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Note from submitter, Daniel Geery: This article was written by a friend of mine, Deana Jensen, who died recently in her early nineties. She wrote the piece in her early seventies and published it as a pamphlet, titled "Godwho: Why I am Not a Mormon." I promised Deana I'd try to keep the story "out there," since I agreed with her as to its importance. I myself am a "devout ex-Catholic," after 12 years of Catholic School, and well aware that one can find similar writings from other religions. For instance, "Why I am Not a Muslim," by Ibn Warraq (who had to change his name to protect his life).
I only wish I'd had Deana's tract when I was about 15, searching for answers, or at least eliminations, regarding beliefs I was indoctrinated into, that never sat quite right. I pass this on now for those who have eyes: Let them see; and for those who have ears: Let them hear. It's longer than your average story here, but for any "seeker of truth," worth the read. Further note: I published this earlier on Oped under the GodWho title, and again on Open Salon, with the existing title.
Recently, I had the honor of communicating with Ross Wells, who you'll hear about in this story, and he kindly noted that his Mother's extraordinary essay was incomplete--I had somehow missed the last two and a-half pages, which are important. I understand the policy of not reposting and thus ask forgiveness in advance. I believe the article is extremely important to humans everywhere, and I wish to correct my own error. Thank you, Ross, for bringing it to my attention.
In a moment of weakness I said, "Yes."
when my eldest son asked me to commit to paper my philosophy of life. At that
moment I didn't realize the enormity of the task of reporting something which
has taken seventy-three years to reach its present condition and is still in a
state of flux. But the boy wants it and you know how mothers are, if their
child wants something they will attempt to move heaven, hell and high water to
get it for him. Perhaps that isn't an apt analogy to use in discussing
something as sacred as God, but before we reach the end of this dissertation
you may find it more than apropos.
I said this was going to be my philosophy of life so right there you can see
that this is not going to be a mimic of something that has been said before.
This will be ME. If anything appears here which has been said before it will be
because I agree with it and for no other reason.
To understand a person's philosophy the reader must know where a person was
raised, what kind of a childhood he had, and what influenced him to develop the
philosophy he now possesses. You wouldn't expect a person to talk like Plato if
he'd grown up as a water-boy on a slave ship. Absolutely not. If Plato had
spent any time at all as a water-boy on a slave ship you can be sure his
philosophy would have been of a different color altogether from what it was. So
I must begin at my beginning.
For me my birth was particularly fortunate. First of all I was born healthy and
strong into a family which, either deliberately or because they had too many
children for the small house in which they lived and the size of their income,
was one of benign neglect. Just the processes involved to feed and clothe the growing
tribe consumed their limited resources to the point that there were little
means and time left over to devote to our intellectual and spiritual growth.
Our parents loved us and we knew they loved us but we were many times left to
our own devises. Blessedly we were free of overt teachings about how God wanted
us to act and what would happen to us if we didn't act that way. They were kind
moral people and they expected us to be kind moral people and that was about
the extent of it.
So like little Eva my philosophy just growed. Of course I heard about God,
mostly from Sunday School and Primary teachers. It was from them, not my
mother, whom I learned about saying my prayers at night, kneeling down by the
side of the bed with eyes closed and hand palms together, fingernails
scratching my chin, and talking to someone whose abode was strangely vague. It
was very disconcerting to do this in a small 10 by 10 bedroom with four sisters
in differing stages of dress and undress, talking about something not quite compatible
with conversations with God. That was a condition on summer nights.
Winter nights were quite another matter. With no heat in the room and with
winter's wind flapping through the ever present hole in the window glass,
kneeling on the cold inhospitable floor, conversations with God tended to be of
the briefest kind. When prayers were said under the covers with my warm breath
thawing cold fingers there was always fear that words said in that irreverent
position never went beyond the top quilt. It is only logical that when one
doesn't speak with God, God will remain silent.
In those early years I had no doubt that God existed. He lived in that square
rock church house in
We had memorized prayers we usually said at the dinner table. Dad always called
on the youngest person seated to say the prayer. By the time we reached a point
of being creative in those prayers our years of service were over.
Children disperse their own philosophy among their peers. One thing I found out
was that God gave rules about where you ate your snacks. Banida, like most
rural places in southern
Many of my daydreams and air castles found substance in those rare moments of
privacy. My friends informed me very early that I must never, at any time,
consume food within the four walls. No one ever mentioned the sanitary
implications of such an act. But they gravely informed me that such an act
would be "feeding the Devil and starving the Lord." Far be it from me
to cause the old fellow any discomfort. Things were pretty bad in Banida with
the depression and all so I could well visualize similar conditions most likely
would exist in heaven. I avoided starving the Lord at all costs.
