August 3, 2007

Daniel. J. Shepard

The World Embracing Hope Foundation

Dear Sir 

Having just completed your next volume, “In the image of God”, I must congratulate you on yet another wonderful piece. Before I go further I must thank you for replying to my previous mail, but you stated it was an in-depth piece I wrote, I assure you it wasn’t. It skated upon a very thin understanding of your work, but now having read a second piece I feel I have fully understood the premise of your “universal philosophy” and apart from the “redecorating” of previous beliefs it is unashamedly brilliant! You truly are a man of good heart and your journey is one of greatness. If you are recorded as anything less in this world it would surely be a travesty. Now back to the main part of this mail.

In essence your entire volume works as a precursor to the implementation of such a theory as your philosophy is, but I cannot help thinking that it does so by using the same old premise of scare tactics used by so many others, stating terrible things that have happened and could happen, but would have been and can be avoided if the implementation of your work found purchase.

To believe that the human race is stupid enough to create billions of A.I.’s giving them the capabilities to “outrank” us, belongs in the fiction books where it was founded. To even hint at the idea humans would enter in to a dialogue with them would mean humans denying their heritage. As a race we do not accept competition, that’s why previous hominids were wiped out by “modern humans”. By the way I think Darwin’s version of events is laughable, we are not descended from primates and to think that we are is quite frankly, disturbing, although primates and hominids may well share a common ancestor. But I digress.

The reason humans arrived at the conclusion that we are made in the image of God is a very logical step in the development of society. Imagine living in the times when this folly was introduced, the uneducated masses were told to believe in something that was so great it had created this place just for us therefore we must give thanks to it everyday we exist. Exactly the same message every child was told by their parents about why they should respect and honour those who had come before them because they had worked hard to establish what the child was allowed to grow up in. When the masses asked (naturally) what does this God look like, the vision they were told to have from that moment on was that of their great leader (of the time) just larger and more majestic. In Eastern philosophy their Gods were colourful and had more limbs to be able to do more things, they were always crowned with “supposed” precious metals and had be-jewelled everything as that is what the top of their hierarchal society adorned themselves with. In the same way all the Greco-Roman Gods wore brilliant white toga’s and golden crowns as that was the style of the time etc.. You get the picture. The “simple” peoples had to envisage a better version of their present day leader to whom they were to bow and scrape to. So I hope you can see why this nonsense of what image the local deity had arose. The were used to following orders from a human, so the step to a superhuman was easy enough to put into the hearts and minds of those less fortunate, or should I say those who had to work hard to maintain the lifestyles of those who were telling them such drivel.

Oh, yes, because you were introduced to the supposed myth of Atlantis (as were we all) you used it in your work. So allow me to “diss” this folly too. I am sure you know of the last ice age and its effect upon the water levels around the world? They were approx. 400 meters lower then they are today and because humans live on the coastlines, for the thousands of years the ice trapped the water, civilisations grew on the coasts. When the ice-cap retreated; the levels rose and submerged them all. In fact every coastline around the Mediterranean and India and the central lying nations around the world have their own “Atlantis’s”. It follows when Plato wrote his account he referred to the Mediterranean areas which would have had hundreds of townships/cities on their coastlines. That’s why people all over the Earth swear they have the one and only Atlantis, when in reality they all are. Anyway if the myth were true and they had conquered powered flight and such they would have been clever enough to understand the ice cap is a floating parameter but they didn’t, so they were not that clever after all.

Your envisionment of meeting other life forms within the galaxy at Alpha Centurai is so predictable it’s unreal. To believe that the next form of life we meet will be inferior to us is shocking, coming from a man who wants to profess respect. I can only think that you have seen far too many episodes of science fiction series, who for the life of them can never imagine beings greater than ourselves without have some sort of Achilles heel for us to show our “greatness” as beings made in the image of the creator nonsense.

