Another zipper snapped off
in my hand ... this one on my green Newport hoodie, made in (you guessed it!)
China. Only had it for a year, which
should surprise exactly ... no one who has any familiarity with the absolute
junk China foisters on us with the full support of every politician out there,
may they all burn and rot in the bowels of ... so anyway, I found an Amazon
entry for a replacement full zipper hoodie ... called Joe’s USA! ... except for the small print that whispered that
Joe USA's entire product line was, I then learned, made in Honduras. “Joe’s USA”, my un-American ass.
It’s been a struggle,
opening Facebook every morning and reading nothing but non-stop crap. I don’t care what side people are on, I just
keep reading more and more insane political crap that stopped making sense a
year ago. I finally found some “safe” Facebook
pages to park on when I’m chatting with a friend, so as to ignore all of it.
Example: I have learned more about space travel,
post-modernism and “Aviation Technology” in the last six months than I had in
the last 20 years – can actually give you the names of different airliners;
discovered that the symbol of Egypt Air is actually Horus. (I absolutely love it - Who knew? Yay, Horus!!)
ANYTHING but American politics.
No, not even politics, it’s
just non-stop juvenile, brain-dead insanity.
And now, I don’t care what side you’re on – nothing you say at any point
will change anybody’s minds, so just GROW UP and SHUT UP! Everything you post is either a deliberate or
unintentional lie, so you are perpetuating this 3-ring circus that the 2016
election has turned into. In fact, this entire country needs an
intervention, at this point. The days
until this insane campaign is over can’t pass fast enough. Thus ends my 2016 Election rant for the day.
And Fall has set in. Any
hope we had for a warmer fall to make up for the chilly May and June has
wrapped itself in hoodies, flannel sweatpants, woolen knee socks and left
town. I have this sullen determination
not to turn the furnace on ... so, as I sit here with my teeth chattering,
grumbling at my perverse stubbornness ...
I would have changed the
title from “The Changing Heart” to the “Watchful Heart”, but that’s just
me. (Woke up to the Alfred Hitchcock Presents program; that’s what was airing at the
time).
Have just begun Asherah
and the Cult of Yahweh in Israel, Saul M. Olyan, Society of Biblical
Literature, Monograph Series,
(#34), Scholars Press, Atlanta,
Georgia, 1988.
What I like: he doesn’t start out like a Judeo-Christian-Islamic
defense lawyer (“Impossible!
Blasphemy! There is no other god
except ...!”), which is very refreshing.
Instead, he starts out with the various (and conflicting)
interpretations of Asherah and her relation first to Baal and to El and to
Yahweh. What I’ve learned: much like the christians swearing their
Paulian version of their cult is the only correct one; the Torah went through
much the same process of being politics-driven as opposed to anything
spiritual. Most christians have little
or no knowledge of the numerous variations of christianity that existed until
Rome took control and ruthlessly slaughtered adherents of the other
versions. Had nothing to do with whether
there might have been any truth in those other beliefs – as always, it was a
matter of who swung a meaner sword.
Since no one likes to look at the truth that their “correct” religious
beliefs only came about by means of grotesque slaughtering of entire towns ...
christians now believe their version is the only “correct” one for spiritual
reasons.
Same was true of the Torah –
Olyan makes a point of which schools of thought influenced which passages he
quotes. Christianity follows their
political choice, the Paulian sword – and Judaism, for the most part, adopted
the Deuteronomistic versions of the Torah, which were re-written after each
tragedy (the fall of Jerusalem, the Babylonian exile, etc.) to explain past
history. The exile, as an example – much
of the blather about their one god being a “jealous” one came after they had
been exiled, by way of explaining why such a horrible episode had happened to
them. You get together a bunch of
pissed-off guys who had just been driven from their homeland, and who buy and
sell women like cattle, and what else is their version of the Torah going to
sound like? The Queen of Heaven
disappeared from early judeo-christian-islamic books. They still don’t believe She ever actually
existed in their belief system. But She
did.
This really isn’t
contributing much to “C’era una volta”, and the origins of the Big Bad ... but
for that I’m reading The Gnostic Gospels: Adam, Eve, and the Serpent, The
Origin of Satan by Elaine H. Pagels (New York : Vintage Books, 1989,
c1988), but I was in the habit of reading that, unfortunately, when I was
laying on the beach, relaxing to the sound of the waves against the shore. Fall comes around ... I have to change my
reading habits.
So how do you resolve the
issue of fallen versus not fallen in the matter of heavenly beings? If you go
by the edicts of the medieval church, the only angels who are to be considered
legitimate and not fallen are those three archangels whose names appear
specifically in the Bible: Raphael, Gabriel, and Michael.
Of course, conspicuously,
these three also appear specifically by name within the sacred texts of another
culture entirely. In the Sumerian tale of Inanna’s descent into the Underworld,
Michael, Gabriel, and associates stand guard at each of the gates of hell.
Those three beings who would later be adopted as archangels into Jewish myth
appear as guardians who exact payment from the goddess before she may pass
through the various levels of the underworld in her attempt to reach the throne
of her sister, Ereshkigal.
The weird and wacky history
of earth’s bizarre religious traditions continues ...
