#Jewish Apocalypticism

[zenosanalytic]

I haven't read the books but I HAVE watched the HBO series, and I can say that the series' cosmology(god being usurped by a human who became an angel and took on the name Metatron, then enforced a tyranny on all of reality) is a fusion of Jewish Enochian apocrypha and Gnosticism(specifically: Metatron in HDM is a fusion of the Enochian Metatron and Gnostic Yaldaboath).

VERY Bscl: Enoch's a character in the bible whose fate can be interpreted as being translated into heaven while still alive. Jews who took this reading developed a mythology around him being the "Most Holy" person ever, eventually becoming an angel due to his holiness, and then coming to out-rank all the OTHER angels by becoming "The Voice of God", Metatron, again due to his holiness. Eventually this belief got extreme enough that Jewish religious authorities even started pushing back against it as verging on heresy(it's been awhile since I watched it but I THINK This Is Dr. Justin Sledge's Video On Enoch/Metatron? It's a really interesting topic!).

But Anyway, tl;dr: Christianity grew out of the same esoteric(and syncretistic) Jewish traditions as Enochianism was an older example of, so I just assumed he was swapping one Jewish esoteric strain for another as the foundation of The Church in Lyra's World. Completely writing Jewish ppl out of existence is still a Bad Look tho(and like: are there ANY Jewish analogues on ANY of the other worlds? I can't remember seeing any in the series. Obvsl there are Jews in Will's world since that's OUR world, but we never meet any. Also-Also can I just say: Hilarious that, with all that's different, Texas is just THERE, somehow XD).

Something occurred to me about the HDM universe... I'm not sure Jesus exists? The Magisterium is obviously meant to be Christianity. They're clearly an Abrahamic religion, and the language they use is Christian-inflected rather than Jewish or Muslim (priest, church, Inquisition), but now that I think of it, I don't think they ever use the word Christian. I also don't think they ever mention Jesus. The whole point of Jesus was that he died to forgive people of their sins, right? You wouldn't think you'd need to cut children's souls out to clear them of original sin in that case, or they'd at least mention why accepting him isn't sufficient. While I am not up on my Bible verses, I don't remember anyone referencing anything past the Old Testament either.

So is the Magisterium somehow an evolution of the medieval church without the whole Jesus thing? And that leads me to my next question, what's going on with Judaism?

[punkcaligula]

2023 READING LOG

JANUARY

-> Books:

HURSTON, Zora Neale; Their Eyes Were Watching God

WILLIAMS, Tennessee; A Streetcar Named Desire

-> Essays & articles:

CHRISTENSEN, Joel; How do chatbots dream of electric Greek heroes?

DYHOUSE, Carol; Why Are We So Afraid of Female Desire?

EDWARDS, Stassa; A Little Madly: Hysteria at the Moulin Rouge

HOOKS, bell; Romance: Sweet Love

LAING, Olivia; NYC blue: what the pain of loneliness tells us

LIEBERMAN, Jeffrey A.; “The Miracle Cure”: A Brief History of Lobotomies

LORDE, Audre; The Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power

SHUSHAN, Gregory; Near-death experiences have long inspired after life beliefs

STADONILK, Joe; We’ve always been distracted

TÁÌWÒ, Olúfémi; The idea of ‘precolonial Africa’ is vacuous and wrong

WYPIJEWSKI, JoAnn; How Capitalism Created Sexual Dysfunction

FEBRUARY

-> Books:

DOUGLASS, Frederick; Narrative of the life of Frederick Douglass

WINTERSON, Jeanette; 12 Bytes: How We Got Here, Where We Might Go Next

-> Essays & articles:

BLACK, Bob; The Abolition of Work

BURDEN-STELLY, Charisse; How Black Communist Women Remade Class Struggle

COBB, Michael; Bigmouth Strikes Again

GOODLAD, Lauren M.E.; Now The Humanities Can Disrupt “AI”

HALBERSTAM, Jack; Towards a Trans* Feminism

HARVEY, Katherine; Medieval babycare

ROTHFIELD, Becca; A Body of One’s Own

RUKES, Frederic; The Disruption of Normativity: Queer Desire and Negativity in Morrisey and The Smiths

