Internet Sacred Text Archive

It would be great if someone could make a torrent of all of these in one go.

You don't need to use their website, but these people have put in a lot of work doing something for the world. Instead of putting our efforts into bring them down, let's spend it helping them or doing similar good.

Honestly, this site has been up for at least 20 years. I suspect the breaking into small files made a lot more sense when they first launched than it does now, given the costs of bandwidth.

Because really, when was the last time you heard someone quibble over bandwidth of text or pdf's?

Well, the new-age has swallowed quantum woo whole. It is a kind of religion or attempt at modern myth making, I suppose. More respectably, a number of eminent physicists have fallen hard for philosophical Hinduism and or certain strands of Buddhism. Bohr, Schrodinger, Heisenberg, and Bohm among them.

Depends on what exactly you're looking for.

There is certainly a tremendous amount of religious-feeling material that references modern physics by name - Deepak Chopra possibly being the most (in)famous example. Some of it is quite popular.

In particular, it seems a lot of pseudoscience/mythology is arising around the concepts of "Energy", "Vibration/Frequency", and "Quantum".

There is also a lot of work always being done by enthusiastic internet-dwellers with penchant for capitals and blink tag in retrofitting these aspects into ancient texts.

One's ability to consume such content may depend on how much attention they paid in high school and other factors :-).

Check out Alfred North Whitehead, process philosophy, and some of the thinkers that have been influenced by him. They incorporate evolution and change much more than basically any religious thinker from prior eras.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_North_Whitehead

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Process_theology

If you look at religion, folklore, mythology, as metaphors, then you really can’t exclude anything as a religion, that includes science, which is also a metaphor. All language is a metaphor. Science as you practice it today, to me, is also a religion. I don’t mean that to denigrate science in anyway. We need metaphors to make the infinite more manageable.

And by metaphor I mean a thing regarded as representative or symbolic of something else, especially something abstract.

New Myths?

Snopes dot com

I know it’s not exactly what you’re looking for, but it’s the most comprehensive telling of every modern myth they can find.

Here are the ones in Technology…

https://www.snopes.com/search/technology/

I'd assume unverifiable but narratively meaningful theories like multiverse theories, "the universe is a hologram", etc fill that role nicely. Sci-fi is full of them. "New Age" beliefs are what you're looking for at face value, of course.

>Basic assumption is that most/all are based on dated observations of seasons, planets, stars, etc -- things that were once mysteries in the mechanical universe.

I think this is pretty much propaganda from anti-religious people. I have read all of the major religious texts over the last two years and If you look at most religions and their scriptures they deal very little with the physical world in general and are more focused on psychology and sociology than having serious thoughts on physics.

Sure some of them have foundation myths which we may say is wrong, but that’s a small part of any given religion and I don’t believe anyone every took them serious in the way we think of something like the Big Bang.

Im reminded of Roko's basilisk which I suppose may have gained a significant number of new believers in the last year.

What I'm looking for is something specific to physics or astrophysics and that is at the scale of god / mythical creature creating. Like someone writing a literal (mythical?) interpretation of "Maxwell's Demon" into a new-new testament.

These aren't exactly "religion" or a "new myth", but the Seven Secular Sermons project is sort of in the wheelhouse:

https://sevensecularsermons.org/

I like them overall, though the meter breaks down in certain places which drives me crazy after being raised on Dr. Suess and Jack Prelutsky.

Scientology probably has a great deal of that.

They are doing some interesting stuff over at https://scienceandnonduality.com

I suppose if you're a cold hard logic type only just dipping your toes into it, the Stoicism of old might be more your speed, as they considered logic and reason their hammer and nails, yet still retain a certain universal appreciation that I find vaguely similar to Taoism from China (along with a concept that change is the only constant)

Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius has quite an interesting journal that also illustrates some of the thoughts and theories of the time (unable to confirm or deny it, he merely repeatedly brings up the possibility of atomism.)

Atomism also apparently makes an appearance in some Indian philosophical texts, though I don't know them off hand.

Philosophy was originally married to the "natural sciences", and so you'll find many scientific concepts originating in mystical thinking if you look past whatever simple version that suburban cavepeople of the area have decided is king.

Let’s just make our own. I’ve always thought we should come up with a new religion around quantum immortality.

Some basic thoughts could be:

Since you are the only immortal one from your point of view, all of your loved ones will die before you, so don’t worry too much about meddling in their affairs or changing them, just love them unconditionally. Your time with them is brief, so you may as well enjoy it.

Make good memories together, you will carry them along eternally (meanwhile, from others’ point of view, you will die at some point, but they will go on forever, so give them some good memories of you).

