the gods must be angry

The Preamble: So I've been reading a book called "Pagan Christianity" by Frank Viola and George Barna and I have to recommend it to anyone searching for a very authentic and original examination of the Christian church. Reading the book and examining the evidence provided has also rekindled my own thoughts about the pagan nature of what most people call "Christianity". (*Disclaimer: None of the information I address in this post has anything to do with what is discussed in the previously mentioned book and I do not represent the authors or their viewpoints.*) Some of the more difficult questions I've had to work through revolve around the roots of morality as a cultural bonding agent and its preoccupation with the ancient pagan fertility gods.

The Case: Let me start by saying that I did not come to any of these questions or conclusions lightly. The sensibilities put in me from my childhood were just as offended in my initial discovery of what I plan to share with all of you as yours are certain to be. What can be certain, however, is that when you start to examine the stability of your foundations and when you begin to perceive that the foundations and structure you've inherited are inherently flawed it can be a frightening experience. I want to approach this topic as sensitively and gingerly as possible without mincing words or watering down my case. I encourage you to continue to respond in the form of comments (for dialogue and discussion), emails, and phone calls because this topic is (in my opinion) too important to walk away from without engaging.

All of that being said, let me dive right into it. There are certain facts about how ancient paganism has infiltrated the modern "Christian" community that are readily obvious to even the most casual question-asker. Some of the easiest examples to digest are found in Christian sacred holidays like Christmas and Easter.

In regards to Christmas, celebrating the birth of Christ on December 25 is a holdover from the old Roman pagan holiday dedicated to Sol Invictus ("the Invincible Sun" god). There is no solid archaeological, Biblical, or empirical evidence to suggest that Jesus was born on December 25 (or even in the winter). One of the main reasons that this has never been challenged by church leaders or theologians is that there is very little evidence to suggest what time of year Jesus was born at all, so no alternative date has ever been offered. Generally for most Christians the date makes little difference because there's no harm and no foul in the current tradition. Let me be clear: I'm not anti-Christmas or trying to argue against the holiday. I'm simply trying to cast some light onto how our traditions started and allow you, the reader, to come to some sound conclusions on what it means for you. The question that should come to mind, however, is this: if Christmas is in the top two most sacred holidays for Christians, why would the Gospel writers not give us a relative timetable for his birth? (All we're given is clues as to the year it happened.) The answer is in the history. The original Christians (including the Apostles and the Apostlic church fathers) didn't celebrate Christmas. There is no teaching in the New Testament or by the Apostlic church leaders of the first 300 years of Christianity suggesting they ever celebrated Christmas. In fact, the only truly Christian holiday they celebrated was the Resurrection (what we now call "Easter"). Most of the holidays the first Christians celebrated were the Jewish religious holidays like Passover. And that, of course, brings us to Easter.

Easter, as we've come to know it, was not celebrated by the first Christians either. The early church celebrated the Resurrection every single day. They held meetings every day (very different from our "church") to discuss the Resurrection and celebrate it, pray for one another, tend to each others' needs, and then they celebrated the Resurrection by partaking in communion every day. But even their communion was different from ours. It was not a saltless wafer and grape juice (real wine if you belong to a more liturgical congregation). The entire Christian population in a given city or town gathered together at a central meeting place (usually a large house - where all daily church meetings took place) and ate a large and hearty dinner there including whole loaves of bread and barrels of wine. It was, essentially, like a wedding banquet every day! But when it comes to setting apart one day in early-mid Spring for celebration of the Resurrection... that didn't begin until after 325 AD when the Roman govenment took over as the central power of the "church". It was then that Easter, like Christmas' from Sol Invictus, was taken from the old Roman pagan holiday dedicated to the fertility god. Easter bunnies, eggs, mandatory church attendence... all of this is a holdover from the ancient fertility god. When the Roman Catholic Church was founded by the Roman government in the early fifth century the new Roman "bishops" (which were simply Roman pagan nobles given new positions of great power) decided to merge the very popular pagan holiday with the Resurrection since they both signified "new life" and, thus, Easter was born. Even the mandatory church service was a holdover from the old fertility god. Romans, under the pagan system, were strongly encouraged to visit the temples of the fertility god in order for that god to continue to give to all of Rome's empire agricultural and reproductive fertility. Since, under Christianity, the old fertility god had been replaced by one God and a very powerful symbol of life and fertility in the Resurrected Christ, the old traditions simply made way for new names and new gods.

