I think a lot about the nature of human beings...I think a lot about what the world could be if everybody understood each other.
There are many academic disciplines that research different aspects of understanding -- science and math prove with matter and numbers, philosophy proves with ideological frameworks, psychology proves with behavior patterns, language proves with sound. Anthropology attempts to connect them all through the loop of culture, but math and science don't operate on anecdotal evidence. Science records measurable results, but only recently has it encountered something it can measure, but can't dissect; it won't publish a fact about dark matter until it has a sample of the stuff. Psychology wants to understand the human psyche, but it can't bring itself to accept a statement that doesn't apply to the entire population. Language itself dragged us into evolving civilizations -- once we were able to communicate with each other, everybody got smarter -- but the study often distracts itself with tiny details, sometimes to the point where it shuts itself off from the rest of the world. And history is nothing but a collection of stories told by those best able to communicate.
I think they could all answer each other's questions. I think about that a lot. A lot of people probably think about that.
I hear distant echoes of it in great works of literature, in politics, in the arts. I see it in the eyes of awe, on the lips of purpose, in the ectoplasm of altruism. I think we might all know all the answers, but only in tiny glimpses -- and as creatures bound by time, the glimpse isn't long enough for us to process it all.
The oldest things that still exist seem like the most obvious clues.
What is religion, assuming no gods exist? What evolutionary purpose did religion serve, and why is it still around?
What if everything operates pretty much the same way? What if the story of God, Mary and Jesus is actually just an analogy of a father, a mother and a son, and can be applied to any earthly creature? Is the Bible telling us that once we've had children, we'll change from jealous and selfish to all-merciful and unconditionally loving?
Was the story of Jesus telling us that some people are simply too good for this world? That when somebody dies in the process of overturning the status quo, that person's work will not end if he has inspired enough people? If he has communicated clearly enough to achieve true understanding in enough people, maybe he does become immortal in a sense.
If it's all just a giant metaphor, the root of it still lies in communication -- it's just that metaphor is a really effective way to make people understand big ideas. In fact, you can use a metaphor to inflate a small idea just as well -- it makes big things small and small things big. It has the capacity to make an idea climb to the top or slide to the bottom of our internal priority lists. Politicians do this incessantly.
Jesus used a lot of metaphor, and his teachings were built on analogies. Does the longevity of the Jesus story reveal something very basic about how we've come to be what we are? Is he still around because, as a species, we must never forget the evolutionary importance of communication? If no one understands each other, we turn inside of ourselves -- we let ourselves become a petri dish for anti-civilization tendencies. We'll stop trusting each other, we'll assume others are the ignorant ones, and it'll become nearly impossible for us to truly understand what another person is trying to say. Was the world like that before Jesus?
Did he bring salvation from eternal (or internal) damnation in the form of metaphor?
I think about this a lot. I think about themes like "To understand God, you must know Jesus," and "Jesus is the only door to God's kingdom," and their potential relationship to metaphor. Is the Bible telling us that metaphor was actually God's gift to us, that allowed mortals to grasp the concept of immortality -- and in that, our own mortality?
Is God a construct of the human psyche that survived because it made us consider understanding things that are greater than us?
Before the Bible, we know that Greece didn't need it to flourish into an advanced society. They did, however, have their own extensive network of gods, and that network is very interesting -- all the Greek gods were behaviorally similar to mortals. In their myths, the gods pick favorites, they hook up and cheat on each other, they even rape humans. They are not fair or just or kind or forgiving, and the Greeks were subject to their whims.
Ancient Greeks also developed astronomy, early calculus, logic, long-form epics, arts, and the very notion of science. They lived in separate city-states, which operated independently and generally got along with each other. They created the first public school system, implying that education was expected of a citizen. They operated under the first form of democracy, and ran a system of checks and balances...And I might be reaching here, but I think it all came from having to live beneath the incessant drama of their gods.
I think their society was so successful because their gods showed them what not to do. They knew the importance of checks and balances because Zeus was a giant asshole with a lot of power, and they avoided any notion of glorifying a human king because Zeus would get the red ass. Is that the only way to maintain an egalitarian society? An invisible dictatorship?
Of course not, because all societies flourish differently, and they will continue to. All the variations are right answers, and all of them work at some point in time. They are born and they die; they are all as mortal as we are.
What if everything operates pretty much the same way we do? What if we're both microcosm and macrocosm of every mystery we've attempted to solve? What if everything is subject to whim, chance, and death, just as we are? If dark matter is just a dense spot of nothing in the ever-expanding nothingness of space, will we be able to accept that? Or will we deny it until the sun blows up, just because we couldn't create a ruler that can measure nothing?
I think the very essence of us is somewhere in the latter -- the reason we're at the top of the food chain, the reason we're driven to attempt to live in peace, the reason we started drawing pictures on rocks. The reason we want to be better than ourselves and leave knowledge behind for future generations.
The divine contradiction.
For human society to propagate, it must be driven to be better than the beasts. In a universe of chaos, on a planet where the odds are so very much against a fragile human body, we can probably assume hope was hard to come by in those early years. But hope isn't the only motivator...it's just an effective one. We read about Ancient Egyptians worshiping the very mortal Pharaoh, and we dug up their graves to find their massive emphasis on the afterlife. But in that society, at least in the earliest phase, only the Pharaoh had an afterlife -- the citizens didn't get that privilege, yet they still worked the fields and built incredibly sturdy monuments to their society. Where was their motivation? Pleasing their Pharaoh, their God.
Pleasing somebody was enough for them.
I sometimes wonder what it was that first made a human being happy. I like to think it was another human being. I like to think that when it happened, both people felt something bigger than themselves, and they couldn't understand it or measure it or forget it.
I like to think that communication grew out of that moment, because those two people had to find some way to express what they felt. Perhaps they'd never felt the need to do it before then; perhaps there was just nothing worth writing down. But this, this was more important than either of them, because it gave them a reason to stick together -- they now had a mission, a purpose, to relate this feeling to everyone they could find. It was too good to keep, the supply was unlimited, and it could be created out of nothing. But how did they find a way to talk about it? I'm not sure that they did. Love is hard to describe -- people are still trying to do it, in fact. In the Bible, it's said that God is love, over and over again.
But if we understand that God's only son is metaphor, then we get this: Love is the father of Metaphor.
And further:
Love created Man.
Man shared part of himself with Love to create Woman.
Love told Mary that the baby in her womb was (a) Metaphor, and was to be the savior of Mankind. No penetration required.
Metaphor got the message of Love across to the population, using allegory and parable. They started to follow Metaphor, because he gave enough of a shit (due to Love) to teach in a form they could understand.
Powered by Love, Metaphor turned water into wine; multiplied bread and fish to feed his followers -- Metaphor created something out of nothing.
Metaphor was nailed to a cross and died, in the society's effort to maintain its framework -- Metaphor was a threat to humans in power.
The disciples of Metaphor wrote books describing Love and miraculous events through Metaphor. The books maintain that the only way to describe Love -- to know it, to feel it -- is through Metaphor.
Is Jesus still affecting the world today because he broke the love-language barrier? Maybe he wasn't the first one to do it, but he definitely told the right words to the right people somewhere along the line. Nobody would have listened to him if he hadn't called himself a savior, or the son of God, so he told them exactly that. If it meant that much to him, I refuse to believe he wasn't in love with a lady.
I think too much about a lot of shit.
