The Audacity of Conviction

By Joba Akinpelu

Yes, indeed, the tomb of Jesus was empty the third day! Is this a myth or a reality? Despised and rejected of men as a blasphemer, was his crucifixion a murder or a sacrifice? He was revered as Son of God, Son of Man, Lamb of God, and the Lion of tribe of Judah! Did Jesuss personality actually fit the billing of these self-contradictory designations?
By inspiration? Does inspiration then automatically confer absolute literary authenticity on every ecclesiastical work selected by few individuals and published in sacred books? To what extent can we rely on this axiom?
Made from the rib of Adam? Till this very moment, every male Jew is proud of his heritage of not being born as a woman or as a slave! So is it a burden of inferiority crises to be created as a woman? Most importantly, was Eve really a by-product from the rib of Adam?
Homosexuality! The battle rages on, for and against. But is apparent attraction between homosexuals based on sexuality or due to other compelling reasons that result in same-sex couples walking down the aisle to tie the conjugal knot?
These and other spiritually burning issues were deeply x-rayed. The work exposes barriers already set up assiduously by traditional beliefs, ideas, and schisms of religious dogmatisms. It challenged time-honored views and rent asunder many a false claim. Therefore, it is not unexpected if its contents attract relentless criticisms and opposition from circles of those already sided with rigidity and hypocrisy of philosophy and religions, particularly those professionally involved in the trade of perfidy.
Truthfulness can never breed doubters nor idiosyncrasies of fundamentalism, whose main goal was to enslave minds of other human beings. It is on this basis that readers may recognize the true worth of this work.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Feb 28, 2017
• ISBN: 9781524670306

Joba Akinpelu

Joba Akinpelu is a prodigy of sort in the field of his career of choice – accounting practice. As a professional accountant he is consummately prolific and passionately buoyant. Leaving no stone unturned, he rose to the pinnacle of his career and was awarded fellowship of Institute of Chartered Accountants of Nigeria. A versatile essayist, he knows how to deliver his pinpoint analysis of issues. Therefore if fusion of passionate commitment and talent can produce any great work, Joba must have leaned on both ends to produce a thought provoking work such as this book. His background as a Christian notwithstanding, he still went beyond the shackles of religious dogmatism to shatter all artificially constructed walls which bars the way for those who are genuinely seeking after the truth. For him the sky should be the beginning of our quest for knowledge, namely those who want to gain recognition of Truth. Always motivated to seek and investigate, probe and search, he finally struck the Source that explains why we are here on earth as human beings, in which the fate of everyone is suspended as if by a thousand threads.

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© 2017 Joba Akinpelu. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

Unless otherwise noted, all scripture quotations are taken from the King James Version of the Bible (public domain).

Scripture quotations marked (NIV) are from the Holy Bible, New International Version (NIV), copyright 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Scripture quotations marked (NLT) are taken from the Holy Bible, New Living Translation, copyright 1996. Used by permission of Tyndale House Publishers, Inc., Wheaton IL. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Scripture quotations marked (RSV) are from the Revised Standard Version of the Bible, copyright 1946, 1952, 1971 by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of Churches of Christ in the USA. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Published by AuthorHouse  02/10/2017

ISBN: 978-1-5246-7031-3 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-5246-7029-0 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-5246-7030-6 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2017901652

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Contents

Preface

Chapter 1 So What Is the Place of Faith in All This?

Chapter 2 The Fascism of Pseudo-Knowledge

Chapter 3 So What Is Time?

Chapter 4 The Trumpets of the Last Judgment

Chapter 5 Spirit Is Life

Chapter 6 The Rib of Adam

Chapter 7 Man, Know Thyself

Chapter 8 Habits First, then Propensities

Chapter 9 And in the Beginning Was the Word

Chapter 10 The Son of Man

Chapter 11 The Lamb of God

Chapter 12 The Empty Tomb—Myths and Realities

Chapter 13 The Prodigal Son

Chapter 14 Not like the Scribes

Chapter 15 Homosexuality: Gays, Lesbians – What Lay Behind It?

Chapter 16 Leadership in Crisis

Chapter 17 The Graven Image

Chapter 18 Entrepreneurship: Roles and Responsibilities from a Spiritual Perspective

Chapter 19 Visiting the Sins of Tyrants on Our Infants

References

How difficult it is to proclaim great truths to human beings in a way they can grasp so easily!

