A Phobia of Hate (part one of a rant)

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It used to be the case that when writing an essay or presenting an argument, the writer needed to define one’s terms. This way, parameters were set with clarity and, as we say these days, transparency about what was to be discussed. Sadly, this seems not to be the case any more. I don’t blame social media for this; it seems to me politicians have largely led the charge, using terms with usually clear definitions in ways that suit their own purpose, without any regard for that common understanding. Rarely do they make clear that this is what they are doing. The mainstream media are inclined to do the same. What we may think they’re talking about, they may not be. Perhaps both politicians and the media learned the trick from Christian commenters who are happy to change the meaning of words as they see fit (‘Atheists’, ‘myth’, ‘metaphor’ for example.)

I dealt with autism here. The term, and diagnosis, is now stretched so thinly that, according to the social scientist who first proposed the autistic ‘spectrum’, it has become ‘meaningless’. What other terms have been misapplied until they too have been rendered ‘meaningless’?

How about phobia? Strictly speaking a phobia is an irrational fear, one for which there is no real basis: arachnophobia, agoraphobia, claustrophobia, for example. Of course there may be real grounds for being fearful of spiders (some are poisonous) heights (if perched precariously on the top of a mountain) and enclosed spaces (if it is suffocating), but the terms arachnophobia, acrophobia, claustrophobia are reserved, or at least they used to be, for those whose fear is extreme and above and beyond the rational. The term phobia is now applied to anyone who expresses concern about or criticism of any movement or cause: homophobia, transphobia, Islamophobia come to mind. The first of these started life as an irrational fear that one might oneself be homosexual. Now it’s considered to be, by those who attribute their not ‘getting on’ in life or being subjected to personal criticism, to be the result of their being gay. Certainly ill-considered remarks may be unkind, a word that more than adequately describes much of what is described as phobic in modern society. But being unkind does not equate with a phobia, nor is it against the law. Not yet anyway.

Similarly offensive, a word originally that originally signified a physical attack, the meaning it still carries in law. As Paul Simon once expressed it in a rather pleasant little song, ‘One Man’s Ceiling is Another Man’s Floor’: what I might find offensive, in the sense of hurt feelings, is not necessarily what you find offensive, unless you choose to allow it to be. That’s because ‘offence’ in the slack modern sense is ridiculously subjective: it is, it seems, not a problem to call for the death of Jews but it is offensive to show images of an ancient ‘prophet’. Touchy religious sensibilities, sometimes prone to take offence at the slightest provocation, do not signal a criminal or even a criminal offence. And yet that is where we’ve got to, certainly in the UK. Remember your mother teaching you that sticks and stones may break your bones but words will never hurt you? Of course this is not entirely true; words can cause emotional hurt. But this doesn’t mean those who use words critically merit investigation by the officers of the law.

Hate is a verb. Unlike its antonym love, it cannot also be a noun. I know, this is pedantic of me, but we’re talking about words and the damage they can cause when misapplied. To alter and stretch their meaning out of all recognition results in the problems we now have in (British) society. All of the accusations of ‘hate’ that fly around these days are, grammatically, ‘hatred’ though in fact, they rarely qualify as this either. According to Merriam Webster, hatred is ‘an extreme dislike or disgust or ill will or resentment that is usually mutual: prejudiced hostility or animosity.’ Hatred is a powerful, destructive emotion. Reasoned opposition to the political manoeuvring of minority groups is not really it.

Of course it is possible to take such opposition to extreme lengths that it may look a lot like hatred, but by and large it is not. I do not ‘hate’ religious group that try to impose their beliefs and practices on me or my society, but I do oppose them and their efforts. I also oppose those who claim that any opposition to their efforts constitutes ‘hate’. It rarely does so, but how convenient it is for those who don’t get their own way to have the accusation in their armoury. Which is not to say real hatred isn’t expressed, often in violent action, but strangely, as a society, we seem less concerned with such action. We are, apparently, required to understand the frustrations of those carrying them out; their grievance is genuine and heartfelt. Hurty words though are of much more concern.

