A little over a year ago, my life went through a turbulent series events that changed everything; I mean all areas of my life and mind shifted radically. I haven’t told that story in detail yet, but it boils down to this: I was shaken and thrown out of all my mental boxes. I was tossed naked into the world with nothing to hold on to! And it was the best thing that ever happened to me.
After falling out of my mental boxes and dusting myself off, I realized I found myself in a wider, freer, more exciting reality. And inspecting the rubble, I discovered one of those boxes had been ‘science’!
How do you feel about science? What does it mean to you? I feel pretty safe in assuming, since this is the internet, that you love and revere it! I’ve noticed this trend growing in line with the development of the internet. Nerds used to be marginal, science used to be niche, but now nerds and science are king in the new mainstream culture. But I have to point something out: science has become the religion of the internet-age.
What’s wrong, did it strike a nerve to hear science called a religion? If it did, that should be your first clue that it is.
Before I go any further, or make any unnecessary enemies here, I want to make it clear that I’m not a ‘science hater’. See, like all religions, criticizing science (especially online) makes egos very twitchy, it makes people want to place the critic in a box that’s ‘anti-science’, casting them in the ‘enemy’ role so they can proceed to hate on that person without feeling bad about it. So before anyone succumbs to that, let me announce here clearly: I love science! Ok?
My relationship with science goes way back, even to my very first memory of life. I often define myself as “artist” but the fact is, before I ever scribbled a doodle, I was a scientist. I don’t mean I have a science degree, or that I work in a lab; I mean that ever since my first moment of awareness, I’ve been plagued by an unquenchable need to understand … EVERYTHING! From a young age, that was the one and only purpose of my daily existence, the one task I was always working on: Understand – Understand – Understand! To see something I didn’t understand would torture me. I was notorious for dissecting any mechanical toy just to see how it worked … I usually had to do this by breaking it open, knowing I could never play with it again, but understanding was more important than enjoyment. I was willing to sacrifice the joy of a thing to satisfy understanding! I was willing to destroy a harmonious structure to gain knowledge. -That’s a scientist- So I was a scientist first, in the same way I’m also an artist: At heart. It’s stitched into the fabric of me.
It also means I’ve never been able to fool myself with a convenient lie to avoid a difficult truth, or even worse, to paint-over science-the-religion’s devil: The Unexplainable! It’s exactly this inbuilt principle that calls me to point out the problems I see in today’s science. To pretend everything science is fine-and-dandy is a lie, there are some serious issues to face. So now you know where these criticisms are coming from, I can continue…
Point 1 – Science, the organized religion:
As I already stated, today Science has become the major religion. It’s also been masqueraded as the religion called Atheism, which holds science as the whole of its belief system. Really, both are one and the same: Science-the-Religion and Atheism are interchangeable titles. Let’s examine the evidence.
First I volunteer my personal experience. Think back to my earlier story about latching on to science as a child. There was a red flag there which is easy to miss; fear. I turned to science because I was scared.
I only saw it in myself once I started paying attention to the mechanics of ego. It boils down to this: Nature, Life, the massive forces of the universe, reality itself; to become conscious among these forces is absolutely terrifying! This is the core challenge of the human experience, all of us are terrified all the time because “what the hell is going on here?!”. Terror must be the first thing a newborn feels; think of that raw scream we all let out when first entering this world! Then as our conscious mind develops into youth, we all latch on to something to cope with the overwhelming mystery and chaos of mere existence! We all seek some refuge from the howling monster that is reality.
Some latch on to the older religious systems like Christianity, fortresses of poetry and intuition; I latched on to science, a fortress of hard facts and control. My lifelong need to understand everything has actually the basic human fear of the unknown. I became unhealthily attached and dependent on science out of fear, desperation to kill the unknown or at least keep it away! The same way vulnerable people become trapped by a cult. That alone turned science into a religion, because religion can be defined as “any system that a human gravitates to in order to make sense of existence and inevitable death”. In itself, there’s nothing wrong with that, it’s only natural to gather an understanding of existence through life experience. The problem comes when the ego treats a system as a refuge, a fortress against terror instead of a rough guide for navigating it.