PREFACE

F rom start to finish, this book promises to engage the attention of as many readers as possible—first, on account of its incisiveness, and second, on depth of what it contains. Of course, each chapter may be considered independently, not necessarily as a follow-up on discussions in previous chapters yet still interconnected. The intention is to touch on as many spiritually burning issues as possible and engage the minds of objective analysts. Against this backdrop I admit humbly that it is difficult to represent the contents of this work concisely by way of introduction.

Again, even if the book may be classified among the genre of classical philosophical essays, the contents of it lean more toward spirituality than religiosity. Readers are therefore in for deep intercourse with new vistas of knowledge, of real knowledge connected with life and existence. It is not unexpected that some will inwardly resist certain views and opinions voiced here, as a result of prejudices already hammered into their subconscious from other schools of thought and carried about like a trophy of priceless worth! Yet some may be jolted back to real-life experiences if they gain new recognitions of truth, not only by the bluntness of its presentation but also by the childlike audacity and style of its expressions. For there is no single vitality involved, nor is it worthy of true humanity, if everybody follows firmly established opinions of others in pretense of religiosity, without subjecting its underlying principles to the strictest scrutiny. I therefore expect every reader of this book to subject the work to the same objective scrutiny.

Today many simply assume that Jesus is the Son of God and also the Son of Man, even though there is no credible evidence in the Christian Bible to support this age-long belief. However, what surprises most is general attitude of fellow human beings to belief in what they do not even understand. To cap it all, the vast majority have never really taken the trouble to investigate what they are supposed to believe, not to mention how such beliefs came about. I have written this book to share life experiences that have come to my attention in the course of my seeking in the Light of Truth.

What fires my final resolve to publish this work was the kind reception I got from a few friends and acquaintances who read my initial drafts. For example, one of them betrayed a deep sense of apprehension and worry, were the contents of what I wrote in The Empty Tomb—Myths and Realities to get out there, because in his opinion the arguments presented were deep enough to change the way of thinking of a few elect. By elect he meant believing Christians. Another bluntly confessed he was confronted with a kind of gapless logicality of facts that put many of his old beliefs to the test, an unavoidable developmental process most human beings would rather avoid, since this puts them under the constant disquiet of not wanting to let go of errors they still desperately cling to, because it is a cheaper alternative. Unfortunately, every cheaper alternative is a tinsel, invariably. Whereas what humankind should embrace in its stead is pure gold.

But without wishing to admit it to themselves, people suffer from a common malady that has become widespread in this present era: fear of the simple naturalness of truth. But why should human beings be afraid of the Truth? As human beings we carry the spark of Living Truth deep within our souls. Yet we are afraid of the Truth on account of wrong teachings we have imbibed as religious dogmas from our childhood days. This clearly shows that the servants of all religions have been breeding blind faithful’s like themselves, who were believers out of mere habit and mere puppets on account of the unsoundness and insecure foundations of their teachings. He whose teaching is sound and secure need not fear its being exposed to scrutiny by others, simply because Truth is eternal and unchangeable. Indeed, what is true in one religion must of necessity be confirmed as true in other religions. Therefore teachers who ban their followers from testing and investigating propagate poison for others to drink. Of course the motive is very clear—selfish gains of such teachers.

In this book I point it out repeatedly that despite constant changes in fundaments about life on earth, making it mandatory to extend the frontiers of knowledge, church authorities have always been too eager to oppose any such extension of knowledge, even after it has become too obvious that the church’s dogmas are no longer valid. Simply put, the church wants to enjoy dominion over the souls of humankind for as long as possible. The fear is that churchly power will be eroded once people gain knowledge that can make them free. And thanks to its absolute power during the dark ages, the church could whimsically condemn anyone that challenged its authority to be burnt at the stake. As recently as 1633, Galileo, the astronomer and mathematician, was tried and incarcerated for having the audacity to challenge the church and warn it against accepting a literal interpretation of the scriptures.

