The bible and scholars

Scholars with pre-eminent credentials all agree that the Old Testament is far, far removed from facts or history.

Dr. James Bennet Pritchard has been recognized internationally as one of the most distinguished biblical scholars and archaeologists in the world. He was Professor Emeritus of Religious Studies at the University of Pennsylvania; the curator of the Near Eastern section of the museum at the same university; biblical archaeological advisor to “National Geographic” magazine, as well as to the British Broadcasting System and Time-Life Books. Authentic biblical scholars of this caliber are rare indeed. In the professions of religious and biblical “studies” ( I use the word loosely) are more phonies, quacks and charlatans than any other known to me.

I heard him speak several years ago when he was the President of the Archaeological Institute of America. I have copies of his lecture in my files so that I have no need to rely only on my memory.
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The female supreme being…the Goddess

At first, in primal times, there was only the forces of nature and the unknown power behind it all. Gradually there evolved the concept of a Supreme Being, a female, a She, a Goddess who created the Universe and all of its laws. She was the ruler of Nature, Fate, Time, Eternity, Truth, Wisdom, Justice, Love, Birth and Death. And so, for 25,000 years there was only the Goddess. Yes, that is 25,000 years.

The earliest agriculture grew up around the shrines of the Mother Goddess and became social and economic centers as well as holy places. These places were the germs of future cities. Growing cities evolved around these sacred centers, built to honor the divine Mother, the mother Goddess, the Creatress of all of life.

The poet and religious historian Robert Graves put it in these words: “The whole of neolithic Europe had a remarkably homogeneous system of religious ideas based on the Mother Goddess. The Great Goddess was regarded as immortal, changeless and omnipotent. The concept of a father God was unknown in religious thought. In Europe, the Great Goddess was thought of as the sole omnipotent deity. Fatherhood was not even a part of religious thinking.”
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Steven Weinberg

Dr. Steven Weinberg is one of the true, authentic, Renaissance men of our time.

He has been called the “Einstein” of our day. He won the Nobel Prize for uniting the electro-magnetic and the weak nuclear forces into a single force. He is a founding director of the Jerusalem Winter School of Theoretical Physics; is on the Council of Scholars, the Library of Congress; he holds honorary doctoral degrees from major universities all over the world. He taught at MIT and Harvard. Nobody since Loren Eiseley and Lewis Thomas has written so beautifully turning science into poetry.

He recently was awarded the Lewis Thomas prize, given to the scholar who “best embodies the scientist as poet.”

He prefaced his acceptance speech by saying…”what a joy to be at a meeting that doesn’t start with an invocation.” He went on to say “that the great passion of his life, with science, is to free human beings from the superstition of religion” and he continued:

“Religion is an insult to human dignity. Science should be taught ignoring religion. One of the social functions of science is to free humans from superstition.”
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