Thoughtless for the Day

Saturday, July 9th

PROJECT GOD: A Scientific Experiment


norm (38k image)Howdy, bail jumpers. Before we move to GOD: Part III (Jews Rule the Night),
I'd like to make a slight detour and answer a question that seems to be on
many of your minds as well as to beg you assistance in a scientific study
that I'm conducting. First, the question:

Over the last week I've received over thirty emails all asking the same
question: and nearly all beginning "I know this is a stupid question but…"
The question to which many of you seem to be seeking an answer to is "Why
is God called 'God'?" Relax; "Why is God called 'God'?" is far from being
a stupid question. "President Bush, you've done such a great job, is there
any way that you can run for a third term?" is, in fact (quidem), a
stupid question. It's a fuckin' moronic question, actually. OK, now that
you feel better about yourselves, let's find out why, in the words of
Liabach, "God is God."

As we discussed last week, God has been know by many names: "Yahweh",
"Elohim", "Hef", etc. You may also remember a reference, in last week's
piece to a rather odd incident in the Bible (OK, it's one of several
odd incidents in the Bible) in which Jacob wrestles with God. In that
strange encounter, Jacob gets a tight grip on the All Mighty and refuses to
let go until God tells Jacob His name. Once Jacob learned God's true name
(Yahweh), he had power over the Lord.

You see, in many ancient cultures names were believed to hold power. Most
individuals in these communities had a public name and a private name: a
name which was only known to trusted intimates. The same rule applied to
Gods. Just as my secret name is "Yendor the Hung" (and I'm only telling
you this because I trust you), God's secret name is Yahweh (keep that bit
of info on the QT, please).

To keep people from abusing the super-secret name of God ("Thus is My
name: doth not wear it out" - Genesis 23:5) Jews, reading aloud from the
Torah, would substitute the name "Adonai" ("My God" or "My Lord": From
the Egyptian "Aton" mentioned in Part I) for "Yahweh".

Since the Nerd Factor for this web site is pretty high, I'm going to assume
that all of you have seen Monty Python's The Life of Brian. Do you
remember the scene in which a bunch of women wearing fake beards stone a
man to death for saying "Jehovah"? Well that's just one of the over two
hundred reasons why Monty Python's The Life of Brian is more histor-
ically accurate than Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ.

As Monotheism progressed this link to the magical past became sort of an
embarrassment to the Jews (not unlike Jackie Mason); eventually they mod-
ified there theology to say that an unseen, omnipresent, endless being
couldn't really have a name (unless that name is "Dave 'The Hammer'
Schultz". Am I seeing things? "The Hammer" is available for "Motivational
Speaking"??? WTPFMYV??? Maybe there really is no God, after all.); so
they began to substitute titles like "God" and "Lord" for "Adonai". The
tradition carried over to Christianity and Islam ("Allah" is derived from
'Al-lah' - "the god"). And now the experiment:

The fist thing that you'll need to do, should you choose to participate,
is to build a small temple. I've built two. One, from scratch, for myself
in Greco-Roman style...

rodtemp (34k image)

…and one, from a kids' set of blocks I picked up at a yard sale, for my
wife who worships Bastet and Sekhmet.

vientemp (22k image)

The next thing that you'll need is a god or goddess to inhabit the temple.
In the examples above my wife and I used the Roman God/Emperor Claudius and
the Egyptian Goddess Sekhmet, respectively. If you don't have a favorite
deity, I suggest that you pop over to www.pantheon.org. It's an invaluable
clearinghouse for gods, goddesses, and heroes from many different cultures.

The final ingredient for the experiment is a Random Number Generator. Now
there are plenty of RNG's out floating around cyberspace for you to choose
from but none of them also offer the opportunity of becoming an instant
gazillionaire: that's why I recommend that you purchase a Powerball ticket.
And since Powerball tickets can be purchased in twenty-seven states,
Washington D.C., the US Virgin Islands, and West Virginia we should all be
able to participate in the experiment.

Place your Powerball ticket in the tiny temple with the deity-of-your-
choice. [Optional: clearly explain to the deity that should you win "an
assload of cash" you will build the aforementioned deity a real temple on
the grounds of your fabulous mansion.] After the Powerball drawing (or
"drerring", as Norm would say) note the amount of correct numbers, out of
a possible six, that your deity provided. Email the results to me.

rickyr (22k image)The truly great thing about this experiment (other than having a tiny
temple or two around your house) is that it can be repeated over-and-over
again with different deities until you either get bored or win enough
money to hire Bill Gates to dress up like a clown and juggle tampons at
your next birthday party.

Here are the results I've achieved, so far, with different gods and
goddesses:

Deity #, out of 6, correct

Placebo (No Deity Used) * 0
Zues 1
Ashera 0
Yahweh 1
Hera 1
Emperor Claudius
Sekhmet

OK, fellow scientists, let's get cracking! Oh, one last thing: if you have
a child, or even know of one, the above would make an excellent school
science project.

