We’re operating with a fake calendar. It has little to do with the earth and nothing to do with the moon. Worse still: years are dated from a hypothetical zero: the birth of one male manifestation of one male god. It’s nice to have a system for marking time. It’s also difficult to present alternatives to a dominant paradigm when the calendar itself has been seized and altered. Which is exactly why they did it. If the Christian calendar seems irrational, and to me it certainly is, this is in keeping with the irrationality of Christianity altogether.

In 1650, archbishop James Ussher declared officially that the earth was created in 4004 B.C. A little over 350 years later, attorney general John Ashcroft is laboring under the impression that calico cats are satanic. These are examples of the sort of reasoning which regularly issues forth from followers of the Christian religion, who base their beliefs on the Bible, a suspiciously edited compilation of heavily revised ancient texts. Interestingly, the later chapters seem to be perpetually at war with the earlier. What begins as an epic novel depicting various East Mediterranean & North African peoples and their struggles to coexist eventually mutates into something approaching anti-Semitic science fiction.

But one consistent theme, running from cover to cover, is the subjugation of everything female. Near the beginning of this book we are told that Eve, the first woman, was born out of the body of a man. This exact inversion of the natural way of things constitutes a serious flaw, jeopardizing the credibility of the Bible in its entirety.

As for the part of a woman from where every baby demonstrably emerges, the Popes called this the pudendum, meaning that of which one should be ashamed. Women are blamed for most of the ills facing humanity. Eve may be seen depicted in "Renaissance" artworks as a grubby miscreant, clutching portions of her distinctive female anatomy while being herded out of Eden (alongside the poor male victim whom she corrupted) by a sword-waving alien. Why do they hate women so much? These monotheistic, patriarchal desert religions are, in their most extreme and violently distorted forms, bitterly misogynistic.

There is beauty in the Torah, in the Koran and in the Bible. There’s also lots to grapple with, if you are a reasoning person who thinks with your own brain. And no book has been so dangerously misinterpreted with such prolonged worldwide consequences as has the Bible.

Altogether a frustrating publication. Over the centuries, many have tried to sort it out. Leonardo da Vinci, in a section of his notebook headed "doubts", ponders two illogical aspects of the biblical flood. First off, where’d the water disappear to? Secondly: fossils. Living clams and snails travel twelve feet per day. He found clam shells in the mountains of Lombardy. Impossible for clams to have traveled 250 miles in 40 days and 40 nights. Case dismissed. Leonardo laughs and draws a perfect circle, freehand.

Okay, perspective: 33% of life on earth are beetles. 11% flies. 11% moths and butterflies. 10% bees and ants. 6% bugs. 8% mollusks. 5% vertebrates. Most important biomass: diatoms. Recently encountered for the first time by humans: a 23-foot-long squid living in the very deep ocean; one, two, even three miles below the waves. The deep sea encompasses better than 90% of the biosphere of this earth. We, swaggering about in our wafer-thin layer of troposphere, we just work here.

But we do have some fossils of our own; literary strata. Greek lyric poetry. "Aeolian" is between extremes of tight and loose strung lyre. To me that spells Temperance and Equilibrium. This is the planet of the Lyre. This planet strums, and purrs. If you listen closely, you’ll hear everything that’s happening on the skin of this earth. And you might catch the voice of that which is beneath, where seismic sighs move gradually and water stretches its arms to include so much of the stone below. Listen closely: this planet is alive and there’s too many of us on the face of it. So many in fact that it’s sometimes hard to hear anything besides talk. Right now I hear olivine in veins beneath the lime and granite. You’ll hear it too when you switch off all those toys.

Now look what I found in the journals of Claire Clairmont, on the road with Mary & Percy Bysshe Shelley. (Florence, Italy, 1822):

"In the reign of Charlemagne, a student by the name of Loup Ferrieres was much persecuted by the clergy on its being detected he admired Homer and applied himself seriously to the art of writing well. Still later, under the reign of Philip Augustus, poetry was inserted in a list, officially published by the clergy, of ‘futile and criminal arts’."

