Renée's Tribute to Life

 Well, I finally got my California citizenship today—in the form of a 1971 Datsun. I don’t really need a car. I don’t even use Robert’s pickup anymore. Work is but a twenty minute walk. Pacific Beach is a good place to live if you don’t have a car, but if you want to do a little exploring, then car is nice to have. Barbara has a friend she used to work with named Renée who has grown tired of California and decided to return to her home in Nebraska and is practically giving the car away—$600—and I have plenty of money saved up, so I thought why not?

It’s strange how many people you find here looking for something. I suppose many find it. I have found something, but I don’t think it has anything to do with what most people expect to find here. Most people, I think, come for the colorful and exciting California lifestyle, the beach, SeaWorld, Disneyland, Hollywood, the glamour and glitter, the sun wearing sunglasses and a straw hat! I don’t know. It’s a Mecca for some new religion, maybe many new religions and gods that are bought and sold.

But this friend of Barbara’s says she is ready to return to Nebraska. Barbara, who is from Lubbock, Texas, told her that she was crazy to leave, but Renée just smiled and said she probably was, since she was crazy to leave Nebraska in the first place. I asked her why she wanted to go back to Nebraska.

“My folks live there. I know that I won’t be perfectly happy back in Arcadia. The winters are long and harsh, and compared with San Diego, there’s not much to do. But there are moments when the earth opens her bosom to you, and time gathers like evening clouds and suddenly you feel yourself standing at the center of the world, at the center of time. And you feel you understand nothing and everything at once. There is no feeling of center here. We never stop. Nothing around us ever stops. There is no world, only city. Here there’s a million little things, some good, some bad, but nothing magnificent like geese migrating, the landscape changing colors in the fall, golden-brown fields beneath a dark cloudy sky, fields of flowers in the summer, a meadowlark singing on a fence post, men and tractors working fields of corn and wheat which become seas of yellow, green, and brown. And windmills, lots of lonely windmills waiting for the wind to pay them a visit. In Nebraska I can accept life—the good and the bad because it seems to be part of something bigger than us. There I can accept all the people into my heart because they aren’t strangers, even if I don’t know them, they aren’t strangers. Everyone, whether they’re farmers or truck drivers or seamstresses or teachers or clerks in stores, everyone seems part of a common way of life, a single great effort that we all participate in equally. Here each is alone in his or her solitary effort. Everyone is a stranger here. In Nebraska life is hard for most everyone; the weather alone ensures that. Here you don’t see the difficulty of life. People hide it behind trendy clothes and cars and silly behavior. People here don’t seem real to me. And I don’t blame them. It’s the way of life here. In Nebraska life leaves its mark on people. You see it in the faces of men and women who work upon the land. It’s the nature of the work and the weather, and people aren’t ashamed of having to work hard or not having a lot of money or not being glamorous. It’s just part of life. People out here live as if life were a TV show. They’re either spectators or playing some role. I never really made any lasting friendships out here except for Barbara, and she’s a Texan whether she likes it or not. People and relationships just seem to come and go.

“But I had to come to California to find out these things. I wasn’t getting along with my parents. I was so full of myself that I never considered them much, their needing me, or if I did I didn’t care. They were always my parents, the ones who treated me like a child when I was no longer a child. But now I understand that they’re like all other people. Having been away from them for almost three years has taught me to see them as human beings who struggle to survive and to be happy and to do the right thing. Perhaps I can see it now because I know what that struggle is. I realize they are not giants of the earth but fragile human beings. My father is a tractor mechanic at a John Deere dealership. My mother works for the supermarket. They live in a small town on the endless prairie beneath a sky the size of an ocean. They seem small to me now, and that is one reason I want to be near them. I want to be a comfort to them. I realize too that one day I’ll no longer have them.”

“Lately, I too have been thinking about the home I left behind and death,” I said.

“Yes, Barbara told me that came here recently from New Mexico. A few months ago, my mother was hospitalized. That made me see my parents in a different light. I went back for few days. It was a mild stroke. She’s fine. She’ll be okay, but it made me realized that that my parents aren’t invincible.” Renée paused a moment, smiled, and then continued. “A brush with death sheds a different light on things. I see everything differently now, Christine, not just my parents. I see the weathered faces of the farmers differently, those toilers of the earth. I see children differently. I want to be close to them, to love them, to watch them play, to enjoy their innocence. I want to say hello to my neighbors and pass the time of day with the old man in overalls who pumps gas at the Mobil station. I want to shop at the market where my mother works, where the floors are dusty and sometimes muddy from the boots of working men. Even the air in the market smells different—old and musty. New air isn’t allowed because it’s either too cold or too hot. But I miss those smells—of people, animals, old rooms, barns, the feed store, the sharp scent of the morning cold, the sweet smell of summer. I even miss the young people who I thought I had to get away from. They’re nice. No matter how wild or rough around the edges, they’ll treat you kindly if you give them the chance, and they have always been decent and respectful to my parents. And many of them weren’t so different from me—wild and aching to get away. They couldn’t wait to be someplace else, someplace bigger and more exciting. What I did many of them would do—leave. It was strange when I was there. I hadn’t been back in three years, yet those people gathered around me as if I had never left. They knew me, cared about me and my family. And here, where I have been living for three years, I’m still a stranger. I will always be a stranger here. But that’s not going to happen because now I’m going back.” Her eyes began to glisten. She turned her head and sighed.

“Your parents don’t think like you, Renée, nor do I for that matter,” interjected Barbara in a tone of maternal exasperation. Yet, right away I knew that Barbara had done what Renée had done but she never went back. Of course Lubbock, Texas, isn’t a country town but an unlovely city like Albuquerque, much worse even because Albuquerque still retains scattered memories of its Spanish and Native American past. I know because I spent a two days in Lubbock with my father who was attending a water-well drilling conference. Mother refused to go, so I did. Dad appreciated that. And I enjoyed the trip. We drove but didn’t take I-40 like I thought we would but the back roads. I enjoyed looking at the countryside. It’s empty and wild, all sky and rolling or flat prairie land. We talked off and on but Dad seemed to enjoy looking at the countryside as much as I did. I think he was remembering the good old days when he was less of a city slicker because every once in a while he’d say his company drilled a water well for so and so near where we were passing through. It’s strange how he and I are alike in some ways.

Anyway, I understand why Barbara never had the desire to return to Lubbock. It reminds me of the ugly dusty towns in Clint Eastwood westerns, but with no imagination or sense of history, perhaps because the Americans who built the city were without traditions, just a practical people who built a city in the same fashion my father would drill for water. But you would expect some sense of beauty today, that the architects would have read at least one book on the history of architecture. Perhaps the early Texans had an excuse when they had to build their towns in rough and ready fashion but not today. And the builders of Albuquerque had no excuse at all since the Indians and the Spanish had provided them with a pueblo-adobe style perfect for the region, but it seems Americans always have to do things their own way, unwilling to learn from the past, or perhaps the builders, who are usually men, believe thinking too much about beauty is unmasculine, especially when a box with a logo will do just fine.

On the way home I mentioned to my father that I thought Lubbock was an ugly city. He smiled. He always liked the fact that I spoke my mind. He agreed but said it didn’t matter because Lubbock was all about growing cotton, not attracting tourists, couldn’t if it wanted to. But what about the people who live there? I asked. They don’t matter, he said, because they don’t know any different. They’re working people, not tourists either. He looked over and smiled. I could see that he was satisfied with that answer, as if he had just given me a precious kernel of truth. I understand now that his view of the world and its people is that of a man who has worked hard all his life, often in rugged terrain and unaccommodating weather. His brother lost an arm doing the same kind of work. Perhaps Dad thought that if you wanted beauty you could always go fishing, which he still does with a couple of the men he works with. When we were younger William and I would go with him, but that was before William went off to college and came back changed. Citified is how Dad once described him to me. And once I started spending summers in Taos I never went fishing with Dad again. The few times he asked Mother she said no way. She was through and through a city slicker. She enjoyed nature when it was presented on a postcard or in painting. Poor Dad must feel like the family has abandoned him. Perhaps me most of all, and I always thought no one loved him as much as I did. The difference between me and Renée is that I’m not sure I can ever go back home. 

In response to Barbara’s comment about Renée’s parents not thinking like her, Renée said bluntly, “No, Barbara, they don’t,” but the expression on her face was full of loving patience for her motherly friend. And who knows, maybe Barbara was a constant reminder of the people she left behind and unknowingly convinced her that those were the people she wanted to be with. Life’s funny that way.

Renée paused as if expecting me to add something, then seemed to understand my interest in her story. Her smile returned, embracing us both and softening the solemn intensity of her words. In her hazel eyes shone a goodness born and nurtured in the country. It would be worthwhile having Renée as a friend, I thought, better yet as a sister.

“My thinking has been changed by California,” she continued, “by the big city. It has become the thinking of an outsider—the way of the prodigal daughter who had to repudiate everything old and conventional, who had to repudiate all the old values and all the old morality, who had to stand naked before the world, not in shame but defiantly and provocatively. But I have grown weary of it all, Christine. Living here has been like swimming in a fast, treacherous current. It has been exciting but perilous. And as with any river, there are no roots, there is no permanence, there is only current. But now I have a need for roots that only the land and sky and my parents and the people can give me. I want to go back a hundred years, Christine. I have seen and lived the present. I fear the future because it’s unknown and doesn’t seem to offer any more than what I have now. My only home is in the past and with its people, my people.”

“Do you feel that you have given up, that you have been defeated?” I asked.

She laughed. “Oh yeah! But that’s okay. There are so many defeated people who remain. And I don’t want to become like them. I still have a home. Oh, I don’t just mean my parents, but also two sisters and a way of life that I can return to. I feel it’s calling me, and I fear that if I do not return soon, I will never be able to go back. I suppose it is a little like going to church. If you stop going long enough, you’ll never go back. I don’t want to end up unhappy here and no home to return to.”

“Do you go to church, Renée?” I asked.

“No, not since leaving Arcadia.”

“But won’t they expect you to go to church in Arcadia?”

“Not everyone there attends church, but my parents do. And I will probably go. I will take from it what I can use and leave what I can’t. It’s not a huge sacrifice.”

“You don’t think you’re going back to something you really don’t believe in?”

“What else is there to believe, Christine? Anyway, whatever the worship may be, it all means the same thing—the worshipping of life, its mystery, its goodness. It’s appreciating something that is not merely bigger than you are or more powerful, but appreciating that mysterious vital something which is the source of everything. God and I haven’t talked for long time, but I still love his creation and his creatures. And I love the compassionate Virgin. I love her most of all. If Christ is God incarnate, then the Virgin is love incarnate. I suppose I identify with her because I share her sorrow, and who knows, maybe one day I’ll share again the hope that Jesus offers. I was rebellious, Christine, but not in that way. I grew up going to church. Jesus and Mary are like relatives. I don’t spend a lot of time worrying whether or not it’s all make-believe. What’s the good of that? I do want to believe in something, and I’m leaving California because I’ve discovered that what I seek can’t be found here, or at least I haven’t found it. Malls, movies, restaurants, endless freeways... It’s all about getting and spending and going endlessly. That’s no longer what I want. And churches in small towns are about more than Sunday services. They are a caring part of the community, in a way the heart of the community. They help people and organize lots of activities. You know most of what people do to have fun in small towns involves the members of the community, like school sports. Even at the rodeo sixty miles away you find yourself among friends and know even some of the contestants. I once told some friends here about going to the rodeo. They laughed thinking I was making some kind of joke, but I wasn’t. I resented their laughter. In a way I had to come here to realize what I had back home. It’s not like here where people entertain themselves among strangers, hanging out at the mall or at bars or the beach. Friendship here is a revolving door, former friends leave as new ones arrive. In Arcadia you grow up with childhood friends, you are with them when they marry and have children, you watch their children grow up, and you grow old among people you have known and loved all your life. Suddenly the life here has made me sad, perhaps because for the first time in my life I’ve been thinking about the future. I realize now that I had a lot in little Arcadia, including a future among friends and loved ones I’ve known all my life. And when I return I will be welcomed as if I had never left.”

Barbara suddenly spoke up. “You’re pregnant, aren’t you, Renée?”

Renée’s eyes widened and her expression saddened. She didn’t speak for a moment. Then she seemed to regain her spunk and said to Barbara, “I should have known I wouldn’t get away without you finding out. One way or another, you find out everything. That’s okay. You’ve been like a mother to me, and I was going tell you, but later in a letter. Oh well.”

“So that’s the real reason you’re going home?” I asked.

“All that I’ve told you, Christine, are the real reasons I’m going home, but I had to get pregnant to see it. And I definitely don’t want to raise a child out here alone.”

“What about the father?” Barbara asked.

“The father doesn’t know, and wouldn’t be interested if he did. He’s a fun sort of guy, not ready for family life. Why should I burden him with the knowledge that I am pregnant with his child? It wouldn’t help any because he doesn’t make much money and wouldn’t be interested in being a full-time dad, and to be honest, I don’t want a part-time dad who takes the kid out on week-ends. Besides, I never loved him that much. We were just fucking friends, pardon my French, Barbara. And if he did find out, he’d probably insist I stay out here so he could take his child to Chargers and Padres games. In Arcadia my child will have a real family and a real community. I don’t him or her being brought up in la-la land.”

“What about his family?”

“They live in Florida. I don’t want that kind of complication raising my child.”

She smiled, but it was a smile without happiness. She seemed so forlorn. It was strange because from what she just told us I would have thought she would be happy. But then it won’t be easy returning as an unmarried, single mother to live with her parents in a small, conservative Nebraskan town. What will she say when they ask her about the father, that he was a Southern California party animal? I could see she was about to cry so I went to her and held her in my arms. I think I did so I wouldn’t cry!

“Thanks, Christine,” she said. “I’ll be okay. It’s just that all this has happened so fast.”

We talked a while longer. Barbara scolded all youth for their foolishness. But added that she hadn’t been any different, divorced from her first husband at seventeen and from her second husband at twenty-seven. “It wasn’t our fault that we were young and foolish. Foolishness came with the territory, and men took advantage of it.”

I then asked Barbara if she had had any children, regretting the question as soon as it came out of my mouth.

“None that survived,” she said solemnly. There was an uncomfortable pause, but I knew better than to ask another stupid question.

Finally Renée said. “That’s too bad. You would have been a great mom.”

“Yeah I would have, but I did have the guts to go it alone like you, Renée. You’re doing the right thing for you and your baby.” 

As I watched Renée and Barbara I felt I had met two women who, like myself, had left their homes, either to find something better or to escape some unhappiness. Renée had left in search of greater happiness and now was now returning because she didn’t find it. But what she did find was a fuller appreciation of the home she had left. For that all the trouble was worthwhile. I thought it strange how sometimes we don’t see the full value of something until we lose it. Of course, the child made a big difference. I too wouldn’t want to raise a child in Southern California or Albuquerque. From what Renée said, Arcadia seem like a better place than most to raise a child, even without the father.

I wanted to know everything about her. I had forgotten about the car, which I finally bought—it was really more of a gift. I think she just wanted to get rid of it. I asked her why she didn’t drive it back to Nebraska. She said she just wanted to get back home as soon as possible and didn’t want to take a chance of breaking down out in the middle of nowhere. She said her dad would pick her up in Omaha. That would give them plenty of time to talk on the way home. The car wasn’t that important. All that was important she carried within. I ask her if her father would be upset when he hears about the baby. She said he wasn’t that way.

“When I think of my dad I think of country roads. Being a tractor mechanic about once a week he’d have to drive out to a farm to fix a farmer’s tractor or bring it in if it couldn’t be fixed there. He called himself a tractor veterinarian. Summers when I was a little girl I’d often go with him. Sometimes I’d hang out at the farmhouse with the farmer’s wife and kids and dogs. There were always dogs. On the way back we’d sometimes stop at the Dairy Queen for hamburgers or the Colonial Inn Restaurant, my dad’s favorite hangout because it’s the hangout for the farmers, cattlemen, mechanics, crop dusting pilots, anyone who had anything to do with raising crops or livestock. It’s like the hub of the town. It was everything I wanted to get away from, but now want to go back to. Maybe it’s having a kid that makes the difference. My child might never have a father but he will have a grandfather and grandmother and lots of local aunts, uncles, and cousins because that’s the way the town is—one big family.”

It seems I’ve taken Renée’s place. How strange, or maybe not. Maybe it’s just the way life is today, leaving one’s hometown, returning years later, or not. I hope I don’t hurt Robert’s feelings, getting a car now that he’s sick. What am I thinking? Well, right now I need to stop thinking and try to rest a little before going to work. It’s been an interesting but unsettling day—like so many others.

From Frank Kyle’s not yet published novel Christine & the Remarkable Lives of Ordinary People.

Death

 XIV

 July 16, 198- 

Death is easily ignored until it appears like a black sun created by an eclipse, casting a shadowy glow upon the world, chilling body and soul alike. Being young and too full of life, Christine had never thought much about death. When the little Mexican man held a knife to her throat, she was too frightened to contemplate her death, and even when she tried to take her life, she was filled with thoughts of living, not death. Death is ignored until it speaks through the living, whether the living be a human being, a tree, or a rock. It is the shadow of absence that follows unnoticed every being until its time has come. Death speaks through the absence of things once known. It speaks in whispers so can be heard only by those who wish to hear. Ruth is such a person, and of course Mr. Rieneau, who sees life as a dream coming from and returning to nothing. Thus to him life is both a dream and a nightmare. No wonder he wishes to spare Christine his vision of things. Through Robert invisible, whispering death has begun to reveal itself to Christine, and from this time on she will continue to see and hear it in all things. The experience has been an epiphany of sorts, the meaning of which she does not yet fully understand. What is there to understand about death? is a reasonable question. Things are and then cease to be. It all seems very simple. Yet, it isn’t, or at least human beings have been unwilling to accept the simplicity of ceasing to be. Just consider how dramatic the word death is compared to the phrase ceasing to be. And given their stake in process who can blame them? If there isn’t some deeply important meaning to be found in that dark abyss, if dying is nothing more than a natural occurrence, then what would that say about the meaningfulness of human existence? Is it any wonder then that most flee from contemplating death. Some simply do not accept it; others ignore it. Christine will not flee from it, not because she is fascinated by death but because she cares about the living. What I mean of course is that the fascination with death is rooted in love—not indifference, not hate, but love.

Death—the word is forbidding like a strange, mysterious looking hooded man dressed in black standing in a darkened doorway. People fear him because his appearance is menacing. 

“Keep away from him!” children are told.

“Who is he?” they ask.

“He is the one who kidnaps the living.”

“Where does he take them?” asks the child.

“We don’t know but we pray it’s a good place.”

“But if it is a good place, then what is there to fear?”

“You ask too many questions. It’s not good to even think about him. He will come soon enough. That’s all we really know.” 

The mysterious taker of life, death, the one who takes what only God can give. Is it any wonder that people avoid even the thought of death, fearing, I suppose, that just thinking about him will attract his attention. He will come soon enough, yes, so why let him spoil today? And if he doesn’t know you, perhaps he will forget about you for a long while. One day he’ll arrive like an intruder, either as a thief in the night or a party-crasher. So it’s best to avoid his doorway. Avoid even his street and you will forget about him—at least until he pays a visit to someone near you. But death is restless, ever prowling about, unexpectedly showing up where he is not wanted. One hopes he is just passing by, but then he decides to move in the apartment next door and everyday one sees him standing at the door as if contemplating what he will do next.

And isn’t that what has happened to Christine. Death has entered Robert’s apartment, a terrible uninvited guest. His presence is tormenting to Robert and depressing to Christine, yet he is there to neither torment nor depress. He simply is what he is, but now cannot be avoided. So from this moment on when Christine comes home she will see death standing at Robert’s doorway. She hates his presence but is also fascinated by him, and so will begin Christine’s conversations with death. She knows she should ignore him, put him out of her mind, but she cannot. And as the conversation progresses she will feel herself falling, not as if into a dark hole, as Alice in Wonderland does, because it is not she who is falling. It is the old securities and certainties of childhood, or what is left of them, that are falling away from her, leaving her disoriented. Perhaps that is the reason children are kept away from death, because to look upon his face causes one to suddenly become old. And once that happens, there is no going back. In the Book of Genesis isn’t mortality one of the truths Eve learns from the Tree of Knowledge. And once she does there is no returning to Paradise.

Eve was warned not to seek knowledge, to be content with appearance, but hers was an inquisitive and courageous nature, and in that way Eve and Christine are sisters. Christine could never be satisfied just with the appearance of death and leave it at that. It would be unfair to the dead and dying. She is too loyal to abandon Robert, yet she is also a seeker of truth, and for that reason as well will not abandon the conversation with death. It seems as if death has come to speak with Christine, almost in a kindly way because he knows she will listen. And why not speak to Robert? Death will do that as well, but in a different voice. Isn’t it odd that death speaks to everyone in the same voice, but is heard differently. To Christine his voice will be solemn, but terrifying to Robert. It is easier to contemplate the terrifying aspects of life from a distance. The poor man does not want to know the meaning of poverty but to escape from it. The sick man does not want to know the meaning of illness but to recover from his illness. And the lessons of death are of greater value to the living, especially the young, than to the dying. So death will linger a while in hopes of perhaps befriending Christine in exchange for dispossessing Robert of life. Ironically, death is a friend of the living to whom its existence is unavoidable. Death takes forever that which is valued most—existence. It’s a very high price for knowledge, but the price is even higher for ignorance. The old fisherman believes that the Greek gods were incapable of fully appreciating life because they were immortal.

So the conversation has begun and Christine’s journey now includes an excursion into the meaning of death, not just for Robert but for all things. She will not choose to exist in forgetfulness. She will not be false to Robert or to herself, even though the cost to her will be the loss of a happier state of mind. But perhaps happiness is not in every case the greatest good. Can one, for example, ever fully grow up without confronting the significance of death? Much of the happiness of children is based on the false belief that the world is better and kinder than it really is. So if that childlike happiness is to be preserved, one must remain ignorant of life’s painful truths.

Christine, however, is one of the inquisitive souls who understand that the price for complete happiness is self-deception, a price most people are more than willing to pay, but one that is too dear to those who value truth. However, there is a danger here because not everyone is ready or capable of enduring the truth, just as a child of six is not ready for the truth that death awaits all things. So it seems that the quest for truth should be a quest for personal enlightenment that respects others’ right to remain ignorant or deceived, as long as their ignorance or self-deception doesn’t interfere with the lives of others. I think that is why Mr. Rieneau is reluctant to be Christine’s mentor—though he is unable to refuse an inquiring mind. He has been a truth seeker most of his life, yet sometime during that quest he came upon what he considers to be a truth more valuable than truth itself, which is to avoid causing suffering because there is already in the world too much unavoidable suffering. As you have already discovered, the old fisherman is a fan of Buddha, who seemed to believe that lessening suffering was more important than acquiring enlightenment. Yet, Buddha came to this understanding as a seeker of truth, and his enlightenment into the nature of things was the foundation of his altruistic moral philosophy. This seems a paradox to me, one that I will let my reader unravel for I have allowed this philosophical rambling to distract me from my main concern, which is not death but the life of Christine, so I shall return to her.

As I have said before, Robert will not be forgotten by Christine. She will not simply continue on her way. Like all romantics she is overly preoccupied with her own feelings and thoughts, but also like them she is drawn to the suffering of others. As she says in the letter, Robert is her friend; she likes him. And yet he has become more. He has become death standing at the door, beckoning Christine to enter, but doing so will require leaving outside the last happiness of her childhood. Christine will enter because life itself seems to be telling her that it is time to seek something more than happiness. It is time to seek wisdom if she is to make sense of a life that is rapidly becoming more confused and enigmatic—her own. It’s time for her to enter the very heart of things, even if it be a dark, lonely place. The journey will not be pleasant. Already she is beginning to feel that she is falling. And what truths will she find? Many, one of which is that God is powerless to protect his creation from death, at least in this world. And perhaps death even waits at God’s door. 

From Frank Kyle’s not yet published novel Christine’s Journey to Enlightenment.

Wisdom of Cows

The Old Man in the Moon smiles wryly thinking that the human species was the only one given reason, yet the cows in the meadow show greater wisdom.

The Wisdom of the Cow

The friendly herbivore the cow is among nature’s greatest philosophers.

Some are very quick learners, while others are a little slower.

But he or she, as you will, is a lover of peace,

aggressive not by nature but only when necessary.

Being gregarious cows enjoy company and

tolerate other species who live differently.

They share their meadow with other creatures

birds, goats, sheep, chickens, pigs, donkeys, mules, and horses.

They even welcome deer to their pasture.

Any nonaggressive creature is welcome.

They are massive creatures yet graceful gentle giants.

They are gently curious but not overly so.

Never greedy, they are content wherever grass grows.

They live stoically without complaint

nobly enduring snow, wind, and rain.

Unless one of their fellows dies,

then they lament mooing mournfully.

Buddha-like they enjoy the simple life,

nonaggressive at heart unless aggressed, startled, or stressed.

Unlike humans they don’t make enemies among their own.

Cows have enemies but are not enemies to others.

They even serve as protectors of lesser creatures

such as goats and sheep threatened by hungry predators. 

They enjoy just being in the world

with family and companions

and enough of grass for grazing.

Neither reason nor ideology is needed.

Nor God to create enemies

where none existed before.

William Shayer (1787–1879)

Netanyahu and Bush Jr. and the Ruin of their Countries

Both were made dunces by terrorists. Frank Kyle’s Gringo describes how Osama bin Laden made George W. Bush a dunce. It wasn’t that hard: 

“I think America will become a divided nation. Half the country will be well off and happy enough but the other half will be struggling and very unhappy, and very angry. I will tell you one thing, Osama bin Laden is a fucking genius. He waited until we had a retard in the White House before striking. He must have known that with idiot Bush in office the country would collapse from its own weight, just like the World Trade Towers. Now it’s like worrying about whether or not there are enough lifeboats on board after the ship has struck the iceberg and is half underwater, the skipper still trying to put on his pants and shoes. It’s too late. Too late. Too late. Just like it’s too late for me.”

“You seem to feel that the immigration problem is way out of control. Is that fair to say?”

“Out of control?” For just a moment I thought the good doctor isn’t paying attention. “Hell yes, it’s out of control. Everything is out of control...[1]

---

[1] George Bush was never a match for Osama bin Laden because George Bush is a phony, and Osama bin Laden is the real thing. He is a real soldier, a true believer who lives the life of poverty that we expect of a spiritual leader. He is a man who fights for his people and their homeland rather than for personal gain. He is a man who without a nation, without a military, without great material resources, took on and defeated the United States.*

He will be remembered as one of greatest leaders of 21^st century (thus far, the greatest leader**). George, on the other hand, will stand out as the 21^st century’s greatest incompetent, a man who had the opportunity and the power to accomplish unimaginable good for his people and the world, but instead squandered both for a personal agenda of cultic Christianity, Zionism, oil, wealth, cronyism, and the will to political power.

