One blogger posted, “Will debt forgiveness be the main policy push from Occupy Wall Street?” (read the article)

Another posts, “As more of an Occupy Wall Street person, my fear is that if there is no clear agenda set soon or if politicians do not soon respond, the energy might dissipate into who knows what.” (read the article)

And another posts, “…as OWS keeps reminding us, they never had a cohesive message to begin with…” (read the article)

According to a Yahoo! News blogger, “Forty-three percent of respondents to a new CBS/New York Times survey said they agree with Occupy Wall Street’s goals, while, 27 percent said they disagree. Thirty percent were unsure.” (read the article)

Pretty good ratings for a movement that doesn’t know what it wants. Or does it? Maybe we take lack of articulation for lack of definite intent. That would probably be a mistake.

Eugene Robinson at The Washington Post seems to get it. Occupy lies deeper.

If Americans were to realize they’ve been the victims of Republican-style redistribution — stealing from the poor to give to the rich — the whole political atmosphere might change. I believe that’s one reason why the Occupy Wall Street protests have struck such a nerve.

Indeed, the CBO report says that even the poorest households saw at least a little income growth. Why is it any of their business that the high-earners in the top 1 percent saw astronomical income growth? Isn’t this just sour grapes?

No, for two reasons. First, the system is rigged. Wealthy individuals and corporations have disproportionate influence over public policy because of the often decisive role that money plays in elections. If the rich and powerful act in their self-interest, as conservative ideologues believe we all should do, then the rich and powerful’s share of income will continue to soar.

Second, and more broadly, the real issue is what kind of nation we want to be.

(read the article)

Everyone knows that the system is rigged. Even those who like the rigging don’t deny it; they just won’t admit that it’s pathological. Disease or not, the rigging is deep and well-established. Occupy is a systemic reaction to a systemic condition in the depths of our social nerves. Such reactions don’t just disappear. If repressed, they simply pop up–or blow up–elsewhere.

According to Robinson, maybe the real issue is not what the Occupiers want, but what we want. Maybe we should be asking ourselves the questions. The Occupy movements are forcing just that kind of introspection precisely because they lack agenda and demands… and won’t go away.

The lesson for us is, “Start listening, because you are not hearing yet; and start looking, because you haven’t seen it yet.”

You haven’t heard or seen until you understand others from their perspectives, given their values and their ways of sorting things out. Short of that, you only heard or saw what you wanted to. We want the Occupiers to explain themselves, but we have asked questions framed for our convenience, to help us sort these people out on our terms.

When my boys were growing up and felt ill, they would tell me, “Daddy, I don’t feel good.” I didn’t send them away to write up a list of specific symptoms, let alone treatment options. “Come back when you can tell me what you want.”  They knew what they wanted. They wanted it to stop.

America, your children feel gravely ill. Forty-three percent run fevers, and another thirty percent are marginal. They recognize the sickness in others, in their compatriots, by their expressions, their tones, their eyes. General malaise is difficult to articulate, but its fever is spreading and rising. This one happens to be powerful enough to support growing conflagrations in hundreds of major cities, now over more than forty days and counting. Where it all will lead is less important than what led it here.

Something draws them together. Something sustains their solidarity in the absence of handles we wish they would present, so that we could get a grasp. Who asks what that is? Don’t we find it remarkable that heterogeneous crowds have formed, occupied, and continue to self-organize in spite of a glaring lack of the usual cohesive accoutrements? This doesn’t fit our mold; but don’t be distracted by looking for what’s not there. Pay attention to what is going on: something that lies deeper than demands, agendas, or even words. It won’t go away until the fever meets a cure.

The Occupiers know why they’re there. They aren’t bothered by lack of demands or agenda; just talk to them! It doesn’t bother them to deny giving politicians and we as political animals what we  want. Maybe this isn’t a political movement. Maybe this is a human, democratic movement. It looks like one.

It’s not hard to see that we have lost touch with democracy, because this is what it looks like, but we insist there must be something else. The Founding Fathers also struggled to articulate agenda and demands, but no one disagreed that there was a need for them. Maybe the same questions and complaints were leveled against them, at first. It takes time to figure things out in a true democracy, especially if you’re green at it and have to figure out figuring out. It’s harder than paying someone else to do it for you. Get used to it.

The British didn’t get an agenda with a list of demands; they got a Declaration. Stop asking Occupy for agenda and demands, and start hearing their declaration. Start seeing what is happening before your eyes. If you can’t hear it and you can’t see it, you wouldn’t understand agendas and demands even if someone articulated them to you.

The Founding Fathers envisioned a government “instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.” Abraham Lincoln called it a “…government of the people, by the people, for the people…” Future generations will look back on their work as the beginning of a transition.

We now enter a new phase of that transition, leading to a New Declaration of Independence and a New Constitution. They won’t mention a “government of…” or consent from the governed, because the government will be us.

We the People of the United States will govern.

If that bothers you, your judgment is premature at best, because you have no idea yet what I mean by an idiot or why I think that we are a couple of them. For all you know, what I mean could be absolutely right. You just don’t like the sound of it, and you don’t like what it means to you. That is, you don’t like what it would mean to you if you had to agree. On that basis, you might already have decided to disagree, maybe adamantly. Your initial reaction to being called an idiot might be, “No, I am not!” or something like that, and I’m sure that I’d agree with you if I understood what you meant by the idiot that you are not and why you think you are not one. But the fact would remain that you still have no clue about what I mean.

I am always intrigued when I encounter people who don’t like what they hear and reject it solely for that reason, without taking the time to find out if they heard correctly, let alone to consider if value lies in what they don’t like hearing. They seem oblivious to the possibility that the speaker meant something other than what they took it to mean. Especially if they hear something that pushes some negative emotional button in their idiotic psyches, they react like simpletons and, in one fell swoop, conclude that how they took it was how it was meant, and how it was meant was wrong. If the speaker objects that they misunderstood, they can be so smug as to argue that the speaker doesn’t know his own mind: how they took it was what the speaker really meant. Even apparently intelligent people who don’t subscribe to such crude and archaic paradigms like “right and wrong” backslide into crudeness and stupidity when you push the right buttons. I have found that this is surprisingly easy to do.

If you’re still reading, my rant might seem farcical, even idiotic, haha! That’s OK; I don’t deny it, but I hope you’ll read on. Or, you might give me some tentative credit and wonder if my opening claims were rhetorical, and if I’ll disclose my reasons for trying to provoke you. In fact, calling us idiots was rhetorical, but only partially. I knew that it might get a reaction, and I definitely wanted to get a reaction out of you. But thinking that I don’t really mean that we’re idiots would be a mistake. I genuinely do think that we’re idiots. We are completely inept, bumbling, fucking morons. I know that I am. I’m pretty sure that you are, too, and I’m not even sure who you are. There’s a slight chance that you aren’t as much of an idiot as I am, because there’s a slight chance that you are more aware than I am of how thoroughly idiotic we are. Barring that, you are every bit as much an idiot as I am, maybe worse. In fact, if you feel offended at this point, I am quite sure that you are a worse idiot than me.

I’m not a hater. I don’t throw insults around to hurt anyone. Insults are unpleasant but necessary in societies that put inordinate energy into protecting ego. Saving face is a game in which we all agree to pay attention to the pretty masks and not peer behind them, or even to pretend that they aren’t masks with something else behind them. We wouldn’t hide our faces if we truly liked them and thought that others would like them, too. We wouldn’t feel a need to save them if they made us feel powerful. As it is, we must feel fairly ugly and weak. I don’t use insults to rip masks off faces, but to remind people that their masks are just masks that might be hiding something worth seeing. After all, our faces are all that’s really there to see, ugly and weak or not. I’m not after advantage, either, and I don’t particularly like people getting pissed off at me, which they invariably do.

I’d much rather have an enjoyable time, but I find that awfully hard to do with so many ego elephants in the room shielding those who cower behind them, the very people I’d like to enjoy the time with. Insults can prod the cowering out from behind cover briefly, until they regain their composure, throw their masks back up to save their faces, and demand that I ignore them and pay attention to their elephants. Back they go to cowering behind their elephants, resenting my intrusion on their safety. I admit that I enjoy the sense of power that insults sometimes afford. I recognize this glee as part of my juvenile idiocy; it’s my fault and it doesn’t please me. But worse than that is how fucking easy it is to offend people. You can avoid it only with concerted care: lots of energy invested to avoid pushing buttons and comply with arcane, archaic etiquettes, prescreening everything for unintentional insults that might offend idiots who refuse to lift a finger to find out if the insult they felt was actually what you meant. That’s OK, and I’m not complaining. I’ve actually gotten quite good at navigating and filtering, so it’s not much of an issue anymore. I just think that the whole scene is idiotic. 

After all that, what do I mean by “idiot,” if anything meaningful at all? Why insult apparently intelligent people–after all, I can write and you can read–by calling us idiots? Idiots compared to what? That last question serves as another litmus test for idiocy, because many people–maybe even you–dismiss out of hand the question whether there’s any chance that they are idiots, plugging their noses against it like some noxious odor. How can you know whether or not you’re an idiot if you refuse to entertain the question? And how can you answer the question if you have no reference for what does or does not constitute an idiot? But maybe you do have a reference. Before I get to what I mean by “idiot,” let’s look at several ways that people–maybe even you–define idiocy right out of their realms of possibility.

Maybe you think you’re not an idiot because you graduated, hold down a job, and have an IQ above 70. Maybe you think you’re not an idiot because you’re a successful professional with a 6-digit salary, a few houses, a bunch of cars, a yacht, and you spend your vacation time in the Azores. Maybe you think you’re not an idiot because you’re filthy rich, or because you’re obscenely intelligent, or you climbed Everest, or you won a marathon. Maybe you think you’re not an idiot because you’re sizzling hot and everyone wants you. Or, maybe you use a sliding scale: you’re not an idiot because you’re better than all the idiots who are more stupid than you are.

