RELIGION -- PLUS

Monotheism arose in the Middle East

The beginning of Abrahamic Religions

In ancient Egypt (under Akhenaten in the 14th century BCE), Iran (Zoroastrianism), Canaan (Judaism, which spread via Christianity), and Arabia (Islam).Zoroastrianism and Christianity aren’t purely monotheistic: the former religion envisions a process by which a single God will reign after an apocalyptic triumph of good over evil, and Christianity is only nominally monotheistic, not substantially so since Christians divide God into three divine persons and Catholics add a pantheon of sanctified saints.Monotheism arises as a reform of polytheism, which speaks to one major influence on this kind of religion: the projection of human preoccupations onto the environment. Polytheism projects social relationships onto the forces of nature, dividing up the powers of the universe into social classes as though nature were ruled by a kingdom of higher and lesser gods.The Mesopotamian gods, for example, “had human or humanlike forms, were male or female, engaged in intercourse, and reacted to stimuli with both reason and emotion. Being similar to humans, they were considered to be unpredictable and oftentimes capricious.

Their need for food and drink, housing, and care mirrored that of humans.” Moreover, “like kings and holy temples, they possessed a splendor called melammu. Melammu is a radiance or aura, a glamour that the god embodied. It could be fearsome or awe-inspiring.”Atheism is what ultimately follows from the repudiation of that vanity, but monotheism was the first curtailment of the bias, an early opposition to the polytheistic belittlement of nature’s inhumanity. The one God of monotheism is still a personification but an alien one. For example, almighty God loses his consort, so there’s no myth of the universe’s creation by a sexual process to reassure us about the cosmic centrality of life’s stature.As social mammals, we’re at home in a family and by extension a community, so the thought of an absolute creator ruling over everything alone, a sole alpha and omega is mindboggling

. Even a king or a dictator needs his sycophants to carry out his commands or to keep him from descending into loneliness and insanity. And indeed, God has his angelic minions as in polytheism, as well as the creatures that dwell in his material creation.

Yet the monotheist’s emphasis is on a single God’s absolute supremacy, which is an alienating view of what’s supposedly most real.

Again, this isn’t as alienating as pure atheism, but compared to the socialized gods of polytheism, the monotheist’s God is an inhuman figure, especially when you look past the incoherent attributes this deity inherits from the pantheon he absorbs as he’s historically confected.What isn’t perhaps as familiar as it should be is another likely influence on this aspect of monotheism. This is the geographic or climatological one. It’s no coincidence that monotheism arose in desert regions or in areas encroached by deserts and thus by some of the harshest land environments. Desert climate likely provided an extended metaphor that countered the humanizing instinct, the urge to reduce the wilderness to familiar, comforting categories.

If polytheism is a naïve mental projection, monotheism is the beginning of an alienating one that was brought out by the desert’s inhospitality.

The Desert’s Tyrannical Overlord

Deserts are defined by the rarity of water within them. Life is possible in a desert, but just barely. Plants and animals such as cacti and camels require highly specialized adaptations to survive with so little water, which make them vulnerable to foreign predators that are introduced or to changes in the environment. Moreover, the deserts in the Middle East present these threats to human life: “dangerous insects and snakes, low rainfall, intense sunlight and heat, wide and fast temperature range, sparse vegetation, high mineral content, sandstorms, mirages, need for water.”Suppose, then, you’re thinking about the Creator’s character, but the image you have of the created world is limited to your familiarity with deserts or else deserts become central to your impression of what the world is like.

That familiarity would begin to adjust the religious expectations that are based on your social instincts. You’d no longer think of God’s abode as a palace or as a paradise, or perhaps you’d assume that if God does live in a paradise, this would be an oasis which God managed to establish within a more universal desert, an island in a sea of chaos.Indeed, you’d no longer think of God as just a superhuman.

God would be a harsh, creative force, showing some signs of mercy (the rarity of life and of water in the desert), but leaning towards tyranny and a terrifying, unknowable purpose. The question the early monotheists had to grapple with wasn’t, “What created the whole world?” given our more encompassing, scientific understanding of the universe. Instead, they must have been preoccupied with the mystery of who created the hostile desert. Who would have deliberately done so?

