to grow his band of followers into an army with which to exact revenge upon The Club. Looking at those he has with him, it may take a while before they are ready.

Decades are skipped through with only significant events being shown. Battles are won and battles are lost. Many followers die in a single battle and Steve’s spin convinces only the few who remember the massacre in Market Town to remain loyal to him. For if they stop believing in his wisdom now they must accept they need not have believed it then and their loved ones need not have died.

Too few in number now to wage war on his behalf, Steve leads his handful of followers to the village of Other Market, only a few days travel from Market Town, hoping to settle into quiet obscurity.
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The third and final fiction in the series begins in Other Market, where the quiet obscurity Steve by now craves is impossible to achieve. Other Market is a small village where no one goes unnoticed and through which many travellers pass en route to Market Town and Steve is soon identified and hauled before a public inquisition on the village green, the arrival of his reputation having preceded that of his physical being by a good many years.

In the eyes of the villagers, Steve’s attempt to settle anonymously in their midst is proof enough of his personal ambition alone being responsible for the massacre at the end of the first film and for all the deaths and woundings in battle his followers have suffered since.

Facing a lynching and already in the hands of the mob, Steve spins a speech to save his life and by the end of it has vowed his intent remains as ever it was and that he has not come to their village to hide but instead to raise and inspire a new army with which to drive The Club from Market Town.

After a few unsuccessful battles and some very creative spin to keep the momentum of his campaign up after each expensive loss, Steve does eventually raise an army of sufficient size and skill to carry out his original Rival Club manifesto promises, to liberate the underclass of Market Town and improve their lot.

While grateful at being liberated, there were many in Market Town who still carried scars from the last time they had placed their trust in Steve and they demanded an explanation as to why, if he believed in the infallibility of his mission as much as he had convinced everybody else to, he had run away at the first sign of trouble, as he had been witnessed by a number of survivors to have done. Steve has a very long think before spinning another speech to save his life again before a very uncertain crowd.

To those who don’t remember the massacre, Steve is their liberator, their rescuing hero. To those who do, rich or poor, Steve is a cowardly liar. Demographics have it that Steve becomes Mayor of Market Town and he immediately makes challenging his authority an offence punishable by death and demonstrates its enforceability.

Steve’s regime is no less brutal than that in any other town in England at the time but the brutality is less random in its delivery to members of the underclass than it was The Club. Now a law has to be broken and there is a punishment to fit each crime.

Steve’s laws are strict, and public punishment is always painful, often permanently damaging and sometimes fatal. When Steve is discovered to have failed to follow his own law he spins yet another speech to save his life, inventing new detail in the law as he goes to permit his own transgression to go unpunished and to enable any such future trangressions to go undiscovered. No one challenges his authority so to do.

It isn’t long before the law has been detailed as much as it needs to be for Steve and those close to him to enjoy freedoms denied to others under the same law and the practice of re-detailing law all but dies out.

The office of Mayor of Market Town and the associated absolute authority within the town walls is passed down through generations of Steve’s family until a period of unrest in the wider county brings the peaceful stability of Market Town under threat again from the latest incarnation of The Club.

On learning of the threat, the incumbent Mayor takes the town's cash and flees to the hills, promising to return with a mercenary army as soon as he can and leaving the town gates open so The Club won't need to break them down to get in.

Roll credits over images of decades passing with no sign of the promised rescue as poverty and oppression under The Club re-establish themselves with a vengeance in Market Town. Cut in shots of the missing Mayor growing old and dying in a comfortable, distant palace.
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But I just know that many years from now, when my trilogy has all but faded from memory, when everybody knows the names of my films and considers them classics but everybody who ever saw them has died, someone will revive Steve’s legend, selectively amending it to suit their time and intent.

By gifting Steve with as many superpowers as the person revising my script considers their audience will have to swallow to cover the gaps created in its sense by their heavy handed approach to abbreviation, a new story will emerge, quite different from mine.

Of course, once SuperSteve has been given magic powers it will be implied that his descendents would naturally be similarly blessed and that it would therefore be perfectly possible that the missing Mayor, the cowardly liar who died behind the credits of my original film, could yet come back with his promised army of liberation.

Then the Market Town PR machine will kick into high gear and the gullible poor will give their hard earned money back to the rich for the privelege of waiting, exactly as instructed to in SuperSteve’s rewritten dialogue, for the missing Mayor to return to free them from poverty and oppression rather than challenge whichever Mayor it is who is keeping them poor and oppressed at the time.

For safety reasons, I remind you that my trilogy of fictions is set in a wild 7th Century Wiltshire landscape and that my principal character is called "Steve".

Hundreds of years will pass before the fourth film is made and the trouble really starts.

© 2012 John Barrow (Po)

Amongst other more profound one-line advices ...

Amongst other more profound one-line advices that had made me famous
When people passed them on in inns and hostelries across the land,
If I had suggested, a thousand years ago, that everyone should

Travel by the swiftest available means of transport
Rather than waste their lives on the journey

It is likely those who took my advice
Would travel on horseback,
As, indeed, would I.

And as would be noticed,
By a hang-around scribe.
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After my death,
To make a few quid
The hang-around scribe
Expands the few snippets
Of common sense I had used
To draw attention to flaws in the
System in to a first-hand biography.

His version of me picked up a good following
So others, too, wrote their expansions of my story.

But common sense is unexciting and soon assimilates into
Everyday life and the relevance of whence it came diminishes.
______

Turn the clock forward to just a hundred and fifty years ago. I am history.
______

Scribes are ten-a-penny now and one decides to make his own fortune by rewriting
The long forgotten story of me, updating it to make it relevant for a modern readership.
______
______

If I had suggested a hundred and fifty years ago that everyone should

Travel by the swiftest available means of transport
Rather than waste their lives on the journey

It is likely those who took my advice
Would travel by steam train
As, indeed, would I,
_____

The Victorian usurper of my reputation, however,
Wrote that everyone should travel only by
Steam train on the routes he was the
Owner of and made his fortune.

He died a very rich man,
As did his inheriting sons
Until
The age of steam died, too.
_____

It is century 21 now, according to local convention,
And my advice would be the same as it always has been,
That everyone should

Travel by the swiftest available means of transport
Rather than waste their lives on the journey.

It is likely those who took my advice today
Would ride bicycles and motorcycles,
Drive cars and lorries and ride
In buses and on trains
Of any kind, on
Aeroplanes,
In boats

As, indeed, would I

According to the
Journey I
Took.
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So why would anyone now

Be limited to travel only by horse
Because it is what a scribe wrote
I had done a thousand years ago?

And why would anyone now

Be wrestling with their inner conscience
As to whether to only travel by train
To only travel by steam train
Or not to travel at all
Because the old
Routes have
Closed
Or,
Worse,
Moved into
Public ownership
For the benefit of all?

And why would anyone now

Be killing anyone in my name
Over a mode of transport
Or route they choose
To achieve their
Destination?
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Where on earth
Would be the
Sense in that?

© Po 2014