The Other Russia

Lecture 18

The business of the Orthodox Church experiences a boom. The Patriarchate received from the State, and also won in courts and took from the “laypeople”: from organizations, from clubs, from factories and warehouses – its property. The RPC [Russian Orthodox Church] has property galore now. It became fashionable to build churches and chapels. I saw a humid concrete church even in the Soviet Zheleznogorsk-26. It is there now that they will take for processing, on the unique mining complex, graved in a rock (“We have an Eight world wonder here!” proudly affirmed to me the director of the GOK Zhidkov. “The pyramids take a rest!”), nuclear waste from the entire planet. A great place for a church. Next to hell.

However the fact that church constructions, return of the treasures, temples’ living spaces and icons are not at all accompanied by the religious activity of the population. The pike of such activity had passed in the beginning of the 90s, that’s been ten years that it had passed. Well, sure that on Easter and Christmas crowds of commoners flow to the Cathedral of Christ the Savior (not so many: according to police data 250-270 thousands in all Moscow churches), however the custom of Easter and Christmas goes beyond the limits of a religious behavior and belongs to the genre of entertainment activities together with concerts and soccer games.

Regularly leaders of the Russian Federation and Moscow, ministers and deputies appear in the Cathedral of Christ the Savior. Back in 1996 I attended, from curiosity, the laying of the CCS foundations. Yeltsin was supposed to be there, so six rows of frozen soldiers, police and special services guarded the fenced off construction site, this is apart from the fence. The guests were stroked over with mine-searchers like in a dance club – a shameful show. Possibly, today such authority visits to a church look less shameful. The authorities, in any case, had set up the church for their own needs, though they doesn’t quite get what profit they can have from these motions of theirs, like the appearance in a church on Christmas or on Easter. Do the voters-believers relate Putin’s or Luzhkov’s visits in church and the frequency of these visits with their civil preferences, when they hold the voting bulletin in their hand? In any case, the habit of a hypocrite coaxing of the elector by visits in the church here in Russia had resuscitated from the dead anew and took root. At first the leaders didn’t know how to cross themselves, now they wave their three fingers with ease.

This wouldn’t matter, but 2001 has come. XXI century. The century of Internet, aerosol bombs, and man is about to be cloned. Therefore Russia’s return to a near-eastern religion turned out to be late, ill timed. In normal days the churches are empty so it doesn’t seem that there is any return at all, it looks rather one-sided, residential-municipal… God lives alone in his lodgings… besides one can’t get rid of the impression that the sticky, hot near-eastern attributes of the legend about Christ look unconvincing in our country’s snows. Just as some kind of Isida cult, if our authorities decided for a reason to implant it in the frozen Russia. Christ, hanging naked from the cross, only in a loin cloth, the palm-tree resurrection (where do we have palm-trees? In restaurants?), sweat, heat, Roman legionnaires in sandals – all of this is an out-of-place exotica. It seems so bath-like. And what do we have to do with all this? I can’t overcome my estrangement from this myth of a climatically different zone. Indeed all these attributes are so foreign. Among the Magi there is even a Negro on the icons, so involuntary you think in bewilderment “a loin cloth, a palm-tree resurrection, a Negro, camels, why not a crucified Negro!”

It is known that the Christian clergy adapted the festive costume of a wealthy Roman citizen of the IV century AD period for church service. Therefore you can’t even reproach the patriarch, the metropolitans and the clergy of the Orthodox church that they, like big officials or big thugs, drive around in Mercedes and jeeps, and they have more and more guards. Like they adapted the costume of a wealthy Roman citizen, thus they adapted Mercedes and jeeps, that is, they behave in complete accord with the church tradition.

