Religion - Mistranslations,Mistakes, and Out and Out Lies

Today let's look at mistakes. I am going to stick with Christian tradition here, because I am most familiar with their mistakes. I am sure all religions make them, but I'll stick to this because it's a fine line between mistakes and differing opinions and lies and I want to get this right.

Let's start with a big one. As a young man, I was taught that Muslims did not believe in Jesus. This is a mistake. While Muslims do not believe that Jesus was Divine, they certainly believe that he was a great prophet and revere him as such. Likewise, many Hindus view him as an avatar of God and Buddhists tend to see him as Bodhisattva.

I was also taught that Jesus was born in Nazareth, near the Sea of Galilee. One problem. At the time he lived, there was no Nazareth. That town was developed in the 2nd Century, well after Jesus lived. This is a fairly honest mistake. Seemingly Jesus was called, by some, 'the Nazarene,' but exactly how the word is spelled determines its meaning. If Nazarine, then it applies to a sect that was close to the Essenes, but not the same. If Nazorite, then it means a Jew who has taken a special vow of holiness, which usually involves not cutting hair and abstaining from wine, for a certain time, which can vary from weeks to a lifetime. If Nazir, then it simply means a green shoot on a seemingly dead branch (the way grapes vines grow). This is what I believe it meant. His followers thought he was the new growth that would reanimate their culture.

Let's look at the Apocalypse of St John. Most of us were taught that this was the end of the world. It did not mean that at all. It was to be the end of an age. The word itself simply means 'a sudden revelation.' The word 'Armageddon' also does not mean the end of the world. It is the name of a location, 'har Mergiddo,' the plain of Megiddo. It was simply the spot where a great battle was to be fought. Because of the mistaken way we were taught, many of us were needlessly traumatized as kids. I mean the whole Book of Revelation is nightmarish science fiction, but thinking it describes the world's end makes it nearly intolerable to young minds.

There are countless other mistakes in Christian teachings. I stress Christian mistakes, not to pick on them, but because, of all belief systems, it is the one that says quite clearly, that it rests on real history. As such, mistakes by its teachers are unacceptable, yet they are perseverated.

I am willing to be charitable in describing these as mistakes. Those who taught me, and others of my era ( and eras before and after) were simply reciting what they were taught. However, if you go further back, to the earliest Church, you will find that some of those men out and out lied. That will be the next subject of this blog.

Religions - Mistranslations, Mistakes, and Out and Out Lies, Part 1

Over the next few posts, I want to discuss the ways religions have become twisted. Let's start with the issue of bad translations.

There are some basic terms that have been bandied about for years that are the result of bad translations. Take the idea of polytheism, the idea of many gods. Often, this is thought to be the belief system of many older religions. Actually, all religions, that we know of, believe in 1 ultimate creator, the reason there is something rather than nothing, the cause of existence itself. Most believe that this god has little interest in the day to day running of the Cosmos and leaves that up to a host of lesser spirit beings of varying power. This is actually henotheism, not polytheism. Thus, when translators came across Hinduism and found the word deva, they mistranslated that as gods. It really means powerful beings. We did the same thing with the Egyptian texts. When mistakes are made in translation, the rest of the translation must be questioned, especially when, as with the Egyptians, we are only guessing at the meanings. Languages are subtle. By the way, our so-called monotheisms have the same spirit beings, we just call them angels and demons.

In Buddhism, I was always taught that the 1st Noble Truth was 'all life is suffering' and that the 3rd was 'suffering is caused by desire.' The actual translation is 'all life is sorrowful' and sorrow is caused by 'ignorant craving' and these are obviously more temperate and realistic sayings.

In  the Old Testament, we have Yahweh telling Moses that 'I am what I am.' This implies a God that is sternly constant and unchanging. The translation should read 'I will be what I will be.' This implies a God who is free, almost whimsically free. Now, this may not be the most comforting way to view God for many, but it is  certainly more realistic. The older I get, the more I realize that our comfort is not the Creators primary concern.

