"The thing's hollow—it goes on forever—and—oh my God—it's full of stars!"

Last night after the public meeting I had the chance to talk with an anarcho-primitivist friend of mine about the role of civilization in human life and where technology is leading us. I tested some fairly radical futurist theories against his own. The conversation was a bit heated but quite interesting. What I found both amusing and disturbing was our propensity to take our arguments to the most extreme ends at which point I don’t think either of us could really believing what we were trying to assert, at least I hope not. There was no room for a middle ground in the discussion

Each of us described the ideal future that our viewpoints would lead to. I argued for the nobility and virtue of self-aware (human) consciousness which might eventually lead to a state of singularity, infused consciousness inhabiting a bio-mechanical conglomeration, something like what is seen in the Matrix, but not so malevolent. My friend, Steven, insisted that, A.) the very concept of a singular consciousness is horrific (Personally, I don’t see why. To me, it would represent the unification of all human life, the equalizing of all disparity, and, potentially, the fulfillment of an evolutionary process.) and, B.) the bio-mechanical transition would not be sustainable as it would destroy the very biosphere that it feeds off of, planet earth. To this latter point, I postulated that the fueling of consciousness would stop being nutrient based and would instead be powered by other sources of energy in nature.

He asked what energy sources would we use once the available fossil fuels were used up. I stated, first the earth’s core, secondly the sun, and hopefully, by the time the sun was no longer an option our cybernetic logic systems would have solved the problem of how to access energy sources outside of our solar system. “So you want to consume the entire universe,” he said. Essentially, yes, was my response, but the amount of time it would take for this to occur, if it is even possible, is incalculable. But consumption of the universe is not the goal. Rather, the goal is to sustain consciousness in manner that gives us an opportunity to understand itself within and without of the material universe in the search for God, who is beyond the universe.

Steven said this narrative sounds far too similar to the story of the Tower of Babel. I agree that it does, and I wonder about that. But frankly, I don’t understand why Steven’s philosophy or utopian vision is more righteous. He would like to see an anti-industrial revolution in which we eventually return to a state of foraging for sustenance. He argues that the human consciousness, which I view as sacred and evidence of the existence of a creator, is actually a corruption of life, and that we would do well to cast off our desire to control our own destinies with technology and instead live in harmony with planet earth. He kept repeating that for two million years our species lived in harmony with the planet; only in the last ten thousand years have we have become dangerous to ourselves and to all other life.

I don’t know where he’s getting this two million year number. I had always heard that the primate life form has only been in existence for eight hundred thousand years, and during most of that time it was barely recognizable as human. The Cro-Magnon man only emerged 35,000 years ago, as the theory goes. No matter, what I think Steven is trying to propagate is a “back to Eden” type of philosophy. The metaphor is that the Garden of Eden represents our animal state, and that obtaining the Knowledge of Good and Evil brought us to our fallen state which is civilization. This viewpoint implies that all culture is evil and misguided and the solution to the problem is in its complete abolition.

This sounds a little extreme, even for Steven. He did say it, but I think it may have been going beyond his actual position. I think he actually wishes that human development had arrested in the state of those indigenous American people who lived here just before European settlers massacred them. But now, since that did not occur, we should somehow return to that life way. This sounds a bit unrealistic to me, barring some major collapse of industrial society, which I don’t argue is impossible. However, even in such a case, it seems unlikely that civilization would regress. Steven argues that the majority of the world, outside of western civilization, is seeking this holistic harmonious life with planet earth. I think he is suffering from a luddite delusion.

Additionally, if a return to this supposedly harmonious life were even an option, it would eventually mean the total extinction of humanity. The possibility of a major catastrophic event that would permanently alter the ecology of the planet is a certainty. The only way we can predict and prepare for such an event is by utilizing technology. And if we got lucky and avoided such an event, the sun is bound to alter over time changing the conditions of solar system in way that the planet’s biosphere could no longer function. Scientists conjecture that it will be a few billion years from now.

