Prioritizing Freedoms

Illusion of Freedom

Are we free?  Can we be free?  Is freedom a given?  Or perhaps freedom is only an illusion?  Can any freedom not come at a cost to another?

One view of freedom

High above a police drone flies, camera pointing down upon a young couple as they skinny dip in a secluded park.

Buying a pack of cigarettes at the local gas station, purchase data is analyzed for poor health choices and insurance coverage denied.

Attending the start of school, a child’s hand is placed on heart and pledge recited while peers and teacher watch, ensuring compliance to accepted behavior.

Pushing a broom on Saturday, the Jewish laborer knows there will be no future employment for him if he does not.

Another view of freedom

Blowing his nose, the old man wishes he was free from the pain of allergy.

We use the word “freedom” frequently in our culture to mean that we are able to act on our will.  Our expectation of deeds without restraint leads us to believe we are at liberty to live our lives.

The reality is we are only free in part.  Actions have consequence.  Freedoms are not equal. 

Each thinking person finds their own view of how to live their lives.  Each living person is driven by causes beyond their control.  Freedom is a goal that may never be fully reached by all people, all the time.

Assumed Freedom

Our culture assumes we have some degree of free action.  Custom holds us responsible for deciding what we do.  Fate and destiny are assumed to be generated, at least in part, by each person.

We expect economic freedom to make contracts, buy and sell, and keep the money we earn.

We desire the freedom to worship or not as we choose.

We want to move freely about without interference.

We expect privacy in our persons and homes.

We demand freedom from harm; to protect ourselves, loved ones, and property.

We aspire to freely choose government and laws it creates and enforces.

We wish to make free choices for ourselves so long as no one else is hurt.

We insist upon speaking freely, to express our views, and join the public debate.

In all these cases, the independence of action, the ability to express our individual will is taken for granted.

Freedoms Conflict

Freedom during war is different

Each freedom does not exist alone.  They are co-dependent and conflict with each other.  The price of one freedom is often the limit upon another.

Our desire for protection causes us to desire police.  Giving police the tools they need to protect us limits our freedom of movement, our freedom of choice, and cost part of our economic freedom.

Our desire for pleasure has consequences on others. Smoking, gambling or drinking have a cost in resources beyond our own persons.  We limit our movement and privacy to ensure our pleasures do not harm others.

Our desire for lawful governance costs money taking away our economic freedom.  We give up our free movement to ensure regulated transport.  Our desire for protection from government means giving up privacy.  We limit our choices in order to allow the whole to prosper.

Our desire for freedom of speech allows bad ideas to be aired.  People with foolish thought or hostile intent can harm us all.  We limit our speech when it causes the society to suffer. 

Freedom in the Balance

Our balances of freedoms are the result of choices we make as a society.

We prioritize one freedom over another. 

Freedom during peace is different

Screaming “FIRE” in a crowded theater when there is none is forbidden.  Such speech is prohibited so that fear does not cause a stampede of injury.  Freedom of speech is sometimes limited for freedom of protection.

Unwarranted searches of our homes are not allowed so that we can maintain the privacy of our lives.  We sometimes value freedom of privacy more than freedom of security.

Not paying transportation tax is prohibited so that we can move more freely.  Moving about freely has a cost we sometimes value more than economic freedom.

We choose freedoms differently with circumstance. 

At one time we thought limiting the vice of alcohol was necessary for other freedoms to endure. 

Feeling our security was threatened in time of war, we limited economic freedom so that money and material could be directed to the soldiers and battles.

Freedom Struggles

Any one freedom can trump the others.  Each of us has a different view of how we prioritize freedom at any time.  When enough of us want one freedom to override another we can collectively make it so. 

Struggling to define the next freedom balance

The balance between freedoms is under constant change.  First one type of freedom will dominate then another.  Later a different freedom will become more important to us.  War, disaster, or even our dreams of the future change our perspectives and thereby our priorities of freedom.

At no time will freedoms be equal.  Trade-offs are searched for in each time and place. 

We use our politics and government to move the balance between freedoms.

Freedom is not an absolute.  Freedom is a balance between competing desires and needs.

