THE GREAT GOSPEL OF JOHN
VOLUME 5
Jesus' Precepts and Deeds through His Three Years of Teaching
Jesus in the region of Caesarea Philippi. (cont.) Gospel of Matthew, Chapter 16
- Chapter 30 -
Roklus critizes the Indian and the Jewish religious teaching.
1
(Roklus,) "Yes, I had spoken out earlier that man's idea of only one god, indwelled from immemorial times by the greatest intelligence, the clearest reason, the highest wisdom and the best and almightiest will, is to be counted as one of man's most beautiful and most worthy. But the concept of a perfect deity should also be a highly pure one, commensurate to the entity, whether it found a reality in spiritually transcendental background or not! But such a deity is professed under all sorts of most foolish and material concepts and is forced with such deceit and often gruesome violence on the other, still level-headed primitive man for worship and deep veneration!
2
If as an experienced thinker one bristles against it, it is said: There must be a god no matter what face he has; whether it is one worthy of a god, or a hideously foolish one, it has generally been all the same to the stone-blind man! But can it be all the same to educated, pure reason? I do not think so because pure reason is based on a mathematically correct, logical order and can never, under any constraints, imagine that a master, whose most artful and most organized works show how much knowledge and many dignified experiences he must have had in order to call into being such magnificent and most organized artificial works, would have been a lot dumber and more stupid than the dumbest fish in the water!
3
How, one says, could I have guessed that a deity, deeply venerated by millions of people, should be so dreadfully dumb? No, listen, great friend, it does not take that much! I am speaking openly now, as it is openly coming from my heart. If we go through the commandments of the deities known to us and examine their visual presentations visible only to us, we have enough! Nothing more needs to be said about it."
4
Cyrenius says here, "Well, you will hopefully have no objection towards the Mosaic law of the Jews?"
5
Roklus says, "This is admittedly the best of all commandments that I have come across as originating from gods. God's oneness and the laws, if not exhaustive, are as humane as possible and have a great resemblance with the ones of old Egypt; but he did not reproduce a wise law of the old Egyptians! It is very nice and laudable that Moses' deity gives a law to children, on how they should behave towards their parents; but the Egyptian's Isis had given quite a wise law to the parents on how they should behave towards their children, because children are people too and should have the full right to demand from their makers a certain something due to them; because they did not procreate themselves into this world and were not asked in advance if they would be all right with being put into this world under very often bitter conditions. In short, the small, weak firstlings have from Moses a law for the behavior towards their elders; but these do not have one with regard to the children and so they stand without any right before their parents, like slaves before their masters. Later and subsequent adjustments were given by Moses with regard to this; but there is nothing in the initial commandment that was supposedly given on the mountain by god."