“Fact” and “truth” are not synonyms. Clearly, they are related; it is, however, a mistake to use them interchangeably (this is one of those mistakes that weakens language by blunting its precision). “Truth” is the synthesis we make of facts, and is thus inherently subjective – as opposed to facts, which are by definition objective. It is thus possible for our “truth” to include falsehoods. If you were taught that God created the world in six days about 6,000 years ago and that he made humankind in his image, as the crowning glory of creation, it is certainly a *fact* that you were taught this, and your belief is a part of the truth of your life. Unfortunately, that belief is not based in facts, so your truth is partly a lie. This applies to any number of beliefs that humans carry around as part of their “truth.” Here are some facts to reckon with: with the exception of the hydrogen, every atom in your body was forged in the core of some ancient super-massive star that has long since run its course and spewed its atomic guts into the galaxy in a supernova explosion. That is true of the atoms in your body, and in mine, and in the bodies of everyone who has ever lived. It is also true of everything we see around us on this planet, including every cigarette butt tossed casually out a car window, and the carbonized trees that were killed in the resulting wildfire. It is true of everything you eat, and the excrement that happens at the other end. It is true of every murdered child in every drone attack in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and true also of the charred remains of those killed by the drones’ firepower – and true also of that firepower and of those who directed it. It is true of the CO2 that we are dumping into our planet’s atmosphere – the same CO2 that has inaugurated a runaway greenhouse effect that will eventually kill us. No matter which direction you look, you see yourself. It’s all you – it’s all the same stuff. So what is there to be afraid of? But people are afraid. They’re afraid because of the alienation they feel, and that alienation started with birth, when “you” (let’s make it “I”) were (was) “separated” from all that is and began to forge an identity that does not include everything else. We have all – each of us – divided the world into “self” and “other,” and we have done so at a tremendous price that we began paying when we were very young. The literature on child psychology is filled with this: the entire history of most human beings can be understood in these terms. Our unhappiness ultimately arises from our sense of separation, and our desperate attempts to achieve some kind of reconciliation with the world by latching onto this and that and attempting to make the more felicitous aspects of our condition *permanent* – which of course flies in the face of everything we know to be factual about the universe – make us all the more miserable. Religion was supposed to help us deal with this alienation. The very word means, etymologically, “re-uniting.” But religious institutions, like banks and advertising agencies, see in our alienated condition an opportunity for profit-taking, and exploit our sense of alienation. Those religious institutions are thus the most cynical institutions on Earth: it took the moneyed class several thousand years to rise to an equivalent level of exploitation. What bankers have been doing to us for 500 years, priests and prelates were already doing to us for millennia. Modern religions – that is, religions based in agriculture and life in cities – are the very antithesis of the “religious” worldview of our foraging ancestors. Our Pleistocene forebears – like those few extant hunter-gatherer societies that are rapidly being driven to extinction – had a very different view of the world and their place in it: they intuited the unity of all that is, and the very word “universe” would have made sense to them in a way that most modern humans never consider (think about its etymology and you’ll see what I mean). I think pretty much constantly on an account I read of Ewe religious philosophy (the Ewe are a people who live around the mouth of the Niger River): “the sea, the lagoon, the rivers, streams, animals, birds, reptiles, and the earth with its natural and artificial protuberances are worshiped as divine, and as the abode of divinities.” This account was written by a westerner, and is couched in western terms. I suspect that the word “worship” is an unfortunate choice: “revere” probably comes closer to what the Ewe actually do. In other words, they see themselves as inextricably embedded in the world: themselves as part of a larger whole instead of standing apart from it. The sciences, if one thinks about them deeply enough, can take us there. But Christianity almost certainly cannot. Christianity has taught us to fear death, to abhor death as a penalty for “sin,” to despise our bodies and imagine the world to be worthless. It places us in a weird position with respect to every other living thing, has taught us to *dominate* the world – and have we ever taken its lessons to heart! It will be our undoing. But as I said earlier, it’s all of a piece: heaven, hell, and everything in between. Christians can only abhor what atheists enjoy in Technicolor™.
Posted on: Sat, 31 Aug 2013 15:22:24 +0000
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