Chapter 2
A Closed Assembly
© Eso   A.B.

After the cry “My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken me?” had echoed around the globe without finding any cliffs of empathy to respond with an echo, the cynics—in response to an unresponding God—celebrated victory by introducing God as Money. The seemingly impossible came true: the more money one had, the more giving one could do.

Money brought feelings of anxiety, which no amount of praying helped alleviate, unless one first bought one’s self a self-addressed present, known as a “consumer product”. Such presents became everyone’s huggie. Children illustrate such a product and its attraction best, because the first pennies that children save, they spend on candy or a toy http://www.lochtefeed.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/john-deere-toy-tractor.jpg.

Because in the days of the Byzantine Empire the Earth was still covered by woods, and gold could be scoured from river beds, it was not difficult to persuade people that a pile of gold was pleasing to God and was worthy to represent him or her. The Incas are said to have had a flower garden with flowers made of gold. The Tartars of Russia made the onion domes of their chapels in the wood of gold leaf. Because Money was God and behind money stood gold, and gold had a shine of gold, it was found by most everyone to be pleasing. Though somewhat of a mystery, God was nevertheless believed to be real. It was a long time before God lost his-her shine, and there arose the need to invent a machine that printed paper money to inflate God into an ever greater balloon.

In the course of time, however, the inflated or Realist God came to be called ‘Sataniel’, a word derived from the word ‘Saint’ by moving around a letter or two. Thus SAINT became = SATIN = A + a + a few juxtaposed letters, and, Voila! SAINT became SANTA, and he, in turn, became = SATAN. Among students who study how the mind works, this phenomenon is called“pareidolia”. Pareidolia is commonly used in all art forms; for example, music http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bk76HPpbhZE&feature=related; and faces and figures we see in clouds or bark of wood. Painters love pareidolia http://neosurrealismart.com/3d-artist-gallery/3d-artworks/3d-fantasy-art/383d_Mona_Lisa_DaVinci_B.jpg

Pareidolia is a common phenomenon in times of troubles and chaos. People see armies, horses, crosses, and corpses move across the skies. Sometimes pareidolia tells true, sometimes not; if one wishes to make use of it, it demands that the content of the package is examined at least twice to see if you see the same thing twice.

One can never be careful enough when one comes in contact with pareidolia. ‘Money’ is a pareidolic phenomenon that quickly connects to Satan. One of the reasons for this is that a private hoard of gold or money soon erases all signs of equality, which is the meme of democratic life in the wild. If the memes for equality go missing, one becomes anxious and manifests through ‘imaginings’ that may lead to theft—just as hungry birds in winter steel all the seeds left lying about. For humans such theft discovers the police come after them and insist that the money is not theirs. This is where trouble begins: inequality is enforced, with the aid of law, which is contrary to the nature of biology.

An extreme form of pareidolia is deception—as when Basil was facing death, but heard the Emperor of Byzantium offer him life. One cannot tell the one from the other. Both Basil and Jesus choose death. To them it was better to be killed (by the ‘moneyed’ Emperor) in order to maintain solidarity with the slaves, their followers. If they failed to self-sacrifice themselves, their community was likely to become further demoralized and humiliated. The Emperor would replace the frog head of the Sphinx with the head of a lion.

Arch- and neo-Christian stories agree that Basil and Jesus prevailed in their visions of how life is to be. There is, however, one difference in approach among these two Christianities: for one the object is to become part of the ritual; for the other the object is without transcendence. The photographer Eddie Adams captures something of the quality of death which lacks the quality of either sacrifice or transcendence http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Nguyen.jpg This is because the image is so naked that it leaves nothing to the wood, which is the dwelling place of the imagination. To kill a human being on the street is as naked and nothing an event as discarding a plastic bag of chicken entrails among bent Coca-Cola cans in a ditch by the road in the desert.

In the oral story, in which Basil hears the roar and feels the heat of the fire, he is seen (even by the emperor’s daughter) to be troubled. The Realist Emperor has exposed Basil to his self-deception and dependency on God for a saving act of love. He surely has no money to bribe or tip his executioners.

The crowds of Bogomils, who have come to watch Basil’s confrontation with secular power, are no less troubled than Basil. Perhaps the crowd is even more troubled, because Basil has an imagination and a will that takes him into the future, but it does not. Basil puts emphasis on his trust that God will respond to his love and trust by sending angels to save him. Indeed, his last words are: “Look! My cloak flies up to the sky!” http://completewellbeing.com/assets/2012/03/trip-to-venus-625x310-n.jpg  As if the angels had come and are hovering above him. To everyone's surprise, God takes the world's first photograph.

