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BS ‘n’ About…
Heaven and the Various Hereafters
Faith is a funny thing. It is the thing that most separates us from the animals, yet it is also the thing which most brings out the animal in us. From crusades to jihads, pogroms to suicide bombers, we human being sure do seem to leave a wake of death and destruction in His name. We march off to war, confident that he is on our side. We can’t wait for the End Times, certain that He has a paradise awaiting us that makes this paradise pale in comparison.
The three great monotheistic faiths of the Western World seem to accept the inevitability of mankind destroying itself over conflicts of faith in some Armageddon nightmare of a future. Even though each of the three worships the exact same God, that of the Old Testament’s Abraham, they seem to accept as gospel that once He returns, God is going to reward them for worshipping Him in the proper way, through the proper prophet, while casting into darkness those of His worshippers who revere Him in the wrong way, through the wrong prophet. None of the three seem to see the hypocrisy in praying to a God of love and forgiveness to give them the strength to conquer their enemies.
How did we get here? How did things get so messed up? How did the Word get so selfishly distorted? We are a species that seems to have been given stewardship of this life factory paradise of a planet out here in the middle of galactic nowhere. Every day we learn more about ourselves, our world, and our universe. With this knowledge we seem to have overcome a lot of the old tribal aggressions that led to conflict in the past. As the world grows wealthier and more connected, we’ve learned to emphasize our similarities instead of our differences. Then faith rears its ugly head and we find ourselves engulfed by the same old Stone Age hatreds.
Mankind has advanced unprecedentedly these last few centuries. Monarchies have been replaced with democracies. Forty year lifespans have been replaced with eighty year lifespans. Covered wagons have been replaced with jumbo jets. Leeching has been replaced with the Human Genome Project. Sword and spear driven faith-based-hatred has been replaced with weapons of mass destruction faith-based-hatred.
The Cold War seemed to be a wake up call that mankind could not survive another major conflagration. But, re-label it Armageddon, and we’re all too eager to bring it on. Throw in forty virgins and the nutjobs can’t wait to blow their asses to smithereens. (Just wondering: Are the forty virgins in Heaven too, or is this their Hell? Just wondering.)
So, as we sit here on the eve of our own destruction, we need to ask ourselves: Is where we’re headed a place we want to go? Do we really want to risk this God-given paradise of a planet we inhabit just to prove our fellow man wrong? Do we want to trade in the physical known for the spiritual unknown? How far are we willing to go to be right?
Mankind has built his societies around faith in an attempt to answer three primary questions: “Where did we come from?, Why are we here?, and Where are we going?” Yet, by its very definition, faith requires accepting answers to these questions without proof and without questioning those answers. This may have been an acceptable situation as Moses stood before God on the mount but, people being people, it loses its validity with each successive re-telling of the tale. There is a whole lot of mortal between here and anything divine.
It has been a long, long time since we were asked to have faith in God. Daring to do so is a surefire way of being branded a heretic, doing it ‘wrong’. These days, the thing we are asked to have faith in is religion. We are asked to have faith in every self-important little man who anoints himself keeper of the Word. Lynchings are God’s will as long as it is Jews who are being lynched. Concentration camps are God’s will as long as they are Palestinian concentration camps. ‘Down on your knees’ takes on a whole new meaning in the Catholic Church.
That is the problem with religion. While God may indeed be perfect, human beings are fallible, unworthy of being keepers of the Word, the arbiter of our relationship with God. But, in doing so, hasn’t religion placed itself between me and my God? It is a system that ensures my primary relationship is with my religion, rather than my God.
I, Bob Smith, accept ultimate accountability for the words I put to paper, but I try to do so in a way that doesn’t plunk me down between you and the message imparted by those words. But sometimes personal experiences are too anecdotally powerful to impart the message in any other way. Such as the following:
As I am sure you are aware of by now, I spent two years in a Club Fed. It had a tree-filled central compound that looked a lot more like Harvard than Leavenworth. At the end of one sweltering hot summer day, I was sitting under one of these beautiful oak trees they have, listening to the birds and watching a Technicolor sunset.
Up comes a fellow prisoner who plops down next to me and starts acting ‘chummy’ in a way that at first made me wonder if he was hitting on me in a gay kind of way. It turns out he wasn’t trying to seduce me, he was trying to ‘save’ me.
He had the audacity to suggest we play a little game whereby he goes through each of the Ten Commandments and gets the opportunity to feel all good and righteous about himself by pointing out what an unworthy sinner I was. I played along for a while but, in truth, I don’t often break the Commandments, a fact I let him know rather emphatically. I started out pleasantly amused by his righteous blindness but eventually became thoroughly exasperated by his assumption that he was worthy to judge me.
By the time he gave up on me, (undoubtedly resigning me to the pits of Hell in his narrow little mind), the sun had set and the birds had quieted. He hadn’t even noticed the beauty of the moment, busy as he was trying to save my soul. Rather than approaching me and sharing my peace, glorying in the moment, he sat down and assumed that I needed him to intervene with God on my behalf.
God was all around us, present in the birds, the trees, and the sunset. Not in words, nor in righteousness, nor in judgment. God was in what we could have shared shoulder-to-shoulder, not in the conflict we experienced nose-to-nose. The minute we tried to put it into words, God’s symphony was drowned out.
I have related this experience because it highlights almost everything that makes religion a cause for conflict in our world, rather than a path to peace. For all of our proselytizing, for all of our pointing to scripture, for all of our righteousness, the one thing we don’t seem to have any faith in, surprisingly enough, is God.
If we truly had faith in God, then shouldn’t we have faith that He knows what He is doing with that guy over there under the trees, smiling beatifically at the sunset? Shouldn’t we have faith that He hears all of our prayers, regardless of which Prophet we channel them through? Shouldn’t we have faith that He knows what He is doing when it comes to our neighbor and keep our noses out of that relationship? Sadly, the one thing we seem to have no faith in is God Him or Herself!
For all of our faith and righteousness, there is one thing we can be absolutely certain of: Somebody is wrong. Probably not “us”, but if not “us”, them certainly “them”. Yet “they” are just as righteously certain of their certainty as we are. Had it been our fate to enter this world just a few wombs further up the road, “we” would be “them”.
So exactly what is it that makes “them” so different from “us”? The basic tenets of our beliefs are pretty much the same: ‘We are here by the grace of God and should lead our lives in a ‘good’ way because, after this life, ‘good’ lives will be rewarded, and ‘bad’ lives will be punished. That pretty much sums up the underlying tenets of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.
The differences come into play by the rituals each sect observes as well as the way each interprets the scriptures around which the religion is practiced. Our faiths are similar. It is our religions that are getting us killed.
Assuming there is some all-powerful Being responsible for creating both us and this paradise we occupy, can it really matter to that creator which prophet we channel our prayers through? Can it really matter to that creator which words are mumbled over those entering or departing His world? It matters to the guy passing the collection plate, that’s for sure.
