The Tar Babies

About the Book

In the framework of that old story by Uncle Remus, when Brer Fox tricked Brer Rabbit into getting stuck in the Tar Baby, Clara Rising has written an iconoclastic bombshell. Too many of our cultural beliefs have become obsessions. Hog-tied into a numb acceptance of inherited commands from religion and government, we blindly obey, ignoring our own capacity to reason and our obligation, as thinking beings of the human race, to understand. It is in this quest for understanding that this book is written.

We begin with questions, as all understanding must. And, if we are to find any satisfaction, we must approach those questions without prejudice. Where did the idea of good vs. evil come from? What is the nature of man, of God, and of their relationship? Why was original sin introduced into the Garden in Genesis? And why did it become inherited? Inherited sin is foreign to Jewish tradition. Why did it enter Christian doctrine? Or, to be more precise, through whom? To answer that question we will meet a host of characters. But this will be no dinner party, although on some occasions we may experience indigestion.

We will meet the Greek philosopher Plato, the Stoics Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius, and the followers of the Persian prophet Zoroaster, who believed that men’s souls are splinters of divine light stolen by demons and who called themselves Gnostics (those who know). Then we find in Alexandria, Egypt the saintly pagan Plotinus, who has been called a Christian without Christ.

But the Church, anxious to establish itself as the ultimate haven-on-earth (a kind of saintly Roman Empire), brought forth its own CEO’s. There was the venerated Origen, too-too chaste, who castrated himself in order to teach women. There was the hypocritical St. Augustine (“Give me chastity—but not yet!”) and the celebrated scholar St. Jerome, who proved to be the nemesis for the only theologian of the day who had an ounce of common sense. In fact, he had so much common sense that it seems an insult to call him a theologian.

His name was Pelagius, an Irish monk who was born about A.D. 360. Too realistic for the total depravity of St. Augustine or the supercilious Jerome, he couldn’t believe in Original Sin and thought man could reach God through his own human free will. His motto was “If I ought, I can.” Such treason against Divine Grace (and the Church’s monopoly on forgiveness) caused an uproar. We will never know what happened to Pelagius. He disappeared from view in A.D. 420. But it is clear now what was running the sideshow. CONTROL.

Control of mind, heart, aspirations. Through fear. It started in the Garden, and flourished through the Middle Ages into the Industrial Revolution, where it found its ultimate champion, someone who would make the CEO’s of the Church look like peasants. His name was Karl Marx, an alcoholic teenager who would become the Saint of Bleeding Hearts, who never worked a day in his life and sponged off his friend Engels, whose father owned a factory. Marx managed, through his hatred of capitalism and democracy, to create a nebulous attitude of fear that has emerged in a new form of Marxism, “Political Correctness.”

Nowhere does Uncle Remus’s story seem more real than our relationship with our pseudo-state, Israel. Smaller than New Hampshire but in need of billions of dollars to defend itself against an impoverished, occupied West Bank, Israel has become our most precious, stoutly defended Tar Baby. If sin began in the Garden, God set up his real estate business in Deuteronomy, when he promised his chosen children the land of Canaan. He ordered the Israelites to cross over “where the sun sets over the Jordan” and leave alive “nothing that breatheth.” With a monumental effort at fairness, Rising examines the Israeli-Palestinian dilemma so eloquently described by Bernard Lewis in his The Crisis of Islam, the fact that both sides—the Jews and

About the Author

Mother of four, grandmother of six, Army wife, ex-professor of humanities, Clara Rising, Ph.D., sold in 1986 without an agent to the first publisher to see it a long manuscript which became the Civil War novel IN THE SEASON OF THE WILD ROSE. Since then four more books, ranging from ancient Greece to the exhumation of President Zachary Taylor, have confirmed her belief that only through the insights of inspiration can the facts of history rescue us from a despair which too often accompanies reality. In the poems of THAT INWARD EYE Rising reaffirms her no-nonsense commitment to a cultural inheritance she considers essential for survival in the 21st century. A large part of that inheritance is an unabashed passion for Nature and for animals--perhaps our ultimate salvation in an increasingly crazy world. Now 81 and a great-grandmother, she lives and rides her horse in the countryside near Lexington, Kentucky.