God and War

God and War

Woman of Wisdom

A writing that has gathered cobwebs that is sadly still relevant today.  This writing was originally in presentation form because I was invited to give a presentation at St. John Fisher College that connected our coven to peace.  When the host saw my presentation, he withdrew his invitation because the truth about religion was part of my presentation.

My presentation started out:  “I am here today to tell you about covens of Goddess women that are materializing all over our nation and why they are necessary for peace.  I have a lot of dots to connect, so I hope you will bear with me as I connect them for you. There is a Goddess saying “To change the world you must first change yourself.”  And regarding peace, the field of psychiatry tells us that for a person to keep making the same mistake over and over again = insanity.  So for people who desire peace to support a religious system that has been the necessary partner of organized war for the last 4,000 that = societal insanity and we cannot afford that kind of insanity any longer because time has almost run out regarding our planet’s resources and livability plus more nations every year are acquiring nuclear weapons.  As covens and circles of women; we are done with vengeful war gods who are full of power, wrath, aggression, and looting.  War gods are very new to the human scene, but they have rapidly brought us to the brink of extinction as a species.

I was fortunate to have had the opportunity to return to college after my children were grown  so that I have a recent education.  Although my major was art history, my passion became anthropology because I came to realize that if we do not understand why people do the things they do, we can never hope to return our world to a place of sanity and peace.

The two most important things I learned in anthropology classes were; number one, organized war did not always exist as part of the human condition; and two, everything that groups of people do, the laws they enact and enforce or refuse to enforce come from the base of their society, their religious system.   The base “has” to change before anything above it can change.

I want to make a very important point and that is that women were for the first 500,000 peaceful years of human existence the leaders of their religion and their societies.   There is an image in The Language of the Goddess  by Professor Marija Gimburtas,  page 237, of a flint knapped figure of a mother goddess that is “possibly as early as 500,000 B. P.” 2

 Humans envisioned the creator of all that is as female.  As in the natural world, man comes from woman, woman does not come from man contrary to the really crazy story the bible writers concocted to support their new system of organized war.

And for those of you who do not already know the difference between matriarchal and patriarchal societies, the best book I can direct you to is Saharasia:  The 4,000 BCE Origins of Child Abuse, Sex Repression, Warfare and Social Violence in the Deserts of the Old World by James DeMeo, Ph. D2

And for the purpose of this wring I will not focus on the Koran, the Confucian Marriage Manual or the Hindu Code of Manu all brutal to women and all coming from god religions.  That does not mean that I am not aware of the various god religions of our world, and that they are equally repressive to the mothers of our world.  I have found a few quotes from the bible that express some of the horrors of patriarchal, warring god societies:

Most of the Old Testament is about the god of the Hebrew tribes demanding that all the people in the 31 nations of the promised land be put to death by the sword and that their property be put into the treasure of the Lord.   This is from Joshua 6:19, “All the silver and gold and the articles of bronze and iron are sacred to the Lord and must go into his treasury.”  Almost complete Genocide of 31 nations of people was recorded in the bible in detail, but what was sacred  to the Lord was the objects of value that were taken from the dead.  I think that is a very telling fact about war and warring gods, and nothing has changed to the present time.  Organized war is still seen as legal, state-sanctioned murder of innocent civilians to take what is of value from them including, of course, their land.  In some instances the young, virgin women were kept to be concubines/sex slaves to the men of the Hebrew tribes.

And regarding collateral damage; even the infants were fair game such as in Psalm 137:8, “Oh daughter of Babylon, doomed to destruction, happy is he who repays you for what you have done to us - he who seizes your infants and dashes them against the rocks.”  And in Nahum 3:10, “Yet she was taken captive and went into exile.  Her infants were dashed to pieces at the head of every street.   And in Isaiah  13:1, An oracle concerning Babylon that Isaiah son of Amoz saw, verse 3, “I have commanded my holy ones; I have summoned my warriors to carry out my wrath.”  And the end of verse 4, “The Lord Almighty is mustering an army for war.”   And verse 15, “Whoever is captured will be thrust through; all who are caught will fall by the sword.  Their infants will be dashed to pieces before their eyes; their houses will be looted and their wives ravished.”  End of quote.  Our modern army of the U.S. a under god; instead of dashing infants and children to pieces, simply drops bombs on their cities and villages which effects the same results.  And to make it sound neater, the dead and mutilated civilians are called “collateral damage.”  Whether men of god are looting gold, silver and bronze or oil, the acts and results are the same.  Whoever gets in the way of their looting is collateral damage.  So the question is why have so many people followed warring gods into our 21st century and even given these institutions tax exempt status?  The answer is because there is no other institution deemed necessary in enabling patriarchy and war to give it a tax-exempt status.  God religions and patriarchal governments have always been either one and the same or in partnership with each other.  The front that god religions try to cover themselves with is that they do a miniscule amount of charity work.  That is of course a very thin veil as the money they give out isn’t even a drop in the bucket to offset their tax-exempt status which allows them to take in huge sums of tax-free monies and property.  And in a matrifocal, humane society, tax money collected from citizens would go for human needs so there would not be homeless people, hungry people, or people with no health care who have to beg to the god institutions for insufficient handouts.

