EASTER AND THE HOLY EUCHARIST

It is Christian doctrine that Jesus died as a sacrifice for man. The idea is that “Original Sin” was committed by Adam and Eve, and that the stain of that sin was upon every human being born thereafter. Thus, even though subsequent humans did not commit the original sin, they were guilty of it as well as other sins. Christ came to save man from original sin and all other sin, and to provide a means for man to achieve everlasting life in heaven. In order to save man, Christ had to perform a sacrifice. Jesus was God, so he performed a sacrifice to himself. The sacrifice was a human sacrifice of the most bestial and agonizing kind, a painfully slow death by suffocation on a cross. 

One has to wonder why this omnipotent, all-loving, almighty God couldn’t have simply forgiven all men of sin without this orgy of torment? Why did he have to be the scapegoat for all human beings and go through this horrendous nightmare of torture in order to provide salvation? The answer is that the writers of the Bible lived in a benighted and barbaric time when this was thought to be the right way for the gods to behave.

The resurrection of Jesus from the dead has been called the basis for all Christianity. Paul says in 1 Corinthians 15:13-14: “But if there is no resurrection of the dead, then Christ has not been raised; if Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is in vain and your faith is in vain.” The celebration of Jesus’ resurrection from the dead is the most important date on the Catholics’ liturgical calendar. It is also the concoction of Paul and other writers who came long after Jesus died.

Scholars use various methods of textual criticism, including language and style, to determine if text is authentic or was added to the original gospel at a later time. There are many things on which they agree. Scholars agree that Jesus did not predict his own resurrection from the dead or his second coming. The quotations in the Bible in which he makes such a prediction (e.g. Mark 8:31) are considered to be later additions.

Moreover, the accounts of Jesus’ resurrection are so contradictory and improbable that the whole story has to be dismissed as fiction. Matthew says that the day following Jesus crucifixion Mary Magdalene and the other Mary went to the tomb (Matt 28:2), but Mark says that the two Marys and Salome went (Mark 16:1). Luke writes that Mary Magdalene went with Mary the mother of James, Joanna, and other women (Luke 24:10). Matthew says that the stone was removed by an angel at the time the women arrived at Jesus’ tomb (Matt. 28:2), but Mark and Luke say it had already been removed (Mark 16:2-4, Luke 24:1-2). Matthew says that when the women arrived, the angel was outside the tomb (Matt 28:2), but Mark says the angel was inside the tomb (Mark 16:5) and Luke says there were two men inside the tomb (Luke 24:4).

In Matthew the two women rush from the tomb to tell the disciples (Matt 28:8-9), but Mark says that they said nothing to anyone (Mark 16:8). Luke says that they reported the story to the disciples (Luke 24:9-11). John tells a very different story from the others (John 20:1-18). Later post-resurrection stories are also in conflict (compare Matt 28:16-20 with Luke 24:13-53, and John 20:19).

The first Gospel written was the Gospel of Mark. Scholars can tell that the whole story of the resurrection of Jesus in Mark was added to the Gospel by somebody else long after the original version was written. Originally, the Gospel of Mark ended at Chapter 16:8. That is the part where the women find the empty tomb and are told by a “young man” that Jesus has risen. The part of the Gospel after that, in which Jesus appears to various people, was added by later writers who wanted to supply authenticity to the myth of Jesus’ resurrection. As Professor Bart D. Ehrman of the University of North Carolina says: “These verses [Mark 16:9-20] are absent from our two oldest and best manuscripts of Mark’s Gospel, along with other important witnesses; the transition between this passage and the one preceding it is hard to understand….and there are a large number of words and phrases in the passage that are not found elsewhere in Mark.”

If you consider the fact that the Gospels of Mathew and Luke were based on the gospel of Mark, then it becomes clear that the Gospels’ story of Jesus’ resurrection is pure myth that was made-up long after the Gospels were written. The earliest Christian scriptures were the Epistles of Paul, yet Paul does not give any details about Jesus’ resurrection other than referring to it (See Rom. 6:5, 1 Cor. 15:13).