No fortress is unshakable, consciously or not, your ego knows it. This leads to defensive behavior when you bunker down behind shaky walls. Ask yourself, why be defensive if your fortress is flawless? And if something even needs a fortress, doesn’t that make it innately weak?
When you latch on to a system with that kind of ego-driven fear, it turns from an explainer-of-reality into a wall against reality. We all clearly see the blindness and shortcomings of other faiths and belief systems, some of which appear completely insane compared to our views. Yet when it comes to science it somehow can’t be questioned, can’t be criticized. But the fact is, each side can find fault in the other because each is faulty. Science is no exception.
Science has become a wall against the unknown, which only allows-in what is controllable and understood. From the inside, this creates a perpetual illusion that it understands everything! This is just another fairy tale. Fully aware of how much it doesn’t know, science-the-religion usually prefers to act defensively against the unknown, rather than embracing it.
The signs are everywhere once you start looking at the idea that science has become a religion. The Higgs-Boson, nicknamed ‘the god particle’; this hints at the true intent of science, to find a god they can accept. This is a religious motivation. Meanwhile, attacking the ‘god’ of other faiths, Neil DeGasse Tyson, the current popular culture poster boy for science, has said things such as “God is an ever-receding pocket of scientific ignorance.” First this is a thinly veiled egotistical attack against all faiths of the world. Further, it suggests that in his mind, science takes the seat of god; his personal savior and truer god, named science. This also assigns the word ‘god’ to his rival, the remaining unknowns of the universe; his aggressive view towards it reveals a fear of the unknown which motivated him to cling to science so defensively and egotistically. Finally, the wording “ever-receding-pocket” paints that age old delusion of “any moment now, science will know everything” when in fact, science is a pathetically minute bubble of knowledge growing across the face of the entire universe, aka the ‘god’ in that quote. It is science that should be called a pocket, not mystery: We know barely a pinprick in the scale of existence.
A more humble man wouldn’t talk this way. I used to idolize Mr. Degasse Tyson as I see so many others still doing, until I started viewing ego as the red flag of a trapped mind. The man is dripping with ego, unfortunately. I signed up to his twitter feed once, hoping to be fed interesting and wonderful facts about the universe; all I found was a stream of snarky attacks at people of faith, and other airs of ‘this person is stupid, that person is stupid”…. Insecurity and ego were all I found.
As I survey the landscape of outspoken and popular poster boys for science or atheism online and in media, I can’t help but notice a pattern: Most of them are angry, aggressive, antagonistic… Dare-i-even-say, somewhat childish. I see very few of them advocating their position from a place of joy, which suggest their position is one of insecurity just as it used to be for me. If you want to see science well represented, look at Carl Sagan, a man who in my opinion advocated science wonderfully. In a balanced way, without ego or insecurity, and most of all with an open sense of mystery. Sagan was one of those true scientific hearts that never forgot that science was only the sum of “what we know so far”, it seems that to him, everything was possible.
I can just feel it; somewhere, out there, the more I talk about this stuff the more upset and insulted someone is becoming … To that person, thanks for listening! Stay with me now: Pay attention to the gears turning inside yourself:
-Are you sure this urge to attack isn’t based in insecurity?
-Are you sure my words warrant attack? What threat have I delivered you?
-Is it because I oppose your standing saints? Shades of religion…
-Is it because you feel I’m calling you ignorant?
-Are you assuming that I must be illogical, ignorant, uneducated, flat-out-stupid?
-Are you assuming I must be a ‘religious nut’, placing me in the ‘enemy’ box?
-Are you feeling that I deserve less of your respect because of my views?
-Do you think I need to be ‘saved’ from my own ignorance, or ‘silenced’, before I ‘infect’ others with my ‘wrong’ perspective?
-Is that burning in your gut loaded with a sense of entitlement, righteousness?
Welcome to ego-based religion, my friend!
