I am an Atheist

 

Picture This... ( a thought experiment)

 

Picture this:

You’re a fisherman at the start of the Iron Age living under Roman rule. You live hand to mouth in extreme poverty without any avenue of personal or economic advancement. Perhaps, you own a fishing boat and thus you are considered wealthy by your more impoverished and ignorant neighbors. 

You’re approached by a traveling, itinerant preacher and ordered to give it all up and follow him. 

You think ‘Give it all up? Give up the back-breaking toil dawn to dusk, the up-keep of the boat, nets, etc.; dealing with fishmongers, hiring fishermen, competing with other fishmen and boat owners … Give it all up for a life of wandering supplication? That might be a hard sell to your family, for sure. 

Nevertheless, you drop your chores and take up ‘apostleship’ with the rabbi. He changes your name from Cephas to Simon-Peter.

Others join a grown rank of work-a-day peasant-folk who follow this Iron Age proselytizer.

A couple of years go by; your itinerant life-style is supported (somehow?) but the daily toil on a fishing boat is no more. 

Then, the traveling preacher is arrested during a high Jewish holiday for sedition against Rome and is publicly executed by the Roman provincial government in a most grisly manner; crucifixion.

As a ‘disciple’ – uneducated, ignorant, superstitious and recently unemployed – you wonder what is your most likely next step; return to fishing and await arrest? Throw yourself on the mercy (Ha!) of the Roman authorities? 

No, you declare that the preacher really was a deity – the son of god – with a message of love and peace for the world. No sedition here; no, sir! After all, the preacher said that his ‘kingdom’ (oh, boy…!) was not of this world! No sedition; ergo no imprisonment, torture or crucifixion. 

(Gulp!)

The prospect of returning to a life of toil as a fisherman seems as undesirable as it is unlikely. You decide to go way out on a delusional limb and declare that you actually saw the ‘son of god’ after he’d died on the cross and had come back from the dead! 

The grift worked for a time. Why not try to keep it going? At least to avoid a similar nasty end. Seems plausible.

There are a raft of other itinerant preachers doing likewise; Simon Magus, Apollonius of Tyana and many others, that bloke from Tarsus – a Pharisee – (hrumph!); Saul (or Paul – huh… another name change. Personal note; you’re meant to meet him next week in Jerusalem.) 

When backed into a corner and asked if this story of the ‘son of god’, resurrection, et al. were true, you claim, with proper, righteous indignation that every word of your testimony is true.

Either that or suffer gruesome consequences… 

Consider the Atoms

 

From Guy Nancarrow March 8 at 1:01 PM  Admin of 'Carl Sagan's Vision'

'Consider the atoms. For 13.8 billion years, they drifted in the void—simple, silent, bound only by gravity and chance. Then, on a tiny rock orbiting an unremarkable star, something extraordinary

happened: dead matter began to dream.

 

Carl Sagan warned us: “Extinction is the rule. Survival is the exception.” Earth’s fossil record is a graveyard of experiments—trilobites, dinosaurs, towering ferns—all reduced to dust by asteroid strikes, ice ages, and oxygen famines. Yet here we are, the heirs of survivors, our DNA a palimpsest of 600 million years of neural improvisation. Your reflexes—the flinch from fire, the hunger for sweetness, the urge to protect a child—are ancient algorithms, sculpted by trial and error in a world where death was the default. 

Daniel Dennett’s insight cuts deep: “You don’t need a smart maker to make something simple.” Evolution is no blacksmith. It is a blind sculptor, chiseling life from randomness. A single-celled organism, mindless and hungry, splits into two. Over eons, those splits compound into eyes, wings, brains. Complexity emerges not by design, but by desperation—a billion tiny solutions to the cold arithmetic of survival. 

 

But it was Charles Darwin who shattered the illusion. Before him, life’s tapestry seemed threaded by divine hands. Darwin revealed a cosmos where dead matter, through patient iteration, could wake itself into being. No deity counted the sparrows; no plan guided the finch’s beak. Life was not bestowed—it emerged, a slow dance of mutation and necessity. His revelation was humbling: We are accidents with ancestry, stardust that learned to count its own steps. 

And what of us? For millennia, we told ourselves that gods or kings authored the cosmos. Then came Newton, who saw a universe governed by a few elegant equations. Einstein rewrote them, bending spacetime to his will. Hubble peered into the abyss and found galaxies fleeing into darkness, proof that the universe is neither static nor eternal. These were not discoveries of complexity, but of profound simplicity—laws so concise they could fit on a napkin, yet powerful enough to birth black holes and DNA. 

But here lies the paradox: From simplicity, complexity blooms. Dead matter stirs to life. Neurons fire into sentience. A species that once cowered in caves now builds rockets and writes sonnets. Your smartphone—a slab of glass and rare earth metals—contains more computational power than all the brains of the Cretaceous period. Yet it was forged not by a genius, but by the slow accretion of human curiosity, each breakthrough standing on the shoulders of ancestral tinkerers. 

