I suspect a lot of humanity’s frenetic activity, our epic booze and drug consumption, our obsessions with sex and things, our need to keep killing each other, stems from a lurking suspicion that god doesn’t exist. And if you take away god, you take away purpose. You take away meaning. You take away hope.
Without god nothing matters (to use a sports term, life is ‘one and done’). The tree in the front yard greens magnificently and then blight or drought or lightning or pestilence or ‘progress’ takes it out. And in short order the tree is replaced by something else – another tree, a Wal-Mart parking lot – and it is forgotten. The same goes for everything.
It’s why the god thing is so unnerving. God remains stubbornly ephemeral; but death is all around us, here, now, real, tangible. You walk into a church for a memorial service and there is talk of god. But lying in front of you is a dead body. You don’t just talk about it – you can poke it, prod it, and if you don’t embalm or incinerate it, it starts to rot, to smell, to dissolve back into the material ether.
God is said to be omnipresent. But if we are honest, that is a far better description of death. Take a simple walk across your neighborhood and you’ll see a veritable genocide of dead or dying insects and plant life. Nearby roads are littered with the corpses of small animals. In the homes and cars around us cancer and heart disease and a thousand other diseases eat away at their occupants even as some are busy preparing for the disposal of the recently deceased.
God enters the picture in the upturned faces of the grieving who ask, “Why?” But there is no answer. The dead are here, but god is not. Some will maintain that they feel a presence, that a ray of sunshine or nearby hawk is symbolic of god’s presence. But like the UFOs forever captured in impossible-to-decipher imagery, this all-powerful god never quite makes its presence unmistakable.
So the enterprising mind makes up stories in an attempt to quell all its uncertainty. Someone creates a story about a place called heaven, others climb aboard the bandwagon, and soon enough heaven becomes part of folklore, of scripture, of belief.
Because there are so many shitty people in life, another story must be invented to accommodate their problem souls (the soul being yet another intangible story), and thus is born a place called hell.
And because the vast majority of us fall somewhere in the middle, we conjure up purgatory, reincarnation, karma, etc., to satisfy our appetites for second chances. If you work really hard in the next/afterlife, if you really apply yourself and overcome your sins, you can move on up to the next level and eventually make it to heaven! (As if heaven was akin to the CEO’s corner office).
As for heaven itself? The story suggests that in this paradise you will never go hungry, never want or need for anything, and you’ll exist for all eternity with your loved ones.
Now think about that for a moment. (It’s precisely why I’m inclined to be as honest as possible with myself about such things.) If you had to invent a post-material paradise, would you really populate it with all the people you so often can’t stand to be around for more than an hour or two? Recall one of those drama-soaked Thanksgiving dinners and now picture it going on forever. Heaven?
It’s akin to these lunatic Muslim ‘holy warriors’ immolating themselves along with a bunch of ‘infidels’ so they can hurry on to heaven where 72 virgins await. Remember having sex with a virgin? Remember what sex was like when you were a virgin? And you want 72 of them?
As laughable as it is, most of us engage in some form of this. My favorites are the “RIPs” that inevitably are offered up to the dead, as if life was so damned hard they need to rest for all eternity. How much rest does someone need? Or the similarly un-thought-out sentiment offered up by just about everyone these days: “Our thoughts and prayers are with you.” Sure they are.
Not long before his own death, George Carlin cooked up a fantastic routine on the myriad “unexamined” things people say at funerals and memorial services. One of the gems was the supposedly comforting words, “I think he’s up there now smiling down on us and I think he’s pleased.” To which Carlin responded, “What kind of a fucking eternity is that?”
So why do we humans conjure up all these ridiculous stories and offerings? I think it’s quite simple: to avoid unpalatable truths that otherwise make us squirm.
God is the biggest story of all. And look, I’m not saying “god doesn’t exist” or “god is dead.” What I AM saying is to be wary of anything that that highly conditioned, biodegradable packet of meat nestled inside your skull might conjure up. I mean, what does it really know?
And isn’t this what we want? To know. Isn’t that why we ask, “Why?” So the trick isn’t to concoct more fictions that lead us away from ourselves and from truth (since we never really believe this bullshit anyway). It’s not to toss out useless aphorisms to placate the grieving or avoid uncomfortable truths. The secret, as more than a few mystics have urged, is to work backward toward the beginning, to be as children again, to go back, back, back toward the start of the equation.
So if I am making up a story to avoid the unpalatable truth about death, let’s start with that sentence and ferret out the truth, the why.
Death sits there at the end of that equation. Seems fairly black and white. There is life, then there is death, not much to do here, let’s move back a bit more, to something we actually can investigate.
There is the adjective, unpalatable. Why is death unpalatable? Because death is unknowable and eventually I too am going to get pulled into that unknowing. Ok, that’s similarly reasonable and there’s also nothing I can do about it. I can’t know death while I’m on this side of the curtain and it’s pretty clear I’m going to die. Let’s move back farther still.
I. I find death an unpalatable truth. I do.
There’s our target, the subject for our investigation. The I must investigate the I. And let’s face it, this I is the only thing we can ever actually know anyway. It’s also the thing that creates the world around itself. If I ceases to exist, or goes into deep dreamless sleep, or stops thinking, etc., the world as I knows it is gone.
So I – the thing that finds certain truths unpalatable, that creates cockamamie stories to placate itself – this I is the culprit, the thing that must be excavated, dragged out into the light. Instead of inventing a god that invented the I, why not dig into that I and it’s need to create god in the first place?
