A PRECIPITOUS BALANCE BETWEEN THE SACRED AND PROFANE!

CHAPTER ONE: 

THE ILLUSION OF SYMOBLISM AND COSMOLOGY, 03-16-14

During my years as a classroom teacher I enterprisingly farmed the wits of my brilliant students to test the hatchling intellectual theories I had entertained some of which dealt with the very nature of the origins of the universe.  So I framed in my mind’s eye the perfect experiment with which to explore the primitive science of meaning itself.  Then I pushed the envelope further to attempt to limit my exploration of meaning within the confines of the sacred and the profane.  Now that is quite a broad enterprise indeed for anyone who visualizes themselves as a portal and vehicle poised to elucidate a figural and conceptual model of anything so difficult capture as the threshold of good and evil.  Nonetheless, I sought to quantify what has eluded measurement and to paint what has no physical substance. I knew then I had to create a model that might be used to identify not only the objects but the corresponding values of those entities as they are commonly experienced within the realm of linguistic symbolism.   I realized I had to define the relationship, (if indeed there was any at all), between the essential truths that may or may not be possessed by natural phenomenon and the arbitrary values imposed upon them by man.  Specifically, I attempted to comprehend the psychology of what I call, “Dipole Cosmology”. In my mind Dipole Cosmology would be an antithetically unstable model of a world, a universe, a cosmos and of infinity locked in a primordial and eternal battle between that which is considered to be sacred and that which is considered to be profane.  Over the uncertain years of mankind’s existence he has developed what I like to call a “See-Saw” and “Dipole Cosmology”.  That is, his understanding of creation is limited to a simplified model of those things he considers to be positive and those which are negative and in order to justify this equation which would otherwise be impossible to balance he has fabricated a god or deity which conveniently created and balances the equation leaving mankind free of the guilt of creation.  Unfortunately in this game mankind merely trades one guilt for another.  In his inexorable aspiration to be something he is not and cannot be, ( for example: immortal, perfect and divine), mankind jinxes his existence with a self-inflicted guilt originating from the idea that he is less than a god, imperfect, flawed, doomed to a lowly mortal echelon in the self-imagined power structure of an eternal cosmos he does not understand but relies on a weak concept called faith to justify.  At the end of the day faith simply cannot be proved on this side of he grave  inspiring the saying among mortals that one takes a, "Leap of Faith"!  The problem in the psyche of mortals lay with the possibility that a leap of faith is nothing more than a hoax; that that leap will cast them off a precipice not to certain doom but to nothingness.  If a man came up to you today and told you to follow his will without question as he was the messenger of a god and though suffering now you would have eternal wealth and happiness upon death if you followed you certainly would brush him off as a con artist.  I am not saying that the claims of any religion, cult or sect are spurious because they cannot be proved save through faith; religion based faith is a valid possibility within the infinite realm of possibilities, it certainly cannot be written off as nonsense until disproven.  I am promoting the option given to humans by virtue of their free will to challenge established and yet unproven theories of cosmology in lieu of cultivating simple common sense values and ethics that can easily be seen and measured without relying on a blind leap of faith.  It takes a leap of faith to betray the innate civil rights of another human being in order to demonstrate allegiance to religious or other laws knowing or as is most commonly the case ignorant of the fact that basic, universal humanitarian ethics have not been applied to the judgement.  We are often unaware that we have violated the human rights of others because we do not understand the fundamental history of the meaning of meaning...