The crowd appears to be less certain of cloaks as angels, because  all their lives they have seen angels painted with wings. This is evident the moment the crowd of Bogomils parts to let their leader, Basil, approach the fire. The crowd does not rise up against the Lord Emperor or scream for the guards to desist, or lock arms—as we may imagine Basil to have expected and the emperor may have feared they would.

Nevertheless, to this day the crowd insists that the cloak of Basil carries on his fight by means of a heat-imprinted pareidolic image http://shroud2000.com/ImageGallery/Set2/029_29.jpg of him.

In the case of the written story of Jesus of Nazareth, the crowd is presented as no less doubtful of the reality he preached. In fact, the crowd is explicitly, even photographically, cynical of Jesus’ make believe (Mat. 27:42): "He saved others, but he can't save himself!... Let him come down now from the cross, and we will believe in him….”

 

 [Mark 15:16-47] “The soldiers led Jesus away into the palace (that is, the Praetorium) and called together the whole company of soldiers. They put a purple robe on him, then twisted together a crown of thorns and set it on him. And they began to call out to him, ‘Hail, king of the Jews!’ Again and again they struck him on the head with a staff and spit on him. Falling on their knees, they paid homage to him. And when they had mocked him, they took off the purple robe and put his own clothes on him. Then they led him out to crucify him.

"A certain man from Cyrene, Simon, …was passing by on his way in from the country, and they forced him to carry the cross. They brought Jesus to the place called Golgotha (which means The Place of the Skull). Then they offered him wine mixed with myrrh, but he did not take it. And they crucified him. Dividing up his clothes, they cast lots to see what each would get. It was the third hour when they crucified him. The written notice of the charge against him read: The King of the Jews.

"They crucified two robbers with him, one on his right and one on his left. Those who passed by hurled insults at him, shaking their heads and saying, ‘So! You, who are going to destroy the temple and build it in three days, come down from the cross and save yourself!’ In the same way the chief priests and the teachers of the law mocked him among themselves.”

Incidentally, Simon may not have carried the cross, but beams of wood to the firepit. One of the thieves may have been thrown into the pit before Basil was. The other may have been thrown in after Basil, just to distract the exact sequence of events from the memory of those present.

“At the sixth hour darkness [smoke from the fire] came over the whole land [Hippodrome] until the ninth hour. And at the ninth hour Jesus cried out in a loud voice, ‘Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani?’--which means, ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’

"When some of those standing near heard this, they said, ‘Listen, he's calling Elijah.’ One man ran, filled a sponge with wine vinegar, put it on a stick, and offered it to Jesus to drink. ‘Now leave him alone. Let's see if Elijah comes to take him down,’ he said. With a loud cry, Jesus breathed his last. The curtain of the temple was torn in two from top to bottom [into a left and a right side]. And when the centurion, who stood there in front of Jesus, heard his cry and saw how he died, he said, ‘Surely this man was the Son of God!’”

In the neo-Christian story, the emphasis of the last moment is diverted from Jesus to the rending of the curtain, and the centurions and their assertion that Jesus is an object, a body, even the Son of God.

These diversions from the events are the result of two Christian religious ideologies, one left, one right:

1) Basil pretends that God’s physical response to his love will save him; whereas,

2) in fact, Jesus ends life with an anxious question and a scream.

It is the scream that today permits the spiritual powers in service of secular powers to interpret that Jesus “believes in God” as an object rather than an Act, and that the scream proves the existence of God as an object. No matter how difficult it may be to grasp, the replacement of Basil with money (the centurions throwing dice over who gets his cloak) is, as gamblers say, right on the money. Some argue that such was asserted by Jesus himself at the time of his resurrection by the fact that he ate fish (Luke 24:3-43)—which stands for money [not ‘life’ as some assert].

http://www.lds.org/scriptures/nt/luke/24.38-43?lang=eng

“41 And while they yet believed not for joy, and wondered, he said unto them, Have ye here any meat? 42 And they gave him a piece of a broiled fish, and of an honeycomb. 43 And he took it, and did eat before them.”

The Bogomil Christians assert their love for God, but remain doubtful whether He is a physical being. For them He is rather an 'Act'. Therefore, they allow the representatives of secular princes to keep the money. It is meant as a dismissive gesture.

In political terms, the story of Basil a) represents a democratic belief (ye shall take the money from the wealthy), while story b) represents parliamentary rule, i.e., a circle that closes in on itself (legislates taxes and keeps the money for itself) and excludes the men and women of the wood from their assembly, by withholding from them education, even pretending to them that stories a and b, are essentially one and the same.