The End Times
It’s a Sunday morning in Provo, Utah, and I’m trying to find breakfast, but the place is a ghost town. This phenomenon is exaggerated in Utah, but there is something common about Sundays across our United States. In Colorado you can’t buy liquor on Sundays. In parts of Utah, it can be a severe quest just to find an open restaurant. In Provo on a Sunday you feel like a member of a rebel militia just sitting inside Starbucks sipping coffee with people who are conspicuously not Mormon on the Lord’s day. The Mormons are all in Church. I pulled up to a cute blond in a little white car who said she was on her way to Church in Salt Lake City at 1:00 in the afternoon. She told me that many people spend practically their whole Sundays out here in big sterile white LDS churches scattered across the land homogenously. Then she asked if I was Mormon. I told her no, and then as she was driving off I smilingly wondered if I had said yes, would she have invited me to some wonderful place?
There are churches all over this world, some are called Temples, some are called Mosques, some are called Ashrams. They generally have in common a story they tell which explains reality. Every religion offers an answer to the ultimate question. The answer to this question is what every religious follower is buying. God created the heavens and the earth in such and such a way, and it is our job to do such and such, and when we die, such and such will happen. It’s a pretty simple formula really, and collectively as a species, humans have been pretty good customers for these religious providers over the years, and it has become second nature for us to believe.
Religious beliefs are often passed down from parents to children, and we are often drawn to the same beliefs as the tribe we surround ourselves with. Some individuals have always broken away from the beliefs passed onto them in their youth, and have rebelled toward Atheism, or chosen a different religion, generally one which surrounds them with their desired peers.
The expansion of religion in the modern world is a puzzling phenomenon, although it makes sense in light of what churches have become, and yet it doesn’t make sense at all. For the first time the world is connected in ways that have never been recorded in history. The information superhighway runs from hemisphere to hemisphere, continent to continent, and village to village. We are one world for the first time.
50 years ago in America, color trumped religious belief in affecting church group membership. Segregation was just ending, and while Institutional Religion still reached across color lines to expand its power, individual churches were still largely color specific. The black man went to a church filled with black people, the white man to the church filled with white people. It was obvious early on that religion was pretty ineffective at unifying different groups of people, even though it has always been good at getting mostly homogenous groups of people to believe the same new thing, and then just the same old thing; and other, totally different groups can believe the same dogma, but often don’t. Members of specific communities historically held similar beliefs amongst themselves in the first place. The church itself was not wholly the tribe.
Religion spreads through communities by offering salvation, feelings of connectedness, and a storybook “truth,” to members of a community. New converts, already members of their individual communities, are then helpful in attracting other members of their community to the religion. Humans crave connection. Community offers connectedness.
As things have become more and more disjointed, as communities have become more and more diverse, and therefore confused and fragmented, as tribal aspects of connectedness to one’s community have died, churches themselves, the representatives of religion, have become community centers, beacons of connectedness and homogeny; but the connectedness is limited to those who buy the story, thus becoming “believers.”
Religions still offer the answer to the question, “what does it all mean?” But the purveyor of religion, the church, has gained a new advantage in its viral spread because of the community it offers to people, as sanctuary, in this ever more confusing, discombobulated and ugly, scary, new world. Time ago, before old time community started being eroded by the invention of the boat, the automobile, airplane, television and computer, people could go about their lives in their little, close-knit communities, going to church once a week to be reminded that God loved them and that the light was brighter on the other side. But back in those days, community was built into their simple lives, where faces didn’t disappear all the time, and most of the people you knew were regular fixtures in your life until they died. That has all changed.
The stories religion tells have not changed. Truth is still the product being sold, and the truth they are telling has never made so little sense in light of the best knowledge available to reason and intellect. But in this new world of overpopulation, disjointed community, and an overworked, overtravelled, under socialized population, the human connectedness which churches provide has become an important part of what religion has for sale. Belief is the ticket to a community largely missing from the modern world. Not only do churches still offer a collective version of the truth, provided by the faith, they also offer a community of people who believe the same thing. The world of the open-minded can be lonely in comparison. And religions and their representative churches just keep pumping and growing, because like corporations and other creations of ignorance and separation they have no concern for man, only concern for themselves and their growth, and they thrive on human separation, desperation, sadness, and loneliness. They all support each other institutionally, and man pays the price in this lonely world outside the Garden.
