The Barbarian Bible

by Ianto Watt

  These clues lead me to believe that there will be a final showdown between ’The God’ and ‘the gods’. And while every man has to face this battle personally in his own life, there will also be a collective, all-encompassing battle directly between these two at the end. And that’s what this book is leading to: The Last Fall.

  And so, having decided against the Craps table of pantheism, we now begin the search for the slot on the roulette wheel bearing the name of the True God. Let’s begin the task of sorting out who the competitors are for this honor, and how to recognize it when we see it. Or, as I said earlier, who is lying, and how to recognize that fact.

  So, having examined and laughed at all the bush-league players, let’s look at the world of Monotheism, and the Big Three players in the major league of religion. Let’s see how they answer the question that really matters- ‘what’s in it for me?’ Can we find one Operating System that promises us anything of lasting, eternal value here, while still staying true to the values one should expect to find in an almighty, omnipotent, all-just God?

  Now it’s time to consider the Big Three of religion; Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Let’s take a look at each one, and continue to ignore all those minor leaguers, like the Rastafarians, the B’hai, and the Flying Spaghetti Monster.

  And since we’re at the point of examining some world-class stories and the civilizations they built, let’s lay down some systematic criteria for judging the validity of each of their competing stories. Let’s ask each of these religions if they have the following marks of what, at a minimum, a really World-Class religion should have, and then see if their answers add up to something worth betting on. So, let’s ask each of these Big 3 Operating Systems the following five questions;

  Does it have an ancient historical (vs. mythical) document or record?

  Does it have a history of accurate predictions or prophesy? Any big miracles?

  Does it promise us anything of great value or reward? Like mercy?

  Does it have an unbroken line of priestly or kingly succession till today?

  Does it have a believable and desirable Messiah?

  So, where did I get these 5 criteria? I made them up, grandson. Why? Because they answer the questions I want answered. And what are those questions? Simple; does this thing exist in a concrete form?; does this thing have any miracles attached to it (because, after all, I only care about actions, not words); does this thing appeal to me, and what I really want (mercy!); is this thing still in business, in its original form?; and lastly, who is the person I will be choosing? To me, these are the questions that have to be answered before I will be interested in buying an Operating System, of any type.

  And so, if any of these three contestants can come up with all-7’s on the slot machine, I think we’ll have to take them seriously as the Operating System that will allow us to accurately decipher ‘the many tales of old’. Seriously enough to act on the story they tell, and the demands their story will make upon us. Seriously enough to make that leap of faith and place that bet Paschal told us about. So here we go. But not yet. First, a word of caution.

  Each of the Big Three Operating System contenders we’re going to examine below has a dark side. Each has a moment when something happens that produces an imperfect mirror image of itself, and the waters get muddy. And just like Mama Cass whispered in ‘Twelve-Thirty’, muddy waters cast no reflection. And so it’s often difficult to clearly see and understand these religious systems unless and until you know how and when and why they mutated and/ or fragmented. You can’t know the players without a program!

  It’s like in the ‘Superman’ comics, where there was a freak cosmic-ray accident that created an imperfect but parallel universe, known as the Bizarro World. Everything there was the same as in the original universe, except for one thing - nothing worked right! Cars had square tires, doors wouldn’t open, and Bizarro Superman always crashed through tall buildings instead of flying over them. Just like 9-11, but it happened that way every day in the Bizarro World. Great stuff! Well, anyway, each of these 3 contenders has a Bizarro counterpart impostor, and we will be examining them as well, in order to distinguish them from the real thing in each instance. So now, let’s get going, this is going to be fun! So let’s go, and we’ll look at them chronologically, as they appear in the annals of time. First up, Judaism!

  Let’s start chronologically, with Team #1, Judaism, and see how they answer our five criteria for judging them to be a serious candidate for personal belief and more importantly, action. And remember, the big clock is ticking, ticking…………

  Does Judaism have a historical written

  document with verifiable facts? Yes.

  This document is known to the Chosen Ones as the Torah and to most of the rest of us as the Old Testament (OT). (Quick note: I am going to refer to Judaism, as defined by the OT, as ‘Torah Judaism’ and the reason for this is that there is going to be another Judaism, a Bizarro Judaism which will be referred to as ‘Rabbinic’ or ‘Talmudic’ Judaism later on. It has it’s own ‘OT’, known as the Oral Tradition. So don’t get confused, grandson. The distinction will be explained later, and it is of crucial importance in understanding Judaism today. This is the first example of the seemingly similar names that have opposite meanings that I warned you about earlier).

  This document known as the Torah is also known as the ‘Tanakh’ or the Jewish Bible, which is generally the same as the Christian Old Testament. It comes replete with thousands of names, dates, places and occurrences that can be historically verified in a huge number of instances (Moses, Pharaoh, King David, Solomon, etc.). Their story also answers the questions of Who, What, When, Where, How and Why. And in the areas of Who, When, and Where, the document is one of the best complete sources for ancient historical data. It contains a chronologically complete story with a consistent theme or plot. But before we go any further, let’s deal with an issue that has to be confronted before we examine any of the evidence before us with an open mind. It is the issue of ‘expertise’, and who possesses it.

