Time vs God

I am looking at a picture of the Parthenon. The Fibonacci-inspired structure stands tall as tourists linger around it. Most of the tourists were clicking pictures, some marvelling, and some buying souvenirs. The magnanimity of the structure somehow remains in the shadow of this constant stream of chaos. However, as tourists walk past the building, it stays on. Unperturbed by the lack of reverence that should be shown to it. Once a structure so magnificent that it stood tall over countless Greek generations, today, it stands reduced to aesthetic demand and Instagram backgrounds.

All this has made me think about how time has reigned over everything, even over our all-supreme gods. Gods who rained fire and hell on these very lands, who created paradise from wastelands, who bought benevolent life on an unforgiving place, today forgotten by the very same people that made them that. Within a few thousand years, the very inhabitants moved on. Its allegiance was shifted to a new god who did the same very things the previous one did and just a little more, only if there was a plagiarism checker in religion. It’s fascinating to understand how people’s short attention span is not only limited to Instagram reels but also to vast swatches of our history. Thousands of years have been forgotten in the middle. Selective amnesia is one of our oldest and perhaps one of our most defining traits. Mankind’s been here for 4.3 million years, agriculture for just 14000 years, yet even in this relatively small period, how many of our gods were created and then reduced to ashes and from there rose another all-supreme being. Our wish to put trust in a higher being is to help us deal with our failures but increasingly more so with our terrifying success. We have regrown failing organs, taken grains of sand and made them power our supercomputers, defied gravity and made new fruits by bending the rules of nature, but yet, even in all this chaos, time has reigned supreme. It has swallowed up our very best and our very worst, from school heartbreaks to kings who ruled enough that the sun never set for them. It didn’t even leave our sky and sea conquering gods. Our time is about Christianity, about. Islam, about Hinduism but the wheel of time shall not spare this as well. There will be a day and age when these gods will be long forgotten. Their holy lands from where they arrived deserted.Their importance overshadowed by a richer history. And then one day, our temples, mosques, and churches will be rediscovered under inches of earth, and our future kind will look at them and marvel at the architecture; they will study our customs and maybe even ridicule some of our practices. They might be in awe at some of our things, but they will never grow to respect them. And the gods that watched people tremble at their feet, watched the earth shiver with their wrath, will now watch as people around them walk like they never existed. Not remembered by intense love or blinded by hate but by the biggest sin, being forgotten by irrelevance.

I glance at that picture again and crack a smile. Under one of the great pillars stands a tourist checking his watch.