This brings us to the topic of reason in religion. There is reason for religion, but there is little reason in religion anymore. We have discussed the reasons for the pervasiveness of religion. Thousands of years ago we believed. We may have believed that there were multiple gods, if we were Greek. We may have believed in a mother creator, if we were one of quite a few Native American Tribes. We believed, mostly. I don’t know the names of any ancient atheists, but I’m sure there were some.
Before telescopes came along to show us the infinite nature of the universe and the multiple universes, back when all we knew “out there” was the sun and sky in the day, and the moon and stars at night, God was a pretty good explanation for things. Sensibly, the God or Gods, back then, were intricately tied to the sun and moon. Afterwards, when the ball really started rolling, and the stories got more complicated as people developed more and more complex societies, moving away from a relationship with the providence of the land, the God idea became more and more human like, and grew into the religions of today. Hence, we have ended up with an angry, punishing, human-like, patriarchal creator God as the most powerful God concept of todays reality. When this God concept began emerging we didn’t know that our species and our ancestor species had been around for hundreds of thousands of years. We didn’t know that “God” created dinosaurs, alligators, and monkeys, before he created us. We didn’t know that we probably set out from Africa on our eventual colonization of the globe.
Organized religion came out of the creation stories of our ancestors. One built on another, and another, and another. Islam uses the same stories as Christianity, Christianity the same stories as Judaism and paganism, and then the additions and the rules. Islam believes Jesus was a prophet, not the son of God. To Muslims, the holy trinity equates to polytheism. Eastern religions have their differences, but are stories nonetheless. What is a prophet, or a human god, or a Buddha, but just another human being who speaks one version of truth, which resonates with many people?
Never in the history of our species, have these different versions of the truth, these creation stories, spread as far, or made as little sense, as they do now.
There was good reason for religion once, and the stories they told did actually make some sense at some point long ago. Belief meant an easier life, at little expense. Today faith may be the most dangerous temptation we face. It is tempting to latch onto a religion in these days of looting, and the ruin of our Earth. It is easier to believe that God is in charge, that He created the world for us and that there is a divine plan, than to choose reason and admit that there is insufficient evidence of God’s work in today’s world to prove His existence unless a person spells G-O-D with the letters, M-A-N. We have to face the possibility that both moments of connectedness, beauty, and spirituality, as well as destruction, discontent, and human suffering, are created in the minds of human beings.
It is possible that we are the Gods of our own reality, and have always been. What we think and create becomes truth. Like Gods, we are constantly manifesting reality. Not just concrete objects, like planes, trains, cell-phones, and computers, but also spiritual and metaphysical realities. The Bible can be truth for Christians, the Koran can be truth for Muslims, and for those of us who believe in our own theory of interconnectedness, faith in the infinite nature of the universe can be our encouragement. But all these are our inventions nonetheless, or maybe time doesnt' exist, and they therefore already existed, and we just discovered them and made them manifest. To believe in infinite possibility may not be quite as easy as choosing faith in a specific religious dogma, which fills in all the blanks that an honest assessment of reality leaves us without, but it does offer us an open-mind. It offers us a chance to live in harmony with our human family, who, through our rejection of dogma and "knowing," we are all suddenly allowed to love as brothers and sisters, no matter how much their beliefs differ from our own. Our own truths become just that, and we begin to create our own reality, separate from the chains of the past.
A rational look at the world today puts us square in the drivers seat, and it looks a lot like we deserve a ticket for reckless driving. Where is God? “He’s coming, he’s coming,” we’ve been told for thousands of years. And for thousands of years we’ve been here, dressing up God like man, and telling each other that it’s Him, not us in the driver seat. But we are driving baby. We need only look at the numerous species we are driving into extinction on a daily basis, and all the life producing earth we are sending into hibernation. If they could talk, or were conscious beings as we, they might be even more likely than us to ask “where is God?” And as the last of the species looks around for any of his fellows, out of his dying lips he might tearfully mutter, “He’s not coming.” Like dead canaries in this coal mine, which we could call a dying Garden of Eden, the extinctions may be warnings that it is time to come up out of the darkness because it is no longer safe down here.