The experiment I conducted with my students explored the nature of meaning.  I had my students create imaginary names for common objects to begin with.  Next they created 3-dimensional objects and named them but these names could not be existing or recycled words, they were required to invent new words from their imagination.  Next they were required to write a brief description identifying the purpose nature, history and composition of the object again they were forbidden to use any existing models forcing them to invent everything about the object including physical attributes.  These objects were not bound by physical laws, like the myths of our religious texts they were wide open stretches of pure fantasy and invention and imagination.  We did similar experiments using words and sounds, creating new concepts and languages from scratch.  The purpose of this experiment was to demonstrate the arbitrariness and randomness of meaning in effect to challenge the meaning of meaning.  What the students and I learned was that beyond the simplest technical explanations phenomenon have no ethical, moral value at all, they have no inherent quality of good or evil, they simply are what they are…  In the cosmos things simply exist and they are subject to the infinite variations that we narrowly call laws of nature that are really not laws at all because they do not uniformly apply everywhere.  Since men have not been to every corner of what we call creation we cannot say that these phenomena we call laws exist everywhere.  What we do know, as in the case of matter and ant-matter, is that every law we hold as constant, invariable and incorruptible may have an infinite number of variations refuting it as a constant law set in divine stone.  The deeper we look into the cosmos the more complexity and contradiction we find and this is certainly proof that our static view of creation as a perfectly, divinely balanced equation is totally incorrect or profoundly flawed because it is far too narrow to hold every possibility within its spectrum.  In fact the cosmos appears to be in a continual state of chaotic transformation, decaying and building, dying and giving birth; it is the most unpredictable and undefinable thing mankind has ever experienced.  Men prematurely convinced themselves they understood creation and now humanity has outlived the usefulness of those prototypical theories.  The modern era of humanity beginning with the enlightenment represented the demise of religion in lieu of rational empirical thought but it is a process that is taking hundreds of years to play out as it took millions of years to fasten itself to and embed itself in the human psyche.  During these classroom experiments I purposely stayed away from the idea of good and evil because they were intended only to prove a point about the arbitrary nature of the creation of concepts and ideas.  But the models exposed a fundamental weakness in the psychological cosmology of human religion wherever it attempts to ascribe prejudiced qualities to otherwise neutral ideological concepts and natural phenomenon that have no logical reason to be targeted as either sacred or profane.  If there were some empirical proof to justify the mysticism religions use to evade logical explanation that all humans could agree upon then there would be no reason to rely on faith but if there were actual proofs we would not have to rely on faith anyway.  Faith is only necessary when there is not valid proof and freethinkers have historically resisted accepting faith as a substitute for absolute, verifiable, incontrovertible in your face truth!  When one thinks on it one realizes that even the gods would have no use for faith, why would they sink to using smoke screens curtains and mirrors in order to manufacture their existence? If the gods exist they will certainly leave such antics to the Wizard of Oz. If the gods are that closely bound to the lives of men and they respect mankind as intelligent beings there would be no reason to maintain a cryptic, mystical existence, a shepherd walks among his herd openly as a power to be identified, he does not manage his herds from the heavens sight unseen.  The fact of the matter is that sheep do not need men at all, they are perfectly adaptable to independent life in the natural environment.  It is not sheep who need shepherds it is shepherds who need sheep!

If there is good and evil then we may safely, (in these models), blame their existence on the gods whose fatal and fateful miscalculations of pluperfect virtue have ultimately compromised their creation of absolute symmetry.  Are we then to believe  that the gods could be fallible, that they are not perfect in every way?  If not then the business of sacred and profane is nothing more than a sick power game created by the immortals to torment the minds of men. But if men truly do have freedom of choice, power over their own destiny, then they must relinquish their power and freedom in order to succumb to the narrow dictates of a plan which has clearly gone awry.  As men become more enlightened not even religion can conceal the obvious rift in logic heretofore compensated by faith but exposed now merely as a grandiose contradiction.  The gods either are absolute or they are not and if they have created creation originally as a perfect equation but failed to account for the unraveling of harmony causing mankind to pay the dues is hardly a viable solution for reconciling the advent of the profane.  Mankind continually oscillates between good and evil during his tormented existence battling against the forces of evil which have grown beyond the control of the gods.  At any given time his probability for entering into heaven moves up and down like a see-saw.  Enter the dipole model of cosmology.  If good and evil are to be quantified at any linear point in mankind’s existence then the up and down cycle of his unstable “See-Saw” constitution may be quantified along a linear “Dipole” ruler with absolute good and evil emblazoned at opposite ends.  One might argue that according to this model, a man’s virtue could be estimated as an average of his upward and downward cycles like a bell curve, a median, an average of negative and positive amplitude along the wavelength of his life. 

