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The example of Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice his son, Isaac, has been trotted out for ages as the supreme example of how one is to approach the “god”. One must be willing to give the god anything and everything! This “Faith” is an essential part of the “covenant” with the god - a sort of “act of trade”, so to say. actually nearly identical to a Vedic story of Manu. These acts of sacrifice were based on what was called sraddha which is related to the The word sraddha was, according to religious historians Dumezil and Levi, too hastily understood as “faith” in the Christian sense. Correctly understood, it means something like the trust a workman has in his tools to “shape or create” reality and techniques of sacrifice were, in the way of tools, similar to acts of magic! knows how to perform a prescribed sacrifice correctly, and who also knows that if he performs the sacrifice correctly, it must produce its effect. In short, it is an act that is designed to gain control over the forces of life that reside in the god with whom one has made the covenant. Such gods as make covenants are not “literary ornaments” or abstractions. They are active partners with intelligence, strength, passion, and a tendency to get out of control if the sacrifices are not performed correctly. In this sense, the sacrifice - the “faith” - is simply black magic. In another sense, the ascetic or “self-sacrificer”, is a person who is striving for release from the bondage and order of nature by the act of attempting to mortify the self, the flesh; testing and increasing the will for the purpose of winning tyrannical powers while still in the world. But again, we see that through this self-sacrifice, he or she seeks mastery of the gods. It is, in short, manipulation and coercion at its most subtle to promote “faith” as the bringer of salvation. What seems to be so is that it is generally individuals who have been “disenfranchised” or who feel helpless and at the mercy of the forces of life - whether they manifest through other people or random events — who are those most likely to seek such faith, such a covenant with a god. They feel acutely their own inability to have an effect in the world, and they turn their creativity inward to create and maintain their subjective “faith” in opposition to objective reality. 31 High Strangeness The story about the almost sacrifice of Abraham in the Bible is words fides, credo, faith, believe and so on. Such “faith” is, therefore, part of a “covenant” wherein the sacrificer > >