The Big Picture

We are but one life form on this planet. Life as a whole does not need us. In fact this planet would be faring much better without us. And it’s difficult to believe that the kind of intelligent God now in place would will the creation of a being that would engage in the piecemeal destruction of one of the centerpieces of all creation. That this God works in mysterious ways is no explanation but, rather, an escape hatch for those believers who find themselves faced with uncomfortable challenges suggested by their own religious scenarios. They claim to know the mind of God up to the point where it is useful to them.

Life created us. And life makes mistakes. It makes genetic mistakes in individuals and species which nature selects against. Are we Home sapiens proving to be a mistake? New and old species alike are constantly put to the survival test and are rendered extinct if unable to pass. Homo sapiens passed the test with flying colors. We became over-achievers. And that may prove to be our undoing. We have not only become the bane to the survival of other species but a threat to our own survival as well. We were created out of life’s prodigious drive to survive and we have hence evolved into a means for its extinction.

Life as a whole has always had to deal with surviving in relation to a planet that is at best indifferent to its existence. With the exception of vegetation life lives on life. And life created the atmosphere in which it evolved. Each species, in procreating through its own survival techniques, conspires to serve in the furtherance of life itself.

One can see a kind of morality at work here. No species totally lords it over any other (until human beings came along) while individuals are sacrificed for the greater good of life, for the existence of their own species and in turn for life itself. Predators, for the most part prey only on those individuals of other species that will provide a meal. Wild dogs have been known to kill more sheep than necessary for feeding purposes. But that could be the result of domesticated sheep that have lost the ability to take defensive measures which would have limited the number of sheep the dogs had access to. The dogs on the other hand have no intrinsic stop-preying signal and will only cease their momentary predation when and if the sheep deploy effective counter strategies to discourage it. But on the whole predators are not a threat to prey. The lion is not a threat to the wildebeest nor is the fox to the rabbit.

Life goes about seeking its own advantage in ecosystems of its own making, expanding its reach through the creation of life forms most capable of using, overcoming and changing environmental conditions for survival purposes. Each species, each part of life, plays a role in providing life as a whole, as a single organism, optimum opportunity for an assured existence in perpetuity by finding ways of living in all kinds of climes and nooks and crannies. In the depths of the ocean where sunlight cannot reach, thus making the process of photosynthesis impossible, life operates through a process of chemosynthesis.

Life as a whole is a cellular colony tenaciously determined to exist however, wherever, forever. Each individual life form of every species has an awareness of this tenacious drive to survive, to be alive eternally. A life form successfully occupying a particular niche secures a brick, as it were, in the edifice of life itself.

Through each member of each species life expresses its desire for immortality. Each life form in a sense desires to prey without being preyed upon. But as life itself needs the predator/prey dynamic for the preservation of life as a whole, individual species also need it for their own existence. The fox, for instance, enables the existence of the rabbit by preying upon individuals and controlling that species growth, while enabling its own individual existence in the process, as well as that of its species. In this way rabbit and fox play a part in the existence of life itself.

Life slowly carved out an existence for itself on a planet that only provided the possibility for the eventuality of life. Earth was not made for life. Life made the planet livable. The very things that help to create life can also be destructive to it. Sunlight, nitrogen, oxygen, carbon dioxide, cold, heat, etc., can all be fatal to life. Life needs the opportunity to be able to use all those things for its own purpose. It needs to find just the right area within the creative/destructive dynamic of the elements conducive to its survival in order to thrive. Life in its primal state was the architect of the ozone layer, which found the area between the creative/destructive dynamic of the sun to make it friendly to new life forms to come.

Initially planet earth did not have the kind of atmosphere as there is today. The foundation for the subsequent development of life as we know it were microbes that could survive on a furnace of a planet while inhaling the nitrogen rich air and exhaling oxygen. This eventually led to their demise and paved the way for life forms that inhaled oxygen. Interesting to note here that primordial microorganisms engineered their own extinction. Something that Homo sapiens now seem to be engaged in. Of course, those primitive life forms did not have the conscious awareness to realize what was happening. So what’s our excuse?

It all has to do with which side of the creative/destructive dynamic a species finds itself at any given time due to its own behavior or to favorable or unfavorable environmental conditions or to how its behavior affects environmental conditions.

The cells of all creatures have been aware of this creative/destructive relationship with the nature of things for billions of years. Cells creating individual species do so with regard to the total cellular colony which all of life is part of. Cellular engineering, along with natural selection, conspires to create a network of life forms with all drives, appetites and instincts of particular species regulated by singular weapons, defenses and breeding rates that provide ample margins of survivability.

