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By Root 773 0

familiar with this dilemma, I suggest you read the Biblical book of Hosea. Hosea’s wife Gomer was not a prostitute, she was raised in a fertility cult. God told Hosea (much to his distress) to marry her because he wanted His prophet to know exactly what it felt like to be the God of Israel, which kept backsliding into the fertility cults. So, if they lived in that later day (we’re talking roughly the eighth century B.C.E.) maybe women like Bachmann and Palin would only do the seven veils in private, and only with their husbands (listening to the ancient equivalent of the Rolling Stones, on the other side of a screen). But unless you’re a Southern Baptist, I think that much has been okay in almost any age.

Stole Many a Man’s Soul and Faith

To give another example of a contemporary religious nut, the depiction of the Mayan human sacrifices in Mel Gibson’s film Apocalypto is a horror in itself, but I must say, he makes no effort to understand the reasons any civilization might have for adopting the ritual. It’s pretty ironic coming from the same guy who willed the world to watch the goriest depiction of human sacrifice in cinematic history (I mean The Passion of the Christ—a movie I’m betting Bachman and Palin endorse, since it depicts their favored kind of human sacrifice).

Contemporary Christians (and me among them, conventional bloke that I am) still gobble up the God and drink his blood on Sundays and somehow fail to notice the analogy to cannibalism. (Of course, it’s just a symbol unless you’re Catholic, but what a symbol, folks.) If you must be a conventional bloke like me, I hope you’ll try not to be an ignorant one—eating the god is about as time-honored as any tradition can possibly be, but it isn’t the Jewish way; that’s a pagan survival in Christianity, more of which shortly.

As frightening as they are, these life and death rituals have always addressed a profound human need. Perhaps we know now, in the last four thousand years or so, that this need can be (at least partly) fulfilled without the bloodshed. That “need” we name with the words “religious fervor,” or what they used to call “enthusiasm.” There is a reason the sports stadiums are full week after week, too. We desire a release of that fervor, a kind of build up of group emotion directed at the gods, or God, or the Dallas Cowboys, or The Rolling Stones. There is a damn good reason the mainline Protestant churches are all in decline while every Sunday morning one can find enormous arenas filled with ignorant people who want to watch a preacher get possessed by the Holy Spirit while a chorus blares the same words over and over to loud ass music. If he reminds you of Mick Jagger, well, is that really surprising?

The mainline churches tried to kill the build up of group emotion in worship and it got very boring and people went elsewhere; in Europe, they went to see the soccer match, but in the US, they’re still at church, plus the sports. And everybody everywhere went to the Stones concert. That is what humans always do and it’s what they always have done, and I dare to think it’s what they always will do. We go where the action is.

The human race is not going to outgrow its desire for the transcendent experience of group emotion. The difference between a Stones concert and a Pentecostal revival is not huge, and there is nothing anyone can do to change that. But make no mistake, in this regard, the Christians are thoroughly pagan, and not pagan in the civilized way that the ancient Greeks and Romans were. Our times are closer to primitive cult than to civil religion, as practiced by elevated people like the Greeks and Romans. And the religious freaks have always been nurtured in the distant provinces of a civilization, remote places like Alaska, or the wild suburbs of Minneapolis.

Use All Your Well-learned Politesse

That brings us to the most ancient part of civilized human life where we have evidence, in places like Gobekli Tepe, and Google these too: Achelleion, Sitagroi, and Argissa Magoula. These aren’t quite as old but pose the same