Dead Gods Wandering Around Lost in the World of Men.

~by David Aiken~

§ I can think of few topics more appropriate to the spring season in the West than Dead and Dying Gods. The season is especially festive for Christians, of course, coming off six weeks of famine-defined Lent, which culminates in Easter festivities and a surfeit of chocolate bunnies, colored eggs, and the Holy Week, which prepares the way for Whitsun (Pentecost) and the descent of the Dove. Apparently in the UK the Christian Whitsun has borrowed some aspects of the Pagan festival of Beltane, the Walpurgis Nacht of Faustian fame, which falls at the half-way point between All Hallows Eve (October 31st) and the beginning of summer. Summer is traditionally ushered in by the June solstice on the 21^st.

Grunewald

For those in the Jewish faith tradition, this season marks the beginning of the Feast of Passover, which commemorates the life of a people over whom the Shadow of Death has passed. 

           

In this springtide season, then, during which men’s fancy seems to turn away from the dying and the dead, and to lightly turn to thoughts of God, the question for our reflection concerns the possibility of verifying authentic religious experience in a period of existential intellectual crisis. The short and honest answer to this question is that, although everyone seems to have an opinion, no one actually knows anything for sure. However, what the Reasoning Man does absolutely know about the possibility of authentic religious knowledge in every period, including those marked by existential silence, is that the onus remains on the Magical Man to demonstrate to all and sundry that Gods are somehow relevant to human existence, which is to say that they can in fact be experienced.

            Insufficient to this task is any pretend-answer that seeks to pawn off on the philosophically shortsighted some religious ritual of faith, which is nothing but a metaphor for interpreting an inexperience or a lack of some quantifiable experience. It is necessary for the Magical Man—the religiously minded—to bring to the round-table of thoughtful citizens neither metaphor nor psychology (i.e., some vague notion of “belief” as a precondition of psycho-experience), but rather some real, verifiable human evidence for an experience of the Gods.

            Let us also be quite clear by saying that although a Socratic philosopher’s naturally skeptical nature is fairly indisposed to the more philosophical concept that gives support to the idea of “Deity,” such a Socratic fellow is not necessarily opposed to the possible historical existence of Gods. So, the odd ‘Socrates’ wandering around in the world can be sure that any Divine Critters, who may potentially also be fellow-wanders in this wilderness, will forgive them if they presume to be so intellectually bold as to pose questions concerning Their relevance and/or existence, and concerning how men might acquire knowledge about such things… But, then, is it not reasonable to suppose that Such Enormities as Gods must be big enough to get over a little philosophizing from a pissant ‘Socrates’?

Yet, let us suppose that the case is truly as Plato has said, quoting Heraclitus (B 83), that “The wisest of men, in contrast to God, appears as an ape in wisdom and beauty and all things.” How is it, then, that Gods really cannot tolerate the pint-sized and irritating musings of thinking ape-like humans, although this is certainly the case if we believe the story of the Tower of Babel (Gen. 11). If it is indeed true that Gods work on a short ego-leash, then the author of this essay and its readers had better watch out for the bolt of lightning coming our way if we dare to continue reading—for friendly fire is just as deadly as if the bolt were meant for another! The Index Librorum Prohibitorum was intended for just such as this author, whence the name of our Phrontisterion URL: nonimprimatur.

 [The following is condensed from peer-reviewed, internationally published research entitled, “On the Death of God. A Post-mortem Reflection on a 'Life’,” which is archived at Phrontisterion, or here. This research is scheduled for full publication in summer 2019 in the Zeitschrift für Religions- und Geistesgeschichte ZRGG 71,3 (Brill).]

§ Other prophets of the Death of God… and other Dead and Dying Gods.

Similar to generic dying God stories typical to agrarian cultures, announcements of the death of a God in the western world may also perhaps be seen to follow cycles. A first important announcement occurred in the mid-first century, at sea off the western coast of Greece, with the proclamation that the Great God Pan was dead. Some believe that this moment marked the beginning of the end of the pagan era. The announcement was heard a second time, in the late 19^th century, when Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, returning into the world of men from a self-imposed exile, encounters a holy man in the wood worshipping, says the Heiliger, “the God who is my God”-- a statement that leaves Zarathustra wondering at the fact that this holy man had not heard in his woods that God is dead. Nietzsche mitigates the matter-of-fact flatness of Zarathustra’s wonder by also composing an exalted, quasi-mystical dirge in the now-famous madman story from the Gay Science.

