Today’s Post 

Last week we continued our relook at God from the secular perspective, moving from seeing ‘Him’ less as a supernatural, separate, all-powerful person who ‘loves’ us and wants us to be good so we can qualify for a perfect afterlife, to understanding ‘Him’ as the basic agency of the flow of evolution seen in its increase of complexity ‘from age to age’.  Last week we extended this perspective to understanding how, for evolution to proceed, this agency’s participation rises from simple physical laws through biological principles to the appearance of an entity with consciousness which has become aware of itself: the person.  In such a way, God can be seen as ultimately personal.

Last week we also saw how, in a straightforward secular reflection, without the need for religious ritual or adherence to dogma, Teilhard demonstrates how any of us can begin to be aware of how this ‘divine spark’ is active in our ‘persons’.

This week, we will begin to explore how this understanding of the participation of the ‘ground of being’, the ‘divine spark” in each of us, is the cornerstone for the continuation of the evolution of the human species.

The Golden Rule: Recognizing the Spark

Nearly all of the world’s religions include a statement of the Golden Rule, generally considered to have been first acknowledged by Confucius about 500 BCE:

“What you do not wish for yourself, do not do to others.”

   This is commonly restated to “Treat others as you would wish to be treated”.  As such, all these religions acknowledge that this reciprocal process must itself start with not only some grasp of how we ourselves wish to be treated but the belief that our basic wish to be treated is somehow ‘universal’, shared by others.  This wish is ‘normative’, common to all persons.

Jesus introduces this third, ‘universal’, context to the Golden Rule when he restates it as

“Love God, love your neighbor as yourself.”

 This restatement carries forward the two basic Confucian concepts of self and others, but brings into play the idea that in doing so we are somehow engaged with the ground of being, and such engagement places us in the thread of ongoing human evolution.

Jesus’ statement is traditionally translated as “God requires us to love one as a condition of salvation”, but in our secular approach to God, we have begun to see ‘Him’ as the ground of being from which flows the principle of evolution of which we are the most recent product.  Such ‘reinterpretation’ offers a deeper ‘articulation of the noosphere’ than does tradition, and also ties into the understanding that our life and the energy of evolution are somehow tied together.

Secular Morality… 

We have looked at how the assumptions which emerge when we unpack the Golden Rule, particularly using the hermeneutic of Jesus, point the way to our emergent evolution as persons and as societies.   Thomas Jefferson’s approach ( as seen previously ) is an excellent example of such a process.  From this reference of September 14, 2017, we saw how Jefferson understood the full impact of the Golden Rule:

“I have no fear that the result of our experiment will be other that men may be trusted to govern themselves without a master.  I know of no safe depository of the ultimate powers of the society but the people themselves.”

   Jefferson expresses a very revolutionary concept of the human person and his society with these views.  At the time, the precedent for government was clearly to trust only in the provenance of royalty in the belief that if government were left to ‘the masses’, so the prevailing opinion said, chaos would result.  The belief that a consensus resulting from these same ‘masses’ could result in setting the course of the ship of state in a positive direction was very revolutionary, indeed .

This ‘will of the people’ is essential to our democratic form of government, but intangible and difficult to quantify.   Believing it to the extent that it is established as the basis for government has nonetheless resulted in a form of government that can be clearly seen to be highly successful, as Johan Norberg has described in detail.

…And Its Absence

Of course, it is very common even on the Western countries which have benefited most from Jefferson’s insight, to disbelieve that it exists.  Friedrich Nietzsche pulled no punches in his statement of disdain for the principle behind the ‘Golden Rule’, from his “On the genealogy of morals”:

“I abhor man’s vulgarity when he says, “What is right for one man is right for another”, “Do not to others that which you would not that they should do unto you”…   The hypothesis here is ignoble to the last degree: it is taken for granted that there is some sort of equivalence by value between my actions and thine.”

   In stark contrast to Jefferson, Nietzsche’s locus of societal order is not ‘the people’, it is the ubermensch, literally overman but usually translated as ‘superior man’.  As Steven Pinker wryly observes in a criticism of Donald Trump:

“..I fret about humanistic morality could deal with a callous, egotistic, megalomaniacal sociopath.  Nietzsche argued that it’s good to be a callous, egotistic, megalomaniacal sociopath.”

And Nietzsche’s rationale is that it takes such a superman to be the locus of social order.  Once the unworthiness of the underclass is established, it’s not surprising that it would take such a superior human to ride herd over the untrustworthy mobs.  Such disdain is the basis for the fear of ‘the other (Jews, Gypsies, immigrants, etc) that autocrats such as Hitler, Stalin, Mao and Kim instilled in their countrymen in order to promote themselves as ‘saviors’.

The Next Post

   Last week we took a relook at how God can be understood as the basic agent of evolution which over time adds a quantum of complexity to each new product, and how the current manifestation of this agency is the person, and how the basis of person is the extension of universal becoming as it manifests itself in every human.

This week we began to look at how this ‘divine spark’ can be seen as active in our social constructions, particularly in Jefferson’s assertion that “the people themselves” are the “safe depository …of the ultimate powers of the society”.

But we also saw how denial of this spark has historically led to some of the most heinous forms of government to have arisen in modern times, in the governments of Nazi Germany, Mao’s Red China, Stalin’s Red Russia and Kim’s North Korea.

Next week we will move on to see how cooperating with this ‘divine spark’ is essential to the continuation of the advance of evolution in the human species.