What would you have done if—after having already given up on all esoteric (i.e., traditional) religions for good because of the obscurity of the meanings of their authoritative writings—you happened to recall that the esotericist Christians’ idea of paradise was a place where everything would finally be “clear, clear, clear, clear, clear”?

And what if—after having already come to the conclusion that all “prophets” (i.e., esotericists) are necessarily liars—you happened to notice that one of the ancient Jewish prophets (namely Zechariah, in 13:2-4) envisioned the “day of the Lord” as ushering in an age when there would be no more “prophesying”—and, moreover, that the reason for this would be that a “prophet” was actually someone who “spoke lies” and “deceived” people?

That’s the position in which I found myself at one point.  If you found yourself in that same position, would those “ironic coincidences” have sparked your curiosity at all?

Might they have raised the possibility in your mind that perhaps there was some unconscious “hidden message” contained in the Bible that the authors were passing along to the reader—even, to a large extent, in spite of themselves?

Would you have proceeded—as I did—to see if you could decipher the “unconscious intentions” of the authors of the Bible, based on the assumption that no one else would likely be making the attempt to do so?

Or would you have simply walked away from your discoveries and pretended not to have noticed what you noticed so that you could “get on with your life”—because of your having vaguely realized that you would be entering a mental quagmire if you ever tried to make sense of what had been going on in the heads of the authors?

Would you have said, “Oh well, I don’t know Hebrew or Greek, so that’s really for someone else to do”?

Would you have said, “Oh well, I don’t have the proper academic credentials to do such a thing; but at the same time, I have no reason to think that the people who do have those credentials will be doing that sort of work—so apparently it just won’t be possible for such a thing to get done”?

I made the decision to enter the mental quagmire, even though I was unprepared to do so, and even though it was really the last thing I wanted to do (just as I know it will be the last thing that many others will want to do)—and I did so because I made the decision that just such a “thing” needed to get done.

Based on having entered that mental quagmire myself, I very gradually became convinced that my initial suspicion was indeed valid:  that, at a partly unconscious level of awareness, the authors of the Bible must themselves have been opposed to the esotericist or “prophetic” type of communication—the very type of communication that they were using in their own writings.

I also concluded that—again, at a partly unconscious level of awareness—the expectation of the authors of the Bible was that the disappearance of this esotericist type of communication would, in one way or another, coincide with the “end of the age.”

And because this esotericist type of communication is intrinsically deceptive, I believe that the end of this type of communication, and the “end of the age,” would have been understood by those authors—albeit somewhat unconsciously—to coincide with the end of the Lie as an active force in human affairs.  (And there is textual evidence to be found for this proposition in the Bible, not least of which is Zechariah 13:2-4, one of the passages I link to above.)

I believe the Lie is both a necessary cause, and a necessary product, of this esotericist type of communication—which is essentially schizophrenic or psychotic in nature.  That is to say, I believe that schizophrenia or psychosis—and more specifically, schizophrenic or psychotic communication—is ultimately both a necessary cause and a necessary product of the presence of the Lie in human affairs.  For that reason, psychosis and the Lie must necessarily both rise or fall together; and for that same reason, the existence of the religious esotericist mode of communication—in other words, a psychotic mode of communication—provides the essential means by which both psychosis and the Lie are able to be perpetuated in human society.  If religions no longer employed an esotericist mode of discourse in their authoritative writings, it would at least become possible for both psychosis and the Lie to be brought to an end.  Otherwise, I believe, it will not be.  And I think the authors of the Bible, at some level of awareness, shared this belief.

Now I realize I’m making some pretty big statements.  How does one get to the point where one can accept them as true?  My answer:  Step by step.  If something I say seems to “check out” or “ring true” even just a little—or, if you happen to come across some suspicious or intriguing connection on your own—then you go on to the next step.  You must follow your intuition in these matters; and persons who are strongly intuitive will see greater rewards for their efforts than those who are not.

As your “first step,” I offer the “ironic coincidences” that I mentioned above.  If they don’t even pique your curiosity in the slightest degree, then I doubt that anything else I have to say regarding Bible interpretation will be of interest to you, and there is no point in going on with it.  (However, the material pertaining to “truth groups” and “non-esoteric religious communities,” i.e., “practical philosophical communities,” may still be of interest to you.)

Unfortunately, I have no irrefutable syllogisms that I can give you capable of definitively proving the correctness of my theory that the authors of the Bible were actually opposed to the esotericist mode of discourse that they themselves were using (although I think Zechariah 13:2-4 does come pretty close to hard proof).  All I have to offer you are a large number of “strange coincidences” along the lines of the ones I already mentioned—which, as they accumulate, begin to look less and less like coincidences.

If you lack the patience to watch them gradually pile up—at least for a while—then the simple fact is that, if you’re like most people, there is no way in which I will be able to persuade you of the correctness of my theory.

If it seems like too much trouble to click on the links that I provided at the beginning of this post—yes, all of the links—in order to verify that the “ironic coincidences” that I mentioned above do indeed have a scriptural basis—so that you are effectively unwilling to take that “first step”—then you won’t be interested in anything else that I have to say about Bible interpretation.  That’s because I’m going to be asking you to keep doing that sort of thing over and over again as I go about making my case.

As far as I’m concerned, with regard to my theory, the Bible to a large extent “speaks for itself”—that is, when it’s cross-referenced in a certain way.  But to let it “speak for itself,” you will, when I do my cross-referencing, actually have to go to the trouble of reading what the authors wrote.  Furthermore, you should be aware that sometimes I’ll be asking you to take careful note of the specific Greek or Hebrew words that an author used—and I ask you to do that even if you are not already familiar with the Greek or Hebrew languages.

If you would have made the same choice I did, and you’re willing to enter the same mental quagmire that I entered, then know that I’ve done everything I could do to make the experience of getting a handle on this type of material as easy for you as possible—easier than it was for me, anyway.  With that in mind, I ask you to begin carefully reading my writings on Bible interpretation (found in my two ebooks, and in Chapters 3 and 4 of Part I of my essay Against the Lie, and in the various blog posts and pages on this site pertaining to Bible interpretation).  Please make use of what I have been able to learn from my efforts at interpretation, so that you will be able to make an even better argument for the theory I am presenting than I have been able to make myself.