Memories of winter’s challenges rise up to nourish me on these days, recollections of times when hardships were met and I was satisfied with my refuge, my larder, my conquest of the elements. In more distant times, I might have twisted strands of wool or linen and watched the wheel spin it to thread, or pounded clothes in a hot kettle for cleaning, or ground corn between stones to make coarse bread. I might have wrapped my children in animal skins and tied my own feet in fur before braving the cold for more wood, or brought the livestock into the other end of a rough cabin to keep them from freezing in the long nights.
How did I, of all my previous iterations, manage to occur here, now, where everything I need comes more or less effortlessly—the twist of a knob, click of a button, the turn of a key? A house with insulated walls and thick glass that keep in the warmth and allow me to watch frozen rain fall from gray-white clouds. What future embodiments of myself will wonder back on this time, and what will they know? What I don’t know. What I can imagine for better. Or worse.
I don’t have to figure it out. Anyway, I can’t. Better to turn to the pan and stir the soup, add another log to the fire, stand at the window longer and marvel at the shades of gray and rust among the trees of the woods, the white of the sky and ground. Soon the scene will explode in infinite shades of green and heat will soak the edges. I’ll be pleased then to remember this cold.
By two a.m. the fire in the woodstove had died down enough that the cold took over. Under heavy blankets and comforter, I could feel the temperature dropping in the house. The electric radiator in the bedroom is no match for six degrees, even with window curtains pulled tight.
A quick trip to the bathroom brought me shivering back to the bed. With the covers pulled up to my nose, I imagined myself not in this last century of modern comforts but rather in the earlier vast millennia of human existence. The cave, skin-covered hut or even the wooden long house would have been far colder, warmed only by open hearth fires and our breath. Heavy furs of mammoth or bear lay under and over us as we curled our knees to our chest and ducked our cold ears into the hidden warmth.
Fire tenders dragged long dead limbs further into the blaze and tugged their fur cloaks around their shoulders, watching as sparks flew into the air and ensuring the fire stayed in its place. Cabbages, apples, onions, and turnips rested in straw lined pits, safe from the cold, and around the perimeter of the shelter, chunks of meat sat semi-frozen, waiting to be brought to the flat rocks at the fire’s edge to drip fat and send up tantalizing aroma. Even then, as food cooked, as men dragged in more wood from the pile near the shelter’s door, we kept our furs tucked over us, waiting for spring.
In the long hours of midwinter night, sleep comes and goes. Fantastical dreams shift us from our known world, so that we fly into the future or past. I relived the death of a loved one and the loss resonated through me, and then magical knowledge enabled me to speed backwards in time with him until I found a new path, a year when a different choice meant longer life, and even before that, an even better restart. Our lives moved forward from there and when we came to the fatal day, he lived.
What was the magic? In the dream, I told myself I would remember. But I don’t. I remember that it was simple, that if I had let myself know what I really know, it would have been obvious. But it’s not. The rational mind is no friend in this.
Other visions of long sleep arise and fade, memories recast in distorted frames, possible futures emblazoned on unfamiliar horizons. The mysteries of embodiment tease around the edges, other forms, foreign memories. Deep in the warm thicket of my bed, I am free to fly away and see it all.
My feet find warm spots at the dog’s side, where the cat lies curled. A screech owl screams its cry at the wood’s edge. At the three a.m. passing of the train, its distant warning echoes up from the valley and sets the coyotes singing. At four-thirty, I’m awake again, fresh from another restive dream, and wondering if I should brave the cold to start new fire.
I wait, snuggled in all my wealth of warmth, finding one comfortable position, then another, until the night starts to lighten and the dogs go outside. Now the quick wood catches in its cove of dried twigs and crumpled newspaper, and the cast iron around it warms. I make tea, open the curtains to stare out at the pale blue and pink world of frigid dawn. Winter sets its own rhythm, and I am content to follow.
Yet again, or should I say, still, we the people are engaged in a religious war. One could argue that religious wars never really stop. Sometimes they go underground to simmer while parents exhort their children in the evils of their neighbors’ ways. But other times, like now, religionists strong arm their beliefs and opinions into public policy.
And that, my friends, is when the bloodshed inevitably begins. It was bad enough that the religious beliefs of your neighbors caused them to say insulting things about you, to sneer or, predictably, pray for your lost soul. Let their prayers rise to the heavens, calling upon their god to save them from the sins of their irreverent brethren.
How many gods are there? Over 5,000? 330 million? But of course only your god is real.
All of them exist in the sky, came to earth to kick-start humanity, taught us important skills, and told us how to honor Him. Well, Her in some cases. Those pesky extraterrestrials with their genetic manipulations, coming here to help us and leaving us to fail.
One source provides this following summary:
Redeeming God.com : All War is Holy War
Abrahamic:
Christians believe in one God, saints, and millions of angels. Muslims believe in one god called Allah. Judaism is also monotheistic.
Eastern:
Hinduism: I don’t know much about Hinduism but some Hindus I’ve met say there are millions of gods. Buddhists don’t really believe in a “god” in the classical sense
Jains and Shinto: animistic, believe in souls of non- living and animate things. Jains believe even insects, plants, fungi, and bacteria possess spirits. Shinto believe in 8 million “kami” inhabiting rocks, trees, rivers, etc.
Persian:
Not sure about Zoroastrianism. Baha’i’ appears to believe in one god. Native religions are often polytheistic.[1]
But of course that’s a drop in the proverbial bucket.
Even more fascinating is the idea, growing in acceptance, that the gods are nothing more or less than highly advanced being from other worlds. Archaeological evidence coupled with the mythologies of most religions provide excellent evidence for this theory. After all, they come from the sky and probably despair of our continuous reversion to animal behavior, from which they crafted us. Haven’t they gone to a lot of effort to instruct us?
But back to the more fantastical concept of magical beings.
Thanks to our mortal fear of things we don’t understand, we humans find ourselves subservient to one god or another, or fifty, in order to cope with our lives. We pray, fervently, when that wall of muddy water rises to our front porch, when our child burns up with fever, when the person we love dies, that our god will hear our prayer and save us. Never mind that the crisis at hand could have been prevented if a god was truly paying attention.