Whales who occupy the top of the food chain in the sea have low breeding rates and feed upon krill which are near the bottom and have very much higher rates of reproduction. In between these two extremes are many more such synchronized arrangements between species by which the one living organism of the sea, that each species and each individual of each species is part of, ensures its existence. This is not to say that the behavior of each individual of each species is somehow directed by the macrocosm of life itself for its own purposes. But that the entire living organism of the sea is all created and orchestrated from the microcosm of a cell. This nice (or perhaps not so nice) arrangement of the macrocosm was not predesigned but came at the expense of countless creatures that did not fit the bill and were condemned to extinction.

On land this same kind of synergistic arrangement between species is also evident. With the development of Homo sapiens, however, the arrangement is severely challenged by the very survival techniques that so successfully brought life to this point in its evolutionary process. We were endowed with a capacity for survival that has now become a threat to our continued survival. Our intelligence, our communication skills, have brought us to the brink of disaster and it now remains to be seen whether or not we can employ our conscious faculties to establish a new covenant with the nature of things that is beneficial to our survival and so to the entire ecosystem our survival depends on.

How do we do this? How do we go about providing the means by which we can reverse our present momentum and realign ourselves, our species, to conform to those elements of the biosphere that conspire to preserve and perpetuate life? Do we really have the ability to change our ways or are we a force of nature without the ability to sit in our own driver’s seat and effectively maneuver ourselves toward a future of a more conscious choice than that which presently appears before us?

There are no grand political schemes that are going to show us the way. That’s for sure. And old religions that still insist that mindless procreation represents the holy will of God are not going to show us the way. There is no God above with a plan for us to follow. We’re on our own. We are part of the God force as everything is. We are infused with particular manifestations of that force which emanate through us from the microcosm. So, we are formed as a force of nature that is one with the God force. We must combine with particular manifestations of the God force in other life forms to create a fuller more complete sense of God, of who we are and how we must conduct ourselves in this world for the sake of this world’s vigor now and in the unforeseeable future.

This world is our only link to God. All material, all matter, all life is the manifestation of the spirit of God, the essence of God. There are not two separate realms natural and supernatural that we must divide ourselves between while not really achieving a salubrious rapport with either, or achieving it with one at the expense of the other. This world is the realm of our concern; here we exist in a moment of God’s eternity. Our relationship to this earth, our relationships on this earth are one with our relationship with the essence of God, whatever God may be.

We know through our knowledge of the nature of things with reference to each other that life on this planet is something we must be responsible for. We also know that this newfound responsibility entails certain adjustments in our psyches and our living standards that we are not yet ready to accept. Our comfort level feels threatened. But it is threatened one way or the other. Present conditions are not very comforting and it seems they will only get worse in the long run. So the question is whether we take effective measures now, measures that we may find uncomfortable for the time being, or continue on our present course and invite wholesale discomfort to become a permanent condition.

Every image of God that ever was presented itself out of human temporal experience in relation with our intuitive sense that God(s) exist(s). Our intuitive sense of God is not contingent upon our experience. Our image of God is. The particular image of God that is formed by such and such a people at such and such a time is as true a representation of God as any other. It provides as good a connection with God as there can be as long as the image of God is relevant to the perspectives of contemporary experience. To change our image of God in reference to a changing world has no effect on God whatsoever. We confuse our intuitive sense of God with our image of God. Or connect the two in a way that causes confusion. Our intuitive sense is not contingent upon experience and we believe our image of God which is partly a product of our intuitive sense should also be unaffected by experience. We feel that any challenge to our image of God is a challenge to our intuitive sense of God’s existence. Our intuitive sense does not produce our image of God it just informs us that there must be some universal God-like presence. Any challenge to an image of God is not a challenge to God or to our belief in the existence of God. It is merely what it purports to be, a challenge to an image of God. Our image of God is not GOD. It is only an adequate means of relating ourselves to God through our knowledge and experience of our world and it is subject to change as our knowledge and experience change.

All the various Gods of the macrocosm have been created from the social interaction of people within various communities in response to their particular environments. It is out of this mingling of elements that all our cultural effects have been produced. The microcosm of individual intuitive knowledge of God’s existence, merging with the intuition of others, develops an image of macrocosmic Gods which gives resonate fullness to the individual’s intuitive sense. Macrocosmic images of God are created from a microcosm of individuals as God creates the macrocosm from the microcosm.

