For the Want of a Time Machine: Prophet or Mental Patient

     I have been having a problem lately with our use of history to guide us. I am a firm believer that we should learn from our history. This is especially true with our failures and mistakes. It is from those mishits that we learn the most. For immediate success, not so much. That is another topic. Really, I am having trouble with the fact that we look back deep in our history and sometimes prehistory with a reverence that perhaps was never intended. Or at the very least hold these words, documents and axioms on a pedestal so high and strong that the idea of displacement or evolution will be met with an almost violent response from the masses or at least those that benefit the most from them.

      I really want to get to the 500 pound gorilla in the room. Lets talk about the bible. All four testaments of the bible that is, Old Testament, New Testament, Koran and The Book Of Mormon. Because that in of itself is it's own conflict. I want to start with the simple fact that these books were spoken, passed along and eventually written down centuries or even several millennia ago. How is it we can take words from a few thousand years ago and possibly know what those that spoke them would have thought about how they applied today. I would love to mention the Leviticus thing where we have cherry picked our devout belief that it is most important that a man not lay with another man in the way he would with another woman. Okay, so the ancient Jewish were homophobes. But it also states that men could not live in the same house with a woman during that time of the month. Perhaps good advice but with all practicallity I could see a lot of good relationships ending because the dude bolted when Aunt Flo came to visit. Why is it we go so far as hate on the gays so much that we tattoo the verse from the bible on our arm but ignore how in the same book tattoos are forbidden. 

     I am not saying that some of the stuff passed down from way back when should be ignored. Honoring thy father and mother is some damn good advice. It is most certainly not an original idea conceived of the by the writers of the old testament. Parents have been and will always be demanding that their kids listen and behave. At least till we enter that Brave New World. Think about some of the real reasons for some of the Kosher food rules. They had practical applications to the time and place but now they are considered some sort of dogma. I just wonder how we can feel that a several thousand year old oral tradition can be considered such a strict set of laws that we can no longer look to the future as a chance for our growth. Well it actually happened.

     Then came the Catholic Church. A Jewish Priest name Jesus came around and spoke about how his religion had it wrong and there was a better way. He had his followers and they helped to spread and expand upon his ideas. Of course the prevailing powers of the time determined him to be a heretic and he was executed for it. I want to get back to the a couple of points I have mentioned so far. They make a lot of sense for the this particular argument. Oral tradition and expanding upon the ideas of a supposed prophet. We know that the language that was spoken in those times, 2000+ years ago, was most likely Aramaic but the earliest translatable printed versions of the Bible (New Testament) is in Greek. (I may be wrong on the Greek thing it could be Latin. Different sources say different things.) Needless to say there has to be something lost in translation. But, really, when the book was compiled was a few centuries after the prosecution of Jesus. I don't want to get into a dispute about it how and when it was all put together. The truth of nature is those books were written by men and the ideas were expanded upon to suit their own purposes. Whether those purposes were to spread the love or to tighten the leash of power of the church does not matter.

     Now we come to a large document that we hold dear and inflexible written by ancient men of 2000 years ago. It has been excepted by those followers that Jesus was not a heretic but a prophet and his disciples were the spreaders of his word which was the words of his god. Okay so again we have a bit of history making things larger than life as time goes on. It is more about how we forget that tends to make the stuff of legend. Once again, I am not knocking some of the general ideas put forth in the New Testament. Forgiveness is a big thing. Treating others with love and compassion is great and how I want to live me life so good for the bible. Of course those things are talked about in a book like “How to Win Friends and Influence People.” What's so wrong with that book? Absolutely nothing. Still it is not a revered as that 2000 year old book.

     I am going to gloss over the next two books of the bible a bit because I know less about them but the general reaction to them and their prophets was similar to that of the reaction to Jesus or to the Jewish by the Egyptians. I know some may thing I speak heresy when I call the Koran or The Book of Mormon part of the bible but really they are just that. They were an extension of what was before. The Prophet Mohamed used some of the teachings coming from his Jewish and Christian ancestors along with other oral tradition of the region to evolve an new religion of Islam. Well in 600 years I am sure there was some Christians shitting their pants over this whack job pushing his new beliefs. Well, it took hold and again the Third Book of the Bible dash 1 became a tome of inflexible unevolving rhetoric. Now with Islam in its adolescence it is the place we put our blame for the worlds problems. Mostly because we all cling to these ancient and antiquated beliefs written by people could have never imagined the present day.