Outside of the logistics of Steven’s ideal, let’s look at the theology. Is a return to the Garden of Eden the point of human life or of being a Christian, as some of my Christian friends seem to conjecture. When Adam and Eve were cast out, they were given clothing, they were told that childbirth would be painful, and from now on they would have to work the earth for their food. And they were told they would die, which, if we are looking at this in terms of the metaphor, I think it’s means that we now understand what death is (to an extent) and fear it. Then God stationed an angel with a flaming sword to guard the garden and prevent them from returning to eat from the tree of life. The point of the story is, we can never go back.

But the people at my church with anarcho-primitivist tendencies love to twist the stories to fit their view. So the story of Cain and Able is about how agriculture is wrong. The Tower of Babel is a cautionary tale against building civilization. I think the most bizarre of these interpretations is the idealization of the Exodus of the Israelites, of their wandering in the desert following God in the form of a cloud of smoke/pillar of fire, that this is somehow the state in which God intended people to live, homeless and dependent on manna from Heaven. Never mind that one day the manna stopped coming and God told them it was time to enter the promised land where they were instructed to settle.

What I realized after the conversation between Steven and I is that both of us were arguing for extremes to their absurd ends, and neither of us were really taking into account the possibility of a spiritual intervention by God, which is of course how the Bible stories tell us things will end. It’s hard to believe in that type of thing, because along with the intervention there’s judgment, and then these unpleasant metaphors of heaven and hell. We don’t like that. I suppose some people get gratification at the thought that their version of justice will come to pass. Personally, I shudder to think of justice in terms of vengeance. But if vengeance is God’s then, probably, much like God, it is something we have no grasp of.

Ultimately Steven and I both come to the same conclusion, that we are fairly helpless about what happens on the grand scheme of things and that we can only choose to lead the best life we can. But Steven has chosen to feel guilty and angry that he is born in a civilization he hates and has dedicated his life to tearing it down and recruiting others to do the same. Whereas I accept civilization as merely a survival tool that is beneficent to humanity but also can be abused. I choose not to focus on what clothing I wear and food I eat which may have been processed through an unjust bio-mechanism in which some suffer more than others. The mechanism continues to improve in my view. Instead, I choose to focus on my personal interactions with others, which is enough of a struggle in itself, learning to assert my individuality in a positive and creative manner and hoping that the consciousness beyond the material world will manifest itself to this lowly body-bound consciousness that needs it so.

Compromising my principles for a girl

This woman I know posted a notice on Facebook about a walk to raise awareness about human trafficking, and specifically sex slavery. Normally I wouldn’t take interest in an awareness walk. I mean, I like walking, but I don’t like protests. But this particular woman I used to have a crush on, okay, let’s be honest, I sort of still have a crush on her. She’s the only female I know my age with conservative values (which shows what kind of liberal bubble I live in—and am trying to burst!), and such a rare person stands out to me, although I haven’t seen her in years. She lives in New Jersey.

I decided to look up the organization the awareness walk is supposed to be raising money for. It’s called Stop Child Trafficking Now. According to their website, unlike other anti-slavery organizations, Stop Child Trafficking Now doesn’t focus on rescuing individual victims from abuse. Instead, their goal is to have governments arrest and prosecute criminals who are involved with human trafficking. Specifically, they want the US military to hunt down traffickers in the same way they do with terrorists.

Now I don’t know exactly how they plan to implement these goals, but something about the concept rubs me the wrong way. While I think that human trafficking is a loathsome practice and its purveyors should be brought justice, I am hesitant in advocating that the US military should police the world. The counterargument is that if we don’t do it, who will? We are one of the few countries in the world with the resources to stop criminal practices that are undoubtedly perpetuated by political corruption so that local governments are accessories to the crim. But I am of the mind that our military presence and our habit of using a military solution for world problems has a negative impact with unforeseen consequences. I can’t help but wonder and wish that there could be a better, more creative solution.

Incidentally, this last weekend during the hurricane I finally got around to watching Ron Howard’s The Missing, a western that came out a few years back. I always meant to watch it because I like Ron Howard, but it’s over two hours long and very serious, so I kept putting it off. The Missing, as it happens, is about child trafficking for sexual slavery, which I had not known. Cate Blanchett’s daughter gets kidnapped by this Indian witch doctor and his gang of thieves, who intend to sell the girl as a whore to Mexican pimps. So Cate Blanchett teams up with her estranged father, Tommy Lee Jones, who, years ago, left his family in pursuit of Indian ways, but showed up around the time of the kidnapping because a medicine man told him that he needed to protect his family if he wanted to be fully healed of a rattlesnake bite.

