Good Friday with Five Broken Cameras and Broken Commandments

The Jewish festival of Passover may celebrate a myth, or more likely the Passover story is part mythology, with a germ of truth. The basic tale is in the second book of the Bible, Exodus, Chapters 11 and 12. The key point is that when the Jews were getting ready to leave Egypt, all the first born Egyptian children and cattle died on an appointed night.

If the whole story is not a myth, and if you don't believe in supernatural crimes against humanity, then there is only one conclusion. Gangs organized by Moses went around and killed a bunch of innocent children, and cattle, in the night.

And so the Jews celebrate passover. They make it a celebration of freedom from slavery in Egypt, and I am all for freedom, and for celebrating freedom.

But given at least 3000 years have passed, would it not be a good idea to stop reminding the world every year that instead of killing the Pharaoh that night, which would have been justifiable tyranicide, they killed an untold number of Egyptian children?

Imagine if Germans annually celebrated the Holocaust like it was a good thing, or if Americans celebrated Wounded Knee or some other massacre of native American Indians.

Good Friday is pretty weird too. If there is anything that whips up Christians to kill Jews, besides high interest rates, it is Good Friday. The Crucifixion of Jesus Christ, the Son of God or at least the Messiah or a Prophet or some sort of rabble rouser who was against the quaint Jewish custom of stoning people to death for sex outside of one man to one woman marriages.

Good Friday follows Holy Thursday, at which Jesus had his last meal with the Apostles. This was on or near the Passover, according to Mark Chapter 14. Mark is the Gospel with the best pedigree. There is reasonably good evidence that it was dictated by the Apostle Peter in Jerusalem, and in it Peter confesses to having denied Jesus three times. It contains no childhood account of Jesus, the account of the resurrection is short and sounds appended, and Peter is not marked out as the head of the church. According to most Bible academics, the other three Gospels make up stuff to add to Mark's version.

I doubt the crucifixion is merely symbolic. Taking everything into account, it was probably a historic event. Psychologists have documented how it is common for bereaved people to imagine a visit (while asleep or even while awake) from someone who recently died. If even one Apostle (or Mary Magdalene, the first person to see him in Mark) had such a vision, it is easy to understand that a decade later every survivor in the inner circle would at least refrain from contradicting the story that Jesus rose from the dead. It is notable that in Mark there is no "doubting Thomas" story to counteract the cynicism of the less gullible.

In time the false Apostle Paul made the Jesus cult into a story about Jesus's triumph over death. This was not a new story: Osiris, Hercules, and Cybele all had cults promising some sort of life after death. Passover became part of the tradition of non-Jewish Christians. Paul also began wrangling for control against Peter and James, Jesus's brother, who led the Jewish Christians in Jerusalem. This led to the hatred of Jews that became such a strong component of Christianity and led directly to the Holocaust of the 20th century, not to mention 19 centuries of Jew killing in between.

But perhaps the best (as in most uplifting) interpretation of Good Friday is that, since Jesus was the first born Son of God, that God is an Egyptian. The Jews murdered Jesus like they murdered the Son of the Pharaoh back in Egypt. Tie that into the story of the Good Samaritan and a few choice other sayings from the Gospels, and you can argue that it is bad to kill people just because they don't belong to your religious or ethnic group.

What a concept.

Many of the parables of Jesus clearly speak to peasants, who were in the majority for most of the world's post-hunter-gatherer history but are now becoming a rare breed.

5 Broken Cameras was nominated for an Academy Award this year as Best Documentary Feature. In it we see arrogant expatriate European Ultra-Orthodox Jewish settlers stealing land from and beating up lovable Palestinian peasants just east of Jerusalem. Some (but not all) Zionists believe that God hands out title deeds, that they are not subject to the commandments in Exodus: "Thou Shall Not Steal," and "Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's house ... nor anything that is thy neighbors."

Think of how many people get recruited into Islamic Jihadist groups after watching such obvious injustice. They won't think "Just a few bad Jews are doing this." They won't even think "All Jews are doing this." They will think "Jews are doing this with American help."

We (Americans) should not be helping anyone steal anyone's land. In fact, American's might want to consider all the land (and other stuff, including labor) we've stolen (including by fraud) over the past 300 or so years. In the name of Justice, or Jesus, or Osiris, or Nature, we should make restitution. Or at least stop killing and stealing.

Philippines War, American Christianity, and Islam

"It is the modest, not the presumptuous, inquirer who makes a real and safe progress in the discovery of divine truths." — Henry St. John, Viscount Bolingbroke

As part of my preparation (or really procrastination) for writing The U.S. War Against Asia (aka The Asian War) I recently completed the most excellent God's Arbiters: Americans and the Philippines, 1898-1902 by Susan K. Harris.

In tracing how an ostensibly democratic and anti-imperialist nation rationalized becoming an imperialist power by seizing Puerto Rico, Guam, Hawaii and the Philippines against the will of their inhabitants, Susan Harris goes into the details of the 19th century transformation of the United States into an overtly Christian nation. Part of that project (for it did not occur spontaneously) was a re-writing of the history of 18th century America, particularly the period between 1750 and the passing (marred by massive fraud) of the U.S. Constitution.

History is always a summation. We cannot study, even if we wanted to, what each American inhabitant did and thought, for instance, on each day of 1776, important as all those thoughts and actions in that particular year must have been. When doing a summary the acts of including or excluding may make for very different end products.

In the 19th century the Enlightenment, which was secular and non-religious, was largely erased from the story of the American Revolution and the creation of the U.S. Constitution. Tom Paine was practically obliterated from history, not for writing Common Sense, which was acceptable to patriots, but for writing Age Of Reason, which was unacceptable to Christians. Thomas Jefferson could not be so easily obliterated, but his early atheism and later deism (which is just atheism with its ass covered) was quietly dropped from the discussion.

In the 19th century, despite the Abolitionists and Emancipation Proclamation, Christianity became deeply intertwined with racism in these United States. How did a doctrine that originated as anti-racialist, and explicitly welcoming all human beings, come to be deeply racist? It started long before the first Church of England member stepped foot in Virginia. [Note also the myth that our nation was founded by Puritans in Massachusetts. That is post-Civil war malarkey. Most Americans who bothered with religion before 1776 were Church of England, and Virginia was the first and most prominent English colony in America.]

Christianity became a European, or "white race," religion, because it was supplanted by Islam as a global religion between 700 and 1500 A.D. Christianity became the dominant religion in the "Near East" and in northern Africa by supplanting previous localist religious cults between 300 and 600 A.D. Islam was created specifically to correct obvious errors in Christianity, Judaism, and paganism. The idea that God (now Allah) needed a son for a co-god was replaced with the idea that Jesus Christ was a great prophet like Moses. Most of the Koran consists of retelling of Bible tales and early Christian fables.

Islam was remarkably successful as a philosophy, culture, and mode of governance. Pretty soon Christianity, already in its Dark Ages, had retreated to the core of Europe. Islam became a global, multiracial religion that extended from Spain across north Africa to Indonesia. When Christianity emerged again in the form of Portuguese and Spanish piracy in the late 1400's, it was incapable of seeing non-whites as full human beings. While some converting to Christianity did occur amidst the pillaging of Africa, Asia, and the Americas, in almost every case non-white Christians were supervised by white priests.

However, it is not fair to blame the destruction of the American Indian tribes in what is now the United States on Christianity alone. Greed played the major part, and it affected the subscribers to the Age of Reason. Nor were the Rationalists immune to racist sentiments. They simply rationalized their racism. For Christian slave owners God ordained the inferiority of the black race; for atheist slave owners like Thomas Jefferson, Nature ordained that same inferiority.

Sexism, too, seemed pre-ordained to almost all men, Christian, Jew, Buddhist, Hindu, pagan, and atheist alike. The Roman Catholic church, to this day, teaches the inferiority of women as a major theological truth. Protestant sects have changed their minds, or not, sect by sect over time. Atheists have led in the women's liberation department, but for decades allowed practice to lag theory.

Apparently it was Robert Ingersoll who reminded Americans of the role of Thomas Paine in the American Revolution and the creation of our system of governance. Even as the Sugar Trust and its imperialist allies enslaved Puerto Rico, Hawaii and the Philippines at the turn of the century, the prestige of science was rising with the prestige of America's industrial might. The world of trains, telephones, and radio had not been foreseen by the prophets of the Bible or Koran. Americans became more secular, even as most tried to keep a gloss of Christianity as a cover. The racial barriers crumbled, gradually at first, and then in a great tumble in the 1960s.

The military-christian-political complex, however, regained a lot of momentum after the attack on the World Trade Center and Pentagon in 2001 brought Islam to the fore as the new Enemy.

