***ORIGINALLY POSTED 20APR08***
Author's note - This is probably one of my favorite posts, ever.
As I write this, my mind is swirling with concepts and feelings that I have had for longer than I can remember, but never been able to cogitate into a detectable pattern and put together as they are meant to be. Now, upon completion of His Dark Materials they are finally going on the path they were meant to. A quick side note: As I started these books I wondered why it took finding out about the movie to spark an interest. I had never seen nor heard of these books when they came out and I felt that there was something wrong with that. But having completed them today, I realize that had I come across them any earlier, I may not have seen what I needed to see. Back to the dissertation.
As I was growing up, I became intimately familiar with the story of Adam and Eve, as I grew up with a Christian mother whose life was The Church and it's teachings. She has since realized the error of her ways and come to a greater understanding, for which I think several of us are grateful. But this isn't about her; it's about Adam, Eve and what Christians refer to as "The Fall". For those of you largely unfamiliar with the story, I will attempt to tell it quickly to give a basis for my musings. Now keep in mind that this is biblical, not factual. In the beginning God created the world. He created all the animals and then he created Adam. (Now here there is some debate because some scholars believed God created Adam and Lilith --Adam's first wife-- at the same time.) However, the majority of people believe that God created Adam and then when he saw Adam was lonely, he created Eve from Adam as a companion. (A point I have trouble understanding is that if God created Adam in his own image, and God wasn't in need of a mate or companion, why did he create Eve? But I digress.) God told Adam and Eve that they could do pretty much anything they wanted except eat from this tree that grew in the Garden, the Tree of Knowledge (aka Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil). There was another tree, the Tree of Life, that gave them their gift of immortality, but this one doesn't seem to be as important to the story (although later in Christian development, it became more important than the ToK, but that isn't where I am focusing).
Fast forward a bit: Adam and Eve had lived in the Garden of Eden since the Creation (do you like my liberal use of Capital Letters?). They were naked and felt no shame. They had everything they needed, wanted for nothing. One day Eve was out walking in her nudity and stumbled across a Serpent. He convinces her to eat of the fruit of the ToK and she does. She then takes and gives this fruit to Adam, and Adam --knowing full well what it is and that it's forbidden-- eats of it as well. Supposedly they then become aware of their nakedness and clothed themselves. Later when God was walking through the Garden, he sees their clothes and knows that they have disobeyed him. He then banishes them from the Garden, denying them the fruit of the Tree of Life (thereby denying them their immortality) and forces them to live by their own labor. This "Fall" is the origin of what Christians refer to as "original sin". This is the concept that all humans are born into sin and if they die before accepting Jesus as their personal Lord and Saviour, they will go to hell. (Want to have an interesting and lively debate? Ask someone that believes this concept what happens to a baby if they die at birth and then question their logic.)
Now begin my musings. As a kid I had some questions with this story that seemed to get me into trouble. The first one was, if Adam and Eve weren't supposed to eat the fruit of the ToK, why was it there where they could get to it? The answer to this, I was told, is so that they could have free will. My question from this was, if they were supposed to have free will why were they told not to eat from the Tree in the first place? Because God told them not to and they obeyed God. If they obeyed God, what made them disobey him? The devil. Why did the devil want Adam and Eve to disobey God? Because he was jealous of them. Yeah, this raised a whole lot more questions, but we wont get into those here.
Now I was about 5 or 6 when I learned this and at the same time I was learning that God was all knowing, all powerful, and able to be everywhere at once (omniscient, omnipotent and omnipresent, respectively). This confused me when I compared it to the story of the Garden of Eden. If God was all knowing, didn't he know that they were going to disobey him? If he knew they were going to do it anyways, why tell them not to do it? If he was omnipresent then how did he go walking in the Garden? If he was omniscient, why didn't he know they ate the fruit the second they did it? Instead he learned of it when he saw their clothes. How did the devil even get INTO the Garden if there were angels guarding the place? Things weren't adding up for me, but no one was willing to answer these questions. Indeed, when I asked them, I was told in no uncertain terms that children were to be seen and not heard.
