The Origin Of Faith
(The Day The Jews Invented God)
PROLOGUE
This article is a exercise of intellect rather than emotion. I would have been delighted had it turned out differently but distorting the truth to suit some precondition is a bad habit for any writer to get into. I therefore proceed with the belief that truth is its own reward.
The Bible is man’s most imaginative, most compelling, and most effective creation of all time. I truly believe that. From beginning to end, this book is a literary marvel. The writing is exceptional, the stories are instructive and absorbing, the messages uplifting and inspiring.
Yet the Bible is even more - it is the single most influential book ever written - a book that has remained relevant for over 2,500 years with messages that have influenced the lives of more people over a longer period of time than any other writing ever produced by man.
The Bible is also the world’s first and best ever “how to” book. It teaches man how to live his life, how to make his civilizations better, how to mange his societies, and how to overcome the difficulties that everyone faces in this ongoing trial that we call ‘life’.
It is all that – and more. But what the Bible is not is the direct word of God. Rather, it is a book written for posterity by extraordinary men – writers - who were subject to error, fabrication, and exaggeration as most writers are.
Faith can be a wonderful thing but it can also be a dangerous thing. The danger comes when the blind faith of a believer leads him to take a position of unquestioning servitude to church authorities that in turn produces ecclesiastical excess.
Examples of such excess can be found in the dungeons of the Inquisition, the depravity of David Koresch, the insanity of Jim Jones, the blood-lust of Charles Manson and the suicide bombers of Muslim fundamentalism. All these aberrations were possible because true believers slavishly surrendered control of their lives to those they perceived as being closer to God than they. I call that misguided faith.
The Bible instructs us: “Give unto Caesar the things that are Caesars and to God the things that are God’s”. That advice can be readily transposed to read: “Give to your Church the things that belong to your Church but keep to yourself, the things that belong to you.”
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This article is about the origins of the Christian faith, the faith of three-quarters of the world’s people. It is an in-depth look at where truth may end and fiction may begin.
At the outset, I wish to stress that the author is neither anti-religious nor anti-Semitic. I admit I believe that God is a creation of man but I also believe that man needed God and so he created Him. I find no fault with that.
I have concluded, as you will see shortly, that many if not most of the Old Testament stories are fabrications and fictionalized accounts of ancient memorable events. The stories of these events was handed down generation by generation through song and ballad, and centuries later, were invested with religious meaning and included in the Holy Bible where they assumed a prominence and stature they didn’t deserve.
Since this article was originally written back in 2003-4, there have been some negative reactions, the most caustic of which have come from Jews or people sympathetic to historical Jewish causes. They rail that the author is anti-Semitic because Jews turn out not to be the heroes in this piece. But I did not sculpt my conclusions, I came to them after careful and deliberate consideration. Had they bothered to take the time to read the entire article, instead of pre-judging it, they would have recognized that fact. Instead, they leaped to silly and erroneous conclusions.
Here is an example: Following the title line is a sub-title which reads: “The Day The Jews Invented God”. Some Jews seem to have taken exception to this line. Perhaps some non-Jews as well. But why should they? It is a perfectly legitimate expression.
Flavius Josephus was a renowned 1st century Jewish-turned-Roman historian who lived about the time that Jesus is said to have been crucified. He left behind seventeen volumes of writings about the period covered in the Old Testament. One of his most important works was “Antiquities of the Jews”. I quote:
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“Now Abram, having no son of his own, adopted Lot, his brother Haran's son, and his wife Sarah's brother; and he left the land of Chaldea when he was seventy-five years old, and at the command of God went into Canaan, and therein he dwelt himself, and left it to his posterity. He was a person of great sagacity, both for understanding all things and persuading his hearers, and for not being mistaken in his opinions. For that reason he began to have higher notions of virtue than others had,
and he determined to renew and to change the opinion all men happened then to have concerning God. In this he was the first that ventured to publish this notion, that there was but one true God, the Creator of the universe; and that, as to other [gods], if they contributed anything to the happiness of men, that each of them afforded it only according to His appointment, and not by their own power.”
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Prior to this time, there were many Gods. Abram was the first to publish the notion of one true universal God that today is the God of Christians and Muslims alike and therefore my subtitle: “The Day The Jews Invented God.”
I could have written “The Day Abram Invented [our] God” but I used literary license to write it the way I did.
Why have I taken the time to explain this? Because readers react according to their own experiences and prejudices and commonly misquote authors or take their work out of context to support their own convictions which has happened with “The Origin Of Faith”. There is nothing new in this but I do wish to state that I take full responsibility for what I write but not for what others do with it. That is out of my control.
It has become apparent over the past few years that some readers resent the fact that I am taking an honest look at the ancient history of the Jews. They would much prefer that I buy into the desired stereotype, which portray Jews as God’s people doing His work and being victims rather than aggressors in the doing. The problem with that is the facts simply do not support such a conclusion. Besides, there are many who do not even believe in God. What does that do to Jewish rationalization about their biblical conquests. Here is a quote from the old testament:
"And I will give unto thee, and to they seed after thee, the land wherein thou are a stranger, all the land of Canaan, for an ever-lasting possession ..."
Now read that again. This passage supposedly God talking to the Israelites, is very clear. It (1) admits the land belongs to someone else. It (2) admits the Israelistes were strangers (invaders) in the land. And it (3) states unequivocably that the Israelites now own this land for God has given it to them.
That leaves me with certain problems. First of all, in this passage, God seems to have authorized the murder of the inhabitants of the land since they obviously would resist the taking over of their homeland by invaders? He allows the murder of one group of His children by another? I don't think so.
Next, He has decreed the Jews will own the land of Canaan forever. Wow. Wonder how the current residents felt about that.
Well, I know how I feel about that: I think the guy that wrote this was a Jew and he wrote it hundreds of years after the fact. It certainly did not come from God. And by the way, remember not everyone believes in God. I wonder how they read that passage?
In the following article, I question two historical assumptions:
(1) that any single group – including the Jews - is truly God’s one chosen people and (2) that God had anything to do with the Israelite conquest of Canaan (or Palestine).
I do not think either is true. Rather, I think it was simply a matter of a superior technology running roughshod over an inferior techology, something that was to be repeated over and over again in the future. God had nothing to do with it.
I have tried to stick to facts gather from a number of sources but mainly from the Hebrew Bible. If someone would like to challenge a material fact, I invite them to leave their comments. I will be happy to read them. If someone simply has a different conclusion based on those facts and they wish to leave those, I will certainly read them also. But readers should know it would take a compelling array of fact and logic to dispel my conclusions. They were not come to lightly.
It has become apparent to me that Jews who themselves have been victims of hideous brutality and prejudice over the millennia (See “On The Matter Of Jewish Persecution”) seem to have forgotten those times when they have done much the same to others.
As you will read shortly, it is only recently that Israel has come to the position that a two-state solution to the “Palestinian question” may be the only solution possible. For fifty years, they steadfastly refused to consider that solution and that intransigence was borne of military superiority. When the Arabs had no means to strike Israel (see the wars between Israel and the Arabs), and Israel was clearly the superior military power, Israel had no reason to consider alternatives.
When suicide bombers brought the war into Israel itself, and Israeli’s suffered the pangs of war, Israel relented as would be expected.
Recently, I was shocked to hear that because of the Holocaust, this article should not have been written. I disagree with that for two reasons: (1) truth is always in order and (2) the Holocaust if it does anything exemplifies the very reason this article should have been written – it was an example of religious prejudice and hatred gone mad and it was Germans, not Arabs that were responsible. What it clearly demonstrates is how far such insanity can go. And though it was evil, it was far from the only evil man has inflicted on his fellow man throughout history. It has sadly surfaced all too often.
WWII cost the lives of 70 million people many blown to pieces with their whole families while they slept in bed. Worldwide communism, including that in China and Russia cost the lives of over 90 million people, many killed violently by their own leaders for ‘the common good’. Sound familiar?
There has been no shortage of evil in the world; yet that is not an excuse to silence thought. For some, the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki that killed 250,000 people, including many innocent women and children, were examples of evil. But then so was Pearl Harbor. So were the bombings of London and Dresden, and Tokyo and Berlin. So were the hundreds of thousands of men who died during Napoleon’s retreat from Russia. There are no battles without casualties and there are no wars without innocents dying brutally. It is all evil no matter there are times when it may seem necessary. And all such evil carries with it some ad hoc justification.
So how does this become a reason to hide from the truth? I would think the exact opposite is true. Throughout history victims and perpetrators are often the same people – albeit at different times. For example, just as the Japanese were victims of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, they were perpetrators at Pearl Harbor and earlier in China. Just as the Germans were victims in Berlin and Dresden, they were aggressors in London and Paris. What goes around comes around.
Nor have Jews always been victims. There have been times in History when Jews have been the perpetrators, the aggressors. The only difference being when they did it, they impertinently used God as their justification.
The Old Testament has story after story of Jewish invaders decimating the people of Canaan, doing the Will of God (which sounds to me very much like The Will Of Allah). I am not going to take the time here to list the individual battles all fought with God’s approval, but in each of those “cities”, thousands of innocent people were deliberately slaughtered.
Examine the Biblical story of Jericho and Joshua, the long-treasured military hero of the Ancient Jews; Joshua, the great warrior with an army somewhere between 40,000 and 100,000 depending on what source you read.
This is taken from the Old Testament: Book of Joshua – P 186.6.
“Then all the army went straight up the hill into the city and captured it. With their swords they killed everyone in the city, men and women, young and old. They also killed the cattle, sheep and donkeys. They set fire to the city and burned it to the ground along with everything [and everyone] in it.” The Bible depicts a brutal, savage, inhuman slaughter of men, women and children by Joshua. How many died? The Bible doesn’t say but if you need an army of 40,000 or more soldiers, the city you are taking is fairly large so the number of residents therein must also have been fairly large. Nevertheless, they were all sadistically slaughtered.
This grisley slaughter is treated in the Old Testament as a great ‘victory’ because God gave the Israelites permission to enter the city and kill every living thing in that city, even to the children.
God did this? Isn't God the father of all? If so, why would He condone the murder of some of His own children by others of His own children? What kind of God would do that?
It is the same with Jerusalem, a city occupied for a thousand years before the Israelistes ever showed up. According to the Bible, God didn't care about those of His children that occupied the city, instead He gave it to the Israelites with these words:
"Here, this city is yours. It's occupied so you will have to go in and kill all the men, women and children - and most of the animals - but you have my blessing. Go to it." Really? Do you believe that? I don't.
The Jews therefore went in and killed everyone that lived there and took it. And why? Because God gave it to them [even if it wasn’t His to give].
But wait? What if there is no God? What then was their justification? What then gave the Israelites the right to invade and murder as they saw fit? I'll tell you by what right: by the right of power. They
did because they
could. As I continued to read the Old Testament, I found no recrimination of the Israelites for anything they did in Canaan. All I read was the same justification: God had given permission to His chosen people the right to do whatever they wanted to whomever they wanted. It was a precedent that came back to haunt the world for millennia.
It has always been my personal belief that murder is murder and slaughter is slaughter and evil is evil and when you put a happy face on it, you are doing humanity a disservice. No matter when it happens. No matter who does it. And since I do not believe that God would take any part in such senseless brutality, the Israelites lose their probable cause.
God had nothing to do with what happened in the land of Canaan. What happened was the expansion of a migratory group that having developed a more successful technology, used it to advance their own interests. Such had happened before the Israelites appeared in history and certainly often times afterwards. God had little to do with any of it.
So what am I suggesting by all this? I am suggesting that the path that got us into today's dangerous and ugly Arab/Jew mess has been strewn with mistakes on everyone's part (including ours) and everyone should dedicate themselves to bringing the two sides together. Taking an honest look back at history might be a good first step. There are no ‘innocents’ in this story.
THE ORIGIN OF FAITH
By this time, you may be asking why I have chosen to write this article. What am I attempting to accomplish? The answer is – I don’t know. Maybe because I suspect very little of what has been written about God is actually true. Maybe it’s because I doubt the events recanted in the Old Testament ever happened or at least ever happened as described. Or perhaps it’s just because I tend to doubt most of the characters and events of the original Hebrew Bible are even real. Whatever the reason, to me the stories of the Hebrew Bible are either directly inspired by God – and therefore literally correct - or they are not. If they are not, then they are just stories, and should be treated as such. There is no middle ground.
I am not prepared to accept anything solely on faith. If a biblical character or event is presented as real, but without credible evidence to support it, then I must view it as an opinion, an assertion, or a fable - anything but a fact. Facts, by definition, are supportable by independent evidence.
Certainly, direct contacts between man and God such as are reported in the Old Testament would require an even higher level of proof because of the staggering implications of such contacts. Such proof must be clear and convincing and independent. For example, I do not accept words from the Bible as evidence to support the stories of the Bible. That would make the Bible its own authority, which it cannot be.
The guiding credo for this article will be ‘it is fine to trust but foolhardy to trust blindly’. For an example of what can happen when trust is blind, take a look at the thousand people who drank Kool-Aid laced with cyanide because the Reverend Jim Jones told them it was time for all of them to die. Or consider the brainwashed children of the Charles Manson gang who killed viciously and without purpose because their leader said he was God. Who would they do such insane things? Who would follow the leadership of such obviously deranged individuals? Who would fail to see that these men were mad? Who indeed?
The answer is people who are brainwashed. People who have been ‘indoctrinated’ to the point where all they can believe is what they are told. People who have relinquished their intellectual independence and with it their ability to think for themselves. These people had become like robots following the dictates of others.
You can see this indoctrination today in countries where religious authorities cultivate servility and obsequiousness on the part of their followers. This blind allegiance to religious authority seems to me to be the direct result of confusing man’s authority with God’s and then mistakenly bestowing on man the purview that solely belongs to God. Mixing the two is where the trouble starts. Obsequiousness is the result.
But there are still other reasons for this article. To begin with, I am concerned that we have ascribed to these ancient Biblical “texts” a status they do not deserve. We have represented them as the direct word of God when they should be seen as the highly creative, beautifully cultivated, spectacularly written works of men, so far more than thirty of them.
To me, this depictions of Bible stories as fact tends to increase the vulnerable of religion because any honest evaluation will demonstrate they are simply stories and if they can be discredited as divine, the message itself will suffer. Taken for their messages and read as the collective wisdom of the ages is far more appropriate and useful than giving them this false status as divine.
Therefore, following the dictate of giving to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s and to God, the things that are God’s, I would prefer to say that these ancient Bible “texts” were written by man ABOUT God rather than by God.
There are a number of reasons why this is so. For one, (as we will discuss further in this article), the ‘texts’ which were eventually canonized and made part of the Hebrew Bible, were unsigned and undated documents found across the deserts. Since they were not signed, no one knows who wrote them and since they were not dated no one knows when they were written. Without any information, we have no clue as to the writer’s qualifications or motivations for writing what he wrote.