We seem to have come to an odd point in history. We have a not-entirely-white President of the United States who has been accused of being a Muslim because his absentee father was nominally an adherent of Islam. Barack Obama professes to be a mainstream Christian Protestant. He has proven he is just as good at killing non-white non-Christians as any prior American president. Half the nations of the world remain home to at least one American military base. Republicans in Congress demand war with Iran and Syria and Democrats keep their mouths shut for fear of Christian backlash.

Religious crazies of all sorts have become used to using the products of scientific reasoning. Soon crazies (other than Obama) will be sending out cheap unmanned drones to smite their enemies. Meanwhile, sects new and old can fish for converts with smartphones and Facebook.

I began this essay thinking about how resilient (and destructive) the Christian America myth has been. Now I am thinking: how do we know if we are in a period of stability? The elements of change could be in place already. Changes in allegiance as great as when Christianity swept over Eurasia in the 4th century, Islam swept over the world in the 7th century, and Communism swept over much of the world in the 20th century could be upon us. Some sect I have never heard of could be getting ready to conquer the world, without its members even being aware of their destiny.

Or perhaps the Age of Man is coming to a close just as surely as the Age of Dinosaurs once did.

Still, apocalypses are pretty rare. Like the rest of humanity tomorrow I will wake up and make the best of the situation at hand, just like any other day. I'm lucky I'm not not in Somalia or Mali or Afghanistan where Obama's henchmen fight it out with Islamic extremists and ordinary people get caught in the crossfire (including the economic crossfire).

Hagel, Hitler, Iran and Zionism

As American mainstream politicians go, Chuck Hagel can be counted as one of the good guys. A number of Senate Republicans disagree, and mainly showed their own evil agendas when questioning Mr. Hagel, who stood before them as President Barack Obama's nominee to become the new Secretary of Defense.

The Republicans think Mr. Hagel is soft on Iran, and so Obama must be soft on Iran too. What has Iran ever done to the Republican Party, or to the U.S.? They kicked out our puppet, the mass-murdering dictator Shah of Iran, decades ago, and set up a democracy. They hold elections in which pro-American politicians can't win a majority in parliament. They are developing nuclear power (note the Republicans are all gung ho for nuclear power in the U.S.). I think nuclear power is a bad idea, but it should be stopped in the U.S. before we go meddling in other nation's business.

They suspect Mr. Hagel of not being a Zionist and anti-Palestinian racist. He is not sufficiently pro-Israel, as shown by past remarks in which he pointed out that Zionists have a lot of political power in the U.S. Note the Republican Party is competing with the Democratic Party for Zionist campaign contributions. You'd think they were a bunch of ultra-orthodox Jews, the way they promote Israel's occupation of Palestine.

Here on the opposite side of the nation a seemingly unrelated Letter to the Editor in the Gualala, California based Independent Coast Observer [subscription required], reminded me that a lot of this whole misidentification of enemies goes back to fundamental mistakes of fact and ideology originating in the 1930s. Modern Americans universally agree that Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party were evil, but they don't have the facts at hand to make reasonable comparisons to new "enemies" like Iran and Islam, or "friends" like Israel.

I've frequently heard "progressive" Democrats and those few brave people left of Democrat call Republicans fascists. I try to refrain: there are both minor and major differences between Republican politicians and Fascism proper. Nor should we forget that the much more radical American left of, say, 1930 to 1980 had little problem calling the Democratic Party fascist, which I can't agree with either. In both cases I think there have been specific policies or at least rhetoric that did deserve the fascist label. I just believe over-gereralizing is a major part of the American political laziness problem.

The letter, from R. Silva, wants to correct a previous letter on the subject of Christianity. R. wants Christianity to be about love, which is fine. But R. can't quite refrain from attacking non-Christians, saying in his or her 4th paragraph: "Sir, I would remind you that is exactly what Hitler successfully did in the 1930s and 1940s, resulting in the holocost (sic), which killed six million Christians and Jews [...]" The ellipsis is the editors, and is one of the few cases where I wish the rest had been printed.

Christians were killed in the holocaust? Well, yes, but ... that is almost like saying we should pity Catholics because Catholics were killed in the Inquisition in Spain. It turns the Holocaust on its head. Hitler imprisoned and killed everyone who openly disagreed with him (but not the young man who grew up to become Pope Benedict XVI). He did not kill them for their religious affiliation. He killed them because they disagreed with him, or were in his way, or had something he wanted. He killed Jews because of their race; converting to Christianity was no escape. The Christians he killed were mainly Lutherans and Roman Catholics, but most Lutherans and Roman Catholics joined the Nazi Party if they could, and fought in the German army. Hitler even killed substantial numbers of Nazi Party members for disagreeing with him.

The big losers, by denomination, aside from the Jews were atheists [See the Atheist Holocaust].

Although there was some promotion of German/Nordic, pre-Christian ideas, the Nazi (German National Socialist) Party was explicitly Christian. Article 24 of the Nazi Party Program states as a party demands "liberty for all religious denominations in the State so far as they are not a danger to ... the moral feelings of the German race. The party stands for positive Christianity." [1] The Nazi Party was opposed to Communism, atheism, and secularism.

At the time, while there was a typical modern secular trend in Germany, the Lutheran Church was by far the largest denomination in Germany. The Roman Catholic Church was the only other major organized religion, and had local majorities in much of southern Germany. In particular the former Kingdom of Bavaria, where the Nazi Party originally triumphed, was majority Catholic.

While Hitler's rise to power has to be credited mainly to him and his party, it was the Catholic Church, and the votes of the members of the Reichstag controlled by the Vatican, that effectively chose to give Hitler power in 1933. Franz von Papen was the Roman Catholic power broker for the deal, along with Eugenio Maria Pacelli, who later became Pope Pius XII, known as the Nazi Pope.

So why does R. Silva believe Hitler was not a Christian? Why does R. Silva not know Hitler was born Catholic and died Catholic, and that all the great fascist leaders were Roman Catholic? It is not R. Silva's fault. History in detail is time consuming, so most people must take their cues from summaries, including grade-school text books and TV. I would not say Hitler was a pious Catholic, unlike Spain's General Franco. But neither was the fact that Hitler was a Roman Catholic hidden from the world at the time.

Things were different in 1933 when both Hitler and Franklin Delano Roosevelt came to power after their years in the political wilderness. Americans and Germans, pretty much everyone in the world, were mainly worried about the economy. It was the Depression, those who did not have jobs were barely surviving, and those who had jobs worried they would not have them long. Hitler came to power mainly on the basis of his economic program, not because of his anti-Semitism or militarism. Germany's economy improved much faster than America's, and FDR's economic program was practically a copy of Hitler's, just lagging a year or two.

The party that elected Roosevelt to office (and Democratic majorities to Congress) was really an alliance of convenience of two parties. The Southern Democratic party was based on racism (segregation) and corruption, and was almost exclusively Protestant in religious affiliation. The Northern Democratic party was based on corrupt urban machines and was almost entirely ethnic (non-Anglo) and Roman Catholic in religious affiliation. The Vatican, through the American Roman Catholic Church, worked hard to keep the United States neutral in the fight against fascism and later in the first couple of years of World War II.

When the United States finally entered the war after Pearl Harbor, it was a propaganda problem for the Democratic Party, the Vatican, and the Roman Catholic bishops of the United States. Any American sympathy for Hitler, Franco, Petain, and Mussolini disappeared overnight (though some hid their lights under baskets). Although the Japanese had initiated the war, Adolf Hitler was designated Public Enemy Number One, as Roosevelt had previously planned with the British Empire,

The Vatican was quite please with Hitler's extermination of atheist-communism in central Europe, but remembered what had happened late in World War I. America had tipped the balance against Germany. Suddenly Pope Pius XI eased the Vatican into neutral. As the atheists (Russians) started crushing the Catholics & Lutherans (Germans) on the Eastern Front, and especially after the Allies invaded southern Italy, the Pope became increasingly critical of Hitler. In the United States, powerful Catholic figures in the Democratic Party prepared for a soft landing.

Hitler a Catholic? Forget about it! Such a bad man must be a satanist pagan. In any case, America's right wing (Democrat and Republican alike) was preparing to go back into completion with Communism after the war. Who would be our new ally? Why, Pope Pius XI. And his pet dictator, General Franco. And a bunch of Catholics and Lutherans who took off their swastikas and waved American flags to welcome the New World Order. To get public buy in for an alliance with global Catholicism, the actual religious affiliations of the fascists had to be allowed to fade from public memory.

William Shirer, in The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, gives some key insights about Martin Luther, the first Protestant (well, first who did not fall victim to the Inquisition). "The great founder of Protestantism was both a passionate anti-Semite and a ferocious believer in absolute obedience to political authority. He wanted Germany rid of Jews ... advice that was literally followed four centuries later by Hitler, Goering and Himmler." [2]

Since the Republicans who questioned Chuck Hagel act as non-Jewish Zionists, it might seem strange to compare them to Luther, Pius XI, and Hitler. But the point is not the particular group that is hated or attacked. Justice should be blind to a person's race and creed. Zionism is inseparable from crimes against Palestinians. War and economic crimes against Iran (or any other nation) are no different than Hitler's economic crimes against Jews or his invasion of Poland, Russia, and France.

