god-came-down

 

Bringing God Down to Earth

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“The vision of an incomplete (and even broken) world is documented by a verse in Isaiah 45:7 which describes God as the ‘Producer of light and Creator of darkness, the One who makes peace and Creates evil–I am the Eternal who makes all of them”
(Shlomo Riskin in an essay entitled ” Sanctity of Time, Sancity of Place, and Sanctity of the Human Being” in David Birnbaum’s and Benjamin Blech’s book entitled “Sanctification”.)
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What follows are a brief series of quotes appearing totally unexpectedly as a philosophical side bar in Gregory David Robert’s fast moving action packed gangster themed novel taking place in Bombay, India.
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“At the Big Bang, some characteristics were imparted to the born universe:  Space, Time, Matter, and Gravity are examples along with the Tendency Field which drives the Tendency toward complexity. I also want to say that a set of Positive Characteristics was imparted to every particle of matter at the time of the Big Bang.”
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“The Tendency Field operates on a very simple program of IF-THIS  THEN-THAT which runs everything everywhere.”
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“If you get in tune with the Tendency Field, through expanding and exploring the set of positive characteristics within yourself, the Tendency Field will respond with constant energy and affirmations.”
“If, on the other hand, you work against the Tendency Field, by being negative, unfair, unloving and unconscious of the truth, you weaken your connection to theTendency Field, and you experience existential dread no matter how rich or famous or powerful you are.”
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“If you remain connected to the Tendency Field, you have serenity”.
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“Life is connection, the world is connection and both are always impoverished by dislocation”.
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“Nothing is a part of the human condition, but our common humanity.”
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“Long ago early human beings learned through cooperation and love to fear no creature, and no place on land or sea. We are magnificent and we are malignant. But we can be anything we want ourselves to be, from killers of neighbors, to saviors of distant neighbors in our galaxy.  We can shape our destiny”
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What follows are more words from Rabbi Shlomo Riskin from the same article quoted above with some additional commentary in parentheses.
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Here is Shlomo Riskin discussing the thoughts of Rabbi Aharon Soloveitchik as to how tradational Judaism teaches us to connect to the positive characteristics within ourselves and with the universe as quoted above by Gregory David Roberts and which connects us to Isaiah’s vision of the “Producer of Light…and the One who makes Peace” (unless we through our ignorance and greed, selfishness and overall lack of mindfulness create an IF-THEN situation which triggers an automatic response from the Universe which brings about conditions of “Darkness and Evil”)
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“A person who has not yet recited a blessing (or does not recite a blessing at all) sees two separate worlds–heaven, which belongs to God, and earth, which belongs to human beings.”
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“Never, do the two worlds meet.  However, a person who is immersed in the world of blessings is able (through constant practice and the right Kavanah (Hebrew word for “Intention”) to perceive the sublime within the mundane, the godly within the earthly, the transcendent nature of God within the immanent universe.”
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“The food he or she is about to eat becomes a bridge between this world and God. Through the blessings, (over the food) a person (and a community) is able to bring God down into this world.”
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“Therefore, AFTER–and as a result of eating the fruit with the blessings having been said, an individual can truly feel that “the entire world belongs to God” (of which he or she as the eater of the food, and the maker of the blessing is connected to in an immediate and meaningful way).”
“Indeed (with the proper attitude) a person (any person and potentially all people) can bring God into the material world by means of an object as mundane as an apple or a piece of bread (IF eaten and appreciated with gratitude and with awareness of ecological, social justice and health issues) “
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And so we see a growing consensus between an ancient Prophet of Israel with two modern day Orthodox rabbis, and a modern day novelist related to the big existential questions of life…all of them pointing to David Birnbaum’s three volume masterpiece entitled “Summa Metaphysica 1, 2 and 3” in which he spells out in great detail his Potentialism Theory that encompasses all parts of the Universe as well as the Universe itself as everything that was, is and will be is on an “Infinite Quest for Potential”
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Michael Papo
mapapo44@gmail.com
www.PapoBlogSumma.com
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Hope.Sail
BEING HOPEFUL
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“The soft overcomes the hard

