Exporting Oil Without a Pipeline

            According to an article the December 29-30 issue of Wall Street Journal, "Disparity in Oil Prices Proves Pesky,"  Americans, particularly those living in the interior,  are now enjoying much lower oil prices than Europeans.  In Iowa, I just filled my tank with regular gasoline for $2.99 per gallon.  In some parts of America, prices are a bit higher, but all Americans have lower prices on petroleum and natural gas than anyone in Western Europe. Historically, the price for European crude oil (Brent Crude) is usually within a dollar or two per barrel of the price of American crude, (West Texas Intermediate).  But according to the article,  U.S. crude is now about $20.00 cheaper per barrel than European oil.

            The reason for this disparity is that we have a temporary glut of oil in the American interior due to shale oil produced by hydro-fracking.  This is temporary, in that the shale formations are shallow and will probably only produce for 10 or 15 years, as opposed to the 30-60 year life span expected for a conventional well.  But at the moment, this surge of production, combined with recent increases in the fuel efficiency of the American automobile fleet, means that there is more oil available than there are buyers, and this is driving down the price of crude.  This is bad news for the oil companies, because the new horizontal drilling and hydro-fracking technology that makes this production possible is extremely expensive. By some estimates, if the price of crude drops below $70.00 per barrel, which it easily could, the drillers won't even break even.

            The oil companies would like to sell this oil to the Europeans and get an additional $20.00.   But there is one problem--there is no practical way to get it there. This oil is produced in the northern mid-west, and the present pipeline capacity to ship this oil to gulf coast ports is inadequate to handle the volume.  In November 2011, the Seaway Pipeline, originally built to import oil from the gulf ports to the main storage hub in Cushing, Oklahoma, was re-fitted to pump oil in the other direction.   But this pipe can only handle about 400,000 barrels per day.  One part of the proposed Keystone pipeline, the Keystone XL Southern Leg, would increase this capacity by another 800,000 barrels.   Another Keystone leg would bring tar-sand oil from Alberta, Canada, into the U.S..   But the whole project has been plagued by delays and environmental concerns.   Ironically, the oil industry has been trying to paint the environmentalist opposition as obstructionists who are obstructing a pipeline that would bring in more oil and lower our prices. This propaganda effort has had some success---millions of morons are writing their congressmen demanding that this line be built.   But the part most likely to be completed is the Southern Leg, which will not bring in any oil but ship it out---which will raise prices.  And that's why the oil companies want to build it.  Along with oil, the new drilling is producing massive amounts of natural gas, which would be even harder to ship to Europe. But where there is a will,  there is a way.

            According to another WSJ article, "Kafkaesque Twist in U.S.-Europe Energy Gap", Dec 26, 2012,   Austrian steelmaker Voestalpine is planning to build a $659 million plant in the U.S. or Canada to produce a semi-refined iron product (hot briquetted iron) to be shipped back to Austria to be refined into steel.  The iron smelting done to produce these briquettes will be using cheap American natural gas instead of metallurgical grade coal.  American gas is now  priced at about $3.50 per million British thermal units--about a third of the European price.  Reducing iron from its ore is a very energy-intensive operation.  The fuel used, either natural gas or coke from coal, not only provides the heat but is the main chemical reagent in the process.  But by using cheap gas to produce an energy-intensive semi-finished product, they have found a way to export gas without a pipeline.  Amazing how history repeats itself.