My reference for idiocy is something else, i.e., none of the above. We’re all amazingly adept at lowering our bars to levels we feel competent to clear. Lowering the bar is idiotic. What if clearing our bars at such low levels is sadly inconsequential? Pretending that it’s more, not caring, and deliberately ignoring the question are just more idiocy. We are idiots to continue glibly after having failed so miserably at life and having hurt so many people we cared about, if we even cared at all. We are idiots to pretend that we have everything well in hand and to believe that the future will be better than the past. What makes us sure that it will be better, other than idiotically blind faith? How do you know? It could easily be much worse. We are even more idiotic if we delude ourselves into thinking that we haven’t failed, didn’t hurt so many, aren’t pretending and, on the basis of such idiocy, believe that the future will be rosy. If we haven’t failed, why aren’t we happier? Why, in fact, aren’t we exuberant? Why do we live on antidepressants and antipsychotics? Why don’t more people like and love us? Why haven’t we been wildly successful; did we choose to avoid it? Why do we tolerate or even hate our jobs, our partners, our lives, and pretty much everyone we know, with just a few exceptions? Why do the reasons that our lives are not far better than this all seem due to the fault of conditions, events, and other people–anything other than us? Are we just tools, just idiots, or both?

Maybe you are one of the lucky ones who doesn’t tolerate or hate jobs, partners, or life itself, at least not at the moment. Maybe you aren’t a tool and don’t feel idiotic. Maybe luck wasn’t even involved, but your wonderful life is the result of hard work, savvy, initiative, and above all, integrity. Maybe you are living in a heaven on earth right now. If so, you are one of the few, and I encourage you to enjoy it while it lasts. I truly hope you will. But you are no angel. What you have now could be gone tomorrow, taken away easily and in spite of all your hard work, savvy, initiative, and integrity. You, like me, have made terrible mistakes, abused people in your ignorance, selfishness, and stupidity, and in spite of your best intentions and efforts, are likely to do it again; maybe not the ignorance, stupidities, selfishness, and abuses you are now aware of, but others you still remain clueless about. If the gods are smiling on you now, they smile on a happy idiot who deserves far less, maybe even far worse. Be grateful, but don’t fool yourself.

Maybe you are a child or a young person, in which case you haven’t yet failed miserably at life or hurt many people you cared about. You probably don’t pretend that you have everything well in hand. You don’t want to be an idiot, but much of the time you probably feel like one. After all, your life comes replete with adults of varying eagerness who confirm your idiocy this way and that. If you’re honest and haven’t been too badly abused, you are full of questions and still have hope for the future.

I wish that we adults had better answers for you, but we don’t. We can’t tell you how to be happy. We can’t tell you what’s right or what’s wrong. We can’t tell you how to live in peace. We can’t even tell you how to find “the right one.” Most of us prove, year after year by the inevitable failure of our relationships, that we didn’t have a clue who the right one was. Most of the rest of us prove that we didn’t have a clue by the awful marriages and abusive relationships we remain in, desperately struggling to hold them together. A few of us have marriages that aren’t awful or relationships that aren’t abusive, but we can’t tell you how to replicate our meager successes, because we don’t really know how they happened. We pretend that we do, though.

All we adult idiots act like we know pretty much everything, and we’ll tell you how to be happy, what’s right and wrong, how to live in peace, how to find the right one, and how to have a successful relationship once you do. We are idiotic enough to believe that you’ll fall for it. We even force you to listen, at first, and then when you’re too big and smart to be physically forced, we force you to pay us to tell you more on pain of remaining uneducated idiots if you won’t. We could behave like intelligent adults and enlighten you out of the goodness of our hearts, but idiots don’t behave like that. So sorry. Maybe you won’t fall for it, because you know that we can’t contradict, fight, and kill each other like we do and still know what we’re talking about. If you do fall for it, you’ll become an idiot just like the rest of us.

I wish there were better news for our children. In America, we force them through an education system that touts ideals like intelligence, democracy, and freedom while it herds them into urban concentration camps where they get daily browbeatings with the proofs of their idiocy, given no voice, and stripped of human rights. They are children, after all; what rights could they possibly have beyond shelter, hot meals, and freedom from physical and sexual abuse? When some do get abused, the first reaction by adults on the scene is to hush it up and deny it until it can be denied no longer. Every enraged parent whose child was abused by someone they trusted has witnessed first hand the denial and the instinctive rush to cover up. And even though the world is now a safer place than it was 100 years ago for some children’s bodies, it’s still open season on all of their minds and self-esteems.

My advice to children and young people: steer clear of adults who claim to know. They don’t. They are idiots. Look at what they’ve done to the place. Listen to them at the risk of becoming one yourself. Instead find people, young or old, who openly admit their idiocy and ignorance, who still have hope that we can help each other and learn something together. If we truly knew so much and this is what it got us, it wasn’t worth knowing. We must discover other knowledge, wisdom that will give us better results. It’s a daunting task, but there are such people here and there in the world. Find them and try. To die trying would be better than succumbing to assimilation into the ranks of idiots.

I must not neglect all you believers out there. Maybe you have faith, so you tell yourself that you’re not an idiot, because you are forgiven for your miserable failures and the people you hurt. God or some higher power or principle has everything well in hand and will take care of your future, ensuring that it will be better than the past. You keep up a steady diet of encouragement to bolster your faith: readings, services, group sessions, inspiring and edifying activities, and lots and lots of talking. For your faith, because you have found God or the Truth or the Source or the Divine, you excuse yourself from being an idiot: innocence by association. If so, your resort to the very evidence of your idiocy, citing it as the reason that you are not an idiot, is ironic. You might not be an idiot for believing, but you’re an idiot not to realize that, compared to God or the Truth or the Source or the Divine, we’re all nothing but idiots, fools, and incompetents, fumbling our way through life while we rely on a higher power that we need to keep reassuring ourselves will keep it all from falling apart. If you find your comparative idiocy insulting, it shows how little you have understood and how unfamiliar you are with real faith. If your faith were stronger, it wouldn’t need so much bolstering. If you recognized your own idiocy, a door to real faith might open to you.

I have reasons for being so insulting and dismal, reasons that might be less than clear. I’d like to clarify two points now, if you still care to know.

First, I wanted to point out the incredibly high level of denial that is the norm in our society. If you weren’t in denial, you wouldn’t feel insulted by being called an idiot. The insult stings because the dart hits home. If you were sure that you’re not an idiot, the dart would just bounce off. If you dropped your denial instead of feeling insulted, you would look at the barely tolerable conditions we live in and realize that we’ve been idiots to tolerate them. If you’re tempted to object that our conditions are not all that bad and resort to citing even worse conditions that others live in, such as those in the “developing world,” you only prove my point with your dodge. Better doesn’t necessarily mean good. Better could just mean not quite so bad, a little less awful, or a short step shy of abysmal. Pretending that this is as good as it gets, or even that it’s good at all, is an example of idiotically lowering the bar, which brings me to my second point.

We have been abused by others and by ourselves. Denial, lowering the bar, defending the rejectable, and clinging to exceptions in hopes that we can escape the rules are classic symptoms of ongoing abuse. When abuse victims reject their victimization, cease regarding themselves as victims, and realize that they do not need to tolerate further abuse–that they in fact should not tolerate it–they commonly have reactions that include rage against their abusers and a sense that they were idiots to let the abuse happen, even more so for letting it go on for as long as it did. At that point, former victims have no problem admitting that they were idiots and that they still retain the capacity for idiocy. Idiocy doesn’t insult them; it’s just a matter of fact.

I see very little rage expressed among us. I see plenty of denial, lowering the bar, defending the rejectable, and clinging to exceptions in hopes that we can escape the rules that we wake up to every day: this world is a mess, and our lives are in a mess. We go on day after difficult day in hope that we’re mistaken, that it really isn’t as bad as it seems, that things will all turn out alright, somehow, and that it only seems terrible because we don’t see it properly. We haven’t tried hard enough yet, but The Dream can still be reached if only we put more effort into it, and everything would be so much easier for all of us if everyone else would put more effort into it, too. Such is the thinking of the abused and disempowered. And the wealth keeps on evaporating upward, and the abuse keeps showering down, as surely as weather. Some of us are determined to disrupt that cycle. Many others have already despaired, believing that nothing will improve by much. Both views testify that the best efforts of the human race have yielded results that only idiots would choose and only idiots would tolerate. If we didn’t choose them and have no choice other than to tolerate them, then we’re idiot tools who can do no better and don’t know how to become anything more. Either that, or we are hellspawn and this hell is what we wanted.

As long as we deny our idiocy, we deny ourselves the odd, surprising secret that only those who face up to themselves discover. Only when we admit our stupidity do we take the first step towards wisdom. Only when we stop denying what we see can we see well enough to actually improve what we find. Only when we stop pretending that hell is the best that we can do will we actually look up toward heaven with real hope–and real possibility–of reaching it.

I believe that there is real hope, real possibility, and that we don’t need to settle for the hell we now live in; but we’ll see neither hope nor possibility if we insist that this hell is not so bad, considering. We have a choice. We can weep and gnash our teeth now in honest admission of the hell that our idiocy created and perpetuates, or we can weep and gnash our teeth later, when we realize that it’s too late to do anything about it. Choose wisely.

I spent a little time on a philosophy forum the last few days. I finally took the time to crystallize a few things that have bugged me for a long time about the God debate. My post appears as it does on the forum in response to the original post, “God Refutation,” with CAPS instead of italics. Hope it doesn’t hurt your ears!

I’d love to hear what you think.

=============

I’ve followed the God/no-God debate since the early 1970s. The most puzzling thing about the debate, besides its dialog-of-the-deaf characteristic, is an assumption SHARED by both sides.

That is, EVERYONE seems to think that God is unable to speak for him/her/itself.

Even someone as sharp as Bertrand Russell assumed this. In a 1959 BBC TV interview, he explained how he became an atheist:

BBC Interviewer: Well you were brought up, of course, as a Christian. When did you first decide that you did not want to remain a believer in the Christian ethic?

