When looking at a global population struck by a pandemic running around like chickens with their heads cut off, looking for answers to questions they don’t have, it’s a need to look for what the questions are.

As I postulate in my recent book, “Climate change the new religion”, it can be highlighted through the approach of the much-maligned Greta Thunberg who seemed as lost as anyone else, even before the pandemic.

During her search, the mission her “Climate Change” is allegorical and deep seated, even if she doesn’t know it. The younger generation being subjected from birth to their parents’ and grandparents’ ideas on religion, can now turn to Google, Wikipedia and YouTube and find out quickly that while for example, the Bible had some uplifting principles on which people could live with each other and is a good story as a novel, it is not real. Archaeology and science can substantiate that. Kids realizing this, feel conned but can’t do much about it since the very foundations of Western civilization are based on the Christian beliefs on which in turn all Western law is based. There is a Queen of England and the Commonwealth with her own Christian Church supporting Biblical dogma and Trump as arguably the most powerful man on the planet swears on the Bible to take office. He wants to promote it in all schools. Then there is the Pope in Rome saying his is the word of God as so many had done before him, leaving us wondering why God should change his mind so often and now why he can’t provide protection from the corona virus. We have symphonies dedicated to Christianity and even our calendar starts from the supposed date of Jesus’s birth, even when the December 25 we know is an artificial date picked to coincide with the Winter solstice in the Norther hemisphere. So children are told they must believe. On behalf of that younger generation,  Greta says, without really understanding it, you have conned us, “How dare you!” 

There is absolutely no way any youngster such as Greta can tackle this religious conundrum her elders would be too afraid to tackle. Religion has done both good and bad as everyone searches for an answer to where did we come from, where are we going and what is the meaning of life? Religion always provided not just some vague options better than nothing even if it lacked proof but was laid down in concrete form by the Roman Empire to keep people in their place for centuries. Yet look then at today and all those people out there searching for something to demonstrate against, whether BLM or just throwing bile at elected presidents. The church had always told them how-to step-in line and remembering the early texts were in languages most people couldn’t read, then in ancient French and Latin, no peasant was going to write a thesis against what they were told. So for the now we had climate change as something to worry about giving you purpose, now overshadowed by Covid-19. Gone is Christian religion and while Islam is proliferating given that it is life-threatening to apostasies, it does not set out the rules clearly nor in a form acceptable today accepting child brides and a secondary role of women.

So how is this issue to eventually be resolved? Apart from the witch hunts and millions of murders carried out in the name of religion, an underlying morality did seep through along with the magnificent religiously inspired architectural and artistic legacy accompanied by brilliant music. What this suggests is the need to retain the good parts handed down in the religious myths, stick with the morality depicted and just admit that it was all a great story. However that does not replace the need for which religion was invented in the first place, down to the basic question of whether God exists. For anyone who does not believe that all the religious myths are real, it is still possible to use the philosophy to say that a very personal God exists. It gets back to all the philosophical arguments going before us, simply put, I am because I am and without me there is really nothing else. Or as even the Bible says Jesus put it, I am that I am “and before Abram was I am”. [John 8:48.] It is one’s own personal reality.

Yet is that enough for the raging public who attack people in the street and find they can violate any man-made law? It was a different time when such instructions came from God but now even the elected leaders at the top contradict each other. So then one sees how China copes with this saying “The Law is what we say it is” and then act accordingly: forget that religious bit except in the privacy of your own home or we have many retraining camps which can help you.

And that’s the problem. People must set their own principles to live by and even if the Bible was only allegorical, most of the New Testament rules expounding on how to live with each other are not too bad. Otherwise if people can’t see where the alternative leads too, just be careful what you wish for…