Terror 29 Religion
https://www.google.com/search?q=dore+illustrations+for+raven&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjbz_apjZTaAhUPM6wKHZSwBaoQ_AUICigB&biw=1260&bih=641#imgrc=9yXhz_7MjO5lyM: downloaded 3/30/18
Golden eagle call: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=66M4ZSjvGUQ
It is the 26th of April, 2018.
A rule of good manners is never to talk about religion or politics.
But I suspect that they are more than relevant to what we are doing, so I make bold the raise the issues, but with a warning. Unlike the talks heretofore, nothing here is based on hard statistics. So either skip the next couple of talks or be prepared to cherry pick them, noticing anything that seems plausible and flatly rejecting anything you don’t much like. My experience is that when people are exposed to this topic, they are most likely to dismiss it in defiance of the evidence and they either ignore or attack me. Fair enough if it means trying to get the truth across, but for this kind of speculation, I don’t feel like fighting.
An early manifestation of what may have been a religious impulse was the creation of figurines like this:
These feminine creations were made over a long period of time. I am told that this one is 7,000 years old. She is decorously if scantily dressed; you can just see the edges of the sleeves. Received wisdom is that she has something to do with fertility. I tend to agree. If then as now infant diarrhea was a scourge, it would make more sense to worry about keeping children well than having children at all, at least if fertility was not a problem. But we have no idols to the formed stool god. This was before people began to form large identity groups and villages may have communicated easily, which of course would have doomed them to the 300 year brick wall we have seen so often. If a typical village was in contact with six adjacent villages and a dozen beyond that, the eighteen on average would have one collapsing every sixteen or seventeen years. Everyone would have known about it and worried about it.
If one defines religion as worship, then no religion is “wrong” so to speak. On the other hand, opinions about the best approach to worship and the best understanding vary enormously. To some extent, this may be biologically advantageous. If different religions encourage people to marry strictly within congregations but be happy to mingle with other congregations for other purposes, that might permit people to enjoy the blessings of a complex society, including high technology and enlightenment ideals, without the curse of childlessness. Of course far more conspicuous is the degree to which religious differences can lead to horrible behavior.
I’ll come clean and say I am a Methodist. I didn’t think up that religion = worship idea. That’s Methodism. As a rank and file, if rather rarely gathering, member I also take Scripture to be a collection of works by different people at different times which are worth serious study but are amenable to more than one interpretation. So let me offer some non-standard interpretations.
Adam and Eve ate from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil and that resulted in them leaving their original garden and losing access to the Tree of Life. Let me propose that we are to understand that to be “The Tree of Knowledge of Life.” And that is precisely what we have been leaning about. If you know the Tree of Life, you don’t have to die out. On the other hand, the danger is for you to say as some say sweetly and some scream at me, “But that’s not right,” as much as to say, “That’s evil.” Ok, I’m pushing on that one, but it’s remarkable that it works out.
Lot was fabulously rich and living in a town called Sodom. He learned that all the men in town were gay; his daughters had friends but were not attracting marrying material. They left, accompanied by special effects which are the reason you remember the story and went to another town. What they did not mention in Sunday school was that the daughters soon told him this town was just like the last one. So they took him out into the countryside, got him drunk and had their way with him. It worked; they got pregnant.
Old men marrying nubile women may indeed have happened a number of times and resolved a fertility crisis more than once. That might account for the otherwise strange fact that women are more attractive than men, yet traditionally take all the risks of having children and the work or rearing them. If the man brings home some money the woman man not feel hard done by. If he fails to provide she’ll feel hard done by but she’ll manage.
It's quite a nice deal for the men. Oh, yes. Males are amazingly sex oriented. A young man will be aroused if he simply falls asleep. Animals fall asleep but unaroused. Arousal is the default setting for men, only temporarily interrupted by waking issues. Very young men will reach climax. That’s as unique as the opposable thumb. I suspect the heightened drive is so that, like Lot, they remain vulnerable to feminine wiles into advanced age.
Moses led the Israelites out of Egypt and presented them with the Ten Commandments, the copy being carried in the Ark of the Covenant. So they aren’t commandments; they are a covenant, a contract, a deal. On the one hand the people are to agree to have no other gods. Since marriage traditionally is a religious ceremony, that can be construed to mean don’t marry out of the congregation. After that order has been repeatedly hammered home, there is the other side’s turn. It’s a list of bad things the people will not do. The promise is, “You will be decent people.” Now if a person loses self-esteem, that person will become depressed and contemplate suicide. Offering to make people be decent is the ultimate prize.
The hooker here is (I prefer the King James Version of the Bible or the Tyndale version; anybody else I suspect of having an axe to grind.) the passage, “Honour thy father and thy mother: that thy days may be long upon the land which the LORD thy God giveth thee.” I do not read Hebrew, but I can use an interlinear translation. The word “that,” meaning “so that” is an anachronism. It appears here and there in the first books and most frequently in Deuteronomy. Then it never appears again; there are other ways to say the same thing. The Deuteronomist stuck it in there, yeah, he had an axe to grind, too. So take it out, and it becomes, “You’ll make your parents proud. You’ll live a long time.” See? Blessings.
When Daniel was a boy among the captives from Judea being held in Babylon, He and some other boys were tapped to be educated to become administrators. That is high status work, and one might have expected that the administrators themselves would have been eager to have their own sons take over after them. But if Babylon, which was one – actually two – of the civilizations we looked at in lower Mesopotamia, if Babylon was having a fertility crisis, it makes sense.
If we are to believe all the stories, it worked out marvelously. Babylon built the mighty temple of Marduk and the Hanging Gardens during those years. The story that comes to us is that the Medes and the Persians took Babylon with a trick, but it may have been just a lack of capable young Babylonians in the administrative class and among the high-ranking officers.
In fact, there just might be a chance that some actual statistics might be brought to bear. One wonders whether the surviving clay tablets have any Hebrew messages. Probably not, I think. The young Hebrews would have been expected to learn the then current language. On the other hand, if Babylon, or any other lower Mesopotamian culture maintained sufficiently extensive birth records, we might be able to read their doom as inscribed by their own hands. We might see birth rate collapse just before the end.
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At last, of course, there is Jesus. As a Methodist I can believe that the notion that love is more important than status is at least consistent with his ministry. You believe as your own tradition dictates, of course; I’d be the last to ask you to do otherwise.