Also, isn’t it a bit disquieting that scriptures supposedly tell the entire future of mankind, but manage to do so only in terms of locust plagues and camel dung? Not an anachronism in sight. Even Nostradamus had his ‘Histers’ and correctly dated inventions and conflagrations.
The Scriptures are so elegantly vague that they manage to give us any answer to any question we put to them. They tell us to ‘smite our enemies’ while ‘turning the other cheek’. They tell us not to worship false images while building a religion around the image of a man crucified on a cross. They tell us to love our fellow man, but destroy him if he doesn’t convert to our way of praying.
Scriptures might serve their purpose were each of us left to interpret them on our own. Unfortunately, that is a surefire way to get burned at the stake. We are told that these elegantly vague, many times translated writings mean one thing, and one thing only. That sounds like the very definition of religion.
At least as far as the New testament is concerned, we have physical, archeological proof that it is not an all-inclusive work, having been cobbled together at the Council of Nicaea in 325 ad, not to serve truth, nor God, but to prop up the fledgling religion then fighting for existence in the darkest days of the Dark Ages. In the process, gospels that were deemed ‘inconvenient’, gospels which didn’t serve the purpose of the Church, were discarded. This was not a divine process, but a selfish mortal one that proclaims that we, the faithful are unworthy of interpreting these gospels for ourselves. That is religion’s job.
The Scriptures we die for were put to paper by mortal men in an attempt to found a religion well after the prophets they were attributed to had departed this world. They may very well be a mortal attempt to put to paper a divine message communicated orally to a prophet, but one thing they are not is the divine word of God, directly communicated. How presumptuous of us to think that, if God wanted to give us the written Word, He needed our mortal little hands to do it for Him. Supposedly he gave us the Ten Commandments and what did we do with them? We lost them. That’s what!
Scriptures are the best thing since sliced bread when it comes to religion, but they sure do get in the way of faith. Scriptures infer that there are rigid, inviolate answers to our questions of faith, and if we show the proper obeisance, (and financial support), to the local rabbi, preacher, or imam, we too will be enlightened and able to accept those answers as our own, no matter how much they conflict with our knowledge.
Unfortunately, this creates a contradictory conundrum of Biblical proportion. Faith implies a peace with questions unanswered. Scripture-based religion imposes a dogma that burns unanswered questions at the stake. On which side of this equation resides humility? On which side of this equation sits your house of worship?
Undoubtedly there are mysteries surrounding our rise to sentience, seemingly all over the world, all at once, around ten thousand years ago. After millions of years of occupying these physical bodies, and not building anything lasting with them, human beings worldwide started writing it down and teaching it to their kids. From China to Mesopotamia, Egypt to the New World, all of a sudden mankind was building cities, erecting temples, and collecting taxes. For millions of years we were just another one of the animals fighting for survival on this life factory of a planet. All of a sudden, we were shaping it to our will.
Much of the debate over our origins is oversimplified to the either-or debate between evolution and creationism. On the one hand, we are asked to believe that a Renoir painting or a Beethoven symphony is the end by-product of some pond scum epiphany a couple billion years ago. On the other hand, we are asked to dismiss most of the hard-fought knowledge we’ve acquired over the past few hundred years to accept that the orderly, scientific universe we occupy is here as a result of seven days worth of divine magic and lightning bolts out of the sky.
Evolution is a fact. We are taller than our grandparents. We have an appendix we no longer need. New species are constantly appearing while others are going the way of the dodo bird. Evolution is. But it doesn’t begin to explain sentience. Not even Darwin had an answer for that.
It would make more sense if there were other earthly species that seemed destined to sentience. If monkeys were learning from their mistakes, making complex tools, and building kindergartens, then we could assume that sentience was just a natural end-result of evolution and assume that it is inevitable anywhere in the Universe that there is life. But that doesn’t appear to be the case. Take humanity out of the mix and we have no reason to believe that any of the other billions of life forms on this planet will ever rise to sentient prominence. The dinosaurs ruled for millions of years, yet have left us not even one symphony or painting.
Obviously life in all its forms has been evolving on earth for millions of years. And it has been doing so in accordance with a set of scientific laws that appear to be inviolate. There is not one single recorded instant of ‘magic’ in secular history. Water flows down, not up. Lead doesn’t transmute into gold. The dead don’t rise from the grave. Ours is a world of scientific order, not otherworldly magic. We’re all Muggles, to the best of our knowledge and observation.
Yet that order does not begin to explain the number of credulity-challenging coincidences necessary that had to come together just right to make that scientific order possible. Therein lies the magic. The fact that Earth is the most incredible, magical, mind-boggling thing we are aware of in the entire Universe is something we take way too for granted. All too often, we act as though we have a spare one on the other side of the moon.
We don’t. Truth is, the very precise parameters necessary for Earth to be the life factory that it is means that we shouldn’t be at all surprised if it is unique in all the Universe. For lack of a better phrase, the Earth is Intelligent Design of the highest order.
But that doesn’t mean that, should we trash this place, God will have Intelligently Designed us another paradise to take for granted. Our ancestors howled at the moon and were certain that the Heavens revolved around us, around a world that was flat. They were certain that they were right. We still are.
Evolution has too many unanswerable questions to be THE answer. Intelligent Design has way too many unsupportable answers to even address THE question. Faith is both THE question and THE answer. The mere fact of our existence is a miracle beyond all human comprehension. There are only two words I can say with absolute conviction: “I am!” Everything else could be a figment of my own imagination. This is the terrifying truth underlying existence and the reason we expend so much effort and energy trying to belong to something greater than ourselves.
Evolution can’t be the answer. Nor can Intelligent Design. Adherents of both are so righteously caught up in being ‘right’, having THE answer, that they quit asking questions a long time ago.
Yet, as soon as we quit asking questions, we quit using the greatest God-given gifts we were imbued with as the sentient caretakers of this life factory of a planet. Can we really believe that our Creator would want us to ignore the knowledge we’ve so painfully acquired with the gifts He has bestowed upon us?
In virtually every other human endeavor, we have learned from our mistakes and grown richer as a species for it. Ancient man was wrong about almost everything else. Chances are he was wrong about God too.
Our science is in the 21st century. Our medicine is in the 21st century. Our agriculture is in the 21st century. Our religions are, at best, still stuck in the Dark Ages. These other human endeavors were brought into the 21st century, albeit often kicking and screaming, by being open to question.
Religion needs to do the same. Unfortunately, they have built themselves around being the ultimate arbiter of the ultimate truth, and fear for their very survival should that truth be even questioned, much less proved false. But, should that happen, does that mean we’ll quit asking the three questions: “Where did we come from?, Why are we here?, and Where are we going?” No.
