Sermon-Memories of Sodom and Gomorrah
Thursday, December 8, 2011 at 08:51PM Memories of Sodom and Gomorrah; It Isn’t What You Think
Sermon to Countryside Church, Unitarian Universalist, May 29, 2011
Sermon to the Geneva UU Society, November 27, 2011
The Rev. Dr. C. Scot Giles
Expectation Creates Perception
My ministry is one of spiritual healing, primarily using the hypnotic arts and sciences.
Hypnotism is based on the fact that much of what happens to us is actually the result of an expectation we create in our minds.
Governments have known for centuries how to exploit this to use it to influence what people think. Today I’m going to show you how that is done. To prove that it has been done as long as governments have existed, I’m going to show you an example of it from the oldest part of the Bible. Then, I’m going to suggest what you might do about this to keep it from affecting you.
Along the way I’m going to share with you a bit of my radical reading of the Bible., and explain why I think the Bible is primarily about psychology not theology.
The Rules of the Mind
It’s actually very easy to put a person into hypnotic trance. I could teach any of you how to do that in an afternoon. The hard part is to know what to do once you have the other person entranced. That’s the craft Consulting Hypnotists study and it’s very, very difficult.
What we do is to create a Suggestion Patter, layers of words, images, stories and metaphors created by following a handful of rules. For example one of these rules is the Rule of Imagination. It says that “When Will and Imagination Conflict, Imagination Always Wins.”
As an example, I want every person in this sanctuary to not imagine that Ms. Sarah Palin, the half-term Governor of Alaska, is standing in the middle of the Church Hall right now. Do not think about her. Do not wonder if she has helped herself to a cup of your coffee. Do not ask yourself where in the room she is standing. Do not even consider what she might be carrying in her left hand. Most important of all, do not picture her in your mind wearing a dark blue mini-skirt and black fish-net stockings.
Can’t do it, can you? No one can. Some of your are probably feeling the urge to leave this room to check out what’s happening in the Church Hall right now.
Where Will and Imagination Conflict, Imagination Always Wins. No exceptions. All I have to do is paint a graphic picture in your minds and you will see it there; even if you don’t want to.
Another of these rules hypnotists know is the Rule of Dominant Affect. What it means is that stronger emotions always push out weaker emotions.. Very strong emotions can actually change patterns of thought because the desire to be reasonable is a weak emotion.
While I use this Rule for healing, it’s got a darker side known to every politician, advertising executive and marketing consultant.
If you want to fool someone, all you have to do is to put your proposition out there framed by things associated with strong emotions. The people who hear it will get so tangled up in the emotion that they will not notice that you actually pulled a fast one and said something that doesn’t make logical sense.
It’s called “Emotional Reasoning”--thinking that what you have heard makes sense because it also makes you feel a strong emotion.
This has a far-ranging impact on our lives that we underestimate, and is the very tool used by governments to keep us in line and prevent us from questioning what we’re told.
One of the places I most enjoy pointing this out is in our understanding of the Bible, because that’s the “authority” a lot of preachers and politicians use to justify what they want you believe.
Some of you are not going to agree with me in the Sermon, and that’s okay. I thank you for giving me a hearing.
The Bible
I love the Bible. I actually have some reasonably serious credentials as a Bible Scholar and routinely use its poetry and metaphors in my personal spiritual life. I take none of it literally, but view it as a book that tells me a lot about how the human mind works.
But we misunderstand it all the time.
Most of us were taught the Story of Noah’s Ark as the story of a God that lovingly sheltered people and animals from disaster. I’ve seen church school toys that are small copies of this Ark filled with cute statutes of animals and waving and smiling people. Because that’s what we expect it to be about, that’s what we perceive it to be.
Yet if you actually look at that story it’s not a happy story. It’s a story of divine genocide on a planetary scale. It’s actually a horrible story about a mean-spirited and unforgiving God.
We hear the Parables of Jesus like the Good Samaritan or the Prodigal Son, and think they have something to do with helping others or forgiving children. That’s what many of us were told they meant, and so that is how we read them. I recall the song from my Methodist upbringing, “Jesus loves me, this I know. ‘Cause the Bible tells me so.” I grew up thinking the Bible was a collection of nice stories about warm feelings and good thoughts.
