religious dogma
(sometimes referred to as religious doctrine)
"People often take the truths of a tradition on faith accepting
the testimony of others but find that the inner kernel of the religion,
its luminous essence, remains elusive." - Karen Armstrong
"The most effective way to close down the human mind and to manipulate its sense of self is to program into it some form of dogma. A dogma will always vehemently defend itself from other information and repel any alternative opinion which contradicts its narrow, solidified view. Dogmas become a person's sense of security and means of retaining power, and humanity tends to cling to both until its knuckles turn white. Dogmas take endless forms, and when you can persuade different people to hold opposing dogmas, the manipulation of conflict and control through "divide and rule" becomes easy." - David Icke
Throughout history unscrupulous men have corrupted sacred writings.
Sacred texts have been corrupted by individuals believing they were clarifying conceptual understanding while in fact such editing, correcting, redacting, combining, re-editing and re-correcting corrupted the sacred text even further - moving the sacred text farther and father away from the original and real conceptual understanding of the original authors.
Many times, even when the sacred text itself has not been overtly corrupted, conceptual corruption occurs when a ‘sacred text interpreter' changes the conceptual structure of the sacred text - perhaps from that of a metaphorical allegory to that of a literal interpretation.
Mankind's storehouse of knowledge has been looted repeatedly over time.
In China when a dynasty fell newly empowered officials went back and rewrote the history of the past hundred or more years to shine a more favorable light on those currently in power.
The libraries of the Egyptians, the Greeks, the Romans, the Venetians, as well as countless others have been destroyed by religious zealots adhering to the conquering invader's or to the usurper's religious or poltical doctrine when such writings were at odds with accepted religious or poltical dogma of the invaders or the religious or poltical dogma of the usurper's supporters as was the case in the Roman Empire of 400 AD.
"From the totalitarian point of view history is something to be created rather than learned. A totalitarian state is in effect a theocracy, and its ruling caste, in order to keep its position, has to be thought of as infallible. But since, in practice, no one is infallible, it is frequently necessary to rearrange past events in order to show that this or that mistake was not made, or that this or that imaginary triumph actually happened." - George Orwell
In the past politics and religion was not neatly partioned into
two distinct compartments or catagories but were one and the same.
Both deal with the structure of human cultural social systems.
The culture of a fellowship of men, a social unit, will continually change over time regardless of
attempts to the contrary and even without an intent to change there is still corruption of original conceptualizations.
Christian, Jewish and Islamic faiths all orginally believed in a single entity named God. They also believe that those that adhere to the popular and commonly held ideology of their particular brand of religion are the 'chosen ones' and that individuals, through their ‘leap of faith' and adherance to the popular and commonly held ideology or dogma of their cult, will attain an afterlife.
Conceptual thinking of afterlife defers from cult to cult. One expectation never differs and that is the idea that one must make a "leap of faith" or in other words, abandon all reason, to be brought into the 'chosen ones' fellowship or 'circle'.
All religious dogma requires believers to suspend belief in their senses,
their experience and their understanding of natural reality.
This is required because no person in a natural state of mind can accept the myths of the religious fellowship as ‘fitting' with their own understanding of natural reality which excludes miraculous supernatural events.
The myths of the religious fellowship seem to point to existence of miraculous supernatural experiences - in Christianity labeled an outpouring of the Holy Spirit.
People expect natural reality to conform to their current understanding of natural reality. Yet people must constantly reevaluate their understanding of natural reality as experience and knowledge are gained, both consciously and subconsciously.
literalist zealots
Zealots of literalist religious thought believe the words of sacred text are a literal, accurate translation - an undisputably accurate copy of actual events.
To be a literalist you must reject reason and believe these sacred texts are written
and copied by men who will not change the facts, the nuance or the reality as presented by the original author.
In other words you must deny the reality of CORRUPTION.
"I have a question for literalists: If the Bible is the revealed Word of God, and God is all knowing, why did God only reveal "facts" that a primitive people 3,000 years ago thought were the truths about the universe?
God certainly knew of the existence of North America, the structure of the solar system, the laws of physics and other currently well known facts. Why didn't he reveal Bernoulli's Principle so the ancients could fly?
The reason that the only things "revealed" in the Bible were ancient myths is because the Bible was written by men, not God. The fact that the Bible is a series of mythical stories does not diminish in any way the teachings that are in it. We can still learn a lot from the Bible on how to live, but let's not get carried away. God had nothing to do with it." - Paul Goldman
