The Atheist Experience

Christianity had something of a start in time (though it heavily borrowed from previous Jewish sects and even mainstream "Judaism" itself). Christianity is a monolith today but the further back you go in time, you sees lots of diverse views (so diverse that the major doctrines today seem increasingly contradicted by the earlier communities).Atheism might be a monolith but does it have any real roots?When did it start?How much did it borrow from other movements?Are its followers a monolith today?

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Atheism is as monolithic as not collecting stamps or not playing golf. It has the same roots as not believing in Bigfoot.

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Another poster seems to describe his "atheism" as simply skepticism.Going in that direction, I shall ask:How would a skeptical mindset toward God relate to something like a Mescalito character?There is a "sacred cactus" (to native Americans) called Peyote.It is the raw material to make the mescaline drug (effects similar to LSD I think).Robert Anton Wilson never knew anything about Mescalito (or anything like), but decided to go on mescaline trips, and AFTER he was off the high, he saw a green man (with pointy ears) in a cornfield.He later found out that TONS OF PEOPLE, from Thomas Edison to Thomas Jefferson, believed in this type of vegetative spirit.He even found out that this green spirit had a name in Mexico. Mescalito was a name that certain Mexican Shamans (who used the peyote drug) called the green man with pointy ears.How would you consider "atheism" relevant to this?Are you "agnostic" on this Mescalito character or is there a specific term?Why do you describe your failure to find a lack of evidence (on God) as somehow a definitive affirmation of knowledge and thus you are grouped into an "Atheist" membership?I don't really understand the distinction between "Agnostic" beliefs toward God and the description of "Atheistic" membership.

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Atheism is just a response to a claim. i.e. Do you believe in a god or gods?

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In an of itself, it is nothing more than that. In the same way theism is a response to the same claim. But theism in an of itself does not have any specific tenets or concepts since it isn't a religion.

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Certain religions are theistic. Or polytheistic. And for that matter, there are some religions like buddhism that are atheistic. Whether someone is a theist or an atheist does not say anything about their specific belief system.

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For atheists like myself, the only reason that label even exists is I live in a society where religion has a large presence. But being an atheist doesn't in any way affect my worldview since it has no core tenets or philosophies.

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A better description of myself as it pertains to specific beliefs is that I am a secular humanist. Although deists can also be secular humanists.

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In short, atheism is merely a response to a claim. Secular humanism is a a philosophical stance that focuses on the value and agency of human beings.

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So it is like the Pagan Romans calling Christians "atheists"?You don't follow the classical myth then so you are called an "atheist"?You don't find the popular myth today (Christianity) so you are "atheist"?Or you just haven't found convincing evidence, so you are "atheist"?(I am having trouble seeing why this should be seen as distinct from agnosticism, but is the issue simply that the term "agnostic" lacks the word related to deity, deus, theology, theos, deva, etc?)

Diomedes said:

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A better description of myself as it pertains to specific beliefs is that I am a secular humanist. Although deists can also be secular humanists.

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In short, atheism is merely a response to a claim. Secular humanism is a a philosophical stance that focuses on the value and agency of human beings.

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Let me get back to this Mescalito issue, since it might be possible to offer you an example of something to chew on.Back to Robert Anton Wilson and Mescalito.From his 1977 book, Cosmic Trigger.

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pp 5-6

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I originally got interested in mind-altering drugs due to an article in the most conservative magazine in the U.S.A., the National Review, edited by Roman Catholic millionaire William Buckley, Jr. Later, of course, Buckley and his magazine would attack drug experiments with neo-Inquisitorial fury, but back in innocent '60 or '61 , they naively printed an article, by conservative historian Russell Kirk, reviewing Aldous Huxley's The Doors of Perception, in which Huxley recounted how he had transcended time and space and experienced "Heaven."

