A Heathen And The Misinterpretation
When some of us who are bent on questioning issues around us talk or write that the early messengers of what is regarded today as the Good News committed a lot of blunders against many nature-given purposes that were working for peoples to institutionalise this News, some folks who are abandoned to swallow everything as they relate to this belief line hook and sinker see us as chauvinists and haters of their religion.
No. There is evidence too lengthy of many misinterpretations to certain issues and words in this world of which one is Heathen.
Let's not be blindfolded with unnecessary fear. I have observed that even among the many so-called schooled persons, conversation stops when it comes to the discourse of their religion. This is common among those who have to read certain books before they invoke their God, because they see everything in their religion, as a must be considered as literal truth. This is our vulnerability.
Many people are sure of some things, but ignorantly. This is how they erroneously see Heathen as an Idol worshiper. Propaganda. They will be quick at telling you that a Heathen is a person who does not acknowledge the God of Christianity, Judaism, or Islam. Are you hearing that? We shall understand the true meaning of 'God' as we go on.
The word 'Good News' is an orchestrated brand to sell the religion. The same way a beautiful lady is used for razor blade advert and you wonder what a lady who is not bearded is doing with razor blade. Just glint, glamour and glitz.
Anyway, there is nothing like 'Idol Worshiper'. It is the art in religious politics of those who wanted to sell their religion for lucre and usurpation of the beliefs of others.
Remember what a John Henrik Clarke once loudly said: They laughed at your clothes, and made you change your clothes; they laughed at your names, and made you change your names; but most importantly, they laughed at your God, and made you change your God.
Because some of the people were instilled with fear in not to question the Good News, it's hard to such persons to go beyond the box to find out things themselves and set many incorrect stories correct.
How many of us know that the Papacy struggled with the German Emperors to maintain world supremacy during the Middle Ages? This was in a bid to conquer the philosophies of peoples of other world and institute their 'supremacy' which Christianity is one of the (supreme) tools used to achieve this feat. (Henry Binkley Stein; Thirty Thousand Gods Before Jehovah). 1. The Germans complained of the Ultramontainism, the money that passed beyond the Alps to build the cathedrals of Rome and never to return.
The Papacy inherited supremacy from the time of Constantine, but it was a known fact that the supremacy was of the Amphictyonic League of Greece. 2. Down memory lane, we know that what is known as the The League of Amphictyon goes back to the time of Troy. And that before the time of Troy the Pelasgi of Greece were settled by the Priests of Ammon. Priests directed more than in the time of Marquette and La Salle.
I see it as crassness, although propaganda is a tool of those who do not want the philosophies of other worlds to be known, when I hear people say or write that Heathens do not know their Creators. But the same people would not tell us that Osiris appeared as a local god in the city of Ded in the Nile Delta, 3. and Isis was sometimes called the goddess of the west. Electra was a Greek Goddess. And the 'Ark of the Covenant' was absolutely a product of Egypt and the god Horus.
As history changes, people forget the foundation of what is regarded today as norms. But they can purge themselves of believing some things, unless they disabuse their minds to seek for the truth, than accepting what people before ages, gave them as the truth.
There is also evidence too lengthy to quote in detail that the gods of the Jehovah strain proclaimed an equity in the Israelites that required the gods of Egypt to acquiesce to a removal. 4. And thus only certain lands were offered, and the Israelites passed over some lands almost as trespassers.
The 'Thirty Thousand Gods Before Jehovah reveals' that: All the Devils of Milton's story [Paradise Lost] were the local gods mentioned elsewhere in this book. Existing side by side they sometimes maintained control by coalition, even as the wet and dry politicians of today sometimes swing their forces together. 5.
Exposure was impossible for they all were practicing the same methods, and for one god to expose the methods of the oracles of the opposing god would be suicide for himself. 6. Thus the Jews consulted the oracle of Beelzebub against the direction of Jehovah, yet Jehovah would not expose the methods of Beelzebub, lest Beelzebub expose Jehovah.
It goes further to explicit that ...circumstances indicate that Julius Caesar's main business in Egypt was to secure the consent of the Priests of Ammon to his world rulership. Caesar himself was a high priest according to Josephus. When the weakness of the organization became apparent Caesar's ambition mounted, ambition not to be king, but to be god. 7.
Indeed in the time of Augustus Caesar daily sacrifices were made by the masses to Octavius as a god. Unlike Alexander, Julius Caesar preempted the powers of Egypt and was directly assassinated as a result of a whispering campaign of the priesthood. 8. Egypt and Rome warred under Antony and Octavius and Rome won, but three hundred years later Constantine was won over to the other side. Such fluctuations of power had happened often. The seclusion of the Popes at Avignon is another example. The struggle between the priests of Typhon and those of Osiris is a third. Milton has dramatized this sublimated story in his Paradise Lost. Satan was the symbolized form for the Priests of Sat in the temple of Sat in Egypt under Typhon.
It is very shameful when Christian dogmatists see people of different beliefs as the ones who are 'condemned'. But they forgot that what they regard as Heathenism and Paganism prepared the ground for Christianity. However, it did not just happen. Heathenism and Paganism were ploughed under by those who saw Christianity as a tool to perfect their supremacy of the world.
In 'The Axe Was God', Henry Binkley Stein exhumes how Heathen which originally means farmer or a person from the heath, was tagged with disparaging significance. He writes that this came about when Christianity made its advent into Northern Europe.
