Essays
revised May 24,2021
The Meaning of Life: Introduction
by A. Cantante
A significant portion of the world's population is Christian, so this essay is specifically for them, as a reminder or wake-up call.
Members of other faiths may find some things of meaning, especially those that share part of the Christian scriptures.
I think that you could sum up the world religions who share some of their sacred scriptures by saying God wants to be with human beings, His people.
It started with Adam and Eve, who chose not to put God first.
Abraham was God's next overture which lasted three generations, with Isaac and Jacob, and beyond.
It is unclear how close the descendants of Jacob were to God in their four hundred years in Egypt.
We only know that they cried out to Him for delivery from their slavery.
Moses was the next overture by God, in a sort of double mission: to rescue the children of Abraham from slavery
and make them His Chosen People in a world inhabited and ruled by pagans-people who failed understand the true meaning of God
as the One Creative Force in Whose Image they were made.
Though God manifested Himself to the Israelites in a way never seen in history to that point in time, the Chosen People
very soon demonstrated a frailty common to all humans: ingratitude. Despite being saved by mighty miracles, they
almost immediately rebelled against God. Due to Moses' pleading, God spared them but they had to wander in the desert
for forty years before entering the Promised Land.
Not only were they ungrateful, they did not have faith that God would continue to provide for them , and complained.
They even told Moses that they were too afraid of God's Voice and He should not address them anymore.
God agreed, and said He would send a Prophet, an Israelite like Moses, who would carry His word to the
people. All Christians know who this was to be.
Once in the Promised Land, they asked God for a king like the other nations had.
If God could feel bad, this would be the time. He said He was their king,, but they wanted a human one instead.
Predictably, most of their kings did not follow God's laws, and the second-to-last (Herod I) definitely did not want God to reclaim
His kingship.
God's next (and final) overture was Jesus of Nazareth, the promised Word of God, who came to bring the Chosen People back to God.
As before, the Israelites missed the point of their existence-to be close to God. They wanted a king of clubs and spades
and diamonds, not a king of hearts. So they persuaded the Romans to release a murderous revolutionary, and crucify Jesus
for no other crime than trying to return them to God.
The rest of the story is summarized in John 3:16 and Revelation 21:3.
Evolution as a Way of the Cross
by A. Cantante>
Finally we see a common ground for all Christians and evolutionists. Has it never occurred to you that we (and all life as we see it today) are the result of suffering and death? The poet Robinson Jeffers expressed this concept in The Bloody Sire:
What but the wolf's tooth chiseled so fine
he fleet limbs of the antelope?
What but fear winged the birds and hunger
Gemmed with such eyes the great goshawk's head?
All we see around us, including our own body, is the result of a constant pruning of the emerging tree of life,
by the forces of natural selection. The very essence of most animal life is to destroy other life, often in a violent manner.
We got to be what we are today because those ancestors who were not as smart,or strong, or swift, met with disaster. If we are indeed the Image of God, we became that way through eons of horrific suffering .
And how was the Christ able to come into His Glory? By the horrific suffering of the crucifixion. If we were healed by His stripes, then we were also “healed “by the stripes of our ancestors, going back to the first cell. There is a similarity: Christ did for us out of love, what out ancestors did for us out of blind necessity. Natural selection made our bodies god-like, and Jesus made our souls God-like.But we know that neither body nor soul is invulnerable to destructive change.
So in the spiritual process and in the evolutionary process we go forward, without guarantees. We don’t know if our individual or collective form will persevere, nor can we assume our soul, saved by Christ,will fulfill the great potential it was given with such generosity.
Golgotha -the Way of the Cross… and the way of evolution.
Why No One Should Confuse Creationism With Truth
by A. Cantante
Creationism is not about truth, nor even about the path to truth. It is about one or more religious groups trying to impress their beliefs on the general population. Other religions in America that do not believe in the Bible also have creation beliefs, which are no more supported by scientific evidence than is Genesis. These non-Bible religions (e.g. those of Native Americans)could argue that if creationism is deemed to have validity based on one chapter in one book written thousands of years ago, their creation myths have at least equal validity, since they are at least as old and as venerated.
If God wanted to create each organism by special creation, He certainly could have. It’s just that He chose
not to. Instead, He chose the process of organic evolution, an unfolding of life over millions of years.
Creationists see God in a simplistic way, characteristic of the primitive mind. I do not, as an evolutionist,deny the existence of a Creator. Indeed, I believe God gave us science as a tool to understand His creation.Creationists insult God in two ways: first, by assuming He is limited to human means of making things, and secondly, by rejecting His gift of science to understand nature.Put simply, creationists see God as a deus ex machina, instead of the Cosmic, Unknowable Force.He/She is. As someone said, we have created God in our image, rather than the other way round.
In acknowledging a Creator God ,I do not mean to invoke the concept of Intelligent Design, except in the most indirect way. There is a God, I believe, and He did create the Universe. But organic evolution has its own laws,
just like the laws of physics. I believe that God simply (if we can ever juxtapose those two words)
took advantage of the results of a mechanism He put in place long ago. It would be like mankind
controlling fire for warmth, and then ,thousands of years later, using its light to read by. This is not
to say that God did not know the future, but rather that His Plan was (and is) so far beyond human
understanding, that simple cause and effect logic is inadequate to explain creation.
Recall the days when people first dared to believe that the earth orbited the sun, and was not he center of
the universe. You could be put to death for a belief that now every school child takes as fact. The Christian
Church was just as sure about an earth-centered universe as some churches now are about creationism.
In truth, creationism is not about faith in God, it is about a feeble attempt to shore up the human ego. Some of us
cannot bear the thought that we are not special. First , we learn that the earth is only one of eight planets orbiting the sun, then we learn there are myriads of suns, some of which surely have planets like earth, and then we learn that God did not even create us specially in one day, but did it over 4 billion years, and gave us ancestors that looked suspiciously like the apes we mock in the zoo. How humiliating.
In all this, our arrogance has blinded us to something all religions are happy to admit: humans are
flawed to their core. We compare ourselves to angels, made in the very image of God, but often-even the
most decent of us- act like devils, sometimes acting far worse to our conspecifics than the apes whose
relationship to us we so vehemently deny. And maybe that is why it is so hard to accept our lowly beginnings;
ust like individuals with low self-esteem are far more sensitive to criticism than better-adjusted individuals,
our collective subconscious knows our flaws, failings, and willful evil acts. If we cannot believe that God
created us in a special act and time, then we must face ourselves, finally, and take responsibility for our existence.
A final note: even the creationists do not believe babies are found in cabbage patches. We all know that every
human starts out as a single cell and slowly develops into an individual(as do all creatures). If we do not see the han