      the gentle overcomes the rigid
Nothing in the world is as soft
      or yielding or as powerful as water”
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Lao Tzu, “Tao Te Ching”
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(as translated by Stephen Mitchell)
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“He who brings peace to the High Places, (may he) bring peace to us, to all of Israel and to all who dwell on earth, and let us say, amen.”
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(updated ancient Hebrew prayer)
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In the 12/18/13 edition of “Logical Science” there is an article entitled “Q4P (Quest for Potential) What Is it? Why Do We Care?” In it we find the following:
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“Let us look at a selection of core metaphysics questions and see how (David) Birnbaum’s Theory of Potential–and then the entrenched establishment’s Theory of Randomness—come down on each of these issues:
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1) Is there an eternal dynamic?
Birnbaum: Yes, Quest for Potential (QP4)
Establishment: No, none
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2) What ignited the Big Bang?
Birnbaum: QP4
Establishment: Random accident playing out across infinite universes
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3) What drives the cosmic order?
Birnbaum: Q4P
Establishment: Random chance
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4) If there is a God what is the essence of God?
Birnbaum: Potential
Establishment: No God or any transcendent force
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5) What was the catalyst for life?
Birnbaum: Q4P
Establishment: Random accident
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6) What sustains life?
Birnbaum: Q4P
Establishment: no answer
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7) What drives evolution?
Birnbaum: Q4P (which includes genetic survival)
Establishment: genetic survival alone and random chance
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8) What was the catalyst for consciousness?
Birnbaum: Q4P
Establishment: Random chance
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9) Does Man(kind) have a purpose?
Birnbaum: To quest for his/her (its) optimal potential
Establishment: No/none
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10) Is there a purpose to the Universe?
Birnbaum: The universe seeks its fullest potential
Establishment: no purpose
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Thus, the battle lines are clear-cut. Birnbaum layers one single elegant concept across then entire spectrum of issues–and across the timeless cosmic continuum.  Aside from the one issue of Evolution, the Establishment does not even purport to provide one single answer.”
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 In the world of science and open inquiry…he/she who come up with the best answer, which by definition is almost always the most elegant and simple explanation, wins.
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In this case, as we have seen above, the establishment view that Randomness rules supreme when it comes to basic questions of cosmology pales and is defeated by Birnbaum’s theory of Quest for Potential.
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So the question is as follows:
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How did the Scientific/Philosophical/Academic/Establishment find itself pushed into the uncomfortable corner where an amateur philosopher beats them at answering the basic question of human life..which is “Does the Universe..including our individual lives have any meaning?”
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The Establishment answers as outlined above are cold, hard, heavy, stagnant, negative, lacking in movement, lightness, comfort or hope.
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How did this happen?
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When one considers the reality of human history..whereby so many individuals and groups in all corners of the world for the entire existence of human civilization have used the twin concept of “God” and the “Religious belief that one’s group and one’s group ALONE has been blessed by God” to enslave, control, manipulate, exploit, rob, rape, and when necessary kill part of or all members of a group(s)  who are not so blessed…then one can begin to understand how and why the liberal establishment has come to the corner it is now trapped in.
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To make major progress to build a fair and just society for all of its citizens….as demonstrated by America over the last 50 years….the very concept that one group of people (in the case of America we are talking about well to do and well educated individuals who could check off the boxes of being “White, Christian, Straight, Males”) having advantages and opportunities that were (not totally) but routinely denied to (almost) all other individuals had to be fought and overcome.
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Those on the outside were the demographic majority and were made up of those who fit into the categories of Black, Asian, Hispanic, Hindu, Moslem Jew, Gay, Female, Undereducated, Poor, Immigrant, or any wayward member of the ruling elite who in any way attempted to upset the elite desire to maintain the status quo of power authority, privilege and wealth.
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And as the ruling elite tended to explain and justify their superiority and the privileges that sprung from them by their being part of the inner group blessed by God, those outside this magic circle of privilege had to fight back and fight back they did.
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And the genius of America is that when Black Americans began to demand civil rights…the children of white veterans of World War 2, including many children of the Elite joined the movement for increased freedom for ALL Americans.
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And to build a fortress around these new found rights, liberals adopted the strategy that never again would they let any group use “religion” or “God” or “Choosiness” to justify the denial of rights and opportunities to anyone at anytime for any reason.
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And this fight and this denial of the misuse of religion to support the oppression of the many by the few has been one of America’s great gifts to itself and to the world.
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And to drive the final nail into the coffin of privilege for the elite..liberals upset the power of both “god” and of religion by establishing new “Gods” for themselves to answer the fundamental questions of life…which they “christened” as Reason” (from the French Revolution) and “Randomness” which they took from the biological sciences.
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And so here we are today 50 years later.
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The science of Physics and its related off shoots of astronomy and cosmology..when freed from establishment politically correct coercion… no longer totally supports randomness as the final answer to questions related to the creation of life of individuals and of the cosmos itself.
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And this is where Birnbaum come in…  Born into an American society that discriminated against him as a Jew, he lived through the metamorphosis of American society where we (while still a work in progress) have made more positive changes toward the social inclusivity of so many different “others” than ever before in human history.
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And Birnbaum being the “insider/outsider” has given America and the world a great gift.
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The liberal attack on religion was needed and was correct. But as often is the case in such heated battles..the baby is thrown out with the bath water.
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Randomness as part of genetics and of daily life is still a reality but now thanks to Birnbaum….wrapped around this hard reality is the softer, more flexible and evermore hopeful theory of Quest for Potential.
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The wheel turns. The concept of a universal power that created the heaven and earth and all that is within was first given to the world by the early Hebrews some 3200 years ago. This concept was corrupted over time..and is still corrupted as we see every day on TV with the religious terror that is encompassing the Middle East…and where it is still corrupted it still needs to be fought with ideas and as necessary also with force.
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But in a modern liberal society that we have in America where secularism is the norm and at the heart of public policy..we no longer have to deny the concept/idea/belief in a Life Force that created all of us and endows all of us with a potential that is our purpose in life to find and unfold, embrace and enjoy.
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Randomness and Reason are part of our world. We do not need any longer to spend much energy in embracing or rejecting these concepts because no reasonable person can deny them. Randomness and Reason are real but so is the old Hebrew concept that there is an Intelligent Designer that created the big bang that has led to the development of human life and human consciousness; What follows from this is the understanding that the task of all living things is to as best as they are able to reach their full potential without claiming exclusive rights to do so, and without denying this right to all those who also live on earth.
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We live in a world of rapidly expanding human consciousness and in a world that is shrinking before our eyes….as we clearly see when an Embola outbreak that may begin in far away Africa soon can make its way to our shores…or when a refugee crisis in Syria soon becomes a refugee crisis in Europe.
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There are no easy answers. The complications and complexities of providing a decent standard of living for some 7,000,000,000 people without having us all drown in pollution and the resulting global warming that will totally disrupt life on earth as we currently know it is mind blowing.
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But if enough of us reach deep to maximize our Quest for Potential..and whether we do this from a secular or religious perspective…we have a fighting chance to bring a measure of peace to ourselves, to our nation/tribe and to all who share the world with us.
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And if we don’t find the ways and means to do this we will all go down with the mother ship which is our complex, harmonious but ultimately fragile eco system
that can only endure so much abuse.
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We as human beings crave hope. It is the wind beneath our wings. It is the Life Fore within us and all around us…and it means we need to take good care of our selves, our families, our tribe and all that share this world with us including all other living things and the environment that sustains all of us.
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It is doable. There is reason to be hopeful.  But nothing is guaranteed. There is a great amount of meaningful work ahead for all us. And this is a good reason to get up every day and to be grateful for all that we have and for all that we can yet be.
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Michael Papo
mapapo44@gmail.com
www.PapoBlogSumma.com

A Connecting Bridge

a-bridge-of-purple-light-connecting-a-square-from-an-array-to-a-distance-yellow-point

“The very order, disposition, beauty, change and motion of the world and of all visible things silently proclaims that it could only have been made by God”

– Augustine, “City of God”

“The human race is just a chemical scum on a moderate seized planet”

      Stephen Hawking, as quoted by David Deutsch in the “Fabric of Society”.

“I do take life, mind and purpose seriously and I concede that the universe at least appears to be designed with a high level of ingenuity. It seems to me that there is a genuine scheme of things–the universe is about something”

– Paul Davies, “The Goldilocks Enigma”

And there it is:  We begin with a historical, traditional/religious point of view (Augustine); we proceed to a very modern, very skeptical, and very nihilistic point of view where Hawking basically writes off biological life in general and human life in particular as a statistical abnormality in an otherwise random universe with no meaning; and we end with Paul Davies, like Hawking a noted physicists and writer, who tries from a secular perspective to build a bridge back to Augustine. But where Augustine defines this “something” as God, and while Hawking denies its existence, Davies asserts that while this “something” (which the universe is about) exists he leaves it undefined.

Paul Davies in his very readable book “the Goldilocks Connection” spends hundreds of pages taking his readers through the history, thought process, and intellectual dilemmas and baggage that each of these three philosophical positions have and what modern physicists know, think and feel about the science of cosmology.

