Never happened. Which isn't to say that the Liberal/Modernist scum haven't tried. They have often hit on my wife, but I had the sense to marry someone outside of disgusting modern culture, so we have been happily married for 23 years. Traditional culture is a necessary, but not sufficient, condition for producing a thriving culture. Protestant culture from the mid-1600s to the mid-1800s is a good example of a sound culture. The Puritans are probably the best example in this group.
I would think the vowels used now would lead to Yahweh, having corrected for what is held to be a Masoretic adulteration of the vowels to protect against uttering the unutterable. As you probably know, "Jehovah" was carried forward out of the Reformation by the Radicals who, when they emigrated to the colonies in America, splintered into a number of sects who are at odds with both their Catholic and Protestent ancestry. It appears to me that they use this pronunciation as way of expressing that resentment. Since this date back to antiquity, any modern usage would reflect a quest toward orthodoxy. Evidently that passage was repealed by the 3rd Commandment. That's a very cynical view of society. You seem to be scarred by something. The folks most likely to romanticize primitive life are those who feel empathy for the genocide against the native peoples the world over, wherever troops dislodged them and homesteaders took over their lands. There is huge application of your morality in those events. Those of us who feel solidarity with folks like them across the generations are evidently not among the ones you classify as modernists. Well I think we can say this was the larger kingdom from which the first Israeli people emerged. It incoporated Phoenicia, which is of interest, because here's where we find the roots of El (Elohim) and Asherah. It stands to reason that the use of Elohim in Gen 1:1 is a harkening back to the era when there was a syncretic infusion of Ugaritic into the middle kingdom which seems to have been the seminal cause for the Jewish culture to emerge. It's hard to call Semite-on-Semite conflict racist. I was referring only to the Bible verses that are so phobic about their powerful neighbors. There is a lot of venom for Babylon -- yet they believe they originated in one of its citadels, Ur. They completely invented a nightmare in Egypt. And in the tumult trying to establish themselves they are forever either being attacked, enslaved or under threat of such. The word I used was xenophobia since that's the tone of those passages. In common usage it imparts a reference to primitive cultures. When speaking of religious groups such as your we tend to use the word "sect" or "faction" although I can't tell for sure if those terms apply to the religion you are advocating. No, I was referring to xenophobia in terms of their fear and loathing of their fierce neighbors. There is no question that Roman atrocities in Judaea were horrific. What makes no sense to me is the statement that a whole culture became racist. I thought that's not who we are - I thought we learned long ago not to generalize to a stereotype. Here you are expressing a hard contradiction to what you were previously enshrining as your personal religious "morality". That's ugly and flat wrong. Just the other day I looked up, to see a delivery truck leaving an affluent neighborhood. It was loaded with goods, obviously donations. A sign on the truck said "Jewish Charities". Now the people who gave them those goods away happened to be Jewish. And they knew full well that this would be given freely to needy people regardless of race, religion or color. So here is one family who defies your generalization, which is all it takes to prove it false. What in the world is wrong with you? Gawd. Considering you hate them so much you have no basis for judging anything if the kind. In any case this kind of hate speech is an insult to the intelligence of the good folks at this site. Geez. Take a chill pill. That is the most bizarre combination of bullshit and hate speech I have ever read. You need to be put on the receiving end of some the medicine you're dishing out. What are you, a Klukker? Well since your view of the Torah includes vindicating Hitler and blaming the victims, I'm glad to hear that Jewish folks are not practicing your style of "morality". They were part of the religious law. And no, they have little or no bearing on modern nutritional standards. Many of the restricted foods and food combinations are part of a healthy diet. My point, however, is that this has nothing to do with morality which you confirmed by noting that they were formulated as health codes. By "culture" you seem to mean "religion". Yes, the Greeks got away from virgin sacrifies and leaving babies on Mt Olympus. Is that kind of progress what you meant by modernism? So let me get this straight: they snubbed Zeus, so he came down from Olympus and kicked their asses and that's why they succumbed to the Romans in ca. 150 BCE? I obviously didn't get that memo. Huh? That was at the beginning of the Empire, and it thrived until the Romans defeated them. Some of the Hellenized world continued to thrive long after that. Alexandria was a shrine to scholarship -- still feared by the Arabs nearly a thousand years later. Besides, Plato was an Athenian just a couple of generations ahead of Alexander who is probably the most iconic symbol of the preeminent Greek culture. Like the ones that invented principles of honor, fairness, civil liberties, self-governance and responsible leadership? Other than perpetuating the Old Testament in their readings and teachings, and a couple of rituals, there is very little evidence that Christendom preserved any Hebrew culture at all. Greek culture survived in the many treasures it left behind. There were perpetual Neo-Platonist movements. Greek classics are still an mainstay of higher learning. They may be considered the most influential ideas throughout all of Western history, affecting just about all the great thinkers across the ages. In some respects they were radical shifts away from Christian norms. During the Enlightenment, for example there was the rise of tolerance for the quasi-atheist Deists. So...the Bible deliberately lies to the