Guest Article on "Nice Guy, Jehovah"

THE TOWER OF BABEL

I am proud to publish a comment submitted by Freyashawk in response to my "Nice Guy, Jehovah" post, as well as my telling her that I'm writing an "impeachment of Jehovah" post. What she sent as a long comment deserves to be given a prominent position. Freyashawk is a leading authority on myths. I see that she has just posted a fascinating article entitled "In Defence of God" on her outstanding blog, "Notes from Freyashawk" .


By Freyashawk

'The stories in the 'Bible' are based on very old myths and only literalists believe that myths should be accepted as literal truth. No one expects that from folktales or fairytales but then they hold the 'Bible' to a different standard. Of course, this is the fault of the writers of the books that now have been collected in the form of a single 'word of God' text as well as religious leaders who want to convince people that 'every word' is directly from the Creator.
God cannot be defined by ANY human being or limited to the restrictions of any human language. How any one can believe literally in myths that were borrowed from more ancient civilisations than the Hebrews is beyond my own (admittedly limited human) comprehension.

The story of the Great Flood is based on the Sumerian tale of Gilgamesh which probably was based on even older oral accounts by storytellers. The Tower of Babel story is found in many different cultures and I think there is even an ancient Egyptian tale that mirrors it somewhat.

Here is where the entire basis of the Jewish depiction of 'Jehovah' or 'Yahweh' breaks down into utter nonsense. Why would the real God choose any tribe or group as his 'chosen people'? The entire thread that runs through the 'Old Testament', purporting to give the Hebrews some special status and special dispensation to pillage, rape and even commit genocide is more than suspect.

The creature depicted in many of the Jewish works that are incorporated in the 'Bible' is nothing more than a series of misrepresentations of God perpetrated by the Hebrews to attempt to justify their conquests of Canaan. God therefore cannot be held to account for lies and fictions created by those who purported to be his 'chosen people'. It is not God who is described by most of these tales. Yahweh probably is a misrepresentation of El in any case, so one
wouldn't wish to throw out the baby with the bath water.

Apart from this, however, the Bible contains some gems of real truth and wisdom. There are hymns of great beauty among the Psalms and philosophical declarations of wisdom by Solomon or Suleiman.

The stories of the Creation, the Tower of Babel and the Great Flood are fantastic tales that should be enjoyed and appreciated as creative interpretations of mythic events.

Unfortunately, as in the case of many religions, the 'fundamentalists' have placed an impossible burden of proof upon old myths. This does not in any way reflect upon God or the true nature of the Divine. It is human misrepresentation and that pernicious human need to control the universe that is at the root of the problem.

'I speak for God' has to be one of the worst spiritual crimes that can be committed by any human being. That is not to say that human beings cannot be inspired by the Divine or even that the 'word of God' does not exist. Common sense, however, should be used to distinguish between truth and fiction.

Those like Jesus and Muhammad who truly have spoken for God can be judged by the message: 'God is Love'. 'God is all Merciful, all Compassionate.' 'Your Lord is the Lord of all Mercy and Compassion.'
This is the Word of God, not found in any declarations of special dispensation for crimes committed by Hebrew tribes.

One last note: There is nothing 'inferior' or 'criminal' about fiction. It is one of the most wonderful gifts that the Divine has given humanity. On the other hand, people do need to be able to distinguish between fact and fiction.
No one can dispute that the book of Genesis contains some beautiful poetry:

'In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was without form and void, and darkness was over the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the Waters. And God said: Let there be Light. And there was Light. And God saw that the Light was good. And God separated the Light from the Darkness. God called the Light Day and the Darkness he called Night. And there was evening and there was morning, the first day. ... And God said, 'Let there be lights in the expanse of the heavens to separate the day from the night. And let them be for signs and for seasons, and for days and years, and let them be lights in the expanse of the heavens to give light upon the earth.' And it was so. And God made the two great lights: the greater light to rule the day and the lesser light to rule the night -- and the stars. And God set them in the expanse of the heavens to give light on the earth, to rule over the day and over the night, and to separate the light from the darkness. And God saw that it was good. and there was evening and there was morning, the fourth day. And God said, 'Let the waters swarm with swarms of living creatures, and let birds fly above the earth across the expanse of the heavens' So God created the great sea creatures and every living creature that moves, with which the waters swarm, according to their kinds, and every winged bird acorrding to its kind. And God saw that it was good. And God blessed them, saying, 'Be fruitful and multiply and fill the waters in the seas and let birds multiply on the earth.' And there was evening and there was morning, the fifth day.'

