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The Indrisation of Jehovah
Monotheism, as a concept, is very old. Some of its earliest traces can be found in the Vedic canon. In the Vedic tradition, it never grew, never took root. But in a remote part of the Middle East, it did, and Judaism was born. The Judaeo-Christian tradition, however, is only an instance of monotheism, and does not necessarily define it. Other instances, with widely varying characteristics, can be found around the world.
A characteristic peculiar to the Judaeo-Christian tradition is that it is Prophetic monotheism – that is, special human beings are intermediaries between the One True God and his followers. Direct revelation is available only to them, and to no other. The authority of God is invested in them as long as they follow his commandments and his code.
Another characteristic is the insistence on faith – acceptance of an authority either in the absence of empirical or logical proof for its existence, or the existence of its authoritativeness. This is because Prophets are few and far between, and are a big inconvenience to the existing order, and having a chain of authority stretching down from God through his Prophets into a book you can put in your pocket and claim as the world's ultimate moral code and deciding factor on pretty much everything is, truth be told, both convenient and necessary given the rest of the structure of this instance of monotheism. The circularity of the argument had not detracted, and still does not detract, from its efficacy.
The third prominent characteristic is that it is an exclusionary monotheism. That is, all other peoples' deities are non-existent. However, this trait does not stop here – because it cannot – this exclusionary nature also breeds insecurity. Other peoples' deities are sometimes granted the luxury of existence, but are relegated to being agents of “Satanic” forces. Jack Chick, and his tracts, are an excellent example. So are many other Christian missionaries in India, who preach to tribal people that the ways they have, and their modes of belief, are all the domain of “Satan,” or something equivalent.
The fourth characteristic is that it is institutionalised monotheism. That is, wherever the community exists in significant numbers, so do their attendant institutions. More importantly, it does not matter whether or not these institutions fit the society into which the community had migrated – they remain constants, even if they are very highly disruptive of life around them. It is also true that without these institutions, the community would find it difficult, if not impossible, to retain its character. This is, to some extent, true of all communities.
It is possible, however, to have a monotheism that lacks all these traits, or in whose framework these traits simply do not make sense, or are irrelevant.
The above was meant as an introduction to the specific characteristics of the Judaeo-Christian instantiation of monotheism which I consider pertinent to the actual analysis which follows in the rest of this essay. I assume that the reader is familiar with the fundamentals of monotheism as in the abstract.
For the rest of the essay, I will use the words deity, God, and ideal interchangeably. This is because the analysis is applicable to any of these three. In the abstract, and considering Gods or deities to be simply instances of ideals, we can say that it applies in general to ideals. However, in our case, and right now, it is this particular instance which is most relevant, and therefore I choose to use the word God.
Each society's Gods (or God) bear the imprints of the times and societal conditions in which they were created or formulated. Throughout the ages, societies invest in their Gods whatever it considers positive. By the study of a society's Gods, you can know a lot about the society itself. You can tell how far it has developed socially by seeing who and what their God is, what he is becoming or being made into, and how he is seen by that society.
Usually, these characterisations of Gods follow a pattern. In the beginning, you have the angry, jealous, and possessive (bordering on the sexually obsessive) Gods. Then, when society moves beyond the “revenge and blood” concepts of justice and organisation, on to the concepts of compassion for humanity, from which are derived the concepts of rights, the Gods change accordingly. They become less judgemental, more compassionate, much less confrontational, more proactive instead of reactive, and in general, don't behave like savages who have been given weapons of mass destruction.
For this to happen, however, a civilisation has to advance to the point where such thought is sustainable – that is, where the followers of such Gods will not be simply destroyed by the followers of the older, more savage Gods. There must be enough people form the critical mass of “trusters” within the society to out-compete the “betrayers”, to use the terminology of the Prisoner's Dilemma. More rigorous and convenient terminology for the study of this phenomenon (of transition) will be defined later.
It often happens that a society, due to its experiences, has moved on socially, and embraced a better moral code than the one it had previously. However, its Gods have not changed correspondingly. For instance, it is possible for a society to have decided that some social custom or practice is wrong or immoral, but its Gods are still of the old mindset.