 

We are the universe waking up. The same hydrogen born in the Big Bang now courses through your veins. The same thermodynamics that drags stars toward entropy also powers your cells, turning sunlight into thought. For 600 million years, life clawed its way from reflex to reason, from survival to poetry. And in the last sliver of cosmic time—a mere 0.000007% of Earth’s history—we glimpsed the truth: We are not above nature, but of it.Consider the atoms. For 13.8 billion years, they drifted in the void—simple, silent, bound only by gravity and chance. Then, on a tiny rock orbiting an unremarkable star, something extraordinary

happened: dead matter began to dream.

 

Carl Sagan warned us: “Extinction is the rule. Survival is the exception.” Earth’s fossil record is a graveyard of experiments—trilobites, dinosaurs, towering ferns—all reduced to dust by asteroid strikes, ice ages, and oxygen famines. Yet here we are, the heirs of survivors, our DNA a palimpsest of 600 million years of neural improvisation. Your reflexes—the flinch from fire, the hunger for sweetness, the urge to protect a child—are ancient algorithms, sculpted by trial and error in a world where death was the default. 

Daniel Dennett’s insight cuts deep: “You don’t need a smart maker to make something simple.” Evolution is no blacksmith. It is a blind sculptor, chiseling life from randomness. A single-celled organism, mindless and hungry, splits into two. Over eons, those splits compound into eyes, wings, brains. Complexity emerges not by design, but by desperation—a billion tiny solutions to the cold arithmetic of survival. 

 

But it was Charles Darwin who shattered the illusion. Before him, life’s tapestry seemed threaded by divine hands. Darwin revealed a cosmos where dead matter, through patient iteration, could wake itself into being. No deity counted the sparrows; no plan guided the finch’s beak. Life was not bestowed—it emerged, a slow dance of mutation and necessity. His revelation was humbling: We are accidents with ancestry, stardust that learned to count its own steps. 

And what of us? For millennia, we told ourselves that gods or kings authored the cosmos. Then came Newton, who saw a universe governed by a few elegant equations. Einstein rewrote them, bending spacetime to his will. Hubble peered into the abyss and found galaxies fleeing into darkness, proof that the universe is neither static nor eternal. These were not discoveries of complexity, but of profound simplicity—laws so concise they could fit on a napkin, yet powerful enough to birth black holes and DNA. 

But here lies the paradox: From simplicity, complexity blooms. Dead matter stirs to life. Neurons fire into sentience. A species that once cowered in caves now builds rockets and writes sonnets. Your smartphone—a slab of glass and rare earth metals—contains more computational power than all the brains of the Cretaceous period. Yet it was forged not by a genius, but by the slow accretion of human curiosity, each breakthrough standing on the shoulders of ancestral tinkerers. 

 

We are the universe waking up. The same hydrogen born in the Big Bang now courses through your veins. The same thermodynamics that drags stars toward entropy also powers your cells, turning sunlight into thought. For 600 million years, life clawed its way from reflex to reason, from survival to poetry. And in the last sliver of cosmic time—a mere 0.000007% of Earth’s history—we glimpsed the truth: We are not above nature, but of it.'

Did Somebody Mention 'Chinese Whispers'?

 

Imagine this scene in Judea or Anatolia or Alexandria:

 ‘Hey! Have you heard about this guy in Galilee? Jesus?

Man, loads of great stories about this dude. Got a minute?

He walked on water! No kidding. I know a guy who knows a guy who knew a guy that said he knew a guy who saw him do it. My cousin told me about it and my cousin wouldn’t lie about it. Very trustworthy dude; not too bright but he wouldn’t lie to me about this. 

Walked on water during a big storm on the Sea of Galilee. This guy, Jeshua ben Josef  I guess is his real name – a Jewish fella – palled around with fishermen, apparently. Anyway, aint that something?

Walked on water!

And he turned water into wine! Man, if I could do that, I could make a fortune!  I could stop being a tanner for one thing. Set up shop. Turn water into wine and make a fortune. 

So, anyway this Jesus guy; he went to a wedding and turned water into wine! Pretty cool, right?

No, he wasn’t just a magician. He did all kinds of magic stuff but…

Like I heard tell that he fed thousands of people with a just a few loaves of bread and a couple of fish! He multiplied that little bit and fed a multitude. That’s what I heard. No kidding!

But he never charged anyone. Man, I’d make a bundle but this guy, Jesus, did it to show he was special. Son of god or something.

But wait – one more – he came back from the dead! After being crucified, he came back from the dead. I shit you not! That’s what my cousin told me! Came back from the dead.

Okay. So that’s a bridge too far for you? Too much? My cousin swears by it, though. If you knew my cousin, you’d know he wouldn’t lie to me about such stuff. Really.

When was this? About 40 years ago or so, I guess.’

Now, imagine this scene being played out many times. Hear-say, gossip, tall tales all told with a level of fervency that would dispel doubt. 