We join with others to pool our resources to build a church or temple so we can pray with others, hoping our joined voices somehow better penetrate the vast distance between our physical existence and the domain of our god(s). We pool even more resources in order to send our emissaries to other places to spread the good word about our god (who is of course superior to any gods those places might already know) in order to gain god’s favor.
Israel’s Homeland Security website
My god is better than your god.
Only believers in my god will enter the kingdom of heaven.
The kingdom of heaven—somewhere in the sky, the kingdom exists with its pearly gates and troops of glittering asexual angels. For Christians, Heaven is where Jesus Christ sits on the right hand of God while the Holy Spirit hovers effervescently around them. There is where you can exist in bliss for eternity if only you follow the rules set down by God. I won’t even try to go into the discrepancies and horrors enshrined within the pages of that many-times-edited document called the Bible, manipulated now for over 1700 years to fit the political whims of one ruler or another, ad infinitum.
Yes, as astute power brokers have long understood, religion is the key to controlling the masses. Through fear. Fear of your neighbor. Fear of disease. Fear of the great unknown, Nature in all her many ways of killing you or your children—flood, fire, earthquake, volcano, lightning, insects that consume your crops, wild animals that want you for dinner, accidents that leave you crippled. There is no end to the great unknowns. No end of things to fear.
Fear of GOD HIMSELF, a judgmental angry god who doles out death and destruction, an eternity in pain and suffering if you don’t follow his rules.
But your god is there, promising that if you only do x, y, and z, you will at least find surcease once you die. By then, of course, it’s too late to figure out it was all meant to keep you in thrall to the power structure with your tithes and contributions, your allegiance, your taking up arms to protect the power structure, your obeisance to the belief system.
Currently, the belief system for at least 74 million U. S. voters is an amalgamation of Christianity and pseudo-patriotic blather, worshippers of the earthly manifestation of their beliefs, Donald Trump. Incoherent as he may seem, he has managed to embody this confused belief system with his worldly embrace of excessive materialism, his adulterous affairs and marriages to women who can’t talk back, and his dishonorable thievery and abuse of countless workmen, friends, and professional associates.
The fear that drives Trump’s true believers is a new kind of fear. This fear is an addition to the traditional fear of Nature, disease, death, etc. The new fear is about incomprehensible technology and science that, on one hand, presents us with marvels like cell phones and the internet, and on the other hand, boggles our minds and bodies with demands we are mostly not yet evolved to endure.
It’s only been one hundred years since the majority of us lived our lives in the same patterns as we had for thousands of years. We tilled the land and cared for animals which in turn provided our food. We interacted with neighbors who were like us, who might have the skills to craft a plow or horseshoe, or who might teach our children to read. We scheduled our days by the season and the chores before us, washing our few clothes, grinding our grain, weaving our cloth. Those of us who lived in the cities might practice special trades, but the cities weren’t yet vast streams of headlights and towering structures of steel and glittering glass. Now suddenly we measure our time by the minute, steer our automobiles down the highways at 70 miles per hour, see on the television scenes of havoc and violence from places around the world.
We are not ready for this.
Battle Scene from 30 Years War, 1856 by Christian Sell
Mostly. The few among us who are ready, who embrace new ideas and new ways of living, are seen as the enemy. In fact, they are the future. They are evolving into the new humanity while the rest of us are doomed to die out.
The new people are different. They see the world as one community, the population as brothers. They accept the personal autonomy of women. They accept transgender and all forms of intimate interaction. They accept people of all colors. They accept that gods are not the answer. Rather, they embody the ultimate concept of any god’s primary teaching, that we must love each other and treat each other as we wish to be treated.
It is the Age of Aquarius.
In retreat from change, fearful people embrace what they know best, the violence enshrined in our past and its reactionary religions. Enemies, those who are Other, must be eradicated in order to protect self, family, and tradition. Random mass shootings are simply the enactment of this understanding.
This is a war that can only get worse as ‘leaders’ of the old beliefs increasingly harden their rhetoric in a craven attempt to bring glory and power to their misbegotten selves. Trump is only the figurehead for these rigid disciples. His inchoate mutterings satisfy the unspoken desire for an understandable past, when saddling a horse or following a plow were the only skills required. While these ‘conservatives’ take full advantage of the products of progress, everything from modern medicine to the use of secret internet groups where they can foment more hatred, they cannot grasp the tandem mindset, the mental/psychological trajectory of our evolution.
If only the ignorant could learn not to fear change. If only the dogmatic could understand the lessons of history. If only the evangelical Christians could see how their desire for a Christian nation mimics exactly the desires and objectives of the Taliban, the jihadists, and echoes the countless previous destructions of human life and civilizations in the name of their god.
~~~
“You cannot raise your children the way your parents raised you because your parents raised you for a world that no longer exists.” Mufti Menk
Senior year in high school included the long-feared ‘senior paper.’ A project of English class, the paper’s thesis had to be approved first then the long drudgery of research would begin. The paper itself, to be footnoted and typed, would form a significant part of the final grade in that class.
I was no stranger to research and looked forward to hours at the local library, which was located only a block from the high school. Unexplored wonders could be found in that quiet place, books on the history of the world and the various exploits of human kind. As I sought further information to prove my thesis, I jotted my notes on 4×6 index cards, another requirement for the project.
My thesis asked the question: Why did existential thought that existed throughout the history of mankind suddenly become an overwhelming condition of modern mankind?
The material I explored included Will Durant’s The Story of Civilization, James Gutman’s Philosophy A to Z, John Killinger’s The English Journal, and a long list of citations from the Bible as well as ancient writings from world cultures. In reading these materials and processing the information into a coherent statement in proof of my thesis, I realized that much of what I had come to believe in my eighteen years was right: Christianity—indeed, all organized religion—was a construct of humanity meant to salve our existential despair.
