Friday 14 June 2002

Pic of the day: Picture from the movie Prince of Egypt. In a fit of artistic liberty, Moses is surrounded and enveloped in the crackling white God-energy.

Creepy Godmaking

One detail that thrilled me in Prince of Egypt was the portrayal of God as a sentient white energy. Well, OK, perhaps not God exactly.

If we read only the story in Exodus, we get the impression that the burning bush was indeed The One, and that Moses spoke with Him occasionally. However, other passages in the Bible claim that it was the Angel of the Lord who spoke with Moses and who led the people out of Egypt. It's kind of uncertain to the lay reader who this Angel was ... was it just some ordinary angel, of which there are thousands and thousands, or was he someone special? Some Christians claim that this character was none else but Jesus Christ, not yet incarnate, acting in his customary role as mediator between God and humanity. I'm sure the Jews have different opinions on this. But basically this character seems to be God's representative or localized presence.

A highly developed religion such as modern Judaism (or the modern spin-offs from Judaism) is a maze of theology. The many layers of theologians quoting and expanding on one another tend to make it all very very abstract, to the point where eventually people don't really think of God as real. Or rather, not part of their reality. Part of some abstract far-away reality, sure, but definitely a long distance relationship. How would these people react to suddenly meeting a sentient glowing energy who claimed to be God? Pretty creepy, it would be. To put it in funny-speak: Not someone you'd like to meet in a dark alley.

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I'll go lightly on the obvious science fiction angles. I'm sure the interested reader can think of some himself. We seem to think it is obvious that we are the highest life form in the universe, next to God if any. And that if there are other life forms out there, they must necessarily be animals like us, with roughly the same instincts and attitudes. But what if they are not? Or ... not anymore? But I'm not going there, not now.

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In The Empty Vessel, a magazine of contemporary Taoism, there was last year a mention of Moses and his God. The article explained the 3 levels of energy that they believe in. Humans process physical energy into mental energy, which allows us to solve problems which cannot be solved by applying brute physical energy, and which controls the lower energy to do our bidding. But according to this article, we can further process mental energy to spiritual or divine energy, which is even more versatile. When people consciously use this god-energy, they can do miracles or magic. But sometimes the energy is wielded by the subconscious, and takes the form of a god. This, they claimed, was what happened to Moses. He had a lot of spiritual energy, which manifested in the form of his God.

Needless to say, I don't believe this. I am not a Taoist, I am a failed Christian. But the article jumped unbidden to my mind when I saw that animation of the divine energy in the movie. And the song didn't help either: "There can be miracles, when you believe ..." Yeah, that's basically what Jesus said too. But he didn't mean it that way, right? Certainly a coincidence ...