Now, imagine that the stories are told in variations with embellishments and hyperbole to increase the effect of the stories upon the listener much as rumor and gossip is altered for effect. Now, imagine all this being done in various languages with colloquial nuance, asides and references. 

That might be what the first Gospel writer (whoever they were) might have used as the basis for ‘Mark’.

The Body & Mind of 'God'.

Where is the body of god? 

Does the Holy Trinity reside in any specific place?

Where did it reside before the creation of the universe?

Outside of space?

Outside of time?

Outside of space and time; what is that? 

If such a concept cannot be understood or conceptualized by the human mind, how can it ever have been conceived as an answer to the question ‘Where is god?’

The body – and physical nature – of god is related in the both the Old and the New Testaments of the Bible. 

Does that ‘god’ have a mind? 

Apparently so as Christians often speak of the ‘mind of God’.
Does ‘god’ have intentions and desires? 

If it created the universe, it – god – must have desired to do so. It must have intended to make the universe. It follows then that the creator-god must have had a mind. Was it a physical mind? If it was a physical, extant mind, then it must have existed in space. Existence necessitates both time and space.

Where did this mind (with its desires and intentions) exist before it had created space/time?

(By the way, if ‘god’ was an absolutely perfect, being – wholly and truly perfect, content, complete and self-sustaining without need for anything more than it was before the creation of the universe, there would be no logical reason for such a perfect being to desire anything more than itself.)

What is Faith?

What is Faith?

Faith is immaterial.

Faith has no atomic weight.

Faith has no mass.

Faith has no charge.

Faith is not an object; it is NOT something one has or possesses.

Faith is an element of a personal heuristic; Faith is part of one’s epidemiology. 

It is only by analogy that one can speak of ‘Faith’ as something one has. 

Those who claim to ‘have’ Faith are deceiving themselves. 

Faith is a delusion; Faith is analogous to a lens through which one sees the world. That world, then, also does not exist except within the heuristic formed by this delusion. God, demons, angels, miracles and so on are elements of the deception that a Believer asserts is true.

As Matt Dillahunty has asked many times; ‘Is there anything that cannot be accepted on Faith?’

The Wrong End of the Telescope

It is woefully hilarious that 'Believers' justify their nonsense by saying that it's 'natural'.

You know, like arsenic and volcanic eruptions.

The basic problem that 'Believers' have is that they persist in looking through the wrong end of the telescope. For them, the world was made expressly for the sentient puddle to inhabit. 

Religion may have been necessary in the earlier ages for civilization to coagulate around but, since the scientific revolution, religion has become a nuisance at best - an obstruction at worst.

Ask Giordano Bruno. 

Ask Galileo. 

Ask Copernicus.

Meeting the Goddess

 An encounter with the Netherworld? (or business as usual?)

Went to a number of temples this week; it being Chinese Lunar New Year (新年 ) - CNY. (A sidebar: It has been said that CNY is the largest annual migration of humans in the world.)

 

Visiting my wife’s family in a small Taipei town of XinWu, we went to a Temple dedicated to Matsu – goddess of the oceans whose name means ‘mother ancestor’. (For more on Matsu (Mazu): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mazu )

 

For background, I’ve long since resigned to going with the flow during family functions and at Lunar New Year (新年: Guo Nian) and being a prop (an accessory to the matter at hand) . I’m typically given a bullet-point schedule on the fly. I’ve learned to leap into action without more than a moment’s notice. 

 

This particular encounter with a goddess wasn’t even on the bullet-point. We drove by a temple to Matsu and saw a company of young woman singing (chanting) while performing a choreographed display with electric torches. 

 

Since this temple was in the neighborhood of my sister-in-law (Da Jie) and is one of her favored sites, we returned to the Temple for the midnight ceremony welcoming in the New Year.  

 

All of the following happened in a flash. 

 

There I was - the unwitting witness to the summoning of the goddess by the temple high priestess. First the priestess – a woman in her fifties – dressed in red garments (auspiciously befitting the season), intoned a prayer while holding a fasces-like  bundle of very long joss-sticks. As the joss burned and gave off incensed smoke, the priestess wielding the bundle of joss sticks like a calligraphy brush, writing words in the air above a square of perhaps 900 wicked candles in jars set in straight rows. While ‘air’ writing, the priestess intoned an invocation to Matsu. 

 

When this task was complete – and Matsu had inhabited the priestess - temple workers lit the candle wicks in a very orderly manner – from the center to the edges of the square.  In the meantime, the priestess returned to her place at the end of a long table set before a statue of the goddess, Matsu.

 

It was then that I was ordered to raise my hand – to volunteer for something. Explanation was not forthcoming but I did so as a dutiful accessory to the festivities. I was quickly informed that because of my age, I was to go to the priestess (who was now the goddess, Matsu) and I that I should be properly deferential in accepting the goddess’ beneficence.

 

I was chosen by the temple assistants to come into the presence of the goddess (who had channeled herself into the body of the priestess). I was to be given a red envelope and a small bracelet as a beneficence from the goddess. 

