Sunday, November 1, 2009

"Bara"

The three big monotheistic religions - Judaism, Christianity and Islam - share the same god (but with a different name), and of course also their basics. Most notably, they share the story about the creation of the world.

This story, although proven wrong by science, is still important to the people that believe in Genesis. Most people, with the exception of the creationists, won't take the story literally. However, its importance is in the fact that it shows that their respective god is all powerful. After all, creation of the world and the universe is not something anybody can do.

Of course, if this story would prove not to be true, there is a problem. First of all it means that god is not almighty. But perhaps even worse, it also means that there is some other mechanism that has created world. More specifically, it means that there may have been other gods that created everything.

When looking at Genesis, this is exactly what the Dutch professor Ellen van Welde has noticed. The details (in Dutch) can be found in her dissertation about Genesis. She proves that the sentence "bĕrēʾšît bārāʾ ĕlōhîm ʾet haššāmayim wĕʾet hāʾāres" should be translate not with "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth", but rather with "In the beginning when God separated the heavens and the earth...", the main difference being
in the word "Bara", which would not be "to create", but "to separate".

When this interpretation is proven correct, it means indeed that JHWH, God or Allah are not the almighty creators, but rather a winning god amongst others, and becoming the most important one. Interestingly, this seems indeed to be the case when you look into the history of Judaism (read the excellent book A History of God by Karen Armstrong). Genesis for example shows to be the mix of two creation stories, both from another god: one named JHWH (or Jahweh), and another Elohim. But later, in Exodus, it is not only suggested, but also proven that the start of the monotheistic religions is based on multiple gods. The first commandment is "You shall have no other Gods before me". This sounds like there may be, or even are, others, but JHWH wants to be the first one. In the original text of Exodus, it even says further "You shall not bow down to them or worship them; for I the Lord your God am a jealous God, (...)". Now can this be any more clear? (And yes, people will argue that it means you should not worship idols, but just read Armstrong's book for good arguments.)

As you may know, I have nothing against people that use religion for their own spiritual life. But this shows that the foundations may be a little bit (well, a lot) more shaky than thought before. It means that any form of fundamentalism, from any of the big monotheistic religions, not only is dangerous, but even ridiculous.

Labels:

posted by Vince | 8:39 PM | 0 reacties