Knowledge, however, is a product—both spiritual and scientific knowledge. As such, it is perishable like all other products. But while scientists are ready to test and accept new ideas that supersede previous theories, theologians and church authorities always resist every extension of spiritual knowledge, forever basking in the glory of bygone civilizations and how the spiritual history of that period has been recorded for posterity. Sensing that such accounts contain knowledge gaps that they themselves cannot explain, they have branded the sacred books as mythology. With this, every dissenting view is silenced even before being voiced.

Unfortunately, anything branded as mythology holds down the spirit and clips its wings. The spirit can never soar upwards to gain connection with liberating truthfulness. The church’s adherence to such practices for decades is a clear indication that it will forever be removed from real knowledge. This means its leaders are worse-off than those in an earlier epoch of spiritual development. Yet they think they have more knowledge just because they can recite the plasms of David or sayings of Solomon from memory. What they fail to take into account, however, is that people of that time received every new revelation in childlike simplicity, which was better than the present era: less detailed explanation was required.

Realizing that it could no longer cope with the demands of genuine seekers who want better explanations, the church soon came up with a subterfuge as a palliative and alternative to gloss over obvious knowledge gaps. One such palliative is the idea that every statement in the scriptures was received through inspiration. Using this as a shield of defense, everything contained in the scriptures is absolute, should be taken in blind faith, and requires no further test for validity. The question, however, is this: Can inspiration make up for deficiencies and limitations inherent in every work produced through human intellect? Most crucial, can it be a subterfuge in situations where the intuitive faculty of human beings has been laboring under the domination of their intellect ever since their fall to the temptation of Lucifer?

A human, however, should never forget one fact, that he is a spirit, and being a particle of that which is spiritual, he carries the urge to develop deep within his soul. This urge to develop has never left him for a second from the beginning of his existence, nor will it ever leave him to remain at a standstill on one spot for all eternity. Therefore, this urge to develop is often expressed in the search to gain recognition of Truth anew every day. Unfortunately, this natural urge to develop has always been curtailed and obstructed through firmly established dogmas of various religions. Many such dogmas, traditions, and make-beliefs have been relentlessly exposed and torn apart in this work.

We stand in very perilous times of the world’s harvest. A whole chapter of this book is dedicated to explaining the Trumpets of the Last Judgment, from a purely spiritual perspective.

Today, one important thing to recognize is that time does not change, because time is eternal. It is we human beings that change as we mature into time, as we learn from it, and as we recall from the record of it, because time has recorded everything and lost nothing. This important concept is discussed in chapter 4 of this book.

Who is humanity? Where do we come from? How do we get here from our spiritual home—Paradise? What is our purpose on earth and in Creation in general? And is the statement in the sweat of thy brow thou shalt eat the bread of life really a blessing or a curse? But how can we know the right answers to these questions if we do not even know who we are or the position we occupy in Creation? Indeed can we advance in real knowledge if we cannot discriminate sharply between the various elements that make us enjoy conscious experiencing as creatures here on earth—namely as spirits, each of us wearing the cloaks of a soul body and a physical body? Answers to these and many more incisive questions will be found in topics like Man, Know Thyself; The Rib of Adam; and Habits First, then Propensities.

Any serious reader would ordinarily expect that the Synoptic Gospels in the Christian Bible would contain more of the Word of the Lord, namely, that Jesus spoke to humankind, but unfortunately the opposite appears to be the case. Rather, what the evangelists concentrated all their attention on and gave more preeminence were the historical life and family background of Jesus and at best exaggerated accounts of miracles He performed. Yet the purpose why Christ came was to give human beings the Holy Word. So for a serious, earnest seeker, searching for the Word of Christ in the Bible is like searching for the proverbial needle in the rubble of haystacks. In this book, however, we are still able to select from the Word what we perceive represents the sense in which Christ would have given such statements as closely as possible. Such are discussed in the chapter titled Not like the Scribes. In it we share our reflections on the Word of the Lord in the Light of Truth.

Homosexuality! This topic actually deserves a whole book to discuss it in full details. Therefore, what is contained in this chapter is still a tip of the iceberg. Nevertheless, the attempt is good x-ray of what lies behind this conduct that is currently spreading like a wildfire. In this endeavor, I am able to debunk the general assumption that homosexuality is a sexuality-motivated factor as an oversimplification of an otherwise complex syndrome. This chapter is a very bold attempt to demystify the subject, and many may find the knowledge shared quite elucidating.

