Abstract

What reads as grotesque in Berosus appears in the bible as so true and so natural that we, with our western credulity, have treated it as history, and have imagined, when we adopted these fables, that we have been discarding mythology.

Ernest Renan, The People of Israel

© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Friday, 31 October 2008

The Idea of God

Andrew Lang is, or was, well known to children for his series of coloured fairy books. Like the brothers Grimm, his interest in religious origins led him to collect folk tales. Zwemer cites him with approval:

We shall show that certain low savages are as monotheistic as some Christians.

The Making of Religion

Why does Lang write “as monotheistic as some Christians”? Surely all Christians regard themselves as monotheistic, along with their fellow patriarchalists, the Jews and the Moslems? Lang is careful to write that only some are as monotheistic as these “low savages” whom Lang says have a supreme being with unique attributes, one of which—presumably the main one for these believers—is that it is the only god there is. Yet most Christians, Jews and Moslems believe that their monotheus is surrounded by a host of lesser gods they call angels, saints, demons, jinns, and so on. They even think there is an anti God called Satan, just as powerful as the monotheus—at least for the time being, because God cannot control him—though the Jewish scriptures describe him as servant of God following God’s own instructions to rile, rattle and tempt humanity. Kind God! Satan’s relation to God is that of Osama bin Laden in relation to the US President, Christians think.

All of this menagerie of superbeings are gods, for a god is defined as a superhuman being with supernatural powers. Anyone who believes in this lot cannot be a monotheist—believe there is only one god. Believing that God is the king of all the gods is not monotheism, but henotheism, as we have already seen, and belief in it now means all the Christian martyrs were fools to die in defence of the belief there was only one of them. It is a problem which they escape very simply—they redefine the meaning of god to exclude the divine menagerie of the patriarchal gods. Lang knew the difficulty, and seems to have known of genuinely monotheistic Christians who rejected God’s supernatural zoo. Thus they were on a par with the low savages who all along had only one god, the god of their tribe. Lang argued the case for a primitive revelation forty years before father Schmidt. It had degenerated because man was “certain to go a whoring”, whoring in the bible being a metaphor for choosing false gods and idols, though Christians, perpetually obsessed with sex, prefer to think it means just whoring!

Schmidt wrote 5000 pages to prove the case to the highest Christian standards of science. By the end of his century no one had ever heard of him. One of his books, a thousand pages long, was about the beliefs of native Americans, whom he could unerringly separate into those that were the oldest in north America and the late comers. It turns out that the oldest three of them have a high god remarkably like the Judaeo-Christian God. As evidence, Zwemer gives an account of the creation by the Omaha indians. whose high god was Wakonda:

At the beginning all things were in the mind of Wakonda. All creatures, including man, were spirits. They moved about in space between the earth and the stars. They were seeking a place where they could come into a bodily existence…

Grace H Turnbull, Tongues of Fire

The first words are indeed amazingly like Genesis, but there are important things to note even so. Though everything was supposedly in the mind of Wakonda, they already existed in spirit form. So, spirit form simply means in the god’s imagination, but whereas Christians regard the spirit life the most desirable one, these Omaha indian spirits wanted to have bodies, and Wakonda obliged them. The similarity, even of words, suggest coaching. A revealing snippet from a citation of R H Nassau, an African missionary, implies that the natives questioned might have been too ready to give answers they thought were suitable or even required. In answer to the missionary asking, “Do you know God?”, using the local name for god, they replied:

No! What do we know? You white people are spirits. You have come from God’s (insert local name) town and know all about him.

Zwemer cites this as part of a passage apparently to show how the missionary spoke the language of the natives and had learnt their customs, but is immune to the evidence it offers that the natives regarded the whites as gods and wanted to say to the Christian what he wanted to hear. Moreover, the missionary had obviously impressed the native source that he already knew everything about god. He had been preaching and proselytizing extensively. Elsewhere, he cites a missionary to Sumatra whose book was entitled The Living Christ and Dying Heathenism, showing he was unlikely to have been too objective an observer.

Any tiny common feature is considered proof of the primitive revelation of God to Adam. In Indonesia, anything suggestive of a patriarchal origin, even if genuine, could be the influence of Islam, but far from having a clearly understood supreme god, the Bataks of Sumatra only perceived “the outline of a thought of some omnipotent power” ruling all the lower gods. This then is not monotheism but a “very vague” idea “always in conflict with animism”. Nor is he a father, but a grandfather, but anything fearful was a grandfather too, such as a tiger. In fact, the god of the Batak’s in these descriptions has been likened to fate or the Providence of the Christians, but it illustrates the quality of Christian evidence. How can anyone fail to conclude that Christians are knaves or fools, and scholars ought not to be fools.

For those who think Chinese are godless communists, Dr Timothy Richards, who lived in China for half a century says:

Everyone I have ever met believes in the supreme god far more than does the average man in Christendom.

The name of god in China is Shangti which means “supreme ruler”, suggesting he is supreme over other rulers, gods or men. It suggests the unification of tribes under one ruler, the king of the nation, and the unification of tribal gods under one ruling god, the national god. Either way, it is no evidence of a primitive revelation.

It is similar in reference to Varuna, the Indo-Iranian sun and sky god. Varuna is Uranus and likely to be Ahuramazda, or be incorporated into him. In the Rig Veda, Varuna is often merciful, but is not the only god or the only merciful one. Zoroaster had to battle to get Varuna, if Ahuramazda is he, recognized as the one true god, so neither in Iranian nor in Indian tradition is the pre Vedic religion monotheistic, yet Christians boldly claim it was. What Varuna was is clear in his identification with Uranus—he was a sky god, Dyaus Pitar, God the Father who became Jupiter and Zeus.

Aryans or Indo-Iranians were tribesmen from the Eurasian steppes, vast grasslands dominated by the sky unobscured by trees or mountains. It is not surprising that the sky should dominate the thoughts of these people, or that they should imagine that the sky overlooked all that they did. In earlier times, an ancestor god, a tribal father was identified with the sky and became their father god. He was indeed the supreme being of these northern Aryan tribesmen, but was not their only god, by any means, because the ones we meet later settled in Europe and India had many gods, some like Varuna and Uranus identifiable. These appeared more than once doubtless because of successive invasions, and the Greek myths explain that Zeus displaced Uranus.

The tribes coalesced by federating into a nation, and the many tribal fathers had to be subject to a national god, a supreme ruler, the Lord of Lords. Doubtless every tribe wanted the Lord of Lords to be the Lord of their own tribe, causing strife, and eventually they all agreed that the supreme Lord was the sky, a natural choice for them. These tribes through population growth, expanded outwards, and in successive waves invaded Europe, India, Iran, and perhaps China.

Another brilliant Christian discovery to make their theory of Adam and God true in cases where it manifestly is not is that people could be monotheists in the middle of polytheist societies. It is like washing your white bedlinen with your coloured items—it can hardly stay white. In any case much of so-called polytheism was not that everyone believed in a pantheon of gods. The merging of tribes into nations and nations into empires meant the large cities had a pantheon of gods available, each with different qualities and special functions, and people mostly favoured one of them, though on special occasions another might be approached for a special favour, a sea god before a sea voyage, or a healing god when sick. It was like the Catholic appealing to a particular saint, and the Catholic tradition replaced the older one. Incidentally, is that monotheism? The truth is that these urbanites generally preferred a particular god, and the notion of the pantheon and the preferred god emerges naturally from the early tribal stage of society.

Seasons had been important when humans were hunter gatherers, but they became crucial when they settled into gardening and agriculture, for the seasonal spirits and the sun took on special importance. The sun becoming more important than the sky in some senses, sky gods took on a dominant solar aspect, or a separate sun god was invented, or adopted from some sun tribe. So, in a sense the Christian is right that a weak monotheism was always present in polytheistic societies in that individuals preferred a particular god, but it was for natural reasons quite alien to the notion of a supernatural revelation.

