The Religion of Nature and the Nature of Religion

The other day I was looking at the "History of Pornography" series and came upon "Fanny Hill" as the first pornographic novel in the Age of Enlightenment. As it turned out, the author John Cleland was an avid deist. This led me into the deist ideas of a creator God that didn't intervene in nature after 'His' creation. Deists were a rationalist movement in the Age of Enlightenment in the seventeenth century that rejected the superstitious nature of miracles, the literal interpretation of religious scripture, Jesus' divine nature and the Trinity, in favour of a notion of deity that was grounded in rational exploration of God in the form of a creator that left nature to run its course unimpeded, once the creation had been set in motion. Despite this, many deists were regarded by their traditional Christian counterparts as irreligious, even though they tacitly believed in God.

Deism was a unique product of the rise of scientific rationality at a time when the presumption of God as a de facto creator of the universe was still almost universal. However two things eclipsed deism as a product of the hopeful Age of Enlightenment. Firstly it depended on a creator deity setting in motion a mechanistic Newtonian universe. This attitude successively gave way to more intellectually precise notions of scientific naturalism that nature itself is necessary and sufficient to describe life and the evolution of the universe. Secondly, the deist belief in the existence of a true source religion uncontaminated by subsequent fallacies spawned by a controlling priesthood and free of the distortions of revealed scripture and superstitious and miraculous confabulation proved to be an illusion. Instead it was found that religions worldwide displayed strong elements of irrational superstition and fear of the unknown, attributed to a miraculous deity,  deities or spirit beings. The rational basis of religion on which the deist premise depended was thus undermined.

Ironically, in the 21st century, it is as if the clock has moved both forwards and backwards at the same time. We see an even sharper division between scientifically and humanistically-minded people on the one hand coming to their own intellectually astute conclusions about the universe, many of whom have very high ethical standards for life and on the other hand increasingly literalist religious believers who discard rationality, good judgment and adequate safeguards for trust in beliefs, to embrace slavish religious imperatives often containing violent attitudes of a collectively psychopathic nature.

In Western society apologists for religion will note that there are good Christian communities that bring about a sense of social conscience and belonging, but Christian assumptions are also at the expense of a sense of ultimate confidence in our goodness of  nature depending on salvation to cure all from the sins of selfish expedience. However in the Muslim world, fundamentalistic attitudes have become ascendent in both Sunni and Shiite followings, leading to a literal interpretation of the scripture and law taking Islam back to the three generations of Muhammad in the seventh century and asserting that we are all to be slaves of God under punishment of death for apostasy, justifying psychopathic violence against Sufis, Amadhis, Yazidis, followers of other religions and democratic society alike.

Our ideas of god as a potential cosmocrater, or cosmic creator of the universe changed irreversibly in the twentieth century with the discovery of dynamical chaos, quantum reality and relativity. No longer is the universe seen as a divine Newtonian clockwork. The Pope recently stated that acceptance of evolution need not be inconsistent with creation, effectively conceding to nature the incontestable evidence of evolutionary change, while assigning to God the technical loophole of the 'big bang'. The difficulty with this idea is that the creator God is left with little meaningful relationship with the universe today. Although the finer details of the cosmic origin are still being researched, we know the universe began in a state of high symmetry and low informational content, in which principles of complex symmetry and symmetry-breaking are key, and that the subsequent processes leading to life on Earth have been complex unstable interactions, bringing both chaotic unpredictability and quantum uncertainty into play in the formation of galaxies and solar systems and subsequently, biogenesis and the evolution of life into conscious organisms. So the conditions at the cosmic origin no longer play out in a Laplacian determinism, which a creator God could induce to bring our personal lives, crises and moral tests omnipotently into being.

Once the laws of nature have adopted the symmetry-broken form we see in the standard model of particle physics, the evolutionary complexification of life becomes a product of the hierarchical interaction of the four forces of nature, to form the fractal architecture of molecular matter, resulting in natural interactions leading to biogenesis, life and evolution, including the opposing influences of mutual selection effects shaped by environmental interactions and stochastic mutational changes brought about ultimately by quantum uncertainty.

The only way a deity could continue to intervene in this evolutionary process would be to play dice with the universe, as Einstein denied, by casting the lot in each individual quantum encounter, which remains unpredictable under the probability interpretation of quantum mechanics. But here we find every statistical measure of quantum uncertainty and quantum entanglement conforms ultimately to the probability interpretation, with no evidence of divine intervention upsetting the odds. In the world of our experience misfortune and ill-health strike naturally with blind justice. There is no evidence for divine intervention to punish the criminals and uphold the virtuous. Indeed it would make no sense in a natural world that must needs contain predators and herbivores, just as it contains plants and animals.

