Smoke and Bounce

8:24 pm EST

DECLARATION of CINCINNNATIAN CATHOLICISM

dear m___,

after snipping the personal note of my last email to you, i published it on my blog, after realizing that it was a fairly comprehensive thing. but -- THIS email i will refuse to paste. why? because to me it is such a profound and dynamic revelation that i must call this an absolute pre-write. at this point i simply do not know where to start.

well, here's a start, as i begin my cigarette -- as of today i consider myself to be a "cincinnatian" catholic.

i'll explain "cincinnatian" first. i have lived virtually all my days in an urban milieu. i've visited other parts of america, and certain cities and national parks, and various suburbs, etc. but as a biologist -- yes, a biologist! -- it is yet in the urban setting that i have drawn an understanding of wilderness, order and chaos. yes, i see the steel, and the concrete, and the cars, all the people and people and people. but microscopically i understand that certain "species" will survive (e.g., flies, mosquitos, finches, squirrels, etc, living day to day). and in the people i've come to appreciate general racial differences in temperament among many other things. you can even make a behavioral analysis of human inhabitants of the city by examining the contents of a public garbage can, or your own garbage can. truly, what diversity, what wildly revolutionary biological phenomena and principles are at work in cincinnati, however i define the zone? it is easy for an observant man to argue that the ecology here is as complex and mysterious as the serengeti of africa or yellowstone park. cincinnati has shaped me, however few neighborhoods have influenced me since i stick tenaciously to my own familiar territories by and large. cincinnati is my model of both the occident and the entire earth; i have both deduced and inferred many, many convictions about nature by never calling an element of the city's landscape too mundane for earnest examination. i am a cincinnatian, and i will remain such.

now, "catholic" -- look up the word in webster's! the #1 definition does not in any way refer to the roman catholic church. it simply means "universal and all-inclusive". to me, again as a biologist, this means that my beliefs about anything from behavior to anatomy to culture must be fully integrated and intellectually consistent, and on an ethical level (and this is THE most difficult) constantly and unceasingly practicable to the best of my ability.

now, the question is: what is more all-inclusive? is it the darwinian concept of the great "tree of life" (said in those exact words in the origin of species), which is manifest under the biological law of evolution by means of natural selection? or is it christian humanism?

here's my way of putting it -- the former is usually pop-biology, and the latter is pop-christianity. darwin was correct in asserting that organic lineages undergo modification over successive generations. and yet believers in the most famous and influential naturalist's theory most conventionally define species (sometimes strictly!) as members of a taxon who have the capacity to produce fertile offspring. i have been studying this problem for years now. and verily i say to you, m___, that this definition of species is not only intellectually lazy but also outright scientifically fraudulent! reproductive capacity qualifies NOTHING AT ALL. i'll initiate this claim's argument with an audacious but perfectly logical point: saying that a Negro is of the same species as a Korean is as scientifically defensible as saying that a cheetah is of the same species as a cactus. no shit, m___ -- dead serious. the split branches on the great tree of life are in the biological sciences called "clades" or "taxa". and they are plainly used for expediency; they are in no way absolute -- EXCEPT in the DEGREE of relatedness of the lineages. biologists call chimps, gorillas, monkeys, orang-utans, and humans "primates". "primates" is a "genus" label -- officially -- which as a pure matter of expediency webster's ranks above "species" and below "family". but the utterly inarguable truth is that any serious scholar of biology KNOWS that there is no fundamental difference other than degree of encompassing-power among the terms "phylum", "order", "kingdom", "family", "class", "genus", "sub-species", "variety", "race", "species", "sub-race", "sub-variety", AD INFINITUM!!! there is no biological law whatsoever that affirms that 2 different kingdoms are necessarily less related than 2 "sub-varieties" of the same "race". indeed -- cheetah is to cactus as Negro is to Korean. who cares? who cares about reproductive capacity? examine your OWN life; is it REALLY all about procreation that will repeat your bloodline in future generations "successfully"? or is your life about LOVE? and what is "success"? what is it? will somebody tell me?

now, christian "humanism", as conventionally understood, draws the boundaries of humanity between 2 or more extremes of a racial continuum. it's as simple as that. but i've already destroyed the validity of the explicitness of the term "race". so, then: what on earth is a HUMAN? hence what is humanism, if the "-ism" is to imply advancement of the best interests of the race? we cannot answer this with silly, fallacious understandings of politically correct claptrap. to answer "what is human?" we must redefine "human"!

