The Real Da Vinci Code

Christians have accused Dan Brown of misleading people about Christianity by writing a novel full of inconsistencies and errors. The Da Vinci Code, however, makes no pretence to be other than a novel, and novels are not true. They are stories. The story about a god appearing on earth in the form of a man in the New Testament that Christians call “gospel truth” is also full of errors and inconsistencies, but these, Christians affirm, are true errors and inconsistencies.

No one honest can deny that this story began to be altered and exaggerated from the outset, and had already been deliberately changed by the time the gospels were written down, particularly when organizations were founded—the gentile Churches—to promote it in the world alien to that of the story itself. The supposed authentic testimony about Jesus in the later books of the New Testament too often are at variance with the authentic testimony about him in the earlier books. The Jesus of Mark is more human than the Jesus of Matthew and Luke and utterly different from the Jesus of John who openly identifies himself with God in a megalomanic way.

The earlier Jesus was obviously expecting the end of the world soon, but when it did not happen, the later books had to play his whole emphasis down, and push the end of the world further into the future. Early Christians made Jesus suit their wishes and the interests of the wider world of the Roman empire, a quite different world to Judaea. The man who led an insurrection against the Roman military occupation of Judaea had to be made into a gentle pacifist whom the Romans could love and admire. His revolutionary actions were bowdlerized into miracles to hide their true nature, and his brief conquest of Jerusalem was made into the eccentric act of simply overturning tables in the temple court with a whip made of a few threads. The pious Essenic Jew was turned into an anti-Semitic gentile god, the judge of the world, a faint memory of his own belief that the world was about to be judged—by God Himself.

There cannot be a priest or pastor who does not know the historical evidence paints a picture quite different from the one propagated by the Christian churches. They are taught criticism and archaeology in the seminaries, but refuse to allow their sheep in the congregations to hear the same truths lest their faith be tested. The same extends to the stories of the Old Testament, most of which before king Omri is simply mythical, and myths not evolved as a people evolved but myths in the Leo Straussian sense—myths imposed by rulers, the Persian shahs then the Egyptian Ptolemies, to condition the people to obey.

These pages try to report in a more accessible form than scholarly papers the historical and scientific evidence for a proper historical reading of the biblical myths and how they arose, and also offer criticisms of Christian beliefs. There is not the least reason why the events of the bible, in both testaments, cannot be understood without God wiggling his index finger in human history. Dan Brown is right that a conspiracy has existed since time immemorial to gull and trick simple, uneducated people but his novel is not a serious attempt to address the issues based on the evidence, but a pot boiler to make money. It has done that.

These pages give the unfanticized and unfinancialized evidence. It is no less interesting, and reveals a fraud on the public that extends beyond Jesus into the fifth century BC. It is not a consistent or coherent plot over that whole time but illustrates how religion was a propaganda machine and a force for social engineering, intended essentially to ensure obedience to the rulers, and to raise revenue for them. The beneficiaries were always a class of priests who implemented the plan at first for the Persian shah, and then simply for the individual benefit of the class of rogues who remained when the shahs had been overthrown.

Christians! Consult Bishop Ecclesiasticus!

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AskWhy! Books website on Christian and Jewish origins, history, faults, fallacies, and alternatives.

02/05/2010 08:00 PM

Jonathan Haidt: The Happiness Hypothesis
Where is the political balance? About half way along the left-right scale appear the liberals, the demonic lefties of modern US conventional politics, almost at the center of the whole political space! In Great Britain, political parties are differentiated mainly on the left-right continuum, and little on the authoritarian-libertarian axis.

02/05/2010 08:00 PM

New Atheists and the Misunderstanding of Religion
Emile Durkheim showed that morality is a set of rules to bind people into an effective group. Religiosity is a feature of human life, and evolutionary, developmental, neuropsychological, and anthropological theories must explain human religions. J Haidt thinks the New Atheists do not get it.

01/11/2010 04:00 PM

Secular Christianity, Morals and the Kingdom Vision
Christ's message was a practical ethic for a successful, caring, unoppressive society for everyone. "God is love" is meaningless outside of a social context, and acted upon within society. Those accepting it and acting on it were Christians. They live their lives by the teachings of Christ, whether they believe in God, or Christ himself.

