An Introduction to The Bible Conspiracy
A proposal for a new religious wombat hole.
A proposal for a new religious wombat hole.
Paltering: the active use of selective truthful statements to mislead.
Why write sympathetically about religion on the godless intellectual hellscape that is Substack?
Well, with the ‘Rona narrative deteriorating rapidly, dissidents had better start expanding our portfolios if we hope to stay relevant. Either that, or we relapse — not unlike Alex Berenson and the sweet Mary Jane — back into old haunts.
Actually, how is Bero going back on Elon’s Transhumanist Trojan-horse Twittersphere?
Nice ratio champ.
Much like Bero, I too have my own side hustle to turn back to — a crutch that can also (allegedly) lead to psychosis if not used correctly.
Not unlike the metaphysical equivalent of crack, Religion can be a hell of a drug — probably why all these staunch and smug lefty atheists have had to resort to worshipping Science to get their fix. Also probably why, despite the best efforts of my dad raising me as a staunch and smug lefty atheist, I was bound to dabble in the real thing eventually.
Unlike most over-comfortable white boys in need of a spiritual reality check, my dabblings weren’t with The Bible, at least not initially — my religiosity was obtained through the Bahá'í Faith. Wait, what?
The Bahá'í Faith is a fascinating academic case study in religion, in itself: it emerged in Iran in the 19th century, offering a set of writings and teachings best understood as a liberal reformation of Islam — a vibe that has enabled it to find some receptivity in Western populations, thanks to diaspora Bahá'í’s who have had little choice but to leave their homeland. Due to the direct challenge its theology poses to the conservative Muslim clergy, Bahá'í’s in Iran have been and continue to be savagely and relentlessly persecuted (you can almost picture your Mike Pence fundamentalist-types in the US, nodding in solemn appreciation and taking notes for when their witch-hunts are cleared to begin).
Western Bahá'í’s are extremely active at the grass-roots level, engaging in the type of structured, parallel-society community-building activities that all dissidents/errants need to be serious about. It was these activities (aided significantly by Persian food and hospitality) that attracted me to the Faith itself: if a shared set of beliefs could bring this level of unity and motivation to create new communities, then maybe these beliefs are worth exploring?
Explored them I did, and i’m glad I did, because I can unambiguously say that religion is not for me: for no other reason that the chronic vertigo condition I had suffered for three years essentially disappeared — in what still feels like a miracle — once I made that decision in my head. I may well have been given the boot by now anyway, given Bahá'ís are prohibited from participating in partisan politics. Nonetheless, I learnt a lot and made some great friends, and my experiences in the Faith have shaped me immensely (I have a whole burrow dedicated to it, although i’m not quite game enough to go back and re-read it yet).
Where does The Bible come in? The Bahá'í’ Faith was the reason why I started to investigate The Good Book, and the reason why I started taking it seriously, despite all the prejudices that had been nurtured in me against it — Bahá'ís are directed to investigate and understand all world religions, and see them as part of a continuous timeline of progressive divine revelation.
Who was I to turn down that challenge; I am (and, despite my best efforts, still remain) an academic at heart: someone who, to paraphrase Tyrion Lannister, takes pride in Knowing Things.
Not always or necessarily knowing things for practical reasons (the more theoretical the better, some might say) but simply for the sake of obtaining and possessing that knowledge. The eventual obligation to share it with others follows mainly to avoid the karma of keeping it to yourself.
And it is from an academic perspective that I come at The Bible, and religion in general: as something that must be deconstructed and interrogated exhaustively and from all angles, without fear or favour. And there are plenty of potential juicy/spicy angles to explore:
As an abridged record of the history of humanity.
As a treaty for universal spirituality.
As a guidebook to the supernatural.
As a prophecy for the End Times.
And, of course, given I am also a dedicated conspiracy theorist, as the greatest, longest running psychological operation of all time: Germ Theory, barely extending across two centuries, is but a prelude to Revelations in this grander story.
What’s that quote about wars and rumours of wars?