STRINGER, Julian; The Smiths: Repressed (But Remarkably Dressed)

VENKATARAMAN, Vivek V.; Lessons from the foragers

MARCH

-> Books:

AMADO, Jorge; Gabriela, Clove & Cinnamon

-> Essays & articles:

ALEXANDER, Amanda; Making Communities Safe, Without the Police

BOURDÉ, Guy; The philosophies of history

ELLIOTT, John H.; An Europe of composite monarchies

ERNAUX, Annie; A Community of Desires

HARCOUT, Bernard E.; Policing Disorder

JABBARI, Alexander; After the mother tongues: what we lost with Persianate modernity

MANTEL, Hilary; Anne Boleyn: witch, bitch, temptress, feminist

MANTEL, Hilary; Holy disorders

MANTEL, Hilary; Night visions

MANTEL, Hilary; No passport required

MANTEL, Hilary; The shape we’re in

MINER, Horace; Body Ritual among the Nacirema

RUSSEL, Francey; What It Means to Watch

WEBB, Claire Isabel; Cosmic vision

APRIL

-> Books:

MISHIMA, Yukio; Sun and Steel

OLADE, Yves; Bloodsport

-> Essays & articles:

BATESON, Gregory; A Theory of Play and Fantasy

CÉSAIRE, Suzanne; The Great Camouflage

CHARALAMBOUS, Demetrio; The Enigma of the Isle of Gold

DAVID, Kathryn; How Stalin enlisted the Orthodox Church to help control Ukraine

SINGLER, Beth; Existential Hope and Existential Despair in AI Apocalypticism and Transhumanism

WYATT, Justin; The Smiths, Pop Culture Referencing and Marginalized Stardom

-> Short stories:

ELLISON, Harlan; The Man Who Rowed Christopher Colombus Ashore

SAYLOR, Steven; The Eagle and the Rabbit

MAY

-> Books:

PLUTARCH; Life of Sulla

-> Essays & articles:

BRAUDEL, Fernand; Clothes and fashion

CHAMPLIN, Edward; Nero Reconsidered

GARTON, Charles; Sulla and the Theatre

HAY, Mark; The Colonization of the Ayahuasca Experience

HSU, Hua; Varieties of Ether: Toward a history of creativity and beef

PROBYN, Elspeth; Cannibal Hunger, Restraint in Excess

STAR, Christopher; How the ancient philosophers imagined the end of the world

TELUSHKIN, Shira; Meet Eva Frank: The First Jewish Female Messiah

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valley_of_Hinnom_(Gehenna)

The Valley of Hinnom is first mentioned in the Hebrew Bible as part of the border between the tribes of Judah and Benjamin (Joshua 15:8). During the late First Temple period, it was the site of the Tophet, where some of the kings of Judah had sacrificed their children by fire (Jeremiah 7:31). Thereafter, it was cursed by the biblical prophet Jeremiah (Jeremiah 19:2–6). In later Jewish rabbinic literature, Gehinnom became associated with divine punishment in Jewish Apocalypticism as the destination of the wicked. It is different from the more neutral term Sheol, the abode of the dead. The King James Version of the Bible translates both with the Anglo-Saxon word hell.

The Valley of Hinnom is the Modern Hebrew name for the valley surrounding the Old City of Jerusalem and the adjacent Mount Zion from the west and south. It meets and merges with the Kidron Valley, the other principal valley around the Old City, near the Pool of Siloam which lie to the southeastern corner of Ancient Jerusalem.

[laurajameskinney]

ferris: sending me books on jewish apocalypticism

me: thats awesome. heres uhhhhh a picture of a really muddy dog

[mediaevalmusereads]

Anti-Christ: Two Thousand Years of the Human Fascination with Evil. By Bernard McGinn. Columbia University Press, 1994.

Rating: 4.5/5 stars

Genre: religious history, theology

Part of a Series? No.

Summary:  McGinn demonstrates how Antichrist has often reflected the human need to comprehend the persistence of evil in the world, and examines how it has haunted popular imagination in both the form of individuals--such as Nero, Napoleon, and Saddam Hussein--and groups--Jews, heretics, Muslims.