The biblical stories, like all myths are attempts to explain things, The story of Adam and Eve explained several things, including the fact that most people had a god. Each god was the God of Adam differently remembered, and the Christian God is merely one of them, with no more right than any other to claim it is not degenerate. Yet Christians claim that their’s is the properly remembered one, and the others are in error. Christ could have been the devil’s prophet, meant to distract them from the holy truth of the primitive revelation, but they will not hear of it. They have no more right than any of the others to claim any purity, yet push themselves on to simpler people through their missionizing activities, and spoil their native traditions.

Evidence of this aspect of polytheism is generously given by Zwemer, who cites Olmstead quoting from an inscription on a statue of the Babylonian God, Nabu:

Trust not in any other god.

Olmstead, History of Assyria

The society is henotheistic or polytheistic because other gods besides Nabu are recognized, but Nabu only is to be trusted. Nabu is being declared the One True God among them all. A mad Babylonian king named after the god Nabu, Nabonidus (555-539 BC), actually spent his time promoting the god, Sin, a Semitic moon god as the One True God, rather as Akhnaten did for Aten in Egypt. The pagan Arabs had a god for every day of the year. It was the typical situation of tribes federating. Whether there were more or less than 360 tribes, the number chosen related to the whole year and to the Sumerian number system which was magical, and so it seemed appropriate. The chief of them was called “The God” or Al Ilah, which rolls off the tongue more naturally as Allah. Wellhausen, whose instincts in religious matters have so often proved right, noted that Al Ilah was actually the name all tribes gave to their god, though each was the god of the individual tribe. It made it easy for the Arabs to agree on a name for a god of the Arab nation founded by Mohammed. Above all the tribal gods there had to be a national god, and then an imperial god, and it was in this situation that Allah became so important.

Schmidt disagrees, calling Wellhausen a Tylorite, doubtless a shocking insult. Tribal father gods might have come out of a combination of ancestor worship and totemism, or either separately, but, though totemism might be an aspect of animism, tribal father gods existed and Tylor was not responsible for them. Gods derive from the personification of totems and powers, and that is true of the ancient gods of the ANE, including Yehouah who became the god of the Jews. He was earlier a Canaanite storm and fertility god, the god of the autumn rains that fertilized the parched soil, preparing it for sowing and thereby saving the people. As a rain and water god, he was a local variant of the Babylonian water god Ea who was similarly responsible for fertility and therefore life.

Such important powers and functions were the purpose of Nature’s gods, but they were often identified with tribal and especially national gods which tended to acquire all the characteristics of the lesser gods as they became more imperial and therefore universal. The initiation of the imperial age also initiated the age of the universal god. Toynbee and Spengler explained it in depth, albeit, like Schmidt, with the errors of their beliefs and time. Thus Yehouah, originally this storm god and son of El in the Canaanite pantheon, rose to become the god of Rome and its empire, and a universal god. Allah, a general title of an Arabian tribal god became the Arabian national god and soon thereafter the god of a mighty Arab empire. Then the caliphs had the Quran compiled, out of Christian hymns and snippets of Jewish and Christian mythology, as a rival to the Judaeo-Christian book of the Roman god.

Fellowship

Now we find Zwemer stating his thesis thus:

The most ancient traditions of the race represent mankind as having commenced existence in a divine fellowship, and as having lost this estate only through sin.

The first sentence of this conjoined pair states the simple observable truth that the human race is social, a word that implies and encompasses fellowship. Human fellowship is instinctive. It is not a choice. It seems divine because we are born with it. The second sentence is pure theology. It has nothing to do with science. “Sin” is a theological word which means disobedience of God. It assumes God and cannot be used by any objective scientist without a caveat. What it means to the believer theologically is that God created human beings pure and sinless, and in direct contact with Himself—what Christians call “communion”. The reality of sin is being anti social.

The supposed time of the Garden of Eden, when God and Adam walked arm in arm with each other, was the sinless golden age but one which lasted only until the serpent tempted Eve to sin, and Eve tempted Adam to sin in the same way. Both disobeyed God and as a punishment He severed them from Him. Thus humanity is estranged from God in the myth because God chose to separate Himself from us through the sin of the first pair of humans. The primeval pair were evicted from heaven and made to live—only a short life before death—by toil, sweat and tears until they died. So much for God’s mercy.

What of free will? Forget it. Obedience of God is obligatory. Humans are punished throughout their lives for Adam’s sin, and then are punished by perpetual torture throughout eternity for rejecting Christian bigotry. So much more for God’s mercy. This is not a merciful God. The Judaeo-Christian golden age did not even last until the primeval couple had become social animals. They were evicted before Eve had born her first fruit. Yet, Christians think this golden age is still yearned for by all human beings.

Humans do have a psychological inclination to imagine that people were better morally, if not materially, when they were young. It can hardly be an awareness of any real continuous decline because it is rarely born out by actual data, and it can hardly be a memory of Adam. It is the slow loss of childhood trust and wonder, the growth of the awareness of the problems of living, and the growing alienation we get as we get older and more remote from a changing society until we are separated from it finally by death. It links in with the basic social nature and creative consciousness of human beings. Societies try to bond people together within a culture and morality represented by the tribal god, and the processes involved in this bonding are what becomes ritual and religion. So, the psychology and the sociology of humanity come together in the invention of a previous golden age which occurred in distant times past when things were not merely better but were ideal, perfect. Perfection is holiness, and, people came to think only what is divine can create it. So, the primitive revelation is explained quite naturally. It is evolves as a past ideal to be aimed for as a future goal.

Now Zwemer asks us why sky gods are so often considered the supreme spirit even in modern primitive sociaties. Again, let us emphasize that even primitive people today are not emergent human beings. They are fully human, and are indistinguishable from sophisticated westerners when they are removed at an early age and brought up in sophisticated societies. Perhaps that would be the case with the primordial or emergent people we are speaking of—who knows?—but they certainly had no possibility of the influence of external people in higher stages of development at the time. That possibility cannot be discounted nowadays, particularly in the obvious influence of missionaries dedicated to changing the religious thoughts of “savages”, evident in much of the evidence offered by Zwemer and Schmidt.

Primordial people had no concept of the supernatural. They only knew the natural world and that was sufficiently amazing to their awakening consciousness. Part of their environment, their natural world, was the band or troop of human beings they were born into as social beings, their social instincts, and the praises, pleasures, cuffs and rebuffs of the members of the group that sheltered, fed and protected them as infants. They could speak, and chattering was a form of social bonding, as was play. Gradually play and chatter were formalized as social binding rituals which evolved into religion. These rituals were a main part of tribal culture—things taught to children by older members of the tribe.

The emergent humans were aware of serious powers in Nature like wind, thunder, sunlight, etc, and more subtle ones like their own instincts, tribe and culture, all of which were considered as “powers”. It was a power that kept the tribe united. It was its totem, and the tribe must have started somehow—it had a founder linked somehow with whatever symbolized the totem, usually an animal. The group had a leader, so leadership was natural to them. A founder was imagined as an original leader, an ancestor who somehow had acquired the qualities of the totem animal, the power of the totem that each member of the tribe had in some measure. It was the power that distinguished the tribe, and evolved into the tribal god.

Meanwhile the other powers of Nature were also personified as acting according to their own consciousness, and these spirits—personalized powers—evolved into Nature gods. Among them was the sky which constantly covered them, and offered many mysteries, rain, hail, clouds, constant change, the sun, moon, stars, shooting stars, constellations, planets. Eventually most of these were considered as powers in their own right. Sky was particularly important, delivering the water that gave life, and the sun that ripened the crops of the newly agricultural humans. All the benefits of sky were eventually attributed to the tribal father, and the high god, the sky god, eventually became the universal god of empires. Note that the tribal father god was a god who began as a man—a mythical founder of the tribe—and therefore is the image of a man. As the founder, all the members of the tribe were images of him, so that when he became a creator god, humanity was made in his image.

