God is Red

In 1972 when I began this book I excluded some questions that were integral to examination of the idea of land and religion. The most basic question, of course, is how we can conceive of deity at all if our religious experiences and knowledge derive primarily from the environment around us. What images do we invoke and what can we expect in the way of a relationship with Him, Her, or Them? I did not anticipate that the complexity of the subject might require considerable critical examination of the cultural context in which religions and ideas about deities appear. During the past two decades I have been able to discover a set of lesser questions that, when taken as a unified inquiry, have led me into a better understanding of how to deal with the major question of the validity and viability of religion. Still, in order to ask the proper questions, one must believe that reality is a bit different from what we have been taught to believe and in this respect I owe it all, in the last analysis, to Oral Roberts.

Several years back, in a memorable TV performance, Oral said that God was dissatisfied with Oral’s ministry and had threatened that if he did not raise something like $10 million by a certain date, God would “call him home.” Since the reward for faithful service for most Christians (if we take funeral orations seriously) is to be “called home” it struck me as mighty strange that Oral was resisting this option with all his might. On reflection it also seemed strange that after some two thousand years of bribing His followers to be good with promises of eternal life, the Deity had resorted to extortion as a means of keeping people in line.

A few weeks later when I happened to be reading one of the Old Testament prophets it suddenly occurred to me that the Judeo-Christian Deity had been a pretty rough character all along. He was always throwing fits of anger over some real or imagined slight; he monitored every activity of His Chosen People to see that they were obeying some rather vague instructions he had given them; and, to hear some Protestants tell it, he had a large ledger book in which he recorded all our evil thoughts and deeds. This behavior can be described in a humorous way but it is not very funny. It suggests a Deity very closely modeled not only after a human personality but also after a personality that is unbalanced and immature.

The Judeo-Christian Deity, as a matter of fact, has emotional characteristics that are quite common and can be easily identified in contemporary human beings. He has the egotism of Henry Kissinger, the stability of Donald Trump, the generosity of Edwin Meese, and the military mind of George Bush. (We should remember that Yahweh killed some 185,000 Arabs in Sennacarib’s army outside Jerusalem one night, Bush slaughtered almost as many in the prolonged bombing of Iraq during the winter of 1991. Both seem to have had the same motive—the Arabs had disregarded one of their warnings.) Having a “personal relationship” with this Deity is akin to being J. Edgar Hoover’s best friend—it is safe but not satisfying.

If people are offended by these comparisons it is because they have not read their Bible objectively to see how their Deity has behaved historically. In Western society we are taught that the Deity is benign, friendly, and intent upon making us rich. So we can read Bible verses that command genocidal acts and pretend that they are merely divine bombast designed to scare us into behaving. When we step outside this cultural context and try to understand the Bible as a literal historical document, we discover that the portrait of the Deity sketched in the Old Testament is very negative and in fact may describe a psychopath like Saddam Hussein (if he is indeed what our media says he is). We find the image of a despotic Oriental monarch determined to have his way regardless of how it affects his subjects.

This uncomfortable image has been further illuminated for me by the startling contrast between Near Eastern religions on the one hand and the other world and tribal religions on the other. Near Eastern deities seem to thrive on controlling all human historical and political situations. They disregard natural law—unable to direct the activities of the physical world in a manner that would enlighten its inhabitants—and are intent on devising punishments. If there is any evidence of a karmic balancing process here, it is submerged under pictures of burning hells and blissful heavens. They are obsessed with human sexual activities and genetic purity. They demand blood sacrifices of birds, animals, and sometimes human beings as the only acceptable way of forgiving our transgressions. Such abstract concepts as redemption and atonement dominate their conversations with humans. The intellectual/devotional structure of the Near Eastern religions consists of these legalities and is presented in sophisticated arguments better raised in a courtroom than in the world as we know it. Their solution to many problems is simply to destroy the world and start over.