What kind of creator is reflected in that handiwork that seems only just tolerant of the emergence of organic life?Here, the metaphor of the desert could have blended with that of the monstrous human ruler. In the ancient world, kings and emperors tended to be corrupted by their concentrated power or they had to be brutal and ruthless in the first place to have commanded the respect and loyalty of their soldiers. Kings would initially have risen through the ranks like a mafia boss in an organized criminal enterprise, by killing his rivals and proving to be the most amoral manager under such harsh circumstances as the lack of legal or moral standards.Thus, the psychopathy of kings would have been as inhuman and antisocial as the desert wilderness. A king could have you killed just for looking at him the wrong way, let alone for threatening his power or his lineage. Likewise, the desert is full of ways to kill the higher life forms that dare to wander the sand dunes.

The Desert Sun’s Omnipotence

The overriding power in a desert is the heat which makes water scarce; everything in a desert bows to that unifying, clarifying force. The heat is almost inescapable: nomads like the Bedouins wore special clothes to protect their eyes and used mud to make brick shelters with insulation and to circulate air. But the predominant factor would have been the unbearable heat which made work during the day dangerous or impossible.Similarly, the God of the desert would have been as unapproachable and irresistible as the sun that lorded it over the beleaguered creatures that watched their every step in that arid climate. You’d exit your rude shelter, and the heat would bear down on you like the weight of God’s superiority and overpowering agenda.

The pantheon was simplified and merged into a single divine sovereign that was as infinite, eternal, and immovable as the sun that was obviously omnipotent in the desert.When trying to eke out a living in a desert, you’re forced to think in stark, black-and-white terms. You need to drink water on a regular basis, which means you planned your movements around the wells or your water reserves. The unbearable heat frazzles your brain, making complex thought onerous. Rather than deigning to reinvent the wheel or to indulge in the luxury of skepticism, you’d be more inclined to follow a code that had been developed long ago.

You’d follow established rules to the letter out of a prudent sense of necessity.In this respect, desert culture facilitated not just a consolidation and dehumanization of the image of the gods, but the later Arabic developments of algebra. The idea of an algorithm, of a stepwise process that guarantees a certain result might have seemed natural to people who survived in desert conditions by realizing that only death lay outside a tried-and-tested plan of action. You had to ride the camel from waterhole to waterhole, veering not at all from the caravan route. Likewise, with an algorithm you could reach your desired result, but only by hewing to the precise steps laid out by the mathematical plan.

The Hope that God would Save Us from Himself

Think of how the psalms picture God in two ways to express these desert expectations. First, there’s the raw fear of God, the candid description of God as an alien tyrant who kills indiscriminately. See, for example, this part of Psalm 8:Yet you sweep people away in the sleep of death — they are like the new grass of the morning: In the morning it springs up new, but by evening it is dry and withered.

We are consumed by your anger and terrified by your indignation. You have set our iniquities before you, our secret sins in the light of your presence. All our days pass away under your wrath; we finish our years with a moan. Our days may come to seventy years, or eighty, if our strength endures; yet the best of them are but trouble and sorrow, for they quickly pass, and we fly away. If only we knew the power of your anger! Your wrath is as great as the fear that is your due.

Now doesn’t that sound above all like the god of a desert? Historians say this image of Yahweh is drawn from his taking on the attributes of the storm and war gods from the Canaanite pantheon, but that doesn’t address the Jewish scriptures’ preoccupation with these harsh attributes. There were over 234 gods and goddesses of Canaan, and they represented the ways of life of all the people who lived in that time and place. Yet Jews were fixated on this characterization, which suggests the desert got the better of their humanizing impulses.

The second characterization is apparent from many psalms such as 91:

I will say of the Lord, “He is my refuge and my fortress, my God, in whom I trust.”

