DNA IS THE NEW RELIGION
More than 2,000 years ago, authors of the Talmud and the Bible threw out the panoply of gods enthroned at the Pantheon of Rome, the Acropolis of Greece, and the Kingdom of Egypt and installed in their stead a single all-powerful anthropomorphic god in whose image, the scribes trumpeted, we are fashioned. In their time, their writings changed the earthly playing field for much of humanity. For millennia now, western societies have canonized the concept of one all seeing, all knowing god who dictates all matters human on a blue dust mote called Earth.
Imagine for a minute that the baseline concept of a single god is off-base, not wrong, necessarily, but not fully realized. Most people of faith today would recognize that a belief in multiple gods –Zeus, Isis, Jupiter, Athena, Aphrodite, Mars, Mercury, Poseidon, Ra, you name it – is, how shall I say, out of fashion. Those superheroes of yester-millennia have been unceremoniously relegated to the dust bin of theological history, and there they will surely stay. But what if hitching one’s spiritual wagon to a single deity is misguided, as well. What if something right before our eyes is operating that provides an avenue to universal truth and ultimate salvation. If we could recognize it, wouldn’t human thought and experience undergo a revolution of profound change, much as the one-god concept ushered in over 2,000 years ago?
What would that something be? Where would we look for the clues to some super-enlightened manner of being?
In 1905 a patent clerk published a paper that would forever alter human experience. Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity changed not only the rules of the game of existence, but changed the earthly and celestial playing fields, as well. Prior to Einstein’s 1905 paper, learned men and women struggled mightily since the dawn of the Enlightenment to fully understand the basic principles at work in the universe. Copernicus, Newton, Currie, and legions of others had meticulously compiled evidence to support an increasingly tidy set of immutable theories that did the yeoman work of explaining how the great clockworks of the heavens beyond the front door stoop functioned.
Then in 1905, Einstein, like an Alice in Wonderland, opened a rabbit-hole door into a space/time continuum no one knew existed. Today, we are busying ourselves on the other side of that door on a planet where nuclear physics, quantum mechanics, string theory, ion engine drive, hyperloops, iPhones, and the boson god particle are at the breakfast table with us along with our plastic K-cup coffee and Crispy Crème doughnuts/diabetes propagators.
The god business is in need of its own theory of relativity. Organized religion could use a key to its own rabbit-hole door into Wonderland.
At the heart of western sacred text and eastern spiritual practice is the individual. The benefits of believing and living a pious existence are bestowed on the believer. Go directly to heaven or a heavenly state. Deviate (sin) from the righteous course as defined by religious text or practice and the benefits will be delayed, withheld, or worse. But what if none of that matters in the least? What if the individual, the believer, isn’t in the eye of the great beholder at all?
You don’t matter. Don’t get testy, now. Neither do I matter. But your lineage does. Or more correctly, our collective human lineage does. We can trace the lineage of Homo sapiens into the deep past. If we do not extinguish our flame through war or pollution of our home planet, humanity’s lifespan could stretch out far into the future. On average, any one species on Earth is thought to endure, before dying out or evolving into something altogether different, about four million years. Some creatures blink out in a fortnight; others, like the horseshoe crab, endure for 500 million years.
Our species has been rummaging about on the skin of our big wet rock for 200 millennia or so. Say we’re allotted five times those years: a million orbits around the sun. That’s to be our run before we call it quits. That’s forty thousand generations of humans. Forty thousand! In that number you and I are sequestered, hidden in the vastness of the figure. We don’t count for much of anything. But our collective human family counts. If you or I pass from the living, it means nothing. But that you and I were a part of the great human experiment scratching out a future for ourselves and our kin, that’s where immortality resides. Now that’s something.
If you have bought into my bit of rainy day nonsense so far, then you’ve just turned the knob on that rabbit-hole door into an altogether novel realm that I’ll take the liberty of calling The Continuum. Why The Continuum? Well, Einstein thought the term was good enough, and, besides, I can’t find my Roget’s thesaurus to ferret out something a bit more sublime.
The Continuum is the conjoined flow of human DNA and hours over grand expanses of time. It is a conveyor of the living genome rolling ever forward, its starting point on the African savannah at the birth of the first child with our very particular genetic makeup some 200,000 years ago. The conveyor will end somewhere in the deep future, hopefully. Let’s pray we don’t put an end to our own voyage this very century.
The Continuum is religion in five dimensions, where grand human existence coupled with unfathomable depths of time is that penta-dimension where salvation resides. Within The Continuum, we can’t influence the past, of course, but we can begin to focus on what really counts in our future collective life as our supposedly wise species. What really does matter going forward is that we begin to husband well our sickly planet. We clean up our act starting today. We live within the home planet’s limits, and ensure that our fellow creatures have the breathing room to move forward on the journey with us. Fail to do this and it will not matter worth a damn if you or I are Christian, Hindu, Muslim, Agnostic, Jew, Seek, Zoroastrian, Buddhist, Shinto, Atheist or what have you. We’ll go the way of the dinosaurs and won’t even make impressive museum fossil bone displays 50 million years hence.
The Continuum, that flow of human DNA down the endless river of time, is the new religion hiding in plain sight. It’s what really counts. It’s the bottom line. It’s the god within, residing in all of us for all human time: human life everlasting, if you will. Everything else is Madison Avenue soft sell or evangelical pulpit hard sell.
It’s cause for celebration, this Continuum thing. It frees us all to seek a higher calling and undertake an ever so monumental cause, that being to ease a small planet off life support so we can guarantee the future for our children 40,000 generations down the road.
The Continuum is the new Bible, a sacred double-helix for all humanity in all its wondrous genetic diversity, dancing the waltz of deep time. It just hasn’t been written yet.
I best dust off the old Royal typewriter, change the ribbon, and have at it.