The premise of the film is obviously not very politically correct, and it made me wonder what caused Ron Howard to take on the project (it isn’t characteristic of his style) and if the story is based on some real incident or if it was merely trying to be incredibly cliché. I think few people are aware that the western story originated in the form of captivity tales. Captivity tales became a popular genre of literature in the 19th century during western expansion of the States. Presumably, the first of these tales published were actual accounts of people who had been kidnapped by Indians and subsequently rescued. But the true life stories proved so popular that soon fictional accounts were produced. I learned about this at the Rosenbach Museum, because Dr. A.S.W. Rosenbach was a collector of captivity tales and the museum probably houses the world’s largest collection of them. So, The Missing fits well into the western movie category, harking back to the origins of the genre. See The Searchers starring John Wayne for a similar example.

To be honest, I didn’t really like movie all that much. It was too simplistic and too violent, much of it seemed to try to deliberately disturb the viewer. But what struck me about it was how it presented a situation in which violence was absolutely the only option for the protagonist unless she wanted her daughter to be sold into a life of constant rape. I came away from the movie thinking, well, that is certainly a case where violence is warranted. Of course there is the argument that if white people hadn’t driven the Indians off their land and into hostility against the States then the Indians wouldn’t have kidnapped their women. But this movie is not about the big picture. It doesn’t address sociological causes. It is about a single incident in which a women must fight for her daughter’s life. (Furthermore, in the film, Cate Blanchett happens to be a doctor, and the opening sequence depicts her treating an old Indian women, so she is absolved from the sins of her race.)

So I watched this movie, was mildly captivated by it (ha-ha, just kidding) and then I hear about the human trafficking awareness walk. Being a person who doesn’t believe in coincidence, I can’t help but think that God is trying to draw my attention to something. But what is the message? In the current crisis, which Stop Child Trafficking Now wants to address, the big picture is that human trafficking happens, not because of imperialistic expansion, but because the world has evil in it, and when this evil is given the opportunity to work, it manifests itself in the most horrendous ways. No not-for-profit organization is capable of culling the motivations of criminals who sell and buy children for sex. Other organizations attempt to rescue children from these situations, one at a time, but unfortunately this does not stop the illicit transactions from occurring, and there is a chance that it makes the human trafficking market more profitable by increasing the scarcity of the “product.” Is this a situation, like in The Missing, where violence is warranted?

It seems that the choice is between using force to stop a horrible crime, or allowing it to continue by not acting. Really, the bigger picture solution is stronger communities that instill a greater sense value for both a human life and appropriate sexual behavior. Such communities should be able to police themselves and stop these crimes at the root. There is probably a good argument that although hunting down and prosecuting criminals with the military is a longer term solution than saving one child at a time, the even longer term solution of a strengthening community is undermined by a foreign military presence. It’s a delicate balance, these problems and solutions where governmental powers are involves, and I can’t say I have the answer.

Either way, this probably wouldn’t affect my decision making process over whether or not I go to the awareness walk, because the only real reason I would consider going is to see this woman. For those of you who are more interested in my crush on her than anything else I’ve been talking about, I have to say, my chances aren’t great. A few years ago, I made it plain that I wanted a romantic relationship with her and she said she just wanted to be friends, so I stopped hanging out with her. Now, I think we’re on good terms, but she rarely responds to my comments on her Facebook wall, and I sent her a text message yesterday, to which she also has not responded. So I don’t know if I would be a welcome presence at this awareness walk or not. I’m hesitant to sign up for it in advance. Maybe I’ll just show up and see what happens.

Hello. I am not God.

For some time, a few months maybe, I’ve had the idea for this blog, a blog of serious ideas and personal reflections on ideas, but I do not know how to begin. It seems appropriate to articulate some scope of the subjects I might hope to address here and I’d like to believe that this first post will be the hardest one. Of course, any definition I put here will be limited and I cannot foresee the full breadth of topics that might be touched upon. But in my hesitation, ideas have come and gone for which I regret not writing on. So it is with a small amount of urgency that I mount the task of this writing project, with hopes that it becomes something to instigate personal growth within me and inspiration to those readers it draws.