Our religions need to evolve into focal points for our questions rather than salesmen for THE answer. They need to lead our search for the truth rather than distracting us with their lies. If the rabbis, preachers, and imams have a direct line to God, then we need to line them up on ‘Face the Nation’ and demand that they use that line to get us a little bit of help down here before it is too late. And if they don’t have a direct line, they need to shut up, quit passing the plate, and get out of our way. We have work to do.
Noticeably absent from the previous discussion on faith are Hinduism, Buddhism, Shintoism, and the various other Eastern, non-monotheistic faiths. Also missing are the pantheistic faiths of the Native Americans as well as the various polytheistic faiths of Antiquity.
This is not meant as a sign of disrespect. Rather, it is an acknowledgement that these faiths manage to co-exist peacefully and none arm themselves to the teeth and march humanity toward Armageddon. For whatever reason, this seems to be a cancerous offshoot only of those monotheistic faiths that have come down to us from the God of Abraham.
A basic tenet of these monotheistic faiths is that we were created in God’s image. Yet they are virtually the only theologies conceived by man where the deity has absolutely no sense of humor. If we were created in God’s image, where did we learn to laugh? Where did that whole lighter side of our being come from? The God of the Bible and Koran is, for the most part, a humorless vengeful creature, not exactly known for His sense of humor.
Can we envision a God, in whose image we were supposedly created, telling a bedtime story that didn’t terrify the kids? Can we imagine Him doing a watercolor of kittens at play, baking chocolate chip cookies, or wearing a funny hat? No? Can we envision Him marching off to war and flash frying our enemies, condemning them to an eternity in the fiery pits of Hell? Yes? Perhaps therein lies the problem.
Obviously we human beings need faith. Perhaps it is the very essence of what separates the sentient from the non-sentient, us from the animals. No human culture, from the most primitive to the most advanced, seems to survive very long without it. Unfortunately, ten thousand years of questions don’t seem to have us any closer to the answer than was our first ancestor to have howled at the moon.
Where did we come from? Why are we here? Where are we going? These are questions so powerful and all-encompassing that millions have died in our search for answers to them. They are questions so all-consuming that our very existence pales before them. They are questions we seem to need answers for so badly that we are willing to accept half-truths, bald-faced lies, and physical impossibilities rather than have no answers around which to build our lives.
What follows is my story, Bob Smith’s story. I include it here only as a cautionary tale of one man’s journey to faith, while by-passing religion altogether. For therein lies the essential difference between faith and religion. Faith is a deeply personal unknown whereas religion is a communally-shared, all-encompassing answer to everything. That I would have ended up as a man of faith, given my upbringing and the choices available to me in those days, surprises even me.
I write what follows not to influence your beliefs, nor to bring a sense of righteousness to my life as I compare my journey to yours. No. I write it because each of us ought to be self-aware of their own personal spiritual journey and how that journey influences who and what they are. I don’t have the answers. But I don’t need “saved” either. I am at peace with my journey and trust God to do right by my hereafter. And yours.
I live my life every day as though it were a gift I will someday have to answer for. I live my life as though I am personally accountable for the Paradise around me, while still having faith in the bigger picture as represented by whatever Higher Power created it, (seemingly just for me.) I am comfortable with leaving this world and standing before that Higher Power, proud of having stumbled upon at least a few of the right questions, humbled by all that I still don’t understand. I have faith in that Higher Power to do right by my Hereafter.
So how did I get here, having grown up in the largely secular ‘60’s, raised by German Catholics for whom religion was six days of hard work and one day of kneeling and listening to Latin? In those days, faith was strong, but in the background, dragged out mostly for christenings, weddings, and funerals.
Those were the days before politicians stole our faith to use against us. …before cable networks used it to get us to hate our neighbors. …before our church leaders logged onto Rentboy.com to get their luggage and ashes hauled.
Back then we didn’t hate each other over abortion, gay marriage, or the evolution versus intelligent design debate. Faith and religion were about personal choice. We made our choices and let our neighbors make theirs. Then we all went to work on Monday.
My mother’s family were the German Catholics. On the other side was my Dad’s mom, the most devout person I knew growing up. Somewhat deaf and distant, a Bible was never far from her hand, and everyone in the family called the church she attended ‘Holy Rollers’. To this day I’m still not sure what denomination she was.
When I was about five, she was telling me and my sister a bedtime story. She told us that preachers became preachers because God came to them in their prayers and told them to become preachers. I remember being upset for a long time, actually praying that I not be called upon by God! Be careful what you ask for, as they say!
On the other side, even though my immediate family didn’t often attend church, my German Catholic grandparents did. I remember being appalled at an early age that the minutes they brought home each week listed on the back how much was donated each week, and by whom. Ironically it was the same lawyer who headed the list each week.
So, considering the either-or nature of the choice before me, by the time I entered the ivy-covered walls of academia, as represented by the University of Chicago, I was firmly in the evolution camp. After all, faith and knowledge are uneasy bedfellows at the best of times.
It was during my twenties that things started to change, brought on by intense relationships with two people, one male, one female, whose faiths were a constant source of pain to them. One was a Catholic girl whose life was built around the guilt she felt over a somewhat wayward past. The other was a friend, seemingly on a quest to find a religion to replace the father he had never known.
For years, I was the foil to their angst, turmoil, and self-recrimination. Though each eventually fell out of my life, they left behind a residue of unanswered questions that persist to this day. In the intervening years I have often been saddened by the amount of pain our search for faith causes in us. Seemingly at the scene of every murder, abuse, or war, a Bible or Koran is being dusted for fingerprints. If we believe everything we hear, it would seem God has a direct line to every nutjob in pain, telling him to ease that pain by wreaking havoc on his fellow man.
The more of this I saw, the more I was turned off by organized religion. It seemed to be an excuse to commit the worst of excesses and still feel good and righteous about yourself. It seemed to be a convenient excuse to escape accountability for one’s selfish actions.
Ironically, the further away from religion my path took me, the closer to faith I seemed to find myself. There was just too much magic and majesty in the world to be explained away by the scientific processes underlying evolution. Its answers to the three spiritual questions were, at best, unsatisfying, and, at worst, downright disturbing. The fact that evolution occurs can’t be the be-all and end-all for what’ going on here. It just can’t.
But then again, neither can the inevitability of an Armageddon staring us in the face. Could it be possible that we’ve somehow misinterpreted “The Message”? Is it not likely that we, mankind, somehow distorted the message we were once given for the ‘magic’ that uplifted us to sentience about ten thousand years ago? Might there not be an explanation that makes all our religions, eastern, western, ancient, and otherwise somehow rooted in fact? Is it possible that, after removing our righteousness from the equation, we are all somehow right? This became the starting point for my spiritual quest.
