MUSINGS ABOUT DEITIES

I've been ruminating about "gods" and religions, how people dream them up and their nature through history.  Like much of my thinking, it comes easiest while I'm engaged in something physical, like the carpet I worked on yesterday and the bumper crop of Mulberry leaves I was vacuming up today and turning into mulch.

The average person doesn't spend much time on such reflections and I probably wouldn't either were it not for my past associations and activities.  It's impossible to be embroiled in a super-fundamentalist cult for over twenty years and not have religion occupying a significant place in your memories and the concepts you've had to mull over and analyze incessantly for decades.  It's led me into very deep historical, religious and pschological study and never-ending analysis.

Our instinctual search for order and patterns, coupled with our vulnerability in a dangerous world and ecosystem led our primate ancestors to seek something to explain and hopefully offset the natural vulnerability we all feel.  I think that situation led to what seems like a "hardwired" proclivity toward religion.

Humans want answers.  There's always someone who will come along and supply what that individual decides are the answers.  In the early group and clan societies, the strongest and wisest or most vociferous and communicative took care of and tended to rise to leadership over the weaker, more reticent and more vulnerable in their group.  Some of them became legends around the campfires and, like Elvis, the stories got bigger and more marvelous with the telling.  I've often said that, in an earlier, less recorded and literarily fixed age, Elvis would have joined the pantheon of gods.  We see the same force at work in the sometimes largely fictional stories about the founders of our own nation.

Just as Roman emperors were exhalted to the position of gods, some of the legends of these exemplary individuals and their families led to deification.  It took the form of a holy family, even among the ancient Isrealites.  It's clear that the Israelites didn't start out as a strictly mono-theistic people.  They also had a god family, known as the Elohim.  El Elyon was the patriarch and Ashtoreth was his wife.  He had several children, like Baal, Yahweh, Anath, etc.

It wasn't until after the Babylonian captivity, during which the Jews had been subjected to Persian Zoroastrianism, that mono-theism became the totally dominant approach of the Jewish nation.  All the other Elohim suddenly were shoved aside and Yahweh became the one and only god.  It was only after that time that what we now know as the Old Testament began to be constructed in the form we know today.  The polytheistic overtones still can be seen in the modified Babylonian creation account in which the Elohim says, "Let us" do something.

Men always create gods in their image, not the other way around.  That reversal of the actual reality is common in both politics and religion.  The ancient gods that still haunt the faiths of today far more than people realize were usually just ordinary people who had been raised to the level of immortality and semi-omnipotence.  I say semi-omnipotence because all devotees to regional gods were constantly afraid that a more powerful god might thwart their god, and that was a good "copout" for the priests and shamans.  It persists in our dualist perception of God and Satan being at war and Satan sometimes coming out on top.  That whole concept comes straight out of Persian Zoroastrianism.

When one thinks about it, the ancients had a very convenient way of justifying their own failings and inadequacies by holding up these powerful conceptual concoctions as models.  The Greek pantheon, and competing pantheons, were filled with gods who were all too human.  Randy old Zeus and his counterparts in other mythologies, as well as their quarreling families and associates could serve as a justification for just about anything. 

I can picture a philandering husband telling his outraged wife, "Look, honey, I'm only mortal.  If Zeus can't keep 'it' in his pants (or whatever Zeus wore), how can a mere man like me do any better?"

So, today we have several evolved religions on this small planet.  All the writings attributed to the Old Testament developed enturies after what they purport to record and some of those events have been shown to be either total fictions or massive non-factual fabrications of quite different events.  The New Testament wasn't gathered together in anything near its present form until the fourth century -- a time approximately equal to the elapsed time between the first American colonies and now -- in a time of no news services, basically no written records, and a Roman world afflicted with hundreds of competing religions and wandering teachers of multitudinous ideologies looking for followings.

We have a more reliable backup of religious writings connected with Islam and Mormonism than we have for either Judaism or Christianity.  We wouldn't even have Christianity if desperate imperial god Constantine hadn't forced the issue by his imperial decree when he ordered the Council of Nicea.  Want an eye-opening expose of that?  Go here:  http://www.nexusmagazine.com/index.php?option=com_docman&task=doc_view&gid=70

IT'S ALL ABOUT THE FAMN DAMILY

Herbert Armstrong, as lousy a theologian as he was, got one thing about the scriptures partially right. He maintained that the Hebrew word “Elohim” was a “uni-plural” name for god that meant God was more than one, actually a family of beings.

