Revelations of a Modern Prophet

                                                             An Earth Manifesto publication by Dr. Tiffany B. Twain  

                                                                                                                      February 7, 2012

Absolute Truths and Other Myths

In the beginning, countless eons ago, the Universe was without form.  There was no Earth, no waters, no Sun, no stars, no matter, no light, no space, and no time.  It was a Void, I reckon.  In this initial state of affairs, unfathomably enormous amounts of energy likely existed, along with a potentiality for the emergence of a highly-structured physical universe in which matter, light, heat, space, and the “laws of nature” would spring into being, as if designed by a really smart, powerful and creative Supreme Being.  What She would have been doing in this state of dark excitement, without space or time, or stuff, or a looking glass, or companions, or even a fathomable purpose, no one can say.

All we know for sure is that we human beings are here now, and that we exist in a physical universe governed by unchanging physical laws of nature which have been operative with no apparent interruption since the beginning of time.  These ‘laws of nature’ are physical aspects of reality;  they are not some miraculous divine decree.  Albert Einstein once observed that either everything is a miracle, or nothing is a miracle.  The nature of Nature is the way that it is, independent of our perceptions, and independent of the way we interpret what we sense and experience, and independent of our judgments.  So is it a miracle?

A Contemporary View of Scientific Understandings of the Seven Days of Creation

Seven formative stages have been involved in the creation of our world.  In the beginning, a colossal exploding forth of energy into primitive forms of matter took place.  Spiraling galaxies of fiery matter were flung in every direction into materializing expanses of space.  As gaseous matter hurtled through the vast reaches of intergalactic space, subatomic particles and atoms and elements were forged in crucibles of nuclear furnaces within stars and during subsequent supernova explosions.  Light and cosmic rays from such ancient stellar supernova events reaches the earth long after the events themselves, due to the unfathomable distances between the earth and the places these cosmic explosions occurred.  Many black holes formed in galaxies throughout the universe, like eddies in a raging river, wherever enough matter was attracted together that the forces of gravity became powerful enough to warp space itself around the masses.  Not even photons of light are able to escape black holes, so they have disappeared entirely from visibility.  This first day of creation lasted more than 9 billion years, and no one at all was around to pronounce it good, or to hear any such pronouncement.

On the second day of creation, in a remote outpost of the Milky Way galaxy, a solar system formed from matter in a solar nebula that was orbiting a modestly large star that we know today as the Sun.  Natural processes of accretion caused Planet Earth and the moon and the other planets to form in this solar system.  About 500 million years passed during this phase in the geophysical evolution of the earth, and then it culminated in a period known as the Late Heavy Bombardment.  I’ll bet that was locally impressive!  Still, no beings were around to pronounce these developments good or bad.

And then it happened.  The third day of creation began with a sudden spark, like some divine bolt of lightening, which struck the primordial soup in the seas of the earth, galvanizing inanimate amino acids into the first primitive kinds of self-replicating animate life.  For almost 3 billion years, single-celled life forms proliferated from these original forms of life in the waters of the planet.  Things were getting good.

At the beginning of the fourth day of creation, about 540 million years ago, an epic development occurred.  Some of the single-celled organisms and colonies of such organisms which had been swimmingly occupying the biotic environs for billions of years finally stumbled upon a mode of organization that allowed them to form increasingly complex multi-cellular organisms.  Soon after this marvelous Cambrian explosion of biotic variety began, extensive cellular specialization and biological diversification and radiation into new habitats and ranges took place.  Within a relatively short period of geological time, all of the 35 phyla of animals that exist today sprang into existence.  A wide variety of new species of fish, mollusks, arthropods, insects, corals, amphibians, and primitive reptiles evolved and proliferated as an “evolutionary arms race” took place between predators and prey.  Plants made the challenging transition from aquatic ecosystems to terrestrial ones during this era, and many species of tree ferns and trees evolved.  This fourth day of creation persisted for 300 million years. 

And then again, an epic occurrence took place.  The most severe extinction event in the entire history of the planet wreaked havoc on life on Earth.  Up to 96% of all marine species and 70% of terrestrial vertebrates became extinct in the course of this mother of all mass extinctions.  As this fifth day of creation began, about 250 million years ago, life struggled to recover from the severe devastation of life forms on earth.  Once this recovery process really got going, many new species of life evolved, including many kinds of reptiles.  Eventually, dinosaurs became the dominant animals in terrestrial terrains.  Our cautious little mammalian ancestors first appeared on the biotic stage during this Mesozoic Era, but they laid low until their time in the sun would come on Day Six.

Sure enough, along came another cataclysmic extinction event that sparked the sixth day of creation.  This Cretaceous Extinction was apparently caused by a meteorite impact in the vicinity of the Yucatan and the Caribbean Sea.  In the aftermath of this disaster, all the non-avian dinosaurs were wiped out along with thousands of other species of plants and animals.  This set the stage for some amazing evolutionary developments over the next 65 million years.  That’s a whole story unto itself.

On the seventh day of creation, after the ancestors of human beings and chimpanzees and bonobos had diverged, a number of species of the genus Homo lived and died over the course of the past 2.5 million years.  Finally, anatomically modern humans made their appearance on the scene about 200,000 years ago, and they reached substantive behavioral modernity around 50,000 years ago.  This is where the story gets real interesting.

How It All Began on Earth

The human race has learned many things about the physical universe and the mysteries of existence and the evolutionary path that our species has taken from the earliest days of our being.  Our remote primate ancestors had descended from trees and began walking upright on African plains in a distant period of prehistory.  They developed opposable thumbs and learned how to make tools for hunting and preparing food for consumption.  At some point they figured out how to control the use of fire for light, warmth, cooking, and warding off predators.  As our conscious awareness of the universe developed, reflection and foresight sprung into the neuronal systems of our brains, and we developed the ability to vocalize utterances with ever-more complex meanings.  A veritable Tower of Babel of languages evolved, and for Heaven’s sake, there appeared to be no God to supervise them.

In the beginning of our species’ existence, just after the pre-human gene pool began to diverge from that of our common ancestors with chimpanzees and bonobos, the bodies of our forebears were still covered with hair.  Their jaws and teeth were much larger than ours today, and their brains were only about one-third the size of ours.  The females of the times were still showing sexual receptivity only during times they were “in heat”.  This receptivity was communicated to the males through the gaudy visual and olfactory clues of the estrous cycle.  This condition caused the males to be frenzied with instinctive desire. 

Alpha male dominance hierarchies likely existed in those remote times, as they do today with many species of mammals.  This social structure helped ensure that the genes of the alpha males were the ones most likely to be transmitted into future generations. 

Roughly 250,000 generations of our ancestors have been born and died since those ancient days more than 5 million years ago in the Pliocene Epoch of geologic time.  Not only have our bodies and brains evolved in quite significant ways since then, but so have our animal natures and cultures.  For the preponderance of the time since our species first evolved from earlier Homo ancestors, humans lived in small nomadic clans and wandered around during the various seasons hunting animals and gathering edible roots, plants, nuts and fruits for sustenance.

Time Out

For a sense of perspective, imagine yourself standing on the rim of the Grand Canyon, gazing far down to the Colorado River, more than 5,000 feet below.  Contemplate the multitude of rock layers in variegated hues of color that are exposed by erosion in this awe-inspiring canyon. 

These exposed sedimentary rocks speak to me with allusions to unfathomable eras of time long past.  I imagine relatively calm equilibrium times punctuated with occasional dramatic events.  Calcium carbonate limestone and silicate chert speak of primordial precipitations of microscopic shells of countless trillions of organisms onto deep abyssal plains on the floors of the oceans, and of sporadic great floods, volcanic eruptions, and underwater landslides on continental shelves.  These lithified sediments speak of practically eternal spells of time, and of the constancy of the formative processes that have been in operation since the beginning of time. 

The sandstone, limestone and shale rock layers in the Grand Canyon extend from the most recent geologic epochs of rock at the canyon rim on down to the Colorado River through layers of rock formed during the Cenozoic Era, the Cretaceous and Jurassic and Triassic Periods, the Paleozoic Era and back into lithified Pre-Cambrian sediments which were formed more than two billion years before the present. 

The amount of physical change which has taken place during this period of time completely dwarfs the amount of change that has taken place in the relatively mere moments in geologic time during which our own genus Homo has been diverging from the nearest living relatives with whom we share a common ancestry.

Richard Dawkins provides a compelling understanding of evolutionary change in his book The Ancestor’s Tale: A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Evolution.  Dawkins cleverly uses Chaucer’s famous book The Canterbury Tales as the inspiration for his ancestor’s tales in this exploration of the grand unifying theory of biology.  He has borrowed the rough structure of Chaucer’s story of pilgrims on their journey from a London tavern to the town of Canterbury, and taken readers on a pilgrimage backward through evolutionary time to the beginning of life, long, long, long before the mythical Adam and Eve. 

Dawkins uses extraordinary evidence of fossilized remains and DNA, as interpreted in modern scientific understandings of genetics and molecular biology, to trace this journey back along the branches of the tree of life.  As he traces all current species of life backwards in time to points where they have common ancestors with other forms of life, he reviews the history of biological evolution in reverse.  As he heads back toward the origin of all life, readers meet humanity’s various ancestral relatives as they converge back in time on common ancestors.  He explores a succession of scientific stories concerned with the formative processes of life at each of 40 “rendezvous points” in the course of this pilgrimage.  A good summary of Dawkins’ Tales can be found in Wikipedia, which contains a recap of these 40 provocative insights.

The Farmer’s Tale and the Cro-Magnon’s Tale lead us further back in time to the Tasmanian’s Tale, the Gorilla’s Tale, the Howler Monkey’s Tale and on back to such stories as the Hippo’s Tale, the Galapagos Finch’s Tale, the Peacock’s Tale, the Dodo’s Tale, and even the Blind Cave Fish’s Tale, the Sponge’s Tale and the Redwood’s Tale.

“… we meet up with fellow pilgrims along the route as we and they converge on our common ancestors.  Chimpanzees join us at about 6 million years in the past, gorillas at 7 million years, orangutans at 14 million years, as we stride on together, a growing band.  The journey provides the setting for a collection of some 40 tales.  Each explores an aspect of evolutionary biology through the stories of characters met along the way, or glimpsed from afar -- the Elephant Bird's Tale, the Marsupial Mole's Tale, the Coelacanth's Tale.  Together they give a deep understanding of the processes that have shaped life on Earth:  convergent evolution, the isolation of populations, continental drift, the great extinctions.  The tales are interspersed with prologues detailing the journey, route maps showing joining lineages, and life-like reconstructions of our common ancestors.  The Ancestor's Tale represents a pilgrimage on an unimaginable scale:  our goal is four billion years away, and the number of pilgrims joining us grows vast -- ultimately encompassing all living creatures.”

Evolutionary Change

Our primordial ancestors co-evolved as social animals in which the survival of the clan became more important than the survival of the individual.  Groups in which males cooperated in the hunt survived with greater success than groups in which individuals did not participate in this common goal.  Likewise, groups in which females cooperated together in gathering foods and medicines and in taking care of their offspring survived with more success than groups in which individuals shirked this common responsibility.  Groups which cooperated together survived better than groups in which too many individuals freeloaded or cheated or were unwilling to sacrifice for the greater good of their clan.  “Altruistic” groups had much greater survival advantages than groups with too many narrowly selfish individuals.

The process of natural selection gradually pruned the groups and individuals of Homo genera into the physical and behavioral animals that we are today.  Homo females developed concealed ovulation and monthly menses.  A vital need grew for a kind of meat-for-sex interdependence with males.  This was because females lost blood every month during menses and males were the ones who hunted to provide meat for the clan.  Meat is one of the best sources for iron, and iron is necessary in the production of hemoglobin in red blood cells.  The protein hemoglobin provides a critical service by facilitating the uptake and release of oxygen to brain cells and others throughout the body. 

People eventually made a mental connection between the sex act and the arrival of a child nine months later.  This caused females to consciously begin exhibiting the overarching concern of “Original Choice”, in which they rejected social misfits and slackers and males with substandard genetic characteristics or character.  They began to choose mates who were better disposed to help provide for their families and protect them from the many dangers of life on the savanna or in caves.  Dr. Leonard Shlain provides a fascinating perspective about these interdependent associations in his illuminating book Sex, Time, and Power - How Women’s Sexuality Shaped Human Evolution.

Humans also developed a keen ability to perceive the intentions of others, partially through the distinctive feature which highlights our eyes -- the sclera, or whites of our eyes.  The sclera evolved partly to help us follow each others’ gazes when we are communicating or when we are cooperating with one another on tasks that require close contact and good communication.  This is known as the “cooperative eye hypothesis”.  We also developed a kind of dishonesty detector and a remarkable ability to recognize individual faces.  The latter capability was a development which helped promote positive aspects of social bonding and cooperative coexistence.

Facial expressions are innate behaviors that even babies exhibit clearly.  They express the six primary categories of universal emotions:  smiling happiness, open-eyed surprise, pained sadness, frowning disgust, scowling anger, and trepidatious fear.  Most people also feel emotions that may be more visually subtle like love, affection, hope, shame or embarrassment.  So-called mirror neurons are involved in our recognitions of these emotions in others.  Curiously, we feel and remember “negative” emotions in the most poignant and powerful ways.  A smile, on the other hand, is the emotion visible from the farthest distance, presumably because it has always been crucially important to see if another person appeared to be a friend or a foe.

Religion, Social Cohesion, Obedience and the Suppression of Freeloading and Deviancy

One of the most interesting human adaptations has been the evolution of religious behavior.  A study of the evolutionary roots of religion and ethics is illuminating because it reveals that every known human culture has been characterized by propensities toward religious belief.  The fact that an instinctive impulse like this is pervasive in every human culture indicates that there must have been a compelling survival advantage in holding religious beliefs. 

Evolutionary psychologists Dominic Johnson and Jesse Bering speculate about this, writing: 

“We have inherited the general template for religiosity because those early humans who abandoned the prospect of supernatural agents, or who lacked the capacity to represent their involvement in moral affairs, likely met with an early death at the hands of their own group members, or at least reduced reproductive success.  Those who readily acquiesced to the possibility of moralizing gods, and who lived their lives in fear of such agencies, survived to become our ancestors.”

The gods of various religions may at first have been just a curiosity.  But early on, they acquired an extraordinarily useful social role.  Almost all early societies developed a highly effective inhibiting mechanism in the form of threats of punishment by supernatural agents.  In societies throughout the world, spirit gods or the spirits of dead ancestors are supposed to be keenly interested in people’s observance of prevailing laws and taboos.  The gods reputedly punish infractions unfailingly, either in this world or in the next, or in both.  For better effect, in some religions, doctrines profess a God that acts with downright vindictive behaviors.

Gods were given this socially convenient role to encourage people to conform by striking fear into their hearts.  Without gods, it was dangerous for anyone in a community to assume the role of the enforcer of punishment because they would incur the risks of resentment and possible retaliation. 

Evolutionary change operates on principles of differential reproduction and natural selection.  Genetic variability is a random process that occurs by means of a recombination of genes during meiotic cell division and through inherited cellular mutations.  But natural selection itself is definitely NOT a random process.  Natural selection is almost unerringly focused, in the long run, on preserving advantageous traits that help individuals survive and adapt to changing conditions in the environment, in competitive pressures, or in social interrelationships. 

Natural selection favored clan members who cooperated in their social groups.  In semi-nomadic hunter and gatherer societies, cooperation had distinct survival advantages for the group because it was vital to have members who felt enough commitment to their clan to be willing to die for their group during intergroup conflicts. 

People are far more cooperative, even with total strangers, than biologists would expect.  This behavior appears to be deeply embedded in human nature.  What biological explanation could there be for cooperation with people other than those who are a person’s closest biological kin?  Such a high level of natural cooperativeness would probably not arise unless those who deviated from this behavior feared severe censure, inexorable punishment, or banishment from the group.

Since freeloaders and non-conformists would have been a burden in a clan group, a belief in moralizing gods was an easy way to discourage freeloading and social deviancy.  Why, otherwise, should immortal gods in their supernatural realm care about things like human sexuality or interpersonal behaviors or dietary preferences?  The only good explanation for such religious strictures is that gods are human inventions that actually embody the moral authority of a society and its interest in having the rules and traditions of social behavior obeyed by all of its members.  From this perspective, the gods are naturally interested in human conduct because it is their very raison d’etre.

Reward Center Calling

Religious behaviors evolved to be perceived as deeply satisfying.  Our brains feature a neuronal reward system that encourages us to eat and have sex and embrace religious beliefs.  The evolutionary reasons for eating and reproducing are to ensure survival and the maximum number of progeny.  Natural selection ensured that we feel a compelling pleasure in eating and mating which encourages people to eat and to have sex. 

These pleasures are distinctly different from the true evolutionary purposes of eating to survive, and of having sex to propagate one’s genes into future generations.  Likewise, people feel definite satisfactions in religious behaviors which encourage them to practice religion, but these rewards are far removed from the evolutionary function of religion, which is to bind people together and make them willing to put the group’s interests ahead of their own.

Experts in the study of the structure and functioning of our brains have made astonishing advances in recent years.  They have found an elaborate system of neurotransmitters and hormones like dopamine, serotonin, and oxytocin which are produced in our brains that affect cognition, motor skills, arousal, connection, mood, memory and feelings of reward.  The reward and pleasure centers of the brain are particularly interesting for their effects on human motivations. 

Neurotransmitters like dopamine provide an activating stimulus in these reward areas of the brain.  They arouse anticipation and create positive feelings of well-being.  We experience positive feelings related to things like the consumption of food, the consummation of sexual activity, and connectedness, spirituality and love.  Curiously, drugs like amphetamines and cocaine are highly psychologically addictive because they imitate the effects of dopamine and provide powerful impulses to reward center receptors in the brain.

Humans are the most intricately social of all animals.  Consider teenagers.  Their brains are highly attuned to dopamine, the neurotransmitter that primes and fires reward circuits and helps us recognize patterns and make decisions.  Teenager brains are also finely attuned to oxytocin, the neuronal hormone which is involved in making social connections more rewarding.  During the teenage years, the hormones of young adults are raging, and teenagers see social rejection and peer exclusion as threats that are almost as significant as physical danger or the lack of food.  This is one reason that teenagers indulge in risky behaviors to gain the pleasures associated with them, rather than being inhibited by overriding concerns for the consequences of their actions.

The more we explore, the more we discover.  The more we learn, the more we realize that there are good explanations for almost everything.  Consider the fact that teenagers practically crave excitement, novelty and risk as well as acceptance and belonging in their peer group.  These traits almost define adolescence.  They are characteristics which make us more adaptive, both as individuals and as a species.  Genes and developmental processes which play an amplified role during this key transition period have been selected for, over thousands of generations, because they produce young adults optimally primed to take the risk of leaving a safe home and moving into unfamiliar territory.  This willingness to take risks and master challenging new environments has been critically important for our species in its adaptive success. 

Our brains consist of 100 billion neurons with as many as a thousand or more synapses each.  These neurons have branch-like extensions, known as dendrites, along which chemical messages are transmitted to neuronal cell bodies across these narrow synaptic gaps.  The cell bodies send information along nerve fiber extensions, are known as axons.  During adolescence, these axons become gradually more insulated with a fatty substance called myelin.  This myelin sheath boosts the axons’ transmission speed up to a hundred times.  Faster brain functions are beneficial because they work more efficiently, providing us with greater adaptive intelligence.  As this insulation builds up, however, functional flexibility diminishes.  This is why languages are harder to learn as we get older and this insulation process is completed.  As we age, our brains literally become less flexibly open-minded.

Mark Twain once observed that “Man is the only animal that blushes.  Or needs to.”  A possible evolutionary explanation for blushing is that it evolved as a means of ameliorating conflict since it reduces the possibility of deception and thereby encourages socially constructive behavior.  

Taboos, like the one against incest, arose in early human societies.  One can well imagine why.  Inbreeding can result in severe physical or mental degeneracy within a dozen generations.  For instance, when the Hapsburg dynasty in Europe tried to keep their dynastic heritage intact by marrying their relatives, physical and mental deficiencies like those of Charles II of Spain resulted. 

Politics and Religion

The Seven Days of Creation scenario adduced early in these Revelations is a modern creation story that provides a dramatic contrast to all the numerous antiquated mythological Creation stories ever invented over the many millennia of mankind’s history.  The Creation stories of all the world’s principal religions have provided, throughout the long years of civilization, positive benefits by facilitating cooperative relationships and providing psychological security and satisfying human needs for belief and faith.  But staunch adherence by religious establishments to their concocted founding conceptions has also caused ideological strife, terrible conflict, and all manner of discrimination, persecution, violence and atrocities.  Religious authorities have also often sided with political establishments in repressing people, causing extensive harm to millions of people. 