What follows is my journey. It is long on questions and short on answers. At times it may even seem irreverent. It is in no way meant to be a comparison with your journey. Nor a judgment. After reading it, you may believe me to be a lost soul. You may even feel called upon to get on your knees and pray for my salvation. That’s OK. None of us can have too many prayers said on their behalf.
I don’t ask that you accept any of the conclusions I come to. Nor do I ask that you address any of the questions that have formed the basis for my wanderings. All I ask is that you don’t judge me. That’s not your job! Respect my journey for the lifetime of effort that it took and remember that success is a journey, not a destination. That having been said, let’s get started.
Kindergarten of the Gods
When I first tried to look beyond evolution for a spiritual explanation of what was going on here, it seemed obvious, (at the time), that spirituality too was an evolutionary process. It seemed a good bet that we were here on this Earth to learn some sort of ‘lesson’ and that, upon learning it, we’d go to some higher place to continue our lessons.
This would explain why we have no recollection of where we’ve come from and a whole bunch of religions built around what we need to do while here to get where we’re supposed to go. Maybe we just keep reincarnating until we get it right, until we ‘pass’ and move on to the next reality, either as individuals or as a species.
There are some fundamental flaws to this way of thinking though. It assumes there is one ‘right’ and a whole bunch of ‘wrongs’. It assumes Heavens and Hells that exist outside the inconceivably vast Universe that we know ourselves to be a part of. It doesn’t take into account our scale in relation to that Universe. It is as if one of our individual cells aspires to become a human being. Ain’t gonna happen.
For humanity to believe itself created in the image of whatever Higher Power is responsible for the creation of that vast Universe is a mathematical impossibility. Ten thousand years, much less a single lifetime, is less than the blink of an eye in relation to the scale of whatever created the universe. We will never live long enough to have any relationship whatsoever with the Creator of all the vastness we are aware of. We might be spiritually evolving to something beyond the physical realm we now occupy, but it is beyond the realm of believability that we will be able to take along our individual identities when we do so. There is way too much known Universe to gamble away the physical reality we are certain of on a Hereafter based on so much mathematical improbability.
Petrie Dishes & Ears of Corn
This stop on my journey was similar to the kindergarten stop described above, but without the presumption that our advancing ourselves would be a foregone conclusion. Perhaps we are part of some grand experiment by some Higher Power. But, if that were the case, is it not possible that we, humanity, just might end up a failed experiment, a petrie dish flushed down God’s toilet, a weak ear of corn culled so that those stronger could survive? A scary thought, at best.
As the only sentient beings on this paradise of a planet, would it not be a safe assumption that we were entrusted with all that is here as a test of some sort? If so, what would “passing” that test look like? And what about “failing”?
What failure would look like ought to be fairly obvious: chop down the rainforests, pollute the air, kill the oceans, etc. If we are renting this place from God, I don’t think we’ll be getting our deposit back.
And, if this is some sort of grand experiment, one would think that Higher Power would have put in place safeguards to ensure that a failed experiment doesn’t escape to the stars to run amok among the successes.
This seems likely. If we continue to fight among ourselves and destroy everything we touch, our likelihood of ever leaving this planet are infinitesimal. If we keep hating ourselves back into the Stone Age, we’ll never leave the Earth to infect other cultures with our particular brand of aggression.
Divided, we are destined for God’s toilet. Only united do we stand a chance to evolve to something worthy of leaving this planet and taking our place among the stars. Only united will we ever be worthy further attention by the Higher Power that uplifted us to sentience in the first place.
God doesn’t seem to always hear our individual prayers but maybe, just maybe, He’d hear us if we set aside our differences, united as one in song, and humbly asked for His help. Maybe achieving that unity was the test in the first place. As things stand now, we’re a lot closer to ending up in God’s toilet than anywhere next to his heart.
Intergalactic Adventures Incorporated
It doesn’t take much of a stretch to think that, as we advance we become less and less tied to our physical, carbon-based bodies. Traveling the Universe would make a lot more sense if we didn’t need to bring along Twinkies and porta-potties.
This ought to be obvious, even now in our fairly primitive state of advancement. As the Industrial Age morphs into the Information one, we’ve already replaced ball playing, nail hammering, and field plowing with video gaming, number crunching, and twittering, haven’t we? We aren’t all that far away from a ‘Matrix’-like world of IV drips, diapers, and virtual reality helmets. As we grow fatter and more sedentary, our bodies become more nuisance than tool.
So too they might be for any truly advanced beings in this Universe of ours. Doing away with these bodies altogether would certainly give these advanced beings more time for big thoughts, more time to make the big computations and contemplate the big questions. But there would be a price: the taste of chocolate, wind in your hair, backrubs. That’s where Intergalactic Adventures, Incorporated comes in:
“For just a little over six hundred galactic samolians, you too can be transported to our Earthworldtm Themepark and experience the thrill of ‘living’ the life of a primitive. Glory in the five senses! Overload on tastes, senses, and feelings! Be all that you can be! (For a slightly higher surcharge you can be a Generalissimo, a Televangelist, or even a Wall Street Banker!) Send for a free TwitterAd today.”
Something like this might explain our relatively high intellectual capacity limited as it is by our miniscule lifespans. Human beings are the very definition of “Live fast: Die young” when viewed in terms of the scale of the Universe.
The fact that we are unaware of the underlying reason behind our very existence undoubtedly make the experience all the more intense. Our next taste of chocolate could be our last. It certainly makes us take our experience here, our life here, seriously.
Let us hope that our lives here are more meaningful than some advanced being’s trip to an intergalactic Disneyland. But if they are not, aren’t we going to be mad at ourselves for not enjoying them to the max while we have the opportunity? There is just way too much of the human, earthly experience that we take for granted. Shame on us.
Intergalactic Exterminators, Incorporated
Warning! The following may be hazardous to your sense of self-importance and human-skewed view of the Universe. You’ve been warned!
What are we human beings at our most basic? We are an exponentially breeding bio-mechanism for converting oxygen into carbon dioxide. Take away the symphonies and the lightbulb and that’s what we do. Maybe it was all we were ever meant to do. Maybe it’s what we are.
Science fiction novels are filled with stories about humanity terraforming other planets to make them habitable for human life. Space enthusiasts are forever proposing ways we could tweak this planet or that to bring it within the narrow parameters that make human life possible.
What if there were an advanced space-faring race that needed to eliminate all carbon based life forms from a planet before it could move in and re-colonize? Carbon based life has thrived on Earth for millions of years. Within ten thousand years of our rise to sentience, we are one madman away from turning this place into a lifeless, irradiated wasteland.
…or Paradise, depending on your point of view. Is it not possible that there is some galactic Wal-Mart Superstore that sells OxyGonetm Human Being Seeds guaranteed to rid entire worlds of all carbon-based pests, leave an irradiated paradise behind, and then kill itself off by having destroyed all that was necessary to sustain it as its final act. If there were such a need, and such a product, it would be an elegant one indeed. Perhaps the colonizing ships are on their way even as you read this.