You’re in a box! I’m just trying to show you the walls! — All of those reactions are calling cards of an exposed ego thrashing for pacification. Don’t be so easily scared into submission; you are not your ego, you can ignore it! Your ego’s screaming ‘DON’T LET HIM RUIN MY ILLUSION OF SAFETY!’ Just like a person of faith reacts against science when it threatens their views with facts. You’ve judged followers of other faiths for behaving this way, don’t be a hypocrite… Be a real scientist and consider the evidence running wild inside you right now.
I can speak with some authority on this defensive mentality because, as I said, I was in that box! I know it well… So how did I get out? I wasn’t so lucky to have someone spell it out like this, I had to find the door myself; with a little tough love from the universe.
Through good or bad luck, I happen to have led a life peppered with impossible things. Distributed evenly throughout my life are dramatic events which science says are NOT possible, do NOT happen. But as a scientist at heart, I couldn’t dismiss them. For most my life I’ve tried to minimize, deny, and rationalize these things. Not able to properly diffuse them, I filed them away in a back drawer of my mind, earmarked as flukes and curiosities: Labels of desperation. Today I can honestly say that these things terrified the hell out of me and threatened my sense of having a grip on reality. They were alarming for the same reason my words are upsetting to other boxed minds; they were shaking my fortress, showing its weak points. I would turn to my god, Science, for answers and it had no power…It even turned aggressive on me and saying I must be crazy, I must be lying, I must have imagined things… Like meteor strikes from the universe, life kept throwing me impact after impact of in-your-face impossibility ever since childhood. Time and again it was showing me that science wasn’t a god. It’s only recently that it all reached critical mass, the wizard’s curtain fell, and I accepted a basic fact: Science doesn’t know nearly everything, science is not a complete system of truth, not even close. There are more things out there we don’t understand than what we do. The only logical option was to abandon science as my be-all and end-all of understanding. Today I’m somewhere outside the walls of science, but I still carry the best of its tools with me. So in short, I was broken out of the fortress of science not by force but by demonstration. The universe has flashed its secrets at me repeatedly, and I could no longer accept science’s position that these experiences don’t exist and are impossible. Remember that I’m a highly logical and scientific thinker, not satisfied with shaky evidence. I know that I can never convince anyone of my impossible personal experiences because I can’t reproduce them, but know that it takes a lot of evidence for me to accept or declare anything. My first instinct is always to explain something scientifically. My own logic pulled me out of the box of science, which is the same door I’m trying to share with you now. Logic.
Back to the box: It’s only logical that any boxed-position doesn’t encompass everything. There is an inside and an outside to every box. A box with nothing outside it is a whole (w-h-o-l-e). A person in search of greater knowledge should always be looking for the boundaries of his own box, and stepping through the exit. When there are no more exits, he will have arrived. There are things outside science that exist despite science’s inability to dissect them; its denial that they exist does not erase those things from reality. Historically, science has always denied and ridiculed new frontiers, only to be proven wrong soon enough. All too often these outside things are regarded with ridicule by the scientific-establishment of the day, driven by insecurity. For example, your own consciousness is one such thing: An amazing mystery that is all too often taken for granted. Awareness is still completely unexplained by science, which maintains your soul does not exist. Yet, there you are, listening to me, I can only assume.
I should make it clear here that science has developed a twin-meaning in society. There is science-the-process or the-technique and science-the-religion, science-the-institution. I appreciate and respect science-the-process. I agree with the concept of understanding through evidence and exploration. I agree with expecting evidence before assigning belief. My beef is with science-the-religion which behaves as a refuge of cowards, a fortress, limiter of knowledge, resister of change, trapper of minds.
Point 2 – Science, arbiter of reality.
Did you know modern science used to be an underground resistance movement? There was a time in history when the catholic church had a complete monopoly on reality and knowledge in western society! What the church said was not only law but the acceptable view of reality. Nothing existed that the church did not approve existed. For example, the sun spinning around the earth: the church was behind that one. Some people born with curious minds like mine wanted to explore the mechanics of this world and saw evidence which could not be ignored: These were the founders of science. The church found this opposition threatening to its fortress. Not to mention controlling a human reality allows you to steer the humans trapped inside it. As a result, all scientific exploration was made illegal; this was the age of heresy. Heretics were often men of science, who had to live in secrecy and crime to plant the founding seeds of modern science. For example, it was a sin against god and therefore illegal to dissect human bodies, so anatomical researchers began grave-robbing at night in order to further knowledge of anatomy. This was the foundation of modern medicine. All branches of science: Medicine, Astronomy, Physics, Chemistry; all have their roots in this era of oppression and rebellion.
