Life in Times of “Deceit”

Last week, one of my sorcery apprentices asked me a rather simple question: “Why do people cheat? Do all people cheat equally? “

On the face of it, it seems a rather simple question but the answer is anything but simple. In fact, it is one of the building blocks of mankind or Homo Sapiens as we have come to be known by anthropologists and geneticists.

To be able to give a decent answer, one must be prepared to break several social, religious and biological barriers.

Let us start with the simplest.

Religion

There is a recurring belief among humans that religion has a heavenly basis. For instance, the Jewish religion starts with a categorical statement:

“In the beginning, God created heaven and earth...” Genesis 1:1

This is a statement, according to the authors of the book of Genesis that cannot, must not, be challenged by anybody no matter how important or learned they are. You are not even supposed to ask any questions about this all-powerful and all-knowing God - like where did he come from, how does he look like, etc.

So much so that today, around 5,000 years after that book was apparently written by we know not whom, no one is supposed to ask anything about that God. Even a modern very educated professor called Dr Wayne Dyer is quite happy to quote an authoritative source, viz., Exodus 7:15, about a man called Moses who was ordered by God to go and deliver his fellow Israelites from the grip of a terrible Pharaoh in Egypt - probably Rameses II - who had enslaved them totally.

When Moses asked God that same question about who He was during an encounter with a “burning bush”, he got a cryptic answer: “I Am that I Am”. End of story. No proof, no explanation and no room for discussion, confirmation or refutation. The rest of this explanation can be found in a long video by the same title by the same Dr Wayne Dyer.

All I know is that Wayne Dyer was a very well informed and persuasive motivational speaker who died in 2015 at age 75. I do not recall him ever giving a satisfactory answer. He simply called it faith which is entirely personal to the believer and his Creator.

If you read the rest of Chapter 1 of Genesis, you will find so many logical inconsistencies that you will not be sure what to believe or not believe especially about his most enigmatic creation: Man. Why, for instance, would he create all other creatures as male and female and yet create Adam, male only. You can guess the reason: you can embellish and exaggerate the story of Adam and Eve and make it the basis of a complete religion that survives to this day. But, it was never a very believable explanation.

On the subject of cheating in that book, there are so many instances that one dares not try to catalogue them starting with Eve tempting Adam with an apple after she herself had an encounter with a “snake”.

In my uneducated view, a lot of the fables started from the time a man called Abram was ordered by God to migrate from a place called Ur of the Chaldeans and go find a place called Canaan that was “full of milk and honey.” Its exact location was even given - west of Jordan River, South of Lebanon and north of Mt Sinai. There was no need to give the fourth boundary as it was defined by the modern Mediterranean Sea.

Abraham’s escapades in that promised land is the kind of thriller you cannot put down. But if you read it carefully, you will notice so many instances of cheating even by Abraham himself - to the Pharaoh that his wife Sarah was his sister - that everything else needs to be taken with a pinch of salt. The other instances are too many to be retold.

Which leads to a fundamental problem: If the bible has so many cases of cheating, deception and lying, what else will you believe in that treatise that has sold more copies than any other book on earth?

And the same goes for all other religious treatises.

Genetics

The second basis of our enquiry on cheating is more scientific or, more specifically, biological. Science has over the years discovered that we are all developed from a scientific activity called evolution.

The other day I was reading a book by the the simple title: “How to be Human - The Manual” written by a lady called Ruby Wax. It was given to me as a Christmas gift by my youngest son and, initially, I thought it was an admonition that I had lost my ability to be “human” because of several undesirable changes in my personality that I had recently become aware of. I decided to read it “in my own good time”.

However, curiosity got the better of me and I started reading it partly because it had two “co-authors”, a monk and a leading neuroscientist. I had recently completed reading two other serious books which had left me in a daze. The first was titled “The Book of Joy” by Douglas Adams and told of the proceedings of a session where a writer brought together two of the world’s eminent religious personalities: The Dalai Llama of Tibet and Bishop Desmond Tutu of South Africa. Their discussions revolved around their remarkable lives and the challenges they have had to face in their disparate lives. Told in a disarmingly human way.

The second book was simply titled ”Sapiens, A Brief History of Humankind ” written by Yuval Noah Harari, a very well researched book running to just over 500 pages. This book traces the development of man from his primordial past more than 70,000 years ago before becoming what we are today. And still evolving by the day..

By now you must have realised that religion and science are in mortal combat. Which of the two protagonistic viewpoints do I, a mere mortal, believe? A bishop, two monks, a historian or a neuroscientist.

I now have no doubt that religion has little if anything to do with our current state. Rather, man like all living creatures, are in a constant state of evolution. Most of it to do with the changes happening in the universe in which our tiny home planet earth is located.

Truth be told, the brain of man is much better hardwired for survival than that of most other creatures - from viruses to dinosaurs.Through having to deal with vastly more complex issues than these other creatures and the universe at large - how many birds bother to find out how many light years away Andromeda is from earth? Or where I can find God if I had the power to

traverse the entire universe that is expanding at the speed of light to I know not where? A brilliant theoretical physicist called Stephen Hawking had tried to do it and, even wrote a nice little book about his efforts called “A Brief History of Time”. He had decided, to try and “understand the mind of God”. He died in 2018 at age 76 before he could understand it - after suffering a horrific brain disorder when he was only 29 years old.

In a strange twist of thought, it occurred to me that pursuing all sorts of antics to prove the existence of God may not be so difficult after all. Consider the case of Albert Einstein. He was born an ordinary kid, did not learn to read or write until he was six years old and then the genius in him exploded somewhere on the way. His ultimate “discovery” of the famous formula, viz., E=MC2, is perhaps the greatest discovery of all time. That to get a huge amount of energy(E) you need very little mass(M) because the speed of light(C) is already so huge and its square almost infinite. That, in my humble view, is the mind of God.

My Conclusion

One of the more frightening things I have discovered from these readings is that cheating, lying, disguising, hiding, disseminating, call it what you will, is an innocent development that is designed to ensure the self-preservation of species, ALL species.

Yet, it should not be frightening because everyone of them instinctively knows that if you are gone, you are gone: END OF STORY. How you went is of absolutely no consequence to others smarter or more foolish than you.

So, as you go about your perennial plundering and meanderings, know this for a fact: You are NOT in charge. You are being done.

And the inevitable conclusion should be obvious: What does it matter?

JH Kimura
24th January 2020

Two months after I wrote this piece, the world exploded into its worst crisis in recent years. And it was not caused by a nuclear explosion or some such calamity.

The cause, as we all now know, is tiny little virus going by the arcane name ‘‘coronavirus”. It apparently manifested itself in a hitherto unknown place called Wuhan in China. While China was relatively quick to take extreme measures, us in the rest of the world sort of believed it was a Chinese affair and even a famous or should I say infamous president of a very prosperous country dismissed it as a “Chinese virus”.

In retrospect, we now know that we should have listened and taken the matter more seriously. But, it is already too late and we are all so deep in this Chinese *** that the world will never be the same again. The more religious among us are already referring to it as Armageddon or “end of time” as predicted in the Jewish last book in the Bible with an enigmatic title: “Revelation”.

Shall we believe it? Only time will tell but, without a shadow of doubt, the price will be exceedingly high. As we get deeper into this month of fools, do not say you were not warned.

5th April 2020

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