Short, ugly, and forever forgotten ...

The failure of gods, and those who claim to be the followers of gods, to make living fuller and better rather than shriveled and harder, is all the proof anyone should need to grasp that the gods do not exist. It hasn't worked out that way of course. World over people are following religion into hate, war, death, and personal denigration and debasement. The middle east is a cesspool of Islamic inhumanity and its residents are, by far, the most religiously degraded members of the human family at the moment. Still, much of humanity is following a similar path. In the US it is the Christians who are on the leading edge of evil.

American Christianity took its hard right turn toward doing harm when American Christians decided that coupling faith with political power was the way to “save” the nation. I was a member of the church back then, an ardent and committed follower of Jesus. Most of my doctrine came from the words and stories attributed to Jesus, which focused almost exclusively on how a person should live their own life, and included how they treated others. Compassion was at the base of it, along with tolerance, an effort to understand. A genuine and selfless love lie at the foundation for it all.

The “Old Testament” was sacred of course, but as the background story of history that focused human hope on the teachings that Jesus shared. In a like manor most of the rest of the New Testament” was expository, also sacred, but exposing the efforts of people to put those same teachings into practice. And, quite frankly, those efforts often seemed contradictory, sometimes deeply flawed, and clearly influenced by the context of the societies they inhabited. Paul's fondness for the imagery of slavery and his relentless misogyny were clearly the marks of a man limited by his society of some 2000 years in the past. The Bible was a source of wisdom and understanding in all things spiritual. No one with any sense suggested it as a text book or "owner's manual".

For some reason, along with the lust of political power came “literal” interpretations of scripture. That seemed okay at first, how could a literal interpretation of “love your neighbor as yourself”, the Sermon on the Mount, or the story of the Good Samaritan, go wrong? An American society measuring up to the standards demanded by the sorting of nations into goats and sheep would be a testament to just how far a human society could go toward justice and peace. But those weren't the parts of the Bible the American Church took literally. In fact the Church leadership spent more and more time demanding that the stories of the Old Testament be taken literally, and less and less time bothering, if they bothered at all, with the stories of and about Jesus. Stories once told mostly to children were insisted on as facts of history. Anyone who dared disagree was declared an enemy of god's own word. Every Sunday morning was more hate, more intolerance, more anger, and an ever increasing call to do battle the very people Jesus had called us to love. It wasn't long before the Church was a place I didn't understand, didn't fit, and could no longer endure.

I often wondered why the backlash of those who followed the teachings ascribed to Jesus, against American Christianity, never materialized. Many of my believing friends became professionals (for lack of a better term) in the Church. Ministers and Preachers and the wives of Ministers and Preachers; some going on to be Professors in theological seminaries and universities. In just a few years people who once favored the story of Jesus and the women brought before him to be judged, took to the pulpit to judge everyone from gay people to political liberals to unmarried mothers. Eventually even the poor and the homeless became targets of contempt. Churches grew bigger and more expensive while the preachers took to limousines, Rolex, and TV. I don't recall hearing of a single one of the people I knew rejecting this bastardized Christianity and walking away. But now I think I know why the backlash never came.

Those who would have been true to the teachings of Jesus, who would have lead the revolt against those who turned the Church toward power and greed, are simply not Christians anymore. They left the church, abandoning faith as the central theme of life. The demands of the Literalist and the Judge are those of nonsense and evil. But grasping that leads to the understanding that all of Christian doctrine is based on mythology rather than truth. The Fall, the Curse, Hell, blood sacrifice, the very idea of a god-man, the doctrines of Christianity are irreconcilable with the ideas implicit in many of the teachings of Jesus. Humility, love, understanding, a desire for truth, forgiveness and compassion are the truth of his doctrines. Many of the “Real Christians” followed the teachings of Jesus out of the church and away from the faith.

I suppose I was one of them. But the distance between me and American Christianity is now so great that it is hard to remember, or even imagine, that I once considered myself one of them. There are no gods. Humanity's only hope is to listen to truth reviled in the teaching of the best of its teachers. Among those being some of the words shared by the character of Jesus. Our mythology holds truth and light, offering guidance passed down through the generations. Religion, however, has always been completely compromised. The demand that one worship and accept as an unquestionable authority both a “god” and those who claim to represent same, has as its foundation the lust for power. That lust is the basis for all evil, and the very act of worship, of bowing a knee without even the idea of questioning the rightness of that being worshiped, twists and poisons the heart.

The lust for power is resurgent in the world and thus, so is religion. Yet love is the very opposite of wielding power. When the backlash, the true revolution, the real revival of the human spirit comes - if it comes - it will show itself as the rejection of the power of one person over another. It will include, and maybe start with, the rejection, of religion.

If it doesn't come human kind will have a short, ugly, and forever forgotten history in the cosmos.

What we like

With the Republican sweep of the mid-term elections it was inevitable that calls for impeaching the President would follow. Republicans will not impeach Obama for any legitimate reason, but that does not mean he should not be removed from office. Unfortunately, the reason he should go is equally applicable to everyone who would be doing the impeaching; the massive, criminal defrauding of the American taxpayer during the economic failure engineered by Wall Street, and the subsequent Government endorsement and cover-up of those crimes. If Nixon was rightly driven from office for covering up the criminal activity around the Watergate break-in (and he was) then Obama – and Bush before him – are equally liable for the criminal activity of Wall Street.

That criminal activity is well documented but is as much “out in the open” as it is ever going to get. Reports of the crimes are covered just enough to support the illusion that "someone is doing something about it". The Republican propaganda machine will not use the issue to go after Obama as their need is to protect the interests of the corporations and banks. But they can claim that Obama is a bad guy and thus paint the Democrats as bad guys as well. The Democratic propaganda machine will not use the issue to go after corporations and banks because they need to protect Obama. But they can claim that Wall Street and the corporations are the bad guys, and thus paint the Republicans as bad guys also. Which, as far as the American people are concerned, is about perfect. We do not want much more than some vague allusions to what is really making our political / economic system do what it does, but we do want a reason to pick a side. Which makes a demented kind of sense.

No one wants this can of worms (snakes really) opened and pored through mass media into the public's lap. If that happens the entire greed driven, crony capitalism that is the foundation of American society is likely to crash. Americans like greed driven, crony capitalism. It feeds our lust for “things” and massages the illusion we can all get rich with some work and some luck. It makes us feel special, so special in fact, that we have incorporated capitalism into our religion. God, we claim, is a free market kind of guy who has rewarded the rich for their enterprising ways and punished the poor for being “takers”. We are, at the same time, both victims of a corrupted system, and its biggest supporters. Cherry picking the propaganda to support our own version of greed and thievery, we pick a party and vote to keep the system exactly the way that is is.

What I see now is an America that is something akin to a pure criminal enterprise, one in which we are all complicit.  America's collective ego will simply not allow us to face the depth of corruption that has overwhelmed our society and the part we play in it. The Supreme Court's “Citizens United” ruling, Obama and Holder's refusal to prosecute anyone on Wall Street for crimes clearly committed, and the America public's refusal to engage corruption as a primary issue in any election, would have us all indited at the hands of any just court in the universe.  We are all supporting criminal activity, but none want to admit that we are the bad guys as well.

Eventually such a system has to collapse. There really is no honor among thieves. Betrayals, double dealings, secret pacts, hidden and not-so-hidden violence, fear, intimidation, and threats, are the hallmarks of our political / economic system and, often, of our personal dealings with each other. No nation jails as large a segment of its population as does America. No society happily endures our level of gun violence. No nation comes near to matching our personal consumption of resources and energy.

