EC 521

Upon Whom the Ends

of the Ages Have Come…

^{A fantasy for an Apocalypse}

© Ludis Cuckold (2015)

30 Addendum 2

Law Out On a Limb

A secularist culture dismisses the Ten Commandments with sniggering comments. The secularists titter “Though shalt not…” and laugh, because the commandments command in no uncertain terms. For example, one of the commandments teaches not to kill. That also means not killing animals.  However, for secularists “though shalt not kill” is applicable only to themselves or those in government offices. It does not apply to those who cannot afford to buy medicine, or must earn their daily bread by signing up to fight in a fascist war, or must live all their lives in a demoralizing ghetto of the poor, or are born cattle, chickens, or sheep.

As far as secularists are concerned, they forbid ‘religion’ (see blogs 10,18, and the infamous Westphalian Peace Treaty; the so-called Reformation—Catholic, Lutheran, and Calvinist did not forsake Catholic theology) to compete with their institutions. This is because for them virtual reality is more ‘real’ than reality. 

As for murderers (on ghetto streets or in government employ), a secularist culture presumes them its own and punishes them accordingly—with imprisonment for life or absolution by secrecy. I recently read on an internet site that one such prisoner had four children by four female prison guards, and was making up to $15,000 in a bad month in drug sales.

In any case, today none of the Ten Commandments are in effect.

Though “the Law” has support from governments, “the Law” all too often provokes and legalizes chaos. As pointed out in a number of instances in above blogs, the law rules not by distisnguishing a living thing from a dead thing, but by making things ever more rigid things. Thus, there never are laws enough to make things thing-like enough.

There are no lack of instances of unjust convictions or miscarriages of justice in either Europe or the U.S., or anywhere else. A militarist government in Egypt, while admitting it was a mistake, recently condemned a four year old to a life-time in prison. The Pentagon is considering--in the event of a war--drafting women. The point is that governments can pass whatever ‘laws’ they wish at any time they wish, while old and unenforced laws pile up in books to be reused in case a precedent is needed.

Though my observations in the field confirm that in times of need and poverty, to find someone who is not a liar, a thief, or a prostitute is a rarity, for some unknown reason (?divine) hope persists. It is for this reason why my suggestion is that at such times we return to prayer, which—all things considered—is much like playing the lottery*: neither all prayers nor all lotteries fail, but both bring hope. No wonder there are such things as prayer wheels and gambling games everywhere in the world.

The coming of the Eschaton (be it today or the day after tomorrow) necessarily brings with it a break-down of secular Law and a return of Eastern Christian (not Orthodox) Religious Law. All lawyers who this makes laugh ought tell how to turn concrete into biscuits and water into gasoline.

Of course, no lawyer today believes that “the Law” has run its course or has come to an end. Indeed, some judges are believed to be like gods, because God has by chance placed them wherever it is they are at. As St. Paul, the presumptive Jesus, says:  “…In his forbearance [for judges to write laws] he left [truth untold so that] the sins committed beforehand [should go] unpunished [until a later time]”.

The question of “the Law” is contentious, not least in the New Testament itself. As Paul says in Romans 3:31: “Do we, then, nullify the law by this faith? Not at all! Rather, we uphold the law.”

As I have pointed out in blogs 2,18,etc., the collection of taxes is not because of human faith in them or because God wrote them, but because Paul—bought off by secular ruffians—nullifies faith and decrees taxes (Romans 13:1-7)  and secular law to replace faith with. All said, Paul places himself not only as one (of 13*) of the twelve disciples, but most likely is a writer of the New Testament, which put the words of Jesus (aka John Basil) in his mouth.

*According the the moon calendar, there are thirteen months in a year. When the number of months was reduced to 12, one month had, so to speak, nowhere to go. While sly Eastern Christians assigned it to Paul, Paul tried to take advantage of it by turning himself into the 13^th disciple.

Paul’s rhetorical question: “Do we, then, nullify the law by this faith?” was not rhetorical before Paul voiced it as such. When oral communication prevailed, the Ten Commandments were obeyed through faith in God. Then Paul’s cynicism got the better of him and turned God’s faith in human character (which God had helped create) into question. Today Paul’s disbelief is aped by psychologists who, because they know their talk is not persuasive, treat the things they create with an overdose of mind cripling pills.

EC 520

Upon Whom the Ends

of the Ages Have Come…

^{A fantasy for an Apocalypse;}

© Ludis Cuckold (2015)

29 Addendum 1

About Christian Theologies

Christian Theology has right and left turns, both. The turns often overlap.

