What’s Up? 06/29/10

Tags

Congress, day dreaming, Elena Kagan, Human Biology, psychology, SCOTUS

I’ve been reading Dorothy Parker the last few weeks. Enjoying short snippets of short stories, poetry, and some of her book and play reviews.

Especially as to her reviews, she was wont to do a lot of (dontcha just love this?) parenthetical asides like I just did there. I recognized it right away, since I do a whole lot of them. Usually and especially when I’m being witty.

I am being witty, in case you weren’t sufficiently IQish enough to notice. Anyway, it struck me that I might be channelling Dot, since I swear I was doing it before I learned that she did it.

That is problematical since she died in 1967, when I was 17, so it can’t fairly be said that she reincarnated in little ole me. Which I would have liked mind you. But perhaps she looked around and slipped her little shadowy ghostly self in me a little, just like sprinkling a bit of pixie dust as she floated ever upward. If so, she knew me better than I know myself.

I have watched a bit of the Kagan confirmation and she’s making the right wing GOP look silly. That’s unbiased I assure you. If you want to read what the really really really wacko crazies are sayin’ bout the soon to be Associate Justice, then go here, and find out that she signals in her own person, evidence of the END TIMES. Scary. I’m getting ready to be twinkled up!

If you would like a really excellent treatment of the history of confirmation by the Senate, then Meredith Hindley has a fine article at the Humanties, which takes a look at the entire issue of when and why the Congress get involved in the type of hearings we have today.

I don’t believe in coincidences a lot. I think that when we are open, we “see” connections, we draw them to us, or more technically, our true Spirit does. So it doesn’t surprise me after yabbering about dreaming and my preference, day dreaming, there should be a neat article in the NYTimes about the values of day dreaming. Freud be damned, as I said. I told ya, you can always count on me to be right. You heard that from the horses mouth. (Psst, I’m not sure what that is, since, I’ve not met a talking horse, AND since I am suspicious that Mr. Ed was not REAL in that sense.)

Well, I have volunteer stuff today, and some errands to run, so I must scoot. Have a fabulous day, and we’ll be back tomorrow with more good stuff.

The Food Wars

Tags

evolution, FDA, food, health, Human Biology, medicine, nutrition

We are living in the WRONG century insofar as food is concerned. That’s obvious, and needs no explanation, but I’ll give you one just in case.

We are smart enough to manufacture the stuff that tastes and looks edible, but are just beginning to have the tools to determine whether we are in fact genetically destroying the human race as a result.

You know what I mean. I grew up in the 50’s and 60’s and thus was in on the ground floor of manufactured edibles. Bisquick, tubed biscuits, mashed taters in a box, and some horrifying thing called “Helper” preceded by things life “beef” and “tuna.”

We were stabilized in all this by things called “preservatives” which basically meant that the shelf life of said faux food could be centuries. We are dripping in a thing called “high fructose corn syrup” cuz somehow it works better than plain old cane sugar.

Now, most of the crap we grew up eating was declared “safe” by an FDA which we thought was actually looking out for us, but we now know is just a shill for the food manufacturing industry, so all these decades later, some of us feel rightly SCREWED.

Americans spend a ton of dough on over the counter digestive aids. Look at Walmart’s my lovelies and see a whole section devoted to stuff designed to make it all go down and through and out without too much pain. We belch and gag and well, do other unmentionable things in an effort to extract some nutritional value out of soy-lent green masked as ding dongs.

Somewhere in the 70’s or so, people started to do actual studies which got everyone worrying. So we ingested tons of bran muffins, cut down on coffee, stopped drinking soda with real sugar, and a myriad of other rules of the road designed to improve our health, or at least stop the damage we had already done.

We are just beginning to have the capability to determine the long term genetic effects of all those chemicals. Who knows, it may already be too late. We may have introduced the genetic oops into the mix (sorry all you silly creationists, but evolution continues ya know even if you pretend it doesn’t) already for all we know.

Every few months we are admonished to stop eating so much of this, and add more that into our diet. If in fact we tried to follow all this goodly advice, I dare say we would spend the better part of every day just working out the schedule.

And, then there is that thing called exercise! It went from 15 minutes three times a week, to 4 times a week, then 2o minutes, then 5 days a week, then 6, and now its 30 minutes 7 days a week. It’s walking, and then it’s strength training too, and then, well it makes a body take to their bed in self defense and exhaustion, I tell ya.

