Sun, Sex and God

Where is the meaning?
The people of old, including our African ancestors  were right -- without the Sun, there is nothing. It is the source of all life and joy as we know it. If the Sun should cease to be, even for a blinking moment we will be overtaken with horrendous and instantaneous catastrophes; which would make the word 'apocalypse' seem like a coy euphemism for a stroll in the park. The most gruesome, horrible form of death would be a welcome relief from the terrifying events that would ensue.

Courtesy of modern science we now know the life-party on planet Earth will one day come to a grim and abrupt end. Our Sun like all the other stars will someday have to cough up and die and any remnants of human  civilization will be inevitably swallowed into the eternal darkness that engulfs the visible Universe.


What are we here for then? Just to live and struggle and to teach our children the same so that they in turn can teach their children to mindlessly struggle and  survive? Are we really here just to be part of such a meaningless recursive cycle of one generation struggling to survive to teach the next one essentially to do the same task to the umpteenth generation? 

Yet it is amazingly clear that in any case if future generations were to solve all the problems of the Earth and resolve all the problems that have bothered man ever since he realized the meaning of the abstract concept of bother -- and was bothered about it -- that their efforts and hence all of humanity's effort since the advent of mankind will undoubtedly, inevitably and immutably come to naught with the demise of the Sun. 

That is right, without embracing what dialecticians deplore as the convenient concept of God everything can be logically deducted to  come to zero, null, zilch, nothing. Simple mechanics dictate that the Sun -- just being a giant fireball will at some point use up it's finite fuel reserves and then all we are doing, that has ever been done and will ever be done will at a very precise and definite period in time come to nothing. That is if humanity ever gets that far -- an impossible feat by all reckoning, scientific and otherwise; man is too foolish, selfish, greedy, vicious and too vile a specie to be extant even say in a million years. 

Mother nature will take us out, long before we figure out how to go back in time to see if really Jesus of Nazareth walked on water. With the death of the Sun everything on this minuscule, cosmically speaking insignificant part of the galaxy we call the Solar system dies along with it. Nothing will remain of this planetary system with the last and most spectacular gasping breath of the Sun.
                                          
How can such wonderful things as ourselves and everything else on this planet come of their own accord and perish of no accord? Where is the sense in that? What evolutionary merit is there in the great design of the Universe if everything was meant to emanate from nothing,  develop over billions of years and then end up where it started -- dissolve into nothing -- and for no apparent reason at that!

So, where do the dotted lines lead? 
There is a God. There is a master planner. There is a creator.
No matter how remote, faint, imperceptible and irreconcilable he is to our modern way of life, scientific knowledge and prowess, there will always be that vivid, innate awareness of something not quite within the range of man's ability of comprehension. That is awe inspiring, all encompassing, veiled from material probity yet certainly present. Forbiddingly silent, keenly watching and to man's eternal irritation and chagrin incessantly biding time.

Perhaps he will reveal himself in our time and spatial dimension, perhaps we can only trully "know" whence we move to a pre-existing, ever-existing alternate reality. 
Perhaps all that happens once we die is that nothing really happens.
Perhaps he is waiting for the end of time or maybe 'God' is the end of time, or perhaps the Universe and everything there is -- is 'God' itself. Good gracious! That could mean all of us could be essentially God!

All I have expressed above are the sort of crazy, desperate ideas that run through the minds of millions of people each and every day. What is there beyond this life? Some as you have already noticed choose to think themselves as God. 

One French mathematician and philosopher called Rene Descartes, in a way greatly contributed to this development. According to him one could not be certain of the reality of anything but of his own being -- and why? Well, he concluded the only proof of reality is that if you can shoot a random thought through your mind then there you are! You exist! 

Unfortunately all else cannot be proven to be as real as your random thought, infact not even your brain can be proved to exist. Descartes was not the first person who ever alluded to his own deism, but from there it became fashionable to muse if really there was such a being as God.  After hundreds of years of expounding, much philosophical debate some are pretty content to simply think of themselves as the centre of everything, and for those flagrantly brazen enough --  man is God.

Don't be silly, you are not God;
You don't feel too Godly right now do you? Ofcourse not, don't be foolish, you are not God no matter what ideology or philosophy you subscribe to you will NEVER convince yourself -- to the point of being sufficiently content that you are really God.

No amount of karma will make you karma itself. The very instant you walk into a toilet after you declare yourself a god, you are humbly reminded of your mortal nature through the very ungodly-like biological processes  you are compelled to submit to in the privacy of the washroom. No living human on the planet is exempt, from presidents and royalty to the idler in Timbactou -- they all must squat and . . . well you know the rest.