The idea of resurrection by a god did not begin with Jesus. Lots of gods arose from the dead in ancient times. Among them are Mithra, Attis, Dionysus, Osiris, Tammuz, Ishtar, Adonis, Persephone, Semele, Heracles (or Herakles), and Melqart. Some claim Buddah was resurrected from the dead.

Roman Catholics around the world celebrate Easter by partaking of the Holy Eucharist. It is a wafer of unleavened bread and liturgical wine. The wafer is placed in the recipient’s hand or mouth, and the wine is usually sipped out of a common chalice ( a somewhat unsanitary practice). According to Church dogma, the bread and wine are not just symbolic commemoration of the body and blood of Jesus. They are the actual body and blood of Jesus. It is believed that by consuming the body and blood of Jesus you take into your body part of his divine grace.

It seems that for thousands of years nobody has ever stepped back and examined this holy practice. A little thinking about it should, however, make us wonder where it came from and why we do it. Why eat a human body and drink human blood. Isn’t that a little cannibalistic? How did the Catholic Church ever decide to ordain this as the most profound way of worshipping Jesus. Obviously, it is taken from an ancient time when men performed human sacrifice. It is well known that following a human sacrifice, ancient men frequently ate the body and drank the blood of the sacrificial victim. The sacrificial victim was often an enemy defeated in battle. It was believed that by doing so the eater took into himself the courage and strength of the victim. Even in more modern times headhunters would eat the bodies of their victims in the belief that the valor and fighting ability of the victim would come into the victor. Thus, as the practice of human sacrifice and cannibalism decreased, religions continued the practice by substituting bread, wine, and other food for the bodies of sacrificial victims.

The rite of the Last Supper, which the early Christian Church adopted as its Holy Eucharist, clearly was borrowed from the ritual meal practiced by more ancient religions. In The Roman Cult of Mithras, Manfred Clauss says: “The offering of bread and wine is known in virtually all ancient cultures, and the meal as a means of binding the faithful together and uniting them to the deity was a feature common to many religions. It represented one of the oldest means of manifesting unification with the spiritual, and the appropriation of spiritual qualities.” Claus describes how the worshippers of the god Mithra engaged in a ritual meal similar to the Christian Eucharist.

In the synoptic Gospels (Matthew, Mark, and Luke), the Last Supper is a Passover meal. In the Gospel of John, it takes place the day before Passover. It is possible that Jesus asked his followers to eat bread and drink wine in his memory. It is highly unlikely that he horrified his disciples by recommending anything so cannibalistic as having bread and wine represent his body and blood. Such ideas were abhorrent to the Jews. Even the blood of an animal was forbidden at a Jewish meal by biblical law (Leviticus 7:26). Geza Vermes, Professor Emeritus of Jewish Studies at Oxford University, in The Religion of Jesus the Jew, says, “...the imagery of eating a man’s body, and especially drinking his blood...even after allowance is made for metaphorical language, strikes a totally foreign note in a Palestinian Jewish cultural setting...With their profoundly rooted blood taboo, Jesus’ listeners would have been overcome with nausea at hearing such words.” The idea that the eating of bread and wine was a consumption of the body and blood of Jesus is a later Greek development, taken from the Mystery Religions such as the cult of Mithra. The biblical version of the Last Supper was obviously added long after the original gospels were written.

In the Mystery Religions, the cult “agapes” were “love feasts” in which the communicants achieved “mystical identification with the divinity.” The cults of Mithra and Attis had sacramental use of bread and wine as a means of communing with the gods. The early Eucharistic feasts of the Christians came to be called “agapes” by the Greeks. It was the Greeks who substituted bread and wine for the body and blood of sacrificial victims. If one goes back far enough, one can see the history of human sacrifice in Greece and how it affected the liturgy of the modern Church.