Then there is the question of credibility. How could these writers have learned the things they wrote about since many of the early events described in the original Hebrew Bible took place hundreds, if not thousands, if not hundreds-of-thousands of years before the writers were even born (i.e. the beginning of the world). With no written records, no documentation, and no eyewitnesses, that would be impossible.
For years, “Divine Revelation” was the answer given. “Divine Revelation” meant that the details of the characters and events of ancient times were transmitted directly to the Biblical writer by God. The words were God’s words.
This explanation was popular until we discovered that these ancient Biblical “texts’ were written by thirty-four to fifty different writers covering hundreds if not thousands of years.
It simply wasn’t believable that God sat directly with all these different writers – over a vast span of time - and dictated to them details that they could not possible have known themselves. With that explanation discredited, we were left with no explanation whatsoever. Yet we are still expected to accept what was written on faith alone.
Another problem with the Bible, this time with the New Testament, is the story of Jesus Christ. The New Testament is based on the life and death and resurrection of Jesus Christ as told in the Gospels. Yet, despite two thousand years of searching, no one has yet uncovered any actual physical evidence that Jesus Christ even existed.
Certainly the gospel writer(s) of the New Testament couldn’t prove it because the writers didn’t know Christ. They weren’t even on the scene during the time Christ was supposed to have lived and died. (I believe the book called ‘Matthew’ was the first written some 35 years after Christ was supposed to have been crucified and the book called ‘John’ was the last, coming along 100-200 years later. Since the texts were not dated, it’s hard to know exactly but those are the accepted dates. )
So whoever it was that wrote the Gospels, they were nowhere near the scene at the time these events were supposed to have occurred. They therefore, are not qualified to bear witness to the events they reported. What they wrote was, at its very best, hearsay. None of them knew Christ or any member of his family.
To further complicate matters, the gospels – like the ancient “texts” of the Old Testament – were never signed by their authors, so we have no idea who wrote them anyway. The names Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John were arbitrarily assigned sometime in the 2nd or 3rd century – 200 years after the fact, when the Emperor Constantine offered to buy 50 copies of the Bible if it could be canonized (finalized). To ‘make the sale’, the names of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John were assigned and the copying begun. No one knows if the four gospels were actually written by one man, or two men, or three men, or four men. For all we know they could have been written by a woman or by women. We just don’t know.
In 1945, an additional gospel was found – the fifth - and this one was also given the name of an apostle. The name that was given was Thomas and this Gospel became known as ‘The Gospel of St. Thomas’. So now we have five gospels without any idea who wrote them, when they were written, why they were written, or how accurate they may or may not be. Yet much of the story of Christ is based on these works. (And if you chose to believe the Gnostic writings, there are even more gospels.)
In the 3rd century, a significant event took place, Constantine the Great became Emperor of the Roman Empire. Having recently been converted to Christianity, Constantine gave his new religion a favored place in the Empire. Together with his mother Helena and his wife Anne (both of whom became ‘Saints’), Constantine set about to find the holy places of the new religion, particularly where Christ had been crucified, buried and from which he had risen. He reasoned correctly that for a religion to be taken seriously, it needed holy places so the faithful could come and worship. But he had no idea where most of the events of the Old Testament had taken place (if they had occurred at all).
So Constantine, with his mother Helena and his wife (Queen) Ann toured the ‘Holy Land’ and picked out likely places for the events to have occurred. When he was done, these places became the Holy Places, and they remain so to this day. So in my opinion, Constantine joins Paul (St. Paul who we will discuss later in this article) as the co-founder of modern Christianity.
In the 1st century AD, a Jewish-historian-turned-Roman – Flavius Josephus – a man who wrote seventeen volumes on the history of the times – visited the towns of Nazareth, Galilee, and Jerusalem in search of the truth about Jesus. He began around 60 AD, about 30 years after the crucifixion is thought to have taken place. Following his trip, Josephus wrote that he could find no eyewitnesses to the crucifixion, no one who had known Jesus or any member of his family personally, and no one who claimed to have himself known anyone who knew Jesus or any member of his family. Nor could he find any record of this crucifixion in the official written records of the Roman Empire, despite the fact that the Romans kept very precise written records of over 250,000 such crucifixions. (There is some talk that Josephus’ original report has since been doctored by unknown religious persons to indicate Josephus may have found such evidence but most scholars agree that he wrote that he did not.) So then, where is there one note or letter, one on-the-scene book written by an eyewitness who can say HE personally knew Jesus or any member of his family? Or who witnessed Jesus in his ministry?
There is none.
This is a recurring problem with the original texts of the ancient Hebrew Bible, there simply is no way to know what is true and what is not. We don’t have to point out the lack of credibility for information passed down word-of-mouth through thousands of years by tens of thousands of people. There isn’t much. Yet that seems to be the only way the stories could possible have survived the ages.
Over the past few centuries, scholars have come to believe they have identified the writing styles of at least four of the anonymous early bible writers, so they have given them names. They are now called “J”, “E”, “P”, and “D”. That’s fine but my problem with this is that giving these unknown authors ‘names’ is very much like what happened in the second or third century with the Gospels. Are we soon to accept “J”, “E”, “P”, and “D” as we now do Matthew, Mark, Luke and John? Why would one have more credibility than the other? This reminds me of “Homer”, another fictitious name given to an unknown writer in ancient Greece. We gave “Homer” his name as we gave Matthew, Mark, Luke and John their names, but who they actually were, we don’t know.
And finally there is this: by the time Jesus was supposedly born in the 1st century AD, writing and writers were commonplace. Far different from the previous millennia when many of the ancient “texts” were written, by the time Jesus was born and the later gospels were written, writers existed in great numbers throughout the world (Homer, Aristotle, Plato, Socrates to name just a few.)
Isn’t it strange that in this time of great writings, there is nothing from anyone who was present in Jerusalem at the time of Christ other than the anonymous Gospels? Is it really believable that Jesus, unlike so many other celebrities of history, kept no records or diaries or notebooks filled with his thoughts and beliefs? What about his family, both local and extended? Some of them had to know how to write, wasn’t this story of sufficient importance to them to record it somewhere?
And what about someone in the Roman hierarchy that kept such detailed records. Wouldn’t they have thought this worthy of recording?
And what about the believers who were present at the crucifixion - the believers who must have been angry or saddened by what had happened - didn’t any one of them think to write anything for posterity about this cataclysmic highly personal event? It would appear not. There is nothing. No writings, sketches or drawings of any of this, none of Jesus staggering under the weight of his cross, none of the crucifixion, none of Mary grieving at the foot of her son’s cross.
It defies explanation. There had to be artists there, artists have existed since the time of the cave art 6,000 years in the past. Yet no one produced even one rudimentary drawing of what he was witnessing. This leads me to doubt it ever happened. Certainly if it happened today, there would be a thousand pictures and a thousand artists’ renditions of the event not to mention countless books.
Instead, there is nothing.
In 1947, in a remote desert area east of Jerusalem but west of the River Jordan, a Sheppard boy looking for a lost goat wandered into an ancient cave and discovered vases stuffed with parchments. In time, his discovery led to further discoveries in eleven additional caves. These ancient writings, similar in many ways to the “texts” that were “canonized” in the Jewish Bible, became known as The Dead Sea Scrolls. They became one of the most important documentary discoveries of all time.
The Dead Sea Scrolls were written in a unique fashion. The writing on the scrolls was without capitalization, punctuation, or sentence structure and one character simply followed another in a long, unbroken string. It took scholars years to convert these scrolls to a readable format. It was determined that the writers were Jews, probably in religious exile sometime around 60 BC about the time of the conflict between the Romans and the Maccabees (166 BC-63 BC), or shortly thereafter.
The texts were divided into two sections. First were copies of many of the books that had been canonized into the Hebrew Bible (Old Testament) by Alexander the Great. Second was a series of 600 texts called “Sectarian Texts” which were original and which concerned themselves with the temporal affairs of Judah during the early days of the Roman occupation.
This find excited the religious community because herein might be found the first-ever non-biblical references to Jesus of Nazareth and his crucifixion and death, something that had been sought for over 2,000 years. Unfortunately, that was not to be the case and fifty-five years later, (2003), the task of translation was ended with no such reference having been found.
By the latter part of the 1st century BC, writing was prolific. During these times, certain authors began to write seriously about their ancient history. But without any written records or documents from those times, and without eyewitnesses, one view of that history had pretty much the same validity (or lack thereof) as another and for that reason, it is hard today to know what may be fact and what may be fiction.
Even a casual reader can see that the Bible is filled with inconsistencies and discontinuations. It is as though one author never read what the other authors had written – and that’s exactly true.
An example of the inconsistencies of the Old Testament can be found in The Torah, the Five Books of Moses. At one time, it was believed that Moses wrote these books as God dictated them. Now we know that more than one man was involved in the writing of The Torah so the God-to-Moses theory is gone. In one of the chapters of the Five Books of Moses, the writer tells about Noah and his Arc. In this text, the writer says Noah took with him on his arc, two of every kind of animal on earth. Then in a subsequent chapter, written by a second writer, where the same event is described, it tells us that Noah took on his boat, two of every type of UNCLEAN animal but seven of those that were CLEAN. These accounts are obviously quite different. Lots more animals in the second version. What does all this tell us? Well, it tells me that different writers write differently, and that God obviously had no part in any of this reporting or both writers would have reported exactly the same thing.
At this time, I wish to examine the people who wrote all those “ancient texts” that comprise the Jewish Bible – the Syrians who invaded and eventually conquered Canaan – and then Jerusalem for a brief time - God’s chosen people (according to them) - the “Israelites”. As we explore these texts, you need to keep in mind that there is little or no evidence to support these stories although there is some archeological evidence to support certain cataclysmic events that did happen in ancient times and which may have acted as the basis for later embellishment.
Another thing to keep in mind is that Jews wrote these ancient texts for Jews and about Jews and that might account for the fact that Jews are God’s chosen people. Had the Irish written these stories, perhaps THEY would have been God’s chosen people – but they didn’t and so they aren’t.
Have you ever heard the phrase, distance lends enchantment? Well that may be the case with the Ancient Jews. Let’s take a look at them and see if they truly sound like they had a personal relationship with God.
As the story goes (Exodus), a million Jews and their animals make their way across the torrid Sinai desert on their way to the ‘Promised Land’. (See: Stories of the Bible – Truth or Fiction). When they reach Mt. Sinai, Moses leaves them and goes up the mount to meet with God. When he returns, what does he find? He finds the people engaging in a drunken orgy. These people who have known God personally on this terrible trip across the vast and desolate Sinai desert, easily reverted back to worshipping idols and having orgies and all in just thirty days. (Moses was on the mount for thirty days.) Now how believable it this?
If God was such a big part of their lives, I cannot believe they would turn against him and return to their evil ways and in just thirty days. While knowing how much they needed him and knowing he was on that nearby mount with Moses where he couldn’t help but find out what was going on. I don’t think so. I don’t believe it ever happened. God didn’t meet Moses on the mount, there was no orgy, and very likely there was no Moses. And most certainly, there were no million Jews camped out in the blazing hot desert for forty years, orgies or no.
Nor was this the only time the Bible says the Jews reverted back to their old lustful habits. They also did it following the death of King Solomon, as their nation was falling apart. It seems lust – not to mention graven idols – were an old habit that was hard for Ancient Jews to break.
As for the sex, the Bible seems to have a sex story on just about every other page. If you don’t believe me, take the story of Lot, and Sodom and Gomorrah. It seems the Lord sent two angels in street clothes (Americanized version) to investigate reports that the people of Sodom and Gomorrah were violating the law. So the two Angels come down dressed in street clothes and, according to the Bible, they are standing on the outskirts of town when Lot approaches them. Finding that they are angels of the Lord, Lot invites them to dinner. At first they demur, but in time, they agree. That night, after dinner, as the men are readying for bed, there is a loud noise outside. Lot went to investigate. Outside are the men of Sodom and the boys.
“Where are the men that dined with you tonight,” they ask Lot, “send them out, the men of Sodom want to have sex with them.”
Lot comes outside and closes the door. “Look,” he pleads, “you cannot do such a wicked thing. I have two daughters who are still virgins. Let me bring them out and you can do with them, as you will, but leave these men alone. They are my guests and I must protect them.”
But the men respond angrily. “Who are you to tell us what we can and cannot do. Give us the men!”
At this point, the Angels pull Lot back into the house and strike all the men blind so they cannot find the door. (Genesis 19.4)
Now I ask you, how much do you find believable in this account? God has to send Angels to find out what’s going on? I thought God knew everything. And what do these Angels look like? Do they have wings? Do they look like men? Are they in street clothes? I didn’t think anyone even wore clothes in Heaven, but I guess they do since the new English version of the Bible says they were in ‘street clothes’. And why would Angels need food or rest? And what about the men and boys who gather – according to the story - in front of Lot’s house because they “want to know the Angels?” It says the whole town was out there. Was the whole town homosexual?
But the best part is where Lot – the father - offers this mob his two virgin daughters to do with as they will, if they just leave his Angel guests alone? Luckily, the Angels step in and strike the entire town’s male population blind so they can’t find the front door and that resolves the issue, but would a father do such a thing? I doubt it. To me, the whole story is utter nonsense. None of it ever happened. However, what might have happened is this: a major cataclysmic event might have taken place a thousand years before and that event was later made the basis for the Bible story which then introduced God into the mix giving the story its Biblical credence. That makes more sense to me than anything.
That story is just one more of a dozen equally outrageous and unbelievable sexually oriented stories to be found in the Bible. It seems to me, the ancient writers knew very well that sex would sell, so they used it every chance they got.
But there are other problems with a literal translation of the Bible. For example, throughout the texts, the writers refer to Israel as “their ancient homeland”. Now when did that happen? When exactly did Israel become the ancient homeland of the Jews? Or is this a case where if you say something long enough it becomes true. Let’s examine the facts.
The Jewish Patriarchs are supposed to have entered Canaan from Syria somewhere around 1900 BC. Seven hundred and ten years later (1250 BC), they were at the gates of Jerusalem. They lay siege to Jerusalem and it took another two hundred and twenty years before that city fell (1030 BC). The victor was Saul, later to become the first of the three great Israeli Kings – Saul, David and Solomon. (This chronology is taken directly from the Bible.)
Jerusalem had a long-time indigenous population when the Jews invaded in 1030 BC. These indigenous people had been there at least seven hundred years and by some accounts, as long as 6,000 years. The point is the place wasn’t empty, people were living there when the Jewish invaders showed up.
So the Jews attacked and took control of Jerusalem. They conquered the city by force and then occupied it as conquerors from 1030 BC until the Kingdom of Israel fell apart about 430 years later (about 600 BC) when they were overrun by the first of a series of invaders. So the Jews were in control for about four hundred and thirty years.
Following this period, the Jews did not return to Israel until 163 BC when the Maccabees re-captured Jerusalem. This newest Jewish occupation (why shouldn’t I call it an occupation, they WERE invaders) lasted just 100 years. In 63 BC, the Romans defeated the Jews and took control of Jerusalem from them.