This is poetry. It is not a literal account of 'creation'. Humanity ever has sought to describe the ordering of the universe and the way in which order emerges from chaos.

In fact, another way in which creation is described in the Bible is through the declaration: 'In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.... Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made.' (St. John)

One of the oldest Creation myths found in written form is the Enuma Elish:

'When in the height Heaven was not named,
And the earth beneath did not yet bear a name,
And the primeval Apsu who begat them,
and Chaos, Tiamut, the mother of them both,
Their waters were mingled together,
And no field was formed, no marsh was to be seen;
When of the gods none had been called into being,
And none bore a name, and no destinies were ordained;
Then were created the gods in the midst of heaven:
Lahmu and Lahamu were called into being...'

Essentially, these Creation accounts describe a fundamental operation of magic. By naming an object and thus defining it, one brings it into existence. God named the Light and thus created it. Order from chaos... this is what is described in every Creation tale.

From ancient Sumer:

'When Anu, Bel and Ea,
The great gods, through their sure counsel
Fixed the bounds of heaven and earth,
And to the hands of the great gods entrusted
The creation of the day and the renewal of the month which they might behold.
And mankind beheld the Sun-god in the gate of his going forth,
In the midst of heaven and earth they duly created him.

In this context, the 'gods' are lesser beings called into being by the Divine.

Yahweh or Jehovah or Allah: these are names for the same Divine Being.

From Surah Al Baqarah: 'Behold! In the creation of the heavens and the earth, in the alternation of the Night and Day, in the sailing of the ships through the Ocean for the profit of mankind; in the rain which Allah sends down from the skies, and the life which He gives therewish to an earth that is dead; in the beasts of all kinds that He scatters through the earth; in the change of the winds and the clouds which they trail like their slaves between the sky and the earth: here indeed are Signs for those who are wise.'

God is NOT Jewish. He cannot be restricted or limited by the claims of any tribe or ethnic group. To condemn him for the misrepresentations or false pretensions of any group would be wrong.'

Commanding versus Begging

If I had to pick one message from my personal experience which might be of the most practical help to people who haven’t already discovered it for themselves, it would be, “You’re in charge.”

That sounds unnatural because from the beginning we are encouraged to feel just the opposite. Our parents are in charge, our teachers, our bosses, our government are in charge – not even to mention the buffetings of “fate” and “chance” which knock us here and there. Even in an apparently equal friendship or marriage one of the pair usually seems more “in charge” than the other, and not because either person intends it or is even conscious of it.

For now I’m going to address how “You’re in charge” relates to prayer.

My religious indoctrination was in the First Baptist Church of Gainesville, Florida. There was a great deal of bowing down and begging in prayers, which occured from the beginning of Sunday School to the end of the main service. There was even a small clique of creaky men in the “Amen Corner” in some front pews who didn’t feel that Preacher McCall’s long prayers were sufficient in length or in pleas for forgiveness or in reminders of the threat of damnation, and my child’s heart sank when one of those old scarecrows rose to address the Lord because I knew it would take at least ten minutes for the Lord to be fully informed of what presumably He knew in the first place. Meanwhile I would start a counter-prayer to make the Amen Corner's prayer shorter.

I learned that the purpose of prayer was to ask God for things, usually a long list of things, and to thank God for giving you things that you had asked for before. God apparently didn’t have a very good memory because every Sunday he had to be reminded again to bless and guide the church, the entire congregation, our missionaries, the Southern Baptist Convention, our President, our House of Representatives, our Senate, and of course to open the hearts of the heathens to salvation.

