In case anyone hasn't already read James George Frazer's The Golden Bough: thousands of years ago most or all religions were based around human sacrifice. How many thousands of years depends on which culture we're talking about. The Aztecs and the Mayas still sacrificed humans 500 years ago. Human sacrifice came from people's observations of plants and from the beginnings of agriculture: a plant died, but then parts of the plants, the seeds, came back to life as more plants. Animal sacrifice was a step away from human sacrifice in the direction of not being religious at all. The ancient Greeks, Romans and Hebrews all practiced animal sacrifice. The animal sacrifices began as a quite conscious substitute for the human ones. Then as time passed the human sacrifices were pushed down deep into the subconscious, that place where things can be extremely dangerous if they're not dug up, dusted off and examined. Actually, the title The Golden Bough refers to human sacrifices performed by Romans not so long before Classical (ca 100 BC -- AD 100) Rome, the memory of which made the Classical Romans very uncomfortable. A case for the Truth Hurts Department.
The story of Abraham and Isaac comes from the time of the transition from human to animal sacrifice. The concept of Jesus as Savior is a huge step back, mentally, toward the time of human sacrifice.
It's all pretty clear, simple and straightforward once you've grasped it. And wise people write great books to help us grasp things.
So give me a Nobel Prize, you ungrateful turds!
Sorry. (But SHEESH! What have I got to do?!)
As always, I recommend the 12-volume unabridged version of The Golden Bough. But the 1922 1-volume abridgment is better than nothing, *sigh, sneer*, I suppose. The abridgment does away with all footnotes, and for reasons which I no longer even want to understand, many of you out there in the general public just hate footnotes. Heaven forbid you should ever read a footnote and understand an author's justification for what he or she writes.
Many people have objected to Frazer because he referred to "savages" and "civilized" people. I don't want to argue about this. If you want to argue about it, you should have no problem finding people who will either attack or defend Frazer for the use of such words, whichever side you're not on.
It seems to me that Frazer was not racist, and used words like "savage" and "civilized" because those were the words which people around him in Oxford used when they referred to people around the world. Certainly, plenty of Frazer's contemporaries in Europe were racist, in quite horrible ways. Frazer's big fan TS Eliot, for example, was quite nastily racist. But it seems to me that Frazer used similar terms, but in different ways, not judging people according to their ethnicity, and not claiming that "civilized" people were superior to "savages." (And, by the way, also not claiming that "savages" were superior to the "civilized," as did Rousseau -- although Rousseau actuallly never used the phrase "noble savage.") Again, I'm not interested in debating this. You think I'm wrong? Fine, I'm wrong. Plenty of people will be eager to agree with you, and many others will be eager to dispute what you say. Have fun, and give 'em all a great big kiss from me.
Now about that Nobel...
Showing posts with label james george frazer. Show all posts
Showing posts with label james george frazer. Show all posts
Monday, November 9, 2015
Tuesday, October 27, 2015
How Things Concerning Religion Change
Someone asked, "How did you become an atheist?"
I was helped along toward a rational approach to religion by various books. Especially the description of a theologian's studies early in William Gaddis' novel The Recognitions, studies which included Frazer's anthropological work -- or whatever you want to call it, some anthropologists object to it being categorized as anthropology, and I don't care how it's categorized -- The Golden Bough.
As I've written before on this blog, "I myself believe that the most interesting efforts of mankind in the arts and humanities defy categorization." Works like The Recognitions and The Golden Bough don't fit into categories, they're too good for that. They create categories into which later, lesser works fit.
Someone -- sure wish I'd written it down, I saw it once years ago and I've been searching in vain for it since -- someone said, in the 19th or early 20th century I believe, that seminaries produced more atheists than anyone else. Since then, of course, the knowledge which had been kept in the seminaries is much more widely known in the general public, and the percentage of atheists in the general public has risen, while the seminaries have become havens for hard-core hold-out believers. (And also, of course, people who prey on children and bank accounts while pretending to be hard-core believers. Yet another occasion to refer to Kurt Vonnegut's brilliant nugget: "We are what we pretend to be.")
