The Replacements

Soon, every last one of us will be replaced by 2 or three more souls

In a hundred or so years every living human being will be dead and replaced with brand new souls god has created for his puppy mill, to test those same souls with an age old game—to see if they’ll simply believe. Finding the correct belief is paramount to continuation or damnation. It all makes perfect sense.

Where to put all these souls?

I’m confident the new crew will fit right in (barely) and adjust to their cages. It’s an interesting test, this god of the Hebrews has devised. With freewill diminishing in every generation, let’s hope grades are based on the curve.

Author: jimoeba

Alternatives to big box religions and dogmas

75 thoughts on “The Replacements”

  2. So here’s the thing: if you want a stable population, reduce poverty, effectively address climate change, reduce infant mortality, and the list goes on and on, there’s one thing that does it all:

    Equality rights for women.

    This is how you stop unfettered population growth. And the proof is liberal democracies with highly stable populations, which allows for the political will for planning to meet all kinds of needs with stable infrastructure (especially for basics like clean water, education, medical care, and hygiene) and improve quality of life across the board. Then the local arguments become quibbles about how best to do these.

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    2. Funny, but indigenous people in North America, and probably other places too, do not have all those things, especially clean water. Liberal democracies are just so caring about the people they stole the so-called”their land” from. Yup, real caring Liberals!
      Meanwhile, the rich people in liberal democracies have so much more of most of those things than the poor people their wealth is reliant on. Makes one appreciate Liberal democracies all the more! What a bunch of bullshit!

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  3. Q: What do you believe it’s the great threat to Mankind?

    A: Mankind

    And as far as the next hundred years goes, forget it. We’ll be lucky to make it the next 50 years. The devastation of climate change – which is already well on it’s way – will bring mass migration and re-population like never before as CA (our “breadbasket”) continues to dry up and people begin the wars over water. Our leaders are either unwilling or unable to stop the tsunami that’s so obviously coming that I can’t imagine what they’re thinking they are going to do.

    To quote an old line “The end is near” only REALLY this time!

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    1. Hahaha. Maybe. There’s a few other river basins to kill first. Desalination is an option. Maybe if everyone just painted their roof white?
      In fifty or so years we could be at expected to level off around 10 to 12 billion by 2100. But the last two doublings of our population was under 50 years. That could mean 16 billion souls to save in this great self perpetuating missionary effort of the god Jesus

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  4. Masturbation. (Sorry. It slipped out. I didn’t mean it.)

    I think the the greatest threat(s) to human life are microbes, viruses, and prions. Ironically, variations of the same things we need to live.

    But the best part of life is all the irony, anyway. 🙂

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    1. Maybe we should start a betting pool? I’m guessing 10,000,000,0016. Problem being you’d never know if you won. I’m holding out for the rapture…they’ll know

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    1. Well there’s always the rapture, Bill. 😃I was reading earlier that Canada generates more garbage per capital than any other country. It’s amazing how much one person contributes each year. Unconscionable really. How to make it stop?

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      1. We may generate more garbage per capita, though I think we also recycle more per capita than Americans do, if no one else, but the thing is, we have 1/10 the population of the USA, and a much lower fraction than a lot of other countries, so who is generating the most garbage, sir? I won’t bring our larger land mass into the discussion, because we are filling up even that way too quickly. But on a per capita basis, how much of our garbage ends up in the ocean compared to American garbag? Like, -1000%? Now, multiply that by the 10 times larger population, and it is Americans who are much more responsible for killing our oceans than we are!
        Now, if God would only get off His Ass and start cleaning up the messes his creations are making (Where the hell are His people bags?) maybe we could reverse climate change! Now there”s another reason for being an Atheist — we know we have to pick up our own garbage, our Father sure won’t be doing that for us!

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          1. Point accepted. Total amount wasted still belongs to the USA over Canada. Myself, I recycle as much as I can, though I have to travel 300 kilometres to do that, thus contaminating the atmosphere each trip we take. It”s a no win situation, but I do it anyway. It someone wants to buy me an electric car, which I cannot afford, I will gladly use it, when there are charging stations available to keep that electric car powered up. Right now, the nearest public charging station is 500 kilometres away.

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            2. Your lucky you can cycle. After cycling most of my life, I lost my ability to balance on my feet, let alone balance on a bike. Don’t get old, you cannot anticipate the things you are going to lose!
              I have a T-shirt that reads “I don’t fall, I just do random gravity checks”. I bought it for a reason.

