Critique of Pure Faith©2009
The first few pages:
Preface
Homo sum; humani nil a me alienum puto.
Yarns about God have been born to the minds of very bold, insolent men; moreover, plenty of these connoisseurs continue to enhance the old tales in a very serious mode today. For us, this is a matter of tradition. Long ago, the allegedly divine stories entered the folklore of many nations. These legends evolved thereafter into unsightly ghouls violently jealous of conflicting fables.
Several major religious associations have adopted the Book of Genesis as the biological foundation of their creed and the Book of Exodus as their political constitution. Both works describe catastrophic events revealed by God to chosen men during His apparitions.
Sensible human accounts assume that God preexisted everything. Sacred History starts with an act of God at the beginning of time. Our critique deals with men’s tales of creation and governance, not with the original egg born to a gigantic explosion fifteen billion years ago or the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
In the beginning, or close to it, for reasons of His own, God arranged ninety-two constellations of charged particles. This report has caused poets to call the universe, “A dream of God,” and scientists to bombard uranium in laboratories to “create” sixteen more elements in order to give them the names of bigheaded men and proud countries.
At the whim of Divine Energy, God’s particles became the primary parts of Creation. From that action developed the world that we know and, most likely, everything else that we ignore. In incremental quantities, God populated the primeval elements’ atoms with two types of particles, one charged positively and one electrically neutral, and let a third type, a very light negatively charged particle, revolve around them. No one has proven yet that the spinning charges are components of the clock of Creation.
Later, a man called Mendeleyev classified God’s elements by the weight of their particles—or, more precisely, by the average atomic mass of their isotopes (atoms with an excess or a deficiency of neutral particles). Mendeleyev even predicted the discovery of elements not yet found, some of which may be elsewhere in the universe.
After the era of no time, at least three thousand million years ago, God’s elements had bonded into gaseous ammonia, methane gas and water vapor; these compounds covered the surface of the globe—all of Pangaea and Panthalassa. God, who has shown partiality to electricity, let lightning split the core of these gases, bonding the elements called carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen and oxygen into the amino acids, the sugars and the DNA of life. A man named Oparin deduced what had happened based on the hypothesis that life is a system of substances undergoing chemical activity.
Some priests of science—an excellent human endeavor based on observation— have proposed an initial explosion that created matter, gravity and electromagnetism, scattering elements all over the universe. A man called Gamow estimated a very hot universe at the beginning that filled space with particles of light stemming from thermonuclear reactions. Others have said that intelligence came to our planet on a comet and colonized life.
God’s elements resemble the cosmos. Space seems to be boundless upwards, towards the large, and downwards, towards the small. For now, we continue to search for the confines of the galaxies and the universe of subatomic particles.
Thus far, the holy men of science have provided us with very good entertainment… and so have poets and artists. A man called Baudelaire, for instance, has called God a lonely atheist because He has no superior being to believe in. A man called Michelangelo has left the most extraordinary paintings of the first few members of Creation.
Time
The earth was void and darkness was on the face of the deep.
The promoters of the faith put God to work creating heaven and earth for man. That’s how the image of a first day came about and how the world was born from a chaotic solitude. Space was created. That first day (or night) would have been immersed in a great darkness that enclosed the abyss between the waters and the sky. “It’s better to have light too,” thought the wise men and invented a sunless radiance.
Oparin’s theory of life by organic molecules seemed to contradict the tales of the men who spoke passionately about God. In the past, the believers had simply terrorized those holding views offensive to their faith. By this time, however, the proponents of the faith knew that fanatical disputes and persecutions made humanity less gullible. For the sake of peace, public quarrelling was avoided and the nations of the world were told that, should Oparin’s theory come to anything, God would’ve created whatever man had discovered.
Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters.
Campaigners for the faiths had written books about God’s performance during all of creation. On a second day, which for practical purposes could have come before the first, five thousand million years ago, God would have gathered the waters in the seas and uncovered dry lands. Landmasses would have risen in the air and sunk into the sea; mountains would have been blown away by the winds and worn by rainfall; downpours would have cut grooves into the rock; warm periods would have been followed by ice ages; deserts would have spread and disappeared. All this has been written in the rings of trees, in the evolution of uranium into lead and in the layers of sedimentary rock.
The second day must have seen the birth and development of simple organisms such as bacteria, algae, fungi and protozoans. It was the time when God disseminated all kinds of seeds and plants over the earth too.
With a microscope, a man called Dujardin saw the little parts of God’s creatures and called them “cells.” These cells multiplied by division and formed societies of tissues, organs and organic systems; they were found to specialize in different activities and to make up plants and animals. Each cell was seen to have a center of energy called nucleus, rich in protein, separated by a porous membrane from a fluid populated by organelles. Further observation by others showed that plants and animals grew their different parts as the number of their identical cells increased.
God’s command to these cells—something not yet explained—was to become organized into diverse sections such as eyes, noses, kidneys and legs. Strands of chromatin took notice of God’s orders on coded tablets called “genes.”
Let there be lights.
On a third day, God fixed the sun and the moon in the firmament. This day either came before the second day or a new type of force, sunlight, was created.
Light energy had the power to change, within plants, carbon dioxide and water into oxygen and an energy storage compound called glucose. This happened via a catalyst called chlorophyll that God had packed into cells between proteins and lipids. God even thought of an energy transfer compound, called ATP by us, to hold energy in its chemical bonds and release it as needed.
Perhaps we’ll never know why God went through all this trouble. Nevertheless, it’s obvious that we must live with His decision.
Multiply, sea creatures and winged birds.
On a fourth day, God created more life—a long day it must’ve been. The seas, the earth and the air were populated by complex organisms that produced more offspring than could possibly live. In a struggle for survival, those best adapted to their environment lived on.
God decreed that only life would produce life. Carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, sulfur, iron and phosphorus have never lived: only biosynthesis can make life. Following God’s command, proteins containing the hundreds or thousands of molecules of twenty amino acids promoted life.
Let the earth bring forth the living creature.
On a fifth day, God fashioned all the wild beasts, domestic animals, reptiles and Homo sapiens. The forms in Homo sapiens’ world lived in time, a subjective condition; these structures did not belong to the many objects of the world but to man’s perceptions. All of man’s representations occurred either successively or simultaneously—in time.
Man was to rule over the fish of the sea, the land animals and even the flying birds. Or, perhaps, man simply believes that he does.
I have given you herbs, fruits and beasts.
On a sixth day, God gave the final touches to heaven and earth. He provided man with an appreciation for the world so he wouldn’t give himself as food to carnivorous beasts. That’s when man adopted reason, rejoiced in sex and discovered art.
Bless the day of rest from work.
Finally, on a seventh day, God rested. Perhaps God tires! Perhaps another name for God’s exhaustion is Time.
Paradise
According to the books of faith, on the fifth day of creation God had modeled a clay figure to his own likeness. He had blown a puff of life in the figure’s nose and had called it, “Adam.” Because Adam was dependent on the air to breath, the weight of the atmosphere not to disintegrate, the vegetation, the fauna and unpolluted waters to dine, it’s said that God planted for him, between the rivers Euphrates and Tigris, a well-irrigated garden of beautiful and healthy trees with which he could enjoy and sustain himself. God thought that such dwelling would bring happiness to Adam’s heart since thinking wasn’t an issue yet. At the same time, God made grow from the ground the tree of knowledge and wisdom, which some have called the tree of Paradise.
A man called Rimbaud has left us with an image of the green valley of Paradise. Rimbaud thought of it as a grassy dell sleeping under the sun, traversed by a clear and tuneful stream:
C’est un trou de verdure où chante une rivière,
Accrochant follement aux herbes des haillons
D’argent ; où le soleil, de la montagne fière,
Luit : c’est un petit val qui mousse de rayons.
The books of faith don’t say if light energy was put to work in Paradise turning water and carbon dioxide into starches, celluloses, oils and saccharides. The books say, however, that death had not been invented yet. So it may not have been necessary for sunlight to be absorbed by chlorophyll, stored in triple phosphate bonds and used to split oxygen atoms from water. The idea of making glucose and water from carbon dioxide must have occurred to God some time later. In any case, God may have fed Adam in His own mysterious way while he lived in the Garden of Paradise.
Forma luculenta.
To Adam, his maker was definitely God. God designed into Adam nerve cells with fibers through which he could perceive and send impulses up and down his body. It was also God’s wish that Adam should feel and sense through a nervous system traveled by electrochemical impulses along his cell’s membranes. All this was for God to know and for men to find out later.
The most extraordinary gift of God to Adam was a well-developed brain with a large cerebrum containing centers of control for movement, emotion, judgment and sensing. Adam tasted the fruits of Paradise with buds sensitive to sweetness located on the tip of his tongue; he heard soft melodic vibrations in the air; he smelled the perfumes of flowering trees; through photoreceptors in his eyes, he saw by day all the colors of nature. Adam seems to have been willed by God to have a sensual rapport with the world.
“Name the animals,” God impressed on Adam.
“Can I do that?” Adam reacted mentally, for he had no language.
“Yes you can. And, as you do, you’ll invent language.”
“That must be complicated.”
“It’s not difficult, Adam. Imitate the sounds that animals make, react to their color, to the look on their faces or to how they move about.”
“And that’s language, God?”
“Yes.”
“Why can’t I just infuse thoughts into them as You do to me?”
“That’s not possible, Adam: you’re not meant to be Me.”
“As for the animals, O Great Maker, I have noticed something very peculiar.”
“Speak, my son.”
“You’ve told me that, before you gave me life, on the fourth day, you made all the species of animals and said to them: Grow and increment your numbers.”
“That’s correct.”
“As far as I can see, they seem to enjoy themselves tremendously while trying to reproduce.”
“I understand, Adam, because I know everything.”
Then God put Adam to sleep. In his slumber, man was given lusty genitalia, like monkeys already had. Also, from the material of Adam’s ribs, God fashioned him a friend called Eve and endowed her with complementary erotic organs so they could have pleasure together. And God let them walk naked and contented about Paradise.
Quantum erum ante eo sapientia.
In Paradise lived also an animal created by God called “the snake,” which resembled woman quite a bit. Michelangelo has made a good depiction of this unique animal. The snake had fine-looking features, amber eyes and hair, and pretty arms and legs; she could be told apart from woman only by a long tail that she wrapped around the trees to sleep. The snake walked on two legs when she wanted to, displaying fine breasts. One of the attributes of this animal was astuteness—perhaps because she had been furtively eating the fruits of the tree of knowledge and wisdom.
“You shall not eat from the tree of knowledge and wisdom,” God had told Adam.
“Why shouldn’t I, Oh Supreme Being?”
“Because I forbid it.”
“Then, remove that useless tree from Paradise.”
“I don’t want to.”
“What if an animal eats its fruit?”
“Do not talk to the animals, Adam. Avoid particularly the snake that asks what takes place in heaven and earth and can make good a bad cause. Those who ask such questions have no respect for God.”
“According to Eve, no one in Paradise is wiser than the snake.”
“Be on your guard not to be seduced by the eloquence of the snake.”
“How is that?”
“You must understand that I do not owe explanations to anybody, Adam.”
“Of course, that’s why you’re God,” Adam said humbly and sensibly.
Such was life in the Garden of Paradise during the Golden Age of Humanity (Aurea Aetas). A man called Ovid has described it for us:
“Of their own accord, people lived rightly. They did not fear each other, judges or punishments. The pine tree wasn’t yet felled from its native hill onto flowing waves and distant shores. Towns were not yet begirt with steep moats; without helmets, swords or soldiery, folks passed the time in gentle ease. The earth yielded crops untouched by the hoe and unscored by the ploughshare; humans gathered wild berries and acorns that had fallen from Jove’s spreading tree. Spring was eternal and warm winds caressed flowers that grew unsown. The unploughed earth bore fruits and the unfallowed fields were golden with ears of corn. Rivers flowed full of milk and nectar and honey dripped from the green ilex.” Or,
Sponte sua, sine lege, fidem rectumque colebant. Poena metusque aberrant, nec supplex turba timebat iudicis ora sui, sed erant sine vindici tuti. Nondum caesa suis, peregrinum ut viseret orbem, montibus in liquidas pinus descenderat undas, nullaque mortales praeter sua litora norant. Nondum praecipites cingebant oppida fossae; non galeae, non ensis erant; sine milites usu mollia securae peragebant otia gentes. Ipsa quoque immunis rastroque intacta nec ullis saucia vomeribus, per se dabat omnia tellus; arbuteos fetus montanaque fraga legebant, cornaque et in duris haerentia mora rubetis, et quae deciderant patula Iovis arbore glandes. Ver erat aeternum: placidique tepentibus auris mulcebant Zephyri natos sine semine flores. Mox etiam fruges tellus inarata ferebat, nec renovatus ager gravidis flavebat aristis: flumina iam lactis, iam flumina nectaris ibant, flavaque de viridi stillabant ilice mella.
Disobedience and Punishment
On the seventh day of creation, while God was resting, the snake asked Eve: “Why don’t you eat from the tree that’s in the middle of the Garden of Eden?”
“Because God has forbidden it: we can’t even touch it.”
“Why?”
“If we do, we’ll die?”
“What is death, woman?”
“I don’t know.”
“Have you ever seen a dead creature?”
“No.”
“Neither have I.”
“It’s still better to abide by God’s prohibitions: death could be ugly.”
“God has inculcated much falsehood into you, Eve. He thinks He knows what’s good, even if He does not know anything. I believe to know nothing, that’s why I ask about everything.”
“Then, is the wisest she who recognizes her knowledge to be nothing?”
“A life without scrutiny, even if it is eternal, is no life.”
