When the old religions die, we can only hope that it is a less than violent death. We cannot expect the current religion industry to help in any way in this transformation. The pastors, the imams, the rabbis—as well as university theology departments—have a vested interest in maintaining the status quo. They study the past; they study every line of scripture; they study every conceivable interpretation of the ancient texts. Their very livelihood depends on sustaining the QWERTY keyboard of the ancient religions.
So many vested interests in keeping the status quo: our religious schools, our religious training in childhood, our suggestibility, our concrete thinking in childhood, our yearning for a lost innocence.
The Sambia, for better or worse, were able to give up their ancient beliefs, their modus operandi, in one generation. We may need several generations; we all may need to die off and die off and die off. Our ancient collective wisdom will then die off, slowly and then more quickly. A phase reaction picking up steam—all inevitable. At some point these Abrahamic faiths will look like historical artifacts—a fraternity or sorority, an ethnic or religious group that carries much less meaning than it does currently.
This change in the way we imagine our gods will be difficult. The Scopes trial—and the resistance to the concepts of Darwin and evolution—may look like child’s play compared to the changeover in our conception of the gods. The legendary smashing of idols by Abraham—in the face of resistance to a belief in a more abstract god—may look like child’s play compared to this coming changeover.
The danger in this transformation lurks when “fresh knowledge threatens to explode the old spiritual forms,” as Wolfgang Pauli reminds us. Yet this change will be liberating. We as a species will be liberated from a punitive and narcissistic god. We will be liberated from rules and commandments that may have made sense hundreds of years ago but make little sense now. We will be free to be our true selves, free from unnecessary and unwanted shame and guilt. We can be straight, we can be gay, we can be transgender; we can be healthy, we can be sick; we can be busy living and busy dying—all without feeling that some god has visited upon us a reward or punishment for some presumed sin of omission or commission.
No panacea in any of this—but a better meshing of science and religion, of our collective knowledge with our faith. No brave new world of reasonable and sensible and caring people. The insensitive and cold-hearted bastards will still be trying to take over the world; the drunken drivers will still have the right of way. But our illusions can be more in check; our willingness to face the reality of our weird universe will be enhanced.
Quantum theory tells us that the connection between cause and effect is not as clear-cut as we had previously come to believe. How liberating to disconnect our unfounded guilt, as well as our unfounded shame and embarrassment and self-consciousness, from the events unfolding around us. We can liberate ourselves from an all-seeing and all-knowing anthropomorphic god who is looking down at us and watching our every move, who is determining whether we are acting in a good way or bad way.
Enough of a micromanaging god.
Life is difficult enough with lurking pathogens and lurking genetic deviations and lurking personal misunderstandings and lurking personal conflicts. Why add another layer of strangeness with a set of ideas that do not fit with our current understanding of psychology and biology and chemistry and physics and cosmology? Why add another layer of strangeness with a set of childlike beliefs in a single god, a monocracy, a monolithic and anthropomorphic deity, a monotheism that can only lead to our own destruction?
We do not have to spend our energies serving—at times being slaves to—each of the punitive and narcissistic gods of the Abrahamic faiths. Our governments do not have to subsidize religions and religious schools. We will have more time and resources to spend with our families and our communities; we will have more energy to allow ourselves to have fun and be productive. Economists have shown that a society that spends less time and resources in serving the gods has a more productive and fulfilling society. Medical researchers have shown that a person with a disease has a better prognosis, a better response to treatment if he does not believe his disease is a visitation from a punitive god.
With a renewed view of the gods, we can accept, instead of fight, the complementarities and the contradictions of life. We can begin to be startled and astounded by the paradoxes and ironies of life. We can begin to see good and evil in new ways. With every curse lie the seeds of a blessing. With every blessing lie the seeds of a curse. Every particle is a wave, and every human being is filled with particles that are waves. All we can do is ride those waves—and perhaps stretch or contract those sine waves. Free will and necessity, free will and predetermination, all at the same time.
Yes, the yin and the yang, the West and the East, the North and the South, matter and antimatter, expansions and contractions, smoothness or steadiness and quantum fluctuations, the predictable and the unpredictable. Particles can be everywhere and some specific somewhere, all at the same time. Good and evil, all at the same time.
Irony of ironies. Complementarities abound all around us. Hitler and Stalin brought the world closer together. Hirohito in Japan brought the Eastern world in to follow along. It was not called a world war for nothing.
And “the real father of the atomic bomb (and atomic energy) was Hitler and the specters his horrifying will conjured up,” noted the historian Paul Johnson. Fear was the primary motive for harnessing atomic and nuclear power. Robert Oppenheimer, a Jew, led the frantic effort in Los Alamos, New Mexico, to build the first atomic bomb because he feared Hitler would do it first. Edward Teller, a Hungarian, was instrumental in building the first hydrogen bomb out of horror over Stalin’s immense Soviet terrorism.
So, thank you, Adolph. Thank you, Joseph. The terror you generated has stretched us, forced us to face a brave new nuclear world, confronted us with quanta and photons and bosons—newly discovered invisible and indivisible gods—that we ignore at our own peril.
