Today is a special day for most Christians...because it marks the start of a Holy Week of preparations leading to Easter, next Sunday, a week in which the passion, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ are remembered. Yet how pertinent is this commemoration to many people in the world today? Friedrich Nietzsche's classic philosophical work "Thus Spoke Zarathustra" (1883-5) is mostly responsible for popularizing the phrase and reasoning that "God is Dead!". In his writings, Nietzche announces the death of God and the birth of a successor, the Superman, and describes his views on a variety of subjects. Deeply influential the idea is stated as follows:
"God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it?"
He adds: "Ah brothers, this God which I created was human work and human madness, like all gods!"
From those far off days Nietzsche's words and arguments seem to continue echoing right into our Twenty-first Century if a cursory glance at life around us is anything to go by. The remembrance of this Week therefore is seen to mean that this man, Jesus Christ, went through such a horrific death for nothing, perhaps for a dream he believed in.....and so we have today replaced him with Easter eggs, bunnies and many other sweet or sugared delicacies.
But is this thinking right? Is God really dead to the masses of the world?
Dr Peter Fenwick, one of the world's leading experts in the field of neuroscience seems to disagree. I listened to him a few days ago expounding to a packed Medical School auditorium in Malta some cold statistics culled from his work and years of experience in the field of how and what makes the brain function. He explained that there seems to be a link to understanding religious experiences and gauging whether these were a figment of the imagination or reality. For starters he told us that a recent study in the UK had shown that for some reason (as yet unknown) many of those who attend mass or a church service at least once a week seem to live longer than those who do not attend!He said that his studies - again based on research in the UK - showed that in 1986 about 46% claimed to have had some form of transcendental experience while in 2006 this had risen to 76%. Yet he had more interesting facts for us to consider if God is dead or not in people's minds (and lives). In the USA, a coronary specialist running a heart ward monitored a group of patients suffering from serious heart trouble and whether prayer or the spirituality of others, had influenced them in any way. He found that this intercessory praying had an important influence on patients who did not know that someone was actually praying for them to get better. As a result those who were prayed for did not need as much hospital care as those who weren't prayed for.
Furthermore, this kind of healing did not need to have any direct or close contact with the patient since 59% showed that they had a positive treatment effect through distant healing!
Fenwick continued to explain that the Kabat-Zinn report of 1992 showed that when meditation, a spiritual practice that has a positive effect on the person meditating, was used clinically it reduced the blood pressure and pulse rates of patients to such an extent that their anxiety was also significantly improved. Three years later, a check of those patients who had been positively effected showed that the majority were still in their improved state.
There was so much more in Fenwick's hour-and-a-half presentation that we needn't go into except to note that whether we like it or not it would seem that there is a God after all, who is definitely not dead and who is having a close encounter with His creation whether we accept this as fact or not. At least leading scientists in the world are now looking closely at the relationship that religion might have in one's life and are also disproving Nietzsche's viewpoint, that "the world seemed to me the dream and fiction of a God....Good and evil and joy and sorrow and I and You - I thought them coloured vapour before the creator's eyes. The creator wanted to look away from himself so he created the world." Instead science is slowly proving what believers instinctively know, that the Almighty Good is madly n love with his creation. And He does not avert his eyes from us. Quite the contrary. So, have a deep Holy Week if you are a Christian and an a Happy Easter too! God is Alive.
