c. 5000 BCE

c 5000 bc

We have an area of the Middle East called Ugarit. We have a story…

We have a god named El. He is a male god; he is a king; he is fire. The character for his name is the head of a bull. He is the father. He created the world from his head, but he’s a one-shot creator… he is no longer creating. He had a wife named Ashtoret.

She has other names in other areas. Attar for the Hittites. Austet for the Egyptians. Isis is her Greek name (she was not a Greek goddess). Ishtar is her Sumerian name. Esther is her Biblical name. Astarte is her Phoenecian name. Asherah is her Aickadian name. Aisha is her Arabic name.

Now some scholars view these as different goddesses. But both the name and the role are so similar that my professor views this as a flawed interpretation.

Ashtoret is feminine. She is the queen of Heaven; she is water; she is a mother.

El and Ashtoret have a formal marriage. They don’t actually have much to do with each other. Ashtoret’s heart is somewhere else. Her [lover/son/both] is Ba'al.

Ba'al is depicted as a storm god (which, in the Middle East, isn’t bad). He is air. He is of much more concern to Ashtoret than El.

Ba'al has a sister named Anat. She doesn’t like men except for Ba'al and sometimes her father. She is a huntress and protector of the wild. She is earth. She is most likely El’s daughter and maybe his lovechild.

A storm god (like Ba'al) wants to do something because he has a lot of energy. He’s young and verile. But El has already done it… he created everything and there’s not much left for Ba'al to do. Ba'al complains to Anat. She goes to El and tells him that Ba'al wants to build a palace on the edge of the river to watch over, and care for… Ba'al wants to take action. Ba'al has had this idea (He is an air god, which is idea-y), but he can’t quite manifest it (Anat is an earth goddess.  Earth is about manifestation). So El accepts and Ba'al is permitted to build his house.  Ma'at (male), the god of the underworld, is jealous of Ba'al’s new toy and kills Ba'al. Ashtoret goes crazy, since she is so in love with Ba'al. So Ba'al is permitted to return at certain points in the year. (Sound familiar??)

In the Hebrew alphabet, fire is symbolized by yod. This letter frequently wears a crown.

Ashtoret, the ultimate feminine, is symbolized by hei.

The lettering for El (yod),

Ashtoret (hei),

Ba'al (vav),

Anat (hei)
is YHVH.

Look familiar? Add some vowels, if not. It’s the tetragrammaton. These letters are the father letters.

The name is a very early God. It’s early monotheism. It’s been condensed into God. It’s a grammatical contraction. YHVH is the God of Abraham. How did we get to the contraction? Eventually, they put vowels (in all the wrong places), so that people would know it’s too holy to speak.

Looking at it, it is yeh-ho-veh-hah. But they wouldn’t say it, because they’d look at it, see the vowels in all the wrong places, and know. Scholars call it the tetragrammaton. The word you use to say it defines you, not it.

The vowels are placed where the vowels in Adonai would go. So that you know this name is the unspeakable contraction for the name of the one God. It’s also useful for keeping it coded… it’s a very “ingroup” thing.

Abraham came from a place called Ur, which means “light.” There is a pilgrimage site there dedicated to the moon god. Abraham’s father was named Terach. Another word for the moon is Ire'ach. Terach means “worshipper of the moon.” His job was to form the letters for the gods. So he plays around, breaks them all, and realizes that if it’s broken, it can’t be god. It has to be larger, more abstract, yet have all former god characters.

In the Bible, YHVH.

In the prayer books, YY (yod yod with poo vowels). You can’t say it… the letters create.

Documentary: Farmageddon

Watch it.  Our farming system is unsustainable and focuses on finances over the healthfulness of what is being presented to us as safe, healthful foods.  

Know about where your money goes, what goes in and on your body, and how the products you purchase impact the bodies of others.

Also: big focus on raw milk.

Western Arrogance in Early Religious Studies

Why was there such an obsession among scholars with presenting the “origin and development” of religion in the late nineteenth century? 

During the nineteenth century, after Darwin’s theory of evolution was publicized, scholars began to see how a more scientific approach would be useful outside of biological fields. By using more deductive reasoning and looking for evidence in religion, scholars sought to find how religion might have developed.

