Subject:
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Re: Does God have a monopoly on gods?
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Newsgroups:
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lugnet.off-topic.debate
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Date:
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Sat, 4 Mar 2000 21:53:45 GMT
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Viewed:
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1201 times
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In lugnet.off-topic.debate, Shiri Dori writes:
> First off, my translation of the original, hebrew 2nd commandment: "You shall
> not make yourself any statue and any picture".
> It originally told the Jews not to create or worship images and/or statues of
> the dieties. These were very common amongst all the religions around the
> Jews -all polytheistic. (Judaism was the first Monotheistic religion.)
BTW, Judaism is NOT the first monotheistic faith. The Egyptian Pharoah
Akhenaten, A.K.A. The Heretic King, is probably the first monotheist in
history -- believing in a single solar diety -- The Aten. When the same idea
was taken up by Moses and his followers about a hundred years later, you had
the makings of a real cultural rift between Egyptian slaves and their Egyptian
masters -- the slaves had taken up the heretical views of the Pharoah whose
name the Egyptians tried to erase from memory.
From an archaeological viewpoint, most of the old testament is either a kind
of inversion of other "pagan" traditions current with early Judaism (i.e.
Innana becomes Lilith), or a series of double-tellings of the same stories to
satisfy both early Mosaic and Aaronid priesthoods. And these trends run up
through at least Jeremiah, who was a kind of redactor for the Jewish faith.
The rest of the old testament, or Tanakh, is made-up stuff justifying a Judaic
view of history (i.e. who begat who) and law codes (i.e. "Thou halt not...").
Its probably the case that "early" Judaic peoples were themselves
practitioners of other current faiths of that time. Abraham, for example, was
probably a believer in a Cannanite sacrificial fire god, Molech, as well as
numerous other gods, before he supposedly comes to the belief of a single
diety. In fact, its my unoriginal interpretation of the story of the
sacrifice of Isaac that God was testing to see if Abraham would now do for him
what he used to do in the name of other gods previously (i.e. sacrifice a
child in a burnt offering as if for Molech).
Point being: you don't tell people NOT worshipping idols to stop worshipping
idols. You tell them its prohibited because they ARE worshipping idols.
Simple as that.
<<God knew (so the bible tells) that the Jews would find it hard to believe in
an abstract God, that they cannot see, feel or touch. So he had to remind the
Jews to forget about these dieties (aka gods), and concentrate on the one true
god (the others were just fake).>>
I would suggest the view that Moses knew this and was trying to consolidate
his own political power under these religious views. Its not by accident that
two priesthoods grew up around the same time, around the same belief system --
its called politics.
-- Richard (armchair biblical scholar, former - thank the gods - mormon,
currently crazy pagan engaging in the religious game of "circle jerks" on
lugnet)
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Message has 1 Reply:
 | | Re: Does God have a monopoly on gods?
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| (...) You're forgetting Abraham and Noah, they were long before this pharaoh and long before formal judaism. The hadn't taken up the views of that heretic, they obeyed the active voice of the God of their fathers. Melchizedek (Gen 14) is called the (...) (25 years ago, 5-Mar-00, to lugnet.off-topic.debate)
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Message is in Reply To:
| | Re: Does God have a monopoly on gods?
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| (...) First off, my translation of the original, hebrew 2nd commandment: "You shall not make yourself any statue and any picture". It originally told the Jews not to create or worship images and/or statues of the dieties. These were very common (...) (25 years ago, 4-Mar-00, to lugnet.off-topic.debate)
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