God

The first matter, God, must be sought in the objective manifestation of religion, and so we turn our attention to religion itself. We find that it immediately defines its own essence as an historical entity, the substance of which is elucidated in a body of writing, a canonical scripture. For the purposes of easy identification, that body is asserted to be the Holy Bible (HB)

Obviously, that text is a translation and collation of older texts. We know this because several of these are currently extant. Of these, the oldest is the King James Version, dating to the early part of the 17th century. Thus we have three centuries of historicity before us as we begin.

Accordingly, we take up the task of historical exploration. What we will seek is the primary material, the original source of the canonical texts/scriptures that make up the HB. We do so because we see in those texts part of the process by which they have evolved, even in the last few centuries. We need to see the originals, the source.

It turns out that this is well known and attested historically by independent accounts. The earliest known texts comprised the sacred scripture of Judaism, as translated into Greek in the early part of the 3rd century BC. The Greek translations are popularly known as the Septuagint, or LXX, which was generated by translations of several dozen written accounts, or books (byblos, hence Bible). The first of these was said to have been by contract between Ptolemy Philadelphius, the son of the founder of the Egyptian Ptolemaic dynasty, and a group of Hebrew/Jewish scholars, to translate the Jewish Torah.

This is the primary sacred scripture of the Jews and serves as the written foundation of Judaism. It comprises five books, said to have been written by Moses, the reputed founder of the Jewish religion. It is included in the HB as the first five books of the Old Testament. In modern times, the Torah is also known as the Pentateuch, which is the primary extract of the Tanahk, or the Jewish/Hebrew Testament, roughly corresponding to the Biblical Old Testament.

It is convenient that we can recognize our possession of the attested founding scripture of the Hebrew religious stream, and know that we have almost everywhere at hand a copy of the Christian version of that scripture. But there is a number of caveats in this regard. It is to be assumed that there are differences between what is commonly available via Christianity, and what was originally translated into Greek millennia ago. It is also to be assumed that there are recensions and revisions of that text as it was brought into conformance with the perceived conditions necessitated by the forces at play in those times. We do not know that these assumptions are valid, but we must presume that they are unless and until they are shown otherwise.

With that in mind, we may proceed to the texts.

The first of the five original books is called in English "Genesis" and the term translates well from both the Greek and the authoritative Hebrew. A word here: The authoritative Hebrew is much younger than the Septuagint, dating only from the Medieval period. But it is in a close approximation to the original language, either Hebrew or Aramaic. Jewish scholars regard it as authoritative and accord it a vast amount of commentary and analysis of their own. In sum, these writings constitute the Masoreh, and the Hebrew texts are known as the Massoretic Texts.

In Genesis, we encounter several historical traditions describing the creation of the world by God, the creation of mankind by God, and the beginnings of the familial lineage claimed by the Jews as their own. A good deal of text is devoted to God, some of it is definitive, some descriptive, and some explanative. As it happens, the opening phrase introduces God as the creator of the heavens and earth.

We can now take our first close look at God, using the three texts (Hebrew, Greek, and English.. the latter in lieu of Latin, which was and is another authoritative source, it is said). Immediately we discover a rather profound problem!

The Latin term for God is Deus, the Greek is Theus, but the Hebrew is Elohim. The first two are singular, but the Hebrew is plural! Read literally, it refers to a group of entities, presumably "of El". We are confronted with a huge problem, because we know that historically, the Elohim were the family of Canaanite gods, as attested in various source, most recently that of (the ancient city of) Ugarit.

So now we have evidence that the Jews and their founding national culture, that of Israel, did not originally worship a single god, but a family of gods. This directly repudiates the entire edifice of the Hebrew religious stream, which is characterized by rigorous monotheism. It cannot be that this has escaped the attention of everyone, and so we look to see what has happened.

We can consult the modern Pentateuch (the Torah being the sacred scroll kept locked in the Jewish tabernacle/synagogue/temple). What we find there is that indeed the Hebrew is explicit. In Hebrew, the word is spelt aleph, lamed, heh, and mem. The opening vowel, aleph, is regarded as silent, and so the consonants lamed, heh, and mem constitute LHM, or with vowels added eLoHiM. The commentary, though, has this to say:

God. Heb. Elohim. The existence of the Deity is througout
Scripture assumed: it is not a matter for argument or doubt.
Elohim is the general designation of the Divine Being in the
Bible (Jewish Tanahk), as the fountain and source of all things.
Elohim is a plural form, which is often used in Hebrew to
denote plenitude of might. Here it indicates that God
comprehends and unifies all the forces of eternity and infinity.

