Towards the end of his life, the Jewish Algerian French philosopher Jacques Derrida (1930 – 2004) declared himself to be a believer in a spiritual force. He said he now prayed every day. Among those who followed and admired him, there were some who felt betrayed. What has happened to Derrida, they asked. Is he not an atheist anymore? Is he afraid of his approaching death? Does he have dementia?

But Derrida made it very clear that he did not pray to the god of an institutional religion. In his opinion, the word ‘god’ was too much of a stereotype and he did not want to use it. He said he prayed to what is unknown and cannot be known.

Derrida’s experience should make people like me reflect about how to go beyond rejecting religion as a cliché. When we rejected our traditional religious upbringing, which prepared us to believe unthinkingly and uncritically, did we also reject what we should have reflected seriously about?

Is there a religio (in Latin an obligation, bond, or reverence) we should seek? Should we not humbly search for the mystery of life? Should we not cultivate a reverence for human life, to understand other human beings who are different yet equal? Should we not treat nature with reverence? Should we not be overawed by the mystery of life and death? 

Without seeking refuge and consolation in the comfort of a religion practised like an insurance policy, demanding only that we receive sacraments and attend religious ceremonies “to keep God happy” as we comply with the obligations of the Church as we would with those of a social club.

Mircea Eliade in The Quest: History and Meaning in Religion’ (1969) says: “Modern nonreligious man assumes a new existential situation; he regards himself solely as the subject and agent of history, and he refuses all appeal to transcendence. In other words, he accepts no model for humanity outside the human condition as it can be seen in the various historical situations.

“Man makes himself, and he only makes himself completely in proportion as he desacralises himself and the world. The sacred is the prime obstacle to his freedom. He will become himself only when he is totally demystified. He will not be truly free until he has killed the last god.”

Where has this led us? This lack of reverence for life, which surely must be much more than attending religious functions in so-called sacred places, has impoverished our existence and made it one-dimensionally materialistic.

Can we live by science and technology alone?

How we killed god

The arrogant and reckless way in which we have used science and technology in the last three centuries was the result of the post-enlightenment mindset that considered the sacred anti-modern. We are too busy making money and exploiting the world for material profit to bother with anything beyond the here and now. We rejected much more than the image of God as an old man with white hair and beard and, at best, saw religion as quaint folklore.

In 1882, the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1844 – 1900) declared: “God is dead.”

Can we live by science and technology alone?- Evarist Bartolo

Till today he is misinterpreted by those who condemn him as God’s murderer when, in fact, he specified that God had not died on His own, that we had killed Him, and our hands were dripping with His blood. We killed Him when we destroyed everything sacred in life, convinced that all we needed was material wealth. We killed Him by destroying the world, which we simply see as raw material for making money. We killed Him by wanting to dominate those we consider inferior to us, instead of taking care of our shared humanity.

The more we have advanced and the more we live in comfort, the more hollow we have become. An existential void corrodes us from within. The more we have, the less we are.

Says Nietzsche in the Parable of the Madman: “Are we not straying as through an infinite nothing? Do we not feel the breath of empty space? Has it not become colder? Is it not more and more night coming on all the time? Must not lanterns be lit in the morning? Do we not hear anything yet of the noise of the gravediggers who are burying God? Do we not smell anything yet of God’s decomposition? Gods too decompose.

“God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we, murderers of all murderers, console ourselves? That which was the holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet possessed has bled to death under our knives. Who will wipe this blood off us? With what water could we purify ourselves?”

Nietzsche goes on to say “that on that same day the madman entered divers churches and there sang a requiem. Led out and quietened, he is said to have retorted each time: ‘what are these churches now if they are not the tombs and sepulchres of God?’”

We are not going to fill our existential void by going back to a golden age where we lived with gods and harmoniously with nature and with fellow human beings in an earthly paradise which never existed.

We have no other option but to discover in today’s terrible reality the sense of mystery, of the sacred and reverence for life, by creating bonds with fellow human beings and with nature which are not based on violence, imposition and injustice.

Otherwise, our life, outside or inside churches, will remain a tomb and a sepulchre of humanity. We will not find meaning in our life by simply attending religious functions and paying lip service to Christian values if, once we leave church, we exploit other people and nature, all in the interests of our selfish material interests.

Evarist Bartolo is a former Labour foreign and education minister.