The Evolution of Religion

I recently read the book The Heathen's Guide To World Religions by William Hopper, and it is frikkin' awesome. (See also WordPress.) Is examines the history of civilization w.r.t. religion and the evolution of various popular religions. Why yes, religions, like all human values, culture & mythos, do change over time. A good subtitle for the book would be “What *Actually* Happened”. The Bible is one source for historical information, but there are many others and most of them are much less dubious. The Heathen's Guide is very highly recommened for all heathens who want to understand the history and delusions of the major religions. It is written in a irreverant and very accessible style.

Apparently, various other historians have been discussing this subject recently as well and tell a similar story. The Da Vinci Code is a fictional murder-mystery that examines the same religious history, though with a bunch of extraneous crap thrown in. There is also brewing controversy and disillusionment in popular culture about the divinity of the Bible. This is good. And there is a movie version of The Da Vinci Code being developed that threatens to turn biblical skepticism into a popular cultural phenomenon. (It's not like that many people read books.) Maybe if the Catholic priests could have kept their penises in their pants, the sheep wouldn't be questioning the unquestionable.

You should read the entire Heathen's Guide, but many of the important points are covered below.

Abraham

• The early Jews were nomadic tribes that wandered the edges of the deserts around 10,000 BC and lived a pretty harsh life. The early Jewish faith was polytheistic, meaning that they worshipped many gods that they ascribed to the natural forces around them. (Most ancient people were polytheistic in this way; this is the principle of the “God of the Gaps” at work, where gods are created to fill in gaps in human knowledge. If you didn't understand solar mechanics, you might be tempted to consider the sun to be a god, and you might be tempted to sacrifice some virgins to insure that the sun rose the next morning. After all, if you made the sacrifice and the sun rose, then you did the right thing, right?) Hopper refers to these gods as “barometric-pressure gods”.

• Abraham lived around 1,600 BC. He was leader of one of these nomadic groups of Jews, but really by this time the world had passed the nomads by and now had real cities, real trading, and real armies.

• Abraham had made a ‘deal’ with the god El-Shaddai, literally “the god of the mountains” (one of those Gods of the Gaps) that said that Abraham and his followers would worship and sacrifice to the god and the god would make the people wealthy and prosperous.

• Abraham apparently had seven sons, but at supposedly starting at 99 years old may have been too old to have actually fathered them; only his wife Sarah knows for sure. He supposedly lives to be 200 years old, and Sarah supposedly is still having children into her hundreds. (They probably actually lived to be relatively old, but not this old.)

• Abraham's followers and their descendents lived around the Nile Delta region and were prosperous and their numbers swelled. The family became known as “Israel”, which means “perserverers with God”.

• Then everything goes south. Some of the descendents said “Screw it” with respect to Abraham's deal with the mountain god, and then there was famine. (Not that there's necessarily a causal relation.) So the people moved, found work in other Egyptian cities, and things were good again, for a while. The thing is, as immigrants, they were always second-class citizens and never really owned much. Many became indentured servants of the wealthy. This servitude went on for a few generations until the land-owners became opulent, the class system more rigid, and the Jews became abused. They eventually became true slaves of the state of Egypt and the seeds of revolution started to germinate.

Moses

• Moses was a Jew who was secretly adopted by the pharaoh's wife. He was raised to be royalty, but was stripped of all title and rank when his secret was finally revealed. Moses was kicked out of the kingdom by his brother Ramses and became a shepherding nomad with a tribe of nomadic Jews. His new, non-royalty life doesn't set too well with him, so he snaps.

• Abraham's god of the mountain is supposed to be watching out for the Jews, but he's not, so Moses charges up a nearby mountain, Mount Sinai, to confront his god about this. His god happens to be home and apparently tells Moses to go and free the Jews and the god will help. Apparently, the god identifies himself as “Yahweh”, which means “I am”. (Doesn't seem like that much of an inspired name to me; maybe he could have called himself “Descartes” or something.) This name is translated in the King James Bible as being “Jehovah”, though there doesn't seem to be any real reason for the differences in the translation. So, this is the God of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, so I guess I'll start using a capital ‘G’ to indicate that it's a proper name.

• Moses goes to confront Ramses and apparently performs some magic tricks. Ramses is unimpressed. Apparently, more arguing about whose god is bigger ensues and more magic tricks are performed (also known as “articles of faith” to believers), and Moses wins the freedom of the Jews and he brings them back to Mount Sinai.

Miscellaneous

• The Ark of the Covenant isn't lost and never has been. It's in Ethiopia. King Solomon and Queen Sheeba's son ‘liberated’ it from the Jews for safe keeping. The history of Ethiopia is very accurately recorded.

• The word “Satan” doesn't actually refer to an evil fallen angel. It actually refers to human intelligence or wisdom. I can see why religious folks would fear this.

• Looks like the League of Nations/UN carved up the Middle East after WWII in such a way as either to indirectly exterminate the Jews once and for all or to keep the Middle East constantly in turmoil so as to avoid the emergance of an Islamic superpower. The League of Nations kicked the Palestinians off their own land (which was taken from the Jews by the Arabs in ancient times) knowing that the Palestenians really had nowhere to go. The British occupied Israel for ten years and forbade the Jews to have any weapons right up until the day the British pulled out. One could easily expect a Jewish slaughter, which is what the PLO was counting on. “It seems that the entire state of Israel went to sleep the night before totally unarmed and defenseless, and then miraculously woke up the next morning not only owning weapons, but being a very real contender for the most heavily armed nation on Earth.”

• Jesu (“yay-soo”) was just an ordinary man (Duh!) who happened to be a Jewish rabbi. Jesus Christ is the name of the religious icon constructed from his image.

• John the Baptist and Jesu were cousins.

• Jesu hated organized religion and took every opportunity to trash-talk the orthodoxy.

• Jesu's mother Mary was never described as being a “virgin”. The Hebrew was translated improperly. What she was actually described as being is simply a “young girl”.

• The story of Jesus' birth is not even an original tale and is in fact plagarized from a book called The Golden Ass written 500 years earlier by Asclepius. Impregnated by God, virgin birth, donkey ride, manger, the whole bit. In fact, virgin births for great leaders was a common mythology at the time.

• There's a lot more... need to flesh this out...

The 1611 King James version, perhaps the most famous book ever written by a committee, may reach poetic heights, but Alter says it is fraught with "embarrassing inaccuracies" and often substitutes Greek or Latin words and Renaissance English tonalities and rhythms for biblical ones.
-- CNN (2004-11-18)

[Trouble brewing... If you were an indoctrinated fool, how you feel to discover that the King James bible is not the "Word of God" but rather the word of a committee. Also, definitely do not do a web search on the "Council of Nicea"... another committee, which formed the whole of the religious canon of Christianity from a tight selection of letters written by fanatical cult members over three hundred years before. Christ's divinity was decided by a majority vote of the men present. Much of the body of the bible was written by a schizophrenic who was born a hundred years after Christ's death.]