Next time you say you are “free”, stop and consider what you mean by it.  Is “free” what you meant before?  Is “free” what you will mean again?  What new balance of “free” are you willing to make?


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Are Corporations, Embryos and Aliens Persons?

What is a person?  Our debate defining ‘person’ is emotionally charged and rarely logical.  Words like ‘baby’, ‘corporation’, ‘human’, and ‘person’ are used interchangeably.  We all may have an opinion, but there is no common agreement on what is a person.

Is he a person?

Historically women and slaves have not been considered persons, even in my own country.  Others wish to consider animals as persons and wish to grant them moral and legal rights.  Science mixes it up with tradition, religion, and law to give us a mind-numbing view of what a ‘person’ is.

When we have an opinion and seek facts to prove it, we are not being honest with truth.  Only when we seek facts first and keep an open mind can we seek truth.  Let’s examine some facts then consider what we mean when we say ‘person’.

Person

There is no legal definition of person agreed upon by states or nations. 

In most societies today adult humans are usually considered persons.

If you look-up dictionary definitions of human and person they are circular.  A human is a person and person is a human.

Frederick Douglass was not a
person until he bought it.

To many a ‘person’ can include non-human entities such as animals, artificial intelligence, or extraterrestrial life.

There are even legal definitions that include entities such as corporations, nations, or even estates in probate as ‘persons’.  In some legal definitions those with extreme mental impairment or lack of brain function have been declassified as ‘persons”.

Religious fundamentalists want to push the definition of person to the moment of conception.

Meanwhile science is struggling to find a clear definition of what constitutes a human. 

Some lawyers and politicians maintain that corporations are legally persons.

Legal Definitions

Initially, only white males over 21 years old who owned property were considered persons in the United States.  Individual states were allowed to determine how much property they must own to achieve personhood.  All others, including the young, poor, women, slaves, and indentured servants were legally considered less than people.

Are corporations persons?

There has been a long struggle across the world to expand the definition of what it is to be a person. In the United States, slaves became persons with the passing of the 13^th Amendment. Women became persons with suffrage. 

Today, children are not considered full persons before the law, only partial persons.  Their rights are limited and controlled until they reach 18 or even 21 years of age.  Voting, driving, and even the freedom to be alone are controlled for children by law.

In 1819 Dartmouth College was granted an initial form of person status as a corporation with Dartmouth v. Woodward.  Later rulings have expanded the definition of corporations giving them many of the legal rights as persons. 

In our most recent election for President one candidate even declared “corporations are people, my friend.”  He meant that corporations are a means for people to enact their powers as persons.

Corporations are widely considered to be owned as property by people and therefore are an extension of the persons who own them.  With multi-national and stock owned companies, the line between what constitutes a person is legally blurred.

Embryo

Conception occurs at the meeting of sperm and egg.  After cells begin dividing they are known medically as an embryo.  At conception a single cell has human genetic material.  If no replication errors occur, there is a potential that an embryo cell will develop into an adult human being.

Is an embryo a person?

Mississippi is attempting to define embryos as a persons.  The legislation says that:

“The right to life begins at conception. All human beings, at every stage of development, are unique, created in God’s image and shall have equal rights as persons under the law.”

Arkansas, Iowa, and Oklahoma have similar legislation in process.  

Recent attempts to define embryos as persons have run against In Vitro fertilization technology.  Couples who have difficulty reproducing may use In Vitro fertilization to generate 15 (or more) embryos. Two or three of those embryos are then implanted into a woman’s womb.  The remaining embryos are kept in storage or destroyed.  Defining an embryo as a person classifies this technology as murder.

Others are claiming that a distinction can be made between In Vitro and sex-based fertilization, by denying person-hood to what they call ‘pseudo-embryos’.

Stem cells are cells that can become any other cell.  Stem cells can theoretically be used to clone a human being.  Embryos created using cloning technology could also be granted person status.  Many nations are actively working on an international ban for cloning humans.

Another consideration about embryos as having life is an often unconsidered moral dilemma.  If a In Vitro fertilization clinic is burning and you only have time to save the technicians inside or the embryos in the freezer, which would you choose?  The most popular choice by far is the technicians, yet thousands of embryos would cease to exist.

