Posted on 11/30/2001 7:07:14 PM PST by medved
You would assume that Islam was a newer kind of religion than Christianity, since it post dates Christianity by about 600 years. Nonetheless, it turns out that Islam is actually an example of an older kind of religion, which had largely died out during the first two or three centuries of Christianity.
Unlike Judaeism and normal kinds of Christianity, Islam involves a claim of prophesy in our own age. Now, when I say "our own age" here, I do not mean the last century versus the previous 10, or the last two centuries versus the previous 5 or anything like that at all. Here the term "ages" is used much as Hesiod and Ovid used it, to differentiate the antediluvian age (prior to the flood), the age from the flood to the time of Exodus, from Exodus to the age of Jewish prophets and the Trojan war, from that time to Christ, and from the time of Christ to our own time.
There is in fact one other example of a religion which depends upon a claim of prophesy in our own age, i.e. the Church of Jesus Christ of Later Day Saints. With all due respect (Mormons are good people, they are Christians, and their social organization is entirely commendable), the question as to how well the claim of prophesy has been borne out over the years cannot be answered in a way which is flattering to the religion's founder.
What about Islam then? Is it possible that Joseph Smith blew it, but that somehow or other, Muhammed got it right, or could it be the case that there is no such thing as prophesy in our own age? That in fact turns out to be the case, albeit demonstrating this is somewhat longwinded.
Ancient literature described a number of things which we do not see in our present world, including:
JOS 10:11 And it came to pass, as they fled from before Israel, and were in the going down to Bethhoron, that the LORD cast down great stones from heaven upon them unto Azekah, and they died: they were more which died with hailstones than they whom the children of Israel slew with the sword.etc. In other words, the kinds of things Velikovsky wrote about.
Hypnotism and schizophrenia, which still exist, are also remnants of the antique paradigm for the use of the human mind.
Prophesy originally involved a trance state, and the prophet attempting to join his mind to that of God in order to know God's intentions, or what he would have us do. The OT prophets speak of "visions", and prophets of a somewhat later time came to be like the Greek oracles in that they did not recall what they had said during the trance. Seeing into the future was a fringe benefit of joining ones mind to the mind of God, presumably since God exists outside our notion of time, but was not the main point of the whole deal.
There is no essential claim of prophesy in Christianity. Christianity in its most basic sense amounts to a claim that God came to this Earth in the person of Christ, to instruct men in proper conduct. Moreover, there is reason to believe that Christianity marks a turning away from older religious practices, based upon things like oracles, prophets, idolatry etc. etc., and amounts to a more rational basis for religion.
There are two starting points for understanding this ancient paradigm of the human mind. One is a curious book titled "The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind" by a psychology professor at Princeton named Julian Jaynes. Nobody can easily remember a title like that but if you tell the folks at Borders or Barnes/Noble that you need a copy of Jaynes' "Origin of Consciousness", they'll get one for you. The second starting point is a serious of pamphlets written by Al DeGrazia and Hugh Crossthwaite on the general topic of electrostatic phenomena in ancient times, and the role they played in antique religious practices. Those works I have in PDF form on my own site Click here to download from Bearfabrique. The two, taken together, tell a story.
Jaynes was a classicist and, reading through numerous ancient sources, began to notice the curious absence of decision making which you observe in the Illiad and in basically everything prior to it, i.e. the fact that at every point at which you or I would have to stop to consider how to proceed, the people in these ancient narratives are being told precisely what to do by inner voices, which are described as Gods and godesses.
It began to dawn on Jaynes that what we would call schizophrenia today, hearing voices, was the normal state of affairs in ancient times. He also noticed, in odd places such as Assyrian bass reliefs, references to a particular point in time at which these voices ceased, people were left to their own devices, and the gods and godesses which had formerly guided humanity vanished, so that an Assyrian sculpture might show a king pointing to an empty thrown which his god had vacated:
There are two kinds of crime in the Old Testament, i.e. minor crime such as rape, robbery, and murder, and then your really bad, serious crime such as making up little dolls and idols to worship. Jaynes noted the big, hypnotic eyes which these idols seem to have more often than not:
and it occurred to him that something a lot more serious than just some sort of archaic pop culture was going on. Could it possibly be that these people were really hearing voices emanating from these idols? Not only does that turn out to be the case, but it also turns out that a voice which is inside somebody's head cannot easily be disobeyed, hence such primordial formulations as "to hear and obey" in English, or the verb to obey being a reflexive form of the verb to hear in Russian (slushats/slushatcya).
