Visitation - Why Earthlings Need Aliens, Lourdes, And Miracles

Ivan Karamazov in Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov tells his brother that Jesus Christ sold out the world when he met the Devil in the Judean desert.  'Man does not live by bread alone', he told the Devil who offered him riches beyond imagining, but in so doing he made promises which he could not keep.  Man needed bread, didn't have it, led a life misery, pain, and misfortune, and with his divine power he could have set the world straight. 

 

Miracles, mystery, and authority was what he gave, and because of it the Church - a manipulative, exploitive, authoritarian - arrogated to itself authority for all moral and ethical principle.  To maintain its power, it gave the credulous, deceived, and ignorant masses what Christ promised, but did nothing to alleviate their suffering - to ease the earthly pain which was humanity's hallmark.

And so it was that Our Lady of Lourdes and Our Lady of Fatima was said to be seen in grottos in France and Portugal, and why saints were granted the right to heaven thanks to the miracles that they performed; and all through this magic, this vaudevillian show of immense appeal, the Church grew to a size and importance which challenged kings. 

Alyosha, Ivan's devoutly religious brother is shocked at Ivan's apostasy.  Alyosha has given his whole life to Christ, had believed completely in Christ's divine mission to offer salvation, redemption, and forgiveness of sins. 

'Ha', said Ivan, unconvinced and cynical of his brother's piety and went on to tell of the most horrendous, brutal, and inhuman treatment of children in the world - beatings, rapes, forced labor, starvation, and early death.  Christ said, 'Let the children suffer unto me', but behind this seemingly innocent and generous gesture, this expression of love and kindness, lay the most duplicitous deceit.  Christ could have eliminated suffering and yet he made it a pillar of the Church. 

To each and every one of Ivan's accusations of Christ's bribery - giving candy to childlike believers but deceiving them in his real intent by offering spiritual renewal and a place beside the Lord, Alyosha could only respond with the simplistic, superficial, patently false platitudes of the Church. 

The story of Christianity is a remarkable one - the evangelism of St. Paul who travelled from Palestine to Rome, preaching the gospel of hope and establishing churches in Galatia, Ephesus, and Corinth, small household gatherings of those whose lives held nothing but penury, sickness, and death. 

These churches could not be left on their own in an age of apostasy, so priests were created, and when the churches grew in number they were given bishops, then archbishops, then cardinals and popes. A quite secular, geopolitical, authoritative institution was created. 

And still the credulous masses blessed themselves, told ordained priests their sins, believed whole-heartedly in the pagan ceremony of transubstantiation, turning bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ as asking believers to 'eat of it'. 

This ritual sacrifice was to evoke the suffering of Christ on the cross where he died a painful, suffocating death.  Suffering had become the mainstay of the Church - a necessary feature of life to make one worthy of admission to heaven. 

Muslims deny that this painful, torturous death on the cross never occurred.  How could the Almighty permit such barbaric treatment of one of his prophets?  How could suffering be made the central feature of human life? 

Yet this was the genius of the Catholic Church - by making suffering the cornerstone of salvation, it was not obliged to relieve it in any way, and so the credulous became even more so.  Every new infliction of pain had divine purpose. 

The Church also knew that it could not sustain its majesty without proof, and so invented the ideas of mystery and miracles.  Go to Lourdes, the Vatican said, and there witness the magnificence of the Virgin Mary come down to earth as a messenger of Our Lord and Savior, and come to Holy Mass to witness the invocation of Christ through symbols, metaphor, verse, and magic. 

Protestant fundamentalism took a page out of the Vatican's book but added a note of urgency.  If you read the Bible, believed in its inerrancy, prayed, and took Jesus as your personal savior, he might well come to you - a visitation, an invitation to glory. 

In churches all over the South, congregants became ecstatic with unbounded joy when they saw Jesus appear before them.  Heaven was real, they now knew, and their path there was assured. 

Over the centuries the spiritual authority of the Church and in fact belief in God himself waned, and the most recent statistics confirm that much of Northern Europe is agnostic, demurring when asked the question, 'Do you without reservation believe in God'; but in Mississippi and Alabama there are no such doubts and questions about divinity are considered traitorous apostasy. 

