Cultural Evolution 1

Chapter One

Cultural Evolution

In recent centuries, Western civilization experienced what had been called, somewhat wistfully, the Age of Reason or the Age of Enlightenment.The advent of the Twenty First Century might have suggested that we had passed out of a teenage trial and error phase and had hopefully reached the beginnings of maturity.

An autistic Politics andEconomics has gloated in The New World Order of marketplace deregulation, privatization and globalization.The resulting social Chaos may well be described as anAge of Disenchantment and Disintegration.

Any meaningful ordered togetherness resulting from a growing awareness of belonging collectively to Mother Nature’s family of Earth dwellers is trampled under foot by individuals in their frenzied marketplace worship of the god of mammon. The common good of the human race is made subservientevilly, yet legally, to the avarice of privatized big business corporations. The greed of magnates in the commercial world can only be satiated at the expense of the economic slavery of the majority of human beings.

Excusing and lying are commonplace in all cultures. Today’s media, the press and television, excel in presenting contrived fictions and deliberate untruths as facts. At the same time, those in authority in some other institutions are often guilty of deliberate distortion of events to suit their personal advantage or to save embarrassment. The cult of dissimulation has been elevated to an art form by churchmen, business executives, politicians and military leaders. Governments set up Departments for propaganda and disinformation to keep the general public either in ignorance or misinformed about events going on in their own country and elsewhere.

During the second half of last century, the male intellectual tyranny that for so long governed decisions in matters of human behaviour, politics and religion has been openly challenged and its deceit exposed. With our knowledge of sexuality in Biology, it is only a father of lies now who claims any sort of male functional bodily or intellectual superiority. Sheer brute strength and its accompanying bullying and destructive ability are not criteria for eminence in an evolving future togetherness of hopeful peace lovingfriendly Earth dwellers.

We do not know how cultural evolution will proceed in the next few years. We do know that we are living in a time of rapid change. We do know that the protagonists of the three great male expressions of monotheistic thought, Judaism, Christianity and Islamism are individually, and blindly, committed to worshipping their own brand of divine lord and master. Some of their fundamentalist leaders are hell-bent on carrying out what they believe are the latter’s designs in regards to mankind. In reality they are engineering their own demise.

Allegiance to a male-imaging belligerent deity, is a sure recipe for mortal conflict in a struggle for national supremacy. A warrior god is doomed to die in the wars of his own making. Those who live by the sword, or the gun, or nuclear weapons will surely also perish by the instruments of their own invent. The religious Crusades of the past are re-enacted in today’s present. They only bring discredit now on genuine love-motivated universal religion while providing opportu- nities for huge financial gains to the private banking industry with its monopoly of credit creation. Banks and their minions in the global Investment Casino, gleefully finance the Military Industrial Complex whilst the manufacturers of their nuclear weapons of universal destruction delight in being numbered among the powerbroking elite.

Historians and archeologists are becoming more and more aware that past events have not always been as oral and written traditions generally pretended. Much extant literature of bygone days is biased and one-sided when it comes to controversial issues. In the past, the development of religious ideas proceeded hand in hand with cultural evolution. The latter was generally structured on shifting sands.

Fictional deities, gods and goddesses, have a mythological existence. Tales about them were handed down by professional storytellers from one generation to the next to satisfy childlike minds with knowledge of heroes and heroines and villains as well. Their good and bad deeds were subjects for endless recounting. The ordinary people thus had something to think and talk about and role models to imitate. Legendary characters though necessary for cultural purposes, have little relevance today in the human search for a more profound and personal experience of the reality of selflife. Transcendent celestial entities have been described in contrived fictions. Their role as protagonists in creation stories has been of vital importance in the evolution of both religion and literature, but it is time to pass on to new and higher levels of awareness and understanding of the meaning of selflife.

We are coming to the end of a period in History of almost exclusive male domination and patriarchal rule. Beginning some time after the invasion of the Middle East by warlike tribes from the North, the Patriarchal Age, as Westerners know it today, received its principal characteristics from Jewish Mythology and the cult figures of Moses and Abraham.All this was part of the evolutionary blueprint in which the male role is as a fertilizing factor, for better or worse, in a moment of time. It is not meant to last. Eventually the male of any species becomes impotent. His ordained place remains at the service of the female and her offspring.