Now, fighting wars and sacraficing children at the behest of wooden idols is not a formula for success in life and, it is for this reason, i.e. the fact that the tendency to idolatry turned the world into an insane assylum for the thousand or so year period between the flood and the time of the Trojan war, that idolatry is viewed as the ultimate crime in the Old Testament, and the first commandment reads as it does.
I assume that at this point, Jaynes, working at a large university, went to the people in neurophysiology and asked them what, if anything could there be in the human brain which would cause people to hear voices.
What they told him was that there is an area on the right side of the human brain which appears to be an analog to the speech center (Wernicke area) on the left side, and a bridge cropssover between the two. This right side analog appears to be like the human appendix and serves no known purpose; nonetheless, when this right side analog to the Wernicke area is stimulated with electrical probes in experiments, subjects more often than not claim to be hearing voices, as real as if you or I were speaking to them.
Jaynes naturally enough surmised that this right side analog area had been in regular use during biblical times, hence his use of the word 'bicameral' to represent the "two chambered" nature of the human mind in antique times.
Now, Jaynes assumed a purely evolutionary model and assumed that all of the phenomena which he described were "auditory hallucinations", and that mankind had simply evolved into a state in which human societies were governed by a well-ordered system of such auditory hallucinations. That is clearly unworkable, since 200 people in a village heeding inner voices would amount to 200 Sons of Sam walking around. To the extent that evolution ever works at all (microevolution) it works by favoring progressively greater levels of functionality. You cannot evolve INTO a disfunctional state, and the world of the Old Testament was intensely disfunctional. Jaynes did not investigate the following possibility: that in an age just prior to the age he studied, i.e. the true antediluvian age, the kinds of phenomena he describes might have amounted to a normal and functional means of communication, and that what we note in most of the OT descriptions are vestiges of a system in an ongoing state of breakdown.
In fact, the word "prophet" only occurs once in Genesis (20:7)in the story of Abraham, which was after the flood. There were no prophets before the flood nor were any needed; men could communicate with the spirit world directly.
That is one problem with Jaynes' analysis. The other is that he does not offer any sort of a believable rationale for the breakdwn of the bicameral system, and the development of the individualized consciousness which we experience today. He vaguely ascribes these massive changes to changing social and cultural conditions, which is not credible simply because the change he describes is an overwhelming biological change. He is claiming that the entire manner in which the human mind and brain are used has totally changed over a period of just a few thousand years and he backs that claim up with massive scholarship.
This is where the works of DeGrazia and Crossthwaite which I mentioned above come in. DeGrazia and Crossthwaite heavily document the fact that many of these phenomena which Jaynes describes as bicameral were also electrostatic phenomena, and you don't really need to be Albert Einstein to put two and two together for four. The basic reality is that the electrostatic nature of the planet itself, vastly stronger just a few thousand years ago than it is now, ENABLED the bicameral phenomena and that, as this archaic electrostatic field broke down, the bicameral phenomena broke down with it and died out.
DeGrazia and Crossthwaite note that the pyramids were basically huge lightning rods, the conductive golden tips of which glowed eternally, the root of the Greek word 'pyramid' being the same 'pyr' which we note in 'pyrotechnics' or 'pyromania', i.e. 'fire'. The ark of the covenant amounted to an exercise in miniaturization of such religious electrotechnics, i.e. a leydon bottle or primitive capacitor, the two golden "cherubims" being electrical conductors:
EXO 37:7 And he made two cherubims of gold, beaten out of one piece made he them, on the two ends of the mercy seat;EXO 37:8 One cherub on the end on this side, and another cherub on the other end on that side: out of the mercy seat made he the cherubims on the two ends thereof.
