Atheists: A Little Tolerance for Christmas, Please

Christmas Can Be Secularized Through Toleration

The Founding Fathers of the United States seem to have included many atheists, agnostics, and deists (people who believe in a God that doesn't matter). It is also a historical fact that in the late 1700's there was a Christian religious revival, and that since that time a majority of Americans have been at least nominally Christian.

Officially the national government has always been secular, as enshrined in the Constitution, which states that "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exorcise thereof." And "no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office of public Trust under the United States."

At times in America it was dangerous to say you were an atheist, especially if you were both a communist and an atheist. So atheists kept a low profile.

For decades now the separation of Church and State has become a battleground. Christians forget the historical fact that they were the ones who originally asked for the separation because they feared the doctrines of either the Church of England (now Episcopal) or the Roman Catholic Church would be imposed on them.

Atheists have led the struggle to keep Church and State separated. That is fine, but some atheists have become as intolerant as their Christian opponents.

I believe we can benefit, now, from showing a little tolerance. I believe that building up a culture of tolerance, including among religious sects, is something that atheists should help with, not fight against.

I believe our message of the priority of reason and fact-based culture over "revealed" religious tradition is winning. I believe that being nice to Christians (within reason) and people in other cults encourages dialog that leads to reason and fact-based beliefs.

So: I don't have a problem calling a Christmas Tree as Christmas Tree. I am not going to deny that Christmas Day is Christmas Day. I personally don't celebrate Christmas, I deny the divinity of Christ (and Isis and Zeus and all the other gods), but I'll take any holiday I can get. Sure, in my ideal world we would secularize Christmas by moving it to the Winter Solstice, but that is not a priority for me.

Let's start with the naming of decorated trees traditionally put up during the month of December. Most atheists, Jews, and other non-Christians want them to be called Holiday Trees or maybe Yule trees.

I can see the argument that official government holiday trees should be for everyone, not just Christians. But it is hard to get around the fact that they are associated with an official government holiday, Christmas Day.

But Christmas long ago came to have a meaning going far beyond the (probably not accurate) birthday of Jesus Christ, who certainly was not God, but was a historic figure and therefore must have had some birthday. Judging from the New Testament, he did not make a point of celebrating his birthday when he was alive. The holiday could be cancelled on religious grounds; the Puritans did not celebrate it.

Many Americans celebrate a non-Christian Christmas. Gifts and family and alcoholism and all that food.

We atheist are supposed to be the reasonable ones. We are the leaders in tolerance. So let the Christians have their Christmas and Christmas Trees.

Let's use the opportunity to talk about what is important: good will towards all people. Including immigrants, homosexuals, foreigners, and people of other faiths than our own. The ability of the Earth to renew itself (the evergreen trees being a symbol of that before being appropriated for Christmas), which is being rapidly lost.

The atheist brand has been tarnished over the centuries in a number of ways, most notably by scientific inventions gone awry, from atomic bombs to insecticides that are killing off bees. Joseph Stalin's mass murders did not help our image either.

If you want to attract people to atheism, the brand should have a positive aura. Fight for the environment, fight for justice, fight for truth. But be kind to those who have not seen the light of reason yet. Our brand should be a showcase of tolerance. We should not fight all the time just because we have gotten used to having to fight for our rights.

I'm going to celebrate Christmas as an atheist. I don't admire Jesus the way I admire Charles Darwin and Albert Einstein. But to the extent he is symbol of the idea of tolerance (as when he stopped stonings) and substituting love for humans over the cruel laws of the Old Testament, Jesus is okay. If he were alive today, he'd probably be an atheist.

Happy Invicible Sun Day Chistmas!

The Winter Solstice (December 21 this year) has a certain gravity to it. Most human civilization evolved north of the equator, and until recently the most obvious natural phenomena, besides the phases of the moon, was the shortening of days in the Fall.

Con artists, having observed the sun cycle, they began telling people that the sun would, indeed, sink forever out of site if "priests" were not given "sacrifices" starting around the solstice. Many ancient religions were centered on the solstice or on the resurrection of green plants in the Spring, or both.

No one knows what day of the year Jesus of Nazareth, aka Jesus Christ, was actually born on. Apparently he was not an important man at birth. The data is not given in the Gospels, nor are there clues in the narrative that would help guess it. Stranger still, there is no record of when Christians adopted December 25 as Christ's birthday, or Christmas. They apparently started keeping written records not too long after Jesus's death, but probably no one wanted to admit they did not have a firm grasp on God's birthday. Or where they borrowed it from.