The whole universe is the unfolding of energy/matter in the form of infinitesimal particles. God is that unfolding. God is the catalyst for the existence of all things. God is the microcosm as well as the macrocosm. God is everything there is. Everything.

God is not our father. God is not a personage, man or woman. What God actually is we cannot know. All we can say is that God must be the essence of existence. And the closest concept we have of that essence is energy, which makes everything possible and yet remains an absolute mystery. What energy actually is we do not know.

About the creation of the universe all we can now imagine with our poor faculties and limited knowledge is that God is the energy that set in motion certain properties, which work upon one another in certain ways, to create a myriad of phenomena, in relation to the particular conditions afforded by particular locations formed by the motion of those properties. And although things must happen in specific ways in relation with other things under certain conditions nothing is really planned out in advance. That life occurred on the planet we call earth was merely a matter of how our solar system just happened to be formed. Life is a possibility nothing more, nothing less. The really significant thing is that life did indeed occur. However improbable life may or may not be is beside the point. The important thing is that it is happening here and now. And it will, in one form or another, continue well into the unforeseeable future. How long our species will be around is another question. Our continuance, to some extent, is in our hands. Excluding the possibility that the earth’s environment will so drastically change that our species will be unable to adapt, our continued existence is solely in our hands.

The universe is a manifestation of the God force, which might be equated with energy. Think of the whole universe and everything in it as one energy. This one energy is a total mystery to us, yet it is all there is, all around and within us. One energy transforms itself into all phenomena while the energy itself never changes. All things are at once in constant flux and absolute permanence. Energy transformed is the very essence of spacetime. The very essence of all there is. One is all and all is one.

All things are infused with this manifestation of God. We as individuals contain that God force. We are not God. We are not a God. But God is us. God lives within us and through us. One is a part of the total God force. One is comprised of subjective Gods. Gods of the microcosm. Personal Gods which serve one’s purposes well enough but must combine or bond with the personal subjective Gods of others to create a whole objective God in which everyone’s personal Gods can be subsumed and elevated. There are also minor objective Gods created. The bonds that are formed between people are a creation of objective Gods wherein subjective Gods can play, fight, love, etc. It is our objective Gods that bind us together and represent to us that which must be done, that which we must hold above ourselves in order to perpetuate ourselves.

Objective Gods fail when they cannot adapt to changing conditions or when subjective gods become confused with objective ones or when both conditions coincide. We now like to think of a God of the macrocosm who is independent of us, who has a plan for us and is judging our every thought and action. A supernatural God who created the human species to be put through the gauntlet of life to see how well we perform in order to get the reward of life eternal. We are, then, kind of like rats in a maze. This might be an interesting spectacle for a Creator but God supposedly knows exactly how everything and everyone will behave. So that wouldn’t be very entertaining. And if God is all knowing, why would He, at the time of Noah, decide to do away with all humanity because He was not pleased with how it turned out. And then, why would He change His mind about destroying everyone because He thinks Noah’s a pretty good guy? Anyway, God decides to spare Noah and his family, along with every other creature on earth. I don’t know why God initially wanted to destroy all the animals too. But, of course, sea creatures would have been unaffected. Anyway, Noah builds an ark at God’s bidding and he, his family and all the animals are saved from the flood.

It’s first of all curious that God, out of all the people He made, would make only one man who He could be pleased with. It’s also curious that God would destroy everyone else because of their wickedness in what was, as it turned out, a futile attempt to improve His handiwork. The world was no less wicked after the flood than before. And God knew that it would turn out that way to begin with?

This vacillating God who makes futile attempts to get things right is one that was obviously made in our image rather than the other way around. That image of God was fine and necessary for a certain people at a certain time. Again that image of God is not God but merely a people’s conception of God based upon their particular circumstance. And, though God in essence does not change, our image of God does change. We may not like the change, we may prefer the old image, we may wish the world didn’t have to change. We may attempt to ignore the changes in the world, deny changing perspectives, and, instead of dealing with those changes, stubbornly insist that the world must remain as it is, or once was, because we feel uncomfortable with the changes it demands.

Change, however, is inevitable and we now see Gods looking through us from the microcosm instead of down on us from the macrocosm. The only plan for us is that which we ourselves arrive at through the interaction of those Gods emanating from ourselves on an ongoing basis. God gives us law through innate moral perceptions that we are endowed with as a result of that part of us which is programmed by Gods of, or universal concepts of, law and order that have been created within us. These Gods of law and order, which radiate out of THE God, the universal essence, as all things do, are more prevalent in some than in others but all must be developed in concert with everyone else’s in order to form and reform a just and lawful social organism.

