Vanguard News Network
VNN Media
VNN Digital Library
VNN Reader Mail
VNN Broadcasts

Old December 8th, 2003 #1
Ossian
Senior Member
 
Join Date: Dec 2003
Location: Missouri, USSA
Posts: 922
Default Barbarism cloaked as religion

Were the Cathars Right About the Old Testament?

The Middle Ages were replete with a number of heretical sects, one of the best-known being the Cathars. They flourished in the 12th and 13th centuries and held a number of beliefs, chief among which was the Manichaean heresy. According to this doctrine, good and evil are primal forces permanently in conflict and existing through all eternity. The Christian God was considered the essence of all Good; his adversary, Satan, that of all Evil. Going beyond this opposition, the Cathars saw God as he was manifested only in the teachings of Jesus and his disciples in the New Testament. In contradiction to the almost universal acceptance that the Old Testament was divinely inspired, the Cathars regarded the Jehovah of the ancient Hebrews as the prime representative of the force of Evil, a point of view that strikes modern Christians as blasphemous in the extreme. It is worth our time and attention, however, to consider whether the Cathars might have had some justification for their heretical beliefs, not in abstract theoretical considerations or in theological subtleties, but in the text of the Old Testament as it has been transmitted down through the centuries.

One question especially relevant to our times must be answered before we go any farther. Is anyone who resurrects and dares to discuss the Cathars not ipso facto manifesting anti-Jewish attitudes? The answer, of course, is a definite no, provided we recognize that the Old Testament is a potpourri of heterogeneous writings, which represent the gradual evolution of the ancient Hebrews’ conception of deity from a very narrow view of him as a tribal god to a far broader, more humane and all-embracing Superior Being. It took only the broadening of this view to transform what was originally a savage, primitive, definitely unchristian religion into one which might justifiably be considered a basis for the worldwide reconciliation of mankind and for the ultimate salvation of the human race (if such a phenomenon can still be considered possible). It is therefore necessary to distinguish sharply between the earlier sections of the Old Testament-the Pentateuch and the historical books, from Joshua down through I and II Chronicles-and the later pans, including the Psalms, the Song of Solomon, Proverbs and the major and minor prophets. Our discussion here will deal chiefly with the earlier sections.
But first it must be asked if it is at all permissible to criticize or condemn any religion, either wholly or in part? Does religious faith not involve our relations with the supernatural? Is it not therefore beyond rational discussion and to be regarded as purely the concern of each individual and no one else? This is true, insofar as each of us restricts his or her religion to that sphere alone. But if the followers of any religion extend it to earthly affairs and use it as a basis for maltreating their fellow humans, it is certainly open to criticism and condemnation. If a religion induces its adherents to cause physical harm to others; if it causes psychological harm (as when children of extreme fundamentalist sects tell other children that they and their families are eternally damned), if it serves as a justification for robbing other persons or groups of their possessions or territories (as in olden times and down to the present in Palestine), then it certainly deserves the strongest condemnation.
Let us examine briefly the main characteristics of Yahweh, the deity of the ancient Hebrews, as found in the earlier sections of the Old Testament. Despite the popular belief prevalent yesterday and today, he did not claim to be the only god, for other deities are constantly referred to. True monotheism came only much later. Yahweh did claim to be the Hebrews’ only legitimate object of adoration and obedience, referring to himself as “a jealous god” (Exodus 20:5), before whom they should have no other divinities. In his initial form, Yahweh was simply one of the local Baals, with many of their highly undesirable characteristics.
What were Yahweh’s principal characteristics? First of all, he was extremely egocentric. “For I the Lord thy God am a jealous god, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me” (Exodus 20:5). This jealousy is reflected in the repeated injunction to worship only Yahweh, who commands, “Ye shall not make with me gods of silver, neither shall ye make unto you gods of gold” (Exodus 20:23). Any denial of his supremacy was blasphemy, punishable by death (Leviticus 24:16).
A natural consequence of this extreme jealousy was an equally extreme vindictiveness, extending not merely “to the third and fourth generation,” but far beyond, as in the case of the Amalekites. “And the Lord said unto Moses... I will utterly put out the remembrance of Amalek from under heaven....Because the Lord hath sworn that the Lord will have war with Amalek from generation to generation” (Exodus 17:14,16). In accordance with this declaration, nearly 400 years after the first battles between the Amalekites and Hebrews (Exodus 17:8-13), Yahweh commanded Saul to destroy their remote descendants. “Thus saith the Lord of hosts: I remember that which Amalek did to Israel, how he laid in wait for him in the way, when he came up from Egypt. Now go and smite Amalek, and utterly destroy all that they have, and spare them not; but slay both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass” (I Samuel 15:2-4). When Saul did not follow these instructions to the letter, but spared King Agag and a few
choice animals, Samuel reproved him severely for disobeying Yahweli’s savage command (I Samuel 15:17-23)
Yahweh was prone to behaving with extreme cruelty and to ordering his followers to do likewise. One aspect of this behavior, especially repugnant to a civilized person’s sense of justice, is its extension to a wrongdoer’s family, servants and possessions, both inanimate and animate, regardless of their innocence. The prize instance is Yahweh’s treatment of the Egyptians in the Passover, when he smote and killed all the first-born of both humans and animals which were not protected by the special sign of the blood smeared on the lintels of the doors: “1 will pass through the land of Egypt this night, and will smite all the first-born in the land of Egypt. . . .And it came to pass, that at midnight the Lord smote all the first-born in the land of Egypt, from the first-born of Pharaoh that sat on his throne unto the first-born of the captive that was in the dungeon; and all the first-born of cattle. And Pharaoh rose up in the night he, and all his servants, and all the Egyptians; and there was a great cry in Egypt, for there was not a house where there was not one dead” (Exodus 12:12, 29-30). As a “massacre of the Innocents,” Yahweh’s wrath far surpassed Herod’s notorious bloodbath recounted in Matthew (2:16).
A sensitive modern reaction to the habitual cruelty of the primitive Hebrew deity and his worshipers is provided by Miss F. Tennyson Jesse in her book, Murder and Its Motives (pp. 44-45)