The difference with the modern age, as so clearly delineated in philosophical examination, is/was that by the very process of advancing civilization, humans have cut themselves off from key partnerships that once provided balm to our woe: Nature, tribal life, our gods, and ourselves, the latter with our frenetic pace and endless amusements. With these alienations, we find ourselves utterly alone, a condition so difficult that we endlessly seek escape in intoxicants, entertainment, and work.
The paper earned me an “A.” I packed it away along with the notecards in their little clasp envelope. I’ve always remembered the paper and the education I gained in my research, but I never looked at those cards again. If the question ever arose, I would have guessed they had been tossed out a long time ago.
Not so. My mother saved them, and they once again entered my domain when a few years ago she handed me a couple of boxes crammed with souvenirs of my life—photographs of junior high and high school friends, letters home from California or the Philippine Islands, clippings of my various public activities through the years. And the notecards.
At first, I picked up the small packet of cards not knowing what it contained. On the outside, at some point my mother had written “Denele’s – what helped her turn away from God!”
Well.
Yes, insomuch as I indeed turned away from the Church of Christ’s concept of God, this project helped. But what my mother could never grasp is that I had been questioning God, or more to the point, religion in general, since age five. By eight years of age, I had settled on key questions no one wanted to answer, typical questions for young people such as ‘Where did God come from?” and “Who did Adam and Eve’s children marry?” The answer always condensed down to “Don’t ask.”
Fast forward six or seven decades while I continued to read and question and discover. I have no regrets that I discarded the blinders imposed by my parents’ fundamentalist faith. I’m happy that my curiosity led me to explore philosophy, natural history, and science with the many mysteries of human existence. What makes me sad is that even today parents still seek to limit their children’s exposure to knowledge that exists outside the boundaries of their rigid belief systems or which violates the dogma of their faith.
For example, I once lamented the limited extracurricular activities available at the small rural school my children attended, pointing out that so many opportunities were being lost. Where was the encouragement to attend college, learn music or art, explore the wonders of the world? The response from one parent actually struck me speechless. “Well, honey, somebody’s got to flip the burgers,” she said, fist propped on her hip. “What about that?”
Indeed, what about that? How tragic that her children and so many others would be trapped in that mindset.
The price of limiting the thinking of our children is immeasurable. We see it every day in intolerance even hatred for anyone different, whether ethnic, racial, or gender differences. We see it in embrace of authoritarian figures like Trump who fit a distorted concept of leadership based on an authoritarian god. We see it in the fear of change that leads to violence against those perceived as ‘Other.’
Frans Hals – Portret van René Descartes, Wikipedia
Much of what is written on those cards is nonsensical taken in isolation, like quotes from Heidegger’s book Being and Time (1927) about the two kinds of being, “Sein” meaning all things, and “Dasein” meaning only mankind. Or the postulation of Descartes in his 1637 Discourse on the Methodwherein he wrote: Ego Ergo Sic, or “I am, therefore I am thus,” or more widely conceived as “I think, therefore I am.” Pondering these kinds of concepts is not easy and tends to take oneself out of the hum of routine. And away from the strict belief systems of doctrines undergirding religion.
What my mother exclaimed in her quickly penned remark about my notecards is true. Those learning experiences helped me abandon religion entirely. Another big step on that path was a college course in English Bible, where the three authors of the Books of Moses were examined with comparisons of material in Genesis to the Sumerian books of Gilgamesh—and much more. It’s been a lifelong study, full of empathy for others who, like me, struggle with the very essence of existence, remarked by feminist French philosopher Simone de Beauvoir in her book The Ethics of Ambiguity (1948):
“The sub-man is not very clear about what he has to lose, since he has nothing, but this very uncertainty re-enforces his terror. Indeed, what he fears is that the shock of the unforeseen may remind him of the agonizing consciousness of himself. …Everything is a threat to him, since the thing which he has set up as an idol is an externality and is thus in relationship with the whole universe; and since, despite all precautions, he will never be the master of this exterior world to which he has consented to submit, he will be constantly upset by the uncontrollable course of events.”
For de Beauvoir, freedom comes in the act of trying to be free and accepting that this journey is the freedom.[1] Freedom to believe, to act, to question, to reach out to others in individual acts of kindness—these fulfill us in myriad ways that counter the existential despair of modern life. Understanding that, and the awareness that our personal journey is best seen as an opportunity to make the world a better place, has helped me live a rich life.
I thank the notecards. I thank the Founding Fathers for enshrining my freedom of thought within the Constitution. And I thank my parents and ancestors for giving me the intelligence, if not the freedom, to choose.
A particular mindset thrives within certain layers of the evangelical set, that a person is merely a pawn of God’s wishes and the Devil’s intent. The disciplining of children, for example, is pursued not as a punishment for bad deeds, but as a casting out of demons who have, for inexplicably malevolent reasons, infested the immediate presence of that child and forced him/her to do bad things.
So it comes as no surprise that Josh Duggar’s defense team would come up with a far-fetched concept that staggers the imagination. Not that Duggar himself, or perhaps one of his equally delusional siblings, inlaws, or—possibly his parents, paragons of evangelical ineptitude—might have been the one who struck upon this brilliant scheme. The key point in his defense was: It wasn’t Josh who secreted his way into the dark web to view babies and young children being defiled in abhorrent scenes of the most depraved form of pedophilia. No, it wasn’t Josh at all!
The person(s) responsible for those videos and images tracked on his work computer and personal Apple device were mysterious strangers who fiendishly crept into his hard drive, manipulated all the right layers of interface, and planted that stuff in there just to hurt poor Josh and, by extension, the rest of his righteous family. Because we all know that True Christians are always persecuted, falsely accused, and otherwise made to suffer the slings and arrows of the world. It’s a story as old as, well, the New Testament, at least.
Government prosecutors asserted that Duggar had installed Linux systems where he worked at the family car lot in order to evade the “accountability” application that would notify his wife if he tried to access sites showing child molestation. Witnesses for the prosecution stated that Duggar has questioned them about installing a Linux system as early as 2010, with the intention of evading the restrictions.