So, there was no primitive revelation except as a myth to explain peoples’ familiar customs. Adam and Eve was a version from Mesopotamia—the fount of ANE empires—specifically the region near the Euphrates river in Syria that was once called Eden—Beth Eden, close to the mountains in Turkey known then as the ancient kingdom of Urartu or Ararat. Some of these people were sent into Yehud to colonize a dessicated and half empty land strategically important to Persia as a buffer against rebellious Egypt. Some of the legends were written into a book as supplements to its main content which was a system of laws. We still have the book, albeit edited and much expanded. It is the Jewish scriptures.

Like most Christians, Zwemer treats the bible as an absolute authority. It is surprising in intelligent men unless they are purposely deceivers. However convinced anyone might be that there really exists, in some indefinable sense, a God, no one intelligent can doubt that the bible is a book compiled of different works written by human beings, erudite and pious perhaps, but people subject to human errors, foibles, misconceptions, prejudices and even sins, if Christian theory is correct. The bible therefore cannot be inerrant as even these so-called scholars maintain. Yet a Christians scholar speaks of “scripture proof”, as if an ancient book can prove anything except what these ancient people believed themselves without any proof at all. Zwemer believes that man is indeed made by God in His own image, and has scripture proof that it is so. In Christendom, when God is depicted, it is as an old man, presumably because he must look like a man, if men were made in His image, and He is eternally old and wise. But the statement “in His own image” means nothing because invisible beings have no image, and Moslems will not make images in case simple people think one might be an image of God.

What “scripture proof” proves is that belief distorts men’s minds, even intelligent men, unless professors of Christianity do not need to be intelligent but simply sociopaths, convincing liars with no self critical faculty. In Zwemer’s next sentence, the scripture proof has descended into merely “scriptural evidence”. Intelligent men know what is acceptable as evidence does not usually suffice as proof, but these people are so dazzled by God they have no sight for anything else, particularly truth.

A man may have eyes but as long as he is shut up in a dark room he cannot see.

Or when he is dazzled by a bright light, we might add. This is a quotation from someone called Kellogg talking of apprehending God, not the world we live in. Christians take that as inferior to some other imaginary world, or at best a distraction from it, and they cannot see it when they try because of God’s blinding corona. Kellogg supports a primitive revelation, and thinks it was not even supernatural, claiming that “even Holy Scripture does not so represent” it, so it cannot have been! It must be because, before the Fall, Adam and God were chums who walked round paradise arm in arm chatting about the scenery and whether a rib would make a suitable help meet.

Other Christian disagree. This scene implies man was once a god himself before God expelled him from paradise, heaven. The revelation then shows that mankind can be gods again. Few Christians would find it possible to accept that sinful humans could ever be gods, although, if sin is all that separates humanity from God, then to have your sins forgiven, as Christians say their faith does, must restore their original sin free state, perfection, holiness, godhood. That then would be why they become immortal again, gods being immortal. The puzzle then is why Christians so rarely act like gods, but commonly act like normal sinful human beings. Historically, they have acted like devils not gods, and institutionally so. Either they are being tricked by the wrong god, or they are indeed the fallen angels, the demon companions of Satan, or they are deluded and insane. Those whom God would destroy, He first sends mad.

Calvin claimed that the seed of this madness is present in everyone as a consciousness of God. Calvin is taking his metaphor from the gnostic heretics who believed people had the “spark” of God within. This seed or spark reverts to being a light shining in the darkness, and the metaphor is explained as meaning a “love for the truth, for justice and a social order”. There you are. The primitive revelation reduces to what the evolutionists find as the natural inheritance of humanity as a social animal—obviously social order, with truth and justice as conscious expressions of important necessities of it. Without truth and justice human societies cannot endure, yet they are far less regarded than a spurious faith.

As the bible has it, human beings have free will. They are not slaves except to God, and, if they are made to be slaves to men, then they can be expected to revolt against their oppressors. The biblical Hebrews in the exodus myth were slaves in Egypt, and God encouraged them to revolt, even killing Egyptians, and advocating the theft of valuables from the oppressors. Truth and justice are necessary in society to avoid oppression, they are moral concepts evolved from instinct, then refined and expressed by humans using their unique abilities of language and speech, their medium of social bonding. Being constantly dazzled by God does not help people guard against opportunists seeking elevation in society. It hinders it, often becoming a tool of the exploiters. It is a distraction from the need to save society from those ready to see it distorted to destruction in their desire to seek an advantage within it. We have seen it was not always so. It began as a means of drawing people closer, but now it has become the tool of rogues leading those bedazzled by God into pits and sloughs, and eventually all of us to disaster. We have seen this with the recent credit crunch!

Creation and the First Humans

Religions now blind people to their own achievements. They teach that God does everything worthwhile, but the notion of God is no longer associated with society as it was originally. God was once a symbol of the tribe, but now He is a symbol of empty space and supernatural fancies. If religious books give amazing accounts of the establishment of the universe, it is not because some human beings 2500 years ago had thought deeply about how it might have happened, but because God told them. Whether the world was conceived as being created from nothing at all, or from matter already present but mixed together chaotically, it is a remarkable deduction from people with little beyond everyday experience to go on. Why are these people denied credit for their genius? And because the account is now scientifically untenable, it is the modern scientists not the ancient authors, putatively writing God’s word, who are wrong.

Religions refuse to give credit to human beings. It demeans them. They were allegedly made in God’s image, but are always depicted as pathetic, dependent sinners incapable of anything without a kick or a tug by God. Christians, as well as the rest of us, never saw God do anything. We see people doing everything. But the authors, human beings, get the blame if it is a failure, harmful or useless, and God gets the credit otherwise. So, an imaginary being gets the credit and efforts by real people that sometimes are truly admirable are the work of an invisible, undetectable, ineffable figment. Human beings invented God to symbolize their social being, but religion engulfs them in its miasma to confuse them and stop them from recognizing it.

So, to pursue the example, did God make the world ex nihilo, from nothing? Christians interpret Genesis as saying He did. Zwemer cites this:

Every religion and every mythology has held to the same formula—From Chaos to Cosmos.

J F Clarke, Ten Great Religions

So all races of men in all times agree on the creation. Yet Christianity, if Christian convictions are right, does not conform to the formula. Are Christian convictions wrong, or is Christianity the exception to Clarke’s formula? Christians seem to let everything rest on the very first verse:

In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.

Genesis 1:1

Nothing is mentioned, then suddenly the heavens and the earth appear, created by God. It is ex nihilo creation. The trouble is that the first sentence seems to have been a summary sentence because the authors go on to explain how God did it, and the detail suggests that Clarke has the right interpretation. Chaos existed at first and God separated out its constituents by creating order. Moreover, fundamentalist Christians believe in the unerring accuracy of a translation! But translations rarely have the same sense as the original, and an alternative translation of Genesis 1:1, cited in the Standard Revised Version, begins:

When God began to create…

It makes clear that the additional details show what God actually did to produce the heavens and the earth, and it is from Chaos, not ex nihilo. First He separated light and dark, from the pre existing formless “void” and “deep”. Then He actually created the heaven and the earth by separating “the waters” to make a firmament, suggesting that when the first light shone, it shone upon the formless deep of the primeval waters, then the lower waters were themselves divided to show the land. God is not actually creating anything in this description, but is sorting out Chaos, separating out a mixture. Clarke was correct, and Zwemer correct to cite him, but many Christians are wrong, including many theologians who evidently do not read too carefully, preferring to have their beliefs put directly into their brains. So much for the inerrancy of the bible and God’s truth.

Christians simply do not get what truth is. Zwemer immediately proves it by citing Aristotle and Cicero as authorities, neither of them Christians, that the universality of any conviction is proof of its truth.

The general and perpetual voice of men is as the sentence of God Himself.

