It requires no unusual effort to see the past two thousand years of European intellectual history entirely in terms of a struggle against Christianity. Indeed, even a cursory familiarity with the main trends and developments of European thought almost forces this view forward, as if it were too obvious and self-evident to merit investigation. The utter and total collapse of all literature, art, and philosophy that coincided with the rise of Christianity in the late Roman Empire, the magnificent flowering of these disciplines that occurred consequent to the rediscovery of the pagan world during the renaissance, and the awesome unfoldings of human capabilities and knowledge that followed the advent of the scientific method in the 17th century, as Christian beliefs were first implicitly, then openly challenged, all combine to make this anti-Christian view the most obviously just lens through which to view the topic. Yet the fact that many, and not only the ignorant, still adhere to Christianity, or hold it innocent of the crimes against human potential and dignity that it so long, and so enthusiastically perpetrated, means that a study of this sort is essential. At least contemporary Neo-Nazis are aware of what their idols did - Christians today can somehow still get away with shamelessly professing their faith without addressing the millions of women killed as witches during centuries of terror, or the immense slaughters of the crusades or pogroms, or the blinding stranglehold their church used to crush intellectual freedom for centuries, or its idiotic hindrance of scientific inquiry and the pursuit of truth, or indeed of the plain fact that their religion essentially ended European civilization for a millennium.
    I see the intellectual history of our culture as a long and slow awakening, during which a mighty goddess, call her Reason, or Nature, or Europa, struggled to arise and cast off layers of foul bedding, to shake from her mighty limbs the effects of an alien and unnatural draught, drank in a weak moment, and to open her eyes to the clear vision of the true and beautiful Reality that surrounds her.
    Before tracing this process in detail, as a foretaste, simply consider what was going on in Italy during the days of the High Renaissance in the early 16th century. Instead of merely copying over flat images of saints, artists began to actually really look at reality, to inspect it, to imply that our world and our own selves were good and beautiful. They challenged the Christian idea that the body and the physical world were uninteresting, impure, and tainted by something called sin. The question Michelangelo’s David poses is “What if humans are beautiful?” Durer’s and Leonardo’s intimate studies of small parts of nature ask “What if our world is fascinating, awesome, and worthy of study?” The implicit question our culture was aching to ask itself was “What would it be like, what would it feel like, if we recognized ourselves and our world as good? If we were to worship Reality, rather than a book? What if our true, inner will, the will to know, the will to enjoy, our lust for each other and our world, what if all these were not the temptations of an invisible adversary, but our true and highest purpose?” These artists re-discovered a spirit that led to a re-emergence of our own dignity and unlimited potential. Can we not call this spirit what it is –the spirit of Paganism?

