I like to say things like ‘when I become the ruler of the Universe’…but, really, if I ever became that, I would pluck Thomas Sowell out and make him do the actual ruler. Because he is that awesome.
I would place Thomas Sowell along with Socrates, Thomas Aquinas, Richard Feynman, Thomas Payne and, well, all the giants that advanced humanity. The only difference between him and them is that he is still alive, able to share his wisdom with us.
As we enter the story, Hera is the Queen Goddess – but her husband , Zeus, is habitually with other women.
This is not so much a function of who Zeus is, as it is a by-product of fusing Ancient Greek’s mythology with their conquered peoples, matching their head god with Zeus to facilitate their integration into the Hellenic culture, but having the previous head queen goddess left over.
‘Obviously’, these were women Zeus had had affairs with, which challenged Hera’s position in the pantheon of deities.
OK, nasty but…
She had to keep her position, both as a goddess and as the queen of the Gods, being the wife of Zeus.
So, Hera had to ‘fight back’ to remain who she was.
I suspect that this is where this aspect of Hera, as the patron of wronged women, came from.
Regardless, Hera was the ultimate step-mother-from hell.
Is it really coincidence that her step-son was the ultimate masculine embodiment?
When the Ancient Greeks would conquer another peoples, they would claim that their main God, the head of their pantheon, is just another manifestation of the Greek head god, Zeus (Romanized as Jupiter), so, there really is not that much of a difference between them. They all worship the same capricious head god – this time, this side won, but if Zeus (by any other name) wanted, the other side would have won.
No shame in defeat – God’s did it. A way to ‘save face’…
We may not appreciate this now in our time, but, that is an extremely important aspect of integrating the defeated peoples’ culture into the winning one in a positive, constructive manner.
It seems that the Ancient Greeks understood (knowingly or not) that destroying a conquered culture’s ‘origin myth’ is devastating, for – what we now know – is a few generations.
So, whether by instinct, knowledge or wisdom, the Ancient Greeks avoided that.
Instead of denigrating the defeated peoples’ mythology, they went out of their way to graft it on to their own mythology, thereby giving the conquered peoples’ a channel to integrate into the Greek culture. This benefited both: new blood, new ideas – but within the same overarching cultural framework that is necessary to hold a society together.
Which makes ‘integrating’ the various ‘goddess queens’ that much more difficult…(coming next)
Ancient Greeks did not see Gods in the same way most modern religions conceive of them: perfect and all knowing and all powerful and (sometimes) all benevolent. Rather, they saw them as larger-than-life figures who may have had special powers, but they also each possessed very human qualities and very human failings.
Ancient Greek Gods are all manifestations of human archetypes, iconic illustrations of human nature. Perhaps the very essence of human nature.
Aphrodite (Romanized as Venus) is the goddess of beauty, love and, frankly, frivolity and vanity. She is married to Hephaestus (Romanized as Vulcan) who is the ugly and deformed god of smithing, metalwork, craftsmanship and fire. He is known to make the most beautiful jewelry (as well as very useful tools) which Aphrodite loves, rather loving him, so she is constantly unfaithful to him.
In modern terms, Aphrodite would be the cheating trophy wife and Hephaestus would be the physically inferior uber-rich man who overlooks his wife’s infidelity, because he knows she will always return to him and that is enough.
We all know modern day couples like that!
Aside: Aphrodite’s most common lover is said to be Aries (Romanized as Mars), the God of War, the ultimate warrior. This is an ancient encapsulation of the archetype of ‘the prostitute and the soldier’: Hers is the personification of femininity without a goal beyond sexuality, his is the personification of brutal masculinity without a goal beyond obeying orders of your superior commanders.
And, yes, most of us have also known couples like that.
Let’s consider Athena (Romanized as Minerva) who is the goddess of wisdom, war and crafts. Wisdom and wars – that makes sense: she is the personification of the wisdom when to enter into a war. She is not the goddess of combat, the way Aries is: she is the one whose wisdom directs whether Aries ought to be unleashed or not.
Yet, Athena’s wisdom was shadowed by her jealousy when her mastery of crafts had been questioned. A young woman named Arachne said she could weave better that Athena, so, Athena showed up for the challenge with her weaving loom and when it looked like Arachne was going to win, Athena – in a fit of jealousy – turned Arachne into a spider who can only weave webs.
Aside: I think it is ironic that I paid for a big part of my University education by designing one-of-a-knit-ware (at really, really high prices) – and I am rather very arachnophobic – or is it really ‘Arachne-phobia’?
