In his groundbreaking book, Le messie et son prophète: Aux origines de l’Islam, Edouard-Marie Gallez lifts the veil and lets us see the historical roots of Islam. He shows it originating in a vast movement of messianic Jews called “Ebionites” or “Nazareens.” These non-rabbinical Jews accepted Jesus as the messiah, but not as the divine Logos. 

Gallez shows how the scrolls and fragments found in the Qumram caves by the Dead Sea and in the vicinity of Massada illuminate the ideology behind this movement of Jews, who were eager and willing to follow the messiah into holy war, believing they would thereby save the world. 

Unlike rabbinical Jews, who looked to the past, these men looked forward to an earthly utopia that would come only after mass exterminations. Like the later Muslims, they believed that the messiah had not died on the Cross but had been taken up alive into heaven and was ready, whenever the conditions were right (i.e., when Palestine was no longer in the hands of the impious and the Temple had been rebuilt), to return to the Mount of Olives and lead them to the subjugation of the entire world. The Nazareens, like the Muslims, forbade pork and wine…


The first tome of this magisterial work of about a thousand pages deals with the Essenes, the Qumram documents, and the Jewish Messianic movement from its rise in the 2nd-century B.C. to its culmination in 7th-century Islam. 

The second tome is devoted in large part to the birth of Islam, the attempt to erase the Nazareen legacy, and the traces of it that remain in the Qur’an, which started as a compilation of Nazareen lectionaries (“qery’n,” to which the Arab word qur’an corresponds). These lectionaries were initially given to the Arab Qorechites to indoctrinate them into the messianic ideology and engage them in the conquest of Palestine.


The Muhammad of History

The last chapter of the second tome is entitled “The Historical Muhammad: a Portrait” and based on sources dating from the 7th century. Let me start with this extraordinary chapter and then return to survey how the two tomes lead up to this “Portrait.”  Gallez states that Muhammad’s first wife Hadija, a rich widow who was older than he, was a cousin of the Nazareen priest Waraqa ibn Nawfal, so she was probably a Nazareen herself. Waraqa was also a distant cousin of Muhammad’s and played an important role in their marriage. (This leads me to wonder whether Muhammad himself was not part Jewish, but Gallez does not raise this question.) Waraqa had indoctrinated the Arab tribe of the Qorechites, who were previously Christian, into joining the Nazareen cause, which was to regain Jerusalem by force of arms and bring about the messiah’s prompt return. When Chosroes led a Persian expedition into Palestine in 614, thousands of rabbinical Jews gave him assistance (one Jewish encyclopedia cited by Gallez puts their number at 24,000), and so the Persian [Iran] general, in return for his easy victory, gave them control over Jerusalem. In the same expedition, Muhammad (a surname which in the Nazareen language meant “one who desires to please God”) probably led his Qorechite warriors into Jerusalem, but the rabbinical Jews, who had been installed as masters there, expelled him and his Qorechites, as well as the Nazareens. Even so, Muhammad had now seen that it was possible to conquer Jerusalem.


The Byzantine Emperor [Heraclius] began his re-conquest of the region in the early 620s, so the Persians abandoned Jerusalem in 622. Gallez thinks it likely that Muhammad’s emigration or hegira towards the oasis of Yatrib (Medina) was the result of this Christian re-conquest. The Chronicle of Sebeos (660) reports that in Yatrib, Muhammad, as a Nazareen follower of the Torah — prohibited wine — and had a Jewish woman and her lover stoned to death for adultery. In Yatrib he won over the surrounding Arab tribes by preaching to them that God had promised Palestine to Abraham’s descendants and, since they themselves were the descendants of Abraham, they would inherit that promise if they returned to the worship of the one God of Abraham and of him alone. This preaching was intended to make them abandon their Christian religion. Contrary to what Muslims say, the conversion of the Arabs had started three centuries earlier, and Maximus the Confessor had written about them in 632, that among them “the error of polytheism had disappeared.”

Muhammad’s success is confirmed by the Chronicle of Jacob of Edessa (before 692) and also by Doctrina Jacobi (before 640). In the latter we learn that some rabbinical Jews arriving in Yatrib in 625 or 627 found the Arabs there already impregnated with the Nazareen ideology and their chieftain Muhammad “proclaiming the coming of the messiah” with such charism that they were all united firmly under his authority. The Chronography of Theophane (who died in 817) states that in 622 some rabbinical Jews known to the Byzantines attached themselves to Muhammad: they saw him as one of “their prophets,” the one who, as Malachy 3:23 foretold, would precede the messiah. In the 8th-century Secrets of Rabbi ben Yohay, a Jewish apocalypse, there is a passage going back to 650 where a rabbinical Jew still believes the Messiah will come if Umar rebuilds the Temple. (Would rabbinical Jews, I wonder, have attached themselves to a “prophet” who wasn’t at least part Jewish? Again, Gallez does not raise this question.)