Only by drawing out the most realistic portrait of a deity can we begin to understand what the image really means. So let us subject the tribal conceptions of deity and religion to the same critique and scrutiny. There are serious questions whether Indian tribes actually had any conception of religion or of a deity at all. Wherever we find Indians and whenever we inquire about their idea of God, they tell us that beneath the surface of the physical universe is a mysterious spiritual power which cannot be described in human images that must remain always the “Great Mystery.”

There are, on the other hand, many other entities with spiritual powers comparable to those generally attributed to one deity alone. So many in fact that they must simply be encountered and appeased, they cannot be counted. In addition all inanimate entities have spirit and personality so that the mountains, rivers, waterfalls, even the continents and the earth itself have intelligence, knowledge, and the ability to communicate ideas. The physical world is so filled with life and personality that humans appear as one minor species without much significance and badly in need of assistance from other forms of life. Almost anyone can have almost any relationship with anything else. So much energetic potency exists that we either must describe everything as religious or say that religion as we have known it is irrelevant to our concerns.

The forms of communication directed toward the deity or higher powers tell us a great deal about our emotional response to the image of God. Hymns, psalms, and chants of the Near Eastern religions are something to behold. They are, quite frankly, little more than crude attempts to flatter and deceive deities who possess preposterous egos. Omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent, omnivorous—almost every human attribute we can conceive is expanded beyond its capability to communicate meaning and credited to the deities. We create logical inconsistencies when we try to apply the knowledge of our theology; thus, “if God is omnipotent can He make a yardstick with one end?” Christian hymns resemble nothing less than LBJ’s or Nixon’s White House assistants trying to convince the president of the propriety of their cause by puffing up his already considerable ego. At times, with the modern popularization of Christian ideas by televangelists, it is difficult to remember that Cole Porter’s “You’re the Cream in My Coffee” is not a hymn.

Indian songs and chants, on the other hand, frequently do not even mention a deity or the Great Mystery at all. They are directed to plants, birds, animals, and the earth asking for assistance in performing rather mundane tasks. When they do specifically address the Great Mysterious power, their pleas are phrased in vague terms, primarily pleading that pity be shown to them. But these pleas do not flatter; they are more in the nature of an objective admission of the fact of human finitude—a rather obvious observation.

The relationship to the natural world is also quite different between the two groups. The physical world is not often seen as a positive place in Near Eastern religions. It is a vale of tears filled with unexplained human tragedies. Animals are definitely placed beneath humans in the hierarchy of things and religious ceremonies seek to purge nature from participation in the rituals, rather than acknowledge the existence of the material world. In many ways the human body is seen as evil. The goal of life is to win eternal life where followers receive imperishable bodies in which they can do exactly the same things that were punishable offenses in the present life. This condition is known as salvation.

The Indian format is precisely the opposite. Not only the natural physical world is regarded as integral to human ambitions and activities, but also even the hypothetical geometrical structures of the world receive some form of religious acknowledgement. Thus, Indians pray to the “four directions,” lay out elaborate sandpaintings to represent the cosmos, and see in pipe bowls and sweat lodges a model of the larger cosmic whole. In contrast to the practices of the Near Eastern peoples, Indians virtually eliminate the human element in their religious ceremonies and concentrate on representing the physical universe.

Of reasonable importance in each tradition are the procedures and devices for predicting the future. Both groups rely heavily on dreams for information about the future. Indians seek predictions in ceremonies in which spirits tell them, or are supposed to tell them, what may happen in the immediate future. The Near Eastern peoples have developed all manner of objective systems of prediction from astrology to tarot cards, handwriting analysis to numerology. Most

of these systems are now regarded as secular, but the visit of the

Three Wise Men to Bethlehem cannot have been anything except a response to these predictive elements deeply buried within the religious tradition.