And then we read things like:
2SA 6:2 And David arose, and went with all the people that were with him from Baale of Judah, to bring up from thence the ark of God, whose name is called by the name of the LORD of hosts that dwelleth between the cherubims.
from which it is pretty obvious what these people were looking at (i.e. what do you see between the two terminals of a capacitor?).
This doe not mean that Moses, Joshua, Solomon, David and all those people were a bunch of ignorant rednecks worshipping an electrical arc; it DOES mean that communication with the spirit world at that time was getting harder. Again, there is no mention of anything like this in Genesis because there was no need for it, particularly before the flood, when communication with the spirit world was believed to be natural and freely available to any and all.
All of these phenomena in fact were associated with static electricity. Hugh Crossthwaite documents the manner in which Greek oracles were located in areas of heightened electrostatic charge (making the job of oracle a somewhat dangerous one):
"Good electrical effects could be obtained on high ground, e.g. Parnassus, Cithaeron, Mount Sinai, etc.. Cithaeron, as well as being the scene of The Bacchae, had below it the town of Erythrae. There is another Erythrae in Asia Minor. Clefts in rock if possible combined with water, as at Delphi, would be helpful. Homer speaks of "rocky Pytho." Such places, together with oak groves, as at Dodona, were likely to be enelysioi, containing Zeus Kataibates, Zeus the sky god who descends in a thunderbolt. One may compare the mysterious flame that burned in Thebes on the tomb of Semele, mother of Dionysus, killed by a thunderbolt from Zeus, and also the fire round the head which did not burn [7]."
Starting around page 300 or so of Origins, Julian Jaynes documents the manner in which all of these kinds of phenomena became progressively more difficult to accomplish and finally broke down. The inner voices first became inconsistent from person to person, and then inconsistent in the mind of the same person, the information obtained from such practices became totally unreliable, and finally people who kept on trying to use their minds this way began to be viewed as we view the occassional throwback like Son of Sam now, i.e. as lunatics, so that the Old Testament is replete with stories of some judge or king driving large numbers of them out of the country or killing them:
SA1 28:3 Now Samuel was dead, and all Israel had lamented him, and buried him in Ramah, even in his own city. And Saul had put away those that had familiar spirits, and the wizards, out of the land.1KI 18:4 For it was so, when Jezebel cut off the prophets of the LORD, that Obadiah took an hundred prophets, and hid them by fifty in a cave, and fed them with bread and water.)
1KI 18:40 And Elijah said unto them, Take the prophets of Baal; let not one of them escape. And they took them: and Elijah brought them down to the brook Kishon, and slew them there.
and, at long last, we read Zechariah describing prophets as unclean spirits, categorizing them as part and parcel of the same thing as idolatry, and advocating that parents kill children who use their minds this way:
ZEC 13:2 And it shall come to pass in that day, saith the LORD of hosts, that I will cut off the names of the idols out of the land, and they shall no more be remembered: and also I will cause the prophets and the unclean spirit to pass out of the land.ZEC 13:3 And it shall come to pass, that when any shall yet prophesy, then his father and his mother that begat him shall say unto him, Thou shalt not live; for thou speakest lies in the name of the LORD: and his father and his mother that begat him shall thrust him through when he prophesieth.
ZEC 13:4 And it shall come to pass in that day, that the prophets shall be ashamed every one of his vision, when he hath prophesied; neither shall they wear a rough garment to deceive:
Lisa Beth Liel, a very serious scholar and expert in Hebrew language and biblical antiquities, informs me that at the time of Zechariah, the Jewish council asked the Lord to lift the curse of idolatry from the world and that he did, but that they lost prophecy at the same time. I interpret this to mean that, with the final breakdown of the antique electrostatic fields, all such phenomena finally vanished.
All of that was several hundred years before Christ. Remember I said that the explaination of the problems with claims of prophesy within our own age was longwinded, but that's basically it. There are no prophets in our age. We know God and the spirit world only through faith and what we know of history, and that's about it.
There's a lot of BS in the world, isn't there? Not only is islam not peace, but it isn't even based on anything which is even possible.
