Cliff James

Have you ever wondered why we bury and cremate our dead? Nothing to do with hygiene, it__ just so we don__ have to see the reality of death. You know, the Zoroastrians used to leave their dead in open places for the birds to eat. Now that__ a far more honest way to go, don__ you agree? Everyone can see what happens. It makes us live our lives more potently. That__ how I want to go, at my end: openly. Not ashamed of death, but embracing it.

Olympus is still a patriarchy. Zeus heads his royal household as jealously as Jehovah rules his harem of dull, harp-playing angels. Both are templates for order on earth, don__ you think?

One way or another, we spend our whole lives being conditioned into accepting some line or order, some position of domination or subjection. It__ hard to unlearn such hierarchy, to undo such control. It__ implicit.

I will simply die, as you will simply die, when our hearts stop beating. And instead of the fires of Hell or the clouds of Heaven, there will be a chorus of hungry worms or fish, depending on how we go. Isn__ that what really terrifies you most of all, why you force yourself against all reason to believe in such tales? It__ because you__e afraid of the nothingness at the end. You__e ashamed of it.

A metamorphosis had come over us. It was something internal, an electrical pulse in the brain, some slight variation in the aortic rhythm that had forever altered our states, transformed our external structures. We were not who we had been, nor yet what we would become.

So, at the turn of the third millennium, you have chosen to base your principles on a collection of contradictory texts _ written by various men years after the death of your man Jesus _ that have been edited and selected out of hundreds of other documents, and bound together into one hotchpotch volume, under the orders of a political primate, Pope Damasus. And, you__e still content to condemn the living love I feel here and now, because of that dusty accident of bad editing? Why?