In the History of Religion, the three great male expressions of monotheistic thought, Judaism, Christianity and Islamism are relatively modern. They all link themselves with an accepted first patriarch, Abraham, who is generally dated now by current biblical scholarship as living probably sometime around 1000 BCE. In contrast, for thousands and thousands of years prior to this in the Near, Middle and Far East, there flourished matriarchal societies in which was worshipped The One Great Mother-Goddess, The Divine Ancestress, The Queen of Heaven, Mistress of the Universe. The Great Goddess was known under a variety of names, but they all were facets of the one Divine Maternity.

In the matriarchal cultures of the distant past, the mystery of new life, birth and growth focused attention on maternal aspects of this many titled Great Mother-Goddess whose very first representations were artistically exaggerated female figurines. In seeming rhythm with the lunar cycle, woman's body bled. This would stop mysteri- ously for long periods pending the miracle of birth when from her body issued both men and women and also nourishing milk.

Throughout many millennia, gender distinction and sexual inter- course in fertility rites were associated with procreation in spite of the very long period of gestation. Only later did servant man superficially reason the male role in animal propagation.He reversed woman's superior position and made himself the lord and master of she who formerly was his queen and mistress. In human history, the most primitive and the most meaningful and enduring unity or togetherness of persons is the mother pregnant with child, not the husband and wife, nor the father and son. The most comprehensive revelation of the infinite fecundity and being of the divine Self is Woman, the self-other-functioning placental mammal. Begetting offspring was the most meaningful expression of her spaced time human otherself's filial becoming.

In prepatriarchal myths, a goddess was understood to reproduce parthenogenetically, i.e. by the act-art of self-fertilization. This perception of the source of life remained long after paternity was divined by men. It persisted on in folk culture well into the Christian Era where overtones of it were adopted or adapted by writers and teachers to complete the gaps in popular religious traditions. Both daughters and sons were the fruit of her womb. Divine sons were meaningful but subordinate and dispensable consorts in cycles of death and rebirth.

Patrilinearity was an essential feature of patriarchal culture. In tribal societies, the chief’s firstborn son was the logical successor inheriting both power and possessions. Brother often conspired against brother and murder or banishment were frequently real outcomes. In ordinary family situations, similar ideas of a mythical Cain-Abel conflict still prevail and fratricide is not infrequent.

There were aberrations in the way various priesthoods interpreted their relations with their tribal deities who were often made out to demand in sacrifice the first fruits of harvests and herds. These offerings served legitimately to feed the priests and their families.

The ritual human sacrifice of firstborn males was a feature of much patrilineal religion. Although Abraham was ultimately exempted from such demanded slaying of his son Isaac, the modern mind finds it hard to accept, indeed rejects a tribal male deity who puts its believers to such bizarre tests.

The development of religious ideas has followed an evolutionary course.Revelations can only be made into cultures which are adapted to receive them. Jewish scriptural traditions and its Mosaic Law were the products of prevailing dominant patriarchal mindsets.

There was a past time on this earth when the activities of human beings, particularly in Mother Goddess worship, were integrated into Nature's grand network and were a true functional part of it. This was always meant to be so. Malekind, as the protagonist on stage now (in what may well be the final act of the current drama of aseistic evolution) is destined to care for the earth in the capacity of Nature's appointed obedient servant and husband-man, not in the usurped evil role of rapacious tyrant. His generally greater physical strength is to be employed in protective service of mother and child.

With their various priesthoods' connivance, men have prostituted their caretaker-career for a get-rich-quick exploitation of natural resources and have blinded themselves to all possible consequences. For the ecology and economy of our Earth, the Judaeo-Christian religious traditions have proved to be more often curses than blessings. The greatest mistake that humans can make is to imagine that evolution is as blind as they are. Our most childish stupidity is to think that the broodinghen bird's spirit in Mother Nature is only a pious myth; to think that the real living world around us in its quasi-infinite complexity, is purely passive and insensitive, neutral and defenceless, meek and virginal, just waiting to be abusively deflowered.

The writer accepts the role of Jewish Mythology. It was a designed part of an evolutionary process which isinexorably progressive.Mythology, for the most part, is primitive science. The empirical evolutionary clock is still ticking as eternal life is better understood as Selflife. An epitaph for the patriarchal deities of the past reads,

Worlds pass, their myths outknown,

their creeds and cults outgrown.

Selflife evolves, forever new.

In Hebrew speech, the relation between person and name is something quite special. It is foreign to our Anglo-Saxon idiom. Name is used in contexts where modern language uses person or self. For the Hebrew mind, to have no name is to have no real or actual existence. If one’s name is blotted out, one ceases to exist. As mythologized in the Book of Genesis, when its God created,he gave the man the task of naming each object of his creation. The giving of a name to someone or to something is to give it its very own proper identity and not merely to distinguish it from other individuals or species. This conferring of a name is an act of power and an assertion of a species of ownership or some other form of control. Healing events took place in the name of or by the power of special people. A change of name likewise, would indicate a change of state or condition, the beginning of a new existence.

