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In his treatise On the Heavens, Aristotle divided the cosmos into two. Everything below the moon is mortal and subject to decay, change and procreation (generation). Everything above the moon is immortal, immutable, indestructible and ungenerated i.e. this is the divine realm. Everything in the sublunary sphere is composed of the four elements: earth, water, air and fire. Everything above is made of aether, the quintessence. The four earthly elements move linearly; aether naturally moves in perfect circles (hence the motion of the spheres).

The heavens are perfectly spherical and move around the centre of the universe (Earth) in orbits of perfect circles. The upper heavens are more divine than the lower heavens. According to Aristotle, stars and planets are not made of fire (as many people thought because they shone), but of the quintessence. Thus, the aether manifests itself in several ways. It can form stars, planets, “crystal spheres”, and it becomes more rarefied, perfect and divine the further it is from Earth. It’s truly a miracle substance.

This view meant that many Greek philosophers did not regard the Earth as a planet. Planets, in their view, were made of aether that had no material density and therefore could float. (It was held that the elements of fire and air had “positive” density, counteracting the “negative” density of Earth and Water: fire and air strive to go up, and earth and water to pull things down. We might call this an early version of gravitational theory: it has nothing to do with the modern scientific concept of density which is graded from high to low rather than positive to negative.) Since the Earth was made of the dense elements of earth and water, it plainly wasn’t a planet but rather a unique Creation (implying the existence of God).

The stars and planets are fixed in their particular spheres of operation, and move according to the circular motion of their spheres. Note that it’s not the planets and stars that are moving but the crystal spheres in which they are set. The crystal spheres move at different speeds, and their overall motion creates the divine Music of the Spheres. As for the four elements of the sublunary sphere, they are not eternal but they come together in various combinations to create all the perishable things of the world. Fire is the element closest to aether and rises highest, followed by air. The element of earth is heavy and sinks downwards. Water is less heavy and sits on top of earth as the oceans.

Although this vision of reality is almost total nonsense in modern scientific terms, it dominated scientific thinking, such as it was, until the time of Copernicus and Galileo, the latter being many people’s candidate for the first true scientist of the modern age. Despite the flaws of Aristotle’s thinking, it is aesthetically beautiful and compatible with a “divine” view of reality. At a simplistic level, it appears to offer neat explanations of all manner of phenomena and is in accord with “common sense”. Christians eagerly seized on it and gave it an interpretation that Aristotle himself never intended.

The Aristotelian universe seems to be built with gods and men in mind. The sublunary universe is like a special laboratory deliberately created by the gods for the purpose of making new gods through an elaborate test of mortal men. Aristotle himself was not someone who believed in the soul in any conventional way, but his ideas were harnessed by advocates of the soul. Reincarnational Gnostics made as good use of his ideas as Christians.

Some Gnostics hypothesised that the soul was a divine spark of the holy substance aether, trapped in the mortal, material world of the four perishable elements. Its natural tendency was to rise up and enter the divine domain above the moon, but it was weighed down by heavy earth (the physical body) and couldn’t escape. Its task was to work out how to free itself of the earthly elements and soar into the heavens.

All of the different spheres of the heavens were associated with various gods and angels, who possessed secret passwords. In order to pass through each sphere and rise higher, a soul had to know the relevant passwords. The finest souls knew all of the passwords to get to the highest heaven itself. Others could find their natural level.

This is a materialistic account of the soul – aether is typically regarded as a material substance – but it makes a lot of sense on a superficial level, and its appeal is apparent. All souls were on a great star journey through the heavens to reach God. They had to acquire the special knowledge (gnosis) that furnished them with all the keys, passwords and maps to navigate the celestial spheres to the highest heaven.

And if the aether is deemed so fine and subtle that it becomes immaterial and can be identified with “mind substance” then we have a soul theory based on mind rather than matter and the celestial spheres become spiritual rather than physical spheres. Much esoteric thinking simply converted materialistic thinking into spiritual thinking. Spirit bodies replaced matter bodies; a spiritual universe replaced the physical universe. Often, material and spiritual elements were mixed together. Much of Theosophy and Anthroposophy is based on a hopeless confusion of materialism and spiritualism.

