A monotheistic holy days mash-up with blood on everybody's hands

Christians in the world outside of Orthodoxy (unless Zelensky got the Ukranian church to move Easter as well as Christmas) celebrated Easter March 29.

Muslims had started Ramadan before that. 

Then, came the solar eclipse April 8, which means nothing to the non-superstitious.

But, the sliver of crescent moon the day after meant Ramadan was done and it was time for Eid al-Fitr.

Up next? Passover, starting Monday, April 22.

And, to wrap? The Orthodox Easter (a majority of Palestinians are Orthodox, I think, but don't quote me) is May 5.

All three of these world religions have genocidal blood on their hands against each other.

Christians, even if Hitler wasn't one, actively participated individually in the Holocaust. Centuries before that, before the Protestant Reformation, both Catholic and Orthodox leaders promoted the blood libel that Jews needed Gentile blood for matzoh. And, Pope Urban II did nothing to condemn First Crusade genocide against Jews in the Rhineland. Let us also not forget, via de las Casas, debate over whether American Indians were pre-Christian or anti-Christian, and thus, how they could be treated. Or mistreated.

Muslims? In what's widely recognized as not "just" genocide, but a holocaust, the Ottoman Empire, where the sultan was, at least nominally, the spiritual leader of Sunni Muslims as well as secular head of the empire Beyond that, per Wiki's page on the causes of this, the Empire committed further massacres before World War I that arguably also rose to the level of genocide. (So did the secular Turkish state after the war.) Those earlier massacres under Sultan Abdul Hamid II, even if not entirely religious, had a religious element. So did the WWI genocide under Mehmed V, who also formally declared jihad after entering the war. On the other hand, these and other genocides weren't entirely religious, and it's hypocritical for Jewish historians like Benny Morris to go ax-grinding.

And, we're now there. Beyond the genocide now having some degree of religious undertone, let us not forget that the Tanakh / Christian Old Testament has Yahweh ordering a holocaust — not just a genocide, a holocaust — against Amalek. Doesn't matter if it's legend/myth. Orthodox Jews, and everybody in power in Zionist Israel's government, cites it. And, historically, the forced conversion of the Idumeans at least approaches genocide. (Given that, per Yonathan Adler, most Jews didn't start regular observance of dietary and ritual purity laws until Hasmonean times, I think these conversions, as well as those of the Itureans, were indeed forcible.) And, Jews can be racist like Christians or Muslims even to fellow believers. Look at the treatment of Beta Israel.

Let's go back to the other two "western monotheisms." In addition to the jizya, many Muslim empires, nations, powers, required both Jews and Christians to wear special, identifying clothing long before popes came up with Magen David for Jews in the Rome ghetto they had created. But, and possibly by direct influence, popes did do that and it spread from there.

That said, don't get smug, Gnu Atheists. 

Stalin has genocidal blood on his hands from the Holodomor. But, don't act so persecuted, Ukrainians. By death rate, it hit harder in the Kazakh SSR than in the Ukrainian SSR. That said, Gnus, don't pull out the old bullshit about "Stalin went to an Orthodox seminary." I'll kick you in your genocidal ass.

Mao has genocidal blood on his hands from The Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution, and in smaller degrees other Maoist-derived stupidities.

Yes, they're all genocides, at least in my book. A deliberate targeting of one's own people, or socioeconomic classes within one's own people, counts as genocide in my book just like racial or religious genocides. That makes the French Revolution one, too, does it not?

Oh, and Hitler wasn't really Christian, even if not "anti-religious" (other than against Judaism) in the way Stalin and Mao were. We'll just leave that there.

The bacon on the grill for Ramadan and beyond

I ate the bacon

That was on the grill

 

And which

You were surely ignoring

And not only

Because of Ramadan.

Or Yom Kippur.

Or Good Friday.

 

It was delicious.

No forgiveness needed.

 

Riffing, of course, on William Carlos Williams' "This is Just to Say."

