It’s time to start wrapping up this year’s Jayary - not that I have another year’s Jayary planned. I am going to take a break before restarting. But that’s for another time: the question at hand is: how to end a year of exploration?
I am going to end the year with thoughts about religion and divinity in the Jaya: today being the day after Christmas after all. Talking about Christmas, it’s impossible for us to think about religion without thinking about God. Not gods: God. The dominance of the Abrahamic religions has ensured that this particular interpretation of divinity is part of everyone’s background, even if:
How would one classify Krishna in this scheme? He’s a supreme deity, but also a human who befriends others. He reveals the secret of all secrets but he’s killed like any other mortal creature. How do we reconcile this hybrid being with an omniscient God?
Then there’s the additional problem that God is dead. I am not the first person to make that claim, and Nietzsche who famously uttered that phrase was only diagnosing the disease. The movement to eject divinity from human experience has a long history; arguably, the history of civilization is the history of gods vanishing from the earth.
In the Biblical story of Genesis, God ejected Adam and Eve from Eden, but one might equally well say that the human earth (given unto us to go forth and multiply) is a world without divinity.