The Faith of a Heretic

The questions are posed: what is the meaning of the Hebrew God as compared to the meaning of god(s) in the Greek world, and what is the significance of the difference? In this interpretation I will assume that the word “meaning” means “significance” or “nature” – as meaning generally associates with personal judgment and is fundamentally impossible to summarize.

The Hebrew God initially was respected in a henotheistic fashion, being recognized as the most powerful or important god amongst many[1] but with Hezekiah’s centralization of the cult at Jerusalem in the 8^th century BCE[2] the other idols were banished and the Tanakh was from that point on written to describe a solitary God, the only god, the creator of the universe and all that ever was[3]. The Hebrew God essentially manifests as a ruthless, unreasoning and murderous tyrant[4] who instills in his people a legacy of conquest by declaring that a large swathe of the Levant[5] was to be divinely granted to them, lands which at the time were populated by many other peoples, nations which the Tanakh contends were destroyed by the Jews in ascension of their manifest destiny.

The Hebrew God is customarily referred to as being omnipotent (all powerful), omniscient (all knowing) and omnibenevolent (all loving) although this may very well be a contemporary perception as there are numerous internal contradictions to these claims within the Bible itself[6][7][8]. Of particular absurdity is the latter claim that God is all loving, considering that it has been estimated by some scholars that he was personally responsible for at least 33,041,220 deaths in the Tanakh[9].

God is obsessed with sumptuary laws and the use and nature of our genitals, destroying those who do not obey seemingly random or nonsensical commandants. In Exodus 4:24-26 for example, God decides to kill Moses because he had not yet cut off the skin from his son’s penis and in Numbers 11:1 God sets the people on fire who had decided to eat meat, as he commanded them to only eat “mana.”

Later on in the history of the Jewish people, as the Assyrians expelled them from Jerusalem and the Bible was modified to explain this apparent injustice, God became a source of salvation and redemption[10] involved in a cosmic struggle between the forces of good and evil, fated to return to redeem the righteous on “judgment day,” the end of times. This latter incarnation of God, a mysterious force that promises redemption to those who act righteously and unknowable barbarism to those who act poorly in the cosmic afterlife, is the more-or-less contemporary Hebrew God.

The conception of god(s) in the Greek world was one of greater polytheism with local polis-level examples of henotheism, centering around the 13 major gods Zeus (king of the gods), Hera, Poseidon, Apollo, Artemis, Aphrodite, Ares, Dionysus, Hephaestus, Athena, Hermes, Demeter, and Hestia. Unlike the God of the Hebrews the Greek gods tended to exhibit human qualities, especially as expressed in Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey: making mistakes, feuding, dying, battling each other, falling into love, showing empathy, taking part in family structures, forming relationships, having sex, laughing, crying, valuing comedy and picking sides in wars and politics.  The gods mostly behaved, especially as depicted by Homer, as being spoiled socialites, all too willing to meddle in the affairs of the common man just for their own amusement or satisfaction, and having little regard for the sanctity of life through their careless indulgences. These Gods love mortals, as Aphrodite did with Adonis or Zeus with Leda, or might outright destroy a mortal who angered them, such as Dionysus did to King Pentheus of Thebes for mocking his religious craft[11]. But the gods were not all too human, for they could exhibit magical powers, such as teleportation, elemental mastery, incredible strength, transmutation and illusion, to name a few.

The Greek gods could also be a source of great ideological inspiration and majesty, inspiring the virtue philosophies of Stoicism, Cynicism and Platonism by venerating the wisdom, courage, temperance and prudence of gods such as Zeus or Athena[12]. In this sense the gods served as exemplary role models but not law givers, inspiring the people to act in a righteous way. While not inspiring the people as lead characters in didactic moral stories and dramas, the gods served as a source of entertainment in the epics, contrasting with the strength, incorruptibility and virtue of the hero.

While the gods were powerful, they did not possess unlimited power, as it was implied that even Zeus, king of the gods, could be inhibited or even killed by the combined efforts of other gods, only having true mastery over their individual portfolio of powers, ex. Hades had absolute domain of the underworld, Zeus over lightning and storm.

Ultimately the significant difference between the Hebrew God and the Greek gods was that that the absolute moral direction and unceasing tyranny of the former is surely missing in all of the latter. While the Hebrew God sought to bring about a cosmic order (at least late in the history of the Tanakh) between the forces of good and evil, moral absolutes, steering a divine people into a particular code of conduct by top-down commands and punishment, the Greek gods were players in the world who stood as role models to inspire the people on how to act by example in poetry and in the theatre. Fundamentally Greek mythology did not demand an especially divisive worldview, as the Hebrew God did, as it did not have a conception of sin, or of judging people on the merits of their perceived transgressions. While the Greek gods could be related to, or be perceived as extraordinary humans, the Hebrew God is an unknowable sociopath of capricious insanity which at one moment preaches love and in the next eradicates entire cities of people without pause or reason. Ultimately the nature of the Hebrew God can be lent to the environment to which it was created: from the culture of a primitive hill tribe torn between the more literate and cosmopolitan imperial forces of Assyria and Egypt. The Greeks, another cosmopolitan and cultured people (by relative standards) would come to create gods which fancied wisdom, creativity, love, poetry, courage, beauty, song, dance and merriment, aspects which they thought were the touchstones of humanity. The Jews, too prone to violence and indecency, were unable to raise themselves from their barbaric infancy and instead resigned to be ruled by a madman.

