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  The Lie of Race: The Politics of Evil

Dr. Ely A. Dorsey

Bridgewater State College, Institute for Technology Management
BSC-Institute for Technology Management
Maxwell 110
Bridgewater, Massachusetts 02325

edorsey@bridgew.edu

Dorsey, Ely A. (2001). The Lie of Race: The Politics of Evil.
Online Proceedings of the American Society for Cybernetics 2001 Conference, Vancouver, May 2001.
http://www.asc-cybernetics.org/2001/Dorsey.htm

 

 
 

 

Beginning the Conversation

The conversation on the Lie of Race is couched in race-color talk, thus camouflaging the contradictions of Good and Evil. Good and Evil were the first discriminators. The first racists. We speak of equality, of ending hunger, of diversity, of gender. We do not speak of Good and Evil being two sides of the same coin. We disassociate racism from ethics. We separate the Lie of Race from Evil, from the Platonic Noble Lie. We isolate racism and speak to it as if it were independent of the discussants. It is a thing, visited by racists and victims; hence expose the thing and all will be resolved. Chide and forgive the racist, repair the victim, and all will live in peace. This is nonsense, for it is not the racists and the victims that need reaction in isolation, it is the conversation that is begging for revolution!

 

On the Nature of Evil

Sometimes when you view small children playing and you see them become agitated and quarrelsome with one another, you wonder how could this be. How is it possible for children to express rage and other forms of great anger with one another? Shallow explanations begin with ontological arguments of competition and the sociobiology of mammals in their emergence within natural selection. These tend to be reduced to either a denial of a natural order by the cybernetic argument of emergence, that is, of history of creating the present, accompanying the capacity of the mammal to be in the present; thus seeking other reasons for the behavior of the children: induced adult influenced behavior, for example. Alternatively, they tend to deny the cybernetic imposition of an order predicated on the construction: the biology of love. The biology of love revolves about the notions of organisms learning, knowing and participating in their phylogenic and ontogenic histories as an explanation of their present (Maturana, Verden-Zoller, 1996, 1). From the perspective of cybernetics, the syllogism is not quite circular: if you are a mammal, you are born in love. Love here is similar to the African notion of authenticity. The syllogism continues. If you act in ways that deny love, then the biology of love explains your actions by explaining your actions(Maturana, de Rezepka, 1999, 5). Explaining your actions deny your actions as having any value since the explaining accounts for them. Moreover, as a mammal, denying love is explained in the biology of love. Thus, the biology of love explains both love and the denial of love within the biology of love. Hence, explaining enables avoidance. What is taking place is a subtle form of begging the question.

Why would a mammal engage in actions other than those of love? We need to find a more effective investigative approach than that of explaining.

Love is the a priori acceptance and invitation of the authenticity and legitimacy of one human by another. It is misleading to say that love is a state of being. Love is being.

Explaining means that it is possible to make an idea clearer. How can the denial of love be made clearer? The point is that the denial of love defies explanation to a mammal because according to the biology of love, a mammal is made in love and is in fact love itself, in the emotioning sense. You cannot explain to an entity that has been constructed as love that it is not love. We are still searching for the collection of theories, forms, systems or biologisms that can explain how a mammal born in love and of love, is out of love and without love. The biology of love, however, describes a morphology of relations that is very useful in the realm of emotioning. Particularly, the biology of love validates the integration of the human with emotions in the sense that they are not distinguishable from the physical, spiritual, mental or other parameters of human existence. One avoids saying, "the human is an emotional being." Instead one says, "being is emotional, and emotioning is all existence." It is a way to speak of these matters without affirming a control or hierarchy of existence. It dispels cause and effect strategies of understanding. Understanding is in the emerging, which is in the languaging, which is the way a human sustains validity: "A [human] who has a language consequently possesses the world expressed and implied by that language." (Fanon 1967, 18). "Human existence cannot be silent, nor can it be nourished by false words, but only by true words, with which [humans] transform the world. To exist humanely, is to name the world, to change it. Once named, the world in its turn reappears to the namers as a problem and requires of them a new naming. [Humans] are not built in silence, but in word, in work, in action-reflection... saying that word is not the privilege of some few [humans], but the right every [human]. Consequently, no one can say a true word alone-nor can [s/he] say it for another, in a prescriptive act which robs others of their words." (Freire 1985, 76-77). Hence, the biology of love seeks to describe human existence lovingly. (Maturana & de Rezepka, 1996, 7). It cannot describe unloving human existence: it can only explain the unloved as an aberration of the natural order of things by accounting for it, and this is not an explanation but a rationalization, an inadvertent camouflage.

