Re: [DMCForum] Re: Why? (For Marc, Jack and now Flavia)

[Andrei Cular <acular@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I really haven't been following this thread but somethign simular has 
been going on simultaniously over in the bio-diesel group I am in and 
someone posted this.  It might be approprate, if not its atlease 
semi-educational for all that are intrested.

Andrei

---------------------------------------
We Are the Other People

by Oberon Zell


"Ding-dong!" goes the doorbell. Is it Avon calling? Or perhaps Ed 
McMahon with my three million dollars? No, it's Yahweh's Witlesses 
again, just wanting to have a nice little chat about the Bible...::
Boy, did they ever come to the wrong house!  So we invite them in:

"Enter freely and of your own will..." (Hey, it's Sunday morning, 
nothing much going on, why not have a little entertainment?)  Diane and 
I amuse ourselves watching their expressions as they check out the 
living room: great horned owl on the back of my chair; ceremonial masks 
and medicine skulls of dragons and unicorns on the wall; crystals, 
wands, staffs, swords; lots of Goddess figures and several altars; boa 
constrictors draped in amorous embrace over the elk horn; white doves 
sitting in the hanging planters; cats and weasels underfoot; iron dragon 
snorting steam atop the wood stove; posters and paintings of wizards and 
dinosaurs and witchy women, some proudly naked; sculptures of 
mythological beasties and lots more dinosaurs; warp six on the 
star-filled viewscreen of my computer; a five-foot model of the USS 
Enterprise and the skeleton of a plesiosaur hanging from the ceiling; 
very, very many books, most of them dealing with obviously weird 
subjects... To say nothing of the great horned owl perched on the back 
of my chair and the
Unicorn grazing in the front yard. You know; early Addams Family decor.

:   And then, of course, it being late in the morning, you can expect 
Morning Glory to come wandering out naked, looking for her wake-up cup 
of tea. Morning Glory naked is a truly impressive sight, and the 
Witlesses look as if she'd set titties on stun as they stand 
immobilized, hands clasped over their genitals. With the stage set and 
all the actors in place, the show is ready to begin.
:
:   Their mission, of course, it to save our heathen souls by turning us 
on to "The Word of the Lord" - their Bible. I guess they figure some of 
us just haven't heard about it yet, and we're all eagerly awaiting their 
joyous tidings of personal salvation through giving our rational 
faculties to Jesus. Every time they come around, I look forward to 
trying out a new riposte. Sure, it may be cruel and sadistic of me, but 
hey, I didn't call them up and ask them to come over; they entered at 
their own risk!
:
:   This time should be pretty good. After letting them run off their 
basic rap while lovely Morning Glory serves us all hot herb tea, I 
innocently remark: "But none of that applies to us. We have no need for 
salvation because we don't have original sin. We are the Other People."
:
:   "Hunh? What?" they reply eloquently. It's clear they've never heard 
this one before.
:
:   "Right," I say. "It's all in your Bible." And I proceed to tell them 
the story, using their own book for reference:
:
:   Genesis 1:26 - The [Elohim] said, "Let us make humanity in our own 
image, in the likeness of ourselves, and let them be masters of the fish 
of the sea, the birds of heaven, the cattle, all the wild beasts and all 
the reptiles that crawl upon the earth."
:
:   Elohim is a plural word, including male and female, and should 
properly be translated "Gods" or "Pantheon."
:
:   27 The Gods created humanity in the image of themselves, In the 
image of the Gods they created them, Male and Female they created them.
:   28 The Gods blessed them, saying to them, "Be fruitful, multiply, 
fill the earth and conquer it. Be masters of the fish of the sea, the 
birds of heaven and all living animals on the earth."
:
:   Now clearly, here we are talking about the original creation of the 
human species: male and female. All the animals,plants, etc. have all 
been created in previous verses. This is before the Garden of Eden, and 
Yahweh is not mentioned as the creator of these people. The next chapter 
talks about how Yahweh, an individual member of the Pantheon, goes about 
assembling his own special little botanical and zoological Garden in 
Eden, and making his own little man to inhabit it:
:
:   Gen 2:7 - Yahweh God fashioned a man of dust from the soil. Then he 
breathed into his nostrils a breath of life, and thus the man became a 
living being.
:   8 Yahweh God planted a garden in Eden which is in the east, and 
there he put the man he had fashioned.
:   9 Yahweh God caused to spring up from the soil every kind of tree, 
enticing to look at and good to eat, with the tree of life and the tree 
of the knowledge of good and evil in the middle of the garden.
:   15 Yahweh God took the man and settled him in the garden of Eden to 
cultivate and take care of it.
:
Now this next is crucial: note Yahweh's precise words:

  16 Then Yahweh God gave the man this admonition, "You may eat indeed 
of all the trees in the garden.
  17 Nevertheless of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you are 
not to eat, for on the day you eat of it you shall most surely die."

