Christianity 1 New Age 0

Or: Why I've Yet To Be Convinced That We Are The Descendants of Slaves Bred By the Annunaki to Mine Gold

If you haven’t already - I’m a bit behind the curve here - I urge you to watch this car crash encounter between Christian apologist and scholar Wes Huff and ‘ancient civilisation’ researcher Billy Carson.

It’s an excruciating experience - probably best to watch it on double speed - for a couple of reasons. First, the hapless podcast host/debate moderator Mark Minard is somewhat out of his depth and is also clearly embarrassed at having one of his guests (Carson, sitting right next to him) eviscerated in front of him by his other guest. This causes him to interrupt the debate at intervals and expound well-meaningly but not very interestingly on his own half-baked views on the mysteries of the universe. You feel a bit sorry for him but you do rather wish he’d shut up.

Second, and mainly, it’s painful to watch Carson being outclassed and outgunned by someone who knows and understands his purported field of expertise so much better than he does. Carson was reportedly so upset by the encounter that he tried to ensure the video was never released. Of course, cf the Streisand Effect, this brought the incident more attention than it might otherwise have had.

I hadn’t heard of Carson until this encounter but if his biography on Wikitia (whatever that is) is to believed, he is quite the Renaissance man: Billboard music artist; tv host; musician; executive; expert in Ancient Civilisations; founder of the website 4biddenknowledge.com.

He seems to fit roughly into that category of out-there researchers - from David Icke to Graham Hancock - who argue, not implausibly, that everything the mainstream tells us about ancient history is a lie. Definitely among those lies, according to Carson, is the Bible whose stories, he claims, are no more than a mish-mash of stories ripped off from earlier civilisations.

As a Christian, I don’t find this kind of scepticism at all threatening. In fact I welcome it. This was one of the points the great poet and Christian apologist John Milton was making in his essay Areopagitica: the best way of differentiating good ideas from bad ideas, truth from falsehood, is not to shy away from any of them.

He that can apprehend and consider vice with all her baits and seeming pleasures, and yet abstain, and yet distinguish, and yet prefer that which is truly better, he is the true wayfaring Christian. I cannot praise a fugitive and cloister'd vertue, unexercis'd & unbreath'd, that never sallies out and sees her adversary, but slinks out of the race . . .

You’re not a very robust Christian, Milton is saying, unless you’re prepared to expose yourself to the arguments of people like Billy Carson. Otherwise how are you going to know what a bad idea looks like? And how are you going to learn to counter it?

Also, how are you even going to know that Christianity is right unless you’ve fully examined the possibility that you might be wrong?

This is where I find myself in agreement with the non-Christian ‘conspiracy theorists’. (Tiresome though their relentless needling and superior smugness can be, on occasion). They say things like “Well if you accept that everything else you’ve been told is a lie what makes you think your religion is the exception?” It’s a fair point. Why shouldn’t Awake Christians subject their belief system to the same form of scepticism and rigorous enquiry they apply to all the other ‘conspiracy theories’ out there?

For example:

What if that Israel Anderson guy is right and “Christianity is a cult invented by the ‘Church Fathers’ to conceal, not reveal, the truth of Jesus and His true mission, rescuing us from YHWH”?

What if Marcion - and some of the Gnostics - are right to think that the Old Testament God is an evil god, distinct from the benevolent New Testament one, to whom we should more properly refer as the Demiurge?

What if - you must have heard this one - Christianity was just a scam invented by ‘the Jews’ to keep the rest of us cowed and in thrall?

How do we know that Jesus even existed?

How do we know that Jesus wasn’t just a mythical archetype who incorporated characteristics remarkably similar to those of figures from older religions?

How can we trust the Bible when it was written by fallible humans, when we don’t have the original source material - only translations thereof - and when there are so many divergences within the various translations?

What about the Elohim? That’s a plural, guys. It means ‘gods’ not just God. So we’re talking space aliens here, pretending to be God, you credulous Christian fools…

What about the stuff they left out, like the Gnostic gospels and the Book of Enoch?

What about the things that some early Christians allegedly believed - the possibility of reincarnation, say - that got edited out after the Council of Nicaea?

What about Atlantis and all those mysterious, apparently antediluvian ruins that we keep hearing about from Graham Hancock et al?

What if we’re just living in a giant computer game created by aliens?

What if humans were actually created by humanoid extraterrestrials - mythologised by the Sumerians as the Anunnaki - as a slave species to mine gold?

And here’s one I just read on Twitter: “What if religious texts like the Bible are just fabricated tools of the powerful, who have used them for centuries to socially engineer the masses, manipulate them into submission, and demand they never question “prophecy” or the word of God, that they’ve created to their liking?”

I would love to be equipped with the knowledge to respond to these questions thoroughly, unequivocally, unanswerably - and for a number of good reasons, one being peace of mind. Eternity, after all, is a very long time in which to have to regret your mistakes. Imagine if, having nailed your colours to a particular mast - in my case the resurrection of the body and the life everlasting - you were to discover on dying that David Icke was right, and that if only you’d listened to him more carefully (“Am I meant to head towards the light or away from it?”) you might have avoided falling into the thing he calls ‘the Soul Trap.’

