9/11 Plus Fifteen

Fifteen years ago today, near three thousand of our fellow Americans, living, breathing, sentient beings with children and mortgages, with lovers and dreams, were reduced to burnt dust in the rubble of the Looming Towers, at the Pentagon and in a lonely field in Pennsylvania.

They were not killed by ignorance or poverty or because “they hate our freedoms”. They were murdered by Faith. Faith in unseen gods, in invisible paradises, in the ancient fairy tales of nomadic desert tribes abutting hydraulic despotisms, weaving  finely spun myths of creation, sacrifice, redemption and eternal life. Faith caused 9/11.

Oh how easy for us, children of the West, to scoff at the outlandish, misogynistic beliefs of the nineteen “holy warriors”, the shaving of their body hair, the 72 virgins awaiting each assassin, the eerie willingness of these highly educated sons of affluent families to viciously slaughter and die for lurid storybook endings in the happily ever after.

But, were not tens of thousands burnt at the stake in just Madrid’s main square over the course of the Holy Inquisition? Were not some 70,000 Protestant French Huguenots suddenly massacred on cue by their most Christian neighbors on the Feast Day of St. Bartholomew in 1572?  Did not all Europe’s Catholic and Protestant armies slaughter and starve to death one third of the entire German people in the horrible war of 1618 –1648, fought over whether the Holy Father or the Holy Bible was inerrant, over whether Communion wafers were truly, truly the very flesh of the Living Lord, or just a symbol of his gory sacrifice? And did not our German cousins, in living memory, grind six million unarmed men, women and children into wet mud in the crematoria of Central Europe because of their peculiar pagan faith in an omniscient Fuhrer?

Chosen People, Elect of the Lord, Master Race, Party of God, on and on, faith in fanciful tales, embellished and handed down for a hundred generations. Faith in omnipotent Fathers and bright Forevers; the lies used by priests, preachers and politicians, by imams and rabbis, since the first witch doctor sought sway over his fellows in a cave at the dawn of our species.

Faith, its arrogant certainties, and its absolute moral imperatives caused 9/11. Faith kills.

A New Insight

Deep waters have always troubled the human imagination. Even with all of our modern technology, whole airliners vanish into them. Hundreds, thousands sometimes, who dare venture out on them, perish in the cold slippery darkness, in minutes. To our ancestors several millennia ago, they were really bad news, often filled with unspeakable monsters. To the point that even the imaginative humans who came up with our ancient creation myths shied away from explaining just where the ocean depths had come from. 

There are now, in this summer of 2014, literally 101 creation stories out on Wikipedia, from Native American to South Asian to Chinese to Norse, on and on ¹ (please see links in list of references below). Most are good fun to read on a Saturday afternoon, with some more than a tad creepy, and a few downright icky. But let’s focus on our own. The one Hebrews wrote down around 600 BC, that Christians and Muslims adopted centuries later, and still believe in to this day.²  Remember it reads right to left….

בְּרֵאשִׁית, בָּרָא אֱלֹהִים, אֵת הַשָּׁמַיִם, וְאֵת

“Bereishit Bara Elohim…” it begins.

Okay, let’s do switch to the familiar and moving English translation ordered up by the otherwise very problematic James I, King of Great Britain and Ireland:

"In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was without form and void, and darkness was over the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters. And God said, ‘Let there be light,’ and there was light." ³

So Genesis tells us that God created the Heavens and the Earth and the Light, but not the Waters. How come? Alas, because the Hebrew creation story is a derivation, way condensed - a one god, PG rated version of the far more exciting, complex and lurid Babylonian creation story that had been set down in writing about eight hundred years earlier, a bit further north, in what is modern day Iraq.⁴ And which the Babylonians had in turn embroidered from the world view of the Sumerian civilization that existed thousands of years earlier in the same spot.⁵

“First was the primeval sea. Nothing is said of its origin or birth, and it is not unlikely that the Sumerians conceived it as having existed eternally. Heaven and earth were conceived by the Sumerians as the created products of the primeval sea”. 