Sounds like regular old hail, not meteorites. In the American midwest there are, every so often, hailstorms which drop 2 or 3 lb (yes, pound) balls of ice, much bigger than what we usually see which is under an inch; were this area heavily populated with tent-dwellers, a lot of folks would die from the things. Here, they just level the crops and womp the occasional steer.
As for the rest... well, pretty weird.
That's pretty much the way I see it.
Okay, one more time:
THE REAL TRUTH ABOUT ISLAM - Some Basic Islamic Beliefs:
1) Belief in God: Muslims believe in one, unique, incomparable God, Who has no son nor partner, and that none has the right to be worshipped but Him alone. He is the true God, and every other deity is false. He has the most magnificent names and sublime perfect attributes. No one shares His divinity, nor His attributes. In the Quran, God describes Himself:
Say, He is God, the One. God, to Whom the creatures turn for their needs. He begets not, nor was He begotten, and there is none like Him.(Quran, 112:1-4)
No one has the right to be invoked, supplicated, prayed to, or shown any act of worship, but God alone. God alone is the Almighty, the Creator, the Sovereign, and the Sustainer of everything in the whole universe.
He manages all affairs. He stands in need of none of His creatures, and all His creatures depend on Him for all that they need. He is the All-Hearing, the All-Seeing, and the All-Knowing. In a perfect manner, His knowledge encompasses all things, the open and the secret, and the public and the private. He knows what has happened, what will happen, and how it will happen. No affair occurs in the whole world except by His will. Whatever He wills is, and whatever He does not will is not and will never be. His will is above the will of all the creatures. He has power over all things, and He is able to do everything. He is the Most Gracious, the Most Merciful, and the Most Beneficent.
In one of the sayings of the Prophet Muhammad , we are told that God is more merciful to His creatures than a mother to her child.
God is far removed from injustice and tyranny. He is All-Wise in all of His actions and decrees. If someone wants something from God, he or she can ask God directly without asking anyone else to intercede with God for him or her.
God is not Jesus, and Jesus is not God. Even Jesus himself rejected this.
God has said in the Quran: Indeed, they have disbelieved who have said, God is the Messiah (Jesus), son of Mary. The Messiah said, Children of Israel, worship God, my Lord and your Lord. Whoever associates partners in worship with God, then God has forbidden Paradise for him, and his home is the Fire (Hell). For the wrongdoers, there will be no helpers.(Quran, 5:72)
God is not a trinity. God has said in the Quran:
Indeed, they disbelieve who say, God is the third of three (in a trinity), when there is no god but one God. If they desist not from what they say, truly, a painful punishment will befall the disbelievers among them. Would they not rather repent to God and ask His forgiveness? For God is Oft-Forgiving, Most Merciful. The Messiah (Jesus), son of Mary, was no more than a messenger... (Quran, 5:73-75)
Islam rejects that God rested on the seventh day of the creation, that He wrestled with one of His angels, that He is an envious plotter against mankind, or that He is incarnate in any human being.
Islam also rejects the attribution of any human form to God. All of these are considered blasphemous. God is the Exalted. He is far removed from every imperfection. He never becomes weary. He does not become drowsy nor does he sleep.
The Arabic word Allah means God (the one and only true God who created the whole universe). This word Allah is a name for God, which is used by Arabic speakers, both Arab Muslims and Arab Christians. This word cannot be used to designate anything other than the one true God. The Arabic word Allah occurs in the Quran more than 2150 times. In Aramaic, a language related closely to Arabic and the language that Jesus habitually spoke, God is also referred to as Allah.
2) Belief in the Angels: Muslims believe in the existence of the angels and that they are honored creatures. The angels worship God alone, obey Him, and act only by His command. Among the angels is Gabriel, who brought down the Quran to Muhammad.
3) Belief in God's Revealed Books: Muslims believe that God revealed books to His messengers as proof for mankind and as guidance for them. Among these books is the Quran, which God revealed to the Prophet Muhammad. God has guaranteed the Quran's protection from any corruption or distortion.
God has said:
Indeed, We have sent down the Quran, and surely We will guard it (from corruption). (Quran, 15:9)
4) Belief in the Prophets and Messengers of God: Muslims believe in the prophets and messengers of God, starting with Adam, including Noah, Abraham, Ishmael, Isaac, Jacob, Moses, and Jesus (peace be upon them). But God's final message to man, a reconfirmation of the eternal message, was revealed to the Prophet Muhammad.