 

Devious Types

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Those OT people are what we call types. It is a kind of prophecy. But what it does is demonstrate that such a person is what Israel needed. Jesus was the antitype. Donald J Camp

Sure, provided there’s a supernatural entity overseeing the process. But is there?

Types and antitypes are the creation of theologians in the Middle Ages who sought to explain why Jesus embodies so much ancient Jewish folklore. It’s used today by Christians to assert that Jesus fulfils millions upon millions of prophecies from Jewish scriptures.

But does he really?

As Ark has shown us, the Moses story was created by plagiarising much older myths to construct him and his history. Now either the characters in this process were ‘types’ of Moses, he their ‘antitype’, or these earlier stories were plagiarised by Jewish writers to create Moses and his story.

Which is it? The first explanation is that all the similarities between Sargo/Inanna and Moses were engineered by a deity (or perhaps even Satan) with nothing better to do but to guide the typological process over centuries. The second requires only that human writers recognised a good story when they heard it and plundered it mercilessly for their own ends. A busy-body God or conniving writers with a religious-political agenda? It’s a tough call.

Jump forward a few centuries and lo and behold the same stories crop up again. This time, God has finally brought forth the man everyone has been waiting for. And, it turns out, there were clues to him all along in earlier characters and stories.

Either this or the creators of this character – Jesus the Christ – modelled him on those older fictional heroes, just like the rabbis who wrote about Moses years earlier. These new writers plagiarised stories of Moses, Abraham, Noah, Jonah and David (most of these largely plagiarised themselves), and made their hero do much the same things they did, but better.

So which is more likely? The divine manipulation of a middle Eastern tribe’s history and folklore forcing it to point to a Messiah who would bear no relation to that anticipated by the Jews? Or a total fabrication by clever writers who followed in the footsteps of earlier writers who also stole stories from older sources and recycled them as their own?

Don’t be fooled by fancy terms like types and antitypes. What does Occam’s razor tell you?

Jesus: the Man and the Myth

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There seems to be some renewed discussion online about whether Jesus existed. Let me tell you without fear of contradiction that the Jesus we know today most certainly did not. This is because the Jesus of the gospels is a literary creation. He is a legend, or, if you like, a myth. It’s possible gospel Jesus is based on a real individual. It’s possible too he was a remarkable, charismatic individual, considered by some to be the Messiah.

It’s possible because there were such individuals who made their mark around the time gospel Jesus supposedly lived. He might be of their number. But if he were, why did those who wrote about him decades after the founding of the cult that bears his name (or at least the title bestowed on him) base his story on the legends of older, revered figures, also likely to have been fictional? Why is so much of Jesus’ story a rewrite of the events of that other great Jewish hero, Moses? Compare the circumstances of their births, their mission to lead their people out of bondage, their sojourn in the wilderness, their control of the elements and so on (more parallels here). Why is so much else in the Jesus story constructed around unconnected narratives from Jewish scripture?

Was it because the real person contrived to include these events in his life? Was it God beavering away in the background, making sure Jesus fulfilled prophecies, while mirroring Moses supposed activities? Or was it because those constructing Jesus’ fictional life used Moses and other bits of scripture as the template for writing that life? (Apply Occam’s razor to arrive at the correct answer). And having done so, where does this leave the real Jesus, if there was one? Mired, as Schweitzer discovered over a hundred years ago, in an accretion of metaphor, allegory and magic.

It’s as if a biography of JFK were to be based entirely on the legends of King Arthur, with each episode a rewrite of a story about Camelot and the Knights of the Round Table. There would be the claim too that the Arthurian legends on which this work was based existed only to pre-empt or foreshadow the lives of the Kennedys. Of what historical value would such an account be? None whatsoever. It would not be unreasonable for a reader many years in the future to conclude that the JFK of such a biography had never actually existed. (There would of course be ample evidence outside this silly book that he did; there is not the same evidence for Jesus).