Eventually the people did break free from the church’s iron grip, and those beginnings set into motion the entire competitive dynamic between Christianity and Science; a war of belief systems. From the very beginning, it was all about battling egos, battling world-views, and to this day that old grudge keeps things that way. Science vs. all faiths, Christianity vs. all faiths: Same thing, all ego.
But now look at what we have today: Today science has become the new arbiter of reality. Of course this has never been declared outright, but its popular figures and followers flaunt that attitude. To claim belief in anything outside Science’s approved model of reality is to be exposed to ridicule by-and-large, it’s become socially acceptable, even cool, to treat these humans as lesser-minded. It’s ok to attack people outside Science, just like it used to be ok to attack anyone outside Christianity. The creation of demons, sounds religious to me! I would argue that a mind stuck in a box is poorer than one which explores many views.
A battle of realities between two boxed minds is as ironic as two caged birds telling each other theirs is the truer sky.
Ironically though, a mind that allows itself to wander out of Science’s beliefs is more of a scientist than one entrenched in Science-the-fortress. Meanwhile the one stuck in a box will never discover any new ground. Human advancement comes thanks to people venturing outside acceptable limits-of-thought.
Time to drive-home the point: Science is not the arbiter of reality. It can never claim or act from that position until it can explain all of reality – All of it! Despite its constant delusion, no, science is nowhere near that point. A complete understanding of all things is not just around the next breakthrough. Science only has a piece of the answer; just like everyone else. So far, I see no signs that science is anywhere near explaining any of the meaningful human questions: What is reality? What is life? What is the universe? What is consciousness? Science still doesn’t even understand why gravity happens, despite knowing how it works.
Part 3 – Science the mechanic.
Science has what is called a reductionist-mechanistic view of reality. That means it thinks everything can be explained and understood by reducing it to smaller and smaller parts, with everything in existence just a set of mechanics. This may sound all well and logical, until you consider the unstated implications in that view: One of the big ones is that you don’t have a soul; you’re nothing more than a machine, NOTHING MORE. How do you feel about that? Do you feel like a random result of chemical reactions? Many aspects of your body clearly are mechanical, but what about your raw awareness of experience; that unexplainable spark that can only be called a mind or soul? The ‘experiencer’ inside you, experiencing things. Does it make sense that a clock with the right arrangement of gears would somehow become aware like you? — That’s what science thinks!
One of the founders of science used to dissect dogs alive. He once sliced-off the lower tip of a living dog’s heart, inserting his finger inside its beating organ, and noted his findings about the functions of the heart. One French scientist, Magendie, nailed a dog’s limbs to a table, and dissected one half of its body while it still lived, exposing and separating out all of its nerves. Then he stopped for the day announcing to his audience that he would finish the other half the next day, if the servants would be kind enough to keep it alive overnight… Barbaric; we hold this view today. But hey, life was just a soul-less machine in their eyes! That thrashing and those yelps of pain were just mechanical reflexes, right? You can do all kinds of immoral things when you decide nothing is sacred… A serial killer might have the same view of the humans he kills — does that make it ok? The truth is science hasn’t changed that position since then; it still regards all things as soul-less machinery which allows it to commit all sorts of immoral acts against life and nature. But it’s all ok as long as it’s ‘for the good of humanity!’ right? Well, if it was socially acceptable, science would do the similar things to humans too. It was only for good PR that it holds humans and pets as exceptions to the rule, while in truth: Science doesn’t believe you’re anything more than a set of mechanics. A dirty stain it would rather you don’t think about.