Fateful words, those.  We will refer back to this admonition later.

Then Yahweh decides to make a woman to go with the man.  Now, don't 
forget that the Pantheon had earlier created a whole population of 
people, "male and female," who are presumably doing just fine somewhere 
"outside the gates of Eden."  But this setup in Eden is Yahweh's own 
little experiment, and will unfold to its own separate destiny.

  21 So Yahweh God made the man fall into a deep sleep. And while he 
slept, he took one of his ribs and enclosed it in flesh.
  22 Yahweh God built the rib he had taken from the man into a woman, 
and brought her to the man.

Right.  Man gives birth to woman.  Sure he does.  But that's the way the 
story is told here.

  25 Now both of them were naked, the man and his wife, but they felt no 
shame in front of each other.

Well, of course not!  Why should they?  But take careful note of those 
words, as they also will prove to be significant . . .

Now this next part is where it starts to get interesting.  Enter the 
Serpent:

  Gen. 3:1 - The serpent was the most subtle of all the wild beasts that 
Yahweh God had made.  It asked the woman, "Did God really say you were 
not to eat from any of the trees in the garden?"
:   2 The woman answered the serpent, "We may eat the fruit of the trees 
in the garden.
:   3 "But of the fruit of the tree in the middle of the garden God 
said, 'You must not eat it, nor touch it, under pain of death'"
:   4 Then the serpent said to the woman, "No! You will not die!
:   5 "God knows in fact that on the day you eat it your eyes will be 
opened and you will be like gods, knowing good and evil."

What a remarkable statement! "Your eyes will be opened and you will be 
like gods, knowing good and evil." The Serpent directly contradicts Yahweh.

Obviously, one of them has to be lying.  Which one, do you suppose?  
And, if the serpent speaks true, wouldn't you wish to eat of the magic 
fruit?  Wouldn't it be a good thing, to become "like gods, knowing good 
and evil"?  Or is it preferable to remain in ignorance?

  6 The woman saw that the tree was good to eat and pleasing to the eye, 
and that it was desirable for the knowledge that it could give. So she 
took some of its fruit and ate it. She gave some also to her husband who 
was with her, and he ate it.
  7 Then the eyes of both of them were opened and they realized that 
they were naked. So they sewed fig leaves together to make themselves 
loincloths.

The author makes an interesting assumption here: that if you realize you 
are naked you will automatically want to cover yourself.  Further 
implications will unfold shortly...

  8 The man and his wife heard the sound of Yahweh God walking in the 
garden in the cool of the day, and they hid from Yahweh God among the 
trees of the garden.
  9 But Yahweh God called to the man. "Where are you?" he asked.
  10 "I heard the sound of you in the garden," he replied. "I was afraid 
because I was naked, so I hid."
  11 "Who told you that you were naked?" he asked. "Have you been eating 
of the tree I forbade you to eat?"

And so the sign of the Fall becomes modesty.  Take note of this.  The 
descendants of Adam and Eve will be distinguished throughout history 
from virtually all other peoples by their obsessive modesty taboos, 
wherein they will feel ashamed of being naked.  It follows that those 
who feel no shame in being naked are, by definition, not carriers of 
this spiritual disease of original sin!

  12 The man replied, "It was the woman you put with me; she gave me the 
fruit, and I ate it."

Right. Blame the woman. What a turkey!

  13 Then Yahweh God asked the woman, "What is this you have done?"  The 
woman replied, "The serpent tempted me and I ate."

So of course she blames the serpent. But just what did the serpent do 
that was so evil? Why, he called Yahweh a liar! Was he wrong? Let's see...

  21 Yahweh God made clothes out of skins for the man and his wife, and 
they put them on.

Out of skins?  This means that Yahweh had to kill some innocent animals 
to pander to Adam and Eve's new obsession with modesty!

And now we come to the crux of the Fall. Yahweh had said back there in 
chapter 2:17, regarding the fruit of the tree of knowledge, that "on the 
day you eat of it you shall most surely die." The Serpent, on the other 
hand, had contradicted Yahweh in chapter 3:4-5: "No! You will not die! 
God knows in fact that on the day you eat it your eyes will be opened 
and you will be like gods, knowing good and evil." So what actually 
happened? Who lied and who told the truth about this remarkable fruit? 
The answer is given in the next verse:
:
:   22 Then Yahweh God said, "See, the man has become like one of us, 
with his knowledge of good and evil. He must not be allowed to stretch 
his hand out next and pick from the tree of life also, and eat some and 
live forever."