The Republican Party has created its own Hell on Earth. No one is allowed to say, "Palestinians have human rights," or "Iranians have human rights" or "Islam should be treated like any other religion." The misinformation and hatred build on each other until a once reasonable man like John McCain ends up sounding like Hitler. The Republican Party rhetoric meant to secure Zionist campaign contributions (and Jewish and pro-Israel Christian votes in swing states) has already hurt many people around the globe. It helps Al-Qaeda do its recruiting. It is ethically wrong and pragmatically idiotic. It needs to stop.

Notes:
[1] Shirer, William L., The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, Simon and Schuster, N.Y., 1960. page 234.
[2] Ibid, p. 236.

Puritanism, Taliban, and Shabaab

"So, now prosperity begins to mellow

And drop into the Rotten mouth of death."

Richard the Third, Act IV: Scene IV

Prosperity is always just around the corner in America. In American History we are taught that the Pilgrims, or Puritans, founded our nation. Because of their high standard of civilization, things were rough at first, but prosper they did. The survivors, anyway.

The Pilgrim paradigm was developed by American educators in the 19th century. Children were taught that Protestant Christianity, the free market economic system, Anglo-Saxon culture, and democratic self-governance were tied in a bundle that marked a high-tide in the history of civilization. America triumphantly expanded westward even as the homeland, Great Britain, conquered the world's largest empire ever.

Puritan Christianity included a number of sects that, in Britain, were more Calvanist than the Church of England (Episcopal Church). Politics, too, was changing rapidly in Britain around the time the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth in 1620. Economic growth fueled by the exploitation of the developing empire and by technological advances was creating a class of business families that sought more political power. This led to the English Civil War (1642-1651), the beheading of Charles I in 1649, and in general to the decline of the power of the old English aristocracy.

The Pilgrims and the larger influx of Puritan Christians who established other towns in what is now the Boston metropolitan area were fairly typical of puritanical social movements in general. They did not believe in religious freedom, and proved it by exiling and executing people who deviated from their sect, including Quakers. They at least pretended to a rigid code of monogamy. Women had no legal rights (except, interestingly, the right not to be beaten by their husbands). Local democracy was possible because they all agreed on almost everything. In contrast back in England, disagreements led to the Cromwell dictatorship, then later the restoration of Charles II.

In England, puritan or not, for the next few centuries the punishment for stealing was execution by hanging. A lucky person might escape the gallows to be exported to labor in Georgia or, later, Australia.

Puritanism is typically a reaction to an excess of corruption. One might say it is an overreaction. Certain puritan ideals, like monogamy and virginity before marriage, may last in cultures for decades, centuries, or millennia. In politics people get tired of injustice and paying bribes to corrupt officials. In economics people react to being ripped off by merchants, or being underpaid or otherwise unfairly treated. Protestant Puritanism was a direct reaction to the corrupt Roman Catholic Church of the late Middle Ages.

We should not be surprised when puritan social organizations arise. Even in the United States today there is no shortage of puritanical energy. The Tea Party can be seen as a puritanical reaction to poor governance, just as fundamentalist Christianity (and Judaism and Islam) in the U.S. are partly reactions to our libertine culture, with its alcohol and drug problems, fatherless children, and unrelenting greed.

The Afghan Taliban ("students" of the Koran) are clearly puritanical. Western propaganda has emphasized their brutality and crimes against women. Why do they still have so much support in Afghanistan? Because the Afghans are not comparing the Taliban to a Saturday at the mall in an American suburb. They compared them, first, to the warlords who ruled various parts of Afghanistan after the Russians exited. Now they compare them to essentially the same group of warlords who try to give the American puppet government the appearance of popular support and democracy.

Aside from the almost universal hatred of Americans that now permeates Afghanistan, with American troops entering a former Taliban area the Afghan "government" also enters. Pretty soon things are back to the old system: theft and corruption. The locals may resent the Taliban for banning music, women may want an education, but no one wants a government that steals. Cutting off the hand of a thief (or corrupt official) sounds barbaric to us, but to most people if that is what it takes to provide security, they will put up with it. At least thieves don't get the death sentence, as they did under the British Empire.

The story of Shabaab ("boys" or Harakat al-Shabaab al-Mujahideen) is similar. Corrupt warlords ruled Somalia. The Islamic Courts Union (ICU) was set up almost spontaneously by the people of Somalia to provide a just government that would end corruption and theft. But the U.S. corporate security state, in a paranoid phase, decided the "Union" was anti-American because it was Islamic. The U.S. paid proxies to destroy the ICU. The militants of the ICU, mostly very young men, survived as Shabaab and eventually became the de facto government of Somalia by defeating the American proxies. They adopted a puritanical version of Islam that wanted Sharia law rigidly enforced, which had not been true of the ICU. Along with a decline in theft and corruption, however, sexual repression and brutal treatment of opponents was thrown in. Just like the American Puritans.

It isn't puritanism, or even Islamic puritanism, that brings forth the wrath of Barack Obama & crew. The Saudi's are the most systematically puritanical Islamic society. But they are pro-American, so they get kisses from Hilary while the Shabaab gets drone attacks. Nor is feminism required for alliance with the United States. Abortions and even birth control are crimes in many countries, and limited education, employment and property rights for women and not uncommon either. But from Chile to Ireland, as long as the anti-feminism is not anti-American, it's okay.

I believe a little puritanism from time to time is not a bad thing, especially if it pushes the scales to the moderate center. It is better than corruption, rampant crime, and the disintegration of education, culture, and ethics. However, the best puritanism is voluntary puritanism. In any culture people have some individual choices to make, like how much to drink and how hard to work. Puritan choices can be good individual choices. In a democratic society corrupt officials can be voted out of office and corrupt police and judges can be fired or jailed. It is when there are no easier choices for reform that people will turn to violent, dictatorial forms of puritanism to try to set their world straight.

There is plenty of corruption, violence, and anti-social behavior in America. We should clean up our own house rather than bombing the houses of our international neighbors. Instead of rebuilding the Afghan army or the Somali army we should rebuild Detroit and Flint and tens of thousands of smaller American communities that have been harmed by the recession and globalization.

Back to the Pilgrims, they had some admirable traits, but they don't provide an example we should emulate. They did not even start us on the road to America. The Virginia colony was well established long before Plymouth was founded. But the South lost our Civil War, so whatever merit Virginian culture might have had, it was eliminated from our educational mythology in the late 1800s.

More Info:

Al-Shabaab at Wikipedia
Taliban at Wikipedia
Pilgrims at Wikipedia

Jesus, Dagon and Mitt Romney

Now is one of those rare times when people are interested in talking not just about religion, but about how religions arise in the first place. In particular people are talking about the Mormons, as represented by their largest denomination, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. Mormon men believe that they can become Gods, and so for Mitt Romney the White House is just a stepping stone to ruling, as a God, his own planet. At the same time Mitt and the Mormons want protective coloring, the acceptance that theirs is a legitimate religion within the broad Christian spectrum.

The Christians themselves went through that process within the Roman Empire. That empire was already in intellectual decline by the time Jesus is believed to have been born. The Greeks of three to four hundred years earlier, or at least their intellectual class, was cultivating science and philosophy, trying to distinguish those from religious mythology. Religion, however, is a useful tool for rulers. Julius Caesar, who died in 44 B.C., had been declared a living God, a sign of both his power and his need to prop up his power with superstition.

In Palestine in that (post-Caesar) era the Romans ruled over a fragmented, multi-ethnic, multi-religious culture. Although the Jews had been a leading tribe in the area for over a thousand years, even before the Romans came they still had large numbers of non-Jews residing in the area. Recall that the Romans took over Judea in 63 B.C., and that the Jewish state had rarely been independent, but had been previously part of the Egyptian, Assyrian, and Macedonian/Seleucid empires.

Given that Egyptians, Canaanites of various sorts, Jews (who had their own various sects), Greeks, and various Arab tribes all mingled in the area of Palestine around the time of Jesus and the formation of the original Christian movement, it should not be surprising that, whatever Jesus himself believed or taught, the early Christians had many possible sources of influence. The crucial differences between early Christianity and the Jewish beliefs of that era was the promise of personal resurrection, or immortality, based on the belief that Jesus was not just the Messiah, but was a god, or the Son of God.

This actually just brought the Christian religion into conformity with the dominant pagan religions of that era, all of which worshipped resurrected gods: the Egyptian Osiris, the Greek gods Hercules and Dionysus, and several resurrection cults closer to home, with god-names varying by ethnic group. Anthropologists generally agree that resurrected gods are associated with agricultural societies that made a ritual of the harvest of grain and its resurrection from seeds each spring.

