Faith and Eden

Sistein Chapel

Well I don't wish to explain or dare say I understood Hopscotch by Julio Cortazar, but one quote did stick out in my mind. “Why have we had to invent Eden, to live submerged in the nostalgia of a lost paradise, to make up utopias, propose a future for ourselves?" (162) I think the answer to the rhetorical question is that we need purpose and we want to believe. What I mean exactly is this:

Religion is prevalent in the world not, because of the need for people to be close to God but rather because of need to have something to strive for. Thats at least, my take on the matter. People set goals and lists just to cross them off. Have you ever wondered why news years resolutions are so popular? It is simply because people love to set goals. I am not saying that goals are bad, but rather it is just human nature to perceive life as setting goals and reaching them. My take on eden is that people were not satisfied with death as the ending to our goals so a new end goal was invented. We needed a goal passed death to insure that we kept continuing to set goals as if death was not an obstacle. If death was the end goal, then people would have a real hard time doing all the intermediate steps to get there. With eden as the last step, it is very easy to keep pushing, because who wouldn't want to live in a utopia.

Now understanding that Eden would be a goal is I think easy to comprehend. I think the hard part lies in having faith that it exists. Faith is a little bit more tricky to talk about. What I wish to say about it is simply that when what we need to have faith in is positive it is easier to let ourselves have faith then when the faith has to do with a negative topic. Eden connects with this point by being the ultimate end of religion. In religion there are both positive and negative things to believe in, like God rescuing people from the flood and bad like thinking God gave your dad a heart attack. However, in Christianity, and other religions, it is not an accident that eden is set as the pinnacle of the believe, arguably equal to Jesus (This point is debatable but I'll save it for a different post). Eden is the pinnacle because it allows a follower to disregard all the bad faith and focus on the one good faith at the top.