There's Something There - Part 5

Now when religious folk start going on and on about revelations, the revelations always seem to come with rules.

And those rules seem to be weirdly focused on what women are supposed to wear.

Seriously. Don't wear this.

Plus, what we are or are not supposed to eat.

And a lot of other stuff that seems to be about what to do and when to do it, or what not to do and when not to do it.

And then we use these rules to make up other rules about who's in, and who's out.

Who belongs to our little group, and who does not.

And don't eat unicorns.

As though the God of the universe is sitting up there in his 5th dimensional whatever it is spending all of his time being really irritated about us not wearing the right clothing or not getting the right haircuts or not eating food that has been prepared in the exact and precise way that for some reason he made up for no reason at all (eat cows! and chickens! don't eat pigs! or goats! or lobsters! and what the heck is kale?!?! I didn't make that! It's not for eating! Where did that awful stuff come from?!?!) and playing Game of Thrones with us (OK, Protestants and Catholics - 1, 2, 3, kill each other!)(OK, Sunnis and Shiites - 1, 2, 3, kill each other! And when you finish that, kill all the Jews, even though I like them a lot! And

all the westerners. I'm not sure why, but what the heck!), and then sending down songs that all kinda sound alike, and then giving all

kinds of strange stage directions (You people, raise your hands and sway back and forth and close your eyes and make weird noises! And play with snakes! (Really? Snakes?) And you guys, pray the same prayer five times a day forever and smack your heads on the ground and NO WOMEN cause they can be distracting sorry about the all-caps. And you, over there, I never ever ever want to see the bottoms of your feet, because have you seen what's all over the ground? Gross! And you other guys never cut your hair, and you other other guys cut all your hair off. And

See. Distracting.

ladies, frankly, you are totally distracting all the time, what was I thinking? and you folks, if I catch you celebrating birthdays or anything else, for that matter, it’s all over for you, and you other folks, happy happy happy and no medicine or doctors or pain meds or stitches or nothing), and on and on and on ...

Seriously? That's what God does? No wonder science thinks religious folk are idiots. They kinda are.

But it's kinda science's fault. Because science told us that in order to be smart, we had to have rules. 

So we still think it's all about the rules.

OK, that's not really fair for science.

Humans seem to have this compulsion to come up with rules. Always have.

But it's really about the Interaction.

The rules come from the interaction.

Because the interaction is about relationships.

And good relationships need good rules.

Just like a working universe needs good rules.

Not to restrict the universe from doing things.

But to cause, to allow, to enable the universe to interact well.

So if there was going to be a real revelation from the real God, then that revelation was really going to be about relationships.

Because that's how we interact.

First, an interaction between God and humans.

And second, an interaction between humans and, uh, other humans.

Now watch this. It's going to get dangerous.

It's also going to be some math.

Interaction = relationship. That's first. That's from science.

Second. 

The highest form of relationship = love.

I just made that up, but I think it works.

Interaction, as I ponder it, has two forms.

Attractive and repulsive. 

Gravity is an attractive interaction, where by the warping of space-time, objects in a gravitational field (which has infinite reach, btw) seem to be attracted to the center of the field, the center of the massive object. Dark Energy seems to be repulsive - massive objects are repelled from each other. Dark Matter, like regular matter, is attractive via gravity. The Strong Force creates a field via the gluon that attracts quarks together, and protons and neutrons together. Electro-magnetism is both attractive and repulsive. The Weak Force binds subatomic particles together into more complex elements under tremendous heat and pressure (which sounds like love to me).

Quantum mechanics by its very nature is interaction between particles, communicating, changing each other in instantaneous and seemingly magical but ultimately entirely natural ways. But because it's Quantum and has to make life difficult, it's neither attractive nor repulsive. It is, however, purely interactive. Again, the poetry of QM is like a love song. 

That might be a stretch. But really, the quantum world needs us as observers, and we need it because we are made of it. It is as interactive as interactive gets in a seriously interactive sort of way.

Human relationships are attractive and repulsive. We like each other, we dislike each other. We are attracted to or repelled by each other.

There is love, and there is hate.

So I will arbitrarily and randomly assigned values to those. Hate is generally the worst.

Love is usually the best.

And love, at its purest, is sacrificial. Parent for child. Lover for beloved. Patriots for country. Superhero for humanity and the earth. Lassie for Timmy.

We are told that there is no greater love than for one human to give his or her life for another.

If you have ever truly loved, then you know the rich profundity of sacrificial love.

And thus, the interactional God who created the universe, who for some bizarre and inexplicable reason seeks an interaction with his creation, with his pathetic little otherwise pointless humans, and wants somehow to interact with us in a way that feels very much like love.

So third, highest form of love = sacrifice of life.

Now, go find a revelation that looks like that.