So, thank you, even to the perpetrators of 9/11: The three thousand people they killed on September 11, 2001, have not died in vain. The appalling actions of the perpetrators have unleashed a realization in much of the rest of the world that each of the literalist and fundamentalist Abrahamic faiths—not just Islam—has reached the end of the line. Atheists have been able to come out of the shadows. We can hear more talk of the “god delusion” and of god not being “great.” We can recognize the wisdom of the comments of Yitzhak Rabin just before he was killed by a fundamentalist Jew in Israel, that the conflict is not between Jews and Muslims, between Muslims and Christians, between Christians and Jews, but between fundamentalists and secularists.
Or, perhaps it is between fundamentalists or literalists and a new kind of deist. Let’s listen to the British philosopher Isaiah Berlin:
Because the ram duly grows fatter, and perhaps is used as a bell-weather for the rest of the flock, he may easily imagine that he is the leader of the flock, and that the other sheep go where they go solely in obedience to his will. He thinks this and the flock may think it too. Nevertheless the purpose of his selection is not the role he believes himself to play, but slaughter (italics mine)—a purpose conceived by beings whose aims neither he nor the other sheep can fathom.
We are just as lost and as clueless as that ram and the sheep that follow him. And our efforts to cling to the certainties and supposed verities of our ancient texts will make us only more clueless—in a nuclear world, no less.
So, let us experience gratitude and terror at the same time. Gratitude at the wonders of nuclear energy and the modern world it has created, and terror at its potential to destroy our entire species. With the first atomic bomb over southern New Mexico, we witnessed heat and temperatures that were four times more intense than those generated at the center of the sun. The harnessing of this atomic and nuclear energy has stopped some prostate cancers in its tracks. And nuclear energy run amok has awarded us with the countermea
sure of hyperbaric oxygen.
Gratitude at the wonders of testosterone and the ingenuity of the human world that testosterone has fueled—and terror at the bellicosity and wars it has fueled. The raping and pillaging it has fueled. The prostate cancers it has fueled. Perhaps going from the masculine to the feminine and back to the masculine, a la the Sambians, can save us.
Gratitude to the sacred texts—and the gods of the Abrahamic faiths—for their ability to unify disparate peoples, for their initiation of laws and ruliness in the midst of lawlessness and unruliness. Terror at the disparity between our current scientific knowledge and the notions conveyed in these sacred texts. Terror at the monotheism that fuels the notion that “my god is better than your god, my scripture is better than your scripture.” Terror at the testosterone-fueled warring nature of us humans that has been the midwife of these ancient religions and these ancient texts—religions and texts that can be the pretext for our own destruction.
1. The Higgs Boson has been called the “God particle,” but it might more accurately be called the “Goddamn Particle,” as noted by the Nobel Prize–winning physicist Leon Lederman, commenting on its elusiveness and the amount of resources spent on trying to find it. What appears to be its presence was confirmed in July, 2012, at the CERNS Collider outside of Geneva, Switzerland.
CHAPTER 20
Our Own Personal Battles and Reconciliations–A Modern War and Peace
“. . . ideas . . . both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed the world is ruled by little else . . . soon or late, it is ideas, not vested interests, which are dangerous for good or evil.”
John Maynard Keynes
“Science without religion is lame; religion without science is blind.”
Albert Einstein
If a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, then indeed more than a little sense of danger is a knowledgeable thing. We cannot afford to ignore the potential self-destructiveness of the human species, the willingness of any of us to cut off our noses to spite our faces, especially in our service to the god of our fathers. Irrational groupthink can consume us. With our current capabilities for mass slaughter—this way for the gas, ladies and gentlemen; this way for the planes used as missiles; this way for the nuclear bombardments—we cannot afford to allow our religions to be agents and catalysts for this self-destruction.
The history of the Aztec culture in Central America offers a cautionary tale, as described by Nicholas Wade. In developing a horrific set of religious beliefs, the Aztecs rose to power seven hundred years ago. But in those religious beliefs were also the seeds for their own destruction, not just the seeds for power and wealth. Using a tradition of human sacrifice, the Aztecs took this tradition to untold heights—with a lunatic objective of capturing as many people as possible from neighboring areas and slaughtering them, all in the bizarre belief that their patron god, the sun god, required massive amounts of human blood to renew his life force. This religious ideology created a society devoted overwhelmingly to a single goal, a drive to excel in warfare and in slaughter. This literal bloodthirstiness, this voracious appetite for human blood had one fatal flaw: Over time the Aztecs lost any semblance of a workforce to work the fields; they had killed most of their potential workers and servants. They had too many warriors and leaders and not enough basic labor, and they became easy prey for Cortes in 1519, especially with the unflagging help of neighboring tribes that reviled the Aztecs. The blessing from the sun god had become a curse; the upward curve of the wave had given way to a calamitous downward arc.
