The Science God: Thinking, Values, and Faith

         

 

 

      by Dwight Wendell

 

Introduction

In this book, the main thing I’ll try to do is reason my way to a moral code that is grounded in observations of the physical world. Only after that task is done will I talk about how grasping that code then leads us to further conclude that there is, likely, a consciousness present in the physical world. A being like what humans have long called “God”.  

I claim it is reasonable for us to say that a “sort of God” does exist. The term “sort of God” describes a personal concept of a deity, which is what I believe every person’s idea of God must be if they are to truly hold such a concept at all. Each person’s idea of God has to shape her or his daily actions, or that idea has no real meaning in that person’s life. So it has to be personal. My aim is to make that personal, pragmatic, rational idea of God reachable for every reader.   

I know that a lot of modern readers will be tempted to stop reading this book right here. I’m asking them to hang in there and give it a chance. In return, I will save the “God conclusion” till the very end. We’ll focus first on making the case for a universal moral code, a code of right and wrong. God can wait a bit.

 

 

                       

                                        Boat-building Near Flatford Mill 1815 

(human thought engaging physical reality) (Constable; Wikimedia Commons)

 

 

 

            Liberty Leading The People (Human thought engaging human reality)

                            (credit: Eugène Delacroix, via Wikimedia Commons) 

 

For those readers who feel a writer’s personal background must be understood if readers are to understand his thinking, I will say that I have been studying this problem of what moral means – what makes “right” right – for more than 50 years. From the time I was a boy, through a long career teaching in the British Columbia schools, eight years of post-secondary study, three degrees (two undergraduate, one graduate), time in agriculture, six rock bands, and small business, time spent raising three kids, and a lot of life. However, in my view, all these experiences neither add to, nor detract from, my case. The case must stand on its own. Thus, but for the odd anecdote used to illustrate a point, there will be no more about me.

It is also worth noting here that the ideas, historical records, perspectives, and texts I discuss in this book are mainly those of a man who was born into, and moulded by, Western culture. I know that plenty of other effective ways of handling the world – in other words, other ways of life – are available today. I will also say from the outset that I know that in every era in history, nations rise to dominance over their neighbors usually for only a few generations. Then, the dominant one gets passed by a competitor, almost always by war.

But one of this book’s goals is to show that a moral code which is true in all cultures exists and is available to all humans via their capacity to reason. A case built on reasoning and evidence can lead us to a moral code that is valid in all cultures. This code, once it is understood by many informed, resolute people, could then lead us to a way out of our war habit. 

I’ll say more on the possibilities of our species’ finding a way to evolve without war as we go along. For now, I’ll be content to say that this dream is not far-fetched or ridiculous. In my lifetime, I saw the USSR go from being a monolithic super-power to a footnote in history. Without a world war. I sometimes still can’t quite believe it. Furthermore, there have been civilizations in the past in which large areas and populations existed under one umbrella of law. Large scale order and stability are possible. The trick for us will be to learn to bring about that order without war. And it will begin from patient, diligent, focused efforts by a determined few who are guided by a moral model that works.

I will also say to my doubters at the outset: if you’re cynical about our species’ ability to live by both reason and love, then you haven’t contemplated the alternatives: ignorance and hostility. In this century, these could lead to our asphyxiating in an atmosphere too toxic to breathe. Or worse. Whole nations scorched in nuclear wars. Let those images renew your resolve.

We can do this. If we, the human race, can reason our way to an understanding of ourselves as we are, one that explains the facts of our history, we can then lay out a path to that world that we presently only dream of. People working from a valid model of human societies could still save our species from itself.

It’s true that I am a son of the West. I tend to think and speak using the ideas and terms that I learned in my country and its schools. However, I believe the conclusions I draw in this book are universal. They can be extracted by logic from observations of the physical, biological, and human aspects of reality as it is revealed in the historical records and daily life experiences of all nations.

The system of ideas that I will construct for readers of this book will then lead logically to a modern theism. In short, Faith and Reason aren’t enemies. They shouldn’t even be called friends. They’re different aspects of the same thing.