Politics and religion make strange bedfellows.  When they form coalitions that are allied against the greater good, they undermine the most important values of our kind.  Today, fundamentalist believers within religions worldwide pose one of the biggest threats to peaceful coexistence and sane courses of action.  In particular, the Religious Right in the United States and Islamic extremists in many nations around the world and the ayatollahs of Iran all seem to be committed to conflict-engendering domination and ascendancy.  This aggressive attitude of supremacism is making international conflicts more dangerous.  Religious extremism is giving unwarranted and counterproductive amounts of power to reactionary elements.  Social harms associated with domestic repression and wrong-headed government policies and misguided priorities are radically undesirable.

Rational decision-making and intelligent judgments about the best approaches to fostering human well-being are being thwarted by vested interests that are supported by these fundamentalists.  Extreme religious conservatives tend to side with economic fundamentalists and authoritarians in nations worldwide, and this affiliation makes disparities of wealth and social inequities more pronounced, thus stoking increased insecurities, stresses, hatreds and strife around the globe.  This is socially undesirable!

Philosophical Introspection

I just love astutely insightful perspectives.  Think of an issue where you believed something was true, but later were presented with a wholly different but entirely persuasive point of view.  In a collective sense, a perceptual surprise like this took place when humankind first realized that the Earth rotates on its axis every day and revolves around the Sun once every year.  This contradicted the apparent fact that the Sun rises in the east every day and travels across the sky to set in the west, as if the Sun is actually revolving around the Earth.

   “Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is an absurd one.” 

                                                                                              --- Voltaire

French philosopher Rene Descartes (1596 - 1650) surveyed the scene of earlier philosophers like Socrates, Plato and Aristotle, and no doubt of skeptics like the Sophists and Stoics, and came to convoluted conclusions like “I think, therefore I am” -- and, “So, from what has been said, it must be concluded that God necessarily exists.”  Descartes makes a bizarre Ontological Argument that God’s existence can be inferred directly from the fact that necessary existence is contained in the “clear and distinct idea of a supremely perfect being”. 

Wait a minute.  I have a clear and distinct idea that the Sun rose this morning and is moving across the sky exactly as if it is revolving around the earth, but that doesn’t make it self-evident and necessarily true.  Will Durant astutely observed in The Pleasures of Philosophy: “Doubtless some philosophers have had all sorts of wisdom except common sense, and many a philosophic flight has been due to the elevating power of thin air.”  Right on!

People claim that God has divine attributes like goodness, omnipotence, omniscience, and eternality.  Really?  That sounds much more like a fabricated idea about the particularities of what a God must be like, rather than a knowable truth.  These characteristics are framed in the language and concepts of what the nature of a super-human might be.  By definition, God cannot be described or limited to some narrow list of attributes.  We should be especially careful not to ascribe characteristics to God which are suspiciously anthropomorphic and anthropocentric.

The existence of God is a conveniently simplistic concept that evolved from earlier animistic and polytheistic ideas.  The concept of one God is a more sophisticated idea than earlier ideas which supposed there are many gods and goddesses.  I personally find the panoply of deities in the pantheon of ancient Greek and Roman myths to be fascinating because these mythological beings embody many marvelous insights into the archetypal character of human beings.  A study of Goddesses in Everywoman and Gods in Everyman, as elaborated by the Jungian psychiatrist, Jean Shinoda Bolen, M.D., can provide valuable perspectives to individuals about archetypes in the human psyche.  Considered from this point of view, beliefs in a God also reveal much about true believers, and in fact they reveal more about those who believe than they reveal about the true nature of an envisioned God.

Likewise, a study of comparative religion and the attributed character of deities as described in canonized religious texts can reveal fascinating things about the people who profess these beliefs and their convoluted thinking.  Consider the belief:  “Presto, God created everything!” This is a curiously convenient construct, but no one has come up with an adequately honest explanation for who created God. 

Religions have often times in history served as a type of manipulative propaganda.  A reliable way to make people believe in falsehoods is through frequent repetition, according to Daniel Kahneman in Thinking, Fast and Slow.  This is because our brains function in ways that make it difficult for people to distinguish familiarity from truth.  People involved in the marketing of products or ideas are aware of this fact, as are authoritarian rulers and religious zealots.  As George W. Bush once noted, “See, in my line of work you got to keep repeating things over and over and over again for the truth to sink in, to kind of catapult the propaganda.”  To catapult the propaganda -- that sounds like a somewhat despicable Crusade!

There is no doubt that fabricated stories can truly alter our realities.  This theme is powerfully explored in the film Life is Beautiful, in which a father uses his imagination and humor to make up a story in a Nazi concentration camp that he tells his son, and even though his story is a fiction, it actually helps the son to survive.  Unfortunately, in the arena of religious fanaticism, stories like those in the Bible and the Koran and the Book of Mormon can have highly negative impacts on society, despite implied morality that holds that religious doctrines are designed to foster the moral good.  Fanatic believers tend to demonize others, and little good comes of such attitudes.

Curiously, the oldest temple ruins found anywhere in the world are in southern Turkey at a place known as Göbekli Tepe.  They date from about 12,000 years ago, long before people began to settle down in agrarian communities.  It is ironic that Göbekli Tepe and the ten other oldest temples in the world were built to commemorate gods and deities of cultures and civilizations long gone and all but forgotten.  No one any longer worships any of the gods that the ten oldest temples were built to honor, and the beliefs in those gods and hundreds of others have drifted into the realm of myth, legend, conjecture and mystery.

The Creation myth of the ancient Greeks says that Gaea, the feminine-gendered Earth, emerged from Chaos and gave birth to a son, Uranus, the personification of the male deity of the Sky, and to their eventual offspring the Titans and the Olympians.  This Creation myth was the dominant spiritual, cosmological and religious explanation of existence for many centuries in the most advanced civilizations in Europe at the time.  A rich and well-developed body of myths surrounded these deities, and enveloped the Greeks in a mythical connection to their world.  It was filled with deeply conceived archetypes of human nature and behavioral patterns.

Today we regard ancient Greek mythology as a quaintly fanciful body of anthropocentric projections and superstitions and imaginative story-telling.  We can no longer access the state of consciousness which prevailed for centuries during which time these myths were the dominant explanations of existence. 

In light of the long evolving history of cosmological conceptions in recorded history, now is the time for those who consider their faiths to represent “absolute truths” to admit that their own founding creation stories and scriptures and doctrines are also stories that have been invented by human beings.  These stories are simply not divine revelations.  Now is the time for people of all religious faiths -- Christians and Catholics and Baptists and Protestants and Moslems and Mormons and even Zen Buddhists -- to admit that other faiths have as much legitimacy as theirs, and to tolerate differences, and to embrace larger humanistic concerns.

A clearer understanding of the founding drives behind religions, and of the ways that religions have been hijacked by manipulative authorities, is vitally important for us in order to help us move forward toward creating saner, safer, fairer, more peaceable, and more sustainable societies.  This will be explored below, after a short digression.

An Aside on the Perspectives of Mark Twain

My great-grandfather Mark Twain, as explained in Happy Harbingers in Good Ideas for a Better Future, was sometimes outrageous in his irreverence for sacred cows like Gilded Age inequities and overly imperialistic national ambitions and pious pretensions.  His astute observations about these things often rang quite true.  His wife Livy helped him edit his writings to make sure he wasn’t too irreverent when it came to his ridicule of things like upper class hubris, religious dogmas and hypocritical sanctimoniousness. 

Mark Twain wrote a scandalous book titled Letters from the Earth that he was unwilling to publish while he was alive because he had concerns that were similar to those of Charles Darwin who was afraid to reveal his unfolding understandings of the biological evolution of life back in the mid-nineteenth century when Biblical believing was almost socially mandatory among people in the British society in which he lived.  Mark Twain’s daughter Clara Clemens, in her turn, worked to prevent the publication of Letters from the Earth for many decades after his death because of the controversial and iconoclastic views of religion that the book contained. 

Mark Twain’s observations about the Christian Bible in Letters from the Earth were definitely derisive and genially scathing.  He stated that the Bible contains “… some clever fables; and some blood-drenched history; and some good morals; and a wealth of obscenity; and upwards of a thousand lies.”  I reckon that sometimes Mark Twain went beyond sardonic irreverence and was downright bitterly cynical in his lampooning of human propensities, ambitions, eccentricities, contradictions, aspirations, pride, tyranny, fraud, foolishness and hypocrisy. 

It’s not nice to make fun of anyone’s cherished beliefs, but good satire does have constructive purposes.  Satirical humor is used critically to focus the bright light of perspective on issues, with the goal of stimulating an improvement in human institutions or undertakings or activities.  Satire seeks not to tear down but “to inspire a remodeling".  Few can deny that our nation and our world are in critical need of a big measure of intelligent remodeling!

“Humor must not professedly teach, and it must not professedly preach, but it must

  do both if it would live forever.” 

                                                --- Mark Twain

The damage that humankind is doing to habitats and ecosystems on planet Earth is facilitated by religious worldviews that instruct mankind to “fill the earth and subdue it” and to have dominion over all other forms of life on earth.  To have any hope, in the long term, of supporting the 7 billion people alive today, and further increases to 9 billion people that are projected by the year 2040, we must find much more efficient ways of utilizing energy and food and water resources.  We arguably must become much better at conserving these vital resources, and of protecting the environmental commons.  We must scrupulously find ways to avoid rashly depleting the Earth’s providential resources, damaging its ecosystems, and driving a significant portion of the species of life on Earth to extinction. 

The very survival of humanity depends on viewing history from a new perspective, and of embracing a clearer understanding of historical facts and trends and implications.  In light of this clearer perspective, we can still honor the understandings and myths and symbols and allegorical stories that offer us wisdom and guidance.

I feel passionately that we need to devote far more collaborative attention and committed energy to boldly addressing the biggest challenges we collectively face.  We need to give more honest scrutiny to global problems, and engage in more constructive and civil efforts to deal with them.  Everyone must be on board in this overarching endeavor, especially including the 1% of people who own nearly half of the world’s wealth and thus have the easiest means to help provide financing for greater good goals.  These goals include creating a fairer, more vibrant and more sustainable economy, sensibly protecting the environmental commons, cleaning up the terrible toxic messes we are making, making sure there is an at least minimally secure social safety net, encouraging lifelong education, fostering peace, and making investments in rapidly moving our societies toward uses of renewable resources.

Controversy in the Service of the Greater Good: The Greatest Deception in World History

Just imagine how astonished Mark Twain would have been to discover the startling perspectives of modern scholars who have found somewhat convincing evidence which reveals the likelihood that the Gospels in the New Testament were actually written by authorities in the Roman Empire.  These scholars believe they have found proof that Jesus was NOT a real historical character.  Jesus, it appears, may actually have been a fabrication of Roman propaganda.  The biblical character known as Jesus suspiciously happened to live out all the stories from earlier pagan religions about being born of a virgin mother and then dying and being resurrected three days later.

New research has found a substantial likelihood that much of the Gospels in the New Testament were written by Roman authorities in about 70 CE.  This was 40 years after Jesus’ supposed crucifixion on a cross and resurrection from death.  The primary collaborators involved in this literary creation were the Jewish Roman historian Josephus and the families who collected taxes for Rome in Judea (the Herods) and in Egypt (the Alexanders).  This possibility would explain why Jesus recommended in Matthew 22:21 that the people of Judea pay taxes to the Roman rulers:  “Render therefore unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s;  and unto God the things that are God’s”.

This startling historical research is extensively explored in scholar Joe Atwill’s compelling book, Caesar’s Messiah - The Roman Conspiracy to Invent Jesus.  Caesar was the title of every Roman emperor of the era, not just the individual Julius Caesar who ruled long before the Gospels were written.  In this book, Joe Atwill points out that the Roman emperors had a powerful vested interest in subduing religious people who opposed Roman hegemony, so they conspired to rewrite the Bible to create a new, peace-embracing Messiah who advocated that disciples turn the other cheek and love their enemies.  This new Messiah was devised to help the Romans control and manipulate the populace in the far-flung reaches of their empire without having to rely so heavily on costly armies to suppress rebellions.

Jesus, it turns out, resembles a composite of many Messianic leaders of the time.  The stories about Jesus never describe what the individual man looked like, and they are couched in a literary creation that fulfills Old Testament prophecies and uses complex hidden codes known as typologies.  Remember that virtually no biblical texts are contemporaneous with the events they describe, and every part of the Bible has been subject to revision by later authors. 

According to Joe Atwill, Jesus’ supposed status as the son of God suspiciously parallels the position of the Roman Emperor Vespasian and his son Titus.  The Romans may have concocted this sophisticated literary tale to lay effective claim to the father Vespasian being God and his son Titus being the son of God.  They propagated myths that usurped the Christian religion by implanting this new, pro-Roman, less militaristic, and more benign set of religious precepts on people in the persona of this peace-loving, turn-the-other-cheek Messiah. 

In this literary undertaking, new testimonies were appended to Old Testament scriptures, and Jesus was anointed as the true Messiah who had been foretold in the Old Testament.  Many Messianic prophets seemed to have been wandering around the holy land in those days of old.  The Hebrew term Messiah is the same as the Greek term Christ, which both mean “anointed”.  It is provocative to realize that the Old Testament had been written between about 900 BCE and 150 BCE, long before Jesus was supposed to have lived, so the Bible ostensibly had been ripe for a shrewdly manipulative sequel to be written for centuries.

A notable aspect of human nature is the drive to control and dominate others.  Long before the famous political scientist Niccolo Machiavelli wrote his best-known book The Prince, mankind had been smitten by the ruthless ambitions of master manipulators, including those of despotic tyrants and religious authorities.  This new Roman literary propaganda adduced in the Gospels of the New Testament is a fascinating synthesis of Judaism and pagan beliefs.  The Romans saw to it that this new story formed a new set of religious doctrines in Christianity.  Not only did the Romans succeed in using religion as a kind of early opiate administered to gullible people, but they managed to make wholesale use of the rituals, paraphernalia, cosmic events, and symbols of pagan religions in the founding scriptures and structure of the Roman Catholic Church.  Roman emperors thus cleverly satisfied their need to control the populace in the Holy Lands without high military costs being needed to suppress the Zealots by using this shrewdly manipulative form of story telling.

Nero was the last of the Julio-Claudian dynasty of Roman emperors, a line of rulers which began with Caesar and included Augustus, Tiberius, Caligula and Claudius.  It was during Nero’s reign that the Great Fire of Rome took place in 64 CE.  This is one reason that the saying arose that Nero “fiddled while Rome burned”.  Nero’s rule is often associated with tyranny, entertainment extravagances, and excessive spending, so he was the original “après-moi le deluge” king.  During this period, wars were bankrupting Nero’s empire and there were widespread political struggles and corruption, a staggering economy, serious religious conflicts, and endless wars.  (Sounds a little like today, eh?  Perhaps it is time for a new religion to be written!)

The Romans had conquered Judea in 63 BCE.  Judea was the western part of the famous Fertile Crescent that corresponds roughly to today’s territories of Syria, Lebanon, Israel and Jordan.  More than 120 years after the Romans conquered this region, a revolt took place in 66 CE that Nero and his commander Vespasian brutally suppressed.  When Nero died in 68 CE, this revolt was ruthlessly put down by Vespasian’s son Titus, who completely destroyed the Second Jewish Temple in 70 C.E.

Upon Nero’s death, Vespasian became the first ruler of the Flavian dynasty which succeeded the Julio-Roman emperors.  Vespasian and his son Titus were, according to Joe Atwill’s theory, the rulers who wrote a back-dated story in the Gospels about a divine father and son in order to legitimize their own claims of divinity.  This story was designed to give credence to the idea that this original Flavian duo was actually God and his son.  It is an historic irony that this tale has become a story almost 2,000 years later which supports the idea that a supernatural divinity exists who gave his divine virgin-born son as a sacrifice for all of mankind sins.  Guilt!

Perhaps there is Good News in this understanding that a real historical character of Jesus may not actually have existed.  The Good News is that there is one less barbaric black mark on humanity’s trail of tears and suffering, because Jesus was not actually nailed on a cross.  Make no mistake about it, however;  there were plenty of crucifixions back in those days, just as there have been many burnings at the stake and pogroms and genocides and other atrocities which have been wreaked upon people in the name of deities or in the service of merciless ideologies or hateful prejudices.

An independent film titled Caesar’s Messiah has been made from Joe Atwill’s book.  It has not yet been widely seen, but it should be, for its conclusions are important.  In a world where the population has increased from 1 billion to 7 billion in the last two centuries alone, and in which we have used up more resources in the past 100 years than in all of the many millennia of human history, the need for us to find ways to coexist peacefully and to compete fairly, and to honor overarching ecological precautionary principles, has become more important than any other issue.  To adapt to rapidly changing demographic challenges and mindless assaults on habitats and ecosystems, it is becoming ever-more necessary to find better ways to unite and cooperate together to create a more propitious future.

Read the compelling ideas in Caesar’s Messiah - The Roman Conspiracy to Invent Jesus, and then consider what you really think about the idea that Jesus was an actual character in history.  Jesus surely exists much more in the minds of true believers today than he may ever have actually existed as a real person in history about whom we know anything for certain.  This contention is supported by Joe Atwill and other scholars who have studied the Bible and the New Testament Gospels in the context of the writings of the Roman Jewish historian Josephus and the Dead Sea Scrolls.

This book about Jesus is not just a debunking of the rigid dogmas of Christianity;  its valuable conclusions could lead us to work together in the service of greater good goals.  We live in a free country, and people should be entirely free to believe in whatever Supreme Being they like, or in any prophet.  But one of the most dangerous threats to humanity is organized, highly-regimented “religion-on-the-march”, especially when it is taken so seriously that faithful adherents act out the worst and most intolerant precepts of their beliefs.  In this time of economic imperialism, nationalism and ethnocentric strife, and of Islamic jihad and a costly militaristic global “war on terror” in reaction, it is madness to allow religions to be the cause of terrorism, preemptive warfare, existential battles, and conflicts between cultures. 

Military aggression and terrorist opposition both counter-support each other.  They thus give strength to repressive right-wing authorities in Christian and Moslem nations alike.  The power engendered by this counter-support is used by authoritarians to augment their influence in controlling and suppressing the populace, and in eliminating subversives who oppose them, and in repressing those who have differing views and who refuse to conform to their inquisitions and preachy moralities and dogmatic certitudes and supremacist gambits.

We simply cannot allow authoritarians to so harshly dominate our freedom-loving societies.  The very survival of humanity depends in part on viewing history from new and more enlightened Golden Rule perspectives.  As planet Earth gets more crowded, we cannot allow authoritarian church establishments to fanatically and mercilessly conflict, or to violently assault people in the name of the righteousness of their particular religious creeds and ethnocentric biases and drives for supremacy. 

We need to be clearer on the historical facts surrounding religious myths so that we recognize the truth about religions.  We should strive to honor true spiritual impulses which offer us the greatest wisdom without being blinded by manipulative doctrines.  We can no longer afford to allow religious rationalizations to condone damages to planet Earth’s habitats and ecosystems.  We can no long accept myths that justify ecological harm like the Bible does in Genesis when it tells humanity to subdue the earth and have dominion over all other life forms without further clearly telling us we must protect creation and demonstrate a proper stewardship for nature.

My goal in the Earth Manifesto is to convince readers of the vital importance of principles of ecological intelligence in our communities, cultures, and nations -- and in the global populace as a whole.  Appropriately, I know that it is a poor plan to alienate anyone by setting forth ideas that are overly controversial, for we are all in this existence together.  In the largest scheme of things, we all share the same common greater-good goals, and we need to work together to actualize them.

Significant aspects of the greater good can be found in more widespread well-being and in more expansive opportunities for the majority of people to flourish.  Social well-being requires civil measures that help mitigate stresses and minimize conflicts between social classes.  The greater good really can be extensively described, as I have tried to do comprehensively in The Common Good, Properly Understood.  The propriety in these understandings comes not from dogma, strict ideologies, orthodoxy or agendas with ulterior motives, but from open-minded and honest evaluation, inspired and enlightened thinking, and a dedication to purposes that are consistent with aggregate well-being.

Controversy attracts attention, and thus creates motivating energies, for better or for worse.  The understandings in Revelations of a Modern Prophet represent an entire flourishing forest of Trees of the Knowledge of the Greater Good.  In the Bible, Adam and Eve ate from a Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil in the Garden of Eden, and God was angry at their disobedience because ‘He’ jealously did not want mankind to become immortal by having divine knowledge.  This allegory is a transparent means of setting up the doctrine of original sin and absolute good and evil in order to establish the idea that “those who obey God and follow his path shall be rewarded with everlasting life in Heaven, and those who disobey God and stray away from his path shall be punished in Hell.” 

