Where does God begin?...2

So anyway, back to my theory. It seems to me likely that the development of the city plays a large part in the rise of the environment which gives birth to the one god. How? Well consider this, the village, which is in effect a further extension of the extended family, is not a likely environment for the development of ideas of individuality, and individuality is necessary for the development of a strong point of view. And a strong, almost megalomaniacal, egocentric, all consuming point of view is necessary for the development of one god to the exclusion of all others.

Now in the days before the rise of cities, individualism meant something like a death wish. For a long period of time during the development of humans being alone was a very frightening prospect. Humans survived by familial alliances. Those extended alliances were effective enough that they grew into tribes. Tribes were very successful. In fact tribal affiliation as a social bond is still so successful a survival strategy that Tribalism is to this day the most real threat to democracy. So it seems unlikely that the idea of one god alone should spring up in in a tightly knit tribal setting. As a matter of fact there is no evidence other than mythological that this ever happened. Historically speaking the first notions of an exclusive god comes from where you might expect it in that time, the place where an individual might survive on his own, where his ego might develop along independent and radical lines: Egypt.

I know, I've heard the arguments, " Akhenaten wasn't a monotheist, he was a henotheist!" Let's set aside the discussion of monotheism/henotheism for a moment and look for a practical rather than a theological definition. Let's look at what Akhenaten did in his religious practice.
1. He personalized the worship experience ( his great hymn to Aten is "heart felt")
2. He builds a new center of worship at Amarna, abandoning the traditions of his ancestors.
3. He closes the worship sites not connected to his chosen form of worship, in effect denying
the "non-believers" ( those who chose to worship a deity other than Aten) the opportunity to
do so.
4. His rejection of the cults of the other gods has the effect of a natural disaster: temples are
abandoned, priests are forced out of their civic function, and not so subtle pressure is put on the inhabitants to fall in line and follow the new and improved Superior god!

Now consider how the religion of Moses develops:
1. He has the personal experience of the burning bush ( an intimate encounter w/ Yahweh).
2. He receives direct quotes form Yahweh which explicitly forbid the acknowledgement of
other deities.
3. His unrepresentable god demands that he conquer a local people and DESTROY all their
religious centers.
4. His god further demands that he and his followers kill anyone of the indigenous people
who refuse to abandon their religious practices and believe only in Him (Yahweh).

And then consider how the Christians, the post Roman Empire monotheist, behave
1. They insist that it is faith in their hero alone which everyone in the world must accept
or die.
2. They actively seek to destroy all cultural elements of societies not associated with
Christianity, no matter the cultural value!
3. They go further than their predecessors insisting that the art of reason ( which was
responsible for such things as the Great pyramids, the aqueducts of Rome, the temples of the
Greeks, the medicine of Galen, the Pythagorean theorem, etc., ) is subject to the influence of
evil and therefore must be subject to faith. They ban the open expression of ideas.
4. Declaring the imitation of the Old Testament Kings the medieval Christian kings go on killing
rampages against nonbelievers, ironically turning on the people who first launched a holy
purging of the land of Canaan.

And again, the Muslims:
1. Receive Allah's word from only one source; Muhammed, his one and only voice.
2. Actively seek to displace all other faiths and in its most radical form to eliminated those
with different faiths.
3. They likewise insist that reason must serve Allah.
4. They reject any culture not like their own. ( Recall the Taliban destroying the 900 year old
Buddhas in Afghanistan).

Akhenatens religious pattern of behavior is exactly that of those who follow his line of thought.
1. Fabricate a new vision
2. Oppress those who will not accept it
3. Destroy/Negate the faiths and culture of others
4. Annihilate/alienate those who will not accept the new point of view and abandon their own.

This is the consistant repeating of the monotheistic cycle.One must wonder, what is the
payoff?

Where does God begin?

For a former fundamentalist this is the hard question. You must realize I was raised on a steady diet of " It doesn't have to make sense, just believe it." and, "God is beyond human understanding". That's the sleight of hand I mentioned earlier. Like when you ask the salesman the important question and he tells you that it's not the important question. Like when you ask an academician a bothersome question and he tells you you wouldn't understand the answer so he won't bother giving it. Like when you ask a politician where the money went and he tells you what you really want to know is how to prevent gays from getting married. In faith good solid critical thinking is called doubt. In my book, that's a virtue.

There isn't much that can hide from critical thinking. Connect the dots, reveal the picture. Remove the foolish, see what you have left. In the cases of Moses and Jesus, when the fantastic is removed so little is left the true believer abandons reason for faith. Some people feel so betrayed they turn from worship entirely. Later I'll suggest a way that reason and worship can function together.

So where do we start looking for God (and by that I mean the one-god-to-the-exclusion-of-all-others variety) ? A long time ago I had a theory. I reasoned that we had to abandon the notion that God somehow miraculously revealed himself to a few key people and the notion resonated in humanity and eventually came to dominated the human spiritual landscape. Again I resort to my mantra: God must make sense or he's impertinent. Like everything else in our lives, a rationale is required.

