AW! Epistles
A Crash Course in Biblical History and Religion: From Bert
Abstract
Tuesday, 23 May 2006
Mike, I have the following comments on: AW! Discussion Pages for Christianity, Judaism and Truth. I stumbled across your site and enjoy it greatly. About ten years ago I read a book called Unearthing Atlantis I believe that was the name. I do not remember the author. The book chronicled the excavation and discoveries found on an Island in the Mediterranean sea. “Thera” I think, now known as Santara or Santarini. I no longer have the book. So forgive my bad memory.
Any way, the author believed it to be the home of a great (and for the time) an advanced civilization. The Island Nation was destroyed by a tremendous volcano dating to near 5000 BCE. The author claims that few human remains have been found in the near twenty or more years of excavation. He speculated that perhaps there was ample warning and that the inhabitants of this nation evacuated. My question is, do you have any theories on what Nations assimilated these people and how they may fit in to history of the middle east and religion? The Bible, in the Moses stories seems to account for some the horrific events that would likely have been witnessed, however I don’t know if the time line fits. Were they enslaved by the Egyptians? Are they the Jewish people? Are the stories of apocalyptic destruction part of the early mythology? Have you any thoughts of this subject?
I do not know the book, but the Thera eruption is well known and explored, although your date is a bit exaggerated. The dating is controversial, however. Most put the date at 1628 BC, the precision coming from the dating of Greenland ice-cores, a large eruption somewhere happening then. It is assumed to have been Thera. But from dendrochronology, and some ice core samples, there are other dates when something happened in the northern hemisphere, any of which might have been the Thera explosion that destroyed the island. 1628 suits Egyptian chronology, but a growing number of historians and archaeologists think the conventional dating is too high (ages are too old), and ought to be reduced by 300 to 500 years. That would bring Thera down to sometime in the 1200s BC, suiting the Trojan war better, and fitting one of the eruption/dendro marked events. It means, I guess, that the 1628 BC event happened elsewhere, maybe in north America (Mt St Helens maybe, I do not know what the vulcanologists might say about it).
Anyway, the idea that it is linked with Exodus somehow is popular pseudo-history. Before any theories about Exodus are suggested, someone ought to show that it certainly happened, and when. No one so far has been able to do it.
The civilization of the Theran people was the so-called Minoan one, centered on Crete, and the people are considered to have been Semites. The Canaanites were active sea people not long after, or maybe at the same time depending on whether you go for the high or low dates. In the west we normally call them Phœnicians after the Greeks and Romans, but it was effectively an insult meaning “redskins”, just as the cowboys of the midwest called the Native Americans “redskins”. The Phœnicians called themselves Canaanites! The Phœnician colonists who set up Carthage also called themselves Canaanites, and did so into the Roman era. So the Minoans might have been Canaanites, the Phœnicians were, and it is getting certain that the people of the Palestinian hill country usually called Jews, also were originally Canaanites, despite the objections of the bible. They were distinguished because they were replaced as rulers in Yehud by Persian colonists in 417 BC, and they wrote the Jewish scriptures over the next few centuries. Bible comes from the name Biblos, a Canaanite (Phœnician) seaport where the people traded in writing media like papyrus and parchment.
Thanks much Dr Magee for your response. The True purpose for exploring your site, is that I am trying acquire a crash course so to speak in biblical history and religion in general. I will try to keep this brief so as not to fatigue you. I am married to a devout Christian women, we have four children, 3 girls and a boy age 2. I am no religion. I abandoned the bible at age 14, not because I possess any higher knowledge of biblical history, just by my own common senses.
Being somewhat scholastically lazy, I found the bible laborious reading. I can’t quote verse, My retention as a lad lasted only long enough to see the absurdities and find doubt. Even with my untrained adolescent mind I could apply the inductive reasoning required to reject most all the script as inaccurate history, conjecture and mythology.
The beauty my pastors saw in the image of the suffering Jesus. I saw as repugnant. The entire concept of a blood offering to a God seemed to me barbaric and primeval, and only slightly beyond the Neanderthal mental ability of conjure. To my figuring a good God would be content with the sweat on my brow.
As a boy I was repeatedly excused from my bible study class for asking questions about the virgin birth the resurrection the holy ghost. They were a little more tolerant of my questions regarding the Old Testament. But I was puzzled at their unwillingness to confront hard questions and generally anxious to find a good one, that would get me out for the day. At the confirmation ceremony I was to recite this tedious passage in front of the congregation but during rehearsals I would only know the first two or three words. My pastor confronted me and I confessed my doubts. He read a lot of passages, and told me my doubts were the work of Satan leading me from Christ and salvation. He asked me which section was troubling me and I could meet with him later in the week before the ceremony. I told him, that it all troubles me from start to finish. I asked him about the Lords Prayer, “It’s God who art in heaven. correct? Lucifer was cast out of heaven and given earth. correct? So which of the two were more likely to have a pen.” I was finally excused permanently.
