by Dennis Green
The best way to understand a religion is not to practice it, but to analyze its aims. Does it aim to make its followers more peaceful, or more aggressive? Does it aim to bring joy into this world, or just more sorrow? Are its deities loving, kind and nurturing, or are they angry, wrathful and judgmental?
The world’s religions manifest all sorts of aims, and a wide spectrum of beliefs — from the Olympian polytheism of the ancient Greeks, Romans and Egyptians to the monotheism of Judaism and Islam to the pantheism of Buddhism and Native American religions. Christianity, with its paradoxical “Holy Trinity” representing three separate aspects of God or “Yahweh” (YWH), falls somewhere outside strict monotheism and as such is a challenge to its believers and its critics alike. Father, Son and Holy Spirit joined at the hips, or at the altar, is a notion regarded as blasphemy by devout Jews and Muslims.
In polytheistic religions, many of the deities are fierce, and are often appealed to for protection and asked to ward off evil spirits. The more ferocious these protective gods are, the better. The gods of the Aztec, Inca, and Maya are positively blood-thirsty, many of them, and others are sweet as honey. But it is likely that all the Pre-Columbian, Mesoamerican tribes practiced human sacrifice.
But so did virtually all of the religions of the Mediterranean and the Middle East at one time, as well as those in Ireland, Iceland and certain Nordic, African and Southeast Asian Pacific countries. Human or animal sacrifice usually has as its aim propitiating the anger of the gods, or proving one’s devotion to them, and one’s obedience as well. It is sometimes associated with cannibalism, and in some rituals, the sacrificial victim is consumed in a feast shared with the gods and then among important members of the community.
The Yahweh of the Old Testament is a savage and a vengeful God indeed. Filled with wrath toward his own creation, he punishes, tests and tries them sorely.
From Adam to Abraham, from Job to Jonah, he puts the screws to anyone who dares believe on him. He wouldn’t even let them speak his name, and almost all uses of YWH, (the vowels came later), were forbidden. Talk about a harsh, unloving, jealous and spiteful Father! Impossible to please.
A human father with such characteristics would not be worthy of admiration.
And in at least two instances, this primitive, chthonic deity demanded human sacrifice as proof of man’s devotion — commanding Abraham to slaughter his son Isaac, and later forsaking his only begotten son, Jeshua, condemning him to suffer torture and the agonizing death of crucifixion.
In much of his own teaching, Jeshua tries to convey the spirit of a loving, protective God, but by the end of the apocalyptic Book of Revelations, we are left with God the Destroyer — judgmental and determined to condemn to eternal damnation those he didn’t arbitrarily
“elect” to salvation.
This is a father who plays favorites, and whose love can be neither won nor earned. Even Jeshua dies forsaken.
Put in such a stark context, I begin to understand that alongside Yahweh, even the most bloodthirsty gods of the Aztecs, Inca and Maya don’t seem so unusual. The aims of all these religions are much the same, and their savagery shares much in common. Even in modern Christianity, ersatz cannibalism is practiced in the drinking of Christ’s blood and the eating of his flesh in the form of the wafer host at the communion rail.
If the aim of this ritual is to appease an angry and a vengeful God, then it is not surprising that its practitioners have been among the most warlike and savage cultures in the world, killing over the years millions of infidels and unbelievers and people of different tribes. Crusader Rabbit, anyone?
©2010 Dennis Green
No comments:
Post a Comment