Why Adam and Eve Created GOD

Mankind raced into the twentieth century like a child dashing into a circus tent.  Looking at everything, imagining wonderful things, full of dreams and hopes. The natural sciences continued to amaze as better instruments revealed more and more about the universe.  The inquisitive were measuring and experimenting with everything—mechanics, medicine, electricity, radio, psychology, and even the supernatural.  Nothing was safe from these probing minds as seen in the dramatic changes in transportation, home appliances, factories, architecture, medicine, and war machinery.  The paradigms of life were shifting, and along with them human tides.  The industrial age brought farm boys to cities and European peasants to America. This convergence of peoples, ideas, and events produced the world of today.

This is only a short summary of this topic.  To find out more, please get Why Adam and Eve Created God.

Around the globe, British, French, and Spanish explored new lands, met new peoples, and saw new cultures—often godless and quite happy places. Prosperous and moral people without any knowledge of a god who made the world in seven days, destroyed it in a flood, or would damn one to hell for not believing.  Priests were still sent to convert them (and dress them like good Europeans) but the greater energy of the nations was directed elsewhere.  Bigger ships, better guns, and faster trade routes were more important than convincing the natives to be baptized.  Europe had not yet developed the vision to see the value of other cultures, of other beliefs, and of other traditions.  It was blinded by its imperial ego being illuminated by the flashes of their spectacular achievements.  The pace of modernization was accelerating—withEuropeon the throttle.

The newly rediscovered sciences were a never-ending fountain of knowledge and understanding. European men likeNewton, Descartes,LaPlace, and Pascal advanced mankind’s knowledge of the world by an order of magnitude.  The international acceptance of French as the language of the educated gave intelligent people a suitable method of intercourse.  Publication in books, journals, and pamphlets gave widespread exposure to new ideas and accelerated people’s ability to build on each other’s work.  Thermodynamics, mechanics, gravity, blood circulation; again and again scientists came up with explanations to things long assumed to be the works of the gods.  It seemed that science would ultimately be able to provide answers to everything. The people who felt this, including the Christian Churches, also felt they were doing their God a favor by using the new scientific and philosophical tools to prove God’s validity.  What they didn’t realize was that it was just such efforts that would ultimately drive most of western mankind away from belief in any dependable god.

This is only a short summary of this topic.  To find out more, please get Why Adam and Eve Created God.

The new age of science, nationalism, missionary zeal, and, above all, economic desire for world trade routes, came together on the scores of ships embarking from Spanish and Portuguese ports. The explorers and traders pressed further out into the Atlantic, up to Greenland, and down the coast of Africa, trying to find a trade route to the Orient–one to replace the ancient overland routes now cut-off by the Muslim Turks.  As sea routes supplanted the overland routes, the Muslim people took a sideline position in the challenge for world trade.  The marriage of Ferdinand and Isabella had, in 1479, united the Catholic crowns of Aragon and Castile, forming a Catholic empire strong enough to repel the Turkish Moors and rich enough to fund such risky trade explorations.  As the reformation of the Church was taking place inEurope, the world was being reshaped by men such as Columbus, Magellan, Balboa, and Vespucci. Their drive was not religious, but economic.  They yearned for the riches of the Orient, but the path they blazed lead to the doorstep of the Americas. In a land filled with millions of people, speaking hundreds of different languages, and living in societies rich with new cultures, all they could see was the gold and silver. Looking for the riches of the Orient, they discovered the treasures of the archaic Inca, Maya, and Aztec civilizations.  They also brought the diseases of Europe to the Americas—diseases that Europeans had grown immune to, but that were unknown to the native’s blood.  The Conquistadors insatiable fever for gold drove them to divide, conquer, and plunder; decimating the local inhabitants. The ones not killed usually died from ill-treatment or a virus.  Within 100 years of the first European landing in Mexico, the native population was reduced by 95%.

This is only a short summary of this topic.  To find out more, please get Why Adam and Eve Created God. 

This chronology of the western religious experience is approaching familiar ground. Names, dates, and events of the Renaissance along with the courage, tenacity, and audacity of the great explorers are drilled into our youth.  With familiarity and hindsight, it is easy to project modern preconceptions into the past, making the outcome of historical events look almost inevitable.  When weighing the “facts” of history, one often forgets to balance the records against the fragile reality of the times.  This tendency can cause one to overlook the significance of discrete actions.  It depreciates the importance of the side that lost; the value of the road not taken; the quality of the life not spared. Single events and individual people affected the lives of millions across many generations.  History is full of such pivotal periods, and the early sixteenth century was certainly one of the greatest.  A period in which, almost all contemporary western religions, can trace ties back to a reshaped Holy Roman Empire or a Reformed branch of it.

This is only a short summary of this topic.  To find out more, please get Why Adam and Eve Created God. 