The truth is nearly impossible to winnow out of the chaff but that is actually fine with most of us. We are really not interested in exposing the system for what it is. It is our system. We like it. We vote for it. We claim it is the best system the world has ever seen and, given half an excuse, will impose it on any other nation by brute force. It has our enduring and unassailable support. And we will go down with it.

Voting one's way into hell ...

When the Son of Man comes in his glory, and all the angels with him, he will sit on his glorious throne. All the nations will be gathered before him, and he will separate the people one from another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats. He will put the sheep on his right and the goats on his left.

Then the King will say to those on his right, ‘Come, you who are blessed by my Father; take your inheritance, the kingdom prepared for you since the creation of the world. For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, I needed clothes and you clothed me,I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me.

Then the righteous will answer him, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you something to drink? When did we see you a stranger and invite you in, or needing clothes and clothe you? When did we see you sick or in prison and go to visit you?

The King will reply, ‘Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.’

Then he will say to those on his left, ‘Depart from me, you who are cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels. For I was hungry and you gave me nothing to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me nothing to drink, I was a stranger and you did not invite me in, I needed clothes and you did not clothe me, I was sick and in prison and you did not look after me.

They also will answer, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or needing clothes or sick or in prison, and did not help you?’

He will reply, ‘Truly I tell you, whatever you did not do for one of the least of these, you did not do for me.’

Then they will go away to eternal punishment, but the righteous to eternal life.

It may seem odd that an atheist would even know that this was in the Christian Bible, but I used to be a believer. Though I don't remember a lot about those days, I do remember that this story, and the Sermon on the Mound, formed two of the pivotal bits of my religious identity. Oddly enough this same story highlights one of the main themes in Christianity that eventually led to me walking away, that of a hell. In this case the people who get sentenced to that hell might well be described as people who where simply going about their lives pretty much minding their own business. At worst they were a bit calloused about the injustice around them, but no where is it suggested they stole food or drink or clothes, that they drove the immigrant back across the boarders, or sentenced the innocent to jail. Though they may not have been very active in making the world a better place (and this assumes they were not good parents, able teachers, skilled craftsmen, or honest business owners), they did nothing to make it any worse. Yet they still “will go away to eternal punishment”.

Though I am not a believer in gods, this bible story (without the hell part) still captures a good bit of my political identity. One crucial item that the Christians seem to miss is that the story revolves around the judgment of nations, not individuals. This may be a criticism of how an individual reacted to one particular beggar, but it equally as much about how societies are structured. The nations that left the hungry and the homeless to fend for themselves, did not welcome the stranger, and who (note this one carefully) did nothing to look after the sick and the prisoner, were condemned.

It is hard to imagine that the United States could find itself at the Son of Man's right hand. (The Son of Man? That title hints, again, at just how far the American Christians have strayed.) Here it would be easy to go into a long diatribe about American and it poor, its prisons, its attitude toward immigrants, and its health care system. From there it would be easy to segue into the love of greed and violence, the priorities of the National Budget, and being the weapons manufacturer to the world.

But my curiosity here, this close to an election, with the Republicans and the T-Party wrapping themselves with the mantel of Religion and claiming a hold on the moral high ground, is more esoteric. They will win (if they win) because Christians voted for them. But if this story is to be believed, they are voting themselves directly into hell.

This is not to suggest the Democrats would do much better.  But it can't be denied that the Republican right's politics would clearly seem to those of the goats, not the sheep.  To me anyway, it appears that anyone, let alone one claiming to be a Christian, would be hard pressed to explain a vote for Republican party priorities.  When shredding social safety nets, building fences and bringing guns to the boarder, deliberately denying health care to millions of citizens, and demanding that non-violent "offenders" be jailed - and often locked into solitary confinement for years, form the basics of the Party platform, claiming  ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or needing clothes or sick or in prison, and did not help you?’  will sound pretty lame.

Some think the country is at a crossroads and that the debate actually matters.  I don't think that is the case.  Long ago, if not at its very inception, the US turned to being a nation for the elite few living off the labor of the many.  In a way it doesn't matter how the Christian votes, any more than it matters how anyone votes.  But at least, should this bible story turn out to be true, the Christian could claim,

"But Lord, I didn't vote for those who wanted to leave you hungry, homeless, naked, sick and in jail."

Who knows, it might help.

Scale

A blog friend, Robert, and I have had a spirited political exchange on Deb's and my sailing blog. It has been fun, though there is a basic misunderstanding typical of conservative thought. For him there is only one possible social scale with conservative ideology at the “right” end, liberal ideology at the “wrong” end. Everyone and every policy falls somewhere on that scale. Since I do not share his conservative ideals I must therefore be a liberal.

That scale is an illusion, it has no units that measure how I see the world. But the truth is I cannot offer Robert, or anyone else (including myself), a label that fits how I do look at the world. “Off the Reservation” is all I have managed, and it is not very enlightening. I am a human being who suspects that humanity is a failing evolutionary experiment on what to do with consciousness and intelligence. We are smart enough to do ourselves in and not wise enough to avoid it. I can be described as an atheist. Yet I see self awareness as a fundamental facet of the universe, akin to a dimension or force, in a cosmos that is more like a thought than a machine. We are a mote of an idea in a fully integrated and border-less reality, and maybe not a very good idea. It may be that biology, tool making, tribalism, and intelligence are simply a bad mix that can never mature into much of anything, but it was worth a try.

At best we are a collection of dimly intelligent children who learned how to write just 10,000 years ago. We have barely begun to grasp our place in the universe, if we have even gotten that far. Our politics, religions, economics and wars are largely driven by animal instincts we do not understand and mostly deny. Our religions have their foundations in our caveman beginnings.

Adulthood is hundreds, perhaps thousands, of generations away. One might suspect, on the evidence, that we lack the capacity to ever live that long. Our travels through this life will always be those of children who do not really understand much of anything. If we could just grasp that, maybe we would actually start to grow up a little. Sadly, that understanding is one that still lies beyond our limited reach.

I am not a believer; neither am I completely comfortable with the label “atheist”. Both terms have their foundations in a view of the cosmos so primitive as to be essentially nonsense. “God” is a term that has no meaning. How can one “not believe”? It is like trying to grasp a vacuum, there is nothing there. In addition most of religion is based on the utterly false claim that we were created as adults, but are fallen. It tells us that we are damaged, not children, and need salvation, not maturity. It teaches that someone will come and save us, not that we need to grow up. Our society is steeped in the false assumption that we already know everything we need to know to be adults; that humans are as intelligent as intelligence gets. Religion prevents us from understanding the one thing we need to understand if there is to be much hope for a future that includes humanity.

We have yet to invent a political or economic system that works. I am not a conservative or a liberal. I am not a socialist or capitalist or communist. I don't “believe” in democracy, theocracy, or the divine right of Kings. They are all the babbling of children whose vocabulary is limited to a few hundred words, pictures whose coloring is far, far from being inside the lines. Scribbles mostly, incoherent and chaotic. With politics we have yet to outgrow the “bully” stage. Nation / States are make believe boarders. This swing set is where the cool kids hang out. That carousal is for the nerds. Our economics consists of “THAT is MINE”.

We still love war and force and threats. We like to hurt things. We like to break things; not to understand them better, but just to break them, like a two year old knocking down his brothers block tower.