All other topics discussed in this work are reflections on the current state of affairs on earth, howbeit from a spiritual perspective. This explains why I include other important topics like Leadership in Crisis; So What Is the Place of Faith in All This?; Visiting the Sins of Tyrants on Our Infants; The Graven Image; and others that readers will find quite useful for their spiritual contemplation.

—Joba Akinpelu

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CHAPTER 1

So What Is the Place of Faith in All This?

A re there any dichotomies or inherent linkages between faith and agitation for secularism, on one hand, and between religion-fundamentalism and justice, equity, and fair play in the running of public affairs in an egalitarian society on the other hand?

No matter the background of the analyst, he is bound to find out that the marriage between religion and faith was one consummated in heaven. For this reason, any attempt to decipher line of demarcation between the two will remain frustrated forever. So what has faith got to do with religion and religion with faith? Can we link world religions with the escalation in human suffering on earth today? Has blind faith contributed anything to the wars and attritions, murders and arsons, deceit and betrayal, treason and felony, slavery and oppression, oppression and subjugation, terrorism and assassinations, colonialism and pillage, etc., being unleashed on humanity?

Religion may mean different thing to different people. In this book we define it as the art and science of making people believe in what they do not understand at all. Why is this so? Simply on account of the fact that most never bother to find out how the religion they accept came about. They simply accept the faith as we met it, either blindly or at best as a welcome habit passed down from parents to offspring.

Faith has thus become synonymous with lack of clear, logical thinking and understanding whenever religious precepts defy simple naturalness of truth. The foundation of every religion on earth today was built on blind faith of this sort among adherents. This, of course, may throw up a controversial dialogue in academic circles. So be it. Therefore, it is not far-fetched that this discussion may raise disquietude within the circles of modern-day Pharisees in guise of religious intelligentsia. Of course they all have ready-made theories to complicate the confusion of already confused adherents.

He who still doubts that the prestige, power, and means of livelihood of these hordes of spiritual highwaymen is desperately dependent on the blind faith of adherents must be a sleepwalker. But most of the blind, ignorant sheep following false shepherds into an abyss of desolation are no great loss anyway, because they have given themselves up as lazy servants in the vineyard of their Lord.

The historical facts connected with how world-famous religions gain prominence and power is not an enviable one, judged by what we read in history books. It should not be strange to us any longer that some of the most heinous atrocities were committed in the name of religion. This eventually gave rise to a reaction of militant secularism. One need not hark back to the Middle Ages or the sad times of agonizing tortures, as well as so-called witch burnings and other crimes. Nor need one touch upon the numerous burnings at the stake, the tortures and murders which have to be charged to the religious authorities. Unfortunately, only their form has changed. The real kernel of it has endured.

Militant secularism is, however, gaining global attention. For example, a recent judicial pronouncement in the United Kingdom affirmed that prayers before council meetings are unconstitutional. What militant secularists are advocating thereby is that religious faith should be reserved to the private affairs of individuals. Their fear is that introducing or adopting religious precepts as among the cardinal principles by which to steer affairs in the public domain will reverse gains already achieved by modern free societies. In their opinion, it can never be guaranteed that any religion will promote equity, justice, and even fairness in modern egalitarian societies. Their fear is justifiable.

Nevertheless, militant secularism must never be given free rein to deny people freedom to belong to any religion of their choice. Frankly speaking, it is difficult to establish any link between real acts of worship of Most High God and formal praying at secular meetings. This formal form of praying has indicated too clearly how unthinking we human beings have become in matters to do with the worship of God. For prayer belongs to worship.

Few may find it difficult to lend support to the dissenting voices coming from secularist circles, to judge by recent happenings. Let us cite just a few things militant secularists have agitated against.

In Islamic sharia jurisprudence, adultery is a sin that attracts capital punishment, namely death by stoning. However, it seems that this law has been fashioned to make it so difficult, in fact nearly impossible to obtain evidence to convict a male adulterer, because according to the letter of that law, not less than two must testify that they witnessed the deed. But where is that sane male adulterer who will undertake fornication in a market square? If peradventure the act done secretly and with utmost circumspection resulted in unwanted pregnancy, the woman is visited with the full wrath of the law. The one-sidedness against the female gender in this law is too apparent, thus an easy target for militant secularists, especially in the modern world, where paternity of a child is easily ascertainable with clinical accuracy through a simple DNA test.

