Carl%20Sagan%20-%20The%20Demon%20Haunted%20World

THE DEMON-HAUNTED WORLD
assumed. Faith always got the nod over Reason.) Similar attempts at
reconciliation permeate Talmudic and post-Talmudic Jewish literature
and medieval Islamic philosophy.
But tenets at the heart of religion can be tested scientifically.
This in itself makes some religious bureaucrats and believers
wary of science. Is the Eucharist, as the Church teaches, in fact
and not just as productive metaphor, the flesh of Jesus Christ,
or is it, chemically, microscopically and in other ways, just a
wafer handed to you by a priest?* Will the world be destroyed
at the end of the 52-year Venus cycle unless humans are
sacrificed to the gods? †
Does the occasional uncircumcised
Jewish man fare worse than his co-religionists who abide by the
ancient covenant in which God demands a piece of foreskin
from every male worshipper? Are there humans populating
innumerable other planets, as the Latter Day Saints teach?
Were whites created from blacks by a mad scientist, as the
Nation of Islam asserts? Would the Sun indeed not rise if the
Hindu sacrificial rite is omitted (as we are assured would be the
case in the Satapatha Brahmana)?
We can gain some insight into the human roots of prayer by
examining those of unfamiliar religions and cultures. Here, for
example, is what is written in a cuneiform inscription on a
Babylonian cylinder seal from the Second Millennium BC:
Oh, Ninlil, Lady of the Lands, in your marriage bed, in the
abode of your delight, intercede for me with Enlil, your
beloved. [Signed] Mili-Shipak, Shatammu of Ninmah.
* There was a time when the answer to this question was a matter of life or death.
Miles Phillips was an English sailor, stranded in Spanish Mexico. He and his
fellows were brought up before the Inquisition in the year 1574. They were
asked 'Whether we did not believe that the Host of bread which the priest did
hold up over his head, and the wine that was in the chalice, was the very true
and perfect body and blood of our Saviour Christ, Yea or No? To which,'
Phillips adds, 'if we answered not "Yea!" then there was no way but death.'
† Since this Mesoamerican ritual has not really been practised for five centuries,
we have the perspective to reflect on the tens of thousands of willing and
unwilling sacrifices to the Aztec and Mayan gods who reconciled themselves to
their fates with the confident faith that they were dying to save the Universe.
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