Thursday, July 27, 2017

HOW MAN CREATED GOD



Observations by Nick Veltjens 2017

God did not exist when homo sapiens started to exist as a new species around 300 thousand years ago. Neither did it exist when man first formed tribal communities. Man was at that time unable to grasp abstracts, things one could not touch. Abstracts did not exist in their languages. Australian aboriginals still have no word for time.
So when the need came, together with formed communities, to find a unifying cultural code that could support peaceful cohabitation and team-like cooperation in their more regional activities, they found important locations signified by objects in the surrounding land, and emphasised their importance by giving them spiritual names and references.
Some of the northern American Indians called them Manitou. The Australian aborigines refer to them in their Dreaming. Both these cultures have their separation from the rest of the world in common and therefore it is possible to identify the very early development of language, going back around 70,000 years. The Australian first people arrived here at least 65,000 years ago, and their culture continued with a very close relationship to and identification with the land. Spirits are attached to physical objects in their world, things you can see and touch.
When agriculture began to create specialisation and the development of urban living in the Middle East, the languages became more grammatically expressive and semantic, god-like spirits became common use in thousands of communities, The Sumerian people, in their systematic way, collected these “gods” and listed them on clay tablets in their cuneiform writing. They sorted them and unified them so that there would be only one fertility goddess and one god of war, etc. and decided that there ought to be one god in charge of them all. This then was the first step to make “gods” out of the spiritual creatures that had followed the tribal emigration from central Africa to the Levant.
The ancient Greeks’ gods where still not completely abstract; they had just retreated to the mountain (Olympus) and the sea (Mediterranean). The ancient Greeks also had problems with time, as they had no word for future; for them it was simply an extension of the present. Also, they had no word for Repenting; when Luke’s Gospel was translated from Aramaic into Greek, they used a word that meant changing your mind instead of repenting.
In the end, it was Abraham, who came from Sumerian city of Ur, who was picking up on the one god known then as El and Ya, both names for the same deity. One text said of him (Pettinato 1981):
“Lord of heaven and earth, The earth was not; you created it. The light of the day was not; you created it; The morning light you had not yet made.”
This found a precise reflection in the Genesis tradition, where God creates the earth and then calls light into existence and is the first reference in this region to one god above all others. ‘El’ and ‘Ya’ are the basis of a number of words referring to God in various Levant cultures, including in the Qur’an and the original consonantal Hebrew bible. Yahweh is the god with whom Abraham had his covenant, and it is considered to be the same as represented by the tetragrammaton YHWH in the Hebrew bible, translated as Jehova by Martin Luther, and representing Yahweh, whose name was not permitted to be pronounced; instead the reader would say Adonai (my Lord).
When specialization became an important economic function, the management of the relationship between gods and people also called for specialists to handle it; that was the beginning of religions and with that came the emphasis on their political function and consequent power.
Religions lost their connection with the culture of the peoples when they were written down as in Bible (old and new), the Gospels, and the Qur’an. They stayed behind the times and in many ways became out of date. Mohammed actually changed some of his preaching from Mecca when he spoke to the less educated tribal Arabs in Medina, incorporating some of their traditional more aggressive ideas, which were then also included in the Qur’an, even though they were a contradiction of his earlier preaching. He had suggested them as introductions (a first message) to the true Islam from Mecca, and they should be deleted when the people were more educated.
Ustadh Mahmoud Taha of the Sudan made a clear distinction between those parts of the Qur’an that had been revealed to Muhammad in Mecca (al-islam), and those after he had moved to Medina (al-iman) . ‘The Second Message (from Mecca) is Islam,’ he said, and concluded that the First Message (Medina) was an ‘explanation’, written into the Qur’an to help believers of a superficial or lower level (al-mu’minin) to become true ‘submitters’ (al-muslimin) at the ultimate level:
“‘Explanation’ of the Qur’an has been only in terms of [expedient] legislation, the Shari’a, and interpretation to the extent appropriate for the time of such explanation and in accordance with the capacity of the audience and the abilities of the people.”
The fact that God had become a political tool of power is seen throughout history and even now. The most terrible examples are the Thirty Years war between Catholics and Protestants, and now between Shia and Sunni Muslims; in both cases the wars were about a mere difference in interpretation of the word of the relevant prophets, Jesus and Mohammed, but with horrendous results. The Greek empire also collapsed by the leadership following their cultural obsession with Eros .
What is needed instead of a god, is a code of ethics, such as the Golden Rule, which in fact is the basis of all religions. Even Jesus said that the 10 (prohibitive) commandments could be combined into two (positive ones):
“‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.’ This is the greatest and first commandment. And a second is like unto it: ‘You shall love your neighbour as yourself.’ All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.”
The creation of God by man had its purpose, but when it became politicised, man now needs to bring ethics back as a personal responsibility for each citizen of this world .

REFERENCES
Luke 1
Earth History, a new approach – The Tradition in Ancient Sumer – http://www.earthhistory.org.uk/genesis-6-11-and-other-texts/the-tradition-in-sumer/
Revered teacher
Mahmoud Mohamed Taha, translated by Abdullahi An-Na’im – The Second Message of Islam – page 125, Syracuse University Press, 1996
Mahmoud Mohamed Taha, translated by Abdullahi An-Na’im – The Second Message of Islam – page 147, Syracuse University Press, 1996
http://etheses.lse.ac.uk/3193/
Matthew 22:34-40 (King James Version), and Luke 10:25-37
World without war, Klaus Veltjens: http://amzn.to/PAUwYg