Ontology of God Series - Offending others |
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Ontology of God is now a book: Ontology of God: The voices of the ancients speak.by Dorian Scott Cole. Description. Available now on Scott's Amazon.com store.
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Echoing through time are the voices of ancient people telling us about God. From Mesopotamia and Egypt 5000 years ago, often from even earlier oral traditions, every civilization has been inspired to tell us about God. Their voices vary widely and even conflict. Is there a common message that they thought was so important that they had to pass it on? In this book, the ancient voices speak.
This study follows the thread of the basic religious concepts of law, mercy, and love that are prominent in many religions. Major religions around the world are investigated up to the launch of the Common Era when most religions had been developed, including religions that later developed independently such as the Mayan.
These are messages refined by the fire of experience through the ages. The repeated messages collectively bear the tests of validity.
This study also looks at the many methods we use to try to understand God and religious literature. Is the nature of God reflected in what he asks of us? The premise is that it is.
By understanding the nature of God, perhaps we can filter out the many competing voices that tell us that God stands for such things as the murder of innocents and destruction.
The very nature of religion is illuminated in the light of the voices from the ages. But is ancient religion a path that we have lost, or does history hammer out newer voices to bear the truth of new experience as people try to understand their relationship with God?
About the author: Dorian Scott Cole is an independent, cross-disciplinary scholar with education and experience in psychology, philosophy, religion, language, visual semiotics, and technology. Other books and publications: How to Write a Screenplay, Writers Workshop Script Doctor, www.visualwriter.com, and www.onespiritresources.com.
Reading type: Mainstream Scholarly Specialist
Central to the idea of understanding the Judeo-Christian-Muslim God, and the God of Mesopotamia, is our understanding of the concept of offending God and others. For example, are we "born into sin," as some teach, so we are somehow contaminated with "original sin," and what does that mean?
This series explores the human condition through the role of religion in our lives, and tries to understand the ontology of God (what God is about through an ontological construct approach to theology, as evidenced in relationships).
The Judeo/Christian/Muslim traditions are not unique in their stories. Other religions or myths have very similar stories. What is unique is the way in which these stories are intepreted so that they have meaning in people's lives. The Biblical book of Genesis sets the interpretive structure in place for the rest of the Bible, giving an interpretation of humanities beginning and its formative relationship with God.
For comparison, around 750 BCE, the Greeks put their stories in writing, notably through Homer, who probably did not invent the stories but recorded aural traditions that had been passed from generation to generation, and were known in many regions.
Flood stories were common in many regions. Hero stories grew in popularity. Creation stories circulated. Even the Savior motif, typified in Christ, were common, with elements of Christ's story present in many other regional religious leader stories. Even in the Middle East, many "Jesus" type people circulated in the years before Christ.
In Ancient Greek stories, there is a parallel to the Biblical Garden of Eden in the "golden" era of humanity in which people existed in an idyllic setting. Another parallel is in the Biblical Eve, who ate of the forbidden fruit and got them kicked out of the idyllic garden. Eve's counterpart in Greek myth is Pandora, who opened a forbidden box and brought evil into the world. Fear of women was also a prevalent motif in Greek mythology as it was in Persia and the Middle East. Creation stories were know in Ancient Sumer as long as 3500 years BCE, and were recorded in rudimentary story form, and continued into Babylonian culture. Most of these stories probably had common roots in older cultures of which we know little. Many are thought to have their root in an area of Turkey that was rather idyllic, and probably did flood, giving rise to both the Adam and Eve story, and to the Noah story, for the entire region. The names changed little through time, and seem to fit.
The Ancient Greek myths were stories about gods, and mostly not about people. The gods had all of the characteristics of people: love, sex, hate, jealousy, rage, spite... The Greek stories appear to be projections of the human condition, possibly projected into stories about gods for two reasons. For one, they could be examined in the actions of the gods. The gods knew few consequences for their actions; they did things, but few things happened to them. From these somewhat arbitrary actions of the gods, some rationale was presented for understanding the events of nature and of people. Something happened with the gods - this was the reason for seasons. Someone displeased the gods - this was the reason for a person's misfortune. Second, probably by puzzling about the gods and their human like actions, people could puzzle about their own nature and the consequences of their own actions, plus the world around them. These stories are typically more fully developed in Ancient Greek myths as storylines than in Biblical literature.
Biblical stories are very different. Biblical stories tell us next to nothing about the world of God and the constituents of God's environment. A relationship with ArchAngels is about all that we are made aware of. Biblical stories, in one context, are about the interaction of people with God, as a way of knowing God. Of the Biblical sources, we know little. Many of the Genesis stories predate Abraham and Israel by an unknown but substantial amount of time. They were either oral traditions that were known to the Semitic people, and earlier civilizations, or the Israelites came into contact with them while in captivity in Babylon.
The source is not so important as the context in which these Biblical stories are cast. They differ in at least two important respects. First they are about understanding God through experiential relationships of God and people. Second, is the meaning interpretation of the stories, which creates a framework for understanding events in people's lives, and of the events in the world.