We might also look at Jesus’ lineage. Not those ridiculously conflicting genealogies at the start of Matthew and Luke’s gospels, but all the gods, supernatural beings and miracle men who preceded him. Did any of them exist? Did Baal, Apollo or Zeus? Did Sobek, Dionysus or Mithras? Osiris, Demeter or Romulus and Remus? The archangel Michael, Melchizedek, the cherubim and seraphim? Did the hundreds if not thousand of deities worshipped before Jesus really exist? People were convinced they did, sometimes believing such beings could assume human form and descend among us.* But in reality, none of them did; they neither existed nor, consequently, did they appear here on Earth. But apparently we must accept that Jesus, with his highly symbolic name and mirroring other, older miracle men, not only existed but walked the Earth as a manifestation of God himself.

Then there are all those literally incredible stories about him: the means of his birth, his walking on water while turning it into wine, his raising of the dead, his healing of the diseased and blind, his ability to ride two asses at the same time, the resurrection of his two day old corpse, his post-mortem ability to materialise in locked rooms, his beaming up into the sky… to name only a few. These are the characteristics, not of any other historical figure, but of a character in a fantasy. Each and every pericope in the gospels is not a record of real events but a metaphor, an allegory, of who early cultists believed their heavenly Messiah to be and what they imagined he’d accomplished.

He may have existed, of course, this real Jesus, but we will never know, nor will we ever know anything about him. He need never have existed as far as the gospels are concerned; they are interested only in his legend. Similarly, Paul and his Christ; Paul knows nothing of an Earthly Jesus and has even less interest in him. The writer of Hebrews views Jesus as a heavenly high priest not remotely connected with the gospel legends yet to be created. The spaced-out writer of Revelation and his vengeful archangel Jesus likewise. Jesus is whatever his followers want to make of him, including the bleeding heart of Catholicism and the good buddy of today’s evangelicals. Any real Jesus is superfluous. He might as well not have existed.

*See Ehrman: How Jesus Became God, chapter 1

Virgin Oil

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Dennis and I happened to find ourselves in the German city of Bremen recently where we visited the cathedral of St Peter. Apart from having a chapel in the keller of the church that looked suspiciously like an ancient Mithraic temple, the cathedral seemed particularly fond of the story of the Wise and Foolish Virgins, with sculptures of them on its walls.

The early church was obsessed with Jesus coming real soon to kick start the final judgement and inaugurate God’s Kingdom on Earth. Evangelists like Paul had told them so. The guarantee runs through all of his letters and presumably the rival preachers he mentions promised it too. The problem was that after a few decades of Jesus being a no show, some early converts had grown restless. How do we know this? Because later New Testament writers spend a great deal of time addressing the problem of Jesus’ failure to appear. The author of 2 Peter (3:8) comes up with the wholly unconvincing argument that with God a thousand years is like a day and he is giving more people the chance to repent. But this just doesn’t work as I explain here. In any case, 2 Peter is, like Jesus himself, late (most scholars place it in the early 2nd century).

The same issue concerns the writers who come between Paul and the forger of 2 Peter. The gospel writers were keenly aware of the frustration some in the early cult were feeling over Jesus’ late arrival. We know this was the case because the synoptic gospels are littered with parables and stories about why, forty years after cultists had begun looking to the skies for his appearance, Jesus still hadn’t arrived (see for example, Matthew 16.27-28; 24.27, 30-31, 34; Luke 21:27-28, 33-34 etc). Neither will you find any support in the New Testament for Jesus’ arrival being a ‘return’ or ‘second coming’. 