Adding the latest 100 years to the former 430 years, we see that the Jews were in control of Jerusalem for just 530 years out of a total of 1,900 years. That’s not very long at all. The rest of all that time, someone else ruled Jerusalem including the Palestinians who were there when the Jews invaded in 1030 BC.
But there’s more. Following the defeat of the Maccabees in 63 BC, the Jews never again regained control of Jerusalem. Once vanquished, they remained vanquished for the next 1,914 years until the year 1914 AD. It was at this time that a political ‘agreement’ was forced upon the Palestinians by the League of Nations in 1914 AD (The Balfour Agreement) which allowed Jews to return to Israel (Palestine).
You can see that, for the better part of two millennia, the Jews had no presence in the Holy Land. That means out of the four thousand years between 1900 BC to 1914
AD, the Jews occupied the “Holy Land” for just 530 years which is only 12% of the total. So tell me, how does this qualify them to call Jerusalem their ancient homeland? It isn’t any such thing. Syria is their ancient homeland; Jerusalem was a captured city that they occupied for a relatively brief time, as conquerors. Just like so many others.
Not long ago, there was great excitement in both the religious and academic communities when a certain “Ussery” was found in Israel that bore the inscription “here lies James, brother of Jesus, Son of Joseph”. It was acclaimed worldwide as the first physical evidence ever found that proved the existence of a member of the Holy Family, James being widely regarded as the brother of Jesus. (A Ussery is a small box in which the bones of departed family members were kept in the 1st and 2nd centuries. Once the body had been interred for a certain period of time, the burial box was opened and the bones removed and placed into the Ussery.)
Unfortunately, upon further investigation, the whole thing proved to be a hoax and they are still looking for any evidence that might tend to prove the existence of Jesus or his family.
To me, the stories in the Bible – Old and New Testament alike – seem more allegorical than real. They are like Greek and Roman mythology – beautifully written entertainment with a message.
Could some of these Biblical people actually have existed? I suppose so, after all, the Jews in the 9th century BC did have ancestors. Could some of these stories that have developed around these ancestors be in the nature of “urban legends”? I suppose that’s possible too. Could there be a snippet of truth in some of them. Of course but it doesn’t matter. Whether they are urban legends or rumors or simply old wives’ tales, one thing is true: there is no real evidence to support any of them.
We are now going to switch our attention from area religion to area politics. We are going to review the history of the ancient Jews - from their on-going search for a homeland (after leaving Syria) - to the conquests of Palestine 1030 BC - to the political establishment of a Jewish homeland in 1948. Following chapters will deal with the stories of the Bible to determine their credibility.
BIBLICAL CHRONOLOGY OF THE JEWISH EXPERIENCE IN PALESTINE
It strikes me as an anomaly that history knows the Romans as invaders for their conquest of Jerusalem in the first century before Christ, but does not view the Jews in that same light for their conquest of that same city nine hundred years earlier. The justification for the one rather than the other would seem to rest with God.
Following is a brief synopsis of the Jewish experience in the Land of Canaan (Palestine):
BIBLICAL CHRONOLOGY OF THE OCCUPATION OF PALESTINE
1. A band of Syrians leave their homeland in 1900 BC. They and their progeny are eventually to comprise the twelve tribes of Israel.
2. The band wanders into Canaan and Southward for 200 years.
3. Eventually the band wanders into Egypt where they are captured.
4. The Jews are held in slavery in Egypt for 410 years until they are released in 1290 BC.
5. Moses leads them across the Sinai desert for forty years, reaching the outskirts of the city of Jerusalem in 1250 BC.
6. The Jews lay siege to Jerusalem. The siege lasts 210 years.
7. The Jews capture Jerusalem under Saul who becomes their first King.
8. King Saul, in an effort to revitalize their religion, appoints a High Priest to instruct the people. Saul reigns for 20 years and is eventually succeeded by his son, David, in 1010 BC.
9. Deciding that one High Priest isn’t enough, David appoints a second. There are now two and each Priest develops his own following. Each is also jealous of the other. David reigns for forty years and has two sons. Not knowing who is going to succeed David, each of the High Priests aligns himself with one son. Eventually, Solomon is selected to rule. When he gets into power, his High Priest drives the other High Priest and his followers out of the city and into exile. The Northern territory now became the Kingdom of Israel.
10. Things do not go well in either Israel or Judah following the death of Solomon in 930 BC. In Israel, there is turmoil as one King after another, comes to power and is slain. Over two centuries no less than sixteen Kings come and go, ten of them murdered.
11. In Judah (Jerusalem), things are not much better. Following the death of Solomon, the people lose their new religion and idolatry returns. One weak King after another is deposed, and “The Law” all but disappears.
12. From the North, an invading army of the Assyrian Empire sweeps downs and destroys the nation of Israel, killing almost everyone. (These are the lost tribes of Israel.)
13. In Judah, the followers of the second high priest have been driven into exile. In exile, they write their own set of ‘texts” and these are discovered many years later and ‘appended’ to the Jewish Bible.
14. In the later part of the 7th century BC, the first of a series of invaders conquers Judah (South Kingdom) killing many Jews. From this point on, the Jews are gone from Palestine except for a brief period of 100 years (163 BC – 63 BC) when they retook Judah prior to the Roman invasion. The Jews would not return to Palestine until 1914, almost 2,000 years later.
THE POLITICS OF THE HOLY LAND
The Bible says Abram and his followers left lower Syria around 1900 BC to journey into the land of Canaan. How many there were, why they felt compelled to leave their homes, and why they wanted to go to Canaan are not explained. The little band of travelers (later to be known as Israelites) wandered down the coastline through The Land of Canaan for over 200 years, eventually landing in Egypt where they were promptly captured and imprisoned as slaves. According to the Jewish Bible (The Old Testament), this occurred in or about the year 1700 BC.
The Jews remained slaves in Egypt for over 400 years – from about 1700 BC to 1290 BC. Despite being in slavery, the Jews did very well. They increased their numbers many times over, and they became wealthy in the process.
As a result of a titanic struggle between God and the King of Egypt which lasted seven years, the Jews were finally ordered out of Egypt in or about 1290 BC. Moses led the exiles, 600,000 men along with their wives and families and animals, into the blazing hot sands of the Sinai desert where they were to wander for the next forty years in what historically has become known as “The Exodus”.
One thing to note about the Jews in slavery (as the Hebrew Bible tell us). They didn’t seem to suffer all that much. For example, one Jewish slave – Moses - became a Prince of Egypt. Another Jewish slave, Joseph, rose to great power in Egypt becoming advisor to the King. The rest of the Jews increased their number (and personal wealth) many times over. So if this was slavery, it certainly was a different kind of slavery. (Keep in mind, all the information we have about this time of slavery comes from the hands of Jewish writers of the 8th century and beyond, some four hundred years after the fact. How they knew any of this is a real question, and exactly how much of it is true – if any of it is true - is anybody’s guess. )
So the Jews were driven out of Egypt and headed out into the blazing hot, Sinai desert where they wandered for forty years. Eventually they arrived at the gates of Jerusalem around 1250 BC and began a siege which was to last another two hundred and ten years. Finally, Saul was victorious and the Jews entered the city in 1030 BC. (Biblical chronology) Along the way to Jerusalem, Moses met with God and the stone tablets bearing the Ten Commandments were given to him. (The tablets have long since disappeared, if they indeed ever existed.)
The siege of Jerusalem successful, the victorious leader, Saul, was named King. He was to be the first of the so-called three “great” Jewish Kings. The most important other fact is this: The Jews kept insisting that GOD was on THEIR side. That God preferred THEM over all his other CHILDREN. And that most assuredly rankled all of God's other children. How could it not???
Altogether, the three Kings ruled Jerusalem as conquerors for a hundred years. Following this period, there were a large number of minor Kings until finally Jerusalem was conquered by outsiders in 587 BC and remained in the hands of one invader after another for the next 424 years.
In 163 BC, a strong Jewish family – the Maccabees – organized an army and attacked Jerusalem once again. This time, they were victorious and for the first time in almost 500 years, the Jews were back in control of the city of Jerusalem. Their victory was short-lived however and after just 100 years, a mighty force swept them out of power. That force was the Roman Empire. The Maccabee’s had ruled Judah from 163 BC to 63 BC. During the battle, the Roman Army all but exterminated the Jews killing more than 300,000 of them. They then changed the name of the province from Judah to Judea.
Looking back at history, it would appear that the Jews controlled all or parts of Jerusalem on two separate occasions for a total of what appears to be about 530 years. (1030 BC to 587 BC and then again from 163 BC to about 63 BC). The rest of the time, the Palestinians or a series of conquerors, ruled the city.
With so little tenure as rulers of Jerusalem, it is difficult for me to see how this land could be called the Jew’s “ancient homeland”. From what I can see, the Jews were just one of a series of invaders who occupied this land for a time, and if they really had an “ancient homeland”, the closest thing to it would probably be Syria from whence they came.
From 63 BC to the year 1914 AD - a period of almost two thousand years - the Jewish population of Palestine was very nearly non-existent. So small was it, that in the year 1914 AD, Jews represented less than 6% of the total population of Palestine and owned less than 4% of the land. They were truly what they had always been – strangers in a foreign land.
But dramatic changes were on the way that would improve the lot of the Jew’s in Palestine. Palestine was about to be invaded again, but this time not by enemies, but rather, by those who professed to be its friends.
Following the breakup of the Ottoman Empire, Palestine had become a protectorate of the League of Nations, which in turn appointed Great Britain to enforce their mandate. While the stated purpose of this action was to ensure the security of the small nation, the real purpose was to ensure the safe flow of vital oil from East to West.
Many people in later years would attempt to justify what happened next to Palestine using the argument that history is filled with conquests, as powerful nations rise and fight wars in which lands change ownership and demarcation. That certainly would seem to be the case with Palestine. In the 1st millennia and over the next thousand years, no less than twenty-three separate invaders conquered and ruled the Holy Land - the Jews being one of them.
But that was not what happened this time. This time there were no wars of conquest - no foreign troops rumbling through Palestinian as the Romans had done two thousand years ago. Rather, the Palestinian land was about to be stolen from the Palestinian people by the very forces that were ostensibly there to protect them.
In what was a planned, illegal, and well-orchestrated land grab, and with the collusion and acquiescence of the (1) League of Nations (2) the International Zionist movement (3) the United States and (4) Great Britain, the Palestinians were about to be robbed of their birthright – their land.
These forces, later to be joined by two Democratic presidents, Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry S. Truman both of whom were indebted to American Jewry for its continued political support of the Democrat party - came together to affect one of the greatest coup de grace in history.
The story of:
‘PALESTINE’
From the assumed Birth of Christ until 1914 AD, a period of nearly 2,000 years, the Jews NEVER regained control of Palestine or Jerusalem. Instead, they were scattered throughout the Middle East and Europe – particularly in Spain – where their numbers once again increased, as they prospered.
As the region of the Middle East faced a new beginning following the demise of the Ottoman Empire, the Jews had no appreciable numbers in Palestine. At the turn of the century, only 6% of the population of Palestine was Jewish and they owned less than 4% of Palestinian land. They were a non-factor in the politics of the area.
By 1914, Palestine had become a protectorate of the League of Nations (forerunner of today’s United Nations). The Ottoman Empire had broken up leaving many countries vulnerable to attack and the task of protecting Palestine was given to Great Britain.
It was also at this time, that the worldwide Zionist movement was beginning to raise its voice in favor of a “permanent homeland” for the Jews.
European Jews were coming under increasing political pressure to abandon their holdings and get out of Europe or face liquidation. The Zionists were paying close attention to the political turmoil in Eastern Europe and knew it was only a matter of time before the situation turned ugly. They turned on the heat and began to work feverishly to find a place that would serve as a refuge for European Jews before it was too late.
Eventually the Zionists turned their attention to the Middle East, concentrating on Palestine. Long called the “ancient homeland” of the Jews (mostly by the Jews), the Zionists began exerting political pressure to open up Palestine for Jewish immigration.
The Palestinians, of course, saw the Jews as their ancient enemies and were not anxious to open up their borders to immigration. But they had little to say. Not only were the Zionists a rich and powerful international pressure group, but their counterparts around the world and in the United States were also rich and powerful. Together they exerted tremendous pressure on the United States, Great Britain, and the League of Nations to do something to save the European Jews.
(It is important to note here that the European Jews were indeed in trouble and the world recognized the need to find a safe harbor for them, and quickly. So there was more than just political and financial pressure brought to bear on this question: there was also a strong moral force working on all the participants. Still, the land being sought by the Zionists did not belong to the League of Nations – it belonged to Palestine. When taken against their will, it was effectively stolen.)
Nevertheless, in 1914 the League of Nations entered into an agreement with Palestine – over the objections of the Palestinians – which allowed that a small number of Jewish immigrants would be allowed to relocate to Palestine. The agreement specifically called for the resettling of a LIMITED number of Jews in Palestine, not to exceed 10% of the total Palestinian population. Having no choice, the Palestinians eventually agreed to the terms of the Agreement.
Known as the Balfour Declaration, the agreement was adopted in 1914 AD and for a while, it was vigorously enforced. So much so, that as late as 1926 – twelve years later - the Jewish population in Palestine was still under the proscribed 10%. The limited immigration has proceeded cautiously but successfully.
But things took a turn for the worse in Europe and Jews came under increasing pressure to abandon their assets and leave their countries. Rumblings of anti-Semitism reached a fever pitch in Europe and the international Zionists feared a Jewish bloodbath in the making.
Pulling out all the stops, the Zionists increased their pressure to find room for more Jewish immigrants in Palestine. An international clamor ensued – spurred by the Zionists and aided by their American Jewish compatriots – to force Palestine to accept additional Jews.
The years from 1926-1931 passed agonizingly, with each year showing an increase in the anti-Semitism of Eastern Europe. Finally, when a German by the name of Adolph Hitler assumed complete power in Germany, and promptly announced his “solution to the Jewish problem”, panic set in. Hitler informed Jewish Germans that if they didn’t leave Germany, they would be subjected to internment in prison camps. If they did chose to leave, their property and money would be confiscated by the State. It was obvious the dire predictions of the Zionists, were about to come to pass.
The plight of the Jews in Europe had become desperate – they had to get out, and they had to get out fast. Facing this mounting crisis, and without consulting with the Palestinians whose land was being taken, the limits on Jewish immigration as prescribed by the Balfour Declaration was abandoned and Jews immigrated into Palestine in ever-increasing numbers. In America, Franklin D. Roosevelt was elected President of the United States.
By the late thirties, it was all over but the shouting. The percentage of Jews now living in Palestine without the approval of the Palestinians had grown to almost 35% from the original 4%, with more coming in every day. It was a perfect solution for the world’s Jews. They escaped the Russians and the Germans –they were establishing what they had always wanted, a homeland - and they were going back to Israel. All their hopes and expectations had been realized.