In this case, there is a mismatch between the society's present-day reality (which is more developed) and its Gods (which are, by comparison, primitive). Usually, this state of affairs – this mismatch, or contradiction – continues if the Gods are not determinants of everyday things – that is, if they do not try to impose their less developed or evolved ideas on the society which has bettered itself. In such a case, they usually slowly become irrelevant, and new Gods take their place without much effort or resistance.
However, if the Gods actually do affect the common life of the people, and do so in a negative way, then there is a realisation that a contradiction exists between a society's actual ideals and the ideals it claims for itself. This realisation leads to an active, instead of passive, rejection of the old Gods, and the replacement is also actively carried out, with an overcoming of resistance involved.
What happens when such a mismatch occurs is that the Gods are cut down to size. The new Gods either defeat them and destroy them outright, or subordinate them by a process of slow editing of the society's collective consciousness of its own mythology. The second process if slower, but it is far more thorough and complete – the old Gods have no chance whatsoever of ever making a comeback. By forcing a constant but non-intrusive comparison between the new and old Gods, in favour of the new, the initiators of the second process ensure that the old Gods lose the power to inspire for all time to come.
For an example of this process, we can see the case of Indra. Once the supreme ruler of the Vedic pantheon, the undisputed and indisputable master of all the others, the Enjoyer, he is no longer anything more than a side-character in the great epics. Before Rama, before Krishna, before the Buddha, before Mahavira, before Abraham of the Jews, he was.
However, as time went on, people started to realise that he could no longer serve as an ideal, moral or otherwise, for the society they had at the time, because they themselves had transcended that level of behaviour, they had evolved beyond it. As even the Vedic deities were not beyond open criticism, criticised they were, and finally reduced to the form they have today. I have taken Indra as the archetypal example of this process – of what I call “Indrisation” (which I define later).
The later ideals – Rama, Krishna, and others – replaced Indra as the expressions of supreme perfection, of ideals, of ideal men. As a small illustration, consider the case of Krishna and Indra. Most of my Indian readers will be familiar with the story of Krishna and the Govardhan Parvat (Mount Govardhan) – but for those not so familiar, I will recount it here in brief, to the best of my ability to recollect it.
During a time of drought, Krishna told the villagers to cease praying to Indra, as they had been doing, and pray to the Govardhan Parvat instead. Indra, enraged, threatened to let loose his wrath on the people. When the people still followed Krishna's advice, Indra let loose his powers, and called clouds and thunder down on the people. This continued for days, and flooding was imminent. In response, Krishna lifted the entire Parvat on his little finger, and saved his people from Indra's (now impotent) fury.
This little example demonstrates many key principles.
The first is that the new ideal usually completely transcends the old one – Krishna did not, in this case, threaten to “strike down” Indra, or anything so crude. Nor did he engage in any sort of contest. His primary focus was the people he was protecting. And his method was positive and protective, not negative, retaliatory, and revengeful. He also demonstrated the impotence of the old ideal, by the act of lifting the entire Parvat on his little finger – showing his complete superiority – and not simply its destruction.
That is, he was not simply another, more powerful Indra.
Now I come to the definitions of the terms I shall be using throughout the rest of this essay. All of these are fundamental concepts when considering the context.
Indrisation: The process of the supplanting of an old ideal by a new and more evolved ideal. When I say that a certain deity is undergoing Indrisation, I mean that:
1.His behaviour is no longer consistent with his society,
2.His society's ideals have improved, have evolved, to something better,
3.The mismatch is apparent and is felt by the society,
and that Indrisation is the name given to the process of his replacement itself.
Indritis: When a deity is lagging behind his society, he can be said to possess the attribute of Indritis. It is not necessary that a deity with Indritis also be undergoing Indrisation – that may come later.
Indrised: When a deity is replaced, or his Indrisation is complete, he can be said to be Indrised. Again, for instance, Indra is, as of now, completely Indrised.
Indrists: The people within a society who are supporters or proponents of believers in a deity with Indritis, and who resist or oppose, or in general disagree with, the Indrisation of that deity.
Here I come to the main thrust of my argument – that Jehovah has had Indritis for a very long time now, and that it is only relatively recently that his Indrisation has begun in real earnest, and that, within one or two generations, he will be completely Indrised.