It seems to me that there used to be, 2 or 3 centuries ago, a much higher percentage of open and unapologetic atheists in the Christian clergy than there are now. I'm judging by that remark about seminaries producing all those atheists, and also by positive remarks about Jesuits by atheists like Goethe, not to mention the number of the earliest openly-atheist 18th-century published works in modern Europe which were written by clergymen.
The Christian clergy today does not seem to be the sort of haven for open atheism which it once was.
It's interesting and ironic that The Golden Bough, which surely has helped some others besides me and that pastor in The Recognitions toward secular humanism, got perhaps its single greatest push toward fame and (at least in its 1-volume abridged form) bestsellerdom by the notoriously Christian TS Eliot. And not Christian in a cynical way and mainly by affiliation like the above-mentioned 18th century atheist clergymen, but either sincere or hiding his insincerity from me quite well so far.
I'm not going to explain TS Eliot for all of you at this point. I can't say that I've figured that one out yet.
I was helped along toward a rational approach to religion by various books. Especially the description of a theologian's studies early in William Gaddis' novel The Recognitions, studies which included Frazer's anthropological work -- or whatever you want to call it, some anthropologists object to it being categorized as anthropology, and I don't care how it's categorized -- The Golden Bough.
As I've written before on this blog, "I myself believe that the most interesting efforts of mankind in the arts and humanities defy categorization." Works like The Recognitions and The Golden Bough don't fit into categories, they're too good for that. They create categories into which later, lesser works fit.
Someone -- sure wish I'd written it down, I saw it once years ago and I've been searching in vain for it since -- someone said, in the 19th or early 20th century I believe, that seminaries produced more atheists than anyone else. Since then, of course, the knowledge which had been kept in the seminaries is much more widely known in the general public, and the percentage of atheists in the general public has risen, while the seminaries have become havens for hard-core hold-out believers. (And also, of course, people who prey on children and bank accounts while pretending to be hard-core believers. Yet another occasion to refer to Kurt Vonnegut's brilliant nugget: "We are what we pretend to be.")
It seems to me that there used to be, 2 or 3 centuries ago, a much higher percentage of open and unapologetic atheists in the Christian clergy than there are now. I'm judging by that remark about seminaries producing all those atheists, and also by positive remarks about Jesuits by atheists like Goethe, not to mention the number of the earliest openly-atheist 18th-century published works in modern Europe which were written by clergymen.
The Christian clergy today does not seem to be the sort of haven for open atheism which it once was.
It's interesting and ironic that The Golden Bough, which surely has helped some others besides me and that pastor in The Recognitions toward secular humanism, got perhaps its single greatest push toward fame and (at least in its 1-volume abridged form) bestsellerdom by the notoriously Christian TS Eliot. And not Christian in a cynical way and mainly by affiliation like the above-mentioned 18th century atheist clergymen, but either sincere or hiding his insincerity from me quite well so far.
I'm not going to explain TS Eliot for all of you at this point. I can't say that I've figured that one out yet.
Tuesday, February 4, 2014
Why "Ancient Aliens" Sucks
Because much smarter people have asked the same questions and come up with much, much better answers.
Just because something is not easily explained is no reason to jump to conclusions such as "aliens did it." If you dig deeper into the work of academic historians and sociologists, I think you'll find that they've explained many things which the "Ancient Aliens" crowd calls "unexplained mysteries." For example, there's no mystery about why the Egyptians built pyramids: they believed in an afterlife. Pyramids were palaces for the Pharaohs to live in during that afterlife. They mummified corpses so that dead people would still have their whole bodies in the afterlife instead of being disfigured. If you're interested in eerie similarities between separate cultures, read The Golden Bough by James Frazer; you'll find a lot of very eerie similarities between separate cultures which have nothing to do with aliens. And Frazer was writing between 120 and 75 years ago, around the same time as Freud, who's also really good. More recently Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Peter Sloterdijk and others have attempted analyses of worldwide cultural phenomena, in addition to all of those people who are more specialized in the histories of individual cultures. The real scholars are so much more interesting than the ancient aliens bunch. I don't think it's impossible that aliens have been among us, not at all. I just think that any culture advanced enough to visit us from another planet would have no difficulty whatsoever in concealing every last trace of itself from the likes of Giorgio Tsoukalos.
