The only words I ever remember my adoptive grandmother saying about my mother were, “Your mother couldn’t tell the truth, if you paid her.”
The only words I ever remember my mother saying to me were, “He’s sick; I’m taking care of him” – “him” being the adult male in my parent’s bed, the sheets pulled to his chin, and his sailor officer’s cap on the nightstand. (I was four and had just walked home from kindergarten. I knew my mother was lying.)
Decades later, postmortem, I forgave my mother for that lie and for abandoning me on the doorstep of a foster home in Brookline, Massachusetts, never to be seen or heard from again – Her very life had been a lie – named “Sister” – a lie. She was, in truth, not her mother’s baby sister, but her mother’s daughter born three years before her parents married. (Surprise, surprise her Harvard father lied on the Birth Certificate that his name was “Smythe,” not Teschner, and she my have fled Boston to Yakima, Washington, where she died at age 31, to flee incest – my brother may have been my grandfather’s son – I do have an uncle younger than me.
So too was my father a lie – born into the Boston Brahmin Otis clan, but adopted at age two into the Coleman’s of Newington, NH and the Bosons of Boston banking and newspaper fame, who purportedly lost his fortune in the crash of the 1880’s.
One of the results of not belonging to anyone and no one belonging to me, was to distrust all Big Lies and those telling them, yet believing all little lies and those telling them.
For example, I distrusted my Episcopal Minister, Rev. Hall, who disliked kids, and therefore his God, but believed that movies were real.
If there were some “good” to not belonging, it was that I owed no allegiances – I was freed from forced loyalties to parents – I essentially had none – family, relatives, a religion, organizations institutions, or political Weltanschauungs, while at the same time always being a “Catcher in the Lie,” – hyper-vigilant to sniff out liars, lies, and Holden Caulfield’s “phonies.”
So, when in my late70’s, I decided to revisit the Torah and the Bible, I discovered in the first words of Genesis II that it was lies, lies, all lies.
For example, Genesis II states as material fact, “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.”
NOT! The “beginning’ – there never was a beginning– beginnings and endings are vanities of vanities – superstitions created by humans to attempt to understand its world, which was, and still is, beyond the scope of its evolving frontal cortex. Furthermore, the presumption of a “God’s existence” presupposes a beginning pre-dating , “In the beginning,” to wit, who named “God” God? It had to be a human-like entity using a common language in which the word “God” was a shared concept. meaning to have existed before before the God of Genesis II! Lies, lies! All are lies!T he Genesis God is the lord of all lies!
“… Created the heaven and the earth.” First, there never was, or is, a God, ipso facto, no heaven to have been created by a non-existent God. Created by another entity other than God? Inhabited by souls – no chance of Earth’s problem with over-population. Weightless souls would be in motion and therefore unable to form a cohesion called “heaven,:” and with no God acting as travel agent to heaven, there can be no population. Lies, lies, all is lies.
“Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness. was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters.” Lies, lies, all arelies. The earth cannot both be “formless and in the form of something called “earth:”. “Empty” presumes a form surrounding or enclosing a space absent substance or matter. (Matter matters.) “Darkness” requires eyes in the body of a species able to have the word “darkness” in its vocabulary, or its means of communication, and therefore an entity existing before “God.”
“Spirit of God hovering over the waters” – “Spirit of God?” implies something outside of God. God has already died? Died on day one, leaving His Spirit to finish the job? Why “His”. Why not “Her” Spirit. The evolution of the species – voice of female to voice of male, clitoris-to-penis, ovaries to testicles – always from female to male – females have penises, but males never have vaginas – evidence the female preceded the male, so why not a primordial God a Goddess? Just asking.
Finally, “Spirit of God hovering over the waters” — And I thought DaVinci had the patent on helicopters, not God! “Waters” already in existence before ”earth and heavens” therefore created by an entity other than God. Lies, lies, lies, all are lies!
So, No God, no Creation, no Garden of Eden, no Cain /Abel, no Noah, no plagues, no Passover, no parting of the Red Sea, no virgin birth, no miracles, and no Resurrection – lies, lies, lies, all lies told by ancient Hebrew scribes to bring law and order to the wandering enslaved tribes of Israel, and later by Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, et al, to do for the Jews after the burning of their Temple by the Romans in 60 AD, that which Martin Luther did for the Christians in Rome with his 95 Thesis on October 31, 1517.
Why lies? To give power to the powerful over the powerless? To control the restless rabble from revolution? As Plato suggested “necessary lies? All of the above? Maybe then, but still now? Trump and his Neo-Conservative Fascists would have it so.
