Deceitful development aid

The majority of the world’s people live in poverty, in countries where poverty is very widespread. The world’s nations may be divided into four broad categories:

• Industrialised countries whose wealth is derived from the export of a variety of different kinds of civilian and military products and services, most of these labour-intensive and requiring a high level of worker education.
• Wealthy countries with very small populations, substantial mineral resources such as oil, and very hierarchical social and political systems.
• Very populous countries whose wealth is derived from the export of substantial quantities of minerals such as oil, with few industrial jobs, widespread poverty, and serious political instability.
• Very poor, politically unstable countries with very limited export earnings and almost total dependance on foreign “development” aid and remittances from family members working overseas.

Foreign aid from industrialised countries to poor people in what are often euphemistically designated “developing countries” comes partly from government agencies and international agencies, financed by taxpayers in wealthy countries, and partly from registered charitable agencies financed by the general public via fund-raising activities. Aid is concentrated in “development projects” run by salaried experts from the donor countries in collaboration with workers hired in the recipient countries.

Development aid is characterised by deceits that are scarcely ever mentioned by mainstream media nor mainstream commentators:

• The causes of poverty are never fully revealed to the general public, though partial explanations may be published. Even supposedly reputable charities are thereby guilty of leaving the general public with a totally false perception of the economics of world poverty and an unjustified acceptance of the status quo. With few exceptions, mainstream and scholarly sources allow the public to sustain the (false) conviction that some nations and races are inherently inferior, and to falsely internalise the cause of poverty to corrupt and incompetent national leadership.
• Private aid charities abuse the natural willingness of individuals to give money away to help poor individuals by falsely extrapolating from the misfortunes of the poor in their own countries to the structural disadvantages of people living in very poor countries.
• No national government ever takes any action whose motive is not the preservation or furtherance of its own nation. This may also involve providing genuine assistance to specific other nations, especially in times of war, but such assistance is rarely what it seems as it is always driven by national self-interest. Even aid projects that withstand critical analysis can be shown to benefit the donor country more than they benefit the target population groups in the receipient country. A fictionalised yet almost totally ignored example of this is described in Norwegian writer Åsne Seierstad’s controversial “The Bookseller of Kabul”, whose main character works hard to put together a bid for a big, potentially lucrative government contract financed from development aid to produce textbooks for Afghani schoolchildren. The last page of the book recounts how he loses the contract, which is awarded instead to the Oxford University Press, a multi-national publishing corporation based in the UK, which is one of the major military and donor nations engaged in Afghanistan.
• Unlike the fictional example just described, many real-world development projects that are subjected to independent analysis not only fail to benefit the target group in the recipient project, but they also fuel corruption and benefit criminal organisations while depriving bona fide local businesses of custom.
• Some development projects are intended to create “import substitution”, namely deliberately to deprive export businesses in third countries of markets to which they previously had access in the target country.
• Even well-managed development projects that succesfully fulfill their objectives by providing the recipient country with contraceptives, schools, roads, power stations or other beneficial facilities that the target group would otherwise have had to do without, and with which the local people express their satisfaction, do nothing to reduce the structural poverty of the recipient country as a whole.
• In donor nations there is a widespread body of thought, encouraged by some political parties and some sectors of the press, that instead of inflicting development aid on poor countries, “we ought to leave them alone”. Anyone who has actually visited a recipient country and bothers to read the nameplates identifying the manufacturers of the machinery, such as cellphone masts, pumping stations, ferries, railway locomotives, aeroplanes etc., installed in these countries will become aware that “leaving them alone” would also entail withdrawing the army of salesmen responsible for the large scale export of advanced manufactured products from wealthy countries to poor countries, some of it paid for at market prices without development aid but from the proceeds of the export of minerals. The businessmen engaged in this trade are very successful at stifling any mainstream public discussion of what “leaving them alone” would really entail.

Nobody who lives in an industrialised country is left in any doubt of the great importance of exports to the wealth and wellbeing of the nation. Both politicians and businessmen are outspoken in reminding us of this. It follows from this that the widespread belief that we live in a hermetically sealed country that is immune to social, political and economic events in the rest of the world is utterly ridiculous – yet it is publicly perpuated every day in countless different contexts, and can readily be observed at all levels of intelligence. If things are going wrong, then it is the fault of our own government, our own banks, or our own education system. If things are going right, then we can all pat each other on the bank.

