from August 2004:
There's a lot to say about this, the whole picture dimming toward one dull color, but right now, it's - stem cells, stem cells, gotta have those stem cells! Think of the lives we'll save!
The reason fundamentalists don't like evolution is not, as the argument's been framed, because the Bible is in conflict with it. It's because their moral systems, and the true fundamental precepts they live by, are anti-evolutionary - as is modern medicine, politics, and social morality.
Anti-evolutionary meaning against evolution, opposed to its processes. Unless they're human-controlled, as in the breeding programs and genetic manipulations of modern agriculture and scientific research.
Human direction of evolution is framed as the only possible good. The very process that gave us life, that shaped our brains and hands, is discarded as a cold-hearted, and defeated, enemy.
Evolution is about people dying as much as it is about them surviving.
This whole enterprise is against that. It is a taboo so deep it's virtually non-existent in public discourse, the idea that there are too many of us now, leading directly, not to a return to the old ways of natural forces in interplay, but to human control of our evolutionary destiny.
That's the gambit. And as sure as you have breath, up there somewhere is the moment some collective of the elect decides it's time to raise the drawbridge and all that science and technology that seemed to be about helping the common folk and their lives, will prove to have nothing to do with common folk at all.
Evolution is about people dying. Any beautiful thing that's alive that you can name gets its beauty from the shaping hand of death. The wolf, the butterfly, the oak, the human female in her breeding prime. And our minds, our brains, the way we can think and conceive our way to dominance of the planet, that came from evolution, too.
But now we're setting that aside, and the tacit morality, while never being openly discussed, is that all births make holy each born life. It's true but only as part of a larger picture where death is also beautiful, and age, and all the spectrum of existence. Look at the humans this way of life ennables. And don't give me that gym-hard cosmetic pseudo-health. This is a breeding program more complex than most of us can see, its edges are too widely flung in time, and its slow work too long for our still-brief perspective.
The danger is this kind of talk gives power to those who would use their own criteria to cull the herd, and that's not my aim. But the alternative is going exactly there as well, with less room to shift. First break up the old ways of being, then disrupt the chains of stories and songs that held human commonality for the millenia we've been here. Then replace them with imitations and subtly skewed versions that will be acceptable because they'll be all there is. It's worked. The television is the story-teller now, and every one of the stories it tells are in a traditional line, all of them come through the filter of the machine and its masters.
We are adaptive creatures first, above any other skill or talent we can change with what comes, and we get that from having had to, and from leaving behind those who couldn't. That's evolution. Leaving behind those who can't.
Not on purpose, that's not what I'm saying.
Disease sweeps across the landscape, and leaves strong immune systems in its wake. We spit on that now. We scorn it. We create an immune system that's working only for the social group, while individuals without the strength to fight are held in place by the increasingly artificial biology we share.
The argument is that I'm suggesting we kneel to disease like it was a god or a master. No, I'm not saying that. I'm saying that it's a ruse to deliver the power and the keys into the hands of a cunning and manipulative trickster. And it's working. This is headed somewhere. It's a program of redirection. And since there will be, as there will with any evolutionary selection, those who benefit and those who lose, there is struggle, fighting, war.
The Pope is right to object to human arrogance, but the beauty of the scam is that the moral system from which he speaks is owned and operated by the people he opposes. It is an anti-evolutionary institution, his church. But he's still right.
The veil of Islam is constricting compared to the vibrant freedom of modern women in the West. But which of those two systems will endure great hardship better? The I-me-mine of hedonistic selfishness, or the submission of the long path, the surrender to God that's at the heart of true religion?
I'm not advocating conversion, I'm pointing to the confused immediacy and the blinding greed at the heart of western social morality. It's corrupt, and corrupting.
We had physical immortality already, just not individually. Something that we are has lived with us and through us all along.
Selfishness is what's appealed to, and what answers willingly, ready to submit.
The greed, the willingness to sacrifice what's beautiful and graceful and obviously right for what's ugly and grasping - that's what's wrong here.
The argument is framed, as so much of it is now, by the same unseen hand, so that both sides lead to the same conclusion, by opposite paths.
Evolution is about death, that's why the simple folk are against it, they see their own doom there, and their masters are against it for the same reason.
The faith, my faith, is that there is a living heart to life itself. That nature is not just dust and random bits of accident. That the beauty we respond to that's ancient, far older than anything we've done, is an expression of something we are, something we have inside us in potential, all of us, even the weakest.
Submission to that is what's missing now, love of that is what's missing. Love of man, and the works of man, and the gods he throws up in his image, that's everywhere and it's destroying us.
The inertia is selfishness, the evil is selfishness, you can redefine it any way you want using any terms you want - it's selfishness at its core. Arrogance.
I think it comes from something that was told it had to go, and it wouldn't, and it's had to keep building greater and greater walls to protect itself from the results of its own refusal to submit. Until we get to this, we come to this place.
The argument will be that in the absence of ready answers that can be quickly understood and easily reproduced, we should continue in the direction we're going. It's a demonic kind of logic, and it benefits demons. We don't need techniques to save individual human lives, we need techniques to save the human race.
