ON RELIGION 1: THE GOD OF THE DESERT


THE GOD OF THE DESERT


A question: If there is a universal god, a master of the universe who created billions upon billions of stars and billions of galaxies, who created matter and all things material, why is he* so obsessed with a Bronze Age culture in the Levant and Mesopotamia? Not only that but he seems also surprisingly preoccupied with, what one can only call trivia. That is the minutia of sex, the undesirability of pork or eating shellfish.
If he chooses to go into that kind of obsessive detail why no mention of the proper use of chopsticks, the permissibility of cuddling up to keep warm in an igloo, fishing on a frozen lake or how to handle  the endless daylight of the Sabbath in Siberia? Nope, China, the Polar Regions, or for that matter the whole of North, South or Central America have no interest for him. Nor did the preceding generations born century after century after century in this same desert area or in the Siberian tundra or on the plains of North America; he is not interested in the sophisticated cultures of China, the Minoans, or Ancient Greece. It seems that several millennia after man first started to become conscious, self-aware and capable of creating mythical constructs to explain the mystery of existence, God chooses to reveal himself to a minor tribe of desert nomads; a god of the desert.


*All three monotheisms seem to agree that God is a ‘He,’ so I’ll take their word for it.

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