The left turn, represented in these blogs by Eastern Christianity originates in the age old notion that God created the world by sacrificing him- or herself. In its mythical versions, God’s hair becomes the wood and grass, God’s breasts and/or buttocks become mountains, the Goddess’ urine becomes ocean, and God’s penis becomes an invisible (like water in water) fish or serpent.

The myth of God or Goddess sacrificing Him- or Herself is reflected in the myth and drama of the Incas, where the King is supposed to sacrifice himself in order to cause the Sun to rise in the morning. Unfortunately, self-sacrifice is a difficult thing for humans to do.

The difficulty is reflected in the story of God Nanauatzin, who of all the Inca Gods, though one of the lowliest, is the only one who had the courage to jump in the sacrificial pit of fire, so the Sun could rise.

The alternative to Nanauatzin’s courageous act was for the Inca kings to build high terraced pyramids at the top of which each year the kings brought prisoners captured in their fascist wars and had their hearts—sometimes by the hundreds—torn from their chests and presented to the Sun.

The failure of the Inca kings to self-sacrifice  does not mean that the failure is in the theology of the Inca priests. Rather, the failure occurs in the inability of the conscious mind of humans to bind with emotional persuasion.

When the God Quetzalcoatl returned to Mexico in the guise of Spanish conquistadores and Catholic Christian priests, the drama of that event most likely resembled what at an earlier time had occurred in ancient Byzantium, where both Eastern and Western Christianity came about, because certain Eastern elites (possibly Vikings fleeing south from severe northern climes) believed that the solution to the failure of Eastern Christian consciousness was because Eastern Christianity failed to give human consciousness Godlike powers.

This East to West shift in Christian theology surely occured, if we note that the Western elites replaced the Eastern sacrificial God, one John Basil of the wood, with a superconscious and melodramatic Jesus Christ of the city.

Contrary to John Basil, who taught the people of the wood how to govern themselves by assuring them of the existence of God, and that God wished them to live self-sacrificial lives, Jesus Christ taught support for tax collectors installed by the elites.

Taxes collected by the elites, supported the elites in a life-style unknown to the people of the wood. To justify taxes to the people of the Commons (because the elites could not sustain themselves without them), Jesus Christ taught through ‘holy script’ written by the priests in the employ of the elites, that “Though shall pay taxes”. The tool of the elites was the "Law", the 11^th Commandment God had told Moses about, but which Moses had failed to reconstitute from the shards of the shattered clay tablets. Indeed, collecting taxes became a ‘law’ enforced by coercion and when that did not work by overt violence.

Thus, modern government was born. It grew from the size of a Prince’s Castle to the size of courts in Washington, Moscow, Beijing, London, Brussels, and elsewhere.

For all the pretension, a failure similar to the one that visited the Inca kings appeared in the Western version of Christianity: human intelligence was not able to overcome its fear of death, and, therefore self-sacrifice failed to become common practice. This failure enabled the elites to become convinced liars and thieves. One of the main theological lies of Western Christianity is that “Jesus Saves”. The argument goes that because He had the courage to climb the cross, we are saved from having to do the same.

Doubly unfortunate is the fact that rhetorical assurance notwithstanding, Jesus saves no one. Western government elites therefore have come to do pretty much the same thing the Inca kings did: they sacrifice to some unknown 'God' people not by forcing them to climb the steps of a temple, but by sending them to be killed in endless wars.

This difficulty, faced by un unsolved by Eastern and Western Christianities, leaves the belief in the existence of God pretty much in every conscious individual’s own head.

For this reason, the only difference between Eastern and Western theology is that every one of the Commons who is able to sacrifice him- and herself for the common good, becomes enveloped in an aura of charisma that encourages all witnesses to follow in their footsteps and keeps the Commons mindful of its health. Thus, he story of history becomes theology reformed.

Be that as it may, it may yet take a tragedy on the institutional stage to remind the mind dwelling within of the courage it is capable of: living without an overtly imposed government.

EC 519

Upon Whom the Ends

of the Ages Have Come…

^{A fantasy for an Apocalypse}

© Ludis Cuckold (2015)

28 Afterword

No story that bases itself on actual events ever really has an ‘Afterword’. However, the beginnings of this story go back a thousand years to a great lie, and have unraveled only gradually. Mine is a brief outline that I tell to show that its ‘End’ may only now have come.

The telling of the ‘End’ began, if you will, with the Westpshalian Peace Treaty (1648), which separated religion from politics. The Treaty was nothing short of a major defeat for religion, because it denied it the ability to resist secularism in an organized fashion and a resort to arms in extreme circumstances. 