Scholars, of course, have tried to research the question. Here is my favorite scholarly guess, by the Very Reverend W. R. Inge, D.D., in the chapter The Rival Religions in Universal World History, Volume Four, pages 1123-1124 (1935):

"The Christians were both puzzled and annoyed by the resemblance of the Mithraic religion to their own. Not only did Mithras have his high pontiff [pope], his priests vowed to celibacy and his consecrated virgins, but there is to be a second coming of Mithras, preceded by great plagues. The dead will rise from their tombs to meet him... Finally, the [Christian] Church paid Mithras the great compliment of annexing his chief festival on December 25, the birthday of the "Invincible Sun," and turning it into the feast of the Nativity of Jesus Christ."

The Invincible Sun. If you need a local god or prophet, why worship some Jewish rabbi or Indian prince or Arabic camel trader or American polygamist when the Invincible Sun is available? Resurrected daily, with an additional annual bonus show around the solstices.

The United States of America has recast Christmas in a modern light. December 25th marks the end of the consumer buying frenzy season.

If there is anything to thank Nature or any god for, it is the end of the modern Holiday season.

Enjoy the holiday, but don't get too drunk, too stoned, too high, or too sad for your own good.

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.

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.

Four Pillars of Mormonism and Islam

The resemblance between the Latter Day Saints sects, or Mormonism, and Islam are not just a coincidence. Before examining the Islamic roots of Mormon in later articles, I want to illuminate the relationship by exhibiting four pillars that unite Islam and Mormonism and distinguish the these religions from orthodox Christianity.

I. The Prophets

Both Joseph Smith and Muhammad claimed the role of Prophet. Each saw themselves, and were seen by their followers, as being in the line of the great Jewish prophets like Noah, Moses, Ishmael, and Isaac. The Koran names Jesus of Nazareth as a prophet. The Mormon view of Jesus will be discussed below. It is notable that during his lifetime his followers referred to Joseph Smith, in writing, as The Prophet, which was how Muhammad has always been referred to by the Islamic faithful.

The Koran (or Quran) says at 4:163-165:

163 Lo! We inspire thee (Muhammad) as We inspired Noah and the prophets after him, as We inspired Abraham and Ishmael and Isaac and Jacob and the tribes, and Jesus and Job and Jonah and Aaron and Solomon, and as we imparted unto David the Psalms;
164 And messengers We have mentioned unto thee before and messengers We have not mentioned unto thee; and Allah spake directly unto Moses;
165 Messengers of good cheer and of warning, in order that mankind might have no argument against Allah after the messengers. Allah was ever Mighty, Wise.

II. Polygamy

The Koran says limits polygamous marriage to four wives [4:3]:

... marry other women of your choice: two, three, or four. But if you fear that you will not be able to maintain justice between your wives, then marry only one.

Joseph Smith endorsed unlimited polygamy. According to former church members writing in 1844 shortly before Smith died, he and other church elders recruited maidens from Europe, who arriving in the United States were deflowered and given no choice except to become one of many wives.

The two largest modern Mormon denominations now both officially rejected polygamy in order to avoid further prosecution for a practice that was unlawful in the United States. However, fundamentalist Mormon sects still practice polygamy, reports of its being practiced in secret by mainstream Mormons have been abundant, and it is hard to reconcile monogamy with Joseph Smith's status as The Prophet. In fact in the Doctrine and Covenants any man aspiring to priesthood is encouraged to take multiple wives [D&C 132:61-62]:

61. And again, as pertaining to the law of the priesthood—if any man espouse a virgin, and desire to espouse another, and the first give her consent, if he espouse the second, and they are virgins, and have vowed to no other man, then is he justified.

The emphasis on the virginity of multiple wives is why teenage women have been the main target of Mormon missionaries from the time of Joseph Smith until the present. Joseph Smith is reputed to have had over thirty wives at the time of his death in 1844.

III. Rejection of Jesus Christ as the One True God

Muhammad lived from 570 to 632 A.D. At this time the orthodox Christian church (only later splitting into Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox branches) had dominated the people's around the Mediterranean for over two centuries. Yet many Jewish and non-orthodox Christian communities still had not been stamped out, and in Arabia itself various forms of pagan worship survived.

While given as a revealed truth from Allah, Muhammad's belief that Jesus of Nazareth was a prophet, not a resurrected god, was supported by historical evidence. Jews in the area, of course, rejected Jesus as both God and Messiah. More important were the Christian Jews whose religion was in line with the original teachings of Jesus. Their historic memory was that Jesus did not claim to be God and was not resurrected after crucifixion. Those ideas were formed decades after Jesus's death, as is reflected in the differences between the Gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke, in which Jesus does not claim divinity, and in John, where he makes it very clear he thinks he is one with God.

Muhammad, in the Koran, quotes Jesus against the Christians, avoiding the Gospel of John and instead interpreting Jesus as having said there is only one, undivided God, Allah, and that no man could be God. Which is the position of Islam.

