Dogma Forever
While serving as President, Thomas Jefferson spent some of his evenings in The White House secretly pouring over the Bible redacting all parts of scripture that told of Jesus performing miracles. He did this secretly when he was alone and did not share this work of his with anyone during his time in the White House. Jefferson actually sat down with scissors and cut and pasted together his version of the Bible sans miracles.
Jefferson was driven to understand what really happened with Jesus in his time and was painfully aware that sharing such an exercise would be viewed as anti-Christian and anti Semitic and not acceptable by his constituency or by his colleagues. He called this work of his ‘The American Bible’. This was not a religious exercise; it was the noble pursuit of simplifying the foundations essential to freedom that Jefferson followed his entire life.
In altering the Bible solely by way of removing those supernatural parts of the writings, Jefferson was convinced he revealed the truth of Jesus and of modern day Christianity. That truth is void of the dogma of sin and the binding philosophy or religion.
His view was that we suffer from the idea that Jesus was speaking to an afterlife of bliss when in fact that life is here now and has been subverted by the use of dogma making religion a powerful manipulation. In this way, claims Jefferson, the few can easily control the mob and thereby maintain a never ending, self-perpetuating stranglehold upon us, the free citizens of the United States.
Believing Jesus was supernatural, Jefferson argues, forced followers to submit to the idea that we do not comprehend the afterlife and that all of our days here on earth are nothing more than a lead up to death and resurrection. Jefferson felt this was a fallacy and a tragedy as it makes us forego our lives, our daily experience and our very existence in lieu of some other life. Along the way we are guided by a small group of people who use this dogma to tell us what to think, how to feel and how to act.
Dogma is couched as infallible and above the law, as being divine and therefore beyond reproach. Frequently monies flow to those who espouse such a position.
To this day we are routinely provided with photo ops of our political leaders and their pastors. Together, Jefferson felt, they cement us into an untenable and dysfunctional position wherein we are made to feel we are inadequate, that we sin and that we must follow their lead or risk losing salvation. Or at the very least lose the ‘privilege’ of participating in a commercially indulgent life of goods and excesses.
Jefferson was astonished to see that the teachings of Jesus were perverted away from the original concept of self reliance and towards submission to the Roman Church and the Jewish Nation. He openly laments the loss of mans’ inner freedoms, the kingdom within.
Referred to as the Holy Spirit, the inner kingdom to Jefferson was the freedom each of us has in our inner dialogue. To Jefferson, the conscience we live with, the innate understanding of common decency and indeed our very humanity is predicated upon how we interact with that inner narrative, what he felt was in fact our soul.
Jefferson did not seek to reduce scripture in any way except to make it more pure and more specifically to rid it of the overlay of beliefs brought into the words of Jesus some 300 years later by Paul whom Jefferson felt had intentionally perverted the message for himself to use as a means to grow his particular sect and to unleash a power upon the masses that would allow the church to reign supreme while citing Jewish law as equal and infallible.
The concept of sin was a Jewish creation and Jefferson had serious difficulty with the notion. The idea of being born into sin and then overlaid with an incomprehensible guilt was bizarre and went against all the teachings of Jesus which, Jefferson felt, were specifically aimed at organized powers- at that time Roman & Jewish -and that the central message to all peoples was to resist dogma altogether. Treason was recreated as blasphemy. Freedom was replaced by ritual and free thought by dogma itself.
Trust yourself was and is the message. Clearly we see governments and religions want you to only trust them. To follow their rules, their edicts their findings, allows them to ride upon the backs of good people and to manipulate the unperceiving. Jefferson felt the central issue was dogma and the acquiescence by the unperceiving. Jefferson viewed Jesus as the most perceptive of men. One who espoused non-violent freedoms over submission, personal happiness and real love over group participation in religious services and in that way actually found freedom within His time albeit at a mighty price.
So against personal freedom was organized religion that they actually killed Him rather than allow or even consider that each of us should be free to pursue their own idea of worship. Reading Jefferson’s American Bible, it is easy to see how Jefferson’s thoughts translated into the Declaration and the firm positions he held on freedom of speech, religion and assembly.
They were intended to be beyond simple laws. They were intended to form the very basis of freedom from dogma and the stifling control which we now labor under as a people.