This highlights the problem in a purely reductionist-mechanistic approach to all things. Consider this example: Imagine a bunch of microbes that are also intelligent. Place their scientists on a computer screen and ask them to explain a displayed image using only the reductionist approach. They will start by taking the screen apart, eradicating the image they were meant to understand. From the very start, they’ve failed. The screen will be reduced to smaller and smaller parts, each of their functions probed and understood. ‘Nobody panic!’ they’ll claim when the image vanishes ‘We’ll find the answer if you just let us keep digging!’ They will feel so close to understanding the amazing mystery of ‘screen’ just in time to fall across the signal cable. REVOLUTION! All will be in awe of microbe science as the books are rewritten to consider a non-local signal. The image will surely be found at the other end! The cable will be followed until the much more complex computer is reached, ‘The God Box!’ which will also immediately be dismantled as it’s explored, until the computer is scattered all across the room in well labeled bins, also wiping out the running program that had sent the image… Science will have discovered so much but will have destroyed the original mystery, no closer to understanding it and in fact having destroyed it forever! They could put the computer back together molecule by molecule, but the memory will have been wiped forever! They will never be able to understand the program that originally formed the image. A sense of emptiness sets in, filled by the assurance that more dissection will someday explain it all. The keyboard, the electrical grid, the room, the house, all will eventually be corroded away by this effort but the image will never be found again. That’s not even factoring in the completely alien organic human which created the image in the first place! That would be a whole other unbelievable revolution… They might take the human apart too, never realizing it was a gargantuan sentient being.
Your consciousness is just like an image on a computer screen, just like a program running on a computer, it isn’t a thing, but an event. It’s happening in matter but it isn’t matter… It’s made of energy but isn’t simply energy. It’s something that comes about in a delicate balance of forces in just the right balance; it’s so easily broken and lost into thin air, it would seem. The reductionist-mechanistic approach will never be able to find the soul, or create consciousness, because these aren’t simply a set of mechanics. They will scan mental process to finer and finer degrees, they will model it, create false reproductions of it and call it AI. But consciousness is part of this ‘big picture’ which requires that it be appreciated and studied as it is, not pulled apart for answers.
Some things are just happenings that can never be replicated. Some things should be appreciated as they are; everything there is to know about them available to know in simply experiencing them. Some things are completely outside the reach of science, and always will be, because they barely exist.
The soul, the meaning of life, the point of reality, are all like the enjoyment in a mechanical toy; joy will never be found inside the toy, joy is nowhere in its gears or materials. Joy doesn’t materially exist but it still happens: It was put in that toy by another intangible thing called ‘intent’, and that intent was carried into the heart of the enjoyer. A force called joy was imbued and transferred through a mechanical toy, and science can never quantify it. The beauty in a piece of art works just the same way; a creative soul intended an emotion into an object, a viewer receives it by experiencing it. Soul, intent, emotion, experience: mechanics like energy transference, cause and effect, all happening in a system outside the physical plane. Some things can only be understood and studied through experience, this is one of the many aspects of reality that science will never ever provide answers to.
Ideas, Inspiration, Emotion, Awareness, Consciousness, Dreams, Souls, Hallucinations: All of these things exist because they happen but they can never be captured. Many of them steer and create our world, yet somehow we consider them non-real why: Because science hasn’t nailed them down. They exist on another plane which manifests in the physical world but somehow doesn’t reside in it. Science understands by reducing matter, so it will always be limited from understanding these things which originate beyond matter. A computer program can’t be understood by breaking down a computer, and understanding electricity. The program itself can only be understood by using the computer, the program doesn’t really materially exist! You can dissect the universe and decode all its mechanics, but you will not understand life or existence in any way but by living and existing. There are other layers of reality which float on top of the physical universe like a program running in ram; science is woefully inadequate when it comes to this realm.
The point is Science has massive blind-spots, it will never explain everything. At best, it will someday explain all of the physical universe. It isn’t even close to understanding even that… It is and forever will be just a part of the answer, not the one and only authority. To treat it like a savior, like a religion, like the only source of human knowledge is as short sighted as assuming a mechanic can drive a car better than anyone else. A mechanic only understands the construction of the car, can build them and fix them; nothing in his expertise guarantees he has more driving skill or a sense of direction.