It is a comfort to Christians who think they cannot all be wrong, but it is not true unless truth is redefined as what is universally believed. Only in one minor sense is that the definition of truth:

The Taj Mahal is a truly beautiful structure.

The adjective “beautiful” is a subjective one and the use of “truly” here implies that, though beautiful is a subjective judgement, few would dissent from the view that the Taj Mahal is beautiful. The only way to quantify the subjective impression of beauty is to take a notional vote on it, and the author of this sentence thinks the overwhelming majority would concur with him that the Taj Mahal is indeed beautiful. Truth is being defined as acceptable to the majority, as Aristotle and Cicero said, because there is no other criterion of beauty in this instance.

The surface of the earth is truly flat.

This is a statement similar to the previous one, and it is a statement that is frequently offered as an example of a universally held view that is not true at all. There is an objective criterion of truth here, the shape of the earth, and it means the surface of the earth is not flat but curved as a moment’s reflexion shows. Aristotle and Cicero were wrong.

So care has to be exercised in claiming that the popularity of a view is a criterion of its truth. Sometimes it is, but often it is not. It means popularity can only be proof of truth in certain cases, not in general. Jesus Christ, no less, believed that sickness was caused by demons. It is not surprising. It was a widely held view at the time, but it is not true. Truth is what actually obtains not generally what people think obtains. Even Christian professors are as stupid as ignorant peasants in thinking truth is what people believe. It means anything they say cannot be trusted. Even if they claim it is what God said, we should recall the inscription on the statue of Nabu. No god is to be trusted. Every god utters the truth according to those who worship him. It simply proves that popularity is no criterion of truth, and it remains true even when one god becomes overwhelmingly popular.

Zwemer even thinks that Genesis is the first of ancient books. He thinks it because of its subject matter. A book that deals with original things must be original itself. It is patently false, but every Christian seems to think the bible was revealed in real time—Genesis 1 in the beginning, Exodus at the time of the exodus, Daniel in the period of the exile in Babylon, and so on. Everything is written as it happened, or soon after. It is demonstrably false, but fundamentalists will not hear of it.

The whole of the Jewish scriptures, and even the Jews themselves, are unknown historically until the third century BC, 4000 years after the creation, even on biblical reckoning, and little more than 200 years before the birth of Christ. The Rig Veda of India, and the Gathas of the Iranian Avesta are much older, according to unbiased scholarship. As Zwemer is fond of citing the Rig Veda, he ought to know this, but, if he does, he has no conscience lying about it.

Incidentally, for fundamentalists, Zwemer notes at this point that a creation by God and evolution are “not necessarily exclusive”. What follows is more illogic. That the universe has existed eternally “has never been the belief of mankind anywhere”. It is a true statement only through sophistry—only if “mankind” means all of mankind. Plainly, some human beings have thought it an alternative to creation. In any case, as we have just seen, it might be true even if the whole of human life thinks it is not, as belief alone is no criterion of truth.

The illogic comes in Zwemer restating that Chaos is first in every system of cosmosgony. He must think a chaotic universe is not a universe. As Clarke says, it is not a cosmos, but that is true because a cosmos is an ordered universe! As we have seen, Chaos is formless matter, not nothing, and a universe is all that exists considered as a whole. So, even if everything is chaotic, it is still something, and so is a universe.

Genesis, when considered carefully in terms of what God did, records God separating Chaos into order, Cosmos. The implication is that Chaos and God coexisted eternally, until God decided to create order, and “creation” is the creation of order out of a pre existing Chaos. In this scheme, God is simply the cause of Cosmos condensing out of Chaos. If condensation is the right metaphor, then God is a temperature. As it drops, eventually the universe is cool enough for order to appear, and this is just what modern cosmologists have found happens. So, God, at present is 3^o K!

If He is not 3^o K, then He is entirely superfluous because events in the real world can occur spontaneously, like radioactive decay, and the emission of light from an excited atom. The world began in the spontaneous eruption of energy from the chaos of a quantum field that existed since eternity. Interestingly, this creation can be considered as a creation ex nihilo because its net energy is zero. Its total energy is the sum of what exists as matter and energy, and the attractive force of gravity all this produces. The potential of the gravitational field is equal to the energy of all matter and energy, but negative compared with it. The sum is therefore nothing! The eruption of energy was followed by a rapid expansion of the universe into the state it is today, and everything it contains, including ourselves. A sentient God does not appear in this scheme. It is uncaused.

The ancient thinkers who authored Genesis were intuitively right that Cosmos emerged from darkness, though the reality is that photons of light either did not exist or could not pass through what did exist until the hot ball of energy had cooled enough. The ancients could not have thought of such concepts. They will have considered if everything was removed then darkness was all that remained, so the primeval darkness had to be broken by the appearance of light, and this suited their notions of God as being like the sky and the sun.

Similarly with Chaos. They will have found it harder to imagine that matter could disappear all together, than that it just got jumbled into a vast state of disorder. So, they conceived of Chaos, imagining it to be like the oceans—which seemed extremely chaotic and disordered to them—therefore of a watery nature, and they understood that water could dissolve things making them apparently disappear, just as they imagined Chaos did. Chaos then was a vast, dark, formless ocean to them, an idea that the Babylonians had long before the Jewish scriptures were written. Water appears soon after, in Genesis, in the story of the Flood, again depicted as the bringer of destruction and chaos. It is probably a variation of the creation myth in which the ark is a metaphor for the earth floating on an vast ocean. It is the egg of life, having on board all the later life of the world in primeval pairs like Adam and Eve. The ark gives birth to all life, once the flood had subsided in the biblical myth.

These were remarkable thoughts, like the invention of the wheel, and the taming of fire, but they were human thoughts, not second hand ones. Growing consciousness, not a supernatural teacher, explains how we got to understand things. When these early thinkers could not figure something out, then they left it to a superbeing. They were not explanations, but they sufficed. The trouble is that believers want to hang on to the easy explanations because proper ones are too hard for them.

Zwemer admits at this point that many creation myths are dual and sexual, rather distant from anything the Christians wants to know. Chaos contains within it seeds or eggs, or it condenses or coalesces into such seeds or eggs, which then hatch into heaven and earth, primeval gods who procreate sexually producing successive generations of gods until the world we know emerges, and then people. It is an evolutionary, biological sort of concept. Sometimes Chaos is represented as a monster, especially a sea monster, to be slain, and one of the generations of gods has the courage to do it. Order comes from the corpse of the monstrous beast. It is a notion that appears in the Jewish scriptures albeit in the attenuated form of scattered allusions. It refers to the Babylonian myth of the creation where the god, Marduk, killed the monster Tiamat, the Tehom or “Deep” of the Jewish myths, because the sea was fearful to many ancient people.

Persians and Judaism

The latter half of Zwemer’s book consists of examples, some of them too suspiciously like Genesis, even in the language used, to give confidence that the missionaries have not influenced the story, its translation or interpretation. One case is unquestionably genuine. The order of creation by Ahuramazda in the Avesta “closely follows the order in Genesis”. Quite so, but the Avesta came first, so how does the Christian discount the possibility that the authors of Genesis copied the Avesta? The continuation of the Persian myth is that the primeval pair listened to the wicked daevas (devils), becoming corrupt, and so were banished. As Persia set up the Jewish temple state under its protection, they sent their minister of religious affairs, Ezra, to read to the colonists and their subjects, the native Canaanites, a law. It seems most probable that Genesis is an edition of the Persian beliefs of the time.

Zwemer chooses not to comment on whether Genesis was influenced by the Persians, whose religion derives via Zoroaster’s reformations, from the Rig Veda, which long precedes the Jews and their scriptures in history. The Gathas of the Persian Avesta have so much in common with the Rig Veda that they must be of a comparable age, but no honest historian can link Jewish myths like Moses satisfactorily to known history, even though Jews and Christians believe they are historical.