My concept of just what or who God was grew in that small, confined,
nonintellectual environment. God was one being, manlike. I imagined it was
possible that I could meet him on the street and shake his hand and say
"How do you do." He wasn't some mystical entity called love, or
morality, or the essence of all being. Christ was a personage apart, an actual
son of God. Christ was not God incarnate.
My mother would sometimes wax mystical and talk of strange happenings like the
lost ten tribes of
She didn't laugh. The implications of what I had said evidently didn't dawn on
her. She solemnly informed me that the unforgivable sin was denying Christ.
"You have to have a sure knowledge of Christ before you can deny
him," she continued. I can't tell you how relieved I was that I wasn't
bordering on purgatory. I didn't know that much about Christ, except for
Christmas, so I was in no danger of denying him.
I was always sorry I never knew my mother well. I left home to go to high
school when I was fifteen and went back to Banida only one summer after that. I
don't know what her philosophy was which relieves me of a lot of anxiety. If I
knew what her philosophy was compared to mine today I'm sure I would be
burdened with guilt. Too often a person's philosophy is a carbon copy of what
his parent's were. Many hang on to unsatisfactory ideas because they don't want
to hurt their dear parents. That is a personal choice everyone has to make. So
that is why I say I was blessed with benign neglect.
Perhaps my beginning seems facetious. It isn't meant to be. The main purpose is
to show the reader my naivetà © and how totally unprepared I was to challenge anything
I had been deliberately or inadvertently taught.
In 1847 the Mormon people separated themselves from the
Joseph Smith, the founder of the Mormon religion, had seen them in person and
talked with them, so he claimed. He received from God the precious gold plates
from which he "translated" a history of the ancient inhabitants of
the American continent who had been visited by Jesus Christ before his
ascension into heaven. Joseph Smith was not only the instrument through which
God gave that Book of Mormon to the world but he talked with God on many other
subjects from where to build houses, what not to eat and drink, to how to get
married so that a man's wife or wives, would follow him to the next world and
there produce spirit children to populate other worlds.
There was no subject too trivial to bother God about. The dead could be
redeemed from purgatory by having ordinances performed vicariously by someone
living. Through the intermediary of Joseph Smith God called men on missions to
proclaim the wondrous new gospel God had restored to the world and no man
courted God's anger by refusing the call. Members were exhorted to obey all
commands given by the voice of God so they would be worthy to serve a Godship
of another world after the glorious resurrections.
BUT! If you were a woman you could not receive the highest glory except along
with your husband. Never, worlds without end, could a woman receive a godship
on her own merits. People of Banida were rarely concerned with discrimination
when it came to things of God. In all of my growing up years I never heard
anyone, male or female, voice any complaint of the sexist discrimination within
God's kingdom.
Joseph said in one of his many creative moments, "As man is, God once was.
As God is, man may become." Wow! Who could ever top that? Such egotism.
Such grandiloquent ostentacity! Hardly a Mormon eye blinks at this absurdity.
Of course J.S. didn't elaborate. Was man going to inherit an "earth"
already in existence somewhere in the Milky Way or beyond, or would he be given
a do-it-yourself-kit and left to his own devices? The question has gone unanswered.
In this grand plan of life and salvation, once a woman was "sealed"
to a man she was his forever and would be a candidate for the
With the coming of Joseph Smith, who lived, preached and stirred up animosity
for himself and his people in the early part of the nineteenth century, all
other religions on the earth were made null and void, according to Mormons.
Perhaps, "having a form of godliness but no truth". According to the
beliefs of Mormons those religions fell far short of the real thing. Mormons
were God's special people. The whole supposition is magnanimous in its portent
but in reality---zilch!
In my early years I had no inclination and absolutely no information on which
to debate any of those issues. I went along with what I was told, sucked up in
the "gospel net" the same as many others. I swallowed it, hook, line
and sandbag. I was sewed up tight into the fabric of Mormonism, although at the
time I didn't know it, and there I stayed being a Mormon woman, trying to be
everything to everybody, being the virtuous, altruistic person God expected me
to be. I never knowingly spoke to another person who wasn't Mormon until after
I was married.
