Overview of the New Testament

1 AEF has read the New Testament
This review of the New Testament is not meant to convince anyone of anything, but is only intended to open the mind from locked-up notions; otherwise, thinking risks getting stuck when it comes to drawing conclusions about anything.

The purpose of this philosophical review is not to take away religious faith, nor to create a new religion.
On the contrary, the point of the review is a way to open up thinking on the question of how we can even read the Bible and sense what the text is trying to point toward.

2 "The New Testament is a palimpsest – a text that has been written over in several layers. At the bottom are the Gnostic and Johannine heights, where the Logos and the Spirit describe the primordial subject of consciousness, how the universe is shaped like a coordinated dream. On top of this lie the bitter historical family feuds from around 90 AD, and on top of that, the Roman Empire's instruments of control from the 4th century, complete with threats of hell and demands for political obedience."

(Even here, the Christian church hesitates to continue reading.)

According to early church tradition (from the late 2nd century), the Gospel of John was written by the apostle John, son of Zebedee, who was one of Jesus' three closest disciples.

3 The text itself never mentions the name "John" as the author. Instead, the text refers to an anonymous authoritative figure called "the disciple whom Jesus loved" (or the beloved disciple). ["Didn't Jesus even love his enemies?"] Tradition has always identified this disciple as the apostle John. According to this view, the gospel was written in the city of Ephesus (in modern-day Turkey) when John was an old man, around 90–100 AD.

According to modern historical-critical research, the Gospel of John was written by a so-called "Johannine school." Most modern biblical scholars do not believe that a single person – and probably not the fisherman John from Galilee – wrote the entire text by themselves. Instead, the gospel is seen as the result of a longer process within a specific early community.

4 We don’t know much about the text "The Gospel of John," but it seems to have been written around 90 AD and was probably very interested in the Greek philosophical aspect of GOD. When the church around 180 AD formulated the text and named the gospel after the philosophically inclined "John," they decided to call this text "The Gospel of John." The last chapter (chapter 21) shows clear signs of having been added later by the community, after the beloved disciple had died, to assert that his testimony is true.

The gospel begins with:

"1 The divine Word became human in Jesus Christ"

5 In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning. Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made. In him was life, and that life was the light of all mankind. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.

There was a man sent from God whose name was John. He came as a witness to testify concerning that light. So it wasn’t John the Baptist who wrote the Gospel of John.

According to the gospel, John the Baptist points to Jesus and tells his own followers, ‘There he is—the Messiah/Christ’ (which means the anointed one) and the one Moses wrote about in the law. So there are very high expectations that all the peoples of the world will be blessed through Abraham’s offspring, and that a ruler (Shiloh) will come from the tribe of Judah.

6 (He basically says: "What you philosophers call the universe's inherent order and reason – we've seen take physical form in Jesus.")

You can't read these texts literally without clashing with historical reality. (The texts, according to AEF, are meant to point toward the possibility of insight into the conditions for the phenomenon.)

If we analyze the beginning of the Gospel of John, it would, according to AEF, say:

"In the beginning was the Logos (thought of as the phenomenon) with GOD (thought of as the existential condition). The phenomenon has come into being through GOD's essence, and without GOD's existence and inherent Essential Nature, nothing that occurs could occur. The essence is 'Life,' and life is the light experienced in the various colors of the spectrum, and this makes 'GOD' enlightened so that 'GOD' can see what happens through a multitude of spectral eyes."

7 "God" (1) flips the switch (2), the light breaks in the prism and becomes the world (3), and through all the eyes of the world, "God" can see himself.

No one who wrote the Gospel of John was present at the wedding where Jesus is said to have turned water into wine. But if you think about it, it’s really the phenomenon that changes from water to wine by watering the vine to produce the wine from the grapes, and that’s even more amazing than imagining a magician making it happen with pure illusion.

"God" does through the phenomenon every year the same thing to the vine that he did in the jars at the wedding in Cana. Water is taken up by the roots, passes through the trunk, is modulated in the grape, and becomes wine. But since we see this happen in a slow, repetitive process every year, we call it ‘natural’ and stop marveling at it. But the miracle is exactly the same.

8 Jesus called Himself "the Son of Man" Jesus uses the word about Himself around 80 times in the New Testament, and it appears: 8 times in the Gospel of Mark 30 times in the Gospel of Matthew 25 times in the Gospel of Luke 10 times in the Gospel of John

By calling Himself the Son of Man, Jesus emphasized His human nature and connection to humankind, while in the Jewish tradition it also hints at a heavenly figure who would come with power and glory.

Jesus says in the Gospel of John that He came down from "Heaven" to raise everyone up on the last day and that He is the only one who has "seen" the Father because He is from "GOD". If you do not eat me, you have no life. If you eat me, you are in me (and not outside). But one of you is a devil!

