Debrecen Messages #10 – The Garden of Eden: Heaven and Earth Together (Genesis 2 Teaching)

It is an Eastern religion. So is Judaism. Hebrew faith is an Eastern religion. There’s nothing you can do to change that. It’s Eastern. It’s Eastern. It’s Eastern. And it came to the West. And when it got to the West, it got profoundly changed. It’s an Eastern religion. I’m sorry to tell you that it’s Eastern. And if you don’t like it, then go change the truth of history.

The problem with you, dear friend, who gets all excited about the fact that the Christian faith is Eastern, is that you’ve been reading too many books by too many fundamentalists who themselves cannot think because they’re so narrow-minded, their ears touch, and there’s no room left for a brain.

Go back with me to Greece. And there grew up two great schools of thought in Greece. One was the school of the Pythagoreans. You’ve heard of Pythagoras. The Pythagorean school. And the other one was the Iona school. I-O-N-A. Iona. Yeah, it’s one of the words for Greece. The Iona school. Now, Peggy, you’ve never heard any of this, have you? You’ve never heard any of that.

Well, Peggy, you’re going to be so smart when this session is over. Well, Peggy, these two schools of thought, the Pythagorean school began with the supposition that all problems were mathematical and that all problems could be solved by mathematics. It was erroneous. It’s never been, it’s not true, but they had these great mathematical persuasions and all of this, that, and the other. It changed some of the ideas of math came. For instance, they figured that they could mathematically figure out the composition of gold and lead, and could mathematically change lead into gold. And that’s where alchemy came from. And this was strongly believed right on up until the atomic bomb.

Well, anyway, it shifted and became a thinking philosophy. And here was its basic supposition. Learn to think, and you need not observe nor do; they almost literally said, Close your eyes and think your way through the problem.

The Iona school said, observe, experiment. Experiment and observe. It is what we call the, and the word just flew away from me, I’ll get it, empirical. Oh, I got it back. Empirical. Experiment. Observe.

Well, perhaps the saddest event in human history in the last 2,500 years is that the Pythagorean school won out. It totally dominated, and the Iona school vanished off the face of the earth. The destruction that this caused is absolutely unbelievable. I would say most of the problems that the Western world has had can be traced back to the fact that the Pythagorean school won.

I’ll give you one example. See, this got over into Western thought, and then it got over into the Western church, and the Western Church passed a law that you could not cut open a human body, that you could only think about the human body. They knew that blood circulated in the human body from the fact that people had accidents, and they could see it circulating, but they had to think about how it circulated; they could not observe. Now that’s one small illustration. I don’t know if you know that in places it was the death penalty to cut open the human body to dissect it and try to understand it, that there were men burned at the stake.

And as far as the circulating of the stars in the sky and the earth, and the moon, you do not try to figure it out or observe it; you think about it. And so men thought about it and they wrote down what they thought. Unfortunately, those men were very intellectual and extremely stupid. As Paul said, you got smarter and smarter and smarter, and yet your smartness was ignorance. And you exchanged God for bugs, and your great intellectualism, and that’s exactly what happened in the Western world. They thought and thought, those men could sit down and rationalize and speak forever on profound thoughts that would absolutely drive you crazy with their thinking, proud and conceited, and walk out among the slaves and the merchants, glowing with this knowledge and these profound discussions you had, feeling you yourself was almost a god.

And it grew to be a non-religion religion. The power and ability to reason and think escalated beyond what most of us can understand. We do not have the IQ to keep up with some of these people and their great thinking.

Now, science died. Science died. And today, you will find science the enemy of religion. That’s a waste of time; it should never have happened. The reason that science and religion today are enemies dates back to 500 and 600 AD. when the church literally outlawed science, and the scientists got burned at the stake, for writing simple little treaties that questioned the thinkers. You didn’t question what the thinkers wrote. You died. And that held forth for a thousand years in Western Europe. And we went into what is called the Dark Ages, and we’re not out of it yet.

And those of you who live here in Eastern Europe, I want you to know, that some of the reasons for your problems today date back to the fact that you lived in the darkest part of the dark ages for a thousand years and you were dominated by a church that believed in the thinkers, and that knowledge was everything, and observation and experiment and questioning were not allowed.