Christianity is plausibly the world’s greatest organized religion, both in reach and in power. The West would be a very different place without the Church’s curate’s-egg influence down the long centuries since the reported birth of its founder, the shadowy Jesus Christ.

It differs from other faiths beyond the three related “Book” religions (Judaism, Christianity and Islam), by tone, by magnificence, and regrettably, by its bloody history of domination.

As a writer on Christianity, and religion generally, I dislike the political aspects now indispensable from its dispensation. It is an old saw that power corrupts. This Easter especially we are all too aware of the weaknesses of clergy on an almost industrial scale. Even the Pope is mired in sleaze after a blizzard of accusations centred on child abuse.

This gathering ecclesiastical storm easily outruns our own Parliament’s expenses scandal which seems trivial in comparison with the lost lives of thousands of preyed-upon children. If only they had been prayed upon instead.

Into this incendiary mix come two seemingly unhelpful interventions. Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury, chooses this moment of maximum weakness to counterattack the Pope’s landgrab of Anglican members who dislike the “liberal” cast of current personnel, including the Archbishop himself. If this is a deliberate distancing exercise, it is very welcome at long last. Ecumenicism, like European Union, has only one boss: Rome — as the EU has Brussels. This is all about power, not spirituality.

Second, Philip Pullman, of His Dark Materials fame, has a new novel out questioning the authenticity of the character and existence of Jesus. The book, The Good Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ, supposes that Mary had twins called, oddly enough, Jesus and Christ.

Jesus is the good guy, strong and truthful. “Christ” is small and weak — the real Satan — which sounds very much like Paul. While Jesus preaches the optimistic message that comes down to us today, the jealous Christ tempts his brother in the wilderness, and even manufactures his divinity.

I haven’t yet read the book, so can’t comment too keenly. However, it seems to ignore the awkward fact that “Christ” derives from the Greek, Khristos meaning, annointed and thus in Hebrew, Messiah. Had Jesus been born around 7 BC as is supposed, he would certainly not have been called Christ, nor would a twin brother. The term Christ was possibly applied to him by the Greek-speaking Paul, who is said to have cooked up a lot of what we think we know of Christianity.

The problem remains that half the texts attributed to Paul in the New Testament are forgeries. What is left show that Paul was a Gnostic, a mystic who believed in a direct relationship with the source of all things, and no founder of churches or funder of bishops.

Hardly any of the much-redacted “Christian” texts can be taken at face value, except perhaps the very early books of sayings (“Q”) from which the synoptic Gospels were clearly developed, adding in the narrative history of an apparently real person. The Gnostic Gospel of Thomas is the closest we have to the Gospel of Q. It is a purely mystical text that resonates with Buddhists, Hindus, Taoists, and other Idealist (consciousness-based) religions of knowledge.

To make any definitive historical statement about these later documents is, frankly, assumption piled upon assumption, not good scholarship. At least John’s Gospel is unashamedly mystical in nature and clearly allegorical in intent. It possibly derives from a Jewish version of the Mystery School texts then dominant among the inducted educated classes around the Mediterranean, from Greece to Egypt and beyond.

The essence of moral Christianity can be traced back to the Axial Age some 500 years before Jesus. The dying and resurrected Godman* aspect, together with the virgin birth, were echoes of tales told in most Middle-Eastern countries from the Axial Age onwards. Far from being original to Christianity, they would have been instantly familiar to intelligent citizens of many of the surrounding lands. You don’t have to rummage very far through the history of the times to find this myth embedded in dozens of traditions.

Even Easter is a Celtic, or Druidic, festival (Eastre) centred around the rebirth of nature in the Northern spring.

All is not lost though. The central story of Christianity is of immortality, not of one man, but of everyone. The import of the Jesus story is correct in its depiction of life itself, as I point out in my book, The Eternal Quest for Immortality: Is it staring you in the face?

My wish this Easter is that the Church of England would mature away from these simplistic stories that hardly anyone takes literally now — with the exception of a few American cults — and pronounce the real message behind the allegory.

Oddly enough, Rowan Williams might be very good at that. He has scholarship enough, and is acutely aware of the mysticism at the heart of the Church, having written books on Teresa of Avila and Dostoevsky.

In doing so, he would save his Church (our Church) and release it from the tainted hand of Rome which has built another empire on a feast of lies and confusions.

This Eastertide, truth and a State of Grace is not a lot to ask, surely?

* See the works of Freke and Gandy.