9 Jesus also says that he will disappear and those who are looking for him will not find him because it is where he cannot go. You neither know me nor my Father. If you knew who I am, then you would also know who my Father is. "You are from below" [bottom-up] "I am from above" [top-down] I, what I do, is always according to his (the Father's) mind. Jesus says in the Gospel of John "The truth will set you free"! He tells the Jews that "your father Abraham is the Devil and a murderer from the beginning." "I am before Abraham was!"

The story of Jesus and Nicodemus is also not an eyewitness account but something that the church's appointed writers put together when they wrote the Gospel of John.

10 What we see in the text is how the church's author uses Nicodemus as a literary "character" – a bit player who gets to ask just the right, slightly slow-witted questions so that Jesus can deliver the absolute core of the gospel text’s theological monologue (this is where the famous quote about "God so loved the world..." comes up). But if we once again strip away the idea of the historical eyewitness and instead look at what they’ve written together, the conversation with Nicodemus becomes the ultimate stress test of the human "house of cards" and what AEF calls the collapse of the personal self. Being born again – or shifting order

11 Nikodemus is the embodiment of the person described in the AEF text: He is successful, highly educated, has status, a career, and a perfect self-image. He has his entire house of cards in absolute order. He thinks completely bottom-up and wants logical, manageable answers about how life works. When Jesus tells him that he must "be born again" (or "born from above," anothen in Greek), Nikodemus's logic completely falls apart. He takes it literally and asks foolishly: "How can someone be born when they are old? Surely they cannot go back into their mother's womb?" Jesus responds with a pure AEF-formulation about how perception and the invisible work:

12 "The wind blows wherever it wants, and you hear its sound, but you don’t know where it comes from or where it’s going. That’s how it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit."

The collapse of the private "self"

Being "born again" in this context isn’t about a religious quick fix. It’s about a radical shift from bottom-up (believing you’re a separate biological machine that needs to survive in a world of dead objects) to top-down.

This is exactly what AEF describes as:

"...the end of the private delusion of existence. It is in that moment the phenomenal house of cards gives way to the Absolute."

Nicodemus is forced to realize that his unique identity as a "councilor and expert" is just a temporary ripple on the surface. To understand reality, he can’t just add more knowledge to his old memory; he has to rewind all the way to the proto-subject, to the pure faculty of perception that makes him awake and aware in the first place.

13 The church's author put together a brilliant scene here. They created a character who represents the total short-circuit of the human intellect when it encounters Absolute Existence. Nicodemus literally gets lost in the dark because his logic is only meant for his own social survival – and when that logic fails, he leaves the scene completely confused.

The bitter family feud that got out of hand Jesus, John the Baptist, and all the first followers were Jews themselves. They lived, thought, and debated within the framework of Judaism of the time. But around 70 AD, a disaster happened: the Romans leveled Jerusalem and the Jewish temple to the ground. This created a huge existential crisis. Different Jewish groups fought over who held the truth and how to move forward. One of these groups was the early Christian movement (which by then was starting to be filled with non-Jews/Greeks). What we read in the New Testament is practically an internal Jewish family feud that has completely spun out of control and become written down by the winning side. That's why the rhetoric is so incredibly harsh. By the time the Gospel of John is written around year 90, Christians have been kicked out of the synagogues. The author is bitter, angry, and full of a sectarian 'us versus them' mindset.

14 The Dangerous Generalization in the Gospel of John In Matthew, Mark, and Luke, Jesus argues with specific groups: Pharisees, Sadducees, or scribes. But when we get to the Gospel of John, the author lumps everyone together into one big collective: "the Jews" (Ioudaioi in Greek). This leads to absolutely horrible passages, such as in chapter 8 where the author has Jesus say to the Jews, "You have the devil as your father." Reading this, knowing how these texts were used by the church over the following 1900 years to justify persecutions, pogroms, and ultimately the Holocaust, is nothing short of a historical nightmare. It is an insult, and it has had deadly consequences.

The AEF Perspective: The Split in Language and Fear of Identity If we take this through the AEF analysis, it becomes a perfect illustration of how human reason collapses when ruled by fear of identity and the need to protect one’s own "house of cards": The AEF text talks about how language is used to break reality into small pieces, and how people build 'mental maps' to protect their private self-image.

15 "Our evolutionary program... tells us to protect our own unique body [and group] against the rest of the world. From that perspective, the idea is often perceived as threatening." When the church's authors formulated the New Testament, they stopped seeing "the others" as reflections of the same Absolute Existence. They got stuck in the binary state: We are right, they are wrong. We are the light, they are the darkness. Instead of allowing consciousness to encompass the phenomenon, they created a religious and political structure based on separation. They used the Logos (the universal reason) to build a local wall around their own group identity, and the price of that ignorance became terribly high for the Jewish people. It is absolutely impossible to read the New Testament honestly without confronting this hatred. It shows that even though the texts contain amazing philosophical heights (like the idea of the cosmic Word), they are at the same time deeply stained by the people who wrote them in the heat of the moment and bitterness.