I noted that something like this was going on all over the world, all the time. How could God possibly pay attention to those millions upon millions of requests, and how did He decide which favors to grant?

I paid a lot of attention to prayer, and I prayed a lot myself, and after years I was forced to recognize that prayer did not work. Prayer as I’d learned it simply did not accomplish its purpose. A whole congregation praying for Brother Jones’ swift recovery resulted in his promptly dying. Hurricanes and tsunamis and bombs destroyed churches filled with people praying for divine deliverance. My prayers for material things proved less effective than my Santa Claus wish list.

To make it worse, it seemed that in prayer contests between conflicting nations and their armies, the side of justice lost the war at least as often as the unjust. I knew that many prayers surrounded sports events, but someone always lost.

Then, one day, it came to me: Don’t ask. Command.

I was on an ocean liner returning alone from Europe, looking forward to the voyage and the delicious food, when I was suddenly hit with all the symptoms of flu. Here I am, eager for the joys of the ocean and a reunion on the far shore, and I’m sentenced to at least a week of misery. For the first hour of fever and weakness I could hardly bring myself to stand up, but as I thought about all that I would miss -- not least the midnight buffets -- I became irrationally defiant.

I sat up and began to give orders to my body. Instead of praying to Somebody out there, I commanded all the cells of my body to bring an immediate cure. I ordered that the fever be gone, all the symptoms be gone, and that I be healthy and filled with energy.

Within minutes those things were true. Incredibly the illness lifted like fog giving way to bright sun. I felt wonderful relief. I was soon walking happily and gratefully on the deck looking forward to dinner. I was entirely well.

(I think it helped that I also tried to identify what might be going on below the surface of my mind to cause an illness. I identified something touchy I was worrying about which would need resolving after I disembarked. I didn’t need to try to get rid of it. Just recognizing it as a possible cause of illness was enough. Seeing it bob to the surface sapped its harmful power.)

Since then I have believed that an impulse to beg God for anything should be handled by strong commands rather than beseeching prayer. I now see each of us as a kind of lens which can focus the infinite power of the Source, of God, to satisfy a particular desire – whether it be for health, for love, for a job, for a home, or for safety from some catastrophe.

There is a lot more to be said on this subject, particularly because many people feel that at times an important “beseeching” prayer actually has been answered, but for now I want to conclude with a story that confirms my belief.

During the tsunami of the day after Christmas, 2004, which took thousands of lives, there must have been thousands of unfulfilled prayers offered up. But one man, a minister, tells of his experience as he was strove to escape the tsunami waves in a small boat with children from his orphanage: Instead of kneeling down and praying, he held up his arms and commanded in the name of his God, in a spirit of determination and strong confidence. . .

“With every second, the wall of sea-water came closer and closer. Something miraculous had to happen if we were going to get out of this alive. It was at that moment, faced with certain death, that a Scripture verse from the Bible popped into my mind.
And I just stretched my hands and I said (based on the strength of the Scriptures where it says that when the enemy comes in like a flood, the Spirit of the Lord shall raise up a standard against it), ‘I command you [wave] in the name of Jesus, stop!'

“The wall of water that was seconds away from engulfing us began to slow down. It became sluggish, it was straining against what I thought at the moment was some invisible wall. It was trying to break free, but something was holding it back. The only force or power that could have stopped it was the power of God. And God, with His power slowed it down and stopped the wave for us, and gave us the time to get away."

Witnesses from a distance confirmed the story.

Small and Large

The Bhagavad Gita has helped me to a fascinating new way of conceptualizing something. It says: “Your soul, your self, is too small to be harmed by any weapon.” “The individual soul is smaller than a tiny fraction of the size of the end of a hair, but God/Source/Creator is the smallest of all, and can easily enter into the heart of the individual soul.”

