A podcast I listened to this morning and posted here and on my Facebook prompted me to think about this question again. It’s bugged me since I was a little kid. If the Bible is true and we are sons of God, spiritual beings having a human experience, if we are more than a cosmic accident, biological robots that arose from the sea and will return to the dust, why is it so hard to understand what we truly are? Why have we forgotten? Why does it seem so many of us are so lost, looking for meaning or even worse given up on the fact there is any meaning?
What I have come to realize is that man has known what he was for a very long time. Religions taught us who we are. Yes, religions, plural. Across many cultures around the world, similar “myths” have arisen to explain the inexplicable. These “myths” give our lives meaning, purpose and transcendence. They call us to be better people here and now and they give us hope for the future. But, somewhere along the way we got too big for our britches. We abandoned these silly stories made up just to make the night a little less dark and a little less full of terrors. We became big boys and girls and faced the truth. Science could tell us all we needed to know. And, so off we went boldly going where mankind had never gone before. We abandoned a huge part of our culture, the foundation of our culture and tried to start anew.
As I have been trying to synthesize all of the information I have been gathering over the last 50 years or so, including my religious background, I’m seeing a pattern. Science seems to be coming full circle around back to the things religion told us a long time ago. Science is starting to understand consciousness doesn’t arise from the material, but consciousness is the source of the material. Science is finally exploring what happens to us after we die beyond the fact that our bodies simply decay. And today I heard a scientist/philosopher even propose that maybe there is some merit in those old myths. It’ll be fascinating to watch if there is a cultural shift based on this and possibly even a return to those old myths to see what deep truths they might actually hold.
