Man's Search For Spirituality by E Christopher Reyes (the best electronic book reader txt) 📖

that Hebrew prophets began to teach the world justice twelve or thirteen centuries after the time of Hammurabi is one which any minister or priest ought now to be ashamed to repeat. ~C. Edward's Hammurabi Code, 1904. Cf. much later Mosaic Code see S.A. Cook's Laws of Moses and the Code of Hammurabi (1903).
Marduk and the representation of the Sun God will play an important part in later history. The Babylonian god, Marduk is the first-born son of Ea, whose wife is Sarpanitum, the primary Babylonian god. Endiku challenges Gilgamesh, a Babylonian King to a wrestling match [deification has now been accomplished in history and from now on all kings will claim descendency from the gods].
Of course, Gilgamesh vanquishes his foe and the legend continues. Gilgamesh hears of a Great Flood, from Utnapishtim, which will destroy mankind. Utnapishtim builds a ship and brings “… The seed of life of every kind into the ship.” On the 7th day Utnapishtim sends out a dove, the bird returns, it can find no land to rest. Then a swallow is sent out, and finally, a raven that does not return [the striking similarities between Utnapishtim and Noah can only lead one to believe that there is a relationship, somewhere far back in history].
Uta-Napishtim [Utnapishtim], a wise man, reveals to the king a plant that bestows eternal life [Tree of Life?] Gilgamesh dives into the to retrieve the plant but loses it to a Serpent of the deep [again, the similarities between this story and Biblical stories shows the inter-relationships amongst cultures]. The stories of Gilgamesh and Marduk change only slightly with the passage of time and due to encounters with new ethnicities the ancient beliefs are assimilated into the various Sumerians [Zui], Babylonians [Marduk], Assyrian, Hittite, Phoenicians, Greeks cultures.
The gods, being extremely jealous of their powers and retention from mankind withheld from man any hope of ever achieving immortality. When human beings died, they crossed a river to the “Kingdom of the dead,” where they lived in absolute darkness and dust, forever hungry and thirsty, unless there remained in the “other world,” a living person, who remembered them and offered them food and drink. The White Temple [most likely due to its limestone outer covering] is constructed and dedicated to Anu, God of the Sky, and Supreme Master.
The Persian Magi teach the concepts of good and evil under the names of Ormuzd and Ahriman. The world as a constant struggle of good and bad, black and white, etc., is carried over into other religious groups and sects. “The Persians believed in a Day of Judgment, when God [their one great god, Ahura Mazda] would destroy the earth, summon before him the souls of all men who had ever lived, reward the good and punish the living.”
“It is clearly from Persia that certain sects of the Jews, and Christ and the early Christians, borrowed this idea of [in Persian language] the coming of the ‘Kingdom of Heaven’…The Roman Catholics, and in a less explicit way other Christians, believe in two judgments of the dead: the Particular Judgment, of each soul after death, and the General Judgment, of all men at the close of the human comedy. Roman Catholics, I find, are astounded and embarrassed to learn that this particular judgment of each soul after death was the most outstanding and most influential belief of the ancient Egyptians from the very dawn of history, and probably long before it.” ~From Joseph McCabe, Rationalist Encyclopedia.
“…The Egyptians were peculiar once more in their conception of the nature of man. He had a body and a soul, and he had a third something, which they called the’ ka.’ In fact, as time went on the ‘immaterial’ part of man was broken up into a number of principles, which puzzle the most learned Egyptologists. There was the khu, the soul proper, the intelligence. Then there was the ‘Ka,’ or double, the seat of sense and perception, so closely allied to the body that it was almost regarded as an ethereal counterpart of it, even as a sort of guardian angel. There was also the ‘Ba,’ vaguely conceived as a disembodied soul, winged like a bird and flitting about the tombs and cemeteries at night. Moreover, there were other fanciful abstractions -- an essence of the heart, of the navel, and so on -- and the confusion of all these in what remains of Egyptian thought gives a big task to the expert.” ~From J. McCabe, Rationalist Encyclopedia.
According to the Assyrian “Seven Tablets of Creation” In the beginning, there existed a primeval abyss. Mûmmu-Tiamat and ApzÛ-RishtÛ, deities of the watery accumulation, which contain the boundless life forms of every kind of living matter, combine the non-existing appearance that bears no name and no destiny and creation begins.
The text is written in cuneiform and most probably copied from another more ancient papyrus or scroll. Tammuz [Thammuz] or, in ancient Sumero-Babylonian, Dumuzi, is a fertility god associated with crops and the harvest, and is no doubt associated with a death-and-resurrection ritual, which was related to the annual cycle of vegetation. ~Ezekiel 8:14.
The women referred to by Ezekiel are celebrating the annual death of their god Tammuz by weeping for him. Now the Christians weep annually over the death of Jesus Christ, and rejoice each year on the Easter of his resurrection.
Tammuz is a ‘Sun God’ who, in his daily cycle, rises from his cave in the morning, travels across the sky by day, before returning to his cave at night. Tammuz is then said to have descended into the “Land of no return” before his resurrection the following day. The death and resurrection of Pagan gods is alluded to in the Bible, specifically in Ezekiel. Yahweh had brought him in his vision to the north door of the Temple at Jerusalem; “And, behold, there sat women weeping for Tammuz.” ~Ezekiel 8:14.
