The Resurrection of the Body

Christmas is near. Everywhere we go, we find long and short silver, gold and red tinted tinfoil  ribbons or silvery mock pine needles along the sides of buildings, straddled or circling the irregular real or plastic green needles of the fir or pine trees amidst similarly coloured and texured balls, balloon, cones and little decorations of Santa, angels or other cuddly figures with sprayed ice foams falling over various parts of the trees.

There seems an electrcity in the air. Millions of internet messages, MSN's, text messages or even voice mails are flickering every second through the optic fibres of the networks of numerous internet and wireless telecommunication network service providers and even pulse through the wireless waves in the air, though invisible to us, from people arranging for Christmas dinners, parties, gatherings etc..

Busy executives would take off their suit and tie and office ladies would take off their high heels and slip into stylishly casual clothes or carefully draw their inner, outer eye lines, paint or stick on their nails, put on their most alluring lip gloss or don their ravishingly beautiful ballroom dresses, generously tip their hairdressers for giving them a hairstyle they consider particularly suited to the shape of their head or complexion or the style of their dresses and douse their dresses, necks, their wrists and even their breasts with their favourite parfumes to attract marauding male eyes and nostrils, and eventually their bodies.

Parents, teachers and students are busy decorating their homes school halls and classroom with all kinds of Christmas decorations to create a festive "atmosphere" and the school's art teacher are eating their heart out in the middle of the night in trying to figure out new ideas to make the school look bright and happy.

Department stores, boutiques, supermarkets are packed with people busily preparing themselves for their big, small, micro-size parties or rendezvous and restaurants and bars compete in putting bigger and better posters and placards on their windows and floor stands in their shop fronts advertising their unique Christmas or Boxing Day breakfasts, brunches, lunches, afternoon teas, dinners, buffets etc. at bargain prices.   Has Christmas become as Don Cupitt says, the "Disneyfication of Christinaity"?

One may well ask, "What for?" or "Why all such fuss"? Christians will of course tell us that Christmas is a time of joy, a time of celebration because with the birth of Christ, all of mankind will thereafer be saved. We celebrate because Christ was born, the Christ, who by his death on the Cross, will restore us to God's favor.

I have never really understood why it was necessary for God's only son to die for us. Can't God spare his own son? Why must He be so cruel to his own son? Why can't God allow men to repent for their sin without having first had his own son to die on the cross? Why must God first create man knowling full well that he will turn against his command, drive him out of paradise, be subjected to the temptation of the devils and see billions die for their sins because they are not strong enough to resist temptations from the devils and his hordes and then cause his own son to be born by a Virgin(?), let him preach for a while and then be accused by his own chosen people before the Sanhedrin and then taken to die a most excruciatingly painful form of death on the cross by the Romans.

If God is almighty, why can't He simply forgive men their sins because after all, it was He who planted the ability to sin and to do evil in man's mind and at the time He created men, He already knew there were fallen angels who rebelled against Him and who were determinined to undo whatever he was trying to do. In computer lingo, He put in the enabling hardware, knowing that Adam and Eve will write the software program of actual sin. If He is as powerful as we are taught that He is, why can't He destroy the devils and wipe them off the face of the universe? If He is powerful enough but refuses to do so, how can we still say He is all good. If He wants to destroy evil and the devil but is unable to do so, then how can we say He is almighty.If He is all powerful and all good, then it must be possible that at the time that He created man, He does not know whether man will succumb to the temptations by the devils. If so, He cannot be all knowing. It simply doesn't make any sense, at least human sense to me, to claim that God is all good, all knowing and all powerful. If He is not so, then why does He create man?

We're taught that God created man to glorify himself. If so, is He not literally a megalomaniac of cosmic proportions, indeed the greatest in the universe which He created, beyond which there cannot possibly be any greater? In particular, I am deeply disturbed by the story of Job, in which God wagered with the devil that Job will remain faithful. If He is all knowing, why does He still need to wager with the devil? The story of God asking Abraham to sacrifice his son Isaac is equally disturbing. If God is all knowing, why did He still need to put Abraham to the test? Is He a sadist? Does it delight Him to see human beings suffer simply because the first man disobeyed Him? Must He punish man for that disobedience by punishing His very own son, whom we are taught is one of the three persons in the Holy Trinity: Father, Son and Holy Spirt. In punsihing His son, is He not punishing Himself? If He must do that, why? Is He a sado-masochist?  Or is He punishing Himself for not having had the foresight to realize that that Adam and Eve may disobey Him thus necessitating His holy anger by banishing them from the Garden of Eden? And if He truly loves the entire human race, as we have been taught, why is He so unjust and allow only those 12 small tribes in the Middle East, the Jews to know of him first. What about the Chinese, the Indians, the Africans, the Red Indians and the people of Oceania and Polynesia? And what about all the people of the world who died before the death of Jesus? Will all of them go to hell before they had the chance to know Him?