The very traditional and orthodox position taken by Augustine about the existence of a God who created the heavens and earth AND who tracks our every thought, mood and action, keeps copious records, and assigns, based on these records, either eternal damnation or eternal bliss to individuals at the moment of their death does not resonate well with most thinking people today.

The rejection of this position comes easily to people who resent the basic unfairness of the threat of eternal damnation for people who lived before the birth of Jesus; or who lived far from the Middle East and never heard of him in their lifetimes; or who honor God within their own traditions. The rejection of the Church’s assertion that one needs to accept Jesus as one’s personal savior or to suffer eternal pain as a consequence is made even easier when one becomes aware of the corruption, greed, lust, lack of compassion and overall hypocrisy exhibited by so many Church leaders over many hundreds of years.

The life of Stephen Hawking, confined in recent years to a wheel chair being totally paralyzed by Lou Gehrig’s disease, but with a very active and creative mind that has made him a world famous physicists, teacher and writer makes him a model for all of us as to how to have a meaningful life on many levels despite crippling handicaps….and this is true whether or not we accept or do not accept his assertion as to the role human life and human consciousness plays in the world.

And Paul Davies, trying to bridge the philosophical gap between the world of religious orthodoxy and the understanding of modern physics, seeks to affirm the possibility of there being somewhere in the mix a benign, if not defined, intelligent life force that is Not the controlling and punishing God of Augustine, or the Goddess of Randomness that so many modern thinkers pay homage to in any discussion as to whether the universe in general or our individual lives in particular have any real meaning.

It is into this discussion that the noted author and philosopher, David Birnbaum, offers his very thoughtful definition for that “something” which Paul Davies left undefined.

For Birnbaum, that “something”, as outlined in his three books “Summa Metaphysica I, II and III”, is the concept of “Potentiality” which he defines as a creative impulse inside the Life Force that drives all change, all evolution (random and otherwise) and is responsible for the Big Bang and the resulting cycles on all levels of energy/matter with regard to birth, growth, decline, death and the continued transformation of energy/matter to ever increasing and higher levels of complexity and level of consciousness.

Paul Davies writes as follows in “The Goldilocks Enigma”

“The carbon atoms so essential for life were forged inside stars somewhere billions of years ago. As these stars entered into the final stages of their lives their nuclear material collapsed to a density of almost a billion tons per square centimeter causing a cataclysmic explosion that propelled carbon laden star dust across billions of miles of space some of which ended up through a process of long evolution into biological life on earth culminating in the creation of human consciousness”.

The beauty of Birnbaum’s philosophical view of Potentialism is that it allows for randomness to function within evolution within an intelligent design that made it possible against overwhelming statistical odds for star dust from dying stars to find their way to a moderate sized planet and to produce the “chemical scum” that made human life possible.

The fact that Birnbaum is able to accomplish this without mandating or insisting that the Potentialism at the heart of the concept of intelligent design is linked to or restricted by any specific system of religious beliefs makes it possible for modern individuals living deep within a culture of secularism to take a fresh look at the challenging and complex cosmological questions with which physicists such as Stephen Hawking and Paul Davies are struggling with not only within the academic walls of their profession and publicly in their books and public discourse; but also no doubt privately within their own souls as they like all thinking individuals ponder the meaning of life.

The fact that Birnbaum finds within the Jewish tradition a deep mystical and poetical understanding of the Universe that is now being mirrored more and more by the experimental and theoretical findings of modern day cosmologists is indeed a vibrant, valuable and most welcome connecting bridge for those of us who have one foot planted in the world of Jewish tradition and the other foot planted equally as firmly in the secular world.

