TRIBALISM

Donald A. Windsor

Tribalism is the real original sin of humanity.  Being members of tribes enabled us to survive and thrive.  However, tribalism is the basis of war -- one tribe against another, or one group of tribes against other groups of tribes, supertribes.

Being tribal is built into our genes and we may never be able to shake it.  We may never want to.  All we can hope to do is recognize it and then learn how to reduce its evil effects.

Being tribal is, in itself, not an evil.  Waging tribal warfare is.  What holds us together seems to keep us apart.  Our tribe is us; our personal identity is our tribal identity.  Everyone who is not in our tribe is them.  Us versus them is the essence of tribalism.

Competition is one thing, but why does it have to be deadly?  Kill or be killed seems to be the attitude.  Is there any hope that this attitude can ever be relaxed? 

Judging by history, no.  Alliances, treaties, and even inter-tribal marriages among tribes may create temporary peace, but eventually war breaks out, again.  Supertribes, groups of smaller tribes, prevent war among their constituent tribes, but then war breaks out among the supertribes.  Peace among all tribes everywhere seems hopeless.

We all belong to tribes.  Teams are tribes.  Clubs are tribes.  Work places are tribes.  Neighborhoods, hamlets, villages, cities, countries are all tribes.  Political parties are tribes who often put their own goals ahead of municipal interests.  Tribes of billionaires (the 1%) wage class warfare against the rest of us (the 99%).  The middle class seems more concerned with the welfare abuses of the poor than with the greed of the rich, thereby allowing the rich to stand back and enjoy the tribal warfare between the middle and lower classes.

Meanwhile, we all suffer.  Humanity has suffered all through history because of tribal warfare.  Humanity did profit, however, because we are now the dominant species on Earth.

Jesus did not deal with tribal warfare.  He dealt with the actions of one person to another.  The Old Testament covers the relationships between people and God.  The New Testament covers the relationships between one person and another.  I am puzzled as to why the tribal interrelationships are not addressed as an evil.

In fact, the Old Testament was heavily tribal, the Jews versus other tribes, as well as their own 12 tribes of Israel.  When the Jews, after 40 years of wandering, finally reached their Promised Land, it was not vacant.  The Canaanites were already living there.  Joshua had to lead the Jews to wage a genocidal war to invade and take over the Canaanite land.  This might-is-right event is the most evil episode in the Bible.  Yet, it is portrayed as being approved by God.

The New Testament has Jesus involved with persons from other tribes, Pharisees, Samaritans, even Romans.  Jesus demonstrated good will toward all people, even those of other tribes.  But Jesus did not touch upon tribal warfare.  Turning the other cheek is not a battle cry.  It is begging to be slaughtered.  Well, admittedly, that is one way to reduce tribal warfare, by annihilating tribes. 

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IS THE BIBLE THE WORD OF GOD?

Donald A. Windsor

Is the Bible the word of God?  It does not make any difference whether it is or not.  The Bible is a great book and certainly can stand on its own merits.

Why then do so many people claim that it is and defend this claim so zealously?  Some of these champions of divine inspiration probably have a strong desire to be on the side of righteousness.  They are making a political or tribal identity statement.

To many others, having God communicate with us via a holy book seems perfectly reasonable.  However, the harsh reality is that God does not do much communicating with humanity.  Many claims are made, but there is no hard evidence that they are true.

God is, by definition, all-knowing.  So God must know how to communicate.  God must know more than advertisers and salesmen.  Holy books and, especially holy men, are not selling well today.

I suspect that God may be communicating with us in ways that should be obvious, but are often ignored.  My goal is to try to find them.

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HOLY SPACE BETWEEN RELIGION AND THEOLOGY

Donald A. Windsor

Religion belongs to the clergy and theology belongs to academia.  Both of these camps would like the rest of us to just follow along with whatever they dole out.  Shepherding sheep is the clergy's model.  Gobbledygook is the theologians' fortress.

I do not need or want a shepherd because I like to go my own way.  I am not a follower.

I do not like, or even tolerate, the approach of academic theologians because they seem to be more preoccupied with the works of each other than they are with God.  Theology is supposed to be the study of God, not the study of theologians.  Academic theology is profound, but useless.  It has no practical applications to every day personal life.

So, I am left free-ranging in whatever ground I can scrounge between the two mighty realms of religion and theology.  To me, this sacred stretch is my holy space.  I can shop around in both realms, pick and choose what I like, and escape back to my precious sanctum.

Furthermore, I doubt whether God wants me to be anywhere else.  The clergy and the theologians, as well as those who are both, are middlemen.  I want direct access to God.

But conversing with God is a one-way street.  I talk, but God remains silent.  No conversation takes place.  But that is why I remain driven to explore.  Perhaps God responds in ways other than linguistic.  Perhaps God dialogs in terms of fate.

