A very short post today, readers. 

There are no ads on my blog, nor will there ever be. Or at least no ads for any individual, company, or organization paying revenue to me. I may someday give in to allowing some charitable organizations to post ads here, but from them as well, I will ask no fee, nor will I accept any. 

This is not because I disagree with people making money. Honest commerce is what makes decent living conditions possible for us all. And I, myself, write some other things that I intend to sell. But not this blog. The philosophy being promulgated here is too vital to the health of my species and my planet for me to risk putting off even one person because I allowed an ad here. Ads are inappropriate here. And yes, I really do believe that. 

Now and then, here and there, someone has to try to stand for what's right. My long, long term goal is to put into the minds of human beings the tools that they are going to need to save this planet and themselves. Then, I aim to stir a deep motivation in people to use those tools. 

We can bring together a human family. We can build a better world. No physical limitations are preventing us from doing these things. The only obstacles standing in the way of courage, wisdom, freedom, and love are cowardice, obstinacy, intolerance, and greed. Thus, the most important riddle humans have to solve is themselves. The most important battles are now going to be fought in each individual human heart. We are striving to learn why for so long we have done the cruel and stupid things that we have, and then to learn to stop doing them. 

It's up to us.  

The discussion of various religions, their values, and the patterns of behavior that the values foster could go on much longer. But I feel this is a good place in which to reiterate a main point that is crucial to any reader's understanding my theory of cultural evolution, which is central to understanding why I think it is reasonable to choose to believe in God. 

A few prime values have been found valuable by all societies on this planet. That means that these idea sets, when they are used to inform a society's code of conduct for its citizens, lead to better odds of that society's survival over the long haul. I claim that they work to achieve this desirable effect because they are designed to match human behavior, over centuries, to the forces of physical reality. 

A balance of courage and wisdom is the large, general response that humans have developed in order to deal with entropy. Freedom and love, in balance, are the large, general response to uncertainty, non quantum and quantum. 

If we are rational, we should be trying to cooperate in writing a moral code for all of humanity that deeply incorporates these values. Right now. Consulting, listening to arguments, making our own, and coming up with a code of conduct that we can teach to our children so as to maximize their odds of surviving through the crises that are coming and then teach this code to their children. 

I believe that what puts many people off the whole idea of moral realism and the project that it points us toward is the thought of how hard the composing of this moral code is going to be. What that tells us is that people in most walks of life in most parts of the world really don't want to know how free they are. Instead, they want a code to live by that is clear and, unfortunately, also familiar. 

The Existentialist philosophers were right to claim that humans don't like to look at how free they really are. Freedom is terrifying. How could one individual possibly weigh and consider so many factors that should be included in his larger decisions, and how could we stand the responsibility of possibly having to answer at some point in the future for our choices? 

But the Existentialists also insist that the fact of the matter is that we are already that free; we just turn away from having to face it. We hide in our cultures, religions, and political parties and cling to what we know, because at least its miseries are familiar. If we stepped out of our familiar roles and really took a chance, who knows where that might lead us? 

All of this is leading up to my saying again, that I know many people don't like thinking about our freedom and responsibility in this modern age, but we have no other path to survival. Our old ways of xenophobia and war, if we adhere to them, are going to finish us. We have to smarten up. 

So what values must be given primacy in that code if we did decide to get started and try to argue our way through to consensus on a constitution for homo sapiens? The first one is pretty clear. It is the one that enables me to write this blog and you to read it. Freedom.

As much as is possible for citizens in a democratic society, and that is a wide range of possibilities, leave me alone. Let me be me, and I'll let you be you. Then, if we both choose to associate in a business relationship, or a personal one, we can negotiate terms for our relationship that we can both agree to live by. This constitution I'm envisioning has to guarantee that or it is not going to endure, nor will its adherents. 

Then, if two individuals do find a mode of communication and maybe even a bond, it's beautiful. 

Khrishna and Arjuna 


To continue our brief essays on the values taught by some of the world's major religions, and the behaviors that the values foster in the religion's adherents, let's now consider Hinduism. 

I have read the Gita in a couple of translations, but I admit right off that my understanding of Hinduism is pretty elementary. Still, there are values in it that I like. 

