dec 10th
interesting stuff from dr kak.
the mitanni (of whom nefertiti was one) must have passed on indic ideas to the desert semites.
the semites did not understand akenaten's monism, and turned it, being barbarians, into monotheism.
similarly, they did not understand agni, one of whose names is yahvah, and took the name and gave it to ialdabaoth, a second-class demiurge whom his mother hen-pecks for trying to pretend he is as big as his father.
trust the christists to take ideas and while they 'embrace, extend and exterminate', to make abominations out of the original ideas.
http://www.ece.lsu.edu/kak/Akhenaten.pdf
also see for more on ialdabaoth here by michel danino: http://www.hindu-religion.net/printthread.php?Board=hinduism&main=60516&type=post
excerpts below.
Now, to pinpoint Jehovah's identity we must remember that he himself acknowledges "Yahweh" to be a name new to the Hebrews : "By that name I did not make myself known to them" (Exodus, 6 :3). He does not say what his earlier name was, but the early Christian Gnostic tradition, which was brutally suppressed by the growing orthodox school, provides us with an answer—or rather two. In the Gnostic Gospels which survived centuries of persecution (most of which were found at Nag-Hammadi in Upper Egypt in 1945), Jehovah is named either Samael, which means "the god of the blind," or Ialdabaoth, "the son of chaos." Thus one of those texts contains this revealing passage :
Ialdabaoth, becoming arrogant in spirit, boasted himself over all those who were below him, and explained, "I am father, and God, and above me there is no one." His mother, hearing him speak thus, cried out against him, "Do not lie, Ialdabaoth ; for the father of all, the primal anthropos, is above you."[10]
This not only shows that Jehovah was not the supreme god, but also that he had a mother ! For the Gnostics, like the Indians, refused to depict God as only male ; God had to be equally female—and ultimately everything. Another text, in the Secret Book of John, points out pertinently, "By announcing [that he is a jealous God] he indicated that another God does exist ; for if there were no other one, of whom would he be jealous ?"[11] In fact, Jehovah is viewed in the Gnostic Gospels as no more than a demiurge or a subordinate deity—exactly what Devas and Asuras are in Indian tradition.
....
The first thing that strikes the unbiased, discerning Indian reader of the Old Testament, especially the Exodus, in which Jehovah (or Yahweh) first introduces himself to Moses under that name, is his ungodlike character. Jehovah is admittedly jealous : the second of the Ten Commandments reads, "You shall have no other gods before me," while the third explicitly forbids the making and worship of any idols, "for I am a jealous God, punishing the children for the sin of the fathers...." Jehovah does speak as often of punishment as he does of sin, and periodically goes into a state of "fierce anger," promising the most complete devastation to the Hebrews who reject him. Not content with cursing his reluctant followers, he also curses nation after nation, and finally the earth itself, which he inexplicably holds responsible for man's sins : "The Lord is going to lay waste the earth and devastate it, he will ruin its face and scatter its inhabitants" (Isaiah, 24 :1), or again, "The day of the Lord is coming—a cruel day, with wrath and fierce anger—to make the land desolate and destroy the sinners within it" (Isaiah, 13 :9). In fact, he is so obsessed with sin that one looks in vain in his oppressive berating and legislating for any hint of a higher spirituality, such as the Gita's final injunction to "abandon all dharmas." Or contrast his "jealousy" with Sri Krishna's insistence on spiritual freedom : "Whatever form of Me any devotee with faith desires to worship, I make that faith of his firm and undeviating" (7.21), or again : "Others ... worship Me in My oneness and in every separate being and in all My million universal faces" (9.15). But the god of the Bible and Koran will have none of this universality.
If Jehovah had stopped there, we might have found him to be simply a foul-tempered and libidinous god ; after all, some Puranic gods too have such defects, although they usually retain a sense of their limits and a compassion of which Jehovah is spotlessly guiltless. But he has a clear plan, he means business and knows that coercion alone can establish his rule : when the Hebrews over whom he is so keen to hold sway go back to their older worship of a "golden calf," he orders through Moses that each of the faithful should "kill his brother and friend and neighbour" (Exodus 32 :27). Instructions which were promptly complied with, for we are informed that 3,000 were killed on that fateful day ; to crown his punishment, Jehovah "struck the people with a plague." I find it highly symbolic that Judaism was born in blood and fear, not out of love for its god. As Sri Aurobindo put it, "The Jew invented the God-fearing man ; India the God-knower and God-lover."[3] It probably took centuries for the old cults to disappear altogether, and a stream of prophets who sought to strike terror into the hearts of the Israelites. It was a radical, unprecedented departure from ancient world cultures. Naturally, it did not stop there and was to find more fertile soils in Christianity and Islam : earlier, Jehovah was content with being the god of the Hebrews alone, but in the new creeds, his ambition now extended to the whole earth.
Increasingly aware of this cruel, irritable, egocentric and exclusivist character of Jehovah, many Western thinkers, especially from the eighteenth century onward, rejected his claim to be the supreme and only god. Voltaire, one of the first to ruthlessly expose the countless inconsistencies in the Bible, could hardly disguise how it filled him with "horror and indignation at every page."[4] In particular, he found the plethora of laws dictated by Jehovah "barbaric and ridiculous."[5] Jefferson depicted him as "cruel, vindictive, capricious and unjust," while Thomas Paine found the Bible more like "the work of a demon than the word of God."[6] With the growth of materialistic science, in particular Darwinian evolution, such views, which were revolutionary at the time of a Voltaire, became widespread in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Bernard Shaw, for example, describes the Biblical god as "a thundering, earthquaking, famine striking, pestilence launching, blinding, deafening, killing, destructively omnipotent Bogey Man...."[7] Freud, seeing in Jehovah an all-too-human creation, subjected him to psychoanalysis—a dream of a subject for a psychoanalyst. Aldous Huxley called the Old Testament "a treasure house of barbarous stupidity [full of] justifications for every crime and folly."[8] Huxley traced the "wholesale massacres" perpetrated by Christianity to Jehovah's "wrathful, jealous, vindictive" character, just as he attributed "the wholesale slaughter of Buddhists and Hindus" by invading Muslims to their devotion for a "despotic person."[9] Because a few—not all—intellectuals had the courage to state the obvious, the power of Christianity was greatly reduced in the West. Yet I have always marvelled that Indians should learn about Christianity neither from their own inquiry nor from those bold Western thinkers, but from the very zealots who are no longer heard in the West.
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