Russell: I never decided that I didn’t want to remain a believer, I decided… Between the ages of 15 and 18, I spent almost all my spare time thinking about Christian dogmas and trying to find out whether there was any reason to believe them. And by the time I was 18, I had discarded the last of them.

Bertrand Russell, in a 1959 BBC TV interview at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2aPOMUTr1qw, at 1:53 into video

Apparently Russell made his decision about Christianity, and with it the existence of God, based on what people said and wrote about the matter: dogmas. What people said about God made no sense, ERGO, God does not exist. Whaaa? Please Sir Russell, tell us you had better reason than THAT! (I know, unfair, he can’t respond.)

Why, when investigating the question of God, do people spend all their time asking OTHER PEOPLE if they have evidence or if it makes sense to believe that God is there? To illustrate, if a guy really wants to find out if a girl is as cool as she seems, does he just go around asking her acquaintances what they think and never bother talking to her?

People who engage in the God debate seem strangely God-avoidant, no matter which side they take.

A couple of basic problems with BOTH SIDES of many of the arguments:

• Even if NO ONE has ANY evidence that God is there, we CANNOT conclude from that alone that God does not exist. Lack of evidence never precluded the existence of anything. Even if we are absolutely sure that we should find some evidence and we find none, lack of expected evidence DOES NOT guarantee the non-existence of anything. After all, our expectations could be wrong or we might overlook what’s there. Lack of evidence more directly relates to our cognitive limitations (i.e., IGNORANCE,) not the limits of existence, whether it pertains to God or faster-than-light neutrinos that according to prevailing theory were “impossible” until we found out (purportedly) that they aren’t impossible, they are actual.

• Even if NO ONE can make sense of the existence of God, i.e., if it makes NO SENSE to ANYONE, we CANNOT conclude from that alone that God does not exist. Our ability to comprehend a matter has never prevented anything from existing and behaving exactly as it does beyond the limits of our ability to comprehend it. (There’s that danged ignorance thing again…)

WORST CASE, God could be hiding from you. Just you. If so, you would never know it, you would have no evidence of God’s existence, and it might not even make sense to you. God could exist and all your arguments why God does not exist might make irresistable, incontrovertible sense, not because God doesn’t exist, but because God decided to hide from you. It wouldn’t be the first or last time that a human being was ABSOLUTELY SURE that he or she was right while in fact being horrendously wrong.

THE KICKER: There is a testable method of determining God’s existential status. I have almost NEVER heard this simple, verifiable method mentioned in an argument over God’s existence. (I almost simply said NEVER, but hey, maybe I forgot a couple of times. I can’t remember ANY.) It’s EASY, SIMPLE, and GUARANTEED to produce an outcome: Ask God to show you if he/she/it exists or not.

Only three outcomes are possible:

1. Nothing happens; you get no response. (No response/effect/result is still a significant outcome.)
2. Something happens to indicate that God does NOT exist.
3. Something happens to indicate that God DOES exist.

Those outcomes alone don’t prove anything. God could still be hiding, or you could be deluded, and that holds for ALL 3 outcomes:

a. If nothing happens, it could be beause you are deluded. God might have done his/her/its best to inform you of his/her/its existence, but you could be so far-gone that you think it’s just the wind.

b. If something happens to indicate that God does not exist, you could still be deluded. It might be a brain fart. You might be mistaken. God might still exist or not exist. Your brain fart might be irrelevant to the question even though you mistakenly think it’s significant. Or it might be proof that God does not exist. How can you be sure?

c. If something happens to indicate that God DOES exist, you of course might be deluded (just ask an atheist!)

d. If something happens to indicate that God DOES exist, God MIGHT STILL BE HIDING FROM YOU. In this case, God is a deceiver. Maybe he/she/it deliberately caused you to think that he/she/it exists as ONE kind of non-existent being PRECISELY so that you will never discover that he/she/it is actually a COMPLETELY DIFFERENT kind of being that does exist. Getting God wrong is not much better than not getting anything about God at all.

Note that those considerations are NOT UNIQUE to the question of God’s existence. They are the same kinds of deliberations that everyone goes through before they resort to picking petals off a daisy. “Does he/she love me?” is just as provable or unprovable as “Does God exist?” and prone to the same epistemological quandaries. (Make no mistake, the question of God’s existence is PRIMARILY an epistemological conundrum, NOT a metaphysical one. It’s about how we know–or don’t know–what is really there.)

Fortunately, there are testable and rational ways to investigate all this. This forum is not the place to elaborate on them. I didn’t point these things out as preamble to discuss details, but simply to give examples showing how LITTLE most people have thought the matter through RATIONALLY, atheists included. Read a little Chris Hedges, and you’ll see how fundamentalism and “sky-hook” airy-nothing faith aren’t unique to “believers.”

MY POINT IS VERY SIMPLE. If God exists–whatever “god” might be or mean–God should at least be capable of proving it TO YOU, to YOUR satisfaction given YOUR unique, personal requirements for convictions of that sort.

WHY NOT ASK GOD for proof?

Why doesn’t doing this occur to most people? My suspicion has long been that one or both of two reasons are behind blindness to the option:

SUSPICION 1 - The person is not genuinely interested in the question of God’s existence, but instead cares primarily about the opinions of OTHER PEOPLE on the matter. In other words, to them the real, naked question is:

Question A. “Can I prove God’s existence to everyone else?”

not

Question B. “Can I prove God’s existence to myself?”

Two very different questions. If a person’s real question is Question A, it makes a lot of sense for him or her to spend a bunch of time and energy arguing about it with other people, regardless of which side of the question his or her opinion falls on. It also clarifies his or her relative priorities. Question A probably holds little interest to any God that might actually exist. E.g., That cool girl you decided to approach will behave quite differently if she thinks that you are interested in HER than she will if she thinks that you are just putting on a show for your buddies.

SUSPICION 2 - The person intuitively realizes that if he or she asks God to reveal himself/herself/itself, the possibility of getting a response from God is real. For whatever reason, the person does not want to face that possibility. E.g., You just can’t muster up the moxy to approach that cool girl.

It’s sad to see so much time and effort wasted following argumentative red herrings, of which most God-is-or-isn’t discussions are chock full. The poor quality of the thinking about the existence of God can be clarified by applying the same arguments used pro or con God’s existence to things like love, honor, loyalty, or anything related to YOUR values and reasons for living instead of committing suicide. SOMETHING makes this life worth continuing for you. You can’t “prove” the existence or validity of ANY of your dearly held values any more than you can prove–or DISPROVE–the existence or validity of God. This isn’t because such things are hard to prove or because there is no evidence of their existence, but because of our biased, selectively applied, and very unrealistic notion of “proof.”

That’s why I sometimes suggest that we think about God in terms of potentiality. How do you “prove” potentiality? What “evidence” can there EVER be that potentiality exists? Evidence for potentiality is ABSOLUTELY LACKING as long as potentiality “exists.” Evidence does not become a fact (kind of a requirement to be considered evidence so far as I know) until AFTER potential becomes actual. In other words, if there’s evidence of the potential of an electric battery, it’s because THAT potential was converted into energy at work. So by the time we get evidence of it, THAT potential no longer exists. [1]

Maybe that’s what would happen to God if he/she/it gave us evidence, haha! POOF! No more God. Spiritually speaking, that’s exactly what can happen in a person’s mind once he/she “finds evidence” or “proof” of God’s existence. The evidence can become as or more important than the God it demonstrates, one reason that Jesus said that an “evil and adulterous generation seeks for a sign.” Apparently, not all evidence is equal. Some evidence is not worth finding, even worth avoiding.

The differentiator is: Who is the evidence supposed to convince, us or everyone else? Most God-debaters seem to answer that question without consciously asking it.

I’m not saying that God is potential energy, although neither would I rule it out. I’m offering an analog in potential energy of something that entails the same problems with demonstrating existence as God does. We don’t let those problems stop us from believing and acting as if potential energy “exists” or, for that matter, believing and acting as if love, loyalty, justice, compassion, honesty, integrity, or any of a plethora of our preferred brand of virtues “exists.” You can no more prove that it’s a good idea or a bad idea either to stay alive or to pack it in than you can prove that God does or does not exist. You can find or devise no more justification to prove that you should continue living than a believer can to prove that God exists. The problems with “proof” are the same in either case.

So why do we have so little trouble with those problems when it concerns our reasons for living and the existence of things that are important to us about living, but those same problems become insurmountable simply because we changed the subject to God?

Just another example of how biased and irrational the discussion has been ON BOTH SIDES. Just saying.

[1] Someone is sure to point out that we have ways of measuring potential, such as that stored in a battery, for example, and that this constitutes “evidence” of the potential energy in the battery. Not so. We have ways of extrapolating what the energy potential of a battery is. Those methods require taking information about energy at work that relates to potential, but is not that potential, e.g., test a bit of the battery’s output current to measure strength, or measure the energy applied to the battery when it was charged. From that tangential information about energy at work, we can extrapolate to figure out potential. Because of the nature of potential, no direct measurement is possible, and so, no direct evidence, either.

Conservative anti-redistribution of wealth dogma be DAMNED, just like all dogmas should be. Besides, if conservative dogmas are worth their salt, it’s time to show it. They’ve never been tested, just squawked about by loudmouths and talking heads.

I did the math. Crude as it might be, it’s not off by much.

If the top 1% retained $1 million per person (no pittance) and the rest of their 42% of household wealth were redistributed, every single man, woman, and child in the 99% would receive about $70,000. A family of four would get $280,000. (see calc below)

The conservative arguments against wealth redistribution seem pretty pithy when a one-time redistribution is concerned. Note: ONE time, not a habit. Besides, why should TARP beneficiaries and other no-goodniks have all the fun? Bailouts must benefit corporations exclusively, not citizens, for what reasons, again?

