I would like to share this particular writing with interested members. Especially with Surya Deva and Nietzsche, who desire to make sense of the aggressiveness of abrahamic religions. Here is an account that might be of interest:
[B]Author[/B]: Frederick Turner.[I]Beyond Geography[/I].1986
In Near East, the sheer visual stimulation of numbers of people living together thanks to human inventiveness must have fostered a burgeoning sense of the efficacy of human willpower - and this is the progenitor of the will to power, of the urge to dominate the land, and of the belief that [I]all[/I] of nature ultimately be dominated.
Evidence of this aggressive, domineering attitude toward the natural world is to be found everywhere in the ancient Near East: in the structure of the cities, in the brutal history of warfare these early civilizations carved out of each other’s hides, and most especially and truly in their mythological needs.
It is hard to think another group of kindred mythologies as unrelievedly brutal, violent, and male-dominated as that of these early high civilizations. Originally deities appear to have been thought of as indwelling spirits that resided in various natural phenomena. Later they are presented in animal form, and still later they emerge in anthropomorphic guise as rulers, parents, tyrants. These sky beings are wholly monstrous in their rages, in their unappeasable appetite for vengeance, in their capricious turnings against one another and against the cities of men. Parricide, infanticide, and rebellion are the lifeblood of their narrattives, and their concern with human life is mainly manifested in the forms of floods, storms, droughts, famines, and the destruction of cities. Thorkild Jacobsen translates a Sumerian lament that speaks of such unmerited visitations of divine hatred. In it the god Enlil has called down a devastating storm on the city of Ur:
Good winds he took away from Sumer.
The people mourn.
Deputed evil winds.
The people mourn.
Entrusted them to Kingaluda, tender of storms.
The storm ordered by Enlil in hate,
the storm which wears away the country,
covered Ur like a cloth,
veiled it like a linen sheet.
Another Jacobsen translation powerfully illustrates the remoteness and arbitrary nature of these beings, now so removed from the earth. In this one, a man has been ordered to build the god Ningirsu a temple, but the god has given the man no more specific instructions. So this prayer, like so many of the old clay tablets and cylinder seals, is stamped not only with piety but with terror also:
O my master Ningirsu, lord,
seminal waters reddened in the deflowering;
able lord, seminal waters
emitted by the "great mountain,"
hero without a challenger,
Ningirsu, I am to build you your house,
but I have nothing to go by!
Warrior, you have called for the "proper thing,"
but, son of Enlil, lord Ningirsu,
the heart of the matter I cannot know.
Your heart, rising as [rise the waves in] mid-ocean,
crashing down as [crash] the breakers,
roaring like waters pouring [through a breach in a dike]
not to be stemmed,
warrior, your heart, remote [and unapproachable]
like the far-off heavens,
how can I know it?
[B]My note: [I]Above, pay attention to the fact that the god is unreachable by any means. This strongly overlaps with the god concept depicted in biblical texts. In Old Testament, god gives 10 commendments to Moses, and when Moses tries to look upon his face, his eyes got temporarily blind due to the intensity of god’s light;
In New Testament, Jesus cries “father, why you abandoned me?” - again, an unreachable god. This unreachability is still perpetuated by Catholics, although Lutheran and Calvinic movements established Protestanism, and rendered god reachable to a certain extent.
In Quran, similarly, god is “plural,” and pouring orders from heavens to kill non-Qureish people, convert them; and the fact that the alleged prophet’s Mohammed face is not shown in islamic records is the attempt to ordain him to a deity status, under an ever-surveilling super-deity called allah. Thusly, both become unreachable. Hereby, I also agree with the historical analysis that the Sumerian/Babylonian Epic of Gilgamesh is the foundation of Hebrew Bible Old Testament and Islamic Bible, Quran. (see Andrew George, 2003; Gary Rendsburg, 2007)[/I]
Lets continue…[/B]
Creation is a work of cosmic destruction in these texts, often taking the form of a violent victory of the male gods over their female adversaries, who here exhibit that terrible face that is but one of the aspects of the Great Mother. Thus in a myth widely spread through the region, the firmament of heaven and the foundation of earth are formed of the dismembered carcass of Tiamat, the primal goddess, defeated in battle by Lord Marduk: he smashes her skull, splits her body like an oyster, and the obedient winds whisk her blood away. Little wonder that the earth was eventually perceived as a hostile with such a murderous conception of it.
The triumph of the male gods guarantees the relegation of the formerly dominant goddesses to the roles of thwarted adversaries, marplots, or supernumerary helpers. We find that the mother goddess of the herd animals, Ninhursaga, becomes the demoness of the stony grounds that ring the arable soil of civilization. In a lament her own daughter asks, “…to whom should I compare her?/ To the bitch that has no motherly compassion…” Even in agricultural myths where originally the goddesses had been preeminant, they are now debased, for instance, in Sumerian mythology, where the male god Enlil is credited with the gift of the primal tool (the pickax) for field work and construction…
…Within these faint vestiges, which form the deepest substratum, is to be found evidence of longings for that still older (oldest?) presedentary freedom, of that radically integrated spiritual existence of Paleolithic cultures. Thus in the greatest epic of the Near East, the epic of Gilgamesh, which Theodore Gaster has called the area’s Illiad and Odyssey, we find the presedentary Paleolithic substratum in the figure of Enkidu: the fall of this man from a state of natural harmony; the debased woman as agent of the fall; and the rise of the hero of consciousness - the fully aware doer of deeds - quester, explorer, and at last tragic exempler of mortal limitations.
…
[I will stop here, but will continue when I find something worthy]