Astronomy: The Origin of Religions
Presented by Bob Baumbach, Professor of Astronomy (Retired), Grand Rapids Community College
About the Speaker
About the Event
Meeting Minutes for September 14, 2005; #193
Presented by Bob Baumbach, Professor of Astronomy GRCC (Retired), Freethought Member
Announcements
Tonight marked the last meeting of the Freethought Association at the Yankee Clipper Library location. In lieu of our regular second monthly meeting in September, the FA welcomes all interested members to attend a special event on September 28, 7:30PM, at the Fountain Street Church in Grand Rapids, where author, attorney and environmental activist, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., will give a presentation on Our Environmental Destiny. The Freethought Association is one of the sponsors for this event. Tickets, for $10, have been for sale at our meetings and at Schuler Books & Music. Check our website for more details.
Thereafter, we will begin meeting at the Women’s City Club at the corner of Lafayette and Fulton by downtown Grand Rapids, starting with our first meeting in October, on the 12th, still beginning at 7PM. Visit our website, listed above, for more details.
There was a question raised by a meeting attendee as to the rationale for our move. A chief reason for it is that we have had a large amount of uncertainty as to the rental fee and about ongoing use of the meeting room at the Y.C. Library. Simply put, we became weary of having to keep struggling to retain our meeting space and never knowing when rates would increase, with little advance warning; a considerable concern for an organization entirely funded by our membership in freewill donations, with no other source of funding or income.
The Women’s City Club has committed to more stability for us, a reasonable and reliable rent, and affords us a number of other benefits including ample parking, equipment already in place, very limited set up, ample parking and proximity to downtown exposure, additional rooms we may use for future activities, some availability for storage, and food and beverages provided. The WCC is an attractive place that very much impressed the FA Board when we toured it together. We are also on friendly terms with the coordinator there.
The Freethought Women’s Group will hold a meeting on September 17 at 10AM, at 736 Lockwood, NE, GR. E-mail group coordinator Jennifer Beahan at or call 616-706-2029 for details and directions. The next FWG meeting after this one will be on October 15.
September 20 (Tuesday) is the date for the Grassroots Action Fair of the Progressive Directory of West Michigan, with the mission of connecting groups for social change. This will take place starting at 7PM at the Wealthy Street Theatre, at 1130 Wealthy St. We will have an information table there and this is an excellent opportunity to learn of various activist, progressive and environmental groups, how to become involved in areas of concern, and to network.
The following day, Sept. 21, Jason P. will host the next Freethought Movie Night, featuring the irreverent movie: Team America- World Police. BYOB and a snack to pass. For more information and to RSVP, contact Jason at or call (616)634-2471. The next FMN after this one will be on October 19.
For our first meeting at the Women’s City Club on October 12, we will be treated to the topic: Baubles of Blasphemy, presented by Edwin Kagin. Kagin is a Constitutional Attorney, is on the Speaker’s Bureau of American Atheists, and is the Founder of Camp Quest (a camp for Secular Humanist youth) and author of the book, Baubles of Blasphemy. This book will be for sale at the meeting.
On October 14 at 7PM, members John and Kathy F. will host the next SEE-TV Book Discussion gathering at their fragrance-free home: 826 Fairmount St., SE. (GR). The featured book for discussion will be The Liberal Virus; Permanent War & the Americanization of the World, by Samir Amin. Call 459-2373 for more information.
Other special meetings and/or get-togethers this year include the Halloween Party on October 29, starting at 5PM at the Seaver Farm, 10721 52nd Ave., Allendale. Costumes encouraged but not required. BYOB and dish to pass. Hayride, bonfire, and fun times. For more information or directions: (616)892-9300 or send an e-mail (see Info contact at the top of these minutes, after the website address). On November 21, we will again participate in the Interfaith Thanksgiving Service, to be held at the Westminster Presbyterian Church at 47 Jefferson St., SE, GR. Jeremy Beahan will be our representative from the FA, giving a Freethought perspective on the holiday. And on December 14, we will have our Winter Solstice Dinner and Presentation at the Women’s City Club. RSVP with check for $25/person to: Freethought Association, P.O. Box 101, Allendale, MI 49401.
Please note that there will be no scheduled meetings on November 23 or December 28.
