In an evolutionary context, we could choose to describe that absolute principle as "the energy and intelligence that initially created and is continuing to create the universe." In the way that I understand it, that driving force is more an impulse than it is a divine being. In that impulse, there is no predetermined plan at work. It is a directionality, a momentum, a reaching towards. This definition of God does not depend on any kind of metaphysical belief or faith. All we need to do is look into the truth of our own experience and what science has revealed to us. 13.7 billion years of cosmic evolution has given rise to 3.8 billion years of biological evolution, which has given rise to tens of thousands of years of cultural evolution. We're on a moving train.
We're all part of a process that's going somewhere.
We don't have to believe in a metaphysical deity to feel the drive of an evolutionary impulse as a tangible energetic presence in our own experience at different levels. At the lowest level, the sexual drive can be recognized as an evolutionary impulse. At a much higher level, the uniquely human compulsion towards innovation can be recognized as an evolutionary impulse. And finally, at the highest level, the spiritual impulse, which is a compulsion towards higher consciousness, can be recognized as an evolutionary impulse.
Something miraculous is going on here and it's trying to happen in and through all of us in every moment.
—Andrew Cohen…
ey had the one true path to God and that everyone else was bound for Hell. When Harding was 21 he left. He could not accept their view of the world. What guarantee was there that they were right? What about all the other spiritual groups who also claimed that they alone had the Truth?
Everyone couldn’t be right.
In London in the early 1930s Harding was studying and then practising architecture. In his spare time, however, he devoted his energies to philosophy - to trying to understand the nature of the world, and the nature of himself. Into philosophy at this time were filtering the ideas of Relativity. Influenced by these ideas, Harding realized that his identity depended on the range of the observer – from several metres he was human, but at closer ranges he was cells, molecules, atoms, particles… and from further away he was absorbed into the rest of society, life, the planet, the star, the galaxy… Like an onion he had many layers.
Clearly he needed every one of these layers to exist.
But what was at the centre of all these layers? Who was he really?
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Added by Michael Grove at 18:55 on February 13, 2012
Meretz party that Meir Margalit represented in the Jerusalem City Council.
We learn from her struggles the fundamental truth that democracy and peace are one and the
same policy, that one cannot be sustained without the other, that the continued Israeli
occupation of the territories over which the neighbouring Palestine should be founded is
converting Israel into an apartheid state, and that this process is a grave and sad betrayal of
Jewish values and history.Equally we are reminded as ever that the global system quo is one that regards ALL CRITICISM
as DESTRUCTIVE and that any CONSTRUCTIVE CRITICISM is therefore INVALID & UNACCEPTABLE.
May her memory be a blessing.
RIP Shulamit Aloni
…
e position in the climate change debate. It is almost as if, simply by demonstrating their supposed credentials and commitment, the ‘answer’ and with it salvation, will be found. The ‘solutions’ to climate change repeatedly proferred by Western leaders, think-tanks and board rooms – technical fixes, managerial reorganisations and diktats from on high - recall the workings and mindset of defunct communist regimes. Put aside political ideology, however, and the notion that technocratic, scientific and political elites have’the answers’ by dint of their societal standing, practically ensures that the one thing rarely opened up to further examination is what drives their self-referential interests, values, hierarchies, mores, or - for that-matter - epistemologies, in the fist place. Even less discussed is the possibility that it might be exactly these imperatives which are acting as an intertial brake on meaningful action, or, worse still, lie at the very not of why we are in these dire straits. Mark Levene & David Cromwell June 2007 BE ASSURED our new masters of the globe are saying to us “rest assured we are not intent on destroying the world, but doing everything in our power to save it.” But the truth is that we most all individually and collectively question that assumption; and must do so by challenging the social, economic and political parameters within which these diverse elite actors (celebrities of al) assume a basis for action (or inaction) on climate change. The essential inadequacy of the elite postion rests on an unwillingness, indeed inability, to accept anthropogenic climate change as an inevitable consequence of their self-interested obsession with the need for ever continuing growth of our globalising economic system. Only by rethinking the operating premises of that are we likely to have any chance of moving towards a safer and more sustainable future.
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