Futile and criminal!? Speaking as a poet, let me ask you this, in the interest of cosmo-poetic comprehension: if God is a Metaphor, what’s God a Metaphor for? Don’t get rank with me, now. I mean of course that Metaphor is a living, breathing entity. Nothing affects humans so powerfully as our own Metaphoric reasoning. We, with our flawed and perpetually suspect codes of communication so jealously maintained as Language, we can only conceive of the mysteries by using Metaphor. And we burn each other alive, we massacre 11-year-olds all on account of lousy or lousily interpreted Metaphor for states of mind and spirit lost in grossly inverted perception. Metaphor is the miracle of the transformation of Words. If God is a Metaphor, what’s God a Metaphor for? This is about different ways of seeing.

With each Christian I ask: what is the Metaphoric aspect of your Jesus? So much depends on how the Metaphor is applied. Periodically over the past 2000 years, Jesus has existed as a Metaphor for malice, torture and greed. Christianity as a Metaphor for colonialism, for the brutal persecution of Africans, Asians, Apaches, Arabs and Jews alike. At best, the Jesus Metaphor denotes benevolence, clear-sightedness, even-keel temperance and possibly even the ability to mind one’s own business, although this last trait is most often absent from the mannerisms of the devout.

I think I’d like Allen Ginsberg for a Rabbi. But I’m not Jewish and he’s not in his body any more. Anyway: Judaism, whence the Christian religion took choice bits of wisdom and lore, is a highly developed system of ethics and justice, particularly when the Rabbi is progressive and free-thinking. A truly hip Rabbi is a joy to behold, a force against hatred, narrow-mindedness and fascism. A socially enlightened Rabbi might respect my saying that Islam is a tonality parallel to Judaism, and even this: that monotheistic religions need to change the fact that they are potentially dandy constructs for the oppression of women. That all of these old belief systems are yet too often filled with ancient chancres of intolerance for Others, and all on account of Metaphor badly applied.

Without intelligent reasoning, it gets very ugly. I can hear them now—if they would use these words it would be ticklishly interesting. "Our Metaphor is the one true Metaphor. Cast aside all other Metaphors, for they are false Metaphors. Thou shalt have no other Metaphors before the one true Metaphor. Our Metaphor is a jealous little Metaphor. All other Metaphors are evil. All who use those Metaphors are doomed to eternal damnation. So sayeth the Metaphor. And I and my people will overrun the territory adjacent to our own space, and we shall burn all the houses to the ground and kill every living thing, for theirs is the kingdom of the false Metaphor. Anyone believing in and applying a Metaphor too different from our one true Metaphor must be punished with something stronger and more tangible than language. We are the Truth. We are the Pure. For we live in the light of the Metaphor of might and right, so let them suffer from pox and blight, for they do not follow our own correct conduit of certitude, our straight and narrow straits. We are the true believers in the one true Metaphor, our Metaphor has all the chips, all the cards, all the power there is to be had, for ours is the one true Metaphor, and no matter how culturally different these heathens may be from us, they should have our Metaphor (the one we sewed together from various other pre-existing Metaphors)—without our Metaphor, these people are shit. We shall cleanse the world of this human sewage, for there is no room for mistaken Metaphor in this world. All have sinned in the eyes of the one true Metaphor. All other Metaphors must be scrapped, along with they who conceive of them. Our conception of reality is the only conception of reality. Everything else is wrong. We will correct their mistakes. We know what’s right. So sayeth our one true Metaphor."

And some have a penchant for blowing up paired structures. Months before the Towers there were the ancient stone Buddhas. Lessons in impermanence: "Bye bye," said the Twin Buddhas, "bye bye."

