Sep 20 2010

The Weaving

In Politics, Morality, and Spirituality (which I just realized, unfortunately, that when acronimized is P.M.S.) I wrote the following…

Now, humanity faces its greatest “Evolve or Die” moment yet. Up until the 1950’s, it had always been about whether a particular society or subset of humanity would survive the unmerciful ravages of evolution. When we acquired the capacity to wipe out all of humanity either through Global Thermonuclear War or now, befouling our atmosphere to the point where the earth is unsuitable for human life, evolution had always been sort of local.

Now all of our eggs are in one basket. And since we have managed (so far at least) to evolve far enough to not have actively killed ourselves, we will see if we can evolve enough to not passively kill ourselves. In the nuclear evolutionary exam, all we had to do was NOT push The Button.

In our current test, we have to evolve far enough and fast enough that we can learn to use foresight and actually cooperate to not kill ourselves. The medium for that will at least include politics.

But it will also involve evolving a new morality (since a large scale agreed upon morality is basically non-existent, having been most notably disposed of during the Bush Years) that we can all agree is valid….otherwise, it will just be more head bashing by whoever is greediest for the remaining resources on the planet.

Up until now, our mostly regional religious beliefs have furnished us with the morals that protect society in general from the worst excesses of the brutality inherent in humanity….to the extent anything has.

But as the planet has shrunk, now our various moralities and religions are at war with each other. And as they war, the planet dies.

In order to solve this problem humanity is being forced to evolve a new shared set of morals, which must necessarily be based on a new shared spirituality (Though I doubt that is the right word.)

If one even casually studies the root texts of the worlds religions and moral systems, it becomes obvious very quickly that there are many more shared realities than conflicting ones. In fact the deeper you go past the imposed dogma of later generations and organizations….there are indeed very few actual differences in the moral codes presented therein.

Most notably, in my opinion, (and I freely admit that I am no expert) is the current nexus of warfare and religious persecution. As far as I can see, there is actually little of “Sharia law” in the Koran, and what is there is one thing…and what is being passed off as Sharia today are nearly all later interpretations. Interpretations made for the most part by both Christian and Muslim men who are trying to use, as is the age old tradition, religion to politically control the masses. Or even to take them to war against each other.

Yes you can find sections in both the Koran and the Bible (and many other religious tracts)that can be interpreted as being hateful, or urging violence and war, etc. But the message of both books, indeed all or nearly all “holy books,” is that it is Peace and Love that are to be valued, that should be striven for. Peace, Love and the Creation of beauty are the highest functions, the greatest aspirations of Human Kind……and the root of every, if not all, religious and philosophical work of note is some variation on “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”

The exploitation of religion and spirituality/philosophy, in fact the complete perversion of religion and spirituality/philosophy into a reason to kill and make war….is yet another example of those who consider themselves ‘the hierarchy’ corrupting our world into a prison of hate and death and division, into the lowest common denominator of human nature….rather than using their positions of authority to advance the cause of freedom, peace and justice.

The Hierarchy use religion to separate and to foster hate, not to bring humans together in love. Just as the Hierarchy also does in the realms of politics and economy.

So on the one hand we have a tiny number of people who control the power and wealth of the planet constantly causing war, death, and suffering in the name of religion economy and politics, and using their interpretation of morality to divide humans and set them against each other.

On the other hand we have 99% of humanity who want peace, freedom and justice for ALL people….not just “their side.”

As we have all here realized, to some extent at least, we the people of the world cannot look to the Hierarchy to unite us, to change from the adversarial competitive systems that benefit them, into the cooperative world society needed to end war, mitigate or eliminate poverty and injustice…..and save the Planet.

It will be up to US to find ways to come together despite them.

It will be up to us to Weave a new world tapestry, bringing together the best of ALL religions and philosophies, to Weave together the best parts of ALL political systems, to Weave together some form of economic equality and justice, based on the new reality of limited resources, that we as humans face for the first time on the planetary scale.

This IS the Political, Moral, and Spiritual Challenge of the 21st Century.

Everything has changed, since the age old, top down, imposition of the nearly obsolete systems we still live under today.

War no longer works. Raping the earths resources for personal (or Corporate) gain no longer works, and even the best political system invented so far has been proven to be eminently corruptible. The concept of the Nation State is even becoming obsolete, in the face of inevitable Globalization, as is of course, raw Capitalism.

These things have failed.

There is a vacuum forming around them as we speak. And as we see with the spokemodels of war, tyranny and injustice, of these now archaic and destructive ways….The Republicans….there are no new ideas coming from the Hierarchy to replace them.

It is up to us to figure it out and put it into motion…up to us to weave together all of the best ideas and practices in our now tiny world, up to us to create a new world. And the clock is most definitely running. I don’t know, I doubt if anyone knows, just how this will come about.