Eliminating the miraculous, or supernatural, portions of the scripture Jefferson argues that what Jesus was really fighting against was dogma. The dogma of the Romans and the Jews was inordinately powerful in Jesus’ time and He spoke openly to resisting those unfounded principles. What Jefferson was espousing was a natural law, a God of Nature as he wrote in the Declaration of Independence, your inner world, the kingdom of heaven. Free from the oppressive nature of organized groups, Jefferson felt that then and only then could you be free to live a good life of love, fulfillment and truly follow the pursuit of happiness.
During Jefferson’s indispensable participation in writing our first breakaway document in 1776, The Declaration of Independence, he also argued for a civil society where each family would have its 40 acres of heaven. On this private and irrevocable land grant we would live in peace, sovereign upon our own patch of land, grow vegetables, fruits and the like and from there we could offer a trade specialty or professional status to exchange for other trade with neighbors or for cash. From this base, this safe haven, we could also pursue higher education and the fruits of that labor as well. This land would pass without question from generation to generation making a stable and independent life secure to all Americans.
This idea of 40 acres was not a backwards kind of lifestyle. It was not intended to create a permanent world of farming or to perpetuate rugged colonialism. But rather to make certain that dogma could not creep into our lives and make us subservient to those powers at the expense of living a truly free and thoughtful life. Being dependent upon large industrial concerns for food, water and energy as we are now speaks to a level of dependency that Jefferson viewed as dangerous and stifling to the human spirit.
Sadly, Hamilton agued successfully for a large and organized central manufacturing economy, the one we live in today. What we call consumerism, Jefferson viewed as a slow death. He knew that freedom lies within security, not against some unseen foreign element, but against groups that seek to control the masses. He knew that without the 40 acres, great numbers of people would simply submit to doctrines claiming supremacy over others and that these unperceptive people would wear uniforms, robes, funny hats and even kill to maintain their position within the ranks of dysfunctional dogma.
What the 40 acres did was allow each family the opportunity to be free. Truly free to pursue their own dreams. It would make them invested in themselves rather than dogmatic groups that really having absolutely nothing to do with their daily lives other than impose their own needs and desires in the form of laws, edicts and religious decrees.
And, of course, it would allow each of us to have a plot of land to walk, feeling close to nature itself and to commune with what Jefferson called ‘Natures God’, which only then was he content to call our God as well. In this way, Jefferson felt, God was pure and free of the perversions of group-man but would maintain the human qualities of individual-man. A critical distinction in his mind.
In this way, each of us could easily see how dogma affects our lives and how, if left unchecked, we would lose that very life which has been bestowed upon us by some truly miraculous event allowing us to completely separate out the authentic wonder of life from the constructs of group-man.
Today we see dogma hard at work. There is something exponential about dogma and the mechanism it brings to our lives. Perhaps it is modern day media that magnifies dogma, a technological echo chamber, a hall of mirrors for narcissism.
In modern times we see dogma used to beat into our minds that we ‘need to attack’ this country or that, even when we are fully aware of the constructs that government has created to manufacture such a need to attack. Dogma is used to browbeat us into submission on the most perverted concepts that we should not underestimate the force of dogma.
Modern warfare, sophisticated financial markets, high speed computers all are fine but they’re no replacement for the common sense that Jefferson was trying to maintain in living a life free from oppression by way of dogmatic beliefs.
Who believes we needed to attack Iraq? Yet, the drums of dogma pounded day after day until such time as a majority support was actually generated for the attack. False or true, never mind. “My country, right or wrong” said the sarcastic Mark Twain. My dogma, my culture, my money right or wrong seems to be the modern day war cry.
Dogma prevails over truth, over facts, over logic and humanity itself allowing our country to violate the most basic tenets of civilization. Truly we biologically regress at a time when technology has multiplied dogma to an unseen before level of dominance. Like everything else today, dogma has attained a high-octane status fueled by split second technology.
To Jefferson, this was the teaching of Jesus. Dogma was to be avoided and railed against at all costs-even at the costs of a life, a crucifixion. Nowhere near as awe inspiring as a miraculous messenger from heaven but arguably much more important to out lives.
Who believes the financial markets are free of the constraints of reality? In the level of sophisticated financial instruments, derivatives and the likes, lies the perversion of the truths that have caught up with the market itself and is now exacting a heavy price for being ignored. The dogma here was, of course, that the American way of life is best, that the markets will always grow and that our technology and world superiority would always carry us to safety and higher profits. So desperate were we to secure the dream that we actually insured these bundles of indecipherable investments to make them more attractive when, in fact, they were rancid causing failures of banks and the companies that wrote and distributed these empty insurance policies. Billions of dollars of worthless paper, gold gilded edges and dressed up to appear valuable. Another golden calf falls to a pile of rubble.