 

Before being persuaded to raise my hand and receive beneficence from the ‘goddess’, I had had a conversation with the son of the priestess. This conversation put a new perspective on the proceedings. After I had gotten the bracelet and red envelope, I was sitting having some hot tea when the priestess’s son, Leo, engaged me once more in English conversation expressing his surprise that I was the only foreigner he’d ever seen at any temple activity. He went on to say that their previous temple had been located in a larger city and they had moved the location to a locale that had fewer restrictions and ordinances regarding temple activities. I found this intriguing but held my questions out of deference to his apparent belief in the goddess herself.

 

However, in this brief conversation, I deduced that the temple was a family business (as many temples are in Taiwan) and that the temple was where he had been raised. I also sensed that Leo and his mother, the priestess, had a matter-of-fact, business-as-usual approach to the dealings of the temple. Leo was clearly unimpressed by his mother being the vessel for the visitation of the goddess, Matsu. 

 

Personally, I could not accept that his mother had been channeled by Matsu or that there was any spiritual significance to the ceremony I had witnessed. I assumed a non-committal, detached role as I thought an anthropologist might do. 

 

The festive mood intrinsic to Chinese Lunar New Year swirled and I partook in the joyous clamor by wishing everyone I encountered with the phrase ‘Shin-nien-quai-leh’ (新年快乐:Happy New Year). I also accepted the congratulations of the temple-goers and my family for having met and received beneficence from the goddess, Matsu. 

 

It was an innocent subterfuge on my part, I felt. I also think that I could ‘dine out’ on this tale for some time. And I have a prop: the friendship bracelet from the goddess herself!

This may be of interest to you...

 The Old Testament (Torah) – 3,400 years old

The New Testament – 2,000 years old

The Koran – 1400 years old

The Rig Veda – 3,500 years old

The Bhagavad Gita – 5,000 years old

The Avesta (Zoroastrianism) – written between 1500 and 900 BCE

The Pyramid Texts (Egyptian burial texts)- c. 2400–2300 BCE

Enūma Eliš – (Sumerian creation myth) written around the 13th century BCE 

 

 

B.C. (Before Christ)

circa. 2000? Abraham, founder of Judaism, is alive.

c. 13th century Moses, Hebrew lawgiver, is alive

c. 1100 - c. 500 The Vedas, sacred texts of the Hindus, are compiled.

604 Traditional birth date of Lao-tzu, founder of Taoism.

588 Traditional birth date of Zoroaster's revelation.

c. 563 - c. 483 Buddha, founder of Buddhism, is alive.

551 - 479 Confucius, founder of Confucianism, is alive.

c. 540 - c. 468 Mahavira, founder of the Jains, is alive.

c. 200 The Bhagavad Gita, important Hindu text, is written.

6 or 4 - c. A.D. 30 Jesus of Nazareth, founder of Christianity, is alive.

 

A.D. (Anno Domini)

33? The crucifixion and death of Jesus Christ.

64? Peter, disciple of Jesus and, according to tradition, first bishop of Rome, dies.

c. 70 - c. 100 First four books of the New Testament - Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John - are written.

5th century Two Buddhist sects - Zen and Pure Land (or Amidism) - are established.

c. 570 - 632 Muhammad the Prophet - whose teachings, recorded in the Quran, form the basis of Islam - is alive.

622 Muhammad flees persecution in Mecca and settles in Yathrib (later Medina); the first day of the lunar year in which this event, known as the Hegira, takes place marks the start of the Muslim era.

936 Traditional date of the arrival from Iran of the first Parsis (followers of Zoroastrianism) in India.

 

How 'bout this?

 A Thought Experiment:

You’re standing on the road in first century Antioch and a passer-by starts going on about a guy who can heal the sick and walk on water. He’s from a podunk town in Galilee and does miracles all the time – fish and bread for thousands this one time, they say.

 

You hear this and more about this Jeshua guy from Galilee and what do you think? 
Gossipy nonsense? 
Twaddle?
Tell me more? 
Do you put any credibility to the story you later heard about this same guy from Nazareth coming back from the dead? 

Recovering from crucifixion? 

Ascending into heaven?

What would you think? 

WTF?  

 

For about half a century, the tales of a healer and magic worker were exchanged by word of mouth. (So were the tales of Simon Magus and Apollonius of Tyana, by the by.)

 

It wasn’t until sometime after Saul had his conversion and name change that anyone wrote anything about this guy. What Saul/Paul wrote tells nothing about the life of Jesus of Nazareth.

 

‘Mark’ was next, writing his Gospel circa 70~80 C.E. (in Greek!) The other canonical Gospels came even later. Until that time, the words and actions of Jesus were the stuff of gossip and anecdote.

How much credence would you assign to gossip and anecdote? 

Authoritarianism, god, kings, etc.