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Huxley did it under the influence of mescaline, a drug derived from the "sacred cactus," peyote, used in American Indian rituals. Russell Kirk thought this was good scientific evidence to support religiosity in general against the "liberal humanists," whom he regards as the prime villains in history. Kirk said, among other things, that "only the most dogmatic old-fangled materialist" would reject Huxley's report a priori without duplicating the experiment. Being a dogmatic oldfangled materialist at the time, I resented this and argued about it a lot inside my head over a period of months. It seemed that, as a materialist, I had to accept one aspect of Huxley's book that Kirk had not noted: the strong implication that consciousness is chemical in nature and changes as its chemistry changes. That was provocative.

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The Materialist had his first drug trip on December 28, 1962, in an old slave-cabin in the woods outside Yellow Springs, Ohio. With my wife, Arlen, and our four small children, I had rented the cabin from Antioch College for $30 per month and had an acre of cleared land to grow food on, 30 acres of woods to seek Mystery in. Farming was only partly supporting us; I was working as Assistant Sales Manager for a microscopic business, the Antioch Bookplate Company in Yellow Springs. But we had found (we thought) a way to escape the regimented urban hive without starving to death.

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Before eating the first peyote button, the Materialist asked his supplier (a black jazz musician), "Is this stuff dangerous at all?"

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p.7

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"The fuck," he said. "The Indians been eating it every full moon for thousands of years."

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"Oh, yeah, that's right," the Materialist said, remembering also Huxley's glowing description of his first trip. I quickly ate seven buttons and for the next 12 hours whirled through an unrehearsed and incoherent tour of the vestibule of Chapel Perilousa most educational and a transcendental experience.

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A few years later, it would have been different, of course. The Materialist would have said, "But the newspapers claim that people sometimes go crazy on this stuff and flip out for months."

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And the Supplier would have said, "The newspapers also say our troops are in Vietnam to help the Vietnamese. Man, don't believe any of the crap they say."

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And, being of a curious and experimental nature, I would have gone ahead anyway, but with a lot of doubt, and that could easily have turned into anxiety or outright panic. We later saw exactly that happen to others, after the press really got into gear on this story and built up the hysteria to feverpitch.

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As it was, the Materialist simply suffered the usual delusion of the first trip: he thought he was reborn. After all, back then, he had Russell Kirk and the National Reviewthe. certified sages of sanctified conservatismon his side.

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When, in the following weeks, it became sadly obvious that I was not entirely reborn, and that many neurotic, depressive and egotistic programs still remained in my central computer, I was somewhat disillusioned. But the trip had been 50 interesting and ecstatic . . . Like the Lady of Spain in the poem, I tried "again. And again. And again and again and again." By mid-1963,1 had logged 40 trips to inner space and it was obvious that peyote was, indeed, a magical chemical, as the Indians claim, but that one had to be a shaman to know how to use it profitably.

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pp. 7-8

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We don't propose to enthuse about those 40 peyote voyages in technicolor prose. There was more than enough of that kind of writing in the 1960s. In Dr. Timothy Leary's terminology, each trip involved a transmutation of consciousness from the "symbolic" and linear terrestrial circuits of the nervous system to the somatic-genetic future circuits.* The Materialist learned to experience rapture and bliss, to transcend time. In each trip, the Body was Resurrected, Osiris rose from his t o m b ; I was godly and eternal for a while. Each time, the yo-yo effect (as Dr. Richard Alpert calls it) occurred within a day or so: I came down again. The next trip brought me back up, of course, but then, once more, I came down again; up-and-down, up-and-downthe yo-yo effect. It was alternately inspiring and exasperating.

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But a change in my mind (my "neurological functioning," Dr. Leary would say) was, slowly and subtly, beginning to happen.

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The Materialist frequently had the hallucination of telepathic communication with plants, both when flying on the wings of peyote and when he was straight. Hallucination was the judgment of his engineering-trained rational mind; it seemed real as all get-out each time it happened. But the Materialist knew too much to take it seriously . . . and he continued to know too much until later in the '60s, when Cleve Backster's research with polygraphs produced some hard evidence that human-plant telepathy may be occurring all the time, usually outside the conscious attention of the human participant.

