Religious-irreligious brainstorming

Dear diary,

If there’s no Christian God who created us, then we’re all alone in the world, and life is meaningless. That’s what I’ve heard people say.

To discover that God is not an external being but an imagination; to learn that the entire history of spirituality—everything from helpful to harmful—was invented by the human mind: I find this uplifting.

When you feel “the force of God,” when you feel “God speaking through you,” when you glow with “the knowledge that God loves you”—all of these phenomena are natural, physical, actual, and they stem from oneself.

I’m thrilled to realize that the “power of God” is available to atheists. We atheists, being bound to no particular belief, can eat from the entire buffet of beliefs with impunity. To accept a particular religion is to chain oneself to a single area of possibility, to exclude oneself artificially and needlessly from vast potentials. But I misunderstand the term atheist: for I think it does not mean “I believe in nothing,” but rather “I make use of any belief that I fancy, and discard it when I’m finished with it—because belief is a tool, not important in itself but good for both creation and destruction.”

God: within or without; bound or bodiless? I used to wear contact lenses that were gas permeable. If God lacks a body, how can he be external—even mist possesses a boundary, albeit fluid, to denote its extent. If God has a body, does that mean God has a heart? What does God’s heart pump—ectoplasm? Please don’t tell me God’s heart pumps human blood: that sounds atheistical. And yet, if God lacks a heart, that’s even scarier (although it explains much).

Or suppose that God is a shape-shifter and a self-contradictor and a trickster, as many believe. The stories that occur near the beginning of the King James Bible seem to present God in this fashion—at least Yahweh God.

That’s another interesting notion: that Yahweh is one among many Gods in the Godhead; or that there is a lone High God, and Yahweh is one of that God’s many underlings: a prince gone bad, kind of like the Christian idea of Satan.

The snake sheds its skin. This is taken as a symbol for immortality: you leave your old body behind and wear a new one, like the snake leaves its old skin behind. So in the early chapter of Genesis, (as I explained back in January) this snake tells the humans that Yahweh God has lied to them about the fruit of the tree of wisdom: it will not kill them; on the contrary, it will make them divine. So the humans partake and become as divine as Yahweh; this of course enrages Yahweh God, so he punishes the humans by barring them from the snake’s tree, the tree of immortality.

A snake wrapped around a tree. A snake wrapped around a staff. Here’s an encyclopedia quote:

In Greek mythology, the Rod of Asclepius is a serpent-entwined pole wielded by the Greek god Asclepius, a deity associated with healing and medicine. The symbol has continued to be used in modern times, where it is associated with medicine and health care…

In the scripture called Numbers (21:9), which is the fourth book of the King James Bible, Moses holds up a brazen snake-on-a-rod, as a savior for his people:

Moses made a serpent of brass, and put it upon a pole, and it came to pass, that if a serpent had bitten any man, when he beheld the serpent of brass, he lived.

And just two verses before the famous “For God so loved the world” quotation in John’s gospel (3:14), the Lord Jesus says:

As Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the Son of man be lifted up: That whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have eternal life.

That’s the serpent from the paradise of Genesis—the snake from the tree of life, and the tree of wisdom—the same serpent who angered Yahweh God by exposing Yahweh’s lie to humankind: Jesus himself is identifying with this snake. And Jesus is said to have been affixed to a cross, like the serpent on the Rod of Asclepius: which healed humankind by overthrowing the evil God Yahweh.

This is also why vampires instinctively recoil from crucifixes. Selah.

Now consider how the following encyclopedia quote seems to have replaced the names Jesus and Jehovah with Asclepius and Zeus:

Asclepius became so proficient as a healer that he sur­passed his father, and was therefore able to evade death and to bring others back to life from the brink of death and beyond. This caused an influx of human beings; thus Zeus resorted to killing him, in order to maintain balance in the numbers of the human population.

Speaking of Jesus being the serpent on the Rod of Asclepius, it’s interesting to note that, according to Plato’s Phaedo, the last words of Socrates are: “Crito, we ought to offer a cock to Asclepius,” which means: “Crito, go pay the doctor, for now I am healed.” The impli­cation is that death cures us of the illness known as life; for death is an entranceway, not an endpoint—it is immortality, the only secret nature cannot keep (see Emily Dickinson’s poem 1748). Therefore even a self-reliant gadfly like Socrates ended up professing faith in Satan the Devil who is that old serpent Jesus the Messiah.

My point is that the story of paradise in the second and third chapter of Genesis is missing a snake. There should be one snake per tree. The tree of life—that is, the tree of immortality—belongs to Hermes, who is the serpent represented in the text. (Note that the Caduceus of Hermes gives us a hint about his missing sibling: for it contains two snakes, as opposed to the single snake on the Rod of Asclepius.) But the tree of the knowledge of good and evil—that is, the tree of wisdom, containing the fruit of enlightenment which makes its eater divine—belongs to Aphrodite: the missing serpent.

Now consider that Hermes plus Aphrodite equals Hermaphrodite. (See my entry called “Scientific Proof that the God of the Bible was Originally an Androgynous Bisexual Epicene.”) What happened is this: Yahweh slew his mother-sister Aphrodite, in order to keep all the divine wisdom to himself (this was the birth of monotheism); but he allowed his father-brother Hermes to maintain his position at the tree of immortality, because Yahweh desired that his slave labor, the first humans Adam and Eve, should remain maintenance-free, so that they might live forever “to dress and to keep the garden of paradise.” (Gen 2:15)

This is why the priests of Christian churches refer to God as male, never as female; and it’s also why Jesus frequently speaks of his “heavenly Father” but never mentions his having a female parent—the poor savior did not know that his heavenly Mother had been assassinated by the Lord Yahweh.

So Hermes is really the grand-father of Jesus; and that explains why we can speak of Jesus as a loving follower of his heavenly Father, while also declaring that the same Jesus destroyed his own Father by ascending the cross.

This blog entry of mine has successfully reconciled the discrepancies between the Caduceus of Hermes, which features two snakes entwined in a battle of love upon a winged scepter, and the Rod of Asclepius, which has just a single snake becoiling a flightless pole: The female element—depicted as the additional serpent and wings on the former pole—is missing from the modern Christian religion, due to the murderous greed of the first monotheistic deity.

To review: Yahweh God killed Aphrodite God, thus causing enmity between himself and Hermes God (alias Jesus or Satan). This had the unforseen repercussion of polarizing the phenomena of wisdom and information—they are henceforward in conflict. Wisdom, being of the intuition, is truly deific; whereas information, stemming from the internet, is merely religious. And all because the Most Divine Hermaphrodite got halved by a sidesplitting laugh at Aristophanes (thus allowing the latter to usurp the High God slot). As it is written in lucky section thirteen of my masterpiece New America:

Gripping the hilt of its divine saber, the androgyne
Hemisphered itself.