Stuff That I Have Noticed #49 – ON JEHOVAH

In searching for something to share this month I looked through my collection of essays and came across this one which I wrote around Christmas time twenty-four years ago. Here it is with zero actual rewrites (just a couple of tweaks for clarity).

Warning: If you’re religious this will piss you off.

What better time to write about the Judeo-Christian myth than December? We’ve got the Christians celebrating the birth of their Savior and the Jews celebrating oil replenishment at the same time.

Before I launch into this composition I’m compelled to inform you that while I have no tolerance for religion, even to the extent that I almost always misspell the word, I am a deeply Spiritual man. I’m convinced that the physical world is barely the tip of the reality iceberg. That belief has often been and will continue to be explored in other of my writings so I don’t need to go into any more detail here.

While I’m neither a philosopher nor a theologian I do think about such things from time to time. What bothers me most about this religion business is the human proclivity for the perpetration of atrocities and mayhem in the name of these absurd notions.

FOR EXAMPLE: The “Tribunal of the Holy Office of the Inquisition” commonly known as the Spanish Inquisition, was established in 1478 by catholic monarchs Ferdinand II of Aragon and Isabella I of Castile. It became the most substantive of the three different manifestations of the broader catholic inquisition along with the Roman and Portuguese versions. According to today’s estimates, around 150,000 people were prosecuted for various offenses (mostly so called apostasy) during the three-centuries of the Spanish inquisition, out of which between 3,000 and 5,000 were executed. These executions were not the sort of legalized murder we have today but unspeakably horrific torture such as “the rack”, boiling in oil, drawing and quartering and were often capped off by burning alive in the public square. Very Christlike, don’t you think?

I was raised as a fundamental Baptist. In Sunday school we studied the old testament as well as the new and the teaching was thorough. To this day I know the bible better than most religious acquaintances both Jews and Christians. As a kid you tend to believe what the adults teach you and in fundamentalist Christianity one of the teachings, maybe the most dangerous, is that if you doubt or question you’re not “saved”. Pretty scary idea for a bright, creative seven year old and it’s hard to shake off. Psychiatrists have put their kids through college from this single doctrine.

Let’s take a close look at some of these bible stories.

There’s this god, said to be without gender but always referred to as He, (only one but He has multiple personalities) who is so powerful that He created everything in the universe in six days. Pretty tough to swallow right there but if you buy the omnipotence concept, believable. From there on it gets weirder and weirder. God (name: Jehovah) created this couple (Adam and Eve) and put them in this incredibly swell garden and told them they could do anything they wanted to; fuck their brains out, boss around all the animals, take whatever they desired from all the bounty of the earth. But here comes the first of many biblical mysteries: either (even though Jehovah created humans) He didn’t know the first thing about human nature or He was a sadist. He told these folks that there was one tree whose fruit they couldn’t eat. There’s this whole tale about a snake giving bad advice but they’d eventually have eaten the fruit regardless of talking reptiles. Anyhow, the eating of the forbidden fruit is known as “original sin”. That was their first big mistake and, incidentally, that’s also when sex became dirty.

All kinds of shit came down after this juicy little snack. At one point Jehovah got so pissed off he decided to kill almost everybody on the planet by flooding the whole place and starting over with just one “righteous” family. After that lovely episode a lot of begetting went on (What else was there to do? No books, TV or movies you know.) and humankind rapidly grew into enough people to envision large construction projects. Their second big mistake was that they decided to build a tower to the heavens so they could check out this omnipotent clown who started all the trouble. This pissed Jehovah off again. (For a supreme being He sure had a short fuse.) He figured that if they couldn’t understand each other the project would never get off the ground so He created foreign languages, hence nations, hence enemies, hence international conflict aka war.

One thing I have yet to mention. This god loved his creatures. This doesn’t show up very insistently until the New Testament but therein it’s heavily stressed.

Anyhow, having made all these people and then separated them into pugnacious factions, He chose one group, the Jews, as His favorite. There’s no coherent reason given for this odd occurrence but I think it may be because they wrote the book. Other societies have produced their own mythical, religious versions of history but I’m just dealing with the one I know best.

This Jehovah did a lot of other strange things. Remember, He loved all his creatures but since He loved the Jew creatures more He slew outrageous numbers of humans who were perceived to be enemies of the Jews. And, because of this original sin deal, He promised that at some unspecified future date He would send a Messiah (or savior) who would clear up that and lots of other issues. This was good news for the Jews because they had all kinds of problems. If they were god’s favorites He sure had a bizarre way of demonstrating His favoritism. They were persecuted in every way imaginable; enslaved, driven out of several countries, promised a new homeland which took forty years to find. (They were lousy with geography.)

They finally located the place, threw out what natives they hadn’t slaughtered in the takeover and settled down for a while. Then along came the marauding Romans who enslaved the Jews in their own country. So much for god’s partiality. By the way, one of their slogans went something like: “If God is for us who can stand against us?” The answer is; damn near everybody.

Now we get to the point when the schizophrenia (if not downright nastiness) of this Jehovah dude really comes into play. According to the aforementioned new testament He actually did send the promised Messiah (one of the personality multiples called the Son or Christ or Jesus, his given name) but he was in disguise. Almost none of the Jews recognized him and a whole new, rival religion sprang up as a result. How the hell could an entity so together He could make the universe in six days be so lousy at communicating with His most favored nation?

(An aside about religion in general: it’s not supposed to make sense. That’s how the priest class, or the clergy, the guys who invented religion and sustain it, run their control game.)

Jesus really was a pretty good guy, probably a truly enlightened Spiritual Master. But – a big but – his teaching, at least according to this “bible”, was rather obscure. He taught in metaphors and some of them were hard to figure out. How much of his wisdom has been distorted by the priests is unknown but a real biggie is what the bible has him saying about post physical existence. According to this book he taught that if you didn’t accept him as the savior and acknowledge that his martyrdom “washed away your sins” you would be doomed to burn in an eternal fire known as hell. This is the same guy who insisted that “god is love”! Come on now, something had to have gotten lost in translation. Or, more likely, was intentionally twisted by the priests.

Therein lies the real cause of most, if not all, of the atrocities perpetrated in the name of Jehovah and religion: the priests (clergy). They are the sleaziest class of political manipulators ever to ooze into existence out of the slime of rapacity. There certainly have been and are today some honorably motivated and truly spiritual people in this company but their purpose, as a fraternity, was and remains political and manipulative.

Consider these two key propositions of their doctrine; sin and salvation. How can “sin” exist in a creature that is the image of god? And what kind of god would create a world populated by a flawed version of Himself and then send an aspect of Himself to that world to redeem it from its flaws by letting Himself be killed.? How could these scenarios make sense to any sane person? It is my unprofessional opinion that they could not.

This brings me to the real skill of this self appointed clerical cadre. For centuries they have played on the fears and uncertainties of the populace with their subtle distortions of spiritual truth until hardly a shred of unsullied verity remains. Their dogma have become ingrained in most of civilization to such an extent that the pure truth has been all but snuffed out.

(The only good thing about religion is that it has inspired some of the world’s greatest music.)

I offer no comprehensive solution to this brain wash. I don’t think there is one. The only hope of freedom from this age old ecclesiastical death grip that I see is in the individual heart and mind. As souls who have chosen to incarnate in this particular version of the physical we have all brought along a fragment of First Cause, a ray of transcendent light. As difficult as it may be, each of us must use our own innate wisdom, hear our own inner voice and with those as our only guideposts, find our own way back to enlightenment.

Originally written 24/25 December 1997

My memoirs can be found here.