            In Elizabethan England, the British isles were running short of chestnut trees, which was then the only source of charcoal suitable for reducing iron from its ore.   At that time, no one had yet developed a way to use coal to smelt iron. The trick is that you first have to change it to "coke", which is like charcoal, only made from coal.  But no one knew that then.  So the whole British iron industry was in peril.  But colonization of the Americas saved them.  North America had abundant chestnut forests, as well as iron ore.  The arrangement which the British preferred was to have the Americans make semi-finished iron to ship to England, which their own iron industry could turn into useful iron and steel consumer products which they could sell back to the Americans. But the Americans had a better idea:  instead of shipping this iron to England and then shipping consumer products back,  why not just turn the iron into consumer products right here in America?  Why accept low prices for our crude iron exports and pay high prices for all our consumer goods, and have all the money go to British shippers?  So we started making our own things.  To prevent this, Parliament passed the Iron Act.  Specifically, this act forbade anyone in the colonies from owning a "slitting mill."  A slitting mill  is a kind of shears that cuts red hot iron plates into narrow strips. Thick plates were not useful to anyone except an iron mill. They are a semi-finished industrial commodity.  But narrow strips could be sold to any blacksmith and converted into horse shoes, hinges, nails, or just about anything.  They were a consumer  good.

            The Iron Act was originally passed about 1750, but it was not enforced until after the French and Indian War was over. One cannot put a strangle hold on a population that one still needs to help win the war.   But after the war, a number of unpopular acts were enforced upon the colonials. The Stamp Act aroused the most ire among the working classes, but among the elites who actually planned the revolution, the most intolerable of all the so called "intolerable acts" was the Iron Act.  It clearly signaled the intention of the British government to insure that America would remain permanently under-developed industrially-- because British shippers and factory owners wanted it that way.  If we accepted these restrictions, we would remain a "third world country" forever.  So a decision was made to escape from British control while escape was still possible.

            Yet today, we cheerfully offer to the Austrians the precise arrangement which we fought a revolution to deny the British.

Greetings to My Readers in Poland

            In the last few weeks, there has been a surge of interest in this blog from Poland.  For three weeks there have been more visits from Poland than from any other European country, and one week there were more visits from Poland than from all other European countries combined.

            It would be interesting to know just which articles are of interest in Poland, but the statistical information provided to me by Google tells me only the total number of visits to each article, and the total from each country.  To know who is visiting what--I can only guess.   My first guess is that my readers in Poland would like to have a view of the current world-wide economic debacle as seen from inside the U.S., where it all started.  But they are not such fools as to accept explanations from government officials, or from economists paid by business interests, or even from the academic community.  (In recent years, though colleges still pretend to be a free and independent voice,  most of them have become so dependent on grant money from business interests that academic economists now publish mostly whatever the business block would like to hear.   It is not that any dissenting professor would be fired--it is that since about 1970, anyone who would be likely to have a dissenting view would never have been hired in the first place. Except for labor organizations and a few newspapers,  there are few places in America to hire an economist today unless he is a robot who repeats the business block party line.  For example, the wealthiest 1% of Americans now control 5 times as much wealth as the bottom 80%, and yet many academic economists still repeat the business block line that taxes on the wealthy are too high. )   So while government economists are not allowed to tell you the truth, the business block economists are not even allowed to think it.  I spent 40 years as an electrician and during some of that time I was an elected union official and a labor union activist.  If you are from Poland, then you understand that such people are not easily silenced.

            I assume that my article about "Why Wall Street Wrecks the Economy" was one of the sites which had a wide audience in Poland.  But here are two others that you may find interesting.   One is labeled Does Keynesian Policy Still Work?  The other is  A Keynesian Error. Keynesian economics was the main engine of growth in America and much of Europe from the mid-1930s until recently.   In the post war years, the economic boom in Western Europe which many in Poland may have envied was all provided by Keynesian expansion. But by the time that Poland became free of the collectivist model, the opportunity to use Keynesian tactics was already closing, for reasons discussed in the article.  And today, it may be too late for Poland to feast at the table which fed its Western neighbors so well. But perhaps it is not too late, if it were done correctly. Here is the link to those articles:

Does Keynesian Policy still work?

A Keynesian Error. 

Best Posts of 2012

Best Posts of 2012

All of these posts can be accessed from the archive list at the left margin, and some have hot links.