And then, exercise the brain. Fend off Alzheimer’s–do math, puzzles, read, or don’t, since there is plenty of literature that say it won’t make a difference. Or eat broccoli, since it seems to be good for much that ails us.

I cannot imagine the young mother these days faced with trying to give her kids a decent chance at a long and healthy life. Where to begin? I have no clue, and frankly, I’ve given up.

What I do mostly and I say mostly most seriously, because my addictions to crap are well, addictions after all, and I’m a firm believer that we can only address about 2/3 of all addictions without going mad, so choose which 1/3 you intend to relish until you die an unnatural and earlier death than you should.

So I mostly stay away from processed food. I long ago tossed the Bisquick and tubes of dough. I don’t by frozen meals or canned gravies and all that jazz. I mostly stay away from a lot of processed meat and pretend side dishes with suspiciously weird looking “flavor” packets. Amazingly, most of this stuff can be cooked from scratch in a few minutes of time, and taste wildly better than their counterparts of ground up cardboard flavored with grape-like taste nuggets.

I have no idea whether I’m healthier or not. But it’s a measure of control, and it’s hugely cheaper as well, which is a bonus. We grow a big garden and I actually like making salsa and tomato sauce for my spaghetti from real tomatoes and garlic and onions and all that. Sure, it won’t last until Christmas like the jars I can get in the local assembly line “food” dispenser, called Piggly Wiggly or Walmart or HyVee or any number of silly names.

Course we eat meat, and I KNOW that is probably cancer on a plate, as well as plenty of other genetic mutating sludge, but there is, as I say, only so much one can do about addictions. And fish is no bargain either, since more and more it comes from polluted waters and is probably not fit for consumption.

We are out there alone my friends, in the big world of food. No one to protect or guide us much. In a couple more centuries, we should probably have this all down pat. No doubt we will be able to discern  the properties of every food with our new third eye. But oh, just think of the added expense of all that mascara!

The Name’s the Thing

Tags

categories, empathy, grace, groups, Human Biology, Jesus, labels, mind, serendipity, sympathy

Serendipity is defined as the act of making discoveries by accident. It is, I would suggest, the movement of grace masquerading as coincidence.

I have learned that if I am open, nuggets of wisdom come to me from others and if I let them lay fallow in the warm earth of my mind, they will be joined by others, watered and will suddenly break open with a new idea.

Such is how I have learned to operate in the writing world of blogging.

The mind is a curious machine. Of that we can all agree. We remain puzzled by much of it, and perhaps we always shall be, at least in this human form.

Whatever new thing is presented to us is taken in and an attempt to understand it commences. In order to understand it, we must, perforce, place this new thing in some context of all the things we already know. It is most like, least like, similar to, sounds like, acts according to, and so forth.

In other words we label, and said label stays with us, often unknowingly throughout life, secretly forming impressions and beliefs about things without our willful knowledge. It is human nature, and at most we can be aware that we are doing it, in an attempt to “see” clearly. It is the antithesis of Buddhist teaching of non-duality. We find it hard to “let it be” as it were.

Much is being made by some, of our propensity to label people. Liberal, progressive, conservative, neo-con, right-wing, fundamentalist–you name it, we label it. And yet, they are mostly useless. If you asked 1000 people who voted for X, they would perhaps in total give you 75 reasons why they did so. The 1000 would split along these reasons, and the resultant “groups” would be insignificant in terms of a demographic.

Our unique make-ups simply don’t allow such easy simplistic categorizations. We are a dizzying array of contradictions, counterpoints, and metaphors. In our own minds our decisions are logical but often they may seem arbitrary and wildly upside down to others. Yet we label away in earnest.

There is a difference between empathy and compassion or sympathy. Some can sympathize with the screw up, but  cannot empathize with him, because some tend to see themselves as rational,  and not tempted into such irrationality. The empath on the other hand, sees their own limitations, and places it on a continuum. Others, they can see, fall elsewhere, and they do not see one as “better” than other.

Let me give an example. The sympathetic person comes into contact with a homeless person. They offer assistance in the form of helping that person obtain employment. They go away satisfied, they have succeeded. The person is now employed, and on the road to getting control once again of life. Two weeks later, they see the same homeless person pan handling on the same corner.