Another mistranslation is found in Isaiah when it is written that the messiah would be born of a virgin. Most Jews of that era did not read Hebrew, reading instead the Septuagint, a Greek translation. For some reason, they translated a word that meant young girl as virgin. Later, the author of the Gospel of Matthew, reading the Septuagint and trying to convince Jews that Jesus was their Messiah, claimed that Jesus was born of a virgin and a world of mistakes has followed, leading to countless unneeded arguments and, at times, to unneeded violence. Next time, I will deal with other mistakes

What Is Truth - Part 3

When it comes to the development of humans, modern humanity, things are even weirder. We know, again, as much as we can know, that we had ancestors, various hominids, ranging from little, not-too-bright Australopithecus up to homo erectus (upright man) and homo habilus (the tool maker). Then, we have some odd kin folk. Seemingly, as we became what we are, there existed Neanderthal man. Long thought to be a dumb brute, we have since figured out that he was a very smart and, for a long time, a very successful creature. Now, we have found a new cousin, Denisovian man. All we know about him, from the scant fossil record he left, is that he was big. Then, we showed up, and they departed. Why they died out, even our smart-ass scientists have to admit they have no clue.          

 

But, we were told, they were distinct lines, separate from us, and, that, despite the human propensity for breeding with anything that looks remotely like us, there was no interbreeding. Well, not surprisingly, geneticists have extracted usable DNA from the bones of our cousins, and, yes, a small, but not insignificant percentage of our genes come from them (except among the people of Africa; what that means, I have no idea). Traditional scientists are aghast at that discovery and last I saw they were trying ways to fault the genetic workups, but they are beginning to admit that, yes, we were quite close to our cousins.                                

 

Of course there are other ideas. If you have ever seen one of the countless repeats of Ancient Aliens on the History Channel, you no doubt have heard it proposed that Sky Gods came down, mucked about with our DNA and made us their somewhat intelligent slaves, until, for some reason, they flew the coop. Likely? Of course not. Impossible? Certainly not. The Universe is old and far stranger than we are capable of imagining.   

 

Again, we are shooting in the dark, guessing. Fine, that is what detectives do, and all of this is a great mystery, but even the great Sherlock Holmes never hesitated to admit a mistake. We do not know; we were not there. 

 

Let us try another question. How did the Universe form? We are told, at least for the last several decades, that all of the energy of the Universe was packed into a tiny point that exploded, the Big Bang. Is that true? Maybe, a little. All of the energy was not packed into a tiny point because things like points and energy are present in space-time. Before the beginning there was no space-time. What was there? Nothing in the literal sense of the word, no-thing. Things only exist in space and time. Scientists know this because the laws of physics break down a short time, called Plank's Time, before they find the beginning. The whole Big Band thing is logical. We knew a goodly number of Nature's Law, we thought, and assumed that if we worked them backward, we would see the beginning. We don't.                          

 

That aside, if there was a Big Bang, when we run things forward, we do not get the Universe in its present state unless we fudge the math with what are called constants. Einstein used them but loathed the idea. The sane thing to do would be to say, "we have something wrong, give us a few years to sort this out." Instead they keep teaching the same nonsense.      

 

There are other ideas. A few daring physicists have dared to suggest that maybe the whole thing burst into existence all at once everywhere and has existed ever since in a sort of steady state where things are constantly changing but always within a constant framework. Other have suggested that creation is constant, that at every moment, the matter and the energy we are aware of is popping in and out of existence from a level of energy that we, with our limited perception, can never know. This, by the way, is an old idea present in some Eastern thought and in Paul Tillich's idea of God as the Ground of Being and it is an appealing idea. It is wonderful to think of our world as constantly fresh and new.                                            

 

Going back to that idea of fudging the math with constants, it seems that those did not really work. Now we are told that for the Universe to be the way it is, there must be dark matter and dark energy. They must be there we are told to balance the cosmic books. Great. What is dark matter? Well, no one knows and we cannot even see it because it does not interact with anything we are aware of except gravity but there is a whole heap of it. Worry not, we will figure out what it is, someday. Okay, fair enough, what about dark energy? Oh well, same thing. We do not know, but it must be there and we will get to it. At what point do we say, "enough. This is idiotic. rethink your basic physics and start over. Until then, not a damn penny for your thoughts."       

 

Everyone, please join me in practicing this phrase until it come easily from your mouth. “We do not know.” Say it over and over, because, when you get right down to it, we really do not know much. We think a lot of things are true and work from there. That’s fine, you have to start somewhere and work with something, but when new information becomes available that you are reasonably sure requires you to change your approach, don’t cling stupidly to the past.       

 

And, more importantly, don’t stop trying to solve the mystery. You never will solve it, but the fun and the gain is in the trying. As humans, we are unmercifully curious and are doomed to trying to solve the unsolvable, but that is how we grow. Also, it’s a hell of a lot of fun and one of the things that makes us so lovable. I sometimes think that curiosity, that sense of wonder, is one of the main reasons our Creator finds us so fascinating, that and the fact that we share that Divine love of good stories and good music.