The endorsement by politicians and professional experts of the myth that every country is a closed system is solid evidence for the existence of an undeclared freemasonry amongs the members of the ruling class that crosses national borders.

Cattle from Oknha-Tey Island being hustled into the
River Mekong near Phnom Penh, Cambodia

No one can fail to notice the impact made by American or Japanese multi-national corporations on life in the country where we live, yet the business community is very effective at suppressing any discussion of the equally obvious needs of businesses in foreign countries (especially the poorer ones) to export their wares and services to our own country. It is a taboo topic in politics and the media, among scholars, and among aid agencies. The words “Cambodian multi-national corporation” would certainly raise nervous eyebrows if mentioned at any sober get-together of highly educated professional people. Why should the obvious needs of poor countries to develop advanced export industries be taboo, unless the business community has something to hide?

It is difficult to defend this otherwise obvious conclusion as long as we are allowed to believe that people of other races and other nationalities are so fundamentally inferior to us that they are not capable of developing the advanced products and services that wealthy countries are willing to import. But would we allow them access to our markets if they did succeed in developing their industry? There is very strong evidence that our business community would ensure that they would be excluded.

During the Cold War, industry in the Soviet Union succeeded in developing nuclear and conventional weapon systems whose reputation was sufficient to keep us in constant fear of nuclear hostilities. Although one Russian reactor at one Ukrainian nuclear power station famously went out of control in 1986, numerous others have been successfully generating electricity for many decades. The Russians succeeded in developing the Kalashnikov, the most successful machine gun ever, used and copied all over the world (except by NATO troups). A missile from a weapon system developed in the USSR recently succeeded in shooting down a Malaysian civilian airliner flying at cruising height over the Ukraine. The Soviets also developed mass produced family cars that made significant penetration into western markets. They developed a variety of civilian aircraft so successful that many westerners chose to trust themselves to these machines on routes between the Far East and Europe.

So when the USSR decided to abandon Communism in 1989, and instead became “capitalist”, as we were all told, there was no obvious reason why its civilian and military products should not enjoy increasing success in, and penetration of, western markets. Amazingly, no one in the west ever publicly speculates as to why the opposite has happened. This, too, is a taboo topic. No one can believe that the former Communists have forgotten their hard-won industrial skills, so there is only one possible explanation – namely, that western business interests and politicians have made sure that the world’s most lucrative markets are closed to civil and military exports from the countries of the former Soviet Union. But they have not told the voters.

The members states of the USSR were not the only non-western countries with a military aircraft industry. During the Falklands War, news reports in countries friendly to the UK sometimes mentioned the Pucara fighter-bomber developed and built by Argentinian industry. Despite being modern and by no means unsuccessful in service, it has enjoyed no great success in export markets. Industry in another South American country, Brazil, has successfully developed a variety of large and small military and commercial aircraft, with some very modest penetration of high-end export markets – but the popular perception of Brazil in the northern hemisphere is still of a coffee producing “developing” country with a reckless attitude to the importance of its tropical rain forests.

Prior to the British conquest of India, the sub-continent had a large ship-building industry, which the colonising power allowed to decline so as to enlarge the market for Britain’s own shipyards. Indian ship-building has never recovered its former scale. Even today, Indians rarely criticise the huge extent of the railways built by the British, with rolling stock and other equipment manufactured in the UK. Yet using the sub-continent as a captive market put an effective permanent stop to the indigenous development of a railway manufacturing industry.

