The Double Refuge ♒️ The Currents of Sumer

Introduction & Overview

Religion vs. Religions - Sums

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Religion vs. Religions

In this section I explore how early Mesopotamian thinking provides a context for Western understanding of religion, philosophy, and culture. I don’t argue that Judaism or Christianity comes only from Mesopotamia, for while the Jews borrowed numbers, language, narratives and culture, they veered away from Mesopotamian polytheism — as Jean Bottéro notes:

The authors of the Bible were […] very happy to receive new images and myths from outside their land, including from Mesopotamia, provided they could pour them into their own religious mold, adapting them to their religiosity and to their particular view of God. — Religion in Ancient Mesopotamia, 1998 (English translation by Teresa Fagan, 2001)

I do, however, argue that the Judaeo-Christian tradition has unnecessarily distanced itself from aspects of its own Mesopotamian ancestry. Using the Biblical scholar Peter Enns and the Assyriologist Jean Bottéro, I argue that the Judaeo-Christian tradition 1) is indebted to Mesopotamia on a deep, often unacknowledged level, 2) overestimates its originality to some degree, and 3) retains a sense of superiority and exclusivity that’s counter-productive.

This third point about exclusivity is difficult to make, given that so much of Judaism is based on its notion of a Chosen People and its claim to a unique monotheism, and given that so much of Christianity is based on its claim of being the elect or the saved ones, and on the claim that we can only reach the Truth by believing in Jesus. As a non-dualist who has great affection for my own European Judaeo-Christian heritage (which I see as far wider than doctrinal Christianity) I argue that the richness and depth of the Judaeo-Christian tradition has little to do with its vaunted exclusivity and its supposed superiority. To the contrary, I think that Christianity weakens itself, and alienates much of its key demographic, by insisting on its originality and exceptionalism.

Behind my argument is the notion that religion in general is more important than any particular religion. Against the superiority and exclusivity that infects Judaeo-Christian tradition, I argue that the attempt to connect with the cosmos, and with the divine, is a human aspiration that includes all religions, including a large variety of monotheistic, polytheistic, and philosophic types. I include open agnosticism here, since I don’t see it as atheism light, but rather as a form of thinking and feeling in which all sides of life are to be explored: science and reason are part of this spectrum, as are religion and mysticism.

Open agnostics want religion to be an open door rather than a hidden shrine. The a- in a-gnostic comes from its objection to the hidden, secret, occult, exclusive knowledge of the Gnostics. Christianity says that it’s opposed to this occult secrecy, yet it nevertheless indulges in it when it says that it alone has the key to the doors of Heaven, Eternity, Salvation, Grace, etc. Agnostics argue that Jesus could still be a personal saviour, and figures like Mary could still guide people to the Light, without all the grandiose claims.

Much of what I argue isn’t new. While I bring in the element of doubt, the idea that Christianity needs to be more open and humble has been around for a long time. We see it in the Romantics and Transcendentalists, and also in writers like Forster who are agnostic by default — that is, they would be more inclined to Christianity if it stressed its open mysticism rather than its rigid doctrine. Certainly, my thinking is in line with contemporary writers like Richard Rohr, who argues that the Universal Christ trumps dogma. The Universal Christ is the immanence of God throughout history — that is, not since the legendary Creation of 4004 BC, but since the Big Bang. The figure of Jesus is a more specific aspect of what should be a universal, dogma-transcending Christianity. Rohr writes the following in The Universal Christ: How a Forgotten Reality Can Change Everything (2019):

The essential function of religion is to radically connect us with everything. (Re-ligio = to re-ligament or reconnect.) It is to help us see the world and ourselves in wholeness, and not just in parts. Truly enlightened people see oneness because they look out from oneness, instead of labeling everything as superior and inferior, in or out. If you think you are privately “saved” or enlightened, then you are neither saved nor enlightened, it seems to me!

A cosmic notion of the Christ competes with and excludes no one, but includes everyone and everything (Acts 10:15, 34) and allows Jesus Christ to finally be a God figure worthy of the entire universe.

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Sums

My perspective is both agnostic and mystical in the sense that I doubt all claims of religious superiority, yet I find something valuable in all religions. This something may not be at its core explicable, yet it has as its outcome the promotion of concepts like love, sacrifice, charity, and fairness. I see no difference between an atheist doctor who sacrifices a fat pay check to work in the Congo and bodhisattvas and missionaries who devote their lives to help others.

As a non-dualist who welcomes doubt, I find it almost impossible to believe that one religion is the real or true religion. I think that instead of playing a zero-sum religious game, we ought to play a positive-sum game. I think we ought to get the most out of the variety on offer. In this way, we can see the depth and wisdom religion offers, yet avoid cutting ourselves off from sources of wisdom just because they don’t exactly match our own understanding of religion.