The link to an interview with the Russian Orthodox Patriarch Kirill (a hop and a skip below) clearly shows how wimpy and obsequious an official Christian has become vis a vis secular government. No wonder that following the disastrous treaty, the  religious  ‘trash’—denied and intimidated of militant resistance—began to express themselves through literature and became what Marx called talking society, i.e., all absurd talk, no mindful action, replaced by the discovery of new enemie, terrorists, a race of humans unworthy of milquetoasts.

It ought to be obvious to the readers of this “Upon Whom...” series that the author and they i) owe much to the Russian mathematician turned historian Anatoly Fomenko and his daring assault on the pseudo chronology concocted by the Western Christian Church and its virtual priests, historians; ii) the obvious falsification of history by modern imperial powers (the United States of America and its allies in the European Union; the German Reich; the Soviet Union; China; Russia; and an endless series of smaller copy cats, among them post-Soviet Latvija; and iii) the author’s own life experience that looks with disbelief at the porridge of history that the above mentioned have been shoving down the throats of humankind.

This is not to say that my claims of disbelief should not be examined and better explained where need be. At the same time, I am confident the ‘doubting Tom’ perspective will survive, if only because history as concocted by the West will not stand. Its falsehoods, a row of dominoes, have already begun their journey toward the black hole dug for them by a doomed civilization that stood them up (with a hey, and a ho, and a lie!) in the first place. Interestingly, the dominoes fall in the direction of the past and begin their journey with the 9/11 ‘Pearl Harbor’* event in New York City. The dominoes end their fall at the ash pit of John Basil, the Bogomil, aka Jesus Christ, the King of the People of the wood.

*Pearl Harbor was an event encouraged by the U.S. Government in order to enter into a war with Imperial Japan.

After the institutionalization of taxation in which Western Christian ‘religion’, masked by the melodramatic figure of Jesus (yes, it is more impressive—if less efficient—to be nailed to a cross than shoved into a pit of burning logs*/**), played a major role.

*Anna Comnena, daughter of Emperor Alexis I of Byzantium, tells in “The Alexiad” that after throwing (?John) Basil the Bogomil into the fire pit dug on the hippodrome in Constantinople nothing but a whiff of smoke remained. / **It has occurred to me that the auto-da-fe incinerations  of the ‘heretics’ is for show only. While the more serious live cremations were done more efficiently by throwing the victims into a pit of fire. I would not be surprised that if archeologists looked for such pits , they would find them.

Ever more persuasive tax collection methods, enforced by the written word turned into ‘law’, followed and secured for governments a ‘God given’ status. After all, the growth of government diminishes the People and their self-created cultures, and one gets the feeling that a feudalist order ‘progresses’ in an orderly fashion to a foreseen return of a new middle ages of a feudal world order.

As highly as our feudalist order may think of itself, its pseudo history has led human beings-at-large to wish for The Eschaton, an End to the sacrifice of lives exacted by the monstrous conceit of ‘enlightened’ minds bringing Death by an endless series of fascist wars that are blamed on the people rather than their governments.

Time obfuscates lies: by the time Lenin and Stalin met the opportunity for a Revolution against an entrenched fascist elitism in the court of the Russian tsars, they no longer knew the origin of the real source of social inequality, but were imbued with the notion that the enemy was a duck in a shooting gallery—because it had not recently been shot at with real bullets. Loss of information and their misplaced sincerity turned Communist revolutionaries into murderers.

A similar blindness has infected Americans. Desensitized by the success of their fascist government ('democracy' sequestered in cities is not democracy) in providing them with a cornucopia of consumer goods, which has given them a sense of accomplishment as well as material well-being, the mindset of The People has grown insouciant enough to believe along with their elites that God’s prejudice favors their conceits. In short, Jesus has ‘saved’ atheist America like no other atheist society has ever been saved*.

*Am I wrong in guessing that the fascist idealogue Donald Duck Trump or fool socialist ideologue Bernie Sanders, or feudalist darling Madame Hillary may win in the fall elections?

Nevertheless, it turns out that the American belief in being an exception is proven to be unsustainable. Most of the world today looks at America as being a fascist empire seeking to sustain its exceptionalist status at the expense of the rest of the world.

But does such a turning exempt the rest of the world from being any less guilty?*

*I see post-Soviet Latvijans from America, Canada, Australia, England, etc. sell their properties in destitute Latvia, and take the money back to their capitalist havens with no sense of guilt whatever.