Meantime, over in Egypt also :

“They all held that the world had arisen out of the lifeless waters of chaos, called Nu.” ⁶

We know now of course that water, abundant on the surface of the Earth, is actually very rare in the universe, and far from being lifeless, is the very foundation of all living organisms.

All the most popular creation stories do involve something happening or being done to create order out of chaos. This is understandable, given the limited perspective our ancestors had as a consequence of their puny technological abilities.

It is very likely that you have seen this intriguing image known as Rubin’s Vase.⁷

The idea that reality is the product of some agent creating order out of chaos is analogous to seeing only one of the two images in the drawing. With modern science in tow, we must now open our minds to the other image there, the one that we have doggedly refused to see for so very long.

That the Big Bang was a glitch in the Perfection of the Nothing.

Before that event, before time and space and gravity existed, before all the variations of matter, anti-matter, energy, dark energy, weak force, strong force, sprouted like weeds, all was in harmony, perfectly balanced and non-existent.

Everything we know, from galaxies to icebergs to sharks to humans to microbes to molecules, and on down to the utterly strange world of the sub-atomic, is the weird and wasteful, hideously complex, but un-designed and unplanned spawn - of some sort of unwelcome disturbance.

Why is it important to think about all this, in this different manner?

Because a creation narrative is the most pervasive influence on how humans attempt to order and make sense of their lives in a given culture. Those of us, who no longer live under primitive conditions, should lead the way in shedding the beliefs of our primitive ancestors.

Copernicus began our modern world in 1543, with his astronomical book showing that the Earth was not the center of the solar system.⁸ After some five centuries, it’s time now to turn the page to new thinking, clearer beliefs and better behavior based on an entirely different paradigm of who and what we are.  

Unencumbered by the fanatical actions, mystical mumbo jumbo, dark fears and utopian fantasies that were, and are still being engendered by our forefathers’ convoluted creation narratives.

We can and should seek to make the best of our situation, accepting that:

None of This is Supposed to be Here. 

And as with any disturbance, it will eventually go away, and the Perfection of the Nothing will be restored.

Because, yes, it all is “Only for Now”. ⁹

List of References

1   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_creation_myths

2    http://www.mechon-mamre.org/p/pt/pt0101.htm

3   http://www.bartleby.com/108/01/1.html

4   http://www.gly.uga.edu/railsback/CS/CSMarduk.html

5   http://www.sacred-texts.com/ane/sum/sum07.htm#page_40

6   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_Egyptian_creation_myths

7   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubin_vase

8   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_revolutionibus_orbium_coelestium

9   http://www.songlyrics.com/avenue-q/for-now-lyrics/

Note to the grammatically fastidious reader – the writer has elected to use “logical” punctuation style for quotes.

http://www.slate.com/articles/life/the_good_word/2011/05/the_rise_of_logical_punctuation.html

The Winds of November

On November 10, 1975 an early winter storm on Lake Superior sank the ore carrier Edmund Fitzgerald with the loss of the entire crew of 29. The song immortalizing this tragedy plaintively asks “Does anyone know where the love of God goes…when the gales of November come early”? Recently, the lead story on CNN.com noted “In the aftermath of Typhoon Haiyan, survivors are asking how God could let such a calamity befall their community”. Same question was asked all over Europe in 1755 when Lisbon was leveled by an earthquake with tsunami and then a city wide fire on November 1, cascading disasters in which tens of thousands died. Nine years ago the December 26, 2004 tsunami in the Indian Ocean caused 230,000 deaths.

The 2004 calamity slaughtered Buddhist, Christian, Hindu and Muslim with scrupulous impartiality in the fourteen countries it afflicted. The leaders of these assorted flavors of belief were quick to roll out their usual and very different explanations for the calamity: divine retribution for sin, bad karma, belief in the wrong idols, the eating of cows, the eating of pigs, evil past lives, and that old chestnut most popular in our Western chunk of the world - that an omnipotent, merciful God works in mysterious ways, but….but, no matter, we’ll get to understand it all, when we meet our Maker in the afterlife.

