Wanna See the Real Life? Lift Up a Stone

Winter - Wk 2: All Religions are True (Unless They're Offensive) | Genes are a Social Construct | The AI Gods Are Playin' Us | What Would "Doubting Thomas" Do?

THE FUTURE LOOKS BRIGHTER BY THE DAY

MYTHOS – All Religions are True (Unless They're Offensive)

Universalists believe that every religion is a valid path to God, like separate routes leading up to the same mountaintop. Regardless of tradition, everyone is equal.

Unfortunately, some routes are bound to be rougher than others. The way may be cluttered with scriptures mandating slavery, or cartoonish idols that look like lawn jockeys with half a dozen arms. Unlike Eastern mystics, Western liberals are too tender-footed to tread these rocky paths.

So how do squishy universalists, eager to see the best in everyone, deal with Hindu racism or Muslim homophobia? The same way they deal with African misogyny—pretend it doesn't exist! The thing is, denial only works when you never actually encounter other cultures face-to-face. In a globalized world, where diverse tribes share limited territory and common borders, it's impossible to pretend all belief systems and cultural norms are the same.

In response to unpleasant encounters with the Other, universalists are now carving a new path up the mountain. Their goal is to embrace all the world's religions at once. Their method is to crush every distasteful element out of existence. The result is a One True God without fundamentalism, racism, sexism, homophobia, xenophobia, or bigotry—a flavorless big-box-store Deity who welcomes everyone (except the unwelcoming).

One of this God's exalted prophets is the religious scholar and World Economic Forum darling, Karen Armstrong. The former nun's literary talent is truly astounding. Her prose is so lucid and seductive, she could persuade a man to castrate himself just to feed the starving children of a foreign nation.

In 2009, she and her global collaborators unveiled the international "Charter for Compassion." The document lays out their battle-plan to end all religious wars. It's ethic is based on the self-centered Golden Rule:

"The principle of compassion lies at the heart of all religious, ethical, and spiritual traditions, calling us always to treat all others as we wish to be treated ourselves...to dethrone ourselves from the center of our world and put another there."

(Cue powerless person aggressively shoving privileged person out of the way.)

Like all dogmas, Armstrong's "Charter for Compassion" requires the believer to accept a whole lotta hooey. For instance, how do we accept the Golden Rule, which holds personal preference as the standard for ethical decisions—Do unto others as you would have them do unto you—while we simultaneously "dethrone ourselves from the center of our world"?

The same way you'd accept any incoherent belief system: don't ask questions.

There's also the thorny matter of human variation. Individuals (and societies) have diverse preferences. If you're a masochist who likes being tied up, burned, and whipped into submission, please refrain from applying the Golden Rule to me, thanks.

In addition to universal dogma, the "Charter for Compassion" also establishes a standard for culling degenerate memes from the cultural genome:

"[S]ome have even increased the sum of human misery in the name of religion. We therefore call upon all men and women...to return to the ancient principle that any interpretation of scripture that breeds violence, hatred, or disdain is illegitimate."

For anyone weary of reading the long, oftentimes brutal passages in the Hebrews’ Torah, the Hindu Vedas, or the Confucian Analects, this is great news! Just cut out the offensive parts and huck 'em to the wind!

Clearly, this intolerance of intolerance is a form of cultural eugenics. The strategy is to capture flawed cultures, excise the undesirable traits (e.g., defense mechanisms), strengthen the preferred strains (e.g., openness, compliance), and then release the defanged offspring back into the wild. Before you know it, the toothless lion will lay down with the hornless lamb, and neither will fight back, no matter what you do to them.

Some might argue that sterile universalism is the real threat to human survival, but those doubters will be silenced soon enough.

Cultural eugenics is just another path to God. Who are you to judge?

ETHNOS – Genes are a Social Construct

Anyone who went to school knows the ironclad dictum: "Race is a social construct."

People of the world look different, yes, with varied skin colors and bone structures. Not that you'd ever notice, of course—no one's pointing fingers here.

Humans even exhibit diverse metabolic processes. These evolved in response to varying food sources. Thus we see selection for the mutations that underlie Scandinavian (and north African) lactose tolerance, for instance, or the Eskimo's remarkable ability to digest raw meat.

Lactose tolerance does not define a "race," however. No single trait can, or ever will.

Think about it this way. When you hike in the wilderness, you see all sorts of geological structures caused by differences in elevation or water flow. Over the centuries, naturalists have given these structures different names. But in reality, where's the border between the "foothill" and the "mountain"? Where does a "stream" end and the "river" begin? Are they not both draining into the same "ocean."

Like geographic distinctions, the classification of human traits is socially constructed.

Yes, these characteristics are determined by genes passed down from parent to offspring. And yes, up until modern transportation shuffled the world's peoples into urban cyclones, close genetic relatives tended to share the same overlapping tracts of land, where their ancestors most likely evolved.

According to science, however, these inherited similarities merely reflect genetic "population structures," easily grouped by continental geography—i.e., Africa, Europe, Asia, Oceania, the Americas. Nothing so crude as "race."

A classic out-of-date definition of "race" can be found in the 1913 edition of Webster's Dictionary:

"The descendants of a common ancestor; a family, tribe, people, or nation, believed or presumed to belong to the same stock; a lineage; a breed."

Can we just burn this book and be done with the hate already?

According to the more enlightened Oxford Bibliographies, genetic "population structure" refers to:

"[T]he patterns in neutral genetic variation that result from the past or present departure from panmixia of a population. … [I]t can reveal when migration regimes changed in natural population. …

“[Population structure] has important biomedical consequences either when a number of subpopulational groups is locally adapted to particular environmental conditions (and maladapted when exposed to new environments)."

