Living in your own private Idaho

 underground like a wild potato

 The B52s

You’ve heard about the “Goldilocks Zone,” that temperate place where H2O exists in the form of water and scientists speculate life might exist on other planets. I think a Unitarian Universalist congregation should be a Goldilocks Zone where the free exchange of ideas concerning ultimate meaning and purpose flows like life-giving water.  After all, the fourth principle of the Unitarian Universalist Association is, “a free and responsible search for truth and meaning.”

Now, I know that actually the UUA principles are only agreements between congregations, underlining the right of each member congregation to respect the particular theological stance of the various congregations. But, in practice, these principles have been embraced more by individuals within congregations than between congregations, where there is pressure to conform to the franchise—a topic for another day.

I mention this because the congregation I serve, First Unitarian Society of Minneapolis, has historically embraced humanism and has its own set of aspirations, the fourth of which is, to “support one another’s journey toward meaning and connection in the here and now.”

That’s a more humanist slant than the fourth principle of the UUA, but aimed toward the same ideal, a Goldilocks Zone for the free flow of ideas concerning ultimate meaning and purpose. This is the ideal. As with most ideals, the congregation falls short in reality.  But reaching toward an ideal is a good thing. That’s what ideals are for—to stretch us.

Three methods help get us to the Goldilocks Zone:

Hit the pause button on being right.

Hang your inner judge and jury.

Trust everyone’s path.

Easier said than done. But one way to get there is to become a pragmatist. As in the philosophy called Pragmatism. Sure, you can remain an idealist or a cynic or whatever in other matters, but try pragmatism when it comes to creating a Goldilocks Zone.

Listen to what psychologist and Pragmatist philosopher William James had to say about that most contentious of issues, theism:

If believing as though we have free will, or as if God exists, gets us the results we want, we will not only come to believe those things; they will be, pragmatically, true.

Now, by “free will,” James meant “non-theist” according to the theological understandings of the time. In that light, consider what he said again:

If believing as though we have free will, or as if God exists, gets us the results we want, we will not only come to believe those things; they will be, pragmatically, true.

A pragmatist is a Pragmatist due to a deep skepticism concerning the human ability to ascertain ultimate truth. Since Pragmatists aren’t sure we can do that, they put air-quotes around “truth” and examine not what a truth is but how it affects human behavior.

In that light, notice what William James is saying: belief in a god or belief in no god works when it works. When it “gets us the results we want.” Whichever way we choose, the path we are on becomes “pragmatically” true.

If we can get there, we’re in the Goldilocks Zone for multi-faith communication and understanding.

This way of thinking led William James to write his great book The Varieties of Religious Experience, which makes most short lists for the greatest work of non-fiction in the Twentieth Century. And this way of thinking creates the Goldilocks Zone for both the free and the responsible search that each of us must make for truth and meaning.

Notice that this pragmatic approach accomplishes all three of my criteria for the Goldilocks Zone:

Hit the pause button on being right.

Hang your inner judge and jury.

Trust everyone’s path.

“But wait: my path is better!” Just add a couple of words to that statement: “My path is better FOR ME.”

“But my beliefs are objectively true!” No: your beliefs are objectively true FOR YOU. Both pragmatically—and scientifically—objective reality is always subject to further examination. The Pragmatists knew this in their bones.

Consider the words of a couple more great Pragmatists. Philosopher George Santayana said, “There is no cure for birth and death save to enjoy the interval by discerning and manifesting the good without attempting to retain it.”

Let it go.

Consider the words of Pragmatic philosopher John Dewey: “Growth itself is the only moral end.”

Who am I—and who are you—Dewey points out, to judge the religious and philosophical understandings of another person? Maybe you have a PhD in religious studies. That’s great. Maybe you were born UU and have a very open mind and no emotional baggage about religion. Bully for you. Remind yourself: anyone who walks into a Unitarian Universalist congregation for the first time is saying, “I need to think about this ultimate meaning and purpose stuff. I’m not satisfied with the off-the-rack, one-size-fits-all answers.”

Remember that NONE of us have the ultimate answers. The answers that work for others. I don’t have all the answers. I’m still thinking. And as a minister I get paid to think about these things. I thought about titling this, “What I Really, Really Think About God (this week).”

Try this: avoid going “underground like a wild potato.” Share your subjectivity but remember that it is a subjectivity, and we all live in some kind of private Idaho. Insisting on our own rightness leads to an icy world; saying there’s only one way leads to a steamed planet.