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pp.8-9

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Several times the Materialist contacted an Energy or an Intelligence that seemed to deserve the description superhuman. It was obvious to me that I could easily, with a less skeptical cast of mind, describe these trans-time dialogues as meetings with actual gods or angels. (Quanah Parker, the great Cheyenne war-chief, who was converted to pacifism by a peyote trip and later founded the Native American Church, used to say, "The white man goes into his church and talks to Jesus. The Indian goes into his tipi, takes peyote, and talks with Jesus.") I regarded the entities contacted as X's unknownsand tried, in each experiment and in reflections between experiments, to find a psychological, neurological, or even parapsychological explanation.

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The strangest entity I contacted in those twenty-odd months of psychedelic explorations appeared one day after the end of a peyote trip, when I was weeding in the garden and a movement in the adjoining cornfield caught my eye. I looked over that way and saw a man with warty green skin and pointy ears, dancing. The Skeptic watched for nearly a minute, entranced, and then Greenskin faded away, "just a hallucination . . . "

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But I could not forget him. Unlike the rapid metaprogramming during a peyote trip, in which you are never sure what is "real" and what is just the metaprogrammer playing games, this experience had all the qualities of waking reality, and differed only in intensity. The entity in the cornfield had been more beautiful, more charismatic, more divine than anything I could consciously imagine when using my literary talents to try to portray a deity. As the mystics of all traditions say so aggravatingly, "Those who have seen, know."

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Well, I had seen, but I didn't know. I was more annoyed than enlightened.

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But that was not to be my last encounter with that particular critter. Five years later, in 1968, the Skeptic read Carlos Castaneda's The Teachings of Don Juan, dealing with traditional Mexican shamanism and its use of the sacred cactus. Castaneda, an anthropologist, saw the same green man several times, and Don Juan Matus, the shaman, said his n a m e was Mescalito. He was the spirit of the peyote plant. But the Materialist had seen him before he ever read a description of him. That was most perplexing to the Materialist. 10

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A fairly plausible explanation is that Mescalito is an archetype of the collective unconscious, in the Jungian sense. He has been reported by many others besides Castaneda and me, and he always has the same green warty skin and is often dancing.

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p.10

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However, might we dare consider that Mescalito may be just what the shamans (who know him best) always say he is one of the "spirits" of the vegetation? Too silly an idea for sophisticates like ourselves? Paracelsus, the founder of modern medicine, believed in such spirits and claimed frequent commerce with them. So did the German poet Goethe and the pioneer of organic agriculture, Rudolph Steinerand the ideas of Goethe and Steiner, once rejected as too mystical, are currently being seriously reconsidered by many ecologists.

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Or consider Gustav Fechner, the creator of scientific psychology and psychological measurement. Fechner lost his sight and then regained it, after which he asserted that with his new vision he saw many things normal people do not see including auras around humans and other living creatures, and vegetation spirits just like Mescalito. George Washington Carver also claimed a link with spirits in the vegetation, and so did the great Luther Burbank. Thomas Edison became so convinced of their literal existence that he spent many years trying to develop a photographic process t h a t would render them visible.

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pp.10-11

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Marcel Vogel (whose corporation, Vogel Luminescence, has developed the red color used in fluorescent crayons, and the psychedelic colors popular in 1960s poster art) has been studying plant consciousness and vegetative "telepathy" for ten years now. In one experiment, Vogel and a group of psychologists tried concentrating on sexual imagery while a plant was wired up with a polygraph to reveal its electrochemical ("emotional"?) responses to their thoughts. The plant responded with the polygraph pattern typical of excitement. Vogel speculates that talking of sex could stir up in the atmosphere some sort of sexual energy, such as the "orgone" claimed by Dr. Wilhelm Reich. If this is true, the ancient fertility rites in which humans had sexual intercourse in freshly seeded fields might indeed have stimulated the fertility of the crops, and the shamans are not as naive as we like to think . Mescalito could be both an archetype of Jung's Collective Unconscious and an anthromorphized human translation of a persistent signal sent by the molecular intelligence of the vegetative world. Naturally, the ability to decode such orgonomic or neuro-electric signals would be eagerly sought by all shamans in societies dependent on agriculture. In other words, according to this model, Mescalito is a genetic signal in our collective unconscious, but activated only when certain molecular transmissions from the plant world are received.