John Evans

Recent Related Commentary
Saturday Ramble: Big Bangs are not what they used to be
Saturday Ramble: What if Labour were to win?
Saturday Ramble: Is David Cameron making the most of his abilities?
Saturday Ramble: Politics and the land of Cockaigne
Saturday Ramble: Bubbles — how they destroy us and how we can fight back
Saturday Ramble: Gordon Brown’s Invictus rictus

From the heights of our self-imposed ordinance of “No politics”, you might be led to believe that there’s very little else to write about.

I’ll admit the air is very thin up here on the moral high ground, but there really is something to get worked up about apart from the dismal state of the nation. What, you may ask?

Why, the Archbishop of Canterbury, of course.

I’ve written a few pieces recently on the state of the Church and of Christianity (see the footer of this article), suggesting that the Gospels are allegories of a process used by early mystics with a universal truth for us in our scientific age.

The texts suffered the indignity of being converted into quasi-historical documents for the political purposes of the Roman Empire.

Rowan Williams, the current incumbent at Lambeth Palace, often gives the impression of being a thoroughly wet liberal who takes the soft option on every issue of our age. His undoubted intellect is seen as a barrier to both truth and communication — Gordon Brown in a cassock.

But wait, who is this speaking from the pages of Friday’s Daily Telegraph?

Addressing the Hay Festival of Literature on author Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy, the Archbishop says, “First of all he takes the Christian myth, or a version of it, seriously enough to want to disagree passionately about it.”

Leaving aside the impression of clutching at straws, look at the words: Christian myth. Slip of the tongue, perhaps? Or the realization that a modern audience simply won’t take the infantilized story presented to us as fact any more?

I believe many theologians in the Church, whether of England or Rome, know this to be true. One historical Cardinal is said to have remarked, “The Jesus myth has served us well down the years”. Is Rowan Williams echoing that sentiment, but in a less cynical way?

Williams continues, “It’s not just dull or remote, it’s dangerous. You’ve got to tussle with it. It’s still alive.” The words of a mystic indeed.

But he’s not a pushover. He disagrees with Pullman’s atheism, but likes his “search for some way of talking about human value, human depth and three-dimensionality, that doesn’t depend on God.” By this he means Blake’s and Michaelangelo’s depiction of the Creator as an old bearded man looking down on us from a very great height. Inner resources can carry us much farther than a rigid anthropomorphism.

Then, something very intriguing: religious authorities shouldn’t “silence the demons” that people carry with them, the essential internal conversation between good and evil. C.G. Jung could not have put it better.

“The threat in Pullman’s novels,” he goes on, “is the Authority — people like me in his imagination — which wants to divide the human spirit and cut off and silence that demonic voice, that voice of the imagination.” Or even that voice of experience, he might have said.

I think this is a very significant moment for the old Church of England. Coming close to pantheism, or at least panentheism — where everything is God, even our enemies — the Archbishop speaks with the real voice of mysticism.

In these dark times, the inalienable lightness of darkness does need to be explained. Rowan Williams may well be its establishment prophet.

Who would have thought it?

John Evans

Recent Related Stories
Saturday Ramble: What is Christianity?
Saturday Ramble: Easter Comment

Belief seems to be essential to all peoples, even if it comes in the form of unbelief. Modern religions, like secularism and scientism, are belief-systems too because their supporters believe in their own views, contrary to other people’s experience.

The problem we have in our scientific age is that our brains have become so big we mistake them for our minds.

The brain is a fantastic tool, like a hammer, a wheel or a knife. Since the European Enlightenment, we’ve been taught to identify with it completely. The result is that most developed humans are trapped in their own heads. Their worldview is limited by what the brain can do and what it perceives.

Thus everything perceptible beyond the brainview is dismissed as “myth”, fantasy and primitive. Richard Dawkins, riding on a reluctant Darwin, is the high priest of this message.

The alternative biologist Rupert Sheldrake, writes about “extended mind”, showing us the obvious fact that our minds extend well beyond our heads. It doesn’t take much introspection to arrive at that result.

We call explorers of our extended mind “mystics” — folk with their heads in the clouds. It’s a term of abuse to scientists. Yet mystics are scientists too, working in areas designated untouchable by the materialists.

Religion is man’s response to the mystical message — that which lies beyond the cage of our brainview. Religion, like philosophy, has followed science slavishly down its tubular path. It has become an artificial construct, dependent on a narrow slice of experience and much wishful thinking. A dramatist’s creation, not a God’s.

The mystic knows “God” as the sea of awareness that lies at the heart of everybody’s consciousness. We all rise and fall within it, and share its characteristics — even its immortality.

We can be made to believe anything, but only through direct experience can we “know” the truth.

Organized religions have caused more violence than almost any other aspect of human life. They are the economic and political exploitation of who we really are.

True mystics are always peaceable, because they “know”, not just “believe”.

Easter symbolizes the rebirth of life in the northern hemisphere. It’s not a subject to squabble over, but to “know”.

John Evans

The most incomprehensible thing about the world is that it is comprehensible.
Albert Einstein

Recent Related Stories
What is Christianity?

On this morning’s Today Programme there was a good-natured discussion about Confucius. The Master would have been pleased.

It seems the old Sage is enjoying a comeback in his native China, where the Communist ruling elite is considering changing its name to the Confucian Party. Have they actually read his words, I’m tempted to ask?

Here’s a little flavour in the form of a quiz:

1. Which British Prime Minister does this saying suggest?

The Master said, “It is rare, indeed, for a man with cunning words and an ingratiating face to be benevolent.”

Clue: Initials, TB.

2. To which British Prime Minister could this saying be directed?

The Master said, “In guiding a State of a thousand chariots, … be trustworthy in what you say; avoid excesses in expenditure and love your fellow men; employ the labour of the common people only in the right seasons.”

Clue: Initials, GB.

And a lesson for the Labour party when in office:

The Master said, “If you insist on guiding them by edicts, keeping them in line with punishments, the common people will stay out of trouble but will have no sense of shame. On the other hand, if you guide them by virtue, keeping them in line with long-held conventions, they will, besides having a sense of shame, reform themselves.”

Now that’s a good principle for a new Conservative Government — remember the Common Law?

Finally, another ancient Chinese saying that Brussels would be wise to heed:

Create ten thousand regulations and you lose all respect for the law.

Where is the modern Confucius? We could do with him now.

John Evans

Recent Related Stories
What is Christianity?
The world needs Up-To-A-Pointism

Gordon Brown’s new back-to-the-future idea is to introduce “old fashioned banking” again to the High Street. After all, banks lend out other people’s money, so should be careful where they put it.

He will “ban” 100 percent mortgages, make borrowers save up their deposits, and force them to meet “old fashioned” bank managers, who will get to know them like GPs did in the days of Doctor Finlay’s Casebook. Ahh, the past is so reassuring, isn’t it?

But Chancellors of the Exchequer also spend and allocate other people’s money. Shouldn’t they be tightening up their rules of tax and spend in the vast public sector? And shouldn’t State benefits be handed out sparingly to those who truly need them? Isn’t it also imperative that no-one should be given a public job unless they are urgently needed on the front line and well qualified for the task?

Brown didn’t begin to address that problem. Bankers will be sent for re-education by Captain Mainwaring characters, but the good old “public realm” will just carry on as before, squandering other people’s money.

Isn’t this just another sneaky way of blaming the banks rather than himself?

Labour MP, Chris Mullin, in a new book* writes: “The trail leads back to Gordon — but if it all goes wrong he’ll be nowhere to be seen.”

* A View From The Foothills

Do you ever have “There is a God!” moments? I had one last week.

I was walking down a narrow pavement alongside a completely empty road, when the tinkling of a bicycle bell assailed my ears from behind. One of those aggressive two-wheel types was attempting to force me to stand aside on a pedestrian walkway.

I won’t go into how irritating these people are, fury is not a pleasant subject to write about. However, whatever allows these oiks to ride along pavements should be repealed by the next Conservative Government.

Naturally, I ignored him — it’s always a he. He rang the bell again. I sauntered on. Again he tried, before snorting and turning onto the road. As he passed he gave me a backward glance of total exasperation.

My returned stare must have unsettled him. He wobbled, desperately corrected his trajectory, hit the curb, and fell off.

I walked past with a beatific smile of satisfaction.

There is a God!

Like everyone else I’ve been trying to make sense of the causes of this world depression. I’ve pieced together bits that have appeared here over the past few months in the hope they make a coherent and plausible case for what went wrong.

In the beginning
1. In 1977, President Carter pushed through an Act forcing banks to give mortgages to sub-prime borrowers.
2. In 1999, President Clinton signed off the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act, which separated commercial banks from investment banking.
3. Clinton also encouraged the securitization of morgage debts into Collateralized Debt Obligations by Bears Stearns. Astonishingly, they were given Triple A investment status by the involvement of government-backed Freddie Mac. Thus, potentially toxic assets were bundled up and sold off to the world’s banking system.

Note: these are both Presidents of the left.

Reinforcing causes
Fed Chairman, Alan Greenspan kept interest rates too low for too long because he believed “downturns will happen and can be cleaned up afterwards”. Meanwhile, just enjoy the white-knuckle ride.

In the benign conditions created by Greenspan and his student Gordon “No more boom and bust” Brown, high leverage (debt) was seen as a one-way bet for financiers and private-equity outfits, some of dubious provenance.

A system of shadow banking was set up outside the regulatory framework which passed debt around between different institutions, hedge funds and capital markets, creating more money than the original debt. The normal effect of a burgeoning money supply is inflation, which eventually squeezes out any asset bubbles that form along the way.

However China simultaneously introduced a massive deflationary element into the mix. Trillions of dollars of very cheap goods poured out of the country to soak up the growing money mountains of the developed world.

The deflationary effect masked the inflation embedded in the Western economic boom, allowing it to last much longer than normal and storing up more problems as time passed.

On the ground, it seemed as if the good times would go on forever. A classic psychological contagion set in among politicians, financial markets and the ordinary public. No-one could lose was the signal, everyone was a winner, even the poorest with no income, no job and no assets.

The Endgame
When sub-prime borrowers in America started defaulting on their loans, as they were bound to at some point, bankers found it impossible to trace the indebtedness through the system because of the sliced and diced nature of the securities that now concealed them.

These assets were effectively worthless as they could not be valued. The whole planet was suddenly stripped of value. There were no hooks left to store capital and savings, except gold and flighty commodity markets. Meltdown time had arrived.

The growing realization that banks all over the world held these poisonous assets, effectively closed down the inter-bank lending markets. Banks no longer trusted any other not to fail and default on their loans. The Credit Crunch was born.

The rule of Up-To-A-Pointism suggests: “If something works, it only works up to a point. Thereafter it yields diminishing returns, followed by negative consequences. Government intervention is like that, as are free markets. Both have a limited bandwidth within which they operate well.”

Let us hope that the new financial system that emerges takes note of this simple rule.

Prediction
The world will now skate helter-skelter in the opposite direction. The pendulum of opinion will overshoot the mark and overregulate financial markets, thus breaching the Up-To-A-Pointism rule.

Something akin to a 1970s situation will be created as legislators try to close off all exits. The result will be a stifling, sealed commercial environment with few incentives for innovation and hard work.

It will take another “liberalization” package of measures a few decades down the line to set off another period of prosperity, leading to another bust.

Plus ca change …

I’ve just watched the seventh of eight episodes of Channel 4′s patchy series, Christianity. It was presented by Professor Colin Blakemore of Oxford University, a colleague of Richard Dawkins — author of The God Delusion — and a fellow believer in the new religion of Scientism.

So far, only three of the programmes have stood out: Howard Jacobson’s, Michael Portillo’s, and Rageh Omaar’s thoughtfully fair view of the relationship between the West’s religion and Islam.

As an Idealist in philosophical terms, I’ve not got a lot in common with Blakemore’s viewpoint, however, he put his case engagingly and intelligently.

One highlight for me was the comparison of a cathedral with the Large Hadron Collider at CERN on the Swiss/French border. This chilling aggregation of metal, electric wiring and brutalist architecture seemed straight out of the Nazi manual of “How To Subdue Human Values By Gigantism and Intimidation”.

Next up: Cherie Blair. What are we to make of that?

Quote of the Week

This is rather a good description of New Labour philosophy:

“The idiot who praises, with enthusiastic tone,
All centuries but this, and every country but his own.
W. S. Gilbert, The Mikado

John Evans

Recent Related Stories
DIARY: Tax evasion, Derivatives, Oborne, Randall, Great Depression 2.0, Political awards, O’Rourke
DIARY: Darwin, Hitchens, Obama, polls, Steyn
DIARY: Today, 24-hour news, 10 rascals, depression, swans
DIARY: Shadow banks, BlackBerries, Flanders, Jackson, liberal fascism
DIARY: Darling, Obama, Parris, Portillo, Devon
DIARY: Kaletsky, Klaus, greens, hedge funds, Sunday papers