*If you haven’t noticed that we have been defeated it’s because you have so little imagination. When you think defeat, you imagine only military defeat. Think again. The United States defeated Iraq’s military and now occupies the country, so the Iraqis are defeated and we are the victors. But no, we were defeated when our soldiers first stepped upon Iraqi soil, and we continue to be defeated each day we remain. And who lured the U.S. into Iraq? Osama bin Laden, because he knew that after 9-11 the U.S. would do something irrevocably stupid because he knew that political extremists like himself but not as intelligent occupied the White House and political fools occupied the Senate and House of Representatives.

If you want to see defeat, America, look in the mirror. What you will see is a nation that is disgraced; morally, politically, and financially bankrupt; bogged down in unwinnable wars; invaded by alien hordes; and confused, conflicted, corrupt, despairing, and demoralized. Instead of being a nation of leaders, we’ve become a people led by fools, which makes us fools since we elected them. We have been defeated and will not recover.

In other words, the greatness of Osama bin Laden is that he understood that he didn’t have to defeat America but only create a situation in which America would defeat itself.

**Do the math. 1 George Bush + 1 Tony Blair + 1 John Howard + 1 José Maria Aznar + 1 Silvio Berlusconi + all the other Bushian lap-dog leaders of the Coalition nations who acted against the will of their people = 0. You ask how 1 = 0 is possible. A politician who stands against his people, ignores reason, and acts immorally is nothing. You may recall that evil is nothing in-itself, but only the absence of good, an argument used to get God off the hook of having created or allowing evil to exist in the world. I will let neither God nor these evil men off the hook, but in the case of these evil men, they are nothing, less than the ash of the burnt homes, villages, cities, and bodies they have caused to be destroyed.

Yet, 1 Osama bin Laden = 1. Why? Because he and a handful of followers struck a blow against the monstrous imperialistic dragon that seeks to control and transform the world: America. He is the knight of old who serves not himself but his village and his people. Americans cannot see Osama bin Laden as a hero because they do not see their own villainy. They do not see that America has become like one of the Humvees that drive through the streets of Baghdad shooting up the town and intimidating the people. But like the lone protester who stood before the line of tanks in Tiananmen Square, Osama bin Laden and a handful of his followers stood up to America. Now millions do. Imagine 1 leader x 100 x 1000, x 10,000 followers and you will understand what has occurred under the reign of George W. Bush. And these millions are willing to follow Osama bin Laden to the grave, and will continue to do so long after he is dead. And why? I will say it again, unlike the other so-called leaders, Osama bin Laden is supported by his people because he represents them, he fights for them, and in their eyes he serve the good by fighting against the evil empire. And who follows George Bush? A ragtag crew possessed either by God or Greed.

Thus I predict that by the end of this century, Osama bin Laden will be worshipped by hundreds of millions of followers because he stood up to the New Rome. I will even venture that he will rival Jesus, who was unwilling to stand up against Rome (“Render unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s and unto God the things that are God’s” [Mark 12:17]), who chose to surrender rather than fight.^† The present-day American politicians and their motley crews of foreign sycophants will be remembered, like a bad dream that cannot be forgotten, as the self-serving fools who led America and the West to their ruin during the final years of their decline, just as the corrupt Catholic priests will have struck the deathblow against a decrepit Catholic Church.

^†Of course, in the hands of Apostle Paul Jesus would become the sword that would destroy the Roman Empire. The strategies of Paul and bin Laden have similarities. Both men relied on psychology as their main weapon. Neither believed the enemy could be destroyed militarily. Bin Laden has always known that the Muslim freedom fighters can’t defeat the U.S. military, but he knew he could cause it to defeat America by turning it against America. That sounds paradoxical. But the American military has helped destroy America in various ways. Money spent on it and its wars abroad is money that financially drains American taxpayers but does nothing to improve the functionality of their nation. And by focusing on the so-called threat abroad, Americans have neglected various threats under their noses, such as a growing hostile Hispanic Nation that is taking over America communities and acquiring greater political clout to accomplish its own mission to take control of much of America, especially the territories America stole from Mexico (the Aztlán Movement). But Americans’ militaristic mindset has also resulted in the continuing deterioration of the nation’s infrastructure, cities, primary and secondary education, social services such as care for the elderly and public transportation, and economy.

In addition, America’s reckless use of the military has destroyed even among its allies its reputation as a nation motivated by ethical ideals. But there is something else about America that is unhealthy and frightening. Because of the 9-11 attacks Americans have come to celebrate militarism, so much so that it has deeply changed the culture. We have become like the ancient Spartans. The military defines our values and self-image. Culturally Sparta had nothing to offer the ancient world except its fighting prowess. It was Athens that was the intellectual and artistic center of the ancient world. It, not Sparta, represented a culture that could inspire future civilizations. America has become a nation of consumption, gadgets, entertainment, and militarism. In that sense, we are much more like Rome than ancient Athens, but at least Rome had inherited Greek culture, which inspired it until the Christians and barbarians cast the empire into darkness. So what is missing? That’s not a trivial question because I’m not sure how things should be. But I believe whatever that way of life is, and perhaps it does take many forms, it should, in essence, be about living beautifully, that is without causing unnecessary ugliness, harm, and suffering. And living with a deep intellectual appreciation of the being of beings and of Being itself, to use Heidegger’s phrasing. I don’t believe one needs special training to do this.

I have an older cousin who lives on a very isolated farm in the Oklahoma Panhandle. On a road trip Anne, Kelly, and I had been camping in Colorado and on the way to visit my mother we stopped by his place to say hello but he insisted that we spend the night. So we did. It turned out to be a big adventure for Kelly because that evening we sat outside and could hear coyotes yipping in the distance. My cousin said that he loves where he lives because though the region has been tamed by farmers and ranchers it remains quite wild. “I live in a wild, untamed world,” he said.

I asked him why he thought that. He said the idea that human beings have tamed nature is an illusion. He then pointed to the sky which had become a canopy of stars. He said, “Anytime a person thinks humans have nature under control he needs only to look to the sky. There is very little of nature that humans have control over. Farmers know better than most people just how untamable and unpredictable nature can be. We struggle with unpredictable cycles of weather and conduct an endless war against weeds and insects. Now there’s talk of climate change. Well, the climate has always been changing, and there’s nothing we can do about it.”

Then I asked him if he thought humans might be part of the problem.

He said, “No doubt about that. Most anything they do creates problems for other creatures and for themselves. I try to be a good farmer, but I use chemicals to increase production. I try to use them wisely. If I didn’t use them I’d lose half my yield. And I rely on irrigation, which means I draw water from the Ogallala Aquifer, which provides water to about a quarter of the irrigated farmland in the U.S. Most farmers know it’s a limited and declining resource so we try to use the water wisely. But one day, perhaps in the next century, it will be depleted. That will be a big problem for all Americans because it will reduce crop production in the country. Lots of jobs will be lost and food will be more expensive. But it will be a bigger problem for people living in areas that depend on water from the aquifer, for all uses not just irrigation, like drinking water. That will be a lot of people because the aquifer supplies water parts of South Dakota, Nebraska, Wyoming, Colorado, Kansas, New Mexico, Texas and Oklahoma. When the water’s gone the agricultural economy will collapse. There will still be some dry farming and grazing, but nothing like today. Young people will go elsewhere for jobs. That’s already happening in lots of places. And then the land will become even wilder than it is today.”

“So what we do have a big impact,” I said.

“Can’t be otherwise. The earth is a resource that all living creatures live off of. Humans are unique because we depend heavily upon nonrenewable resources or overuse the ones that are renewable, like water. Before the white man showed up the Apache Indians lived in these parts. They lived off what nature provided each year—plants and animals. Couldn’t have been an easy life, but it could have continued for thousands of years because they didn’t depend on nonrenewable resources or overuse the renewable ones. It’s not that way anymore. Too many people taking too much from nature can’t go on forever.”

“That sounds pessimistic.”

“It shouldn’t. Everything comes to an end. That’s another part of nature that humans have little control over.”

“But Christians believe life will continue after death.”

“Let’s hope they’re right. But that’s not nature.” I then asked if he believed human life will continue after death.

“Nature says no. The Good Book says it does. I hope the Good Book is right, but I guess we won’t know for sure until the time comes.”

I asked him if he ever went hunting. He said no. He didn’t see any reason for it.

“Mostly what people hunt out here are wild turkeys, geese, and pheasants. I’d rather buy my meat at the market. Cleaning birds is a lot of work. Growing up it was different. We raised most of our food because it seemed foolish to spend money on what we could grow and raise ourselves. Now it seems foolish to do otherwise. A lot of the hunters we get out here come from Amarillo and Oklahoma City. They just want to be outdoors for a while. I’m outdoors all day long. Besides I like farming better than hunting or fishing. But I don’t blame the hunters for wanting to get away from the cities. I don’t care much for them myself.” I asked him if he allowed hunting on his land.

“No I don’t. I get mostly pheasant hunters wanting to shoot on my property. They come in droves during the season. I post no-hunting signs. I don’t like having men with guns on my property. Some farmers have had their equipment shot up, though not by hunters. Still it sours them on people being on their property with guns. But that’s not really my reason. I just figure the land provides for my family and by allowing animals to live on it without being hunted is my way of returning the favor.”

Though my cousin calls himself a Christian, it seems to me that his relationship to the land is pagan. But I’m not sure Christian or pagan really describes his thinking about life and how he relates to the natural world. Somewhere during the conversation he said that living and thinking can become a routine that causes us to take world around us for granted. He explained that as we grow out of childhood the world becomes familiar to us and by so doing loses the mystery it had when we were children. To children the world is a very mysterious place. The simplest creatures—such as insects—are objects of amazement. He said that never happened to him, that as he grew older the world and its inhabitants became even more mysterious.

 

Why God? A Revelation Apropos the Israeli-Hamas War

Introduction to the Problem

During the Israeli-Hamas War the one question that continually comes to mind as Jews, Christians, and Muslims pray to God to end the war and bring peace is WHERE IS GOD? The obvious answer is NOWHERE! Bible scholar Bart Ehrman addresses that question and its obvious answer in his book God’s Problem, which is the existence of evil in the world when a supposedly all-good, all-powerful God that could prevent it. Another question that comes to mind WHY GOD AT ALL? Why not try another spiritual approach to life, one that is more human-centered than God-centered, one that celebrates all life and our Earthly existence. In other words, why not another spiritual approach to living.

It really is just a matter of replacing religious scriptures because clearly scripture is the only place that the God of the Jews, Christians, and Muslims can be found since he is never around when needed. And it is inconsistent to pray to a God for peace and an end to war who is a God of war. Historian William McNeill says,  “After all, Yahweh was a god of the desert and of war” and “Yahweh’s role as the national war god kept his worship alive, for there was frequent need to call upon his aid in battles against neighboring peoples” (The Rise of the West 159), like today!

Then there is Jesus Christ who says, “I have come to bring fire on the earth, and how I wish it were already kindled! Do you think I came to bring peace on earth? No, I tell you, but division. From now on there will be five in one family divided against each other, three against two and two against three. They will be divided, father against son and son against father, mother against daughter and daughter against mother, mother-in-law against daughter-in-law and daughter-in-law against mother-in-law” (Luke 12:49-53).

And then there is Allah who declares jihad on all the infidels (non-Muslims) of the world. Muhammad’s “primary campaign was against his own tribe in Mecca, the Quraysh” (“Military career of Muhammad,” Wikipedia). In other words, he did what Jesus Christ hope Christians would do. Endless books, have been written on Islamic jihad, such as Paul Fregosi’s Jihad. Of course, books are not really needed. The hundreds of Islamic acts of terror that have occurred during the past two decades tells us all we need to know.

And Christianity turned the pagans of the Roman Empire against one another just as Jesus Christ hoped it would. This process of violent ethnic cleansing is clearly explained by historian Ramsay MacMullen’s Christianizing the Roman Empire: A.D. 100-40 and by historian Catherine Nixey’s The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World. Christianity was adopted as a weapon by the emperor warlord Constantine I. So clearly, looking for peace from the God of these religions is misguided. A new paradigm is needed, one crafted from the ancient wisdom philosophies of the ancient Far East.

Revelation

It’s easy to think that the word revelation refers primarily to religions though the word can be used in other contexts, such as revelations of misbehaving politicians, corporations, or celebrities, which are media favorites. There are various sources and subject matter of revelations. In this book I’ve examined various texts—religious, secular, poetic, philosophical, and nonreligious spiritual. Three of the most influential religious revelations are the Old Testament, the New Testament, and the Quran. All three are based on information that was supposedly communicated by God to chosen individuals such as Moses and Muhammad. Jesus is a special case since is considered to be God’s avatar communicating directly to ordinary people rather than via prophets, disciples, or saints. 

Old Testament

The various points of view of the revelations of the Abrahamic scriptures are interesting and greatly influence the believability of the revelations. In the Bible, for example, revelations are often described from the point of view of an omniscient third person. For example, in the Book of Exodus we read, “The Lord said to Moses, ‘Cut for yourself two tablets of stone like the first, and I will write on the tablets the words that were on the first tablets, which you broke” (34:1). What is being said is by neither God nor Moses. So who is this omniscient narrator? Moses is supposed to be the narrator. Bible scholars, however, have abandoned that assumption, deepening the mystery of the narrative origin of Exodus but lessening its credibility as a revelation from God to Moses. According to most scholars 6th century B.C. is the date of composition. Is the passage then the point of view of a writer who received—a half-dozen centuries after Moses lived—a revelation of what occurred between God and Moses? To me, the implication is that someone is telling a story, most likely based on earlier versions of the same story, modified over the centuries by various “inspired” scribes, yet originally the product of the imagination of some religiously enthralled storyteller. 

New Testament

In the New Testament in the Gospel of Luke we are given a description of the angel Gabriel announcing to Mary that she is miraculously pregnant with Jesus. Understandably, Mary is puzzled. Next we are told, “The angel answered, ‘The Holy Spirit will come down to you, and God’s power will come over you. So your child will be called the holy Son of God’” (1:35). My question is who was present to witness this event? Not the gospel writer. So who? Of course, it can be argued that Mary told someone else what happened. It’s difficult to believe that she could remember precisely what was said. But even if she told the story herself, then what we have is not a revelation from God but a description of events given by Jesus’ mother. Why should Mary be believed? Or more precisely, why should storyteller be believed? And why do Luke and Matthew give different versions of the Annunciation? And why is such an important event absent from the Gospel of Mark?

Even more puzzling is the description of Jesus being tempted by Satan. The Gospel of Matthew, for example, says the following: “Then Jesus was led by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil. After fasting forty days and forty nights, he was hungry. The tempter came to him and said, ‘If you are the Son of God, tell these stones to become bread’” (4:1-3). The question that comes to my mind is who is witnessing this? Why isn’t the episode told by Jesus? The same is true for the stories about Jesus’ birth. 

The Bible and God’s BIG PLAN

It is claimed that the Bible is the word of God. I suppose what this means is God guided the very many literary hands (minds) of the men who describe the hundreds of incidents described in the Old and New Testaments. But when I consider the flights of fancy, inconsistencies, contradictions, and countless statements that are just plain false, it becomes unclear how God was the celestial director overseeing the creation of the Bible. The Bible contains descriptions of endless revelatory moments experienced by its large cast of characters. But the central revelation is supposed to God’s BIG PLAN for humanity. Yet, I find it odd that this divine global project would be revealed in a piecemeal fashion over a period of about four thousand years. The actual composition of the Bible supposedly begins with Moses who supposedly lived sometime during the 14^th century, B.C. Supposedly, God dictated to Moses the first five books (Torah) of the Bible. The information given in those books is a very large, complex, and multifarious revelation for one mind to manage. As special as he was, it’s difficult to imagine how Moses could have accomplished such a feat.

This would mean, for example, that God told Moses about Adam and Eve’s sinful behavior in the Garden of Eden. Here is an excerpt from that revelation: “And they heard the sound of the Lord God walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and Adam and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the Lord God among the trees of the garden” (Genesis 3:8). I find it odd that God would feel/believe it necessary to reveal these details to Moses. The story suggests, for one thing, that God is bullying the human neophytes. And his description of himself walking anthropomorphizes him. He appears very Zeus-like stomping about in the garden. The Adam and Eve story and the many others that occur in the Torah are to me unbecoming of God, creator of the Universe.

And how was all this information conveyed to Moses? Was it downloaded in an instant into Moses’ brain or over a period of time, in a manner similar to the way Allah lectures Muhammad via the archangel Gabriel?^[1] As far as I can tell, Moses was a very busy man living under difficult circumstances, though he did live to be 120 years old. Did God give all of the Torah at one time, on Mount Sinai, and did Moses write it down while on Mt. Sinai? Supposedly, Moses was there for 40 days and night, which is a lot of time, yet he didn’t eat or drink water during the whole time. And did he write the five books of the Torah on stone tablets like those the Ten Commandments were written on? If Moses wrote it down later, how did he keep so much information straight in his memory? Another big question is why even bother telling Moses what occurred twenty-four centuries earlier. If God has this BIG PLAN for humanity, why didn’t he simply implement it? And another fifteen or so centuries would pass before God decided to visit Earth in the form of an avatar, Jesus, so he could reveal his BIG PLAN to humanity directly, though to a very, very small and insignificant portion of humanity. And today, two-thousand years later, we are still waiting for the BIG PLAN to be implemented.

What all this tells me is that the numerous revelations to be found in the Bible came from the imaginations of religiously inspired storytellers who believed that what they imagined was true. It has been a process of the divines, prophets, rabbis, priests, theologians, saints, clergy, etc., chasing the creations of their own imaginations and then sorting them out into a coherent historical drama. That the BIG PLAN has come to naught (unless one counts endless wars as part of God’s BIG PLAN) after so many thousands of years has brought about another revelation, but not among true believers. One literary expression of that revelation is The Sun Also Rises. But before discussing Hemingway’s modern, post-Narrative revelation, a word about the Quran. 

Quran

The rhetorical structure of the revelation presented in the Quran is very different from the various forms that make up the Bible. The Quran consists solely of what God or Allah reveals to Muhammad, the prophet who relates his revelation to the world via the Quran. This information is verbally delivered by Allah’s messenger angel Gabriel.* Whereas the scriptures of Judaism and JudeoChristianity present a rather Kafkaesque mazelike rhetorical path, via endless raconteurs, to God’s BIG PLAN, the Quran simply opens the door to God allowing “him” to speak for “himself” via his messenger Gabriel. Using angels as God’s messengers is commonplace in the Bible, but in the Quran the relationship between God and his messenger is apparently unique because it is similar to the way a ventriloquist speaks through a puppet, in that Gabriel delivers the messages verbatim.

*Interestingly, disbelievers often demand of Yahweh/Allah’s prophets “Why has no angel been sent down to help him [a prophet] with his warnings?” (25:7). The question that arises is why Allah doesn’t send angelic messengers to deliver his warnings rather than relying on human prophets who, for good reason, are often thought to “be under a spell” (25:8) or “a learned sorcerer” (26:34). It seems a reasonable question since God has an abundance of angels whom he uses to communicate to prophets or other select individuals. And receiving God’s message directly from an angel, as Muhammad did, would be much more convincing. 

The Abrahamic religions offer God’s communications in various ways, as a Zeus like god walking about in the Garden of Eden, through angels, natural phenomena such as a burning bush, a pillar of cloud, a storm, and as a human in the New Testament. The problem is how to conceive the inconceivable, a Universe-creating, world-controlling divine No-thing, since God is not a thing.  However, though God cannot be visualized as an entity, his character comes across very clearly in what he says and does. As in the Old Testament, the JudeoIslamic God is very much a masculine figure, an authoritarian tribal chief who considers humanity his tribe, consisting of good and evil members—loyal true believers and disloyal disbelievers (pagans, doubters, backsliders, heretics).

The advantage of the Quran’s mode of revelation is that it provides a consistent, clear portrait of its deity. This consistent clarity makes it easy to decide whether or not Allah is the God a person would want to surrender his or her life to. Unlike in the New Testament, God is not presented in an ambiguous fashion. Jesus is very much a Janus-faced character. On the one hand, Jesus is a loving, divinely inspired person who welcomes all of humanity to follow him; on the other hand, he is a fanatically conservative disciplinarian who will harshly punish those who choose not to follow him. In the Quran the same duality is present, but not in the person of God but in what “he” offers believers and disbelievers in the afterlife: an eternity in a paradisiacal garden or in a fiery torture chamber called Hell, descriptions of which occur on almost every other page.

That God—Yahweh, Jesus, or Allah—would inflict horrific punishment upon humans (for whatever reason) is a moral issue. Hellish punishment of disbelievers is the dominant, recurring theme of Allah’s communication to his prophet Muhammad. That Allah would reward his followers is not necessarily morally wrong, but the cruel punishment that he inflicts upon non-followers (whose response is not aggressive but passively doubtful) is egregiously morally wrong. Why not simply deny eternal life to non-followers? That seems punishment enough, though it’s not clear that disbelievers should be punished at all. The Quran’s unambiguous presentation of God’s hatred (extreme aversion, hostility, or detestation) of disbelievers* does ensure that many readers will conclude that the Quran’s portrait of God is incompatible with the view that God logically must be a morally perfect being. As Ludwig Feuerbach says in his The Essence of Christianity, “The idea of God is dependent on the idea of justice, of benevolence; a God who is not benevolent, not just, not wise, is no God” (21, translated by George Eliot).

*Often the disbeliever is simply a misbeliever, a person who misunderstands the new theology, yet he or she will be punished as severely as the diehard atheist. 

This conclusion assumes that what is moral is not based on whatever God decides is moral. In truth, only morality decides what is moral. Might does not make right especially since might is often used immorally. It can be used either way, morally or immorally, which suggests that something other than might decides which uses are good and which are not. Thus, I find Allah’s heavy-handedness falls short of my expectations of divineness. The Quran is to be credited for its honesty. It says, here is the JudeoIslamic version of god, like it or not. The New Testament, on the other hand, offers via Jesus a sugarcoated version of the Jewish God. Thus, it can be argued that the Gospel writers especially (certainly not the author of the Book of Revelation) are guilty of deceiving their readers of the true nature of the god Jesus represents.

Essentially, the Quran is a stern warning to disbelievers: such as those who think stories of people being resurrected from “dust and bones” are just “ancient fables” (23:82-83); or polytheists, who believe in Allah but also in other gods (those who “pray to another god alongside Him” (23:117) or assign him partners (17:111, 5:72); or those who claim Allah has offspring (19:88)*; or those who continue to worship the gods of their ancestors (7:70-71). The Quran’s warning to these disbelievers is that they “will cast face downwards into the fire” of Hell (27:90) unless they surrender their lives totally to Allah.

*“How terrible is this thing you assert: it almost causes the heavens to be torn apart, the earth to split asunder, mountains to crumble to pieces, that they attribute offspring to the Lord of Mercy” (19:88-91). A doubly blasphemous version of this heresy is assigning “daughters to God” (16:57) because when an Arab man was “given news of the birth of a baby girl, his face darkens and his filled with gloom. In his shame he hides himself away from his people because of the bad news he has been given” (16:58-59). 

That the JudeoIslamic God doesn’t simply threaten disbelievers with annihilation but with terrifying everlasting torment is what makes Allah an impossible representative of what I imagine God would be like if he/it existed. An example: 

But as for those who disbelieve, garments of fire will be cut out for them; boiling fluid will be poured down on their heads; Whereby that which is in their bellies, and their skins too, will be melted; And for them are hooked rods of iron. (22:19-20) 

You have to look pretty hard at Greek mythology to find a god as cruel to humans as Allah is. And there are no Greek gods that demand human beings totally surrender their lives to them. The freedom-loving ancient Greeks would have found such subservience demeaning. The idea is even demeaning to God, as if a god would treat humans as pets, demanding obedience of them in the way humans demand their pets to be obedient. The difference is that most humans treat their pets (even when they disobey) far better than the Abrahamic God has treated humanity. Of course, such a religion is really not about God but about its creators, an expression of human narcissism, humans believing they are so important that the creator of the Universe would become obsessed with being adored by them, even more vain the absurd idea that the Universe was created to serve as the stage for the human-divine drama. 

ὕβρις

The notion of hubris, overweening pride, originated with the ancient Greeks. It was not considered a sin but a character flaw that was shameful and among humans could bring disaster. Its presence meant an absence of virtue. Agamemnon was certainly guilty of hubris when he decided to sacrifice his daughter Iphigenia because by doing so he placed himself above morality. Satan is considered the archetypal illustration of hubris because he places himself equal to or above God. In the Quran Iblis is guilty of hubris because he won’t follow Allah’s command to bow down to humans. Whether his refusal was an act of hubris or simply a refusal to humiliate himself before a lower species is an open question. Personally, I don’t think any human should be required to bow down before another human. It suggests Hegel’s master-slave relationship. Other than Iblis, I really don’t find many people in the Quran who are guilty of hubris. Those who refuse to worship Allah or hold mistaken beliefs about Allah seem to be guilty more of skepticism, confusion, or ignorance.

Allah, on the other hand, exhibits a good deal of hubristic thinking and behavior. Of course, true believers argue that Allah is God so humans should surrender their lives to him regardless. There are two problems with this. First, it’s one thing to surrender one’s life to God and another to surrender one’s life to an idea. Many of the characters in the Quran are skeptical because God never pays them a visit, only his proselytizing messengers do so, such as Muhammad, who appeals to them to surrender their lives to the idea of God expressed in the text of the Quran. Second, people are not morally required to surrender themselves to an authority, religious or political, that they believe is an immoral abomination. It’s interesting that Allah uses the same method to intimidate (to make timid) people into submission that dictators use—fear of punishment. 