The traditional Christian God is totally incomprehensible to me. I can understand Jesus preaching love. But I cannot understand why he must die. Of course, we have been told it was our sins which caused his death. But if sin is as St. Thomas of Aquinas said, simply the act of man voluntarily choosing to reject, to distance, to separate and to alienate himself from God, why must sin be invented in the first place. Some theologians will argue that the ability to sin is part and parcel of man's freedom and that freedom is an attribute of God and that therefore in exercising freedom, we are in a way, partaking in an attribute of God: we are to the extent of our freedom like unto God. But then, this merely pushes the question just one step further: why must we be like God who is supposed to be perfect. Why can't we simply be man, with all our inherent capacity both for good and for evil, with all our reason and our emotion, with all our imperfections? Is God not simply the projection of purely human values conducive to the aim of having a harmonious and functioning social, economic and political society, built up over the ages by different theologians each with a slightly different ideological and moral agenda to push values like co-operation, mutual assistance, empathy, sympathy, pity, mercy, equality and justice epitomized by the word "love" and later the authority of the church, but without due regard to consistency?

If Christian theology does not make sense, ( quite apart from the corresponding extremely anthropocentric Christian cosmology, which has also been shown by modern scientists to be utterly wrong) then the resurrection of the body must be understood in another sense. We have been taught that man has a soul and that after we are dead, our soul will survive us and that at the day of the Final Judgement, all the dead of the world will be bodily resurrected and their souls will rejoin their previously dysfunctional and decomposed bodies which will somehow miraculously be reconstituted and that the resurrected bodies together with the related souls will be judged either fit to rise to heaven to enjoy eternal happiness or be cast to burn in hell fire for all eternity.

The Bible did not say in what way our decomposed bodies can still be reconstituted and joined to our souls. It merely said that our resurrected body would be a "glorious" body, whatever that means. Nor does it tell us what heaven is like nor exactly what hell is like. Such concepts are deliberately vague. I don't blame them. After all, no one has ever come back from either of those "places" (is it a place? or just a condition of mind/body?) to tell us what they look or feel like. To me, all these are merely metaphors to describe our mental state when we do good or do evil. To me, what is good is everything which encourages, promotes and protects Life and evil is simply its reverse. I am not the first to think so. In Tolstoy's War and Peace, he said, "God is life and to love life is to love God. Everything moves and shifts together and that movement is God. God is everything." And heaven and hell are merely picturesque ways of describing our mental state when we are full of life and love or full of death and destruction and hatred or other negative emotions. If we can believe our scientists, then it is impossible for our mind and its physical embodiment the brain, to exist independently of our physical bodies. If so, then if we would like to have a healthy mind, we must first have a healthy body.The Romans have the motto: mens mana e corporo sano (a healthy mind and a healthy body).  Jesus said, man does not live by bread alone. But he did not say we can live without bread. He merely assumed that the latter proposition is self evident. If so, then there is a good deal of reason why we must treat our body well.

To me, whatever is good for the body cannot be bad for the soul. Only a happy body will make for a happy soul. To this extent at least, we must respect and revere our bodies as much as we respect and revere our souls (assuming in the first place that soul is not just human consciousness but something transcending such normal human consciousness and which will NOT expire upon the physical death of our bodies, a rather questionable assumption).   If so, then resurrection of the body may well mean something very different from what traditional Christianity teaches. Resurrection of the body will mean in such a context, the abandonment of all bad habits which restrict, retard, injure, or cause harm to the physical health of our bodies eg. excessive drinking, smoking, alcohol, drugs, work, sex and unhealthy lifestyles and the restoration of a regime fit for our physical health through reasonably moderate practices in our intake and use of food, drink, relaxation, exercises, sex etc via a structured and disciplined but not mechanical or rigid lifestyle.