My childhood was made wretched by the Old Testament stories of cruelties inflicted in the name of Jehovah, and to this day if I am looking through the Bible I instinctively avoid the story of Achan Uoshua 7:24-25], for it poisoned life for me when I read it. I did not mind so much that Achan was stoned; I could just bear the knowledge that his wives were stoned with him, but that his children and his cattle suffered the same fate was the worst thought of the lot. I used to see horrible mental pictures of those swaying, horned heads and frightened brown eyes, and dewy muzzles being broken and made to bleed by the stones of the virtuous Israelites. The cattle, even less than the children, could not have known what it was all about; they must have been so utterly puzzled.

Nor was Yahweh above inflicting similar cruelties on entire Hebrew tribes. When some Benjamite hoodlums had first wanted to sodomize a visiting Levite, and then gang-raped and killed his concubine in the city of Gibeah (Judges 20:21), Yahweh gave the avengers from the other tribes his advice as to when and how to nearly exterminate the tribe of Benjamin and his possessions. The Hebrew god had the habit of intervening in individual cases, as when he performed a miracle to cause Dathan and Abiram, together with their houses and all their goods, to be swallowed up by the earth (Numbers 16:29-33). Other instances of Yahweh’s sadistic cruelties towards transgressors of any kind are too many to list in detail here. An adequate summary of his typical behavior is given in Isaiah’s invective against the Babylonians (Isaiah 13:15-16,18): “Every one that is found shall be thrust through; and every one that is joined unto them shall fall by the sword. Their children also shall be dashed to pieces before their eyes; their houses shall be spoiled, and their wives ravished. Their bows also shall dash the young men to pieces; and they shall have no pity on the fruit of the womb; their eye shall not spare children.” Such behavior, ascribed to Yahweh by Isaiah as an ideal, justifies Miss Jesse’s further observation. “We know nowadays how bad it is for the stone-throwers themselves. We know that, from starting full of virtue and a wish to root the evil thing from their midst, they must have become mad with blood-lust” (Murder and Its Motives, p. 44).
In early times, Yahweh’s blood-lust extended even to human sacrifices. We are informed (Exodus 13:2,1 2) that the first-born of man and beast was sacred to Yahweh, and that the human first-born could be saved from death by monetary payment.
 