People who believe the Bible contains literal truths assert that the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil is an actual type of tree.  Really?  It sure seems transparently to be a symbolic tree representing moral knowledge and guidance and perhaps immortal prerogative.  Good grief!  Let’s not be stupid.  This story is a naked ploy to establish a sublapsarian religious doctrine which asserts that God decreed the fall of mankind to establish the duty of people to seek salvation by believing this story and professing faith to its dogmas and singing glory be to God and being obedient to the dictates of the Church.  This story in Genesis is as clearly an allegory as the characters in John Bunyan’s book, The Pilgrim’s Progress, who have names such as Christian, Evangelist, Obstinate, Pliable, Goodwill, Hypocrisy, Piety, Faithful, Wanton, Envy, Hopeful, Ignorance, and Atheist, and places named the City of Destruction, the Slough of Despond, the Valley of the Shadow of Death, Vanity Fair, the Doubting Castle, the River of Death, and the Celestial City.

Reflections on Holy Book Stories

God rested on the seventh day of his biblical Creation.  He had gone to all the thankless toil and trouble of having spent six days conjuring up light and darkness, the earth and the heavens, the waters and dry land, and grass, herbs and fruit trees, and stars in the heavens serving “for signs, and for seasons, and for days, and years …”, and the Sun and the moon, and all manner of living creatures and fowl and great whales, and beasts of the earth and cattle and creeping things.  Then he said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness, and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.” 

  “And God saw every thing that he had made, and, behold, it was very good.”

                                                                                                       --- Genesis 1:31

Food for thought:  Who was God talking to when he said “Let us make man in our image”?  Since all Holy Books develop by incorporating many of the beliefs from prior mythologies, this God of the Bible may essentially have been talking to the pre-Biblical Olympian or Titan Gods of Greek mythology. 

God reputedly rested on the seventh day “from all his work which he had made.”  There is little time for rest in this modern day and age, so I am going to continue relating some fascinating perspectives in this epistle.  Wisdom counsels, however, that an occasional day of rest and reflection is valuable in our lives.  Wallace Stevens once poetically opined:  “Perhaps the truth depends on a walk around a lake”.  So breathe deep and exhale slowly and appreciatively, and make an imaginative and Nature-respecting circumambulation around some beautiful body of water in your mind’s eye.  Pay particular attention for any signs from the heavens for guidance.

In the second chapter of the Bible, God created a garden eastward in Eden for the first man to tend, but told him in no uncertain terms that he must not eat from “the tree of the knowledge of good and evil”.  In this chapter, God also made the first woman from one of Adam’s ribs.  In the third chapter, a talking snake cajoled the first woman into eating of the tree, despite God’s prohibition, telling her that “in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil.” 

The first woman was curious, and this particular tree was apparently to be desired to make one wise, so the woman ate from the tree and gave also unto her husband some fruit to eat.  An old joke summarizes the story:  “Adam blamed Eve, Eve blamed the serpent, and the serpent didn't have a leg to stand on!”  Ha!

God, as a result, angrily cursed all snakes forevermore, and supposedly condemned all human beings in the future to live in mutual enmity, and for women to suffer sorrow in bringing forth children, and for husbands to rule over their wives, and he cursed the ground so that all future generations of humankind would need to eat of the land and grow herbs and grains for food and bread amidst thorns and thistles in the field. 

By chapter 6 of the Bible, “God saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually.  And it repented the LORD that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved him at his heart.  And the LORD said, I will destroy man whom I have created from the face of the earth;  both man, and beast, and the creeping thing, and the fowls of the air;  for it repenteth me that I have made them.”

So God sent forth a great flood upon the earth for forty days and forty nights, to destroy all flesh, except for six-hundred-year-old Noah and his wife and three sons and their wives and two of every kind of beast, one male and one female, to keep them alive.  Mark Twain in Letters of the Earth relates his humorous version of this story:

“The Ark continued its voyage, drifting around here and there and yonder, compassless and uncontrolled, the sport of the random winds and the swirling currents,  And the rain, the rain, the rain!  It kept on falling, pouring, drenching, flooding.  No such rain had been seen before.  Sixteen inches a day had been heard of, but that was nothing to this. This was a hundred and twenty inches a day -- ten feet!  At this incredible rate it rained forty days and forty nights, and submerged every hill that was four hundred feet high.  …  At last the Ark soared aloft and came to rest on the top of Mount Ararat, seventeen thousand feet above the valley …”

Orthodox people hold that the Bible is literally true and historical.  On the other hand, early religious Gnostics viewed the Bible as myth, allegory, legend, and maybe even some poetry.  Gnosis is the common Greek noun for knowledge.  The central idea of Gnostics is that there is knowledge that is superior to faith, and independent of it. 

The Greek word soteria is most often translated as salvation.  But it also means deliverance and health, and thus healing.  One who offers salvation is like a teacher who offers wholeness and well-being.  The early intellectuals known as Gnostics believed that there are three types of people:  those ensnared in material things, those caught up in intellectual thinking, and those awakened souls who live a life of spirit and soul.  The Gnostic theologian Valentinius taught his followers that they could attain a divine state of spiritual fullness through gnosis (knowledge), while ordinary Christians were caught up in confused thinking and could only attain a lesser form of salvation.  Materialistic people, he prejudicially asserted as he referred to pagans and Jews, were beyond salvation and doomed to perish.  Yikes!

An astonishing treasure trove of early Gnostic scriptures, gospels and treatises was discovered in the Nag Hammadi valley in upper Egypt in 1945.  This discovery has dramatically transformed biblical studies, as explored provocatively by Stephen A. Hoeller in his article, The Genesis Factor (www.gnosis.org/genesis.html), and in Bill Moyers’ much publicized television series, Genesis: A Living Conversation.

Now known as the Nag Hammadi library, this discovery consisted of a collection of 12 ancient leather-bound papyrus books that had been buried in a cave in a sealed jar in Egypt.  These writings contained fifty-two handwritten Gnostic treatises which had been preserved despite a condemnation as heresies of a wide range of gospels and writings by the Christian theologian Bishop Athanasius in 367 CE.  Bishop Athanasius, known as the father of orthodoxy, is reputed to have ordered the burning of books containing alternate perspectives to the official Bible. 

The First Council of Nicaea in 325 CE had tried to cope with the astonishingly prolific set of beliefs that characterized early Christianity, and to circumscribe them into a coherent unity.  It is provocative to realize that there were literally hundreds of gospels and epistles during the early years of Christianity.  One of the most divisive differences was whether Jesus was divine and the literal son of God or instead a figurative son like all the other “sons of God” in the Bible.  After struggling with efforts to resolve wide disagreements for decades, orthodox stories were established and then all other versions and beliefs and speculations were banished.

“Where they burn books,” a German playwright named Heinrich Heine noted in 1821, referring to the burning of the Muslim holy book during the Spanish Inquisition, “so too will they in the end burn human beings.”  Ironically, Heine’s own books were amongst some 20,000 books burned  more than a century later under the instigation of Adolf Hitler and his Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels during an infamous Nazi book burning on May 10, 1933.  And sure enough, within 10 years after that, the Nazi’s were burning untold numbers of people, most of whom were Jews, that they had killed in gas chambers in concentration camps.

Orthodox ideas seem rather absurd in light of scholarly study and introspection.  Consider the contrast between narrowly orthodoxy ideas of Christian fundamentalists and the more expansive interpretations of people like Valentinius, who had almost become Pope in the second century CE.  Those who faithfully hew to orthodoxy not only hold that Jesus was the divine Son of God and the savior of mankind, but that salvation can only be achieved through faith.  Gnostics, in contrast, believed Jesus is an archetype and a teacher who can lead to salvation through a process of enlightenment.  Orthodox believers think that Satan is the source of evil in the world, while Gnostics think that it is ignorance that leads to many of the things we designate as evil. 

Orthodox beliefs blame Eve as the cause of original sin.  To the Gnostics, Adam and Eve were not actual historical figures, but representatives of two “intrapsychic principles within every human being”:  one, the masculine embodiment of psyche, or soul, and the other, the feminine embodiment of pneuma, or spirit.  I feel strongly that a greater honoring of feminine spirit perspectives is needed in our modern times.  Check out such points of view in A Feminine Vision of an Achievable Better World.

These concepts are vitally important, for the creation stories of every culture are powerful frames of reference that inform our actions.  The overarching challenges facing humanity today are ecological ones.  When will we commit ourselves to truly striving to ensure that the legacy we leave to future generations will be a salubrious one?

      “We’d better start saving’ up

          For the things that money can’t buy.”

                                            --- Bruce Springsteen

Interrupting Happenstance

The largest breast cancer charity in the United States cut off funding on January 31, 2012 that had been dedicated to Planned Parenthood clinics for breast cancer screenings.  The backlash to this decision by the Susan G. Komen Foundation was strong and immediate, and the charity was forced to reverse its position three days later, and to emphasize that Komen was committed to helping women, who have been the principal supporters of this cancer-fighting cause.  Curiously, the Komen Foundation had cut off funding for embryonic stem cell research late last year.  Both decisions appear to have been politically motivated, due to leadership by Komen’s conservative founder, Nancy Brinker, and its senior vice president for public policy, Karen Handel, who pledged to eliminate funding for cancer screenings provided by Planned Parenthood when she ran unsuccessfully as a Republican candidate for Governor of Georgia.  Karen Handel was forced to resign on February 7 to diffuse the very bad public relations caused by this decision.

The Susan G. Komen Foundation should hire progressive staff and a non-ideological board, and recruit only people who are committed to an overarching interest in women’s health and well-being.  Ultra-conservatives should let up on their anti-Planned Parenthood gambits, and stop opposing international family planning efforts and women’s health and maternal well-being.  The best dollars we could invest for future well-being would be those devoted to reducing rates of population growth in developing countries and addressing the driving influences behind large families.

No one could convince me that continued rapid population growth in the developing world is a good thing for humanity’s future prospects.  I couldn’t be convinced that 9 billion people on Earth by the year 2040 won’t involve severely depleted resources, worse air pollution, a less stable climate, diminishing biological diversity, and more intense stresses and conflicts.  I couldn’t be convinced that it is smart national policy to allow the government to interfere in women’s personal decisions about birth control, sensible family planning, and other reproductive choices.  I couldn’t be convinced that it will be a good plan to continue spewing rapidly increasing amounts of greenhouse emissions into the atmosphere every year.  I couldn’t be convinced that it is smart for us to continue to mindlessly damage the ecosystems which sustain us. 

The Delphic Oracle Speaks

The Pythia was the high priestess at the Greek Temple of Apollo at Delphi on the slopes of Mount Parnassus.  This priestess was regarded for centuries as the Oracle of Delphi.  This Oracle was established in the 8th century BCE, and she made prophecies for more than 1,000 years until late in the 4th century CE.  These prophecies were attributed to being inspired by the god of light, Apollo, and were reputedly to have been delivered by the Pythia in an ecstatic trance or a frenzied state induced by vapors rising from a chasm in the rock.  Hmmm …

These prophecies had highly influential impacts on leaders of the ancient world, so the Pythia of Delphi was arguably the most powerful woman of the ancient world.  Hundreds of the Oracular statements of Delphi are known to have survived since classical times, according to Wikipedia, and over half, stunningly, are said to be historically accurate.  Many of them are anecdotal, and have survived as proverbs.  “Love of money and nothing else will ruin Sparta”, proclaimed the Oracle.  Maybe we need a modern new Oracle today for our materialistic Western world! 

The Oracle also advised the wise ruler Solon, who was considering what constitutional reforms to make for Athens:  “Seat yourself amidships …”, said the Oracle.  As a consequence, Solon instituted a graduated tax system and a means by which debts could be forgiven.  This helped to create an Athenian middle class, and to prevent the gap between the “haves” and the have-nots” from growing too dangerously large.

Carved into the Temple of Apollo was the maxim, “Nothing in excess.”  Hey, maybe our hyper-partisan representatives should meditate on this idea of “moderation in all things”, and accept this oracular advice when it comes to making decisions on public spending, budget deficits, and ideological issues!  Moderates and liberals within religious faiths, in particular, need to step forward and challenge the extreme right conservatives who dominate their religions.

  “The world would be a far better place if poets or jazz musicians ruled our societies.”

                --- A pronouncement of a modern reincarnation of the Priestess Oracle of Delphi

If jazz musicians ran the world, in syncopated harmony, with penultimate cool, it would likely be a much better place.  A little help from visionary poets, Buddhist philosophers and deep ecologists, and we really could improve the world! 

I love the idea of the nine Muses in Greek mythology.  The Muses were nine divine daughters of Zeus, the supreme Olympian god, and Mnemosyne, the personified Titan goddess of Memory.  These goddesses were said to be the inspiration for the creation of literature and the arts.  Please step forward and take a bow on behalf of the epic poets, Calliope, and on behalf of music and song, Euterpe, you divine feminine inspirations!

Transcendence Beckons

Carl Sagan once said, “A religion that stresses the magnificence of the universe as revealed by modern science might be able to draw forth reserves of reverence and awe hardly tapped by traditional faiths.  Sooner or later, such a religion will emerge.”  The time has come for us to be proactive and to choose to develop the ecumenical and ecological canons of this new faith, and to wholeheartedly embrace them.

In order to ensure a more advantageous future for our kind, a more enlightened appreciation of existence is called for.  We need to develop more holistic Gaia understandings.  Cultural evolution has the potential to change at a much faster rate than the biological evolution of our genes, so cultural changes are our best hope for helping us to successfully adapt to converging challenges in our times.  We are well-advised to come together to choose cultural “memes” that are most favorable to our collective flourishing and survival.  Hey, maybe the Earth Manifesto could function as a handbook for these wiser ideas!

What we really need now is a new attitude, a new global perspective, a new belief system that generously satisfies our religious impulses while at the same time integrating the vital Golden Rule principle of tolerance for other faiths.  We need a belief system that is simultaneously open to loving thy neighbor -- or, at least, to giving thy neighbor fair-minded respect.  Live and Let Live attitudes are vital in matters of race, gender, sexuality and religious beliefs.

We must also come to grips with how to properly deal with criminal deviants by establishing rules of law and punishment that are proportionate to the threats they pose to society as a whole.  We cannot afford broad wars on terror.  We can no longer afford draconian punishments like those against drug users.  And in the context of the mindless materialism of our times, which is so seductively promoted by advertising, we can not afford to let corporate profiteering override all other considerations.  We must come to grips with the identity of the real cheaters, freeloaders and exploiters in our societies, and how to best deal with the problems they pose.

Who would have thought that the true freeloaders in a society might be the ones who abuse the power of their wealth to game the system ever more radically to their selfish advantage?  Who would have imagined that our societies might face an existential crisis specifically because a small group of rich and powerful people are allowed to harvest the preponderance of benefits for themselves at the expense of the vast majority of workers?  Who would have imagined that a narrow 5-4 majority of Justices on the Supreme Court would side with this abuse of power, and allow money to triumph over the health of the providential commons and the prospects of all people in future generations?

Consider, as an aside, the words of Pope John Paul II in 1984:

  “The needs of the poor must take priority over the desires of the rich;  and the rights of

   workers over the maximization of profits.”                                                      

At the time Pope John Paul uttered these words, about 33 million Americans were poor, and 7% of American workers were unemployed, and 28% of the nation’s wealth was held by the richest 2% of the population.  Today, 46 million Americans are poor, more than 8% of American workers are unemployed, and 40% of the nation’s wealth is held by the richest 1%.  Republican tax-cutting ideologies would make all of these trends significantly worse.  Don’t vote for any one who proposes slashing taxes even further on rich people and corporations!

Our long prehistory of hunting and gathering not only required a high degree of cooperation, but also an increased measure of egalitarianism.  This was a dramatic contrast with earlier social groups which were ruthlessly dominated by alpha males.  Picture rams butting heads during rutting season, or baboons fighting fiercely to establish male dominance so that the alpha male could mate with as many females as possible.

Talk about family values!  Aggression, like all vices, was once a virtue, back before anything was regarded as a vice or virtue, or good or bad.  The process of natural selection helped determine which individuals and their traits were chosen to be propagated forward in time.  It made these choices with impersonally fateful and mortally final decisiveness as our lineage was pruned into the entire paradoxical panoply of our human nature and character today.

The goal of creating more equality of opportunity and a greater measure of egalitarianism is one that is arguably more critical to our collective survival and flourishing than the status quo of allowing privileged people the freedom to create ever more inequality of economic gain or political power.  Extreme frustration with the status quo began to be expressed by the 99% of people in the Occupy Wall Street movement and related protests around the world in late 2011.  More cooperative problem-solving is needed, not obstinate opposition or harsh attitudes toward the poor or merciless defenses of inequality or the suppression of dissent or the perpetuation of low tax rates for the super-rich.

Homo sapiens sapiens is the sole surviving species in our genus Homo.  In this sense, all of our biotic eggs are in one basket.  Only by continuing to think rationally, and to honor vital social and ecological principles and intuitions of the greater good, will we therefore continue to be.  Every thing we do that increases the likelihood we will drive ourselves closer to catastrophe or possible extinction is the ultimate in foolishness and immorality -- the ultimate natural selection faux pas. 

This perspective makes it clear that public decision-making must give greater priority to policies and practices that are fairer and more likely to be sustainable.  Such an emphasis is necessary because unsustainability implies movement toward riskier and less providential outcomes for humanity as a whole.

Biological Evolution Today

Some say that human beings may be devolving today because weak and unintelligent people and the infirm are reproducing, to a significant extent, more than the strong and healthy and educated.  But this trend is only a momentary blip in the context of geologic time.  Evolutionary changes tend to speed up when conditions are changing more rapidly, and it seems indisputable that conditions will change rapidly in the coming decades and centuries as human impacts on the environment and ecosystems and weather patterns accelerate, altering habitats and driving other species of life to extinction.

Now that it is no longer cool to kill outliers or those with genetically undesirable maladies, we have temporarily suspended some of the selective pressures which have always been integral to the evolutionary process.  On the other hand, it is enlightening to realize that the effects of civilization itself have significant evolutionary impacts.  The growth of villages and towns and cities has had the effect of making people more secure than in the days when every one of our reflective ancestors was aware in every moment that they would either eat that day or be eaten. 

Greater security allows people to feel less anxiety and less stress, and thus they produce less of the hormone adrenaline.  This calms people down, makes them feel better, and decreases their propensities toward aggression and violence.  It also encourages social tendencies to cooperate with others.

Success, in evolutionary terms, is surviving and better adapting to prevailing conditions.  The transcendental implications of these understandings are clear:  we must collectively act in smarter ways to ensure that we achieve greater good goals for our entire social group, Homo sapiens.  We must demand that our leaders reverse the trend toward increasing inequality, and that they take steps to alleviate the desperate stress associated with high unemployment, healthcare insecurity, cuts to social safety programs, and environmental injustices.

A Digression on Dogs

Evolutionary biologists who study the remarkable diversity of varieties of “man’s best friend” -- dogs -- reveal that all dogs are descended from grey wolves in the relatively recent geologic past, like in the past 15,000 years.  Dogs come in a wide variety of appearances and dispositions.  The process of selection which created such diversity may be correlated with the fact that as dogs became tamer and more secure around humans, they produced less of the stress hormone adrenaline.  This hormone is involved in fight-or-flight impulses, and also in characteristics like skin pigmentation and the shape of ears and tails.  Artificial selection and inbreeding have also contributed to the diversity of anatomical features and coat colors in dogs.

Dogs are the ideal companion for humans because of their genetic inheritance of wolf pack behavior from their wolf ancestors.  Wolf social groups have very distinct rules of dominance hierarchy.  All the members of a wolf pack are intensely loyal to their leaders.  This is an instinctive characteristic which made their descendents perfectly adapted to human tendencies to love companions that “suck up” to them with eager and enthusiastic appreciation.  This was practically a match made in heaven!

“Use it or lose it” is an evolutionary axiom.  Traits that are not actively maintained by natural selection tend to disappear.  Species of fish and other animals that live in lightless underground caverns eventually lose their sight.  Birds on remote islands that have no terrestrial predators lose the ability to fly.  Mammals that once lived in trees where a tail was important for balance lost their tails once they descended from the trees and began to walk upright on the savanna.  Our vestigial tailbones prove this fact of our ancient evolutionary history. 

Even within an individual, “use it or lose it” is an operative biological truth.  An active brain stays more alert and healthy than an inactive one.  Reading, doing crossword puzzles, and playing word or card games are activities that help maintain our brains in good working order.  Apparently the neurons of our brains create a greater number of receptive dendrites when they are actively used than when they are allowed to atrophy. 

This ability of neurons to generate more connections in response to environmental stimuli, and to change adaptively when challenged, is known as neuroplasticity.  To improve memory and the processes involved in thinking, and to prevent neurodegenerative diseases, it is a good idea to engage in stimulating activities.  Since reading is good for your brain, read on!

Reasons for Religious Strife

All of the various established religions compete, in a sense, for adherents.  The pool of people who might want to convert to a new set of religious beliefs is small.  This is one reason that reproduction is dogmatically encouraged amongst the faithful of many religions with a self-serving urgency.  It is just much easier to inculcate people with beliefs when they are young and gullible and their brains are still malleable, rather than trying to convert them later in life to beliefs in myth-like stories and doctrines. 