One month of the ancient Hebrew calendar is actually named Tammuz and, “It was unmistakably allied with the worship of Adonis and Attis, and even of Dionysus. Much might have been hoped for these religions with their yearly festival of the dying and rising Gods [Sun Gods].” ~Catholic Encyclopedia, Vol. XI, p. 388.
All Sun Gods and saviors are born in caves, as was Jesus.
“This was the darkest abode from which the wandering Sun starts in the morning. As the dawn springs fully armed from the forehead of the cloven sky, so the eye first discerns the blue of Heaven, as the first faint arch of light is seen in the east. This arch is the cave in which the infant is nourished until he reaches his full strength,  in other words, until the day is fully come... At length the child is born, and a halo of serene light encircles his cradle, just as the sun appears at early dawn in all his splendor.” ~Doane, Bible Myths.
Significantly, as dawn approached the next day, a halo appeared, encircling the rising sun. The halo worn by the infant Jesus is said to be connected with the Tammuz myth. In addition, the Christian practice of praying with eyes closed is a reminder that Jesus originally descends from a sun god tradition “Son of God,” or “Sun of God.” Why else would the ancients pray with their eyes closed unless it was to shield their eyes from the sun moving across the sky? Like Jesus, Tammuz, in his seasonal cycle, was born to a virgin, called Mylitta, on December 25th the height of the winter solstice.
Tammuz allegedly performed miracles, healed the sick and suffered a painful death in order to become mankind's savior. On the third day, some accounts claimed, Tammuz is resurrected, like Jesus, into a new life of eternal blessedness. This resurrection is celebrated in an annual lamentation that involved washing with water and anointing with oil. “When those who lament, men and women, come up with him to me,” said one Akkadian text, “May the dead arise and smell the incense.” The annual lamentation of Tammuz is described by the ancient Hebrews in the Old Testament: “Then he brought me to the door of the gate of the Lord's house which was toward the north; and, behold, there sat women weeping for Tammuz.” ~Ezekiel 8:14. With the return of Tammuz, the lands of the Akkadians became fertile [resurrection or rebirth] again and the seasonal and daily cycles continued.
The Great Flood is related as Tamzi [Tammuz] looked out of his ship and saw that "mankind was turned to clay; like reeds the corpses floated.” Tammuz relates how he was commissioned by the gods to save himself and his family.

“I alone was the servant of the great gods. Their father, Anu, their king; their counselor, the warrior Bel; their throne-bearer, the god Uras; their prince, En-nugi; and Hea, the Lord of the Underworld, repeated their decree. In this destiny hearing, He said to me: Destroy thy house and build a ship, for I will destroy the seed of life.” ~Tammuz.
Instructions are then given as to the size of the ship, which eventually landed on Mount Nizor, Mount Rowandiz, and the Akkadian equivalent of Olympus.
To the Christians, Tammuz became the disciple Thomas while to the ancients he became Adoni [Phoenician], Adonai, Syrio-Hebrew, and Adonis, Greek, ... Adonis, whose name Adon in Hebrew means “Lord” or “Master,” was born to a virgin on December 25th. It is alleged that Adonis, also known as the “Anointed One,” “Suffered for mankind,” before his death and resurrection at the time of the Spring Equinox, now known as Easter. According to M.D. Aletheia, the festival of the “Resurrection of Adonis” was observed in Alexandria, the cradle of Christianity, in the time of Pope Zosimus, AD 417-18.
The festival also was observed at Antioch, the ancient capital of Syria, where the followers of Jesus were first called Christians in the time of Pope Liberius I, 352-66 C.E. “The celebration in honor of the Resurrection of Adonis came at last to be known as a Christian festival,” says Aletheia.
“The ceremonies held in Catholic countries on Good Friday and Easter Sunday are nothing more than the festival of the death and resurrection of Adonis...” ~from the works of D. Christie Sinton Arnoume.
The Phoenicians venerated the Sun God as a deity also, for in the inscriptions of Assur-bani-pal, an Assyrian King, we read that the name of the then crown-prince of Tyrenus Yahu-melek,  “Yahuh is my King.”
On a coin from Gaza of the 4th century B.C.E., now in the British Museum, is a figure of a deity in a chariot of fire, over whose head is written “Yho,” in old Phoenician characters. “Yahuh” held only a subordinate position in the mythology of the Semites, and he only owes his notoriety to the fact that he was chosen as the patron deity of the Beni-Israel.
The word “Ashera” or “Asherah” is admitted to in the preface to the Revised Bible to be “Uniformly and wrongly rendered as grove” in the Christian Authorized Versions of the Bible. But, why such mystical and misleading nuances? Perhaps it is to conceal the coarse character of the item signified as “ Ashera,” which is an upright stone, and unquestionably a Phallic, sexual, symbol. ~ M.D. Aletheia, The Rationalist's Manual. Bank of Wisdom, Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201.
The Eastern Semites of Accadia, Babylonia, Assyria, etc., the originators of the Chaldean religion, were astrologers and astronomers, and diagramed the ancient skies and zodiac.
The Chaldean Mysteries can be traced up to the days of Semiramis, who lived only a few centuries after the flood, and which is known to have been impressed upon the masses to instill the sacred image of their own depraved