What is Truth - Part 3

So let us move to another matter. How did we get here? Okay, we will start with life itself. For years, countless years, we in the Western World were told that God put us here. Sounds reasonable, until you begin to look in depth. The story, as told in the Bible's Book of Genesis, is simply a reworking of the older Sumerian tale, with a twist. This time, we were told, God created man, stuck him in a Garden and gave him a very strange rule, do not eat the fruit of a tree that will give you knowledge. This is nonsense. If God is to thought of as Father, why would He want you to remain ignorant. Either we are talking about a most unpleasant and irrational God, not a comforting thought, or the story was twisted by the priests who reworked it to make us all feel guilty. All cultures have their creation myths and all are sorely lacking, although this one is about as odd as it gets. So let us look forward.              

When I was a student, and for years after, we were taught that the primordial seas were full of organic chemicals that kept bumping together and, when energy, probably from lightning, struck the water, lo and behold, life emerged. Now, virtually all scientists believe that the odds against this are so unthinkably huge that this did not happen, a position made more solid by repeated and failed attempts to thus kick start life in a lab.    

Francis Crick had a great idea. He was a smart guy; he figured out the shape of DNA. Well, he figured that life came to Earth on meteors from somewhere in the Cosmos. Sounds reasonable. We have strong evidence that simple life can roll itself into little balls, cysts, go completely dormant, survive the harshness of space and then reanimate when conditions were right. Only one problem. All he did was pass the buck. If life came from elsewhere, where? And, more to the point, how did it start there? Again, the sensible thing to do is say, "We don't know," But that is not an option when you are paid big bucks to assure everyone that you do know. Such is the current state of science. They are great at tinkering, making new shiny toys for us all, but if you want answers, run the other way when they speak. They will give answers and they are almost all nonsense.   

To make matters worse, they tell us that life changed, from simple, to us, by means of random mutation and natural selection of the mutations that fit the ecology best. This is total crap. Of course life has changed, we have fossil evidence. Of course an organism unfit to survive will die out. Polar bears would not do well in the Amazon and gorillas would be very unhappy at the North Pole. But random mutation? No way, not when we see that change frequently happens very quickly. Most humans were lactose intolerant until Man started keeping domestic animals. Then we are told, out of the blue, a random mutation changed all of that, all of the very complex nature of digestion and in a few thousand years, a blink in Human history, we were all drinking animal milk (except in Asia where, for some reason, the change never took hold) The odds against that scenario are ridiculously huge plus you have the problem of finding a breeding population to pass on the trait. Random mutation effects the individual, not the population and it takes a very long time for one trait in one person to get passed around and odds are it will die out before it becomes dominant. Again, it seems, by hard evidence, that life forms have changed throughout our history but Darwinian evolution should be abandoned. The only reason it has not is that those who pushed it are too damn stubborn and too in need of funding to admit it. We really do not know what happened in our deep past. Perhaps one day we will but only after we uncover a lot more solid evidence on which we can make assumptions that are valid.                                                                                                                   

What is Truth - Part 2

            We were children and saw with the eyes of children. Now, there is a wonderful aspect to children, their openness and thrill as they discover their world but, like it or not, children grow up. Yes, it is easy to lose that excitement and energy of youth, but, when we look back at those days, it is all too easy to forget the anxiety and fear that are present in then. Children are terrified by ordinary experiences such as thunderstorms and have no way of protecting themselves from sudden disasters and no way of caring for themselves. Mommy and Daddy cannot, and should not be there forever, feeding and nursing them.                  

 So, as children grow, so grew the human race, and we began thinking and observing and trying to put two and two together. We began to reason. At first, the attempts were feeble, but, with time, we grew stronger and we began questioning. The tribes from what is now Turkey, Iran, and the steppes of southern Russia spread. These folks seemed to have a serious talent for three things, conquest, reasoning, and invention, and, it seems, wherever they went, they sowed the seeds of civilization.                                                                             

Or so it seems. This was not always the thought and it is still not what is taught in schools. Many mainstream historians are aghast at such concepts, but, too bad, because the facts are slowly being discovered. The oft told story is that civilization began in Egypt. Well, that was the tale for years, until, after much digging, and much gnashing of teeth, it was decided that, no, Sumer was the place. Actually both spots were suspect, or should have been, right from the beginning.                                                                                                                                        

Egypt is a dessert, hardly the most advantageous spot to build the cornerstone of civilized humanity. Yes, it is farmable, but only because they built irrigation ditches from the Nile. Otherwise, it was a dreadful place, hot, dry, subject to unpredictably vicious flooding by the Nile, and home to a whole lot of nasty creatures.       