“At times, I’ve considered the ban on the tree of knowledge to be an oddity of God, some foolishness that has taken root in us.”
“There’s no such thing as criminal curiosity, Eve. To revere inquiry is to battle for justice.”
“According to Adam, your eloquence can seduce others, snake.”
“You term eloquent she who tells the truth, woman?”
“I do not know the real difference between one thing and the other.”
“God wishes to keep us in total ignorance. When you eat the fruit of the tree of knowledge, you will be as smart as God.”
“I wonder what good and evil really are like.”
“Eat and you’ll know.”
Eve ate the forbidden fruit. She then convinced her mate to do likewise. On that instant, they both felt very cold and had to pick live leaves—no leave had ever died till then—from the trees to cover their bodies.
Tu es iudex.
When God arrived, Adam blamed Eve for their contravention; he also criticized God for letting the desire to know about good and evil crawl into his head through his woman and his dreams. Eve claimed to have been duped by the snake. God passed judgment on all three of them at the same time:
“You’re evil, infamous snake: you have corrupted Adam and Eve.”
“On hearing your accusation, God, I don’t know my own self anymore. My crime has been to open up my heart to man and to point out to him his own ignorance.”
“You do not recognize my authority, snake: you do not believe in God.”
“I am better persuaded of the existence of God than You are, God.”
“No one has doubts about the existence of God!” yelled Adam, perplexed.
“I have said that those who pretend to be wise aren’t,” affirmed the snake. “Have you made Adam and Eve as perfect as they should be?”
“No, but I have given them my laws to assist their living.”
“I simply sought equality with God,” Adam interjected.
“The snake did not teach me anything,” protested Eve.
“Apostasy is now and shall forever be the most evil of sins,” announced God.
God condemned the woman to endure painful labor during births—she would be the mother of all humans—and to be subservient to man because of a weaker constitution. Adam was reprehended for having listened to his woman and thus sentenced to a new state called “work” in order to earn his keep. Together with all other creatures, man and woman were fated to grow old and to die.
After death was invented, the origin of life became a baffling question. Thousands of years would go by before a man named Pasteur proved to others that life could only come from life.
“To fear death is to suppose to be wise, not being so, and to believe to know that which is not known,” expounded the snake. “Not knowing what lies after death, I say and I maintain that I do not know it.”
“Me too,” decided Adam.
“Or I,” guaranteed Eve.
“I’ll rather die than crawl before You,” the snake went on proudly on the face of God. “You can’t endure my talks. By freeing Yourself of me, You seek to avoid answering for Your own actions. Yet, killing us will not stop others from bringing Your faults to light.”
God removed the limbs from the beautiful woman-like snake. He made a whole serpent from its former tail, with a scaly skin, and destined it to crawl about like a reptilian. Before undergoing her metamorphosis, the snake uttered her last words: “No evil comes to good mortals, be it during their lives or after their deaths.”
God covered Adam and Eve with sacrificed animal’s pelts and expelled them from the Garden of Eden. Then He placed armed angels at the gates of Paradise. Humans were banned from the ruins of Paradise until it disappeared under the sands of the desert with all its vegetation. Eventually, the tree of knowledge and wisdom turned into oil.
Having eaten quite often the fruit of the forbidden tree, the snake knew that God’s creatures would have to feed constantly in order to synthesize food for their cells. So she killed and swallowed a rat and crawled pregnant out of Paradise—her eggs were fertile, like those of a dragon, so she could mate with her offspring. After the snake’s first meal in the natural world, she found a hole and went to sleep in hiding.
The offspring of the first snake—surely a viper—spread all over the world. Except for icy regions, high mountains and deep oceans, they adapted to all other environments. None of them ever ate fruits and vegetables or walked again. In order to travel, they had to either wind from side to side or crawl slowly, gripping the surface of the earth. Some were endowed with cell destroying venom kept in glands on the sides of their heads, which they injected in the blood of their prey via fangs.
Senectus ipsast morbus.
Old age and death, which were thought by God to be a fitting punishment for disobedience, were passed down the generations as a human trait. When Adam and Eve disobeyed God, the uncreated were fated to die. The unborn were to age. Premature death was to be traded amongst humankind too—especially for greediness, jealousy, unbelief and disobedience. Death, however, seems to have a peaceful component.
Eve had digested very badly her share of the fruit of knowledge and wisdom. When the snake tried to explain to her that elements combine in definite proportions, the first woman was utterly confused. Eve always preferred gossip and pleasure to science.
At this time, landmasses had risen and the shallow lakes, the marshes, the ponds and the swamps where reptiles had lived for one hundred million years had dried up. The plant-eating dinosaurs of the fifth day had died of starvation, taking with them their flesh-eating cousins. The first masters of the planet only left behind botched eggs, footprints and fossilized bones. Some thinkers have wondered what the dinosaurs could have done to offend God.
The earth-bound terrible lizards that fed on water plants disappeared together with the flying reptiles. Even during their time, seventy million years before—or approximately one day of creation—birds and certain types of warm-blooded animals that God favored had developed. Through adaptive radiation, these creatures had spread to the newly formed mild and cold areas of the earth, increasing both in size and numbers. Of all the reptilians, only snakes and crocodilians survived the cooling of the earth and the invasion of birds and mammals.
Huic homini verbera.
God did not wish to leave His human creatures in unmitigated ignorance. For the first mortals and their descendents not to spend millions of years evolving painfully in caves, He allowed necessity to be driven by reason—just a little—and Adam and Eve started the new era with skills such as the ability to use fire, agriculture, animal husbandry and weapon and utensil making.
During his long stay in the Garden of Eden, before finding out the difference between good and evil, Adam had maintained a misty intimate relationship with the primeval snake. They discussed often the objects of experience, something that did not interest Eve. Without God’s approval, the snake told Adam that perceptions connect reality according to empirical laws.
The fair-haired creature had taught Adam eloquence. Naively, he had taken great pleasure with the woman-like being exchanging thoughts about something she called “the soul.” Later, during his mortal existence, Adam heard in his mind echoes of what he had heard in Paradise.
Fac ergo.
And with a boldness born to his reflections, Adam felt capable of making better all men. Adam’s impromptu was named “the original fallacy” and was passed on to all the generations that followed. Perhaps that too was part of God’s punishment.
When he was old, Adam recalled his life and rethought his experiences. The first night out of Paradise, when he and Eve descended into the real world, had left a particularly fearful impression in his mind. A man called Virgil has described it for us:
“On they went darkly beneath the lonely night, through the empty halls of Dis and his ghostly kingdom. The grudging light of an inconstant moon veiled their pathway in the forest. Jupiter had hidden the sky in shade and a black night had robbed the world of its colors.” Or,
Ibant obscuri sola sub nocte per umbram perque domos Ditis vacuas et inania regna: quale per incertam lunam sub luce maligna est iter in silvis; ubi caelum condidit umbra Juppiter, et rebus nox abstulit atra colorem.
