The New Messiah?

“Are you such a dreamer to put the world to rights?”

They say you’re not a fully paid up member of the Schizo club until you’ve been Jesus. Why on earth do I feel a sense of achievement that I can say I have been? For a long time I believed I were the reincarnation and the second coming.

I did try and argue; for instance I thought “hey, I have no special powers and no angel has come to tell me I am to be crucified to save the souls of man”. But a voice somewhere inside me immediately sprung up; “there’s no evidence Jesus had any powers either, people must have made that up to keep things interesting and as for angels, well, men are living longer nowadays so the angel probably thinks he has time before he need appear to you, right?”

Any way I looked at it there was always a comeback. I should stress that this back and forth was almost subconscious. I was aware of it as I would be a conversation going on at another table in a busy restaurant; sometimes I’d catch a few words but I wouldn’t always be aware that people were talking.

You could blame that particular delusion on my religious upbringing – although it is probably seriously blasphemous to have such a belief. I’ve been hearing a lot recently on how it cannot be psychosis to believe in a creator - and all of the dogma attached - so long as there are many beside you who also believe; safety in numbers.

I grew out of the belief that I was the Christian son of god, back after 2000 years as Chris de Burgh sung. I like to think that I don’t believe in anything supernatural and I feel comfortable in that Universe.

I based my entire belief system on this lecture above by Lawrence Krauss. Although it mostly went over my head I did make out was that there everything can come from nothing. This changed my whole sense of life overnight. I suddenly discovered a world that I could conceptualise, where morality was essentially evolutionary and where I didn’t need a meaning beyond nature.

Judging by what I have seen, heard and read the vast majority of people don’t have the impulse to desire that knowledge. They are quite happy to get on with their lives, dealing with whatever is thrown their way. That is exactly how nature intended it. Evolution by natural selection takes a long time but unfortunately the evolution of society doesn’t. We live in a modern society and yet have primeval brains.

(For example our brains are designed to deal with scarcity. That is why when food is abundant you have the problem of obesity because the instinct says “eat eat eat, who knows where the next meal will be!”)

And yet I find myself aware of desiring that knowledge. My initial reaction was that there had to be a natural explanation for this. A complicated concoction of genes and environment – maybe even the head injury I had experienced when I was younger had caused lesions in my brain. But then a voice somewhere inside said “hey, what if you are special? What if you are destined to make a difference? What if you are the one who will start a new religion of knowledge and lead the world out of the darkness? What if?

It feels like a very naïve idea when I write it down like that. Of course I watch the news and see the situation in the Middle East and North Korea and the overriding worries of Climate Change. I was told you should never base anything on divine revelation and this certainly has that aroma about it. But what if we stopped valuing and wasting money on material things?

Religion seems to glue communities together but they have a dark side as well. But what is there in place of religion? I see young people leading hedonistic lives and it makes me feel sick inside. Is knowledge the way forward? Will it get better if people are made aware of their place in the Universe and realise that there is nothing beyond nature and causality? There need be nothing else because that in itself is so incredibly humbling.