Our Daily Bread: Noah’s Genocidal Prayer

With Hurricane Ike threatening Texas, who better to remind us of the wrath of God then Noah? The Kitáb-i-Íqán tells us that Noah had plenty of time to build his great ark:

For nine hundred and fifty years He prayerfully exhorted His people and summoned them to the haven of security and peace. None, however, heeded His call. Each day they inflicted on His blessed person such pain and suffering that no one believed He could survive. How frequently they denied Him, how malevolently they hinted their suspicion against Him! Thus it hath been revealed: “And as often as a company of His people passed by Him, they derided Him. To them He said: `Though ye scoff at us now, we will scoff at you hereafter even as ye scoff at us. In the end ye shall know.'”

That’s right, Noah. You tell them! 950 years is a lot of scorn. A guy can get very frustrated being ignored and mocked for a millennium.

Long afterward, He several times promised victory to His companions and fixed the hour thereof. But when the hour struck, the divine promise was not fulfilled. This caused a few among the small number of His followers to turn away from Him, and to this testify the records of the best-known books.

I wonder how many books from Noah’s time have survived.

This is a valuable precedent for prophets, or warlords, with bad track records: “yeah, we lost the first time, the second time, and the third time, but eventually I’ll have victory and you’ll all pay. Just you wait and see!”

After all that, all he had to do was ask: “Dear Lord, kill them all!”

At last from the depth of His being He cried aloud: “Lord! Leave not upon the land a single dweller from among the unbelievers.”

And so it came to pass. Mass murder on a divine scale, and all it took was the malevolent prayer of a single man. Never underestimate the power of hatred.

3 comments on “Our Daily Bread: Noah’s Genocidal Prayer

  1. shahram rohani says:

    it is very interesting blog,n the recent article is also a warning 4 all of us.tks

  2. Inge Barthel says:

    Dear Dan,

    At last from the depth of His being He cried aloud: “Lord! Leave not upon the land a single dweller from among the unbelievers.”

    And so it came to pass. Mass murder on a divine scale, and all it took was the malevolent prayer of a single man. Never underestimate the power of hatred.

    Your line of thought is interesting and blends synchronistically with my current reading and exploration. The book is called :”DENN SIE WISSEN NICHT, WAS SIE GLAUBEN: ODER WARUM MAN REDLICHERWEISE NICHT MEHR CHRIST SEIN KANN” (“For they don’t know, what they believe in: or why one cannot decently remain a Christian”) . To my knowledge it hasn’t been translated into English – unfortunately. It is a critical examination of the Christian Bible by Franz Buggle, German Professor Emeritus for Applied and Developmental Psychology at the University Freiburg.

    He mainly collected quotations from the widely used sections of Old and the New Testament and proves that the book is deeply inhumane and unfit to be a moral guideline for humanity in our time. – He makes a very good case and succeeds in removing the habitual blinkers of childhood conditioning and inspires the reader to take a fresh look at the old and familiar phrases. (Actually this book would be sooo important for American readers, especially with Sarah Palin looming. Book at Amazon.de)

    Needless to say, it is a very controversial book and perhaps the contemporary version of the people who so persistently mocked old Noah and drove him to his curse.

    About a month ago I had an argument on behalf of the book with a dear woman friend who is a Lutheran Minister, 67 years of age and quite progressive in her thinking. She conceeded all the issues and said the church had already integrated those things, mainly by attributing them to “time and circumstance” or “culture”, and that contemporary theology stayed clear of those aspects. – My point was that this theological discussion and re-evaluation hasn’t reached the public and in many cases is also ignored by small town ministers. Moreover there are many literalists out there, especially in America and Israel, who continue to draw justification for their violent policies from The Book. (First she denied my point and then freaked out, as if I had personally accused her of not saving the world – a reaction which I deeply regret. I should have known, she has done that before. She tends to take things incredibly personal, as if everything is always her personal failure – we haven’t really spoken much since. It’s quite sad. I’m confident, however, that we’ll overcome this in the near future.)

    My own personal conclusion as it has been forming over the past few weeks, is not the same as Franz Buggle’s. Even though he unmasks “The Good Lord” as a serial killer and genocidal tyrant, a bloodthirsty and revengeful partisan spirit who orders his subjects to kill without mercy and deny human rights to people of other races or creeds, Buggle still doesn’t transcend the pattern in the sense that he too is without mercy, not on the physical plane but on the intellectual one.