Get that?  Yahweh himself admits that he had lied!  In fact, and in 
Yahweh's own words, the Serpent spoke the absolute truth! And moreover, 
Yahweh tells the rest of the Pantheon that he intends to evict Adam (and 
presumably Eve as well) to keep them from gaining immortality to go with 
their newly-acquired divine knowledge.  To prevent them, in other words, 
from truly becoming gods! So who, in this story, comes off as a 
benefactor of humanity, and who comes off as a tyrant?  THE SERPENT 
NEVER LIED!

This story, to digress slightly, bears a remarkable resemblance to a 
contemporary tale from ancient Greece.  In that version, the Serpent 
(later identified as Lucifer, the Light-Bearer) may be equated with the 
heroic titan Prometheus, who championed humanity against the tyranny of 
Zeus, who wished for people to be mere slaves of the gods.  Prometheus, 
whose name means "forethought," gave people wisdom, intelligence, and 
fire stolen from Olympus.  Moreover, he ordained the portions of animal 
sacrifice so that humans got the best parts (the meat and hides) while 
the portion that was burned to the gods was the bones and fat.  In 
punishment for this defiance of his divine authority, Zeus condemned 
Prometheus to a terrible punishment for an immortal: to be chained to a 
mountain in the Caucasus, where Zeus' gryphon/eagle (actually a 
Lammergier) would devour his liver each day.  It would grow back each 
night.  Zeus promised to relent if Prometheus would reveal his great 
secret knowledge: Who would succeed Zeus as supreme god?  Prometheus 
refused to tell, but history has revealed the answer...

The interesting thing about all this is that the Greeks properly 
regarded Prometheus as a noble hero in his defiance of unjust tyranny.  
One may wonder why the Serpent is not so well regarded.  On the 
contrary, snakes are loathed throughout Christendom.

  23 So Yahweh God expelled him from the garden of Eden, to till the 
soil from which he had been taken.
  24 He banished the man, and in front of the garden of Eden he posted 
the cherubs, and the flame of a flashing sword, to guard the way to the 
tree of life.

So that's it for the Fall.  But the story of Adam and Eve doesn't end 
there.

  Gen 4:1 - The man had intercourse with his wife Eve, and she conceived 
and gave birth to Cain...
  2 She gave birth to a second child, Abel, the brother of Cain.  Now 
Abel became a shepherd and kept flocks, while Cain tilled the soil.
  3 Time passed and Cain brought some of the produce of the soil as an 
offering for Yahweh,
  4 while Abel for his part brought the first-born of his flock and some 
of their fat as well. Yahweh looked with favor on Abel and his 
offering.  But he did not look with favor on Cain and his offering, and 
Cain was very angry and downcast.

Well, why shouldn't he be?  Both brothers had brought forth their first 
fruits as offerings, but Yahveh rejected the vegetables and only 
accepted the blood sacrifice.  This was to set a gruesome precedent:

  8 Cain said to his brother Abel, "Let us go out;" and while they were 
in the open country, Cain set on his brother Abel and killed him.

Accursed and marked for fratricide,

  16 Cain left the presence of Yahweh and settled in the land of Nod, 
east of Eden.

We can assume that the phrase "left the presence of Yahweh" implies that 
Yahweh is a local deity, and not omnipresent. Now Eden, according to 
Gen. 2:14-15, was situated at the source of the Tigris and Euphrates 
rivers, apparently right where Lake Van is now, in Turkey.  "East of 
Eden," therefore, would probably be along the shores of the Caspian Sea, 
right in the Indo-European heartland.  Cain settled in there, among the 
people of Nod, and married one of the women of that country.  Here, for 
the first time, is specifically mentioned the "other people" who are not 
of the lineage of Adam and Eve. I.e., the Pagans.

So let's look at this story from another viewpoint:  There we were, 
around six thousand years ago, living in our little farming communities 
around the Caspian Sea, in the land of Nod, when this dude with a 
terrible scar comes stumbling in out of the sunset.  He tells us this 
bizarre story, about how his mother and father had been created by some 
god named Jahweh, and put in charge of a beautiful garden somewhere out 
west, and how they had gotten thrown out for disobedience after eating 
some of the landlord's forbidden magic fruit of enlightenment.  He tells 
us of murdering his brother, as the god of his parents would only accept 
blood sacrifice, and of receiving that scar as a mark so that all would 
know him as a fratricide.  The poor guy is really a mess 
psychologically, obsessed with guilt. He is also obsessively modest, 
insisting on wearing clothes even in the hottest summer, and he has a 
hard time with our penchant for skinny-dipping in the warm inland sea. 
He seems to believe that he is tainted by the "sin" of his parent's 
disobedience; that it is in his blood, somehow, and will continue to 
contaminate his children and his children's children.  One of our 
healing women takes pity on the poor sucker, and marries him...