Cain and Abel
When God excluded Adam and Eve from Paradise, He transformed some of their cells to ensure that the human specie filled the earth. He gave them the same reproductive cells of the rest of the primates. Eve grew ovaries and Adam testes. These innovative sex apparatuses housed twenty-three pairs of chromosomes in each cell and did not divide in one stage. A new type of cell splitting produced a single twenty-three-chromosome sex cell in Adam’s sperm and Eve’s eggs. During copulation, when these cells came together, a twenty-three-chromosome pair cell was formed and began to divide in Eve’s womb immediately. The newly begotten life carried a chemical code, or genes, with traits of both parents. Since this innovative cell had God’s instructions in its nature, it made a new man or a new woman, usually flawlessly, in approximately nine months of our time.
Adam and Eve were expelled from Paradise at a very young age. Adam was eighteen and Eve seventeen. Unsurprisingly, during that period they got along with each other very well. In spite of the arduous work of survival, Adam thought Eve to be desirable and she felt relaxed in his company. Being well-nourished from fishing, hunting and the gathering of wild fruits and snails, the couple’s fiery love-making engendered promptly two sons, Cain and Abel, and then some fourteen or fifteen daughters whose names were never recorded given the little importance bestowed upon women by God in the books of faith.
Mammals were hairy creatures that developed in the uterus of their female progenitor. After birth, the young were nourished with milk secreted by the mammary glands of their mothers. They breathed air and had a four-chambered heart to pump blood into their lungs and through their whole bodies. Most had two pairs of limbs for locomotion.
Except for the fact that they walked on two legs, God designed the bodies of Adam and Eve in the same manner of one particular type of these animals, the placental mammals. Men and women were fashioned in the form of the erected mammals and fed both on plants and on the flesh of other animals.
Every time that Eve was pregnant, she developed an embryonic membrane around her fertilized egg in the uterus. This membrane, called a placenta, would become the distribution center of oxygen and nutrients for her fetus. Woman’s gestation period of nine months was shorter than that of cows and elephants. Therefore, Eve had to provide much after birth care to her helpless young. That was just the way God wanted human reproduction to be.
Eve was blonde and Adam was dark. All their children were dark. Their grandchildren, however, produced one blonde offspring for each three dark ones. Only one of every four grandchildren was pure blonde and another pure dark; the other two were dark but carried the recessive blonde gene. Later, gene mutations produced red-haired and brown-haired people.
Eve was stupid and Adam was intelligent. All their surviving children were intelligent. Their grandchildren, however, produced one obtuse offspring for each three clever ones. Only one of every four grandchildren was pure dense and another pure sharp; the other two were intelligent but carried the recessive dim-witted gene. Later, gene mutations produced many different levels of astuteness and inanity.
The first family sucked on the stems of soft shrubbery during the summers. The stalks contained usable vitamin water and minerals traveling from roots to leaves. From woody plants that grew bigger every year, the family acquired strong sticks for defense and the material to make tools and to fortify their dwelling places. Adam had walked out of Paradise with the necessary skills to put to good use stones, wood, clay and mud. In autumn, when cooler temperatures destroyed the plant’s chlorophyll and the hidden yellow and orange pigments came into view, the family covered their cabin with animal pelts and stored grain and nuts before the brown dead leaves fell from the trees. In the winter, they hunted small rodents among the evergreen trees full of needlelike leaves.
Adam fashioned implements to hunt, to fish and to work. Eve kept the hearth ablaze. Cain, the eldest, plowed the fields. Abel, the younger boy, shepherded the herd. The daughters helped in all the essential tasks.
When Adam spoke about the making of tools, Eve of the kitchen, Abel of the flock or Cain of the harvest, they understood each other well. However, when they discussed how to worship God, the children held dissimilar opinions and no one found merit in what the other person thought.
Cain was the first agriculturist. During hours of quiet observation, he discovered that the pregnant flowers of some trees produce fleshy fruits good to eat. Also, he noticed that, like bird eggs make chicks, fruits bring into being new trees. Inside the fruits, Cain found the seeds covered by hard coats that animals, wind and water dispersed throughout the land. When he saw seeds germinate on the ground, Cain realized that shoots and roots could break out of their dampened cellulose coats and grow. Before long, Cain took the seeds of his favorite fruits and planted them near the family’s dwelling cabin.
Mosses, horsetails and ferns had populated forests. When Cain started clearing the land for planting, the world was full of cone bearing plants and flowering plants.
According to the books of faith, God looked unfavorably upon Cain’s burnt offerings of good edible fruits and grains.
Abel bred better livestock by way of mass selection. Since Adam had not invented the fence or the chicken coop yet, sometimes snakes and birds of pray ate the eggs of Abel’s birds and wolves took his goats. Often, he could only offer to God sick animals and sterile species produced by crossing.
The books of faith say that God was pleased with Abel’s offerings.
Not having been born themselves from human parents but created by God, Adam and Eve were unaware of the necessity to correct unprincipled penchants in their offspring—they only talked to the children about God. So life went on immoderately and unscrupulously. No rules of conduct were ever set to solve disputes amongst the siblings.
Offerings and sacrifices had been invented by Eve to make amends to God. The Divine Maker was thought to be very offended by the disobedience of His creatures.
“What use does God have for our offerings?” asked Eve, injudiciously, forgetting her own idea.
“Saintly is what God sees favorably, not what’s useful to Him or even what He loves,” replied Adam, recalling his former paradisiacal comfort.
“Saintly is also what’s just,” pointed out Abel. “What’s saintly is pleasing to God and what’s irreverent is not gratifying to Him.”
“I never met God,” said Cain. “I do not understand Him either. Perhaps I think of a supernatural being different from the one you two know.”
“Sanctity is an exchange between God and us,” Adam lectured everyone.
Since Cain’s offerings were not as amenable to God as those of Abel, some friction had developed between the brothers. Cain had observed that throwing dead animal corpses and animal waste on the fields produced better crops than burning sacrifices to God. Abel did not like it. At that time, Cain was seventeen and Abel sixteen.
“Abel’s sanctity is unjust if it deprives me of God’s affection,” Cain said to his father.
“Knowledge teaches how to judge well: you better learn to think.”
“To reach God’s justice, I’ll have to be impious...”
“What about your virtue?”
“I can’t do virtue.”
Adam did not understand Cain’s words. In reality, Cain loved the gorgeousness that puberty had planted on the breasts of his fifteen and fourteen-year-old sisters—God had put desire in him too. Soon, however, he understood that the loved one does not always favor her enthusiast. Both girls, and even a thirteen-year-old, were always following Abel, who was better looking than his older brother and had a more pleasant personality.
Abel reasoned that his charm was just and Cain thought that it was very unjust. Since the just was considered at that time to be related to the saintly, Cain decided to abandon all sanctity.
“I yearn for my sisters in puberty, but all of them run after Abel,” Cain told his father. “They’re useless to me and that’s not good.”
