New Ideas

I spent the weekend doing more research. I can't help it. I want to learn. 

I have found a couple of things that are interesting. One of those being that the album I have been drawn to for the last six months, as I hear it enough for the lyrics to sink in I realize that the message of this album is the exact experience I am going through. The exact realizations I am coming to. I should have known, with the album title Existential Reckoning. I didn't even know what that meant, until recently. But is exactly what I am experiencing. 

I caught a quote from actor Jim Carrey this weekend. He went through this experience a few years ago and he said of it, "I used to feel like a guy experiencing the universe. Now I feel like the universe experiencing a guy. 

That was pretty profound. 

I have been spending time dissecting the Bible, lately. I have come to realize that in church, parishners are spoon fed parts of the Bible that a pastor or priest chooses and it is taught according to that teacher's understanding and interpretation of it based on what they were taught and how their brain makes sense of things. It turns out that there are a lot of pretty awful things in the Bible and it ALSO turns out that the Bible is not as authentic as we are led to believe. And since we are taught not to question and also because most church going people don't read the Bible in its entirety to understand it, there is a lot that goes unknown

I'll explain what I have been learning. I am way down the rabbit hole now. I have pulled back the veil to the point of no return. 

I have been studying the Bronze age people. I have been learning about the Mesopotamians, Phoenicians, Egyptians and the Canaanite peoples. It is very interesting to see how the different legends and myths about creation and a flood epic and a Moses character and a man who has a God for a dad appear in all of their ancient writings. Could that be because they all experienced the same TRUTH!? Well, no. It actually appears like as these groups co-mingled, were conquered by one another or enslaved by one another or were otherwise exposed to one another's mythologies, they adopted (or stole) the stories and retooled them to fit their cult's narrative. 

I also learned about how the powers that decided what to include and exclude from the Bible also chose how to interpret certain things and they made translation choices to force the Bible to fit the narrative they wanted. Things changed a ton, from the original writings, it turns out. See, it turns out that the early Jews, the Hebrew people (Canaanite people) were polytheistic. This means they believed, like all other developed societies of that time, that there were many gods and not just one. They believed there was one MAIN GOD and then a bunch of lesser gods. The oldest versions of the first books of the Bible that we have, speak of gods in plural. They refer to a few different gods. There appears to be El (the main dude) and then under El are the Elohim which are lesser gods like Baal and Yahweh. El had a wife too. A goddess named Asherah. Baal was said to be a child of El where Yahweh was just a lesser God, not a child of El. 

As the religion evolved, they decided they didn't want to be polytheistic anymore and were going to be monotheistic. So, they translated the names El and Yahweh all to just God, as if these were suddenly one and the same. Yahweh, who is the accepted God of the Bible was actually a subordinate god to El and was the god of the forge. He was a god of metalworking. You know. In the BRONZE AGE! 

I remember learning about Baal in church. This god was the one that was used to preach against idolatry. Baal was called a false God whose followers were evil. It was presented to me like these people were just too stubborn and they wanted to sin so they chose to worship a fake god. Turns out that the Baal worshippers were just another group of the Canaanite people that happened to be a rival clan to those who worshipped Yahweh. Remember, everything was about taking over and conquering rival groups. That is literally what mankind was for thousands of years. And since history is written by the winners of wars and not the losers... There you have it. The worshippers of Yahweh were not morally superior to the worshippers of Baal. Yahweh's worshippers took part in blood sacrifice including humans. These were not less barbaric folks. They just won, so they got to be the heroes of the God story.

So, back to the Bible. You've got these bishops from everywhere at the council of Nicea and they are trying to figure out how to make the stories monotheistic. How can they make it make sense? Well, they had all these instances of gods being plural. So they decided that ACTUALLY didn't refer to those El and the lesser gods, instead it meant what the book of John in the NT says about Jesus being with God before he was on earth as a man. So, that's where they justified adding the idea of the trinity. Those plurals were just God (Yahweh, of course) talking about himself in the three persons thing. Makes sense, right? Never mind that this was decided in 325 AD under the watch of Constantine and was put together by bishops of the "Holy Roman Empire." Sounds legit. 

So, what I have gathered in my studies so far is that the early books of the Bible are rip offs of basically all other early mythological archetypes and differed very little from all other mythologies and legends of the time. The characters of the Bible have corresponding characters in earlier mythologies in Mesopotamia and Egypt as well as Roman and Greek mythologies. A bunch of men got together to compile ancient writings, purge those they didn't think fit their narrative, translated things in a way that could change things just enough to fit their narrative. 

Turns out, the ancient Jews were no different and were no more special than any other group of ancient people. They aren't the one group chosen by the one true God. They had gods for everything just like every other civilization back then. It's how they explained things back then. It is mythology. All of it. Add to that the fact that there are basically zero archeological finds to corroborate the stories in the Bible and you've got an archaic book of fairy tales. It's lore. It's mythology. 

El, Yahweh, Baal, Odin, Zues, Ra, Vishnu, Sheva, Allah, these are all the same.