On the horizon is an approaching religious and cultural furore so contentious, any clash of civilizations may have to wait. On one side, a manuscript titled: The Final Freedoms, against all the gravitas religious tradition can bring to bear.

The first wholly new interpretation for 2000 years of the Gospel/moral teachings of Christ is on the web. Redefining all primary elements including Faith, the Word, Baptism, the Trinity and the Resurrection. This new interpretation questions the validity and origins of all Christian tradition; focusing specifically on marriage, love and human sexuality, it overturns all natural law ethics and theory. At stake is the credibility of several thousand years of religious history and moral teaching, and will certainly impact other fields of intellectual inquiry.

What first appears a counter intuitive challenge to the religious status quo is worth closer examination; it carries within its pages ideas both subtle and sublime, what the theological history of religion either ignored, were unable to imagine or dismissed as impossible. An error of presumption which could now leave ‘tradition’ staring into the abyss and humble all secular, atheist speculation. This new teaching has nothing whatsoever to do with any existing religious conception known to history. It is unique in every respect. What science and religion have agreed was not possible, has now become all too inevitable.

Using a synthesis of scriptural material from the Old and New Testaments, the Apocrypha , The Dead Sea Scrolls, The Nag Hammadi Library, and some of the world’s great poetry, it describes and teaches a single moral LAW, a single moral principle, and offers the promise of its own proof; one in which the reality of God responds directly to an act of perfect faith with a individual intervention into the natural world; correcting human nature by a change in natural law, altering biology, consciousness and human ethical perception beyond all natural evolutionary boundaries. Intended to be understood metaphorically, where ‘death’ is ignorance and ‘Life’ is knowledge, this personal experience of transcendent power and moral purpose is the ‘Resurrection’, and justification for faith. Here is where true morality, called righteousness begins.

Here then is the first ever viable religious conception capable of leading reason, by faith, to observable consequences which can be tested and judged. This new teaching delivers the first ever religious claim of insight into the human condition, that meets the Enlightenment criteria of verifiable and ‘extraordinary’ evidence based truth embodied in action. For the first time in history, however unexpected, the world must now measure for itself, the reality of a new claim to revealed truth, a moral tenet not of human intellectual origin, offering access by faith, to absolute proof, an objective basis for moral principle and a fully rational and justifiable belief!

This is ‘religion’ without any of the conventional trappings of tradition. An individual, spiritual, virtue-ethical conception, independent of all cultural perception, contained within a single moral command and single Law that finds it’s expression of obedience within a new covenant of marriage. It requires no institutional framework or hierarchy, no churches or priest craft, no scholastic theological rational, dogma or doctrine, stripped of all myth and ‘worship’ requires only conviction, faith and the necessary measure of self discipline to accomplish a new, single, moral imperative and the integrity and fidelity to the newly created reality.

If confirmed and there appears both the means and a growing, concerted effort to test and authenticate this material, this will represent a paradigm change and advance in the moral and intellectual potential of human nature itself; untangling the greatest questions of human existence: consciousness, meaning, suffering, free will and evil. And at the same time addressing the most profound problems of our age.

While every day, from every television screen, newspaper, radio and web, the limitations of mankind are becoming both obvious and ominous by the failure to successfully address and resolve the most pressing problems facing the modern world, threatening humanity and the earth itself, with this revelation, we are offered a way out.

Providing the ‘means to ends’ this new teaching is asking humanity, choose the future you prefer? The status quo, where existing religious traditions, mired in their own contradictions, corruption, hypocrisy and hocus-pocus, offer little but pretensions and divisiveness, and where existing political process can only feebly respond to the growing chaos of more war, terrorism, economic turmoil, environmental degradation, injustice, spin and whitewash, natural disaster, plague and pandemic; or learn to comprehend that human nature, prisoner to its evolutionary root, exists within fixed limits of understanding, and by taking new personal and moral responsibility, in a single change of mind, heart and conduct, by faith, transcend those limits and blow the status quo strait to oblivion.