Fetus

At nine weeks, the embryo is redefined to be a fetus.  Human-like features only begin to appear after this point of development.  In the first trimester all mammals appear similar.  There are no uniquely human characteristics that can be observed until the second trimester begins.

Is a fetus a person?

The Catholic Church has legally argued for fetuses to be considered persons.  Lawyers representing the Catholic Church have also argued the opposite case that fetuses not to be considered persons. 

Often the debate about a fetus being a person struggles around the issue of when human thought starts.

Brain waves do not start until the 30^th week of pregnancy. Brain waves are not a sign of humanity, rather of animal-like brain function.  Cats, mice, elephants and human fetuses are highly similar in brain function at this time.

Some have been pursuing a definition of a person that starts at independent viability, when a body can live outside of its mother.  These advocates claim that the fetus is a part of the mother until it separated from her body.

Some technologies have been developed that can substitute for a womb, however prior to nine months of development, death outside the womb without these tools is almost certain.  Fetuses are generally not able to live outside the mother until birth.

Most agree babies are persons

Baby

Medically, upon leaving the womb a fetus is redefined to be a baby.

It is scientifically inaccurate to use the word ‘baby’ when referring to an embryo or fetus.  While this may be emotionally satisfying or appeal to our paternal or maternal instincts, it is not a factual scientific or correct legal definition.  

Religion and Spirit

Some religions, like Sunni Islam and fundamentalist Christians, claim that souls are attached to bodies at conception and are therefore persons.

Jewish law defines the legal status of a person at birth, claiming that a fetus is not yet a person until the umbilical cord is cut.

Sunni Islam maintains
persons start at conception

There is no scientific evidence that a soul is attached to a developing human at any point in the development process, embryo, fetus or baby.  Only religious claims based upon faith use this terminology, not the law or science.

Attempts to use the religious doctrine of some to make law for everyone are the equivalent of trying to establish religious law.  In the United States this is expressly forbidden by the constitution which states: 

“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof”.  

A Fourteenth Amendment was passed to say that rule is also applied to individual states.  

Since not all religions or even sects within a religion agree on person-hood, no one church can say what a person is for all persons, only their own.

The US Supreme Court has made it clear that until objective evidence can show a soul is attached to a body, declaring an embryo as a person will remain a matter of religious opinion and not law.

Animals

Are dolphins persons?

Some view animals as persons.  They advocate vegetarian diets and rights for animals.  Some even go as far as advocating non-violence on animals.  While it may seem extreme, their moral and logical arguments are worth considering in our quest for a definition of what is a person.

Gary Francione thinks we should go so far as to enact animal welfare laws.

Desiring protection for a special subset of non-human species, they wish to see rights defined for animals like chimpanzees, elephants, dolphins and even some birds.  They claim that if we would not do it to a human, we should not do it to these animals either.

If we were to make a genetic modification to an animal, like we do with engineered plants today, that allowed them to speak with us even in a limited way; would we start to see them as persons? 

Science

The debate in science about defining person is not from over by a long shot.  Several definitions have been tried and each has failed in its turn.

Birds use tools, have language, and act morally

At one time, persons were those who used tools.  Evidence that birds, primates, and other species built and used tools took this definition away.

For many years language was seen as the division between person and animal.  Slowly dolphins, chimpanzees, crows, and even ants were seen to have language.  Language alone can not be used a definition for what is a person

Morality is often used as a way to separate humans as persons from other animals.  This definition is under serious threat as sharing, fairness, and even intentional self-sacrifice is documented in animals.

If we could create a clone from a Neanderthal or Cro-Magnon would we consider them a person?

If we meet an alien life form that can think, communicate, and has morality would we give it rights as a person?

How much of a brain can be taken away before stop considering a human body to be a person?  If the brain mostly dies and the body is kept alive by machines, are they still a person?

Conclusions

We do not share a common definition of what a person is. 

Science provides no clear definition.  Religious views vary.  The law adds entities that disturb us.  New technologies will push the boundaries even further.