Periodically I grieved for those who were not as fortunate a I was in belonging
to God's elite. I was devastated when members of my family were not living up
to the rigid formula that would get them into the glorious hereafter.
I was a snob. I was one of the uninformed being led by the misinformed.
And then I became one of the misinformed who was leading the uninformed.
Because I never refused a church assignment that was asked of me the church
became my whole life. I won't bore the reader with the many church offices I
held from the time of my marriage to J. Greene Wells in 1935 until I "saw
the light" in 1960. At one Oneida Stake conference in the late forties I
was asked by President Shirley Palmer to read the story of Joseph Smith's
wonderful first vision to the congregation. I read it with all the feeling and
reverence I had for the tale. There were those in the congregation who wept as
I brought the story to them again. When it was over John Longden, the visiting
General Authority from
At that time I had no suspicion at all that the story of the first vision was
written at least 18 years after it was supposed to have taken place, with
several different accounts of it occurring in historical records and with no
two versions agreeing as to content. Historians, even Mormon historians, admit
the credibility of the account of the wonderful first vision is fogged in
suspicion. The accounts of Smith's translating of the golden plates is equally
complex and vague.
Then Syble married Max. Syble was Greene's sister, seven years younger than I.
She has often confessed that I was her mentor. She believed everything I said.
She was only seventeen and Max was twenty when Greene and I went with them down
to the
A year later Max died, leaving Syble with a small baby. Syble knew her world
had come to an end. It was during the Second World War and Syble went to live
with her parents who were employed at the
Nine months after Max's death Syble wrote me a letter. She had met a man, she
said, whom she wanted to marry. In the logic of a Mormon woman she knew in the
next world she would belong to Max. In essence her letter said, "What kind
of a God can be that unfair to one of his so-called daughters, to force her to
spend eternity with a man she didn't love? Can't a woman change her mind? I
want Ardith, not Max."
Syble thought I knew the answer to that question? I had never thought on that
eventuality before. But in my strong faith I knew that there was an answer
somewhere. All I had to do was dig it out. I began searching the written word.
What I found out wasn't answers to any of the questions I had, but more
questions. Syble didn't wait for my profound advice. She and Ardith Beck were
married.
Ardith had been raised a Mormon boy in a very devout family but he had received
a B.S. degree in political science from the University of Idaho and he had also
found out that there was a lot more to this world than what the Mormon
philosophy embraced. He was already alienated from his family because he
thought and spoke on a different level than they did. When he took Syble to
wife outside the ceremonies of the Mormon Church he became further ostracized from
them. Syble was sealed to another man and therefore any resulting children
would belong to Max and not Ardith in the glorious hereafter. Ardith told me
shortly after the marriage, "I'd be dead as a rock in heaven without
Syble." Even though he had intellectually drawn away from the church he
couldn't quite pull out of the net.
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Years later Syble and her family came to
He said I cried. I don't remember that I did. He called me Horatio. "There
is much more in heaven and earth, Horatio, than is dreamed of in your
philosophy." Ardith knew more about Shakespeare than I did at that time.
He knew a lot more about a lot of things than I did at that time.
I set out not only to find the information which Syble asked of me but I also
set out to prove that Ardith was wrong. I read the Book of Mormon seven times
from cover to cover. I read the Bible four times cover to cover, the Doctrine
and Covenants, the Pearl of Great Price, the History of the Church by B. H.
Roberts many times, still hunting. Many other books too numerous to mention. Soon
a pattern began to show through. Women were second rate members of the human
race, belonging to men, controlled by men, of little use even to themselves
without a man. I loved my daughter the same as my sons. What kind of a God was
it who disliked his daughters so intensely as to make them second class
citizens in his family? And that rational inquiry was not a way of life but
heresy. Proof was of no value. God must be accepted without proof. Something
was putridly wrong in that philosophy.
The process of my investigation took place over a period of many years. I lived
my life, full and useful and enjoyable as I studied. On the surface Greene was
indulgent of my investigation, not apparently concerned with what I was
hunting. I don't even remember discussing it much with him.
In the summer of 1958 I decided to enter
I read and collected books about the philosophy of religion and politics,
especially those of Walter Kaufman. I discovered Fawn Brody's book, No Man
Knows My History and Juanita Brooks' Mountain Meadow Massacre and learned how
both of those woman were chastised by the Mormon Church for their candor. I
read the history of John D. Lee and many other men of the early church in
Then I took a psychology class from James Tjedski. He said, "How do you
establish what is true? You take a premise, gather all the knowledge that you
can on one side of the premise and all the knowledge you can get against it.
