I've been getting some interesting reading for holidays. One book is from the Libertarian book club and is called Common Genius: Guts, Grits and Common Sense, How ordinary people create prosperous societies and how intellectuals make them collapse (by Bill Greene). His argument is that all human progress is made by very ordinary people and intellectuals pick up on what ordinary people are doing, express it in appropriate terms and make it appear they have made some great discovery, but actually ordinary people have already been responsible for the discoveries. Interesting.

More to my point- I have been reviewing the issue of God present in humanity. Early people sensed the transcendent behind life but saw it more in terms of animal life (the early cave art expresses this). They then related God to beastliness- anger, punishment (destructive forces of nature), and blood sacrifice (appeasement). This viewpoint also developed along with the shamanic tradition- special mediators, divinity in relation to special persons, with special insights or esoteric knowledge. And caves for ceremonies became state temples for special ceremonies. And of course, later ideas of divinity incarnating in special persons.

And yes, a few saw something different. The Psalmist asked rhetorically, where can I flee from your presence? But most people would have been enslaved to the sense of God isolated in the Temple, manifest on special occasions via special sacrifice. There would have been little sense that every act of human forgiveness and love in the ordinary setting was the pinnacle of an experience of manifest Divinity. There was nothing higher to seek.

In our age with our sense of the value of individuals and individual freedom and so on, we find it easier to grasp the kingdom message that God is here. This has been a great shift in understanding of Transcendent Reality. We can see that the gift of God (Sheehan) is evident in such things as human consciousness. We can see better that our responsibility to humanize life is what Jesus meant by the kingdom of God spreading everywhere. Sheehan expresses these things so well in The First Coming-

Henceforth, God is found only among men and women. Jesus merely proclaimed what had always been the case. He invited people to awaken to what God had already done from the very beginning of time. The eschaton that Jesus proclaimed was not a new coming of God but a realization on man?s part that ever since the creation God had been here among his people. (it was not God's return, but) reawakening to the fact that God had always and only been here. All Jesus did was bring to light in a fresh way what had always been the case but what had been forgotten or obscured by religion. His role was simply to end religion and restore the sense of the immediacy of God, everything was already in God's graceful presence and that everyone was already saved- precisely because they did not need salvation: they had already been saved from the beginning. God had identified himself without remainder with his people, the kingdom was the Father himself given over to his people. God was one with mankind. The Father was not to be found in a distant heaven but was entirely identified with the cause of men and women. God had become incarnate. He had poured himself out, had disappeared into mankind and could be found nowhere but there. Henceforth and forever, God was present only in and as one's neighbor,(and so much more from Sheehan).

Having received this incomprehensible gift, we manifest it in our own lives- fearing not, worrying not, taking our hope for something better and making it manifest now in improving life here and now. Trying as Breech does in Silence of Jesus, to understand what love is, what it means to affirm life.

It is such a huge shift in history and human understanding to try to grasp this entirely new understanding of divinity or transcendence as only that which we find in humanity and human consciousness and the progress of the human endeavor. Such a wondrous thing manifest in all the varying activity of decent human persons trying to make sense of life and do their best to contribute to life.

Related to this I was thinking of the damaging view of apocalyptic that is re-emerging so strongly today. For instance, our province is bombarded with government ads pushing their carbon tax with all sorts of dire warnings of catastrophe from global warming. The old tactic of the shaman- create fear to manipulate people to do what you want them to do. This outlook of catastrophe darkens the public consciousness with unnecessary fear and worry and despair. And these emotions produce all sorts of other dark human emotions. An atmosphere of fear is not conducive to the flowering of the human spirit. It does not help promote love, generosity and inclusiveness (fear in societies in the past has led to such things as increased xenophobia). Apocalyptic undermines hope.

It is irresponsible for people to ignore reality (the actual overall state of things) to indulge this obsession with problem areas in life. The outcome of such obsession is to distort problems out of proportion, and dumping this into the public realm enervates others with fear- it weakens other?s ability to face and tackle problem areas. Simon spoke to this in Ultimate Resource.

Anyway, just some thoughts on varying issues.

Below is a short piece for my website (a weather report)- an attempt to produce new ways of viewing the issues that environmentalists too often cast in terms of catastrophe and destruction. To give a more positive slant:

The Weather Is Just Fine


There has been a slight warming (0.6 degrees Celsius) over the past century which is part of the natural rebound from the unnatural cold of the Little Ice Age of approximately 1350 AD to 1850 AD. We hope the trend toward a warmer world will continue but unfortunately the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDA) has shifted back to its cooling phase. These phases last approximately 20 to 30 years. A previous shift to a warming phase helps explain the warmer temperatures that we had from about 1975 to 1995.

Also, solar cycle 24 has not yet produced any sunspot activity and this further explains the cooler temperatures that we have been experiencing since the turn of the millennium. This could mean cooler temperatures for some decades to come but such is the natural variation in a climate system that is influenced most prominently by such things as the PDA and solar cycles. The best we can do in light of such natural variation is to adjust.

Over the past century and a half there has been a rise of about 100 ppm in CO2 levels in the atmosphere (from 280 to 380). This rise has resulted in a healthier amount of CO2 in the atmosphere which has led to increased plant growth (a greener world). More plant mass on earth has meant more food for animal populations which have subsequently increased. It has also meant more crop growth for humans and this has helped in feeding the increased human population.

Unfortunately, the small human addition to CO2 in the atmosphere has not helped to further warm the earth very much, if at all. There has still not been a scientifically confirmed linkage of CO2 levels with warming. And CO2 levels are still low compared to past history and have been exceptionally low over the years of the Ice Ages. Our atmosphere continues to be ?CO2 impoverished?.

Perhaps we could encourage governments to pay people to produce more CO2 emissions. Or find a way to properly value CO2 in the market (I?m just kidding). But it is not a negative externality that needs some market mechanism to price its supposedly damaging costs.

The best way to prepare for whatever weather we will experience in the future is to encourage economic growth and development across the world. We can do this best by strengthening the fundamental institutions that have produced such growth and development in the past. These would include the most vital of all elements- individual freedom and individual rights such as private property rights. The critical counterpart to individual freedom and rights is to limit the greatest threat to such rights which is state power and intervention (growing government). The growth of government has inevitably resulted in the decline of economic growth and development. The history of the past few centuries has taught us clearly that trusting the spontaneous activity of our citizens is the safest way to promote freedom and growth. Freeing our citizens encourages them to express their natural creativity which then results in great explosions of technological innovation and progress.

Economic growth and development is also the best way to ?save? our environment. Such growth and development leads to meeting the basic needs of people. Once their basic needs are met and they have the money to do so, people then naturally turn to improving their environments as they are natural environmentalists at heart and value clean and enhanced surroundings.

So this is your latest weather report. Relax and enjoy the weather as for the most part it will continue its natural variation due to factors beyond human influence. Over the past we have learned to adjust to such natural variations and even adapt to the extreme weather events. The result has been less loss of life, especially in the more economically developed regions.

The future looks promising.

Wendell Krossa wkrossa@shaw.ca