This is not my last post, and far from it I expect, though “last” times are on my mind. Part of that is the challenge of endings and there have been quite a few in my latest absence from this blog. The sad ones are losses of friendship and kinship (R.I.P John Kaminski, Daryl B. Smith, my dad) and others that are like shearings, sheddings, good riddances and renewals. Another chapter begins. So let’s pick a bone over basics and move on.
Subject matter: the Four-Letter God, a.k.a. Tetragrammaton, #26, you know, from the Old Testament. I’m calling ‘him’ Yahu in accord with my current comprehension of the water-jug entity recovered in Timna (of the Arabah desert) being the oldest known artifact (c.1300-1200 BCE) with The Name, found east of Egypt. If I use or cite any other it’s for written discussion only. We speak our truth in this metaphysical existence and that’s another lesson I’m learning from contemporary Law theory too. Freemasons and Illuminists seem to know it well in their constructions of ‘see-and-say’ props and psychopomps. Invoke your heart’s desire only, friends, “from your mouth to God’s ear” is a profound saying that we share.
Okay, I once wrote in here somewhere that I wouldn’t post about theology. I changed my mind. Covid really turned the bird, even more than the accumulated stressors since Nine Eleven. How were we going to interface?? The revolution will not be digitized, no matter how much virtuality we have. At last, I thought, seriously fake stuff was causing real results everywhere.
And here’s the lesson about the (fake stuff) O.T. “God”, from Bible literalist Israel Anderson: “Yahweh the Physical God,” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X3xCZVAxtmo , with 23 minutes of examples from the Torah including Deuteronomy 23: 12-14 where God instructs the encampment of Israelites in the Arabah wilderness to bury their feces. Quoting the RSV, “You shall have a place outside the camp…and…have a stick…and when you sit down outside, you shall dig a hole with it, and turn back and cover up your excrement Because the Lord your God walks in the midst of your camp,” making a point, says Anderson, that “God doesn’t want to step in your crap, man!” when he visits “face-to-face.” Citing by contrast the New Testament Gospel of John 1:17 that ”No one has ever seen God,” Anderson adds that “Yahweh is not the God of Jesus” if you didn’t already know from study. Jesus’s mission, today as ever, is to redeem you from YHWH-Jehovah and remove Death from Life. Bear the lesson a few minutes more where this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kqwn3NuEwz4 turns to a reading of YHWH and Satan (the Adversary) being one and the same, interchangeably. Words matter.
In Law and contracts, the right words can help you “walk on water” and “resurrect the dead” or rather, rise above the legalistic jurisdictions of maritime and corporate rule by restoring your soul to your corpse (strawman) while you still have one. Confused? It’s okay, we’ll talk it out later—I finished my business on this piece after “Words matter.” It’s good to be back. Sea you next post.
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Watch these absolutely essential presentations by Frank O’Collins on Western Roman Law (four segments totaling approx. 1 hour) https://www.youtube.com/@presentclear and the Meaning of Words https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MIbP__nmiKQ
For a further exposition on Yahweh, I transcribed and edited a twelve minute segment from an interview with Joseph Farrell, posted from Red Ice Radio in 2012, describing his then new book Yahweh the Two-Faced God:
[from minute 28] “This little book…grew out of conversations [with co-author Scott DeHart] that we’d had for nearly twenty years—rather disturbing things and not the least of which is the character of Yahweh in the Old Testament… And the bottom line is this: you have in the character of Yahweh, by any objective moral evaluation, a psychopathic, genocidal, murderous, manipulative, emotionally abusive character claiming…to be God… The early church fathers [were] grappling with this whole problem…[and] no amount of theological juggle-ry will change the fact that you’re dealing with a real moral ambiguity… [A] second point…is that once you accept this moral schizophrenia then [you’re looking at] the cultural effects of subscribing to one of the three… Yahwist traditions… meaning Judaism, Christianity and Islam. The cultural effect of [any one of] this religion in ancient times was that it introduced a schism in the social space…[by] defining itself constantly as being in opposition to something that pre-existed it…whether it be Egypt[ian], …paganism,… [or]idolatry, it’s always got to have something in which to be in opposition.
“And there’s a third [point of] consequence when you enshrine a text as the basis of knowing God. And this is in complete opposition, it’s completely different, than the types of…philosophical systems that preceded it, where, it’s not a text…but an understanding of nature itself… This [written text] is the basis for the biblical proscriptions against…worshipping creatures…[and nature] that it’s defining itself in opposition to.
“And the final point that we have…is that Yahwism is a revolution… It’s a conceptual revolution and it’s a moral, or as we would see it, an immoral revolution. And like all revolutions it has a founding moment in violence… And so many times in history since then [we have] this pattern repeated [i.e. French Revolution, Bolshevik Revolution, etc]… All these [events] follow some founding act of violence…and in this respect Yahwism is no different… so it fills the bills of revolutionary violent movements if you strip off all of the religious connotations of it. So, in other words… it’s a grab for Power. Nothing more than that.
“And from [there, in the book] we go into explorations of American civil religion and I don’t even want to call that Christianity… We go into the relationship between this absurd doctrine that you see with evangelicals—the Rapture…and tie it to the modern nation-state of Israel and why [it is tied-in]…
[minute 36] “What happens is… you enshrine a text and the text literally becomes your God. You enshrine, in other words, a system and [with it] a system of interpretation and therefore you elevate to positions of authority a clerical elite that does the interpreting. That’s the first thing [the text/system] does. The second thing it does is that it introduces into the psychology of anybody following the ‘religion’, and doing so with good consciousness [conscientiousness?] to live out the tenets of the faith,…it introduces [the idea] that any other human being… is looked at in purely mechanistic terms—and what we mean by that is… viewed as either a convert to the system or as a potential enemy. So…the net social effect of these types of [text-based] revelation religions is that it introduces schism and…division in the social space. [Henrik of Red Ice: “you’re either with us or against us”],[exactly] …the effect is to keep humanity divided…[and] it has huge political and geopolitical implications… It enshrines an authoritative oligarchical elite that does the interpreting of the text. In the American version of this, you have this hideous pre-Tribulation Rapture doctrine that, for one thing, people have to understand is not the doctrine of any, ANY, sort of historically-connected Christianity… The bottom line [in historical Christian doctrine] is, if you understand the doctrine of Christ, the incarnation within standard Christian dogmatics, it is meant to be a Once and For All Final Sacrifice that abolishes for all time, and in all places, any return to an Old Testament system of…sacrifice… [The] teaching [of] the Rapture doctrine…is a denial of Christ… So [we] have a major departure in American civil religion with this Rapture doctrine…[that] serves no other purpose theologically than to enthrone the Jewish people…as a specially selected chosen group…[or] otherwise we incur the wrath of Yahweh!… It’s just plain nutty!”
Listen here https://archive.org/details/youtube-ObA0_usuMhM
Jennifer Lake's Blog 