And so another year draws to a close. This is the final edition of The Republic for 2006 and we’ll be taking holidays the next two weeks to reappear January 4, 2007. We hope you get holidays too, and that you enjoy them!

Much of what The Republic covered this past year falls with a thud into the “doom and gloom” file. But that’s because it’s been such a doomy and gloomy world this past year. There are a lot of things to worry about, none that bear repeating at this moment, but you know what they are.

To suggest we all have a good time anyway seems calous, even cruel, after having raised the alarm about so much suffering and injustice. And yet, is it good and right that we should all induce depression just to ensure we suffer to some degree in kind with those victims of injustice? How can we in good conscience feast, buy presents, drink, play music, and wish other members in our exclusive 2% club of extreme wealth and privilege yet more good luck in the coming year?

I learned of one source of this contradiction when I was studying the theological work of ubër-scientist Isaac Newton some 20 or so years ago. It turns out that for most of his adult life, Newton spent far more time poring over the huge number of versions of the Bible he kept in his library—Bibles in Greek, Latin, Egyptian, and several variants of Hebrew, all of which he could read—than he did working out laws of physics in his lab. He had completed the vast bulk of his scientific work in his early 20s, but lived to 84, busy all that while with questions of theology. One of the key aspects of Western religious philosophy that drove him deep into so much exegesis was the conflicting accounts of Genesis.

In the account familiar to those raised in the Judeo-Christian West—which is most of us—mankind begins as an immortal being endowed with many qualities shared with God while he dwells off-world in a wonderful paradise called Eden. He then commits a crime, the crime of curiosity about God’s Earthly creation, and as punishment, he is thrown out of Eden, stripped of his immortality, cast into the Earthly plain, and made to suffer all the bodily pains and terrors that come with the mortal, Earth-bound life we are familiar with today. This is meant to explain why there is so much injustice, pain, suffering and death all around, and it’s why we seem unable to do anything about most of it. Only God can mitigate the pain, and as the story goes, he sent Jesus, his son, to absorb some of it, though not all. That’s the birth our culture still widely celebrates to this day, in fact on a special day coming up just a little later this month.

But there is a much more ancient version of this Genesis story, from much more ancient Egypt, a Genesis account that the Judeo-Christian account we know today borrowed heavily from, although not in its entirety. It was the original Egyptian account of Genesis that so intrigued Isaac Newton, and you’ll soon see why:

According to this earlier version of Genesis, mankind again starts off in Eden, a paradise, as an immortal who shares some attributes with God. But then he observes God’s art installation, the planet Earth, and it is stunningly beautiful. So beautiful in fact that mankind wants to go live in that painting. That’s fine, says God, but he warns mankind that if he chooses to go live in his art piece, he would have to take on all the attributes of the world of that art, including mortality and all the bodily pains and terrors that come with mortal life on Earth.

Mankind thinks about this a moment, but then decides—freely of his own will—to damn the torpedoes and go ahead and do it, to go and accept mortality, pain, and suffering, because the chance to live inside this incredible piece of art by God, even for the fleeting and torturous moment that life on Earth offers before death consumes him, is worth it, so beautiful is life down here. This myth also offers an explanation for the pain and suffering we observe around us, but it comes from a different source. It isn’t created intentionally by God as a torture chamber to punish us for our sin of curiosity, it is more like an unfortunately necessary by-product of a beautiful piece of art, much like a rose, we can observe, is only beautiful because it does shrivel up and die.

It also removes the contradiction of us wanting to alleviate other’s pain, even while it seems to be God’s will that there should be pain. In the Egyptian Genesis, which is the original version, attempting to alleviate others’ pain and suffering doesn’t contradict God’s will at all; it could even be construed as an attempt to collaborate with God in making his piece of art even better. It also resolves the question of whether pain and suffering is a necessary condition of life on Earth, and whether or not we should try to reduce or eliminate it. In the Egyptian Genesis, there is absolutely no reason to think pain and suffering, injustice and sorrow, are inherent conditions of life on Earth. They can be safely removed or at least deeply reduced without risking the downfall of the human species.

But, the Egyptian version doesn’t involve sin and punishment, and so there is no need for redemption—mankind freely chose to come to Earth, he hasn’t been exiled here. Without sin, punishment, and the need to redeem himself in the eyes of God, there isn’t a role to play for a savior. The Egyptian Genesis doesn’t need a Jesus to show us the way back to heaven and away from all this pain and suffering, because we choose this over heaven, we don’t want to go back. We like immortality, pain and suffering, or at least, we freely accept it as part of the bargain that allows us to live for a short time in this incredibly beautiful painting. In the Egyptian version of Genesis, the birth of Jesus, his storied life, and his end—dying up there on that cross like that—is just a sad and tragic tale of an enlightened preacher earning capital punishment from the authorities wary of his insistence on challenging the authority of the emperor.

Well, that is how most of us think about the story now, isn’t it, few of us anymore think of this Jesus as a savior leading us the way back to heaven. It’s almost as if we have reverted back to the original Egyptian version of Genesis without realizing it, and have adopted a picture of Jesus, the undeniably central character in our culture, that follows from that earlier version of Genesis, and have over time discarded the picture of him that used to follow from the later, Judeo-Christian version of Genesis. Maybe it’s because the Egyptian version is more aligned with the natural, organic sense of self we carry in our DNA, while the latter, Judeo-Christian one was a synthetic, invented and bureaucratic Roman Church Genesis aligned more with emerging structures of political power in developing human societies of the Middle East.

If Christmas is really about celebrating birth, it’s more likely its origins are in myths of Genesis than in the singular birth of some man, half God or otherwise. And if that’s the case, it must be to celebrate the earlier, original Egyptian version of Genesis, rather than some later twisted perversion of it dreamt up in some stuffy office of corrupted power in Rome or Constantinople. So then let this season of celebration be about that, let’s celebrate, and reaffirm, our conscious choice to come here, accept mortality, pain, suffering, injustice, and sorrow, all in exchange for 80 or so years of getting to live in this stunningly beautiful painting. And then let us try to make it even better by removing the wholly unnecessary pain, suffering, injustice and sorrow of others around us, at least as best we can.

You decide how much it's worth to you: