II. Shared Values: A Public Philosophy
Augustine wrote of free will of choice. You don’t need to read it; let me explain it to you in one sentence. We don’t know the future, and we are responsible for our own actions. Freedom, then, is God’s gift to man. But in relation to the purpose of mankind, soul evolution through mind consciousness to reach enlightenment, God’s Law would be freedom, liberty to pursue happiness, and fellowship. Freedom means freedom to live; freedom to live means freedom to grow and evolve in one’s unique way; growth means a fertile environment, a livelihood and freedom of choice. Liberty to pursue happiness means finding one’s unique golden mean; the golden mean is balance between ego and spirit, awareness, and self-esteem; it means freedom to be unified with a person who they love regardless of caste or class or tribe or gender or race; it means liberty to make mistakes; it means not to be denied rights in a double-standard system. Fellowship means equality and unity; it means celebrating our differences, because differences make us beautiful; it means respect for self, mankind, the earth and the universe- in other words, respect for God. The laws of man should be in accordance to this- the primary virtues that come from God.
If you want to evolve in your soul (liberation/moksha of Hinduism/Buddhism; redemption/salvation of Abrahamic religions; being one with the nature and universe of Taoism and native religions), and see a new beauty that puts childlike awe of nature and belief in magic through the higher-focused lenses of eternal divinity, then God is the way to go.
Trade in your immaturity for these shared values: responsibility, conscientiousness, empathy and ability to turn pain into strength/loss into lesson gain, altruism/giving and sharing, consciousness/awareness, understanding, good humor, independence and unity/ healthy relationships with self humans and objects and nature, ubunutu/community and family ties (unconditional love and support) and loyalty, knowledge of self-rhythms, positivity, intelligence and knowledge of ignorance, reasonable hope and trust, health/wellness and stress management/ability to express emotions, developed convinctions, forgiveness, discipline, learn how to participate with inevitability- develop faith in change and have no fear of death, honor and integrity, authenticity and conscientiousness in creativity, listening to one self’s inner higher powers, self-respect based on divinity of everything including the self, raw honesty, faith in change, patience, effectiveness in realizing-organizing-marketing ones specific specialty, love and communication/eloquent speech, rehabilitation as justice first and violence as justice last, will to learn/openness and finding happiness by keeping up with ever-evolving balance (temperance/middle path) – managing one’s separate ego versus united part of the soul/self-esteem and managing one's strenghts and weaknesses.
My shared value system takes what is the best from all cultures and all religions and makes them secondary to the primary value of what I have said before: freedom, and all that it implies (freedom to live, liberty to pursue happiness and equality in fellowship of all humans). That is the only morality that does not come from mankind’s conventions of civilization and culture. Secondary values, according to Eric Voegelin, are the things like trust, punctuality, responsibility, conscientiousness and positivity and all the shared values I listed; they are not virtues in themselves, but only in relation to the right object. For instance, a Nazi could be punctual to the execution of a Jew just the same as a churchgoer could be punctual to a sermon; a gangster could be conscientious in cleaning up the blood from the scene of his murder in the same way a community-minded individual would clean up the trash in a park. Every culture praises sacrifice to the state, but how is sacrifice a primary virtue when your state is fighting for spreading tyranny? (This concept is taken from Eric Voegelin in his work Hitler and the Germans). This is what Tim Leary calls tribal morality, and it also governs cleanliness rules and sexual mores. (homosexuality, which once could have been detrimental to a tribe because it took away from procreation, and so was frowned upon by tribal morality; now, for some tribal moralist mentalities, it is good because the world is getting overpopulated and has too many babies in adoption agencies needing parents, but it is still bad for most tribal moralists today because it is unusual and therefore unnatural; something to be feared or hated; a threat to peace of mind.)
The political implication of my religious views, my religious being everybody else’s religious views, is that a political entity must take freedom into account as their highest value. That even means the freedom not to follow the secondary values of a given society, because, like I said before, those secondary values could be directed toward tyranny.
