321- Blasphemy, 13, 666 etc

image is a montage from public domaine images

This topic shall raise controversy, but the goal of this post is to demystify numbers feared in religions, and to move on into the topics of blasphemy VS religious dogma, and into atheist freedoms. 

The title and image may scare you. The content as well. I hope that you'll read it on, learn and ultimately, understand why I wrote, and then you can choose what to do with the new knowledge. 

My 616th overall post was a photoshoot of my wife in a cemetery, and just like numbers 13 & 616, this current one, 666 is very scary to religious people - well, to some. But, before I tell you why, let me explain the background to this post, which is my overall 666th (counting all my anglophone blogs). 

It is the result of one of my discussions with my wife, whereas the importance of pointing out the path of an atheist breaking away from religions dogma, which rely heavily on fear.

Indeed, fear is a tool, designed with the purposes of controlling individuals and masses, as well as depriving each person of their individuality. I'll come back to this after my discussion on the fears based on these numbers. 

Now, Christians believe that the number 13 has always been and shall always be unlucky. 
This is called Triskaidekaphobia, in Greek : Tris =3, Kai, and, Deka =10, phobos =fear. Thus, fear of 13 (3+10=13). This is based on the belief that Judas who would betray Jesus during the last supper was the 13th disciple to sit at the table, although there is no order mentioned at all. Triskaidekaphobia causes buildings in the USA, but more frequently in Europe*  - or sometimes floors, to skip over this number, and these are only 2 examples of how religiously based fears create lasting effects, and actions. The 13th floor or building are thus numbered 14. 

* : It used to be automatic in Italy. 

Now, this particular fear is based on a series of fallacies. First of all, Jesus most probably never existed in the form that he is thought of and taught to people (read : drilled into people's minds). 

Second, even if he had, there remains the debate on Judas fulfilling his destiny. Thus, even IF both he & Jesus had existed, he only had to follow his nature and what he was "programmed to be". Denying this shows that Christians take away the same free-will they say god gave to humans.

The third point I want to raise is that those who think 13 has always been bad luck are also totally wrong. It's only in the late 1890's that this belief propagated and became a cultural norm. What happened in the supposed "forever" lapse of 2k years?  

Although Christianity stemmed out of the loins of Judaism (and both rely heavily on borrowed material from previous religions, including pagan roots), the number 13 isn't uniformly feared, as in Judaism, god has 13 attributes of mercy. 

Some thought the 13th law in the Code of Hammurabi from about 1754BC have also been omitted as a proof of a long-lasting truth that 13 is bad luck and has to be avoided. However, it was only one translation that had left this rule out of the book, and the original laws weren't even numbered at all! See ? Fallacies.

Now, let's talk about the fear of the numbers 616, and of 666 (with the cute long name of Hexakosioihexekontahexaphobia which I won't try to spell and pronounce 13 times in a tongue-twister, and which breaks down, evidently, to "fear of 666" in Greek).
  These numbers are linked, and feared in Christian belief system to be that dreaded number of the beast. 616 is given in Papyrus 115, whilst all other sources give 666, in Revelations 13:18, a verse which discusses the number of the beast "This calls for wisdom: let anyone with understanding calculate the number of the beast, for it is the number of a person. Its number is six hundred sixty-six" and is part of another fear present in all religions: that of the end of the world. 

This fear isn't just a fallacy, it's also a misunderstanding of its roots. Let me explain : there is a complex numerology system called Gematria which the Hebrew peoples have been using (but never invented, let me stress this out), and which has both "spiritual" and "mundane" goals, one of them being a code used by the resistance the Hebrews, and later the Christians, occupied by the Roman empire used to describe the occupant force, namely emperor Nero, which can be spelled in two ways in Aramaic, the language of that period, with two different total gematria (numeric) values, which are... 

*drum rolls*... 

616 or 666. 

נרון קסר or נרו קסר meaning Emeperor Nero(n), the last letter having a value of 50. Thus, you can have two different totals to represent the same person. Basically, instead of saying "I hate Emperor Nero" they said I hate 666... Which in turn would become to be known as the number of the beast and adorned with a veil of supernatural end-of-the-world creature, feared to this day in Christian circles. 

