Wisdom Through the Ages

 I started this for a friend of mine. It still needs some work, probably some review by a better historian than me. It's been a hobby for a while, but it's turning out to be more applicable to the world's political problems. We have always fought over resources, and pondering our existence needs some time of peaceful reflection. To have that, someone else needed to be protecting borders and working to create that stability. 

The same forces that create civilization often are the ones that destroy other civilizations. Centuries of this have led to scientific exploration into how the mind works and where we came from. The questions that appeared on cave walls. What we're finding is, feelings and intuitions are more central consciousness than we thought.

Pre-History

Before written language, we can see from archaeological evidence that people were influencing each other in non-violent ways, implying some reflection on who they are and what type of future they desire

https://www.science.org/content/article/early-humans-domesticated-themselves-new-genetic-evidence-suggests

Axial Age 8^th to 3^rd centuries BC

3000 BC

The early books by Homer and the Epic of Gilgamesh show us how they were thinking about the meaning of life, how to organize society, and what it is to be good.

To develop a robust philosophy that could challenge empires, civilization first needed to develop. One of those empires fell, but left behind a middle class, and was isolated enough to stay intact and for them to organize themselves and trade with neighbors. The advancement of a language that was easier to learn and could be used across disciplines, helped put the authority of words above gods and kings.

The Origins of Greek Philosophy » Internet Infidels

500 BC

The Pre-Socratics then Socrates, Plato, Aristotle are well documented, so I won’t regurgitate that here.

Hindu Buddhist had a tradition of emptiness, as in ‘empty the mind’ that led to the use of “0” in linguistics. Silent beats also occurred in music, eventually inspiring Brahmagupta to create zero and negative numbers. I mention this as an example of how ideas precede inventions and innovations that become part of our worldview.

Zero to Infinity | NOVA | PBS

As we’ll see in a bit, it takes more some literature and good ideas to develop philosophy that can support democracy and increase cooperation on a world scale. The East didn’t have the ideas the Greeks had, and the Roman Empire was collapsing. Philosophy was preserved but didn’t advance for a thousand years.

Indigenous people might have had a better sense of intuition and a better relationship with the natural world, but without written language and widespread travel, those ideas didn’t spread. They remained tied up with their mythology and were almost lost when Western philosophy promoted colonization in the name of progress. This is not just an aside, it is significant. It’s only in the last 100 years of advancements in neuroscience that we are beginning to see the errors of viewing ourselves as creatures separate from our environment, and worse, ones with dominion over it.

700

The Islamic world had a Golden Age around 750-950AD with improvements in agriculture, poetry, arts, synthesis of crafts across the Asian and European continents and even the beginnings of Calculus. But they continued to be driven by the desire to conquer. They held Greek writings but very few people could read the language anymore. Averroes was tasked with squaring the secular logic of that philosophy and the Islamic scripture. Internal threats of despotic Caliphs and Clerics like Al-Ghazali and external threats like the Mongols eventually brought down the empire.

1100

Judaism had been pushed out of the East by Islam, but they were allowed to live and work within that empire. Sects ranged from strict adherence of Jewish laws to the more philosophical. Maimonides attempted to apply ancient ideas to the emerging modern thinking.

As that was happening, Europe was just starting to crawl out of the mud and mount a challenge to the long domination of the Catholic Church. Early humanist Christians interpreted the Bible with more compassionate themes. Thomas Aquinas continued the work that Judaism and Islam had been doing and found himself in trouble with the Condemnations of 1277. Fifty years after he died, in 1323, he was canonized as a saint. Some view this period as a time of horrible oppression of scientific advancement by the Church. Others say it was moment when the Church agreed to let that knowledge continue to grow, as long as they didn’t get their noses into the miracles of God and Jesus.

This is a good time to take a break from history and go over just where philosophy fits in the spectrum of human thought and knowledge. People who are working on discovering the wonders of creation are still called “natural philosophers” at this time, but where is the line between philosophy and science?