Had the homeowner been living under the 40 acre rule today there would be a lot less suffering, certainly less foreclosures and less dependency on a system we can no longer can even understand. We have out slicked ourselves with excessive dogma.
Jefferson argued for ‘Natures God’ because he knew there would always be constants that dogma could not overturn. Incorporating natural law was akin to keeping one eye on gravity while riding a bike. There was not a lot of thought in the process but to ignore it altogether would surely result in a fall.
The simplicity of such an elegant statement is often lost in today’s world of complicated systems and the belief that the individual is dispensable.
Dogma has so dominated our world for centuries that all we really have to show for having lived on this earth for at least some 2000+ documented years is a fractured existence pitting one dogma against another. The ‘American way of life’ against radical extremists who would ‘have our heads’ if they could. And so on and so on. Modern explanations pit culture against culture but really dogma still dominates as the central theme to our existence.
On a smaller more immediate practice we see dogma played out in schools where teachers follow some form of a script and an understanding of what it means to be part of that group, that dogma. In police stations there is dogma in that ‘these are the rules and we follow them and we enforce them’. In politics, religion, universities, unions we find the same dynamic practiced but to what end?
Most of our institutions have proven to be self-serving to such a degree that frequently they lose sight of their original charter; to make a positive contribution to civil society.
The lines between government, industry and education have been so blurred as to be imperceptible. Economic strains create a clear view of our society and how we coordinate ourselves to live what we think is a better life. To Jefferson, this was akin to being a hamster forever stuck in a spinning wheel inside a small cage.
Jefferson knew dogma was an enemy of personal freedom and sought to crush it and eradicate it from every bit of our existence beginning with the 40 acres.
The 40-acre concept was not just for newly freed slaves but for all who find themselves pinned to a narrow life by dogma.
While serving as President, Thomas Jefferson spent some of his evenings in The White House secretly pouring over the Bible redacting all parts of scripture that told of Jesus performing miracles. He did this secretly when he was alone and did not share this work of his with anyone during his time in the White House. Jefferson actually sat down with scissors and cut and pasted together his version of the Bible sans miracles.
Jefferson was driven to understand what really happened with Jesus in his time and was painfully aware that sharing such an exercise would be viewed as anti-Christian and anti Semitic and not acceptable by his constituency or by his colleagues. He called this work of his ‘The American Bible’. This was not a religious exercise; it was the noble pursuit of simplifying the foundations essential to freedom that Jefferson followed his entire life.
In altering the Bible solely by way of removing those supernatural parts of the writings, Jefferson was convinced he revealed the truth of Jesus and of modern day Christianity. That truth is void of the dogma of sin and the binding philosophy or religion.
His view was that we suffer from the idea that Jesus was speaking to an afterlife of bliss when in fact that life is here now and has been subverted by the use of dogma making religion a powerful manipulation. In this way, claims Jefferson, the few can easily control the mob and thereby maintain a never ending, self-perpetuating stranglehold upon us, the free citizens of the United States.
Believing Jesus was supernatural, Jefferson argues, forced followers to submit to the idea that we do not comprehend the afterlife and that all of our days here on earth are nothing more than a lead up to death and resurrection. Jefferson felt this was a fallacy and a tragedy as it makes us forego our lives, our daily experience and our very existence in lieu of some other life. Along the way we are guided by a small group of people who use this dogma to tell us what to think, how to feel and how to act.
Dogma is couched as infallible and above the law, as being divine and therefore beyond reproach. Frequently monies flow to those who espouse such a position.
To this day we are routinely provided with photo ops of our political leaders and their pastors. Together, Jefferson felt, they cement us into an untenable and dysfunctional position wherein we are made to feel we are inadequate, that we sin and that we must follow their lead or risk losing salvation. Or at the very least lose the ‘privilege’ of participating in a commercially indulgent life of goods and excesses.
Jefferson was astonished to see that the teachings of Jesus were perverted away from the original concept of self reliance and towards submission to the Roman Church and the Jewish Nation. He openly laments the loss of mans’ inner freedoms, the kingdom within.