 Authoritarianism and resultant social control was the basis for religion. The first nations, with rare exception, were authoritarian theocracies. The Harrapan culture (aka: the Indus Valley culture) of northern India may well be the sole exception.

 

Sumer, Akkad, Pharaonic Egypt, Mycenean and Hellenic societies were authoritarian societies. These centers of human civilization were controlled by a privileged class. This privileged social class had evolved from ‘Headman’ tribal leaders; a hierarchy endemic to most societies.  

 

 The privileged class (i.e. noble family) was fronted by a strongman who became known as ‘king’. The priesthood - the god’s earthly representatives - then propped up the nobility and the King in a symbiotic arrangement; undoubtedly sharing with the nobility the booty collected to honor the city’s patron ‘god’.

 

As civilization proceeded, the centers grew from villages that serviced the farmers to cities which serviced the gods, the nobility and the priesthood. (The city states of Greece make for a ready example of this new social organization.) 

 

Each city had a patron god serviced by the priesthood, the nobility and the people. The patron god was revered and served as the guide for the character of the city.  Very similarly, the cities of Mesopotamia each had patron gods with central temples, a servicing priesthood and a king to maintain order.

For example, the goddess, Athena, was the patron deity of Athens and Sparta. Apollo presided over Delphi; Dionysus became Thebe’s divine patron. The god, Ashur was the patron god of the city named ‘Ashur’ in Sumer. 

 

Initially, the authority for control of the new social grouping (i.e. the city) came from the patron god or pantheon of gods proposed by the earthly representatives of that god – the priesthood. the priesthood was a privileged ‘earthly’ authority which benefited personally from the collection of goods and products to placate the gods. (At what point in human development of civilization this hierarchy was formed is buried in the depths of pre-history.) 

 

It was declared by the priests that each patron god and goddess had an actual physical presence in the temple at the heart of the city. Each temple was the home of the god on earth; so declared the priests. Each god also had very evident physical needs which were seen to by the temple priests and their staff. The priests declared that the people would gain the god’s beneficence and protection for the host city by making offerings to the patron god. 

 

(If this doesn’t smell like a con nothing does.) 

 

These offerings to the deity came in the form of agricultural products (grain and animals) as well as the products of artisans such as wine, beer, cloth, jewelry, gold, etc. These offerings were collected from the people. 

 

Where else?

 

In order that the priesthood to be allowed to demand the gathering of private property - the result of labor and special skill – and be protected in that endeavor, the priests and temple attendants were afforded deference in the society.  Deference even beyond the privileged standing they had as the god’s earthly representative. They had to have been granted that deference or the people would have refused to share the products of their labors, otherwise. 

 

A little fear of terrible reprisal from the god doesn’t hurt, either. 

 

The inevitable resultant graft in which the priesthood partook was undoubtedly seen with disfavor by the farmers and artisans. The attendants of the Temple were appropriately armed. Subsequently, the nobles (as strongmen) were needed to bolstered the temple authority. 

 

Thus was born the protection racket which is called ‘religion’. (Later, the protection money for the present life would include protection and the guarantee of the after-life but that’s a discussion for another time.)

 

Obviously, this essay should include loads of footnotes and references to studies and peer reviewed papers supporting this subject. However, I don’t have any of that. Sorry. Check with Dr. Joshua Bowen; he’s an Assyriologist and an atheist.

Henotheism & Monolatry

 

Henotheism (Greek for "one god") is a term coined by Max Müller, to mean devotion to a single primary god while accepting the existence or possible existence of other deities. Müller stated that henotheism means "monotheism in principle and polytheism in fact".

 

Monolatry (Ancient Greek: μόνος, romanized: monos, lit. 'single', and λατρεία, latreia, 'worship') is the belief in the existence of many gods, but with the consistent worship of only one deity. The term monolatry was perhaps first used by Julius Wellhausen.

 

Monolatry is distinguished from monotheism, which asserts the existence of only one god, and henotheism, a religious system in which the believer worships one god without denying that others may worship different gods with equal validity.

 

Both Matt Dillahunty and Dr. Richard Carrier contend that the Jews of Abraham’s time were Henotheistic; they considered the other gods (Baal, ISIS, Ra, etc.) as real but worshipped their local tribal god, YHWH. 

 

Abraham’s father, Terah or Terach (Hebrew: תֶּרַח Teraḥ), worshipped many gods; he was polytheistic So, it must be assumed were other Hebrews.. Terah made graven images of them - again, an assumedly an ordinary practice. 

While he was away, his son, Abraham, burnt them all. Abraham claimed that the other gods had had an argument and did the burning themselves. Evidently, Terah bought or accepted this nonsense as possible. (gods being what they are, I suppose) Thus, was the henotheist worship of YHWH initiated. The YHWH sect was established with a single worshipper, Abraham. 

 

Henotheists – that’s what the Israelites were at the time of Abraham and afterwards. 

 

This would explain why the first 4 commandments out of 10 are regarding the worship of ‘the One, True god’.

 

1.   You shall have no other God's before me.

2.   Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven images. 