Muhammad and his Arab troops soon began making incursions into Palestine to “liberate” it and restore “the House of God.” He and his followers called themselves “muhajirun” or “emigrants” living out a new Exodus. Others called them “Hagarenes” and “Saracens,” but they themselves kept this unique name of “muhajirun” for at least three generations.  This was the name they used in official documents, such as the Charter of Medina (Yatrib), a pact which included Jews (the Nazareens) in their “Umma,” or confraternity of war. Gallez explains that “muhajirun” meant “those who have left their country or emigrated in order to fight for God.” It is only in 775 that they start calling themselves “muslimun” and that “islam” replaces “hijra.” In 629 Muhammad led an attempt to conquer Jerusalem, but was defeated by the Byzantines at Muta, southeast of the Jordan. He died a few years later, probably in 634, the same year that Sophrone, Patriarch of Jerusalem, reported that the Arabs were boasting about “conquering the world.”


Read more:

https://culturewars.com/news/jewish-origins-of-islam



Long live Charlie Hebdo... and the crass freedom.

What was this about?

We cannot afford giving god, allah or any superior-being the credit for having created the universe in which our planet has been a small grain of sand for the last 4.6 billions years. 

We are in trouble. We are about to loose much of nature, we are about warming the planet beyond our comfort and we have the power to destroy ourselves, the whole of humanity, about 5 times over with nuclear thingies. And we still pray uselessly to Shitface in the sky above. Are we nuts?

Please don’t answer this. I know. We’re nuts. But can we come to some sort of reality and understand that the human history is full of crap, designed to give power to some people over others, whether we are Jews, Muslims, Christians, women, men and dogs. We have made ourselves masters of this planet natural evolution and we’ve understood bugger all about the processes, including those that give us our power of thinking. Molecular thinking. God is an idiot that we invented to manage the fear of death… He ain’t going to improve your status. 

So what was this all about?

Scientific secularity is the only way to progress, without the shackles of our woeful stupid history. But sciences cannot be absorbed nor controlled by politics and religions. By now if you still doubtful, politics is a mugs' game in which we’re invited from time to time to place a bet on one or another sociopathic moron. And while secularity has been a force since Enlightenment, our growing mercantile activity is destroying the planet for hamburgers. We’re intelligent but not smart.

We have to come to terms with our loneliness in the universe and learn to live with each others and nature without any religious values. We simply have to be humans in a natural evolving environment. 

As we lie through arts for entertainment, we have to be truthful with sciences.

Welcome to the real world.

GL.


Read from top...


Meanwhile, be prepared to weather a storm of religious bullshit…

As we are already through one fifth of the "21st century", the religious mobs see their power control slipping. Thus they try hard to ensure the sociopath we elect as US president is either Catholic or an Evangelical Nut, here placed against the reality of natural evolution, but in the dangerous glory of US exceptionalism. It’s hard to know how even a Joe Biden, a Catholic, can understand any scientific questions without being conflicted and confused. Oh I know how he does it: he is a politician... You work this one out... We also know that some media, including some idiotic Russian media, still push a social “religious” agenda with stupid articles, possibly with the sole purpose to annoy Mr Leonisky.

Here comes Claudio Chianese:

Modern science, born as a reaction from below to the unquestionable truths of the Scriptures, is now removed from the doubts that come precisely from below; raised to the rank of untouchable faith by a tireless army of televised priests. For this reason today it is necessary to defend science from itself, from the tendency to transform itself into a congregation of theologians, extraneous to society and intolerant of democratic control.


Читайте больше на https://english.pravda.ru/science/145345-die_science/


EXCUSE ME? Religion invented BIG BROTHER! Hell…. "The unquestionable truths of the Scriptures"? Please, the nonsense of Roald Dahl makes more sense and contains more truth than the “sermon on the mount”. “Modern science, born as a reaction from below to the unquestionable truths of the Scriptures” is crap. Some smart people could see that religious beliefs were bullshit, thus decided to explore reality with observations. It was not reactionary, but totally PROGRESSIVE (in the true sense of the word, not its political application).

Claudio Chianese quotes one of the great American generals of the last century, Omar Bradley who died, almost 90, in 1981... In a 1948 speech, Bradley had said:

     "We have many men of science, but few men of God. We have understood the mystery of the atom and rejected the Sermon on the Mount. The world developed genius without consciousness.”

So? "The world developed genius without consciousness" is a stupid meaningless statement. Please explain genius and explain consciousness...