  17 Cain had intercourse with his wife, and she conceived and gave 
birth to Enoch. He became builder of a town, and he gave the town the 
name of his son Enoch.

With both of their first sons not turning out very well, Adam and Eve 
decided to try again:

  25 Adam had intercourse with his wife, and she gave birth to a son 
whom she named Seth...
  26 A son was also born to Seth, and he named him Enosh. This man was 
the first to invoke the name of Yahweh.
 
   Now it doesn't mention here where Seth's wife came from. Another 
woman from Nod, possibly, or maybe someone from another neolithic 
community downstream in the Tigris-Euphrates valley. But her folks also, 
cannot be of the lineage of Adam and Eve, and must also be counted among 
"the other people."

But whatever happened to Adam? After all, way back there in chapter 
2:17, warning Adam about the magic fruit of knowledge, Yahweh had told 
him that "on the day you eat of it you shall most surely die." So, when 
did Adam die?

  Gen. 5:4 - Adam lived for eight hundred years after the birth of Seth 
and he became the father of sons and daughters.
  5 In all, Adam lived for nine hundred and thirty years; then he died.

Hey, that's pretty good! Nine hundred and some odd years isn't bad for a 
man who's been told he's gonna die the next day!

Well, the story goes on, and maybe next time the Witlesses come to visit 
I'll tell more of it. But suffice it to say that those of us who are not 
of Semitic descent (i.e., not of the lineage of Adam and Eve) cannot 
share in the Original Sin that comes with that lineage. Being that the 
Bible is the story of that lineage, of Adam and Eve's descendants and 
their special relationship with their particular god, Yahweh, it follows 
that this is not the story of the rest of us. We may may have been 
Cain's wife's people, or Seth's wife's people, or some other people over 
the hill and far away, but whichever people the rest of us are, as far 
as the Bible is concerned, we are the Other People, and so we are 
continually referred to throughout.  Later books of the Bible are filled 
with admonitions to the followers of Yahweh to "learn not the ways of 
the Pagans..." (Jer 10:2) with detailed descriptions of exactly what it 
is we do, such as erect standing stones and sacred poles, worship in 
sacred groves and practice divination and magic.  And worship the sun, 
moon, stars and the "Queen of Heaven."  "You must not behave as they do 
in Egypt where once you lived; you must not behave as they do in Canaan 
where I am taking you.  You must not follow their laws." (Lev. 18:3)  
For Yahweh, as he so clearly emphasises, is not the god of the Pagans.  
We have our own lineage and our own heritage, and our tale is not told 
in the Bible.  We were not "made" like clay figurines by a male deity 
out of "dust from the soil."  We were born of our Mother the Earth, and 
have evolved over aeons in Her nurturing embrace.  All of us, in our 
many and diverse tribes, have creation myths and legends of our origins 
and history; some of these tales may even be actually true.  Like the 
descendants of Adam and Eve, many of us also have stories of great 
floods, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions and other cataclysms that wiped 
out whole communities of our people, wherein "I alone survived to tell 
the tale."  Nearly all of our ancestral tribes (and especially those of 
us who today are reclaiming our own Pagan heritage) lack that peculiar 
obsessive body modesty that seems to be a hallmark of the original sin 
alluded to in the story of the Fall.  We can be naked and unashamed!  
Why, our Goddess even tells us, "as a sign that you are truly free, you 
shall be naked in your rites."  Not being born into sin, we have no need 
of salvation, and no need of a Messiah to redeem our sinful souls.  
Neither heaven nor hell is our destination in the afterlife; we have our 
own various arrangements with our own various deities.  The Bible is not 
our story; we have our own stories to tell, and they are many and 
diverse.  In a long life, you may get to hear many of them...

May you live long and prosper!

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Walter Coe wrote:

>>Furthermore, I don't recall ever
>>    
>>
>trying to "convert", or "save" anyone.
>
>Yeah, it is so annoying when people try to convert me to
>their brand of Christianity when they think that my own
>isn't good enough.  Even from another Yahoo group recently,
>I had a Muslim trying to convert me (and ask for donations).
>So instead of proselytizing, if the subject comes up I just
>mention it like my dentist or a favorite restaurant.  If
>they want to know more then they can ask.
>
>I, myself, wouldn't mind a law against these Jehovah
>Wetnesses knocking on my door.  Wetnesses?  Lawn sprinklers!
>
>Walt
>
>
>
>
> 
>Yahoo! Groups Links
>
>
>
> 
>
>
>
>
>  
>

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