When supremacism and intolerance are distinct facets of the competition for adherents, the outcome can be very negative for humanity as a whole.  The reactionary wings of international religions like Islam, Christianity and Mormonism are fighting ferociously for dominance here in the twenty-first century.  This strife has now become a danger to the survival of the über-group:  our species as a whole.  Now is the time for us to cultivate our cooperative natures, and to moderate alpha male impulses and aggression and greed.  The false god that is personified as Mammon, who is preoccupied with riches and avarice and material gain, is one we must not allow to remain completely dominant in our societies.

Similarly, extreme religious fundamentalism like that demonstrated by the ayatollahs of Iran and the right wing of American religious establishments is dangerous to world peace.

Now is the time to foster more farsighted sensibilities.  We simply must find ways to help ensure the survival of our entire social group.  Now is the time for a cultural leap forward.  It is not a time that we can afford to allow reactionary ethnocentricity to prevail.  Now is the time to protect fundamental ecological underpinnings of our well-being.  Now is the time to commit our nations to Bills of Rights for Future Generations to guide our societies and to ensure that we do not drive ourselves to desperate straits or even a cataclysmic extinction.

The propensity toward religious belief has been nurtured by shamans and holy men and priests from time immemorial.  This tendency has been exploited and abused by religious authorities for almost as long.  All authorities who abuse the power of their influence for narrowly selfish purposes deserve condemnation, particularly when they exploit the vulnerable or sexually molest children.  They should be regarded with even more serious censure than people who commit mere thefts and financial frauds.

Human Development

It has been more than 150,000 years since the first true members of our species Homo sapiens evolved.  During the preponderance of this time, our kind lived close to Nature.  Then, somewhere around 10,000 years ago, nomadic wanderers of the Stone Age of human development discovered the advantages of growing crops instead of wandering around to find food, and of domesticating animals instead of hunting down their dangerous wild cousins.  This allowed people to settle into agrarian communities, and villages and towns and cities began to develop, and eventually civilizations began to flourish in places like Mesopotamia and Egypt and China. 

Cultures and customs and values and belief systems shifted seismically with the social revolution inherent in the transition from hunting and gathering to animal husbandry and agriculture.  At the same time, the roles of men and women changed radically.  Both male hunters and female gatherers had to become more content with new roles that were required to succeed in farming and taking care of animals. 

Every culture ever in existence has invented its own creation stories, its own cosmological conceptions of the universe, and its own explanations for life and being.  The earliest spiritual understandings were forms of animism that attributed spirits or souls to human beings AND to animals and plants and mountains and rivers and the Sun and the moon and natural phenomena like lightening and winds. 

With the revolutionary changes from nomadic to agricultural modes of existence, people naturally began to worship female deities that are generally known as Earth Mother Goddesses.  These forms of worship honored fertility and motherhood and nourishment and annual renewal and creative forces in nature.

Many cultures borrow elements of their explanations of first causes in the universe from earlier myths.  The Bible, for instance, incorporates many of its major themes from earlier myths, like the concept of a virgin birth, and that of a great flood, and that of a ‘Lamb of God’ dying for mankind’s sins and being resurrected three days after death.  Many of the traditions and rituals of orthodox Christianity were adopted from earlier pagan religions.

Religion, n.  A daughter of Hope and Fear, explaining to Ignorance the nature of

   the Unknowable.                          --- Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary

“I believe in the resurrection,” a friend told me at a delicious Easter dinner.  This is really quite stunning.  The Bible story about Jesus being crucified and then resurrected from death is an echo of many earlier pagan myths.  Egyptian believers mourned the deaths of their god Osiris, for instance, and Persians mourned the death of their god Mithra, and Greeks mourned the death of their god Adonis, and then the various faithful respectively rejoiced when these deities were reputed to have been resurrected three days later. 

Death and revival themes are powerful in the human psyche as a result of many kinds of natural cycles that involve dying and renewal.  Many of the stories found in the Bible, including the story of Jesus, originated as allegories for natural phenomena, such as the Sun's annual circular journey along the ecliptic through the twelve constellations of the Zodiac and the corresponding passage of the seasons of the year.  To me, it seems apparent that the well-known stories of the Bible are amongst “the greatest stories ever sold”!

The adaptive use of earlier mythologies in the creation of new holy book stories might be seen as a source of hope that current day religions will likewise be able to evolve into more transcendent understandings.  Maybe they will begin to honor cogent natural needs, and thus enable us to collectively embrace a resurrection of hope and respect for vital natural ecosystems.  What we need today is a new form of belief in a resurrection, but instead of a rebirth of a legendary figure that has died, we need a belief in a global renewal in which antiquated and destructive old ways of thinking are replaced by wisdom and fair-mindedness and ecological intelligence.

One of the main problems with all established religions is that they are inflexible.  When better understandings arise, religious authorities generally stubbornly oppose these more realistic ways of seeing the world.  Established religions consecrate and glorify their own version of explanations for “Creation”, and then when more accurate knowledge comes to light, they are left stranded with absurdly antiquated antediluvian stories as supposed absolute truths.

Anchored to archaic dogma, and unwilling to admit the truth of more modern insights into the nature of the physical universe and the evolutionary changes that occur continuously, the central tenets of established religions can become outmoded.  Domineering religious authorities tend to have an inherently reactionary character.  They want to put the ‘smackdown on heresy’ like Cardinal Ratzinger, the current Pope, did in his previous job.  This contributes to a repressive social and political stance that often opposes progress toward a fairer and more enlightened and safer world. 

Our collective salvation depends on foresight, so institutions and forces which stand in the way of better understandings threaten our existence.  As global challenges mount, new approaches to helping ensure fairness and sustainability and peace are becoming ever more urgently needed.

The Evolutionary Stages of Understanding

Divine feminine deities began to be overthrown by more war-like male gods about 4,000 years ago.  Many influences have been supposed to explain this dethroning of female deities.  Invasions of agrarian settlements by warring barbarians with male gods were one factor.  The creation of private property and male inheritance that is associated with farming may have been responsible for the shift to honoring male gods instead of goddesses.  Wealth generated from agricultural surpluses may have stimulated ruthlessness of competition. 

Another provocative explanation is that shifts in perceptions of reality occurred after alphabets and writing were invented and literacy became widespread in cultures around the world.  These changes caused a tectonic shift from the feminine-honoring right hemisphere of the brain to the more male-oriented values of the left brain.

People naturally hunger to make sense of the world.  Every society in history has used creation stories they have invented to explain the presence of the physical universe and the mysteries of being, as well as the reasons for existential conundrums like death and ‘evil’ and misfortune.  It is illuminating to see the über-context of the development of these ideas. 

There have been Five Stages in the Ontology of Existence, similar to Auguste Comte’s “Law of Three Stages”.  As noted above, the earliest explanations for everything in the Universe were ‘animistic’;  all physical things and natural phenomena and life forms were conceived of as having intangible souls.  This conception was born of intimate associations with the natural world and anthropomorphic projections and superstitious perceptions.  These animistic beliefs were interpreted by shamans and other early ‘holy men’ and ‘holy women’. 

Animism evolved into a more concrete attribution of ‘divine being’ to a polytheistic pleonasm of deities that supposedly ruled all phenomena.  A rich body of mythology developed like that which reached its pinnacle in the marvelous anthropocentric Greek and Roman mythologies of old.  Pagan priests and oracles and mystics interpreted these gods and goddesses and other deities to the common folk.

In the third stage of the evolution of explanations, storytellers and self-professed prophets embellished these mythic concepts.  Joyous hopes, cogent fears, vivid dreams and megalomaniacal imaginings inspired a plethora of such prophets.  Each claimed to speak for some divine being.  A constellation of mythological goddesses and gods finally congealed into a more sophisticated speculation that there is only one God.  Eureka!  This was a ‘monotheistic’ epiphany that was swaddled in deep human hopes and fears, and packaged into tidy doctrinaire explanations.  Soon such dogmas and their accompanying creation stories were canonized and given the status of certitude. 

Believers in the new monotheistic God and even those who doubted were intimidated by being told that they would spend all of eternity in some kind of afterlife.  Those who expressed questions as to the veracity of religious dogma became heretics who were told they would burn and suffer in a nasty place called Hell if they did not embrace the new beliefs.  A long process ensued as these ideas became established, and then for a thousand years of persecutions and crusades in the Western world, it became dangerous to contradict the powerful clerics in Church establishments that enforced their dogmas with Inquisitions and wars and burning women at the stake and such things.  Corruption within established churches led to periods of ‘reformation’, but the new domineering stance of religious authorities ensured that conflict would rage, and that intolerance of others would become serious global problems.

As the human race learned more and more about Nature and physics and cosmology and biology, new metaphysical abstractions evolved that theoretically elucidated the workings of the world.  They did this in an insightful yet curiously perplexing kind of way.  This fourth stage in ways of explaining existence attracted many deep thinkers and philosophers over a period of more than 2,000 years.  It is fascinating to study even an abbreviated summary of all the philosophical speculations they conjured up.  My copy of Roget’s Thesaurus contains more than 140 different forms or trains of thought in philosophy.  They range from agnosticism to Epicureanism to utilitarianism to vitalism. 

Most philosophers thought very deeply about existence, but they were often so enveloped in established convictions and ‘conventional wisdom’ that their ideas and arguments sometimes seem somewhat bizarre and even foolish.  The famous German philosopher Gottfried Leibniz, for instance, had noted the more-or-less miraculous nature of the astounding parameters of physics and mathematics and he postulated that “this is the best of all possible worlds.”  But he appears to have really stretched to reach this conclusion by conforming his thoughts to the belief in the existence of a beneficent and perfect God. 

Circumstances have a way of undermining absurd theories, so when the Lisbon Earthquake killed thousands of the faithful while they were praying in churches on All Saints’ Day in 1755, the speculations of Leibniz took on a ridiculous aura, and philosophical optimism was severely and appropriately ridiculed.

The fifth stage overlapped these developments.  Scientific understandings had begun to come into their own before the days of Aristotle, and especially in the past two centuries.  Scientists have found extensive evidence about the physical unfolding of the universe, and about the evolving genetic cellular nature of all forms of life on planet Earth.  Physical relationships described by the scientific disciplines of astronomy, mathematics, chemistry, physics and biology may seem to be almost as arcane to the average person as ghosts, or angels, or the flight mechanics of Santa’s reindeer, yet they describe fascinating and compelling aspects of the way things actually are.  “Reality, what a concept!”

Our modern bias toward reason and analysis discredits the shamanistic, the ‘pagan’, and the dogmatic fundamentalism of established religions.  But we must respect the spiritual nature of our deepest selves to an adequate extent.  Our spiritual selves recognize valuable modes of making sense of the world.  Enlightenment philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau exalted instinct and feeling above intellect and reason, and though this is sometimes a crazy approach, we must not entirely discount the important ways that images and intuitions and metaphors and myths and parables and emotions shape our perceptions and understandings of the world.  We would be well advised to cultivate a better balance between the feminine wisdom that is associated with the right brain and the cold logic of more masculine values of the analytical left brain.

Prometheus and Epimetheus

In ancient Greek mythology, three of the offspring of the first-generation Titans were Atlas, Prometheus and Epimetheus.  Atlas was said to hold up the sky.  Prometheus was renowned for having been a champion of humankind because he stole fire from Zeus and gave it to mortals.  In ancient Greek mythology, Prometheus was wise;  his name literally means ‘forethought’.  The name of his brother god, Epimetheus, literally means ‘hind-thought’, “in the manner of a fool looking backward while running forward.”

One of the defining characteristics of humanity is the ability to extrapolate from experience to realize foresight.  This ability is crucial to our survival.  It is an ability we must cultivate in our societies to ensure that our activities do not squander resources, pollute ecosystems, deplete and damage fresh water sources, over-harvest fisheries or forests, heighten injustices, cause dangerous climate changes, wipe out many species of life, or devastate the ecosystems of Mother Earth upon which we completely depend.  We must realize that we cannot continue to fleece future generations by pursuing such courses of action.  We must stop adding to the already extremely heavy burden of debt on people in the future.  In the grand scheme of things, this long-term perspective is the most essential of all moral considerations.

An Aside Related to the Nature of Our Thoughts

Though primordial shamanism has long been disparaged by religious people and modern societies, it does represent a complex and significant expression of the human spirit that has a ‘historical pedigree’ extending back 30,000 years to the Ice Ages in late Paleolithic times.  The shamanic phenomenon has had a remarkable durative power since antiquity.  It has also existed in a striking ubiquity across many cultures worldwide.  The reasons for this lie deep in our psyches.  The roots of our being and understanding are found not only in our experiences, but also in the very structure of our brains. 

All of our conceptions, and indeed all of our thoughts and ideas and emotions and myths, spring in part from the way our brains are structured.  We all have a kind of ‘hard-wiring’ that reflects universal dispositions of our minds, or ‘typical images’, known as archetypes.  Carl Jung called these evocative images the ‘collective unconscious’.  Myths, religious beliefs, symbols, metaphors, dreams and psychoses are rich mines of archetypes that we inherit as aspects of our minds.  Our perceptions are strongly influenced by these archetypal understandings, so they contribute in a roundabout way to determining our fates.

The late accomplished surgeon and author Leonard Shlain writes in his book The Alphabet Versus the Goddess: The Conflict Between Word and Image that the human brain evolved into two specialized lobes as higher thinking functions developed.  This specialization of the brain is known as “hemispheric lateralization”.  Scientists have discovered surprising details in recent years about the various functions of the right brain and the left brain.  For instance, the right side of the brain is the ancient part of the brain that is most familiar with the authentic needs and drives that stem from the early stages of human existence.  The right side of the brain is the nonverbal hemisphere which generates non-logical feeling states such as love, faith, mystery, humor, and aesthetic appreciation.  It operates by recognizing images and integrating feelings.  It resonates with metaphors and intuitions, and relates to myths and parables.  And it is finely attuned to music. 

The more recently evolved synapses of the left hemisphere of the brain, on the other hand, specialize in reasoning, logic, speech, right-handedness, analytical thinking and abstract ideas.  A harmonious balance between these two hemispheres of perception and their differing ways of interpreting experience provides people with more holistic and valuably integrated worldviews.  We should honor the spiritual natures of our being, and our drives for spiritual transcendence, by honoring the various ways that we search for deeper levels of awareness and understanding.

The Correlation of Left-Brain Specialization and the Suppression of Female Deities

Dr. Leonard Shlain created a highly intriguing premise in The Alphabet Versus the Goddess.  He noted that a historic transition took place around 1800 BCE in the nature of human “creation myths”.  He postulated that the reason Great Mother Goddesses gave way to more patriarchal myths and warrior-like male gods at the time was due in large part to the cultural phenomenon of writing and expanded literacy and left-brain dominance.  How so? 

Early writing evolved from rock art.  It came in the form of Mesopotamian cuneiform ideograms, more than 5,000 years ago.  Cuneiform consisted of more than 600 picture-like characters or symbols.  At about the same time, Egyptian hieroglyphs were developed that used more than 2,000 picture-symbols and very complex rules of ‘grammar’.  These early forms of writing were still partially right-brain ways of seeing the world through evocative images.  Such complex systems made literacy a prerogative that only a small, well-educated elite could master. 

When these image-oriented ideas evolved into simpler alphabets of less than 30 letters, they could easily be learned by anyone at a young age, so literacy rapidly became more widespread.  Profound changes in the nature of the way we perceive things then took place.  Left-brained dominance gained power, and abstract thinking became more pronounced in interpreting the world.  Female deities that had been pictured in images and rituals were overthrown by abstraction representations of male gods and their prophets, which were contained in written words. 

The use of alphabets made cuneiform pictographs and hieroglyphics of early civilizations obsolete, and they were figuratively buried by the blowing sands of antiquity.  This led to a sea change from the worship of female deities through representative imagery and observed rituals to a new mode of male God worship in which deities were revealed in written “holy scriptures” that prohibited idols and enacted strict commandments.

Harsh patriarchal written rules of law almost simultaneously appeared in the historical record.  The most famous is the Code of Hammurabi, named after a Babylonian chieftain who created the earliest extant code of laws around 1750 BCE.  The Code of Hammurabi was harsh, advocating a severe form of justice: “an eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth.” 

The Code of Hammurabi was also distinctly sexist.  It treated women as little more than chattel, like slaves.  The Code of Hammurabi was instituted around the same time that the Babylonian Goddess Tiamat was dethroned in the macabre Seven Tablets of Creation story.  In this story, the Great Goddess was violently slain by the upstart son Marduk, the male god of gale and storm.  Dr. Leonard Shlain wrote that this story is the most violent and misogynistic of any creation myth ever found amongst thousands of other cultures around the world.  He saw a strong correlation in these developments.

Creation myths are quite entertaining.  Marduk’s vassal gods complained that their existence was dreary because they lacked worshippers to make them offerings.  So Marduk responded by creating mortals to obsequiously honor the gods.  Ha! -- Likely story!

Early emotive images and intuitive understandings were suppressed when religious beliefs were taken over by the written word in ‘holy books’.  This is a main reason that the Ten Commandments in the Bible featured such strong prohibitions of idols and images of deities.  Those who wrote the Bible, over a period of many centuries, recognized the importance of repressing images from their new belief systems so that people would more cerebrally believe the Written Word which asserts that their God is the one and only God.  The new monotheistic male God seems to have had a desperate need to banish pagan deities and earlier beliefs and Mother Earth Goddesses.  It seems like this must have really been a daunting early marketing challenge!

Beliefs in deities have evolved in all civilizations.  Historians of mythology observe the evidence of this evolution, and realize that changes in societies that propagate myths are mirrored by concomitant changes in the gods they believe in.  Which came first, in this case, the proverbial chicken or the egg?  The chicken and the egg, of course, evolved together.  It seems probable that dramatic changes in societies caused by altered economic or social developments have led to revisions in their spiritual explanations.  Natural disasters, or invasions by conquering barbarians, or perceptual changes like the widespread literacy that followed the development of simple alphabets, all tend to significantly impact the ways people make sense of their worlds.  In turn, new spiritual beliefs not only affect the way we see the world, but they also facilitate social changes and moral revisions.  Perhaps, indeed, we make our destinies by the gods we choose AND by the beliefs we embrace.

On a grand scale, entire civilizations shape their destinies by the myths they create.  These myths are powerfully correlated to the economic and social status quo, and by trends in changing roles and evolving moral visions, and by the factions that dominate and control the societies.  To the extent that we can choose regressive or progressive elements to form the identity of our societies, we should choose progressive ones.  The same is true of choosing between reactionary ideas and liberal-minded ones, or the Strict Father constellation of beliefs as opposed to the Nurturing Mother ones.  We should arguably choose moderately permissive approaches rather than harshly suppressive ones.  We should commit our nations to greater good goals rather than rationalizing “tragedy of the commons” outcomes. 

Greg Mortenson, the author of the bestseller Three Cups of Tea and the more recent Stones to Schools, asserts that literacy helps thwart intolerance and challenge dogma and reinforce our common humanity.  He believes that the education of girls and women is one of the best ways to reduce poverty and violence in the world.  This idea is a provocative and inspiring one.  It is a curious conundrum that literacy may historically have been correlated with analytical changes in the way we see the world that have had powerful suppressive effects on the privileges and status of women in patriarchal societies.  Such outcomes persist to this day in many places.  We must now use our left-brained reasoning in conjunction with our empathetic feeling to transform our societies back into ones that are fairer toward women, and ones that are saner for us all.

The evolution of writing and literacy has been heralded as a vitally important development in human history, so it is a grand irony that this development may have had a devastating effect on the tolerance of differing beliefs and on the role of women in societies worldwide.  The fact that violence against others over religious beliefs may first have come into being because of beliefs in masculine Gods is fascinating.  I believe that understanding the reasons for this could lead to the next revolutionary transformation in our civilizations, one that makes our societies more fair and peaceful and sustainable.

How is the Medium the Message, Marshall McLuhan?

Dr. Leonard Shlain intriguingly proposed that the analytical process of learning alphabets and reading is an essential factor that has caused a shift of sensibilities from the image-perceiving right brain to the word-perceiving left brain, even more so than the content of what is read.  This shift causes a profound shift in values.  The prominent linguist George Lakoff’s ideas about the constellations of values that typify the Strict Father can be seen to be perspectives that are generally associated with left-brain thinking, while more empathetic values of Nurturant Parents are generally associated with right-brain thinking. 

The right brain is the intuitive-feeling part of the brain.  It facilitates the embrace of love of nature, generosity toward others, tolerance of dissent, heartfelt sympathy, appreciation of beauty, spontaneity, laughter, nurturance of children, playfulness, mysticism, forgiveness of enemies, and nonviolence.  In contrast, the left brain is engaged when a person is absorbed in work, focus, achieving goals, and getting power and money, so in these capacities, the cerebral left brain takes over and there are heightened tendencies to be argumentative, authoritarian, strictly disciplinarian, violent or cruel.  There also tends to be a more distinct disregard for nature and healthy ecosystems, together with a lack of concern for the weak and the underprivileged and disabled people and the mentally ill.

