Description
Who Owns God? falls in six parts, since six is the number of life on earth, with each of the six parts covering a topic of its own.
Part 1 starts out with philosophy and the approach of the scientist to the odd new world he suddenly found himself thrown into, and its addresses the meaning of Life and our raison d’être.
Part 2 deals with the tale of the Egyptian pharaoh Akhenaten who became the first recognised monotheist in the world when he declared that there is only One God, the sun-god Aten; all the other gods were just (lower) aspects of Him. In a sense it is a worldview similar to our modern ideas of One God and a host of Angels in service to him, and the similarity is likely to be more than a coincidence for the Jews were enslaved in Egypt until the end of Akhenaten’s reign, so prior to the Exodus they got a first class view to the One God concept. After Akhenaten’s death the old polytheistic ideas returned and the concept of One God was declared “heresy” in Egypt, wherefore Akhenaten’s name was removed from the historic records of Egypt until he was “rediscovered” in modern times - for which there has been the misconception that it was the Jews who invented the idea of One God (only).
Part 3 deals with Judaism and the transformation of the Habiru “slaves” in Egypt into what we recognise as “Jews”. Habiru were polytheistic Canaanites during their captivity in Egypt, and for centuries they remained that despite nominally being monotheists. The change came with Babylonian captivity some seven hundred years after the Exodus, and we see it evidenced among other things in the disappearance of Yahweh’s wife, “Ashera”, from the religious cults, forming a male-chauvinist monotheism bleeding into Christianity and Islam.
Part 4 deals with Christianity, the new faith born from a Jewish splinter religion revolving around a certain “Jesus”. In Christianity he is more a myth than a fact, though, as the new religion was not “born” until after his death. Moreover, the Jewish religions community that picked up the torch after him was eradicated during the subsequent Jewish rebellion against Rome. Thus, Christianity has its true roots in the splinter congregation surviving outside of the Holy Land, which may go part of the way towards explaining how we ended up with a Christian Church so different from it Jewish roots. The segregation continued for a couple of centuries as the core of the faith was developed as the Living Word spread through a multitude of disparate congregations, but the biggest fingerprint was put on the Church when the faithful had become so numerous that the Roman emperor Constantine the great turned Christianity into the Roman State religion. Through this move the Living Word was transformed into petrified dogma forced upon the people with the brutality that also created the Roman Empire, and over the next centuries the church lost its remaining spiritual connection of Yeshua bar Yosef, the man the Romans crucified under the name of “Jesus”. Now they stole “his” religion too, like Rome always took whatever it liked by whatever means necessary, and married the religion of the Light with imperial darkness to create religions intolerance and concepts of “heresy”
Part 5 deals with Islam and when one understands the Christian “disaster” it is obvious that there was a need for a rebirth of true faith - however dark, intolerant, and destructive Islam may seem to Many Westerners today. This second disaster of True Faith followed a bit of the same track as we know from Christianity - despite that the founders of Islam tried to learn from the mistakes of Christianity and made their best efforts to create a better outcome for their religion. Indeed, if we are loosing ourselves to detail the deroute of Islam may be seen as different from the deroute of Christianity, but, if we apply a more overall perspective, it is the same story of True Faith getting absorbed into earthly power and of the Living Word being replaced with dogmatism and intolerance.
Part 6 works from the fate of our three main monotheistic religions and urges that we backtrack to before things went wrong and find our footing in Judaism before Moses, Christianity before the birth of The Church, and Islam before the creation of the Koran, the cult idol of that later religion.