Throughout the ages, people have looked back on their “golden age” of faith, be it ten years or a thousand years earlier, and idealize it as a better time—a more pure and true time.  If ever there was a golden age for Christianity it occurred during the Middle Ages, in a time where the heart of Western mankind was religion.  But the Middle Ages did not start out hospitable to new religions.  As was done in the past and continues up to this day, people blame others disregard of the “official” gods for the woes of the state.  During theRoman Empire’s long decline, the religious were often persecuted, with Christianity most vehemently oppressed.  On and off for over a hundred years, persecution of Christians was used to divert attention away from mismanagement of government and its depressive practices.  Christians were easy targets for blame because they refused to worship the Roman gods or to attend the state games.  Rumors abounded regarding Christian cannibalism and incest—misconceptions of the Eucharist and private worship services.  Christian persecution at the hand of the Romans ranged from political discrimination to torture and death.  Such persecution tended to increase the commitment of the faithful, but not all persecution was unavoidable.  Christians believed that a person who died as a martyr at the hands of the Romans would go straight to heaven, a teaching that encouraged little resistance and often deliberate provocation to martyrdom.

This is only a short summary of this topic.  To find out more, please get Why Adam and Eve Created God. 

The intellectual alliance of Athens with Rome panned the spotlight of Western history from Greece to the Roman world. The radiance of Hellenistic culture was passing, but many felt its powerful influence as it illuminated cultures fromSpaintoChina.  Social strata sharply divided the Roman republic’s people, as the abundant use of money in commerce enabled people to acquire wealth, slaves, travel, and leisure. Conquered nations were taxed to support the Roman citizens who paid none. The rich got richer. The plebes sunk into poverty. Enslaved nations provided the labor to build the empire. Like ancient religions from the Orient, the emperor claimed he was a god.

Early Roman religion was a more practical, simple, version of Greek mythology with anthropomorphic gods such as the great sky god, Jupiter and the water god, Neptune.  The government orchestrated much of the religious activity and performed many of the priestly duties.  Their disbelief in the power of the gods could not be hidden, and this contributed to the disintegration of the ancient Roman faiths.  Cynically, the orator Cicero remarked that the gods were only needed to prevent chaos in society.  Wealthy Romans hired Greek tutors, permeating Rome with Hellenic ideas, art, science, literature, and religion.  In this way, the philosophy of the Epicureans, Stoics, and Plato made their way to Rome, leading to further erosion of Roman religious ideals.

This is only a short summary of this topic.  To find out more, please get Why Adam and Eve Created God. 

The Old World, a world in which a few distinctive civilizations existed autonomously in Mesopotamia, Egypt, and Crete, sounded the first crescendo in the rhythm of civilization, but by the beginning of the first millennium BC the world was entering a new stanza.  Increasing prosperity made people aware of more desires.  Instead of working to satisfy primal needs as Neolithic man had, people possessed the resources to go after their indulgences. They desired more wealth.  They desired more land.  And they had developed the means to achieve them, but they had not yet learned the consequences of their actions.  Military victory and political victory are two different tasks, but this fact was often discounted. In stark contrast to the relatively just laws of ancient Babylon, under Hammurabi, Assyrian King Tiglath-Pileser’s (1115-1077 BC) “policy of frightfulness” caused his enemies and his subjects to be barbarically treated.  Whole cities of people were impaled on stakes, and appalling punishments were dealt for even minor infractions of the law.  The bloody Assyrians were triumphant in war, but less successful in winning subjects.  As soon as the soldiers departed from conquered lands, the people rebelled. Between 1500 and 900 BC numerous nations, thoroughly convinced that they had the god(s) on their side, ruthlessly tore apart the ancient Near East.  The armies of the Hittites, Kassites, Philistines, Hebrews, Dorian Greeks, Arameans, Chaldeans, and Peleponnesians all took part in the dissection of the land, but their leaders were not successful in gaining significant political control of a foreign population.

This is only a short summary of this topic.  To find out more, please get Why Adam and Eve Created God. 

From the turmoil of Akkadian-occupied Sumeria departed a Semitic tribe of Jews who, a millennia later, became a minor power in ancient Palestine.  But those Jewish religious seeds would grow to become the most important religious, moral, and philosophic influence in western civilization.  Previous religions added and deleted gods into and from their pantheon to accommodate intellectual and political change, but Judaism was very different.  It derived its longevity by keeping only one god, and modifying his attributes, his commandments, and his history to suit the purpose of his advocates.

The beliefs, traditions, conquests, accomplishments, and failures of the Hebrews[1] are recorded in their Torah, and much of this information is contained in the books of the Old Testament Bible and Apocrypha. These works chronicled their history and were an oracle guiding their lives. The Torah contains most of what is known about the ancient Hebrews, for there is little archeological evidence of their early days and only opaque evidence remaining of them during the zenith of their nation.  The Torah is part of the foundation of the Jewish faith, and the stories incorporated from it into the Old Testament Christian Bible play a key role in later religious development in the West.  The stories we have today were put into writing 600 – 1000 years after the events occurred, so separating the facts from imaginative creation is very difficult.  Archeological evidence of the geography, politics, and the societies of this era is in enough agreement to say that stories of the Jewish Patriarchs are probably based upon real people.  Biblical accuracy and the history of the Hebrews have been debated by scholars for thousands of years, and may never all be sorted out, but what is important is the underlying thread of the stories and the Hebrew’s emphatic belief in the sacredness of their history.

This is only a short summary of this topic.  To find out more, please get Why Adam and Eve Created God.