For any one of us to claim they have the one and only answer is only opinion.  There are no clear facts defining person-hood. 

Attempts, largely by religious fundamentalists, to enshrine their opinions into law, will fail.

Perhaps we should simply admit we are not sure?  Perhaps we should allow ourselves to be more open to others views?

We single persons do not have the right to pick for all other persons what a person is and what a person is not.

Extending compassion and understanding seems like minimal steps for persons to share.

Meme Wars (Part 7)

A war for mind share is going on around us.  Ideas struggle for territory in our brains.  In the last part of Meme Wars we consider how on science and commerce are effected by battles between memes for minds.

Meme Wars: Part 1 - Part 2 - Part 3  - Part 4 - Part 5 – Part 6 – Part 7

Market Memes

Commercial memes spread through advertising
everywhere on the planet

Business uses branding to create demand for their products.  Branding is a type of meme associated with a product or service.  Images, words, and feelings are generated in the brain by the meme that meet needs, create desires, or inspire lust.  Advertising is the art of creating thoughts in human minds.  Advertising, when effective, generates and propagate memes, that reproducing in people’s minds.

Adapting to new meme reproduction methods, advertising has begun to shift meme creation and reproduction strategies to internet, social media, and other information technologies.

This revolution in meme reproduction has disturbed centralized broadcast replication.  Print media is struggling for access to mind share with web pages.  YouTube is capturing eyeballs once controlled by network television. 

Advertisers have long known that younger minds are more receptive to new memes.  Humans now spend three billion hours each week playing video games.  These gamers are largely younger minds.  In order to circulate their memes, business must learn means of reproduction inside these media.

Even in the poorest of societies, pervasive
commercial memes are hard to ignore

Immunity Avoidance

Global consumer business has boomed by being successful and spreading memes.  The poorest countries in the world know what Coca Cola is.  Nike’s meme of “Just Do It” is in most of the planets brains. 

Entertainment media uses meme’s sexuality to grab our attention so that businesses can place their ideas in our brains and associate them with the other attractions.  Sporting events that grab us emotionally are used in similar manners to allow more receptive brains to get meme’s about automobiles.  Demand is thrust upon us unaware.

Commercial memes are intentionally crafted and delivered to avoid our mental immune systems.  There economic success depends upon meme-crafter's ability to do circumvent our minds immunity.

Opinion Makers

On a more strategic level, owners of businesses try to convince get us to act in their best interest by creating memes that distract us.  Pointing to people and branding them as lazy, leeches on society, and “takers”, memes can cause us to act in ways that are not beneficial to us.  Driving down expectations for compassion while driving up anger and fear, these memes warp our view of reality.

Non-compassionate meme generator

Shell Oil has tried to cast itself as caring and for good, while destroying thousands of livelihoods.  Wal-Mart convinces that lower prices are most important for consumers while Main Street dies and wages plummet.  Goldman Sachs did severe damage to the world economy in the 2007 financial collapse yet advertises on public television for how they build small business.

News networks and online media build and circulate memes that tear at the fabric of society.  Belittling their opponents with personal attacks, bad memes about government, economy and society are allowed access to unwary minds. 

Appealing to frustrations and remapping it onto their own desires, meme crafters shift public opinion.  Calling public servants useless, they devalue our ability to help each other.  Politics devolves to personal attacks, civil debate disappears, and solution finding becomes nonexistent as memes wage war in peoples minds.

We have yet to build meme immunity systems that will allow us to keep such bad ideas out of our minds.  Until we do, bad ideas will reproduce and cause havoc.

Religion and Science

A meme war between science and religion is being waged in brains.  Religious memes have a huge “head start” on scientific ones. 

Science and religion engage in a meme war

Around the planet, religion is taught to us when we are very young.  Science is kept from developing minds until much later.  Religious stories enter our brains while they are still forming.  Most western society’s children know of Noah, Adam and Eve, and Christmas before they know of numbers, letters, or discovery methods.

Most religious people acknowledge that other faiths have “bad ideas”.  Immunity memes against other religious beliefs are placed in children’s minds early on, thus barriers for science memes are also set high.