In order to understand religious thinking, it is necessary to understand the type of science and cosmology to which ancient peoples subscribed. If you were born into a world where science was taught in the Aristotelian manner, religious ideas would make much more sense to you.

The truly astonishing thing about modern religious thinking is that all of its “scientific” underpinnings have been destroyed by modern science. Everything that makes sense in terms of the ancient view of science makes no sense at all in the modern view. Logically, religion should have died when modern science killed ancient science since the model that supported conventional religious thinking has been removed. It’s a testament to how irrational modern religion is and how dangerous faith is that people can continue to believe in concepts and a worldview that has been definitively refuted.

In terms of known science, it made some sort of sense to believe in the Abrahamic God 1,000 years ago (leaving aside the immorality of the Abrahamic God), but it makes no sense now. Modern religion has made no credible attempt to compete scientifically, withdrawing into a fanatical mind-set of faith and mystery. It has divorced science and religion and claimed that they address separate questions. They absolutely do not. As the ancients understood, religion and science must relate to the SAME reality. There are not two different worlds: one of science and of religion. There are not two different truths. Scientific truths CANNOT contradict religious truths or vice versa.

When, historically, science and religion collided, it was invariably science that was the winner by revealing a truth about the world that entirely disproved the mainstream religious thinking. When Galileo was put on trial for his life by the Inquisition for supporting the Copernican heliocentric theory rather than the Abrahamist/Ptolemaic geocentric theory it represented the absolute collision of scientific and religious truth. The Catholic Church knew instinctively how critical this moment was. If science were allowed to refute revelation, it was the end of revelation. The Church had long understood that many matters of faith stood at total odds with matters of reason. If revelation fell to reason, Abrahamism – a religion of revelation – was certain to die. Thus everything was at stake in Galileo’s trial.

Galileo was found guilty of heresy, of course, and he recanted to save his life. His life was spared but he lived out his days under house arrest: a dismal fate for the world’s first modern scientist. This was the Trial of the Ages. Although the Catholic Church seemed to win (by completely ignoring science and citing only theology), it was in fact science that proved the victor in the long run. In terms of the intellectual debate, mainstream religion is now a sad, marginal activity that keeps out of the way of science for the most part, though Creationists sometimes fight desperate rearguard actions.

The “Intelligent Design” movement is Creationism in disguise, but this movement would in fact be entirely respectable and admirable if instead of covertly supporting Abrahamism it focused on a different angle: promoting the primacy of mind over matter. Illuminism is a species of intelligent design, asserting that living mind is the underlying reality of existence rather than mindless, dead matter.

According to scientific materialism, everything happens because of inexorable mechanistic laws, sprinkled with randomness. Matter collides and some of these collisions have miraculously managed to produce life. More collisions have managed to add mind to matter. Human consciousness is just a product of atomic interactions and, because atoms and their interactions are scientifically determined, so is human consciousness. In this view, free will is an illusion and we are all automata. That is the essence of mainstream Darwinism advocated by the likes of Richard Dawkins. In truth, mind is the basis of existence and mind drives all processes. Mind, not matter, originated the laws of science. Laws are inherently mental and not material.

It’s time for a new Trial of the Ages, and this time the boot will be on the other foot. It’s time for science to prosecute Abrahamism according to the findings of modern science. Let the whole world see this trial. Let’s call all of the star witnesses for both sides. Let’s get it all out in the open once and for all.

When Abrahamism has been found guilty and sentenced to oblivion, let’s have part two of the trial: Idealism versus Materialism. Now it will be scientific materialism in the dock, and the Illuminati will be more than happy to lead the prosecution on behalf of panpsychism, dialectical monism and mind as the origin of matter rather than the other way around.

Isn’t it time the world was allowed to see all of the main systems of thought put to the test in the Court of Reason? Isn’t that the least our “leaders” can do for us? Of course, they never will because they are Abrahamists who hate the truth, and are doing very nicely with the world as it currently is, thank you very much. People must be motivated to change, and the super rich controllers of our world have no incentive to change anything at all. Quite the reverse.
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Parmenides and the “One”:

PARMENIDES, one of the pre-Socratic philosophers, has been called the first Western metaphysician, he who looked beyond natural science to apprehend reality. Parmenides’ has an abiding place in the philosophical pantheon for arguing that all change and becoming are illusory. Pure being is all there is. Our senses deceive us. The multitude of things revealed by the senses are not truly there.