the best way to define human is contained plainly in the holy scriptures -- but NOT in genesis! adam and eve were essentially NOT biological entities. adam and eve were and are spiritual entities rather. paleoanthropologists often employ the metaphor "african eve" when they estimate the date and location of "our" most recent common ancestor -- but, you guessed it! -- that ain't good enough. life preexisted the separation of the south american continent from the african continent. "we" are a strain of intestine going far deeper back in geological time, indeed to Pangea, and then even to the bottomless depths of primeval oceans. is it beyond God's power to possess a mere bacteria with a soul? is it beyond His power to possess a single grain of sand with a soul? or an eruption of blazing magma? or a bolt of lightning; which since in creation's earliest hour preexisted the witnessing of an organic being with any sensory capacity (since no creatures or plants existed) might as well have been a bolt of lightning lasting a unique eternity beyond any mortal's power to comprehend? NO. nothing at all is beyond God's power, nor do we have a clue of His beginning inclinations.

i do not suggest that genesis is bankrupt of beauty, meaning, poetry, symbolism, or any good thing at all. Job 38-41 makes it clear that it is simply not our place to understand God's majesty in a substantial fashion: Jehovah says to Job "who has given me something first, that i ought to reward him? under the whole heavens it is mine. i shall not keep silent about its parts or the matter of its mightiness and the grace of its proportions." (Job 41:11-12) are scientists really the ones trying to "explain" creation? good question. but more significantly, aren't so-called creationists (as if that isn't an utterly vacuous label) stepping way out of bounds by calling the book of genesis a materialistic account of God's deliberacy and methodology both, and even more? how arrogant! how out of tune! what do they expect genesis to BE? a complete and unabridged textbook of natural history? that's not what genesis is about. genesis is a work of art meant to induce as many multifarious interpretations as there are men reading it, multiplied by the number of times a man rereads it. St Paul aptly pointed out that "the wisdom of man is the foolishness of God." (1 Corinthians 3:19) Thus, why would any reverent man expect or demand genesis to be more than a deadly important fable? and yet this ridiculous debate between "science" and "religion" finds its way time and time again back to this empty, stupid, noisy, disingenuous, mutually self-deceptive "argument". to call it an "argument" is an insult to the practice of philosophy. to say this is "science" versus "religion" is an insult to the intelligence of an earthworm.

so... FINALLY! what is a human? it is not a race, not a bloodline. i've made that clear. are we enlightened? do we already have an answer? the answer is indeed, yes, we do. and not only as a matter, i'll add, of mere spirituality but also on top of that it is a matter of historical self-actualization. the advent of the manifest human was a life. it was a life in accord with nature, however many times this living thing had to compromise with His environment and socio-polity, and however many guises and masks this living thing had to wear, and however many paradoxes He had to draw to make His meaning and message supremely symbolically effective, and however shamefully His work would come to be corrupted or adulterated or assaulted by strongmen as a miserable failure. Jesus Christ of Nazareth INAUGURATED man. he inaugurated the essence and truth of the HUMAN. at bottom, rock bottom, a human is a personality. a human is a friendliness. a human is a compassionateness. a human is a local dutifulness. a human is a generous trustfulness which commands righteousness and authority by this very seemingly impractical, unsustainable, perhaps somewhat gullible and anti-worldly trait.

we see men in clouds. we see a man's face on our moon. if we've lost a lot of sleep, or smoked a bit of weed, we've seen his face wiggling in the shadows when we turn off our bedroom lights. and what a variety of wonderful faces we see! we see quasi-men, pseudo-men, elvish men, long-bearded men, troll men, leprechauns, men we've never imagined, men of the strangest countenances of our wildest fantasies, faces out of the most gothic fairy tales we've never read!

is it too audacious, then, too generous, then, to qualify the leopard who nurses with her own milk an orphaned monkey as a human being? is it too generous to qualify the orang-utan who saves a drowning chick -- and not by picking it out of the water but instead additionally empowering it and educating it by offering it a twig to bite on and be lifted -- as a human being? is not a beaver's architecture more charming and humble than some ugly steel phallus standing thousands of feet high in the city of Dubai? there is not one cultural nobility not analogous to a calculus equation on a chalkboard that a human realizes that a naturally gifted, God-inspired "animal", somewhere, some time, has never matched. conversely, when we quote: "Lord, what fools these mortals be!" -- which "species" are we referring to?

my cat Sully is a human being. he may even be a Christian -- in fact, i strongly suspect it.