Referred to as the Holy Spirit, the inner kingdom to Jefferson was the freedom each of us has in our inner dialogue. To Jefferson, the conscience we live with, the innate understanding of common decency and indeed our very humanity is predicated upon how we interact with that inner narrative, what he felt was in fact our soul.
Jefferson did not seek to reduce scripture in any way except to make it more pure and more specifically to rid it of the overlay of beliefs brought into the words of Jesus some 300 years later by Paul whom Jefferson felt had intentionally perverted the message for himself to use as a means to grow his particular sect and to unleash a power upon the masses that would allow the church to reign supreme while citing Jewish law as equal and infallible.
The concept of sin was a Jewish creation and Jefferson had serious difficulty with the notion. The idea of being born into sin and then overlaid with an incomprehensible guilt was bizarre and went against all the teachings of Jesus which, Jefferson felt, were specifically aimed at organized powers- at that time Roman & Jewish -and that the central message to all peoples was to resist dogma altogether. Treason was recreated as blasphemy. Freedom was replaced by ritual and free thought by dogma itself.
Trust yourself was and is the message. Clearly we see governments and religions want you to only trust them. To follow their rules, their edicts their findings, allows them to ride upon the backs of good people and to manipulate the unperceiving. Jefferson felt the central issue was dogma and the acquiescence by the unperceiving. Jefferson viewed Jesus as the most perceptive of men. One who espoused non-violent freedoms over submission, personal happiness and real love over group participation in religious services and in that way actually found freedom within His time albeit at a mighty price.
So against personal freedom was organized religion that they actually killed Him rather than allow or even consider that each of us should be free to pursue their own idea of worship. Reading Jefferson’s American Bible, it is easy to see how Jefferson’s thoughts translated into the Declaration and the firm positions he held on freedom of speech, religion and assembly.
They were intended to be beyond simple laws. They were intended to form the very basis of freedom from dogma and the stifling control which we now labor under as a people.
Eliminating the miraculous, or supernatural, portions of the scripture Jefferson argues that what Jesus was really fighting against was dogma. The dogma of the Romans and the Jews was inordinately powerful in Jesus’ time and He spoke openly to resisting those unfounded principles. What Jefferson was espousing was a natural law, a God of Nature as he wrote in the Declaration of Independence, your inner world, the kingdom of heaven. Free from the oppressive nature of organized groups, Jefferson felt that then and only then could you be free to live a good life of love, fulfillment and truly follow the pursuit of happiness.
During Jefferson’s indispensable participation in writing our first breakaway document in 1776, The Declaration of Independence, he also argued for a civil society where each family would have its 40 acres of heaven. On this private and irrevocable land grant we would live in peace, sovereign upon our own patch of land, grow vegetables, fruits and the like and from there we could offer a trade specialty or professional status to exchange for other trade with neighbors or for cash. From this base, this safe haven, we could also pursue higher education and the fruits of that labor as well. This land would pass without question from generation to generation making a stable and independent life secure to all Americans.
This idea of 40 acres was not a backwards kind of lifestyle. It was not intended to create a permanent world of farming or to perpetuate rugged colonialism. But rather to make certain that dogma could not creep into our lives and make us subservient to those powers at the expense of living a truly free and thoughtful life. Being dependent upon large industrial concerns for food, water and energy as we are now speaks to a level of dependency that Jefferson viewed as dangerous and stifling to the human spirit.
Sadly, Hamilton agued successfully for a large and organized central manufacturing economy, the one we live in today. What we call consumerism, Jefferson viewed as a slow death. He knew that freedom lies within security, not against some unseen foreign element, but against groups that seek to control the masses. He knew that without the 40 acres, great numbers of people would simply submit to doctrines claiming supremacy over others and that these unperceptive people would wear uniforms, robes, funny hats and even kill to maintain their position within the ranks of dysfunctional dogma.
What the 40 acres did was allow each family the opportunity to be free. Truly free to pursue their own dreams. It would make them invested in themselves rather than dogmatic groups that really having absolutely nothing to do with their daily lives other than impose their own needs and desires in the form of laws, edicts and religious decrees.
And, of course, it would allow each of us to have a plot of land to walk, feeling close to nature itself and to commune with what Jefferson called ‘Natures God’, which only then was he content to call our God as well. In this way, Jefferson felt, God was pure and free of the perversions of group-man but would maintain the human qualities of individual-man. A critical distinction in his mind.