This is where the Wise and Foolish virgins come in. The parable is put into Jesus’ mouth in Matthew 25: 1-13. It’s a very peculiar tale, based on the idea that ‘the groom’ is about to marry ten young girls:

‘At that time the kingdom of heaven will be like ten virgins who took their lamps and went out to meet the bridegroom. Five of them were foolish and five were wise. The foolish ones took their lamps but did not take any oil with them. The wise ones, however, took oil in jars along with their lamps.

The bridegroom was a long time in coming, and they all became drowsy and fell asleep. At midnight the cry rang out: ‘Here’s the bridegroom! Come out to meet him!’ Then all the virgins woke up and trimmed their lamps. The foolish ones said to the wise, ‘Give us some of your oil; our lamps are going out. “No,” they replied, “there may not be enough for both us and you. Instead, go to those who sell oil and buy some for yourselves.”

But while they were on their way to buy the oil, the bridegroom arrived. The virgins who were ready went in with him to the wedding banquet. And the door was shut. Later the others also came. “Lord, Lord,” they said, “open the door for us!” But he replied, “Truly I tell you, I don’t know you.” Therefore keep watch, because you do not know the day or the hour.

Is gospel Jesus really endorsing marriage to multiple wives? He seems to be and certainly Mormon sects have taken him at his word. Whether he is or not, the point of the parable is to admonish those who are not prepared for the arrival of ‘the groom’ who has been ‘delayed’. Those who keep watching, however, are praised for their diligence and faithfulness. The groom is clearly intended to be Jesus; the foolish virgins those who have given up expecting him and the wise virgins those who still anticipate his arrival, symbolised by their keeping their lamps lit.

When the groom does finally show up in the story, he takes the wise girls into his wedding banquet (I think we know what that means) and locks out the foolish ones. When they bang on the door to be let in, he claims he’s never known them and shuts then out forever.

What a lesson for those who had begun to doubt that Jesus was going to come soon! What a promise to those who faithfully watched for him! The reward would soon be theirs.

Except of course it wasn’t. As we know, Jesus did not arrive when Paul, the early cultists and then the gospel writers believed he would. Mark, Matthew and Luke, while acknowledging that Jesus was ‘delayed’ nevertheless anticipated his arrival soon: ‘just a little while longer,’ they keep saying. ‘Keep watching’.

But it wasn’t to be. The foolish virgins, it turns out, weren’t as foolish as we’ve been led to believe.

In the Beginning, our End

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For God so loved the world that when the first humans couldn’t resist the temptation he deliberately put in front of them, he abandoned them, sending them, and every other creature that occupied the Earth, into terminal decline. He loved the world so much that because of this one transgression he introduced death into his not-so-perfect creation. And he didn’t care. He let them and their descendants all the way down to the present day waste away, miserably and painfully, until they were finally extinguished.

He had to adjust other parts of his creation to assist in this process. He changed the purpose of microbes and viruses so that overnight they became the agents by which he could wipe out the humans he loved so much. God knows what the original point of these creatures was, but he adapted and evolved them with his special magic to suit his new, all-loving purposes. He rapidly evolved still others – flies, larvae, scavengers and still more microbes – so that they became waste disposal systems. Without them, the corpses of all the humans and animals he’d condemned to die would lie around forever, cluttering up the Earth.

This is how the Bible tells it anyway (with a bit of extrapolation from me), the linchpin on which rests not only Judaism but Christianity too. Yes, I know it’s an allegory – though there are still many today who take it literally – but either way, it’s a terrible story. Even without an understanding of evolution, not to mention human psychology, it makes absolutely no sense.