    In order to facilitate this study, I here introduce two new terms. A claustra is an artificial mental world that humans create for themselves to live in. We love, and almost require such little worlds, because our minds can only with difficulty, and sometimes with terror and blind incredulity, be made to contemplate the eleutherion, or the wild and unbounded total freedom of Reality. Claustra is Latin for a room, and eleutherion combines the Greek words for freedom (eleutheria) and wild beast (therion). Any self-contained and self-referential system of ideas that humans inhabit is a claustra. Islam, Marxism, and the World of Warcraft computer game are all fine examples of claustra. These offer a completely enveloping world that people inhabit, in which literally all aspects of reality can be either explained or ignored. Warcraft, or Warcrack, as it is often called, because of its highly addictive nature, and renowned ability to rapidly come to occupy all a person’s life, is an extremely popular computer game in which players compete and cooperate in real time, on line, in a synthetic dungeons and dragons type setting. It is a fake universe whose demiurge is a collective human timidity, and love of the comfort that a synthetic, limited and inclusive reality can afford. It is graphically impoverished, pixilated, and completely limited by artificial rules. Most strikingly unlike Reality, the World of Warcraft is entirely centered on, and devoted to, its human inhabitants. This is an essential characteristic of a claustra, and one in which that mighty claustra called Christianity likewise excels.
    The more we learn about reality, the more ludicrously inconsequential our own concerns are revealed to be. For this reason, any system of thought that can effectively impede or inhibit human access to reality swiftly becomes a popular pursuit. In the case of an especially effective or cunning claustra, this phenomenon can snowball a significant portion of the earth’s population into a single dark mass of ingrown, blind ignorance, which gnaws itself endlessly in the dungeon of its own contorted stupidity. Christianity is certainly the most ancient, effective and virulent claustra still operating in our world today. Its ability to convince humans of the risible, demonstrably false premises that they are at the centre of the universe, and that the minutiae of their behavior and thought are of singular and immense importance, contribute to its ability to effectively parasitize vast segments of the population.
    Whether this and other claustra have arisen independently, in the manner of self-replicating biological organisms, or were designed and engineered by parasitic non-physical forces, is a question not dealt with here. It is my opinion that, rather than being the product of deliberate, conscious engineering, claustra arose spontaneously as a result of innate human tendencies, and soon evolved into vast, world-wide systems that afforded idiotic, non-physical entities increasing opportunities to feed off of human psychic energies. Through an unconscious, unintentional symbiotic dynamic, these low-level entities affected the development of claustra in ways most beneficial to themselves. See my extensive investigation of this topic OOC3.
    It is important and instructive to differentiate this anti-Christian analysis from the anti-Semitic, crypto-fascist, narratives with which it might be confused. The idea that Europe, in becoming Christian, was somehow infected by a dirty, alien Semitic current, and struggled to re-assert its pure Aryan or Indo-European spirit, is not a new one, to say the least. Investigating the falsity of that analysis will serve as an excellent method of revealing what Christianity really is.
    It is important to realize first, that the teachings of Jesus represented a significant departure from contemporary Jewish thought, and furthermore, that Christianity as it was eventually adopted, had very little, if indeed anything, to do with those teachings. Christianity was a product of the syncretic religious and intellectual currents of the late Hellenistic period, and thus had far more to do with Neo-Platonism, vernacular pagan religions, and the spiritual needs of plebeians in the late Roman Empire than it did with Judaism or Semitic tradition. It is my firm suspicion that wandering Cynic and Buddhist philosophers whom Jesus encountered in the thirty years before he began his ministry provided much of the innovative current that he brought to the traditions of his culture. The evidences for this suspicion will readily present themselves to those familiar with Jesus and his period, and have been treated in several lengthy studies. Without plunging into these fascinating, though speculative details, one thing should at least be made clear. Jesus’ teaching, although posing as a fulfillment, could be seen, and certainly was seen, as a repudiation of Jewish tradition. Thus even had Christianity been based on these teachings, which it was not, any theory of Semitic contamination would be ignorant and incorrect.
    The social chaos during the last few centuries of the Empire saw the rise of various foreign cults, of which Christianity was only one. Had conditions differed slightly, Isis worship or Mithraism could well have ended up as the new religion of Europe. Even a brief glimpse at the iconography of these two traditions will indicate their proximity to Christianity. The thousands of small statues of Isis with Horus in her lap, excavated in all corners of the Empire, could be easily mistaken for images of the Virgin Mary and child, for they are essentially identical. The themes of solar resurrection and sacrifice found in the cult of Mithras have likewise long suggested parallels to Christianity. Tracing the origins of Christianity is of course a vast topic, which I have neither the time, interest, nor erudition to pursue. Let it suffice to conclude that Christianity was a product of the various intellectual and social currents of late antiquity, rather than a Semitic tradition, or the preserved doctrines of its founder. This knowledge ought to allay suspicions that an anti-Christian or neo-pagan discourse is necessarily anti-Semitic or fascist.


    Observing our surroundings, we may note that all self-perpetuating systems, be they single cells, complex organisms, populations of organisms, individual human psyches, or vast social systems, sustain themselves by processes of self-repair. Self-repair is a basic characteristic of life, whether the entity in question is an organism, a mind, or an institution. The processes of self-repair are easily recognized by biologists on the cellular and the macroscopic scales in organisms, but it is worthwhile to point out that self-repair is likewise essential to the continued health, and even the continued existence of a human psyche. Most of the daily mental surface chatter of our minds consists of routine self-repair. Note how a healthy mind naturally seeks to bolster its own position, and to pass off or minimize elements that demean or threaten it. The person who dumped you was a douchbag anyway. You knew all along that the job that fired you wasn’t right for you. We naturally seek to note and treasure up in memory ways in which we are better than others, or instances in which our knowledge or understanding exceeds theirs. Observant and self-aware persons will be able to cite instances from their lives in which information that could not be readily assimilated was utterly ignored, despite the plain openness of its appearance. Simple experiments can indicate that human minds retain vast powers of obliviousness, when confronted with data not easily related to their accepted habits and modes of operation. It is notable how readily the mind will seek out and seize on the remotest bits of information confirming its prejudices and settled habits of thought, while passing over enormous contradictions and difficulties that sprawl flagrantly before of it. Once they insinuate themselves into our ways of thought, claustra are able to hijack this process of constant mental self-repair to ensure their own persistence.
    But self-repair is basic not only for organisms and individual minds, but for vast social systems themselves. In this context, it is particularly instructive to note the specific set of increases in human knowledge that the Christian Church has found especially threatening during its history. While generally tending to promote conservatism and stultification in all fields of human endeavor, the church never found significant occasion to condemn or obstruct progress in mathematics, historical research, architecture, philology, or other fields relating solely to human concerns. These never threatened the membranous enclosure it had over its hosts. But observe the fulminating and especial vehemence with which it sought to strike down and wipe out progress in fields that expanded human concerns beyond the dull round of self-referential, human-centered rumination, into space, into deep time, into Reality. And not without very good reason. Christianity can never hope to recover from the utterly crushing blows dealt it by the truth of heliocentrism and the fatal puncture meted out by the manifest reality of natural selection. Now, all educated people are aware that humans are essentially a form of biotic slime evolved over unthinkable eons of time, and that our little sun is but one among uncountable multitudes. These truths really eviscerate Christianity’s central myths, and render some pretty stupendous feats of willful blindness necessary in order for intelligent and informed persons to cling to it. But as we have seen, willful blindness is one of the central self-repair skills inherent in any healthy mind.
   