The Friendship Bridge over the Mekong River
in Phnom Penh, Cambodia,
built with Japanese development aid

Taiwan and South Korea are two south-east Asian “tigers” that in just a few decades have developed from impoverished underdeveloped countries into wealthy industrialised nations with a wide variety of high-tech exports. Contrast.them with Cambodia and Vietnam, two very different states whose similarities are that each was once a French colony and where poverty is still widespread. Note, however, that Cambodia receives much more foreign aid than Vietnam, which exports both minerals and manufactured products. Contrary to what mainstream economists and geography teachers try to deceive us into believing, the enormous success of Taiwan and South Korea is the result of a conscious decision to allow export businesses in these specific countries unrestricted and privileged access to the domestic markets in the USA and its western allies. This cruel strategy was adopted explicitly to demonstrate to the leaders of Communist countries the rewards available to those states who resisted Communism – though this message was designed for the ruling elites, and deliberately misinterpreted for the general public.

Long Bien Bridge across the Red River in Hanoi, Vietnam.
Badly damaged by repeated American bombing, it was
repaired by Vietnamese engineers, without foreign aid.

There is no mystery about world poverty, but the deceit can be summarised as follows:

• Structural poverty in struggling countries is caused by the policies deliberately adopted by the ruling elites in wealthy countries, mainly by denying businesses in poor countries access to the most lucrative markets. The historical term for this practice is mercantilism.
• This poverty could be greatly alleviated by the replacement by wealthy countries of mercantilism by specific elements of the Christian canon of ethics, namely the “Good Samaritan” principle, and the 10th Commandment, which condemns covetousness (i.e., greed).
• Wealthy nations are dependant on the existence of poor nations in order to maintain prices and profits. The general public is unaware of this simple but awful fact, because it has been taboo ever since Jesus observed that “the poor you will always have with you”.
• The general public believes, incorrectly, that scholarly and non-sensational popular sources of information about geography are doing their best to be honest. Consequently the public has no idea that their leaders are constantly confronted with an ethical choice between mercantilism and Christianity, and that they always settle for the former.
• The 9th Commandment condemns “false witness” (especially against one’s “neighbour”). Allowing the general public (including the people in poor countries themselves) to believe the myth that national poverty is self-inflicted violates this Commandment by denigrating those “neighbours”.
• Allowing the public to believe the “false witness” perpetrated by the development agencies that their aid is the main or only solution to poverty in “developing” countries also infringes this Commandment.

It was not a real duckling

The phrase “a real duckling” is dominated by the qualifying adjective. “A duckling” means exactly the same, so the adjective has been put in to exploit a context that led us to expect something different. If it were not a real duckling, what was it then? – a plastic duckling?

The Ugly Duckling

This is the title of one of Hans Christian Andersen’s best known and most subtle “fairytales”. This complex story about prejudice and rejection should properly be designated a fable. It begins in an idyllic rural setting, where a mother duck is anxiously watching as her brood as one by one they hatch out of their cramped eggs and start to take in their surroundings. “Goodness”, they exclaim, “how huge the world is!”

“Huh!” snorts their mother. “You think this duckpond is the whole world? The world is much bigger than this – it reaches all the way to the edge of the parson’s glebe, or so I’ve heard. Not that I have ever been so far away myself.”

Everyone in Denmark knows this story, yet few Danes are aware that their enthusiastic globetrotting literary idol is making gentle fun of them from the grave in this little anecdote. Of course the people of every nation are aware that there is indeed a wide world beyond their own “duckpond”, and many of them have been there too. Nevertheless, their opinions on a wide range of public issues reveal that they can easily be oblivious of anything beyond the borders of their country. Despite the fact that every nation is closely and inevitably linked by transport connections, trade, tourism and family ties, people constantly behave as if their nation is a closed society, hermetically sealed from the outside world. This is the Mother Duck Fallacy.

Hans Andersen was making fun not just of the Danes, but also of the Children of Israel and all those other earnest people who take literally Moses’s grandiose claim that God created the entire world and everything in it. Moses was the “parson” of the parable, and the creation of his glebe with its “duckpond” was a task of considerably less than biblical proportions.

Ducklings are cute, attractive creatures. However, one of the ducklings in the brood in Hans Anderson’s story turns out to be ugly, as well as a social misfit. It suffers from “integration” difficulties and is ejected from the duckpond. After many adventures, it grows up and discovers that, far from being an ugly duckling, it had been a cygnet all along, and is now a beautiful swan. It was not a real duckling – it was not a duckling at all.