NOAH’S ARK AND HUMAN STUPIDITY

           Today, March 28, 2014, Hollywood will release a film called “Noah” starring Russell Crowe. While Christian groups will nit-pick the biblical accuracy of the film, I want to discuss the total absurdity of the biblical story and the stupidity of the people who believe in it. My point was made very well by Bill Maher in a recent television show where he said:

“No one can blame me when I say this is a stupid country when 60 percent of the adults in it think the Noah's Ark story is literally true--which is why I'm already sick of the ads for this floating piece of giraffe crap. You believe a man, Noah, lived to be 900 years old, that's what the Bible said, and when he was 500, he decided to have three kids just like Clint Eastwood. And when he was 600, he and his three 100-year-old sons built a boat unto which, in one day, they loaded over 3 million animals, all of which were apparently indigenous to within five miles of the boat.

"The thing that's really disturbing about Noah isn't that it’s silly, it's that it's immoral. It's about a psychotic mass murderer who gets away with it--and his name is God. Genesis says God was so angry with Himself for screwing up when he made mankind so flawed, that he sent the flood to kill everyone--men, women, children, babies. What kind of tyrant punishes everyone just to get back at the few he's mad at? I mean besides Chris Christie.

"You know conservatives are always going on about how Americans are losing their values and their morality. Well maybe it's because you worship a guy who drowns babies. And then God's genius plan after he kills everyone is to repopulate the world with a new crop of the same ass-holes who pissed him off the first time with predictable results. He kills millions more. If we were a dog and God owned us, the cops would come and take us away. Why are we getting our morals out of this book? Why are people following any of it?"

I can cite many reasons why the Noah story in the Bible is simply a fairy tale, but that should be obvious to ordinarily rational people. Nevertheless, for some reason, many people believe this garbage, so I must point-out several things:

In the first place, there are two flood stories in Genesis.  In one, God tells Noah that he is going to destroy sinful mankind with a flood and that Noah is to take his family and two of every kind of animal on board the Ark (Genesis 6:19).  In the other, God directs Noah to take seven pairs of clean animals, of every type, and one pair of the unclean (Genesis 7:2). The reason that there are two stories is because there were different people who wrote different stories at different times which were later stitched together into what we now call Genesis. It was not written by Moses as is claimed in the Bible.

According to the Bible, the Ark was 300 cubits (about 450 feet) long. Try to imagine fitting all those millions of animals onto the Ark. There are currently 5,488 species of mammals on earth. There would be two (or seven) of every kind of elephant, rhinoceros, hippo, gorilla, ox, bull, cow, horse, pony, lion, tiger, Komodo Dragon, zebra, bear, giraffe, wildabeeste, elk, moose, pandas, buffalo, Llama, panther, pigs, dogs, racoons, etc. Because of the extinction of species in the past few thousand years, there no doubt were thousands more species at the time that Noah was supposed to have lived. However, the Bible says that Noah took two (or seven) of every kind of “animal” on board the ark, so this includes all species in addition to mammals, including amphibians, birds, reptiles, and insects, which in today’s world would account for over 2.4 million animals. It would have been impossible for many of the animals to come from distant parts of the world. How could kangaroos and koalas get from Australia to the Middle East? How did Noah keep lions, tigers, bears, panthers, and hyenas from attacking deer, elk, antelope, sheep and other kinds of natural prey? How did Noah feed all those animals? Many of these animals constituted the primary source of food for other animals. How did he and his family clean-up after the animals?

Some time ago ABC News did a story about some Christian archeologists from Texas who claimed to have found the remnants of Noah’s Ark. They apparently found something that looked to them like the Ark on Mount Suleiman in Iran's Elburz mountain range rather than on Mount Ararat in Turkey, the site identified in Genesis 8:4. Nevertheless, they believed it was the Ark. "I can't imagine what it could be if it is not the Ark," said Arch Bonnema of the Bible Archaeology Search and Exploration Institute--a Christian archeology organization dedicated to looking for biblical artifacts.

We have to wonder at the pathetic spectacle of “scientific” teams of grown people going out and climbing mountains to find the remains of Noah’s Ark. It is a little sad. Serious archeologists, geologists, historians, and theologians know that the story of Noah’s Ark is an ancient myth, a fairy tale, not history. It never happened. Fundamentalist Christians and Jews might argue that the building of the Ark was a miracle and that the whole story must be taken as miraculous. Why then do they go out on safaris trying to find the actual Ark? Surely if it was a miraculous vessel that God created only for that one period of time, it would not still survive today.