What reads as grotesque in Berosus appears in the bible as so true and so natural that we, with our western credulity, have treated it as history, and have imagined, when we adopted these fables, that we have been discarding mythology.

Ernest Renan, The People of Israel

The Jewish scriptures are best explained by concluding the obvious—the foundation myths of Judaism are as mythical as the foundation myths of other people. Zwemer indignantly rejects it. The biblical creation is not mythology. His clever reasons are that it has the “stamp of truth” and that “no nomad shepherd could have invented it”. The nomad shepherd is presumably Moses, a man who was a shepherd among the Midianites. He could not have invented it, written it as fiction, believers maintain, but a shepherd could have written it all down as history a thousand years before the first historian! Moses is supposed to have written the Pentateuch, which includes Genesis, and the believer, naturally, believes it, even though Moses dies before the tribe enter the Promised Land in the account he is supposed to have written! Obvious clues like this show the account was written long after the land had been settled, and so long after Moses had died, yet they still believe. Is belief a synonym for insanity? Surely, in some ways it is.

And what is a “stamp of truth”? It is a purely subjective judgement. What someone thinks has a stamp of truth, another will judge to be incredible or laughable. Hitler’s secret diaries must have had the stamp of truth. They fooled prominent historians, but they turned out to be crude forgeries. The Solomon stele had the stamp of truth and the James ossuary. Both were forgeries. Any good historical novel, like The Last Days of Pompeii or the Hornblower series, have the stamp of truth but they are untrue—they are fiction. Gullible people, especially when they are desperate for evidence of their beliefs, are easily fooled. Christians are among those easily impressed by supposed relics and biblical evidence, and the forgers know it. Only the believers do not.

The evidence is that these books were written about 200-300 BC, and by professional Jewish scribes and Egyptian priests familiar with the scholarship of the Schools of Life of Egyptian temples. The authors of the god, Serapis, the Egyptian Ptolemies, commisioned the bible too, Serapis being the model for Yehouah, perhaps why a bust of Serapis is kept in the Vatican, and the emperor, Hadrian, thought Christians were worshippers of Serapis, so the identity had some basis. The bible was commissioned for the Alexandrian library, a project of the Ptolemaic kings who borrowed books, copied them, then returned copies to the original owners. They were renewing ancient books, and, in the course of it, the Alexandrian scholars corrected and improved them.

The best explanation of the Jewish scriptures is that they were started by the so called “returners from exile”, colonists sent by the Persian chancellery to Yehud to set up the temple state. This Persian version consistied of Deuterononomy, the law, and some history culled from Assyrian archives fictionally elaborated to show the Jews as constantly punished for backsliding from proper obedience of the law—God’s law. It was greatly improved by the Egyptians in collaboration with the priests of the Jewish temple, whom the Ptolemies were treating with huge respect at this time, to give a new country a spurious Egyptian tradition. It was therefore not the work of a nomad shepherd, but nor was it the work of a holy spirit. It was written as a holy book to keep the Jews on side, initially by Persians, then by the Egyptian Greeks.

A Persian hand in the writing and propagation of myths like Genesis would explain, a lot more easily than any primitive revelation, similarities beyond general concepts like actual expressions, sentences and the order of events between the bible and the myths of other distant Asian countries like China and India. Persia was, from the sixth century BC up to the Moslem conquests, a powerful empire at the center of the Eurasian continent. Persian myths could have spread into China, India, Arabia, Egypt, Syria, and the west via Greece and the Jewish holy books.

The point is that when the original Persian empire succumbed to the Macedonians, the Greeks destroyed the extensive collection of Persian holy books and, with them, decimated the Persian religious tradition. Tiny Judah, however, survived under Greek patronage and eventually achieved independence for the first time ever, and the Egyptian Ptolemies extended the Jewish law that the Persians had imposed into the collection of Jewish scriptures. So, although the Jewish tradition came from Persian tradition, the links were almost severed, and signs of the Persian origins of the bible, which are plentiful and often plain, were utterly ignored as mere influence. Now apologists for Judaism or Christianity say the Persians were influenced by the Jews, though there is no doubt that the Persian religion preceded Judaism by centuries.

Ethnic Creation Myths

Many other traditions, however, though having certain common factors with Genesis, have little that cannot be more easily explained by evolution from similar beginnings and in similar circumstances, namely the preservation of human society and culture. It means that important details can be wildly different and remain unnoticed by the dazzled eyes of Christians. In many creation myths Schmidt likes to think show signs of a primitive revelation, God does not make the world Himself. The Gnostics thought the world had been made by a Demiurgos, an artisan God, unknown to the supreme God, but in other mythologies, the true God subcontracted the Demiurgos to do the work. Christians think Christ was the Demiurgos from their reading of the introduction to John;

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.

John 1:1

They persuade themselves that this Word was another name for Christ, so Christ was God acting as the creator in Genesis, the Demiurgos. The fact that the Genesis of the Jewish scriptures has no knowledge that the Word was another God called the Demiurgos does not bother them. God’s Word, for them, is also the bible, so they will read whatever suits them into it, and by the same token ignore what does not suit them, while claiming it is absolutely inerrant. In other mythologies, the Creator or Demiurgos is the tribe’s totem animal. The curious half-animal gods of the Egyptians are what would be expected when totems are personified and become gods, and when tribes merge to form nations with a plethora of gods which get regional or functional attributes. The high god is the national god but the totem gods do the work in their specific regions or with their special abilities. Before the tribes federated the local god was the tribal god.

The comical beliefs of people like Zwemer are staggering in the childish idiocy:

It is not easy to explain why the creation of man should be regarded as a special and extraordinary work by the high god…

S M Zwemer

Can you believe you are reading this? Such incomprehension leaves you gaping. For Zwemer, the bible is God’s autobiography. He is thinking to himself, “If I were God, pure and just, why would I pick mankind out of many to make special? Why not a mouse or a moose?” Nothing makes him think the story is easily explained if its author is a man not God. Goats, pigs and birds do not write such stories, only people do. Yet Zwemer is astonished that God favours humans rather than pigs. Humans see themselves as special, and want to honour themselves as being like God Himself. God has no reason for doing it, but humanity has. God does just as the human author wants him to do—declares man as being unique in creation, and with authority over the rest of it. Man is not a character in God’s story, God is a character in a human’s story.

Now the idea of culture and morals being set in an ideal tribe of the past founded by the ancestral father, as we saw, provides the model of tribal behaviour in the future. It is a model society, a paradise, a kingdom of God, that never existed in fact but is a myth. Myths are symbolic lessons for preliterate people. Humans necessarily are intrinsically moral. They express their intrinsic morality as myths. Morality is not a euphemism simply for sexual restraint, as many Christians seem to think. It is being socially responsible. So, it is hard to conceive of a human society that does not develop a myth of a golden age.

Having done so, what has to be explained is why are all people in society not moral, why people are tempted not to be, and what immorality is? Societies do it by developing a myth about why they did not retain the original perfection of the tribal founder. It is a myth of a fall from the perfection of the golden age or of paradise. There is nothing uniform about such myths except the human failure that brings it on. People were careless and lost a gift god had left them, or they broke a taboo as in the Genesis myth, or a woman’s folly brought about the misfortune again as in Genesis, or a quarrel caused it as in Cain and Abel, or an animal trickster brought it about again as in Genesis, etc.

Despite the selection of ethnic creation myths Zwemer has offered as evidence of the primitive revelation, narked by Renan, Zwemer now refers to them as “contrasting stories of creation and myths often grotesque and absurd” compared with the effects of the Holy Ghost. Consistency among Christians? Not when logic, sense and honest judgement are concerned. The anthropological myths are grotesque and absurd except for those bits of them that can be picked out as suitable evidence for the primitive revelation.

Prayer

God is the tribal totem personified, and, like the totem, He stands for the tribe, the Chosen People of God. God in reality is the people he stands for. The Jewish God, Yehouah is the Jewish people. Prayer is a petition to the people, to the tribe, for some favour or a right wronged:

Prayer is a social phenomenon.