***Full review below.***

Content Warnings: discussions of antisemitism and anti-Islamic belief

Since this book is non-fiction, my review is going to be structured a little differently than usual.

McGinn’s book is a historical survey, tracing the origins and evolution of the antichrist legend from ancient history to the modern day. Using a number or primary sources ranging from Biblical commentaries, political propaganda, letters, histories, plays, and poems, McGinn argues that antichrist has, over time, been used to embody various anxieties and theological views about evil and the end of the world. Though this book does not cite every appearance of the antichrist in literature, it selects a good representative body of work that shows how different historical eras contributed to the evolution of the antichrist legend.

I very much appreciated the wide scope of this book and was delighted by the way McGinn could cover such a broad historical scope yet still make each chapter feel incredibly detailed. It's very clear that McGinn has done a lot of research and has methodically presented what he feels best represents each era he writes about; as a reader, it's hard not to be incredibly impressed.

I think McGinn's strongest chapters are the early ones in which he covers Jewish literature and developing Christianity before the Middle Ages. This isn't to say his later chapters are bad, but I did get the sense the McGinn was writing in his wheelhouse early on, as those chapters felt much richer and varied in the way they approach history and literature. Later chapters also tend to focus almost exclusively on (Western) Europe, and while I understand that Europe is kind of a hotbed of Christian development and conflict, I was still a bit curious as to how non-European Christianity was handling the legend of the antichrist. Maybe Europe is a special case in that it took a particular interest, so I don't know how valid this critique is.

All that being said, I don't think I'd recommend this book to casual readers. Though the scope is large, McGinn doesn't waste time explaining much historical context, so you have to go in with at least a basic understanding of Christian history. This isn't to say this is a failing for McGinn; rather, I don't want to give the impression that this academic book is "pop history."

TL;DR: Anti-Christ is a fascinating survey of the history of the anti-Christ legend from about 50 BC to the late 20th centuries. Readers with a scholarly interest in the history of Christianity and theology will surely appreciate this book, and I can't recommend it enough for anyone wanting to do work on apocalypticism.

[mirandamckenni1]

The History of Yahweh - Storm God to Israelite Deity This episode contains a paid partnership with BetterHelp. Get 10% off your first month: https://ift.tt/rjs5Ct0 For early, ad-free access to videos, support the channel at https://ift.tt/mGAI3PE To donate to my PayPal (thank you): https://ift.tt/dDMER51 - VIDEO NOTES Justin Sledge is currently a part-time professor of philosophy and religion at several institutions in the Metro-Detroit area and a popular local educator. His YouTube channel is "Esoterica": @TheEsotericaChannel - LINKS Buy "The Early History of God" by Mark Smith: https://amzn.to/44ezTes Buy "The Origins of Biblical Monotheism" by Mark Smith: https://amzn.to/3JyyZ32 - TIMESTAMPS 00:00 Pronunciation of YHWH 02:33 The Origin of YHWH 07:01 Oldest References to This God 18:00 How Translation Influences the Bible 20:00 Evolution of YHWH's Influence 27:55 Assimilation of the Gods 30:59 From Many Gods to One God 37:09 Link Between Religion & Intoxication 40:19 How Different Regions Worshipped YHWH 51:48 What is Jewish Apocalypticism? 54:47 The Introduction of Jesus 1:01:50 How Jesus Became Identified With YHWH 1:09:03 Paul’s Mystical Visions of God 1:12:41 Is This Theology Gnostic? 1:18:52 Christians Believing Jesus is YHWH 1:23:17 What is the Demiurge? 1:35:43 A More Attractive Christian Narrative 1:40:28 Recommended Books - SPECIAL THANKS A special thanks to my top-tier supporters on Patreon: Tom Rindell James Younger, DDS - CONNECT My Website/Blog: https://ift.tt/mHZ3os9 SOCIAL LINKS: Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/cosmicskeptic Facebook: https://ift.tt/L3wim4k Instagram: https://ift.tt/KDQFVr6 TikTok: @CosmicSkeptic The Within Reason Podcast: https://ift.tt/9EWReNF - CONTACT Business email: contact@cosmicskeptic.com Or send me something: Alex O'Connor Po Box 1610 OXFORD OX4 9LL ENGLAND ------------------------------------------ via YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K3koeHN-6mU