Parmenides believed in an infinitely large and indivisible cosmic sphere called The One. It seems that he intended it as a material, extended entity but it’s also possible to conceive of it as a cosmic mind. The One was the Truth. It was God. It was the Logos. It was pure Being. It was complete, whole, uncreated, indivisible, unmovable and eternal. It was the sole reality. There could be no other.

Parmenides held that there was no such thing as empty space, so the One could not be divided into parts (which would have involved spaces between the parts). Since there is no empty space, the One cannot move because to do so it would have to occupy a space previously empty, and no such thing is possible. The One must always have existed because something which IS cannot come from something which is NOT. And that which is NOT does not exist by definition. In short, you can’t get something from nothing.

This remains a supremely important doctrine. Many scientific materialists believe that you CAN get something from nothing. They talk of a free-lunch universe, all the properties of which cancel out, leaving a total of zero i.e. if you can generate +X of something and cancel it with –X then you can have something that is, overall, nothing. Nothing and something are therefore potentially compatible.

The enormous question for Big Bang theorists is what did the universe consist of prior to the Big Bang? How did “nothing” explode into something, even if the something cancelled out over all? If such a thing can happen once, what is the sufficient reason preventing it from happening all the time? Why isn’t something continually appearing from nothing and exploding into entire universes (destroying any existing universes in the process)?

It is perhaps the case that Parmenides was the first philosopher of pure idealism. One way to remove motion from the world would be to deny that the physical world actually exists. Although things seem to move, they are going nowhere because there is nowhere to go – except in the imagination. In a world of nothing but mind, it is certainly true that there is no physical motion and no physical change. These are indeed illusions. This seems to be the most probable interpretation of his work given that he said that thought and being are one and the same: what cannot be thought cannot be and what cannot be cannot be thought. This is a classic statement of idealism. Mind is everywhere and mind is the cause of everything. Matter, to the extent it exists at all, is caused and created by mind.

The idea of a perfect realm of immutable, eternal things was highly influential since it inspired Plato’s domain of Perfect Forms beyond the reach of the perishable material world of becoming. Parmenides was taught by Pythagoreans, but he was not recruited by the Illuminati because he opposed the dialectical doctrine of becoming of Grand Master Heraclitus. Nevertheless, he was held in high esteem as a subtle and ingenious thinker who was certainly no slave of common sense thinking.
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Spheres, Circles and Ellipses:

To the Ancient Greeks, the sphere was a supremely perfect shape, as indeed was its junior partner, the circle. Had they not been such devotees of spheres and circles, the Greeks might have discovered much earlier that planets actually trace elliptical rather than circular orbits. Sometimes, the Greeks were simply too entranced by aesthetic considerations of perfection. They couldn’t conceive that the divine order would produce anything ugly or imperfect.
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Emanationism:

NEOPLATONISM asserts that the source and structure of reality is a spontaneous and ongoing outflowing (emanation) from a transcendent principle called the “One” (God “in himself”). The task of humanity is to “turn back” and contemplate their divine origin, and, ultimately, to become one with that origin. It is often said that evolutionary theories have completely discredited emanationism, but in fact the two fit together perfectly. There is no contradiction and it’s time that science started appreciating the qualities of emanationism. It’s none other than the source of the “dark energy” that drives the expansion of the universe.
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Pythagoras:

PYTHAGORAS has been dubbed “the speculative forefather of modern natural science”. The tetraktys was the sacred symbol of the Pythagorean Illuminati and all binding oaths of the ancient Illuminati began with the words: “By him that gave to our generation the tetraktys which contains the fount and root of eternal nature…” The tetraktys is an equilateral triangle comprised of dots representing the first four integers: one, two three and four, which add up to the decad (ten), the most sacred number of the Illuminati. To modern Illuminists, 10 is 1 and 0 – the binary system that underlies computing. It is also 1 “something” and 0 “nothing”: existence is all about the interaction of “something” (matter) and “nothing” (mind).

The word “cosmos” was coined by Pythagoras and refers to the notion of the universe as a rational, ordered whole. The word also has connotations of fitness, beauty and harmony. Plato held the view that the goodness of anything was dependent on its being properly constituted, with all of its parts properly ordered. This is a classic teaching of Illuminism, applying in particular to the meritocratic State.