The sympathetic person is angry. He sees the homeless one as “lazy” happier to live on the “dole” than do an honest day’s work. He labels the person as unworthy of further efforts.

The empathetic person sees something quite different. He may offer the same assistance, but if he finds the person panhandling again, he doesn’t become angry. He realizes that the person is unable to cope at some level with what he can cope with. He accepts and can understand that some persons by personality, psychology or life experiences, cannot handle the stress of bills, work schedules, and so forth. I might  acknowledge  that I could not handle being a air controller–the stress would be too much for me. That is my limit.

Our ability to “walk” in someone else’s shoes, helps us not to label. We can accept, and we can agree that such persons deserve warm, dry, shelter each night, health care, and food. We accept their limitation because we are mindful of our own, knowing they are only different in degree.  We can see the homeless person as “doing their best.” And doing one’s best is all we can ask.

I have, therefore, found it profitable to  challenge assumptions in my life. At least, at this juncture of my life. I often suggest that certain phrases, certain old assumptions make no sense to me. I have no idea what they once meant, and we fling them about as if they meant something. We “know” what we mean in using them, but we don’t really “know” what they mean do we?

We preach faith, because we are sure that we are right about what we preach, yet we don’t acknowledge that the essence of faith is the fact that we don’t have the facts to back up what we believe. So what are we declaring as “true?”

Jesus spent much of his ministry trying to help people to challenge the assumptions they lived by. He shook them up, shocked them at times. He challenged the Pharisees again and again. You do all these “things” these rituals. Do you know why they were instituted? Do they still accomplish their intended ends? If not? Well? Are the ends still valid? Then find a new  way of accomplishing them. If not, then simply discard them.

We do well to, from time to time, examine the rules of the road that we live by. Are they valid, these ends we so tout? If so, is this the most effective means to accomplish them? If not? Well?

We would all do well to emulate Jesus. Buddha said similar things too. All the great thinkers and doers, all the great prophets and seers, all the philosophers and such, look at our assumptions and question them. They remix and separate, they re-organize, turn around, flip upside down. They challenge us to justify our beliefs and our commitments.

When Jon Kyl, (R, AZ) suggests that maybe unemployment benefits for laid off workers are somehow “encouraging of laziness in finding a job,” I suggest it’s time to question our assumptions once again. Mr. Kyl’s assumptions are certainly not mine. And it suggests a lot about Kyl and people like him in their opposition to say things like health care, and other programs that are designed to help the less fortunate among us.

Think about it.

Evolutionarily Yours

Tags

amygdala, brain, depression, evolution, frontal lobes, God, Human Biology, image of God, medicine, mind, neural pathways, PTSD, science

Long time readers here, know that I suffer to a degree with SAD, seasonal affective disorder. During these past couple of weeks, with temperatures hovering near or below zero most days, I’ve spent time sitting at the window, since blessedly the sun was out most days.

I handled the intense cold and resultant miseries rather well, and was mostly upbeat and happy during our self-imposed snowbound exile.

With the return yesterday of vastly warmer temperatures, I found myself strangely depressed and grouchy. It got me to thinking, and you know what that means–I have something to say.

I’ve said often enough that one of the reasons why I can see God’s hand in creation so very clearly, is that life is tenacious. Spotting a lone dandelion growing in the cracks of an old sidewalk proves that. It seems that evolution does it job in providing mechanisms that protect our lives in various circumstances.

I came to the conclusion, that this was just one more instance of that. In the midst of the perceived “danger” the brain somehow protects us from the depression that such events should precipitate. After the danger is past, the natural depression descends since we can now afford to give attention to it. 

This led to something I remembered from a three part show on PBS regarding the brain and how it functions. The Emotional Life describes a variety of brain mechanisms, often illustrating the working by showing dysfunctional brains where the mechanism is faulty.

One such is the amygdala, that small portion in our more primitive brain that operates to alert us to danger. A life-protecting mechanism in and of itself, it prepares us for “fight or flight,” flooding our bodies with adrenalin. This information is then sent to the frontal lobes, site of our rational cognitive thinking.

