Belief versus paradigm evolution Part the Last

The penultimate step in the evolution of the religious paradigm is the Götterdämmerung or twilight of the gods, but not in a Wagnerian sense. It will be, and some might argue already is, the gradual erosion of the mysterious mythical spirit of our forefathers (and foremothers) by the personalization of the god experience by an ever increasing number of believers. The transition, as stated earlier, involves the waning of the ascendancy of GTF (God the Father) and a shift to Christ and a subjectivization of his teachings and general perception by the faithful.



Already one is confronted by a litany of interpretations and restatements when it comes to faith and definitions of god abound that personify emotions as being equivalent to Jesus. The most common would appear to be “God (Christ) is Love.” A student of language like me is apt to respond to this statement with the observation that, if we already have a word for it, why do we need two. The same goes for, “God is Peace,” “God is the power of Nature” and even “God is Harmony.” Reflexive verbs such as ‘is’ indicate an equivalence between the noun preceding and the noun following the verb so writing an essay on god would be equivalent to writing an essay on love or peace or nature or whatever.



The next logical step is probably the elimination of God from the equation since nobody would know whether we were talking about love or harmony if we substituted the word ‘god’. This is in part what Nietzsche meant when he said god was dead – we kill him when we start to examine him as an entity. Christ had to die on the cross because he had become incarnate; the same fate lies in store for any entity that crosses from the celestial plane. It’s like only being able to dissect a living thing once it’s dead. In the case of god, there may be the occasional revival and it may take hundreds of years but the demise of the gods is inevitable as people turn inward in their search for meaning and outward in their search for social and financial gain/stability.



But then there’s death. One of religion’s main promises is eternal life, often with a binary fork that separates the wheat from the chaff or the believers from the non-believers. Although we have moved past the selling of indulgences and even the celestial waiting room (sans magazines) called Limbo, some sort of afterlife still waits to cosset or damn our souls for all eternity. That’s a long time. What if you become weary of all that harp playing and want to put yourself out of your misery? What if you don’t like the company of Mother Theresa or are tired of hearing the same old stories from Saint Augustus? Tough.



Old people I’ve known, my grandmother, mother, and father among them, get tired of living because the pain outweighs the pleasure or simply because they’ve drunk their fill. And yet, like the rest of us, they don’t want to die. It’s like the old Woody Allen joke that goes approximately, “I’m not afraid of dying, I just don’t want to be there when it happens.” The fear of the unknown, of that “undiscovered country from whose borne no man returns,” keeps us from departing this life in anything but regret and trepidation.



Perhaps it is part of the legacy from partaking of that fruit in the Garden of Eden – to become aware of ourselves is to become aware of our own mortality. The birth of the ego in sentient man also bore with it the understanding that death was final and the imagination that caused us to project into the future our eventual demise. Animals don’t have that problem.



If a planeload of our children were off to Disneyland or wherever, and crashed at the end of the runway, we would be implacably horrified and racked with panic, guilt and grief. If a herd of cattle were present when their calves were headed off to Disneyland and the plane were to crash at the end of the runway, they might be spooked by the noise or subsequent fireball, but soon return to whatever cows do when they are milling about.



Now, no animals (except, possibly, lemmings) go to their deaths willingly. If they did, all that would remain is their fossil record as a sad epitaph. But we project decades into the future and feel the angst whenever we have lots of time on our hands and are not thinking about food or sex. Since organized religions have set themselves up as the custodians of our immortal souls, they are well placed to mitigate any everlasting death and guarantee eternal life. Of course they are not in a position to do this for free, so one has to keep one’s membership (and one’s dues) up to date in order to avoid something ‘worse than death.’ The specter of Hell, after all, is as important as the concept of Heaven in making sure the donations keep rolling in. The idea of demons keeps the dangers of straying from the celestial path helps keep our focus on mortality and acts as a gentle reminder (sort of like mob leg breakers) of what lies in store for the recalcitrant.



It’s always been strange to me how reluctant that most believers are to die in the face of the great ‘reward’ that is waiting for them on the other side. Does this mean that they have doubts about the teachings of their faith? Does it mean that their belief system can’t override the instinct of self-preservation? Does it mean that their ego clings too tenaciously to sensory experience and reflects the unwillingness of the personality to “go gently into that good night?” Is it fear of the unknown? There are too many forces from insurance companies to medical supply companies, to prescription drug providers, to faith healers and psychic surgeons, to organized religions, who have a vested interest to make death a dreaded experience.



And modern medicine hasn’t helped things by allowing death to happen in the confines of institutions such as hospitals and nursing homes. The reality of the modern family unit guarantees that, no longer will the experience of death be normalized by having it occur in a domestic setting of Granny's bedroom, adding to the mystery of the final life process by removing it from all the other life processes. We are often so afraid of death that we remove ourselves from its presence and, thereby, intensify its hold over us. The only people whose deaths we seem to have any appetite for are those of murderers and terrorists, intensifying the feeling that death is the ultimate punishment rather than our passing into the oblivion that is the final chapter in our life’s story.



All fear is fear of death. In this context, it is easy to see why courage is in ever shorter supply and our apprehension causes us to condone the death of others who we perceive to be a threat to our continued existence. No life is sacred but it is important to remember that when it’s over, it’s over forever and we must have a better excuse than fear to remove anyone or anything from life for that reason alone.