Bleeding Out
My home is Batavia, a river town established at a time when Americans were settling the West. The importance of Christianity for past generations is borne witness by several substantial churches at the center of town, steeples with a Crosses piercing the sky. Even if forms of Christian thinking are not as close to the surface now, they persist as a deeper substrate within our psyche.
Our inheritance: the symbol of a steeple with cross piercing a blue sky, or is it a metal spike impaling us, victims of slow-motion wreck of culture,… entangled by this dark spectre.
In the balance, perhaps survival of our species?
The future is up to us.
We must conceive better gods, different symbols.
When on a Sunday morning
we hear the bells ringing we ask ourselves:
it is possible! This is going on because of a Jew
crucified 2,000 years ago
who said he was the son of God.
the proof of such assertion is lacking.
In the context of our age the Christian religion
is certainly a piece of antiquity intruding
out of distant ages past,
and that the above-mentioned assertion
is believed…
is perhaps the most ancient piece
of this inheritance.
A god who begets children
on a mortal woman;
a sage who calls upon us no longer to work,
no longer to sit in judgment, but to heed the signs
of the imminent end of the world;
a justice which accepts an innocent man
as a substitute sacrifice;
someone who bids his disciples
drink his blood;
prayers for miraculous interventions;
sins perpetrated against a god
atoned for by a god;
fear of a Beyond
to which death is a gateway;
the figure of the Cross
as a symbol in an age which no longer knows
the meaning and shame of the Cross
-how gruesomely all this wafted to us,
as if out of the grave of a primeval past!
Can one believe that things of this sort
are still believed in?
Human All Too Human by Friedrich Nietzsche, trans. by R. J. Hollingdale, aphorism 11
2 thoughts on “Bleeding Out”
Hmmmm . . .
Methinks this should have appeared on a Sunday.
Nevertheless, symbols are but structures made of materials that came from the earth. If humans decided that turnips were a manifestation of some god, would we not build turnip shaped edifices in which we pray to the almighty omnipotent turnip? Whatever object we imbue with meaning doesn’t just take the shape of our adoration, it becomes the adoration itself.
To me religion is nothing more than a way of deflecting fear. Fear of the unknown (death in particular) and fear of facing the reality of life. Nancy might ask how I’m so damn sure of my point of view. I would answer that from my personal perspective I see no alternative to living in a WYSIWYG world. There is a ton of evidence to indicate that religion is nonsense and nothing but someone’s faith to “prove” otherwise. As I age I become less and less tolerant of religion. I see its tenets helping to destroy our planet (that plus greed and a lust for power). It sounds arrogant and pejorative of me to say, but our species is fucking nuts. No wonder we are accelerating towards oblivion.
I would like to add an addendum to my comment from earlier today. There is an exception to my notes about religion in general. That is the person who holds the position of the Dalai Lama. I may not believe in reincarnation, but there is something that is so different about that concept, I find it intriguing. When one believes that the spirit will return in the form of another life, it seems that one would want to take care of the earth, to treat our home with respect for if we are going to come back, we would want to live on a habitable planet and not a burning garbage dump. And when I hear him speak, I sense a calm and matter-of-fact person who treats others with kindness and love. His thoughtfulness that shines through is indeed transcendent and I can’t help feel gratitude for the example he sets for a better version of the human species. So there is at least one exception to my screed on religion.