* In place of not using a deity, you could also substitute Ben Schumin.




Rodney on 07.09.05 @ 06:50 PM EST [link] [No Comments]


Monday, July 4th

GOD (Part II: Have it Yahweh)


Prologue:

rummy (22k image)The other day I was channel surfing when I happened upon Secretary of
Defense Donald Rumsfeld making an appearance on the state-run media: or,
as it is also known, Fox and Friends (with friends like that…). Now,
whenever I come across an interview with Rummy I stop and listen on the
one-in-a-billion chance that he'll break character and decide to explain
either why we still haven't captured bin Laden (despite knowing exactly
where he is) or why Karl Rove felt it necessary to "out" Valerie Plame.
Once again I was shitouttaluck. Rumsfeld was crying in his beer over the
new President of Iran, whom Donald claimed was "too close to the Mullahs".

Yes, the last thing that anybody would want is a President with ties to
religious fanatics.

Finding out how we got to the point where one member of a government ran
by Mullahs can talk smack about a member of another member of a government
ran by Mullahs is, of course, what this series is all about. Last time we
took a look at the man who just may have been the world's first Monotheist.
This time we'll peruse the instruction manual for Monotheism: The Old
Testament.


"God said to Abraham, 'Kill me your son.' Abe said, 'Man you must be
puttin' me on.'"

For most of us, Science has replaced God (if we ever believed in Him
to begin with). Creation is either the result of the Big Bang or Membrane
Theory. No Great Flood covered the Earth; and the only "Eve" is the
Mitochondrial Eve. Because of this, we don't spend a great deal of time
(if any) reading the Bible, and that's a shame because, if you have the
right mental toolkit, the Bible is a fascinating book.

The first thing that you'll need to see the Bible with a fresh pair of eyes
is not an afternoon with Lisa Whelchel and two tabs of acid, but a
familiarity with the myths of the Middle East and the Mediterranean. For
example, the Epic of Gilgamesh not only contains a flood story which is
strikingly similar to the on in the Bible, but it also features a sneaking
serpent. Ever hear of the Enuma elish? It's a Babylonian Creation Myth
written between 1600 and 1100 BCE. When compared with the fist chapter of
Genesis, some interesting parallels emerge:

Enuma elish

In the beginning, Deities and the universe exist simultaneously

Primal chaos reigns (called "Tiamat")

Earth is dark and desolate

The Gods create light

Marduk defeats Tiamat

Marduk creates firmament

Marduk creates land

Marduk and his ol' lady, Aruru, create man from clay

The Gods rest and rejoice


Genesis 1
God creates matter

Darkness covers the deep (called "Tehom")

God creates light

God creates land

God creates man from clay

God rests

And those are just two examples. The amount of dovetailing between the
Bible and other mythologies is staggering. The thing to take away from
this is that many, many cultures share (or shared) a common mythology.
This may not be the great beauty that most people who open the Bible hope
to find, but it's there, nonetheless. You just have to know where to look.

The second thing you'll need to sink your teeth into the Good Book is a
fairly firm set of linguistic skills. This might come as a shock to the
entire state of Kansas, but the Bible was not originally written in
English, so it helps to know as much Hebrew, Greek, Latin, Aramaic, and
Sumerian as possible. And keep in mind that words have skeletons.

Here's a word skeleton that can be found in all Indo-European
languages: M_[T,TH,D]_R. The spaces show where vowels are placed. T,TH,
and D are a group of constanants which can be substituted for each other.
Hence we get the Latin "mater", the Greek "meter" and the English "mother".
Try it with the skeleton [F,P,V]_[T,TH,D]_R and you'll get the Latin
"pater", the German "vater", and the English "father". Now, ain't that some
shit?

If you take the above into consideration, along with the fact that early
Semitic alphabets had no vowels, it's possible to see how Lotan (word
skeleton: L_[T,TH,D]_N, a Canaanite sea monster slain by the god Baal,
ended up in the Hebrew Bible as, envelope please, Leviathan:

In that day the LORD with his hard and great and strong sword will
punish Leviathan the fleeing serpent, Leviathan, the twisting serpent, and
he will slay the dragon that is in the sea.
- Isaiah 27:1

Hey, didn't our new buddy Marduk, who we just met a few paragraphs ago,
also do battle with a sea monster?

May he vanquish Tiamat, constrict and shorten her life. Until the last
days of humankind, when even days have grown old, may she depart, not to
be detained, and ever swept away."
- Enuma elish

And what about Baal's scrap with Lotan?

When you smote the fleeting dragon, destroyed the crooked serpent…
- Enuma elish (Ugaritic text)

"Yes, my new novel does feature a character named 'Uncle Tom' and,
yes, he does reside in a cabin in the antebellum South, but any connection
to any other novel is pure coincidence. Now fuck off."