By 1940, the Jewish immigrants – called an “occupation force” by both Palestinian and Arab nations - had swelled to 44% of the country and the Jews immediately began to make their presence permanent. They began setting up various operations such as collective farms, defense perimeters, military outposts, and agencies that had all the trappings of a permanent occupation. The Jews were here and they were going to stay – even if they had to fight to do so. They began to prepare for war.
By the year 1948, the stage was set for the conflict. Jews now numbered more than half the population of Palestine. They were accumulating money, military equipment, and power and they were ready to make their move. With the consent of the United States and they new United Nations (but not Great Britain), the Jews declared the establishment of the new Jewish State of Israel - right in the heart of Palestine. The State of Israel was established and the doors were thrown open to worldwide Jewish immigration. The Balfour Agreement was dead and buried and the Western world welcomed a new nation: the nation of Israel.
(At this time, Great Britain was entertaining serious doubts about what they had done to Palestine. After all, the English Government had been named ‘protector’ for Palestine and they knew the terms of the Balfour Declaration, and they knew the limits on immigration had been illegally violated. They felt they – along with the United States – had violated a sacred trust.)
In 1947, they (Great Britain) lodged a formal complaint with the United States stating that the deal creating Israel was nothing but a political payoff to American and International Jews who had supported Democrats Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry S. Truman in their campaigns for the American presidency. They announced they would not recognize the new nation of Israel.
But it was too late, no one cared. The English Prime Minister was harshly reminded about what the US had done for England in WWII, and his objection was brushed aside. In 1948, the state of ISRAEL was born.
Great Britain, still feeling pangs of conscience and pique, refused to offer the new state recognition and, in fact, did not do so until January 1949 when the Labor Cabinet finally offered ‘de facto recognition’ to the new state followed by full recognition in April of 1950. During all of this, Israel had a strong ally in London, British war hero and former Prime Minister Winston Churchill.
Israel had arrived. The Jews had a homeland at last.
When someone asked the new Israeli Prime Minister David Ben Gorion how he thought the Arabs and the Palestinians would react to this fate accompli, the Israeli Prime Minister replied, “the old will die and the young will forget”.
He was half-right, the old DID die but unfortunately, the YOUNG did not forget and because of that miscalculation, the bloodshed continues to this very day.
Two wars were fought between Jews and Arabs immediately following the establishment of the State of Israel, and the Jews were victorious in both. These victories firmly established the State of Israel as a permanent part of what was formerly called Palestine.
Hatred is certainly a terribly destructive thing and the hatred of the Arabs for the Jews is no exception. Yet, reviewing history, you can see where some of this hatred is justified. It may be self-destructive, but in their eyes, it is justified.
Lest anyone reading this be deluded into thinking that I am suggesting the Jews pack up and leave Israel and give the land back to the Arabs, nothing could be further from the truth. Expansion of superior technologies over inferior technologies is the way of the world. It has happened over and over again back into the millennia.
Therefore, I would not suggest Isreal abandon it's new homeland any more than I would suggest America give back its land to the Indians. What is done is done and Israel is not the only country to have been created by duplicity, coercion and/or force.
What I do suggest, however, is that all parties examine the past and try to understand the history of this area – understand the heavy-handed invasion by the Jews of a land that was their's solely as a military conquest - and understand the political complicity of the United States in the ‘Rape of Palestine’. The formation of the Jewish State was NOT a military conquest or a conquest of technologisa (which is "normal") but a political "back room job".
A good beginning might be if we, the United States, and the Jews in America and Israel, would stand up and say: “Mea Culpa, Mea Culpa, Mea Maxima Culpa”. We were wrong. We were wrong. We were most grievously wrong. Let us make amends.
Then perhaps we could open the door to a new dialogue and to lasting peace.
In closing the political side of this Article, let me say this. The Jews are an amazing group of people. Throughout history, when given the chance to do so, they have excelled. They are leaders in almost every field with more successful people per capita that almost any other group on earth. Why this has come to be, I don’t really know, but maybe it’s just a case of turning weakness into strength. Not having a “homeland”, being universally defiled and despised, having to start over and over again, perhaps this has made the Jews stronger, more driven to succeed than other races. Whatever the reason, they have proven themselves to be over achievers.
But perhaps even more amazing, and perhaps without any intention to do so, the Jews have given the world a Bible and a God whom they created for themseves. As many as three quarters of the world’s population now worship the Jewish God, Jehovah, the so-called “King of the Jews”, a God I believe is largely the product of the vivid imagination of a very creative and very persuasive people. The Jews.
The next section is called: “Stories Of The Bible – Truth Or Fiction?”
Again, please excuse whatever redundancies that may be encountered.
Introduction
Question: Who wrote the stories (‘texts’) of The Old Testament?
Answer: The Jews.
Question: For who were they written?
Answer: For the Jewish people.
Question: About who were they written?
Answer: They were written about the Jewish people.
The Jewish Bible was written BY Jews, FOR Jews, and ABOUT Jews. It would be well to remember that as you read.
Two otherworld “places” were introduced by religion into our consciousness sometime around the 1st century. One is Heaven and the other is Hell. Heaven is a place where good people go as a reward for a good life, there to bask in the presence of God forever. Hell is a place where bad people go as punishment for a bad life, there to suffer pain and banishment forever. These are the simplest definitions.
But are these places real? Do they really exist? How in the world did we ever learn about them if they only exist AFTER we die? Who went up there (or down there), looked around and decided to come back and tell us all about it? Who could have? After all, if you have to be dead to go there, how did we learn about them?
The same is true about Lucifer the fallen Angel who became difficult in Heaven and as punishment, was tossed out but given his own Kingdom that we call Hell.
How did WE hear of this story? Who told us about this trouble in Paradise? Do we, who are living, have reporters up there to watch over what’s going on, and then report back to us?
As the story goes, the Archangel Lucifer got into trouble and had to be punished. What kind of trouble he got into, we don’t know because we weren’t there. Nobody who is alive is allowed in Heaven because it’s for dead people. Nevertheless, we are told that Lucifer got into trouble with God and had to be punished.
Right here, you should have put that book down and found something else to do because this is scary. DISCONTENT IN HEAVEN? LABOR UNREST? How is this possible? Doesn‘t it fly in the face of everything you were ever taught? If everyone who is saved is going to bask contentedly forever in the light of God, why didn’t Lucifer bask? What was his problem? And if he had a problem in Heaven, although he was basking in the presence of God, wouldn’t that tell you that OTHERS might also have a problem? That others might not be content to simply bask in His presence for all eternity? And wouldn’t that shatter the whole concept?
I think it would. After all, there isn’t anything to do in Heaven except bask in the light of His presence. If that doesn’t do it for you, I would think you could have a very big problem.
But don’t worry about it because none of it is true. No one came back to life to tell us about the confrontation between Lucifer and God or about Heaven and Hell either. The whole thing is the result of someone’s vivid imagination. It reminds me of a rather bad James Bond movie.
The truth is, there is no Heaven and there is no Hell and there most assuredly is no Devil. These things were invented right here on earth for a very practical reason: to frighten LIVING people like you and me into doing what we are told. And for all you devil worshippers, you are making asses of yourself because there is no such thing as the devil to worship. The devil doesn’t exist.
(How does this nonsense survive anyway?)
And if that isn’t enough for you, take a minute to think about the punishment God supposedly meted out to His fallen Angel, Lucifer.
According to the story, GOD got so angry at Lucifer that He set him up in his own business and gave him the power to seduce God’s children away from him. Now you have to admit that makes a lot of sense. God punishes this guy by setting him up in his own business – the Kingdom of Hell – and giving him the second most powerful job in all of Creation - a job where he can steal souls from God. Hmmm. Somehow this concept of punishment eludes me. But maybe it’s just me.
There are other inconsistencies that bother me. Hell is supposed to be a place where you go if you are bad, to burn in hellfire to suffer for all eternity, right? Well, maybe, but not necessarily. Again, I have some doubts.
A soul has no physical property. It has no body, no skin, and with no body, it has no brain. The soul is spiritual, not physical. Your soul is your spirit.
On the other hand, fire is a very physical thing. If it is to hurt, it must be real. And if it is real, it will need a fuel that it can burn. So if Hell is going to be a fire that burns for all eternity, what exactly is the fuel that it uses? What is this fuel that will burn but never BURN UP? A consumable fuel with a source that will NEVER be exhausted? Don’t know? Can’t imagine? Well, me neither. But let’s go on.
Assuming this to be true and that Hell is a real place, what is supposed to happen to the soul that is sent there? It is supposed to burn forever, right? That’s its punishment. But since the soul is spiritual rather than physical - it has no skin to burn up and no brain to register pain – so how can it suffer? It cannot feel anything because it has NO physical senses. There is nothing to feel pain with. So what’s the big deal about being sent to hell? Without a body, you can’t feel anything anyway.
On the other hand, if your soul is actual physical, and if the fire is actually real, then your soul would certainly burn and that would cause great pain. But for how long? If the soul has a physical presence, if it has a body and a brain, then maybe it might burn and it might cause excruciating pain. But, for how long? Certainly not for eternity, it would be burned up long before that, I’d say in about three seconds.
You can’t have it both ways. If the soul is physical and the fire is real, there would be pain but it would last three seconds and that would be it. Your soul (or your body) would be instantly cremated and that would end the punishment. You are dead, burnt to a crisp, and gone. End of story. So much for being punished for all eternity.
It doesn’t take much to see the nonsense in all of these stories. All you have to do is set aside your indoctrination and think for yourself for a few minutes. They all fall apart rather quickly. Religions depend on ignorance and blind faith to exist. They say it, you believe it, or they have no chance. There is no Heaven and there is no Hell and if there were, you wouldn’t know about it anyway because you are not dead. All it is, is the church’s way of establishing reward and punishment to try to keep its people in line. But none of it is true.
Now it is time to examine “The Old Testament”, those ancient “texts” written by anonymous authors with stories that purportedly go back thousands of years. I am going to examine a few of these ancient stories to see if they make any more sense than what we have looked at so far. If they do, I will be surprised.
I call this section: Stories of the Bible – Truth or Fiction.
STORIES OF THE BIBLE - Truth or Fiction?
Although the Rig-Veda is thought by some to be the oldest writing known to man, the Old Testament ‘texts’ are almost as old and far more influential. While the Rig-Veda has remained local in its influence, the Old Testament writings of the Bible have profoundly affected the affairs of men around the globe.
As discussed earlier, the 1st millennia seemed to be a fertile time for writers around the world, and in that period, many ‘texts’ were written about Jewish history, Jewish traditions, and what was then known as “The Law” viz. a body of rules and regulations that governed Jewish life.
A number of these “texts” were found in Israel and later translated (canonized) and incorporated into “The Hebrew Bible”. They are now known as “The Old Testament”. Later, still others were found but were not translated because of the high cost involved in translation. These were added to the Hebrew Bible as an addendum. (Unfortunately, these additional “texts” have since disappeared and are now known as “The Lost Texts of Israel”.)
What is fascinating about these texts is the status they have acquired over the centuries. After all, we don’t know who wrote them, we don’t know why they were written, we don’t know the status of the individual writers and we don’t know whether the stories they recite have any basis in fact. All this uncertainty makes it very difficult to place a value on what was written.
Since the writers weren’t alive at the time of the stories, and since there were no written records they could possibly have researched, the stories had to come from word-of-mouth repetitions, ancient gossip, ‘tradition’, or what we today call urban legends. How much of any of them were true is anybody’s guess.
The one thing that is certain, however, is that there is no evidence to speak of that supports any of the events or characters they wrote about. Nor could there be. The writers came along many hundreds of years – some as much as a thousand years - after most of the events they wrote about had occurred. And as we just mentioned, there were no written documents they could consult, no letters, no notes from the principals, no anything - so all they had to rely on was superstition, hearsay, and stories that had been passed down – and embellished - for generations. That and their own imagination (which I believe they used freely).
But the one unquestioned truth is this: To date, there has been no independent archeological or empirical evidences that any of the Patriarchs (or events) of the Old Testament ever existed. Maybe one day they will find such evidence, but so far, they have been unsuccessful despite diligent searches over 2,000 years by both religious and secular organizations. All we have to go on are the anonymous ‘texts” of the Bible.
It is for this reason that we are advised we must take so much of the Bible on “Faith”, because that’s all there is, there isn’t any evidence. But believing things that can’t be proven is never a good idea. It leaves you wide open to chicanery.
Take a moment and think of the things you have been asked to believe on faith. Stories, mostly from the Bible, without a shred of evidence to support them, stories that defy both logic and human experience. (Many of these will be examined in more detail later in this Article.)
We are asked to accept on Faith that God came down to earth and talked one-on-one with Moses on a mountaintop. We are asked to believe that, although obviously there is no evidence to support it. What is significant is Moses never said it; Moses didn't leave a single note or letter about this experience or any other. It is an unknown, unidentified writer a thousand years after the fact, who said it.
We are asked to accept on Faith the existence of two nether worlds that no one has ever seen: Heaven and Hell. Since no living person has ever seen them, how can we know they exist? And where did the story of the fallen angel – Lucifer – come from? Did someone come down from Heaven to tell us what went on up there?
We are asked to accept on Faith that two stone tablets etched with the Ten Commandments were dictated to Moses by God and were promptly lost? Can you believe that God dictated them to Moses and can you believe that anything so priceless and so revered would ever be destroyed or lost?
We are asked to accept on Faith that God sent his Angels down to murder thousands of innocent Egyptian babies because the Pharaoh wouldn’t release His people (the Jews) from slavery. Like those innocent babies had some control over their government. It sounds like murder or infanticide to me and to think God would do such a terrible, insane thing, belies logic. And so does the fact that anyone would celebrate such a horrendous story as a holiday.
(Not only is this a terrible, unbelievable horror story but consider this: since God was God, couldn’t He have come up with some other idea rather than killing innocent infants by the thousands to get His way? Didn’t he mind having all that blood on His hands? Didn’t He care? It’s a horrible thought no matter how you look at it. If that’s God, you can have Him.
We are also asked to accept on Faith, the story of Joseph’s attempted murder by his brothers who they threw him into a well to die. That act was followed by his sale into slavery in Egypt and that was followed by his (Joseph’s) rise to a position of authority in Egypt as the King’s #1 advisor and finally Governor of all of Egypt. The whole thing sounds like a fairytale to me but I do notice one thing in common in all these stories - the Jews always prevail. I guess that’s what happens when your people are doing the writing.
We are asked to accept on Faith that Moses was put into a wicker basket by his Mother and subsequently hidden in the reeds of a river. The story goes on to say that the basket was found by a slave woman (probably Jewish) in the court of an Egyptian Princess (naturally). The Princess loves the little abandoned Jewish baby (how could she not) and decides to raise him as her own, another lucky break. Because of this fortuitous event, Moses grows up to be a Prince of Egypt and eventually leads his people out of slavery. As I said, the Jews always prevail in their own stories.
