Man's Fate and God's Choice - Bhimeswara Challa (best e books to read .TXT) 📗

even distasteful task that drains our energy. Yet, ironically we do cherish it. We constantly choose to judge, and we find the idea of giving up judgment to be beyond ordinary human effort.

Whether it is evolutionary or environmental, innate or imbibed, we are all imperfect, but we have eyes only for the faults of others. We do not accept life; we do not accept ourselves; we do not accept others. We live in a state of denial, resistance, and rejection.

 

 

 

 

128 Cited in: Quotations Paul Johnson. [Modern Times: A History of the World from the 1920s to the Year 2000]. ConservativeForum.org. Accessed at: http://www.conservativeforum.org/authquot.asp?ID=855

129 Sidney J. Harris. BrainyQuote. Accessed at: http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/s/sydneyjha152323.html

130 Ralph Waldo Emerson. BrainyQuote. Accessed at: http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/r/ralphwaldo397348.html

131 Aleister Crowley. BrainyQuote. Accessed at: http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/a/aleistercr156791.html

132 Cited in: Allen Watson. Why Do We Judge People? Circle of Atonement. Accessed at: http://www.circleofa.org/articles/WhyDoWeJudge.php

 

What most people yearn for is acceptance and a feeling of being wanted, just to be missed. We are overly indulgent towards intolerance, and impatient with diversity and difference of opinions. The Italian poet and philosopher Giacomo Leopardi, said: “No human trait deserves less tolerance in everyday life, and gets less, than intolerance.”133 Acceptance is not condoning sin or ignoring injustice; it is simply to desist from compelling others to lead their lives in a particular way; it is to desist from judging others because no norm is foolproof if solely based on human intelligence, which is inherently imperfect. In the highest sense, acceptance is love, and intolerance is a manifestation of hate, and exploitation is the opposite of compassion. It stems from a culture that worships the winner and ridicules the loser, a culture that considers tolerance and success as incompatible. In common parlance, success often is another name for short-cut, a quick way to achieving an objective regardless of all scruples. Does it all mean that success and morality and spirituality are incompatible and irreconcilable? At first glance that does appear to be so, but a deeper look belies the premise. It depends on how we delineate the boundaries. There is an emerging new breed of ‘success seekers’ who believe that success can be sharing too, and not necessarily unscrupulous, who put people ahead of profit, personal fulfillment before material gain. But such seekers are too miniscule in number to tilt the social scales, or to make a difference to the human moral balance sheet.

 

Civilization and chemicalization

As a result of our obsession with ‘success’ in conjunction with another ubiquitous word ‘progress’, man no longer lives in the natural order. In that order, fruits ripen in their own time and in general, things mature in consonance with natural laws, and as a part of and as an input to the larger cause of life on earth. Human culture has sought to change that — to improve upon what Nature offers as food and medicine and to want a menu of choices more than what is naturally available. The main facilitators of that gratification are synthetic chemicals, and between them and toxicity there is only a thin line. We are told that more than 100,000 chemicals are already in the marketplace, and that about 1,000 new ones are being introduced every year. We have been made to believe that through chemicals, we can lead better lives, and that manufactured chemicals are no different from naturally occurring products. The path of ‘progress’ that modern man has embarked upon, which requires industrialization and processing of everything that Nature offers, has led to the ‘chemicalization’ of everything that goes into our body. As a result, we live in a ‘chemicalized’ milieu, the impact of which, scientists tell us, is “changing both the social and mating behaviors of a raft of species,”134 through what are called ‘endocrine disruptors’, which “potentially pose far greater threat to survival than, for example, falling sperm counts caused by higher chemical concentrations.”135 In what we may call chemically afflicted societies, and increasingly universally, many people are plagued by mysterious neurological disorders that rarely, if ever, existed just a century ago. We have disorders with all kinds of complex sounding names like Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), Lou Gehrig’s disease,

 

 

 

133 Giacomo Leopardi. ThinkExist. Accessed at: http://thinkexist.com/quotation/no_human_trait_deserves_less_tolerance_in/184205.html

134 Andy Coghlan. Pollution Triggers Bizarre Behaviour in Animals. New Scientist. 3 September 2004. Accessed at: http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn6343-pollution-triggers-bizarre-behaviour-in- animals.html

135 Andy Coghlan. Pollution Triggers Bizarre Behaviour in Animals. New Scientist. 3 September 2004. Accessed at: http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn6343-pollution-triggers-bizarre-behaviour-in- animals.html