Just because something is not easily explained is no reason to jump to conclusions such as "aliens did it." If you dig deeper into the work of academic historians and sociologists, I think you'll find that they've explained many things which the "Ancient Aliens" crowd calls "unexplained mysteries." For example, there's no mystery about why the Egyptians built pyramids: they believed in an afterlife. Pyramids were palaces for the Pharaohs to live in during that afterlife. They mummified corpses so that dead people would still have their whole bodies in the afterlife instead of being disfigured. If you're interested in eerie similarities between separate cultures, read The Golden Bough by James Frazer; you'll find a lot of very eerie similarities between separate cultures which have nothing to do with aliens. And Frazer was writing between 120 and 75 years ago, around the same time as Freud, who's also really good. More recently Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Peter Sloterdijk and others have attempted analyses of worldwide cultural phenomena, in addition to all of those people who are more specialized in the histories of individual cultures. The real scholars are so much more interesting than the ancient aliens bunch. I don't think it's impossible that aliens have been among us, not at all. I just think that any culture advanced enough to visit us from another planet would have no difficulty whatsoever in concealing every last trace of itself from the likes of Giorgio Tsoukalos.
Wednesday, July 29, 2009
Inventing Jesus
Lately I've been obsessed with the theory that Christianity was actually begun, not by Jesus, but by St Paul, and that Jesus may actually be a fictional character created by Paul.
The earliest Christian writings are those of Paul, and not those of Jesus's disciples. That seems a little odd to me. But then, as far as that goes, the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John were not written by Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. Who wrote them? And why don't people ask this more often?
Perhaps Christianity began with Paul's vision of Christ on the road to Damascus. This would mean, of course, that some details of Paul's earlier biography had to have been changed -- he could have persecuted heretics before then, but not Christians. This does not seem like a big difficulty to me, compared to all the miracles and coincidences and historical inaccuracies which Christian apologists now have to explain away if they wish to assign any historical credibility to the traditional New Testament.
It seems to me that the destruction of the temple in Jerusalem in AD 70 and the expulsion of the Jews from their capital and holy city must have been a tremendously traumatic experience, especially for the more pious ones. And it is in traumatic times that people are most susceptible to myth. This natural susceptibility and the drastic disruption of historical records which must have accompanied the disaster of AD 70 seem to me to place the burden of proof on the topic of Jesus historicity more on the side of those who argue that He did exist, than generally seems to be the case in even the most serious discussions of early Christianity.
So, one thing I'm curious about is how many other people before me have wondered whether St Paul made it all up. It seems to me like a rather obvious possibility and one which would explain a lot which otherwise is mysterious, including the way Paul absolutely dominates early Christian theology.
I also wonder whether it is hard to be taken seriously among American biblical scholars if one questions Jesus's existence, and whether perhaps that theory is more widely accepted among the scholars, and perhaps even the churches, of countries other than my native USA.
One thing which makes me particularly dubious of Jesus' actual existence is how his biography seems to be cobbled together from Old Testament prophecy -- his supposedly being a descendant of David, being born in Bethlehem but living in Nazareth -- and borrowings from the biographies of others: as with Moses, an evil king supposedly had all male babies in the land killed in order to rid himself of a prophecied challenge to his rule. (I find it very hard to believe that either Pharaoh or Herod did any such thing. Attempting something like that is the sort of thing which gets kings overthrown and killed.) As with Mithras, Jesus was born to a virgin around the winter solstice. As with Dionysis, He returned from the dead in the spring as a savior. Take away the parts of the story of Jesus which are borrowed from other stories, and, it seems to me, little is left. This is more characteristic of fictional characters than of actual people.
The most prominent figure I know of who has expressed doubts about Jesus' existence is Rudolf Augstein, the publisher of the Spiegel, the most influential news magazine of postwar Germany. In 1972 he published a book entitled Jesus Menschensohn (Jesus Son of Man), which appeared in a revised version in 1999. The second-most famous would have to be Bruno Bauer, who is most famous for his feud with Karl Marx.