A one-time $25.46 trillion injection into the economy would have a huge impact. Houses, cars, and other goods would be bought, businesses started, debts paid. Yes, the lazy and irresponsible would squander their shares, further stimulating consumer markets and entertainment industries. It would be interesting to find out how much squandering would actually happen. Conservatives like to pound that drum, but IT’S NEVER BEEN TESTED.

And the down side is? Hmmm? Conservatives might be offended? Their myth of meritocracy might be challenged? If there’s any merit to the conservative viewpoint, a one-time bailout isn’t likely to shatter it. If it shatters, good riddance.

Or, horror of horrors, conservatives might be forced to admit that most Americans who are now in a pickle didn’t get there because they lacked merit or work ethic.

Meritocracy, my ass. Greedocracy is more like it. This is where greed has gotten us. Let the days of the greedy bastards be over, both for them and everyone who condones them.

======
Calculation, based on figures from April 2011:

42% of $58.5 trillion = $24.57 trillion, figure from Sep Fed Reserve report for April

USA population was 311,228,000 in April

1% * 311,228,000 = 3,112,280
99% * 311,228,000 = 308,115,720

If all but $1M per person in the 1% were distributed, 3,112,280 * $1,000,000 = $3,112,280,000,000 would be retained by the 1% (with future income unchanged)

$24,570,000,000,000 – $3,112,280,000,000 = $21,457,720,000,000 for distribution

$21,457,720,000,000 / 308,115,720 = $69,641.76 per person for every man, woman, and child in the 99%

My Mom used to smile and sing, “Slow down, you move to fast; You got to make the morning last!” as I’d race past her (from Simon & Garfunkel’s 59th Street Bridge Song). She knew it wouldn’t change anything, but she smiled and sang anyway. As I got older my compulsiveness didn’t wane, but my guilt over my “impatience” waxed with plenty of help. People have told me all my life how impatient I am.

Last night I realized a resolution to my conflict over patience. Some might call it a “middle way,” but I have found that middle ways just mitigate problems, not solve them. Middle ways are the results of compromise or tolerance; great aids for living with problems, but not for eliminating them. The best solutions don’t accommodate competing problematic factors, but instead reframe problems to eliminate the competition. Then problematic factors resolve easily, or they simply become irrelevant. Some call this “paradigm shift.” I prefer “context shift” and practice it all the time, not just with big problems.

I’ll weigh in after a half century of life and observation: I am certain that we need to speed up, that urgency is appropriate, that our expectations are far too low, and that our rates of progress aren’t clearly better than zero. Am I impatient? Yes, but the reason for it surprised me last night. Now I am more patient, for the same surprising reason.

Denying realities can mimic patience, right up to the point that denial becomes untenable and panic knocks the knock-off on its ass. Then it’s usually too late to speed up, for urgency to move us, to adjust our expectations, or to attempt further progress. We don’t often wake from our delusions until the last minutes of the twelfth hour. If we refuse to engage in denial, urgency and criticality compel us, often desperately.

The alternative to denial and compulsion is faith, but not the delusional, vacuous “faith” touted by the religious. Instead, real confidence: that we can speed up, that our urgent endeavors will succeed, that we are realizing our expectations, and that our rate of progress will not only outpace our self-destructive tendencies, but will bring heaven within reach rather than keep it on the “other side.” Funny thing about heaven, no matter what we think it consists of: it’s always on the other side of something.

Faith grounded in reality, born of experience, and confirmed by evidence is no fairy tale. Faith need not be delusional and vacuous. Science has taken us a step closer to real faith, but science alone can’t realize it. Faith in science as be-all and end-all is as delusional and vacuous a faith as its religious counterpart. Science gives us it probably will; beyond that, it speaks myths if it speaks at all. Science can’t touch it will for me; but that’s the confidence we need to act successfully. Without real confidence–real faith–life sinks to a series of relatively desperate dice rolls in a cosmic gamble, reducing us to hope in the magic of lucky breaks.

When you know that you are accelerating, that your efforts are succeeding, that your expectations are being met, and that you are progressing at a rate faster than you would have believed if someone had described it to you, faith for the future is easy. The natural result is patience. The alternatives are denial with a patience knock-off or compulsion with no patience at all. Neither is a solution. That was last night’s surprising realization. We need to speed up, but there’s no need to rush. Hurrying in fear that you’ll miss out or fail feels completely different than putting on speed because you want more, sooner. It is different.

The patience of faith is odd. It doesn’t spawn apathy, but fervor: a quiet, calm, intense assurance, untainted by desperation, suffused with gratitude and a longing for much more. This kind of patience is born of seeing the end from the beginning; not baseless assertion that what we feebly hope for will materialize, but a vision of what will and must come, no different than a vision of the rising sun while we sit in pre-dawn darkness, and every bit as certain.

The way we recognize power reflects our transitional status. We could simplistically divide power into three types with their motivating characteristics:

1. Power of force, motivated by fear
2. Power of charisma, motivated by sex
3. Power of intelligence, motivated by reason and compassion

In real life, we rarely encounter any of these in “pure” form. After all, we’re human, and what is more human than inconsistency? One type of power can be used to serve the purposes of another type. One type of power can hamper the effectiveness of another type by design, as in a checks-and-balances system, or for dysfunctional reasons, such as those involved in addictions. Mixing them is not the problem, but finding effective mixtures has been.

Some interesting questions are:

1. Which type or types of power predominate in a situation?
2. Is the power mix is appropriate for the situation?
3. Will the power mix achieve desired goals?
4. How we can alter the mix when we want to?

I don’t pretend to have answers to those questions. However, I do have some considered opinions about the three types of power.

Fear of Force

Much of the world remains subjugated under the power of fear of force. The power of actual force is rarely used, because it’s destructive. Force-wielders don’t want destruction, but control. Fear of force affords control without destroying everything worth controlling.

In the United States, we flatter ourselves and think that we are largely free from the fear of force. We aren’t; our fear is hidden by faith in our system: faith that it works and won’t go too far, and faith that system-prescribed methods will produce the changes we need. That faith has proven to be misplaced, maybe even illegitimate. It might have held true if the system were designed to work for us and to allow serious change, but it isn’t. Maybe it never was. Even Thomas Jefferson realized that self-improvement is a tall order.

“The people cannot be all, & always well informed. The part which is wrong will be discontented in proportion to the importance of the facts they misconceive. If they remain quiet under such misconceptions it is a lethargy, the forerunner of death to the public liberty. We have had 13 states independent 11 years. There has been one rebellion. That comes to one rebellion in a century & a half for each state. What country before ever existed a century & a half without a rebellion? & what country can preserve it’s liberties if their rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms. The remedy is to set them right as to facts, pardon & pacify them. What signify a few lives lost in a century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots & tyrants. It is its natural manure.”

– Thomas Jefferson to William Smith, November 13, 1787

What precludes the terrorism advocated by an American Founding Father? Fear of the world’s most powerful standing military and police forces, along with military technology and systems of surveillance that any tyrant would drool over. All that power for the advertised purpose of protecting us from forces we fear. How do we face the power that supposedly protects us when it becomes a fearful force itself?

Tanks and planes and bombs dwarf the hand-held weapons we as citizens are legally allowed. There was no comparable power differential in Jefferson’s day, but let’s be honest and let’s be real. That perceived power differential springs largely from our fear of force. It’s in our minds.We’ve never seriously tested it, and so we have no data to support our faith in the terrible power that our military could exercise against our citizenry. It’s just a faith. Millions–or even just thousands or hundreds–of armed citizens who directly confronted a highly efficient military might be doomed, but they would not be negligible. And historical data proves that poor odds don’t necessarily spell doom. And there are many alternatives to direct confrontation, as we’ve seen from conflicts since the late 20th-Century. And there are many alternatives to physical conflict, as we’ve seen from the success of non-violent movements. We haven’t come close to exhausting our known options for resistance, let alone those we haven’t discovered yet.

Power doesn’t automatically result from possessing destructive technology, hardware, munitions, and the personnel trained to use them. Power is absent without the will to use those destructive resources. Either the democratic state and federal governments of the United States, world-renowned for self-proclaimed piety, do not possess the will to destroy their own citizens, or their democratic piety is bogus. If popular will becomes strong enough that citizens defy the odds and resist superior forces, they make clear the depth of their distrust of the governance system. A democratic government that has lost the confidence of its citizenry and proceeds to oppose them proves that its democratic facade is bullshit. The near-term outcome of the confrontation would be secondary to the truth it would reveal.

Fear of force intimidates us into compliance. Its effectiveness does not depend on the true power of the force we fear or on the likelihood that it has the will to exercise its power. Untested belief in power and the will to exercise it are sufficient to induce fear, intimidate us, and inhibit resistance.

Complacency can infect even the oppressed in our highly affluent nation. No matter how poor we might be, our conditions are likely better than most in other places. Allure of potential opportunity for “upward mobility” can compensate for actual injustices and abuses, anesthetizing us from feeling indignation and rage that would actually be appropriate.

Fear of force might seem invisible or absent when force goes unchallenged. Our agreement with a force does not erase our fear of it. Servile compliance is often the direct result of overwhelming fear. Habitual compliance eventually yields agreement, even loyalty, a common experience among chronic abuse victims.

Every American knows that powerful forces exist to prevent the resistance that Thomas Jefferson advocated. We just disagree with each other about why those forces exist and how powerful they really are. Our fear of them will keep us intimidated until we decide to test them.

Charisma

Napoleon Hill, in his book Think and Grow Rich, one of the best-selling books of all time, wrote that charisma is a sexual power. Charisma and intent to exploit are the necessary and sufficient conditions for cult formation. Not all charismatics form cults, but all cultists live and sometimes die for their charismatics. We celebrate the power of charisma and reward it with office, license, and wealth. Our celebrities have it; our executives have it; our political leaders have it. Why we celebrate it remains unclear. We aren’t sure why we are drawn to charismatic people, and we’re not sure whether our attraction to them serves us well or ill.

