For the love of God, how can deeply depressed people get relief? Could God haul them out of the muck of existential blankness? Better yet, up the anty and save them from the whole shooting match? (Chris Rock, I need your help on this one.)
For God to be able to help us, does he depend on us to fulfill his role as "God"? And why am I capitulating to the cultural norm of capitalizing the name of this ineffable good guy, who is deemed ubiquitous, yet invisible and unseen?
I use the male pronoun because everyone who swears fealty to this invisible entity calls it a "he," which reminds me of a joke my atheist father used to tell. A man dies, ascends to heaven, and then by some miracle is revived and returns to earth. A bevy of doctors and his curious family are eager to know whether he has seen God. "Yes, and she's black!" replies the man.
I am a fan of the much-needed woke culture, de Santis be damned, so I must caution all worshipers of this ineffable Big Daddy in the sky. Rather than calling Him "He," how about "Ze?" Or "Them," although using "Them" might mistake you for a pantheist and you could end up getting help from Zeus or Thor instead of Christ's daddy.
As the reader might suspect, I am not only the off-spring of avowed atheists, but embrace Buddhist philosophy, which posits that God is a dualistic fiction. Instead of looking to a pie-in-the-sky father figure, the answer to that depressive state that drowns so many of us is...look within. Uncover the false beliefs that have been thrust upon you from the womb and out. Know that your inherent nature is good, filled with the potential to live in blessed harmony with all living forms. It is our alienation from reality that depresses our body and mind. In the same way that water vapor rises from a cold, wet pavement when the sun shines upon it in the morning, connecting to our energetic commonality evaporates depression.
No comments:
Post a Comment