When seeking an answer to habituated theft, we see ‘the rest’ or ‘opposition’ kaleidoscoped into one Russia, a country with many traditions grounded in Eastern Christianity. This fact, makes it an erstwhile past and future opponent of the West. Yet, like Lenin and Stalin a hundred years ago, it may mistake the complaints of the herders of elk in the wood for the complaints of factory workers of the Industrial Age.

The recent meeting—after a near thousand year hiatus—by Patriarch Kirill of Moscow and all Rus’ with Pope Francis of Rome (without giving any theological justifications whatsoever) is a warning that the catastrophe of misperceptions may repeat itself and bring new violence and disasters.

Surely the reason for the meeting if the two popes is not justified by either men’s concern over the fate of Christianity at the hands of Muslim rebels (however misinfored they may be) or the End of the World at the whims of nuclear powers. The meeting, no doubt solicited by Pope Francis, is a circus.The only matter that justifies it is the iffy sense by Western Christian persuasion that the emerging Eschaton is due to the excommuniction of homo sapiens from relevant society and the imminent seizure of civil society by the elites of governments.

Nevertheless, Patriarch Kirill of Moscow and all Russia, fails to understand the theology of his Church and predecessors. For one, the two popes call themselves ‘brothers’ and declare to leave the ‘Old World’ behind them (see item 3), because theysee it as no longer relevant.

Nothing demonstrates more clearly the failure of Patriarch Kirill to understand history and the Christian faith of his forebears than his  presumptuous ‘holiness’ that reeks of a betrayal of history.* Re: a forgetting that early Christianity arose from the egalitarian life-style practiced by the people of the wood when challenged by exceptionalist lords. The life-style of the city does not come close to the equality found in and maintained by people living close with nature. Nature is not virtual. By accepting the Joint Declaration’s reference to 1 Peter 3:15, where Christ is referred to as Lord of both Catholic christianities, Patriarch Kirill shows himself suffering from an insult when he so cavaleerly forgets that at the time of the Great Schism there were two Christs, re John Basil (aka John the Baptist, Healer, Christener) and Jesus Christ the friend of tax collectors and creator of governments and empires.

*I make the statement as a self-appointed Russian Orthodox. While I was baptized as a Lutheran in infancy, I received my true baptism by the figure of Christ in the Riga Russian Orthodox Cathedral in 1940 at the age of seven. My mother had taken me there on the occasion of the disappearance of her father, the former ambassador from Latvia to the Soviet Union. On that occasion we stopped before a life-size statue of Christ, which was located in a niche on the right side of the Cathedral (the figure is no longer there). The sight of the statue overwhelmed and awed me with a sense that the figure was at the same time both dead and alive. Neither the sight or the feeling have ever left me, which is why for all these years, I have felt compelled to try understanding our times.

EC 518

Upon Whom the Ends

of the Ages Have Come…

^{A fantasy for an Apocalypse}

© Ludis Cuckold (2015)

27 Meeting Again 76 Years On

The dream takes me to a public park in Rīga. It is dusk. Given what I wrote in the previous post, I find myself in a half real, half virtual optical environment.

At the southern end of the park, I see an old man and a woman escort walk on a path. They walk slowly and at diagonal, from my right to left. The diagonal recedes into a darkening corner. The man is my paternal grandfather. The woman is (I thnin) my godmother, Emiliya, his second wife.

Grandfather has come to meet me. No one has arranged this meeting except the dream I am dreaming.

I cross the park and find grandfather sitting on a park  bench and waiting for me. He sits slumped and looks to be asleep. If true that his response in his younger days to concerns over his health was: “Do not be concerned over me, be concerned over my Devil”, it appears as if now the Devil has been beat out of him. Emiliya, has disappeared.

The scene is reminiscent of the movie “Wild Strawberries” (Ingmar Bergman director, 1957), where the wheel of a horse drawn hearse, after hitting a lamp post, comes off the hearse, rolls a short distance, falls flat and breaks up beside the dreamer.

Sitting in a chair in front of grandfather is a musician who sings him a religious hymn. In the dream, I seem to recognize the melody and the song, but when awake, I no longer recognize it. After searching the Internet for religious songs, I eventually select “Rock of Ages” (a hymn composed by Augustus M. Toplady, an American, in 1775) as one that most closely resembles the melody that I heard in the dream.

I sit down on the bench next to and to the left of grandfather. Somewhat awkwardly, I embrace him, and say: “It has been a long time since we have seen each other. I am Anton, the keeper of your name.” Then somewhat apologetically I add: “Alas, I have only 100 euros left to my name.”

Grandfather makes no response. I notice in his right hand a slip of paper. He raises the hand and I see that it holds two theatre tickets*.

