A lot of my posts are merely review and further explanation of the things I say in my book, which I began re-posting on this site last April, a bit over five months ago. It might take a bit of time for you to read it, but if my thoughts on human history, culture, and moral values intrigue you at all, then reading my whole book might be enjoyable for you. And you certainly do not have to conclude at the end of the journey that God is real because I am exhorting you to. The whole point of my book is that I think I can make, and now have made, a case for the conclusion that belief in God, in a way that suits this twenty-first century, is just rational.

                       




God is there alright. She is just one stern mama sometimes. The hawk has babies to feed too, and her talons are not meant for grasping melons out of your garden. Some songbirds must die. The wolf keeps the caribou herd strong. She just looks a bit scary when she is dragging strands of intestine out of her kill and her jaws are dripping blood. But the caribou calf she killed would have weakened the herd. It wasn't deformed or diseased or even slow of foot. It was just dancing at the fringe of her mate's sprint zone while she hid in the rocks a few feet further on. When she got a good opportunity to lunge out and bring it down, she took that opportunity. Nature has no place for weak or sick, but she also has no place for stupid. Harsh. Real. The wolf has cubs that she must feed too, and her teeth are not meant for grazing. 

Yes, God is pretty harsh, but the harshness is kinder in the end. All things die. The fit deserve the chance to breed and pass on their genes and their ways. The rest don't. The herd must stay strong. 

Humans, on the other hand, have modified nature's code somewhat. We protect the lives of the weak even when they are not our young or the young of anyone else in our tribe. Most animals protect their young, but we also protect nearly every herd/pack member. Why? Nearly all human tribes have adopted this value because our way of life is so dependent on passing detailed, complex knowledge and skills down the generations. Humans learned long ago that people who might not make it if left to fend for themselves in a raw environment, often become excellent spear makers or healers of diseases and injuries or tellers of the tales that hold the myth-embedded wisdom of our ancestors. 

Loving your neighbor turns out to be a good practice over the long haul for humans. Even loving neighbors you hardly know or ones from another town that you don't know at all or ...you see where this train of thought is going. Love your neighbor because your neighbor with his somewhat peculiar ways may one day use those very ways to save your life and the lives of your children. You nursed him through the epidemic time. He remembers that time. Years later, he shows you how to stop the blight that is withering your crops. 

My larger point for today then is this: all human values/beliefs, and the mores and customs that come attached to those beliefs, have a survival index associated with them. Loving your neighbor, when you really do and you really practice it, is just smart for you and your tribe over the long haul. 

Quantum uncertainty, which is built into reality remember, guarantees that the future is going to hit you, me, and everyone with some shocks. Events we have made little or no provision for. If we have a lot of different kinds of people in town, the odds that someone will see a way to fight or block or dodge the coming catastrophe are just higher than they would be if we were a more homogeneous population. Freedom is one of our values because it means that lots of kinds of people can live lots of kinds of ways in our nation. Love so that our nation does not fall into factions and mutual suspicion and then violence and fissioning. We have freedom and love as prime values for a reason. Together, they are our response to an absolutely universal, inescapable trait of all of empirical reality. 

Values connect to reality. They are not mere conventions. The core ones are not particular to any one tribe. They are found everywhere because over the long haul, they work.  

Ah, well. If you follow my blog, you know I have repeated this claim many times. 

It will be enough for today if I simply leave you with a picture in your head of millions of humans living out their lives, day by day, in tribes and nations all over the world, over millennia of time, encountering uncertainty - that is due, at its deepest level, to quantum uncertainty - over and over everywhere. Now run the film forward, but slowly. Watch what happens.  

Enough for today. 

In the shadow of the mushroom cloud, nevertheless, have a good day.