Despite his demotion to Prophet, Jesus (Isa) and his mother, Mary (Maryam) play a major role in the Koran, even aside from preaching against Christianity.

As with Islam, which developed over the course of the life of Muhammad, the relationship of the Latter Day Saints to Jesus of Nazareth is complicated by the temporal development of the revelations of Joseph Smith. In the Book of Mormon Jesus is pretty much the Jesus of the Christians except, unbeknownst to them, after his Ascension Jesus is said to have visited the Americas.

Later, as the power of being himself treated as a Prophet and having a lot of young wives went to his head, Joseph Smith deviated increasingly from Christian doctrine in his Doctrine and Covenants. While not explicitly rejecting the Trinity, Joseph Smith described an elaborate cosmology which would allow him and his male followers to become godlike, and Jesus-like, themselves. Even God the Father, our planetary god, was reduced to an advanced and glorified man. Quoting those who left the church just before Smith's death [Nauvoo Expositor, June 7, 1844]:

"Among the many items of false doctrine that are taught the Church, is the doctrine of many Gods, one of the most direful in its effects that has characterized the world for many centuries ... It is contended that there are innumerable Gods as much above the God that presides over this universe, as he is above us; and if he varies from the law unto which he is subjected, he, with all his creatures, will be cast down as was Lucifer."

IV. Rejection of alcohol
While it may seem to be only of practical importance, the rejection of alcohol by Islam, and later by Joseph Smith and his followers, is of the deepest symbolic and theological importance.

 
Wine plays a role in two key sacraments of Christianity, marriage and communion. Jesus is believed by Christians to have turned water into wine at the wedding feast of Cana [Bible, John 2:1-11], his first miracle in John (but missing from the three earlier gospels).

By rejecting wine both Muhammad and Joseph Smith rejected the Christian rule of monogamy. They also both recognized divorce, which Jesus outlaws for Christians in Matthew 19:3-9.

According to his followers, Jesus is not a Prophet, or the Messiah, but a true, resurrected God. Wine represented, in his times, the transubstantiation from of an ordinary food, the grape, into an intoxicant. Earlier religions in which a man-god was killed or sacrificed and then rose from the dead, showing the glory of God, were closely tied to celebrating events with wine. Notably the Greek god Dionysus and the Egyptian god Osiris had large cult followings throughout the Roman Empire that had many doctrines that were adopted by non-Jewish Christians at some point in the history of the early Church.

By rejecting the drinking of alcoholic beverages, Joseph Smith brought his church more closely to conformity with orthodox Islam and differentiated it from orthodox Christianity.

"That inasmuch as any man drinketh wine or strong drink among you, behold it is not good." [Doctrine and Covenants. 89:5 by Joseph Smith the Prophet at Kirtland, Ohio, February 27, 1833] 

"Satan desires to stir up enmity and hatred between you with intoxicants and gambling, to prevent you from the remembrance of Allah and prayers. Will you not abstain?" [Muhammad the Prophet, Koran, 5:91]

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.

Cicero, Desert Revelations, and Virtue

I started reading Cicero's de Officiis (On Duties), during brief breaks, only because I ran out of better things to read. I have long had an old used Loeb Classical Library copy, with the Latin on left pages and English on the right. I once aspired to learn Latin, but now admit that is a low priority.

I am finding a lot of good stuff in Cicero. I feel like Cicero was a wise and basically modern guy, despite being pre-Christian. Whereas talking to Rick Santorum and crew I feel like there really might be demons about; how else to explain their irrational thought processes?

Today I came across Cicero quoting Prodicus in Xenophon: "When Hercules was just coming into youth's estate ... he went out into a desert place. And as he saw two paths, the path of Pleasure and the path of Virtue, he sat down and debated long and earnestly which one it was better for him to take." That made me think of Jesus, who is after all a Jewish Hercules, also spending his famous 40 days in the desert, where he was tempted by Satan. Jesus and Hercules had a lot in common, including rising from the dead, although Jesus's miracles tended towards healing, and Hercules' were feats of strength. Since they were both supposed by their followers to be sons of God, I suppose that would make them brothers.

I once spent several weeks, more than 40 days, alone in a desert. Nothing much came of it. No voices spoke to me. I did not see visions. The plus of that is for all my faults, I am apparently not inclined to schizophrenia. I only made one important decision in the desert. I decided to finish college. I had dropped out of college for lack of funds and out of exhaustion. I then started working in restaurants, which was a lot easier than going to college. Plus, I had some money to spend for the first time in my life. In college every dime went to tuition, textbooks, my room and cheap carbohydrate-rich foods. Being out of college was way more pleasurable than being in. Still, I decided to go back, so I hitchhiked to Rhode Island and got a job to start saving enough money to enroll again.

