Ol Shifty

Gleaning notions.

Reading an article today relating to Michael Cremo’s Forbiddon Archeology (a book that we used to sell lots of back in my Powell’s days) and discussing problems with the currently held beliefs of the human history and contrasting it with some vedic stuff got me in a bit of a tizzy last week. One thing that it brought to mind is that I feel that a disservice has been done to the world by the combining of the concept of evolution with the particular writings of Darwin.

I find it annoying when people poke holes in the work of Darwin in an attempt to disprove the concept of Evolution. Species "evolving" is such a bluntly obvious fact to anyone who tries to consider it, that the debunking of Darwin’s work should not be considered connected with actual evolution just because he got his name on the idea. I would say that while a particular 19th century scientist’s observation, built on a background of very little actual evidence (limited by the means of the times), may have done a great service to the forwarding of science, it isn’t really relevant that 100+ years later people are able to find holes to poke in what he had to say.  Combining Darwin’s scribbling’s with the actuality of Evolution would be akin to stating that Mars doesn’t exist because the lines on it did not turn out to be manufactured canals as some early observers thought.

In the same vein, even if there have been repeating cycles of hominids going back millions of years, or if this current cycle has exited much longer than is generally accepted, that has nothing to do with some weird Hindu mumbo-jumbo about repeating time cycles.

Where they mention: "Many thoughtful people… have concluded it is ultimately a spiritual crisis that demands a spiritual solution. Part of the problem lies with our modern scientific cosmology, which is mechanistic and reductionist. There is little place in modern science for the soul and God"

Spirituality (by which I mean some form of belief in the supernatural, rather than just a focus on the conceptual "spirit" of being human and acknowledging that we are a part of the general ecosystem) and man’s so-called souls and gods with which he has polluted and punished his mind and being since before he knew better, do not have any realistic or practical place in the existence of humans who (well, for the most part anyway) have gained the ability and willingness to actually investigate the universe around them. Nearly all forms of spirituality point to the human fault of continually looking for ways to put themselves (and their existence and history) above all else that may exist in the universe. Honestly, I would think that when the theory that the stars in the sky were actually other suns with potential worlds around them was first broached (an idea dating to classical Greek times but again voiced [and, of course, punished by death] in the 16th century) that humans should have recognized their ignorant ethnocentricity and all forms of religion and spirituality should have immediately been thrown into the dustbin.

Oh well. Also and somewhat related, this is an interesting little article on Giordano Bruno and the Infinite Universe.