Watching a news program last night, they had a shock reporter interview people at the latest Gay Pride parade in San Francisco. They had the expected outrageous costumes, or complete lack thereof, but also some interesting contrasts.  At one point, the interviewer talked to a man in late middle-age who was dressed in something that looked appropriate for a Sweet Sixteen party, but his comments were surprising: he said, "it should be OK to come out, but it shouldn't be shoved down people's throats."  Interviewer: "But isn't this (the parade) shoving it down people's throats?"  Man: "Yes, I guess it is."  

We then had a "straight" man in his 30's with his wife and young children, who said: "At last they can do what the rest of America can do, and that's marry."  Interviewer: "Are you sure this is good for your children?"  Man: "Absolutely.  They should learn about tolerance."  And so the older, blue collar guy who was openly gay was against radical gay activism, while the younger hetero guy was all for it, even for pre-school children.  

This contrast in generations is nothing new, but it seems now to be broadening at an astonishing clip.  Gay marriage is just one of many issues or perspectives that highlight the contrast - patriotism, religious affiliation, sexual encounters, hetero marriage and views of the nation and world in general are all viewed from perspectives stunningly different from those of past generations, including those from the baby-boom set who were so proud of their revolutionary ideas. They - we - are old-hat now.  Contrast these perspectives with those of a century ago and we are in another world altogether; from 6 centuries ago and we are in another dimension.  To say that we are changing at light speed in every way - technologically and socially and personally - is to put it mildly.  

In this blog, I have touched on the positive or negative possibilities for our age because it seems so obvious that we cannot continue as we are.  As social norms drop at an increasing rate, we are left with only bureaucratic government or worse to fill in the spaces; bad because bureaucratic government is amoral and exists only to perpetuate itself, and worse, that we get some totalitarian masters to control us.  No - for any decent life, we need to settle on new norms, even as these somehow include constant change, if that is possible. 

But there is also the possibility that we simply don't know what we're talking about.  Just as we may have invented a God that is mammalian in characteristics against a greater reality, so we might have invented a crises that does not exist in a greater sense. Perhaps our struggles with normative society and crime and so on are only tangential tips to an iceberg that we - even our great theologians - cannot see.  Perhaps there is no real evolution or de-volution, no direction or misdirection, but merely spirit alighting in form in various geometries according to a cosmic plan about which we are clueless.  There is, after all, an "overmind," in us all, one that we have all witnessed, from resolutions to problems in the middle of the night to true transcendence of overall daily life.  "It" knows; it knows that the party we miss or attend will lead to meeting the woman we will marry, and to the life we will have; "It" knows that the decision to drop out of college will lead to a career that will bring a different and more individualistic kind of fulfillment; "It" also knows the inklings of the cosmic plan.  But does this plan include ANY of our current or past social notions of good or bad, of a right direction or a wrong direction?

I personally don't like that possibility, for right and wrong seem fairly obvious to me.  On the other hand, gay sex, let alone gay marriage, was seen almost universally as abhorrent only 40 years ago.  Is it any less wrong or more right in a greater sense now than 40 years ago?  Abortion was murder, sex outside of marriage immoral, going to church crucial, warfare necessary and even glorious, and one's side was always right.  That last notion hasn't changed, but who, then, knows what is right?  Who, in their daily lives, even knows what is real?  

That is a real question - who really knows?  And of course, we are necessarily thrown back to the great spiritual sages of our time.  It seems that it might be the time to re-read them for the Truth they may hold in the midst of radical change and relativism.  And so we are, have been, and will do so again. FK            

As I continued to read Ilia Delio's anthology on spiritual evolution, I had an uncomfortable memory of our (human) limited thought process.  Years ago, the New Yorker had a cartoon with a bunch of animals walking about - giraffes, bears, storks, whatever - each with a thought bubble over its head reading "I am made in God's image."  Now, we are almost certain that animals do not think like humans, for what would be the point?  And they don't behave that way, either.  With some variation, most of what they do is stimulus-response, although they do often enjoy the moment when not bothered by existential threats.  Still, it makes the point: are our notions of love and god merely reflections of our mammalian nature? Mammals snuggle with the mother, especially when young and feeding.  They often like the comfort of their kind and work in cooperative herds or packs.  We as humans love to cuddle with puppies and other cute little animals, and we have given sexual reproduction the benefit of the name "love."  Are we not making god in our own most desired image?  

