Crows and ravens as an omen of death

Here is the story of a recent event, a mystical experience if you want to think of it that way.

Ten days ago I and my wife Eliza arrived in Nairobi, a city that is remarkably full of trees and birds, with hawks and storks and pied crows visible almost anywhere, including from our hotel balcony. The first morning (Monday, March 5th) we were walking back from the hotel office to our building when we saw a gardener with a BC Ferries baseball cap. Eliza and I had both lived in BC for 10-20 years, had met there, and Eliza had been the Project Manager of the BC Ferry Terminal expansion at Horseshoe Bay. (And I still kept contact there with my ex-wife, and two kids, and my ex-sister-in-law, and my ex-mother-in-law Molly, among others.) But the gardener didn’t have any connection to BC – he didn’t know where it was, or what his cap was about. Fun!

Pied Crow, cawing.

Back in our rooms I opened my email, and the first I read was from the friend I first went to BC to meet, almost 40 years ago. I had met him in Quebec the year before, and I hitchhiked over to BC to stay with him and his wife in Vancouver. I ended up staying in BC for 17 years. I haven’t seen him in decades, probably hadn’t heard from him in 10 years. Nice!

The next email I opened was from my son in Toronto – and he was writing to say that his Gran in BC (my ex-mother-in-law) was is her final days. At age 96 she had stopped eating and drinking, and the doctors gave her not more than a week to live. The four other family members previously mentioned were coming over from Vancouver Island on the BC Ferries to be with her in White Rock.

A couple of hours later Eliza and I walked out to get some food. As we went along one of the driveways of the hotel, a pied crow (a big raven-sized bird) flew down onto a tree branch just ahead of us: “Caw! Caw!” It was a very loud, somewhat rusty noise. Then as we came up it flapped a little further away onto a fence: “Caw! Caw! Caw!” And as we came up closer, it again flapped a little further away onto a tree branch: “Caw! Caw!” And then, communication complete, it flew completely away.

I have been around crows in many countries, many times, but this has never happened to me before. In Kenya there are, apparently, no superstitions regarding crows or ravens. But with my northern European background I know many stories of crows and ravens being messengers of death. The stories include Odin and his two ravens, Thought and Memory, who fly throughout the world and bring him news, and Odin is a god of death. Celtic beliefs included the crow as an omen of death and conflict. The English have superstitions about a crow cawing three times as it flies over a house as an omen of death. And so on.

We walked on and talked for a minute or so, and then checked the time: 1:07 pm. “So that was about five after two in the morning in BC,” we said.

Molly indeed died that night – very peacefully, not even waking her daughter who was sleeping in the same room. She was not found dead until 8 in the morning, and the reports give her death as either 1 or 2 in the morning.

“Magical Thinking” – I’m always railing against accepting it as a physical reality. So what happens when something woo-woo occurs? I accept it, I enjoy it, I delight in the Universe being such a rich and mysterious and poetic place… and I speculate about where a physical explanation may eventually be found.

There was a time when the idea that animals knew an earthquake “was going to happen” was one of those woo-woo ideas. People swore they had seen it – a dog snapping awake and running out of the house, or other creatures behaving in a panicky mode a few seconds before an earthquake struck. Eventually, once we had developed good seismic tracking devices, it was shown that animals are simply able to pick up on the earliest beginnings of an earthquake, while we humans aren’t aware until larger, slower and more powerful signals arrive a little later.

So… could a subconscious awareness of death generate a chemical reaction in the brain? Is it possible that a crow can smell that chemical reaction in a human, and respond that they want a taste of the carrion? Is it possible that there could be some quantum entanglement involved between people who have known each other for decades, such that a change of state in one will register in the subconscious of the other?

Or was it all nothing but statistically insignificant chance?

Regardless, the Universe is a rich and mysterious and poetic place! Goodbye, Molly, I am glad to have known you, and grateful for all you did.

New religion: Butt-Gnomes. News conference report.

There’s a new religion out there, and it’s serious: the battle in your lower intestine between the good butt-gnomes and the bad butt-gnomes will determine what kind of experience you have in the afterlife. So pay attention!Winston Bedwell and gnome

Winston Bedwell held a press conference to ask for help in having the US Government recognize Butt-Gnomes as an official religion. He even offered physical evidence, in the form of a grainy photo of a butt-gnome that he had expelled and which is even now running loose in the streets. I strongly recommend this link:

http://pascalspress.wordpress.com/2012/03/03/man-wants-recognition-of-butt-gnome-religion/

My only caveat is the blog’s unfortunate tagline: “Faux News You Need To Know”…

Executing Jesus was OK; murdering civilians isn’t

When a military occupation by a Western power (the US, or the Romans) of a poorer country (modern Afghanistan, ancient Palestine) takes place, the occupying troops will kill people. Even after the situation settles down, there will be ongoing resistance.

Murdered child - killed in his sleep by Americans on Sunday.

Neither ancient Jews nor modern Afghans like being ordered around by large, well-fed, heavily-armored men who don’t speak their language, don’t adhere to their religion, don’t wear their clothing, and don’t respect their culture. A pig-eating, beard-shaving, uncircumcised military is an insult to them. Ongoing resistance is natural.

So when, every 20 or 30 years, there was a Zealot uprising in Galilee or Judea, or an attempt by Jesus to take control of the Temple in Jerusalem and have himself proclaimed King, they knew they were facing execution by the Romans if God failed to intervene actively on their behalf.

We may not condone Roman imperialism, which was mostly driven by trade – the need to suppress piracy in the Eastern Mediterranean, to connect Egypt to Syria, to build a reliable harbor at Caesarea Maritima, to protect the trade routes to India, to defend against the Persian Empire – but we can respect it. It tried to integrate all local gods into the Empire, it gradually extended Roman citizenship to local populations, and it brought peace and infrastructure development and an improved standard of living.

American imperialism appears to have less justification, and to be more based on pure exploitation. And when an Army sergeant (acting alone or not) goes on a killing rampage in the night and murders women and children in their sleep, he should not be protected by the occupying forces, but should be turned over to the local authorities for appropriate execution.

Witchcraft and Magical Thinking

What is religious ritual except witchcraft? You are performing rites with no practical purpose, in an attempt to influence the future outcome of earthly events by either begging from a god (or angel, or demon, or saint, etc) – or else by symbolically replicating the outcome you want by dropping blood where you want rain or dressing up as the animal you want to kill – or else by sacrificing (“making sacred”, i.e. killing or destroying) an animal, child, or other valuable object.

Not all circumcisions are successful

So Abraham hears voices in his head. God tells him to sacrifice his son. He’s ready to do it, when he sees a ram caught in a bush, and the voices tell him to kill that instead. Lucky for the boy. Then God says he’ll make a deal with Abraham: worship Him only, and He’ll favor Abraham’s descendants as the Chosen People. (Seems like a good deal. It’s not being offered to anyone else. Except somehow every people on earth seems to think it’s more special than the others.)

And to prove they’re still committed to the deal, all Abraham’s descendants – forever – have to have their foreskins cut off. Which is a better blood-offering than actually killing yourself or one of your family. But this God is definitely one of the gods that likes to see a bit of blood.

And Abraham, being the first, circumcised himself. Nowadays we would just assume he was insane.

And then there are people like this man in British Columbia who figured things weren’t going right with the family because he hadn’t had his son circumcised. The doctors wouldn’t do it now that the boy was four. The man botched it. The son was hospitalized and is damaged for life. The father was convicted and jailed, and it was noted by the court that he had tried to circumcise himself a couple of years earlier.

So he’s just a lunatic, you say. (But not that different from Abraham.) You can’t apply that criticism to trained religious practitioners, you say.

Strictly speaking, the father is meant to do the circumcision if he’s able, but there’s always someone willing to be paid to do it for you. So there’s the Jewish practitioner, the mohel. Orthodox Judaism prescribes circumcision as a religious ritual, to be performed according to strict Talmudic laws. According to those laws, the mohel must suck the infant’s bleeding penis with his mouth. (How Abraham achieved this isn’t explained.) So when a mohel has a sexually transmitted disease like herpes, might there be a risk? Here’s a report of a two-week-old boy who died in New York, thanks to his mohel.

It’s not just uneducated people whose magical thinking leads to witchcraft and deaths. A religious education can be just as dangerous.

Modern European Witchcraft – not pleasant

Witchcraft, and accusations of witchcraft, with all its horrific tortures and murders, is coming back to Europe after centuries of quiet. The media find it difficult to deal with the issue systemically, and only go case by case, because of the racism aspects that get brought out when you acknowledge that all the problems stem from non-European immigrants, especially Africans.

Magical thinking - witchcraft, exorcisms, etc - lead to torture and murder

March 5th, 2012: a Congolese couple (Eric Bikubi and Magalie Bamu) are given life sentences in London.

Background: in December 2010, five children come from Paris to visit their older sister, aged 29, and her boyfriend, 28. The man, backed by the woman, accuses three of the kids of using witchcraft and of coming to kill them. Two girls are let go after admitting to witchcraft, but their 15-year-old brother is severely tortured for several days, and finally killed on December 25th.

Not just tortured and killed: the irony is that having accused the boy of witchcraft, the couple use witchcraft exorcisms and all kinds of other magical thinking to justify their attacking him “with knives, sticks, metal bars, ceramic floor tiles, bottles and a hammer and chisel by Bikubi and Bamu who also used a pair of pliers to twist his ear. He drowned after he was placed in a bath for ritual cleansing.” (Per the BBC report.)

Eradicating such “magical thinking” in adults might have saved the boy’s life. Perhaps the man would not have behaved in that way.

Or perhaps the man is genuinely insane, and he would have tried to behave in this way even if he had not been brought up to believe in witchcraft and to think in those terms when solving problems. But if his girlfriend didn’t think in witchcraft terms either, she might have worked to prevent to insane attacks, might have listened to the pleas of her sisters.

But in any case, there needs to be an organized effort to educate the most primitive immigrants out of their preliterate thinking. And to punish them in such a way as to deter other from such crimes. And if that means targeting a racial or national minority as the best means of achieving such education, so be it.

Mormon Archaeology – good luck with that!

The Mormon story is that the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel didn’t simply assimilate into other populations under the enslavements and dispersals of the great empires of ancient times (which is what most historians, Jewish and non-Jewish, believe). Instead, they made their way east to the Americas and created a civilization that Jesus teleported to after he had come back from the dead, before he rose up into the sky.

Jesus teleported over to talk with the Jewish tribes of America (say what?)

This had the advantage of prepping North America to house the United States as God’s Chosen Country, personally blessed by Jesus.

But there is a problem: no archaeological remains from the civilization detailed in the Book of Mormon.

However an interesting website shows how dedicated believers can use the power of the human brain to construct fantasies of contorted logic to meet their predetermined objectives. This page of RestoredIsrael.org appears to outline the following argument:

  1. There is a discrepancy between Scientific timelines and Biblical timelines, regarding prehistorical events.
  2. The Bible is correct, of course.
  3. The Scientific sequence is correct, but the timelines have to be adjusted to fit within the Biblical 7,000 years.
  4. We have virtually no archaeological evidence from 100,000 to 40,000 years ago, and none from the Americas.
  5. That equates to the Biblical period of 2400 BC to 2200 BC.
  6. Therefore we should not be surprised that we can find no evidence of the Ten Lost Tribes’ activities in the Americas from the Biblical period of 2400 to 2200 BC.

Do I understand this correctly? I am open to correction. I may not have grasped all the intricacies, but this looks clear enough: Mormon archaeology is pure fantasy. And that’s logical, as it’s based on a book which is pure fantasy.

Unasked questions: What happened to Joseph?

One of the signs of a great story is the listener’s question, “What happened next?” In the National Geographic for March 2012 the cover article is “The Journey of the Apostles”, detailing the lives and teachings of not just the original Twelve, but also others such as Mary Magdalene, after Jesus’ crucifixion.  We have stories about what happened to all of them, and to many others associated with Jesus. Not all the stories are believable, but where there is no fact there is plenty of speculation and legend.

Except in the case of Joseph, the (step)father of Jesus.

This is strange. If his fate was unknown, we would have legends and rumors. Search for “What happened to Joseph of Arimathea?”, for example, and you find him traveling all over the place, carrying the Holy Grail, settling in Britain, you name it. But search for “What happened to Joseph the father of Jesus?”, and you find nothing about him after his last mention in the Gospels, going up to the Temple in Jerusalem with Mary and Jesus when Jesus was 11 or 12.

Mass crucifixions after an uprising

But suppose his fate was a) not something that the early Church wanted to talk about, and b) so well-known that no one could make up an alternative narrative without having the whole thing dragged out into public discussion again. Therefore silence. No narrative, no legends, nothing.

The interesting event that happened around that time (probably later in the same year that Joseph took Jesus to Jerusalem, but the timing is uncertain) was an uprising led by Judas of Galilee with an attack on Sepphoris. (Sepphoris is the Roman name; the Hebrew name is Zippori.) This was Herod Antipas’ capital city in Galilee, 4 miles north of Nazareth. Probably a lot of men from Nazareth were in the uprising. The uprising was crushed by the Romans, and the Romans crucified 2,000 Jews outside Sepphoris.

And after that, we don’t hear anything about Joseph in the Bible, or in legends or stories.

Jesus, however, retains a remarkable father-fixation all his life, and is himself crucified after leading an attack on the Temple in Jerusalem, having tried to claim the messianic kingship of Israel.

So… what happened to Joseph? And why didn’t anyone want to talk about it in the early Church, as they tried to make Christianity acceptable throughout the Roman Empire?