Here is where the problems begin. The prefrontal lobes examine the evidence and assess the danger. However, they are behind the game at this point. The amygdala is already in action, and the pathways from frontal lobe to amygdala, are not direct as they are from amygdala to frontal lobe. They are convoluted, containing a fairly round about way of getting there.

The amygdala thus functions to push the body to respond before the frontal lobes can get the information back to it, that it can relax. It has already poured forth its adrenalin. Interesting you say, but so what?

The commentator suggested that this portion of the brain, the FL to A pathway is not yet evolutionarily developed. We are on the way to a better connection, but not there yet. Evolutionarily speaking, it was better to be ready to act than to mull it over first. Makes perfect sense.

A couple of other fascinating things also are explained. It probably comes as no shock to most people that during a crisis (something fear inducing or terrorizing), we seem to have heightened senses. We hear, see, smell, feel, taste, more acutely. This apparently has something to do with the adrenalin or other chemicals that are released during such crisis conditions.

This means, that every single thing that happened during the moment of terror is exquisitely recalled in perfect detail. One can literally, upon proper cuing, smell the smells, and hear the sounds. Of more serious consequence, the memories are literally seared into memory. This has important implications for PTSD (post traumatic stress disorder). Here a particularly frightening episode is  cued, and the person feels for all practical purposes as if they are once more actually there, within the event again.

Each and every recall brings on the adrenalin flow and the terror is relived in 3D . For years, given the military’s desire to downplay the disorder, and because we knew very little of the inner workings of the mind, no real treatment was effective. Now there is some hope. Namely, the patient is forced to recall and describe again and again in detail what they are experiencing. And the frontal lobes slowly help the person accept that the signals are but memory. In other words, the patient’s own mind signals back sooner that all is well.

In time, hundreds of thousands of years no doubt, we will have the capacity to shut down the amygdala much quicker when there is no real danger present. So we live with the disorders that faulty connections allow for now.

Why is any of this interesting? Well quite simply to me, understanding the inner workings of my mind is one of my ways of understanding God. I have come, over time, to the conclusion, that being made in the “image of God” can only mean having a brain that thinks like God’s does.  Surely we all recognize that God is not the image of Michelangelo’s in the Sistine Chapel. Yet most of us do recall that image when we think of God.

Yet, I believe God is not corporeal but spirit. As such it would seem to me that we would have no reference point at all to “think” of God unless our minds were similar in nature. This is not to say that God does not have multiple “minds” each designed to the species (earth bound or otherwise). And in some sense, the evolutionary development of the human brain moves toward a more God-like orientation as it develops. Cats, as far as we know, don’t meditate on God, humans do.

It suggests to me that we are moving toward God as we move away from war, hate, anger, anxiety, selfishness, vanity, sloth and all those “sins”. As our brains develop, we move away from them as well. The frontal lobes take over and are the cop on the block, as it were.

Which is all to say that I appreciate my brain for its protection of my psyche during the great ice age just endured, saving my “depressing” day for a “safe” one. I look forward to the day when my brain doesn’t need this safety net, but can control itself by reason. Evolutionarily speaking the time needed is but a drop in the ocean of time. See ya there!

Somebody’s Gotta Know

Tags

brain evolution, brain physiology, hominids, Human Biology, language, thinking

Okay, perhaps I have too much time on my hands. But this issue has been bugging me for a couple of years at least, and I have never had an answer from anyone. And I’m not particularly sure where to look anyway to find an answer, other than plowing through obvious tracts on brain physiology and evolution.

You see I got the idea from watching something or other on dogs and cats and how they think. And it occurred to me, that at some point in human evolution, hominids must have faced the same issue.

The question is exactly how do you think when you have no language? Ha! bet I caught you on that one. Have you ever thought of that? Do you have time in your normal lives to even contemplate such issues? Well, for whatever it means, I seem to. I fear this disease is catching. On the road today, the Contrarian in the midst of driving on the freeway with cars and trailer trucks zooming willy nilly left and right, he pointed to the glove box and said, “why did they call it a ‘glove box’ do you think? Why not the flashlight or tool box or map box or registration box?”

Well, that set me back a step or two. Like a gnat buzzing around my ear, interfering in my life, he drops this lovely little notion into my unprotected and not prepared for combat, ears, and I have to start contemplating that instead of the fine look of the passing cornfields. But we aren’t going to discuss glove boxes so just stop thinking about it if you were.