 

Note: I'm not a Gnu Atheist, but I do skewer at times. 

Also, I'm a semi-vegetarian, but here's how to get crisp oven-roasted bacon.

Baruch Spinoza remains excommunicated

From Mondoweiss, late last year.

It's not just that he remains excommunicated by the Amsterdam synagogue that booted him (and he does), but that a modern Spinoza scholar is also persona non grata. Indeed, per that second link, Rabbi Joseph Sefarty claims that Spinoza's excommunication cannot be removed.

Behind all of this? A clear refutation, as I've already blogged, that Christianity is allegedly all about orthodoxy and Judaism is all about orthopraxis. It wasn't bad cantorial skill that got Spinoza excommunicated; rather, it was the claim that he was an Epicurean, code words for being an atheist.

Not true, of course. Pantheism isn't atheism.

I later noted that distinguishing between orthodoxy and orthopraxis is somewhat a Mu point (pun intended), as they're not really separate domains.

Look at Islam. No "graven images," or anicony, is a praxis. But, it's a praxis based in a doxa, the idea that God cannot be represented AND that attempts should not be made. Note also that many Sunnis consider Shi'ites about one-quarter heretics, Sufi's half there, and Alawites fully there. 

Buddhism and Hinduism? Since both are, yes, religions, while you won't be excommunicated over rejecting karma and either reincarnation or a one-off afterlife, actual Buddhists and Hindus likely won't consider you one of them. And of course, in Hinduism, the caste system is both praxis and doxy. Or, within Buddhism, at another blog post, about orthodoxy vs orthopraxis in general, again, it won't get you excommunicated, but one of the big dividing lines between Mahayana and Theravada is dogma, not praxis. Within Muslims, the succession to Muhammad, or within Shia, the split between Sevenrs and Twelvers? Dogma. Per Spinoza, definiing who Yawheh is or is not, to then wonder who can say the Shema or not? Dogma.

Top blogging of April-June

Unlike at my main blog, I don't think it's productive to do a top blogging of the month post.

But, top blogging of the quarter, instead of only an annual roundup? Why not?

So, here goes the first run.

No. 1? An oldie but a goodie from a year ago. St. Anthony of Fauci’s Platonic “noble” lie about masks.

No. 2? PTSD, journalism and existentialism, about a weird piece in Atlantic from an ambulance-chaser reporter.

No. 3? The other Platonic lies of Fauci.

No. 4? “Once more on Hume and slavery,” part of a series deconstructing his thought on Africans and other things.

No. 5? Libertarian pseudoskeptical pseudoscience is about Brian Dunning above all, then about Michael Shermer, then about Skeptics™ in general and even older than Fauci takes. 

No. 6? It's kind of related to No. 5. Skeptatheism, fossilized looks at fossilization in Skeptics™ and Gnu Atheist movements.

No. 7? Martin Luther vs. Charles V, part of my Reformation 500 series.

No. 8? Talking about Jeff Kloha and Hobby Lobby in my personalized connection to Museum of the Bible’s Dead Sea Scrolls forgery.

No. 9? A non-gnu atheist has thoughts from seeing his first May Crowning.

No. 10? In response to Zionists and others, the true meaning of Hanukkah.

Waxing science, waning religion

Note: Per the tagline, I wrote this 12 years ago. While doing a search on my computer recently, I came across it and realized I'd never posted it here.

The slimmest clarion of new crescent moon 

Strives against being horizontally swallowed 

By a modern, urbanized mix 

Of haze, smog, high-rise skyline and near-solstice summer sunset. 

A totem of a more simplistic time 

(Whether simple or not) 

When times were measured by moons 

Along with sacrifices and other aspects of worship 

As the stench of old, dried, burnt blood 

Coated stones, steles, tabernacles and temples; 

Nasty, brutish, short and simplistic, even if not simple. 

Nor bygone. 