01/02/2010 10:00 PM

Sociality and Common Identity in the Evolution of Religion
Human sensitivity to social reputation is a psychological mechanism, unrelated to religion, that evolved to facilitate reciprocal co-operative bonds in groups. Selfish people could be accused, punished or excluded from the group. Religions help sociality in large groups, but efficient secular social organization, and practical institutions to enforce the law have reduced the need for and conviction behind the upholding of morals by religion.

12/27/2009 06:00 PM

Secular Christianity for Christians and Darwinians
Professor Kitcher of Columbia university classifies Christianity into three main taxa, of which "spiritual" Christianity is the only one suited to the modern world, and seems closely similar to Secular Christianity.

12/23/2009 03:00 PM

Christmas Links
Christmas Feature: Six links to articles at AskWhy! on Christmas, putting the festival into context

12/23/2009 03:00 PM

Pauline and Secular Christianity
Since Paul, Christians have had almost two millennia to justify their revisions of Christ's social teaching. Real Christians get on with being a Christ. Fake Christians boast about their faith. Faith and doing nothing is not an option. Christ told them precisely what they had to do, love one another.

12/20/2009 06:00 PM

Personal God: How Morality, Intentionality and Religion Evolved
People often reason egocentrically about others' beliefs, using their own beliefs as an inductive guide. Correlational, experimental, and neuroimaging evidence suggests that people may be even more egocentric when reasoning about God's beliefs. The God of the believers has just the same opinions as themselves!

12/06/2009 10:00 PM

Evolutionary Morality, Society and the Golden Rule
Moral judgments promoted prosocial behavior, expressed to our ancestors the common judgement of the group of why anyone should act favorably to others in society, even though directly it might be somewhat detrimental to themselves. People had this instinct because those without it had been unable to live in a group. Those with it could, and the group was stronger for it.

11/23/2009 12:00 PM

Daily Lit Crit
Updated: New daily literary criticism for students to get ideas for coursework. Free to use. Public domain.

11/18/2009 06:00 PM

Reciprocity and Selfishness
Cooperation is the cement of society, but people will cooperate only when others cooperate. Selfish people prefer free riding. When free rider unfairness cannot be punished somehow, people stop cooperating. Without social glue, society will come unstuck. Selfishness must be punishable.

11/13/2009 06:00 PM

Divine Command Theory and the Evolution of Morality
Survival of the fittest was misinterpreted for a long time as equalling pure selfishness. It seemed to mean selfish enough to make sure you reproduced even if it meant your rival did not. Pure selfishness seems to exclude any type of altruism, but reciprocal assistance within a group might make all of the members of it better able to reproduce than their purely selfish solitary rivals.

11/06/2009 04:00 PM

Christ as Social Bandit
Even peasants who normally accept a degree of exploitation and subjection, dream of equality, brotherhood and freedom, an apocalyptic renewal--the messiah will come, king Arthur will return, or Barbarossa, or Charlemagne, or the Queen of the South, or Zoroaster, or Christ--the sign being the collapse of social order making the apocalypse seem imminent.

10/29/2009 10:00 PM

Evolution for Political Conservatives: Larry Arnhart
Sympathy is the basis of morality. In The Descent of Man, Darwin says our morality is rooted in human nature, and modern social scientific research confirms it. Proper conduct is socially approved conduct, conduct that earns us the praise of others when we do it. Proper conduct towards others is morality, and evolution upholds it.

10/21/2009 08:00 PM

Morality and Liberty: J S Mill
People should be allowed to carry their opinions into practice without molestation as long as the cost borne is entirely their own. The condition of freedom of action is like that of freedom of speech: they must not make themselves a nuisance to other people.

10/18/2009 06:00 PM

Does Civilization Speed up Evolution?
Are human beings still evolving? For long it was thought that human evolution had stopped when culture took over from natural selection about 50,000 years ago, in other words when we started to use our brains. But the human races emerged since then. At the "Who Lies Sleeping?" blog.

09/24/2009 10:00 PM

Morality and Moral Natural History
Why is justice the fundamental and essential moral law? It is a vital regulation of social life. Why is murder the greatest crime? It is the gravest social delinquency. In tribal society religion and morals had remained close to each other. Then religion became the interest of the sacerdotal caste of priests

09/21/2009 10:00 PM

Morality and Humanity
Excessive richness shows society is malfunctioning, and wealth must be redistributed to correct it. The Principle of Humanity is to get people out of bad lives, not to put them into them, even the rich. If everyone has a good life, then no one has a bad one. Those who are already well rewarded, like bankers, do not need inflated bonuses as an incentive. It is robbery of the bank's customers and shareholders.