God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the greatest of all murderers? … Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it?

Many have been the assertions that “God is dead,” and sundry the variations on the theme: from the “flight of the Gods,” the “Entflohene Götter”, of Hölderlin, to the contemporary God is Dead movement in America. It seems, however, that there is always hidden within the very language of the assertion a second proposition: namely, that the Gods, and especially the God that surfaced in the theological traditions of the Christians, once existed. More philosophically oriented than the German romantics and their “Gods,” the high priests of the American Death of God movement offered up the death of the Christian God not by talking about “Him,” but rather, by talking about how humans seem to have transcended the need, interest, or even the possibility, of Him. So what has been at issue in this Death of God tradition, it would seem, is really not (the) Deity, but rather the human (lack of) interest story.

In the light of the various traditions of God/s in the West, then, and of Their dyings, let us examine a different alternative—let us assume that we moderns do in fact live post mortem Dei christiani. Let us also assume that there are plausible intellectual justifications for why the modern world has moved beyond the Christian faith.

In the Great Conversation, the "death of God" thinkers have laid the theoretical foundations of an idea. For when Plato posited the reality of the Forms to explain how things came into being and (were) moved, it was not long before Aristotle came along to point out that, at the end of the day, the Forms are only a theoretical model with logical issues (e.g., their immovable, yet causative natures, present contradiction), and that a very adequate, persuasive, and almost entirely empirical description of reality could be posited without them. Similarly, I would like to suggest that the modern God-is-Dead propositions and treatments also contain an untenable logical assumption – that the Christian God ever existed.

         The wider evidence of Western history, and not simply the evidence from the history of the Western philosophical tradition, suggests that it is in fact the Christian God, and very specifically The-God-of-the-Bible, who has gone missing. And there is no need of a romantic and exalted post mortem, for the failure of The-God-of-the-Bible, equal to that of His Alter Ego The God of the Christians, is that as a philosophical Fiction derived from debate and consensus, He/They never had any historical reality.

Is the Christian God, the Protagonist of the Bible, really dead? The question is certainly of academic interest to the scholar of religions, and also a challenge for the believer in the fides Christiana.

            Evidence clearly shows that The God of the Christians is not The-God-of-the-Bible; rather “It” is a Concept of philosophy—an extraterritorial Deity of Logic born out of the speculations of the earliest Platonized Christian philosophers. It could in fact be argued that Western philosophy already reached its zenith in the first half of the Common Era with the philosophical conception and articulation of this God, whose genealogy can be traced in its evolution from a Hellenistic Abstraktum, to a Supreme philosophico-religious Idea(l). This “God,” conceived very literally out of season, corresponds to the highest ideals of western neo-platonic thought, and bears no comparison, either in actions or character, to the historico-geographical deities of the Hebrew Bible. There is considerable evidence to substantiate this argument.

§ The-God-of-the-Bible.

Buttressed by archaeology, biblical scholarship has paved a wide road for the articulation of this argument; and much of recent scholarship received its impetus from Albrecht Alt’s groundbreaking 1929 essay on the God of the Fathers, which was so fruitfully furthered by the works of Albright, Gordon, D.N. Freedman, and the Harvard scholar Frank Cross, of Dead Sea Scrolls fame. The Albright “school,” in seeking to identify more fully the various Deities of the Bible in the light of Their ancient Near Eastern origins, has led some to wonder whether the Western Religious narrative has not in fact completely “lost” the Yahweh of the Hebrew Bible in its attempt to articulate a philosophical God. Such is R. Friedman’s recent thesis: that the Hebrew Bible is literally a record of the disappearance of God—that it is the story of a God who has gone into retirement, who, like the Canaanite El a thousand years before him, is become deus quiescens.

            This is a troubling state of affairs for the study of western religions. Indeed, it is potentially a worst-case scenario. For in addition to having perhaps identified the wrong deity as God, western religious scholars now must consider the possibility that the Hebrew Bible may be the narrative record of a God-become-absent from the world of men (deus absconditus).  Indeed, it has always been difficult for the missionary to make a persuasive case for a God who is not present to defend himself publicly—the Baalite priests of I Kings 18 learned from Elijah, much to their detriment, that les [dieux] absents ont toujours tort.