We do know one thing….that we are indeed that change.

And perhaps when a critical mass of people on the planet start living that way, start actively weaving a new society that rejects the worst of human nature, and starts living in a new way based on the best of human nature…..that that world will start to emerge all on it’s own.

Or else, ya know….we all die ….and Nature starts over with a new project, here on this pretty little blue planet.

I vote for Weaving.

20 comments

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  1. ANYTHING could happen!!!

    Photobucket

  2. Fabrics, colors, designs, dyes and all the time in the world. Calmly. Let’s use language as a constructive and cooperative tool. Thoughtful dialogue. Respectfully disagree.

    And now, one of the trickiest problems we all had when I was teaching Theory of Knowledge: What is compromise and when, if ever, should it be used?  

    • RiaD on September 20, 2010 at 23:16
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    i think you left out one ver important phrase

    So on the one hand we have a tiny number of people who control the power and wealth of the planet constantly causing war, death, and suffering in the name of religion economy and politics, and using their interpretation of morality to divide humans and set them against each other in order to profit.

    i’ll go finish reading now…

    • RiaD on September 20, 2010 at 23:42
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    we will. weaving is an excellent term for it…

    i think it’ll be sort of a network of small inter-dependent communities (think very small town) that satellite each other, all with a global outlook.

    that in each community there will be most of what is necessary: physicians, farmers, accountants, teachers, plumbers, etc etc & the buildings to house these.

    & that some of these services can be ‘bought’ by bartering…

    or given to those who need them.

    more of a locavore type system.

    and yet have exchanges with other communities

    not only of goods but of ideas. of knowledge

    the internet makes it possible.

    it’s already starting here at home and around the world

    • Edger on September 21, 2010 at 01:07
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    Nick Cohen wrote this at The Guardian Sunday last week:

    Societies without God are more benevolent

    Writing sometime around the 10th century BC, the furious author of Psalm 14 thundered against those who say there is no God. “They are corrupt, they have done abominable works, there is none that doeth good.” If the denunciations of wicked atheists coming from today’s apologists for religion are any guide, the spirit of Iron Age Israel is abroad in 21st-century Britain.

    In advance of the pope’s visit, clergymen and commentators are deploying every variety of bogus argument against those who advocate the superiority of secularism. Edmund Adamus, director of pastoral affairs for the Catholic diocese of Westminster, led the way when he denounced the “wasteland” secularism produced. If he had been condemning the atheist tyrannies of communism and fascism, I would have no complaint. However, Adamus was not objecting to Cuba, China or North Korea, but to the wasteland of secular, democratic Britain “with its ever-increasing commercialisation of sex, not to mention its permissive laws advancing the ‘gay’ agenda”.

    Rightwing columnists and, depressingly but predictably in these appeasing times, leftwing journalists have joined the moaning chorus. The arguments of Geoffrey Robertson QC and Professor Richard Dawkins that the cops had grounds to ask the pope to account for his church’s failure to stop the rape of children in its care drove them wild. “The hysterical and abusive nature of some of the attacks on the pope will do nothing but discredit secularism,” said Andrew Brown in the Guardian. “I accept, of course, that lots of secular humanists are tolerant and reasonable people,” says the more restrained and judicious Stephen Glover of the Mail. “But there is a hard core which embraces and promotes atheism with the blind fervour of religious zealots.”

    Not all of those who condemn atheism are pious themselves, as the presence of journalists among their number suggests. Rather, they believe in piety for the masses and fear that without religion the lower orders will lose their moral bearings. “All religions are equally sublime to the ignorant, useful to the politician and ridiculous to the philosopher,” said Lucretius. And behind many of the demands of today’s religious apologists that we “respect” Catholicism, Islam, Hinduism, Judaism and even the Scientology cult lies a desire to keep the plebs in their place by protecting their ridiculous but politically useful beliefs. Although I am proud to be on the board of the National Secular Society, Britain’s most urgently needed pressure group, I am not a militant atheist. I have seen too many vicars being moved by their Anglicanism to dedicate their lives to others to agree with Christopher Hitchens’s bald statement that “religion poisons everything”.

    But the notion that in free countries atheism promotes intolerance and immorality is demonstrably false. Last year, Californian sociologist Phil Zuckerman responded with facts rather than witless abuse to claims from Christian psychologists and theologians that atheists were “selfish and pusillanimous curmudgeons”, “unnatural” or “just damn angry”. He pulled together the available evidence and found that the more atheists or agnostics a free society has the more moral it becomes.