People thought so much about Christianity, fanatized so much around it, pondered so much about it, they spun it, turned, interpreted texts and analyzed so much that they exhausted it, wore it to holes. Only maybe the works of Karl Marx are comparable with the Gospels by the intensity of the interpretations to which they were submitted. Christ came to the world to expiate our sins – that is the base of the Christian building, the foundations. But we really don’t have any sins, what sins can have a whitish, kissel-like, composed at 80% from water, soft being, covered with a thin skin and sparse hair? Even if there are sins, let’s assume, (only before whom?) then we are all condemned to expiate them by our death. Death is our judge. And we wouldn’t avoid it. What has to do with that a yellow-skinned, bearded man in a loincloth on a cross? Why did he suffer for us? We inevitably suffer for ourselves anyway. Moral agents between man and death are not provided. No brokers and dealers and lawyers: bash for bash -sin for an indulgency… sinner or not – death will take its due. It’s another thing that Christ’s story is an impressive moral parable and a universal literature subject. Here everything is ok. But religion itself, i.e. proofs of the power of a Lord from beyond, the power of supernatural forces in Christianity is not that evident. The Aztecs or the Mayas who offered human sacrifices to the God of the sun on their pyramids, had more faith…

They brought us this bath-like (since sandals, sponge, a loin cloth – are requisites of a bath) fairy-tale in our snow visibly not so that we believe in it in the Beyond Power, rather with more utilitarian goals. Unwillingly I tend to the idea that Christianity was brought us from the West (just as later the Siamese twins capitalism/socialism) by A SOCIAL NEED. With political and police goals. And they didn’t even adapt it so much, stuck it urgently in the same “set” with the loincloth, the Negro mage and the legionnaires’ sandals.

Christ proposed to love his neighbor and to put the other cheek in case of a blow on the jaw. And when he expulsed the traders from the temple, then, from the point of view of order and European law he was right – traders have nothing to do in a temple. Once I heard from the screen of a French television a sacrilegious thing: the Paris archbishop (actually, by origin a Jew) calmly said: “From the point of view of Judaism, Christ died an orthodox Jew. Since the Synedrion didn’t excommunicate him. He was given to the hands of the roman authorities and he was subjected to their punishment.” Monseigneur said that and cast down his eyes.

Read again the Ten Commandments, remember them if you know them: “thou shalt not kill, thou shalt not steal, thou shalt not commit adultery, thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s wife…” In real fact the text of the Ten Commandments reminds mostly the Criminal Code, is general positions, as a first draft of the ancient CC. God the father who sent on earth these valuable indications through Moses possessed a general prosecutor’s mindset. And if one is to add to the Ten Commandments God the father’s indications about what to do if you were hit on the cheek and other rules of obedient behavior (but only among one’s own people, for the enemies, it speculates the reducing to ashes as minimum) then we get the commentaries to the CC.

Many people attacked Christianity. Nietzsche called it the religion of the weak and the despicable, but nobody attempted to look at it from a legal, police point of view. Christ even though he wanders with picturesque apostles and disconcerts the neighborhood, in real fact does not disturb the order, in the contrary enforces the order. He comes forth against corruption, money-grubbing, he clamps down on Judea, sunk in sin, especially the rich, calls not to forget about the poor and the destitute i.e. to provide social help. It’s another story that the roman secular rough power doesn’t need any concurrence. All of this becomes clear if one is to read carefully the Gospels.