A modern day example is societies that impose Shari’a, which forces people to follow secondary and therefore man-made conventions as if they were following God. No, making women wear burkas and not allowing them prominent positions is a false interpretation of Islamic text because it inhibits the freedom of women. The women should be given the choice of whether they want to follow this interpretation, which some Muslim women do, because they want to live life as it was lived in the traditional time of Muhammad. Sharia also has a homophobic political system and does not allow free speech that criticizes Muhammad. This is the result, I speculate, of in inability to recognize God’s law as distinct from man’s law. Also, some Mormon polygamist sects force marriages, often between blood relatives, and hold women as subjects to men. Any claim of God's law that goes against Freedom of a life of progressive growth of the soul, Liberty to pursue happiness in a balance and have the opportunity to hold any job if one has the skills and the opportunity to marry whoever one chooses, and Equality- in the spiritual sense that everyone/thing is God incarnate and all souls are on the way to liberation and so deserves respect and is responsible for each other's souls - any claim going against this- whether it be in Leviticus or St. Paul's Gospel because it goes against homosexual rights, or whether it be the way mankind tries to twist religion into supporting chauvinism (which people have done with the Bible), racism or anti-Semitism (Christian Identity Movement or religions that have been used to call a race of people the Devil), is not inspired by the Holy Spirit.
The Holy Spirit is Freedom- Free Will, Free Choice, Free Love, Free Salvation, Free Opportunity...Freedom is God's Eternal Law. That is why killing is wrong in itself, because it goes against freedom, and anything that causes harm- rape, robbery, or assault deprives a person of immediate liberty. A crime that removes liberty at a slower pace, such as defacement, cat burglery, or making threats is a crime that is not as serious and yet it still removes opportunity to pursue happiness. Pranks fall under this category, as does anything that does not involve the trespassor and the victim together in an interaction of physical harm or physical loss. Identity theft falls in between these two categories- it is not immediate restriction of liberty and yet it is serious enough to make a person bankrupt. Punishments should fit the crime, and involve the trespassor getting an empathy dose. I'm not saying kill a murder or rape a rapist, though it sounds just, it is not. It means ending the cycle of harm by getting to the root of the trespassor's behavior, probably by someone who has committed the same crime but is now reformed. This way, the two speak the same "language" and are able to learn from each other in a manner that, under guidance by a third party, manages to resolve the conflicting moralities by getting into the spiritual drama that allowed for it to happen. The trespassor remains under rehab (committed in-patient if a serious crime, commited out-patient if less serious) until they can demonstrate knowledge of why the crime was wrong and an apology to the victim (or the victim's family) and restitution work. Of course, intent must be looked at. If it was a crime of passion (temporary insanity), it will likely not be committed again, except the trespassor has emotional issues needed to be worked out. Crimes of profit- money or notoriety or otherwise- are the main focus of rehab, because it shows conflicting morality of acceptable behaviors to obtain an end. Crimes of (constant) insanity- where the subject has a frontal-lobe defect or acute psychological drama, are special cases where rehab alone will not work. Either these people need to be put in an institution forever or else they need non-violent (but liberty-restricting) therapy until cured. People with sick fascinations they cannot control are too dangerous for society.
God’s law, say religious people, is the Ten Commandments. I disagree, all except for murder, I prefer to call them the Ten Commitments. To me, God’s only law is freedom and all that it implies. The Ten Commandments are values, values that if one commits to, will lead a life toward liberation of the soul- it will grow and bloom and only fade in the shadow of your transgressions and trespasses, but will always be there. And should you choose to reach enlightenment, your soul's liberation will be complete. (for more on enlightenment, try Raja Yoga or other mysticism)
Remember that free will and free choice mean the freedom to make mistakes. God only wants us to be free and gives us all a spirit guide to keep us on the right path, since we are free to follow the wrong path. God doesn’t ask that we all give up earthly pleasures, God only asks that we find a balance. We are separate yet equal from God- the immanent source, the seemingly transcendent yet immanent Holy Spirit. We are still the source; everything is connected back to God. We are God. So is nature and the universe, in all its dimensions/cosmic strings.
When people talk about a transcendent God, I speak not to deny them; I just say what they call transcendence I see as immanence. Sure, life as we know is only a nerve ending to God’s brain, but God’s brain is still immanently connected to ours and our hands and our feet and every cell in our body. We can access God’s brain through mystical revelations of many means: meditation, dancing, prayer, psychoactive drugs, sleep and writing trances, just to name a few. Sometimes we get flashes from eternity and call it déjà vu or synchronicity (meaningful coincidences) or by being in the moment when performing a task that motivates us: kama sutra or surfing or skiing or climbing a mountain or taking nature walks or dancing or epiphanies that cause us laughter or Nobel peace prizes or to perform good karma.