A few years ago I read a book about users (explorers they would say) of DMT, a powerful psychedelic.  Many experienced dimensions of the insect world, where everything moved in mechanical, unemotional sync.  One woman, filled with a sense of divine love, told them that love is the answer, to which they replied, "even here?"  "Even here," she said. But is it true?  Is there love in an ant's nest, or only instincts for survival through the group?  

Biologist E.O. Wilson not only said "no" to this question about love, but speculated that even humans operate at this base level, with only superficial alterations that we claim make us human.  His movement is called socio-biology, where all actions are gauged by their usefulness to the continuation of the species.  To say that this is materialistic reductionism is to put it mildly, but the question remains a nagging one: are those glimpses of God while in ecstasy only glimpses of the human archetype?  The spiritual evolutionists would disagree, of course, stating that we have reached the level of self-reflection necessary to reflect on the cosmic nature of God, and I agree.  Still, there is a lesson in this - we probably should be wary of our own reflection in the cosmic mirror, and our own wishful thinking.

On to Jihad, which is the essence of cultural reflection, whose "love" is really only the continuation of all that is considered  worthy by certain fundamentalist Muslims, and whose wishful thinking is the World Caliphate.  I write of this now because, as of now, the movement has gained considerable steam throughout the Mideast, some parts of Asia and large swaths of Africa.  There are two camps of thinking about this: one, the dominant one, sees these people as evil or deluded fanatics who must be beaten back by any means, for they poss a threat to modern civilization.  The other, a more radical vision, sees their anger as a response to Western hegemony and capitalistic materialism, forces that are threatening the very way of life of devout Muslims.  They are therefore justified and it is WE who must change.  While it may prove difficult, I believe we can properly split the baby on this one:

The modern world IS a threat to traditional Islam, which was created in the 7th century and flourished in the late Medieval period of European history.  The power of the caliphate of the last great Muslim empire, the Ottoman, fell to pieces after WWI and the world has been picking up those pieces ever since.  The story is complex and goes on and on, but essentially, it seems that the radical Jihadists equate Islam with both devout worship AND great (Allah-inspired) political power.  The West did indeed bring about the final demise of that power, although it was the corruption of the Empire, the "weak man of Europe, that made it possible, but that latter point is not seen by the radicals.  Rather, they see the push towards secularism - which is indeed occurring in the West and now the world - and political hegemony as one and the same, coming from the same source.  Rapidly changing world cultures, secularism, and scientific modernism, then, are all brought together in one Great Satan - the West and anything to do with it (and increasingly, the East - China is a great secularizing force and outspoken foe of any religion).  

But the Jihadists' vision is fatally flawed - they cannot see that we have experienced very substantial changes in knowledge over the past thousand years and there is no stuffing the genii back in the bottle.  What their movement brings is not a renewed purity, but chaos and brutality.  With such fruits, it cannot end in the ideal World Caliphate that they envision, one that they know must be brought about to preserve their dying way of life.  The thing is, it is far too late for that. Whether they, and anyone else, likes it or not, all the old ways of life are dying or are already dead - from tribal Native American life, to Tibetan isolation, to a hegemonic Christianity or Islam or Buddhism or Communism or any other spiritual or ideological norm.  

And once again, we are back to the question of the last several weeks: are we undergoing a positive evolution of the spirit, or simply the demise of spirit altogether and our (world-wide humanity's) inevitable fall?  Are we only a species of lemmings who have over-populated, both in a real sense and in the sense of a smaller world through technology, and are now being led to edge of the cliff?  For that is what such movements as Jihad will bring.  Or are we made in God's image after all, and we are being pulled towards the Omega of greater divine unity as envisioned by Teilhard de Chardin?  

I keep asking the question and awaiting the answer, and one does seem to come.  There does seem to be a "pull" that exists beyond human design in our collective history.  It will not end in an Islamic Caliphate or any such archaic form.  There is that "time of death" feel to our era, but it also seems as if it is, as the writer of that quote said, the necessary step to something new.  The Jihadists struggle against this death, but cannot accomplish their goal no matter what gains they make.  Indeed, none of us can stop this "pull" anymore than air can stop the fall of a rock.  The great question that remains is: is God good in the eyes of we self-reflecting mammals?  Or are we on the same cycle as all other animals, one of a simple rise and fall of populations?  Are we being brought to a greater "evolved" self, or a mere population collapse?  Is our greater history cyclical or spiral?