The German Assyriologist Friedrich Delitzsch profiled this argument already in a 1920 volume entitled, The Great Deception, in which he argued that, just like the other olden gods: “the Hebrew national god (Nationalgott) belongs also to the ‘anemic’ ones (elîlîm)—as the Old Testament relishes designating the gods of other peoples—and it is impossible that he should be identified … with the most-powerful GOD.” Delitzsch concludes with this: “Israel is not the people of ‘GOD’, but the people of Jaho, as Moab is the people of Kemosh and Assur the people of the god Asur.” In a similar iteration in the Interpreter’s Bible one reads: “The religion of the fathers was not the same as the worship of the thundering Yahweh of Sinai. The God pictured in Genesis is not like the God who reveals himself to Moses in the book of Exodus.”

(Reprised from an original Phrontisterion essay first posted in April 2013)

On Believability, and Other Cloudy Assumptions-- A Charlie Hebdo problematic.

~by David Aiken~

The study of conspiracy theories is really quite similar to the academic study of religions. In both fields there is much in the way of outlandish thinking, and in the study of both there are entirely too many intellectually unwarranted assumptions troubling the waters of Thought.

In this Charlie Hebdo editorial, Riss reflects on two of the more troubling aspects of conspiracy theorists… of those who believe in what might seem, at least at first blush to the normal Joe, to be outlandish conspiracies. The first and most obvious question is, that there actually are many. The second question is, why certain people (i.e., conspiracy theorists) believe things that are so obviously unbelievable for just about everybody else. Two fine questions indeed for reasonable people; and tentative answers to both of these questions are anchored in the single phenomenon of Belief. Which gets us nicely through the door to the much bigger philosophical questions: Why do humans believe and why do they believe what they believe?

Of course, in Riss’ editorial the underlying premise of both these questions is that ‘conspiracies’ are inherently unbelievable. Now, that is well and good for this specific editorial, which is contextualized by an entire edition on conspiracy theories (cf. especially the more critical article by G. Erner (CH, 17 January 2018, N^o1330 / 3, p. 7) that Riss refers to), but in the broader landscape of intellectual & philosophical reflection, this is a supposition that should give skeptical pause both to students of conspiracies as well as to students of Religion. Because labeling an event as a ‘conspiracy’, or a type of phenomenon as a religion, assumes as obvious their status as mythology; it presumes, without so much as a hint of argument or reasoned preparation, that the event or phenomenon is not possibly realistic or authentic, and therefore has limited or no truth value. Yet this unstated premise cannot stand unchallenged, because it unavoidably creates a Catch-22 situation for the study of conspiracies as much as for the study of Religion—in the words of the famous author: “Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they aren't after you.”

The unfortunate by-product of this type of Catch-22 for the study of both conspiracy theories and religions, is that in the flurry of words that usually follow the banner in such articles (as Riss’) or in academic studies of Religion, this foregone and unstated assumption/presumption gets obfuscated; and yet it continues to subsist and to maintain itself entirely uncritically, passed off at face value, underneath the many layers of words and comparisons and metaphors and objections, without so much as a reasoned by-your-leave. One such foregone conclusion that typically goes without saying, as exemplified here in Riss’ editorial (which is the nature of such reasoning, n’est-ce pas?), because it has gotten conveniently lost in this layer-cake of ex silentio premises, is that the conspiracy theorist himself (or the Magical Man, the man of religion) is ipso facto a babbler or a lunatic (for this, see Erner’s article above). Yet for students of philosophy and religion, the first-tacit-assumption-which-hides-the-foregone-conclusion, which is snuggled deep down in the layer-cake, is equivalent to assuming & presuming, without argument or analysis, that all religions (or conspiracies) are entirely and equally lacking in any metaphysical (or speculative) merit. 

In the contemporary academic study of religions, for example, this is precisely the (foregone) framing that too many scholars give themselves permission to use in the study of the phenomenon of Religion. This frame allows scholars to ‘safely’ consider all Religion, simply and uniformly, as purely sociological or psychological events, without them ever having to address any of the messy, because truly difficult, philosophical questions that constitute the real interest and intrigue in the academic study of Religion, but which most scholars prefer to ignore—questions about transcendence, deity, afterlife, souls, et al.

Q.E.D.

§ The editorial by Riss (translation Aiken) under the rubric L’Edito (CH, 17 January 2018, N^o 1330 / 3): “Can One Conspire About Everything?” [Can there be conspiracies for everything?]