It is also imperative to patriarchy to make young men believe that they must unquestionably  obey father figures.  The point of the Jesus myth is that Jesus‘ father, God, demanded he be crucified, and Jesus meekly complied while his helpless mother looked on.  That is what patriarchy is about and it is necessary for war.  And of course, poor mothers must feel that they have no choice in the matter of sacrificing their children to the wars of the wealthy.  They simply mirror what their husbands are saying that war in noble and poor people need not try to figure out what is really going on ~ that is something so complicated and secretive that they must trust their leaders to do that for them.  For those first 500,000 years of Goddess, not god, organized war did not exist.  The Goddess communities and cities such as Crete had no fortifications, weapons, or armies.  

   

There are women scholars who have put into words much better than I can the origins of war and I would like to bring your attention to The Great Cosmic Mother by Barbara Mor. 3

  In her chapter, “Denial of the Mother; Denial of the People,” starting on page 315 Mor connects god religions with nuclear annihilation and more of us had better learn that lesson and fast.  Mother Earth will go on, but she may be too irradiated for any life but maybe the simplest of life forms to exist.

There are many such women as myself who are serious about going from patrism back to matrism a time when women had their natural place in society and all of its functions especially that of the mother religion.  Since women have fought to return to places of higher learning, we now have women anthropologists, etymologists, theologians, archeologists, as well as many women researchers.   I would especially recommend the recent  scholarly work by Dr. Leonard Shlain, The Alphabet Versus the Goddess 4

 because it is on the national bestseller’s list and is in print.  

And I did write that women had to fight to return to places of higher learning.  Before monotheistic god religions, women were scholars who taught men.  Perhaps the very first author in recorded history was the Sumerian High Priestess Enheduanna daughter of Akkadian King Sargon who was fluent in both the Sumerian and Akkadian languages.5

  And it was the Greek priestess Diotma who was Socrates’ mentor.  Another example of a woman who taught men was Hypatia who was a renowned mathematician and the head of the Neoplatonist School of Philosophy in the city of Alexandria.  There she taught both genders of students until Alexandria’s Christian patriarch ordered her violent death by the hands of Nitrian monks.  Christian clergy murdered priestesses and razed their temples to the ground.  And eventually the Christian reign of terror started by Dominican friars and maintained throughout the 500 years of the Inquisition that spread throughout Europe and even reached the shores of North America at Salem, MA in 1692, traumatized and silenced woman for centuries to the present.  You simply cannot have organized war if women have equal rights and freedom.  And that is why our government leaders have fought against even allowing an equal rights amendment to come up for a vote.  It would mean the beginning of the end of the Pentagon as a government-funded business.  And I want to make a note here that women who follow gods are masculist in their thinking (have become masculized in their thinking) and that is why the opposite of masculist, feminist” has become a derogatory phrase among men who also support the god systems of our world.  

Barbara Mor states on page 316, “Under god there is a literal belief that all of life is created for men to use.  And what patriarchal men see as usable is also seen as contemptible.  We suggest that the atomic blast is man’s final identification with the Sun God, the final annihilation of matter/mother and that this is the implicit goal of all patriarchal religions....”  And, “Because the Christian church relentlessly uses words like ‘pious’ and ‘meek’ to describe the character of Christ, such words have masked the actual historical aggressiveness of the church against human bodies and minds....but throughout the Christian Empire, concepts of humility and meekness  have been systematically used for centuries to condition submissiveness in the masses, while the ruling elites quite arrogantly and aggressively grabbed the earth’s treasures for themselves.”

And the Goddess religions did not just fade away; from page 260 of The Alphabet Versus the Goddess: “As the New Testament grew in stature, women’s rights were curtailed and imagery was eliminated.  In 308, the temple of Isis at Philoe was closed.  In 391, the temple Artemis at Ephesus was sacked.  In 390, a mob under the direction of the patriarch Theophilus attacked and burned the library at Alexandria because it contained Pagan/Goddess classics.   And on  page 529: “Justinian ordered the Academy of Athens disbanded.”  Christianity plunged our civilized world into the dark ages.

The good news is that we are out of the dark ages and covens of women are returning to our Goddess of a thousand names.  She is 500,000 years old and She reigned supreme in the times of peace; the times before Aryan thunder gods attacked the peaceful Goddess settlements of Europe, Asia and North Africa.  All these facts are documented in the list of books that we have prepared.