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This shamanic kind of selective attention, or special perception, has been duplicated in the modern world by Dr. Vogel, who has given many demonstrations before audiences, in which he accurately reads vegetative signals from plants. It is no more spooky than the selective yogic trance of the average city-dweller, which allows him to walk in mindless indifference through incredible noise, filth, pandemonium, misery, neurosis, violence, psychosis, rape, burglary, injustice and exploitation, screening it all out and concentrating only on robot repetition of his assigned role in the hive-economy. One can train oneself to receive or ignore a far wider variety of signals than the neurologically untrained realize.

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(Wilson immediately went on to mention the possibility of aliens sending signals to our planet and implanting into our thoughts and experiences.)Now is the Biblical description of cultures with fertility cults and things existing beyond our human perceptions in any way related to your Humanism and Atheism?How does scientific evidence (like what is mentioned above) factor in?Is there some demarcation between agnosticism and humanism and atheism?What about Biblical events like "mystical" communications?Edited by LamarkNewAge, : No reason given.

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I don't really understand the distinction between "Agnostic" beliefs toward God and the description of "Atheistic" membership.

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Tangle responded:

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The only difference between an atheist and an agnostic is intellectual honesty. People either believe in god (or little green men) or they don't. If they don't know, then they do not believe. Belief is positive - like pregnancy - you've either got it or you ain't.

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But an agnostic says they don't KNOW based on the evidence.So an atheist is saying "I don't know" as opposed to "There is no God"?Or an atheist simply says "I don't follow the religion"?I always have trouble figuring out what a person means when terms are thrown around. Perhaps there should be some committee to iron out what the term should technically mean.

Diomedes said:

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As I mentioned, atheism is merely a response to the question of 'do you believe in a god or gods?'. The question is not asking my opinion on a specific religion. Now if someone asked me if I believe that Jesus is the son of god, I would also answer no. But that answer wouldn't necessarily label me an atheist. Muslims would answer the question the same way.

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So it is about belief and not evidence?Diomedes then said:

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I will state that I haven't found convincing evidence of the claims for a god. But more to the point, when reviewing the myriad of religions out there, I have found substantial counter-evidence to their claims. Such as visible evidence that there was no global flood, that we were not descended from Adam and Eve, that the Earth is not 6000 years old. And so forth.

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Primeval mythology is undeniably the work of man, and based on little observation among the ancients.But there does seem to be legitimate evidence of actual observations of "spirits" and "visions" and "voices", and the "Holy Books" aren't quite as easy to dismiss in all their details (and implications) as modern rationalizations rather simply make everything out to be.But back to the evidence verses belief and people's self-described theo-ideological labelsDiomedes said:

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Regarding atheist and agnosticism, the labels are actually somewhat distinct. Theism/atheism delves into beliefs while gnosticism/agnosticism speak of knowledge and certainty.

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If one looks at it from a purely logical argument, then they actually operate in corollary to each other.

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For example, someone can be an 'agnostic theist'. What this essentially means is that they have a belief in a deity, but they do not claim certainty with that belief. And in conjunction, an 'agnostic atheist' would be someone who does not believe in a deity but does not claim absolutely certainty that there isn't one.

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The main rational for an agnostic stance in either direction is without testable mechanisms to leverage, there is no experiment that can be derived that can ascertain proof one way or the other.
Now there are some individuals who would label themselves as 'gnostic atheists'. Which in my opinion makes no sense since there isn't any test they can reference to claim absolutely certainty that their stance is accurate. The same can be said for a 'gnostic theist'. As per my dialog with Phat earlier, he acknowledged that his stance is subjective. Which means it is more based on emotions and feelings than evidence. Which is why it can't be measured or tested in any way.

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Well, at least SOME people recognize the devil is in the details.Not to many will put their self-described (via a label) "faith" to the test.The really odd thing is that we all honestly "don't know".We should all be forced to say "I don't know" or "We don't know".

