The Fountains of Youth - Brian Stableford [72]
Unlike many of my contemporaries, whose birth into a world in which religious faith was almost extinct had robbed them of all sympathy for the imperialists of dogma, I proposed that the great religions had been one of the finest achievements of humankind. I regarded their development as a vital stage in the evolution of society, considering them as social technologies whose use had permitted a spectacular transcendence of the former—tribal and regional—limits of community.
Faiths, I suggested, were the first instruments that were capable of binding together different language groups, and even different races. It was not until the spread of the great religions, I pointed out, that the possibility came into being of gathering all men together into a single common enterprise.
I was not recklessly incautious in offering these observations. I took care to regret that the principal product of this great dream had been two millennia of bitter and savage conflict between adherents of different faiths, and between adherents of different versions of the same faith. I was not content, however, simply to praise the ambition while deploring its misshapen outcome. I retained some slight sympathy for those jihads and crusades in whose formulation people had tried to attribute more meaning to the sacrifice of life than they ever had before.
I had already examined, in the first part of my history, the implications of the fact that one of the most common pre-Crash synonyms for human being—derived, of course, from the ancient Greek—was mortal, and that the term had continued to carry even greater significance once the prospect of emortality was in sight. Now I examined the implications of the the most common Latin-derived synonym for human being: individual
To describe humans as “undivided ones” is to take it for granted that death divides, and that the mortal part of humanity is neither the only nor the most vital part. This blatant fiction, I suggested, was the most powerful of all the weapons deployed by primitive mortals in their psychological war against death. Whereas other historians of my own day thought it a hastily improvised crutch, I saw it as an item of field artillery, parent of the heavy cannon of prophecy and scripture.
My comparative analysis of the great religious traditions was, I hope, reasonably evenhanded. I tried to pay appropriate compliments to all of them. Inevitably, the summation that attracted the most criticism, in a world that was still host to more than four million self-proclaimed Buddhists, three million Jews, two million Hindus and nearly three hundred thousand followers of Islam, was that of Christianity—the only great religion to have been officially declared extinct.
To tell the truth, I was particularly fascinated by the symbology of the Christian mythos, which had taken as its central image the death on the cross of Jesus and had tried to make that one image of death carry an enormous allegorical load. I was entranced for a while by the idea of Christ’s death as a force of redemption and salvation: by the daring pretense that this person had died for others. I extended my argument to take in the Christian martyrs, who had added to the primal crucifixion a vast series of symbolic and morally significant deaths. This collectivity of legends, I suggested, ought to be regarded as a colossal achievement of the imagination, a crucial victory by which death and its handmaiden, pain, were dramatically transfigured in the theater of the human imagination.
I was somewhat less impressed by the Christian conversion of the idea of death as a kind of reconciliation: a gateway to heaven, if properly met; a gateway to hell, if not. It seemed to me to be less ambitious