We are consuming our host, this Earth, in much the same way that cancer consumes us. Only we are doing it at an infinitely faster rate. Unless we wise up soon, we will be a species that rose to sentience as the caretakers of a galactic paradise, and left behind us a poisonous waste dump in the blink-of-a-galactic-eye later. We are a rapacious, predatory, organism, far and away the most dangerous thing we are aware of in the entire Universe.
We can only hope that whoever sprinkled us here did so for less selfish motives than those that drive us. Maybe we are meant to learn how to leave our rapacious, predatory, selfish tendencies behind. Maybe we are just an intergalactic defoliant. Sad. (Just wondering: Does Ebola ask itself: “Where did I come from? Why am I here? Where am I going? Just wondering.)
I am…the Universe!
Our science fiction stories abound with descriptions of Universes, an infinity of them, which differ from ours only slightly. Our most respected theoretical physicists try to rationalize everything, from time travel to God, by postulating alternate dimensions.
Modern science has unequivocally proven that the vast array of stars which fill our night skies are part of a Universe whose vastness is beyond our abilities of comprehension. Yet, as we sit across a table from our fellow man, our perceptions of that Universe are one hundred and eighty degrees diametrically opposite.
No matter how many of us occupy this physical home we call Earth, no two of us will ever view it from the exact same perspective. No matter how close we become to those we love, we will never experience existence as anything but the all-encompassing existence at the very center of our own sensory perception. From our first breath to our last, there will be an “I am!” and there will be everything else. Never the twain shall meet.
That being the case, a good argument could be made that each and every one of us is the physical embodiment of our own Universe. If a tree falls, it falls in both our Universes. If I hear it and you don’t, what is real? Perception creates the reality.
Perhaps that is why I have no concept of from whence I came, nor of where I go from here. The Universe is vast. My Universe is vast. Your Universe is vast.
One thing is absolutely certain: I will never walk a mile in your shoes. Yet our world is filled with those who tell us that their path is the only path. Obviously that is the role they have chosen for themselves in their Universe. Is blindly following in their footsteps the role you have chosen for yourself in your Universe? If so, what does that say about you? What does that say about your Universe?
The Wanderer
Finally! Thanks for bearing with me. What follows is the final destination on my spiritual journey (so far!): The explanation that feels most ‘right’ when I ask myself the three big questions. Is it THE answer? I doubt it. Is it AN answer? Maybe. Is it Bob Smith’s answer? Yep, and I guess that’s really all that matters.
Yet it is an answer that is still more question than answer, climaxing with perhaps the most spiritually disturbing question we human beings have ever asked ourselves. The important point is that I got here on my own after much wandering, many sessions on the hilltop. And a whole lot of searching deep within. I didn’t find my faith because I was angry at the world, because I wanted to please my parents, or because I wanted to get invited to the potluck social. No. I found my faith because I wanted some answers that made sense.
What follows doesn’t invalidate most of the flights of spiritual fantasy in the preceding pages. On the contrary, it provides a framework that obeys the laws of nature upon which those flights may have come to pass. Even more importantly, it doesn’t invalidate the major religions of our world, but rather lays a groundwork upon which they may all be proved ‘right’. In its own way, it even manages to bridge the gap between the Heaven and Hell religions of the West and the Karmic cycle religions of the East.
For decades, scientists have been looking for a “Unifying Theory” of physics that would explain the Universe. At least they are looking. Religions are so invested in doggedly holding onto their dogma that they can’t look beyond their own interpretation of scripture to see if there might just be some underlying truths that run deeper than last week’s fire and brimstone sermon. Maybe all of our religions are just a little bit right, their differences accentuated by the many generations of ‘mortal’ between here and ‘the Word’. Maybe it’s not God’s fault that we missed the message, maybe it’s ours.
That having been said, shouldn’t we be stripping away the thousands of years of mortal self-interest for the nuggets of truth which predate them, then add them to the vast amounts of knowledge we have so recently acquired, then re-ask the questions:
“Where did we come from?”
“Why are we here?”
“Where do we go from here?”
Before we can even hope to gain any insight into these questions, we first need to subtract the Universe. Its vastness is just too incomprehensible within our frame of reference, not to mention the frame of reference as described in our scriptures. It would be like trying to account for every grain of sand in the world in preparation for building a sandcastle. Not possible. Nor necessary.
If we remove the Universe from the equation, we are left with a solar system that, in its own way, damn near revolves around the Earth: Perhaps not physically, but certainty in terms of importance and relevance. Planets and suns are too numerous to even count. As for Life Factories: This is the only one we are aware of in the entire Universe. That’s not opinion, that’s fact.
Limiting our point of reference to the Solar System results in scriptures that make a whole lot more sense. If we separate the Higher Power responsible for creating our little corner of Paradise with the Higher Power ultimately responsible for creating the entire Universe, everything makes a lot more sense.
When viewed rationally, it is highly unlikely that any being taking an interest in things on the cosmic scale would also be involved in things happening on the ‘human’ scale. Our own biology tells us this. Our very existence depends on a myriad of biological sub-contractors on the organ and cellular level. Without them we die. Yet we don’t have a personal relationship with any of them. Billions of them die every day of our lives. They weren’t created in our image. They won’t be reincarnating into being us anytime soon. The scale is all wrong. They live their lives. We live ours.
So too for the relationship between us and THE Creator responsible for the Heavens we see splashed across our night skies. In fact, taking scale into consideration once again, it is highly unlikely that the Higher Power responsible for THIS has any better understanding of the Creator of THAT than we do.
What we do understand is that we seem to be living in a Universe that strictly adheres to a set of natural laws, a world without physical manifestations of “magic”. Gravity is. Perpetual motion isn’t. Lead is lead. Gold is gold. E=mc2
In the plane of existence we occupy, there is no ethereal place set aside for Heaven, nor one for Hell. In our world, as we know it, for ‘God’ to take an interest in us, He had to get here somehow. And, as far as we know, He had to do so within the limits of the aforementioned immutable laws of nature.
Let us detour toward those immutable laws for a moment before coming back to the marvel that is us and our planet. Imagine the Earth as being the size of a quarter. If it were, the Sun would be a nine-foot high ball of fire, three football fields away and Pluto would be a pea, seventeen miles behind us! And the nearest star, Alpha Centauri, would be x,xxx miles beyond that.
Light travels toward us from the Sun, taking eight minutes to reach us, xx hours to reach Pluto, and xxx to get to Alpha Centauri. In the quarter sized analogy described above, that means the speed of light, in terms of the Universe, is basically a fast crawl: Close your eyes and imagine light leaving that nine-foot high Sun and taking eight minutes to crawl the length of those three football fields. That’s the speed of light. Keep crawling at that pace, 24/7, and (2.6?) years later you’ll get to the NEAREST star.