Muslims believe that Muhammad is the last prophet sent by God, as God has said:
Muhammad is not the father of any one of your men, but he is the Messenger of God and the last of the prophets... (Quran, 33:40)
Muslims believe that all the prophets and messengers were created human beings who had none of the divine qualities of God.
6) Belief in Al-Qadar: Muslims believe in Al-Qadar, which is Divine Predestination, but this belief in Divine Predestination does not mean that human beings do not have freewill. Rather, Muslims believe that God has given human beings freewill. This means that they can choose right or wrong and that they are responsible for their choices.
The belief in Divine Predestination includes belief in four things:
1) God knows everything. He knows what has happened and what will happen.
2) God has recorded all that has happened and all that will happen.
3) Whatever God wills to happen happens, and whatever He wills not to happen does not happen.
4) God is the Creator of everything.
Muslims respect and revere Jesus (peace be upon him). They consider him one of the greatest of God,s messengers to mankind. The Quran confirms his virgin birth, and a chapter of the Quran is entitled Maryam (Mary).
The Quran describes the birth of Jesus as follows:
(Remember) when the angels said, O Mary, God gives you good news of a word from Him (God), whose name is the Messiah Jesus, son of Mary, revered in this world and the Hereafter, and one of those brought near (to God). He will speak to the people from his cradle and as a man, and he is of the righteous.
She said, My Lord, how can I have a child when no mortal has touched me? He said, So (it will be). God creates what He wills. If He decrees a thing, He says to it only, Be! and it is.(Quran, 3:45-47)
Jesus was born miraculously by the command of God which had brought Adam into being without a father. God has said:
The case of Jesus with God is like the case of Adam. He created him from dust, and then He said to him, Be! and he came into being. (Quran, 3:59)
During his prophetic mission, Jesus performed many miracles. God tells us that Jesus said:
I have come to you with a sign from your Lord. I make for you the shape of a bird out of clay, I breathe into it, and it becomes a bird by God's permission. I heal the blind from birth and the leper. And I bring the dead to life by God's permission. And I tell you what you eat and what you store in your houses....(Quran, 3:49)
Muslims believe that Jesus was not crucified. It was the plan of Jesus's enemies to crucify him, but God saved him and raised him up to Him. And the likeness of Jesus was put over another man. Jesus's enemies took this man and crucified him, thinking that he was Jesus. God has said:
...They said, We killed the Messiah Jesus, son of Mary, the messenger of God. They did not kill him, nor did they crucify him, but the likeness of him was put on another man (and they killed that man)... (Quran, 4:157)
Neither Muhammad nor Jesus came to change the basic doctrine of the belief in one God, brought by earlier prophets, but rather to confirm and renew it.
Islam provides many human rights for the individual. The following are some of these human rights that Islam protects.
The life and property of all citizens in an Islamic state are considered sacred, whether a person is Muslim or not.
Islam also protects honor. So, in Islam, insulting others or making fun of them is not allowed. The Prophet Muhammad said: {Truly your blood, your property, and your honor are inviolable.}
Racism is not allowed in Islam, for the Quran speaks of human equality in the following terms:
O mankind, We have created you from a male and a female and have made you into nations and tribes for you to know one another. Truly, the noblest of you with God is the most pious. Truly, God is All-Knowing, All-Aware. (Quran, 49:13)
Islam rejects certain individuals or nations being favored because of their wealth, power, or race. God created human beings as equals who are to be distinguished from each other only on the basis of their faith and piety.
The Prophet Muhammad said: {O people! Your God is one and your forefather (Adam) is one. An Arab is not better than a non-Arab and a non-Arab is not better than an Arab, and a red (i.e. white tinged with red) person is not better than a black person and a black person is not better than a red person, except in piety.}
One of the major problems facing mankind today is racism. The developed world can send a man to the moon but cannot stop man from hating and fighting his fellow man. Ever since the days of the Prophet Muhammad, Islam has provided a vivid example of how racism can be ended.