FA Board member, Jan Van Oosterhout wishes to have member feedback on the interest in starting Dinners for 8. These would be social gatherings for adults, meeting about four times a year at different people’s homes, on a rotating basis. Each participant brings a food item to the dinner and participants may be single or couples, but with the number adding up to eight. This is a fun way to meet other members in an informal social setting. Contact Jan for more information at .
Jan and Bill Van Oosterhout’s daughter, Stacie, wishes to gauge our membership’s interest in forming and/or participating in a Freethought Association Youth Group. To that end, she has put together a hard copy questionnaire, available at meetings, and an e-mail version which has been distributed.
Presentation
Our topic for this meeting was Astronomy; The Origin of Religions and was presented by Bob Baumbach, Professor of Astronomy, GRCC (Retired) and FA member. Professor Baumbach taught for 35 years; 25 of which were at the Grand Rapids Community College and was bitten by the astronomy bug while in junior high school.
Having been brought up in a conservative religious home, he was expected to follow narrow religious strictures unquestioningly. However, his questing mind was beginning its exhilarating journey of plumbing the very depths of an infinite universe. Simplistic mythic religious tales no longer provided satisfying explanations or a comforting harbor for him, but instead thoughts of the universal religious impulse fueled his thirst to discover where religion itself sprang from. He began to find his answers in the very place where he was imbibing so deeply from- then and now: astronomy.
The ideas Professor Baumbach came to generate were not of the sudden eureka variety, but were carefully developed over many years. He noted that his views connecting astronomy with religion were not entirely novel but that overall there has been, until fairly recently, a dearth of scholarly work emanating from authors who were both competent in the science of astronomy and well informed about religious mythology, and then, who shared the connections found between these two spheres of interest and knowledge. For his presentation to us, he contrasted the biblical creation story with what astronomy and other sciences teach us, as he had done in his own personal journey of discovery. Then as now, he found the former story wanting.
The question of where religion originated from would be answered by many without hesitation: the Creation. Of course there was not but one Creation story dealing with supernatural direction, a select group of people that everything was made for, and which contained pre-scientific explanations for everything encountered in the world. But the one Professor Baumbach was taught and the one most familiar to probably most of the attendees at this meeting was the one that was focused on this evening for comparison/contrast with what science shows us. The Judeo-Christian tale starts its explanation of the universe with the words: In the beginning… where there was nothingness only, but out of this void a Creator spun out the entire universe. This, however, only highlights more questions regarding an Uncaused Cause and Unmoved Mover… a Creator of all that came from nothing and apparently existed for an eternity in nothingness but who, in a sudden week-long spurt of ambition and energy, fabricated everything that is or will ever be. For the ancient tribes who told this Creation tale, the universe was a very small place with a great deal of attention focused—virtually all of the Days of Creation—on just one planet; which seemed to have, in that inchoate time, to have been flat with a dome over it, a greater and lesser light, and a smattering of pinpricks along the dome at night, probably located just under the Firmament.
We now know that this greater light was but one middle aged and average sized sun among countless billions (some much more glorious, some less so, all going through a life cycle of birth and death, in a process that forges different elements necessary for life from those which are not beneficial to the creation of living organisms, within their vast nuclear furnaces) in a single unremarkable part of one spiral arm of an average- sized galaxy; itself one of billions of other galaxies. These stars, part of systems ringed by planets, planetoids, dust, ice and other assorted matter, and the galaxies themselves, are all traveling apart from each other in an expanding universe, rather than fixed lights in a dome with a centrally located single planet that all else was made for. The Genesis myth tells us that this explosive fiat of stunning creation of an entire infinite universe took only one day out of the week! Meanwhile relatively mundane and simple acts also took a day each; a single star (our Sun) and Earth’s moon took as long to put together as a googolplex of others, for instance, and there was illumination before the light-giving sun, and other out-of-sequence events during this apocryphal week, according to this tale.
Out of the endless array of planetary bodies thronging their own stars, the Creator selected just a single one for special attention. And on this planet, itself only one of several others in one solar system (we are not given to know why the Creator made the other unfavored planets around this single unremarkable star), there were replicating beings put on it; viruses and mosquitoes as well as the okapi and dugong… the echidna and the pangolin… weeds and woodchucks. All these were made to be subservient to a single bipedal primate and to be named by him. This sole male being, who was made from the clay of the Earth, was given some assistance by his female counterpart, which for some unknown reason the Creator constructed out one of the first man’s ribs. This peculiar approach was never employed since in the making of mates for male beings.