The version of “Reason” I will use in this book will be the inductive one called “science”. I will show that science and its way of thinking support a model of cultural evolution on which we can build a universal moral code, one which, with a few other models from science added, can lead us to belief in a deity.

 

We can use the scientific method, apply it to evidence, and reason our way, via a small number of steps, to belief in good and in God. That is the point of this book.  

 

 

Donald Trump’s Sincerity

                               former U.S. president, Donald Trump (via Wikipedia) 

Donald Trump’s Sincerity

 

Today’s post is a stretch, I admit, but it presents a modest, but real, claim.

I wanted to point out today something about events in 1945 and then relate those events to events in present times.

I will start by summing up some things about Adolph Hitler’s final days and hours. Hitler started his whole campaign to become dictator of Germany, and then to expand Germany’s “living space” (“lebensraum”, in German), by basing his plans on his vision of how history works. He believed he had discovered that history only moves forward by warfare. Struggle between nations. He claimed, for example, that “mankind has grown strong through eternal struggles, and it will only perish through eternal peace.” And he sincerely believed that his model of how history worked was as correct and exactly accurate as was Darwin’s Theory of Evolution about Biology. “Races” (his term) must struggle and fight or they do not survive. In fact, any tribe that is reluctant to fight wars, or that loses a war, deserves to die out. 

As I have said before in this space, Hitler’s theories about “races” of humankind are nonsensical to real students of Genetics. Humans are all members of one species. The amount we humans differ genetically from so-called “race” to “race” is less than 1/10 of 1% of our total genetic code. There is no “Aryan” race. In fact, in the real science of Genetics, there are no “races” at all. Not from Europe to Africa to the Far East to the Americas before Europeans came to the New World. Some people in all those places may have talked as if the term “race” made sense, but it simply doesn’t. The term, for modern science, is empty.

Why does this matter? Because in his final days and hours in a concrete-hardened bunker in Berlin, Hitler kept raving about a rescue army that was going to save Berlin, himself, and the Reich from the Russian troops that were closing in. There was no such army. Then, at the very last, he raved that the Germans should go down in a sea of blood and fire because that was what they deserved. They had lost this colossal struggle to another “race”, which, in his eyes, was the Russians – who, by the way, really were mainly responsible for the breaking of the power of the German war machine. (Look up the casualty stats.) In the laboratory of history, Hitler believed, the Germans had proved weaker than the Russians, and, thus, the Germans deserved to die out. He even wanted Albert Speer, his most essential minister of War, the economy, etc. to order German troops still fighting in parts of Germany to destroy infra-structure like bridges, electricity grids, water purification plants, and so on. Go down in a sea of blood. Like the heroes in his favorite operas by Wagner. At least the Germans would go out in a blaze of glory. This, by the way, Speer did not do. Much of Germany’s infrastructure was destroyed, by the invading Allies and by some German units, but at least some was saved. The important thing to see is that Speer could imagine a world in which a defeated Germany was prostrate before its enemies and somehow survived. Hitler couldn’t.

I have to grudgingly respect Hitler’s sincerity. At least on the surface, he stuck by his original vision of history and how it works. He found out that Speer had not issued the orders that he had told Speer to issue, and he did not punish Speer. He just shut up about the matter in his final hours. He apparently chose to let Speer off for disobeying direct orders. But he never took back his words – maintained in public and in private for nearly two decades by this point – about his model of history and what the German people deserved. In short, he had a kind of grotesque sincerity.

Why this matters today is that I don’t think a lot of people in the world, and especially in the US right now, get that in his warped way, Donald Trump is sincere. I think he really believes that somehow, by some trick those dirty Democrats pulled – a trick that has proved too subtle for his people to detect – the election really was stolen from him. There must – must – must be a fraud in there somewhere. He could not possibly lose that election to the man that he, for a long time called, “Slow Joe”. Trump, in his own eyes, is so much handsomer and so much more charismatic and savvy about the “art of the deal” that there must be a trick in there somewhere. Or so he believes. He couldn’t really l – l – l - lose. How he loathes that word! So much so that in his universe it can’t ever really be applied to him. So much so that, in his view, losing that election is an impossibility under the laws by which -- he believes -- the world functions.