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  8. You’ve reminded me of The Vitanuls by John Brunner, in which the human population crosses the threshold number of all previous humans who have ever died and babies start being born without a soul.

    We’d better watch out. Brunner probably accurately predicted the future better than any other SF author, though Kurt Vonnegut ‘s anticipation of Jeff Bezo’s Blue Origin (Porno Genesis?) rocket in The Great Space Fuck was pretty uncanny. Norman Spinrad also predicted it in The Iron Dream (or was that the famous futurologist Adolf Hitler?), so I guess it was inevitable.

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    1. Perhaps we are the alternate history. Born without a soul? Isn’t that just for gingers, which is about 2% of the population? We have a ways to go and short time to get there.

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      1. Alternate history or an SF reality TV simulation?

        Maybe we exist in the Matrix simply to provide entertainment to the real (non-virtual) people.

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        1. Simulation with limited programming. How else do we keep going like this when we know better? Those who don’t learn from history are doomed to repeat it. Those who do learn from history are doomed to repeat it too.
          Whoever the author is is easily amused by trivial events

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    2. Hmmm, cg. Seems I missed some novels. I never heard of either the Brunner novel, nor the Vonnegut Jr. one. This is one thing about Canada I hate, our media outlets (book stores, music stores, even television ptogramming) does not offer our tiny market all the things available to Brits, Americans, or others. And we cannot look for things we don’t know about. (The Internet has helped a lot with that, but Brunner and Vonnegut Jr. were before the Internet! I wonder how many other of their books I missed, and never thought to look up? Stand on Zanzibar, The Sheep Look Up, and Shockwave Rider were the big three for John, now I gotta go looking for more!)

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  9. i love this quote by Anandamayi Ma (an Indian saint that was born enlightened) “All sorrow is due to the fact that many are seen where there is only One.”
    she’s so lovely, check her out!

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  10. I agree with you that those Christians who view life as a test to see who will “simply believe” have an odd view of things.

    Origen thought souls had pre-existed the creation of material things. I still find some merit in views along those lines – even though I believe it was formally denounced as heresy.

    “With freewill diminishing in every generation, let’s hope grades are based on the curve.”

    Do you believe free will is diminishing with every generation?

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    1. All these souls up there just waiting for their 70 year shot? Or maybe it’s like amazon where they print the book after you order it.
      There isn’t much if any freewill. The well has been poisoned more and more with each generation. The divide is set. We are reaction of stimuli and cultural bias. Are there any original thoughts to be had? Very few and far between. Your brain is primarily a receiver from birth to death that scans for danger.
      There was a guy on here just a while ago (TEP) he admitted to me that he knew very little of any beliefs but Christianity, then went on to say those other beliefs didn’t have full conclusion. Since his belief was all he knew he could easily dismiss all he didn’t know.

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      1. Origen’s position on these souls is somewhat disputed as he was writing about 200 AD and we have some of his material from his detractors. But I believe the issue some Christians had was that the souls were not printed to order like amazon, as you suggest, but pre-printed/existing.

        It may sound odd but it also sounds odd to think there is no you and no me. Sometimes reality is odd and philosophical questions often have no easy answers. In reading your blogs I think we agree it doesn’t make us wise to pretend we have answers when we don’t.

        I see having original thoughts – as in thoughts that no one else ever had – as being distinct from free will. Yes I think there are many original thoughts to be had.

        In any event you do think there is some free will and perhaps there was more free will in the past? That is interesting. I would have thought you believed no one ever had any free will. Glad I asked.

        I’m not familiar with TEP or what you describe of his views. It seems he has a few non-sequiturs floating around in his head.

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        1. It may seem odd at first to think there is no you or no me, but that is merely a social construct that is at odds with reason, even for the scientific minded, because of the Hebrew religious influence on our culture. In actuality there are no separate things or events. Where does one end or the other begin?
          Take the Big Bang for instance. You are not a result of that but you are that, still banging out here on the fringes. You’re not separate from it.
          For the others, we have the primordial om, the word, the name that cannot be named, the vibration, the Big Bang, however you want to describe it it is as Tesla said, vibration and energy.
          On the original thoughts, many of the great inventors claimed no ownership to those ideas. They just came out of the blue. Why Tesla said his mind is just a receiver—that consciousness is what is, and there is only one.
          What I’m seeking is a contradictory free route of reason to the top. There is only one answer. It is what all the great sages saw when they awoke from the dream.
          “When the Supreme Experience supervenes, everyone’s service is revealed as one’s own service. Call it a bird, an insect, an animal or a man, call it by any name you please, one serves one’s own Self in every one of them.”—Anandamayi Ma
          Even Jesus’ dialog suggests this. To his apostles he wanted them to see it and thought it was a method that could be taught. The biggest problem is this process is hidden from the Christian Church and severely subject to the Hebrew culture in which he was raised, where admitting the Self was worthy of stoning. He had to be very careful with his wording, but it’s all in there. He did not find his position unique to himself—he was trying to get them to realize that they too could realize it’s all one. The