It is time for all gods to leave now and for the looting to stop whether it is in the form of war profiteering or having our military act as mercenaries, paid for by our taxes, to work for multinational corporation's so-called “interests” in the resources that belong to people in foreign countries.  Looting has always been a dangerous enterprise and armies are needed to “get the job done.”   I would propose that it was Bush’s and Cheney’s goal to establish a military base in Iraq for just that purpose.  And that is why they have already built a fortified embassy that is 42 acres large; while at the same time, the Iraqi people have almost no necessities of life such as water and electricity.  But the Bush gang of looters have their mega embassy and they want permanent military basses to protect the privatizing of the Iraqi oil to American oil companies.  That is blatant looting.  And President Bush is sure that god was on his side in this latest war enterprise, and he often invoked god’s name in his speeches and comments.   And he is correct, his god was on his side.  In any war, both sides have a god who cheers the soldiers on.  

What our coven has chosen to do is to celebrate our various goddesses at the times of our eight sabbats of the year.  Some of the sabbats are very easy to remember because all the images of our holidays come from Goddess times such as our upcoming Eostore which is on the first full moon following the vernal equinox because it is a full moon celebration of the Teutonic lunar Goddess Eostre.  That is where the word Easter comes from and also our word for estrogen.6

  And that is why there is no set date for Easter.  It always follows the first Sunday after the first full moon after vernal equinox.  The Easter rabbit is Eostre’s moon hare.  And also our Easter eggs were originally the great cosmic egg of creation also part of Eostre’s celebration.  All the symbols of all our holidays come from Goddess times.  

Besides celebrating the eight sabbats, on May 5th of every year we remember the women victims of the Inquisition because as that was a crime so huge, so vile, so unspeakable, and so horrific that  no monument has ever been created to remember the, perhaps, 9 million women and children who died the most horrible, untimely deaths by fire at the hands of god’s servants.  And it was not only women, but the women’s children and even their pets who were burned alive with them.  We know from much documentation of those times that girls as young as 13 and women as old as 82 years were burned alive by the men of the Christian god in order to terrorize all women into silence and  wipe out any remaining traces of matriarchy.  And in the  beginning of the Inquisition it was decreed that pregnant women could not be tortured until after having given birth.  But that order was later rescinded.7

 Today’s circles of women are about  remembering.  We are done with being forced to forget our murdered sisters.  We are remembering them.

And on August 23rd of every year when the Nemesea takes place, we look at bible scripture to see what it is really saying.  This tradition was started in 1971 by another group of women.  And because this forum is focused on peace (my original presentation was part of a program that supposedly was concerned with world peace).  I would like to direct you to just one bible quote from Nahum 1:2, “The Lord is a jealous and avenging god; the Lord takes vengeance and is filled with wrath.”  This is not what Goddess is about.  She is about love and nurturing, about respecting all life, and about the natural cycles of life and death.  There are no crazy stories about virgin births or holy ghosts.  And there is no vampire who rises from the dead and after appearing to humans on earth, rises up to a place that has only been created in some human minds.  Instead there is the original trinity of maiden, mother, and crone.  It is a beautiful, peaceful religion that honors women and tells the story of their divinity and their connection with all that is natural on our mother earth.  We are reborn very day in our offspring and our worn out bodies are simply recycled by the crone aspect of the Goddess or mother earth.    

The women in our coven are from this area and also from places as far away as Cape Cod and the state of Washington.  I invited my like-minded women friends to be part of a oven.  I chose the name, but everything else is egalitarian, not hierarchal; we are equal sisters each having our own special talents that we share with each other.  We have a voluntary newsletter for each sabbat, we do not require a tax-free or tax-exempt status because no money changes hands.   

And I just want to mention briefly that I had a Guest Essayist spot in a local newspaper on domestic violence as that is always a big part of any patriarchy society.

War should be the most hated and despised word in our language, but it is glorified.  If the base of our society, god religion, hated war; it could not exist.  But it doesn’t.  In fact most of our males feel an adrenalin rush at the sound of the word.  Until Goddess replaces god, war will always be glorified.  We are continually told that we must mindlessly support our troops who must mindlessly obey their superiors.  No matter which world leader pushes the nuclear button first, his god will be squarely behind him or her.  

Before the first antiwar protests in the spring of ’03, I took it upon myself to write to the heads of  thirty of the largest area churches of different denominations in our area including the city of Rochester, NY.  I asked that the ministers and priests not forget to have their congregations come to the anti-war protests.  And I wrote that I would be wearing an American flag bow; and so, to come up and say “hi” to me.  I only got one reply from a minister who wrote me to never again send him correspondence.  That tells you how really heartless men of god are and how their number one priority is an alliance to the government which grants them their tax-exempt status.  And no one came up to me at the protests except for my peace friends who were not religious people.  The protests should have been huge, they were not in this nation under god.  When the American citizens had a chance to speak out against the slaughter of thousands of innocent women and children in Iraq, the majority chose not to be interested.  It is time for a change and our Goddess covens and circles are about the beginning of real change.    

  

Thank you,