From: doug@uuisis.isis.org (Doug Thompson)
Subject: Re: The Adam and Eve Thing
Organization: International Shared Information Service (Ottawa)
Date: Sat, 12 Sep 92 06:26:31 GMT

lpb@florida.swdc.stratus.com (Len Bucuvalas) writes:

> I know that this isn't going to sit well with MANY ...but I have
> to share what I have read. There is evidence, according to the
> recent translation (recent meaning in terms of 4-10 years) of
> the Sumerian and Akkadian tablets that God, as described in all
> our sunday school books...in all accepted mainstream religous
> literature, that God was an advance being from another star
> system. No God at all but a creature with a group of others who
> came here to mine the planet for minerals, saw Humanity in it's
> animal state, did cross breed fertilization, and develop homo
> erectus to use as slave labor.
> 
> Now PLEASE....no arrows...I am NOT the message. This information
> can be found in the following books:
> 
> 	The 12th Planet.....by Zacharia Sitchin
> 
> 	Flying Serpents and Dragons: A history of man's
> 	reptilian past .... by Boulay

I have no comments on those texts. I can say that at least seven Bronze Age
cultures we know of have myths/legends/scriptures which speak of 'god(s)'
(immortals) who came to earth from 'heaven' (high places). These 'gods' had
super-human powers but they walked on earth among people, married and begat
children, were vulnerable to being hurt or even killed sometimes, ate, drank
and slept according to all these Bronze Age traditions.

In the Old Testament one can find some passages which refer to entities with
these attributes. In addition one finds references to many gods. God (with a
capital G) in the English translations, and Lord (with a capital L) will
sometimes be used to translate the Hebrew word Yahweh and sometimes used to
translate the Hebrew Elohim (the latter being a plural).

I find it quite interesting that so many different cultures, widely
dispersed geographically, end up telling stories which have many common
elements. It is even more interesting to me that certain of these elements,
including a multiplicity of 'immortals', the corporeality of the
'immortals', the mortality of the mortals, the sexual activity of the
mortals, etc., deviate from the ordinary theological description of "God" as
a single spiritual entity with omnipotence and omniscience.

The stories exist, that is not really open for debate. The meaning of the
stories is another matter. Conventional theology and history look on these
myths as rather fanciful fictions invented by superstitious primitives to
explain the unexplainable. From that view the stories are false at worst, or
metaphors and literary devices at best. In any event conventional wisdom
does not take them at face value.

Some historians are now raising the question "Why not take them at face
value?" Just because they are not consistent with our ideas about gods or
how things were back then is not a good enough reason to dismiss these
traditions.

Among the hypotheses offered by some historians today is the notion that the
earth was indeed visited by human-like people from other places. These
people possessed a higher level of technology and relative 'immortality'. In
this view, the Bronze Age stories can be taken at face value as a primitive
people's report of its dealings with a more advanced people.

I don't think we can dismiss the possibility of inter-planetary visitations.

Now, whether these 'immortals' spoken of in Bronze Age traditions have any
direct connection to God, Christ, Allah, Buddah, Moses, or any other prophet
or divinity spoken of by modern religions is a completely separate question
in my mind.

You could prove to me beyond any doubt that space travellers wandered about
Greece in 1500 B.C. and are responsible for Greek mythology, and that Zeus
was really a citizen of Sirius without in any way shape or form influencing
my ideas about who Yahweh was/is or who Jesus was/is beyond broadening the
spectrum of possibilities that could be entertained.

In addition to the Bronze Age tales that may well be reports of alien
visitations, there are other religious/theological traditions which tell
about a spiritual entity that normally does not show up in a physical form,
doesn't eat, is immortal, speaks to people in an inner, spiritual way rather
than an outer, verbal way, doesn't have a body or physical manifestation, is
omnipotent and omniscient and is often given credit for Creating the world.

The two kinds of stories are often interwoven and frequently appear to
overlap but still can be distinguished, one from the other.

So the idea that God is just an astronaut from another place is not a
conclusion that logically follows from the idea that the earth has been
visited by aliens. Much of theology (god-talk) in all major religions that I
know about understands a God (or great spirit) with characteristics which
are inconsistent with any idea of sentient animal life that I know of.
Included in those characteristics or attributes given the supreme being are
supremacy, immortality, creator of the world, omniscience and omnipotence.
In many traditions there is also the idea that there is only one God, or one
supreme creator-being.

So all of theology in all the world's religions can't be explained with the
space-traveller hypothesis even though a lot can be.

Whether one personally believes in a supreme diety or not is rather
irrelevant here. What I'm trying to do is examine the ancient tradtions that
I am familiar with with an eye to figuring out what those people were really
saying and what they were really experiencing.

