Subject of the Month
Recently, we recieved word of this fascinating idea. We thought we'd pass it along to you.
“The next 11-year cycle of solar storms will most likely start next March and peak in late 2011 or mid-2012—up to a year later than expected—according to a forecast issued by the NOAA Space Environment Center in coordination with an international panel of solar experts. The NOAA Space Environment Center led the prediction panel and issued the forecast at its annual Space Weather Workshop in Boulder, Colo. NASA sponsored the panel.
“Expected to start last fall, the delayed onset of Solar Cycle 24 stymied the panel and left them evenly split on whether a weak or strong period of solar storms lies ahead, but neither group predicts a record-breaker.
“During an active solar period, violent eruptions occur more often on the sun. Solar flares and vast explosions, known as coronal mass ejections, shoot energetic photons and highly charged matter toward Earth...”
Read more here:
Waking God on Location
As WAKING GOD reviewer Christopher Friesen (BookPleasures.com) said, “What if every truth you had ever been told was really a mosaic of falsehoods?” WAKING GOD turns theology on its head in that one of the lead characters, Mantrella, a.k.a. Lucifer, is portrayed as the positive force for humanity and Michael, yes that one, is seen as humanity’s nemesis. Several people thought the novel promotes some kind of “devil worship” and that we were distorting the Bible for our own purposes. As Pierce Anthony said, you need an open mind to fully appreciate this novel and it will “make you think.”
In order to set a little of the record straight, we thought we would include a little history on Lucifer and demonstrate that perhaps it is others who are perverting scripture to achieve their own ends.
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“The word ‘Lucifer’ in Isaiah 14:12 presents a minor problem to mainstream Christianity. It becomes a much larger problem to Bible literalists, and becomes a huge obstacle for the claims of Mormonism. John J. Robinson in A Pilgrim's Path, pp. 47-48 explains:
‘Lucifer makes his appearance in the fourteenth chapter of the Old Testament book of Isaiah, at the twelfth verse, and nowhere else: ‘How art thou fallen from heaven, O Lucifer, son of the morning! How art thou cut down to the ground, which didst weaken the nations!’
“The first problem is that Lucifer is a Latin name. So how did it find its way into a Hebrew manuscript, written before there was a Roman language? To find the answer, I consulted a scholar at the library of the Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati. What Hebrew name, I asked, was Satan given in this chapter of Isaiah, which describes the angel who fell to become the ruler of hell?
“The answer was a surprise. In the original Hebrew text, the fourteenth chapter of Isaiah is not about a fallen angel, but about a fallen Babylonian king, who during his lifetime had persecuted the children of Israel. It contains no mention of Satan, either by name or reference. The Hebrew scholar could only speculate that some early Christian scribes, writing in the Latin tongue used by the Church, had decided for themselves that they wanted the story to be about a fallen angel, a creature not even mentioned in the original Hebrew text, and to whom they gave the name ‘Lucifer.’
“Why Lucifer? In Roman astronomy, Lucifer was the name given to the morning star (the star we now know by another Roman name, Venus). The morning star appears in the heavens just before dawn, heralding the rising sun. The name derives from the Latin term ‘lucem ferre, bringer, or bearer, of light.’ In the Hebrew text the expression used to describe the Babylonian king before his death is Helal, son of Shahar, which can best be translated as ‘Day star, son of the Dawn.’ The name evokes the golden glitter of a proud king's dress and court (much as his personal splendor earned for King Louis XIV of France the appellation, ‘The Sun King’).
“The scholars authorized by ... King James I to translate the Bible into current English did not use the original Hebrew texts, but used versions translated ... largely by St. Jerome in the fourth century. Jerome had mistranslated the Hebraic metaphor, ‘Day star, son of the Dawn,’ as ‘Lucifer,’ and over the centuries a metamorphosis took place. Lucifer the morning star became a disobedient angel, cast out of heaven to rule eternally in hell. Theologians, writers, and poets interwove the myth with the doctrine of the Fall, and in Christian tradition Lucifer is now the same as Satan, the Devil, and --- ironically --- the Prince of Darkness.
“So ‘Lucifer’ is nothing more than an ancient Latin name for the morning star, the bringer of light. That can be confusing for Christians who identify Christ himself as the morning star, a term used as a central theme in many Christian sermons. Jesus refers to himself as the morning star in Revelation 22:16: ‘I Jesus have sent mine angel to testify unto you these things in the churches. I am the root and the offspring of David, and the bright and morning star.’
“And so there are those who do not read beyond the King James version of the Bible, who say 'Lucifer is Satan: so says the Word of God'....