Michael Papo
mapapo44@gmail.com
www.PapoBlogSumma.com

MANKIND IN OUR EVER CHANGING UNIVERSE

space-light
“God hides Himself, putting aside His essential infiniteness and withholding His endless light to the extent necessary in order that the world may exist.”
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– Steinsaltz  “The Thirteen Petalled Rose” page 37
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“The great Tao flows everywhere.
All things are born from it,
yet it doesn’t create them.
It pours itself into its work,
yet it makes no claim.
It nourishes infinite worlds,
yet it doesn’t hold on to them.
Since it is merged with all things
and hidden in their hearts,
it can be called humble.
Since all things vanish into it
and it alone endures,
it can be called great.
It isn’t aware of its greatness;
thus it is truly great.”
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– Lao- Tzu “Tao Te Ching A New English Version” by Stephen Mitchell p.34
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“The cosmic order does not necessitate pain per se. It does necessitate, however, the possibility of pain. This was the ‘ransom’ paid by ‘life’ in its escape from the bottomless cosmic void. Humankind chose the Tree of Knowledge/Potential at Eden,rejecting zero growth” and embracing Life with its eternal promise of uncertainty, growth, free will and the infinite Potential of the universe of which human consciousness is a precious part.”
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– David Birnbaum, “Summa Metaphysica I”
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SOME THOUGHTS RELATED TO MANKIND IN OUR EVER CHANGING UNIVERSE
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Infants, and young children are basically helpless other than to communicate with piercing screams their need for food, milk, or comfort.
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As adults we look to ourselves to meet our own needs but by necessity we also need to take into account that in our complicated society we are totally dependent on others to grow our food, purify our drinking water, produce electricity, build our roads and bridges, rescue us if our homes catch on fire, maintain civil order, protect us from terrorism, educate us, and heal us when we are sick. We also depend on others to hire us, or to buy our products, to love us and enable us to establish families and to meet a wide range of emotional, physical and spiritual needs.
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So it is perfectly understandable that faced with continued existential anxiety for the health and well beings of themselves and their children that our long ago ancestors, wherever they lived on planet Earth, began to imagine, dream of, and yearn for some kind of supernatural power(s) to whom they could appeal  (as they once had as infants and small children) to protect them, help them, support them; and to give them good health, peace and prosperity; while simultaneously confounding and weakening/destroying any of their fellow human beings who actively desire, plot and execute plans to exploit, enslave, and or kill them.
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Throughout the past 10,000 years, human beings have shown great ingenuity, and creativity in developing simple to complex rituals involving the construction of huge buildings; plant, animal and human sacrifice; a variety of celebrations and fast days and prayer in an attempt to appease the gods, to seek their support, and to show continued good will (money in the bank as it were) against the day when the individual/family/group/nation in question would desperately need divine intervention to end a drought, heal them from illness and or stop their avowed enemies far from their borders.
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In more modern times, mankind is less vulnerable to devastation by nature as we have trucks to bring in life saving supplies and emergency medical assistance.
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But, as we all know, these same trucks in the hands of others can cause unspeakable amounts of pain and destruction: Think Nazis; think communism under Stalin; think Cambodia under Pol Pot; and think the horrors of the genocide of both the Holocaust in Europe and in Rwanda to mention just a few of the historical horrors human beings in all corners of the world have caused and endured in the last 75 years.
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There is, therefore, every reason for modern people to feel the same need for divine comfort as did our ancestors.
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But for modern college educated American young adults whose heads are swirling with facts and theories related to science, evolution, free will, the misuse of religion in the past to condone slavery and the power of the ruling classes, not to mention the misuse of religion today to deny women and gay people full civil and human rights… it is fully understandable why religion and religious ritual is viewed by many to be, at best, a support/crutch for those less educated, less prosperous and, without doubt, much less sophisticated.
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And yet………………
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And yet modern science….. while it cannot and will not ever confirm or support the concept of the existence of God….. is nonetheless coming ever closer to realizing that given the complicated physics that existed at the time of the Big Bang and the seconds, hours, and years that followed…that it is progressively harder to assert that all this evolution, and all that followed over the next 13.5 billion years leading up to the development of human consciousness here on earth was 100% totally based on Randomness.
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And a growing number of those whose professional career is focused at looking at this very question are beginning to publicly talk about the fact that since it is so statistically improbable that everything in the universe is due to randomness that other possibilities including Creative Intelligence need to be considered, at least theoretically.
This theoretical concept will, however, continue to be rejected out of hand by those whose “religious beliefs” compels them to continue to pay homage to the god of “Randomness as the mother of all creation, and the father of all change in a universe devoid of meaning”.
The counter concept that statistically is more probable than pure randomness is that somehow somewhere there is a creative Life
Force seeking through trial and error, and, yes, sometimes through the  pure randomness of biological evolution, to have brought human consciousness to the current point where our knowledge of the world is growing exponentially, and our Potential to reach out to the stars, as well as a deeper understanding of how our brains work has never been higher.
Our minds are never a vacuum, and we as human beings tend to become what we think, feel, and believe.
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The only chance we as a human race have NOT to destroy ourselves and the Earth on which we live, is to recognize our Potential for evil, as well as our Potential for love, and the fact that we have the Potential of Free Will and Free Choice.
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Prayer then, rightly viewed, is a very valuable form of mediation that pulls us away from the negative siren call of anarchy, randomness, and existential dread, and points us towards a view of ourselves and our world in which we seek to balance all the forces that swirl in and around us..seeking balance, beauty and peace as we struggle to live up to the Potential that lies within each of us to do our small or large part in healing ourselves and the world in which we all co-exist.
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Michael Papo
mapapo44@gmail.com
www.PapoBlogSumma.com

Living with duality

duality-girl

“I form the light, and create darkness;
I make peace, and create evil;
I am the Lord,
Who has made all these things”
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– Isaiah, 45.5
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“Good and evil form a duality. Creating potential for good, by definition, creates the inverse potential for evil along with it…..God’s omnipotence or non-omnipotence is not the issue. It is rather a question of definition. By definition, good comes packaged with concomitant evil.”
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– David Birnbaum, “Summa Metaphysica I”,  page 95.
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“The Tao doesn’t take sides;
It gives birth to both good and evil”
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– Lao-tzu,  “Tao Te Ching” 5
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It is not as if there were a separate “god” for good and a separate “god” for evil battling it out as it were; just as there is not a separate “god” for the lions and another “god” for the zebras; and one “god” for winter cold and another for the heat of summer.
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What we learn from individuals who have thought deeply about these matters…and whose ideas stand up to both reason and intuition…is that there is but one God who created a universe of dualities with infinite possibilities and potentialities working themselves out in and through the laws of nature, the evolution of species, and the hearts and minds, ids egos and super egos of that part of God’s creation that was created in God’s image.
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As human beings living in groups we are very keenly aware that whatever the circumstances there are always….at least from our limited and at times biased perspectives…. both in relative and in absolute terms, winners and losers.
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And as human beings we are sometimes joyfully and sometimes painfully aware that we live in a world of constant flux and change. Potentiality may rest every once and a while and for short periods of time the status quo may seem immovable until it is not. The wheel of time does turn, and life, moves with its manifold complexity and seeming contradictions, moves with it.
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This fact of life was recognized by both Isaiah and Lao-tzu. And at the very center of the wheel… which Isaiah calls “God” and Lao-tzu calls “the Tao”…lies the duality of both Peace (stillness) and Potentiality (movement).
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Religion and spirituality, at its worst, becomes the “opium of the people” as well as rationalizations by the “winners” of society to flaunt their power over those they have defined as “losers”.
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At its best, religion and spirituality teaches us of the infinite complexity and potentiality of life. It teaches us that the world is in constant motion and that our task as human beings is to accept this reality, NOT with our potentiality for selfishness, envy, greed and stupidity; but with our potential for intelligence, compassion, acceptance, love, hard work, creativity and joy that is available to all of us created in the image of God.
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Michael Papo
mapapo44@gmail.com
www.PapoBlogSumma.com
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Adam and Eve in the Garden II