*As a result of winning the 3^rd prize for “In a Fog”, a play against the use of alcohol which he wrote in 1895, grandfather was introduced to the world of theatre in Rīga, specifically the “Rīga New Theatre”. In fact, that is where he met Emiliya, who had volunteered to work in the gardrobe and as a cashier at the theatre.

Having passed the theatre tickets, grandfather leans toward me, and slumps into my lap until the bald back of his head was just below my chin. Because of its closeness the head appeared unnaturally large and made me uncomfortable. It was as if I was given to smell his skin.

What is so remarkable about the dream to me is that grandfather died May, 1939. A few days before his death my sister and I brought him a small bouquet of forget-me-nots, which our nanny had advised us to pick. When we went to deliver the flowers, we found grandfather sequestered in a small room at the back of his villa. We were not told that the bed we saw him lying in was his death bed. This is the first time since that time that I see him other than in a photograph.

A few moments later the dream transports me to the opposite and north end of the park, which is bordered by a city street, across of which there are a row of buildings featuring shops. As is a dream’s wont, I am brought to stand before what looks like an empty store front. As I approach its window, I see that behind the window is a platform that is projecting deep into the inner space of the store. On the platform stands a table. A man is sitting at the table. His back is turned toward me. He sits alone.

Because the man’s back is turned toward me, I cannot see whether he wais reading a book or eating a meal. He is dressed in a dark suit. Over the top of the curtain, which stretches across the inside portion of the niche, I see that the store is not a boutique, but a restaurant. The dining room appears rather cozy. Each of the tables has lit candles on it. I can see number of diners.

As I retreat from the window, I notice close by, a dark skinned nanny and a group of children. I do not see either the woman or the children clearly. The woman—in retrospect I feel that she may be have been Daisy—stands at the door of the restaurant and sings to the diners inside. Is she begging food for the children?

The nanny sings to the melody of “Plasir d’mour” (a classical French love song written in 1784 by Jean-Paul Martini).

After I awake, I reflect that—what with the appearance of grandfather—the dream may be a premonition of death. True, the candles on the dining tables by turning into grave sites is rather surreal. It was only after I recalled that the window behind which sat the man had written across it “Restorāns Valentīns” that I rejected the idea of a cemetery. But what was Daisy doing singing the song? Did not the words of the song have a double meaning for her?

The joys of love last but for a mo-mAnt, its sorrows keepers keep it a life-time long.

Everyone, I suppose, has his-her own translation of what the words mean. To me, the words suggest lasting loyalty or, better, a long lasting need of love. If a black hole is the result to gravity so strong that it swallows all light, the mo-mAnt of love—not quite as strong—is the residue of regret that stays as a pain nothing but God may cure.

Einstein, the physicist, whose prediction of the existence of gravitational waves was proved to be correct a hundred years later, also said: “God does not play dice”. Yet in the ‘developed world’ there is an army of Enlightened men and women who ridicule Einstein for the statement and roll insouciant dice on the surface of a mirror that has been taken off the wall and placed on the floor.

The rolling of dice by the Enlightened, however, has shattered the mirror into shards beyond counting and no lesser number of lives ruined, not to mention the millions upon millions killed.

It is rather amazing—though not at all surprising—that the great fascists* of the 20^th century, Germany’s Hitler and Russia’s Stalin (each in his own way), have been replaced by the United States of America, a country that not so long ago was almost universally believed to be the great purveyor of peace, freedom and liberty.

*Fascism, as I have already pointed out a number of times, is but socialism for one’s self and one’s own. Fascism has also appeared under the guise of other names. For example, historian R.I. Moore calls it “Persecuting Society”, the title of his book (2007, Blackwell, PB); David Nirenberg calls it “Communities of Violence’’,  also the name of a book (Princeton, 1996). Moore claims that the Persecuting Society arose in the 11^th century. As we see, thay society has not come to an end yet. So, yes, fascism has a very long history indeed.

How did such a reversal come to be?

Well, you see, there is this big theatre called “1054-2016” on the corner of yonder block, which for all of this time has been playing one and the same play called “The Eschaton”. I first learned of the play after I encountered historian Fomenko’s observations and crashed the ticket booth. Now I have two tickets from my grandfather. It’s called approval by ‘secondment’.

In any case, the current Act of “The Eschaton’’ has arrived to the point where the governments of the world, following the example of the government of America (delivered into the hands of a Kenya born politician), are doing all they can to eliminate the Republics of their own in order to replace same with fascist governments of elites only. Sing: Joy to The World!