Charity is good – just like Shakespeare spoke of mercy (paraphrasing): it blesses him who receives it as well as him who provides it.
Yet, in order for this to be true, it needs to be personal: one person choses to help another, one way or another.
When governments get involved – we are taking on a whole new thing.
Governments decide who is to ‘receive funds’ and who is to ‘surrender funds’ – you cannot give someone money without first taking it from someone else. Governments have a monopoly on taking money from some individuals (taxes) and they are permitted to use force to extract these funds.
Nay, they have a monopoly on violence to extract taxes.
These are collected from all citizens, willing or not. (We shall focus on the ‘not’ ones in just a bit.)
Then, a portion of these tax-collected funds are given out to people who do not work (cannot or are not willing to – sad, but irrelevant to the point of my argument).
So, some people work without compensation (taxes taken away) for a period of time (part of the year) only to support the lifestyle of other people who do not work.
In other words: people who are on welfare are ‘slave owners’ who do not need to work yet have their living needs provided for by other people who do work, but who would not support them if it were not for the threat of force (in this case, by the tax collecting governments).
If working/doing things for the benefit of others under the threat of force is not THE definition of ‘slavery’, then I do not know what is: and I would like your input – please correct me if I am wrong!
Dr. James Lindsay is a Mathematician who, along with friends Helen Pluckrose and Dr. Peter Boghossian noticed that there was a marked lack of rigour and scientific method in highly regarded, peer-reviewed papers published on a particular part of the Social Sciences, derogatorily referred to a Grievance Studies. To see if they were correct, they wrote a number of bogus papers with very poor scientific methods and a lot of popular buzzwords and claims of the Grievance Studies.
Surprise surprise, their papers (like how dog-owners react to male-on-female humping vs male-on-male humping in dog parks and how these reactions ‘prove’ inherent sexism in our culture) began to be published and acclaimed. I actually remember some of these papers being papers being touted in mainstream media (MSM) and rolling my eyes – and it is a sad commentary that so many people accepted them as ‘science’ because they were ‘peer-reviewed’…because none of us quite realized that the ‘peers’ doing the ‘reviewing’ were not scientists but ideologues.
When what they thought were transparently fake and somewhat satirical papers began to be cited and nominated for scientific excellence awards, the trio pulled the plug on the project and revealed what they had done.
Perhaps some of my details of the story are fuzzy by the flow of time, but the major point remains.
Since then Dr. Lindsay has taken a deep dive into the world of Grievance Studies and what were the underlying principles that let to them and their open disdain in rejecting the scientific method and instead treating purely political screeds as ‘science’. He has gone to many primary sources and slugged through them, as well as some excellent analyst like Maj. Stephen Coughlin of Unconstrained Analytics. Here is one of Stephen Coughlin’s ‘briefs’:
Winston Marshall prides himself on being a banjo player in some band, but had to quit because he liked a book written by a journalist who was seriously injured by Antifa. Now, he has a wildly successful program here he interviews the greatest thinkers of our times and helps unlock the complexity of their arguments to those of us just learning about the topic can follow with ease – but they are complex topics.
For example, in the video below, James Lindsay and Winston Marshall delve into what is wokism (best explanation so far is that it is Critical Constructionist Epistemology, where the ‘way of knowing’ is constructed on the foundation of the Critical Theory as evolved from the original Frankfurt School teachings – yes, big words – but they really explain them) and the difference between the ‘woke right’ and the ‘woke left’ as well as the different flavours of conservatism and leftism/progressivism in our current political milieu and how the second coming of Donald Trump to the Presidency disrupts how the various groups are evolving.
It is only an hour-and-a-bit long, but is is distilled information that is made comprehensible and Winston Marshall asks all the questions I would have asked for clarification when the wording got too technical.
Warning: James Lindsay – in any of his videos/podcasts/interviews will stretch your mind. But, Winston Marshall is such a skilled interviewer, he makes it enjoyable.
So, please, do enjoy this video:
This is a bit of a technical – is that the right term? – musing.
Monotheism is the belief that there is only one God.
Monolatry is the worship of only one God to the exclusion of all the others.
It is my proposition that Abrahamic religions are all a form of Monolatry and not at all Monotheism.
Abrahamic religions typically include Judaism, Christianity and Islam. There may be other off-shoots, but these three are the big ones – three of the main world religions.
So, let’s start at the beginning:
Jews made a pact with a specific God, Jehova: they will worship him exclusively and he will make them prosperous.