16 And so it continues with feeding 5,000 people (See here, Jesus is even greater than Moses!" It's pure marketing and public pandering from the 90s AD.)

and a walk on the surface of the water (something anyone can do in a dream)

The Dream and the Waking Modulation In a dream, you can fly, walk on water, and build cities in an instant. Why? Because in the dream you are fully aware that it is your own mind creating the environment. There are no external, separate “Lego pieces” of matter in there. The subject and object are one. AEF claims that waking reality works in exactly the same way, just with a different frequency and inertia: "The Absolute Existence philosophy assumes that ‘matter’ is just the way relatively stable, repetitive modulations appear as resistance and lag in perception." Walking on water in the waking state is “impossible” for us because the common, coordinated frequency (what we call the laws of nature) has enormous resistance. We are stuck in the idea that water is a solid, separate object and that the body is another.

17 But if Jesus represents the Logos – that is, the very ur-subject, the dimensionless source that "turns on the current" – then the whole universe is His own dream. If you realize that you are the one dreaming, then walking on the awake water surface is no more strange than doing it in bed at 3:00 AM. Then the water surface is not an external threat, just a ripple in your own perceptual ability.

Missing the point The funny thing in the sixth chapter of the Gospel of John is how the people react. After getting free food, they immediately want to make Jesus king. They understand nothing. They think completely bottom-up: "Perfect, a magical free buffet, now we don’t have to work!" They see the trick but completely miss the existential point. They are exactly like the people described in the AEF text – those who are so fixated on the objects (the bread and the fish) that they are completely blind to the sensory ability that even allows them to experience satiety. If we break down these stories, they are either cheap kidnapping stories written to impress illiterate people in ancient times, or they're deeply coded metaphors for how consciousness (the Ur-subject) shapes the phenomenon. And as AEF says: in dreams, we all do it, every night, completely effortlessly.

18 The stories in the Gospel of John continue with Jesus giving sight to a boy who had been blind since birth by smearing a clay paste on his eyes. Mythologically, symbolically, spiritually, or what? Because in the next paragraph, Jesus says that he 'came so that the blind may see and those who see may become blind.' Like the Father knows me and like I know the Father. 'I and the Father are one.' 'Is it not written in your own law that you are gods?' 'The Father is in me and I am in the Father.' 'I am the resurrection and the life. Whoever believes in me will live even though they die; and everyone who believes in me shall never die forever.' Then the myth of Lazarus is told, and it only happens in the Gospel of John! Not in the other gospels.

It says in the scripture: Tell the city of Zion: 'Now your king comes to you; he is gentle and rides on a donkey, on the colt of a working donkey.' The reason Jesus rode in on a donkey is that he had read about it in the scriptures and took the opportunity to make his entrance into Jerusalem that way.

19 Jesus says in the Gospel of John "Whoever loves their life will lose it, but whoever hates their life in this world will keep it for eternal life." "When I am lifted up from the earth, I will draw all people to myself." "In my Father's house are many dwelling places." "Whoever has seen me has seen the Father. I am in the Father, and the Father is in me." If you ask anything in my name, I will do it. On that day you will understand that I am in my Father, and you are in me, and I am in you. The Father is greater than I. "I am the true vine, and my Father is the gardener. Every branch in me that does not bear fruit, he takes away; and every branch that does bear fruit, he prunes, so that it will bear more fruit." "Remain in me, and I will remain in you." "Apart from me you can do nothing." "Friends" I call you, because everything I have heard from my Father I have made known to you. : so that you will love one another. But they will do all these things to you because of me, because they do not know him who sent me. "When the Spirit of truth, who comes from the Father, comes, he will testify about me. And you also will testify, because you have been with me from the beginning, when I was with you." If I do not go away, the Helper will not come to you. I am going to the Father, and you will see me no more. [/] and then you will see me in a little while. "I will see you again."

20 Stories and sequences of events differ. In the Gospel of Luke, it is the soldiers who put up the INRI sign, and in the Gospel of John, it is Pilate who made the sign that he had placed on the cross. The Jewish priests then say: do not write 'King of the Jews.' Pilate answered, "What I have written, I have written." Suddenly, it says that Jesus had a garment without seams that was woven in one piece (an overall?)

Two angels appear to Mary Magdalene, and then Jesus says: "Do not touch me, for I have not yet ascended to the Father."

Jesus also goes through walls and appears to the disciples.

It also says in the Gospel of John that Jesus performed many other signs that are not written in the Bible.