The Goldilocks Zone, where the fresh water flows, is only possible when we get outside our own stuff and listen.

The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible. ~Oscar Wilde

There is more than one type of mystery. Some mysteries aren’t even mysterious. For example, how a diesel engine works is a mystery to many, but only those who haven’t taken the time to look at diesel engines. They are a marvel of complexity, yes. But there’s no mystery to how a diesel engine works. People design them. People build them. People repair them.

How planes fly; how battle ships float; how cereal stays fresh for months in cardboard boxes . . . none of these are mysteries to those who bother to look into them and figure out how they work.

Then there are those things that once were mysteries but aren’t any longer. How Ouija boards work, for example, isn’t a mystery. The motions are due to the “ideomotor effect.” That’s the term that a scientist, William Carpenter, coined in 1882 when he was researching how fortune-telling pendulums and dowsing rods work. He also studied the movements of tables at seances. No, the movers and shakers are not spirits. They are us, ourselves. We don’t even know it, Carpenter argued, but we unconsciously make the movements we expect spirits or magic magnetic forces to make.

How dowsing rods work is not a mystery.

But the reason that Ouija boards are not a mystery is that curiosity led someone to discover the truth. Fact is, the “ideomotor effect” is counter to the evidence of our own senses: we don’t know we are producing the movements that we think are coming from the spirit world. Our senses have fooled us.

Only a deep curiosity to solve a mystery can lead to this kind of discovery.

This is the distinction I’m searching for.

Mystery, it appears, can lead to complacence and even superstition, or it can lead to discovery.

That’s why the battle between science and religion has been so brutal for so long in the Western world. It has been twenty-five hundred years since Socrates was convicted for “refusing to recognize the gods acknowledged by the state, and importing strange divinities of his own.”

Can the gods make rain if there are no clouds? Socrates thought it’s not likely. His assertion threatened to kill a sacred cow.

Yet slowly, over time, more and more people looked at the mystery of rain and decided that perhaps the phenomenon occurred for some reason other than the actions of the gods.

It makes me wonder why the Abrahamic monotheisms—Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—have been so resistant to scientific knowledge while Hinduism, Buddhism, Confuscism, Daoism, and earth-based religions have not.

Is that another one of those mysteries?

Is this resistance to science a product of these religions, or is it a product of the ways of thinking that led to these religions? After all, Socrates died four hundred years before the birth of Jesus.

Could it be that democracy is the problem?

Or perhaps patriarchal rule?

Or perhaps the very oppression itself served to encourage curiosity?

Is it a mystery? I’m curious . . .

We human beings have a sense of awe and wonder that motivates us to ask questions, that motivates us to use our imaginations and our reason. At one time, a time before microscopes and telescopes and oscilloscopes and scoping in general, stories and reason were all we had. Then we began to build instruments. Eventually we figured out why it rains.

How do we answer some of those other mysteries, question such as,

What is the purpose of the universe?

Why are we here?

What is the purpose of our lives?

Who’s in charge here?

For many people, even those living in the industrialized world, the answers to these questions remain steadfastly in the realm of superstition.

Who’s in charge here?

El?

Yahweh?

Astarte?

Quetzalcoatl?

Vucub-Caquix? (a Mayan bird god)

Gods and gods in charge of this and that, gods in human form, gods in animal form. For human beings, at one time, stories were all we had. Eventually a curious Greek named Xenophanes came along and said,

“If oxen and horses and lions had hands and were able to draw with their hands and do the same things as men, horses would draw the shapes of gods to look like horses and oxen would draw them to look like oxen, and each would make the gods bodies have the same shape as they themselves had.”

Xenophanes saw—he was roughly a contemporary of Socrates—Xenophanes saw that our stories concerning these ultimate questions depend upon anthropomorphism. We create gods in our own image. They do things that we understand. “Why would that be?” asked Xenophanes. It was a mystery.

Seriously: What is the purpose of the universe?

Xenophanes told us, 2500 years ago: even if there were a purpose, human beings would not understand it. Purpose is an anthropomorphism, a giving the universe human characteristics. We might as well ask, Does the universe yearn? Does the universe get hungry?

Xenophanes remains, whispering into our ears: the universe just isn’t human, even if we imagine a really, really big human.

Poet Dana Gioia expresses this in a poem called “Words:”

The world does not need words. It articulates itself

in sunlight, leaves, and shadows. The stones on the path

are no less real for lying uncatalogued and uncounted.