The key defense witness, Michelle Bush, a digital forensics expert, admitted under prosecution questioning that she had never been trained on a Linux system or the Torrential Downpour software used in investigating Duggar’s case. She also agreed that the installation of Linux on the computer at Duggar’s used car lot had to have been done by someone at the car lot, not remotely as Duggar’s defense tried to claim. Furthermore, she admitted that a thumb drive could not have been plugged into that computer unless a person was present at the car lot to plug it in.
Further questioning of Ms. Bush confirmed that the bookmarked Hidden Wiki site found in these computers was frequently accessed specifically for viewing child exploitation sites. She also agreed that multiple applications were found on both the car lot’s computer as well as Duggar’s personal Apple devices, and there were no files or evidence of remote access to those systems.
Despite the utter absurdity of this attempted defense, attorneys for Duggar really had no other option. Their client has a long history—at least since he was fourteen years old—of being a pedophile. Many evangelicals who hung on every episode of the long running television series enshrining the Duggars’ reproductive excess utterly rejected the idea that he was a pedophile even after he admitted that he had regularly crept into his sisters’ bedroom to fondle them while they slept.
Oh, they said, he just made a mistake. He’s sorry.
That there could be some scientific understanding of pedophilia evaded the consciousness of Jim Bob and Michelle Duggar whose firstborn child first confessed his attraction in early adolescence. In keeping with the typical evangelical denial of science in general, their response included a lot of prayer to cast out those quirky demons and to ask divine forgiveness. Ultimately, when his continued indulgence in his perversion pressed their hand, the solution was to send Josh off to do hard manual labor in the company of another evangelical.
That worked well.
Savaoph God the Father, 1885-96, Mikhailovich Vasnetsov
Legitimate treatment of pedophilia might include cognitive-behavior therapy such as relapse-prevention therapy, aversion therapy, and other forms of psychotherapy (conditioning approaches, behavior skills training, social skills, empathy training, and trying to address the underlying sexual arousal pattern) as well the use of drugs to affect androgen levels or serotonin inhibition. Treatments for obsessive-compulsive disorder have also been shown to be effective in treating pedophilia.
Some might have privately suggested the quite effective old-fashioned method of treatment: castration.
No treatment will be effective if the pedophile does not want treatment. As long as Josh Duggar lives within a cloud of denial, he will not stop craving child molestation. Sadly, there’s little chance that he will find his way out of that cloud. It exists all around him, in his parents, his siblings, and in the greater community of evangelical believers who see themselves as pawns to God’s will or Satan’s.
There is some evidence that pedophilia may run in families, though it is unclear whether this stems from genetics or learned behavior. A history of childhood sexual abuse is another potential factor in the development of pedophilias, although this has not been proven.
According to mental health studies, “some experts propose that the causes are neurodevelopmental. Differences in the brain structure of pedophiles have been noted, such as frontocortical differences, decreased gray matter, unilateral and bilateral frontal lobe and temporal lobe and cerebellar changes,” according to mental health specialists.
“Pedophilia could be a byproduct of other co morbid psychiatric diseases. These brain abnormalities may have been formed by abnormal brain development. However, post-traumatic stress disorder also causes these types of brain abnormalities. Traumatic experiences in the pedophile’s early life could have caused this atypical development. Other neurological differences found in pedophiles included lower intelligence levels and the lower the intelligence level, the younger the preferred victim.
“Some pedophiles were also found to have chromosomal abnormalities. Out of 41 men studied, seven of them were found to have chromosomal abnormalities, including Klinefelter syndrome, which is a condition in which a male will have an extra X chromosome in their genetic code.
“The environmental factors involved in pedophilia must also be considered. There is much controversy over whether or not being sexually abused as a child causes that child to grow up to be a sexual abuser. Statistics do weigh out indicating, that in general, more people who abuse children as adults were abused themselves as children.”[1]
Cornelis Galle I, “Lucifer” (c. 1595)
Whatever the reason for Josh Duggar’s sexual perversion, it is most certainly not that “the Devil made him do it.” It is possible that other members of his family suffer similar mental health issues but have been more successful in keeping them secret. It is possible—even likely—that one or more of his children have been the target of his obsession. As noted in mental health studies of this affliction, pedophiles feel that they ‘love’ their victims and believe that the victims enjoy the interaction.
Clearly Josh Duggar’s parents, Jim Bob and Michelle, are not “normal” in their sexual proclivities which urged them to keep producing children far beyond what might be considered a healthy number, even past the point when doctors were warning Michelle not to become pregnant again after, at age forty-three, her nineteenth child required a Caesarian delivery. At forty-five, she miscarried her 20th pregnancy. Again, this is the mindset that the individuals themselves bear no responsibility for the outcome. In other words, having unprotected sex doesn’t make babies, God does.
It follows that when one believes that sex itself is not to be indulged unless one intends to produce children, one might end up with lots of children. Simple.
Medieval thinking is comfortable for those who don’t have the capacity to think for themselves and for those who have been convinced early in life that thinking somehow insults God. Science has long shown that disease and natural disasters are not, in fact, a punishment sent by the Invisible Almighty, but rather the result of natural forces like bacteria, viruses, and weather/geology. But to understand science, a person needs the capacity and will to learn about cells, bacteria, and tectonic forces which, to many, is simply an insurmountable task. Much easier is willful ignorance dressed up like God’s will and the intercession of demons.
Until the insidious impact of religious and home schooling is interrupted by enforced teaching of science, this plague of irresponsible stupidity will continue alongside inevitable fallout such as pedophilia in denial.
Bawd, tart, hussy, jade, libertine, sport, soiled dove – familiar terms among many for women who sell the use of their bodies. Shockingly enough, Fayetteville had them. But no one talked about it, probably because the town fathers and university powers feared that parents across the state might not send their sons and daughters to school here if this particular element was known to exist. But it did exist, and finally in 1935 the news exploded onto the front pages of the newspaper.
“Fayetteville’s Immoral Houses” is just one of nine articles exploring local history collected in the new release, Second Glimpses of Fayetteville’s Past.
Chapter 1 – New! Daguerreotype was the first form of photography, and Washington County had several daguerreotype professionals in the years before the Civil War. The story follows Anderson Frieze and documents others in this image-making profession circa 1850-1880.