[2] Hezekiah’s Reforms and
the Revolt against Assyria. The Foundation for Biblical Archaeology. http://www.tfba.org/articlespreview.php?articleid=10

[3] Isaiah 43:10

[4] Cruelty and Violence in the Bible. Skeptic’s Annotated Bible. http://skepticsannotatedbible.com/cruelty/long.html

[5] Ezekiel 47:13-20

[6] Can God do anything? Skeptic’s Annotated Bible. http://skepticsannotatedbible.com/contra/cando.html

[7] Does God know and see everything? Skeptic’s Annotated Bible. http://skepticsannotatedbible.com/contra/knows.html

[8] Does God love everyone? Skeptic’s Annotated Bible. http://skepticsannotatedbible.com/contra/god_hates.html

[9] How many has God killed? Dwindling in Unbelief. http://dwindlinginunbelief.blogspot.com/2007/01/how-many-has-god-killed-complete-list.html

[10] Who Wrote the Bible?. First broadcast 25 December 2004 by Channel 4. Directed by Polly Morland and written by Robert Beckford.

[11] Dionysus – Wine God. About.com: Ancient/Classical History. http://ancienthistory.about.com/od/dionysusmyth/a/Dionysus.htm

[12] The Ethics of Athena. The Encyclopedia of the Goddess Athena. http://www.goddess-athena.org/Encyclopedia/Ethics/index.htm

Healthy communities need a common place to meet for means of socializing the children, cultural events, discussing values and discovering meaning – one flaw of modernity is that in the wake of godlessness the people have made the mall their new church, and sorely lacking any moral direction or sense of community in their lives, have given to abandon and decadence, to shallow and meaningless lives. I believe that man needs a proper community place to replace churches – not one fueled by profit. Civic goods must replace cosmic goods.

In class the question was posed: “what does it mean to know.” To know something is to deconstruct it with reason, to scrutinize it against the rigors of logic and to be fully aware of its nature, to hold it before the mind’s eye and to see it bare in its true form; to know is to pierce through what is apparent and to discover the essential nature of a concept, object or emotion. Realizing what is true, to know rather than to have an opinion of something, goes to the heart of one of my favorite passages from book six of the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius (Gregory Hays translation):

Like seeing roasted meat and other dishes in front of you and suddenly realizing: This is a dead fish. A dead bird. A dead pig. Or that this noble vintage is grape juice., and the purple robes are sheep wool dyed with shellfish blood. Or making love – something rubbing against your penis, a brief seizure and a little cloudy liquid.

Perceptions like that – latching onto things and piercing through them, so we see what they really are. That’s what we need to do all the time – all through our lives when things lay claim to our trust- to lay them bare and see how pointless they are, to strip away the legend that encrusts them.

A man with true knowledge of things would find the notion of becoming upset over the destruction of his property to be silly – after all, if we look at things critically and cast away all pretenses of glit and glitter, we are really crying over chunks of metal, or stitched together cotton or perhaps wood nailed to stone. Marcus Aurelius speaks evident truth to this topic to such a degree that I feel as if I waste my efforts in attempting to match his keen insight. And this insight is a crucial one: most people do not live in the domain of knowledge but in opinion, a self-defeating shroud of insecurity and indecision trammeled by faulty judgments, wherein only the superficial surfaces of reality are appraised. A man who is overcome with turbulence upon seeing his car destroyed is one who is squandering his moments and causing himself undue grief. If such a man were to have a knowledge of what a car truly is, and how the cosmos will eventually reclaim all of his possessions in due time anyway, he would not be offended, and would be a more helpful member of the community.

The logic behind Marcus’ words fundamentally addresses what is within and without of our control as human beings: we can only claim control over our own desires, actions, beliefs, aversions and decisions, while we can claim no control over things external to us, such as the caprice of fate, chance, other people, disease and disaster. To know of what is in our control and what is not in our control allows us to reach our true potential as human beings, to know what the case is truly. All grief is caused by the opinion that we may control these things outside of our control, and by control it is also meant to expect certain behaviors of things outside of our control. We have no control over the injustices inflicted upon us by others, or the devastations of disease and natural disaster, nor the ability or inclination of another’s heart to love us, nor the behavior of bosses, parents and friends. Knowledge of this state of the world is necessary to live happily and through the ages up until the present we observe countless people futilely sticking to opinion and cursing the gods and others for their misfortune.

