The Forbidden Sagas

©2022 by Vernon Miles Kerr and VernonMilesKerr.com

#FirstCuppaJoe for Sat Sep 24 (thread)

We are taught the myths and sagas, of ancient Greece, ancient Rome, ancient China, ancient India, ancient Scandinavia (and all else Teutonic) NOT just in Universities—but in High Schools.

In modern rhetoric, we very effectively use the names of those old gods and demigods as symbols which carry all the weight of their foibles, their strengths, their weaknesses—their triumphs and their hopeless failures.

At the same time, we scholastically ignore the myths and sagas of the ancient Semites:
both Hebrew and Arabic—the Bible and the Qur’an. I’m talking literary output, which if combined with the commentaries by religious scholars, would fill a modern container ship, beyond the gunwhales. To get it all in for public consumption, we would need a whole new wing built onto the Library of Congress. But, over the past century and a half, even talking about this heritage as being equally worthy of study as those other ancient traditions, is TABU. Why?

First: The taint of the tradition’s claims— yes, even by the writings’ own claims—that they are the living, breathing word of God.
Second: The “appropriation” of this literary tradition by evil men who feign belief and even feign a prophetic connection with the purported author, in order to build self-serving empires of worshippers. One scripture says “you shall know them by their works.” A quick look at the major “works” of churches and governments stemming from these Empires quicky tell us, these were not the type of works the scripture alludes to.

When the North American Continent was first salted with scraps of quarreling religious sects, spread sporadically and unevenly over a sylvan wilderness, the University of Mexico had already existed since 1551. And the, then modern, European urban civilization that produced it had been around for almost 100 years.
In North America, it took a lot of trails and traces through the brush and over the waterways, to generate the nexus for a new nation of unified colonies. Once that was accomplished, the question arose: “whose religion should we use?” The need for separation of church and state was born. Answer: No one’s. Let the Churches handle religion, let the government handle governing, WITHOUT input from anyone’s church. (One is immediately inspired to use that trite, old saying: “Sounds good, but the Devil’s in the details.”
The religious taint that inevitably crept in to American government, about a hundred years later, caused a great pendulum swing in American Academia: In both public and non-religious private universities: the Bible, at least any non-critical reference to it, became TABU.
Now, today, there’s a societal opposite pendulum swing in a significant number of American states to bring the Bible, in the full religious sense, back into public education.
Given the secular literary value of the Bible, the throwing the baby out with the bathwater, in the 19th and 20th centuries, was a huge scholastic loss. But, now, a part of America wants to drink the swill from the tub and leave the poor baby, kicking and screaming out on the lawn.