We may gather from that commentary that argument and doubt have indeed existed, and that they are here suppressed by fiat. It can be argued that this indicates the awareness of the problem, and a web of explanation crafted surrounding same. It can also be argued that said web is not considered definitive, perhaps even sufficient, and within Judaism itself it remains a matter of controversy.

Further, however, we may ask: What can we make of this? Many questions arise, and for their answer we must turn to the history of the ancient near east. Were, in fact, the Israelites actually originally Canaanites? If so, why did they reinterpret the Canaanite family as being a single divine entity? And the questions keep coming.

We can indeed turn to that history, but for the moment let us continue with the text.

The first chapter comprises the account of the Elohim creation story, entailing six days of effort, one of the latest of which involved the creation of man. The term "elohim" is used throughout.

In the second chapter, we encounter a retelling of the story of the creation of mankind, but now the term for God is different. It is the one we are most familiar with, the Hebrew yod, heh, vau, heh. In both the Greek and the Latin, the terms are different. In the Greek, we find a couple of different usages: in some cases, yhvh is rendered as an X cross with dots in the four quarters, and in others, it is rendered as 'theus'. But in both cases, it is followed by the Greek 'kyrios', which directly translate as (paraphrase) "who is in authority, lordship, etc." The Latin term follows suite: 'Jova deus'. In English, this is the familiar LORD God.

Again, we have a problem: Yahveh is a name/title of an individual deity, but is in fact not a member of the Canaanite pantheon. Some evidence does suggest that Yahveh was known to the Canaanites, though I cannot provide relevant citations.

In any case, a literal reading of the primary material reveals that there is not just one deity, but a family of deities, and that God is not the same deity in the first two chapters of the first book! Of course, the Jewish text explains this in a like manner to 'elohim', and that is that the Tetragrammaton (yhvh), the unpronouncable name of God, is yet another descriptive name, having yet another different significance.

Like questions arise, but let us continue.

The second chapter yields the story of the creation of what are presumably intended to be understood as the first two humans. Their names are given in the English as Adam and Eve, and they are placed in a garden where their needs are presumably all available. They are told not to eat of the fruit of two trees, however. From the text, we learn that these trees bear the fruit that yields knowledge of good and evil, and yields immortality.

The third chapter reveals, as can be expected, that one of the fruits are taken and consumed, and that it is the first fruit, that of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. An apparent morality play then takes place where Adam and Eve recognize their own sexuality, and are caught out by God (Yahveh). They are summarily expelled from the garden with a speech from Yahveh that ends in a curious aside. This is given as Gen 2:22: "Behold, the man has become as one of us, to know good and evil; and now, lest he put forth his hand, and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live forever." After which the two are quickly gone.

The various languages closely agree in all these particulars.

Here, we have scriptural assertion of a partial self-definition by God. The commentary from the Pentateuch explains this allegorically, as one has come to expect, but good scholarship demands that we contemplate the primary material in its own right before assigning any received commentary as authoritative.

In this third chapter, we have learned some things about God/Yahveh. We learn that He has cultivated a couple of rather potent botanical items, two trees that bear fruit that have a dramatic effect when consumed. We gather that they have not been cultivated for the benefit of these two creations, but we are given to understand that their effects are known and presumably understood. It seems reasonable to conclude that Yahveh and friends/family have comsumed these fruits themselves and so know of their properties.

Thus, we know that the Gods had what they considered to be extraordinary intelligence, and what can only be regarded as an indeterminate life span. It is of interest here that Yahveh reckoned that they would have the same affect on the new humans, as that tells us that the Gods considered themselves as biologically somewhat close to homo sapiens, if indeed that is what Adam and Eve were. We now know, however, that the Gods were definitely biological, and were quite evidentally no higher on the evolution scale than Adam and Eve, the first humans.

The fourth chapter continues with the family of Adam and Eve, the first fratricide, and the descendants of the perpetrator Cain. Cain is described as a tiller of the ground, and Abel as a keeper of animals. Cain's produce was not acceptable to Yahveh, while Abel's was. Which of course drives Cain to kill Abel. We get the message that agriculture was not sanctioned by Yahveh, though herding was, and it can be suspected that this by extension refers to the preference for the nomadic rather than the settled life, but we're getting too far away from the text at this point. Cain is banished, of course.

Cain's descendants are listed, and it is interesting to note that their names were quite similar to those given to those of Adam and Eve's third progeny Seth.

Chapter Five is given over to the listing of the Seth line of descendants, which is the better known line of the prediluvian patriarchs who all lived extremely long lives. Included is Enoch, who "walked with God and he was not..." The lineage ends with the sons of Noah.