3.   Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain. 

4.   Remember the Sabbath day and keep it Holy. 

 

What a lot of narcissistic rot.  If the desert war deity, Yahweh, were the only ‘god’ around, why impose such commandments that sanctified and demanded worship of it/himself before all other gods?

 

This idea in essence has broached before this and it makes good sense as it provides a link between polytheism (pantheons of gods, each with individual traits, associations, abilities, domains, predilections and provenance) and monotheism. 

 

‘Our god is the best god of them all. Defy it/him and die!’

 

That the Hebrews were henotheistic would also explain why YHWH is so jealous. He was vying for a position amongst other gods. Maybe like Neil Gaiman’s ‘American Gods’, if YHWH lost the Hebrews, he’d have faded away without worshippers and bloody sacrifice.

 

That the Jews were henotheistic would also explain why the Israelites made a Golden Calf after Moses disappeared for too long in the Sinai collecting god’s commandments on the stone tablets; they'd lost faith and looked to another god - one’s whose image they molded from their own gold. 

 

(…er…WTF? Gold? They had gold? They were slaves on the run from Pharoah, yet they had gold enough to make a statue? Where’d they get all the fucking gold? Let alone enough to shape into a god they’d hoped to worship and get them out of the fucking desert at last.)

 

Note that the first four commandments were to protect YHWH from competition; YHWH stakes a claim and assures his franchise by commanding ‘Thou shalt have no other gods before me.’ (Hebrew: לא יהיה־לך אלהים אחרים על־פני)

 

That’s an interesting injunction if there were no other verifiable gods around to worship; no graven images, no taking the name in vain, keeping the Sabbath holy, and so on. Only then does the god get to the part on how these pathetic desert wanderers were meant to treat each other. 

 

Thou shalt not steal… No shit, Sherlock. 

Hammurabi already chiseled that in stone. 

Or tell a lie? Were the Israelites a pack of uncivilized hooligans before this? They learned no manners in Egypt-land? How did they keep from killing each other before this?

(See Morality)

 

Odd that thought crimes and sex crimes seem to stand out amongst the vague though mundane injunctions against killing, theft, lying and dishonoring your parents.

Thou shalt not covet. (Isn’t that the basis for capitalistic trade?) 

 

Thou shalt not kill? Could you be less specific, god?

Kill what? Goats? Wheat? Grub worms? 

Sometimes translated as ‘Thou shalt not murder.’

Unless commanded by god to commit genocide, perhaps is the addendum to that commandment. Ask the Canaanites or the Amorites.

 

In fact, YHWH commanded the Israelites to kill everything in the ‘Promised Land’; men, women, children, livestock, etc. 

 

WTF is with the ‘Thou shalt not kill’ injunction then?

 

Question: why a golden calf? 

Glad you asked.

It must be noted that one form that the gods of the Bronze Age took was a bovine one; cows, bulls, oxen, calves. The prize of the tribe or the nation was cattle. 

 

Gavaevodata is the primordial bovine of Zoroastrian cosmogony and cosmology, one of Ahura Mazda's six primordial material creations and the mythological progenitor of all beneficent animal life.

Another Zoroastrian mythological bovine is Hadhayans, a gigantic bull so large that it could straddle the mountains and seas that divide the seven regions of the earth, and on whose back men could travel from one region to another.

 

The Iranian language texts and traditions of Zoroastrianism have several different mythological bovine creatures. The bull was also associated with the storm and rain god Adad, Hadad or Iškur. The bull was his symbolic animal. The Sumerian guardian deity, lamassu, was depicted as hybrids with bodies of either winged bulls or lions and heads of human males. The Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh depicts the killing of the Bull of Heaven as an act of defiance to the gods by Gilgamesh and Enkidu.

 

(Fuck with the god’s bull and you get the celestial horn.)

 

Also in the Sumerian religion, the chief god, Marduk is the "bull of Utu" and Babylon used huge sculptures of bulls as emblems of their King. The Minoan god of the Labyrinth, the Minotaur, was a bullish creature. ‘Apis’ was the bovine god of ancient Greece. 

 

(Incidentally ‘apistavist’ is the term that means one does not Believe in any religious notion.)

 

The Olympian chief of gods, Zeus, took the form of a bull to rape Europa. A very virile form. In Hinduism, Shiva's steed was Nandi, the Bull. Aurochs (the precursors to modern cattle) are depicted in many Paleolithic European cave paintings as mighty beasts. Indeed, though not manifestations of gods, amongst several African tribes (the Maasai, the Mundari, the Dinka) cattle are still highly valued, esteemed and are taken as signs of wealth and ‘heavenly blessing’. 

 

In summation, cattle – specifically bullocks – were manifested in many godly panoplies throughout history, hence, when the Israelites grew weary of waiting on YHWH to deliver, they turned to a tried and true representation of a generic Bronze Age god; a golden calf.