A few years back Lee Strobel wrote a book called “The Case for Faith.” Even if you haven’t read it, you probably get a pretty good idea what it’s about from its title. A quick summary: the benefits of believing, the promise of everlasting life in Heaven, outweigh the benefits of not believing; one is assured freedom from punishment after death if one does believe, but the potential consequence of eternal damnation for not believing makes belief the best option. The book was a few hundred pages long, but left out the most negative consequence of what he was arguing for. He makes the case that we should have absolute faith in Jesus as Lord, and he argues that it makes sense, but when a faith based belief dictates the realities of life, we are automatically forced into a life of delusional reality; and it limits our abilities as a human race, to function in a rational way. If a fundamental piece of a persons’ reality is based on something that by its definition is not defendable by reason, and is therefore faith, then how can that person expect to live in a reasonable, honest, rational way or be depended on to make rational decisions? Is it any wonder that every President who has professed a belief in a religious God has been responsible for the deaths of innocent people? And hasn’t every leader who has categorically said that there is no God also been a killer, because Atheism is just as insane? How can a reasonable man say that there is no God, when he knows how small he is in the cosmos?
How can any of us say that God is or isn’t? This debate has gone on far too long and should not even be a debate anymore. Atheists say “there is no God,” and the believers retort: “There is a God,” and their idea of God is almost unfailingly the God of their chosen faith, or a faith in no faith. Does either of the groups have the information to make a rational argument that God does or does not exist? No. Are any of the specific religious stories the right one? Not likely. Is there an answer? Yes there is, and it’s called “shut up, we don’t know.”
As much as we may want to understand the totality of reality, the fact is that we are too small to ever totally comprehend the infinity from which we have emerged. There may be an ultimate intelligence which created us, a master plan for the universe, but it is time for us to allow it to be just another possibility. We can choose to have faith that we are connected to the universe, and to each other, or we can choose to believe in nothing, or we can choose to believe that we are the inventions of our own understanding, we can believe whatever we want, but we can’t call ourselves right. And we need to take the power away from people who think they are right, because they are insane.
Faith in God produces chemicals in our brains which we do not experience as non-believers, and belief is a good high. But the consequences of dogmatic beliefs in religion have gotten to the point that we really do need to check ourselves and stop dancing foolishly in church. It’s government sanctioned insanity, and it is affecting our decision making process and is therefore a terrible deterrent from reason and sanity.
This kind of believing creates ecstasy and euphoria, and people like George W. Bush. Religion is failing us because people are not as dumb as we seem, and our insane beliefs are driving us insane. Rome was insane, the United States is insane, and the religious Middle East is insane. People are insane all over the world, and we are acting like it. We don’t need spiritual leaders, we need spiritual people. The true teacher or spiritual person knows not the spiritual truth of anyone else but himself. If he teaches as if he knows the ultimate truth, he has already failed truth. Man is smaller than he has ever been because the Universe and universes that we are looking out into are bigger than they have ever been. And the farther we look out there, the farther it goes.
Are we looking for heaven in our spaceships? If we can’t get all the way out there, and we never will in these bodies, then how are we to comprehend what God is? We can experience God, and we can even call it God, or Allah, or whatever word you want, but we can no longer call ourselves reasonable if we believe in what any of those books offer as the true story of the reality of creation.
We must admit that we do not know, and never will know, even, most probably, after we die. Just like we have taken control over earth, water and wind to make electricity and power, engines which fly through the air, and wireless phones which can communicate across oceans, we can also take control over ourselves again, and start to come back to earth. It is our duty as the guardians of the planet. If we want the Garden of Eden, then we must create it here, and do our best to preserve it, till our day is done. We can trust in God if we choose, but we must begin to live by reason and sanity.
We can’t know what that white light means until we get all the way there. Considering the new information we now have at our disposal, the fact that we are a human species, that the decisions we make as nations and individuals have consequences far beyond what we used to think of as our sphere of influence. It is time for us to try what we have never tried before, at least not in our historical memory. It is time for us to open our minds. For whatever reason it seems we are the earths conscious born protectors and guardians, its angels. We have yet to find another consciousness out there like our own. We need to begin to acknowledge our power here. What we do does matter. In God We Trust is not working anymore. It is time for us to start taking responsibility for reality. We are the benefactors of our future generations, and it is truly up to us to decide what kind of future we are going to create here on earth. Do we want to create hell on earth? Or something else?
I wish there was a magic wand to wave to get us out of this mess we've created with the best of intentions. Human beings have been doing their best for a long time, and we've done good. Our progress has brought us together as a planet, and though there are negative consequences, our past, errors, glories and all, have brought us to this moment. We are trapped in our old ways of being and thinking, but we had to get to this point first. We cannot look into the past to find the answer. How we are going to fix things and avert disaster, I don't know, but until we can escape from the delusions of our past thinking and discover an open mind, there is little hope for a happy future for our species.
