Wednesday, August 27, 2014

Religion In Ancient Cultures

First of all -and to make things clear- I DO NOT oppose religion, although I myself am absolutely not religious.
What I DO oppose is ORGANIZED religion.

If someone on a blue monday decides to follow this or that religion, hey, who am I to be against that.  If, on the other hand, you have someone who stands up and claim they are the keepers of the truth and that they're going to show you in what to believe -and in what not- how to believe and when to believe, then something's not right.

If on top of that, those "keepers of the truth" are known to have altered quite a lot of stories -including, YES!, the bible- to fit their own agenda and that they have knowingly tried to disguise wrongdoings on a global scale, then you unequivocaly know that you're dealing with charlatans who's only goal it is, and always has been, to stay in power, to have power over the people, over "their flock".

As a consequence, 90% of the people who claim that they are religious, are in fact not religious at all.  They are followers of the dogmas and doctrines of a CHURCH, dogmas and doctrines written by men whose sole purpose it was to get a grasp on the common people.  Don't forget that the RC church was started around AD325 out of POLITICAL reasons, namely to try and keep a crumbling Roman Empire together without the use of military force...

But let's get back to the purpose of this epistle, namely the shedding of some personal light on religion in Ancient Times.

As a matter of fact, I think that the term "religion" is totally unfitting for a lot of things ancient civilizations did.  With ancient civilizations, I mean the pre-dynasty Egyptians, the Azteks, Mayas, Incas, Olmeks, Tolteks, Sumer and other nations.

First of all you have to know that those civilizations had many gods.  Mostly they had a god for almost any variety of known activity.  Why would that be?  Could it be that these "gods" were originally "masters" in some or other craft; a craft that they passed on to lesser instructed civilizations?

I'm not claiming that these gods were extra-terrestrials.  Although this is of course a possibility, seeing how ancient tales from different civilizations all have these "beings" descending from the sky, often in a cloud of smoke with roaring thunder and fire to boot.

Okay, so let's for a second -even longer if you like- say that these "gods" (aliens or not) were indeed each specialized in some or other craft or technology.  Sounds kinda logical when -in the case of space farers- you go places where you could use a decent amount of scientists and experts in every field imaginable.  Also, seeing you read in different ancient texts that these "gods" taught all kinds of stuff to a primitive but intelligent local populace.  Stuff like writing, agriculture, mathematics, geography, etc. .

Once these gods departed to wherever they went (or came from), we all of a sudden see how "religions" cropped up; religions that -according to us- venerated these magical star beings.  And what do we see popping up as well?  Priests.  Plenty of them.  Teaching what this or that deity left behind.  By the way, maybe in a distant future, people will find "proof" of the veneration of a "god" named Jimi Hendrix who had millions of followers and who taught his flock how to play a weird musical instrument called the "Fender Stratocaster".  The name of the instrument being an indication this Hendrix god spent some time in a layer of the sky, high above the Earth...

Now, to me this sounds more like ancient religious temples were akin to houses of knowledge, where the "priest" was instead a specialist who was a "master" in a certain field and who passed on, to a select chosen few, what had been taught to her/him before.

That "religion" among ancient civilizations wasn't like we know religion today is pretty clear to me.  Today you have church leaders who keep spitting vaguenesses at us, coming up with abstract "knowledge" about even more abstract places like "heaven" or "hell".

In ancient times, priests had a knowledge that was far from abstract.  Priests were people of wisdom, people who knew stuff and to which you went when wanting to know something.

You had "priests" specialized in healing, others specialized in crops and weather forcasts, still others led temples of matters of the heart and maternity and so on and so forth.

The thing is that it is US, today, who call these diciplines "religion" and the masters of those diciplines "priests" in a religious context.  The main reason for this is that most discoveries of ancient civilizations were done by religious folk, or have been researches under the wings of this or that religious institution.

One thing religious people are good at is to explain things in ways that are most favourable to their own religion and the point of view of their masters to whom they pledged allegiance.  Is what has been happening for almost 1800 years now.  To the point that we in fact have two paralel histories: one as things REALLY happened, and one adapted and rewritten by "the church" (guess which one).

At a certain point, things came so far that even science -which in my opinion should be devoid of any kind of religious influences- often started taking contemporary religious conclusions as their basis to build their own conclusions upon.

Normally, when starting from this -rather crooked- foundation, it should be so that after years of research and finding evidence that things weren't exactly as this church had been claiming for all this time, that scientific views would shift and that scientists would constantly adapt their basis as new stuff was revealed.

This is of course what baffles me, that science does NOT adapt their starting pont to their findings, but have been doing -and still do- exactly the opposite: they adapt their findings to their foundation!!

Excuse me for saying so, but this is flabbergasting and, quite frankly, wrong.  I mean, it's like saying that the lowest number one can count to is minus 4000 and that, whatever means of calculus you use, anything that comes out below minus 4000 is impossible because it was established that minus 4000 is the limit.  This strongly reminds me of the "experts" who claimed the Earth was flat and that any hint at our planet being a globe was answered with a bale of hay and a match under yer arse.  Or other experts and scientists claiming the speed of sound could never be attained, let alone breached.

By the way, I find it extremely strange that a lot of these so-called experts, are in fact not at all experts.  They think they are because they spent several decades in the field.  But, it takes more than staying in "the field" for decades to become an expert.  I mean, how can spending time studying artefacts give you the nomination of an expert when all you did was try to fit your findings into a pre-established timeline, a timeline which was done by holding glyphs next to wrongly translated bible texts and oracling that everything fits neatly while in reality nothing fits at all?

The only expertise I can discern is that of fiddling with the facts in order to be able to maintain a self established truth.

To me, it is a fact that ancient religions weren't religions, but sciences.  Priests weren't such as seen in our religious context; they were scientists.  Not mumbling weirdos wearing dresses selling incomprehensible paragraphs of mumbo-jumbo as a certain thruth with a hithertho not yet clarified meaning, but people of knowledge who were instructed to pass on that knowledge to a select few.

Why a select few?  Simply for reasons of making things not too complicated.  Writing things down exactly as they should was a long process -an expertise all by itself.  More students meant more books had to be written.  Also more books would be read and lent out with a risk of losing valuable books and writings.

This is also one of the things that get me cranky: the explanation by some of our modern day scientists and experts that writers from the past like Homeros or Plato would keep themselves occupied with writing fiction.

Wake up folks!  Before the invention of the printing press, writing wasn't done for pleasure!  People only wrote down what was extremely important to them, important enough to write down for future reference.

Anyway, a rather long piece to say so little.  Just that I feel religion wasn't religion at all in ancient times, at least, not as we live our "modern" day religions.  Simply because first of all, "gods" were part of people's daily lives.  Not some entities one needed to go worship on Sunday.  No, they were part of people's lives because the gods all had a meaning to the different practices in ancient societies.  Gods of wine, gods of war, gods of plants and trees, gods of prosperity, gods of fertility, gods of beauty, gods of this, gods of that...

Today, you have a god which doesn't even have a name in christian belief.  Jaweh or Jehovah are the most common names in Judaism, but for some reason the christians don't have a name for their god...

Speaking of Jehova... this reminds me that "god" was not the only one and that christianity (just like Judaism) isn't a monotheistic religion, as the RC church has been claming right from the start in AD325, but that's for another blog, one of these...

JJ

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