Merry Christmas

     Now that it's winter, summer in the Atacama Desert, I feel the familiar sense of seasonal transition, a perception linked to the mathematical portion of my brain, the idea that just because a solstice or equinox occurs at a precise time on the clock, my mood shifts automatically from tired despair associated with the passing season to new awareness of possibilities in the new season, even though this one coming today is winter, the environmental miseries of which make it my least favorite season.
     Many centuries ago, Christians, basing their inspiration on a then-popular religion, Mithraism, decided that Jesus was born on December 25, a date close to the Winter Solstice, but also the birthday of Mithra, a deity worshipped extensively by Roman legionnaires.  The Winter Solstice represents the moment when light begins to grow, the days lengthening from that point.  Jesus, as mythological figure, starts life, then, on a date similar to the concept of the birth of a new star.  Appropriation of Mithra's birthday also helped people of the Greco-Roman period associate the new god, Christ, with something familiar.  Psychological studies by fast food corporations have shown that the colors red, yellow, and orange promote hunger.  No fast food restaurant would be painted wall to wall pink, a color said to inhibit the appetite.  Give the new worshippers of Christ something familiar, like Mithra's birthday.  It's a way, too, of stealing a familiar idea from another competing religion.  Adolf Hitler, when he designed the Nazi Party's flag, chose red on purpose because it's the color associated with Communism.
     Much of what happens in the human sphere has less to do with divine intervention and more to do with psychological manipulations and chance.  People choose to do much of the activities they do; they also are guided by larger forces in their lives, events beyond the horizons of their perceptions and experiences that nevertheless affect them--call that fate.
     If someone is a Christian, that has mostly to do with where that person was born and who they were born to, or raised by.  No baby or small child would ever think about Jesus, Muhammad, or Moses, if their parents didn't have them indoctrinated in religions associated with those personages.  It's possible that someone growing up in isolation, never hearing of God or other religious ideas, would ever think of anything associated with divinity.  Yet, ancestors of current humanity's deep past had thoughts, feelings, visions, associated with divine experience impacting the species.  This could come from within, or from without, or both.  Modern scientists point to noisy brain activity in schizophrenics, for instance, as being responsible for voices and visions manifesting to the schizophrenic and no one else.  Jeanne d'Arc (Joan of Arc) alone heard her voices and acted upon what they told her to do, actions that changed the histories of France and England.  If her "voices" were the result of mental illness, as some with modern psychiatric viewpoints believe, we nevertheless can't dismiss what that extraordinary teenaged woman accomplished in the fifteenth century.  I don't know if God, through saintly intermediaries, talked directly to Jeanne d'Arc, but I know she experienced something significant enough to motivate Charles VII to get off his ass and do something about the English forces marauding across and occupying his country.
     The human mind, as we know, changes the world.  Inventions, like portable phones linked to a vast information transfer network--something existing only in science fiction as recently as the
1980s--didn't just appear like mushrooms on the dark side of a tree.  People dream up and create things, altering the world thereby.  Earth has become, like its dominant species, technologized.  Floating islands of discarded plastic in the oceans should remind us that we make both wonders and pollutions as the results of our ideas, the "voices" coming to us.
     It doesn't matter to me if God exists or not.  There have been five mass extinction events in Earth's history; people are creating the conditions for the sixth.  In terms of survival--and what else ultimately matters?--it's important to take "the end," not any terminus written about thousands of years ago in prophetic books and taken literally even today, as a real danger that affects all life on the planet.  Governments that don't take this seriously are useless to humanity and non-human life forms. Any politician who doesn't take this matter seriously is a fucking idiot.
     If God, who's said to have created Earth, shows anything truly revealing about a long-term strategy, it's the allowance of five mass extinctions which should make any religious person pause and wonder.  That humanity, God's height of creation according to the Bible, should be responsible for the mass killing of millions of species as well as itself, indicates a deity that doesn't think in terms of humanity as the ultimate jewel of divine contemplation.  That would mean a future species, or perhaps a species existing currently in another star system, enjoying God's preeminent favor.  These kinds of thoughts might motivate a Christian, Jew, or Muslim, to stop thinking about being so special in God's grand unknowable scheme.  Religious systems are a way of getting to enlightenment, not enlightenment itself.
     I'm of the opinion that should a humanity-caused mass extinction event occur, there will then be no more Muslims, Jews, Christians, Buddhists, Hindus, or others religiously categorizable, but God, whatever that is, will still be.  Any human survivors will then make new religions, and God may wonder why humanity didn't learn from the last catastrophe that religions are a side effect, not the goal, of true visionaries.

                                                                             Vic Neptune