Sunday, October 6, 2024

chap 3 excerpt

    The main question for human beings is whether we were created or evolved. If you believe the former, there are explanations for it, and if you believe the latter, there are explanations for it too. When most people speak of god it’s based on the idea of omniscience—of knowing all things. An old poem once described looking down from above, that the greatest experience of all is to stand on the highest vantage of truth—to look upon a situation and see it as it is. The more you know, the higher in the heavens of truth you ascend, the more god you become—or in religious terms—the closer to god you become. That’s why politicians are treated as gods, because presumably, through intelligence briefings, they’re in possession of much more knowledge about what human existence actually is.

    I was brought up in a family of monotheists—people who believe the things described in the King James version of the Bible—that there’s a god in the heavens looking down, who created Adam and Eve, who ate fruit they weren’t supposed to, and got booted from a garden, cast out to live by the sweat of their brow. Not only do Judeo-Christians know this version of events, but Muslims too, because the exact story is part of the Koran. In other words, roughly half the people on Earth know the Creation Story as recounted by monotheist religion.

    In sharp contrast is the Theory of Evolution—single cell organisms evolved into sea animals, which moved onto land, and evolved into apes. For millions of years the physical appearances of these apes remained basically the same until an inexplicable progression occurred where brain mass increased fifty-percent, and our faces became flat while slipping into a hairless, modern anatomy. According to paleontology and archaeology it all happened in the blink of an eye—suddenly we looked like movie stars compared to millions of years of monkey-ness. The natural selection and random mutation required for us to have become what we are today—from what we were, in so short a period—hasn’t ever been explained. It doesn’t mean science is invalid, just that the theory of how we went from monkey to movie star so immediately, is a mystery, and requires faith. The Creation Story and Theory of Evolution both require faith. Whether you believe one or the other, or believe something else altogether, knowing that these two fundamental world-views each require faith.

    Most people who know Hebrew accounts in the Old Testament know they took place in the Tigris/Euphrates river valley—Mesopotamia, the cradle of civilization—and in the 1850s waves of scientific expeditions conducted excavations there—British, French, and German. They brought back tens of thousands of tablets with Sumerian cuneiform writing—script composed of triangles and arrow points pressed and fired into clay. Tens of thousands of these tablets rest in basements of the finest museums around the world to this day.

    Also sitting in a museum is a popular attraction known as the Rosetta Stone; forty-five inches tall, a smooth surface containing three different scripts all saying the same thing; discovering all three in the same place enabled us to unlock the cosmology and records of the Egyptians. Lesser known, but arguably more important, is the Behistun Inscription—fifty feet high, eighty feet across, carved 300 feet up on a limestone cliff, it first came to the attention of the western world in the 1600s when an Englishman on a diplomatic mission through Iran spotted it. Just like the Rosetta Stone it has three different scripts all saying the same thing. One of the three is the Akkadian, root of all Semitic languages, including Hebrew. With the Behistun Inscription we were finally able to unlock the information found on all those fired clay tablets uncovered by Europeans. Up until about the 1880s Judeo-Christians believed the Creation Story originated through oral tradition amongst rabbis, but in fact, Adam and Eve being banished from Eden, the Tower of Babel, Noah and the Flood—all that and more—are spelled out on the fired, clay tablets. Originally and unedited the Creation Story reads as science-fiction. They record an aristocracy of beings who ruled over a group of lesser beings, and they all splashed down here on Earth a half million years ago and created humans. Many today know this due to cable TV programs and the idea of Ancient Aliens—the idea that another race of beings visited here.

    As it happened, in this original version of the Creation Story, the captain and chief science officer were brothers—Enlil was commander and Enki was chief science officer. Enlil and Enki were their names in the original version but have altered over the centuries. Through time Enlil and Enki became Zeus and Prometheus, and to Judeo-Christians, Yahweh and Lucifer, and to the Muslims, Allah and Satan. Enlil outranks Enki, just like Zeus outranks Prometheus, Yahweh outranks Lucifer, and Allah outranks Satan.

    At some point Enlil and Enki decide to create a worker—“Let us create them in our image….” The first male and female—Adam and Eve—spent each day in a garden with the lesser gods—angels—and at an appointed hour—as the monotheists tell us—fly up to heaven—Enlil’s ship orbiting Earth—while Adam and Eve are left alone, each given a portion of the garden to watch over. This went on for some time until one day Enki stayed behind at that appointed hour everyone went to hang with Enlil, and finds Eve. “Is it true Enlil said you shall not taste of every tree in the garden?” he asks.

