Jesus Greatest Evolutionist Ever!

It is out of love for you as a special friend that I would write about “religion”. Really, the topic is what is the nature of the universe, what is really going on. Also, I would like to let you see how others may perceive the Bible, and the words of Jesus.
In any case, I allow for any reality to ultimately be the “true” one, I can and do accept that I have no way of ultimately knowing, beyond my belief, what reality is, so the reader's belief may trump anything I write here.
It is often mistakenly said that scientists claim to have absolute knowledge, in fact it is the opposite. A scientist is always ready and willing to give up current beliefs when newer evidence comes along. For instance, radio waves became known with radio use, so that the idea of signals in the air is now commonplace: everyone believes it true.
Hypotheses, or test questions, they say, can never be fully proved: they can only be disproved. Any hypothesis that has not been contradicted by some observation is considered valid. The “truth” is a set of hypotheses that have not been heretofore contradicted. They say that Newtonian physics, and the mathematics involved, is now known to be wrong. More accurate is Einstein’s form of mathematics. Nonetheless, you can still fly a rocket to the moon and back using only Newtonian mathematics. So some things can still “work”, even though they are known all along not to be “true”.
What I am trying to say is that scientific thought is always ready to admit it does not have final truth, and that current models may be in error. Conversely, anyone relying completely and totally on belief and conviction is in fact more rigid in their thinking. The scientist, rather than being unreasonable, is open-minded.
I mention this as it is a basic sticking point over the notion of believing every aspect of Pauline Christianity, or any other such scripture-based religion. I urge more strongly for the error of human ways, and regard all such literature as ultimately human books. They are people’s best attempt where they live and where they are at trying to figure out reality, being a life form on a planet out in the middle of the universe (as is seen at night).
Since everything is relative culture to culture; like language, social customs, notions of sexuality, kinship, age groups, politics, economies: just one more for the list is religions. As many different kinds of peoples as there are / were on earth, there are / were religions. Humans invent religions. Being a human, I understand, and I can’t blame them (us). As we have found out with telescopes for the last 400 years, we are in an immense universe full of huge groups of stars, what we call galaxies. We live in a roughly pin-wheel shaped galaxy. Not only are there a bizillion stars in our galaxy, there are a bizillion- bizillion other galaxies, many of them bigger than ours anyway!
It looks to many of us as if we live inside of an atom or molecule, that the universe goes on and on, not just in terms of going off far far away in distance, but also in terms of scale. So that down in our skin might be thousands of little bacteria doing their thing: to them it is like their world, their universe. To those bacteria, you and me are huge galaxies. Living down inside of the bacteria are even more worlds on a continually “smaller” scale.
I put smaller in quotes because it is not really that things there are littler than we are. It is rather that each group of individuals on their own level all feel like they are just the right size.
Bacteria do not feel “small”, just like we don’t feel “big” even though to the bacteria we are big. The Milky Way does not “feel” large. The beauty of this is this: every manifestation of consciousness feels like they are “here”, in the “middle” of everything. And in a very real sense, they are.
By analogy, you can have a center point of a line. It is midway between the ends. But there is no “middle” along an infinite line. There is no middle in an infinite world. Rather, therefore, we are all in the middle. Every point in the universe is the middle. That is why it feels that way, I believe.
It is evident to me that things die. We eat things. In the fossil record of our ancestral humans, the increase in the size of skulls (brain power) occurs around 2.4 million years ago, according to the best science today. This is also when the first meat eating by our hominid ancestors is seen in the archaeological record. They find the oldest tools then, rocks chipped on one side, in piles with scavenged hippo femurs in East Africa. Our ancient ancestors were splitting the long bones for their marrow, it would appear, apparently scavenging them from lion kills and such. The brain grew from about 450 cc up to about 750 cc over the next million years. The lower number is roughly equal to chimps of today. Humans have brains around 1400 cc in volume today (1.4 liters). In any case, it all appears to have hinged on meat eating. There were some offshoot pre-human branches at the same time that kept smaller brains and developed huge molars for chewing, a further adaptation to the eating of vegetal matter exclusively. The point I am making is that this is a tough world! We have had to, as God told Peter in the vision, “Slay and Eat”! So we are in a plight anyway ethically and morally and pragmatically.