We are discussing thinking, in general, and thinking without language in particular. Now, I am firmly aware that all of us, at least those considered sane, and those not proficient in the meditative arts, are engaged in a general conversation with self all our waking hours. We chatter about the past, rerunning any number of old films about what could have been, what should have been, what didn’t happen, what did, and what we should have said, not said, and so on. We wander around the future in the same way, playing out plans and scenarios that we hope, want, plan, expect, are afraid, will happen to us or others we care about, love, dislike, hate, wish were dead in the near, middle or far future.

We chat along, as if there were indeed two of us, all the time explaining to self what the self is drudging up in memory. It’s all quite strange and odd when you come to think about it, but we all do it, and we don’t often talk about doing it. I don’t know if we are mildly embarrassed or what. We are somewhat curious about others doing it, since on occasion, we inquire, “penny for your thoughts,” or just the mundane, “whatcha thinkin’ about?”

Anyway, we spend a lot of time, and goodness knows how many words we might utter in this silent talk, if they were all written down. I’m rather surprised no one has done a dissertation on that, but of course, maybe they have. Given the output of the planet in terms of written material, I can hardly be expected to keep up with it all. It’s hard enough to keep track of the grocery list most weeks as it is.

So, there was a time before language. That seems obvious. Chimps don’t have a verbal language, and neither do the apes. We have a common ancestor, and we once were even more like them than we still are, so language developed from grunts and pointing, to grunts that had lilts and drops and became at some point multi-syllabic I assume. I assume, since I’m way too lazy to look all this stuff up. That’s what blogs are about, I trust somebody out there knows and can save me the trouble!

Anyway, when Oscar, (the hominid) had put the kid to bed in the cave, and the wife was tidying up the campfire, and Oscar was burping from a fine meal of mastodon, or cave lion, picking his teeth with a stick, and looking up into the night sky, he starts to wonder what that big old pock-marked grey thing is up there. How exactly does he contemplate it? How does he wonder? How does that conversation go with no words?

This drives me nuts to think of actually, since I spend some time every day, doing my darnedness to stop the yackety-yack of my head so I can ummmm, reach a higher plane of “being.”  Inquiring minds want to know!

The best answer I’ve come up with is what I came up with for dogs and other less intellectually stellar creatures, namely that their heads are filled with pictures, that flash one after the other. Now with animals it may function crudely enough that they can’t string them together in long “movies” if you will. Which is why animals seem easily distracted into new pursuits so readily. Perhaps we can string pictures together in our mind that tells a story of sorts, and is akin to “thinking.”

How else do we “figure” out how to shape a cutting tool, or a spear or throwing spear? We must be able to control the sequence of pictures in some coherent manner than allows us to progress in “thinking” through a  difficult problem with  some degree of sophistication. Anyway, the more I think of it, the more my head hurts. If you have an answer, why I’d be happy to hear it.

By the by, in closing lets go to something completely different: I’m wondering what you like, dislike, would like more of, less of on this blog. I write first for me, but also because I think some of you enjoy reading. Too much churchy stuff, not enough? More politics? More humorous nonsense like this post? More reviews of the news today? Something else you’d like to see? Can’t say as I’ll comply, because of course this is a personal thing first and foremost, but I’ll consider ideas certainly with great interest. Let me know!

God Hopes in Ida!

Tags

chimpanzees, evolution, fossils, Human Biology, Ida, lemurs, missing link, paleontology, transitional fossils

Isn’t she cute? She’s our ancestor of sorts. At least those who have studied her svelte little body seem to think so. She is the most perfectly preserved fossil of an animal that is “linked” to humans ever found. Much better than “Lucy” found about 30 years ago by Don Johanson. Only about 60% of her was found, while we have 95% of Ida.

Darwinius Masillae is her quite formal name. She was about three feet tall, and was only 6 months old when she died. She lived in what is modern day Germany. At that time, the area was firmly in the grips of global warming and was a tropical rain forest. It was also highly volcanic, and it is surmised that Ida came down to drink and was overcome by noxious fumes and fell into the lake and drowned. She sunk to the bottom, and remained there for 47 million years.