Charisma produces only one verifiable result: followers. Their reasons for following might be squishy, but follow they will, reasons or none. Charismatic success is measured in crowd or membership size and intensity of loyalty. Gathering enthusiastic human resources is not of itself a bad thing, nor is it necessarily good. We have no evidence that the knack for making people eager to say and do things indicates the wisdom of saying or doing them. Charisma is often wildly disconnected from wisdom, just like large crowds and celebrities tend to be. Charisma gives the impression that power and wisdom are present; otherwise it does nothing, even worse than nothing. Charisma often serves as an attractive cloak that hides despicable secrets, and still we love it. As democratic and reasonable as we tout ourselves to be, we still love kings and queens, spectacle, pomp, glory, and reasons to believe.

Despite mountains of traditional wisdom and historical evidence to the contrary, our fondness for charisma lets us pretend that its power is neutral, an equal opportunity power. We pretend that it can used benevolently or atrociously, depending on the character of the charismatic. We lack evidence of that neutrality. Charisma is a function of personality; what makes us suppose that persons who vary widely in character have similar capacities for it? Great, good leaders were charismatic, but they were also few. Others used charisma to achieve unbelievable tyrannies and monstrosities. The rest of our charismatics have given us the world as we know it, not exactly a stellar product. It could just as well be that charisma is not neutral, but biased towards exploitation.

At least here in the United States, we don’t fear a Hitler or a Stalin or a Chairman Mao. Our charismatics are more cagey than that. We prefer them on stage, so that’s where they meet us. They inspire our confidence. Why? We’re not sure, except we’re sure that we like them. As long as they promised us a better world–and we didn’t insist on a much better one–they managed to maintain stasis. The boat didn’t rock and seemed to be moving, so we kept stoking the steamer and giving them the helm. But the boat is no longer steady, and most of us don’t like its direction. We just disagree with each other about why it’s rocking and where we should steer it. Charisma can’t answer those questions. Unable to agree on why and where, we fall back to fighting over who.

Intelligence

The power of fear of force and the power of charisma haven’t worked. Expecting new outcomes from further reliance on the same old powers is stupid, and that’s being kind.

We’ve long recognized the connection between intelligence and the wisdom of a course of action. We have mountains of evidence to support that connection. Isn’t the connection sometimes tenuous? Aren’t there exceptions? Of course, but the more important question is: do we have anything better? Hopefully we will find something better and move beyond the frailty and unreliability of wisdom based on intelligence, but that probably won’t involve backsliding to fear of force or charisma. Our sciences, economic systems, and educational systems rely on the connection between intelligence and wisdom, and so in turn do our societies. In other areas, like law and politics and religion, we have growing up to do.

We admire superior intelligence, as long as we can keep it within limits we prescribe; prescriptions that tend to dumb it down to our own level. Otherwise, we fear it. It challenges us. Superiority makes it seem beyond control. We lack the means to assess its intentions and motivations. We can’t be sure where it’s coming from. Trust our freedom to intelligent people? Better trust that to a strong military. Trust our governance to intelligent people? Better trust that to those who can wheel and deal, make impressive speeches, navigate Byzantine political structures, and have good camera presence. Better to trust ourselves to those who can make us feel confident and secure even when we shouldn’t, not to those who understand facts and tend not to spin them, who recognize our limitations and plan to compensate for them, and who don’t have $100,000 smiles.

Doesn’t leadership imply intelligence? Isn’t intelligence how people get to be leaders? Yes, intelligence of a sort; but look where our military, law enforcement, justice, political, and corporate leaders invested theirs. If they were truly intelligent, they would move their stock out of fear and sex, into something more constructive.

We choose our leaders and grant them power much like our ancestors did, much like our evolutionary forbears did: on the basis of striking visuals, impressive noises, and threat of bodily harm. Fear of force and charisma still rule the day. If we have in fact evolved to the point of managing our own development, we would invest in better ways and teach them to our children. Instead, the forceful get away with keeping us under thumb, the charismatic get away with keeping us fooled, and we brainwash our children to embrace the values and perpetuate the systems used to stick it to us.

The American Dream is just a dream, a myth. The myth makers never intended us to experience their promises. To realize our hopes, something far better than the mess we’ve got, we need to wake up and stop listening to them. They lied. Both fear of force and charisma are predicated on untested faiths and falsehoods. The intelligent need to wise up, rise up, and stop their inferiors from getting away with it.

Oh, well, that kind of stupidity. We have a couple of defenses for that. Out pop our internal Books of Common Knowledge.

Verse 1, the Creed of Futility: “Thus shall it always be.” We can’t expect people to change overnight, if ever. After all, we’re just human, and the jungle isn’t so far behind us. Craziness and evil are chronic, here to stay. The question is how to live in spite of them, how to mitigate them, manage them, even profit from them. Besides, we’re not to blame.

Verse 2, the Creed of Evil People: “Evil, crazy people do evil, crazy things.” It’s their fault. If we knew how to get rid of them, the world would be a better place.

But we don’t know how, do we? We don’t even know if getting rid of them is a good idea. We instinctively fear that it’s a bad idea, and that we aren’t much different than they are; not different enough to be sure that getting rid of them will stop with them and not include us. And we’ve seen how the certainty that ”they” are essentially different from “us” transforms us into monsters.

Those aren’t our only complicities.

“Thus it shall always be” is a prophecy, and we recite it with all the conviction of a prophet’s blind faith. If hope that things could be different is out there somewhere, we keep it shut out by reciting our creed like a mantra.

“What shall be” is in our hands. Maybe the weight of that responsibility makes us panic and deny that we’re capable, deny even that it’s our responsibility. Admitting hope in a better future puts us–not them–on the hook to realize that future. But to avoid the hook, we deny progress and insist on futility. We take our own hope, scrap it, and declare it irrecoverable. That’s a choice. We can make it differently.

But someone is to blame. So, we blame “them,” those crazy, evil people. It’s their fault, but it hasn’t been so long since the jungle for us, either. Their raw displays of awful power still attract us. We stand amazed at their capacity for monstrous acts. Marveling, even with disgust, we watch. When things blow up, we run to see. Threats to blow us up make us run with fear, but then we stop and turn to look again. How can they be so crazy, so evil? We don’t know. We can’t understand. Their minds are lurid, inscrutable. Their actions are horrific, incomprehensible, mesmerizing. We stand dumb, in awe and fear, attracted, stupid. In our ignorance, denying our kinship, in the blindest of faiths and against all evidence, we consign them to the unknowable, the unimaginable, and the unthinkable: our own brand of outer darkness.

Each soul we consign to outer darkness emboldens our creeds of futility and evil people. Avoiding hooks of understanding and responsibility, we hang skewered by our own disempowerment, thinking like victims. Our faith in futility and our faith the power of evil people hold us prisoners, at the mercy of ignorant fear and perverse reverence.

These are faiths. We can replace them. These are people. We can understand them. But first, we need to do the most difficult things: divorce stupidity and understand ourselves.

That might sound strange, but consider: we view ourselves as relatively powerless beings that are vulnerable to all kinds of forces, most of them more powerful than we are and beyond our control. We only feel really powerful when we compare ourselves to relatively powerless things. Other relatively powerless beings intimidate us with ease. Anything from natural disasters to microbes can end the whole lot of us, and we live in not a little dread of them all our lives. On a grand scale, how much do we really control and how much controls us? How then do we differ from objects? We don’t like admitting that we see ourselves through those glasses. We’ve worn them for so long that we forget, even deny, that they are perched on our noses.

I like to ask people what they want. Wanting, at least, is one thing that we don’t have in common with objects. Someone might complain about the poor treatment they received, or try to think through a problem, or strategize how to achieve a goal. I like listening to them for a while. It’s always interesting to hear how people frame the questions that they want to answer, and to see how differently a familiar situation appears when viewed through someone else’s eyes. Those are views you can’t discover on your own.

After listening a while, I ask them what they want. It’s always a challenge. Invariably, they respond by describing how they want things to be, but that’s not what I asked. When this happens, I try to make my question clearer. Sometimes it irritates them, but sometimes we connect. Sometimes I get them just a step closer to my real question. On the second take, instead of describing how they want things to be, some respond curiously. They list the preconditions that limit their range of options. X, Y, and Z are the only apparent options. X doesn’t make sense, so they are left with Y or Z. Y is impossible given the current situation, so that leaves only Z. To me, this might be a valid response to the question, “If you can’t have what you want, what would you settle for instead?”

It’s always cool when we do connect and people understand what I’m really asking. It’s cool even before I hear their answers, because I often see a light go on in their eyes. Maybe that light has to do with validation. Here I am, interested in what they want instead of their best guess about what is possible or proper or advisable or permitted. Just realizing that I’m interested in what they want makes them perk up, like someone just noticed them in the room. Being recognized is powerful. Sometimes they respond as if it’s a new experience to have someone treat what they want like it matters. They aren’t used to it, like a sudden waft of warm, sunlit breeze after  months of musty Seattle rain.

When they get to it, their descriptions of what they really want almost always involve something that they didn’t think they could have. Simply describing it makes a difference, even if they still think they can’t have it. You can see in their faces, in their postures, in their tones; their very beings seem to expand a bit. And it makes me feel like asking, “Who said that you couldn’t have it?” but of course it’s never that simple. Maybe they tried and failed many times, and now trying again seems fruitless or impossible. Maybe they were shot down by family or friends who ridiculed their aspirations, or worse, ridiculed them for daring to have aspirations. Judging from my own life, though, those are superficial explanations.

We are always the first person and the last person to deny ourselves what we want. We decide that trying again is futile or that the situation makes it impossible. We decide to listen to others who ridicule our aspirations. And, if we are honest, we know that we said all that nay-saying to ourselves before we heard it from anyone else. We silently prophesied it before we gave anyone the chance to echo what we already feared and believed.