These two approaches to religion are also distinguishable by their ideas about the importance of the location in which worship and other religious activities are to be held. Near Eastern religions have a propensity for building massive temples and tombs and this tradition has been emulated by Christian tendencies to construct gigantic cathedrals. Temples, churches, and synagogues separate the faithful from the secular world and from the natural world as if religion needs to be isolated from the rest of human activities. The Indian religions, on the other hand, insist on holding their ceremonies and rituals in a natural surrounding and could not have conceived of establishing a separate building especially for religious activities. The sweat lodge and the kiva are designed to represent the larger cosmos and basically have nothing to do with the subservience that characterizes churches and temples.

These two traditions are polar opposites in almost every respect and come to different conclusions about the meaning of life and the eventual disposition of the soul or personality. The Near Eastern religions seek and guarantee salvation, which is conceived as an escape from this planet to a place where loyal followers can enjoy eternal life filled with the delights that they were denied during this lifetime. Indians see themselves returning to nature, their bodies becoming the dust of Mother Earth, and their souls journeying to another place across the Milky Way or sometimes being reborn in a new generation of the tribe.

Although several generations of scholars have sought to devise a comprehensive theory of religions that would explain how these diametrically opposed religions are similar to each other, I can find no satisfactory explanation of what elements they have in common. Perhaps the most popular explanation is the device whereby cultural evolutionists see tribal religions as primitive efforts to come to grips with their experiences in nature and the later world religions as sublime expressions of religious knowledge. But if we examine the substance of religion as cultural evolutionists have described it, the comparison is unsatisfactory.

So-called primitive peoples do not cringe in superstition before nature and they are not fearful of natural processes. They are capable of creating situations in which they can use the forces of nature to their benefit. There is no discernible reason for primitive or tribal peoples to abandon their ceremonial life and spend their time trying to arrive at a clear description of a deity and its several powers. Religion for them is an experience and they have no reason to reduce it to systematic thought and the elaboration of concepts.

The doctrines of the world religions, expressed in the most precise phrases and elaborate concepts with every nuance of meaning represented by weighty tomes, describe virtually nothing and do not inspire anyone to do much of anything. Much as I admire the philosophical writings of Paul Tillich, the social concerns of Reinhold Niebuhr, and the sense of modernity of Harvey Cox, their theologies do not trigger off great religious feelings in me. Indeed, I suspect that the ability to describe the attributes of God may preclude the possibility of ever experiencing Him, Her, or Them. Academic orthodoxy in religious studies, however, regards the statements of the world religions as a higher evolved expression of religion primarily because the concepts are more rational. Tribal religions, with their emotional and ceremonial emphasis, are placed at the bottom of the cultural evolutionary scale because they practice rather than preach.

Unfortunately, the evolutionary framework is the only acceptable method of arranging information in Western society and it is very difficult to get anyone to break out of this context and look seriously at the data. In fact, this method of arranging data is highly suspect and more fiction than fact. The real question of determining the nature of religion is bound up with the evolutionary thesis. The traditional evolutionary interpretation of human societies assumes that one group of people was inherently brighter than the others, invented the wheel, invented written languages, established legal codes and political institutions, domesticated plants and animals, discovered metallurgy, and as a final gesture began to direct our species toward the control of nature, thereby banishing the superstitions that composed earlier expressions of religion.

Breaking free of the evolutionary context is not difficult if a person only learns to read critically and demand sensible answers to questions. As an example let us observe how Jacob Bronowski deals with the origin of wheat in the evolutionary setting:

Before 8,000 b.c. wheat was not the luxuriant plant it is today. It was merely one of the many wild grasses that spread throughout the Middle East. By some genetic accident, the wild wheat crossed with a natural goat grass and formed a fertile hybrid.1

Emmer (the product of this cross) crossed with another natural goat grass and produced a still larger hybrid with forty-two chromosomes, which is bread wheat. That was improbable in itself, and we know now that bread wheat would not have been fertile but for a specific genetic mutation of one chromosome.2

So, we have two genetic accidents, each producing a hybrid that was fertile, a sequence that would have been all but mathematically impossible. Then Bronowski leans back and fogs his high, hard fastball at us and we are expected to swallow it.

