What's wrong with us?

This is what I'm going to say about this and this is all I'm going to say. We have a lot of firearms in the USA. We always have had. For a few, hunting for food or furs or hides and protection from wild animals makes them necessary. For many, protecting the hen house, the livestock, the crops, might require a firearm.  For some a firearm is something you shoot at paper targets or clay pigeons with at the country club. For others, it puts meat on the table and for some, they can be relics of history prized for craftsmanship or beauty or historical value. For many, living in a violent and dangerous area, people who have to transport valuables, people who are a target for criminals for many reasons;  having a gun is peace of mind.  For such people, being associated with psychotics and terrorists and hit-men and bandits and deranged murderers is offensive and worthy of scornful denunciation. And don't we hear a lot of it?

We have a lot of people in this country who cannot conceive that any of the above will own one for any justifiable reason or that firearms exist for any other reason but to kill someone, and so these horrifying and otherwise useless pieces of metal must be made to disappear and right now and at all cost. If you don't agree with that, words will be placed in your mouth that prove how deranged you are so don't even try to explain. Many of those people, and  they are in the minority, refuse to discuss what needs to be done to protect us all from crime and the grotesque results of a madman with a gun or a bomb unless and only unless there's a prior agreement to reduce or eliminate or severely curtail the right to own one. For them it's guns and guns alone that explain the needless death of innocents and the notion that the murderer is more guilty than his weapon is offensive and well worthy of scorn and mockery. It's all about guns, guns, guns and guns alone and don't we hear a lot about it?

Welcome to American fear, American extremism and American intransigence. Neither side will talk to the other with the intent to understand, just as with so many things America concerns itself with. Neither side will brook any discussion of the complexity of human behavior and motivation, the cost of reducing risk, the efficacy of anything that has already been tried or proposed, the "other side" certainly being so far into a delusional state or simply so committed to brutality and mayhem that there is no middle ground between "we must trust the people" and "it's too dangerous ever to trust the people" and no point to looking for it.

What will never be discussed is the very reason discussion is futile. That reason is us.  What we don't want to talk about and what we cover up and distract from with epithets like Libtard or gun nut, with shibboleths like the NRA or the Brady Bunch or the Gungrabbers or the Gun Culture or even made up discussions is that it just may be that the enemy is not some piece of metal and explosive, some nefarious group of bogeymen, but something to do with who and what we Americans are and why we seem to be different, so angry, so afraid, so filled with self pity and lack of compassion.  It just may have something to do with the reason Switzerland with a widespread love of shooting and hunting; Switzerland where there are 46 guns per hundred residents has virtually no gun crime, nobody shooting up the schools and movie theaters -- and the US with about twice as many has vastly more than twice as much. What causes that difference is something we need to talk about.  Without doing that, all we will hear are rationalizations of prejudice and peremptory proclamations of belief  --  but that's up to you the people, because I'm too disgusted to give a damn any more. I'm not even going to read the comments.

The First Thing Is to Admit What We Don't Know

I search for truth in our shared experiences, our disagreements, the good that humankind promotes and the evil that we enact. We are artists and poets, writers and musicians, but destroyers of life. The one thing we never are is boring. It matters not one whit as to whether you believe or don't believe in God, for me it's about examining all of the possibilities. Science offers many answers but not all. Science is continually changing because valid science is born of a hypothesis and proof (See the scientific method). Sometimes the hypothesis cannot be proven. Sometimes the proof reveals a totally unexpected truth.

However, science without contemplation, without moral considerations can lead us into dark places. The medical experiments of Josef Mengele and others were clearly a search for scientific proof gone wrong. The whole science of eugenics was a perversion of science, yet for a time, those who believed in eugenics boldly cited scientific proof to support their beliefs. Is science bad and responsible for the atrocities of Nazi Germany and the United States' own little foray into forced sterilization of some of its citizens, mostly poor and black? Of course not, but such events are an indication that science can be perverted just as any other belief system.