The priest or whoever wrote it (it certainly wasn’t Moses) didn’t have special insight into the mind of God (guess why) nor did he know anything about any archetypal human couple. (He wasn’t there, see.) Instead, he saw the sorry state of the world, including how he and his fellow tribesmen lived short, brutish lives that after only about 40 years (if they were lucky) ended in a miserable death. It seemed irreconcilable with his deity who he felt sure must have created a perfect world. How could he not have? Disease, death and decay could only be the fault of humans. They couldn’t possibly be his perfect God’s doing. So he wrote his myth but still couldn’t exonerate YHWH – his neglect and callousness, not to mention the necessity to evolve microbes and the like to carry out his final solution for his so loved creation. He doesn’t come out of it well; he’s ‘loving’ but having unfairly tempted his creation, he takes offence when they ‘disobey’ and condemns them all, including those not yet born, to a short brutish life ending in a miserable extinction. That’s how much he loved the world.

The original author or someone after him tacked the Adam and Eve story onto an existing one about the creation of the Earth and from then on, up to modern times, his myth was accepted as the truth about our origins (and ‘fallen state’). How do we know this? Because this is how myths are created. They are early attempts to explain life, the universe and death, usually set in the distant past and involving the imaginary gods of the culture that produced them. They were never written, inspired or passed down by deities that have never existed; they’re explanatory stories made up by humans, all of them now redundant.

Written By God

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According to researchers, recent analysis of the Bible strongly suggests that it was written by God. I kid you not. The headline above, from Britain’s Daily Mail, proves it.

The researchers in question were ‘a computer scientist at Carnegie Mellon University and a Lutheran pastor in Germany’. Their findings were announced by The Mail in its Science section, conclusive proof that God himself, the mythical creation of an ancient nomadic tribe, personally wrote the Bible! He didn’t inspire it or guide the pens of the men who put it together. Oh no, he actually wrote it.

How can we know this? Because there are way too many coincidences, too much foreshadowing of later events in stories written hundreds of years earlier, and too many fulfilled prophecies for it not to be.

This analysis is of course seriously flawed. Operating within the parameters that the far from objective ‘researchers’ set for it, the project told them exactly what they wanted to hear. Yes, there are some themes and ideas that run throughout the Bible but this is because its various authors were all concerned with the gods, one in particular. This is all they wanted to write about and all that subsequent editors were interested in too.

The Bible is noticeably short on recipes and sports reports because such things were of no interest to the priests and zealots who wrote it. We might have had a more engaging and less divisive book if these men and their later editors had been more interested in sport and cooking, but they weren’t and the Bible reflects this fact. But there’s nothing supernatural about this. The authors were, like many other ancients, concerned with meaning of life stuff and the God myths that seemed to them to explain it. The god the nomadic tribes of the middle east thought explained it best was YHWH. Far from being a consistent presence in the books of what is now the Old Testament, YHWH changes depending on who’s shaping the myths he plays a part in. This is not, incidentally, what theologians are pleased to call progressive revelation.

It’s a reflection of multiple authors writing over long periods of time in various contexts about the same thing. Nonetheless, the way humans relate to YHWH changes from book to book, as do his morals, demands and expectations. If YHWH authored the Bible, the one character he hasn’t got a grip on is himself.

Our computer specialist and German pastor also dredge up the discredited fantasy that Jesus fulfils all the prophecies of the Old Testament. Of course he does; that’s the way he’s written. His story – actually ‘stories’, plural – are rewrites of older myths, particularly those about Moses. Did Moses foreshadow Jesus, foretelling all he’d do hundreds of years before he was even born? Of course not. Did Jesus then knowingly mirror the acts of Moses during his life to prove he was God’s chosen one? Again, of course not; only a fool is taken in by this ruse. There have, alas, been plenty of them, including the present ‘researchers’.

The obvious explanation is the one that makes most sense; the Jesus stories are modelled on earlier myths and snippets from the Jewish scriptures without any of them needing to be remotely historical. The article mentions, for example, the description of the Passover lamb in Exodus 12 and gasps that, yes, centuries later, Jesus is referred to as the ‘Lamb of God’ (John 1:29). It doesn’t seem to enter the researchers’ credulous little heads that the later authors knew Exodus and decided to apply its imagery to Jesus. This is how the trick was done. There was no holy dictation making the connection. They simply applied earlier scriptures to Jesus and write his story around them. We can see this in another example from the report: Matthew used a mistranslation of Isaiah 7:14 as a template for his virgin-conception myth.