Possibly the main historical event of the early Christian Church, other than the life and death of its founder, was the Destruction of Jerusalem in 70 A.D./C.E. If the earliest Christians were divided as to whether Jesus had been a Jewish Messiah or a Canaanite resurrected god, that destruction of the Jewish state, which would not be resurrected for 1900 years, settled the question. Whatever Jesus was, he was not the Messiah who would make Judah an independent state again.

The New Testament is self-disproving: it has one clear prophecy made by Jesus (Matthew 24:34): "This generation shall not pass, till all these things be fulfilled." The generation did pass, and nothing was fulfilled. To survive Christianity needed a belief system and a structure that could perpetuate itself without divine intervention. The Christians never took over the old Jewish kingdom, but they did eventually take over the Roman Empire.

Which brings us to fish. There is no plant or animal more closely associated with Jesus Christ and the early Christians than fish. Fish are everywhere in the New Testament. Jesus's favorite recruits as Apostles are fishermen. One of his most important miracles is the multiplication of fishes. Early Christians used the fish symbol more than they used the cross. Jesus also displayed the powers of a sea god by calming the seas and walking on water.

That points to Dagon (which has many spelling variations), who the Jews believed was a fish god. He was also a resurrected god, probably originally a grain god who became associated with fishing later. The Jews claimed they destroyed him with the Ark of the Covenant, but more likely that is just a symbol of a period of successful ethnic cleansing (I do not mean to pick on the Jews here. Back then ethnic cleansing was an almost universal human practice).

This raises an important question: was Jesus really Jewish, and it so, how so?

How many of the Twelve Apostles were fishermen? It is hard to say because the list of Apostle names differs somewhat in each of the four gospels (Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John) [See Apostles for tables]. Only Simon Peter and his brother Andrew are specifically identified as fishermen from Bethsaida in Galilee, and Philip is also from Bethsaida. James and John abandon their nets to follow Jesus, so that would be at least five out of twelve. The prior occupations of most of the other apostles are not mentioned. The apostles were supposed to have been Jews, but were just as likely to have Greek names.

Jesus himself is "of Nazareth." Nazareth was nowhere. It was, at best, a town so small that the Jews did not include it in maps or lists of town names during Jesus's era. Nazareth was about halfway between the southern tip of the Sea of Galilee and the Mediterranean coast. A thousand years before Jesus it had been occupied by the Jewish tribe of Zebulun, but that was one of the Lost Tribes of Israel.

Even if Jesus was a Jew, some his neighbors probably were not. They were Palestinians of some ancient tribe, and Dagon was one of their gods. Jesus grew up north of the areas controlled by Samaritans, who thought the Jews of Jerusalem were innovators who brought back a false version of the old religion when they returned from the Babylonian Exile. In Jesus's time the Samaritans and Jews hated each other, the Jews having destroyed the Samaritans temple in 110 B.C.

The Jewish rebellion against Rome that started in 66 A.D. was not the wholesale rising of a united people against a foreign oppressor. Only a few Jewish cities, notably Jerusalem, actually fought the Romans. Many Jews were expelled by the Romans, though many remained. Most of the inhabitants of the area would later convert to Islam, including the ancient Jewish villagers. Christianity arose in this chaotic context and fragmented deeply. The Apostle Paul was self-appointed. His version of Christianity conflicted, by his own admission, with version of the Jewish Christian leaders in Jerusalem. It also conflicted with the many other self-appointed preachers who brought the idea of communal living and tithing to support ministers to whoever would pitch in. By 100 A.D. the original Christians were probably all or mostly dead and the fight for the intellectual property, the magic formula for converting pagans to cash cows, was full on.

It's all very fishy. I like the Dagon Hypothesis. If Jesus was a non-Jewish or semi-Jewish Palestinian who tried to convert the Jews to Dagon's ways, it all almost makes some sense.

Mitt Romney's Satanic Voter Problem

Who will Satan's followers vote for in September? If you are a Republican, chance are you expect Barack Obama to sweep the Satanist vote.

If you are Mitt Romney, you have a problem on your hands. You need those Satan votes in November. And you can get them only if you keep a very dark secret, and I don't mean about your tax returns.

By happenstance a friend of mine has been thinking of converting to Mormonism, or more specifically to the the largest of the Mormon sects, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, headquartered in Utah.
Reporting on her occasional doubts about converting, she said she was told, by a group of young Mormon priests, that anyone who discouraged her conversion was "speaking for Satan."

Um, let's see, who would be likely to discourage a friend or family member, or even just someone reading their blog, from joining the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints?

Certainly Roman Catholics would. Baptists would. Methodists would. I am pretty sure no Protestant Christian sect would encourage anyone to convert to Mormonism. Neither would Jews, Hindus, Moslems, or even atheists. I suppose agnostics, if you asked them if you should convert, would say "I don't know." I keep hoping agnostics will revive the American Party, more commonly known as the Know-Nothing Party.

I have nothing personal against any branch of the Mormons. The people I know who seem to dislike the Latter Day Saints the most are—former Mormons. Most people don't know much about Mormonism except that the Church was founded by an American, Joseph Smith, was run out of practically every state in the Union. After he died most of his followers settled in Utah, and used to be polygamists, although they mostly dropped that back in the late 1800's. We know more about the tiny polygamist sects because we've seen Big Love on TV.

So, with a Mormon looking like a potential President, with control of the world's largest army, economy, drone fleet and nuclear weapons, like most political bloggers I have been learning more about Mormon beliefs of late. At the same time the Church itself and cooperative corporate media outlets have been trying to paint a pretty picture of the self-styled Saints.

What kind of people would become followers of Joseph Smith, who claimed to be The Prophet and headed towards being God? Joseph Smith was killed by a mob, consisting largely of former followers, who were angry because he had been raping virgins and marrying other men's wives, running down Jesus as a second-rate demigod, and uttering nonsense that was supposed to be new Sacred Scripture.

Smith's religion was not a variation within Christianity, but an unorthodox form of Islam [See Four Pillars of Mormonism and Islam].

On the plus side, most seriously religious people believe that anyone who does not share their faith is a heretic, satanist, or atheist. Mormonism has no monopoly there. For the record, while I believe in religious toleration [See my Tolerance Statement], I don't think much of any religious sect.

I doubt Mitt Romney, who after all is really French, thinks that all the non-Mormons he works with are Satanists. That mode of operation might help pressure a weak, single woman into converting, but it is detrimental to the larger picture of trying to bring every single person in the world into the Church of Latter Day Saints. By now most people know that even converting every living person is not enough for the Mormons. They have a constant ritual going that baptizes dead people into the Church. Dead people can't say No. They can't hear Satan whispering doubts.

Mitt must win over voters that don't worship the One True Prophet Joseph Smith. He must keep hidden the fact that that his Church believes all those voters are Satanists. If he were as smart as he pretends to be, he would have left the Mormons years ago and joined a larger denomination. What attracts him to Joseph Smith? The bank scandal with Smith at its center? The ability to convince people to believe in nonsense, like the Republican Party Platform?

Right-wing nutcases have engaged in a long-running smear campaign against President Obama, claiming he was not born in the U.S. and, despite his long attendance at Christian Churches, claiming he is really a Muslim.

It is only right that the American people should understand what Mitt Romney's honest religious beliefs are. If we get nothing else from the Romney run, hopefully we will get a wider understanding of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints.

Mitt Romney, Mormon, and Islam

Last night I was at a dinner party where three of the five attendees were former Latter Day Saints, better known as the Mormons. I am a former Catholic. I am not sure about the fifth person's childhood faith. In any case we had a good time talking about the Mormon faith and Mitt Romney.

Two of the Mormons had been mainstream, Utah Mormons. One had been in the much smaller Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (RLDS). That is the one that did not follow Brigham Young to Utah, and instead stayed loyal to the family of the founder, Joseph Smith. And I just leaned something new (from Wikipedia) that the ex-member did not know: this sect changed their name in 2001 to the Community of Christ, and now allows women to be priests.

We had a discussion of where Mitt Romney and the mainstream Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints fits into the theological spectrum. The Mormons, according to their former members, do not believe Jesus is God in the sense that most believing Christians do. They believe Jesus is a sort of planetary god. They believe that if they (the men, anyway) have enough wives and children and are holy enough they will reincarnate on planets of their own, which they will rule over as (small g) gods.

This strange combination of science fiction and primitive Christianity makes a lot of sense if you understand the culture of the United States of America in the 1820s, when Joseph Smith pieced his cult together. Science had discovered that planets were not just mobile stars, but bodies like earth, big enough to live on, perhaps. The large number of stars indicated that there might be large numbers of planets beyond the solar system. The Bible did not mention this (or foresee steamboats and railroads and other development), so either the Bible was not written by a omniscient God or it was only a partial revelation. Times were changing, and religion clearly needed a major update. Joseph Smith was the most successful of the updaters of that era.