Cicero, on the same page as the Hercules quote, is talking about the various ways careers are chosen, and things are not much different today. "We each copy the model he fancies, and we are constrained to adopt their pursuits and vocations. But usually, we are so imbued with the teachings of our parents that we fall irresistibly into their manners and customs."

My parents had been professional terrorists, employees of the U.S. government. My older brother followed their path into the Marine Corps, and while he was not much of a combat guy, he did his logistical role in bossing Islamic people around.

I decided to write novels, which turned out to mean working in restaurants or offices, with an occasional income boost from journalism or technology work. I did finish several novels, but gave that up over a decade ago now.

The more obvious dichotomy in our society than pleasure versus virtue is money versus virtue. Money has for centuries been the mad passion of American society.

Virtue is harder to define. Some let religion define it for them. The world is a complex place, and so too virtue is complex. What is virtuous in one situation may not be virtuous in another. Cicero's world was not brimming with 7 billion people who all want central heating and air conditioning. We all need to think more about virtue in this new context. We might even want to practice it now and then, as the occasion arises.

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.

Conservative by Nature

I was thinking about a facebook post I saw that accused Department of Education Assistant Deputy Secretary Kevin Jennings of advocating men forcing themselves sexually on boys. It was based on Fox Network false reporting as usual, but what concerned me was that someone, in fact probably a lot of people, were perpetuating this kind of lie on facebook. Kevin Jennings has spent his life advocating against the bullying of children who are or appear to be homosexuals. Fox and doubtless a coterie of pedophile priests and ministers are whipping up their anti-homosexual base. They can't be honest and say "but we are bullies, we think it is good to beat up on homo children." Instead they attack by making false claims about Jennings. And they congratulate themselves for being good Christian people. The sort who would throw stones at whores and homos, which I guess Jesus spent a good deal of the New Testament advocating for. [If you don't get the irony here, you might want to spend a few hours reading the Gospels]

But I have a problem with putting all conservatives in a bundle and tarring them with being hateful people. Fox gives conservatives a bad name, and encourages our worst behavior.

People really can't help but be conservative. The reality is there is almost nothing new under the sun, so aside from the latest tech gadget burning a hole where your pocketbook should be, it is just a matter of picking what sort of conservative you are.

Marxist used to think they were radicals. At best they are following a 160 year-old system of thought (actually, it goes back to the beginning of human society). Many of the splinter Protestant groups of the U.S. are far younger than that. Even if you accept their Bible-based claims to conservatism, the New Testament is still less than 2000 years old. Protestantism is a mere 600 years old. Is that radical or conservative?

Our genes, our DNA, are very, very conservative. We still have many genes that function the same as bacterial genes that are a billion years old (or 5000 years old if you believe God created all of Nature recently, and did the trick partly by using what programmers call object oriented, re-usable code).

Some members of every generation of young people try to break with the conservative mold. They reject their parents' and society's values and set themselves apart as a youth cult. The general term for that is bohemianism. Actually, it is a form of ultra-conservatism. It almost never drives culture forward. Youth rebellion usually seeks an even more conservative past when people were not so uptight and rule-bound. They pick a different flavor of conservative and call it "our generation."

To really be a religous conservative, you would have to become either a pagan or an atheist. Christianity is an innovation, and a poor one.

As to homosexuality, it appears to be as ancient as mankind. The radical new document called the Old Testament mentions it. The ancient Greeks, or some ancient Greeks, once things got urbanized and class-stratified, believed it was a superior form of love, above that of a man for his wife. It tends to be associated with cultures that make women inferior. Once you have declared women to be inferior (no females in the hierarchy of priests and ministers), and hang out mostly with men, homosexuality is only a kiss away.

As to myself, I believe in conserving as much of the natural world as possible. The mountain-top coal removers and the nuclear power plant builders, they are the radicals. They are the ones that need to be stopped.

Before homo sapiens split off from other apes on the tree of evolution, there were bullies. Now we have a wider variety of bullies: physical bullies, intellectual bullies, social bullies, cultural bullies, economic bullies. In a class-stratified society like ours much bullying is institutionalized. People don't even realize they are engaging in it. It is part of the upper classes protecting their privileges.

Still, it is good to try to minimize the bullying of children by adults, and of children by other children. Gay boys and girls should be treated with the same respect that all children should be treated with.

The difficult part of the equation is dealing with the adult bullies who don't see themselves as bullies. They see their actions as "helping" children. Helping them to obey all orders from authority figures, no matter who stupid. Helping them to conform to the gender roles of the adults' subculture. And the problem is deeper, because children do need help. They do need to pay attention in school; they really would benefit from doing their homework. So we need to be able to distinguish between arbitrary authority and good leadership.

