More Of The Root Of All Evil

From Babylon came Persia in conquest, the Greece, then Rome. In each successive empire, money became “etherialized” from gold and silver coins, to which were added bronze and cheaper metals by Greece, until Rome realized that coin of any metal, with Caesar’s image in it, would serve as “money”.

The king called Daniel, a young Jew well educated in the Babylonian system, who told him that the head was Nebuchadnezzar, the chest and shoulders of silver would represent the next successive kingdom, and brass the one after that. With each emerging empire, the metal cheapened, until it was no more than sand.

With each “etherialization” of money, the power of the empire grew, but it also gained in complexity. While Persia was incredibly massive and powerful, the same etherialization of the alphabetic text that had created mobility of the military class also furnished the competing systems that would overthrow each empire. Babylon had been overthrown by the “barbarian” hordes of Persia, and Persia, in turn, was overthrown by the disdainful “barbarians” of Greece.

The mobility and simplicity by which the alphabet offered education and training to the people was also fueled by the parallel “etherialization of money, which as it became cheaper and cheaper, allowed for greater and diversity, along with greater central control of the system by taxation.

Greece, deeply infected by the alphabet and its linear focus, as we discussed earlier, developed geometry and sciences of reason and logic that propelled it along the path of civilization. With Greece, men began developing the “machinery of thought”, the syllogisms of logic, the linear power of geometry, and the power to connect thoughts in this linear fashion accommodated by mathematics.
As Howard Bloom points out:

“…Rome’s rise was part of the world’s inexorable march to higher levels of form. By force–sometimes sadistic force–she brought an unprecedented mass of squabbling city-states and tribes together. In the process, she allowed an exchange of ideas and goods that radically quickened the pace of progress.”

The superorganism was growing, but it was growing by a more rapid exchange of ideas, cultures, religions, every possible combination offered by a ranging civilization. In the midst of all this, still absorbed as a kind of virus within all the cultures, acting as an adaptive sub-culture, cutting and pasting the developments of civilization with its own Mishna, were the Jews. Rome, writes Bloom, introduced pluralism, an easygoing attitude that allowed diverse cultures to live side by side. Rome further developed the concept of a republic, the form of government later claimed by the United States. As McLuhan pointed out, the Roman soldier became the labor that provided the factories that became the later model of the Western world.

About this same time, as Rome rose to its peak, came the collision of ideas at various levels, including the clash of ideas from Jews who arrived in Israel, coming from the Hellenists of Greece, the orthodox of Jewish faith from other countries, all looking for the kingdom of God that was expected after the fourth empire, and Rome was the fourth empire described in Daniel.

During the peak of this symbolism, of money and ideas, came Jesus, who challenged not only Rome, but the leading legal authorities among the Jews; the Pharisees. The culminating recognition of this symbolism and its effects came when the Pharisees asked Jesus if it was lawful to pay taxes to Caesar.

Jesus asked for a coin and when one was produced, asked “Whose image is on this coin?” By that question, the Pharisees knew instantly that Jesus referred to the second commandment, in which they Jews were forbidden to make or bow down to any image of any kind on heaven or earth. Roman soldiers and citizens would not have noticed this answer, but the Pharisees k new its implications, They were NOT to pay taxes to Caesar.

It was at this point in history that a direct challenge came to the superorganism, which, until that time, was allowed to grow and conquer. Jesus had directly challenged the organizing symbolism of both money and state in its rapid growth.

While it is argued that Rome killed Jesus, and not the Jews, or that Jews killed Jesus, and he started his church at Rome, the fact is, he challenged a force that had been developing for centuries, proclaiming that Jews were to pay taxes to no one, that the law even demanded only that tithes be paid voluntarily.

During this growth of world history, the Jews had been busy cutting and pasting, organizing, building toward their view of the kingdom of God as their only duty on earth. Yet Jesus, himself a Jew, challenged the authority of their leading experts in law and religion, and his message was about true individual freedom, not the claptrap later invented by Constantine.