  Now, whenever I refer to a particular factoid contained in any ancient document, you might say, ‘well, modern historians don’t believe …. (fill in the blank).’ All I can say is that, anytime you use the word ‘modern’, you’re basically cutting yourself off from anything ancient, because the favorite mantra of modernists is that we can’t truly know anything about any event prior to the appearance of The Beatles. Therefore everything ancient must be doubted. Except for their modernist conclusions about the ancient world, of course. Which is amazing, considering that these guys weren’t there to see these ancient happenings. And so, their doubts must be doubted, at least by me. I have a saying about that; believe your beliefs and doubt your doubts, and don’t get the two confused. Now, let’s look at what’s really doubtful.

  I’ll give you a perfect example. Read the blurb on the back of the DVD from The History Channel entitled “The True Story of Troy” which claims to be about the Trojan War. The writer says, in all seriousness, “In this exciting program, archaeologists, literary detectives and military analysts journey to uncover evidence that mythology’s greatest war- and the fabled city in which it was fought- may have actually been real.”1 Well, duh! I’ve got a news flash for those guys- there’s tons of evidence that Troy existed, and that a war was fought. And the biggest four pieces of evidence have been around for thousands of years. They are known as The Iliad, The Odyssey, The Post-Homerica and The Aeneid. There’s also about a hundred other lesser known works from antiquity. These happen to be known, collectively, as the Epic Tradition, the canon of western civilization. Not that these ‘modern expert’ wizards would know anything about that though. But since these works weren’t copyrighted after 1963, they don’t appear on the modernist radar-screens.

  Would these modern ‘experts’ have us believe that the entire Greco-Roman civilization that lasted for over 3,100 years was actually organized and lived out in accordance with completely false s
tories contained in these works? Or that for nearly a thousand years The Iliad and The Odyssey were actually memorized by the bards of the ancient Greeks and transmitted orally, without any changes to speak of, to succeeding generations? For a millennium? Or did somebody just dream all this up and tell it to someone, and somehow it became a best-teller of all time (sorry, I couldn’t resist), without any basis in actual fact? Really? That thought, to me, is more bizarre than the ‘world on the back of the tortoise’ story! I’ll take the Iroquois or even the Hindu version of history before the modernist writers of The History Channel, any day.

  And so, whenever I come to a point in this narrative where someone wants to say ‘wait, the modernist historians don’t believe that…(fill in the blank, again)”, I know I’m on firm ground, because modernists are idiots. They have lots of degrees to be sure, but so do I, but they’re idiots nonetheless. They are usually found in academia or federal and state bureaucracies, and they closely resemble dachshunds. That’s right, Wiener-Dogs. Now don’t get me wrong, I have no problem with true scholars. There just doesn’t happen to be very many of them these days. True scholars approach issues and questions with an open but rational mind, and seek to learn the truth from historical fact. Scholarship died about 300 years or so ago, however, with the invention of ‘The Enlightenment’. That’s what led to Darwinian thought, which came to replace actual science, and people fell for the idea that things can actually morph from one kind of thing to another, DNA-be-damned. And that’s when scholarship morphed into ideology. And most professors morphed into Wiener-Dogs.

  These ‘Weiner-Dogs’ are genetic mutations that were bred for the amusement of the ruling class who laugh at them as they pathetically try to imitate real dogs. They can bark on command like true canines. But just match them against a greyhound or any old mutt in a fight or a race and watch what happens. And nobody but the Wiener-Dog really believes they’d last 30 seconds out in the wild, where real dogs come from.

  But Wiener-Dogs serve the purpose of their masters, who set them to barking at people who are conditioned to flinch at the sound of a real dog’s bark. But there is no real bite. Which, by the way, is why their masters bred them that way. Their masters, who bankroll the tax-exempt Foundations that fund ‘higher education’ research and textbooks, have no fear that their custom-bred Wiener-Dogs will ever actually bite the hand that feeds them. The difference between Wiener-Dogs and their breeders is that the breeders are classic and accomplished liars, but they don’t actually believe their own lies. The Wiener-Dogs actually do believe the lies the breeders tell them. Including and especially the one that says they are real dogs! And so, they take their place in the academic world to fulfill the role of faux sheep dogs, herding their students into the mind-set that will get them a passing grade. The truly compliant students get scholarships as well. The best get Oxford or Rhodes Scholarships. The rest get blue collar jobs, and live poor but relatively happy lives.

  But now, back to the evidence for Team #1, Judaism. We were talking about how their Historical Document (in the Torah-Old Testament) answers the basic questions of What, When and Where. Then we looked at how ‘modernists’ have a hard time dealing with the What, When and Where of anything before The Beatles.

  And when we get to the ‘How’ part, a lot of folks, modernist and otherwise, have a hard time with this Torah story, because the One who created it all in the Torah seems to have done it all out of thin air or less (ex nihilo). But hey, every story has to have a beginning- unless you’re Richard Dawkins, right? And rationally speaking (as in the study of physics and metaphysics), if the beginning of any ‘genesis’ story starts with something of a material nature that is already in existence, then we’re not really at the beginning, are we? So, to my mind, it makes sense that the world was created out of nothing. Besides, who wants to believe in the concept of a ‘God’ if that God can’t create ex nihilo (from nothing)? Who wants to believe in a wimpy God?

