An open Letter of Protest
Δημοσιεύτηκε: 21 Ιουν 2009 21:44
Αγαπητοί κυρίες και κύριοι του φόρουμ,
όλοι όσοι γράφετε αγγλικά γράφετε καλύτερα από μένα (είμαι αυτοδίδακτος) και για τον λόγο αυτό θέλω να ζητήσω την βοήθειά σας στην σύνταξη και παρουσίαση της επιστολής που ακολουθεί.
Η επιστολή απευθύνεται στον κ. Ντώκινς και θα την αναρτήσω, όταν ετοιμαστεί, στο τμήμα του φόρουμ του το οποίο παρακολουθεί και ο ίδιος. Μια προηγούμενη ανάρτησή μου στο ίδιο τμήμα (με τίτλο Mr. Dawkins, please join category 7) είχε ατυχή κατάληξη διότι οι συντονιστές την μετέφεραν αμέσως σε ένα subforum του οποίου στόχος είναι η γελοιοποίηση όσων θεμάτων θεωρούνται γελοία, δικαίως ή αδίκως.
Οι απόψεις μου είναι ριζοσπαστικές και κάπως δύσπεπτες. Πρόθεσή μου πάντως είναι να τονίσω εκείνο που θεωρούν αυτονόητο όσοι δεν ικανοποιούνται με την κατάταξή τους στην ίδια κατηγορία όπου ο Ντώκινς τοποθετεί τον εαυτό του: ότι δηλαδή είναι απαράδεκτο η δήλωση αθεΐας να συνοδεύεται από αμφιβολία. Για τον λόγο αυτόν θα χαρώ πολύ αν κάποιος κρίνει ότι συμφωνεί με τα γραφόμενα μου και επιθυμεί να προσυπογράψει την επιστολή. Εγώ υπογράφω επώνυμα, αλλά βεβαίως εσείς μπορείτε να χρησιμοποιήσετε το ψευδώνυμό σας.
Dear Mr. Dawkins,
my protest is based on the fact that although you are quite right in saying that you‘d be surprised to find many people in category 7, your placing yourself in category 6 cuts off the flow towards category 7!
We all have to move up to the penthouse and here is why:
You wrote that religions such as Buddhism or Confucianism should not be treated as religions at all but as ethical systems or philosophies of life. Religion is based on god/s and their actions and therefore there can be no definition of religion without reference to god/s.
To my opinion Christian and Muslim religions (deist ideas included) should also be considered as philosophical systems. Authentic religions have their own proper god/s. Christians and Muslims borrowed theirs, made a copy out of the loan and now that the copy does not any longer fit the original, the texts of the Old Testament are blamed for describing faithfully the original.
Actually, monotheism should also be considered a mere ethical system. Monotheism originated as an idea into the Egyptian priesthood and therefore, since the slight doubt raised about God’s non-existence does not refer to the conception of God but to the God as an entity, it is only Adonay or Elohim, the non-entirely-monotheistic God of the O.T., that can be thought of as an entity.
Amun-Re, The “One God”
The expression “Lord of All” is an epithet that could apply to any god. In the passage that follows it is the god Khepri who is addressed and the Lord of All appears as the one who commands the slaughterers:
Oh Khepri in the midst of your sacred bark, primeval one whose body is eternity, save me from the watchers of those who are to be examined, to whom the Lord of All has given power to guard against and fetter his enemies, who make slaughter in the slaughter houses, who do not leave their guardianship. May their knives never cut into me, may I never enter their slaughter-houses.
The German Egyptologist Heinrich Karl Brugsch collected a number of striking passages, as W. Budge said, from the Egyptian texts where the words “God one” do not mean “One God” in our sense of the words, as M. Maspero believed.
A selection of the said passages follows:
God is one and alone, and none other existeth with Him.
God is the One, the One who hath made all things.
God is the eternal One, he is eternal and infinite and endureth for ever and aye.
God is truth and He liveth by truth and He feedeth thereon.