Jesus also appears in the form of another man, whom the disciples are convinced is Jesus.

Then it comes:

"It is the disciple who bears witness about this and who has written this, and we know that his testimony is true." Jesus also did many other things. If everything were recorded in full detail, I don't think even the whole world could hold the books that would then be written.

21 In the Acts of the Apostles, Luke, who never met Jesus, writes that Jesus says: you shall be my witnesses in Jerusalem, throughout Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth. After he had said this, he was taken up into the sky while they were watching, and a cloud took him out of their sight. As they continued looking up at the sky while he went up, suddenly two men in white clothes stood beside them. They said, "Men of Galilee, why are you standing here looking up at the sky? This Jesus, who has been taken from you into heaven, will come again in the same way you have seen him go into heaven." Then they returned to Jerusalem. This continues the interview study 46 years after the crucifixion.

Paul writes in First Corinthians that after his death, Jesus "according to the Scriptures" was seen by Cephas (Peter) and then by the twelve. After that, he was seen by more than five hundred brothers at once. Most of them are still alive, but some have fallen asleep. After that, he was seen by Jacob and then by all the apostles. Finally, he was also seen by me, who is a despicable creature, for I have persecuted God's church, and that is why I am the least of the apostles and do not even deserve to be called an apostle.

22 The list of the 500 brothers, James and Peter, is not in the Old Testament. It was current news in Paul's time. What was written in the "Scriptures" was the prophetic blueprint: that the Messiah would die for people's sins and conquer death by rising again.

Paul writes in the Epistle to the Ephesians that: When it is said that he (Jesus) "ascended," it is implied that he first went down to the regions under the earth. He who went down is the same one who went up above all the heavens, so that with his presence he would fill the firmament."

But if "death" is only an idea, then all resurrection is also just an idea.

But Paul really complicates things when he distinguishes between body and "Spirit." In the Old Testament, we can read that in the beginning God's Spirit hovered over (the) waters. Creation happens through words: God created the heavens, the land, the seas, and all life solely through his will and his speech. The world is not shaped from a prior matter or divine substance, but from matter and time alone. The origin comes from God's command. God creates the world 'out of nothing' through His spirit. Paul writes in First Corinthians that the spiritual does not come first, but the natural. Then comes the spiritual. When Paul writes his letters several hundred years later, he does so in Greek to people who are deeply influenced by Greek philosophy (Platonism and Gnostic currents). In the Greek world, people often thought the opposite: The spirit is good and pure, while matter and the body are a prison, something lower or even evil.

23 On Division and the Roman State Religion. In the Acts of the Apostles, it is said that Moses receives a revelation where GOD promises a homeland to His people.

What began as deeply existential or metaphysical thought experiments in the Johannine school quickly turned into a political tool of control. When Christianity became the Roman state religion in the 4th century, emperors and bishops didn’t need a complicated ontological framework – they needed order, tax revenue, and obedience.

And how do you get millions of illiterates to obey? Not by asking them to reflect on the conditions of existence, but by creating scenarios of fear.

The Drama of Power: Kidnapping "The Absolute"

If we look at how the church operated based on that AEF framework, we see exactly how they rigged their system:

They objectified the Absolute: They took the idea of the dimensionless, timeless foundation of conditions and turned it into a little old man on a throne – an external authority (God/The Bishop/The Pope) who held the 'Truth'.

24 They created the "glue": Since they assumed that the world consisted of separate parts (you, me, and God as completely different Lego pieces), they needed glue to hold everything together. The church called that glue "the sacraments" (baptism and communion). Without this glue, you were lost. They exploited the evolutionary program (Fear): As AEF assumes, we are biologically programmed to protect our unique "self." The church hacked that program by inventing an eternal threat to that self: "Hell" and "The Evil One." "The trolls" that close the open mind. Just as parents in the past used trolls to keep children away from dangerous marshes and cliffs, the church used "The Evil One" to keep people from starting to think for themselves. Fear is the absolutely most effective way to close Zappa's parachute. A person who is terrified of burning forever doesn’t ask philosophical questions; she does as she's told, pays her tithe, and buys indulgences.

25 The ironic thing is that they used absolute fear to protect the most worthless information on the hard drive: the little temporary, scared "self." When you look at it through AEF, the church's threat becomes pretty transparent. If the "self" is just a temporary ripple on the surface, a sequential variation of Absolute Existence, then what are the trolls supposed to take? What's supposed to end up in hell? A piece of cache memory? A bunch of stored cookies on the brain's hard drive? The church built a gigantic, profitable amusement park based on the idea that we have to save our little ego-action. But if you realize that you really have “the Base” – the unchanging Being that never moves – then the trolls die the very second the light is turned on. Then there's no one left to scare. The mind is here like a parachute and only works when it opens.