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Is a Cat Microbe Changing Your Behavior?  Mar/5/12  Is an ancient parasite controlling our brains?

Are Bar Flies Just Sex-starved Males?  Mar/23/12

Electric Car Battery Cost  Apr/19/12

1493, by Charles C. Mann   May/6/12  The Cat's book review--this is a must read.

U.S. Debt Not a Problem. Jun/25/12

Why Wall Street Wrecks the Economy.  Jun/29/12

What They Won't Tell You About Farm Bills.  Aug/4/12  The secret success. For eighty years, American Farm Policy has actually been astounding success.  But it's a success that its architects dare not take credit for, as this would require them to disclose what the goals were. No American government will ever do this.

How Ancient Builders Moved Things.  Aug/12/12

Oil, Imperialism, and the Real Causes of WWI.  Sep/18/12  A review and synopsis of Wm. Engdahl's book,   A Century of War.   A must read.

When Computers Were Reliable.  Oct/14/12

The Germs That Make Us Us.  Oct/22/ 12

The Ethicization of Religion.  Nov/20/12  The Long Shadow of Zarathustra.

An Optimist Looks at His Future. Mar/28/12  A grimly whimsical look at modern life.  Are you the type who always finds the worst case scenario?  No, you're not!  Not compared to me.

The Real Housing Crisis.  Feb/4/12  A view from the epicenter of an economic disaster. Probably my best post, it is also the longest. It's  an insider's view of what happens when the job market and housing market in a whole region completely collapses around you.

Gasoline Price Explained

           A few weeks before the election in the U.S.,  gasoline prices began to drop a bit.  Now, everyone knows that voters are more likely to re-elect the party in power when prices are stable--and less likely to do so if prices, especially fuel prices, are high and rising.  So everyone had a theory as to who was manipulating  prices for political purposes. The right wing pundits suggested that Obama was secretly releasing oil from the strategic reserve to buy votes.  My own theory was that the oil barons, although they do not particularly like Obama, realized that the alternative to his being re-elected was to actually have Mitt Romney as President, a prospect which scared the hell out of them.  And so they were trying to beat down the gas price to prevent Romney's election.

            But after sober reconsidering, I realize that no person or agency was manipulating anything at all.  What happened is that in the northern temperate zone, where most of the world's cars are,  winter fuel blend is not the same as summer fuel.   About mid-October, the refineries briefly shut down and re-tool to make winter blend gasoline.  This fuel is lighter and will vaporize at a lower temperature. Back when we used engines with carburetors, this lighter fuel was absolutely necessary for cold weather starting. But in extreme cold weather, even cars with modern fuel injection systems may require a lighter mix to run well.  So about mid-October, we all start buying a different fuel.   The oil companies love this because this lighter blend of hydrocarbons weighs less per gallon, and they can get a few more gallons per barrel of crude oil.  But by dumping more gallons on the market, this bids the price down. 

            And of course, we consumers are delighted to have a lower price.  But nowadays,  a lot of cars are equipped  with a digital readout on the dashboard with gives an instantaneous estimate of fuel consumption in miles per gallon.   And as soon as you start burning winter gas, you notice that the gas you paid 10% less for will also give you 10% fewer miles per gallon.  Why?  What happens is that fuel consumption per pound (or per kilogram) remains exactly the same, but there are fewer pounds per gallon ( grams per liter).  If fuel were priced per pound instead of per gallon, the price and gas millage would have remained unchanged.

            This change in mass density of the fuel would itself have explained a 10% drop in price.  But by today, the total price decrease in my area has been about 14%.  The additional 4% is due to the fact that in cold weather, people drive less.  If you live in the "frost belt", there aren't many things to do or places to go in cold weather that would actually be a pleasant experience, so people stay home as much as possible.  And with fewer gallons of gas sold, normal supply and demand factors have depressed the price.

            When we feel miserable, we try to put a face on our problem.  We look for an "oil executive in the woodpile".    We like to identify some particular individual or institution to blame for our misfortune.  But sometimes our fortunes are tied to the impersonal forces of supply and demand.  Do not think I am championing the value of "free markets."  Having watched market forces all my life, I can assure you that except perhaps for John Maynard Keynes, no man ever lived who had a lower opinion of "the market."  Schumpeter believed that markets cause "creative destruction."   He was partly right.  Market forces are almost always destructive--but not always creative.  When we say we have free market forces, that is merely a polite way of saying that we have  chaos.  There was a time when Saudi Arabia could control the price of crude oil. And there was a time when the US, acting as the world's largest consumer, could also dictate the price of crude. In the 90s, the U.S.  broke the price of crude oil simply by using less.  But with China entering the market, those days are gone. Today, no one controls the market--it's simply chaos.  But with chaos, at least no one is in charge of it.

Ingenious Old Boilers

           I just helped cut up an old steam boiler--a 1913, Kewanee 300 hp coal fired, fire tube, low pressure steam boiler.  This is the boiler which originally heated the building where I now reside.  I live in an abandoned school building.  Not a cute little one-room school, but a three story brick building that once held classes for grades 1 thru 12.  As larger farms replaced small farms throughout the 20th century, rural areas such as the one where I live lost population, and many schools were shut down as the districts were re-organized.  My building was last used as a school in 1961, and I obtained it about a decade later.  I carved out a small apartment, about one fifth of the total square footage, which I then heavily insulated, and which I heat with a small LP gas furnace.  So since 1961, the old boiler has just sat there rusting.   A good thing, since it burned 300 tons of coal the last winter it was used.  The carbon footprint of operating such a monstrous teakettle (about the size of a small railroad locomotive) would be absurd.

            The thermal efficiency of coal boilers has improved since the days of the old fire tube boilers.  A modern "water tube" boiler in a coal fired power plant can yield over 90% efficiency, whereas the old fire tube boilers were lucky to get 15%.  So I was surprised to discover that these old boilers still showed some ingenious engineering. For instance, the thickness of the iron plate walls was not uniform throughout, but each area was only as thick as it had to be.  The main boiler walls were 1/2 inch thick, but the crown plates were only 3/8th".

              My boiler  was a "scotch boiler" design, but perhaps I should  digress a bit to explain exactly what that means.  A "straight through" boiler is simply a heavy walled horizontal barrel with a "crown plate"  welded or riveted across each end.  About 72  three inch tubes run through the length of  the barrel and through 3" holes in the plate, and then end. The tubes are secured and sealed to the plate around the outside of each tube, so that fire can flow through the tubes, but steam cannot get out of the chamber which surrounds the tubes.  The reason that the crown plates could be thinner is that the 72 tubes fastened to it would reinforce it.   A "straight through" boiler simply had a fire box at one end and the flames went through the boiler tubes to the other end and up the chimney.  The barrel, laid horizontally, had to be heavy enough to withstand the pressure of the steam, and long enough to allow the fire to travel far enough for the heat to be absorbed by the water and steam.

            But with a Scotch boiler,  the whole barrel is only half as long, but the flue gasses travel the same distance.  This is done by having the hot gasses first travel through only the lower 36 tubes, then be directed back through the upper 36 tubes.  So the fire goes through the boiler twice.  But this means that the last 5 ft before the fire goes up the chimney, it goes right over the fire box where it started. That means that the barrier between the fire box and the steam chamber is a flat plate that forms the roof of the fire box. So at that point, the steam chamber is a "D" shaped space with its floor as the ceiling of the fire box, and the ceiling being the top of the outer hull. So although the roof of the fire box was flat, it had steam pressure above it. But being flat, it did not have the strength of cylindrical walls found in the rest of the boiler.   To compensate for this, a forest of  3/4" iron rods connected this flat plate to the arched walls above.  When I discussed this with my brother, a former Navy boiler man, he explained that these rods would not only reinforce the walls, but also conduct heat.  And the fire box itself had double walls on three sides, with water circulating in between. Any heat which escaped from the fire box would still be heating water. Yet these walls, being flat,  also had to have 3/4" iron rods between them.