followers, just to trick them into worshiping God? I think I can accept that explanation. While the women reach for their barf bags, let me point out that since the discovery of Ardipithecus there is reason to believe that protohumans were not alpha-male dominated. In any case, there is no basis for drawing this conclusion since acculturation wipes the instinctual slate clean. Humans are motivated by rewards not recognized by other species, hence the connection to ancestral behaviors is washed out. Something called a personality moves in and takes over. Let me get your horse and buggy ready, Massah. It's a long ride all the way back to the Victorian era. You sound like a person who never took a class in sociology, yet you have reached all these sweeping generalizations about the world. I'm not sure I could assess my 10 ten closest friends and family in regard to what singular force motivates them to be decent people. It would take me at least 10 pages to take them apart and put them back together again. You must be omniscient. Well geez if it's an alpha male there won't be any election. There will just be fur flying and the last guy standing gets the gig. Except that in all of mythology the male is often phallic and not necessarily alpha. In many cases it's merely about fertility and abundance. Besides, the God of the Hebrews doesn't at all fit that model - he is never challenged by any counterpart, never has to prove himself. And anyway the myths and legends are all a hodge-podge any way. There is no central theme like that. The creation myths predate Genesis. There are elements of the Sumerian in the Hebrew, for example. For them the primordial struggle was between a male warrior and a female dragon. It bears almost no resemblance to anything remotely suggesting alpha competition. That's assuming that such a person ever existed, and it places the origins of Judaism in the wrong part of the world. Why would a person in Egypt drag in the Code of Hammurabi, or the Flood Myth from the Epic of Gilgamesh? Besides, there is good reason to believe that no Israelite ever made it farther than Elephantine Island (on the Nile). In any case the references to El (Elohim) the Creator and Asherah the wife of Yahweh appear to be Ugaritic in origin . . . which puts them back in the Levant when the story telling begins. If one man "wrote" Genesis then he would not have left you two versions of the story, one ascribing it to Elohim (Gen 1), and the second ascribing it to Yahweh (Gen 2). That's a very antiquated idea, that Moses wrote the Pentateuch. But it would comport with a writer in Egypt who had never been to the mountains of Turkey where the headwaters of the Tigris-Euphrates don't come into confluence with a river in Ethiopia, as anyone searching for Eden, from Moses' directions, would note. Except when God is the Godhead, "we", who created them in "our" image. That's the other story one writer would not have produced. I think you misunderstood me. I was referring to the origins of pantheons. Everything in nature acquires a divine spirit. You end up with a goddess of the river, a god or goddess of fertility, a goddess of storms, and so on. If each tribe has its own God then there is no point is believing there is one God. Whoa. This was really weird. :bugeye:
Great Old One: Is the following from Lovecraft? He wrote some interesting stories. I remember him writing about gods I never heard of.
If look at statues of Buddha, there is the sitting Buddha, the laughing Buddha, etc. There are hundreds of statues of Buddha in different moods, poses and actions. Groups will often specialize in one his attributes, by worshipping one of the statues. The Catholics have the matron and patron Saints. This specialization is how each group will consider itself the true path (knows lots about this little), while the other path is false (they know little about your statue). The trick is to accept only part of the truth and not the entire truth. This is also done today with politics. It is easier to herd with a smaller piece of the pie. The entire pie tends to lose the crowd. As an example, humans can be happy or sad. Some like to laugh, while others enjoy the blues. Some like to watch feel good stories on TV while others like to watch stories about crime and punishment. Each is part of the human experience, but neither specialty expresses whole truth. Yet each specialty will try to convince others of how good their show is, and maybe how boring the other guys shows are. Humans attempt to specialize into perfection, instead of generalize into completeness. The latter is harder to do since the data field is much larger. Monotheism was an attempt to explain all the data and all the angles with one theory, which is much harder to do, since it involves resolving paradoxes. How can one love and hate the same person at the same time? People will revert back to specialization, since it is easier. It is more manageable to handle only a small piece of the pie instead of the whole pie. I love this but hate that. If we look at political parties how many people can fully see the POV of both parties? Most prefer only one Buddha statue at a time, so to speak. This human nature was also around during the earlier days of religion and is still in effect today. This has a physical basis and is connected to conscious mind using the left brain more than the right. The left brain is differential and will isolate phenomena into specialization. The right brain is more spatial and will attempt to form the 3-D image for completeness. We call it the charisma of faith. Left brainers can't always see this. If you look at the two political parties, moderates are in the middle attempting to resolve the paradoxes of the wider data set, which includes the good data from both parties. These people are often called whishy washy. The hardliners who pick a side are the tough guys, which is driven by over compensation due to partial data. Yet, this stronger dynamics will convince people this is more than the whishy washy of double the data. This repression dynamics is often why the herd is easer to lead to narrow mindedness than to open mindedness.
"Volcano."-Posted by Sorcerer. Or the Moon appearing in the sky (which caused many natural disasters.)