And some children, maybe most children, will conform. But many will just harbor resentment and try to survive until the day they are adults and can get out from under their parents' authority, and maybe move to some place where there are more nice people around, like California.

Lazy Nature, Lazy God

Is nature lazy? It certainly is slow. Look how long it took for life as we know it to evolve.

The ancient Greek philosopher-scientists knew that light was lazy. They showed that when light is reflected from a surface the angle of reflection is equal to the angle of incidence. Whatever the speed of light was, this reflection rule resulted in the shortest, and therefore the fastest, path between a source of light, an observer, and a reflective surface between them. Light takes the shortest path.

In the era historians refer to as the Enlightenment, this came to be called the principle of least action.

Nature has a number of definitions; when I write Nature, I mean the Universe or totality of things, including the principles that cause it to exist and determine the specifics of existence. Primitive people take the ancient idea of a god (tree, rock, ghost, or human) and try to amplify that up until they have a God that created and rules over, or at least within, Nature. Whether you believe in God or Nature, the physics experiments come out the same.

So the principle of least action implies that God is lazy too. God's laziness makes the universe predictable.

You can make a lot out of this simple principle, which applies to solid physical objects as well a light and energy fields. To understand this, unfortunately, the path of least effort leads through the quicksand of something called the calculus of variations. And of course, most people in the world need to start working or fighting or begging before they even get to regular calculus in school. On the other hand, if you do happen to study calculus and then the calculus of variations, you can get anything you want in the world. You will be able to see deeper and further than other humans, and make of it what you will.

With your math magic, you are now ready to do Lagrangian dynamics, among other things. You can see where Newton's Laws come from: a lazy, symmetrical universe (designed by a lazy God). And using only the principle of laziness, you can work out Schrodinger's equation (for the motion of a non-relativistic particle in a potential field) [Byron & Fuller, Mathematics of Classical and Quantum Physics, p. 71]. Thus you have the key to quantum physics. In retrospect it is surprising no one came up with it before Erwin Schrodinger.

Which brings up another important point: Chance. Or probability, if you like the more modern formalism. Many Romans worshipped Chance, or Fortuna (Tyche to the Greeks). In addition to the chance events of human lives, the practice of gambling was already well-developed. Dice pre-exist recorded history, as did other methods of casting lots or determining oracles. The minor Christian god Jesus Christ may have been an incarnation of chance, as it was written in the Bible (King James translation), Mark 15:24, "And when they had crucified him, they parted his garments, casting lots upon them, what every man should take." [Alternate versions found in Matthew 27:25, where this is attributed to fulfilling a Jewish prophecy; Luke 23:34; and John 23:24]

The role of probability in quantum physics, and in particular the Uncertainty Theorem, has led to a lot of guru-driven nonsense spouted in the popular arena of wishful thinking. There is probability in quantum physics, which is to say in Nature, but it is of a type. We say things like "the probability of finding an electron within this space-time region in our experiment is 40%." It sounds like "there is a 40% chance of rain today." But if an experiment where the equations create a 40% expectation is run a few hundred times and the electron is only found 37% of the time, what physicists do is alter their equations. Afterwards it looks like they got the 37% figure from theory, but in fact they got it from practice and molded their theory to their results. See Inward Bound by Abraham Pais for numerous historical examples.

Asking where an electron is in space-time relative to an atomic nucleus is actually simply asking a bad question, although strangely it is fine to ask where the same electron is traversing a vacuum tube. Chance in quantum land is probably best seen in radioactive decay, where it is clearly a result of a probabilistic decay mechanism, not of observational or prediction problems.

The principle of least action leads to quantum probability equations. So in some sense the rules of probability in quantum phyics are themselves predictable. Just as we cannot be sure what any throw of the dice may bring, but we can predict the outcome of large numbers of throws using the rules of probability.

In classical physics, laziness appears to be exact (assuming you know exactly everything about your system), or too pick an exact shortest path. In quantum physics the mask of exactness is removed, but the laziness of Nature is still the rule.

Book references:

Randomness, Chance, and Two Darwins

We have the usual missionary cult groups in rural Mendocino County, California, near Point Arena: Mormons, Seventh Day Adventists, and Jehovah's Witnesses. In general they seem to be pretty nice people. I don't mind them visiting their neighbors. They'll talk if you want to talk, and go away politely if you don't want to talk. It is interesting to see their opening talk lines.

A few month's ago Paul (not his real name), an earnest young man (younger than me, anyway, no big feat these days) from one of these groups, asked me, "You don't believe all of this is due to chance, do you?" His sweeping arms indicated my bishop pines, eucalyptus, the people present, the sky and the universe.

"Yes, I do," I said. That threw him. He acted as if they forgot to put that in the recruitment play book. We talked a bit more, and they left (they always seem to come in pairs, which is good, because you can offer them a beer and they'll say No).

