At This Time of Year I Contemplate the Passing of Time, the Meaning of Life, and Religion

December 24, 2018 – In two weeks time I turn 70. Going back ten of my lifetimes would take us to the year 1319 AD, a pre-industrial world far different than anything on the planet today. Go back a further ten and we are at 619 AD, a few years before the meteoric rise of Islam out of Arabia. And do the exercise again and we are back in the period of the late Roman Republic, before the common era that marks time for most of us on the planet today. When you think about those thirty, 70-year cycles, it is but a blink of an eye in the history of the Universe.

At this blog site, I write about where we are going scientifically, technologically, and intellectually in the 21st century. It’s hardly more than the addition of my current lifetime before we get to the century end. And yet when we look back 70 years you would be able to count the number of computers on the planet on the fingers of one hand. Today in our digital world there are as many computing devices as there are humans on the planet. It is but one aspect of the dimensional leap humanity continues to demonstrate in less than a blink of cosmological time. And it makes you wonder just how far we can go in thirty more of my lifetimes, and how unrecognizable humanity and society will be when that time comes.

On the day before Christmas, I’ve been reading Stephen Hawking and his description of time and how the Universe began from nothing. According to Hawking, you cannot describe the Big Bang in terms of time because until it happened time didn’t exist. In fact there was nothing. Our Universe arose from it in what some call a singularity, an event that marked the beginning of time. That Universe as we know it has dimensions of breadth, mass, and energy, and also can be measured in time.

Hawking describes the yin and yang of the existence of the Universe in which the mass containing galaxies, dust, and gas reflect the yin, and empty space the yang. Space is the negative counterweight to the positive energy and matter that balances the equation. The two negate each other bringing us back to the nothing from which the Big Bang occurred. In Hawking’s description of the Universe, it is clear there can be no supreme divinity. A Universe that began from nothing in which the equation of its construct still calculates to zero doesn’t require a divinity to build it.

Which bring us to the religious aspect of the annual ritual of Christmas celebrated at the Winter Solstice in the Northern Hemisphere (Down Under it’s the beginning of summer) each year. Christmas always sees me contemplative about such big questions like, how the Universe came into being, how life began, and is there a god or gods, and are they our creators.

When I was studying in university to be a teacher of world history, I focused on researching the origins of religion. I was particularly interested in the commonalities found in many faiths, a study called religious syncretism, the borrowing by religions of the culture and practices of other faiths. The period of my study focused on the rise of Christianity during the Roman Empire, a world dominated by Hellenistic paganism.

Our idea of Hellenistic paganism is a world of many deities, Zeus or Jupiter, Hera or Juno, Helios or Apollo, and such. Could the rituals, rites, mysteries, and practices associated with these gods have been equivalent to those practiced by monotheistic faiths?

Yes they could.

Just look at evidence in our daily lives. Hellenistic paganism defined our months, weeks, and days. Our seven day week is based on pagan observation of the Moon’s phases. The names of our weeks and months come from pagan gods and not just Hellenistic ones. And our divisions of time, the 24-hour day and 60-minute hour come from Babylonian rituals and practices based on the number “six,” the common denominator defining Babylonian religious observance as well as mathematics.

The concept of divine birth, salvation, the soul, and a cosmic, morally perfect deity, all were conceived within Hellenistic philosophy. They are not divine in origin. Pythagoras, the Greek was the one whose mathematical constructs attempted to explain the metaphysical world as described by his predecessor, the philosopher, Plato. Number forms and number theory were expressions of the order of existence from we humans on Earth, to transcendental intermediaries (Catholics call them saints), to an ultimate supreme divinity. The saints of Catholicism, who were the intermediaries and intercessors between the supreme divinity and humanity, is a borrowing from Plato who placed intercessors between the physical world and the ideal one.

It is this same Hellenistic pagan world that observed cult practices that we recognize as rituals in today’s Christian faith. Baptism is one. Immersion in blood or water goes back to pre-Christian religious practices, freeing believers from their sinful bodies.

Christianity borrowed baptism from Mithraism, a faith predominant in Roman imperial armies. The cult of Mithra also included a rich history of stories, tales about a divine presence appearing on Earth in human form, acting as saviour, and suffering and dying in sacrifice to save humanity. Mithra was the saviour who was then resurrected and ascended to the divine.

The rival to Mithraism in the Roman army was the cult of Sol Invictus, the divine sun. It too had a saviour. And in both faiths there is the tale of the nativity scene repeated each Christmas and depicted in the image below. The story of the Magi, the appearance of a divine star, and the divine birth that Christianity celebrates to this day are borrowed, as is the holy day of Sunday, the day of Sol Invictus. Even the rite of the Eucharist comes Mithraism and the cult of Sol Invictus. Talk about syncretism.

So Christmas as practiced today represents a syncretic merging of practices and beliefs from two of Christianity’s predominant competitors during the time of the Roman Empire. One can easily see how those who proselytized the faith might have found it expedient to adopt the cult stories, rites, and practices of the competition to win over converts.

In my musing I have wondered if at the time of Constantine the Great, the Roman emperor who consolidated power and united the empire in the early fourth century, and who fought his way to victory under the banner of the cross, if he had instead chosen symbology from Mithra or Sol Invictus, would the Europe that followed have been called “Mithradom” or “Soldom,” and not “Christendom?”

And if Christianity, had borrowed less from the cult practices of Mithra and Sol Invictus, and instead adopted the mathematical constructs of Pythagorean forms in conformity with Plato’s philosophical teachings, would it have evolved a religion based on scientific observation mixed with philosophy? In this alternative world would we be making saints of Stephen Hawking and worshipping the Big Bang? Some food for thought on Christmas Eve.

To all my readers I wish you all the best of the season whatever faith or non-faith you follow. This is my last posting for the year as I take a sabbatical to work on other tasks. I will return in the New Year and hope you will come back often to read the postings here.

A Happy Julian Calendar New Year to you all.