Abraham’s Spiritual Inversion

Judaism is spiritual inversion. It takes all of the perennial truths, taught in just about every spiritual tradition in just about every culture on every continent – and flips it upside down.

I will be providing many examples of this, and I think it’s fitting that the first example should come from the First Jew.

The Torah tells us that Abraham was a wise, healthy, morally upright man, and that all of the decisions he made in Genesis were good ones.

But if you believe that, then you yourself have been infected with the spiritual inversion that the Abraham story was created in order to spread.

Think about this for just a moment, as a sane, rational person:

If you’re out and about one day, and you start hearing a voice in your head, claiming to be God, and telling you that it wants you to do things, you’re not supposed to believe it.

If you hear, “Hi I’m god and I want you go do this this and this” – you’re not supposed to believe it.

When you get a voice in your head, you’re not supposed to believe that that voice is God. I don’t care if it claims to be God – your’e not supposed to believe it.

It could be God… but it could be also be a demon, or a psychological problem. You don’t know. 

So when this Abraham character heard this voice in his head claiming to be God, and he believed it, he made a mistake.

But the story presents his choice as being the right choice. Think about that. The story says that if a voice in your head claims to be God, you should just believe it; and if it tells you to do stuff, you should go and do the stuff!

And that’s not right! That’s wrong! You’re not supposed to! 

In fact, if you want to discern the nature of the voice that’s speaking to you, the easiest way is to look at the things it wants you to do, and evaluate them, and ask “are these things good things or bad things?”, and if they’re bad things, then it’s probably a demon, or a psychological problem – and not God. 

Now let’s look at the things the voice told Abe to do. 

First it told him to commit self-harm. It told him to cut himself with a knife. And not simple slashes on the arms, but to cut off an entire organ from his genitals. That’s called self harm.

Now if a voice in your head is telling you to commit self harm, what kind of voice is that? Come on folks it’s not hard. That’s a demon. One more time for the folks in the back: If a voice in your head claims to be god and tells you to self harm with a knife, that’s a demon – period.

What’s the next thing it asked? To kill his son, Isaac.

Listen up, folks. Listen really carefully:

If a voice in your head tells you to kill your family, that’s a demon.

Come on people! Really simple! God doesn’t tell you to kill people – demons do that. Ok? So if I voice in your head claims to be God and tells you to commit self harm and kill your family, the correct answer is NO. You say “No! I will not be cutting off anyone’s genital organs, and I will not be killing my son. No. Not in a million years. Begone, demon! Trouble me no more!”

And then, if the demon doesn’t leave you alone, you’re supposed to visit the local shaman or medicine man/woman, and tell them the problem, and see if they can exorcise the demon. Abraham should have exorcised the voice – not obeyed it!

Duh. Is this difficult mathematics here? Am I coming up with some innovative newfangled idea here? This makes sense right? Don’t obey voices in your head that tell you to do violence. This is Being Human 101.

But Abraham in the story says Yes to the voice, on all accounts. And it presents that as if he made the “right choice.” So the book is presenting a wrong choice, an evil choice, as if it’s a good choice. And that is spiritual inversion.

And it came with consequences. Because what’s the lesson there? What lesson is the Abraham and Isaac story trying to convey? Well if you ask any religious scholar who believes in it, they’ll all tell you the purpose of the story is to convey that you’re supposed to do whatever God says, no matter what it is, no matter how heinous, no matter how vile. If a high enough authority tells you to do it, you do it.

And that’s a wrong lesson. That’s the lesson of a cult. That’s the lesson of an army – an army that’s been sent to conquer and kill. An army that knows it’s going to have to slice little kids’ heads off. You have to tell the soldiers of that army that when you’re ordered to do something by authority, you do it, no matter what it is. And that’s the lesson that the Abe story is meant to convey, and it’s the root of the evil that’s plagued humanity for the 3000 years since: This idea that when authority tells you to do something vile, you do it.

No you don’t do it. That’s the wrong lesson. And the horrors that humanity has faced for the thousands of years since, is due to the inverted lesson taught in the Abraham story. That story is responsible for humanity’s agony. That story is why humanity can’t grow up. That story is why humanity has to keep reliving savagery, century after century after century. That story.

It’s one of the evilest stories in the world. It’s like a disease that got into humanity’s brain. Whoever wrote that story was as far away from God as it’s possible to be. In fact, I think that story was written by the devil.

And yet that story presents itself as if it’s from the highest and most divine origin. That is spiritual inversion.