That’s hogwash.
As Professor Jennifer Wright Knust, a Professor of Religion at Boston University whose recent work I draw on in this sermon, said in her book Unprotected Texts, “The only way that the Bible can be regarded as straightforward and simple is if no one bothers to read it.” (p. 10)
Those parables of Jesus I mentioned were not nice stories, and they meant something very different in Jesus’s time than now. The Good Samaritan was an outcast in 1st Century Society and no respectable person would have accepted help from one. It would be like accepting help from a group of terrorists.
The crime of the Prodigal Son wasn’t that he was greedy, but that he worked as a pig farmer and made himself ritually impure under the Holiness Code of Jewish Society.
The Parables of Jesus are actually about subverting the authority of the culture of the time, and we miss that meaning completely.
The Two Ways of Understanding the Bible
There are basically two ways of understanding the Bible. Theologian Brian McLaren, one of the leaders of what is called the “Emerging Church” movement contrasts people who think of the Bible as if it were a Constitution, and those who view it as I do, as a Library.
People who see the Bible as a Constitution believe that every word has authority. They believe that apparent contradictions can be reconciled into a uniform meaning, and that the document contains rules that we are supposed to live by. It’s a rule book. Just like the Constitution of the United States is supposed to be a rule book, interpreted and reconciled by a Supreme Court so that everything stays consistent.
This view of the Bible has many problems. In some cases the rules make no modern sense or become outdated with social changes. For example, the rule in Leviticus 19:27 that men should not trim their beards is one I routinely ignore. I can also verify from regular attendance at a Summer Renaissance Faire that the rule in the next verse that no one should get a tattoo is obviously ignored by many young women--to my absolute delight.
Then there are the contradictions. Such as when Isaiah 2:4 urges us to beat our swords into agricultural plows and our spears into pruning hooks, while Joel 3:10 urges us to beat our agricultural plows into swords and our pruning hooks into spears.
On the other hand people like me see the Bible as a Library of a particular culture. A culture is a group of people who have informally agreed to argue about the same issues over a sustained period of time.
Now, I argue that the library that is the Bible is actually a psychological library, because it tells us how the minds of the people who were, in most cases, our ancestors worked. Their psychological assumptions have become encoded in every facet of our civilization and government.
Now in any library, all the books will not agree with each other, nor is there any expectation that they will. If we collected a library of books on, say, Global Warming, the books would not all agree. Some would be proponents of the theory, others would be in opposition and few would exactly agree with each other.
So too the books in the library of the Bible. They fight, disagree and contradict each other.
But those books had in influence on the minds of the people who read them. The earliest of the books in this library were gathered at the end of a long literary dark age, and contain fragments of stories that are far older than the Bible itself. One of those stories is the Story of Sodom and Gomorrah. And it’s not what you think.
It’s Not What You Think
In our time, popular culture views the story of the destruction of these two cities in Genesis 18-19 through the lens of Victorian social mores. The sin of the people who lived there was supposed to be sexual immorality, and the the cities were destroyed in a cataclysm because that immorality offended God. That’s what we expect this story to be about because that’s what those of us who were taught anything about it were taught.
Therefore, when we read it now we assume it must be about sexual immorality.
Actually, that interpretation is nonsense.
In an era before kings and centralized government, the people who lived in the Fertile Crescent were ruled by warlords, called Judges, who would be singled out from among the people when there was a need to respond to some crisis. The Book of Judges in the Hebrew Bible is about them.
There were legends about one sort of warlord that never failed. These warlords were more than human. They were a race of Demi-Gods, and they were called “the Nephilim.”
To understand this you have to grasp an obscure section of the Bible found in Genesis 6: 1-2 that mostly puzzles people.
When people began to multiply on the face of the ground, and daughters were born to them, the sons of God saw that they were fair; and they took wives for themselves of all that they chose. ….The Nephilim were on the earth in those days--and also afterward--when the sons of God went in to the daughters of humans, who bore children to them. These were the heroes that were of old, warriors of renown.
What’s this about? There is little that survives in the Bible to explain it. However, we know from other old documents that the Niphilim were believed to be a race of semi-divine beings that were the offspring of union between humans and Angels (or, the Sons of God).