The fluent leaves speak only the dialect of pure being.

The purpose of the universe in relation to human beings is not a mystery: the universe does not need us and our endless words. As Ludwig Wittgenstein said, “If a lion could talk, we could not understand him.”

There. That is where the mystery is.

Because we need purpose, we project purpose upon the universe.

Our first job is to figure out that we do that. And then stop doing that.

Only then can we get down to a real mystery: Each of us can ask ourselves, “What is my purpose?” When each of us figures that out, we have pursued wisdom and caught up with it. Maybe even put a saddle on it for awhile.

Wisdom is knowing that me, you, all of us—nobody has a purpose . . . until we figure it out. And, even after we do manage to wrestle it to the ground and put a bridle on it once, our purpose is very likely to do a little Houdini on us. Purpose is a shape shifter, if you will. It’s a moving target in our lives.

Our own purpose is the greatest mystery. Yet, we know we’ve got it when we feel the excitement of living in this world. As Howard Thurman famously said, “Don’t ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive, and go do it. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.”

Seriously: who said we get to declare our own mysteries?

The age of the earth is not a mystery.

When dinosaurs existed is not a mystery.

That natural selection shaped life on this planet is not a mystery.

Just because I don’t know something—from ignorance, lack of will, or even adamant refusal to see the facts—does not make it a mystery.

As science fiction writer Philip K. Dick put it, “Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.”

Our challenge in this world is not to create mysteries that are not there. Our challenge is to adjust to the real. And find our meaning and our purpose in the here and now.

Newsflash: Grief is completely irrational.

Does this surprise me? Not rationally. I knew it, know it, have seen it in my own and other people’s lives. But if I ever doubted what I know, this week has given me complete and utter clarity about it.

I’m on a trip away from home, doing things in the real world, in my real life. I hadn’t set off to take a trip down memory lane, or through the land of grief. But to my surprise, that’s where I seem to be, at least in part. The grief is completely interspersed with vibrant blips of current reality. In terms of time spent, vibrant reality overshadows the grief 10 to 1. But the intensity of the grief has given the whole week a strong flavor. Perhaps because of the strength of current life’s vibrancy, the irrationality of my grief sometimes takes me all the way to Wild Grief.

This was a two-part trip: It began with a meeting in Cleveland of a group of Unitarian Universalists, called “Allies for Racial Equity.” A group engaged in compelling, active work on a very present issue that I’m engaged in now. It had barely occurred to me that, 30 miles away in Akron, my childhood home was now owned by people who were not my parents. But when I got to Cleveland, I needed to head down to Akron and circle that house like a buzzard. So I did, driving along familiar streets, noting things I remembered and things that have changed. In a declining industrial city, most things that have changed are not for the better.

At my childhood home, my rational brain noted that the new people appear to be taking care of some major house issues that my father refused to address, and that is a very positive thing.

Meanwhile, my grief spoke in a completely different voice. Wild Grief began to howl: How dare they? Why did they take down those bushes [hideous bushes I had always hated]? How could they paint the door that new color when my mother had so carefully picked out that purple color [I never liked], and hand painted the door herself, twenty or twenty five years ago? What was wrong with them?

I shook myself a little, drove around familiar streets of schools and friends, streets filled with the ghosts of friends , some living and some dead. Then I headed back to Cleveland, back to my life, back to my trip. Next stop: Boston.

The Unitarian Universalist Association is preparing to sell its buildings on Beacon Hill and move across town. These include office buildings and also a bed and breakfast that I have stayed in, literally hundreds of times, over the past twenty five years. I knew that I was grieving the loss of this home away from home, but it wasn’t until I began to see the ubiquitous presence of the people who are purchasing it, measuring and discussing future plans, that irrational grief began to burn in me. “They’re walking around as if they own the place!” I sputtered to a co-worker, who responded kindly, “They do.”

And from there Wild Grief took full flight. As I was walking to a nearby café, I realized that not only am I losing this place to stay, it’s also unlikely that I will, in the future, spend much if any time on Beacon Hill in Boston. Why didn’t I ever live on Beacon Hill, when my child was young? I asked myself. Look at those people with a stroller! Now my child is 17 and I’ll never push a stroller on Beacon Hill! How could I have denied myself that opportunity? It would have been the best place to live, and I denied myself the experience, which is now gone For.Ev.Er.

