Rant - To Divide is Not Divine

The more I think about all of the seemingly senseless violence in the world these days, I keep thinking about how we humans seem to have the tendency to divide people into different groups. The type of division I am thinking about isn’t that which classifies people in ways that is edifying or trivial (e.g., bike riders vs runners). It is more in line with saints vs. sinners, Muslims vs. Christians, straights vs. gays, etc. I guess the divisions I am thinking are those driven by ideology, religion, politics and the like. The ones that are concerning me the most in this case are religion and ideology.

It seems to me that we should be able to more easily weed through the hateful and wrong religions and ideologies. By the way, I think there are many of them, but the level of hate and “wrongness” does vary in degrees for some of these. The first idea that came to me in this regard was prompted by some ideas I learned reading Brian Greene’s books about physics. I was particularly struck by his description of experiments that demonstrated that if one sends individual particles through slots on a plane you get the same effects as when you send many particles at one time. He compared this to the effect one sees when you see flowing water through a series of even spaced and sized slots on a plane. The water forms waves and the waves from each slot interact with each other. Sometimes the waves cancel each other out and you see waves intermixed with smooth parts. OK, remember I am not a physicist. Thus, I may not say this quite right, but I think I’m in the ballpark. The interpretation in the particle case is that the particles which were released 1 at a time could not have interacted with each other like the water did. Thus, any given particle once released individually has at any given moment infinite potential movements within the same kind of space as that which would appear if many particles were released through the slots at the same time.

You must be thinking, “where is he going with this?” Here: what if the Divine behaves in ways that is consistent with the same principles governing the phenomenon we observe. For example, what if any given human released into the world has infinite potential movements in Divine space. Thus, it is invalid to classify Muslim or Christian as religions as more or less divine then the other. The seemingly deterministic, legalistic, “extreme” points of view that say if you dogma isn’t exactly like mine then you are damned or you are fodder for extermination and abuse are WRONG.

So, the critical question becomes what defines Divine space. I suggest that we can judge Divine by its objectives. When these objectives are seemingly focused on killing people of label X, it is not divine. When these objectives are to abuse people who don't believe like you, it is not divine. When these objectives are focused on convincing yourself or others that others are damned because they don't think like you, it is not divine. It seems to me that right now there are a lot of groups that are not focused on making anything better as much as they are focused on simply making them worse for someone else. That is not divine. No one is perfect, but we should all strive for the divine.

By the way, I put the NATO-Caliphates war I referenced in an earlier blog entry in this non-divine category. Identifying 2 sides from which one can choose to join to fight is not the answer to our woes. It is not divine. It does not even exist. There is strife. There is hatred. There are horrible things happening that result in the deaths of those who don't deserve it. Failing to accommodate the times and seeking the divine will only make it worse. Let's stop dividing into Jew, Muslim, Christian, ... for non-divine purposes. He hurts us all and helps no one.