God is life and through Him only man liveth.
God hath made the Universe, and He hath created all that therein is.
He is the Creator of what is in this world, and of what was, of what is, and of what shall be.
God is merciful unto those who reverence Him, and He heareth him that calleth upon Him.
God knoweth him that acknowledged Him, He rewarded him that serveth Him, and He protected him that followeth Him.
The creation of the concept “One God” was accomplished by merging the attributes of Amun and Re into Amun-Re.
Jan Assman, a modern German Egyptologist, writes in his book “The Search for God in Ancient Egypt”:
The Theban theology of these decades (18th Dynasty, 1570-1293) can be interpreted as an attempt to fill the hyphenated formulation Amun-Re with theological content, that is, to develop a divine concept sufficiently comprehensive to include all the traditions concerning Amun and all those of Re as well. The pure Amun aspect of the city god and the pure Re aspect of the sun god are connected by the concept of the supreme being who had already emerged in the theological fragments of the Middle Kingdom (2000-1800) in his aspects of primeval god, creator god, and god of life.
I call this process “additive,” for I have the impression that this new concept of a supreme being was arrived at primarily by accumulation and juxtaposition. All aspects of divine unity –preexistence, creator, sustainer- were combined and connected with one another by means of simple but well-ordered juxtapositions of sequences of predicates of Amun and Re.
By way of an example he provides the following eulogistic insertion from the offering prayer on the tomb stela of a man named Amenemhet:
An offering prayer to Amun-Re, lord of Karnak,
lord of eternity, lord of everlastingness,
prince, lord of the great two-feathered crown.
The sole one in the beginning, the greatest of the great,
primeval god without his like,
he is the great one who created men and gods
…
Living flame that arose from the primordial waters
to illuminate those in the sky.
divine god who came into being by himself.
He who speaks, and what is to happen comes about.
It is quite probable that the enigmatic word “Amen,” by which Jews, Christians and Muslims still close their prayers, is an invocation of the name of the “hidden” god of the Egyptians, Amun (imn in hieroglyphic means hide).
Judgement
God created people and judged them. The god who did not do that is no god worth of bothering with. The layman of the past knew that he was created by the gods and the philosophers and theologians of the past felt that it was their duty to inform him on how the feat was accomplished. Plato (Timaeus 73e) describes in detail how God made and shaped the bones of the skull. According to the “Great Hymn to Khnum”, the God: built the skull, formed the cheeks to furnish shape to the image. He opened the eyes, hollowed the ears, he made the body inhale air.
Deist scholars and priesthood stretched anthropogeny to include cosmogony and transformed personal judgement of living people into mass judgement of dead people.
The God of the O.T. “came down” to judge the people of Sodom but eventually he did not pass judgement for the simple reason that mass judgement was never practiced. There was only mass execution and on the subject of personal judgement as well as on that of the mass execution the O.T. is punctual and correct!
Surely you are aware of the fact that the oldest and largest corpus of archaic texts, the Egyptian funerary texts (The Pyramid texts, the Coffin texts and the Book of the Dead), deal exclusively with the subject of the judgement of the “dead.”
Those “dead” are considered dead ones, dead people, corpses, by the Egyptian priesthood and by modern Egyptologists as well, but not so by the authors of the texts.
According to the Egyptian tradition it was the body, of the supposed dead, which was examined at the judgement and not the soul (which is nowhere to be found into the older texts) and therefore the person being judged was alive (Plato confirms this information in his “Gorgias” dialogue 523 a - 524 b).
“Dead” and “souls” were introduced by means of erroneous renderings of some of the basic Egyptian terms such as m(w)t, ba, akh, Maat, asfet, khet.
Ask an Egyptologist to justify the rendering of the term ba as “soul” and you’ll realize that there can be no justification, or you’ll get an incomprehensible explanation, as the following one supplied by Jan Assmann: Ba is an enigmatic concept. It designates as much the visible manifestation of a hidden power as the hidden power behind its visible manifestations.