We now know that Earth existed for a long while without life of any kind upon it and then for the majority of its existence after biogenesis, it harbored only single-celled life. After multi-cellular life emerged and evolved, countless species lived and expired, never to be seen again. All those extinct species were winked out slowly or in catastrophic massive waves of death, long before beings capable of forming concepts of sin and salvation, Heaven and Hell, messiahs and prophets, came to be. It is quite a thing to wonder what sinful activity the trilobites, as one example, engaged in to cause their mass smiting from the Creator, since it was usually such acts that caused such wrath from the Supreme Being.
Even after the johnny-come-lately hominids entered the picture, very, very recently in geological time, they too met with their various lines ending, save for a single fragile twig on one minute branch of an arborescent bush of life. Eventually, after Homo sapiens finally emerged from this inauspicious beginning, there were countless generations of them that apparently perished in the same ignoble death at the rat and sea slug—just dead and gone- since they existed before ancient tribes concocted stories about living on after the grave, and others refined this concept as being one bestowed only upon those who believe in a single individual who may (or may not) have drawn breath a couple millennia ago.
So for billions of years, we are told, all beings experienced death as a complete finality until this one figure was born to a divinely impregnated virgin (whose mortal husband seems to have taken this rather shocking event, at a time when women were routinely stoned to death for slight societal infractions or signs of infidelity, completely in stride) in a remote and backwards Middle Eastern speck on our planet, whose papa was the Creator of the universe no less! For all time afterwards, any who did not espouse belief in this individual’s divinity and as representing the sole means to possessing eternal life, would also perish along with the finch and the wombat and every other being without a soul. Worse, humankind, is selected out by the all-loving Creator to not only be excluded from a paradisaical everlasting life- but to exist for all time as horrifically tortured kindling in an inextinguishable inferno… should they not believe in this one particular religious saga out of thousands promulgated by peoples throughout the world and throughout human history.
To summarize: we have the Maker of the entire universe, picking out what is analogous to a single grain of sand in a desert stretching out beyond any comprehensible horizon for special attention. On this grain, it makes one man. From his body It fashions a single anatomically modern human female (after, in one of the two contradictory versions of the Genesis fable, It parades before the first man all the other critters of the world to see if he deems any among them to be a worthy companion and helpmeet—apparently the Creator is stymied at first in just what constitutes a female counterpart for It’s debut male.) Somehow, all humankind emerges from this couple, apparently from a flurry of frenzied incestuous pairings. Among the Earth’s human populace, one barbarous tribe is held out for special consideration by the Creator, even though other cultures and peoples far in advance of them are already thriving. It is into this group that It inserts a Savior supposedly for all the world, but who, like his Daddy, has feelings only for this one group. Other tribes are delivered to this group by the Almighty to be exterminated without a whiff of divine angst.
Instead of the several mass extinctions we know of via science to have occurred throughout geological time on our planet, there is told of a single worldwide Deluge in the religious Creation story Professor Baumbach spoke of. And instead of non-human, sinless beings, wiped out by capricious nature, we have all life save one drunkard’s family and two of every species of animal being loaded onto a large vessel to ride out the flood and repopulate the Earth. The Creator deemed Its human production to be wicked and fit only for destruction, so It horrifyingly drowned babes and the brontosaurus; the innocent people along with the most vile indiscriminately. For some reason unknown to this writer, this sickening scene of incomprehensible carnage (imagine the flailing panicked human and non-human animals breaking the surface of the water one last time during the Flood and a landscape littered from horizon to horizon with bloated decaying corpses in the aftermath) is seen as a fit tale to depict for the decoration of nurseries and Sunday school classrooms.