Yesterday I read about the difference between the randomness of classical physics and the randomness of quantum physics in Inward Bound by Abraham Pais. It reminded me of how much trouble I have had accepting the nature of reality at the quantum level, of how most people are even more confused by randomness than I am, and the conversation with the earnest Christian.

I knew Paul was referring to the Theory of Evolution by Natural Selection. No, for things to be as snafu as they are in this world, you need a Central Planning Intelligence, a sort of cosmic CIA, God's designer intervention team.

Because even trained scientists have difficulty with issues of causation and randomness, you can bet (or lay odds) that religious recruiters are going to use people's confusion to lay out their own highly improbably, but very simple, causal story: God created things (and he speaks directly to the leaders of my religion, the only true religion).

Natural liberation involves understanding nature's randomness and causality. That means understanding their respective roles in the world. You need to remind yourself some times that words like chance, randomness, planning, and causality are used by humans to lump together a wide variety of natural phenomena.

It is said that some Roman soldiers worshipped Chance (Fortuna) as a god. Plato, on the other hand, did not like randomness, and preferred unseen causes to explain the otherwise inexplicable world. There are also the related ancient ideas of Fate and Free Will. Some people don't like causality because it seems to take away free will, but most people accept some causality in the "outside" world while reserving free will for people's decision making process.

A lot of this is illuminated by understanding the difference between the randomness of genetics and evolution, the randomness of classical physics, and the randomness of quantum physics.

Classical physical randomness is the best starting point. Think about dice or better still, a card game. The cards in poker are supposed to be dealt randomly, and for practical purposes we don't think about that when playing poker unless we think the dealer is cheating. But we know that each physical card maintains its physical identity from hand to hand; shuffling cards is a causal process that gives the card order a sort of practical randomness.

The classical physics problem that is solved with this sort of randomness is calculating the energy, specific heat or temperature of some matter. It is easiest with certain "ideal" gasses (ideal because the theory works out!). In classical physics everything is causal. The gas molecules all have locations, masses, and velocities. They bounce off each other in a causal manner similar to colliding marbles. But there are two many of them to use ordinary calculus to keep track of, much less calculate the temperature. By treating the molecules as having random velocities and directions, scientists could group them. The properties of the groups, fit into the right equations, give good answers. Even then this is complicated enough that scientists (notably Ludwig Boltzmann) did not get this essentially right until the late 1800's.

The point to be noticed is that in classical physics, there is no inherent randomness in matter or energy. Randomness is at the macro level, or the level of human perception. It arises out of microscopic events that are too difficult for us to keep track of. When we roll dice, they obey all of Newton's laws of physics, we just can't keep track. Nature, presumably, does keep track.

Charles Darwin's Theory of Natural Selection is covered under this classical randomness theory. Darwin did not know about chromosomes or DNA. We now know that the DNA of two parents is randomly mixed and selected for each child. This is an example of classical physical randomness: causal laws are at work on the cell level, but we can't follow them, we can only see the results. Survival until reproduction of the next generation involves both events that we classify as causal (quicker, and so escaped a predator) and random (standing in wrong place, wiped out by a flood).

I knew I was technically wrong to say, to Paul that I believe "all this" was a result of chance. There is chance involved, but evolution is really best described as causal. Its randomness is classical, a matter of humans using statistics to describe complex large scale events that are causal at a microscopic letter.

A second scientist Darwin (or fourth, if you want to include Erasmus Darwin and George Howard Darwin), Charles Galton Darwin, a grandson of Charles, was one of the many scientists who contributed to the creation of quantum physics. Coincidence, or caused by his high level of intelligence, education, and a family tradition of breaking new ground?

In quantum physics, very early on, it appeared there were truly random processes in nature. Radioactivity was the first example. Atoms of radioactive elements appear to decay randomly. So of course all the bright guys of the era set out to show that there were underlying causes for the decays. That would have set their classical physics world to right. But they could not find any underlying, classical mechanism for the randomness. In the 1920's some younger physicists started accepting this quantum randomness as just inherent in the universe. Today there is still no causal theory that explains quantum randomness. It is an simply a human observation about nature at the quantum level.

The philosophic and religious interpretations of this facet of natural reality tend to simply be used to reinforce prior prejudices. Some say quantum randomness proves there is free will. Some say it means there must be a multiverse. Many project the randomness into scales well beyond quantum physics. In fact, randomness averages out very quickly, even quantum randomness. Put a few atoms together in a molecule, and quantum randomness tones way down. By the time you have anything worth worrying about, say a few hundred molecules of gold in a lump, quantum randomness has no effect on causality. Classical physics works better.

Scientists and technicians have produce clever ways to bring quantum randomness into the world of objects that humans can see, but this is an engineering trick. Electronics parts may use quantum randomness (as in quantum tunneling), but they are themselves very predictable.

