Staying Real

Once Upon a Time, there existed a world in which war was being waged against order (good) and chaos (evil). Evil was the result of an Evil Being. Above this world there existed a supreme being -- the Creator -- who was displeased.

[fm. Wikipedia]: "The final savior of the world will be born to a virgin impregnated by the seed of [God] while bathing in a lake. [He] will raise the dead – including those in both heaven and hell – for final judgment, returning the wicked to hell to be purged of bodily sin. Next, all will wade through a river of molten metal in which the righteous will not burn. Heavenly forces will ultimately triumph over evil, rendering it forever impotent. [He] and [God] will offer a bull as a final sacrifice for all time, and all men will become immortal. Mountains will again flatten and valleys will rise; heaven will descend to the moon, and the earth will rise to meet them both."

Judaism? Christianity?? No -- Zoroastrianism, which pre-dated Father Abraham by about 1,500 years.

The Bible and Christianity are both based on one basic premise: humanity is lost and in need of rescue. How did this come to be? I am not a historian nor a Bible scholar. But I have lived a pretty long time in this Reality, and read or listened to and watched a lot of really smart people. The farthest back we can go with any certainty in recorded human history seems to be about ten thousand years.

Humans began making myths and creating heroes. Homer's Odyssey and the story of Beowulf come quickly to mind. We looked out upon the natural world and wondered at both its order and its chaos. We also looked inside ourselves and others and wondered about life and -- more importantly -- death.

People could not explain the things they saw (eclipses, night and day, storms, earthquakes, murders, theft, greed), and so they began creating other realities. Gods and demons, angels and devils, heaven and Hades. The smarter ones began to analyze things and recognized patterns in what they saw. This is a fundamental fact of this Reality -- recurring themes and cycles. Once people began to understand this, they started to progress beyond mythology as a way to explain everything.

The greatest change in modern thinking has come about due to the development of science and the Enlightenment. Men such as Copernicus, Newton, and Rousseau took much of the mystery out of the natural world, and removed humanity from the center of the Universe, while simultaneously elevating the human mind as the greatest instrument in this world.

Newton was first a man of faith, as were most of the earlier scientists. It was religion that led people to ask hard questions about the laws of nature. For two hundred years Newton's physics explained nearly everything about the nature of Reality. Most people of science were content with that, even as they continued to ask questions and experiment.

My favorite Christian apologist, C. S. Lewis, was a professor of Mythology. His good friend and companion was J. R. R. Tolkien, creator of such works as The Hobbit and The Lord Of The Rings trilogy. These men, and others such as the late Joseph Campbell, understood the role of myth in understanding the impulse toward religion. To this day, both Christmas and Easter are celebrated when they are on the calender, not because that is the actual time of these events, but due to earlier pagan "holidays" celebrating the winter solstice and vernal equinox.

In the hard sciences, Albert Einstein did away with the predictable, solid world of Newton. Now, relativity is the accepted model of reality. And as we as a species move forward, Einstein's equations have provided the light to see into the world of quantum mechanics, the reality of both the infinitely huge and the incomprehensibly small.

Just as Einstein's general theory of relativity blew away the "hard" physics of Sir Isaac Newton, so the Rationalists and Humanists such as Rousseau and Descartes placed humanity beyond the "need" for religion as an explanation for all that is mystery within ourselves and our behavior.

Someone over at Dr. Richard Beck's blog (Experimental Theology) noted the other day that the "absolutisms" of the Middle Ages have given way now to a more relativistic approach to theology and faith. And I am here going to state that the modern movement within the Christian faith, especially Evangelicalism, towards Universalism, could only arise in this environment.

I lived through the social and cultural revolutions that occurred in western societies during the 1960's. Ethics and morality, up until that time fairly well understood and defined by most people, became fuzzy and a matter of individual emotions and thoughts. Instead of basing their lives on any one creed or set of beliefs, many people began searching instead for "spirituality" as an end in itself, as in Buddhism or TM (meditation). Searching for a way to connect with The One.

Today we have the belief in the Universal Salvation of all souls based on a Good God. Hell as such is fading in the rear-view mirror. Whereas for centuries verses were culled from the Scriptures to define God as One who hates Evil, One who demands Justice, One who requires a "sinner's prayer" (ala Billy Graham), and One who justifies war and punishment (children, wives, slaves) -- now we are told that Everyone is going to Heaven!

Well, that's great news. My question is this: if we are all saved and going to heaven no matter what because there is a Loving God who would not eternally punish anyone for the finite sins committed here, why bother anymore to believe in God at all? Believers will say that it's because such belief changes your priorities here and now. That's fine, but there are plenty of people who do not believe in any god and have their priorities well-set, and they feel they are correct (the new standard, of course).

Why can't we take the final step and acknowledge that we will never know what happens after we die? The real mystery, for me, lies in that question.