He’s wrong, of course. The results were checked and checked, again and again. Tested in several different courts. In addition, it is worth pointing out that a conspiracy of multiple traitors who could manage to gather/create the so-called “fraudulent” results would be impossible to sustain. Any such conspiracy would have to involve thousands and thousands of conspirators – so many in on the scam – election officials in multiple states, judges, etc., many of whom he appointed. In a conspiracy that large and complicated, someone would blab, probably within a few hours, or at most a few days. No documents support his election fraud theory either. No witnesses in any position to make such a call have ever said the words he so desperately longs to hear. No documents support his version of events, and they have been painstakingly searched for.

Like Hitler in his final days, Trump was, and is, delusional. A solid majority of the American people don’t want him for their president anymore.

Still, in the face of overwhelming evidence and testimony, he will not admit that he lost. He admits that Biden is now president, but secretly, Trump believes, the election is a fraud. He will not put the word “loser” anywhere near to his name in speech or print. Why such obstinacy? He holds onto this view, not in a superficial pretense, but because he really believes it.

His losing as clearly as he did also tells us something very hopeful. Maybe, just maybe, with a free and responsible press and an engaged electorate, decency and sense really can win in a democracy. Maybe, like Hitler, Trump lost because he is just wrong. His way of seeing reality doesn’t match the way reality is. Maybe, democracy’s endless wrangling, in the end, is right. It does sort the con artists out from the sincere candidates, the neurotic out from the stable. In short, maybe DT lost the election because the majority saw him for what he is.  

I believe that history does move under an extremely subtle set of laws, but that set of laws, over the long term, favors freedom and pluralism. Democracy. It really is stronger, in the end, than bigoted totalitarianism and belligerent tribalism. It just takes a while for the laws of history to prove themselves.  

What Trump will try in the coming months remains to be seen; some of the possibilities are scary, I admit. Hitler took several elections to come to power in Germany. And it was only after a failed coup attempt that he decided to go the democratic route to power, for the time being, until he really could, as duly elected chancellor, get full control over the armed forces, the courts, the police, the writing of the country’s laws, and so on. Then he began to move forward with his terrible agenda. But I don't see that level of ambition or cynicism in Trump yet. During his time in office, he didn't try to take over the military or the economy. 

And in the end, Hitler did lose. My prediction, my hope, is that Trump has lost a lot of his power base, and with many of his former underlings now running for cover after his desperate attempt to use his supporters to overthrow the constitution of the US, his popularity is going to continue to shrink. If those things do come to pass, this will be evidence showing that decency and sense really can win out -- on the big scale of nations and the long haul of generations -- over cynicism and egotism.

There is still hope for our species.

In the shadow of the mushroom cloud, have a hopeful day.

                     

                                      U.S. president, Joe Biden (credit: Wikipedia) 

 

A Rough Analogy from History

 

                                                    US Senator Joe McCarthy 

                                        (credit: United Press, via Wikimedia Commons) 

A short post today, but I think it makes a point worthy of attention.

Almost always, if we look long enough, we can find examples in history to inform and enlighten us about what is going on in our own times. Consider, for example, the case of Senator Joseph McCarthy in the 1950s.

McCarthy was the chief “commie hunter” in the world in those times. By the 1950s, US intelligence services had proved beyond any reasonable doubt, that there had been, and very likely still were, agents spying for the USSR in practically every sector of American life. Though many of these agents were doing nothing more than promoting communist organizations in the US and other nations of the free world, a few really were stealing major secrets and selling them to the USSR. 

McCarthy and his followers used legitimate fears of real threats to whip up public paranoia. Ordinary citizens began to imagine that they were seeing “commies” everywhere. Even next door.

McCarthy's hearings led large sectors of the American public to believe that there were, for sure, commies all over the film industry, the entertainment industry, and the publishing industry. And, more dangerously, facilities where vital scientific research was going on. Some of these fears, I will reiterate, were based on facts. A prime example of this came from the Rosenbergs, who were found to have procured and sold the secrets of building an atomic bomb to the USSR. They were caught, accused, convicted, then executed (by electric chair) in 1953. The Rosenbergs were, by the way, not immigrants, but full blown, born and raised, Americans. 