God is in all living things, and we should be striving to re-establish contact with that awesome consciousness. That belief ought to enjoin us to a reverence for life, meaning, hopefully, a reverence for this Earth and her ecosystems. There is something there for the whole world to learn and practice, if we aspire to being good people. And a society that lived in harmony with its environment, if we could form one in India or anywhere else that truly lived by this prime value, would have a much better chance of surviving the next hundred years of our species' history on this planet. We, as a species (and the Hindus are guilty here too), in our greed, are cooking this Earth. As the scientists keep telling us, this can't go on. Or rather it can, but if it does, we are going to begin to suffer consequences, for sure serious and perhaps horrible, all over and soon. 

Vegetarianism and even veganism seem to me to be excellent ideas as you will know if you have read around on my blog. Our respecting higher life forms and not killing them for food is a spiritual practice, but it is also replete with health benefits, and benefits for the whole planet. It takes twenty times as much land, for example, to produce a kilo of potatoes as it does to produce a kilo of beef, The China study also demonstrated, conclusively I think, that eating animal protein is a major factor in the risk of one's getting all kinds of diseases, including heart-attack, stroke, osteoporosis, Alzheimer's, and many others. A society that stopped eating animal protein would be a healthier society, on average, than any of its competitors, gaining in productivity and reducing its health care budget by orders of magnitude. 

On the other hand, the ideas of karma and reincarnation scare me. If you are working out your karma over many lifetimes, then the conclusion to be drawn and that is drawn, is that some of your fellow citizens are worse off than you are because they are paying for past sins. They were born into the untouchable class because on the grand scale, this time around in life, that's what they deserve. That one may make rationalizations that justify ignoring the poor around one easy, but it is not right. Deep inside it is very offensive to me. Some people suffer through no fault of their own because they were born into poverty and any explanation that excuses us from acknowledging that is, to me, cosmically wrong. This way of thinking may have granted a degree of stability to Hindu society for eons ("Hang in there through your misery. If you bear suffering well, you will get promoted next time around"). But in modern times, it is beginning to sound more and more like rationalization and bafflegab. We have simply seen too often in history all over the world that most suffering is unnecessary. So many diseases have been cured that once were considered simply part of the human condition. So many practices in farming have made food production rise dramatically and made the suffering that had happened in the world because of malnutrition seem like nothing more than pointless waste.

Then there are all the hazards of polytheism, but those I've already discussed so I'll leave it to you if you want to go back a few posts and check out what was said about the dangers of polytheism hidden in Christianity.

And there are many more aspects to Hinduism, that have both good and bad effects on the long time survival odds that a society gets from living the Hindu way. Too many for me to do more than touch on here. It's enough just to say that Hinduism, like all of the others, has it graces and its faults. As does each one of us. The biggest thing to learn is that we must not stop trying. We can learn from each of them and each other, and we can still build a better world.   

Values, I say again, foster patterns of behavior in millions of people over thousands of years. We see this best when we focus on the values and history of a given culture. The Persians. The Romans. The British. And so on. When we look at the social/cultural evolution of whole societies in this way, what we are trying to discern is how those people's values affected their survival probabilities. How well did they survive through the threats and opportunities of their history, how much of their success was due to their cultural programming, and how much was just luck. 

In fairness, since I had a go at Christianity a few days ago, I should dissect some parts of the value system prescribed by Islam in the same way. Let's consider a few of the distinctive beliefs and values of Islam.  

Muslims are directed, by one of the "pillars" of Islam to pay a tax in every community in which they live that must be spent on caring for the poor. Not to fix roads, install public lighting, build parks, or pay police. Care for the poor. That one seems admirable to most people in the West. As I said in an earlier post, that kind of behavior on a society-wide scale makes the likelihood of that society's surviving improve. People in that kind of a country stick together even during hard times. The odds of revolution go down, the odds of vigorous resistance to invaders go up. 

Muslims also must not make what the Old Testament of the Christian bible calls "graven images". No statues or paintings of Allah or Mohammed, or even people or animals for that matter. This one, I believe, draws a clear line between what we place monetary, material value on and what is beyond such valuations. Don't put high value on things. Under Islam, the way believers view moral and spiritual matters is in an utterly separate category from the concerns of daily life. The point is that we are not to get attached to stuff. Things. Really living one's spiritual practice requires that one give one's deepest loyalty to the ideals of one's religion, not its buildings, statues, or gem-encrusted chalices. And the even deeper danger is in the clergy themselves. If church leaders begin to feel proud of their "stuff", then ordinary folk, without even being aware of it, absorb this materialistic world view. The erosion of ordinary people's moral codes and the replacement of loyalty to those values with loyalty to gems, gadgets, garments, and gain then becomes only a matter of time. The society whose members are commanded to cut that kind of thinking out of their heads will hang together more effectively over the long haul. They share because no one attaches excessive amounts of importance to material things anyway, again binding the community's citizens to each other more tightly.

