If God exists, we can all observe the decisions of God. Some of these decisions are listed below:
Should thinkers have eternal life?
Should thinkers have the power to die?
Should thinkers have free will?
Should the thinker live in isolation?
Should thinkers be able to reproduce?
Should thinkers be required to believe in the existence of God?
Should thinkers be free to believe what they wish to believe?
Should life be created as newborn infants and then should these infants be entrusted to thinkers to raise?
The list goes on. We can all see the decisions of God. We have never needed a teacher or a Bible or a Quran to see the decisions that God has made. Most of us however have been taught that knowledge of God must come from a book or a scholar or a priest. Our ancestors meant well, but they were confused and the result is that many of us have psychological constraints imposed by their false notion that God is some angry being that demands worship and belief at the cost of eternal torment.
As we can clearly see, by observing the decisions of God, nothing could be further from the truth. But our minds have been prejudiced by a lifetime of thinking of God in terms of the false patriarchal ideas of the scriptures. So, to free ourselves from these psychological constraints we can use the feminine pronouns. When we do this, the old false ideas crumble to sand in the wind. We can then, with a clear state of mind, observe existence to learn what we can about her nature.
If God exists then every day, for thousands of years, she has been creating life in the form of newborn children and then to entrusting them to us. We can all see that she is not required to do this. We can then ask ourselves why she does so. Are we worthy of such trust? What is she telling us by continuing to trust us like this?
Is she not expressing faith in us, that we will respond in a manner that will prove we should be trusted? Is she not expressing hope for us, that we will finally learn to get along with each other, realizing that we are entrusted with each other? And is she not expressing overwhelming love for us when we find ourselves so gifted and entrusted with the raising and teaching of children?
The answer to these questions is very clear: if God exists, she is very beautiful and benevolent in her nature. She loves us very dearly. She is nothing like the angry character described in all of our ancient texts. So, why did our ancestors write about God in the manner they did?
If we could observe the evolution of life on another planet like earth, as they acquire consciousness and mature thinking processes, as they evolve from strictly instinctual behavior we would see them develop theories of God. They would do this in response to the terrors of nature: volcanoes, tornadoes, thunderstorms, earthquakes and the marauding beasts. They were instinctual animals, now they are thinking beings, they understand they die, often violently. The roars of nature are like the roars of the beast and the logical conclusions is that there is some great angry being behind the clouds, behind the volcanoes, reaching out to strike them down in great explosions of anger. What can be done to appease such a creature? Cowering in fear in a cave, they naturally and logically found themselves praying in supplication to the angry being, to stop the torment.
And so did we. We cowered in our misunderstandings ofr the forces of nature and we prayed. Eventually, the maelstrom subsided and we concluded that our prayers were answered. What else could we think? We had not acquired the knowledge of the cause of storms and earthquakes. From these initial erroneous conclusions, we developed our theories of the angry God in heaven who demands worship, belief and sacrifice. Once we had invented writing, it became written down and passed down through the generations. Along the way, we discovered that large groups of people could be cajoled to live in relative peace with each other if they all shared a fear of the mythical God.
We can see from these decisions that God would never speak to us directly through books or popes or messengers or prophets because she can see what we all can see, that when we believe these books or teachers are infallible we will fight each other over the interpretations of the words. And we have only to observe our history to see what God can see, that we will kill each other because one of us thinks the other has offended God or a prophet or a teacher or a family or the local cultures interpretation of the scripture.
We can also see that God does not ask for worship, nor does God command that we believe. We are free to believe or to not believe. If she exists at all she has no objection to atheism. Indeed, she seems to encourages atheism. She gives us our minds, our tools of reason, to learn and understand nature, to treat each other well, to build a world of peace, to branch out and populate this spectacular universe.
We can see from the decisions of God that we are afforded an opportunity. We are granted a choice: We can live as repositories of trust for those with whom we are daily entrusted, or we can be something less than that. And from this simple observation we can observe that we all were once born as infants, and as such each one of us is a gift, to each other, from God. We must now turn to our neighbors and find a way to love the things she loves, to love each other.