In order for the person been judged not to fail the examination and be instantly executed, he should have had a body free of defects.
The accused pleads not guilty on the grounds that there is no fault (asfet) in his body or that, as a consequence of the lack of asfet, there is Maat (divine purity) in his body.
A body without faults is a ḏt nṯrty, a god-like body.
The sons of God saw the daughters of men that they were fair and they took them wives of all which they chose (Gen.6:2)
Those “daughters of men” have names. They are called Pandora, Io, Danae, Persephone, by the Greeks, or Ninhursag, Ninmu, Ninkurra, Uttu, by the Sumerians.
In the Sumerian myth “Enki and Ninhursag,” the god Enki impregnates the goddess Ninhursag, “the mother of the land,” who gives birth to the goddess Ninmu. Enki then proceeds to impregnate his daughter Ninmu, who gives birth to the goddess named Ninkurra. Enki then impregnates his granddaughter Ninkurra and the latter gives birth to the goddess Uttu, whom Enki prepares to impregnate too.
Collectively these women were known as Mother-wombs and they lived in the “garden huts,”(Lamentation over the Destruction of Sumer and Ur, line 331), or in Bayith (house, hut) according to the O.T. (In the O.T. and the Hittite “Song of Ullikummis” the mothers, who are called Good-women and Mother-goddesses, appear as midwives).The Mother-wombs, having been sheltered and with main and, obviously, only purpose in life the production of god-like children, got inevitably too fat.
The 26,000-year-old Venus of Willendorf wears a hood which is probably the precursor of the burka and yashmak and she used to live in a breeding ground (a precursor of the harem) consisting of “garden huts”.
The feat of the “gods” to create “mortals” was, obviously, achieved by way of those breeding grounds. The mortals were made in the likeness of the gods because the ones that did not possess the “divine likeness” were automatically wiped out. Thus, those who survived attributed their life-preserving “divine likeness” to their mother, who not only gave them life but, most important, endowed them with the correct form. That mother, therefore, deserves all the love she is getting from her “good looking” children during the thirty thousand years devoted to her worship.
You did allow that slight possibility of God’s existence but you failed to investigate into the past of the God whom you call a psychotic delinquent. Yes, he is that and he is also jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully. The God of the O.T., however, is not a liar. The authors of the texts of the O.T. attribute to their god all the crimes (as we know them from the rest of the archaic texts and popular tradition) that the gods committed.
The O.T. is put to blame because Abram twice, and his son Isaac once, misrepresented their wives as their sisters. The texts, however, provide an explanation for this behavior. Abram says: And yet indeed she is my sister; she is the daughter of my father, but not the daughter of my mother; and she became my wife. (Gen. 20:12)
Abram is the son of a divine couple such as Enki and “lawful” goddess wife.
Ninmu, the product of Enki’s initial raping of Mother-womb Ninhursag, is a sister to Abram by another mother and a Mother-womb herself.
Both Enki and his son Abram have a “right” to rape Ninmu. So Ninmu is sister and lover of Abram.
The texts are also put to blame because of the incident of incest between Lot and his daughters.
Love making was prohibited before judgement, that is, before having been decided whether the person under judgement was a human being or an animal. Those accused of love-making prior to their judgement were given to the pyre.
“I have had no sex”, assures his judging gods the “accused”.
In Sodom they disobeyed. They had natural, pure, clean sex before passing through judgement and so the Mother-wombs were burnt along with the naughty youths. With Mother-wombs gone, Lot or Abram or any “son of God”, was then left with only his own women, the women of his own tribe for love making, the women of the tribe of the gods. In order for this information to be passed down to the generations of future initiates, the wife of Lot had to be removed from the scene by becoming a pillar of salt.
The key to understand the O.T. is to study the Egyptian funerary texts on the original, because the translations are not but a disgrace to the Universities sponsoring their publications.
I am sure that you want to show the world how ridiculous the idea of the immaterial God is. The way to accomplish that aim is by doing some research into the archaic texts. You will also help humanity to discover its past.
