7-10-25

An Empty Battlefield

The consciousness of the Old Humanity was more fearful than ours. It tended to be parochial and separative because anyone not a friend might be an enemy. Because of their heavy sanskaric burden, they were usually jealously attached to possessions—any possession, even knowledge. But some interesting advancements, predominantly American, paved the way for us.

Many of the Europeans who founded the United States were reformist Christians fleeing religious persecution and they did not want a repetition of governmental oppression of religion. Also Old America was founded at the height of the European Enlightenment, which was in great part a rationalistic reaction against the religious authority of the Catholic Church. Recall that the Old America had a secular law scripture called the Constitution. It was little more than a list of legal rights and they added to the enumeration of rights from time to time as events seemed to require. The Constitution was the sacred bible of a secular religion, and while it did not replace God consciousness it did serve the cause of freedom. The first assertion of the first item in the list was that government would have nothing to do with religion. This was a radical, transformational idea in 1789. Throughout most of the Old Humanity it did not even occur to separate religious and political authority and even throughout the Manifestation, governmental and religious authority was combined in many nations, especially among sects following the Prophet Mohammed. But the Old American Constitution unambiguously denied political authority to religion.

This separation of dominion wonderfully purified religious experience in Old America. The denial of political power to religion also denied it public economic power. Nobody had to bribe a clergyman to build a road or end a marriage. Religion was not a good way to "make a buck." You recall the idea of money, the symbolic representation of future possessions, and the American obsession with hoarding these symbols. Except for a few charismatic preachers and church executives, the religious life was not a road to wealth and power. In Old America people did not read their Bibles or go to their temples for the sake of status and money.

Wilson himself had a religionistic character structure. He worshipped rationality, rules, and orderliness, which is why he sought to turn scientific knowledge into a religion. He was living in the past in his charge that religion victimized scientists. I have a treepaper book called Rocks of Ages by a colleague of Wilson's named Stephen Gould. This little book explains very thoroughly how religions had stopped fighting with science by the early part of the 20th century. It was not at all necessary for a scientist to go to church or to profess a religion in order to teach at a university or win research money. Scientists like Wilson were not persecuted by any religious group. They could have large money hoardings and be famous without having to fear religious persecution. So the notion that scientists had to submit their studies to religious authority is false.

During the Manifestation, Christianity was a safe scapegoat for scientists who wanted to debunk theistic religion, so they pretended not to notice that their opponent had left the battlefield. Tyler in 2005 used karmic theory to explain why the Old Humanity had a tendency to fight the battles of the past. The reaction of science against religion was, in part, an unconscious sanskaric residue from earlier centuries when religious authority did persecute scientists.

Wilson's targeting of Christianity was disingenuous for another reason. When Consilience written, Darwinism was experiencing serious and legitimate scientific questioning. Even though Darwinian selection was sacrosanct, the fossil record had never completely supported the theory. Microevolution within species was well supported by the fossil record, but the macroevolution aspect of Darwinism was almost literally devoid of supporting evidence. The "intelligent design" movement postulated that because the emergence of species themselves, as well as many complex biological functions beginning at the cellular level, was not supported by physical evidence of progressive adaptation, Darwinian explanations were not scientifically adequate. This was a complex movement, with interesting contributions from leading molecular biologists, paleontologists, and other scientists. Wilson would have better served his apotheosis of rationality if he had addressed—or even simply acknowledged—the existence of this major, serious scientific questioning of evolution. Instead, he tilted madly at Christian narrow-minded irrationality, even though for all practical purposes it no longer existed.

Of course, we have since learned that the sudden, dramatic shifts in speciation are associated with "turnings," that dovetail quite comfortably with Darwin's overall view. A colleague of Wilson's, Stephen Gould, speculated that the gaps in speciation were functions of punctuated equilibrium. Of course, he was looking in the right direction, but Wilson chose to ignore this significant issue of his day.

The 'Monkey Trial' was possibly the most famous legal courtroom drama of the 20th century. A small state called Tennessee was a place with many trees and little indoor plumbing. Much of the population there used fire for light and heat and cooking. Tennessee was in an area of the country often referred to as the 'Bible Belt' because of the devotion so many people there felt for Jesus. Tennessee passed a law forbidding the teaching of evolution in public schools. A teacher challenged that law. And in a small stifling courtroom two of the greatest orators of the time argued eloquently for and against the state's right to ban the teaching of evolution.

Darwin's theory of evolution, with all its gaps and problems, was too powerful to be suppressed by any religion or government. The Monkey Trial marked a turning in the history of human consciousness on this planet. In that trial science helped the Old Humanity accept the self-evident. And still nobody even dreamed of the spiritual and intellectual spade work the Awakener was doing through Darwin and this momentous trial. Only a few decades later the Awakener gave humanity the Theme of Creation which, building on the theory of evolution, introduced the concept of involution.

Here is one of my most favorite facts of the 20th century: The Monkey Trial began on July 10 1925, the very day The awakener began His Silence.