Anthropoligists and paleoanthropoligists have used fossils and DNA to trace the history of man. They know that our species originated in Africa hundreds of thousands of years ago. They recognize that man evolved from lower animals over a period of millions of years. There has been no worldwide flood interfering with human history. Moreover, geologists are unable to find any physical evidence of the kind of worldwide flood spoken about in the Bible.

The story of Noah and the Flood did not originate with the writers of the Hebrew Bible. It was borrowed from ancient Mesopotamian myths that precede the writing of the Bible by thousands of years. The Mesopotamian myths were written about different gods and different people.

I agree with Bill Maher that in order to believe in the story of Noah’s Ark one has to be stupid. Not just uninformed, not just religious or reverant, but downright stupid. There is no basis in history, science, or even theology to believe in this silly story. Some people think that Americans are smarter than people in other parts of the world. The fact that so many Americans believe in the Noah’s Ark myth indicates to me that we are really no smarter than most of the other people in the world.

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CHRISTIANS, THE TEA PARTY, AND THE POOR

            The Tea Party movement arose out of anger at the use of taxpayer money to help the poor during the recession. In February 2009, the day after President Obama announced his Making Homes Affordable plan to help people facing mortgage foreclosures, a reporter for CNBC named Rick Santelli went on a rant at the Chicago Mercantile Exchange against the proposal and announced that: “We’re thinking of having a Chicago Tea Party in July. All of you capitalists that want to show up to Lake Michigan, I’m going to start organizing.”

            The Chicago rant went viral and immediately attracted millions of right-wingers who were enraged that the government was going to spend billions of dollars to help poor people, particularly African Americans, whom they deemed to be lazy, shiftless, and undeserving. Said Santelli: “How many of you people want to pay for your neighbor’s mortgage that has an extra bathroom and can’t pay their bills.” There was not a word of sympathy for the families undergoing the agonizing trial of losing their homes, often because they had lost their jobs. While President Obama showed deep empathy for the misery and distress of these people, Tea Partiers all over the country organized and struck out against those suffering terrible hardship from the effects of the great recession.

            Naturally, the mass of adherents to this newly named right-wing movement were people who call themselves “Christians.” Those ultra-conservatives use their religion not only as a comfort and consolation, but also as a weapon to bludgeon those with different theologies and values. Their so-called Christian pastors can drive their congregations into frenzies of hatred merely by attacking abortionists, gays, liberals, Hollywood types, the ACLU, atheists, Moslems and Jews.

            It is the belief of these “Christians” that Almighty God came down to earth in the form of a wandering Jewish preacher named Jesus of Nazareth. They assert that unless you believe that Jesus was the eternal creator of the universe and the “Son” of God, you are doomed to spend eternity in Hell or in the outer darkness.

            Nevertheless, they do not seem to pay any attention to the teachings or example of Jesus. They are wildly antagonistic to the idea of government helping the poor even though helping the poor was the cornerstone of the life of Jesus. Surely Jesus did not mean that although we should all help the poor, government should do no such thing. I doubt that Jesus would have agreed with the anti-poor fury of today’s right-wingers. It is surprising that so many of these Christians can quote the Bible, yet seem indifferent to the message that Jesus left with us.

            One of the finest modern books about Jesus is Thomas Cahill’s Desire Of The Everlasting Hills. In his book, Cahill zeroes-in on the great moral teachings of Jesus, and movingly describes that part of the Gospel of Matthew where Jesus tells of the second coming and tells the story of the King who says, “...for I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, I was naked and you clothed me…I was sick and you visited me ...as you did it to one of the least of these my brethren, you did it to me.” (Matthew 25:35-40). Says Cahill:

It is ironic that some Christians …

have never bothered to heed

these solemn words about the presence of

Christ in every individual who is in need.

Jesus told us only once (at the Last Supper)

that he would be present in the Bread and

Wine, but he tells us repeatedly in the

gospels that he is always present in the

Poor and Afflicted---to whom we should

all bow and kneel.