Critical Thinking as a Sin

Allah tells Muhammad to say the following to the people: 

“People, I am sent only to give you clear warning.” Those who believe and do good deeds will be forgiven and have generous reward, but those who strive to oppose Our messages and try in vain to defeat Us are destined for the Blaze. (22:49-50) 

The Quran is essentially a warning to the people of the world that Allah demands that all people must surrender their lives to him. The word Islam (Arabic: aslama) means to surrender. Those who do will be rewarded in the afterlife; those who don’t will be sent into the fires of Hell. “Oppose Our message” means to reject or disagree with the message. In the Quran there are no examples of disbelievers opposing the Islamic religion in the way Islam opposes other religions—aggressively with condemnations and threats of “The Fire that God has promised the disbelievers!” (22:72). What is described are people who do not wish to give up their traditional faiths or people who want more convincing proof. The Quran even refers to “disbelievers” remaining in “doubt about it [the Lord’s Truth] until the Hour suddenly overpowers them or until torment descends on them on the Day devoid of all hope” (22:55). In a sense, one could argue that Satan represents critical thinking, which the Abrahamic religions loathe. In essence, the purpose of the Quran is to discourage critical thinking.

What we see in Allah is divine hubris, which apparently is associated with all deities. The assumption is that gods are logically entitled to be excessively prideful. I disagree. God/gods should be judged by the same standards humans are. In the Quran Allah repeatedly refers to “the many generations We destroyed” (20:128) and “the communities We destroyed” (21:6). These people were destroyed for not accepting or believing in Allah. To me, that is excessive pride in the extreme, a form of narcissism that would be considered pathological in humans.

The Sun Also Rises

During the 19^th century occurred a great blossoming of revelations—contra the Grand Narratives of the Abrahamic religions—in fiction, philosophy, theology, and science. To name just a few of the most prominent prophets of the age: Karl Marx, Charles Darwin, Arthur Schopenhauer, Friedrich Nietzsche, David Strauss, Ludwig Feuerbach, Thomas Hardy, George Eliot, Herman Melville, Stephen Crane, Ivan Turgenev, Matthew Arnold, and Alfred Tennyson. Of course, the soil had been cultivated by the great thinkers of the Enlightenment, men such as Thomas Hobbes, David Hume, and Immanuel Kant. God was not the source of these revelations, empirical-logical reason was.

I’m claiming that The Sun Also Rises is a revelatory work. The prophet that produced it is Ernest Hemingway, and the inspiration of the revelation was neither divine communication nor divine signs but the historical event World War I. Did Hemingway think of himself as a prophet? In some sense he must have. His stories are not merely entertainment. The Great War resulted in a seismic shift in the European worldview. Hemingway was one of the writers who had the ability to express the radical change in attitude and its implications for a different way of viewing and appreciating the world, one that goes beyond the mythic narratives of the Abrahamic religions. I doubt that Hemingway was aware that he was announcing a neopaganism that was the next stage after of Romanticism’s failed attempt to perpetuate supernaturalism by making nature God’s dwelling place, a form of pantheism. The only role the divine plays in neopaganism of The Sun Also Rises is its absence.

It is significant that in the novel there is no glorious announcement of the return of mundane world as the only sources of reality, value, and meaning. A common announcement of the Abrahamic religions is that there is no God but Yahweh, Christ, or Allah. But what is always present in the Old Testament and the Quran is nature. One can doubt God but one cannot doubt nature. Even more revealing is that the Abrahamic God has nothing to offer in this world other than the benefits offered by nature with which he is causally associated. The Quranic heaven is a natural setting, gardens graced with flowing streams. And the kingdom God promises his chosen people will be populated with nature’s creatures, domesticated: 

The wolf shall dwell with the lamb,

    and the leopard shall lie down with the young goat,

and the calf and the lion and the fattened calf together;

    and a little child shall lead them.

The cow and the bear shall graze;

    their young shall lie down together;

 and the lion shall eat straw like the ox. (Isaiah 11:6-7) 

Recently Pope Francis said that “One day, we will see our animals again in the eternity of Christ. Paradise is open to all of God’s creatures.” Heaven will be a kind of petting zoo. The leader of the Catholic Church made the remark in order to comfort a young boy who was mourning the death of his dog. And consistent with the Abrahamic religions, the Pope’s saying so makes it so. 

What Is God’s Contribution to the World?

However, the important question raised here is this: Truly, what has been God’s contribution to human existence when the elements of the mundane world, nature, and humanity are removed? Nothing but unfulfilled promises. And there is no logical reason to assume God had anything to do with nature’s endless contributions to human existence. And there is no justification for assuming that rational or moral thinking are gifts from God when clearly they are the products of the human intellect. Cambridge University Press says, “Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics is the first and arguably most important treatise on ethics in Western philosophy.” Aristotle wrote the Ethics about 350 years before Jesus lived and about 1000 years before the Quran was written. It was a product of Reason, not divine revelation, though it could be consider a revelation of reason.

What I’m looking for is God’s unique contributions to human existence. And all I can find is the promise of either living in a future bucolic utopia here on earth or living eternally in a state heavenly or paradisiacal bliss. The Book of Revelation says that Heaven will be a place where, “There will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain” (21:4). The author says also that there will be a “new heaven and a new earth” but to be honest I don’t know what that means, especially when the author also says there will be no night or sun because the Lord God will provide light (22:5). It appears that in his revealed version of Heaven human existence is reduced to basking forever in God’s spiritual light. Personally, I prefer a petting zoo. 

God = God ≠ God Exists

Let’s return to the notion that there is no God but God, which sounds like a tautology that can be said of any unique thing fictional or real. There is no number 1 but number 1. There is no Geronimo but Geronimo. However, the big difference between my examples and God is that there is universal agreement on the nature and existence of the number 1 and Geronimo. About God there is agreement on neither, only an endless number of conflicting opinions. I do (reluctantly) assume that the statement is logically true if it means that there can be only one God—supreme being—because logically two supreme beings would mean that neither one would be supreme. It’s like saying there are no unicorns other than those with a single horn in the center of their forehead. The statement is true analytically in that the definition of unicorns requires a single horn in the forehead—though not all such animals are unicorns. Being supreme is logically required of God just as the single horn in the forehead is logically required for unicorns. However, the claim “there is no God but God” is not necessarily existentially true just as no definitional claims about unicorns logically implies they exist.

Jake Barnes has concluded—whether he admits it or not—that only the first part of the statement about God is true: THERE IS NO GOD, which changes the existential situation for Jake and his disbelieving friends. This is part of The Sun Also Rises’ revelation. The other part is exploring ways of living meaningfully in the mundane world without God. And, as it turns out and as the story reveals, there are many profound sources of meaning available to nonbelievers—including the esteem of courageously facing life without God and accepting that God is the product wishful thinking. Jake does try to avoid the truth that God does not exist by behaving like an ostrich and sticking his head in the sand, that is, by going to church. But it doesn’t work. He has seen too much horror in the war to continue to believe in God, at least the Abrahamic God supposedly devoted to humanity’s welfare.

And I will add that it doesn’t matter whether God exists or not. The Great War and all the other ceaseless horrors humanity has had to endure means God’s existence is irrelevant to humanity’s existence, though the various ideas people hold about God have been (detrimentally) influential. What good is a God that inspires fear, anxiety, and hatred of nonbelievers yet does nothing to improve the human condition, even that of believers? All improvement has come from human effort and ingenuity with the help of nature’s largess.

Hemingway was not an intellectual storyteller like George Eliot. His revelation was not inspired by the revelations of bookish critical-thinking intellectuals who came before him or lived during his time. Yet, the young Hemingway was very much, in his own way, a critical thinker. It’s just that what spoke to him most was his experience of the people and events of the empirical world. The biggest influence was the Great War. With the Great War abstract belief systems collapsed. The individual was thrown back upon himself or herself to pick through the rubble of discarded ideas to build a personally constructed worldview and value system. In The Sun Also Rises the reader sees Jake Barnes doing just that. But most of all what the reader sees is a character seeking to live as meaningfully as possible in this world. Jake, like Hemingway, saw enough death—bodies blown to pieces—to know that death, not God, is the final arbiter of a person’s life. 

Basho’s Revelation

Basho’s poetry and especially his The Narrow Road to the Deep North are a revelation. Basho perceived and understood the world from a perspective that is very different from the two dominant perspectives that have determined Western Civilization’s perception and understanding of world. Judaism degraded the world as a fallen setting of sinful behavior yet, paradoxically, a material showplace that reveals and glorifies God. From the perspective of Judaism and its religious offspring, the mundane world possesses no inherent value. To the contrary, it is often depicted as a place where various forms of evil flourish. 

The Judaistic Perspective and God’s BIG PLAN

Judaism also gave the West the idea that the Universe has some BIG PLAN that is being realized through history. Basically, it involves a war that Yahweh (Christ and Allah) declared on polytheists, idol worshipers, members of non-Abrahamic faiths or the wrong Abrahamic faith, heretics within the faith, and disbelieving atheists—all of whom are advised and supported by Satan and his horde of demonic followers. The goal of the war is to eradicate the mundane world of disbelievers and apostates and in the afterlife intern them eternally in the fires of Hell. Those who surrendered their lives to the Abrahamic god will be rewarded with eternal life in paradise. 

Religious Stress Disorders

Psychologically, the mental state caused by the Abrahamic religions is the opposite of that resulting from the religions represented in Basho’s poetry and travelogues, Zen Buddhism and Taoism. In my opinion, the Abrahamic religions induced an obsessive–compulsive religious mindset, characterized by anxiety, intrusive thoughts that produce uneasiness, apprehension, fear or worry, and repetitive behaviors aimed at reducing the associated anxiety. Fear and chronic anxiety would be caused by institutional censure, rejection by other true believers, fear of sin, fear of the Devil, and fear of going to Hell in the afterlife. Repeated anxiety-reducing behaviors would be daily readings of scripture, praying throughout the day, and attending regular religious services. The goal of the Abrahamic religions is to take captive the mind of the believer, resulting in the true believer being imprisoned in a religious house of mirrors. Everywhere the believer looks God is lurking and watching. As the Quran says, “Your Lord is never unmindful of what you all do” (27:93). An aspect of the totalitarian nature of the Abrahamic religions is God’s role as a divine Big Brother, constantly watching his subjects, not as a shepherd but as a mistrustful slave master. 

Decline of religious anthropomorphism in the West

The BIG PLAN of the Abrahamic religions is the one initially given by God. However, once belief in an anthropomorphic God waned, some other BIG PLAN mechanism was searched for, such as those invented by German Idealists, the best known being Hegel’s notion that a rational Absolute had a BIG PLAN in Mind for human history, realized through Hegel’s philosophical system. It was hard giving up the BIG PLAN ideal of the Jews because it transformed reality into a story all about humanity. Before they were infected by the Hebrew myth, the ancient Greeks and Romans were too rational to accept such a notion, though their philosophies would be corrupted by Eastern spiritualism, in particular the belief in the migration of souls from this world to their spiritual homeworld or the Stoic’s notion of the Universe being a cosmic organism having a rational soul (Logos). 

The Rational Perspective the Ancient Greeks

The other perspective is that of the ancient Greek scientists—thinkers such as Thales, Anaxagoras, Archimedes, Euclid, Democritus, Aristotle, Ptolemy, Epicurus, and many others.^[2] Their view of reality—the mundane world—is in many ways similar to that of Basho. Both Basho and the ancient Greek scientists allow the earth to speak to them. It is their source of revelation. These early scientists were most interested in the workings of the mundane world, and their approach relied more on empirical and logical reason rather than superstition. Basho’s understanding was fundamentally intuitive. Yet, though the attitude of the Greek scientists was one of appreciative understanding, it was also objective and impersonal. The subject and object are not one. On the other hand, Basho’s attitude toward the things of this world is essentially aesthetic, sympathetic, and personal. He became one with the people, creatures, and things he observed. 

Basho—Living in the Worldly Present

Whereas the Abrahamic religions obsessively focus on the past and future, Basho focuses on the present moment. For Basho, human life is a series of present moments captured in immediate awareness. In addition, the Abrahamic religions create a mythic matrix that isolates believers from the reality of the mundane world by distorting their understanding, thus perception and appreciation of mundane reality. Basho relates to the world directly rather than through the interpretative medium of religious myth. For Basho a rose is a rose is a rose, not a sign of God’s goodness, sin, or Christ as the new Adam.

The Abrahamic religions seek to harvest a person’s soul for God, thus co-opting the process of self-realization. The benefit to the egocentric is becoming a subject of God’s personal concern and the raison d'etre of the cosmos’ creation. Both are huge ego boosters.  The place of the individual in Basho’s worldview is cosmically significant but less flattering and inflating to the ego. But Basho was not driven by ego concerns but by love for the mundane world and its creatures. He sought a role to play, but it was essentially of altruistic appreciation rather than egotistical self-aggrandizement. The mundane world would exist to serve him but he would exist to serve it as an appreciative observer. 

Basho’s Invitation

What characterizes Basho’s method of appreciation is its naturalness. Basho allows experience of the world to flow into the self, naturally, without the distortions caused by political, economic, religious, ideology, or even scientific ideas. A peach is not commodity, not a gift from God; nor can it be reduced to its material-mechanical operation described by science, as interesting as they might be. A peach is not even its name. It is a fragile, mysterious, beautiful entity that just happens to give pleasure to those capable of experiencing it during their own fragile moment of existence. In their fragility and finitude all things are related; all things are equal.

Basho invited the world into himself, and that internalized world became the soil from which Basho self-blossomed artistically. Basho’s writings and paintings are only glimmerings of Basho’s self or soul that cannot be revealed directly. But what we do know is that Basho’s self, as with any artist, is a mixing bowl that infuses the perceived object with human subjectivity. In Basho’s case, the nature of that subjectivity is suggested in his words and paintings. This approach to revealing the world is individualistic thus heterogeneous and multifarious. The meanings of the world become like white light scattered into a spectrum of colors. Basho’s subjective response to the world is one unique color of appreciative understanding. His approach is one that encourages, rather than discourages, individual understanding. Through his life he tells us that each person can travel his or her own path through life and by doing so allow the world to reveal itself uniquely to that person. 

Traveling One’s Own Path

Basho’s approach to understanding the world is contrary to that of the Abrahamic religions, whose purpose is to spread a spiritual monoculture, a single vision and experience of the world. They impose upon the mind a filter that enables only one revelation, one experience of the world, one that is also unfaithful to reality, to nature, to the earth and its creatures. Seeing the world through them is truly seeing it through a glass darkened by a depraved myth that transforms the world into dark, depressing drama filled with all sorts of nefarious characters, the most nefarious of all being not Satan but the world’s diabolical puppet master—God. Putting aside the Bible or Quran to enter into Basho’s world is like leaving a dungeon and entering the world at sunrise to begin a journey that is one’s own.

For Basho the divine is unnecessary because one’s life is fulfilled in the living of it each day. There is nothing more. Nothing more is needed. Life is in-itself miraculous. The Quran says, “Everything in the heavens and earth glorifies God” (59:1). Untrue, everything in the heavens and earth glorify the heavens and earth. Basho places emphasis on the immediacy of the present moment. There is nothing else. The past is past; the future is an illusion of expectation. The afterlife is an illusion of the ego’s craving for eternity. As much as he is adored, God lacks even the reality of a peach—an existing entity that can be observed and gratefully eaten. There is no God other than thinking there is. God is an intangible, imagined idea full of “sound and fury” signifying nothing. A peach is there whether I will it or not. It is there in stubborn, gracious suchness. It is not a waft of ghostly smoke given off by the imagination. 

Nature’s Wisdom

We can learn more from plants and animals than from God because God doesn’t live. “He” exists only in the way ideas exist, as non-living abstractions. And what we can learn from nature’s creatures is part of what is to be found in Basho’s revelations.^[3]  One of the key lessons learned from nature’s creatures is, with certain exceptions, living simply: their impact or disturbance upon their environment and other creatures is slight. And often, they not only live their lives but enhance and provide for the lives of others. Plants and animals can be enjoyed for their beauty, but they also provide sustenance for other creatures. Basho’s home, clothes, food and drink all came from nature. 

Theologies of Suffering

Letting go of the ego—one’s own and God’s—is to invite the world into one’s appreciative awareness without distortion, without a lot of mythical clutter. Returning to the source of all things is a return not to God but to the evanescent reality of the mundane world that is clearly illustrated in Chinese landscape painting. The Abrahamic religions expect one to surrender to God, that ghostly No-thing whose involvement in the mundane world is usually destructive forms of punishment inflicted upon pagans, heathens, polytheists, disbelievers, sceptics, dissenters, apostates, heretics, scoffers, and satirists.

Totally contrary to Buddhism’s and Taoism’s attempts to minimize suffering by avoiding forms of thinking and behaving that cause disharmony and suffering, the Abrahamic religions introduced ways of thinking and behaving that have increased disharmony and suffering in the world, in part by encouraging conflict. The Jews invented a god that hates and seeks to punish most of humanity. The Bible begins with God condemning and punishing humanity. JudeoChristianity and JudeoIslam declared a holy crusade or jihad upon humanity. The Abrahamic religions are essentially breeding grounds for conflict. The extent of the conflicts is almost incomprehensible given the religions are at war against not only endless groups of pagans, disbelievers, infidels, and heathens but also against people they consider heretics or apostates within their own faiths. What the ancient Jews invented was a religious cluster bomb that has been exploding for millennia and continues today.

In addition to the suffering cause by conflicts between religious groups, there is the psychological suffering caused by the fear of punishment in the afterlife, the fear of demonic elements such as devils, the fear of sin, and endless forms of self-loathing resulting from believing one has fallen short of God’s expectations. Even if a person who has lived the life of a saint cannot be sure that he or she will not be damned since God is far above being influenced by a lowly human being no matter how pious. And the notion of predestination implies that God has already decided who will be saved and who will be damned. The painter Hieronymus Bosch illustrates in works such as Death of the Reprobate and Temptation of St. Anthony the grotesque and nightmarish mindset and its view of reality that can result when the mind is enthralled by the worldview of any of the Abrahamic religions.

Taoism and Buddhism, on the other hand, combine to offer a worldview that minimizes conflict. They are both critical of ideas that influence how people interpret and relate to the world. Ideas can become sources of distortion or barriers between the observer and the observed. And they would certainly be critical of religious ideologies that claim to “know” the truth and even demand that other people embrace that truth. According to Buddhism, ways of thinking that result in unnecessary suffering are false and to be avoided. Logically, then, Buddhism would have to reject the thinking of the Abrahamic religions if only because of their propensity to cause suffering. 

It’s an odd God that Declares War on the World

It is quite odd that God would encourage conquest, bloodless or otherwise. Wikipedia’s article “Religious War” provides a list of major religiously motivated conflicts. All involve the Abrahamic religions. The Buddhist uprising listed was not a rejection of Catholicism but rebellion against Catholic military juntas guilty of “discrimination against the majority Buddhist population.” It’s noteworthy that Catholicism was introduced into Vietnam by aggressive French missionaries and colonizers. In 1649 the Jesuit missionary Alexandre de Rhodes “pleaded for increased funding for Catholic missions to Vietnam, telling somewhat exaggerated stories about the natural riches to be found in Vietnam” (“Rhodes,” Wikipedia). In essence, the Jesuits were carrying out a religious war against the Vietnamese Buddhists. Would the United States government have been so zealously supportive of the France’s colonialistic oppression of Vietnam if it had not been the case that the oppressed were pagan Buddhists or Marxist atheists and the oppressor Christian? What JudeoChristianity and JudeoIslam cannot do is live side by side with disbelievers because conversion of nonbelievers is an integral part of their religious doctrine.

Totally contrary to the thinking of Buddhism and Taoism is the idea put forth by the Abrahamic religions that God would consider that most humans (gentiles, infidels, and atheists) are deserving of suffering horrifically in the fires of Hell. Just the idea of Hell has been a cause of endless mental and emotional suffering—thus is incompatible with the Taoist-Buddhist mindset.  Whereas Taoism and Buddhism seek to achieve a quiescent state of mind, the Abrahamic religions seek to instill in believers a terrifying fear of God, whose punishments and threats of punishment are the dominant themes in Abrahamic scriptures. Observing the world from the looking glass of the Abrahamic religions one sees a world fraught with sin and devils, humans threatened with damnation and eternal punishment, and a god whose role is that of a green-eyed tyrant and cosmic Big Brother. The Abrahamic religions are mental constructs that distort believers’ experience and understanding of the world rather than reveal the world as it actually is. Truly, the world is terrifying enough without adding to it invented mythological terrors. Death awaits all human beings. That’s bad enough without inventing the fires of Hell.^[4] 

Life as a Puppet

Mental constructs can liberate the mind or imprison it. The Abrahamic religions do the later. One needs only to observe Jews praying, chanting and mechanically jerking to and fro before the Western Wall in Jerusalem or consider that Muslims praying to Allah five times a day to realize what it means to be imprisoned in a religious mindset that isolates true believers from the mundane world by focusing their minds upon imagined transcendent realities (God, angels, devils, and the “truer” world of the afterlife in paradise or Hell). From the perspective of Taoism, the Tao—the way of the world—is one with mundane reality, not with a transcendent supernatural reality.

The philosophy of Taoism is simple: understand how the world works and by doing so learn how to live in harmony with it. This view of the world does not assume the world is all harmony and tranquility. To the contrary, it is because the world is a dangerous place that one needs to learn how it works. Raging rivers are dangerous so should be avoided by swimmers. The belief that epilepsy is caused by demons is a misconception that prevents beneficial treatments (anticonvulsant medications rather than exorcism) that are based on the “way” of the disease—a disorder of the nervous system. When one cannot explain a phenomenon, it’s best to avoid flights of the imagination (flashes lightning are divine thunderbolts) and rely on careful empirical investigation. That means that in some cases it’s better to do nothing rather than act out of ignorance. The fundamental assumption here is that thoughts and actions based on ignorance are more likely to increase suffering rather than lessen it. 

Nature’s Laissez Faire versus God’s Intrusiveness 

In nature creatures take what they need. Once satisfied they tend to leave other creatures alone. The Abrahamic religions are characterized by the insatiable quest to convert the entire world to accommodate the demands of their deity. This goes beyond the conversion of disbelievers to include converting nature from its wild demonic state by domesticating it. Inflicting one’s desires upon others creates adversarial relationships that unavoidably result in suffering producing conflict. The adversarial relationship is exactly what characterizes the Abrahamic religions’ relationship to the rest of the world. Certainly, behaviors that cause harm have to be restrained to prevent or reduce suffering, even if doing so causes some (lesser) degree of suffering, such as that resulting from the restraint itself. We don’t allow children to play with fire or adults to drive when drunk. The most egregious demand associated JudeoChristianity and JudeoIslam is the condemnation and conversion disbelievers, which, strangely, also includes Christians from the Muslim perspective and vice versa. The great suffering conversion is supposed to avoid is the imagined punishment will occur in the afterlife. In reality, however, the mission to convert nonbelievers is not done to save them but to enslave them to God’s will. 

The impermanence of existence

From a Buddhist-Taoist perspective the mundane world is not sustained by an underlying, unshakable reality such as Plato’s forms or the Abrahamic god. In his discussion of the Buddhist’s view of the nature of reality John Koller explains that the world/reality is “constituted by combinations of discrete, evanescent elemental forces in constant motion (Oriental Philosophies 179). Certain Chinese landscape paintings represent the world as consisting of gigantic, cloud-like emanations that virtually eclipsed humanity’s presence. In reference to the influence of Chinese philosophy on landscape painting, Wikipedia says, “Taoism stressed that humans were but tiny specks amongst vast and greater cosmos.” (“Chinese Painting”)

In Chinese Art Mary Tregear says, “Taoist beliefs can be expressed in landscape, and particularly in what mountains evoke: the remote, the eternal, an over powering sense of scale when they are related to human beings” (107-108). The world appears as an elaborate dreamscape. And though humans make their way in the world, its reality remains essentially mysteriously alien and fundamentally indifferent to humanity’s presence. Tregear provides a number of such landscapes. Two are Xu Daoning’s Fishing in a Mountain Stream and Guo Xi’s Early Spring.

The themes expressed in these paintings are very different from the worldview presented by the Abrahamic religions. First, nature is God in so far as nature is the creator of the world. Second, once the conventional labels that are applied to nature for purposes of interpretation and understanding are suspended, nature is revealed as essentially mysterious. Third, humanity is not the raison d'etre or purpose of the world. Neither nature nor the Universe (which are one) exists for humanity’s sake. Humans have no purpose other than what they assign to themselves. Like all creatures humans are brief visitors. Their one unique contribution, however, is illustrated by the two artists—to serve as appreciative observers. Finally, spirituality or divinity does not require an anthropomorphic god such as Yahweh, Christ, or Allah that is aware of its creation and obsessed with the thinking and behavior of the human species. It can be argued that humans provide awareness to nature, but their perspective is theirs alone. Nature/Universe has no perspective.

For the Buddhist-Taoist artist nature’s imposing, alien, and primordially mysterious presence seen from afar, yet is intimate when observed close-up as individual entities. In a sense, the macrocosm of nature highlights and enhances the microcosm of the mundane world. In the flow of existence, each individual—especially living creatures—appear momentarily and then disappear forever. Their brief existence inspires a heartfelt appreciation in the equally vulnerable and equally finite observer. Since I’ve already discussed in some detail Basho’s revelatory The Narrow Road to the Deep North, I will mention here three Chinese paintings that I believe express visually Basho’s Buddhist-Taoist attitude toward the mundane world and its inhabitants. 

Artistic Contemplation

In the paintings already noted the fundamentally mysteriousness of the mundane world inspired a Buddhist-Taoist meditative mindset totally unlike that of the mindset created by the Abrahamic religions. In Shen Zhou’s painting Poet on a Clifftop the dominant presence is mysterious nature that envelops, almost concealing, human society represented by a group of houses half hidden in a valley. The poet gazes from the clifftop, a small, insignificant figure, yet the subjective portal that enables the world to reveal itself to appreciative contemplation. There is no super-natural presence only the mysterious, creative divinity of nature. The poem that accompanies the painting could very well describe Basho: 

             White clouds sash-like

            wrap mountain waists,

        The rock terrace flies in space,

            distant, a narrow path.

        Leaning on a bramble staff,

            far and free I gaze,

        To the warble of valley brook

            I reply with the cry of my flute.^[5]

 

The scene is tranquil; the human presence nestled unobtrusively in the nature’s bosom. 

Incompatibles: Taoist-Buddhist East/Abrahamic West

Zhou’s painting epitomizes the contrasting attitudes toward nature of the West and East. Whereas the Buddhist-Taoist seeks to live in harmony with nature, the ideal of the West, inspired by Judaism, is confrontational. Unruly nature is to be conquered and subdued (domesticated) just as disbelievers are to be destroyed or converted. The Bible begins with God giving mankind dominion over all of nature: 

“Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth.” (Genesis 1:28) 

Such a notion is alien to the Buddhist-Taoist worldview. And when the members of the Abrahamic faiths take the time to appreciate nature they don’t appreciate it for itself but as a darkened glass through which to “know” its always-absent divine creator. Shen Zhou’s painting reminds us that the highest function of humanity’s relationship to nature is not conquest or domestication but appreciative awareness. 

