Is there a graveyard for ancient gods? The Gods of ancient times have come and gone – the gods of Rome, Greece, Babylon do not reveal themselves - if they ever did. Something did - entities exist but their existence doesn't make them gods.
My beliefs affect my life, have some impact on those around me but that’s about the extent of it. Born into a Roman Catholic family it takes a lifetime to sort truth from lies and in the process my beliefs are revealed to be just that – belief and not born of experience.
Christ was as revolutionary in his time as he is now. I don’t need a virgin birth nor a resurrection, no heaven nor hell to focus my mind on the difference between right or wrong and if in fact the kingdom of God lies within and ‘love your neighbour and do unto others…’ is the foundation of character and ‘know oneself’ is a necessary directive then that’s sufficient for me and whether I go to the worms or to some other plane of existence upon my death is almost irrelevant.
Along the way, the twists and turns of life, my sense of what an almighty God may be - never very clear- became crystalised as that consciousness which permeates the Universe and all of existence and whose motivation is love – not very satisfactory but sufficient for me and a far cry from the ancient gods of Earth. Perhaps they were real entities perhaps not but either way their common characteristic was that they needed to be appeased … or else!
The vile behaviour of Israel can’t be understood without examination of their claim that the territory that they occupy is given to them by God.
The Universe uses synchronicity to get my attention and so I’ve been reading about the introduction of Christianity to Britain, hundreds of years before Augustine arrived with his Papal doctrines and met with opposition by the long established British church.
I quote from Wilson and Blackett and have checked their references to biblical verses. They’re correct. The land that Israel claims was given to them by ‘God’ was not an empty land devoid of people.
“The destruction of Canaan”
“When Moses told the Hebrews that God had decided to give them the lands of Canaan to be their own, he also ordered them to carry out a complete genocide of total inhumanity. The instructions were that every city and village was to be captured and every human being: the old, the mature, the young, and the infants, of both sexes, had to be murdered.
Not only this, but also all the animals that belonged to these massacred people were also to be destroyed and all their property had to be burned. This was the holocaust in Canaan and no trace whatsoever of the previous rightful owners of these lands was to remain.
( Numbers 33: 50-56, Deuteronomy 20: 10-20, 25: 17-19, Joshua 24: 8-13.)
As recorded in the Christian Bible, some of the Hebrew tribes failed to carry out these evil instructions and they spared the lives of many of these condemned communities.
This is plainly recorded and they then used these conquered people whose lives were spared as second or third class persons and as non citizen slaves. These almost merciful actions were subsequently heavily criticised and condemned by the brutal priests of the god Yahweh.
If Yahweh is real and if this ‘god’ ordered his followers to carry out these disgusting massacres then one has to question why anyone would worship Yahweh-Jehovah. “
Quite so and no difference between these ancient gods and the equally ancient Yahweh-Jehovah.
In light of this then the inhumane actions of Israel today are understood for what they are – a continuation from ancient times and nothing to do with THE divine entity.
As for ‘ancient times’ – they’re not. A few thousand years is not ancient and in light of the tens of thousands of years of Aboriginal occupation of the land in which I’ve been a guest they’re minimal.
I’m not a materialist – a spiritual being having a human experience is my understanding.