Copernicus made his revolutionary breakthrough after discovering the ancient Pythagorean view that the Earth was spherical and travelled around a central fire. Unlike many ancient Greeks who held the view that Earth wasn’t a planet and was fixed at the centre of the universe, the Pythagoreans, by putting Earth in motion around the centre, were easily able to start conceiving of the Earth as just another planet.

Pythagoras was the first to say that the Earth was a sphere. He was the first to say that Earth wasn’t fixed but moved through space. He was the first to say that Earth wasn’t the centre of the universe. He was thus the first to break out of anthropomorphic thinking. In other words, Pythagoras had taken all the decisive steps of the revolutionary Copernican model some 2,000 years earlier!

While the rest of the world was slipping into the madness of superstitious religions, Illuminism was striding ahead in the proper direction. It put those 2,000 years to the best of use.

“I do not know of any other man who has been as influential as [Pythagoras] was in the sphere of thought. I say this because what appears as Platonism is, when analysed, found to be in essence Pythagoreanism. The whole conception of an eternal world, revealed to the intellect but not to the senses, is derived from him. But for him, Christians would not have thought of Christ as the Word; but for him, theologians would not have sought logical proofs of God and immortality.” –Bertrand Russell

One day, it will be acknowledged that Pythagoras and the Illuminati were the guardians of human reason against endless attacks by irrational forces. In the sign of truth, we shall conquer. We will prove victorious in the end because we represent the highest aspirations of humanity. The barbarian hordes, the slaves of the Abrahamism and Mammon have offered the world nothing but misery and bondage. It’s time to be free. We are the culmination of the dialectic of freedom, and, ultimately, freedom sweeps aside all opponents.
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The Primum Mobile:

The outermost physical shpere of the cosmos is the Primum Mobile (“first mover”) where all physical motion in the cosmos originates. The reason given for the physical motion of the universe is an extraordinarily beautiful, if completely unscientific, one. Beyond the Primum Mobile, is the immaterial Empyrean outside space and time where God resides. The Empyrean is perfectly still. The Primum Mobile loves God. It’s a love so great that every fibre of its being strives to touch the Godhead, and to touch it in all possible places, so the Primum Mobile sphere whirls around endlessly, and its motion sets in motion all of the other spheres below it.

It was an Aristotelian doctrine that there was an unmoved mover, a first cause that set everything else in motion. God is this unmoved mover, and he produces motion by being LOVED.

The Primum Mobile is the swiftest sphere and all the inner spheres get progressively slower. All the spheres are of course in direct contact with each other and “rub together” so to speak. The spheres act as a huge interlocked mechanism. If one part’s in motion, all parts are.

The Primum Mobile is the highest heaven, encased in the Will of God. The largest and swiftest sphere, it is the physical origin of life, motion, and time (a function of motion) in the Aristotelian-Ptolemaic universe. It’s the supreme physical heaven in the universe, wrapped in the Mind of God. From God, creativity cascades into the other spheres via the Primum Mobile. It shapes and directs the natural operations of the universe. Through it, God’s will is transmitted to Creation.

Earth is fixed and motionless at the centre of the nine concentric, revolving heavens. The last visible heaven is that of the Fixed Stars (the eighth sphere). Identifiable only through the motion it imparts to the cosmos, the Primum Mobile is also called the Crystalline heaven because it is totally transparent.
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The Crystalline Heaven:

Strictly speaking, none of the planetary were ever technically described as “crystalline” although this became their popular and poetic name. The expression came from coelum crystallinum (crystalline heaven, the Primum Mobile) a sphere said to exist beyond the fixed stars. It was called “crystalline” in the sense of being clear, like water, and one of its purposes was to try to reconcile cosmology with the Biblical assertions that there were waters above the heavens (Genesis 1.7): “And God made the firmament, and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament: and it was so.”

Where were these waters above the firmament? Clearly, they MUST exist because the Bible said so (and we all know the Bible is never wrong) ergo they were in a special sphere beyond the fixed stars of the firmament. Or so goes Abrahamic logic, which is infallible because it comes from God himself, as they never tire of telling us.
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The Earth: the Centre of the Universe:

The Earth, of course, stands at the centre of existence. Why? Because the Bible says so, so it must be true. It is completely stationary and unmovable:

Psalm 104:5: He set the earth on its foundations; it can never be moved.

