Search Results for Moses
Moses
In the Old Testament, Moses (13th – 15th century BCE) is the son of Amran of the tribe of Levi. He became a major prophet and lawgiver as well as the leader of the Iraelites during their 40 years in the wilderness.
Like many heroes, mythic or not, Moses escaped premature death from a hostile power. As a baby he was placed in the Nile river in a basket, to be later discovered by the Egyptian Pharaoh’s daughter. Although the Jewish people and the Egyptians were generally at odds with each another, Pharaoh’s daughter, who is unnamed in the Old Testament, takes pity on the baby and rescues Moses from certain death.
Raised as an Egyptian, in the book of Exodus Moses eventually led the Jewish people out of slavery through the Red Sea and received the Ten Commandments on Mt. Sinai (Exodus 20: 1-17).
Tradition ascribes authorship of the Pentateuch to Moses.
Related Posts » Adam, Akhenaton, Aliens and Extraterrestrials (ETs), Bahai, Burning Bush, Freud, Hero, Miracles, Moses and Monotheism, Pyramids, Torah
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Moses and Monotheism
Moses and Monotheism is the last work written by Sigmund Freud in 1939, prior to his doctor-assisted death by morphine.
The book fancifully reconstructs the Biblical story of Moses, according to Freud’s psychoanalytic theory.
Freud claims that Moses was an Egyptian who introduced the Jewish people to the Egyptian monotheism of Akhenaton. This eventually caused unrest among the Jews who, according to Freud, murdered Moses.¹
The resultant collective guilt necessitated a religion of atonement for slaying what Freud calls the ‘primal father’.
The book is variously regarded as a ludicrous view of history to a groundbreaking exercise in postmodern reconstruction.
The main critique of Freud’s view, however, is that Akhenaton’s monotheism advanced Aten, a solar diety, while Yahweh is far greater than the universe he creates, as made evident throughout the Bible (e.g. Isaiah 55: 8-9).
While it is easy to fault Freud for applying his own theories to the Bible, not a few New Age thinkers and contemporary religious zealots also offer facile reconstructions of the past to support their views, and far less cleverly than Freud did. Now called pseudohistory, a good example can be found in the idea that UFO‘s instead of real human work gangs built the Egyptian pyramids. Although there is plenty of hard archeological evidence that human beings built the pyramids, some pseudohistorians, for whatever reasons, simply overlook this fact.
Another example can be found among Christian fundamentalists who zealously proclaim that ‘the end is near’ whenever anything bad happens. Extremist Christians have been doing this for centuries. Nero, The Black Death, Napoleon, Hitler, the atom bomb, Y2K, 911… all have been taken as signs that the end of time was imminent. While we can perhaps understand why his might have happened earlier on in history, there’s really no excuse for it now.
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¹ Some scholars suggest that Freud borrowed this idea from Ernst Sellin, deduced from Hosea 12:13-14.
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The Book of Job
The Book of Job is part of the wisdom literature of the Hebrew Bible and the Christian Old Testament. Its main character is Job, a suffering and blameless servant of God.
Christian apologists say that Job’s suffering points to the mysterious ways of God and highlights the need for faithful obedience in the absence of human understanding. Critics say that it depicts God as an immature, cruel tyrant. For instance, the Swiss psychiatrist C. G. Jung and some Jungians say that God “makes a bet” with Satan. In the story, Satan contends that Job will not remain faithful if God allows Satan to torment him.
In Jung’s Answer to Job, a short commentary about the Job’s plight, Jung says the Biblical story reveals a dark, non-integrated aspect of God. Why would a perfect God, Jung argues, allow a blameless servant to be persecuted by the devil? When Job challenges God, asking why he suffers, God answers not on Job’s terms but by completely overwhelming him. God asks if Job is able to create the stars, the oceans and a sea monster.
Jung sees this as indicating God’s immaturity. For Jung, God projects his own dark side onto Job. While this dynamic may occur in many people, to Jewish and Christian believers it’s misguided to suggest that God would behave this way (See Isaiah 55:8-9). As God implies to Job, could an allegedly immature consciousness create all of creation?
Biblical scholars debate whether the story of Job refers to an actual person or if it’s just a folktale outlining the general human problem of why do bad things happen to good people? The author of the book is not mentioned. Some traditional rabbis and early Christian theologians believed the author was Moses. Today, some scholars believe that parts of Job were written by at least one additional author.
But to return to Jung, he seems to overlook the folktale aspect by treating Job as a real person. Jung’s writings about Job have also been criticized by Fr. Victor White. White says that Jung confuses a narrative image of God with the actual God. In Jungian terms, White says Jung confuses the God-image (archetypal image) with God (archetype).