As an eternal entity, God, in essence has no past or future but always exists in the present. What need of past and future to an eternal presence? How could something that always was, always will be and never changes have a past or a future? We have concepts of past and future because they go along with the temporal realm in which we exist.

So, God has no idea of our future nor of any future. God doesn’t know what’s going to happen but God is what’s going to happen, whatever happens. It doesn’t matter to God whether we exist or not. Whether there is a planet earth or not. It matters to us. It matters to that of God which is looking through us. That part of God that is us. The Gods emanating through us and throughout creation have an interest in the perpetuation of a thriving planet earth. Otherwise, God, the essence of God has no such interest. That God exists in everything there is, unchanged, no matter what happens.

Our experience of God is a localized conceptualization of the essence of God. All we can say about what happens after we die is that we remain as part of the existence of God as all things are. But what that means exactly we just don’t know. Our purpose here on earth is to live according to those principles that speak to preserving life, preserving the ecosystem in which life can perpetually prosper. Assuring that virtual eternity, which must be measured and visualized through present actions, is the closest we get to the essence of God on this earth and to aligning ourselves to God’s eternity.

All the changes we have undergone in the past and are undergoing now as a result of scientific inquiry and technological innovation challenge traditional perspectives in all areas of life. Culture, government and business are all affected. The market place has generally been able to incorporate new ideas and perspectives more easily than institutions like government and religion. Businesses have found new philosophies and new ways of structuring themselves that are total departures from past practices in response to the changes wrought by the electronic age of information. Government and religious organizations have been floundering precariously in recent years as they struggle to maneuver through an ever-changing landscape with their outmoded concepts, structures and policies. In the commercial market place there is a survival of the fittest element, a selection process that is not subject to the bias, prejudice, tradition and convention that so constrains the market place of ideas. Significant cultural change is usually brought about through violent revolution or as the result of a culture’s total collapse, the Soviet Union, for example.

The collapse of the ancient City of Ur is another example. The demise of that culture seems to have led to the idea of one God. The many Gods of Ur were supposed to provide for the city’s welfare but they did not hold true to their promise of ongoing prosperity. A series of crop failures brought about an economic collapse of such magnitude there was nothing that could be done to remedy it. The Gods that the people of Ur had relied on to hold things together had utterly failed them. There was nothing left for them to do but leave the city and hope to find a home elsewhere.

Among the fleeing people of Ur was Abraham who is credited with conceiving the idea of one God. Jews, Christians and Muslims alike speak of the God of Abraham as the wellspring of their religions. This God appeared to Abraham as a way to fill the void within that was created by his disillusionment with the gods of Ur.

The scenario could have been something like this: On the disheartened journey away from his collapsing world Abraham felt that he alone was now responsible for the health and well being of his family. Everyone relied on him while he had no one to rely on but himself. Charged with this greater sense of responsibility, a God like position in regard to his family, along with an eagerness to fill the emptiness resulting from his shattered faith, Abraham envisioned God in an image created out of his own situation. One God. God the Father. With people as His children. Abraham was stripped of all the material wealth his civilization had provided and hence his new God did not have an interest in such things. Abraham was on a journey, a long and arduous journey, without any certainty as to its outcome. Where was one to go after one’s world had collapsed? And if one’s whole world could collapse what was the point of earthly existence? Again, the vision of his new God provided answers to his questions. Life itself was merely a journey one had to make in order to gain acceptance into a really permanent world beyond this one. The world where God existed. God’s world was the important one. The only one that mattered. The many Gods of Ur were unable to secure things in this world. But one could surely believe that one God could be relied upon to forever secure things in his own world. A world where all His children would be welcome to live after completing their particular journeys on earth.

This must have been a great relief to Abraham as well as an invigorating stimulus to his dissipated spirit. He now had a God whose efficacy was not connected to the impermanence of this world and one’s faith could be preserved regardless of earthly disasters. He now had a God who was not concerned with earthly success but by spiritual worth i.e., how one behaved on the journey. He now had a God who gave him a purpose beyond the outcome of any particular journey through this world. The real journey was connected to another world assured by the vision of his new God.

Religious/cultural beliefs can evolve with respect to cataclysmic change. But belief in God, whatever that may entail, endures.

