My American God father, Mike, is 60, divorced, of Hungarian (Central European) ancestry. He owns and manages a business he started a number of years ago.
When he walks into a room, women stampede and dogs swoon. Or maybe women tremble and dogs stampede. I can never get this sentence right!
In the evenings, he devotes to reading the classic texts of Western civilization. These texts encourage one to evaluate the kind of life one leads and help develop one’s own human spirit.
The live theater and Symphony are beyond compare and take much of his time.
Long-distance motorcycle trips into the wilderness are a joy to him.
Racing a Porsche 911 RSR for fourteen years taught him much about competition and about life. The people(his racing buddies) were the best.
Our friendship is beyond the age gap. I LOVE Mike, the most brilliant man I ever met in my life.
Mike's philosophy -- the source of ethics.
The universe is so complex that it is beyond the understanding of the human brain. How can beings as limited as we understand the universe?
So, how do we live our lives?
By trying to understand and conform to the Ethics wired into by evolution.
Religion seems to be broken into two components; namely, God and the wonder of it all, and Ethics, how one should conduct one’s life.
The “God” part does vary widely by culture. Does God depend on where you’re born and whom your parents are?
The Ethics part varies little by culture.
Cultural evolutionists believe that Ethics improves our ability to reproduce. It’s all about Darwin and evolution. Ethically-driven cultures are better at lasting for centuries and producing more offspring than non-ethically driven cultures. Ethics, the right way of living, is wired into us by millions of years of evolution.
You and I are “good” not because of religion, but because it’s the right way to live, and efficient in an evolutionary sense.
Religion is good because it celebrates the wonder of it all (the “God” part) and tells us how to live a life (the “Ethics” part).
The two need not be from one source. The ancient Greeks kept the “God” part separate from the “Ethics” part and worked out the beautiful Ethics which Augustine later incorporated into Christianity.
What does science tell us?
The earth was once flat. Then the sun circled us. Now we circle the sun.
Newton added gravity, then Einstein determined that gravity does not exist.
We are an expanding universe. But we might be steady-state, or expanding to an eventual contraction.
One respected physicist thinks time does not exist, that we are a pulse, a beat, in a universe forever expanding and contacting.
Regarding physical laws, I’m not sure we’ve discovered any. They only work within limited specifications. Don’t we come up with a law, get new data, then revise the law? That implies to me that we never had the law right in the first place.
Someone wrote that the laws of the universe must be written in eleven dimensions, and we are capable of writing only four.
I believe that, if we ever find a way to write in eleven dimensions, we will find that it takes 121 dimensions.
We are my dog. He sees the Sun come up and sees the Sun set. He is incapable of understanding the evidence right in front of him, that the Earth circles the Sun. Like my dog, we see, but do not see.
Unfortunately, we will die not knowing what it is all about.
In the “Apology”, Socrates tells us (he is to be executed via ingesting hemlock that evening) that he will shortly be with the famous and honorable in History or he will be in an infinitely long and restful sleep. Our views have not changed much in 2,500 years.
请阅读更多我的博客文章>>>
| • | Soooo cute. |
| • | Do Americans love debts? |
| • | Something gets under my skin |
| • | We went to Christine&Aaron’s wedding reception……(1) |
| • | Pride in Chinese heritage |
选择“Disable on www.wenxuecity.com”
选择“don't run on pages on this domain”