Yet modernization - what closed the door on spiritual cant in Scandinavia - will happen in Mississippi and Alabama and the thousands of churches that seem to be everywhere will disappear. 

But the Church knew something about human nature and the desire of human beings to believe in something bigger than themselves.  There is no way that human beings could have no need for divine authority, a higher intelligence, a superior force. 

Conservative critics have noted the erosion of a central Christian ethos in America - one, universally accepted credo that unified the varied and diversified population of the nation.  It was there at the heart of the Republic when created after Independence, God-given rights, the declarers of freedom said, drawing inspiration from European Enlightenment. 

Now America is a playing field of secular identities, promoted as the new ethos.  Diversity, equity, and inclusivity became the mantra of the new Left.  God is immaterial, unnecessary, supernumerary in the struggle for a utopian, secular reality. 

The Left of course - like its Communist forbears - wants the State to assume the mantel of absolute authority, and progressives have preached the gospel of statism.  There is nothing that government cannot do, and in an ironic reprise of Dostoevsky, certainly more than God can provide. 

Americans of every living generation grew up on comic books, and alien invasion was a common theme.  Creatures from outer space, fleeing their own dying planet were looking for new worlds to conquer, and earth with its verdant landscapes, abundant water, and generous climes was the perfect place.  These creatures were superior in all ways, but human beings always found ways around their dazzling intelligence and superpowers. 

Arthur C Clarke wrote 2001 - A Space Odyssey and Stanley Kubrick turned it into an iconic movie about human contact with an extraterrestrial intelligence.  This story was a sophisticated antithesis to the dime store fantasies of the day.  It suggested that the universe did indeed contain intelligences far more advanced and superior to our own - intelligences which had evolved far beyond physical form and space and were simply pure intelligence, existing everywhere. 

Clarke admitted that he found inspiration in Hinduism where God is simply the One, a universal, inexplicable force that suffuses the universe with its being.  Hindus despite the profusion of their many gods is a profoundly monotheistic religion.  Siva, Krishna, Vishnu, Ganesh, and all the other gods are but manifestations of the One, the understandable transformation of the unknowable into knowable form. 

These more sophisticated notions often do not find currency in Christian America.  Judeo-Christian tradition insists on palpability, knowability, approachability, fear, respect, and duty.  God and Moses talk to each other in Exodus.  God wants Moses to lead his chosen people out of Egypt, but Moses says he is not worthy.  He stutters, is just a poor man, and not a leader. 

God and Job speak.  Job wonders why he has been chosen by God to suffer so.  What have I done? he asks God, but God refuses to answer and send another pestilence to test Job. 

All of this leads to the obvious question - if all human societies, every last one has believed in religion, deities, higher powers, supreme, authoritative intelligences, can our modern one survive without it?  Can there ever be a completely atheistic, secular society that lives and breathes on its own?

The Russian Communists tried.  Marx and Engels conceived of a utopian secular society without God. God and belief in him were obstacles to progress; and American progressives are no different.  Yet religious belief persists, at least in pockets especially in the South.  What has always been a human need cannot easily be eradicated.   

 

There has been talk recently of UFOs, and the current administration has promised to open formerly secret files about them, giving at least some currency to the notion of extraterrestrial, highly intelligent life.  

And what if there were some truth to the rumors?  Given Clarke and Kubrick - and Hinduism - it seems highly unlikely that aliens of a supreme intelligence would be riding around in flying saucers. 

Nevertheless Christian fundamentalists are preparing for first contact and deciding how they would evangelize these alien visitors.  The assumption that a human god - Jesus Christ - a very accessible divinity with human and celestial origins but very much from our planet could have relevance for a evanescent, transcendent intelligence is arrogant and presumptuous at best; but that is the nature of true belief.  An absolute conviction of rightness. 

The advance of Artificial Intelligence adds a new twist to Ivan Karamazov and his cynical dismissal of Christianity.  Before long AI will become more than human.  In its self-replicability, its boundless intelligence and complete authority it will become God, perhaps not worshipped but accepted as a higher power. 

Only time will tell.  Believers insist there is a God, an all knowing, all powerful being; but have a tough time distinguishing it from a future, although not so remote artificial intelligence.  God has always been a human abstract if not a creation, so let's see what new form 'he' will take.