     Real quick, we look at the other third book of the Bible. The Book of Mormon. It is not the fourth because it is really not an extension of the Koran but more of a different branch. Holy smokes, Joe Smith was considered such a nut job and heretic he eventually pissed somebody off enough to the point of killing him where he stood. Actually, it was premeditated where a mob stormed a jail he was in and effed his shit up along with his brother. Yet things caught on. Still with a text that is only 125+ years old it is nowhere near as accepted as its predecessors. Still it has had enough time to be considered another rigid regulation that has to be accepted because somebody a long time ago had to be wiser than we are today. I know I have spent a lot of time on the religion thing and in particular the Judea-Christian stuff. It is what I know more about but I list other old shit that perhaps need to be taken with a modern grain of salt.

Sacred texts of various religions:

• Hinduism: Shruti (Vedas, including the Rigveda; also Aranyakas, Brahmanas, Upanishads, Bhagavad Gita, Mahābhārata, Ramayana); Panchatantra
• Buddhism: The Tipitaka, the Dhammapada, and other Buddhist texts.
• Ayyavazhi: The Akilattirattu Ammanai and Arul Nool.
• Judaism: The Hebrew Bible (Tanakh = Torah, Nevi'im, and Ketuvim)
  • The Talmud, which includes Pirkei Avot
• Zoroastrianism: The Zend-Avesta
• Taoism: The Dao de jing, also Chuang Tzu, and The I Ching
• Confucianism: The Analects of Confucius, also The I Ching
• Mandaeanism: The Ginza Rba
• Sikhism: The Guru Granth Sahib and The Dasam Granth Sahib
• Bahá'í Faith: The Kitab-i-Iqan, plus many other writings including ones from other faiths
• Thelema: The Holy Books of Thelema especially Liber Al vel Legis
  

       It is about time I get to what really sparked my personal furor, “The Constitution of the United States of America.” So over 200 years ago these guys got together because the law of the land that was written a few years prior, “Articles of Confederation,” did not work. They decided to rewrite how they formed the government and how it would run. They made the ability to amend the constitution to allow for some changing of the time that they had just witnessed in the days of the “Articles” and its failure. They made a set of amendments we call the “Bill of Rights.” And those are quickly summarized here.

1	Freedom of religion, speech, press, assembly, and petition.
2	Right to keep and bear arms in order to maintain a well regulated militia.
3	No quartering of soldiers.
4	Freedom from unreasonable searches and seizures.
5	Right to due process of law, freedom from self-incrimination, double jeopardy.
6	Rights of accused persons, e.g., right to a speedy and public trial.
7	Right of trial by jury in civil cases.
8	Freedom from excessive bail, cruel and unusual punishments.
9	Other rights of the people.
10	Powers reserved to the states.

      They are nice and really work well. But lets use the second amendment as a starting point. At no point does it say we need a gun to hunt with. I am sure our founding fathers probably thought that it would be reasonable for people who hunt to have a gun but it is not part of the constitution. Number 4, unreasonable search and seizures. If you get arrested for a crime and have a cell phone on you it should be confiscated and used as evidence against you for the crime. How is that much different than arresting somebody for accounting fraud and seizing their books. Still some how we are trying to use a 200 year old document as our balance for determining if our law enforcement can do their job to keep us safe. Don't get me started on speedy trial. Bureaucracy is an infection that has clogged up our justice system.

      The point is that if the framers of the Constitution where brought up to speed on our modern times and asked to look how their grand plan was being implemented they would exercise their second amendment rights to topple this joke of government system. Quite frankly, because our inflexibility the constitution is a failure. We (those in power) have bastardized the system of government to suite themselves and not the people it was originally intended to protect and serve. Having a different view on how to help the country is okay but putting up the great wall of China between the republicans and democrats with jumble of complicated parliamentary procedure is nothing but a grab for power that shows a total lack of respect for the constituents they lie about representing.

      Of course our founding fathers would not be the only ones wholly confused by our rigid unimaginative way of following these guidelines. I would bet, and win the bet, that the compilers, preachers and prophets would be sickened by how the world has clung so ignorantly to what had been said with no chance of a context in the modern world. Again, I am sure that if they were brought up to date with our common era they would see the wisdom in an ever evolving and growing set of beliefs and written doctrine.

So in the conclusion and bringing back to the title of this piece I would guess that because I said this stuff today, I am a lunatic. Perhaps in two hundred years or so historians will look upon my ramblings and declare me a prophet. If only I had a time machine to find out or to plant my lunacy in the past.