The quote below is from Psalm 8:4, but it also exists in Job 7:17 and Hebrews 2:6. Here a religious thinker is regarding the idea from a conventional point of view, a few decades ago.
". . . I must try to answer the question raised by King David in his Psalm: “When I consider thy heavens, the work of thy fingers, the moon and the stars, which thou hast ordained, what is man that thou art mindful of him? And the son of man that thou attend him."
Both men and women in the "Western" world -- where ever people are Jewish or Christian and probably some other closely related institutions --have been mulling this idea for a long time. The answers change over time as we learn more about the world. We've survived the idea that we were little clay puppets and also the theory that we were once monkeys who mysteriously transformed. Serious people understood early versions of evolution, which has partly been thought of as a tree, as a pilgrimage to the future, or as a huge wheel.
Now there is a totally different vision of what life itself is, and therefore a new vision of humans, a new understanding of sentience (living with thought). We know that everything is code, both the DNA code that creates and runs our bodies and the electromagnetic code of sense organs translating the world to us. We've dumped the notion of God as a great big land-owning white man, who was a mirage anyway. Until now we had assumed that even if we weren't in the image of our mirage we were more special than other creatures. Now we see that the world and the other creatures are what make us who we are, pressing us into our shapes. Lose them and we lose us.
We see this planet -- if not the whole cosmos -- as enveloped in codes of life: ingenious, interwoven, barely perceptible to us but omnipresent. Some "religious" systems have already suggested something similar as did the early "Western" people. (West of what? On a sphere can such compass points be absolute?) Even the movies speak of "the Force."
We used to think every human who appeared to be in one body was an individual according to a unique DNA code. This is true as a beginning, but as soon as the blastophere of a mammal begins to grow, it edits the code to suit the part of the body being built. It builds the airplane as it flies. Bits of code go up the umbilicus and live in mom forever. By birth the microbes, little independent cells, have joined the party -- coming and going according to the environment, the economy, and all these living others, not necessarily human at all. Bits of your dog are now living in you.
Like the elements, like the idea that energy can become matter and vice versa, the creatures that are existing now are those who managed to survive so far, not as individuals -- for all of us die eventually -- but as a code pattern. Thus, no one really dies but is only transformed. Death is not much of a puzzle (unknowable) but suffering is. Why must we suffer? What does it have to do with death or survival? Is it the price of self-awareness?
The reciprocating puzzle is joy and delight. They make us want to live more, bigger, wider, with more others. How does that interact with suffering? How does one affect the other? Why do we always think of one thing opposed to its opposite when we know that so much is mixed, spread along a spectrum, capable of transforming, harbouring exceptions.
The "West" is always struggling with individual versus community. Science says we need each other. But also, the community needs the lone adventurer who enacts the Campbell hero cycle of going to see what there is out there and coming back to tell the others.
When we lived in valleys and along ridges that separated us into tribes, we developed the technique of protecting ourselves by hating others. This has persisted too long and has translated into stigmas against one practice or another. Cultural codes have imitated biological codes by trying to survive by oppressing others. This is a deadly and doomed strategy. As is the idea that simply being virtuous and "smart" can assure survival to children by avoiding vaccines and certain kinds of knowledge, like where babies come from, while promoting others, like how to have a bigger orgasm than anyone else.
The true nature of God is Time. The true nature of human beings is survival. Humans have understood that if they can dance with time, finding and accepting new ways, they can survive, especially if they hold hands with others and pull everyone along. This is the beginning of a whole new religious point of view, an idea that life is music both sad and celebratory, and that we can all hear it most of the time if we help each other.
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