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One issue with individuals who say they are purely 'agnostic' is that they are actually making an error in logic with their view. A common statement mentioned is that they will state that 'the view that the existence of God, of the divine or the supernatural is unknown or unknowable'. This statement is actually logically invalid. It is ironically, actually making a claim about something (in this case god), and then ascribing a characteristic to that claim which makes any form of testing impossible. In common logical parlance, this would be a 'meaningless standard'. It is a claim that anyone can make and it is impossible to refute. You could replace god with Thor, Odin, The Loch Ness Monster, Cthulhu or The Flying Spaghetti Monster.

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'the view that the existence of God, of the divine or the supernatural is unknown or unknowable'?The last 2 words sound really dogmatic.The "unknowable" part really is a discussion stopper.There will be no need for any further testing in that case. Each man to his own "beliefs" and damn the person who asks for a discussion of evidence.

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I always have trouble figuring out why people have to make something as simple as atheism into a complex, absolutely defined, totally fucking structured world view. Why do you care what happens in other people's minds?

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My atheism is based on the complete lack of a shred of evidence of any supernatural entities, period. When I was around 12 it became obvious to me that the bible was refuted by evidence that even a kid could figure out. Bad shit happens to good people and good shit happens to bad people and God doesn't give a shit and is batshit crazy anyway.

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But the Biblical text had observations. Just like the Canaanite texts. And we need to put them to the test in every way we can think of. (Not just simply say they have lines about only bad people getting cursed and only good people getting blessings and prosperity).Look at the issue of blood seemingly being described as the "soul". It led to the "Ecto Plasma" theory of past centuries.What about the Canaanite fertility rites?This is often described as sacred prostitution.(More on what that has to do with scientific examination later)But see this blog argue that it is false history to say Canaanites had sacred prostitution.KinaaniHere is an interesting bit from the blog.

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) The sexually repressed Victorians allowed their own fascinations colored their theories, theories which have formed the basis for other scholarship. The Victorians developed and added to what they knew from biblical propaganda and Classical authors’ secondary accounts, then emphasized themes of fertility as represented by sexuality.11 In addition, the scholars of this time and into the early twentieth century supported the biblical notions of Canaanite religion as depraved.12 Yet we know from primary texts that the Canaanites had a sense of ethics similar to their Israelite and Phoenician descendants.13

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4) These ideas on sacred sexuality as applied to ancient Canaanite culture came about before primary texts on Canaanite religionwritten records from the rediscovered city of Ugaritwere excavated and translated.14 However, the first translations of these primary texts demonstrate a presupposition of these early concepts and biases. Early translators took into account the theories of sacred sexuality and fertility at the time and fished for evidence to prove the concept, which would verify Classic scholars and the Bible. This is bad scientific theory: one’s hypothesis should not presuppose a foregone conclusion and a scholar should not examine and interpret the evidence with a conclusion in mind.

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5) Scholars rely on previous scholarship, and if the previous scholarship is problematic, it is incumbent upon the scholars to examine and resolve the problems. However a good dose of common assumption (the old everybody knows... and it’s common knowledge... argument) causes these problems to remain unexamined and often unknown. Without reexamination, scholars build on a house of cards. Sacred sex in Canaan has been a common assumption for so long that some scholars don’t bother to footnote where they get this idea, but when it is footnoted it’s from a combination of items 1-4. Any scholar who doesn’t do independent research often must rely on another scholar who likely makes use of items 1-5 and thus she unknowingly perpetuates the same misinformation as do the scholars who come after her.15

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What we end up with is circular reasoning and a self-perpetuating historiographical mess.

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Elusive Prostitutes and Sacred Marriages: Evidence?
The primary Canaanite material mentions one class of priests that has been labeled as temple prostitutes by later scholarship, and there is one ritual text that if read in a particular fashion is thought to reflect a heiros gamos

