Posted on Apr 02, 2007

i3 April monthly editorial
by Margaret Chen, Editor-in-Chief
2 April 2007

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” I S . G O D . D E A D ? ”
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Perhaps the question to answer – in 2007 – is: does it even matter whether God is alive or dead?

Now that mankind has learned to fend for himself and dominate the earth – to create medicines and procedures that successfully prolong life; and to abide by Laws and due process that provide an ethical model by which to conduct human affairs and resolve disputes, without the need to resort to “fear of God’s punishment” to lay down a blueprint for moral conduct – it is logical that “God” has become a distant figure in our modern world of human-engineered-plenty.

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THE BIRTH OF CONSCIENCE
Conscience is what distinguishes man from his animal cousins. Conscience is the part of human nature that prevents us from doing harm, or, treating others badly. So it should come as no surprise that criminals and socio-paths are often described as people who have no conscience.

Christianity, Judaism and Islam were among the world religions that each gave their believers strong and clear rules by which to conduct their human affairs. And in the early days of human history, these religions were absolutely necessary in that they set down Rules as a sort of baseline of civility for all to abide by. These particular religions were strong advocates of the Heaven/Hell; Good/Evil diachotomies, using fear of God’s wrath as a means to control the baser instincts of mankind, that include emotions and inclinations like jealousy, avarice, revenge, gluttony, etc.

FEAR OF PUNISHMENT
And for many many centuries – until a few centuries ago – man lived literally in terror of God’s Judgement. Because God was All-Knowing, this gave man a conscience from without to do right by his fellow man – to not cheat, steal or do harm – even if only to avoid an eternity in Hell. The early Church and the Powers-that-be had a very direct hand in solidifying those messages in the minds of every man, woman and child.

The Crusades, 1095AD – 1292AD and The Spanish Inquisition, 1478AD – 1834AD, were about first consolidating Christianity’s power over Islam’s, and then about solidifying the Power of the Catholic church over the Monarchies of Europe. With each battle fought, religion was becoming like a wolf-in-sheep’s-clothing. Religion was becoming a Secular Power in Sacred Garb ( in the person of the Catholic Pope or some particularly ambitious monarchs of the Dark Ages, 476AD – 1000AD & Middles Ages, 500AD – 1500AD ) and came to be really only about using fear to control the people who were its subjects.

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THE CULT OF DUALITY: EITHER/OR, SCIENCE/RELIGION, MIND/BODY WITHIN/WITHOUT, GOOD/EVIL, BLACK/WHITE, ZERO/ONE, ...

Religion is all about having Faith in things that are difficult, if not impossible, to prove. But then the Men-of-Science came along – and Science is all about Evidence – and their work started to cast doubts on the many immutable doctrines of the All-Powerful Church.

Renaissance men like Leonardo Da Vinci (1452 – 1519) who under cover of night and in utmost secrecy, did photograph-like sketches of the human anatomy on cadavers dug up from the grave, and who – if found out – would have been ex-communicated, possibly tried as a heretic, and put to death.
[ Did you know that some medieval books were bound in HUMAN SKIN…!]

Wikipedia declares the Scientific Revolution officially started in 1543 with the publication of Nicolaus Copernicus’ On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres because that book disproved Church doctrine which posited Man and mankind’s planet earth as the Center-of-the-Universe, saying that instead of all the other planets and the sun revolving around earth, in fact, all the planets – including earth – actually revolved around the sun!

All this Enlightenment-Era-work to take away the “mysteries” – to unveil the cloak of Darkness under which the Medieval Church thrived – revealed the world to be somewhat mechanical and predictable – “Rational” even – and, certainly not in any way, whimsically reliant on The-Will-of-Jehovah. The Scientific Revolution meant that an all out war had been ignited between Science and Religion, a war that is still being fought on many levels, and that is due to misinformation rather than any actual inconsistency between Science and Religion.

Rene Descartes (1596 – 1650) – Father of Modern Philosophy – creator of the Cartesian Coordinate system, and the person who coined the phrase “I think therefore I am” cemented our over-reliance on dualities and dichotomies, by introducing the Mind/Body split into our collective consciousness.

The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886) is a story about the duality of man’s nature, and illustrates the hypocrisy of the Victorian ideal that any person is either Good or Evil. It is because Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde cannot be reconciled in one body that they both lose their lives, for they also cannot exist apart – in the final analysis, the two men are the two sides of one person.

It seems more likely that if one were to believe in God, one would be better “served” by a God that is all about “acceptance”, “forgiveness”, and “acting from love, not fear”. Or, in other words, that we would, likewise, be more willing to serve just such a generous, compassionate, God-of-Light, than to serve a God that tries to keep humanity in the Dark.

We must each and every one of us, decide for ourselves whether and how God is Alive for us – if – we choose to believe that there is some Universal-Entity beyond Logic-and-Reason that holds the key to the true miracle of the life that exists in and around us.

So, does it matter whether God is alive or dead? For me personally, I prefer to live in a world where Easter means more than bunnies and chocolate eggs, even if both are metaphors for reproduction and everlasting life.

And in the final analysis, “God-fearing” is not a bad thing at all, it means that we individually recognize our human limitations, and that because we have the good sense to be awed by how much of the natural world we do not understand, we would likely proceed with caution and not with recklessness. Perhaps, it seems in examining the world around us today, too few of us are “God-fearing” in the good sense of those words.

Margaret Chen
Editor-in-Chief
iCubed.us.
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Long but worth-reading – On Nietzsche’s famous quote, ‘God is Dead’
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And, for a look at iCUBED.us’ editorial theme for the month of March - INTELLIGENCE AND ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE iCUBED.us' editorial theme for the month of May - ETHICS, CHEATING, AND PIRACY