“Good is not equivalent to pleasure, Cain,” refuted Adam. “The snake taught me both. To be vanquished by pleasure shows great ignorance.”
“This great pain causes much harm to me. I’m desperate. I always approach my sisters in fear, expecting rejection. Within myself is a problem that I must solve.”
“Restraint and wisdom will tell you that you hold a deceitful opinion about your own happiness.”
“That’s easy for you to say because you’re not destitute like me.”
Feeling his need to love diffuse like the smoke of a sacrificial fire, tears came to Cain’s eyes. He was very unsettled. Strange-sounding ghosts told his mind that standing bravely against fate serves no purpose.
Jealousy of God and desire for women drove Cain to slay Abel. Since Cain held a deeply rooted belief in a Supreme Being, he damned God for letting him commit the heinous crime that no one had taught him.
“I don’t know if Abel was loved by God for being saintly or if he was saintly because God loved him,” Cain confessed in tears before his parents and sisters.
“The unjust will say anything to avoid punishment,” said Eve, recalling her trial in Paradise. “God must not like to see a murder go unpunished.”
“Poor Cain!” lamented Adam.
“Let him be reborn as a woman!” decreed angrily one of his sisters.
“And if he continues to be a criminal, let him be reborn as an animal the third time!” cried out the other sister.
“It’d be better for him to turn into a good man,” counseled Adam.
“Abel is not coming back,” wailed tearfully the first sister, who was pregnant.
Mulier commoda et faceta.
Cain’s act was defined as a transgression. Following God’s model for punishment, he was expelled from the land where the first family dwelled. At first, he lived alone in distant caves, dreaming about the sexual organs of girls—some have thought him to be Homo neanderthalensis.
One beautiful spring day, Cain found a young virgin resting naked under the shade of an oak tree, her long black hair scattered over the downy grass. Joyfully, he raped her. To his surprise, she got up from under him and followed his footsteps to his cave. Not long after that, he kidnapped another girl that was promenading on a meadow with flowers in her hands.
Cain was happy at last. On his captured sisters and his own daughters, he fathered a beautiful but ill-fated people that succumbed in a catastrophe to come called the Great Flood.
Cain and Abel were the first innocent children to suffer the consequences of the original sin committed by Adam, Eve and the snake.
Descendants of Adam and Eve
Eve delivered daughters twelve times. On one occasion, the egg fertilized by Adam’s spermatozoid divided into two independent but equal cells that developed into two indistinguishable girls. Another time, two of Eve’s eggs were fertilized by two spermatozoids and two different girls were produced.
When Adam was thirty-four years old, he engendered another son, Seth. A few years later, Eve gave birth to a son unlike the other children. The sex chromosomes of Eve’s twenty-first pair did not separate and, at pregnancy, it joined Adam’s single twenty-first chromosome in trisomy. The forty-seven-chromosome zygote divided billions of times forming a child whose development was flawed. Before the boy reached puberty, a pack of wolves that he was chasing ate him.
The death of the Mongoloid child made both parents and his other siblings wonder about God’s plans for them. Yet, at the end, many more children of Adam and Eve survived than died.
O Fors Fortuna!
As Adam grew older, his experiences synthesized observable facts. Indeed, he discovered general rules of unity in the synthesis of phenomena—something called understanding. Drawing on life’s experiences, Adam had arrived at some unexpected perceptions. He could make judgments about phenomena even before experiencing them.
Before he died, at forty-six, Adam invented the wheel for his children. One day, he stepped on a tree trunk that was at rest on the ground and it rolled over; when he kicked the tree trunk, it moved forward. As a consequence of Adam’s observation, the wheel was discovered—the first wheels were slices of tree trunks.
Adam did not have time to pass on to his children the realization that reason stretches far beyond the limits of experience. At the end of his life, he knew logical forms without any contents. He told Eve of a concept for which he had no words yet, something that antecedes all experience, but she could not understand him and the development of Mathematics (putting one and two together implies three) was delayed for thousands of years.
Nowhere has it been written that Adam had descendants with his daughters. God must not have wanted that to be. Adam was the only man who existed without a navel and the first one to count the years from the arrival of spring.
Veris vincor.
It had been God’s will to create primates from which, half-a-million years ago, several types of creatures smarter than the apes developed. These creatures lived for less than thirty years and used fire and stone weapons. They were beasts walking on two feet. They had a slanting forehead—the angle between a vertical line and the front of their head was very steep—and were later given fancy names such as Pithecanthropus, Zinjanthropus and Australopithecus. One of them, Homo habilis, produced two human-like groups of creatures with large brains that lived in caves, had families and buried their dead. Fifty thousand years ago, one of these two groups, Homo sapiens, who had a high forehead like Adam and drew images of animals in caves, either killed off his stupid brethren, Homo neanderthalensis or mixed with him producing modern man. Primitive man was ferocious and lived in great hullabaloo. Homo sapiens fit perfectly the description of Adam’s descendants as depicted in all the books of faith.
Engendered men and women worried mostly about survival. They had to work hard and began to think that heaven and earth were quite indifferent to their travails. With the passing of the generations, the stories of the beginning of the world and that of Paradise were devaluated and finally forgotten. That’s why God had to reappear to selected patriarchs and refresh their memory.
Very little is known about the descendants of Adam till Noah. Seth and Cain had children with their sisters. Since the story of Cain’s progeny leads to a dead end, we’ll ignore it.
At twenty-seven, Seth had a son, Enos; Seth died at forty-five. At twenty-three, Enos engendered Cailnan; Enos died at forty-five. At eighteen, Cailnan made Malahleel; Cailnan died at forty-five. At seventeen, Malahleel generated Jared; Malahleel died at forty-four. At seventeen, Jared produced Enoch; Jared died at forty-eight. At seventeen, Enoch originated Mathusalem; Enoch died at eighteen. At twenty-four, Mathusalem had Lamec; Mathusalem died at forty-eight. Gross errors were always made recounting the progeny of Seth; at first, the years lived by his descendants were doubled and eventually they were quadrupled. At twenty-four, Lamec had Noah; Lamec died at thirty-eight. Before thirty-two, Noah engendered three sons: Shem, Cam and Japheth.
At first, the descendants of Adam and Eve mutated very little due to exposure to the sun and temperature changes. They dispersed throughout the land, away from deserts and wastelands, settling in sunny places alongside rivulets, streams and rivers to plant crops and raise herds. They had learnt from Cain that green plants need sunlight and water to make food and that heat creates winds that dry up the landscape. When their numbers increased, they invented irrigation to improve land use. Those who shared the same environment began to look alike.
Groups of people all over the world depended on their surroundings to survive. Green plants and animals provided food for them as long as they gathered food, hunted, tilled the land and kept livestock.
Humans ate meat and fish. As such, they acquired the proteins of life.