There is a similar subtlety about Jesus’s parable of the Good Samaritan. He could just as well have told a parable about a good traveller, but His choice of a Samaritan served to emphasise the man’s goodness, because His Jewish audience considered people from Samaria, as a rule, to be thoroughly selfish and untrustworthy.

During World War 2, Denmark was occupied by German forces, and the Danish news media were subject to censorship. The general public were aware of this, but, without reading carefully between the lines in the mainstream newspapers, they had no idea what they were not being told. In response to this situation, members of the resistence printed an illegal newspaper, called simply “Information”, to emphasise that it contained the ugly truth about current events, in contrast with the cute attractive version disseminated by the rest of the press on the orders of the Nazis.

Cross-examined by Pontius Pilate, Jesus (according to the gospel of John) explained that his purpose in life was to testify to the truth. Unlike the priests who had brainwashed the Jews into falsely believing that they were God’s chosen people, Jesus’s words were the real deal. Everyone, Jew or gentile, was one of God’s children, according to the man before him. Pontius Pilate was himself a leader, so he knew all about the deceit and manipulation of power in general and that of the irritating and self-satisfied Jewish leadership in particular. He could have gone down in history as the man who first talked the emperor into making Christianity the official doctrine of Rome – but he blew it. “What is truth?” he replied, fearful of upsetting the Jewish leadership and provoking a bloody revolt in his back yard.

Jesus Christ whistleblower

What He founded is not a religion

Statue of Dr. Martin Luther at Prenzlau.
It was his actions in 1517 that are
generally credited with
starting the Reformation

The European Reformation was the biggest confidence trick in history. The Holy Ghost was no more nor less mysterious than the http (“hypertext transfer protocol”) – a device to enable people with different cultures to collaborate and communicate across international boundaries. The creation of the Protestant national churches, however, was a false-flag operation instigated to protect princes against the successful spread of Christian principles. No rational understanding of European history is possible without a renunciation of the illusory perception of Christianity as a “religion”. The word is not found at all in the Bible itself.

The main grounds that people give for dismissing “religion” are that is is characterised by beliefs in the impossible, obsolete values, archaic language, mysticism, and that it is optional. These are spurious grounds.

The impossible

Impossible beliefs and untrue convictions are just as widespread amongst people who claim not to subscribe to religion. The White Queen in Lewis Carroll's fantasy “Alice in Wonderland” stated, “Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.” A list of impossible beliefs commonly held by atheists includes the following:

• The square root of minus one (√–1) does not exist, can be shown not to exist, and is designated an “imaginary number”. Nevertheless, it forms the basis of a branch of math dealing with complex numbers, and is much used in acoustics, vibration analysis, wave mechanics and electrical engineering. Every time you switch on the light, it would be as well to remember that the design of electricity distribution systems is greatly facilitated by the use of this non-existent number.
• Quantum mechanics shows that atoms, molecules, and even large objects, also behave as waves.
• Einstein’s theory of relativity has had great success in accounting for anomalies in the motions of heavenly bodies that Newton’s laws of motion failed to explain, yet relativity postulates, unbelievably, that the speed of light is the same regardless of how fast you are travelling, and that, if you travel very fast indeed, you will age more slowly, and your dimensions will also shrink in the direction of motion.
• Public attitudes are earnestly based on the perception of each nation as an economically and socially closed system despite the obvious evidence of the enormous flow of trade and persons across international boundaries (the Mother Duck Fallacy).
• A passport is no more than a legal document defining the jurisdiction in which its bearer is entitled to reside unreservedly, plus the other jurisdictions that its bearer may visit or even reside in subject to certain conditions. Yet many people, encouraged by the public authorities, uncritically ascribe sacred properties to a passport, as if it acquires a physical embodiment of the bearer’s identity on being issued – rather as the communion wine and bread are believed by Catholics to be literally transsubstantiated into the blood and body of Christ. The beliefs about the holiness of a passport manifest themselves in the widespread popular opposition to applications for “naturalisation” by immigrants from poor countries, and the reluctance of expatriates from a wealthy country who settle permanently in another wealthy country to apply for “naturalisation”.
• Wealth is characterised by both its scarcity and the demand for it. A civilised society must therefore inevitably comprise both poor people and wealthy people. Jesus endorsed this depressing conclusion in a throwaway line after a woman had annointed him with precious oil at Bethany, yet most people today firmly believe the UN’s claim that poverty can be eliminated, despite the overwhelming evidence to the contrary from the real world.
• Most people believe that Europeans and Jews are superior to other races, even though they might not go so far as to repeat publicly the view of Cecil Rhodes that the British are superior to all other nationalities. Yet the facts of geography and history that dominate the enormous differences between wealthy nations and poor nations are very well known. These facts overwhelm any possible genetic differences between races.
• Feminists insist that women are just as intelligent and capable, on average, as men, despite the well known facts that almost all great inventors, artists, composers and Nobel prize winners have been men, and that few women can park a car as successfully as most male drivers. Let her who renounces her belief in the inferiority of the non-European races cast the first indignant rebuke.
• Democracy is given the credit for the economic success of industrialised nations despite the evidence that politics is dependant on spin, transparency plays no role in most major government policies, and voters leave their commonsense outside the polling booths.
• Despite widespread evidence to the contrary, most people, especially socialists, firmly believe that the state is inherently wiser than, and morally superior to, any private individual or corporation. Most people, especially conservatives, also have an unjustified faith, bordering on the fanatical, in the illusory “independence” and the integrity of the judiciary and the police.