26 During the first centuries (100–300 AD), the Church Fathers (like Justin Martyr, Clement of Alexandria, and Origen) realized that if Christianity was going to be taken seriously in the Roman Empire, it couldn't just appear as a local Jewish doomsday cult. They had to speak academic Greek. They started using the concept of Logos to explain Jesus. Justin Martyr went so far as to claim that philosophers like Socrates and Heraclitus were actually "Christians before Christ," because they lived according to the Logos. This Greek influence gave the early Church enormous philosophical weight. God was no longer just a tribal god angrily hurling thunderbolts in the desert; God became the very Ground of existence – pure Being.

27 But then what always happens when deep, existential insights meet human power politics happened. The Church made three fatal mistakes that completely amputated the concept of Logos and turned it into its own opposite.

Mistake A: They personified and monopolized the principle The Greeks saw Logos as a universal principle available to everyone. Since Logos flows through everything, every human had a spark of this cosmic reason in their own consciousness (conscience/intuition). The Church took this dynamic principle and locked it into a single historical person: Jesus of Nazareth. Logos was no longer a universal structure in your own mind; Logos was now an exclusive title for the founder of the Church. The result: Instead of encouraging people to awaken to the universal reason within themselves, the Church demanded that they worship a historical figure. The principle became a person, and the insight turned into idolatry. Mistake B: The binary power-political shift (From the 4th century

28 When Emperor Constantine made Christianity the Roman state religion in the 4th century, the empire needed unity. Complicated, open philosophical discussions about the nature of consciousness (which the Gnostics and the Johannine schools engaged in) were directly dangerous to the stability of the state. At the major church councils (like at Nicaea in 325), the dogmas were fixed. The Logos was defined in strictly legal and metaphysical terms: How many natures did Christ have? Was he of the "same essence" (homoousios) as the Father? The cosmic, living Word became rigid clauses in a dogmatic house of cards. If you didn’t sign off on the bishops’ exact formulation of the Logos, you were branded a heretic and excommunicated (or executed). Logos—the universal reason—was now being used to shut down people’s reason.

29 Mistake C: They replaced Logos with Fear (Bottom-up control) To control millions of illiterate people, you can't preach about ontological assumptions. You have to play on the strongest string of the evolutionary program: the fear of annihilation. The church hid the open, boundless Logos behind a curtain of guilt, original sin, and eternal punishment. They took the idea of living in Logos (being awake, conscious, and in sync with Being) and turned it into obeying the church hierarchy. The Greeks' Logos: An invitation to the open mind – to realize that we are all angles of perception of the same Absolute Existence. The Church's Logos: A tool for separation – "We have Logos, you have the Devil. Obey us, or you'll burn in hell."

30 It was Irenaeus (Born: 130 AD) who insisted that there could only be four gospels (Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John) – because there are four cardinal directions and four winds. All Gnostic texts (like the Gospel of Thomas, the Gospel of Truth, and the Gospel of Philip) were labeled as false and dangerous. He attacked the various teachings of Gnosticism and argued that the Christian community had preserved the apostles' preaching in a credible way. Among other things, he claimed that the Gnostics claimed to have more gospels than actually existed, in his view. In his writing Refutation of the Perpetual Wisdom (around 180), he condemned all unchristian, heretical, and pagan teachings with the words 'an abyss of folly and blasphemy against Christ.'

31 Year 326 AD: issued a law that prohibited Gnostics (and other non-orthodox groups) from gathering. Their meeting places were confiscated and given to the Catholic Church. The Church ordered that all Gnostic writings be tracked down and burned. Owning a Gnostic text became a crime.

It was during this period (around the year 367 AD) that some brave monks in Egypt refused to obey the order to burn their books. They packed 52 Gnostic texts into a clay jar and buried it in the mountains near Nag Hammadi. There they remained hidden for over 1,500 years until a farmer discovered them in 1945. Thanks to that jar, we today know what the Gnostics actually thought, instead of only reading the Church's propaganda.

32 The Albigensian Crusade (1209–1229): Pope Innocent III launched a formal crusade – not against Muslims in Jerusalem, but against Christian Gnostics in the heart of Europe. This was history's first purely ideological genocide. French knights were sent in to slaughter entire cities. “Kill them all, God will recognize His own.” – This infamous quote is claimed to have been spoken by the Pope’s envoy Arnold Amalric during the storming of the city of Béziers in 1209, where over 20,000 men, women, and children were brutally slaughtered without distinction. The birth of the Inquisition: To purge the last remnants of Gnostic thinking, the Pope created the Inquisition. The remaining Cathars were systematically hunted down, tortured, and burned alive on massive pyres (as at Montségur in 1244).