Let us return to the model of dipole and see-saw cosmology.  The experiment demonstrated how mankind may have first created the concept of sacred and profane from his need to survive and began to attach qualities of good and bad to those survival skills that kept his alive or got him killed.  We can draw a simple equation to balance the relationship between the sacred and the profane.  This model can be expressed as a linear equation or as a sinusoidal curve.  In order to set the model up we must identify the phenomenon we desire to track.   The elements driving the curve must fall into either the sacred or profane category and must have corresponding values of good and evil in order to balance the equation, for instance; a man did 5 good deeds within a 24 hour period and he did 4 bad ones; one has only to quantify the value of each deed in order to get the average and presto! We have determined whether this man, if he were to perish this very instant, shall be hell or heaven bound!  Of course this is outrageously ridiculous but it is the model that human beings have created to help them understand or proportionately misunderstand the landscape of the sacred and the profane.  But the landscape is far more complex than most people realize who choose to delve in the realm of the sacred and the profane. Because every atom, every idea, every object, in theory is charged with good or evil value in the dynamics of religion the equation can never perfectly balance and that is the basic premise and hook of religion, it is like a mysterious credit score that you can only get just before you make a purchase but that is never really quantified… you either get approved or declined.  The fundamental concepts of what society considers to be sacred or profane are embedded in the most critical tool of human communication, our language. Language is expressed both visually through symbols and audibly through sound associations and through physical gestures as nonverbal language.  In equation #1 below I created a perfectly balanced relationship between sacred and profane.  Actually the negative and positive values cancel one another out and so the resultant is neutral. Using the key below the following absurdly arbitrary meanings apply to equations #1 and #2:

KEY TO ARBITRARY SACRED AND PROFANE VALUES

a)      Sin₇  = adultery;

b)      Sin₅ = lust and Sin₉ = stealing

c)       Virtue₁ = forgiveness  

d)      Virtue₃) = charity. 

EQUATION #1:  [(Sin₇ x -5) + (Sin₅ x -2) + (Sin₉ x -10)] = [{(Virtue₁ x ((+)7)} + {(Virtue₃) x ((+)10)}]

                                                                                       -17 = +17

 

SINUSOIDAL CURVE:

EQUATION #2:  [(-Sin₇ x -5²) + (Sin₅ x -2) + (Sin₉ x -10)ᶟ] = [{(Virtue₁ x ((+)7)} + {(Virtue₃) x ((+)10)}]

                                                                                     -10027 = +17

In equation #2 the scales are tipped in favor of the profane, therefore this unfortunate person is undoubtedly hell-bound as their sins far outweigh their virtues.  I demonstrated this as a mathematical equation in order to reveal the absurdity of any science that attempts to evaluate a man’s ethical and moral character as an indicator of his eligibility for salvation or damnation based on preconceived notions of what is sacred or profane.  There are billions of variables that cannot be factored into the equation because the real conscience of any man is a complete mystery to any but themselves.  We cannot evaluate anything of such gravity based only on external observations all we can do is identify patterns and trends but we cannot know if they have been manipulated to throw off our evaluation.  The point of this argument is that men have to move away from such childish and unsophisticated prejudices.  Maintaining the fundamentals of humanitarianism and compassion we must abandon the myths of our prehistoric past and replace them with a warm factual and scientific rationale.  There is nothing wrong with humbly admitting we do not know something and it empowers everyone because valuable time and energy is not squandered arguing about things that ultimately have no proof.  Better to spend our time learning how to accept and love one another’s differences and to focus on how to live together upon this finite planet in peaceful harmony. 

But it will take time for men to unlearn their troubled, violently segregated and prejudiced past.  Like everything of mankind’s creation, religion is not exempt from the mortal flaws of our nature.   Yet mankind should not allow his knowledge of his inherent imperfections to cause him to berate himself.  Only when man grows comfortable with his own nature will he escape the perilous, self-deprecating journey of fear and guilt that is the by-product of his own creation and that he calls religion.  Let us look upon an example of how mankind has allowed his cultural prejudices to influence his religion and necessarily his view of other human beings. 

