Tag Archives: monotheism

The monotheist God is so small!

The God of the monotheists, especially as he appears in the Jewish scriptures, is such a small humanlike creature. He is irritable, petty, boastful. He seems more like a Norse-style second-level god, a Jewish Loki, than the creator of a universe of a hundred billion galaxies.

Consider his personal discussion with Job and Eliphaz in Job, chapter 42:

After the Lord had said these things to Job, he said to Eliphaz the Temanite, “I am angry with you and your two friends, because you have not spoken the truth about me, as my servant Job has.

So now take seven bulls and seven rams and go to my servant Job and sacrifice a burnt offering for yourselves. My servant Job will pray for you, and I will accept his prayer and not deal with you according to your folly. You have not spoken the truth about me, as my servant Job has.”

So Eliphaz the Temanite, Bildad the Shuhite and Zophar the Naamathite did what the Lord told them; and the Lord accepted Job’s prayer.

And a couple of billion people still think that this is an accurate depiction of how the universe runs? What a joke! Somebody please spend a bit more on education. A course in comparative religion would be a useful start.

Jewish Monotheism, Roman Polytheism. Atheism.

It is amusing to think that many religious Jews and Romans saw each other as atheists.

The Jews felt that polytheism showed that Romans had no concept of the supreme Creator, and were therefore atheists.

The Romans felt that Jews acknowledging only their one tribal god showed that Jews had no concept of the rich and diverse spiritual nature of the universe, and were therefore atheists.

So it goes.

Socrates – bearded old dude who lives on in libraries and T-shirts

The Jews had a point: the Roman gods didn’t look like they were capable of creating a planet, yet alone an entire Universe. They weren’t an orderly or spiritually uplifting bunch.

The Romans had a point: the Jews were claiming that there was only one God, and that He was their tribal god, and no one else’s counted. That’s a no-win situation for anyone but Jews.

Presumably a real atheist, whether Roman or Jew, didn’t give a damn either way.

Chapter 1, Notes

Chapter 1 of “The Gospel According to the Romans” introduces key factors regarding the social structure and day-to-day environment of 1st century Palestine: Palestine was a province of the Roman Empire and, as such, was under the military occupation of a Roman Legion. The figurehead ruler might be a local king, but real power rested with the Roman governor.

Palestine was unique in the Empire in having only one local god, and this god was considered superior to all other gods, to the extent that Jews were not allowed to worship any but Yahweh. Normally the Romans just added the local gods to their own pantheon and expected the natives to allow the worship of Roman gods alongside their own. This was not acceptable to religious Jews.

So the local leaders had to choose between four approaches to the Romans: that of the Sadducees – active collaboration, favored by the wealthy, powerful and venal; of the Pharisees – resentful acquiescence while ignoring sacriligious Roman factors like pigs, shaved chins and graven images; of the Essenes – retreat from Roman influence into remote, self-sustaining and traditional communities; and of the “Fourth Philosophy”, the Zealots – armed resistance, assassination, robbery, and province-wide uprisings.

But not all Jews were religious. The novel’s protagonist, Matthew Levi, was born and raised in another province, Syria, and has long been friends with individual Romans. Chapter 1 sees him interviewed by the governor, Pontius Pilate, for a position as tax collector in Capernaum. As the Roman agent in a small town he will also be expected to send reports about any anti-Roman sentiment or activities he hears of. In effect, any tax collector will be a spy.

Epilepsy and the origins of monotheism

Five closely related Egyptian Pharaohs shared two unusual traits – each had unusually feminized figures (large breasts and large hips), and each died young (and in fact younger than the preceding one). The former trait is suggestive of epilepsy, and the latter of a hereditary disorder. The five are Tutankhamen “the boy king”, his probable father Akhenaten, his possible uncle Smenkhkare, and before them Amenhotep III and Tuthmosis IV.

Saint Paul’s epileptic seizure – the creation of “Christianity”

In addition, two of them had powerful sun-related religious experiences: Tuthmosis IV in the middle of a sunny day, as detailed in the Dream Stele  inscription near the Sphinx in Giza; and Akhenaten, who elevated the minor sun-god Aten to be the supreme god, replacing Egyptian polytheism with what was probably the world’s first monotheist religion – the first of national significance, anyway.

Of the 40 kinds of epilepsy, the one that fits best is Temporal Lobe Epilepsy, in which seizures can be triggered by sunlight. Common symptoms include a compulsion to write, fainting, extreme religiosity, and obsessive compulsive disorder.

Akhenaten, the creator of monotheism had it. Others suspected of it include Moses, almost certainly St. Paul (who was termed epileptic by contemporaries, and whose conversion on the road to Damascus would be a classic example of such a seizure), and definitely Dostoevsky.