Old December 8th, 2003 #2
Ossian
Senior Member
 
Join Date: Dec 2003
Location: Missouri, USSA
Posts: 922
Default

To give even Yahweh his due, we must recognize that the ancient Hebrews, unlike other Semitic peoples, considered the casting of babes into the fiery furnace of Moloch as an abomination (Leviticus 18:21; I Kings 11:7). But Yahweh was not opposed to filicide, as shown by the shocking story of Abraham and Isaac (Genesis 22). when Abraham was ordered by Yahweh to kill his son, the heinous act was stopped at the last minute by an angel who ordered the heartless father to offer a ram to Yahweh instead. Somewhat later, however, Yahweh seems to have made no objection when Jephthah carried out his vow, made after his victory over the Ammonites, to sacrifice whatever he saw first on returning home, even when it turned out to be his own daughter (Judges 11:30-40).
Unsurprisingly, treachery was not inherently evil in Yahweh’s sight; on the contrary, he rewarded it whenever it was beneficial to the Hebrews. Two notorious instances of what would to normal civilized people seem outrageous are the cases of Dinah and Shechem (Genesis 34)
and Jael, the wife of Heber (Judges 4:17-21). In the first case, after Shechem possessed Dinah sexually, their parents, Jacob and Hamor, reached an agreement whereby Shechem was to marry Dinah and the two tribes were to merge (and the Hamorite men would undergo the Hebrew rite of circumcision!). Dinah’s brothers, Reuben and Levi, at first feigned acceptance of this arrangement, but on the third day fell upon the Hamorites, slaughtered all the men and took their wives and animals. Jael invited the fleeing Canaanite general Sisera into her tent, saying, “Turn in, my lord, turn in to me; fear not,” and then murdering him in defiance of all principles of hospitality by driving a tent- nail into his head while he slept. Despite their thoroughly blameworthy behavior, Dinah’s brothers and Jael were made into folk heroes.
Yahweh was quite ready to grant possession of foreign territory to his worshipers. He promised the land of Canaan to Abraham and his descendants (Genesis 12:7 and elsewhere). Before the Hebrews left Egypt, Moses spoke to them of “the land which the Lord will give you, according as he hath promised” (Exodus 12:25). From then on there are constant references to Canaan and, more generally, to Palestine as “the Promised Land,” an epithet which has lasted down to the present day in both the Jewish and non-Jewish vernacular. Many of the tribes the Hebrews displaced were exterminated, according to Yahweh’s commands. The Canaanites, Hittites, Amorites, Hivites and Perizzites, however, were able by resorting to some guile (for which the Hebrews reproached them) to persuade the princes of Israel not to subject them to genocide. They were allowed to remain put, but at the cost of being reduced to “hewers of wood and drawers of water” (Joshua 9:21).
From the psychological point of view, it is not hard to see in Yahweh the projection, onto the metaphysical- religious level, of his worshipers’ own characteristics. In many respects they were very much like the surrounding tribes, but they outdid all the others in their rigidity and insistence on single-minded and minute observance of religiously prescribed behavior, as their customs (dietary and other) were transformed into absolute laws. Yahweh himself describes the Hebrews as “a stiffnecked people” (Exodus 32:9, 33:3-5; Deuteronomy 9:6).
As already pointed out, their religious barbarism was only spelled out in primitive Hebrew history as codified in the Pentateuch and earlier historical books, down through I and II Chronicles. In the later books the characteristics ascribed to Yahweh are replaced by a loftier, more truly spiritual auitude, such as when the Lord is portrayed as rejecting burnt offerings and similar sacrifices, and as having a “contrite and humble spirit” (Isaiah 1:3-15 and 57:1 5). The emphasis in the later prophetic books, from Isaiah and Jeremiah onward, is on the mercy shown by Yahweh to those who practice justice and righteousness, particularly towards the poor and the unfortunate. In this respect, Christ was only continuing and refining the more recent Hebrew tradition.
To return to our original question: Were the Cathars right? Our answer must be: To a certain extent, yes, but only in part. The Yahweh of the earliest tradition was indubitably a Satanic deity, fit to be worshipped by uncivilized savages concerned only with their own tribal affairs and aggrandizement at the expense of any and all others who might stand in their way. Yahweh’s followers in those days were indeed devil worshipers. The Jehovah of the post-Exilic tradition, from the time of Isaiah onward, was a different kind of god. Present-day non-fundamentalists (both Jewish and Christian) tend to downplay the uncivilized aspects of the earlier books of the Old Testament, thereby preserving a rather unrepresentative set of picturesque tales like those of Eve’s temptation and Noah’s Ark often simplified and bowdlerized ad usum Delphini.
What should we latter-day folk do about the older, barbaric part of the Old Testament? Jettison it or preserve, for serious attention, a portion of it? My suggestion would be to keep only the Ten Commandments. The Garden of Eden and similar folklore will do for the earlier grades of Sunday School; but as soon as the pupils become capable of understanding the moral problems involved, teachers should make them aware of the essentially uncivilized nature of the ancient Hebrews and their deity, Yahweh, who should not be identified in any way with the God of love, mercy and justice. Serious discussion of the further implications of the rejection of Yahweh, his savagery and cruelty and of any type of theocracy based thereon, can remain for adult Bible study. The effects of this rejection on modern domestic and international politics also need a much freer and more open airing than it is possible to achieve at present.
Lucretius was certainly right when he said: "Tantum religio potuit suadere malorum." ("Religion has been able to sweeten so many evils.")