The nature of Evil is that it hides within the imposition of Truth: Truth being an arrest of the consciousness that demands adoration and worship. We say, ‘this is true.' As if the act of saying this and its logics somehow makes a thing true. And we become accustomed to this way of speaking and insisting that others speak the same way to be understood, that is, linked to an act of articulation about what we all agree is what we want to be true, whatever true may mean. True has meaning in its exclusionary power. It enables discrimination among things, ideas and their links. Thus, the purpose of logics is to enable discrimination. We can create difference with logics. Logics being defined as methodologies of language, including syntax, vocabulary, notation, tokens and other things that self justify by enabling the articulation of ‘true' things. This self justifying of the logics is justified because these logics make ‘true' things such as mathematical theorems, chemical laws, engineering algorithms, which in turn make useful things such as software operating systems, bridges, cures for disease. Moreover, it is not in the realm of applicability that the misuse of logics lays, but in the nature of Truth itself that the deception lives. Truth is an arrest of the consciousness. It is an arrest, not a revelation. It tears at the fabric of being and demands a separation. It says, ‘Look at me! I am different from you.' You, being all of existence. Hence, it is not that we misuse the logics in sociology or physics that is to be criticized, but that we insist that the logics yield anything that can be separated from the all that is. We deny this ripping of our humanity. The ripping is seen in competition, rivalry, profit making, just wars, and the like. All of these exist in the name of Truth and its logics that enable it.

Evil is clever in that it produces words that enable it to hide: words such as bad, horrible, cruel, dark, good, inhuman, evil, sinister and the like. This is how Evil hides through the words used to explain it. In addition, it is protected by Truth. One can be heard saying, ‘it is true that such and such a thing or person is bad or good.' The arrest comes from Truth that enables Evil to be disguised as a judgment of bad or good, for example.

We state, "Evil is that collection of acts and constructs that affirms and validates within its constructs real or imaginary differences among humans." (ASC, 2000, 3). Thus, Evil is about making one human different from another. Truth is about making one thing-idea different from another. Now racism has a theater. "Racism is the generalized and final assigning of values to real or imaginary differences, to the accuser's benefit and at his victim's expense, in order to justify the formers own privileges or aggression." (Memmi 2000, 169-170).

Now able to speak of the Lie of Race: the Politics of Evil.

 

The Lie of Race: the Politics of Evil

Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Thomas Aquinas and Spencer Brown have some things in common: they all use Truth as an arrest of the consciousness. They all use logics to affirm that Truth creates differences. While Brown does not, Plato, Aristotle, Augustine and Aquinas through their application of the fiction of ‘natural law' use Truth to justify dominance of one human over another. Brown uses logics to establish axioms of a language of dominance.

