The assault on the Tower of Babel

Fork in the road of human evolution

5th February 2010

… Of the sayings of the wise men, there was not one, probably, more wise than that of the celebrated Know Thyself, and probably there was not one to which so little regard has been paid. It is to the want of attention to this principle that I attribute most of the absurdities with which the wise and learned, perhaps in all ages, may be reproached. Man has forgotten or been ignorant that his faculties are limited. He has failed to mark the line of demarcation, beyond which his knowledge could not extend. Instead of applying his mind to objects cognizable by his senses, he has attempted subjects above the reach of the human mind, and has lost and bewildered himself in the mazes of metaphysics. He has not known or has not attended to what has been so clearly proved by Locke, that no idea can be received except through the medium of sense. He has endeavoured to form ideas without attending to this principle, and, as might be expected, he has run into the greatest absurdities, the necessary consequence of such imprudence. …
 — Godfrey Higgins, Anacalypsis, 1834, p. 29

So there were these guys — I don’t know how many, just a few of them — came down into town one day and took a look at what the townsfolk had created. The visitors said — get this — we don’t like what these people are building. If we don’t put a stop to this, they’ll wind up becoming even greater than our illustrious selves.

So they came up with what they thought was the perfect solution. “We will confound their speech by putting so many languages in the world that no one will understand what anyone else is saying,” said Yahweh to his cronies, presumably the Elohim, those angelic types we see decorating so many cathedrals.

In the Book of Genesis, the anchor story of all the other lore in the Old Testament of the Christian Bible (and also the Jewish Torah), in 600 BC, Almighty God is presented as a tyrannical cowboy decreeing that all thought processes other than what He Himself must prescribe would be forever off limits to the human race.

The need for such an attitude was readily apparent during ancient times; anyone who wandered outside the village was liable to be cut down by villains. Everybody in the village must all be on the same team. This xenophobia was ubiquitous, even though everybody was basically in the same boat. Extension of trust was prevented by profusion of languages.

The great tragic irony in all this is that we all do speak the same language; only the words are pronounced differently due to environmental and geographic variations. If these guys really did this, it would easily be the greatest crime against humanity of all time. But no “god” did that. Gods are human projections, mass consensual hallucinations.

I’m sorry to dampen your pious theological fervor, but this condescending cowboy is not some Almighty Supreme Being speaking. It is an evil, perverted old man, snuffing out the minds and lives of others with criminal intent to steal people’s possessions and erase people’s lives if they don’t follow this insane tyrant’s holy law. And for better than two thousand years, this law has been followed! Such is human history.

Now, as foreign objects course through our bloodstreams and radioactivity permeates the atmosphere, if we are going to survive this current Tribulation, we must decide how this all was created — how we created this hell on earth — and we have but one body of knowledge to be considered, namely, how we came to believe that what we do is right. Remembering, all the while, that we who are doing the considering are Americans who have cheered, for two centuries, the abuse and mass murder of other nations as long as the reasons for such primitive behavior were gift-wrapped in heart-rending stories of freedom and bravery that concealed the actual financial facts.

The Old Testament is a history of crime, sanctioned by one god to snuff out all the others. The wreckage and hypocrisy and real blood that you see in the world today are the actualized projections of that belief system.

God said we should kill everybody and take over the world. That’s no God. That’s an insane maniac. And that’s why we have insane maniacs running the world. It’s that simple. And also, one other point. Yahweh’s words have the ring of a man trying to kill his own death. And every man since has tried to do the same. We can fix this, simply by understanding that our consciousness is fraught with superstitions and subliminal activations that we cannot now fully comprehend, and these aspects are acting upon us in ways that we do not realize. But we can comprehend them, if we put in a little study.

Something like this has happened to humanity once before, a very long time ago. It was the invention of language, and that first person, very beloved of someone, who was given a name etched in a mountain pass above some innocuous pile of rocks. Because once something has a name, nothing is the same. This is how consciousness has grown, by hyperbolic accretion, first created by spin, then materialized, all the way across time right down to the present moment. Note: everything is created by spin. We seem to have forgotten that.

Knowledge and civilization grew by accretion, one word upon another, until finally, after thousands of years, great empires were built. These empires were built by ideas that were turned into words and WRITTEN, the most momentous expansion of consciousness in human history. Because once something was written, the commands of the gods echoing inside the brains of semiconscious humans that drove humanity all the way to a certain point in time (600 BC), were no longer infallible.

With writing comes questions. All the famous gods we know didn’t like questions. They only issued commands. Why do you suppose that was? And whom do you suppose was uttering them?

But writing does more than that. It creates an interior mindspace where one can quietly review the data of the day, which is a third arbiter of pro and con.

Thus, writing itself guarantees revolution, because since all communication is an expression, no matter how oblique, of the writer’s deepest wish, considering any thought automatically means changing it, revising it, improving it, as your understanding of its meaning deepens with repetition.

So in evolutionary terms, the supposedly sacred utterances of the gods never had a chance to survive forever. Time is a more powerful force than human-created deities.

The most sacred verbal relics of the ancient holy books are half-remembered aphorisms that were passed down verbally through centuries, and finally written down. They are not genuine pronouncements of some “god” who suddenly appears on the scene. But they have maintained their status of holy writ because of their antiquity, and because of the miniscule memory in everyone’s mind of the time before words, and how, despite the lack of them, we retained genetic memory of behavior that predates words.

How can that be? Short answer: it can’t. Consciousness begins with the development of language. This is precisely the slice of our psychological spectrum where resides our insanity that creates the wars and the addictions and the poisons. An injured part of our historical mind.

So many of those sacred pronouncements are merely rote memorization of symbolic stories that we may not understand, except in terms of their psychological intent.

The intent was control. Controlling the life and death of another person guarantees they will treat you as a god, simply because they want to stay alive. This is not freedom. But it is the human condition.

So that makes the most ancient thoughts in the Old Testament, those famous stories that have been passed down through time and accepted as Gospel, mere echoes of the schizophrenic hallucinations bouncing through human brains in the time before language was developed.

And that’s what the great historian Godfrey Higgins meant when he said that we have formed ideas without paying attention to the basic rules of knowledge acquisition: we have accepted magical, hallucinated fiction and made it the basis of our civilization.

Live by the lie, die by the lie. You know, the lie that we don’t die. That’s why we so much enjoy killing others. Didn’t you know?

Every good war has consisted of unspeakable crimes committed against innocent people, then all spun into tales of heroism when really only barbarism was involved.

True freedom has never been accessible because of the lethal embrace of the mindlock of monotheism, which prevents us from seeing the world as it actually is.

[A longer version of this story, featuring Nimrod and other cavemen, will appear at a later date.]

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