“Henry Neufeld (a Christian who comments on Biblical sticky issues) went on to say,
‘this passage is often related to Satan, and a similar thought is expressed in Luke 10:18 by Jesus, that was not its first meaning. It's primary meaning is given in Isaiah 14:4 which says that when Israel is restored they will "take up this taunt against the king of Babylon . . .’ Verse 12 is a part of this taunt song. This passage refers first to the fall of that earthly king...
“How does the confusion in translating this verse arise? The Hebrew of this passage reads: ‘heleyl, ben shachar’ which can be literally translated ‘shining one, son of dawn.’ This phrase means, again literally, the planet Venus when it appears as a morning star. In the Septuagint, a 3rd century BC translation of the Hebrew scriptures into Greek, it is translated as ‘heosphoros’ which also means Venus as a morning star.
“How did the translation ‘lucifer’ arise? This word comes from Jerome's Latin Vulgate. Was Jerome in error? Not at all. In Latin at the time, ‘lucifer’ actually meant Venus as a morning star. Isaiah is using this metaphor for a bright light, though not the greatest light to illustrate the apparent power of the Babylonian king which then faded.
“Therefore, Lucifer wasn't equated with Satan until after Jerome. Jerome wasn't in error. Later Christians (and Mormons) were in equating ‘Lucifer’ with ‘Satan.’
“So why is this a problem to Christians? Christians now generally believe that Satan (or the Devil or Lucifer who they equate with Satan) is a being who has always existed (or who was created at or near the ‘beginning’). Therefore, they also think that the 'prophets' of the Old Testament believed in this creature. The Isaiah scripture is used as proof (and has been used as such for hundreds of years now). As Elaine Pagels explains though, the concept of Satan has evolved over the years and the early Bible writers didn't believe in or teach such a doctrine.
“The irony for those who believe that ‘Lucifer’ refers to Satan is that the same title ('morning star' or 'light-bearer') is used to refer to Jesus, in 2 Peter 1:19, where the Greek text has exactly the same term: 'phos-phoros' 'light-bearer.' This is also the term used for Jesus in Revelation 22:16.
“So why is Lucifer a far bigger problem to Mormons? Mormons claim that an ancient record (the Book of Mormon) was written beginning in about 600 BC, and the author in 600 BC supposedly copied Isaiah in Isaiah's original words. When Joseph Smith pretended to translate the supposed 'ancient record', he included the Lucifer verse in the Book of Mormon. Obviously he wasn't copying what Isaiah actually wrote. He was copying the King James Version of the Bible. Another book of LDS scripture, the Doctrine & Covenants, furthers this problem in 76:26 when it affirms the false Christian doctrine that ‘Lucifer’ means Satan. This incorrect doctrine also spread into a third set of Mormon scriptures, the Pearl of Great Price, which describes a war in heaven based, in part, on Joseph Smith's incorrect interpretation of the word "Lucifer" which only appears in Isaiah.
“The author of The Polytheism Of The Bible And The Mystery Of Lucifer, F.T. DeAngelis, comments on this page as follows:
“It seems minor, but - the actual term used in the Greek Septuagint version of Isaiah 14:12 (given that there is no ONE way of accurately transliterating) is Eo(u)s phoros, morning star/DAWN god of light. Eos or Eous phoros [not Heos (as your website claims) or phos phorus (as a Christian website I visited shows)] - although there is a Greek term and English... phosphoro(u)s. Your [site] is pretty accurate.
“The actual name, ‘Lucifer,’ goes back to the Greeks, before the Romans. Socrates and Plato talk about this ‘god of light’; surprisingly, not in the context of Eos (god of Dawn), but -- as a morning star -- juxtaposed with the sun (Helios) and Hermes. This information can be found in Plato's Timaeus (38e) and in Edith Hamilton's Mythology.
“On a lighter note, Arthur Clarke, in his fictional book 2061 correctly uses the word ‘Lucifer.’ He uses it as a name for a new sun in the solar system which is correct since the new sun is a second 'morning star' of 'original' 'light-bearing' substance--not some evil being of religious mythology.
“The following is an excerpt from a review of Pagel’s, THE ORIGIN OF SATAN. Of interest are the reviewer and the comments on the book pertaining to Satan.
“David Grinspoon comments on the historical aspects of the word as follows: ‘The origin of the Judeo-Christian Devil as an angel fallen from heaven into the depths of hell is mirrored in the descent of Venus from shining morning star to the darkness below. This underworld demon, still feared today by people in many parts of the world, is also called Lucifer, which was originally a Latin name for Venus as a morning star.’ (Venus Revealed p. 17) Actually, Grinspoon should just refer to the ‘Christian Devil’ since the Jews never believed in such a creature and still don't to this day.