It takes a lot of study to gain even a basic understanding of quantum physics. Even the Bible is an easier read than an introduction to quantum physics text book, not to mention the mathematical prerequisites required to comprehend the equations in it. Pop quantum physics is about as useful as Bible quotes taken out of context.

Nevertheless, here's a recipe:

Two Darwins Quantum Piety

"Then said Jesus, Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do. And they parted his raiment, and cast lots [for it]." The Bible, Luke 23:34 [See also similar Matthew 27:35]

Thus is was that lots were cast at the most sacred event of the Christian religion, the Crucifixion [if it is not just a myth]. It was recorded because Fortuna wanted people to know that She does roll dice, both in the classical and quantum sense.

Will the Real Jesus Christ Please Rise Up?

The Spring Equinox falls on March 20 this year. In checking that fact I came across the Egyptian holiday of Sham, which has been celebrated the Monday after Easter since some time during the brief Christian era of Egypt (roughly 325 A.D. to 650 A.D.) Before that it was the Spring Equinox celebration. Of course the legendary rising up of Jesus after his death on the cross had to happen if he was killed by the Jews like an innocent Egyptian child murdered on the Passover. This reminded me I had wanted to see what the Wikipedia consensus on the Ebionites is.

Recently the idea that Jesus is totally mythological has been put forward by a number of celebrity atheists. I don't think this idea holds up to analysis, though it is more plausible than the standard Christian Jesus was God's Only Son idea that implies that God has a low sperm count.

The case against a historical Jesus has two main points. One is that there is no record contemporary record of Jesus, and certainly not of the central points of his followers' creed. He does not appear to have been noted at all by the Romans, the Greeks, or the Jews. Even the writings (or dictations) of Saint Paul (Acts of the Apostles and Letters) don't say much about Jesus the person, as opposed to Christ the deity. The Gospels, of course, fill in many details of Jesus's life, but they were provably written down much later, they frequently contradict each other (they don't even give consistent lists of the Apostles), and they are filled with borrowed myths, notably the Resurrection.

The probability that Jesus was obscure in life, and that his real biography did not match the inventions of the Gospels, should not lead us to the conclusion that he was made up whole fabric. There are several points against this. Which leads us back to those Ebionites.

The Ebionites were Jews who were followers of Jesus. They did not believe he was resurrected from the dead; they did not believe he was a miracle worker. They seemingly believed he was a holy man, rabbi, or messiah of some sort. Non-Jewish Christians who drank the he was God's Son, give all your possessions to the Church (or die: See Ananias and Sapphira) kool-aid did not like the Ebionites. The mainstream Jews did not like them either. The Christians accused them of being a novelty: a group of Jews, descendents of Jews who saw the Resurrected Jesus, who had lost the true faith. That makes no sense whatsoever, but then neither does Christian doctrine.

However, it seems to be an accepted fact that one James, a "brother" of Jesus, and other members of Jesus' family were in charge of the Christian community in Jerusalem until the Jews were expelled by the Romans in 135 A.D. So there you go: Jesus had a family. Being Jesus followers became the family business. But being Jews, they were not willing to graft non-Jewish fantasies onto the religion of their ancestor. Those fantasies were borrowed by Saint Paul and others from both the Greeks and the Phoenicians. In particular, the Jesus of the Gospels, despite being made to fit into Hebrew Old Testament prophesies, is pretty much a dead ringer for the Son of Baal and Astarte.

A particularly funny cultural development was the emergence of Islam as the world's main religion after about 650 A.D. Mohammed had his faults, but he did not claim to be God or the Son of God. He specifically rejected the idea that God was anything but a Unity. And we know that he had many conversations with various religious leaders before he decided to make up his own religion. People who have not read the Koran, or the Old Testament, don't realize that the Koran is mostly recycled Old Testament stories, or apocryphal stories that were widely circulated about Old Testament figures long before Mohammed arrived on the scene. Mohammed appears to have been influenced by Ebionites, who were still to be found in the region. Like them he accepted Jesus as a prophet, but not a God. [See any good history of Islam. I like Washington Irving's Mahomet and His Successors for its narrative style.]

What was the real Jesus like? Perhaps he was a revolutionary, Zealot type. Maybe he was an Essene. Or an ordinary rabbi of the school of Hillel. Possibly he was influenced by Egyptian, Greek, or Phoenician religious men. I would not be surprised if, after his death, he appeared in his follower's dreams. Which would have been the seed of the Resurrection myth, when planted in the soil of a man as obviously dishonest as Saint Paul [See, for instance, The Mythmaker, Paul and the Invention of Christianity by Hyam Maccoby].