On the other hand, this fear is mixed with anticipation, and HOPE! Why? Because the supposed end of the world is also supposed to be the dawn of a new one, where an elite of humans would rejoin with god, for eternity to come - and the others, impure sinners would perish and their souls burn in eternal damnation, burning on a stake in hell. 

Thus, fear of the end of the world has spurred countless acts of violence and cruelty, of abuse, strife and war, in the sole hope to bring about this end of the current world and give birth to the new one - even though it is bathing in the blood of billions of people labeled sinners - and, depending on the degree of open or close mindedness, the list can be as short or as long as you can think of. The first victims to this label are homosexuals, but they are far from the last. 

But, Christianity isn't alone in hoping the world would end. It's just the one that propagates it the most. It, as well as a different kind of end imagined in Judaic traditions, or any other offshoot. It's like humans cannot stop fearing the end, and yet they create all kinds of causes to precipitate it, and live in perpetual fears. 

The fears, and this is by no means an exhaustive list, are those of

• God and his wrath if you sin or don't believe in him
• and his anti-thesis Satan, the devil, the beast. 
• Jesus, because he saved your soul, and if you don't behave, you'll rot in hell, because, he is the son of God, and is God. Oh yes, it's "logical". 
• Demons and their taking possessions of humans (Christians will try to cast demons out, by prayers and by force, by holly water and other tools, but they aren't the first to fear or try to push those devils out, and in many cases, miss all advanced signs of mental illnesses, such as schizophrenia).
• Some numbers, depending on the culture and period (13, 616/666, and the beast are examples but not a full list) 
• Women are to be feared in almost every single religion and cult. Monotheistic patriarcal ones are the evident ones to see this fear, but also some polytheistic, and non-theistic religions (examples : Hinduism for the first, Buddhism for the second). Fear of women have created so many problems that it'd require a whole other series of blog posts and books. In fact, they exist all over, because we need humanist intersectional feminism to combat every little and big side-effect of this illness called religiously created culture of misogyny. 
• Witchcraft, because, you know, it's of the devil, and tends to be practiced by ... women (well that's what some think)
• End of the world. Judaic traditions place us in the year 5778 and the common belief is that the world will end in 6000, whilst some Messianic traditions and cults of the past 40 years kept hoping the end was near, as it'd bring about the restoration of the temple and the return of the messiah which the Christians think was Jesus and that the Jews missed ; and the Jews think Jesus was only a false-prophet, and a heretic and his name to be cursed for ever (that's his name in Hebrew, by the way). Hindu traditions give the world a far greater age than that of the Judeo-Christian traditions, and also believe it'll end and be re-created all over again, in the mind of their main super-god. At least, this is the case for some of the Hindu traditions, but not all, as there are 100's of them. 
• Sins and transgressions have are a type of fear as well. In polytheistic religions, people feared particular gods for particular natural disasters, scary beasts, etc. Human and animal sacrifices were practiced to appease the gods, whilst in monotheism, animals still have to pay the consequences with their lives, sacrificed as their very Being has been negated, and relegated to be slain by humans for food, clothing, and appeasing the last god in office. Scapegoats, or the Kapparot are two of those practices, among many others that still persist in a supernatural fear of god. 

I go back to the previous kind of fear, End Time has been a common fear to many many MANY religions, not just Judaism and its direct sequel Christianity, but also : Zoroastrianism, Islam, Taoism, Buddhism, Inter-Religion (Inter-Faith). I'll let you read wiki's article about this as my entry's getting big and I don't want to plagiarise. 

Suffice to say, humans seem particularly afraid of the end, and since they are afraid of death, they created a huge amount of side-belief systems to try to explain the purposes of life, of death, the after-death - think of Egyptian embalming ; of reincarnation, of hell and returning to god, of prayers to the dead, huge pyramids, tombs and graveyards. 

I also think of all those who believe that the human body was made by god, and has to be kept the same way. It cannot be checked to find a cause of death in some cultures, out of fear to disturb the body as reincarnating in a mutilated body wouldn't be ok. 

I think also of those who refuse medical help for blood transfusion, or surgery to save their life, because ... god wants them to die as they are and be reborn ; Or the soul rejoin him/it/her (depends on the religion, right?), and too bad if their life is cut short, the next will be better. They will go to heaven, be merry and healthy, with varying degrees of benefits to the dead/souls. 