A much-avoided saying of Jesus offers a radical alternative to the idea that we are objects to be manipulated, whose right to want and right to power must be established and defended before we have any at all:

Jesus answered them, “Has it not been written in your Law, ‘I SAID, YOU ARE GODS’?” John 10:34

Most religious thinking portrays us as small, relatively powerless objects being manipulated on some divine or cosmic board like so many game pieces. Many scientific perspectives effect the same view. Religions offer little more than spiritual supplements that, in the form of enlightenment or God’s grace, merely mitigate our impotence. Some, like Hinduism and Buddhism, affirm our connectedness to divinity and power only by eradicating us as individuals, rendering us in some ways as less than objects. Most Christian thinking presumes our objectification: we are lost, sinful, depraved, doomed creatures apart from God’s grace, power, and salvation.

Such views are quite different than the one that Jesus presented. He didn’t make it up. He simply cited a claim made by the God of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Moses, written in Holy Scripture and recognized for centuries. God said so. Neither did Jesus think of or treat people like objects, but he chided many for acting the part. We might be gods who falsely believe in our own objectification, sure. That would make us deluded gods, but gods nevertheless.

Affirming our godhood doesn’t set well with people intent on keeping us in our places. Some might regard it as blasphemy, even if they happen to be atheists. (If you read the entire passage, you’ll see that this was precisely the accusation that Jesus faced when he said those words. Start at verse 22.) How dare we claim to be gods? They want us to believe that we are powerless objects in need of help–their help more often than not. The world is full of offers to help us acquire the wherewithal to change ourselves into something a bit less pitiful than the wretched creatures we supposedly are, for a nominal fee of course.

But of course, some people are gods. We tend to prefer other terms: idol, celebrity, chief, tyrant, billionaire, Holiness. Millions recognize them as such, whether for their knowledge, wisdom, beneficence, achievement, or brutality. All it takes is enough people to say so. What the worshippers don’t realize is that their gods are gods only because they can elicit say-so. Without that say-so, those gods are no different than you or me. History is rife with examples of those who merited god status and never got it, passed over in favor of their inferiors. Examples also abound of gods that simply lacked sufficient merit, even of gods who were monsters. Merit doesn’t qualify anyone for this kind of “godhood.” Say-so does. If any real godhood remains once the say-so is gone, there’s no reason to think it’s more or better than yours or mine. If you’ve got it, you’ve got it, with or without the say-so. If you are a god, you don’t need worshipers before you know it and act like it.

Innumerable forces compel objects to find paths of least resistance or risk being crushed. Gods affirm and act. Sure, sometimes good things fall into our laps even if we don’t act. Someone somewhere will win the lottery, just probably not you or me. Besides, good fortune isn’t the same thing as success.

I learned a lot about success from sports. I learned a lot about failure from business. In sports, at least in my youth, I was a god. I could hit home runs. I was fast. I could throw hard and true. Recently, I leaned my son’s Triumph Daytona 650 into turns at 120+ MPH, just like he did, coming out of them exhilarated and unscathed. So, why did my first motorcycle accident happen when I was only going 35 MPH? Maybe because I was headed for the side of the road, felt sure that I would hit the ditch, and tapped the brake instead of doing what I should have done: lean into the turn and roll on more throttle. It would have taken confidence to do that, and I didn’t have it.

In business, I started behind the 8-ball and scrambled, barely managing factors that seemed largely beyond my control. They eventually overwhelmed me. Would a more “positive attitude” have changed the outcome of my business attempts? God only knows, but I know that if anything could have changed the outcome, conducting my business as an empowered individual—a god in the best sense—was something that could have done it. And being a god is more than just “positive attitude.”

Think about your own successes. You had some, or you probably wouldn’t be here. Even in simple things, like baking a cake or acing a test or approaching a pretty girl or getting that adorable guy’s attention, success is invariably linked to confidence, except for lucky accidents that we have no real right to call “successes.” What was it like as you were in the process of succeeding? Did you doubt every step of the way, or did it seem inevitable, even easy? When we find ourselves doubting every step of the way, even if things still turn out like we hoped they would, we don’t usually feel successful. We feel surprised, relieved, even lucky. We might claim credit for the success, but we don’t feel it.

When we are winning and we know it, we experience something else entirely. Some call it being “in the zone.” When we’re in the zone or in the groove or in the flow or in the spirit, (whatever our metaphor of choice might be,) we feel empowered; success is a foregone conclusion. We expect it. Doubt and failure aren’t in our minds. Like Isaiah, who said, “I have set my face like flint, and I know that I will not be ashamed,” we are intent on our goal and give it our all. We feel our godhood.

Sooner or later the zone ends or the groove is over or the spirit leaves. What do we do then? Do we again affirm what we want and act with confidence, or do we start looking or waiting for the next amazing constellation of circumstances to emerge, like those that created the last zone or groove? Or do we pitifully hope for nothing more than to avoid a bruising? Are we gods, or are we just objects wishing and hoping to fall onto some magical track that we can ride, weaving in and out between the myriad manipulative forces that make us feel so vulnerable and powerless?

As long as we regard ourselves as objects, the stuff of manipulation by heaven, earth, gods, and other people, it probably doesn’t matter in the long run whether we spend our lives hoping for magical tracks or being crushed because we couldn’t find any. Either way we are the same: objects, not gods.

Regardless of the magic or the crushing that life might bring us, if we affirm what we want and act like gods, how is that a bad thing? Viktor Frankl described what he realized during his imprisonment in Nazi concentration camps:

Ultimately, man should not ask what the meaning of his life is, but rather he must recognize that it is he who is asked. In a word, each man is questioned by life; and he can only answer to life by answering for his own life; to life he can only respond by being responsible.  

— Viktor Frankl, Man’s Search For Meaning. Beacon Press, 1992. pp. 113-114. (italics Frankl’s)

Life is asking. As objects, we hunt for right answers as if we were taking a school test, hoping for a grade that will please teachers and parents, those gods of educational approval. As gods ourselves, we choose our own tests and create our own answers. All creation still groans under our wars over “right” answers; answers we devised with self-objectifying glasses firmly perched, skewing our views; answers we use to objectify us all and pillage our world. It’s long past time to quit that folly and start answering life creatively, powerfully.

According to Paul in his letter to the Romans, the creation earnestly looks for and eagerly expects the revealing of the sons of God. I like thinking that the eagerness and expectation he described involves excitement to see what we come up with. Gods and sons of God; who are they? They must, at a minimum, be people who think that they are gods, who feel their godhood, who don’t see themselves as objects, but as creators. In my experience, those who knock it haven’t tried it, and not so many have dared to try, yet.

It is little short of mind-boggling to see how timorous we are with our own desires. We seem to universally hold certain assumptions:

1. We have no right to want anything unless we can show good cause.

2. Our wants are at best suspect and at worst the cause of all the problems and evil in the world.

3. There is no accounting for our wants, especially the problematic ones. In other words, they are rooted in irrationality, even insanity.

4. Shame is our default attitude towards our deepest personal desires, especially those secret ones.

Our philosophers and religious leaders have been cowards. Rather than do what could have been helpful and constructive, they each in their respective ways defined our real problems out of the question, then proceeded to offer solutions to “problems” that ranged from irrelevant to fictitious.

Our scientists have distracted us with wonderful things. Especially in the last few decades, we have learned so much about the workings of biology, in particular the brain and the rest of the nervous system, that we began to hope that science will one day help us understand our own tendencies, maybe even improve the human condition. Somehow we missed the fact that science never claimed that it could do this. Better houses, better food, better transportation, better entertainment, better information? Sure. Better attitudes, better aspirations and desires, better thinking and behavior, better lives, better people? Come now, please. The hope that we project onto science constitutes a faith more wishful and blind than anything our religions ever produced. At least our religions actually promised the things that many of us blindly believed. Our faith in science far overextends, reaching well beyond any legitimate promise of science and, in fact, flies in the face of science’s own disclaimers.

What if our real problem turned out to be that we have denied ourselves what we want or, more accurately, that we have denied our right to want anything? We have accepted a policy of disempowering ourselves without cause and often without awareness. We disavow what we always had, the legitimacy of our desires. Now divested, disempowered, we invest our energies in justifying and proving our right to what we just threw away. This is our “objectivity” and it has nothing to do with knowledge. Our institutions fully support this voluntary divestment of our own power and rights. They encourage it. They profit from it. They perpetuate it, offering us carrots of privilege: opportunity and knowledge that they promise will enable us to reacquire what we discarded, on condition that we accept their authority and follow their prescriptions.

Our philosophies are predicated on this voluntary divestment. We doubt first without cause, then grope and labor to find justifications that will help us overcome the doubt. How can justifications remedy a situation that we freely imposed on ourselves without justification?

Our scientists reinforce this divestment by donning blinders in order to see what is “really” there, disavowing all aspects of life except the least interesting one: the physical. We pretend that their blinders, like our wants, are inconsequential. We believe that somehow science will provide us with keys to the very aspects of life that it explicitly disavows, and most scientists allow us to continue in that delusion.

Our religions exacerbate this divestment. It isn’t enough that we threw away our right to want, we must regard wanting itself as sin or deception. Our “faiths” shut us out by means of guilt and fear in order to show us doors by which we can enter again and be saved from the shame of our nakedness. But who told us that we were naked?

It would be interesting to explore the prospects of affirming our right to want and living thus empowered. Maybe just as interesting is the irrational, unjustified, and powerful reaction that the very idea evokes in us. When was the last time that you believed that you deserved to get what you wanted simply because you wanted it, not for any other reason? Not because you earned the right to it. Not because of your office, your position, or your role. Not because you belong to a class or caste or elite, privileged group, whatever it might be and however you became a part of it. Not because you are entitled by something or by anything. Just because you wanted it. The idea might strike you as foreign, as nonsense, gibberish, as hopelessly Utopian, or even as something dangerous. It can prompt us to commit a beginner’s fallacy like a knee-jerk: given that bad people follow this rule, (do they really?) any who follow this rule must be bad people. Is this the rub? Do we have no more sense of self and our own goodwill than to be dictated by appearances? Do we not know who we are?