The “penal colony” theory has two hopes of being true, one called Bob and the other called No. It makes absolutely no sense whatsoever, and if it did the rest of the piece doesn’t refer to the original place our ancestors came from, surely that would be our quest to return to our former selves. You do not describe the search for them. If we are truly descendants of some sort of mega humans who felt our ancestors were terrible enough to abandon them here, would we not when we had grown, search for them? In the thousands of years away from them surely they would have evolved even more and so we could never be like them. But to say that my ancestors and yours were not good enough only brings about a theory that they are still around and watching and waiting for us to “mature” enough to be welcomed within their society again, wouldn’t that make them the ideal candidates for the “gods”? If they were it seems as if the holier-than-thou-human need for worship-because-we-said-so hasn’t left the originators of our species even after all of these years. I for one think this trait of expectance piety is one we should rid ourselves of as soon as possible.

There are without a doubt beings that are far superior to us, alive in this galaxy and throughout this universe, logically! If you look at this planetary system it is an infant in comparison to other places in our own galaxy. If life could find purchase here it can find it elsewhere too. If our planet and galaxy were the oldest in the universe you could surmise that this is the only place where life exists, but because it isn’t, it make perfect logical sense that life flourishes throughout the known universe and beyond. It’s incredible to think that we can see the entire universe, we used to think the universe was the stars visible to the naked eye for millennia and now because we can see further we also see more, our vision is still blurred by the magnetosphere of the sun, so even Hubble suffers from a cataract so to speak. We are far too proud and that brings about an arrogance.

Right let’s approach this bit about God borrowing us a piece of its soul to learn. What is it you will have us believe it will learn? Humans have been the same since time in memorial. They live exactly the same way they always have. There is no difference from when we built Stonehenge to today. The principles of daily existence haven’t changed one iota. The dominate ones tell the less dominant what to do and they do it for fear of death and or damnation. When physical dominance failed then dominance through wealth and status took over. In your work you give the perspective global population of about one hundred billion, I guess you could have used any number, but why is God sending more and more of itself into this supposed void to learn for? You stated that there are only two states of existence; growth and decay and to get around the equilibrium paradox for God you sent bits of it here so it could grow in knowledge, well what happens when it thinks its learned enough? Is God that greedy it needs to send more of itself to balance out something you have invented? Anyway why place a human understanding of balance into the being of God? It is not human and therefore does not need to follow the rules made up by us. Who says God needs to learn anything? You are far too human in your approach of what a God is and needs to exist.

Life exists in this universe because it is the will of the universe to be the host for life. Not the will of something you have reduced to human terms. You are a scientist and your endeavour for answers have led you to believe that even a God needs answers. There is no use being omniscient if you need answers. Also I do not want to be reduced to a “lab-rat” and your theory makes me one. To say that this universe is a laboratory means even after your retirement you need an environment you felt safe and controlled in.

Go beyond your creator, please. We can keep religion because we have to, if we dismiss it now we will all perish. You also state that logic and religion are separate entities, well again you are wrong, religion was the logic of the time.

You state very firmly that God can do without us yet we cannot do without God. Guess what? Wrong! It is truly a symbiotic relationship. Proof? When people stop worshipping deities, they disappear, just take a look at the amount of deities previously worshipped in the southern continent of the Americas, yet for thousands of years they truly existed! Just ask anyone who lived there in those thousands of years and they will swear its true, and if you said otherwise they would kill you where you stood. Yet the peoples of the Americas still remain today, so I am afraid your statement although well meant is folly. Society was built around the need for a deity; it gave logical sense to those who were building the societies to have a bigger threat then themselves to kerb the natural instincts of humans in large groups to become self destructive instead of nurturing each other. I do not have the exact number but there are studies that have show when humans are living in large numbers and close proximity to one another, the natural competitiveness turns into a fight for survival and struggle for power. Sad but true.

I don’t understand your need for time to reply to my mail, and by the way you don’t have to, your initial reply was enough. Remember one very important thing my young friend, everything I have written is only an opinion and like all opinions it can be changed.

I bet you checked out my profile on Yahoo and found my age according to it, makes me the younger of us two. Don’t believe everything you read. And you can admit it, you liked the idea of being called a young man again! You can smile now if you like.

I have written something you can rip to sheds, as I have done to yours if you like, I feel it only fair to give you the chance. Many have tried. But you have to want to read it. I have to bow to the rules of freedom of choice. Until another time my young friend.

Peace, Love and Respect

Remember : Religion guides you, it doesn’t rule you.

J °C

Logician