Seven Billion Saviors

Have you ever commanded the morning to appear and caused the dawn to rise in the east?

–Job 38:12

 

 

One day every living human being became Jesus. Well, not Jesus exactly. No one was divine. No one had miraculous powers. No one thought they were the son or daughter of any god. It would be more accurate to say that everyone became morally pure.

The will to harm was gone. Feelings of superiority−gone. Lust for power−gone. Ego−gone.

Not only did every person understand what had happened to them, this Christification, they understood that it had happened to everyone else as well.

Prison guards immediately opened cells and opened gates. Cops took handcuffs off freshly-arrested criminals. Killers and rapists, abusers and thieves flooded the streets of the world and no one tried to capture them. No one was afraid of them.

Extra-marital affairs stopped. Unscrupulous business practices ceased. Wars ended. Unequivocally, instantly.

At first, there was a lot of crying. A haunting, inescapable grief shook every soul. A universal contemplation of the incalculable suffering humanity had inflicted upon itself since the dawn of its awakening. Such a weight. Such ugliness. It had to be mourned.

Then joy erupted. Literal leaping, whirling, and dancing in the streets. An absolute abandonment to newfound freedom. Freedom from every kind of addiction, freedom from every emotional oppression. The hurt were free from fear and any desire for vengeance. The hurters were free from guilt and any desire to hurt again.

Wealthy people drove their super-expensive cars into impoverished neighborhoods. They walked into barber shops and liquor stores and fast food joints. They asked people what they needed and went about meeting the needs. Of course they would do that. Most natural thing in the world.

Inequity, suddenly, was unthinkable. Political parties, irrelevant. Racism, absurd.

Religion, unnecessary. War, obsolete.

Essentially, life on Earth (silly as it may sound) became a John Lennon song.

Artists, for a moment, were puzzled. What did one write about or make movies about if there were no conflicts, no bad guys? What did one paint if there was no evil, no cruelty? What did one sing about if lovers never hurt each other?

The answers came. Love, of course. Nature. Children. Touch, taste, sight, smell, and sound. Wonder. Sex. So much of the old art now seemed macabre, obsessed with the wrong things; a reflection of an inner condition that no longer existed in the human heart.

Sadness was fair game−it didn’t disappear. People got sick. Accidents happened. Natural disasters. Birth defects. People died.

Suffering, however, only happened in the natural course of living; people no longer deliberately chose to cause the suffering of others or themselves. People no longer withheld charity or denied love. Why would they? Why would anyone desecrate so profound a gift as life?

 

…

 

As you can see, it isn’t so hard for a fool to imagine a world where the fundamental and constant nature of mankind is good. A world where we have free will, yet are gently constrained by an overwhelming inner desire to do no harm, to do the most good; where we act out of the very core of who we are. Who we were made to be.

What if we had begun like that? Would that have been so bad?

(This is a story/essay that is in my book Under Different Suns: Stories from the Multiverse. The complete collection of short stories is available on Amazon for .99.)

Under Different Suns: Stories from the Multiverse