I have to live in this world, navigating the preschool playground that is humanity, all the while knowing I am just one of the children. A person who lived 20,000 years ago couldn't reach much beyond his or her primitive society. He or she was limited by the social boundaries of knowledge and technology. I can't reach much beyond mine. We are all as integrated into human kind's current disposition as we are in the dimensions of space and time. That current disposition is one based mostly on fantasy, hubris, ego, and delusion. (Remember that that earlier person was physically identical to us and fully human in every possible way, just as smart, just as capable.)

I try to live my life with the curiosity and joy of a child while remembering that we do not even know what it is we do not know. I try to judge things by how they work for all of us on the playground. Who gets hurt, who gets helped, who does the hurting, who does the helping. Who is hording all the marbles. Who are the bullies and just how dangerous are they likely to be. Who cheats. Who plays fair. But I can't help but hope that in a truly adult world such concerns would be laid aside, making room for a better way to live.

I act all grown up when I talk about it, use the biggest words we have, pontificate a bit. All kids like to sound like adults, and we all do it. But the fact is we do not even know, for sure, just what “adulthood” means. I thought I did when I was 20. I thought I did when I was 30. At 59 I am not so sure. Humans have barely 5,000 generations of evolution behind us, just 300 since we started to write, 13 since Galileo first spotted the moons of Jupiter, 5 since Darwin published his book, not yet 3 since Hubble discovered the universe is expanding. Dark energy was discovered and the Internet invented in this generation. (The cosmos by the way, if measured by human standards, is 490,000,000 generations old. But then, we are not exactly sure just how to measure time. All we have is our reference frame. For a photon of the original “Big Bang” - what we call cosmic background radiation – no time has passed at all.)

I'll argue politics, religion, economics, and philosophy. Not very well sometimes, but I will give it a shot. I may even enjoy it. But I can never forget that the debaters are children playing hopscotch in the sand, that most of what is being debated is based on utter, unrelenting, nonsense.  We are talking but, on any real scale of measure, we can't possibly know much of what we are talking about.

 The only saving grace is the hope that we are doing the best we can. But I'm not sure that we are.

Robin Williams

Robin Williams died today of an apparent suicide. It may seem strange that I noticed or cared, given my contempt for America's celebrity culture is deep and long standing. But I enjoyed his manic humor and was touched by his work in “Good Will Hunting”, “Dead Poets Society”, and “Patch Adams”. He was, to me, a celebrity because he was an artist and thus in his own unique way a speaker of truth.

Truth is a rare commodity in our world. Politics is devoid of truth, as is religion. Business cares only for profit and will sacrifice truth, without thought, if a single penny can be added to the bottom line. So the loss of anyone who speaks to the truth of the human condition is a loss to be noted and felt.

There is another sad truth to his passing. With all the resources available to him, a loving family, money, access to the best health care available, and a community of people who respected his work, he was still unable to win a battle with depression. Just being a human was too heavy a burden for him to carry and his illness made death preferable to life. That is a sad and sobering thought.

I don't suffer from depression, which might seem odd given my generally poor view of human kind. One would think that being a member of a species as demented and self destructive as is ours would be enough to depress anyone. This is particularly true given the head long rush to insanity that drives every day's headlines. But, somehow, I bumble along finding tiny bits of joy midst the chaos.  We humans are likely a failed attempt in the evolution of a conscious universe. But a failed experiment is not a bad experiment so long as something is learned.  Even as we fail there and things to discover, children and grand children to love, and adventures to seek and enjoy.

Humans have proved that tribalism and hate will undo any society, regardless of its promise of intelligence and curiosity. It appears that true intelligence requires the skills of a tool maker for, without tools, learning and curiosity are truncated.  Without tools there is no ability to spread intelligence across the cosmos. But the tools of war based on tribalism and hate will negate an otherwise promising history.

Anyway, Robin Williams died today. The world is a slightly sadder place.

Random musings of the last few months

1.  All religions continuously evolve as various sects form, evolve within themselves, sometimes turning into something new, sometimes fading away. Conflict between sects of the same religion is a continuous part of human history. At times the conflicts are mostly intellectual contests as various doctrines are presented, defended, challenged, and changed. Often the conflicts are simply violent confrontations between warring sectarian groups. Those are the source of much of the world's misery, currently threaten the daily survival of millions of people, and may engineer the extinction of the human race.

Drawing clean lines between the sects is often impossible. Sects within a religion must share large blocks of ideology and doctrine, and the prejudices of the person drawing the lines must always be considered. For this atheist all religions are sects of “god belief”, much of it pure superstition and all of it based on a magical view of the cosmos where a “god” can do anything it likes without limit or restraint.

Then I consider the Jewish / Christian / Muslim faiths three sects of the same religion, one based on the God of Abraham as described in the Jewish scriptures. Those broad divisions are divided into additional sects, and those divided even further; a reflection of the tribalism which is a part of human evolution. Because I was born in America and raised in the Protestant sect of the Christian sect of the religion of the God of Abraham, Christianity is the faith I know the best and the one that I abandoned. It is also the faith that all Americans simply cannot avoid. Christianity is its various forms deeply affects American politics and sets the foundations for much of the national identity.

In America several of Christianity's major sects are pretty easy to define. There are somewhat liberal and much more conservative branches of the Catholic sect. Among the Protestant sects there are branches much more liberal than the Catholic brand, and those much more conservative. There is also the growing sect of the Mormons with (I am going to guess) its own branches more conservative and more liberal. And to all of this I am going to add my own sect, that of American Capitalism Christianity.

American Capitalism Christianity (ACC) is its own sect, though its adherents self-identify as Catholic, Protestant, or Mormon. (Drawing lines between sects is always an exercise in “fuzzy logic”, and not in a good way.) In spite of these three distinctions, American Capitalism Christianity is a real sect of like minded individuals. Among the shared doctrines of ACC is a absolute faith in unrestrained capitalism and its religious counterpart of a prosperity doctrine. ACC has as its benchmark of “good” that which makes money. Oddly, it doesn't matter if the individual believer shares in that prosperity, only that he or she believes that they might become wealthy in the future should they serve god in the proper manor. Bound up in this ideology is an antipathy for the poor, or anything that would appear to be a social safety net for the disadvantaged.

This love of money is the defining doctrine of American Capitalist Christianity and sets it apart from every other Christian group. But it is not the only doctrine that defines this sect. Deep at the core is a fundamental racism / tribalism. Though there are some minority individuals who claim this sect as their own, fundamentally this group is the home of the middle aged and the white; with their social values carried from the 1950s.

2. Liberty …

Liberty is not the right to self-absorbed narcissism. Liberty is the chance to live in a society where the value and aspirations of each individual are cherished and supported by every other member of that society. Liberty is found where universal civil rights are protected by the full weight of a first world society. Liberty is found were every individual is rewarded for his or her contribution to a better life for all, where no one profits from the contributions of another. Liberty is found where no one is allowed to coerce another in any way for any thing. Liberty is only found where the full resources of a society are focused on protecting me from you, and you from me.

Liberty is not an individual thing. Liberty is a gift offered to each individual by an enlightened and powerful community.

Liberty is too hard, too complicated, and too fragile a thing for any individual to gain alone. Liberty is a community effort. Which is why liberty has been lost in the United States of America.

3. Clive Whats-his-name, the T-Party / Republican rancher who owes the US taxpayers a million or so dollars for grazing his cattle on public land, is back in the news. The last time was for avoiding being arrested (hopefully temporarily) by holding Law Enforcement Officers off at gunpoint. Republicans all over the country cheered him as a true American Patriot for that, at least until it became clear he was also a dumb shit racist.  Of course, had he been a Black American holding off the law with a gun, he would have been filled with government issued bullets in less than a heartbeat and Republicans all over the nation would have cheered.