Then you put that knowledge on a scale. If the scale tips significantly to one
side or the other that side of the premise is probably true, but not
absolutely. Perhaps tomorrow you may find evidence to shift the weight to the
other side. There is a challenge to you to be honest with yourself, don't be so
in love with one side of the question that you ignore all the evidence against
it. All you can say for sure is 'With what I know today this seems to be
true.'"
Sometimes I went home from his class trembling with the experience of learning
something I had never known existed. I felt as if I were breaking out of a
chrysalis in which I had been confined one painful step at a time. As you can
plainly see, Tjedski didn't last long at
As my intellect broadened, I fought a deep sense of guilt that I was looking
into secret places that were forbidden me. I could feel the chains breaking
which had been confining me, holding me back from new things which should have
been given to me freely. I couldn't blame my parents nor my teachers. They had
been imprisoned in the same chains which held me.
Common sense kept whispering in my mind's ear. "If a particular religion
is to govern a person's life, as it had governed mine, then that religion
should not be above debate." But Church doctrine made debate a nasty word.
"Lean not unto thine own understanding." "Do as church
authorities tell you." "Believe without a sign." "Kill
reason." "Belief comes first and knowledge comes afterward."
These were ideas so firmly established within my being it was like extracting a
tooth to discard any of them. But when evidence kept staring me in the face I
had to admit I would only be a fool to continue to believe the old things in
the old ways. "Indeed, Ardith, there were a lot of things in heaven and
earth than were ever dreamed of in my philosophy."
It would take volumes, and many volumes have been written, to itemize all the
reasons which proved that Joseph Smith lied when he said the Book of Mormon was
translated from golden plates laid up by the power of God to come forth at the
last days. It took the reading of many books both pro and con on Mormonism.
To my despair my investigation imposed upon my intellect several irrefutable
facts:
1. Joseph Smith didn't get around to telling of the remarkable first vision
until 18 years after it was supposed to have happened, and then when he did
tell it there appeared three or four different versions until even modern
historian are suspecting the authenticity of any of the stories.
2. There is little consistency in the stories he told about the golden plates.
At one time he said he received the plates and they remained in his possession
until he was commanded to return them. But he didn't show them to the three
witnesses who saw them, an angel did, and they saw them with their mind's eye.
Another time when people were afraid the plates had been stolen he reassured
them that an angel had them. A statement made by Oliver Cowdery when he said in
his history of the church, "You would have thought Joseph and I were
bereft of our senses if you would have seen us translating the plates with the
plates nowhere in sight." Joseph ostensibly looked in his hat and read the
translation from the Urim and Thummin inside his hat. The Anthon transcript was
a hoax all around. No man could say that Smith's translation of the Egyptian
figures which Martin Harris took to the language specialist Anthon was a
correct translation of those figures when the Egyptian language had not been
broken until 1838. Smith translated the Pearl of Great Price from an Egyptian papyrus
which modern scholars have found to be just prayers for the dead which was
often buried with the mummies.
3. He copied into the Book of Mormon at least 25,000 words directly from the
King James Version of the Bible, with only an occasional change of a
'wherefore' or 'it came to pass'. the King James version was the final product
of four or five translation from the Greek, the Latin and the Hebrew plus 1600
years of cultural change, many of those changes yet to happen and the
transporting of early books of the Bible across an ocean onto another continent
which already had a civilization sophisticated enough to have a perfect
calendar and yet comes up matching the King James version perfectly. Did Joseph
Smith actually translate those 25,000 words from golden plates dug up on a hill
in
The Book of Mormon is so full of things that couldn't possibly have happened
like the use of chariots in war when there is no evidence that the American
people ever used the wheel except as a toy. There are numerous other things I
won't take the space to mention here. Most genuine scholars don't even want to
be bothered about trying to disprove the Book of Mormon. It would be almost as
egregious as spending time to prove that Jack and Jill really did go up the
hill to fetch a pail of water. Actually the Book of Mormon is its own greatest
witness of its fraudulent origin.
4. Smith lied and he admitted he lied, many times excusing himself that God had
told him to keep certain matters secret from even his own people. He lied to
his own people about the early practice of polygamy, that infamous practice
which exploited Mormon women and he advised his brethren to lie also. He lied
publicly to his people when he had already taken several women as spiritual
wives. He lied when he said the temple ceremony came from God when it was an
obvious steal from the Masons.