Darwin is said by many, though not himself, to have killed God. If God didn’t create man, then he may not have created religion. If biological species had evolved, perhaps religion evolved as well. By tracing religions’ histories and looking at the “primitive” religions, they sought to trace and understand the development of world religions from “primitive” to “civilized.”

Sociological Analysis of Religion

Sociological Analysis of Religion

While there are more religions in the world than we can number, each with varying guidelines, structures, and followings, there are common functions of religion that draw people to them. People offer many reasons why they become religious and adhere to religious systems or join religious communities. Sociologists have also offered both “top-down” and “bottom-up” explanations as to why people engage in religion. These explanations, while insulting to some religious people, are readily embraced by others who recognize the social and personal benefits of their religious experiences. While we can try to understand religion from perspectives within and without, a more comprehensive explanation can be offered when we combine both emic and etic perspectives to offer a tentative “why,” as religious experience, reasoning, and formation is as varied as the people who call themselves religious. It is perhaps as flawed for us to dogmatically try to explain religion as it is for religion to dogmatically explain the world.

Adherents of religions tend to express a comfort and security derived from their religion. Most religions seek to answer the “ultimate” questions: why humanity exists, what the purpose of life is, what happens after we die, and how we should relate to other forms of life. The theoretical aspects of religion provide interpretive frameworks for religious communities to operate within—“For adherents, the truths of their religion are the ultimate lenses by which they see themselves and their universe. Religious interpretation assumes its stance directly and faithfully from its own religious language” (Paden, 87). By framing reality in these theoretical ways that often extend beyond what we can consider “objective reality,” religion can provide answers to that which objective observation cannot—by offering an extension of reality for religious believers, meaning can be extended beyond that which can be observed.

While religious institutions may provide answers for some of the most difficult questions to answer, religious communities provide a family-like structure of support. Complete with rules, hierarchies, ritual, and tradition, religious communities are extended families for many who choose to join them. Religion, for many, is social activity and a sense of belonging. Religious communities “unite to become a single unified experience, which points to the ultimate nature of the sacred and becomes a part of the inner life of each person touched by it” (Ellwood, 14). The unifying experience of religion is a large motivating factor in religious participation.

Beyond the observable qualities of religion, religion is felt by its adherents. People feel inspired and moved toward worship. Religion moves people to sing, compose poetry and literature, dance, and can create experience unlike those of everyday life. The mystical elements of religion draw many to it and yet are the least observable and most ineffable.

“It is the terror and beauty of phenomena, the ‘promise’ of the dawn and of the rainbow, the ‘voice’ of the thunder, the ‘gentleness’ of the summer rain, the ‘sublimity’ of the stars, and not the physical laws which these things follow, by which the religious mind still continues to be most impressed; and just as of yore, the devout man tells you that in the solitude of his room or of the fields he still feels the divine presence, that inflowings of help come in reply to his prayers, and that sacrifices to this unseen reality fill him with security and peace.” (James, 145)

The reasons people give for their religious affiliations are extensive and diverse in their reflections on those who call themselves religious. There is no set of characteristics which decisively draws one to religion, nor set of characteristics in a person that decisively make one religious. The reasonings for religiousness are as diverse as the people and vice versa.

Emile Durkheim theorized that religion “united members around common shared values and social goals by providing them narratives about their place within the cosmos, their common historical heritage, and purpose of life.” This top-down approach provides a view of religion as a primarily social institution which internalizes patterns of acceptable behavior and can “sanction the governing structure of a society and the exercise of its political power” (Olson, 210). For Durkheim, religion is an answer to the social needs of human beings and continues to exist in modern society because of humanity’s need for public ceremony. While this approach is certainly plausible and can also be seen compatible with many people’s emic perspectives on religion, it seems lacking as an encompassing explanation of religion.

Max Weber’s more individualistic approach to religion can be seen as the bottom-up counterpoint. Weber saw religion not as a means by which social structure could be validated and maintained, but as a “connection between [individual] motives and intentions (noumenal realm) with acts and events (phenomenal realm)… [by which] religion worked not only to challenge the established order but also created social change” (Olson, 210). Weber’s most famous work, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, seeks to exemplify how the motives of the individual (in the form of the Protestant Ethic) create social action (Capitalism). In Weber’s system, individual motivation is equally as important as the societal norms and can even be a motivating force in altering those norms and producing change within society.