These offspring were immensely powerful beings who became invincible Warlords, enabling the City-States they represented to conquer and enslave their enemies. In an age before for creation of Kings, these Warlords were the ultimate political and military leaders.
Some of the legends say these Warlords, or Nephilim, were so powerful that God was afraid of them and set out to destroy the Angel-Human hybrids.
Perhaps that is why right after this passage, the text goes on to describe the Great Flood and Noah’s Ark. Some scholars think was more about the destruction of these semi-divine hybrids than people, who were after all, permitted to survive.
The tale of the Great Flood is ancient--it actually comes from a Sumarian text called the Epic of Gilgamesh written about 2500 BCE, almost 1000 years prior to the writing of the Book of Genesis.
However the story was dusted off and re-written by people who had a vested interest in explaining why there were no more Angel-Human hybrids. These people were the early Kings in Israel who wanted everyone to understand that there were no more Invincible Warlords to be found. Therefore, you see, the institution of Kingship and central government made sense. As did everything that went along with them; like a royal court, a royal army, taxes, police and a moneyed aristocracy.
No more Invincible Warlords, so we have to tolerate kings.
A false proposition, we don’t have to tolerate kings, but put forward wrapped in a scary story of divine genocide that would frighten anyone who believed it might be true. Who would quake at any sound of thunder, lightning or rain.
So scary was it, that people didn’t notice that it actually was a rationale for the institution of an ancient monarchy. That’s the Rule of Dominant Affect. If you put it out there with enough of an emotional charge, people will not notice that is doesn’t make sense.
By an amazing coincidence, the writers who were putting all this down on paper are believed to have been scribes in the court of King David, the second King in Israel, or his son Solomon. They employed the best spin doctors and marketing professionals of the age. They dredged up the old Sumerian Story of the Flood and put it down in scripture in a way to shore up their own political position.
So what about Sodom and Gomorrah? Very much the same. Sodom was a beautiful city located in present-day Iraq. At the time it enjoyed a magnificent climate like the best of our Southern California Coast. It was a rich and prosperous city. But Sodom was locked in perpetual war with its sister city Gomorrah. The wars were mostly trade wars, but they cut into the profit margin and real estate values.
The story is that two Angels travel to the City of Sodom after visiting with Abraham, the Patriarch of Israel. They come to the house of Abraham’s nephew in Sodom, a man named Lot.
According to the story, the citizens of Sodom realize that Lot’s guests are not humans, but Angels. They demand that Lot allow the citizens to rape the Angels.
Trying to protect his guests, Lot offers the citizens his daughters instead, but the citizens say no (what the daughters said has not been recorded; and don’t feel bad for them as they get even later in the story).
Finally the angels use their supernatural power to strike the citizens blind. Lot and his family escape. As they flee the city it is destroyed in a cataclysm, as Lot and his daughters flee to the hills. Lot’s wife looks back upon the burning Cities of Sodom and Gomorrah, and is turned into a pillar of salt.
This story is almost always presented as a tale of the dangers of immorality or a denunciation of homosexuality. That’s what we expect when we hear the names of those two ancient cities, so that is how we perceive the story. When conservative preachers condemn gay, lesbian, transgenered or bi-sexual people, they routinely use the story of Lot and the City of Sodom as their authority. But that’s not really what it is about at all.
The citizens of Sodom wanted to rape Lot’s guests because they knew they were Angels. Angels were thought to be androgynous. An Angel that appeared male could still take the female part and give birth. The story of the City of Sodom is really a story about an attempt to have sex with Angels. It’s about an attempt to create Nephilim.
The goal was not rape. The goal of the citizens of Sodom was to create what, in their time, was understood as the ultimate Weapon of Mass Destruction. They wanted to create Angel-Human hybrids that could become Warlords, and allow their city to conquer and enslave its enemies. We don’t see this because we are expecting it to be about something else, because we were taught to believe that it had a more risqué meaning. The Rule of Dominant Affect again. The emotional charge around sexual mores keeps us from see that the payload of the story is different.
God hates Invincible Warlords (the Angel-Human hybrids). Look what God did to the City of Sodom when they tried to create them. Because God destroyed them all in the Flood, there are no more Invincible Warlords around now. Therefore, we have to have Kings, and taxes, and police and nobility because there is no other way to hold society together in a world without demigods.