Plato in the Republic: III (Jowett, 1964, 266-268) created the Noble Lie wherein he posits that God is the father of us all and when he made humankind he made some [humans] of gold, some of silver, and some of brass and iron. And it was the natural order of things that [humans] of gold should rule through [humans] of silver over [humans] of brass and iron. He goes on to say, "... and the species will generally be preserved in children... And God proclaims as a first principle to the rulers, and above all else, that they are to be such good guardians, as of the mixture of elements in the soul. [Mixture of the castes]. The Noble Lie goes on: "... is their any possibility of making our citizens believe in it [the Lie]? Not in the first generation... but their sons may be made to believe in the tale, and their sons' sons, and posterity after them." Furthermore, in Laws: III & IV, Plato rationalizes slavery as part of natural law. What is special about the Noble Lie is that within its construction, Plato directly creates a class of ‘untouchables:' the humans of brass and iron. He requires that such humans are not to be pitied and that intermarriage or other mixing with them must not take place. What is important here is that he creates an avenue of hatred of humans camouflaged by natural law to continue without rationalization. Not only are these humans to be hated but the lie about why they are to be hated is also hidden: it is the natural order of things and the idea of hating a human is not to be considered a question of value for consideration about humans of brass and iron.

Aristotle in his Nicomachean Ethics, Politics and Eudemian Ethics (Bollingen, 1984, 1835) speaks of slavery being justified as part of natural law and not contradicted by the innocence of birth.

Augustine in his City of God (De Civitate Dei), XIX, 15 writes: " The prime cause, then, of slavery is sin, which brings man under the dominion of his fellow -- that which does not happen save by the judgment of God, with whom is no unrighteousness, and who knows how to award fit punishments to every variety of offence... Moreover, when men are subjected to one another in a peaceful order, the lowly position does as much good to the servant as the proud position does harm to the master. But by nature, as God first created us, no one is the slave either of man or of sin. This servitude is, however, penal, and is appointed by that law which enjoins the preservation of the natural order and forbids its disturbance; for if nothing had been done in violation of that law, there would have been nothing to restrain by penal servitude."

Thomas Aquinas in his Summa Theologica II-II: 57:3,4; 52:1 (Sullivan, 1952) rationalizes slavery as a matter of natural law whereby the State can enslave a human as a right of wisdom. Further, in the Summa, he calls slavery a punishment for sin and takes issue with Pope Gregory saying that while all men were created equal, natural law did not preclude slavery.

When examining the caste system of the central provinces of India, (Russell, Lal 1969, 13), we see that the Sudras or ‘untouchables' were as the humans of brass and iron of Plato: humans to be despised and hated by all other castes.

Spencer Brown (Brown, 1972, 15) in "Laws of Form," writes:

  1. Call a state indicated by an expression, the value of the expression.

  2. If an expression e in a space s shows a dominant value in s then the value of e is the marked state. Otherwise, it is the unmarked state.

So if we define politics as that assemblage of techniques that is focused on the justification of the attainment of power, dominance and privilege of one human over another, then our philosophers above can certainly be conscripted as authors of a politics of Evil. We include Spencer Brown to show how easy it is to use a language of dominance in seemingly innocent ways. With Brown's rendition of identity, the marked state, value is had only if dominance exists.

What is behind this discourse so far? We are aware of the tenacity of the application of the Lie of Race: racism. We are aware that this has been with human kind for thousands of years and event-places such as Israel-Palestine, Northern Ireland, Rwanda, East Los Angeles, Bosnia, Turkey, Burma, Vieques, Guatemala, etcetera are with us today. In addition, they are clear applications of the Lie of Race. We are asking ourselves with this essay, "why?" We are trying to ask this question from what we know from cybernetics and from a caution: we do not want to give the Lie of Race any more power. We believe that it is the fundamental evil in the world, but that it can be exposed and its fragility seen. However, just exposing the Lie is similar to explaining the Lie, and this will not work as we argued before when viewing the uses of the cybernetic notion of the biology of love. We need something else. That is the aim of this paper.