    Predictably, atheists were far more likely to be tolerant supporters of women’s rights and gay rights than believers. The pope, like militant Islamists, orthodox Jews and the ultras in every faith cannot see that struggles for female and homosexual emancipation are among the most moral causes of our age. But as believers in a sternly misogynist and homophobic god, they must want to be tough on crime.

    If so, they should welcome the contribution that atheists make to promoting law and order. A study in the 1990s found that a meagre 0.2% of the US prison population were atheists. In America, the states with the highest murder rates tend to be highly religious, such as Louisiana and Alabama, but the states with the lowest murder rates are among the least religious in the country, such as Vermont and Oregon.

    True, there is some evidence to suggest that atheists and agnostics are more likely to engage in underage drinking and illicit drug use. But the wider conclusion on the links between crime and religious belief holds good: if you want safe streets, move to a godless neighbourhood.

    more, godammit! 😉

  6. will do some more reading when I have time again but heres a little snippet or two

    I have always had a profound respect for aboriginal superstition, not as formulations of literal truth, but as a way of keeping the human spirit obedient to aspects of reality that are beyond rational articulation.

    — Lauren van der Post, The Lost World of the Kalahari

    and

    We know so much intellectually, indeed, that we are in danger of becoming the prisoners of our knowledge. We suffer from a hubris of the mind. We have abolished superstition of the heart only to install a superstition of the intellect in its place. We behave as if there were some magic in mere thought, and we use thinking for purposes for which it was never designed. As a result we are no longer sufficiently aware of the importance of what we cannot know intellectually, what we must know in other ways, of the living experience before and beyond our transitory knowledge. The passion of the spirit, which would inspire man to live his finest hour dangerously on the exposed frontier of his knowledge, seemed to me to have declined into a vague and arid restlessness hiding behind an arrogant intellectualism, as a child of arrested development hides behind the skirts of its mother.

             Intellectually, modern man knows almost all there is to know about the pattern of creation in himself, the forms it takes, the surface designs it describes. He has measured the pitch of its rhythms and carefully recorded all the mechanics. From the outside he sees the desirable first object of life more clearly perhaps than man has ever seen it before. But less and less is he capable of committing himself body and soul to the creative experiment that is continually seeking to fire him and to charge his little life with great objective meaning. Cut off by accumulated knowledge from the heart of his own living experience, he moves among a comfortable rubble of material possession, alone and unbelonging, sick, poor, starved of meaning. How different the naked little Bushman, who could carry all he possessed in one hand! Whatever his life lacked, I never felt it was meaning. Meaning for him died only when we bent him to our bright twentieth-century will. Otherwise, he was rich where we were poor; he walked clear-cut through my mind, clothed in his own vivid experience of the dream of life within him. By comparison most of the people I saw on my way to the sea were blurred, and like the knight at arms in Keats’ frightening allegory, “palely loitering” through life.

    — Laurens van der Post, The Heart of the Hunter

    and…

    There’s nothing wrong in searching for happiness. But we’re using happiness there in a term as if it were the ultimate of human striving. And actually what we found in prison, and I find in life, which gives far more comfort to the soul, is something which is greater than happiness or unhappiness and that is meaning. Because meaning transfigures all. And once what you are living and you are doing has for you meaning, it is irrelevant whether you are happy or unhappy. You’re content. You’re not alone in your spirit. You belong.

    — Hasten Slowly, The Journey of Sir Laurens van der Post, 1996

  8. the silo is destroyed. It happens in sawmills and coal mines. big empty spaces, filed with hot air and atomized particles. Sometimes peole are caught in the spaces, trying to do a job. They do not necessarily agree with each other but somehow the do their work. They have an objective. Gazing from afar, you might call it spirituality but later, there is time to think about it, paint it, write about it, sculpt and even copy it.

    Explosions happen, they even make sense in a way. I does not keep people from working within and without these places.

    It does not take inspiring words to find these jobs, later on, at the academy or the cloister, they can be given a names.

    The work comes first though, it is not found in reflecting pools, only children, narcissists and egomaniacs are found there.

  9. Photobucket

  10. Bucky Fuller told us that in the near future (his near future, our now) we would inevitably be confronted with a rather stark choice:  Utopia or Oblivion.  That choice is up to us.  There are many roads to oblivion, but Peter Kropotkin pointed to mutual aid as the path that is within our nature to get us toward utopia.

    http://www.amazon.com/Utopia-O…

    http://dwardmac.pitzer.edu/ana…

    • RUKind on September 22, 2010 at 04:12
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    He strips off all the cultural “religious” contexts and emerges with a common to all basic philosophy.

    This is also used as the introduction to the translation of The Bhagavad Gita by Swami Prabhavananda and Christoper Isherwood (of some fame himself).

    Huxley nails it. Should be must reading for anyone looking for the difference between religion and spirituality.

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