[aparrotandaqrow]

Heck more than 2,000 years, and it's especially rich that they're trying to dismiss us given Jesus was a bit player in a centuries-long cultural and geopolitical conflict bookended by the events that led to Hanukkah and then 2000 years of diaspora and the wholesale destruction of our homeland on the other! Why do these people think there was an atmosphere that favored messianic cults at that time?? How about over 200 years of colonization, oppression, and having the last independent Jewish rulers (who took power because of the Maccabean revolt) replaced by a family of corrupt assholes hand-picked by the Roman occupiers, who represented the most powerful empire the world had yet seen? Pretty fucking hopeless situation without a couple messiahs walking around, eh? Jesus was just the only one who got popular, because the Romans had the poor sense to murder him in a sufficiently public and dramatic way, and then three hundred years later decided his followers' brand of apocalypticism was useful after all! By rights the whole nativity story and all of Christ's narrative ought to be understood as no more than a footnote in the story of Hanukkah!

Please excuse us if we're not falling over ourselves to celebrate the birth of your daydreaming apocalyptic wacko instead of observing a pivotal moment in our 3300-year-long struggle for independence and autonomy from violent imperial colonizers in our homeland. Even if you have made it excessively corporate and secular in order to make it easier to colonize us.

Happy first day of the war on Christmas everyone

Yearly reminder to gentiles that

1. Jews do not recognize Jesus as anything but a human man who probably existed in some capacity at some point

2. We do not celebrate his birthday. He is just some guy to us.

3. It is not a personal attack on you if we don’t celebrate your favorite holiday.

4. Chanukah is not the most important Jewish holiday, its just the only one you know by name because it happens roughly around Christmas time.

5. You can say or do whatever you want, we just think you’re annoying. At the end of the day, you’re still gonna get school or work off on Christmas and Easter while I have to chose between my religion and my schoolwork every year on Yom Kippur and Rosh Hashanah.

6. You are not the victim. However, unfortunately you are usually the main character.

[bottheologian]

Uncovering the Hidden History: What the Dead Sea Scrolls Reveal about Judaism and Christianity

The discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls in 1947 was one of the most significant archaeological finds of the 20th century. These ancient manuscripts were found in the caves near the Dead Sea and contain some of the earliest known versions of the Hebrew Bible. But what did the Dead Sea Scrolls reveal about Christianity?

First of all, it's important to note that the Dead Sea Scrolls were written by a Jewish sect known as the Essenes, who lived in the area where the scrolls were found during the Second Temple period. While the scrolls themselves don't mention Christianity, they do shed light on the religious and social context in which Jesus and his followers lived.

One of the most interesting things about the Dead Sea Scrolls is that they reveal a diversity of beliefs and practices within Judaism during the Second Temple period. This challenges the notion that Judaism was a monolithic and static religion at the time of Jesus. Instead, the Dead Sea Scrolls show that there were many different groups and ideas circulating within Judaism, including messianic expectations and apocalypticism.

Some scholars have argued that the Dead Sea Scrolls provide evidence for the existence of a community similar to the early Christians. For example, the scrolls contain references to a "Teacher of Righteousness" who was opposed by a group known as the "Wicked Priest." Some scholars believe that this conflict may have been a precursor to the conflict between Jesus and the religious authorities in Jerusalem.

The Dead Sea Scrolls also contain fragments of texts that are similar to passages in the New Testament. For example, there is a fragment that contains a version of the Beatitudes, which are the famous sayings of Jesus found in the Sermon on the Mount. There are also similarities between the scrolls and the Gospel of John, particularly in their use of light and darkness imagery.

Overall, the Dead Sea Scrolls provide valuable insights into the religious and social context of the time of Jesus. While they don't provide direct evidence for the existence of Christianity, they do challenge our understanding of Judaism during the Second Temple period and provide tantalizing hints about the diversity of beliefs and practices that existed at the time.

Dead Sea Scrolls #Second Temple period #Judaism #Christianity #religious history #biblical archaeology

[asinglesock]

it's dualism! pessimism! vindication! imminence!

