Arthur Clarke igen

Her er et herligt stykke fra en bog jeg lige nu læser for Gud ved hvilken gang, nemlig Arthur Clarkes "3001 - The final Odyssey". Her viser Clarke i dialogens form (han har tilsyneladende lært noget af Platon, som han forøvrigt nævner i stykket her - næsten for oplagt, ikke??) hvilket syn han har på religionens rolle i menneskenes verden. Dette skal naturligvis ses i lyset af, at Clarkes gennemgående tese i forfatterskabet er, at udenjordiske intelligenser griber ind i laverestående, potentielt intelligente, væseners udvikling, nærmest som om de selv var guder - blot er de det ikke; derimod er de eksistenser på et ufatteligt højt udviklingsstade, både teknisk, fysisk og moralsk, som sætter dem i stand til at gribe ind og påvirke evolutionen hvor end de finder mulighederne for det.
Vi kommer ind i handlingen hvor hovedpersonen Frank Poole, nedfrosset i henved 1000 år, og nu genopvakt til en tilværelse i en tid, hvis udviklingsstade han til stadighed (i nogen grad forgæves) søger at forstå, fører en samtale med en filosof (Dr. Khan) bosat i en koloni på een af Jupiters måner.


Anubis City was far too small to boast a university campus - a luxury which still existed on the other worlds, though many believed that the telecommunications revolution had made it obsolete. Instead, it had something much more appropriate, as well as centuries older - an Academy, complete with a grove of olive trees that would have fooled Plato himself, until he had attempted to walk through it. Indra's joke about departments of philosophy requiring no more equipment than blackboards clearly did not apply in this sophisticated environment.

'It's built to hold seven people,' said Dr Khan proudly, when they had settled down on chairs obviously designed to be not-too-comfortable, 'because that's the maximum one can efficiently interact with. And, if you count the ghost of Socrates, it was the number present when Phaedo delivered his famous address...'

'The one on the immortality of the soul?'

Khan was so obviously surprised that Poole could not help laughing.

'I took a crash course in philosophy just before I graduated - when the syllabus was planned, someone decided that we hairy-knuckled engineers should be exposed to a little culture.'

'I'm delighted to hear it. That makes things so much easier. You know - I still can't credit my luck. Your arrival here almost tempts me to believe in miracles! I'd even thought of going to Earth to meet you - has dear Indra told you about my - ah - obsession?'

'No,' Poole answered, not altogether truthfully.

Dr Khan looked very pleased; he was clearly delighted to find a new audience.

'You may have heard me called an atheist, but that's not quite true. Atheism is unprovable, so uninteresting. Equally, however unlikely it is, we can never be certain that God once existed - and has now shot off to infinity, where no one can ever find him... Like Gautama Buddha, I take no position on this subject. My field of interest is the psychopathology known as Religion.'

'Psychopathology? That's a harsh judgement.'

'Amply justified by history. Imagine that you're an intelligent extraterrestrial, concerned only with verifiable truths. You discover a species which has divided itself into thousands - no by now millions - of tribal groups holding an incredible variety of beliefs about the origin of the universe and the way to behave in it. Although many of them have ideas in common, even when there's a ninety-nine per cent overlap, the remaining one per cent is enough to set them killing and torturing each other, over trivial points of doctrine, utterly meaningless to outsiders.
How to account for such irrational behaviour? Lucretius hit it on the nail when he said that religion was the by-product of fear - a reaction to a mysterious and often hostile universe. For much of human prehistory, it may have been a necessary evil - but why was it so much more evil than necessary - and why did it survive when it was no longer necessary?
I said evil - and I mean it, because fear leads to cruelty. The slightest knowledge of the Inquisition makes one ashamed to belong to the human species... One of the most revolting books ever published was the Hammer of Witches, written by a couple of sadistic perverts and describing the tortures the Church authorized - encouraged! - to extract "confessions" from thousands of harmless old women, before it burned them alive... The Pope himself wrote an approving foreword!
But most of the other religions, with a few honourable exceptions, were just as bad as Christianity... Even in your century, little boys were kept chained and whipped until they'd memorized whole volumes of pious gibberish, and robbed of their childhood and manhood to become monks...
Perhaps the most baffling aspect of the whole affair is how obvious madmen, century after century, would proclaim that they - and they alone! - had received messages from God. If all the messages had agreed, that would have settled the matter. But of course they were wildly discordant - which never prevented self-styled messiahs from gathering hundreds - sometimes millions - of adherents, who would fight to the death against equally deluded believers of a microscopically differing faith.'