Sincerely,
Dimitri Trimijopulos
όλοι όσοι γράφετε αγγλικά γράφετε καλύτερα από μένα (είμαι αυτοδίδακτος) και για τον λόγο αυτό θέλω να ζητήσω την βοήθειά σας στην σύνταξη και παρουσίαση της επιστολής που ακολουθεί.
Η επιστολή απευθύνεται στον κ. Ντώκινς και θα την αναρτήσω, όταν ετοιμαστεί, στο τμήμα του φόρουμ του το οποίο παρακολουθεί και ο ίδιος. Μια προηγούμενη ανάρτησή μου στο ίδιο τμήμα (με τίτλο Mr. Dawkins, please join category 7) είχε ατυχή κατάληξη διότι οι συντονιστές την μετέφεραν αμέσως σε ένα subforum του οποίου στόχος είναι η γελοιοποίηση όσων θεμάτων θεωρούνται γελοία, δικαίως ή αδίκως.
Οι απόψεις μου είναι ριζοσπαστικές και κάπως δύσπεπτες. Πρόθεσή μου πάντως είναι να τονίσω εκείνο που θεωρούν αυτονόητο όσοι δεν ικανοποιούνται με την κατάταξή τους στην ίδια κατηγορία όπου ο Ντώκινς τοποθετεί τον εαυτό του: ότι δηλαδή είναι απαράδεκτο η δήλωση αθεΐας να συνοδεύεται από αμφιβολία. Για τον λόγο αυτόν θα χαρώ πολύ αν κάποιος κρίνει ότι συμφωνεί με τα γραφόμενα μου και επιθυμεί να προσυπογράψει την επιστολή. Εγώ υπογράφω επώνυμα, αλλά βεβαίως εσείς μπορείτε να χρησιμοποιήσετε το ψευδώνυμό σας.
Dear Mr. Dawkins,
my protest is based on the fact that although you are quite right in saying that you‘d be surprised to find many people in category 7, your placing yourself in category 6 cuts off the flow towards category 7!
We all have to move up to the penthouse and here is why:
You wrote that religions such as Buddhism or Confucianism should not be treated as religions at all but as ethical systems or philosophies of life. Religion is based on god/s and their actions and therefore there can be no definition of religion without reference to god/s.
To my opinion Christian and Muslim religions (deist ideas included) should also be considered as philosophical systems. Authentic religions have their own proper god/s. Christians and Muslims borrowed theirs, made a copy out of the loan and now that the copy does not any longer fit the original, the texts of the Old Testament are blamed for describing faithfully the original.
Actually, monotheism should also be considered a mere ethical system. Monotheism originated as an idea into the Egyptian priesthood and therefore, since the slight doubt raised about God’s non-existence does not refer to the conception of God but to the God as an entity, it is only Adonay or Elohim, the non-entirely-monotheistic God of the O.T., that can be thought of as an entity.
Amun-Re, The “One God”
The expression “Lord of All” is an epithet that could apply to any god. In the passage that follows it is the god Khepri who is addressed and the Lord of All appears as the one who commands the slaughterers:
Oh Khepri in the midst of your sacred bark, primeval one whose body is eternity, save me from the watchers of those who are to be examined, to whom the Lord of All has given power to guard against and fetter his enemies, who make slaughter in the slaughter houses, who do not leave their guardianship. May their knives never cut into me, may I never enter their slaughter-houses.
The German Egyptologist Heinrich Karl Brugsch collected a number of striking passages, as W. Budge said, from the Egyptian texts where the words “God one” do not mean “One God” in our sense of the words, as M. Maspero believed.
A selection of the said passages follows:
God is one and alone, and none other existeth with Him.
God is the One, the One who hath made all things.
God is the eternal One, he is eternal and infinite and endureth for ever and aye.
God is truth and He liveth by truth and He feedeth thereon.
God is life and through Him only man liveth.
God hath made the Universe, and He hath created all that therein is.
