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Gurdjieff - Beelzebubs tales to his grandson

"The third religion, founded on the teaching of Jesus Christ, soon spread so widely in its original form that almost a third of all the three-centered beings of this planet became its followers.

"But before long they also began to mistreat this religious teaching based on 'resplendent Love,' and transformed it into something equally resplendent, but now, as our dear Mullah Nasr Eddin says, into a 'resplendent terasakhaboora from the kesbaadji fairytale. '

"Furthermore, it turned out that the followers of this great religious teaching split up, on account of some unimportant external details, into various sects, and were no longer called just 'Christians,' as were the first followers of this teaching, but 'Orthodox,' 'Zevrodox,' 'Ypsylodox,' 'Hamilodox,' and various other cognomens also ending in 'dox. '

"And into this teaching of truth and verity they also began, for various egoistic and political reasons, to mix fragments taken from other 'religious teachings' already existing there—fragments that not only had nothing in common with the teaching of Jesus but sometimes even flatly contradicted the
truths revealed by this divine teacher.

"They mixed into it a great deal from the teaching of Saint Moses, which by that time had been thoroughly distorted, and much later, during the period that contemporary beings there call the 'Middle Ages,' the so-called 'Fathers of the Church' inserted into this Christian religion nearly the whole of that fantastic doctrine invented long ago in the city of Babylon by those learned beings belonging to the school of the dualists, about which I have already told you.

"The 'Fathers of the Church' in the Middle Ages probably concocted this mixture for the benefit of their own 'shops' and the 'shops' of their assistants, because of the famous 'Paradise' and 'Hell' contained in that doctrine.

"So at the present time, in place of the teaching of the divine teacher Jesus Christ, which revealed the power of the All-lovingness and All-Forgivingness of our Creator suffering for beings, a teaching now exists that our Creator torments the souls of His followers. "

"Dear and kind Grandfather, explain to me, please, what is meant by 'Fathers of the Church'?" asked Hassein.

"They give the name of 'Fathers of the Church' to those beings there who become professional dignitaries of the highest rank of any 'religious teaching '

After this laconic reply, Beelzebub continued:  "By the way, I should tell you here that the teaching of Jesus Christ was preserved unchanged among a rather small group of terrestrial beings and, passing from generation to generation, has even come down to the present day in its original form.

"This small group of terrestrial beings is called the 'Brotherhood of the Essenes.' The members of this brotherhood first succeeded in introducing the teaching of this divine teacher into their own being-existence, and then in transmitting it to later generations as a very good means of freeing themselves from the consequences of the properties of the organ kundabuffer.

"The fourth great religion existing there today arose several centuries after the Christian religion and was founded on the teaching of the 'full-of-hope' Saint Muhammad At first it spread there widely, and might eventually have become a 'hearth of hope and reconciliation' for all of them if these strange
beings had not also stirred this up into a 'hodge-podge.'

"On the one hand, its followers mixed into it some of the fantastic theories of the Babylonian dualists, and on the other, the 'Fathers of the Church' of this religion, in this case called 'Islamic sheikhs,' invented and added to it many things about the blessings of that famous Paradise supposedly existing in the 'other world'—blessings such as could never have entered the head of the chief governor of Purgatory, His All-Quarters Maintainer the Arch-Cherub Helkgematios, even if he had deliberately tried to imagine them.

"Although the followers of this religion also split up, from the very first, into many different 'sects' and 'sub-sects'— which, by the way, continue to exist even till now—they nevertheless all subscribe to one or the other of its two independent 'schools,' as they are called, which were formed at the time of its arising.

"These two schools of the Islamic religion are called there 'Sunnism' and 'Shi'ism.'

"It is interesting to note that the psychic hatred of each other formed in the beings belonging to these two independent branches of one and the same religion has now, on account of their frequent clashes, been completely transformed into organic hatred.

"During recent centuries the beings of certain European communities have greatly contributed by their intrigues to this peculiar transformation of that strange being-function.

"And they make use of these intrigues again and again to increase the animosity between the followers of these two independent schools of one and the same religion so that they should never unite, for if this were to happen there might soon be an end of those European communities.

"The point is that nearly half of the three-brained beings there are followers of this Islamic teaching, and only as long as this hatred prevails among them will they constitute no serious threat of 'reciprocal destruction' to European communities.