Everyday life tells us that it is a spiral - that our actions are not just to complete the turning of the wheel, but to have the wheel get us somewhere in its turning.  If we are indeed images of God, we should expect to be led as such to a more perfect union.  To have endless repetitions of cycles within cycles seems more the reality of the Jihadists than that of the modern world.   To me, the greatest concern seems more in that "time of dying."  How will it be, and how long will it last?  Is it written in the stars, or is it our actions that are necessary to maintain the progress that so many hope for?  It is important for our actions: should we meditate in a cave or work hard for a better future?  That in itself raises more questions, (for instance, well intentioned actions often go very wrong, and spiritual bliss might affect the world in ways more than we understand) but this writing is already too long.  For another time, FK  

Struggling to put the two visions of the future together - that of fundamental decline and that of progress - the 4th of July weekend has offered many anecdotal evidence of both.  On the night of the 4th, I had planned on going to bed early to be in good shape for a planned outing on Geneva Lake in Wisconsin, but my son's friends changed all that with a phone call: Dad, is it all right if we blow off fireworks in the field tonight? While visions of blown-off fingers and lawsuits danced in my head, I said "yes" - they were 18 after all - and so I stayed up to watch the Laurel and Hardy antics as misdirected rockets made red glare at the feet of the spectators or over the roof of the house, but all ended safely.  It was encouraging to see the young show the initiative and have fun with home-fireworks, and it put me in a happy place: ah, they are just like we were, maybe better!  When my son asked if some could light up doobies (to a resounding "no!") I thought, ah, maybe not better but the same.  But afterwards when several of the boys shared plans for the future, I felt less sure.  None had grand plans, and several were hoping simply to get a job at the local factory, unskilled labor that they hoped would get them 13 bucks an hour, hardly a living wage and certainly not one good enough, or with prospects good enough, to raise a family.  With this, they seemed so lost - unable to grow, scared for the future, hopeful of only something, anything that might get them enough money for a good used car.

I have noticed this with boys now.  While girls have made great strides in the professions, boys seem lost, without a sense of what it is to be a man.  Dithering, smoking weed, playing X box and moaning about life, they seem lifeless.  Is this a transition, or a permanent decline?  Will our culture find a place for average boys, or relegate them to a mass of disposable workers?  In the past was farming, and then manufacturing, but now boys, who are less able to sit still and mind the office than girls, what do they have? And with the loss of their place in family and society, where does that leave society and family?  

The next day we went to Geneva Lake and had a boat tour of the many mansions that rise in astonishing splendor from the green, perfectly cut lawns along the water's edge.  We heard of the excesses of these fabulously rich, of personal race tracks and parties that cost millions of dollars just to impress the well-healed and well-connected guests.  Many were built at the turn of the last century, when average wages were about 2 bucks a week and there was no social safety net of any kind.  Many of the fortunes were built on connections and fast deals, but some were made the good way, with hard work and inventive minds.  Were and are these people money-hogs, or do they - at least the honest ones - deserve their cash and any silly way they have in spending it?  Are they to be congratulated or damned?  

Geneva Lake has always been the playground of the Chicago rich, but the streets and beaches were crammed with  ordinary - looking people - most of whom were either of non-European extraction and many, if not most, of whom spoke in foreign languages.  Is this part of the progress of America, to have the whole world in our borders, more so than at any other time in history?  Are we at a glorious convergence of peoples and cultures, or are we overcrowding our land with cheap labor to the advantage of the filthy rich?  Will we end as a post-national society of peace and prosperity, or a post- American society, where we sink to the level of the rest of the world but worse, without a cohesion of culture or race or religion or history? 