He is the Creator of what is in this world, and of what was, of what is, and of what shall be.
God is merciful unto those who reverence Him, and He heareth him that calleth upon Him.
God knoweth him that acknowledged Him, He rewarded him that serveth Him, and He protected him that followeth Him.
The creation of the concept “One God” was accomplished by merging the attributes of Amun and Re into Amun-Re.
Jan Assman, a modern German Egyptologist, writes in his book “The Search for God in Ancient Egypt”:
The Theban theology of these decades (18th Dynasty, 1570-1293) can be interpreted as an attempt to fill the hyphenated formulation Amun-Re with theological content, that is, to develop a divine concept sufficiently comprehensive to include all the traditions concerning Amun and all those of Re as well. The pure Amun aspect of the city god and the pure Re aspect of the sun god are connected by the concept of the supreme being who had already emerged in the theological fragments of the Middle Kingdom (2000-1800) in his aspects of primeval god, creator god, and god of life.
I call this process “additive,” for I have the impression that this new concept of a supreme being was arrived at primarily by accumulation and juxtaposition. All aspects of divine unity –preexistence, creator, sustainer- were combined and connected with one another by means of simple but well-ordered juxtapositions of sequences of predicates of Amun and Re.
By way of an example he provides the following eulogistic insertion from the offering prayer on the tomb stela of a man named Amenemhet:
An offering prayer to Amun-Re, lord of Karnak,
lord of eternity, lord of everlastingness,
prince, lord of the great two-feathered crown.
The sole one in the beginning, the greatest of the great,
primeval god without his like,
he is the great one who created men and gods
…
Living flame that arose from the primordial waters
to illuminate those in the sky.
divine god who came into being by himself.
He who speaks, and what is to happen comes about.
It is quite probable that the enigmatic word “Amen,” by which Jews, Christians and Muslims still close their prayers, is an invocation of the name of the “hidden” god of the Egyptians, Amun (imn in hieroglyphic means hide).
Judgement
God created people and judged them. The god who did not do that is no god worth of bothering with. The layman of the past knew that he was created by the gods and the philosophers and theologians of the past felt that it was their duty to inform him on how the feat was accomplished. Plato (Timaeus 73e) describes in detail how God made and shaped the bones of the skull. According to the “Great Hymn to Khnum”, the God: built the skull, formed the cheeks to furnish shape to the image. He opened the eyes, hollowed the ears, he made the body inhale air.
Deist scholars and priesthood stretched anthropogeny to include cosmogony and transformed personal judgement of living people into mass judgement of dead people.
The God of the O.T. “came down” to judge the people of Sodom but eventually he did not pass judgement for the simple reason that mass judgement was never practiced. There was only mass execution and on the subject of personal judgement as well as on that of the mass execution the O.T. is punctual and correct!
Surely you are aware of the fact that the oldest and largest corpus of archaic texts, the Egyptian funerary texts (The Pyramid texts, the Coffin texts and the Book of the Dead), deal exclusively with the subject of the judgement of the “dead.”
Those “dead” are considered dead ones, dead people, corpses, by the Egyptian priesthood and by modern Egyptologists as well, but not so by the authors of the texts.
According to the Egyptian tradition it was the body, of the supposed dead, which was examined at the judgement and not the soul (which is nowhere to be found into the older texts) and therefore the person being judged was alive (Plato confirms this information in his “Gorgias” dialogue 523 a - 524 b).
“Dead” and “souls” were introduced by means of erroneous renderings of some of the basic Egyptian terms such as m(w)t, ba, akh, Maat, asfet, khet.
Ask an Egyptologist to justify the rendering of the term ba as “soul” and you’ll realize that there can be no justification, or you’ll get an incomprehensible explanation, as the following one supplied by Jan Assmann: Ba is an enigmatic concept. It designates as much the visible manifestation of a hidden power as the hidden power behind its visible manifestations.
In order for the person been judged not to fail the examination and be instantly executed, he should have had a body free of defects.