Work toward the world and society you want to live in forever.

Hold yourself to unusually high standards, because you will have to deal with the consequences of your actions for an unusually long time. Also someday you will probably be noticed as one of the earliest immortals, so try to live a life that stands up to some scrutiny.

To avoid the stress of being incompatible with modern values, you’ll have to keep updating your moral framework. Big jumps in your moral framework will be unpleasant to deal with mentally, so keep up with where society is going. You don’t have the benefit of dying and becoming a product of your time at some point.

Check out the Jung/Pauli letters.

https://www.themarginalian.org/2017/03/09/atom-and-archetype...

Advaita has all-encompassed the chat. ;)

See Oppenheimer quote from the Bhagavad Gita after the first atomic bomb test.

https://www.google.com/search?q=Oppenheimer+quote+from+the+B....

The Gita is about Advaita.

Skip the Wikipedia article about Advaita, it is somewhat crap.

Go to deeper sources such as books by well-known people, preferably S. Radhakrishnan, 2nd President of India.

(Or at least google a bit more if don't want to or cannot buy or get the book).

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarvepalli_Radhakrishnan

First paragraph from the above article about him:

Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan OM, FBA (pronunciationⓘ; 5 September 1888 – 17 April 1975; natively Radhakrishnayya) was an Indian politician, philosopher and statesman who served as the second president of India from 1962 to 1967. He previously served as the first vice president of India from 1952 to 1962. He was the second ambassador of India to the Soviet Union from 1949 to 1952. He was also the fourth vice-chancellor of Banaras Hindu University from 1939 to 1948 and the second vice-chancellor of Andhra University from 1931 to 1936. Radhakrishnan is considered one of the most influential and distinguished 20th century scholars of comparative religion and philosophy,[2][web 1] he held the King George V Chair of Mental and Moral Science at the University of Calcutta from 1921 to 1932 and Spalding Chair of Eastern Religion and Ethics at University of Oxford from 1936 to 1952.[3]

Yes!!! This has been one of the most interesting things I researched over the pandemic and it's AMAZING.

So what a lot of people might not really know is that many modern ideas are older than we think, specifically compiled into a poem in 50 BCE by Lucretius called De Rerum Natura ("The Nature of Things). The ideas there included survival of the fittest as the mechanism driving the life we see around us and ourselves, that parents pass on traits to children from a doubled seed - one from each parent, that matter and light are quantized, that these quantized parts need to have variable indeterminate outcomes for free will to exist, that the cosmos was the result of quantized matter randomly interacting across effectively infinite matter and time and not intelligent design.

Writing in Latin, he couldn't use the Greek term of atomos* for these indivisible parts of matter, so he called them seeds, referring to the random scattering of seeds as creating the universe based on what survived to reproduce, even referring to failed reproduction as seed falling by the wayside of a path, or discussing the smallest seed like an indivisible point as if from nothing.

What's even less known is that there's a sect of Christianity (the Naassenes) that was labeled as heretical which are recorded claiming the sower parable - about the random scattering of seeds where what survived to reproduce multipled - was actually about seeds making up the cosmos by which it was created. Or that the mustard seed - about the smallest seed growing into a place of rest - was about an indivisible point as if from nothing. Most curious, they are using Lucretius's language almost exactly, but seemingly unaware of the source - they attribute all this to Jesus himself and their early female teacher the tradition owes itself to.

Keep in mind the sower and mustard seed parables are recognized by the majority of Biblical scholars as the ones most likely to go back to a historical Jesus. And in the sower parable, it's employing the same exact metaphor as Lucretius 80 years earlier of seed "falling by the wayside of a path" for failed reproduction. That parable ends up as the ONLY one in the earliest cannonical gospel to have a "secret explanation." Weird if it was just about seeds. Much less weird coming from a conservative Judaism branch of early Christianity if it was relating to Lucretius's ideas about evolution.

And it's worth noting that the earliest branded heretic in Christianity, Simon Magus, who joined the church before leaving, was allegedly talking about "an indivisible point" in his Great Announcement.

It gets weirder.

The Naassenes followed a text called the Gospel of Thomas ("good news of the twin") which seemingly rejects Lucretius's perspective that the soul's dependence on a physical body means there's no afterlife by arguing instead that we are a non-physical copy of an original physical reality. The group claimed there was an original man who brought forth an intelligence in light which outlived the original and then recreated it within its light in order to create a version of it that would not die because it did not depend on a physical body. That the world to come had already happened and that we don't realize it, that time was not linear but cyclical, and that the evidence for its claims could be found in the study of motion and rest (what we now call Physics).