From there, his understanding and subsequent teaching went way off into left field, and beyond, leading to the assertion that we, if saved and faithful to the end, would join that family – would actually be born as Gods, brothers of Jesus, at the resurrection.

I won't get into the varying teachings of multitudes of sects, philosophies, religious denominations, etc. that sometimes put us humans in the category of already being individuated parts of the universal god spirit. The Mormons expect to be glorified and become supreme gods over multitudes of worlds throughout the universe. I guess that pertains only to this planet as the originating center of everything because that's where they happen to be. I haven't delved into the specifics.

Ancient cultures of Southern Europe and the Middle East all worshiped anthropomorphized gods who were mirrors of human society on an exalted level. All the pantheons revolved around a supreme, randy, philandering divine patriarch with jealous wives, concubines, multitudes of quarreling children jockeying for position, etc.

In the Greek world, Zeus was at the top of the heap and father of the gods, with all the inevitable attendant problems. The Romans had their Jupiter.

The Canaanites and Mesopotamians had their own little god-family setup. Into this world was born a guy we know as Abraham.

In that world, there was a father of the local gods known as El Elyon, God Most High. One of his sons was Yahweh who became over time the specific god of the Israelites. Others of his sons and daughters became the exalted gods and goddesses of other tribes and localities. There was Ashtoreth, his wife, also called Asherah, Ishtar, Ninlil and Elath, Baal, his senior son, and Anath, his daughter.

They were known collectively as Elohim, the divine family of El or El Elyon.

The names given these gods varied throughout the Near East. El was Ilu Kergal to the sumerians. Baal was known as Hadad in Phoenicia and Nergal in Mesopotamia. Anath was Inana to the Sumerians and Astarte to the Phoenicians.

According to I Kings 11:5, Solomon worshiped Ashtoreth and that worship continued in Judea until the Babylonian captivity.

The Israelites did not consider Yahweh the only god any more than their neighbors did. That is why the commandment against worshiping other gods specifically stated that they should have no other gods “before” Yahweh because he was jealous of his position as their specific god. It took centuries of development before those other gods got shoved out of the way, sublimated and incorporated into just one deity that is worshiped to this very day as the one and only god. These gods were considered real and a competitive threat.

Scholars like Laurence Gardner, Chris Rolston, Mark Smith, Frank Cross and others tell us that the early picture given for Yahweh is that of a Near Eastern tribal deity. Those facts have been covered up and forgotten as that tribal deity evolved over time along with Israelite chauvinistic aspirations. Soon he became the only true god, the others being marginalized and finally, totally ignored by followers of Judaism and Christianity.

The Hebrew scriptures as we know them today weren't written by Moses or any of the other “heroes” they portray. They evolved slowly over centuries and began taking shape only after the Babylonian captivity during which the Jews became more highly educated and had access to the historical records and myths their “hosts” and scholarly neighbors had meticulously preserved. There was no organized Jewish book for centuries; just separate scrolls, revered in some places, questioned in others and constantly revised and edited to correspond to currently held opinions and doctrine, and, of course, the interests of the temple priesthood.

Laurence Gardner in The Origin of God makes this revealing statement about Genesis: “...there is little discrepancy between the manner of his biblical representation and those of the Sumerian, Akkadian and Canaanite tablets from which the Genesis portrayal derived....but there is much information in the source records which the Bible writers preferred to leave unstated....God's image becomes increasingly a matter of retrospective scribal interpretation.” In other words, there was “scribal spin.”

Gardner's book is currently available through bookstores and Amazon. It is thorough and scholarly but is easy to read and understand. Likewise, The Early History of God by Mark S. Smith.

These facts have been known to scholars for generations. Recent archaeological discoveries have added immense new knowledge which makes it plain that the common conceptions about the origin of the “god” people confidently worship are totally erroneous.

The Pentateuch, and much of the rest of the Old Testament, is basically a legendary fiction crafted in the centuries following the Babylonian captivity largely from sources the Israelites obtained from their more advanced captors and neighbors. It is based on fables and myths that circulated freely from nation to nation and tribe to tribe and were preserved in the libraries and archives of the more advanced peoples and the chauvinistic motives of the priests and scribes involved.

For quick and interesting info on the multiple gods theme, go to You Tube and look up videos by the backyard professor.  For another good rundown on how this evolution took place, here is another great You Tube video:  http://www.youtube.com/user/Evid3nc3