Is Philosophy Stupid? (richardcarrier.info)

1500

With more riches coming into Europe, a class of people who could do nothing but think about life started coming up with new ways of viewing the human condition. Descartes famous “I think therefore I am” stands out. This left many unanswered questions. Descartes attempt at answering them included thinking up a “perfect being” that must exist. It was an advancement in that we began to look at ourselves as thinking beings, instead of purely driven by the whims of gods or magic, but it has also come to be known as the “Cartesian error”.

With the challenges to the three major religions and the empires they were tied to, and the growing merchant class, and world travel, the stage is finally set for science. So many changes happened within a few centuries, that it’s hard to pin down just what they were and how to label them. Richard Carrier does a pretty good job of that.

What Exactly Was the Scientific Revolution? • Richard Carrier

1650

I couldn’t talk about philosophy without mentioning Spinoza. Although he maintained his loyalty to the Judaism to his dying day, he has been called a pantheist. His logical proofs have supported many philosophies of “God is everything”.

Enlightenment

Durkheim 1858-1917

Darwin, Origin of Species published 1859

Camus

The Boy Who Knew Infinity

Robert Sapolsky  Bonobo and the Atheist

Frans de Waal

EO Wilson What We Do - This View Of Life

American History of Slavery

I have read books, listened to lectures, attended college classes, and heard speeches on the topic of slavery all my life. I'm still surprised by some of the details that I find. Recent memorials and museums will hopefully help all of us better understand our own history. My great grandfather was born into a slave-owning family, in 1860. He wouldn't remember it, but his family moved west to opportunity, and I'm sure it was a difficult life. We have very little record of it. 

I try to address all of the anecdotes I have heard, as well as the major milestones that are well documented. Some, like Bacon's Rebellion, are murky, but play pivotal roles. International trade and economic forces are important but deserve a timeline of their own, so I only touch on those. 

If there is something I should add, please comment.

 

16xx	Irish Slaves and Indentured Servitude	This article contains factual errors
1641	First Law legalizing slavery	The beginning of the triangular trade
1654	First Slaveowner	This article should be fact checked
1662	Slavery is a lifelong heritable condition	Virginia law
1676	Bacon's Rebellion	A complicated chapter in American history where the limits of freedom were tested
1676	Bacon's Rebellion	This article offers three possible outcomes of Bacon's Rebellion
1676	Bacon's Rebellion	It was a turning point. Worker's demanded more rights and at the same time, the supply of Africans was increasing. Slave laws began to focus more on them.
1690	Slave Codes	increase over the next 50 years
1705	Who can be enslaved	Blacks, mulattos, natives, non-Christians
1724	Code Noir	Dominated slave treatment in the South through the Civil War
1778	3/5th Compromise	The US Constitution
1788	In Britain	Petition for aboltion had 10,000 signatures. The next year it had 100,000 and kept growing.
1800	But slavery continued	The Whitney Museum in New Orleans
1862	Black Confederate Brigade	Did slaves fight for the South?

You Are Here

You’re in My Light

A blog about my upcoming novel

One of my reasons for wanting to write this book was the story of how religious freedom has evolved in the United States over my lifetime. There are some good sociology books on this topic and plenty of polemics from one side or another as well as those who say they have found a middle way. I hope I’ve avoided any of those types of presentations. Instead, I follow two people who were born in the middle of these changes. 

I don’t ever mention the attack of 9/11 in the book. The Orions arrive on earth in 1999 and that event does not occur in my fictional timeline. Anything before alien arrival is factual, to the best of my ability. The two main characters grow into adulthood in a world where cross cultural relations are improving. The Orions focus on the more basic causes of conflict, like resources scarcity and fair distribution of technology. Cultural divides are in their distant past. Their one continent world developed sustainably and much more peacefully than ours. 