GOD IS DEAD was the cover story for an issue of TIMES magazine around 1965. Fredrich Nietzsche proclaimed the death of God about one hundred years earlier. Both obituaries were the result of similar context. Nietzsche lamented the transformation of God from being perceived as a reality to becoming a mere concept, theory or ideology. The announcement on the TIMES’ cover was a result of the ascendancy of secular humanism over orthodox religious doctrine, which, again, usurped the position of a reigning God with an academic refinement, in this instance, Social Science.

To proclaim the death of God by mere mortals seems a curious matter. If God exists, there is no way in which we could arrange his death. All it really means is certain perceptions of one’s world, one’s self and one’s God have changed in such a way as to require a reassessment and realignment of one’s world, one’s self and one’s idea of God. No one has ever known God. No one has ever known the very essence of God. We can only relate to God through the world we live in, how we perceive ourselves in that world and our knowledge of it.

So, perceptions of God can change though God, if one actually exists, remains the same. It is only through this world that we can know anything at all about God and it is through our knowledge of this world that we create perceptions of God that serve as reasonable facsimiles of what God might be. Any personal contact one feels one has with God amounts to reverberations of one’s intense belief in the Godly perceptions one creates. So it is not a question of whether God is dead or alive or even whether God exists or not. It’s a question of what is the best view of God that can be created through the enlightened perspectives afforded us by our knowledge of this world.

Belief in God provides a focal point for the values that one must put above one’s self in order to maintain a cohesive society. A civilized society of disparate individuals competing with each other for survival requires a belief in a god that demands obedience and instructs people on how to behave. The birth of Islam among the Bedouin tribes serves as an excellent example here.

As Karen Armstrong describes it in A HISTORY OF GOD: “…Muhammad was acutely aware of a worrying malaise in Mecca, despite its recent spectacular success. Only two generations earlier the Quraysh (A Meccan tribe.) had lived a harsh nomadic life in the Arabian steppes, like the other Bedouin tribes: each day had required a grim struggle for survival. During the last years of the sixth century, however, they had become extremely successful in trade and made Mecca the most important settlement in Arabia. They were now rich beyond their wildest dreams. Yet their drastically altered lifestyle meant that the old tribal values had been superseded by a rampant and ruthless capitalism. People felt obscurely disoriented and lost. Muhammad was aware that the Quraysh were making a religion out of money…They felt they were the masters of their own fate, and some even seem to have believed that their wealth would give them a certain immortality. But Muhammad believed that this new cult of self-sufficiency would mean the disintegration of the tribe. In the old nomadic days the tribe had to come first and the individual second: each one of its members knew that they all depended upon one another for survival…Now individualism had replaced the communal ideal and competition had become the norm…family groups of the tribe fought one another for a share of the wealth of Mecca…unless they learned to put another transcendent value at the center of their lives and overcome their egoism and greed, his (Muhammad’s) tribe would tear itself apart morally and politically in internecine strife.”

And the Middle Eastern prophets Amos, Hosea and Isaiah saw that the social fabric of their respective cities was being eroded by greed and corruption as individuals put their own welfare above that of the entire community which they sought to remedy with the concept of one God. There were similar developments in other parts of the world as well.

Karen Armstrong writes: “The period 800-200 BCE has been termed the Axial Age. In all the main regions of the civilized world, people created new ideologies that have continued to be crucial and informative. The new religious systems reflected the changed economic and social conditions. For reasons that we do not entirely understand, all the chief civilizations developed along parallel lines, even when there was no commercial contact (as between China and the European area). There was a new prosperity that led to the rise of a merchant class. Power was shifting from king and priest, temple and palace, to the marketplace. The new wealth led to intellectual and cultural florescence and also to the development of the individual conscience. Inequality and exploitation became more apparent as the pace of change accelerated in the cities and people began to realize that their own behavior could affect the fate of future generations. Each region developed a distinctive ideology to address these problems and concerns: Taoism and Confucianism in China, Hinduism and Buddhism in India and philosophical rationalism in Europe. The Middle East did not produce a uniform solution, but in Iran and Israel, Zoroaster and the Hebrew prophets respectively evolved different versions of monotheism. Strange as it may seem, the idea of “God”, like other great religious insights of the period, developed in a market economy in a spirit of aggressive capitalism.”

