How We Believe_ Science and the Search for God - Michael Shermer [129]
There shall be no more thence an infant of days, nor an old man that hath not filled his days: for the child shall die a hundred years old; but the sinner being a hundred years old shall be accursed.
And they shall build houses, and inhabit them; and they shall plant vineyards, and eat the fruit of them.
They shall not build, and another inhabit; they shall not plant, and another eat: for as the days of a tree are the days of my people, and mine elect shall long enjoy the work of their hands.
They shall not labour in vain, nor bring forth for trouble; for they are the seed of the blessed of the Lord, and their offspring with them.
The wolf and the lamb shall feed together, and the lion shall eat straw like the bullock: and dust shall be the serpent’s meat. They shall not hurt nor destroy in all my holy mountain, saith the Lord.
According to The Interpreter’s Bible, in these Isaiah passages “the meaning is not that the present world will be completely destroyed and a new world created, but rather that the present world will be completely transformed … there is no cosmological speculation here.” Indeed, in the Hebrew Bible it is not until the book of Daniel—the latest addition to the canon—that one can find reference to humans ascending to heaven. For mortals, heaven generally meant a new Kingdom on Earth, not a place to go where God resides. The shift from earthly paradise to cosmological firmament began in Daniel and was reinforced especially by Jesus who portrayed to his oppressed peoples that redemption was just around the chronological corner. Yet even Jesus made intriguing references to the Kingdom that “has come upon you” (Luke 11:20), that has suffered violence since the time of John the Baptist (Matthew 11:12), and especially in Luke 17:20–21, where he seems to infer that heaven is a state of mind: “And when he was demanded of the Pharisees, when the kingdom of God should come, he answered them and said, The kingdom of God cometh not with observation: Neither shall they say, Lo here! or, lo there! for, behold, the kingdom of God is within you.”
SECULAR HEAVENS
In a biocultural model of religious thought and spirituality, the idea of a Heaven on Earth or a Kingdom of God within should not be restricted to Judaeo-Christian theology, or even to religious traditions of the West and East. Indeed, it is not. The myth of the golden-age past or future can also be secularized, and it has been by modern environmentalists who construct mythical epochs like the one above, where beautiful people have lived or will live in eco-harmony with their environment, which resembles, for all intents and purposes, the heavenly states of world religions.
I first encountered the beautiful people myth as a graduate student in a course co-taught by an anthropologist and a historian in the late 1980s, when both fields were being “deconstructed” by literary critics and social theorists. Anticipating the study of customs, rituals, and beliefs of indigenous preindustrial peoples around the world, I was instead bogged down in books such as Michael Taussig’s The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America, which explicates “Fetishism and Dialectical Deconstruction” or “The Devil and the Cosmogenesis of Capitalism.” The anthropologist soon announced that his was a Marxist interpretation of history, seeing the past in terms of class conflict and economic exploitation. The beautiful people lived before capitalism.
Old-line Marxists see communism as the liberating climax of a six-stage evolutionary process that requires the collapse of capitalism. Capitalism is The End. Communism is The New Beginning. Liberal democrats, meanwhile, have their bard in Francis Fukuyama, whose book, The End of History and the Last Man. pronounced that the cold war was won by democracy and