But I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For

At an age of 72 years and after a lifetime of curious thought, I now find myself with a good working hypothesis for "what's it all about" that has not greatly changed over the past 20 years. As I explained in What’s It All About? and What's It All About Again?, I know that my current working hypothesis must definitely be wrong, but I am coming to the understanding that it might be the best that I will ever be able to come up with before I finally check out of this magnificent Universe. At least my current working hypothesis does not contradict itself as so many other human worldviews seem to do. For more on that see my last post The Self-Organizing Recursive Cosmos. I bring this up because recently my wife and I had a luncheon with a dear old friend and her husband. My wife had been a college roommate of this old friend about 50 years ago at the University of Illinois in Urbana, and we have all kept in close touch ever since over the many decades. But after two glasses of wine, this old friend finally built up enough courage to ask if we had given any thought to returning to the religion that she so deeply held and, specifically, to the version of this religion that she currently followed because she thought that the "other" versions of this religion all had it a bit "wrong". Since my wife and I both try to refrain from talking about politics and religion with friends, my wife and I both demurred. But after much persistence on the part of our old friend, I finally unloaded my current working hypothesis on her for "what's it all about" and my current working hypothesis about the Multiverse that she calls God.

But I must confess that this failing in self-restraint on my part was partly due to the current world situation in the Middle East. Once again, we now find Christians, Jews and Muslims all running around in the Middle East shooting at each other with machine guns over their particular model of a God. It seems that all of these very religious people have found what they have been looking for in the model of a God depicted as a Middle Eastern warlord. So much so, that throughout the ages they have all been willing to torture and kill for it. This model is more than 3,000 years old and was first formulated by people who thought that the Earth was flat and at the center of the Universe. This model of God was created to help them vanquish their Middle Eastern tribal enemies and it continues to do so even today. This is what I find so disheartening about the current state of the human condition. Thanks to the Internet and the hard work of many people over the past 400 years, for the first time, we all now have easy access to the information necessary to truly appreciate the majesty and grandeur of our Universe, and yet we do not. I find that nearly all human beings are still so self-absorbed with their own little petty grievances that they never are able to truly enjoy the astounding privileges of being a sentient being in a Universe that has become self-aware. That is indeed a very sad thing to ponder. But more alarming, this particular religious sect has also aligned itself with the Alt-Right Fascist MAGA movement that now threatens to end the American Experiment with the 18th-Century Enlightenment's radical idea of a self-ruling democratic republic. This, even though the current leader of the Alt-Right Fascist MAGA movement has always demonstrated the exact opposite behavior extolled by the founder of this very sect.

Comments are welcome at scj333@sbcglobal.net

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Regards,
Steve Johnston