A Biblical scholar, Morton Smith, was doing research in a library Jerusalem in 1958 when he chanced upon a letter that appeared to have been written by one of the 2nd century church fathers, Clement of Alexandria.
Category: readings
Readings and analysis from various literature
You Are Going to Die Soon
It is commonly thought that the Bible details the blissful afterlife of the righteous in Heaven and the torturous existence of the damned in Hell; in fact, the Bible has nothing of the sort to say about Heaven, and has little to say on the topic of the afterlife in general.
Bizarre Bible Stories
Most of my research has focused on stories in the Bible with which I am already familiar. Often I find in the text aspects to these stories of which I was not previously aware (such as Noah’s sacrifice to God after the flood), but I also find stories that I have never heard mentioned before at all. One of these follows after the stories of the Great Flood and the Tower of Babel in Genesis, about which I have already written. This is the story of Abram, who later came to be called Abraham, and his wife Sarai (later Sarah), and their exile in Egypt.
Satanic Thought in Ancient Religion
One of the reasons that I venerate the Hindu religions may be that I find Satanism present even in its earliest sacred texts, which are as well the earliest extant sacred texts that we have access to.
Paradise Lost as a Sacred Text
Should Paradise Lost, John Milton’s 17th-century epic poem concerning the fall of Satan from Heaven, be considered a sacred text, especially with regard to the Satanist?
The Divine Hedonism of the Mind
This week I’m taking a break from my usual focus on the sacred texts of the Abrahamic tradition and turning my attention to those of Hinduism. In reading the Text, I’ve come to a new and different understanding of what hedonism might mean for me in the context of this Satanic religion that I’m building…
In Search of the Religion of Jesus
Christianity is not the religion of Jesus. It is not the religion that he followed. It is not the religion that he preached. It was not the religion that he would have had his followers pursue during his life or after his death. What do we know of Jesus and the religion that he promoted?…
Imagining a Better God
The Bible has its own narrative of the origin of language, or at least the origin of its diversity, and it paints a problematic picture both of God and of language.
The Tragedy of Christian Science
Sometime when I was very young, my mother began bringing me to church. The church was of the Christian Science denomination, in which she herself had been raised. She did not adopt the doctrine of the religion wholesale, but rather maintained a loose and abstract belief in God and Jesus. She told me many years later that she was not trying to indoctrinate me into the religion, but rather only to expose me to religion in general and to give me some moral grounding
The Great Flood
What’s interesting to me is that the story of a great flood is one that many people have been telling for a very long time. But in many traditions, and in the Abrahamic tradition in particular, there is an aspect to the story that is particularly troubling: God became displeased with us. So They murdered almost the entire world.