“Gay Pride” in Copenhagen. No one would designate
homosexuality a “religion”, yet parades are held to
celebrate it, just as parades are held annually in
Catholic countries to celebrate Christianity
and in Brazil to celebrate heterosexuality
(Photo: Café Munk)

Beliefs in the impossible, or at any rate the manifestly untrue, characterise all systems of beliefs and values, not just those popularly designated as “religious”.

Religion is optional

There is nothing unfamiliar about the legal enforcement of what is considered “important”:

• The education of children has been compulsory for two centuries.
• Although I personally was brought up to believe that the left-hand side of the road is the only natural side on which to drive,  it is not a belief I would try to put into practice in this country.
• Paying taxes is compulsory, and the last Dane who tried to argue that it should be optional was sent to prison. The Danish belief in the legitamacy of the state’s voracious need for imposing heavy taxes has the character of a religion against which rational arguments carry little weight.
• Even if you would like to, you cannot opt out of the EU, except by moving to Norway or some other country that is not a member.
• Opting out of NATO is even harder.

It was King Harald Bluetooth who is credited with making Denmark a Christian country. He may not have managed it in one fell swoop, as it were, but in each of those parishes that did get a priest, staying away from church on Sundays was not an option for anyone. Contrary to what secular historians would have us believe, the king’s motives were not particularly spiritual. The Vikings had become sufficiently prosperous to trade with Christian countries instead of raiding them, and Christianity was the key to being allowed to do so regularly. Like the EU, the function of Christianity was to subordinate national economic and political interests to the common European good. After the Reformation, however, Christianity was “nationalised” and turned upside down to serve the interests of the individual rulers. By making it optional, furthermore, introducing “religious freedom” debased Christianity to something unimportant and marginal.

Jesus and his disciples had a lot of medical knowledge, and wherever they went, they cured sick people and helped the injured to recover. Jesus was very keen to teach anyone who would listen about their ethical, social and financial responsibilities. These responsibilities covered strangers as well as friends and family. We might just as well designate the “Sermon on the Mount” his “Lecture on the Mount”. He established important doctrines for wealth and poverty, and for human rights. Jesus’s “kingdom” would take over responsibility for health, education, social security and legislation. His “kingdom” was “not of this world” because it was not delimited by the borders of “worldly” national states, but would rule wherever men and women went. Its ministers were to maintain their integrity and their independence from “worldly” rulers and from the business community by renouncing all personal wealth and family considerations. He was the first advocate of the “minimal state”, but He invented the “holy church” because He knew that deceit and covetousness are unavoidable obstacles to both “the invisible hand of the market” and “the workers’ paradise”.

Which obsolete values?