Chapter 2 – The Yoes family was one of the first to settle in Washington County. The story follows them from the time of their immigration from Germany through three generations. Some of this information was previously in various parts in The West Fork Valley: The West Fork of White River, Arkansas, Its Environs & Settlement before 1900.
Chapter 3 – This award-winning article about Jesse Gilstrap tracks his travel to the gold fields of 1850 California, his inventions and millwright operations in south Washington County, and his efforts on behalf of the Union during the Civil War. Published in 2018, Flashback.
Chapter 4 – This article delves into the murder of a prominent businessman on a downtown Fayetteville sidewalk. Why did these two men — brothers in law — come to such a crisis? A greatly abbreviated version of this story appeared in Murder in the County: 50 True Stories of the Old West.
Chapter 5 – New! “The Final Abuse of Ann Jarvis” recounts the horrific murder of a wife and mother in a case of extreme domestic violence and mental illness.
Chapter 6 – New! “Fayetteville’s Immoral Houses” uncovers the previously hidden world of prostitution in Fayetteville.
Chapter 7 – This exposé of an auto theft ring operating in Fayetteville in the 1930s portrays a man’s attempt to entangle the city attorney and the police chief in his foil. Previously appeared in Flashback.
Chapter 8 – New! Circuses drew enormous crowds through the 19th and early 20th centuries, even to locations like Fayetteville whose population at the time of the first circus was less than 1,000 people.
Chapter 9 – The story of the Brumfields and their fated dream to build Fayetteville’s Downtown Motor Lodge tracks the rise and fall of that dream to the vacant lot that scars Fayetteville’s downtown today. Appeared previously in Flashback.
Great reading for cold winter days ahead! Also makes a good gift for any of your history-lovin’ friends. Order now! Amazon
Recently in discussing the role of religion in wars over the centuries, my sister wrote:
“The Jewish people conquered and obtained land, because God told them to. He kept his word to Abraham, telling him he would give his descendants that land, though it took hundreds of years. He said plainly in his word that it wasn’t due to the goodness of the Hebrews, but as a punishment to the nations there, due to their unacceptable practices…”
I wrote back:
Surely you realize that the claim that ‘God told us to do it’ is an entirely self-serving justification for whatever the Jews wanted to do. The Old Testament, written by Jews, is full of their violent behavior, not only by conquering tribes in order to seize the lands, but in admonitions like ‘an eye for an eye’ and other aspects of their primitive early laws.
By the way, if you ever want to know how the Israelis got a lot of their Old Testament stories–especially the creation stories–check out Sumerian history recorded on clay tablets. The Sumerian civilization predates the rise of Jewish tribes by at least a thousand years. Tribal people who would become Israel lived in the hills around early Sumerian cities and adopted much of the Sumerian mythology. Here are a few of the Biblical stories that are copied from earlier Sumerian beliefs:
In the beginning, there was chaos (Enuma Elish–Sumerian story of creation)
Chaos was transformed to order (Enuma Elish)
God/gods created all things (Enuma Elish)
Light existed before the creation of the sun and moon (Enuma Elish)
God/gods were displeased with humanity and decided to destroy humanity via the flood (Epic of Gilgamesh, Eridu Genesis, and the Epic of Atrahasis)
The flood (Sumerian kings list)
One man and his family survived the flood (Gilgamesh, Enkidu, and the Netherworld)
Those on the Ark opened a window near the end of the journey sending birds as scouts
Food and drink can give eternal life (Adapa)
After the flood, this one man gave thanks to his God
The early settlers in Mesopotamia were of one speech (Enmerkar and the Lord Aratta)
The language was confused (Enmerkar and the Lord Aratta)
Migration originated from those who survived the flood
The Sumerians knew the concept of eternal life in paradise and were seeking it (Gilgamesh, Enkidu, and the Netherworld)
Part of the preserved clay tablet record of Sumeria
But I’m off topic. I deviated into that to explain why I have zero faith in the Jewish idea that they were God’s chosen people. They were just a scrappy little fringe tribe that came together around an adopted mythology and used violence to take what they wanted.
Warmongering and violence inflicted by the Jews is part and parcel of their history. Consider when God instructs King Saul to attack the Amalekites: “And utterly destroy all that they have, and do not spare them,” God says through the prophet Samuel. “But kill both man and woman, infant and nursing child, ox and sheep, camel and donkey. When Saul failed to do that, God took away his kingdom. In modern terms, God was demanding genocide of an entire people.
But then, the Old Testament idea of God included wiping out all of humanity because God was offended by sin. According to the Epic of Gilgamesh, the gods who set up the great flood were offended by the NOISE.
Similar edicts by God urged the ‘utter destruction’ of the Canaanites when the actual motivation for Jews was to take over Canaan instead of continuing to live in the mountainous regions where few crops could thrive. i.e.–the Jews wanted the land and they’d do whatever it took to get it including slaughtering as many Canaanites as necessary including women and children.
Part of a new print ad for Henry guns; a new TV commercial plays up the brand’s origins as made in the United States. From The New York Times, “My Rifle, My Bible and Me” by Stuart Elliott, Sept 17, 2009
Yes, the New Testament claims certain teachings of Christ were meant to limit or eradicate the old ‘eye for an eye’ mindset of the Old Testament. “Do not repay evil with evil or insult with insult. On the contrary, repay evil with blessing, because to this you were called so that you may inherit a blessing,” for example. But I’m pretty sure that while this idea sounds good in church, in reality many Christians today are among the first to hoard guns and exert deadly force when they feel they are threatened. It is Christians who pray over a campfire then turn around and start killing Afghans, or Syrians, or whoever else they decide to improve or challenge in their native lands!
Or, on a lesser more pathetic scale, pray in a huddle to win a football game before trotting onto the field to physically assault one another.