“Strange” may not be the adjective for this particular phenomenon. Interesting to be sure, but where else could one turn to remedy the inequality, exploitation and social chaos of the time other than to some presence or idea that all must be beholden to. It is, of course, true that people are basically out for themselves. That is a fact of life. Nature creates individuals with an intense fundamental interest in their own survival. In the natural world this serves to bind members of a group together because each member realizes one’s absolute dependency on the group for one’s own survival. Civilization had substituted the natural world’s conditioning properties, with respect to channeling individual self-interest into the formation of cohesive groups, through the power of the state in the form of king and priest. With the rise of the market economy, however, that system failed to hold things together and self-interested survival became the order of the day, or rather the disorder. Divisiveness took over for lack of a unifying force. The idea of one God above everyone and everything, a God who was intensely focused on the everyday affairs of people was one way of installing a new force for cohesion. The one God was a means by which self-interest could once again be used to bring a people together. A means to put universal values above one’s own personal gain and provide a perspective through which a people might come to see and appreciate the big picture.

Isaiah’s unpopular message to his people was that Yahweh would turn against them if they continued in their selfish and wicked ways. The prophet warned them that their callous indifference to the misfortunate among them and the worship of other gods would cause Yahweh to bring catastrophe upon their heads. Isaiah’s warnings materialized with a vengeance. Israel and Judah were invaded and conquered by Assyria. As a vanquished and exiled people the Israelites and Judaeans began to consider that perhaps Yahweh really was the one true God. After all, what had been prophesized in His name had come to pass. Still, this Yahweh was a difficult God to accept. He was not merely acting on behalf of His people as provider and protector but He made them painfully aware of the error of their ways and would make them pay the price when His laws and warnings were not heeded.

As mentioned above these events were mirrored in other disparate geographical regions around the same time and for the same reasons. In each region the new gods, ideologies and philosophies were spawned out of disparate cultures and therefore took different forms. But they grew out of the same need and administered similar remedies. They were concepts that grew out of certain individual natures that stood apart from the cultural status quo. These were individuals who possessed an intense awareness of the big picture. They had, as it were, a god’s eye view of things. It was a vision that manifested itself in various ways within the different cultures but was constant in reacquainting people with the awe and mystery once found in the nature of things. Taoism, Confucianism, Buddhism, Hinduism and Judaism all reached inside people and brought them outside themselves through the invocation of something for greater than themselves and yet was immanently part of their individual lives. These visions were not from another world but from an earlier time in this world. They were not divine inspiration visited upon human nature, but were divined by human nature in response to cultural inadequacies. The cultural inadequacies all had to do with a lack of binding power between a people and the solutions were similar in various cultures because religion had evolved from the same wellspring - the awe of nature and the strictures nature imposed upon primitive people as they went about the business of survival.

It is indeed a tribal mentality that locks us into ideologically defined camps that flaunt a “you’re either for us or against us” attitude with respect to the rest of the world. This is not a healthful situation. Religious tribalism, for instance, poses a grave danger in its drive to rule the world from the Taliban of Islam to the evangelical fundamentalists of Christianity. In countries like Turkey where Islam is the predominant religion and a secular state presides an ongoing tension between the two persists as it does in the West between church and state – religious zealots seek a total power grab in the name of their particular God.

In the US the church and state issue was thought to be resolved over two hundred years ago. The American Revolution was in part a rebellion against dogmatic authoritarian rule under such concepts as the divine right of kings assumed at the time by English royalty. Such divine right claiming to represent the will and law of God is now assumed by religious fundamentalists who seek to have their beliefs imposed on everyone else by having them become the law of the land. Their position flies in the face of the First Amendment and the very spirit of American freedom and yet they flaunt themselves as true Americans.

That’s just plain ridiculous and demonstrates how ideological thinking can so severely skew one’s thought processes.

Here is another example; on a program that aired on 6/27/2002 conservative talk show host, Rush Limbaugh, in trying to dismiss the notion that the First Amendment to the US Constitution had anything to do with the separation of church and state, said the following - “There is no such clause in the constitution. All it says is that government should not establish an official religion.”

That is also what religious fundamentalist Gary Bauer claimed when discussing the matter as a candidate for the republican presidential nomination in 2000.

That statement was then, as it is now, a distinction without a difference in reference to the separation of church and state.

To point out that the First Amendment only prevents the state from establishing an official religion in no way argues against the concept of separation of church and state. In fact, it supports it.

Not establishing an official religion requires that church and state remain separate.

How else are we supposed to ensure that the government does not establish an official religion except by keeping the two separated?

Limbaugh mistakenly thinks his distinction makes a difference because he lets his ideological fervor take precedence over his better judgment.