            Those who built boilers one hundred years ago did not have the sophisticated technology that we have today--but they were certainly not fools.

Note:  If this kind of post interests you, I have another post called, Ingenious Old Windmills  

The Anatomy of Gratitude

            This being Thanksgiving weekend, we are immersed in a deluge of appeals to feel or to express more gratitude--and I certainly have no problem with this.  One observation in almost every opinion you will hear about gratitude  is that there is little connection between how much of everything  we have--and how likely we are to feel thankful for it.  In fact, if there is a correlation, it is negative. Those who would appear to have the least are most likely to feel thankful for all that they have, and vice versa.   The customary explanation is that we humans are arrogant and ungrateful bastards.  While this is, of course, true--there may be a deeper explanation.

            What if the act of giving thanks is simply an acknowledgement of our insecurity, our helplessness, and our dependence on the giver.  When we say, "Thanks," what we really mean is, "Thanks--You really saved my butt!"  Then, the more precarious our existence,  the more deeply we feel genuinely grateful for any little contribution to our welfare.  A person who has no reliable connection to food, shelter, or income might see the offer of a single meal or nights shelter as a lifesaver--because it is. But as our situation becomes less precarious, we offer less thanks to others and to life itself.  And when we reach the point where we have a secure job, own a home (or own a serious equity in one), and have a little nest egg salted away, we may forget to give thanks for any of it. Why?  Well, if thanks is an acknowledgment of our vulnerability,  we can't very well acknowledge vulnerability if we don't see that we have any.  Of course, we all have a degree of vulnerability that we may not appreciate. Nowadays, each one of us is just one illness, one accident, or one lawsuit away from abject poverty.   We sometimes fail to see this, and perhaps that's the problem. But that's another issue.

            Besides being correlated to our degree of insecurity, there is one other factor.  This would be the level in sacrifice and inconvenience undergone by those who have agreed to  help us.  If you were lost in a desert and were dying of thirst and someone found you and gave you a drink from his canteen, I'm sure that you would be grateful.  But your gratitude would be infinitely greater if you knew that the person who did this had so little water that his own survival was in doubt.  So if I define gratitude as being directly proportional to the degree of sacrifice borne by the givers, but inversely proportional to the security we already have, then I will have defined gratitude about the way that Newton defined gravity.  I have given a formula for how it varies, but haven't actually said what it is.  To speak of thanks in this way undermines the sentimental attachment we all feel for it, and I wish I could do better. I wish that I could define it less insultingly or experience it more nobly.    If any of you readers have any thoughts, feel free to comment.   

The Ethicization of Religion

Planting the seeds of modern religion.

  The long shadow of Zarathustra.

            I recently watched a DVD lecture series called The Religions of the Axial Age, by Dr. Mark W. Muesse of Rhodes College.  "Axial Age"  is defined as a pivotal age, a point in time where everything changed forever.  He explains that between 800 BC and 200 BC, several different prophets and philosophers came onto the scene in four different parts of the Eurasian continent,  and they all radically changed the religious ideas of the areas where they lived.  Yet they all changed things in the same direction, and all modern religions bear the marks of the changes which these sages made. In short, there are ways in which all modern religions are similar to each other, but different from anything that existed before this transformation.

            During one brief period, philosophers all over Eurasia set down ideas that have defined religion and philosophy ever since. In China, Confucius and Lao Tse  gave China the political and philosophical underpinnings that served for 2,000 years.   In Palestine, Jewish prophets shaped what would become Judaism.  In Iran, Zarathustra (Zoroaster) had already established Zoroastrianism and directly influenced all of Iran and indirectly influenced every culture that later had contact with Iran, including Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.  In South Asia, the Buddha and Mahavira founded Buddhism and Jainism. In Greece, Thales, Pythagoras, Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle laid the foundation for Western philosophy.  And every one of these thinkers  wrestled with the same questions:  Who are we, how must we live, and what is our ultimate destiny? The Axial period ended twenty-two hundred years ago, yet nearly all major religions practiced today still derive core elements of their belief system from the religious and philosophical ideas first written down during this period.