Chapter Six opens with a very interesting bit of information. The first five verses tell us that as mankind proliferated, the progeny of God (Yahveh?) came down and took human women as mates, the offspring of which were "mighty ... men of renown". This tells us that Yahveh had one or more mates who gave him children, and as those children mated with human women and got offspring as well, we now know a very important thing about the Gods. They were human! This is a very explicit and incontrovertible piece of evidence.

Well, let us stop and consider what we have learned in the first few chapters of the first book of the canonical and defining scripture of the Hebrew religious stream. And what we have learned about the nature of the central figure of that stream explicitly contradicts the entire structure that subsequently developed. This is very serious indeed, because it indicates that what we think we know of religion literally is entirely without foundation. And furthermore, the evidence of that presumed fact is open to all.

What we believe we know about God has to do with the three Hebrew religions: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. We are given to understand that the same God (the only God) is the central figure in each. We are allowed to perceive that each of these reveals a somewhat different aspect of God. Judaism portrays a vengeful warrior God, jealous in his covenant with His people, who is a stern and unforgiving taskmaster. Christianity reveals a beneficent and loving God who enters into arrangements with (presumably) other aspects of Himself for the further growth/andvancement/education of his flock. Islam allows God to show Himself as an enigmatic guide who demands obedience in the absence of understanding and comprehension.

None of these images are revealed in the original texts. Nowhere else is there any indication that God is not the sole divine being, possessed of aspects that can only warrant the attribution of absolutes: omniscient, onmipotent, omnipresent, etc. Instead, we read of a fabulous story that smacks of an account of land reclamation after a natural disaster, we read that mankind is the special creation of the deity Yahveh, and we read, or would read if we continue, of what sounds like an extended contract between a warlord and a high class mercenary military unit. This last is then extended into a supposed permanent relationship, although frought with difficulty. In short, we read nothing of what we expect to discover!

What can this mean? We can look for any indication that our assessment is without merit. We can seek any sign that these events were understood to be "magical" or otherwise abnormal, and the evidence for that suspicion simply does not exist. All we encounter is commentary of a much later period to the effect that what we read doesn't mean what it says. So, on the strength of that conclusion, we are forced to consider the possibility that there has always been something other than what we believe at work within, or connected to, organized religion.

We can make some tentative observations. One of those is that the continued inclusion of the cited material means that some other consideration continued to exist and have power well into the historical period, otherwise that material would surely have been edited for comformance long ago. That just makes good sense in view of what we all know all too well about human nature.

So we may reasonably ask: what was that, or those, other consideration(s)? But we are well aware that there are no easy answers forthcoming, else they would have surfaced long ago and be well known and understood today. In fact, it would seem that the likelihood of any reasonable answer ever emerging at all from the canonical source is vanishingly small. Nevertheless, it behooves us to keep the question in mind, I think.

As we stand back and contemplate what we have discovered, and we wonder why it survived, it turns out that we can probably mount an attempt at our own answer. It wasn't until the 15th century that the HB as we know it came into existence. It is the product of a collation by Johannes Gutenberg of the ecclesiastical texts available to him was made further available in a printed form for general usage in all countries. He was after a profit, of course. But Gutenberg had a profound effect on human history, because he made written material not only generally available, but in a form that could readily be guaranteed as uniform. All readers had the exact same text, and so had the same material to discuss and over which to argue, etc.

This was not the case prior to that time. Texts were in manuscript form, written and copied by hand by a scribe. Transmission of textual material was thus a chancy business at the very best, because errors in copying were expected. More often, the texts were vulnerable to editing and glossing and all sorts of revision and change, though it was in the scribe's interest to be able to do true and fair copies lest he find himself unemployed. The most likely scenario is the scribe executing a copy with the revisions required by his employer.

Thus it was that until Gutenberg, it was possible to keep these matters largely secret. And it was only afterward that the need to "explain" these obvious discrepencies arose. A plausible scenario. Afterwords, it was not possible to change because the authoritative text was in the Torah itself, and it was understood that the Latin, French and English translations were in fact of the Torah itself with regard the first five Old Testament books.

Another plausible scenario, though darker, is that there has always been a cadre in control of the texts that understood the necessity for preserving these anomalies, though for whatever reason we are forced to conjecture only. This scenario is more powerful, because it provides an ongoing driving and controlling vector. Less powerful because it invokes some sort of conspiracy theory.

In any case, we could continue with our inspection of the primary data, but we've already got enough to cast it in an entirely different light than it is commonly portrayed, and so our reason for doing so would be for related research only. We already have a sound grasp of the nature of God, as provided in the canonical text itself.