The Lie of Race, Plato's Noble Lie, Brown's Axioms, the Augustine Doctrine, the Aristotle-Aquinas Argument all require sustainability to continue. One has to pass the lie from one generation to the next and with the lies comes the logics to enable the articulation of the lies. You cannot hope to eviscerate the Lie by looking at it in this generation or by setting in place another counter force to be sustained in generations to come. Why? If we look at the Lie in this generation as if it were a present thing and not a cybernetic thing in the sense that it has histories and the capacities to recreate itself structurally in a coordinated way in the present, then we will patch some of the damage of the Lie but not touch its life force: Truth. Hence, we will actually strengthen the Lie since we will create more camouflage through the reform that we introduce. We cannot kill the Lie. If we put in place a collection of practices aimed at combating the Lie for the succeeding generations, then we carry the Lie forth under the protection of those practices to combat it. What should we do? Let us look at the seven essential components of the application of the Lie of Race: Racism. Memmi is the author of the first five (Memmi, 2000, 170).

  1. A collection of Logics that enable the axioms of racism and six components below:
     
    1. Pure races exist.
    2. Impure races exist and are inferior to pure races.
    3. Axiom a. and b. justify any form of aggression aimed at the dominance of one human over another.

  1. An emphasis on the real or imaginary differences between the racist and the their victims.

  2. An assignment of value to those differences to the advantage of the racists and the detriment of their victims.

  3. A strategy of making the differences absolute by generalizing them and claiming they are final.

  4. A justification of any present or possible aggression or privilege.

  5. A strategy of camouflage using any strategy including a strategy of reform to hide the Lie of Race.

  6. A reward system that yields pleasure to the racists and their victims that includes not only political, psychological or economic rewards, but also an addictive pleasure in Evil itself.

We believe that the seventh component is the most powerful because it hides Evil itself. We ask, "How can a mammal, a creature constructed in love, of love and for love, sustain so monstrous a lie?" Would not a mammal let this go? One would expect a mammal to say, "This is absurd. I do not want any of this!" How do you make a soldier? How do you create an army? Obviously, the key is to take away love and put something else in its place. However, who can take away love? We are mammals. We are love. We are born in love, of love, for love. Can we take love away? Why did Plato instruct in his Noble Lie that it be embedded in generation after generation until it took hold and developed a life of its own? Clearly, he understood that humans would initially resist the lie since it was absurd; but one had to work at it generation after generation to enable it to take hold. To enable the lie you had to substitute the ultimate aphrodisiac: a license to sin with impunity: a power to kill, to torture, to rule over, to kill another. This was the seduction of all seductions. You could have slaves: humans that were yours to do with as you wished.

Do we need to know who took away love, or how it was taken away? Some argue that God did this or the Devil or that we were not born in love as the biology of love purports. In the Christian Bible (Heisbergh, 1995), the Story of Job posits God and the Devil as two combatants using humans for their sport. Yet, the story is deeper. It shows Job's defiance of the two divinities, putting forth his commitment to love, including loving God. Job is triumphant in his journey: he never deviates from his capacity to love; even if it is God, he articulates it to. Job never gives in to hurt his neighbor or himself. He looks both God and the Devil in the eye and continues to chant that he is human and will remain so no matter what is befallen him. Job is the only winner over Heaven and Hell. When one reads the story in either the Greek or English version, it can be seen that the authors of the Job story rewrote the ending many times to reconcile the politics behind the story. It is clear that the poetic beauty and strength of the story changes dramatically at the end, being reduced to a shallow and somewhat mediocre finish of God rewarding Job for his faithfulness. However, there is more to this story, as we shall revisit below.

Some argue that through some random collection of random collections, Life began in the universe and that there are no rules that govern human behavior except those that we create for ourselves. Others argue that God is independent of good and evil, i.e., good and evil are social constructions of humans only. God has no interest in good or evil. God can be what you wish God to be: an invention of convenience or logics. God is whatever you need God to be, but good and evil are inventions of humans. These arguments aside, as humans we have a desire to live. We believe that it is a fair doctrine that describes what we want as a life free of injustice and domination and oppression. We do not want the Lie of Race to continue to reign imperially over the planet. We do not want humans to be ripped from humanity by the abuse of logics and the arrest of Truth. On the other hand, do we want this? Do we want the Lie of Race to continue?