A rather alarming survey, published last week, confirms that 79% of the French have believed in conspiracy theories, which gives the impression that almost everyone has believed, at some point in their lives, in one or the other of these theories. Although the survey has been criticized (cf. the article by Guillaume Erner, p. 7 of this edition: “Un sondage au bord de la “Fake News”), it remains a fact that conspiracy theories are thriving. One only has to go on the Internet to be persuaded.

            In the expression ‘conspiracy theory’, it is not so much the word ‘conspiracy’ that is bothersome, because conspiracies have existed: the attack of the Petit-Clamart (NT: the assassination attempt made against French President Charles de Gaulle, August 22, 1962), and the coup d’état in Chili in 1973 were very real conspiracies. The thing that poses the problem is the word ‘theory’. A theory is a hypothesis that needs yet to be tested and validated. But the theory about a conspiracy cannot be verified precisely because there are hidden forces at work that keep us from proving the conspiracy. First, there is a conspiracy that threatens the world, and then there is a conspiracy that keeps us from revealing the conspiracy. So, we can go around in circles for days and even for years. The more difficulties there are in finding evidence for a conspiracy, the more it demonstrates, in the eyes of the conspiracy theorist, that there must in fact be one. The conspiracy theorist invented, without even knowing it, perpetual movement. Come back in 50 years, and he will still be spinning around in circles in exactly the same place you left him 50 years earlier.

            There is no use dialoguing with a conspiracy theorist in an attempt to persuade him that he is mistaken, because, in reality, his pleasure is precisely not to know the truth. What excites the conspiracy theorist is to imagine a reality that he shall never be able to reach. The more our modern era, which derives from the century of Enlightenment, causes religious obscurity to retreat, the more some men will seek refuge in the shadows. Because in the obscurity everything is possible; one can imagine things that happen there that can never be verified. On the contrary, the light discloses, it gives explanations, and it shreds to pieces myths and the pleasure to fantasize about those myths. When science elucidates the mysteries, then one has to create more. Conspiracy theories have a future because the human imagination needs them to entertain itself in a mind-numbingly boring era.

            If various conspiracy theories were only surrounding innocuous subjects, that would not pose any particular problem. But when they get injected into politics and pretend to be the forerunners of public opinion, the result can be catastrophic. The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which accused the Jews of wanting to dominate the world, were really created whole cloth by the Tsar’s secret service. And although the hoax was quickly discovered, this text still influenced a tremendous number of people, including Adolf Hitler, who was inspired by them to spew his anti-Semitic hatred in Mein Kampf.

            Today, Hitler would not have need of an entire book to diffuse his conspiracy theories, he would have a blog for that. The Internet filters hundreds of conspiracy theories, providing them with an availability unequaled in history. We can even ask ourselves if, by means of this powerful vector, which is the Internet, the conspiracy theorist does not already have the means to become a more powerful ideologue than those of the more traditional political parties—the Socialist Party sells its headquarters on the Rue de Solferino; there was hardly anything left to put in it. In comparison to the vast number of hocus-pocus theories seething on the Internet, the political platforms on offer to us today seem quite timid. Will the conspiracy theory replace socialism one day, liberalism, communism? Obviously, it is only a theory. Which still needs to be verified.

Other Phrontisterion posts from Charlie Hebdo:

·      http://nonimprimatur.blogspot.fr/2018/01/charlie-hebdos-great-heidegger-debate.html

·      http://nonimprimatur.blogspot.fr/2017/11/my-nights-without-heidegger-editorial.html

·      http://nonimprimatur.blogspot.fr/2017/02/potpourri-from-charlie-hebdo-november.html

·      http://nonimprimatur.blogspot.fr/2016/09/a-rousing-charlie-hebdo-rendition-of.html

·      http://nonimprimatur.blogspot.fr/2016/02/heidegger-treacherous-millesime.html

·      http://nonimprimatur.blogspot.fr/2015/11/paris-and-charlie-hebdo-wager-on.html

·      http://nonimprimatur.blogspot.fr/2015/12/paris-and-charlie-hebdo-enlightenment.html

·      http://nonimprimatur.blogspot.fr/2015/04/a-wager-on-history.html

See also:

·      http://nonimprimatur.blogspot.fr/2013/04/dead-gods-wandering-around-lost-in.html

·      http://www.tagesschau.de/inland/unwort-des-jahres-105.html -"Alternative Fakten" Unwort des Jahres "

April's Blog_Dead Gods Wandering Around Lost in the World of Men

(Part I of a loosely knit series).

