Fear of meaninglessness is externalized as "faith" in a divine story that gives meaning to those who both need such meaning (to make the carrying of the cross of their own mortality bearable), and who lack the imagination and the courage to create such meaning for themselves.
Ironically, each such person operates under the delusion that the story they hold in their head and heart is the same story shared by billions of other people. In truth, however, each story is only similar in character names and general events, but the meanings and the version of that story is always unique to each person's own imagination.
And even if the story is perfectly true in every respect, the grand illusion is that everyone who feels a need or desire to devote themselves to defending it as true (which is like people devoting their lives to defending the fact the earth revolves around the sun), imagines the story the same way they do.
After all, if a different version of who we are exists in the mind of each person we know or meet, and each of those versions continually changes just like we do, and we are made of finite material stuff, then a "God" that is a wholly abstract idea of infinite proportions is infinitely more so. Indeed, as we change our ideas about anything, from slavery to science and beyond, so must our ideas as well.
From this perspective, Christianity has more Gods than any religion in history. The Mesopotamians had 3000 gods, for example, but if anthropologists from a 1000 years from now were reading the different books about Jesus Christ, they'd be forced to conclude that Christians of the 21st century worship a religion with more than 42,000 gods!
Comments
Post a Comment