Yet today several million lobster loathers, 

And a billion followers of an illiterate itinerant peddler, 

Mark their calendars by that same crescent, 

While well more than a billion adherents 

Of a dead rebel Jew they cluelessly deify 

Mark his death by that same lunar orb. 

What would Earth by like without that Moon? 

No science of Galileo and Apollo landings, 

But no madness of Middle Eastern myths. 

 — May 31, 2009

Per the last stanza, a lot of people have written about how astronomy might be far different without Earth having a satellite, especially one as close as our Moon. And, that sets aside the issue of how the biology of our plant would be different without that.

But, given the centrality of lunar issues to many world religions, even if lunar month observances were secular, as a way of marking time, as well as endowed with religious import, I don't think you can talk about how science would be changed without talking about how religion would as well.

The Khazar hypothesis is real

 For the unfamiliar, the "Khazar hypothesis" is that Ashkenazic Jews are not Semitic, but are primarily descended from the Turkic people, the Khazars, who ruled the Khazar Khanate for approximately 200 years in what is today's eastern Ukraine and southeastern Russia. A khan converted and, depending on how true the legend is, got his people to all convert.

It surely isn't all true. From Constantine in Rome to Grand Duke Vytautis in Lithuania, the last pagan country of Europe, the populace didn't convert overnight after the sovereign did. But, more and more people would have eventually converted it.

Novelist Arthur Koestler first broached it in modern times. His idea was to show that many Jews weren't "Jews" in hopes of stopping Hitler's persecution. But, Hitler was persecuting on both racial and cultural-religious grounds, first, and second, might have considered Khazars to be untermenschen from the East anyway.

That said, was Koestler right? Are some modern Jews who raise similar ideas right?

Survey says: Yes, largely. The author says that East European Jews probably have some Alan background before the Khazars, but that, otherwise — as indicted by DNA! — a West Asian background for Ashkenazic Jews stands up. Sorry, Zionists.

In an earlier piece, Eran Elhaik discusses the origins of Yiddish. He says that it originated as an Ashkenazi trade language, and ties this to the rise of the Khanate. He said it grew to control Silk Road traffic.

I have a partial problem with that one, though.

Control it to where? Kievan Rus grew in power on the corpse of the Khanate, so it wasn't around to get Silk Road trade. Further west, after the brief Carolignian florescence, further Europe was in the throes of the Dark Ages. And, the Abbasids would have used trade routes running south of the Caspian. Middlemanning trade between China and the Byzantines might have happened, I suppose.

The second partial problem is that genes aren't language, which Elhalk kind of acknowledges in his first piece, thereby undercutting his second. Why don't we have a "Yiddish" more influenced by Khazar words than the real McCoy is? To me, it seems likely that there was back-and-forth pollination between various groups of Eastern European Jews, some of who were in today's Poland at the rise of the Khanate, but without any organized nation state.

That said, Elhaik is, like Shlomo Sand, himself Jewish, so nobody can honestly play the anti-Semitic card against him. And let's introduce that second name.

Or, his book.

The Invention of the Jewish People by Shlomo Sand
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Per the editorial blurb, this is a historical tour de force indeed.

The introduction tells Sand’s story and reason for writing. Noting that multiple women wanting to do aliyah were told no because of non-Jewish mothers, I thought that this issue itself could be a full chapter.

Around 150, he talks about Maccabean forcible conversion. I knew it well re the Idumeans, like Herod’s ancestors. Forgot about the Samaritans, and in grokking Josephus, don’t think I’d read about the Itureans in Galilee.

In conjunction, he notes something I already knew in part: That the revolt was purely religious freedom related, and not anti-Hellenism. After all, by John Hyrcanus, Maccabees are using Greek names.

He also notes Hanukkah was originally pagan. And he’s right! And, this explains why it was relatively “low” in Jewish life until modern times. It was too Messianic. See here for more. Yet more here. (Update: See LOTS more at this longform for just what Daniel, First Maccabees and to some extent Second Maccabees, presumably willfully and polemically, get wrong.)