Professor Baumbach calculated that this flood would have been roughly 30,000 feet deep, with the waters rising at an astounding 10 inches per minute for 40 days. Then it would all have to dry up again in some system that defies everything we know of the Water Cycle. All this fuss because the Creator’s humans were too distracted by living their lives to worship It sufficiently. One might be forgiven to think that a Being that could create the entire universe would have a sense of personal satisfaction of a sufficient degree that It would not crave continual praise and worship from one of Its sentient animals. The first couple, too, we are told in the sacred writings, was expelled from a sort of Heaven on Earth for not having the proper degree of blind obedience to their Maker, and for listening to a Hebrew-speaking snake, causing them to partake of a single forbidden fruit.
Later, this Creator of all that is, would trouble itself with such minutia as what fibers Its chosen people wore, how they planted, their diet, the excising of foreskins, the mass slaughters of neighboring tribes, the insinuation of demons into some unfortunate swine, the hardening of the heart of Its chosen people’s captor so that he would not countenance the release of said people, only to have wave after wave of plagues ravage all that breathe (apparently bringing them all back to life in time for the next successive wave of annihilation, over and again), and concerns over urinating on a wall, the ownership policies regarding one’s wife and/or concubines, the spilling of one’s seed in non-sanctioned places (such as not within one’s brother’s wife should her spouse-his brother- die), how one deals with one’s slaves, approving of the smell of mass animal slaughter and gaudy displays of structures as tributes to It, doing a bait and switch at the last minute with a command to one man to kill his son, testing another to his limits as part of a wager with one of Its fallen angels who oversees the vast torture chamber that It sends unbelievers to, etc., etc. This seems akin to a human designing and creating a vast megapolis the size of the entire planet and then concerning his attention almost exclusively upon one pigeon’s preening and molting habits, within that Earth-sized city.
After the final release of the Creator’s special group of people from Babylonian captivity, It sort of leaves them to their own devices—as they are sentenced to wander around in a desert for 40 years. Occasionally It sends manna or birds to them for their consumption or smites a complainer now and again, or other random acts of metaphysical capriciousness. Some of the other activities the Creator of the universe engaged in was to carve out stone tablets with commandments for It’s humans, including that It has exclusive rights to praise and worship, what days are special, not to covet another man’s property, including the chattel wife and slaves, the no-brainers for perpetuation of any society, such as proscribing killing each other off and stealing from one another, and so on.
It also fancied using a burning bush and a donkey as communication devices. The Maker of billions and billions of galaxies let It’s sons have sexual relations with human women, thus producing giants (though It’s lad, Jesus, was portrayed as asexual, but if he had had sexual intercourse, no giants were said to have issued from this union); confounded the speech of the peoples of the Earth; made rainbows independent of atmospheric principles and merely as signs and portents; made a man who lived 969 years, transmogrified a woman into a pillar of salt for gazing back from whence she came; got into a wrestling match with an angel; transformed sticks into snakes; employed flies and frogs as agents of It’s wrath; felt that people who made hair oil should be put to death; sent a she bear to maul to death children who teased a man over his bald pate; objected to the existence of deformed people that It supposedly created in the first place; demanded human sacrifices; buried a man only to revive him to write an account of his funeral; believed there had been four footed birds; sent warriors out in conquests of other tribes, sparing only the virgins of the conquered people for the purpose of rape; stopped the Sun in the sky (actually, it would be halting the Earth’s rotation, though the Creator of the sun was apparently innocent of this information) as part of a military strategy; and so on and on.
The universe and all within it evolves. Man creates gods, not the other way around. But why, our presenter asked, would humans manufacture gods? It has been a thriving industry, this mass production of deities—some 2,500 or so supernatural entities have thus far been born in the minds of various peoples. Professor Baumbach believes the reason is that life for most of humanity over most of human history has been cruel, short and fraught with inexplicable challenges, heartbreaks and hardships. Religion, as Humanist Rabbi Sherman Wine stated it, is a way of staying sane in an insane world. If one’s crops failed, if one’s cherished child died, if diseases consumed a village, if one’s cattle became emaciated and non-productive, if storms, floods or other natural disasters pummeled the land… there was no geology, no meteorology, no germ theory, no comprehension of genetics, viruses, hygiene, modern medicine, etc. to turn to. Ignorance about the natural workings of the world and physical laws and the ways of matter and energy were one capacious gap. This is where the supreme governing deity(ies) dwelt. It (or They) functioned as explanations for the slings and arrows of life as well as seemingly unearned good fortune. If one worshiped his or her gods sufficiently and performed arcane rituals accurately, the gods would be pleased and smile upon the worshiper. When one lost in battle or experienced an incomprehensible disaster, his god(s) were lifting It’s/Their protection as an indication that It’s ego had not been properly stroked or a sacrifice was not great enough or there had been some other slight committed by the sufferer. Sadly, such primitive thinking is used by many widely listened to evangelical leaders to explain natural disasters today—blaming gays, Church/State separation advocates, Humanists, and other reviled groups for God’s rationale for lifting It’s protection from one region or another of the landmass of the Earth.