 

Facing the Seduction of the Lie of Race

How does one give up the seduction of being able to sin with impunity? Think of it! You can attribute to a person or a group any set of real or imaginary values that you wish so that you can dominate them for whatever your heart desires. They can be your slaves. You can kill them and not be punished. You can curse them and feel no remorse. You can be charitable towards them and feel generous. You can hate them and pity yourself for your weaknesses. Think of it! Anything you wish will be yours. Anything! You can even become enlightened, despise slavery, and militate against it for the good of humankind. All these things are yours for the asking. There is no price to pay. You will be forgiven. All this for the asking. Surely, you cannot reject such a gift. You have doubts? Allay them! Truth is on your side. You can see that. Look at the logic. God has given you an opportunity to confront the sins of others. Slavery is their punishment for being of the other. This is written and it has always been so. There is no contradiction. Listen to how nice it feels when you beat the slave. Remember that man in the hallway of that Bronx apartment? You had to shoot him forty one times, it was your duty as an officer of the law. Did it not feel wonderful, pulling the trigger, seeing him fall, seeing your other comrades shooting? Do you see the gift we are giving you? Were you punished? Of course not. Is it not right that you who have been burdened with wisdom find an outlet for your frustrations at the folly of the other? This ingrate! You have brought him shelter, knowledge, and a means to clothe him in his delusion of mind. You have even brought the clothes. You have allowed him to petition you. To ask you to stop hurting him. To prick your conscious of the misdeeds attributed to your enlightenment. Are you not gracious? Have you no personal compassion? See how you suffer from your own inner constructions of justice. There is no need for self-mortification. All is forgiven. Go and live among the humans. After all, did you not bring humanity to humans? Are you not wise and of noble birth? Paint yourself superior. This is given to you as the gift of life. Paint. Paint. Paint. Do not stop! Keep painting.

If the biology of love is correct in that,"... To live in love, the biology of love, ... has been the fundament for the evolutionary trend of conservation of the continuous expansion of intelligence in our lineage." (Maturana & Verden-Zoller, 1996, 7), then what accounts for the existence of Evil? Is Evil to be coupled with the biology of love in perpetuity? Is the Lie of Race to be with us forever?

Let us reconsider the Story of Job. To be human is to be in love. To be in love is to be in dialogue with all that is without fear or anxiety. "Dialogue cannot exist, however, in the absence of a profound love for the world and for [humans]. The naming of the world, which is an act of creation and re-creation, is not possible if it is not infused with love. Love is at the same time the foundation of dialogue and dialogue is love itself."(Freire, 1985, 77-780). What happens with Job? God gives Job over to the Devil to see if good will triumph over evil. The Devil goes about this ugly business and makes life terrible for Job and his family. The traditional interpretation then is that Job remains faithful to God and is likewise rewarded at the end. What is more important is that Job is in constant dialogue with God and His surrogates. In all that happens, Job never falters. He continues to affirm his capacity to love. He continues to affirm that he is human. So powerful is his commitment to being human that he triumphs over the God of Good and the God of Evil. He pushes them both back and asserts his humanity in the face of their demand for worship. While the traditional interpretation is that Job is doing all this because the God of Good is so good and Job is faithful, what is really taking place is that Job is preparing the way for the emergence of humankind to be free of hierarchy and oppression. Job is the first Messiah. He frees humankind from good and evil. He establishes that love is the parameter of human existence and that there is no need for either good or evil when we live in love. This is because in love there is no place for judgment. The God concept becomes one of love, of justice without judgment. It is a freeing of all existence to be in love. Worship is no longer necessary. The Noble Lie is valueless. However, in reaction to the freeing of humankind and emergence of a God of love, the gods of Good and Evil fight back. Moreover, we have the seduction of the Lie of Race hidden in Good but being acclaimed as Evil. These are the same two gods looking for ways to remain relevant to humankind. The biology of love gives us a way to remember the triumph of Job and be done with these two gods for the last time.