 

fibromyalgia and Alzheimer’s disease, and so on. Many things we use to improve our ‘quality of life’ are loaded with chemicals, about which we know nothing, not to speak of their effect. Our body tissues themselves have become toxic because of our quality of life. One expert on toxins in food wrote that we are so contaminated that, had we been cannibals, our meat would be banned from human consumption. We are often reassured by the authorities and by the chemical industry with phrases such as ‘no direct evidence’, or with the argument that at ‘low’ levels those chemicals are either safe or pose ‘low risk’. That may be the truth, but it is not the ‘whole truth’. Each of the chemicals in question might qualify for such descriptions at that level in isolation, but together and with thousands of other chemicals we are exposed to every day in our civilized world and in urban settings, their cumulative effect might no longer be ‘low risk’, particularly for children. It could affect not only their health but also their behavior. Then there is a phenomenon called ‘body burden’, which is the effect of these cumulative chemicals inside the human body. Randall Fitzgerald, author of the book The Hundred-Year Lie (2006), on the prevalence of toxic chemicals says, “The problem here is that our bodies do not recognize these synthetic chemicals, most of which have been invented, patented and produced since World War II. Our livers, which are the main detoxifying organs of our bodies, do not recognize these synthetic chemicals, and as a result, do not metabolize them. Instead, the chemicals are either pushed off into the far reaches of the liver, to be stored, or sent into body fat and body organs to be stored. As these toxins accumulate, they begin to interact with each other.”136 Fitzgerald says that we do not know the synergic effects of two or more chemicals in the human body and that chemical combination could increase toxicity and cause neurological damage. He warns us that we are becoming a mutant species, and cites the example of the fish and amphibian species in the lakes and in swamps becoming hermaphrodite and developing both male and female sex organs as a result of the toxic chemicals dumped into those water bodies. Fitzgerald adds that every day, we play what he calls a game of biological Russian roulette with our bodies, based on our food, medicine and environmental choices. Furthermore, there is now emerging evidence that chemicals in the environment can influence animal behavior drastically — can humans escape it? Maybe much of the malice and the violence in human behavior is chemically induced. We talk about ‘substance abuse’ and ‘drug dependence’ of the youth in affluent countries but not about our ‘chemical dependence’, which perhaps is at the root of all those dependences. We worry about ‘cold-causing viruses’ but are oblivious to the surge in human violence possibly influenced by the chemicals that we imbibe through our food, water and the air. Chemical pollution is far more deadly than atmospheric pollution, and it is possibly altering the processes that determine human personality and behavior. Man is addicted to chemicals because they offer what the human mind wants: comfort, convenience, instant gratification, and short-term security. In the long run, the combination of chemically weakened human bodies and toxic habitat could threaten human survival more than the specter of nuclear holocaust. In fact, some scientists say that one of the emerging frontiers of research is to find a way to keep the human alive and healthy in a much more toxic world.

But as someone said, we are actually not living longer but ‘dying longer’, kept alive longer through technology.

Unmindful of all these portents, man is waging a war on the very source that provides his life-supporting infrastructure. Human civilization is increasingly becoming noxious to

 

 

 

136 Cited in: Mike Adams. Interview with Randall Fitzgerald, author of The Hundred-Year Lie, on the Prevalence of Toxic Chemicals. NaturalNews. 21 June 2006. Accessed at: http://www.naturalnews.com/019434.html

 

Nature. Instead of being caretakers and custodians, we have become predators and exploiters. On the other hand, those who advocate the cause of Nature seem to imply that man must suffer so that Nature remains pristine. In the words of Peter Schwartz, “Human beings survive by reshaping nature to fulfill their needs. Every single step taken to advance beyond the cave — every rock fashioned into a tool, every square foot of barren earth made into productive cropland, every drop of crude petroleum transformed into fuel for cars and planes

— constitutes an improvement in human life, achieved by altering our natural environment. The environmentalists’ demand that Nature be protected against human ‘encroachments’ means, therefore, that man must be sacrificed in order to preserve Nature.”137 ‘Conquest of Nature’ is considered as the telltale sign of human civilization. But every power won over Nature, as the Irish essayist C.S. Lewis (The Abolition of Man, 1843) says, is a power over man as well; it could be directed against himself — a kind of a returning boomerang. It is true that man has come this far by harnessing Nature. The difference between the attitudes of pre- modern man and modern man is a state of mind, the desire to tap the magnanimity and munificence of Nature, and the thought of being a conqueror. It is the difference between a baby suckling at the mother’s breast and a rapist ravaging the same breast. The home of human ‘civilization’, it is useful to remind ourselves, is Planet Earth. It is on the soil and sweat of the Earth that man created the infrastructure for his way of life, by harnessing its resources to cater to his comfort and convenience. Now, some scientists say that we are in serious ‘erotological overshoot’, that we might run out of both room and resources on earth as early as 2050,138 and that thankfully, we are now poised on the brink of an interplanetary civilization. But, let us come down to earth and remind ourselves that we have not created even a planetary civilization that treats the Earth as a holistic entity, and humanity as a coherent community. Alfred North Whitehead wrote that “Civilization is the victory of persuasion over force.”139 On that account alone, what man has created never was ‘civilization’. It is fear and force that have been the driving forces in human society from the earliest to modern times, more so now than ever before. The noted historian Arnold Toynbee wrote “to be able to fill leisure intelligently is the last product of civilization.”140 We have failed that test too. Technology has created a lot of leisure, at least in some parts of the human world, but our civilization has not found a way to fill that leisure wisely. If anything, it has fuelled avarice and violence. Furthermore, the current civilization is based on ownership and is built on fragmentation and fracturing of the earth; not only nation-states but even individuals behave as if they own a bit of the earth. Once you buy it, you can do what you want with it, subject only to the law of the land, not the law of Nature. The key concept is ‘to afford’, which means