It is hard for us living in cities with noticeable air pollution and with awful “light pollution” at night to appreciate that we have lost the wonder of a truly dark sky. If you have had the good fortune to go out West, far from a city on a clear night, it is a breathtaking view of thousands of stars and the Milky Way.

In the distant past, our earliest ancestors looked up from their miserable lot at the then crystalline night skies, and perceiving an eternal and stately order up above, imagined that a being or beings much like themselves, only powerful and immortal, just had be in charge of it all - somewhere out there. Being(s) who would share their immortality with their devotees, if the faithful but stayed on their good side with pyramids, prayers, chants and sacrificial victims.

Medieval astronomers, clinging stoutly to the ancient belief that the Earth was at the center of an unchanging universe, imagined convoluted schemes of spheres rotating within spheres to square their increasingly accurate nightly observations of the planets’ erratic motions with their totally wrong premise.

Now, looking outward with modern telescopes, we see an incomprehensibly vast and ancient universe of colliding galaxies, voracious black holes, dark matter, and frozen moons. We learn from nuclear physicists that the very minerals in our flesh could only have been forged in the monstrous heat of dying stellar giants that went supernova, billions of years ago. Looking inward, modern medicine discovers that a stumbling stew of haywire proteins, not divine wrath, is the cause of afflictions such as AIDS, arthritis and Alzheimer’s, of cancer and cholera.

Most of us instinctively shrink in childlike terror from the frightening abyss that these insightful observations inexorably lead us to: That reality is random, and Earth is one place where a one in a zillion long shot has panned out; where a race of sighted, information retaining, language capable animals has evolved out of the universal muck and chaos.

But once you come to accept that we are very much alone in a cold, uncaring cosmos, you can then cease asking the pointless “Why” about tornadoes, typhoons, temblors and tsunamis, and accept that all meaning and purpose, all good and evil, reside solely inside the neurons of our brains. That each of us has but one brief life to live. And act on the fact that we frail, deeply flawed human beings, otherwise mere random foam on a chaotic quantum ocean, have in our hearts, and with our hands, the sole power to create and nurture all the love in the world.

9/11 Plus 12

Twelve years ago today, near three thousand of our fellow Americans, living, breathing, sentient beings with children and mortgages, with lovers and dreams, were reduced to burnt dust in the rubble of the Looming Towers. They were not killed by ignorance or poverty or because “they hate our freedoms”. They were murdered by Faith. Faith in unseen gods, in invisible paradises, in the ancient fairy tales of nomadic desert tribes abutting hydraulic despotisms, weaving  finely spun myths of creation, sacrifice, redemption and eternal life. Faith caused 9/11.

Oh how easy for us, children of the West, to scoff at the outlandish, misogynistic beliefs of the nineteen “holy warriors”, the shaving of their body hair, the 72 virgins awaiting each assassin, the eerie willingness of these highly educated sons of affluent families to viciously slaughter and die for lurid storybook endings in the happily ever after.

But, were not tens of thousands burnt at the stake in just Madrid’s main square over the course of the Holy Inquisition? Were not some 70,000 Protestant French Huguenots suddenly massacred on cue by their most Christian neighbors on the Feast Day of St. Bartholomew in 1572?  Did not all Europe’s Catholic and Protestant armies slaughter and starve to death one third of the entire German people in the horrible war of 1618 –1648, fought over whether the Holy Father or the Holy Bible was inerrant, over whether Communion wafers were truly, truly the very flesh of the Living Lord, or just a symbol of his gory sacrifice? And did not our German cousins, in living memory, grind six million unarmed men, women and children into wet mud in the crematoria of Central Europe because of their peculiar pagan faith in an omniscient Fuhrer?

Chosen People, Elect of the Lord, Master Race, Party of God, on and on, faith in fanciful tales, embellished and handed down for a hundred generations. Faith in omnipotent Fathers and bright Forevers; the lies used by priests, preachers and politicians, by imams and rabbis, since the first witch doctor sought sway over his fellows in a cave at the dawn of our species.

Faith, its arrogant certainties, and its absolute moral imperatives caused 9/11. Faith kills.