                                        Ethel Rosenberg (credit: Wikimedia.org) 

But most of the accusations McCarthy was shouting about were groundless. Most of those he accused turned out to have never betrayed the US to a foreign power in any way. They had simply criticized some of their country's policies and gone to a few meetings. And let us not forget that criticizing policies with which one disagrees is a patriotic thing to do in a democracy. Democracy lives, grows, and evolves by dissent and compromise.

It is true that there were many in film, entertainment, literature, and other sectors of American life who had once belonged to Communist organizations, openly, right in the US. But belonging to a Communist party is not illegal now in the US, nor has it ever been so. In addition, in the 1930’s in particular, little was known about life inside the USSR. Stalin’s camps had not yet been anything more than rumored. 

Lots of very smart people were fooled for years by Communist propaganda into thinking that the Communist way of governance offered the big majority of citizens a better way to live. Why? Because, in the Depression era of the 1930s, there seemed to be only two options to associate oneself with if one was interested in politics. Hitler, Mussolini, Franco, and the other fascist leaders, on the one hand, or the USSR and all others who openly opposed fascism on the other. The fascists' aggressions against people within their own societies and against other nations were much better known than what Stalin was up to. For millions of people, the fascists were clearly dangerous, vicious men. The USSR seemed more enlightened, kinder. 

The West, in the meantime – America, Britain, France, etc. – seemed to want only to avoid having to confront the crimes of the fascist leaders. The USSR, the home of Communism in those times, was the hero that opposed the fascists. If you were a person who cared about decency and sense, you were moved by that fact and at least curious about what communism was and who the folk promoting it were. So you read books and magazines and went to meetings just to see what communism was about, never dreaming that all of this might be used against you 10 or 15 years down the road in the late 1940s and early 1950s.

          

                                               American entertainer and film star, Lena Horne (1946)  

                                                            (credit: Wikipedia) 

                       

                                                  Charlie Chaplin (film star, writer, and director)  

                                             (credit: Strauss-Peyton Studios, via Wikipedia)

The encouraging thing to notice in McCarthy's times and then apply to our times is that for a few years, Joe McCarthy wielded enormous power in the US. Accusations and innuendoes that came out of his Senate sub-committee hearings destroyed or severely damaged the careers of a significant number of prominent American figures. Dalton Trumbo (played by Brian Cranston in the recent movie about Trumbo’s life) had to work secretly under names other than his own for years because of McCarthy’s accusations. Lena Horne, Pete Seeger, Charlie Chaplin, Orson Welles, and many others had their careers seriously damaged by similar allegations arising from McCarthy’s sub-committee hearings. Writer Ernest Hemingway committed suicide. 

But McCarthy fell. 

His bullying, threatening tactics caused most of the US public to turn against him, largely because some of the Senate sub-committee hearings that he chaired, ones investigating supposed “commie sympathizers” in the US Army, were televised. The visual images finally showed the public, beyond all doubt, what a bully he really was. He ended up being censured by the US Senate, and he died shortly thereafter in 1957 at the age of 49.

Why is all this important now? Because the US has a dangerous bully in its politics now. And he has a lot of public support. But that support is shrinking. And the exact nature of his intentions and tactics is becoming clearer to the US public with every day that goes by.

Furthermore, like McCarthy, who was a Republican, Trump, the current bully is not synonymous with Republicanism. That party still has a platform, some parts of which still seem very sensible to many voters, in spite of the damage to American unity that Trump has done. Balanced budgets, smaller government, robust free markets, and a strong military all still make good sense to many Americans, despite their having acquired a profound distaste for Donald Trump, the man.  

My bet is that media coverage will eventually end this bully’s reign. Gradually, as more and more of the public see what he is, he’ll lose his base. 

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

 

                  

                                                     J.B.S. Haldane (credit: Wikipedia) 

Lighter Thoughts For More Hopeful Times 

A month since my last post. Well, it is the festive season. But no excuses. Instead, let’s get on to the more important points.