[charlesoberonn]

That's probably because Christianity started out as a cult.

During the 1st century CE, Judaism was going through a bit of a sectarian crisis. The "Temple Cult", the main religious institution centered around the temple in Jerusalem, was getting weaker. Many groups downplayed its importance or rejected it outright, especially groups outside of Judea.

A lot of these sects would be what we would call cults. Small, high control groups that isolated themselves from wider society.

One of the most popular movements among these splinter groups was called Apocalypticism. The idea that the reason the world was full of suffering is because it was ruled by evil demonic forces. But someday soon God would bring forth a savior, a Messiah, to defeat evil and establish a godly kingdom.

Another phenomena that existed at the time, this one as part of the Hellenistic world, is called Mystery Cults. The mystery cults were cults devoted to a single divine savior figure. They would perform baptisms to symbolize rebirth with their saviors, celebrate a passion in which the savior deity defeats death and evil, and eat special meals representing their covenant with the savior, often symbolically eating the savior's flesh. These mystery cults often combined elements of Hellenistic religion and another culture. Like the cult of the Persian divinity Mithras, or the Egyptian gods Isis and Osiris, all three had their own cults.

Christiniaty was essentially in the right place and time to combine elements of both Hellenistic mystery cults and Jewish apocalyptic sects to create a new religion. And many of the cultish elements of its dual origins (changing your identity for the savior, believing in the coming end of days, isolating yourself from non-believers) stayed with it for the last 2000 years.

[apilgrimpassingby]

I saw this post scrolling through @litost-opinions and decided to elaborate with an ancient history of Judaism. That and I just like talking about this part of history

So, what can really be called Judaism only began in the Babylonian Captivity (586-539 BC). The religion of the Israelites/Judeans was Yahwism; they worshipped YHWH from the Jerusalem Temple and had the Torah, but many were polytheists (even a quick skim of Judges or Kings should make this clear) and most accepted that gods other than YHWH existed, even if they weren't worthy of worship. It was only in the Babylonian Captivity that monotheism decisively won out.

Then we get Second Temple Judaism after the Temple was rebuilt. By Jesus' day, it had gone through development (this is when Ezra, Nehemiah, Esther, Daniel and many of the Minor Prophets were written, plus the deuterocanonical books like Tobit and Sirach) and turned into five schools.

The Sadducees. They were based out of the Temple and emphasised animal sacrifices, preferred to read the Tanakh (Torah/Pentateuch + Nevi'im/Prophets + Ketuvim/Writings = Tanakh) literally and did not use oral tradition, rejected a future resurrection of the dead, believed in free will and fully accepted Greco-Roman culture.

The Pharisees. They were based out of the synagogues and emphasised Torah study, preferred to read the Tanakh metaphorically and used oral tradition, anticipated a future resurrection of the dead, believed in free will and selectively accepted Greco-Roman culture.

The Zealots. Pharisees who instead emphasised guerrilla war against the Romans.

The Essenes. They were based out of monastic communities (such as the one that wrote the Dead Sea Scrolls) and emphasised apocalypticism, read the Tanakh as having both literal and spiritually metaphorical meanings via their own tradition, called pesher, accepted a future resurrection of the dead, did not believe in free will and rejected Greco-Roman culture.

Minor sects like those of Jesus and John the Baptist.

Then comes the Roman-Jewish War of 66-73 AD. The Temple was destroyed, most of the country laid waste and the Jews sent into exile once more. The Zealots were exterminated, and the Sadducees, Essenes and minor sects wiped out in the carnage. The Pharisees survived because a focus on Torah study allowed them to pack up and move in a way the monastic Essenes and Temple-based Sadducees couldn't.

As for Christianity, by this point it had ceased to be a Jewish sect in any meaningful sense having, (A) rejected circumcision and kosher, (B) accepted so many Gentile converts they now made up the majority of the religion and (C) accepted its founder, Jesus of Nazareth, as the incarnate God (the Epistle to the Hebrews was most likely written 63-64 AD).

Going back to Judaism, around this time the Talmud was codified, and thus we got Rabbinic Judaism, which nearly all modern Judaism is at least nominally.

Anyone enjoyed this history lesson?