This time he is making the news for claiming God instructed him to start his “civil war” with the US government. If Clive was brown skinned and skinny, sporting a scraggly beard and turbine, and invoking the Islamic sect's version of the God of Abraham for his jihad against America, every Republican in the country would be howling for his head on an NSA platter. But Clive is fat and white, and invoking the Christian sect's version of the God of Abraham as the justification for his “civil war”.  No one is calling for his head, and he has yet to take up residence in an NSA holding cell for terrorists.  I would love to hear any Republican explain why that is without sounding like a idiot.

It is hard to imagine that Clive is so dumb as to believe he has actually provoked, or is involved in, a civil war with America. Seal Team Six, by all accounts and all by itself, could end the War With Clive in less than a week without so much as working up a sweat. They appear to be pretty good at offing religious fanatics who threaten the Homeland. A single Predator drone could do the same in less than an hour. The only reason Clive is hale and whole and still shooting off his mouth is, as an American inside the boarders of the US, he has claim to certain legal rights from the same government he derides as his enemy. A good bet would be, should Clive ever pull the trigger and actually kill a Law Enforcement type in the name of his God, he will have the chance to talk it over with the Almighty, face-to-face, a few moments later.

It is also telling that in a world of war, poverty, child sex slaves, and genocide, God's big problem is with the America's Bureau of Land Management.  Even more amazing is His prophet, chosen to bring holy war to America, is a welfare rancher who likes guns. For Clive to see himself as talking with, and being a particularly chosen servant of, the One-And-Only-God-Of-All-The-Cosmos, is surely a level of delusion that clears the bar of being a serious mental illness with several light years to spare.

So its hard to tell if Clive should be arrested for the criminal he clearly is, laughed at for the fool he clearly is, or medicated for the mental illness he clearly has.

No invitation ...

One of the smarter people on the planet, Dr. Neil deGrass Tyson, suggested that intelligent life has already visited the earth, glanced over the locals (us), saw nothing of interest, and moved on.  On the scale of intelligent life in the cosmos, human beings simply have no rank.  We are not intelligent enough to even be considered intelligent.

We have been writing barely 10,000 years, roughly when our earliest civilizations were formed.  The industrial revolution is not yet 200 years old.  We are not intelligent enough to end wars, feed our hungry, care for our sick, or protect our children from violence.  I suspect Dr. Tyson is onto something.

I am going to assume, just for a moment, that true intelligence is, for all practical purposes (or at least from our point of view) eternal.  Intelligent beings would be offered a seat at this eternal table.  With that image in mind, what would human kind bring to such a setting?  We could hardly shed our tribalism, war mongering, violence, prejudices, and still carry the label of "human".  Our most popular god (the Jewish/Christian/Muslim god of Abraham) reserves his heaven for the chosen few while condemning most of our species to torture.  One of our most cherished beliefs is that He will return with a "holy army" and conquer the world in a orgy of blood and death in one glorious, final battle, and rule supreme.  We imagine this same god created the entire cosmos, and all of its other intelligent beings, simply for our benefit.  We believe, when this final battle comes, those other intelligent species will be caught up in our tribal battle.  This embodies our best image of "goodness".

I suspect, at the eternal table of true intelligence, human kind would be an ill-mannered, loutish guest; at best.  Fuck, even our god wouldn't rate an invitation.

Could it be?

I am not very optimistic about America's future, being of the opinion that a country this far gone in illusion, propaganda, war profiteering, violence, lies, religious fundamentalism, and corruption, is not likely to find its way into a bright and promising future. Most of the focus of my disillusion is the SCOTUS, followed closely by the Senate. Both are controlled by conservative / religious fundamentalists and beholding only to their corporate masters. The remainder of my disillusion rests with the people of the US, enough of whom vote conservative / religious to keep that abusive minority in power. Democracy is hard, and the people of the US are simply not up to the task.

Or so it seems.

There is, however, a small ray of hope. At the moment the media is full of stories of how the Republican / conservative / religious fortunes are on the rise. Media talking heads fully expect the Senate to go to the conservatives in the fall, along with an increased majority in the House. The Republicans are portrayed as confident while the Democrats are supposedly paralyzed with dread at their coming irrelevance.

All of this portrayed by the same media that said Obama was in trouble in the last election and that fully supported the Bush administration claims of WMDs. It is a media that I routinely describe as completely lost to propaganda wars. So why would I think that they are getting this rise of conservatism right? If every “close race” goes to the Democrats this fall, it is the Republican party that is done. Isn't it likely that, deep in some conservative dungeon somewhere, they worry about their future and know their time is nearly up? After all, even King Rush admitted (after the election of course) that he knew Romney was going to get skunked. (It should be amazing that none of his followers reacted to such blatant lying by their No. 1 Talking Whore. But it isn't.)

According to this same media religion is certainly having its way. Religious fanatics keep the headlines filled with cognitive disconnect as the country slides into theocracy. Yet in spite of all that religion can do gay marriage is a done deal, the drug war is on the wane, and prison abuse and reform is at least on the horizon. While it is true that fundamentalists have, in several conservative controlled states, gutted science education and replaced it with religious mythology. But really, who cares? For the most part all that happens is that the rest of the country makes fun of them. Are the kids from these states going to make much of an impact in the world, do much good, raise any one's standard of living? Probably not. But some kid from a state whose school system reflects what humankind has learned in the last 500 years, will be there to fill the gap. So far as society as a whole is concerned, no problem. And while religion is reported to be on the rise, most Catholics use birth control, most Christians know the world is old and revolves around the sun, and the churches are empty on Sunday morning with less then 25% of Americans in attendance.

Every state government, blue or red, has bowed to the mighty NRA and passed concealed carry laws. But are most Americans now walking around secretly packing heat? Some are, now that its legal. But most, even many? Slightly more than a third (37%) of Americans say they or a family member owns a gun. If even half of the owners carry, (and I think that unlikely) it would mean less than one in 20 of those around are potential gun threats. Pick a crowd at random and it is likely there are more gay people in it than people toting guns. (Some of the gay people may well be packing, which should give the homophobes among us pause.)

Some loon of a welfare rancher gets the media foaming at the mouth. Armed revolution! The Police State! Tyranny and anarchy! Yeah well, the Feds go home figuring this asshole is not with the price of a bullet. Yet one can be pretty sure his list of legal woes is just beginning. Bank accounts? Frozen. Access to loans? None. He may find it very hard to market his beef when the Health Inspectors finish. And really, should he become a real threat, how long would it take a handful of trained military snipers or one drone to eliminate that threat? This guy is nothing but a conservative fuck in full stupid mode. (Surprise, he turns out to be a racist stupid fuck as well.)

Yet no one that I know doubts this guy is a true Republican, one of the party's base. Big time conservative names jumped right into bed with the guy as soon as he hit the media, then got caught with their pants around their knees. Rather then conservatism on the rise these dicks were going limp in a hurry.

Propaganda is a powerful tool and the people of the US are at least as susceptible to it as any other nation. Maybe more so since mine was the first generation raised on TV and taught to believe whatever came out of it as news. Remember Uncle Walter's, “And that's the way it is...?” A 30 minute reading of carefully crafted headlines, we were told, is how the world really was. Pure bullshit, but that's what we were raised with.

On the other hand, maybe the propagandists are starting to believe their own shtick and missing the fact that the rest of us are on to them?

One can only hope.