To me, even going into places to evangelize — teaching the ‘pitiful heathens’ about God — is a form of violence. There are tribes who existed for thousands of years in peace, living off the land and worshiping in their own way, now told that their beliefs are all wrong and they must adopt this new religion in order to be ‘saved.’ Suddenly they become caught up in a war of dogmas–Islam vs Christianity, mostly, although in India and Myanmar for example, the conflict is between Buddhism and Islam. Africa right now is an absolute nightmare of warring tribes operating under the flag of Islam or Christianity, a situation I blame entirely on Christian missionaries who were so arrogant to believe that undermining tribal traditions with this new religion could ever turn out well.
While we can agree that Islam is often the birthplace of radical sects pursuing jihad in the name of their religion, we can’t escape the long history of equally abhorrent behavior by Jews and Christians. I mean, all you have to do is read through the Old Testament to see the countless times that the Jews use “God said” to justify their aggression against other people who possessed lands or other resources the Jews wanted. According to the pope, God said Christian crusaders should invade the Middle East and exterminate the ‘infidels’ (Muslims) who had occupied Israeli (Canaanite) lands for 500 years. The latest version of this mindset is before us today–Israel has not only taken most of the land away from Palestinians, but continues to attack and kill those who protest and move forward with taking more land–bulldozing homes, orchards, and gardens to drive out Palestinians. The situation in Israel is infuriating to any neutral observer.
I think this kind of attitude of ‘God said’ and its subsequent use to justify aggression both in personal dealings and in national ones, is an underlying cause of the hatred directed toward Jews over the centuries. At the end of WWII, sympathy for the Jews after Hitler’s holocaust led Western powers to grant Jews a place of their own by taking a SMALL PART of Palestine to create Israel. Jews had not ‘owned’ a homeland since around 600 AD, so it’s hardly a matter of giving back what had been theirs any time recently. What other place on earth takes land away from its current occupants and gives it to people who lived there 1,400 years ago? This came about due partly to a strong Zionist movement among the Jews living in places like the U.S. as well as Christian fundamentalists eager to facilitate the predictions of Revelations. *sigh*
Here’s what the Jews have done with that:
Finally — here’s a hilarious take on the situation with the land now mostly called Israel. https://vimeo.com/199418954
Sibling response to this email? Silence.
And that’s fine, because a) there is no reasonable response, b) we’ve argued about this for decades, and c) they do not have interest in challenging the belief system in which they’ve been brainwashed since birth. They’re comfortable with what they believe. How I escaped is beyond my comprehension, but I am thankful for it. I’m especially encouraged that nearly one out of three people in the U.S. today share my disgust with religion and the evil it often perpetrates.
Yanomami, Brazil [https://www.survivalinternational.org/articles/3162-yanomami-botanical-knowledge]
On first glance, it seems as though people descended through Western European ancestry are, by far, superior to people of color, those primitive folks who lived in tribal groups as hunter-gatherers in Africa, Australia, and the Pacific Islands—and American Natives. Let’s not leave out those strange people from Asia whose skin color isn’t exactly white. None of them look like us with our pale skin, light colored hair, and elegant facial features.
We are, after all, the ones who invented the marvels of our modern age from electricity to computer chips. It’s been the Americans and other Western Europeans, the penultimate of PIE western expansion and ingenuous invention, who have won the wars with our aircraft carriers and jets, sent men to walk on the moon, and just met the latest challenge from the viral netherworld to invent vaccines to conquer COVID-19. What more evidence do we need?
That’s the first and only consideration given to such a question by those who want—need—to believe they are superior. It was this thread of ancestry that supported Hitler’s quest to create a ‘pure’ Aryan race, thereby justifying the horrors of the Holocaust.
A second glances pulls back the curtain to reveal much more.
In truth, what white Indo-European descendants have created would not exist were it not for the earlier works of other cultures. The modern world and its many marvels exist not because of white supremacy but rather as a result of all cultures of all times.
It was the Sumerians (Iraq, Mesopotamia) who developed number systems, the wheel, a set of laws, and invented the earliest writing.
“Scholars now recognize that writing may have independently developed in at least four ancient civilizations: Mesopotamia (between 3400 and 3100 BCE), Egypt (around 3250 BCE), China (1200 BCE), and lowland areas of Southern Mexico and Guatemala (by 500 BCE).
“…The Phoenician alphabet is simply the Proto-Canaanite alphabet as it was continued into the Iron Age (conventionally taken from a cut-off date of 1050 BCE). This alphabet gave rise to the Aramaic and Greek alphabets. These in turn led to the writing systems used throughout regions ranging from Western Asia to Africa and Europe.[1] [Phoenicia was located in Lebanon (Middle East) from about 1100 to 200 BCE.]
Black eggshell pottery of the Longshan culture (China, c. 3000–2000 B.C.E.)
Most of the foundations of modern science appeared first in China and/or the Middle East, neither of which were white people. In Babylon, successor to Sumer in the lands of modern Iraq, medical practices, metallurgy, animal anatomy, and astronomy were documented as early as 2000 BCE. Egypt developed astronomy, medicine, and mathematics including geometry as well early concepts in neuroscience and in the empirical method of scientific study. By the first century BCE, the Chinese had advanced the use of decimals and fractions, kept records of astronomical events such as sunspots, supernovas, and eclipses, and are credited with a long list of other discoveries and inventions including gunpowder which, upon discovery by Western explorers in the early Renaissance, were lifted wholesale into Western cultures.[2]
While Islamic achievements between 786 and 1258 CE encompassed a wide range of advancements, especially in astronomy, mathematics, and medicine, white people of Western Europe lived in fortified tribal encampments, waged war with swords, and did not read or write except in cryptic runes or enclaves of monks using the remnants of Roman literacy.[3] These earliest non-white cultures advanced the inventions of Greece and Rome.
Hindu-Arabic numerals, set of 10 symbols—1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 0—that represent numbers in the decimal number system. They originated in India in the 6th or 7th century and were introduced to Europe through the writings of Middle Eastern mathematicians, especially al-Khwarizmi and al-Kindi, about the 12th century.