Some memes are more complex and complicated than others.  Complex memes require more time and space in minds to reproduce than simple ones.  Entrenched complex memes are much more successful at holding onto minds.  

The new information technology is allowing education to be individually tailored.  Home schooling, especially for religious people, surges in western cultures.  This permits minds to form without common concepts.  Science memes that were delivered in public schools not long ago are allowed to die out.

Science tends more toward facts and religion tends more toward faith.  In the meme war between them, science will continue to press that advantage.  Will it be enough to overcome early indoctrination by religion into young minds?  Perhaps science needs to shift it's memes to the battlefield of younger minds?

Conclusions

There is a war of ideas struggling to control our brains and thereby our actions.

By examining previous meme wars, we can learn more about those ideological struggles in our own time.

Ideas replicate in human minds in ways similar to biological systems.  New technologies alter how meme’s reproduce.  Our current communication technology is accelerating and focusing meme reproduction. 

Meme wars may never end.

Good ideas (facts) do not always win over bad ideas (myths).  Memes are engaged in an ongoing struggle for supremacy.

Memes can develop immunity to other ideas.  Some memes can stop the entry of other memes into brains.

There are too many ideas for any brain to handle, so we specialize and move toward familiarity memes. We also are trending toward simpler, easier to mentally digest memes and trending away from complex, subtle ones.

Business, religion, governments, and media create memes intentionally.  We are usually unaware of their existence.  They can and do cause us to act against our own interests

Conflicts of ideas occur in our brains regularly.  We need to become aware of these conflicts and build our own immune systems. 

We can build better minds by expending effort to allow complex memes to enter our brains.  Resisting the simple, we must learn to think more deeply to avoid bad memes.

Crafting memes is a relatively new idea itself.  Like DNA, words and pictures are the tools that we can use to build memes.  Technology is providing us with powerful ways to reproduce memes.  

In this new revolutions, each of us as individuals can and should engage in the meme wars.

Meme Wars: Part 1 - Part 2 - Part 3  - Part 4 - Part 5 – Part 6 – Part 7

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In God We Vote

In order to be elected to United States Congress, it is still necessary to affiliate oneself with one of the major publicly accepted religions.

Religious composition of the 113th Congress.

Our current crop of Representatives and Senators are still largely Protestant and Catholic with only a small 13% representing all other religions.

A full 97% of elected members self identify within the Judeo-Christian paradigm.

Although specifically ruled out in the U.S. Constitution as a requirement for any appointed or elected office, declaring a faith of some kind is widely known to be a litmus test for elect-ability by individual voters.

In early January of this year The Pew Forum On Religion & Public Life released its latest survey results of congressional members religious identifications.

This years batch, the 113th Congress, had three unique people one each declaring for the first time to be a Buddhist, Hindu and None.

Detail of protestant sects within Congress.

Protestants Highly Divided

Baptists, Presbyterians, Episcopal and Methodists still make up the largest group of protestants in both houses.

Many smaller protestant groups such as Adventists, Pentecostals, Quakers, and Christian Scientists have a member or two each compromising the "other" group.  A significant number of Senate and House members refused to define which branch of protestants they belong to and remained "unspecified".



Party Affiliation Important

When comparing Democrats and Republicans religious affiliation, there is a startling difference in their composition.

Republicans proclaim themselves to be over two-thirds Protestant while many more Democrats identify as Jewish or Catholic.  Further those who do not identify as one of the large Judeo-Christian denominations fall almost exclusively in the Democratic party.


Long Term Trends

Using historical data from similar Congressional surveys, a long term trend away from Protestant faiths toward Catholic and Jewish adherents is small and slow, but clear.

The presidential election of 1961 was when the United States elected its first non-Protestant President in the Catholic John F. Kennedy.  Mitt Romney also may be a bell-weather for the small rise of the Mormon faith in U.S. public life, although their impact is still small in comparison to other major faiths.

For a detailed break-down on the religious affiliation of each member of Congress, The Pew Forum as a PDF file available for download  here.

Ohhh! The Humanity (Part 3)

Sexual Ethics

What does it mean to be a 'human'? In this series we are examining our definitions of being human from several viewpoints. In Part I of this series we explored the idea that we each have our definition of humanness and that this view changes with time and culture. In Part II some background information about the biology of conception was presented.