He’s good on describing Judaism’s expansion by evangelism in the eastern Mediterranean, then Rome itself, then down to late classical antiquity Yemen. He also offers plausible reasons why Jews in Palestine declined after the Islamic conquest, including the tax-free Muslim advantage, plus Islam being more congenial than Christianity. (Besides hating Byzantium and “orthodox” Christianity, it’s arguable that Jacobites, if they took the “two persons as well as two natures” far enough, could see Jesus in a quasi-Ebionite way and convert to Islam as well.) He notes that pre-statehood Zionists in 20th century Palestine even presumed that the Palestinians were ethnic kin.

Paul Wexler of Tel Aviv Univ. used philology to conclude that most (now former) Spanish Sephardim were of Berber origin, or Arab-Berber, and not Jewish by ethnos.

Next, he goes to the Khazar Khanate. He does NOT just recapitulate Koestler. First, he notes that both Jewish and Russian historians in the first half of the 20th century did sound work on the Khanate history. In short, it lasted long enough that Judaism surely became the religion of at least a fair chunk of the masses, not just the rulers. Second, at least one subtribe can be clearly shown to have migrated with the Magyars when they left the Khanate and headed to the Hungarian plain.

He also goes beyond (from what I remember) of Koestler to pull in linguistics and philology. Everybody knows that Yiddish is a Germanic language, but one with a number of Slavic words and a few Hebrew ones. Not everybody knows that it also has a number of Turkic words, including the word “to pray.” Oops. (For the anti-Khazar Zionists, that is.) It’s things like this, given that the work on the history side by Abraham Polok is pre-WWII, at least in his earlier work, that has historians like Tony Judt saying the book has little new for the academic.

Related, Sand notes that the number of Rhineland German Jews simply wasn’t great enough to have caused the mass of Eastern European Jewry. Conclusion? Some version of the “Khazar hypothesis” is surely true.

From this, Sand does some speculating on the origins and development of the Yiddish language.

He then goes beyond Koestler in one other way, since such things didn’t exist in the 1970s. He addresses DNA testing, and not just that narrowly and specifically related to the Khazar theory. He notes that DNA testing is still in its infancy, that because it offers inconclusive results in many cases it can be (and is) “spun,” and this:

“Like similar investigations carried out by Macedonian racists, Lebanese Phalangists, Lapps in northern Scandinavia, and so on, such Jewish-Israeli research cannot be entirely free from crude and dangerous racism.”

Earlier, he notes the irony of descendants of Jews who suffered brutally from the race-essentialist ideas of the Nazis now engaging in race-essentialism themselves. He adds that some early Zionists supported eugenic ideas.

He also notes that words like “Sephardi” and above all “Ashkhenazi” are cultural, ultimately religious (and linguistic, I would add) markers, not ethnic ones.

Sand wraps his last chapter by noting the development of “Israeli identity” in the new state, and Ben-Gurion engaging in a mix of apparent surrender to and actual manipulation of the rabbinate. The flip side, he says, is many Zionists refusing to talk about an Israeli people. That may be in part because an Ashkenazi Eastern European culture has not been forcible on other Israeli Jews.

He concludes with a brief response to his critics.

One thing is missing from this book. It’s not huge, but it’s not minuscule, either. Based on his introductory passage about matrilineality, and on things from the Christian New Testament, and other evidence from that time about how this wasn’t always the case, it would have been nice for Sand to spend, oh, half a dozen pages more directly on this issue, especially with the rise of genetic testing.

Sand’s original conclusion, that Israel as we know today cannot stand with its current citizenship definition as the Arab population inside its 1948 boundaries grows, seems too wishful today. Only time will tell.

Why is this book so controversial? In part, from being translated into the language in which I read it, as well as French. Being published in Hebrew, it made only a modest stir inside Israel. But, when translated, Zionists could see a cat being let out of the bag.

Related? I rarely do this, but most one-star reviewers have to be critiqued. They basically fall into two camps. One, on the Khazar issue, claim this is nothing but a repeat of Koestler. LIE.