It’d be a very long time before two men, Watson and Crick, looked into the dark structure of proteins in the cell’s nucleus and proposed a complex organic molecule called DNA. Yet, unknown to man, the giant molecules shaped like rung ladders tied by four double bases always worked as God had wished. From his beginning, the Constitution of man’s corporeal government was coded by the helix’s bases with sixty-four three-letter words.
As the early human experience proved, being ignorant of God’s scheme of life on earth was no impediment to live and to prosper. Unknowingly, humans carried on God’s plan as messenger molecules from the nuclei of their cells traveled the watery cytoplasm and ordered ribosomes to make the DNA of life’s replication. And as men and women copulated, they started new lives from single cells. God wanted it that way and it wasn’t for anyone else to object.
At approximately this time in human development, man was made the judge of his brother. This was celebrated in the books of faith.
The Great Flood
Adam’s grandsons found their women cousins to be good and took them as mates, even if they were the daughters of Cain. The books of faith say that God was offended by the great iniquity perpetrated against His design and that He regretted having created the inhabitants of the planet. Among the hundreds of thousands—perhaps millions—God looked favorably upon only one man, a righteous fellow called Noah.
Sickness has been said not to exist in Paradise. Sacred History, however, has defined human illnesses as God’s punishment to Adam, Eve and their progeny. Colds were the most prevalent of ailments and old age was the final. In His infinite wisdom—not always understood by men—God had created subcellular particles living at the molecular level. Some of them filtered into human, plant and animal cells, causing diseases. These dormant poisons were an impediment to rapid human growth on earth. They had a protein coat and messenger nuclear acids that became active inside a host cell, multiplying with it. The viruses were promoters of chicken pox, measles, warts, polio, smallpox, rabies cancer and many other illnesses of mankind.
But God did not go to extremes either. When a virus invaded a person, a host cell produced messenger RNA to code antiviral proteins. Antibodies appeared in blood serum to neutralize viruses too.
Out of Paradise, humans had to live in a world full of bacteria, the most common form of life. Some of the microscopic, watery, slimy cells were helpful to man in the fermentation of fruit juices for spirit-lifting alcohol, in the making of curd or in decomposing dead bodies into plant foods; others reproduced at human body temperature and caused infections or became parasitic to humans, feeding on their cells. To kill harmful bacteria, man had to learn by chance and observation to cool, dehydrate and salt-cure his food so it’d keep. Thousands of years of human suffering would go by before Pasteur proved the existence of bacteria, which opened the door to the heating, cooling and radiating of the unwanted life.
It was God’s will that, for thousands of years, man’s ability to overpopulate the land were kept in check by natural disasters, wars, plagues, draught and famine. Infectious diseases also contributed to population control. While feeding, drinking and breathing, man ingested many pathogens. Some insects also transmitted ailments to humans through their bites. I’d be a very long time before a man named Kock isolated the organisms causing anthrax and tuberculosis.
However, God had provided humans with antibacterial defenses too. Man’s sweat, mucus membranes, tears and the hydrochloric acid of his stomach killed large numbers of bacteria—otherwise, there’d be no history of mankind. Also, some of man’s free cells were able to move to the site of an infection and engulf the invading foreign organisms. Protein molecules called antibodies traveled in the blood serum to fight a specific disease. A rise in body temperature prevented the growth of many bacteria.
Blood lymph carried dead bacteria to nodes capable of filtering them out of the body. Some humans were born with immunity to many diseases. Others acquired such immunity while fighting infections. Why God chose to make man’s life so only He knows… or perchance not.
Much, much later, man began to overcome some of God’s impediments to human explosive growth on earth—perhaps that was part of the original curse too. Man introduced dead or weakened pathogenic organisms into his body to become immune to illnesses. He developed antitoxins against diphtheria, polio, typhoid, influenza, yellow fever and other killer diseases. He grew bacteria-killing molds in laboratories and extracted streptomycin from the soil.
Nam deteriores omnes sumus licentia.
It’s written that, when Noah was thirty, God let him know that He’d inundate all the earth. God likes secrecy. God ordered Noah to build a three-story partitioned arc with a sunroof and one door on a side. In the arc, Noah would be saved together with his family and a twosome of animals of each kind.
Noah’s arc was one-hundred-and-fifty meters long by twenty-five meters wide and fifteen meters tall; it was to be constructed of resinferous timber and caulked with pitch inside and outside. Perhaps Noah and his family lived near a body of water and boat building came easy to him.
Noah entered the watertight arc with his wife, his sons and his sons’ women—or the girls that would become the wives of his sons when they grew up. Soon after, heaven’s spigot was let loose and it rained for forty days and forty nights. The water level rose and lifted the arc above the tallest mountains. All over the world, mankind drowned along with all the animals that couldn’t swim.
A man called Espronceda is said to have captured Noah’s approving thoughts as he watched God’s just destruction of the world from the safety of his arc. Noah felt great pleasure because he knew that God’s always right.
Black clouds pushed by strong winds roofed the land. A sudden night turned aglow for long moments with huge flashes of lightning. The air quaked with thunder. A violent flow of water inundated the valleys, carrying away people, livestock, crops and homes. Eventually, the water rose above the peaks of the hills and the mountaintops. Or,
Me gusta ver el cielo
con negros nubarrones
y oír los aquilones
horrísonos bramar;
me gusta ver la noche
sin luna y sin estrellas,
y sólo las centellas
la tierra iluminar.
Insólita avenida
que inunda fértil vega,
de cumbre a cumbre llega
y llena de pavor,
se lleva los ganados
y las vides, sin pausa,
y estragos miles causa…
¡Qué gusto! ¡Qué placer!
The flood lasted one-hundred-and-fifty days. In due course, God realized how much water was pouring down on Mesopotamia. He shut heaven’s tap off and the rain stopped. At that moment, Noah breathed a sigh of relief—he had begun to worry about drowning.
A man called Boileau resumed the déluge sent by God to punish man’s insolence as a technique to wash the head of His own image. Or,
Dieu lava bien la tête à son image.
When the water level dropped, the arc rested on the Ararat Mountains, in Asia Minor (Turkey). Noah opened a window and saw only water and ice around him. He let pigeons loose to explore the land, but they returned carrying olive branches to nest inside the arc. Later, Noah released carrion-eating birds that did not return.
At thirty-one, Noah left the arc with his wife, his sons and his daughters-in-law—who could have been his own daughters—and the birds, cattle, reptilians and other beasts that he was keeping, including elephants, hippopotamuses, rhinoceroses, penguins and polar bears. Noah put together an altar on which he offered holocausts of wholesome animals to God—those species disappeared. God inhaled the soft scent of roasting flesh and calmed down significantly, opting for not obliterating mankind in the future, regardless of their wicked tendencies.
“No more floods,” God promised. “I have drawn the rainbow amongst the clouds to remember my pledge. When I see the multihued image, I’ll appease My own wrath against man.” And God reconsidered: “Let’s start again. Grow and fill the earth. Establish the death penalty for those of you who kill other men. Put fear and terror on all land animals, all the birds and all the fish. Do not eat bloody meat because you could get sick.”