Just as many of the Christian faiths in the U.S. sought to justify slavery, so did science. Negroes were judged inferior. Skulls were measured, brains were studied and the conclusion was that black people were intellectually inferior to whites, an idea that continued to be presented as having a scientific basis in 20th century works such as The Bell Curve. From the early 1920s to the 1970s, some 65,000 men and women were sterilized in this country, many without their knowledge, as part of a government eugenics program to keep so-called undesirables from reproducing. Then there were the scientific experiments known as the Tuskegee syphilis study. The clinical study conducted between 1932 and 1972 in Tuskegee, Alabama, studied the natural progression of untreated syphilis in poor, rural black men who thought they were receiving free health care from the U.S. government.

The current worship of nuclear power is a perversion of science. We have the science to create nuclear power plants but it seems highly irrational to play with a substance that creates radioactive waste that is toxic to all life in some misbegotten belief that we can keep it under control. Depending on the half-life of the radiation, it could stay in a person for much longer than a lifetime. The half- life is the amount of time it takes for a radioactive material to decay to one half of its original amount. Some materials have half-lives of more than 1,000 years. I find this no more rational than the religious sects that deny medical treatment to their children because they believe that if they pray hard enough God will heal them.

What is inherent in our nature that makes us need to believe in something so strongly that we exclude reason and compassion from our thought processes? Our belief in science created the first atomic weapon, a weapon capable of wreaking havoc and devastation, a weapon capable of leaving behind lethal radioactive waste with an indefinite shelf life, when reason should have perhaps suggested that just because we could didn't mean that we should. Science has helped us create more efficient ways of killing; we can now kill humans and leave the buildings standing. What an accomplishment!

Am I opposed to science? No. Science has also been used to promote the greater good and I would not condemn all of science for its missteps. However, a belief in science is just as potentially dangerous as an unwavering belief in a man with a beard who lives in the clouds. Looking inwardly isn't about justifying our worst impulses; it's about studying what makes us who we are in order to find our way to being better than we are. Most people act without ever considering why they act. This is why mobs form so easily and get so out of control. Individually, most would not engage in the type of vicious and sadistic behaviors that they will as a group. How do we move beyond this mob instinct?

I think that it is far more complex than simply declaring that all people need to embrace science and reason. Either can be perverted as much as any religious belief because the issue lies within ourselves not the stars (Thanks Will). Certainly there have been magnificent advancements in science that have benefited us all; however, humankind has also used science to develop even more efficient ways of killing one another. Hanging the solution to today's problems solely on science or reason is no more rational than announcing that it's all in God's hands.

For me this is where psychology and philosophy must be added to the mix. Science is a type of knowing, based on proposing a hypothesis and designed experiments test and hopefully prove that theory. But that which makes us human goes beyond the concrete, factual answers that science can provide. What we do with that science is based on a complex working of human nature and science hasn't designed an experiment to take the full measure of what makes us tick.  Perhaps psychology and philosophy lack the straightforward factuality of science but it is their study that continues to reveal the human psyche, bit by bit.

I doubt that I will persuade anyone who finds all of this to be some esoteric discussion based on belief that cannot be proven to consider this seriously but at least let's respect that we have differing perspectives.

Of the nature and State of Man, with respect to the Universe

Say first of God above, or man below,
What can we reason, but from what we know?

-Alexander Pope-

Of course those of the Age of Reason had no idea of the size of the universe and the English language has no word to describe just how much bigger the visible universe is in comparison. Indeed they did know that it wasn't as the ancients thought: our floating planet covered by a rotating bowl with lights affixed, above which gods lived -- a bowl so close that it was possible for bronze age people to reach it by building a tower. Intimations they had, that a universe vast enough to include other suns, other worlds, could not have been designed to be a place for humans; a place for humans to dominate; a place designed for no other purpose.

Ask for what end the heavenly bodies shine,
Earth for whose use? Pride answers, 'Tis for mine

The Anthropic Principle suggests otherwise. As Steven Hawking says, it simply states that the suitability of Earth for life on Earth is self explanatory: any form of intelligent life that evolves anywhere will automatically find that it lives somewhere suitable for it. If existence wasn't created for us, that's one less ineffable mystery that needs to be dressed up in godlike robes.