While both Weber and Durkheim offer compelling explanations of religious action and the motivations for religion by explaining the functionality of religion, both explanations are incomplete without the consideration of the reasons which believers provide for their own involvement and experiences of religion. Sociological explanations can offer answers for us in trying to understand the absurd nature of religious piety, which in its own self-explanation, can often be understood as devoting enormous amounts of time, energy, and money into worship of entities that cannot be seen or known through any objective experience. The basis of these practices, according to those who perform them, is fundamentally in relation to subjective experiences of the nouminous, which though often lengthily described, are frequently ineffable and seldom can be explained in meaningful ways to those outside of the experience. In this sense, “understanding” the practice must truly be emic, though explaining the practice can easily be done sociologically (as well as through other disciplines).

It could also be noted that the Western world’s bias toward science and scientific objectivity may be fundamentally at odds with a true understanding of religion, which is a primarily subjective of the world, language, and scripture. Much of the Western world has turned away from religion since the scientific revolution, the circulation and consideration of Darwin’s evolutionary model, and the scientific models that can be used to reframe religious experiences as natural processes. The endeavor to understand religion scientifically may be in vain (or at very least, inadequate) simply because of the nature of religion.

Prominent sociologists have attempted to analyze religion from both top-down and bottom-up perspectives. These efforts have shown us much about the nature of religion and religious communities, yet they are incomplete on their own. Both perspectives need to be incorporated into our understanding of religion if we are to understand it most completely.

I would suggest that efforts to explain religion are useful, not only for the sake of curiosity, but for the sake of the communities themselves, which can learn from these analyses, and for society at large, that it may learn how to predict and work with religious institutions and religious people. The pluralistic nature of today’s global world and its success as such is dependent on our ability to understand each other—this begins with understanding the cosmologies within which people operate, which are often dominated by their religious frameworks. To understand religion, sociological perspectives are useful in their analyses of group and individual behavior. Etic approaches from a variety of disciplines can provide useful perspectives on religion, religious people, and the belief systems which citizens of this world operate within. However competent these disciplines may be in describing and predicting religious behaviors and religious communities, the incorporation of the adherents’ perspective is essential to understanding how they operate and why. That said, because of the nature of religion’s emphasis on subjective experience, perhaps we cannot completely grasp the internal perspective of religious communities without being sincere members of them. However, this should not halt the continual efforts of sociologists and scientists and scholars within other fields from attempting to describe and understand religion; the endeavor cannot be in vain if it leads to an increased understanding of other people in the world.

Works Cited
Ellwood, Robert S. and McGraw, Barbara L. Many Peoples, Many Faiths: Women and Men in the World Religions. New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 2005.

James, William. The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature. New York: Modern Library Publishing, 1994.

Olson, Carl. Theory and Method in the Study of Religion: A Collection of Critical Readings. Belmont, CA: Wordsworth Publishing, 2003.

Paden, William E. Interpreting the Sacred: Ways of Viewing Religion. Boston: Beacon Press, 2003.

Communion Song

Women in Scripture

I notice that a common portrayal of women/female characters in religious stories is as a seductress. Is it possible that women are frequently portrayed as seductive because seduction was the only power that women had over men? Obviously, this isn’t true in all of these stories… many, if not most of the characters, have extraordinary abilities. Circe has the power to transform men into animals, for instance, and Morgan le Fay is a healer. Yet while these women have magical powers, it is probably true that most women in these societies lacked such extraordinary abilities… however, it might be true that women used seduction as a means of gaining control of certain situations, since women were typically deprived of most forms of control and choice. Although many men would have us believe that certain women simply have no control over their sexual desires, as Jason posits in the story about Medea, it seems to me that the underlying reality in many cases of seduction is that a woman was using what was possibly her only means of gaining control of a situation or manipulating a man into doing something that society prohibited her from doing herself. I would see these frequent themes of women as seductresses as a sign that these women were oppressed and had very little control over their own lives…