    Yet I felt a great beneficial stimulation coming from reading his book. For once, I saw Baha’u’llah’s careful efforts to be associated with the lineage of the biblical God in a clearer light. He wanted to be perceived in that tradition, he didn’t disown this lineage. That in itself is the root of the problem. From the outset he was on the wrong foot. – Why would he have chosen this lineage if not for power? – That makes him fail as a redeemer from the word go. It’s like a Jekill/Hyde phenomenon, when the old violence breaks through. It’s not a minor and incidental side effect of his earthly life but the surfacing of the very essence of the lineage. I felt happy and proud for having come to renounce this spirit on my own.

    Wow, having come to this point I felt like a reverse-engineered religious zealot. The biblical God as the wolf in sheep’s clothing? The beast masquerading as the beauty and the frog pretending to be the prince? Yes, that’s the level of mirroring the pattern without transcending it. Judgement and condemnation for those unenlightened brutes, revelling on the intellectual level with gleeful righteousness, perhaps even pretending to be “better” than those old martials for I am not lusting after blood and gore – only after the sublime satisfaction of being right and gutting my opponents by means of superior, bold and fearless intelligence? –

    And what about Jesus? – Buggle observes, for all Jesus’ meekness he still seemed to bow to the idea that our sins make God so angry and furious that he has to shed his blood in order to appease his father. True, I can’t deny this. Even though I may have a different interpretation of the story, this is still the way the overwhelming majority of the Christian churches – mindlessly(?) but emphatically repeat the old pattern and therefore neutralise any real transformative power of the message of forgiveness and love. I conclude that this is the most great calamity in my humble sight! – So is all lost? – Has the world at large sunk unredeemably beneath the waves of dualistic mirror play, artful deception and ill will?

    I don’t think so. Every new-born baby is a warrior of light protesting the absence of love, trust and good will. We all carry the seed of truth inside. We are at a point in history where this love-truth-light is breaking uncontrolled and unorganised through the cracks of the established structures. What happened for example within me is happening inside many people from all walks of life. Transformation manifests around the broadest variety of issues, not only religious or spiritual concerns but also environmental, social, political or scientific ones. We are collectively transforming the vibrational level of humanity – completely without formal agreements and 5-, 10- or 15- year plans, campaigns or crusades. It just happens. But does it happen fast enough to preserve this physical earth as a playground for our immediate future or will we loose this location? – I think this is a truly open question. It depends on us, there is no foregone conclusion. (Just as I believe it was no foregone conclusion that Jesus was martyred by his contemporaries. To depict his death as God’s will and Gods requirement for being able to forgive us removes to a degree human responsibility and diminishes the power intensity of the story. Intentional or not, I think, it is a spin by the dark side.)

    It is almost as if the upcoming elections in America will serve as a spiritual poll on contemporary manifestation of the very same issue. Not for what Obama really is, but for what he is perceived to be, he seems to project the consciousness of “love over fear”, “rational idealism over zealous power-play”, “the higher self over the survival instincts”, “transformation over coercion”, “trust over control”, “resolution over domination” etc..

    And it is not just an American election. The whole world participates, as has become obvious with the war in Georgia. Thousands of American “military advisors”, within the country for years, ought to have guaranteed that the US must have been informed of the situation and at least didn’t bring their influence to bear in dissuading the Saka-man from attacking and invading the dissident provinces. Putin reacted as would have been predictable and the whole charade is now mobilising fears, power-play, survival instincts, coercion, control and domination tendencies. The European nations chime in whith their open invitation for Georgia and the Ukraine to join the NATO. That is certainly using war as a possible choice to carry forward the political desire for hegemony – normal for America, but not for Europe, at least not in recent times. – Predictably this weakened Obama’s position in the presidential race.

    One of my favorite quotes from the Bible is where God comits to “sparing the city as long as there is but one pure soul in it”. In this sense I want to offer a rephrasing of your comment on Noahs curse:

    “Mass murder on a divine scale, and all it took was the caving in to malevolence of the last pure soul. Never underestimate the power of Love.”

    In this sense I think the divine mass murderer is an expression of or even identical with the corresponding aspect in human collective consciousness. The loving and forgiving God corresponds to our own capacity to integrate the dualistic vision.

    (B.t.w. this does not answer the question of the independent existence of God. It is logically still possible to think either way.)

    xxInge

  3. Zachariah Wasson says:

    LOL. I had forgotten that the Baha’i Faith taught a literal interpretation of the Noah fable. When I was a Baha’i I became quite adept at doublethink. I also had a tendency toward confirmation bias. I remembered the Baha’i teachings that agreed with my worldview and put those that didn’t out of mind. Eventually, through independent investigation of the truth, the cognitive dissonance in my head became too intellectually painful; I was forced to reject all revealed religion as the only logical conclusion.
    Also, while the conclusion that God exists is is certainly logical (it contains no internal inconsistencies), every argument I have ever heard used as a premise for that conclusion has contained at least one, if not many, logical fallacies. Most frequently, appeals to authority and begging the question.

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