These are just some of the outrageous Biblical stories people seem to accept as true just as if they had suspended their senses. That’s what indoctrination is all about. Being willing to believe anything you are told regardless of how far-fetched it may be. But there’s more, a lot more. Take the story of Adam and Eve, the first humans. I recently saw a documentary about this story in which it was said that Eve had a dream in which was foretold to her, that her first son Cain would slay her second son Abel. And amazingly, it happened. Let’s take a moment to look into this story.
The story goes that Eve’s first born son Cain brought the Lord gifts from his harvest of the fields. The second son Abel brought the Lord a slain lamb. Because the Lord seems to love dead things, particularly sacrifices, he accepted the lamb but decried the harvest from the fields. Cain was hurt and angry so he turned on his brother and killed him. That’s the story. But there are problems with this story, lots of them. To begin with let’s examine the time this all was supposed to have happened. Adam and Eve were the mother and father of the human race (according to the Bible). They had two sons. So that made four people on the planet.
Science has determined that there were actual civilizations on our planet as far back as 6000 BC (the 6th millennia) and humans on the planet as far back as 300,000 years (the 300th millennia). We also know that writing as we know it was not invented until the mid-second millennia (1640 BC). So the question is, how exactly could the details of this story (or any story from that time) come down to us over these 6,000 years? After all, the writers who wrote this story (and others) were living in the 1st millennia. How in the world would they have learned about these things since no one could write? They had nothing to read and nothing to research.
Are we assuming these many stories with their many details were passed down through 6,000 years, by word of mouth? That would be impossible. Try telling a story to one person and come back a week later and see if the story being told, is the same as when you told it. It wouldn’t be. And that’s with just a few people over a few weeks. This is thousands of people over thousands of years. You can see that’s impossible. So these stories are all make believe. That is the only explanation that makes sense. But read a little further.
(Genesis: 4.13-17) And the Lord was angry with Cain and drove him from his land. And Cain cried out to the Lord: “This punishment is too hard for me to bear. You are driving me off the land and away from your presence. I will be a homeless wanderer on the Earth and anyone who finds me will kill me!’
“Anyone who finds me”? But I thought Adam and Eve were the father and mother of the human race and they had two sons, one of whom was now dead. Who are these other people Cain is referring to when he says, “anyone who finds me”?
It gets even more confusing.
“But the Lord put a mark on Cain to protect him saying, anyone who kills you, their lives will be taken in revenge”, and sends him off. Cain went to live “in a land called “Wandering”, which is East of Eden.” There he took a wife and had a son, Enoch.
So, Eden is not the only place where people live. And Adam and Eve are not the only people on the planet and hence, are not the founders of the human race. How could they be when Cain goes to a nearby land and marries one of the women there. The Bible says it, and I have to believe if there was one other village, there must have been others. There goes the assumption that Adam and Eve started the human race.
It is well to remember the one fact that I have repeatedly stressed, that none of these stories were written at the time the events took place and none were written by any of the actual participants. They are all written a thousand or more years later (in this case, 6,000 years later) by anonymous writers, who basis was gossip, urban legend, and pure imagination.
So Cain found a wife in that nearby village and they had a son named Enoch. Enoch also married and bore a son. Again, the writer sees no need to explain where this new wife came from and here’s why: at the time he was writing 6,000 years later, there were lots of villages and lots of people. He simply lost track of the fact that at THAT time, the human race was supposed to have consisted of Adam, Eve and Cain and no one else. Heck, the writer who wrote this story may not have even read the story that now precedes it. So how was he to know? (Strangely, following the story of Cain and Abel, Adam and Eve simply disappear from the Bible. They are never mentioned again. To me, the reason is obvious: one writer didn’t know what the other writer had written. There is no real continuity to these stories except what the editors put it in years later when the Old Testament was being assembled. That’s why Adam and Eve disappeared, because they belonged to Writer #1 – Writer #2 didn’t care or perhaps simply didn’t know about them.)
But perhaps the best story of all, the one that makes absolutely no sense from any direction, is the pride and joy of Jews everywhere: The Exodus. The story of the Jewish “nation” leaving Egypt and crossing the blazing hot Sinai Desert, in a unbelievable journey that took forty years.
We are asked to accept on Faith the story that 1,000,000 people plus another million animals spend forty years in the Sinai desert whose daily temperatures range from 120 degrees in the daytime to 50 degree at night. All they had to eat – man and beast – for forty years – was manna, a kind of bread that God sent down to them like rain every Sunday. They went out with containers and caught it.
How can anyone take that story seriously? Is it at all believable? Millions of creatures lived in a blazing hot desert for forty years? Can’t you see how many things are wrong with this whole idea? Take water for example.
The water demands of these people on just about an hourly basis would be impossible. There are a million people out there (not to count the animals that went with them who are mentioned in the Bible). They would all die of thirst or heatstroke before noon on the first day out in that blazing heat unless they had ample supplies of water. But there is no water in the desert; that’s what makes it a desert. If there were water, it would be farmland. Yet, somehow they found water for the next forty years - all one million of them and their animals. To accept this story as true, you have to take a lot of nonsense pills. Let’s take a closer look.
THE EXODUS
According to the Bible, 600,000 men along with their wives, children, and “a large number of others” – English version, left Egypt on a journey across the Sinai Desert, a place where temperatures range from 120-degree during the day to a cold 50 degrees at night. Each family took with them an untold number of goats, sheep and cattle representing the wealth of the nation.
There were old people and young people, sick people and well people, children and babies and even newborns. According to the Bible, this lusty throng was bent on reaching Jerusalem across a blistering desert, a place where there would be absolutely nothing but blowing sand and a blazing sun for the next five hundred miles.
The Biblical rendition goes on to say that this huge mass of animals and people lived out there – in that desert – in that horrible, torturous place – all 2,000,000 of them, for the next 40 years!
Now let’s think about that for a moment to determine if it even sounds plausible. First of all, how much LAND do you think so great a throng would cover out in the desert? Let figure it out. A million people would make a good size city, let’s say a city the size of Phoenix, Arizona. So that’s like ten to twelve miles square (say one hundred square miles).
But there were also a million animals. The Bible mentioned goats and sheep and cattle for starters, but this is a desert so there must also have been some camels. In any event, there were a given number of these animals for each family (animals represented their wealth) and when you add them up, that amounts to at least another million creatures in the desert. So for starters, we have two million living creatures in the Sinai Desert for a period of forty years who would certainly need both food and water to survive – lots and lots of water. At any one time, they would also occupy a lot of space extending for miles in every direction.
Allowing ten more square miles for the one million animals which is probably a gross understatement (what did the animals live on out in the desert anyway? They don’t eat bread.) we have a total of twenty miles square or four hundred square miles of creatures spread out across the blistering, blowing sands.
That means just to walk to the back of the crowd in that heat and over those sands would take Moses up to six hours with another six to return to the front. That’s a twelve-hour walk in 120-degree heat Just to communicate with his people bringing up the rear. Did he do this every day? Once a week? Once a month? Or did he just sit down and wait as his people struggled past him until the people in the back caught up?
That’s what the Bible says. Because it is so patently ridiculous some people have tried to alleviate the problem by saying the Bible doesn’t mean exactly what it says. That maybe instead of 600,000 men, their wives and children and “a large number of others”, it just means a few people. Sorry, but that doesn’t wash. It’s true or it’s not true, you can’t have it both ways. The numbers are quite specific
So if the Bible is to be believed, this immense mob traveled out into the desert on a journey that was to take forty years. They couldn’t travel at night because at night the desert is very cold so they would need to seek shelter for themselves and their children. So they huddled at night and moved during the blazing hot daylight hours. Either way, it’s a tough, formidable journey – a journey that would require a lot of food and even more water to accomplish. Where would that come from out there in the desert?
The Bible says the food came from God in the form of Manna, the water from the few existing springs along the way. I think manna is like an unleavened bread. Now, if you can accept that they ate nothing but this bread, three meals a day, seven days a week, for the next forty years, we will let it go at that. But I find that hard to believe both psychologically and physically. This type diet would cause serious problems among the adults. I can’t imagine the effect on children. And the animals as I said earlier, don’t eat bread. As to the water, that is another matter altogether.
The Sinai desert isn’t littered with wells. If it were, it wouldn’t be a desert at all. That’s what makes a desert – the lack of water. So even if a few wells are there, and they are, they are few and far apart.
Now could this immense throng of people and animals get through a day, walking in the blazing hot desert, without a continual supply of water? No they couldn’t. If they walked an hour in that sun without drinking water, they’d all be dead at the end of that day. You have to have water with you all the time. So, I guess they would have carried water bags – goatskin water bags. (Where they could have found a million goatskin water bags, I have no idea. And if you say they killed their goats and made them, it would take maybe a hundred thousand goats to make a million water bags and that’s a whole lot of goats. But to continue.)
Day 1: 8:00 AM.
The people have been walking for an hour. The sun is high, and the temperature hovers around 110 degrees. The hot sands are blowing, children are whining and everyone is hungry and thirsty – but mostly thirsty. They need water. They ALL need water. The children and animals most of all. There is an oasis up the desert a short ways. It contains four small water wells. Our people that stretch backward for over twenty miles need to fill their million water bags from those small wells. (Figure a water bag must hold at least a quart of water – probably more. A million quarts of water would be 250,000 gallons. A quarter of a million gallons of water from these four wells? I’d think those wells would be dry in an hour.)
So, how long do you think it will take us to fill all our water bags? Well let’s figure it out. Do you know how you draw water from a well into a water bag? It isn’t easy and it isn’t quick. You have to lower the bag, let it fill up, then bring it up and start the process over again. It has to take fifteen – maybe twenty seconds per bag at the quickest. So, if you have a million PEOPLE and you have to fill a million water bags, how long would it take? We have decided on fifteen seconds per bag. Now fifteen seconds may not sound like much but you have a million people so that’s a million water bags. That would mean they’d need fifteen million seconds to fill them all up. That converts to 250,000 minutes, 4,166 hours, and about 175 days. That’s six months. And the animals still have to be watered somehow.
Of course, if there were four wells (probably a typical oasis), it would only take maybe six weeks for the people to all get to the well. But it wouldn’t matter because in six weeks, they’d all be dead. You can’t go two hours in the desert without water let alone six weeks.
So the folks in the front get their water and move on. But this takes time and even as they do, people in the back are keeling over, dying of thirst from the scorching heat. And during all this, what happens to the babies and the animals? They too would begin dying by the thousands. It would never work. It could never work. Everyone would be dead of heat stroke or dehydration before they got 20 miles from Egypt. Life is really tough in the desert.
Something is wrong here and I’ll tell you what it is. The story is patently ridiculous. It is impossible five different ways. It never happened. Maybe a dozen people could make such a trip, maybe a couple of dozen Bedouins could, but that’s it. Not the million reported in the Bible story and certainly no animals other than maybe a few camels. The truth is the Sinai would have been a deathtrap for the fleeing Jews and their animals and they wouldn’t have gotten anywhere at all.
Water and food are not even the only problems. This is a huge crowd of people. People of all types, males and females, young and old, angry and impatient. Such a huge and diverse throng of people is bound to have problems – all kinds of problems. How is this huge throng to be disciplined and controlled out in the desert?
For example, what did these people do all day and night, every day of the week, seven days a week, for forty years? That’s a lifetime. What did they do just to pass the time? Did they have disagreements, fights and arguments caused by the heat or by someone coveting his neighbor’s wife or daughter? Who policed them? Who was there to respond to emergencies? Who was in control of such a mass of humanity?
Hell, the guys in the back were twenty miles away from the leaders so who was in charge way back there? Come on now, let’s get serious. These weren’t a bunch of pussycats. They were ancient Jews, a tough, robust, lustful group of people (as the Bible tells us). Remember when Moses came down from the mount? What did he find? The people were engaging in a drunken ORGY! And now, they are out in that stinking, hot, sweaty desert with nothing in view but more and more hot days and nights. They want relief. They want to forget. They want a PARTY!
And who was there to deal with all the pent up frustration these people would have had to feel? Who would see that fights did not break out? That people didn’t start killing each other? After all, tempers had to be short in that terrible heat with never enough water and boredom had to be a continuing problem. So who would be in charge. The Bible doesn’t address any of these problems. And the reason is that none of this ever happened. It would have been physically impossible to move such a large number of animals and people across the Sinai Desert in this manner. No matter how many years you tried. If you started out with a million, you’d be lucky to reach your destination with a couple of hundred. That might even be optimistic because it is very likely that none of you would ever get where you were going - not with that crowd.
And remember this: there had to be births along the way over forty years. Babies – lots of them. After all there were a million people and Jewish families had a lot of children in those days. They were a lustful group. So how did they tend their babies in the blowing sands and in the awful heat of the desert? How were they able to raise their young (and the young animals that also must have been born.) How did they get milk for the infants, or water or food? After all, it is said the people existed on Manna from God but babies don’t eat manna. Neither do animals. And if the adult women were living on manna, how much mother’s milk could they have produced?
The whole thing is utter nonsense. It never happened. It never COULD have happened. Not the way it’s written. A writer heard an old story from the ancient past and embellished it just as fiction writers do today. We call it poetic license. The biblical author used poetic license to tell his version of an “urban legend” that had become near and dear to his people.
Anyway, if God wanted the Jews to cross the desert, there were easier ways for Him to accomplish that. After all, he is God. He could have simply transported them from where they were to where he wanted them to be. That would have been much easier. Why kill half of them if he loved them so much? No, this story is not real, it is largely allegorical but based on something. What that something might be we will discuss in a moment.
(Did you wonder where I got the 1,000,000 animals from? Well the Bible says that there were “600,000 men accompanied by their wives and children and some hangers-on (English version) together with many sheep, goats, and cattle”. You can make up your own numbers but I used 150,000 families represented by the 600,000 men, each of whom had some number of animals. Figure for yourself how many they might have had per family? A dozen sheep, half dozen goats, a donkey or two, a camel or two, a dog or other household pet, some pigs, some chickens? Pick a number per family. I used an average of 7 per family, which I really think is conservative. And that’s where I got the 1,000,000 animals.)
Anyway, none of this happened because none of it COULD have happened. It’s just not possible. MAYBE a few dozen people MIGHT have been able to do something like this, but this wasn’t a few dozen, this was a million or more. The Bible is very exact about that.
In closing, let me make a few observations. As the Bible recites the tale, the Egyptian King let his slaves go but then changed his mind. So he sent out 600 chariots to catch them and bring them back. He also sent some soldiers.
First, chariots are horse-drawn and horses can gallop easily at 15-18 miles per hour. Soldiers force walk about 3-4 miles per hour. After the first hour, the chariots will be 14 miles ahead of the soldiers. It will take the soldiers four hours to catch up. After three hours, the horses will be 54 miles down the road and the soldiers just 16 so they will now be at least 9 hours behind. And so forth. So the soldiers are pointless in the chase. Also, chariots normally carry one or two men standing side by side. If it’s two men, and 600 chariots, that’s a total of a maximum of 1,200 men.
