The elaboration of God

By Dalia Céspedes

“From time to time, there are going to be things that are acts of God that cannot be prevented.” –Rick Perry, U.S. politician, reacting to the latest ecological disaster provoked by British Petroleum.

“My greatest strength is in my shoes, because under their tongues I’ve written ‘GOD IS FAITHFUL’ so I can remember Him at all times.” –Kaká, Brazilian soccer player.

“Reggaeton is my God.” –Misha, Cuban reggaeton performer.

It is not a question that God doesn’t exist; he may very well exist regardless of our will (in fact, that’s how He is defined). The issue is how the human creature has fabricated an effervescent and toxic cult of itself through the cult of God.

That this cult is sexist and that this sexism responds to a circumstantial framework of thought becomes evident when this “superhuman” entity is given the name of The Lord, never The Lady, because she has gone on, though struggling mightily, to perform other tasks more proper to her sex, such as piety and the maternal care of the children of the abovementioned entity, who, in his Christian version, excludes her from the all-encompassing Trinity.

Why does this discriminatory myth remain untouched even in this era of so many gender conversions? Why doesn’t someone propose an androgynous institution in the style of Ying-Yang? That is the theological mystery of our times.

The anthropomorphism of the Lord (or the gentlemen and ladies) has been violently criticized for centuries, and even millennia, without ever slowing down the process of assimilation and projection. The divine ones continue to behave, like during the apogee of the Hellenic pantheon, exactly as we, we, like during the days of Attila or Julius Caesar, continued to behave like them.

With the Lord’s blessing, everything is permitted to us; and to Him, with our blessing, everything is given: huge earthly properties and spiritual powers that don’t stop misery and ignorance are exchanged between families – the human and the divine – with grand and costly celebrations, through bloody pacts and avowals of loyalty and extreme discretion: the ineffable, the unnamable, the unknowable draw new verbal and conceptual curtains over the daily crime of lesser nature and lesser life.

Like Kafka said, we don’t have to wait for the Final Judgment: we actually live under a permanent Martial Law.

Whom does this institution benefit which postpones ad infinitum the assumption of responsibility? Given that “only He knows,” that “His ways” are inscrutable, that He works “in mysterious ways,” the worst murder remains unsolved: the crime committed against the principle of life and its shelter, nature, to benefit a superior being, a human, who is protected by another superior being who is divine.

But, when did the human creature invent its inventor? I imagine that, in the cold nights on the plains, threatened by other creatures, the same creatures that later would have to be dominated or annihilated, one by one, Man needed a talisman: an ulterior presence with inexplicable and wondrous strength, whose way of reasoning was similar to his.

Then did Man beget God. He organized in his mind two disassociated realities, neither of which is totally true or false, which revolve around a privilege, the privilege of a conscious relation with the meaning of life, which – Man assumes – no other form of life has, even if he has no way of proving it.

To do so, he would have to communicate with them in their own language, would have to put himself in their stead, perceive the universe through their senses; in sum, he would have to understand them, not to overpower them, domesticate them, study them to take advantage of them, but to love them the way he claims to love a god he has never seen, who has never given him milk, fur or eggs. Or proteins, or honey, or morning songs, flowers or barks of joy.

But by assuming that the creator of everything that exists is his boss and personal friend, Man thinks he has the divinely granted right of mistreating everything that nourishes and protects him.

Many years ago, in Indonesia, a woman became pregnant by herself, by her mind desirous of children, hungry for order. Eventually, her breasts engorged and dripped a sentimental colostrum. The Dutch missionaries that examined her – and thereby found that she was a virgin – did not know whether to declare a miracle or confirm a madness.

Finally, when the time came for the delivery, the people were divided among those who leaned toward a supernatural explanation (the child, fruit of the woman’s union with a local divinity, would not be born because of the townspeople’s lack of faith), an objective argument (the child would not be born because he never existed outside the woman’s mind), and the magical argument: the child was born in the form of a sparrow, seen fluttering above the bed of the sick or possessed or chosen woman. It was a seven-colored sparrow, say the witnesses, and disappeared just when the womb deflated.

Oh, when will our nine months come to an end and we’ll deflate from so much divinity!