SO MANY WAYS TO DISCREDIT MODERN RELIGIONS

One way to discredit Bible stories is to fact check the inaccuracies and the missing data which leave gaping holes in supposed Bible truths. Another is to show how Bible truths are just latter day interpretations of even older myths which existed way back in time. Below, I've entered some more numerological data from that eminent mythographer, Joseph Campbell, which goes a long way toward tying older myths to Christian myths, thus knocking the holiness hell out of religious dogma:

"Let me take, as an illustration of the effect on mythology of this disenchanting turn of mind, the example of the Deluge. According to many of the mythologies still flourishing in the Orient, a world flood occurs inevitably at the termination of every aeon. In India the number of years of an aeon, known as a Day of Brabma, is reckoned as 4,320,000,000; after which there follows a Night of Brahma, when all lies dissolved in the cosmic sea for another 4,320,000,000 years, the sum total of years of an entire cosmic round thus being 8,640,000,000. In the Icelandic eddas it is told that in Valhall there are 540 doors and that through each of these there will go at the end of the world 800 battle— ready warriors to join combat with the anti-gods. But 800 times 540 is 432,000. So it seems that there is a common mythological background theme, here shared by pagan Europe with the ancient East. In fact, I note, with a glance at my watch, each hour with 60 minutes and each minute with 60. seconds, that in our present day of 24 hours there will be 86,400 seconds; and in the course of this day, night will automatically follow light, and, next morning, dawn follow darkness. There is no question of punishment or guilt implied in a mythology of cosmic days and nights of this kind. Everything is completely automatic and in the sweet nature of things.

"But now, to press on a few steps further: according to a learned Chaldean priest, Berossos, who rendered in the early third century B.C. an account of Babylonian mythology, there elapsed 432,000 years between the crowning of the first Sumerian king and the coming of the Deluge, and there reigned during this period ten very long-lived kings. Then we observed that in the Bible it is reckoned that between the creation of Adam and coming of Noah’s Flood there elapsed 1656 years, during which there lived ten very long-lived patriarchs. And if I may trust the finding of a distinguished Jewish Assyriologist of the last century, Julius Oppert (1825—1906), the number of seven-day weeks in 1656 years is 86,400."


ANIMAL BECOMING HUMAN

Step by step, humankind has been freeing itself, through evolutionary adaptations, from instinct, from the gods, from kings and rulers of all kinds. In the West, more than the East, the individual has become an important spoke in the wheel of the universe while gods have slowly been displaced. The final step in human evolution will be total atheism. About 2000 BCE, according to Joseph Campbell, in Mesopotamian texts "a distinction is beginning to be made between the king as a mere human being and the god who he is now to serve. He is no longer god-king, like the pharaoh of Egypt. He is called the 'tenant farmer' of the god.... Furthermore, it was at that time that Mesopotamian myths began to appear of men created by gods to be their slaves."

Before that, men and kings were all just functionaries in a universe of divine laws which were above and beyond both king and person. That is still the way it is in Buddhism where gods are still only expressions of universal laws. The individual means nothing in that scheme.

I think the idea of one's being engulfed in the Universe reflected a very early time in mental evolution, when all kings and people were cogs in the wheel of human nature, more animal than human. Their bodies were enslaved by instinctive, natural behaviors. They couldn't conceive of being free from their instincts which probably pushed them around like so many puppets on strings. Without evolved consciousness, they couldn't even "conceive of" or express what they were experiencing. Only with evolving consciousness could humankind state the slavery they "had been" in in the past. In other words, the written and spoken record always lags behind the actual evolution of consciousness. One must be beyond any stage in development to look back at it and express the bondage. Freedom from nature had already occurred before the myth of the "slavery to the gods" could be expressed. Atheism is the next stage. The handful of atheists can already state the past myths by which others still live. More atheists will follow after.

Or, as Campbell states it more poetically but less scientifically (p. 76) "... as a consequence of... this loss of essential identity with the organic divine being of the living universe, man... has won for himself release to an existence of his own, endued with a certain freedom of will."
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'A woman occasionally is quite a servicable substitute for masturbation." —Karl Kraus (Who?)