Now we have a beautiful ear of wheat, but one which will never spread in the wind because the ear is too tight to break up. And if I do break it up, why, then the chaff flies off and every grain falls exactly where it grew. Let me remind you that is quite different from the wild wheats or from the first, primitive hybrid, Emmer. In those primitive forms the ear is much more open, and if the ear breaks up then you get a quite different effect—you get grains which will fly in the wind. the bread wheats have lost that ability. Suddenly, man and plant have come together. Man has a wheat that he lives by, but the wheat also thinks that man was made for him because only so can it be propagated. For the bread wheats can only multiply with help; man must harvest the ears and scatter their seeds; and the life of each, man and plant, depends on the other. It is a true fairy tale of genetics as if the coming of civilization has been blessed in advance by the spirit of the abbot Gregor Mendel.3 (Italics added.)

It is indeed a fairy tale although we are taught to pretend that it is science, a hard-won insight into the nature of the physical world that is superior to any other explanation.

If we cannot give a better explanation of the origin of wheat than Bronowski’s, how can we explain the rest of the amazing complex of civilization we have found in the Middle East? Why would early man or woman bother to harvest the wheat? If they ate the wheat raw, they would have a spectacular stomachache. If they already knew that it should be ground into flour and baked in order to break down the enzymes in the husk, where did they get that information?

We have been told that primitive peoples discovered the smelting process while baking bread. They happened to include some copper ore in their ovens and, when they completed their bakery chores for the day, discovered that they had smelted ores to produce copper or iron while making their primitive pastries. But an oven has to be in the neighborhood of 1,500˚C in order to break down ore. There would be no reason to heat an oven that hot in order to bake bread.4

In fact, we cannot explain hardly anything about how civilization began. We simply find a very complex urban society when we uncover the ruins of earliest settlements anywhere in the world and we make up fairy tales to avoid asking ourselves hard questions about the origins of these ruins. It is at this point that I could well believe the theory of the ancient astronauts as bringers of culture and technology. This makes as much sense as any other explanation. At least it enables us to explain the incredible technological advances that we see so early in human history, and it helps us avoid making totally stupid statements.

Today the ancient astronaut thesis is anathema to respectable scholarship because it has been put forward in an irresponsible manner. Popular writers have simply cited a catalog of strange, unexplained items such as the large stones in Baalbek, the lines of Nazca, the dry-cell pottery battery of Mesopotamia, and citations in Ezekiel about flying wheels. These writers screamed, “Ancient astronauts!” without offering any prolonged argument that would illuminate us about exactly what these ancients did that was so important and how they have affected us today.

One writer, however, has tried to present a comprehensive view of an ancient astronaut invasion of the earth and its consequences. Zecharia Sitchin, in a four-book series, Earth Chronicles, reinterprets Near Eastern history with the bringing of technology, the rise of the kingship and urban settlements, and the imperial wars as if this history were the result of an intrusion from a superior civilization—certainly food for the imagination. The books, The Twelfth Planet, The Stairway to Heaven, The Wars of Gods and Men, and The Lost Realm, have an internal logic to them and illuminate some of the ruins of ancient times as well as explain social and political ideas that have continued within Western civilization for which we have only the slightest explanation.

The basic theme is that a superior civilization, finding its atmosphere is thinning and its planet threatened with extinction, comes to earth to dig gold that it plans to suspend in the atmosphere of its home planet to save it. Highly trained astronauts, once they have landed on earth, are then forced to do heavy work in gold mines in southern Africa. Finally, they rebel and demand that the head of the space mission allow them to create a “worker” to do the heavy work. After much genetic experimentation the space doctors with the cooperation of the space women produce a worker—a human being, Homo sapiens.