The Koran tells believers that each of them must answer for how he or she has lived life when the day of judgement comes. There will be no foisting of responsibility onto one's parents, teachers, imams, bosses, or anyone else. In the general society, each person's accepting responsibility and becoming his or her own chaperon and disciplinarian has value for the community. Once this thinking gets into the head of each child, he or she will not need to be watched by parents, teachers, policemen, or anyone else. Community efficiency, again, works to increase the community's survival odds. 

Note that I am not saying that all Muslims live up to these values. They are only exhorted to do so, and when they manage to live these values even some of the time, the survival odds for the whole society go up. From all we can tell from history, Muslims were living these values quite a bit more universally and sincerely than were Christians, from Mohammed's time right into the 1600's. At that point, they seemed to lose a major part of their confidence and integrity as a society. Why this was so is still an intriguing mystery for historians. 

But I haven't so far dealt with the big one that we in the West hate and fear. The Koran tells the true believers that they can fight and kill their enemies as proof of their piety. That one we in the West do not like the sounds of. Now the Koran does say in a couple of spots that Muslims are only supposed to do this kind of fighting and killing if a foreign force invades their land and drives them from their homes. Only then, Muslim scholars are eager to tell Westerners, are the "faithful" allowed to kill other human beings. "Allah does not love aggressors." 

This value or belief is directing Muslims very clearly to stand together if they are invaded and that policy has obvious value for the survival of the larger society. But it sounds very amoral to us in the West. Jesus told his followers to turn the other cheek when someone slaps their face. He wouldn't even fight back when they came to take his life. Mohammed is saying something more like: "When they come and drive you out of your homes and kill some of your family or neighbors, then all bets are off. Then you can kill them to the last man if need be, and Allah will approve." 

That there are imams who want to go from defense over to the offense and convert the whole world to Islam at the point of the sword we all have seen too clearly. But then again, if there are imams trying, probably unconsciously, to make themselves feel more important, well ...so did the Christian leaders during the Crusades and so do many of them today. There is nothing new here. The whole grim process is sad, foolish, wasteful, cruel, and wrong. But it is very human nonetheless.  

Be

Standing silent, in the twilight,

By the path where lovers linger,

Here among the fragrant cedars,

Hear the river insects murmur;

See the fading sky reflected,

On the rippling, blue-gray waters;

            

Weave the quiet, dark sensations,

In and out of … who? Who am I?

Can I see me? Can I be me?

Standing silent in the twilight. 

Christianity has its big flaw, namely its basic polytheism, the same flaw that ironically Abraham was trying to remedy long before Christ's time. But it is important for our clear thinking about values and their sources to recognize that Christianity, as a system of thought and of living, also has some large strengths. It has lasted roughly two thousand years, and its clear predecessor, Judaism, has lasted at least a thousand more. 

My own model of human history argues that each meme complex/culture shapes the social behavior of its carriers and that the behavior then directly controls the survival odds of the society programmed by that meme complex/culture. From this model, one can easily infer that any values-system that has lasted over a hundred generations and grown in numbers of adherents must have some strengths. That value-system must foster behaviors in its adherents that work in the real world, or the generations of believers would have dwindled away and died out long ago. 

Christianity has many strengths, but let's talk about just three for now. 

In the first place, Christians are urged to downplay the importance of material things. Jesus said a camel would get through the eye of a needle before a rich man got into heaven. From all accounts, he himself had few-to-no possessions and wanted none. True, the churches all over the world are great hoarders of stuff, but their rationalizations for this materialism ring hollow even in the ears of small children. They lose credibility with their followers any time they visibly grow in materialism. It is too clearly not Jesus' way.  

And philanthropy has become a respected tradition in most Western societies. We tend to respect wealthy people much more when they give generously to the needy of their communities and of the world. And many of them do. Even bosses of organized crime consolidate their grips on their communities by giving to the poor. Is this guilt or human decency? Whatever we see as the motive, charity was certainly not a virtue practiced by many. if any, in pre-Christian times. Charity meant a few shekels to the beggars on the sidewalk when one was feeling good. Organized charities before Jesus were all but unknown. 