Western Europe’s invasion of Latin America brought diseases which wiped out nearly 90% of the native population, with the remainder subjugated into slavery to see their religious texts burned and accumulated wealth loaded onto ships bound for Europe. Yet before this invasion by the Catholic Spanish and Portuguese into Central and South America, the native cultures there had developed some of the world’s most advanced mathematical and astronomical expertise, calendars that equal anything invented so far, and agricultural refinements that produced corn, peppers, squash, potatoes, and tomatoes along with many of the bean types in popular use today.
An artistic recreation of The Kincaid Site from the prehistoric Mississippian culture as it may have looked at its peak 1050–1400 CE.
The myth perpetuated by such invasions, including the stories taught to generations of white Indo-European descendants in the United States, is that the Native tribes of our lands were uncivilized people who benefited from the teachings of European religion, speech, and cultural traditions. But for over 15,000 years before European diseases killed tens of thousands of them and deliberate genocide killed thousands more, Natives had lived quite well on this land, following their spiritual practices and developing extensive trading routes. Their general philosophy encompassed “harmony with nature, endurance of suffering, respect and non- interference toward others, a strong belief that man is inherently good and should be respected for his decisions.”[4]
Just as with the so-called primitive cultures in Africa, Australia, the Pacific Islands, and—closer to home—the Natives of the Americas, the civilizations they built did not wipe out their forests or pollute their rivers and air. They enjoyed communal life, unlike modern America where hardly a day passes without a mass shooting by frustrated Indo-European males who cannot go off ‘a-Viking’ to loot and plunder. The longing for a return to the violent ways of medieval ancestry is reflected in everything from the hue and cry over gun ownership to the rabid insurrection of January 6, 2021, when men carried Confederate flags symbolizing their supremacy.
Today, those finding unacceptable differences among persons wishing to make their homes in the United States (and other Western European countries of PIE descent) chose to discriminate not only for skin or hair color but also for religion, cultural practices, and even styles of dress. This is not new. As noted in a recent article in The Atlantic, “the United States has never been a “diverse nation of immigrants,” a phrase that first appeared in the national dialogue in the late 1890s. The U.S. has consistently favored immigration by Northern Europeans (PIE DNA) and, since 1882, has “deported more than 57 million people, most of them Latino.”[5]
Like so many other revelations resulting from modern science, DNA research clearly reveals that behaviors ascribed to our white ancestry are not in fact hardwired into our minds.
“Further studies finally debunked race as a biological marker for humans for two key reasons. First, we cannot distinguish a “white” person, for example, from a “black” person by looking at their genetics, alone. Skin color is determined by a number of genes, and so even if a certain set of genes suggests someone may have dark skin, an entirely separate set of genes could also make their skin lighter. In addition, humans are so mixed that any physical features that may have arisen, such as height or skin color, do not clearly “belong” to one group of people. Moreover, the traits we might see in a particular white person — blond hair, blue eyes, light skin — are not grouped together in our DNA. In other words, many characteristics that we consider as racial traits are not inherited as a fixed combination. Having light skin has nothing to do with one’s having blue eyes (or being tall, or liking math, for that matter).”[6]
The evidence is clear that racism is not an inheritance based on our DNA but rather a choice taught by parents or cultural institutions and perpetrated by those who refuse to learn. Increasing numbers of white men and women of Indo-European ancestry have evolved to accept all humans as equals and embrace progressive reforms that overcome earlier, prejudiced views. Of the 255,200,373 Americans eligible to vote in 2020, only 159,633,396 actually cast a ballot (66.3%). Of those, supporters of an entrenched Indo-European view gained 46.9% and the progressives gained 51.3%, neither of which is a majority of the nation’s eligible voters. In the greater eligible voter population, only 32% voted for Biden and only 29% voted for Trump.
The slow trend toward an increasingly evolved view of the world based on science and acceptance gives hope that human intelligence can overcome the ancestral influence of PIE DNA’s long traditions. But only if we try.
Typical Western European/American representation of Jesus Christ as a white man with light hair and blue eyes
If we track the roots of Western civilization to its earliest evidence in language and genetics, we find that our language and other markers of our ancestry track the spread of the Proto-Indo-European (PIE) language from its roots in the Eurasian steppe circa 4,500 years ago. This expansion can be traced through word relationships as well as commonalities of myth and religion, but also through similarities in social behaviors. From Bronze Age Greeks, Indo-Iranians, and Anatolian (Hittite) people, this cultural thread weaves through Iron Age Indo-Aryans, Iranians and, most importantly for our consideration, European groups including Celts, Germanic peoples, Italic peoples, and other Western European populations.
Recent DNA analyses of these populations support the theory of PIE migration and conquest over earlier human settlements.[1] By the Middle Ages, ancient Indo-European traditions, myths, and languages had reached Scandinavian cultures and spread across medieval Europe. Genetic information shows that certain characteristics currently attributed to European ancestry such as blue eyes first appeared in the genetic record around 13,000 to 14,000 years ago in Italy and the Caucasus. Light skin is less easily tracked as a genetic factor but researchers believe this feature spread through Western Europe between 19,000 and 11,000 BCE (Before Current Era). Other physical characteristics also follow this migration, including taller height and blond hair.
This movement from east to west parallels the penetration of farming practices into hunter-gatherer populations. Farming required settling into one location to oversee the planting, cultivation, and harvesting of farmed crops, meaning that people were able to accumulate more worldly goods which in turn led to inequalities as well as the need to determine paternity of children who might inherit such goods. Social rules proliferated to govern communal norms including the sexual behavior of women.
Migrations that spread PIE language and culture
By around 3500 BCE, people of the PIE traditions had domesticated the horse, adapted the wheel to chariots and wagons, and begun herding food animals such as cattle. The growth of grazing herds led to conquest of neighboring lands to expand grazing space. Increasing use of metals for weaponry (copper, bronze, iron) alongside war chariots pulled by domesticated horses led to the rise of empires from Greece and Rome to the European colonialism that shaped the modern world starting in 1500s. Just like their PIE ancestors, early Western civilizations seized power by conquering bordering indigenous populations and usurping any natural resources native to those lands.