As a mechanistic thinker, science will always only know the ‘how’ of things, not the ‘why’ of them. Science, even when it has reached every corner of the universe, will still only know how the universe works, not what or why it ‘is’. Having decoded all details of the human mind, will still not be able to explain your awareness, much less the ‘why’ of it. Look to science for how things work, nothing more; that is its proper place.
Point 4 – Science the controller, the destroyer
I touched on it already; science understands by dissolving wholes. It isn’t happy to study the results of mechanics but is compelled to know how they function. Just like I destroyed my toys as a young boy, science is a well-intended monster. It’s important to remember this. It’s a weakness of character that we as a human society don’t keep it accountable to nearly enough and when we don’t ‘BOOM’ nuclear bomb!
Then there’s the matter of what science does with its acquired knowledge. A lot of terrible things are done and created for the sake of advancing scientific knowledge, but what happens then? Science has very unhealthy urges of control. Science is a religion born out of the human urge to control the universe, not understand it. Where other religions aimed to explain the terrible forces of life, find a way to get along with and navigate them, Science has always been an urge to make them bend to human will. That demonstration of power is what impresses most people into joining it as followers.
The control impulse is smeared all over Science’s actions and principles. Take for example the principle of something not existing until it can happen under laboratory conditions. By this rule, then, all things that can’t be reproduced or produced on-demand don’t exist. “Only things that we can control exist” as I said earlier, that’s a little box-reality where only what’s controllable is allowed to enter. What about things outside the walls, things that only occur once and never again? What about things that don’t come when they’re called but only manifest when and where they choose to? By the principles of science, these things can never exist, even if they do. This is a kind of denial necessary when living in a fortress of fantasy.
This is the kind of denial present in science’s expectation that if something doesn’t performs or appear on command, it can’t exist. Some things will never come under such control. Let me be fair though: If you look at Science as a quest of gathering the list of things we can prove to be true, I don’t blame it for this rule-of-entry. What I’m criticizing is the position that if science can’t catch something, it doesn’t exist: That’s an aspect of Science-the-Religion.
Still, across all angles of science, I maintain that Science is out to control the universe. How many times does science realize it has power and doesn’t exercise it? How many scientists are happy with understanding something without testing it? The shiny image of science is the pursuit of knowledge, my point is that the intent under that is actually power and control, and under everything is fear of reality. I’m just pointing this out for the sake of awareness and caution.
Point 5 – Science, the infallible, unstoppable juggernaut.
Science is the most dangerous religion in history. It is a religion with nuclear bombs, bio-weapons, drone warfare. It has facilitated man’s severance from nature, facilitating and making the destruction of nature seem less alarming; a self-perpetuating cycle that ends with the collapse of mankind. It crosses lines of morality and wisdom with impunity, tossing the masses trinkets to validate its trespasses and sins against life. It’s stuck its fingers inside all organs of the delicate systems of nature, gone so far as to seek editorial power over the most ancient thread of existence, DNA. All along the way it has pointed out the good it has done for us, curing disease, giving us iPads and air conditioning. But it’s time to face the truth, it has always come at a destructive price that is most often greater than its benefits. All too often that point is ignored. Nuclear knowledge has brought us nuclear bombs, Fukushima, Chernobyl, does chemotherapy balance that out, considering it also might give you more cancer?… Antibiotics has brought us resistant strains of bacteria that now make them useless. The combustion engine has brought us global warming, pollution, increased rates of illness… We’re always reminded that science solves all problems; how often is it also pointed out that science creates most of them in the first place?
My point Is that some things should be held sacred, such as DNA. Some Pandora’s boxes should never be opened, such as nuclear power. Mankind was nowhere near wise enough to gain nuclear power, it is even less prepared to manipulate the web of life. But science, the unstoppable, the infallible, will charge forward anyway, unencumbered. The runaway ruling church of the day, which must never be impeded. “We can do it, therefore we will. To hell with the consequences; science will solve any problem we create. Anyone that speaks against us is a heretic!” A severely flawed, ironic and egotistical perspective.