F Heiler, Prayer

Heiler says the attitude to God of those praying is one of subordination and dependence. God is greater and mightier than petitioners and their destiny is in His power because in reality He is the social unit, the tribe, upon which the petitioner depends.

This relationship of dependence is always a faithful reflection of an earthly social relationship, mostly of kinship…

F Heiler

Notionally, members the tribe are kin, offspring of a common father, the tribal founder and god, and they comprise several clans who are indeed kin—extended families. In prepatriarchal times the tribal god was a goddess, a mother god. Thus the petitioner in prayer addresses a notional parent as a child using appropriate words, and the prayer, which cannot be heard by any imaginary god or goddess is heard by the tribe, and it is the tribe which originally responded when a response was possible or appropriate. Often prayers are a form of self assurance. Communal prayer strengthens those praying. Hardship is put before the tribe publicly, and the tribe invited to respond. The father god is the protector and saviour of his people because it is the role of the tribe to look after the interests of its members. Marx called it primitive communism.

Sacrifice doubtless began as a ritual when humans were hunter gatherers. The hunters will have returned to the cave or camp with their quarry, and the clan or tribe will have enjoyed a communal feast. The totem or the tribal god will have been offered a little of the food in thanks for the success. When people settled into farming, the slaughter of a beast for the feast will have similarly required a food offering to the god in thanks. The bits offered will have been bits the humans did not want to eat but which burnt well like fat, or smelled strongly, like bones.

When tribes coalesced into federations, the same traditions continued as sacrifice. But the purpose of feasting remained with the sacrificing. What had been previously a feast with an offering to the god, became an offering to the god which was communally eaten, the priests now taking prime cuts for the god, but which they ate themselves. The ritual was fulfilled for the crowd by burning fat and bones as before. What began as gratitude for having been fed and a communal feast for mutual bonding became a scam to feed the clever drones of society. In late antiquity, the urban poor depended on the sacrifices for animal protein, their food being bread otherwise, while priests became men rewarded with the best joints for doing nothing at all, and so it has remained. They did not even fight, like the warrior class, so they were usually the cleverest men, and sometimes women.

Sacrifice was also associated with moral lapses, as a punishment. The very object of social living was security, so crimes against tribal members were taken seriously in primitive societies. They were moral because morality is the purpose of a tribe—it is protecting people, caring for them, feeding them, ensuring they are secure, and generally helping them, and all of it done communally, “each for one and one for all”. These too were the functions of the god because it was the tribe. Individual members of the tribe were members of one of its constituent clans or families, and if a clan member committed a misdemeanour, a moral lapse, then dishonour fell upon the clan, which then had to atone in some way. A Nigerian tribe, the Isoku, offered expiatory sacrifice…

…when the family name has been sullied by incest, adultery, theft, or misuse of the family land and possessions.

Offering a sacrifice and its concomitant feast out of their own produce earned the approval of the rest. In serious cases the clan avenged the dishonour by murdering the sinner, perhaps the beginning of human sacrifice. The more sophisticated the society, and the more “advanced” the religion, the more sins the priests devised for punters to have to offer a sacrifice, and so the priests got still fatter.

The origin of the idea of god, the tribal totem, Le Roy considered to have been a magical pact with the totem animal, implying that the totem animal was what was important—it had the power. The evidence is the reverse. The animal simply stands for the power of the totem. The totem is a power not a pact, an abstract power which unites and motivates the tribe. Even Le Roy recognized it:

Totemism is a means employed by primitive man to unite, distinguish, strengthen and extend the family…

Now Le Roy describes the totem as a spirit not a pact, but one which has made a pact with the devil. No imposition of Christian ideas on to primitive people could be more obvious. In any case, the totem is not a spirit, but a power. Admittedly, a spirit is a power personalized, but the totem is an abstract power, and therefore not a spirit. It is a power the tribe or clan thinks it has, and only it has. That is what was unifying about it. Often the totem is thought of as making them somehow kin with the animal—for example by the tribal founder being born a twin of one of the animals. In any event, the totem and the totem animal differed, and although the animal was respected, it was not the source of the totem power but simply another recipient of it.

Fire

The religion that is often described as fire worship is Zoroastrianism, the religion of the Persians at the time of the so called Jewish “return from exile”. In Zoroastrianism, the four elements, fire, water, earth and air are sacred, not to be polluted, especially gratuitously. If the Jewish religion had been set up under the auspices of the of the Persians, one might imagine that these elements, especially fire, the link between heaven and earth, would have been prominent in Judaism. In fact, Zwemer tells us that the bible has…

…more than 400 references to fire, its use on the altar or as a symbol for the presence of God and his manifestation in power and judgement.

Consequently, Zwemer thinks that fire was part of the primitive revelation, but, if that is so, Protestants have virtually denied it totally, and Catholics have the burning of candles and incense as tokens of the former importance of fire in worship, though both Protestant and Catholic Christians were fond of burning people until only a few hundred years ago. From the expulsion of the primeval couple from heaven, fire has been important in Jewish myth, because God placed cherubim on guard at its gates with swords of fire to keep them out, presumably by burning their bodies. Hell is similarly thought of as a fiery place, where anyone not a Christian is cruelly tortured by incessant burning forever, even the citizens of hell being immortal. So, God’s primitive revelation must have been a foretaste of hell for the first humans! As a reminder, He was fond of dropping fire from heaven upon their descendents, obviously the lightning of a storm god in reality! Yehouah was long ago, a Canaanite storm god, probably known as the Beloved One, because he brought fertility to the soil parched by the summer heat, and identifiable with Hadad. The pillar of fire, on the other hand, showed the promise of God to Moses. The Persian religion had the notion of a world purification by fire, the righteous not being affected by it. The gospels speak of a similar purification, and Jesus says:

I am come to cast fire on the earth.

Luke 12:49

Zwemer says the bible is so full of this great symbol of “God as a consuming fire” that it ought to be called The Book of Divine Fire, but the Zoroastrians are the ones always being accused of worshipping fire, an insult they deny. They treat fire as sacred because it is God’s tool for various things, the everyday one being the channel of communication between humanity and God, the conduit of prayer to the heavens, a divine telephone line. The Jewish scriptures (1 Kg 19:12) similarly declare that fire is not God but the symbol of Him, as in His appearance in the burning bush.

Jewish commentaries on the scriptures are full of additional traditions about fire. One is pertinent to the supposed primitive revelation in that fire was revealed to Adam in the rubbing together of two “bricks” to reassure him at night. Divinity is symbolized by fire, so the Torah was considered fiery, and divine matters that were beyond human understanding were considered dangerous to those who toyed with them. Zwemer is amazed that other religions are rich in fire mythology, proof that it was revealed in the hypothesized primitive revelation.

Yet the ability to control fire was one of humanity’s greatest discoveries. Why must God have the credit for it? Fire must have been as scary to early humans as it is to animals, but humans began making stone tools two million years ago, and the domestication of fire probably came from toolmaking. Striking one stone (not bricks!) with another to make tools as in knapping flints, can produce sparks, and sometimes they must have ignited nearby dry grass. Most often the grass probably flared then fizzled out, making the flint knappers realize that fire could be controlled, and they did. The discovery of the art of making fire must have seemed like a gift, and indeed many such discoveries were thought of as metaphorical gifts, and the giver must have been the tribal totem, then the tribal god, when these concepts developed.

The heat and light of fire must have associated it with the sun from the outset, and sun and fire worship are often related. The seasonal movement of the sun is often marked by bonfires. Many extant myths have fire delivered to mankind by theft from the gods, as in the myth of Prometheus. Prometheus is from the Sanskrit paramantha, meaning a fire drill, another way beside stone knapping of making fire. Many of the myths of the acquisition of fire are myths about acquiring the means of making fire. The use of fire, like the use of symbolic language and glyphs is one of the factors that distinguish us from animals, and so is important in human self regard, a crucial aspect of religion.

