Muse Four - Evil

Good and Evil Angels by William Blake,
Tate Gallery, UK

Cain killed Abel, of that there is no doubt,

But for heaven's sake, who left knives lying about?

David Attenborough said that he could not conceive of a loving God who creates worms that blind young children.

The Christian response is that it was never supposed to be this way.  Evil entered the world, and we were the ones who opened the door.  But this paradox is not so easily explained away.

Terence the Roman Comic Playwright is quoted as saying "I am a man; I count nothing human foreign to me".

The evil things that exist in the world have all come from the capacity created and imprinted into the fabric of the world.  All of this can be present in my brain.  

This might be through my own evil volition,  such as 'I desire harm to come to my enemy.'  But conversely, it can be through 'negative automatic thoughts' that just jump into my mind, such as 'I could push that person in front of a tube train', which rather shocks me, and I quickly shoo away. "Where did that come from?"

The capacity for good and evil we see about us is part of the array of all that has been created.  Like Miss Flight's birds in 'Bleak House', they range from the inspirational, to the mundane, to the horrific.

Light is defined by darkness.  The creator has allowed for unbelievable beauty and goodness, and the converse, despair and degradation.  But to study evolutional biology is the study the intertwining of good and evil in all things.  It can be argued that nature is without morality, we see bullying, rape, deceit, and torture.  On top of this there is plenty of infanticide, and general male violence and aggression.  This path is witnessed from the beginning of time.  It's not peace and harmony, then 'the fall', and then behaviours that make us wince when we witness them.

In Eastern traditions, evil is accepted as part of the balance of life.  It is a necessary 'anti-matter' to balance the 'matter'.  The Creator is a remote force, or being, who we can attempt to influence.  But the thought of a personal connection is seen as somewhat egocentric.  Like the ocean, we may find ourselves floating and exploring the wonders about us, or we might be flipped over and drown in an instant.

The big difference I notice in amongst this confusing mess comes  in the form desire or inclination.  The wonderful thing to be discovered is that goodness (or Godness) is to only desire  wholesome and liberty, despite what is going on about me.  As in the metaphor offered by South American 'Liberation Theology', the jackboot is pressing my head into the mud, but I have the ability to be freed from my head, and rise up into the air, and observe my oppressor down below.   For a moment I am not there in my wretched body, and I up here, floating freely in the breeze.

Three Muses - Challenge

 

When I was 16, I went to a talk in the Wantage Civic Centre.  It was on ‘Challenges to the Theory of Evolution’.  Now this sounds very American.  There are video channels and much ‘scientific’ evidence supplied to contradict the current mainstream theories.  But just as with Galileo in the past, challenging orthodoxy is a risky business.  Galileo was proved to be correct.  Time is the judge.

One argument I remember from this talk was the discussion on how humans began to walk upright.  The argument goes that the hip sockets of the human pelvis put the joints right at the front.  For Gorillas and Chimpanzees the joint is located at the back.  When moving quickly these animals choose to run on all fours, even though their ‘hands’ look like ours, and are certainly not paws.  How is it possible to transition from fours to twos? It doesn’t sound plausible to charge around at 45 degrees.  There are wonderful pictures of Chimpanzees wading through rivers, erect and looking very much like our kindred.  In my mind this is not a watertight argument.  In our time's discussion of Homo Erectus did not address the issue of how humanity rose to it's feet.

War and death are inevitable.  Look across history.  Again Harari suggest that war has had it’s day.  There is nothing to be gained by modern day destruction.  But he forgets that war is evil, and evil knows no bounds.

Three Muses - Reproduction

Our Western ‘modern day’ story posits that we evolved from beasts like those we see about us.  We are all the leaves on the edge of a large tree of life.  Our branches follow back to one central life-giving trunk.  We recognise the family resemblance with our close neighbours.  It is in our eyes, ears, testis, and mammary glands.

The great drive of nature is to reproduce. 

The command is to go forth and multiply; the writer of the early Jewish text got it right. 

But where did this urgency to reproduce come from? 

Fortunes are spent searching for life on Mars.   Why on earth should life exist on Mars?  Why should it exist? Reproduction is such an effort.  The benefits are slight.

The theory goes that proteins, for some inexplicable reason began self-replicating.  Replicating became ‘the thing’.  Eventually single cell organisms were doing it; dividing down the middle.

Reproduction takes energy and resources.  Pelicans famously puck their own chest to feed their offspring.  What an effort!  When I die, I gain nothing.  What do I care if my off-spring go on to inherited the world?

In my mind’s eye, I live in the Stone Age.  It is a fantasy of Eden; the beginning of time.  According the Yoval Noah Harari the Stone Age was the ‘best of times’.  It was short and sweet.  Work comprised of an average of four hours a day of hunting and gathering. 

For me the Stone Age is the way I can consider life without the cultural context that surrounds me now.  It is like the first time a teenage leaves home and moves to a university town.  This is when they discover what they truly believe; what they value.  They learn what is their own taste, and what is the ‘wallpaper’ they have been surrounded by for years.

As Julian Baggini points out, the chances of being a Catholic are significantly increased if you are born in Poland, and a Hindu if India, a Muslim if born in Malaysia, and so on.  In the Stone Age of course these cultural contexts exist, but perhaps I get a truer view of on the ‘essence of life’ with the use of this contrasting lens.

I once met an English sociologist in Nepal who worked for an NGO.  Sociology is very democratic.  It defines religion by how the majority describe it.  In this way my sociologist conjectured that although he professed to be a Christian, he might not define himself as the Christian using the majority view.  Britain is described as a post-Christian country, yet, over the years, it has not done much to convince the world that its inhabitants live like Jesus.

Ref:

How the World Thinks, by Julian Baggini

Homosapian, by Yoval Noah Harari

Three Muses - The beginning

In the beginning there was nothing.

In the ‘West’ we are pretty much agreed on that.

But ‘nothing’ is unstable.

The bits of nothing reach out and pull on the other bits.

Soon, in the gathering momentum, clusters appear.  The closer they are drawn, the faster they pull, until in a sudden rush, they collide.  The collision creates heat and light and an almighty explosion. 

With this comes energy and life. 

The world begins to swirl round and round at breakneck speed.  This continues with a powerful momentum.  God has shaken the dice and let them spin.

 

Clumps can be gentle.  Look up and see the clouds.  Far off planets feel the pull, and here on earth people form communities.

The attraction is a force.  For the physical, this is gravity.  I am pulled toward the earth, but in the same way, the earth is pulled towards me.  Our forces are in proportion to our mass, so the earth wins.

It's like this with a lot of things.  Minorities know it well.  The pull of the majority far exceeds that of the minority.  The minority is able to have a slight pull on the majority, but on the whole, the minority also gets swallowed up.  In Leicester curries taste more fiery, but soon Gujrati will become a rarity.