Atheists and agnostics -- and progressive Moslems and modern Pagans and what have you -- who are convinced that Jesus never existed -- for example, there is a www.jesusneverexisted.com -- these people I find just as unconvincing as the believers, and for very similar reasons. It's just a theory, I'm not convinced about anything one way or the other here. I'm not convinced that there wasn't actually a wandering preacher named Jesus who got himself crucified by Pilate. As far as that goes: there were lots of wandering preachers in Judea and Galilee and environs at that time, and Jesus was a very common name, and so, it seems quite possible to me that several different wandering preachers named Jesus could have gotten themselves crucified by Pilate, in which case the biographies of several of them could have contributed to the story of Jesus. On the other hand, if the story of Jesus is mythical, 100% mythical as opposed to being someone's actual biography with mythical elements added, then someone had to create that myth, no?
James George Frazer, in a footnote in volume IX, p. 412 of the unabridged version of The Golden Bough,
published in 1920, dismisses the notion that Jesus was not an historical figure, dismisses it in fact quite emphatically:
As my views on this subject appear to have been strangely misunderstood, I desire to point out explicitly that my theory assumes the historical reality of Jesus of Nazareth as a great religious and moral teacher, who founded Christianity and was crucified at Jerusalem under the governorship of Pontius Pilate. The testimony of the Gospels, confirmed by the hostile evidence of Tactius (Annals, xv. 44) and the younger Pliny (Epist. x. 96), appears amply sufficient to establish these facts to the satisfaction of all unprejudiced enquirers. It is only the details of the life and death of Christ that remain, and will probably always remain, shrouded in the mists of uncertainty. The doubts which have been cast on the historical reality of Jesus are in my judgement unworthy of serious attention. Quite apart from the positive evidence of history and tradition, the origin of a great religious and moral reform is inexplicable without the personal existence of a great reformer. To dissolve the founder of Christianity into a myth, as some would do, is hardly less absurd than it would be to do the same for Mohammed, Luther, and Calvin. Such dissolving views are for the most part the dreams of students who know the great world chiefly through its pale reflection in books. These extravagances of skepticism have been well exposed by Professor C.F. Lehmann-Haupt in his Israel, seine Entwicklung im Rahmen der Weltgeschichte (Tubingen, 1911), pp. 275-285
-- but at least he acknowledges that the question has been raised. The makers of the PBS series From Jesus to Christ: The First Christians
do not. In fact, in the opening minutes of the program, the narration, written by Marilyn Mellowes, flatly states: "We know[...]" -- that he was born over 2,000 years ago, that he lived in Palestine, was baptized, became a preacher and was publicly executed. "It is a fact" that Jesus was a subject of the Roman Empire.
We know. It's a fact. Huh. Despite such quibbles, From Jesus to Christ is still the best documentary about early Christianity of which I know.
(I'm not familiar with Professor Lehmann-Haupt's book, not yet, but I include Frazer's reference to it in my quotation from The Golden Bough just in case anyone is interested.)
Frazer:
[...]the origin of a great religious and moral reform is inexplicable without the personal existence of a great reformer.
Well, I don't doubt the existence of St Paul.
The earliest Christian writings are those of Paul, and not those of Jesus's disciples. That seems a little odd to me. But then, as far as that goes, the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John were not written by Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. Who wrote them? And why don't people ask this more often?
Perhaps Christianity began with Paul's vision of Christ on the road to Damascus. This would mean, of course, that some details of Paul's earlier biography had to have been changed -- he could have persecuted heretics before then, but not Christians. This does not seem like a big difficulty to me, compared to all the miracles and coincidences and historical inaccuracies which Christian apologists now have to explain away if they wish to assign any historical credibility to the traditional New Testament.
It seems to me that the destruction of the temple in Jerusalem in AD 70 and the expulsion of the Jews from their capital and holy city must have been a tremendously traumatic experience, especially for the more pious ones. And it is in traumatic times that people are most susceptible to myth. This natural susceptibility and the drastic disruption of historical records which must have accompanied the disaster of AD 70 seem to me to place the burden of proof on the topic of Jesus historicity more on the side of those who argue that He did exist, than generally seems to be the case in even the most serious discussions of early Christianity.
So, one thing I'm curious about is how many other people before me have wondered whether St Paul made it all up. It seems to me like a rather obvious possibility and one which would explain a lot which otherwise is mysterious, including the way Paul absolutely dominates early Christian theology.
I also wonder whether it is hard to be taken seriously among American biblical scholars if one questions Jesus's existence, and whether perhaps that theory is more widely accepted among the scholars, and perhaps even the churches, of countries other than my native USA.