Trials of this new teaching are open to all and under way in many countries, colloquial evidence already suggest confirmations are taking place. For those individuals who can imagine outside the cultural box of history, who have the moral courage to learn something new, to stand against the stream of fashionable thought and spin and will TEST this revelation for themselves, an intellectual and moral revolution is already under way, where hope meets reality and the ‘impossible’ becomes inevitable, with the most potent Non Violent Direct Action any human being can take to advance peace, justice, change and progress.

Published [at the moment] only on the web, a typeset manuscript of this new teaching is available as a free [1.4meg] PDF download from a variety of sites including:

http://www.energon.org.uk

“I do believe ultimately, in terms of establishing truth, in objective means, that is, if it’s based on a personal experience, if it’s nothing but this personal experience and you can’t offer grounds that everyone can evaluate, I don’t trust that…”

When Chris asks her what if the FRMI (machine gauging the love in her brain) was flatlined, thus contradicting her feelings:

Well, then “You trust the subject.” Mrs. Goldstein responds that trusting her subjective love of her husband is different than trusting a subjective view of “the nature of the universe.”

That sounds like a pretty convenient argument to me. But why oh why must it be so cut and dry. Why can’t we start from the premise that it’s all subjective and only analyze the endgame.

Yesterday in my first visit to the MET, I experienced for the first time, the works of El Greco. In his painting View of Toledo I found more truth about the nature of the universe than a scientific photograph of that city could give me. The gallery label read: “it seeks to portray the essence of the city rather than to document its actual appearance. In Aristotelean terms, it substitutes poetic for historic truth.”

What’s the endgame of the truth you seek? What are your principles and do you strive to wear them or embody them? Mrs. Goldstein trusts her own rapture when it comes to Love because the endgame of her marriage has turned out well. Helen Keller was religious and her endgame was to change countless lives. Bill gates is an atheist and his endgame has been to change countless lives.

It’s like the Beatles song says, “Whatever gets you through the night.” Whatever it takes to get you through that darkness, just be ready for the Rosy-fingered Dawn of Homer – and of the good.

So that is the proposition I bring to the betting parlor of Pascal. I will strive to live up to dawn of my principles, and if it turns out – even though I passed on worshiping the big guy – there is a man upstairs, my wager is he will nice enough to let me duck under the velvet rope.

I am an atheist, but it terrifies me to think of what my life would be like had I not grown up Christian. The metaphysical questions Christianity allowed me to explore as a child are very much who I am.

I remember that as a child, I had wondered about the nature of heaven. I knew as people aged, they changed. And to think that somebody could lose who they are in age, and then be sent to heaven that way was disturbing. Heaven seemed to be a personality archive, and to function properly, surely it must archive everybody at every state of their lives. This lead me to ask questions about when people could be said to change, what a moment was (because to say there was a version of us every year, every month, every day, every hour, every second, was unsatisfying), what change was, etc. I did come up with some strange notions too, I concluded that a functioning personality archive would be of most benefit to good people who lived the longest, and how there must be an infinite number of any one of us in heaven and hell, and that even as I was thinking about this, these thoughts were changing me and I had my ever replenishing souls being taken away (and probably having my questions answered by getting confirmation of my idea, which would lead to further change and more need to archive, which was problematic!). I can laugh now about how silly it is, how elaborate a system I ended up creating to preserve my notion of heaven being a personality archive. But some questions it lead me to ask have helped me develop my secular ideas.

One doesn’t need religion to ask questions, thinking about science (and science fiction) certainly has aided my development in similar ways. But religious perspectives are often so developed and interesting. I kind of hate how difficult it is for me to relate to religious perspectives now, because of how easy I find it to just dismiss religion and think no further.

(I’m kicking myself for not having read Betraying Spinoza, even though several years ago I had checked it out from the library.)