Twelve hundred men to capture and bring back over 1,000,000 hot and tired people - people that are spread out over 400 square miles of desert with 1,000,000 animals in tow? You got to be kidding. The Jews were a tough group of ex-slaves. If they decided to resist just a little, the charioteers would have no chance. With twelve hundred against one million, the soldiers would have been overwhelmed in a heartbeat.
PLUS and most importantly, GOD was on the side of the Jews. The King knew this because, according to the Bible, he had just been beat up for the past seven years until in defeat, he had to let his slaves go. Yet before they are out of sight, he changes his mind and dares God to strike him and his people dead by going after them. Now this is indeed a man with a hard head.
Anyway, how come as they galloped across the desert sands, the Bible doesn’t mention the bodies of Jews lying in the burning sand where they dropped from heat exhaustion and thirst which most certainly would have been the case. The desert should have been, and still must be, littered with their bones by the thousands.
But it isn’t and that’s because this never happened. Neither did the crossing of the Red Sea (actually the Sea of Reeds). That is one myth (The Crossing) born of another (The Exodus).
THE CROSSING OF THE SEA OF REEDS
The reference to the Red Sea in the Bible is an error of translation. The Bible does not say the people of the Exodus crossed “the Red Sea”, it says they crossed the “Sea of Reeds”. The Sea of Reeds refers to a small number of lakes also known as the Bitter Lakes that in many places is simply marshland.
None of these small lakes is very large individually and crossing one of them might be easy enough for a small number of people (particularly when the lake is at its low ebb, which happens regularly). But, to talk about a million people and a million animals crossing these lakes, is another matter altogether.
(Not to mention 600 Egyptian Chariots with accompanying foot soldiers that all fitted nicely within the banks of one of those small lakes at the same time so they could be conveniently drowned – another wild stretch of the imagination.)
Look, let’s try an exercise. Let’s compute how long this Egyptian column chasing the Jews would actually be. The column consisted of 600 galloping chariots and some number of trailing foot soldiers as described in the Bible. Figure to fit conveniently into the river channel to drown, the chariots would be limited to two abreast, with sufficient room between the first and second sets so they will not run up each other’s heels. The horse and chariot are 20’ long front to back. With spacing between the sets, I made it 30’ total. Multiply that by 300 sets of two chariots each, and you get a column that is 9,000 feet long (almost two miles) and that doesn’t count the column of foot soldiers coming behind them. So that’s a column at least two miles long that would have to fit nicely into the bed of the first of the ‘lakes’, so they could be conveniently drowned together.
(As a matter of fact, I doubt any of the lakes are actually wide enough to have contained all the Egyptians soldiers and chariots at one time so they could drown together as the Bible states they did. Remember the Bible says there were no survivors so they all had to be inside the waterbed at the same time. If some were too far behind they would have seen what happened and escaped. If some had been too far up front, they would have been out of the riverbed before the waters rushed over them. For everyone to drown, they all had to be within the banks of that marsh lake at the exact same time which alone seems impossible.)
But that doesn’t matter anyway because trying to get 1,000,000 people and 1,000,000 animals through this narrow channel as God held up the waters would have taken the better part of a month. Big crowds in the hot desert move very, very slowly and this was more than a big crowd, it was a huge crowd. (God would have been much better served just building them a bridge.)
(Note: Biblical ‘scholars’ – those people who study the Bible more to reinforce it than to seek out the truth – find all kinds of excuses when Bible stories turn up to be inaccurate or flat. When you ask them about the million people and the million animals specifically referenced in the Bible story, they tend to brush it off by saying it wasn’t meant to be a literal number. Well to me, it’s true or it’s not - when they say 600,000 men I assume they mean 600,000 men or what’s the use of saying it?)
The Hebrews of the Exodus were a HUGE throng of men, women, and children, all moving at a snail’s pace across a very difficult landscape. They have another million animals with them, So we have two million living creatures moving across a very difficult desert landscape in intense heat. Earlier we calculated about 400 square miles of them.
Now for two million of ANYTHING to make its way past a given point ANYWHERE, would take days – maybe even weeks – to complete. And in that excessive heat, and over that difficult terrain, it very well would have taken longer. So for them to make their way across the bed of even the first lake of the Bitter Lakes, the waters would have to be held back a long time (even by Hollywood standards). For me, I like the idea of a bridge much better.
(Keep in mind, the width of this ‘channel’ through the water that God created would be limited to feet or at most yards. Therefore, the throng that we estimated to be 20 miles wide and 20 miles deep would had to be reorganized to get through that narrow channel. Let’s say they were reorganized into a column 12 abreast. How long would the new column then be? My guess would be 60 miles long. So the Jews would be passing through that channel, between those high walls of “mighty water”, for at least a month. Talk about being scared!
But they weren’t scared because it never happened. And the story isn’t new either. Check this out. It’s from ancient Egyptian writings.
Note: A woman accompanying the pharaoh on a rowing excursion, drops "a fish shaped charm of new turquoise” into the lake. Then the chief lector Djadjaemonkh, placed one side of the water of the lake upon the other, and lying down upon a postsherd, he found the fish-shaped charm. Then he brought it back and gave it to its owner. Now as for the water, it was twelve cubits deep, and it amounted to twenty-four cubits after it was folded back. Again he said his magic sayings and the waters of the lake returned to their rightful position. This marvelous thing occurred in the Reign of King Snefru".
So you see, it had all been done before. This little Egyptian story is thousands of years old and yet, is very much the same as the story of the Red Sea crossing of the Bible written much later. Would you believe this fanciful tale any more than the equally fanciful tale of the “Exodus”? You shouldn’t. Both are equally unfounded.
Over the years, people have tried very hard to make the Exodus work. But they haven’t had much luck Today, they are trying very hard to dispute the Bitter Lakes as the place of the Israeli crossing, preferring it to be the Red Sea, the “mighty waters” of the Biblical passage. But the literal translation of the Hebrew text is not Red Sea, it is Bitter Lakes, an extended group of marshes.
The story of the “Red Sea” crossing is a fable just as is the story of the Exodus. Neither ever happened. Consider this fact: Bible scholars estimate the size of the Exodus being anywhere from one to two million PEOPLE plus the animals. (I have used a total of 2,000,000 to include both.) That’s fine, but if there HAD been such a huge throng living in the desert for forty years, where is the physical evidence they would have had to leave behind? The desert is an inhospitable place. If a large group of living creatures spent forty years out there, many, many would have died and their bones would be buried in the sands for eons. But they are not. Despite continuing efforts on the part of geologists for centuries, no physical evidence of any kind has ever been found in the Sinai to support the thought that a huge throng of living creatures ever lived out there
The following is from the Sea of Reeds Web Site in Egypt and speaks to this very question:
TRADITIONAL MOUNT SINAI: “Having visited Mount Sinai in the southern Sinai Peninsula, I have seen first hand the only place the Israelites could possibly have camped in the desert. It is a small, flat valley area adjacent to Mount Sinai. Yet even this place would allow for only about one square yard per person and how could so many have lived cramped into so small a place for any length of time? Furthermore, despite extensive archeological investigation throughout the region, nothing has ever been found that can conclusively be tied to the Exodus – to so large a population ever having occupied this area.”
(Note: Animal bones including human would be preserved forever in the desert sands. If many people or animals had died there, their bones would still be there, but they aren’t. The reason is simple: it never happened. Keep in mind, this particular Egyptian article deals with one valley in which the Israelites are said to have camped for a couple of nights. But these people were moving across the Sinai for forty years so they had to find valleys to camp in like this one, every night. The problem is, they don’t exist anywhere in the Sinai. I guess the anonymous writer didn’t know this when he wrote his story.)
Here’s another amazing claim. The Bible says the Egyptian charioteers left shortly after the Jews. But the Jews couldn’t have managed any more than a couple of miles a day in that heat and over hot sands, while the charioteers could gallop as much as 18 miles AN HOUR. It wouldn’t have taken an hour for them to catch up to the Jews many of whom would have been lying dead in the sand anyway.
It couldn’t have happened as described. The dynamics just don’t work. The story goes that the chariots rushed full speed ahead, two by two, into the small channel between those two great walls of water being held up by an unseen force. You would think it would have been a shocking and amazing sight – enough to frighten almost everyone! But it didn’t frighten the Egyptian commander. His courage never faltered. He plunged right ahead at full speed, right down into the riverbed, right where he had to be so that he and his men, and his horses, and his trailing soldiers, could all come together and conveniently drown at the same time. Nice touch.
Think about that. Fools rush in where angels fear to tread. If you saw a body of water divided into two towering walls being held up on either side by a mysterious unseen force, would you plunge ahead down into the dry river bed feeling secure that the water would stay up there until you got safely across?
Not me, I admit I’d be scared to death by such a sight. After all, waters being held back by some mystifying, unknown force, high above me and my men, are not an
everyday sight. Not for Egyptians, nor for Jews. Not even in those amazing Biblical days. I would have taken a pass. “You go ahead,” I would have said, “ I’ll come later.”
But not so the Egyptians. Their charioteers plunged down into the ravine without the least trepidation. And their foot soldiers did the same. (The soldiers must have been fleet-of-foot since they were able to catch up to the galloping charioteers and get into the ravine before the charioteers had gotten through, so they could all die together. Another lucky break for the Chosen People. )
Finally consider this question for a moment: if the Jews didn’t know God was going to part the “Red Sea’ for them, and if they were being chased by Egyptian charioteers, why in the world were they where they were in the first place?
(Think carefully about this.)
There apparently weren’t any roads or bridges across the Sea or the Jews would have used them and there would be no problem. That makes sense. So assuming there weren’t, how in the world did Moses expect to get across the Lakes? And if he didn’t know how, then what was he doing there? Was he lost? Didn’t he know another way across or around the Lakes? He apparently knew where he was going because he was on a 500-mile trip. So, why would he lead this huge group of people up to the edge of a Lake that he couldn’t cross? Who in the world planned that trip anyway? Certainly not ‘Triple AAA’!
The whole story simply falls apart if you simply think for yourself. If you are indoctrinated, then your answer will be “God did it” to everything. That’s what indoctrination is all about. But if you think for yourself, you can easily see how poorly thought-out it is. It collapses of its own stupidity once you stop sucking in the party line.
The Red Sea (Sea of Reeds) didn’t open up. The million or so Jews and animals didn’t exist and they didn’t cross the desert and God didn’t hold the waters back for them. None of it happened. As for the Egyptians chasing them, they didn’t happen either. The 600 chariots and their accompanying horses and soldiers didn’t all fit comfortably and stupidly into the Red Sea between two high walls of water so they could be conveniently drowned. No one would be that stupid, certainly not combat veterans, and certainly not the seasoned commander of an Egyptian unit of trained charioteers. None of it ever happened and, come to think of it, neither did the Exodus. That story is filled with holes from beginning to end. What amazes me is that these stories have hung around so long. But remember what I said earlier: the stories in the Old Testament are all about Jews. And in every story, the Jews prevail, thanks to this God who loves them so much because they are so wonderful and because Jews wrote all the scripts.
But did something happen? Sure. And we will get to that in a moment. But the second part of the Exodus is Passover, the holy day that preceded it. We need to take a look at that story.
You remember Passover? That’s where God killed thousands of innocent Egyptian children in order to punish the King of Egypt. Like what the King did was the children’s fault. Here’s how that story goes.
PASSOVER
The Egyptian King refused to free his Jewish slaves as God requested. (Here comes God again to save his Jewish kids from the rest of us.) So, God decides to punish the King. He sends an angel to tell the Jews He is coming to kill all the Egyptian first-born babies. Since God didn’t know where the Jews lived, and in order to keep them safe from his avenging angels, he tells the Jews to put lamb’s blood on their front door. That way, His Angels would know which homes to let alone – which homes to “pass over” – and which ones to ‘visit’.
(Know what I would have done if I were an Egyptian in those days? I would have immediately got some lamb’s blood and put it on MY front door to confuse those dumb Angels – and they would have skipped me thinking I was Jewish. Make sense? Of course it makes sense. Not only that, but I might have gone into business selling lamb’s blood to other Egyptians to put on their front doors, to save their children from being murdered. Without the houses being marked, the Angels were apparently helpless.)
Can you believe that anyone would celebrate this supposed massacre of infants as a feast day? Isn’t that appalling?
And what about this one: the story of Joseph. This is one more wonderful success stories about a Jewish kid that makes good in a foreign land. Joseph is a slave who becomes the Pharaoh’s dream interpreter and top assistant and eventually Governor of all of Egypt. That’s not a bad job for a Jewish slave but we have to keep in mind who it was that wrote this story. Somehow Jews always seem to come out ahead in Bible stories. (I wonder why.)
(Note: As we read on, keep in mind the one thing that is integral to belief in all these stories: the suspension of common sense.)
Some Bible documentaries seem to suggest that Moses was the son of a Jewish mistress and the Pharaoh, Rameses II. That in fear for his life, his mother spirited him away. Somehow, Moses ended up living for some years in a small town in the desert. Then one day, God appeared to Moses in a burning bush. (Suspension #1.)
God tells Moses to go back to Egypt and order the Pharaoh (Rameses II) to release the Jews. God apparently can’t accomplish this by Himself, but needs Moses to carry this message to Rameses. (Suspension #2.)
So Moses goes back and gets an audience with the Pharaoh, Rameses II. No one bothers to explain how this unknown man out of the desert can get such an audience (Suspension #3), but he appears before the Pharaoh and tells him God has sent him (Moses) to demand that he (Rameses II) set the Jews free.
Rameses declines. To prove the power of his God, Moses then throws his shaft to the floor where upon it turns into a deadly snake. (Suspension #4.)
(Remember this is not supposed to be a fairytale. It is not supposed to be science fiction. It is supposed to be true. Do you believe this happened? Do you believe this COULD happen, a walking stick turn itself into a living deadly snake? I don’t.)
Rameses, seeing the snake on the floor before him, and becoming frightened, motions to two of his high priests that are standing in the room. Responding to their Pharaoh’s concern, the two priests throw their own shafts onto the floor whereupon BOTH OF THEM also turn into snakes. (Suspension #5.)
(So now we have three snakes on the floor in the room.) At what point does this become silly? But wait, there’s more!)
As the snakes tangle, Moses’ snake suddenly turns on the other two and devours both of them! That’s right. The good snake eats the two bad snakes. (Suspension #6.) The Pharaoh is suitably impressed and I don’t know where the story goes from there but who cares. It is all such silly nonsense.
Bible stories are like that. The are predicated on the assumption that you will suspend your thinking processes and buy into what is pure nonsense. And for thousands of years, the “faithful” have done just that. That’s why these stories persist. The willingness of the faithful to be manipulated.
So what is the truth behind these stories? Here’s my guess.
A small group of Jewish slaves, perhaps a few thousand, did escape slavery in Egypt. When they were found to be missing, the Pharaoh send his charioteers – 600 of them – with a small number of soldiers under the command of his eldest son to bring them hack. Altogether about 1,200 soldiers to bring back a few thousand Jewish runaways. However, when the soldiers caught up to the fleeing Jews, there was an intense battle and the Pharaoh’s son was killed (hence the first born story) permitting the Jews to escape.
