p13opt Sleepers Awake

Why go through it all?

By John Taylor; 2008 Feb 06, 19 Sultan, 164 BE

Our kids have always been late sleepers, and I had just finished my long obligatory prayer last night when Marie called me in to put Tomaso to sleep. My technique for sending him to the land of Nod is to either read straight from the longer sections of Baha'u'llah's Prayers and Meditations, or when the light is already out to do just what I do for you dear readers, that is, drone on and on about God and Baha'u'llah and whatever comes into my head. Last night Tomaso was unusually alert. When I had just got into a summary of ideas about the proofs of God, out of the dark came a small, still voice, posing a stumper:

If God created heaven and knows what is going to happen to us already, why does He not just send us there directly? Why do we have to go through all that we must experience in this world?

We arrived at an answer together, but today I want to give the best answer I can for an adult audience, at least insofar as it relates to my overall writing goals, and then to the overarching theme of this Gregorian Calendar year, the proofs of deity.

First of all, I want to correct my little joke about droning on about God and Baha'u'llah. I go on tangents, it is true, but I have a serious purpose, indeed, a goal towards which all my writing points. Plato put it better than I can:

"... I would wish you and Cleinias to consider whether my words have not also a bearing on legislation; for I am not discoursing only for the pleasure of talking, but for the argument's sake." (Laws)

My argument is for a new direction more consonant with the spirit of the age. A divine order is about to replace our present secular compromise, and our goal, the goal of the human race, is first to meet the God of planning, and from Him to learn how to plan. Only then will we be prepared in mind and heart to lay out a planned world order. My argument is that as soon as we learn to plan on a world level there will be an immediate need for concurrent local planning. Local structures must be improved, containerized and universalized. We will have to agree upon standard and then plan out new designs for homes and other buildings to fit us into the natural world optimally, naturally and harmoniously. I have been working out a sketch based upon a world standard cityscape that I call Mound Architecture.

Because Mound Architecture requires such a basic revision of property and other social arrangements, I am starting with basics, in other words, God. The present argument with anti-theists is a first step up a long stairway. But as I mount the steps I must never let go of the hand railing, and that is our current climate crisis. The cry goes out: remember the deluge! In order to keep me from letting go of the railing, I return periodically to one of the series of Youtube videos put out by my favorite activist director, Wondering Mind. Here is an index of his video series "How it all ends,"

http://youtube.com/watch?v=2oCYW4ScUnw

These short amateur films argue for climate-based planning on the grassroots level. They were put out by a science teacher concerned only for our collective survival. Like about half of all scientific types, he is not at all religious. So when I came upon this index of his arguments, naturally the first video I chose was this one, called "God's Will."

 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kOjCcL1PN_Y

Here Wondering Mind tells how he encountered a Christian at his dentist's office and his mind wondered what she thinks about climate change. Her response was that it seems to be God's Will that such bad things should happen. He offers a tight little argument for planning and acting rather than passively sitting and labeling everything as the Will of God. I do not want to get into what he says, but I must say that his question is surely what future generations are going to have in mind as they read the record of our thought today, including our religious thought. They will be tracing the origins of the Supreme Being that I call the Planning God. For if we survive the climate crisis, it will be by planning, and by nothing else. And I must say, for the most part religious people could not plan their way out of a wet paper bag. In two hundred years of increasingly close contact, world religions have come together for what? Four Parliaments of Religion?

So, finally back to Tomaso's question, why does God not just give us a free ticket to heaven? Why do we have to suffer through this bung-hole of a life on earth? God knows about heaven, why even conceive of hell?

God seems to be really concerned that we do things for ourselves, that we plan our way to heaven. Yes, He could send us there directly, but He wants us to work out a path for ourselves, both alone and together. And when you think about it, the ability to see and act is what defines a rational being. The more you think, will and plan, the more God-like you become. God, who planned and sustains this gorgeous universe, wants us to make ourselves into His image.

I look at many of the protests that anti-theists make against religion and find myself agreeing more often than I am comfortable with. For example, they say that all the time that religionists spend praying, going on pilgrimages, performing devotions, reading scripture and jawboning about God, that is time we could more productively spend improving the world, saving us from climate destabilization.

I think that this is a point that even God in Holy Writ supports to a certain extent.

For example, there is the hadith that says, "An hour's reflection is worth 70 years (i.e. a working lifetime) of pious worship." Worship, like anything else, has a purpose, a limit to its usefulness. Only God is an End in Himself. Yes, God created us to worship Him, but worship, like "making love," has a far broader than the narrow sense of the word. This is true of knowing Him as well as worshiping Him. Think of the Bab's saying that a verse chanted with joy is far better than listlessly plodding through the entire body of the Writings -- and his followers proved this by in many cases reading a single line and then joyously giving their lives for its Author, thus trumping the most learned scholars who will ever study them.

Sayings like that seem to be telling us that devotions are useful only insofar as they condition reflection, and that reflection is what invigorates and gives value to our mission in this world. And what is our mission? It is surely to knead love and knowledge together into one, into the transcendent form of oneness called justice. In a prayer, Baha'u'llah explains exactly how it works:

"I testify, O my God, that Thou hast, from eternity, sent down upon Thy servants naught else except that which can cause them to soar up and be drawn near unto Thee, and to ascend into the heaven of Thy transcendent oneness." (Prayers and Meditations, 298)

This is the principle that Leibniz calls optimism, or the ameliorative principle. God creates the optimum amount, and one who is God-like is an optimist. God sends down upon us nothing but what is for our best good, if only we take the effort, if only we work out the justice, to make something optimum out of it. This world, then, is only apparently imperfect; from a God's-eye point-of-view, it the best of all possible worlds. Anything less or more than what it is would fall short of the best that can be. This passage continues,

"Thou hast established Thy bounds among them, and ordained them to stand among Thy creatures as evidences of Thy justice and as signs of Thy mercy, and to be the stronghold of Thy protection amongst Thy people, that no man may in Thy realm transgress against his neighbor."

This is the principle of optimal justice. The goal is zero injustice, just as God has been totally just to us. This starts off with each individual curbing and domesticating his or her desires and passions.

"How great is the blessedness of him who, for love of Thy beauty and for the sake of Thy pleasure, hath curbed the desires of a corrupt inclination and observed the precepts laid down by Thy most exalted Pen! He, in truth, is to be numbered with them that have attained unto all good, and followed the way of guidance."