It is important, indeed essential, for any understanding of the evolution and history of modern societies and their religions, to be mindful that in the Hebrew language, there was, and still is, no word for divine mother or goddess. Theologically speaking, in the patriarchal mindset, Judaism and its offspring were, and still are, motherless children. They are all born and live outside any sort of wedlock. Female divinities were officially anathema to it and to its later derivatives, Christianity and Islamism. Their common folk were continually reprimanded for whoring after the “unspeakable” abominations of their godless neighbours.

In their superficial and prejudiced assessments, patriarchal authorities considered the female as merely the receptacle of the male semen from which all new life had its assumed beginnings.Philosopher-Scientists like Aristotle and doctors and others with a questioning frame of mind put forward theories of sexuality. For Aristotle, homunculi existed in the male seed.Homunculi were fully formed miniature human beings ejaculated into the female womb in copulation. The same agenda applied to all creatures.

Women had considerable economic value. Nevertheless, they were inferior servant beings, useful like animals for breeding and mere labour activity. They served also as desirable objects for male pleasure in sexual gratification. This activity however was not without its dangers. Women could be deceivers and artful seducers. Of course men were not exempt from such vices but as the Genesis story of Adam and Eve pointed out, it was all Eve’s fault in the first place. This attitude towards women’s role in society still prevails in many cultures. Regrettably it is not just confined to Middle Eastern, Asian and indigenous African and Australian societies.

The patriarchal mentality, inherent in priestly Judaistic external- ism, still dominates most Western Religions as it has for the past two thousand years. As the heirs of the Jewish tradition of religion, Christianity has only parted company from it in name, but by no means in nature. The visible authoritarian Christian Church, with its male clergy, canonical legislation and liturgical rites is no different in essential form from that of the Judaism which gave it birth. After two thousand years of attempting to superficially sanctify individual souls, Christianity's experience of inner space is still generally that of a void or empty tomb. It has yet to come to grips with the dual lobed focal core of volumed human consciousness.

The cultural and scientific revolutions which have characterized the last four Centuries have left Philosophy and Theology in a state of having to rethink and remodel their basic postulates and rational procedures if they are to have any relevance and credibility for the generations to come. This author dares to contradict many long- standing and cherished ideas and to pass critical judgment on the theological foundations and development of a masculine gender Monotheism in general and Christianity in particular. He nowise intends to destroy the latter but to free, both it and all other thinking about religion, from the deceptions in which patriarchal hierarchies have implicated them over the course of some four or so millennia.

There have been, and still are, theologians who were dedicated scientists, but in the hierarchy of intellectual disciplines, Churchmen have always put their Theology’s Articles of Faith on a much higher plane than the dictates of mere Empirical Science. In matters of dispute, scientific theories had no standing alongside what ecclesiastical authorities deemed as divinely revealed absolute truths. New scientific knowledge which shed fresh light and dispelled the prejudices and a priori misconceptions of past theological teaching was, and is, invariably suspect at first.Very few theologians conceive their deity asscientifically or mathematically minded. Fewer still would concede the possibility of understanding and interpreting the so-called divine in the sign language of algebraic abstraction.

Christianity, particularly in its Pauline mindset, is at a crossroads in cultural evolution. It is being forced to choose between either a retrogressive childish fundamentalist worship of the Bible and Tradition, or by cutting its umbilical link with the past, be reborn into the becomingness of adult age in a Scientific Reformation.

As an institution, it is undergoing the greatest credibility crisis in its history. The sources of its revelation, the Bible and Tradition, are both called into question. The historical Nazarene reformer Jesusand Paul’s visioned Messianic Christ are highly controversial subjects of academic speculation. Most scholars accord the biblical concept of a primeval parental Original Sin with only a mythological reality and the dying god Christology of mankind's subsequently necessary Redemption becomes no more than an emotive religious intellectual abstraction.

For traditional Christianity, the real climax of human evolution was the Incarnation. Culturally, supposed virginal conceptions and virgin births were nothing new. They were prime material for most mythologies and folk lore and influenced the early centuries of Christianity far more than we have been led to believe. Science now poses more problems than ever about the consistency and credibility of Biblical traditions, about Jesus’ birth and crucifixion and the Creeds of the early Church.