OpEdNews - Page 5 of Article: Godwho: Thoughts from a former Mormon

With Thomas Aquinas I searched the forbidden manuscripts of the early Greeks and saw how he stirred Greek philosophy into the soup of Christianity. On Christmas day in 800 I saw Pope Leo III place a crown on the head of the emperor Charlemagne and realized how that incident sealed the bond between church and state which would imprison the freedoms and intellectual development of man into a state of inertia for at least another 800 years.

I held the candle as Augustine wrote his mountains of prose pleading with God for mercy and enlightenment and saw how he, too, stirred Plato, Pythagoras, and Aristotle into the Gospels. I knelt with Galileo when he confessed aloud to the Catholic prelates that the earth stood still and the sun moved around it--he confessed he was mistaken when he said the earth moved around the sun. But I heard him whisper as he left the church, "But the earth still goes around the sun." I stood on the faggots and was burned with Bruno in punishment for his scientific investigations.

I walked with Paul on his way to Damascus and felt his inner rage against his Jewish heritage and knew that Paul's personal zeal, his enthusiasm and love of the mystical would make him the real Judas. In Jerusalem I walked with the apostles of Christ and heard their displeasure with Paul's ministrations.

I listened to Jesus stress obedience and not the development of reason, and heard how he relied on dire threats rather than argument. I could see he never conceived of rational inquiry as a way of life. Study made it clear to me that Paul was the real architect of Christianity. He made Jesus into something he was not.

I stopped by Athens to hear Aristotle and wanted to throw rotten apples at him when he talked about women. "Women is to man as the slave is to the master, the manual to the mental workers, the barbarian to the Greek. Woman is an unfinished man left standing on a lower step in the scale of development. The male is by nature superior and the female inferior, the one ruler and the other is ruled: and this principle extends, of necessity, to all mankind. Woman is weak of will and therefore incapable of independence of character or position." Instead I cried because I knew he wasn't the first person nor the last one to say those things about women who weren't like that at all. I grieved that religious zealots were his pupils and mimicked his words.

I heard Epicures say. "Soul and mind evolve with the body, grow with its growth, ail with its ailments, and die with its death. Nothing exists but atoms, space and law; and the law of laws is that of evolution and dissolution everywhere." and knew why the church at Rome had suppressed the Grecian manuscripts. I read Plato's Republic and could see how Christianity had stolen Plato's ideas of heaven, purgatory and hell and many other ideas without giving him credit and at the same time calling the knowledge of the Greeks, pagan. It was as the expedient Christian church believed "If you can't lick 'em, join 'em." or "If someone has a better idea than you steal it from him and call it your own."

I traveled beyond Isaac, Jacob, Abraham and Moses to the grand production, the play in the Garden of Eden which I watched with delight as I had watched Jeremy Irons play Duke of Athens in Stratford on Avon. Nothing but a play. A play probably written to entertain but then taken seriously with historical ramifications that reached into all the world. I raged that millions had been taught, and are still being taught, that the fictional play was literal.

Back to Hammurabi I went and read the ten commandments Moses said he had received from God. I called on Confuscious and Buddha, studied the Vedas of Midras, Hunduism and the Upanishads, the many and varied tribal cultures that evolved around the world. I realized that all of them had a code which resembled the Golden Rule about being concerned with one's neighbor.

Suddenly we stop. Nothing more on the tape except what we read in the bones, in the tools, in long buried camp fires, warriors, bison, ceremonies painted on walls of caves and in the rocks. At last we see thinking man pulling away from the rest of the animal kingdom.

We start up the VCR again, this time we go slow forward. In the first scene we see thinking man walking upright carrying his stone tools, carrying his child on his shoulders. the child's mother walking beside them. In John 1:1 in the New Testament of the Bible it says, "In the beginning was the word." Many interpretations have been put on that simple sentence but to me it means that is where man came to be, when he began to communicate verbally with other people. That was where he separated from his fur-skinned relatives, when the first infant said "Mama" and meant the woman who gave him suck.

That was the giant step in the anthropological evolution, when man could communicate with his neighbors in abstract terms, remember the stories his father told him and repeat them to his children. Man's curiosity, his brain which can perceive dangers and remember consequences, looked at his environment and asked Why? Why does the sun disappear in the evening and then come up in a different place the next morning? Why does the sun nearly disappear in the south when days or short and then swing back to the north when the days grow longer? Why does a person lie down to go to sleep and then bloat up and stink?

It was unfortunate from the beginning that men and women are inclined to construct answers even when they do not have enough information on the subject to give correct answers. Thus answers, in the beginning had strong mythological quality. What added to the confusion was that man had no compunction against spreading false information. It is part of the ego of knowing man that what he says has validity.
The man or woman who knew the most was usually looked upon as the leader. So to be hesitant in giving an answer to a subordinate's question was a sign of weakness. Darwin's law of the survival of the fittest was as active in the sociological field as it was in the biological field An appearance of superiority, strength, often discourages attacks and encourages confidence. Man/woman developed early the skill of bluffing, putting on the bold front, telling things as truth when there was no proof at all, just to give them prestige and a position of power. The more egotistical the leader the more creative his answers were.

Since man didn't have any knowledge of his environment he saw gods, mystical beings in everything. He saw the river roaring away, didn't understand the law of gravity, and assumed that the river moved under its own power---it was alive. He saw the destruction of the lightning and his primitive thinking made it an angry god out to punish him for something he had done wrong.

Thus laws came into being controlling behavior so as not to anger the gods. The person in the group who was in the know gave out the laws. It didn't take much for a god to be created and those gods were perpetuated by the telling and embellishing from generation to generation. The mystical has an anti-rational and anti-logical bias and above it grows a contempt for reason. In every society a system of rules grew and as the leaders enjoyed and enhanced their power the stronger hold they had on their followers.

The more power the leaders got the more they wanted. And these leaders found out their words and commands had more effectiveness when the leader gave his commands in the name of some god. Gods became a source of control of societies. Rituals evolved. Were perpetuated by brainwashing. And often perpetrated if there was some sacrificial offering connected with ritual. The gods were even more effective if people were taught the gods could see inside a person's brain, listen to what he was thinking.

When writing came into being those rules were written down and the written rules became scripture. As each generation grew up and studied the old scriptures some of the more creative of the scholars made changes and new interpretations. Therefore almost all writing was done to reinforce laws and beliefs that already existed, or to revise them, put new interpretations on them or to introduce new laws.
After many generations there got to be so many gods that priests were in a dither trying to keep track of them all. At last someone consolidated them all into one god, one god above all the other gods. That god was a jealous god and he stated "Thou shalt have no other gods before me." The Biblical character of Moses became a convert. That's why the Bible was written, to prove there is but one god, and Moses by his own declaration and his political position over the Israelites who had been in slavery for many generations in Egypt, became the intermediary between that one god and man. That was the impetus for writing down the scriptures which eventually came to be collected into a single book, to prove that there was only one god, to show his power and his wisdom and to put fear into the heart of the doubter.
The creation story has been told from many different cultures and in many different ways usually verbally for many generations until it was finally written down.

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