Surely he will save you from the fowler’s snare and from the deadly pestilence. He will cover you with his feathers, and under his wings you will find refuge; his faithfulness will be your shield and rampart. You will not fear the terror of night, nor the arrow that flies by day, nor the pestilence that stalks in the darkness, nor the plague that destroys at midday. A thousand may fall at your side, ten thousand at your right hand, but it will not come near you.Here, God is portrayed as Jews’ saviour who protects them from various dangers but note the implication that God would be saving the Jews from himself. The pestilence, plagues, and terrors of the night are parts of the world God would have made which are unmistakable in the desert. Thus, to pray to God as a merciful savior would have been like hoping you wouldn’t succumb to the desert’s hazards, that you’d find water over the next dune.That is, the desert has the dual nature reflected in these two characterizations of God. God and the desert are fearful in their alienness and lethality, but there’s hope for shelter from either: even in a desert, life finds a way to survive if not exactly to flourish.

The Desert: A More Realistic Religious Metaphor

What this suggests is that monotheists sharpened their religious metaphors to incorporate the overwhelming features of their landscape, which happened to be the desert. God couldn’t be like any old king, not even a tyrannical one. God’s character had to be reflected in his created world, and that meant God had to incorporate not just inhumanity but sublime remoteness and indifference. The one supreme God must have been beyond parochial notions of right and wrong, because the desert’s harshness demonstrates that God doesn’t need living things. If God plays favourites, his will must be as inscrutable as the luck that determines who will succumb to heat stroke or who will get bit by a venomous snake.If God is preoccupied by what we call “morality,” this morality must be relentless and unwavering. Just as moral questions cut through self-serving excuses and political compromises, the desert heat is a clarifying force in that it compels you to dispense with trivial matters to stay alive. The desert and an almighty God cut through illusions and cleanse the land of all that’s unfit to occupy it.According to the monotheistic myths, whoever is judged unworthy will be heaved into the fires of Hell; again, excruciating heat is the overriding metaphor for the wrath of God. In some monotheistic theologies, Hell will have a cleansing effect, purifying the soul to enable it to endure God’s presence without tormenting itself with vain misconceptions. Likewise, the desert concentrates the mind, assimilating life to its lifeless vistas.All of which suggests that the desert’s seeming singlemindedness was a driving metaphor for monotheists. Fear of God was paramount, and God’s intentions were as mysterious and stark as the desert heat and blinding glare. If God created the land, sea, and sky, why were some regions so inhospitable? What else could have been on God’s mind besides life when he created the universe?And if God’s not so consumed with thoughts of our welfare, why should we be so fixated on worshiping God? Wouldn’t that be like lusting after someone who’s out of our league? This doubt emerges in the books of Job and Ecclesiastes, and it leads to atheism and to secular humanism or to a more pessimistic philosophy. In the meantime, monotheists wrestle with the existential issues raised by their peculiar faith.

Monotheism

Religions have been used to justify or coerce people into engaging in acts of violence or harm.

Some examples include:

1. CHRISTIANITY:

During the Crusades (11th-13th centuries), Christian armies launched military campaigns to reclaim Jerusalem and the Holy Land from Muslim control. There were instances of violence, massacres, and forced conversions during these wars. The Crusades (11th–13th centuries): A series of religious wars sanctioned by the Latin Church against Muslim forces in the Holy Land, including the Siege of Antioch (1097–1098), the Battle of Hattin (1187), and the Siege of Acre (1291). The Crusades, a series of religious wars sanctioned by the Latin Church in the medieval period, were waged to reclaim holy lands in the Middle East from Muslim control. Additionally, wars and conflicts within Europe, such as the Thirty Years' War, often had religious motivations or were fought between different Christian denominations.In the last 200 years, there have been several instances where religious factors played a significant role in conflicts and wars, though labeling them strictly as "religious wars" can be complex due to the multitude of factors involved. Here are some examples of countries where religious tensions have contributed to conflicts:

·

Thirty Years' War (1618–1648): A conflict primarily fought in Central Europe between Protestant and Catholic states, resulting in widespread devastation and loss of life.