Which brings us round to Islam. There can be no doubt that Mohammed, the Prophet, was the Joseph Smith of his day (570 - 632 A.D.). He too was born a nobody. He became a trader and capitalist (just like Mitt) and in the course of business visited much of the Middle East. He came in contact with people of many different religions. Most importantly, in addition to meeting orthodox Christians, he met both gnostic Christians and the original Christians. The original Christians were still Jews and thought Jesus was a prophet, not a god. Their historical records told them that Jesus had died on the Cross, but had not been resurrected.

Eventually Mohammed founded a new religion. He did not pretend to be a god, and his followers have been very strict about that issue. His religion must have met a lot of people's needs because it became wildly popular far faster than any prior religion. It is still popular today.

Just like the Latter Day Saints, early on Islam split into two sects. One, the main Sunni branch, was started by the powerful elders, mostly military leaders, who had known Mohammed. The other, Shia, was formed by the direct bloodline descendants of Mohammed. They have been fighting ever since.

Mitt Romney does not want potential voters to know what Mormons really believe. He does not want them to know that despite its name, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints could be categorized as Islamic. Joseph Smith certainly knew some of what was then modern science. He also clearly was influenced by ancient Egyptian precepts and Islam. Many passages of Smith's writtings are paraphrased from the Koran. The polygamy thing is obvious: Mohammed practiced polygamy. The concept of Heaven in the Mormon Church is right out of the Koran, with some 19th century science updates.

Of course Joseph Smith gave no credit to the Koran, which would have been impolitic. He was a new Prophet and according to his theology, was headed to being a god on his own planet when he died on this earth.

Like most small starter religions, Smith's new Church advocated religious tolerance. "We claim the privilege of worshiping Almighty God according to the dictates of our conscience, and allow all men the same privilege." [Pearl of Great Price] Thus they advocated for a non-Christian America where their version of Islam could be part of the cultural mix.

Why then, since he belongs to a branch of Islam, is Mitt Romney currently siding with Israel so strongly?
Mitt Romney has always been skilled at the art of deception and willing to do whatever lying it takes to get what he wants. He went to Harvard Law School to brush up on that skill. What else would you expect from a man who grew up in France, who speaks French better than English, and yet want to be the first Latter Day Saint President of the United States of America?

Romney needs to win in Florida to be President and establish Joseph Smith's vision of a Mormon Kingdom on the American continent. "We believe in being subject to kings," [Pearl of Great Price].

Mitt Romney needs a few hundred thousand Jewish votes in Florida to become President. Those of you who support the human rights of Palestinians don't need to worry about Romney's pro-Israel, zionist rhetoric. Mormons know the True Zion is on the American continent. Their leadership is very pro-Islam, and has already made deals with the Saudis to gain total economic control of the globe and its women. The Jews and Christians just need to be fooled for a few more months.

Good Friday, Socialism, and Acts 4

Even the heathen readers of my blog probably at least know that Good Friday is the day Christians around the world remember the death of their Lord Jesus of Bethlehem by crucifixion, the death penalty being carried out by Roman soldiers. According to the Christian Bible, two days later, on Sunday morning, this same Jesus rose from the dead.

Protestant Christian sects, once there were some that were not murdered by the Catholic Church, hold that the Bible is the best guide to Christianity. Fundamentalists hold that the Bible is literally true. Given all that, be sure to memorize the following passage. Feel free to recite it at Republican Party and Tea Party meetings, where Bible quoting is generally considered a good thing.

It is Acts of the Apostles, chapter 4, verses 31 to 37 (Acts 4:31-37). I quote from the Authorized King James Version, lest anyone accuse me of using some liberal translation of the Greek.

"32 And the multitude of them that believed were of one heart and of one soul: neither said any of them that ought of the things which he possessed was his own; but they had all things common.

33 And with great power gave the apostles witness of the resurrection of the Lord Jesus and great grace was upon them all.

34 Neither was there any among them that lacked: for as many as were possessors of lands or houses sold them, and brought the prices of the things that were sold.

35 And laid them down at the apostles' feet: and distribution was made unto every man according as he had need.

36 And Joses, who by the apostles was surnamed Barnabas, (which is, being interpreted, The son of consolation,) a Levite, and of the country of Cyprus,

37 Having land, sold it, and brought the money, and laid it at the apostles' feet."

If that is not socialism, it is communism. It certainly is not the free-market capitalism of the Christian Right. It looks like a welfare state to me. Those with property are taxed 100% and that money is used to take care of "every man according as he had need."

There have been a number of Protestant Christian sects that have tried to implement this Bible-mandated system, but apparently the Devil has whispered his free-market system in the ears of most Christian leaders. Political Christianity is nothing new. The Protestant movement was highly intertwined in the politics of the past. In the Middle Ages the economy was dominated by the Roman Catholic Church holdings and the landed Aristocracy. Starting in the 15th century Protestantism appealed to the merchants and manufacturers, who were growing in economic power and sought higher social recognition and political say.

In the struggle between those Protestants who wanted to re-create primitive Christianity, including Acts Chapter 3, and those who wanted to mold the Bible to support their own ambitions, the latter won out. Peasant rebellions (like that of 1381 in England) tended to focus on Acts Chapter 3, but peasants never gained social or economic power. Just as today Fundamentalism is obscured by the greed of those who want the literal Bible to not interfere with their hatred of immigrants and hopes of joining the billionaire boys club. (Speaking of which, read on to Acts Chapter 5).

Good Friday, too, has always been a problem for Christians. What kind of Dad has his son Crucified? Even the evil old Jehovah, tribal god of the Jews, did not make Abraham actually kill his own son Isaac. The sadomasochism of the Catholic Church, the tendency toward a homosexual priesthood, and the love of cruel punishments for heretics (especially female heretics) all. feed on the Crucifixion.

Perhaps the lesson of the Crucifixion is that Death is no big deal. For all its proclaimed Jewishness, the early Christian cult seems to have gathered more from pagan resurrection cults than from the Torah. Life and death were known to be part of a cycle. Living things must die so that other living things can eat. Life dies back in winter and returns in spring. To seek immortality is to wreck what Fate has ordained. And so Jesus is supposed to have risen from the dead, but then he vanished into thin air, like a ghost, but with the promise of returning in the spring like the daffodils.

Perhaps He never came back because Christians never took his communist social system to heart. Perhaps only when Acts 4 is instituted on a global scale will we see the true return of the god of Spring, and the establishment of the true Zion.

Me, I'll stick with the more modest democratic form of socialism. I like my liberty, but I'm willing to temper it to a reasonable degree for the general good. Maybe Jesus would not have liked that, but then while I might take his advice into consideration, I don't feel at all bound by it.

On the other hand, since the Bible demands that we hold medicine in common, I think a little preaching might turn the corner in favor of Universal Health Care.

Creationism and Free Markets

Religion and politics can make even stranger bedfellows than politics alone.

One of my favorites is the Free Market and Creationism combo of the Christian Right. But then wasn't it transcendentalist Ralph Waldo Emerson who said, "A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds?" The inconsistencies between free market ideology and creationism are seldom examined, but require a very, big mind to have room to keep them separate.

The benefits of free markets were first described by Adam Smith in Wealth of Nations. He showed how men and women, each individually selfish, could compete with each other in producing (and consuming) goods in an unregulated market. The result would be an improvement in the overall good of the community, just as if the individuals had been acting out of community spirit. This non-obvious result, that selfish behavior could have a positive result for the whole community, was called the Invisible Hand.

Right wing Christians, or at least pundits who pretend to be Christian, love free markets. They love private wealth, and their basic Christian doctrine can be summarized as "every man for himself." Out of the random transactions of free markets is born capitalism, and from capitalism comes everything good in the lives of free market pundits, Christian and pagan alike. They hate central planning by governments. They hate the strong-arm five year plans of the old Communist regimes. They even hate the gentler planning by Democratic governments that seek to ameliorate some of the situations where the Invisible Hand has not worked out quite so well for a few ten millions of American citizens.

Not all right-wing economic commentators are Christian, or even Creationists, but plenty are or pretend to be. Creationism is the opposite of free market ideology. Its mildest form, Intelligent Design theory, states that complex things, like the earth and its creatures, must have been created by an Intelligence, i.e. God. It rejects the scientific observation that complex things can be created over time by natural processes, also known as the theory of evolution (by natural selection).

The more fundamental Christian belief is that the world was created exactly as described in the Old Testament of the Bible: a particular God (not Allah or Zeus, or even Gunputty, mind you) created the world and all of its creatures in seven days. Since this has no basis in science, or even in pragmatic observation, Intelligent Design theory was designed to offer an alternative to the theory of evolution in U.S. public school system biology classes.