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“On what level is the Garden of Eden tale to be understood? Did the first man and woman (Adam and Eve) determine the course of untold billions? Was my destiny chartered by one one or two primitives?”
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-Questions posed by David Birnbaum in “Summa  Metaphysica 1” page 90
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A Brief commentary on David Birnbaum’s “Theory of Potentialism”
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The question of “On what level is the Garden of Eden tale to be understood” summarizes a major fault line that exists today in American society.
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The far right of both Christianity and Judaism would answer this question with great confidence and a certain smugness: “We (in contrast to the unbelievers in our midst) understand it (this tale and the whole Bible) AS it is written.”
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In contrast, the “unbelievers” symbolized by the secular left in today’s political terms, would, because they are on the defensive, respond with a somewhat longer answer:
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“The story of the Garden of Eden, the entire bible, and god him/herself (to be politically correct) are all fairy tales that no longer need to be or should be read or thought about, much less venerated….because if one begins to take the bible seriously on any level (including as philosophy or literature much less, god forbid, as a religious or spiritual guide) one risks the very serious possibility of sliding down the proverbial slippery slope where pure fanaticism, intolerance, and dangerous behavior toward others awaits.”
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For most people, mainly concerned with day to day life of surviving and prospering within a rapidly changing and at times disorienting world, philosophic arguments over the bible outlined above is becoming increasingly irrelevant.
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Proof of this is the continued decline of church and synagogue attendance by all ages but most pronounced by the young. The exception to this rule is in the most fundamental religious groups who feel increasing isolated and therefore all that more determined to preserve their religious points of view.
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For more liberal churches and synagogues swept up in our culture’s scientifically correct understanding of evolution, and  based on the new god known as Random Selection with no context, it is very hard for these religious leaders to present any kind of acceptable religious philosophy other than “Be nice; Be kind; Be considerate, and Be tolerant”…which while is important and valuable advice is not a sufficiently enough deep philosophy to bring people coming back to the pews or to convince them to contribute to or publicly identify with any particular religion.
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And as the gap between left and right grows, the opportunity to find common meeting places decreases with unfortunate consequences for America.
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But even though “religious” people think they have ALL the answers, and more secular people think that because the universe unfolds ONLY through random selection, as is well known in the halls of academia, there, therefore, are NO answers;  it is still nonetheless true that all human beings continue to ask and struggle with the questions of
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“Why is there evil in the world?” and the even deeper question of “What is our life all about?”
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With regard to the first question as to “Why is there evil?” the answers are not so hard to come by.
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Freud has taught us that all human beings, from Adam and Eve going forward, have an Id, Ego and Superego. And that when young innocent children are traumatized, brutalized, abused and neglected that their later ability to contain the selfishness, wish for revenge, rage, lust, disregard for others may know no boundaries; and the resulting weakness of their ego’s and superegos to regulate, contain and transform the raw and now traumatized energy of their Ids can sometimes result in massive acts of self destructive and destructive behavior that can cause great pain and suffering in ever growing concentric circles.
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With regard to natural evil..the pain and suffering caused by nature being nature…with shifts in weather patterns causing floods or droughts, not to mention the earth shaking due to the violent movement of fault lines that criss cross the world; and thereby making a huge proportion of human beings vulnerable to massive acts of natural destruction …which we can try to remedy with good building codes, but which are not sufficient to protect against the instant damage that major earthquakes have  and will continue to inflict on both minor and major population centers.
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Given Freud, and our understanding of how nature works one does not need fancy or complicated philosophical or religious theories to account for man made and natural disasters.
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But one does need a good philosophical theory  to even begin to discuss, much less wrap our arms around the harder question of “What exactly is the meaning of our lives?”
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It is to reflect on this question that David Birnbaum in his book “God and Evil Summa Metaphysica 1” postulates his theory of “Potentialism”…a theory that gives space for a religiously oriented person to accept evolution and randomness within evolution as part of a larger context going back to what ignited the big bang in the first place; and space for more secular inclined individuals to begin to understand that the recognition of evolution within the context of “Potentialism” provides the context which allows for continued intellectual, emotional and spiritual contemplation of a major philosophical question that our scientific theories cannot by definition answer.
.
In this light, Adam and Eve were not two primitive who on a whim or by poor judgement or ignorance or by seduction by a snake, or the malicious advice of Satan gave up for themselves and for all future generations the comforts and security of the Garden of Eden.
.
And if one adopts a more nuanced view of Adam and Eve one might indeed begin to see them as the first conscious philosophers and religious leaders in recorded human history.
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And within this philosophical framework there is the understanding that Life was/is/and will continue to be about Potential expressing itself through opposites, balance, and the continued expression of potentiality in every aspect of the Universe.
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Adam and Eve’s great realization was that if they accepted the opportunity to continue to live in the static but comfortable womb of the mythical Garden of Eden it would be to opt to return Life (their own particular lives as well as the full Potential of the Life Force of which they felt  themselves to be an integrable part) to the static moment before the big bang…before Potentiality first expressed itself; and before they as individuals had a chance to connect their potentiality (small p) to the larger Potentiality (large P) that created the Universe and against all statistical odds brought Life and later human consciousness into being.
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Michael Papo
mapapo44@gmail.com
www.PapoBlogSumma.com
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Choices

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Under the heading “Evil and Necessity”, David Birnbaum in his 1998 book “Summa Metaphysica” 1 asserts:
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“With the creation of potential for good, which is required for man to be able to reach his spiritual potential, potential for evil indirectly, but nevertheless inexorably, came into existence as a consequence.” (page 94)
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And some 2800 years ago the Hebrew Prophet Isaiah, reflecting on his mystical connection with the Divine, reports that God had communicated to him the following message related to the issue of good and evil:
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“I form the light and create darkness;
I make peace, and create evil;
I am the Lord,
Who has made ALL THESE THINGS” (emphasis added)
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-Isaiah 45.5
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Between these two dates an academic question emerged that ignored the complex and nuanced “primal organic forest” of interconnectedness as portrayed by both quotes, above, and used an ultra-sophistacated line of argument based on an assumption/assertion made up out of full cloth, as it were, and to be found nowhere in Scripture.
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The question is as follows:
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“IF the definition of God is HE who is ever present, all knowing and all powerful, then how can there be evil in the world without immediately diminishing one of the three attributes whereby God is defined?”
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And, (in contrast to the historic and prophetic voice of Isaiah) IF one accepts the view of God (as all powerful, ever present and all good), and given the recognition of Evil in the world, then it makes no sense to respect, admire, venerate much less pray to such an incomplete and flawed deity. In which case:
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Score one for secular man; zero for the man of religion; God Gone; Game over.
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But as stated above, the interconnectedness of Good and Evil…as interwoven possibilities to be activated or not by the free will of human beings…a set of conditions created by God… there then is indeed room in our complex world for theology to be a part of our philosophic understanding of our world and of our place in it.
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All three Abrahamic faiths..and all world religions… teach us that IF we open our hearts we will experience  love and compassion towards ourselves, our fellow human beings, and all of creation; and we will work in harmony with others, respect the fragility of our eco system, and we will focus our individual and collective energy to maximizing our creative potential in every area of peaceful human endeavor.
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And we are taught that IF we don’t open our hearts to love and compassion what will almost automatically flow into the vacuum are feelings and convictions of anger, rage, lust and envy which collectively lead us to foul our own nests (mother earth) and our relationships with all those around us.
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The glory and strength of being human is our Potential to be able to chose to tip the scales toward peace and harmony. But with this Potential for humans to chose  the good, as Birnbaum describes above,  came the Potential for humans to chose the opposite.
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And again, we have Isaiah’s testimony that God created and sustains both options, and two separate but linked paths for humans to follow.
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Evil then is NOT something that God allows to happen because of inattention, or lack of interest, or of a sadistic part of his divine personality, or because of incompetency, or lack of power. Evil exists in the world because it was God’s will to give human being the dignity and autonomy to live their lives according to their own will/desire/and understanding taking all things into consideration..which is the exact thing that makes us fully human.
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In Freudian terms, the choice is between giving into the selfish cravings of our ID…something  we all possess..and the more refined and civilized prompting of our ego and superego.
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Hard choices, yes, but not impossible ones. To blame God for our failings both  individually and as families, communities and nations, and for our poor choices is a cop out.
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And if we ask: “If God made us this way with the Potential for good and evil, why didn’t He at least give us an owner’s manual and a set of easily read and remembered instructions which would be valid throughout the ages?”
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And the answer is that through the prophet Micah, we have a set of  instructions that are short, easily understood and universal in nature”
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“He has told you, O man, what is good,
And what the Lord requires of you:
Only to do justice
And to love goodness,
And to walk modestly with your God”
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-Micah 6.8
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Michael Papo
mapapo44@gmail.com
www.PapoBlogSumma.com

