The Death of God

The death of God was announced briefly, to a large group of school children, on March 15, 2100, and a tombstone was placed in Bill Gates square as a monument to the death of superstition and the rise of science. Penelope Gates the supreme world leader presided over the opening ceremony watched by a few of her minions from the World Forum, in addition to the students. She gave a short speech extolling the advances in science over the last hundred years and how humans now controlled their own destiny and had no need for the Gods of old. “We are a fully enlightened species and have buried all the superstitious nonsense of the past”. The ceremony was duly recorded and screened in all residences to further indoctrinate the masses to the will of the ruling elite.

The teacher moved on with his students. pausing briefly to read aloud the inscription on the Frederick Nietzsche memorial, “God is dead, God remains dead, and we have killed him”.

Penelope Gates rushed from the brief Death of God propaganda ceremony wanting to be early for the scheduled meeting of the Executive Committee of the World Forum. She needed to review the agenda in detail and prepare her notes before the meeting began.

The first item on the agenda ‘population control’ would be the most contentious, as the motion was to decrease the planet’s population by a further billion, going from 5 billion to 4 billion. There would be a debate about whether 4 billion was a sufficient number to preserve the planet’s resources, and whether birth restrictions or euthanasia would be the more appropriate method of reducing the population.

The second item on the agenda ‘ software update for implants’, shouldn’t need much discussion as the technology was now thirty years old and the pain threshold was being tolerated by far too large a percentage of the population and could lead to reckless behavior. There would be general agreement that the pain impulses needed a higher frequency to control the masses.

The rest of the agenda was comprised of minor administrative details and she saw no problems in getting them passed quickly.

Sitting back, relaxing, Penelope Gates, allowed her mind to wander over the last hundred years thinking how easy it had all been once science had ascended to replace God. Humans were now just viewed as a biological construct with no soul, creativity, or moral compass. They now served the elite of the World Forum and lived out their drab lives in the service of science.

Voltaire was right when he wrote, ” if God did not exist he would have to be invented”.