A Conversation With Morgan Freeman
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Do you remember the old song Searchin’ by The Coasters? Some of you may never heard of it but this song describes my state of mind these days.
If I asked you what Morgan Freeman and a lovely young woman have in common most of you, at least those who do not know me well, would say the movie “Million Dollar Baby”, and you would be wrong. Those who do know me well would wonder how I got them in the same conversation together, at the same time. Well, I didn’t, exactly, but they would be close.
You see, as I am among the atheists over here, I keep searching for some rhyme or reason why so many people keep believing in this invisible entity that is running 7-billion lives all at the same time. To me, it just seems unfathomable that anything could do that. I mean, if this life form has any intelligence at all why the hell would it do it. I am fairly intelligent, even though that often comes into question, and I have trouble keeping just my life in order. But, never mind, back to Morgan and the lovely lady.
During the past few weeks I have been watching a series called “Getting to Know God” or something like that. Anyway, Morgan, who I do respect for his acting ability and his great voice overs, has been scampering around the earth trying to find out what various religions think about God, and you know what, there are a lot of people who are really insecure about themselves.
It seems that people all over always needed something to explain their existence. We are not unique in the civilized world, even the uncivilized among earth’s population could not accept the fact that we were just here either. In fact this crap did not start here in America even though we act as if it did.
It seems, according to Morgan, and I am not sure if it was John, Paul, Buddha, or God himself that appointed him as the one to discover this, Egypt was the place that humans decided that there would be only one God and was where humans decided that evil was in the world. Damn, I would have thought that Adam found that out about the time Cain hit him upside the head with a brick or something like that.
I mean there is the question about the apple and women leading men astray, or the snake who talked, or the bad apple, or something to that effect. But, come on, we can do better than the Egyptians putting a virtual heart on a virtual scales to describe evil. Morgan, my friend, you really did a better job of playing God than interpreting him, or her, or both, whichever.
Anyway, back to my point. How did Morgan and a lovely young woman get in the same conversation with me? Hell, I was just lucky enough to spend the evening with a lovely young woman who is young enough to be my granddaughter and had a really great time. Since I am in Selma, Alabama for only a few days, and she is here for a few days, I told I would like to take her home and keep her. She just laughed of course.
I wondered, did I just commit a SIN according to the the invisible entity. Am I going to burn in hell now? Nah, I don’t think so. First, I don’t believe in it. Secondly, the Egyptians invented it and nothing they invent seems to work anyway. Third, their idea was to actually weigh one’s heart to see if it was heavier than the weight of justice, and, well, I don’t see that happening anytime soon.
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Do you think there really was an Abraham? I guess anything is possible, but according to Maximillien de Lafayette, Ya or Yahoo or Yawheh was part of the Phoenician and Syrian pantheon. Abraham I believe identified himself as a syrian. It’s likely that Ya was his personal god and monotheism didn’t come until later. Some sources identify the Sumerian Ea with Ya, but who knows? Personally I don’t think real monotheism was mostly written into Jewish literature until the Babylonian captivity during which there was an active movement to identify all the Babylonian gods with various aspects of Marduk. Before that I suspect it was more of a henotheistic religion: accepting of many gods with one supreme god. Even so and as to monotheism, we can’t forget good old El, the Canaanite god, son of Baal who may have become the Hebrew God when Canaan was “conquered” The Bible after all has two names for the old man in the clouds. El is translated as “God” and Yaweh as “Lord” and the stories attached to each are rather different. Are we really hiding two gods here?
Great Information Glenn. I had not had time to look the information from the show up. The archaeologist showing this to Morgan Freeman had dated it at 1350 B.C. which would have put it at about 3500 years ago. What I found interesting, if it is correct, is that the priests who began to regain some of their power were never able to really establish the multiple gods philosophy and the Abraham used the one god theory to focus the Israelites on a single god although he did not believe the sun was god. But, then again, Freeman, may have simply gotten his information wrong.
The pharoah in question was Amenhotep IV who changed his name to Akhenaten to dedicate himself to the Aten, the sun disk and one and only God. He moved the capitol to Amarna, a city he built from scratch in order to get away from the priesthoods of Amun and Ra and instigated a truly bizarre period in art we call the Amarna period, typified by an almost grotesque mannerism and realism. He may have been deformed – at least his pictures indicate that. The famous Nefertiti was a wife of his and Tut Ankh Amun was a son or grandson who became pharaoh and restored the priesthood’s property and power and changing his name from Tut Ankh Aten. There has been speculation that some son or heir of Akhenaten was the model for Moses as the world Moses or Meses means “heir” in old Egyptian.
Gilgamesh lived about 3000 BC, I believe but the oldest Sumerian version of his epic story ( where he’s called Bilgamesh) we have is from about a thousand years later. It includes chapters about the journey of his dead friend Enkidu into the underworld of death and his attempts to get out. So anyway, the idea of the underworld appears in Western Literature for the first time but may well be much, much older. It seems to appear all around the world.
Glenn, you may be right as far as I know. Morgan was only back to 1350 B.C. when the Egyptian Emperor Rah wanted to be the center of attention and declared that all of the other God’s were null except the Sun God and people to worship the sun through him. it does give some credence, though, to many of the mid Eastern countries having similar stories about creationism.
You blasphemer you! Love it! 🙂
I think the Sumerians wrote about an underworld where dead people go before the Egyptians did, but of course they had written language first and the idea was probably incredibly old before anybody wrote anything about anything. As to it being a place of everlasting terror and limitless pain, we may have to credit the Christians (God is love) for that.