When, I first came across the work of Acharya S in an article by Glenn Miller that dealt with the assertion that the Gospels borrow from pre-Christian pagan mythology (http://www.christian-thinktank.com/copycat.html), it was already under heavy fire. Glenn pointed out that Acharya does not use any recent scholarly works or deal with the primary sources on the lives of the god-men that allegedly provided the framework for the story of Christ. He went on to investigate the Acharya's list of similarities, and came to the conclusion that her work was extremely erroneous.
I followed the link to her site that he provided, and came across her e-mail address so I decided to send her a letter. After stating that her work was "interesting", and that I had a few questions concerning some of it that I'd like her to address point-by-point, I sent her an excerpt from and a link to Glenn's site. I received no response from Acharya S. I did however receive this letter from a friend of Acharya named Lee, insisting that I disregard Glenn's work because Glenn is a Christian:
Acharya sent me the following question of yours. She is quite busy.
What else do you expect a Christian to say? Beliefs need to be justified, don't they. Use your head.
If you are trying to decide whether to buy a Honda or A Buick, do you go to the Honda dealer and ask him about Buicks, or vice versa?
No way, Jose, not unless you are braindead and stupid.
I do a lot of research on the Old Testament, and New Testament, especially the definitions of the Hebrew words and the transliterations into Greek. I will never go to a Christian or Jewish source for definitions, never that is the road to stupidity. I really solely on secular academic sources, because they are the least biased.
However if you have a need to believe, in anything, then you will believe and all you will look for and acknowledge are arguments which will salvage your beliefs.
On the other hand if you know that we live in a world of Borg or Serpents People (groups of people controlled by words) then you know instinctively that you can't trust the words of Word Controlled Humans, or the Borg.
The question is then personal to you. Are you an individually sovereign person, who is in charge of your own personal cosmology, your own identity, your own thoughts, your own ability to reason or think, or are you a braindead part of a hive, a collective of Borg.
Lee Markland who is not a drone.
After weeks of arguing with Lee, I decided to end the correspondence due to her inability to directly address any of the points Glenn had made. She apparently thought it was enough to plagiarize anti-Christian rants from skeptical web-sites and tell pornographic jokes about Jesus. I e-mailed Acharya, informing her of the red herrings and intemperate remarks made by her friend, but received no response. Having lost all hope of communicating with Acharya, I decided to buy her book, The Christ Conspiracy, to see if maybe there she could support any of the claims made on her web-site. Her book, especially the list of "savior gods", was not even as well documented as her web-site and I found the majority of the information to be either ridiculously out of date or just plain ridiculous. After running into several skeptics who described her as "brilliant" and her book as "the truth about Christianity", I decided to beg JP Holding to put her up in the Rogue's Gallery. Though he felt Acharya's work was not even worthy of a response, I mailed him the book and told him about all of the skeptics I had come across who were buying into it. He agreed to rogue her, even if just for the sake of humor.
A few weeks later, a friend of mine sent me the following link to an audio file of Acharya's appearance on the show "Sightings" hosted by Jeff Rense. This can be found at
http://www.audionet.com/shows/endoft...05/end0527.ram
Towards the last quarter of the show, a caller is discussing the existence of "alien beings", and Acharya makes what I thought were some rather interesting admissions. The conversation is as follows:
Caller: "I wanna tell the lady that I think there's a heavy..uh…extraterrestrial connection..ummm…involved with a lot of our ancient activities. Um, I believe a lot of its missed...um…in relation to missing information or information they just weren't given but but you can't deny the fact of...um…eyewitness accounts throughout the Bible and extra-biblical texts…especially uh, the apocryphal texts…involved with beings who have hair white like wool and eyes like flames, because um…eh…they are throughout our history and um, they have some integral part they're playing…involved with various different religions. Uh, there's too much of them seen…and uh um…involved with the high priests of various different religions, to be just a myth, because um…uh…if you read the Jewish Kabballah…uh, it talks of seven planets with seven cultures there. One of em called Thebel (sp?), which is a sun in our solar system…far away from the sun. Uh, all these things are written down and somebody had to give them the information. There's just too many eyewitness accounts that there's definitely a connection there!"
Acharya S: "Well, I don't know what you mean by eyewitness accounts but uh…quite a few of the artifacts that people are taking to be…um…alien visitation…uh…legends, like for example there's the story of Ezekiel. He's describing…when he talks about the wheel within the wheel…he's talking about the zodiac. Ok, so if you're gonna be looking for characters, the first thing you have to realize however is that many of the myths that we're discussing do record astronomy and astrology. Now as far as other influences upon those stories, that's another factor. I have not denied that there have been contact with strange entities. I think there's definitely been so. In the Tibetan world, they claim on-going contact with people who live inside Venus…Venusians."