The Aztecs had desperately needed someone, some influential small group in their midst, to question their basic religious assumptions—to find a way out of the morass they were creating for themselves, to alter a religious ideology that was inevitably leading to their own destruction. To dehypnotize themselves, to take themselves out of their sun-god trance.
Yes, free will and necessity can coexist. Yes, the waves we are riding seem to have a certain inevitability. And yet, we can change these wave patterns—narrow them or widen them—that otherwise seem so very predetermined. Yes, the electrons and photons are precisely where we expect them to be most of the time, but not all of the time.
Ultimately adrenaline may be able to trump testosterone. Terror, and the adrenaline that accompanies and mediates terror, can override our warring nature fueled by androgens. Fear and our adrenaline-infused terror and our amygdalan reactivity can reshape the waves. We can muster our sympathetic nervous systems to alter the testosterone-driven waves, to ride a new wave of the masculine to the feminine and eventually back to a new version of the masculine, to alter our perceptions of the gods, and to bring our views of the gods more in-line with science and more in-line with our current understanding of the universe. Our adrenaline can indeed subdue our androgens.
It is time to dehypnotize ourselves, to remove ourselves from the trance of the Abrahamic faiths. It is time to direct and muster our fears toward the literalists, the fundamentalists—those among us who believe the books of the Abrahamic faiths were written by prophets and spirits and angels all emanating from one god. It is time to direct and muster our fears toward the so-called great books, the scriptures, the sacred texts themselves. No longer can they demand devotion, no longer can they demand diligent teaching of them to our children, no longer can they demand that we worship and serve and die for a venal and vindictive god, a narcissistic and punitive god. The texts are merely historical artifacts, harking back to a time of naivete and innocence and constant warfare—all reflecting an unnuanced and unambiguous view of the world, a world of black and white, of good and evil, of believers and unbelievers.
Who could have imagined large airplanes being turned into deadly missiles on 9/11? And who could have imagined that the sacred manuscripts could have been corrupted and perverted into texts that can inspire our own demise? Can we muster enough fear of these texts and enough fear of these views of the gods to overcome our fears of the unfamiliar, our fears of change—to be able to alter our collective inner lives, to alter our collective religious and spiritual beliefs?
No need to get rid of the ancient texts. We are not talking about the banning of books, the censorship of books, the burning of books, the outlawing of books. These old scriptures contain some inspiring stories, some useful stories—stories that can teach us useful values—and some not so useful stories that teach inappropriate and bizarre and psychologically inaccurate lessons on things like masturbation and homosexuality.
Let’s also separate these books from the supposed gods that wrote them or inspired them. Enough of the supposed prophets and spirits and angels and even gerunds that helped write these books. With the invention of the printing press, with the creation of film and television, with the innovation of the internet, we have almost infinitely more stories—fiction and nonfiction, all more strikingly told, and told without the pretense of being divinely inspired—to invigorate us, to teach us values, to instruct us on how to live.
And, yet, religion and spirituality have a place in our lives, a different place, perhaps, than in the previous two to three millennia. If we continue to use religion as a way of inspiring us in battle, as a way of helping us go to our deaths in warfare in service to our gods, then we are not just simply killing our enemies. We are destroying ourselves. Our nuclear capabilities, our abilities to use biological poisons, change the natural order of things. We kill ourselves and our planet in our efforts to destroy our enemies. We become modern-day Aztecs.
And, yet, we need religion to help us fight our personal battles. In the midst of these battles, we want to believe we can influence those infinitesimal lumps of energy; we want to believe we can change the place where the electron can be found on the wave. We want to believe we can communicate with and engage with the quanta to change our own personal course.
Quantum theory tells us that it is impossible to know both the position and velocity of a particle at o
nce. When we measure the position of a particle, we disturb its velocity; when we measure the velocity of a particle, we disturb its position. Prayer and meditation can help us assess our position while changing our velocity. Likewise, prayer and meditation can help us assess our velocity while disturbing our position.
When dealing with cancers and other illnesses, when dealing with personal struggles, when facing our enemies, we may want to take a step back and measure where we are on the wave, to measure our position, to measure our velocity, to disturb our position, to disturb our velocity. We can ride the waves, and we can disturb the waves. Free will and necessity, all at the same time.
When we allow ourselves to develop a more healthy narcissism—a belief and confidence in ourselves, a narcissism in which the gods and quanta serve us, rather than vice versa—and when we allow ourselves to get rid of pathologically narcissistic gods that insist upon us serving them, we will live freer and more productive lives. No longer slaves to our gods—free at last, free at last.
When we embrace the exactitudes and inexactitudes of life, when we embrace the certainties and uncertainties of life, when we embrace the fairness and justice of life along with the unfairnesses and injustices, we will be able to die more freely, and paradoxically we will be able to live more freely.
Arguably the most compelling purpose of religion and spirituality is to help us deal with and manage death. Religious rituals for dealing with death are crucial. No need to change them. Whatever our religious background, let’s hold onto these rituals; let’s use these rituals to manage death, to hold onto and remember the person who has died, to internalize the significance and values of that person.
A Salamander's Tale Page 17