These are not all the questions I have had about the stories I was told from the Bible, but they are the earliest I remember having. A few years ago I turned my back inexorably on the Christian faith. It had been coming for a long time, but I finally made the decision and did it. No, I didn't make any pacts with the devil (mainly because the devil seems to be a completely Christian concept and it seemed silly to me to make a pact with something or someone created by the very stupidity I was trying to escape), nor did I sacrifice any small children or animals. I simply made the decision that I was not going to let fear be the deciding factor in my faith anymore. Fear of screwing up, fear of hell and fear of God. These are the things that Christians teach. Sure they give lip service to loving God, but what they spend far more time talking on is about Fearing him. The Fear of God. That is a popular sermon topic, let me tell you. They also talked about him being my Heavenly Father. Well this helped me to understand the Fear of God because I had Fear of my earthly father as well. Fear that he would find fault with me or the things I did, fear that I would be punished for doing wrong, fear of failure. These were things that I was taught at home and at church, so I thought that was all there was. When I broke those ties to Christianity, I realized that fear was something created to control us. I realize as a parent and as an adult observing other people that fear is a tool that we use far too often. If you fear your boss, you won't screw up, you'll do your job. If your kids fear you they will supposedly listen to you more. If you fear the police or prison, you will be less likely to commit crimes. We live in a society based on this concept of Fear. Read Michael Crichton's novel "State of Fear" for a fantastic example of what this fear can do for an environmental movement. (Global warming, anyone?)
I discovered today what the opposite of fear is. Love. Wait isn't hate the opposite of love? Well let me ask this: what creates hate? Fear. Think about it. It's been proven time and time again that the root of every hate crime is fear. Fear of homosexuality, fear of oppression, fear of repression, fear of a culture or an ideal. Why did the Catholics burn witches in the Inquisition? Fear of the damnation of their souls and fear of what the witches "could make them do" and what the witches knew about them as told to them by the devil himself.
So lets go back to the story of Adam and Eve. Before they ate of the Tree of Knowledge, they were naked. They had no children. The Bible is very specific that they had their children AFTER leaving the Garden of Eden. So it isn't a leap of faith (no pun intended) to see that there was probably no sex either, seeing as how the pill wouldn't come around for another few thousand years. And what is sex but the greatest expression of love between two people. Sure sex can be perverted or used for purely physical satisfaction, but anyone who has ever been in love can tell you that the sex with someone you are truly, deeply in love with is FAR more satisfying and pleasurable than any number of meaningless sexual liaisons. So looking at it from this perspective, lets look again at the eating of the fruit. Eve ate the fruit of the ToK and became aware of Good and Evil, and I believe at the same moment became aware of something else as well. Love. Overcome with this love she took the fruit and offered it to her companion, who then ate of it and became aware of the same sensation. Supposedly they then became aware of their nudity and became ashamed. Why would they have been ashamed simply after learning of Good and Evil? Nudity is not evil. Nor is it good. It is neutral. It is only how we PERCEIVE the nudity that makes it what it is. For example, look at Africans. Their women go topless. There is nothing wrong with that. It is only in Christian-centered countries like America --where 85% of the population claim some faith in the Christian God-- that there is something wrong with a woman's breasts and that they need to be covered. And they take this to ridiculous extremes. Only in the last couple of years has it no longer been a sex crime to breast-feed in public. Before that, if a woman was reported for breast-feeding in certain states, she would actually have to register as a sex offender! All for feeding her baby in public where someone might ::Gasp:: see a nipple! Interestingly enough in non-christian-centric countries, sex and nudity are far less restricted, is this because they are Evil? Or is it that the concept of nudity being shameful is purely Abrahamic? (For those of you unfamiliar with the term, I am referring to Christians, Jews, and Muslims) In those cultures women must be covered in public at all times, even to the extreme in the case of Muslims. Why? If God and the christian religion truly is not the creation of Man why isn't all mankind in the same understanding of sex and nudity? That it is shameful.
Ok back to the story. So they supposedly became shameful and had to clothe themselves. I believe that they discovered something else. Something that the Christian church cannot come to terms with. Sexual love. The Unification church is of the mind that the ToK symbolizes Eve and that the ToL symbolizes perfected Adam. The "fruit" of the tree is Eve's love. Her offering of that love to Adam is implying a sexual relationship before they had the permission of God. Thus the "fall". Although this is a physical fall instead of a spiritual fall. The temptation of Eve by Lucifer is the spiritual fall. Although the Unificationists go so far as to say Eve had a sexual relationship with Lucifer first.