Part III looks at the ethics issues with sexual reproduction of humans.

A zygote at its beginning.

Sexual Reproduction

When we think of reproducing humans, we normally think of a man and woman having sex. Mechanically this is about getting a single sperm into a ready egg that beings the process of growth leading to an adult human. Until 1978, this was the only way to have a baby.

A Zygote is the initial cell formed when a sperm and egg combine. It is also used to describe the mass of cells that divide. Zygotes are composed of cells that have not yet become other types of cells. Cells in a zygote have the potential to become any kind of other body cell and are sometimes known as stem cells.

A zygote.

Many religions maintain that the moment a zygote is formed, God puts a soul with the zygote. This belief has no direct observable evidence and is an act of faith on the part of the believers. Using this description of “soul attachment”, believers then claim that the zygote is a human.

Science indicates that one quarter of all fertilized zygotes die before ten weeks of development. Frequently this occurs because of errors in the zygotes genetic material.

It would seem, from the religious perspective, God is choosing which souls are becoming humans by chemical selection early in life much more often than humans do. Some believe that the world is cursed and miscarriage is God's way of limiting the curse.  Others believe that miscarriages are caused by sins of the mother.

Philosophy views procreation as a fundamental human right. Rather than examining the means of reproduction or miscarriage, philosophy focuses on the moral right of human beings to reproduce if both adults are willing.

Land of the those who are no longer human.

Masturbation

A few religions believe that every sperm and egg are sacred. The focus is upon individual cells as part of a potential human being. This viewpoint suggests that every wasted egg/sperm is a failed potential human being.  This view of humanity however makes every man who masturbates is a mass murder, committing genocide on an epic scale. Women who masturbate do not kill eggs and are therefore are only sexually deviant, but still sinful.

Science takes the view that sperm cannot reproduce. Sperm outside the body quickly dies. This means sperm is a not a being by itself, but a part of a human. This view equates blood cells, brain cells, and muscle cells to be equal with sperm cells.

Sexual reproduction is well understood by science and religion. Both ethical sources have strong established views on how we become human. This is not true for other means of reproduction.

In our next entry, we will look at the the morality In Vitro (test tube) reproduction.

Part I - Part II - Part III - Part IV - Part V

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Ohhh! The Humanity! (Part 1)

What does it mean to be a 'human'? When do we become humans? How can we tell if something is a human or not?  Are all persons humans?  When do we cease to be human? What are the elements that make up a human?  Part 2 is here.

One human or two?

The Catechism of the Catholic Church states that “the human person, made in the image of God, is a being at once corporeal and spiritual.” More simply, a human has two parts: a body and a soul. The soul exists before and after the body. When a soul is attached to the body, it is a human. This view of two parts to being human is sometimes called “dualism”.

Biology science tells us that humans are “primates of the family Hominidae with a well-developed brain making them capable of reason.” A mind emerges from how the body is put together. Science's concept is that body and the mind are not two things, but one. This one thing view of what makes a human is technically called “monism”.

From some philosophical views we are told that we think therefore we are. Thinking is what makes a person different from all other matter. These ideas can be expanded to include aliens as a part of person-hood. A human then becomes just a specific type of person, in the class of thinkers.

The human within.

This small sample of the debate about the definition of 'human' is at the heart of many struggles in our society today. Abortion, the death penalty, cloning, stem cell research, and even basic freedoms are all subject to arguments raging across the planet. At the root of them is a disagreement about what it is to be human.

We develop our opinions of humanness from our own experiences. Our lives, as lived, give us a sense of being human. We examine ourselves then thrust the result upon others. From religion, science and philosophy we are given ideas about what we are. We are left to determine, each for ourselves, what we are.

Assumptions about what we are, define who we are. When we threaten those assumptions, we lose our own context. Our self knowledge allows us to interact with the world in known ways. Redefining ourselves is a a most basic threat to our self identity. Changing our definitions of what we are scares us.

Humans: all are different, all are the same.