We ponder the future - are we de-volving or evolving?  In the past few weeks we have heard from theologians who believe that we are evolving spiritually just as we are evolving physically - the two going hand -in- hand in the ever-present creative flow of the All.  But entropy is at work in our world as well - non-biological form naturally decays towards its beginnings, towards the "angle of repose" or maximum rest.  In human society - which is neither living or dead but rather an abstraction  - we could see it working both ways, as it has for periods of time in the past (although towards greater complexity over greater time.)  But if we talk of society as a living thing, does that mean that "truths" also must change?  Is the Bible a snapshot of an antiquated world speaking to an archaic mind, or is it forever, etched like the Ten Commandments in stone?  As we celebrate our independence, is our Constitution flexible as well, many parts now antiquated, or is it the bedrock of our social truth that must always retain its original meaning? 

In the short period of time that is history - only about 5, 000 years - we have seen the loss of great civilizations and the rise of new ones, with an overall trend towards bigger and more complex.  This limited picture does seem to point to an evolving social animal in humans.  But it is limited - some view the world in blocks of hundreds of thousands of years, where humans have lived in great cycles of 26, 000 years at a stretch.  These see an overall de-volution, and crashing of the spiritual as it sinks into a belief in only the transitory material.  In the snapshots I have had of our America on our most patriotic of holidays, it does appear that we are on a cusp.  We are moving quickly, but towards what, for most of us, is only a guess.  Great things seem possible, but bad things seem probable.  It is, as one author said, indeed a "time of dying," where the old is being strangled while a new - there must be a new - remains hidden, either with the promise of a new millennium, or the horrors  of chaos and collapse.  We shall think and research and continue and hope - but also look with clear eyes around us.  Maybe in it all we can find the key to progress without the need for a dark period - maybe an age - of chaos and ruin.  FK

Last night was one of those nights - awoken by the first bird songs of morning at 4:30 AM, the unpleasantness of the dream that was running came through and was amplified, as it always is at such an hour.  With the intellect at a low voltage, it is in these hours that the true depth of emotions is revealed, and they are as deep as the crying of a frightened child.  This was about anxiety, being late to class, and inadequacy, not making it in class, things that I dismiss in waking life as unimportant.  Something within me really, really does not believe that, though.

This was followed latter by another dream, this of my mother as she told me "I'm dying, you know," and on waking I found that this really mattered more than the waking mind could admit.

Which is true?  Emotions are deep and searing - but often ridiculous.  The first dream was about things over with long ago, things of younger days that are, in any case, irreparable.  The latter was not ridiculous; in the first case, mind (rational thought) is the superior or more true; in the second, the emotions.  But can we always tell the antiquated, that which is no longer relevant, from the truth of the present, where emotions find our true depth?

Lately I have been exploring the possibilities of a new concept of God, of one which is involved and evolving along with us.  In this, it did not occur to me until this morning that evolution is still relevant in
America in today's theological debate.  This is not because I have ceded spiritual wisdom to materialistic science, but because I never saw evolution as a theological problem.  Years ago, in fact, I taught it to bored young minds at the university level, and, just in case some were seriously religious, would explain my own point of view concerning evolution: that, the way I saw it, it was God's exceptionally brilliant way to create life (of course it was exceptional - it is God!)  Why this is so can take up pages, but to me at the time, I could think of no other way for God to reflect on our greater reality - that, even with increasing differentiation through evolution, we were all related to the first spark of life, which came from the dust of non-life, which came from the stars and so on; that is, that in infinite time, we are all one, not only in concept, but in hard, physical reality.  We are all related absolutely to everything else.  Brilliant.

However, it was not until a bit later that I learned where a truer conflict lay; that is, over the mechanism of evolution.  For the materialist, all, including matter itself, is by pure random chance.  In evolution, things just happen with random mutations and only the fit survive the random weather and conditions of the time.  There is no divine plan or input, just a random number generator.  And here is where we might shake the wheat from the chafe.  