Just try suggesting the notion that wanting is good, that we have an innate right to want anything we choose and to choose anything we want, and that the world would be a better place if everyone were empowered to do just that. At first the idea will get brushed off like some silly, pesky gnat. However, if people get the impression that you are making a serious suggestion, watch the sparks fly and the guns come out. Pay attention to the guns that come out and realize, first of all, that they are guns. They come out only to shoot down the notion, which has suddenly graduated from gnat to stinging, noxious pest, big enough to warrant shooting. What are you, anyway, a bohemian, a pagan, a subverter? We must have law! There must be order! Morals are essential! Notice how rarely anyone will show the slightest interest in understanding the notion well enough to judge its merit. Notice how quickly someone will raise the problem that the notion would empower bad people. Their argument is, in effect, that good people should remain disempowered in order to keep bad people at bay. It would seem that bad people are a more important concern.

Why is wanting such a powerful and intimidating proposition? Why can merely suggesting that we should affirm our right to want push such hot buttons? Does the notion elicit considered responses, those of rational, thinking people, or something more like vague senses of threat, of the alien, of aggression and a need for defense, of a slippery slope into chaos? Taken seriously, the notion triggers something in us akin to dread, even terror. That is probably why most people refuse to take it seriously.

One thing is for sure: there is power here.

Legend has it that Martin Luther told a group of his students, “Love God with all your heart, then do whatever your heart desires.” I suggest that Martin Luther had it backwards. Instead, do whatever your heart desires, then maybe you will learn to love. What is love, anyway, if it isn’t a desire from the heart that we act on? It isn’t love if it originates elsewhere. It is pretense if it serves to cover and hide the things which are in our hearts, those deep, secret things that we are afraid to let ourselves do or even admit. Are we secretly afraid that we are monsters at the core? If we permit ourselves to look and be honest about what lies deep in our hearts, maybe we will find out that it isn’t so bad there, down there where we want.

Before we reject an idea, I think that we should at least give it a fair hearing, even give it a try. When people refuse to do either, there are reasons. It just makes the idea all the more interesting.

I’m no different. Like anyone, I like being understood.

OK, now that you know that this is completely self-serving, don’t you roll your eyes, too! I promise I’m gonna make you think in this one.

I can go ’round and ’round with people, sometimes to their dismay and often to the amazement of onlookers. I make no bones: I can drive people crazy. There’s actually a method to my madness, though.

I am interested in the assumptions that we build our thinking on, especially the ones that we don’t realize we have. Getting people to talk about them is a prickly proposition. The extreme case is when we treat our assumptions as givens. We use signals to indicate that we are doing this, by saying things like, “Everybody knows that,” “It’s so obvious,” or, “How can you disagree?” If someone like yours truly keeps at it, questioning those “givens,” things quickly go south and get personal. That’s how you know that you’re onto one of them.

The best way that I know of to ferret them out is to make a really good opposing case which beads right down on a “given.” When I stump or seriously challenge someone on something that they care about, and it turns out that this isn’t too hard to do with “givens,” they do one of two things. They get irrational (emotional, personal, etc.) or they take a step back and realize that they have a weak spot in their thinking. Guess which happens more often. That’s my method, as uncomfortable as it can sometimes get, of opening the kinds of discussions that I’m interested in. I’m all ears to suggestions for a better way that still actually yields the discussion. So far, it’s all I’ve got.

These aren’t “polite company” discussions, of course. I like Edie Carey’s lyrics in a song written to her father, “If I Start To Cry,” which starts:

I got so much to ask you
It’s never the time
Why would I spoil a perfect evening?
We’ve gotten this far on being polite
Besides, I know you’re proud of me

Politeness is important, but it’s not a good excuse for long-term ignorance on important questions. And sorry, I don’t think that answers will just come wafting in to us on the night air like so many ghosts. We actually need to ask the questions. Out loud. And then we need to answer them. Out loud. What can I say? There are parties that I just don’t get invited to.

Back to the atheists. My sole purpose in going to them on that forum was truly to understand: understand their positions and understand my position. Actually, for me it’s more about figuring out my own position. I am truly position-less on a number of things, on so many things that it surprises people. They tend not to believe me. Remember Harry Nilsson’s The Point? Yeah, I’m Oblio, the only round-headed person in the Pointed Village, where by law everyone and everything has to have a point, except that in my case I’m supposed to have a position. The atheists didn’t believe me, either. They are used to more of a fight. When they didn’t get one from me, they got suspicious. Short story: I think we’re getting over it.

My sole purpose in life, likewise, is truly to understand and foster understanding. Put that on my gravestone some day. Beside the fact that it’s a compulsion, I have a vested interest in figuring things out for a number of reasons. First, for my own sanity. Well, I guess that’s the compulsive part, isn’t it? Second, I have six amazing sons in whose lives I figure prominently. I raised them to think for themselves. I don’t presume to tell them what is “true” or what they should think, but I do tell them as clearly as I can what I think. There are things that I still can’t understand, things that they are grappling with or will soon grapple with. I want to have something to tell them. In the meantime I tell them, “I don’t know,” and wish I didn’t have to.

Like anyone, I have at times wanted to strangle someone or simply walk away. Fortunately, I never considered either as a viable strategy for the long haul. So, that left learning to communicate. Uphill struggle if ever there was one, just ask those who know me. In struggling with this, I wondered why. Why do people cling to things when letting them go would actually serve their causes? Why do people disregard the dearly held values of others, their precious babies so to speak, and insist on throwing them out with the proverbial bathwater? Don’t they care? Or can’t they tell the difference?

Several times in my life, I’ve started from scratch. I did this in high school once I discovered philosophy. I did it again when I discovered religion. I did it again when I came to care about people who had different religions than mine and discovered that they had the same reasons for believing theirs as I did for believing mine, so I doubted everything. I started from scratch again when I came back to religion, but this time to a group of people who told me that everything I had believed before was wrong and that the truth was very different. I believed what they said because they seemed to walk their talk, which certainly was very different. I did it again when they rejected me as if I were something evil and infected. Since then, I’ve spent a lot of time trying to rationalize the craziness that I’ve experienced. As I figure things out, my wondering about why and how people engage in conflict gets more and more general.

I started wondering why Darwinists and creationists all use the same argumentation devices, tricks and all. Darwinists find arguments based on “faith” to be laughable, and creationists tout their faith as something that they are proud of. They are actually talking about the same thing, not two different things. I’ve talked to them, and the Darwinists actually do understand what the creationists mean by “faith.” So, the source of the conflict can’t be a misunderstanding on that point, anyway. Many creationists, especially the militant ones, believe something evil or malicious is up with the Darwinists, who not only won’t listen to faith, they laugh at it. No, the Darwinists aren’t evil or malicious. They are laughing because “faith” makes no sense to them, and they don’t think that it should to anyone. The Darwinists dismiss what is precious to creationsts: their faith. The creationists dismiss what is precious to the Darwinists: their intellectual integrity, even their moral integrity.

I was trying to figure out where the source of the conflict in this argument really was. I started realizing that there was something wrong with the argument itself. I ended up realizing that the argument really makes no sense. Darwinism is not mutually exclusive from creationism, as both parties would have everybody believe. When you get down into the details that actually have evidential support, those details can be interpreted pretty well from either philosophical standpoint. So why the conflict? I suspected that it might be philosophical. Duh. At this point, I lost interest in the details, so I don’t know much about the other player in the fray, Intelligent Design.

To cut to the chase, I concluded that the disagreement that fuels the Darwinists’ argument with creationism (and maybe with Intelligent Design too) is the result of pre-scientific, pre-evidential, even pre-rational decisions made by both sides prior to and without regard for either the argument or the evidence, and that it concerns precisely the question of God. I have a label for such pre-scientific, pre-evidential, and pre-rational decisions: beliefs. Beliefs are no less prevalent on the Darwinist side than they are on the opposing sides. Darwinist beliefs just have scientific face paint on.

Coming to that conclusion made me wonder whether the atheist/theist argument itself was the same type of phenomenon: people arguing at one level when their argument and its inevitable outcome were already cast at a completely different level, one that they were ignoring or even trying to avoid. Thus my current obsession with assumptions.

So, the question that everybody who meets me wonders but hardly anyone asks: why would I put this kind of effort into a pursuit guaranteed to curtail cash flow? Like I said, it’s a compulsion. I’ve worked in information technology and I’ve worked in construction, back and forth a bit, since the early 1970s. To me, earning money has always been a necessary evil that stole time away from what I really wanted to do. In this I don’t think that I’m much different than a lot of people.

For the last 15 or so years, I tried to push the earn-me-the-money ball up the hill and over, so that I would have the means and leisure to do what I wanted to do. My goal was to fund my own research and writing. That didn’t materialize. I admit that, given the circumstances, it was a long shot. So, last year I was led by circumstances to consider the alternative: embrace material frugality in order to generate obscene quantities of leisure. I’ve been writing and discussing ever since with no end in sight. This is my kinda heaven!

I am now here on this earth to do what I always wanted to do:

1. understand
2. test out ideas
3. find ways to express my ideas that can be understood by others, especially by those who disagree with me, because preaching to the choir just isn’t that much fun
4. maybe one day over the rainbow, publish something

The best way that I know how to accomplish objectives 1-3 is to talk to people who are inclined to disagree, erect straw men for them to knock down, and learn from the experience. If a straw man stands, I get interested. And as I go along, my straw men get a little sturdier each time I erect them. At some point, they are sturdy enough that I’m tempted to rely on them. If someone then succeeds in knocking one down, I don’t see that as a problem. It shows me that there was a weakness in my thinking that I didn’t notice. Otherwise, I wouldn’t have put reliance on that idea. I then try to understand the weakness, kick myself for not noticing it, and put a better, faster, stronger straw man back up for the next knock-down.