The difficulty of applying the Creationist mindset (the need for a dictatorial controlling intelligence to get anything done) to the economic system of the United States of America is a blessing. Things seem to happen in the economy without God sticking his nose into our business.

Adolf Hitler did not like quantum physics, but he was okay with natural selection. Hitler was Roman Catholic, and he did like controlling Germany's economy. I think the mutual hatred of Catholic and Communist leaders in that era had much to do with their mutual desires to run command economies. All the Catholic dictators of Europe of the 1930s and 40s, Francisco Franco, Benito Mussolini, Philippe Petain, and Hitler ran command economies, just like Joseph Stalin did in the U.S.S.R., then the only communist nation.

Protestant Christianity, in its diversity, has a long historical association with the merchant class. The Catholic Church mostly sided with the aristocracy during the formative centuries of the modern epic. The merchant class does not like to be dictated to. Hence its ideology of individualistic interpretation of the Bible and support for republics or, if necessary, democracies.

The divide, then, is not so wide. Creationism is an assertion of Biblical authority. Protestantism is associated with the idea that the business of Christianity is business. Christian businesses (including preachers and pundits) need to appeal to their target market. So they promote Creationism to further their own self interest. Free markets also promote their self-interest because the people with the most money to give (buying advertisements to sell over-priced gold on radio shows, for instance) are still mostly from the merchant (business people) class. It is all about self interest. If there were gods, they would probably want nothing to do with it.

Confusing Muslim Childhood

Last night I started reading Irfan Yusuf's Once Were Radicals, My years as a teenage Islamo-fascist. I got to page 93. You must read it.

Once you get past the I-am-not-a-terrorist Prologue, Irfan's story gets really funny, really fast. His family is Pakistani Muslim, middle class emigrants to Australia. He gets picked on as a child because he is different. His developing understanding of religion, both Muslim and other, is wonderfully portrayed through the eyes of a six year old, then as he matures.

I can relate, if my experiences were no where near as extreme. Irfan's mother was his main religious influence. Compared to my own mother she seems quite tolerant. I was raised by a mother who had converted to Catholic Christian from old school Baptist/Methodist, in a community (Jacksonville, Florida) where Catholics were still a minority clumped in with Jews and Blacks by the local KKK.

I have not gotten to the point in the book where Irfan goes militant, but in my own youth I did a back flip on that idea. Irfan rebels against Australian society by becoming, for a time, a militant Muslim. I dropped the Catholic Church like a hot potato and was attracted, instead, to Marxists, Anarchists, and even Buddhists.

The great thing is that Once Were Radicals allows you to see the varieties of Islam (it is just as varied as Christianity or atheism) from the inside, with an overlay of being able to have the sharp critical insights that usually come only from outsiders.

Buy this book and circulate it. Americans need to read it, especially those few remaining Americans who are religious intolerants.

Corporate Personhood, Islamic Rebellion, and the Philippines Occupation

The Philippine Islands are numerous and cover a large area. Before the Spanish conquistadors arrived in 1521 the islands were not united under a single government. People on the various islands belonged to a number of ethnic groups and spoke a variety of languages.

The Spanish forced their Roman Catholic religion on the conquered, but of course many held to their pagan beliefs. In some of the southern islands Islam had already taken hold. Only a few centuries earlier Spain itself had been mainly Islamic, so getting rid of Islam was a priority. But despite centuries of effort the Catholics were not able to drive the "Moro" (Moors) out of the southern Philippine Islands.

In the 1800's nationalism took hold in the Philippines. Just as a weakened Spain lost its colonies in the Americas, the towards the end of the century Filipinos defeated their Spanish occupiers. Only their timing was bad. U.S. sugar growers wanted the Philippines. Theodore Roosevelt saw to it that a U.S. Fleet attacked the few surviving Spanish armed forces in the Philippines when the Spanish American war began. The Spanish Army in Manila preferred to surrender to white Americans than to the Filipino nationalist army that had them surrounded. In the peace negotiations after the war was over the Filipinos were not invited. Spain sold what she did not own to the United States.

Having an army, the Filipinos set up their own government in opposition to the U.S. By now Theodore Roosevelt was President, and showed himself to be a genocidal maniac [See U.S. Conquest of the Philippines]. The war never really ended, even when the U.S. granted the Philippines nominal independence in 1946. (The Japanese, having kicked the U.S. out, had granted independence on October 14, 1943 [John Toland, The Rising Sun, page 573]).

According to Eliza Griswold in The Tenth Parallel, today's Islamic insurgency in the Philippines is rooted in U.S. conquistador policy. The U.S. failed, for the most part, to convert Catholic Filipinos to Protestantism. But they "employed a policy of shipping Filipino Christians from the Catholic north to the Muslim south." [p. 254]

In a classic example of granting personhood rights to corporations, while denying them to people (especially people who were not wealthy white male protestants), "To further break the Moro ancestral land rights, the United States pushed forward laws stipulating that only individuals and corporations—such as Dole, B. F. Goodrich, Del Monte, Weyerhaeuser, and Goodyear—could own land, not Moro tribes or clans." [Griswold p. 254]

This is a policy that went back to George Washington and his gang of "investors" with claims in the Ohio country. Tribes don't own lands, even if it does take a bit of militia muscle to ensure that corporations can turn those lands into their private property.

The rights of corporate persons is a big deal right now, with the recent ruling in Citizens United v. FEC and a number of new corporate personhood cases on the upcoming United States Supreme Court docket.

It is also another example of the Gruel of Law. Caviar law for the corporate elite, eat bullet lead law for the indigenous people.

Indonesia's Atheist Holocaust

The last few days I have been reading Eliza Griswold's well-written, detailed yet fascinating account of the modern proselytizing competition between Christians and Moslems, The Tenth Parallel: Dispatches from the Fault Line Between Christianity and Islam. My wife Jan heard Eliza interviewed on NPR, got the book from our local library (that paragon of government-in-business socialism), and allowed me to grab it. I'll have to buy a copy; I want it in my permanent collection.

It reminded me of another "incident" in history that can be characterized as an atheist holocaust. The largest atheist holocaust I know of was run by the Catholic Church's and Adolf Hitler (with help from General Franco and less Catholic fascist leaders like Petain) [see The Atheist Holocaust.]

This one, which took place in Indonesia from about 1965 to 1966 after Suharto made himself an American-friendly dictator.

Some of the victims of the holocaust were without a doubt Communists, which means they were atheists. Most American historians would therefore classify their murders as political, not religious. Okay, legitimate killings, as the only good communist (or anti-U.S. rebel of any kind) is a dead communist.

But of course it could not be that simple, even at the height of the Cold War, when President Lyndon Johnson (the Democratic Party leader) and the United States of America had its hands full committing war crimes and crimes against humanity in Vietnam.

According to Griswold (and confirmed by other sources) "militant Islamists manned Suharto's death squads." Further "Since converting to a state-approved religion prevented people from being charged as godless Communists, many Indonesians did ... the state outlawed the Chinese practice of Confucianism; most Chinese turned to Christianity instead."

Any murder is abhorrent for any reason, but in sorting these mass murders out it is important to understand what is going on. Communism angers Capitalists, and vice versa, that at least seems natural. But Christian socialism and Islamic socialism don't inspire the kind of hatred in Christians and Moslems, respectively, as atheistic socialism does. The Communist Party of Indonesia (PKI) was participating in the government under Sukarno and had some success getting land redistributed to poor Indonesians. The rich landowners being Moslem, they were able to combine self-interest with religious fervor. Estimates of atheists killed range from a low of about 500,000 on up.

The Wikipedia article, Indonesian Killings of 1965-1966, has a good level of detail.

Comparing this to Hitler's more famous actions against non-Christians, begin with the political element. Hitler's Nazi goons started killing communists and socialists before they started killing people just for being Jewish. Many communist and socialist leaders were Jewish by descent, but not religious Jews. They were atheists; all good Marxists were. That is why the Catholic Church led by the two fascist Popes, Pius XI and Pius XII, engineered Hitler's rise to power. He was the Church's tool to destroy atheism. The biggest group of atheists were in Russian, which just happened to be communist, which the Church did not like much either.

The Tenth Parallel mainly chronicles the battle between Christianity and Islam. The danger of both groups to modern, pagan, agnostic and atheist people is something of a side story.

The Tenth Parallel also reinforces my view that the U.S. government remains anti-atheist and anti-Islamic. Officially, of course, it is impartial. But with a variety of Christian and Islamic (and Jewish) groups killing each other, why is it that essentially all of the groups designated as terrorist by the U.S. are Islamic? Groups that do the same thing, if they are Christian, are not considered terrorists. If you want to give to Christian charities abroad, no problem. Try giving to Islamic charities, and Obama's FBI thugs will be at your door step.