When one tunes in to images that are in accord with accurate ways of seeing the world, then holistic understandings and propitious outcomes become more likely.  Those who tune in to imageless masculine gods, and who dedicate their purposes in life to such gods, may find that they have tuned into preposterous purposes and harmful biases and extremely unfair and conflict-stoking ways of being.  We should choose visionary, smart, intelligent goals rather than narrow, unjust and foolish ones.  Remember that the roots of the evolution of religion and ethics revolved around social cohesion -- not social discord.

Common sense is the combined wisdom of all the senses.  Thus it is “a holistic and simultaneous grasp of multiple converging determinants”.  It is intuitive, and not necessarily logical.  Common sense can also be seen as a form of wisdom that is generated in common with others.

A Scientific Perspective of Existence

Most people are happy to believe in some neatly packaged belief system, rather than to study and think for themselves and to follow reason and logic in comprehending reality.  Established religions eagerly provide simplistic and dogmatic explanations for the genesis of the universe.  Their stories tend to be suspect and improbable, so they run the risk of becoming outmoded and obsolete as new discoveries and better understandings evolve. 

Picture this:  Light travels at a speed of 186,000 miles per second, or about 6 trillion miles per year.  It takes about 8 minutes for sunlight to travel from the surface of the Sun to the Earth, a distance of 93 million miles.  The light from Proxima Centauri, the nearest star to our Sun, takes about 4 years to traverse the distance from its source to our perceiving eyes.  Marvelous optical instruments like the space-based Hubble telescope have detected light which emanated from the most distant objects in the Universe ever detected.  This light has been traveling for almost 14 billion years before arriving to be perceived by us.  That is how vast the Universe is.  It is truly unfathomable. 

The implications are astonishing of the fact that light is arriving in every instant from trillions of stars.  All of this light is arriving simultaneously as we see it, so this means we are seeing a visible snapshot of the entire scope of the history of the universe in every moment.

Every star is an energetically burning mass of matter that is hurtling through space, away from some apparent central starting point.  The ‘Big Bang Theory’ credibly explains this state of affairs.  This vision of the unfolding universe sees it as the result of a massive exploding forth of physical matter from some obscure starting point, as if it came from nothingness. 

It may be that, in the highest state, all matter is energy that has not yet materialized.  The famous equation of Albert Einstein, E=MC², says that Energy and Mass are different forms of the same thing; they are EQUIVALENT.  Nothingness (no matter) may happen to be the highest form of expression of the Universe.  This dimensionless high-energy state might figuratively have run down 14 billion years ago, perhaps through a tendency like that known as entropy. 

When this energetic Void wound down and reached a sufficiently unstable condition, energy suddenly burst forth into its equivalent form:  matter!  This materialization into existence occurred with such force that hundreds of billions of galaxies of burning elements are still spiraling through space in every direction at millions of miles per hour in the far distant aftermath of this seminal event.

Perhaps now is the time for Carl Sagan’s aforementioned prophesy to come true: 

“A religion that stresses the magnificence of the universe as revealed by modern science might be able to draw forth reserves of reverence and awe hardly tapped by traditional faiths.  Sooner or later, such a religion will emerge.” 

Faith in primitive myths seems to be more satisfying to many people than understandings of modern science.  How else can we comprehend the fact that religious fundamentalists cling to their suspect dogmas and deny such extensive evidence of evolution as that of the fossil record and the discoveries of disciplines like genetics and molecular biology?  Beliefs in personal deities are, perhaps, more reassuring than the crushing impersonal imperatives of cause and effect, and of the certainties of individually terminal death for each and every living being.

The famous Chinese thinker and social philosopher Confucius once wrote:  “Learning without thought is labor lost;  thought without learning is perilous.”  I advocate that we cultivate clearer and more open-minded ways of thinking;  and never stop learning!

We need not be wild in our speculation about the place we find ourselves.  Humanity has awakened into awareness on a planet that majestically rotates around a center-of-gravity axis once every 24 hours.  While it does so, our home planet speeds through space at more than 66,000 miles per hour on its 585-million-mile orbit around a life-enabling source of heat and photosynthetic energy, the burning ball of fire that we call the Sun.  A fixed tilt of the Earth in its orbit gives us summer weather patterns in the northern hemisphere when the planet is tilted toward the Sun, and then winter conditions six months later when the Earth is on the other side of its orbit and its northern hemisphere is tilted away on the far side of the Sun.  Aware, we contemplate and we imagine.

    “A wise man proportions his belief to the evidence.”   --- David Hume

Being a big-brained and curious bunch, we human beings have, since time immemorial, studied and investigated the surroundings in which we find ourselves.  In doing so, we have gained an ever-evolving better understanding of the physical nature and conditions of our existence.  Unlike more primitive mythologies, science presents a worldview that is much better articulated and coherent and accurate and modern and adaptive with regards to observable reality.  In contrast, religious doctrines consist of speculative stories that have an extremely low order of probability.  Their creation myths assume in the beginning what they are attempting to explain, i.e., intelligence and complexity, so they actually explain nothing.  Geophysical evolution and the evolution of life by natural selection are ideas that start simple and then explain increasing complexity, so they are much more valid explanations of reality.

Let There Be Light!

Fascinating discoveries characterize our world.  We have found, for instance, that there is an entire spectrum of radiation that accompanies the hurtling forth of matter in the universe.  Scientists categorize these forms of radiation according to their wavelengths.  Only a narrow part of this electromagnetic spectrum actually consists of light that is visible to our eyes.  The entire spectrum includes cosmic-ray photons, gamma rays, x-rays, ultraviolet radiation, visible light, infrared radiation, microwaves, radio waves, heat and electric currents.  These things exist.  They are not merely some decreed Creationist idea being held in force by some kind of biocentric ‘divine will’. 

I find Gary Zukav’s words in The Dancing Wu Li Masters to be fundamentally ironic:

“Acceptance without proof is the fundamental characteristic of Western religion.

     Rejection without proof is the fundamental characteristic of Western science.”

All matter is governed by elemental forces.  These include nuclear, atomic, electromagnetic and gravitational forces.  All elements of matter in the world have an essential physical nature.  They even have astonishing ‘periodic law’ relationships, as can be found by studying the Periodic Table of the Elements.  It’s a great mystery why!  Hydrogen atoms have apparently been fused into all of the heavier elements within the fiery crucibles of burning stars.  We can see the results of many supernova explosions across deep space, and we can come to understand that galaxies have collided, and stars have collapsed, and new solar systems have been created.  We, and every atom in our solar system, are all literally ‘stardust’.

Astronomers and astrophysicists confirm all of these things.  They see that galactic matter had been hurtling through space for more than 9 billion years before our solar system and planet Earth formed about 4.5 billion years ago.  They find that life must have been sparked into existence on Earth, in the form of ancient single-celled ancestors of all living things, millions of years after the Earth smashingly came into being.  They also find that life existed for billions of years as single-celled organisms before these organisms found a way to organize themselves into more complex multi-cellular forms of life. 

Biological Insights

This proliferation of species of life into more complex species is found in the fossil record beginning about 540 million years ago during the Cambrian explosion.  This proliferation probably resulted from pressures of predation.  Some speculate that it may even be correlated to the competitive evolution of primitive forms of vision in ancient sea creatures.  Dr. Andrew Parker advances such a hypothesis in his 2003 book In the Blink of an Eye - How Vision Sparked the Big Bang of Evolution.

On Earth today there are estimated to be between 10 million and 100 million species alive.  Each and every individual amongst these species is descended from generations before it, throughout previous centuries and millennia and untold eons and geologic eras. 

Look up ‘Geologic Time Scale’ in any good dictionary.  This Time Scale gives a remarkably concise snapshot of Geologic Eras:  the Precambrian Era (before the Cambrian proliferation of life into multi-cellular organisms), the Paleozoic Era (‘old life’ era), the Mesozoic Era (‘middle life’ era) and the Cenozoic Era (‘recent life’ era).  Each of these three Eras in the existence of multi-cellular life forms was demarcated by a mass extinction event in which a large percentage of life forms were wiped out, as if by some competitive revolution or devastating ice age or volcanic winter or meteorite impact. 

Human activities are destroying habitats and altering environmental conditions.  These changes are driving many species of life toward extinction.  The 65-million-year-long Cenozoic Era is, in this sense, ending -- and a new era of life is beginning:  the Anthropocene.  We are contributing to these extinctions by over-harvesting animals and plants, destroying habitats, and helping to cause global warming and changes in the global climate and weather patterns.  The species of life that are surviving and in the process of adapting to our destructive presence will be the ones that will be the ancestors to all future species that come into existence in the millennia and eons that are to come.  This is thought provoking, and it leads naturally to many of the fundamental ecological insights contained in the Earth Manifesto.

The species of life living today, it turns out, comprise less than 1% of all the species that have ever lived.  We share the Earth with millions of species of plants and animals which are all descended from forebears, grand forebears and great grand forebears in an incomprehensibly long chain of ancestry extending back through a period of more than 500 million years to ancestral single-celled organisms.  We find that the 99% of species of life that are now extinct are found only in the sketchy record of fossilized remains. 

Fossils are relatively rare, because they are only a miniscule and fragmentary sampling of life that has been preserved in stone from the world long before us.  Fossils contain compelling evidence of the corporeal remnants of creatures that evolved and died out millennia ago.  The processes by which fossils came into being continue at this very instant:  birth, death, evolution, and extinction -- and sedimentation, the slow lithification of rock, mountain uplift and erosive exposure. 

It is difficult to imagine our lives in the perspective of the profound context of the vastness of geologic time.  This is one reason why so many people ‘buy’ simplistic religious myths as if they are valid explanations of existence.  We only roughly comprehend the incredible span of time has existed up until this instant.  We are cogently aware that each of us is alive for all too brief a duration during our individual physical lives, and we ponder the vast eons that will pass after we are gone.  And we wonder how all this came to be.

I’ve personally found that most things in life have a pretty good explanation, or a variety of convergent good explanations.  The “Presto, God made it this way” explanations tend to be superseded by much more probable natural explanations as experience and evidence are examined more closely, and as knowledge accumulates.

Religion and Science

  “The one thing we do not know is the limit of the knowable.”

                                                                        -- Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Human beings have evolved the ability to think and to reflect, and to understand many aspects of the unchanging physical laws that govern the universe.  We have been able to analyze the past and make predictions about the future.  Our curiosity and creativity and imagination have also led to an on-going and diverse cultural evolution wherein a variety of explanations have been set forth as to how all this has come to be.  Most of these explanations have been solipsistic and self-centered, and they almost invariably involve supernatural deities visualized in our own image. 

Most of these belief systems assume that humanity is central to the purpose of the whole shebang, even though we are Johnny-come-lately beings who actually know little of the true purpose of the universe, if there is such a purpose.  And most of these mythologies pre-suppose that the Earth is the center of the Universe, though this, alas, is far from accurate or true.

Mythology, n.  The body of a primitive people’s beliefs concerning its origin, early

  history, heroes, deities and so forth, as distinguished from the true accounts,

    which it invents later.               --- Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary

Religious people generally believe in a God as described by myth-like revelations in one of many “holy books” that have been written in the past several thousand years.  Deists, in contrast, are people who believe in the existence of a God based on the evidence of reason and nature, but not on supernatural revelation.  Agnostics go one sophisticated step further, and believe that we can only know about nature and its physical aspects, not about the causative force before the emergence of matter and light, or indeed anything about the Void that we assume existed before Nature sprang into being in all its awe-inspiring aspects of matter, space, time, order, atomic structure, elemental forces and infinitely eternal change. 

Background History of Religions

All cultures leave evidence of their religious conceptions in their artifacts, icons, records, ruins, and burial grounds.  A study of archeology and cultural anthropology reveals the general trend of this evolution of thought and ideas and rituals and beliefs. 

Indigenous cultures were more intimately tied to the land than we are.  They were more closely connected to the elements, to the seasons, and to wild plants and animals.  As a consequence, their expression of what we now call religious beliefs had its genesis in the veneration of Mother Earth and the life-giving force of the Sun.  They respected and appreciated animals and the cycles of nature.  Though human beings were much closer to the natural world in ancient times, they had little of the knowledge that science has since given us about the physical nature of Earth and the Universe and life.  In this early context of uncertainty and mystery, supernatural explanations naturally developed to help explain the inexplicable.  Thus superstitious beliefs prevailed. 

All evidence indicates that human beings in the earliest civilizations in Mesopotamia and Egypt and China revered Earth Goddesses and honored fertility and the annual renewal of springtime.  For thousands of years, the divine feminine was exalted, and the status of women in these early societies was correspondingly high. 

Later, Sun gods and deities representing fertility and bountiful harvests and varying forms of animism and fetishism and the worship of images and idols dominated.  Hope and fear played large roles in these early belief systems, just as they do in religious doctrines today.  During the days of ancient Greeks and Romans, people worshipped a fascinating pantheon of gods and goddesses.  A thorough study of the anthropomorphic characteristics of these deities of early Athens and Rome provides fascinating revelations about human nature and thought.  Check out Jean Shinoda Bolen’s Goddesses in Everywoman for some illuminating observations about human nature as revealed by powerful archetypal impulses and voices in the subconscious of us all.  Or check out the Earth Manifesto ‘magnum opus’ in Part One, Comprehensive Global Perspective: An Illuminating Worldview, and see in particular Chapter 22 – The Gaia Understanding.  

‘Mythological’ deities like Zeus and Athena and Aphrodite were very real to people back in the days of ancient Greece and Rome.  Today we regard these gods and goddesses as mere figments of primitive imaginations.  We essentially belittle early polytheistic beliefs because religious beliefs have evolved into more sophisticated and more all-encompassing conceptions of a Supreme Being.  After this relatively new monotheistic ‘one God’ conception arose, it became dominant.  It now underpins the doctrines of most of the major established religions of the world.  It is, unfortunately, a conception that is peculiarly patriarchal, and it is used to repress the rights and prerogatives on women in cultures worldwide.  Hmmm … Zeus!!

The Crux of the Matter

Monotheism was an evolutionary leap forward from early belief systems, so we regard polytheistic ideas, retroactively, as primitive and naïve.  But people today are mired in their own myths of ethnocentric faiths.  Many people refuse to recognize that there is no faith which has a rightful monopoly on the one and only true version of God.  There is only one true actuating force in the Universe, independent of the narratives we create about it.  This one true force is extremely unlikely to be accurately understood as a glorified or jealous or wrathful old man as portrayed in the Bible and Koran and other ‘holy books’.

To most comprehensively describe what God actually is, one of the best conjectures we can make is one that unifies and incorporates the truths contained in each and every way of seeing the world.  Every person, regardless of upbringing, education or indoctrination, has his or her own unique worldview, including agnostics and atheists.  When all of these worldviews are taken together, they represent a mosaic of all the many particular perspectives we have of the greater reality. 

We are all like the blind men in the old parable who were given a task of feeling and describing an elephant.  In the parable, each man had a different description due to touching different parts of the elephant, and each thus had differing perceptions and points of view.  There were many perspectives and varying experiences, but only one elephant.

Richard Dawkins points out that, “When two opposite points of view are expressed with equal intensity, the truth does not necessarily lie exactly halfway between them.  It is possible for one side to be simply wrong.”  Hmmm … 

Dogmas thrive, as they say, in soil where the truth could not get root.  Professed atheists believe in one fewer god than ‘true believers’, who dismiss all other possible gods.  Since believers deny all other gods, they should easily understand why atheists dismiss their god.  An atheist is not someone who believes that a god does not exist, but someone who sensibly does not believe in the probability that a particular version of ‘God’ does exist.

In any case, given the dangerous conflicts rationalized by ethnocentricity and religious certitudes, it is time for us to find a new way of comprehending the world.

The Need for a New Religion

Think again about Carl Sagan’s idea:  “A religion that stresses the magnificence of the universe as revealed by modern science might be able to draw forth reserves of reverence and awe hardly tapped by traditional faiths.  Sooner or later, such a religion will emerge.”  Let’s honestly ponder this!

The next step in the evolution of religious beliefs must be one that is inclusive and farsighted and more ecumenical and ecological, and one that embraces unifying themes.  It is becoming too risky to allow ethnocentric religions to embrace divisive doctrines and to strive to vanquish all others.  Organized religions must become more accepting of efforts to improve the prospects of peaceable coexistence and mutual security in the world.  They must utilize the great fonts of faith, mystery and spirituality in new ways that emphasize inspiration, positive connections, peace, rationality, fairness, ecological sanity, and the tolerance of differences in order to achieve goals consistent with sustainability and the greater good. 

Writer John Fowles wrote in his provocative book The Aristos:  “All the old religions cause a barbarous waste of moral energy;  they are like ramshackle water mills on a river that could serve hydroelectric dynamos.”  Imagine the positive outcomes that could be achieved if these formidable energies were redirected into more wholesome channels.  A fresh and unifying reverence for life might be achieved.  Forceful new doctrines could be cultivated so that they could gain sway and establish greater human responsibility toward other people, toward future generations, and toward other forms of life on earth. 

   “We make our destinies by the gods we choose”.   

One reason I love this quote, attributed to Virgil, a classical Roman poet of antiquity, is that it gives us hope that by choosing a new concept of the divine, we might be able to improve the probable destiny of our species.  We need a new mode of seeing that has its firm underpinnings in concepts of reality that honor justice for all, true prosperity, and a fairer legacy for the well-being of future generations.  We must demonstrate greater integrity and commitment through ecologically-sound initiatives.  Our success or failure in our responsibility to properly protect Earth’s biodiversity and natural resources is a crucial element of our legacy.

This new concept must involve a paradigm shift that emphasizes the virtues of fairness, inclusivity, peace, sustainability, responsible stewardship, and a committed caring for Mother Earth.  We can no longer afford to believe in a God that says all others with differing beliefs are not only wrong, but evil to boot.  They are not!  Beliefs in God must not continue to present a rallying cry for war, terrorism, injustice, discrimination, hate, supremacy or intolerant ethnocentricity.

Calvin asked Hobbes:  "Do you believe in the devil?  You know, a supreme evil being 

   dedicated to the temptation, corruption, and destruction of man?"
     Hobbes replied:  "I'm not sure that man needs the help."

                                                           --- Bill Watterson, Calvin and Hobbes

Too much energy is poured into bigoted religious beliefs, as well as into ethnic supremacy, sexism, racism, and prejudice against gay men and lesbian women.  Insidious and powerful efforts are being made to keep women subservient, and to oppose their empowerment.  Equally strong efforts are made to relegate minorities to the status of second-class citizens, and to keep them in that status.  Hateful and condescending anger is directed at often hard-working immigrants, just as it was in the days when most of our predecessors emigrated from Europe and Asia and Latin America to the United States to escape destitution or persecution, or to find better opportunities.  We must change these attitudes!

Anthropocentricity and Delusion

“So much of man’s thinking is an anthropocentric delusion.  The root of the greatest  

   errors in philosophy lies in projecting our human purposes, criteria, preferences,

     hopes and fears into the objective universe.” 

                                                        --- Baruch Spinoza, 1632 – 1677 CE

The aim of the study of philosophy is to find out what other people have thought AND to find out what the truth of the matter actually is.  Philosophy theoretically seeks the most probable truth, and not some mere dogmatic ‘scholasticism’ form of truth that coincides with preconceived notions.  I have created the Earth Manifesto principally to make an incisive exploration of the currents of thought and feeling that flow through written history, and to investigate and evaluate the ebbs and flows of authority and liberation, of doctrine and illumination, and of the back-flowing eddies of retrogressive dominion.  I find it compelling to imagine the impulses behind the cathartic cataracts of revolutionary change that have taken place in history. 

No matter what we believe, or how hard we try to understand and explain the nature of the Universe, our emotional and spiritual propensities and our thoughts are couched in limited ideas and conceptions.  All our impressions are rooted in solipsistic and biocentric perspectives and anthropocentrism.  Our beliefs are naturally biased.  We make curious projections of archetypal aspects of our collective unconscious onto the Universe.  We are intrinsically incapable of seeing the Universe in a way that encompasses the fullness of eternity and infinity.  We are incapable of being completely objective.  We cannot comprehend the ultimate nature of reality, or of the ineffable, or of the inexplicable, or of what we imagine to be an absolute ‘Supreme Being’.  Is God a biologically living being?  Or is God an awareness that is part of physical nature that predates life and somehow created the Universe and is not actually a form of life? 

We can never know the ‘purpose’ of the Universe, or whether any purpose exists independent of our being and that of other forms of life.  We can each have a purpose-driven life, of course, without there being a knowable purpose of the Universe.  Every creature has its own biological purposes of surviving and reproducing to continue its own kind.

All of our established religions represent varying versions of the current myths of our species.  Science is a kind of mythology of its own, but in contrast to religious myths, it presents a worldview that is much better articulated and coherent and accurate and adaptive with regards to observable reality. 

