'Cons Who Rule a Ruined World'

Continued from page 2

It is absurd to talk about a Judeo-Christian tradition. I say this in spite of the political good that this does for the State of Israel or the remnant of Jewry. Nevertheless, it is an absurd fiction. There is no Judeo-Christian tradition. There cannot be. What is at the heart of the book is a very grim fact: As you and I talk to each other at the moment, we are in a cosmos in which there are 1 and a half billion people who call themselves Christians. One and a half billion people who call themselves Muslims. There are 14 million self-identified Jews. That takes care of Yahweh on the one hand, and that takes care of--since we're outnumbered 1,000 to one by each--that takes care of.... ah, never mind. I don't want to say the obvious.

It all started back about 1801 in Cane Ridge on the Kentucky-Tennessee border [where a major revival helped spark the Second Great Awakening]. From then until now, this has been a religion mad country. It's an ongoing revival all the time. And what I call "the American Religion" is weird in the extreme. Every second year, the Gallup poll publishes a poll on religion in America. They always send me a copy, and I always turn to just one thing immediately, it never varies: 93% of Americans say they believe in God. I don't care about that one way or the other. 89%--almost nine out of 10 Americans--say that God loves him or her on a personal and individual basis. That's what this book is going up against.

The closest thing that we have, since the Christian God the Father isn't even a pale shadow of Yahweh, and Adonai--or whatever you want to call him, the rabbinical, normative God of what is now Judaism--has much more in common with the God of Deuteronomy or of the so-called priestly author strand in the Torah than the original Yahwistic portion. It is a very strange irony, that Allah of the "recital" or Koran has on the whole more features in common with the original Yahweh, though he's by no means identical with him.

Total authority, total demand for submission. Remember that Islam is a word meaning submission, and the Muslim is one who submits to the supposed will of God. It's the assumption of total authority.

The Gospel of Thomas, which is proto-Gnostic or quasi-Gnostic or a mixture of Gnosticism and ordinary Christianity shows it pretty clearly. Or what I would call "the American Religion" is clearly a Gnosticism: The belief that the best and oldest part of you, the most inmost part, is no part of the created world at all, that it is part of the original Godhead; the belief that except for that spark or breath hidden deep within the lock of the self and very hard to get at, that otherwise all divinity consists of is a good God who has either been exiled to or has exiled himself to the outer spaces, out beyond our cosmos, and he cannot get in touch with us, and we cannot get in touch with him or it or her or whatever you want to call him.

Look at the epigraph of my book. There is a hidden purpose in that. It's from William Blake's "To the Accuser Who Is a God of This World." I quote the second stanza:

Tho' thou art Worship'd by the Names Divine
Of Jesus and Jehovah, thou are still
The Son of Morn in weary Night's decline,
The lost Traveller's Dream under the Hill.

There's the essence of a Gnostic's stance. A god of this world, worshipped under the names of Jesus, Jehovah, Yahweh, Allah, call it what you will, God the Father, the Holy Ghost--which by the way is nowhere in the Hebrew Bible, it's a weird importation--they are cons who rule a ruined world.

_Related Features

An excerpt from "Jesus and Yahweh" The Editorial Team Behind the Bible The Search for Jesus