• Respect for the family and marriage 
• The right to life
• The right to the peaceful enjoyment of one’s property 
• The right to transparency from traders and public officials, and to protection against arbitrary attacks on one’s good name

are all enshrined in the UN's Universal Declaration Human Rights and the European Convention on Human Rights. Each of these rights is also derived from a corresponding Commandment in Moses’s Decalogue. This also proscribes marriage-breaking and greed, each of which is still a major issue today, just as it was in biblical times.

Murder is forbidden in all
societies, not just in the Bible
(Paul Bond and Janice Harvey as
Othello and Desdemona,
Queens' College Cambridge, 1967)

No mainstream value system endorses murder, sexual offences, theft, slander, dishonesty or covetousness. The last six or seven (depending on the denomination whose numbering you apply) of the Ten Commandments are essentially universal and “secular”. This is the “elephant in the room” of those who dismiss the Bible as “religious”.

The significance of each of the first three or four of the Ten Commandments is more complex but not formidably so. Most atheists dismiss No. 1, which prescribes monotheism, because they do not both to ascribe a definition to “God”. However, if we strip the Israelites’ Ten Commandments of their mumbo-jumbo, what we are left with is the earliest example of a mainstream national constitution, which furthermore defines “God” as the monopoly source of moral authority for both the executive and the citizens. This same principle has been and still is applied in every other national state, be it a monarchy or a republic. In practice, however, all states delegate authority to a diverse mosaic of institutions and corporations.

The acknowledgement by this very first Commandment of the very “existence” of other, shadowy gods controlling the lives of foreign nations, has a significance that is enormous and ramifications that are invariably overlooked.

No. 2 forbids the engraving of images of living beings, and this rule was dropped after Christianity had become the established value system of the Roman empire. Even Mohammedans, for whom holy images became a major issue in the 21st century as a result of cartoons of the Prophet printed in a Danish newspaper, are disconcertingly silent on the underlying reasons for this ban on images that might get worshipped. You could be forgiven for concluding that this Commandment was just a simple matter of forbidding the Israelites from introducing barbaric foreign customs, such as worshipping golden calves, or mixing up an actual physical engraved image with a conceptually abstract god.

However, other possible explanations emerge as soon as one reflects on what was overwhelmingly the most important and widespread application of engraved images in biblical times – the minting of money. The 2nd Commandment could also have been a ban on counterfeiting (which was still a capital offence not so many centuries ago), or even a protectionist measure to prevent the Israelites from trading with specific foreign currencies bearing representations of plants, animals or humans. Jesus himself drew attention to the engraving on a Roman coin of a portrait of Julius Caesar – the first head of state to instigate this practice.

Swearing an oath in court or during the marriage ceremony in the name of God is the gravest guarantee of a person’s credibility. Unlike lesser agencies, God, or the state, can be depended upon to find out and punish those who betray their oath by taking God’s name in vain. The name of God was also probably invoked to underpin business deals between merchants who did not know each other well.

Moses probably introduced the Commandment to keep one day a week holy in order to reinforce his ridiculous doctrine that God created the universe in no more than seven days. The Israelites were not noted for their astronomical expertise, and like everyone else, then as now, their perception of their own “world” corresponded to that of the mother of Hans Anderson’s “Ugly Duckling” – namely, the boundary of the parson’s field in which her own duck pond was situated. Unlike a year and a lunar month, a week has no astronomical significance, yet it was practised throughout the civilised world wherever merchants traded, far beyond the writ of Moses. So the 7-day business rhythm was probably already well established by the time the Pentateuch came to be written, and the Commandment about keeping the Sabbath was simply a straightforward labour law intended to protect workers from greedy employers.