09/10/2009 08:00 PM

Origin of Writing
How writing began in the ANE not for recording speech but for recording items and quantities, ie numbers.

08/23/2009 08:00 PM

John Rawls, a Theory of Justice as Fairness
Justice as fairness permits justice to be indeed fair. It shows why people want a fair and equal spread of rights and duties, and also an equal distribution of benefits, to value a place in society. Any variation in the distribution of benefits will only be acceptable because they are within acceptable limits of tolerance, or because some inequality of distribution benefits everyone.

08/20/2009 08:00 PM

The Sinai Theophany
The people were fearful of the theophany, and asked Moses to mediate with God. Moses entered as Ahuramazda brought down to earth, and Yehouah replaced Ahuramazda. The law had the authority of Ahuramazda, the Persian god, but God had to be Yehouah.

08/09/2009 10:00 PM

The Origins of Religion
The origins of religion. Further update of pages that introduce aspects of religion as a scientific study.

08/03/2009 08:00 PM

Is Jesus' or Jesus's the Possessive Jesus
Biblical scholars have decided that whatever Jesus possesses is written as Jesus', as in Jesus' miracles. Most people would quite naturally say Jesus's miracles

07/18/2009 08:00 PM

Evolution and Animal Morality
Evidence of morality has been observed in animal behaviour studies of great apes, some monkeys, wolves, hyenas, dolphins, whales, elephants, rats and mice. Are animals moral? Well, Yes!

06/22/2009 10:00 PM

When was the Bible Written?
If the bible was written around 700 BC, Jewish historians preceded the first historian, Herodotus by 200 years. It is manifest nonsense. Persian scholars with access to Assyrian records wrote the history to back up the law, Deuteronomy. The message was to obey God whose law it was. It showed God had punished previous generations for apostasy, and would do again, if the people were not righteous, ie obedient to the law. Obedience suits rulers.

06/22/2009 10:00 PM

Did King David ever Live?
Revised: The evidence for king David outside the bible is minute and controversial. No kings of Judah before Hezekiah are attested outside the bible. Judah was created as an Assyrian puppet.

06/22/2009 10:00 PM

Solomon and his Temple
Revised: An empire centred on Jerusalem in the tenth century BC is strongly disputed. There was a tenth century BC, but no emperors called David and Solomon lived in it. Tenth century BC "Solomonic" strata should be dated to the ninth century BC Omride dynasty of the Northern Kingdom. No literary tradition existed in tenth century BC Palestine.

05/17/2009 08:00 PM

The Dinosaur Heritage and the Extinction of Man
They're back! The Anthroposaurs! "Who Lies Sleeping?" is online again from adelphiasophism.com

03/20/2009 08:00 PM

When was Exodus Written?
Updated: Evidence that Exodus is an Hellenistic romance written in Alexandria

12/11/2008 10:00 PM

The Bicameral Mind
The breakdown of the bicameral mind that Jaynes saw in the mid first millennium BC was a bonfire of scribal vanities, writing conventions from the times when only specialized scribes were literate, and all recording was official. The Persian empire torched the conventions of the ANE, and Greeks continued the bonfire after Alexander. But there was a stage when the personality did not count in consciousness.

09/15/2008 10:00 PM

Higher Criticism of Islam
Islam, like Judaism and Christianity, is a sham and honest scholarship on these religions cannot avoid being offensive to believers. Religious belief excludes scholarship, so no believer can decry work critical of belief as not scholarly. Moslems, as usual, will be outraged that their beliefs are subject to the same criticism here as Judaism and Christianity. These religions are false, and any amount of indignation cannot change it.

True Christian History. True Jewish History.

AskWhy! Books explains historical Christianity and Judaism, Christian and Jewish origins, history, faults, fallacies, and alternatives, the truth based, not on wishful thinking—faith!—but on scientific and historical evidence, over 1000 pages of it! Once the clergy might have believed their lies, but now they have no excuse! The real history of these religions is rational, unlike the sacred history. What we need is a manual for personal survival, and for preserving the world. It should serve for reading for pleasure, for devotion, as a source of facts and as a basic text for primary schoolchildren. It would be a primer of philosophy, science and ourselves. We should be able to dip in it anywhere and feel enlightened. It would explain the natural selection of all living things, and give the key facts of living, ranging from our relationship with other creatures, and our place in the Solar System and the Universe, to our duties and responsibilities to each other and to Nature. The guiding stars of naturalism are wisdom and empathy.