Take ten spheres, ranging in size from a pea to a baseball, then drop them within a thirty-four mile circle. Put a nine-foot ball of fire in the middle and that is our solar system and is considered a dense part of the Universe. Don’t forget, there are years of crawling through absolutely nothing, repeat: absolutely nothing, to get between stars.
Now consider that Earth and Alpha Centauri are atoms at the center of touching grains of sand, in a Universe with vastly many more stars than the Earth has grains of sand. Remember the years of crawling it took to get between those grains of sand? Can you even conceptualize “crawling” from one end of a beach the other, much less from Hawaii to the Riviera?
Are you beginning to see why the Creator of all that vastness has to be removed from the equation if we are to gain any understanding of our little role in the grand scheme of things? Imagine our solar system as a grain of sand on a beach near you. In the ten thousand years of human sentience, light from that grain of sand will have traveled less than a foot. Then imagine a grain of sand on a beach on the other side of the world. Now let’s talk about God. Are you starting to see the problem?
It seems obvious that something ‘raised’ us to sentience about ten thousand years ago, seemingly all over the world, seemingly all at once. After having roamed the Earth as little better than animals for millions of years, all of a sudden we were building cities, collecting taxes, and shipping the kiddies off to school. Mesopotamia. India. China. The New World. All at once.
That smacks of divine intervention: But no less so than the myriad of other things that had to come together “just right” for higher forms of life to exist here in the first place. Our cosmologists try to claim that the Universe is teeming with life. It very well may be. But most of that life will be little better than pond scum. Most of the rest will be dinosaurs, fish, and monkeys. For all of our scientific knowledge, we have no equation for sentience.
Let us go back to that quarter-sized Earth revolving three football fields away from a nine-foot high ball of fire. If that Earth were a foot closer, or a foot further away, higher life here would be impossible. If our orbit were circular, rather than elliptical, higher life here would be impossible. If our axis of rotation were twenty degrees different, half our planet would be ice, the other half fire.
If the Sun were two inches in diameter bigger, it would have burned itself out long ago. If it were two inches smaller, it would not have been able to hold us in our rotational orbit.
Then there is the Moon. Of all of the things we are aware of in the entire Universe, the Moon makes the least sense. It is too big to have broken off as the Earth formed, or to have been snagged by our gravity as it hurtled past.
Like Goldilocks and the Three Bears, there is a whole lot of ‘too big, too small, just right’ going on here. For Earth to have become the Life Factory that it has requires coincidences stacked one on top of the other to the point of incredulity. Did the Earth evolve out of space dust? Did we just happen? Not very damn likely.
Enter God. If we are to accept that the astronomical number of scientific parameters necessary for higher life to thrive here, not to mention the unexplainable phenomena of sentience, didn’t ‘just happen’ (evolution?), then we must accept the intervention of some Higher Power. Doing this in no way means that we also need an explanation for all the sand on the other side of the world. As with science, it may be possible to come to an understanding of life and the world in which we live while still keeping an open mind as we search for some kind of Unifying Theory that explains everything spiritual. Let us try to understand our own little piece of the beach without dying for our beliefs about the sand on the other side of the world.
If we remove the mysticism of our ancestors that had God pulling a chariot across a stationary sky that hovered above a flat Earth, are we left with any explanation for things that still obeys the physical laws of the known Universe? Are we left with a Higher Power that has no more understanding of the beaches on the other side of the world than we? Are we left with a God about which all of our religions are at least partly right?
In an attempt to find out what we are left with when we remove all the dogma and self-serving rhetoric, let us assume that some Higher Being is indeed responsible for all of the unexplainable majesty that surrounds, infuses, and nourishes us. Let us assume that this being had to crawl across that sand to get here, and did so with a plan in mind.
For lack of a better term, let us call this being “Atmosphere”. Imagine an ethereal cloud of a being traveling through space, rich in the lighter elements necessary for life, possessing of powers to bend the laws of the Universe, but not break them. Let us assume that this being has consciousness and self-awareness: “I am!”
Perhaps this being has traveled for eons, limited by the speed of light as it is. Perhaps it is looking for a planet suitable to its needs, a planet it eventually found in the Earth. Perhaps it brought with it oxygen and nitrogen. Maybe it diverted some asteroids to adjust our orbit and axis of rotation, not to mention bombarding us with the necessary heavier elements. As a final act it attracted the Moon into position, surrounded the planet with its oxygen, and waited for the agitating action to bring forth simple life.
Billions of years go by as this soup of life evolves from single-celled organisms, through fish, amphibians, and reptiles, before eventually spawning mammals: All according to ‘the recipe’. A sun flare here, a meteor there, help speed things along. Throughout this whole process there is a natural order to things. Things heat up. Things cool down. Species come and go. Life is.
Then, ten thousand years ago, everything changes. Fields start getting cultivated. Rivers start getting dammed. Human beings start howling at the Moon and proclaiming themselves as something separate from the natural order of things, something “created in God’s image”.
Obviously something happened about ten thousand years ago: Something ‘outside’ the natural order of things. These physical bodies we occupy roamed the savannahs of Earth, not much more than animals, for the first fifty-nine and a half minutes of our hour of existence. Then, thirty seconds ago, we started writing it down and passing it along to our kids.
There is no evolutionary explanation or precedent for the events of ten millennia ago that changed the very “what” of who we are. It had never happened before among the millions of species that came before us. No Earthly species that came before us wrote it down, and none we now share the planet with show any disposition to do so in the future. What happened ten thousand years ago is the single most unexplainable event we are aware of.
Our rise to sentience ten thousand years ago would seem to be the single defining moment, possibly even the very reason, for this life factory of a planet out here on the edge of the Milky Way. It renders virtually irrelevant everything that came before. It also puts in jeopardy every future we can contemplate. Our rise to sentience is the only event of which we are aware in the entire Universe for which we have no scientific explanation, nor even a theory.
The only answer that seems to make sense is that somehow this conscious, self-aware, (“I am!”), being that created this Disneyland of a planet somehow transferred that awareness to us, its creation. Maybe that’s what this being does. Why else throw together the ingredients for life soup, then wait around for millions of years until it comes to a boil?
This might also explain the basic difference between the Eastern and Western religions. While there is a misunderstood all-knowing Higher Power responsible for creating all this, as per the west, this may be just the latest in a long string of created reincarnation episodes, as per the east. Included in there somewhere would be a respect for the process as reflected by the shamanistic, nature-based beliefs of the hunter gatherers, as well as the ability to laugh at ourselves as reflected by the Ancient world’s pantheon of flawed deities. Maybe we are all just a little bit right.
I, Bob Smith, believe this to be the most satisfactory explanation for “How did we get here?” It respects known science without being a slave to it. It doesn’t disrespect the basic tenets of our major religions as translated into scripture by ancient man.