I truly am a skeptic, particularly about my own thinking. I am a thorough-going, equal opportunity, comprehensive skeptic. I only have a few things that I’m sure about. Everything else is fair game. Oddly enough, this seems to threaten people. Or maybe what threatens them is that I subject their thinking to the same level of skeptical scrutiny that I subject my own thinking to. It seems silly to me if that’s what threatens them, frankly. After all, I could always be wrong.

Q: What’s the difference between straw men and idols?
A: Nothing. Yet, straw men fall down to men, while men fall down to idols.

I’m not vested in much when it concerns ideas. When it concerns people, that’s a different matter. But as far as ideas go, I started with a simple, incontrovertible position: something exists. Something is. It’s an incontrovertible position unless you are willing to shoot yourself in the foot with whatever bullet you try to shoot it down with. Give it a try. By observation, (which to me means personal experience, since even science MUST come down to SOMEBODY’S personal experience SOMEWHERE,) by rational thought, and with the help of other people committed to observation and rational thought, I am betting my life (it’s that serious to me, isn’t it to everyone?) that we can build all that we need from there. My emphasis is on the “we.” Thus my interest in communication and conflict resolution.

Science is a huge part of all this. However, science is appropriate for some things and is not all that we need. I call bullshit when people apply science beyond what it is appropriate for. Sometimes I’m wrong to do so. Sometimes I find out that I didn’t properly understand what the domain of science is. More often, though, I call bullshit when people have unscientific reasons for making science do more than it was intended to do.

I also call bullshit when people invoke faith in God to enable them to get around scientific fact or what they (often wrongly) think are the ramifications of scientific fact on their faiths. Atheists call that kind of argument many things. Among some of the less offensive terms, they call them “sky hooks” and “airy nothings.” This is where the atheists know exactly what the believers are talking about. A sky hook is an argument that is just sitting there, hanging mid-air with no logic or evidence to support it. Airy nothings are pretty much what they sound like. When your truth gets pulled out of thin air, it tends to resemble its point of origin. Just listen to believers explain their reasons for adopting “faith.” Ask them why they believe. Then ask them how they are sure that their answer is correct. Then ask them how they know that answer. Eventually you’ll get down to something like, “because I just do,” or, “because I just know.” Sorry. Wrong answer.

After a fair amount of equal opportunity investigating and, as you might glean, a little equal opportunity bashing, I found out something interesting about all this. When I managed to get down to the reasons why science adherents pushed science too far, they turned out looking very much like the reasons why believers invoke sky hooks and airy nothings. Odd. I thought that they had a fundamental disagreement.

I keep seeing the same behavior over and over, regardless what the context is or what the argument is. Both sides of any long-standing controversy insist and defend their right to insist on throwing the opposition’s babies out with their dirty bathwater. I like babies. I don’t care whether they are “your” babies or “our” babies or “their” babies. The fact that they are precious to someone makes them worth trying to save. Even if we don’t succeed, at least we tried, and what’s the down side of trying? We already know what the down side of throwing them out is.

Maybe that’s what truly distinguishes our species from others: our unique ability to perpetuate, even institutionalize, conflict. Predators kill because they are hungry. Humans kill because… ???

That’s the tragedy: everybody has an answer, even many answers, and for all our “answers” the killing goes on. What that really means is that we remain clueless after all this time and all this killing. World peace? An end to crime? Step right up with your solutions, folks. But no one does, because we are clueless. If we weren’t clueless, it would mean that the killing and crime continue even though we could stop them. Clueless or monsters, take your choice.

But we’re talking about conflict before it gets that far. I’m looking for ways to re-frame controversies so that both sides can distinguish babies from bathwater. Once people get rational, they normally don’t want to preserve their own dirty bathwater, nor do they want to throw out babies, even if they belong to the opposition. And speaking from personal experience, in the process that it takes to tell the babies from the bathwater, they start seeing the other side a little less like opposition. Bottom line, I’m not here to change anybody’s mind except in places where they decide that they want to change them.

I get all kinds of reactions to my agenda, usually ranging from the negative to the condescendingly sympathetic. I sometimes find support, but rarely without a little eye-rolling. I think that this very interesting. After a while, after people around you roll their eyes long enough, you tend to wonder if you might be crazy. But wait! I’ve gotten that I-just-might-be-crazy feeling before. It came from listening to all kinds of people (not just my ex!) who claimed that I was chasing unicorns and jousting with wind mills and had delusions of grandeur. These were people who wanted me to stop. It might have been out of concern for my own good, but here’s what I would like to know: if it’s all so impossible, why did they put so much energy into convincing me to stop? Why not just let me find out for myself? Maybe they didn’t want me to take that hard knock. Or maybe they didn’t want to find out that hard knocks were not what I’d actually get.

I decided not to listen to them or give in to that feeling. I have yet to regret that decision.

Besides, I have history on my side. Every good idea large or small got similar reactions from people who didn’t recognize it. It’s been quite consistent. The more important ideas got those reactions all the more once people realized that there actually was something to the ideas, often from those who were pissed off that they hadn’t thought of them first. The rest of the reactions ranged from the ultimatums of Thou-Shalt-Not-Rock-The-Boat authorities who feared for their offices and their incomes to the baaing of don’t-rock-the-boat sheep who feared the authorities.

For another thing, I have statistics on my side. Statistically, those who claim “Impossible!” end up wrong 100% of the time. Think about it. Aside from the truly preposterous, somebody eventually manages to do the “impossible” almost 100% of the time. Doing that fraction short of 100% at any point in time is just a matter of time. Alchemy might be the notable exception to the rule, but if Garrett Lisi gets his way, that box might open up to us, too. Seriously. He is trying to prove a theory of matter and energy at a scale so much smaller than the atom that it’s conceivable. After all, lead and gold are only 3 steps apart. Remove three electrons, three protons, and three neutrons, and lead becomes gold. It’s that simple. Remove one more and you get platinum. It’s the same story with tin: it’s just three steps away from silver. Whachya think that would do for the economic crisis?

Besides, sometimes people even manage to pull off the truly preposterous. And once they do, it suddenly stops being preposterous. Einstein and his cronies did it. H. G. Wells took time travel seriously, just like he took travel to the moon seriously. Time travel? Preposterous? Thanks in part to general relativity, now look who’s talking about time travel: everyone’s favorite, Stephen Hawking. Still preposterous?

Looking back at what happens to us over and over, it makes you wonder why we so doggedly insist on being wrong. I think it has to do with an imagination deficit (one side of the coin) and an obsession with intellectual (maybe egotistical?) security (the other side of the same coin.) It’s even more amazing when you stop and think that we insist on being wrong when we are working with so little. Knowledge, I mean. For all the knowledge we got, we ain’t got much, not nearly enough. Either that or we’re monsters. Don’t deny the magnitude of our ignorance. It’s our last sanctuary from which to claim innocence.

The time that elapses between someone making claims of impossibility and someone utterly destroying those claims is shrinking as we go along. Is there anything that Jules Verne wrote about that we haven’t actually done, except maybe for putting a human being on a comet? You watch, that will come. We’re watching “science fiction” increasingly morph into science prognostication. As science and technology advance, the distance between imagination and reality becomes shorter and shorter. At some point imagination will become our primary concern in everything we think about doing. The question will stop being, “Can we do it?” and will become, “Is there anything that we can’t do?” At that point our humility will be tested in a way that hasn’t been possible since the Tower of Babel.

I think that we live in an incredible period of history. Impossibility is being radically redefined right before our very eyes. More power to the scientists and technologists! My concern is the fact that none of these new capabilities have helped us one whit to answer basic questions that we’ve had for thousands of years. Questions like, “Why am I here?” or, “What should I do?” or, “What does it all mean?” Gods’ sakes, we can’t even teach our children how to tell if the person they met last night is the “right one” or not! Shouldn’t we at least be able to do that? And when our children tell us that they have found the right one, shouldn’t we be able to tell them how to keep it together? Apparently not. A lot of our kids have no expectation of keeping a relationship together long-term. Some of them don’t think that doing so is healthy. Our own behavior screamed at them so loudly that it drowned out what remained of our excuses.

Many people seem content to fiddle while Rome burns or dance as the Titanic sinks. I don’t get it. Am I being melodramatic? Well, let me answer that with a question. Are you so sure that I haven’t hit the nail squarely on the head? I’d say that we have more riding on the second question.

For all our self-touted excellence in other matters, there is one thing that could stop it all: our inability to resolve conflict. Our conflict resolution “expertise” isn’t much better than what it was in the Paleolithic era if we judge ourselves based on outcomes:

You… No… Say? Me… Club… You… Hit.

Except that now we have more words to threaten each other with and our “clubs” can exterminate all of us, not just raise bumps on our noggins. Now that I think about it, what with genocides and such, I wonder if we really do any better than cavemen. I could argue that we do much, much worse.

From the 3^rd Century through the 17^th Century, an estimated 207 million people were killed in major wars and atrocities. That’s about 14 million killed on average every hundred years, or 140,000 a year.

In the 18^th and 19^th centuries, an estimated 49 million people were killed. Now we’re up to almost 25 million per century, or 250,000 per year.

In the first half of the 20^th Century alone, there were an estimated 142 million people killed in major wars and atrocities, an average of almost 3 million per year. Things cooled down a bit in the second half of the century, so the century’s average killed per year was closer to 1.2 million. That’s still more than an 850% increase in less than a thousand years. And that doesn’t count all the people who lost their lives every day to preventable starvation and disease or as a result of all the wonderful technology we came up with, particularly in auto accidents.

(Sources include Matthew White’s (Possibly) The Twenty (or so) Worst Things People Have Done to Each Other and The Worst Genocides of the 20th Century.)

Still think that we’re better off than cavemen? Well, the lucky among us are. It would seem that the rest of humanity is just a little less remote than cavemen to us lucky ones, for all we’ve done about their plight.

I believe that we can do better than that. If we can’t, then shame, shame, shame on us and curses too. Call me old-fashioned, but there has to be something better than this.

I’m going to find it. Wish me luck. Any fool can roll his eyes.