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FINDING PURPOSE IN LIFE

Donald A. Windsor

Assume that God has a purpose for each of us, or at least, some of us.  Our mission, then, is to decipher what it is -- and then accomplish it.  The actions performed carrying out this mission would constitute religious behavior.

The problem is determining what is the will of God, and what is our will, and what would be the proper mix.  Thinking that you are doing the will of God can be dangerous.  Atrocities have been committed by persons who firmly believe that they were doing what God told them to do.  Suicide bombers and other mass murderers immediately come to mind, as do psychotics and extreme zealots.  The harsh truth is that none of us can really know the mind of God.  After all, we can not even be sure that God exists.

An old joke states that Shakespeare did not really write all those works attributed to him.  Someone else with the same name did.  OK, then if God does not exist, assume that someone else is doing all the things attributed to God.  For it is obvious that the Universe exists and that something keeps it running.  Call that something God.

One way or another, we strive throughout our lives to find our purpose, our reason for being.  For some folks, it seems to have been easy.  They do everything right, earn the proper credentials, and practice their profession.

Unfortunately, for the rest of us, life is not so smooth.  We get jostled from one disappointment to another.   Our lives are jumbled misadventures full of agonizing frustrations.  Attempts at success are smacked back with abject failures.  Our every hope, our every dream, our every aspiration is crushed.  Sometimes we even come very close -- and then get walloped.

Sometimes I think that my purpose in life is to fail.  But maybe life is like trying to get out of a maze, where each dead end is a sign that the path chosen is not the correct one.  If that were indeed the case, then finding one's purpose would be a simple procedure.  Just keep plugging away, trying one damn thing after another, until the right one turns up.  Hackers use this approach when looking for passwords.  In fact, trial-and-error is widely used in trouble-shooting everything from machines to computer programs.  Why not use it where it counts, in our own lives?

However, what if trial-and-error never produces any successes?  Does success equal purpose?  Is our purpose in life to be successful?  It may not be.  Perhaps God's purpose for us was, or will be, achieved by some of the actions we performed as we struggled to achieve success.  After all, strange and devious are the ways of God.

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TALENTS, DEFECTS, AND FATE - A PERSONAL RELIGION

Donald A. Windsor

Religion on a personal level uses our God-given talents while overcoming our defects, all within the guidance of fate.  We are endowed with talents so that we can use them for God's purposes.

Organized religion is for community worship.  As such, it emphasizes rituals and organizational bureaucracies to provide social cohesion and control.

Some of us, such as yours truly, are not comfortable in the environments generated by these groups.  We like to go our own ways.  In fact, I believe God wants us to.  Does this mean that we are not able to have a religion?  No.  It merely means that we have to practice our own personal religions.  We certainly can belong to religious groups, but we cannot get too bogged down with them.

My personal religion is based on three components:  talents, defects, and fate.

TALENTS.  Talents are abilities that we were blessed with.  Of all our abilities, talents are the ones which are way above average, the ones at which we excel.  Many people seem to have no talents, which figures because most people are, by definition, average.  Or, if they do have talents, they do not display them.  They may even suppress them, out of fear of ridicule or abuse.  Exercising your talents can make your companions jealous, even contemptuous and vengeful.  Society punishes showoffs, except when they become successful; then they are merely envied.  Most successful people, especially in show business, came up the hard way, by overcoming rejections.

DEFECTS.  Defects are disabilities that we were cursed with.  These are the ones that distract us from or interfere with the development of our talents.  The most obvious defects are physical, but they can also be mental.  Some people are crippled.  Some are psychotic.  Some are highly emotional.  Some people with great talent are also saddled with devastating defects.

FATE.  Fate is how God communicates with us on a personal level.  The holy books and holy persons of organized religions tend to intrude between us and God.  Fate manifests itself in mysterious ways, sometimes jarring and painful, other times exhilarating and joyous.  Everyone experiences fate.  It is best recognized, and appreciated, when it saves us from horrible events.  Somehow, we come out unscathed.  However, sometimes we do suffer from terrible calamities.  Sometimes we react by asking, "Why me?"  Then again, sometimes fate is so benign that we hardly notice it.

Fate does not nullify free will.  If we choose to do something stupid, it is our own fault when we suffer the consequences.  Fate is usually expressed as improbable coincidences, such as being in the right place at the right time, or its opposite, being in the wrong place at the wrong time.  Fate is very mysterious, but as I review my own long life, I can see how it has shaped me into what I am today.

I tried very hard to be a success.  In fact, I am still trying.  But every time I come close, something untoward happens to knock me off course.  However, when ever I get very discouraged to the point of giving up, something positive happens to inspire me to keep striving.  It is as if my life has been an eight-decades long channel in which I bounce between almost success and almost failure.  I consider this channelization to be my religious struggle.  I have been trying to push my talents and overcome my defects within the bounds that fate has allowed.

