We no Longer Believe our Stories

What it means for the future of humanity.

The Crucifixion has long been a symbol for mankind — a Judeo-Christian representation of the transcendence of suffering through its voluntary acceptance. To me, the crucifixion of Christ is a symbol of the implacability of nature and Man’s unwillingness to submit to its demands. Rather would we, in defiance, accept the unavoidable treatise of suffering on the condition that we have the ultimate authority and last say on the terms and conditions. Such is the defiance that defines our species, and for millennia, humans have toiled with this image acting on their psyche.

So why should we work at all, if there is no afterlife and there are no god(s)?

You see, the world can be most fundamentally broken down into a forum for action and a place of things. Modern man digs deeper into the true nature of matter, but I posit only at the expense of the mythological stories that got mankind to this point. And with the manipulation and transcendence of nature due to technology, he is poised to do unprecedented good or evil.

Why gods exist| It is hard for the solitary creature to be his own juror, castigator, and friend. Such vocations are cast to society, and therein he can find his worth in what he has to offer. So too, he might like to believe in the existence of the untethered to find his purpose. For to look inwards infinitely is to look through infinite mirrors. If one wants to know oneself, one must look into the eyes of another. The only set of eyes not clouded irreducibly. Insodoing, human nature is gifted and cursed with the collective. So, too, must he create a set of the watcher’s eyes, apart from he, that he may better know himself and find his purpose.

Mircea Eliade, The Forge and the Crucible

It is right that the historiographic consciousness of Western man should be at one with the deeds and ideals of his very remote ancestry — even though modern man, heir to all these myths and dreams, has succeeded in realizing them only by breaking loose from their original significance.

Religion was borne of the fundamental human quest for purpose| You don’t judge a painting by the gallery it is in. You don’t judge a book by its binding. So why judge our inherited religious ideation on the ignorance and corruption of its modern-day inheritors?

I argue for the beauty of religion as for the purpose it was invented, not for the one it serves today. It served a soteriological function — offering salvation to even the most pitiable soul. The Judaeo-Christian ideation that we have inherited indeed oriented good and bad for civilizations over millennia, and engendered some of the most culturally beautiful art, architecture, writing, etc.

So, why do we work, again?

Mircea Eliade, The Forge and the Crucible

Man has from time immemorial been condemned to work. But there is a difference, and it is a fundamental one. To supply the necessary energy to the dreams and ambitions of the nineteenth century, work had to be secularized. For the first time, in his history, man assumed the very harsh task of ‘doing better and quicker than Nature’, without now having at his disposal the liturgical dimension which in other societies made work bearable. And it is in work finally secularized, in work in its pure state, numbered in hours and units of energy consumed, that man feels the implacable nature of temporal duration, its full weight of slowness. — Eliade.

We’ve but an endless fabric between us and no man is an island unto himself. The spirit of Man evolved through dance and song and word, writ and spoken. And under the auspices of aim good and true, many a god has been born and has died in the heart of man. And though the gods no longer rule high court in the sky, still and to this day, they rule the realms of men. So, to those who dispense with religion as simple farce, or proto-theory, ask yourself whence your culture evolved from. And heed, do not cast out so readily the tapestry under your feet, for you do not know what lurks below. Nor ahead.