Emperor Huizong and the Taoist Aesthetic

Basho’s revelation is rooted in Chinese Taoism, which was exquisitely expressed six centuries before Basho in Taoist Emperor Huizong’s painting Five-colored Parakeet on a Branch of Apricot Blossom. The inscription to the painting reveals that Huizong considered the bird one of nature’s miracles, as are all of nature’s creations. The parakeet is valued for itself, not a sign of God’s creativity. To truly appreciation the mundane world one must empty one mind of God, which can only distort and distract one’s appreciative understanding of the mundane world and its creations.

Huizong’s response to the world is essentially aesthetic. Like other Buddhist-Taoist artists he saw the mundane world as a landscape of beauty. That he found so much beauty in a single creature reveals that beauty is its own self-justifying value—expressed naturally in the bird and artificially by the inspired poet-artist. Unlike God, the parakeet’s value is intrinsically present for anyone to observe and appreciate. The intangible, invisible Abrahamic god must derive value from the things he supposedly created. The poem by Huizong inscribed on the painting is revealing: 

Heaven produced the parakeet, this strange bird,

From far away he came to the imperial precinct.

His body is complete with five colors and his nature

rare.

Blessed is he, uttering many a fine speech, his tone

most beautiful.

When flying high, to be envied is he, his feathers elegant.

When walking about, contented is he, fed with choice

grain.  

His yellow breast and purple feet are truly perfect,

Thus I compose a new verse and sing as I stroll. (Trans. Kojiro Tomita.) 

Huizong attributes to “heaven” the creation of the bird, not God. Heaven seems to represent the mysterious creative force of nature that lies beyond reach of the human imagination. That short phrase is all that is devoted to the creator of parakeet. The rest of the poem is devoted to the bird. By painting the parakeet and writing a poem in its honor, Huizong achieve an appreciative sympathy unity with the bird that is aesthetic, intellectual, and emotional.

To the Buddhist-Taoist observer the bird’s value resides in its beauty, finitude, and mystery. The beauty of the parakeet is something of a miracle, and the “strange bird” is fundamentally mysterious. The nature of beauty has been discussed in great detail by philosophers and artists, yet it remains notoriously difficult to define. A quality that gives intense pleasure or deep satisfaction to the mind is hardly adequate since it describes the response rather than define what causes the response. Beauty is both enchanting and enthralling thus understandably a threat to a god that demands to be the sole object of humanity’s adoration. It could be argued that beauty and the sublime are attributes that make the mundane world an object of veneration. And it’s not surprising Yahweh/Allah was so jealous of the idols (material objects) that attracted veneration. And it’s not surprising that so many of the pagan gods where associated with natural phenomena. 

The Kinship of Finitude and Mystery

The awareness of one’s finitude can result in one resenting the material world and one’s material self and longing for an eternal afterlife. It is this resentment and longing that characterizes the Abrahamic religions.^[6] On the other hand, one’s finitude can inspire a sympathetic bond with all finite beings. And I believe that is what one finds in the art of both Basho and Huizong. Finitude is the bases for the tragic condition of existence. All things that come into existence will parish. Accepting gracefully and courageously that fact is one of the lessons offered by the Buddhist-Taoist worldview. And because suffering is an inherent part of life, the two spiritual philosophies teach ways of avoiding causing suffering that is unnecessary. Finally, it is a worldview that especially inspires a sympathetic bond with those things that are most fragile and vulnerable to harm and suffering.

That there should be so much beauty in the world—exquisite, perfect beauty embodied in the most diminutive of creatures such as birds and flowers—and that such entities should exist at all convey a mysteriousness to all of existence. The mystery does not reside in an inability to explain the emergence and workings of nature’s creations. Science has provided those explanations. The mystery is existential, that there is something rather than nothing and that so much of that something is so marvelous. The God solution to that mystery is no solution at all—replacing one mystery with another not nearly as enchanting. The God solution of the Abrahamic religions is a specious, anthropomorphic, self-aggrandizing, reassuring feel-good solution that accomplished little good and has caused great harm.

The ontological mystery of Huizong’s parakeet is one that is both profound and enjoyable. It is a mystery that both the observer and the observed share in. Their shared existential condition created a loving bond between Huizong and the parakeet. The same bond and celebration of being-in-the-world is found in Basho’s poetry. Their Buddhist-Taoist approach to life—defined as a reverential appreciation of the mundane world and its creatures—realizes the highest perfection of humanity’s being in the world. But, of course, it could not last. Human perfection defined morally and aesthetically is far rarer and far more vulnerable than are the works of art and diminutive creatures Huizong admired with such affection. 

The Artist Emperor’s Utopia

Not only did Huizong create beautiful works of art, as an emperor he also sought to create an ideal society shaped by a Buddhist-Taoist-Confucian approach to life and by aestheticism. He thought of himself as an enlightened ruler, though he was an impractical one given that the art of ruling unavoidably involves the art of war. In his zeal for the arts and for building Taoist temples, Huizong neglected his military. If all of humanity could adopt Huizong’s Buddhist-Taoist, aesthetic approach to life, perhaps there would be no need for militaries. Huizong’s ideal society is illustrated in the famous Qingming Shanghe Tu scroll painted the by Zhang Zeduan.

What characterizes most the ideal society is social harmony and people being allowed to devote themselves to their respective roles and to the enjoyment of life generally. What is absent is conflict intruding into people’s lives from without or from within the city. In regard to my interpretation of The Sun Also Rises this would require an effort to restrain the primordial forces of chaos and maximize harmonious order. The Chinese social philosophy of a well-run society was based on Confucianism, defined as “stressing love for humanity, ancestor worship, reverence for parents, and harmony in thought and conduct.” Nevertheless, Confucianism imposed severe restraints upon the role of women in society. Their natural place was thought to be in the home, their essential roles being those of mother and wife. Their place in society was limited to associating with family members.

The Ideal Woman, not so Ideal for Women

The ideal woman, such as Mary, is one who has been sexually neutered, which is to negate in some manner her inherently sexual, sinful nature. In JudeoChristianity Apostle Paul says that ideally men—like himself and Jesus—should avoid sexual relations, that is, romantic, intimate relationships with women. Though Jesus treated women kindly, he compartmentalized them and relegated them to the periphery of society and excluded from his priestly elite just as they had always been by pre-Christian Judaism.

Let’s face it that in spite of all the hoopla and affection accorded Mary, the significance of her existence in the New Testament is limited to being the mother of Jesus. She is mentioned by name twelve times in the Gospel of Luke and only in the narrative about the birth of Jesus. She mentioned five times in the Gospel of Matthew, and four of those are in the infancy narrative. She is mentioned by name only once in Mark’s gospel and referred to only twice in John’s but never named.

The Quran has a chapter named after her,^[7] but the Quran’s interest in Mary seems to be to reiterate that “it would not befit God to have a child” (19:35). Of course, the contradiction here is that God impregnated Mary (if only by decree) thus is the father of her child, human or otherwise, whether or not he likes being designated as such. Wikipedia says Mohammad had eleven or thirteen wives. I simple cannot see how allowing men to have a bevy of wives doesn’t lessen the status women in relation to that of men, in part by limiting the role of women to performing domestic duties. Clearly, the main role of women is to produce offspring but also to provide men with sexual variety. Muhammad also had four concubines, all of whom were slaves. To me what is lacking about the women in the Quran is individuality. Men of distinctive personality are mentioned often and stand out prominently in the Quran, but women are usually referred to generic way in discussions of inheritance, divorce, treatment of widows, etc. Women are respected, but that is not the same as being admired.^[8]

And as I’ve mentioned, Allah is angrily insulted by the notion that he would have daughters, as if were he to have offspring they certainly would be sons. According to the Quran, men are successful if they have wealth and sons (68:14). The various translations mention children or sons, not daughters). However, the lack of equality is also seen in the discussion of inheritance: “GOD decrees a will for the benefit of your children; the male gets twice the share of the female” (4:11). This may have been an improvement over the way women were viewed and treated in pre-Islamic Arabia and perhaps the Christian Dark Ages and after. However, one would expect God to treat males and females equally.

As far as I recall there is no reference in the Quran to women being successful.^[9] Here are four other passages from the Quran that reveal the status of women in Islamic society: 

It is made lawful for you to go in to your wives on the night of the fast. (2:187) 

O Prophet, tell thy wives and thy daughters and the women of believers to let down upon them their over-garments. (33:59) 

Fair-seeming to men is made the love of desires, of women and sons and hoarded treasures of gold and silver and well-bred horses and cattle and tilth. This is the provision of the life of this world. (3:14) 

Men are the protectors and maintainers of women, because Allah has made one of them to excel the other, and because they spend (to support them) from their means. Therefore the righteous women are devoutly obedient (to Allah and to their husbands), and guard in the husband's absence what Allah orders them to guard (e.g. their chastity, their husband's property, etc.). As to those women on whose part you see ill-conduct, admonish them (first), (next), refuse to share their beds, (and last) beat them (lightly, if it is useful), but if they return to obedience, seek not against them means (of annoyance). (4:34) 

Success is something that is achieved, but achievement is an approach to life that is denied to women. And that is pretty much true in the Bible as well. Mary’s is the most famous female character in the New Testament (in the world, for that matter), yet she is esteemed primarily for passively and obediently accepting the role of motherhood. The Old Testament does offer a couple women of admirable achievement. I have in mind the Books of Ester and Judith. Yet, such women are a rarity. The Bible generally is about the accomplishments of great men and a male deity.^[10] 

Abrahamic Totalitarianism

The Abrahamic religions are essentially authoritarian and even totalitarian in their use of coercion to control the minds and lives of believers. The restraints are much stricter and limiting for women than they are for men; nevertheless, the lives and minds of men are also severely constrained. In the Old Testament gentiles are slaughtered with glee and dissenters are killed or scorned. In the New Testament Jesus is crucified for engaging in freedom of thought and speech. Yet, no religious text is as critical of freedom of thought and speech as is the Quran: 

“The disbelievers are steeped in arrogance and hostility. How many generations We [Allah] have destroyed before them! They all cried out, once it was too late, for escape. The disbelievers think it strange that a prophet of their own people has come to warn them: They say ‘He is just a lying sorcerer. How can he claim that all the gods are but one God? What an astonishing thing [to claim]!’ Their leaders depart saying, ‘Walk away! Stay faithful to your gods!’ … It was not without purpose that We created the heavens and the earth and everything in between. That may be what the disbelievers assume—how they will suffer in the fire.” (38:2-6 & 38:27) 

The disbelievers are, in fact, doubting critical thinkers. They want more proof than the words of a prophet offering a new religion that requires their giving up their old religion. The Quran also warns those expressing alternative perspectives on religion: 

There is the sort of person who pays for distracting tales, intending, without any knowledge, to lead others from God’s way, and to hold it up to ridicule. There will be humiliating torment for him. (31:6) 

This sort of person would include Socrates, Jesus Christ, and Darwin.

Finally, the Quran describes the Biblical David being told, “Do not follow your desires, lest they divert your from God’s path; those who wander from His path will have painful torment” (38:26). David’s behavior is often morally despicable as in the case alluded to here: David’s seducing Bathsheba, wife of Uriah, whom David has killed. But the message being directed to everyone is that Allah demands total loyalty and obedience. These demands are what make the Abrahamic religions totalitarian. They want automatons for believers, that is, total surrender of the self. 

Suffering Submission to Lessen Suffering

The authoritarian-totalitarian approaches to religion unavoidably cause suffering. As a social philosophy containing elements of Buddhism and Taoism, Confucianism seeks social harmony, the result of which would be less suffering-producing disharmony. However, it does this by imposing a rather ridged behavioral template that defines acceptable behavior. As we’ve seen, in the case of women, the template limits the possibilities for self-realization, which included foot-binding at one time. Thus harmony is preserve by restraining the behavior of individuals, thus creating a potential conflicting or clashing relationship between individuals and the social roles they are expected to perform. It is this conflict that can result in various forms of suffering for individuals who feel painfully (physically or mentally) restrained by the social roles imposed upon them. And believing the restraints are unjustly or unequally imposed would further aggravate their suffering. 

Compassionate Restraint

Taoist-Buddhism takes a more inclusive approach to conflict, disorder, and suffering. Buddhism recognizes that those who suffer are living creatures—human and nonhuman. Thus, from the Buddhist point of view order is not an inherent good in-itself. Ethically, order is good only when it prevents and lessens suffering. Society is an abstraction that cannot suffer. Only its inhabitants suffer. And if a less constrained society—less tightly organized—produces less suffering and greater happiness, then it is from a Buddhist perspective the more desirable society.

Taoism recognizes absolute harmony would be a condition in which conflict, thus suffering, is absent. As Freud would later recognize, Taoism understands that societies are an inherent source of conflict because societies necessarily impose a broad range of restraints upon people’s behavior. However, Taoism accepts that such conflicts are justified if they prevent greater, more harmful forms of conflict. Rivers sometimes must be restrained so they do not flood fields and communities. In the case of the restraints imposed upon Chinese women, however, a Taoist view would recognize that such restraints placed half the population in a condition that was repressive and conflicting. And, I believe that the Taoist would argue doing so vastly and unjustly increased suffering.

My point here is that Taoism does not consider harmony inherently good but good only in so far as it results in something beneficial, such as lessening harm to living creatures. Buddhism and Taoism offer different approaches to addressing the causes of suffering. Buddhism describes various causes and various solutions to suffering. Taoism tends to discuss order and disorder, chaos and discord as metaphysical principles that shape existence. Both philosophies are primarily concerned with human beings’ relationships within the mundane world—how they relate to one another, to society, and to nature. Their relationship to God is irrelevant—either because God doesn’t exist or is noticeably uninvolved in the goings-on of the mundane world. 

Inhumane Restraint

The focus and concern of the Abrahamic religions are antithetical to those of Confucianism, Taoism, and Buddhism. The former are obsessed with serving the transcendent reality of God, and the latter are concerned with humanity’s welfare in the here and now of the mundane world. As I said earlier, for the Abrahamic faith ethics and values are God-centered; for the Confucianism and Taoist-Buddhism, they are humanity-centered. The God of the Jews is not concerned with the suffering of humanity and only secondarily concerned with the suffering of his “chosen people” or servants. The following passage from Deuteronomy clearly expresses the Abrahamic god’s view toward those people who, for whatever reason, are classified as infidels: 

And when the Lord your God gives it [a conquered Canaanite city] into your hand, you shall put all its males to the sword, but the women and the little ones, the livestock, and everything else in the city, all its spoil, you shall take as plunder for yourselves. And you shall enjoy the spoil of your enemies, which the Lord your God has given you. Thus you shall do to all the cities that are very far from you, which are not cities of the nations here. But in the cities of these peoples that the Lord your God is giving you for an inheritance, you shall save alive nothing that breathes, but you shall devote them to complete destruction, the Hittites and the Amorites, the Canaanites and the Perizzites, the Hivites and the Jebusites, as the Lord your God has commanded, that they may not teach you to do according to all their abominable practices that they have done for their gods, and so you sin against the Lord your God. (20:13-18) 

The Jewish God (Yahweh, Christ-God, or Allah) sanctified conquest, slaughter, and plunder. At the time of the above event, Jews were not interested in converts. Pagans were an abomination to be destroyed or avoided. JudeoChristianity and Islam took conversion as their mission in the world (in accordance to Jesus’ Great Commission: Matthew 28:16-20). Thus they would spare the lives of infidels who surrendered their lives to Christ or Allah. Conversion—coerced or voluntary—is a religious form of foot-binding. It controls the development of the personality and thus its outcome. This is true of all religions to some degree, but shaping of the personality is especially severe among the Abrahamic religions because they are designed for one main purpose—to impose restraints upon the minds and behaviors of their followers. 

Suffering on God’s Behalf

Clearly, suffering producing conflict is a defining characteristic of the Abrahamic religions. They are essentially expressions of their God’s declarations of war upon all of humanity—including, ironically, one another. Conflict and suffering are not to be avoided but to be pursued. Suffering is not a byproduct in the Abrahamic religions but part of their methodology. Suffering on God’s behalf is considered meritorious. In addition, suffering is a primary enticement to inspire religious conversion, loyalty, and obedience. Even God and his angels are at war with fallen angels and the demons who were once pagan deities, though apparently spiritual entities such as angels can suffer no physical pain. However, most appalling is that this declaration of war upon humanity originated with God, not humans. I find the Abrahamic God to be a divine hypocrite given that he causes so much suffering for humanity while his divine nature precludes suffer. It is as if he watches from his celestial throne the bloodletting of religiously inspired gladiatorial games that he invented. 

Hateful Deities Mass Produce Hateful Believers

The natural tendency of believers is to internalize their God’s perspective toward the mundane world and humanity. It would not be logical to do otherwise since God embodies the ideal attitude toward the world and its inhabitants. This means members of the Abrahamic faiths internalize the extremely negative and hateful mindset of the Abrahamic God toward people who reject his religions for other religions or for a non-religious belief system. This is the reason why the histories of the Abrahamic religions are characterized by centuries of endless suffering-producing religious wars and sectarian conflicts. And even if JudeoChristianity or JudeoIslam were successful in converting humanity to their brand of Judaism, what kind of global society would be achieved? A totalitarian society that produces individuals in a manner similar to a factory’s production of widgets—which are designed and constructed in an automated fashion. Widgets are not allowed to constructive themselves because then they might become something that does not serve the interest of the corporation.

How radically different from the three Eastern spiritual philosophies that seek to create harmony and lessen suffering. Confucianism seeks social harmony as its ultimate goal. Such a goal could become totalitarian and suffering producing if its motivation was ideological or religious—subservience to an idea or to God. In both cases what is being served is an abstraction. Buddhism is humanistically centered upon reducing suffering in the world. This would include not causing animals unnecessary suffering. This is a moral good in itself but benefits humans as well. Callousness toward creatures that can suffer can be carried over to humans. In the Abrahamic religions living creatures have no inherent value. Their value is only utilitarian—to serve humans or to showcase God’s creative powers and beneficence toward humans. Until the destruction of the Temple, animal slaughter was a central part of Judaism’s mode of worship. And Yahweh was very finicky: 

Bulls or rams or goats are the animals that you may burn on the altar as sacrifices to please me [Yahweh]. You may also offer sacrifices voluntarily or because you made a promise, or because they are part of your regular religious ceremonies. The smell of the smoke from these sacrifices is pleasing to me. (Numbers 15:3) 

Taoism offers two simple yet remarkably effective principles that can enhance harmony thus lessen suffering. The first is to avoid thinking and acting in ways that contribute to disharmony thus greater suffering. The second is to take a laissez-faire or noninterference approach to how one relates to the world, especially toward people but toward nature generally. The underlying idea of noninterference is that interference unavoidably leads to some form of conflict thus suffering. Yet, since the main purpose of noninterference is to avoid creating suffering, the operating principle of noninterference can be suspended if doing so lessen some form of suffering-producing conflict. So rivers are damned if doing so is beneficial. And in this regard it’s worth mentioning that there is also an aesthetical motivation involved with noninterference. The beauty of a river is compromised when the river is damned. The bound foot is an aesthetic monstrosity. And war destroys the beauty of a functioning society. 

The Yin-Yang of Confucian Restraint

At first glance, Confucianism appears to be a philosophy of interference, and it is, but is so because the natural inclination of humans is to interfere, to engage in conflicting (combative, aggressive, antagonistic, contentious) behaviors that cause both suffering and ugliness. So Confucianism attempts to channel (restrain) human behavior so that it flows meaningfully and beneficially, rather than destructively. Still, the focus of Confucianism is on society—the creation of a humane society—rather than on the individual, thus ideally allowing all individuals the opportunity to flourish as individuals. The yin-yang image is revealing here. It expresses a delicate balance of conflicting tendencies. Aggressive, intemperate behaviors are reined in but not blocked. Thus, the yin and yang restrain one another in a relationship that allows both to flow harmoniously. In part, this is why the image itself is aesthetically flawless. From a Confucian Taoist-Buddhist perspective the yin-yang principle-image is the ideal to which both the individual and society should aspire. 

Judaism’s Religions of Disharmony

One of the noble attributes of yin-yang is harmonious tolerance. And it is tolerance that is so woefully lacking in the Abrahamic religions and in the secular version Marxism. Their various scriptures are declarations of war upon the world. Were any one of them completely successful, the result would not be a world of light but of darkness—a total negation of individual freedom. From the perspective of these religions the negation of freedom—to live and worship as one pleases—is a justified because all values are subordinate to God and subservient to his will. The goal of Judaistic religions is to subjugate gentiles, infidels, disbelievers, and heretics to God’s will through conversion, achieved through force or rhetorical persuasion.

The scriptures’ subterfuge is that the stated purpose is the salvation of the individual, but this is, in fact, not the main purpose at all—which is getting all of humanity to serve God’s will to be adored, worshiped, and obeyed. The rhetorical duplicity is revealed here in what the all-benevolent deity is saving humanity from: the punishment that he has prepared for those who, for whatever reason, do not adore, worship, and obey him. I find it quite unbecoming for God to behave like a spoiled child who threatens to throw a fit if he is not the center of attention. And even in the end, harmony will not be achieved. Judaism eventually has gentiles worshiping and serving Zion (Isaiah 61& 62). In JudeoChristianity and JudeoIslam harmony will be achieved for a few in Heaven at the expense of the majority being damned to exist in the painful pandemonium of Hell. And JudeoMarxism will achieve harmony by keeping people in constant state of oppression. 

Hell = Pure Disharmony

All three Abrahamic scriptures explicitly state that Yahweh’s, Christ’s, and Allah’s punishments are horrific, but without a doubt the Quran’s descriptions of Hell are the most vivid and terrifying. The following is just one of many references to hell, according to scholar Einar Thomassen nearly 500 under a variety of names): Those who reject God’s scripture and messengers will have “iron collars and chains around their necks…” be “dragged into scalding water, and then burned in the Fire” (40:71-72). It is a strange God who offers salvation from death yet will condemn most of humanity to an eternity of the most exquisite suffering. It’s difficult not to suspect that his motivation is not to save human beings from death, which in-itself is a state free from suffering. And one must ask, “Is this the best that God could do?” One would think—logically—that the all-powerful, all-wise, all-good creator of the Universe would have avoided the dungeon of eternal torment in his plan for humanity.

Hell is fundamentally immoral. Civilized human beings condemn the use of dungeons and tortures. Shouldn’t God do the same? What is moral for humanity should be moral for God, but isn’t because God places himself (actually his believers do) above human morality—that is to say, human-centered morality. The irony here is that nature comes across as being morally superior to God. Nature does not engage in revenge, torture, or punishment after death. Human nature, however, does (postmortem torture being imagined), which suggests that there is an aspect of human nature that is unnatural (perverse).

As Epicurus and his devotee Lucretius point out, the only suffering caused by death occurs while a person is alive, and that is the fear of death. As the Quran repeatedly states, Allah must give life to the dead if he is going to reward or punish them. The dead no longer exist, and existence is a sine qua non for suffering to occur. So what is his motivation? I offer that God needs Hell for leverage, to frighten humanity into adoring, worshiping, and obeying him. And to be honest, what scripture makes abundantly clear is that the most appealing aspect of going to Heaven is avoiding going to Hell—not avoiding death, not being in God’s presence, not living forever like a tourist in a five star luxury resort.^[11] 

Hell’s Injustice

And it is also revealing that according to the Quran sinners and the sinless will be found in the fires of Hell. For example, Marie Curie, winner of two Nobel Prizes, “known for her honesty and moderate lifestyle,” was an agnostic, which would qualify her as a disbeliever destined for the blazing fire. And had she not been an agnostic, she would have been a Catholic, thus believing God has a son. It was, by the way, the deaths of her mother and sister that caused her to give up her faith. At least in Hell she will be with her father, who was an atheist. From a purely humanistic perspective, Marie Curie was a saint of a human being, not a sinner. Thus, the Islamic Hell will be filled with virtuous people whose only sin was to misconceive or disbelieve Allah.^[12] These innocent people will be accompanied by the most heinous of sinners who for whatever reason were not devotees of Allah—such as Hitler, Stalin, and Genghis Khan who was responsible for massacring millions of people. (And a question that should come to mind is where was omniscient, omnibenevolent God—humanity’s helpmate—while this horror was occurring?) 

Criminals in Paradise

Regardless of how horrific a Muslim’s crimes are against humanity, being a devout believer is like having a get out of jail free card. The multitude of Muslims in our day and age who are slaughtering men, women, and children can expect to have their crimes forgiven and be sent to a stream-laden garden paradise. In fact, if slaughtering those men, women, and children was done on the behalf of Muhammad or Allah, then no crime was committed. And the same can be said for the fate of the most evil Christians—and they were copious in the past^[13]—who seek forgiveness for earthly sins.^[14] Burning in the Islamic Hell along with Curie will be many religious true believers who mistakenly believed that God has as son (Christ) or worse yet daughters or that God has partners (other deities). In light of the Quran, any (male) Muslim would prefer a son to a daughter. When an Arab male is told that his wife has given birth to a daughter, “his face grows dark and he is filled with gloom” (43:17). Odd given that Curie alone won the half as many Nobel Prizes in science as 1.8 million Muslims have won: two. 

Hell: God’s Sacrificial Altar

What are the people who are sent to Hell for rejecting God? They are sacrifices to God. Sacrificing animals and humans to God has a very long history. The pagans were the first—and last, I believe—to engage in the bloody business. Judaism originated as a pagan religion and the Jewish Temple was a sacrificial slaughterhouse. But the Jews had to give up sacrificial slaughter once the Romans destroyed the Temple. JudeoChristians turned the sacrificial tradition on its head by having God himself being sacrificed on the cross for humanity’s benefit.^[15] In his Five Stages of Greek Religion Gilbert Murray says that JudeoChristians were “pinning their faith to the approaching end of the world by fire. They announced the end of the world as near, and they rejoiced in the prospect of its destruction” (189-190). Strange indeed is a religion whose members long for the destruction of the world that would also “plunge the rest of mankind [nonChristians] in everlasting torment” (190).

The dominant theme of JudeoIslam, at least according to the Quran, is the end of the world when billions of dead will be exhumed (a ghastly sight to say the least) and judged, “the Day when the sky brings forth clouds of smoke for all to see” (44:10). For JudeoIslam nothing matters except for the Day of Reckoning. Even obedience to God is subsumed as simply the necessary condition for avoiding the “terrible torment” of Hell. Thus, what we have here is the entire mundane world being horrifically destroyed on God’s behalf—so that he can reward his servants and punish disbelievers. Any sensible person can only hope that the disbelievers are correct. 