I also notice that women are also often portrayed as irrational, which makes me think of the way that many people go about arguing today. It’s easy for the person who has the upper hand in an argument (whether by deftly arguing or simply being backed by a larger/more powerful audience) to dismiss an opposing view as irrational, as if the person they are arguing with is too simple to really understand what the argument is “really” about. I hear a lot of that thrown out in abortion arguments, where the Pro-Life side will assume that the other person simply doesn’t see that there is a human life involved in the situation or the Pro-Choice person (often female) will just assume that a man shouldn’t be involved in the debate simply because he can’t understand what it is to be female. While both arguments might have merit, neither of them acknowledges the complexity of the issue when they simply dismiss the other argument as simple. It perhaps takes validity away from their own argument by making it seem as simple as “You’re not a Christian, so you can’t understand” or “you’re not a woman, so you can’t understand.” Perhaps it’s a tangent, but I was using it as an example… I believe it also applies to a lot of the ways that people argue (or don’t argue by dismissing the opposition as “irrational”).

African Proverb

"Until the lion has a historian, the hunter will always be a hero."

— African proverb

The Fourth Gospel

"I find [the Gospel of John] to be a book not about religion, sin and salvation, but about life, expanded life and expanded consciousness. I believe that this book leads us in an entirely different direction from the one traditional Christianity has followed from Nicea to this day."

—

Dr. John Shelby Spong

Spong, John Shelby. The Fourth Gospel: Tales of a Jewish Mystic. 1St ed. New York: HarperOne, 2013.

Grace

Because defining things is fun.

Grace: the extravagantly generous extension of community to all of humanity (including the most self-righteous, the most downtrodden, the wealthy, the unwealthy, family, friends, and strangers) in a way that equalizes us all in the realization of God’s active presence spread in and through each of us so continuously that we cannot think of ourselves as separate from each other in any meaningful way.

Music for Earth Day

Danger: Bible

"Sometimes the Bible in the hand of one man is worse than a whiskey bottle in the hand of another… There are just some kind of men who are so busy worrying about the next world they’ve never learned to live in this one, you can look down the street and see the results."

—

Harper Lee (via godinthebrokenness)

THIS!

Christianity should be concerned about showing the love of Christ to those around us hear on Earth.

(via 2ndhalfoflife)

(Source: godoftheoppressed, via 2ndhalfoflife)

Jesus Seminar

"We have been betrayed by the Bible. In the half-century just ending, there is belated recognition that biblically based Christianity has espoused causes that no thinking person or caring person is any longer willing to endorse. We have had enough of the persecution of the Jews and witches; of the justification of black slavery; of the suppression of women, sex and sexuality; and of the stubborn defense of a male dominated, self-serving clergy… We cannot, we must not shrink from engagement with the ignorance and misunderstanding that fuels such egregious misuse of scripture."

— Robert W. Funk, director of the Jesus Seminar

Blessing

Documentary: Dark Girls

Today I watched a documentary on Netflix: “Dark Girls.”  The documentary has to do with colorism in the Black community, especially against women.

Last night I had a conversation with a friend of mine about colorism within a variety of cultures.  She spoke about traveling once and being unable to speak the dominant language.  She asked someone where to find face wash in the store (or tried to explain it) and was directed to the aisle of face whitening products.  It’s an interesting contrast to my cultural perspective which privileges tan skin (as long as it's white!).

It’s a tragedy that so many people, in so many ways, especially women, are raised to believe that they are ugly, that certain qualities, many of which I find very attractive, are less beautiful than contrasting qualities.

As a young girl, I envied physical qualities unlike my own.  I still do.  I want every young girl (not that any are reading this) to know that for as many jerks out there that say mean things about your appearance, there are just as many people who think you are beautiful and desire your physical qualities.  

Security

"Security is so seductive, and insecurity is so frightening. But security is always false, and insecurity is always real. No religion can make anyone secure, though it, like the drugs on which our society is so dependent, can give the illusion of security. True religion enables one to grasp life with its radical insecurity and to live it with courage. It does not aid us in the pretense that our insecurities have been taken away."

— Spong, John Shelby. A New Christianity for a New World: Why Traditional Faith Is Dying and How a New Faith Is Being Born.  New York: HarperOne, 2002.