Jesus endorsed the specifically personal Commandments and added several unmistakably “secular” rules of his own, though he modestly attributed them to the authors of the scriptures:

• He asserted that the greatest of these additions was the obligation to respect and protect strangers (including foreigners) as much as you would your own family and friends. This was no ivory-tower ideal, since the Jews and all the other peoples of the Mediterranean region were trading with each other, but no one can do business with a merchant whom one neither trusts nor respects. The implications of the parable of the Good Samaritan are enormous, yet even its title is widely misinterpreted. Jesus played on a popular prejudice that the inhabitants of Samaria were not kosher. Apparently not every Samarian man chose a Jewish girl when taking a wife. With this one exception, Samaritans were not the sort of people you could trust.
• It was from the good-Samaritan principle that Jesus derived the concept of “sin”. Since He made it perfectly clear that everyone is a sinner, the Roman Catholics who identify e.g. smoking cannabis, or using your mobile telephone while driving, as sins have misunderstood Him. Many law-abiding citizens have never done either of these things, whereas sin is something no one can avoid. If you e.g. innocently accept a present that you could not possibly have known was stolen, then you incur a moral deficit to the unknown victim without being aware of it. No one who is fortunate enough to be born in a wealthy country can help it, nor is anyone allowed to pay off their moral debt to those in poorer countries who made that wealth possible.
• He repeatedly exposed hypocrites who endorsed double standards, namely Pots who called the Kettle Black without removing the foreign body from their own eye. Jesus was just as concerned with the wealthiest of men as He was with the poor, so His reiteration of the ban on giving false witness against your neighbour was also an admonition to any head of state who deceitfully describes the head of another, less wealthy, state as “an evil dictator”.
• He was an egalitarian, a champion of the poor, a pacifist, and a supporter of women’s equality.
• Jesus and his “hippy band” did not have a budget. They lived off the hospitality of their patrons. His disciples sold their capital assets and gave the proceeds to the poor. The reason why Jesus insisted on this was to ensure that his teaching was perceived to be impartial and free of financial and family interests, but organised churches and their professional ministers prefer not to mention this.

Archaic language

Even if you are an atheist, you are probably familiar with much of the Bible, and you even acknowledge a sneaking respect for some elements of it. Unless you are a scholar, your Bible is a translation made some centuries ago, into a single language that is pompous, and was already archaic even then. You may be vaguely aware that the New Testament was written in a language completely different to that of the Old Testament, but it probably has not crossed your mind that they were intended for two different groups of readers. You and I – those of us whom Jesus politely identified as “the meek” – are by no means among the intended readership of any of the Bible.

Most of the Books of the Old Testament were written in ancient Hebrew, a language spoken only by the Israelites and perhaps a handful of foreigners who had daily dealings with them. The intended readership comprised exclusively educated Jews.

The New Testament, in marked contrast, was written in everyday Greek, the language of commerce and diplomacy throughout the Roman Empire. The intended readership comprised both parochial and expat Jews (the diaspora) and also non-Jews (“gentiles”) who would have been be neither familiar with Jewish history, nor able to understand Hebrew. The cosmopolitan nature of the target audience for the Gospels and of Jesus’s incisive message is something that got lost in translation – and that was indeed the covert intention of the nationalist architects of the Reformation.

There is another essential feature of the target audience for all the books of the Bible that two centuries of universal adult literacy have caused everyone, including the salaried priests, to forget. The original books of the Bible were written down and copied by professional scribes. Very few other people could even sign their names. The ability to read was confined to a small elite, namely clerks, court officials and priests. Even among the members of the ruling class itself, reading was probably not universal. Kings and princes had people to do their reading for them. The significance of this is that the Ten Commandments and the value system promoted by Jesus were written down first and foremost as directives for the “powers that be”. Respect for human rights, honesty and fairness started at the top.

The big difference between God (or rather, Moses) and Jesus (whose pedigree shows that He too was related to the ruling elite) was that God and Moses accepted the murder of foreigners and the theft of their territories, their possessions, their land and their wives – whereas Jesus insisted that kings and princes should accord foreign kings and princes the same human rights as their own subjects. This was a breathtaking advance in statecraft, which the Popes tried very corruptly to enforce, and which the European rulers who endorsed the Reformation were determined to stamp out. How could Queen Victoria ever have ruled over an empire on which the sun never set if her Bishops and clergy had not been paid their salaries from her own Treasury but preached to her only what she wanted to hear?