The last paragraph of the above is the opening to the rest of the essay, which explores this properly, with a full list of comparisons between Indra and Jehovah, showing their similarities (and key differences). I'll post that later. I'd request readers to ignore that paragraph for the moment, and focus, for the moment, on the rest of the essay, and whether or not they agree with the ideas and concepts presented therein.
The Indrisation of Jehovah
Monotheism, as a concept, is very old. Some of its earliest traces can be found in the Vedic canon. In the Vedic tradition, it never grew, never took root. But in a remote part of the Middle East, it did, and Judaism was born. The Judaeo-Christian tradition, however, is only an instance of monotheism, and does not necessarily define it. Other instances, with widely varying characteristics, can be found around the world.
A characteristic peculiar to the Judaeo-Christian tradition is that it is Prophetic monotheism – that is, special human beings are intermediaries between the One True God and his followers. Direct revelation is available only to them, and to no other. The authority of God is invested in them as long as they follow his commandments and his code.
Another characteristic is the insistence on faith – acceptance of an authority either in the absence of empirical or logical proof for its existence, or the existence of its authoritativeness. This is because Prophets are few and far between, and are a big inconvenience to the existing order, and having a chain of authority stretching down from God through his Prophets into a book you can put in your pocket and claim as the world's ultimate moral code and deciding factor on pretty much everything is, truth be told, both convenient and necessary given the rest of the structure of this instance of monotheism. The circularity of the argument had not detracted, and still does not detract, from its efficacy.
The third prominent characteristic is that it is an exclusionary monotheism. That is, all other peoples' deities are non-existent. However, this trait does not stop here – because it cannot – this exclusionary nature also breeds insecurity. Other peoples' deities are sometimes granted the luxury of existence, but are relegated to being agents of “Satanic” forces. Jack Chick, and his tracts, are an excellent example. So are many other Christian missionaries in India, who preach to tribal people that the ways they have, and their modes of belief, are all the domain of “Satan,” or something equivalent.
The fourth characteristic is that it is institutionalised monotheism. That is, wherever the community exists in significant numbers, so do their attendant institutions. More importantly, it does not matter whether or not these institutions fit the society into which the community had migrated – they remain constants, even if they are very highly disruptive of life around them. It is also true that without these institutions, the community would find it difficult, if not impossible, to retain its character. This is, to some extent, true of all communities.
It is possible, however, to have a monotheism that lacks all these traits, or in whose framework these traits simply do not make sense, or are irrelevant.
The above was meant as an introduction to the specific characteristics of the Judaeo-Christian instantiation of monotheism which I consider pertinent to the actual analysis which follows in the rest of this essay. I assume that the reader is familiar with the fundamentals of monotheism as in the abstract.
For the rest of the essay, I will use the words deity, God, and ideal interchangeably. This is because the analysis is applicable to any of these three. In the abstract, and considering Gods or deities to be simply instances of ideals, we can say that it applies in general to ideals. However, in our case, and right now, it is this particular instance which is most relevant, and therefore I choose to use the word God.
Each society's Gods (or God) bear the imprints of the times and societal conditions in which they were created or formulated. Throughout the ages, societies invest in their Gods whatever it considers positive. By the study of a society's Gods, you can know a lot about the society itself. You can tell how far it has developed socially by seeing who and what their God is, what he is becoming or being made into, and how he is seen by that society.
Usually, these characterisations of Gods follow a pattern. In the beginning, you have the angry, jealous, and possessive (bordering on the sexually obsessive) Gods. Then, when society moves beyond the “revenge and blood” concepts of justice and organisation, on to the concepts of compassion for humanity, from which are derived the concepts of rights, the Gods change accordingly. They become less judgemental, more compassionate, much less confrontational, more proactive instead of reactive, and in general, don't behave like savages who have been given weapons of mass destruction.
For this to happen, however, a civilisation has to advance to the point where such thought is sustainable – that is, where the followers of such Gods will not be simply destroyed by the followers of the older, more savage Gods. There must be enough people form the critical mass of “trusters” within the society to out-compete the “betrayers”, to use the terminology of the Prisoner's Dilemma. More rigorous and convenient terminology for the study of this phenomenon (of transition) will be defined later.
It often happens that a society, due to its experiences, has moved on socially, and embraced a better moral code than the one it had previously. However, its Gods have not changed correspondingly. For instance, it is possible for a society to have decided that some social custom or practice is wrong or immoral, but its Gods are still of the old mindset.