The difference between "race" and "population structure" should be obvious to any educated person who wants to keep his job.

"Race" is what you check on a census form or your university application. It's purely subjective. Anyone can claim any "race"—at least in theory—and who could argue?

"Population structure," by contrast, is revealed by sequencing individual genomes by the millions, then using elegant software to identify relationships.

When you send off your saliva to some totally non-racist company like 23andMe, AncestryDNA, or MyHeritage, they'll break your bloodline down to, say, "35% Irish, 30% English, 20% German, 10% Ashkenazi, and 5% Inuit."

This analysis determines your relationship to particular population structures, defined by the company's proprietary DNA databases. They're not classifying you by racial heritage. Only racists do that.

"Race" is a highly problematic social construct, and should be rejected from polite discourse (unless it's being used to combat racism, of course).

Exploring your genetic relatedness to certain continental population structures? That's good science!

MACHINA – The AI Gods Are Playin' Us

Robot progress is basically measured in human failure. Presently, AI neural networks have mastered games of strategy from the East and the West, surpassing their creators in both speed and skill. Once thought impossible, a robot finally came to excel at the ancient Chinese boardgame, Go.

In 2016, the AI nerd-bot AlphaGo—a neural net developed by Google's DeepMind team—beat the living bat-shit out of Go master, Lee So-dol. The eeriest moment came in Game 2, move 37, when AlphaGo made an original move that no human player has ever even considered. After five matches, our hero was utterly defeated, 4-to-1.

Lee retired from his Go career in shame, saying, "Even if I become the number one, there is an entity that cannot be defeated."

His humiliation hearkened back to 1997, when IBM's Deep Blue vanquished Russian chess champion Garry Kasparov, 2-to-1 (with 3 draws). "The computer is an alien opponent," he growled, "and the characteristics of this opponent are very, very different from any human opponent."

Last August, an expert F-16 pilot—call sign: "Banger"—faced an AI pilot developed by Heron Systems. The simulated combat was part of the DARPA-funded AlphaDogFight tournament. Throughout five consecutive engagements, the robot fighter pilot demolished its human opponent.

Is it any wonder, then, that the U.S. and China are neck-and-neck in an arms race to make us all obsolete?

First, meka-lobsters replace all the blue collar workers. Then high-speed algorithms out-organize every last office clerk. Before you know it, these AI bots will be telling bad jokes in binary code.

"How do you keep a human pet alive?"

"I give up. How?"

"Pfft! Who cares?"

"GWAAA GWAKA GWAKA!!"

RELIGARE – What Would "Doubting Thomas" Do?

The Gnostic Gospels have a bad reputation for saying all the wrong things, especially if you prefer the warm comfort of the flock. To the bishops’ eternal displeasure, these forbidden texts call blind faith into question.

The most compelling is a collection of Jesus's secret teachings known as the Gospel of Thomas. Its title comes from Jesus's apocryphal brother, Thomas, or Didymos in Greek—"the twin". He's the suspicious disciple who touched Jesus's wounds after his resurrection, just to be sure he was real (Jn 20:24-29). Legend has it that the Twin fled to India after the ascension, where he founded an obscure church.

Many of the aphorisms in the Gospel of Thomas resemble those in the canonical Gospels, but with a weird twist:

Jesus said, "Love your brother as your soul; keep him as the apple of your eye."

We see the Savior as a tortured genius surrounded by numbskulls:

Jesus said, "A prophet is not acceptable in his own village; a physician does not heal those who know him."

These similarites establish a bridge to the accepted Bible, but most Gnostic texts present images of Jesus far different from traditional portrayals. This illuminated Christ did not demand faith of the elect. To them, he conferred gnosis, or “knowledge".

For centuries, these visions were passed down by renegade mystics in underground churches. Eventually, the One Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church caught up with them. Other than a few disparaging quotes by Church fathers, the Gnostic teachings were lost.

The post-WWII reemergence of the Gnostic Gospels shook Church orthodoxy to its core, just as quantum physics relativized the Newtonian world. The center of the universe was called into question.

A full copy of this ancient text, written in Coptic, was hidden in the Nag Hammadi library—a cave in upper Egypt—during the 4th century AD. That cache was re-discovered by a rogue shepherd in 1945, one year before the Dead Sea Scrolls were found outside of Jerusalem.

Among the sayings original to Thomas's collection is this gem:

Jesus said, "If the ones who lead you say, 'There is the kingdom, in heaven,' then the birds of heaven shall go before you. If they say to you, 'It is in the sea,' then the fish shall go before you.

“Rather, the kingdom is within you and outside you. If you know yourselves, then you will be known, and you will know that you are sons of the living Father. But if you do not know yourselves, then you are are in poverty and you are poverty."

Some passages evoke erotic opposites in tension:

Jesus said, "He who acknowledges the father and the mother will be called the son of a harlot."

These extraordinary finds came immediately after American forces detonated two atomic bombs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki, vaporizing some two hundred thousand men, women, and children as if they'd been ghosts all along.

Coincidence? Maybe. But to the wild imagination, it sure seems like an ancient entity was drawn out by an immanent tech catastrophe. As Philip K. Dick would say, the divine plasmate reemerged in the world and started replicating itself furiously—first by word-of-mouth, then on the printing press, then across computer screens.

Jesus said, "I am the light which is above all of them; I am the All. The All came forth from me and the All reached me. Split wood, I am there; lift up the stone, and you will find me there."