The 1995 hit song released by Joan Osborne, “What if God was one of us?”, reminded me of another mythical story (ignoring the poor grammar of the title). Called “The Rabbi’s Gift,” it is a tale of a rabbi visiting and giving a talk at a Christian monastery fallen on hard times in which he postulates that one of the few remaining monks may actually be the Messiah in disguise — which notion they embrace as a distinct possibility. What if…surely not me, but maybe you, are indeed the Second Coming?… and this results in the revitalization of the monastery.
With all the events happening in the world today, and in fact, in my living memory — the present only seeming to be an acceleration of the past as prologue — it got me to thinking of another “What if?” — What if this Earth, and by extension the whole present universe, is not positioned somewhere between heaven and hell, but actually is hell itself? Leaving aside for the moment whether or not there may be a heavenly realm somewhere else, or another universe that exists as a kind of purgatory, sandwiched between a paradisical version of existence and a hell realm?
This concept is not alien to conventional, Protestant Christianity, as I learned as a panelist on an online, Christian-inspired interfaith dialog promoting world peace more than a year ago. The young Christian minister panelists went to great pains to explain how a loving God could permit such atrocities as are our daily fare on the news and in our neighborhoods — a question that naturally occurred frequently.
They held that the doctrine of the Second Coming teaches that the Earth is now, indeed, ruled by Satan; and that only when Christ is reborn on Earth will he be defeated, and an eternal reign of peace on Earth can ensue.
Some anomalies in this belief popped up as well, such as that Christ redux will live a normal life, including marriage and family, and will die when the time has come. I am not sure whether he then retires to heaven to receive his reward, and his kids take over. But I was intrigued by the notion that this branch of theism allows for a kind of rebirth, as taught in classical Buddhism, if limited to the one and only begotten son of God.
Whatever the future implications of my initial conjecture, I think it reasonable that if we take an unblinking look at the operative conditions and conditions underway on the planet, for the moment ignoring their many possible causes, a telling description may emerge. A short list from the top of my head — and that you may feel free to embellish — includes, in no particular order:
National leaders betraying their own citizens, and waging war on other nations, approving of the bombing of civilians, including children.
Religious leaders giving lip service to the gospel, benefiting from lavish lifestyles of the clergy, all the while molesting children and/or covering up the rapacious and predatory behavior of others.
Online scammers taking advantage of weak and aged members of their own communities as well as those far-flung around the world.
Charitable leaders pocketing proceeds and ripping off their donors based upon good intentions and genuinely charitable instincts of their victims.
So-called institutions of higher learning offering worthless degrees for increasingly higher costs financed by loan sharks charging usurious fees.
Child labor on the rise in dangerous and degrading jobs under hazardous working conditions that no thinking adult would accept.
Political leaders basing public campaigns for office and fundraising initiatives on religious premises while privately violating tenets ofthose faiths.
Corporate monopolies in all industries gouging consumers with ruinous prices no matter the varying cost of acquisition and production of goods.
Government leaders at all levels promoting myths of free markets while on the take from the corrupting influence of lobbyists.
I could go on, as could you, but it is getting depressing. My basic question is: Does this not read like a perfect description of hell? Or hell on Earth, at least? And it is clearly going to get a lot worse before it gets better. Imagine the following future scenario:
Having recently launched the 27th space ship in the last months — count ‘em, 27 — more than the total launches in history to date, the private space industry, in collaboration with NASA, is planning to send astronauts on a ride around the moon and back, then to land on the moon once again, as a launching pad for a future junket to Mars. As a Sci-Fi junkie, I welcome these developments. But as a citizen, I regard them with a healthy paranoia, as to the intent and eventual usage of enhanced powers of world domination portended by extending our corporate reach to other celestial bodies.
But for the sake of argument, let us say that all goes well, and we eventually find ourselves exploring our sister planet much as we would vacation in another country. What if (there I go again) we find that Mars does, indeed, have adequate water on board — which should not surprise; even the otherwise arid lunar surface is bogarting some ice at one of its poles; and after all, hydrogen is the single-most abundant element in the universe, if we are to believe the astrophysicists. Let’s allow that we can, indeed, establish a successful colony there.
Let us further suppose that in the more distant future, but not so long that all racial memory of the old planet has been lost, we are still reporting back to Mother Earth. At a certain point of inhabiting the new world, what if we inchoate Martians make another game-changing discovery. After re-establishing the atmosphere that those same wily astrophysicists claim once enshrouded Mars, we have the luxury of time, and the advanced technology in hand, to detect that, indeed, the planet once hosted life; but further, that it was actually once occupied by an advanced civilization of beings, as imagined by an early astronomical discoverer of the “canals” of Mars. Suppose that, through ground-penetrating radar, emanating from Mars-bound satellites, we (okay, they) discover irrefutable evidence of — if not man-made, then some kind of intelligent creature-made — underground imprints of historical artifacts, including architectural and city-planning geometries, now long obscured by accumulation of debris, much as we still find traces from ancient civilizations, on Earth.
Suppose further that the only conclusion to be drawn, from the preponderance of evidence, is that the “new” planet is not only not new, and was not only once a home to life, but had been occupied by an intelligent race! But, somehow, it had declined over time — a lot of time — to the deplorable state in which we now find it. Much like Easter Island, but on a planetary scale.
All along, and after all of our hard work, we were hoping to colonize, and bring to life, a new world. Now revealed as an old world, perhaps much older than the tenure of humanity whence we came. We now know that it was once so, but some solar cataclysm must have occurred that wiped out all life, or somehow its denizens managed to blow it up, much like the old planet that we are hoping to abandon, like our humble starter home, likely to be a teardown for someone planning to build new digs.
With climate change looming back home, triggering all manner of natural disasters that are no longer exactly natural, but karmic consequences of humanity on a cosmic level, we begin to accept the terrifying possibility that we may be truly alone in the universe.
But rather than as God’s chosen people, privileged to live in what could have been a kind of earthly paradise as we would like to believe, we are instead doomed to be reborn, again and again into eternity — in this same neighborhood of the vast and hellish chiliocosm, the same and only living planet in the local solar system, as our just due and perpetual punishment — haunted by the ominous premonition that even if we were reborn on another whole world, in another whole galaxy, it would be no better. And even if it were slightly better than our present abode, that we would probably destroy it as well, as our cultural evolution once again becomes sufficiently advanced.
“When will they ever learn?” applied to Infinity, and Eternity.