The accused pleads not guilty on the grounds that there is no fault (asfet) in his body or that, as a consequence of the lack of asfet, there is Maat (divine purity) in his body.
A body without faults is a ḏt nṯrty, a god-like body.
The sons of God saw the daughters of men that they were fair and they took them wives of all which they chose (Gen.6:2)
Those “daughters of men” have names. They are called Pandora, Io, Danae, Persephone, by the Greeks, or Ninhursag, Ninmu, Ninkurra, Uttu, by the Sumerians.
In the Sumerian myth “Enki and Ninhursag,” the god Enki impregnates the goddess Ninhursag, “the mother of the land,” who gives birth to the goddess Ninmu. Enki then proceeds to impregnate his daughter Ninmu, who gives birth to the goddess named Ninkurra. Enki then impregnates his granddaughter Ninkurra and the latter gives birth to the goddess Uttu, whom Enki prepares to impregnate too.
Collectively these women were known as Mother-wombs and they lived in the “garden huts,”(Lamentation over the Destruction of Sumer and Ur, line 331), or in Bayith (house, hut) according to the O.T. (In the O.T. and the Hittite “Song of Ullikummis” the mothers, who are called Good-women and Mother-goddesses, appear as midwives).The Mother-wombs, having been sheltered and with main and, obviously, only purpose in life the production of god-like children, got inevitably too fat.
The 26,000-year-old Venus of Willendorf wears a hood which is probably the precursor of the burka and yashmak and she used to live in a breeding ground (a precursor of the harem) consisting of “garden huts”.
The feat of the “gods” to create “mortals” was, obviously, achieved by way of those breeding grounds. The mortals were made in the likeness of the gods because the ones that did not possess the “divine likeness” were automatically wiped out. Thus, those who survived attributed their life-preserving “divine likeness” to their mother, who not only gave them life but, most important, endowed them with the correct form. That mother, therefore, deserves all the love she is getting from her “good looking” children during the thirty thousand years devoted to her worship.
You did allow that slight possibility of God’s existence but you failed to investigate into the past of the God whom you call a psychotic delinquent. Yes, he is that and he is also jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully. The God of the O.T., however, is not a liar. The authors of the texts of the O.T. attribute to their god all the crimes (as we know them from the rest of the archaic texts and popular tradition) that the gods committed.
The O.T. is put to blame because Abram twice, and his son Isaac once, misrepresented their wives as their sisters. The texts, however, provide an explanation for this behavior. Abram says: And yet indeed she is my sister; she is the daughter of my father, but not the daughter of my mother; and she became my wife. (Gen. 20:12)
Abram is the son of a divine couple such as Enki and “lawful” goddess wife.
Ninmu, the product of Enki’s initial raping of Mother-womb Ninhursag, is a sister to Abram by another mother and a Mother-womb herself.
Both Enki and his son Abram have a “right” to rape Ninmu. So Ninmu is sister and lover of Abram.
The texts are also put to blame because of the incident of incest between Lot and his daughters.
Love making was prohibited before judgement, that is, before having been decided whether the person under judgement was a human being or an animal. Those accused of love-making prior to their judgement were given to the pyre.
“I have had no sex”, assures his judging gods the “accused”.
In Sodom they disobeyed. They had natural, pure, clean sex before passing through judgement and so the Mother-wombs were burnt along with the naughty youths. With Mother-wombs gone, Lot or Abram or any “son of God”, was then left with only his own women, the women of his own tribe for love making, the women of the tribe of the gods. In order for this information to be passed down to the generations of future initiates, the wife of Lot had to be removed from the scene by becoming a pillar of salt.
The key to understand the O.T. is to study the Egyptian funerary texts on the original, because the translations are not but a disgrace to the Universities sponsoring their publications.
I am sure that you want to show the world how ridiculous the idea of the immaterial God is. The way to accomplish that aim is by doing some research into the archaic texts. You will also help humanity to discover its past.
Sincerely,
Dimitri Trimijopulos