In papal Christendom, the church vested authority on their priests to grant forgiveness of sins to sinners who confessed before them. Now a serial rapist comes to confess the dastardly crime before a priest, who grants him forgiveness and exhorts him to sin no more. Meanwhile, the victim of the rape is another parishioner. In papal doctrine, the priest is prohibited from either reporting the crime to the police or divulging the confession to the victim.

How can human beings live comfortably with that type of duplicity and lack of conscience? How can a church use its doctrine to cover up crime and pervert the course of justice? These and similar questions have been raised by militant secularists.

Meanwhile, both the serial rapist and his accomplice, the priest, are commonly yoked in one delusion of blind faith that their deeds are in alignment with the incorruptible Justice of Divine Laws. How human beings have sunk to the extent that a church denomination can elect to set itself above the Laws of Creation, for spiritual comfort of its parishioners is yet to be fully appreciated.

In the UK democracy, bishops of the Church of England have permanent seats in the House of Lords, unelected! This tradition was based on the superiority and dominance of one faith over others, since bishops and imams of other prominent religious groups have not been allocated similar recognition in same highest decision-making institution. Yet Britain always prides itself as a most idealistic democracy, which others should endeavor to copy and emulate.

So does faith have any linkage with all this? True, the numbers of officially recognized religions worldwide today may be few, but the number of denominations and splinter groups is almost unbelievable. Coming to Africa the huge number of sects and denomination in Christendom presents an excellent case study for academicians. In Nigerian Christendom alone, not less than twenty five thousands church denominations have their names officially recognized by the Registrar of Companied limited by guarantee, not to mention the mushroom churches not yet registered under the law of the land. Prophet Mohammed predicted that there would be seventy-three sects in Islam but that only one would be his. By the dawn of the twenty-first century, the number of sects had exceeded 150! Have all these mushrooming sects been founded on genuine service to the Most High or established for material gains?

Every Catholic considers his faith far superior to that of a Protestant. On the other hand, a Protestant thinks he has a better grasp of Christian principles than a Catholic. Yet the only thing this dichotomy has achieved is puerile—merely spawning one more denomination looking down upon others with incorrigible buffoonery and arrogance. In this superiority complex, each group continues to argue and shout from the rooftops to attract attention to itself. And this is the only thing real they have achieved so far.

Thus, as Prophet Mohammed once prophesied before Abbot Paul during a brief sojourn in the latter’s monastery in Syria, Christianity soon became nothing but a continuation of Judaism, although Judaism itself had come to a standstill some two thousand years earlier, even before Jesus came. For this reason, it failed to recognize the Messiah in Jesus! And as Abd-ru-shin once said: Pleading humanity was robbed of the precious jewel which Christ Jesus brought to all who long for it.

When Jesus came into this world, it grieved Him profoundly to find the souls of human beings darker than anticipated. And when He stood before humanity, no one recognized Him or His high Mission, nor did anyone ask after Him … and yet we needed Him, all of us without one single exception! Meanwhile, the number of true seekers after the Truth He brought was diminishing by the day, in contrast to those who opposed It, namely those who feared the Light and sought to avoid It. Unscrupulously the priests had usurped power over the souls; they acted arbitrarily, exploiting people for their own selfish ends.

And so the Truth Bringer, the Living Light, the Love of Almighty God was murdered by tyrannical human beings! The whole process leading to His murder was based on sordid schemes of human vanity, vengeance, hatred, betrayal, falsehood, incendiarism, and kindred dark motives—instigated and unleashed by religious leaders and earthly representatives of temples and synagogues of His time. Thus a Judas must be bribed by a Caiaphas to deliver Christ into the bloodthirsty hands of a priestly caste, and a Pilate must commit a judicial murder! What a mockery of justice all this was, merely to massage the egos of decayed humanity?