One of the things I keep hearing in conversations with friends and online is the claim that Trump’s followers seem incomprehensible to many people of liberal sympathies. “How can those people still give their loyalty and support to this spoiled, sociopathic clown?” And the liberals sometimes make other, equally confrontational remarks. These don’t show much respect for some of our fellow citizens, but I admit that I have said similar things myself in the past four years.

However, I came across some material just a few days ago that made me take another look at, and have another think about, the gap between the two political camps – pro Donald and anti.

What I have found is more reassuring than disturbing so I want to share it with readers. Back in the times two or three generations ago, there were people of great intelligence who gave an all but unshakeable loyalty to “world socialism”. What that meant was that thousands of distinguished men and women, ones who had achieved great honor in their fields, kept making excuses for the main champion of Marxist ideals, namely the USSR, in spite of mounting evidence that its leaders were doing greater and greater atrocities to their own citizens, and some were even flying in the face of science itself.

J.B.S. Haldane and several of his colleagues in Biology, for example, began to defend a warped version of the theory of evolution called “Lysenkoism”. It had been thought up by a Russian scientist named “Trofim Lysenko”, and essentially it flew right back in the face of Darwin’s Theory of Evolution. According to Lysenko, species could be made to change their DNA and the traits that they would pass on to their young by stressing, even physically altering, the parents. Surgically alter the udder of a cow, and her calves will ever after have udders like the one made by the veterinary surgeons for the mother. Similar changes to all species could be made. Darwinian evolution, in reply, says “Absolutely not. The gene code passed on to the next generation of any species will mainly be the one that the parent generation had when it was conceived.” There is some evidence today that some epigenetic changes can be passed on to a parent’s descendants, but for the most part, the Darwinian answer holds. Living things evolve, mostly, by genetic variation and natural selection. A slower but safer way.

                  

                                          Trofim Lysenko (credit: Wikipedia) 

But Darwinism did not suit Marxist ideology, so Darwin’s theory, at the will of party bullies in Moscow, supposedly had to bow to “scientific socialism”.  

Surely no real scientists would buy into and support such absurdity, you say? Oh, yes they did. And so did philosophers in their field and economists in theirs and so on. And yes, to reiterate, even scientists were called upon to trim their views to suit the party’s will and many did.

Haldane, to his credit, dodged and dodged the issue when he was called upon to comment on Lysenkoism. But he should have spoken out emphatically against it. Science deals with reality as it is, and no, that is not a matter of opinion. It may take some time and research to get the facts clear, but the facts are always just what they are, not what any person, no matter who he/she is supposed to be in the human made power structures, says they are. They just are. We study them and adapt to them or we sicken and die. That’s the bottom line. And by the way, Lysenkoism all but destroyed Soviet agriculture for decades. 

Why would I find this information I came across recently kind of reassuring? Because it shows us, that even in these times, there is nothing new here. Smart people being blinded by wishful thinking have always been around. And just like in past times, the truth will come out in the end, though we may have to do some suffering to get to it. The Marxists occasioned Joseph McCarthy and his followers in the U.S. in the 50’s, one group of nuts opposed by another group of nuts. But they are both gone now. Like Donny Johnny soon will be. Sensible heads will  prevail, and it looks now like there won’t have to be a bunch of blood shed to bring about his removal from power. Which is what democracy is for, isn’t it?

              

                                          Abraham Lincoln (credit: Wikipedia) 

It’s Lincoln who is supposed to have said, “You can fool all of the people some of the time, and some of the people all of the time, but you can’t fool all of the people all of the time.”

In the shadow of the mushroom cloud, still folks, have an honest day.

 

Artist's portrayal of a brown-skinned Jesus 

               (credit: https://medium.com/the-stories/a-gentle-reminder-that-                                   jesus-was-a-brown-middle-eastern-refugee-who-would-not-have-voted-for-                              donald-trump 3aec4eaf1620)

                                        A Hopeful Christmas

Thank you for dropping by. I have one small announcement: the chamber of commerce has asked me to remind you that there are only twenty-two shopping days left till Christmas. (Just kidding. I enjoy Christmas shopping like I enjoy drinking bleach.)        

        But it’s the meaning of this season, Christmas, that I want to write about today. And I promise to be more serious for the rest of this post.  

