Yes, the title is a
reference to Joss Wheddon’s space western Firefly.
Under Ireland's
2009 Defamation Act, “A person who publishes or utters blasphemous matter shall
be guilty of an offence and shall be liable upon conviction on indictment to a
fine not exceeding €25,000.” Seriously, Dail
Eireann, what the fuck? Have you even
HEARD of the 21st century? And if there
were a God or Gods, he/she/it/they sure as hell wouldn’t need you to stick up for
him/her/it/them.
“Man is an animal,”
wrote anthropologist Clifford Geertz, “suspended in a web of significance he
himself has spun”.
On Planet Terra
(Earth) of the Solar Planetary System in Orion’s Spur of the Milky Way Galaxy
in the Local Galaxy Group of the Virgo Galaxy Cluster in the Laniakea
Supercluster of the Universe, during the Anthropocene Chron of the Subtlantic
Stage of the Holocene Epoch of the Quartenary Period in the Cenozoic Era of the
Phanerozoic Eon of the Current Supereon in Galactic Year (GY) 20, Jews believe
that Adonai speaks Hebrew, Muslims that Allah speaks Arabic, American
evangelicals that Almighty God speaks Elizabethan English, Roman Catholics that
Dominus Dei speaks Latin, Eastern Orthodox that Kyrios speaks Greek, Hindus
that Brahman speaks Sanskrit, Zoroastrians that Ormazd speaks Avestan,
Buddhists that Adibuddha speaks Pali, Shintoists that Amaterasu speaks
Japanese, religious Daoists that Tai Di speaks Mandarin Chinese, and Sikhs that
Vahiguru speaks Punjabi.
Each of these
groups, and each subgroup and splinter and cult and sect within each of them,
believes they are the Chosen People from which will come the Anointed One to
assert their rightful dominion over all Creation for all Eternity.
That belief is
absurd. In fact, all “belief” is
absurd.
* * * * *
To believe is to
define. To define is to limit. To limit is to control. To control is to corrupt.
Belief is not humble; it is aggressive. Belief
is not a sign of submission; it is an assertion of domination. Belief makes itself superior to that in which
it claims to believe by controlling it through the very act of belief. Thus, belief is blasphemy. Belief
is vanity. Belief is futility. Belief is the very antithesis of faith. At the opposite end, disbelief affirms
belief by that very negation, which is another attempt at control.
To have faith, one
must surrender control. To surrender
control, one must abandon limitation. To
abandon limitation, one must give up definition. To give up definition, one must let go of
belief. To have faith, one must neither
believe nor disbelieve; one must unbelieve.
* * * * *
There is no Higher Power in the ‘Verse, no Supreme Being, no
Divine Creator-Redeemer- Transformer, especially not an anthropomorphic and
anthropopathic God such as humans repeatedly create in their own image with
whom to have an illusory personal relationship, an illusion of an illusion with
an illusion.
Every form of Ultimate Reality conceived and believed by
human religion and philosophy, each of which is geocentric and anthropofocal,
is too small for our Universe. Even in the very rare instances in which
humans have perceived an Ultimate Reality as something genuinely Other, they
have then proceeded to append to that insight intermediary realities to connect
it to our own in order to believe, define, limit, and control, reducing fairly advanced
intellectual and spiritual concepts to mere ideological dogma. As the Hymn of Creation in the Rig Veda
admits, “The gods themselves are later than creation”.
To state
categorically that there is absolutely nothing beyond what we can see with our
five physical senses, however, is as unscientific as religion. For all we know, that Something may be so far
outside our ken that it is as invisible to us as the tall sailing ships of
invading Europeans initially were to the native peoples of the Western
Hemisphere whom their passengers were about to conquer, kill, rape, and
plunder.
In Somerset
Maughm’s The Razor’s Edge, protagonist Larry Darrell said, “A God that
can be understood is no God”.
So, if there is Something that was before all Time, is now,
and will be even after the end of Time, with Time here being defined as the lifespan
of the current universe, it is beyond personhood, beyond being, beyond
effability.
If there is Something, it produces yet claims no possession; it redeems yet requires no
gratitude; it sustains yet exercises no authority. It has no need of obedience, worship, prayer,
praise, adoration, supplication, benediction, love, or even respect. It just is.
If there is Something, it is both perpetual and ever-changing, flowing through and animating all
that is throughout spacetime and beyond, transcendent yet immanent, metacosmic
yet omnipresent, eternal yet omnitemporal.
If there is Something, it has no name. It has no need of a
name. Since it is the one and only
Something, there is no other Something from which it needs distinguish itself.
If there is
Something, it is the Source of all that is, the Course shaping its formation,
and the Force energizing its manifestation. From our
perspective, these are different things, but in reality they are One.
If there is Something, it is neither male nor female. It
does not take sides, nor have sides.
From it emanate both light and dark, good and evil, order and chaos, yin
and yang, life and death, integrity and entropy, creation and destruction,
everything and nothing. Each of those
antitheses is defined by its opposite.
Without their counterpoints, none of them can exist, and the fact that
those opposites exist in competition with each other is what give us choice,
the choice which is the definition of freedom.
And without death, life has no meaning.
The essence of life,
of all existence, is change and evolution.
The nature of time is this: The future has already happened and the past
is yet to be, and the moment where we are now is the beginning, and the end,
and every moment in between.
Tune in next time
for, “The Meaning of Life, Part 3: No Gods, No Masters”.
(Video of Stephen Fry interview for which he was recently "investigated' by the Gardai)