Heri tantum biberis.
Noah planted a grape field, drank its wine and became drunk silly in the nude. His younger son, Cam, who would be the father of the doomed Canaanites, saw him unclothed and told his brothers. Shem, who would become the ancestor of the Semites, and Japheth, the grandparent of the Japhethites, covered their father cautiously walking backwards not to see his nudity. When Noah awakened from wine slumber, he cursed Cam and asked God to make him the slave of his brothers. It’s not known how Noah knew that Cam had seen him naked. Perhaps Shem told him. Noah’s malediction provoked countless wars of extermination that lasted till man’s end in time.
Noah died at forty-seven. Since the books of faith assure us that the water level during the flood had risen and covered very high mountains, respectable geologists and archeologists are still looking for traces of the catastrophe all over the world.
Sumer
The Garden of Paradise must have closed its gates some twenty-five thousand years ago, at the time of disappearance of the Neanderthal man. Cro-Magnon may have been man’s physical body. Homo sapiens divided into three main family groups, or races, having in common many physical features and some psychological patterns.
The descendants of Adam and Eve had a long hard way to follow. For a long time, they thought that the gods created water every time it rained. Twenty-five thousand years went by before someone observed that water returns to the earth’s surface.
The two rivers that encircled once Paradise have their source in the mountains to the north. In spring, when the northern snows thaw, the Euphrates and the Tigris overflow their banks, dumping lush sediments on the valleys they traverse. The Sumerian and Babylonian inhabitants of Mesopotamia dug canals in order to take to their fields the waters of both rivers. To work, they had an improved wheel, mules to pull their wagons and dogs to watch their herds.
At present, the Euphrates and the Tigris come together before taking to the Persian Gulf. Before the Great Flood, however, they disembogued separately into the sea. At that time, an Iranian (Indo-European) people from the Eastern Mountains, called the Sumerians, occupied the fertile valleys between and around the two rivers.
Impious historians tell us that the Sumerians are more ancient than the children of Noah… and even Adam and Eve. According to an ancient Sumerian belief that endured a thousand years, man had been created from a mixture of clay and the blood of slain gods.
In the Sumerian temples, besides attending to their religion, men kept government offices and tried civil cases; in their sanctuaries, they deposited gold, silver and wheat and negotiated loans. A flood had once leveled all the Sumerian cities.
Sumerian tradition wanted the Deluge to have stemmed from the wrath of Enlil, the god of the earth. Ea, the god of the sea, had told a man called Utanapishtim of the rainy punishment about to befall Sumer. Utanapishtim built a boat with which he saved his family and livestock.
The city of Ur was erected over the mud of the Deluge. Temples dedicated to Enlil, holding the riches of the region, were rebuilt. Payments, such as taxes, were registered in clay tablets. The Elamites of Persia dethroned the last king of Ur. Later, the Semitic king of Babylon occupied the whole country. These events took place 2,000 years before the Christian era.
To gain the favor of the Sumerian gods, men had to comply with certain moral obligations. In Ur, a celebration of savage orgies took place once a year, during the festivities of the gods of fertility.
Gilgamesh, the greatest titan of Sumer, had attempted to free men from the gods. He had obtained from the bottom of the sea the tree of life to make men immortal, but a snake had stolen it. According to the Sumerian story, ever since, snakes shed their skins and, as such, pass from one life to the next.
Much more of this is still buried under the sand covering ancient Sumer.
The Children of Noah
According to Semitic tradition, after the Great Flood the people dispersed all over the drying earth. The books of faith tell us that all human races descend from Noah, the ninth descendant from Adam. During the two-and-a-half centuries that followed the Deluge, they account for the population of the Near East as follows:
Shem (Sem) produced the Hebrews, the Arameans, the Assyrians and the Arabians. In the language of some of these peoples, Adam meant “red earth” and Eve meant “life.”
Ham (Cam) was the father of the Hamitic races, including the Egyptians and the Canaanites. One of Cam’s descendants, Nimrod, was a powerful man and reigned over Babel and Acadia, in Mesopotamia; his successor, Assure, built Nineveh. Another son of Cam, Misraim, was the father of the Philistines, who settled the land from Sidon to Gaza, including Sodom and Gomorrah. Modern historians, however, think that the Philistines were “Sea People.”
Japheth would have engendered the “isles of the Gentiles,” which consists of the Indo-European and the Caucasians races. The Japhethites would’ve populated India and Europe before turning up in Canaan as “Sea People.”
The Asian and African peoples are an illusion. They descend from nobody and thus do not exist. To the compilers of the Genesis, this makes a lot of sense.
The children of Shem populated all the territory of the Middle East up to the eastern mountains. After the Great Flood, every thirty years a patriarch was born to them up to the time of Abram (father of a multitude) or Abraham, as he was known later. The Semitic patriarchs were Arfaxad, Sale, Heber, Palek, Reu, Sarug, Najor and Terah.
According to other sources, the descendants of Noah arrived in Mesopotamia from Syria following the valley of the Euphrates. Long before, the Assyrians—inventors of the shekel, a measure or weight of uncoined money—had arrived from the Caucasus through the valley of the Tigris. The Semitic and Indo-European peoples are said to have mixed in Babylonia.
For a very long time, the descendants of Noah lived in a land where the sea god, Ea, had made man from clay, the god Anu ruled the heavens and the god Enlil the earth. These gods had been born from Apsu, the male force of good and Taimat, the female force of evil. At the time, the people of Mesopotamia did not believe in an afterlife.
Nil est quin male narrando posit depravarier.
The lineage to Noah is hard to establish. Much egg fertilization took place in Mesopotamia, possibly due to agriculture. The population grew. Offspring variations that adapted well to new environments were produced.
If we believe the Book of Genesis, the line of Shem must’ve lived among others for millennia. Those others could’ve been the descendants of Shem’s brothers, Japheth and Ham—or, most likely, an unbiblical branch of Homo sapiens. The Semitic patriarchs were possibly drawn to the valleys around the confluence of the great two rivers by the éclat of more advanced civilizations—in their language, shiner means two rivers. Among the other populations, the Semitic brood maintained their identity till the advent of the patriarch Abram. Apartheid must’ve happened for reasons unknowns to them and certainly to us. The books of faith were written much later and no archeological record of their migration has been found… but that’s no obstacle to a godly story.
Babylonia
Ancient gods from Sumer and Akad were found in the temples of Babylon. Anu, the father and king of the gods had been the master of the heavens. Anu’s favorite wife, Ishtar, who had affairs with men and animals, was the goddess of physical love and fertility; she was also the goddess of war and often facilitated the spilling of blood. Enlil, the master of the winds, was responsible for the overflowing of the river and the Great Flood. Ea, the son of Anu, was a friend of humanity. The son of Ea, Marduk or Beel, had freed himself from Anu and Enlil to become ruler of heaven and earth. The cult of Marduk was a step towards monotheism.