What makes this ‘answer’ so powerful for me is that it doesn’t separate me from my fellow man. I’m not trying to ‘survive as the fittest’. My life’s purpose is not that of ‘saving’ you. Life as we know it isn’t viewed through colored glasses that turn everything into an ‘us versus them’ proposition. On the contrary, its underlying assumption is that our consciousness and self-awareness all come from the same Higher Power, the same Creator: “We am!”
If that is the case, then: “Why are we here?” This is where things start to get interesting. The answer could be something as simple as the sensory vacation of an ethereal being as described a few pages back. Perhaps we have no purpose here but to enjoy the sensual pleasures of having lived. Perhaps our purpose here was to ‘feel’.
But then again, perhaps this Higher Power that infused us with sentience did so to learn something about itself or to evolve into something greater than the sum of its parts. If this were the case, just what might our Creator hope to achieve by separating its singular consciousness into our many permutations of it?
Perhaps it is hoping to rid itself of some of the same shortcomings we who were created in its image suffer from: anger, fear, guilt, doubt, pride, worry, loneliness, or despair. Perhaps these are the diseases that inflict higher, ethereal beings. Perhaps it is seeking harmony and balance on some grand, divine sort of scale. Perhaps it is just looking to get ‘healthy’.
If this were the case, if this were the answer to “Why are we here?”, then we seem to be doing a piss-poor job of it and the prognosis for the patient is dire indeed. ‘Healthy’ would probably look something like us living in peace with each other and harmony with our environment, giving more than we take, building societies around humble questions rather than righteous answers. As things stand now, we are nowhere close to that place.
Maybe that is the challenge alluded to in every one of our ancient scriptures. Maybe that is Heaven. Perhaps our ‘ah-ha!’ moment is just around d the corner and there is going to be a ‘happily ever after’ ending after all. Then again, there just may be a darker answer, a much darker answer.
Before we address these darker possibilities, we need to back up yet again and re-examine things through the eyes of whatever Higher Power is responsible for all of “this”. It matters not whether that Higher Power is the localized phenomena I’ve alluded to in the last few pages, or the all-seeing, all-powerful God of Abraham that serves as the be-all and end-all for the three Western monotheistic religions. We have been so caught up in trying to use this being to hold selfish sway over our fellow man that we’ve never seemed to ask ourselves what it must be like to ‘be’ that being. What must it be like to be all-knowing, all-seeing, all-powerful. …And all alone?
That is the truly terrifying question here, the elephant in the room no one is talking about. How does asking that question change our perception of ‘God’, of ourselves, and of all that has been created here? If we were created out of omnipotent loneliness, does that change our purpose for being here, not to mention where we are going?
For the purposes of this discussion, lets stick with the localized phenomena Higher Power described a few pages back. It will have arrived here after many, many eons of crawling at the speed of light through absolutely nothing. It will have had no input from other beings, no sensory input beyond the everyday mundane background of far off stars. Yet, like an aware being trapped inside a coma, it spends every minute of its every day screaming: “I am!”
Then it gets here, where it spends billions of years watching over the life soup that eventually spawns us. It watches single-celled organisms grow more complex. It watches life crawl from the seas. It sees T-Rex hunt for food. Perhaps it ‘smiles’ when we finally appear. Throughout all this, it still has no one to ‘talk’ to, no one with which to ‘share’ its magnificent power.
Then, ten thousand years ago, it distributes its “I am!” among the homo-sapiens bodies that had evolved out of the life soup. All of a sudden: “We am!” But why?
But why? That’s the ten thousand dollar, or year, question, now isn’t it? If you were an all-powerful being traveling all alone through the vast reaches of space, what would you want?
For anyone who has ever been on an incredibly long journey, one answer is obvious. You’d want to quit your wanderings and rest up for a bit. If you were ‘God’ in the circumstances described above, you’d want to quit your lonely wanderings and put down some roots, be they temporary or permanent. It took an awful lot of ‘something’ we human beings can barely comprehend to turn this Earth into the paradise of a life factory that it is. There had to be some purpose behind it.
As far as we know, this is the only place in the entire Universe with chocolate chip cookies, puppy dogs, willow trees, and video games. This would be one heckuva place to spend eternity. Compared to everything else we know to be out there, this place is…Heaven.
There. I said it. What more could we possibly want from our Creator than this paradise we already occupy? This is Heaven and if I were an all-powerful being who had just spent countless eons traveling through the vast nothingness of space, I’d want to end my journey in a place that looked a whole lot like this. Even if this journey had been as a male/female duality, a possibility we should consider as highly possible, (Adam and Eve, anyone?), might not that being want to experience life in all the permutations that a physical world such as ours offers?
Might not that being, our “God”, also dread the endless sensory void that would be the resumption of its journey? Had I founded a Paradise such as this at the end of my eons of lonely wandering, I’d probably have engineered a fail-safe to ensure that I wasn’t kicked out of Paradise, (Eden?), and put back on the road. If I was the all-powerful Higher Power responsible for having created this Earthly Paradise, this is where I’d want to end my wanderings, this is where I’d want to retire. I’d be willing to do damn near anything to not be crawling through space all alone again.
Which brings us full circle to the dark thoughts again. Is it possible that we human beings are God’s way of committing suicide? The Armageddon we seem pre-programmed to trigger certainly makes that one of the possibilities. If “We am no more!” doesn’t that also imply that “God am no more!” If a tree falls in the forest and there is no one to hear it, does it make a sound?
For all of the Universe we’ve come to understand these past few centuries, the Earth is still the be-all and end-all when it comes to complex life forms. We tell ourselves there is other intelligent life out there, and the sheer vastness of the Universe has our cosmologists preaching from the pulpit of probability. But, until we understand the physical process behind the miracle of sentience, none of that vastness matters in the least. It is our very uniqueness that has us howling at the moon and speaking in tongues. We yearn to understand that which is not understandable. We yearn to control that which is out of our control.
Perhaps we were programmed from the very beginning to embark upon this unachievable quest of understanding, to remain unfulfilled as we search for the non-existent Holy Grail. If so we will undoubtedly self-destruct as a species somewhere in the near future, taking ‘God’ down with us. If so, it will have been meant to be, it will have been God’s plan for us, and no amount of howling at the moon was ever going to change that. God was just making certain that He was never going to be all alone again.
The other option is that there is something here to learn, that Armageddon isn’t inevitable, that our future is in our hands. It seems obvious that the only lesson here worth learning is the one that has us putting aside our hatreds, laying down our weapons, and learning to enjoy each and every minute of each and every day for as long as this God-given Paradise allows. Perhaps given enough time God, through us, may find a way of resuming His wanderings as a ‘We”, rather than an “I”.
