- My suspicion about the death of gods became confirmed
in the latter part of September 1998 when my wife and I visited Vienna,
Austria. I took her to see the great Karlskirche, a magnificent Baroque
church. I often visited that church in the 1930s. The side altars were
always aglow from the light of hundreds of votive candles lit by the faithful
at the shrine of their favorite saints. The flickering lights bathed the
nave with a soft glow. A lingering scent of incense, left behind from a
hundred masses, filled the church with a mysterious presence of The Other.
A priest scurrying through the transept added an authoritative mark communicating
in the stillness of the church that this was, indeed, a holy place.
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- Some 60 years later, on that September day, a few lonely
candles kept a forlorn watch in front of the images of the saints. Gone
was the aura of mystery and awe. There were more tourists, visiting the
church as though it were a museum, than there were worshippers on their
knees before their god. There was no sense of a holy presence. Only the
reminiscence of a world lost long ago flooded over me. I experienced the
same sense of the loss of The Other while visiting the St. Rochus church
in Vienna's Third District. Both churches were relics of what once was
vital and alive but now seemed to be sepulchers of a dead god.
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- A visit to St. Stephen's Cathedral only heightened the
sense that even that venerable church had become more of a museum than
a symbol of the presence of the divine.
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- It dawned on me that gods do indeed die. We are living
in a time of a wake for god. Thus, it has always been in the history of
humankind. We worship our gods. They die and others gods take their places.
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- Mighty Zeus, once believed to have reigned from Mt. Olympus,
has been reduced to nothing more than a mythological figure from classical
antiquity. We know Zeus never really existed. None of the ancient gods
or goddesses ever actually lived. They were only abstract ideas. It is
a shame that Astarte, the Canaanite fertility goddess, is not alive today.
A statue depicts her with seventy breasts. She was the wife of the Canaanite
Chief God El and bore him 70 little sub-gods. I guess she had a nipple
for each one of her offspring. With the male penchant for female breasts,
Astarte might win every beauty contest in America. I am sure John Ashcroft
is glad that she was not behind him when he spoke in front of a bare-breasted
statue of Justice. At a cost of $8,000 to shroud one measly mammary gland,
taxpayers would have had to shell out $560,000 to cover Astarte to protect
American morality.
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- Gods and goddesses come and go. Odin, Frigga, Ceres,
Persephone, Marduk, Timat, Xpiyacoc, Xmucane, and many more gods are all
dead and gone. All were worshipped with sincerity and devout piety by countless
thousands. To have suggested to these humble, although bloodthirsty, folks
that these gods were mere figments of their imaginations would have caused
them to kill the messenger.
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- Who is America's god today? What is the status of our
god whose name is printed on every single dollar bill, marked on every
coin, plastered on placards, bumper stickers, and even T-shirts? Do we
not proudly proclaim his name when we swear allegiance to our flag? Who
is the god whose life and mighty deeds are proclaimed in the Bible?
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- The existence of a thousand different and differing churches,
sects, denominations, assemblies, fellowships, etc. provides a mute witness
that there is no agreement about the nature of the biblical god. We say
that we worship the god of the Bible. But money and power are the gods
of our civilization! Where is god when corporations cook their books in
order to show a bigger profit? Where is the god of the Bible when corporate
lackeys, posing as the elected representative of the people, pass laws
enabling corpgreed to inflate the value of their stocks? Where is god when
individuals find ways of cheating on their income taxes? When push comes
to shove, who is Kenny Boy's god? Todd Geiger, a former energy trader,
in a story appearing in the Houston Chronicle, December 16, 2002, admitted
that traders provided false information in order to push up natural gas
prices. Who is their god? Most of the rest of us join in the adoration
of the greenbacks in our wallets. Most of us are members of the choir along
with politicians, business tycoons, and the Wall Street Journal adoring
the god of Mammon. Profits, stock options, corporate mergers, and R.O.I.'s,
are the names of our gods.
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- We grovel before the C.E.O.s, C.P.A.s, lawyers, bought
legislators, et al who are the popes and priests, the parsons and preachers,
the rabbis and rectors of the god of Mammon whose name is capitalism. In
past centuries, the money-gods were known by different names: Imperialism,
Feudalism, and Mercantilism. They are all dead now. The god of Capitalism
will also die. Our god lives by stock frauds, insider trading, enslavement
of an entire population to a disintegrating health care system, faulty
manufacturing problems protected by special legislation prohibiting lawsuits
for negligence, and a hundred other schemes to make our god a symbol of
fiscal obesity, an emblem of monetary overindulgence. Such a deity must
eventually choke to death on his own vomit or die because of a blocked
bowel since all that fecal matter backs up in his intestinal tract.
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- The god of Eternal Youth is another postmodern deity.
Plastic surgeons tuck in tummies, lift sagging breasts, bellies, buttocks,
and remove face and neck wrinkles. But we know that the gods of Eternal
Youth are just temporary deities. They are gods of fraud and sham. Time
marches on and everything lifted will again sag. The wrinkles will return.
It used to be that women mostly worshipped that idol. Now we find men in
ever increasing numbers bring their offerings to the surgeon's scalpel.