Why she has excited the paleontological world to near hysteria, is that she may we be a transitional fossil, namely the one before the split between prosimians which gave us lemurs, those cute antic-prone animals who climb like monkeys but aren’t, and anthropoids, which gave us monkeys, apes and then US.

Ida seems a cross between the two groups. They checked her very thoroughly, and although she exhibits characteristics of the lemur family, she has neither the “toilet” claw used for grooming, nor  the “comb” tooth, front  bottom. So she is before the line split. She had fingernails like present day chimps and gorillas, and walked on all fours though she could stand up on two legs.

She lived in the trees, coming down for toilet and water. She fed on leaves and berries and nuts. They were able to identify the contents of her tummy as leaves and nuts I believe. It’s all quite wonderful to think about.

I am of the opinion that God created the universe by setting into motion the laws that would govern it along with the “stuff” of the big bang. He watched and watches it materialize. Some places the right stuff comes along at the right time and place, and live evolves, higher and higher if conditions are right.

I think God “hopes” that lots of life develops into sentience, because then he can truly interact with it. So I imagine that he was cheering on little Ida that day, and hoped the best for her and her kind. Being God, I guess he could project out the possible outcomes, so no doubt, Earth was a place that thereafter he kept an especially close eye on. We were a “promising” place.

What was shocking about learning about Ida, is the underbelly of this business of paleontology. One would like to think that all this stuff is conducted by universities and higher places of science. Sadly this is not the case, and is definitely not the same for antiquities either. Rather, privateers find a lot of this stuff and sell it to the highest bidder. Private collectors end up with some of it, and it can remain hidden from science and the world for decades.

Such happened to Ida. She was actually found back in 1986, and would have been sold to the highest bidder if not for the efforts of Jorn H. Hurum, from Norway. He collected over I believe, one million dollars, to buy the fossil and preserve it for the scientific community.

We saw a special on this Monday night I believe on the History Channel. A book entitled “The Link” is on sale now. What was all quite amusing to me, is that the brain-dead who argue that evolution is all a massive hoax perpetrated by millions of atheists, always complain that there are no transitional fossils as an argument. Of course that is shear nonsense on its face. But during the show, they interviewed a professor of paleontology I believe from Duke University. His speciality is “transitional” fossils and his collection is I think the largest in the world. I imagine he would be quite shocked to learn he was an expert in nothing!

To be fair, Ida is not a direct ancestor as such. She is more aunt than grandmother. But still, isn’t it grand to learn about how incredible God is in creating a universe that has such symmetrical beauty in it. Evolution proves too wonderfully that we are all in God and God is in all. We are all inextricably tied together in a beautiful symphony of DNA. It’s elegant to be sure, and something so very worthy of God.

 

Fertile Minds

Tags

Art, evolution, fertility goddesses, God, God Gene, Human Biology, theology

Venus of Willendorf circa 13,000-18,000 BCE

I got to thinking about fertility gods the other day. Goddesses to be specific, for most, as you might expect are female representations.

I recall a couple of years ago, the Contrarian and I became quite engrossed in a public television series on art. The documentarian started with the most primitive of art, often found on cave walls in Europe, and moved through to more modern pieces. It was a real eye opener, and helped me in many ways to understand art better. As some of you may recall, I’m reading a coffee table tome on art history, and I recalled the IPT (Iowa Public TV) show, while reading of the prehistoric era.

To the point, I learned that when it came to fertility goddesses, they were pretty much the same worldwide. That means that if you found one in South America, it might look amazingly similar to one found on the Russian Steppes. That idea initially floored me. It still does, but I’ve had some time to let it sit and ferment as it were.

My analysis is as follows. Man and woman, as they contemplate their lives, recognize the importance of procreation. Children, early on, and up to fairly recent times, were not only blessings in and of themselves, but were also quite coldly, economic commodities. Boys and girls were essential to the family. They assisted in all manner of tasks, tasks that could not be accomplished simply by two adults.

Some where, early on, humanity determined that there were mystical beings, called gods, who directed human affairs, and a good deal of the natural forces we are forced to contend with. Rain, and snow, cold and heat were deemed the gifts of gods or their punishment. We began to offer worship to them to gain what we wished and to avoid that which we did not wish.