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he Sacred Prostitutes: QedeshimThere’s a term in Ugaritic which also occurs in Hebrew: q-d-sh ( ), most often vocalized as qedesh, qodesh, qadish, or qedesh; also as q-d-sh-m ( ) the qedeshim (Hebrew) or qadishuma (Ugaritic)--the -im or -uma makes the word plural, the words qedeshah or qadishtu are the feminine singular forms of this word. This term is often translated as hierodule, i.e. sacred prostitute. The root word, q-d-sh translates as holy, consecrated and implies a sense of sacredness, of being set apart, and is used to identify clergy.16 To discredit polytheistic clergy, biblical scribes pair the word qadesh with the word zona, which means prostitute.17 Using the terms qadesh and zona together in a poetic technique called parallelism gives the impression that the terms are connected even if they are not: consider President G.W. Bush saying 9-11, Al Qaeda, and Iraq frequently together. The reason for the qadesh = zona equation originates from the biblical notion that a polytheist commits spiritual adultery by worshipping gods other than the chief god of Israel.18

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All we know for certain about the qadish-priests comes from Canaanite-Ugaritic primary texts: the qadish-priests sing. They serve as cantors or as the choir, and possibly also as diviners.19 We have musical scores20 left behind from the city of Ugarit so I think it is unlikely that sing or hymn was a euphemism for sex. Nowhere and in no way do primary texts from Canaan associate qadish-priests with sacred sex.

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In Ugaritic texts, the use of the word qadish or qadishuma is always masculine, thus we have no way of knowing whether this word includes females among this clergical class or not. Branching out beyond Canaan and into Mesopotamia, we have some evidence of qadishtu-priestesses: a qadishtu-priestess was of upper class; she could marry or be independent but she was typically disallowed from having children.21 She worked primarily as a midwife.22 A Mesopotamian unmarried naditu-priestess outranked the qadishtu-priestess; the naditu was expected to refrain from sex and she may have lived in a cloister.23 If the qadish-priests were serving in a primary capacity as sexual functionaries, then it’s likely that the scribes would have noted this in a more obvious way, as forthright as the Ugaritans were regarding sex and their deities.

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Kinaani

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Singing not screwing.(I found this site, above, by putting CANAANITE TEXTS ON FERTILITY into a Bing search engine using Google Chrome)It helps to understand what the old religions might actually be saying.I just noticed that Marcus Vogel, and his polygraph stuff, has apparently been falsified.Robert Anton Wilson book claim:

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Marcel Vogel (whose corporation, Vogel Luminescence, has developed the red color used in fluorescent crayons, and the psychedelic colors popular in 1960s poster art) has been studying plant consciousness and vegetative "telepathy" for ten years now. In one experiment, Vogel and a group of psychologists tried concentrating on sexual imagery while a plant was wired up with a polygraph to reveal its electrochemical ("emotional"?) responses to their thoughts. The plant responded with the polygraph pattern typical of excitement. Vogel speculates that talking of sex could stir up in the atmosphere some sort of sexual energy, such as the "orgone" claimed by Dr. Wilhelm Reich. If this is true, the ancient fertility rites in which humans had sexual intercourse in freshly seeded fields might indeed have stimulated the fertility of the crops, and the shamans are not as naive as we like to think . Mescalito could be both an archetype of Jung's Collective Unconscious and an anthromorphized human translation of a persistent signal sent by the molecular intelligence of the vegetative world. Naturally, the ability to decode such orgonomic or neuro-electric signals would be eagerly sought by all shamans in societies dependent on agriculture. In other words, according to this model, Mescalito is a genetic signal in our collective unconscious, but activated only when certain molecular transmissions from the plant world are received.

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Humans having sex to successfully stimulate plants?False! (it seems anyway)But what about human interaction in other ways?Like the Canaanites perhaps SINGING TO PLANTS?"playing music to plants polygraph" was put into the Bing search engine.I found:Does Music Affect Plant Growth? | Sciencing"plants grow faster with people" was put into BingI found:Talking to Plants Can Help Them Grow FasterMusic Can Help Your Plants Grow....seriously? - SiOWfa12: Science in Our World: Certainty and Controversyhttps://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=200810300501...The blog had questions about whether females had a role in Canaanite fertility rituals.But singing seemed to be indicated by the evidence.NOW ON TO ATHEISM.Tanypteryx said:

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Why do you care what happens in other people's minds?

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My atheism is based on the complete lack of a shred of evidence of any supernatural entities, period. When I was around 12 it became obvious to me that the bible was refuted by evidence that even a kid could figure out. Bad shit happens to good people and good shit happens to bad people and God doesn't give a shit and is batshit crazy anyway.