As in any court of law when a witness lies many times his word loses its
credibility. If he lies about one thing, says the opposing attorney, then he
will lie about many other things until no one can believe what he says.
I studied, prayed, analyzed, and agonized trying to find just one thing that
wasn't suspect in Smith's life and in his writings. At last I was impelled to
admit that Joseph Smith had been a fraud and a tyrant no matter how
charismatic, personally charming, and occasionally sympathetic he could be.
The bulk of the proof is J. Smith's fraudulent actions came not from
anti-Mormon sources but from Smith's own words, his accounts of his own actions
and his historically substantiated personal behavior.
Brigham Young had this to say about Joseph Smith: "Joseph was mean from birth,
wild, intemperate, dishonest, tricky, but for all that he was a prophet of the
Lord. These trifling faults were as nothing against the religion he founded. I
care not if Joseph gamble, lie, swear, run horses and marry women every day:
for I embrace no man in my faith" Perhaps that also reveals something of
the character of Brigham Young. No matter how clean, industrious and family
oriented Mormons now are it doesn't erase the smut of their beginning, nor does
it add one whit of credibility to the Joseph Smith story.
I fluctuated back and forth between the pull of the old ways and what I
intellectually knew to be true. At that time the church had a poster that was
on display in the foyer of every church. A person pointed a finger directly at
you and said, "Be honest with yourself." When I would go to church
that poster would slap me in the face. I would sit and listen to what was said,
get angry at the stupidity of it, go home and swear I'd never go to church
again. Then like some drunkard going back to his drink I would go back again
and search for something I could rely on and that poster would slap me in the
face again, "Be honest with yourself."
Be honest with myself. What was I getting out of church affiliation?
Sociability. That was all I found. Sociability is fine but not when you have to
pretend to believe the nonsense that you now know is nonsense in order to
belong. I got to feeling like a hypocrite. In October of 1960 I wrote in my
diary that there were too many things against the Mormon Church, the lies, the
fraud, the lechery, the tyranny, the exploitation of women, their brain-washing
of children. I wanted no more to do with it.
When a person perpetuates lies and fraud believing it is the truth is he
blameless? He is not. He becomes a liar himself. What responsibility does a
person have to substantiate the truth of the doctrine he's spouting before he
passes it on to unsuspecting people as fact? If there were a severe penalty
connected to such an activity it would silence a hell of a lot of preachers.
Evidently when God, or whomever, made the commandments, teaching untruths
wasn't considered worthy of any concern.
Is emotion evidence? Just because a person wants something to be true does that
add one whit to its validity? I ran upon a quotation from Socrates:
"Philosophy begins when one learns to doubt--particularly to doubt one's
own beliefs, one's dogmas, one's axioms. Who knows how these cherished beliefs
became certainties, with ease, as if some secret wish did them, clothing desire
in the dress of thought? There is no real philosophy until the mind turns
around and examines itself." It seemed to me as if the long dead brain of
Socrates was speaking to my own brain.
At that time I intellectually withdrew from the church of my childhood and early
adulthood. It wasn't easy. For the better part of ten years it was a source of
anxiety. But no longer. I have continued to read and study all religions, all
philosophies, hundreds of books and all I find is more evidence to substantiate
my withdrawal from the Mormon Church. You can only see what it is like when you
get out of it, view it from a distance.
I copied this from a book I read but I've forgotten the title: "She felt
the way she did when Jehovah's Witnesses stood on her doorstep and talked about
God or when fresh young Mormons tried to convert her, young men with shaved
faces and shaved minds, who grinned at you politely, despite your sins and
talked of life and eternity as if they'd been equipped with looped tapes in
some Salt Lake City basement." It is only when you regard it from a
distance, from a new perspective, that you see its real face.
But in October of 1960 I hadn't even scratched the surface of a tantalizing new
world I was seeing for the first time. There was more to come. It was like
stepping back in time. With each step I took backward new terrain opened up to
my view. When I became familiar with that new set of facts my mind would ask,
"What's behind that?" As I searched I grew. When I stretched my mind
over new ideas I knew it could never, worlds without end, return to its once
puny size.
