"This
is a peculiarly Christian reaction. The Hindus, the Moslems, the Buddhists,
the Taoists, all the major religions have had their sexual mystics and
have honored them. Every Hindu knows that the Tantrists achieve their
mystical visions through sexual intercourse with a beloved partner; the
Buddhists, Moslems and Taoists all have similar sects. The ancient Egyptians,
Greeks and Romans had highly developed cults of hierogamy, ritualized
sex magic. Christianity is alone in thinking that sex is entirely the
Devil's business and an offense to God.
"The consequences of the doctrine are even more bizarre than the
belief itself. If a man writes a poem to his beloved in a Christian nation
and is too frank about expressing that love, he is in danger of being
called 'obscene'; throughout most of Christian history, he could be jailed,
tortured or even killed, at times. As William Blake wrote in horror:
Children of the future age
Reading this indignant page
Know that in a former time
Love, sweet love, was called a crime
"Hating, kicking, stabbing and all manner of sadism are allowed
in movies for Christian audiences; only love is vile."
Is any of that not true? Robert
Anton Wilson, like Timothy Leary, will write things that are true, knowing
that it's hitting a nerve. Let's expand on what he's saying. The Western
religions aren't really religions because a religion is not a religion
if the people who "believe in it" have no idea what a religious
experience is, let alone having had one. To put it another way, if a
religion has nothing to do with having religious experiences, then how
is it a religion and not just brainwashing propaganda?
Does it make sense to think that you were born with sin or guilt because
of something from 2000 years ago? It's from 2000 years ago and we don't
even know exactly, for sure, what happened. Therefore, certain "assumptions"
were made and pushed as the truth, leading to the formation of a "religion".
This is somewhat like John Doe saying that he alone is the one and only
God, convincing some people that it's true and then forming a "religion"
based on that. That's great except that John Doe is off the wall. So
is anyone who believes in him. The Western religions are based on assumptions
that are just as silly.
Every child is told that they are separate from God. They're told that
if they aren't good and do and think as they are told all of their life,
then they will go to tortuous, everlasting hell after they die. They're
told that because they were born in sin, they have to suffer in order
to not feel guilt. The choice is to be miserable and suffer or live
with guilt and shame. They're told not to question anything that they
are told about their religion and to just blindly go along. All of this
is quite a lot to throw at a child. As Alan Watts says on pages 89-90
of his book, This is It:
"The Hebrew-Christian universe is one in which moral urgency, the
anxiety to be right, embraces and penetrates everything. God, the Absolute
itself, is good as against bad, and thus to be immoral or in the wrong
is to feel oneself an outcast not merely from human society but also
from existence itself, from the root and ground of life. To be in the
wrong therefore arouses a metaphysical anxiety and sense of guilt-a
state of eternal damnation-utterly disproportionate to the crime. This
metaphysical guilt is so insupportable that it must eventually issue
in the rejection of God and of his laws-which is just what has happened
in the whole movement of modern secularism, materialism, and naturalism.
Absolute morality is profoundly destructive of morality, for the sanctions
which it invokes against evil are far, far too heavy. One does not cure
the headache by cutting off the head. The appeal of Zen, as of other
forms of Eastern philosophy, is that it unveils behind the urgent realm
of good and evil a vast region of oneself about which there need be
no guilt or recrimination, where at last the self is indistinguishable
from God."
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