When Dave in his early thirties. His father divorced his mother because she wanted her son to go to church. She wasn’t entirely sure why, but she felt there had to be something that created the universe, and churches seemed to know what that was. He meets Suzanne, whose mother never had a relationship with her father. Her mother disdained organized religion. So she grew up in a community based shunning tradition, unless you call witchcraft and psychic phenomenon a tradition. 

The two personalities that result clash, but they gain respect for each other as they are riding across Indiana. The book begins in the middle of their journey, when they come across a conflict that is playing out with weapons and claims on territory. That conflict, of people with traditional values against a government they don’t feel represents them anymore, reflects the conflict that I see many people going through in this real today, of their values versus the world of powers and economics. Through flashbacks to how Dave and Suzanne ended up in the middle of a cornfield that is in the middle of a battle, we see how the world has ended up in the conflicts we experience now. 

We also see some of my thoughts, which are informed by better thinkers than myself, on how the world could have ended up differently. In the lore of the Orion world, in an early chapter, we find out that one of their early leaders fought to prevent the spread of the idea of land ownership. When they come to this planet, before they build their spaceport, they work with farmers who are barely able to feed themselves. When the spaceports are built, they offer an entire continent on a planet near their home planet. This essentially solves our current dilemma of not having a Planet B. 

As the heroes travel, we see the world as it has developed for 17 years of improvements to agriculture, reduction in population, and opening of borders. Non-motorized traffic is everywhere with some roads repurposed for pedal power only. Work is flexible and requires fewer hours. Families have more time for each other. Manufactured goods are being recycled into the new economy. By focusing on the poorest in the world, want has been reduced, and that has reduced conflicts and increased cooperation. And yet, not everyone is happy. 

With those needs met, the questions of where we came from and why we are here are freely asked. There is no powerful organization that can claim authority by claiming to have those answers. Almost no one feels that they need to give to such organizations to help procure a place for themselves in the afterlife. There is one character who offers religious advice, and her role, her job, includes meeting their physical and medical needs. 

I don’t offer much in the way of answers in this story. I hope reading it opens questions about what you might do if you had more choices and a clearer sense of where you were in the universe.

 The Worst passage in the Bible. Another expanded sermon helper.

Easter Sunday, Year C

I link to an article titled “The Worst passage in the Bible” this week. It’s the Corinthians passage, actually scheduled for Tuesday.  It’s not one of those articles that goes on about evil Christians who want to see people burning in hell. It’s not that kind of bad. It’s bad because it is not seen as bad by perfectly kind and loving people. What’s bad about it is that it sets up a wall between Christianity and anything good that doesn’t validate or might even contradict it. It renders useless any discussion about where we come from or something like morality comes from. As it states a few times, such talk is “foolish”. 

There are other difficulties in leaving or challenging religion, like in-group loyalty, or in more insular environments there are people who will come after you if you try. If this bit of bad logic only existed in Christianity then I think we would have overcome it a few hundred years ago, if not sooner. But like many things in religions, it was not invented by just one of them, it’s something more ingrained in human nature. 

That makes the way out of this bad reasoning a lot harder than people think. Those who are not involved in organized religion think they have the right reasoning, but often they are doing the same thing from the point of view of whatever worldview they have chosen. The problem is explained in the link within the Lectionary helper but I’ll skip to the positive answer first, rather than focusing on that negative. 

Religion can and does contain helpful practices and teachings. It is becoming more popular for mainstream churches to say they “don’t own the franchise” on faith. They are willing to partner with other faiths and with secular organizations to accomplish the goals they believe are in line with their faith. They will also use logic like this passage to explain why they still think it’s important to pick one set of beliefs, one denomination, and stick to it. And this logic prevents any curiosity about where else their ethical teachings might come from or why it is that there is so much cross-over with those other faiths.

The answer to that, I believe, is natural facts. That is, when choosing to put someone’s eye out, turn the other cheek, have an abortion, or enter war with another nation, everyone always relies on facts that can be derived from observing nature. Some experimentation may be needed, and in all cases, certainty is impossible, but deriving our views from our environment is part of being a conscious social creature. We figured out how to get along over millions of years of evolution and what we learned was passed on, with many errors along the way. 