Soon the astronauts all want workers and the space women are occupied giving birth to workers. Space headquarters in lower Mesopotamia has domestic workers, and one day in the garden, an astronaut shows humans how to have sex. To his surprise, they discover they are fertile and that they are naked. The rest, as the preachers say, is history—human religious history in this instance. Temples are built to the respective astronauts who now adopt the posture of being gods in order to control the human population that is expanding at an incredible rate because humans rather like the idea of sex.

Some of Sitchin’s ideas beg credibility. The preliminary cosmology describing the creation of the earth is difficult to believe and the mechanics of the Great Flood seem unlikely. So the narrative cannot be read uncritically. When it comes to explaining the origin of civilization and religious institutions, however, this thesis has a lot to offer. It provides a context in which virgin birth, blood offerings, the jealousies of the gods, the erection of temples and resulting institution of a priesthood, and the description of heaven as a courtroom—royal and jurisprudential—ring true.

More important, orthodox scholars had come amazingly close to reaching the same conclusions. Samuel Noah Kramer, the dean of Sumerian studies and archaeology, in his book History Begins at Sumer, seemed to endorse the idea that the astronauts engaged in some kind of genetic engineering in order to create lesser creatures who could work for them. Kramer observed that “Sumerian thinkers, in line with their world view, had no exaggerated confidence in man and his destiny. They were firmly convinced that man was fashioned of clay and created for one purpose: to serve the gods by supplying them with food, drink and shelter, so they might have full leisure for their divine activities.”5

Many of Kramer’s other observations, not intended to support a thesis of ancient astronauts—when he was writing there were no such things as astronauts—dovetail nicely with this thesis. The knowledge of the ancient Sumerians does not reflect any previous effort to come to grips with the natural world and devise classifications of it that would have been useful in expanding man’s knowledge. Kramer is frankly puzzled at the manner in which Sumerian knowledge of the natural world is arranged.

[I]n the linguistic field, we have quite a number of Sumerian grammatical lists that imply an awareness of numerous grammatical classifications, but nowhere do we find a single explicit grammatical definition or rule. In mathematics we find many tables, problems, and solutions, but no statement of general principles, axioms, and theorems. In what might be termed the “natural sciences” the Sumerian teachers compiled long lists of trees, plants, animals and stones. The reason for the particular ordering of the objects listed is still obscure, but certainly it does not stem from a fundamental understanding of, or approach to, botanical, zoological, or mineralogical principles and laws.6

In other words, what we have are the necessary inventories of information but no explanation of the scientific reasoning behind the data. This is precisely what a dominant group would make available to a lesser species if it wanted to ensure the proper operation of laboratories, farms, and cities but did not want the lesser beings to understand how the whole complex functioned. The British, among other imperial colonizers, practiced this philosophy in the Americas and later in India.

In what we have previously called “religious matter,” there is a pattern not unlike what we would expect if a highly superior group were to create a lesser species having similarity to itself but were determined to emphasize the difference thereby setting themselves up a quasi-deities in order to maintain control. Kramer comments,

From as far back as our written records go, the Sumerian theologian assumed as axiomatic the existence of a pantheon consisting of a group of living beings, man-like in form but superhuman and immortal, who, though invisible to mortal eye, guide and control the cosmos in accordance with well-laid plans and duly prescribed laws.7

And there existed a ranking of these gods that was organized along vocational lines, precisely as we might expect our own astronauts to do if they found themselves living on another planet with an inferior species and felt it necessary to draft that species to perform certain ordinary service and blue-collar functions.

[I]t seemed reasonable to the Sumerians to assume that the gods constituting the pantheon were not all of the same importance or rank. The god in charge of the pickax or brickmold could hardly be expected to compare with the god in charge of the sun. Nor could the god in charge of dikes and ditches be expected to equal in rank the god in charge of the earth as a whole. And, on analogy, with the political organization of the human state, it was natural to assume that the head of the pantheon was a god recognized by all the others as king and ruler.8

In a ranking system this complex, one has to question why does a pickax or an irrigation system have to have its own deity? And why do the activities of these deities revolve around tasks that are common occupational divisions within a civilized society?

When we compare this pantheon of powers and functions of the early Near Eastern religions with the arrangement of the various spirits and powers made by the tribal peoples, the contrast is even more startling. Tribal peoples are concerned with the personification of natural powers and neighborhood animals and classify their knowledge of higher powers by function, refusing to build a pantheon in which various powers become subservient to others as a matter of course. Additionally, although tribal peoples personify the forces of nature, they do not place this personification within the context of a “personal” god. Kramer suggests that this personal deity of the individual, the most basic tenet of modern Christianity, originated in this ancient context in which individual humans worked for the gods, as follows:

As they saw it, gods were like the moral rulers the world over, and no doubt had more important things to attend to. And so, as in the case of kings, man must have an intermediary to intercede in his behalf, one whom the gods would be willing to hear and favor. The Sumerian thinkers therefore evolved the notion of a personal god, a kind of good angel to each particular individual and family head—his divine father who had begot him, as it were. It was to him, to his personal deity, that the individual sufferer bared his heart in prayer and supplication, and it was through him that he found his salvation. …”9 (Italics added.)

Kramer’s explanation makes sense if humans and astronauts are living together in an urban setting, the astronauts being dominant in everything. Indeed, the situation is not unlike the social arrangements in southern towns after the Civil War when blacks had to have some reliable whites to protect them against unexpected and irrational violence. Because the astronauts were presumed to have a greater life span than humans, it was natural for the space people to hold out promises of a longer life filled with the luxuries they enjoyed as a means of keeping humans in their place. It is ironic that modern American Protestants still cling to this idea and expect their deity to make good the contract.

Near Eastern religions seem to have originated as cults with the additional element that our species was created specifically to work for the outer-space visitors. It would be impossible today to trace back into our various human societies and groups to locate the genes of the astronauts that went into creating us. But modern geneticists have posited the existence of a single woman who lived in southern Africa, precisely where Sitchin says the original genetic experiments were conducted, as probably the genetic mother of us all. So perhaps we are closer to verifying Sitchin’s thesis that we would suppose.

I suspect that tribal peoples would be only peripherally affected by these ancient astronaut intrusions. Most tribal peoples no social forms or beliefs that would suggest that they were part of the civilized complex that we find in the Near Eastern civilizations. Many of them do have legends about people from the skies visiting them and intermarrying with them. Much of the food-preparing knowledge and domestic skills are said to have been brought to them by remote-culture heroes who spent some time instructing the people and then departed (i.e., in Aztec legend Quetzabcoatl, a blue-eyed blond, taught them to plant corn and left them promising to return one day). Some tribes, perhaps to mark the genetic intrusions of the astronauts, divided their people into sky and earth subdivisions. The theory is not difficult to integrate into what we know of tribal traditions, technology, and social organization.

The major belief that has survived the passage of time among the peoples who were visited and created by the ancient astronauts is the expectation of eternal life. Incredible hardships have been endured by people within the religious traditions that look forward to eternal life as their reward. But as a practical matter these people do not believe this promise. Thus Oral Roberts, who should have responded to the Deity’s extortion threat with a counterargument outlining his faithful service, cried copious tears on television and pleaded with his followers to fill the coffers lest he be “taken away.” In the end, then, our species did not trust its divine creators and were left with the puzzling problem of making sense of human existence—and there was no good answer.

Tribal peoples, who had no difficulty with death, and saw it as part of a natural progression in the stages of life, seem to have no memory of promises of specific delights and rewards. However, they have a healthy attitude toward death that is a result of living completely within the normal earth cycles of life and death. Examining how the two traditions deal with death should enable us to further understand our relationship to the earth and the meaning of life.