Israeli archeologists recently admitted with regret that no, alas, archeological artifacts were discovered in biblical famous places, although intensive excavations were done during all the half-a-hundred years from the times of the creation of the State of Israel. No vestiges of the walls of Sodom and Gomorra, no crocks, no lances, no vessels. And in the Sinai desert, where Moses wandered for a long time with his people – nothing, and in the Ancient Judea – nothing. The professors Fomenko and Nosovsky must wildly rejoice to the admitting of the Israeli archeologists. Since it’s been a quarter of a century that they affirm that the biblical Jerusalem is in reality the city of Constantinople. According to their version all the biblical places should be looked for in Constantinople – the modern Istanbul. And it’s not by mistake that it’s Constantinople that the crusaders captured in 1204. They didn’t get lost at all and they didn’t deviate from the right itinerary on thousands of kilometers in order to, supposedly, punish the Byzantines for some offenses, it’s not the Catholics who got revenge on Orthodoxy. They arrived where they had to – to liberate Lord’s Tomb. It is in Constantinople that Christ’s grave is located, crucified in real fact eleven centuries later, in the suburbs of Istanbul on the mount Beykos. There is also a table. It is said on it in Turk: “Saint Yusha (Jesus)” The most probable date of Christ’s crucifixion is 1095 AD. Another possible version is 1086, affirm Fomenko and Nosovsky. The books of these two scholars is really great material for thoughts and doubts. The crusaders in 1204 came where they had to. And, time speaking, they came when they were supposed to, they weren’t late, since the crusades began already in the end of the XI century, just after Christ’s crucifixion. To suppose that the Europeans decided to liberate Lord’s Tomb after 11 centuries after Christ’s crucifixion is extremely unconvincing, what, the tragedy got to them only after 11 centuries!? Long before the awkward admitting of the Israeli archeologists, Fomenko and Nosovsky affirmed that in Palestine in “biblical” times and during the entire first millennium, up until the beginning of the Middle Ages there were no big cities. That Constantinople is Jerusalem.

One gets the impression that religions in general and Christianity in particular pursued the goal not so much to convince man in the existence of a Lord from Beyond, but, referring to the Supernatural authority had procurator goals: to frighten and to submit the wild, aggressive and chaotic human nature. Since the very fact of death’s existence practically unties man’s hands, anyway you’ll die, everything is allowed – they had to put over him a supernatural supervisor: “Behave, otherwise the last judgment and other horrors await you”.

A peasant fairy-tale was created: a baby, Mary, Joseph, Immaculate Conception, sheep, a bull and other characters of a puppet show. However behind the unbelievably simple fable dissimulated an entire ethical system of obedience. And the tale was made peasant since the major part of the audience on which Christianity counted were peasant inhabitants. Sheep, a bull, the carpenter Joseph – they understood that. It is extremely interesting, who did develop this effective fairy-tale after all? It can’t be that such necessary to the world means of unification, this perfect straight-jacket to human passions appeared by itself. In what knight castle, what collective of medieval philosophers, letters men, theologists and necessarily Public Prosecutors wrote the script of Christianity? There was not one Public Prosecutor there, it’s not for nothing that in the script such a fateful, mystical place is held by Pontius Pilate. Since he’s a procurator, that is, a Public Prosecutor. (The Ten Commandments without doubt already smell of concentration camps and Lefortovo fortress. It is still far – the fortress, but already appears in the foggy darkness of the centuries.) A scientific collective developed Christianity. An international one. The principal goals – to muffle man and to globalize the world – to introduce a single religion. I don’t doubt in my conclusions. Taking as a starting point the crucifixion of a little known Christopher in 1086 or 1095 (a rather usual punishment in those days), the international scientific body created a powerful religion. Later it was brought in our snowy lands as well. Since the subduing-police-like successful role of Christianity was already indubitable.

Today Christianity looks like a puppet show for retarded children. It is simply comical. Our time of the telescope “Hubble” and the decrepit rusty hundreds of satellites turning over the planet Earth and the close, just-just, human cloning reclaims a New God. A bit more complicated and a bit scarier. Looking through the “Hubble” on the rough stony sides of the planet, on the inexorable stone-iron universe; on the wild temperatures of the planets, on the graphics of the rotations of all this machinery, looking on the collisions, catastrophes and destructions; looking on the pictures of our green-blue round planet, seating on the thickness of rocks who hide melted magma inside the Earth, there is something to think about. The Universe, more precisely, all the volume of spaces and time known to us, is today way more mysterious than it appeared to the imagination of the most crackpot geniuses of the past. It also turns out that the Universe is constantly enlarging. Only to think to what point all of this is strange! Mad blocks of matter rush through ice worlds, nuclear explosions of suns burn with hundreds of thousands of degrees, all of this collides time to time, so that the burning giants of asteroids fly to pieces… And on the green-blue planet Earth the patriarch Alexiy The Second seats on a chair, and many hundreds of kilometers down under his chair burns magma. Even if man will clone his fellow men soon and in unlimited quantity he will not be able to comprehend the sense of man. There will be a mechanical reproduction of some genetic versions of man, but why are we sent to crawl like bugs on woods and cities – we won’t know. Gurdzhiev affirmed, remembers Uspenski, that human kind exists to feed the Moon, on distance. And he gave to this, really mad affirmation, a rational cosmic explanation. In Severodvinsk lives the engineer Kovalevsky. I never met him but he sent his scientific manuscripts to the newspaper “Limonka”.