God is in fact not a single being, but a family or clan of human beings that had access to chemical enhancement of intellectual prowess and life span. No magical or spiritual dimensions were indicated and so none are construed. That does not mean none existed or exist even now. There is no indication that the presence of the gods was, or has been, terminated.

We may conclude that the gods may well be with us even today as a genetic lineage long bereft of chemical enhancement, though that may not be the case. We simply cannot know.

We could at this point invoke the rest of history and further define and describe the gods, but that will be left as an exercise for the reader. A thumbnail sketch chronicles the existence of a family of deities who appear to have charge of some part, if not all, of our earth, our planet. This family appears to have made themselves a part of all of the history of the ancient near east, from whence comes western civilization, and we can see evidence that they presented themselves to virtually all known civilizations within some number of millennia, ending in the middle of the 1st millennium BC. The details of their existence are both extensive and spotty. It may be that the story of their existence, or sojourn as the case may be, was carried both eastward and westward from their place of origin as part of history. It would seem that said place was the ancient near east, though perhaps including a wider area embracing eastern Europe and Africa, western Asia and perhaps as far east as India.

Within the ancient near east itself, we can and have traced languages and cultures, and we can see evidence of the evolution of the names they were given, or themselves chose. So we are pretty certain that this group is probably something on the order of a clan, with a founder from whom a number of families descended. Evidence suggests that they took or were given areas of responsibility, such that the memory of them includes "attributes". We are made privy to their relationship with mankind in some detail and to some significant extent, and in the main, it seemed to be a simple dominance on their part, though that dominance appears to have included some amount of responsibility as well.

These people, for that is what the evidence says they were, were said to have bequeathed their genes to certain human lineages, having had progeny out of unions with human men and women. Down through history, those lineages have preserved their bloodlines, occasionally merging two distant lines and presumably renewing themselves thus. No known biological consequences marks these lineages so far as is generally known, and their putative special nature has been thoroughly repudiated down through history. What is known from the records is that in the earliest historical periods, "kingship" was said to have descended from these people. This presumably is the basis of the "divine right of kings", etc. Certainly, history records some number of rather high profile concerns about the divine status of some royal lineage, or the lack thereof.

Other than their asserted specialness, and their genetic heritage, they seem to have bequeathed a certain level of cultural and social technology. For some while, the apparent sudden rise of civil and social technology evidenced in the early history of Sumer was thought to be a conundrum. Now, proto-Sumerians have been proposed, though no special evidence of such a technology has been found. Egypt as well seems to have inherited a cultural technology; no trace of proto-development has been found to exist, and the general suspicion was that it was imported, though from where is unknown. For the Sumerians, the time frame seems to have been late 5th or early 4th millennium BC, and for Egypt, it appears to be the late 4th millennium BC. The testimony of Sumer was that it was the gods that provided the entire foundation of civilization, and it was the gods who were in charge of how things developed, etc. There is a hint of this in the earliest Egyptian writings as well.

In any case, all of this is largely considered moot in academia. The thinking seems to be: The gods don't exist because they can't exist, and because they can't exist, they never existed. It is admittedly a circular argument, but the basis is said to be a complete lack of any evidence for the existence of such people, gods or not. Therefore, the entire business is carefully explained as what one could expect from the primitive mind that lacked the scientific knowledge we possess today, and which invoked the anthropomorphic images of nature as an explanation. Much argument from psychology is said to support these theses, but the very nature of the arguments in these regards are logically suspect, because they are far more tortured and convoluted than the simple supposition that the evidence is as given.

But there is an entirely different dimension that is assigned to the matter of the gods, and that is that they represent the existence of an objective non-physicality, such that allows them to flout the now familiar laws of physics and so accomplish magical miracles of one sort or another. This new dimension has been proposed in the introduction as that of spirit. It is this dimension of the matter of the gods that is said to have captured the cooperation of mankind, that apparently said cooperation earns access to a state of non-physicality that allows the consciousness, presumably replete with memory and continuity of identity, to survive physical death. Further, it is said that direct access thus is a species of divine gift that can be earned directly without the necessity of divine intercession. Thus this business takes on independent significance, but is traditionally regarded as a part of the matter of the gods. In any case, unless and/or until evidence of a spiritual dimension is found, all questions and issues of that nature must be left unaddressed.

Thus, the most reasonable scenario, based on what we know today, is that in fact such a family did exist at some point prior to the historical past. As they declined the roles created for them by the various cultures, remembrance of their presence created the "cargo cult" phenomenon, where humanity celebrated what they increasingly misunderstood until that celebration became an empty ritual no longer having any connection with the original reality.

As always, such things are a power vacuum quickly filled for purposes of political and economic domination. And so institutional religion was born.