Doomsday

In creating You, Out Father-Lover unleashed Sleeping Creation’s Potential for Change. In YOU the Virus of TIME began! – Angel from Tony Kushner’s Angels in America Act II Scene I.

The first organisms produced asexually: they continued the same genetic code so that mother cells and daughter cells were exact clones of one another. The only hope for change one could have were random mutations that occurred in the cell division process. In other words, change was the result of mistakes– this was the exception, and not the rule. However, some of these mistakes ended up being useful to the organism and, so, the organism thrived and the mutation did as well. Eventually, mutations led to a system of sexual reproduction where offspring did not look like their parents and the genetic combinations resulting from the process of sex are practically infinite. Every time one engages in sexual intercourse with the possibility of procreation, one has the potential to change the shape of humanity. Also, when we are not clones of one another, as a species, we develop many different perspectives and problems. Finally, with the imagination to create new solutions for our problems we are no longer living in the world of our parents (ta da! progress).

The God that Tony Kushner portrays in Angels in America reminds me of the relationship some parents have with their children. God, like our parents, created us but he/she/it/they do not seem to have the foresight to know where our lives will take us: he/she/it/they do not know what to do when their creation has “gone astray.” At this point, some parents disown their children while seems to have abandoned them. However, if the Creator /Parent (knowingly or unknowingly) endows their children with the ability for progress, they have to accept the fact that, one day, they will no longer be their children. The baby a mother has given birth to will eventually turn into a saint, a criminal, or something in between just as God’s first amoeba gave way to Mozart and Einstein.

Finally, without progress, time would be irrelevant. We use time as a way to measure and predict change. However, in the tradition of a linear sense of time, with time comes the end of time. Thus, in some way, progress is both a precursor to the Apocalypse and the reason why humanity drifts away from god: no wonder why so many are afraid of it.