An older way of seeing
When the foundational epics of humanity emerged, survival mattered more than what we now call “objective truth,” the 500-year-old lens started by Bacon, Descartes, and Newton. Today we are too scientific and materialistic to understand that way of seeing the world. But pain is real, undeniable, and some subjective things matter more than matter.
Different elements of reality
→From a Darwinian perspective, nature - reality itself - is what selects. Our physical bodies adapted to the physical world, but mentally we adapted to the elements of experience. Consciousness is what mediates the meta-realities of chaos and order. The subjective meaning that we encounter is the reaction of our deepest being. Meaning comes on its own - you can set the preconditions, but you cannot simply produce it.
→ We evolved with intensely social circumstances, so we personified things before we understood them. Significant elements were personalities, not things. For example, parent/child and male/female date back millions of years - far beyond our own species.
→ Order is where the behavior of the world matches our expectations and desires. We’re stable, calm, competent, think long-term. The oft-invisible axioms we live by organize our experience and actions so that what should happen, does happen. Sometimes, Order is tyranny and rigidity.
→ Chaos is the things and situations we neither know nor understand, the place that emerges when tragedy or malevolence appears, and we respond with hyper-fast, ancient, and simple circuits.In its positive guise, it is possibility itself, the source of ideas. It is mater, origin, source, mother; materia, the formless potential from which God called forth order using language.
Ideas set humans apart
→ An idea is a personality, not a fact. An idea has aim, it wants something, it posits a value structure, asserts that the aim is better than the present.
→ Animals only act out their nature - a singular mode of Being. Humans produce abstracted representations of reality, with potential modes of Being, that allow ideas to die in our stead.
→ Over millennia, we figured out how to distill ideas into a story to simply say, “if you are disciplined and favor future over present you can change the structure of reality in your favor.”
The Creation Story
→ We remain eternally nostalgic for the innocence of childhood, worshiping what we perceive as the “original state” of Nature. But the original Man and Woman were less, not more, than their post-Fall counterparts, because their goodness was bestowed, not earned.
→ The entire Bible is structured so that everything after the Fall is presented as a remedy for that Fall, a way out of Evil: to return to where we were - to embody the Image of God - to speak out of chaos the Being that is good - but to do so consciously, of our own free choice.
→ We know our flaws, our nakedness, and we try to hide it. But if we lived in Truth, if we spoke the Truth, then we could walk with God again, and respect ourselves, others, and the world. Then we might strive to set the world straight.
→ You have some vital role to play in unfolding destiny. You are, therefore, morally obliged to take care of yourself. You should care for, help and be good to yourself the same way you would care for, help and be good to someone you loved and valued. Do this by considering what would be truly good for you (not “what you want,” nor “what would make you happy”).
Evil
→ Is to inflict suffering for the sake of suffering. When we ate of the Tree of Good and Evil, it opened in us the possibility to be evil in a way that animals are not. We’re tough enough to take on everything Nature throws at us - but conscious human malevolence can break the spirit even tragedy could not shake. This is why Genesis treats that knowledge as cosmically cataclysmic.
→ The central problem of life - the dealing with its brute facts - is not merely what and how to sacrifice to diminish suffering, but suffering and evil - the conscious and voluntary and vengeful source of the worst suffering. Our guilt - the sense of inbuilt corruption and the capacity for wrongdoing - is what keeps man from psychopathy.
→ The tragedy of the self-conscious Being is that once you truly understand pain in yourself, you understand how to produce it in others. People who experience evil always have two paths available to them: to perpetuate it, or to learn good from it. Most of the adults who abuse children were abused themselves as children. But most abuse victims don’t propagate the sin. School shooters question reality and its cruelty at a religious depth. But hating life, even for the genuine pain that it inflicts, is the very essence of evil, and makes life unbearably worse.