Real responsibility

This is a violent, hate filled nation with a morality so twisted as to be indistinguishable from evil. Our politics are utterly corrupt. Our courts are stuffed with religious fanatics. We have politicians who sanction rape and laws written specifically to excuse murder, racism and oppression. The culture's dominant religion (various forms of Christian fundamentalism) preaches a god that rewards the rich, despises the poor, supports the powerful, punishes the weak, loves guns, endorses war in any form, and considers women to be second class citizens. Theirs is also a god that rewards blind faith and is an avowed enemy of knowledge and education. And while the ultimate failure of a society as ill as this one is assured, it sometimes seems as though the rest of the world is following close behind.

At the moment war is eminent in parts of the old Soviet Union as Russia seeks to provoke a confrontation with the Ukraine. China is showing every intention of instigating war with Japan, while N. Korea is ever posed to invade the South. (China would be well served to have N. Korea start a war with S. Korea when they take on Japan.) Russia and China are working together on war games. None of this is ideologically driven, there is no effort to spread communism around the world. This is pure greed for resources, power, and land. And the people of the world, as usual, rally to the propaganda of their leaders. Human kind is infested with war and hate, and it is likely a disease fatal to the whole of the race.

The next series of wars brings the full Monty, nukes, chemicals, biological weapons, terror attacks across the globe. Drones will reach into every neighborhood and the police state will battle its own citizens with the same zeal as the military battles enemies of the state. All of human society seems intent on an orgy of self-destruction.

And I don't have a clue what a moral, self-aware person it supposed to do in such a world. Rejecting the entire ethos of war, greed, and self-gratification seems the only choice, but it is a choice that matters little. A single drop of fresh water in a raging ocean. People everywhere accept the nation / state and follow the leaders of their tribes. In the US liberals follow the liberal playbook without comment, doing battle with the conservatives who do the exact same thing. Each side vies for power and control, just in different guises. Vote for the liberals and one votes to cede power to the nation / state. Vote for the conservatives and vote to surrender power to the corporations and the religious fanatics. Pick a side. Each intends to battle to the death in order to rule the world.

The only hope for the future is for an entirely new ethos to sweep across the planet; an ethos that rejects the concentration of power in governments, religions, corporations, and the military. It must be an ethos that rejects greed as the foundation for running an economy; one that grants basic civil rights to every human, everywhere. It will have to be a tough ethos, one that accepts casualties as a part of sweeping out the old. And it will have to be one where people simply refuse to support the old, not going to church, not voting, not paying taxes, not accepting being indentured to a corporation in exchange for a meager living with little hope for joy.

Such an ethos would be evident when the Pope speaks to an empty St. Peter's square, where elections are held and no one supports any of the corporate approved candidates, where governments fall for simply suggesting war is a viable option. It will have to be an ethos where workers walk away from the production lines building weapons of war; where, in the land of the Second Amendment, gun stores shutter their doors for a lack of customers. No one sharing this ethos would volunteer to wear a military uniform. Those conscripted by force would march and train and take up weapons. But when it came time to fire they would be aiming at their own officers, not those conscripted by the “other side”. (This on both sides of the front line.)

The foundation of such an ethos is simple, individuals are responsible for the actions of the collective. Not a matter of judgement but one of personal responsibility. A responsibility felt at the deepest core of being, at a place where each steps up to, or abandons, the claim of being human.

In this place generals are murderers, but so are the privates, cooks, mechanics, and office workers who kept the military machine working. The propagandist is the enemy of truth, but so is each person who responded to the lies without thought, the people who write the speeches, the media CEOs who air them, and the sponsors who supported them.

The CEO of the weapons manufacturer is guilty of genocide, but so is each worker who makes a living helping create the weapons used to kill thousands of innocents, right down to the cleaning staff who empties the trash cans each night. The CEO who sacrifices the quality of life of his employees in order to add a few pennies to the company stock price is a thief, but so it the board of directors and the bankers who reward the “increased productivity”.

Where the people vote each would be held responsible for the politics of the elected. If “your guy” supported the NRA each child killed is your responsibility. The rich prosper while the poor starve? The politicians bought by the corporations are guilty of corruption, but so is each poor person who voted them into power. Education subverted to fanaticism as the teaching of lies? Every single parent, school board member, and teacher is guilty of failing the next generation.

Human kind is responsible for its own survival, but until a large majority of us realize this truth, our survival is highly unlikely.

Easter

Today is Easter Sunday. That doesn't mean much of anything to me, but it does highlight a curiosity. On this day a billion or so Christians are celebrating an act of sacrifice, forgiveness, and love, actions taken on their behalf by a benevolent god. This is the peak of the Christian year and the most important holy day. So the doctrine of this day must be the most precious of doctrines and the focus of their religious efforts, correct? Come morning a billion people will go out in the world freshly motivated by god's sacrifice, forgiveness, and love. In the United States, supposedly, 3/4s of our friends, neighbors, bosses, and political leaders will be part of that outpouring.

Sacrifice. Forgiveness. Love.

Tomorrow should be a pretty good day.

Does anyone really think tomorrow will be any different from yesterday? Come tomorrow the Christians will act as they always do. They and their church are on the receiving end of sacrifice, forgiveness, and love; the beneficiaries. Not the bearers of.

A sacrifice has been offered on their behalf but they will offer none that benefits another. Indeed, instead of offering a sacrifice they will demand that others sacrifice to them. Gay people will be expected to sacrifice their self-worth and love of another. Women will sacrifice the idea that they are equal partners with men. Other religions will be expected to sacrifice the right to worship as they were taught. Facts will be sacrificed in the fire of Christian interpretations of an error free holy book. Poor people will sacrifice access to health care, food, and education so tax breaks can be offered to the wealthy Christian CEOs and wars can be fought by the Bible believing Generals of the US military.

Think that is a stretch or a twisting of the truth? Christianity is THE religion of the American Conservative movement, and that of conservative movements throughout the world. Vladimir Putin was at mass this morning, most of the members of the Supreme Court, and anyone who is anyone in the Republican Party. Obama was at church this morning. (Maybe the drone warriors will get a day off?) If just the world's leaders who were in church today acted in accordance with the claimed doctrine of this day, tomorrow really would be a pretty good day.

The Christian claim to fame is that they have been forgiven. Forgiving others, however, is beyond them. With the possible exception of Muslims, Christians appear to be the least forgiving people on earth. In the case of even minor doctrinal differences they are incapable of forgiving even each other. The American division of Church and State was institutionalized to keep the churches from each other's throats. Christian forgiveness is evident anywhere Christians take up arms against other Christians, or trade words of hate and disrespect. Forgiveness is rare within the family of the Christian god, there is none left for those outside. That is okay with the Christians. They are, after all, "not perfect, just forgiven".

Love. Christian. Got ya.

Pretty much all one has to do is say the words "love" and "Christian" together, then look around the room. Even in a church most of what one will see is rueful smiles. As bad as the Christians are with forgiveness, at least they have some idea of what the word means. When it comes to love they are clueless.

Only a Christian would equate the word "love" with torturing someone to death. The church made a science of such activity for thousands of years. In Uganda today gay people are imprisoned for life or summarily executed. Christian Ugandans acting in love with the direct support of Christian Americans. Given the power many American Christians would enact the same laws in this country. They call it, "loving the sinner, not the sin."

Christians beat their children in the name of love. Loving Christians demand that god destroy the USA or apologize to Sodom and Gomorrah, and cheered when New Orleans was drowned by a hurricane. As a act of love a Christian will shun friends and ostracize family for leaving a church. Any act of depravity, war, torture, imprisonment, or terrorism can be justified by carefully wrapping it in the word "love". And the ultimate travesty, the "god of love" needing a hell in which to imprison and torture most of humanity for all of eternity.