That is actually in the Ten Commandments: Thou shall have no other Gods before me.
OK – that clearly defines that the primary loyalty is to this particular God, but does not in any way state that this is the only God, nor does it prohibit a secondary worship of any other God(s).
In other words, it is a statement of loyalty. It is in no way a declaration of monotheism.
Islam is a bit stickier, but, please, do bear with me.
Laat and her sisters were, at one point, declared by Mohammed to be the daughters of Allah – Satanic verses and all that. So, some people argue that these verses may not have been dictated to Mohammed by Satan because he did not originally recognize any difference between these verses and the verses dictated to him by the Angel messenger of Allah.
Very controversial, so, let’s set it aside.
It has been decades since I have studied this and the easily accessible links are, well, burried too deep. But, there is a point in The Sunnah where Mohammed is said to have said that ‘Christians and Jews worship the same God – WE worship the other one’.
That is why they differentiate themselves, having a beard without a mustache, men sitting down to pee and a host of other ways to differentiate Muslims from Christians and Jews.
And this states that Islam (even if we omit the daughters of Allah) is not Monotheism but, at least, Duotheism.
Of course, I do acknowledge that there may, indeed , be monotheistic religions.
Sikhism comes to mind – but, Sikhism is an artificial religion.
It arose as Muslim armies were invading Hindu India. The king who ruled the kingdom which turned out to be a buffer-state between the Islamic invasion and the Hindu kingdoms. Having learned that Muslims would not kill monotheists, he took drastic action: he went on a hunger strike.
At the time, it was the custom of Hindu men in this kingdom to wear a ‘string’, a thin sashe, over one shoulder (think Miss Universe sashe type thing, but thinner). This king sat on one platform of a balance scale, fasting, until men of his kingdom placed their sashes on the other platform of the scale to signal they had rejected Hinduism and accepted monotheistic Sikhism…he sat there, fasting, until the weight of the sashes balanced his own.
Then, they could oppose the Muslim invaders as Monotheists and earn better terms: this was a political move, a loyalty test, and in no way a religious monotheistic belief system.
Source: I went to my local Gurdwara and let the elders teach me the history of their faith.
In conclusion: all Abrahamic faiths are all forms of monolatry, NOT monotheism. Sikhism is a political ideology in its inception, not a religious one.
I do not know of any religions that seek the nomicker ‘monotheistic’ whose doctrine actually supports this claim. If you know of some, please, do let me know and I will research it and repot back to you.
Please, do let me know your thoughts!
Act! For Canada’s Ottawa chapter brought the iconic Dr. Jordan Peterson to speak at the main branch of the Ottawa Library.
And, luckily, we got Mrs. Tammy Peterson (a powerful intellect and personality in her own right) to give us a glimpse into how their lives have been altered since Dr. Peterson’s pro-free-speech rant went viral in 2016:
Q&A videos to come as they are published.
For the record: Dr. Peterson WILL go down in the history books as THE Socrates/Aristotle/St. Thomas of Aquinas/Jan Hus/Gogol/Jung/Nietzsche+++ of our era – all rolled into one.
Just saying…
…but history will prove me right.
He will have turned out to be THE most influential thinker of our era. That much I am certain about.
Sorry that this has to come as a post: but, it would appear that due to WordPress’s most excellent latest updates, my response to POD’s comment is too long to post as a comment.
I guess I am just a little bit too verbose…but I hate being misunderstood, so I had to reply in some length.
The comment by Peter O’Donnel is here.
My reply is below:
Thank you, Peter, for the long and well thought out reply.
Let me take things in order:
It seems to me that Christianity stopped committing atrocities whenever it became separated from actual real, hands-on political power. I suspect that this will be true of all religions, secular (non-theistic) as well as theistic: it is the real-world power combined with a firm and unshakable belief that one is not just correct, but ‘absolutely right’ that produces tyranny.
Since this piece focuses on Christians forming what they hope will be a religious terrorist organization, I naturally focused on Christianity. That, plus Christianity martyred more of my family than any other doctrine – so it’s personal. Of course Communism and Islam are greater threats now than Christianity has been in the 20th century, but my point was that regardless of which religion it is, it can and will be used by some to usurp power over others. If we let them.
As for Jesus whispering similar things to people – I understand your belief in this, but there have been many wars between Christian sects all of whom truly and honestly believed to have Jesus’s true message while the other guys were idiots who were wrong. Just consider the difference between Catholics and Evangelicals on the topic of evolution: Catholics assert it is the means through which the various species were created by God while Evangelicals claim it is Devil’s teachings…
Solzhenitsyn: good book, the Gulag Archipelago. However, Solzhenitsyn himself longed for a totalitarian state himself – he just wanted the tyrant to be the Russian Orthodox Church instead of the Bolsheviks…which is really much the same thing.