The (Subconscious) Motivation behind the Abrahamic Religions

What motivated the ancient Jews to invent a god that would condone and encourage their aggressive tendencies? Perhaps to inspire the underdog to victory? If God is one’s ally then victory would be thought to be certain. This was common belief in the ancient world and even today. Ancient Judaism, however, did more. It morally legitimizes hatred of and aggression against others. As the ancient Jews marched into Canaan they could feel better about themselves if they believed their mission of conquest was a divinely sanctioned moral mission. They were not there simply to take land and booty that did not belong to them but to destroy evil people. The land and booty was their reward. And the “in God’s name” rationalization for conquest, plunder, and pillage would be adopted by Judaism’s religious offspring JudeoChristianity and JudeoIslam.

JudeoChristianity originated as a war against the all-powerful pagan Roman Empire. Jesus said “Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I have not come to bring peace, but a sword” (Matthew 10:34). He says to his disciples, “Behold, I am sending you out as sheep in the midst of wolves” (10:16). His view of the world is very negative but not altogether incorrect. The wolf lives in men, yet Jesus is also sending his disciples on a wolf-like mission of conquest. Like him, they are wolves in sheep’s clothing who seek to devourer the pagan world. At the time, his only weapon was words, yet his followers would become wolves with teeth once they acquire the military might of Rome. JudeoChristianity was adopted by a Roman Emperor Constantine, beloved by Christians, for the sole purpose of achieving victory in battle. Both the New Testament and the Quran are scriptures used as weapons. What I am arguing is that what one finds in the Abrahamic religions is barbarism in the fancy dress of saintliness woven from religious rhetoric. 

La Bête Masculine

As the Abrahamic religions abundantly illustrate—men are flawed. And most flawed of all is their masculine Abrahamic deity, who is nothing more than the deification of masculinity. In The Sun Also Rises perhaps the reason Jake is not allowed to have Brett is that he is flawed. Symbolically, male aggression makes unachievable for humanity the beautiful world Brett represents. The Old Testament reveals ancient Jews longing for paradise, but they always seek it through conquest and aggression. The same occurs in JudeoChristianity, JudeoIslam, and JudeoMarxism; yet violence cannot achieve utopia because it is the very thing that makes it impossible. Men like Basho and Huizong are, like postwar Jake, impotent against the destructive forces manifested in male aggression. Male aggression continually throws the human world out of balance, so that humanity rarely comes even close to achieving the state of harmony expressed by the yin-yang sign.

The beauty-loving Huizong clearly illustrates the impotency of men like himself, who, whether they admit it or not, have allowed the life-affirming feminine to influence their thinking thus their way of relating to the world. Such men rarely become the movers and shakers of politics and commerce (which usually requires some degree of aggressive willfulness). And when they do succeed in creating a golden age as Huizong did, it never lasts. Whereas Huizong “founded an art museum richer in masterpieces than any collection that China has ever again known” (Our Oriental Heritage, Durant 750), the Jurchen barbarians destroyed nearly all its thousands of paintings. After weeks of looting, rapes, arson, and executions, the barbarians took Huizong prisoner. He would endure eight years of poverty and disgrace before he died in captivity.

Eight centuries later the “civilized” French and British would engage in similar destruction, but they chose to steal rather than destroy Chinese artifacts. Huizong’s painting Five-colored Parakeet on a Branch of Apricot Blossom was originally preserved in the Old Summer Palace (in Chinese know as Yuan Ming Yuan, Gardens of Perfect Brightness). The palace was ransacked and destroyed by French and British soldiers during the Opium War in 1860. Today the painting is held captive in Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts. 

Transcending la Bête Masculine

Like all philosophers, scientists, and intellectuals generally, Huizong sought an appreciative understanding of the world and like artists he was inspired by beauty, its mystery, and its expression in nature. He sought to create a society that embodied the principles of beauty, a society that was civilized, cultured, and sophisticated—all that was contrary to the barbarism that encircled and would eventually destroy his aspiring utopia. Basho was of the same temperament as Huizong but was not saddled with political responsibilities. Whereas Huizong’s Taoist approach to understanding and appreciating life was very artificial, the product of instruction, discipline, and training, Basho’s Zen (Taoist-Buddhist) approach was spontaneous and natural.

Like Huizong, Basho was essentially an artist observer but unlike Huizong he could achieve oneness with what he observed. Unlike Huizong or most painters and poets, Basho crossed the divide between the artist and his or her object. At the moment, I have in mind Wordsworth’s “Solitary Reaper.” Whereas the solitary highland lass is at one with nature, even of nature, the poet remains appreciative outsider. Basho was able to transcend the divide between observer and observed yet remain an artist. He not only achieved oneness with nature in the way Wordsworth’s reaper embodies as a creature of nature living as such, but did so as a contemplator at one with the object he contemplates. The reaper, of course, never had to overcome an alienating separation between herself and nature that results from forms of social conditioning that separate the human self from the natural world. Basho, on the other hand, had to make an effort to shake off his artificial (objective?) self to achieve a sympathetic oneness with the things, creatures, and people who inhabit the natural world, the primordial world.

He did this in two ways. First, he became a creature of nature, not in the way that the farmers, fishermen, or hermits he describes are such creatures but as a wanderer detached from the artificiality of civilization. Basho reminds me of an autumn leaf, blown this way and that down whatever path that struck his fancy—or perhaps as a Wordsworthian cloud. By doing this he shook himself loose not only from civilization but also from the inclination to intrude or interfere. In accordance with a Taoist sensibility, Basho adopted toward the world and its inhabitants a passive, receptive relationship of noninterference.

What Basho did was to invite into his subjective, appreciative self the be-ing (or existential flow) of the mundane world. Occasionally he judges (expressions of disappointment with human behavior) but rarely so and never harshly. Perhaps this is because he accepted that from a moral (thus artificial) perspective humans are naturally flawed.^[16] His response to human misbehavior is often tinged with sorrow. Basho is a joyful pessimist. Even Buddha who seems to have achieved perfect detachment was acutely aware of human suffering and clearly understood that most human suffering is self-inflicted. 

Basho’s and Huizong’s Loving Oneness

To me what is most revelatory about Basho’s poems and travelogues is his affectionate unity with all things. Like Huizong, Basho relates to the world—both natural and human—with a deep sense of equality. When one views the Five-colored Parakeet on Blossoming Apricot Tree one senses that the bird and the tree are natural treasures possessing beauty that humans can aspire to but never truly equal. Huizong’s painting and Basho’s poems are expressions of reverence toward nature’s creatures—and human creatures when they behave with the same stoical dignity of the least of nature’s creatures. The folly of humanity is to equate greatness with pomp and circumstance, with military victories and the building of empires, with great accumulations of wealth and power. As Basho makes clear, in the sweep of time the greatest empires are as fragile as any of nature’s creatures and in beauty are their inferiors.

Basho’s relationship to the world is aesthetic rather than scientific; and I am tempted to say it is more personal. He loves nature’s creations. One knows this because only love could inspire him to endure hardships in order to seek out nature’s natural treasures; only love could inspire his poems and paintings. Yet, today I believe many natural scientists love the entities they study as much as Basho did. What both also share and reveal is the role of the subject-object relationship as a profound source of meaning for human existence, and perhaps humanity’s unique contribution to existence as appreciative observers and interpreters. What Basho achieved that was so remarkable is intimate oneness with the beings of Being, nature’s creations, especially her creatures. Basho’s heartfelt appreciation is due in part to his acute awareness of the finitude that he and all things share in common. For all entities existence is a momentary event. Like the ancient Greeks, Basho recognized that the finitude of all things is the basis for existence being essentially a tragic affair. What Basho offers as a revelation is radically contrary and superior to the so-called revelations of the Abrahamic religions: a loving appreciation of the mundane world and all its inhabitants. Basho’s way of life is essentially religious because it embodies an attitude of piety toward the natural world and its inhabitants. 

Worshiping the Great No-Thing

The Abrahamic religions worship God as humanity’s creator and provider. But that which they worship is a figment of the Hebrew imagination. It is an entity that cannot be experienced but only imagined. We know without any doubt whatsoever how the nature gave birth to the Universe we live in, to the earth we live on, to the sun and moon and planets of our solar system. We know how nature gave birth to the human species and how nature (via mothers) gives birth to individuals. Allah hates those who doubt him, but there is no reason not to doubt the existence of the Abrahamic god or other gods. And God did not give humanity morality; humans invented morality as a way of bestowing upon humans the right not to be treated arbitrarily. Today, we see exactly how humans bring about moral principles with the emergence of a new moral perspective that has accorded animals certain moral rights. In addition, considered from a moral perspective, the attitude and behavior of the Abrahamic god are atrocious. 

Basho’s Religion of Equality

The religious attitude displayed by Basho does not worship nature as the ancient pagans did, but reveres it. There is no subordination of the self to nature. It is a relationship of equality: the observer and the observed are essential to realization of each’s value. Using the Five-colored Parakeet on Blossoming Apricot Tree as an illustration (of what many of Basho’s poems do), the beauty and value of the parakeet painted by Huizong is realized through Huizong’s presence. Huizong does not worship the bird but reveres it. And that reverence characterizes the manner in which he and Basho relate to the world—both human and natural.

In the Quran God says, “The life of this world is but play and amusement” (47:36). Only a transcendent being that need not struggle to survive, that never suffers emotional or physical pain, and that never dies could say such a thing about life in the mundane world. Basho knew better. That is why Basho’s relationship to the world is full of sympathy. The word sympathy comes from the Greek, meaning “having a fellow feeling.” It is logically impossible for God to have a sympathetic relationship to humanity. He (more accurately “it”) is totally other, totally alien.^[17] He/it is no more capable of relating sympathetically to humans than gravity is. This is to say that if God did have a relationship to humans it would be something like gravity, influential but without emotion or awareness, both of which are attributes that only conscious entities can possess. Not being a thing, God doesn’t even qualify for the existential status that gravity possesses. 

The Mundane World: Means or End?

It is only within the context of the Abrahamic religions that life in the mundane world is a game, a pastime, a diversion, a means to an end, a road rather than a destination, a preliminary event, a test only, etc. God and only God is the raisons d'être for the existence of the Universe and all its contents, in particular humanity. The Abrahamic god created humanity solely that he might be revered, feared, and worshipped; thus, from God’s perspective any meaning not related to him is trivial. The Quran makes it vividly and repetitively clear that the purpose of the Universe’s existence is Judgment Day—when god will judge humans according to their allegiance and obedience to him.

But, of course, humans such as Basho see the mundane world and its creatures differently. They are an end in themselves, the only raisons d'être for existence, in part because they are sum total of existence, but also because they possess beauty (a quality not available to a divine No-thing) and mystery. They are, as well, the family of finitude, to which humans belong. The Zenist Taoist-Buddhist tradition to which Basho belongs reveres existence rather than transcendence. The mystery, suffering, and beauty of each individual being, which is the focus of the Taoist-Buddhist tradition, are what Basho’s poetry illustrates. What Basho understood is that judgment day is each and every day, but it is not so much a day of judgment as it is a day of opportunity and appreciation—appreciation not of a divine No-thing but of one’s fellow beings who, like oneself, are here today and gone tomorrow, and once gone always gone.

Unlike the mentality of the Abrahamic religions, for Basho being a witness to the world, not God, is humanity’s most profound calling. God is not our father, mother, friend, or companion. Look as one may, he is nowhere to be found; but everywhere are to be found family, friends, and companions. When Basho lost his house to fire, a new house was built for him by his friends and disciples—not by God. When I see family, friends, and strangers sacrifice their time, money, effort, and even their lives to rescue others from dire circumstances, God’s promise of a better life to come seems hollow. 

Learning from Basho

We learn from Basho the proper way to relate to the world—with an attitude of appreciative reverence. Nowhere in Basho’s worldview will one find hatred. Love is the defining theme of Basho’s relationship to world. Nowhere do you find Basho damning others for what they do or believe. In other words, nowhere in Basho does one find the negativity toward the things and creatures of the mundane world that is so pervasive in Abrahamic scriptures. Reading Basho’s poems instills in the reader a peaceful tranquility and a renewed feeling of reverence toward mundane world. One learns from Basho that to exist in the mundane world for that brief moment that is one’s lifetime is a rarely given privilege to be an appreciative witness to the be-ing of the world.

Why does one not find in Basho the bitterness that pervades the Abrahamic scriptures? Part of the answer is found in the spiritual philosophies—Taoism and Buddhism—that guided Basho’s thinking and infuse his art and poetry. The mundane world is brimming with sublimity and beauty. Hatred does not come naturally to nature. It is essentially the product of the human mind inspired by human behavior and deified in the Abrahamic religions. When one who has grown up in the Abrahamic tradition accompanies Basho on one of his pilgrimages into nature, one leaves behind notions of sin, damnation, righteousness, self-loathing and contempt for the mundane. For such a person, following Basho is a return to reality and to a renewed appreciation of life in this world. 

The Bond of Finitude

Carl Sagan tells us in his television series Cosmos that “the earth and every living thing are made of star-stuff.”^[18] That is a reminder of our profound affinity to nature and the mundane world. It is us and we are it. Basho’s fellow-feeling (agape^[19]) toward all of nature’s creations must be rooted in the understanding that as nature’s offspring we are all siblings. But I also believe that Basho felt a closeness to all things because of their finitude. Because they are finite, all things eventually perish and all creatures suffer to some degree. It is clear to me from his poetry that Basho was most sensitive to the condition of finitude. Like poet Alfred Tennyson Basho lost his closest friend, Todo Yoshitada, and writing companion at a young age. At the age of nine Basho had been assigned to the young nobleman as a study companion. Yoshitada was only eleven years old, yet in every way he was Basho’s mentor. He taught Basho to write linked verse. The two friends shared a love of poetry as they grew into manhood together. Yoshitada’s death at the age of twenty-five could not have been other than a life changing event for Basho. Yoshitada was destined to replace his father as the governor of the providence. That a young man so full of promise could be so easily struck down must have impressed upon Basho the frailty of finitude. However, Basho, unlike the proto-Darwinian Tennyson, believed that the sacred resides in the world that surrounded him and nowhere else. 

Jesus: Once a Friend but No Longer

I find strange the claim that we have a friend in Jesus. To me the statement is meaningless. In what way is Jesus a friend? Unquestionably, the historical Jesus was a friend to many people, those he helped and defended and with those who shared his views, but not to all. In his The Life of Jesus Ernest Renan quotes passages from the Gospels that Christians either ignore or accept with indifference, such as ‘I came not to send peace, but a sword’ and ‘I am come to set a man at variance against his father, and the daughter against her mother, and the daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law. And a man’s foes shall be they of his own household. I am come to send fire on the earth’ (293). He was also no friend of the Earth according to Renan: “Everything which attaches man to earth, everything which draws him aside from heaven was to be avoided” (285).

I also question the claims that the postmortem, mythical supernatural Jesus can be a friend. How can a ghost be one’s friend? True friendship is found in Tennyson’s relationship with his friend Arthur Hallam and in Basho’s relationship with his friend Yoshitada. A character in a story can never be a friend except in an odd sense, such as Elwood P. Dowd’s friendship with an imaginary rabbit in the movie Harvey. And certainly the god of the Old Testament and Quran are incapable of having friends. What they have are subjects.

One of my favorite poems by Basho describes a crow on a bare branch: 

On a withered branch

A crow has alighted:

Nightfall in autumn. (Taken from oaks.nvg.org.) 

The poem was written five years before Basho’s death. It suggests the endings that all finitude must face. In his Basho and his Interpreters Ueda provides a painting by Morikawa Kyoriku that was inspired by the poem. The crow in the painting is raggedy looking as if it too is approaching the end of its life. The crow lacks the enchanting beauty of Huizong’s parakeet, yet it is painted with affection. To an aged person the bird expresses the weariness of growing old after having lived a long life filled with wonder, pleasure, happiness, suffering, loss, and tragedy. Poetry was Basho’s branch from which he observed and meditated on life. The crow and the artist are one joined together by the artist’s sympathy. 

A Tragically Missed Opportunity

Had humanity adopted Basho’s appreciative, non-aggressive approach to living in the mundane world it might have achieved paradise for itself, and Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises would never have been written because the Great War would not have occurred and atomic bombs would not have been invented and dropped on Basho’s homeland. Instead, huMANity chose to continue to make peace in this world an impossible dream. The solution offered by the Abrahamic religions—even as they declared war upon the world—was a postmortem peaceful kingdom, thus religions that long for death. Eastern religions have been often called by the West religions of resignation, yet giving up on peace is a dominant theme of the Abrahamic religions. They assume that humanity is incapable of creating a peaceful paradise for itself and thus must depend upon God to do so—but only in the afterlife and only for his servants. This is Abrahamic religions’ self-defeating message to humanity: Don’t bother to do what only God can do.

Karl Marx rejected the defeatist gospel of the Abrahamic religions. He believed that humanity could do what God refused to do, create on earth a humane society. Unfortunately, like its religious predecessors, Marxism also declared war upon the world inspiring endless bloodletting and creating a Hell on earth for those trapped in the Marxist totalitarian dystopias. And after two world wars and the Holocaust certain nations jettisoned nay-saying superstition and ideological extremism and created in a rather short period of time societies that are truly humane. The Nordic countries of Europe, Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden, have been especially successful in creating a high quality of life for their citizens, and they are countries that rank among the lowest in church attendance.

But perhaps Basho’s greatest revelation—revealed to us through his poetry—is that the mundane world is full of enchanting miracles that make existence in the mundane world a heavenly experience for those people who take the time to understand and appreciate them. A paradisiac afterlife is not necessary since nature has already provide the best possible of all worlds. Nature, not God, offered humanity a Promise Land. If nature’s promise land turned out to be more hellish than heavenly, that has been mostly humanity’s doing. Human beings have proven themselves very good at ruining a good thing for themselves and for others. In fact, the notions of Heaven and Hell would be unnecessary inventions if evil people didn’t ruin the good life for good people in the here and now. But since they do, those good people can only hope that there will be an afterlife where they will get a second chance at living a good life and where the evil people, who made the good life impossible for good people, will be elsewhere receiving their just punishment. But all that is wishful thinking. And really adults know that because they constantly tell their children not to squander their youth or waste their lives because adults know their children will not get a second chance. 

Heaven: Dwelling Place of the Dead

And let’s face it, even if Heaven or Paradise actually exists, it is not a place where people live but where they simply exist. In the Book of Revelation existence in Heaven is a static state, something like being in a movie theater: one does nothing but enjoy the spectacle of the Lord. The first earth—the mundane world filled with nature’s wonders—will have passed away and there will be no more sea (21:1), thus no boating, no fishing, no swimming, no surfing, no more magnificent seascape sunrises and sunsets. The entire purpose of life on earth was so that God could gather the faithful before him on a new earth. Apparently there will be one city, a temple city where the Father and Son will be worshipped, an inorganic city made of jasper, sapphire, chalcedony, emerald, pure gold, etc. There will be a river of life and a Monsanto tree that produces twelve kinds of fruit (22:1-2). There will be no sun or moon (21:23). I’m sorry but this is not life, not living; it is existing like divinely animated zombies.

What the Quran offers is something like an eternal banquet where men will be “comfortably seated on couches arranged in rows” paired “with beautiful-eyed maidens.” They will eat all the “fruit or meat they desire” and drink from cups a pleasant beverage “that does not lead to idle talk or sin.” And they will be waited on by “devoted youths.” They will “turn to one another and say, ‘When we were still with our families we used to live in fear—God has been gracious to us and saved us from the torment of intense heat’” (52:20-28). This is not living either, but existing in epicurean indulgence. And what did they fear when still with their families? They feared the fire that Allah had prepared for them. Thus, Allah uses terror to get people to surrender their lives to him, rather than rational argument.

Living is doing and struggling, living is an adventure, accomplishing of goals and projects, getting educated, working, falling in love, raising a family, exploring, investigating, creating and inventing. There is such a thing as a living death usually associated with the passive indulgences, drug addiction, alcoholism, sex addiction, and other forms of passive intoxication. In the Odyssey Homer describes men who no longer live but only exist. They pass the time in a lethargic state of intoxication induced by the lotus plant. The main characteristic of the lotus plant is that it is so delicious or intoxicating that the eater enters into a state of perfect satisfaction and loses the desire or will to do anything else. The afterlife of the later Abrahamic religions seems very similar. In the Book of Revelation the intoxicant is the glorious vision of Christianity’s two gods Yahweh and Christ (2 ≠1). In the Quran the intoxicants are sensual pleasures of limited access, apparently only food. These existential states might be pleasurable but they are not living. In Homer the antithesis of the lotus eaters is Odysseus—farmer, husband, father, reluctant warrior, and voyager.

And there is no better illustration of living than the life of that restless, wayfaring poet philosopher Matsuo Basho. 

On the Nature of Things

Above I said that had the humanity adopted Basho’s appreciative, non-aggressive approach to living in the mundane world it might have achieved paradise for itself. The same can be said for Epicurus’ approach to living and understanding life. Three centuries before Jesus, about a thousand years before Muhammad, and about two thousand years before Basho, Epicurus offer a way of thinking based on reason and a way of life devoted to minimizing suffering. He is thought of as being an ego-centric philosopher of self-indulgence. Nothing could be further from the truth. His philosophy is based on the notion that all forms of life that can feel seek to live pleasurably and avoid pain. Like most Greek philosophers he believed that the ideal life—the happy life—is one that is lived in moderation.

His hedonistic philosophy of life was not purely selfish. He himself devoted his life to helping other people to live in such a way as to avoid causing themselves unnecessary mental and physical pain. Clearly, helping others gave him pleasure.^[20] I am not claiming that Epicurus’ ethical teachings are the most noble. They are self-centered rather than other-centered, but that did not make them selfish in the negative sense. He clearly was offering to everyone a way of life that brought happiness. What Epicurus sought was a salubrious (favorable to health of mind and body) method of living that individuals like himself could adopt. For Epicurus the good life was a happy life and the happy life was pleasant, which required minimizing thoughts and behaviors that cause one suffering. The optimal good life requires tranquility of mind. As an ethicist Epicurus was primarily interested in value, in particular that which is the good life, summum bonum, the highest good in life. The highest good he believed was pleasure, but there are many sorts of pleasures, some better than others. Of those, Epicurus believed that what produced tranquility of mind was the highest pleasure.^[21]

Unseemly Selfishness and Freedom Denying

As far as I can see all the Abrahamic religions appeal to their members’ selfishness. In the Old Testament the appeal is the Promise Land taken from the Canaanites. Selfishly immoral actions—conquest, carnage, and pillage—are rewarded. Basically, God is an ally in all this. His central role is to be called upon by the Jewish people whenever they are threatened by an enemy even though they are often the enemy. What moderates the selfishness expressed in the Old Testament is the tribal concern of the Jewish people for one another. Moses might be a tyrant but he is a tyrant committed to the welfare of his people. When necessary, he will even stand up to God on behalf of his people. Still, their attitude toward others is one of selfishness.

The motivation of the historical Jesus was altruistic, or was it? He did devote is life to healing people spiritually, psychologically, and physically. I do not believe that his motivation was self-aggrandizing conquest. That will come later with Apostle Paul. The historical Jesus came as a prophet, but it’s difficult to believe that the God he claimed to represent was the cruelly selfish Yahweh. The deity he was channeling was transformed by his infinitely more human nature. The mythic Jesus, the creation of Apostle Paul and the writers of the Gospels, on the other hand, is a grandiosely narcissistic subjugator who sought not to conquer land and acquire booty but to conquer souls and minds, to exorcise all of humanity so that it would become absolutely subservient not so much to him but to his ideology.

What occurred, I would argue, is that the mind of Jesus became imprisoned by his ideology. Referencing Richard Dawkins’ “Viruses of the Mind,” an ideology infects the mind, taking control of it in the way software programs take control of the minds of robots. Religious institutions continue to propagate the virus by conversion and/or coercion and by prohibiting conflicting ideas. Jesus’ own ideology took control of him. As a result, his goal became to enslave everyone to his ideology. The scripture of the ancient Jews is unique because it illustrates in narrative fashion how an ideology (religious in this case) takes control of a people by transforming their culture and capturing their minds.

The Old Testament describes in allegorical fashion how the Moses comes upon his big ideological idea for his people via communication with Yahweh. In his Moses and Monotheism Sigmund Freud attempts a historical explanation, saying, “if Moses was an Egyptian and if he transmitted to the Jews his own religion, then it was that of Ikhnaton, the Aton religion” (27). The point here is that Judaism is a composite of elements from other religions, as explained by historians such as William H. McNeill (The Rise of the West) and Ninian Smart (The Religious Experience of Mankind). The same is true for Christianity, which absorb elements from Greek philosophy. Islam was fashioned from Judaism. All three religions are nothing more than collections of ideas. The supernatural elements they refer to are never present other than in stories. The pursuit of religious understanding for a minister or a layperson is always done through words, words, and more words. Moses was able to speak with God, Jesus was able to speak with God and Satan, and Muhamad was able to carry on a long conversation with angel Gabriel. But everyone else has to rely on words—essentially the words of scripture and priests.

The twentieth century witnessed how a secular ideology, Marxism, Marx in the role of a modern Moses but whose idea, like Christianity and Islam, sought the eradication of cultures worldwide to be replaced with utopian communism. Once the ideology came to life, like Victor Frankenstein’s creature (yes, words can become monsters), it became a juggernaut crushing traditional cultures and societies out of existence and killing untold millions of people. The indoctrinated converts became zombies whose minds were infected by the ideology. An example would be China’s Red Guards that attacked the “Four Olds” of Chinese society: old customs, old culture, old habits, and old ideas. “The most gruesome aspects of the campaign included numerous incidents of torture, murder, and public humiliation” (“Red Guards,” Wikipedia). The Old Testament describes the Israelites doing the same to the Canaanite pagans. Catherine Nixey describes in The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World Christians doing the same. And in Jihad in the West: Muslim conquests from the 7th to the 21st centuries, Paul Fregosi describes Muhammad and his Muslim soldiers going on the warpath agains pagans, Jews, and Christians.

