On religion, drugs, and the question of whether Moses was stoned

"Theology is a thing of unreason altogether, an edifice of assumptions and dreams, a superstructure without a substructure."

Ambrose Bierce

"This story of the redemption will not stand examination. That man should redeem himself from the sin of eating an apple, by committing a murder on Jesus Christ, is the strangest system of religion ever set up."

Thomas Paine

From Israel comes the kind of "duh!" enlightenment that confirms what we all knew: religion and drugs go together like a horse and carriage.

An Israeli researcher claimed evidence that “Moses was on psychedelic drugs when he heard God deliver the Ten Commandments,” saw the burning bush, and so forth.

The professor, Benny Shanon, writing in the Time and Mind journal of philosophy, gets his premise right but his conclusion wrong.


Torah has liberal drug policy!

He cites the intermingling of religion and psychedelic drug use, a practice that goes back thousands of years and spans the globe. Indeed, the Torah has – and therefore all observant Jews must have – a very liberal drug policy, allowing the Israelites to consume “wine or other intoxicant” (Deuteronomy 14:22-26).

There’s every reason to believe, as the professor surmises, that the early Jews were getting stoned on concoctions made from the bark of the acacia tree, frequently mentioned in the Bible. Dr. Andrew Weil has been privileged to sample the psychedelic drugs of many cultures, and they do indeed induce very convincing hallucinations.

Look at the significant role that dreams and visions play in religious stories. I promise you, if you got me high on datura (jimson weed), I would very soon be conversing not only with Jesus, but with all 12 apostles!

Wrong conclusions

But the professor gets his conclusions all confused. He doesn’t believe that Moses’ revelation to the Jewish people was a supernatural cosmic event. Okay so far. Yet he doesn’t believe it was a legend, but rather that Moses was an actual human being under the influence of drugs.

Well, why couldn’t the whole thing be a legend? Who knows where folk tales first come from?

The original Moses, if he existed, is lost in the mists of the preliterate Middle East. Maybe there was someone like him, whose reputation ballooned into something way beyond what it was in historical reality. Maybe the whole Torah was made up by stoned priests who had no idea why things were the way they were.

Was Moses real?

The problem with talking about Moses as an actual human being – and this will occupy all of us Jews very soon, since we’re on the verge of another Passover – is that he does not meet the reality criteria that we impose on other human beings: independent contemporary documentation/-verification (even the Torah requires a witness) and/or physical evidence.

Consider: we have physical evidence of things that happened thousands of years ago, even back into prehistory. We can tell where Neanderthal settlements were. Do you think we would not have some trace of 600,000 Israelites trekking across the Sinai?

If Moses was such a mover and shaker, would he not have been noticed by other literate cultures of the region? Were they all out to lunch when the Exodus took place? Egypt was one of the most powerful empires of the time. They kept records of everything. They don’t mention Moses (or Joseph before him), plagues, or the Jews.

There is evidence that a Middle Eastern nomadic group called the Apiru attacked the fringes of the Egyptian empire, and some were killed and captured. That’s about it.

Proof – NOT

People who want to believe in the Passover story – or in the whole Torah, for that matter – always like to cite bits of anecdotal and circumstantial evidence that support this or that facet of the story (never mind that the place names existed at the time of the Torah writers, but not at the time of the supposed events).

Thus, the Ten Plagues might have been some sort of series of ecological disasters, in which the firstborn son, since he went out to get the first grain off the pile, might’ve ingested a plant fungus, and so firstborn children died in large numbers. Interesting speculation. (The Torah also notes that the Egyptian magicians duplicated the first couple of plagues, so they couldn’t have been that special.)

But again, everything must be subjected to the two basic criteria: physical evidence and contemporary confirmation or documentation. If nobody else noticed it and it left no evidence, how could it have happened?

Religion, drugs, and science

If you put psychedelic drugs together with a near-total absence of science, you could come up with hundreds if not thousands of stories of how the world came to be, stories of fantastic events, of interactions between human beings and divinities.

But the only way to find out what really happened is to look at the evidence. Impartial examination of the evidence results in the actual story, told by sciences such as cosmology, evolution and history. The actual origins and extent of the universe are far more exciting and awe inspiring than the simple seven-day setup project described in the Book of Genesis.

Psychedelic drugs are still useful as creativity aids, as an inspiration for art, and as an expander of consciousness, but when it comes to accounting for reality, they’re not nearly as reliable as science.

The losers

It’s unfortunate that psychedelic drugs have been split off from religion in the Middle East and the West. The big losers, in my opinion, are the religious believers whose doctrines do not allow the use of psychedelics.

I can see the rationale: people’s minds need to be totally open to control by clerics and dogma, and no chemicals must interfere with this process.

But the downside for believers is that – like the storied Israelites who had to build bricks without straw – they have to maintain their fantasies without drugs, through sheer willpower, group consensus, and reprogramming.

Although many religious believers find that non-thinking comes naturally and is the path of least resistance, others, as science progresses, have to fight harder and harder to hold on to their faith. There is much talk of Faith and Doubt (often capitalized).

It takes a lot of effort to maintain belief in nothing, and I sometimes feel sorry for them.
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Alan M. Perlman is a secular humanist speaker and author -- most recently, of An Atheist Reads the Torah: Secular Humanistic Perspectives on the Five Books of Moses. For information, go to www.trafford.com/06-0056.