My own best guess is that they did experience alien visitation and that they
also had a spiritual awareness of a diety which, while it may have gotten
confused with the aliens at times, represents an awareness of something
quite distinct from the flesh-and-blood aliens. My hypothesis is that both
kinds of awareness and experience tended to get woven together in the
legends and religious traditions that have been preserved.

In all cases, subsequent generations who inherited the traditions but did
not have the experience of the alien visitors and who may have understood
the spiritual aspect of diety-awareness differently put their own meanings
and interpretations on what they got from their ancestors and handed down to
us something which has been interpreted, if not altered.

By "interpreted if not altered" I mean that if you take something like the
Bible and just read it without bias, what you find is enormously different
from what the Vatican, for instance, says it is. Those of us who have been
exposed to the interpretations of a particular institution or religion or
bias often have a hard time seeing what's *really* there since we've been
told so often about what is *supposed* to be there.

Even assuming that something like the Bible may have suffered editing and
revision in the text, what is actually there in black and white is pretty
remarkable and deviates enormously from most religious teaching.

I have many reasons for supposing that the Bible hasn't suffered too much
from editing and revision. One of the main reasons is that the
'true-believer syndrome' in authoritarian religious institutions doesn't
really care what is written there. They don't need to edit the text, they
are quite capable of getting their followers to believe whatever they want
them to believe regardless of the text.

There are scads of examples but a really blatant one is the Catholic
practice of calling certain male clergy "father". Now the Bible quotes Jesus
as saying "Do not call any man 'father'". The point here is that the content
of the text is less important than the content of the interpreted teaching
even where there is a direct, plain and obvious contradiction - even where
the text specifically forbids a practice advocated by the religious
authorities. So if you can ignore the text that directly and that easily,
why bother altering the text?

The second reason I don't think there has been much alteration is that if
there had been we should be able to find proof of at least some instances of
this. But wherever we can track the history of a biblical text - i.e.
wherever there has been a new manuscript found that is much older than the
previously known oldest manuscript, we find that the text got through the
centuries with remarkably little alteration.

This doesn't prove an absence of meddling but it does demonstrate that
preservation of textual integrity has been pretty darned good.

Editing is another matter, especially as it relates to which documents were
chosen - and by whom - to be included in 'scripture' and which documents
were rejected.

Obviously there has been a great deal of religious thinking and writing in
the Judeo-Christian tradition that hasn't been included in the Bible.

However that which has been included contains an enormous diversity of ideas
and experiences.

In approaching something like the Bible one has to realize that you are
reading documents which are, at their newest, nearly 2000 years old. One has
to realize that the authors' culture was radically different than our own
and that they were writing to their friends and colleagues - not us. Much of
what is written in the Bible was written to argue a point in a controversy
which is long forgotten, by people immersed in long-dead institutional
biases.

In particular one must remember that 'science' wasn't really invented for
more than a thousand years after the text of the Bible was frozen and that
the idea of an explicitly factual and detailed exposition was almost
unknown. Literature, 2000 years ago, was literature. Metaphor and image,
poetry if you will. Inspired, moving, real and true yes. Scientifically
factual? Well the concept was unknown.

So the Bible says Noah lived 900 years. One cannot assume this isn't
'correct' but neither can one assume that the author was being careful about
his dates or that a 'year' meant 365.25 days of 24 hours to him/her.

If you or I said that so-and-so lived to the age of n years we'd assume a
literal, scientific, factual veracity. That's because our culture places
great importance on accurate facts. But 3000 years ago people weren't so
fussy by and large.

If you take the Bible's geneologies and the ages of people and add it up you
find that Adam's live began in 4004 B.C. right about the time the world was
created. Now we *know* that the earth is billions of years old from the
geologic record. So clearly the bible's authors aren't giving us a geology
lesson and you can't get much geological information from people who had no
concept at all of what geology is.

In other words, we can't judge their writing and ideas by *our* cultural
standards and biases without completely missing *their* point.

I have read some colonial documents from the 18th century that relate how
Canadian natives reacted to and described their first experience of a large
sailing ship. It's approximately "a great canoe with white eagle wings".

Now these people were not setting out to mislead anyone or misrepresent
anything. They were trying to describe something they hadn't experienced
before in terms they were familiar with. You or I might judge the
description as poor, even false. Sails are not, after all, 'wings', in any
scientifically accurate sense.

A musket was described as a "thunder stick" and those same Cree have a lot
of legends about "thunder birds".

There is a fault line in the Canadian shield created by the Thunder Birds,
according to Cree legend. It's a deep fissure in the earth about two meters
wide. Go figure. 

Now I wonder how a stone age person would describe a jet fighter? Or flying
saucers in combat?

Anyway, when approaching the Bible or any other Bronze Age literature, you
have to take all this into account or you are almost certain to
misunderstand the document as badly as the Cree misunderstood ships and
firearms a few hundred years ago.

=Doug

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