After 2000 years of religious lies including religious wars, some ENLIGHTENED people awoke to the fact they have been told porkies. Even the sermon on the mount is a gross abuse of human capable understanding.  

Believe in god if you will, but keep this illusion/delusion of Him (god is male) away from the political levers and scientific understanding of spacial naturalness. Sciences are not easy. They demand logical complex computations and an absence of a-priori (absence of faith) — unlike religion that says god made the universe in six days and had a rest on the seventh some 6,000 years ago… How can you believe this scriptural shit?

Understanding the “mystery” of the atom is far more important than farting around with god’s moods — "His" (god is a male) love and wrath… because god does not exist. In order to support his hollow thesis, Claudio Chianese quotes Paul Feyerabend (we have mentioned him there) who wrote in 1975:

  "Without chaos there is no knowledge. Without frequent renunciation of reason there is no progress. [...] We must therefore conclude that, within science, reason cannot and should not dominate everything and that it must often be defeated, or eliminated, in favor of other instances. There is not even a rule that remains valid in all circumstances and there is nothing to which one can always appeal.”

This was not an appeal by Feyerabend to believe in god! What Paul Feyerabend did was to suggest the scientific processes and philosophic understanding also needed some “invention” through lateral thinking and imagination to progress. And guess what? This was Einstein's baby… “Imagination is better than knowledge” is the incomplete quote seen on T-shirts… But without knowledge there is no imagination. Meanwhile, please understand that the so-called knowledge (knowing-without-questioning) of the scriptures is an imagination killer: believe or else. It's loony.

In sciences, one asks questions and there are answers that are plausible, verifiable and repeatable. Enters the telephonic "miracle" of the shoe-phone... The major problem with religions is that they believe in perfection which is a scientific anathema. Perfection is frigid and dogmatically uncreative. Nowhere to go. Feyerabend knew this. 

So, we need to expose the idiocy of Claudio Chianese who has a narrow point of view which is Western Christian centric to say the least. It’s awful to think that an adult like Claudio — I guess he is above the age of 14 — still believe in Santa Claus.

Go away…

Egypt’s president has spoken of his belief in the “sacred” nature of religion during a discussion about free speech and the publication of cartoons depicting the Prophet Mohammed at a media event with France’s Emmanuel Macron.

The French leader and President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi held a joint press conference at the Elysee Palace during a state visit by the Egyptian president on Monday.

While the two praised one another for their efforts in challenging Islamic extremism, they also expressed opposing views on the role of religion and free speech, stemming from the circulating of controversial cartoons depicting the Prophet Mohammed, which many Muslims find blasphemous.

 

Read more:

https://www.rt.com/news/508926-france-egypt-macron-sisi-cartoons/

 

Please, Freedom of expression is far more "sacred" (important) than the image of a prophet who was only a human controller of ideas at a specific time of history... Yes we agree, the images from Charlie Hebdo are low class, crass, crude, idiotic and childish... Meanwhile, read from top...

 

We, dumb Westerners, had the same discussions about Christianity more than 200 years ago — discussions we should have had more than 1700 years ago when the lies of Christianity were being formalised under Constantine (way before Mohammed was born). This image (below) from 1913 was part of our coming to terms with the repression of evolving human intelligence — a repression coming from religion:

 

The Crucified Venus is an expression of Norman Lindsay’s belief that Christianity is a repressive force: clerics and puritans are shown nailing up the goddess of love. The drawing was shown in Melbourne in 1913, provoking such hostility and debate that it was first removed from, and then reinstated in, the exhibition. It was later destroyed in a fire.

A preparatory pencil sketch for The Crucified Venus was on show in Glorious Days, on loan from the Norman Lindsay Gallery, National Trust of Australia (NSW).

 

Extract (from Gus's private collection):

 

 

 

The full image:

 

Rather than attract attention to your exclusive sacredness, let humanity be more human... Don't worry about the images. Worry about the guns.

France's Macron defends arms sales to Egypt despite rights concerns

French President Emmanuel Macron says French arms sales to Egypt would go ahead despite its poor human rights record. At a meeting with that country's president, he said Egypt's fight against terrorism was paramount.

 

Read more:

https://www.dw.com/en/frances-macron-defends-arms-sales-to-egypt-despite-rights-concerns/a-55846151

 

Freedom of expression is the necessary evil of understanding who we really are.

 

Selling weapons is only a balance sheet gymnastics. It won't help in the "fight against terrorism".

 

Read from top.

 

Note: Luther hated the Muslims as well, but slightly less than the Jews...

 

 

Read also: http://www.yourdemocracy.net.au/drupal/node/34711