All ideologues, of whatever stripe, make the same mistake. In seeking to have their preferred ideology dominate over all others they don’t think things through. They can’t think things through because that would inexorably lead them to conclusions that they do not want to reach. Conclusions that are true but that do not agree with the way an ideologue desires to see things.

In this day and age where we have religious zealots trying to impose their beliefs onto others through their assumption of some divine right of their own we need to take another look at the concept of church and state as it regards individuals. The concept of the separation of church and state for a society is the concept of the separation of faith and reason for individuals.

Keeping the two clear of one another can be a tricky proposition. The convolution of faith and reason is all-pervasive and has been part of our survival gear, perhaps, for as long as we’ve been on this earth. Where reason fails us faith succeeds. Reason cannot answer questions like – “What happens when we die?” - and so it becomes a matter of faith. Where reason falls short faith can soar. But when faith flies in the face of reason, clip its wings.

At the time when the idea of an afterlife was first developed people probably did not think in terms of faith and reason. All that mattered was that the idea of life after death answered their question in a comforting manner. It was something they wanted to believe and was lodged securely in their minds as was the fact that rocks were hard and snow was cold. Chasms arose between faith and reason as a result of certain beliefs that were contingent upon ignorance of physical reality and were eventually shown to be erroneous. These beliefs; the geocentric solar system, Creation, etc. were eventually demonstrated to be unfounded as science became more and more sophisticated. The Church’s reaction to Galileo’s heliocentric solar system was to try and suppress his findings while today those on the side of keeping their faith exactly as it is awkwardly try to bend reason to their will by creating oxymoronic organizations like, Creation Science, in a desperate attempt to challenge the science of evolution.

Difficult as it is we have to come to accept the lesson of history which teaches us that faith must evolve and adapt to the findings of scientific knowledge and sometimes be amended by reasonable views of the world developed through a more accurate assessment of things than that which had been in place in the past. For instance, it would not be acceptable today to conduct ourselves under the belief that God created a world of infinite resources for humankind to do with what we will, as it was once believed. And, one wonders, if Abe Lincoln were alive today would he say, “God must love all the wretched starving people of the earth because he makes so many of them,” as he once said of poor people? Such perspectives once rooted in faith are no longer tenable and illustrate how one’s faith needs to be supervised and amended by reason. The moral argument against birth control needs to be amended by the need for intelligent control of population growth. If one purpose of morality is to preserve life then the moral point of view should realize that living things sometimes have to check their growth in order to preserve themselves.

Again, with the issue of faith and reason we are presented with a dispute that appears to be irresolvable. Those who proclaim themselves as the keepers of the traditional faith brand those who seek to change it as heretics, instruments of Satan. They see faith as something unchangeable, absolute. If it is subject to change it becomes worthless in their eyes. They contend that sanctions against birth control are the immutable word of God. However, one could, without much stretch of the imagination, envision a world in which such an absolute morality could not exist. In fact, a world in which its exact opposite would become the absolute: Sometime in the future, if we are unable to halt the wholesale deterioration of the earth’s environment, we may find ourselves having to live within totally enclosed spaces housed under artificial life-support systems like the one constructed for the Biosphere II experiment undertaken in Arizona.

As one might imagine, space and resources in such an environment would be severely limited and able to support only a small static population. So, a policy of strict birth control would be an absolute moral imperative. That faith is blind to such a possibility is one reason why such a possibility could become a certainty.

Religious values are believed to be absolute in their inexorable connection with preserving life. Which means they are contingent upon the preservation of life. Therefore, it is our interest in the preservation of life that creates our value systems. It is the instinct for the preservation of life that is the absolute.

A moral value system can advertise that it promotes the preservation of humanity. In this way it extends one’s instinct for self-preservation to the preservation of all human life. But this is nothing special to human beings. Even in other species self-preservation is projected out to the preservation of one’s progeny, which in turn fosters the preservation of one’s entire species. And one’s own self-preservation can be overridden in favor of the preservation of one’s progeny and even one’s species. The “martyrdom” of lemmings, for instance.

It has, of course, been traditional lore to think of lemmings as committing suicide in mass numbers as a means of managing the threat of overpopulation. This myth, of course, has not been borne out by research. However, instances have been documented which explain its genesis. In a book by Dennis Chitty, Do Lemmings Commit Suicide?, the author cites examples of lemmings being found dead on sea ice in the Canadian arctic and he writes, “Lemmings that move on to sea ice will almost certainly die from lack of food and shelter, and in a sense are committing suicide. So, it’s easy to see how the myth arose. But it’s harder to believe that suicide is what’s on a lemming’s mind. For one thing suicidal lemmings would leave fewer descendants than those that stayed home, and natural selection would put an end to so simple a solution to overpopulation.”