Rational self pointed out to Wild Grief that, actually, I didn’t like the five years I spent working in Boston. The climate, the culture, the population density was so alien to me that I pretended to myself I was just there for college and would graduate soon and leave. Rational Self also pointed out that my stays at the bed and breakfast include such memories as my young child getting hives because of the lack of screens in the windows and a mosquito infestation, with air conditioning and heating that never quite worked right. Rational self had all kinds of these reminders, but Wild Grief had no interest. She was off and running.

Walking in one of the Boston streets that my Midwestern heart found so claustrophobic and anxiety producing when I lived here, Wild Grief continued to spiral and escalate. What is this time I live in, anyway? Wild Grief moaned. Wouldn’t it have been better to have lived in the 1950’s, when businesses were building after the war and people got married, had jobs, bought houses, and just stayed put for life? Wouldn’t it have been great to live in a time when things were predictable, and steady?

And that’s when Rational Self dissolved and Cackling Self came in. The 1950’s? Me in the 1950’s? I told a friend about this later and we had a laughing fit, envisioning me, a bitter secretary for a mean and controlling male boss, unable to create or claim or own anything as a woman, slinking into smoky lesbian bars on the weekends hoping not to get arrested, a bitter alcoholic, viewed by the rest of the world as a lonely spinster. And with that cackling, wild grief quit soaring in the skies and spiraled down a tiny hole. From which I am confident she will emerge again any minute and take flight again.

I don’t know what adventures my heart will bring me today, but I hope Cackling Self stays with me. Turns out not only is she more fun, she’s more effective, in vanquishing Wild Grief.

I have a terrible confession: almost all of the calories I consume in a day, I consume after 8pm.

No, I don’t cook extravagant dinners late at night. Far from it. I eat junk.

I’m not proud of it. I know that eating late at night is the worst sort of thing for my health. I have talked with my physician about it. I’ve talked with therapists. I’ve talked with nutritionists.

I have even stopped doing it for, oh, two or three days at a time.

As a matter of fact, the thought that I shouldn’t do it goes through my head each evening. Right before I head for the fridge.

And the knowledge that I shouldn’t do it . . . adds to the rush I get when I do do it.

This is a terrible confession. But you who have not sinned may hurl the first stone. Perhaps binge eating doesn’t appeal to you. OK. But something does . . .

Something you know you shouldn’t do. Bacon. Scotch. Pistachio ice cream. Gambling. Driving too fast. Drunk-dialing your ex. Sex. Drugs. Doritos.

Something.

Yes, you know you’re going to face-palm when you wake up the next morning. But you just can’t stop yourself.

Many Christians blame it on “original sin,” but a quick survey of the wreckage around us shows that sin isn’t all that original. You who have not sinned may hurl the first stone.

OK, so I know that’s not what St. Augustine meant by the “original” in “original sin.” But there is certainly a connection between those seven deadly sins—wrath, greed, sloth, pride, lust, envy, and gluttony—and the sort of thing I’m talking about. They are all things we do because they come naturally. Each is an easy answer in the immediate moment, though each is fairly clearly not good for us in the long run, if by “good” we mean . . . well, what? Our animal selves?

Why do we fall so easily into those patterns of behavior described as the “deadly sins”? St. Augustine thought that it’s because we’re born that way—we are born into a fallen world. I don’t think St. Augustine’s answer quite survives Occam’s Razor—it is not the simplest explanation by a long shot.

But the fact remains: why do we do what we know we shouldn’t do and that we know we will regret?

Despite the fact that he’s been dead for a hundred and thirty-three years, Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoyevsky still has the best explanation, I think. His insights continue to challenge our most sacred of cows.

In his time, most Europeans believed that humanity had finally rounded a corner, and that the human future would be determined by rationality and reason—the greatest good for the greatest number.

Dostoyevsky was there to say this was not the case . . . and never will be the case.

Of all the reflections on why we human beings do what we do, from philosophers to neuroscientists, Fyodor Dostoyevsky still gets my vote for the deepest insight concerning why human beings make the choices we do:

“One’s own free unfettered choice, one’s own caprice, however wild it may be, one’s own fancy worked up at times to frenzy—is that very “most advantageous advantage” which we have overlooked, which comes under no classification and against which all systems and theories are continually being shattered to atoms.”

Dostoyevsky knew that the “most advantageous advantage”—for me that’s losing twenty pounds—the “most advantageous advantage” is NOT what might be reasonable and “right.” Rather, the “most advantageous advantage” is our exercising what we see as free will—making a “capricious” and “unfettered choice.”