God doesn't appear on the radar of human evolution, let alone earthly evolution, until the most recent of times. In reference to human evolution it would look like this:

Human language
Clothing
Art ( visual)
Villages
Agriculture
Bread
Beer
Property
Music
The Boat
Writing
Written Law
The Wheel
Long walks alone in the desert
Terms of Divorce
A Troubled Heaven ( to match a troubled earth)
Divine Hierarchy to match Human Hierarchy
One God that shatters all Others ( Just as we crave one opinion to
destroy all others)

Something like that...I imagine.

nothing up the sleeze...

So having realized that Yahweh doesn't know anything about the world beyond the Levant and I do, and that renders his declaration that the land of Canaan is "the promised land!" nonsense, I wondered just what else in this tale is nonsense. Keep in mind that my new creed is rational honesty. In other words no mental gymnastics to justify ones faith. And no sleight of hand on the part of the proclaimers. Look for the source where the evidence leads, not where the proclaimers misdirect.

Item #1: By the time the five books of Moses are written down, the Epic of Gilgamesh, the Code of Hammurabi, and the tale of Sargon the Great being rescued as an infant , in a pitch lined basket, from the river, were all more than a thousand years old.

This is a good starting point. Moses is clearly a created character, just like Jesus in the New Testament. Both characters ask you to believe the impossible:

MOSES JESUS
Born poor/slave becomes prince Born poor becomes God

Highly educated he becomes leader of the Endowed with special knowledge he
poor/slaves. imparts it to the least trained.

He receives messages from God He receives messages from God
which no one else hears which no one else hears

He insists that his and only his view He insists that his and only his view
of God is acceptable of God is acceptable

He insists that his followers be He insists that his followers be
willing to abandon all for his view willing to abandon all for his view

He dies and disappears prior to the He dies and disappears prior to the
payoff of his faith (the promised land) payoff of his faith ( the church)


Note: Humans neither part nor walk on water.

Making God make sense

So suddenly, nothing makes sense. If Yahweh is the creator of the universe, then how can he possibly imagine, and declare from heaven, with knowledge of the entire earth, that the "LAND OF CANAAN " is the prime location for His Chosen people? It just doesn't make sense. And, like I said, nothing else in the subsequent myth makes sense as some sort of quantifiable fact. When you look at the mono myth of the Old Testament, I mean the first five books, in reference to what we've learned through archeology and anthropology, what we know about humans, then none of the OT myth makes sense.

First, what do we know about humans? We know without a doubt that humans have been around for a long time. Now that is an amazing fact. We know that large brained, bipedal, tool making humans have been around for more or less two MILLION years. We know that Homo sapiens-sapiens, the descendants of the first bipedal tool makers, have been around for more or less one-hundred-thousand years. Image making: both painting and sculpting, has been around for more or less twenty to forty thousand years. Writing has been around for five to seven thousand years. The idea of one god above others has only been around, historically,verifiably, about thirty-four or thirty-five hundred years. Beyond that, there is no evidence that anybody ever thought, talked, or wrote about the idea of one great god to the exclusion of all others.
This is what we know. For sure.

The miopic Yahweh

So, if Yahweh, the OT God, doesn't seem to know the world beyond the Jordan valley... doesn't know about the abundance of Europe, the vast variety of the African continent, the wonder of the seas beyond the Mediterranean, and certainly not the beauty of the north American continent, nor the density of the south American continent, let alone the culture of the Asian peoples, how can such a god have anything to say on my life? In short, he can't. So what do I care for a god whose only concern seems to be for one tribe of people? In short, I can't.

At this point it seems necessary to refer to a question I first heard raised many years ago. At the time it seemed innocuous. I flippantly dismissed it for its' simplicity. It was Bertrand Russell in his little book, Why I'm Not A Christian, asking, "If we don't believe in many gods, why do we believe in one?" That is the most pertinent question of faith, at least of monotheistic faith as it has come to be in the west. And from that question I began to search for an understanding of how and why monotheism arose and then spread, from Egypt, through the Levant, and then across Europe and the Americas.

In the Begining!

I grew up in the eastern united states. We hunted, and fished. There were chickens in the yard, a cow and some horses in the lot, and across the creek, against the bottom of the mountain, next to the spring, there was a hog pen. We planted small crops in april and in october, after first frost, we butchered. I don't remember having money till I was a teenager, but I never remember going hungry.

We were fundamentalists.Everything in the King James Bible was literally true. So, for more than twenty years every tale in the sacred book, no matter how unlikely, no matter how it might challenge reason, was loaded into my head as an absolute touchstone for truth.

Some time later I made my way, as all good believers yearn to do, to the hills overlooking the Jordan river. I had imagined that when I stood there, within close range of where Moses stood, pointing the way to the "Promised Land", Gods' chosen spot for His favored people, that I would feel something of the awe he must have felt. I gazed, and I waited. Imagine my shock when a voice said to me, "Yahweh doesn't know as much about real estate as you do." And that, for me, was the beginning.

Who God is has been a lifelong obsession. I think I know some things on that subject now. Since the subject is a bit of a party downer than either blue or red I've come here to think out loud. Comments, reasonable comments, are welcome.