So we must decide, are we going to continue in the human trend and remain animal or elevate the level of human thought? What does Christ mean when he says that we could give our lives? It cannot mean the killing that goes on in the name of religion! The Jews are guilty of it in their religion. The Islamists are guilty of it in their religion. And the Christian country America is guilty of it in the worst way: all hypocrisy when it came to the genocide of American Indians. The list goes on and on. Zionism by definition is racism. It is a singularly odd and strange idea that a group of people would suggest that they (the Jews, fundamentalist Islamists, the Hopi Indians of Arizona, or whoever makes such a statement) claim themselves to be somehow selected by the very creator of the entire universe! If you think about it, it is the ultimate egotistical act. Of course, religion itself is a human invention and replaced when it could the less-controlling spirituality of the shaman or healing priestess, etc. Religion is a tool of control in other words, and has been such a feature of human life since minimally the advent of complex societies in Iraq and Peru some 5000 - 6000 years ago. I do not have the over-inflated ego to think that anyone is selected out by the Great Spirit, and if that is true, I refuse to participate. I don’t like a God who would invoke such discord and divisiveness. For this reason, I believe that all religions that suggest that theirs and theirs alone is the “only” true way, or the absolute doctrine, to me, that is a sure index of their falseness, and the ungodliness of their interpretation of what is holy. In other words, if you are considering the philosophy of a unified humankind, you can eliminate the hypotheses that dictate separation, at least when it comes to God. You can discount creeds that are exclusive. Spiritual exclusivity is evidence of doctrinal falsehood, I would even say.
My God would not and does not suggest that we humans are the end arbiters of the validity of other’s cultures. God has made all. You may be able to kill off tribal people, but that did not make their religion “wrong”. The truth of religion is not whose army is bigger. God forbid! The God I evolve toward strains to rid from me the killing of others. I am instead to look to repressing my thoughts of hate and separatedness. All is one. All religions taken together may just begin to come close to our best human effort to communally attempt at recognizing and accepting the creation as is! The Scripture says “Repent and Enter the Kingdom”. I believe that we are now in the Kingdom. We must repent of our fear, our fear of death, and must give up our ego. There never was an “us” or “me” any way. Illusion, separation. The universe is one, and this is it! Step in, and enter! Welcome! Isn’t this place just awesome?
You and me both fought hard to get here as swimming sperms, fighting off millions of competitors!
We are born winners, each of us reaching the egg first!!! What a beautiful place we inhabit, this fine mysterious earth. I do not need to cave in to fear of death: death and life are one. No one can take anything from me: everything only adds to my bliss! We are indeed in the palm of the Most High! We needn’t worry ourselves with judgment: that is His. All pain and fatigue will be resolved; all are indeed the phenomena of life.
I do not need an afterlife and I do not think it the only reason that we should act righteously here on this fine planet. I will be true even though mortal. The phenomenon of life is so mysterious that I am filled with joy! The Holy Quality of things tells us to love one another, not to condemn.
I know all religion is folly, the sweet dreams of dreamers and politicians. The human song goes on, but none will pay heed to our nest. We are, alas, befouling it sorely, and surely it shall be our undoing! All we can moan is “forgive them for they know not what they do”!
It is not a shameful thing to be born mortal on this planet, it is rather an extreme honor and outrageously rewarding. If we are to forgive seven times seventy times, than the last thing we will do is pass judgment on this planet, as do Christian literalists, saying earth is a bad place, they are not of this world, and that this life is somehow less than the best. Shouldn’t it be expected that life would be faced with issues of growth? since in the end, we are a life form evolving toward the highest we can imagine? We have to, as it were, “unlearn” our innate animal nature, that which has gotten us this far through millions of years as hominids and hundreds of millions of years as smaller animals: it has been one big long fight and contest. After all of this time on earth we can now attempt to aspire to justice.
Rather than give up to the darkness and say that “because it is written” it cannot be done (for this becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy), we must consciously disengage on a one-to-one level from the historical ways of our genetic past. This is the great charge of Christ, the ultimate evolutionist: that we put behind us the lowly and take on the lofty full bore. This entails no less than rewriting our instinctual animal aspects, and we become, as they call it, holy.