As for Buddha: he was not so much enlightened as cowardly. He was in the perfect position to alleviate the suffering of the common folk, being a crown prince and all that. Instead he went and sulked in a cave….and had the nerve to accept food from the poorest of the poor, who thought it was their duty to feed him even if it meant their own children starved. Yeah, great spiritual enlightening there!
And before you go on about the accomplishments of monks who meditate: please consider their diet and that their ‘enlightened meditation’ perfectly fits the symptoms of brain damage due to malnutrition.
I would not go looking for spiritual advice there!
As for God being the foundation of morality. I did not intend to say that since God does not exist, it cannot be the foundation of morality.
I do not know whether god(s) exist or not or how we would define them. I suppose I am very much an ignostic. As such, I would need a clear definition, because different people mean different things when they say ‘God’ – and without knowing what they mean, I cannot possibly hold an opinion, much less knowledge, regarding their existence. (Having said this, I find little to no evidence that supports the existence of Bible-definined deity, and consider monotheism to be the least credible of all the theological positions – but that is not the point here.)
What I was referring to is the continued assertion by Christian apologists that morality is whatever their God defines it to be. So, if God commands genocide, then genocide is the moral thing to do. If selling your daughter to her rapist for 40 silver pieces is what God says is the moral thing to do, then that is indeed the ‘moral’ thing to do.
In other words, many Christians argue that without God, there can be no morality.
Because ‘morality’ is obeying anything and everything that God commands.
I hold the diametrically opposite view: ‘obedience’ to morality dictated from the outside (be it from a parent or God or teapot or whatever else) is exactly that. Obedience.
And obedience, in my never-humble-opinion, precludes morality.
Morality is making decisions about what is right and wrong, what is good, bad or evil. Weighing the consequences of one’s actions – then choosing what to do and living with it. Morality is reasoning from the first principle of self-ownership and deriving the least incorrect course of action therefrom.
Morality is choosing one’s actions and accepting the responsibilities thereof.
Without this decision making process, without internal locust of decision-making, there is no ‘morality’ – only obedience.
After all, how can you be held responsible for following someone else’s rules?
So, to my way of thinking, ‘obeying the word of God’ is abdicating ‘morality’ in favour of ‘obedience’.
Because doing the right thing for the wrong reason does not make you ‘moral’….it makes you, at best, ‘accidentally right’. Because you did not make the choice as to what the moral course of action would be – you simply obeyed the what somebody else decided is the moral course of action.
Sorry to go into this in so much detail, but as I did not make my position clear in the original post, I want to make sure to be more clear in my reply.
To recap: I am not saying that morality cannot come from God since God does not exist: I am saying that obeying somebody else’s rules about what is or is not moral is not morality itself, it is simply obedience because the locust of decision-making about what is or is not moral is external to one-self. And I am perfectly aware that many religious people consider ‘morality’ to be ‘obeying God’s commands’ because they believe they are owned by God (in one manner or another). I acknowledge their belief, but disagree with them. Obedience is not ‘morality’ – or every puppy would be the most ‘moral’ creature in the world!
Which brings me to Mother effing Theresa.
Just this past weekend, I had a huge fight with a self-defined Christian apologist about Mother effing Theresa!
He had driven her around Montreal for a week and thought the sun shone from her behind!
Of course, being a fact-focused person, I know better than to buy in to the hollow propaganda about this profoundly evil person, who fetishized the suffering of others and maximized it in order to bring about her own salvation. Her clinics did not differentiate between curable and incurable patients and used unsterilized needles for all…as well as denying even child-patients life-saving medical care and all painkillers….’cause, suffering would bring them closer to Jesus!
If the evil bitch Agnes (self-called Mother Theresa, which in itself should be a hint as she was NOT a mother and it is deeply immoral of her to usurp that noble title) is your example of the good things Jesus whispers to people, then you confirm my suspicion that all religions are, at their core, evil incarnate. And that to get good people to commit evil deeds, all you need is religion….
Jesus himself: perhaps we can leave discussion of the Nazarene and his teachings for another day…
As for giving God a chance: I rather like Thor…and Tyr…and Hospodin and Baba Maja. Have you given them a chance?
Xanthippa's Chamberpot 