Another claims that he never talks about the Jewish people. (He notes people raised Jewish, who converted to Christianity, then applied for Israeli citizenship based on Israeli nationality and were denied, with Israel’s supreme court saying a “Jewish nationality” existed but an “Israeli nationality” did not.) Given what I have shown he does in the first chapter, talking about “people” vs “nation” and his recap at the end, this too is a LIE.

LIE is the only word that can be used.


View all my reviews

Orthodoxy "versus" orthopraxis

In a post two weeks ago, I noted that the idea of Christianity being all about orthodoxy and Judaism being all about orthopraxis — right doctrine on the one hand, right action on the other — was more stereotype than reality.

Going beyond that, I'd like to say that the division between orthodoxy and orthopraxis in religions in general is more a permeable membrane, and one permeable in both directions, than a wall.

Doing the right thing is usually based on a belief.

Take Communion or the Eucharist.

Catholicism traditionally reserving the cup only for the priests was a practice. But it was based on a doctrine that included ordination as a sacrament. But that sacrament developed — along with other things, such as a single clergy — out of a practice of separating the priesthood from the laity. (Single priesthood also developed from Rome as a way of trying to prevent land in a bishopric from being heritable and thus strengthening regions at the expense of Rome.)

In Judaism, I noted in that previous post, in pre-rabbinic Judaism, Qumran's use of a solar calendar was a praxis issue. But it eventually led to separation from the Jerusalem priesthood, and eventual condemnation of it on both praxis and doctrinal grounds.

Move to Buddhism, outside the Middle Eastern-Western monotheism orbit entirely. Mahayana and Theravada Buddhists may not excommunicate each other, but practices in the two that differ from each other differ in part on whether someone who is an arhat should stay around and help fellow humans or not. And, yes, and yes Buddhists, that's a doctrine. 

Within Muslims, the succession to Muhammad, or within Shia, the split between Sevenrs and Twelvers? Dogma. Per Spinoza's excommunication, defining who Yawheh is or is not, to then wonder who can say the Shema or not? Dogma. Or, if you're a Karaite vs Rabbinic Jews, the status of the Talmud? Dogma.

Stereotypes: Christianity is "orthodoxy" vs Judaism is "orthopraxis"

Two weeks ago, I blogged about my personal academic connection to the forged Dead Sea Scrolls.

Baruch Spinoza: Jew or not a Jew?

The next day, I got to thinking about the claim that Christianity, out of all the world's religions, focuses on "orthodoxy," or right belief of doctrines and dogmas, vs. other religions that focus on "orthopraxis," or right actions. Supposedly, this is in part because Protestant Christanity especially rejects "works righteousness."

But, is this really true?

The real Dead Sea Scrolls, especially the 30 percent or so that are Qumran community documents and weren't known of in other form before 1946, say otherwise. Expulsions from the community.

Per John J. Collins, the Essenes or whomever we call them, separated from other Jews of their time over observances of ritual Torah points, calendrical observances and more. This is spelled out in the 4QMMT scroll. This is doctrine or dogma, not praxis. Remember that the pope and the patriarch of Constantinople excommunicated each other in 1054 CE in part over whether or not the other used the "filoque" in the Nicene Creed.

The Qumran expulsions also fall under orthodoxy not orthopraxis because, in my interpretation, calendrical observances affect things like observances of festivals like Passover. From there, discussion spills into whether wrong observance makes the whole event nugatory or not, per the old Catholic phrase "ex opere operato." And, when you use multiple Latin words, and use them about interpretation of religious acts, even if it is an act itself, you're still moving toward orthodoxy and out of straight-up orthopraxis.

Qumran's ethico-ontological dualism, as expressed in places like the War Scroll, appears to be more clearly Zoroastrian-bent than what Orthodox Judaism holds today. Given that such beliefs underscored belief in the observance of purity rituals at Qumran, that's orthodoxy.