Long hair, short hair

Jesus wanted the Mosaic Law upheld in all its details. “Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them. I tell you the truth, until heaven and earth disappear, not the smallest letter, not the least stroke of a pen, will by any means disappear from the Law until everything is accomplished. Anyone who breaks one of the least of these commandments and teaches others to do the same will be called least in the kingdom of heaven, but whoever practices and teaches these commands will be called great in the kingdom of heaven.” (Matthew 5: 17-19)

Symptomatic of this is Jesus’ hair, always shown long in keeping with Leviticus 19:27 “Do not cut the hair at the sides of your head or clip off the edges of your beard.”

To Jesus, the Romans were pig-eating, uncircumcised, beard-shaving idolators who needed to be expelled from Israel.

Pilate and Jesus

But Paul wanted to move away from ethnic-based Judaism to a universal religion acceptable to the whole Roman Empire. Paul’s entire outlook is Roman. He writes: “Does not the very nature of things teach you that if a man has long hair, it is a disgrace to him” (1 Corinthians 11: 14)

Paul’s Christianity is hostile to the beliefs of Jesus. The hair says it all.

Yahweh: demanding and insane

What can a God possibly want? It appears the Yahweh of the Old Testament wants to have people worship Him. Obey Him. Sacrifice things to Him. In order to achieve this, He created a Covenant with Abraham that He would favor Abraham’s descendants, so long as they did everything He demanded. He had apparently already created a system that guaranteed eternal punishment for those who failed to follow Him, as incentive for obeying Him. And He created a system that, by the time of the New Testament, allows for a total of 144,000 people to go to Heaven, and the other 100 billion or whatever to go to Hell for eternity.

Almost everyone would go to Hell, because they would be born in a state of “sin” – they would be born already out of favor with God. How can He set people up to fail, and then send billions of them to hell for eternity for failing to meet His requirements? Edward FitzGerald, in his version of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, asks

O Thou, who didst with pitfall and with gin                      (“gin” means “trap”)
Beset the road I was to wander in,
Thou wilt not with Predestination round
Enmesh me, and impute my Fall to sin?

Yahweh is a God of Terror and Chaos

Followers of this God say it has nothing to do with Predestination. He gives everyone freedom of choice, to follow Him or not. The only problem is, He created the whole system that in His omnipotence He could have made any way He wanted, and in His omniscience He knew damn well that tens of billions would go to Hell for eternity.

Not only that, He triggered it by setting a trap for Adam and Eve, and then punishing all their descendants forever for falling into the trap.

Is this loving? No. Is it even rational? No. It is beyond cruel, it is insane.

If there is a God of the Old Testament, He is merely a manifestation of the Chaos of the Universe, and is without direction or morality.

As for believers in the God, are they rational? How can they call this God by such names as “the beneficent”, “the all-loving”, “the merciful”? How can they love Him? How can they respect Him as a God who looks after and cares for all His creatures, when thousands of children die every day from starvation and preventable diseases?

Grow up, believers! Outgrow your prayers and worship of the irrational Old Gods of Chaos, and turn to the joyful task of discovering the Universe and improving human existence.

God wants blood!

God wants blood. There doesn’t seem to be any other explanation. He demands sacrifices on His feast-days, sacrifices of birds and animals. He demands that people even sacrifice their own children, on occasion. He demands that when His Favorite People are moving into land He has promised them, that they will wipe out every man, woman, child and animal in the cities He is reallocating (Deuteronomy 20: 16-18).

God says kill it, and give it to God (or His friends...)

And don’t piss Him off! He has been known to curse all humanity for all eternity for eating an apple. He once wiped out all of humanity – again, every man, woman and child – except for Noah and his immediate family. He has destroyed individual cities in a fit of anger.

He’s no different from any other nightmare monstrosity from humanity’s Stone Age past, a manifestation of all that is brutal and random in the Universe, a Universe that can send lightning and meteorites from the sky to devastate the earth.

And He must be appeased the only way that humans know to appease a violent bully who randomly inflicts torture – give Him anything He wants… and if you can’t find Him, give His friends whatever they tell you He demands.

Give, donate, tithe, sacrifice… because otherwise, He will take it in blood. And His friends tell you that then He will be happy.

No different from the pre-Biblical flood story in the Epic of Gilgamesh. When Utnapishtim (the Noah figure) finally lands his boat on the mountain and lets all the animals out, the first thing he does is burn things in sacrifice.

“The gods smelled the savour,
The gods smelled the sweet savour,
The gods crowded like flies about the sacrificer.”

Well, at least it’s only one God that monotheists have to appease these days… But on the other hand, there’s no longer anyone to keep Him in check.