Charity, even at a very basic level, helps to knit a society together more tightly and to reduce the odds of a revolution breaking out even in hard times. At the same time, it improves the odds that the society's citizens will close ranks and pull together, even fight side by side, when threatened by a tyrant, especially if the tyrant can readily be painted as an enemy of the very Christian values that make a compassionate, sharing way of life possible. Thus, the survival odds for the tribe and its way of life are raised. 

A second big strength of Christianity is its insistence on our trying to extend our empathy for other human beings beyond the circle of our families or our tribes. All other human beings are our brothers and sisters, and I must grant every one of my neighbors the same consideration in all things that I would wish to see granted to myself if the positions of myself and my neighbor were reversed. This is Jesus' Golden Rule in its simplest form, and every child can understand it. "How would you feel if you were in her shoes?"  

When we show respect and kindness even to outsiders, we proselytize for our way of life on the subtlest level. It was far more the decency of the priests and ministers, than the pain inflicted by the soldiers, that caused Western values to spread. 

In the calculations of cultural survival, one of the best defenses a society and its way of life can have is a good offense. In cultural terms, the priest did far more damage to the culture of the aboriginal community in which he set up chapel and school than any of the soldiers or traders ever did. But in an objective analysis we are also driven to admit here that he did a great deal of good for the spreading of his own Western way of life. 

Perhaps a side note is in order here. Like it or not, let us say clearly here that Western values now run this planet. Walmart, McDonald's, and so many like them are everywhere now. Almost everyone at the U.N. wears Western garb to the General Assembly. 

On the other hand, the big majority of us in the West are ready to try our best to educate and integrate - other cultures with our own and our own with other cultures. We know -implicitly today, I think - that we can't go on in the future as we have in the past. War, rapacious capitalism, and cultural imperialism have to stop.  

It is not a nice picture of Western imperialism we are painting at this point. But I contend that it is a real one, and it is only by looking at things as they are that we have any hope of learning how societies work and so of empowering ourselves to use our knowledge wisely and to do better in the future. To gradually move into a global way of life that is simply more efficient: a way of life for all of us that is vigorous, but that still has set war aside for good. Hard. Not impossible.   

A third large strength of Christianity, probably its largest strength, is the personalness of the Christian way of relating to God. This was Jesus' big breakthrough. "Don't pray in a rote-memorized, public, superficial way. Instead, talk to God as you would to me." And there is the crucial thing that Jesus did. He made each adherent's way of relating to the divine and thus, to the values of his religion, personal. At the same time, he created for every citizen a form of therapy that enabled them to let off the hurt and frustration of living in close communities with fewer blows being struck. It doesn't work perfectly all of the time, but one shudders to think of what life was like for so many ordinary folk, living without the restraint of compassion or the outlet of prayer, before Jesus' time. He gave us a way to let the poison out. 

Violence, especially domestic violence, once was the rule. But gradually, over generations, people are learning a way of life in which they don't take their frustrations out on each other. They talk out their problems, or they talk to God and calm down. All of this makes complex, industrial society with all of its forms of alienation a little easier to bear. That trend again raises the odds of the Western way of life surviving and growing more vigorous each generation.     

Granted, in modern times, many in the West are losing or have lost their faith in God. But the numbers and sincerity of believers have wavered about before. What is important to see is that we are part of a two thousand year old human social trend and that the values that have given us our present complex and affluent way of life are the ones that Jesus taught. Love your neighbor. When that gets hard, talk to God. You'll get a lot of anger out of your system, and once you calm down, you'll start to see ways that your family's problems or those of your whole society can be eased, reduced, and finally eradicated. Love and a privately accessed back-up system that supports love in every human heart and renews it even when events do not - these have served us well. They have enabled the progress we have made so far, and they are what must see us through if we are to survive at all.   

But to close, let me re-iterate the major point made in my last post, and integrate it with what is being said in this one: Jesus was not a god. He had a spark of something in him that seems divine to us even now. But it was only a bigger spark, or flame if you like, than lies in the rest of us. He differed from you and me in degree, not in type. Worshipping Jesus as a partner-God is a way of going down the broad road to perdition. Definitely the wrong direction. We can feel a personal connection to God without viewing Jesus as God too. We were instructed to talk to God as we would in private to a good friend. That we can do. And it works. 

A way of talking to God in private and with total candor, that is the big gift that we got, as a whole species, from Jesus. It made, and it still makes, our salvation from the hell called "war" possible. 

The rest is up to us.   

A few lines a day, perhaps, are reasonable over the next few weeks. My main point is made. If you wish to discuss the reasoning on this blog, email me at <drwendell49@gmail.com> . I'd love to hear from you, and I promise that I will reply within a day or two at most. 