Indeed, it seems that Jung analyzes God from the perspective of his own, man-made psychological theories. In reducing God to Jung’s all too human ideas, might Jung, himself, exhibit the psychological mechanism of projection? Theological critics of Jung would certainly say that his commentary on Job suffers from presumption—that is, intellectual arrogance.
Regarding the problem of evil, many theologians would maintain that God’s ways are usually way over our heads. Along these lines, we could hypothesize that God permits evil to torment Job for a greater good which, Job, Satan and Jung couldn’t hope to understand.
Jung’s (questionable) analysis aside, the story of Job has parallels in other cultures, most notably the ancient Egyptian Protests of the Eloquent Peasant.
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Bahai
Bahai is a relatively recent world religion. Adherents of Bahai claim that God is progressively revealed through a sequence of teachers, including Abraham, Moses, Zoroaster, Buddha, Jesus, Mohammad, and its Persian founder, Baha’u'llah (1860′s).
The religion is monotheistic, emphasizing monogamous family life, obedience to government authority, personal honesty and cleanliness. Bahai schools and media programs are flourishing.
Baha’u'llah originally went by the name Mirza Hoseyn, a Shi’ite Muslim. Hoseyn aligned himself with the Bab, head of the Babis, a Muslim sect claiming to have privileged knowledge about ultimate truth. The Bab was executed for treason by the Iranian government and Hoseyn was then exiled by orthodox Sunni Muslims.
Hoseyn went to Constantinople (Istanbul). There, in 1867, he declared himself to be the Imam Madhi (“rightly guided leader”), as foretold by the Bab.
Violence ensued and he was banished to Acre, where he developed the contemporary doctrine of Ba’hai: Universal brotherhood and the unity of all religions. Pilgrims from Iran and the USA journeyed to Acre to learn about his teachings.
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Collective Unconscious
The idea of the collective unconscious refers to Carl Jung‘s belief that humanity shares an underlying, biologically inherited storehouse of collective experience and knowledge.
From his considerable study of world myth and religion, Jung came to the conclusion that this collective data is cross-cultural. In fact, he didn’t just see the collective unconscious in myth and religion. He saw universally recognizable motifs among dreams, myth, religion, the arts and architecture. One leading example he provides is the mandala. For Jung, the circular shape of the mandala represents the potentially limitless self.
Jung calls these hypothesized patterns of human existence archetypes.¹ Existing in a larger time frame than most people’s daily awareness, the archetypes of the collective unconscious apparently connect the past, present and future.
Jung speaks to the arbitrary nature of the term collective unconscious. Towards the end of his career he writes that he rendered essentially spiritual ideas in scientific-sounding language for the sake of professional and societal legitimacy. So this, in a sense, makes him something of a postmodern thinker way before the term became popular.
Because he was, in part, doing a sell job, his insistence on the bio-genetic base of the collective unconscious seems confusing to some, especially when he says:
The unconscious has no time. There is no trouble about time in the unconscious. Part of our psyche is not in time and not in space. They are only an illusion, time and space, and so in a certain part of our psyche, time does not exist at all.²
Could a timeless psyche be entirely biological? Perhaps Jung was saying that, although grounded in the body, the archetypes exhibit or resonate with a spiritual component. That is, a bio-genetic ground is necessary for the interplay of body and spirit.
What About Sigmund Freud and the Unconscious?
Freud and Jung’s views about the unconscious differ, but not so much as many believe. Some pop psychologists and New Age gurus quickly dismiss Freud’s ideas, unaware that his model of the unconscious also contains collective elements.
As we’ve seen in the above, Jung describes the archetype as a component of mankind’s psychological substratum—the collective unconscious. Freud similarly spoke of phylogenetic “schemata” and “prototypes.” And borrowing from ancient Greek and Jewish literature, Freud also devised the “Oedipus complex,” a “primal father” and likened the shadowy contents of the unconscious to archaeological ruins.
In addition, late in his career Freud revised his libido theory to include the general ideas of eros (life instinct) and thanatos (death instinct). Because Freud maintained that the fundamental aspects of the unconscious are universal, aspects of his model of the self, like Jung’s, point to a collective unconscious.³ And not only that. Freud, himself, said that Jung introduced nothing new with the idea of the collective unconscious. He wrote that the “content of the unconscious is collective anyhow.”4
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¹ Jung’s notion of the archetypes borrows from ideas previously found in anthropology, sociology, philosophy, religion and theology. The term archetype is traceable to St. Augustine, 354-430 CE.