Or, if you're a Karaite vs Rabbinic Jews, the status of the Talmud? Dogma.

Remember that Baruch Spinoza was not only excommunicated, if one will, but even suffered an Orthodox Judaism version of an Amish "shunning," the Jewish "herem" (yes, that's cognate to the word "harem" from Arabic "haram") over matters of orthodoxy, not orthopraxis.

And, it's not just Judaism. Look at Islam. The Shi'a / Sunni split? The issue of succession to Muhammad is orthodoxy, not orthopraxis. I'd argue the same for the splits between the Seveners and the Twelvers within Shi'a, or the four major schools within Sunni.

And, that's having initially ignored that the "recitation," the head of the Five Pillars of Islam, "there is no god but Allah," is clearly doxy, not praxis.

And, if I looked closely enough at Eastern religions, I could find some "-doxy" there, too.

Top blogging of 2019

 It was a very interesting year here by what readers liked.

A mix of debunking, takes on things Luther, pseudoscience debunking, philosophical hot takes and my poetry made up the 10 posts most read by readers this last year. More than half of the posts were pre-2019, but that's fine. Good stuff ages well.

No. 1? A decade-old blog post that I'd originally forgotten to put a header on and that eventually took off. (Spammers, maybe?) It was about "libertarian pseudoskeptic pseudoscience" and looked at some of the worst in pseudoskepticism, and sometimes pseudoscience, by leading libertarian lights in the Skeptics™ world like Brian Dunning and Michael Shermer.

No. 2? My take on a recent revelation that  early research on which Benjamin Libet based his "brain delay" studies, "undermines his research angle but also reinforces his philosophical scrivening." I chided some not to throw out the baby with the bath water; in other words, Libet ain't dead yet.

No. 3? My rewrite and update on Edward Arlington Robinson's classic "Richard Cory."

No. 4? A throwaway post, at least on the surface, from a decade ago. I encouraged intellectual types to be themselves in making small talk.

No. 5? An update to a 2017 blog post, where I further call out the cultural Catholicism lies of alleged atheist Tim O'Neill and his History for Atheists blog. (I found out, in the process of the update, that I'm far from alone.)

No. 6? Gun Nuts for Luther? Headquartered here in Tex-ass? My brother a member of their Facebook group? Whoda thunk? Here's the details.

No. 7? More Luther, this time my extended review of Lyndal Roper's 2017 biography. A solid 4-star work, but at the end of the year, with books newish and older, I still hadn't found a total 5-star tome.

No. 8? My uncle died just over a year ago. Rather than attend the funeral and be laden with religion and religious-based guilt-tripping, I wrote a poem about all that.

No. 9? Also from late 2018? I smacked around Andrew Sullivan for his latest (at that time) stupidities, and attached one of my most delightful Photoshoppings.

No. 10? Daring to touch the third rail of American foreign policy discussions, and based in part on my review of Yuval Noah Harari's "Homo Deus," I dared ask "Who's a Jew vis-a-vis Zionist claims?"

Finally, it was the most productive year blogging here since 2012. It's given me a diversion from my main blog. And, as 2019 readers can see, for the next two years, expect more Lutheran Reformation 500th anniversary posts.

A few thoughts on Catholic projectionism, partly Reformation connected

I'm using the word "projectionism" in its normal everyday psychological sense, made more popular perhaps by Freud but existing as an intellectual concept long before him.

As I noted before, Catholics don't seem to miss a dollar with church bulletin ads.

Nor, per my most recent post before this, do they miss a dollar with tchotchkes related to the Sacred Heart of Jesus cult.

And, even though Chimayó is not a wealthy place, the squabble between the Archdiocese of Santa Fe and other folks, plus the fact that it doesn't work even though it has swag for sale and takes donations, show that no dollar is missed there either.

And, the early modern Catholics who developed the Cult of the Sacred Heart (while condemning Aztecs for something, arguably in a symbolic sense no more grotesque) were lusting for gold in the New World.