It all involves mind over matter; a healthy attitude in which you set yourself up to receive answers in a self-fulfilling prophecy. God the source (some call it the collective consciousness or akashic records or the first cause or the Creator of the Genesis) connects to us, us being God the son, through the Holy Spirit (some call it a spirit guide), which manifests itself in those aforementioned ways (flashes from eternity) to seemingly transcend existence to allow us to communicate with God. Near death experiences and out-of-body experiences or drug trips that seem to take us out of this world only move us from one dimension of the universe to another.
That is the myth of transcendence. I am a pantheist, and I worship the same God as you, but if your God and fear are not separate, then I only worship part of your God- the positive part. God is unconditional love. God is divorced from fear. Fear is only an instinct that protects us from something harmful- and God is never harmful. God is positive side of the force, the Qi, because God is the source of the force, and only installed negativity (see Pt. I) so, causally, the positive side of the coin could exist thanks to its opposite. But this causal plane is not all there is. Negativity was never meant to rule our hearts and be used by the hands of sinister or ignorant politicians and preachers and public figures and parents and peers to lead us into a land of lies and confusion, at least not forever.
Observation wise, we are not seeing all that is there. Parallel universes, alternate dimensions, cosmic strings…it’s all beyond the naked eye. It’s all God. When I speak of immanence versus transcendence, I’m talking about beyond these strings, up and down to the eternity that is the universe, even beyond black holes as all immanent because it is all still the universe that we are a part of, just not able to access with our human faculties. The myth of transcendence has caused us to not identify the earth with God, and look what we’ve done to it. I’m doing it too! I suck at being an environmentalist. And look at what we’ve done to other people for not sharing our same opinions or last names or status or country or skin color or gender or sexual orientation or path to God or way of expressing ourselves- we’ve dehumanized them!
III. Why America's Heading on the Wrong Path
When nature stopped being important, and got replaced with another green- MONEY; when we decided we were too busy to socalize or focus on community, we gave ourselves up to the false god on ever wall in every building- a clock- TIME; when we sold ourselves short and the advertisers won our hearts over, beating God in the bidding contest for our spare time, we joined the CULT of the SELF-ABSORBED CONSUMER. This is the American, western False Trinity. Relationships with real people and nature and God have been trumped by this trinity, and it's aboout time we show the world that America's soul has not been corrupted entirely, and that we hold these truths to be self-evident: Our Creator endowed us with certain inalienable rights- freedom to live a free life, liberty to pursue happiness, and fellowship! (the Declaration of Independence lifted its trinity from the European fundamental rights of “life, liberty and fraternity” slogan from the zenith of Europe's enlightened ideas; I just synthesized and made gender-neutral the two) This is our Absolute Law of Morality- and it is all we need for freedom.
Life, liberty to pursue happiness, and fellowship- they promote fairness, respect, community and equality. It promotes everything our elected officials should be fighting for.
America could lead the world in democracy by actually living up to God’s Law of Freedom and Absolute Law of Morality, which is right there in our Declaration. But we vote Democratic so the government’s agencies can do all the moral duties for us, fighting for affirmative action and raising the minimum wage and making green energy initiatives. That’s not the government’s job! That’s our job! That’s our churches and community’s job! That kind of stuff should be second nature- and because it isn’t- we’ve obviously got a ways to go. The world population should increase from 6 billion in 1992 to 9 billion in 2042. (http://www.census.gov/ipc/www/idb/worldpopinfo.html) Remember all the crap we had in 1992 and multiply it by three billion. There’s not enough dumps for that crap!
“for the rest of the world to reach United States levels of consumption with existing technology would require four more planet Earths.”- E.O. Wilson’s The Future of Life http://home.comcast.net/~neoeugenics/eow.htm
Interview with E.O. Wilson from Salon magazine:
Salon-Stephen Hawking recently said that the human race won't last this millennium unless we start to colonize space. Do you agree?
E.O. -I admire Stephen Hawking but I think he's completely wrong. All of the evidence shows that we can turn Earth into our permanent, safe home. This is where our species evolved. It's what our biology adapted to, in exquisite detail -- our physiology, the way our mind developed.
-But what if we do stay on the same track we're on now?
-Then Stephen Hawking might turn out to be right.
-And in that case how long have we got?
-It's highly unlikely that homo sapiens will go extinct -- ever -- but we will have lost most of the natural environment, and the species of animals and plants in it, by the end of the century. I don't, however, see it going that way. We can and we will learn to live on this planet sustainably.
-You won a Pulitzer for a book called "On Human Nature," and you really believe that?
-Yes. I think people are smart enough to act in the global interest when they see it is their own interests at large.
http://dir.salon.com/story/people/conv/2002/01/14/eowilson/index1.html
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