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Theory of Potentialism

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“On what level is the Garden of Eden tale to be understood? Did the first man and woman (Adam and Eve) determine the course of untold billions? Was my destiny chartered by one one or two primitives?”
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Questions posed by David Birnbaum in “Summa  Metaphysica 1” page 90
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A Brief commentary on David Birnbaum’s “Theory of Potentialism”
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The question of “On what level is the Garden of Eden tale to be understood” summarizes a major fault line that exists today in American society.
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The far right of both Christianity and Judaism would answer this question with great confidence and a certain smugness: “We (in contrast to the unbelievers in our midst) understand it (this tale and the whole Bible) AS it is written.”
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In contrast, the “unbelievers” symbolized by the secular left in today’s political terms, would, because they are on the defensive, respond with a somewhat longer answer:
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“The story of the Garden of Eden, the entire bible, and god him/herself (to be politically correct) are all fairy tales that no longer need to be or should be read or thought about, much less venerated….because if one begins to take the bible seriously on any level (including as philosophy or literature much less, god forbid, as a religious or spiritual guide) one risks the very serious possibility of sliding down the proverbial slippery slope where pure fanaticism, intolerance, and dangerous behavior toward others awaits.”
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For most people, mainly concerned with day to day life of surviving and prospering within a rapidly changing and at times disorienting world, philosophic arguments over the bible outlined above is becoming increasingly irrelevant.
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Proof of this is the continued decline of church and synagogue attendance by all ages but most pronounced by the young. The exception to this rule is in the most fundamental religious groups who feel increasing isolated and therefore all that more determined to preserve their religious points of view.
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For more liberal churches and synagogues swept up in our culture’s scientifically correct understanding of evolution, and  based on the new god known as Random Selection with no context, it is very hard for these religious leaders to present any kind of acceptable religious philosophy other than “Be nice; Be kind; Be considerate, and Be tolerant”…which while is important and valuable advice is not a sufficiently enough deep philosophy to bring people coming back to the pews or to convince them to contribute to or publicly identify with any particular religion.
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And as the gap between left and right grows, the opportunity to find common meeting places decreases with unfortunate consequences for America.
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But even though “religious” people think they have ALL the answers, and more secular people think that because the universe unfolds ONLY through random selection, as is well known in the halls of academia, there, therefore, are NO answers;  it is still nonetheless true that all human beings continue to ask and struggle with the questions of
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“Why is there evil in the world?” and the even deeper question of “What is our life all about?”
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With regard to the first question as to “Why is there evil?” the answers are not so hard to come by.
.
Freud has taught us that all human beings, from Adam and Eve going forward, have an Id, Ego and Superego. And that when young innocent children are traumatized, brutalized, abused and neglected that their later ability to contain the selfishness, wish for revenge, rage, lust, disregard for others may know no boundaries; and the resulting weakness of their ego’s and superegos to regulate, contain and transform the raw and now traumatized energy of their Ids can sometimes result in massive acts of self destructive and destructive behavior that can cause great pain and suffering in ever growing concentric circles.
.
With regard to natural evil..the pain and suffering caused by nature being nature…with shifts in weather patterns causing floods or droughts, not to mention the earth shaking due to the violent movement of fault lines that criss cross the world; and thereby making a huge proportion of human beings vulnerable to massive acts of natural destruction …which we can try to remedy with good building codes, but which are not sufficient to protect against the instant damage that major earthquakes have  and will continue to inflict on both minor and major population centers.
.
Given Freud, and our understanding of how nature works one does not need fancy or complicated philosophical or religious theories to account for man made and natural disasters.
.
But one does need a good philosophical theory  to even begin to discuss, much less wrap our arms around the harder question of “What exactly is the meaning of our lives?”
.
It is to reflect on this question that David Birnbaum in his book “God and Evil Summa Metaphysica 1” postulates his theory of “Potentialism”…a theory that gives space for a religiously oriented person to accept evolution and randomness within evolution as part of a larger context going back to what ignited the big bang in the first place; and space for more secular inclined individuals to begin to understand that the recognition of evolution within the context of “Potentialism” provides the context which allows for continued intellectual, emotional and spiritual contemplation of a major philosophical question that our scientific theories cannot by definition answer.
.
In this light, Adam and Eve were not two primitive who on a whim or by poor judgement or ignorance or by seduction by a snake, or the malicious advice of Satan gave up for themselves and for all future generations the comforts and security of the Garden of Eden.
.
And if one adopts a more nuanced view of Adam and Eve one might indeed begin to see them as the first conscious philosophers and religious leaders in recorded human history.
.
And within this philosophical framework there is the understanding that Life was/is/and will continue to be about Potential expressing itself through opposites, balance, and the continued expression of potentiality in every aspect of the Universe.
.
Adam and Eve’s great realization was that if they accepted the opportunity to continue to live in the static but comfortable womb of the mythical Garden of Eden it would be to opt to return Life (their own particular lives as well as the full Potential of the Life Force of which they felt  themselves to be an integrable part) to the static moment before the big bang…before Potentiality first expressed itself; and before they as individuals had a chance to connect their potentiality (small p) to the larger Potentiality (large P) that created the Universe and against all statistical odds brought Life and later human consciousness into being.
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A Brief Commentary on the Question of Good and Evil based on David Birnbaum’s “Summa Metaphysica 1″….A Modern Day Midrash
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“In the Beginning”–actually before “THE beginning” there was (no)thing. No life, no movement, no understanding, no gasses, no chunks of matter hurtling through the cosmos, no explosions, no heat, no cooling down and no light; and no human consciousness to appreciate what was, and what was about to happen.
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.What was before “the beginning” was Pure Potential which our scientists and many religious leaders today imagine that all that ever was, is, or will be was somehow or other contained in an unimaginably tiny microscopic speck of energy/matter…. self sufficient unto itself, quiet  but coiled like a very tight spring and waiting for some deep internal process inside itself to express its latent potentiality.
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And when that fateful moment arose for this latent Potential to rise into existence, it did so in and by an evolutionary process of what is now commonly referred to as the Big Bang.