The annual pilgrimage (Hajj) to Makkah shows the real Islamic brotherhood of all races and nations, when about two million Muslims from all over the world come to Makkah to perform the pilgrimage.
Islam is a religion of justice. God has said:
Truly God commands you to give back trusts to those to whom they are due, and when you judge between people, to judge with justice.... (Quran, 4:58)
And He has said:
...And act justly. Truly, God loves those who are just. (Quran, 49:9)
We should even be just with those who we hate, as God has said:
...And let not the hatred of others make you avoid justice. Be just: that is nearer to piety.... (Quran, 5:8)
The Prophet Muhammad said: {People, beware of injustice, for injustice shall be darkness on the Day of Judgment.} And those who have not gotten their rights (i.e. what they have a just claim to) in this life will receive them on the Day of Judgment, as the Prophet said: {On the Day of Judgment, rights will be given to those to whom they are due (and wrongs will be redressed)...}
The Five Pillars of Islam are the framework of the Muslim life. They are the testimony of faith, prayer, giving zakat (support of the needy), fasting during the month of Ramadan, and the pilgrimage to Makkah once in a lifetime for those who are able.
1) The Testimony of Faith: The testimony of faith is saying with conviction, La ilaha illa Allah, Muhammadur rasoolu Allah. This saying means There is no true god but God (Allah), and Muhammad is the Messenger (Prophet) of God.
The first part, There is no true god but God, means that none has the right to be worshipped but God alone, and that God has neither partner nor son. This testimony of faith is called the Shahada, a simple formula which should be said with conviction in order to convert to Islam. The testimony of faith is the most important pillar of Islam.
2) Prayer: Muslims perform five prayers a day. Each prayer does not take more than a few minutes to perform. Prayer in Islam is a direct link between the worshipper and God. There are no intermediaries between God and the worshipper. In prayer, a person feels inner happiness, peace, and comfort, and that God is pleased with him or her. The Prophet Muhammad said: {Bilal, call (the people) to prayer, let us be comforted by it.} Bilal was one of Muhammad's companions who was charged to call the people to prayers.
Prayers are performed at dawn, noon, mid-afternoon, sunset, and night. A Muslim may pray almost anywhere, such as in fields, offices, factories, or universities.
3) Giving Zakat (Support of the Needy): All things belong to God, and wealth is therefore held by human beings in trust. The original meaning of the word zakat is both purification and growth. Giving zakat means giving a specified percentage on certain properties to certain classes of needy people.
The percentage which is due on gold, silver, and cash funds that have reached the amount of about 85 grams of gold and held in possession for one lunar year is two and a half percent. Our possessions are purified by setting aside a small portion for those in need, and, like the pruning of plants, this cutting back balances and encourages new growth.
A person may also give as much as he or she pleases as voluntary alms or charity.
4) Fasting the Month of Ramadan: Every year in the month of Ramadan, all Muslims fast from dawn until sundown, abstaining from food, drink, and sexual relations. Although the fast is beneficial to health, it is regarded principally as a method of spiritual self-purification. By cutting oneself off from worldly comforts, even for a short time, a fasting person gains true sympathy with those who go hungry, as well as growth in his or her spiritual life.
5) The Pilgrimage to Makkah: The annual pilgrimage (Hajj) to Makkah is an obligation once in a lifetime for those who are physically and financially able to perform it. About two million people go to Makkah each year from every corner of the globe. Although Makkah is always filled with visitors, the annual Hajj is performed in the twelfth month of the Islamic calendar. Male pilgrims wear special simple clothes which strip away distinctions of class and culture so that all stand equal before God.
I am prepared to argue that a type of sensory deprivation and self-hypnosis can produce hallucinations that are interpreted as religious experiences or visions.
What about epilepsy (suffered by many very creative people such as Dostoyevsky)?
Interesting about the pyramids, but what would be the point of burying the deceased Pharaoh in them if they were primarily communications devices? Do your sources indicate that all the othger pyramids around the world had similar functions?
I myself don't believe in human evolution of any kind since Creation by God, so would not be likely to believe such an argument. But it is fun reading.
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