What is the Calamity?
Ah, what will convey unto thee what the Calamity is!
A day wherein mankind will be as thickly-scattered moths [Qur’an 101:2-4]
We have entered an age of absolute flight from reality. We don’t want to be who we are or where we are or what we are. We want to be a different sex (Bruce Jenner), a different race (Michael Jackson), and pretty soon, I’m sure, a different species. An under-age boy apparently asked his parents if he could be a girl, so they had him castrated and pumped full of female hormones. Why is this not considered child abuse? And what if he had asked to be a raccoon instead? Science and the medical profession will undoubtedly soon be able to provide him with at least a first step toward this newly-conceived “freedom”…
We have entered an age of mass human insanity. Prof. Stephen Hawking has said that one of the things that frightens him most is the possibility of human contact with extra-terrestrial alien intelligences. His response to this threat? To partner with a billionaire and initiate an all-out campaign to discover extra-terrestrial alien intelligences. Both the United States and the European Union have dedicated financial and technological resources to finding extra-terrestrial life. Why? They have done so in the wild, last-ditch hope that we might thereby discover that we are “not alone.”
But there are over six billion of us now; why do we feel alone? We never felt alone when there were far fewer of us. If we ever do find living bacteria in the sub-surface oceans of Ganymede, I hope they will be some very compassionate and understanding bacteria, “friendly” bacteria, like those in our digestive tract…if these bacteria love us—or at least if they agree not to destroy us—maybe that will overcome our cosmic loneliness. We might even be able to establish communication with them…
A number of scientists apparently now believe that if we ever discover life, even the most rudimentary kind, on other planets, this will somehow disprove the existence of God—a notion that is completely devoid of any form or degree of rationalism or logic; a non-sequitur; a convulsive, arbitrary declaration with no meaning to it whatsoever. Clearly few of them realize that every religion that believes in a Creator believes He created not just the earth but the entire universe, as well as a vast chain of higher worlds, both formal and formless…stunning ignorance! The Holy Qur’an, for example, names Allah Rab al-Alimin, “Lord of the Worlds”, often given as 18,000 or 70,000 in number, and speaks of other races of humanity than the one we know…
Our loneliness does not stem, however, from uncertainty as to whether other planets inhabited by intelligent beings exist. It stems from the fact that, as a collective, we can no longer confidently conceive of the existence of God, His awareness of us, His care for us, His awesome wrath and majesty if we betray and abandon the human form He has created us to inhabit…which is simply to say that the loneliness that science claims to be laboring to save us from, it itself has created.
Luckily there are graces available to us in these latter days, these days of the fitna, that were never accessible before, because never necessary. In the words of the great Hindu epic, the Ramayana:
In the first age of the world
men crossed the ocean of existence
by their spirit alone.
In the second age sacrifice and ritual began,
and then Rama lived,
and by giving their every act to him
men lived well their ways.
Now in our age what is there to do
but worship at Rama’s feet?
But, my friend, the last age
of this world shall be best,
for then no act has any worth, all is useless….
except only to say Rama.
The future will read this. Therefore I tell them:
When all is in ruin around you, just say Rama.
We have gone from the spiritual to the passionate.
Next will come Ignorance. Universal war.
Say Rama and win! Your time cannot touch you.
Charles Upton 