Caller: "What about the…even if you look at the book of Revelation the first chapter there…as John turns around, and he knows its, for instance Jesus, he says 'Aha'…and the being says 'Aha, its me…yes I am, the one…the hair white like wool and the eyes like flames'..The same thing with the book of Enoch, when Noah was born…"
Acharya: "Ok the eyes of flame and the white wool is the sun, itself. So the whole book of Revelation is basically Zoroastrian and its astronomical. Much of what's being described in there is interplayed in the heavens."
Caller: "Ok Mohammed also met one of them in a cave…a similar type of being. And also in the book of Isaiah, Daniel…all the extra-biblical texts talk of the same type of beings and other cultures talk of the same type of beings. I'm wondering how they all would describe the same thing…"
Acharya: "Well, I can tell you I've had beings around me too and they are telling me to put this information out there. So I'm not disagreeing that there are beings. But it takes a great deal of knowledge and refinement of that knowledge to realize what you're looking at and unfortunately most people don't have the platform from which to be viewing this information necessarily. So they…there's all kinds…The speculation that starts getting in becomes quite tortured…"
Caller: "Can I say one more thing?"
Host: "Sure"
Caller: "Um…I have a…um…family history of…a very interesting family background and um… uh, my biological mother had an actual contact with one of these beings and the information she was giving was quite astounding. So..in my…the only thing coming from is I absolutely know that they're real. So, anybody can take that for what it's worth. What I'm telling you…as far as I'm concerned, I know they're absolutely real and the things that I know of are absolutely astounding…so we should uh…There may be myth…There may be myth in everything else but I can tell you beyond a shadow of a doubt that I'm…that I can tell you….that they are absolutely real."
Acharya: "Well, I think I just said that I have also experienced many beings, many many times."
It seemed to me that Acharya was speaking about alien "beings" here, as was the caller. I provided the link, and showed the transcript to a fan of hers, and he immediately ran back to her asking what she had meant. He first reported that Acharya claims she was just joking about the "beings", but when I questioned him about the fact that no one else on the show seemed to think so, he claimed that the "beings" she was referring to are human "beings", i.e., her friends. Somehow, the new explanation just didn't square with the language she uses in the interview so I decided to e-mail her anonymously and ask her myself. This was her response:
…concerning the "beings" business. I've gotten a few messages concerning the idiotic and retarded claims of my detractors, who have no credibility. Nor do they have any true spirituality or empathy. That comment was made on Jeff Rense's show, "Sightings." It is truly pitiful that these morons could listen to that interview and remain fixated on that one comment, entirely unaffected by all the profound information I relayed. They are really sick. My point was that I could feel the suffering of all those who were hideously tortured and murdered in the name of this disgusting ideology and its repulsive godman. I spent the first decade of my life literally barfing over man's inhumanity to man and other creatures. That is the reason why I do what I do: I am extremely empathetic, and I feel for people all over the world, as well as for those who have died horribly. Such is a true spiritual experience, which these chowderheads think they're having with their garbagey cartoon character god. In any case, I don't believe in anything, including that there are only three dimensions. I've had many experiences in other dimensions, which is why I am not a hardcore skeptic.
First of all, Acharya didn't relay any "profound information" on this show. She simply read the same old erroneous list of god-men and their alleged attributes out of her book. Secondly, this explanation is extremely hard to swallow, as it would be completely out of context in the conversation with the caller. Regardless of what it was she actually meant, from the quality of her work and statements like those above, it seems obvious that we are not dealing with a "scholar", as she refers to herself, but someone who has spent too much time in the New Age section at her local bookstore. I'm not sure what kind of scholarly standards exist in the other realms Acharya visits. But here in this dimension, its necessary that she provide the primary sources that predate Christianity to establish the alleged borrowing she insists the early Christians engaged in to create their "garbagey cartoon character god."
Bottom line: Though I feel like I'm (pick one) a) calling in the Air Force to take out a fly; b) using Excalibur to lance a boil on the face of modern Biblical Scholarship; c) using a shotgun to break a pinata, I leave it to my friend, J.P. Holding, to reduce Acharya's laughable theories to rubble, and her mindless fans to the quivering amoeba they are. Of course, she'll never know it happened. This is the same woman who accused Glenn Miller of "turning wheels" in response to his devastating refutation of her work on the dying and rising gods. Needless to say, the S doesn't stand for Smart. I will thoroughly enjoy watching Acharya's wacky would-be scholarship get thrown to the lions of Tekton Apologetics.
