Tag: god

Assumptions

The other day, I wrote a short post, “End Game.” I’ve been amused by the position that people won’t accept other genders because, God, and the Bible, or some other deity and religious document. I assumed that were it true that a deity created the original one or two sexes, they may now have decided to add more sexes. I assumed they could agree with that.

That might be a wrong assumption.

After posting that, I read an article about conservative American thinking in Salon. I infer from the article that Conservatives have a difficult time accepting change. So if God created two sexes and stopped, that’s it; the end. That chokes the life out of my position. They were taught one thing, so they believe one thing, and they can’t change their thinking to believe anything else. It’s a fascinating conclusion, because it’s not about politics or religious beliefs, but about brain structure and how our brains develop and work.

That leads to another assumption, embraced by so many, that we are all the same. An intriguing dichotomy arises: if you have a hard-wired conservative brain and were taught that everyone is the same, then you can’t change your mind, and yet you’re the very evidence that we’re not all the same. That explains why so many conservatives will drop back and point to differences in gender and sexual orientation as either choices or sicknesses. They can’t conceive of the third choice, that either their God has more in mind for the sexes and variations for humans, or that humans continue to develop and evolve. Like generals fighting the last war, their thinking is predicated on the past situation. To think that gender changes might be required for humanity’s survival is unthinkable, and unimaginable.

Now we’re entering X-Men territory. Yet, medical science can point to evolutionary changes and mutations beyond genders and sexual orientations that indicate, yes, human beings are dynamic and evolving. Changes have emerged, and will continue to emerge. Unfortunately, my recent reading about conservative thinking is that they have a hard time with science, too.

The way we learn has an impact, as well. We’ve learned that what we first learn often stays with us; it’s difficult to overcome what we initially learn, even when new information is later added that shows that we initially learned was wrong. Part of this also has to do with with our brains, memory, and wiring.

I wish I was more intelligent and better educated so I could understand and explain it all with more clarity and nuance. Sadly, I ponder if humans might end up destroying humanity trying to stay the same as were were when they believe they were created.

I hope that I’m just assuming the worst.

5

End Game

Lot of people are upset out there. They’re upset about this whole gay, lesbian, bi-, trans-, binary gender neutral thinking. They expostulate that it’s this simple: if you’re human, you’re either a man or a woman. If you’re a man, you have sex with a woman. If you’re a woman, you have sex with a man. Everything else is wrong; everything else is an abomination.

I laugh at that. They’re so absolute in their knowledge and beliefs. Many fall back to the idea that God (or Allah, or someone) created the two sexes, and it was written in the Bible or some other religious tome, or inscribed in rocks, or were whispered into ears, so, The End. There’s nothing to discuss. Two sexes make sense, because it’s all about procreation. Go forth and multiple.

Which is, you know, amusing. Did God finish, and say, “Okay, that’s that. What else can I do? I’ve got a lot of time on my hands. Where’d I put my list?”

You figure, if God, or some force behind creative intelligence, is out there, they’re probably trying new ideas. Maybe they have the big picture, and said, “Okay, I got to plan this carefully. Start with baby steps. Start small. First the foundation, universe, planet, and so on. You know, the heavens and Earth. Right. Now add people and animals. Start with two sexes, just to keep it simple. Then go from there, once there’s enough people. It’ll take a while, if I’m going to create one or two, and then have them multiply a couple at a time. I don’t know why I just don’t create the numbers needed now and be done with it – I am the creator, you know – but, whatever, I got the time. No hurry. We’ll have them procreate for thousands of years, get the numbers up, spread out across the planet, and then I’ll add more sexes later, along with new skin colors, like blue, and purple. That’ll be cool. Those other sexes and skin colors will be needed to finish the big picture. Okay, Miller time.”

I don’t know the big picture. I’m not God, or a God, or a prophet. I’m agnostic about having deities out there putting everything in place, pulling strings, and giving mysterious directions. I don’t know, though. You’d think that if you believed there’s some all-powerful being out there behind our existence, you’d trust them enough to believe that they’ll keep on creating, and that they have an end game in mind. You think you’d keep an open mind about it, because, you know, if you pass on, and come face to face with God, he – or she – might ask you, “Why didn’t you accept the other sexual orientations? Who do you think you are? Don’t you know how you messed up the big picture? You guys messed it up so badly, rejecting the others, that I might have to scrub it all, and start over.”

If whatever God is out there and does scrub it all and starts over, I hope he or she re-thinks those whole war, violence, and abuse angles. Other sexual orientations and identification doesn’t bother me nearly as much as all that pain and killing. That seems pretty senseless.

But then, I don’t know the end game.

5

The Now

“What is time? If no one asks me, I know; if I wish to explain, I do not know. … My soul yearns to know this most entangled enigma.”

I hear you, Augustine.

Writing science fiction that involves thinking about now, the past and present, and the various theories attempting to unify and explain everything, I ended up standing my thoughts on their head: instead of believing the past exists and the future is the potential outgrowth of the past, only now exists. We create now as it happens; without us to establish order to existence and reality, there isn’t any existence and reality, except that which we know now.

Yet, in creating now, we begin creating echoes of now that drift toward the past, creating a past. We believe, therefore, it was, ha-ha. As we conceive of structure to explain what’s going on, we’re creating what’s going on, establishing it as something more substantial, as it were with the laws and rules that we believe to be immutable. As others theorize, it’s our limitations and practices that actually establishes our expectation of how time flows, and causality paradoxes.

Yes, I know, this smacks of Sartre’s POV regarding essence and existence and others’ existentialist thinking. I get a kick out of running it through my mind’s treadmills, taking it back to its ultimate point: in the beginning, there was one. The one thought of others, and the others came to be in the moment called now, and that first one was called God.

God never liked the name God, and used multiple other names as he, she, and it did the same thing with other races, species, places, times and realities, becoming the first each time, and then creating a new now from which others created a past. It was natural he/she/it would become associated with the Trickster and the Mischief Maker.

Of course, just like the Big Bang Theory of how our Universe came to be leaves us wondering, what was there before the Big Bang, we always ask, what was there before the one called God?

He/she/it always answered, “I was always energy. Then, I thought, I think, therefore I am.” Others claimed they thought of it first, and phrased it a little differently. God knew better but wasn’t worried about gaining credit. He/she/it knew that fame was as fleeting as now, as certain as the past, and as secure as the future. And yet, he/she/it knew it was a fragile response, because if he/she/it was energy back then, that’s still something, and if he/she/it is right about being the first, then where did that energy originate from which he/she/it came to be?

Ah, there’s the rub. He/she/it likes to think of themself as a nested existence, beginning with nothing, and conceiving of themself as the first particle and then doubling up until he/she/it achieved sufficient energy to perceive themself, but he/she/it stews over such an answer as much as Augustine stewed over defining time.

All this thinking about physics and now isn’t new; others have come up with various structures of a Now Hypothesis, and are attempting to prove their hypothesis. For me, it’s all just a nice little fun diversion from the serious business of novel writing.

That’s all, for now.

 

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