Psalm 96:10: Say among the heathen that the LORD reigneth: the world also shall be established that it shall not be moved: he shall judge the people righteously.

1 Chronicles 16:30: Fear before him, all the earth: the world also shall be stable, that it be not moved.

Ecclesiastes 1:5: The sun rises and the sun sets, and hurries back to where it rises.

So, there you have it: the Sun moves around the static Earth. And if you disagree, you’ll burn in hell forever!! In Abrahamism, if you disagree with the revealed truth of God you get killed. That’s how to encourage the open-minded, fearless pursuit of knowledge, isn’t it?
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The Cosmology of the Jews, Christians and Muslims:

Just in case you’ve forgotten, it goes like this:

Genesis 1

The Beginning

1 In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.

2 Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters.

3 And God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light.

4 God saw that the light was good, and he separated the light from the darkness.

5 God called the light “day,” and the darkness he called “night.” And there was evening, and there was morning—the first day.

6 And God said, “Let there be a vault between the waters to separate water from water.”

7 So God made the vault and separated the water under the vault from the water above it. And it was so.

8 God called the vault “sky.” And there was evening, and there was morning—the second day.

9 And God said, “Let the water under the sky be gathered to one place, and let dry ground appear.” And it was so.

10 God called the dry ground “land,” and the gathered waters he called “seas.” And God saw that it was good.

11 Then God said, “Let the land produce vegetation: seed-bearing plants and trees on the land that bear fruit with seed in it, according to their various kinds.” And it was so.

12 The land produced vegetation: plants bearing seed according to their kinds and trees bearing fruit with seed in it according to their kinds. And God saw that it was good.

13 And there was evening, and there was morning—the third day.

14 And God said, “Let there be lights in the vault of the sky to separate the day from the night, and let them serve as signs to mark sacred times, and days and years,

15 and let them be lights in the vault of the sky to give light on the earth.” And it was so.

16 God made two great lights—the greater light to govern the day and the lesser light to govern the night. He also made the stars.

17 God set them in the vault of the sky to give light on the earth,

18 to govern the day and the night, and to separate light from darkness. And God saw that it was good.

19 And there was evening, and there was morning—the fourth day.

20 And God said, “Let the water teem with living creatures, and let birds fly above the earth across the vault of the sky.”

21 So God created the great creatures of the sea and every living thing with which the water teems and that moves about in it, according to their kinds, and every winged bird according to its kind. And God saw that it was good.

22 God blessed them and said, “Be fruitful and increase in number and fill the water in the seas, and let the birds increase on the earth.”

23 And there was evening, and there was morning—the fifth day.

24 And God said, “Let the land produce living creatures according to their kinds: the livestock, the creatures that move along the ground, and the wild animals, each according to its kind.” And it was so.

25 God made the wild animals according to their kinds, the livestock according to their kinds, and all the creatures that move along the ground according to their kinds. And God saw that it was good.

26 Then God said, “Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness, so that they may rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky, over the livestock and all the wild animals, and over all the creatures that move along the ground.”

27 So God created mankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them.

28 God blessed them and said to them, “Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky and over every living creature that moves on the ground.”

29 Then God said, “I give you every seed-bearing plant on the face of the whole earth and every tree that has fruit with seed in it. They will be yours for food.

30 And to all the beasts of the earth and all the birds in the sky and all the creatures that move along the ground—everything that has the breath of life in it—I give every green plant for food.” And it was so.

31 God saw all that he had made, and it was very good. And there was evening, and there was morning—the sixth day.

So, are you convinced? Has the Book of Genesis nailed it? Has it dispelled all doubt? It’s the infallible Word of God, you know – and if you don’t believe it, you’re GOING TO HELL FOREVER. So either you’d better start believing or you should tell this moronic Abrahamist God to fuck right off! Only stupid people believe the Bible. No intelligent person could ever take this ludicrous book seriously.
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Creation:

Let’s recap the ancient view of religion. The sun, stars and planets were, the ancients thought, essentially the same thing, made of aether and located in transparent, aether “crystal” spheres. The aether became more refined in the higher heavens, and was most refined, to the extent of being immaterial, in the highest heaven of “God”. Earth wasn’t a planet but a kind of laboratory where, uniquely, it had four perishable elements of earth, water, air and fire. Imperishable aether, if it existed in this sphere at all, was associated with mind/nous/psyche/soul. Earth was a unique environment (Creation) beneath the divine order.

