Yesterday aft I rode the bus down to 8th Ave, marched on to Grand and Toy to snoop around the bargains not finding any for myself, but bought some pens for Juliet. Earlier, I had posted (2.65$) a card to my sister for her up coming birthday. I used my new fountain pen to write her the note and told her so as well.

At Juliet’s we did not do any computer work, but chatted a lot, had some supper with nice soup, but without the wine. After supper we went for quite a walk to the pastry shop in the old ‘Concord Place’ - now Calgary Place - where I stayed with my family during our first month in Calgary in 1973!

Once back at Juliet’s we had some tea with the nice cake from the shop. Juliet also surprised me with the gift of a wristwatch, which I still have to get going and learn to operate. This watch was not a total surprise, because she had enquired about two months before regarding my not wearing one.

Last night Derrick called relating his community activities with his friends in the group of ‘Radical Fairies’ with which he and I are now getting familiar. Derrick took some time off from studies and work, getting away from the routine of daily obligations.

Last nite I posted my entry and incorporated the Trouw link to Kees Schuyl, the retired sociologist who got me going on the writing of letters, for which I bought The Pen!

Human origins.

Yesterday I completed the soteriology part, but the start of humanity I have not mentioned. Today we have our scientific accounts about the origins of life and humans, accurate though not complete. These have taken the place of the more elegant and complete mythological narratives as related in the various human traditions.

The scientific account deploys the ideas of adaptation and evolution, as well as the biological evidence of genes and DNA. This has given us a more accurate account and better understanding, but at the price of being far more complex and removed from daily life and no less mysterious.

I say this, because how will we ever understand the formation processes of DNA itself? You can also ask this about the formation processes that gave us the one hundred and eighteen (118) elements, of which only about eighty-two (82) are fully stable; see ‘The Elements’ by T. Gray.

Nice to know, but how come? These kinds of questions are of the second grade as I call this. That is not about understanding the nature of the thing, but rather about its formation process. Humans just keep asking questions as we try to order our world of experience, increasing our modeling efficiency!

I realise that I’m off on an apparent tangent here, but one that relates to the double aspect of scientific explanations. It is that science does give us better understanding, useful in many respects, on the one hand. On the other, the first order mysteries - such as creation - are replaced by second order mysteries about the processes that made things come about.

For example, the retrograde motion of the ‘wanderers’ - the planets - was explained by Kepler’s discovery of their orbits being elliptical instead of the assumed circular one. Yet, today we ask about the formation of those planets. We could say that science changes our mysteries in a beneficial way - if we are ethical enough - yet not eliminating, but rather deepening them.

Humans came into existence according to a still poorly understood process of evolution and adaptation, spreading from the Olduvai Valley near Somalia on the African continent starting about sixty thousand years ago (60kYa). They spread over the globe in the very short time of about twenty thousand years. (Ref: ‘Deep ancestry’, by S. Wells.)

The next prominent evidence is that of the cave paintings in Southern France and Northern Spain starting ca 40kYa. It was followed by animal domestication and the development of farming about fifteen thousand years ago. This lead to established cultures with writing in the five major areas on our planet, to wit: Egypt, Mesopotamia, Indus valley, Yangtze Valley and the Yucatan Peninsula; note all near or in the belt of the tropics.

You will become like the gods, knowing both good and evil!

And today we face each other around the globe rising to about nine billion from the present seven, before our multitude starts to decline. It is this problem of over abundance of human beings on our planet that is our own and must urgent concern.

It is our boundary situation, one of our own making - unconsciously in a way - and now here for us to address. Doing so, we must bring to bear our conscious abilities, human traditions, experience and learned wisdom. It is the self-recognition of this, our own state and its formative history, that constitutes our ‘salvation’, being the key to and driving force for our insights.

The Genesis story relates the ‘Snake’ promising Eve and Adam that, ‘they will become like the gods, knowing both good and evil’. Truer words were never recorded and in a symbolic sense, we still live with the consequences.
<9:00am and 10:01am~