Too often adherents of Western religion see other religions as inferior and at times evil. One instance of this is the negative way Christians see the polytheistic religions and cultures of Mesopotamia. And yet Mesopotamia — comprised largely of Sumer, Akkad, Babylon, and Assyria — is the dominant religious, cultural, and linguistic landscape out of which the Judaeo-Christian tradition arises.

I’ll give one example of this to intimate the many examples I look at in this chapter. In the Mesopotamian story of The Flood, the high god Enlil is bothered by humans and decides to flood the Earth, yet the compassionate god Ea secretly tells Utnapishtim (later Noah) to build a giant boat. After the waters recede, Ea reprimands Enlil for his cataclysmic cruelty, suggesting that it would have been wiser to drown only the people who sinned — or better yet, forgive them:

“But you, the most sage of the gods, the most valiant, how were you able, so rashly, to decide on the Flood? Heap guilt only on the guilty, and sin only on the sinner! Or, instead of doing away with them, pardon them; don’t annihilate them; be merciful to them!”

Because the cuneiform script of the Ancient Mesopotamians was only deciphered in the mid-19th century, for 2,000 years we didn’t know about the Mesopotamian version of the Flood. Even when people refer to it today they don’t often highlight the positive details. For instance, they don’t observe how Ea represents a voice of dissent and compassion, one that questions the notion of a high god’s anger and violence — an anger we see in the Old Testament and in the shift away from that anger (toward mercy and Grace) in the New Testament.

"The Deluge," frontispiece to Gustave Doré's illustrated edition of the Bible, 1866. Based on the story of Noah's Ark, this shows humans and a tiger doomed by the flood futilely attempting to save their children and cubs. (from Wikimedia Commons)

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Historically, Christians accepted the negative Jewish view of the Mesopotamians, reducing them to stereotypes of crude paganism, and to a culture of iniquity (Bottéro challenges this view — see Currents of History). How else could we have arrived at an expression such as the whore of Babylon? (see The Whore).

KKK cartoon showing the Klan removing a woman from a beast. The woman represents the Papacy (the woman is wearing the Papal tiara) and compares the Papacy to the Whore of Babylon. 1925, Source: The Ku Klux Klan In Prophecy, 1925. Published by the Pillar of Fire Church in Zarephath. Author: Alma Bridwell White. (from Wikimedia Commons)

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A closer look reveals that Mesopotamia wasn’t only the birthplace of number systems and written script, but also legal codes, institutions, city-states, warfare, organized religion, astronomy, and a rich literature that’s at turns dramatic, poetic, epic, sociological, religious, and philosophical. Indeed, the first great epic in world literature, Gilgamesh, comes from the Sumer and Akkad of the third and second millennia BC. In it we find an adventurous tale of deep political, psychological, and philosophical insight, as well as, embedded within its final tablets, a version of the Flood that’s the basis of the account we find in the Bible (The Flood).

In getting at the disparity between a negative and a positive view of the Mesopotamian contribution to world religion and culture, I use the writings of Peter Enns and Jean Bottéro (The Exegete & the Philologist). In Zero & Positive Sums, More Zero Sum, Gaming Out, The Bounty of Sumer & Akkad, Friendly Gods, and Again, Minus 1 Plus 1 I argue that Enns opens up perspectives inside the Bible, yet he also plays a zero-sum game: he uses the Mesopotamians to show how the Bible is an improved and better version of religion. As an agnostic I have to be open to the possibility that he’s right, yet when looking at religion from a historical perspective (like that of Bottéro) causes and effects don’t always lead to improvement. The Judaeo-Christian notion that polytheism evolved into monotheism is especially fraught with difficulties.

In the realm of religion, as in the realm of literature, 1 + 1 seems a better formulation than -1 + 1. In the former, we end up with a greater sum, and in the latter we end up with nothing, having used one to cancel out the other. In doing so, we’ve engendered holy wars and crusades.

Agnostics, mystics, and students of comparative religion wonder why we bother playing a zero-sum game at all. Why not see all religions and philosophies as open for business, liable to be experienced, yet still facets of one larger Reality that no one can define? Who here is confident enough to say what exactly God means or what exactly God wants to tell humanity? Who has a balance so finely calibrated that they can weigh one sacred text against another? Who can weigh the value of Reason versus Religion, the demonstrable knowledge of science versus the hidden knowledge of gnosticism? The agnostic and the mystic find this impossible, and opt for a positive-sum rather than a zero-sum perspective.

After looking at zero versus positive sum theology, I sum up my arguments and introduce the final pages in Rewind & Fast-Forward. I then look at the question of sin, the afterlife, and forgiveness — in Grace: The Most Positive Sum, Myths of Sin & Divinity, & Post & Other Scripts. Finally, I conclude with The Return of Enlil, a short story in which I conflate 2022 BC and 2022 AD, and in which the anger of Enlil and the compassion of Ea play out in the context of the Ukraine War.

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Next: ♒️ Currents of History

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