RELIGION

QUESTIONS OF RELIGION: Psychological and Mystical

A Graspable Jesus Displaces God (a new essay)
Rudolf Bultmann opens Pandora’s Box

Bernadette Roberts and the No-Self    (a new essay)
A Catholic mystic deals with the Jesus problem, and much else.

Blick und Einblick     (a new essay)
The sustained renewal of self-presence in relation to ‘seeing’ in a new way.

Christianity’s ‘Occult’ View of the Mind’s Depths     (a new essay)
Demonising the creative unconscious in order to escape the challenges of psyche and its directives.

Gnosis versus Theology      (a new essay)
Our capacity to unhitch ourselves from our deeply conditioned and reactive minds.

Gurdjieff’s ‘Dirty Dog’    (a new essay)
An exploration of what it means to be ‘consciously asleep’ as individuals, and as a collective.

Lucid Consciousness and Attention      (a new essay)
Things we never suspected to be case in relation to being consciously aware human beings.

The Appearance of Presencing Individuals      (a new essay)
The force of ‘attention’ as an antidote to Christianity’s virtue-bound theories of the spiritual life.

The Contemplative Urge      (a new essay)
Bernard de Clairvaux’s vitalis vigilque sopor: a ‘sleep’ alive and watchful.

The Enigmatic Father Sylvan       (a new essay)
The whole business of being religious and its repercussions for the individual and society.

QUESTIONS OF RELIGION: Historical and Theological.

The Cathar Heresy  (a new essay)
A Short History of the Cathars and their link to the Nazarene Sect

Lead Us Not Into Temptation  (a new essay)
Is Pope Francis Wrong in Trying to Change the Lord’s Prayer?

Believe believe believe (a new essay)
The Church’s belief that its traditional answers are true to reality, that answers found outside of the Church must necessarily be inadequate, and the fact that there are now two distinct Christianities in existence.

Catholicism’s Dark Side (a new essay)
The Holy Roman Catholic Church replaces the Roman Empire as an historical entity, develops a theology of intelligent evil to excuse its excesses, flexes its pontifical authority in the extermination of heretics, and recalibrates the Jewish Messiah into a species of Divine Emperor.

In the Name of ‘IS’?  (a new essay)
The name ‘Jesus’, its sacred significance in relation to the Nazarenes and the Christians, and the conquering, revealing, sacrificing, dying and reappearing Jesus-archetype in Jewish history

Loyola and the ‘Trained Will’ (a new essay)
The revival of learning, the Church’s grand delusion that it is engaged in a cosmic war, and the challenge of theology to the Western intellectual tradition.

Satan Chats with Jesus (a new essay)
The abduction of Jesus in the wilderness by Satan, the Church’s tendency to demonise what it did not understand, and the curious fact that it was the very best of the Christian communities who deserted the ship of faith for the ship of understanding.

The Human Jesus 1 (a new essay)
Jesus’ Transfiguration on Mount Hermon, his agony in the garden of Gethsemane and his prearranged ordeal on the cross at Calvary in the service of a ritualistic dream – a dream of perfect freedom for the human spirit.

The Human Jesus 2 (a new essay)
The attempt to partially defuse the mythology of Jesus being literally God, the intellectual obfuscation used to stop him from becoming properly human, and the translation of Jewish Wisdom-language into that of the Logos-concept to circumvent the imagined threat of the feminine.

The Nazarene Conundrum
The Church imaginatively extends the Gospel message, invents the idea of an apostolic succession and threatens, by stealth of its theology, the intellectual development of the Western world.

 The Nazarene-Mandean Conglomerate (a new essay)
The calibration of our minds towards accepting conscious engagement as our greatest mental achievement, the Gnostic challenge to this modern claim by way of a carefully coded language (now decoded), and the Church’s befuddlement in the face of Gnosticism’s superior psychological insights.

The Satan Hypothesis (a new essay)
The Church’s imaginary field of Satanic energy, the Teilhardian idea of consciousness as a general phenomenon in nature, and the necessity to go beyond childish things and accept the responsibilities of adulthood.

Christianity Without Incarnation (a new essay)
Maurice Wiles explores the possibility of a Christianity minus the notion of a divine Jesus. What would that mean for our conception of God?

Questions of Religion – Older Essays

The Myth of Apostolic Authority – The power of a lie when it is a thumping big one.

Homo Mysticus – The anti-conventional, anti-collective and anti-dogmatic nature of mysticism.

The Lost Secret of Christianity – A technical reappraisal of ‘attention and ‘awareness’ in a Christian context.

Rescuing Jesus From the Church

The Resurrection of Jesus – Comments on Joan Bakewell’s BBC Documentary on the Resurrection of Jesus

The Nazoraean Sect and its Independence from Christianity

The Underneath of Things – The Church’s masterstroke in defining the human psyche as the underworld.

What I Used To Believe – What I Used To Believe about Jesus