42. We Are The Judges Of Ideas

One of the earliest known stories of rebellion is the ancient Sumerian "Epic of Atrahasis." The lesser gods, called the Igigi, have the difficult job of maintaining the world for the higher gods, the Anunnaki. Exhausted and oppressed by their endless toil, the Igigi gods decide they have had enough. They burn their tools and surround the great god Enlil’s temple staging a strike. The rebellion leads to the creation of humans. The gods decide that instead of burdening the Igigi with labor, they will create mankind to do the job. Humans, like the Igigi before them, become overwhelmed by the job. They are forced to work for the gods, but a god sympathetic to them, Enki, helps them. He taught them to appeal to the gods through prayers and rituals, pleading for relief. His message, now clear to me, is that humans do not have the might of the Anunnaki or the power of the Igigi. We have something else. We can understand, even the gods. We can learn from errors. The gods use “might to make right” but it does not work well. They created the lesser gods to work for them which ended in revolt. They then made humans but had to inflict plagues and famines to get control of the population. It seems the gods do not know everything. They can make mistakes just like us but with one key difference. While the gods may judge us we judge ideas. Knowledge creation (creating and criticizing ideas) is our domain. In it, we rule with creativity and critical thinking.