Dostoyevsky asked,

“And how do these wiseacres know that man wants a normal, a virtuous choice? What has made them conceive that man must want a rationally advantageous choice?

What man wants is simply independent choice, whatever that independence may cost and wherever it may lead.”

Why? That’s the question we ask in those face-palm moments: Why? Why do we do that?

Philosopher Crispin Sartwell puts it this way: “When you consult your experience, the fact that you are a body is more obvious than that two plus two equals four.”

There: I think that’s it. And that’s what Dostoyevsky knew is the case: The physical trumps the reasonable. Virtue. Reason. Those don’t feel like independent choice, do they? They feel, well . . . wholesome. And wholesome, like two plus two equals four, doesn’t feel real, doesn’t feel embodied.

Isn’t the concept of original sin merely a complex way of saying that human beings are born with bodies?

And isn’t this the wellspring of so much of Western thought? Our dualism, our denial of the body?

The doctrine of original sin is all about how merely being born with a body, merely entering this world, makes us sinful. Fallen. Dirty. In need of redemption.

Well. Maybe you don’t buy that. But, when we turn the terms into “head” and “heart,” which do you think is more important? Which should predominate? Isn’t one about me staying in my chair and the other about my trip to the fridge?

Perhaps most people nowadays don’t think that the mere fact of embodiment— em-bodi-ment—the Latin prefix “em,” meaning “put into”—we perhaps don’t think that the mere fact of having a body has us on the highway to hell. But it certainly puts us in the way of some bad choices, doesn’t it?

Consider some other “em” prefixes: em-brace, em-bryo, em-barrassment. Fleshy stuff, isn’t this “em,” this being “put into”? Getting into a body appears to put us into quite a fix. I’m reminded of that Punk classic from Richard Hell and the Voidoids: “It’s a gamble when you get a face.”

I think that the most damaging idea in all of Western philosophy and religion is the body / mind distinction.

It led to the belief in a distinction between the body and the soul, which I think is a psychologically damaging and completely erroneous idea.

It led to the erroneous idea that consciousness itself is somehow distinct from the functioning of the brain.

These errors permeate Western thinking. Perhaps it’s easiest to see in the statement, “I have a body.” How could a human being possibly “have” a body? We can “have” a beer or a smoke or a snack or a new car. We can even have an opinion. But we don’t have a body: we ARE a body.

Rather than “I have a body,” the truer way to say this is, “I AM a body.”

Yes, Dostoyevsky said, people are capable of realizing the advantageous—what is good for us. But this knowledge, far from leading to rational decisions, shows us instead the way to REALLY mess things up.

I feel, as I head toward the fridge, liberated. I feel as if I were practicing free will. But am I? Or am I merely playing out my enslavement to one of the seven big sins, gluttony?

Dostoyevsky understood this dilemma. He was ruinously addicted to gambling. Still, in a world full of human beings whose actions can be predicted by statistics, what can we do? The irrational.

As Dostoyevsky had his Underground Man put it,

“The formula ‘two plus two equals five’ is not without its attractions.”

More next week . . .

In the world of super heroes, it’s called an “origin story,” that trauma that led to the super hero being super.

Poor little Bruce Wayne watches helplessly as his parents are murdered. Superman rockets off the planet Krypton, sent away by his father moments before the planet explodes, only to find himself in Kansas where a loving couple adopts him and imbues him with truth, justice, and the American Way. Magneto and Professor X start out as just normal . . . mutants . . . but life experience sends one on to found the good-guy X-Men and the other to . . . electrical evil.

Clearly, the creators of super heroes believe that nurture trumps nature in that long debate between nature and nurture. But the more we know about genetics, the more we have to ask, is that true? Do our genes make us do it, whatever the “it” might be?

Science has been known to give us answers that we are not culturally capable of understanding. The most egregious moment of that in the Twentieth Century was the eugenics movement, that is, the belief that “better babies” could be produced by selective human breeding; and the corollary belief that those born with disabilities and those of races not of Western European origin, were inferior.

Liberal preachers preached it. Liberal people practiced it. It was part-and-parcel of the early birth control movement. And of course it led ultimately to the atrocities of Nazi Germany.

It also led, in the US, to immigration laws barring most people not of Western European origin, and the forced-sterilization of thousands of people. Proponents believed they could eradicate mental disorders though eugenics; they believed they could eradicate alcoholism. Forced sterilization for those in mental institutions was a practice upheld by the US Supreme Court. Thousands of poor people were forcibly sterilized. And the practice of requiring sterilization as a pre-condition for receiving welfare checks continued in some states into the 1970s.