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I would respond that there are things we can't understand and haven't begun to understand.But modern-day kids (whether 12 or 17) might not be able to grasp everything about the old religions of Canaan (like the Israelite religion for one).The Israelite and Canaanite folks seem to have had some sort of spiritual experience.There is evidence they at least had hallucinations (perhaps even on a mass level). And visions.I just don't think that their witness somehow shoots down the entire notion of a higher power existing (before the creation of our universe or coming to be after the start).You have this "Atheism" thing going based on some bad sermons you heard about good people prospering (which used parts of the ancient scriptures)

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And this is another big hoax against the truth, part of the whole attempt to substitute fake heretical New Testament manuscripts in the place of the Textus Receptus, touted as the "oldest" manuscripts and therefore the most authentic.

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The Textus Receptus was an eclectic text from the Middle Ages.Never mind the fact that there are no existing original Semitic (as in Hebrew or Aramaic) "New Testament" manuscripts. A problem that you constantly ignore. There are translations into Aramaic, from the Greek texts (which, in translation, don't fit 100% with the European "Textus Receptus", in fact there are missing parts and added parts in the Aramaic translations), but no ORIGINAL Aramaic texts.The fact is that the entire existing "New Testament" shows evidence of being an original European work, though it bent and twisted (what was) a Middle Eastern religion.

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Well, you have some sources of your own I guess, they certainly aren't the ones I trust. There should be no reason for an Aramaic version of the NT that I know of, it was written in Greek, and while fragments of many translations exist I don't see why an Aramaic translation would be of any importance one way or another.
The Textus Receptus is the best compilation of manuscripts as attested by all the scholars I trust.

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If you want to read the best scholar on the subject in my opinion, read Dean John William Burgon, "Revision Revised" and "The Last Verses of Mark" and he's written many others.

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My biggest problem is that there are NO (original) ARAMAIC (or Hebrew) LETTERS OR FRAGMENTS OR ANYTHING.It would be nice to have something that is not late European stuff (some of the European texts are fairly early though, but not too impressive, as they mostly consist of letters of Paul, a shadow in history that we don't know a lot about, except that he never met Jesus).I admit that my "problems" could be (possibly) described as more of an "archaeology problem", but this is still serious.I have no confidence that this stuff we have for a "Bible" is from anybody remotely connected to Jesus.This is a "problem", right?Can you admit that nobody, really, "knows Jesus"?Edited by LamarkNewAge, : No reason given.

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The more the debates go on here at EvC the more I find myself pulling back to my simple traditional belief passed down through the conservative Protestant lines. I trust those in the conservative traditions who have studied the history of the Bible manuscripts and concluded it is to be trusted.

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How old is the earth?(more than 1900/2000 years, right?)How old is (any form of) "Christianity"?Keep in mind the FACT that Augustine was, in 388-431 A.D., still attacking those who thought there was land on the other side of the earth (mono poles or something) - that is, a "new world" not mentioned in the Table of Nations of Genesis. It was a major controversy, over 1000 years later, to "discover" the Americas and the Native Americans when SCRIPTURE FAILED TO MENTION BOTH!Jesus did not have any existence before 2000 years ago, and the (later) written "records" of him did not spread too far for a very LONG time after he died.Christianity came long after the earth, and humans, existed.Look at your even later example, Faith:Your reliance on Protestant offshoots - of a VERY recent Roman Catholic church (the RCC did exist longer back in time, but Protestants are offshoots of a recent Roman Catholic Church, which itself came from a developing religion that is very LATE IN EARTH'S HISTORY) - show us that you are isolated in time and place.Faith, here is what I feel:Your religion is a product of a modern European culture, and the old religion of Jesus did not get so much as a public hearing outside of Syria. You don't even have a Hebrew Gospel of Matthew to show me (or the world). China never got the Gospel According to the Hebrews. Neither did England, of all places. England only ever has Roman Catholicism or the later Anglicans. These old "Celtic" legends are a myth, btw (the "pure church" stuff and associated fantasies).Edited by LamarkNewAge, : No reason given.