The turning point of the story of Adam and Eve in the idyllic existence of the Garden of Eden, is the point where Eve disobeys God and eats the forbidden fruit - that is, the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Through the experience of disobedience, they are no longer in an innocent and idyllic state. Experience (disobedience) brings them knowledge of good and evil - and as a symbol of this new awareness, they know that they wear no clothes, and they are embarrassed (ashamed - naked - unprotected - vulnerable) and cover themselves with fig-leaves. Their relationship with God is diminished by their knowledge of having offended God so they (symbolically) hide from him (offence puts distance between them). Therefore they no longer can live in an idyllic state so are banished from the Garden (symbolically puts distance between them and God), and must (symbolically) work (will find hardships in life, such as working and the pain of birthing children).
The moral of the story, which points to a way to interpret hardship in life, is that disobedience to God causes people to separate from God, and God to separate from offensive things, so difficulty in life is the result. Extended further, suffering because of offending and separation from God, makes people want to find God and cease offending.
This interpretation is consistent through much of Biblical literature. This teaching in Ancient times was extended to say that God blesses those who follow his ways, both materially and spiritually. This teaching continues to this day. But the Biblical Wisdom literature challenges this teaching. Solomon, King of Israel, found in his observations that the wicked also prosper, and the righteous also suffer.
The puzzle of life is not readily answered in observation of the world - one cannot analyze everyone's brief experience and make conclusions. What is more commonly recognized is that following God brings spiritual rewards to your life. Setting your heart on money is the road to evil. Thus, giving so that you can get money or wealth in return is not a sound policy, and not consistent with religious experience.One can derive other morals from the Garden of Eden story. Disobedience is a part of the experience that leads to knowing good from evil, which leads to spiritual growth. Offending God and others creates separation (hiding and rejection) and suffering.
The entire Bible is devoted to this basic theme: Offending God and others causes separation from God and suffering. This theme is extended in many respects, including the Day of the Lord motif in which absolute disobedience causes absolute destruction of people and civiliation; God pursues people by always forgiving, by looking for the lost sheep, and by threatening destruction to make people aware of their offences and get them to turn back.
In the ontology that I previously began (ontology), the preeminent characteristic of God - that is, what God is about, the basic nature of God - he is about "love." Love is what he extends to us, love characterizes his actions, and love is what he asks of us toward others. God's demand of obedience to him is not a reflection of a tyrannical nature, but primarily gets to the heart of how we treat each other. The second characteristic of God, born of love, is that offending God or people leads to separation, and to our suffering, and God wants us back and relationships healed. To accomplish reconciliation, God may just rattle your cage, and if you continue offending, he may even destroy you.
This interpretive framework ultimately became twisted as the Ancient Israelites tried too hard to please God. Every good event in their lives was interpreted as a reward for having pleased God. Every bad event in their lives was intrepreted as a punishment for having offended God. Reward/punishment conditioning, and profit motive, as Solomon noticed, were not the intention of God. When the Israelites were captured and dispersed into foreign lands, their prophets interpeted this as the result of their having displeased God. When some were allowed to return to their land, they became very attentive to following "The Law" of God. In fact, they became so preoccupied with following the letter of the law, that by the time of Christ, they were willing to commit great offences to others in order to follow the letter of the law. It was like bureaucracy run amuk.Christ tried to help them understand that strict obedience to laws makes one lose perspective - the law is a beginning, not the key to life or spirituality. To put it succinctly, Christ and the Apostle Paul reframed this as: The law condemns you. It is a beginning for knowing good and evil. It brings awareness of offending. We should all love and forgive. God wants everyone in a close relationship with him, he loves to forgive, but will destroy your flesh, if necessary, to save your soul. If the time comes when too many people forsake God, then a world of destruction will occur.
There is a lot of misinterpretation, or more probably overemphasis, that happens with this literature. Some emphasize "original sin" or that we are all sinners, saying that we are all born into sin and all are condemned, and we got in this condition because of Adam. This overemphasis is often offensive to people and drives them away from what is perceived as a tyrannical and threatening God. The answer to the confusion, I have already given in the previous paragraph. Disobedience to God, as shown by Adam, is destructive and can lead to our destruction.
To me, the more important thing to emphasize would be that we are all children of God, and like children, we learn by doing and experimenting. God, our parent, loves us and forgives us for what we do. Through experience, we grow spiritually. Without experience, we don't grow spiritually. Fear of making mistakes simply paralyzes many. As some wisely counsel, we learn the right way to do things by making a lot of mistakes. Precisely, we learn what hurts others by hurting and being hurt, and then reconciling. We become better people for it. Relationships become stronger through it. But encouraging hurting others to learn, would also be as badly placed an overemphasis as adhering to the letter of the law. We have to encourage not hurting, and forgive it when it happens.
Religions have difficulty describing the indescribable. To tell us about God, the experience has to be described in terms that are already familiar to people. So by necessity, the divine becomes desribed in terms that are very human. As history contienues and people understand more and have words that extend the boundaries of knowledge, the descriptions of previous ages seem very inadequate and even misleading.
- Scott
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