we have two separate and distinct societies today,
those who believe and those who don’t……
I don’t believe and I have never tried to hide that……
but it has occurred to me that belief in god is a different thing
then non-belief…… and the difference, one of them anyway,
is belief in god negates history… belief in god is belief in
one world, created by god and populated by god with no reference
to any historical context of the world, people or animals…….
and then exists end times, where we exists outside of time forever…
on the right hand of god as it were………
believe is ahistorical, it doesn’t need history to exist…….
whereas non-belief is about historical context…
if you believe in Darwin and I do, then you believe in
the historical context that Darwin places on the world,
man, animals… life……
the history of life is historical… whereas belief is not…
everything is historical when you are a non-believer…
and everything is not historical when you are a believer…
I am born, I live and I die… everything about me exists in history and
must be seen in a historical context… whereas if I am a believer,
I don’t need or want history because god is not about historical context…
that is why it is easy to dismiss global warming or over pollution or overpopulation
warnings because it doesn’t matter in the universe of god… because
all that matters is heaven and getting to heaven and heaven is not
about historical context because you are there forever… and who cares
about earthly concerns when it is about spending time on heaven…
or so says the believer……
and so we have one root cause for the indifference to the major
problems of humanity and existence…….believers don’t care because
they are ahistorical and non-believers are historical and they must
care because they exist within history and is part of history and
a legacy of history and a creator of history……
history is before us and history is during us and history is after us…
we exists in historical context… while history before us could
be considered like the Zen problem… where before Zen, the mountains
are stable and the sea calm and the river stays in its bank…
while during Zen, the mountains dance and the sea rages
and the river overflows it’s banks and after Zen,
the mountain are stable and the sea becomes calm and
the river stays in its banks…
that is us… in the middle of history and in the middle of Zen……
the mountains are dancing and the sea is wild and turbulent
and the river has overflowed it bank’s…
and how do we return to the after Zen and after history…
we don’t… but we don’t allow the during Zen to claim our
understanding of what it means to be human and how to become
more human……. what are our possibilities? to have trust in
history is the only trust we need to have…………
if we trust Darwin to be right, and he is, then we must have some
faith in history……… and simply work out our issues, both individually
and collectively…….
to state you believe in god is to say, you don’t believe in history
and to say you don’t believe says, you do believe in history……
Kropotkin