Religions have many aspects.  They are a deeply personal expression of our inner spiritual natures.  They are also a reflection of cultural belief systems that are internalized within each of us.  At the core of our consciousness, deep within our psyches and souls, our religious beliefs are an expression of profound human hopes, and of needs for identification, validation, belonging, inspiration, spiritual connection, wisdom, identity and maybe even enlightenment.

From the vantage point of 1,000 years from now -- should our race manage to survive for that long -- today’s concepts of God will likely appear as primitive and as naïve as the mythologies of old, like those marvelously bizarre Greek Myths.  As the famous and provocative philosopher Lao Tzu, writer of the wonderfully abstruse Tao Te Ching, might have said, ‘That which you say it is, it is not’.

Perception, Knowledge and Philosophy

Do we really want to know about the Universe?  Or are we like the prisoners in Plato’s Allegory of the Cave who had been chained since childhood in a cave in such a way that they could see only shadows?  Those prisoners, according to the parable, preferred to see the customary shadows, so they refused to explore or listen to someone who had actually seen a truer aspect of reality.  Are we capable of revising our worldviews? 

Change-averse people seem to not want to learn more accurate ways of understanding the world, because it means being faced with terrifying certainties and uncertainties of reality.  We might even be forced to change our habits and our behaviors -- oh, chagrin!  And we would find it necessary to accept the fact that each and every one of us will someday die -- and, relatively speaking, our individual deaths will occur not all that far in the future.

Many people embrace ideas propagated by organized religions because they seek a sense of certainty in a world where uncertainty is unfortunately a fundamental fact.  In the most modern and arcane understandings of quantum physics, there is actually a principle called the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle which confirms that even the physical nature of reality is rife with intrinsic uncertainties. 

Meanwhile, the ground shifts beneath us.  Change accelerates for our race in a curious kind of relativity that is oddly parallel to the general relativity proved by Albert Einstein.  Cultures are shifting.  Contradictions exist deep within each and every one of us.  Economic insecurities and political conflicts are increasing.  There are more and more inequities of wealth and correlated pathetic inequalities in countries worldwide.  Existential questions are fluid.  Hot-button social issues perplex us, and they create hurdles which prevent us from uniting to make our world a better place.

Simultaneously, global risks are rising.  The moral moorings that guide us are being swept away by a variety of influences, including secularism and profound technological and demographic changes.  Authority figures offer us guidance in this uncertain world, and a shred of certainty, and a sense of solace.  They offer us, and then they’re on us;  ‘off us and on us’, as the old joke goes.  Ha!

Human knowledge seems to be evolving toward ever-better understandings.  When we are flexible and adaptive, we can progress and strive to keep ourselves adequately in balance with natural ecosystems.  This is becoming increasingly necessary to ensure our species’ survival.  But struggles with selfish and often reactionary forces hinder progress.  A storm of adverse developments is making progress more challenging, including resource scarcities, rampant and wasteful consumerism, speculative excesses, mindless pollution, carbon emissions, overpopulation, wars, and ruthlessly unprincipled forms of competition and corruption.  I strongly believe that we can achieve wiser courses of action by gaining more accurate and comprehensive understandings, and that being open-minded to adaptive progress will give us a better chance of saving ourselves. 

Our fate is not predetermined.  The die is still in the on-going process of being cast.  Architects and construction workers alike know that the foundations of a building are critically important to the safety and durability of a building.  We must not scrimp on structural materials that go into the foundations and the infrastructure of our societies.  It is not too late for us to collectively choose to mix superior batches of concrete, rather than substandard ones that are likely to fail.

The physicist James Trefil relates an interesting personal realization in the Preface to his book Human Nature – A Blueprint for Managing the Earth – By People, for People:

 “The universe does not give a damn about us or any other living thing on our planet. 

   As far as our survival and well-being are concerned, we’re pretty much on our own.”

Spiritual Truths

All the shamans and priests and bishops and rabbis and imams and monks who have ever lived have promulgated fervent beliefs and spiritual ‘truths’.  But these truths are much more like Rorschachian revelations of human nature than they are accurate insights into the fullness of objective reality.  All spiritual leaders and prophets have been influenced by natural human drives and propensities and visions.  They have been motivated by a wide variety of impulses, intentions and purposes, including some or all of the following:  humanitarian concern, altruistic service, desire for meaning, noble aspiration, prophetic revelation, impulses for personal recognition, ambition, pride, avarice, illusion, glory, fame, delusions of grandeur, or compulsions to gain power and control over others. 

“Religion is nothing but institutionalized mysticism.  The catch is, mysticism does not lend

  itself to institutionalization.  The moment we attempt to organize mysticism, we destroy

   its essence.”               

              --- Tom Robbins, Skinny Legs and All

Religious establishments are powerful social institutions.  They are extraordinary forces that can influence people in highly positive ways, as well as in quite negative ones.  They can be forces for ‘good’ or for ‘evil’, for justice or injustice, for peace or conflict.  Their purposes today, as they have been throughout recorded history, are often corrupted by the desire for power, money, plunder, exclusive righteousness, discrimination, control, political intrigue, sex, or war for the goal of dominion.  The role of religion throughout history in governments worldwide has had -- and is currently having -- extremely troubling impacts on the lives of people and on the geopolitics of the world. 

  “Instincts and passion are magnificent as driving forces, but dangerous as guides."

                                                                                                             --- Baruch Spinoza

It becomes increasingly clear, year after year, that the world must create conditions wherein the positive elements of organized religions flourish and the negative elements are diminished.  We need the moderate and progressive aspects of spiritual doctrines to prevail, and we must reject the patriarchal, doctrinaire, reactionary and extremely conservative ones.  Recent years have unfortunately seen fundamentalist forces in churches grab the microphone and the steering wheel from those sensible and moderate factions that are more modern and more accepting and more progressive, and more pragmatic and socially intelligent as well.  The ‘Taliban wing’ of all religions must atrophy or be vanquished! 

Mark Twain once noted that, “If Christ were here now, there is one thing he would not be:  a Christian.”  Twain was highly skeptical of the laughably ludicrous improbability of anthropocentric Christian myths that are contained in the Bible and the Koran and the Book of Mormon.  He recognized the preposterous hypocrisy of the conservative establishment in Churches, with their orthodoxy and obstinacy and inflexible doctrines and bigoted narrow-mindedness.  Let moderates and progressives rule!

“Our Bible reveals to us the character of our god with minute and remorseless exactness. 

  It is perhaps the most damnatory biography that exists in print anywhere.”

                                                          --- Mark Twain, Reflections on Religion, 1906

Humorous Interlude

  “A sense of humor, properly developed, is superior to any religion so far devised.”

                                                                    --- Tom Robbins, Jitterbug Perfume

Here is a clever and entertaining comedy sketch by George Carlin that can be listened to online at Zeitgeist Movie.com (toggle to minute 11:38 of the 2-hour-long film.)

“I gotta tell you the truth folks; I gotta tell you the truth.  When it come to bullshit, big-time, major-league bullshit, you have to stand in awe of the all time champion of false promises and exaggerated claims -- RELIGION.  Think about it!  Religion has actually convinced people that there's an invisible man, living in the sky, who watches everything you do, every minute of every day.  And the invisible man has a special list of ten things he does not want you to do.  And if you do any of these ten things, he has a special place full of fire and smoke and burning and torture and anguish where he will send you to live and suffer and burn and choke and scream and cry forever and ever till the end of time ...  But he loves you!!” 

“He loves you.  He loves you -- and he needs money!  He always needs money!  He's all powerful, all perfect, all knowing and all wise … somehow just can't handle money!  Religion takes in billions of dollars, they pay no taxes, and they always need a little more.  Now, you talk about a good bullshit story!  Holy shit!!”

An Aside Concerning Ecological Understandings

  “The idea is to write it so that people hear it and it slides through the brain and

       goes straight to the heart.”                                

                                            --- Maya Angelou

The profound realizations of ecology are like an upwelling of an ancient, honorable and spiritual veneration for Mother Earth and its denizens.  Deep down we all know that we basically depend completely upon a healthy environment and on the goods and services provided by healthy ecosystems.  We must teach our children to believe in a God that favors those who are strongly committed to PROTECTING this ‘Creation’.

Perhaps the best way to save ourselves is to forget about God saving us and to embrace a revolutionary transformation in our economies and our lifestyles and our beliefs and our behaviors.  Discipline and some austerity are almost certainly required.  We might even stretch a little and gain more of a “small-is-beautiful” awareness.  Maybe we could go SHOPPING a little less, and prioritize more toward salubrious and fulfilling undertakings! 

We are moving into the era of Peak Oil.  Declines in fossil fuel production are inevitable, and they will begin relatively soon.  Our material demands and population growth are already exceeding natural ecological limits.  Our exploiting and polluting activities and our propensity to spew billions of tons of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere every year are beginning to have distinctly detrimental impacts and unintended consequences upon the ability of our Mother Earth to sustain our growing numbers.

Many of these ideas were originally written near the time of Earth Day 2009.  In commemoration of Earth Day, let us consider one of the fundamental truths of ecology:  a healthy environment is indispensably important for a prosperous economy.  This is a practical issue as well as a highly moral one.  We simply can not continue to pollute rivers and damage ecosystems, and destroy wetlands and forests and coral reefs, and drive thousands of other species to extinction. 

Why not?  Because there are serious adverse unintended consequences in the long term that are associated with these actions.  For this reason, our economy must be restructured, and our behaviors and habits must be modified using effective incentives to be consistent with activities that are sustainable indefinitely into the future.  We can no longer afford to be led by head-in-the-sand cheerleader throwback apologists for old school machine-politics and entrenched corporate interests. 

A true, honest, and rapid ‘greening’ of our activities must take place soon.  A mere greenwashing of the status quo is not enough.  All companies worldwide must be required to include all true costs in product prices, including pollution mitigation, carbon emission costs, and other costs associated with ecological degradation, toxic wastes and the depletion of resources.  We must stop allowing such costs to be externalized onto society and future generations. 

We must also reduce the amount of money that we are borrowing from our children and our grandchildren and foreigners.  Deficit spending is an expediency that helps some people make big profits in the short term, but it is nonetheless socially irresponsible and myopic.  We are effectively fleecing the powerless, the disenfranchised, and all Americans in the future with this foolish expediency.  It is a great game for the greedy beneficiaries of these policies today, and it may have become an urgent and desperate necessity to keep our economy from crashing, but it is not smart in the long run to keep radically increasing the national debt.  If we accept the short-term exigency of borrowing money, we should do it to invest the money wisely, not to squander it on tax breaks and ‘entitlements’ and low tax rates on those with the highest incomes.

This sentiment flew in the face of developments in April 2009 when economic conditions had deteriorated so seriously that a consensus arose that the federal government simply must borrow hundreds of billions of dollars to stimulate the economy.  I am skeptical of the wisdom of such plans, and of the efficacy of the shortsighted nature of some of the ideas that were included in this stimulus package.  We backed ourselves into a desperate corner where declining asset values and unemployment made this course of action necessary.  Otherwise, inaction and feedback loops could have made the economy much, much worse.  But it may be a Pyrrhic victory to borrow so much money, even if such a strategy succeeds in getting the economy to expand once again.  We should strive to make all such stimulus programs “green”, and take advantage of the crisis as a positive opportunity to create a better and more indefinitely sustainable economy.

We need honest leaders to tell us what we need to hear, which is this:  we must invest in good citizen goals and other intelligent activities, and stop rewarding and subsidizing short-term-oriented polluters, extractors, exploiters, speculators, con artists, war profiteers and other insiders.  Barack Obama made points such as these during his campaign, and we need to embrace them.  Bold progressive long-term-oriented change must be enacted!

John Steinbeck wrote about a ‘Congress of honest men’ in his Log from the Sea of Cortez.  He was referring to Congressional representatives who said we cannot afford socially beneficial programs, but who then approved much more costly expenditures for the military.  Today we are led by politicians and business leaders who similarly say we cannot afford to pay-as-we-go, or to put a price on pollution or carbon emissions or resource depletion, or to invest in vitally important domestic priorities, and yet they seem to believe that there are no limits on how much money we can shell out for war.  Check out Tall Tales, Provocative Parables, Luminous Clarity and Evocative Truths – A Modern Log from the Sea of Cortez for a deeper appreciation of John Steinbeck’s valuable ideas relating to life and war.

Nobel-Prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz has written that the cost of the Iraq War will eventually exceed $3 trillion.  We are bankrupting our nation to go along with this aggressive ideology of militarism and the overweening influence by the military/industrial/congressional complex.  Let’s change course!

Revelations Concerning ‘Peak Oil’

The issue of resource depletion merits attention.  Some say there is no cost associated with resource depletion.  We are right now at the point of having burned up about 50% of all reserves of oil ever discovered, and we are ratcheting up our fossil fuel addiction and usages worldwide.  The true cost of the depletion of oil is this:  once fossil fuels are gone, an enormous investment will be required to develop cleaner and safer renewable alternatives.  It is foolhardy NOT to be taking advantage of the great energy and wealth contained in the last 50% of the world’s oil reserves to fund this cost. 

E.F. Schumacher observed in his book Small Is Beautiful that we should be treating fossil fuels as capital resources, not as income.  This would mean that we would conserve them, and that we would put some of the profits obtained from the use of these irreplaceable assets “into a special fund to be devoted exclusively to the evolution of production methods and patterns of living which do not depend on fossil fuels”.   

Schumacher wrote this in 1973, just a few years after “Hubbert’s peak”.  This was the date that oil production from U.S. reserves peaked and began a long-term decline.  In 1956, American geophysicist M. King Hubbert had accurately predicted this peak.  At the time, experts had scoffed, but nonetheless Hubbert’s forecast proved to be accurate.  Production has fallen significantly since then as our domestic reserves have become drastically depleted by some 90%.

We must not dangerously delude ourselves into thinking that global Peak Oil will not occur within the next decade, if it has not done so already.  Some of the smartest guys in the room have ironically joined a conspiracy of fools in opposing such insights and their implications.  As a consequence, we are failing to adopt far-sighted energy initiatives that oil profits should be helping to finance. 

Back to the Future

“God is love,” people used to say in the Sixties.  Hold that thought.

The idea that we need a new spiritual consciousness leads us to the conclusion that we must not only be more pragmatic and far-sighted about economic and environmental issues, but we must also cultivate a new awareness that respects all of Creation, not just true believers, and not just humankind.  This new spirituality must be ethical, and we must embrace it with evangelical enthusiasm.  We must acknowledge wholesome ecological understandings. 

“A man's ethical behavior should be based effectually on sympathy, education, and social ties and needs;  no religious basis is necessary.  Man would indeed be in a poor way if he had to be restrained by fear of punishment and hope of reward after death.”                                                                                         

                                                                                                        --- Albert Einstein

An honest new religion must be immune to being hijacked into jihad terrorism against innocent civilians.  It must be less susceptible to being used as justification for injustice, aggression, oppression or ‘preemptive’ wars.  It must be effective in diminishing violence and brutality and arrogance and hate and mercilessness.  Its leaders must not be so authoritarian or so eager to wantonly get into bed with politicians from the right-wing.  They must encourage the faithful flock to be more tolerant and less sexist and less discriminatory and less homophobic.  They must act with a more ecumenical resolve, rejecting conflict-causing ethnocentric convictions of superiority.  Give us a break!

Religious freedom should be guaranteed in all countries, and people should be free from any persecution for their religious beliefs.  At the same time, both the Golden Rule and a strong separation between Church and State must become primary tenets of governments worldwide.  An enlightened ethos that is similar to that which characterizes ‘secular scientific humanism’ must be incorporated into Church doctrines to guarantee wiser and fairer societies around the globe. 

Every religion is grounded in its own traditions, its rituals, its dogmas, its holy book, its body of myth, and its Rorschach expression of human nature.  Each religion has its own specific story, and each and every religious brand seems to stick to their stories, ‘come hell or high water’.  They stubbornly resist evolving, even in the face of great advances in knowledge and scientific understandings of the physical Universe and living things in such fields as astrophysics, earth sciences, evolutionary biology, genetics, anthropology, neuroscience and psychology.

I personally favor wisdom traditions like Buddhism, which are founded on a search for knowledge and truth, rather than faith traditions like Catholicism and Mormonism and Islam that are an expression of deep-seated yearnings for guidance and belonging, but which are founded on our hopes and fears and comforting delusions about an anthropocentric God.  As long as we are leaping in the dark, we might as well leap towards the light!

I find it exceedingly curious that Western religions seem to be focused on controlling people, while Eastern spiritual disciplines like Buddhism are more focused on liberation.  Hmmm … I’m ready to pass judgment!

Church Establishments

Spokespersons for God must begin to embrace understandings that are more intelligent and socially beneficial.  Instead of allowing conservative extremists in their faiths to assert control and impede progress, they must embrace more progressive understandings.  This is especially true for Christian and Muslim churches, because together these two faiths claim well over two billion adherents.  By competitively and fiercely conflicting with each other, these faiths are increasing strife and exacerbating international conflicts and wars.

Unfortunately, these churches are extremely undemocratic institutions.  Pope Benedict XVI, for instance, was chosen in April 2005 by fewer than 120 people -- and all of them were old men (Catholic cardinals).  A screen of white smoke traditionally goes up from the Sistine Chapel to announce the anointment of a new Pope.  Before the white puff went up announcing the selection of Benedict XVI, the name of the Pope they chose was Joseph Ratzinger.  He was the one who had been charged with the orthodox religious responsibility of defending Church doctrine “by putting the smackdown on heresy”.  

Revelations in March 2010 surfaced about Ratzinger’s role in the cover-up of sexual molestation by priests of trusting children, some of them deaf.  This scandal makes it clear that church officials should have spent more time putting the smackdown on sexual predators, instead of protecting them and transferring them to other parishes.

Heresy is any opinion that differs from established religious dogma.  A healthy and honest perspective of heresy is that it is an aspect of reasonable debate and possibly greater truth.  Rational skepticism of all religious dogma is actually quite well founded, so it is important for us to more clearly understand the nature of our world in order to assure ourselves of better harmony and more propitious outcomes in our policies and activities. 

Cardinal Ratzinger was chosen from his previous position as the head of the conservative ‘Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith’.  This office began centuries ago as the ‘Sacred Congregation of the Universal Inquisition’, known simply as the Inquisition.  Yes, this is the very same Inquisition which had a horrific role in torturing people and burning untold numbers of women at the stake over a 300 year period during the Dark Ages.  This had to be straightened out a bit by the so-called Reformation before a salubrious Renaissance could come about.  The Inquisition represents a horrible and extremely tragic, inglorious and bloody episode in history.

Official Vatican doctrines are still much too antiquated for the modern world.  The Catholic Church, for instance, officially opposes artificial insemination and in-vitro fertilization and surrogate motherhood.  They also strongly oppose both contraception and abortion.  What does this mean?  It means that the Catholic Church essentially forbids fertility to many women who WANT to bear children, but aren’t able to;  AND it makes fertility mandatory for those who are able to conceive, but DON’T WANT to! 

What?!!!  Read that paragraph again, and think about it.  This is ridiculous -- surely God is not so illogical and cold-hearted!!  He loves us, doesn’t ‘He’?  This is a political control issue, women.  We must be given greater power in this stodgy old church.  As Mark Twain pointed out, “The church is always trying to get other people to reform;  it might not be a bad idea to reform itself a little, by way of example.” 

At the core of the set of ideas that characterized the Age of Enlightenment were attitudes that questioned traditional institutions, customs and morals.  It turns out that being open-minded has positive adaptive value!  As Voltaire said, “Nothing can be more contrary to religion and the clergy than reason and common sense.”

Some say that one of the principal problems in the world of debate is that we actually tend to pretend that there are two sides to every story.  Ha!  I agree with this;  and I alternatively want to play the devil’s advocate.  Some points of view definitely deserve more credence than others.  Some ideas are based on a preponderance of evidence and fact, while others are based on dogma or illusion or wishful thinking.  Almost everyone has finally come to realize that the Sun does not revolve around the Earth, for instance, and that the Earth is not flat.  Presenting both sides of an argument about these things is palpably absurd.  Teaching the dogmas of Creationism in public schools, as if they are equally valid alternative explanations of existence, is similarly absurd.

Galileo Galilei was persecuted in the seventeenth century for supporting the contention of the polish astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus, who 70 years earlier had published the then-heretical idea that the Earth was not the center of the Universe.  Galileo said that the Earth is actually in an annual orbit around the Sun.  Galileo vastly improved on the primitive technology of the telescope in the early 1600’s, and he discovered visible confirmation that there are moons orbiting other planets like Jupiter.  This physically contradicted the Church’s view, which was grounded in early scientific ignorance, which held that the Earth is the center of the Universe.  To regard the Sun as the center of the Universe was heresy, but it turns out to be relatively more accurate than regarding the Earth as the center of the universe! 