The End Time has been prophesied and feared by Judeo-Christian (messianic) traditions for a very long time. In my own lifetime, the end was announced by various people (including my cult leader schizophrenic father) always for a "soon" which would be re-dated to later once the original date had expired, and explained only as miscalculation. 

Five examples : 

1. Messianic and other religious cults tried to purify themselves to be ready. Some prayed, others cut their private parts as they saw comets coming close to earth and thought they'd ascend in them to Heaven, and to God. 
2. Others feared meteors would hit Earth and wipe life, yet they refuse to admit dinosaures exited and were extinguished in this fashion 65,000,000 years ago (give or take!). 
3. For many, the year 2000 was going to be a disaster. Y2K bug never hit in the proportions that the populations had feared. 
4. 21/12/2012 was also thought as the date the mayan calendar ended and thus would mean they KNEW for sure that the world was ending and thus had ended their calendar for that day. Throughout 2010-2012, the posts on social media and newspapers fed the mass-fears created by this in epidemic scopes. The day came, nothing happened.
5. The same for many so-called super-rare eclipses or planetary alignments, which weren't as rare as imagined. 

So, humans really fear a lot of things, especially when religious dogma have fed them these fears. They fear death and the end so much, that they forget to live! They live in perpetual fear, and to point out how religions all borrow from one another, and from paganism, and ultimately from attempts to understand nature next and around us, and the universe in which we exist have all been labeled heresy, and of the devil. Because religious people don't want to accept knowledge and proof. They want you to be scared, just like they are, and to keep you ignorant. 

This is the the real meaning of the original sin in the garden of Eden, which itself is borrowed from much older myths (you can read at least 4 parallels here). Women and snakes have been given the guilt over this, but in the end, the myths represent the acquisition of Knowledge, and how religions - especially Abrahamic, who believe in this myth - don't want you to know, and keep you ignorant. 

As a person who grew up with many of these fears due to my upbringing in a religious cult, and who became an atheist, I want to say that it's so important to have a healthier approach to all these stories - because that's what they are. The same way you view any other pantheon as a collection of mythological stories, the ones depicted in modern-day religions are all myths, and you must remember that all those previous religions were the official ones in their days and locations, before they were re-branded as mythes. 

In the same way, we must understand this about all other religious, as they are all human-made. 

I was a believer - in Faith, Fate, Religion, God and many other precepts which were all distorted perceptions of Reality, in the eyes and mind of my biological father. Becoming and embracing atheism doesn't make me a believer, but a dis-believer. I de-program all the clutter that was put into my brain. I become freer of fears, as I no longer fear all these judgments by god and his retributions. 

There are enough phobias to deal with, as humans, and we really don't need the amounts of fears added by religions. 

When I discuss how god/yawhve etc, Jesus, demons and angels, and others are all figments of human imagination, trying to understand both macro and microcosms, natural events and disasters, and how all these are the results of agrarian cultures who created calendars to understand nature around them so they'd know when to sow and reap, I do so to raise awareness and the level of Knowledge. This is my goal also when I discuss the numbers 13, 616, 666 and any other than you may fear : they are all cultural references, born some time in our past, but not as far and widely as believed.

A healthy amount of critical thinking, realising and accepting the facts we know of the REAL world aren't blasphemy, a blanket term that religions put on anything that contradict their fallacious dogmas as they'd take away the faithful out of the houses of god/s and put them into Science. 

We NEED and we MUST point out all the irrelevant beliefs in religions, and that the holly books are all man-written and that religions are (hu)man-made. We need to encourage free thinking, and this is what atheism does. It takes away the power given to fears of supernatural numbers and deities, of supernatural order of things, and puts into perspective the realities that as humans, there are many things we DO know, and many that we don't. 

And that, contrary to what religions want you to think, it's okay not to know and freely admit it. 

Admitting we don't know some things about the Universe, and Nature is a liberation, and a humility that we must display, admit and acknowledge. It's not wrong to say I know this, but not that. The contrary is arrogance and ultimately shows all the short-comings of religious belief systems : they are closed boxes, and want to trap you in ignorance. 

Resistance is never futile - at least, Resistance to Religions and Ignorance isn't. We must strive to learn, to expand our knowledge, and remain humanly humble. What we know is a tiny fraction of Reality.