There has long been a recognized association between monotheism and the desert’s all-powerful sun, as there is between polytheism and the lush diversity of sun-shaded forests. And it seems that epilepsy is another component of the development and spread of the idea of the One God.

If only they’d had shades in those days, think how much grief we could have avoided!

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.

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.

In Praise of Ignorance

“All men, by their nature, desire to know,” Aristotle wrote. Knowing that we lack knowledge, we seek it. In seeking knowledge we discover things which often make our lives more dangerous, but overall better. We have longer, healthier and more richly diverse lives than our neolithic ancestors, and it is thanks to our search for knowledge.

The search for knowledge stops, in the individual and in society, when there is a sense that all the answers are known. While the Greeks questioned everything, knowledge (and speculation, even if it didn’t lead to proof, certainty or fact) expanded rapidly. Coupled with Roman organization and engineering, there were enormous innovations in everything from underfloor heating, to urban water and sewer systems for cities of a million inhabitants, to the use of anesthetics in surgery, to the invention of the safety pin.

Ancient Roman engineering was superior to Britain's until the 19th century

The Greeks and Romans allowed for a diversity of religions, or for none at all, all of which promoted free inquiry. Then monotheism got a strangle hold on the Empire; Christianity provided Certainty and The Truth; scientific inquiry was crushed; and (not coincidentally, according to historians in the line of Gibbon) the Roman Empire collapsed. Western Europe had 700 years of the Dark Ages.

Meanwhile Islam came out of nowhere in the 7th century and expanded into different areas and cross-fertilized Greek and Indian learning. “Seek knowledge,” the Prophet Muhammad advised, “though it be in China” – which was the ends of the earth to him. As it turned out, China indeed had a wealth of knowledge to add to the mix. Islam was in the forefront of science for a thousand years. Western Europe came into contact through the Crusades in the 12th and 13th centuries, and Arabic culture and scientific texts kicked off the Renaissance. You can see it in the Arabic words that entered European languages as fresh concepts in the Middle Ages: admiral, alchemy, algebra… calipers, candy, chemistry, cipher, cotton… magazine, mattress, muslin… all the way to zenith and zero.

Arabic scientific advances led to the European Renaissance

And then Islam, being the most advanced, decided everything essential was known from the Qur’an… it provided Certainty and The Truth; scientific inquiry was crushed; and, not coincidentally, the various Islamic empires stagnated and were overrun.

And in both the US and the Islamic world today, the argument in several states is over who has the right to teach (Comparative) Religion and history in general… geology and biology and science in general… should it be those secular, agnostic or downright atheistic scientific types, or should it be those for whom Religion has provided Certainty and The Truth?

Let’s have a little more acknowledgement of our ignorance. Uncertainty and free inquiry have always produced better results than Certainty and divinely-revealed Truth.

What’s this blog all about, anyway?

This blog is a marmalade – sweet and sour boiled together, both rind and juicy bits.

Jesus was not a pacifist.

  • It’s a blog for the ideas of my novel. The novel looks at Jesus in the context of the constant uprisings against the Roman Occupation that began 100 years before his preaching, and went on for 100 years afterwards… until the Romans finally leveled Jerusalem, and killed or enslaved and deported all the Jews, and banned them from the replacement city of Aelia Capitolina.
  • It lets you read Jesus’ words and actions with the awareness that his “greatest commandment” is to recite the Shema, the fundamental Jewish prayer (“Hear, O Israel,”) – and practicing Jews do it multiple times a day. It’s Judaism 101. Jesus wanted Israel to turn back to the Covenant with God, and get rid of the idolatrous, beard-shaving, pig-eating Westerners who were marching around the country without bothering to learn the language.
  • Yes, it makes comparisons with modern Western invasions and occupations.
  • So it carries all my grudges against the Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld/Wolfowitz/Blair destruction of Iraq in the hope of oil money and imperial glory. 100 million of us around the world had protested and pointed out that it was going to lead to nothing but death, destruction and economic catastrophe at home and abroad. And here we are.
  • It also carries the ironies of the current Westernized Israeli occupation of Palestine, and the cynical and heavy-handed Israeli destruction of the people who have been indigenous there for the past 2,000 years… a repetition of how the Jews slaughtered all the Canaanites and others who had been living in the area before Moses came along.
  • So I think Moses was a genocidal barbarian (Deuteronomy 20: 16-18).
  • And Jesus was a Jew, and more in tune with Osama bin Laden than anyone else.
  • And St. Paul was an epileptic visionary who created Christianity out of a mishmash of Judaism, Mithraism, and bits of Egyptian and Roman mythologies and practices.
  • And I have no respect for any monotheist who believes the earth was created in the past 10,000 years, or thinks the tribal legends of illiterate herdsmen have relevance for government policy today.
  • Does anyone really believe the first chapter of Genesis, when it says that God created day and night on the first day… and then made the sun and moon on the fourth day? What I believe is that we live in a universe of a billion galaxies, each with a billion suns – and someone who can’t even figure out the relationship between daylight and sunshine is to be treated seriously?
  • As for what the creative force behind a billion galaxies looks like, who knows. Call it God if you want… but where did it come from? Why is there anything at all?
  • And I love polytheist mythologies, and they speak to the soul’s images and poetry and inner health – but they’re not literally true.
  • And I loathe people who use religion as nothing but a way to make money, or to grab power. And I loathe people who use politics in that way, too. So I doubly loathe hypocritical politicians who mouth religious crap.
  • But oh how I love it all, at the same time! What a planet! Unbelievable natural beauty and works of art, and the most appalling destruction and massacres, planet-wide pollution, and greed and ignorance. But what can you expect of a planet of 7 billion heavily-armed apes? Humans are simply mind-boggling, stumbling through the dark like reckless two-year-olds.