            It is plain from reading the many passages of the Bible where Jesus spoke about the poor that he did not believe that they were worthless and undeserving leeches on society. He favored the poor. He even counseled some to sell everything they had and give to the poor (Matt. 19.21). He wanted his followers to see him in the faces of the poor and afflicted. How would he have felt to be spit upon and despised by the Tea Party people of today.

WHERE IS GOD

            In recent weeks I have seen many postings by Christian believers who affirm their strong belief in God despite facts which you would expect to have caused them to be disillusioned. The local paper asked people’s opinion about the debate between the “Science Guy,” Bill Nye, and the director of the “Creation Museum,” Ken Ham. Numerous people made it clear that regardless of science, they believe that the Bible is right and the Earth is only six thousand years old.

            In other places I saw the same kind of mindset. To these people, it does not matter what facts you show them, they are compelled to believe in God. For them, without God life is meaningless. They are not bothered by the fact that they have never seen God, never talked to him, never seen a picture of him, never heard of anybody on Earth who ever saw or talked to him. Many of them believe that he came to earth in the form of an ancient wandering preacher named Jesus of Nazareth. They are convinced that he exists. They believe that God does act in our lives, and that we should pray to him. It matters not that such prayers never seem to be answered. They are unaffected by the thousands of terrible things that happen every day. They do not blame God for the tsunamis that kill millions of people or the massive loss of life from diseases, earthquakes, volcanoes, tornadoes, hurricanes, floods, wars, and other disasters. They give God credit for good things that happen, even though there is never any evidence that God is responsible for them, but never blame him for the bad things of life.

            It is interesting to me that people claim to have a warm, close relationship with God, when, in fact, they have never seen or heard or touched him. Despite the fact that God is a nonexistent being, people act as if they are able to get very close and personal with him. It is interesting to me that our brains are able to perform this trick.
            The other day I was watching a documentary about the large scaffold that collapsed at the State Fair in Indiana killing several people and injuring others. One woman, whose child was caught in the wreck, said she was praying. She said: "Prayer is very powerful." I had to ask myself, "Where did she get that?" How could she say prayer is powerful when in real life it seems to have no power, no strength, no effectiveness at all. I doubt that she felt assured that once she prayed everything would be all right. She said other people were praying. She seemed to believe that with more prayers God would be more likely to take notice of the problem and help. Am I not seeing something, or isn't this pathetic?

              In my book, The Case Against God, A Lawyer Looks at the Evidence, I describe the phenomenon of people being able to read a book or go to a movie and be caught-up in the story. If it is well done, the story has us believing that it is actually happening. Our brain plays a trick on us. I believe that that is similar to what happens to us with God. We let our minds suspend disbelief so that we can have some meaning in life and some hope that we will live on after we die. Perhaps the thought that we die to eternal oblivion is just too much for the human mind to accept.

You hear preachers say that “God told me…” That would seem to be a kind of fraud on his congregation. God does not exist, and therefore he could not tell the preacher or anybody else anything. But we do have ideas pop into our heads, and I believe that most preachers honestly believe that some of these ideas are communications from God. We are often surprised by the ideas that pop into our heads. They may be very good ideas, sometimes brilliant, seemingly inspired. To the preacher, even though he did not speak directly with God, the inspiration seems to have been a message directly from God. Thus, without describing what actually happened, he feels truthful when he says “God talked to me last night.”

There are times when we have powerful feelings of warmth and happiness. When people pray they sometimes are able to go into that state which is experienced by people who meditate. It is a form of total relaxation. No doubt they feel that it is a communication with God. Other people believe that they have seen God because they have had dreams in which they experience his presence. People who have received anesthesia for surgical operations sometimes claim that they died and met God. They deny that it was simply the effect of the anesthesia. Similarly, people who use drugs often claim that they have met God. In every such case, it is the effect of the praying, meditation, dreams, anesthesia, or drugs that have caused the feeling of God’s presence. There simply is no God. We do not ever meet or see or hear him. He does not exist.   

