In my book “The Opium of the People” (Metaihmio, 2021) I support the view that all religions are nothing more than normalized conspiracy theories – that is, while they are no less teratological than “non-normalized” conspiracy theories (sometimes even surpassing them), that ‘institutionalization’ allows them to simultaneously enjoy the exceptional privilege of having their teratologies treated as an integral part of a peculiar and morbid ‘normality’.
In any other context than a religious one, for example, the claim that someone was born of a virgin and then resurrected (a common motif in Middle Eastern mythologies) would certainly secure you a permanent place in a psychiatric institution – but by invoking ‘institutionalization’ you can not only move around freely and enjoy respect, but sometimes even mingle with high-ranking figures in the secular state.
Somewhere at this point we encounter the case of Abbot Ephraim, one of the greatest and most successful swindlers in modern Greek history. When, in the early second decade of the twenty-first century, he was remanded in custody for the infamous Vatopedi monastery scandal, he was released after the personal intervention of Vladimir Putin. Since then, he has turned the Vatopaidi monastery into one of the most profitable operations of manipulation and milking of the ubiquitous lambs: by carrying around a piece of cloth, which any ordinary student of Archaeology recognizes with a naked eye as a Byzantine relic twelve or thirteen centuries later than the time when the Virgin Mary supposedly lived, and by not allowing it to undergo radio-dating in order to determine the relic’s real age (he is a fraud, not a sucker), but at the same time by unabashedly declaring on camera that this piece of cloth cures cancer and infertility, without a prosecutor even thinking of getting involved.
At the same time, he financed and continues to finance extremely expensive television and film productions (“The Man of God”, “Saint Paisios – From Farasa to Heaven”, etc.) that are marketed as ‘historical’ and cultivate stupidity to an unprecedented and humiliating degree for a secular democratic state.
Finally, when the swindler in question fell seriously ill during the recent pandemic and was hospitalized for a long time, he did not resort to any ‘holy’ belt to save himself. The swindler’s cloth is accepted with the honors of a head of state in countries that ostentatiously despise the intelligence of their citizens, and he himself, instead of spending morning and night apologizing to prosecutors’ offices, speaks privileged words with heads of state and prime ministers. This is the most shocking and shameless case of a success story swindler in our days.
However, without the ‘institutionalized’ shield of protection, he would share the same fate as the swindler Parthenios or any other swindler of a similar ‘repertoire’. Double standards in all their disgusting glory.
Adaptation to English of a post in Petros Tatsopoulos’s Facebook page.
Petros Tatsopoulos is a writer and former Member of the Greek Parliament.
*featured image from Wikimedia Commons.
AAI comment:
Our blog collaborator is being prοsecuted by the Vatopedi monastery for the content of his book “The Devil’s Child” (Metaihmio, 2024). In it, among other things, he refers to the deception of the naive religious people with the so-called “Holy Belt of the Virgin Mary”.
This belt is celebrated by the Orthodox Church today, August 31.
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