But to business. 

I think this is a good point at which to ramble through parts of some of the world's major religions in order to explain why I don't belong to any them. Unitarianism, in spite of what many people see as its vagueness, or wishy-washiness, is as much of a traditional religion as I am willing to embrace. But it makes good sense to me. 

It is the dialogue about spiritual matters that is most precious, not any one dogma. The freedom for each individual human being to find his or her own path to the deity or universal consciousness, and to live a life informed by courage, wisdom, freedom, and love in a personally designed balance, is sacred. At minimum, that personal balance should allow other people to go their own way, as long as they are letting you go yours. The old saying in English is: "Live and let live." Thus, the changes we want to bring about in our society we should try to accomplish by rational persuasion, no matter how long or difficult that path may seem. 

But what of the world's major religions? If I'm right about the connection between moral values and human social behavior and thence to human survival, then can I deal with some real cases? Can I offer evidence and argument to show that the tenets of some of the world's major religions threaten our species' survival over the long haul? 

Consider Christianity. It's single biggest flaw is the exact one that the Muslims insist they could never compromise with. In fact, it is the main point of the Koran. Jesus is not divine. God has no partners. The whole idea of any splitting of the sacred is dangerous for human society over the long haul. Why? Because when people divide up their idea of universal consciousness, that is, the sacred, they are well on the way down the road to dividing up their moral code. In any form of polytheism, there will always be the opportunity for the spoiled kids in the family to try to play Mom against Dad or Dad against Mom or Grandpa against both of them. 

What I mean is that Christians very easily, naturally, and humanly slip into equivocating their way to treating non-Christians as lesser beings. This comes from believing that people who don't think Jesus was a god aren't quite as good or as morally considerable as those who do. Under this thinking, if I, as a Christian, treat you cruelly, well, you aren't a Christian. It doesn't matter as much as if I did the same thing to one of my Christian neighbors. That thinking, if it were deeply entrenched in the head of some powerful leader in the West, could pull our species into a nuclear war, the catastrophe we must avoid at all cost. That kind of thinking is indeed dangerous.  

Jesus never claimed to be divine. He claimed to represent the best version of divine wisdom that was circulating in the world at his time. He said that if people wanted to be saved, they had to follow him in the sense of emulating his compassionate and non-materialistic way of life. 

The leaders of the early Christian church invented the "man-god" concept. They did so, consciously or unconsciously, because the net result was that they could then insist that Jesus, the divine one, had passed the mission to establish his church to his favorite disciple, who had set up the church of Rome, and passed on this sacred mission to its leaders. The church's edicts from then on were therefore, supposedly, above any humanly-made laws or arguments. 

This thinking, by so many Christians in all later sects, that they have a lawyer with contacts in the eternal court who can get his clients a deal, is prevalent right into our time. There are some in virtually every denomination of Christianity who will assert flatly that one cannot get into the blessed afterlife unless one has accepted the divinity of Jesus. A man.  

This specialness that only comes with being saved, and that makes Christians unique, was used to justify all sorts of crimes all through history, including, glaringly, the pogroms conducted against the Jews and the Crusades. "We're better than they are. They won't convert even when given every reasonable chance. They deserve whatever happens after that." 

Of course, other religions have used similar arguments to justify their similar crimes. But it's Christians I am talking about in this essay. They are no better and too often, they are smugly confident that they really are. We all have to get over this "us-them" nonsense. 

The polytheists in every form - including Christians because that's what they are - have over and over found moral rationalization a little too easy. Athena can get you a deal with Zeus. Freya has pull with Odin. You have a coterie of judges on an archipelago of moral codes, and you can navigate among them. And Jesus can get you a deal with the Father.  

Of course, I admit that Christians are often very likable people. I have several Christian friends. I don't make this case to them unless they ask why I can't be a Christian. But if they do ask, I also don't hold back out of concern for their feelings or for courtesy's sake. This matter is too important to equivocate over. But once the point is made, I can let it go. Meme complexes - what we usually call "ideas" - can survive on their own. They just need to be put into the meme sea and set free. 

And yes, I really believe that. Almost all humans, given the chance to weigh matters carefully and privately, can think quite soundly for themselves. It just takes time. On the small, medium, or global scale, hope for humans only runs out when we stop trying to talk to each other. 

If you, dear reader, feel that this logic can be disputed, please, write to me at the email address above. I will post all rhetorically sound replies. 

And in any case, have a nice day.