In the context of contemporary living conditions in an urban commercial environment in which  the capitalist ideal of maximization of profit seems the surpreme value and which thus encourages artificially stimulated excessive consumption to keep the economic and financial machineries moving and which in the process squeezes out the last ounce of our energies, the last second of our working time and the maximum employment of our reason and logic, resurrection of the body  may mean giving ourselves more time to engage in certain totally "useless" or "non-productive" activities (from the point of view of the economy) or lesiure, activities we enjoy in and for themselves e.g our hobbies and the reactivation and re-sensitization of our congenital faculties for the generation of pleasure ie. our perceptual and experiential organs: our eyes, our ears, our noses, our tonques, our skin and for the promotion of that ultimate pleasure: the act of copulation. We must take time off to feel the sensations streaming in from our skin and other sensory organs and learn again to delight in the various forms of beauty accessed and expressed through those perceptual and sensual apparatus peculiar to each of our senses. We must live again but from our body, not just from our mind. We must live up, not down. We must build our happiness downward up, and not top down. We must start with what we most concretely have at our disposal, our body. We must feel the beauty of Nature: the beauty of the plants, the animals, the sea, the sky, the mountains, the rivers, the lakes and the form of the human body. We must learn to celebrate our body, not just our minds! We must never forget that without our bodies, there can be no minds! As a philosophers quipped after long standing disputes about whether idealism or materialism or dualism should prevail, "no matter, never mind.". Long live the human  body!

Let there be no mistakes. I am not advocating indiscriminate use of our sensory faculties and of sex. I am only advocating the removal of artificially and often religiously motivated but unrealistic restraints upon our freedom to employ those facilities for human happiness provided by Nature itself.

To me, nothing which goes against Nature and its laws can be moral. In this respect, I am afraid that religious institutions have unwittingly been the greatest sinners. They sin against Nature, our only true source of happiness, including so-called "spiritual" happiness.  Out of misconceived notions for the promotion of what they think is good, they have turned themselves into instruments for the perpetration of evil. In sinning against Nature, they have also sinned against Man and his humanity! I believe that the time has come for another type of salvation, one not perfect but contingent but one much more firmly based upon facts and evidence and phenomena within our grasp.

Our eyes must learn to turn no longer skyward to the old man in the clouds but downward, upon the apparent solidity of the Earth, its mountains, its seas, rivers, plants, animals and ourselves and we must snatch salvation from amidst the confusion, gratutitousness, the transcience, the contingencies and possibly the ultimate void of this world. It is a world which is constantly being remade, destroyed and remade again and again by us. It is a world that is constantly passing away and constantly being renewed but in a different form and the primary intrument of that renewal and new salvation shall be the friend we have had since we first laid eyes upon this world, our own body and with our body, our mind with our creativity and our imagination ! 

We must find a new spirituality and a new lifestyle which will make us whole, in our own way, through our own brain and our own body. Values and meaning must be sought, no longer from an external and so-called "objective" Being, because we are no longer sure if he exists and if he does, the form that he takes. It must be sought from within ourselves. We must create our own meaning. No one else will or can create it for us. We may cry out for help but our voice may be lost in the void of the universe and if by any chance there shall be any echoes, it is more likely than not that those echoes will be those of our own vpoces, only much fainter and slightly delayed in time and in accordance with the relentless and impersonal laws of sound mechanics which  dictate that they shall diminish in energy in accordance with the square of the distance from the source of the sonic emission! 

The epoque for demythogizing God is long gone. It has been done by Copernicus, Galileo, Freud, Jung, Darwin, Durkheim, Marx and Feuerbach. The time for remytholozing has come. The remythologizing must be done, this time, by ourselves. From a collective enterprise, it may first have to start as a personal enterprise. It may not be a pretty or attractive picture. We may look with nostalgia back to a time in which everything was laid out for us, as Christ said, as a feast in which the host invites the faithfuls. But it is the only realistic one now! We must learn to let go of our former certainties and live in the here and now, through our own body and if we look after it well, hopefully our mind! We must learn to smile and even to laugh in the face of such uncertainties as if  they did not exist and learn to play amongst the myths of existence created and fashioned by our own hands or more precisely our own minds with the assistance of our bodies! We do not have any other viable and realistic choice which is not based on illusion!