Creationism vs. Evolution

      Recently there was a debate on Creationism vs. Evolution between Bill Nye, the "Science Guy" on television, and Ken Ham, the head of the Creation Museum in Kentucky. Many people were critical of Mr. Nye for debating something which they consider to be non-debatable. I agree with them. Creation vs. Evolution is not a proper subject of debate. It is like arguing whether the Earth is round of flat. The issue was settled a long time ago. The only people who believe in Creationism are extremely ignorant adherents of religion and superstition. It makes no sense to debate with such people because they are intellectually incapable of understanding science.

Several years ago I wrote a column for the newspapers about a visit to the Creation Museum by a group of scientists. Here it is:

NESCIENCE IN NORTHERN KENTUCKY

            In order to get from Dayton to the Creation Museum out near the Cincinnati-Northern Kentucky International Airport, one has to drive over bedrock of Ordovician and Silurian rocks that were deposited between about 435 and 445 million years ago. World geography was quite different then. North America straddled the equator and Ohio was located south of the equator. The Ohio River did not exist. From a geological standpoint, the Ohio River is quite young. It was formed on a piecemeal basis beginning between 2.5 and 3 million years ago from north-flowing rivers dammed by the early ice ages.

           According to news reports, in late May, 2009, seventy paleontologists took a break from a conference at the University of Cincinnati and drove over Ordovician bedrock to visit the Creation Museum. I’m sure that they were interested in seeing not only the displays at the museum, but also the living fossils of a species that was thought to have become extinct at the time of the European Enlightenment; the irrational,  superstitious, religious believers for whom modern science means nothing. Contrary to popular belief, long after the time of Galileo and Columbus, this kind of people continued to believe that the earth was flat and was the center of the universe. Today, they insist that the earth is 6000 years old. They believe this despite the fact that everybody knows that even Dick Clark is more than 6000 years old.

One display at the museum shows two prehistoric children playing while dinosaurs, which became extinct 63 million years before the human species developed, cavort nearby. The scientists visiting the museum were astonished. "I'm speechless," said Derek E.G. Briggs, director of the Peabody Museum of Natural History at Yale; "It's rather scary.” Jerry Lipps, professor of geology, paleontology, and evolution at University of California, Berkeley, said: “It's sort of a monument to scientific illiteracy, isn't it?” Lisa Park, a University of Akron professor of paleontology, who is an elder in the Presbyterian Church, called it "bad science and even worse theology -- and the theology is far more offensive to me."

Leaving aside the geological evidence, it does not seem likely that the earth began 6000 years ago. There was already a flourishing civilization in Egypt 6000 years ago. British archaeologists have found 30 sites rich in art chiseled into rocks up to 6,000 years ago in the desert east of the Nile. The rock drawings show cattle, boats, ostriches, giraffes, hippos and the men and women who lived in the area in 4,000 BC, long before the first pharaohs or the first pyramids.

“Lucy” was the name given to an early ancestor of the human species discovered by Donald Johanson and Tom Gray in 1974 at Hadar in Ethiopia.  Its age is about 3.2 million years. Lucy was an adult female of about 25 years and was assigned to the species “Australopithecus Afarensis.” There have been hundreds of discoveries of pre-human fossils going back millions of years.

Fossils of the now extinct species of human called Neanderthals have been found in various places in Europe and the Middle East. The first proto-Neanderthal traits appeared in Europe as early as 600,000–350,000 years ago. Fossils of our ancestors, Cro-Magnon men, date back 40,000 years. Archeologists in Oregon have located an ancient trash dump and latrine which was found to contain human DNA linked directly to modern-day Native Americans with Asian roots. The materials found were radiocarbon dated to 14,300 years ago. It is believed that the ancestors of Native Americans came over the land bridge to Alaska around 20,000 years ago.

The universe has been around for about 13.5 billion years, and the earth is over 4 billion years old. They may not believe it at the Creation Museum, but that, my friends, you can take to the bank.