The journey between what we think and what we will come to know requires traveling through a valley of doubt. This journey is one worth taking as it leads us to a better of understanding of who we are. In this and in several of the next posts, we will be exploring the different views of what it means to be 'human'.

Less Than Human

There is no common definition of what it means to be human. A standard meaning of human that all can agree to for all time may not be possible.  The definition of 'human' changes by time and culture. There are many ways that humans are divided into classes that are perceived superior and inferior. Sub-humans, slaves, and not-yet-humans are just some of the ideas used to define what is human and what is not.

In ancient Sparta, if a baby was considered puny or deformed it was thrown away.  Until a council of elders examined the baby, it was not a human.  Once the baby past the test it became a human.

Dividing human-ness.

The traditional Indian caste system divided the labor and power of individuals according to strict lines. Person-hood was defined people as more human or less human depending upon their origin and birth.  The rights, responsibilities and potential types of careers were determined by caste.

In the original U.S. Constitution, humanity was segregated by a value system that designated persons who were not free as being only counted as three-fifths of a person for purposes of representation and taxation.  This multi-class system determined humans in gradations between human and property.

Nazi's described Jews, gypsies and others as Untermenschen or sub-humans.  Sub-humans did not need to be considered as having rights and were seen as a drag on society's progress.  Killing a sub-human was not murder, but rather eugenics to protect the gene pool.

Less than human?

Hutus involved in the Rwanda genocide thought of Tutsis as cockroaches rather than people. Similarly to the Nazis, Tutsis where defined as pests. Pests were viewed as a contamination that needed elimination.

In each of these cases, actions based on the definition of human seemed  right and just.  The definition of what is a human allowed certain behaviors.  

Even our current culture provides us with a context for defining what we are. Our definition of humanity allows us to act with each other in ways that seem fit for that moment and place.  These older and foreign definitions of humanity seem alien to our current ways of thinking.  They should however cause us to pause and reflect and ask if our definitions are correct because they are familiar.

In future posts, we will examine humans from the biological, spiritual, and philosophical perspectives to see how this can inform us on who we 'humans' are.

Be sure to subscribe to this blog in order to follow the explorations.

Part I - Part II - Part III - Part IV - Part V

Flowers of the Field

Many kinds of blooms. 

Most humans, it would appear, seem to think they have found “the one true answer to meaning, life, and the universe”. Perhaps this is a part of the love of self we need in order to be mentally healthy.  We may all be wrong, we may all be right; most probably the answer lays in the middle where no one of us can see clearly.

Each of us is a product of nature and nurture that has grown into its environment from our genetic starting point, influenced by family and culture to become what we are. These two factors, nature and nurture, define a kind of limit of what each of us can be. It is difficult for a Utah Mormon to become a Southern Baptist, or a Sunni Pakistani to become an Iranian Shiite.

Human beings' beliefs can be thought of as a field of many flowers. Each plant breeds its own kind and prospers or not in the ground it finds itself. It is very difficult for any plant to become another kind, although it rarely does happen.

When we argue about the merits of being a rose versus an orchid, a Hindu versus a Buddhist, we are re-affirming ourselves. A rose may wish to convert the orchid into another rose, but it is improbable and very difficult as it challenges the orchid to disavowed being an orchid.

Perhaps it better for all flowers to understand the beauty of diversity of flowers in the field, to embrace the awesome nature of it all, and allow us each to grow and flourish.

Those who would by force, by reason, by coercion, or by destruction, attempt to change one kind of flower into another work against the good of the whole, like some disease upon the land. Does this make them then like a type of parasite?

Another view would be that even parasites add to the diversity of beauty of the whole, challenging each plant to become stronger. Then even the parasite has value to the whole, but not the individual.

Those who would make us all the same type of flower, damaging many, are hurting the great beauty of diversity that we all represent. In our diversity we unite to struggle against the mono-culture of the field becoming just one kind of plant.

As a daisy, I resist the parasites and try to remain a daisy.

For each of us to celebrate our own belief system is generally a good thing. As long as we do not threaten the whole field. To step outside what we are, even for a brief moment, allows us to see the great beauty of the field we all grow in.