The yet unresolved question was, why should the Most Sublime God approve of this most sordid, dubious means to call men back from their senseless descent to the bottomless pit? The most unfortunate part is that most human beings glibly accepted the explanation offered them by those who schemed to cover up this crime, namely that it was exactly what God wanted, so that the sins of those who believe in it would be easily forgiven. Most refused to see this as the trap it was. As a result, no other contrary explanation, no matter how true and logical, is acceptable to modern humanity. This is how we burdened ourselves with wrong useless belief that barred our way to ascend to the Luminous Heights.

Nevertheless, the call still rings out once more: What is the place of faith in all this? And yet the Truth is always consistent with perfect logic and simple naturalness, because it is eternal. Indeed, whatever could be bent was no longer the Truth!

But if this most exalted doctrine of an easy and broad road to attain forgiveness of sins was true, why did Christ warned repeatedly against it, citing it as broad way that leads to perdition? One thing is certain though: the Lord is not mocked! And mocking includes disobeying His Holy Laws. But the Lord is not mocked! This is a warning that will bring fulfillment to all creatures in God’s Creation. And the day of this reckoning is not far off.

Abd-ru-shin also warned us:

Man should not believe in things he cannot grasp! He must try to understand them; for otherwise he opens wide the doors to errors, and with errors the Truth is always debased. To believe without understanding is just indolence, mental laziness! It does not lead the spirit upward, therefore, we are to test and investigate. Not for nothing does the urge to do so lie within us. (In the Light of Truth: The Grail Message)

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CHAPTER 2

The Fascism of Pseudo-Knowledge

He who is inwardly bound will remain a slave, even if he were a king. —Abd-Ru-Shin

O nce upon a time the pope was the most powerful politician under the guise of a world-acclaimed ideology—the Christian religion. And through the ranks of monks and cardinals, an organic religious cult was firmly established behind monastery walls. Slowly but surely, the ideology gained widespread dominance over the souls of humankind. With skill, the new leaders usurped powers after the demise of imperial powers that preceded them. And a new ruling clique soon emerged.

Church doctrines were firmly enshrined, and woe betide anyone who dared counter the least of them. Only a lucky few got away with long imprisonment. The not so unlucky find themselves face-to-face with death before they knew it. Burning at the stake was the usual ultimate price! Heresy in those dark days attracted more severe penalties than treasonable offenses in modern states. With brutal fists, the church used sophistries of religiosity to slow the progress of humanity. It stood against gaining further insights to how Creation is governed by its natural Laws, since no one can attain such knowledge through scientific theories or intellectual postulations.

One of the most widely celebrated cases in mind was that of Galileo, a seventeenth century astronomer and mathematician. Galileo had the audacity to challenge the church and warned it against accepting a literal interpretation of the scriptures, which interpretation put planet earth at the center of our solar system, meaning the sun revolved around it. Convicted of heresy in 1633, he died of heart palpitations in 1642, as a result of harsh measures taken against him whilst under house arrest. Today, the heresy against which he was fiercely opposed and persecuted has become a common knowledge, so much so that an elementary level pupil knows that Galileo was absolutely right and the church absolutely wrong.

We should recall that about a century and a half earlier, Christopher Columbus and his fleet of ships ventured out and sailed across the oceans and as it were coincidentally found the New World in 1492. But Columbus was shrewd enough to know that if he returned home and claimed he had found a new world and a new people, he would be contradicting one of the long-standing teachings of the church. So he decided to bring back proof! When he arrived in Lisbon in March 1493, he had with him a couple of native Red Indians from the Americas.

To realize the import of this wise move, one may recall that the Catholic church had taught for years that the people on earth lived in the then only-known world and that they were all descendants of Noah, who left the ark after the flood with his wife and three sons, Shem, Ham, and Japheth, and their wives. They were supposedly the new generation of elements necessary to go forth, multiply, and replenish the world, after the worldwide flood destroyed and annihilated the previous evil generations of their time.

The church taught that Shem’s descendants were those who populated the Semitic lands which are known today as Israel, Palestine, and Lebanon. Ham’s descendants were the people of Egypt, Libya, and the rest of Africa. The light-skinned Europeans were the descendants of Japheth. Everything was tailor-made for such pretended knowledge.