In the Abrahamic view, God created the universe – heaven and earth – from nothing. The ancient Greeks didn’t have a Creator God per se – and absolutely denied the Creationist principle of something coming from nothing – but they did have divinities, divine forces and intelligences that could shape and organise the world.

We can conclude that the “divine order” prepared a special space with unique properties for the “mortal order”. Either way, whether you accepted the Abrahamist Creationist view or the pagan view of divine teleology, Earth was a place like no other. Human souls could join the divine order if they did the right things and lived the right way.

Crucially, the ancient religious paradigm was also a scientific paradigm based on the most advanced scientific thinking of the day then available to a mainstream audience (rather than the much more sophisticated scientific knowledge of secret societies such as the Illuminati).

The radical difference between the old religious paradigm and that of the present day is that religion was scientifically respectable and credible back then. That’s one of the reasons why there were so few atheists. Religion and science were in apparent harmony. To be religious was to be scientific, and vice versa (and indeed the Illuminati hold that exact position even now: religion and science CANNOT be in conflict!)

However, the old scientific paradigm of Aristotle was destroyed by modern science. Earth became a humdrum planet orbiting the Sun, which was in a humdrum solar system, part of a humdrum galaxy in a universe so vast we don’t know where, or if, it ends.

In the old religious paradigm, Heaven and Hell were specific locations in the known universe. God lived in a precise place and so did Satan. The soul could travel towards God or Satan (up or down) in a physical sense.

Modern science made the old religious paradigm untenable, so mainstream religion had three options: to give up now that it no longer had any scientific underpinning, to find a new religious model that was scientifically underpinned (e.g. Illuminism) or to declare war on science and inhabit a separate dimension of “faith” (i.e. total, anti-scientific irrationality). We all know what it chose to do.

Modern religious people are much more stupid than the religious believers of yesteryear. Dante had a whole vision of reality, religiously and scientifically compatible, that he could plausibly believe in. No such vision exists today with the SOLE exception of Illuminism.

It’s a form of madness to be a mainstream believer in the present age. Science has not left that as a rational option. You are proclaiming yourself an outright enemy of science and knowledge in the present day if you proclaim religious faith. That was not the case 1,000 year ago. All of the excuses have run out for modern believers. They are dumb, dumber, and dumberer!!
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Astrology:

The medieval mind was sure that “above” (the Heavens) was full of intelligences and angels. All of the shining stars and planets were deemed to be the visible signs and manifestations of divine and angelic minds.

If you think of the planets as active celestial intelligences rather than inert lumps of matter, it becomes much easier to understand astrology. It seems bizarre to suggest that the alignment of Mars with Saturn would cause any effect on a human baby, but if all the planets are angels and celestial intelligences with specific qualities it’s possible to imagine that their mental qualities could be transmitted to newborn babies via the aether, and could mentally influence their lives afterwards.

The ancient belief in astrology is much more rational than the modern belief in the subject. Astrology in ancient times was to do with the mental influence of the planets (celestial intelligences) on human personality. In modern astrology, the physical location of lumps of rock in space is said to influence human personality and fate: a much more bizarre claim.

In the Platonic view, the Earth had a soul and intelligence, as did all planets and stars. Matter was infused with soul and intelligence. This lends itself quiet naturally to an astrological view of reality: minds influencing minds; minds shaping future events; higher minds controlling destinies of lower minds.

In short, the ancient and medieval conception of the universe was that the universe was suffused with soul, and each cosmic sphere was guided by an intelligence. In the light of modern scientific materialism, these ideas seem absurd. In fact, the old view is largely correct. The universe is panpsychic: mind is everywhere. The universe is indeed suffused with “soul”. There are no conscious intelligences guiding stars and planets, but there are certainly unconscious intelligences (as in Gaia Theory). Black holes are cosmic interfaces between mind and matter. They are present in the physical universe and yet the black hole singularities have zero size and are outside space and time. It’s thought that supermassive black holes are at the centre of every galaxy and were vital in the formation of those galaxies. We might regard these supermassive black holes as the “guiding intelligences” of the galaxies.