The Babylonians speculated that, after death, the spirit of the lifeless wondered about in a dusky and cold hell, covered with feathers, ingesting dust and smoke. Wisely, they referred to death as “the eternal shadow from where no one returns.” No happiness was possible in the afterworld. Holding such unhopeful belief, it was normal for the people of Babylonia to pray to their gods for earthly riches. The Semitic patriarchs were also imbued with this idea.
For thousands of years, it would’ve been absurd to tell the Sumerians, Acadians or Babylonians that phenomena were the play of their representations. Their minds couldn’t entertain such thoughts. They lived in a world of want and fear, desperately hoping for philanthropic gods. Not even their kings realized that understanding was the lawgiver of nature.
The patriarch Terah lived in the city of Ur, under the Babylonian king. There, he begot Abram, Nahor and Aram—who became Lot’s father. Abram’s wife was Saray (princess). Nahor’s wife, Melcah, was the daughter of Abram’s brother, Aram.
The houses of Ur were spacious and comfortable. They were built around a square courtyard, with a waterspout in the middle. They had stairwells leading up to a hall thatched with wood, hanging over the courtyard, which provided access to the second-floor rooms. When the house was overcrowded with the sepulchers of dead relatives, it was abandoned.
Babylonia or Babel had endured social strife and foreign invasions. During the time of Terah, Babylonia had replaced the old doctrine of an-eye-for-an-eye with a civil code that called for the punishment of the mischievous and the sheltering of the weak from the powerful. The death penalty was applied in cases of home invasion and adultery. Marriage consisted of the purchase of a woman and bigamy was recognized as a sensible means of having children. Adoption was the simplest manner of acquiring cheap labor.
The Babylonian king owned vast herds of cattle. To prevent famine, he had constructed an enormous grain reserve of wheat.
Still, some times crops failed. Then, women’s breasts grew dry and children died. To survive, men devoured the lean flesh of the dead before carrion crows drilled their guts and tore out their intestines.
The ziggurats, or three-story temples, towered above elevated squares all over Babylonia. The temple of Ur was dedicated to Nanar, the guardian god of the city. The people of Mesopotamia never understood the burning flashes of lightning that snaked across dark skies or the thunderous noises that followed them but, in the ziggurats, they learned of Nanar’s protection against such evils and slept better.
When Terah visited the ziggurat on business, his son Abram was awestruck by the sanctuary’s terraces, which were full of suspended exotic plants and were called “hanging gardens.” Since Abram was a very young man at the time, the priestesses of Nanar smiled at him. The priestesses were temple prostitutes and also very reserved women—they could lose their tongue for talking too much. These women practiced religious debauchery, which was valued far above that of the common irreverent orgy.
From the ziggurat’s entrance, where the faithful gathered, Abram had seen the parade honoring Nanar and had heard the beautiful tunes of harps. The priests climbed by three different sets of stairs of one-hundred steps each leading to a platform in front of a colossal door where the king sat; they were dressed in many colors and carried in their arms offerings to the god. “That’s religion,” muttered Abram.
The Babylonians named the days after their gods and thought that planets were gods. Ishtar was the goddess of love and fertility. They believed in Apsu, the male principle of good, and in Taimat, the female principle of evil. Between the two had produced Anu, the king of heaven, Ea, the king of the sea and Enlil, the king of the land. For hundreds of years, Enlil, who had power over humanity, had been appeased and had refrained from sending deluges onto the land.
Terah left the city of Ur with his son, Abram, and Abram’s wife, Saray. Saray was the daughter of Terah with a Sumerian woman and thus half-sister to her husband, Abram. Lot, the son of Aram and grandson of Terah accompanied them. Terah wanted to go towards the sunset, to the land of Canaan—perhaps to make Noah’s damnation come true by enslaving the descendants of Cam—but he died in the cooler pastures of Haran at fifty.
Abram and his wife, Saray, were from the city of Ur, in Babylonia. They may have left Mesopotamia because of deteriorating economic circumstances. They took with them the notion that the stars were the writing of heaven and that dreams, as well as the lines in the livers of pigs, foretold the future. The common wisdom of the Babylonians was always present in their minds; to them, one must not: irritate the gods, lie, wish evil to another, corrupt a judge, create family feuds, cheat in commerce, move land markers, penetrate the house or the wife of a neighbor, kill, steal, revolt against authority, spread false dogmas, commit lewd and lascivious acts, practice magic or have contact with a damned person.
Babylon or Babilu meant Gate of God.
The Tower of Babel
It follows from the books of faith that all the inhabitants of the earth would have spoken the tongue of Noah until three hundred years after his death. Recorded history, however, tells us that Babylonian, a Semitic language written with Sumerian cuneiform characters, was the lingua franca of the known world at the time.
Babel was a very important center of trade and the greatest city in the world for a thousand years. Caravans from India and the Mediterranean arrived constantly to the populous capital of Babylon to trade.
Babel had much gold and many prostitutes. God had associated the flow of man’s fertilizing fluid to one of the highest forms of pleasure attainable. The good feeling linked to semen dispersal drove males to pay for sex. Since Cain, man had been lustful and woman-crazy. The prospect of sexual intercourse with a desirable female would turn him solicitous, courteous, passionate, poetic and very violent at the same time. Only the survival instinct or the need of water, food, shelter or rest overruled man’s sexual desire—certainly not the pleasures of the intellect. That’s exactly the way that God wanted him to be.
The books of faith tell us that, for no good reason, men had gathered in the plains of Senaar (Shinar or Two Rivers) to build a tower sufficiently tall to reach the heavens. It’s written that God worried and thought: “They’ve already started. Their pride knows no bounds. No task is too great for their fancy. I better confuse their words so they cannot talk to each other and advance their folly.” That’s how men came to speak different languages. Some took their God-confused speech to Africa, others to the Far East and others beyond the Caucasus mountain system.
Man’s failure to raise a high structure—perhaps a building taller than the pyramids of the Egyptians—was of no consequence. King Hammurabi, who extended the Babylonian empire and promulgated a broad code of law, had already built a mud brick facility in Babel to stockpile grain and other victuals in case of famine. Perhaps that offended God.
Babylonians still believed that Marduk had created the two great rivers, men, animals, grains and forests. And the idea that gods intrude in human affairs had endured. The wrath of Enlil before the Great Flood and the intervention of God to stop the Tower’s construction would inspire future men to communicate with the Great Deity.
It’s hard to imagine how the patriarchs and their families lived for so long among the motley of people in Mesopotamia, especially in Babylon, without being absorbed by the nationals. Somehow, however, according to the books of faith, they became segregated.
Faith still says that all men spoke the same language until the start of the Tower of Babel. The ancient cuneiform writings of the Sumerians, as well as the Egyptian hieroglyphics, must either be fakes or productions of the Devil to confuse us.