In a capricious world, humans seek patterns and predictability. Living as most humankind had for most of its history without light pollution, towering structures, or other impediments to gazing at a pellucid night sky spangled by countless lights, early stargazers noticed that the heavens produced that very much sought after predictable pattern. The stars were manifestations of the gods and the shifting patterns told stories to the ancients. They built amazing structures to chart the course of astronomical phenomena; the most iconic to the lay public probably being Stonehenge. Professor Baumbach showed images of this and other such early astronomical sites. What patterns were captured by these structures were determined by what was most prominent in the sky to those who built them, due to where each group was located on the Earth.
The word disaster means bad star and people looked to the heavens to seek omens of ill or signs of good fortune. The seasonal changes on Earth were reflected by changes in the sky as the Earth tilted on its axis, revealing different constellations. What the myth makers beheld many millennia ago, we can still see today. Interestingly, the early people who studied the stars were employing scientific methodology but ended up interpreting the data to create, in a non-scientific approach, the underpinnings of a supernatural realm. They used observation, sometimes built giant monolithic structures to make astronomical records, could formulate predictions about events that occur with precise regularity, generate and test hypotheses, and adjust their tools and methodology of measurement accordingly. But what they observed- and the patterns they recorded, to them were ways of seeing the behavior of the gods and what these deities had in store for them. Even as recently as the late 19th Century, theologically inclined observers of nature, who made many valuable and accurate records of plant and animal life and geological patterns, felt they were seeing into the mind of God. Ironically, we now live in a time where naturalistic study and the information gleaned from such investigation, is seen as a threat to belief in a Creator and as a heretical undertaking that young people should not be exposed to.
Today believers still think of God/gods or the spirits as dwelling in the celestial vault. When the ancients formulated their early mythologies, the universe was very tiny, so gods could live on a mountain top (Mount Olympus) or just above the Earth in the skies. Now, if one pauses just a moment to actually think about it, with our knowledge of the incomprehensible vastness of the universe, thinking of the heavenly realm superintended by the Creator as existing somewhere “up there” in immediate space, where we have sent humans and probes, satellites and telescopes, seems atavistic, and smacks of the primitive past from which these concepts were formed. We can’t have our gods and angels billions of light years away, or we become too insignificant and unattended to, but having them hovering just out of sight above some nonexistent Firmament is incomprehensibly limiting for the divines within the scope of the universe. There just does not appear to be any sensible way to reconcile the ancient geocentric cosmology and its attendant deities, with our modern understanding of the cosmos. Professor Baumbach showed several diagrams of different depictions of how the ancients from different societies regarded the Earth, space, the underworld, the biota and the deities, all employing iconography familiar to them at their time and place.
Professor Baumbach also displayed images of Orion and Cassiopeia; the latter example is visible in Michigan all year long. Vega, he mentioned, is straight up at 9PM and is a pole star, as is Polaris. The sun sets on different parts of the horizon depending on the season; itself dependent on how the Earth shifts on its axis. During the Autumnal equinox the sun sets in the middle horizon in the west, while in December, it sets in a very different region of the sky. When people began to change from nomadic to more stable civilizations, they could plant markers that recorded and preserved these movements they observed. Some star clusters are close enough together (from our vantage point and perception) that they seem more like a single, more prominent light source, which attracted more attention and therefore garnered more mythologies to be attributed to them.
Those who could study and gain knowledge of the star patterns were as conduits to the divine for the masses and able to make prophetic predictions and explain catastrophes to them. For the ancients, the sky was part of the Earth. Thunder, lightning, comets, and so-called shooting stars, were seen as phenomena to interpret. The interpretation was always that it showed the gods in action. The early creation models from this sky activity lead to the genesis of religions.