Their motto was, “Eugenics is the self-direction of evolution.”

Fact is, the Nazis got many of their ideas from the United States and used the example of the US to justify their actions to other nations all through the 1930s.

Today, we know this behavior well as the rhetoric of neo-Nazis, the Ku Klux Klan, and some far-out right-wing politicians. But liberals?

I don’t want to in any way justify these beliefs. They are despicable. Yet dismissing these ideas as something from the dark past is a very bad idea. Rather, we should look to that terrible chapter of American history as a cautionary tale. Because, besides being based in the most virulent forms of racism and ableism, political progressives also saw eugenics as good science: the latest in scientific knowledge. That’s the cautionary tale: Eugenics appealed to the very people who were most open to the theory of natural selection.

Why? One reason is that they applied the idea of natural selection—still not well understood by most people in the early Twentieth Century—to an idea most Americans knew very well at the time—the selective breeding of animals. Remember the motto I mentioned: “Eugenics is the self-direction of evolution.” Nowadays most people who look at the matter know that natural selection can’t be self-selected—the time frame is way too long for human beings to affect, or even comprehend, for that matter. But, most people did not know that at the time.

Here’s how the fatal error occurred: We have cats and dogs and ridable horses because of selective breeding. People figured this out a loooong time ago. My grandparents, who could barely read and write, were experts at selective breeding. Most farmers were.

People knew that traits can be affected in a short time among animals, and so they assumed that human genetics could be affected in a short time. And that simply isn’t true—not in animals such as human beings that have long lives, anyway. Fruit flies are a different story. As is the famous case of the tube (subway) mice in London that have evolved in about a century and a half to have grey coats that exactly match the color of paint used on the bottom of the London train tunnels. But people aren’t fruit flies or mice.  Scientific ideas often become dangerous when they are applied to culture or human life on a micro-level.

Remember that Charles Darwin knew almost nothing about genetics: Mendel’s work on peas was in existence in Darwin’s lifetime, but Darwin never encountered the studies.

Remember that the structure of DNA was not discovered until 1953, well after the horrors of Nazism. The first draft of the the human genome appeared in 2001.

To that we must add that the overt racist and ableist assumptions in the US at the time made for the perfect environment for the eugenics movement. Racism and ableism permeated US society—from outright segregationist to progressives to just about everybody. Heck, even the Homeopathy Society supported eugenics.

We see the same sort of misapplication of science today: Despite what New Age gurus might claim, people are not lonely because we live in an expanding universe. We can’t walk through walls because there is lots of space between atoms. We don’t vibrate with cosmic vibrations because of String Theory.

And you don’t speed up natural selection through eugenics. The time scales of the two are completely different. All these are the realm of hucksters. And, in the case of eugenics, racists.

Take away: when science appears to support your preconceptions and prejudices, watch out!

No, there isn’t really a super hero who became Spider-Man because he was bitten by an irradiated spider. But here are some things that are real science that we easily forget:

Genetic research has taught us that the entire concept of race is a fiction. A mistake. There are no genetically identifiable races. Homo-Sapiens developed along about 200,000 years ago and some homo-sapiens began leaving Africa something along about 80,000 years ago. Human generations are roughly 25 years, which means that some homo-sapiens left Africa about 3000 generations ago; other homo-sapiens, such as our Somali neighbors, left in this generation. We’re all immigrants out of Africa.

Despite what the racists of the early-Twentieth Century believed, there is no “race” in the homo-sapiens population, only separation by time and cultural difference.

You may have read that President Obama is related to Harry Truman, Dick Cheney, George Bush, and Brad Pitt. This is not urban legend. But it doesn’t prove a whole lot either, except that human beings are all related, and that we tend to notice the famous ones and not the infamous or un-famous ones.

Until everyone understands this, we will have not only the egregious lunatics such as the Neo-Nazis and the Ku Klux Klan, but also the casual cliches that still permeate our culture and destroy the lives of too many people.

Marvel Comics

Poor little Bruce Wayne. He could have been a man of leisure.  Superman might have hung out on Krypton (or at least Kansas). And there’s no telling what nature might have had Magneto and Professor X doing. As for us, we will have to continue wondering and speculating just how much of what we do is up to us and how much is up to our stars . . . and our genes. All will be well, so long as we remember humility in the face of a very large universe.