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          1. yes. by the process of always being aware of your mind/thoughts. who watches your thoughts? we say “well, i’m self aware” and assume (and this is where all confusion starts) that Self is within the body, somewhere. but is it? and if the Self isn’t inside the body, then where is it??

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            1. Answering you, Monicat, only because you were the last on the thread when I arrived. To you, I say, a bit of the Self is in each body, which is how the Self gets to communicate with itSelf. Without bits in every body (not just humans) Spitit would have no one to communicate with, and progression is impossible when there is nothing to compare oneself to.
              To Jim, knowing where you are coming from, Free Will is not just an idea, but something we are all capable of, IF WE CHOOSE TO DO THE WORK! Most of us choose not to do the work, while some of us do so choose. Without Free Will we would still be running around the jungles of the world fighting for food and sex. Tell me the first woman to say no to a male had no free will, and I will call you a liar!
              To Joe, I won’t call them souls, a highly loaded term, but for this I use the word spirit–Spirit pre-existed the Big Bang, and probably unconsciously caused it. (Spirit is NOT synonymous with God or gods.) Spirit was, yet was nothing because there was nothing else! Spirit probably unknowingly felt a need or desire for Other, but there was no Other. Therefore it unconsciously caused a universe to be created, which could be a home to Other. But unlike Field of Dreams, Spirit built it, but no one came. So Spirit was forced to populate this new home with ItSelf, thus causing a need for Life in this dimension. But once there was Life, there was still no Other available for discussion, which prompted evolution. Of course, Life being haphazard, Spirit had to wait some 5 billion Earth years to find beings capable of philosophic discussion.
              Where we go from here, I have no idea, maybe we succeed in furthering progression, and maybe we are just another dead end. But at least we are trying. And without Free Will, we will never get anywhere.
              I can only hope that ties up this discussion for the four of us, who are, of course, just four bits of the Original Spirit. Our importance is, of course, that were we not individual bits, at least in theory, Spirit could never have had this conversation. And that is why we are here, and this is how the One progresses. (You often ask, Jim, what I brought back from my acid experiences. This is the best I have ever described what I brought back, what I never had any way of imagining on my own. This is what changed my life, even if it took 52 earth years to be able to articulate what I could feel inside me. Don’t believe it, I do not care. But this is me, and I am One with everything.)

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            2. hmm… is the space in a room any different than the space outside the room? regardless of how you fill that room, does that change in any way the space within it?
              can we really separate space and say “this is mine” “this is yours”?

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            3. Yes and no. Being humans, whom most of us have no idea we are anything but total individuals, yes, we need to separate rooms into mine and yours, otherwise thmost in their rooms pay no attention to the (to them) fatuous claim “we are all One.” But even on top of that, being that we are all somewhat separated from the One while we are on this plane, we have to have some individual perpective, or the whole experiment falls apart. Spirit is not all-knowing, or there would be no purpose in splitting itself into bits. We are not Other, but we are “other” in that we each develop our own ideas according to our own experiences over the past 4.5 billion years. (This is NOT to say we each have an individual time line, but just to emphasize that while we exist on this plane we are only as connected as we allow ourselves to be.) We might know things as connected spirits, but as temporary individuals sometimes we have to articulate things for those who are for all intents and purposes disconnected from the Self. This is why we are in “separate rooms,” or individual bodies in the first place. We, Spirit! are learning in the only way we know how, by being “other.” So, on this plane, to throw away other is wrong, but at the same time we need to be aware we are ONE.
              So, while it might sound contradictory, this is how We advance, by being us. Not to get religious, but when Christ said “We are a house divided” that is what he meant. Same with the Buddha, we all have to come to Enlightenment all in our own ways and times, else we would all be “born enlightened” and then have no purpose. And as far as I can tell, there are way way way more unenlightened spirits on this world than there are enlightened spirits, even though we are all the One.
              Maybe you feel no need for this articulation, and all power to you. But because I began my life without any “knowable and understandable” connection to Spirit, I had to discover that connection for myself. So for now, I exist in both realms, but acknowledging first that while I am on this plane, I am here for a reason. I am here to learn, so that Spirit can learn, and understand. I take this enforced seperation very seriously. I am not content to say, I am One without forgetting I am “one” at at the exact same time. This is how “I” operate. How all the other “Is” operate is up to them. Is that not why we are One yet one? This is how I understand my “life,” and until I find out otherwise, I will continue to be other, because there is no Other…