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The big bang began and set in motion a process of evolution that is still going strong today…some 15,000,000,000 years later with the creation of uncountable galaxies, stars, planets, moons, meteors, black holes, space dust, and the very concepts of space and time; as well as our own planet earth teeming with life, and human beings in constant strife with nature and other human beings as human consciousness  struggles to understand its origins.
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And as scientists continue to map out theories of what happened in the seconds immediately following the big bang, the big unresolved and fundamental question that remains is “Whether this entire process was/is completely random? Or whether the Big  Bang was started, guided, and maintained by Potentiality unfolding through the active creative intelligence of a Life Force…that has as one of the arrows in its quiver, as it were, the condition of evolution through time within an overall framework?”
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In  historic Jewish tradition, the Life Force that activated the potential at the core of the big bang is named “God”, or in Hebrew, as one of its many names “Adon Olam”…the “Master of the Universe.”…with whom we as human beings have an ability at some minimal level to understand and to be in communication with.
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Over time this “communication” has been envisioned as having taken place in, through and by dreams, animal sacrifices, (and tragically also by human sacrifices), song, dance, mind altering drugs, and a wide range of religious and spiritual beliefs, doctrines, actions, celebrations and rituals.
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Jewish mystic belief as well as the Torah itself, takes us back to a time when God spoke to Adam and Eve, Noah, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, Moses, and later in a more subdued form to the Hebrew Prophets.
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And from this “Speaking” Jewish mystics, philosophers and religious leaders have concluded that it was God’s need to speak, and to have someone else there who could understand and to be, in Martin Buber’s terminology a real “Thou” to God’s “I” that was the motivation for God to unleash the Potential…. the ignition of which produced the big bang and all that followed.
—————————————————————————————————————-
“The Garden of Eden tale, which is fittingly placed at the commencement of the biblical narrative, is a philosophically exquisite theodicy/philosophy wrapped in an image-ladden, but ultimately sophisticated, parable.”
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(“Summa  Metaphysica 1”, David Birnbaum, page 87)
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“Midrash Rabbah, Genisis 49, no. 20 portrays Abraham as expostulating with God: ‘If you want a world, you will not have justice; if it is justice you want, there will be no world. You are taking hold of the rope by both ends—you desire both a world and justice–but if you do not concede a little, the world cannot stand'”.
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(“Summa Metaphysica 1, David Birnbaum, pages 86-87)
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And God wished to have a “Thou” to relate to his “I” and in doing so he released the power of pure potential into the world through the evolutionary process of the big bang, and the first creatures that came into being were the angels.
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And how marvelous they were: Quick to Praise, attentive, perfect work ethic, never disagreeable, and so beautiful and graceful to watch in flight.
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But from God’s point of view, talking to the angels was like flipping a coin to decide whether He or satan would pay for beer; when there was only one coin, and that one coint was manufactured to always land head’s up; and God always got first call….a wonderful scenario if one wanted 100% security and never wanted to buy satan a beer (not a bad choice because a drunk satan was even more trouble than a sober one); but totally unsatisfactory if one wanted more than, in Martin Buber’s terms, an
“I- It” relationship with the world.
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And we know this because we are here and because God “wanted” a true “I Thou” relationship with at least some small part of His massive universe—a relationship not with dead matter, or with pre programmed angels, but with real live and dynamic creatures with minds of their own and thus quite capable to respond to God with a “Yes” as well as a “No”; or out of the complexity of their beings respond with a “Yes/No” or a “No/Yes”; or the dreaded “No/No”; or the highly desired and valued “Yes/Yes”.
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And here we come to the crux of the matter,
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God could not have a true “I Thou ” relationship with humankind IF he created them like the angels: beings who lived forever without suffering, violence, illness or natural or man made evil including death and the pre-recognition of death.
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In fairness to God, He tried his best to struggle with this conundrum, and with his deeply felt desire to protect his creation of mankind from suffering and pain, He at first pulled back from immediately establishing an “I’ “Thou” relationships with Adam and Eve, and placed them instead in the protection of the Garden of Eden as a kind of trial run to see where evolution and their own free will would take them.
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God wanted to see whether his newly created human beings would opt to be like the angels and live eternally in peace, tranquility and total comfort by eating the fruit of the Tree of Life, or whether they would on their own choose freedom over comfort; autonomy over dependence; adventure over inertia; mortality and an “I Thou” relationship with God, rather than immortality and an  “I It” relationship with God by being self willed, and rebellious and eating from the Tree of Knowledge.
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And God having just won by a coin flip another bet for free beer from Satan, sat back and waited to see how the drama he had constructed would conclude.
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And to His immense satisfaction, Adan and Eve were soon growing their own food outside the garden.
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And so we come to the question…as all of us who delve in philosophy must:
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“And how is it possible, therefore, for an all present, all powerful and all good God to allow his creatures to suffer pain, misfortune, illness, grief sadness depression and death? And how is it possible for this very same God to allow natural and man made evil to cause so much needless pain and suffering to so many people?
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And when we look at the issue of God and evil in this light, we come to realize that by necessity God had no choice.
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If God was to fulfill his desire to have an authentic “I Thou ” relationship with human beings and if mankind was to have an authentic “I Thou” relationship with God, as decided at the dawn of human history by Adam’s and Eve’s choice to eat from the Tree of Knowledge then natural and man made evil would hence forth, by definition, be part of the world in which we live.
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It is, of course, entirely possible that many of our fellow human beings would, if they had the choice, have voted for Adam and Eve to have stayed in the Garden, and for human history never to have gotten started and perhaps for the latent Potential that fueled the big bang to never have happened.
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But these choices have already been made, and as there is no turning back the clock, our task is to understand that the Potential in all of us; in the universe; and in our relationship with each other and with our Creator Is huge, Is still very much untapped and Is available to each and every one of us to do much good, and to bring much joy and enlightenment to a world very much in need of our activating the Potential for good that is in us and all around us.
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How we do this is clearly a much more valuable, and critically important question than the endless and totally non constructive academic debate in which we feel sorry for ourselves and fantasize having a God who would allow us to have both our freedom and autonomy when convenient and to have the Garden available to us when desired, and to be angry and dismissive to the point where we simply no longer see the Potential that created the world and continues to sustain it.
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Michael Papo
mapapo44@gmail.com
www.PapoBlogSumma.com