Unfortunately most evidence that might help us solve this historic enigma was not only lost with time, it was destroyed. The Christians of the 2nd century A.D. onward believed that any historical record that contradicted them was falsified and needed to be destroyed. While we do have the various "Gnostic" gospels, we don't have a record of the Ebionites' beliefs. Which are probably as close to the truth as we might get. Unless someone finds an early, provably accurate life of Jesus buried in a cave somewhere.

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.

Sun Worship Revisited

Today is the summer solstice, the longest day of the year in the northern hemisphere, the shortest day in the southern hemisphere. Where I live, roughly 39 degrees north latitude, the sun will rise at 5:49 AM and set at 8:42 PM. Further north much or all of the day will be sunlit, but at the equator only careful attention reveals the solstice.

Some pagans are celebrating the solstice today; the typical news article I have seen, released by the Associated Press, mocks the celebrants as freaks. I have never noted mainstream press mockery of Christianity at Christmas or Easter. The consensus is that it makes sense to worship Jesus Christ and it is just plain silly to worship the Sun.

Christianity, after all, is seen as a modern religion. Sun worship is seen as a primitive, pre-Christian form of worship. People worshipped the Sun because it was big and bright and divided the day and night. According to Christians, God revealed himself the to Jews and then sent a son (just one, mind you, and would that Christians limited themselves to one child, following their God's example) to set everyone straight with a promise of immortality.

Physicists tell us that our sun is not immortal. True, it is billions of years old, but it was not formed during the earlier epochs of the universe. True, it will go on a few billion years, but it is expected to eventually consume its nuclear fuel and collapse into a cold cinder. If it isn't immortal then it can't be God, can it? But then the human race is newer than the sun and is unlikely to continue much longer (on cosmic time scales), so why believe a human form, Jesus, can represent immortality?

When Christianity was born Apollo was Helios, the Sun God of the Mediterranean world and had numerous followers. People, except perhaps the most ignorant, realized that the human attributes of Apollo were to be distinguished from the very real Sun in the sky. Other cultures are believed to have worshipped the sun as a god, but in some cases they may have simply been tracking the sun to keep their agricultural calendars straight, rather than truly believing the sun created the universe.

Yet this primitive sun worship was much closer to reality than Jesus worship. The Sun does predate the earth and mankind; in a very real sense, the sun created the earth and its energy imbued the earth with life. If the sun went out tomorrow we would all be dead in quick order, but Jesus died on the cross and nothing much happened. Let's face up to reality: Jesus is not a very good candidate for being God, even if you are egotistical enough to think that God must be human. Crazy as he was, the Emperor Caligula (who also claimed to be a god) at least was Roman emperor. Jesus was the founder of a small cult that apparently murdered Ananias and Sapphira for money (Bible, Acts of the Apostles, Ch. 5).

Let us skip some of this primitive thinking and go to a more sophisticated version of God (God 2.0?): the creator of all things, visible and invisible. Atheists would say that if you need a first creator, the Universe itself can serve that role as well as God. But lets split the difference and call our hypothetical deity the Creator, which should satisfy Catholics and open-minded atheists.
What would better represent the Creator in our sector of the Universe, a dead Jesus or a living Sun? The Sun is bigger and lives longer. The sun is singular, at least around here, whereas any number of men and women (not to mention elephants, snakes, and natural phenomena) could be claimed by their followers to be God. (My sentimental favorite is Gunputty.) Is the Sun more likely to be an incarnation of the Creator, or a raggedly little Palestinian?

Why then, is Christianity one of the dominant religions today, but Sun worship is just an occasional reason for pagan partying? Two big reasons. The Christian religion is a remarkable example of social engineering. The Apostle Paul took a tiny Jewish cult and made it into a money maker by combining it with non-Jewish resurrection myths, the promise of immortality, and a sort of primitive socialism in which standing Christians were fed from the seized property of new recruits. Then, as time passed, the Roman Emperors saw Christianity as the perfect way to keep their subjects in line. Once that happened, conversion at swordpoint became the rule, and a very successful one.

The other reason we fail to worship the Sun is that it is both too remote and too easily tested by reason. It does not appear to care about humans when it wilts crops under its heat. Humanized gods have always been popular because it is easy to imagine they understand human problems. Pregnant and unmarried? Talk to the Virgin Mary.

Those who see through the vanity of anthropomorphizing the Creator usually also see that Nature is complex. No one subset of Nature should be worshipped as God.

There are good reasons to celebrate the Solstice without trying to make our good sun into a God. The Solstice marks the annual rhythm of life. It reminds us that humans are just a part of nature. And it is cheery to have such long days when you don't live near the equator.

More data:

Solstice quick facts (at Encarta)
Sun facts (at NASA)
My Religion page at IIIPublishing.com
Sun Worship (Wikipedia)