    “We can eat of others, but the one our lord said we shall not taste, or we will die.”

    “You will not die, your lord knows that on the day you taste of it you shall be as gods, knowing good and evil.”

    Later that evening, Enlil comes down to Earth to take a stroll in the garden and Adam and Eve hide. He asks why they’re hiding and they say they’re ashamed because they went against his command and tasted the fruit. Enlil says that because they can now distinguish between good and evil, they must be banished from the garden, telling the lesser gods, “For behold, if they eat of the Tree of Life, they will live and endure forever.”

    Sometime after we leave the garden and begin to multiply, some of the lesser gods take an interest and start getting it on with us. “The sons of God saw the daughters of men were fair….” Enlil then ruled the experiment terminated, humanity exterminated, and all the lesser gods not to alert humans to a pending, catastrophic event. Enki found the most righteous guy he could and told him he had to get his family together and build a boat.

    The question comes to mind—why would the Enlil character create a worker, tell it not to eat something, then leave it alone with that very thing each day? Isn’t placing newly minted humans in proximity to something that would alter their consciousness tantamount to child endangerment? And isn’t it an injustice to punish Adam and Eve when they had no intention of going against the original command to begin with? They were blissed-out, enjoying the garden—it was Enki bringing up the idea that things went wrong. And it appears Enlil not only sets up the temptation, but blames the victim when they fall. In addition to that, the narrative shows it was Enlil who lies because eating of the tree did not kill us, it only made some gods jealous and fearful we might become immortal too, maybe even more righteous than our creators.

    The Akkadians and cultures that followed, have all written that the Sumerians were the first writers. In other words, unless you believe those civilizations lied about where they learned to write, and/or also believe the Sumerians lied about where they learned to write, then you realize the historic record, in the form of fired clay tablets, and a giant panel carved on a limestone cliff, shows that at some point in the past, humans were taught to write. Which means we’re not alone and didn’t get where we are as a civilization without intervention by another specie of sapient beings. The question is: are they still here or gone? If still here, evidence shows they’re keeping a political charade in place in order to obscure their presence. If they’re gone, then maybe another race of sapient beings happened upon us, and they’re keeping the political charade in place in order. Or, lastly, if they’re gone and no other specie has happened upon us, then maybe the current state of affairs is nothing but a class of humans keeping the political charade in place, and the rest of us enslaved.

    Supposing we were freed from the charade, would humans not one day reach a mastery of the physical universe and travel the stars? Would we not one day master genetics and live lives hundreds of thousands of years long? Of course we would. However many different forms of sapience in the cosmos—the ability to remember the past, consider the present, and imagine the future—to know, reflect and create—means all sapient species have a seat at the same table.

    So why is the Enlil character jealous? Why care if humans know the difference between good and evil? Why care if humans tasted of the Tree of Life and lived longer? Is there an actual threat or is it a form of cosmic pettiness? Maybe Earth really is unique in its visual appeal, special in its climes, and alongside other planets, a paradise, and there’s only so much room, and the creators need to keep a lid on things? If we created a worker for ourselves, and there were limited resources, we would probably argue it’s our right to prevent our worker from overcoming us—the same way if you had pets, you wouldn’t let them eat you out of house and home.

    The problem with that excuse as to why our creators have to keep a lid on us—is framed by the history of energy, figured out fair and square by Nikola Tesla—tapping lay lines of Earth and manipulating vibrational frequencies into unlimited electrical energy. The investors put Edison in place. If you go to archives of national newspapers and periodicals you realize this is actually the truth. That when Tesla died in The New Yorker Hotel, that agents of the US Government removed all his papers and they’ve never seen the light of day since. Whether or not you believe that’s true, for the sake of argument, let’s say it is—that we have access to free, unlimited energy but are being denied it by the political charade in place—it would mean those who created us are being petty for some reason.

    Is Enlil/Yahweh/Allah sapience jealous? Why do humans have pets? To provide multiple benefits. If we humans were left to our own devices, and began to travel the cosmos and created something to comfort us, and found it to our advantage to let it believe certain things, while denying it knowledge of others things, would that be bad? In this context, are good and bad completely subjective? Or is there something which distinguishes and determines, objectively, what is good or bad?


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