By
Yesterday I juxtaposed a discussion of demographics, specifically the prolific Muslim immigrants in
Commandment 1. The unity of God
Truth 1. the being and unity of God
Commandment 2. No representation, by painting or image, of that Being, who is invisible to mortal eye.
Truth 2. God is not any of the things that can be seen, but of a nature too sublime to be the object of human conception, or of human sight.
Commandment 3. He has knowledge of all human transactions, even of our very thoughts; an omniscience upon which the obligation and sanctity of oaths is founded, for God is a witness even of the secret designs of the heart, so that every solemn oath is an appeal to his justice and his power, for the vindication of truth, and the punishment of falsehood.
Truth 3. With the eye of his providence he regards the events of this world, and regulates them with the most equitable and unerring judgments
Commandment 4. The fourth commandment presents us with an account of the creation of the world, to commemorate which God appointed the Sabbath, commanding it to be observed with a degree of reverence above every other sacred institution.
Truth 4. God is the creator of all things, except himself.
One of the most important abilities of God is his creative ability to, well, create. As the Master often pointed out, a God who does not manifest Himself in creation is like a king without a kingdom, that is, not a king at all. The sun is known by its radiation, and a God that does not radiate is not a God at all. Creativity, effective action then is the Sine Qua Non of God's Being. Similarly any and all living species exist by grace of their effectiveness at reproducing. And, as Jesus said, each species reproduces its own kind; a fig does not bring forth thorns, or a thorn bush dates. Each kind of human is duty bound to spread what he stands for. That is as true for us as it is of our greatest enemies, rats.
"Rapid-fire reproduction that incorporates an entire colony's gene pool is the key to rat adaptability. Twice in the past 50 years, rats have evolved resistance to anticoagulant poisons, our most potent anti-rat weapons. Fresh generations keep tried-and-true traits -- lab rats 200 generations removed from the experience of a cat will still panic at the smell of one -- and quickly spread new adaptations." ("Second to humans, and trying harder, The hatred we feel for rats is the respect due our toughest enemies," by Brian Bethune, Macleans,
The sexual prowess of rats is truly frightening. Consider the following details about their sex life.
"Any female you see is pregnant: after a four-week gestation period and the birth of up to 12 pink, hairless offspring, she can ovulate, mate and conceive again within hours; she announces her availability by running through the colony spreading pheromones, upon which the males will line up to mate with her, more or less politely, so long as the biggest get to go first. The newborns will nurse for almost exactly the same length of time as the next litter takes to gestate, as the perpetual motion breeding machine rolls on. It's possible for a three-year-old female to have more than 500 offspring; with their young factored into the equation, she could be responsible for 16,000 new rats in one year, almost 100,000 in three. Male rats are ready, aye, ready to do their part. When they are not eating or fleeing for their lives, male rats are having sex. Despite the constant availability of receptive females, they aren't very patient during the rare downtimes. In the absence of females, males have sex with each other; in the absence of live rats of either gender, males have sex with dead ones. To cope with the sperm demand, a one-pound male rat has testicles -- known familiarly as torpedoes -- twice the size of a 400 lb. gorilla's." (
Rats, then, worry only about surviving long enough to reproduce; their only conscious concern is whether the biggest males get into the copulation line first. Nature does the real selection, brutally, by killing off the scum. After that the sole aim of males is more sex, the sole aim of females is more babies, as quickly as possible.
Humans do not reproduce nearly as quickly as rats, but that does not mean that genetic adaptations play no role in our advancement. Quite the reverse, I think. It is very doubtful that we could have become what we are today, that we could have developed our huge brains and formidable theoretical abilities in only a few million years, without some sort of very effective eugenics program going on in our recent past.
Humans do not and cannot take a shotgun approach. We live by our intelligence, and our intelligence is gradually augmented over decades and centuries. That means that we must provide a greater role for rationality in reproduction. In order to learn from the past we need long schooling for our young. We do this not by turning intergenerational control over to natural selection or to chance or to passion, desire or taste, but to the agents of evolution themselves, that is, parents.
In fact, that is what traditional sexual morality, as sanctioned by the world religions, was designed to do. The institution of marriage is designed to act as a buffer between social and personal demands in sexual reproduction. Note, for example, that the Ten Commandments do not even mention obedience to government, they mention only obedience, reverence and respect for parents. So right after establishing God's supremacy, they immediately command obedience to parents. Why? To give parents a say in their children’s choices, especially their choice of mate. As we have learned, the Law of Demographics recognizes that, long term, genetically, the choice of mate is the only choice that makes any difference. The institution of marriage allows love and rationality to enter into the otherwise random machineries of mixing genes.
The law of God in the fourth commandment thus confers an unprecedented influence and unique power upon parents. At the same time, it sets upon their shoulders a special obligation, to teach to their offspring the preceding Commandments, to love God, not to make images of Him, to uphold divine history in the form of the Sabbath to the next generation. This was the first instance of what is now called "viral marketing," and Baha'is have adopted a similar self-sustaining process lately with our three core activities, devotional meetings, children's classes and Ruhi institutes. By putting parents into the mix so early in the Ten Commandments, Moses opened up a much more prominent role for reason, love and past experience in the life of the family. This in turn conditioned what evolutionary theory now calls artificial selection. Except that this was not artificial, it was divine selection. Parents' job was to hand it all over to the commandments that precede obedience to parents. The mix of divine and artificial selection allowed past experience with divine intervention in history and the particular social contacts of parents to enter into human evolutionary adaptation by deciding whom their children would marry. Baha'i law has reduced this to a veto, but the principle, the truth behind the command, stands and always will. Out of many, one, and out of one, many. The Great Being Himself affirms this.
"The Great Being saith: The Tongue of Wisdom proclaimeth: He that hath Me not is bereft of all things. Turn ye away from all that is on earth and seek none else but Me. I am the Sun of Wisdom and the
No comments:
Post a Comment