The 36 “Tzadikim”

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Optimism about life, humankind, and the general state the world is in, is often in short supply when one looks around, reads the newspaper and contemplates whole areas of the world being driven back to the barbarism of the dark ages.
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And when one reflects on the “sanity” and “civilized” behavior of what modern civilization in our own day is capable of doing as evidenced by the horrors of the Holocaust, ethnic cleansing in Bosnia, and genocide in Rwanda, Cambodia and Sudan one can see why an existential pessimism may indeed be warranted.
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And yet life is not all bleak. Here in America we have generation by generation freed ourselves not entirely, but in very significant ways from views and prejudices that in the not so long ago past led to very serious discrimination and suffering for women, people of color, people with disabilities, people incarcerated for long terms for relatively minor drug offenses, and people whose sexual orientation is towards people of their own sex.
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The fact that we currently have an Afro-American finishing up his SECOND term as President of the United States means that his first election was no fluke; and the fact that a very conservative oriented US Supreme Court has endorsed the concept of Gay Marriage as the law of the land speaks volumes as to how our society has evolved to become more inclusive.
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And yes, while it is true that black men are still gunned down unnecessarily by white police officers, it is also true that these acts are now unanimously condemned at all levels of government by both black and white elected officials. And this is a far cry from just 50 short years ago when lynching in the South was a relativly common experience and where senators from southern states were able for decades to prevent the US Senate from approving any kind of national anti lynching laws which basically left million of black American citizens living in the South unprotected from lynch mobs instigated by the KKK.
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Judaism as a culture and a religion has always, in spite of often cruel realities, offered up a nuanced optimistic view of the world which began with father Abraham heading out on a long and dangerous venture to a new land.
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Some 3800 years later the Chief Rabbi of pre-state Israel, another Abraham (Abraham Isaac Kook) in his book “Orot Hakodesh” (Holy Lights) as quoted in David Birnbaum’s “Summa Metaphysica 1” (page 154) wrote as follows:
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“Light is steadily pitted against the dark, and light will increasingly overcome the dark. Nothing remains the same; everything blooms, everything ascends, everything  steadily increases in light and truth. The enlightened spirit does not become discouraged even when he discerns that the line of ascendence is circuitous, including both advance and decline, a forward movement but also fierce retreats, for even the retreats abound in the potential of future progress”
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But what happens when there is a “fierce retreat”and a functioning, beautiful, productive, and creative society is condemned to smoke in the ovens of Auschwitz and Treblinka.
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Victor Frankl, the noted Viennese psychoanalyst, philosopher, author and Holocaust survivor as quoted by David Birnbaum, page 154 of Summa Metaphysica 1, relates to this very topic as follows:
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“But I prefer to live in a world in which man has the right to make choices, albeit wrong choices, rather than a world in which no choice at all is left to him.  In other words, I prefer a world in which, on the one hand, a phenomena such as Adolph Hitler may occur, and, on the other hand, phenomenon such as the many saints who have lived”
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No doubt many of us, including me, would greatly prefer, if given the choice, to give up a few saints in return for Adolph Hitler to have been one of the many millions of caualities of World Wart I.
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But this level of “choice” is not given to us.
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What is given to us is the old Jewish Tradition of the 36 hidden “Tzadikim”…(righteous people/saints) whose very existence keeps the universe as we know it from collapsing.
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I must admit that I do not know where when and how this story/myth came into being. And, in any event, It is not intuitive, at least for me, to think, feel, or believe that the fate of the universe as we know it depends on the number of “Tzadikim” NOT falling from 36 to 35…and that such a slight change in numbers could possible mean so much.
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And as I pondered this matter, valuable insight appeared, as if out of nowhere, in the editorial section of the NY Times in an article by the noted author and  Professor of Neurology at the NY University School of Medicine, Oliver Sacks.
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In an opinion piece entitled “My Periodic Table” published on 7/26/15, Sacks writes as follows and hereby indicates his scientific understanding that the line between existence and non existence is a very fine one…just as Jewish mystical belief, as indicated above, postulates that a reduction from 36 to 35 “Tzadikim” could have cataclysmic consequences:
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“In a recent issue of ‘Nature’, there was a thrilling article by the Nobel Prize winning physicist Frank Wilczek of a new way of calculating the slightly different masses of neutrons and protons. The new calculations confirms that neutrons are very slightly heavier than protons–the ratio of their masses being 939.56563 to 938.27231–a trivial difference, one might think, BUT IF IT WAS OTHERWISE THE UNIVERSE AS WE KNOW IT COULD NEVER HAVE DEVELOPED” (emphasis added)
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What we learn from this is that if the relation between neutrons and protons did not fall exactly in the place where the percentage difference between them in terms of the ratio of their masses was greater or less than .001376509 the universe as we know it to be with the reality of life here on earth and the potential for life in other places would in scientific terms not be possible.
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It would indeed seem…both scientifically, and from Jewish mystical tradition… that we live on an existential knife edge between being and non being..both in terms of the lives of each individual as well as the overall existence of the universe and that human consciousness…feelings, thoughts an actions, as symbolized by the 36 “Tzadikim” plays a very important role in keeping the precarious nature of our universe in a sustainable balance.
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One way to look at the concept of the “36 Tzadikim” is to view all of the Jewish people, and indeed all of the world’s population, to be divided into 36 groups..and in each group there is a constant battle between compassion and cruelty, love and hatred, greed and sharing..and the ongoing struggle to move forward to fulfill our Potential or to back away from this struggle.
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The good news is that we can and should be inspired, assured and reassured by the words quoted above of Rabbi Kook:
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‘Light is steadily pitted against the dark, and light will increasingly overcome the dark. Nothing remains the same; everything blooms, everything ascends, everything steadily increases in light and truth.  the enlightened spirit does not become discouraged even when he discerns that the line of ascendance is circuitous, including both advance and decline, a forward movement but also fierce retreats, for even retreats abound in the potentials of future progress”
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And so it was, so it is, and so it will be..and all together just like the mass of neutrons is slightly higher than the mass of protons…and thereby allowing our universe as we know it to exist…the ratio of the “Potential of future progress” that supports and sustains the 36 “Tzadikim” is, was and, according to Jewish tradition, will, thankfully, always be slightly higher than the “fierce retreats”..both internal and external that obstruct our forward progress.
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Michael Papo
mapapo44@gmail.com
www.PapoBlogSumma.com
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