Indeed, 16th century astronomer Jerome Wolf wrote to Tycho Brahe that the "infinite size and depth of the Universe" ( if only he knew how close to infinite it is) was the greatest danger to Christianity. Fortunately for that enterprise, most today still haven't grasped that size and what it says about the irrelevance of Human values and indeed the importance of anything to do with us.

What we've come to know about the nature of reality; about what the meaning of is is, has presented us with a landscape more vast and more inaccessible to the public grasp than is the 14 billion light year fraction of what is that we can see. There are whole dimensions that we can't see and can't come close to comprehending and what we can see and comprehend is little more than the shadows in Plato's cave. That everything in this infinite universe can be attached to a two dimensional membrane floating in 11 dimensional space/time requires more than fasting, chanting, meditation and drugs to become apparent keeps reality well out of the reach of all of us. Certain conclusions about it however, are hard to avoid without avoiding the entire question of just why is is. To my admittedly limited mind, questions of creation, of entities involved with creation, entities beyond the properties of matter and energy and dimension and in what places they exist, are absurd. Isn't it absurd to discuss the number of angels that can dance on a pinhead without being able to ascribe any characteristics or properties necessary to their existence? And of course we cannot without dragging them into a place of scrutiny, which is impossible.

Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatum

Said old William, hundreds of years before the Enlightenment; don't create entities if you don't have to, yet we're still doing it. We're still creating creators, plugging the ever narrowing gaps in our ability to explain nature with gods and demons and angels and disembodied spirits, although it's long since become obvious that we don't need gods of gravity or electricity or of the nuclear forces. We don't need gods to determine why and when it will rain or to give purpose to earthquakes and storms or to make it very important to the cosmos that we worship a certain god and avoid another or refrain from sleeping with the wrong people or obtain knowledge reserved for the gods.

Know then thyself, presume not God to scan;
The proper study of mankind is Man

What we see as energy and matter and time are properties of other phenomena, not results of conscious or unconscious entities that create and control them. We don't need to create them to explain what is otherwise explained by what we can demonstrate and we can demonstrate that random fluctuations of that fabric which manifests itself in all things can more easily do what the old consciousness needed to create entities to create.

Stephen Hawking's soon to be released book claims that existence explains itself, that there is no need to invoke entities for which existence contains no place and allows no properties to explain the spontaneous origin or virtual particles or indeed that tiny part of an infinite thing called existence. If indeed, current theory is correct, there are such an infinite number of conditions that can be called universes, inaccessible from one another, all our religions become absurd. In such isness, the creation of ever more universes is an inevitable result of the nature of is. No nebulous incorporeal entities need apply.

And in spite of pride, in erring reason's spite,
One truth is clear: whatever is, is right

M-Theory is hard to grasp. OK, it's damned near impossible, but as theories do, it predicts outcomes otherwise not predictable. Hawking has come to embrace it as it makes the singularities embedded in classical theories nugatory. It makes it unnecessary to postulate something existing before time that caused time to start, for instance. It makes it unneccesary to postulate the entire idea of anything before time.

"It is not necessary to invoke God to light the blue touch paper and set the universe going,"

Hawking writes in the introduction. Indeed, it's no longer necessary to explain the tides, the winds, the orbits of bodies in space, lightening or the nearly infinite number of gaps in our knowledge in which gods once found refuge.

If there are no more gaps for our gods to hide in, no more firmaments to divide heaven and earth, what then will become of them? Perhaps we'll find him in the one place we have never looked. In ourselves. If universes can be self-creating by virtue of physical law, cannot we be self creating in terms of what we wish to be?

History says no, Glenn Beck thinks it leads to death camps, theologians trip over their tongues trying to show how even if there isn't a God or any place for him or anything he could do if he could -- there is a God. Personally I prefer the freedom of knowing nothing matters for very long; nothing a hundred billion years of time won't wash away. I prefer to think that only the free can be moral, only the mortal can be compassionate and only in our transience can we find glory.