Job has freed God to be the God of Love. This idea is developed further by Jesus in Mathew 22:34-40 (Heisbergh, 1995):

You shall love the Lord Your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the greatest and the first commandment. The second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. The whole law and the prophets depend on these two commandments.

Before Job, when one spoke of a love of God, one meant a worship of God, for to love a god was meaningless. Job changes this. He listens to God as an authentic and legitimate other. He does not judge God. Through Job, we see that a dialogue with God is possible. Jesus then in a manner of progressive revelation affirms that God is free from good and evil. He states both commandments so that the misery and strife that exists because of the denial of love, the Lie of Race, can be addressed.

Why is it not a common practice to pray for the Devil and God to reconcile themselves so that misery may end? Why is there prayer to do good and combat evil? Are we not affirming the Lie of Race when we pray this way? After all, someone has to be good and someone has to be evil, and what better way to ensure this, than to have races, pure and impure! Thus, the Lie of Race is intrinsic to the gods of Good and Evil. Only a God of Love as Job has enabled and Jesus has affirmed, can be sustained with our being human.

Jesus continues in this vain. To love God is to keep God free from judgment. That is why the last point about love being the basis of all law and the prophets is given. From the law comes justice, i.e., the ethical organization of requisite variety among humans as they live among each other. Order here would mean sociotechnical structures to enable the authenticity and legitimacy of the humans in society. Prophets are not leaders, but doers of things needed. Thus, all humans are prophets.

Augustine and Aquinas seem to understand justice except in their writings on sin and hierarchy. Here they reintroduce the gods of good and evil, obfuscating the messages of Job and Jesus and bringing back the Lie of Race: Good and Evil. The biology of love rescues us from this dilemma. It reaffirms the messages of Job and Jesus. It states clearly that we are human, and because we are human, we are free of good and evil. Nevertheless, we anticipate an accusation from confusion.

Openness is just a word hinting at an experience. Freedom is another word froth with layered interpretations. We argue that it is dialogue, and only dialogue that enables both concepts. The operant nature of good and evil is to limit discourse by imposing judgment, but it was discourse that freed God.

 

The Conversation Continues

The purpose of a religion is to worship a god, a thing, or a purpose. This is not our aim in this paper. We do not seek to establish a new religion or to reaffirm an existing one. We simply wish to point to Greco-Roman-Christian social constructions of racism. These constructions are an excellent laboratory for the biology of love. We are mammals seeking creation and re-creation in the dialogue with the world. In the West, the God concept is intrinsic to identity. Whether one accepts God or not is somewhat immaterial, the weight of the concept is felt in every social structure. There are threads of the concept other than the ones discussed above, but the discussion on good and evil nevertheless prevails. To posit that God is now free of good and evil is to enable the biology of love to affirm the nature of the human. Without this, the biology of love is just another wish at the misery that besets the world. With God free, we are all free to be in love. We cannot have love in the presence of good and evil. Hence, we can now view the biology of love as revolutionary politics.

Let me say at the risk of appearing ridiculous, that the true revolutionary is guided by strong feelings of love. It is impossible to think of an authentic revolutionary without this quality."
  (Guevera, 1969,398).

Skeptic: With this biology of love conversation, are you not simply substituting one conversation for another? Is this not just a parlor trick and nothing more?

Response: We are being human. Conversation is what freed God and what will free us.

Skeptic: God? God! Why spend any more time on God? We cannot be free without God? We do not need God. Bah! You are like all the rest of the soothsayers and moneychangers in the temples of delusion. You seek power through the control of myths.

Response: Humans will reinvent God because they are curious about why they exist. This curiosity is part of love, part of the dialogue with the universe of possibility. It is better to name God, the God of Love, than to let God reemerge as the God of Judgment, the God of Good and Evil.

