OK. Here’s the deal. We are people – organisms. We are not God. We are not even atheists, because we all know that we are a part of Life. Whatever created the laws of physics – that’s what made life possible – it wasn’t us. Probably it was God; or maybe physics. Not the science or the word but the real thing.
So we people have pretty good brains. We figured out how the laws of physics function to make life possible in our biosphere. (OK, more or less figured it out, we know enough to do no harm.) So that means we can use the laws of physics to do things and make things. That’s technology. Technology can not change the laws of physics. It is also not God.
A lot of people don’t like what we have been doing with our technologies. Destroying things. A lot of people are blaming science, can you believe it? Science didn’t destroy anything. People and their technology did/are.
But we thought science had failed. We have to blame someone/thing, never ourselves, and so we switched to “social science” which is the study of how people function. This really is what we need to know, isn’t it. Because actually it is people who are destroying things, so we need to know how to benevolently control societies so the societies will stop using technologies to destroy things.
But that’s not how we are using our knowledge of either basic science or “social sciences.” Now that we have both, we are using both sets of knowledge to destroy things — when we could be using both to save ourselves within our bubble of life on this earth.
Obviously basic science is not enough and “social science” is not enough to save us. We need something more. I’ve spent the past ten (oops 11) years studying what that something more could be, and I’ve concluded it is something we had all along, if only we would believe in ourselves and educate ourselves. That is compassion. Obviously, compassion by itself is not enough, because we have had that all along. What could be enough – if we want it – is our innate compassion informed by an understanding of our knowledge of basic science of how life is possible, and our social science of how people function.
Now I am not God and you are not God. We agreed about that. And I also think we can agree that one of the most basic capacities contained within every normal human genome is compassion. It’s how humans always have related to the living world. So after all these millennia, the answer was right inside of you (and me) all along. But the problem is that compassion itself is not enough, because have added two levels of function between us and the ecosystem: our political structures (level two above us) and the corposystem (level three). These levels are not based in our “right brain” genomic/instinctive knowledges, such as compassion, hatred, fear and sadness. They are built around “right brain” intellectual learning. That’s probably why quite a few people don’t like intellectual, but in fact we live in it and we won’t be able to control it unless we understand it’s most basic qualities.
First, we (each) need to know the basics of how God set up the laws of physics to work. Because physics does not function according to the inborn human values – it is not written in our genomes as is compassion — and we can not stop the killing without knowing at least the most basic bare bones biology of what the living ecosystem needs to stay alive.
You think you do? Great, then add that to compassion unto the 7th generation and you’ve got the key to human survival on this lovely earth. It’s the challenge we each face, individually. To deal with our own selves (level one), our families and social contacts (level two), the corposystem (level three) and the ecosystem (level four), in ways that increase the benefits for all the living earth.
That’s enough of a responsibility for one person, and the hardest part is nothing to do with the God question. We are basically all on the same wavelength there.
The hard part is figuring out what is a “benefit” and what is a “harm.” We certainly cannot depend upon George, the government or the corposystem or any other single authority to decide what is best for us all. We must each do some study of how things really function at least at the level of the ecosystem (because without it we surely die). If we don’t use this “left-brain” knowledge to inform our compassion, we will end up doing good today that will cause harm for tomorrow. That’s what we have been doing unawares, and it’s time to change.
You can’t make anyone else do this, so it’s in your hands. You can decide what kind of world you want to live in and live your own life accordingly, understanding the impact that your decisions have on future generations. No easy answers, nobody to blame. But it is a choice that any person can make. The better part of our inborn human values, plus the better parts of our factual, provable human knowledge base even when we don’t like the facts, plus the courage to make the choice. That’s all there is to it.
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