 

Much later, in Abrahamic religions, the bull motif became a bull demon or the "horned devil" in contrast and conflict to earlier traditions. So, the devil got horns – to denigrate Ba’al and disassociate YHWH from the old symbology, perhaps?

 

Where were we before we dove down the rabbit hole of the Bulls and the Golden Calf? Ah, yes, ‘the Hebrews as henotheists’.

 

To give this henotheism idea longer legs, YHWH, when dealing with the shenanigans around the Tower of Babel, says, “Man has become like us.'

YHWH says this to himself, by the way; or was it to his lieutenant Satan?

(see below)

 

A quick side note: Trinitarians, (Catholics) will claim that the other two ‘gods in one person’ are/is to whom the ‘father’ is speaking. Trinitarianism, it would seem, is a kind of rump version of polytheism and henotheism combined. A missing link! 

The Catholic/Christian ‘3-in-1’ god is a kind of half-step from polytheism to monotheism with its ‘Holy Trinity’ conundrum. Three-in-one or One-in-three. Sounds like a bit of confused sophistry but there you are. 

(Anyone care to re-read Alexandre Dumas?)

It’s a massive head-ache to reconcile the issue; one which the Church managed to side-step by murdering all those who would openly question such immense piffle. 

 

(Nota bene: Such speculation and ironic jocularity would have meant a one-way trip to the stake in earlier times.)

 

 

Ba’al and Yahweh

 

In non-Biblical sources, “the ba’al” refers to the Phoenician storm deity, likely understood to be a form of Yahweh. The related term, “the ba’als”, is used separately as a collective for gods.

 

The myth of Ba’al was also a way of explaining seasonal cycles. In the myth, Ba’al is slain by Mot and is considered to be dead until he miraculously comes back to life through the aid of Anat; so, Ba’al is a dying a rising god just as Jesus would be centuries later.

 

(Ooh-boy, more gods than you can shake a stick at, right?)

 

In the Gnostic texts, Yahweh is the demiurge; that is not a supreme god but a demi-god that was created by the aeon (or minor goddess) of wisdom, Sophia. Yahweh, then created a celestial world (not this one) and is a malevolent sub-god who does not deserve worship. This brain-twisting story can be read in the ‘Wisdom of Solomon’ in the Bible canon of the Eastern Orthodox Church and in the Gnostic gospels. 

 

It may be noted that the gods have been spoken of here as if they were real entities. This is done to provide the basis of an understanding of the minds of the people of the era. Of course, none of these gods existed but in the minds of these people. The Biblical Abraham and his father, regarded their own gods, polytheistic and then henotheistic before winnowing out the weaklings and declaring one god, YHWH, the winner.

 

Ba’al (also given as Baal) was a Canaanite-Phoenician god of fertility and weather, specifically rainstorms. The name was also used as a title, however, meaning “Lord” and was applied to a number of different deities throughout the ancient Near East. Ba’al is best known from the Bible as the antagonist of the Israelite cult of YHWH.

 

Ba’al and YHWH were each a god in a panoply of gods. The word ‘ba’al’ also means ‘Lord’, ‘god or deity. As silly as this sounds – as neither were more than mental constructs – Ba’al and YHWH were in competition. Ba’al had the Canaanites; Yahweh had the Israelites.

The two tribes were at war. Baal was the god of harvest, rain, dew and fertility; YHWH was the god of war. 

 

As a reminder to further confound you ‘dear reader’, YHWH and his/its rival, Baʿal were both associated with the bull as it symbolized both strength and fertility. (The link to the Golden Calf, again) 

 

(Oi, my aching head.)

 

Again, it must be stressed that none of these gods are or were real. 

It must be noted that Ba’al is cited as one of the Dying and Rising gods (i.e. resurrected gods ) by Dr Richard Carrier on findings by Tryggve N. D. Mettinger  documented in his book ‘The Riddle of Resurrection: "Dying and Rising Gods" 

 

But we press on…

 

Satan, Ba’al and that stuff

 

When YHWH tested Abraham by telling him to kill his son Isaac – telegraphing the whole ‘only begotten Son’ episode played out in the New Testament -, YHWH’s motivation was to see if Abe would either be a loyal servant or ‘fall away’ and worship some other desert deity. 

 

Interestingly, prior to the Persian conquest of Judea, the Hebrews had a different role for Satan (Lucifer the Light Bringer) Once conquered, the Hebrews were influenced by the dualistic Persian religion; Zoroastrianism. 

 

Zoroastrianism, the religion of Persia depicted an eternal, cosmic battle between Light and Truth (led by Ahura-Mazda) and Darkness and Deceit (led by Angra Mainyu). 

 

Satan might well have been originally the right-hand man (angel) of YHWH. Then, after the Hebrews were conquered by the Persian Empire, Satan became the ‘adversary of god’. This would more or less reflect the dualistic nature of Zoroastrianism with the supreme Ahura-Mazda in the position of YHWH and Satan in the position of Angra Mainyu.