TODAY'S SOUTHERN BIGOTS AND THE CIVIL WAR

            Now, two days before the celebration of Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthday, the news tells of the outrage in Florida by a group of people who still commemorate the actions of Confederate soldiers. They are violently opposed to the erection of a monument to Union soldiers in a park where Confederate soldiers are honored. This tells us a great deal about the modern South. There are still millions of white people down there who would be happy with the return of Black slavery. They mourn the loss of the old South with its terrible and inhumane treatment of Negro human beings. They are an example of America at its most ignorant, bigoted, stupid, and backward. They will tell you that the Civil War was about States Rights and about economic issues. Well, they are right, it was about one huge economic issue--slavery. 

             The fact that the cause of the Civil War was slavery is clear from the pronouncements of all the leaders of that time. Lincoln made it emphatically clear in his Second Inaugural Address when he said: “One-eighth of the whole population were colored slaves, not distributed generally over the Union, but localized in the southern part of it. These slaves constituted a peculiar and powerful interest. All knew that this interest was somehow the cause of the war.” The arguments made today by right-wing apologists for the Southern cause are spurious at best.

            What is not fully understood is the reason why slavery was so important a ground for conflict between the North and the South. It was not simply racial bigotry that caused the South to so fervently support the institution of slavery. It was money and greed. Slaves were considered property, and a very large percentage of the wealth of southern planters was tied-up in slaves. To the southerners, abolition of slavery meant abolition of much of their fortune. In addition, refusal of the government to allow the expansion of slavery to the western part of the country meant a stark restriction on where and to whom slave holders could sell their slaves. Lincoln said: “To strengthen, perpetuate, and extend this interest was the object for which the insurgents would rend the Union even by war, while the Government claimed no right to do more than to restrict the territorial enlargement of it.”

            The powerful hatred between North and South was generated by the fear in the South that the North planned to take away a very large part of southern treasure. For this, the southerners were willing to fight to the death.

            It is immaterial that many of the common southern soldiers did not own slaves. Like everyone today who wishes to become more affluent, they looked upon slavery as a way to gain riches, and considered the institution of slavery to be a proper capitalist endeavor. They also looked upon Black slaves as animals that, like any other form of property, could and should be bought and sold. In addition, poor ignorant whites who lived lives of quiet desperation were happy to have someone to look down on. Much of that is still true today. 

            Even the southern slave holders knew that slavery was wrong. They clung to it because of its importance to their economy. They could not simply free their slaves without giving-up much of their wealth. Those few who did free their slaves showed a lot of courage and humanity.

Slavery was, after all, a gigantic horror. In my mind it is second only to the Nazi Holocaust in evil. Regardless of whether slave traders and slave owners thought that Black people were inferior, they knew that they were human beings and not just animals. Many felt deep pangs of conscience at the exploitation of their fellow men, and some people, like the Englishman Wilberforce and the American William Lloyd Garrison, could not tolerate such evil.

The legacy of slavery today is a divided America. It is not just divided between whites and blacks. It is divided between rich and poor, northerners and southerners, liberals and conservatives, educated and uneducated, intelligent and ignorant people. It is no coincidence that the most conservative parts of America are in the South where slavery was prevalent, or that the most liberal areas are in the North where abolitionism prevailed. The legacy of racial intolerance which once belonged to southern Democrats now belongs to southern racists called Republicans or Tea Party adherents. They continue to recite all of the old slogans and canards of states’ rights, smaller government, and freedom from governmental interference, but what they really want is the right to continue their discrimination against and mistreatment of African Americans. They deeply resent the fact that some of their tax dollars are spent to aid poor Black people, and that the government is the main enforcer of the civil rights of Blacks.  

CHRISTMAS AND ATHEISTS

     How do atheists celebrate Christmas? The long nights and short days of the Christmas season can be quite depressing. It would be an even bleaker time of year if those of us who do not believe in the myth of Jesus were unable to celebrate the happy Christmas season. I certainly do not believe that the eternal and almighty God who created the universe came down to earth and allowed himself to be born as a human being. That is a myth of many religions, not just Christianity, and it speaks to man’s inner needs rather than to any historical happening. It is possible for the nonbeliever to celebrate Christmas, however. Christmas as a holiday has a long and ancient history that goes back long before Jesus.