The title of this entry should be an obvious fact to most individuals, obvious to the point where it is almost absurd to state. Clearly, I am not God, and if I seem to imply that there was really any question, one might accuse me of illusions of grandeur. Yet, I think if put differently, the question of whether or not we (each of us) think we are God is really the contemporary crisis of common humanity’s philosophy (or religion), at least in Western Civilization. For clarity, instead of asking, Am I God, might I not ask, who do I worship?

Even if in responding to this question the answer seems clear. I don’t, or at least I try not to, worship myself. Instead, I try to worship God, who is truth, goodness, rightness, lovingness, creatorness, etc. All of these things which I have identified as aspects of God, because I have been taught that they are aspects of God, make God worthy of my worship. Thus while, I might have to fight my selfish desires on a daily basis, I can measure my success by how well I am able to devote myself to God that day.

This response to the question is coming from one who has been culturally attuned to a particular understanding of God that is built upon tradition which has changed over time but in general holds a benevolent view of God. But there are other cultural stances which do not hold this view of God, or most often more accurately deny that the benevolent aspects listed above are attributable to any god, though in most cases they acknowledge the benevolence of such attributes apart from a god. Holders of such a stance might say, There is no god, but there is goodness.

So we come to the question of what is goodness. This becomes more tricky because what some people think to be good, others may think is bad, or at least not “good.” In a recent conversation in my cell group, someone made the statement, “I feel uncomfortable saying what things are right and what things are wrong.” Fopr reference, this was in a conversation about sexual behavior. To me this statement was fairly astounding, particularly because the other cell members seemed to be in agreement. Of course I’ve heard such sentiments expressed widely in a secular humanist context, but here I was among a group of Christians who all seemed to have a similar evangelical sort of background and they had misgivings about saying what is right and wrong.

Their misgivings really aren’t shocking when viewed in a wider context. Among today’s “intellectuals,” or the higher educated, the widely agreed upon understanding of truth is that it is impossible to for any individual to identify the Truth, which is absolute, if such a thing exists, because all conceptions of truth are corrupted by individual experience. Experiences in which we are actually present are our most direct encounter with actual truth, beyond that our understanding of the world is based on the accounts of others, whose reliability may vary. This understanding of the world in turn affects how we interpret the experiences in which we are present. Even our direct perception of reality may then be distorted by unreliable information we have received from outside sources. No one can presume that every source is reliable, so based on our understanding of reality, we must pick which sources we think best convey the truth, even though our understanding is shaped by sources in our development which we were unable to pick and which may be unreliable.

Thus the consensual conclusion among the higher educated is that truth is not ascertainable, so we must rely on our personal sense of what truth is, and subsequently, our personal sense of goodness can only be defined by we as individuals for ourselves. With this in mind, we return to the question of who do we worship and it takes on a slightly different meaning. If our only conception of goodness is what we define for ourselves, if no one else has the “right” to tell us what is right, then the god of our worship is not the God of truth, but a god of our understanding, a small and unreliable god based on an unreliable understanding of goodness.

Too often, I feel that even those of us who are Christian fall into this flawed habit of relying on our own sense of what is right, or in other words, what is “right for me.” We lose trust in the communal understanding of rightness if it seems to disagree with our personal sense. Or we pick and choose, saying the community cannot discern this particular truth. This is understandable when considering the cycle unreliability in human interactions discussed above, but to reject community in preference to our own discernment we run the risk of rejecting the God of truth in preference for the God of ourselves.

I am not saying that the God of community or tradition is perfect and without flaw. I am only rejecting the notion that the truth is unascertainable and the subsequent irrational conclusion that therefore we must settle for a flawed truth we construct solely from our own experiences. Truth instead can be realized through a give and take process with the community, where we are constantly processing and re-processing our ideas among those around us. This is how we become more reliable to both ourselves and others.

Thus is the scope of this blog, a give and take process in pursuit of the truth and in search of a God that does not fit inside our personal definitions. Perhaps this first post is a bit confused and badly argued. There’s a lot more to be said for sure (…and I’ve been writing at work in between customer service phone calls). Hopefully future entries will provide better more thought out points, or more interesting stories. In the meantime, I hope you can take something away from it and give something back with your comments.