That certain behaviors result in lack of descendants, however, does not mean those behaviors would necessarily disappear – homosexuality, for example.

Exactly why lemmings behave in this manner is not totally clear but, whatever the cause, their actions do serve as a means of population control, thus serving the higher purpose of group survival at their own expense. They are in a sense martyred by circumstances they find themselves in because of who and what they are.

On the human scale, Thomas More, for instance, did not intend to become a martyr. He became a martyr due to circumstances he found himself in because of who and what he was. This is not to downgrade his or anyone else’s martyrdom. Nor is the comparison meant to upgrade the behavior of lemmings. It merely points out broad similarities, especially in the fact that one does not need to have a conscious intent to become a martyr in order to become one.

Of course, one might say here, Thomas More made a conscious decision to die rather than deny his faith and that is not at all comparable to the behavior of any lowly lemming. However, one could also say, given who and what Thomas More was he really didn’t have a choice in the matter. A religion may teach us to put the interest of others, or the interest of holy principles, before self-interest. But it takes a certain type of person to carry that teaching to the extremes of a Thomas More. If we say there must be certain physiological attributes that give one the necessary character to be a Thomas More that would be no objection to celebrating such people. And as much as we’d like to separate our “lofty” actions from basic instinct the martyrdom of a Thomas More is, of course, supposed to ensure one a palatial suite of rooms in one of heaven’s finest hotels for eternity. Now, might one have a smidgen of self-interest in that prospect? To preserve one’s life for eternity? So, we’re back to the instinct for self-preservation.

It’s something one cannot get away from no matter what metaphysical labyrinths one constructs in order to distance oneself from such fundamental instincts. In denying self-interest in this life we see that one can actually increase self-interest infinitely in the next. It is the instinct for self-preservation that is the most powerful element engineering our whole outlook on the world and it is that which must be addressed realistically.

In perpetuity it is the condition of the gene pool that the instinct for self-preservation is subject to. When the gene pool becomes contaminated then self-preservation can become compromised. This, it seems, is what happened to the chimps of Gombe with respect to the internecine conflict that wiped them out. It was as if the chimps were programmed to survive or perish as a community. They were surviving together until suddenly something snapped. A signal switched on and ordered each and every individual chimp to declare war on one another. Like an individual biological cell that has been compromised in some way. A signal can be switched on that instructs the cell to self-destruct as it poses a threat to the self-preservation of the organism it is responsible for. Passion’s aberrant behavior along with other burdensome afflictions evident in the Gombe community, an outbreak of polio, a young chimp refusing to mature, were perhaps responsible for flipping the switch to self-destruct and thereby destroying their contaminated gene pool.

Might such a signal be switched on with respect to the human community and trigger a nuclear holocaust? There are those of us who are moved to indulge in wildly unrestrained violence for no other reason than to indulge in wildly unrestrained violence. Skin heads, the random self-destructive violence that has taken place in Mogadishu, in the Semitic community Arabs and Jews cannot help killing one another nor can Shiite and Sunni. And there is “ethnic cleansing” in various parts of the world - school and workplace rampages. Are we perceiving one another as mutant species that need to be killed off? Is that not how the chimps of Gombe came to perceive themselves? In the human sphere, as with chimps, those of other tribes were always considered to be completely exploitable and candidates for whatever aggression one tribe chose to dispense upon another for whatever reason.

When a threatened planet becomes more and more unable to support the billions of people that inhabit it along with it being manned by increasingly touchy and aggressive world leaders with their trigger fingers on nuclear weapons things could easily spin out of control in our ever shrinking global village.

The only possible solution is for social organisms all over the world to redesign themselves from the bottom up, with the microcosm firmly in control of the macrocosm. The world cannot be managed on a global basis, but global management can be achieved by communities managing themselves within a global context. That is, thinking globally, acting locally and keeping in mind the responsibility for the survival of life on this planet. That is the one value that unites every single human being on earth, indeed every living thing and honors the moral compact with life to come in the unforeseen future. And as we have come to measure our conduct here on earth according to how we believe we must behave in order to ensure ourselves continued life in the hereafter, we must now come to realize how we must conduct ourselves to ensure the continuation of life here on earth. The instinct for self-preservation is a powerful force and must be powerfully conditioned to serve the preservation of life rather than merely disguising it in self-serving moral finery in preparation for one’s death.