I can think of few topics more appropriate to this particular season than Dead and Dying Gods. The season is especially festive for Christians, of course, coming off the long season of Lent, which culminates in Easter, a surfeit of chocolate bunnies and Easter eggs, and the Holy Week, which prepares the way for Whitsun (Pentecost) and the descent of the Dove; but also for Jews because it marks the beginning of Passover, and the life of a people over whom the Shadow of Death has passed. 
            The Christian Whitsun also happens to correspond seasonally to the Pagan festival of Beltane, the Walpurgis Nacht of Faustian fame, which, falling six months after All Hallows Eve, marks the beginning of summer (traditionally early May). 

In this springtide season, then, during which men’s fancy seems to turn away from the dying and the dead, and lightly turn to thoughts of God, the question for our reflection concerns the possibility of verifying authentic religious experience in a period of existential intellectual crisis. The short and honest answer to this question is that, although everyone seems to have an opinion, no one actually knows anything for real. HOWEVER, what I, the Reasoning Man, do absolutely know about the possibility of authentic religious knowledge in an existential period, is that the onus remains on the Magical Man TO DEMONSTRATE to all and sundry that Gods are relevant to human existence, which is to say that they can in fact be experienced.

            Insufficient to this task is any pretend-answer that seeks to pawn off on the philosophically shortsighted some religious ritual, which is nothing but a metaphor for interpreting an in-experience, or a lack of some quantifiable experience. It is necessary for the Magical Man—the religiously minded—to bring to the round-table of thoughtful citizens neither metaphor nor psychology (i.e., some vague notion of “belief” as a precondition of psycho-experience), but rather some real, verifiable human evidence for an experience of the Gods.

            Let me also be quite clear when I say that although my naturally critical nature is fairly indisposed to the more philosophical concept that gives support to the idea of “deity,” I am certainly not opposed philosophically to the possible historical existence of Gods, as are some. So I am sure that any Divine Critters out there will forgive me if I presume to be so intellectually bold as to pose questions concerning Their relevance and/or existence, and concerning how men might acquire knowledge about these things… But then I suppose that Such Enormities as Gods must be big enough to get over my little pissant philosophizing.

            However, if it should in fact turn out that the Gods cannot tolerate the pint-sized musings of thinking humans, Dear Reader, which might actually be the case upon closer reading of the story of the Tower of Babel (Gen. 15), then you best watch out for the bolt of lighting coming your way if you dare to continue reading this post—friendly fire is just as deadly as if the bolt were meant for you! The Index Librorum Prohibitorum was intended for just such as me, whence the name of our Phrontisterion URL: nonimprimatur.

[The following essay is condensed from research (complete with references) entitled, “On the Death of God. Reflections on His Life and Post-mortem Future (2011),” which is archived on our Phrontisterion site. ]

Other prophets of the Death of God… and other Dead and Dying Gods.

Similar to generic dying God stories typical to agrarian cultures, announcements of the death of a God in the western world may also perhaps be seen to follow cycles. A first important announcement occurred in the mid-first century, at sea off the western coast of Greece, with the proclamation that the Great God Pan was dead. Some believe that this moment marked the beginning of the end of the pagan era. The announcement was heard a second time, in the late 19^th century, when Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, returning into the world of men from a self-imposed exile, encounters a holy man in the wood worshipping, says the Heiliger, “the God who is my God”-- a statement that leaves Zarathustra wondering at the fact that this holy man had not heard in his woods that God is dead. Nietzsche mitigates the matter-of-fact flatness of Zarathustra’s wonder by also composing an exalted, quasi-mystical dirge in the now-famous madman story from the Gay Science.

God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? … Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it?

Many have been the assertions that “God is dead,” and sundry the variations on the theme: from the “flight of the Gods,” the “Entflohene Götter”, of Hölderlin, to the contemporary God is Dead movement in America. It seems, however, that there is always hidden within the very language of the assertion, a second proposition: namely, that the Gods, and especially the God that surfaced in the theological traditions of the Christians, once existed. More philosophically oriented than the German romantics and their “Gods,” the high priests of the American Death of God movement offered up the death of the Christian God not by talking about “Him,” but rather, by talking about how humans seem to have transcended the need, interest, or even the possibility, of Him. So what has been at issue in this Death of God tradition, it would seem, is really not (the) Deity, but rather the human (lack of) interest story.