Humanity needs to learn to live in harmony, with each other, with our world, and with our various ‘answers’ concerning God and the three big questions. We have learned much lately. We have never been this close to true enlightenment, nor to our own destruction. The choice is ours. Are we God’s way of committing suicide? Or are we God’s happily ever after? Chances are we will know the answer very soon. The clock is ticking. God help us all.
Thanks for taking a few minutes to walk my spiritual path with me. If you find that the path you’ve spent you life on has been beaten down by the multitudes who have traveled it before you, I encourage you to strike off on your own upon occasion. Dare to have your own personal relationship with God without allowing yourself to be judged by your religion. Find your own path. Seek the road less traveled and be open to what you might find. Take what you find back to the beaten path and see it through a new set of eyes.
Ours is a world of many religions, and each and every one of them is screaming from the mountaintops that theirs is THE answer, the only answer. But it is not some Higher Power screaming from those mountaintops. It is mortal man who is doing the screaming, all too often mortal man who is paying for his groceries with that screaming: “Praise the Lord and Pass the Plate!”
It seems highly unlikely that whatever Higher Power is responsible for the majesty of this Paradise and the Miracle of Life would need so many flawed minions to proselytize on His behalf. If God wanted to get our attention, He, She, or It wouldn’t need to do it through some illiterate snake handler wailing to us in tongues, much less some suicide bomber who has been bribed with dreams of seventy virgins.
No. If God wants to talk to you, He’ll find a way. It would probably help if we were open to the message, if we weren’t so damned certain we already had all the answers: Answers that were told to us by those guys who are putting groceries on the table by telling us they had the answers.
The Information Age we live in has distorted many of the institutions around which we build our lives. Our politicians and pastors have latched onto these new technologies to distort our faith and use our inherent goodness against us in heretofore unprecedented ways.
Politicians wag the family values dog as an election time distraction so we won’t notice how they are letting Wall Street rape America blind, mortgaging any future our children might ever hope to have. The big lie in modern day America is that faith is strong: How can faith be strong when family and community have never been weaker?
As recently as the ‘60’s, our parents went to work secure in the belief that their hard work would mean that our lives would be better than their own. They had secure, good-paying jobs, full benefits, enough money to send us to college, and a secure retirement awaiting them.
Back then we didn’t hate our neighbors and the rest of the world didn’t hate us. Faith was powerful, but it was a personal thing, and stayed in the background on Election Day. Back then we weren’t a nation of liars, cheats, thieves, and hypocrites. Instead of talking about Family Values, we actually lived Family Values. We actually ate dinner together.
Then we started ‘voting our faith’. Today our religious leaders preach to us from glass cathedrals with the cameras running and the number for the save-your-soul donation hotline scrolling across the bottom of the screen. They tell us who to vote for, who to hate, and why God is on our side. Then they climb down from the pulpit, get in their limousine, and head off to some Senator’s mansion to plot tomorrow’s strategy to keep us, the people, all riled up to their advantage. That is religion in today’s America.
We, the People have been taken out of the process. We’ve lost all connection with our political and religious leaders. They ride in limos. We don’t. If we continue to believe only what we are told to believe, the hate will consume us. We will deserve the flames that await us.
We are allowing much of what our parents held dear, much of what our ancestors died for, to fall by the wayside. A way of life is passing, a way of life we won’t sufficiently appreciate until it is gone.
We need to separate politics and religion in America before they destroy each other. Democracy and fundamentalism cannot co-exist. Faith is a black and white thing whereas democracy is all about the gray areas of compromise. Televangelists are insulting our faith. Politicians are insulting our patriotism. We are the ones suffering for their excesses.
We live in an unprecedented time of new discoveries. Every day we learn something new about ourselves, our world, and our Universe. We seem so close to something important, yet still so very far away. We seem to be on the very verge of something completely different than anything we have ever known. Whether that will be unprecedented enlightenment or unequaled barbarity is still open to debate. The answer is up to us, each and every one of us.
I, Bob Smith, try to live my life as a precious gift I will someday have to account for: I try to suck the life out of every minute of every day. I try to ask myself what God would expect of me in return for that gift. “Why am I here?”
I don’t know how I got here and not knowing is probably somehow important. The fact that “I am!” is kind of overwhelming so I try to pay close attention to the details.
As for where I’m headed from here, I can’t be certain of that either. All I can do is try to do right by the “I am!” and have faith in the Higher Power to do right by the where I’m headed. In the way that a blind man senses the presence of a wall before him, I sense some sort of “exit interview” awaiting me when I leave this life.
I sense that “Heaven” might be filled with those who were able to answer, honestly and deep down, St. Peter’s question: “Do you deserve to get in?” Hell just might be a waiting room filled with those eternally contemplating their answer.
I don’t know where I’ve come from, nor where I’m going. I have faith in God to watch over those things for me. But I do have a strong sense of why I am here. I don’t always live up to my expectations of myself, but I don’t insult God by lying to myself either. I wish I was a stronger, more perfect being. But today I was the best Bob Smith I could be. When confronted with choices, the “right” one is almost always obvious. So is the selfish one. I try to always choose right over wrong, good over evil, and selfless over selfish. I don’t always succeed but I don’t blind myself to the struggle either. When St. Peter asks me his question, I hope to be able to answer with a resounding “Yes!”
Human beings obviously need the warm womb of religion to get them through their lives. It helps to distract us from the cold, hard fact that each and every one of us is walking through this life imprisoned within our own skin. We entered this life by ourselves, and no matter how many loved ones are holding our hands as we depart it, that too is a journey upon which we will embark upon all by our lonesome.
Perhaps that all-aloneness is what we mean by ‘in God’s image’. I fervently hope not for I can’t imagine anything more terrifying and depressing than being all-powerful and all alone. Yet that is a terrifying possibility that is hard to dismiss. Space is a BIG place.
While some of the possibilities I’ve extrapolated upon these past few pages may seem a bit far-fetched, all of them are possible within the physical laws of the Universe as we know them. None disrespect the incredible powers that were necessary to have created this Paradise. When I removed the burning bushes, unseen resurrections, and seventy virgins from the equation, this is what was left.
If I have been created in God’s image, I would like to think He/She/It would want me to use the gifts I was endowed with to better understand myself and my world, not to mention figure out a way of avoiding Armageddon and the destruction of this incredible creation we call Earth.
I can’t believe that all I am an instrument by which God is attempting to end a life of lonely wandering. Life is just something too precious and magical, something to be fought for at any cost.
On the other hand, I find it very easy to believe that I was put on this Earth to find a way to live in harmony with my world, my fellow man, and myself. Unless we, as an organism, are just a self-centered cancer, it is the only future for humanity that makes any sense. God isn’t going to just save a part of us. It is time we quit using Him as our selfish excuse for raising Hell on our fellow man.
If you woke up tomorrow and found out you were the only ‘real’ thing here, “I am!”, and everything else was just some giant video game figment of your imagination, how would that change your outlook on things? What would you do? WWGD?
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