The Church put Galileo under house arrest for the last decade of his life for defying their dogmas by espousing this idea of the Earth’s motion around the Sun.  It took authorities of the Church 350 years to finally admit the now-obvious notion that the nature of ‘heliocentric planetary motion’ is scientifically correct.  Church establishments once again proved they are stubbornly doctrinaire, not nimble and honest -- and not exactly merciful!

The Church always feels the need to defend its dogmas because it fears that once various aspects of its primitive worldview began to be proved false by more accurate understandings, they might eventually be forced to admit that God did not make man in ‘His’ image, as the Bible indicates.  In fact, they would be required to actually admit the much more obvious fact, if you think about it:  that human beings have made every deity in our own image!  The image that established religions generally propagate is an image that is simplistic and manipulative and conducive to patriarchal control, rather than an image that is fairer and more salubrious and more honoring of feminine values.  It is time we began to really honor Mother Earth!

Some people, like Socrates, embrace skepticism and doubt, and they seek knowledge.  Other people cherish certainties and embrace ignorance.  Some believe that evolutionary processes have taken place over the eons.  Others believe in a relatively recent Biblical Creation.  There is extremely little probability that Creationism is a more accurate explanation of the Universe than evolution, which has overwhelming facts and evidence supporting it.  For some deeper perspective, see Chapter #101 – The Evolution of Life in the Earth Manifesto treatise Comprehensive Global Perspective: An Illuminating Worldview. 

The Dalai Lama states the obvious succinctly:

”Regardless of different personal views about science, no credible understanding of the natural world, or our human existence, can ignore the basic insights of theories as key as evolution, relativity, and quantum mechanics."

Faith, Religion and God

Westerners tend to be puzzled by the divisions in the Islamic faith.  The two primary factions of Islam are the Shia and the Sunni.  It is hard for non-Muslims to imagine that so much strife and violence has been invoked over doctrinal divisions between these two factions.  It must be a really BIG dispute, right?  Well, let’s look into it:  what is the dispute about?  It appears to be a stubborn disagreement over which of four original Caliphs was the rightful successor to the Prophet Muhammad after his death.  That’s all?!  Peace, brothers!

Christian faiths themselves have been fractured into so many different churches that it is really hard to figure out their differences.  Who amongst us can even say what the differences are between Catholics, Protestants, Baptists, Episcopalians, Lutherans and Methodists?  Jesus Christ would no doubt be perplexed by all the conflict that has been fomented in his name, if indeed he existed as a real peace-loving man.  How, he might wonder, could people have lost his important message about loving thy neighbor and caring for the poor?  How could people choose politicians that pander to the rich and oppress the poor -- and women and gay people? 

God is many different things to many different people.  Hundreds of religions and cults and mythologies have been propounded throughout the long course of recorded history.  Almost without exception each one has had its own story of Creation, its own moral doctrines and its own symbolic mythologies.  None of them are absolutely right or wrong.  They are alternative ways of trying to explain the way things are.  There is no certain truth, because subjectivity is ultimate.  Absolute truths cannot be found in a quantum world, and the constructions in our minds are related only indirectly to ‘reality’.    

“Scriptures, n.  The sacred books of our holy religion, as distinguished from the

    false and profane writings on which all other faiths are based.”

                                                                          --- Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary

No one person’s God is a better or truer God than anyone else’s God.  If there really is a Supreme Being, it is a God bigger than the narrow concepts provided by our limited imaginations and our solipsistic and anthropocentric thoughts and religious establishments.  If there is a God, it is a God that presides over ALL of humanity, a God that does not take sides in conflicts, a God whose highest virtue is love, and a God that embraces the Golden Rule of tolerance for those who believe differently than us. 

If there is a God, it is a God that equally accepts Muslims, Jews, Christians, agnostics, Baptists, Mormons, Buddhists, Hindus, Protestants, atheists, rich people and poor people, the powerful and the weak, men and women, old people and the young, black people and white people and Latinos and Asians, citizens and immigrants and foreigners, heterosexuals and homosexuals - EVERYONE! 

The Gods that humans have created throughout history always have anthropomorphic qualities.  This is due to our desperate hopes, in which we worship concrete symbols of inexplicable and implacable forces.  We hope to sway our deities from their otherwise demonstrably impersonal indifference.  Through prayer and righteous devotion, we hope to get them to grant us personal benefits.  But if there is a God, it must be a God that doesn’t side with one person against another, a God that loves peaceful coexistence between ‘His’ human subjects, a God that favors reason and not irrationality, a God that helps those who help themselves, a God that offers salvation to those who most deserve it because of their own efforts to live well.  If there is a God, it should be a God that smiles upon those who act with honesty and virtue and compassion, a God that appreciates people who have the attitude that they are going to make the best of whatever comes their way.  

It is no wonder that, in conjunction with our widespread embrace of mythological deities as simple and convenient explanations of existence, we have also created many versions of the Devil.  We have always been quite busy ‘making bargains with the devil’, so maybe that’s why we assume such an entity must exist!

“The fundamental irony of American history is that we follow the better angels of our 

   nature when we honestly and compassionately confront the devilish realities we would

     like to ignore or deny.”

                                                  --- Cornel West, The Atlantic, November 2007

At varying depths deep within each of us there is a laughing philosopher self, a self that recognizes what is essentially a preposterous anthropocentricity of every one of our conceptions of God.  There is a profoundly suspect superstition-like foundation for all of our cherished convictions about a Supreme Being and an afterlife and all of the great mysteries of existence.  We are all spiritual beings, but spirituality and knowledge and religious doctrine do not mix thoroughly, or permanently, or well.  Doubts lie in wait for every person who is honest with themselves.  Packaged religious beliefs are convenient and captivating;  they are addictively opiate-like in their tempting underlying effects. 

There is substantial power in believing, and belonging, and praising, and praying, and singing together, and in sharing convictions.  But the positive social and psychological aspects of religious experiences do not in any way prove that the dogmas of established religions are true.  Instead, they reveal far more about us as human beings.  They are like Rorschach tests that manifest subconscious psychological traits.  They are like Greek myths revealing archetypal human characteristics that exist within each of us.

Our attitudes are vitally important to us personally, our attitudes toward circumstances and adversities and successes, and our attitudes toward others.  We have limited control over the circumstances that affect us or the emotions we feel in response to them, but we can and do choose how to respond to them.  To live well, it is good to have a positive attitude, and to let go of negative impulses.  It is valuable to live by the tenets of the Serenity Prayer:

    God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change;
       the courage to change the things I can; 

          and the wisdom to know the difference.

If there is a God, it must be a God that loves a healthy environment and biological diversity and responsible stewardship of the natural world.  If there is a God, it must be a God that demands respect for the ecological underpinnings of ‘His’ creation.  If there is a God, ‘He’ surely would not be supportive of our ceaseless human efforts to control and exploit Nature for our own selfish ends while disregarding the harms we cause. 

Nature itself is supremely indifferent to any particular individuals.  Nature is ordered according to the impersonal certainties of physical laws.  Things take place due to causes and effects that we can’t quite fully understand.  If a large meteorite were to crash through the atmosphere and wipe out a preponderous proportion of all organisms on our planet tomorrow, as apparently occurred 65 million years ago with the Cretaceous Extinction, it would be just another day in the Universe.  Cool!

If there really is a God, it must be an all-inclusive God that encompasses all of time and space.  God must be infinite and eternal and ineffable.  God cannot conform to limited human concepts or mythological imaginings or superstitious beliefs or dogmatic ideas or constructs designed for manipulative purposes.  God surely cannot be limited to mere anthropocentric projections of our hopes, hubris and insecurities upon a Universe that is far more complex than our understandings can ever contain. 

The followers of God must accept the higher priorities of God’s role in loving, not hating.  They must favor the greater social good, and support true justice, not narrow partisanship or religious extremism.  God must embody true moral concepts, not jealousy or pride or cravings of adulation and praise.  And doggone, religious authorities must stop cultivating attitudes of abomination towards gays, and subversion of people’s privacy rights, and opposition to family planning and women’s reproductive prerogatives. 

It is tragic for humanity -- and oddly paradoxical -- when religious fervor is channeled toward ends that are reactionary or self-righteously discriminatory or violent or extremely sexist.  People who are self-professed born-again Christians have formed alliances in recent years with politicians who adhere to radical right-wing doctrines.  In such bargains with the devil, religious people are often manipulated into throwing their support to shrewd politicians who espouse regressive social policies and aggressive foreign policies and war.  These religious people have, as a consequence, been swindled into supporting an agenda that contradicts the major moral tenets of their faiths.

As Martin Luther King noted, “Any religion that professes to be concerned about the souls of men and not concerned about the city government that damns the soul, the economic conditions that corrupt the soul, the slum conditions and social evils that cripple the soul, is a dry, dead, do-nothing religion in need of new blood.”  “Too often the church talked about a future good ‘over yonder’, totally forgetting the present evil over here,” he wrote.

Many religions have their roots in appeals to the poor and the downtrodden.  They set forth doctrines that promulgated ideas of what is morally good.  Their holy books speak of love, social justice, peace, charity, mercy and neighborly good will.  After generally terrible struggles against persecution, the prophets of new religions occasionally gain enough adherents to achieve wider acceptance.  Eventually they may even grow into movements and obtain political power, and when they do so, they abuse their power with astonishingly hypocritical and absurd fervor.  Instead of advancing the ideals upon which they have been founded, they collaborate with those in control. 

In the United States so far in the twenty-first century, religious establishments have helped involve our nation in unjust imperialism and Crusading foreign interventionism and preemptive wars and empire-building activities.  They have often directly or tacitly supported politicians whose policies condone punitive prisoner torture and policies that are anti-democratic, such as unjustified government secrecy and dishonesty.

What existential irony this is!  What sinister cynicism!  It is amazing that people in positions of power can so dishonorably exploit gullible people and take advantage of the blind faith and ignorance of this ‘coalition of the willing’.  Powerful people act this way to achieve selfish objectives, and they do so with ignoble and brazen hubris when they target people whose religious beliefs are founded on what should be noble ideals and traditions.  Politicians exploit such people with disguised contempt, advancing the narrow interests of the rich, the powerful and the privileged.  This is unconscionable!

Our lone superpower nation, bristling with nuclear missiles, has been acting arrogantly, as if MIGHT is actually RIGHT.  When we ruthlessly lord it over others as if ANY means is justified to achieve our ends, no matter how base and selfish and materialistic these ends may be, we betray our humanity.  To harvest peace, we must sow justice!

An ancient Chinese proverb says:  “May you live in interesting times.”  Well, we sure do live in interesting times!  As urgently fascinating as these times are with all the economic malfeasance calamitating our societies, they are going to get even more interesting as fossil fuels run out, and carbon ‘sinks’ fill up, and the climate heats up, and our human numbers continue to increase due to religious and ideological pronatalism (“the encouragement of fruitful multiplying”). 

Future generations will be forced to deal with the consequences of the actions taken during these interesting times.  Experts like Nobel Laureate Joseph Stiglitz point to the crippling legacy that we are leaving in the form of enormous debt, which has been incurred in outlandish amounts in the past decade for expediencies like enriching the rich and fighting wars without requiring current taxpayers to pay for them.  This must change!

Self-aware, humanity teeters on a precipice, powerful yet vulnerable.  We are driven by strong biological drives, and animated by a hierarchy of needs and desires.  Most people are moved to a faith in a God, and their faith has an underlying motive of seeking hope in their lives and self-justification in their prejudices. 

A pop-culture guru once made a curious observation:

“Life is eternal.  But even if it isn’t and I made it up, I like it!  I mean as long as  

   you’re going to make it up (the way that REALITY IS), you might as well make it up

     the way you like it.”  

This is a fascinating way to look at things, isn’t it?  (“Get An Afterlife!”)  To the limited extent that it is true that we make up our realities, we should choose beliefs that we like, but only if they are not inimically dangerous to our well-being, or to that of others, like our children.  Let’s interpret reality in ways that are modern and accurate.  Let’s choose to see reality in ways that are strongly in accord with spiritually nobility AND important human values.  Let’s make ‘growth choices’, not ‘fear choices’;  let’s progress, not regress.

Jared Diamond, the professor who has written a book about societies that essentially choose to fail or to succeed, indicates that at times behaviors and institutions that once served society well become antiquated and no longer serve healthy utilitarian social or ecological values.  When this happens, they must either change or face collapse.  It is high time that at this critical juncture in history we embrace bold positive adaptive change.  This must involve not only our religious institutions, but also our economic, financial and political ones!

Was John Lennon onto Something?

Entertain this possibility:  God is a fiction, like an über-Father-figure Santa Claus Easter Bunny Tooth Fairy invention of the human mind.  What if there is no God, no hell below us, above us only sky?

Imagine there's no heaven
It's easy if you try
No hell below us
Above us only sky
Imagine all the people
Living for today...

Imagine there's no countries
It isn't hard to do
Nothing to kill or die for
And no religion too
Imagine all the people
Living life in peace...

You may say I'm a dreamer
But I'm not the only one
I hope someday you'll join us
And the world will be as one

Imagine no possessions
I wonder if you can
No need for greed or hunger
A brotherhood of man
Imagine all the people

Sharing all the world...

You may say I'm a dreamer
But I'm not the only one
I hope someday you'll join us
And the world will live as one.

                               --- Imagine, John Lennon

Belated Preamble

Feel free to believe what you like.  Yay for you!  And, “Yay for us!”

The essential concept of FAIRNESS that is embodied in the Golden Rule is a basic underpinning of true democracy.  The first Amendment to the great American Bill of Rights establishes the freedom of religious belief.  An overarching need exists in our societies for rules of law to be established that guarantee religious freedoms.  The reason for this?  Because we know that so much conflict has arisen throughout history from religious differences, and the only fair way to prevent this is to guarantee all people equal rights to believe what they like, and to make sure that governments do not endorse any one divisive religion over another, or persecute those who belong to minorities.

People have a deep human desire to live their lives in freedom and dignity and with guaranteed individual rights.  Everyone feels deep-seated insecurities, so most people seek the security of certainties in a world that is ultimately subjective and relative.  Each of us has a curious need to believe and to belong, so leaders that represent authority have a powerful appeal to our emotions.  Religious authority is unfortunately highly undemocratic, and it generally embraces a kind of reactionary suppression of alternate ways of seeing things.  It even censors information and discriminates against those who believe differently.  People who think they are absolutely right tend to be self-righteous and zealous and sometimes fanatical.

Every person is entitled to believe whatever they want, but no one should be allowed to impose their beliefs on others.  It may be natural to feel a kind of bemused contempt for others who seem so wrong from the perspective of one’s own absolute convictions, but intolerance and hatred must be emasculated.  There is always the possibility that one’s own cherished ideas and doctrines are, in fact, erroneous.

'God works in many ways his wonders to perform.'  But He's not a skillful mechanic.  A man drives over a cliff and 'by a miracle' he only breaks his back.  It would be more divine if he were a better driver and stayed on the road.  (!!!) 

                                                                  --- Paul Goodman

People tend to be sheep-like in their beliefs.  They inherit them through genetic propensities and a kind of social indoctrination, rather than arriving at them through evaluation and sensible consideration.  This is why people are susceptible to being manipulated by demagogues, religious zealots and certainty-proclaiming politicians.  People seek security in traditional beliefs, and this makes them vulnerable to being exploited for purposes that are completely contrary to the noble aspects of their beliefs. 

Religious beliefs can have a definite potential positive utility, but they can become detrimental to the true safety and security of those who believe, or of others.  When this takes place, they should be reconsidered or circumscribed, especially when the values embraced have become outmoded or detrimental due to changing circumstances or greater truths or more important understandings for the greater good.

In simpler days, kings claimed “divine rights”.  This doctrine was so blatantly self-serving that it is astonishing anyone actually believed that monarch’s derived their right to rule directly from the will of God.  As that era was coming to an end in Europe during the Age of Enlightenment, King Louis XV of France saw the writing on the wall and observed, “Après moi, le deluge.”  Sure enough, after many years of despotic rule and inequities and the bankrupting of the nation and the levying of high taxes on the peasantry, the flood did figuratively come, in the form of the French Revolution of 1789.  The preposterousness of divine privilege and autocratic rule were suddenly exposed when some brave souls finally stood up and figuratively declared, “The king has no clothes!”  King Louis XVI was overthrown and became the only king of France ever to be executed when he had his head lopped off by a guillotine on January 21, 1793.

But I digress.  It is contextually impossible to be absolutely objective or to see the world “as it really is.”  Some understandings, of course, correspond to reality more closely than others.  For instance, no matter how much it was taken for granted as a fact that the Earth is the center of the Universe, when Copernicus and Galileo discovered that the Earth actually revolves around the Sun, this was a superior understanding.  No matter how fervently people believe in an idea, if it contradicts objective reality, eventually the belief will lose its utility and slip into the dustbin of history.

This treatise explores conundrums like these, for humanity is in increasingly desperate need of a new period of enlightenment, and of a new Golden Rule era to get us through the tricky straits of our economic, social, political, spiritual and ecological predicaments.  Thinking objectively about our lives gives us the ability to step outside of our everyday ways of seeing things, and to appreciate the rich interrelatedness of all life.  Think about the amazing beauty, diversity, complexity and fragility of all living things.  Yay!

Politics and Religion in Recent Years

The winds of change are blowing, and the American people hunger for leaders who are more honest, ones they can trust, and ones who act for the greater good.  They want leaders who are committed to more fair-minded goals, and to policies that are consistent with the ideals upon which our country was founded.  Oddly, the Republicans who competed to win the Presidential primaries in 2008, as well as those who are trying to gain the 2012 nomination, have been quite retrogressive.  Each of them has stumbled over themselves to appeal to born-again-Christian religious fanatics and social conservatives.  This loyalty is understandable, but it is a narrow political loyalty to conservative stances on hot button social issues and failed ideologies.  It is also a form of pandering to those who have been taught to fear terrorists above all else.  John McCain’s views on war and attacking Iran and his stated belief that we should stay in Iraq for 100 years were frightening and would have been prohibitively costly.  Repent, or fall!

Religion is a vital part of our culture.  The First Amendment to the Constitution included the provision that Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.  The government is limited by this first provision of the Bill of Rights:  it must remain neutral on religion, and not take sides.  Yet many Republican candidates for office declare that we are a Christian nation, and Mitt Romney faithfully stands by the mythology and bizarre tenets of his Mormon grandfathers.  All other American politicians strive to reassure the populace that they have deep personal convictions in God, for otherwise they would probably, oddly, have little hope of getting elected. 

The Republican coalition has splintered into a struggle between progress-opposing religious reactionaries and change-averse social conservatives and power-hungry apologists for military occupations and profiteering and monopolies on wealth.  Voices for a balanced budget, fiscal restraint and far-sighted policies have rarely been heeded or heard in the past 10 years.  With Republicans the minority party, they are uniting in opposition and obstruction of almost all initiatives of the Democrats.  Divisive strategies are paramount in our politics, but this severe partisanship is a modus operandi that is harmful, so it is distinctly undesirable.  We do not need a ‘party of no’;  we need a party of visionary good ideas to solve the daunting existential problems that face us.

There is unquestionably a surge of discontent amongst people who oppose unfair economic policies, corporate abuses, regressive tax policies, irresponsible fiscal policies, fear-mongering, military aggression, empire building, and the hypocrisy of anti-evolution and anti-choice religious zealotry and ignorance.  Our leaders need to be able to rise above partisanship and short-term-oriented expediencies and act with honesty, integrity, fairness and far-sighted intention to improve our nation.  Can they? 

The election of Barack Obama portended positive new directions.  Young people were beginning to recognize how antagonistic and dangerous the status quo is to their own long-term interests.  Their outlook is naturally solipsistic, but they can be surprisingly alert and intelligent, and they are becoming increasingly aware that their future well-being is being threatened by the status quo of wars, wasteful consumerism, Peak Oil, corrupt corporatism, mismanagement, enormous debt, policies that primarily benefit older people, and unmitigated greenhouse gas emissions that are causing global warming and climate change.

Growing threats to democracy and freedom and the separation of Church and State are posed by theocratic movements and religious extremism and parochial beliefs and discriminatory self-righteousness.  Revivals in the world’s religions must be progressive, not fundamentalist or reactionary or harshly patriarchal.  Unfortunately, it seems to be the case that anxieties and fears tend to propel religious people and others away from socially valuable common sense and moderate views.  The Age of Enlightenment was also known as The Age of Reason, so it is quite curious that today there are so many assaults on reason in the name of established religions!

On Education

It is incumbent upon us to gain more thorough and accurate understandings of religious establishments and their motives.  To better understand the driving forces behind churches and social mores and their impacts on societies, I wholeheartedly advocate the teaching of a course in religious studies in all high schools.  The defining doctrines of all major religions should be studied, as well as the understandings of agnosticism and atheism.  The genesis of all these beliefs should be studied along with more primitive worldviews that were ascendant before the ‘more sophisticated’ idea of monotheism evolved. 

