Theos-Talk Archives (October 2002 Message tt00261)

brianmuehlbach wrote:
> 
> Bart Lidofsky: Tell me what you're talking about, and I will tell you
> where the evidence is.
> 
> Brian: Well your evidence of having sex with goats was sufficient for me.
> In spite of the fact that millions of people claim "The Protocols of 
> Zion" are not a fraud, I say it is. And so are the Mahatma letters 
> that, although not identical with, are just as much concocted as The 
> Protocols of The Elders Of Zion.

OK, let me see if I can eliminate a couple of rounds of messages. 

The Protocols of the Elders of Zion were created for the purpose of
fabricating a justification of the persecution and execution of Jews.
They are supposedly secret documents that show that there is a
conspiracy among the Jews to take over the world.

Fact:
The Mahatma Letters, are essentially a collection of letters written by
a group of people who claim a greater level of knowledge of the workings
of the Universe than most, answering correspondence of a number of
people, mostly to A. P. Sinnett. Most, but not all, of them are printed
in a method using technology of which we have no current knowledge. 

Question: Do you believe that the Mahatma Letters exist for the purpose
of persecuting people?

For the moment, I will assume no. What I am assuming is that you
believe one or more of the following:

1) The group of individuals who wrote the Mahatma Letters had no more
knowledge about the workings of the Universe than anybody else.

2) That they were written by members of Blavatsky's group possibly on
her instructions (it is pretty certain that Blavatsky herself didn't
write them, but that doesn't mean that she didn't give someone the basic
content to rewrite in their own words). 

3) Any "materialization" of the letters was done by trickery.

4) The fact that the writers of the Mahatma Letters claim that they
sometimes dash off an answer without thinking about it, or tell a
student what to write making room for mistakes is simply a ruse to get
around mistake and contradictions. 

It is my opinion (and the opinion of many Theosophists) that even if
ALL FOUR of those suppositions are true, they are outbalanced by the
fact that the letters themselves say that we are not to consider the
Mahatmas as an authority; that we are to take their writings, and
determine for ourselves whether or not they are true. 

In other words, what they are writing are not given as the Absolute
Truth(tm), but as hypotheses for us to test and determine for ourselves
the truth. Many Theosophists have determined for themselves that much of
what is written in the Mahatma Letters is true.

It is also true that many Theosophists take the fundamentalist error of
interpreting the letters in a way they define as "literal", and believe
that their own interpretation of the Mahatma Letters is the Absolute
Truth(tm), even when statements of fact can be shown to be incorrect via
experiment (such as their statements on potential energy, which could
certainly be attributed to not knowing the correct definition of
"potential energy"; it still shows they don't know everything). 

I seem to have a feeling that you believe that the Mahatma Letters are,
in fact, vehicles of hate. One may even find isolated sentences that
might be interpreted that way. If, however, you compare those odd
sentences to the messages in the Mahatma Letters as a whole, it becomes
clear that either the sentences are aberrations, or that you are
interpreting them incorrectly. 

I am still curious as to WHY you find it necessary to spend so much
effort in trying to convince a handful of people that there is something
terribly wrong with Theosophy; if we knew, then you actually might have
some success.

Bart Lidofsky