33 In the New Testament, the faculty of perception is interpreted as God's Holy Spirit. It is written that the existence of the subjective condition (God) has sent itself into an already created world inhabited by humans that this God created in an earlier stage from clay and then breathed His holy spirit into, thereby bringing them to life. But now the Bible says that God plays a trick and makes sure that Mary becomes pregnant without cell division, without 12 chromosomes coming from another person and merging. Mary's egg still divides and continues to divide, and what would be confusing about this if it weren't about impressing the members of the Christian church, which is to become a result of a person who grew up as a Jew and is to form a sect that will become the dominant Western religion.

34 Regarding the idea of Anthropomorphism in the Bible Anthropomorphism is the attribution of human characteristics, emotions, intentions, or behaviors to non-human entities.

In the Bible, GOD is given attributes and is divided into three parts, and these three parts are the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. These three concepts may be humanizations of the concepts Existence, Phenomenon, and Essence. The reason the church has arranged the concepts in the way it has is to categorize the sum of the concepts that is GOD, that is, the three concepts together where the Father is what the Son speaks about and the Spirit is what is the inherent nature of GOD. In thought, these are three different aspects of GOD. But in the church's idea, these three create the world from the void outside the three, which then steps into what the three together have accomplished.

35 In the Bible it says that the "righteous" shall live by faith, and this naturally means that every person reaps the fruit of what they believe about reality and what makes the experience of existing possible.

Justification is basically about giving acceptable reasons for a certain behavior or decision to show that it is reasonable to consider the action necessary.

And this is not about idolizing Jesus as GOD.

And regarding following the laws stipulated by GOD through Moses in the Old Testament, you can read in the Bible that even if someone doesn’t read the Bible and has heard of some Father in heaven and some only-begotten son born of a virgin by some holy spirit, the 'heathens' who haven’t heard about this and don’t have the law 'by nature do what the law requires, making them their own law, even though they don’t have the law. Their way of life shows that what the law requires is written in their hearts. Their conscience also bears witness to this, as do their thoughts, which in their mutual dealings either accuse or even defend them.'

36 It also says in the Bible that "no one is justified before GOD by doing the works the law requires. Through the law comes only knowledge of sin." And this is where the church's role comes in – by telling people about Jesus and by believing in what Jesus points to, they can receive forgiveness for all the violations of the law they constantly commit. In the Bible, Jesus becomes a "throne of grace" for those who believe in what Jesus points to. In this way, GOD is said to "overlook all the sins that have been committed in past times."

37 The whole point of the church is to free people from their sins. The Bible says that sin entered the world through a single man, and through this came death, and death spread to all people. It says that there was indeed sin in the world long before the law existed, but no sin is recorded as guilt unless it is established by law. Yet death reigned from Adam all the way to Moses even over those who did not sin in the same way as Adam, by breaking a specific command—namely, by letting themselves be tempted by Eve to eat the apple from the "tree of knowledge" and thereby realizing they were naked, and this disobedience is punished with "the penalty of death." And sin has established its rule through the fear of death, but by believing in what Jesus points to, we let go of the thought of death and believe in an eternally ongoing existence.

39 The church realized that people become neurotic and easy to control if they constantly fail to live up to the perfect law (which cognitively shows us our shortcomings). By offering Jesus as a “chair of grace” – a safe zone where guilt is wiped away through faith – the church created the ultimate monopoly system: They invented the disease (original sin/hell) and sold the only cure (the sacraments/forgiveness).

The worst thing the church is guilty of is turning nature into sin. It says: “What the sinful nature desires leads to death, but what the Spirit desires leads to life and peace.”

40 The talk about the sinful evil nature comes up again in Galatians: "Live a life led by the Spirit! Then you won’t do what your sinful nature craves. That nature wants the exact opposite of what the Spirit wants, and the Spirit fights against the evil nature. The two are at odds with each other. That’s why you can’t always do what you want. But if you are led by the Spirit, you are not under the law. Everyone can see what the deeds of the evil nature are. They are sexual immorality, impurity and debauchery, idolatry and witchcraft, hostility and fighting, jealousy and fits of anger, selfish ambition, division and factions, envy, drunkenness, orgies and the like. I have told you before, and now I repeat it: those who live like this will never inherit the kingdom of God. But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness and goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control. Against such things there is no law! Those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified their “sinful nature” together with its pleasures and desires. Since we have received life through the Spirit, our life should also be governed by the Spirit. Let's not chase after our own glory, so that we challenge and envy each other.

41 In the Epistle to the Ephesians it also says: "Have nothing to do with the unfruitful works of darkness. What these people do in secret is so shameful that you cannot even speak of it."

The view of nature as "evil at its core" is detached from reality. It's as if nature somehow wouldn't be the way the phenomenal manifestation of the faculty of perception operates. If what the Bible calls the Spirit were not the same as the condition for the phenomenal manifestation and the very dynamic nature of Absolute Existence, then it becomes understandable why the argument falters upon reflection. If the Spirit’s only chance to experience anything at all doesn’t happen through the phenomenon, then nothing can be understood at all.

