polilogues

Gerard Bodifée 0302

Question: I have always liked the expression: We are halfway between the Beasts and the Gods.

Bodifée: Yes, and let us hope that we are indeed halfway. We are somewhere between the apes and god, so we have already come a long way. Everything depends on your viewpoint. This is the ambiguity within all religion. Sometimes you get the feeling: I am nothing, I am only a speck of dust in this universe. Blow me away, and nobody will even notice. I’m nothing. And sometimes it is even written in these terms, in the Bible where God curses man: Thou art dust, and to dust thou wilst return. You are nothing. And that is my reality. And yet there are other moments where you look up at the sky and say: I can feel the divinity in me; I yearn for divine perfection.

And in fact, it is already in me by dint of the simple fact that I yearn for it, that I try to grasp for it, and because I am already so much more than mere inert matter. I am already like a God, I rule the universe. I can get this feeling, I can carry the expanding universe within myself, I can know it and partake of it, and I know myself to be on road to that endpoint, and at that moment I am a God in waiting. So at one moment I feel that I am nothing at all, and at another I feel I am everything. And that is the ambiguity of the religious feeling. This is why religious practitioners can sometimes aim at total humility and at other times there are no limits to their hubris. This is also why religion can be such a dangerous phenomenon. It can crush a person, it can make a person explode.