What If?

 

 

What If?

 

Lloyd H. Whitling

 

 

 

 

What if we all have been trained from birth to see good and evil as reversed? By that, I mean to see what was created to be good as evil, and what was created to be evil as good? Does that sound ridiculous? What if people had been trained that way for thousands of years, until in today’s time we take for granted what is good and what is evil, and now we take them for granted? What if everything in our lives and in what’s around us has been adjusted to accommodate that? Would that not make our first question sound ridiculous?

“But,” comes the reply to that, “we can plainly see what is good and what is evil and know it by application of common sense. How do your questions get past that?”

What if we have also been taught for all our lives how we cannot trust our senses, that they will inform us wrong, and so we cannot apply common sense to such a question?— and that science makes a wrong assumption from the outset by basing its conclusions on sensible observatons? What if we are convinced that to even ask such a question as we did at the start, is a part of what is evil, designed to steer us away from the ancient writings? What if we have always been informed that we are inherently evil in our own selves, and so must be told about the good and, through instructions and punishment, learn to accept such teachings without question? How is our common sense going to be of anything different than what those teachers tell us and show us in the ancient writings which they have apprised us as truth?

So, even now, would not our common sense about it depend on what what the teachers chosen by our parents have taught us is right and wrong? Would not some of us see differently according to what we had been taught, so that sometimes we see evil in what they see as good, and each side think the other guilty of heresy? Could they not justify, according to the view of the ancient writings they had been taught, that we are guilty of heresy and not themselves, so that no agreement could ever be had about what the ancient writings mean?— or even, many times, of which ancient writings should apply? Would not both sides try to apply them upon each other in the same manner in which they were taught them in the first place, by insistence and punishment, even to the point of war?— and let that side which is most truly God’s side win?

What if the existence of every god depends upon the beliefs about them promoted among the people by teachers who have mastered the art of pursuasion, so that their existences, all, are only found in the support such teachers raise? What if the teachers’ efforts falter, and the people stop believing?— would such gods disappear from prominence and fade away until all that is left of them are statues and paintings?

And, what if what some of those faded gods had promoted as good what is now taught to be evil? What if, over the passing of generations of human beings, the course of history would show that what had replaced those ancient gods had always also sooner or later been replaced, so that all that had ever been allowed as good had now become viewed as evil according to the teachers who spread their names and words among the people? What if the gods whose edicts we now follow are also doomed in that same way?— or even, as can be seen within the ancient writings, doomed to evolve so that what we are told about them by one end of those writings is vastly different from what is said at the other?

What if the first gods were those of people unconscious of their own nakedness, and that increased sharing of a consciousness of evil led the people into feeling increasingly exposed, so the evolution of religion had evolved away from what the first god had declared good, to a state where what had been good to see gained punishment in the latter stage for its exposure? What if more than half the crimes and lewdness of the latter generations were nothing worse than a widespread emanation of a desire to shed the unnatural evil state and return to what the first god had declared to be good?— and that the evil teachers who rail against the good were made by such acts to climb upon their pedestals and pulpits and demand that laws be made against them, and that such laws as they had already caused to be made should be more harshly enforced, so that insistence and punishment should be carried forth in evil’s cause in the name of good?

What if an early promoter of the cause of good had set himself against evil in his own time, and demanded that we should care for ourselves the same as we do our temples, that we should live simple lives free of amassed wealth and possessions, that we should give of our excesses to the poor that they, too, might live good lives free of the evils of hunger and need? What if the evolution into evil of all such messages has caused his to be buried beneath the dross from later teachers, until productivity and amassment of wealth and possessions has now become the standard according to which we live, according to which we assess each other, so that our houses as well as our temples have become ornate and gaudy, and the walls of wealth put on display are built of amassment of debt, are false, and therein the evil lurks to strike us down when we answer to the stress of it, and relax our vigilance.

What if, in earlier times, seeds for a second prosaic vision of how we should understand our existence and all that surrounds us took root and slowly spread, as vines, into all of humanity’s endeavors and, by trial and error, grew until the priests took note of it and had it declared evil. What if centuries of human torture, burnings of live bodies, and persecution only served to stir wise persons into making assessments of this newly declared evil, so that it was seen to be useful, actually pacific, and to actually work where common sense as taught by the priests said it should fail? What if the priests and those politicians they supported used technologies advanced by this new vision to make weapons so they could show how it is evil, and demonstrated that by using them to destroy heretics around the world? What if this new heresy, which offered them so many advantages in their causes of insistence and punishment, were to also evolve at their behest, so that evil promoted evil until now it can threaten all of humankind, all of the forms of life that have for millenniums roamed and evolved upon this Earth, with extinction.

What if those who declare that to be a form of good, saying it would signal the return of their missing god, should vie against those who declare that kind of ending to be the totality of evil, and win? What if that must be the ultimate test for good and evil, and what if humankind must make up its mind whether barren planets represent the good because of their vast majority in numbers, or if a lonely planet teeming with a plethoric variety of life forms represents a good thing in the midst of prehistory replicas of catastrophes. What if we should someday observe how evil seems to displace good in every kind of way we’ve observed, and that good requires guarded protection and nurturance, not cudgeling insistence and punishment, if it will survive?

 

Religion VS Science

Religion VS Science

by Lloyd H. Whitling

April 27, 2009

The religious claim science is based on an illusion of reality, which is necessarily a temporary version of creation. Supporters of science claim religion is based on unverifiable myths told about absurd incidents. Each side claims it cannot understand how the other can claim to possess the only version of truth. The conflict appears unresolvable for lack of a shared vision of what constitutes reality, and a shared language about it where words mean the same on both sides.

