Religion, Cosmos, Thought, Death

Religion is largely anthropomorphism gone amok. There are variants on the anthropomorphic theme -- the Judeo- Christian/Muslim traditions typecast God as a scolding male parent, slow to anger but powerful in His wrath. In the East, this great patriarch in the sky must co-exist with other, nearly equal deities, as He did in the non-Judaic early Mediterranean theologies. These bickering gaggles of gods and goddesses were universally and entirely human in every way, albeit rather brusque in their many moments of self-assertion.

The Jewish and Christian traditions refer to God as "The Lord" -- in Latin, "Dominus," the root of the English word "dominate." The Old Testament certainly bears this out -- "The Lord" is vengeful, demanding absolute obedience and brooking no competing loyalties. This is a near-perfect model for an hereditary tribal chieftain or a medieval baron -- the head honcho of a divinely-chartered protection racket.

Even the relatively little we know of the nature and extent of the universe make the existence of a "prime cause" of all reality in the form of a human-like personality very unlikely, to say the least. Visualizing God in such an Earth-bound fashion denies humanity's most unique capability: the awareness of the difference between elusive truth and socially convenient fable.

The same incomplete knowledge of the cosmos makes it equally unlikely that the "reality" accessible to human senses and identifiable by human perceptions is the only game in town. The sheer extent of the universe as we know it, after roughly 5,000 years of hard-won advancement in astronomy and physics, is huge beyond what human intelligence can grasp except through the insulating objectivity of mathematical notation. The 25,000 mile circumference of the Earth is comprehensible in terms of smaller, more familiar distances -- eight North Americas, joined east coast to west, aren't unthinkable. Even our solar system comprises conceivably distant objects.

Our galaxy, with millions of stars comparable to the Sun and possibly thousands of solar systems, is where the process of human perceptual overload generally begins. When one realizes that even our limited knowledge includes the existence of many thousands of galaxies, each with millions of stars, the obsolescence of traditional religious cosmologies is obvious.

Although the inability of humans to grasp the true extent of reality is unavoidable, the experience of bringing thought and perception to their very limits can be a very profound one. It is impossible to maintain even the slightest pretense of hubris in the face of such immensity; indeed, a choiceless humility and serenity may well arise.

When the "data processing" ability of our brains fails, the identity of the individual with that particular function is often weakened or sundered. While, for practical purposes, identifying with the thinking mind is useful and nearly unavoidable, maintaining that identity as an unassailable absolute is severely limiting. In the context of galactic and larger scales, it becomes appropriate to identify with all of reality, rather than with the supposedly autonomous human individual.

From such a universal perspective, it becomes clear that the individual human's place in the cosmos is not at all central, and that the idea of being "created in God's image" is a convenient way to see human nature as somehow divine. Clearly, what we are as humans is very small components of the universe, albeit components with self-awareness and the ability to reason.

Our organs, and indeed our very cells, are our component parts. The brain is one of our organs, the one that supports thought. We tend to identify with the brain because it is the organ that enables the process of identity in the first place; if we're fortunate we can also identify with our entire physical/mental/emotional selves, and hopefully with humanity as a whole. Beyond that, we can see our human selves as part of our Earth, as cells in what is for all intents a "metaorganism" of living entities sharing a planet.

These broader identities help put the existence and extinction of individuals in perspective. Just as individual cells in a plant or animal can die while the organism as a whole continues to live, so individual humans can die while humanity, the planet as a whole, and the overall universe continue to exist. The first thing to fall when identity transcends the individual is often the dread of personal extinction -- fear of death can itself become extinct.