It would be impossible to corrupt the word "love" any more than already accomplished by the Christians.

Today a billion Christians celebrate being blessed by god's sacrifice, forgiveness, and love. Tomorrow, armed with those same words, they will go out and do immeasurable harm to the rest of us.

I hope the criminals are loosing

The world seems dangerous and often depressing place these days, but I wonder if there is a different, and better, way to look at it. There is little doubt battle lines are being drawn in every culture, between nations, dividing up societies, and across economic classes. Political parties are divided against each other and often, fracturing from the inside. Something has shaken human kind to its core.

I think all of the chaos is largely the result of one discovery, the knowledge of which is sweeping into human consciousness at an ever increasing rate. This discovery so drastically alters our understanding of the universe that virtually all of our social norms and power structures are challenged and undermined. Somewhat abruptly, in just the last 100 years of so (three generations at most) we discovered that none of our ideas about a god as proclaimed by any of our religions, are true.

Dismiss completely the "god or not god" fight, of theism verses atheism. Concede that there may be a fundamental, even self-aware, cosmic motive force somewhere out there. The fact is that none of our religions describe a god that is consistent with the universe. All the gods of mankind are human-centric. The cosmos, clearly, is human-couldn't-care less.

All of our religions are false. None of our gods exist. And we are just now starting to realize it.

None of the religions have any foundation on which to base their claim to power. There are no god made rules about women being subjected to men, gay people having sex, little girls going to school, kings ruling by divine right, or life beginning at conception. The Pope has no special relationship with a god and thus no elevated standing among people. Nor does any other religious leader. No religion has any basis for holding title to its property or claims on land and territory. Every action and every dictate of every religions person made on any day of human history, insofar as it invokes a god for justification, is utterly without merit. Most of human history is little more than a fraud. Most of our social norms and power structures are built on sand.

Reluctantly, ever so hesitantly and confused by the implications, the reality that we have been wrong about gods all along is, nonetheless, sinking in. But it is impossible to overstate how fundamental a shift in human history this will be. There is no guarantee that we will survive it at all. Everything around us is being undone.

So reluctant are we to admit to our place in the universe that people on both sides of the battle lines, even those on the side rejecting the claim that this or that is god's will, still cling to a god belief. For example most gay rights advocates insist that god didn't make the rules about gay sex that the other side claims He did make. Rarely does the gay man simply dismiss the "god said it" claim as utterly immaterial. The same "He said," "He didn't say" bickering goes on over contraception, abortion, women's rights, poverty, immigration, foreign policy (particularly when it comes to the middle-east); in fact across every battle line there is.

It is long past time to make the line clearer. Those on the progressive side should simply stand up and state, "your claim about what god says is bull-shit. I will not buy your claims to power if it is based on one of human kinds religions. If that is the only argument you have then you have no argument at all."

Then the lines should be drawn even more clearly. Religion is most often used to justify acts that would clearly be criminal if done without the claim of a god. But even with the claim those acts are still criminal acts. Discriminating against women is illegal in modern, first world societies, except inside the Church. Catholicism, and many Protestant fundamental groups, insist that god discriminates against women so men must as well; while women are supposed to accept their inferior statues. (This all based on an utterly ridiculous myth of Adam and Eve.) But invoking a god doesn't make discrimination any less a criminal act. Discrimination against gays, minorities, immigrants, even other religions, is also an act of lawlessness.

The big crime in religion though, is murder. Religiously instigated mass murder is an every day occurrence in the world today. Only criminal organization make murder an option for someone leaving the organization. Only street gangs and drug lords use murder to build empires and protect profits. And no street gang has ever sunk so low as to have among its ranks someone who, in the name of that gang, shoots a little girl in the face for going to school. Religion can't make that same claim.

No corporation or company has ever made murder a response for someone taking another job. Corporations don't send out suicide bombers to kill those who work for other corporations. Corporations often use the phrase "cut-throat" as a metaphor describing market place competition, but no throats are actually cut. But religion can't make that claim either. Indeed, all religions find room in their respective ideologies in which murderers easily hide. No other lawful human organization does the same.

Somehow religion continues to get a pass for masking criminal actions as something that doesn't really do any harm to people and societies. But part of the knowledge that comes from realizing that none of gods of human kind actually exist, is the knowledge that religion often acts as a criminal organization.

The battle lines are real, the battles are real. On the one side is a increasingly aware segment of the human family. Even if they don't reject religion altogether they realize the gods of old are no gods at all.

On the other side are the criminals.

One can only hope the criminals are loosing.

Drifting

Every often I feel like a person adrift in the world. Since I live on a sailboat without a fixed address that is true in the most literal sense. But in this case my feeling isn't about my physical relationship but rather a worldview, a sense of place. I don't really belong anywhere. No place is home.

This presents several puzzling issues. We are all social creatures, formed by the times, society, and families we grow up with. The language(s) we learn, the churches we attend, and the media we experience shape much of how we see the world. That shaping can be restrictive in the extreme; for example that of religious fundamentalism or xenophobia, sexism, and racism. Raised in such societies even the victims (women, minorities, or the underclass) will accept the abuse they endure as appropriate, just, and even moral. The Divine right of kings was a belief held, not just by the kings, but by the subjects of kings as well. How does anyone come to feel out of place in the society that formed them? Yet the fact remains many, including myself, do. Sometimes to the point of rejecting much of what forms the basics of the society.

In my case those basics include religion, capitalism, and democracy; pretty much the whole gambit of modern western society.

Like most I was raised a religious person, an Evangelical Christian fundamentalist. That put me at the very center of the current religious foundation of the US. Human kind is fallen and damned. A small remanent will be rescued in accordance with the fall / sacrifice / redemption story of Christianity. The rest will be judged, condemned, and lost. "Lost", to the fundamentalist, means tortured in hell forever. This was the first of the fundamentalist doctrines I eventually rejected, and the first step to ultimately abandoning all of them.

Yet that Christian Fundamentalism still underscores much of American politics. The ridged law-and-order mentality that twists our judicial system, stuffs prisons to overflowing, and shrugs at the abuse of migrant workers has its foundation in a judgmental and unforgiving god. Much of our war mentality grows from worshiping a god who ordered the annihilation of "his people's" enemies; and the assumption that the Christians of the USA now constitute "his people". The continued discrimination of women and gay people is rooted in the interpretation of god's supposed reasons for creating sex. The USA's continuing war on the poor is a twist on the law-and-order mindset. The poor aren't (usually) considered criminals per-say. But they haven't obeyed the godly rules of capitalism as they should. Their punishment is that of being poor, and it is rightly deserved.

Rejecting the religion of the USA as mythology, mean-spirited and evil, makes it difficult to accept the politics based on that religion as anything other than mythology, mean-spirited and evil. Though mythology should be a tool for passing wisdom from one generation to the next, the religion of the US has turned mythology into dogma, the antithesis of wisdom. Ours is a society increasingly "sharp" but fundamentally ignorant and dim witted. We often do what we want to do with little thought given as to what we should do. Since I try to live my life the other way around, only doing what I want if there is a certain element of wisdom to it as well, our is a society more and more distant to me.

Media, in what ever form, has always been a way for a society to tell its stories, to share the wisdom of its mythology. Media in the US had taken on an entirely different roll. It celebrates those doing what they want while eschewing anything remotely celebrating wisdom. That media is paid for with advertiser's propaganda, the worst kind of mythology ever invented. The combination may make commercially produced "reality" programing perhaps the ugliest story telling in the history of mankind.

