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Star Wars: Our Narcissistic Battle With Ourselves

The essence of religion is the war between men and gods. The "men" in this case is humanity, and the "gods" in this case is our minds. One is fashioned from the clay of the material world itself, from which humans have evolved in one sense or another, from matter. And as that matter eventually produced simple life and then complex life, it would produce an immaterial human consciousness; the apex of which humans believe - rightly or wrongly - to be the highest manifestation of animality. From that, they would build imaginary people called corporations, that have all the attributes of God and more rights than any human being alive.

As such, the latter is the realm of man's ideas and ideals, his highest hopes and darkest hells, his emotions, vices and virtues, his intelligence and his gods.

Trapped between these two points, between the earth from which we sprang and the heavens to which we aspire, our mortal mind struggles to shed its skin and become the immortal idea that we imagine must be as real as the mind that beholds it. And all the while, we struggle only to convince ourselves that the love we have for our fondest wish, a wish to live forever nestled in the loving bosom of the God who created us, will be enough to make it so.

But what is it of us that we are really hoping will survive?

It is not our body, but our ideas; and nothing more so than our ideas about who each of us "believes" we are, which we further reduce to an "essence" we call a soul. This soul, however, is simply a manifestation of our love, passion, and ideas, but freed from the human container in which it remains confined, like the prisoner Edmond Dantes  at the Château d'If .

We are so in love with our own identity and our own ego, in other words, that we think we can wish upon a falling star over Bethlehem, which we celebrate as the birth of our highest ideals in the flesh, and forever live with them in a place that reflects their perfection and radiance, with a deity who is the personification of everything we only wish we could be.  

 Like Geppetto in Pinocchio wishing on a star for his creation to come to life, we wish upon the star of Bethlehem that we might have eternal life, after we have shuffled off this mortal coil.  The irony being, of course, that we are all made of stardust.

Christian authors had drawn a connection between the winter solstice on December 25 and Jesus’ birth. "The church father Ambrose (c. 339–397), for example, described Christ as the true sun, who outshone the fallen gods of the old order." In 274 C.E., the Roman emperor Aurelian likewise established a feast of the birth of Sol Invictus (the Unconquered Sun), on December 25. What's more,  Tertullian of Carthage and Augustine both calculated that Jesus was possibly conceived and crucified on the same day of the year, which was also December 25 (or possibly Jan. 6).

Between these two points, the soil below and the stars above, we are stretched and pulled. The Christian directs us to the heavens and aspires to "be like God," while shunning the sinful ways of fallen flesh, and the humanist resists the lure of technology with its promise to make us all "like God," with its singularity.  On the one hand, humans seek to negate their genetic animal nature in their aspirations to be like their ideals, embodied in their concepts of an immaterial God, while on the other, they resist the cybernetic developments that hold the promise of the eternal human life wished for in their religions, for fear of becoming more machine than man.  

Michael Bakunin described this internal conflict between our identity and our aspiration - a conflict that has only proven to be as clear in theory to some as it has proven impossible in practice by all - and the God that has become our idealized perfection in thought, which has also always been the devil in his deeds, at least according to the Christian Bible. As Bakunin put it:


"Jehovah, who of all the good gods adored by men was certainly the most jealous, the most vain, the most ferocious, the most unjust, the most bloodthirsty, the most despotic, and the most hostile to human dignity and liberty — Jehovah had just created Adam and Eve, to satisfy we know not what caprice; no doubt to while away his time, which must weigh heavy on his hands in his eternal egoistic solitude, or that he might have some new slaves. He generously placed at their disposal the whole earth, with all its fruits and animals, and set but a single limit to this complete enjoyment. He expressly forbade them from touching the
fruit of the tree of knowledge. He wished, therefore, that man, destitute of all understanding of himself, should remain an eternal beast, ever on all-fours before the eternal God, his creator and his master. But here steps in Satan, the eternal rebel, the first freethinker and the emancipator of worlds. He makes man ashamed of his bestial ignorance and obedience; he emancipates him, stamps upon his brow the seal of liberty and humanity, in urging him to disobey and eat of the fruit of knowledge.

We know what followed. The good God, whose foresight, which is one of the divine faculties, should have warned him of what would happen, flew into a terrible and ridiculous rage; he cursed Satan, man, and the world created by himself, striking himself so to speak in his own creation, as children do when they get angry; and, not content with smiting our ancestors themselves, he cursed them in all the generations to come, innocent of the crime committed by their forefathers. Our Catholic and Protestant theologians look upon that as very profound and very just, precisely because it is monstrously iniquitous and absurd. Then, remembering that he was not only a God of vengeance and wrath, but also a God of love, after having tormented the existence of a few milliards of poor human beings and condemned them to an eternal hell, he took pity on the rest, and, to save them and reconcile his eternal and divine love with his eternal and divine anger, always greedy for victims and blood, he sent into the world, as an expiatory victim, his only son, that he might be killed by men. That is called the mystery of the Redemption, the basis of all the Christian religions." 

The irony of all of this, then, is that the Christian has become too attached to their identity as a Christian, even though their Christianity is predicated on the single premise of not becoming attached to material possessions, especially their own flesh. This idea is embodied, ironically enough, in the Bible's admonishment that we can only be "reborn" through our willingness to "die to self." But what greater "self" could there be for us to die too than that of our own identity, which we defend so fiercely in both our politics and our religions, which is simply an avatar, fashioned wholly from human hands, of our own ego?  

 That the Christian cannot forgo their identity as a Christian in their hope to become like an all too human Christ figure, who is said to have ascended into heaven in his human form much like his own mother, illustrates our wish to cling desperately to our human form, and especially our human consciousness and our personal identity. That consciousness provides what John Locke described as the "tabula rasa," the blank slate of human awareness, that we then write upon, but is mostly written upon by our environment, to form our "identity." And the love we have for this combination becomes our ego, which religion then glorifies as our divine "beliefs."    

If Christ was indeed conceived and crucified on Dec 25, as some have argued, this may only be because we are reborn of the dust and energy of dying stars, and the impediment that leads us to deny this fact, that Christianity blames on an egotistical devil, may simply be our own ego, and our desire to ascend into heaven in our all too human form, beliefs and all. We turn our Earth into our own collective hell, in other words, because rather than accept that our ideas and our ideals are only as mortal as our minds and our bodies, we impose the wrath of God upon each other in our endless quest to "be like God"- the perfected everlasting projection of our own egotism, which we embody, sanctify and even worship as God himself, so often in our different religions.

In short, our religions are the narcissistic worship of our all too human ideals, personified in a "God," while the devil is anyone who dares to humbly suggest that we are only human, born of stardust, and to that dust we shall return.






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