42 The church also strengthens its position by writing in the Bible that "Every person must submit to the authorities over them. For there is no authority except that which God has established, and the authorities that exist have been instituted by God. Consequently, those who resist the authority are opposing God’s order, and those who do so will be punished.

Furthermore, there is a perspective on women that can be questioned. In the Bible it says that "man did not come from woman, but woman came from man. Nor was man created for the sake of woman, but woman was created for the sake of man." "But both have their origin in God."

43 In the Bible, it says that creation (the phenomenon) has come under "the dominion of nothingness (the abyss of nihilism/non-existential void) not because of its own choice but because of His [GOD's] will, which handed it over to this dominion."

The Bible also has the parable of GOD as an organic unity: "You are the body of Christ, and each one of you is a part of it."

In the Epistle to the Ephesians, Paul writes: "There is one body and one Spirit, just as you were called to one hope when God's call came to you. There is one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one hope, one God and Father of all, who is over all, through all, and in all."

In the Epistle to the Colossians, it says: "Christ is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation. In him, all things in heaven and on earth were created, the visible and the invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities - all things were created through him and for him. He existed before anything was created, and it is through him that everything is held together.

44 (This resembles the view that Stefan Hlatky had of the unchanging Being, into which he snuck parts and in that way made a relatively monolithic existence.)

This could be interpreted according to AEF as that GOD (The Absolute Existence) chooses or can do nothing other than hide Himself so that the phenomenon can appear through its capacity to perceive. But the world is not God, rather a phenomenal expression within the Absolute Existence.

But for someone who is Christian and interprets the Bible literally rather than metaphorically, it can be read: You have risen from the dead together with Christ. Therefore, seek what is in heaven, where Christ sits at the right hand of God. Let your thoughts be focused on what is in heaven, not on what is down here on earth. I repeat: you have died, and the life you now have is hidden with Christ in God. Your true life is Christ.

45 AEF's analysis shows that "The Truth That Sets You Free" is not about obeying a master, but about waking up from the dream of separation and realizing yourself as Absolute Existence - the unchanging Being whose faculty of perception experiences the phenomenon through a multitude of phenomenal angles.

If you, through gnosis (insight), realize that the being's capacity for perception experiences the cosmic light, then the private self's fear collapses. And when the fear disappears, so does the church's control.

The Bible and the church claim to hold an absolute, static truth that demands blind obedience and slavery under dogmas. AEF offers instead a logical starting point, an open mind, and a thought experiment that actually has the power to make us free - for real.

46 Paul writes in Second Corinthians that 'Satan disguises himself as an angel of light.' So it's not surprising that his servants appear to be servants of righteousness. But they will get the end they deserve. He means that it's only by believing in Jesus that it is possible to come to God.

And in Galatians, Paul writes that 'if anyone preaches a gospel other than the one you accepted, let them be under God’s curse.'

Many wise words can also be found in the Bible, like 'do not let anger linger until sunset. Greed must not even be mentioned among you. Nor ambiguous jokes. That is unworthy.'

47 3:1-3:13 SECOND LETTER TO TIMOTHY

3 The Last Days Will Be Evil

“You need to know that difficult times will come, when the end of this age draws near. People will be only concerned with themselves and chasing money, they will be boastful and arrogant, their speech will be full of insults, and they will no longer obey their parents. They will be ungrateful, godless, without affection for anyone, never willing to make peace with an opponent, fond of slander, lacking all self-control and corrupt. They will not tolerate what is good, ready for every kind of betrayal, quick-tempered and conceited. They love their desires instead of loving God. They have an appearance of godliness, but they are estranged from its power. Turn away from them!”

48 “This also applies to those who sneak into homes and ensnare naive women, burdened with sin and driven here and there by all sorts of desires. Such women always want to be taught, but they never reach knowledge of the truth. Just as Jannes and Jambres were once opponents of Moses, so are these men opponents of the truth. Their minds are corrupt, and their faith does not hold up. But their success will soon come to an end. It will be just like it was with Moses' opponents: everyone will soon see what fools they are.”

Further in the First Letter of John

"Whoever confesses that Jesus is the Son of God, God is in him, and he himself is in God. And we have come to know the love that God has for us, and we have put our faith in it. God is love, and whoever is always in love is always in God, and God is always in them. This is proof that God's love has fully taken control among us: we have confidence on the day of judgment."

49 Jesus spoke about the condition for the ongoing perception of reality and about the experience of existing, and that these are connected in the same way that the voice is connected to the one who speaks. The shift between light and darkness, which is the essence of the presence of Being.