The Bhagavad Gita also compares the smallness of the Creator to the gigantic material universe which came from that smallness. I’m exhilarated and inspired by the idea that creation is from the smallest to the largest, from inside out. That makes sense to me. Crystals grow that way. Even when I stir my coffee, my instinct is to make an expanding spiral which begins in its center.


My mind was conditioned, probably because of the way the Bible was interpreted to me, to think of the Creator/God as outside myself, and very large. On the other hand, when I thought of something “within” I could visualize only the dark inside of the body. Thousands of creaky old teachings gave me the idea that to “face God” in some way, I should look up and lift my hands.

The Old Testament creation stories caused me to imagine a gigantic Being fashioning the earth, the sun, humans, animals, like a big potter at a wheel, or a child making mud pies. Biblical language leads to that. This naturally caused me to conceive of myself as a small creature on a big stage created by the Biggest of all, looking down on me.

For that reason I’ve always had trouble with statements like, “look within for God,” and “The Source is within you.” Now, with the idea that God/The Source is the smallest of the small, and is within my own very small (relative to the size of the body) Soul, I finally am able to conceptualize, if only in a crude way, God as within.

I can’t help immediately thinking of quantum physics’ ”string theory” -- that everything in the universe is made up of vibrating bits of energy, possibly the smallest of the small, from which all the physical universe is constructed -- the vibrations of the smallest creating and sustaining the components of sub-atomic particles, then atoms, then structures made of atoms, molecules -- sphere expanding outside sphere -- and on out to humans and elephants and cars and stars and galaxies.

I realize that the Source is inconceivable by my human mind, that non-physical things like the Soul can’t be compared in size to physical things, and that Creation is perhaps what we’d describe as a grand illusion in which nothing is really smaller or larger, but a new way of conceptualizing nevertheless has helped me to entertain the feeling of God “within” instead of outside and above.

Original Beliefs?

Have you ever asked yourself how many of your beliefs were put into your mind by other people, and how many you originated all by yourself?

I’m willing to bet that the number of people in the world who carry around even a few independently generated beliefs is smaller than the number who are over 7 feet tall.

When I say “beliefs”, I am thinking mostly of religious and spiritual beliefs. “Other people” includes parents, teachers, friends, books, newspapers, television, movies, and anything else except your own original ideas based on independent observation and intuition.

It took me a long time even to ask myself a question like the one above. When I did, it was, “If I had grown up alone on a tropical island with no people, no books, no means of communication with the rest of the world, would I ever have thought of the concept of ‘God’”?

I know it’s hard to imagine a lush tropical island today without a luxury hotel and fusion cuisine, much less without people, but try. Based on your isolated experience with Nature and yourself, would you have discovered a concept you would have labeled the equivalent of “God” as depicted in the Bible?

In the unlikely event that you came up with a biblical kind of “God” entirely on your own, we have to wonder what Nature, and your mind, would have revealed to be that God’s characteristics and effects on you in this life and after death.

We also have to wonder if a dozen men and women growing up alone in a dozen other completely isolated places would have come up with similar discoveries.

I was born and raised in the United States, not in isolation, which is why my question refers to the Old and New Testament Gods that were presented to me while I served a term in the Baptist church. From the beginning I felt there was something wrong with the entire system I was taught, and I collaborated and prayed more from fear of God’s plentiful punishments than from positive beliefs. Then I began asking Sunday School teachers and the minister embarrassing questions and getting embarrassingly irrational answers.

So one day, when I was in my early teens, I asked myself a question: Would I ever, entirely independently, have thought of the existence of God if God had not been named and described to me by other people? I concluded that the answer was a definite, “No.” My first original realization: I felt very strongly that there was some single, unseen basis that underlay and supported everything in existence, and that it was nothing like the Christian or Jewish Gods. I soon called this universal creative and animating source “spirit” for lack of a better term – a “spiritual” essence behind the visible world.

Of course I was not the first person in history to come up with such an idea! I was just the first person in my own history to come up with it. When I was later fortunate enough to read the “Upanishads” I felt a burst of light and confirmation.

More about all this next time. . . Thanks for looking.