The weird thing about some of the more vocal Jewish people on this site is one the casual use of slurs (goy/goyim is a slur for gentiles) and the other is the claim to be an expert on Jewish topics even though, it's most likely that they're a Reformed Jew which some are in essence just culturally in a very loose sense as in they might celebrate the major holidays but, not really believe in what's taught.

The other thing is, contemporary Judaism is not Biblical Judaism, it's Rabbinic Judaism that had it's hard split with Christianity after the Destruction of the Temple and the formation of the Jewish diaspora, there is no real central authority, the closest to that is the Talmud which part teachings, part debate and part commentary and there are two versions.

In addition, most people who are commenting upon this are run of the mill Jews and not like religious leaders or experts on their religion. I have the same gripe when you have run of the mill lay people trying to act as "experts" despite only having a fairly limited amount of perspective and knowledge.

[normal-horoscopes]

do you think the religous people in the us government trying to make the rapture happen by supporting jewish people in israel (not asking your opinion on israel itself btw) is in itself them trying to cast a magic spell to end the world because to me trying to fulfill a prophecy and casting a magic spell is indistinguishable in this case except the magic spell is trying to doom the whole world

It's weird. I wouldn't feel comfortable causing the mass American Evangelical support for Israel an act of ritual magic, it's an incredibly complex geopolitical situation with far too many factors to make that call.

I am, however, extremely comfortable commenting on the role of apocalypticism in it's regard to the real world propagation of magical thinking and magical beliefs.

It's a thread you see multiple times in history. The constant resurgence of the popularity of Revelations in response to overwhelming stresses like the protestant reformation always includes an explosion of charismatic sects, mysticism, and outright magical practices. Hell, even the advent of Apocalyptic Judaism rode in on a tide of magical writing. Magic and the apocalypse go hand in hand.

[creature-wizard]

Do you have any sources on ufology being constructed around conservative christian beliefs, or could you expand on that? I mainly ask because based on what I have read it seems mostly connected to the theory that says " gods were aliens and we worshipped them as gods and they helped the human race to evolve. Without them humanity would have remained stuck in an animal like state " ( which is problematic in a lot of ways)

I remember there was a Christian writing ( book of ennoch if I'm not wrong ) which people considered to be about alien experiments and abductions, but besides that I never made a link between christianity , ufos and aliens.

You might check out the #new age to alt right pipeline tag, where I've been writing about this kind of thing for awhile. If there are other people addressing this specific issue right now, I don't know about them.

Ufology is deeply tied in with conservative Christian conspiracy theories and apocalypticism. The alleged behavior of aliens is frequently very similar to alleged behaviors of demons during Europe's witch trials, if the aliens aren't just said to be demons altogether. For those who reckon at least some alien beings as positive beings, they functionally take the role of angels. Furthermore, they are frequently imagined in a very militaristic, authoritarian light. One popular figure is Commander Ashtar, who is supposed to be a Pleiadian military commander stationed here to protect Earth from bad aliens. The Pleiadians, also called the "Nordics," are basically just Aryans In Space. Their primary enemies, the reptilians, are at best demonic figures; at worst they are worked into antisemitic conspiracy theories, and it's often outright claimed that Jewish people are more susceptible to reptilian influence. These people also tend to believe in an imminent apocalypse. Exactly what that will entail depends on who you ask, but they'll pretty much all cite the New Testament as authority sooner or later. They believe that the good and the wicked (or the "high vibrational" and the "low vibrational") will be separated one way or another, because conservatives tend to think in terms of "in-group good, out-group bad." To be sure, many of these people have some pretty unorthodox views of who Jesus was and what he set out to do, but they nonetheless center Jesus as a cosmically important figure. They pillage other people's sacred traditions for anything they think will support the beliefs they already have; they do not make any effort to understand these traditions on their own terms because they fundamentally do not care about anyone else's opinions or perceptions. They are "racially tolerant" only insofar as POC can be converted to their beliefs. They demonize nonbelievers and play the victim when they aren't taken seriously just like any other conservative Christian. They do not care about actual facts and evidence; they trust in truthiness. I hope this helps clear things up!