If you can overlook that and still declare yourself a god, then you trully  don't need 'God' because you have no sense of meaning for the word.

Humanism is rubbish. Just think of selfish greed in capital letters and there you have what it means. It has many ideological siblings and offspring with fancy nicknames like hedonism, anarchism, agnosticism, atheism, utilitarianism, amorality etc.

I don't waste too much time on them, and perhaps you prefer not to either. Unless of course you need  and want passable excuses for more wanton sex, more fun, more money, more power and the crux of it all --  less rules.  These are the very components of human existence that in part provided the motivation to invent or explore the above mentioned notions. 

As humans we all want in some measure some of these perks that come with money and power, but if extrapolated to any numerically significant social unit, exclusively guided for instance by hedonism, the situation quickly translates to one of more chaos, more misery, more crime, more conflict, more violence, more death and so forth.


Laws are Godly, human logic isn't;
Human laws and rules have purpose. They are there to ensure social order. This enables as many people as possible, in as an orderly a fashion as possible,  and as equitably as the powerful ones can be prevailed upon to accept --  allow in theory, the maximum number of people to grab whatever they can and hold onto it for as long as they can. Which is why it probably isn't a joke, that obeying laws --not only traffic rules -- increases longevity. They ensure we do things more methodically and controllably; including killing each other.


The nature of God is not so easy to understand, and no man can possibly do, for then he would not be so mysterious and Godly. Would he? But fortunately his laws are.

If  I may, I have a quirky, messy analogy that may demonstrate his nature.  First visualize he is the beach and we are the sand grains. Then add onto that he is simultaneously the beach owner, the beach restaurant, the sea and the people playing on the beach. To make it roundly complex, he is animate and inanimate at the same time. 

The more you delve into this analogy the less sense it makes. For instance in my example he would have to be pouring onto himself mango juice if he were both the glass and the person pouring the mango juice.Then he would have to be drinking himself, remember he is also the mango juice and the person drinking the mango juice. Besides that he would have to be swimming in himself in multiple instances at the same time because he is all the people on the beach and the water in the sea. Perhaps as a side show he would have to be the cat that poops on a favourite couch and in perplexing twist he then has to be angry at himself for he is the cat, the home owner, the the couch and so on. 

If you can rationalize that into human understandable terms without contradiction then you are well on your way to defining God empirically in scientific terms! All in all, what am trying to say here, is that the more we try to reduce God into terms that describe our level, using human logic, all we end up doing is generate more and more irrationalities.

It all reminds me about  a very fascinating story of a certain scientist called Schroedinger, who in an effort to explain a counter-intuitive concept elaborated with an example of a cat in a cupboard that could be dead, alive and even more interestingly -- dead and alive at the same time! But in his case it all made sense,  courtesy of the very real world of Quantum Physics.


The Bible is not infallible --  but it is the only thing that makes sense;
We are not part of God simply because we are humans and sentient but simply because everything is him, in him and from him. And how do I know? Well he told me so. Could anything be easier than that. 

Yes he told us in the Bible what he is, who he is  and where he is, yet we bother to define, comprehend, measure, quantify, rationalize, philosophically deconstruct, mythologize and do all the funny things the human mind is capable of doing to dispel the nagging reality that we are not a force onto ourselves and that we are and we will be held accountable for our actions. 

I fail to see what joy there should be in  'killing" the concept of God. Everyone knows, including those who are busy trying to kill God like the Marxists, atheists, agnostics etc that he isn't dead.  With blatant intransigence they forge ahead while they know what they are doing and all the attendant rationalizations and all their elegant intellectual posturing will never silence the voice within them of the being whose existence they are busy repudiating .

In an effort to provide ourselves the comfort and excuse not to do what he explicitly wants us to do -- and more incredibly, for our own good -- we have decided to make the most striking fact of existence itself a figment of man's fertile imagination.

What then of racism, religious fundamentalism, social and gender prejudice, economic disparity, political double standards, patriarchy, bigotry, militarism and many other social ills that many devout people perpetuate and even promote with such gusto? What does that have to do with atheists and homosexuals? In any case hasn't this kind of myopic dogmatism been tried for centuries and only managed to drive humanity further into misery? Isn't this sufficiently demonstrated by the dark ages? 