On Good Works

In the arguments between Protestant and Roman Catholic Christians there are a number of big issues. One is whether the Pope, or whoever happens to be Bishop of Rome, was ever meant by Jesus Christ to be the dictator of the Christian faithful [see Was Peter the First Pope?]. Another is whether during the ritual of Communion the bread and wine are simply symbols, or are actually tranformed into the body and blood of Christ. Today, this year's Easter Sunday, I want to take on the Faith v. Works issue. Protestants, starting with Martin Luther, hold that man can enter Heaven by Faith alone. Catholics hold that people must have faith, but must also perform good works to go to heaven.

The controversy is a good example of people overreacting to a historical situation, and then setting their beliefs in cement. Martin Luther was not the first Protestant (or heretic, if you take the Catholic view); he was the first to live to tell about it. He did not like the Roman Catholic version of good works, which insisted that they consisted of cash payments to the Church. This took a variety of forms, including selling indulgences [see also Catholic defense of indulgences] but the money for all this seldom went to charity. Rather it supported the rather lavish life styles of bishops, cardinals, and the Pope.

Luther reacted by saying that Faith alone determined whether people were in God's grace and got into heaven. On the one hand this was an act of self-denial, for Luther was (or had been) a beneficiary of the heaven-for-sale system.

But Luther had misidentified the problem. The problem was not good works; the problem was the substitution of a system of extortion for a system of good works. And not only did Luther and his Lutherans fail to correct this initial reaction, it became worse with John Calvin and his followers. Protestant sects in the 1500's (most of them) adopted, as a theological position, that people with money had no obligation to give to charity. This, of course, appealed to certain people with money. It was the basis of the Protestant work ethic: work or starve, for there will be no charity for the unfortunate. In the most extreme Calvinist interpretation a man could behave rather badly and still get into heaven solely because he held the correct faith.

While the Catholic Church did little in the way of reforming its theology, during its internal reformation in the 1500's, in response to Protestant criticism, the Church did make an effort to do more genuine charitable work, and has continued supporting its charitable arms to this day. In the United States, Catholic Charities is a big organization.

Many modern Protestant churches have their own interpretation of the good works issue: good works may not be necessary to get into heaven, but they are a basic part of being good humans.

Islam, more than any other religion I know of, emphasizes the donation of money to charity by its wealthier members. This is one reason it is so popular in poorer communities around the world.

For those of us who know there is no heaven and no hell, the question is how we should act here in everyday reality. Most of us see a value in charity. Sometimes it is rationalized in social terms: feed the hungry, and they don't need to steal food. Modern economies have shown us that economic tragedy can happen to almost anyone. Feeding economic unfortunates creates a culture where, if you become unfortunate yourself, you can depend on others to feed you. But most of all, it just feels good to help other people. It makes you feel competent and useful. It is a basic human function; to not be charitable is to not be fully human.

I have met vitriolic American "Christians" who believe that they should not give to charity. The idea that God and Jesus Christ actually prohibit Christians from doing good works is bizarre and must reflect an underlying social or mental pathology.

Fundamentalist Christians Endorse One Son Policy

[Antioch, Ohio] The Congregation of Christian Fundamentalists, a global organization whose membership includes many Christian sects that believe that the Bible should be interpreted as literally true on a word-by-word basis, today recommended that Christian families imitate God by having only one child per family, a son.

"We take the literal word of the Bible literally," said Reverend Thudpucker, spokesman for the Congregation. "We do expect a degree of controversy because few Christian Churches have been literalists on this point. It will be up to each individual denomination to ratify this finding."

"God had only one Son, our Lord Jesus Christ. Jesus said to follow him, and he clearly put an emphasis on ministry, not on family life or procreation. God had no female children. However, he did need the Mary, Jesus's mother, to participate biologically in the creation of Jesus, who thereby was both Man and God and a fit sacrifice to redeem the sins of Mankind. Women have a role in creating the one son per Christian family that we are recommending."

Thudpucker refused to comment on the current controversy about Pope Benedict XVI. "The Catholic Church is none of our business. The Pope and his predecessors just bend and shape the words of the Bible like it's wax, and they have ended up worshipping an Idol of their own making."

Asked about the Biblical admonition to "Go forth and multiply," Thudpucker said: "It says to go forth and muliply until the earth is filled. Which it pretty much is. The example of Christ our Lord was to have no children at all. But Christ is God, so he really did have a Son, himself. So Jesus Christ had one son. It is all there in black in white in English in the Bible. You reporters should try studying that."

Dating a Religion

Suppose you have a woman friend, Ann, who is dating. She meets a guy who is handsome and has money and pays attention to her; he sweet talks her. Let's call him Adam.

But you know Adam's history. You know he has three former girlfriends or wives, abandoned with children, who talk of how cruel a man he was, after those first few sweet dates.

Being a good friend, you decide you have to rat out Adam. You tell Ann about Adam's exes.

You know what happens next. Most of the time Adam gets the girl. Why? Because Ann having already made a decision in favor of Adam, the new information gets rationalized away. Plus Adam is skilled in subjugating women.

You can understand a lot about the spread of religion from understanding this fact of human nature (and it is a gender-neutral fact, as far as I can tell). Once people commit to a religion, for whatever reason, new information seldom causes them to change their minds.

In the United States of America, we know that people change their religious affiliations relatively often compared to other cultures. But the number of conversions is limited. At the end of each generation, so far anyway, most people who are religious are in the same religion they were born in. The overall religious statistics of 2000 are not much different from those of 1900.

History is filled with examples of mass religious conversions. Most were forced by governments, as when most people in the lands around the Mediterranean Sea became Christian Orthodox in the Fourth Century A.D. under advisement from the Roman Emperors. These last couple of days I started reading Commodore Perry and the Opening of Japan
by Francis L. Hawks, which looked tedious but so far has turned out to be a delightful travelogue of the Marco Polo sort. This reminded me to look up histories of Sumatra (part of Indonesia) and Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), as part of my studies for my work-in-progress The U.S. War Against Asia. But the history of changes in religious affiliations on those islands reminded me I have wanted to try writing a Dating a Religion essay. This is the first draft.

When a missionary or local proselytizer dates a potential convert, they don't usual start with a history lesson. In my experience, they don't even know the true history of their own religion. They start with a well-worked-out line. They treat you as if you are important to them. They tell you things that amount to spiritual flattery: you are immortal. Your life will improve if you join our community. They may use the stick, too: convert or go to hell.

The history of Christianity in Japan and of Japanese brands of Buddhism in the U.S informs the story well. The first Christians in Japan were Catholics from Portugal. The Portuguese were major league pirates and imperialists in that era (the 1500's), but the Catholic missionaries did not mention that. They converted quite a few people at first. As the Japanese rulers started worrying about being conquered by the Portuguese, they also learned about other imperialists powers and other versions of the Christian religion. The Catholic missionaries presented their religion as one of peace, but the real world facts did not match that fantasy (see, for instance the Thirty Years' War). That rulers of Japan decided to expel the missionaries and ban Christianity. That goes against our modern, American, tolerate-all-religions and hope they all calm down ethic. But it makes sense if you consider that the Christians were lying. The ruler of Japan were simply excluding a new brand of liars from their kingdom.

Buddhism (which with Shinto, was one of the two major religions of Japan) was known and even admired by some European, and later American, intellectuals, at least as early as the 18th century. But the big invasion of Japanese Buddhist sects into the U.S. started during the 1950s. Americans like Alan Watts and the Beatniks got a lot of people started in Buddhism. Later, specific sects from Japan saw the economic opportunities in setting up churches (usually called centers) in the U.S.

There was a time when I was young that I thought Buddhism was way better than Christianity. But now I realize that I was being fed a Zen pablum specially designed to attract Americans. Like Christian history, Buddhist history is filled with violence. The theology is different, but like Christianity it is a mixture of good observations that can be kept as folk wisdom, and ridiculous metaphysical speculations.

Once the hook is in the fish, the fish starts rationalizing it. I have met serial converters, but most people only change once in their life, perhaps twice. The most common oscillation to note is when those raised without religion decide they need one, and when those raised in a religion decide that rather than switching to another, they will just drop the matter.

I hope the development of a more coherent, reality-based philosophy and system of ethics will supplant the old faiths. In the mean time, the best I can do is urge those who are dating religions to look at their histories.

Histories are better predictors of future behavior that the sweet lies of courtship.

Magic Obama

He gives great speeches. I will grant President of the United States Barack Obama that. I like a good speech as much as anyone. But I am an analyst by profession, and the old analytic cynicism runs in the background thread of my brain even during an Obama speech.

Today's speech on Islam at Cairo University in Egypt is a great example. It flatters Islamic culture. At the same time it reminds those few Americans who have a slight grasp of history that after the fall of Rome it was Islam, not Christianity, that maintained and developed civilization for almost a millennium.