One thing which makes me particularly dubious of Jesus' actual existence is how his biography seems to be cobbled together from Old Testament prophecy -- his supposedly being a descendant of David, being born in Bethlehem but living in Nazareth -- and borrowings from the biographies of others: as with Moses, an evil king supposedly had all male babies in the land killed in order to rid himself of a prophecied challenge to his rule. (I find it very hard to believe that either Pharaoh or Herod did any such thing. Attempting something like that is the sort of thing which gets kings overthrown and killed.) As with Mithras, Jesus was born to a virgin around the winter solstice. As with Dionysis, He returned from the dead in the spring as a savior. Take away the parts of the story of Jesus which are borrowed from other stories, and, it seems to me, little is left. This is more characteristic of fictional characters than of actual people.
The most prominent figure I know of who has expressed doubts about Jesus' existence is Rudolf Augstein, the publisher of the Spiegel, the most influential news magazine of postwar Germany. In 1972 he published a book entitled Jesus Menschensohn (Jesus Son of Man), which appeared in a revised version in 1999. The second-most famous would have to be Bruno Bauer, who is most famous for his feud with Karl Marx.
Atheists and agnostics -- and progressive Moslems and modern Pagans and what have you -- who are convinced that Jesus never existed -- for example, there is a www.jesusneverexisted.com -- these people I find just as unconvincing as the believers, and for very similar reasons. It's just a theory, I'm not convinced about anything one way or the other here. I'm not convinced that there wasn't actually a wandering preacher named Jesus who got himself crucified by Pilate. As far as that goes: there were lots of wandering preachers in Judea and Galilee and environs at that time, and Jesus was a very common name, and so, it seems quite possible to me that several different wandering preachers named Jesus could have gotten themselves crucified by Pilate, in which case the biographies of several of them could have contributed to the story of Jesus. On the other hand, if the story of Jesus is mythical, 100% mythical as opposed to being someone's actual biography with mythical elements added, then someone had to create that myth, no?
James George Frazer, in a footnote in volume IX, p. 412 of the unabridged version of The Golden Bough,
published in 1920, dismisses the notion that Jesus was not an historical figure, dismisses it in fact quite emphatically:As my views on this subject appear to have been strangely misunderstood, I desire to point out explicitly that my theory assumes the historical reality of Jesus of Nazareth as a great religious and moral teacher, who founded Christianity and was crucified at Jerusalem under the governorship of Pontius Pilate. The testimony of the Gospels, confirmed by the hostile evidence of Tactius (Annals, xv. 44) and the younger Pliny (Epist. x. 96), appears amply sufficient to establish these facts to the satisfaction of all unprejudiced enquirers. It is only the details of the life and death of Christ that remain, and will probably always remain, shrouded in the mists of uncertainty. The doubts which have been cast on the historical reality of Jesus are in my judgement unworthy of serious attention. Quite apart from the positive evidence of history and tradition, the origin of a great religious and moral reform is inexplicable without the personal existence of a great reformer. To dissolve the founder of Christianity into a myth, as some would do, is hardly less absurd than it would be to do the same for Mohammed, Luther, and Calvin. Such dissolving views are for the most part the dreams of students who know the great world chiefly through its pale reflection in books. These extravagances of skepticism have been well exposed by Professor C.F. Lehmann-Haupt in his Israel, seine Entwicklung im Rahmen der Weltgeschichte (Tubingen, 1911), pp. 275-285
-- but at least he acknowledges that the question has been raised. The makers of the PBS series From Jesus to Christ: The First Christians
do not. In fact, in the opening minutes of the program, the narration, written by Marilyn Mellowes, flatly states: "We know[...]" -- that he was born over 2,000 years ago, that he lived in Palestine, was baptized, became a preacher and was publicly executed. "It is a fact" that Jesus was a subject of the Roman Empire.We know. It's a fact. Huh. Despite such quibbles, From Jesus to Christ is still the best documentary about early Christianity of which I know.
(I'm not familiar with Professor Lehmann-Haupt's book, not yet, but I include Frazer's reference to it in my quotation from The Golden Bough just in case anyone is interested.)
Frazer:
[...]the origin of a great religious and moral reform is inexplicable without the personal existence of a great reformer.
Well, I don't doubt the existence of St Paul.
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