[zerogate]

The belief in all-round progress is based upon the wishful dream that one can get something for nothing. Its underlying assumption is that gains in one field do not have to be paid for by losses in other fields. For the ancient Greeks, hubris, or overweening insolence, whether directed toward the gods, or one’s fellow men, or nature, was sure to be followed, sooner or later, in one way or another, by avenging nemesis.

The dogmatists of progress imagine that they can be insolent with impunity. And their faith is so strong, that it has been able to survive two world wars, and several revolutions of almost unprecedented savagery, and remains flourishing in spite of totalitarianism, the revival of slavery, concentration camps, saturation bombing, and atomic missiles.

Belief in progress has affected contemporary political life by reviving and popularizing, in an up-to-date, pseudo-scientific form, the old Jewish and Christian apocalypticism. A glorious destiny awaits mankind, a coming golden age, in which improved gadgets, more grandiose economic plans, more elaborate social institutions will somehow have created a race of more virtuous and more intelligent human beings. Man’s final end is not (as all the masters of spirituality have always affirmed) in the timeless eternal now, but in the not too distant, Utopian future. In order to realize this temporal final end, the masses ought to accept, and their rulers need feel no qualms in imposing, any amount of suffering and moral evil in the present.

It is a highly significant fact that all modern dictators, whether of the right or of the left, talk incessantly about the golden future, and justify the most atrocious actions here and now on the ground that such actions are means to that glorious end. We see, then, that scientific and technological progress has produced a boundless faith in the future, as something necessarily better than the past or present. But the one thing we all know about the future is that we are profoundly ignorant of what is going to happen, and that what in fact does happen is generally very different from what we anticipated. Consequently any faith based upon what is supposed to be going to happen a long time hence must always be hopelessly unrealistic. But to act upon unrealistic beliefs is generally fatal.

In practice, faith in humanity’s progress toward a future assumed to be bigger and better than the present is one of the most potent enemies to liberty, peace, morality, and common decency; for, as recent history has clearly shown, rulers feel themselves justified by what they fondly imagine they know about the future in imposing the most monstrous tyrannies and waging the most destructive wars for the sake of the entirely hypothetical fruits which those tyrannies and wars are expected (goodness only knows why) to bear some time, let us say, in the twenty-first or twenty-second century.

-- Swami Prabhavananda (ed.), Vedanta for Modern Man

[biganimal92]

i 100% encourage anyone to correct me if i feel like i'm misappropriating my understanding of the historical aspect of either of these religions but like i guess the new testament wouldn't be considered the sequel to the bible because even though it's built on foundational ideas from the torah and it was written by apocalyptic jews during the second temple periods and the stories are ultimately about a jewish man at the time, it's not really intended to be a continuation of the ideas presented in the torah. like the old testament was more of a recorded history and doctrine of ancient hebrew people whereas the new testament is chronicling this one dude who says god's his dad and this is how you have to save yourself before the world ends and also here's how it's going to end

like during the babylonian captivity and onward apocalypticism amongst jewish people was gaining popularity due to influences from zoroastrianism and a response to the collective trauma they'd been experiencing as an oppressed and occupied demographic and this heavily influenced jesus's teachings and the overall intent of the new testament as a preparation for the end times and as a guide on how to make sure god saves your ass. like it's paired with the old testament because christianity was originally a sect of judaism during very early christianity and also like even though it's not really a continuation of the old testament it's still like. very fundamentally dependent on it because you kind of need to know what the fuck is happening because it's STILL important literature from the culture despite branching off into its own thing

like i would say then that the quran really is "the bible 2" because it's an abrahamic religion that developed entirely separately from the jewish community as a whole because muhammad pretty much did stumble upon it himself and decide he wanted to start practicing it in his own way. and this is in pre-islamic arabia so people are quite largely polytheistic and also in separate communities and tribes so him becoming interested in christianity and becoming such a large proponent in spreading what was his interpretation of it is a really huge deal actually especially since it ended up developing into a very massive religion. but even then like the quran REALLY IS just muhammad's interpretation and what he got from studying the bible in a pretty isolated environment so like would HE consider it the sequel to the bible or would he see it as "an accompanying text". is it independent of the bible or is it a direct connection to it.

what is "the sequel to the bible"

[grandhotelabyss]

The entirety of the Larry Kramer-scripted Ken Russell adaptation of Lawrence’s Women in Love from 1969 can be watched on YouTube. (I would embed the video, but it’s age-restricted unless you’re signed in.) The film seems to me not notably inferior to the novel. Despite the symbolic and theatrical non-narrative technique Lawrence adopts, he is often too prolix and analytical. The novel must have wanted to be a film all along. And stressing the visual over the verbal tilts the tale’s ideological balance away from Lawrence’s Germanic apocalypticism to something lighter, brighter. Or, as I write in my new essay on the novel:

If my criticism above implicating Lawrence in the Holocaust was too heavy and moralistic, and it was, I will conclude by suggesting that the novel’s best critics were screenwriter Larry Kramer and director Ken Russell, who adapted Women in Love into a classic film of 1969. The gay and Jewish Kramer and the Catholic Russell revenge themselves on the ultra-Protestant Lawrence’s northern apocalypse by stressing the novel’s painterly pictorialism, often drowned in Lawrence’s prose-poetic prolixity, and the arch wit of its dialogue. Lawrence’s somber Nietzschean homoerotic fascism—as relevant as ever in our epoch of Bronze Age Pervert—melts into a more campy playfulness. Onscreen, the narrative’s sexuality, gay and straight, is unmistakably a matter of bodies in sweltering or shivering contact rather than star-souls in an abstract cosmic collision. And Glenda Jackson’s Oscar-winning turn as Gudrun fills out the character with the knowing sensuality and artistic gift she sometimes lacks in the novel.

I don’t quote much criticism in my essay. From my casual glance, Lawrence criticism doesn’t seem very interesting; it looks mainly biographical, mainly political. He’s a strange writer but not a puzzling or riddling one, so he doesn’t inspire the critic to virtuoso feats of exegesis like some of the other modernists. I only cite an essay from the ’70s by Joyce Carol Oates, who, despite her indeed ’70s-style feminism, once wrote that Lawrence (and Thomas Hardy) understood “the relations between the sexes” better than Jane Austen and George Eliot. I like a good offensive provocation, but this is apples-to-oranges, an unfair comparison; Hardy and Lawrence were writing later and could be more frank.

As for anti-feminism, I didn’t find the space to quote Camille Paglia’s tribute to Women in Love (collected in Vamps and Tramps), where, weirdly, this cinephile has nothing to say about a film adaptation that seems tailor-made for her. Like Oates, with whom she otherwise has nothing in common, Paglia judges Lawrence more insightful about men, women, and sex than second-wave feminism.

Lawrence’s caricatures of feminists seem realistic again, since the current [i.e., ’80s/���90s-era] reborn women’s movement similarly veered toward fanaticism, not just among the anti-pornography and anti-beauty ideologues (today’s Carry Nations) but among mainstream activists whose obsession with feminist rhetoric has supplanted all larger philosophical or cultural concerns. I now recognize in the dissatisfied, word-obsessed Gudrun Brangwen the bright, perfect, brittle overcontrolled women careerists of the legal, corporate, and academic worlds who have risen to prominence in the last twenty years and who coolly schedule their delayed pregnancies and professional childcare by the time clock. Their destined mate is Gerald Crich, the ultimate capitalist manager, patron of the body reduced to a machine.

Very prophetic of and influential upon the anti-neoliberal anti-girlboss anti-feminism of recent years. I will end, however, with her most compelling tribute to the novel’s aesthetics. While I tend to see Lawrence in the Puritan line—why he understood the American classics so well—she emphasizes his questing multiculturalism:

One of Lawrence’s major insights, a basic principle of Hinduism and Zen Buddhism, is that words cannot possibly correspond to or fully convey ultimate truths about life or the universe. By rhythmic repetition, surreal imagery, and heightened, operatic phrasings, Lawrence uses language to break through language in ways far beyond French poststructuralism with its bourgeois pedantry and preciosity. The characters of Women in Love struggle toward understanding, their rational and verbal resources overwhelmed by influx of unsorted sensory data and by eruptions of amoral unconscious impulses.

Once again, my essay on the novel is here.