Now the question is, why did God not want them to have this awareness? I mean, WHY did he not want them to eat of the ToK? Was he just being a parent and forbidding something just to test them? Or was there a real reason for it? What doesn't make sense to me, again, is if he is omniscient, why the whole ruse in the first place? He knew that Adam and Eve were going to fall, so why the games? Setting the omniscience aside for a moment since that makes even less sense, why then does he not want them to have this knowledge? Is it because he, himself, is incapable of love? All love is based from sexual love. Love for our children comes from the sexual union that created them. Love for our families again came into being because of that sexual act. So isn't it possible that sex itself is the foundation of our love? They say you can have no love without sex, but you can have sex without love. Is that really true? Can you? I am starting to doubt that. Sure, maybe on the surface you can, but truly, the reason for the sex is a love of SOMETHING. The love of orgasm, of ecstacy, maybe not love for the person you are having sex with, but love nevertheless. Since God has no one else, is he even CAPABLE of love? The bible gives lip service to this, but nothing really definitive in any of his actions. If anything he seems like a pretentious child king. He kicks Adam and Eve out of the Garden of Eden even though --since he's omniscient-- he KNEW they were gonna do it. He turns his back on pretty much all of his children. He tells Isaac that he has to sacrifice his own SON to him, and does he stop Isaac? Nope. He has an angel do it for him. Supposedly he loved the world so much that he gave his only begotten son to save us all, but if he hadn't been a jerk in the first place he wouldn't have HAD to send his son. And what the hell is up with the begotten crap? I mean he didn't even impregnate Mary himself. He sent the holy spirit and she was suddenly "with child". At least Zeus had the balls to do it himself. Repeatedly.
So is this incapability for love what causes the church elders to label what Adam and Eve felt as shame? Since God didn't write the bible himself, and he just dictated it to somebody, how did that go?
"So, wait, they started having sex so you threw them out? Why the hell did you do that?"
"Just write it down"
Now lets look at what this shame --oh, and by the way, shame is the FEAR of being viewed as less in the eyes of someone you respect or care about-- has done to us. Let's start with the Catholic church. Because of Eve's fall, the female form is seen as shameful and sinful. Hell, even the CONCEPT of "original sin" is because of Eve. Because of this the church sees women as evil. Priests are not allowed to wed. They are not allowed to know love in it's physical manifestation. Because of this we have scandals that "rock the foundation of the Church" when priests try to find that love where it is closest to them, the altar boys. (Amazingly enough these same priests are the ones that vocally detest and denounce homosexuality stronger than almost anyone else, hypocrisy knows no bounds in the Church) Anyone who does magick knows that when you are done with a working you have to release that power. The best and most satisfying way is with sex. Again this goes back to love. And priests work magick every time they hold mass, whether that is how they want to refer to it or not, that is what it is. They are calling the power of their chosen deity to manifest itself in a form they choose through their commandment (communion through transubstantiation). That's magick, folks. Every magickian on the planet aims to reach closeness with their form of deity through their own power or commandment. Aleister Crowley, arguably one of the greatest magickians of all time, calls that Greater Magick. Another way he describes that is "pursuit of the beloved". There's that love word again. Crowley also teaches "Love is the Law, Love under Will".
Love is the Law. That is a concept I have been struggling with for quite some time. As many of you know, I have a problem with loving my fellow humans. I really don't like them. Frankly they tend to disgust me. Other than the few I choose to share my life with, I can't stand to be around them. Why is that? As I finished His Dark Materials, I was challenged to confront that. I always disdained the New Agers when they went on touting Love and Tolerance for All Mankind. "Fuck tolerance" I have said many times in the past. I always thought that love was one of those things reserved for my wife, kids and family. Because of the truly hypocritical nature of Christianity, I thought love for everyone else meant I would be doing the same thing they are. Namely giving lip service to a concept that they want you to believe they practice. But I came to the realization long ago that love is NOT the name of their game. No matter how hard they want you to believe it, it's not what their religion is based on. Like I covered before, their religion is based on Fear. And you cannot have both Fear and Love be the focus of your thoughts. They are mutually exclusive. If you think I am wrong, prove it. In my experience people whose badge and banner is Christianity are truly miserable people inside. Why is that? As I go through life, I have found that the people who truly seem to be happy and in love with life have nothing to do with religion what-so-ever. Sure I see people who on the outside seem to be loving with their Christianity, but when you truly get to know them, you discover how spiteful they are of everyone but their "God". In my hatred of Christianity and God, I have really been doing what they wanted me to do all along. I have alienated myself from others. Because let's face it, those are the true teachings of Abrahamic religions: God above all else, including self and others. I have simply replaced that concept of God with another, but I am still doing the same thing.
Does this mean that I will all of a sudden be a different person? No, unlike Saul in the biblical story, I have not had a hallucination that alters my complete frame of reality. I have, however, had my eyes opened to a new concept. One that I hope can begin to change my life in a more positive way. Love is the Law. Love for everyone. Does this mean I have to LIKE everyone? Absolutely not. But love accepts the humanity, not necessarily the actions of the human. Our lives also need to be filled with the love of things around us. The trees, the birds, the earth, our families, our friends. We cannot focus on trying to fix everything wrong with everyone else, we simply need to accept and love what we can. I think that is the point of this. Where Christians claim to love everyone but are truly only motivated by fear of their God, humans need to actually LOVE.