We have some sense of being good. I’m going to have to wave a hand here and acknowledge there are bad people, but it is rare to find someone who can articulate that they know they are bad and that they don’t care. I’m not talking about having too many sweets or not flossing kind of bad, that’s covered in the “many errors” part of how we have passed along these ideas of right and wrong.

I also acknowledge that we can see bad behavior rewarded. Nature itself does not enforce morality. We can’t claim that killing is moral because predator animals do it. We can observe that and see that those creatures are still leading brutal lives, lives that don’t lead to cures for diseases or vacations by the sea. 

That good person that we think we are, is constantly challenged. Our choice of grocery store includes how our food sources and packaging affect people around the world. It can’t be avoided. Even doing nothing, when there is so much need in the world, is a moral choice. We can’t save the world, and sometimes that is a source of stress. Prayer does not always make that go away. 

Even if you believe in God and love your church, you bring some reasoning to it. When challenged to question your beliefs you will start with facts. You might say something about the value of human life. At some point, you will run out of reasons why, and you will rely on some cosmic origin for those values. These are patches for those errors in our understanding of the world. A less charitable anti-theist might call them “crutches”. In any case, they are a way to bridge what we are able to discern with our rational minds with the place we’d like to be, our aspirations for what we envision. 

I see the same phenomenon in Wiccans, or pagans, of some off-the-grid self-made philosophers. Even an average person on the street of an industrialized nation will admit there is work to do. You may have heard the words that capitalism or democracy are “the worst systems, except for all the others”. We are beings that look to the future, reflecting on the past, with barely a plan. 

It’s interesting that this passage comes on Easter Sunday, a day that attempts to reconcile the world to the Old Testament, and to deal with the death of Jesus on Good Friday. After a few hundred years of Jews trying to understand these letters and gospels, the dominant theology said that death had been conquered. I think that was an interpretation of people who had lost their own history. I think Easter is about accepting death and moving forward, not about finding a way around it or conquering it. 

Sermon Helper: Hagar

Starting now, I’ll be selecting sermon helpers from milepost100.com and digging to them for more insights or just interesting tidbits. This won’t be every week. I’ll pick the ones that I think stand out. 

The second Sunday of Lent in Year C

I didn’t link to the sermon from Cedric Lundy before, but I’m glad it was easy to find. He’s funny, he’s smart, and he brings a new point of view on inclusiveness, a broader one that we could all take a moment and hear. He jumps off from Hagar feeling like an extra in this Genesis story and relates it to an experience from his own youth of going to a movie with two friends and realizing those two are on a date. He looks at how the church has worked in America for some time now; where young people are put into the youth ministry and learn to see themselves as part of a group defined by age. So, they move on to look for the student group, then the singles, and so on until old age. Then he gets to the heart of the sermon, talking about the narrow societal focus we have for people in heterosexual relationships who have children before they are thirty.

Hang on, this is way more than just another preacher telling us to be inclusive. In the passage, Hagar sees where she fits in and doesn’t like it, and leaves for the desert. This is early in the Bible, so the nation of God’s people is just Abram and Sara, and now a pregnant servant. God isn’t even named yet, but when an angel appears to Hagar, she calls it “a god of seeing” or, maybe it’s “The God of seeing”. With that, she returns to this dysfunctional relationship despite there lack of a promise that it will get better.

It could be Hagar rethought her situation; she was risking death in a time when there were no support systems for single mothers, let alone escaped slaves. It could be she believed this angel would help her offspring be “seen” for generations to come. Cedric doesn’t comment directly on whether that worked out, but it’s obvious to me when I see ancient promises like this, unfulfilled. He relates this to the “sexual minorities” we have today when we let everyone remain somewhere in the system, but not as the central focus of it, to put it lightly. He doesn’t limit this to LBGTQ, rather it’s everyone outside of those perfect nuclear families.