The curricula in a Comparative Religion course should be unbiased.  It should be based on a comprehensive assessment of the tenets of each body of doctrine and thought.  It should investigate the history of religion, the genesis of religions, and the psychology of religious belief itself.  It could be based on a textbook similar to Philosophy for Dummies, which more or less fairly analyzes the deep underpinnings of religious and philosophical beliefs, even though that book does have distinct theistic biases.  It could incorporate the fascinating insights of the book Spontaneous Evolution.

It would be valuable for young people to think about such things as the essential differences between Western religions and Eastern religions in their explanations of existence and Creation.  Jewish, Christian and Islamic religious beliefs hold that the Universe was created about 6,000 years ago and someday in the unknown future it will end.  Hindu and Buddhist beliefs hold that the Universe has always existed, and that it always will;  that it will change, but it will never end. 

Science offers a differing understanding, and an intriguing one for which there is compelling and extensive physical evidence:  the Big Bang theory.  Scientists think that the Universe will either expand forever or eventually begin to contract and collapse back into a central place in untold billions of years, maybe then ‘to Big Bang again’.  The latter outcome would no doubt involve fascinating impacts and explosions, I imagine!

The further the spiritual evolution of mankind advances, the more certain it seems to 

  me that the path to genuine religiosity does not lie through the fear of life, and the

   fear of death, and blind faith, but through striving after rational knowledge.

                                                                                                        --- Albert Einstein

It would be valid for students to explore the likelihood that all Holy Books contain the words of men, and NOT the Word of God.  The authors of Holy Books sought legitimacy in the words they wrote.  The authors of the Book of Mormon, for instance, reassured readers in a preface that the words that followed were the absolute truth.  They adduced the “evidence” of sworn testimony by a number of witnesses who claim that they’d seen “the plates and the engravings thereon” which Joseph Smith translated into the Book of Mormon.  The Golden Plates were allegedly delivered by an angel of God that came down from heaven.  “And we lie not, God bearing witness of it,” they conclude.  (It reminds me of Richard Nixon angrily declaring, “I am not a crook.”  It made one wonder what he was covering up.)  The fact that the Golden Plates mysteriously disappeared after their translation explains why such testimony was required.  Phony Moroni?!

Mark Twain took note of these Mormon absurdities, writing humorously in Roughing It: 

“Some people have to have a world of evidence before they can come anywhere in the neighborhood of believing anything, but for me when a man tells me that he has <seen the engravings which are upon the plates>” and not only that, but an angel was there at the time and saw him see them, and probably took his receipt for it, I am very far on the road to conviction, no matter whether I have ever heard of that man before or not, and even if I do not know the name of the angel, or his nationality either.”

Tears and laughter converge in both the poetic and the preposterous;  tragedy and comedy are seen to have certain unsuspected affinities.  The profane can approach the sublime.  The profound and the nonsensical may not really be all that much different!

Good and Evil and Judgment Day and ‘the Rapture’ and All That

Sometimes I feel like we inhabit a world of melting clocks like that depicted in Salvador Dali’s painting The Persistence of Memory.  Consider those who believe in an imminent Day of Doom.  Judgment Day may metaphorically be upon us, but it is not the particular judgment by God of each person when they die, as is held by Christian eschatology.  This is a real judgment which will be a reflection of future generations looking back on the economic, political, social and ecological ethos of today, and judging that we have been acting with obtuse selfishness and terrible shortsightedness and harmful ignorance and rashly risky behaviors.

The metaphorical Judgment Day of modern times will be “Biblical” in a fascinating and sad sense:  Sure enough, all future generations will suffer, and they will do so for our sins.  But in this case, the suffering will be an extremely tangible carry-forward of our shortsighted selfishness in squandering natural resources and polluting the planet, and in contributing to the destruction of habitats and altering the climate, and in helping drive many forms of life on Earth to extinction, and in saddling our descendents with enormous amounts of debt for generations to come.  

These are sins of an obtuse lack of concern for the legacy that our actions portend.  Unless we change our public policies and behaviors soon, will we suffer punishment in an afterlife of eternal Hell for our wrongdoing?  Or will it actually be our children and our descendents who will be the principal ones to do the suffering for our follies, here on Earth?

I prophesy:  There will be no End Times.  There will be no Armageddon.  THERE WILL BE NO RAPTURE.  Hucksters who claim otherwise rank up there in religious fanaticism with the most extreme of right-wing Iranian Islamic ayatollahs.  Yes, there will be more floods, hurricanes, earthquakes and tsunamis.  There will be famines and plagues and wildfires and droughts and species extinctions.  These are natural events, with a little help from human beings in those cases where anthropogenic influences have distinct impacts on outcomes.  We curiously call such natural events “Acts of God”.  Right, “and so it came to pass!”  There will of course also be more economic panics and recessions and depressions and wars and repressions;  these are the consequences of human nature and greed and folly. 

We must not despair;  we must instead act boldly to create a more salubrious fate.  We must not even think of welcoming ecological devastation as the Rapture crowd is apparently wont, according to Bill Moyers in a powerful speech that he gave about the Rapture and the dangers that such blind beliefs pose to civilization.  See the Part One essay of the Earth Manifesto, Rapture Mania: Bizarre Beliefs and Epic Epiphanies, for further related insights and the full text of the thought-provoking observations made by Bill Moyers in his talk.

The psychology of End Times beliefs is curious.  Most everyone has seen the cartoon image of a bearded, gnome-like, down-on-his-luck prophet who stands with a roughly-carved sign that says “The End Is Near”.  Oh, really, is it now?  No, a Day of Doom is not imminent;  rather, the dramatic event that approaches us is not the end of Time, but the beginning of a revolutionary transformation that will take ecological facts into account and balance gender roles and allow women and feminine values and Mother Earth to be treated with more respect in our patriarchal societies. 

Rapture believers are not simply stupid or ignorant of the realities of nature.  Their beliefs are a misguided credulousness that is like a form of madness.  Their certainties of conviction in demonstrably delusional stories, especially of malicious attributes of a deity, reflect a kind of debasement of any kind of honorable concept of God. 

Zeitgeist Movie makes a convincing case that theories about supposed End Times are actually a misinterpreted astrological allegory that misconstrue Matthew 28:20.  This film makes a compelling case that this verse of the Bible refers not to the end of the world, but to the end of the Age of Pisces and the beginning of the Age of Aquarius.  The phenomenon is known as the ‘precession of the equinoxes’.  It is caused by a slow angular wobble of the Earth.  This periodic change causes the Sun to move through all of the twelve constellations in the sky that ancients named in the Zodiac, appearing in each segment of the sky for a period of about 2,150 years. 

The Sun moved from the constellation Aires into the constellation Pisces at the time of Jesus Christ, and it will leave the constellation Pisces about the year 2150 to go into the constellation Aquarius.  I recommend watching Part I of the Zeitgeist Movie to better understand this.  But in any case, whether the Bible predicts End Times or not, it is a bizarre anthropocentric concept that does not correspond to geophysical or astrophysical realities on the scale of human time.

In fairy tales written by C.S. Lewis, like The Chronicles of Narnia, forces for good heroically defeat those of evil.  But things in the real world do not always work out this way.  ‘Evil’ people and ‘good’ people are not easy to identify, because even good and bad are relative, and there is good and bad in every person’s intentions and behaviors.  Any person who reads Cannery Row by John Steinbeck will find that the main character in the book observes that traits which lead to success in our society are often vices such as greed, meanness, egotism and self-interest -- and traits which lead to failure may be the result of virtues like kindness, honesty, openness and generosity.  Go figure!   

The Bible says that we are all paying for the terrible sin that was our due for the Fall of Man in the Garden of Eden.  This story sounds to me much more like a manipulative construct of Bible writers rather than the likely justice of a loving God.  God should have been intelligent enough to know that human nature is gravely susceptible to the powerful allure of forbidden fruit.  The penultimate skeptic, Mark Twain, sure knew about the nature of temptation.  He wrote, “There is a charm about the forbidden that makes it unspeakably desirable.”  Ooh la la!  Give me that fruit!

The comedian Bill Maher tellingly says, I would like people who think more like me to understand that it is okay to stand up and say, “We're not the crazy ones.  The crazy ones are the people with the talking snake."  Downright Religulous!

It ain't those parts of the Bible that I can't understand that bother me,

   it is the parts that I do understand.         --- Mark Twain

A Feminist Perspective

The alluring temptations of today are more mundane than the search for the knowledge of good and evil.  They often involve such things as men inappropriately trying to get their hands on women without their consent, or people like Bernie Madoff trying to get their hands on assets of other people that do not belong to them;  or people trying to profit from the undisciplined largess of the government for corrupt purposes.  Our nation is supposedly governed by fair-minded rules of law for this very reason:  we need clear rules to provide guidance for socially acceptable and socially beneficial behaviors.

In The Goddess and the Alphabet, Dr. Leonard Shlain examined the curious transition of early civilizations from Mother Goddess worship with high levels of respect for women and their roles in society to a starkly contrasting worship of a male God with accompanying restrictions on the rights and prerogatives of women.  One of the curious changes that accompanied this sexist revolution was a severe devaluation of symbols and images that were formerly highly regarded. 

Take snakes, for instance.  “Western culture has long reviled the snake, associating it with evil and temptation.  But at the dawn of civilization the snake was a positive symbol of feminine energy.  Ancient Egyptians perceived the snake as a beneficent, vital creature intimately associated with female sexuality, and, by extension, with life.  A snake’s sinuous mode of locomotion is evocative of a nubile woman’s walk and dance.”  Ooh la la, Lenny! 

Serpentine visualizations and metaphorical associations aside, snake-lover associations and women-appreciating organizations alike lament the male arrogance that has devalued the divine feminine and suppressed women’s rights and prerogatives for so many centuries.  Marshall McLuhan’s famous aphorism “the medium is the message” has a more profound meaning than we commonly comprehend.  The advent of written words, and alphabets, and the concomitant spread of literacy have had powerful affects upon our consciousness.  These developments, so positive in many ways, have ironically facilitated left-brained domineering male control, and oppression in societies which became increasingly patriarchal at the time these changes took place, according to Shlain’s provocative theory.

Perhaps we all share a degree of nostalgia of the soul for the estranged divine feminine, and a kind of regretful sadness that the heartfelt feminine aspects of each and every woman and man have been so rudely suppressed in connection with the dominion of male gods and linear thinking and the outsized influence of the analytical left hemisphere of the brain.  As if we are sitting in the flickering light of a crackling campfire that warmly illuminates the darkness with brightness and shadows, we all indistinctly see that our inner selves could feel greater equanimity and appreciation if only we could achieve some sort of transcendent epiphany of feeling and being.

Women have gained increased civil liberties and voting rights and cultural freedoms in the last century in most Western nations.  That does not seem to be true in some Muslim nations, where women are sternly required to submit to Islamic cultural conservatism.  There is a significant hangover effect in the still predominantly-patriarchal societies around the globe today.  This is a residual influence of the days when women were relegated to a lowly status wherein their prerogatives and rights were substantially circumscribed. 

Established religions and male-dominated governments oppose changes to this status quo.  Regardless of how this came to be, it is only right and fair that we now commit ourselves, and our governments and our social institutions, to the education and empowerment and fair treatment of women.  We must find ways to ensure that they are given rights and privileges that are equal to those of men, despite the howls of social conservatives.

Reason can be used to rationalize atrocities.  It can be responsible for wars and imperialism and sexism and the abuse of nature, just as it can be credited for positive movements to embrace individualism, democracy, environmental protections, stimulating prose, compelling drama and engaging philosophy.  As Plato noted in the fourth century BCE, effective individual action should be characterized by desire and passion, warmed and banked with feelings and emotions, and guided by knowledge and wisdom.  Not a bad approach, when one thinks about it!

Today, with the advent of visual mediums like films and television and YouTube, there may be an offsetting trend that allows our brains to be more aware of the evocative and affective imagery of the right hemisphere.  This may be contributing to a valuable and salubrious feminization of our cultures.  There may even be a parallel between this trend of ‘feminization’ in our societies and a similar trend in the evolving ideas within the Earth Manifesto.  Since nobody has ever read the entire Earth Manifesto, this theory will have to wait for its eventual corroboration until after its ideas become better known to the general public and historians of literature and philosophy.

Bizarre Concepts, Concluded

“Strange … a God who could make good children as easily as bad, yet preferred to make bad ones;  who made them prize their bitter life, yet stingily cut it short;  who mouths Golden Rules and forgiveness multiplied seventy times seven, but invented Hell;  who mouths morals to other people and has none himself;  who frowns upon crimes yet commits them all;  who created man without invitation, then tries to shuffle the responsibility for man's acts upon man, instead of honorably placing it where it belongs, upon himself;  and finally with altogether divine obtuseness, invites this poor, abused slave to worship him!” 

                                                                                                           --- Mark Twain

The great Greek novelist Nikos Kazantzakis imagined the first sermon of Jesus on a hillside above the Lake of Gennesaret in Galilee, in his book The Last Temptation of Christ.  “Jesus’ voice was tranquil and wavering;  a gawky bird he was, struggling to twitter for the first time;  and his eyes, instead of burning, caressed.”  He said, “Forgive me, my brothers, but I shall speak in parables.  The sower went out to sow his field, and as he sowed, one seed fell on the road and the birds came and ate it.  Another fell on stones, found no soil in which to be nourished, and withered away.  Another fell on thorns, and the thorns grew up and choked it.  Finally, another fell on good soil;  and it took root, and sprouted an ear, and brought forth grain and fed mankind.  He among you who has ears to hear, let him hear!” 

Listen!!  Jesus’ message was “Love one another!”  “God is love”, he said.  “He is our Father.  He will leave no pain unconsoled, no wound unhealed.  However much we suffer pain and hunger in this world, by that much, and more, shall we be filled in heaven.  Rejoice, for blessed are the poor, the meek, and the wronged;  it is for them that God has prepared the kingdom of heaven.”  A voice jeered at the prophet’s words:  “Pie in the sky when we die!” 

Laughter ensued.  The message, nonetheless, of blessing and redemption and reward appealed to the poor, the meek and the wronged, who abounded in those days, as they do today.  Later, Nikos Kazantzakis imagined Jesus going alone off into the desert, seeking God.  He finally realized the terrifying truth that had eluded him his whole life:  he was the Son of God!  Yikes!  Really?  Wow!  I feel sorry for his Mother Mary, who he abandoned!

The struggle for survival was harsh in those days.  The land was arid, and most people were desperately poor, so they hungered for a Messiah, a Savior.  Prophets and false prophets abounded.  Perhaps, Judas thought, the Messiah was the entire people.  In our conflict-strewn, dog-eat-dog world, we lose sight of the simple fact that by uniting, much can be accomplished.  Unity in narrowly-shared evangelical dogmatic beliefs is a thin and precarious and doomed means of achieving a lasting unity that would be sufficient to save us all.  On the other hand, unity in universal understandings and reasoned convictions and sensible commitments to the common good would likely provide a much sturdier framework upon which to pin our hopes for a healthy and sustainable existence.

If God created anything, he also created wine, women and song;  Eat, drink and be merry!  Of course it is true that over-indulgence in wine can harm one’s health, and women may not want a man, and eventual bitterness or suffering or despair do not inspire a very happy song.  But those who evangelize about the kingdom of heaven overlook the woes that are partially caused by religious leaders who collaborate with the powers-that-be.  These leaders help, all too often, to deceive people into forgetting the beneficence provided by nature and the providential ecosystem services of a healthy planet.  The real purpose of human beings is lost in the rabble of zealous and gullible believers in God, and in the certainty of conviction.  What is our real purpose?  To live in the here and now, to enjoy and appreciate the authentic in life, to nurture the spirit as well as the body, and to do so in balance and moderation;  and to have mercy and forgiveness for others as well as for oneself;  AND to leave a legacy that renews rather than destroys the hopes and well-being of all in future generations.

Maybe Mormonism?

A final observation about religion:  John Krakauer indicated, as I recall, in his compelling book Under the Banner of Heaven, that in the early days of the Mormon Church, anyone and everyone was empowered to receive revelations from God.  This quickly became unmanageable, as one might imagine.  It was probably like a bad dream of omnipotence begetting impotence, or a proverbial bad trip on LSD.  Maybe it was more accurately like the wildly artistic expressions of people at the annual Burning Man festival in the Black Rock Desert of Nevada, where tens of thousands of revelers gather in an astonishingly harmonious annual expression of anarchic creativity, community, fire and wild abandon.

Mormon leaders in their early Church apparently found it much too hard to control the flock with this democratic approach to revelation.  So a revelation came from God to Church leaders that indicated only the leader of the Church could receive revelations.  How convenient is that?!  Curiously, leader Joseph Smith, after being married for many years and just possibly having become a bit bored with the charms of the Missus, suddenly had a brilliant revelation in the year 1831.  He claimed to have been told by God that he could have as many wives as he wanted.  Oh, I can just imagine what a hell of a good time he had enjoying younger women for a while thereafter.  It turns out that Joseph Smith probably had a good number of his 33 wives before the revelation, and that he was just ‘covering his ass’.  Who knows? 

But God soon thereafter revealed to Joseph’s wife that she could have as many husbands as she wanted.  Horns on the man!  Predictably, darned if God didn’t set the record straight the very next night with a revelation to Joseph that only men could have multiple spouses.  Whether any of this story is actually true, it points out an allegorical fact that seems true:  egalitarianism always seems to suffer at the hands of the patriarchal, and those people who are obsessed with control and dominion tend to unjustly prevail.  And made-up stories seem to cotton suspiciously to the motives of those who make them up!

Maybe presidential candidate Mitt Romney, or Warren Jeffs who is currently incarcerated in a Texas prison for sex crimes, can provide a more honest and more accurate understanding than my satirical one regarding polygamy and the control traits of Mormon men in the Mormon faith.  I do want to be fair.  But the Church of the Latter Day Saints strongly opposed religious pluralism in the 1800’s.  They recognized that mankind is challenged to govern himself, so they concluded that the best of all possible worlds would be one in which Mormons established overarching power and eliminated the Babel of voices, and the perplexity of choices, by making everyone bow to the orthodoxy of their particular beliefs.  Most people have strongly differing and more sensible points of view!  Utah, meanwhile, is the most staunchly Republican and anti-progressive of the fifty American states.  The role of the Mormon Church in lobbying against human rights for gay people is shameful and wrong.  Humbug!

The Power of Positive Thinking Leads Us toward a Conclusion

The day after Halloween, November first, is All Souls’ Day in many sects of Christianity.  This date is also known as All Saints’ Day, and as Dia de los Muertos.  In commemoration of this day, people sometimes celebrate in New Mexico and some other pagan locales by constructing and then burning a giant ‘Zozobra’.  This is a tall marionette effigy that is said to represent “Old Man Gloom”.  By burning such a figure, people symbolically incinerate their personal worries and troubles and gloom in the hopefully healing flames.  Recent years have been extraordinarily difficult ones for many, many people, so let’s all imagine a little Zozobra conflagration of our own -- one in which we ceremonially project our troubles into the heavens and get rid of them!  (Good luck!)

A sedulous philosophic sibyl aspiring to attain the status of a percipient prophetess recently received a vivid vision in which she saw a transcendent truth.  Seductive reasoning, she realized, can get lost in a fog of words and a maze of quibbles, and the essence of what is important can be concealed or obfuscated.  Do me the favor of reviewing more of the essays in the Earth Manifesto, and let me know what changes might be made to make it more meaningful and clear!

Conclusion

The Earth Manifesto is certainly not a holy scripture, but its ideas deserve reverence more than the narrow parochial patriarchal doctrines and propaganda of most other myth-engendered holy books of old, in my humble opinion.  Together, understanding the ideas in this manuscript, humanity could improve the collective prospects of our kind now and far into the future for decades and centuries to come.

I believe that we must all seek redemption and salvation, while we can, by choosing to act in ways that are fairer, more intelligent, more ecumenical and more responsible.  Let’s ‘pay forward’ some goodwill, and take precautionary actions to ensure that our legacy is a more positive one than is implied by our current trajectory!  

Rejoice in the world, for every one of us transubstantiates food into energy, and we can choose to channel this energy into enthusiasm and laughter and love and productivity and positive social action, rather than into complaints or anger or hatred or destruction.

I seek the truth, elusive though it may be

Explain it to me once again, slowly, honestly, plausibly

And elaborate as you see fit, for I am patient and willing to believe

Tell it to me as it is -- accurately, relevantly and not merely glibly.

The evolution of Creation myths has a rich and fascinating history

A marvelous reflection of the increasing sophistication of human conceptions

From Babylonian Marduk, Hindu Brahma, Egyptian Ra, and Greek Titans to modern God

And on to scientific perspectives, revelations and other various prophetic perceptions.

Thanks for reading!                  

       Truly,

          Dr. Tiffany B. Twain  

            Hannibal, Missouri  

              Contact at SaveTruffulaTrees@hotmail.com

 Written primarily before Easter Sunday, April 4, 2010, with substantial updates in 2011 and 2012