The Western Book of the Dead
(Originally published by Intervarsity Press a few decades back. Humorous in an academically witty way, even if it does tacitly accept evolutionism for the sake of the story.)
CHAPTER I
In the beginning -- i.e., before
the beginning -- there was
NOTHING.
And MATTER came
out of NOTHING. And MATTER
was CHAOS.
CHAPTER II
Strangely, and for no reason
whatsoever, CHAOS started to
change.
Simplicity begat complexity,
randomness begat order, most
peculiar
of all, inanimate MATTER
begat organic MATTER.
CHAPTER III
Many, many, many years passed
and quite by chance organic
MATTER
developed in a strange
direction. It became more
and more complex, and
then for
no apparent reason at all, it
became conscious of itself. It
called
the consciousness MIND and it
gave itself a name and that
name was MAN.
CHAPTER IV
Now MAN equipped with MIND
found that MIND played peculiar
tricks
on him. He found that
instead of just accepting himself as
part of
MATTER, he had a longing
for significance, a desire to live
for a
purpose. Instead of being
pushed about by blind chance, he
wanted to
direct his own affairs.
He also found that there was a state
of being
that was entirely
satisfactory and he called it LOVE.
CHAPTER V
MAN kept on searching for purpose
and meaning and after a
while
strange rumors began to spread --
rumors that spoke of a
creator-GOD
who was LOVE, who had created
MAN in his own image. Many men
believed
the rumors. It gave
their lives meaning; it told them the
universe was
not purposeless
after all. Inspired by hope, these
BELIEVERS started to
write, to paint,
and to chip away at blocks of
stone. Some of these
craftsmen
were extremely skillful. They seemed
to be expressing the
longings and
aspirations of all men. To
these exceptional pieces of
craft
a name was given, and that name was
ART. And the men who wrote
them,
painted them, or chipped them
out were called ARTISTS. And all
their ART
said: MAN IS SIGNIFICANT.
CHAPTER VI
It was also rumored that
the son of LOVE became a MAN,
showed men how to
live,
then died. A legend has it that
the son of LOVE came back
from
the dead then disappeared
in a cloud. In some parts of the
Western World
the BELIEVERS
of this legend spread a very
influential form of the
message:
MAN IS SIGNIFICANT.
CHAPTER VII
For
many years this state
of affairs existed, but MAN became
restless. Was
it so? Was MAN a
creation of LOVE? Why should he
simply believe a rumor?
Had
anyone used his REASON -- a very
special activity of MIND that
had
proved to be successful in
understanding MATTER -- to find out
if the
rumor was true? Did the
rumor correspond to what
really was? A thorough
investigation
began and it lasted many years.
CHAPTER VIII
After an era of investigation MAN
came to certain
conclusions:
(1) The rumors were certainly
false. REASON found no
EVIDENCE to
verify the GOD hypothesis. God,
they said, was the result of
wishful
daydreams, a figment of IMAGINATION --
which itself was an
early aberration
in primitive MAN, now happily under
the control of
REASON. And if the
rumor of GOD was false, so surely was
the complex
rumor about his son.
(2) MAN was not some mysterious
higher being who
was significant. He
was, on the contrary, of no importance
at all --
simply a complex product of
cause and effect. A meaningless
piece of
MATTER on a large but equally
meaningless piece of MATTER called
EARTH.
He had emerged from
primordial slime and was really neither
more or less
than that.
CHAPTER IX
At first nothing
much changed.
But a few years passed and a few
perceptive men began to
notice a
difference. Music didn't seem
to sound the same, painting
didn't
look the same, and books didn't read
in the same way. Some people
started
to complain, but the ARTISTS --
always very honest transparent
people --
simply said, "We are
interpreting REALITY. If REALITY is
meaningless,
then we must imitate
that meaninglessness. You must not
give yourselves
airs. You are nothing.
You are a conscious bit of protoplasm
condemned
to death on this planet."
At that, the critical group stopped
carping
and started to say how beautiful
the NEW ART was. They didn't want
to
use the word beautiful because
everybody knew it didn't mean anything,
but
it had been around for so long
why not use it anyway?
CHAPTER X
Then, too, a few perceptive
men noticed changes in the way
men
and women behaved. Once
they had loved each other.
And their LOVE was
thought to be
a reflection of the LOVE who
was GOD. But now there was
just
SEX -- liaisons of the moment.
And families began to die as
families
and children were left
to the whim of the courts. And
men called these
liaisons LOVE,
though they knew the word didn't
mean anything.
CHAPTER XI
All sorts of startling consequences
followed. Some men
said, "If
MAN is only a machine caught up
in the vast mechanism of
nature,
why not treat him accordingly?
So the MANIPULATORS set to
work
and used men just like
objects of nature. And behold
there came a very
efficient system
called UTOPIA, and the occupants
were called
NECROPHILES. Of course,
it was really nothing new, for
the MANIPULATORS
had picked up
their model from the ANTS, a
natural group of beings who
years
previously had attained the
perfect state of affairs.
Another
group of men resisted
UTOPIA. They said, "In spite of all
that
REASON has proved we will
continue to believe that our longings
and
aspirations are meaningful."
So they tried to forget their DESPAIR
(a
feeling that MAN experienced
when he wanted to hope and did
hope knowing
it was hopeless)
by taking chemicals and behaving
like animals, living
only for each
successive moment and trying hard
to make each moment
pleasurable.
Most of them got tired playing
these games after a while
and
disposed of themselves in various
ways. Some went to DEATH, some to
PSYCHEDELIA
(a beautiful country
with a synaesthetic landscape), some
to NIRVANA.
Some even went to UTOPIA.
And so nonsense was worshipped
instead of
sense (they called it the
absurd). REASON was abandoned --
because, you
see, it couldn't
give answers to the really big questions
after all. In
its place came UNREASON
(they called it irrationality). And
MORALITY was
abandoned --
because that particular ability to
distinguish between THE
GOOD and
THE BAD was simply regarded as
a mere matter of taste or
caprice.
THE GOOD and THE BAD had been
popular once, but that was when
rumors
of GOD were rife. THE GOOD
was GOD's holy character
and had to be
obeyed. THE BAD was
disobedience or revolt against
THE GOOD. But THE
GOOD and THE
BAD departed with REASON and GOD.
And now there was no
longer
TRAGEDY -- only MISERY.
CHAPTER XII
So
MAN ceased to be MAN --
a rational, moral creature, a being
who once
transcended the
causality of nature. Instead he
became a meaningless,
enigmatic
machine-like piece of MATTER.
Even the MANIPULATORS who
controlled
UTOPIA ceased to be
MAN in the old sense of the word.
After denying
their mannishness
for so long, they finally lost
it and so became the
most terrifying
animal on the face of the earth.
POSTSCRIPT
The
old rumors still persist --
found in outlying regions and small
cliques
of NON-CONFORMISTS in
UTOPIA -- that LOVE is. Some still
say MAN is. But
these are the same
ones who say no MAN has ever
really died, that even
the ancients
are alive (some well, some not)
and living in OTHER WORLD.
Such
rumors are being suppressed
wherever they are found.