 

Aspects of Ideology

Four important aspects of ideology have been illustrated. First, ideology becomes autonomous via political institutions and converts to the ideology. Second, the ideology nihilistically devalues the moral rights and value of nonmembers, thus they can be robbed, tortured, murdered, and annihilated from existence via ethnic cleansing. Third, the ideology seeks to create a monoculture within a society or worldwide if it has global ambitions which all four of the ideologies discussed have.* Fourth, the ideology negates autonomous thinking by imposing ideological restraints on thinking, meaning limited or prohibited access to other ideas and restricted use of reason and expression of ideas. Believers become mental prisoners of the ideology that determines how they think, perceive, and behave toward themselves and others.

*The exception seems to be Israel of the Torah or early Israel. However, the book of Isaiah (60-66) does suggest that Judaism developed global ambitions: “Nations will come to your light, and kings to the brightness of your dawn.... the wealth on the seas will be brought to you.... foreigners will rebuild your walls....you will feed on the wealth of nations....and the people of all nations and languages...will come and see my glory,” and so on. Ninian Smart says, “The hopes of the Jews were fastened on the possibility of a national restoration, when Israel would become a light to illuminate the world” (289). It did just that, but its “light” darkened the world. 

Guiding Philosophies that Encourage Self-realization

Religions need not be ideological. They can guide rather than control. The spiritual philosophies of Buddhism and Taoism seek to guide a person’s thinking and behavior, not to shackle his or her life and mind to a particular ideology. A guiding principle of Buddhism is not to cause suffering, thus using physical and mental forms of coercion are prohibited. A central principle of Taoism is to avoid causing conflict and disharmony. In addition, Taoism emphasizes the flow state or the “Wu Wei.” This is the opposite of the confining, controlling, containing, and restricting influences that religious and secular ideologies have on individuals and societies. The ideology serves as a template for the individual and the society. In such societies the  we-self overrides the I-self. In a humane society the I-self is allowed and even encouraged to flourish (via self-realization) as long as it respects the autonomy of others.

The ancient Greeks flourished in science, philosophy, and the arts because they had no ideology controlling their thinking and behavior. Edith Hamilton says in The Greek Way that “Greek religion was developed not by priests nor by prophets nor by saints nor by any set of men [my emphasis] who were held to be removed from the ordinary run of life.... It was developed by poets and artists and philosophers.... The Greeks had no authoritative Sacred Book, no creed, no ten commandments, no dogmas. The very idea of orthodoxy was unknown to them.... In Greece there was no dominating church or creed” (174-175). As a result, the Greek religion was a celebration of life, not of God. That is why after the Christians closed the Greek schools, including Plato’s Academy, and destroyed libraries progress ceased in Western society during a period call the Dark Ages the 900 years of European history when the Church had complete control over society and its members. As Hamilton implies, it was relying on single book for one’s worldview and knowledge about world that brought individual and social progress to a standstill. The Dark Ages was a static age. Self-realization and social progress were limited by the demands of scripture. The book was the Torah for Jews, the Bible for Christians, the Quran for Muslims, and two centuries later Das Kapital for Communists. During a period of about a thousand years, the total intellectual accomplishment didn’t equal the work of a single Greek philosopher—Aristotle. 

The Selfishness of Christianity

The primary motivation of JudeoChristians is clearly selfish: Christ is their divine Sugar Daddy. And what could be more ego-inflating than standing before the people as God’s servant? Whereas traditional Jews were concern primarily with the welfare of their people, the concern of JudeoChristians primarily with themselves as individuals and their immediate loved ones. They want Jesus to be a friend in this world, a go-to deity when needed. Jesus even offers to cleanse really evil people of their guilt, so they can once again feel good about themselves: “Once a sinner but now I’m saved.” But more than anything JudeoChristians want to live forever. They are greedy for everlasting life. Living forever in Heaven is the big prize offered by mythic Jesus Christ, but he also warns that those who do not follow him will end up in the fires of Hell. I have little doubt that the Hell option was added to Heaven as a negative incentive. Thus, JudeoChristianity is all about the self. Its greatest appeal is to the selfishness of the individual. Not only does the JudeoChristian get to live forever but is able to boast in this life that he or she serves God, creator of the Universe, and is one of his chosen. 

The Selfishness of Islam

I find Islam to be the most selfishly motivated of the Abrahamic religions, and I will use the sura titled “Man” to make my point. The sura begins with the common refrain of Allah’s threatening disbelievers with the horrors of Hell: “Lo! We have prepared for disbelievers manacles and iron collars, and a blazing fire” (76:4). Then comes the reward true believers who “fulfil their vows; they fear a day of widespread woes; they give food to the poor, the orphan, and the captive” (76:7-8). What the true believers say is revealing: “We feed you for the sake of God alone: we seek neither recompense nor thanks from you” (76:9). As it turns out, that they refuse expressions of gratitude does not mean their motive is altruistic. It’s not at all; it’s purely selfish. They do it for the lord, they say, because “We fear the Day of our Lord—a woefully grim Day” (76:10). “So God will save them from the woes of that Day, give them radiance and gladness, and reward them for their steadfastness” (76:11-12). What we see is that Muhammad adopted the stick and carrot approach of JudeoChristianity.^[22] So first of all the big motivation is to avoid the manacles, iron collars, and blazing fire. 

Seeking the Pleasures of Paradise

The second motivation is everlasting life of sensual pleasure described as follows: 

They will sit on couches, feeling neither scorching heat nor biting cold, with shady branches spread above them and clusters of fruit hanging close at hand. They will be served with silver plates and gleaming silver goblets according to their fancy, and they will be given a drink infused with ginger from a spring called Salsabil. Everlasting youths will attend them—if you could see them, you would think they were scattered pearls—and if you were to look around, you would see bliss and great wealth: they will wear garments of green silk and brocade; they will be adorned with silver bracelets, and their Lord will give them pure drink.” (76:13-21) 

“This is your reward” (76:22) concludes the passage. The following sura says that “those who took heed of God” will be told, “Eat and drink to your hearts’ content as a reward for your deeds” (77:43). The motivation here is clearly selfish: to live forever, to avoid Allah horrific tortures in Hell, and to enjoy an eternity in a garden of delights. All that is required is to “bow down before” God and “glorify him” (76:26). The last line of the “Man” sura is “He… has prepared a painful torment for the disbelievers.” 

Booty

In discussing the origin of Islam historian Montgomery Watt considers the rise of Muhammadanism from a materialistic point of view. I would include the acquisition of booting as a material consideration given it was an economic activity Muhammad’s followers. And I would suggest that Muhammadanism took advantage of discrepancy between the haves and the have-nots, between the creators of wealth and the takers of wealth, between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. The Quran expresses a proto-Marxist ideology: 

You do not urge the feeding of the poor... And you love wealth with immense love. (89:18& 20) 

He was not believing in God Almighty,

Nor would he advocate the feeding of the destitute.

Today he has no friend here. (69:33-35)

About his pious followers, on the other hand, 

...in their wealth the beggar and the outcast had due share. (51:19) 

What such passages accomplished was to demonize the wealthy and glorify the poor and those who provide for them. Jesus did as much. However, what Muhammadanism does is religiously justify the violent acquisition of wealth from one social group (the creators) by another social group (the takers). It is basically a Robin Hood scenario, in which theft is justified as long as some of the booty is shared with the disadvantaged. Initially, in other words, a crude form of Marxism was used to ideologically justify behavior that was already widespread but characterized as outlawry but was legitimized by Muhammad’s religious Marxist ideology. Among those on the receiving end of this policy were Jews because they were a hardworking prosperous group. Alfred Guillaume says in his Islam that “At the dawn of Islam the Jews dominated the economic life of the Hijaz....The prosperity of the Jews was due to their superior knowledge of agriculture and irrigation and their energy and industry” (11-12). On the other hand, according to Philip Hitti’s History of the Arabs, to the Arab Bedouin, “Agriculture and all varieties of trade and craft are beneath his dignity” (24). That could explain the Jews’ superior economic status to the Muslims.

As a result, Muhammadanism eventually negates, changes, the local (Arab) social environment by inverting the economic social structure. Watt says, “Ideas, especially religious ones, have an important part to play in the adjustment of a social system to a change in the material environment” (45). Certainly, Muhammadanism resulted in a reconfiguration of the attitudes toward the traditional players of the society’s economic structure. With Muhammadanism, the taking of wealth was legitimized and glorified above the production of wealth in part by transforming raiding and brigandage into a religious and political crusade.

Thus, we should not overlook what was perhaps the primary mundane motivator of early Islam: the acquisition of booty. Apparently the idea of booty raids or caravan raids came to Muhammad once he left Mecca with his few followers. As explained above, Muhammad’s modus operandi included religiously justified raiding, looting, and confiscation property, which would then be distributed to himself and to his followers. Watt tells us that “the chief feature of the year 623 was the adoption of the practice of organizing razzias [raids] against Meccan caravans” (103). This is just a year after the Hijra, when Muhammad and his followers abandoned Mecca to settle in Medina. This resulted in “Muhammad's metamorphosis from a preacher to a political and military leader” (Wikiislam, “Timeline of Muhammad”). So after ten years or more of unsuccessfully preaching to the Meccans, “Muhammad had few [my italics] followers.” Thus says F. E. Peters, “Force became an option for Muslims only after their arrival in Medina” (Muhammad and the Origins of Islam 184).

At this point, Islam becomes a religion of raiding, looting, and conquest. As usual Muhammad justifies the use of force by claiming it was allowed by Allah: “Permission to take up arms is given to those against whom war is made, because they have been wronged and Allah, indeed, has power to help them” (22:39). So it seems that not only Muhammad but Muhammadanism also underwent a metamorphosis. It became a religion devoted to raiding, looting, and confiscation of property. It’s almost as if someone told Muhammad about the Book of Joshua* that describes God’s commission to Joshua to take possession of Canaan and all its wealth. But, of course, that wasn’t necessary because the Arabs already had a tradition of raiding and looting. All Muhammad had to do was incorporate that tradition into Islam. Guillaume says that “trading as much as raiding formed the basis of their social and economic life... As we shall see, trading was the Prophet Muhammad’s first occupation, and the end of his life was occupied with raids” (4). Thus, it could very well be claimed that, as with the ancient Jews, the economics of conquest became the religion’s real motivating force.

*Perhaps related to him by Jews: “The young man Muhammad had probably met many Jews and Christians” (Norman Stillman, The Jews of Arab Lands 5). Muhammad himself was illiterate. 

The reason for the shift? To attract followers. The fate of the Jewish tribe the Banu Nadir illustrates the kind of payoff Muhammad’s followers could expect. The Banu Nadir was located in the neighborhood of Medina. They “were forced to lay down their arms and evacuate their settlements. Valuable land and much booty fell into the hands of the Muslims” (Guillaume 46). In addition, Peters tells us that “a string of military victories rapidly made the new believers rich from booty rather than local trade” (198). Such conquests would continue and grow larger in scale until, “In size and population it [Muslim Empire] was broadly similar to the Roman Empire at its height in the eighth century” (Kennedy, The Great Arab Conquests 363). Guillaume says it was “an age when war was a pastime and a means of gaining loot...” (45). I would argue that regardless of the kind of society Islam would eventually settle into, during its formative period, the defining feature of Islam was economically motivated aggression that materially benefitted Muhammad and his booty-seeking followers.

In conclusion, Islam is essentially a religion characterized by both divine and human selfishness. God selfishly demands that humans worship and glorify him. From God’s perspective that is the raison d'être of human existence; from the human perspective the goal in life is not to serve humanity but to serve oneself by serving God and conquering and exploiting infidels. Any good deeds that might have occurred were not altruistically motivated but simply the price of admission to Paradise.^[23]

Philosophical Psychotherapy

Epicurus was as much a self-help psychotherapist as he was a philosopher. Like the historical Jesus he was not concerned with saving humanity (the intent of the mythical Jesus) but with saving individuals who, for whatever reason, suffered physically and psychologically. Both men emphasized the individual taking control of his or her life, and both men explained how this could be done. The key difference between the two approaches is found in how they viewed the self. For Epicurus the self is always kept in focus. The concern for the Epicurean is determining which actions will cause oneself pleasure or pain.^[24] For Jesus, happiness was achieved by realizing the moral self through altruistic actions. The Good Samaritan was not only a good man but a happy man. I suppose what occurs is realizing the moral (highest) self by transcending self-concern. Epicurus’ path to happiness was living prudently, which meant carefully considering the consequences of one’s actions for oneself. Jesus path was basically to act on the behalf of others, which is the life he chose for himself.

The goals of both men are quite different from that of the god of the Abrahamic religions. Yahweh/Allah is not interested in improving the lives of human beings but making them his worshiping servants. In the Quran there are a few demands for better treatment of women and the poor,^[25] but these are hardly revolutionary measures designed to improve the human condition. Muhammad’s primary goal was to convert humanity by word and sword into Allah’s subjects. Given that the essence of his message from Allah is that nonbelievers will be inflicted with “spiraling torment,” thrown into a “scorching Fire” that “spares nothing and leaves nothing,” that “scorches the flesh” (74:17-29), the unavoidable conclusion is that Muhammad’s concern was not to lessen human suffering in the here and now. To the contrary, he dramatically increased suffering via his religious conquests, the continuing conquests of his inspired followers, and the spread of his psychologically terrifying religious ideology.^[26]

Allah’s threats of fiery punishment recall Lucretius’ discussion of Agamemnon sacrificing his daughter by immolation. Poor Iphigenia is struck dumb with dread and sinks to her knees in fear (On the Nature of Things, all quotations are from are from Martin Smith’s translation, 5). And then there is Abraham who proceeds to sacrifice his son Isaac at God’s request. Not only does religion inspire terror in the hearts of humans, it inspires acts of terror. 

Lucretius

Since only a few fragments and letters of Epicurus works remain, I’ve chosen Lucretius’ On the Nature of Things to serve as Epicurean scripture. Like his mentor, Lucretius was primarily concerned with how human beings cause themselves unnecessary suffering. He believed the great source of suffering is wrongful thinking (a central theme of Buddhism), which itself causes suffering but also causes behaviors that cause suffering. The type of wrongful thinking he believed to be the most egregiously harmful is superstition, which has resulted in humans “groveling ignominiously in the dust, crushed beneath the grinding weight of superstition, which from the celestial regions displayed its face, lowering over mortals with hideous scowls” (4). Certainly, the “hideous scowls” does fit Yahweh and Allah, but Lucretius was referring to the fictional deities of Greek mythology. Lucretius believed that Epicurus was the first to challenge the tyranny of superstition.^[27]

Apparently Lucretius believed in the gods but the real gods lived in a kind of never-never land in a state of tranquility, which understandably required that they remain uninvolved in human affairs. His view of deity seems more consistent with what one would logically expect of divine beings. However, I suspect that they also serve as role models for how humans should try to live—immune from the excesses that plague humanity. Lucretius believed that his mentor Epicurus and his followers achieved that divine way of life. 

Superstition as a Mental Disease

Superstition was for Lucretius a disease of the mind, a “terrifying darkness that enshrouds the mind” that must “be dispelled” “by study of the superficial aspect and underlying principle of nature” (7), in other words, by empirical observation. What was being offered was a methodology for gaining knowledge that would prove itself to be the only reliable method for learning about and understanding nature and the workings of the mundane world—a prototype of the scientific method. It is also a method of understanding the world that has immensely improved the living conditions of that part of humanity that has adopted it. The goal of science is to know through observation and logic what actually exist—the forces and stuff that actually make up humans and the world they live in. Superstition, on the other hand, invents endless phantoms that clutter the mind, thus have obfuscated and retarded humanity’s understanding of the workings of the world.

I’ve already used the example of how superstition prevented for thousands of years the disease of epilepsy from being investigated in a beneficial manner, that is, in a manner based on observation and empirical explanation. Wikipedia says that the oldest account of an epileptic seizure was written four thousand years ago and says, “The person described in the text was diagnosed as being under the influence of a Moon god, and underwent an exorcism.” Wikipedia says further that “In the fifth century BC, [the Greek physician] Hippocrates rejected the idea that the disease was caused by spirits. In his landmark work On the Sacred Disease, he proposed that epilepsy was not divine in origin and instead was a medically treatable problem originating in the brain” (“Epilepsy”).

Because of the Abrahamic religions’ belief that epileptic seizures are caused by supernatural beings, progress in treating the disease would have to wait about twenty-three centuries after Hippocrates correctly diagnosed its cause. Epicureanism was one of the earliest advocates of using empirical investigation to understand natural phenomena because there really is no supernatural phenomena given the gods themselves were considered material beings (super men and women). In addition, Epicureans believed that nature operates according to materialistic principles. 

Satan’s Touch

The Quran mentions “someone tormented by Satan’s touch” (2:275), apparently referring to one of the supernatural causes of epilepsy. The Islamic Satan, Iblis, is a jinni, a spirit made from smokeless fire. I bring this up because this view of epilepsy illustrates how the multitudes of invisible spirit beings are detected: by the phenomena they cause in the empirical world. The rhetorical strategy goes like this. First there is the claim that the mundane world is populated by billions of spirit beings that are in themselves empirically unknowable. So how do we know they exist? By claiming a causal relationship between imperceptible spirit beings and perceptible phenomena such as epilepsy.

We are familiar with this way of thinking in polytheism, which attributes divine causes to natural phenomena such as lightening, thunder, and rainbows. By assuming that a divinity causes a natural phenomenon, one logically must assume the existence of that divinity. The Abrahamic religious do pretty much the same thing when they claim that Yahweh/Allah are the creators of everything in nature and even are the ultimate controllers of what goes on in the mundane world. However, as with epilepsy, science has provided empirical explanations for natural phenomena, making supernatural explanations unnecessary and doubtful, especially given that supernatural entities/causes remain in themselves undetectable. 

Billions of Unknowables

The Abrahamic religions claims there are billions of angels and other spiritual beings all around us. The Quran/Allah says, 

It makes no difference whether any of you speak secretly or aloud, whether you are hiding under cover of night or walking about in the day; each person has guardian angels before him and behind, watching over him by God’s command. (13:10-11) 

Given the context of the passage, it seems that these angels serve as God’s informants rather than human protectors. Another sura says, “Over you stand watchers, noble recorders who know what you do.” On Judgment Day they will report, sending the good to “live in bliss” and the wicked to burn in Hell (82:10-13). From what Wikipedia says, these are two additional angels, one on the left, one on the right (“Kiraman Katibin”). This situation sounds to me very totalitarian, each person being followed by two to four angels, and becomes a reality when humans play the role of informants within the religious community.

Getting back to the point I want to make, there are seven billion people on the planet, each with two to four guardian/watcher angels. And there are billions more of jinn (made from smokeless fire by Allah), but mythically convenient these creatures are either invisible to humans, appearing only in animal or human form; thus, they are in themselves indescribable but are still assumed to exist. Given that the number of supernatural beings far exceeds the number of humans, one would think there would be some empirical indication of their presence, but there never is. It’s not surprising that disbelievers have had so much trouble believing such religious claims. And isn’t it unjust to punish them for not taking some prophet’s word that people are part of an elaborate divine fantasy that they have no evidence for other than the prophet’s saying so? In addition, all the squabbling and threats could be avoided if just some of the billions of angels revealed themselves. Then the fires of Hell would not be needed for doubters. 

Mental/Intellectual Salvation

Lucretius takes it as his mission in life to “endeavor to disentangle the mind from the strangling knots of superstition” (28). His reasons are basically two. First, superstition prevents a clear understanding of the world, which certainly prevents effective interaction with the world—such as finding cures for disease. Second, and no less important, is that superstitions terrify people and inspire them to commit horrible acts. To illustrate how superstition can inspire horrific deeds, he uses Agamemnon’s sacrifice of his daughter Iphigenia to the goddess Artemis for his having killed a deer in a sacred grove (men again not respecting limits). Poor Iphigenia is struck dumb with fear, tears streaming down her cheeks (5). Though it is believed that Artemis rescues the girl, deity to the rescue never happens in real life, such as when Joan of Arc was sacrificed to God or to the Church.* And the story of Abraham legitimizes murder in the name of God. It makes no difference that Yahweh calls off the murder of Isaac. The point is that if he hadn’t called it off, the murder would have been divinely justified. Lucretius had no idea how bad things could get with religion since JudeoChristianity and JudeoIslam had not yet arrived. After their arrival millions of people would be persecuted, tortured, and murdered on behalf of God.

*She is not rescued in Euripides’ tragedy Iphigenia at Aulis. 

It’s understandable that people would be terrified by the belief they are being followed by spying angels whose evidence will condemn them to the fires of Hell where they will endure “tremendous,” “terrible,” “painful,” “agonizing,” “shameful,” “torment,” just because they couldn’t believe Muhammad’s message or because they believed that God had a son or a daughter or because they belonged to another religion or simply could not make the leap of faith to any religion. It’s truly ironic that atheists and true believers of other faiths will both be sent to Hell. The inept psychology of the Abrahamic faiths is the failure to realize that believing is not simply a matter of will, or if it becomes a matter of will it is pathological.^[28] If I believe there is a tomato on my desk because there really is, that is a healthy belief because it is not a matter of will but of empirical observation.* However, if I will myself to believe my room is full of invisible tomatoes, that is not a healthy belief. One problem with this approach to belief is that a person could, theoretically, will himself or herself into believing anything, such as a person’s believing his or her room is full of supernatural creatures spying on him or her on the behalf of a greater supernatural Big Brother spirit. It’s odd that the one belief (in invisible tomatoes) would be considered insane but the other (in spying angels) isn’t.

*The belief here is really a case of knowing. Knowing occurs when (1) what is claimed to be known can be empirically experienced and (2) and that experience is available to anyone. More precisely, the experience is unavoidable. So, I know a tomato is on my desk because I see it there and any person who enters the room can also see it there (under normal conditions, cannot avoid seeing it there). In other words, the tomato’s existence is public knowledge, not private belief. That doesn’t work for ghosts or angels. They cannot be experienced empirically nor can they be experienced by just anyone. That’s because they are not experiential objects. They are objects of belief.

Important here is that verification of the belief claim comes not from the object itself but from the believer. It’s a matter of conviction, not empirical experience. My claim that the tomato is on my desk is based on the observable presence of the tomato—not on what I think or believe. On the other hand, the claim that there are angels in my room is not based on my experience or observation of angels but only on my conviction that they are there. 

Faith or Reason, Imagination or Observation

Lucretius died a half century before the birth of Jesus and the religion associated with him were born. At this historical moment two incompatible approaches understanding life would be offered. Jesus represented Judaic supernaturalism and Lucretius represented the philosophical/scientific tradition of the Greeks. The one consisted of prophets, the other of scientist philosophers.^[29] The prophets relied on revelation for their information. The scientist philosophers relied on logical-empirical reason. The ultimate concern of the prophets was God. They had no interest whatsoever in understanding the nature of the mundane world for itself. They already knew what the mundane was all about—its teleology or purpose.

The three Abrahamic scriptures state clearly the purpose of the Universe, but I will allow the Quran speak for the entire Abrahamic tradition. In the Quran the angel Gabriel says, “He [God] crated the heavens and earth for a true purpose” (39:5). Later, God declares that purpose: “I created jinn [spirts that take on human and animal form] and mankind only to worship Me” (51:56). That’s the purpose of the Universe in an Abrahamic nutshell. The Universe itself is God’s magic trick performed to impress humans. As the Exodus story of Moses and the Pharaoh reveals, God loves to show off.

The Greek philosophers were mostly interested in the mundane world, not God^[30]—at least not until Murray’s “failure of nerve” occurs and philosophy ceases to be philosophy and becomes theology, as in the case of Neoplatonism and later Stoicism. According to Epicureanism the Universe has no purpose. It exists, and that’s all. This view is consistent with that of science. Still, it is a magical kingdom filled with an infinite number of the most beautiful and sublime mysteries to be explored. If I were to give the Universe a purpose, it would be to explore though creative generation all the possibilities of being. In a sense, the Universe makes the statement “This is what there is when there is something rather than nothing.” Of course, the generative stuff is atoms (helped along by forces unknown to Lucretius). About the magical procreative matrix Lucretius says, 

Certainly the primary elements did not intentionally and with acute intelligence dispose themselves in their respective positions, nor did they covenant to produce their respective motions. In reality, from time everlasting countless elements of things, impelled by blows and by their own weight, have never ceased to move in manifold ways, making all kinds of unions and experimenting with everything they could combine to create. (149) 

The possibilities of being are apparently infinite—ranging from inorganic, organic, conscious, self-conscious, natural and artificial. Without God, the Universe is a magnificent place far more interesting and mysterious than God. 

Offering Peace of Mind

Lucretius’ poem On the Nature of Things is addressed to Gaius Memmius, a friend and perhaps patron, and the intent of the poem is to persuade Memmius to adopt the worldview of Democritus and Epicurus, based on the combination of inductive/deductive logic and empirical observation, rather than on the myth and imagination of superstition. Lucretius believed that by doing so Memmius would achieve peace of mind.

Lucretius was a poet therapist rather than a philosopher or scientist. He adopted the science of Democritus and the philosophy of Epicurus because he believed they were true, clearly verifiable by observation, and because, in this case, the truth provided greater peace of mind. Ironically, Lucretius often describes how unfriendly nature can be toward her creatures, and, clearly, the scientific view of the world is not one that is especially conducive to peace of mind. Consistent with science, Lucretius knew that death meant the absolute end of one’s existence. However, as part of the Greco-Roman tradition he was made of sterner stuff than the JudeoChristians and JudeoMuslims who long to live forever. Lucretius believed that even the gods (basically supermen and superwomen) were eventually doomed because they too were made of atoms. Lucretius even offers his own version of entropy: “All things gradually decay and head for the reef of destruction, exhausted by long lapses of time” (65).

Yet, as frightening as nature could be, more frightening were the gods and an eternal afterlife in some gloomy realm or a place of torment, such was the fate of Tantalus who was sent to Tartarus (the underworld’s place of punishment) where he endured various torments, including being “paralyzed with vain terror,” having a “huge rock suspended over him in the air” (94). Just how terrifying the belief in the afterlife could be would have to wait on the appearance of the Quran, which is essentially scripture devoted to terrifying the reader or listener, who is threatened on every other page with the horrors of Hell. Interestingly, as far as I know, Greek mythology, unlike JudeoChristianity and JudeoIslam, does not have people being punished in Hell for disbelief or preferring one god over another. Tantalus had to commit a very serious crime to be sent to be punished in Tartarus: He killed his son Pelops, cooked him by roasting the pieces of his body, and served him to the Gods. That’s evil. Even so, Tantalus’ punishment is a slap on the wrist compared to what Christ and Allah have in store for independent thinking disbelievers.