 

Satan’s role in the temptation (torture) of Abraham might well be seen in light of the notion that Satan, prior to the Zoroastrianism influence was YHWH’s lieutenant (and perhaps advisor) in this and all affairs. 

 

Enter the story of Job: WTF is with that? Pick the best guy, happy, content, big family, prosperous, healthy and a devote worshipper of the big kahuna ‘YHWH’. 

 

Satan challenges ‘god’ (huh?) to bring death, disease and ruination upon Job as a ‘test’? The all-knowing part gets glossed over again. And so, the story goes with Job’s family murdered, Job covered in boils, his life in ruins, all to ‘prove’ that Job is devout and committed to the jealous, petty god of ‘creation’ with the able assistance of Satan as adversary or as lieutenant.

 

Once again – WTF?  

 

If this same, sad, silly story had been written by J.K. Rowlings, publishers would chucked her out of the office. 

 

The absurd notions of most Biblical tales (Adam & Eve, Noah’s flood, the Resurrection, the virgin birth, etc) told with the unspoken warning that questions were out of the question and are an affront –to ‘god’ and all righteous people. 

 

Question the sheer insanity of Noah living to the age of 900 years invokes curses of ‘Blasphemer!’ and accusations that the questioner was being prompted by Satan.

 

“How is Satan so powerful?” Lucifer was cast out (after exercising free will) and given Dominion over the under-world (where did that come from?)

 

‘God’ made the angels (at some point) and made Lucifer – the Light-bringer…

 

(a kind of Prometheus: (Who is Prometheus? In Greek mythology, Prometheus is one of the Titans, the supreme trickster, and a god of fire. In common belief, he developed into a master craftsman, and in this connection, he was associated with fire and the creation of mortals.)

 

To the point, though, Lucifer/Satan was made to be close to the power of ‘god’. Was Satan originally YHWH’s lieutenant before Zoroastrianism turned him into the lying adversary?

(Tolkien did a similar thing with Iluvatar and Melkor in the Silmarillion, a much better story than the Bible.) 

 

Then – the story goes – that Lucifer rebelled against ‘god’ (Tolkien’s Melkor does, too) waged war and was cast out of heaven. Was this the first exercise of ‘free will’? 

 

So, now Lucifer - renamed ‘Satan’ – goes on a tear of evil bad-doings out of spite or hate or something, First, in the Garden, tempting Eve as a talking snake (I love that) and then throughout the Bible as the baddie; Job, Jesus, etc. 

 

Again…

 

Satan was made in god’s image, so the story goes. He vied with god and was cast down, so the story goes. This raises loads of questions about god’s power and god’s knowledge; Why didn’t god simply ‘wish’ Satan out of existence? Why ‘create’ Hell for the devil (Satan) to rule in? 

 

Why didn’t god foresee that Satan would revolt and take a host of angels with him? 

Why does god allow Satan to continue to vie for the ‘souls’ of humanity? 

Why did god enter into a pissing contest with Satan about Job? 

Why did god follow Satan’s ideas to torture Job and test Job’s faith? First, didn’t god already know the future about Job? 

Second, why did god allow Satan to have influence over the torturing of Job; all of the torturing, the murder of Job’s children, etc were done by god, him/itself. 

Why?

Why did god allow Satan to tempt Jesus? 

Why didn’t Jesus understand that everything offered by Satan was already Jesus’s by dint of his being god?

‘Mysterious ways’ – amounts to bullshit responses to serious questions regarding god.

 

Is Satan eternal? According to the story, Lucifer (the light giver – smacks of Prometheus, does it not?) was there in ‘Heaven’ with god and predated the creation of the earth, etc (so the story goes…)

Why does Satan continue to exist? More ‘Mysterious ways’?

 

Who were these Canaanites whom God ordered to be annihilated? 

 

Snarky god!!

 

What was the source of the god that became YHWH? It had been known as El. Also Adonai, Elohim ("God," a plural noun), Shaddai ("Almighty"), and Tzevaot ("[of] Hosts"); some also include Ehyeh ("I Will Be").

 

names of God so holy that, once written, they should not be erased: YHWH, Adonai, El ("God"), Elohim ("God," a plural noun),^[a]Shaddai ("Almighty"), and Tzevaot ("[of] Hosts"); some also include Ehyeh ("I Will Be").^[1] 

 

YHWH-Niss"i (Yahweh-Nissi) — "The Lord our Banner" (Exodus 17:8-15). YHWH-Shalom — "The Lord our Peace" (Judges 6:24). YHWH-Ra-ah — "The Lord my Shepherd" (Psalms 23:1). YHWH-Tsidkenu — "The Lord our Righteousness" (Jeremiah 23:6).

 

Sound familiar? This happens a lot – borrowings from other myth cycles and attributing them to some character in the Bible. Moses is a pastiche of borrows from other hero legends.

 

Another similarity: just as Zeus ousted Chronos as chief among the gods, the Baal cycle explains Baal’s rise to prominence and popularity among the Canaanites.