It talked about… the control over human kind by cosmic extraterrestrial civilizations, about clusters of energy that govern us, those like “Christ” or “Brahma”, about cosmic invisible copied ships, to operate which Kovalevsky was ready to teach human kind. At first I decided that the engineer from Severodvinsk was completely mad, but after reading more carefully, I discovered with fright that this could be. That this could be like this too. Especially interesting seemed to me the promise to train man for flights on copied, hovering somewhere ships – pieces of plasma and that Kovalevsky promised to train man to do without food. I sent members of the Severodvinsk department of the national-Bolshevik party to the engineer, but they didn’t get a contact with Kovalevsky.

Man doesn’t know anything. He only uses the miracles, but he didn’t get to the essence of the miracles. He uses electro-energy, energy of the split core of uranium, but the mysteries of these energies he didn’t discover, didn’t understand. Therefore he needs God. But a bit more complicated and a bit scarier. Wrapped up in the cocoon of atmosphere, the Terrestrial Globe quietly bears human kind until a precise, but also designed for chance inexorable mechanism of the universe doesn’t smash it to pieces together with the cocoon and the planet-bearer. What Christ, sponge with vinegar, lance can express man’s confusion before his insignificance, shabbiness. A sponge, vinegar are objects more from the show “Duty Unit” or “Road Patrol” – a requisite of the everyday murder by bums of their own comrade, they just tortured him a bit…

Maniacs feel man’s mystery, and in their, of course, manner, try to solve it, pitilessly ripping a meat doll, possibly look for the soul, look for the meaning and each time are disappointed. Just like the natives from Fiji Island, who discovered that God – the captain Cook – bleeds from the stone they had thrown. There is some solution to the meaning of man, to imagine that we hang around here in vain each his term would be awfully bitter. Obviously, we, alas, are not the principal in the multiple gigantic worlds, as it seems to human kind, seemed until now. The head of it all, the Leader of world order cannot be only a god of men, what a specialization! And man cannot be such a God’s favorite pet so that he jealously, without leaving from sight, watches his morality. The God of an incalculable quantity of worlds, cold, rough, stone-metallic and inexorable, has to have the shape of some planet Saturn, scary and remote. And indifferent. When I want to pray, I admit, I imagine myself ice worlds, black holes, spaces of light years, rough sides of scary planets, all this revolving cosmogony, and I pray to Saturn. Also it is good to pray to the Tunguska meteorite – a part of the universe. The Muslims, who pray to the black meteorite of Kaaba are closer than us to the truth…

And if man needs so badly HIS special GOD, for men, then he should pray to human semen. That’s where the miracle really is, the only miracle of life. It doesn’t have to be falsified, it is each time Rebirth, Immortality. Dropped semen in the lap of a woman – happens the miracle of mans’ creation.

Smeared like Disneylands multiple houses of God are empty, only fat servants make invocations there. Actually, there are always unthinking souls, ready to accept these invocations for contact with God. In a simple computer today there is more mysteriousness than in Christianity. If fat, Moscow women, soft from the buns, ate by them in unrestricted quantities, crowd in front of the entrance to the CCS with Easter cakes, then what right has the national-Bolshevik to linger there too?

Thinking about the mysteries of the universe, imagine yourself the rough sides of the gloomy planet Saturn. Pour your semen in a young woman natzbol and a Human being will be born. Was anything ever born from Christianity, from the Church? Nothing, ever.

Our God is the planet Saturn. Bear on your chest a piece of meteorite. Trust the engineer Kovalevsky.