In this case, there is a mismatch between the society's present-day reality (which is more developed) and its Gods (which are, by comparison, primitive). Usually, this state of affairs – this mismatch, or contradiction – continues if the Gods are not determinants of everyday things – that is, if they do not try to impose their less developed or evolved ideas on the society which has bettered itself. In such a case, they usually slowly become irrelevant, and new Gods take their place without much effort or resistance.
However, if the Gods actually do affect the common life of the people, and do so in a negative way, then there is a realisation that a contradiction exists between a society's actual ideals and the ideals it claims for itself. This realisation leads to an active, instead of passive, rejection of the old Gods, and the replacement is also actively carried out, with an overcoming of resistance involved.
What happens when such a mismatch occurs is that the Gods are cut down to size. The new Gods either defeat them and destroy them outright, or subordinate them by a process of slow editing of the society's collective consciousness of its own mythology. The second process if slower, but it is far more thorough and complete – the old Gods have no chance whatsoever of ever making a comeback. By forcing a constant but non-intrusive comparison between the new and old Gods, in favour of the new, the initiators of the second process ensure that the old Gods lose the power to inspire for all time to come.
For an example of this process, we can see the case of Indra. Once the supreme ruler of the Vedic pantheon, the undisputed and indisputable master of all the others, the Enjoyer, he is no longer anything more than a side-character in the great epics. Before Rama, before Krishna, before the Buddha, before Mahavira, before Abraham of the Jews, he was.
However, as time went on, people started to realise that he could no longer serve as an ideal, moral or otherwise, for the society they had at the time, because they themselves had transcended that level of behaviour, they had evolved beyond it. As even the Vedic deities were not beyond open criticism, criticised they were, and finally reduced to the form they have today. I have taken Indra as the archetypal example of this process – of what I call “Indrisation” (which I define later).
The later ideals – Rama, Krishna, and others – replaced Indra as the expressions of supreme perfection, of ideals, of ideal men. As a small illustration, consider the case of Krishna and Indra. Most of my Indian readers will be familiar with the story of Krishna and the Govardhan Parvat (Mount Govardhan) – but for those not so familiar, I will recount it here in brief, to the best of my ability to recollect it.
During a time of drought, Krishna told the villagers to cease praying to Indra, as they had been doing, and pray to the Govardhan Parvat instead. Indra, enraged, threatened to let loose his wrath on the people. When the people still followed Krishna's advice, Indra let loose his powers, and called clouds and thunder down on the people. This continued for days, and flooding was imminent. In response, Krishna lifted the entire Parvat on his little finger, and saved his people from Indra's (now impotent) fury.
This little example demonstrates many key principles.
The first is that the new ideal usually completely transcends the old one – Krishna did not, in this case, threaten to “strike down” Indra, or anything so crude. Nor did he engage in any sort of contest. His primary focus was the people he was protecting. And his method was positive and protective, not negative, retaliatory, and revengeful. He also demonstrated the impotence of the old ideal, by the act of lifting the entire Parvat on his little finger – showing his complete superiority – and not simply its destruction.
That is, he was not simply another, more powerful Indra.
Now I come to the definitions of the terms I shall be using throughout the rest of this essay. All of these are fundamental concepts when considering the context.
Indrisation: The process of the supplanting of an old ideal by a new and more evolved ideal. When I say that a certain deity is undergoing Indrisation, I mean that:
1.His behaviour is no longer consistent with his society,
2.His society's ideals have improved, have evolved, to something better,
3.The mismatch is apparent and is felt by the society,
and that Indrisation is the name given to the process of his replacement itself.
Indritis: When a deity is lagging behind his society, he can be said to possess the attribute of Indritis. It is not necessary that a deity with Indritis also be undergoing Indrisation – that may come later.
Indrised: When a deity is replaced, or his Indrisation is complete, he can be said to be Indrised. Again, for instance, Indra is, as of now, completely Indrised.
Indrists: The people within a society who are supporters or proponents of believers in a deity with Indritis, and who resist or oppose, or in general disagree with, the Indrisation of that deity.
Here I come to the main thrust of my argument – that Jehovah has had Indritis for a very long time now, and that it is only relatively recently that his Indrisation has begun in real earnest, and that, within one or two generations, he will be completely Indrised.
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