Unlike Nicolo Machiavelli’s singularly sinister 16th century guide to Florentine statecraft, “The Prince”, the content of the books of the Bible were not actually unsuitable for consumption by the ordinary people. Bible stories can be both instructive and entertaining. In the absence of printed Bibles and widespread public literacy, these stories were disseminated selectively, however, by the priesthood. Before the introduction of universal education, the civil obligation to attend church and listen to the priest was just as easy to defend as the civil obligation to pay your taxes is nowadays. Once everyone could read the Bible (all of it translated into an archaic, mystical variant of their own language) for themselves, however, the need for church pews was greatly reduced. Re-inventing Christianity as a national “religion” for ordinary people in place of an international programme for the ethics of kings and merchants was one of the motives for the imposition by national governments of compulsory education.

It is much easier for us members of the “meek” classes to observe the teachings of Jesus than it is for the leaders of states and corporations. They are exposed to much more formidable temptations than we are. That is why it is important for us to understand that His system of values applies especially to the “powers that be”, and not just to e.g. the intransigent working-class teenagers across the road. The dreadful state of the world shows that we have not got the message at all.

Mysticism

From where this blogger stands (and he can stand nowhere else), Dr. Martin Luther appears as a very complex schizophrenic. The 95 theses that he pinned on the door of All saints’ Church in Wittenburg on All Souls’ eve 1517 seem to address 95 obscure theological details, yet the direction of the brutal Reformation that he started was to hand over key “spiritual” issues of law-making (human rights) health, social security and education to the “wordly” (i.e., geographically-defined) authorities, and leave the priesthood only with the mumbo-jumbo. It was like setting the fox to guard the chickens. By acceding to this, he threw out the baby with the bath water, yet on the other hand he also issued his essentially secular “Little Catechism”. This comprises his succinct interpretation of the Ten Commandments, re-numbered to take account of his omission of the one prohibiting images of living things. Did he do this as a mark of his friendship with the artist Lukas Cranach the elder, who painted such splendid portraits of him?

Jesus about to be crucified. A lifelike effigy carried
in the Easter Procession to celebrate Christianity
outside St. Mary’s Church, Mosta, Malta

The impossible things that Christians believe in include the Resurrection of Jesus, after he had been excrucitingly painfully impaled by nails through his wrists and ankles, suspending him from the cross so that he was able to breathe just enough to keep him alive for many hours. The reason he was condemned to death is that he blew the whistle on Moses’s doctrine that His fellow Jews were the chosen people. Jesus explained to Pontius Pilate that he was there to expose the truth. The Jewish business community was only too happy to be rid of Him.

Jesus also allegedly performed impossible miracles, such as walking on water, and feeding five thousand with five loaves and two fish. Christians also believe in an after-life in Heaven, for the existence of which there is nevertheless no obvious evidence. You are not entitled, however, to sneer at any of these, if you believe any or most of the secular falsehoods and impossibilities listed and exposed above. This applies especially to the mystique surrounding the national state that is obligatory in the modern world.

Dr. Martin Luther broke with clerical practice when he married a nun, Katharina von Bora, who bore him six children. A priest with a family has economic responsibilities that can compromise his impartiality, so the Roman Catholic church prohibited clerical marriage in a prosaic but not entirely effective effort to reinforce the integrity of the priesthood and its commitment to the values described by Jesus.

Jesus styled himself “the son of God” both to emphasise the authority of his value system, but also to distance himself from Moses’s Jewish god, who was inextricably linked to the powerful mystique of Israelite nationalism. Jesus fully understood the need to introduce the concept of an authoritative “Holly Ghost” to counter-balance the formidable power of the national god of each of the other states and princedoms that adopted Christianity.

Both the United Nations Organisation and the European Union are unmistakable derivatives of the universal value system promoted by Jesus. The UN was set up in an effort to reduce the incidence and cruelty of war between sovereign nations, by defining and promoting the international fundamental rights of human beings. The EU has developed from an instrument for reducing the risk of European war by obliging European jurisdictions to enforce the same standards of fairness and honesty for trade between member states as those they apply to domestic trade. Like the Roman Catholic church, but unlike the early church, both the EU and the specialist agencies of the UN have budgets, which inevitably gives them dirty hands. Both the UN and the EU are conspicuously handicapped by their lack of a “Holy Ghost” to counter-balance the destructive mystique of national chauvinism that is as pervasive today as it was in Moses’s time.