Being is then the unchanging, constant condition for what, through biodynamic interaction, can be perceived as a flow rather than small alternating jumps. The alternation of the two states of the essence of being is, in fact, the key to solving how the experience of ongoing perception can occur.

Then the experience of being inside reality can be replaced by the experience of simply Being real. (AEF comment)

50 That the church early on opposed people gaining their own insight into existing in this way is documented in the Bible. The rejection is expressed in the Letter of James. There it explicitly says: "Do not deceive yourselves, my dear brothers. Every good and perfect gift comes from above, from the Father of heavenly lights. In him, there is no change or shifting of shadow. By his own free will, he brought us to life through the word and the truth, so that we might be the firstfruits of all that he created. You know this, my dear brothers."

The church always forbids interpreting "creation" in any other way!

All interpretations of reality come in the form of speech about reality. To speak like this, one must use the tongue, and the speech must then be interpreted by someone who can hear it. In the Bible, in the Letter of James, it says about the tongue: "It is a small part of the body, yet it boasts of doing great things". "It is an unruly evil, full of deadly poison." ("A salt spring cannot give sweet water.").

51 In Jude's letter, in the footnotes under The Fight for Faith, it even explicitly says:

"The faith that... has been entrusted to the saints is the gospel, the true Christian teaching. The mentioned false teachers naturally claim to be Christians, but both in their teaching and in their life they deny the gospel. Their life is immoral, and they blaspheme God and the angels. They appeal to dreams, and they claim to possess high spiritual insights. They actually represent non-Christian religious movements that existed in the Greco-Roman world at that time.

(Here, it is again warned against thinking outside [the box] from what is explicitly stated in the Bible as truth. It is not even allowed to test any other assumptions.)

52, the one who uses the grace of our God, etc. They live a blameworthy life, and they justify this way of life by referring to the fact that God's grace makes a person free. This is a shameless distortion of the gospel's teaching about the Christian's freedom. God's grace trains the Christian to live a holy life.

Since this is stated in the Bible, it must be interpreted as truth by those who believe in the ink on the page.

According to the church, the truth is only what is literally written in the gospel!

In the "Book of Revelation," it says that in a vision, GOD is seen on a throne as "someone whose appearance was like the brilliance of jasper and carnelian" (probably transparent and greenish] and carnelian [usually reddish]. [These two gemstones were the last and first stones on the high priest's breastplate). Despite this objective description by John, the footnote says that he makes no attempt to describe Him.

"The throne was a rainbow, like the brilliance of an emerald." (It is green while the rainbow shows all the colors that are possible to perceive with the eye) In the footnote, it talks about the life-beings that are revealed. These life-beings' many eyes suggest that they see everything. They convey GOD's presence in the visible creation. (!)

53 The entire Book of Revelation is like a dream state that happens while awake. Dragons, demons (and "The Devil, his aunt and Emperor Nero" "666" ?) are defeated by GOD’s army and suffer a hell of a lot of torment, and the Babylonian whore gets what she deserves, and something happened… it was a hell… yeah, things went to hell for the evil forces as they are cast down and locked up for a thousand years, and afterward the door will be opened ajar for a while to torment humans again before they are thrown into a burning lake where they will be tormented day and night forever (by the good forces as punishment?).

54 John writes: "Now I saw a great white throne and the one who sat on it. Before him, earth and heaven fled, and they were no more. And I saw the dead, great and small, standing before the throne, and books were opened. Another book was opened as well; it was the book of life. The dead were judged according to their deeds, based on what was written in the books. Even the sea gave up the dead that were in it, and death and Hades gave up the dead that were in them; and they were judged, each one according to their deeds. Then death and Hades were thrown into the lake of fire, the lake of fire being the second death. And if anyone was not found written in the book of life, he was thrown into the lake of fire."

55 After that, the 'New Jerusalem' shall be lowered from heaven.

"I saw no temple in the city, for the Lord God Almighty is its temple, he and the Lamb. The city does not need light from the sun or moon, for the glory of God illuminates it, and its light is the Lamb. The nations shall walk in its light, and the kings of the earth shall bring into it all that is glorious. The city's gates shall never be closed during the day—there will be no night there. Everything precious and glorious that the nations possess shall be brought there. Nothing unclean will ever enter it, no one who is involved in abomination and lies, but only those who are written in the book of life, the Lamb's book."

after that.

“I direct this warning to everyone who listens to the prophetic words in this book: If anyone adds anything to them, then God will add to him all the plagues described in this book, and if anyone takes away anything from the prophetic words in this book, then God will take away his share in the tree of life and in the holy city, which are described in this book.

He who declares this warning says: "Yes, I am coming soon." Amen. Come, Lord Jesus!

The grace of the Lord Jesus be with everyone.”

This ends the review of the New Testament and the story about 'The Book of Revelation'!