Northern Ireland (United Kingdom):

· The Troubles, a period of conflict primarily between unionists (who identify as British) and nationalists (who identify as Irish), had strong religious undertones, with Protestants mainly on the unionist side and Catholics predominantly on the nationalist side. The conflict involved paramilitary organizations representing both communities and lasted for decades until the Good Friday Agreement in 1998.

·

2. ISLAM:

Crusades (11th–13th centuries): Various wars between Christian and Muslim forces, including the capture of Jerusalem during the First Crusade (1099) and subsequent Crusades in the Levant.

· : Throughout history, various Islamic empires engaged in wars of conquest to spread Islam or expand their territories. . Rashidun Caliphate conquests (632–661 AD): Wars waged by the early Muslim caliphs, including the battles of Yarmouk, Qadisiyyah, and the conquest of Persia, Syria, Egypt, and North Africa.

· Examples include the early Islamic conquests following the death of Muhammad, the expansion of the Umayyad and Abbasid Caliphates, and later conquests by the Ottoman Empire. . Sectarian violence between Sunni and Shia Muslims has been a significant feature of the conflicts in Iraq, particularly following the fall of Saddam Hussein's regime in 2003. Various militant groups have exploited sectarian tensions, leading to widespread violence and instability extremist factions have used it to justify acts of violence. This includes terrorist groups like ISIS, Al-Qaeda, and others who have committed acts of terrorism in the name of Islam

· Syria:

· The Syrian Civil War, which began in 2011, involves multiple factions, including the Assad regime, rebel groups, Kurdish forces, and Islamist militant groups. While the conflict is primarily driven by political and ideological factors, religious differences between Sunni and Shia Muslims have also played a role, with various sectarian militias participating in the fighting.

· Nigeria:

· Intercommunal violence between Christians and Muslims, particularly in central Nigeria and the northern regions, has led to numerous conflicts and thousands of deaths over the past few decades. Factors such as competition for resources, political grievances, and religious extremism contribute to the violence.

· Myanmar (Burma):

1. disputes are also significant factors, religious identity and holy sites play a central role in the conflict.

1. The persecution of Rohingya Muslims by the Myanmar military and Buddhist extremist groups has led to widespread violence, displacement, and humanitarian crises. While the conflict has political and ethnic dimensions, religious tensions between Buddhists and Muslims are a significant factor.

·

3.INDIA:

1. Communal violence between Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs has erupted at various times, leading to significant bloodshed, particularly around the time of Partition in 1947 and during subsequent communal riots.

Hinduism:

In India, there have been instances of violence perpetrated by Hindu nationalist groups against religious minorities, particularly Muslims and Christians. These groups often promote a supremacist ideology and have been involved in attacks, riots, and forced conversions.’ Battles between Hindu and Muslim rulers in medieval India, such as the Battles of Tarain (1191 and 1192) between Prithviraj

Sikhism:

The Sikhs, a religious community founded in the Punjab region of the Indian subcontinent, engaged in several military conflicts defending their faith and lands against Mughal and Afghan rulers in the 17th and 18th centuries.

· Battles against Mughal and Afghan forces: Examples include the Battle of Amritsar (1634), the Battle of Chamkaur (1704), and the Battle of Muktsar (1705), which were fought during the Mughal-Sikh wars.

Buddhism:

Though Buddhism is generally associated with non-violence and compassion, there have been instances where Buddhist-majority countries have seen violence against minority groups. For example, in Myanmar, there have been reports of violence against Rohingya Muslims perpetrated by Buddhist extremists.

4-JUDAISM:

While Judaism does not advocate violence, there have been instances where violence has been carried out by extremist individuals or groups claiming to act in the name of Judaism. However, such instances are relatively rare compared to other religions. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict has deep religious roots, with tensions between Jews and Muslims over control of land, particularly in Jerusalem. While political and territorial

Ancient Roman Religion: The expansion of the Roman Empire often involved military conquest, and the Roman religion was closely tied to the state. Wars were waged to expand territory and exert control over conquered peoples

, sometimes with religious justification.srael and Palestine:

These are just a few examples, and religious tensions have influenced conflicts in various other regions as well. It's important to recognize that while religion can be a significant factor in conflicts, underlying political, economic, and social factors often play equally crucial roles.