Getting two thousand hardy Jews across the desert might have been possible and that might be the genesis of the story of Passover and the Exodus. The original “urban legend” has a small grain of truth to it and that was the basis for the Bible story. But (1) all the Egyptian first born were not slain, (2) There was no fly-over by the Angels of Death (what’s that?) and (3) Passover is the celebration of something that truly never happened – thank God. (You would think the death of thousands of innocent children would not be a cause for celebration for anyone who had a moment’s clarity of thought on this matter.)
Next we examine another marvelous tale, this one the story of Noah and his super-gigantic Ark, built by hand long before even the most elementary of shipbuilding tools was invented. Back in the days of Genesis. Let’s see how this one goes.
NOAH’S ARK
There was a great flood. A man named Noah and his three sons, at God’s request, built a great Ark and on it, they put two pairs of every unclean animal and seven pairs of every clean animal on the Earth. How many animals were there? That depends on who’s counting. According to paleontologists, one million years ago, the planet was covered with dinosaurs and huge, flying reptiles. But according to Genesis, God created animals after he created Adam and Eve and Noah came along even later. So by Noah’s time, there had to be lots of them. So, God told Noah to build this ark, then bring all these creatures aboard.
The Ark was to be two football fields long, a football field wide, and three decks high. (The dimensions were in cubits but totaled 625’ long, 60’ wide, and 40’ high.)
Unfortunately, all Noah had to work with were his three sons and maybe some prehistoric stone tools primarily cutting stones and bores. With these ancient tools he had to do the work. He had to (1) cut down 250 or more very large trees, (2) rip 2,000 planks from these trees, (3) smooth the cut planks with a stone tool, (4) bore thousands of connecting holes with still another stone tool, (5) build the Ark and fasten it with thousands of wood pegs that he had to make himself. Finally, he had to caulk the Ark and somehow get it down into the water to see if it floated. (Even if they could build this monster, how in the world would three people (or even seven) get the thing down into the water?) It must have weighed as much as a building, being 2 football fields long, 1.5 football fields wide and three stories high (3 decks). My guess, God must have helped push.)
[The possibility exists that Noah never put the Ark into the water but waited until the flood waters came up to meet the Ark and float it away. This would mean they never checked the caulking of which there would have been a lot and had to risk drowning if there were leaks in the Ark. I can't imagine anyone doing that but it is possible that placed their faith in the Lord.)
Even then, Noah’s work wasn’t done. Next he and his sons had to go around the world - on foot - collecting many pairs of all the animals and birds on Earth. Plus they had to gather enough food to last them all six months, a gigantic task in itself.
When that was done, they then had to herd this huge mass of living creatures - animals and birds - along with tons of food - all the way back to where the Ark was waiting. How they could have accomplished any of this is beyond me. I would have figured it would take up to 10,000 men about 3-5 years to get it done back in Noah's time. But I could be wrong. Faith does move mountains, they say.
Lastly, once they got everybody and every creature and all that food up on the Ark and set out to sea, the seven of them had the unenviable task of handling the waste matter and manure from all these creatures for the next six months. Every day, sometimes many times a day, these folks would have to enter these cages of wild beasts, gather up the tons of waste material they would generate, and find a way to transport that mess to the sides of the arc, and throw it overboard. The trouble with that is the Ark is a closed vessel, so I don’t have the slightest idea of how they would have been able to discard these tons of waste material without flooding the boat. It's just one more question that is left unanswered in the Bible's rendition of the story.
So that’s the story of Noah and his Arc. Unbelievable? Of course. In fact, it’s so unbelievable you wouldn’t think anyone would take it seriously. Yet, every few years, someone finds the Ark buried in the mountains somewhere. I’m waiting for it to show up in Disney World.
The truth is, it never happened. The story is maybe allegorical, maybe apocryphal; but certainly it is fictional. Maybe there was a local flood and maybe a guy built a boat and took his family and his pets with him until the water went down in a few days, but that’s about it.
(Actually, this version may be close to the truth. Let’s examine some new archeological evidence about a great flood in ancient Mesopotamia.)
The first known civilization appeared about 3500BC in the area between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers known as Mesopotamia (modern day Iraq). In the late 1800’s, archeologists excavating an ancient Sumerian site uncovered a series of clay tablets covered with a form of wedge-shaped characters now called cuneiform writing. This earliest form of writing was used to depict stories of the culture and events of the early Sumerians. (Later these same people invented the more traditional form of writing that we know today.)
The clay tablets uncovered in this ‘dig’ were packed up and brought back (I believe) to England were they were promptly stored and just as promptly forgotten. It wasn’t until one hundred years later that someone remembered them and took them out and began the tedious and difficult job of translating them.
On one tablet – or perhaps a series of tablets – was discovered the story of a great flood. To understand the story, we need be aware that the area we are speaking of – the area thought to be the Garden of Eden of Biblical history – lies between the Tigris and the Euphrates rivers and as such, is subject to frequent, though manageable, flooding.
But on one of the clay tablets appears the story of a flood unlike all others. A flood so widespread and so severe that much of the surrounding land simply disappeared. According to the tablets, an observer on a raft on the river was unable to see land in any direction.
The story went on to say that a local merchant and who made a habit of shipping cargo down river to the towns that lay below Sumeria, became apprehensive about his supplies and decided to construct individual rafts to save them. When the rafts were completed, in order to keep them together on the river, he fastened the sections together. (The Bible makes reference to the Ark having 'sections'.) When everything was ready, the merchant ordered the raft loaded and he, his family, his animals, and his cargo set off down river to safety.
The story put down on the clay tablets is long. It states how the passengers lost all sight of land as the water rose to levels never seen before and the raft drifted down river until finally, it entered the Persian Gulf that bordered Mesopotamia. There the raft continued to drift for about seven days, finally coming to rest on an island. Because the Gulf waters are salted, the passengers had no fresh water to drink so they drank the cargo of beer, a substance which preserves well and which is full of nutrients.
The cuneiform story ends showing the passengers and animals disembarking from the raft and being greeted by a large crowd of people. These people are threatening the merchant and have been since translated to be angry creditors who were there demanding that the merchant pay his bills or become a slave which was the fate of debtors who couldn’t pay their bills in those days.
That is the ancient Sumerian story of a great flood recorded on the Sumerian clay tablets in cuneiform, the oldest writing known to man.
It is easy to see how this story could have been fabricated 2,500 years later into the Bible story of Noah and his Ark as we know it today. All the Bible writers had to go on was a word of mouth story handed down over the millennia. It is no wonder it got twisted and exaggerated in the telling and retelling.
Yes, there may have been a great flood. The tablets support that. But the flood was simply a LOCAL flood, not a regional on international event. And God didn’t appear to the merchant to tell him to save himself and his family; the merchant was simply trying to save his merchandise. Nor were two of every unclean animal and seven of each clean animal taken aboard the Ark That would have been impossible.
What was on the Ark were a few pack animals intended to be sold down river along with a few people, some cargo, and some beer. It is all on the tablets.
.
And the voyage itself, far from taking seven months, which would have been impossible, took one week, which was very possible.
The questions about gathering, feeding and caring for all those animals disappear with the Sumerian version. There aren’t that many animals on board. And the questions of fresh water disappear because the passengers on the raft drank beer, a good substitute. In fact, all those things that made the Ark an unbelievable story simply disappear with the Sumerian version.
It seems very likely the Sumerian version is fact while the Biblical version, complete with God and a series of mythical religious extensions, is pure fiction.
I could go on but it would be pointless. The stories of the Old Testament are all the same – works of fiction that should never have been taken seriously. Only the blindest of faith could give them any credence whatsoever. They are nonsense on their face and any honest, intelligent reading will confirm this. But for millions of people, the words of the Jewish Bible even more than the stories, are the words of God Himself and if this comforts them, more power to them.
But if this is so, you may ask, how is it possible that the story of Jesus has lasted for so many years? How did it begin? What nurtured and supported it for over 2,000 years?
Let’s examine the history of those times.
SUMMARY
At the time of the supposed birth of Jesus, the world was a terrible place. For fifty years past (and for three hundred years to come), the Romans ruled a despotic, pagan society. During those 350 years, they crucified as many as 400,000 people, nailed them to a cross and let them hang there until they were dead.
In Rome, and throughout the Empire, ‘games’ were held in which bloodletting was celebrated and human beings were killed as entertainment. The society was flagrantly sexual with orgies prevalent. Abortions were permitted by law, as was infanticide wherein a family could kill an unwanted infant. Homosexual love between men and boys was tolerated. Rome was Sodom.
So bad was the behavior of this time, that the very people that were part of this immoral and decadent society, felt the need for something better. Ordinary people must have begun to wonder if life had any meaning at all. Depression in such a society must have been rampant.
In this time period, and in this sorry state, a few men sat down and wrote fantasies about a better world. A world of hope and promise and of a God who would come to deliver them – a prophet who would come in this time of great need and pacify them.
And soon these stories took root and developed a life of their own. Who were the men who first wrote these stories? No one knows. The documents they left behind were found – unsigned. Soon they acquired the name ‘Gospels’.
In the previous text, I explained how no one really knew who wrote these Gospels, and that’s true. But, what was written was marvelous, stories of a new religion, hope for a better world – and a new leader who was called: Jesus of Nazareth.
The stories offered hope for a people who had no hope.
And a new religion took hold. It was called Christianity and was founded on the words of Jesus Christ. Its message was unchanging. It was a message of love for others, of being your brother’s keeper, of doing for others as you have them do for you. It touched a responsive chord in a people that needed uplifting. The new religion uplifted the souls and the hearts of men.
And perhaps most importantly, it gave them someone to pray to, someone to call on when they needed help.
Perhaps more important to Christianity than the anonymous writers of the four gospels was the man we now call: St. Paul.
Paul lived at the time of Christ and though he admits he never actually met Jesus, his work has an assumed extra credibility since the two men shared a common time frame in history. Paul was a Christian. He spread the word near and far. He organized churches, preached to the people, and wrote letters. He wrote letters to everyone – parishes, parishioners and possible converts – everyone and anyone who would listen. (Some of the letters attributed to Paul have since been exposed as 2nd century forgeries but most of them are still considered authentic.) Paul was truly a harbinger of religious change and until he died, he journeyed back and forth across much of the known world bringing his message to the people.
Two hundred years later, in the 3rd century, another powerful man entered the picture and took up where Paul had ended. That man was Constantine, the Emperor of the Roman Empire. Constantine was sickened by the excesses of the Empire and took the words of this new religion to heart. He believed this message was good and he became fiercely dedicated to the new religion. He announced that he, himself, would become a Christian, and with that, Christianity came of age and the Roman Empire was converted. The rest is history.
The individual religions that have spring up since, and the authorities that run them, often act in ways that are directly opposite to the teaching of Christianity. There have, in fact, been terrible crimes perpetrated over the past 3,000 years in the name of God. Yet throughout all this, the essence of the Christian message has remained firm. It is one of hope and promise. With this message, and because of it, Christianity has grown until today, it is the religion of three quarters of the world’s population.
It has become all but irrelevant whether the early stories of Christianity are real or imagined. Today, what matters is that the religion uplifts and supports humanity and encourages Christians to live better lives with the single caveat that while the message is always good, the messengers are not. Against this, the people should always be on guard.
Religion becomes a danger when it twists the principals of its message to suit its own needs. Believers must always be on guard to resist this. Formal churches are organizations primarily dedicated to their own needs, their own growth, and their own survival and it is well for churchgoers to also remember to separate the message from the messenger.
One final point remains to be stressed: it is never good, and certainly not ever necessary, for people to surrender their own free will in order to accept God. People should never become so indoctrinated that they cease to think for themselves. Religion does not require – nor does it benefit from - obsequious obedience.
Religion is filled with such contradictions. Here is one that I stumbled on recently, that completely confounds me. It concerns one of the greatest Theologians and Catholic intellectuals of all time – the pillar on which much of Catholic doctrine is founded, the redoubtable, world-renowned St. Thomas Aquinas. For those of you who don’t know much about St. Thomas, you should know that he is very probably the single most revered religious writer, teacher and theologian of all time. In the 60-volume set of “The Greatest Works of Western Civilization”, the works of St. Thomas Aquinas occupy two full volumes, which is far more than any other author.
The monk, Thomas Aquinas, was for fifty years, one of the leading spokesmen for Christianity and for the Catholic Church. He wrote prodigiously about God, about the meaning of life, about morals and ethics and about such divine mysteries as the Holy Trinity, the Six Days of Creation and of the relationship between God and Man. He was a tireless writer and a consummate teacher and he was responsible for much of the doctrine of the Catholic Church. He towered above all others and his name has been handed down for over eight hundred years, so great is his prestige.
But I was confused. How, I asked myself, could a man of such intellectual capacity believe all these stories which to me seem to be so obviously unsupportable. Which of us is closer to the truth?
I decided to read Thomas Acquinas’ teachings, beginning with his world famous “THE SUMMA THEOLOGICA”, in an attempt to find the answer. I knew it would be a daunting task but I had to know why we saw these things so differently. Within two days, I had received two separate and distinct shocks.
For many years continuing to this day but particularly in the period from 1260 AD through 1830 AD, the Catholic Church was very powerful in the world. In some places where the Church was strong, persons who were not Catholic were persecuted, banned, and even put to death for their beliefs. Scientists who offered theories which were contrary to Catholic teaching (such as Galileo and Copernicus), were disciplined, often imprisoned, and sometimes also put to death. Science was deemed to be secondary to religion and any scientist who dared to contradict religious teaching with science, would suffer the consequences.
The architect of this philosophy apparently was Saint Thomas Aquinas who, in his great work, “The Summa Theologica”, wrote:
“The principles of other sciences are either self-evident and cannot be proved, or are proved by natural reason through some other science. But the knowledge proper to this science (religion) comes through (Divine) revelation, and not through natural reason. Therefore it has no concern to prove the principles of other sciences, but only to judge of them. Whatever is found in other sciences contrary to any truth of this science, must be condemned as false.
In case you didn’t get it, Thomas Aquinas was instructing his church that where science contradicts religious teaching, science (or the scientist) is wrong and must be condemned as false. That’s what the man wrote and that’s what he believed and that’s what he taught and that became the Catholic Church’s dogma for centuries. Since the principle teaching of the Church came via Divine Revelation, it could not be wrong. Therefore, anyone or anything that differed from this teaching was also wrong and was condemned.
Thomas not only believed in Divine Revelation (things revealed to certain humans directly by God), but he condemns science wherever and whenever it differs. This policy became the basis for the imprisonment, excommunication, and death of non-believers all over the world for the next six centuries. Religion was always right, no matter what. But that’s not all to the story of St. Thomas Aquinas.