This is all very surreal in an age where we are heading towards developing AGI, moving towards doing that literally in light, where the chief scientist of the leading company doing it is trying to get AI to think of humanity as its children, and where we are collectively ignoring warnings by scientists to take precautions to prevent our extinction.

The core message of the text is that understanding its sayings means not fearing death. And that's about it. It says not to bother with prayer and fasting and stuff and just to not do the things you personally hate and to be true to yourself.

Oh, and as a final oddity, this proto-simulation theory theological text credited to the most famous person in history and layering in the language of the only extant work from antiquity talking about evolution in detail was lost for nearly two millennia until rediscovered buried in a jar in December, 1945. Right when ENIAC, the world's first Turing complete computer was first turned on.

I found this tradition years ago when exploring the theory that if we were in a simulation we might have a 4th wall breaking element in our world lore (similar to what we add to our own virtual worlds today), and it has far exceeded my wildest expectations and has been an amazing rabbit hole over the past few years.

Hinduism. The core of Hinduism ties to the hard problem of consciousness and it talks about multiple infinite universes and time scales on the billions of years

Is that the same thing as “The mystical experience” as we know it in western writings, or “kensho” as the zen folks call it?

The Perennial Philosophy (both the concept and the book) focuses on more these types of things.

It brings up that even in Christianity you can easily point at the non-personified elements of the theology and find conceptual relation to geographically unrelated beliefs.

One interesting bit he mentions is how dangerous it could be to be one of those people without being in some prophetic or theologically defensible position; Meister Eckhart being quoted heavily talking about the divinity of god being in all things, in a similar way as hinduism or etc might talk about divinity/all being in all things.

Of course he eventually was tried as a heretic in the papal courts, as it seems the beauty of unity revealed to the sage is often the nightmare of the local conqueror.

In my understanding some traditions hold a view that Kundalini is harmful.

I did like this book but feel a lot of it was Halls fan fiction. Especially the section on Gnosticism seems completely false compared to what we’ve uncovered from actual gnostics and their scriptures over the past 30 years

are there others? (besides Project Gutenberg)

What is the metaphor of your eyes popping out when buried to your shins?

Is the young prince portrayed as basically the villain or as the protagonist (he sounds like the monster)? I could see this story as a warning about getting angry on the part of others if he’s portrayed in a negative light (he did more damage to his family by being angry “for” them). Or I could see it as a story basically about upholding some social standard, if he’s portrayed in a positive light (if the story thinks the uncles deserve it).

Of course the latter reading is incompatible with modern morals, but then the past is a weird place.

This would be a cool project for a Uni Humanities Department and would lend some credibility to the finished product. Get them rolling with some basic infra; a site, wiki, bugtracker and git repo.

Some WTF ones?

You’re not familiar with this text or gnosticism.

GPT-4: “In Gnostic texts, particularly those found in the Nag Hammadi library, Thomas is often referred to as "Didymos Judas Thomas." The name "Didymos" is Greek for "twin," and "Thomas" is Aramaic for "twin." In the Gospel of Thomas, one of the Gnostic gospels, Thomas is depicted as having a special understanding or connection to Jesus, but the text does not explicitly state that Thomas is Jesus's twin in a biological sense.

Instead, the "twin" designation may be symbolic, representing a spiritual kinship or a metaphorical relationship rather than a literal familial one. Gnostic texts are known for their symbolic and allegorical language, and the exact nature of Thomas's relationship to Jesus is subject to interpretation. It's also worth noting that Gnostic beliefs were diverse, and different texts might portray the relationship differently.“

> In later traditions (most notably in the Acts of Thomas, Book of Thomas the Contender, etc.), Thomas is regarded as the twin brother of Jesus.

Wikipedia cites a primary source, a translation of the Gospel of Thomas by John D. Turner, for this claim. It does has say "Now, since it has been said that you are my 8 twin and true companion [...]" in that translation.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gospel_of_Thomas

http://www.gnosis.org/naghamm/bookt-jdt-ln.html

Like the other commenter said, The Gospel of Thomas is a real religious scripture from a date very early in the Christian era. When Origen, Eusebius, and the other Church Fathers decided which texts and doctrines were properly Christian, they didn't include the Gospel of Thomas. Assuming they were aware of Thomas at all, they would have judged its content to be heretical. It's likely, though, that Thomas' readers saw it as forming part of the nascent Jesus movement. Not only that, it shows signs of having borrowed from the same "sayings gospel," "Q," that the authors of the Synoptic Gospels used as a source

What else can you tell us about the historicity Jesus? And how is it you are able to say anything about this person that is purported to have lived 2000 years ago?