Sumer was worse. This city, in what is now Iraq, was a fetid, malaria filled, swamp, yet we were to believe that an advanced civilization sprang full blown, practicing advanced agriculture, almost overnight. How? Because a bunch of gods decided to make it home, created man to be their servants, and settled in. Let me ask this. If you were a powerful god, why would you settle in such a miserable hellhole, when you could be in any of thousands of beautiful, lush, friendly, fertile spots on this Earth?    

Modern humans have dug and dived and thought and measured and some facts are now in front of us. Underwater, off the shores of India and Japan, we have found temples, underwater, and after much distraught hemming and hawing, geologist and archeologist are being forced to concede that these structures were once on shorelines; that the sea rose and swamped them thousands of years before Sumer.          

 As if that were not enough to make the case, in Turkey, at Gobleki Tepi, a vast temple site is being dug up, dating back to 10000 BCE or so. This was long thought impossible. See, historians and anthropologists were convinced that until agriculture was firmly entrenched, societies would not have the time and would not be stable and centralized enough to do a whole lot of building and in 10000BCE, we are told, agriculture was just starting. So, even though Gobleki cannot be there, it is, and there seems to be no sign that anyone there was doing any farming.                     

Now you see the problem. The historians, anthropologists, and archeologists made the very reasonable assumption that people had to be settled to start building large structures and that they had to be farming to be settled. This was a perfectly reasonable assumption accept for one small thing. It was wrong, and this is a problem we will see again and again. A theory built on an invalid assumption, no matter how logical, is utterly useless.      

Where did the people of Gobleki Tepi go? We have no idea, nor do we know why they left. Speculation is ridiculous because we do not have any vague clues to work with. Possibly, the ancestors of those people retained some knowledge of their kinfolk's culture that gave them an advantage as they swept across the world, but that is simple speculation. Makes sense, but, really, who knows?      

We do know, as much as we know anything, that the Earth has suffered many catastrophes, freezes, floods, volcanos, earthquakes, meteor strikes and others cataclysms whose nature we do not know. Historians long taught that history proceeded in a fairly orderly and predictable way from point A to point B to point C. This idea of uniformity was always nonsense. Look at your own life, if it is that orderly you must be very bored. Life is constantly disrupted by unforeseen problems and occasionally they are catastrophic. Scholars may not like it but that is just the way this world works. All cultures have stories of various disasters and it is most likely that at least some of them are true and that Man's tale has often been interrupted by Nature's whims.                                                                                          

What is Truth? - Part One

 What is truth? When asked, by Pilate, Jesus ducked that question, which should give you some clue. Well, I do not believe in ducking anything, so here goes. Short answer. No one, none of us, has any idea. Or rather, we have many ideas, but that is all they are, ideas.                                                                                 

Not very satisfying, I suppose, so here goes the long answer. Throughout history, men have tried, with mixed success, to figure things out. Here we sit, on this lovely blue, spinning marble, zooming through, the Universe in orbit around a hot ball of gas, which in turn is zipping around the edges of a system of an unthinkably large number of other hot balls of gas, which is but one of many such systems. All of this motion seems to be governed by a system of laws that describe the action, sort of.                                                                                                              

For years, humans looked out at this ridiculously vast space and wondered, then tried to figure how they related to the whole thing. No wonder we are all, really, quite mad. This, we decided was the realm of the gods and we read tremendous import into the motion in the skies. We observed spectacular events, flares, eclipses, comets, meteors, and believed we were witnessing the rages and battles of those gods, and fearful, for damn good reason, we performed rites and rituals to appease them, and rites and rituals to feed them, for surely all of their effort left them weak, and we could not let them cease their activity and allow the Universe to fail.                                                                                                                     

We were children and saw with the eyes of children. Now, there is a wonderful aspect to children, their openness and thrill as they discover their world but, like it or not, children grow up. Yes, it is easy to lose that excitement and energy of youth, but, when we look back at those days, it is all too easy to forget the anxiety and fear that are present in then. Children are terrified by ordinary experiences such as thunderstorms and have no way of protecting themselves from sudden disasters and no way of caring for themselves. Mommy and Daddy cannot, and should not be there forever, feeding and nursing them.                     

In Part Two, some alternatives to conventional history will be discussed (don't worry, this won't be too academic)

The Symbol of the New American Religion

All religions need a symbol, so our new American religion, The Church of Who Knows, will have an appropriately representative symbol, one that captures the essence of our beliefs.

                                                                                ?