By the way, it’s also a blog for the novel itself. With links to the trade paperback and to the Kindle edition. But don’t expect to find all the blog’s ideas in the novel – it’s just a contrarian (realistic, commonsense) retelling of an old story from the point of view of, yes, the Western occupation. And yes, Jesus was crucified. No, he didn’t come back from the dead. So, do you want to see how he did all those miracles?

When monotheism goes really wrong

Who would have guessed that Jesus’ fundamentalist Judaism would be hijacked by Paul as pro-Roman, and end up anti-Jewish? And who would have thought that a message of poverty and trust in God would lead to Pope Leo X…

If Heaven was a thing that money could buy, the rich would all be there...

At age 38 Giovanni de’ Medici – sick, syphilitic, stinking from open ulcers, and having bribed the Vatican’s physicians to say he had less than a month to live – was elected Pope to give the Cardinals time to decide on a real successor to Julius II. But he recovered, and his first declaration as Pope Leo X was “God has given me the papacy, now let me enjoy it.”

He turned the Vatican into a non-stop party of banquets and sex – his preferences were obscene plays, and sex with his chamberlains. To raise money, he created 1,353 new salable Vatican offices, licensed and taxed 6,800 prostitutes (for a city of 100,000 people), borrowed massively at 40% interest, and greatly extended the sale of indulgences (rich people buying forgiveness of sins so that they don’t have to spend time being cleansed in Purgatory before they can enter Heaven).

It was Leo who created one of the most famous and damaging quotes in Christian history. At a lavish Vatican banquet on Good Friday, 1514, in the company of Cardinals who recorded it, he raised a chalice of wine and toasted:

“How well we know what a profitable superstition this fable of Christ has been for us and our predecessors.”

All of this – the immorality, profligacy, and sale of indulgences – led directly to the Protestant revolt touched off by Martin Luther in October 1517.

But of course, the Roman Catholic church wouldn’t engage in anything so cynical nowadays, would it?

NOTE: The comments immediately below the clipping are NOT MINE, thank you!

Refs: http://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/vatican/esp_vatican30c.htm

http://www.nexusmagazine.com/articles/Papacy3.html

Encyclopaedia Britannica, 3rd ed., Edinburgh, 1788-97, vol. ix

and other references found within the above.

A short, simplistic history of monotheism

Three or four thousand years ago the Jews decided to only worship one god, Yahweh; and some time after that they decided that Yahweh was the only God.

Symbols of the three major monotheist religions

Two thousand years ago, under cultural pressure from Egyptian neighbors, Greek settlers and the Roman occupation, Jews were sliding in their beliefs. Jesus was one of many preachers who tried to restore the people to hardline Judaism through an emphasis on the Shema as the basic prayer: “Hear, O Israel…”

After the Romans crucified Jesus for his Messianic kingship claim, Paul came along. Paul was a Westernized Jew who wanted to spread a religion throughout the Roman Empire, and he decided to do it by blending Jewish monotheism with the polytheist rituals of Rome and Egypt and with the popular military sun-god cult of Mithras. He made Jesus into a Jewish Mithras, elevating him to a divine – or at least mythic – status, and downplaying Jesus’ physical nature.

Fourteen hundred years ago Muhammad, knowing a fair amount about some forms of Christianity as well as Judaism, preached a return to pure monotheism, and the worship of a God who is “One, and eternally sought, who neither gives birth nor is born, and there is none like Him.” Jesus is given recognition as a prophet, but fully human.

So Islam is very close to Judaism and the actual teachings of Jesus, while Paul’s “Christianity” is the odd one out. Think about it: God cannot be human; God can’t be pictured, and you shouldn’t even try; pray to God, not to any saint or any other human; oh, and don’t eat pork. Judaism and Islam agree on all those, and Christianity disagrees. That’s pretty fundamental. And clearly, Christianity isn’t really monotheism at all.