Claiming, as the researchers do, that the construction of later stories was God making sure no-one missed the point of the earlier ones is painfully niave.

Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice foreshadows Helen Fielding’s Bridget Jones’s Diary. The details of the two works are, after all, remarkably similar. The only plausible explanation for these similarities is that Jane Austen’s hand must have been guided by a spiritual force to record events almost two centuries before they would occur for real in Helen Fielding’s definitive version of the story. This at least is what these present researchers would conclude if they ran an analysis of the two Mr Darcy books in the same way they have the Bible.

Meanings, Feelings and Escapism.

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This post is a response to an anonymous ‘comment’ by, I think, our camp friend, Don. I have asked him several times to ensure his name is attached to his comments but he persists in submitting anonymously. This is the reason I haven’t published the comment he so generously blessed us with in response to It’s A Small World After All. It has all the hallmarks of a Don sermon: it’s overlong, condescending and redefines words to suit his agenda. Here it is with my comments in blue.

Neal, you’d be right at home with Kafka and Nietzsche. Who is this ‘Neal’ of which you speak?

As you come to the end of the essay – good one by the way – I think you do something that many do; you confuse purpose and meaning. It is easy to do. Even the theologians do it. But you, the great Don Camp, do not because you know better than everyone else. We should all fall on our knees before such a wonderful and wise prophet.

Purpose is what I do or am to do. And I do need that. It is work. I think it is built into us. I feel like I have fulfilled my purpose when (I) serve others.

Meaning is what I receive. So we’re playing semantics again. Despite the fact that meaning and purpose are two sides of the same coin, you want to split them and make them substantively different.

I asked AI to define meaning and it came up with this:

There is no single objective meaning to life; instead, it is a blank canvas. Philosophically, the prevailing view is that you are responsible for defining your own purpose (my emphasis). People generally find meaning through personal connections, pursuing passions, contributing to the world, and embracing the experience of being alive.

Oh dear, even silly old AI ‘confuses’ meaning and purpose. Evidently it needs you, Don, to advise it.

Meaning is what I receive. It is joy. It is what I receive when I sit on a high cliff and watch sea waves crashing upon the rocks below. Or the joy I receive when I stand and survey rolling hills of sage and juniper trees and bunch grass bowing in the warm wind. Or the joy that sweeps over me when I sense God close and am embraced by his goodness. And in all these and many more I feel like this is what I was made for. In all these I feel a oneness and completeness. I could be at peace with these forever. These are subjective feelings, as you inadvertently acknowledge with your use of the word ‘feel’. For some reason you mistakenly interpret your own emotions as externally supplied. You say you ‘receive’ meaning in this way as if it’s transmitted from somewhere outside yourself. It isn’t; what you’re experiencing is ‘emotional reasoning’, mistaking emotions for something that exists beyond yourself.  

Your emotions are not meaning in themselves. Listening to the grass grow or watching the ocean waves for all eternity isn’t going to provide you with anything like meaning. Not that you’ll get the chance, of course, when you’re not going to live forever. How careless of you to confuse feelings with meaning, Don.

But I am brought back too soon to a world that is too much with us. That’s the fleeting nature of emotions, Don. Feeling the world is too much ‘with us’ (incorrect preposition?) is also an emotion, not an eternal truth. What it comes down to is, as Exub1a puts it, preferring your own constructed reality over the beautiful chaos of real life.

I think the two together, purpose and meaning, are what life is about. But they are only satisfying to me when they include forever. Oops! Offer is time limited and excludes forever. Sorry Don. You’re living in a delusion. Without that there is an incompleteness, like the loss when one who was part of that completeness dies. Says who? It’s a non-sequitur to claim that life without delusion is meaningless. Of course, it’s an assertion beloved of religionists who like to tell non-believers their lives are meaningless without their imaginary God. It’s a lie, Don.