And, on the reality side of legend vs reality on Martin Luther, the medieval indulgences system was a money-grubbing gold mine, and lots of Germans' beliefs about a ravenous Curia were true.

So, the projection?

First starting around, oh, 1095 CE and the First Crusade, then articulated by kings and emperors (often with Church-blessed titles) who didn't want to pay off bank loans, seems to me that about 1,000 years ago, and moving on from there, talked about "money-grubbing Jews."

Projectionism.

And, the bloodiness of the Sacred Heart, at least symbolically? The ancestors of the priests at Chimayo, the Franciscan missionaries who flagellated themselves (Puebloan society and moiety leaders also did)? The re-sacrifice of the Mass, which comes off not as metaphorical or symbolic, but, yes, as the church proclaims, a re-creation, a re-enactment, and which I also don't get as atheist or ex-Lutheran?

Versus those bloody pagan Aztecs, or other bloody pagans?

Projectionism.

I'm sure Tim O'Neill, cultural Catholic (maybe actual Catholic and not total atheist) proprietor of the deblogrolled History for Atheists will object.

Not that Protestants might not have some projectionism of their own on "pagans." Nor, given British then American capitalism and the so-called Protestant work ethic, that there's not Protestant projectionism on money-grubbing Jews.

But, I'd argue that, once we get past the early Baroque and into the Age of Enlightenment, Protestant monetary projectionism onto Jews was lower than Catholicism's. And, that lacking a cultus of sacrifice, that even if Luther himself held on to elements of the Sacred Heart myth, there still wasn't the same projectionism onto "savages" in this way.

JUDAS THE SON OF GOD

I am the Son of God.

I was born, I saw and I fell;

That last part due to mythmakers

Who rejected my message.

My name was Judas, Son of God.

The lies against my name are many.

Some claim I was demon-seized

And sold the man named Jesus

For 30 pieces of silver.

Others say I was his cosmic twin,

Judas Didymus Thomas

Later denigrated to move the force

To the one and only.

Others yet call me Ormazd

To his Ahriman,

The dark side of a dualistic god.

And others still a ???

Fated to play out a role;

A reasoning pawn in a cosmic play.

All are wrong.

Rather —

I was the one, the Monogenetes,

I was the Son of God, the Word made flesh.

Am I jealous of the Nazarene?

But of course. I am the Word made flesh.

With good motive — emotions no less dark

Than my father Yahweh had against Sodom

And against the Amalekites, then against Saul.

I am the Son of God.

I am.

For Xns or Jews worried about "American sharia"

Substitute "halaka" for "sharia" and this is what you get. "Halaka communities," already in existence.

Neither Islam NOR Xianity NOR Judaism is ‘religion of peace’

Andrew Sullivan, whose internal and geo-politics must be called neo-Sulllivan, got that one wrong in his Iran live-blogging round-up.

Point is, Islam, Christianity and Judaism, all three are neither “religions of war” or “religions of peace.”

Beyond finding admonitions to both war and peace in the Quran, we can do the same in the other two world religions.

The Tanakh has Isaiah talking about “bending swords into plowshares,” but another prophet later talks about “bending plowshares into swords.” Per a quote by Jesus, the temple is allegedly a “house for all nations,” but, earlier, King Saul is told to till all the Amalekites — men, women, children and even livestock.

In the Christian New Testament, Jesus, in one Gospel, tells Peter to put his sword away at the Garden of Gethsemane, after he cut off the ear of a servant of the high priest. But, earlier in that same account, he asked his disciples how many swords they had.

Elsewhere, he tells his listeners, “I came not to bring peace but division.”

And, as Islam had its jihad, Christianity had its crusades and ancient Israel had its Ha’Aretz Yisrael.

Bottom line?

They simply are religions, the youngest of them 1,500 years old, all coming from tribalist roots whose values systems almost make Pop Evolutionary Psychology sound true.