² C. G. Jung Collected Works vol. 18, para. 684, cited in “Time and Space” at
http://www.fundacion-jung.com.ar/ingles/citas.htm
.
³ Michael V. Adams illustrates this point in The Cambridge Companion to Jung, (ed.) Polly Young-Eisendrath and Terence Dawson, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998, p. 101.
4 Sigmund Freud, Moses and Monotheism, p. 209, cited in R. J. Lifton with Eric Olson (eds.), Explorations in Psychohistory: The Wellfleet Papers, New York: Simon and Shuster, 1974 p. 90.
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Dionysus
Dionysos in a ship, sailing among dolphins. Attic black-figure kylix, ca. 530 BC. From Vulci. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Dionysus was the Greek god of wine but with implications and influence far outreaching such a description. Son of Zeus and Semele, Dionysos was also known for his cult of frenzied followers who allegedly ate live animals and children during ecstatic orgies.
He’s been associated with the raw, natural, emotional and unconscious forces of the psyche, in contrast to the cool and orderly aspects of ego-consciousness, as personified by Apollo. He’s inspired artists (David Bowie) and philosophers (Friedrich Nietzsche) alike, with his ritual madness and ecstasy perhaps appealing to those fascinated by the outer limits of normality and living on the edge.
In contrast to benign deities like Jesus Christ and the Buddha, Dionysus didn’t take kindly to those who didn’t respect him. Myths abound where he severely punishes people, even children, for not honoring his apparently divine status.¹ Nevertheless, he’s one of the most widely represented deities in ancient art,² and was worshipped in the country and the city.
In Rome his counterpart was Bacchus, the Roman god of wine, invoked and honored at musical and dramatic functions. But there was a dark side to the Roman worship of Bacchus. When occupying Judea, the Roman authorities forces the Jews to wear ivy during the annual festival of Dionysus, and they threatened to destroy the Jewish temple and replace it with one dedicated to Dionysus if the chief priests didn’t hand over Judas Maccabeus.
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¹ For instance, in the Homeric Hymn 7 he turns a ship full of pirates into dolphins for not recognizing his divinity. See Susan Guettel Cole “Dionysus” The Oxford Encyclopedia of Ancient Greece and Rome. Ed. Michael Gagarin. © Oxford University Press 2010. The Oxford Encyclopedia of Ancient Greece and Rome: (e-reference edition). Oxford University Press. Toronto Public Library. 13 August 2012 http://www.oxford-greecerome.com/entry?entry=t294.e384
² The Oxford Classical Dictionary, 1999, pp. 479-483.
³ The Eerdmans Bible Dictionary, 1987, p. 284.
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Exodus
English: Israel’s Escape from Egypt, illustration from a Bible card published 1907 by the Providence Lithograph Company (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Exodus is the second book of the Pentateuch (and Old Testament of the Christian Bible). It outlines God’s punishment of the Egyptians and Israel’s departure from bondage in Egypt, facilitated by the miraculous parting of the Red Sea, and their subsequent travel through the wilderness, as led by God through the intercession of the prophet Moses.
Although no Egyptian historical records tell of the parting of the Red Sea and Israel’s escape from captivity, the New Oxford Annotated Bible claims
There can be little doubt that the story rests upon actual historical occurrences.¹
Other respected, mainstream scholars concur that, while it was once fashionable to give too much credence to the alleged historicity of Jewish scriptures and, later, to conversely discount them as myth,
It is reasonable to believe that a good part of the biblical stories have a historical background.²
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¹ New Oxford Annotated Bible , 1991, p. 69.
² Mircea Eliade, Ioan Couliano and Hillary S. Wiesner, The Eliade Guide to World Religions, New York: HarperCollins, 1991, p. 169.
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Sigmund Freud
Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) was a Jew of Austrian parentage and the founder of psychoanalysis. He studied medicine in Vienna and then neurology and psychopathology. He was marginalized by the medical community for his interest in the idea of infant sexuality. Today he, perhaps ironically, is often frowned on as a reductionist.
Freud remains one of the great innovators of the modern age. He attempted to scientifically outline the idea of the unconscious which formerly had been represented in literature, philosophy and nineteenth-century occultism.
His psychoanalytic techniques of free association and abreaction were influenced by several other contemporaneous “doctors of the mind,” most notably Jean-Martin Charcot, but Freud made them uniquely his own.
His works were almost entirely destroyed by the occupying Nazis. In 1938 he reluctantly withdrew from Vienna to London, leaving behind several sisters, all of whom died in concentration camps.
