WHAT IS HUMAN?

The dispersal or evaporation of "God" which was the notion we've used to justify our morality, claiming that "He" told us what to do, has had a consequence related to what some claimed would happen:  lawlessness.  Unless some imaginary entity told us what to do, we could not sort out what's right or wrong.  No lightning bolt would intervene to destroy tyrants.  We are reduced to "carbon units," "meat sacks."

What has replaced the fantasy of a sky-bound dictator is science, but not what we think we know.  Rather, what we are just learning now -- that we know less than we think.  Our research tells us that a very small part of our bodily functioning is conscious and that it, that part in turn, is often busy justifying things we did unconsciously and can't account for.  But we DID do it.  Don't know why.  Make up reasons.

Many "facts" were just satisfying convictions that resist changing.  For instance, the idea that the Bible is a unified and unambiguous message from that guy-in-the-sky.  Scholarship tells us about the Bible being an accumulation of old writing, not even chapters in the same book, that has been translated to say quite different things at different times to suit changing culture, and is sometimes edited by authorities, like the committee in the fourth century that voted in or out each section, creating an Apocrypha of what was excluded.  You can explain that all you want, and people go right on treating it as the "Word of God," a supernatural unity.

What science dictates, both consciously and unconsciously, is not the idea of what God might be, but our convictions about what human beings are.  At a biological -- even reptilian -- level, we only believe that human beings are whatever people are like us.  The new heresy is not that we are descended from monkeys, rather that there have been lots of rough drafts of us, but we alone are the true human beings and everything was preparation for us.  But we assume that only people like us are also human, and the signs of who is human are quite specific:  do they dress like us, eat like us, smell like us, talk like us?  

Who do they say lives in the sky?  People who have no theory of God are not human.   The idea that our kind of hominin may be so maladapted as to be doomed is also inconceivable.  The idea that we may be transcended by better versions some day is inconceivable. Or even how to improve ourselves now.

Thought has gone in two ways, one that generously sees every biologically human as like us so that there is a taboo on killing each other in war or murder.  The other way finds or invents reasons to see other humans as sub-humans, merely animal, and legitimate to kill the way we kill pigs and cows and deer.  Most of us, however, still obey the taboo on eating humans, though cannibalism is being justified in small abstract thought settings.  I mean, it happens and sometimes you just have to.  I guess.

These two opposite convictions are both included in what philosophical and theological circles call "anthropology," the study of humans.  This is how we know that people kill and then rationalize it with fantasy morality and political justification.  This is how we know that some people are sociopaths, that they care nothing for the value or nature of other humans.   There is no cure.  It is a physical brain aberration.

Also, death and sex or love and sex are so confused that serial killers of children and girls can claim that they "loved" them as human and therefore killed them.  It was a way of "having" them.  There is something similar happening to leaders with power who order war.  Bombs give them erections if not emissions.

We have always separated science from religion, but anthropology is an area where the two are merged.  Therefore, institutions that claim to be religious must today take notice of science.  It has never been more true that hell is on earth, hell is other people.  In fact, both religious and scientific contexts must take a harder look at what is self-serving fabrication and what is carefully checked fact.  The evidence for what is NOT rationalization, bogus justification, fantasy, must be explicit and public.  Is the Pope the only one who knows this?  What kings grasp it?  What is a human being but an extrusion from or into the rest of the world, capable of reflecting on the quality of thinking, the legitimacy of emotion.  Yet we cope in large part by not knowing, not looking, not telling.  

At a time in my life when marriage and understanding of love were deeply challenged, a new wave of psychological thinking was growing, one that we have forgotten.  Instead of obsession with cobra-deadly evil in the name of domination -- which we have fallen into again in our media and politics -- the new thought was to look for what is healthy, beautiful and inclusive.  This has been corrupted by overextending the idea of human to include primates, then mammals, then all life, even the "thinking" grass.  It has also become a weird sentimentality supporting failure to act, even in supportive structural ways.  Bliss out.

Being human is painful as well as sometimes exalting so we try to keep control by smoking, drinking, chewing, indulging in ways we find will shut down or addle the mind.  We get the idea that the brain is the only organ that counts because of consciousness and think of ourselves as jiggly computers in a skull bucket with bodies only necessary to carry it around, entirely ignoring the wisdom of gut and butt.  We get "full of ourselves" and defy those who try to diminish us, or maybe fade into ghosts and go seeking someone who can restore us, pull us into a group, even a horde, let us merge with them.  We throw away what we have or acquire piles of stuff we'll never use.  All unconscious.

We can communicate, share ideas, talk and write, in a way we think is more than any other animals, even other hominins.  Some believe (hope) this is the way we'll evolve until we understand our existence as extrusions of a constantly transforming planet and can survive without killing each other.