[I’m not sure which would be worse in this scenario: the Luciferian New Ager being right part or the being stuck in the endless cycle of reincarnation part. Either prospect is pretty horrendous]

Perhaps I’m being slightly flippant here. I don’t think I’m any serious danger of abandoning my Christian faith. But that doesn’t mean I’m one of those ‘Trust the Plan’ Christians so secure in their fidelity that I no longer feel the need for reassurance or the desire to ask awkward questions. I’m more by way of a Doubting Thomas Christian: yes, of course I believe, but let’s have a quick feel of those wounds, Lord, just for insurance purposes.

Also, as a conspiracy theorist and an overeducated semi-intellectual, I am relentlessly curious - especially about those subjects where I’m told I’m not supposed to venture. If a Christian of the ‘Trust the Plan’ variety tells me I’m not supposed to think such and such because it’s doctrinally incorrect then that, I’m afraid, is red rag to a bull. It’s like telling me I’ve no need to look any more into the Kennedy assassination because the Warren Commission has ruled it was carried out by a lone gunman.

I don’t think, in any case, that I’m disrespecting my faith by treating Christianity as yet another gigantic rabbit hole. On the contrary, I think I’m rendering it proof against the wiles of the devil. If I’m going to do Christianity, I want to get it right. I don’t want to be like, say, those Christian Zionists in the US - 30 million of them, apparently - who conflate biblical Israel with the geopolitical entity in the Middle East and clearly haven’t understood Revelation 3:9. Still less do I want to be the kind of Christian who, during the fake Covid pandemic, thought it perfectly acceptable to wear masks while singing hymns, and even to persecute those members of their congregation who didn’t observe ‘social distancing’ or wouldn’t get death-jabbed. I want to be the kind of Christian that Jesus wants us to be. And what exactly that is I’m on a daily mission to find out, aided by prayer, reciting the psalms and reading scripture.

But I digress. The point I’m trying to make is that, Christian though I am, I’m perfectly open to the possibility that I may be wrong and am more than willing to hear a persuasive case for the alternatives.

If, for example, you think we’re the descendants of slaves created by a pair of alien astronauts called Enki and Enlil in order to mine Earth for gold, bring it on! It sounds a really interesting theory and I’m hungry for the details: particularly on where you sourced this information.

And I don’t think I’m being picky in asking for sources. I mean if Christians are to be put on the spot by New Agers and other atheists - and rightly so! - as to why they believe what they believe, then the reverse should surely apply too. Otherwise what we’ll end up with - as indeed, actually, we have ended up with - is a situation where all manner of extravagant claims can be tossed around the internet and on Netflix TV series and in pub conversations and so on, each claiming to represent the Truth about the nature of our existence, who created us (or where we evolved from) and why we are here and where we’re going to end up.

Some of those claims - almost of all them, actually - are the purest bollocks. And if they don’t stand up, I don’t think we should permit them to keep doing the rounds, being repeated by the gullible. We need to squash them before they do any more damage.

So Jesus wasn’t actually crucified, you say. OK. Fine. Show me your sources.

When you watch the Wes Huff v Billy Carson debate you’ll see what I’m getting at here. It’s one of the more painful moments.

Carson says that the ‘Sinai Bible’ - which is even older, he adds, then the King James Version (!) - ‘denies the crucifixion’. So Huff, a Bible scholar, asks him to elucidate. Does he mean the Codex Sinaticus, a 4th Century Greek manuscript, of which he keeps a facsimile in his office? Because if he does, um, then there’s no passage where it says Jesus wasn’t crucified…

I had a similar epiphany when I was researching some of the claims made by David Icke who, as we know, is quite contemptuously anti Christian.

Here is what he claimed in one of his bestselling books, The Biggest Secret (2000).

“Horus was the ‘son’ of God in Egypt. He was derived from the Babylonian Tammuz and, in turn, provided another blueprint for the later Jesus. The connections are devastating for the credibility of the Christian Church: Jesus was the Light of the World. Horus was the Light of the World. Jesus said he was the way, the truth and the life. Horus said he was the truth, the life. Jesus was born in Bethlehem, the ‘house of bread’. Horus was born in Annu, the ‘place of bread’. Jesus was the Good Shepherd. Horus was the Good Shepherd. Seven fishers board a boat with Jesus. Seven people board a boat with Horus. Jesus was the lamb. Horus was the lamb. Jesus is identified with a cross. Horus is identified with a cross. Jesus was baptised at 30. Horus was baptised at 30. Jesus was the child of a virgin, Mary. Horus was the child of a virgin, Isis. The birth of Jesus was marked by a star. The birth of Horus was marked by a star. Jesus was child teacher in the temple. Horus was the child teacher in the temple. Jesus had 12 disciples. Horus had 12 followers. Jesus was the Morning Star. Horus was the Morning Star. Jesus was the Christ. Horus was the Krst. Jesus was tempted on a mountain by Satan. Horus was tempted on a mountain by Set.”

You can read my take on this in my essay David Icke’s Gingerbread Cottage

But essentially, my TL;DR is this: Yes, these claims would indeed be ‘devastating for the credibility of the Christian Church’ if they were actually true. Problem is, David, the only source you have produced for them is Albert Churchward, a freemason who claimed in the 1920s that Jesus didn’t exist. And if that’s the best you can do it doesn’t really inspire much confidence, does it?