my name paul: that isht between y'all...,

Phillipians 3:5-8Though I might also have confidence in the flesh. If any other man thinketh that he hath whereof he might trust in the flesh, I more: 5 Circumcised the eighth day, of the stock of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, an Hebrew of the Hebrews; as touching the law, a Pharisee; 6 Concerning zeal, persecuting the church; touching the righteousness which is in the law, blameless. 7 But what things were gain to me, those I counted loss for Christ. 8 Yea doubtless, and I count all things but loss for the excellency of the knowledge of Christ Jesus my Lord: for whom I have suffered the loss of all things, and do count them but dung, that I may win Christ,

The Tanakh (a.k.a. Old Testament) has been a part of our culture for so long that we seem incapable of applying the same critical standards to this musty collection of cut and pasted literature that we would apply to any other such quaint material. After all, if we found this material today, we would we even for half a hot minute pretend that Noah and his wife had actually herded all the world's animals onto their little rickety, non-Phoenician raft? Or that Joshua had blown down the walls of a city with a magical trumpet?

We would give this material less credence than we give the Epic of Gilgamesh or the story of Beowulf, with the clear-eyed understanding that anything even remotely historical in this material is buried beneath so much silly accretion as to be ridiculous. We would certainly not be in the absurd situation in which we find ourselves in which a nuclear-armed garrison state of European refugees has laid claim to Palestine on the basis of fraudulent mythology and threatens to thrust the world into the chaos of nuclear war later this year.

Two thousand years ago a Jew born of the tribe of Benjamin, circumcised on the eighth day, a zealous Pharisee, fully righteous and down by law described the sacred texts of Judaism as isht. We know this cat as the "apostle" Paul, and although he was entirely right back in the day to describe the Tanakh as so much isht, he was wrong about them being supplanted by the entheogenic gnosis of the Christ. Instead, the coded literature of the gnostic cults of the entheogenic Christ was subverted and distorted into the wholly made-up scriptures of the Church of Rome which also adopted the Tanakh isht as its Old Testament. This fustercluck was further compounded when another later engineered scientological formation calling itself Islam based itself on much of this same old musty isht. Now, almost half of the world's population calls itself Jewish, Christian, or Moslem and this fact has left the rest of us up to our eyebrows in isht.