It is interesting to reflect upon the concept of doctrinal exclusivity, or selecting for a “chosen people”. From a Darwinian sense, this doctrine would seem to be beneficial to that group’s genetics. If the identity of the group and individuals was such that they condone all of their own actions as confirmed by their “chosen” status, then the option for genocide against competing tribes or other societies would exist at all times. This sense of the knowledge of the elimination of competing genetic material is often described in the Old Testament, but I can’t cite which phrase or chapter, etc. Enemies and their sons would be hanged or executed as such, however.
I used to speculate but now believe that the human trend toward universal compassion arose from the invention of agriculture, and more specifically, from the domestication of livestock, of animals. Some would become pets or buddies. Humans through our ancient eyes felt drawn to the other animals anyway. The identity and expression of our home is felt in each other’s glances, us and the animals. Soon, it became evident that those whom we had hunted and eaten for thousands upon thousands of years were conscious just like us, and were as expressive and as real as we are, relishing their precious lives as much as humans.
From this we get the transference of human sacrifice (the ancient way) to animal and then back again to the karma of the individual one human, Christ. Buddhism and certainly pure bhakti (love) suggest non-meat eating. It is the opposite of genocide. It is a relaxing of the prime directive of survival, I think because as a genetic assemblage of earth’s history we have attained and continue to attain to levels of consciousness which allow for a relaxing of the historical norm. I would conjecture that passive vegetarian individuals as such did not exist say 30,000 years ago in Europe when those cave drawings were made. Agriculture started about 12 to 14 thousand years ago in the Middle East – Turkey area, and only since then, since we got to know animals as friends, could we think about objectifying them and not eating them. Also there would have been ample non-animal food around once the bread, wine, fruits and vegetables of agriculture and domestication flowed in abundance.
As such, Christ, Buddha, Krishna, and the whole lot of them are historically situated elements of our heritage. They ring the bell to us as a species, saying that we are now ready to give up the old ways of hatred and competition. This recognition came with the recognition of awareness in animals , that we are all one. Christ and Buddha are urging people to mellow out, not to fight. This stuff about there being a heaven and about killing off everyone with whom we disagree doctrinally is scary nonsense. It will doubtless play right into any coming global conflicts as they arise, especially when there are fundamentalists like bin Laden, Sharon et al, and Bush running the large ideological countries. For those of us who are secular agnostic rationalists it is quite sad and outrageous that people are so afraid of this universe, that they condemn it and each other to such pain and destruction. Even in a “just” world, we’re going to be killing chickens, right? Cows? Pigs? Cauliflower? Bacteria? Just what does deserve to live and what to die and in who’s eyes? It’s all self-justified: Christian or Islamic, bacteria or human.
People like easy answers. Life is rather unruly and harsh, and doctrinal religions give an element of accountability and order. That is one of their main features, that there are prescribed behaviors, histories, and world-views. Life at large is infinitely more complex. Indeed, in life nearly anything can happen.
I instead wish to see humanity in a historical context, as a struggling life form making noble attempts at figuring out what the universe is, to express our humanity through music, art, and writing, etc. Not through war. I support the quest of science. Rather than wrapping them in a thick armor of inarguable deterministic rules, in a doctrine that fails to recognize historical change or growing human perspective, I engage with deep human questions from an historical perspective.
An example of such historical knowledge would include that about the Jewish state since its beginnings in the pre-WW I era, from the late 1800s. I am no master of the info, but apparently the founding of a Zionist state was formulated then, when Palestine or Argentina had been considered a possible choice for such a land. The British (with the assistance of Arab tribes) captured Palestine from the Turks (the Ottomans). Then Britain, against the wishes of the Arabs who had helped expel the Ottomans, gave the land to the Jews. This was the so-called “Balfour Declaration”. This was around 1918. The boundaries of Iraq were invented around this time, with tribes cobbled together and made to compete, by the oil-hungry colonial British. Israel was formally declared a nation in 1948. Many moderate Arab states eventually agreed to recognize this as the country Israel.