But there are iron knuckles under the glove. "We will, however, relentlessly confront violent extremists who pose a grave threat to our security. Because we reject the same thing that people of all faiths reject: the killing of innocent men, women, and children." Unless it helps us. We are the nation of Wounded Knee, the Republican Party's genocidal campaign in the Philippines, of Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and napalm-soaked Vietnam. We destroyed civilization in Iraq even though its leaders, including Saddam Hussein, were enemies of al Qaeda.

President Obama wants us to remember some nice history, and forget the blood on American hands. At a time when our nation's economy is in trouble, he is wasting more money on the U.S. military than any previous President of the United States.

That part about Thomas Jefferson owning a Koran is cute. I bought a Koran (in English) and read it in college as part of trying to understand the world (I was also interested in Sufism, Zen and the like for a while). Note Barack does not say he has a Koran in his library - that would not go over well with American voters. Has he ever read the Koran? He did not say.

"America is not the crude stereotype of a self-interested empire." That is a three-pointer. We are a complex empire, filled with do-gooders who are frustrated by the Pentagon's bewitching every President we elect.

"And despite the costs involved, America's commitment will not weaken." There, you see, is the policy statement. We like you, we really do. But our policy is to kill you if you disobey us, no matter how much it costs American tax payers who voted for the Democrats hoping they would bring the troops home.

If Islam is not bad, if it is violence that is bad, why is only American violence good? And included here is violence by our allies and puppets. Tell me oh great Obama, why is it okay for you to be the most violent leader on earth? "The Holy Koran teaches that whoever kills an innocent, it is as if he has killed all mankind." Thank the Lord Jesus Christ he has an exception for innocents killed by aerial bombardment.

"And that is why we are providing more than $2.8 billion to help Afghans develop their economy and deliver services that people depend upon." Heck, didn't we give even more than that to the CEO's of a few U.S. banks known for causing the global economy to implode? Think of it as the Widow's Mite.

As to Palestine, occupied and unoccupied, "Resistance through violence and killing is wrong and does not succeed." It succeeded for the Israelis, and it worked like magic for them while Barack was patiently waiting to become President. But it is wrong for the Palestinians. They don't give anywhere near enough in donations to the Democratic Party to make it right. "It is time for these settlements to stop." Wow, what a verbal tongue-lashing of Israel for the Cairo University audience.

As to Iran, "we are willing to move forward without preconditions on the basis of mutual respect. But it is clear to all concerned that when it comes to nuclear weapons, we have reached a decisive point." In other words, we will talk nicer, but our policy is the same as the Bush administrations. Only our allies like India, Pakistan, and Israel can have atomic bombs. If Iran wants atomic bombs, it must first become an American ally.

At the end of the speech there is a flurry of talk about Peace, with quotes from the Koran, New Testament, and Torah. Nothing like a little gift-wrapping of the same old American policy package for the Moslem world.

For years I have heard Barack Obama cast a magic spell with his speeches to the American people. And yes, there have been some minor policy changes since Barack has taken office, and it is early in his administration. Maybe, having cast a spell over the people of the world, he will start working to make it a better place.

But the world does not work by magic. You cannot resurrect the civilians killed by orders from Barack Obama in Afghanistan with a speech.

Still, I liked the part of the speech reminding us of Islam's contributions to civilization.

A History of Egypt by James Breasted, commentary

title: A History of Egypt from the Earliest Times to the Persian Conquest
author: James Henry Breasted
year of publication: 1905
Amazon.com: A History of Egypt

Anyone interested in the human species and its civilization will want to know how things got started. Egypt, specifically the Nile river valley, plays a central role in the development of civilization. Breasted's history of ancient Egypt was once the accepted standard of scholarship on the subject. Today's serious student will find that more recent archeologists and historians find many of Breasted's details to be incorrect, or interpret them differently. On the other hand in another century more corrections, or differences of opinion, are certain to come in. Breasted makes a good, detailed, readable introduction to the ancient Egyptian civilization.

I was struck by how little social organization has changed from 4000 years ago. The Egyptians could undertake massive projects, for good or ill or for silly religious reasons, despite having a population that was a fraction of most modern nations. At times ethics was raised to a high level. Almost all the religious ideas that would be woven into the various religions that survive - Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Buddhism and even Atheism - can be found in ancient writings that somehow survived the ravages of millennia.

One realizes that Israel, in ancient times, was never more than a petty state, often comprising little more than Jerusalem and the countryside for a few miles around. Christianity appears to be the old cult of Osiris grafted onto the more ancient cult of sun worship with Hebrew and then Greek-Roman name changes. The ancient Egyptian religions appear enlightening only in the sense that they show that Christianity is just another layer of folly glossing over more ancient folly. People did not like the idea of dying, so they went into massive denial. The Osiris cult was a resurrection cult, just like the Jesus cult, except healthier in that at least a female, Isis, was part of the Trinity.

The best of Egyptian philosophy I already covered in An Ancient Egyptian Song with Commentary [February 22, 2008]. Breasted also follows the development of the idea of a supreme, rational god, Ptah, cumulating in "The Egyptian thus gained the idea of a single controlling intelligence, behind and above all sentient beings, including the gods. The efficient force by which this intelligence put his designs into execution was his spoken word and this primitive logos is undoubtedly the incipient germ of the later logos doctrine." [my italic]

When I was young I bought into some pop theories about how impossible it was to build the pyramids and other ancient monuments made of large stones. Breasted does not even go there. Apparently kings of Egypt thought nothing of mounting expeditions to far off quaries and bringing back large stones. It was a well-worked out system that lasted thousands of years and required no magic. It was simply a matter of organizing enough people to use the tools and skills available at the time.

The scope of this history is vast. The standard view numbered 27 dynasties in ancient Egypt; any one king's reign might have deserved a full book. Picking and choosing what to write about when so much history is available is the main task of the historian. Time, of course, destroyed most of the records and even many of the monuments from those ancient days. So some kings are barely mentioned, while others get a great deal of space in the book. One thing I like is how Breasted takes time to show that some kings had an awareness of what we call a good life, or civic virtue, consisted of. Prosperity then, as now, depended on to what extent the government looked after the welfare of the common people. When greed and corruption ruled, civilization declined. You can follow many cycles of prosperity and depression and their relation to civic policy in Egypt.

Recommended, but when I have a chance I'll read a more modern work covering this period for comparison.

An Ancient Egyptian Song and Commentary

Consider this song from the 12th Dynasty, written around 1900 B.C., when the religion based on the resurrection of Osiris was all the rage:

This goodly destiny is fulfilled
The body perishes, passing away,
While others abide, since the time of the ancestors
The gods who were aforetime rest in their pyramids.
Likewise the noble and wise, entombed in their pyramids.
As for those who built houses, their place is no more.
Behold what has become of them.
I have heard the words of Imhotep and Harzozef,
Whos utterances are of much reputation:
Yet how are the places thereof?
Their walls are in ruin, their places are no more,
As if they had never been.
None cometh from thence
That he might tell us of their state.
That he might restore our hearts
Until we too die.

Let the heart dwell upon that which is profitable for thee.
Follow thy desire while thou livest.
Follow thy desire and they pleasure
And mold your affairs on earth
After the mandates of your heart,
Until the day of lamentation comes to you,
When your stilled heart cannot hear their mourning.
Lamentation recalls no man from the tomb.
Celebrate life, do not rest before death,
For you take nothing with you to death
And no man returns from death who has gone there.

[Interpreted anonymous song in James Henry Breasted, History of Egypt, Bantam Classic paperback edition, page 172-173]

This song stands in contrast to the worship of Osiris and the "Chapters on Going Forth by Day," better known as the Egyptian Book of the Dead. Already at that time people believed that they would be judged after death and be sent to a pleasant or unpleasant afterlife according to that judgement. Just as Christians and Moslems do today. It is believed that men acted in a just manner because they feared this judgement. Apparently fear of the government was not enough.

If you believe that, then the attitude expressed in this song is a dangerous one. If you will not be judged after death, then perhaps you will be unjust in this life. You might steal or murder or be unkind or unhelpful to your neighbors.

On the other hand, a system of social control based on nonsense about life after death is no guarantee of good people or a good society. Religions often group people into categories, allowing the treatment of slaves or woemn, for instance, to be an exception to the rules for treating peers. Religious rules can suppress the truth in favor of dogma.

And faith can be shattered, leaving people dependent on fictions morally adrift.

Note that the creator of the song does not say there is no afterlife, so feel free to pillage. Just as a community can create civil laws for the guidance of its citizens, so people who do not believe in the afterlife can be good neighbors.

In fact, I prefer people who don't believe in the afterlife. They value life, usually including the lives of others. They don't expect other men to slave away building them a pyramid. They don't dream of the mummy life. They tend to their gardens and their handiwork because that is what makes life pleasant.

I'll be commenting quite a bit about the worship of Osiris because much of what is essential about Christianity is borrowed directly from this Egyptian religion.