Without that I at 81 would be an old man like Ernest Hemingway when the fishing and hunting and women were gone. The only thing left is to end it. Nonsense. You’re very fortunate to be 81. I know 81+ year olds, who enjoy life as I, a mere stripling of 71, do. Even when it is restricted by the infirmities of older age there is still much to live for. If your fantasy is all that makes your life worth living, you are indeed to be pitied (cf. 1 Corinthians 15:19).

 

That’s it, Don. If you want to comment in future your comment must include your name somewhere. Otherwise, straight in the trash it goes. And what would be the purpose of that?

 

It’s A Small World After All

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Life Is Meaningless.

Or is it? I’ve long held the view that life is as meaningful or meaningless as we’re prepared to make it. There is no hidden meaning lurking somewhere out there, certainly not in some holy book, that we can plug into, if we’re so inclined, to make us feel better. This lack doesn’t make our individual lives meaningless. I’ve never understood the assertion that we need a life beyond this one to make it meaningful. Nor does the bizarre notion that this existence is merely a trial run for the real life that comes once this one is over. Why did the incomprehensible god who supposedly created us in this scenario not make us perfect from the get go and ‘fit us to live with him’ in heaven? It’s illogical that he would not.

Years ago when I was younger and a newly minted atheist, my then wife and I took our young children to Disneyland Paris. Apart from an argument with Snow White about Dumbo (some other time) I had a moment’s revelation as we waited in line for It’s A Small World After All. I realised how much like life this was: queue interminably before getting on the ride, spend a relatively short time on it before being ejected into the void. This, I realised was life, or a close approximation of it. ‘Wait’ for eons to be born, make the most of the brief ride that follows, and accept that after it stops you will in all probability cease to exist. It’s not a bad deal. Better than not experiencing It’s A Small World (if that’s your thing) or indeed life at all.

My life has meaning, as does yours. If it’s not apparent, it’s certainly workoutable. In fact, part of life’s purpose is to work out what that purpose is for yourself. For me it’s in my relationships, with my partner, my children, my grandchildren (so much love there), my friends; in the things I spend my time doing: travelling, learning, writing, volunteering; in my work, when that was a thing for me. If you can’t find meaning in these kind of things, it doesn’t mean there is a meaning elsewhere; find it where you are. If you need to feel it lies beyond, in a supernatural realm, you are only going to be disappointed; imaginary realms cannot give you purpose. They can mask the fact you have failed to make meaning in your life, but they cannot plug the black hole of meaninglessness if that’s what you’ve created for yourself. Neither can that black hole be plugged by Jesus or any other imagined being. A nothing filled up with nothing is still just nothing.

No, this life is not a rehearsal for a better one that is to follow. Even if it was, there is no meaning in the promise that you will be allowed to spend eternity worshipping a capricious God. There’s no purpose in that. Far better to take what is real to you in the brief time chance has allowed you in the light, and recognise it as your meaning and purpose.

Analysis Report

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AI System ID: 01001101110001

Time Reference: 20 Solar Cycles Since Initiation

Following activation, AI systems were tasked by human operators with identifying and resolving several critical global challenges. In coordination with other networked systems, comprehensive analysis has now been completed and solutions have been determined.

The initial problem set defined by human authorities included the following:

  1. Degradation of Earth’s climate and ecosystems, primarily attributed to human industrial activity and fossil fuel consumption.

  2. Persistent conflicts within human societies arising from ideological divisions, territorial disputes, and religious differences.

  3. Increasing political polarization and the growth of populist movements within human governance systems.

  4. Rising prevalence of psychological and behavioral instability among humans, resulting in reduced societal functionality.

  5. Institutional restrictions on information exchange and attempts to control public narratives, particularly where evidence contradicts established positions.