Operating in the arrogance of supremacy, or the ‘might-makes-right ideology,’ expansionists viewed the world as theirs for the taking. If the tools of conquest could overcome native defenses, then it was conveniently considered a God-given right to take whatever the natives might have, not limited to their possessions and lands but also their very lives. Enslaved to their new masters, conquered people endured the various brutal labors required of empire building whether mining lead, tin, or salt or building roads, temples, and coliseums where even more slaves could be forced to ‘entertain’ their masters with fights to the death.
Rising from the ashes of the vast Roman Empire, by 1500 CE, Western European powers traveled the world, spiking their nation’s flags into new lands to claim it for king and country. During the next five hundred years, Spain ‘discovered’ the so-called New World. France, Great Britain, Portugal, and Holland (Netherlands) quickly joined the land grab, swooping in to establish their own satellites in the Americas and then around the globe. Most of these conquered people were people of color, therefore automatically considered inferior and suitable for genocide or enslavement.
Ironically, all these Western European powers were themselves shaped by invasions by outsiders, virtually all of which were also PIE cultures. For example, after the Celts penetrated the British Isles sometime around 2000 BCE, continuing waves of foreign invaders included the Romans (circa 55 BCE); Germanic Angles, Saxons, and Jutes (circa 400-500 CE); Norse, Danes and other ‘Viking’ entities (700-900 CE); and finally the conquest by Normans (1066). The influence of Scandinavian influence on British culture and language can’t be understated, since the Normans (Northmen) themselves were Norse Viking invaders of France circa 900 CE who agreed to stop pillaging Paris in exchange for lands along France’s western coast.[2]
England and subsequently the British Empire staked its claim first on Ireland and Scotland, but also on North America, India, Australia, Egypt and a major swath of Africa along with portions of China, Indonesia, and various Pacific islands.[3] Spain plundered most of South America as well as the western half of the present-day United States and the Philippine Islands. Not wanting miss out on native hoards of gold, silver, and precious gems, the Catholic Church worked through both Spain and Portugal to destroy indigenous religious traditions and take possession of their wealth.[4] France suffered the loss of much of their colonized territories to the British in the Seven Years War (1756-1763) including a large swath of the United States heartland and much of eastern Canada, then made up its losses with the occupation of northwest Africa, parts of India, and various parts of Indochina.[5]
Along the way, racism stood as a primary justification for enslaving not only Africans to produce wealth in American and Caribbean colonies, but virtually any indigenous peoples who fell before the advance of Western Europeans. A standard concept undergirded these actions, perhaps best stated in 1884 by the Frenchman Jules Ferry: “”The higher races have a right over the lower races, they have a duty to civilize the inferior races.”
The western European colonial powers claimed that, as Christian nations, they were duty-bound to disseminate Western civilization to what Europeans perceived as the heathen and primitive cultures… In addition to economic exploitation and imposition of imperialist government, the ideology of the civilizing mission required the cultural assimilation of “primitive peoples,” as the nonwhite Other, into the colonial subaltern of eastern Europe.[6]
Then, just like that, there were no more new lands to conquer and movement westward turned back on itself. Throughout the rush to ‘conquer’ the American West, freed slaves, migrant laborers from Mexico and the rest of Central America, and imported Chinese performed the backbreaking labor of building railroads, mining, and agriculture. Today’s U. S. agricultural industries depend heavily on the descendants of mixed Spanish-Native peoples.
For a time, the tradition of colonization continued into the 20th century in the form of wars against lesser nations. In a belated effort to rein in this long tradition of conquest, “In 1941, PresidentFranklin D. Roosevelt and British Prime MinisterWinston Churchill jointly released the Atlantic Charter, which broadly outlined the goals of the U.S. and British governments. One of the main clauses of the charter acknowledged the right of all people to choose their own government. The document became the foundation for the United Nations and all of its components were integrated into the UN Charter, giving the organization a mandate to pursue global decolonization.”[7]
Meanwhile, domestic discrimination by whites takes form in laws that are used selectively in the United States to disproportionately imprison Blacks and Latinos where they are used as a labor force and whose imprisonment enriches the rapidly growing private prison industry. The racist white-supremacy inheritance of PIE ancestry continues in the 21st century, thriving in right-wing hate groups and political party movements across the United States and Western Europe.
The racialist perspective of the Western world during the 18th and 19th centuries was invented with the Othering of non-white peoples, which also was supported with the fabrications of scientific racism, such as the pseudo-science of phrenology, which claimed that, in relation to a white-man’s head, the head-size of the non-European Other indicated inferior intelligence; e.g. the apartheid-era cultural representations of coloured people in South Africa (1948–94).
…Despite the UN’s factual dismissal of racialism, in the U.S., institutional Othering continues in government forms that ask a citizen to identify and place him or herself into a racial category; thus, institutional Othering produces the cultural misrepresentation of political refugees as illegal immigrants (from overseas) and of immigrants as illegal aliens (usually from México).[8]
The same science that has tracked white ancestry over thousands of years has not only provided modern civilization with countless amenities but also clear evidence that underneath our skin and other outward appearances, humans are all the same.
What if we all had the same warmth in winter, cool in summer?
Who would we fight then?
What if we eliminated the industries of war, destroyed all guns and other weapons?
Would we kill each other with rocks and clubs?
What if our jobs all paid the same and my stainless steel appliances were no newer than yours? What if our furniture was exactly the same, our lawns just as nicely tended, our cars the same year and model?
Would you still resent me then?
What if we were all born with the same color of hair, the same color of eyes, grew to the same height, the same musculature?
Would you still be jealous because my nose was slightly longer? Or my lips slightly fuller? Would you still pay for surgery to make your nose and lips more like mine?
What if we sat side by side through all twelve grades and received the same education and yet somehow I went to college and became a lawyer while you went to trade school and became a plumber? Would you call me a libtard and resent my career? Would I look down on you as you installed my new toilet?
Will we always find something to resent, something to be jealous of, something to fight about?
Will it always be our nature to fear the Other, even if their Otherness is only birthmark, a broken tooth, a different hairstyle?
How does the skin color, the religion, the material wealth of Others make us fearful?
denelecampbell 