What's important to remember about this is that the Romans lived in absolute terror of angering the fertility gods. They believed that if they did not continually satisfy the fertility gods, then those gods would cause the land to stop producing food, the rivers and lakes to dry up, and the women to stop having children. Without water, food, and new Roman boys the empire could not maintain its staus and power in the world. When the people of the Roman empire came to believe that there were not many different gods but one all-powerful God, the fear and dread of that one God became even more intense and the already-existing pagan morality became even more strict. The empire could not afford to risk angering this new God: a god - according to the Jewish scriptures - that was able to cause droughts and floods, was able to open and close the wombs of women, and was able to turn farmable lands into fields of blood. This ancient pagan devotion infiltrated the Roman "Christian" church from the very beginning and has not left since.

It is this pagan sense of morality that I intend to dive deeper into. By now you may be asking yourself, "Why does he keep saying 'pagan' and 'morality' as if they're linked?" That would be a truly excellent question to ask. One of the points I intend to show is that morality is not a creation of New Testament Christianity but, rather, pre-Christian paganism. Furthermore, this morality hasn't fundamentally changed since the first pagan society was formed and the very same pagan morality that existed in ancient Sumeria still exists today: it exists in our modern world as the foundation of western civilization, even as the backbone of the American culture and the skeleton of our modern - yet incredibly pagan - "Christianity".

It may surprise many of you to find out that morality as we know and practice is not Biblical in origin (neither Old nor New Testament... more on this in a little bit). For as long as humans have been living together in towns and cities, and as long as governments have existed, and as long as the old pagan gods have been worshipped by tribes and nations - morality has existed. The very first comprehensive morality code was created by the Sumerian/Babylonian civilization under a ruler named Hammurabi (1795-1750 BC), at least 300-500 years before the Exodus of the Jews from Egypt and the creation of the Ten Commandments. Depending on the dates of Abraham's departure from Ur (which was under the rule of what became Hammurabi's kingdom), Abraham and Hammurabi could have been contemporaries and Abraham could have taken the existing Babylonian morality code with him as he travelled to Egypt and Palestine. It is also just as likely that the Israelite culture, in keeping with the tradition of Abraham, was influenced by the existing morality code of Hammurabi when they produced (at the instruction of God, according to the texts) the Ten Commandments.

Now whether the Jewish Law was borrowed from another culture or whether it was hand-written by God himself is not really the question. It is an interesting question to get into, but that's not the point I'm trying to make. What I'm trying to point out is that what we consider "Biblical morality" actually existed in a culture that was, in no way, devoted to the God of the Bible. Hammurabi's morality code (which rivals the detailed laws in Leviticus) was developed in service to Babylonian pagan gods. And it isn't just Babylon, either. Egypt, Assyria, Neo-Babylon, Persia, Greece, and Rome all shared the same morality code. Surprisingly enough, four of the ten commandments are found in every single morality code in history: do not steal, do not kill, do not lie, do not commit adultery and two others were present in all pagan cultures: do not covet your neighbors possessions, and honor your parents.

All of that simply goes to show that the only thing that was unique about the standard morality code of the ancient Jews is that it was done in devotion to one God instead of many gods. But, more importantly, the ancient Jews shared the same rules, laws, customs, and taboos as their pagan neighbors when it came to issues regarding the fertility gods. Some of the most oft-repeated miracles in the Old Testament revolve around Yahveh (God) performing miracles of fertility: making barren women have children, making the crops grow, making the rain fall on drought-ridden lands... producing prosperity and ensuring the survival of the Israelite people through history. These were the very same miracles that the pagans asked of their gods and the pagans had special altars, special sacrifices, and special rituals to help get the favor of the gods just as the Jews did with Yahveh.

So, you may be asking, am I saying that the Jews were really pagans or that the Old Testament of the Bible is a copycat of the pagans? No, I'm not saying that. It should be noted that while Abraham followed the instruction of Yahveh, he still came from a pagan culture and it is never said that he rejected that culture. While the decendents of Abraham dedicated themselves to the One God, they still kept their knowledge of other gods and it was not uncommon for men in pagan cultures to devote themselves to one god over another in the group: the god of war for soldiers and warriors, the god of agriculture for farmers, the god of the sea for sailors, and the fertility god for nearly every woman on Earth whose worth was tied to the production of children. Abraham simply chose a mysterious, powerful and unknown God to dedicate his family to and that family (which would become the Jews and Arabs in later generations) knew nothing of monotheism as a religious practice until the Exodus and Moses.

But what does this have to do with our modern "Christian" morality being pagan in origin? The religious priesthood and authorities of all pagan cultures before Christianity had the same kind or moral system that we do and it was, like many other things, totally preoccupied with the fertility gods and the cultural survival that those gods represented. The Egyptians, Babylonians, Greeks, and Romans all had cultural and moral taboos against homosexuality, for instance. These moral taboos weren't always enforced (as we all know in history) because of the impact of hedonism but we know, in history, that many of the Roman emperors (before Christ and Christianity) outlawed homosexuality and cracked down on notorious locations of gay orgies because they were concerned over the morality of the empire and the impact it may have on the blessing of the gods (most especially the fertility gods).

