Dissolved Illusions
We start off believing. We believe in Santa Claus, we believe all the dogma in our inherited religion is absolutely true, we believe that God will guide us through life if we pray and act properly, we believe our country is always right, we believe everyone has a chance to succeed if they only try, we believe in certain sport heroes, certain political heroes, in friendship that will last forever, in a perfect love, in right makes might, and it goes on and on. With time, all of us, to varying degrees, begin to lose some of these illusions and are forced to deal with stark reality about much of life. The innocence of so much around us becomes lost. I guess this is called maturity.
Some people, for some reasons, become more critical about their faith based beliefs than others. Those who tend to question things as they were led to believe are called rebels, insurgents, liberals, heathens, etc. Those who hold fast to their inherited beliefs or culture are called conservatives, archaics, purists, dolts, gullibles, intransigents, etc. Both groups have little use for the other.
Because God's evolutionary process depends on CHANGE for life to evolve to more and more complex life forms, conservatives have a harder life. Things do change, especially in the areas of justice and ethics, but these changes come about not because the conservative opposition changes and supports these changes, but because a new generation has the more unprejudiced mind set to view the reasons for the change. And so with time, evolution is always an upward process, with stalls and reverses, but given time the process moves forward and upward. It really is an amazing process. It all seems to be some kind of brilliant chemistry and chance, with each of us in this process being no more than complex molecules governed by the same laws of evolution as any other molecules. We can insist God created man in His image but this is without any reasonable basis. We may feel a need to believe God is our special friend or our country his special guardian, but this is not based on any scientific evidence. We really create such a
God because we fear death, need to believe in life after death, and so we create a God in our mind who is in tune with our own thoughts and lifestyle. And just in case, we always make God a forgiving God so that even if we 'sin' it can be overlooked IF we have our inherited theology straight. Well, at least he is forgiving for us and those like us, while those other heathens become our sacred duty to punish, the sooner the better. I mean why wait for God to punish them. Maybe we don't really trust God to punish them appropriately. Sometimes these people even have the audacity to worship in front of us, or in our neighborhood or dress different etc. Of course, enough is enough.
I can't say I regret losing many of life's illusions. The more you line reality up with your own understanding, the more contented you will be. Contentment has a lot to do with going gently down the evolutionary stream of life. Humans have the greatest ability to manipulate our environment to improve our lives and prevent disaster to our own person. But we FOOL ourselves if we think our own free will changes the course of evolution. There may be several ways to get from point A to point B. This will be determined by the laws of evolution. That's the big picture. The more narrow picture is our own welfare during this minute period of time in evolution that we exist. We can tamper with this, and we call this our freedom. Freedom really does exist and we are free to make choices. The choices have consequence to our own well being or the well being of our contemporaries on earth. My cat has the chance to behave or suffer the consequences personally. Whether she behaves or not has nothing to do with the bigger picture of evolution.
I don't know why we need to feel special in order to be grateful and contented with our lives. It is the old "Mother likes me better than you" act only mother in this case is God. I have had several pets that I really liked including cats, dogs, horses. If they could talk it would seem silly to me if any of them felt they were created in the image of me, or that I gave any of them dominion over the other or I liked one species better than the other. You can't compare apples to oranges, they are all different species. God just has more species created by his evolutionary laws to like. Illusions play a role in our sanity. We all have to believe in something, I believe I will go to bed now.