Even though I had in my core decided the bible to be just the work of men, I found that I still had a fear of Satan, and at times I still do. I can rationalize it away for the most part but it lingers in the recesses.
I am so PISSED off, that they put that evil crap in my head. In protest I had a special bible I would take with me on camping trips just to have something handy to wipe my ass with. I worked my way through the entire book starting from Revelation. It took near twenty years do completly digest. It was good therapy.
Anyway, I laid down with respect to my daughters religious training and allowed my wife to do the church thing with them. But now with my boy, I feel quite differently, I am much more passionately opposed to introducing him to this nonsense. I don’t want my son polluted with these made up demons dancing around his innocent head. Mind you, I did not want it for my daughters either but I’d rather cave than divorcee over the issue.
I love reading your arguments, but I’ll have to temper mine with a mild flame. Not to imply that yours are unnecessarily pejorative. But I will be arguing the case with my wife. Whom I love very much. I also see the futility of any argument with a fundamentalist Christian that won’t accept any biblical stories as allegory or metaphor “my wife”. I think I may have more success with “Jesus is Satan” thing, I love that one. It at least is an appeal to one of engines driving their delusions.
I have often wondered whether there is genetic component in being believers. In fact I have read material that addressed and supported the idea. If in fact there is, it must be a recessive gene that has obviously not been passed to me. Therefore I can conclude that God in his infinite wisdom knew that myself and others like me, would not have the need for a belief in anything other than the natural world and thus we are exempt from concern of salvation. If indeed there is a heaven it is then guaranteed, ours by proxy and ordained by God.
I have become lonely, adrift in a sea of insanity. I work with these people, I live with them, they are everywhere. I start a conversation and learn they are Christian and I loose all interest, the dialog is languid and superficial. I fear they apply their odd analytical principles to all subjects, it invalidates them. Their opinion becomes useless to me. It frightens me that they are allowed to vote, hold public office, and serve as jurors. What has become of the Age of Reason? Is there such a thing as reverse evolution?
Well, this wasn’t very brief, my apologies. Must be the loneliness.
You are in a tough situation, and I can see why you felt you had to write. I do not think it is wise to act contrary to the way you have felt for a long time, but I appreciate that you have to tread carefully. I empathize with much of what you say about your upbringing, though I doubt that I was subject to as much pressure as you were. My school was Anglican, and fairly easy going, but I felt much the same way about religious instruction as you did, and had the same sort of questions. I loved what you had to say about who had the pen. Brilliant.
Unfortunately Christianity is a lobster pot. It uses psychology to trap people, and then they find it too hard to get out. When we have succeeded, as you and I have, it is something to celebrate and to try to pass on. In your case, your wife’s deep convictions hold you back, and I realize that a confrontation is not the answer because of the love you have for her. But presumably she loves you too, and so you can talk to each other still, despite your different religious positions. You know, none other than Charles Darwin was in a similar situation to you. He and his wife were devout Christians when they married, and Darwin had ideas of being a clergyman at one stage, but his studies of Nature led him in a different direction. He too still loved his wife, and they remained married all their lives, but they found an understanding, albeit one which always upset Mrs Darwin.
With children, it gets more complicated still, but there are much more liberal forms of Christianity that you can introduce your daughters to when they are old enough. Fundamentalists cannot understand liberal Christianity because of the odious indoctrination of the pastors, for whom religion is not a calling but a career. They are doing exactly what the catholic priests did in medieval times when no one was allowed to read the bible for themselves. After Protestants died in their thousands to get the right to read the bible themselves, these so-called ministers do the same, they tell the flocks what to believe. What I am saying is that you might be better off arguing with your wife and daughters from a liberal Christian viewpoint, even though it is not the extreme one that they have adopted, and perhaps the position you would prefer to take, if it were possible. I say this assuming that Fundamentalists have some regard for their fellow Christians, even if it is slight.
Incidentally, I believe that praying is valuable whether you believe in God or not. Its main effect is psychological and works without any supernatural intervention. It is quite illogical when applied to a God who knows what you are going to pray for anyway, and so has already decided not to answer your prayer because otherwise He could have done so already. It probably works at different levels, but it does help you by drawing on your personal reserves, has a placebo effect, a quieting effect (like meditation) and, in thinking about the problem requiring the prayer, prepares the mind to come up with a solution or compromise. These effects are what give the illusion of God answering the prayer when it is really already within you, but has not yet been tapped, so to speak.
Anyway, take heart that you are doing right, are correctly treading carefully, but do not worry that you are making a mistake in not caving in to the social pressure. I cannot believe that any good God could have ever wanted to lend His name to the dangerous tribalism that religion has always led to. If any God is Good He cannot be supporting the pastors in their bigotry. The best you can say is that when he appears to people He must make allowances for their cultural background. As I understand it, that is how Christians must justify Jesus appearing on earth as a Jew. Well then, why could God not appear to Arabs as Mohamed and so on? Even believers must accept that God does as He chooses, and not as catholic popes, or baptist ministers tell Him.