  But wait, you say. Doesn’t the Jewish Bible presume that the universe was created about 6,000 years ago? And don’t modern experts like Carl Sagan tell us that their research proves that the universe is hundreds of billions of years old? Yep. And don’t they point to things like the Grand Canyon and dinosaur fossils as proof? Yep. And aren’t they highly paid, by big organizations, thus proving they are experts? You got it. But there’s only one problem. A big one. A math problem, naturally. And that question is not ‘how old is the earth’, but rather, ‘where did the earth (and everything else) come from?’

  It’s pretty simple to me that if you can’t explain that point (which absolutely none of the experts can), you can’t explain anything. Don’t tell me you can know and measure something you can’t even define. And if you don’t know where something came from, you can’t predict where it’s going, let alone how long it has been around. And don’t give me that ‘it’s always been here’ crap, because that means it will always be here. And that means we’re back to the Hindu version of endless, repetitive cycles of birth and death, with no meaning attached, because there’s never any point where things end and a final accounting is made of every man’s life. And if you’re going to say that this version of life suits you, then all I can say is ‘give me your car keys and your wallet, turkey.’ Because if we’re back to Hinduism or Hindu-Lite (evolution), then like I said before, nothing matters. So it’s alright if I kill you and take your stuff, right? No? Make up your mind, Wiener-Dogs! What, you don’t like Barbarian Logic? Sorry, you can’t have it both ways.

  And so, I have to say that I like the Jewish version of creation, because it does, literally, explain where everything came from (nowhere), and when (a little more than 6,000 years ago), and how it came to be (God spoke, omnipotently).OK, I can see you’re still having trouble here with the ‘out of nothing’ part, right? So let me explain it, as a math problem. Actually, it’s physics, but never mind. Here’s how it works.

  Matter and energy are interchangeable, right? And a voice wave is energy, right? And energy can coalesce to matter, right? And vice versa (like a log that burns up), right? And in the Jewish Bible, God says he spoke into the ‘void’, right? And a void will have zero resistance (think of the principle of ‘ohms’, as in the electrical world) to energy or matter, right? In which case, if an all-powerful being speaks (all-powerfully) into a non-resistive space, the energy contained in the voice-wave can coalesce into matter, right? And, depending on what the speaker wanted (and how he shaped his original Word) he could make this creation appear to be anything he wants. It could even be something new that looks very old, from our perspective.

  There you go, Weiner-Dogs. Bark all you want, and it still doesn’t matter. Because this physics-friendly version answers both the question of ‘where did all of this stuff come from’ as well as ‘what does it all mean?’ And to top it all off, the Jewish story tells us that their God predicted (long before modern scientists got fat heads) that his wisdom would deliberately confound those who were wise in their own conceit. I’d say this explanation pretty well sums up the situation today. Especially when, as I have pointed out, modernists insist that they can explain everything except what really matters- and that is, where did ‘matter’ come from? And how? And why?

  So here’s how I see it; if you’re going to tell a story (e.g. the ‘historical document’), then you’ve got to have a beginning, and an ending too. That’s what the Jewish story has, and the Wiener-Dogs don’t. So nothing they say can be considered to be historical, let alone scientific, because they can’t answer the most basic question of all time, or even eternity. The Mosaic Jews can. So, having answered in the affirmative the question of whether original Judaism has a believable historic document, let’s now move on to the second criteria.

  Does Torah Judaism have an impressive

  history of prophesy and miracles? Yes.

  Let’s start with Noah and the Flood. Obviously, the God of the Jewish canon known to us as the Old Testament (or what the Jews call the Torah) mad
e a prediction that there would be a great flood, because Noah responded to this prophecy and survived it, enabling his descendant (Moses) to record the results in the OT. And there is also a record of a great flood story in almost every culture, regardless of the fact that these cultures in question were pagan. The Irish, the Sumerians, the Aztecs, the Hindus and many others all talk of such an occurrence. Many of these pagan nations even have historical documents or sagas that trace their origins back to a man named Noah. And interestingly enough, there is tons of archeological and geological data for a flood of worldwide proportions. That’s why you can find tropical plant fossils in the heights of the Himalayan Mountains. And if the flood was universal in scope, then there had to be a survivor to tell the story. And nobody else claims to have been the survivor(s), so the Jewish story is consonant with the physical evidence.

  Modernists, on the other hand, as they seek to understand this universal-flood data and culturally-common stories, can’t bring themselves to see such a cataclysmic event in any sort of a religious context. Then again, they can’t see anything in a religious context. We call this remarkable inability willful blindness. It’s a special talent bestowed primarily on the proud and arrogant. And it tells you that they have a predetermined agenda, because even though they claim to be empirically driven, they have already ruled out one whole set of possible explanations. Why? Simply because these explanations are religious in nature, whereas Weiner-Dogs aren’t religiously inclined. If you’re a real scientist, you don’t reject the data before you test it. That’s not a good way to run an experiment (or to pick an Operating System), guys.