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FERTILITY CULT FOUNDATIONSHere's another experiment for you. You will need two glasses that hold the same amount of liquid but are of different shapes. One should be tall and narrow, the other short and squat. You will also need a bright colored liquid drink, such a kool-aidâ, and a pre-school child. Sit the child down at a table. Pour the liquid from a pitcher to one of the glasses as the child watches. Then pour the liquid from that glass to the other glass. Now, ask the child which glass she wants her drink in. Most likely she will choose the tall narrow glass, but that doesn't matter. Next, ask why. Most pre-school children will say the glass they have chosen is bigger. We know that both glasses are the same size. But...a pre-school child isn't capable of recognizing volume, that is height times the radius of the glass times pi. Consequently, for a pre-school child, the glass that she recognizes as bigger, usually the taller one because children this age most often think of tall as big, will hold more liquid, in her mind. Children don't develop the ability to see that the amount of the liquid does not change as you pour it from one glass to the next until sometime in their primary years of grade school. That is when the brain develops the mechanism to recognize this fact. Pieget, a pioneer in child psychological development called it "conservation of liquids." Most other psychologists will say that it is the beginning of the ability to "generalize," that is to see that something learned or known in one area might apply in another. Part of the purpose of education is to develop the ability to see the world as it really is. We learn to form intellectual structures against which we measure the truth of an idea. One of these intellectual structures is genetics, which we studied in high-school biology classes. Perhaps we even remember who the father of modern genetics was, the Austrian Monk, Gregor Mendel. We know, from this study, that an Afro-American couple cannot have a blond-haired blue-eyed child. They do not have the genes for this. Consequently, when we read the story of Jacob cited in the previous section, we know that it is not entirely true. Yes, perhaps he did amass a large flock from his father in law, but he did not get all of those sheep in one breeding season. He was not able to guarantee that all the lambs born would be spotted with the use of branches that appeared to be spotted. At best, according to Mendel, if he mated black sheep with white sheep, about twenty-five percent might have been spotted. These intellectual structures, through which we judge the truth of an idea, took a long time to develop. Mendel published his findings in 1866, a scant 134 years ago. Before Mendel, it was reasonable to believe Jacob's story and it was reasonable to believe that an Afro-American couple could have a blond-haired blue-eyed child because they looked at a picture of one before sexual relations. There were a lot of other strange ideas that are rarely discussed now that science has proven them false. Some of those ideas continue to work even though we know they are false. While we know that the earth is shaped like a giant ball, we act as if it is flat. This is because our limited range of travel is not affected by the curvature of the earth. While we know that the earth rotates around the sun, we still speak of sunrise and sunset. It still appears that way to us. However, the ancients did not have the intellectual framework that we do. For them, the earth was flat and the sun did rise in the morning and set in the evening. If you tried to convince them otherwise, they would think that you were crazy. One of those mind-sets that now seems fantastic to us concerned fertility. In a fertility cult, you planted the fields then you conducted the ritual that insured a harvest at the end of the growing season. This ritual consisted of performing the sex act in the vicinity of the newly planted field. This is called sympathetic magic, where you imitate the results that you desire. It is the same magic that the story says Jacob used to put together his large flocks. In the more ancient fertility cults, where they believed that everything had spirits, the purpose was to instruct the fields or the plants on what to do. The parallels were obvious. You put the seed into the ground -- the man put the seed into the woman. The seed was supposed to germinate and produce a harvest -- the seed did germinate and produce a child. To the primitive mind, both actions were the same thing, just in different settings, in the same manner as the liquid remains the same amount whether in the short-squat glass or the tall-narrow one. And, it worked...well, almost always. There was no reason to question the effectiveness of this ritual because it was done every year. If it didn't work, if there wasn't a sufficient harvest, then the tribe must have offended the spirits. In this manner, taboos were worked in. As these primitive societies evolved and started adopting a theistic religion, then it was the gods which were offended. From this, we received the concept of sacrifice. But the fertility ritual itself was never questioned because it had always been done, because it was the same thing that was wanted from the planting, and because it usually worked. All religions can trace their ancestry back to a fertility cult. There is nothing wrong with this fact. It is nothing to be ashamed of. The fertility cult was the beginning of the awareness that there was something else in this life with intelligence. It was the beginning of the spiritual exploration that, for the Hebrews/Jews/Christians culminated with our present concept of God. However, some traces of this fertility cult beginning still exist in our Hebrew Scriptures. And, this fertility cult beginning of our faith explains the ancient taboo against homosexuality. PREVIOUS ESSAY NEXT ESSAY |