Marriage

Moving on to the role of marriage in the primitive revelation, Zwemer recognizes, “whatever the condition of the so called caveman, he must have been a social being and had a family”, and:

In spite of all the pseudoscientific gossip about promiscuity, marriage by capture, or the picture of the caveman beating the cavewoman with a club, the verdict of science today rather agrees with the statement of Genesis 2:18-25.

He means man will leave his parents to cleave to his wife, not really a controversial or remarkable statement to make, although Christians seem to think it is. As for so called pseudoscientific notions, it is Christians who like to make out that early humans were savages, promiscuous, and took women by force, but it does not fit this Christian hypothesis of the primtive revelation to the first human pair, so suddenly Christians are scientific, and Zwemer pretends these are other people’s notions. The closest to this caveman joke that reality ever came is that the alpha males had the first pick of the women—the first fruits of womanhood, one might say—a privilege that obtains still, rich men selecting “trophy wives”. The thesis is that God restrains human beings from being promiscuous, but God is the tribe itself, human society. It is tribal sanctions that apply to those who break tribal morality, and one of the first, probably instinctive, was the taboo on incest.

The family must always have been important before the ape crossed the threshhold into humanity, but we were not a type of gorilla, we were a type of chimpanzee—or chimpanzees were a type of human, if you wish—so the family was not a nuclear family consisting of a male, a female and some children, but an extended family. An extended family is a clan, and led originally by a matriarch because she knew who her children and grandchildren were, but fathers were never sure. The proto humans knew their mothers, but could not know for sure who their fathers were—they did not understand the purpose of sex because they had not thought about it.

The tribal leader was a male, but he achieved his position by superiority and dominance, and though he had the pick of the females for his harem, he could never be sure any of his wives had not been tempted by a handsome young male in the troop. These humans were much as we now are, in that respect. Even then, it was the women who built the home. They stayed with the children of different ages, foraging with the other mothers in the tribe for berries and roots, and showing the children how to do it, bonded together by their constant chattering, slowly evolving the skills of symbolic language.

The males were away from the home, hunting and fishing, or developing their skills as warriors. They too spoke and chattered for they had learnt it as children from their mothers, but they never had the same chance to practice it as women, and were never as good at it. On the other hand, the women did not have to throw stones and spears, especially while running, and so never developed the spatial skills and mental mathematical calculus that males have to let them do it successfully.

When humans settled into gardening, it was the women who led them. They had been doing it for centuries, having gradually realized that burying some of the roots and berries they found gave more the following year. Similarly gathering grass seeds sowed some of them, and taking them home in gourds and skins, scattered more, until they found their routes to their gardens had become lined with grasses, and they could sow these too. Women were in the forefront of all of this, but males noticed that some of their prey animals were feeding on the grasses and the vegetables planted by the women. These animals were gradually domesticating themselves for a ready supply of food near the human camps. The men would kill them, but sometimes caught and tethered them for later slaughter, and so sheep, pigs, goats and cattle became domesticated. The same happened to dogs and cats. They also crept into the human camps looking for food, and were caught, or, in the case of cats, just tolerated as useful for catching vermin, the mice and rats which were doing the same thing, seeking food in the human waste.

As clans grew and formed tribes, social functions adjusted to the changing situation. Family groups were therefore not nuclear like Adam and Eve and babies Cain and Abel. If the taboo against incest was part of the primitive revelation, then there could have been no human race, according to this myth, because there was only one woman involved. Christians have to abandon this myth and go to the other one in Genesis to save Eve from embarassment.

The primeval extended family must have been the matriarch with her children and grandchildren, other than those that had left to take wives in other clans according to the taboo against incest—exogamy. The whole clan helped in bringing up its children. Every child in an extended family is brought up with cousins as well as brothers and sisters, and many uncles and aunts, as well as their mother and father, whoever he was. The matriarchal household might have valued homosexual men who served as additional parents and defenders of the clan, because they did not move away to another clan to marry. Sexual taboos were instinctively preserved within the clan, so promiscuity and communal sex were not condoned at all. It would have weakened the clan, and the tribe, so that where it did occur, the tribes soon failed or were pushed aside by rivals. E Westermarck (History of Human Marriage) confirms that promiscuity has never been a form of accepted sexual relations in any tribe, or ever been a general stage in sexual social development.

Exogamy and totemism are closely linked, the totems originally being a clan identity, like a surname, and family pride was encouraged. Totemism arose at least partly to avoid incest. To us, it is a moral question, but that is begging the question! Both morals and taboos were instincts formulated once symbolic language made it possible. Possibly perversion only persisted at all in humans because they were thin on the ground, and possibly some could get isolated, when incest became necessary to preserve the race. That is the implication of Adam and Eve, and the story of Lot and his daughters (Genesis 19:30f) is even more explicit, Lot and his two daughters living in a cave with no other men in the land, and so the daughters contrive to commit incest with their father. Incest remains a minority activity even when people are not religious, and conversely it still occurs though people are nominally Christians in circumstances of isolation, like the widely separated farmsteads of the old west.

Morals

What of morals generally? J H Breasted could not find glyphs for right and wrong in early dynastic Egypt. He concluded that until then, Egyptians had no conscience and so no morals. The evidence is not conclusive, for no one can be sure of the meaning of all the ancient glyphs at the time. Zwemer choses to regard it as scientific. Conscience begins with instinct like that relating to incest. Surely it is obvious that social animals have to have social instincts. Why otherwise would they remain social? It is not something they choose to do. Human beings, being able to speak and think, were able to express their instincts as formal rules, and eventually to write them down using symbols. These are laws and morals. Beginning with instinct, they were elaborated through our skills in talking and organising.

Some laws and morals pertain to marriage, society having an interest in making sure it does not degenerate through neglect of the taboo of incest, so exogamy was the expression of the instinct. A ritual separation from the family of birth, and acceptance into the new family, ensured that incest could not happen. A girl who committed incest within her own clan was liable to incriminate herself when she became pregnant, and to avoid it, she was sent to another clan, or a husband was brought in for her. Sexual play among the immature was tolerated, and if a child should be born of such play, it was killed.

Zwemer admits that morality relates not just to the nuclear family but to the whole group. “Kin” and “kind” are cognate words. As nouns they mean of the same birth, and the adjective “kind” is what people of the same birth are meant to be towards each other. Westermarck considered exogamy to be the result of incest. Yet Zwemer insists in the Christian myth that apes were immoral or at least amoral. Morality is a function of consciousness, and while apes are certainly conscious in that they are self aware and have some idea of future and past, it is hard to say that they were moral. If a resistance to procreating with close kin is instinctive, then apes might be moral in a sense, because morality initially evolves out of social instincts. Once morality is accepted as evolving then no primitive revelation is necessary, and even if an instinct can be described as morality, then social instincts precude any primitive revelation.

Bentham, Hume and Mill thought self interest produced morality, and as living socially is a self interested strategy for personal security, they were right. Christians just cannot, or will not try, to understand evolution. They cannot seem to see animals morphing into different animals given sufficient time for the changes to show, even though they can see perfectly easily that children are not identical clones of their parents. They cannot comprehend features emerging. So, consciousness cannot emerge. If it is there then God put it there at the beginning. They refuse even God the right to use evolution if he wanted to! Nor can they imagine different societies from their own. They cannot understand people who do not have their own false piety about God, but live as if God was present in the very society around them. Yet that is what Christ taught!