            Prior to this time, religion was separate from ethics. Religions were about the ritual sacrifices owed to various local gods, and ethics was about what humans owed to each other--and it was not generally believed that there should be any connection between religious practice and ethical behavior.  The gods cared only about how an individual treated the gods, not about how humans treated each other.   But during the Axial Age, several philosophies arose which taught that the gods, or perhaps some impersonal force of nature, did care about our individual conduct,  and all our moral and ethical choices would be rewarded or punished, either in this life or the next.    Just the idea that there might be some sort of afterlife for ordinary humans was a stark transition, and the idea that we ourselves could influence that destiny by our own actions was also a departure from what had gone before. For those of you raised in the tradition of any Ibrahimic religion (Judaism, Christianity, or Islam),  the idea that you will ultimately be rewarded if you are good and punished if you are evil will seem pretty commonplace.  But before the Axial transformation, such ideas were unheard of.  Even Jews, whose religion had included an ethical code since Moses,  had no belief in an afterlife until after the Babylonian Captivity. 

            Why did this one period yield such an outpouring of creativity in ethical philosophy?   Dr. Muesse suggests a number of reasons.   One reason was urbanization.  Tribes that for thousands of years had been rural migrant herders found themselves in large, impersonal  multi-ethnic cities where no one knew their name and most did not even speak their language.  Life suddenly became a lot lonelier--and a lot more dangerous.  Back in the hills, a man lived as part of an extended family, clan, and tribe.  Life's grand questions were unimportant.  A man accepted his own mortality, because as he died, other generations of his family continued. It was all part of the natural cycle.   And unless you were raided by some other tribe, the people you saw would not try to kill you or cheat you or lie to you.  They were all family.  But urbanization changed all that.   To make matters worse,  the axial period was one of extreme political instability.  In China, this period was called the "Period of Warring States."   Slaughter and genocide reigned on a grand scale.  Any thinking person in these circumstances would be  tempted to wonder, "What does it all mean?"  All of the prophets and philosophers I mentioned, and probably hundreds more,  tried to find answers.  Those whose answers seemed to make sense to large numbers of others,  are those whose answers became influential enough to survive and be passed on to succeeding generations.  It is true that Jesus of Nazareth came 200 years after this period came to a close. But Jesus was a Jew who quoted Isaiah and other Hebrew Prophets who were indeed part of the axial period, and who had shaped the Judaism he grew up with.  So if you accept that Zarathustra was born about 628 BC, the traditional date given for his birth, then all of these sages were of the axial age. Only one problem:  scholars now believe that although Zoroaster's ideas were not written down till the 7th century BC, he actually lived much earlier---perhaps 10 or 15 centuries earlier.   That means he probably lived and died well before Abraham.  His ideas had a profound effect on the religions of the axial period and on every major religion since, but he himself may have died a thousand years before this age began.

The Long Shadow of Zarathustra.