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            5. A poem for you Jim. I wasn’t thinking about free will when I wrote it, but I think it relates:

              the miracle

              pictures are worth a thousand words
              but poetry is worth a million
              so on i write
              into the night
              cringing in fear
              with insanity near
              breathing new life
              into words as old as death

              isn’t it amazing
              in all the length of time
              humanity has spent upon this earth
              someone can still combine
              words into lines
              that never before have graced
              the printed page

              miracles
              are all around us
              if only we had
              the presence of mind
              to see them

              Of course, “miracle” was not used in a religious way here. That would be unatheistic!

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            7. Thank you, Jim. I used to write a lot of poetry, and I loved to write about the writing process itself. I think you, and Lander, might appreciate this next statement: a lot of what I wrote was more like automatic writing, rather than me writing it myself. Not always, but much of the time, I would sit at my typewriter, or even pen and paper, and words would just appear that I myself was not thinking about. Where were they coming from, I cannot even speculate. Sometime a word would be in my head for days, and suddenly I would have a poem, or a short story–or a novel. It was about 1991 I invented one character, and the next thing I knew I had a novel. I could tell what parts I wrote, and what parts wrote themselves. It was really freaky. I myself was so emotionally involved in the story I cried for two days at the end. Then I did the unthinkable.
              I needed to get out of the novel, so I sat down and wrote one l. I had nothing else in mind, no characters, no setting, nothing. The line: Everything he could throw flew everywhere it could go!
              That was me, that line. When I came back to myself I had a short horror novel. I hate horror. I have never read a horror novel as such. I have never been to a horror movie. But I wrote a horror novel, and I had no part in writing it. The characters appeared on paper, the settings did not exist in real life though they were set in Alberta before I ever moved here, and so I had no knowledge of what Alberta was even like. The “horror character” was not a character “I” could ever have invented. Where this came from, I have no idea. But it was all there.
              Neither novel was ever submitted to a publisher, and probably never will be. But my hands wrote them, one without any help al all from my mind. The characters that inhabited the horror novel drove the story from start to finish, even with an opening for a folliw-up novel which I will never write. It came from some deep, dark place inside me that I figured must exist somewhere, but it was in no way me.
              Sorry for rambling on, but this just all came out of me, unintentionally. Maybe I should believe you that everything is driven by chemicals and such in the brain, but can chemicals and electric pulses actually write like this? I’ll leave that for you to ponder. I don’t think they can…

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            8. I actually don’t think your “method” is that unusual, rawgod. Of course those who are more inclined towards order and procedure will undoubtedly do it differently, but I do think there are others like you that simply “go with the flow.” And many times, their compositions far “outperform” those by the more “regulated” writers. 🙂

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            9. I won’t go that far, but some scenes had me in tears or laughter even as I was writing them!
              One scene went from a wake, to a marriage, to a christening all in a matter of minutes in a hospital chapel while the band played three different version of “To Know Him Is to Love Him.” I didn’t know whether to cry, laugh or be joyful, so I did all three. Mostly, though, I was amazed that scene came out of of my fingers.

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          2. This is my take in a nutshell.

            It seem conceptually coherent to understand our distinctions as “man made” constructions that are not nearly as significant as we think. But just because it seems coherent doesn’t mean it is true.

            I think one can believe this one-ness sort of thing in a non-contradictory way because I am not sure it has any implications for how we live. Perhaps it implies the answer there is no way to live or it doesn’t matter.