In this way, each of us could easily see how dogma affects our lives and how, if left unchecked, we would lose that very life which has been bestowed upon us by some truly miraculous event allowing us to completely separate out the authentic wonder of life from the constructs of group-man.
Today we see dogma hard at work. There is something exponential about dogma and the mechanism it brings to our lives. Perhaps it is modern day media that magnifies dogma, a technological echo chamber, a hall of mirrors for narcissism.
In modern times we see dogma used to beat into our minds that we ‘need to attack’ this country or that, even when we are fully aware of the constructs that government has created to manufacture such a need to attack. Dogma is used to browbeat us into submission on the most perverted concepts that we should not underestimate the force of dogma.
Modern warfare, sophisticated financial markets, high speed computers all are fine but they’re no replacement for the common sense that Jefferson was trying to maintain in living a life free from oppression by way of dogmatic beliefs.
Who believes we needed to attack Iraq? Yet, the drums of dogma pounded day after day until such time as a majority support was actually generated for the attack. False or true, never mind. “My country, right or wrong” said the sarcastic Mark Twain. My dogma, my culture, my money right or wrong seems to be the modern day war cry.
Dogma prevails over truth, over facts, over logic and humanity itself allowing our country to violate the most basic tenets of civilization. Truly we biologically regress at a time when technology has multiplied dogma to an unseen before level of dominance. Like everything else today, dogma has attained a high-octane status fueled by split second technology.
To Jefferson, this was the teaching of Jesus. Dogma was to be avoided and railed against at all costs-even at the costs of a life, a crucifixion. Nowhere near as awe inspiring as a miraculous messenger from heaven but arguably much more important to out lives.
Who believes the financial markets are free of the constraints of reality? In the level of sophisticated financial instruments, derivatives and the likes, lies the perversion of the truths that have caught up with the market itself and is now exacting a heavy price for being ignored. The dogma here was, of course, that the American way of life is best, that the markets will always grow and that our technology and world superiority would always carry us to safety and higher profits. So desperate were we to secure the dream that we actually insured these bundles of indecipherable investments to make them more attractive when, in fact, they were rancid causing failures of banks and the companies that wrote and distributed these empty insurance policies. Billions of dollars of worthless paper, gold gilded edges and dressed up to appear valuable. Another golden calf falls to a pile of rubble.
Had the homeowner been living under the 40 acre rule today there would be a lot less suffering, certainly less foreclosures and less dependency on a system we can no longer can even understand. We have out slicked ourselves with excessive dogma.
Jefferson argued for ‘Natures God’ because he knew there would always be constants that dogma could not overturn. Incorporating natural law was akin to keeping one eye on gravity while riding a bike. There was not a lot of thought in the process but to ignore it altogether would surely result in a fall.
The simplicity of such an elegant statement is often lost in today’s world of complicated systems and the belief that the individual is dispensable.
Dogma has so dominated our world for centuries that all we really have to show for having lived on this earth for at least some 2000+ documented years is a fractured existence pitting one dogma against another. The ‘American way of life’ against radical extremists who would ‘have our heads’ if they could. And so on and so on. Modern explanations pit culture against culture but really dogma still dominates as the central theme to our existence.
On a smaller more immediate practice we see dogma played out in schools where teachers follow some form of a script and an understanding of what it means to be part of that group, that dogma. In police stations there is dogma in that ‘these are the rules and we follow them and we enforce them’. In politics, religion, universities, unions we find the same dynamic practiced but to what end?
Most of our institutions have proven to be self-serving to such a degree that frequently they lose sight of their original charter; to make a positive contribution to civil society.
The lines between government, industry and education have been so blurred as to be imperceptible. Economic strains create a clear view of our society and how we coordinate ourselves to live what we think is a better life. To Jefferson, this was akin to being a hamster forever stuck in a spinning wheel inside a small cage.
Jefferson knew dogma was an enemy of personal freedom and sought to crush it and eradicate it from every bit of our existence beginning with the 40 acres.
The 40-acre concept was not just for newly freed slaves but for all who find themselves pinned to a narrow life by dogma.
1 comment:
Excellent! I can't imagine why this would make you think of me. ;-) I think it reads like a Harper's article. The writing here is wonderful. I will do my best to keep up with you, though my track record is grim.
P.
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