We have a job to do. In our world, children are born every day and enforced into beliefs in the ancient mythical angry God. While any person should be free to believe in God as they might wish, it should never be compelled. The children of the world need to receive complete educations and political freedom so they can make their own decisions as to what to believe about the existence and character of God. How long will it take to heal the world? 20 years? 100 years? 1000 years? What is the cross generational plan that will get the job done? How will atheists and theists work together to see that it happens? Crated or evolved, we have a common ground, to love and educate our children and to build a world of peace.
It is true, she might not exist at all. but if she does, then we can all see the decision she has made and learn the true nature of her character. If she exists, we can all see she is as beautiful and benevolent as this earth and beckoning cosmos. What else can we learn from the decisions of God?
There are obvious biological reasons why people tend to treat their parents well, and to think badly of murderers, adulterers, thieves, and liars. It is a scientific fact that moral emotions like a sense of fair play or an abhorrence of cruelty precede any exposure to scripture. Indeed, studies of primate behavior reveal that these emotions (in some form) precede humanity itself. All of our primate cousins are partial to their own kin and generally intolerant of murder and theft. They tend not to like deception or sexual betrayal much, either. Chimpanzees, especially, display many of the complex social concerns that you would expect to see in our closest relatives in the natural world.
ReplyDeleteCritics of evolution have argued that "survival of the fittest" provides a justification for behaviour that undermines moral standards by letting the strong set standards of justice to the detriment of the weak. However, any use of evolutionary descriptions to set moral standards would be a naturalistic fallacy (or more specifically the is-ought problem), as prescriptive, moral statements cannot be derived from purely descriptive premises. Describing how things are does not imply that things ought to be that way. It is also simplistic to suggest that evolutionary "survival of the fittest" implies treating the weak badly, as social behaviour cooperating with others and treating them well improves evolutionary fitness. It has also been claimed that "the survival of the fittest" theory in biology was interpreted by late 19th century capitalists as "an ethical precept that sanctioned cutthroat economic competition" and led to "social Darwinism" which allegedly glorified laissez-faire economics, war and racism. However these ideas predate and commonly contradict Darwin's ideas, and indeed their proponents rarely invoked Darwin in support, while commonly claiming justification from religion and Horatio Alger mythology. The term "social Darwinism" referring to capitalist ideologies was introduced as a term of abuse by Richard Hofstadter's Social Darwinism in American Thought published in 1944. When used as a criticism of Darwin's theory of evolution, this claim is also an example of the appeal to consequences fallacy – even if the concept of survival of the fittest was used as a justification for violence in human society, this has no effect on the truth of the theory of evolution by natural selection in the natural world."Source and further information:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survival_of_the_fittest#.22Survival_of_the_fittest.22_and_morality
Further information:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Darwinism
The further development of Evolution theory has show that human, and even animal evolution can works with various other mechanisms.
"In the science of ethology (the study of behavior), and more generally in the study of social evolution, altruism refers to behavior by an individual that increases the fitness of another individual while decreasing the fitness of the actor. Research in evolutionary theory has been applied to social behaviour, including altruism. Some animal altruistic behaviour is explained by kin selection."
"When apparent altruism is not between kin, it may be based on reciprocity."
ReplyDelete"Researchers on alleged altruist behaviours among animals have been ideologically opposed to the social darwinist concept of the "survival of the fittest", under the name of "survival of the nicest" the latter being globally compatible, however, with darwinist' theory of evolution."
"Recent developments in game theory (look into ultimatum game) have provided some explanations for apparent altruism, as have traditional evolutionary analyses. Among the proposed mechanisms are:
- Behavioural manipulation (for example, by certain parasites that can alter the behavior of the host)
- Bounded rationality (for example, Herbert Simon)
- Conscience
- Kin selection including eusociality (see also "The Selfish Gene")
- Memes (by influencing behavior to favour their own spread, for example, religion)
- Reciprocal altruism, mutual aid
- Sexual selection, in particular, the Handicap principle
- Reciprocity (social psychology)
- Indirect reciprocity (for example, reputation)
- Strong reciprocity
- Pseudo-reciprocity"
Source and further information:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altruism_in_animals
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kOxMQ3Q095Y
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mm2Jrr0tRXk Who Says Science has Nothing to Say About Morality?