    In some sense, it might be possible to argue that the function of the human mind is not so much to perceive reality, as to ignore it. The chaos of information received by the sensory organs is filtered, edited and cropped to fit into settled and pre-formed patterns. The process of learning, considered at the neurological level, does not involve the growth of neurons, or the expansion of their connections. Instead, it entails a reduction in their interconnectedness, a trimming back of the chaotic initial state of neural wilderness, into the settled topiaries that characterize an educated adult mind. Thus, everything we know is the result of the cutting off of potential connections, and the very organ we use to apprehend reality operates by inhibiting our access to reality.

    All sorts of quotidian human behaviors demonstrate our fear of encountering reality, and the eagerness with which our minds hurry to lapse into comfortable, synthetic matrices. People walk around staring at their pixilated personal devices. I have always found it interesting to observe how patrons of museums and art galleries crowd around the minute textual labels, and spend more time reading these than looking at the art itself. Like weak bugs, our minds hasten to scurry off into familiar dark crevices, preferring these to the open sky of reality. Who knows what might pounce down out of that void?
    A somewhat ludicrous, but pointedly relevant instance from my own experience demonstrates the human mind’s natural distaste for reality, and the eagerness with which it retracts into synthetic recesses of its own devising. I work in a doughnut shop, in which the various doughnuts available are displayed in a hexagonal, rotating glass case. While serving the doughnuts, my job largely consists of an often futile struggle to get the customers to actually look at the doughnuts available, rather than at the printed menus or illustrated guides provided for them. These texts reference a full array of items not necessarily available at all times. These menus are designed to pander to the innate tendency of the human mind to immerse itself in a synthetic representation of reality, rather than in reality itself. A typical interaction will go something like this:

Customer, looking at menu: I’d like doughnut X, please.
Me: I’m sorry; it looks like we’re out of that one now. If you check out the case, you can see the doughnuts we actually have available now.
Customer briefly glances at case, is clearly overwhelmed, and looks back at menu: Do you have doughnut Y?
Me: Sorry, it looks like we’re out of that one too. If you look at these doughnuts, you can see the available selection.
Customer, nervously looking at doughnuts: But I don’t know what they are!
Me, to self: They’re doughnuts, you blitheringly idiotic mass of protoplasm. You seem to be a fluent native speaker of one of the most complex human languages ever to evolve. Do you think you might be able to look at the selection and use your formidable language skills to describe the one you want?

    This is the same sort of behavior that the great renaissance anatomist Vesalius railed against in the medical teachers of his time, who presided over dissections perched on a high stool, armed with a copy of Galen and a long stick to remotely indicate bits of cadavers being dissected by servile barbers. Vesalius was responsible for the crucial innovation of actually getting down to look at the thing one was talking about.  In retrospect, it is painfully sad just how long it took for this basic insight to arise- “Hey, we can know about what’s real by looking at reality!” The facts that it did take so long to arise, that it arose only once in human history, and that it was not immediately accepted as the blindingly obvious method of gaining knowledge, ought to tell us something very important about ourselves. Reading through the early volumes of the Transactions of the Royal Philosophical Society, one gets a sense of just how exciting it was to be around in these early days, when the omnipotent catalyst of the scientific method first became available. Leeuwenhoek’s groundbreaking efforts in microbiology are intermixed with accounts of monsters, prodigies, and things such as Account of a Fork put up the Fundament. Our species muddled through millennia of blind bungling, until the advent of the scientific method, and then it was only years before we were aiming at the stars.