A Treatise on Natural Truth: Organic Truth Perspective I
Organic Truth Perspective I. Human Persons are not innately, metaphysically flawed.
The most common contrary distortion of this truth is the Abrahamic concept of "sin". The story of sin posits a helpless humankind, which cannot of its own accord or merits rise above "sin", and who, without the teachings of revealed religions, will not only fail to create peace within individuals and the world, but will also fail on the eternal stage to attain the presence of "God".
This fundamentally distorted story of human existence has been responsible for miseries untold for a very long time. The simple and incontrovertible truth of the matter is this: children believe stories that they are told. A culture has "stories" that it tells, and which inform the beliefs and activities of every member. People live their stories, and without fail, on the whole, they actualize the story in their lives. If you teach a child that they will fail, that child will grow up to fail. If you teach people to see evil and flaws in the world, evil and flaws are what they will see.
The story of "sin" is a self-defeating and self-fulfilling prophecy-story. It is not based on a fact of human nature or reality; it is based on a certain culture's own guilt and shame and frustration at what they perceived were the drawbacks and failings of human existence. Many cultures have their own way of explaining why less than ideal situations exist in human life and in the world. "Sin" is only one attempt at an explanation, and far from the most universal one. It was created by a very tiny culture in one part of the world, during one specific period of time.
"Sin" has a hallowed presence in Western religious/philosophical discourse because it has been promulgated as a simple fact of reality for thousands of years, and it has been given the predictable sanction of the divine, supernatural being believed in by the promulgators. Many cultures sanction their "world explaining stories" by pointing out how a sacred being of some kind told them about their explanations.
The ancient Hebrew culture is no different from any other in this respect; they are, however, different from others only in the sense that their particular story was taken and spread around the world, largely by force. The promulgation of their story, and its acceptance on the parts of millions or even billions, does not add an element of universal truth to it. It remains now what it always was: a perspective.
It is painful, human-depreciating perspective that is largely embraced due to traditional numbness, but also because it offers a simplistic explanation of evil that people are willing to accept, rather than accepting the hard alternative truth that we really can't satisfactorily explain the origins of all evils. People would, (as history has shown) rather blame themselves with bizarre stories of innate depravity and human error, rather than accept that they just don't know why bad things happen, or accept that some evils are natural.
Aside from the fact that the "sin" story creates the temporal and political necessity and justification for revealed religious establishments (who offer the "cure" for sin), this story also poisons people's own send of self worth. This story has been taken to its full logical (and horrible) extreme by Western Catholicism, which extends the flaw of sinful evil even to unborn children and newly born infants, who are seen as stained with "original sin", a taint they believe was somehow spiritually sexually transmitted to the child from the parents. When the most innocent and pure members of a society- infants and toddlers- are seen in terms of "sinful", this "sin" story has reached the most despicable, incomprehensible levels of degeneracy.
Human beings are not innately flawed. They do not naturally "miss the mark" of truth about themselves or their relationship to a "creator" being. The existence of painful realities in this world is not a consequence of "missing a mark"- painful realities in this world are born in omnipresent natural processes, including
-Aging and disease or even extremes of weather or natural events which are experienced by humans as disastrous
-The natural urge to power which expresses itself through every living being, and, if not sublimated, leads to interpersonal and social conflict
-The mostly predictable and inevitable conflicts that arise through resource competition between populations of living beings
For centuries, the Christian West has posited the unbelievable stance that aging, disease, and extremes of natural powers are not "natural" at all, but part of a world that has become warped and chaotic because of sin. In other words, it was disobedience on the part of the first two human beings that cause the world to turn hard and lethal- that cause "thorns" to grow from the ground and caused women to cry out in pain during birth, and which caused human beings to lose a natural immortal state, and die after a certain number of years. This story of humans ruining nature through sin is an absurd distortion of the organic and natural truth of our condition.
This story is born in the root-poison of denial- denial on the part of certain humans who could not (and still cannot) accept that some suffering is natural, and has nothing at all to do with human tampering or human failures. It is also born in a denial of death; instead of accepting that death was always a natural process that human beings were subject to, these stories have to set up humans as naturally immortal, and lament death as an unnatural intrusion into human life. This sort of denial and wishful thinking has sanity-destroying and world-destroying potential.
It is apparent that death is an immutable law of nature, and that all things in our everyday experience are subject to it. "Death" is a name given to the ongoing processes of transformation that we observe around us on every level, and can even see within us, as no human alive today is precisely the same person "within" that they were ten or twenty years ago (assuming they have been alive that long).
The constant transformation of memory, personality, and perspectives that all humans undergo can be qualified or described as a "dying" process, and from that process arises to new life a new person, continually. The "greater death" of the body is likewise more wisely seen as a greater, deeper arc of that process. Death itself, in our world, is a cleansing and renewing force, which clears out old wood (as it were) and allows for new growth.
Competition between living beings is a part of life, not evil, not good, but neutral and natural- "simply what it is." A human may judge competition- especially when they lose themselves- as a great evil or inconvenience, but it is the way of things. No human revealed philosophy to date has ever lowered the incidence of, or cured the world of, competition and the conflict that it creates, and none ever will. The final last ditch effort of human religionists to answer the issue is to say that their "God" will return one day and "really fix it but good"- but this is just a shred of irrationality and wishful thinking.
Nature does not create competition or conflict without governing laws. For millions of years, countless species on our planet have been in natural predator/prey relationship with one another. They have been in "conflict" with other species for resources. This state of "conflict" is not hateful or primitive, nor is it a state of "war" as humans understand that term.
Beasts that eat other animals do not hate their prey or seek to drive them extinct; preyed upon populations themselves eat other things and benefit from having their populations controlled, and an ecosystem of give-and-take is maintained, barring the intrusion of another natural power such as a drought or an ice age. Humans attribute fear, unqualified violence and hate to the sight of animals preying on others, or the sight of prey-animals fleeing, but this is a human perspective on a neutral, natural reality that lacks the moral opining or shallow sympathies that humans bring to it.
Human beings are not exempt from the laws that govern conflict, resource taking, and reciprocation. Nor are they exempt from the dangers other creatures face from predation, disease, natural disasters, or anything else. A story has arisen that tells humans that they are, and technologies have been created to place humans at the apex of the world, but the laws are still in effect. Gradually it is being shown that no amount of human technological innovation (and no amount of denial storytelling) will spare humans from their intimate participation in the laws of nature.