The reason fundamentalists don't like evolution is not, as the argument's been framed, because the Bible is in conflict with it. It's because their moral systems, and the true fundamental precepts they live by, are anti-evolutionary - as is modern medicine, politics, and social morality.
Anti-evolutionary meaning against evolution, opposed to its processes. Unless they're human-controlled, as in the breeding programs and genetic manipulations of modern agriculture and scientific research.
Human direction of evolution is framed as the only possible good. The very process that gave us life, that shaped our brains and hands, is discarded as a cold-hearted, and defeated, enemy.
Evolution is about people dying as much as it is about them surviving.
This whole enterprise is against that. It is a taboo so deep it's virtually non-existent in public discourse, the idea that there are too many of us now, leading directly, not to a return to the old ways of natural forces in interplay, but to human control of our evolutionary destiny.
That's the gambit. And as sure as you have breath, up there somewhere is the moment some collective of the elect decides it's time to raise the drawbridge and all that science and technology that seemed to be about helping the common folk and their lives, will prove to have nothing to do with common folk at all.
Evolution is about people dying. Any beautiful thing that's alive that you can name gets its beauty from the shaping hand of death. The wolf, the butterfly, the oak, the human female in her breeding prime. And our minds, our brains, the way we can think and conceive our way to dominance of the planet, that came from evolution, too.
But now we're setting that aside, and the tacit morality, while never being openly discussed, is that all births make holy each born life. It's true but only as part of a larger picture where death is also beautiful, and age, and all the spectrum of existence. Look at the humans this way of life ennables. And don't give me that gym-hard cosmetic pseudo-health. This is a breeding program more complex than most of us can see, its edges are too widely flung in time, and its slow work too long for our still-brief perspective.
The danger is this kind of talk gives power to those who would use their own criteria to cull the herd, and that's not my aim. But the alternative is going exactly there as well, with less room to shift. First break up the old ways of being, then disrupt the chains of stories and songs that held human commonality for the millenia we've been here. Then replace them with imitations and subtly skewed versions that will be acceptable because they'll be all there is. It's worked. The television is the story-teller now, and every one of the stories it tells are in a traditional line, all of them come through the filter of the machine and its masters.
We are adaptive creatures first, above any other skill or talent we can change with what comes, and we get that from having had to, and from leaving behind those who couldn't. That's evolution. Leaving behind those who can't.
Not on purpose, that's not what I'm saying.
Disease sweeps across the landscape, and leaves strong immune systems in its wake. We spit on that now. We scorn it. We create an immune system that's working only for the social group, while individuals without the strength to fight are held in place by the increasingly artificial biology we share.
The argument is that I'm suggesting we kneel to disease like it was a god or a master. No, I'm not saying that. I'm saying that it's a ruse to deliver the power and the keys into the hands of a cunning and manipulative trickster. And it's working. This is headed somewhere. It's a program of redirection. And since there will be, as there will with any evolutionary selection, those who benefit and those who lose, there is struggle, fighting, war.
The Pope is right to object to human arrogance, but the beauty of the scam is that the moral system from which he speaks is owned and operated by the people he opposes. It is an anti-evolutionary institution, his church. But he's still right.
The veil of Islam is constricting compared to the vibrant freedom of modern women in the West. But which of those two systems will endure great hardship better? The I-me-mine of hedonistic selfishness, or the submission of the long path, the surrender to God that's at the heart of true religion?
I'm not advocating conversion, I'm pointing to the confused immediacy and the blinding greed at the heart of western social morality. It's corrupt, and corrupting.
We had physical immortality already, just not individually. Something that we are has lived with us and through us all along.
Selfishness is what's appealed to, and what answers willingly, ready to submit.
The greed, the willingness to sacrifice what's beautiful and graceful and obviously right for what's ugly and grasping - that's what's wrong here.
The argument is framed, as so much of it is now, by the same unseen hand, so that both sides lead to the same conclusion, by opposite paths.
Evolution is about death, that's why the simple folk are against it, they see their own doom there, and their masters are against it for the same reason.
The faith, my faith, is that there is a living heart to life itself. That nature is not just dust and random bits of accident. That the beauty we respond to that's ancient, far older than anything we've done, is an expression of something we are, something we have inside us in potential, all of us, even the weakest.
Submission to that is what's missing now, love of that is what's missing. Love of man, and the works of man, and the gods he throws up in his image, that's everywhere and it's destroying us.
The inertia is selfishness, the evil is selfishness, you can redefine it any way you want using any terms you want - it's selfishness at its core. Arrogance.
I think it comes from something that was told it had to go, and it wouldn't, and it's had to keep building greater and greater walls to protect itself from the results of its own refusal to submit. Until we get to this, we come to this place.
The argument will be that in the absence of ready answers that can be quickly understood and easily reproduced, we should continue in the direction we're going. It's a demonic kind of logic, and it benefits demons. We don't need techniques to save individual human lives, we need techniques to save the human race.