And they, and their Kool-Aid drinkers, label them as “religions of peace” as needed for external public relations, while not-insignificant minorities in all three push the “religions of war” side externally against the other two, or internally about their own “crusades” for “religious corporate communications,” also as needed.

Outcasts in the name of gOd

The Hindus took racism
Against natives of darker hue
And made it a religious crime.
Their four-tiered socio-religious totem pole
Had the grunts of manual labor at the bottom,
But, left without even a pole to pose on
Were, and still are today,
The shittiest workers of Indian society,
Pun intended –
Out-castes.
Untouchables in their alleged contamination,
Calling them harijan, or the lOrd’s children
As a Gandhian absolution
Is no absolution for a stain, a blot,
On the very core of Hindu thought.

God told Saul, “Kill the Amalekites!”
And not just the adults, but the seven children
That went along with each adult family,
And not just the children,
But the seven livestock the adults had
For each of their children.
No Amalekites would be allowed to go to St. Ives,
Or Hebron, or Shechem, or Shiloh,
As the world’s first recorded Holocaust
Was perpetuated by Jews and not against them.

In the American South, in the land of cotton,
Old bible passages were not forgotten
But were twisted, to look away from the evil
Of black slavery in Dixie land.
No, no, worse than that;
Twisted to justify slavery as a redeeming,
Christianizing uplift,
For alleged children of Canaan,
Smitten by the curse of Ham.
People who wished they had not been born in Dixie
Were told it was for their own good,
And in fulfillment of the word of gOd.
Oh, ye cursed of Ham!

No wonder that Sunday morning
Is still the most segregated hour in America;
No wonder that Indian outcastes
Have their own political party;
No wonder that right-wing Israeli Jews
Talk of an Arab-rein Eretz Yisrael.
The real wonder is that blacks didn’t become atheists
Long before the Nation of Islam,
Or that the Dalits, oppressed outcastes, aren’t all Buddhist, or Christian,
Or that some Arabs still participate in Israeli political life.

Were a god actually to exist, he would be mocked by his own alleged words.

A very “unlucky” non-Friday the 13th looming?

I wouldn’t want to be in the West Bank or Gaza Sept. 13. Why?

Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, starts the evening of Sept. 12, according to the modern Western/Christian Gregorian calendar, and runs through the daytime hours of Sept. 13.

Ramadan, the Muslim month of daytime fasting, starts Sept. 13.

Can you say “potential for explosiveness”?

The reason one or two particular versions of early Christianity has some appeal to me

But not enough realism, for the most part, to be usable

Whether or not there even was a Jesus of history, one of the earliest Christianities, and the first to impute words to a historical Jesus, was the Cynic-shaped “Galilean Christianity.”

Combining the maxims and convention-rejecting emphasis of Cynicism with the prophetic preaching of late-Israelite proto-Judaism was a potent mix. For a person wanting a foundation for personal and spiritual growth that transcended the materialism of its day just as much as ours, why wouldn’t a quasi-idealist like me be attracted?

And, speaking of idealism …

The middle Platonism of the early Christian philosophers has some appeal. Defining a heaven or afterlife as a progression into a Platonic ideal self and locale, without the mysticism or worse of later Neoplatonism has some appeal, especially if one does so with a non-Greek emphasis on a physical, yet somehow Paulist spiritual, body, and rejects the existence of an immaterial soul.

Of course, that’s not a key tenet of Platonism.

As for the other aspects of Christianity in its development, the jealous tribal God Yahweh of the Torah and Former Prophets has zero appeal. Neither does the dripping vengeance of Iranian apocalyptic dualism, wedded and welded to Judaism beginning with Daniel. Certainly the religious mysticism and the philosophical mumbo-jumbo of Paul’s adaptation of eastern Mediterranean mystery religions doesn’t, either.

Alas, though, there’s no indication of a divinity of any sort, let alone one powerful enough to recreate physical bodies into some Platonic ideal.

As for Cynic maxims and Israelite outcries, well I can, and hope I continue to, get better and living that from a secular background.