Age is a whisper that has turned into a scream. That moment when you begin to suspect survival, cross from assumption to vulnerability, when you stare at nothing, you age. This crossover moment can happen any time. An Olympic champion of 2012 told that cancer has shortened his calendar is suddenly as old as an octogenarian. They share a blank perspective.
How often does a hostage in Gaza die? How many lives has a Palestinian child lost when buried in the rubble of a bomb with a message: revenge comes in multiples? War is cruelty; it has no other philosophy though it might seek a few justifications, including elastic logic. A few billionaires want to buy the freedom of hostages. No one has told them cash is not the currency of war. There is no price which can pay for a corpse under rubble either. God did not create man for peace.
Peace is merely the interval between wars; books on peace do not sell, while the ones on war become movies. Those fortunate enough to survive during these intervals, those who succumb to decay instead of a bullet, may have merely borrowed time from the next generation. If time cannot be equal, why should we expect equality in the many minced aspects of existence?
Waking conscience
The mind, always tempted by the rational against evidence of the unthinkable, has made the heart synonymous with humanism to elevate humanity with some much-required positive spin. The illusion works because we would be further lost without illusions. We need God, although history is witness to the dispiriting reality that divinity has often been a useful excuse for mass murder. It might even alleviate the conscience assuming there is such a thing in our waking hours. What we know for certain is that conscience wakes up at night and does disturbing things to sleep.
Man needs God for philosophical as well as functional reasons on a wide scale: from death as Government policy to buying new clothes on festivals in the name of the Almighty. In the decades of uncertainty we call life, God is necessary either as belief or as invention. God is a commoner’s practical necessity; idealism is the privilege of saints or the rich. God obeys man’s commands. That is the eleventh commandment. Make that the only commandment.
Mundane commandments
The Ten Commandments bequeathed by Moses from the mountain are a bit mundane. The first four—worship only me, etc.—are evidence of a very nervous deity indeed: Does God exist only because man worships God? Five commandments are from a very basic penal code. And if you need God’s command to honour your parents you must be pretty low on the sensitivity list. When you don’t have a good father, create one, said Friedrich Nietzsche, the sometimes misunderstood but always controversial 19thcentury German scholar; but this was good advice, whichever way you examine it.
Nietzsche also declared that God was dead, but there he got it wrong if indeed he was a philosopher and not a journalist. Journalists sometimes like a headline for effect rather than as a précis of the accompanying text.
Nietzsche went too far. God, being omnipotent, had the second and last laugh. Nietzsche was paralysed at the age of 44 with vascular dementia and died of multiple strokes. That’s what you get for laughing at God. The German argued that there is no objective truth, everything is perspective until he discovered that death has only one perspective. By then it was too late to revise his books.