Ancient Egyptian Religion:

The pharaohs of ancient Egypt often waged wars against neighboring kingdoms, sometimes with religious motivations tied to the assertion of divine authority or protection of religious beliefs.

Ancient Norse Religion (Norse Mythology):

Viking raids and conquests across Europe during the Viking Age (8th to 11th centuries) were often intertwined with Norse mythology and religious beliefs.

OBVIOUSLY A SPARSE LIST -- WORLD WIDE EVENTS- COMBINED WITH THOSE IN HISTORY - TO MANY TO LIST

GRANTED - MANY ARE MORE OF POLITICAL-CONTROL NATURE- THAN THEOLOGICAL

WORLD'S RELIGIONS

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boltzmann_brain#:~:text=The%20Boltzmann%20brain%20thought%20experiment,cosmologists%20think%20it%20actually%20did.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kgU_uSzKzmA

https://eejjbair.medium.com/cultural-christian-richard-dawkins-is-horrified-at-islam-s-popularity-1f17cabc2779

https://medium.com/interfaith-now/god-from-the-searing-desert-heat-58248bc78d12

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b7TJoQSGAtw&t=8s

Religion References

GNOSTICISM - DEMIURGE

GNOSTIC DEMIURGE

FIRST CENTURY CME CHRISTIANITY

( THIS SECTION IS MAINLYFOR HISTORICAL INTEREST- ALWAYS GOOD TO KEEP AN OPEN MIND ABOUT THINGS WE DON'T REALLY KNOW ABOUT- THERE HAS BEEN SOME REAPPEARANCE OF GNOSTIC THOUGHT IN PHILOSOPHY-RELIGION TODAY)

The demiurge is one of the esoteric terms that has been a part of the ancient Revival of knowledge that we're experiencing within the spirit of this age so today I'm going to be explaining exactly what the demiurge is the demiurge first originated with in GNOSTICISM AND NEOPLATONISM Only within these two separate spiritual systems the demiurge can play distinctly different roles the one commonality that they both share. that the demiurage means CRAFTSMAN OR ARTESIAN and in this age we would know this term of the demiurge being a Craftsman of the material world to e more along the lines of what is known as an architect.

So we can look at it as the demiurges the architect of the material Realm .So in gnosticism this was aligned with a negative overall world view ,meaning that the Physical Realm we know was this cast off from the Celestial Cross. To gnosticism .the physical world was a colossal abomination a metaphysical mistake that was made to cut off our own Essence from its true reality .Its true realm belongs in the pleroma which is the spiritual perfected Realm - now with the demiurge being this representation of what the god-like or architect of this physical world would be, is dependent on what school of thought we come from -this architect which is known as yeldebath is looked at in a more sympathetic lens he is in true ignorance that there is a Creative Source higher than his own and more powerful than his own -for this we can almost pity him because yaldaboth within this tone never asked to be created in the first place --- in other parts of this concept of their being a demiurge the architect or the Craftsman that rules over the Physical Realm is one who does so calculatedly and intentionally and knows its true place-- but always tries to hide exactly where its true place is located within the entire Cosmos --in gnosticism there is a dualistic cosmology and what this is is that the physical world is separate and distinguished from the spiritual world

the physical world has an architect or a Craftsman that we know as the demiurge who rules over it and we can look at this demiurge as being a Lesser God