Botox is the name of the new god. Yet, deep down inside, we surely know
that the smiles of this god will eventually turn to the wrinkles of an
old man whose death is just around the corner.
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- Now comes the real shocker. America really does worship
the gods of the Bible! Only it is an array of gods we hardly ever recognize
as the official pronouncement of the good book. While I do not believe
in using the Bible as a proof-text, there are profound insights about life
in that collection of 66 books written over about 1,000 years. You know
the scenario of the Adam and Eve story. The damnable snake, who really
has always gotten "dissed," talked Eve into taking a bite of
the fruit that God had forbidden either Adam or Eve to eat. The snake said,
"Éfor God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened,
and you will be like God, knowing good and evil." (Gen. 3:3) Eureka!
That is the passage. When we claim to know good from evil, we become gods!
Our heads swell, our egos inflate, our vanities explode! Isn't this the
place we have always been in human history? We profess to know absolutely
what is right and wrong. The moment we make that profession, we ourselves
become the gods of the universe.
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- With a sense of false humility, we may deny such an accusation.
But when we look at our deeds and our prejudices, we know that we have
set up ourselves as little gods! Like god, we sit in judgment of each other.
Like god, we also execute judgment. He who does not embrace our interpretation
of good is likely to be nuked, fried, gassed, and condemned to die by biological
or chemical terrors. In the name of some deity, we seek to justify our
blood-thirst. But there is no such deity. We are the gods who determine
the destiny of the world. It makes little difference whether we live in
Washington, D.C. or in Baghdad, Iraq. We proclaim to know good from evil.
That knowledge makes us think that we are the gods of universe, judging,
condemning, and executing.
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- We could provide enough renewable energy to make Earth
a Garden of Eden. We could desalinate enough seawater to flood the Sahara
and make it the breadbasket for the entire world. We could learn to live
in harmony and peace. But we are gods whose claim as our Fathers are gory
Mars and bloody Ares. We speak ex cathedra with the air of absolute finality
and, like the gods, we pronounce who shall live and who shall die. Alas,
when we die, the god also dies!
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- The record shows that today's pathetic absolutes disintegrate
with tomorrow's knowledge. Time makes ancient good uncouth. The little
gods who are nothing but reflections of our hubris, our ignorance, and
our inadequacies will die the moment our coffins are placed into the earth.
The world is split into warring camps not because there is an actual deity
who, in an incontrovertible, incontestable, irrefutable manner, has pronounced
the meaning of good and evil. The world is rent asunder because we are
gods pronouncing our petty preferences as incontrovertible, incontestable,
irrefutable truths. Yet, in a nanosecond of cosmic times, we shall be dead
and the god we confess to be shall be six feet under the ground.
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- Obviously, proclaiming to be gods, we bite off a bit
more than we can really chew. The result is emotional imbalance, intellectual
confusion, and mental incoherence. President Bush is a good example of
the problems we all face when we act as gods. During the presidential campaign,
he averred that Jesus is his philosopher. The philosophy of Jesus is, of
course, hard to define. During two millenniums of the life of the Christian
Church, untold tens of thousands have been killed because of different
interpretations of the text. Yet, I think that most believers, in spite
of the fact their lives do not validate their confessions, would affirm
that Jesus' philosophy, if that is what you want to call it, embraces love
and compassion. "Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you,
bless those who curse you, pray for those who abuse you É Do unto
others as you would have them do unto you." (Luke 6: 27 & 31)
"But if anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn the other also."
(Mt. 5: 39)
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- I, for one, have a hard time reconciling the President's
saber-rattling with the philosophy of Jesus. One or the other god worshipped
by the President is dead. If, indeed, it is true that we are really known
by our deeds, then the God of love is deader than a doornail. Billions
spent for "defense," tax cuts for the super rich, Kenneth Lay
walking around a free man, erosion of the Bill of Rights, all provide evidence
that the righteousness of God in the august halls of our government is,
in fact, very dead!
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- The reason human history is littered with the bodies
of dead gods is because we have yet to define the essential essence of
our lives. The god we worship is but a mirror image of our egocentricity.
Having taken a bite of the apple, we become gods and when we die, god dies
along with us. The world is a brutal place because we believe ourselves
to be god, knowing good and evil. Yet all we seem to know is our self-interest.
We are pathetically ignorant about the nature of Nature.
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- Were God alive, we would be filled with humility, we
would hunger and thirst for righteousness, we would be merciful, we would
be pure in heart, and we would seek the things that make for peace.
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- God dies as soon as you take your last breath. To move
beyond good and evil releases us from the curse of being god.
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- [John Brand is a Purple Heart, Combat Infantry veteran
of World War II. He received his Juris Doctor degree at Northwestern University
and a Master of Theology and a Doctor of Ministry at Southern Methodist
University. He served as a Methodist minister for 19 years, was Vice President,
Birkman & Associates, Industrial Psychologists, and concluded his career
as Director, Organizational and Human Resources, Warren-King Enterprises,
an independent oil and gas company. He is the author of <http://www.yt.org/gifts.php>"Shaking
the Foundations."]
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- John Brand encourages your comments: <mailto:jbrand@YellowTimes.org>jbrand@YellowTimes.org
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