> ``..People believe that the world has a narrative
> structure and a "personality" to it because that is
> how they experience the world...'' Chris Doss
This little pensée and its responses, as is always the case when religion is at issue, stay at the superficial individual/psychological/ sociological level. What they ignore, never even notice, is that religious people are always characterized, by themselves especially, as "god fearing." The central point is that religion finds it's origins, and recalls them in its central myths, in terrifying planet-wide experiences that drove deep into the collective unconscious the archetypal lesson that *The Gods Are To Be Feared* and that the apotropaic rituals need to keep that fear suppressed are rituals of sacrifice originating in rituals of *human* sacrifice.
Let me only make a few summary points:
1. The essential point of the great theistic religions is that God (or The Gods)
is to be feared. Greatly feared. The truly religious are *godfearing*. The Book of Revelation, read correctly as history transposed into prophecy, stands as a depiction of what the people of the whole planet experienced and (a few) survived. The nature of those experiences, however, was stated with total clarity in Plato's *Timaios* (22 c-d):
"...There have been, and will be hereafter, many and varied destructions of mankind, the greatest by fire and water...Thus the story...that Phaethon, son of Helios, once harnessed his father's chariot but could not guide it on his father's course and so burnt up everything on the face of the earth and was himself destroyed by thunderbolt: this legend has the air of a fable but the truth behind it is a deviation of the bodies that revolve in the heavens around the Earth and the destruction, occurring at long intervals, of things on earth by great conflagrations..."
2. All religions start with blood sacrifice. For routine propitiation of the Gods
animal sacrifices may suffice--but when really needed, human sacrifice is
the sole remedy. The blood of steers cannot persuade the wind to blow,
but that of Iphigeneia is effective. The auto-da-fe is pleasing to God.
3. Religions try to hide and sublimate their human-sacrificial origin. Christianity
celebrates the sacrificing of Jesus by symbolically reenacting it compulsively.
Jews and Muslims celebrate the "forgiven" sacrifice of Isaac by blood-sacrifice of sheep but skip gaily over the sacrificial murders of innocents by Samson, Jephtha, Elijah...
4. The sacrificer must sooner or later face punishment. Christians perpetually
punish this figure in the form of Judas--and often the rest of his tribe. Elijah,
like Cain, is thrown into perpetual exile, "taken directly into heaven." The
Aztec priests sacrificed human hecatombs to keep the Gods from destroying
the world--and in the process destroyed their own world. Agamemnon is
ritually sacrificed by Klytemnestra who in turn is sacrificed by Orestes. For Samson the sacrifice and the punishment are simultaneous. Hitler shoots
himself in a cellar.
5. No existing society sanctions the underlying propensity to human sacrifice at
the same time that well grounded apocalyptic fears resonate throughout
the human unconscious and more and more erupt into open consciousness.
So what now can give religious sanction to the mass murder of innocents?
The sole sanction possible is one's own death. Everyman his own Samson.
Thus, for instance, "9/11."
To consider these ideas more fully, the essential book is "The Sacred Executioner-human sacrifice and the legacy of guilt" by Hyam Maccoby (Thames and Hudson, 1982.)
Shane Mage
"Thunderbolt steers all things...it consents and does not consent to be called Zeus."
Herakleitos of Ephesos
Shane Mage
"Thunderbolt steers all things...it consents and does not consent to be called Zeus."
Herakleitos of Ephesos