The final Sears Craftsman wrench in your biblical toolkit is an
understanding of what is meant by J, E, P, and D texts.

The 'official" view of the Old Testament has always been that the first
five books of the Bible, the Torah, were written by one man: Moses (an
author so dedicated to his work that he even managed to record his own
death!). And was finished around 1200 BCE. Today (around noon), most
biblical scholars saddle up to the much saner idea that that Torah (AKA
the Pentateuch) was most likely finalized around 400 BCE and had several
different authors. This theory is known as the Documentary Hypothesis, and
you're about to get a crash course in it.

"J" (derived from the German, or "Kraut", word for Yahweh - Jahveh)
indicates the earliest writing (probably written between 960 and 915 BCE)
and starts with the second creation story (Yes, there are TWO
creation stories in Genesis. As Julia "It's Pat" Sweeney puts it in her
one-woman show about becoming an Atheist: "It's like all those people who
consider the Bible to be the infallible Word-of-God must've never read the
first two chapters."), and portrays God in very anthromorphic terms
(Jacob actually wrestles with the Big Guy and wins by a pin)


"E" is for "Elohist". This text was written around 850 BCE. In it God is
referred to as "Elohim" (the word is plural: it means "gods"), not
"Yahweh".

churchat (26k image)"D" is for "Deuteronomy (written around 621 BCE), while "P" relates to the
"Priestly" texts (most likely penned before 568 BCE)

When you divide J, E, D, and P into separate narratives (and get a handle
on your binge-drinking), some very interesting tales emerge. For example,
there's a new take on the story of Abraham's sacrifice of his son, Isaac
(yes, I know it's Ishmael in the Koran. We'll get to that in a month or
two). In the E version of the story, both Abraham and Isaac go up
the mountain, but only Abraham comes back down. Translation:
Abraham sacrifices Isaac. Either that of Nicole Simpson's real
killer has been at it for a very long time.

You're probably more familiar with the additions to the story from the J
and P texts in which God stays Abraham's hand and substitutes a ram that
happens to be in the right thicket at the wrong time for Isaac. Once again
knowledge of other myths comes in handy: Remember in the Iliad when
Agamemnon sacrificed his daughter, Iphigeneia, in order to get some wind
action? Well, the story of a king sacrificing one of his children (even a
female child) kind of embarrassed the later Greeks, so they altered the
story so that the goddess Artemis substituted a steer's ass for Iphigeneia
before spiriting the child off to safety and a lifetime of severe issues.

In another Greek myth, a ram, later to become the Golden Fleece, also saved
the hide of Phrixus.

Isaac may not have been the only human sacrifice in the Big Book of Family
values. There's some evidence to suggest that Cain (who has come to be
known as a farmer but was actually a smith - a sort of Hebrew Hephaestos)
may have offered up his brother Abel. After all, Cain does get off pretty
lightly for murder (True, the case may have been hard to judge due to lack
of a precedent) with only exile and a mark that means no one is allowed to
harm him.

Speaking of Cain, it was upon the occasion of his birth that Eve uttered
"I have gotten a man with the help of Yahweh." Now, the Hebrew word which
was translated as "gotten" is "qanah". Qanah can also mean "created". Why
would Eve say that she and Yahweh had created (a) man together? That's the
sort of stuff Marduk and Aruru got up to in their free time.

Maybe Eve was "echoing" an earlier sentiment expressed by God's wife?

There was a "Mrs. God"?!?

A few years back, some dirt scratching at a place called Kuntillat (named
after Michelle Malkin) Ajrud turned up a huge ceramic jar bearing the
inscription "I bless thee by Yahweh and by his Asherah. The jar
dates to around 800 BCE. If were to believe the traditional view of
biblical history (oxymoron alert!), rule numero uno - "Thou shalt have no
other gods before me" - had been if place for roughly four hundred years.
And yet here were Jews worshiping Yahweh and his Saturday Night Thang.

OK, so maybe God was once a member of the Canaanite pantheon. Fine. And
who cares if he had wife, fought sea monsters, and demanded human
sacrifices. I mean, it's not like anybody takes the Bible seriously…

By nearly all accounts, Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin was a kind
and decent man. For his role in the creation of the Oslo Accords, Rabin
was awarded the 1994 Nobel Peace Prize. As part of the peace process,
Rabin handed over land which some Israelis believed had been given to them
directly by Yahweh. On November 4th, 1995 he was assassinated by a young
Orthodox Jew whose defense was "Everything I did, I did for the glory of
God"




Recommended reading:

God Against The Gods by Jonathan Kirsch

A History of God by Karen Armstrong

Secret Origins of the Bible by Tim Callahan

The Bible Unearthed by Israel Finkelstein

Who Wrote the Bible by Richard Friedman




Rodney on 07.04.05 @ 01:52 AM EST [link] [27 Comments]




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