Said the government scribes, spin doctors and marketing consultants.
A Historical Basis?
The story of the destruction of the Cities of Sodom and Gomorrah probably does have some historical basis. Likely it was based on a dim ancient recollection of the destruction of two actual cities in a Pompeii-like volcanic eruption. If you look at how the destruction is described it’s very much like that--fire, explosions, brimstone, etc. At the ruins of Pompeii to this day you can find the petrified remains of its citizens whose bodies were covered in ash that calcified and look for all the world like salt.
Many scholars believe that the story of the destruction is actually a survival of an older end-of-the-world story just like the story of Noah’s Ark. Indeed, later when living in the hills, Lot’s daughters do something that makes it look very much like they believed they were the only surviving family in the world. However, I will leave you to read that part of the story on your own.
The stories of Sodom and Gomorrah and Noah’s Ark turn out to be ancient stories resurrected by Kingly-Appointed spin doctors to justify the imposition of centralized government on the people of Israel.
Much of what we have in the earliest writing of the Bible are prehistoric stories dusted off an given new life by kingly scribes because they provided a justification for the political life of the time.
Controlling Expectation
If you can control the emotional orientation a person has toward a story, you influence almost completely that person’s reaction to it. If the emotional orientation is powerful it can so influence opinion that people will overlook the fact that it is actually about something else.
The Story of Sodom and Gomorrah is about--gasp-- immorality. The Story of the Flood is about--gasp--divine genocide. Not. They are in fact scriptural examples of the Rule of Dominant Affect used to influence the minds in a culture.
A smart spin doctor can do a lot with the Rule of Dominant Affect. Governments have always used it, from ancient to modern times.
You can use this principle to justify a war fought to control oil production, by dressing it up in a claim to be “democratic liberators”--as did a former Presidential Administration.
You can break up the families of minority groups by dressing up the laws that prosecute them as laws intended to insure “public safety”--as did the Legislature of the the State of Arizona.
You can destroy a whole class of people by building walls through their neighborhood so they can’t get to work or find water, provided you justify those walls by saying they are there to “prevent terrorism”--as does the current government of the secular state of Israel.
You can bust unions and deny whole classes of workers job protection by claiming that your actions are intended to promote “economic responsibility” in a time of “fiscal crisis,” as did the Governor of the State of Wisconsin.
You can destroy wetlands, parks, forests and tundra by claiming that doing so is really about “promoting jobs.”
You can argue that people should be deprived of affordable health care if you put that claim out wrapped in the emotional language of “freedom.”
You can deprive people of a constitutional right by saying you are doing it to “make our streets safe” as do the more unreasonable advocates of gun control.
You can rig elections by creating a swollen public payroll of people who will vote for you provided they don’t have to work hard, by saying you are doing to to establish civic “stability,” as did the Chicago Political Machine for decades.
So long as the claim you put out there has enough of an emotional charge, the brain will work its magic and most people will not see that you are actually doing something else. The way the brain works can be our liberator, but it can be used to enslave us too if someone knows how.
Breaking the Bonds
How can we prevent this from hurting us and those we love. How can we stop the chemistry of our brain from being tricked?
As any hypnotist will tell you, that’s almost impossible. Where will and the mechanics of brain chemistry conflict, brain chemistry almost always wins.
I personally take refuge in the psychological counsel offered by the Bible, which when considered separately from the interpretations imposed on it by the traditional church often offers expert guidance.
In Ephesians 4:14 we read, “We must no longer be children, tossed to and fro and blown about by every wind of doctrine, by people’s trickery, by their craftiness and deceitful scheming.” That is, we should automatically maintain a skeptical doubt about any claim made in our hearing that also carries a strong emotional charge. We should automatically subject such claims to analysis, even if they come from people we trust.
Learning to adopt a pervasive skeptical doubt about any claim that also carries an emotional charge is an excellent policy. I do it myself. I never assume my emotional response to something is the same as a logical response. I separate them and when possible, give my emotions a chance to calm down before I decide an issue.
That is, I always doubt what my emotions tell me, at least at first. As an old Chinese parable puts it "With great doubts come great understanding; with little doubts come little understanding."
May we all come to have great understanding.
And that’s my sermon.
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