Extemporaneous musings, occasionally poetic, about life in its richly varied dimensions, especially as relates to history, theology, law, literature, science, by one who is an attorney, ordained minister, historian, writer, and African American.
Thursday, May 21, 2015
COSMIC MITOSIS
COSMIC MITOSIS
Nothing and no one is solely self-determined. Everything and every one is affected or effected by others; & connected to others.
As John Dunne has famously said, "No man is an island entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main...." https://web.cs.dal.ca/~johnston/poetry/island.html
Otherwise stated, certain factors or forces: known and unknown: near and far; seen and unseen, felt and unfelt; help to influence and to determine each aspect of our lives, our loves, our destinies. These factors and forces exist and operate with us, within us, for us, through us, by us, yes, even in spite of us, toward consummation.
Ultimately, we humans are but an infinitesimally tiny part of a vast whirling vortex, whose vortices extend outwardly and inwardly beyond the range of our profoundest conceptions.
Yet, simultaneously, we are somehow made very self-aware, very assertive, and very perceptive, ascribing unto our human selves consciousness and cosmic uniqueness. Yet, still doubting that such wondrous grace could be so.
We have been ever bold to ascribe to ourselves primacy, even human supremacy over all other life forms on earth. In so doing, we had earlier, for 2,000 years at least, deigned our planet, Earth, to be the center of our solar system, indeed, the center of the universe itself, around which all stars and planets and celestial objects, revolved in annular homage and in extraterrestrial tribute to us, or so we imagined.
So confident were we, that we proselytized others to believe, to submit to, our capacious--so we deemed them--religious and scientific doctrines and axioms.
Yet, slowly, inexorably, the truth about our too-comfortably, collusive construct of grand human pretensions began to seep, bit-by-bit, into plain view slowly, insidiously, inevitably.
Eventually, science and religion, though once tightly bound together as one, began to divide to unravel, to replicate, to reproduce themselves anew, with each partaking of the other's essences, insensibly.
As a consequence this renewal, they also came to an apparent parting of the ways, science to the left; religion to the right, in an energetic dance of spooling dissolution, an ephemeral meiosis, a cosmic mitosis.
An epistemological, "War of the Worlds"- type, battle scorched earth by fire and by attrition; it devolved into competing normative paradigms, battling for supremacy over the the hearts and minds of mankind in schools, books, pulpits, media. http://www.ask.com/wiki/The_War_of_the_Worlds_(radio_drama)
Here now we sit, survey, and survive, in the midst of these whirling vortices, these "star wars," being daily bombarded, while being bombastic, dumbed-down and dumbfounded, too, in quest of uncertain respite!
We humans, all and each, by merely living and working and loving and studying, may also be thereby contributing to, and participating in, this ever-evolving scientific and religious rapprochement-process, automatically, and intuitively. In doing so, we too may be unconsciously searching for a satisfactory solution, a righteous reconciliation of the former one, thence two, now three most elusive vectors: science, religion and human love. Amen.