Adultery and prostitution was also outlawed heavily from time-to-time for fear of angering the gods as a culture, but not because it was a betrayal of the sacred marriage bonds as we percieve it in a modern post-Christian culture. In the ancient world (and even parts of the world today) marriage was not done for love between two people. Marriage was a contract between families to hand over the ownership of women to men so that the man could use the woman to produce children. Women, in marriage, were not objects of love and beauty but objects of breeding. I apologize for offending any sensibilities when I say this, but it is from this built-in tradition of breeding that men - even today - continue to obsess over the hips and busts of women! And in this light our cultural and moral opposition to adultery does not come from a betrayal of love but a violation of property. It would be as if one cab driver took another cab driver's car to use for his own pleasure. The owner of the cab probably has little sentimental attachment to the car when you compare it to depriving the owner of his ability to use that car to provide for his family.

So, I'm sure you're asking, what's the point of all of this? What am I trying to say? Let me break it down as much as I can and get straight to the point.

America has a very strong moral backbone. It is built into nearly every institution we have and it is entirely inseparable from the culture and the society at large. Since the creation of the Roman Catholic Church in 325 AD (and nearly every single denomination that has followed since the Reformation in the 1500's) Christianity has become synonymous with morality. Christianity has adopted many things over the last 1700 years which Jesus, the Disciples, and the Apostlic church leaders never intended it to pick up and a systematic "morality", that ultimately seeks to gain the favor of God (or, more accurately, the gods), was one of those things. We've made hot-button issues out of adultery, abortion, and homosexuality because they offend our cultural morality and then call it Christian. But that morality was created, originally, by pagan societies, adapted for a single God by the Jews (with the best of intentions, I'm certain), abandoned by the New Testament and adopted again by pagans in Christian clothing after the early church fathers and the Twelve Apostles were long dead. The ethic of the New Testament is not one of morality but one of the Divine Character: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self control (Galatians 5:22). Christians in the New Testament are instructed on how to live as Christ did, conforming themselves to His example - going to the "moral outcasts" and bringing them into a redemption that morality and "the law" could never give.

It is the time for all New Testament disciples of Jesus to see the moral code we've adopted for what it is: a pagan manifestation intended to curry favor with the gods. We can see it when Jerry Fallwell blamed 9/11 on abortion. We can see it when Pat Robertson says that Katrina happened because of homosexuality. We can see it when James Dobson warns against calamity and disaster because of adultery and the failure of the family unit. These men do not represent the Jesus of the New Testament but the old gods of paganism when they claim such things. We put ourselves under the yoke of the old gods when we live in fear of violating morality for even more fear of disaster being brought to our doorstep. God is not a vindictive old man with a thunderbolt waiting to crush you under his feet if you fail to please him. That's not what Jesus tells us about God... and if Jesus is who he said he is, he ought to know!

The mission of the New Testament church is not to fight the "moral decline" of America or western civilization. Leave that to the pagans in Christian clothing. The mission of the New Testament church is to love and support the moral outcast without any agenda or ulterior motive. It is to let their love, not their tired sermonizing, do the preaching to the "lost" and broken. Is abortion heartbreaking? Yes. But the answer isn't morality - the answer is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self control. Is adultery heartbreaking and harmful to families? Yes. But the answer isn't morality - the answer is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self control. Does homosexuality miss the ideal of human monogamy and family creation? Possibly - but I'm not one to say and never will be. But I do know this: morality isn't the answer - the answer is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self control.

"I seriously command that you may not exploit your neighbor or oppress him... You may not curse the deaf or trip the blind... You may not slander or spread rumors and gossip about your neighbor and do not treat the lives of your neighbors as worthless... You may not secretly hate your neighbor... You may not seek revenge or keep a grudge against any of your people. You will love your neighbor as yourself. I am the Lord." - Leviticus 19:13-18

"If all you do is love those that are like you, what good is that? Even the pagans do that much. No, I am telling you this... live generously and graciously towards others in the same way that God is generous and gracious towards you." - Jesus, Matthew 5:47-48

The Question: I realize that this post, somewhat differently from other posts, works from an assumption of Christian spirituality as opposed to a more universal and generic framework that I usually work from. This was done in order to respond to a specific problem I perceive within the framework of Christianity in order to start a dialogue between Christians and non-Christians about the foreign and dangerous nature of the infiltration of pagan morality. There is no question this time... I'm just asking that we begin the dialogue.

Leave the light on.