We see deception in all aspects of society — the last two and half years suggests that it has infiltrated and become imbedded within the entire elite class, who practice and refine its art with impressive effect.
And the tactic they seem most fond of is that of paltering: the “extremely common practice of lying and deceiving with true statements” according to Urban Dictionary.
We can pick out many examples from our ‘Rona era, particularly in how real data has been employed to argue for and uphold largely fictitious narratives. The most egregious must surely be the “14 Days To Hide Jibby Jab Injuries” fiasco: where germ-possessed authority figures rolled out seemingly stunning hospitalisation data seemingly showing the un-jabbed selfishly hogging hospital beds, knowing full well many of these “unjabbed” had actually been stabbed within the last two weeks, but because they’ve decided their precious Jibby Jabs only work after two weeks you are still “unjabbed” for two weeks because they think people will actually be stupid enough to believe it ahahahhhhh fuck these germ-conspiring assholes who know our psychological weaknesses too well.
‘Rona aside, paltering exists as a broader and pervasive phenomenon in society: and, it should be noted — as anyone who has been in or witnessed an abuse relationship would attest to — it is certainly not limited to the elite levels of society. That is why, leaving all conspiracy talk aside, it is a concept that everyone must be familiar with and seek to detect… this being the Age of Deception, after all.
Deception doesn’t have to be malicious, or planned. It will often be employed as a coping mechanism; the calculated use of a partial truth in deference of the whole truth, something we all must do to some degree to negotiate social interactions.
Deception doesn’t even have to require active consent: it might, for example, be allowing someone to wrongly interpret a true statement, and in turn allowing them to be mislead.
But that’s not why we are here. We are here for the blatant, usually malicious porkies.
If you seek to deceive humanity, why use religion?
Well: the greater the truth, the greater the lie that can be hidden inside of it. Imagine the type of deception that could be created if the secrets to the nature of our existence on this round/flat/simulated Earth happened to fall into the wrong hands?
This is my proposition: The Bible is indeed a divine work; a bearer of profound truths (albeit largely the same truths found in the writings of numerous other ancient cultures); a source of and pathway to Gnosis; to true Knowledge; to INNERSTANDING.
But yet, simultaneously, it is also a work of great deception: convincing people into worshipping a psychopathic bipolar deity, and referred back to to morally justify the most heinous of crimes.
What makes this duality more complicated is that there is no single nor precise way to conceptualise this deception, and how it has come into being.
Its origins could be attributed to misunderstandings, to lost in translations, to wilful interventions, to deliberate omissions within the text itself. Such errors become accepted implicitly through the station in which this text is held in society — before being reinforced through the suppression of other ancient texts that might enhance and widen our understanding of the archetypal events in The Bible. Further noise is then added through the agreed conventions around which it has been interpreted and sermonised across the world, and the numerous subjective commentaries that do battle within the religious skirmish of the Great Information War we find ourselves in.
In short: this is one holy egg that may never be unscrambled.
So what do we do?
The last thing we should do, in my opinion, is throw the baby out with the bathwater (with the possible exception of the baby being Moses (think about it)): discarding the divine nuggets hidden in The Bible just because the Inverters have had their way first.
There is no doubt that those pages have much to say about our current and future time and how to survive them, as do the pages of many other ancient scriptures. While our contemporary methods of understanding the world are increasingly failing us — science, academia, the media to name a few — perhaps it is time we went back to scratch, to tradition, and started to take seriously the wisdom and warnings that long gone civilizations have left us?
The Coronaspiracy, as important as it is to get to the bottom of, is not the end game here. All these germ theory hacks we see coughing out the final painful breaths of this fatally injured psy-op? Amateurs: those who got in over their heads too early, who the Arch-Inverters are getting out of the way now before the A-list stooges take the stage for the finale.
One thing I have found as a conspiracy theorist is that the truth is always out there: but it will only give itself up to those who are truly searching for it. What if we already had the script for this finale? We see pieces of something like it, strewn throughout The Bible. They make little sense on their own, but perhaps that was the point: they are only clues, there for us to start putting the grander story together.
Welcome to The Bible Conspiracy.