These concerns though seeming to provide ample ground to disregard religion they do not provide any valid premise to disavow the existence of God. All the above ills are perpetrated by men, who cloak their flagrant greed and selfish aims  in the hollowed out and rotten core of empty religious structures and doctrine. 

Furthermore they do not vindicate the actions of those who take counter pose stances that are evidently inimical to what is a pre-ordained, and if I may, the natural order of things. 'Fagism' and homosexuality, to be blunt, cannot be justified due to the hypocrisies and failures of religion.

Some factional interests have found leverage in the failures and prejudices found within the major world religions to promote promiscuity and iniquity, things that as humans we innately know, despite our backgrounds and cultures, not to be right.


Don't be a sucker, live right;
How far we have fallen indeed. I do not know how explicit it can get other than fire being sent down from the sky to consume homosexuals, for Christians to get it into their heads that homosexuality is anathema to God. Yet God has already done that -- to Sodom and Gomorrah, whence the word sodomy gets its name. 

But alas! We now have gay priests openly serving the faithful. It was not sufficient to win legal recognition and protection for their sin, but their guilt simply compels them to rub it right on the face of God. By tarnishing his altar with their open service as gay ministers they hope to rid themselves of their last obstinate opponents.  The gay community has found it imperative to vanquish the last remaining enclave of dissenting voices, the irksome, moralizing voices of rebuke --  particularly in the West, where these voices happen to be marooned within the weakened and beleaguered Church. 

In Africa the gay bandwagon has just made it over, and the tried and tested formula of getting constitutional and legal protection which is then rapidly followed by a pervasive program of robust promotion of gay rights in all social strata is just getting underway. Already there is growing discomfiture with the issue and politicians as usual are capitalizing with populist remarks followed by prevarications, partial retractions and twig like vacillation.


The pretext that homosexuality is moral on the grounds that emotionally and mentally gay people come pre-programmed that way falls flat on its face as the omnipotent God, nature, evolution or whatever one chooses to call it seems to have utterly failed or forgotten to provide the appropriate supporting biological mechanism for gay people  to live fruitful, natural and fretless lifestyles. Instead what they have are collapsing recta, haemorrhoids and whatever else that afflicts them, with no feasible chance for natural procreation.

In my view it is the notion that homosexuality is natural that is a figment of man's imagination. For it has no discernible, natural biological merit; homosexuality is capable only of achieving perverted satisfaction and ultimately nothing more. 

Think about it, since heterosexuals do enjoy having casual sex, even at times during these frivolous escapades develop some emotional intimacy, and feel perfectly normal afterward --  does it make it any less immoral? Does the fact that sex is consensual make it morally acceptable outside the context it is meant to take place in society and universally accepted as such? Being consensually gay and being infatuated can never wash away immorality.

We can be pressured by modernity and so called enlightenment to acquiesce as humans to homosexuality as an acceptable phenomenon (the rationale is that it is no more nefarious than any other anti-social practice) but it won't make it right in a million years. Should they be persecuted or discriminated against due to their orientation? Without equivocation I say no. They should be allowed to lead full, productive lives with the full freedoms and protection as any other members of society enjoy. But there is absolutely nothing to be endorsed in it either.

As the creator I believe God knows what is best for us. But that would be too simplistic, too narrow, constraining and parochial, too limiting and unimaginative, too uninspiring, deterministic and inimical to our modern liberal ways.  

To the hardened souls and minds modern religion is just sanitized voodoo from the stone-age and what am advocating, may very well seem to them like pining for juju-figmentation and nostalgia for ignorance. Being the humans we are, we'd rather run ourselves into philosophical cul-de-sacs rather than accept  the most logical of all answers.  Which is that nothing ever comes out of nothing. 

Seriously, of all things, can the entire and immeasurably complex Universe come from nothing? I don't know, but spontaneous emanation and self-origination theories that science offers regarding the origins of the Universe sound to me more like the mumbo-jumbo nonsense they tell us religion is all about. Even if both faculties have no proof for their respective claims and assertions on the origins of the Universe, something doesn't seem quite right with the one of such a big thing as the Universe coming from nothing.

As much as some of us may loath the idea, we are simply a creation of a masterful creator, and the greater good can only come by following the will of the one who designed existence itself.

I don't know how we ever got to the point we are, but it is a sad fake reality we have created, in which millions of people are taught all over the world to accept fiction as fact. I implore you to reject being a gullible fool. God is real -- and it is very unlikely that he could be congenial, happy or even apathetic with man trampling on his will.


By M. Wycliff
30-12-2011
Nairobi.