What conclusions do we come to if we apply a moral realist model to the cultural phenomenon called “Christmas”? What do I see in the beliefs and customs that surround this man who probably lived from about 4 B.C. to about 36 A.D.? I think more deeply about this question at Christmas time, as most of us do. In this Covid 19 year, even more so.

Like many thinkers in Western culture, I get fed up with how commercial Christmas has become. This year consumer spending will likely be dampened down, or maybe just in-person shopping will be. Maybe Jeff Bezos, the tycoon of the online shopping world, will double his already unimaginable wealth by the new year.  

The ads sometimes start before Remembrance Day, and I find that hard to take. The men and women who fought in the wars that the nations of the world got drawn into in the last century or so deserve a special time that is set aside just for them. November 11 is supposed to be that day. The rest of us ought to be setting aside time for them and showing respect, gratitude. Greedy merchants crowding into that time by advertising their Christmas junk infuriate me. I make a quiet vow when I see Christmas ads anytime before November 12 to be sure that I do not buy whatever it is those ads are trying to sell – ever again.

I don’t like the commercialism that has poisoned Christmas, but I add to that, gluttony and drunkenness. We eat too much food and drink too many kinds of alcohol that we don’t need or even like.

Can anything save me from disillusionment in the Christmas season? Yes. I couldn’t have said that for many years, but I can today. Ten years ago, I figured something out.  

The way of humans on this world for the most part has been to take as much as they can as often as they can. In our era, the philosophy of greed has even begun to threaten what once was taken for granted, namely the ecosystem of this planet. Perhaps in what I have to say today, I can give some hope to those of you who are beginning to despair at the indifference of our leaders toward environmental issues. But my main focus will not be on environmental issues because they weren’t issues in Jesus’ time. His main gift to the human race was something else.

The worst consequence of human greed for many centuries of our history on this planet has been the crime that we do to each other, i.e. war. When earthquakes or hurricanes hit another land, we grieve for the people there, we send help, and we do what we can. But basically, we can handle natural disasters. The horrors people do to each other are in a different category altogether. A child can tell you that we have more than enough resources on this planet to feed, clothe, and shelter everyone in comfort. Our leaders’ sending us to war is not about making sure that people have enough to live in dignity. Wars are about vain people gaining face. Realizing that truth is what makes us feel so disillusioned with our own species.  

And let me not mince words or be vague here. Historians estimate that of the horrors that have happened to people because of the aggression of other people, more than ninety percent have been caused by governments, not by criminals. Wars and concentration camps, mostly. Mafia thugs are disgusting human beings, but they are small fry compared to the Hitlers and Stalins of the world. And the Shaka Zulus, the Genghis Khans, the Caesars, the Alexanders, and the Joshuas.

Where, then, does Jesus fit in?

War had been ugly and pointless for centuries before Jesus ever came on the scene. Everything any war ever actually accomplished in real world terms could have been accomplished without any bloodshed at all, if the people involved had agreed to debate the issues openly, negotiate, and compromise. He saw that. And then, he extrapolated and saw much further. He saw even in 30 A.D. that humanity was on a course of self-destruction.

The ways of greed, politics, and war and the improvements in our military technologies can be thought of as lines on a graph of time. As the two lines climb forward across the graph – as our greed and our technology both keep growing - we watch in horror. The lines are gradually converging. We know that inevitably one day the lines will touch. There we will finally make a weapon capable of wiping out the whole human race at the same time as the sea of politics casts up a leader who will use it. There is a kind of paralyzing, mathematical certainty to this graph. Even to Jesus, two thousand years ago, it looked as if we were doomed to someday destroy ourselves. He saw this desperate situation taking shape even in his own time.

But then he put into his world a new way of seeing ourselves. He left us this: love one another as I have loved you. If you remember nothing else that I told you, remember this: love one another as I have loved you. You can do this. You really can. Just love your neighbor. Then, all the good you can imagine will follow.  