The central problem with old and new views of the cosmos is that they employ radically different vocabularies. The mode of “speech” of science is inherently materialistic and anti-mind. Therefore the paradigm of modern science simply doesn’t cater for the possibility of mind. Mental phenomena cannot be described in terms of scientific equations, and scientists automatically take the next step of asserting that mental phenomena do not actually exist.

There is only one way to resolve the problem: to find a vocabulary of mind that science can understand. Illuminism has the right vocabulary: mathematics, the queen of the sciences. Once the true mathematical architecture of the cosmos is understood, all of the problems surrounding mind and matter dissolve. Mathematics provides the Logos foundation of Illuminism. Using nothing but mathematics, Illuminism bridges the gap between scientific materialism and the older panpsychic view of the universe.

It’s impossible for the modern mind to tune into the religious ways of thinking of the past. One thing we have sought to achieve is to resurrect the often ingenious context in which religion once flourished. Religion once made much more sense to people than it does now. It was part of a coherent worldview linking all of the knowledge of the world then available. Religion nowadays seems rather ridiculous because the paradigm of scientific materialism has destroyed the link between humanity and the divine order.

Illuminism has the vital task of sealing that catastrophic rift and it can be done only through knowledge, not through the anti-science mantras of “faith”. No one can truly understand religion unless they are familiar with the history of ideas, the history of philosophy, of science and mathematics, myths and legend, and the history of religion itself.

Is the Jewish Bible good religion or incredibly bad history? The Jews were the first people to convert their own history into a religious discourse. Actions that would otherwise have been regarded as political and social were turned into religious events. The incredible tale of 70,000 Hebrews being killed by God because King David carried out a census (!) is plainly a preposterous distortion of some political feud. David almost certainly wanted to impose his authority (symbolised by the census) over a group that rejected his rule, and violence subsequently erupted. The bloodletting was then transformed into the sign of God’s disfavour and punishment.

Similarly, the Jewish enslavement by the Babylonians was, in reality, simply a much stronger power destroying a weaker one – but the Jews decided it was caused by their failure to worship Yahweh properly. A completely mad conclusion, but that’s the Jews for you. (Their way of thinking would have turned 9/11 into a sign of divine displeasure at gay marriages, teenage sex before marriage, shopping on the Sabbath, or something equally ridiculous.)

In order to escape from captivity, the Jews needed a divinely appointed Messiah, so they became obsessed with that concept. Christianity came along and transformed the idea of a terrestrial messiah into a celestial one. Then, hundreds of years later, Mohammed appeared on the scene and couldn’t make any sense of the Christian Trinity, so he returned to Jewish monotheism, but because he was an Arab and not a Jew, he changed the emphasis of the Bible from Abraham, Isaac and the Jews to Abraham, Ishmael and the Arabs. The whole thing is history, politics and identity. Religion comes into it only as camouflage.

Abrahamism made sense cosmologically while science and astronomy located Earth at the centre of the universe. When that was no longer the case, Abraham should have been a dead duck, but instead it simply went into denial and the believers redoubled their faith – a classic psychological defence mechanism. It’s nothing but an example of cognitive dissonance. Everyone is driven to minimise cognitive dissonance. If you can’t do it rationally, you do it irrationally. The more that modern science contradicts Abrahamism, the more irrational the latter becomes, and the more extremist: look at the Muslims!

The intellectual, historical, mythological and psychological underpinnings of the main religious traditions are brought about by the evolution of ideas – by the dialectic – not by “revelation”. The revelations of Abrahamism have been 100% refuted by science and philosophy. There’s nothing real left, just a ghost called “faith” that people refuse to abandon.

An enormous amount is revealed about the human psyche by the failure of Abrahamists to reject their failed religious system. What is clear is that truth and reason don’t matter at all to most human beings. Comforting delusions are always preferred. People want to be lied to. They beg for the truth to leave them alone. Nothing is more frightening to the ordinary person than the truth. Yet isn’t the truth what it’s all about?
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