We can only and most quietly hope to settle the differences between science and religion, and show why science is the most effective stabilizer of humanity, by taking the discussion into a completely unrelated place. Let’s take it into the ownership of real propery to not only emphasize the nature of both, but to perhaps show why this kind of property gets called ‘real’.

Real estate involves definite chunks of property, with or without buildings, located in recognizable places on the face of the Earth. Consider how ownership gets transferred and also how it gets established. We can compare modern methods to the ancient, call the ancient “organized religion” (faith) and the modern ‘organized science” (objective). Faith and objectivity both are not about whether or not the property exists, but whether it was accurately and cogently described, and whether those descriptions were accurately translated into usable every day terms.

In ancient times, where individuals could own land, borders and corners were by individual agreement, as being something on the order of “From that hilltop by that tree down to that bend in the creek, over to the road, then to the bridge over the ravine, and back up to the hilltop.” While that might not be an exact replica of it in every instance, what is intended is to demonstrate the absence of any precision.

Winds blew hills away as the land passed from generation to generation, the creek eroded a new bed (or dried up and disappeared, the tree died and another grew near to its place, and the bridge over the ravine one day collapsed. The generations of humans involved kept their faith in the old descriptions, and learned to revise them as time would pass and the scenery rearranged itself.

As science advances, technological innovations develop to fill human needs, and accurate deeds and descriptions were most certainly one of those needs. People applied scientific discoveries to how to more accurately find locations on the Earth’s face, not for just this problem, but for how to cross oceans and end up closer to one’s intended destination.

What works on sea without landmarks works even better on land. The development of accurate compasses made predictable directionality a welcome achievement. The development of accurate clocks led to the dividing of the Earth’s surface into longitiude and latitudinal divisions, wherein exact points could be defined by surveyors, trained to read each others’ instructions and find within inches of where another had been perhaps years into the past. Stakes driven into the ground get reassessed from time to time to assure new owners that old lines were accurately defined and they could know where their property rights ended and their neighbors’ began.

Today, entire megalopolis-sized cities depend on scientifically-stated accuracy for their layouts, including beneath the surface. Mines collapse, and rescue workers on the surface drill precisely-located shafts into the ground to where they hope to find survivors. Pipelines and roads are laid out and constructed in carefully measured plots and, nowadays, crews can work toward each other while fully expecting to meet in an exact fashion.

Compare that to the laying out of Tennessee’s nothern border and the obvious miss those crews made while using ancient methods and primitive instruments. Constant refinement enables science to introduce technological devices of which that absence of accuracy is no longer granted consideration.

It is not only the exact locations that get serious consideration nowadays, but also the exact area confined with a set of borders. A small farm that may once have been assessed at “about” eighty acres may now be accurately measured at 72.6 with no one disagreeing. Surveyors can walk knowledgeable people around a plot of land and explain how they arrived at their figures, and all parties will either arrive at the same numbers, or know wherein their disagreements lie.

That cannot be said of the ancient ways. Money would exchange hands, a fight or feud break out, some authorities get called upon to arbitrate, but all sides would as likely as not fail to achieve real satisfaction from the results, wherein there would be winners and losers with bad feelings between them. One sides ‘faith’ in the results would be the other side’s reasons for doubt. That has been the case for most of the duration of human existence.

It is the nature of human beings that vested interests will also lead to doubt, one way or another. Application of technological advancesa that led to a smaller tax assessment might have gained a farmer’s support, but if it led to assessing a smaller acreage at the time of intended sale would certainly be put to the test. There will always be exceptions: “Uncle Charlie took it like a man, and sold a smaller farm than he bought and paid for.”

Part of science is the finding of ways to gain dependable answers to the questions it raises. If Uncle Charlie worked with the surveyors who measured his farm and understood their math and methods, he would be satisfied with a result that might have disappointed him. He would fully expect that surveyors far into the future would measure the farm and arrive at very similar conclusions. He would know that mistakes can be made, and that part of the process would require verification, and that he could, himself with the right training, check the math and methods and see for himself there were no mistakes.

That sort of assurance is not available where ancient methods still prevail. People who must “take it on faith” that their authority figures are acting in their behalf have to make choices when some authorities assess their property at “more or less eighty acres” but another insists it is hard-put to make sixty. Where the tax man insists upon eighty acres for a plot that a potential buyer can only see as sixty, a sale is apt to fall through unless the seller can successfully convince someone the farm is worth the asking price no matter what its size in acres.

When science fears to tread on religion’s domain, as in today’s hazardous world, no modern surveyors will ever get called in to decide the actual size of such a farm. The farmers on either side of the deal will have no idea how the surveyor arrives at his results, except for stories told down at the meeting hall in town. Urban legends will abound in such a climate, such as the story about a man who owned an entire tall mountain that got surveyed “as only one acre, and he had planted ten acres worth of seeds and gotten that much of a crop off it.”

After much exposure to many such stories as that, the farmers on both sides of a potential deal will hesitate to rely on modern methods and those who use them. Even worse, having heard of other surveyors who might have been beaten or killed for arriving at figures that diverged from what both sides had expected, many surveyors might turn down the job. The farmers on all sides might revel that the old ways of faith had been preserved, and never get to realize the peaceful sense of confidence they would never experience in their lifetimes.

By now, the point of this should be well understood. Faith in guesswork will never be the equal of confidence found in verifiable accuracy. Even while the landscape changes around us, an accurate understanding gained from verifiable methods enables the tracking of those changes, and awareness of their effects upon how we will describe and recognize that little portion of it all we wrap our minds around. Without that awareness, we must resort to placing our faith in authority figures and the gods for whom they decree enforcement.

And, that is when we have religion instead of science.

Lloyd

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Copyright ©2009 by Lloyd H. Whitling