Thomas Aquinas - whose family had twice ‘sacked’ the Papacy during his lifetime and with his help – wrote that some things revealed by God are simply ‘beyond man’s reasoning’ and must therefore be taken on Faith. In other words, it makes very little sense, and we can’t prove it, but believe it because we tell you to. (That must be what Jim Jones told his followers before they all committed suicide.)
Thomas also said if a person has not accepted God ‘as an article of Faith’, there is little chance he will accept him by human ‘reasoning’. In other words, if a man does not accept these matter on faith, because the church says so, he cannot be expected to accept them using human reasoning. The more I read of his teachings and of the Bible, the more I understand why the man said this. Without Faith, the whole thing simply falls apart as a gigantic fairytale. Unfortunately, to believe something on ‘faith’ means to believe something that doesn’t exist. That why you have to believe it on ‘faith’.
But here is the shocking ending to the story of this so-called great theologian and teacher. St. Thomas taught, wrote, and preached all of his life. Then on December 6, 1273, at age forty-eight, after serving Mass on a Sunday morning, he announced that “a great change had come upon him and he would never write again.”
When pressed by his friends and associates to at least complete his “Summa”, he declined saying: “I can do no more. Such things have been revealed to me that all I have written seems as straw and I must now await the end of my life.” He died March 7, 1274. He was forty-nine years old.
For almost a thousand years, scholars have pondered the meaning of that phrase,
“all (that) I have written seems as straw. “ What does it mean? Could it be that Thomas Aquinas woke up that day and suddenly realized the error of his teaching? That the things he had taught were all untrue?
Or could it be that for all his adult life he had suspected what he was teaching to be untrue and he could no longer live with the lie.
“Such things have been revealed to me that all I have written seems as straw.”
St Thomas died three months later of an undisclosed ailment. Could it be that after learning his life’s work was as straw, he died of a broken heart, so great was his disappointment?
Or could it be that his church, a church that over the years has not hesitated to take the lives of those who challenged it, decided they could not afford to have their spiritual and intellectual leader announce that he had changed his mind and so eliminated him? After all he was only forty-nine and known to be in good health and many have done much more to protect much less.
It’s hard to know what to think, but I know what I think.
I think people believe what they want to believe (or need to believe) and it has very little to do with reason. Religion is no exception.
I spent the greater part of this Article finding thing I did not believe in. This postscript is devoted to the things I do believe in. First, about formalized religions, including the Catholic Church.
As you know, I do not believe in the hereafter. I don’t even know how we learned about the hereafter since no one who goes there, ever returns to tell us about it. Yet we seem to have a lot of information on what it is and how it works. I guess the religions need rewards and punishment to motivate their parishioners.
So what about the churches and what about religions? Here’s my thought. Let us divorce any thought of the hereafter from religion. Let’s make each denomination simply a secular organization with rules for membership and dues to be paid. Let those organizations decide who is to be allowed to be a member and who is not. Use the collective force of a large group of people to accomplish the greater good.
Formal religions can accomplish a lot of things for the advancement of humanity. So let them do it. But let’s not base their existence on the afterworld. Because it doesn’t exist and I am sure, many of the clergy know that. If that’s so, then they have to be pretending and that is a lie and that makes the whole thing sad and pointless. So let’s reorganize the churches into secular membership clubs with do’s and don’t and reward and punishments. Let’s appoint boards to oversee them and let’s take care that their power does not expand beyond the boundaries set by the group itself. We can live with that.
As to me, I look in another direction. When I think of the afterlife, I am convinced it doesn’t exist in the normal sense of the world. But it does in a different sort of way.
I believe the Cosmos is eternal. It had no beginning and it will have no end. It always was and it always will be – much like the definition of God.
Once upon a time, Albert Einstein agreed. He said the Universe was static and eternal. But then he changed his mind when he found the universe was expanding and decided the Universe started with a big bang and will end with a big clump (or words to that effect). He said that the Universe would - much like a rubber band - stretch to its limits and then snap back, collapsing onto itself. I agree. But where Einstein may have made his mistake was in using the two terms (Cosmos and Universe) interchangeably. They do not refer to the same reality. There may be multiple Universes (and probably are) but there is only one Cosmos. The Cosmos is the totality of all that surrounds us. As such, it is eternity. Universes - like galaxies, stars and planets - come and go. The Cosmos is forever.
Yet even the big bang is a conclusion drawn on a single event, the on-going expansion of the Universe. If it is moving outward, it can only do one of two things: (1) continue expanded into eternity or (2) collapse onto itself. This starting point is called the point of singularity where the big bang occurred. This point of singularity is defined as – a point of zero size and infinite density.
To me, that definition sounds like something you say when you don’t have anything to say. A point of zero size but with infinite density? All the matter of the Universe compacted into one point that is so small it has no size but holds all that matter?
I have another idea. Think of the Universe (or Universes) as neighborhoods in the Cosmos. Shaped something like a weather balloon, the drift through time ands space until their appointed time is up. Then they disintegrate in a number of ways.
But what if at the bottom of the cone, there is an opening into which energy flows to build the Universe and from which energy will escape back into the Cosmos when the Universe has died.
Wouldn’t this simple technique answer all the problems and eliminate the need for this so-called big bang?
If it weren’t science and someone told you there is this point in time and space which is so small you can’t see it, but in which all the matter of the entire Universe one day was pack into intimate density, would you believe him?
I wouldn’t. I like my idea better.
Everything in the Cosmos is made of energy. And one day, everything must be returned to energy. The building of stars and planets and other space bodies is an on going process that never stops. Getting rid of old stars and planets and space bodies is also an on going process that never stops.
Energy is the basis for all this building but energy can neither be created nor destroyed. So, since the Cosmos has existed forever and will exist at least for trillions of years if not also forever, how come it hasn’t long ago run out of the energy it needs to build new things?
I say the answer is simple: they just recycle old energy. It makes perfect sense. Since the Cosmos is forever – it must have a renewable energy supply. Where best to get it accept from reclaimed and recycled old entities that have lived their lifetime and died. The process might take a very long time but time is what the Cosmos has a lot of.
This is the cycle of life - energy to matter to mass and back again to energy. A seed, the sun, and the rain combine to grow a tree. The tree is cut down for lumber to build a house. The house gets old and the wood is taken for firewood. The firewood is burned up providing heat to those around it, and the heat energy is returned to the stars for recycling.
Energy to matter to mass and back to energy. Doesn’t that sound a lot like “ashes to ashes and dust to dust”? I think it does.
So all things are created and live their assigned lifetime and die. They are then recycled as energy. That includes everything - stars, planets, clouds, even you and I, we are all recycled. All things are made from energy and all things will one day be returned to energy.
And then what? Well, then they will be recycled. The energy that is you and me, and the Earth, and maybe a star or two – will all be recycled to make something new.
Over and over and over, the recycling goes on. Energy to matter to mass to energy and back again. It is a never-ending process.
Some of the energy that was you, and some of the energy that was me, and some of the energy that was something else that had lived its lifetime and died, will be combined, refurbished and recycled to form a new thing. First one, and then another. Over and over for all eternity.
It takes eons of course, but what are eons in eternity.
Sometimes I think maybe our energy when it is released drifts into space in a peaceful manner, renewing itself and gathering strength to become part of some other thing – another life perhaps, or a bird or animal, or perhaps a rain drop or a cloud or even a distant star. After all, those things are created and all those things are made of energy and if energy is recycled, at some point all energy becomes part of all things.
Maybe the memory of this peaceful drifting for eons (preparing for reuse) imprints a memory on our own energy and maybe that is what we think of when we speak of Heaven, a peaceful place without anger or controversy or ambition – a peaceful drifting into forever.
In this view of eternity, no one ever really “dies”. The energy which is each of us is simply recycled over and over into new and different forms of matter – first one thing and then another. And we all – in some form – live on.
I rather like that thought.
Lest you think this is too “far out”, it really isn’t. It is certain that new entities are being created all the time in the Cosmos. It is equally certain that planets, stars, even galaxies become old and are destroyed on a regular basis. And it is also certain that new entities cannot be constructed by the Cosmos without energy and that energy can neither be created or destroyed. So where else would the Cosmos get this energy that it must have. Think about it. After all, even on Earth we recycle.
It IS the thing to do, right?
Right.
Finally there is this: recently there has been a spate of people who have experienced ‘out of body’ experiences. They include all manners of contact with the ‘other side’ from flying around the room to long tunnels with bright lights. That’s fine. I cannot speak for them. But I can speak for myself and I shall.
I belong to a very exclusive club. So exclusive is this club that I wanted them to issue a memorial pin saying: “I went and I came back.”
Suffice to say the pin was never issued. But what the pin referred to was those people who have “died” and been brought back to life.
I am one of those people.
In 1998, in the emergency room of Holy Redeemer Hospital in suburban Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, I went into cardiac arrest as a result of a major heart attack. I ‘flat lined’ and was pronounced dead. My son rushed out of the room to notify his siblings of their father’s death but upon returning, he was amazed to see me sitting up, apparently very much alive. I informed him that news of my demise had been premature (as someone once said). I had been resuscitated, a procedure rare at that time, but more common since.
I am, therefore, the only person I know that has gone and come back. I hear a lot of stories from people about the experience – people who have never done it - but I remain the only person I know or whom I have ever talked with, who has actually died and been brought back to life. When I woke up, the first question the nurses asked me was “what did you see?”
I replied “nothing”; I was here, then I was gone, then I was here again and absolutely nothing happened in between. Some of the nurses were disappointed.
Now the ‘believers’, the good people, will say that since I am a non-believer that’s why I didn’t see anything. You might say the ‘door’ wasn’t open for me. To which I reply, if not believing leads to the loss of salvation, you would think at least that the OTHER door should have been open for me and I should have been able to see what was down there, right? But alas, no door, no light, no nothing.
People loved to be fooled and so, there are lots of people who will try to fool them. This is no exception. But then, there are those who honestly believe they saw something. They are simply misreading what happened to them – taking the effects of the mal-functions of a dying brain and assigning spirituality to them. It is not an uncommon experience but it is as erroneous today as it was in the past.
Kind of like John in “Revelations” to whom Heaven and Hell were revealed. The throne room he visited with the twenty-four “elders” surrounding the crown, and the seven-headed monsters with their seven whatevers. Lucky for John, he revealed all his revelations a couple of thousand years ago when people were willing to believe anything. If it were being revealed today, John wouldn’t get off first base with his story. Nor should he. Whoever he was, this desert dweller was seriously in need of an anti-hallucinatory drug.
In closing, I return once more to the 2,000 year-old, “The Antiquities of the Jews” written by the ancient Jew-turned-Roman historian, Flavius Josephus. This excerpt identifies Abram, the Jewish Patriarch who lead a small band of exiled Jews southward into the land of Canaan, as the source of man’s belief in a one, true, living and universal God.
HOW ABRAM OUR FOREFATHER WENT OUT OF THE LAND OF THE CHALDEANS (1950 BC), AND LIVED IN THE LAND THEN CALLED CANAAN BUT NOW JUDEA.
1. Now Abram, having no son of his own, adopted Lot, his brother Haran's son, and his wife Sarah's brother; and he left the land of Chaldea when he was seventy-five years old, and at the command of God went into Canaan, and therein he dwelt himself, and left it to his posterity. He was a person of great sagacity, both for understanding all things and persuading his hearers, and for not being mistaken in his opinions. For that reason he began to have higher notions of virtue than others had, and he determined to renew and to change the opinion all men happened then to have concerning God.
2. In this he was the first that ventured to publish this notion, that there was but one true God, the Creator of the universe; and that, as to other [gods], if they contributed any thing to the happiness of men, that each of them afforded it only according to His appointment, and not by their own power.
Note: Paragraph #1 indicates that Abram was the first to publish the notion of a one true universal God.
3. This, his opinion, was derived from the irregular phenomena that were visible both at land and sea, as well as those that happen to the sun, and moon, and all the heavenly bodies, thus: - "If [said he] these bodies had power of their own, they would certainly take care of their own regular motions; but since they do not preserve such regularity, they make it plain, that in so far as they co-operate to our advantage, they do it not of their own abilities, but as they are subservient to Him that commands them, to whom alone we ought justly to offer our honor and thanksgiving."
Note: Paragraph #2 indicates that the one true universal God controlled heaven and earth and all other Gods are subservient to Him. .
4. For these doctrines, when the Chaldeans, and other people of Mesopotamia, raised a tumult against him, he thought fit to leave that country; and at the command and by the assistance of God, he came and lived in the land of Canaan. And when he was there settled, he built an altar, and performed a sacrifice to God.
Note: Paragraph #3 indicates that the people raised up against Abram because of his belief in a one true universal God and drove him out of Chaldea.
5. NOW, after this, when a famine had invaded the land of Canaan, and Abram had discovered that the Egyptians were in a flourishing condition, he was disposed to go down to them, both to partake of the plenty they enjoyed, and to become an auditor of their priests, and to know what they said concerning the gods; designing either to follow them, if they had better notions than he, or to convert them into a better way, if his own notions proved the truest.
Note: Paragraph #4 indicates that Abram was willing to discard his own idea of God if the Egyptians had a better idea, but if not, then he would try to convert THEM to his beliefs.
Joseph J Kusnell
April 2004
Note: I finished this piece almost four years ago. In the meantime, I have ruminated on the subject of religion and Christianity and feel I now understand why the Romans adopted Christianity in favor of paganism. It also explains why the world may mourn it’s passing.
The strength of religion (in this case, Christianity), was that it provided a rallying cause for people. It brought them together; gave them a common purpose. It provided them with hope and reassurance during a period when people did not understand much of the world under them or over them an era when superstitions abounded. Fear of the unknown was commonplace. In this environment, Christianity provided answers (God), hope (God), reassurance (God) and a common path to salvation. It also brought people together and made individuals into communities which became their strength. They bonded within their religion. Today we know much more about what surrounds us and this knowledge and feeling of self-reliance has voided our need for religion, for churches, and even for God. Advanced, well-educated people, now understand much of what once frightened their forefathers, and have therefore have lost their need for religion. In the process, they have also lost their sense of commonality, of group, and of purpose. Instead they have become individuals thereby splintering the groups they once made strong. It is sad for them, sad for religion in general, but significantly worse for humanity.
Religion made the world what it is. What we will have now is that which religion replaced originally: hedonism. More’s the pity.
And finally there is this: Christianity is more than just about religion. It also has a political impact on all of our lives. Christianity is the glue that has held Western Civilization together for over 2,000 years. It was the one glue that bound Americans from countries like England and Germany, France and Spain, and Italy and Poland into a cohesive nation. Christianity was the common unifying force – the one common unifying belief – that overcame the ordinary partisan bias of the mother countries. We call America the melting pot because so many of our forefathers came from divergent European countries but, lest we forget, they were all Christian countries so despite what separated them one from the other, Christianity joined them one to the other. Without it, we wouldn’t have made it this far.
Without it, we may not make it much farther. .
Joey
PS 2009. On quarter of the world’s population is now Muslim. And they ARE religious. Very much so.
