2413. Reverence for life.

It is hard to mobilize humanity to care if they are 1, threatened, 2, have no reverence.

I am struck by the word reverence. It comes along with awe and appreciation for life, nature, spirit each other.

An important way to look at how we got here is to see that the key event of the West is the breakdown of Christianity and the scramble to fill the gap. A society needs beliefs. Christianity gave us appreciate for each person as well as too much rationalized violence as a way of coping with the failure of he church to accommodate to new ideas. The loss of the church in the center of cultural life has meant no shared belief system. We tried to fill the gap with the nation State, but that led to bounded territories in conflict with each other. The idea that we should love our neighbor has been lost. The key event for the East was the intrusion of the West into Asia breaking the integrity of their own development. So we now have confrontation between a scared ad greedy West and an Asia trying to recover its own integrity. The gap from the loss of christianity has been fillled by the nation state and the autonomous individual but these lead to more conflict within the human community at the time we need a reverence for humanity and the earth.

Reverence is part of the ensemble of words: spirit, grace, transcendence, love, that we need and have pushed aside.. Reverence seems like s good word to bring along as we follow Feynman’s advice. “there are tens of thousands of years in the future. Our responsibility is to do what we can, learn what we can, improve the solutions, and pass them on.”

Chose between accumulation or love. The goal is not survival alone but together.