It is also extremely profitable, part of the reason capitalism is no more attractive than is religion. (In the US the two are deeply intertwined, making it a bit misleading to treat them as totally different enterprises. Something to keep in the back of the mind.) American Capitalism is based on two premises. One is that wealth is equal to value. The second is that accumulating wealth is superior to creating wealth. Both are deeply destructive.

In our society an expensive thing is automatically a valuable thing, yet nothing could be further from wisdom. Indeed, many of the expensive things have remarkably little value at all. A $10,000 watch or a $30,000 necklace are expensive, far beyond the purchasing power of most of the people in the world. Yet neither has any real value. There are plenty of ways to tell what time it is without the watch. The necklace doesn't do anything useful at all. Indeed, the only real attribute of either is that they suggest that the wearer is wealthy, and therefore is a person of value. It is an illusion.

Wealth and value are completely different characteristics. A wealthy person is no more likely to be a person of value then a poor one a person without value. But capitalism, borrowing some of the mythology of American religion, tries to insist otherwise. The elitism of American religion, that of the chosen people being the only ones worthy of god; are echoed by capitalism, where the rich are the only ones worthy of value. As the chosen of god are beyond the criticisms of those who will be condemned by that same god, so are the the wealthy beyond the criticism of those who are poor. Of course the once criticism, above all, that must be suppressed is that the wealthy do not, in truth, deserve their wealth.

In other words accumulating wealth is superior to creating wealth. This is the driving principle behind capitalism, where the lender of money collects interest, gets to lend more money, collects more interest, and thus slowly appropriates the wealth created by the borrowers of money to himself. This is how they accumulate wealth without actually creating any wealth. (Remember, here we are only talking about wealth. Whether or not any of this has any value is an entirely different debate.) Unless very well constructed regulations are in place and enforced, the lender of the money will collect ever larger percentages on the money loaned through increases in interest, fees, and penalties. Our society long ago dismissed any such regulations as necessary (let alone enforcement) and has, as a result, transferred the majority of the wealth of the country into the hands of this new aristocity; the aristocity of the money lender.

Rejecting capitalism puts one far adrift from US society, as "free markets" are assumed to be integral to capitalism. A "free" economy is viewed as the only basis for a free society. Again, two false assumptions. The only free part of capitalism is the freedom of the capitalist to appropriate as much wealth as quickly as possible. There is no inherent check, balance, or counterweight to that accumulation, no "ENOUGH". A world where one person (or family) has accumulated and is living off of the accumulated wealth of the entire planet while the rest of the population dies of starvation is the final state of a world of capitalism. A free market is an entirely different animal.

In a free market the person who creates wealth profits from that creation, sharing it with the rest of society through an exchange of other wealth (be that a medium like money or the trading of goods for goods). But free markets (like capitalism) are not a natural phenomena. They don't exits until people make them up. They are products of regulations, of social contracts, of accepted norms. They are, in fact, the products of governments.

The government of the United States is a carefully constructed sham of democracy. The Founding Fathers built a system where power was very carefully divided between three branches, the Executive, Legislative and Judaical. But that same system was also created, with equal care, to ensure only the only the wealthy, only the land owners, only those beholding to the capitalist or a capitalist themselves, would populate those three branches.It is a system that endures to this very day. With few exceptions at any layer of government, only wealthy hold office.

In those rare cases where the less than wealthy slip into the ranks (after all no system is ever perfect) the system is rigged (some might suggest the word is "corrupt") to treat that person as wealthy, eventually let them accumulate some of society's wealth for themselves, and thus become part of the aristosity they once might have campaigned against. This ensures the system of the wealthy governing for their own benefit endures.

This is not to suggest that a pure democracy would be much better. In its worst renditions the 49.9% are the subjects of the 50.1%. Such a society would be complete unstable and would soon resort to civil war. Then again, a 33.3% vs 33.3% vs 33.4% democracy would be equally unstable. Human kinds best answer, so far, has always been a powerful minority dictating to the rest with some limits set as to what the dictators get to decide. The US constitution is a good effort to set such a limit, both on what the dictators themselves get to decide as well as how bad the majority can abuse the minority.

A longer view of history suggests that the US is actually doing a pretty good job of evolving an ever more just society. From the Revolutionary War through the Civil War, worker revolutions, unions, the Suffrage movement, wometn's rights, civil rights, the end of Jim Crow ... this is all good and encouraging progress. But the progress is uneven and, for most of my adult life anyway, has been slowing and is now showing signs of reversing. Progress, a more just society, always costs someone something. It is costing the new aristocity money, and they are nothing if not greedy. Perhaps this is just a bump in the road of a progressive society, though it looks more to me like a cliff. One whose lip we have already stumbled over.

For myself I need no religion. That, however, is the most personal of things. The religion of others is of no concern to me as long as that religion is not used as an excuse to do harm. (Okay, virtually all religion fails right there, but not all religious people need the excuse.)

I am not a capitalist. It is the system that has brought a new kind of dictatorship to the world. Eventually it will be unmasked for what it is. Those who are the victims will revolt. The system will be removed, something different will grow in its place.

And democracy? To me democracy is a bit like a jail, a necessary assault on individuals who has stepped over the line. Jails are used to limit the damage we do to each other and reign in the excesses of the few. But they are far from perfect and I am not pro-jail. But, so far, we have yet to invent any better solution for people who will abuse others. Democracy serves the exact same purpose; limiting the damage we do to each other and reigning in the excesses of the few. And at the moment democracy in the US is failing as badly as its jails.

End of a species

Two characters in modern society suggest something dramatic is looming in human kind's not to distant future. One is the media talking head. They are not experts in any sense when it comes to any subject. Violent imagery is always in the sub-text. They don't have political opponents, they have enemies. These enemies should be "taken out" in the next election (often described as a war), "targeted" and "eliminated". Their rhetoric is filled with arrogance, judgment, intolerance, and hate. They talk tough but most, if not armed with a gun, would clearly pose little threat in an actual confrontation. Many couldn't climb a set of stairs without stopping to catch their breath.

The other character is the martial arts expert. Unassuming, tending to quietness, and lethal; truly, absolutely lethal. Yet they dismiss hate, reject it even. Their ethos may be one of combat, but not of judgment, not of intolerance, not of hate.

These are characterizations of characters, chosen and described to accent the extreme two ends of one aspect of human character, the mind set of hate. And it is a mind set, a particular arrangement of the matter / energy making up the human brain. We know that the mind, however it is described, is reflected in the physical properties of the brain. Like any physical characteristic, the mind set of hate can be attributed to heredity and environment. We normally regard emotions as an event in the mind, disassociated with the brain. But I want to avoid that error for a bit. I'm going to take the brain structure, the interaction of neurons and synopsis, the associated chemical and hormone flows that go along with the emotions of hate, and call it the meme of hate. Again, a physical characteristic of the human brain, like color is a physical characteristic of the hair and eyes.

At the one end of the human meme of hate is the media talking heads. At the other end is the martical arts master. I picked these two to separate the meme of hate from the capacity for violence. The media talking head, for all the talk, doesn't really come across as potentially violent. (There are a couple of exceptions.) The martial arts master doesn't project hate at all, but the capacity for violence is potent indeed. Both human but with this dramatic difference in in the meme for hate. Both human, but with remarkably different brains.