Returning to the topic at hand, it can be said that to know something is to be aware of what is truly the case as opposed to what is not the case. We can judge the truth of an idea by scrutinizing it with logic and reason (checking to see if it is free of fallacies and holds evidently true to all minds through a chain of argumentation) and the truth of reality and the nature of objects through scientific inquiry.

We discussed both mythology and scientific approaches to understanding the origins of the cosmos. While the mythology serves as inspiring poetry and as a powerful force in unifying a nation it fails to address the state of the way things are and only pretends to understand essential truths about reality. Creation mythology is a form of social memory which serves to justify the existence of a people’s habits, customs and culture: the “chosen race” cannot be special when it is clearly a product of historical forces rather than magic, and so magic takes the lead in seducing our perceptions. This magic is woven by the priest-caste which seeks to control the population and does so by pretending to be given divine revelation and auspices. Religion is complete bunk.

That being said, I do have a sort of religious experience when meditating on the vast expanse of the cosmos or when observing the beautiful complexity of nature. I do indeed recoil at the notion of littering, or of treating other people with barbarism, infidelity, disloyalty and unfaithfulness – yet these dispositions arise from the heart of natural reason rather than the command of the god, or more relevant to the subject at hand, a knowledge of my own divine creation.

Ultimately while we may know of the scientific explanation this knowledge only serves a technical merit (in exploring space for example) rather than a teleological one: knowledge of the Big Bang, for instance, does not say anything about the ultimate meaning of life or why the universe was created. Understanding cosmology is similar to understanding how a ball set into motion continues to roll, and what effects it may have on reality: it is a cautionary knowledge rather than a mystical one. While I am awed by the sheer scale and number of nearly unlimited possibilities in the universe, fixating on its creation is ultimately pointless as no human can further understand why we are here than any other human. In this sense one could label me a “militant agnostic” like Michael Shermer, “I don’t know, and you don’t either.” We should, as Rousseau and the ancients contend, pursue virtue rather than the sciences, so as to live our lives properly, leaving the natural geniuses to obsess over such abstract knowledge. It is this sublime science, the acquisition of virtue, which should rather obsess our thoughts than pretensions of understanding cosmology, for the former is the labor of regular men, and the latter is a wasteful entertainment for all but the most clever of minds.

To clarify, many people do not have a understanding of what constitutes scientific “theory.” In science: theory is not the same as a theory used in common language, it does not refer to an approximate explanation of a phenomenon, but instead is a system of mutually supporting evidence and fact which offers itself as a model to explain an aspect of reality. “Theory” is a higher form of truth than fact, using facts in conjunction with one another to form a grander statement about the nature of reality.

When creationists say “evolution is a theory, not fact” – they are not only confused but superbly misguided, basing their worldview on a merely incorrect definition of a word.

I know I normally don’t post internet culture/gamer related stuff on this site but I had to preserve the following forum post for posterity:

I played the ‘Rommel in Africa’, scenario. It is great, except that the Italian airforce based at Tripoli, and the German Airbase near Benghazi, handle all what is demanded of them without a hint of sweat. Are the British air bases perpetually under supplied?

I have come to realize, that one can actually win, playing computer games. I have taken Cairo, with my German Forces, playing the easy mode. I had major problems, but one has to try different variations to tactics. For instance, when there are nine divisions, some have to support attack, one has to attack, some perhaps, may have to defend, some may be kept in reserve. I never put many divisions under one commander. A Major General has no problem in commanding two divisions. He does it very well. The few divisions under the command of the General, perform exceptionally. The many Generals work as a team, perhaps, which is extremely important. The air force of Germany, does the impossible. It does the impossible, as if it does nothing. When I first asked the air force to crater the runway at Alexandria, they hovered for a long time, over their own base, then, after they began to do so, I realized that they were better off performing more immediate and important tasks, not exceedingly difficult ones. The air force were sitting ducks for the British air force, for some time, until better sense prevailed. Hearts of Iron is a great game, one of the greatest. I reached Cairo in four hours real time, playing the very slow mode. The interest the game generates is unbelievable. Adolf Hitler gifted me a squadron of aircraft, perhaps bombers, and abruptly took the gift back, before I knew what they were about. I may have taken Cairo, and may have 17 divisions in the proximity of Cairo, but I hope there is nothing amiss behind my back. If I am not supplied, then I will have to take the Suez Canal, but Africa being a continent, one can always find a supply route, provided Tripoli is not taken. The Italian Garrison only has to perform anti partisan duties, at Tripoli. I try to remind Crete of my proximity, by regular bombings, and by maintaining air superiority.

‘Sometimes I speak to men and women just as a little girl speaks to her doll. She knows, of course, that the doll does not understand her, but she creates for herself the joy of communication through a pleasant and conscious self-deception.’