Science currently has more funding globally than any other branch of human development, which reflects the false view that it is the only provider of truths. Where is the funding for art, spiritual advancement, philosophy, consciousness expansion and so forth? Where is the department in society that reminds us to live, and to wonder at the simple existence of existence? Where is the class that reminds our kids that their own exploration of life is as important as the bank of shared human understanding we’re cramming down their throat like gospel? The fact is none of these things serve an insecure ego as well as science does, because none of these provide weapons, control or destructive power to governments… A government, like every other institution, acts as a large scale human; reflecting the minds of the humans that run it. The vast majority of people in power today are insecure, unbalanced, undisciplined egos; a product of this same unbalanced society. Therefore all funding is funneled into the advancement of science, the religion that supplies control over the material world.
What we have as a result is a society with more science than its humans are ready to control. A society full of knowledge but little wisdom in applying it. A society devoid of spirit, wonder, passion; where everything is thought to be understood and boring. Still we continue to forge ahead, funneling most human energy into science with the illogical and flawed idea that it will provide all answers, all meaning, all solutions before the same imbalance destroys us.
Wrapping it all up
So what am I saying, stop all science? What if I am? Considering that new science brings at least as many problems as benefits (which would mean they cancel each-other out) continuing the mad dash for science is doing nothing except adding more complexity to the world and making it that much harder to correct problems. What I’m saying is maybe we should take a break right here, humanity… Maybe we should take it easy on scientific advancement for a generation or two and focus those minds on fixing the damage and problems we have right now. Maybe it’s smart to spend some time catching up as people, before we gain the power to make black holes? Maybe we should all calm down and try to see how science can help us live with the universe instead of trying to beat it back with an ever-fancier stick. And if we won’t slow it down, maybe it’s time to massively ramp-up the taming of the human ego, so we have half a chance of being wise by the time we gain the power to vaporize continents at the molecular level.
If you ask me, the guiding principals of humanity need updating a lot more urgently than science does. Science is already in the future! It’s time to let humanity and societies catch up from medieval mentalities. Or before you know it, even the smartest of us will be monkeys piloting a machine we don’t understand, and steer it right into a wall.
Do we really need more technology as we stand? Do we really need anti-matter weapons, nano machines, brain-hacking, master-control over all DNA? Slow down, humanity! Catch your breath, you’ve left something behind. And don’t worry, science can be kept busy in the meantime: We can demand it solves the problems its created, before allowing it to bring newer, graver ones. Take time to look where you’re going before you step off a cliff.
I’ll say it again: I love science! I’d hate to be born in an era without it. Science deserves our respect as an invaluable human tool. But I can’t stay silent about the problems I see. Science has become enshrined and untouchable and it’s time to put it back in a proper light.
Don’t put the fate of humanity in the hands of science alone. Science doesn’t work for the good of humanity, it works for its own satisfaction. If it really worked for the good of humanity, we would see our health and energy problems solved before the next major weapons technology: I won’t hold my breath. The growing ecological problem would be top priority instead of dead-last, because it threatens the future of all human endeavor including the expansion of knowledge!
Some people must be wondering “Then what the heck are YOU, if not a scientist, not an atheist, not a religious nut etc…?” Why should I call myself anything? I’m a wild man in the jungles of existence. I’m a traveling truth merchant that frequents all towns. I’m a freer of minds, a crusher of fortresses! Enemy to all boxes in myself or in view. I’m a conscious soul, battling the trappings of ego and fear. I’m the shaman in the woods. I’m the hermit in a cave. I’m a branch that bends with the winds of existence. I’m the flame that burns in your heart. I’m alive! I’m a being, in a human, exploring existence as nakedly as I can: The spirit of freedom and wonder!
To the bird in a cage, I’m a bird in a tree, singing “Your gates are yet open. Fly free!”
Be brave and fly free, fellow human, of whichever box you’re in; define reality yourself and give value to your own experience. Consider creating your own world view; your own personal image of reality based on the best of science, experience, philosophy, spirituality, any other tool you find value in. What you’ll find will be worth more than anything any one book or faith can deliver! Don’t depend only on rigid institutions to deliver your truths, go outside and find some yourself! Feel around in the darkness out there, re-discover your long lost inner light.
Eventually you’ll learn the resonance of real truth, and all around you fortresses will begin to fall.
-i