I think the meaning and implications of this profound symbol are obvious for who among us, brothers and sisters, has a clue what is going on, why we are here, and who is running the show. It is a humble symbol and I would prefer that it remain simple.

I thought about adding frills and colors. I thought about learning the craft of Medieval monks and illuminating the letter and while I admit that such decoration would be lovely, I do not want this New Religious Movement to be thought pretentious, so let us keep things plain.

Now, if you wish it put it on a chain around your neck, like a crucifix, I approve. Also allowable will be t-shirts and caps with that logo, bumper stickers with a '?' decal, and letterheads and business cards displaying your belief. Actually, you can do whatever you please because, dear brothers and sisters in confusion, I really do not care what you do with it. This is to be a Church without dogma.

Remember, this Church is not based on beliefs, but questions. Our guidelines are the facts, and because there are darn few hard core, iron clad facts about this Cosmos, we have few such guidelines. Remember, the keys are kindness, help, non-judgementalism and forgiveness. Nothing else really matters.

America Needs A New Religion

Now, friends and neighbors, I present what America needs, what it has been waiting for, even if no one knew that they were waiting. A New Religion, a belief system that finally tells the truth and nothing but the truth, well, mostly. Here it is: The First Church of Who Knows.

Our belief system is about as simple as you can get. We don't really know much of anything. Well, you say, that's not true; we know lots. Think again.

We have a way of viewing the Universe within a set of limitations imposed on us by our bodies. We can't see like a hawk, hear like a bat, sense air motions like a cat does with its whiskers, feel heat like a snake, and we sure can't smell like a dog. Even with our finest instruments, we sense a limited world. This is proven by those big particle colliders. In them we see the paths particles take after collisions, but never the particles.

Even with what we perceive, we only see the World our brain creates. The brain uses sense data to construct a model of the World. As the Zen saying goes, 'do not confuse the moon with a finger pointing at the moon.' Our brains have limits, and further more, the brain's own mechanism limits our awareness to what is needed to survive. We are bombarded by a tremendous number of bits of sensory input each second. If we registered all of them consciously we would be hopelessly overwhelmed. If you doubt that, watch someone on their first acid trip. They are near helpless. This is because LSD puts that limiting function out of commission, temporarily. By the way, do not try that yourself. I strongly advise against acid use for a variety of reasons.

So, if we are aware of an incomplete World, we cannot say we know it. We have enough data to make some guesses, and no doubt, some are pretty good, but you cannot know with insufficient information. I will remind you that we thought we had a pretty good grip on electricity, until quantum theory showed up. Now, that seems far from settled.

As far as Theological matters go ( bet you wondered why I was calling this a religion), if you reject the picture of God as the Ancient of Days, the old man on the cloud keeping track of whose naughty and nice, you will have to admit that there isn't much you can say. Congratulate yourself because that is exactly the conclusion reached by such theologians as St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas. The Jewish mystics refer to God in his totality as ein Soff and say that as such, He is unknowable (my use of 'He' is simply a convention, gender does not apply). The Hindu teachers have students list the attributes of God and, to each one, respond, 'neti, neti, not that, not that.' This is because that which is beyond time and space is unknowable in that words, or even concepts, do not apply.

Some will say, 'God is Love,' and to those I will ask, have you ever actually read the Old Testament, a book in which God orders genocide at many points and in fits of temper takes the matter into His own hands at several points. For those of a New Agier point of view, please look at the World, with floods, fires, earthquakes, volcanos, and many, many viscous diseases. Look at the Universe full of  the thermonuclear burning of stars, the incredible explosions of super novas, the raw power that is constantly giving birth, and destroying.

To eliminate the confusion of theology, I propose we start a church where we finally admit that while there certainly is something awesomely powerful at work, we do not really have much of a clue about what that is. This way, we can get about the business of living. Our rituals are simple, have fun, any way you want that doesn't hurt others. Our sacrament, sharing. Our morality, be forgiving, as non-judgmental as is reasonable and  kind.

I think this a fine way to face the future. It eliminates all the stupidly violent fights we have over matters that no one has much clue about. We will in this Church have a God; I, myself am a firm believer, but we will be honest and, in the spirit of the Native Americans call this ultimate God, the Creator, the Great Mystery. I for one am going to stand by this belief until someone can answer for me the one great question, 'why is there something, rather than nothing.'

So join me, all who wish to be free from the shackles of divisive beliefs,  as members of the Church of Who Knows. We can meet in the chapel of Good Deeds, sing hymns from the books of Kindness and Forgiveness, and preach the word of Non Judgementalism. Then we can all have dinner and relax.