Skeptic: Is not love just another word? A word used to fill a void of explanation of human behavior? A word is as empty or full as any other word.

Response: All words are full of their histories and their capacity to re-create their use upon their calling. This is the nature of language. We live in language or as we say, in languaging. Love is a calling to open to the all that is. It is not a constraint on being. To use the word love is to evoke the universe of possibility

Skeptic: Nevertheless, humans must make choices. They must decide among things that affect their lives. They must make judgments. Surely, this call for a God of Love does not preclude the human instinct to decide. Moreover, this being so, then this God of Love must also make judgments?

Response: If all we have known is a world where judgments drive actions, then to comprehend a world where actions are driven by love is impossible for our imaginations.

Skeptic: What nonsense! We pose to you a reasonable question and you respond that we, including yourself, cannot imagine the answer. What type of trickery is this?

Response: We cannot imagine a world without judgment, but love allows us to pose that such a world is possible. Just saying it, enables the world without the judgment. In such manner as we constitute ourselves in the praxis of living, we bring forth this world, mistake after mistake, adventure after adventure, moment after moment. That is the possibility that love brings. Consider this fable. There once were two nations, very mistrustful of each other. Both had armies and weapons of stupidity, as is the case with armies and weapons. One day while marching through the desert, companies of both armies came upon each other. The leaders of both seeing the folly in combat, since both were well matched as in the law of requisite variety, came to each other and spoke of alternatives to combat. One leader suggested a truce where the soldiers could relax and sup with one another. The other leader agreed and suggested a sporting contest to integrate good feelings among the armies. Both leaders were content with their thoughts and went back to their troops to tell them of the development. The soldiers on both sides were glad to hear the news and looked forward to the exchange. After the troops had eaten, it was time for the contest. It was expected that both armies would cheer for their respective teams. Then one of the leaders struck upon an idea: suppose that instead of the teams being comprised of one army versus the other, the teams were integrated with members of both armies on both teams. The other leader immediately supported the idea, and the sporting event took place with only sport being cheered. This is what love can bring forth.

Skeptic: Well then, in like manner, we can bring forth a world of judgment, a world of human frailty and rationalization, a world of mediocrity and war. You pose your world of love as a competition against any other world that is imagined. Oh ye hypocrite!

Response: Is not life the act of life? Do we not seek to continue no matter what horrors beset us? If our natures were closed by the judgments of what is safest, easiest, or most expedient, do you think that we would still be in the universe? Are we not aware of ourselves, without explanation? Do we not know that everything is everything? Do we not seek to end separation? Do we not define madness as aloneness? Clearly, we are living within living. We are opening all the time, as Job during the enslavement of God. His message as well as that of Jesus and so many others after and before them is that we can be in love. That is the news of the biology of love.

Skeptic: So there have been many messengers with this message of love. Looking at the world, it is clear that the message has not been heard or believed. So, what is different this time? What of this message is so compelling that the world will listen and believe?

Response: The world does not need to be saved. Life is an act of life. Living has not stopped, nor will it stop. God is free; love has enabled that. The dialogue will continue. We can end misery. We can give up Good and Evil. We can be human.

Skeptic: How? How can this be?

Response: We are human and if we can free gods then we can free each other. During a recent presidential campaign in the United States, two senator emeriti, one conservative the other progressive liberal, came upon an idea to provide breakfast for every child in the world. These men saw the universe of possibility. They judged neither the world nor the children in it. They loved and that is how they saw. In love, there are no constraints to the intelligence. If we can imagine it, then it is real. If we can state it, then it will emerge.

Skeptic: Utopia! You are just dreaming utopia.

Response: We are being in love. We are being human. We are naming the world in action and reflection. We are in dialogue with the world. We are engaged in acts of life coming from life. We are in love.

 

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