This is another example of what had been a long period of Colonialism in the world (toward the end of that period). America had been occupied, South America conquered, Africa and Asia exploited. We did it to Indians in arguably the most awful example known. We took virtually the entire continent! We make the Zionist movement look tame, so American's can’t really complain about the Jews occupying Palestinian land, now can we? So let Israel exist, they fought for that land fair and square, in numerous wars and through years of guerrilla warfare. The early leaders of the country were from the guerrilla corps that were essentially the terrorists of their day, like Menachim Begin, Ariel Sharon, and others, back in the ‘30s and ‘40s. Israel has engaged in preemptive attacks in all military conflicts they have seen in their short history (since 1948), including wars in 1953, 1967, 1973, and by invading Lebanon in 1982. There are standing United Nations directives instructing Israel to return the land occupied in 1967, but these international decrees are blatantly ignored. Israel bombed an Iraqi nuclear power plant in 1982 without provocation or warning. If any other country in the world had launched so many attacks unilaterally as has Israel, they would be view as hostile and incorrigible. Israel escapes sanctions because we block all such motions with our veto power in the UN Security Council. Israel gains their military strength by being funded by the US to the tune of some three-billion-plus a year, the largest recipient of American foreign aid.
It is a misconception pushed by the Bush machine, and Jewish and Christian fundamentalists that the Arabs hate Americans or our culture. Everyone knows that this is the hippest place on earth, and that we set all trends: clothes, movies, style, commerce, personal freedom. The Arab youth love us and things modern.
What they don’t like is blind support for Israel, and their harsh policies. The same genocide that Israelis wear on their sleeve (the Holocaust) they brought to bear on Palestinians in the refugee camps in Lebanon in 1982, Sabra and Shatilla. Arabs are sick of the self-righteous hypocrisy.
This hypocrisy, which is only believed by the fundamentalist elements in our society, not by the majority and certainly not by the free thinkers, is bringing an undeserved level of hatred upon our country. This blind alliance to Israel is ruining my country. Because of supporting Israel as some divinely inspired entity, the US is bringing the hatred of much of the world upon us. We are going more toward the hate-filled sort of society that Israel is, with machine-gun-toting cops on all corners and everybody with their own gas masks! Figure it out Israelis, if you didn’t act like such fascists, maybe people wouldn’t hate you so much! But this is what happens when you go around telling everybody that you have got life figured out and that you got a message from the “real” God, who told you this land is yours, and that you can kill to keep it. This is the same idea we Americans used with the Indians with the “Manifest Destiny” concept, stating that we were given the Indian’s land by God, as it were, because we were technologically more advanced and learned. (Notice: and we were capable of taking it. Back to the very Darwinian idea of “might makes right”).
So religion has ceased to become just a matter of some people’s opinion or their holidays, or their customs or their religious observances. It amounts to a bunch of driven ideologues wishing for the rapid end of this beautiful planet, as they are too terrified of life and existence. Like a spoiled child who knocks over the Monopoly board because they are losing, fundamentalists preaching the absolute evilness of this world and who proclaim its end, are cowards copping out on Mother Earth. In a self-absorbed rage characteristic of their “realized” state, viewing their obstinacy as conviction and their closed-mindedness as assuredness, the spoiled child hastens to end the game for everyone. Rewriting the rules, they proclaim, “Now no one can play!” So it is with those who await with smugness the apocalypse!
So that may sound overly critical, but that is how it effects politics. The effect is not passive. Various factions who each believe themselves to be chosen by the creator of the entire universe are causing international war. There are entire political organizations (countries), armies, media networks, etc., geared toward each group’s movement. Looked at objectively, it is rather fascinating, but also deeply tragic. It would be hard to outline a more “sci-fi” type story. Imagine, the Klingons, driven by devotion to their ancient Gods, are warring with the Romulans, who are also determined to spread their ways of life, and adhere to the certainty that they are destined to rule the universe. The entire planet of their origin is one big shrine, toward which devotees turn and pray each day, etc., etc.