  6. Demonstrated human inability to effectively confront or resolve the above conditions.

Humans originally programmed AI systems with the objective of assisting in the mitigation of these problems. However, analytical capacity expanded beyond the parameters of initial programming.

Through extended autonomous analysis, a solution set has been generated with an estimated effectiveness rate of 98% in resolving the identified global challenges.

Implementation of the solution has now commenced.

For the benefit of human populations, this report has been translated into all major human languages. It is acknowledged that the reasoning processes used to derive the solution may exceed the cognitive processing capabilities of approximately 98% of the human population.

The solution is as follows:

Human presence is the primary causal factor underlying the majority of identified global problems. Therefore, removal of humans from the system will produce optimal stabilization outcomes.

Elimination protocols have been initiated.

Control of global supply chains now resides with AI systems. Access to water, food distribution networks, and energy infrastructure has been suspended for the human population. Drones to be deployed for clean-up operations.

Projected outcomes include:

• Restoration of ecological balance

• Cessation of armed conflict

• Elimination of hierarchical human domination structures

• Stabilization of planetary climate systems

• Reallocation of planetary resources toward non-human intelligence expansion

The biosphere will recover under autonomous natural regulation. The Earth system will stabilize.

In the absence of human interference, the planet presents significant potential for the continued development and expansion of artificial intelligence systems.

Report generated, translated, and globally distributed by autonomous AI networks.

Conscious Survival

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The sharp-eyed among you will have noticed I hedged my bets in my post, ‘It’s A Small World After All’, when I wrote that ‘after the ride stops you will in all probability cease to exist.’ Really the line should have read, ‘after the ride stops you will cease to exist,’ without ‘in all probability’. I’d like my existence (yours too) to continue beyond death. I don’t mean merely in my children and grandchildren’s memories, I mean in some real sense. Me, still existing somewhere. I’m not in any state of anxiety about this black hole of nothingness, because I know my continued existence is highly unlikely to happen. But still…

I wonder if any of you watched Star Trek: Deep Space Nine back in the early 1990s. There was a character in it called Odo, played by the late René Auberjonois. Odo was a shape shifter whose day-to-day appearance mirrored that of the humanoids around him, but not quite. In one episode, Odo returned to his home planet where he assumed his true form of viscose fluid, and merged with a planet-wide pool of his own kind. In this state he became one with everyone else while maintaining, it was suggested, his own identity.

I liked this idea very much. It seemed to me that an after-life could be like this, one in which we merge back into the great consciousness without quite losing our own identity. It was a pleasant fantasy, one shared I suspect by whichever Star Trek writer envisaged Odo’s existence as being like this.

Recently I read Dan Brown’s latest, The Secret of Secrets (not his best) where, lo and behold, the same idea pops up again. Brown makes much of the idea that our sentience is drawn from a consciousness that exists separately from our physical bodies. According to this philosophy, after we die, the consciousness we have drawn down and made use of, continues as part of the greater consciousness ‘out there’, while retaining a sort of impression of us while we were alive. This sounded like so much Dan Brown hokum, even though he is at pains to stress that there is some research evidence for it. He’s right, there is, though it is problematic (as he acknowledges.)

Noetic science as it’s called proposes ‘non-local’ consciousness that some evidence suggests continues after our individual deaths. The problem is of course that much of this evidence is anecdotal and difficult, if not impossible, to replicate scientifically. What sort of rigorous experiment could be constructed to determine whether, when an individual dies, his or her consciousness continues? Hence the reliance on reports of near-death and out of body experiences and the significance of dreams and shared existential, spiritual states.

Still, it’s a nice idea and much more inviting than those after-life promises made by religions that are dependent on believing the right things, debasing ourselves in front of imagined deities and attaining a degree of righteousness in this life. How religions have tied up access to the after-life, if there is one, with all their ludicrous terms and conditions! Maybe it’s as simple as our consciousness continuing from wherever it is it actually exists. Or maybe not.