My life is strangely compartmentalized. There’s the family compartment, the professional compartment, the Joshua-Only compartment, the love compartment, the lust compartment, the Godness compartment, the morals-and-morality compartment, the Godlessness compartment, the materialist compartment, etc… I have so many compartments.
Naturally, some appear to overlap – like the love / lust compartments or the love / family compartments. In reality, as far as I can tell, they don’t overlap but only seem to. I know pretty well when I’m loving and I know pretty well when I’m lusting and, believe it or not, I know pretty well when I’m accessing love to facilitate lust or lust to facilitate love. This is, in my experience, one thing people too often mess up. For the average bear, it’s too easy to become confused. Blurring these lines is like setting your ego loose in a wide, open field to fun amok. It’s generally a bad idea but all of that is something I’ve written about before and will maybe write about again – but not now.
So… there are these instances in life when it seems like any two compartments might be one-and-the-same or at least blurring a bit, but they aren’t. One instance, however, wherein I think there might actually be a blurring is, of all compartments, one of the borders between the Godness compartment and the Godlessness compartment. Neither can actually, really, or truly answer the question of how we all got here. I mean, to a degree, they both can: I’m here because my parents were here. They were here because their own sets of parents were here before them, and those parents’ parents’ parents … on and on … but only so far back. In the Godness compartment, usually, we reach a brick wall when we trace back far enough to figures like Adam & Eve or some other set of figures who supposedly got the whole human thing going here on Earth. In the Godlessness compartment, we can mostly trace ourselves to an even earlier point in history – perhaps successfully back as far as the dawn of life on the planet but that’s pretty much where the evolution story stops. And, I suppose, rightly so.
Religion tells us, “We know we go back as far as such-n-such point and just before that point – POOF! – like magic, it all just happened because of The Divine’s Word.” Science tells us, “We know we go back as far as such-n-such point and just before that – POOF! – like magicless magic, it all just happened because of the Big Bang.” However they arrive at it, they both reach the same point – eventually, each story gets to a place where something has to come from nothing. From the Godness standpoint, that’s all the sense that’s needed. God is magic, right? No other explanation is required. But from the Godlessness standpoint, a lot more work is needed to come to a conclusion which is our sure commencement.
Occasionally, though, as I’ve been trying to say, the two come together – or at least they appear to from where I stand. As a person of the Hindu persuasion, there’s no real conflict between the Godness and the Godlessness. Any Hindu who claims there is conflict there is terribly deluded and under the spell of Abrahamic oppression. Surely, superficially there are real conflicts. But nothing superficial is really real and nothing superficial should be taken very seriously. Time and time again Hindus have seen science catch up to what we call religion or spirituality. I say science is “catching up,” but that’s not really what I mean. What I mean to say is that the two are increasingly complementary. On an ever greater scale, the two help each other to explain each other.
I think an article I happened across back in January of this year helps to illustrate this. You can read it by clicking here. It’s a long-ish essay which was written (I think) in January of this year, too. A geologist started down a path of thought after his kid’s toy broke. The toy, as it is described, reminds me of those Magic Rocks or whatever we call them here. You have a container, some water and a solution, and then you drop colored “rocks” into it all and they start growing and whatnot. Do you know what I mean? His kid had one of these and one of the rocks broke and he took a look and now we have this essay to read.
The author, Tim Requarth, thinks he might be onto something where the origin of life is concerned. From the Godlessness perspective we know well how matter came / comes into existence. And we also know energy is never lost – never really ever created or destroyed. But the marriage of the two is where things always get messy. Nature itself provides tons of chances for the two to mingle. But that’s only the first, super small, step. If you can energize matter, that’s great. But you need to not only energize it, but also need to have just the right form of matter energized and then to keep it energized in just the right way so as to possibly cause just the right chemical reactions which would enable that energized matter to sustain itself long enough to keep sustaining itself – aka survive, thrive, and reproduce.
YOWZER! What a challenge! No wonder religion uses magic and science has these kind of gaps in its theories.
“But in Russell’s mind, the origin of life and the source of the energy it needed were a single issue, the two parts inextricably intertwined.” – This is where I started to smile while reading. Hindus have always known that the two parts are inextricably intertwined. Maybe if you read the essay, too, it will make you smile as I did.
Aum Shri Mahaganeshaya Namaha | Aum Shanti
Sthapati Samanvayam 