Monday, December 24, 2007

Life and the Universe

Life and the Universe show spontaneity;
Down with ridiculous notions of Deity!
Churches and creeds are lost in the mists;
Truth must be sought with the Positivists.
Mortimer Collins, The Positivists

Why is it that world religions practised today by the faithful who invest their spiritual hopes and trust in the vision of an omniscient, all-powerful deity has more resonance, is more plausible than a pagan belief in a panoply of gods? Why is it more acceptable to believe in a single, overarching entity, the fervid belief in monotheism as opposed to a pantheon of gods? Fact is, the Christian church itself has clung to a hierarchy of gods, with its reliance on a Trinity.

As organized religions of the present day go, we have convinced ourselves that this singular entity, this Holy Spirit has granted us dominion over the beasts and the fowl of this world. Why would ours be an anthropologically selective Spirit other than He is of our own design? It took some fairly clever and intelligent human beings to fashion a spiritual figure who would have dominion over humankind, and to convince that we were fashioned in His image.

We have not succeeded in unravelling nature's mysteries, so we ascribe them to the arcane, the supranatural, the presence of a superior, supreme presence. Ancient philosophy owed its wisdom to the study and observation of human tendencies and emotions - while at the same time ascribing them to those of the gods in whose visage we were fashioned. Themselves exemplars of the very worst human emotional tendencies, fraught with anti-social manners.

Religion should extinguish strife,
And make a calm of human life;
But friends that chance to differ
On points which God has left at large,
How fiercely will they meet and charge,
No combatants are stiffer!
Cowper, Friendship

Personalizing the god figures with all the emotions, traits and characteristics - for good and for ill - that nature has endowed humankind with. The ancients, steeped in the wisdom of philosophy, worshipped their perceptions of a panoply of gods, themselves falling victim to the same emotional vulnerabilities they lectured their disciples and their human creatures against.

If mankind must recognize a creator, a protector, a prolonger of life on earth, it is nature, more specifically the presence nature herself owes her dominion to - the sun, the warming, life-giving centre of our presence within the universe. What are we, after all, without the sun's warming, life-giving, life-enhancing rays? Give credit where it is due. We are here by the singular grace of nature.

The ancient Egyptian Pharaoh, Tutankhamen was actually the world's first monotheist, upsetting two thousand years of Egyptian belief in polytheism. He, like Moses, like Christ, like Muhammad, felt himself guided by God to declare His supreme deity. Tutankhamen's god was the God of the Solar Disk, Aten - the Eternal Light. Whose purpose was to guide mankind's way within the universe. His vision lasted a handful of years.

Our redemption is in our own incapable hands. Socrates was a wise and humble man, whose spirit and soul were wedded to pagan belief. Christ, yet another ancient philosopher, engaged with the bedazzled conviction he was a demi-god. Humankind's susceptibility enslaved it to the idee fixe of the mortal transformed to the immortal. Fearing the finality of death we grope for faith and hope to lead us to everlasting salvation in Heaven - the life hereafter.

Against her foes Religion well defends
Her sacred truths, but often fears her friends . . .
But most she fears the controversial pen,
The holy strife of disputatious men.
George Crabbe, The Library

So too does the Hebrew god of Moses promise much to His believers. Yahweh is a god of thunder and vengeance declared against those who would take His name in vain as did the poetic philosophers of ancient vintage whose child of the inventive human mind He is. Yahweh is a vestige of a tribal deity, representative of pre- and post-biblical Jewish need. A kingdom of Jewry representative of assorted tribes of triumphant victory and vividly abject slavery in conquest.

Scratch a Muslim believer in Allah by the circumstance of religious dissent or armed conflict and you reveal a tribal warrior of yore. Expressing nature's injunction to her offspring: survival attends the fiercest, the fittest, the adapters. Somehow, along the trajectory of millennia Christians and Jews have managed to shed the vestigial tribalism that gave birth to a tribal god, while Islam's hold on its inspired birth has refused adaptation to the modern era.

God Himself, in his ineffable wisdom, appears content to exhort and to chide. Sitting back to observe human drama unfold as we devour one another in our insatiable greed, anger, blame and the frenzy of our fierce determination to surmount others' ambitions by whatever means given us. Those who are meek of mind and mild of temperament, exhibiting compassion and forbearance are God's true flock.

And they succumb to the predatorily entitled others. Is God, then, representative of a complete moral failure from on high, in His inability, His incapacity, His unwillingness to intervene? A placid sadist? Yours to answer. Does mankind express His purpose, or pervert His purpose through one man-made cataclysm after another?

Men will wrangle for religion; write for it;
fight for it; die for it; anything but -
live for it.
C.C. Colton, Lacon: Reflections

The truth, to be found in the spirit of the faithful, or the minds of those eschewing faith for reasonable doubt. They are legion, we are plentiful. God Himself remains divided. Humanity appears destined to forever battle our most base instincts and emotions. A metaphor for the choice set before us by God and His dark counterpart.

O how far removed
Predestination! is thy foot from such
As see not the First Cause entire.
Dante, Paradiso

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posted by Pieface @ Monday, December 24, 2007

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