Right up to modern times this meme for hate posed no real threat to the survival of the species. In a tribal society battling for limited resources, hating the "other" was useful. They could be maimed, abused, murdered, made slaves, raped, or a whole tribe eliminated all together, babies included. All this without a twinge of conscious or empathy getting in the way. Thus was this characteristic in the brain passed down from generation to generation, evolving, just like the ability to speak and an opposing thumb. Human Species Hate Man thrived. (HSHM)

HSHM now faces many environmental pressures working against his survival. With the invention of weapons of mass destruction the meme for hate isn't nearly as useful. No tribe can be easily eliminated without risking a conflagration that would spell the doom of all tribes. The total collapse of human civilization and the death of the human race is most decidedly counter-productive in an evolutionary sense.

There are other factors at work as well. HSHM has a tendency to kill off its young. Every suicide bomber takes him or her self out of the gene pool. This is a small number of course, but these same are the one most visibly burdened with the meme of hate. They will not be breeding, passing along the genes most likely to form this brain characteristic. They will not be raising the next generation in an environment reinforcing this same brain form.

HSHM dominates the planet. Virtually any war pits the species against itself. Most of the casualties in the tribe of Islam are inflicted by other Muslims. They are killing themselves off, and killing off the DNA that forms that particular brain structure at the same time. Survivors could fall into two camps. Those shaped most by the meme of hate will likely go off to war, responding the only way their brain allows. Many will then be eliminated before they breed as well. Others, less shaped by the meme, have a better chance of surviving. They are less likely to go to war looking for revenge. Instead they have families; weakening the hate meme brain characteristic in the next generation.

In less violent societies the hate meme still works against the survival of the species. Hate is less and less helpful in the working of complex societies, societies which support the continuation of the species. Being around someone whose brain is more deeply formed by the meme of hate gets tiring for those less burdened. For the most part the meme makes for angry loners, people who drift toward the edges of a complex society while looking for a reason to lash out at people they don't know and who have done them no harm. Here in the US school shooters and mass killers carry the meme the strongest. Like the Islamic suicide bomber, these carriers of the meme will not be around to breed, not be around to raise or influence the next generation.

It has to work that way. We now know that the environment forces changes in the basic DNA of life, changes then passed on. The meme of hate works against itself on at least two levels, failing to pass along the genes that build the basic brain structure for hate; and then failing to provide an environment that strengthens the neural pathways to support that same structure.

I have long felt that the species of human is untenable. We can not survive our own tendencies for long. But "we" is HSHM. What if evolution is doing what it always does, eliminating those characteristics that work against the survival of the species? What if the Human Species is already being replaced by one more suited to survival? Perhaps we are about to see the rise of Human Species Non-Hate Man.

Human Species Non-Hate Man (HSN-HM). Members of the family tree of human but lacking the brain characteristics necessary to support the hate meme. They might know the word "hate" but it would be like talking color to the blind or musical notes to the deaf. That is not a particularly good analogy since we normally think of the lack of an ability to grasp something as a liability. In this case though, imagine the hate meme as a birth defect, one that usually causes crippling pain and is often fatal. Human Species Non-Hate Man are born without this defect.

HSN-HM may already walk among us, just as modern humans once walked among the Neanderthal. HSHM is struggling and faltering, but HSN-HM may be ready to step in. HSN-HM may look a lot like HSHM. After all, dress a Neanderthal in modern fashions and walk him through downtown NY and he wouldn't even draw a glance. Hell, a Neanderthal living homeless under a bridge would not draw a look either. There is no reason that people who lack the brain structure for the hate meme should appear any different than those who have it.

Terrorism is an old man's game in which the young are used as cannon fodder. That generation is dying out. In a like fashion the demographics of US media talking heads are shifting older. The next generation isn't nearly as racist, sexist, or homophobic. Maybe their brain structures are just slightly different, less condusive to holding the form of the hate meme. Not all of them, and not all to the same degree; but already different from the generations before them. The generations after them may be more different still, the hate meme unable to fit into their brains at all.

At the moment all of our institutions were built by HSHM. They may not be a good fit to HSN-HM. What will HSN-HM do with religions built on hate? Many religions once held to actual, repeated, human sacrifice. Those religions are dead now, no intellectual basis for their being, no followers. How will Jewish / Christian / Islamic ideology resonate with a people who simply can't hate those who are not Jewish / Christian / Islamic? How does HSN-HM relate to a god requiring blood and sacrifice before It can forgive? How could a person who lacks the ability to hate, worship a god whose main claim is that those non-hating people will be tortured forever? Isn't it likely they will simply abandon the theologies that can have no hold on them?

According to the religious leader's themselves, their biggest challenge is to relate to the next generation. What if that is impossible? What if the next generation has brains that simply can't grasp the tenets of the hate meme? Will not the churches slowly empty? Isn't that happening now?

What kind of economics will work for HSN-HM? Cut throat capitalism? Can capitalism work at all without some element of the hate meme driving the capitalist? Who deliberately loots trillions of dollars from their society without the thought that, at some level, those so looted deserved the economic beating? How does greed work without some touch of hate? Is communism or socialism backed by weapons, police, and storm troopers, likely to work in for HSN-HM? (In a species lacking the hate meme, who will be the storm troopers?)

HSHM stuffs its prisons with the non-violent, the mentally ill, the young; the only intent to punish people in the harshest ways possible. In prisons throughout the world (including those in or sanctioned by the US) brutal, physical, often lethal torture is a regular occurrence. That can't really happen without the influence of the hate meme. A person's very brain has to be shaped in some deep, foundational way, to allow them to take part in torturing another. For HSHM just another day in the life. For HSN-HM an utter impossibility.

What will nation / states and boarders mean to HSN-HM? Who will pick up weapons to kill complete strangers when there is no ability to hate those strangers in the slightest degree? It is easy to make a soldier out of HSHM. Can it be done with HSN-HM? Without soldiers, without armies, without laws written specifically to hurt or take advantage or oppress, of what use are boarders? Government structures built to rule over and control HSHM are useless to HSN-HM.

Every single social structure will be modified, replaced, or abandoned. None of them will fit the needs of the new / replacement generations as HSHM recedes into history. It is odd to think of the human species being replaced by a new human kind that fits the environmental niche better; but we know that must be happening. It is always happening. Human Species Hate Man evolved in an environment that no longer exists. The meme of hate assures the end of the species in this new environment. But environments that support life are never left empty and something new will come along that can make the new environment work. HSN-HM fits and there are clear hints the first of a new kind are already among us.

As the environment shifts even further, more access to weapons, easier and faster travel, the pressures working against HSHM build. Sadly, the species can react only within the confines of its own evolution, its own physical characteristics. For HSHM that means reacting with the hate meme, a species accelerating its own demise. Its numbers shrink as the still evolving HSN-HM numbers grow. At some tipping point the world starts to change. Ever larger numbers of HSN-HM find their way into positions of power and leadership, reforming the society to fit their physical characteristics, their norm of non-hate. As breeding opportunities diminish HSHM's gene pool shrinks even more. Eventually the brain characteristic of the hate meme fades away.

HSHM will have gone the way of the dinosaurs.

So how should a member of HSHM view the coming extinction of our species? Much of the genetic makeup of HSN-HM will be built on that of HSHM. Chimps and humans share around 95% of their DNA code. HSHM and HSN-HM will be much closer, at least to start. The rise of HSN-HM also means that human based intelligence has a much better chance of surviving into the future.

Knowing that we are a species reaching the end of our shelf life (as it were) helps when trying to understand the societies we have built. We are a species whose brains are shaped for and by a meme of hate. What we see around us is who we are, and it is fading away.