'Coming into the large cities first, then in the smaller, it received its support from the fountain-head in Rome and Constantinople. The last to become Christians were the farmers who were reluctant to forsake their ancient rites. There is even today a vestige of this accursed method of disparaging the farmer. He is looked down upon by the city dweller, not knowing that the start of the downward push was given by Christianity in placing a disgrace upon the Heathen. So much pressure was made, it is a matter of record that in early Paris the Heathen or Farmer was boycotted and failed to sell his produce unless he became a Christian and was baptized.' (Henry Binkley Stein; The Axe Was God).
As I know, propaganda is a dangerous tool. For example, again, to downsize somebody today in the Islamized and Christianized Nigeria, when it comes to religion, is by painting a non-adherent of the two Constitution-recognised religions, as a person who does not know his or her Creator.
But if we must accept that there is a Creator, we must also accept that the Creator is neither a member of any of these worldly sects that parade themselves as being supreme to the other and with dangerous mindsets to outsmart opposing views. 'Good News', indeed.
While many feel that we cannot be better persons except we embrace some religious books, they have not come to realise that our Igbo forebears saw Morality as a handiness and a training that must pass from one generation to another, and is not a somewhat holy writ adaptation. So, the aboriginal Igbo belief is neither Heathenism nor Paganism, using the nascent definition of the words. Odi n'ala Ndigbo is symbolic in their ways of life, and not a cosmetic game of fighting for supremacy and inventing some Gods and want to sell the Gods to your neigbour. No. Ndigbo venerate their ancestors as an act of showing love, and not the misleading story that we worship the dead. Just propaganda, everywhere.
To understand this better, Henry Binkley Stein tells us consequently: Beyond the history of Masonry there is unwritten evidence that the lodge is the product of the religion of Bell or Baal. Scotland, England, Ireland show evidences of the religion of Bell. Christianity and Masonry join up in agreement on antediluvian mythology, yet Masonry differs from Christianity in doing no proselytizing, in doing no healing, in avoiding many emotional disturbances common to Christianity.
Before Emperor Constantine was converted to Catholicism (around 350 AD), it is on record that theocracy went underground during the Roman ascendancy and churches were held in secrecy for about three hundred years. Constantine came 'back' with a force and by fire, and the Church came out of hiding and took open secular control in Rome. (Thirty Thousand Gods Before Jehovah). All the Oracles simultaneously ceased to speak... Power had shifted to the control of the Emperor. The Pope took to himself the prerogative of crowning kings. At this point Christian Scientists claim that the power of healing was lost to the Christians. As worldly power was gained, spiritual power was lost.
Christianity has never allowed peoples to exercise their rights to freedom of religion, if we must use the word religion. (Thirty Thousand Gods Before Jehovah). For example, Christianity pushed the religion of the Asen gods [Els] to Norway and Sweden. From there was the Christian religion moved in, a band of settlers moved to Iceland to have their freedom of worship unhampered by the religion of Rome. It was here that the Eddas were collected together and written down.
Hence Henry Binkley Stein delivers: They were already old at this time. These Saga or Sayings combined with the oral myth of the northern Europe are the source of the information relative to the prehistoric gods. It is scanty indeed. The Greek and Roman material is one hundred times so plentiful. Enough exists however to show that the Nordic Gods were the same as the gods of the Levant. The Gardens, Halls, warfare, altars, sacrifices, marriage and family life, were the same. Most of the stories are primitive exaggeration, yet the raw material could not have originated sui generis. The savages of the north could not have invented the civilization of the halls and gardens of their own accord. The gods were agricultural pioneers seeking a foothold on the continent. There was a partial failure.
Naiwu Osahon, the erudite writer/poet investigated what the world today refers to as the 'Most High God' and found it was the Canaanite God 'El'. He said: 'The Canaanites deity was El (or El Elyon), whose subordinates or sons were spelt with small letters as in: el, eloah and elohiym. None of these deities, not even El, was considered the Supreme or Universal Being. They were all deities with El as their superior of Father or the only God that could be spelt with the capital letter 'G'. These deities were actually super human beings who had at one time or the other lived on earth and are now ancestors who took charge of several individual nations. El Elyon (Black, Father or God of all gods), allocated the nations of the world to the deities'.
Henry Binkley Stein orates that the ingredients of Christianity were already prepared by the secret mysteries of the Illi gods, though they contended among themselves very often. Such similarities and many others are mentioned in such researches as The Golden Bough.
They bring one to the brink of wondering if, after all, the crucifixion of Jesus Christ were not a "super colossal" miracle play, based on such secret rites as were given at Eleusis and Samothrace, played on a grand and real scale in a large city for the benefit of the secular public--or as Diodorus said, "What was done in secret, later was done openly." If so, for this drama Christ was prepared and schooled from infancy. Stein cries.
It is, therefore, ruthless and dim-wittedness for any person to say that he or she lives for Jehovah, to teach the Heathen the way to eternity. I see certain use of language or comments among peoples as 'mantra'. They use anyhow comments anyhow, because somebody handed them the comments, without them making any attempt to find out if such is reasonably.
If we must accept Heathen in the misinterpreted definition given to it, I stand bold to say that Heathen morality is far better than the hypocritically sermons of majority of the clerics in the church today. And a spiritual and moralistic Heathen is one hundred better and appreciable to me than one million or billion hoodwinking pastors unwisely christened Men of God.