An Open Letter to Our World:
EVER WONDER HOW HUMANS CAN
POSSIBLY DO THE THINGS WE DO?
Dear Friends Across the Globe: As we look around the world today, do you wonder how on Earth people can do some of the things they do? I can tell you how…and this explanation will not condone our behavior, but it will help us understand it.
The problem is: we are children.
In their book New World New Mind, Robert Ornstein and Paul Ehrlich noted that if Earth’s history were charted on a single year’s calendar, with midnight January 1 representing the origin of Earth and midnight December 31 the present, the first of our ancestors recognizable as human would not show up until the afternoon of December 31. Homo sapiens—our species—would emerge at around 11:45 p.m. . . . and all that has happened in recorded history would occur in the final minute of the year.
In cosmic terms humanity is an astonishingly young species. And we are, not surprisingly, very immature.
And so, we have used violence to produce outcomes that we were sure justified its use (even if it meant death to millions of innocent men, women, and children).
And so, we have used domination—sometimes cruel, heartless domination—to generate results we were sure were desirable to experience (even if it subjected the entire population of a country or an area to ruthless suppression, persecution, and maltreatment).
And so, we have used self-interest—sometimes unmitigated, unbridled self-interest—to generate a level of sufficiency for ourselves that we were sure we deserved (even if millions of others had to go without, given the global economic model that we have empowered).
And so, we have used self-righteousness—sometimes appalling, execrable self-righteousness—to generate a sense of self-worth that we were sure we deserved (even as we told others that they were unworthy and were going to be condemned by God to hell).
These childish, almost infantile, behaviors are seen by God as the uncontrolled and irrational tantrums of an unenlightened species, a breed of sentient beings in the primitive, primeval, primordial stages of its maturational process.
Put simply, The Divine perfectly well understands the nature of what it is to be human. Even as we understand how a three-year-old could knock over the milk reaching anxiously for the chocolate cake because it wants the cake so badly, so does God understand completely how we could act as some of us have acted, reaching for what we have wanted so badly.
Even the wanting of some things, in and of itself, could be considered “wrong” by judgmental humans, just as a child’s wanting more cake than his little sister might be considered “wrong.” In our human value system, he shouldn’t want more than everyone else. And he certainly would be considered “wrong” for trying to get it by bullying his way to it. Yet the wise parent understands the not-yet-mature desire of the older brother, and does not send him to his room for the remainder of his childhood.
God sees us just as we see our children: in the process of maturing, but nonetheless whole, complete, and perfect just as we are right now. There is nothing we have to be, nothing we have to say, and nothing we have to do to gain the love of our Creator, who adores us even as we misbehave. There are no credentials we must acquire in order to be qualified to return to heaven. Our credential is our existence. Nothing more is needed.
That message is important enough to be repeated.
There are no credentials
we must acquire in order
to be qualified to return to heaven.
Our credential is our existence.
Nothing more is needed.
Again, this is hard to believe and difficult to accept by a race of beings conditioned to imagine that perfect justice requires condemnation and punishment—including, in some cases, death.
You must remember that human beings are of such infantile comprehension that they will claim that the killing of people by the state is the way to teach people that killing people is bad.
You must remember that human beings are of such infantile comprehension that they will claim that the use of weapons of mass destruction in a preemptive strike by one country is the way to teach another country that to have weapons of mass destruction is bad.
You must remember that human beings are of such infantile comprehension that they will claim that strict adherence to a religion that teaches intolerance of any other religion is the way to teach the world that intolerance is bad.
A God of Unconditional Love is utterly incomprehensible to a species that has still not learned to love itself enough to stop destroying itself.
We cannot believe that God would forgive us for that which we cannot forgive each other.
It is nonetheless true that even if we have done what we, or others, consider to be truly horrible things during our time on the earth . . . even then, God will welcome us back Home.
(Excerpted from GOD’S MESSAGE TO THE WORLD: You’ve Got Me All Wrong, to be released Oct. 23. The book — which describes how to get out of this mess — may be pre-ordered from Amazon.com at this link.)
