At first—
At first God was among us and told us what would happen and how to handle it. Then at some point he didn’t seem to be there anymore and whether he ever existed at all became a philosophical debate, passed down orally by what we would call later a priest class. Of course, the future return of God was their overriding belief and teaching.
We passed through a desert, a lifeless place where corpses had been placed to decay, and marveled at the profound peace and beauty of it. If God had been with us, he no doubt would have told us of the subjugation that awaited us beyond that serene nothingness, but all we had were priests who darkly wondered who had put those corpses there and only insisted that the important thing was to keep believing what we believed.
Maybe they sensed that those who were to enslave us would despise what we believed, and would set about forcing us to believe something else. It’s not so much that they succeeded as we just got tired.
At some point—I can’t say exactly when because there wasn’t an exact when, and pieces of me lived on in other people and in the memories I had engineered upon the earth—I died, and had a vision of an archaeologist of exceptional brilliance, millennia later, who would sift through our remains and arrive at the ingenious conclusion that these people had believed in something called “God.” Since it was such an abstruse abstraction, as with Einstein at first, very few people were equipped to understand it. That would come later when the mechanism of human thought creating form was more commonly understood. But then, things only got worse as our brilliant investigator deduced the concepts of worship, salvation, damnation, prayer, and other inscrutabilities, and tried to elucidate the purpose of some silver artifacts.
Two broke away from one in a daring move, and created the plane—then three rebelled and gave us space. These processes were called “time”—which by its nature is filled with woe. Reality is an infinite set of possibilities, inherent in nothingness. Thinkers who followed in the archaeologist’s footsteps would discover the question: why did “he” do this? Why did “he” step out of pristine unity and create good and evil?
Which is more brilliant—the ingenuity of the primitive mind, or the later finesse of its decoding?
October 14, 2018