New York Times, Friday September 28, 2001, page B1, ‘A Nation Challenged’
excerpt from article headed: In Stopping to Save Woman, Rescuers Saved Themselves

Alexander Zemlinsky [1871-1942] explains how I tune my brains: "One voice moving naturally and consistently allows freedom for the other five." And there is no separation. This is why "one" is such an important word in Judaic life. It is there in the morning, it is there during the day, and very present at night. "One" is the last word one pronounces before leaving one’s body. All is one. Jewish longing for unity is the root of Einstein’s lifelong quest for a unified field theorem that would encompass all physical phenomena. Also Karl Marx searching for an all-embracing historical method. Also very present in Arnold Schoenberg’s musical universe. Schoenberg, who advocated searching for the sake of the search itself. This is all from Jewish spirituality. (I’m getting these insights from a book called Arnold Schoenberg: the Composer As Jew by Alexander L. Ringer; 1990 Clarendon Press, Oxford)

Unity—Oneness—Indivisibility. Judaic manner of celebrating interconnectedness. Where monotheists get into trouble, says Lindsay Forbes, is looking at cosmic unity through the distorted vision & thoughts of a linear mind. The universe, for all of its pretty lines, is wonderfully non-linear. Question of interpreting existence without getting stuck in desperate states of mind born of scarcity and brutal competition. Listen to the Mother: every sentient being is divine. Practice your disciplines. Do not force them on others. Do not corrupt the laws in order to appease the God of your discipline.

We should demand that Christian ideology not be permitted to influence the laws of this nation, and its states. The State of Michigan should not be permitted to offer specially made license plates bearing the phrase "Choose Life". This is not a benign statement. It’s bad enough as a bumper sticker, existing as it does in an atmosphere of coercion and intimidation. (What sort of a person tells other people what to choose? Especially inside of one’s own body! How fucking boorish and presumptuous can you possibly get?!) As a state-sponsored fundraising plan for Christian-approved, anti-Choice clinics, these license plates are an abomination against all women. Whether or not young Republican females recognize its significance, the fact remains that they as women possess the power to give life or not to give life. It’s the greatest power imaginable, a power of which the Church and the State have been jealous for thousands of years. The Church-State has always resented the fact that women have the power of life and death. Gradually rendering it difficult & dangerous for women to be informed about or have access to safe pregnancy termination is exactly in line with the Christian lie which states that Eve came out of Adam’s body. It is monstrously nonsensical.

Intolerance is inseparable from Christian history. Any portions of the Bible which slander entire groups of people must be placed in historical context. This is something that increasingly few seem to have the intelligence or the inclination to do. Let’s visit a handful of choice moments in this very obviously contrived Gospel:

THE NEW TESTAMENT IS BOUND TOGETHER WITH ANTI-SEMITIC CALUMNIES

JOHN 8:44 In which Jesus, a Jew, tells the Jews that they are children of the Devil. Very clever—who wrote this garbage? Someone with a vested interest in the slandering of Jews, obviously. How obvious does it need to be before you question it? And listen, there’s no shortage of knuckleheads who read this shit and use it to justify all kinds of idiotic violence. Martin Luther wrote a nice long book specifically degrading the Jews. So did Richard Wagner. They based their hateful spew on passages like these.

MATTHEW 27:25 The Jews are quoted as saying "His blood be on us, and on our children." This self-curse constitutes what I call the Pogrom Clause. Note that the blood of Jesus is not on the hands of the Romans, who crucified thousands of people, but on the hands of the Jewish people, a group which included Jesus of Nazareth. An obvious example of slander, and one which has resulted in murder & oppression. Who killed Jesus? The Italians. This is probably why Rome has had such a complex about it ever since Constantine brought Church & State together.

MATTHEW 28:13 Here we are told that "the Jews" bribed the soldiers to spread the story that the disciples came and stole the body of Jesus overnight, and that "this saying is commonly repeated among Jews to this very day." How interesting (and pathetic!) to assign this logical explanation to Jews specifically. I first encountered the body-snatching theory (when I was 13) in the writings of the Marquis de Sade.

[Giotto’s frescos in the Arena Chapel of Padua are lovely to gaze upon. That is until we see the Betrayal of Christ by Judas. The very name "Judas" was placed in the Gospel as an obvious code for "Judaica". Judas wears a yellow robe. His features are rendered as a caricature of the Jew; the sort of propaganda of which Dr. Joseph Goebbels would have approved]