         In the light of the various traditions of God/s in the West, then, and of Their dyings, let us examine a different alternative—let us assume that we moderns do in fact live post mortem Dei christiani. Let us also assume that there are plausible intellectual justifications for why the modern world has moved beyond the Christian faith.

In the Great Conversation, the "death of God" thinkers have laid the theoretical foundations of an idea. For when Plato posited the reality of the Forms to explain how things came into being and (were) moved, it was not long before Aristotle came along to point out that, at the end of the day, the Forms are only a theoretical model with logical issues (e.g., their immovable, yet causative natures), and that a very adequate, persuasive, and almost entirely empirical description of reality could be posited without them. Similarly, I would like to suggest that the modern God-is-Dead propositions and treatments also contain an untenable logical assumption – that the Christian God ever existed.

         The wider evidence of Western history, and not simply the evidence from the history of the Western philosophical tradition, suggests that it is in fact the Christian God, and very specifically The-God-of-the-Bible, who has gone missing. And there is no need of a romantic and exalted post mortem: for the failure of The-God-of-the-Bible, equal to that of His Alter Ego The God of the Christians, is that as a philosophical Fiction derived from debate and consensus, He/They never had any historical reality.

Is the Christian God, the Protagonist of the Bible, really dead? The question is certainly of academic interest to the scholar of religions, and also a challenge for the believer in the fides christiana.

            Evidence clearly shows that The God of the Christians is not The-God-of-the-Bible; rather “It” is a Concept of philosophy—an extraterritorial Deity of Logic born out of the speculations of the earliest Platonized Christian philosophers. It could in fact be argued that Western philosophy already reached its zenith in the first half of the Common Era with the philosophical conception and articulation of this God, whose genealogy can be traced in its evolution from a Hellenistic Abstraktum, to a Supreme philosophico-religious Idea(l). This “God,” conceived very literally out of season, corresponds to the highest ideals of western neo-platonic thought, and bears no comparison, either in actions or character, to the historico-geographical deities of the Hebrew Bible. There is considerable evidence to substantiate this argument.

The-God-of-the-Bible.

Buttressed by archaeology, biblical scholarship has paved a wide road for the articulation of this argument; and much of recent scholarship received its impetus from Albrecht Alt’s groundbreaking 1929 essay on the God of the Fathers, which was so fruitfully furthered by the works of Albright, Gordon, D.N. Freedman, and the Harvard scholar Frank Cross, of Dead Sea Scrolls fame. The Albright “school,” in seeking to identify more fully the various Deities of the Bible in the light of Their ancient Near Eastern origins, has led some to wonder whether the Western Religious narrative has not in fact completely “lost” the Yahweh of the Hebrew Bible in its attempt to articulate a philosophical God. Such is R. Friedman’s recent thesis: that the Hebrew Bible is literally a record of the disappearance of God—that it is the story of a God who has gone into retirement, who, like the Canaanite El a thousand years before him, is become deus quiescens.

            This is a troubling state of affairs for the study of western religions. Indeed, it is potentially a worst-case scenario. For in addition to having perhaps identified the wrong deity as God, western religious scholars now must consider the possibility that the Hebrew Bible may be the narrative record of a God-become-absent from the world of men (deus absconditus).  Indeed, it has always been difficult for the missionary to make a persuasive case for a God who is not present to defend himself publicly—the Baalite priests of I Kings 18 learned from Elijah, much to their detriment, that les [dieux] absents ont toujours tort.

The German Assyriologist Friedrich Delitzsch profiled this argument already in a 1920 volume entitled, The Great Deception, in which he argued that, just like the other olden gods: “the Hebrew national god (Nationalgott) belongs also to the ‘anemic’ ones (elîlîm)—as the Old Testament relishes designating the gods of other peoples—and it is impossible that he should be identified … with the most-powerful GOD.” Delitzsch concludes with this: “Israel is not the people of ‘GOD’, but the people of Jaho, as Moab is the people of Kemosh and Assur the people of the god Asur.” In a similar iteration in the Interpreter’s Bible one reads: “The religion of the fathers was not the same as the worship of the thundering Yahweh of Sinai. The God pictured in Genesis is not like the God who reveals himself to Moses in the book of Exodus.”

End of Part I.