In fact yaldaboth is also known as Jehovah and as Yahweh and so we can look at this as almost Source being the entirety of physical and spiritual material planes and Source - now we're starting to look at God and the devil as distinct and separate entities and that's pretty much the fragmentation that's going on with the character of the demiurge---the demiurge is the ego's fragmentation into what we know as God and what we know as the devil and that entire battle between those two forces that goes on within the lower consciousness of being --the demiurge it's actually androgynous it has both its negative feminine polarity and its negative masculine polarity summed up into this expression that we're calling the demiurge

the demiurge in its most brutal expression as the force that crystallizes us here through entropy into the Physical Realm but Cuts us off from our higher spiritual Force and leaves us to become fed off of and siphoned to go feed it by Strife conflict suffering violence any type of sadism -the best concept that we have in modern times in the spirit of this age would be the Matrix because the Matrix even though that term is neutral and objective in and of itself is shown in its negative polarity best through the movie The Matrix and in that we see how the demiurge is playing this system that controls the consciousness of all the individuals who are plugged into it --perfect example it could have just been written by gnostics --r vague phrases in the spiritual Community like the powers that be or the forces that be or are they it's referring to the demiurge because the demiurge is that architecture of a systemic program that keeps us trapped in the illusion of time and trapped in the illusion of physical reality where we're consuming one another --order beings because they don't have a first connection they don't have a first link to source and because of that they're rulers in a sense that do the bidding of the demiurge and this can be looked at in The Matrix once again as the agents the agents would be the modern concept of this gnosticism knew it as the archons just like how Angels go and do the bidding of God archons would be the highest demonic force that goes and does the bidding within the demiurge and this could even be within the system so a lot of times we think that we're giving our energy into powers and institutions that have our best interest at heart and in reality they're entirely just iconic systems

Plato had an entirely different arrangement of the cosmos and the demiurges role within the cosmos-- although within Plato's cosmology and neoplatonism it considered the demiurge still a Craftsman but a benevolent one a benevolent architect that held the vital role of shaping the physical universe taking it from its unorganized chaotic raw materials of the void and then creating order out of it-- so synthesizing and organizing it into the different elements into the different platonic solids into all of the different features so Plato's demiurge was benevolent and it was considered the first emanation from the monad so the demiurge according to neoplatonism was not actually the all it wasn't Source it wasn't the monad but it was that first reflection that first awareness of viewing the all of becoming self-aware of the monad and from there the demiurge was seen as a benevolent Craftsman to organize

so the demiurge was benevolently organizing the all into what we would consider the Physical Realm its physical expressions in all the different ways and then from there yet again the story differs first we see that the demiurge started off as this benevolent Craftsman and then in some versions of the story we see that it had that intention for the Physical Realm until some things went awry and then it got cut off from that original intent and then we see it within the demiurge version that it is now which it was not ever intended to b

so we have different versions of this concept of the demiurge but the ones that are tried and true throughout all the different veins and all the different threads of this is that the demiurge is a Craftsman of the physical reality whether we assign that to be beautiful and benific or malevolent and hostile it depends on our own personal cosmology a

we can also acknowledge that it may be able to serve a higher more unified purpose and so even if there is an inherent separation within the concept of the demiurge so that inherent separation would be the Physical Realm is separate from the spiritual realm that might serve Us in some parts of our ability to extract the knowledge and the wisdom of the truth of our reality so we might need to look at things in that Paradigm to get certain knowledge that can't be accessed if we were to look at it through a different paradigm

if we have already integrated as much as we can from viewing reality in that dualistic setting of physical reality material plane/ evil spiritual realm perfect then we might be able to grow and incorporate more of the higher Divine architecture that's contained within that same realm

The demiurge is us it's representing what's going on within our own soul complex is this reality purely negative is it a food farm is it a simulation is it all Divine-- is it Pure Heaven are we the creators all these different things are how the demiurge figures out what its creation is and the more we imbue it with our own Divinity

it is the ego --it represents the physical reality that the ego operates in so how we view this physical reality how we view having an ego being in a seemingly separate experience from the spiritual realm will mean different things and will be perceived different ways the demiurge itself is the organizing force that structures spiritual Essence into physicality and it can accommodate All Views it can accommodate all forms of reality because it's trying to organize and it's trying to synthesize themost basic or original substance and the monad is everything .

Gnosticism References

https://medium.com/brain-labs/gnosticism-and-the-dawn-of-agi-consciousness-c42bb940c0cc

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lGCqv37O2Dg&t=96s

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tb2TYU7FuxE

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mTnQ__VSQzc

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kgU_uSzKzmA&t=18s