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

MORE THAN AN ATHEIST

Yes, I am an atheist.  I do not recognize the existence of a god or any higher power.  In that, I am in the good company of patriots like Thomas Paine and many of the other rationalist founders of this country who were sons of the Enlightenment.

But, I am more than just a quiet, rather passive non-believer.  I have found most atheists fall into that category and never forcefully "come out" to family or the world at large.  Often there are good and practical reasons to be reticent about doing so.  I was in that category for a short -- very short -- time.  Then, I decided that approach was not for me.  It was "Full speed ahead!  Damn the torpedoes!"

I became, and intend to remain, a dedicated ANTI-THEIST!

What's the difference?

The difference is that anti-theists are not content to be hidden in some corner or to be relegated to a closet.  We don't care if those who are accustomed to having their way with the world denounce or persecute us and call us every vile name they can think of.  Our message to them is that their ascendancy is going to come to an end and we are going to be instrumental in bringing that end about.

They can denounce and threaten us however they choose.  We will not be intimidated.  We will not be silenced.

Ever since desperate Constantine convened that council at Nicacea and saddled the Western world with his hodge podge of mostly mithraic syncretic religion and then enforced it with Roman military might, Christianity in myriad manifestations has run roughshod over occidental society.  For centuries, its  book of fiction doomed multiple generations to stultifying ignorance.  The renaissance mollified and challenged their dominance.  The Enlightenment dealt it heavy blows, as has modern science (which it hates with a purple passion) and led to the establishment of an American republic officially free from religious domination.

That was a bitter pill for theists to swallow.  They have never ceased to chafe under the limitations placed upon them by the Constitution.

By every stratagem and subterfuge available to them, they have sought to subvert that great document unceasingly.  It has been such a pervasive campaign that one ex-president has publicly stated that an atheist cannot be a good citizen "because this is one nation under god."

If he weren't so abysmally ignorant, he would know that that unconstitutional addition to the pledge of allegiance was not added until about sixty years ago.  Our founding fathers would have tossed it into the nearest waste basket!

Fanatical religion has never ceased to assault and seek to undo the freedoms our founding fathers took such great pains to bequeath to us.  They have been on their zealous quest to undo and circumvent those precepts ever since their establishment, resorting to such ridiculous slogans as "faith based."

Not just the old, traditional Catholic and Protestant organizations.  A plethora of new, and just as illusory and ridiculous cults and superstitions soon came on the scene.  Many of them have become very widespread and powerful.  They are just as, and in some cases even more so, dedicated to surreptitiously gaining control over the thinking and lives of the general population of this country!

It wasn't very long after our nation's founding that a deranged con-artist by the name of Joseph Smith came along and set up the travesty of Mormonism that has now become so mainstream that we have a viable presidential candidate from that organization whose holy book is so stupid as to be laughable even as a work of science fiction.

In the mid-eighteenth Century, the Millerites and their prophetic debacle came along.  Like all extremes, they didn't go away when their prognostications were proved false.  From their ranks emerged another deranged "leader" who probably suffered from partial-complex seizures (http://www.ellenwhiteexposed.com/egw79.htm) spouting prophecies and inane garbage and set up what is today known as The Seventh-Day Adventists.  That led to The Church of God Seventh-Day, The Branch Davidians, Herbert Armstrong's Worldwide Church of God and an inestimable and growing number of COGs and ridiculous cults. 

The Western world, and particularly the supposedly rationalist U.S.A., is awash in religion!  I couldn't even begin to cover the "wooo, wooo" out there!  Like "Scientology!"

As an anti-theist, I refuse to just sit here on my little lot in Cottonwood, Arizona and blow it all off.  I have very few years left now, but while I still draw the breath of life, I will never cease to "cry aloud" the anti-theist message.

Every time I encounter a new book, a new article, a new website, a new blog, etc., trumpeting the anti-theist message, I want to shout for joy!

I will continue to seek out others of like mind and meet with them, just like those founding fathers gathered in taverns and lodges to sow and cultivate the seeds of freedom and rationality. 

Back off Theists!  You've had your nefarious run!  A several centuries run of ignorance, deception and tyranny!

The truth will be proclaimed!

You will not stop us!