Notes:
I. It seems preferable to use the form Yahweh, which is normally considered to represent the actual pronunciation of the four-letter sequence YCWH or tetragrammaton, which was used to represent his name, rather than Jehovah, because of the widespread emotional connotations of the latter. I am using only Yahweh to stand for WHWH, Elohim and The Lord, and am not going into the irrelevant (for our purposes) distinctions between the Yahwistic, Elohistic and Priestly traditions.
2. One is tempted to speculate that, in reality, if the basic story is true. Abraham may have had second thoughts and, on espying a ram tethered nearby, decided to sacrifice it instead, and then told the story of the angel when he returned to his people.
3. Even the equally primitive Germanic tribes had a law that, if a person gave hospitality to an enemy, it was not permissible to attack him as long as he was a guest. This custom is reflected in Siegfried being allowed to stay overnight in the house of Hunding, his enemy (Wagner’s Die Walküre, Act I).
4. Judith’s action in obtaining admission to Holofernes’ tent (Judith 11:5) involved trickery, but not treachery, since her use of the term “my Lord,” was ambiguous: “I will speak no word of a lie in my Lord’s presence tonight.” Holofernes’ servants took it as referring to him, whereas for Judith the reference was to Yahweh.
 
Old December 9th, 2003 #3
no_nomen
Guest
 
Posts: n/a
Default Maybe a shorted read but itz the same old YHVH

.and a little less scholarly...

Yahweh Chats About Cannibalism and Other Fetishes
http://www.vnnforum.com/showthread.php?t=271


...............

.

Last edited by no_nomen; December 9th, 2003 at 12:27 AM.
 
Old December 9th, 2003 #4
Ossian
Senior Member
 
Join Date: Dec 2003
Location: Missouri, USSA
Posts: 922
Default

Quote:
Originally Posted by no_nomen
.and a little less scholarly...




.
Izzit? If you say so, but dandy, just the same (like all your contributions, as far as I can see!)
__________________
Produce good men -- the rest follows.
--William G. Simpson
The Morality of Survival
 
Reply

Share


Thread
Display Modes


All times are GMT -5. The time now is 08:44 PM.
Page generated in 0.50383 seconds.