Buddhism says to give up attachments of all kinds. A multitude of other religions have a piece of this elephant: give up something you value, often by killing it. It could be cattle, or birds, or other people, willing or not. All of this is a gross perversion of the original idea of dispatching the delusion of self, and with it personal suffering. We have, naturally, no evidence of prehistoric teachings by those who understood attachment in any way, nor of their decline and perversion into ritual murder to appease Gods or bring good luck, or to have servants in the afterlife. Nevertheless I claim that we have sufficient evidence to infer it.
Human sacrifice
Animal sacrifice
I will not review this whole sorry history. But I will go into some of the more instructive examples about attachment, and just mention the Thuggees, devotees of Kali who murdered/sacrificed solitary travelers in India until suppressed by the British. We get the English word “thug” from them.
Abraham and Isaac
Almost all of the commentary on this planned sacrifice focuses on the killing, and misses the main point. God promised Abraham, in the Genesis mythology, that his descendants would inherit the land of Canaan and be
as numberless as the sands of the sea.
Isaac’s birth was a miracle from God in fulfillment of this promise, aka Covenant, in the tale, because Abraham’s wife Sarah was long past menopause.
Abraham is then willing to give up this entire promise, a definite sign of non-attachment.
Bob Fitts - Sacrifice, to clips from Abraham and Passion of the Christ.
Satan Allowed to Test Job
Job 1:6-22, English Standard Version
6 Now there was a day when the sons of God came to present themselves before the Lord, and Satan also came among them. 7 The Lord said to Satan, “From where have you come?” Satan answered the Lord and said, “From going to and fro on the earth, and from walking up and down on it.” 8 And the Lord said to Satan, “Have you considered my servant Job, that there is none like him on the earth, a blameless and upright man, who fears God and turns away from evil?” 9 Then Satan answered the Lord and said, “Does Job fear God for no reason? 10 Have you not put a hedge around him and his house and all that he has, on every side? You have blessed the work of his hands, and his possessions have increased in the land. 11 But stretch out your hand and touch all that he has, and he will curse you to your face.” 12 And the Lord said to Satan, “Behold, all that he has is in your hand. Only against him do not stretch out your hand.” So Satan went out from the presence of the Lord.
Here God and Satan/The Adversary decide to sacrifice Job’s property, children, and employees as a test, and in the second round, give him a loathsome skin disease. Job’s wife counsels him to curse God and die. His best friends come around to tell him at great length that it’s all his fault.
This includes Bildad the Shuhite, reputedly the shortest man in the Bible.
😋
OK, I apologize for that. There is nothing funny about this to Job.
Job seems to have lost everything.
Nonetheless, Job remains steadfast. In the end, God tells off Job for presumption,
Who is this that darkeneth counsel by words without knowledge?
(Job 38:2)
and his friends for much worse than that, and gives Job his health, new property, employees, and children. Job realizes that God is correct about the nature of the Universe. We can call that a kensho, but from the text alone we cannot properly expound it.
There are, of course, many other issues with this myth that we will leave alone today.
In Zen, we are familiar with these matters, which are known as Zen diseases. Hakuin wrote about his in Yasen kanna (夜船閑話), Idle Talk on a Night Boat, and Rev. Abbess Jiyu Kennett described hers in How to Grow a Lotus Blossom. But we will leave those for another time.
Broken Praise (Job)
The Fall and Redemption in Christianity
Jews focus on the symbolism of the two trees in the Garden of Eden, one for Knowledge of Good and Evil, and one for Life, as I have mentioned before. Adam and Eve messed up in the myth, but Jews know what to do about it.
A Jewish Koan
Christians have, as we say in Zen,
raised great waves on dry land, and dust storms on the bottom of the sea
over this, starting with Paul in the Epistles to the Thessalonians.
1 Thessalonians 1
8 For not only has the word of the Lord sounded forth from you in Macedonia and Achaia, but your faith in God has gone forth everywhere, so that we need not say anything. 9 For they themselves report concerning us the kind of reception we had among you, and how you turned to God from idols to serve the living and true God, 10 and to wait for his Son from heaven, whom he raised from the dead, Jesus who delivers us from the wrath to come.
1 Thessalonians 5
9 For God has not destined us for wrath, but to obtain salvation through our Lord Jesus Christ, 10 who died for us so that whether we are awake or asleep we might live with him.
And so on at great length.
Jesus certainly is not recorded teaching any of this.
The worst version is that of Young-Earth Creationists. Ken Ham and his associates explain that Adam and the Fall must be historical. Otherwise Jesus God Himself cannot save him from the wrath of His genocidal Dad (Himself), and He will be powerless to save us from eternal torture in Hell.
In Defense of the Historical Adam
No Adam: no gospel. If Adam and the Fall are not historical, then Jesus died for a mythological problem and He is a mythological savior offering us a mythological hope. The American Atheists understand this better than many Christians:
No Adam and Eve means no need for a savior. It also means that the Bible cannot be trusted as a source of unambiguous, literal truth. It is completely unreliable, because it all begins with a myth, and builds on that as a basis. No fall of man means no need for atonement and no need for a redeemer.7
No need for confession and atonement is particularly notable bushwah.
Even those who don’t have it that bad get wound up in
- Original Sin
- The redemptive sacrifice of the Lamb of God (Jesus)
- The Passion
- Crucifixion porn
- The Blood
- The Sacred Heart
- The Eucharist
- The Rapture, the Tribulation, Armageddon, The Thousand-Year Kingdom
Blood Of The Lamb—Billy Bragg
Are You Washed In The Blood Of The Lamb - 250 Voice Mass Choir - Classic Hymns " Old Rugged Cross"
Here, have a brief palate cleanser. The theology is still weird, but the music is transcendent, and there is plenty more where that came from.
J.S. Bach: St. Matthew Passion / Part 2 - Chorus: "Lamb of God, I fall before Thee"