In the middle of the Roman Empire, Jesus’ time was a time when war and the way of life that it forced people into were considered obvious. Almost every person in that empire would have thought debating the matter was childish. If you had begun to argue that war might not be necessary, they would have told you, “Oh, grow up!” Many would have looked at you like you had just grown donkey ears. The main thing they prayed to their gods for was victory in battle.

All the recently conquered peoples in the Roman Empire contained rebels who were eager to get even with the Roman conquerors. This was true especially of the Jews, the people among whom Jesus had been born and grown to manhood. They had many secret groups plotting sabotage and assassination all the time. Jesus grew up in the middle of all of this.

In this social milieu of jealousy, hate, and violence, people paid to go to arenas all over the Empire and watch men kill each other, right there in front of their eyes, a few meters away.  

Then Jesus came along and said: “It doesn’t have to be this way. If a man hits you on one cheek, turn the other to him. If he grabs your jacket, give him your shirt. If he forces you to walk a mile with him, walk three.” And he lived his values, all the way to his death. Others had said similar things, but Jesus, by the actions of his life and by the dramatic character of his death, caused people to listen and remember.

       

                                      Artist's portrayal of Jigonhsasee

                          (credit: https://alchetron.com/Jigonhsasee

Since those times, heroes all through history, even modern ones like Wilberforce, Gandhi, Mandela and King, have shown by real-world example that with enough courage, the way of non-violence really can work. The rest of the Christians have mostly been less sincere in observing Jesus’ simple rule, but we have still gotten gradually kinder every century since Roman times. The horrible “games” of Jesus’ time were abolished in about 300 A.D.. In more modern times, no one goes to bear-baiting anymore and people who secretly support dog fights, once their secret is discovered, are hounded from our midst, sentenced to jail time, as unfit to live with. Even then, if they sincerely ask for forgiveness, they can be forgiven. Jesus taught us that too. (Michael Vick comes to mind here.)

At first, the Romans didn’t consider Jesus’ ideas important. In fact, they thought his ideas were stupid. But well after he was gone, his cult – and a “cult” is what it was to the Romans – kept growing. There was something about it that tugged at human emotions. Worst of all, it began to steal some of the Romans' own sons and daughters right in Rome. Many converts were young people, even teenagers, fed-up with the materialistic, hedonistic emptiness of their parents’ way of life.

The Roman Empire is long gone, as are many others too numerous to list; Jesus’ words are still here. Love your neighbor.            

So, for me, was he divine? Was he the son of God the churches claim he was? No. Or, to be exact, he simply had a lot more of a quality that all of us have, the spiritual quality, the capacity to believe in things not seen.

But what matters much more is that he put into the mix of ideas being passed back and forth by the human race, the simple idea that we can solve our differences without fighting one another. Thus, he injected a new variable into the equations of human history. If we can learn to love our neighbors, we may make it through the era of greed and war and finally grow up. Emerge as a new kind of species, a differently programmed species that no longer needs to keep itself fit by programming its members to be their own cultural predators, that toughen their cultures by war.

Before him, our destroying ourselves was a mathematical certainty. Now there is that tantalizing little ‘maybe’. Maybe ...we can learn to truly love our neighbors.

For me, seeing the truth of that one big principle is more than enough to keep me from cynicism at Christmas time. Christmas, for me, is the time of year when I celebrate the fact that this gentle man entered into the flow of human history in the most warlike society that, up to his time, had ever existed, and changed – everything.

So what if some lying, greedy politicians won this round? My struggle against them will go on. They can’t stop that as long as there is breath in my body. I have free will and a truth to live by. The rest is up to me.  

Let materialism and greed fill the shopping malls to the roof with junk. They can’t discourage me. I believe in something real that is beyond all of that. We keep trying; we win some and we lose some; the struggle goes on. But there’s hope now. Before this one guy, as I see human history, anyway, there was none.

Merry Christmas, lads and lassies. Enjoy your family and friends.

 

 

 

Quote by Marianne Williamson (often attributed to Nelson Mandela):

Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness, that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, who am I to be brilliant or talented? Actually, who are you not to be? Your playing small doesn't serve the world. There's nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won't feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. We were born to make manifest the spiritual glory that is within us. It's not just in some of us; it's in everyone. As we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our very presence liberates others.