Once burned, twice shy. When I admitted my disenchantment with what I had once
believed, I didn't turn to other churches for new comfort. After forty three
years I had my eyes open. I couldn't force them shut again. I didn't try to
find an opiate which would shield me against the cruelties of this world. By
that time I had met many of history's theologians, scientists, philosophers,
and thinkers. I gobbled up books on all those subjects as if I were starving
for knowledge, and I was.
I read books on early Christianity, besides the Bible, I studied Augustine,
Martin Luther, Wycliffe, St. Francis, many on the Catholic Popes, the Spanish
Inquisition, the Crusades, the religious wars in Europe and England. I should
have kept track of the books I read. I had no idea I was going to attempt to
document what I believe or I would have done so.
Let's pretend I made a documentary account of those times. Come with me over
the past thirty years and I'll show how the documentary was made. Let's press
the fast-backward switch on our VCR and as the film rolls backward we will
catch glimpses of the men and events which played parts in the scenario The
Making of Deana Jensen who has the audacity to write GODWHO.
I rode with
I knew John Calvin and John Knox and bled with them as they saw mans' depravity
and mourned for his sins. I helped Martin Luther nail his grievances against
the Catholic Church on the Wittenburg Chapel Door and stood with the crowd
which watched him consummate his marriage to a nun.
There I was watching with the rest of the curious as religious zealots dug up
the bones of Wycliffe and hanged those bones for heresy because Wycliffe had
translated the Bible from the Latin into the "language of the Angels"
so that common people could read it.
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 f*ggots and was burned with Bruno in punishment
for his scientific investigations.
I walked with Paul on his way to
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
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
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
Back to Hammurabi I went and read the Ten Commandments Moses said he had
received from God. I called on Confucius 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.
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 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 and were perpetuated by brainwashing. Perhaps more so 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
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. Whoever wrote the book of Genesis in the Bible
decided he was going to commit the story to paper. Who can tell at this late
date what was the purpose of that particular writer when he committed that
story to writing. Was he consolidating many stories into one? Was he writing
down a particular story someone had told him? Was he writing down a story
different from the one his father had told him? Was he being satirical? Did he
do it because he had a free day and thought he'd try his pen at something? Did
he take, as some have said, several stories and try to make one out of them?
Some historians say that there were many writers who contributed to those first
five books of Moses. It is immaterial to this work whether there were one or
many. The result was the same. The story of the creation was the first bit of
"proof" that there was only one god. And that story set the world on
a giant sidetrack with eyes on the mystical instead of on the human race. Even
up to the present time millions believe that fictional tale to be an account of
what actually happened.
In the early days, before the writing of scripture, societies had been ruled by
matriarchs, the giver of food, the sustainer of life. Man resented his
dependence on women. His ego told him she was his inferior but she provided
food when hunting was poor. She made clothes to keep him warm in the cold. She
made moccasins that protected his feet during the hunt. If she refused him sex
he would fight her for it. She knew who got things done. She could survive
without man but man couldn't survive without her. He resented his dependence on
her. He was jealous that she could give birth and he couldn't. To control her
he belittled her and all her sex. For generations the main god was female.
It is entirely probable that the story of Adam and Eve was written to put woman
in her place. In the first story in Genesis God made Adam and Eve at the same
time out of the dust. But in the second version God made everything, the
plants, the beasts of the fields the skunks and the cactus, before he decided
that Adam should have some one to "help" him. He took a rib out of
Adam's side from which he made Eve. He called her woman, because she came out
of man. Now, after this scripture was given to man by the undebatable God, man
could say to woman, "You belong to me because I gave birth to you. So
there!" It is significant that Adam didn't give birth a second time.
The God of the early Bible was not a likeable chap. He was cruel, vindictive,
giving orders to generals to kill everyone in certain cities and punishing the
general if he failed to kill every last one. That God ordered human sacrifices
until Abraham rebelled against it. When Moses wrote his own version of the
moral code of Hammurabi, he made the first and greatest commandment, "To
Love the Lord thy God with all thy heart might and strength." By that
unfortunate statement he set the Jewish people off in a disastrous direction.
He turned their eyes away from mankind and toward mysticism by commandment, set
such fear in them of God's anger and retribution that few people got around to
considering the next commandment which was to love your neighbor as yourself.
That first commandment made it a sin to doubt the existence of the mystical
force that made the world, has control over it and everything that exists in
it. It made doubt a sin. It made curiosity a sin. The binding of the intellect
was the original sin, not sex. When Eve wanted to eat of the tree of knowledge
God cursed her for it.
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