For evidence of this assertion, our presenter noted three bases of support: The study of still extant primitive cultures, where they can be interviewed to extrapolate beliefs back to earlier times; the existence of primitive structures for charting the stars; and the study of the religions and mythologies of ancient cultures.
Cultures that left a written record had their writings translated many times by those who were uninformed in the subject of astronomy, thus producing several errors and incorrect attributions of findings. The late writer and lecturer on mythology, Joseph Campbell (“Mythology is other people’s religion.”), wished he had studied astronomy better when he had been younger, to have had greater insights into the backdrop that various cultures’ mythologies all played against. Unfortunately, Baumbach lamented, there is little cross- talk between those well versed in mythology and those who are conversant in astronomy, so a great deal of potential richness of understanding is often lost.
We tend to know much more about the mythologies/religions of ancient cultures that had left a written record, but many others left behind non-written artifacts that show how they interpreted the heavens to produce their own full pantheon of the governing gods and how these played out in their cultures. But they can only be fully understood if one has a good grounding in astronomy. Astonishingly, even Stonehenge’s formations have been linked to astronomy only within the last seventy years. It came in a startling flash of new comprehension, when researchers noted how many ancient structures had markers lined up with the equinoxes and solstices (solstice means: sun stands still; the twice yearly equinox is a time of equal day and night length). This was done before calendars stole the gaze away from the stars to note the coming of seasons and events that occurred with perfect regularity. The shamans and priests were early astronomers, as noted previously in this summary. They would report the times to pray to the gods or celebrate solstice events, etc.
The familiar Christian religious holidays have come down to us in modified form from their older traditions which celebrated seasonal and celestial events. Christ’s birth was moved to the time of the winter solstice in keeping with the myth of the Unconquered Sun, along with other solar deities, including Mythra, and many others. Easter is hardly even changed in name from its pagan tradition of the celebration of the fertility goddess, Eostre, and it is still celebrated with symbols of fertility and fecundity. This and much more is well-covered in other, earlier minutes from presentations regarding the holiday celebrations and their origins.
Professor Baumbach showed us pictures of the Medicine Wheel in Wyoming in the US, also with posts that line up with the sunrises and sunsets as they occur in the different seasons. Other structures in the American Southwest we were treated to are clearly temples and astronomical recording devices both, showing the strong link to religion and astronomy.
The imagery of other cultures shows how the people of those cultures perceived the star patterns and their universe. Even when strangely (by modern standards) interpreted as, say, tortoises and snakes consuming themselves, etc, the astronomical events and patterns they pertain to is unmistakable, valid and well observed. As mentioned earlier, the ancients saw the sky, where the deities were manifest in the stars, as a part of the Earth. The Christian tradition, a latecomer, relatively, in the scope of full fledged religions, was unusual in its creation of a Heaven, apart from the earthly plane.
Some of the motions of the stars (which represented the gods themselves) that the ancients, without specialized equipment, could observe and record were diurnal, annual, lunar, planetary, and processional.
The Big Dipper was especially significant in the Norse, Chinese and American Indian cultures. Seven was a lucky number to each of these cultures, and there are seven stars that compose this constellation. Of course, more recently, the American slaves who fled to the north for freedom, Followed the Drinking Gourd (the Big Dipper) as it indicated the North star which shone the way to their liberation. Different constellations are observable at different times of the year but this follows a definite path; an ecliptic line.
The link between religious notions and astronomy can even be noted by a negative rendering. Those peoples who lived where trees often occluded a well seen vista of the starscape tended to create myths dealing more with ground level spirits instead of being located in the skies.
Professor Baumbach talked of the Zodiac, saying that this means the dwelling place of animals (think of zoology—the study of animals). Human forms were later incorporated as well. Modern astrology is a remnant of these ancient interpretations of beings being outlined in the star patterns.