For Lucretius death was neither to be sought nor feared. It meant that pain and happiness are no longer possible because for that which is not neither suffering nor pleasure is possible. Lucretius believed that though life is unavoidably painful humanity itself was responsible for most of the suffering humans endured, including the invention of terrifying religious myths. Smith tells us that “The times through which Lucretius lived were dominated by intense social and political unrest and punctuated with outbreaks of revolution and war” (ix). Humanity’s willingness to inflict suffering upon itself hasn’t changed since Lucretius’ day—as the horrors of the twentieth century’s revolutions and world wars remind us. Thus far the 21^st century forebodes more of the same without end. Lucretius lamented the new invention of weapons that “heightened the horrors of war” (172). He says that as dangerous as life was for early humans who “pursued the wild beast of the forest with sling-stones and ponderous clubs… never in those times did a single day consign to destruction many thousands of men marching beneath military standards” (163-4). The biggest threat to humanity and human happiness is not nature but human nature.

Unlike the naively religious Stoics who believed a beneficent deity was in control of the world, but very much like many people today, Lucretius and his mentor, Epicurus, were not optimistic concerning the larger picture of the human condition. This sounds defeatist, and it is but no more so than JudeoChristianity or JudeoIslam, both of which gave up on life in the mundane world and placed all bets on the postmortem. And really, neither Lucretius nor Epicurus gave up completely on this life but shifted the focus of salvation away from society to the individual. Salvation was not going to Heaven but finding happiness (peace of mind) in this world. This was accomplished by finding ways to improve the individual’s life by giving him or her more control over it. In fact, self-control is the major key to an individual’s achieving happiness. Also essential are adopting an attitude of truthfulness based on empirical reason, living on little (167) by reining in the appetites, and becoming a member of a small community of friends.

If this sounds like a village of neighborly yet self-reliant residents who enjoy the simple pleasures associated with nature, work, family, and friends, that’s because the Epicurean mini-utopia isn’t new but very old. A nation that behaves like a village—modern-day Denmark, Sweden, Finland, Norway, Netherlands, Switzerland, Canada, Japan, Australia, and New Zealand—can become utopian. Stoics encouraged participation in public affairs, an attitude that was in accord with the mindset of the ancient Greeks and Romans. Without high-minded public servants, utopian societies cannot be achieved. Unfortunately, citizens and/or leaders of most nations too often lack the required element of self-control, ethical-mindedness, and the belief that less is often more required to create a society that offers health, safety, work, fun, and opportunity for self-realization. When a society fails to do this, individuals feel lost, helpless, and threatened. That’s when self-help philosophies are needed. If individuals can’t change the world, they can change themselves—their way of thinking and behaving. That’s what Epicureanism offers.

Epicureanism’s therapeutic focus on the happiness of the individual seems very modern given the rise of self-help philosophies and the mental health industry. Yet, advising individuals how to take control of their lives in a turbulent world for the sake of achieving mental/spiritual tranquility was not as uncommon in the ancient world as one might think. The Stoics, Buddhists, and Taoists offered methods similar to those of Epicureanism, and, as I have argued, the historical Jesus engaged in pastoral counseling that empowered individuals to take control of their spiritual lives. The central principle his life embodied was thinking more about the welfare of others than about oneself. This was accomplished not adopting a particular religious myth but by existential acts of care that improved other people’s lives in the mundane world thus increasing their happiness and peace of mind. There is no better illustration of this than the parable of the Good Samaritan. As it turns out, Lucretius’ mentor, Epicurus, was just such a person. 

Offering the Truth

What does one really learn from scripture about the world? Very little. The cosmology of the Book of Genesis, for example, doesn’t describe the particulars of how the Universe was created. It simply describes God’s bringing into existence integral parts of the world by commanding them to appear.* Here are some examples.  God said, “Let there be light” and there was light. He said, “Let the water under the sky be gathered to one place, and let dry ground appear,” and Voila! the ground and water were separated. He said, “Let the land produce vegetation,” “Let the water teem with living creatures,” and “Let the land produce living creatures,” and all that was accomplished just by words alone. And we are told that “God made the wild animals according to their kinds,” et cetera, et cetera. Exactly how the creation of approximately 4 billion species of plants and animals occurred is not revealed. All that is “revealed” is that it supposedly happened. What are missing are the particulars of the Universe’s creation. ^[31] What is described is not knowledge, not even justified belief. At best it’s somebody’s opinion based on what that somebody imagined happened. The cosmology of Genesis is myth, and myth is not a source of knowledge.

*The Abrahamic god is not an artisan but a magician. He really doesn’t create at all because he doesn’t engage in a creative process, as artists do, for example. Actually, he can’t because God cannot sully himself by engaging directly with the materials of the mundane world. 

Certainly, the Abrahamic scriptures provide a mythic window on the human psyche and human nature. It’s not a pretty picture. The Old Testament offers a very cynical view of humanity, and its religion is characterized by greed, hatred, betrayal, and desire for revenge. According to the Old Testament, the ancient Jews hated non-Jews (pagans) and often themselves. Their God, Yahweh, is a bully. He does to the people that Jews see as enemies what the Jews wish they could do. That is the wish-fulfilment of ancient Judaism. There are fragments of history that actually occurred, mostly distorted by aggrandizing scribes. Most of the history given is fictional. Noah, Moses, and Abraham are mythical, not historical, characters. And King David and King Solomon were tribal chiefs if that, nothing more.

The two most profound and entertaining books of the Old Testament are Ecclesiastes and Job. Both the protagonists challenge the idea that Yahweh is a beneficent and just God. The Old Testament is full of stories, but their mythical context lessens rather than enhances their entertainment value. Of course, the language of the Bible—Old and New Testaments—is remarkably beautiful, but I can’t say whether that beauty originated in the original Hebrew and Greek or was provided by inspired translators who produced English versions of the Bible. Still, what can be learned from the Old Testament about the mundane world that is humanity’s home? Almost nothing.

The same goes for the New Testament, which is essentially a textbook on JudeoChristian theology. It does offer an entertaining story about an itinerate narcissistic rabbi who is often frustrated by people rejecting his claim to be God’s messenger. Eventually the post-Gospels portion of the New Testament declared him to be God incarnate and warns of the world’s destruction when he decides to return. However, the New Testament is redeemed by the existential Jesus’ caring, self-sacrificing attitude toward people most ignored and most in need of care and affection. Unlike the Old Testament, Jesus’ view of humanity is not cynical or hateful. And though at times he becomes disillusioned, over all he seems to believe that humans are capable of doing the right thing. However, the rest of the New Testament seems to lack Jesus’ faith in humanity—illustrated both by his crucifixion and the fact that most of humanity will not make the grade and will be destroyed and/or sent to Hell.

Of the three Abrahamic scriptures, one learns least from the Quran. That is because it has nothing to say about the mundane world other than its having been created by God. Nothing specific can be said about that process since it’s considered a mystery. Much of Quran consists of shorten and often distorted versions of stories taken from the Bible. Because most of those stories are myths or legends, there is nothing to learn from them, and repeating them does not make them more informative. The main purposes of referring to the stories is to warn readers or listeners that disbelievers will be severely punished and to present ideal role models, men who have surrendered themselves completely to God, men such as Abraham and Moses.

The Quran contains very little theology. I don’t count as theology epithets such as almighty, all wise, forgiving, merciful, severe in punishment, all-knowing, etc., which are on every page. Allah is a two-dimensional character, self-obsessed, hateful, and angry. He is described as having a throne, which gives the impression that he is understood to be the king of the cosmos, and he behaves as a tyrannical monarch. 

Ethically Barren

Finally, the Quran offers little that is ethically illuminating or morally useful. The care of the most vulnerable—widows, the poor, orphans, etc.—simply repeats the ethical insights of the New Testament. Greater respect for women is demanded, yet this respect is compromised by Allah’s outrage at being accused of having daughters. In the Quran women are worth something but only half as much as men: “God commands you that a son should have the equivalent share of two daughters” (4:11). The Quran allows men four wives (Muhammad had twelve) and female captives (4:3). The Quran does expect the wives to be provided for and treated justly or fairly, that they all be treated equally, no favorites. A slave wife was not entitled to same material benefits, but was supposed to be treated kindly. Being worth something is better than being worth nothing ethically (having no moral rights or moral value), but rights accorded women by the Quran are hardly a great ethical advancement. If so, one can only conclude that the condition of women in pre-Islamic Arabia must have been absolutely awful. The missing truth is that women are ethically equal to men and deserve the same freedom allowed men. That’s the revelation one would expect from God. 

Dubious Morality

However, not only does the Quran offer few if any new moral insights, much of what it says is contrary to a just, humane moral system. It is unjust, for example, that women be given half the value of men. It is unjust to burn disbelievers in Hell. And threatening people with Hell* degrades and condemns people who want to think independently and who do not want to surrender their minds and lives to a religious ideology.

*This might be called gun-to-the-head persuasion, basically, frightening a person into making a particular decision. That is not allowing free choice because it involves coercion (terrifying the chooser). Such a method of persuasion is unethical and barbaric. This is especially true given the so-called crime is simply some form of disbelief or misbelief, not a crime involving harming another person. Essentially, the crime is an action that is considered an affront to God, even if no disrespect was intended. Clearly, Allah is offended by acts of disbelief or misbelief; otherwise, the threats of Hell wouldn’t exist on every other page of the Quran. Nevertheless, the idea that God—creator of the Universe—would be offended or insulted by such behavior (or any behavior, for that matter) is absurd and illogical. Equally absurd is the idea that God would be obsessed with being worshiped. That is God’s paramount concern in all three Abrahamic scriptures: “Thou shalt have no other gods before me!” Or, “Thou shalt worship me or burn in Hell.” 

Because the morality of JudeoIslam—consistent with traditional Judaism generally—is God-centered, the focus of moral judgment is on the act in relation to the will of God, not on the act itself or even on the victim of the act. For example, the Quran says “Cut off the hands of thieves, whether they are man or woman, as a punishment for what they have done—a deterrent from God: God is almighty and wise” (5:38). Personally, I find the punishment horrific, but what is especially revealing about it is its focus on the act in relation to God rather than on the act itself, the theft or even the victim of the theft. What is left out of the judgment is consideration of the harm done as a result of the action. In this case, what makes theft so morally egregious? Because it is an offense against God (more so than against the victim of the theft). It is an act of disobedience. The thief isn’t being punished because he or she stole but because he or she disobeyed God. A moral system that focuses primarily on the act in relation to the will of God is an inhumane moral system, which can and has given birth to inhumane religious and political institutions. One recalls a similar situation in the Book of Numbers that describes a man stoned to death for gathering sticks on the Sabbath day (15:32-36). The use of the wood—to heat the home or cook food for the family—doesn’t matter. And there is no theft or any person harmed, yet the act received capital punishment. 

Discouraging Moral Reasoning

Ethically, the Quran is not heuristically useful (intellectually stimulating) because it fails to encourage a person to understand, evaluate, and solve ethical problems on his or her own. I understand this is not necessarily the purpose of scripture, but scripture can be faulted when it discourages moral reasoning. Essentially, the Quran does not appeal to moral reason. It only commands, and commands do not need to be justified. For example, demanding the cutting off of the hands of thieves does not explain why thievery is wrong, whether its wrongness is the same in every case, or why amputation is just punishment. And focusing on punishment hardly encourages critical thinking concerning the wrongness of the act and the fairness of the punishment. To the contrary, the gruesome punishment would tend to discourage questioning God’s judgment since doing so would place one in the category of those who challenge God’s authority.

The act of theft is wrong and deserving of amputation because God says so. That’s the end of the matter. What is lacking here is any confidence humans’ thinking for themselves, or worse that it doesn’t matter that they can think for themselves. Commanding someone to do something teaches them nothing. Allah says, “be charitable—it is for your own good” (64:16), meaning doing so will result in postmortem prosperity; not doing so will result in postmortem punishment. As such, the motivation/justification is selfish. What about a good deed being its own reward, as in the Old Testament’s Book of Ruth? What about the principle of equality, treating others as you would have them treat you? Why should one do that?  Scripture’s answer is to please God—in particular, not to make him angry and be punished as a result. That hardly counts as an ethically enlightening explanation and certainly doesn’t encourage ethical reasoning. It encourages people to become ethical automatons. 

Either/Or

So what revelation does one choose? Either the dogmatic superstition of the Abrahamic religions or the aesthetic, rational revelations of Lucretius, Basho, and Hemingway. Either God, hidden from view, transcendent, angry, self-centered or nature, indifferent yet beautiful creator and provider of all things. Either a prejudicial God who unjustly condemns most of humanity to the fires of Hell or impartial nature that without hostility or hatred reclaims all things to merciful oblivion. Either a life as an unquestioning slave to an authoritarian God and his priestly authorities or life as an autonomous thinker who is his or her own master. Either a life programmed by an ancient religious myth or one of personal self-realization. Either a life determined by God-centered morality or one determined by moral concern for humans and other creatures who actually suffer. Either a life devoted to divine No-thing that doesn’t live but simply exists or a life devoted to living in the mundane world in an attitude of appreciative awareness. 

En Fin

William Butler Yeats’ poem “The Second Coming” is apropos here:

 

Turning and turning in the widening gyre  

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere  

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst  

Are full of passionate intensity.

 

Surely some revelation is at hand;

Surely the Second Coming is at hand.  

The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out  

When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi

Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert  

A shape with lion body and the head of a man,  

A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,  

Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it  

Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.  

The darkness drops again; but now I know  

That twenty centuries of stony sleep

Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,  

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,  

Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born? 

The monster that was born in the sands of desert that would spread death and destruction throughout the world was the religious ideology Judaism. This monster was far more dangerous than Victor Frankenstein’s monster or Godzilla because it spread by taking control of people minds. It was an ideological virus. It made its way to Bethlehem, from there to Rome, and from there to Arabia, and from there it was carried throughout the world. There is no vaccine other than reason, but reason proved no match for the virus especially since reason was its first victim. In the way HIV kills immune system cells that help the body fight infections and diseases, ideologies destroy reason’s defenses that protect the intellectual integrity of the mind. More than that, ideology will co-opt reason to serve its particular agenda.

Judaism introduced the first ideology into human history—a religious ideology. Religions are not inherently ideological, but the Abrahamic religions are. Three of their characteristics are as follows: they are all masculine inventions, they are aggressive rather than passive, and they are inherently hateful. In short, their aggressiveness is rooted in the masculinity of the creators. A characteristic unique of Judaism that it introduced into human history that was passed on to Christianity and Islam and, one might argue, to Marxism, is a new category of enemies: ideological enemies. Until its invention, enemies posed a threat or were a source of harm. The ancient Greeks and Native Americans, for example, had plenty of enemies but no ideological enemies.

The definition of an ideological enemy is a person who, for whatever reason, is not a member of the ideological cult. Pagan Canaanites were enemies of the Jews because they were not members of the cult of Judaism. What the ideology did was to create enemies where none existed before. Virus like, the ideology of hatred  of outsiders was passed on the JudeoChristians who hated non-Christians be they pagans, Jews, or Muslims, and then to JudeoIslam, which considers non-Muslims—such as pagans, Jews, and Christians—enemies. For Christians and Muslims an enemy could cease being an enemy by negating the old cultural self and converting to Christianity or Islam. This is offered by those two ideologies as an illustration of how they are ideologies of love rather than hatred. But the offer of conversion is not an expression of love but of hatred for what one is—pagan, Jew, Christian, or Muslims. Conversion is a form of execution of the cultural soul of the individual. When Native Americans were converted to Christianity they ceased to be Indians. The Indian in them was killed. Christians considered to this to Indians as an act of love. It wasn’t. It was an expression of hatred for Indians and their cultures. That is easily verified by the fact that if they didn’t convert they remained hated and without moral rights thus could be killed. Aggression and hatred are the legacy of the Abrahamic religious ideologies. And what about God? God is the deification of the ideology, nothing more.

A note on Marxism—a secular Judaism. Like the other Judaisms it is an aggressive us-versus-them ideology. It takes from early Christianity and Islam a hatred of the rich or the bourgeoisie. It is understandable that factory owners who exploit and abuse their workers are enemies of the workers. Friedrich Engels’ The Condition of the Working Class in England is a masterwork that describes abusive to the point of evil employers. That the conditions of the workers should be improved was a moral imperative—even requiring violence if need be, just as a war was fought to free slaves in America. But Marxism demanded more than just eliminating abuse of workers, which could accomplished politically, as it was in Great Britain and by implementing socialist programs that improve the lives of all citizens. Socialism like most religions is not an ideology, but Marxism is, as is the totalitarian monster it Created—communism. As an ideology, Marxist Communism declares as enemies not only those employers who abuse their workers but anyone who is not a Marxist Communist. Those people were ideological enemies, enemies not because they abused other people—they could be Good Samaritans—but because they were not members of the Marxist-Communist cult. They were not evil existentially but ideologically, that is, because document declared them evil.

It is said that Yeats’ “The Second Coming” “predicts that time is up for humanity, and that civilization as we know it is about to be undone.” I doubt Yeats fully understood the problem of why that is the case. However, having written the poem after World War 1, he understood that a great violent unraveling of civilization was possible. That fear was again verified with World War II. He certainly understood that the unraveling would be caused in part by the abandonment of reason: “The falcon cannot hear the falconer,” or when civilization is no longer guided by reason but my irrationality, males filled with “passionate intensity.” It happened before when classical civilization, i.e., Western civilization, was overthrown by religious irrationalism, which threw Western civilization into the Dark Ages. The threat today is not a temporary period of disintegration but a total collapse which could be brought upon by a nuclear war.

What Yeats couldn’t have known is the role of masculine aggression, which is really the fuel that drives the circumstances described in his poem. Nationalism is often to blame for wars, and rightly so. It’s simply bullyism occurring at a national level. Putin’s war against Ukraine is a form of national bullyism. He and his crew are the bullies and the Russian military is their truncheon. But increasingly political bullies don’t want to be equated with a caveman with a club; thus, nationalistic aggression needed some form of justification. And that is what the ancient Hebrews invented—ideological justification for aggression. In other words, ideologies are used to justify masculine aggression.

The problem facing humanity—as descried in Yeats’ poem—is two-fold. Masculine aggression is the primordial source of the aggression that has threatened humanity since forever really. The Book of Genesis illustrates the problem of masculine aggression in the behavior of their God Yahweh. He is the pure embodiment of masculine aggression. He demands complete control and obedience and inflicts suffering and death on those who disobey. He punishes Adam and Eve with death and suffering, he floods the world causing endless deaths because he consider humans wicked (thus emerged the idea that humanity is inherently wicked), because humans wanted to build a great city and tower he confounded their language so they could no longer work in harmony together, and he demands that Abraham prove his obedience by sacrificing his beloved son, and so.

What is clearly revealed is a masculine tyrant who relates to the world through aggression. In a sense, Yahweh is the masculine DNA of men deified. The image below is male DNA personified.

The seriousness of the threat to human civilization is that rooted in DNA masculine aggression is as resilient as gravity. So we have seen its “progress” from the cave man’s club in the above image to this: 

And this progress in weaponry is the second part of the problem. Hand-held weapons, even guns, are not a threat to civilization, but a war with nuclear weapons is. Nuclear weapons have been in existence for 78 years and apparently are going to continue to exist into the unforeseen future. In addition, there are 12,500 nuclear warheads in existence. The threat is made worse by unstable men such as Putin and Kim Jong Un having possession of nuclear weapons. Putin has recently threatened to use his Satan II intercontinental ballistic missile to destroy Paris, London, and New York. Such threats have to be taken seriously because we’ve seen in mass shootings and terrorist attacks men who are willing to die in order to commit mass murder.

Langdon Winner’s Autonomous Technology: Technics-out-of-Control uses Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein to illustrate how a technological creation can become autonomous, which means not that they behave like people or autonomous robots but people’s dependency upon them insures their continued existence and influence. A mundane example of a technological creation has taken control of human life is the automobile. Another is nuclear weapons that are still with us after three-quarters of a century. The same can be said of ideologies. Like bombs and automobiles ideologies are constructs, inventions made of words. They are autonomous because they take control of people’s lives. Like certain forms of bacteria they implant themselves within humans, which enable them to be mobile and spread virus-like among humans.

Shelley’s cautionary tale is also of interest because it illustrates how human creations can not only become autonomous but can turn against their creators as Victor Frankenstein’s creation turns against him. That scenario can be applied to the Jews’ creation of their religious ideology. It became autonomous once it was modified by Jesus and his followers, in particular Apostle Paul and the Gospel writers. In other words, the Jews lost control of their ideology. The modifiers of the old ideology created a modified version of the old ideology (which is the New Testament) that demonized Jews for not becoming members of the Christ cult. The first anti-Semites were neither pagans* nor Christians but Jews.

* In his book Hellenistic Civilization and the Jews, Jewish scholar Victor Tcherikover investigates the origin of anti-Semitism. He says, “The inner quality of anti-Semitism arises from the very existence of the Jewish people as an alien body among nations.” This suggests that the alien character of Jewish culture expressed in their religious ideology was an early cause of anti-Semitism, not the religion itself. He says that anti-Semitism originated in Egypt with the Egyptian priest [my emphasis] Manetho (flourished c. 300 BCE). He says further that “Such detestation had been unknown to the Greeks previously” (358). What angered pagans toward non-Jews were first they were often given special treatment in terms of taxation and exemption from military service and second their condemnation of the religions of the pagans. The Jewish religion was respected because the pagans were polytheists.  

However, once Constantine I came upon the scene Jews and pagans became the ideological enemies not of a religious cult but of the most militant and powerful empire on the planet. Both Jews and pagans were victims of the modified Judaism Christianity. The pagans got the worst because Jews were recognized as the people God first revealed himself to. Still they were condemned for deicide, the murderer of Christ and treated as such. Judaism mutated again with Islam, and with the mutation Jews acquired a new ideological enemy. But they were not the only ones affected. As in Shelley’s story the ideological monster went on a rampage of killing bodies and souls (via conversion). For example, Christians (Protestant and Catholic) murdered Native Americans and believed they were justified doing so. Once the tribes were conquered, Native American children were sent to schools to be reeducated as good Christians—giving up their language, their Indian name, and Indian dress. Their long hair was cut short. In essence, they were purged of their Indian culture and way of thinking and living. They became Christian automatons.

But even Christians became the victims of the Christian ideology. Smaller Christian sects were annihilated. Women suspected of being witches were set afire or drowned. Heretics were burned at the stake. The Protestant and Catholic sects went to war against one another because of ideological differences. Life in Christian theocracies was totalitarian. Muslims too suffered schisms and fought one another. It was a time as described (modified) by Yeats when 

Things fell apart; the centre did not hold;

Mere anarchy was loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide was loosed, and everywhere  

The ceremony of innocence was drowned;

The best lacked all conviction, while the worst  

Were full of passionate [bloody] intensity. 

The situation for Jews became only worse. The Protestants and Catholics hated one another but both hated the Jews. The Sunni and Shia hated one another but both hated the Jews. Part of the problem was the tenacity of the Jews: they refused to be converted. Eventually, their victimization and suffering reached an apex with the Holocaust. They prayed believing Yahweh would come to their aid. As in the past, he never did. Who would have thought that the ideological beast born somewhere in sands of the desert with the shape with lion body and the head of a man, a gaze blank and pitiless as the sun, moving slow would conquered the world? 

Wisdom Gained from the Native American 

The importance of what can be learned from the ancient Native Americans is twofold. They are important because they are a primordial people. Their lives were uncorrupted by sophisticated philosophies and religions. Thus, the revelations to be found in their way of living and thinking are primordial truths. First of all, internecine masculine aggression existed among them. Peaceful tribes seem to have been isolated from other tribes. Tribal wars were common and raiding, sometimes bloody, was a pastime among men. Thus, the first primordial truth revealed is that masculine aggression is rooted in DNA, not culture. Animosity and hatred came naturally. However, it wasn’t further inspired by ideology. Native Americans recognized that essentially all native peoples were the same. Warfare and raiding was simply a game that gave added excitement to life. At pow-wows various tribes gather together. It was Native Americans’ way of meeting together, to join in dancing, singing, visiting, renewing old friendships, and making new ones. Dakota Sioux Ella Cara Deloria says in Waterlily that “Among the Dakotas all traditional enemies were received in friendship for the annual celebration, and the courtesy was reciprocated” (107). This was possible because there were no ideological enemies, and certainly no enemies of God. So old enmities could be set aside.

*Compare this to the biblical story of the rape of Dinah (Genesis 34) that describes the divide between the Jew and pagan as being absolute because Jewish ideology prohibited friendship with pagans, even those willing to convert to Judaism.

The other revelation is the absence of a God that creates hatred and conflict between tribes. As with the life of the ancient Greeks, the life of Native Americans was not dominated by religion. They believed in spirits and God, who was a provider but not a lawgiver and who did not require being worshipped. French explorer Champlain wrote of the Huron that “they recognize no divinity, they adore and believe in no God” (Vernon Kinietz, The Indians of the Western Great Lakes 122). Of course that wasn’t true, but there were no churches or Sunday services. Howard Russell tells us that “Should the season’s crops prove bountiful, the sun, the earth and the rainmaker deserved gratitude and praise. The principle was live and let live, or the Indian felt himself in the presence of living entities who were a conscious of his existence he of theirs....In Indian eyes it was a sin to injure unnecessarily even the least fellow creature.... ‘With all beings and all things we shall be as brothers’” (Indian New England Before the Mayflower 44). How different from the Christian who wantonly destroyed forest and decimate species, some into extinction. The difference was that Christians were of the God cult who considered nature and the Earth world as existing in a fallen, evil state,* whereas Indians were members of the Earth Clan who appreciated and revered nature and the Earth world.

* Apostle Paul: “I consider that our present sufferings are not worth comparing with the glory that will be revealed in us” (Romans 8:18). 

God’s Other Problem

As we’ve seen, Biblical scholar Bart Ehrman addresses in his book God's Problem: How the Bible fails to Answer Our Most Important Question—Why We Suffer. He says, “If there is an all-powerful and loving God in this world, why is there so much excruciating pain and unspeakable suffering?” Philosophically known as the problem of evil. It was first recognized over two-thousand years ago by Kohelet, the wisest Jew of the Bible expressed in the Book of Ecclesiastes. However, Ehrman knew the answer to the problem: the Jewish God is an invention, a rather malicious one according to the Old Testament. Kohelet didn’t believe that, so God’s toleration of evil, in particular evil men (still the problem today), remained a mystery to him. However, there is another problem of evil associated with God himself that can be titled God’s the Problem, which has been addressed by another scholar the late Christopher Hitchens in his book God is not Great. His concern was the evil added to the world by religious ideologies. It’s time for Ehrman to narrow the focus and examine how the various Judaisms have contributed to the problem of evil.

