I Replaced God

by Paul de Bruin

God is dead (Nietzsche)

For something to die it has to be alive first, quite simple, but what does that mean? What does it mean to be alive? Is it because I can think? (Descartes) Can an entity think? Can something we have never actually seen, heard or felt be alive?

The answer is quite simple, yes. How so? The thing is that the human mind is capable of many wondrous things and one of the most fantastic things is that it can imagine things and bring them to life. Through our imagination we have brought to life many Gods. The pantheon of Greek and Roman Gods is a good example of that. They were alive as long as we worshipped them and they died when we stopped doing so. In those days the Gods were tangible, we could touch them through statues, we could smell them through incense and we could carry them around. We built temples to be able to worship them and in doing so we brought them to life and gave them a home.

We humans needed our Gods and still do, we need a higher authority to help us to get through life, to give us meaning and comfort. Humans live in groups, and to be able to do so we need structure and so we created the Gods to be able to explain thunder and lightning in the Stone Age and to explain our emotions such as love, hate, lust and grief in the later stages of our growth into bigger and more complex societies.

We are now more than 2000 years further and most of those Gods have disappeared and only a handful remain (the Hindu and Taoist religions being the odd ones out although many of the Hindu Gods are an incarnation of Vishnu). The remaining ones are also the more practical ones because they have only one God and He can be worshipped anywhere.

In our modern society the temples and gods are becoming outdated and old-fashioned, but we still need something to believe in. That new something became the “I”. Since the 60s the trend has been to abolish the old and to advocate individuality. On the one hand, there are groups which cannot imagine a life without the supernatural and they cling to the old ways with an ever increasing fanaticism, becoming more and more secluded from modern-day society. The other and so-called free thinkers have only to fend for themselves and are not weighed down by ancient rituals and the “I “ takes center stage with a still larger proportion of people feeling that they are unique and very capable of organising their own lives. But are we that capable? Nowadays there are many books written on the subject of self-help, “How to be a success in business?”, “Anger Management” and so on and these are replacing what the preachers used to teach us. I don’t need help, I can do it myself. We no longer feel the need to turn to something to guide us, we now turn inward to look for answers and our imagination will lead the way, just like we did thousands of years ago when we created our Gods who were alive when we needed them. But what if there actually is a God? Douglas Adams gives us the perfect answer to this in his book “Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy”. As soon as it can be proven that He exists, religion will end and become Science.

These are difficult and confusing times we live in, but it is a period of transition, we will have to find new ways to deal with the difficult questions of life, but human kind is very resilient. Believe in yourself and the sky is the limit. We can and will do it, again and again, forever.