According to Benny Shanon, a professor of cognitive psychology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, psychedelic drugs formed an integral part of the religious rites of Israelites in biblical times.
OH, it that’s what it meant when the bible mentions that various evil-doers were stoned. I’ll bet that the apostles got it backwards about Jesus’ statement. He probably really said, “Let that one of you who is not stoned cast the first sin.”
Here’s the thing. There probably wasn’t a real Moses. We have some historical proof that Jews wer not the main slaves of Egypt (many people were slaves, having more to do with indentured status than with nationality). Many Jews living in Egypt were not slaves. And there wasn’t a large exodus of people out of Egypt at that time.
These stories were created over time and collected by King Josiah around 700 BCE.
_The Bible Unearthed_ by by Israel Finkelstein and Neil Asher Silberman.
Now, this is an interesting story, I mean King Josiah or Yoshihayu, incorporated in the “Bible” supposedly presented to Cyrus the Great at Babylon, to beg for his support of the “Jewish” faithful. All evidence from outside the “biblical” relation, indicates that Jerusalem at the claimed time of his fictional life, was a site of a local chief subordinated to the Babylonian rule, placed in charge of controlling the movements of Egyptian power. Which perhaps explains the relation of his fictional death at the hands of Pharaoh Necho/Nekau II -Wehemibre- army, this last ultimately defeated by the Babylonians at Carchemish and Hamath sometime around 605 or 604 BCE. The story of Josiah highlighting the “victim of the Babylonian schemes” of the “Jewish people” in the eyes of Cyrus II was part of the arguments to convince the Achaemenid king of the legitimacy of their claims and foster his sympathy, knowing that his policies were to support the local religions as means of control of subjugated realms (those restored to a relative local power wouldn’t cause trouble to the source of their power.)
Of course, Cyrus also had his problems with the Egyptian Pharaoh Amasis/Ahmose II, and saw the wisdom of settling a sympathetic ally at the gate that Jerusalem was, while buying time before confronting the Egyptians, task that never undertook before his death.
The point of all this is that Josiah was a character “created” within the “re-creation of the Bible” to justify an uncertain factual pre-existence of the book of books. Too bad for the researchers of our time that there aren’t real extant biblical documents which antiquity could be analyzed in a lab, which would go that far in time (even if they might be purported copies); on the other hand, fortunate for those that claim the bible’s antiquity. We cannot prove them wrong as much as they cannot prove themselves right. And the arguments go on.
Doesn’t surprise me a bit. I remember reading in the Old Testament where the Jewish religious leaders would retreat to the Inner Sanctum of the Sanctuary, breathe incense and dance themselves into a frenzy until they passed out; all so they could commune with god and receive divine revelations to pass on to the Jewish people. I was a Christian back then, and my faith cracked just a little bit when I realized the ancient religious leaders were a bunch of stoned fools.
Isn’t there also evidence that ancient Hindus and Buddhists took some drug called soma? Didn’t the Sufis smoke something like pot? Or something?
Imagine if we formed a religion every time someone dropped acid in the 60s and had a revelation — maybe we did.
As time goes by, I think we will discover more evidence of religious originators either using drugs or suffering from certain brain conditions (Paul’s epilepsy).
That’s where Aldous Huxley got the name. For more, see for example HERE. Many so-called “primitive” cultures used various drugs to get closer to their notions of the deity; in the western tradition wine is the most used, as the “blood of Christ”. (Interestingly, the italian grape “Sangiovese” comes from the words for “the blood of Jupiter").
FWIW however, I don’t think that the supposition that Moses was on drugs has any real historical merit, even if we assume that he was a real person. The evidence is just way too thin one way or the other, and there is no real tradition of drug taking in the Israelite culture apart from wine.
I smoke pot occasionally. I don’t think pot would cause a religion, but I may be wrong.
LOL, I guess anything is possible - though I’d like to think if some stoners created a religion, it would surely have some comedy in it. Cheech and Chong…
I think many religious folks in ancient times were on crack… because if not, they were completely insane.
I smoke pot occasionally. I don’t think pot would cause a religion, but I may be wrong.
LOL, I guess anything is possible - though I’d like to think if some stoners created a religion, it would surely have some comedy in it. Cheech and Chong…
I think many religious folks in ancient times were on crack… because if not, they were completely insane.
You have to love when Sam Harris describes the 10 C’s in “Letter to a Christian Nation.”
He talks about how these must be the most important things ever because they are the only things that God ever felt the need to write down… “here they are, get ready!”