      Ancient people began celebrating the winter solstice because that was the time when nights were longest and days were shortest. The long nights made people depressed and sad and no doubt motivated the need for some kind of celebration to rouse people’s spirits.

     The history of celebrations at the time of Christmas dates back over 4000 years. Many of our Christmas traditions were celebrated centuries before Jesus was born. The 12 days of Christmas, the bright fires, the Yule log, the giving of gifts, carolers who sing while going from house to house, the holiday feasts, and the church processions, can all be traced back to the early Mesopotamians. Many of these traditions began with the Mesopotamian celebration of New Years. The Mesopotamians believed in many gods, and their chief god was Marduk. Each year as winter arrived it was believed that Marduk would do battle with the monsters of chaos. To assist Marduk in his struggle, the Mesopotamians held a festival for the New Year. This was called Zagmuk, the New Year's festival that lasted for 12 days.

     In ancient Germany people honored the pagan god Oden during the mid-winter holiday. Germans were terrified of Oden. They believed he made nocturnal flights through the sky to observe his people, and then decide who would prosper or perish. Because of his presence, many people chose to stay inside. The Germans brought trees inside the house at the winter solstice and hung gifts on the trees to placate the gods and in hopes of keeping green things alive for the coming Spring.

     There were mid-winter festivals in ancient Babylon and Egypt, and Germanic fertility festivals also took place at this time. The birth of the ancient sun-god Attis was celebrated on December 25th. Attis was the son of the goddess Cybele. The worship of Cybele, known as “The Great Mother,” was introduced into Rome from Phrygia (in today’s Turkey) around 204 BC. She was worshipped in Greece in the 5th century BC. The adherents of this religion celebrated the death and resurrection of Attis, who was not only Cybele’s son, but also her lover, eunuch attendant, and the driver of her lion-driven chariot. Attis was killed by being castrated. After fasting on the “Day of Blood,” on which Attis was mourned, sorrow was turned into joy with the Hilaria celebrating his resurrection on March 25. The celebration included a sacred meal of thanksgiving, or, in Greek, “eucherista."

     The Romans celebrated Saturnalia, a festival dedicated to Saturn, the god of peace and plenty, that ran from the 17th to 24th of December. Public gathering places were decorated with flowers, gifts and candles were exchanged and the population, slaves and masters alike, celebrated the occasion with great enthusiasm. Lo Saturnalia!

     One of the the myths which closely resembles the story of Jesus was that of the God Mithras (or Mithra). Many aspects of Mithraism parallel Christianity. It is not known exactly when Mithraism began, but it preceeded Christianity by hundreds, if not thousands, of years. Although some scholars claim that it goes back to the Persian empire fourteen centuries before Christ, when the Persians worshipped a god “Mithra,” others claim that the worship by Romans of Mithras originated much later in Tarsus of Cilicia (today’s Turkey). Mithras was the god of light, or the Sun, and was born of a virgin. He was identified with a bull who had to die as a sacrifice for all humanity. His worshippers believed that Mithras promised resurrection from the dead and that he ascended into heaven. The worship of Mithras included forgiveness of sin by baptism of initiates and a communion of bread and wine to commemorate Mithras’ last meal on earth.
Evidence of Mithraism can be found in the ruins of Pompeii. It was popular among the Roman soldiers.

      The early fathers of the Christian Church did not know the date when Jesus had been born, so up until the fourth century AD there was no celebration of Christmas. The worship of Mithras presented a real problem for the Church fathers because of the similarities to the worship of Jesus. In around 353 AD, the church fathers decided to combat Mithraism and other pagan holidays by celebrating the birth of Jesus on Mithras’ birthday, December 25. Merry Mithramas! 

     Clerics often say that we should celebrate the real meaning of Christmas, the birth of Jesus, and not put so much emphasis on Santa Claus and gift giving. I say that those things are the real meaning of Christmas, and that the birth of Jesus is just a relatively new attachment to a much more ancient celebration. I celebrate Christmas as a celebration of the winter solstice, and like most people, I use it to lift my spirits during a dark time of year.