            For whatever reason I am driven to try to understand if there is a way “I” (whatever I am) should live in this life. I think it is rational but I understand some other people that I consider reasonable seem unconvinced that it is important. It seems as long as they are “pretty sure” there is no way we should live then they are content to brush the question aside. But for me saying I am one or not, is not really answering the central question – “how should I live?” Maybe if as it turns out the oneness scenario is true then there is no way to live. But for me that just makes the oneness possibility a dead end. For me I would say ok if in that scenario there is no way I should live I should consider other possible scenarios where there is a way I should live and try to live rightly according to those possible scenarios. Yes it could be all folly – that I was inescapably destined/doomed to pursue. But if I was inescapable destined/doomed to pursue it then ok it was beyond my control. I try not to concern myself with matters that are beyond my control.

            BTW: I wouldn’t blame only the Hebrews for our sense of self I think Greeks and other ancient people also had a sense of self.

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            1. Thank you Joe. Great comment!
              ”Just because it seems coherent doesn’t mean it is true”
              Ok, where does one event begin or another end? Where does one ecosystem begin or end, and who gets to decide? We can cast a net (or a graph) over it, lay a ruler along side it, measure the time to demarcate certain aspects of it, decide what are the regularities, file it in a class of similar (pattern seeking) “things” that seem to correlate, but that is not how nature operates at all. You find regularities by using something regular, like a ruler or clock, but that is simply for convenience. It isn’t what they are at all. That is not only coherent but it is also true. There are no separate things or events. It’s 100% all the same process of a self regulating organism.
              “ For whatever reason I am driven to try to understand if there is a way “I” (whatever I am) should live in this life.”
              Certainly it feels like you have some control over that, while simultaneously realizing no one else seems to be able to. Since we’re not rooted to the ground like a tree, it takes a moment to get used to the idea that you too came out of the earth, but what are you without it?
              “No one is as dumb as all of us” It is very difficult to change who you are. Can you change your personality? One can behave in certain ways to gain full acceptance, but as you know that gets tricky to lace that boot without massive hypocrisy which is what we see in believers in particular. They can’t change. They can pretend to, but the inner struggle wins (hence the hypocrisy) or one just resigns the idea and then, only then does the change take place! There’s a reason self help books continue to be bestsellers—because they don’t work. But really Joe, you are a good guy because that is in your best interest. But little did you have to do with that. You were lucky
              I want to share a short example of what I’m getting at; do you realize that alligators have survived the last 5 extinction events? When the world ends again and life begins to spring forth, is it possible that alligators are more like the original seeds of the earth? Time and time again we see them at the beginning of the next cycle. Call me crazy if you like, but this handful of originating species brings the game back in play by millions, if not billions of years. What is a bird that visits your property? Is it a class of animal that we foto, file, and study, or is this bird serving a higher purpose than to be named, cultivated, and dominionated [sic] over? Each of these things are connected to the other. Man would be well served to remember this.
              “ But if I was inescapably destined/doomed to pursue it then ok it was beyond my control”
              Maybe so, but how could you persue something you didn’t know? Of course in our culture we are spoiled from the start with preconceptions about the meaning and importance of everything, but nothing really changes. Imagine (as one) how that would make you feel about nature, animals, and other humans? It wouldn’t be pointless but the entire point. Even Jesus was trying to teach this, but like you, the apostles just couldn’t picture it, “that they may be one even as you and I are one”. Trying to escape that culture culture of separateness is very difficult. But “that it may be done on earth as it is in heaven”? Seeing this is the key to that.

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            2. “Imagine (as one) how that would make you feel about nature, animals, and other humans? It wouldn’t be pointless but the entire point.”

              I have a fairly positive view of humans and the world so I am inclined to think positively of such a oneness. I like to think human kind has a certain bond. But it would also mean being “one” with Hitler or even Donald Trump right? I’m not thrilled with being indistinguishable from them.

              When I think of being one with everything nature and animals and bacteria and rocks overall I just sort of feel pretty neutral. I don’t have any strong feelings about whether a rock should exist or not and so I am not sure how being one with it should make me feel.

              If I could create a universe of rocks separate from our own universe would that be something worth doing?

              One of the things I like about life is having control to explore and do things as I choose. (Yes perhaps it is all just imaginary – but perhaps we really do have control and there really is an us – just like people like Origen thought. His views of pre-existing souls are also coherent.) Just existing as with no control like a rock doesn’t do much for me. Its not that I don’t love nature. I do, but I think I love the experience of nature. And that means I am experiencing it as “I’ do. Part of nature but separated enough to have a relationship with nature.