Cedric is careful to clarify that he is not suggesting that we blow-up the current system and make it illegal to make anyone feel uncomfortable or police the use of language. What he is suggesting is a community where intimacy is not based on identification with a group that has had certain sexual acts performed in a certain way or time in our lives. Instead, considering that sitting down at a meal with people who are different is something that gives us strength.

I quoted him almost directly at points and added my own thoughts in others, so take the half-hour to listen and see what you think. 

When Time is Sacred

In one of my more recent past lives, that is, a part of this life that I am living, I looked for traditions within religions that could and maybe should be kept. It was sometimes challenging. Sam Harris does it like he's ordering coffee. 

Sam Harris on Deep Time

He and Oliver Burkeman discuss the simple topic of time management but in the context of the not-so-simple question of the meaning of life. In the last ten minutes or so, they get to the topic of how difficult it is for any three adults to arrange an evening together or even a lunch (unfortunately, you need to subscribe to get past the 37 minute mark). This includes times of pandemic but it was around long before that, with the demands of work that includes beepers and emails and being on-call, even if you are self-employed. 

Oliver brings up the idea of rules of temporal organization that exists in religions, the calling to prayer, the holy days that we sometimes dread but bring us into contact with the community. They are somewhat arbitrary, an interruption to the things you think you need to accomplish in life, but serve as a reminder that you never finish all the tasks or complete all the goals of that lifetime, that you never win the battle with time. 

The Sabbath is supposed to be about anything except "getting things done", aka work. If you don't fill it up with mindless entertainment, contemplation can emerge, something spontaneous that wouldn't occur while your mind is focused on a task. As Sam says, "There are social norms and structures, some of which we've inherited and need to give a modern, non-embarrassing gloss to, and some of which we need to invent. That would punctuate all of this."

Or, as Hunter S. Thompson put it,  “Life should not be a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in a pretty and well preserved body, but rather to skid in broadside in a cloud of smoke, thoroughly used up, totally worn out, and loudly proclaiming “Wow! What a Ride!”

A parent's view of existentialism

 A philosopher facebook friend had a baby a few years ago. While trying to figure out what that baby needed one day, he took some notes:

So, basically the routine with baby is pretty simple. I pick her up and sit down and hold her and talk to her and smile at her until she smiles back. We stay like this for as long as possible until she starts expressing agitation. Then there's basically a rundown of options. First, check the diaper and if it needs changing see if we can go back to normal after that. If not, a bottle if it's been more than two hours. If it's not been two hours, I try burping her, putting her on the playmat and trying the bouncy seat. If none of that works, I try to put her to bed. If that won't work, I put her in the carriage and walk her all around the park until she falls asleep.

If none of that works and she's still upset, I accept that even she has no idea what she wants so there is no way to satisfy her. She has an insatiable and unbearable emptiness that lacks any recognizable means of being filled. It's essentially an existential crisis. So we read some Camus together while she screams. Which doesn't fix her problem any more than it fixes anyone else with an existential crisis---since he is better at confusing people into nihilism than getting them out of it with his lousy misrepresentation of the human condition. But I figure Sophie is French and she should learn the vacuity of 20th Century French philosophy sooner rather than later so that we can get her on to better things in preschool.

His son probably understands the vacuity of Camus better than I do by now, but I did come across this, a speech by Albert Camus, reflecting on the world after World War II. It is still relevant now. Perhaps more, as we struggle to determine if we have prevented another massive conflict or are on the brink of one. 

I know we are all busy, so here is a summary of the part where he answers, "what are we to do?"

1.       Reject acquiescent and fatalistic thinking.

2.       Eliminate capital punishment and torture and reduce anything that increases fear in the world.

3.       Put politics behind reflective thought, and focus on our own values and aspirations.

4.       Create expressions of positive values.

5.       Speak your truth, while being aware of when your values are shared, and when they are not.