Some thoughts on Heroes, Part 1

Introduction and Religion

All the heroes are dead; long live the heroes of the age.

We seek a 'something' or a 'someone' in life to follow; if not to follow then at least to believe in; if not to believe in then at least to identify with. Where does it come from, this need to follow, to have faith, to be like? Why is so difficult to believe man to be 'the measure of all things?' Somewhere along the line mankind, ανθρωπος, 'He Who Looks Up' has lost the ability to gaze skyward and see only the sky; today there must be something there to fix their eyes on. Why?

The religious disposition (if so general a term can be said to exist) is very much concerned with such philosophical finding of objects in the sky. Christians march under their banners with their eyes 'fixed firmly on the Cross of Jesus'; Muslims try to live as exactly as possible in the footsteps of the Prophet Muhammad; Buddhists live the slow turning of the wheel, life into life into life with their hopes on far-off Nirvana. For all of them, the aim is something ahead, something only perhaps and possibly attainable, something - and this is vitally important - too big for the human mind to grasp unaided. Perhaps the luckiest are granted slight revelation, maybe a saint will strive a whole life for one crumb of uncertain wisdom, but why? What is it that makes people follow a star that they cannot see into a land that they cannot call home? For when people ask why religion has so little changing effect on the world, the answer is in how people follow: with their eyes fixed firmly on the cloudy part of the sky where they believe their star may be hid. How can a hidden star shine on the world; how can it affect change? In all the long history of belief in God, how many times could on possibly say God himself has intervened to change things? Miracles remain sparse and unverified, and if God is willing to show himself to the world, then he is doing it slowly and through his sad, fallible human vessels. How sad it is that so many religious people fix their lives on the unknown eternal when it is their God, if he exists, that has given them the potential to show himself to this world; to choose our own star to follow, different to the rest of the teeming masses of humanity. Though perhaps we all go by the grace of God and strive by his strength, nevertheless it is given to us to choose our path and venerate our creator by a life well lived. No 'certainty of heaven' for the truly righteous, no 'eternally elect' of God, no fundamentalist absolutes, for to the truly righteous comes the uncertainty of having to draw the map as they go. "I love those who do not know how to live," Nietzsche writes, "for they are the ones that cross over." If God truly loves anyone, how could it be those who put stock in eternity and so fail to affect change in their world? No, it is not them who are truly Christlike, trying Islamic, truly heightening their status in life, it is those whose constant devotion to the life that they live proves them to be wonderfully, awefully and perfectly human, on the road to becoming everything humanity was and should be again. It is these.