“Years earlier, looking for something she (Pagels) imagined would be the ‘essence’ of Christianity, Pagels had realized that ‘one cannot get back to that revelation in any form we would agree is pure. In just a generation after Jesus of Nazareth, there are all kinds of refractions and differences in the gospels themselves.’
“Out of those refractions she builds her profile of Satan. Reaching back into the origins of our faith, she finds the origin of a new Satan. The archetypal figure of Satan--in the Hebrew scriptures called ‘God's obedient servant’--is transformed by generations of Christians into a whipping boy for troublesome elements without and within the church.
“In pristine and swift-reading prose, Pagels delineates an early, if unconscious, decision the hierarchy of the church made to address the world in terms of a ‘cosmic struggle’ between the forces of good and the forces of evil. The losers in this early church controversy were those who ‘instead of envisioning the power of evil as an alien force that threatens and invades human beings from outside’ strove to ‘recognize the evil within [each human heart], and consciously eradicate it.’
“This cosmology in which the world is a battlefield where light and good face assault from opposing forces of darkness and evil amounts, for Pagels, to a retreat from pure monotheism. From the end of the apostolic age, Pagels says, Christians have used this constructed duality to deal with all sorts of conflicts between the prevailing brand of orthodoxy and an ever-lengthening procession of dissenting groups. The church learned to prefer battle to conversation.
“Pagels is especially brilliant in her writing about early apologists and forgers of church doctrine such as Justin Martyr, Irenaeus, Origen, and Tertullian. Pagels is no ground breaker in her chapters on the first and second centuries of this millennium. But, like our own bishop, she illuminates contemporary scholarship, making it accessible and vivid to non-academic readers.
“In The Origin of Satan, Elaine Pagels outlines how our Christian ancestors set for us a course of damning those who disagree with us. She describes with exceptional fairness the basic human impulse to do just that out of a need to grasp at assurance in the face of opposition. But, as an alternative to defining all detractors, in the style of St. Paul, as ‘servants of Satan,’ Pagels commends to today's Christians the challenge posed by a tradition of the faithful from the first century through St. Francis of Assisi to Martin Luther King. She presents a strain of Christians who ‘have believed they stood on God's side without demonizing their opponents.’
“The division of the world into the forces of good opposed to the forces of evil is not the only way, she concludes. There is a struggle within our tradition ‘between the profoundly human view that "otherness" is evil and the words of Jesus that reconciliation is divine.’ “Can we learn to oppose policies and powers we regard as evil while praying for reconciliation with those who oppose us?”
by Mark Lewis, Vicar, Church of Our Saviour
Secaucus, New Jersey
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Let’s not forget the Quran! Despite all of the demonizing going around these days it is interesting that we find the concept of duality not in terms of a good god and an opposing god, but rather, the required pairs of opposites that are needed for a manifest Universe.
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“The Duality Principle: A Quranic Approach to an Integrated Science Curriculum”
Submitted by
Sabah E. Karam
The following paper is based on the Quranic verse 51:49 which describes the nature of all created things. The English transliteration of the verse is, "Wa men kulli shayen khalqna zawgyne la'alakum tadhkaroon." This translates into English as, "And all things have We created in pairs in order that you may reflect on it."
The word 'zawgyne' is consistently translated into the English language as 'pairs.' In scientific literature its meaning is extended to incorporate such concepts as 'duality', 'complementarity', 'opposites', 'inverses' and several other concepts reflecting conjugate and/or reciprocal properties. Terms will be listed below, within their respective disciplines, from the natural, biological and social sciences.
We find mentioned in the Tafsir of Ibn Kathir the following pairs of creation: the heavens and the earth, the sun and the moon, light and dark, night and day, the land and the oceans, life and death, jannah and narr. Ibn Kathir elaborates on the meaning of this verse explaining that, "Every aspect of creation has the pair characteristic, extending even to the animals and plants. This is the case in order that we may reflect and know that Allah, The Creator, is One and there is nothing that can be associated with Him." In addition to verse 51:49 there are five other Quranic verses which include the term zawgyne. They are: 11:40, 13:3, 23:27, 53:45, and 75:39. These ayat refer, respectively, to pairs at the time of Prophet Noah, to the pair of male and female, to pairs found in vegetation, and to the pairs found in fruits. Besides the dual form, zawgyne, the singular and plural forms, zawj and azwaj, appear in multiple verses of the Quran.”
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There is much more on this topic and over time we will highlight some of these fascinating commentaries on the issue of good vs. evil, or rather the duality of the Universe. WAKING GOD sets out to dispel some of the myths surrounding the topic of “evil” and demons and lays the responsibility for man’s actions right where it belongs, upon our shoulders!!