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[1] The Quran has Gabriel using the first-person plural pronoun “we.” Thus, I assume the pronoun refers to Gabriel and Allah, which has the advantage of making it appear that the reader is “listening” to God speaking rather than Gabriel. I say more about this below.

[2] See the following online: Index of Ancient Greek Scientists – ICS.

[3] No people learned as profoundly from nature as did Native Americans (Indians). Their way of living in the mundane world is their revelation to humanity. Their lives and worldview can be found in many terrific books. I remember a time when bookstores devoted entire sections to them. Today those bookstores have disappeared but the books can be found with a little effort. Yet, one cannot hope to begin to understand their way of life and way of thinking without visiting the natural landscapes in America where their lives were interwoven with nature’s geographical monuments and their natural inhabitants.

[4] The wise ancient Greek philosopher Epicurus (341–270 B.C.) understood this and sought in Buddha-like (566?–480 B.C.) fashion to combat the religious notion of the afterlife, upon which postmortem punishment or suffering is based. He did this by embracing another wise Greek philosopher’s theory of atoms, Democritus (460–370 B.C). Atomism is also a feature of Buddhist beliefs. So much humane and scientific wisdom offered so early in human history, only to be superseded by the cruelly terrifying and bizarrely irrational superstitions of the Abrahamic religions.

[5] The painting and a different translation of the poem are found Tregear, 157-158.

[6] There is good reason for thinking Plato felt this way to some degree. And he certainly provided the philosophy and theology that encouraged such a view. However, I doubt many JudeoChristians or JudeoMuslims would be satisfied with Platonic soul’s destination. It seems that for Plato there are two fates for the soul. The first is to be reincarnated into another body, an idea perhaps adopted from Hinduism. The implication is that the new bodily receptacle will have no knowledge of the soul’s former receptacles. The second fate occurs once the soul qualifies for its final release from the material world (no further reincarnations). It will then remain a disembodied mind that will make its way to the eternal forms or truths, which will either absorb the soul or serve as pure ideas to be contemplated by the soul. Such an afterlife could appeal only to a philosopher.

What is most interesting about Plato’s (via Socrates) discussion of the soul in the Phaedo is how the imagination can invent such an entity that is then assumed to exist and become the topic of endless investigation, elaboration, and conversation that will produce additional imaginings inspired by the original. Essentially, what Plato did was to reify (thingify) the metabolic process known as life. Yet, if the soul—this eternal, animating entity is what gives life to humans, then why do we die if the soul itself is imperishable? And if the soul and living body are thought to be truly separate, then the real purpose of the soul becomes clear: to serve as a postmortem escape pod.

And since the Phaedo takes place during the last day of Socrates’ life, it’s apropos that Socrates’ friends, most in tears, would want to know the wise man’s views on death and the possibility of life after death, which, of course, would require an entity such as the soul. Most of Socrates’ admirers in the Phaedo are skeptical of the continuation of a soul-like entity, but they are feeling a little desperate now that their beloved teacher is on his death bed. What we have described in the Phaedo is a grasping of straws, wish-fulfillment being satisfied philosophically. Yet, as Epicurus would point out a little later even if death is the end there is nothing to fear because a person cannot be threatened or harmed if he or she does not exist.

[7] Christian Mary is the only woman mentioned by name in the Quran, which seems to push Muslim women further into the background. A nonMuslim reader of the Quran gets the impression that in Islam the role of women is passively supportive. They are the invisible gender because it’s impossible for them to emerge from their traditionally assigned domestic roles—servants of both men and God. Even in the New Testament, Mary as an individual has nothing to offer the world other than a son who will become the world’s benefactor by serving as God’s spokesman. As the Quran makes clear, God sends only masculine messengers.

[8] Recently Maryam Mirzakhani, an Iranian woman who presently teaches at Stanford University, received the Fields Medal, the most prestigious award in the field of mathematics. Any person deserves to be respected, but simply being a person doesn’t merit admiration. To be admired requires extraordinary accomplishment that is unique, that stands out, and that is individualistic in nature. Men are not admired for simply being good fathers. Being a good father is expected of men who have children. Men who are admired stand out for their unique accomplishments in science, philosophy, medicine, art, politics, sports, etc. The same is true for women, yet by being limited to domestic roles women have been prevented from pursuing achievements that would gain them admiration. That’s more than unfair; it’s cruel because it denies women control over their lives thus prevents them from achieving personal, individualistic self-realization—rather than having to passively surrender themselves to generic social roles that patriarchal societies impose upon them.

[9] Though we know from other sources that Muhammad’s first wife, Khadijah, was already a very successful merchant when she hired Muhammad to work for her as a caravan agent. Yet, her success as a woman was achieved before the arrival of Islam.

[10] Still, achievement in societies dominated by the Abrahamic myths is quite limited for both men and women. Life is reduced to becoming God’s subject. Any achievement outside religion is of subordinate value and looked upon with suspicion. All one needs to do is compare the achievements of the ancient Greeks with those of the ancient Jews, Christians before the Renaissance, and Muslims past and present.* What we find among the ancient Greeks is a multitude of remarkable achievements in fields some of which the Greeks themselves invented. This flowering of creativity occurred in part because the Greek mind was not oppressed by and preoccupied with religious concerns, restrictions, and obligations.

*I explain above (p. 74) that the Islam’s Golden Age had more to do with the contributions of the sophisticated civilizations conquered by the Arab Muslim barbarians (what else would one call them?) and less to do with the religion of Islam. In addition, the religion was probably the greatest reason for the Golden Age coming to an end.

 

To be creative people must have the freedom to think and do as they please. As it turns out, the greatest accomplishments of the Abrahamic religions are not ideas, given most are mythical and thus false. What stands out are the works of art inspired by the religions—primarily that of Christian architecture, sculpture, painting and literature. The prohibition against depicting representational images and the suspicion that secular art is sinful, limited artistic creativity among Jews (until recently) and Muslims. The great irony I find in appreciating the art inspired by the Abrahamic religions is that as magnificent as it can be (e.g., the cathedral Notre-Dame de Paris) it’s based on a false understanding and interpretation of the world. Yet, I can admire the magnificent religious works of the ancient Greeks, in part because they are really celebrations of the beauties of the mundane world. Greek sculptures of gods and goddesses celebrate the beauty of the human body. They are the body deified.

[11] Then again, what we also find in the Islamic religion is what we find in the mundane world: that it is a priestly-political elite that benefits most from terrorizing people to surrender themselves to God, because by surrendering to God they are actually surrendering to the dictates of religious institutions that are traditionally intertwined with political institutions, most perfectly in theocracies. Such control makes it possible for religious and political elites to live as royalty, often midst a sea of poverty. And as patriarchal religions they bequeaths to men power over women (which seems to be the case in Paradise as well). So to some degree, all men in an Islamic society are beneficiaries of their religion. Using Saudi Arabia as an example, I don’t see that women greatly benefit from the religion.

[12] Actually, not Allah but Muhammad. No one experiences Allah directly, not even Muhammad converses with Allah but with an angel (archangel Gabriel). Ergo, disbelievers doubt or disbelieve what Muhammad said or says via the Quran—a man who CLAIMS to have had an ongoing conversation NOT with God but with one of his angels. The Quran makes clear repeatedly that the doubts of disbelievers are directed to what men like themselves are telling them. In one case, messengers are told by the nonbelievers, “You are only men like ourselves. The Lord of Mercy has sent nothing; you are just lying” (36:15-17). Muhammad states the obvious when he says, “It is only the disbelievers who dispute God’s revelations”* (40:4). Of course, and they have every logical reason not to believe a man who claimed to be the recipient of divine revelations delivered to him by an angel during a twenty-year period.

*In other words, it’s only disbelievers who disbelieve. That they disbelieve is not the issue. The reasons why they disbelieve are. 

The implication is that doubting and critical thinking are sinful. And they are as far as Allah is concerned: “We shall certainly give the disbelievers a taste of severe punishment” (41:27). This message contradicts normal human thinking: that just because somebody claims that what he says is true does not make what he says true. Words cannot be evidence for themselves. Something more than words is needed. Verbal or written claims must be empirically or logical justified. And Allah is unjust when he condemns people for thinking logically and critically. The so-called logic of the Quran would have us believing the words of every street-corner preacher are true. Allah and his spokesmen (prophets) demand that people be gullible—to deny that part of their humanity called reason. That is a crime against humanity.

On the other hand, it is not a crime to be gullible—foolish and imprudent, yes, but not a crime. Muhammad has every right to believe he spoke with an angel, but he has no right to expect others to believe his claim of having done so. He should recognize the evidential (epistemological) difference between the two sources of information—first-hand versus second-hand. And nobody would doubt a message deliver to him or her by God himself or even by one of his angels. So why doesn’t God do that, since he has countless angels, rather than relying on a handful of human messengers? The moral incentive would be to avoid causing a lot of unnecessary bloodshed and to avoid filling Hell will billions of doubters.

[13] Such men as those who condemned and imprisoned Galileo and those who had Giordano Bruno and Joan of Arc burned at the stake. These men (yes, always men) represent millions of JudeoChristians who committed crimes against humanity in the name of Jesus Christ or simply committed horrific crimes for their own benefit but then found Christ and asked his forgiveness. All these moral monsters will go to Heaven, which makes going to Paradise or Heaven less attractive to people who find such “justice” repugnant.

[14] In God’s “eyes” the crimes committed against Galileo, Bruno, and Joan of Arc aren’t crimes at all because they were done on God’s behalf. Yes, perhaps the punishers were overly zealous, but certainly zealotry in defense of God is always forgivable. Though I find it strange that the creator of the Universe would need defending, as if he were being bullied by disbelievers. Shouldn’t God be able to defend himself? All the bullying, mockery, doubting, and disbelieving would go away if only he would pay us a visit in all his glory.

[15] The communion ritual has a very long history. Durant tells us in his The Life of Greece that in the early day each pagan household had its own god and in the fire of the family hearth offerings of food and wine were made before every meal” and “This holy communion, or sharing of food with the god, was the basic and primary act of religion in the home” (175). Pagans, however, would find it difficult to accept the communion of JudeoChristianity, the feasting upon the flesh and blood of God’s incarnated divine son. And given Christ was human it does appear as a form of divinely sanctioned cannibalism.

[16] The flaw is complex rather than simple, thus cannot be reduced simply to willful malevolence, but it does seem to always involve some form or degree of moral deficiency, such as acting in an unthinking fashion. Mindlessly following one’s inclinations or the collective behaviors of society. What comes to mind is joining a festive parade of soldiers marching off to war.

[17] Of course, the Abrahamic religions anthropomorphize God while at the same time claiming he is totally alien to whatever can be conceived. They want God to absolutely transcend any and all natural attributes. That makes sense given that he/it is a No-thing (because entities have limits and God is without limits, thus he/it is misleading as well). They want God to be totally mysterious, yet the Judaism has him stomping about in the garden angrily as he hunts down little Adam and Eve hiding in the bushes, busily sewing themselves their first set of garments, so that he can punish them; JudeoChristianity goes so far as to have him appear in drag as a human being; and JudeoIslam has him making threats like a surly monarch throughout the Quran. You can’t have it both ways—an absolutely mysterious, inconceivable, No-thing behaving and acting like a human being. The ancient Jews created a deity that is a contradiction, a squircle deity: a walking, talking, bragging, ranting, haranguing, demanding, meddling, hating, punishing, killing, etc., deity that is supposed to be totally nonhuman but thinks and behaves only as a human (with a nasty disposition) would.

[18] Let me say here that when I speak of neopaganism it is Carl Sagan’s worldview that I have in mind. His Cosmos is science expressed poetically and artistically. It is an exquisite expression of Sagan’s appreciative understanding of the world. If the Universe could speak for itself, it would express gratitude for Sagan’s reverential revelation of the great cosmic drama that began with the big bang and consummated in the minds artists, philosophers, and scientists such as Huizong, Basho, Aristotle, Lucretius, Einstein and Sagan.

[19] From a JudeoChristian perspective agape is defined “the love of God or Christ for humankind.” The Gospel of John says, “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life says (3:16) or in First John, “He who does not love does not know God; for God is love.” (4:8) However, these verses contain a glaring contradiction. God is not unconditionally loving. Those he loves—a very small minority of humanity—will enjoy everlasting life in some version of paradise but everyone else will spend an eternity burning in Hell. And not even the most strained, convoluted, garbled argument could make such Hitler-like treatment of humanity into some weird expression of love. The fact is a god who would condemn people to a blazing fire cannot be a god of love. Even the love the Abrahamic god supposedly “feels” toward those who worship him is egotistical. True love must be to some degree must be unconditional. That is certainly the case for the kind of love agape is supposed to be. Sorry, but the Abrahamic god doesn’t qualify for “God is love” status.

[20] There are people—mostly men—who derive pleasure from harming others. But these people are subhuman, less than or not fully human because they haven’t fully realized their humanity. In a sense, they are below both animals and humans. Animals have no interest in doing harm for its own sake. They are like people who eat meat because it gives them pleasure not because it causes pain to animals (though it does to some degree). The two standout characteristics that define humans are reason and morality. Of the two, morality is the characteristic most associated with being a fully realized human being. Without a doubt, the bar for qualifying as a fully realized human being has been continually raised ever since humans became self-aware critical thinkers.

What about children? They are not subhuman but proto-human, not fully realized. The behavior that clearly throws a person into the subhuman category is intentionally harming another human being or (even harming nonhuman creatures simply to cause them harm). This is an unforgivable violation of another person’s autonomy. Thus, subhuman is a moral category. Evil people (especially those who take pleasure from harming others) are subhuman because they are sub-moral. A man who is executed for raping and killing a woman, for example, has been declared subhuman. By committing such a crime he compromised his moral status and by doing so compromised his human status.

Buddha, Socrates, and the historical Jesus were all fully human. Genghis Khan, Stalin, Hitler, Putin, and all similar evildoers were/are subhuman. To be fully human one must realize the highest quality of humanity, which is morality, essentially respecting the autonomy of others, which is, as far as I can see, the cardinal principle of morality.* In this context, violating a person’s autonomy in such a way that causes serious suffering is an unpardonable sin. Once one behaves as a subhuman, he remains subhuman because the past cannot be erased. This means that certain crimes cannot be paid for thus returning a person to fully human status. A murderer is always a murderer. The crime cannot be undone.

*A central principle of Immanuel Kant's ethics: Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals.

[21] There are many pleasures that result in pain, the best known being drugs, alcohol, and careless, permissive sexual behavior. There are even people who enjoy the perverse pleasure of seeing people harmed, such as in movies, viewers who might even identify more with the evildoer than with hero. (Armchair serial killers!) In some cases, the perverse enjoyment could come from seeing people being harmed without oneself being exposed to harm oneself. In this case, seeing others (but not oneself) harmed as in horror movies might result in the viewer more fully appreciating the safety and tranquility of his or her home and community. Or perhaps people need to confront their greatest fears and prefer to do so vicariously. Another attraction may be the desire to see evil people defeated and punished. In video games, the player has the pleasure of being the one who defeats evil. In such cases, the viewer/gamer might even be reassured that he or she could confront and defeat evil. On the other hand, certain video games all allow players to be evil.

Epicurus’ approach to dealing with pain causing situations was simply to avoid them. Will Durant refers to the Epicurean escape. What he is referring to is the individual who seeks the highest degree of happiness—the tranquil mind—by retreating from the hustle and bustle of the everyday world. In this sense, Epicurus’ approach to the happy life is consistent with Eastern philosophy and with Basho’s way of life. Today, in the age of pervasive media that brings all the horrors of world into one’s home and can make even the most sophisticated user its prisoner, in an age when most of humanity lives in urban environments not congenial to producing mental tranquility, such retreat seems even more necessary and less achievable. And I suspect that Epicurus would advise the person seeking mental tranquility to seek out entertainment that calms the mind, rather than entertainment that agitates, distresses, and disheartens. Today, that would mean not watching the news on television which can lead to chronic feelings of worry, anxiety, and depression, in part because of its vivid audiovisual images.

[22] Or perhaps from Zoroastrianism, which might have been JudeoChristianity’s source for the notions of Judgment Day and Heaven and Hell. Durant says in his discussion of Zoroastrianism’s concept of Hell, “we hear the threat of that awful Last Judgment which seems to have passed from the Persian to the Jewish eschatology in the days of the Persian ascendancy in Palestine.” He adds, “It was an admirable formula for frightening children into obeying their parents” (Our Oriental Heritage 371). Says William McNeill, “Zoroastrianism was thus bound to influence other religious traditions, notably Judaism” (157). Yet, clearly prophets and priests used just as effectively the threats of Hell to frighten naive adults into obedience. In the words of Apostle Paul the goal of JudeoChristianity is absolute obedience: “We capture people’s thoughts and make them obey Christ. And when you completely obey him, we will punish anyone who refuses to obey” (2 Corinthians 10:5-6). The ultimate punishment is Hell.

[23] Helping widows, orphans, the poor, captives, and others in need is simply moral garnish to give a religion that exhibits selfishness at every turn the appearance of being moral or being about behaving morally. The following passage from the Quran reveals the moral sensibility of Muhammad’s followers: “And of them [Muhammad’s followers] there are those who blame you with respect to the alms; if they are given a share, they are pleased; if they are not given a share, lo! they are full of rage.” (9:58) Guillaume says that “among the objects of almsgiving is the ‘gaining of men’s hearts.” (51) Revealed here is the political use of a moral principle and loyalty’s materialistic (rather than moral) incentive.

And in reference to the Quran’s altruistic demands, Watt says, “These are, of course, good and sound injunctions, but what is surprising and puzzling is that this is the only aspect of conduct that is mentioned (apart from worship of God and belief in him). There is nothing about respect for life, property, parents and marriage or the avoiding false witness.” (33) Clearly, certain of these moral principles would have been contrary to the Muhammad’s Islamic agenda. Neither Islam, Allah, nor Muhammad respects the life and property of disbelievers. The Quran says, “Believers never ally themselves with the disbelievers, instead of the believers. Whoever does this is exiled from GOD.” (3:28) This includes friends and family members: “O you who believe, do not ally yourselves even with your parents and your siblings, if they prefer disbelieving over believing. Those among you who ally themselves with them are wrongdoers.” (9:23) In the context of Muhammadanism the moral discrepancy and deficiency are not surprising, but coming from God (Allah) they are inexcusable.

Allah himself will condemn to the fires of hell widows, orphans, the poor, and captives who are disbelievers. Personally, I can see no moral justification for torturing people for rejecting as false or doubtful claims of any kind—true or false. Allah is especially annoyed when someone calls Muhammad’s revelations “Ancient fables.” (83:13) They have no reason for believing otherwise. They are for the most part ancient fables adopted from the ancient Jews—stories about Moses, Noah, Abraham, etc. (Which are today considered unhistorical legends. See, for example, The Bible Unearthed, written by two archaeologists who will burn in Hell for their disbelieving science. Actually, that book is itself a revelation.)

The revelations, furthermore, are not being delivered by God but by a man, who himself can’t claim to know God since the revelations were supposedly delivered to him by an angel. What the disbelievers are expressing is doubt that is clearly justified. For that they will burn in Hell. Such punishment is underserved thus immoral.

In the sura that condemns Muhammad’s revelations being called ancient fables, the reader learns that cheaters will also be sent to burn in Hell. Right away comes to mind shady used car dealers. A man once knowingly sold my mother a car that had had the odometer turned back. He even knew my mother. Let’s assume that he engaged often in such trickery. Would such a man deserve to burn an eternity in the fire of Hell? No. And to punish him in such a way would be unjust and cruelly immoral. Muhammad tells the reader that in life the disbelieving cheaters laugh at believers, but in the afterlife “believers are laughing at the [burning] disbelievers as they [believers] sit on couches, gazing around.” (83:29 & 34-35) Allah’s punishment makes a mockery of morality and justice, and his elect behave as cruel sadists.

But, actually, sura about cheaters is not about punishing cheaters. It’s about punishing disbelievers. Cheaters are not sent to Hell because they are cheaters but because they do not believe in the resurrection and Day of Judgment. Cheaters who accept as true Muhammad’s revelations and surrender their lives to daily praising Allah will be excused from the fires of Hell. A more extreme case of Allah’s moral hypocrisy is describe in sura eighty-five, which describes the damning of disbelievers who made a fiery trench in which to burn believers, who were apparently Muslims:

 

They ignited a blazing fire. Then sat around it. To watch the burning of the believers. o Him belongs the kingship of the heavens and the earth. And GOD witnesses all things. Surely, those who persecute the believing men and women, then fail to repent, have incurred the retribution of Gehenna [Hell]; they have incurred the retribution of burning. (85:5-10)

 

A moral inconsistency seems to be lurking here. Allah says, via the angel, via Muhammad, that the disbelievers’ only grievance against the believing Muslims was their faith in God (Allah) and for that the believers were burned in a pit. Yet, the punishment for the cruel disbelievers will be to burn in Hell. So, it seems that Allah is punishing these religiously intolerant malefactors for doing exactly what he does: burning people who disagree with his religious beliefs, more precisely his religious beliefs according to Muhammad. Actually, Allah is far crueler. The victims of the religious persecutors died in the fire, thus their suffering came to an end. That is not the case with those Allah punishes. They burn and burn and burn.

There is more. The Study Quran says the most frequently cited account of the origin of this incident is the story of a king who is angry at believers who place God above him. He demands that the believers give up their religion or be thrown into a fiery pit. Historically, the believers were most likely Christians, not Muslims. That would make the Quran’s suggestion that Mohammad’s Muslims were persecuted in this cruel manner fallacious. Interestingly, the editor says that the verses “present a universal condemnation of all who persecute believers of any faith.” (1497) If that is true, then Islam doesn’t practice what it preaches.

The real revelation of the Quran is that nonbelievers have no moral rights. That’s because the Quran, thus Islam, is really all about the glorification of a selfish, narcissistic deity, not morality. Neither Allah nor Yahweh can serve as moral authorities. They must recuse themselves as such for their inability, due to their narcissism, to consider moral questions objectively. 

[24] Consequentialist egoism—it looks bad, and can be, but one must also consider that doing good (altruism) can make one feel good (by enhancing one’s ego ideal) and causing harm can cause one suffering, such as in the form of a guilty conscience (tarnishing one’s ego ideal).

[25] And I suspect that the modus operandi Muhammad used to gain adherents was similar to that of the promoters of JudeoChristianity and Marxist ideology—to appeal to the proletariat masses by arguing that the theology (or ideology) is especially concerned about their welfare.

[26] One is tempted to absolve Muhammad from condemnation since he was just a messenger, a servant carrying out Allah’s orders. Or was Muhammad’s Judaized version of Allah simply a tool that served his will to power? Religion has always served the will-to-power interests of individuals and institutions. Again, there is no better example than Constantine I.

[27] A few centuries before Epicurus, the original writer of the story of Job challenged God on the moral grounds that he whimsically and unjustly played with humans. Epicurus would have argued that Yahweh was a fiction. That nicely solves the problem raised in the Book of Job. God cannot behave immorally if he doesn’t exist.

[28] I can choose to open a door, but I can’t simply choose to like or love someone. I can choose to be nice to someone, but I can’t choose to believe that I should marry a person I know nothing about. The difference is between choosing to act in some way versus to feel or think in some way. The latter isn’t simply a matter of choice. A person can know that flying is safer than driving by looking at statistics. But a person cannot make himself or herself feel safer when flying than when driving. It’s not a matter of decision. By looking at statistics a person can come believe flying is generally a safe form of travel, though they may continue to feel unsafe in an airplane. And certainly people cannot simply decide to believe that they have a guardian angel looking out for them or that a St. Christopher medal will protect them when traveling. And it is wrong to condemn people for not being able to make a leap of faith they don’t believe in. To force them to do so—by torturing or terrorizing them, for example—doesn’t result in their making a decision but corrupts the decision-making process so that the person is no longer acting rationally but irrationally. As far as I can see, it induces a form of insanity by breaking a person’s will, by destroying their integrity as rational human beings.

[29] And we should keep in mind that for many of the big names of the Old Testament—such as Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Moses—there is no evidence whatsoever of their having existed other than as fictional Biblical characters. On the other hand, the existence of the big players in Greek philosophy/science—such as the Presocratics, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Lucretius, Zeno, Pythagoras, Euclid, Archimedes, Hippocrates, etc.—is undeniable.

Physicist Carlo Rovelli praises co-inventor of atomic theory Democritus (460 BC - 370 BC) who wrote dozens of scientific tracts (listed on page 19), most lost during the “centuries dominated by monotheism” that he characterizes as “the intellectual catastrophe of the Dark Ages.” About the philosopher, he says, “The ethical ideal of Democritus is that of a serenity of mind reached through moderation and balance, by trusting in reason and not allowing oneself to be overwhelmed by passions” (Reality Is not What it Seems 20 & 10).

What occurs when a religion bases itself on the behavior of fictional characters of another religion? The fiction of the earlier religion is transported into the later religion. This seem to be the case for Judaism’s two offspring—JudeoChristianity and JudeoIslam.

[30] In his Early Greek Philosophy John Burnet says of the founders of Greek scientific philosophy, the Ionians, “In all this there is no trace of theological speculation. We have seen that there had been a complete break with the early Aegean religion and that the Olympian polytheism never has a firm hold on the Ionian mind. It is therefore quite wrong to look for the origins of Ionian science in mythological ideas of any kind” (13). Burnet also says, “...the Greeks never had a priestly class and that may well have had something to do with the rise of free science” (4). Superstition puts a drag the free, independent thinking required by philosophy and science. Greek philosophical-scientific thinking flourished in such a remarkable manner because the Greeks checked “the growth of a superstition like that which ultimately stifled Egypt and Babylon” (4).

[31] The Jewish theologian Philo Judaeus attempted to provide the particulars of divine creation and the result both bizarre and ludicrous. Here is his explanation of why the number 6 was chosen for number of days it took God to create the world: 

When, therefore, Moses says, “God completed his works on the sixth day,” we must understand that he is speaking not of a number of days, but that he takes six as a perfect number. Since it is the first number which is equal in its parts, in the half, and the third and sixth parts, and since it is produced by the multiplication of two unequal factors, two and three. And the numbers two and three exceed the incorporeality which exists in the unit; because the number two is an image of matter being divided into two parts and dissected like matter. And the number three is an image of a solid body, because a solid can be divided according to a threefold division. (Works, “Creation of the World,” vol. 1, bk 1.) 

Of course, the real story has nothing to do with the number 6 and everything to do with 14 billion years of cosmic evolution.