In the Scope's monkey trial, what infuriated the people of Tennessee was not the idea of a godless and random universe, but the idea that the universe was not created in the 6 days as spoken in the Bible - and further, that humans were not immediately made and separated from the beasts as the "image of God."  Now, of the latter, it is still not proven that we share an ancestor with modern apes (no, we did not come from apes - they, too, have been evolving.  Instead we may have had a common  ancestor somewhere along the line, as far back as 30 million years ago and as close as 5 million.) although it seems likely.  What seems almost certain is that we evolved from other forms, and, in the beauty of the divine plan, came through the wilderness of instinctual being into consciousness, where we can now conceive of a unity with God. This is not literalism, however, and I suppose there are many, perhaps millions, who would be scandalized by this divine evolution.  However, it does seem to me that this deep emotion, this sense of scandal, is an attachment to something that is long-gone and futile.  As our recent authors have stated, this form of thinking might be causing the end of religion in the wake of scientific knowledge.  It, that this universe is only 6000 years old and was created at once and for all time in 6 days just isn't coinciding with current knowledge.  It speaks rather of a connection and a hierarchy of being, not real cosmological time.

However, on the mechanism of evolution we have an entirely different matter; it is rather the materialists who are left holding the bag.  It is they who have to prove that entire organs can change by random mutation, they who have to prove that an infinity of stuff can arise out of nothing, and they who have to show that clear laws of physics and the clear path of evolution towards greater complexity are all a matter of chance.  It is here where it seems that mentation is inferior to something far deeper that touches emotion - where logic is not negated, but is superseded by an interior depth.  Where, for example, the knowledge that your mother is dying is not only fact, but a deeply felt reality.  The spiritual evolutionist cannot prove to the materialist that God exists, but it is such a richer and more true explanation, so much so that the materialist reductionist viewpoint makes the the fundamentalists view look like the tower of wisdom that it once was to people 3, 000 years ago.  FK      

Last night, the thunder followed the lightening with sonic booms, causing the dog to cringe in panic and me to think of monsters and gods.  How simple and natural for our ancestors to think of natural events as the work of anthropomorphic gods!  When the thunder booms or the earth quakes or the sea goes wild, the first instinct is to huddle and utter something to oneself  - oh, please, not me!  God or gods or monsters of weather, spare me!  

But we have dispatched such beliefs, first through monotheism and now through science.  Nothing to fear except the potential for destruction, no gods to placate, no God to pray to for deliverance. And such starts the essay by Ilia Delio in her essay from the book, "From Teilhard to Omega."  In it, she outlines the philosophical atheist of our age - not the snide and arrogant materialist who sees all spirituality as bunk, but the reluctant atheist who honestly can't believe in a god or gods, but wants to and, most importantly, needs to.  Most of us can no longer look to Zeus as the cause of the lightening, and many can no longer look to a transcendent god who judges our life from afar as a supreme and all-powerful superhuman.  But without that personal touch, what is a person to do?  How do we believe in something that is undefinable and as such, unreachable?  In the present era of cause and effect rationality, how can we conceive of a god beyond such rules?  

The solution, Delio believes, is found in Teilhard's belief that science should enter the core of religio-spirituality, and at the core of this core should be evolution.  Building on the former essay (in yesterday's blog), Delio reiterates the notion that the static view of most traditional religions simply will not do in the face of  evolution, and instead we should change our perspective of God to suit the new knowledge.  While this might smack of heresy - and it did to the Catholic Church, which forbade the Jesuit Teilhard from publishing his works until Vatican II in 1962 - Teilhard and Delio resolve this simply; if it is God who has prefigured evolution (and novelty and eternal renewal) into creation, then it is through evolution that we get a clearer picture of God.  Looked at from this way, we remain steadfastly spiritual and hardly iconoclastic - for weren't the prophets of the People of the Book intended to change things?  And more: a god of evolution now changes from a clock maker who watches his machine run, to something with a "draw" or pulling force, much like gravity, who encourages growth in life to fulfill ITSELF - that is, God acts as a force to pull us towards IT in completion and unity, as we cooperate more and more through our cells, and then with other human beings and beings in general, and finally with All THAT IS.  

This "draw" is called "love," that which, like  human lovers, makes each more an individual just as it forms the two as one.  For an atheist who wants to believe, the ground work is there, with all the pieces fitting, for in the final analysis, evolution did not HAVE to be; rather, it is a law built into the universe.  For what purpose?  For greater complexity and, in this, for greater unity, including the development of a conscious that could conceive this unity.  And what lies ahead, then, would be higher complexity, higher consciousness, and greater unity.  That is, we are led to hope and a new age, or Teilhard's "Omega Point."  Not a bad start for the confused post-modernist and scientific mind.  FK