Changes happen by evolution, and they refuse to get it. At one time in the early history of mankind there was no religion because people had not yet conceived of any such idea, but it did not need to be revealed by an outside agent. The social life of these early humans, social animals as they were, already had in it the seeds of religion, as it had the seeds of the whole of our modern complex societies. In particular, in respect of religion, they had a moral instinct which gave rise to religion. Believers think it was the reverse, religion gave rise to morality. People, even in primitive societies, will sacrifice their lives for the sake of their clan or tribe. The reason is that they know the clan or tribe is security for their kin. In that sense, society is greater than them, it lives on after they are dead, and their father god is the symbol of their society. A sacrifice offered to their god was a feast for the tribe, and religious occasions became festivals:

Charity is no late message sent down to civilized folk from heaven. It is something that whispers in the very blood of the race, as if it were the Earth Mother bidding us remember that we are all her children.

R R Marrett, Faith, Hope and Charity in Primitive Religion

Solitary animals have no reason to be charitable, whereas social animals are necessarily charitable to others of their kind. It is the reason they have herded together—to help one another. Admittedly the instinct to be charitable is not fully developed in human beings. Some can ignore their duty to society, their social instinct, for personal aggrandizement. That is why society has laws and morals, and it is the reason they have to be taught to children. Then most people accept them and are good citizens. This has latterly been the main function of religion, and why many believers think it is the source of morals.

Zwemer’s hero, Schmidt, in his attempts to prove a primitive revelation shows the essential social character of human beings, not anything given to them, but something intrinsic in them as social and thinking animals. When they began to think, they began to notice they behaved in certain ways, socially and culturally, and they had to attempt to explain it. They had the characteristic of culture, of teaching their children, and when they had built up a store of metaphors suitable for it, they added the metaphor that they were the children of a higher being who had taught them the way to live. That explained their instinctive and cultural habits.

The first such teacher was probably the mother, because it was mothers who cared for the young children and began teaching them. It became the totemic founder of the tribe and eventually, under patriarchalism, the father. Founding gods became fathers and so they have remained. The father became the mythical revealer of all things good, but the basis of them, the social instinct we cannot fail to uphold consciously, if our societies are to survive. That is what Christians are incapable of comprehending. Indeed, in the US particularly, they try to sever the individual from society in their adoption of what they call neoliberalism and neoconservatism, which amount to longwinded worlds for selfishness and institutionalized greed. They reject humanistic liberalism and socialism, ideologies which try to fulfil our social nature while accepting individual rights within society. Christians cannot find arguments against social science other than to contradict it and call it names, socialism or Marxism, but to do it they have to ignore that Christ and the apostles were communists. Their koinonia extended to them holding everything in common. Their argument is to deny it! Yet the inerrant bible plainly says it. In this regard, US Christianity is diametrically opposed to the purpose of religion—social unity.

Immortality

Immortality is a notion spread far and wide in the earth, and which seems to extend back in time well into prehistory, to judge from archaeology. Since the body obviously dies and decays, and announces it is doing it by a most unpleasant smell, the body cannot be immortal. It is a soul or spirit that is immortal, though some thought the body could survive somehow, including the Jews who think immortality is in a renovated and purified body in a renovated and purified world. Others, including the ancient Egyptians, thought there were more souls than one.

Besides these confusions of the primitive revelation, the place of immortality varies widely—in a heaven in the sky, under the ground, on a distant island, on a high mountain or a hidden valley, beyond the stars in the milky way, in the far west where the sun sets, beyond a shadowy river or across a bridge, sometimes the rainbow. The common feature of these paradises is that they are all blissful places, offering total security forever. There are no worries or problems, no enemies—they are all wicked people and so are in hell—only friends, family, warmth, sustenance… Even the Mesopotamians and the Greeks who saw the abode of the dead as an underworld kingdom, dark and dreary, saw it nevertheless as free of trouble. Some Jews, according to the bible, saw it as awful just because the dead had been forgotten by God. These dead souls seemed to drift around here, slowly fading away, so the concept might have been a later logical one, deduced from burial, and the way the human personality often fades away in old age with senile dementia. It simply continued the process after death. Some tribes, on the other hand, mercifully killed off their aged people to save them the slow fearful decline they expected, sending them immediately to the land of bliss. Others had different heavens for different classes of society, already a symptom of its breakdown.

Death is ubiquitous but is of no importance to any animal that is not conscious, not self aware. Some mammals and perhaps birds have glimmerings of self awareness, supporting the idea that it evolves, but it is unlikely any are self aware enough to realize they will die. It seems fearful when we first realize it as children, making us worry we might be hit by a meteorite. It must have been worrying when humans first realized it. Trying to alleviate the fear seems a natural reaction. As death cannot be avoided, the only alleviating thought is that it is not actually final! Did this idea come to people spontaneously, or by a primitive revelation, or by some more natural example? It was society.

Each person was an element in the tribe, lived through the tribe, and the tribe lived through its members. It was a model that could carry life forward. The power of society, of the tribe, was the totem. Individuals died throughout anyone’s lifetime, but the tribe, under the power of its totem, lived on. Thus the totem power was understood from early on to be immortal, and as everyone in the tribe had inherited some of that power as a tribal member, it was easy to imagine that the power enabled them to live on too. They had found what seemed to them a convincing argument that they did not die when the body died.

The totem was personified as a spirit which was the tribal founder and father, their god, and they were his children. Everyone had a portion of the tribal power or spirit, so everyone had a type of spirit, their soul, and that is what lived on within the tribal power, the totem. But the totem represented the tribe. Social life in the tribe gave the people security, but it was never perfect. The culture of the tribe and its morals provided for the ideal that the founder had set up, and would eventually be achieved again in the future after a decline, through what Jews and Christians have called sin, the imperfection of the social instinct in humans. The life after life was a life in this idealized society in an idealized world. The real world suffered decay and death, and the ideal society did not because it was eternal, and so too were those who lived in it, the dead members of the tribe. The tribe lived on after death and they lived within it—in the kingdom of god. As an idealized tribe, it is where the souls lived.

Sinners, interpreted in natural or evolutionary terms, are those who undermine society by neglecting its codes of conduct, its morals, making it insecure for others living in it—those who want more than they deserve, or can have without denying others. Christ said:

What shall it profit a man if he shall gain the whole world and lose his own soul?

It is a warning about greed. It can destroy society, and without society, humanity is helpless. Zwemer remarks that “a social gospel without an other worldly message” is not attractive to anyone. Maybe, but that does not make the social gospel wrong, and it does not make the other worldly message right. The gospel message is a social message, and the other worldly message is, at root, the same message. The other world is the idealized world, and the gospel message is concerned with how it can be brought about in reality. Few Christians realize it, and what confuses them above all is their false belief that the ideal society actually exists as heaven or paradise. It does not need building because in some sense, an imaginary one, it already exists. Yet, God and his kingdom came out of the primitive tribe. God is the tribe personified, and the kingdom of God is the idealized tribe, thought to have been founded by the tribal founder, and imagined as an ideal society—heaven.

It is up to our leaders to set moral examples and to ensure that the roots of our culture in primitive society is properly taught, then people can understand what the purpose of our ancient institutions are, including religion. Few of them have any such motivation. Our ways of choosing leaders democratically is faulty. It encourages opportunists rather than leaders with the strongest sense of duty to society. Those with the interest of society at heart should begin by putting their own wealth into it, as public benefactors, rather than using their position to get whatever they can out of it.

Further Reading

• The first part of the article on Zwemer
• More on religious origins
• More on culture and resources
• More on the death of God and secular Christianity

Skeptical Resources—Internet infidels | Jesus Never Existed | Steven Carr’s Website | Christianism | Early Christian Writings | God is Imaginary | “Religion Detoxification” | Our Judaio-Christian Heritage | Archaeoastronomy | No Deity | No Beliefs | Evil Bible | Bible God | ex-Christians | Jesus Police | Islamic Faith Freedom | Atheist Experience | American Atheists | Jovial Atheist | Askwhy! books
Other Resources—Early Christian Docs | Resources for Study | Traditional Bible-History | Traditional Bible World History | Traditional Bible History | about.com biblical history | Apologetics web sites | Advent Ch Fathers | Orion center links | Wikipedia | Traditional Jewish History