            When dealing with any ancient leader who has attained a mythic stature, it may be helpful to try to separate the man from the myth.  So I'll digress a bit to  explore the real historical Zarathustra. To understand who Zarathustra was, you have to know who the Indo-Europeans were.  If your native language is any European Language other than Turkish, Hungarian, Finnish, Estonian, or Basque--then you speak an Indo-European tongue.  If you speak Iranian, Hindi, Punjabi, Urdu, or Pashto, you are also speaking an Indo-European language. The Indo-Europeans called themselves Aryans, and the name for Persia (Iran) and the name for Ireland, (Erin) both mean "Aryan."  But the Indo-Europeans did not originally come from anywhere in India or Europe.  About 3,500 BC, there was a group of related tribes scattered across the steppes of central Asia who all spoke a common language, a language  which scholars now call Proto-Indo-European. By 2,500 BC, there began an exodus in all directions that continued for 3,000 years.  First to leave were the Hittites, who went to Anatolia and the northern Levant about 2,500 BC.  Then there was an invasion of Egypt about 1,750 BC by chariot-driving red-bearded Indo-Europeans called the Hyksos.   And about 1,500 BC, a group of Indo-Aryans headed south and split into 3 groups: one conquered the Indus valley civilization of northern India, one conquered Iran, and one group, called the Mitanni, moved into the northern Zagros mountains next to the Hittites.  About 1,200 BC, Dorian Greek tribes invaded Greece and western Anatolia, disrupting and displacing a Mycenaean civilization of Greek speaking peoples who had migrated from the steppes somewhat  earlier.  After that, the Italians and Celts moved into southern and western Europe, followed by the Germanic peoples, and finally the Slavs.  And every one of these invasions was from that same central Asian grassland, and they all spoke an Indo-European language, though the one original language gradually evolved into many different tongues.  In fact, the entire early Mediterranean history is a story of non-Indo-European civilizations being invaded and destroyed by hoards of horsemen from the steppes, who then built new civilizations  which were themselves  to be destroyed by the next wave of horsemen from the steppes. And if there was one thing Aryans were good at, it was conquering.  By the start of the 20th century, 3/4 of the earth's population lived under  governments using Indo-European languages.  Why should this one small group be so successful?  Probably because they were the first people on earth to domesticate the horse.  It happens that the boundaries of their original range were exactly the same as the boundaries of the range of the Asian wild horse.  This was not a coincidence. For thousands of years, they had hunted the horse for food, much as the Plains Indians had hunted the Bison.  That's why they always happened to be where the horses were, and were therefore the first people to have an opportunity to domesticate them.

            Although the Aryans had begun making spoke-wheel carts almost as soon as they domesticated the horse, until their contact with Mediterranean cultures, about 3,000 BC, they lacked the technology to make a really good war chariot.  But by 2500 BC, armed with technologies they had learned from Mesopotamia, the Aryans had a good war chariot and knew how to use it.  And in the next millennium,  the conquest began.  And that's where Zarathustra came in.  The conquests  were unimaginably bloody. Whole villages were annihilated--men, women, and children were put to the sword. Zarathustra was a minor religious  functionary, an Aryan priest. He was appalled by the scale of the slaughter, and doubted if any of the gods approved of it, unless they were pretty evil gods.

            While bathing in a stream, he had a great epiphany which allowed him to simplify Aryan religion and give meaning to what he saw.  As Zarathustra saw it, of the 30 or so Aryan deities, there was really only one god, Ahura Mazda, the god of light and fire.  Mazda was good and wanted us to be good. There was another heavenly being, Ahriman, who was evil, and who wanted us to be evil.  Although Ahura Mazda was assisted by six other ahuras, and Ahriman was assisted by other daevas,  Ahura Mazda was really the only god.  The others were heavenly beings, perhaps like angels, but not really gods. So Zarathustra can be thought of as the first real  monotheist. He preceded Ikhnaton and also Moses by several hundred years. (Of course,  Moses was not really a monotheist;  he was a henotheist.  A henotheist agrees to worship only one god, whereas a monotheist believes that there is only one god. It is unlikely that the Hebrews would have a commandment requiring them worship only one god--- if they already believed that there was only one god.  According to Muesse, not till 2nd Ezekiel do we see any assertion that Hebrews considered their god to be the one and only god. )  Besides being the first monotheist, Zarathustra saw life as a grand struggle between good and evil, and he saw god, his one and only god,  as requiring us humans to take sides in that struggle.  He asserted that those who are on the side of good would be rewarded eternally, and when they die,  they would go to heaven--but the unjust would go to hell. But he also believed that time itself  had a beginning and would have an end. He prophesied that at the end of the world, there would be a last judgment. The dead would be resurrected and judged, along with those still living at that time. He also prophesied that a redeemer would be sent to save humanity, and that he would be born of a virgin.   Zarathustra also originated certain ritual practices,  including that people should pray five times a day, and that they should pray in the presence of fire.  Today, Christians do not generally pray five times a day, unless they are monks.  But they did until the late middle ages.  And Moslems still pray five times a day.  And do Christians pray in the presence of fire?  I was raised a Roman Catholic, and as an altar boy, one of my duties was to light the candles on the altar before each mass.  Now, since Zarathustra received his enlightenment while bathing in a river, I think we can assume that this might be the origin of baptism.