Christianity Revealed! —Massive book explaining the historical origins of Christianity in the New Testament free of pious lying. Incorporates much of the Mystery of Barabbas and the Hidden Jesus and more besides. Jesus was an Essene revolutionary who captured Jerusalem 40 years before the Jewish War! | Abstracts

The Truth about the Jewish Scriptures —Full explanation of how the Jewish scriptures, the Christian Old Testament, were founded by the Persian kings in the fifth century as a political weapon of mass control and its subsequent evolution and elaboration under the Greeks and Maccabees. Nothing supernatural here either! | Browse Article Abstracts

God’s Truth or Pious Lies? —Science and Truth or Christianity? Addresses the way that Christians believe lying is acceptable as long as it is to the glory of God and His religion, Christianity. | Browse Article Abstracts

Analogies and Conjectures —Speculation at the fringes of history and science. Is it unlikely but, on the evidence, not impossible? Or quite likely but lacking sound evidence? Or even likely but ignored because of prejudice.

| Browse Article Abstracts

Heresy, Inquisition and Witchcraft —The heyday of Christian love.

| Browse Article Abstracts

Questioning Belief—Questions most Christians never wonder about.

God’s Truth —Answering the evangelist Ernest Phibber.

Discussion and Letters —from Christians, mainly critical.

Goddess Pages —Articles on aspects of the Goddess as Nature personified and the need for matriarchy. | Browse Article Abstracts

War and Propaganda —Comments started on Bush's Iraq War, and widened to the political origins of it, and the use of propaganda in war. | Browse Article Abstracts

Last year in Marienbad —what happened? | Browse Article Abstracts

Epitomes —Epitomes of great works of religion and politics

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Frome: Home of AskWhy! Publications —Learn about this relatively unspoiled Wessex town, the cider capital of the world!

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SupplementArt Gallery —Mike’s paintings.

E-books for download —and miscellaneous amusements and DLs.

36 Plots —George Polti thought there were 36 dramatic situations. You can get some ideas for creative writing from an old source updated, the Polti plot outliner.

UK Lottery picker at AW!’s old main webpage, and another one.

FIBA Sermoniser Download zipped Java application (22KB). Same as Bishop Ecclesiasticus, this page.

Anthroposaurus sapiens Pages relevant to Who Lies Sleeping? The Dinosaur Heritage and the Extinction of Man. Who Lies Sleeping? Blog

AskWhy! Books —The Hidden Jesus, The Mystery of Barabbas and Who Lies Sleeping? US customers, order our books from Borders. Orderform to print and order direct from AskWhy!

The Hidden Jesus. The Secret Testament Revealed —ISBN 0-9521913-2-6 £12.99. A commentary on Mark’s gospel that relates the Jesus of the gospel to the practices of the Essenes. The life of Jesus can be convincingly explained without recourse to supernatural inventions. Buy the printed version from Amazon | Orderform to print and order direct from AskWhy!

The Mystery of Barabbas. The Origins of a Pagan Religion —ISBN 0-9521913-1-8 £9.99. Why does Barabbas suddenly appear in the gospels as the hero of the Jews when Jesus had been hitherto? He was called Jesus. Coincidence? His surname, Barabbas, means "son of my Father" —Coincidence? Buy the printed version from Amazon | Orderform to print and order direct from AskWhy!

Who Lies Sleeping? The Dinosaur Heritage and the Extinction of Man —ISBN 0-9521913-0-X £7.99. No longer online Book—Dinosaurs, Extinction and Ecology—Death planet or planet of death? What caused the end of the dinosaurs? Perhaps the coup de grace was an impact but why had they been failing for centuries? Did they poison their own environment—like mankind? But you can get it in a convenient book form! Buy the printed version from Amazon. | Orderform to print and order direct from AskWhy!

Self publishers page Aspire for you to advertise your SP book.

Nice fractal designs at PEM’s (Paul Evan Magee) site.

PEM’s music after all, he is primarily a classical music composer.

Hanratty! Did he do it? Amazingly Thorough run down on a controversial murder. Worth studying.

Genealogy of Paul’s parent’s families, one of which, by coincidence, is mine!

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