Yeah, but I hear those goddamn babylonians were a bunch of drinkin, 
partying mutherfuckers.

   Jim

On 5/19/98 1:24 AM Lew Kellogg wrote:

>Babylonian documents indicate that the ethical and moral beliefs of the 
>people stressed goodness and truth, law and order, justice and freedom, 
>wisdom and learning, and courage and loyalty. Mercy and compassion were 
>espoused, and special protection was accorded widows, orphans, refugees, 
>the poor, and the oppressed. Immoral and unethical acts were considered 
>transgressions against the gods and the divine order and were believed to 
>be punished by the gods accordingly. No one was considered to be without 
>sin, and therefore all suffering was held to be deserved. The proper 
>course for Babylonians unhappy with their condition in life was not to 
>argue and complain but to plead and wail, to lament and confess their 
>inevitable sins and failings before their personal god, who acted as their 
>mediator in the assembly of the great gods. 
>The religiosity of the Babylonians has come to be proverbial, and not 
>unjustifiably so. Never-the-less, religious skepticism existed and may 
>have been more prevalent than sources reveal. 
>One extant literary document known as the Babylonian Theodicy, for 
>example, consists of a debate between a skeptic and a believer in which 
>the latter finds it necessary to conclude with the patent and somewhat 
>unsatisfying argument that the will of the gods is inscrutable. In another 
>Babylonian essay, taking the form of a dialogue between a master and 
>slave, the tone is similarly skeptical and the mood cynical; the 
>relativist view is advanced that all human actions can be justified and 
>are therefore fundamentally without meaning, particularly because death 
>makes life itself insignificant. 
>For the Babylonians, death was indeed the consuming dread and a source of 
>great despair. The Babylonian generally believed that at death the 
>disembodied spirit descends to the dark nether world, and that human 
>existence beyond the grave is at best only a dismal, wretched reflection 
>of life on earth. Any hope of an eternal reward for the righteous and 
>deserving was absent; everyone was impartially consigned to the world 
>below. It is not strange that the most popular, dramatic, and creative 
>Babylonian literary work, the Gilgamesh Epic (q.v.) , centers on a vain 
>and pathetic quest for eternal life.
>
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