Columbus knew he wouldn’t be long for this world if he tried to oppose the view directly that there were people who did not fit into the little box the church had created. So he decided to bring back concrete evidence to defend himself. He came back with some of the red men. Curiously, some Europeans came casually to appraise this obviously strange phenomenon, and, strange as it may sound to us today, a few even doubted that the red men were humans. Under these circumstances, we may well imagine the kind of danger Columbus would have put himself if some still expressed high level of incredulity at the evidence presented. Unperturbed, he then wrote a couple of letters to King Ferdinand to assure him that yes, these creatures were indeed humans, strange as it might appear.

And he was right. For under this circumstance, nobody could drag Columbus before the Inquisition and force him to recant this heresy. It was hard to dispute that kind of proof, for these red men didn’t speak any known language; they were completely different!

So now what would the church do? What prospect was there of rearranging the existing doctrines to make these new people (humans) fit in? How would they suddenly account for the red race? Flabbergasted and overwhelmed, the church studied the situation for a way out of the quagmire. Yet a suitable one was hard to come by—for almost forty years. And when finally an explanation was offered, it introduced unanticipated complications.

Initially, Alexander VI, the pope when Columbus presented the Indians, ignored the confusion posed by the problem, pretending that he had more important issues to cope with. Yet this discovery raised great skepticism in the monasteries, an indication that it could not be completely ignored. Expectedly the monks began to murmur that people might exist who were not accounted for in Genesis. If that was true, then maybe some of the teachings of the Bible were not accurate—perhaps even false! How was that possible? What a scandal that would be!

Unfortunately, they did not realize that their skepticism was justifiable, indeed a healthy development that would have brought much progress if the leadership had been wise, humble, and above all bold enough to admit that their understanding was incomplete. That there were gaps in their knowledge to be filled as regards understanding of the mightiness of this wonderful Creation. It is, however, a sad commentary that this false attitude has prevailed till today. Simply put, refusal to gain knowledge has prevailed. Only its form has changed. Happily though, the church has lost its power to drag anybody before inquisitions, otherwise I too would have suffered same fate meted to Galileo today, for daring to oppose its firmly established dogmas.

Meanwhile, the skepticism raised by Columbus’s action was capable of splitting the church. This it must prevent at all costs to maintain self-preservation. Losing control of the monks would prove fatal, since they were the educated elite in those days. They were coincidentally the same group who had tried to prevent Columbus from going on the journey that led to the discovery of Americas. They told him the world was flat, and warned that if he dared to go on the voyage, he would fall off the edge of the earth.

But forty years later, Julius II, who succeeded Alexander VI, decided it was time to address this thorny issue. So Julius came up with a seemingly good explanation regarding the red men. In 1533, he presented the findings of the fifth Lateran Council: The story of Noah and his sons stands true, but just before the flood, some wicked Babylonians were cast out and sent to the Americas. This doctrine replaced the old one. So once again the vexing question was seemingly resolved. Yes, the red men did fit in the Bible after-all. They were the descendants of outcast Babylonians? Perfect!

However, the cardinals failed to foresee two new posers thrown up by this theory. First, how did the outcasts get to the Americas? And second, the worldwide flood must have spared some human beings, including the wicked Babylonians. This of course is the paradox of a liar who must always remember all previously invented lies, otherwise he is soon exposed to the world as a liar, as copiously demonstrated in this case.

The truth, however, is that without wishing to admit it to ourselves each human being carry deep within his soul certain element which needs further clarification concerning some of the things we think we know already, when compared with sober realities of daily experiences, as we encounter them each moment, every hour anew. And under most favorable circumstances, we are always at a loss as to how to resolve contradictions we encountered through honest seeking. Therefore man’s intuitive perception continues to labor under the domination of his intellect since literal interpretation of the sacred book no longer suffices. And blind faith never helps anybody! Simply put, humanity needed more than what is being offered by tenets of our current faiths.

Sadly the church never came up with superior explanations. For instead of supporting expansion of frontiers of knowledge that would have brought further enlightenment, it did the exact opposite by curtailing it! It undermined and agitated, disunited instead of uniting, pulled down instead of building up, and in a rage of mad ambition subjugated the progress of humankind toward higher spiritual consciousness. The church capitalized on the existing knowledge gap in its teachings to unleash all manner of extraordinary measures and compromises, including murder of Jesus, so that people might continue to believe the unbelievable and thus follow the broad road blindly like a metaphorical sheep following a blind shepherd. Some not only became disillusioned; they