So, man and woman thought about how to improve their likelihood of having children. The began to envision a goddess of pregnancy and fertility. How would she look? As you can see from the photograph, a rather bulbous body was thought to denote perhaps a well fed woman? Huge breasts stood for the ability to suckle children successfully? The face was of little consequence, nor were the other limbs. Healthy fat women with big breasts seem to be everybody’s determination of what a fertility goddess should look like.

This suggests that worldwide the human race is pretty much genetically predisposed to view the world in the same manner. Or so I have concluded.  We deduce conclusions from facts in the same manner. I don’t know quite how to reconcile that with the fact that we seem to be at odds with each other on so many issues these days.

One would assume that the mind that can visualize a fertility goddess the same as another living very far away in entirely different circumstances, would mean that we were genetically predisposed to empathize with each other. Yet, it seems we are not. Palestinians seem unable to empathize with Israelis or vice versa. I am told that the animosities between Turkish people and Armenian folks have gone on for some centuries with little abatement.

I can only conclude that such loss of empathy has been a culturalization event. We have grown apart in our humanity by events and by folks who have chosen to interpret those events in ways that divide. It seems we have taken the division caused by competition for limited resources and never let go.

That of course begs the question of what limited resources. One would have thought that another herd of bison or woolly mammoth would be just around the corner. Yet compete we did, and somewhere in that, we lost our ability to empathize. It seems it must be taught again.

I can understand the fertility goddess thing as a result of evolution. No doubt it is useful to humans to view the world with rationality, and that leads to an increase in survival chances. We view the world with the same tools and come to rational conclusions about it. That makes sense.

But another issue doesn’t. There are those in the medical and biology field who now tell us that they have uncovered a “God gene.” The chief proponent of this work is one Dean H. Hamer, author of “The God Gene: How Faith is Hardwired into our Genes.” While many disagree and criticize his work, it positively sets the evangelical right on a path of apoplectic denial. God forbid that we are inclined to believe!

But that is not the point of Hamer’s work at all. What he says that several genes seem to be at play when Buddhists meditate or when nuns pray. There is a genetic predisposition to “transcendence.” This is not the same as God, but it does cause us to look outward, away from ourselves, to find meaning to the world around us.

That transcendence can cause us to empathize I would think with others, but of course, also to conclude that some greater force is at work defining our world, and controlling what happens in our lives. The first part makes sense to me from a evolutionary frame. Anything that causes us to empathize with others and to cooperate seems a good survival technique.

But I am constrained to figure out how belief in a superior deity is helpful to survival, or was deemed useful such that it was perpetuated in the gene pool as a valuable addition to our human condition. Perhaps there is just something I fail to understand about evolution.

Unlike the wingnuttery religious right, I don’t see Hamer’s and other’s work as some danger to religion. Of course, that is crazy anyway, since truth should always be our goal, not simply results that support our pet theories of the world.

Since, I don’t see the “God gene” as an evolutionary necessity or even a help, I can easily conclude that the God gene, is indeed that Spirit of God placed within all humans (whether it extends to all life is another question. I personally think it does, but that isn’t the issue before us.). I see the research as just as much supportive of that as it supports the notions of so-called atheists that it’s all a figment of our genetic soup.

I find the God gene, a comfort in fact. It suggests to me at least that we are all on a path to our Creator, though some of us know it not. We are all journeying,  however consciously or unconsciously that is occurring.

I’m sure there is more wrong with my analysis that right. I’m neither a geneticist nor an evolutionary biologist. I barely skim the surface of those disciplines in terms of knowledge. Yet, I am comforted, as I said.

Isn’t this more interesting to contemplate than to continue to argue about what the “real presence” means? Are we to be forever bogged down in issues of apostolic succession and women’s ordination, celibacy, homosexuality, and all this? Why oh why aren’t we celebrating our, should I dare say, God given ability, to share a world view of God’s presence? Should we not celebrate our ability to both see a mountain in the distance  or a stream jumping with salmon? Are not these the hallmarks of our unity?

Let us have the spirited discussions about all these sundry other matters, yet, on Sunday, let’s go to church and worship, setting aside all our utterly unimportant differences. On one thing we all agree, we are called to transcend our limited selves, we are drawn to that. Let us transcend and begin the process of healing.

May you dream of peace and understanding, unity and compassion, empathy and cooperation in this season of the Epiphany.

It’s just what I was thinking about yesterday.