Zeitgeist
Addendum
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Zeitgeist: Addendum - Part Four - Page 2
This is the 2 page of part four in my series of articles on Zeitgeist: Addendum. Please refer to the introduction if you were lead to this page.
Yet, religion has succeeded in shutting down the awareness of this emergence by instilling the psychological distortion of faith upon its followers, where logic and new information is rejected, in favor of traditionalized, outdated beliefs.
Blame religion, very original. Like I said in Part III, if you blame religion and cast out religious people, you're essentially doomed as a movement, especially here in the US. Maybe people are ready to move beyond money, but most aren't going to give up their beliefs about god, the afterlife, and so forth.
[Jacque Fresco]
The concept of god is really a method of accounting for the nature of things. In the early days people didn't know enough about how things
formed, how nature worked, so they invented their own little stories, and they made god in their own
image: a guy that gets angry; when people don't behave right, he creates floods and
earthquakes and they say it is an act of god.
Again, hindsight is 20/20, and it's difficult (at least for myself) to imagine a time when people believed even rashes were caused by a god, spirit, witch, demon, etc.
[Narrator]
A cursory glance at the suppressed history of religion reveals that even the foundational myths themselves are emergent culminations, developed through influence, over time.
For example, a cardinal doctrine of the Christian faith is the death and resurrection of Christ. This notion is so important, that the Bible itself states, "And if Christ be not risen, then is our preaching vain, and your faith is also vain"(1 Cor 15:14).
Yet, it is very difficult to take this account literally for, not only is there no primary source denoting this supernatural event in secular history, awareness of the enormous number of pre-Christian saviors who also died and were resurrected, immediately puts the story in mythological territory by association.
Early Church figures, such as Tertullian, went to great lengths to break these associations, even claiming that the devil caused the similarities to occur, stating in 2nd century, "The devil, whose business is to pervert the truth, mimics the exact circumstance of the Divine Sacraments. He baptizes his believers and promises forgiveness of sins...he celebrates the oblation of bread, and brings in the symbol of the resurrection. Let us therefore acknowledge the craftiness of the devil, who copied certain things of those that be Divine." Tertullian, (155 - 222 AD , CHAP. XL.- THE PRESCRIPTION AGAINST HERETICS. )
Jesus in Islam did not follow with the Easter tradition, and of course Judaism simply doesn't have Jesus.
What is truly sad however, is that when we cease the idea that the stories from Christianity, Judaism, Islam, and all the others, are literal history, and accept them for what they really are, which are purely allegorical expressions, derived from many faiths, we see that all religions share a common thread, and it is this unifying imperative that needs to be recognized and appreciated.
As far as I've seen, at least with Christians and Jews, most don't believe the Bible to be literal, though millions of people do believe that, but the average person on the street who celebrates Christmas doesn't really care.
Religious belief has caused more fragmentation and conflict than any other ideology. Christianity alone has 34,000 different subgroups.
Christianity does have a lot of fragmentation, but it seems as though the film is counting every church in the United States as a fragment, but that's simply not the case. While each church can of course interpretations the canon in their own way, there are four primary denominations of Christianity: Catholic, Protestant, Eastern, and Nontrinitarian. Protestations have the most fragmentation without 20-30 subgroups, but the others have around 4; interestingly much of the protestants have nearly no difference between them.
[Jacque Fresco]
The bible is subject to interpretation. When you read it you say, "I think Jesus meant
this, I think Job meant that, oh no, he meant this..." So you have the Lutheran the Seventh-Day-Adventist, the
Catholic. And a church divided, is no church at all.
Of course not, that's why there's no longer a single Christian church.
[Narrator]
And this point on division, which is a trademark of all theistic religions, brings us to our second failure of awareness. The false assumption of separation, through the rejection of the symbiotic relationship of life.
Apart from the understanding that all natural systems are emergent, where all notions of reality will be constantly developed, altered and even eradicated, we must also understand that all systems are, in fact, invented fragments, merely for the sake of conversation, for there is no such thing as independence in nature. The whole of nature is a unified system of interdependent variables, each a cause and a reaction, existing only as concentrated whole.
Try telling the average person they're a animal and they'll think you're nuts because we view ourselves as separate from nature in pretty much every facet of life.