CHAPTER TWO

BUYING IN TO COSMOLOGY: MANKIND'S STRUGGLE AGAINST AN UNNATURAL ORDER OF THINGS: 
04-29-14

Scholars of ancient history will point out how closely aligned are the hallmarks of Roman culture with christian concepts of evil.  This is the best example of the self-deprecating nature of humanity that can also be called self-hatred.  Instead of isolating the most beloved of qualities, our strongest most prototypical human instincts and aligning them within a positive matrix of self-awareness we fight our own human nature as if it were somehow alien in an effort to become something alien which we are not.  Men are not and will never be gods.  Aspiring to develop inhuman instincts mythically attributed to gods is absurdly impossible. It is not healthy to hate who we are, we must love and embrace our humanity and stop defining our world within the limited confines between that which is considered to be sacred and that which is imagined to be profane knowing full well that these two theoretical concepts are patently arbitrary! 

Humans seem not have been able to step back from their primordial selves to recall how they grouped those things which were beneficial to their survival as positive or good and how they grouped those phenomenon that were not beneficial to survival as negative or bad.  They have all but forgotten how in the absence of scientific and rational explanations for the vicissitudes of life they opted not to take credit for their own successful and failed choices and their outcomes but handed responsibility over to the concept of gods which they manufactured to relieve themselves from accountability.  We have forgotten the time that we agreed to believe that some invisible, intangible, unverifiable force could take from us the power over our own destinies to choose and decide our outcomes for us, in spite of us as if we were incapable of thinking and acting on our own behalf.  I can imagine that some of the fiercest wars mankind has ever fought were over the fundamental right of men to drive and negotiate their own destinies rather than succumb to the absentee caprices of a god.  On a time in remote prehistory this would certainly have been a new and revolutionary concept and men who were used to living free would surely have resisted a slavish subjugation beneath the unseen presence and unproven powers of gods wreathed in mysticism and doubt.  It is quite clear from folklore passed down the centuries that proponents of prototypical, mystical religions and cults quickly manufactured a labyrinth of myths based on ancient oral traditions to set the instruments of guilt and fear as a locking defense against insurgence.  Our most ancient cults utilised human sacrifice, torture, or any means deemed necessary to exact obedience and to inflict fear into the hearts of those who might question but dared not challenge the mystical word of mediums claiming to be divine oracles of the gods of their own creation.  Alas it has been  so very long ago that we have forgot…

Because the quest for power is such a fundamental passion in the nature of men it is easy to see how opportunistic men saw religion as a perfect instrument through which to trick men into relinquishing their own power to unseen gods.   These ancient power mongers knew full well the spurious nature of the pantheon of gods created through their own artifice.  We can discern a shift from animism, spiritualism driven by the elements and by worship of animals, and including inanimate objects such as mountains, rivers and heavenly bodies.  Suddenly these cults became dominated by humanoid images and characteristics.  For example, whereas early water cults evolved around a belief in water as an essential healing and fertile element at some points these elements were superseded by humanoids that possessed dominion over the water.  For example take the deities Osiris and Poseidon/Neptune who were not the element of water itself but an anthropomorphic-supernatural hybrid of that element framed as a god.  Replacing cult worship of natural phenomenon with an anthropomorphic figure was the first digression from pure spirituality and the final step was for men to proclaim themselves as living gods suspended between the spiritual and the mortal world.  With each degree of separation from the natural phenomenon men had once naively marveled at they ensured themselves increasing power over the social, political and economic communities under their influence whilst true spirituality actually diminished.  By proclaiming themselves as mediums through which he gods favor flowed in the form of good fortune or bad fortune and by fortifying themselves so that their will could be enforced as if it were actually the manifestation of some divine relationship between man and god, mankind succeeded in inverting the concept of religion altogether.  Whereas mankind had once viewed himself as one of the inestimable bodies with which the forces of nature interacted without regard for him or any other variable, now he had placed himself above nature bending its will to suit his own needs in the numbused figure of humanoid god.  For millenniums men have rejected religion because it sets man as the diviner and controller of nature through the artificial figure of an all-powerful god driving a rational and predictable cosmos rather than the opposite; a random unpredictable, chaotic, disconnected, unfathomable cacophony of phenomenon we are no better equipped to comprehend now than when we were at the advent of our evolutionary waltz. 

TO BE CONTINUED: