Finally, this effort is feeling conclusive, which I hoped for from the outset 2+ yrs ago. With the discovery of the socialist emergence from the "Jewish settlements in the Pale," the pure negativity of academic oligarchy the possibility of scientific rehabilitation in an aboriginal context. Cultural "fleshing" will continue with reprints of currently-relevant recently-historical experiences, often gangster, while "the Pale" experience is solidified upto present revolutionary efforts. The hope is to create a hinge with which to restore revolution as evolution after the excessively long period of oligarchic occupation -since 500BC.

Then, probably, the entire blog will be consolidated and "put to rest" with the first wikified writing about the occupy dialectic two years ago.

Merry Christmas from Caesar and Christ

The second coming will be aboriginal and pacifistic

Christ and Caesar resembled each other in that they were "people's people."  They took their "stands" with the working people and the poor to attempt to organize them to help improve the "qualities of mercy" that affect them.  In so doing, they synergized their respective cultures nearly concurrently.   Caesar was "top down" in that he attempted to synergize the Roman empire by changing its laws and institutions so that it could be strong yet beneficial. "Top-down" would be expected from a General.  

Christ, in contrast, was nearly-anarchist in that he attempted to "humanize" Judaism by replacing its 700+ highly-repressive laws to only a handful about love and respect for others, self and God.  He hoped to ultimately empower individuals, family and community to synergize surrounding society.

Both, of course, were martyred for their attempts despite being so important to Western democracy.

This comes highly paraphrased from Will Durant's Caesar and Christ, and, in my opinion, summates his volume and the Western democracy and represents the crux, pardon the term, of Western democracy (rather than its founding Durant initally dodges an "atheist bullet" by showing material that Christ may have been the product of Christian imagination, but then carefully describes Christ's life (and the beginnings of his religion) in the context of the Bible largely as fact.  

Durant trivializes Christ by describing Christ's initial Christian family as "a band" and appears to credit Church founders in succeeding centuries for the Christian religion, especially the Roman Church which he describes nearly-merely as an extension of Rome in the Middle Ages.  I should seem obvious, however, that without Christ there would be no Christianity(!) and humanity today might be purely-Roman with no resistance to the likes of Hitler or Stalin.  In so doing, Durant exposes himself as an oligarch--a likable one--who makes many useful observations from excellent research that is (unfortunately) held together with Socratic cement.

He accurately describes a three-to-four century transition from Christ's liberation movement to Christianity's institutionalization, but he hilariously calls Christ a communist in many places--communism had not been invented then! (Perhaps he saw communism as a natural phenomena rather than a synthesis.)  As a philosophic oligarchic, Durant fails to see that Christ was simply attempting to restore natural democracy.  Because oligarchic leader Plato equated democracy to anarchistic chaos, a spiritual from of anarchy, perhaps seeking to restore the aboriginal relationship with the surrounding environment--including Rome's, would then necessarily be out of Durant's scope. Nonetheless, "spiritual anarchy" correctly describes what happened: civic law was largely erased, and natural morality was restored.  Over succeeding centuries, the negative aspects of ancient Judaism were re-instituted by Christian leaders with the preservation of Jewish law as the Old Testament, and the ancient prophesies were extended, especially the violent ones, as the visions of the mad apostle John--the apostle no one talks about in public!  It was this reversal of Christ's beliefs that Durant credits for Christianity's success, not the efforts of Christ's extended family, nor its humanistic morality --as every Christian believes.

Judaism was, of course, rejected violently by the Christian hierarchy (as Christianity had been by both leading Jews and Rome), but Judaism's controlling "belief system" was preserved in the Old Testament and revived and extended, for instance, with the hellacious hallucinations of the last of the apostles, mad John.  Durant closes by describing Christianity as that last pagan invention, particularly the communion as a typically-pagan ritual cannibalism.  Christ, as I am told, however, only asked us to think of him (viscerally) when breaking bread (a symbol of brotherhood) and drinking wine (a libation); ritual sacrifice was most-definitely off the menu!

The best of Christianity is Christ's walk to organize (and admonish) his followers; a walk we literally take at times, perhaps all through life.  The best of preachers make one feel the dry Mideastern gravel under his bare feet and the internal conflicts he feels as he admonishes his disciples.  We feel his feelings as he approached his arrest, death sentence, and crucifixion at the hands of the Jewish oligarchy.  Christ's fellow Jews may have been excited or ambivalent about his new version of Judaism, but they all accompanied him to the Calvary--he was their man, the first mensch!

Important in our time is the memory (Durant describes perfectly) that Christ was not willingly killed by Pontus Pilate, nor for any Roman crime. The Roman empire caved to the Jewish oligarchy of the time whose (ill-advised) rebellion against it would lead to Jewish Diaspora.  Likewise, Rome did not hate apostle Paul; it gave him every opportunity to escape, gave him endless judicial delays, good treatment --Paul sought martyrdom, as did many early Christians.  Further, Rome's issue with Christianity was not its religion (which it would eventually adopt), but it's pacifism, something it could not afford as the many lands it colonized increasingly rose to retaliate --seemingly in concert.

Durant shows how Christ's pacifism became distorted to be some kind of guilt-ridden masochism that Rome could accept, and promote, to scaffold it's declining civilization.  Many independent priests of the time attempted a "living Christ" (as we see today), but Rome chose the incomprehensible Holy Trinity (gleaned from ancient Egypt according to Durant) at Constatine's Nicene conference . Representatives of the "living Christ" at the conference were disemboweled to assure that Rome's newly-ritualized "belief system" could create organizational alternatives as its military government collapsed.  It is exceedingly unfortunate that Christians today tend to live the very repression that Christ sought to end with images of human sacrifice (Abraham and Issac) or sexual repression (Leviticus' rules against homosexuality).