Practicing such a personal religion is not for everyone, only for those of us who believe that we really are talented, even if we have been presented with plenty of evidence that we are not.  We have a fire-in-the-belly motivation, and I assume that it has been bestowed on us by God to give us the perseverance to move forward.

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FIREWALLS BETWEEN SCIENCE AND RELIGION AND BETWEEN RELIGION AND THEOLOGY

Donald A. Windsor

Scientists can believe in God.  However, they cannot incorporate God into their scientific explanations.  A firewall must separate those two domains.  Jesus emphasized this separation in his admonition "Render onto Caesar what is Caesar's and onto God what is God's" (Mark 12:17).

But suppose that, as a thought-experiment, scientists were able to peek around the firewall and look at nature from the aspect of God.  What would they see?  They would observe much clearer patterns, because God would not need probability.  Probability is defined as one option divided by all the applicable options.  Probability is an expression of a lack of knowledge, for if we knew which option would occur, it would have a probability of 1.  Every event that has ever occurred had a probability of 1. 

God probably sees the past, present, and future all at once.  Our present is just the interface between the past and the future.  We are swept along by the unstoppable flow of time.  Does time exist for God?

For that matter, does God exist?  Do we define God?  Did humanity create and perpetuate the concept of God simply because we have no choice?  God is the logical framework that we need to complement our paradigms of time and of existence itself.  We recognize time, so we tend to wonder what no time, or eternity, would be.  We exist, so we wonder about nonexistence.  Anything that we wonder about, that we cannot figure out, we attribute to God.  We are visible; God is invisible.  We are mortal; God is immortal.  We have huge gaps in our knowledge; God is all knowing.  We make mistakes: God is infallible.  And on it goes.  God is everything that we are not.

The firewall separating science and religion is often under attack.  Much, if not most, of humanity does not recognize this firewall, usually because they do not understand science.  Moreover, they do not understand religion.  Most people see God through their religion and probably cannot comprehend how God could be separated from religion, particularly their religion.

Which is why we need another firewall, one separating religion from theology.

Theology is the study of God.  Religion is a prescribed set of beliefs and rituals peculiar to a group of people.  Religion is a tribal identifier, much like a uniform, which separates us from them.  In fact, some religions do have dress codes.  Religion divides people and is a rallying point of wars.  Iraq is a poignant example, where Shi'a and Sunni Muslims perpetually kill each other.  History is full of such conflicts throughout the world.  Even when wars may not be caused by religious differences, these differences are exploited by their holy leaders to inspire the combatants. 

Religion seems to have been invented by kings to convince their subjects to endure extreme hardships, and even death, in support of sovereign (= divine) causes.  Kings proclaimed themselves to be God's rulers on Earth.

Theology is the study of God and should not be contaminated by religion.  Theology should be a branch of philosophy and should enjoy the same interrelationship to science that philosophy does.  No firewall is needed.  The distance between theology and science is maintained because theological experimentation is difficult, perhaps impossible.  The effects of prayer on event outcomes, such as healing or survival, are interesting, because they ask God to change what seems to be the inevitable future.  Nevertheless, they are also puzzling and inconclusive.

I have tried many theological experiments and they all leave me unsatisfied, but not so unsatisfied that I could conclude that they produced negative results.  My problem is my own deeply entrenched bias.  I want the God that I learned about in Catholic schools.  However, I fear that such a God probably does not exist.  "Probably" indicates my lack of knowledge.  Consequently, I seek reassurance that my God is still there. 

My religion is Catholic, but some of the rules of the Catholic Church seem to be nothing more than tribalistic stances.  Opposing birth control, abortion, and same-sex marriages has no basis in Christianity.  Jesus never mentioned these subjects.  Celibate male priests is another position that the Church simply cannot rationally defend, yet it persists in enforcing.

All of which leaves me as a lonely infidel clutching an elusive figment of a hoped-for God.

Erecting firewalls between science and religion and between religion and theology helps me cope with life.  Evidently, I am not fond of religion.  But I am a scientist and remain fascinated by theology.

Amen
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THE ANNUAL HANGING OF THE PITCHFORKS

Donald A. Windsor

When an irate mob storms the castle, they are equipped with pitchforks and torches.  Or so some legends seem to portray it.  The pitchforks in my drawing are not noticeable, nor is there any hint that an annual event is occurring.  Why would an angry horde want to hang their pitchforks anyway?  Let alone on an annual basis?

The metaphor in this drawing is that assigning a periodicity (annual) to an event that virtually nobody has ever witnessed (hanging of pitchforks) is a brazen act of audacious incongruity.  The cognitive dissonance between what the title says and what the drawing depicts segues into the metaphor in an abrupt, jocular moment of temporary befuddlement.