Sirius is related to Osiris in the ancient Egyptian culture and it was very prominent due to its brightness. Saturn is often seen in various cultures as the prime Creator; Yahweh is based on this planet. Jupiter is related to such religious figures as Noah, Moses and Adam. Since ancient sacred writings are generally a patchwork of stolen concepts from various other traditions and notions, there is a great deal of inconsistency that results when one reads the text in one light, and then it switches to another framework, without reference to the origin of the disparate concepts. One can reverse engineer the myths to uncover how they came to be however, when armed with sufficient astronomical and mythological understanding. Even Methusula living for 963 years makes sense when lunar cycles are substituted for solar ones, where he becomes an octogenarian. However, this breaks down, Baumbach conceded, with the biblical tales of 50 and 60 year olds having babies. I would offer that biblical chronology is always problematic and inconsistent, however. The Day/Age species of Creationists are always employing hermeneutics to explain away the conflict between the Genesis story of a young Earth with the abundant and irrefragable evidence of an ancient planet by saying the Days of Creation represent Ages. But then, would this not throw all the subsequent days mentioned in the Bible into this chronology? Did Jesus rise from the tomb three Ages from the time he was crucified?
Some other relationships between planetary bodies and special beings are Eve being related to Venus; the Devil, to Mars; and Saturn and Jupiter as the two principle gods. In some myths, Saturn created Jupiter. Orion is generally seen as the hunter god.
Conjunctions that occur with regularity spawned many myths, such as the conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn passing through the Milky Way. These are seen as portals, pertaining to mythic constructs such as the Styx River or real ones, such as the Nile, where the souls can traverse, as they are believed to touch the horizon at these times. Spirits can, at the conjunctions, pass to the Underworld or from the heavens to the Earth. The gods may also use these routes in their travels from one realm to another. The many flood myths of which the Noah one is but one out of some 400 (with the Epic of Gilgamesh containing one of the earliest recorded examples), have their impetus from these conjunctures as well.
When Jupiter and Saturn join at the Equinox it was seen as the beginning of the new year. At one time the year began with the month of March. This is why the months September (Sept. = seven), October (Oct. = eight), November (Nov. = nine), and December (Dec. = ten) seem out of sequence on the modern calendar with what their designation signifies.
The seasonal changes derive from the Earth’s tilt on its axis; summer coming to regions tilting toward the sun; winter when these areas tilt away. Because of this 23 degree tilt, the ecliptic line is not identical with the equator. The Tropic of Cancer is as far north as one can go and still have the sun overhead, while the Tropic of Capricorn is as far south one may venture for this to occur. Professor Baumbach also discussed the processional rotation which takes 25,000 years to occur; the North Star changes position and seasons are altered gradually.
The procession of the equinox puts us in different Ages, such as the Age of Aries, or Aquarius, as examples. Interestingly, 2,000 years ago was the Age of Pisces, and the putative time of Jesus, the Christ. Early followers of him used the symbol of the fish, which Pisces represents. Continuing with these connections, we see that 4,000 years ago it was the age of the Ram and Judaism is associated with it. 6,000 years ago, it was the Taurian Age, which is associated with the Egyptian culture. Could it be possible, our presenter mused, for people to perceive these processional changes, occurring over such tremendous stretches of time? The cultures of these ages were more sedentary and more watchful of the unobstructed skies, made enduring markers as records and attributed the changes as extremely significant. Mythic writings may survive by being passed down through countless generations. Even now, North Americans living in 2005, cling to words in a book about ancient Middle Eastern barbarous tribes they have very little in common with and whose myths cast little illumination now on our understanding of the natural world.
Regarding the Christian myth, 2,000 years ago, the conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn may have produced what the ancients perceived as the Star that serves as a portent of the birth of the Messiah.
We turned last to the evolutionary stages of religion, beginning with observation of phenomena that are transfixing, vexing and in need of explanation. In a pre-scientific time, these explanations resulted in mythology. A priest class grew to interpret for the masses. Then, with the advent of written works, direct observation became somewhat usurped by the text in the books, that have then become sacred and inerrant. Now it becomes these texts that direct the action of the masses and what is interpreted by the priests for the masses instead of the celestial play that spawned the myths in the first place. Eventually this returns to a state where observation comes to the fore again and predictions can be made about the behavior, structure and future of the universe. However this may lead to to the emergence of other contemporary myths, despite that now scientific knowledge and amazing instruments- that can plumb the depths of space- exist, and information can be had by the common person, instead of passed along by a religious elite class who interpret data for their own advantage.
Secretary: Charles LaRue.