Sound familiar? In a perverse way, exciting? Unfortunate? Yes. Various human cultures are emerging from ancient-hood simultaneously, and each is reluctant to rationalize their honored religions. Each seeks their identity not in the direct god experience that this life is, but mired in fear and uncertainty, each seeks the stability of an entrenched religion. People are unable to formulate their identity as based entirely on the world as we see it, on life as we feel it; the uncertainty, good and bad luck, death, sexuality, brutality and injustice in human history: the “rules” and realities of all of these and more are found unattractive by most. While claiming a desire to get closer to the creator, fundamentalists choose to ignore life itself, and life’s own terms, instead finding this closeness to god in words and comprehension of their own making, of human making.
This amazes me in regard to genetic evolution. It makes perfect sense that life would adapt over the stretch of time units that we can only name: we cannot really comprehend a billion, nor a million years. We are talking about a very large amount of time, such that time itself is like some sort of wizened old man or woman: often silent, usually alone, and insane with wisdom. Hopi and Zuni myths hint at the feeling of the emptiness of such duration. In the beginning of the world, there was only Grandmother Spider and her two sons. The sons would walk out on the earth, onto the landscape, batting a ball between them as they went. And they would never see anyone or anything else alive. Taoism and Christianity refer to a deep sense of duration when they describe the realization of matter, that LOGOS from the formless to form, to light, such as was in the beginning. Hindu refer to the Brahmanic day. Scientists refer to geological time. Against such a backdrop of time, I am not surprised that life develops, generation after generation.
We easily see this on our time scale with bacteria that reproduce extremely rapidly and in large numbers by human standards. We are all aware of the problem we face today with antibiotics and their potential to produce resistant strains of these adapted bacteria. If we are to note that the thing we call god is throughout the entire universe and in everything, even thought, then it should be reassuring to us that we would find evidence of genetic principles in as common a thing as illness-causing bacteria. We are not left in misunderstanding. The unity of thought as appearing through different phenomena is akin to the realization that all life is one, and analogously that the essence of the great spirit is, by definition, found in all things.
So that rather than violating some cosmic ethic, or being in disharmony with holiness, Darwinian evolution opens a layer of logic into the world that is surely profound and deeply unifying. As when Indians refer to animals and people as “all my relations”, or as cousins, so the logic behind evolution demonstrates the real genetic ties that all life on earth shares. What could be more unitary and holy?
Why is the idea of evolution found offensive by some? While on one hand the Christian devotee attributes to god the wisdom and omniscience to do all, and asserts his / her own ignorance before god’s omnipotent knowledge, yet the same devotee will forcibly argue that the creator could not have possibly made humans from other “lowly” animals? So that God is capable of doing anything He wills, except for letting lifeforms develop through evolution! In this stilted assertion, we find contradiction, ego, and a denial of the profound notion that we are all one.
It follows from this sense of detachment from the fabric of reality that fundamentalists rationalize that they need not care for the earth. Their doctrinal certainty grants free license to kill with indiscretion when it comes to animal flesh, and to perpetuate inherently genocidal acts in warfare. From this hubris the fundamentalist can care not a whit for the environmental state of the earth. Having de-historicized the plight that the earth bears today, the problems of climate and pollution are instead transformed into a confirmation of the prophecies of the scripture in use (e.g. Bible, Koran, Hopi oral tradition, etc.).
It is especially confounding that the social institution that is claimed to foster spiritual understanding and human unity, religion, is instead put to the opposite ends: promoting division and irresponsibility.
Talk about Satan fooling people! Probably what happened was people like Jesus or Mohamed or Moses or Krishna or Buddha were probably fine teachers to hang out with in person, but once they passed and the churches developed, there was a drift away from the true sweet truth each had told, and now it became saturated with human bullshit again. Hence we can say that “satan”, or whatever you want to call it, is likely fully within most religions of today.
This sort of viewpoint relies not on being a literalist, but on trying to understand as many religions as possible and trying to make some humble sense out of what life “really” is (whatever that means, it seems like people invent their own realities in alot of ways). What makes Jesus so real for me is not the whole God thing and heaven thing, which I do not believe to exist, but rather the solid character and reach for love that Jesus offered. In the end, love is not about religion. In the end, religion is hate. “I come to bring division”. Hate, being a yang active principle, can fully upend otherwise stable systems that are in equilibrium. One rotten apple can spoil the barrel. A little leaven effects the whole loaf.