            If you were raised in the practice of any Western religion, you surely notice the parallels to Zoroastrianism.  Western preachers try not to emphasize these parallels as this might cast doubt on the uniqueness or divine origins of their own religion. But even the Eastern religions did not escape this influence. By the time that the  Buddha and Mahavira came onto the scene, Zoroastrian missionaries had already reached India. So these sages were already familiar with the basic ideas of Zarathustra, and so were their disciples.  Had that not been the case, the philosophies which flourished in the East might have been different.

            If you were raised in the practice any Ibrahimic religion, then you were probably taught that there is one god, that he is good, and that he wants you to be good.  And you may or may not have been taught that you will be eternally rewarded or punished by this god, or that there is a devil who would like you to be evil.   So, what most of you have been taught  is some kind of Zoroastrianism.  You may protest: "Yes, Zoroaster had these ideas--but so do nearly all major religions."   I would answer: "Of course they do----and they got these ideas from Zoroastrianism, either directly or indirectly."   We see such ideas as being pretty basic, so we might assume that if Zarathustra had never lived, someone else would certainly have thought of the same thing.  But perhaps not.  Religion began very early.  Consider that even the 30,000 year old cave paintings in Europe seem to show suggest some kind of shamanism, some primitive religious stirrings.  Yet, by Zarathustra's lifetime,  26,000 years later,  no one had yet gotten the idea that god wants us to be good.  They had 26,000 years to think about it,  and it had not yet occurred to anyone that the deity, if there be one, might have a preference that we not murder our neighbors.  Would we have waited another 26,000 years to get that message if Zarathustra had not come along? Who knows?

             I know what some of you may be thinking.  You're thinking that though all religions of the world claim to be dedicated to kindness, their adherents' actual record of behavior is so miserable that we'd be as well off with no religion at all.  But having no religion might not be the alternative that we would get. What if we continued to have religion-- but to a god who is evil and wants us to be evil.  (Would we have  hypocrites who would make an elaborate public pretense of being evil, but sneak away to do good things when no one was looking?)  More likely, what  we would get would be a devotion to gods who simply did not much care how we treated each other. This is the religion that the Romans had, and they were the one of the most brutal societies that ever lived.  Not only did they crucify tens of thousands of people for political reasons, in their final debauchery they crucified people in the arena just for sport.  Yet that all abruptly stopped when Rome converted to Christianity.   For about 1,200 years, from about 300 AD to 1,500 AD, the Christian church was firmly in charge of Europe, and much blood is on its hands.  But the usual  number murdered at the hands of Christian kings and church officials in any given year was infinitesimal compared to the scale of slaughter in pre-Christian Rome.  So the Axial Age changes in religion, changes that Rome never experienced until they embraced Christianity, were still a remarkable improvement.

            The only time most of us think of Zarathustra is when we hear Richard Strauss's tone poem,  "Thus Spake  Zarathustra".  And when we hear that grand opening codex, we think, "Wow! I don't remember who  Zarathustra was, but whatever he spake, it must have been pretty awesome!"   Trust me.  It was.