A habitual cigar-smoker, his relationship with his daughter Anna became extremely close; she acted as secretary, friend and confidant. Freud eventually contracted jaw cancer but refused pain-killers because they dulled his mind and interfered with his work.
After Freud’s death Anna further elaborated on the idea of defense mechanisms, distinguishing herself as an important thinker in her own right.
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Guardian Angel
The term guardian angel refers to the Catholic belief that we are guided from birth to death by an angel, assigned by God to each particular individual.
Similar ideas are found in the ancient world. In Plato’s Apology of Socrates, Socrates speaks of some kind of otherworldly agency that tells him what not to do but never what to do.
The Old Testament also speaks of angels that intercede for mankind, the most famous example being that of Moses leading the people through the wilderness. Here God tells Moses that an angel will lead him. And many Muslims believe that they are guided by two angels.
In Shamanistic and Amerindian belief, the guardian and guide may be in the form of an animal spirit.
Today, the belief in guardian angels is quite widespread and does not pertain to any single religious group or denomination.
Historically speaking, it’s long been believed that dark or evil angels can confuse people and compel them to sin, even to suicide. No doubt as a product of mankind’s sexist history, women, especially, were thought to be driven to the point of madness by evil spirits posing as loving presences.
Contemporary psychiatry generally downplays or ignores the possibility that evil spirits could influence a person’s behavior. Psychiatry does recognize the phenomenon of “magical thinking” but usually within the interpretive framework of a cognitive error or mental illness.
Many exhibiting so-called magical thinking probably do make all sorts of interpretive errors. But the issue here is the underlying cause. The medical psychiatrist looks to inherited, (apparently) abnormal predispositions and adverse environmental conditions which may, indeed, be present. However, psychiatry tends to overlook the possibility that these contributing factors could be part of a much larger dynamic, a dynamic that might involve evil spiritual influences.
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Genesis
In Religion
Genesis (Hebrew Bereshit = “In the beginning”) is the first book of the Bible, containing the two different versions of the Jewish and Christian the creation story. Among other things, Genesis tells the tale of Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel, Noah’s Ark, and God’s involvement with the apparently chosen people, the Israelites.
Although Genesis is the first book to appear in the Bible’s collection of different books, scholars say it’s not the oldest written biblical material. The following is a transcription of the first few verses of Genesis:
1:1 In the beginning God created heaven and earth.
Bereshit bara Elohim et hashamayim ve’et ha’arets.
1:2 The earth was without form and empty, with darkness on the face of the depths, but God’s spirit moved on the water’s surface.
Veha’arets hayetah tohu vavohu vechoshech al-peney tehom veruach Elohim merachefet al-peney hamayim.
1:3 God said, ‘There shall be light,’ and light came into existence.
Vayomer Elohim yehi-or vayehi-or.
1:4 God saw that the light was good, and God divided between the light and the darkness.
Vayar Elohim et-ha’or ki-tov vayavdel Elohim beyn ha’or uveyn hachoshech.¹
The author of Genesis was traditionally thought to be Moses. But modern scholarship looks to several different anonymous sources, and academic theories are always changing as to why and how this book came about.
Genesis concert at the Verizon Center, Washington, D.C., USA. Performing "I Know What I Like" by Andrew Bossi via Wikipedia
In Music
Genesis is also the name of an English progressive rock group which recorded the notable album, Selling England by the Pound (1973), along with other, arguably less achieved albums like The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway (1974).
The band’s mature sound was, for the most part, complex and introspective (some nicknamed the band “Genesnooze”) but they remain an important influence in the history of rock.
The band also spawned commercially successful solo careers for Peter Gabriel and drummer/vocalist Phil Collins. When Gabriel left the band in 1975, the remainder of Genesis (with Collins taking up lead vocals) began to produce more radio-friendly singles. But some hard core Genesis fans felt that the departure of Gabriel left behind a watered down, flimsy remnant of the “real” Genesis.
A Genesis collector array in the Genesis clean lab at the Johnson Space Center (photo courtesy of NASA) via Wikipedia
In Space
The Genesis space probe was launched by NASA in 2001 to study and collect samples of solar winds. It was the first spacecraft to return material to Earth since the Apollo missions.
Unfortunately the Genesis recovery parachute malfunctioned. So in 2004 the probe crash landed in Utah, resulting in the loss of some otherwise valuable data.
Genesis I is the name of an experimental space habitat launched by an American firm in 2006.
The habitat is inflatable, making launch easier due to its initial deflated diameter of 1.6 metres. Fully expanded, the Genesis I measures 4.4 by 2.54 metres.
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¹ Source »
http://bible.ort.org/books/torahd5.asp
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