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            3. I think you miss the point. It’s not that this connection to everything makes you all warm and fuzzy, but fosters a sense of responsibility to the planet, each other, and all things. That’s what you were looking for, motivation.
              You see the world and its goings on is all your fault. There is then no one to blame. This is your shit show and it’s exactly the way you want it, so we take responsibility.
              As far as Hitler or Donald trump, can they be anything but what they are? Can you? They are as natural a phenomenon as a tsunami, and so is opposing them. In this philosophy we learn to trust the bad as well as the good, meaning to drop the pretenses. I know you’re a scoundrel and you know I am. If we’re honest about that we can do pretty good business. But it is most common in western culture to hide it. We have a social self and a personal self. We’re set up to live anxiously from the beginning. Not everyone lives that way.

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            4. We’re set up to live anxiously from the beginning — and the primary reason behind this, IMO, is religion. Yes, just through natural events and conditions, there is a certain amount on anxiousness, but I personally think it’s magnified by religion.

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            5. Of course. We’re taught from the beginning that we are fallen creatures and no matter what immutable attribute we possess we have to fight it. Miserably I’m many cases.

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            6. Jim this is what I don’t understand. You say it is my responsibility and speak about “blame.” But then you say I can’t be anything other than what I am. I don’t think people or other things are to blame for events beyond their control. I don’t blame the basketball when I miss a shot because the basketball did not control where it went. It seems you want to say we are in a situation where we are not to blame but also want to hold on to notions like blame. I think that is contradictory.

              I agree it is *possible* we have no control over who we are or what we do as this oneness view implies. I am just saying that is not the possibility I focus on. Because if the world is that way then there is nothing we could do anyway. It is like someone has symptoms that make you think they could have either disease A or B. Disease A is completely uncurable and there is nothing you can do to treat it. Disease B has treatments. You treat the situation like the person has Disease B. It doesn’t matter if you are 99% sure it is disease A. The one percent possibility is the only one you can do something about so you do that. If you ignore the treatment for disease B (because you decided it probably wasn’t that disease) and find it was in fact disease B and it could have been treated then you acted irrationally.

              Someone can keep telling me the person has disease A and I may even agree that is possible or even probable. But I still think it is rational to act like it is Disease B.

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            7. “ I am just saying that is not the possibility I focus on”. So you focus on what is not possible and contradictory at every level because of want. Doesn’t mean that’s what is.

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            8. I’m not sure what you mean. Are you saying it is “not possible” that we actually are distinct persons that have control of their actions?

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            9. You have just enough control (and enough perceived separation) to “think” you are a distinct person in control of your actions. But there are but a handful of variations to play with, repeating variations (vignettes) in the same play.
              Little illustrations or portraits which fade into its background without a definite border.
              You may control some actions, but only with the mind and physiology you possess. Had you a a tiny wire crossed you could just as easily be Charles Manson. Did he have a choice? Could he have done anything different than he did? Can you?

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            10. Jim
              I think it is hard to say how much choice we have. I think Manson made choices in his life and I do in my own. I am just saying that if we are in a situation where we have no choice then ok there was literally nothing we could do anyway. That is why I adopt the view I do have a choice because that is the only situation where I can do something blameworthy or praiseworthy.

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            12. Because I want to act in a way that is good if I have the power. So by adopting the view that I can act in a way that is good I then move on to other questions – like how do I know what is a morally good way to act.

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            13. “like how do I know what is a morally good way to act.”
              You don’t really know that. Every apparent “good” decision does not produce a linear effect, but spreads out from the center. What seems great at your level of magnification is disaster at another. One ultimately finds a space of comfort and equilibrium, and that is “good”. While others—like Amazon Outreach, feel the necessity to inflict Christianity on a once happy people (service and love) and wind up erasing language, tradition, and cultures that thrived for 1000’s of years so the missionary can feel good about his belief through assimilation. While I believe the health of our planet requires such diversity just like any ecosystem does.
              So there is no way to know what is right, it just is.

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            14. And again I would use the same analysis. It is possible we can’t know how to live. But I also think it is possible we can know how to live. If we can’t know how to live then ok nothing I can do to know how to live rightly. So I focus on the possibility we can know how to live rightly. If it is possible, then how would we learn what it is? I don’t think just looking at what is will tell us what should be. That is why I don’t think science is the answer. We need to look for something beyond “what is” if we want to know “what should be.”

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  11. Ourselves. We will kill each other off with war. And polluting the earth. Natural disasters. When the power of love overcomes the love of power only then will the world know peace. And it’s not happening anytime soon.

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