Rather than imposing our naive ideas of creation onto the universe, we are better served by developing our understanding of existence from how we actually find the universe and nature to be in the world around us, without overlaying over the facts with preconceived notions based on naive attitudes of fixed belief and undiscerning superstitious faith in a divine power.

Central to the dilemma of existence is the nature of life, death and mortality. Understanding the natural condition of mortally reproducing life brings us much closer to gaining the depth and breadth of insight we need to be able to become a meaningful part of the universe and to come to terms with our own existential condition. Since we are mortal biological organisms there is no point in selfish aims which ultimately lead nowhere. We will gain ultimate satisfaction only by giving our all to the benefit of life and its immortal continuity.

This ultimately delivers on the moral issues posed both by Buddhism (enlightenment from grasping egotistical desires) and monotheism (leading a virtuous sinless life in the eyes of God). Furthermore, we learn that morality is a local process that is a functional part of a vital society, increasing intra-social cooperation to aid social vitality and inter-social dominance, but the universe is in no way a moral dictatorship - a cosmic stage for God to give humanity a moral test of judgment and faith in religion under pain of eternal damnation. We also learn that sin is not all bad and virtue is not all good - natural change involves both defection and cooperation mediated through astute tests of trust, in a climate of strategic dissimulation - Machiavellian intelligence - which gives us the complexity and diverse diplomatic survival niches of human society, accompanied by degrees of both altruistic punishment and discerning forgiveness.

When it comes to the meaning of life, we need to realize that, although we are mortal, sexuality provides the ultimate immortal altruistic antidote to individual mortality. Sexuality transcends parthenogenesis, inducing an almost endless source of variety through genetic recombination. While we are individually mortal, we are part of the immortal enchanted web of life, generating new forms of conscious being through sexual reproduction, in which our own genetic identity provides an equal half share along with that of our sexual partner.

We also need to learn from nature about our original virtue. The evolution of emotional responsiveness in mammals has enabled the formation of societies whose mutual altruism extends far beyond narrow kinship boundaries. Although we are capable of selfish expedience, jealousy, anger and even violent hatred, we are also capable of sexual, familial, comradely and selfless love and empathy for others in plight and feel most at home in a climate of belonging, in which we are a part of a mutual fabric of caring support - an evolutionary endowment of being small bands of people surviving together in the wilderness.

Some of the finest attributes of caring and sensitivity to others, as well as creative art, music and family life, come from the astute processes of sexual courtship, particularly those of women astutely choosing good partners to father their children, given the huge investment of the human female in pregnancy, birth, lactation and early child-rearing. Thus, rather than being lustful sinners to the core, we are a palette of emotions, which in the balance, provide evidence of our original virtue, which has sustained us into compassionate existence in the world of tooth and claw.

Beyond the narrow confines of sexual reproduction and parenting, to fulfill our place in the sacred web, while we are here, we also need to cherish and replenish the Earth in its natural diversity, because, although individual incarnation is mortal, the passage of the generations of life is perennially immortal, so long as the Earth shall live and be hospitable to life. We also gain fulfillment in life by playing our part in the pursuit of understanding, social caring, and creative expression of our cultures so that society and the world becomes, at least in some small way, a better place, through our presence in it. All of these provide the essential meaning of life as a creative process.

The key learning point is that sexuality is the generator of all complex life and absolutely necessary for us to come into the world as incarnate sentient beings. We trade off mortality for life's complexity and abundance. Without recombinational meiosis we could never have become complex multi-celled organisms. Sex is thus sacred and sacrosanct in the passage of the generations. While God is an uncertain proposition, sex is our certain foundation, and the key to our becoming and belonging.

Sexual incarnation might seem to be an endless round of menial animalistic reproduction, but it is far more than this. It has an intrinsic psychic dimension, because each conscious being is a novel evolutionary manifestation of the processes which invoke sentient consciousness - the ultimate mystery of existence. At the same time we are collectively evolving into a state of deepening awareness of life the universe and everything when we step back form the pressures of trying to feed ourselves to survive and the distractions of internecine inter-social and inter-religious strife. This coming to an inner knowledge of the world may be the key to the cosmic destiny of the universe - Gnosis or 'knowing'.

We can seek spiritual fulfillment in a variety of ways, many of which are quite direct, from meditation to psychedelic reverie. These avenues frequently lead to full-blown mystical experiences of a religiously formative nature. We can learn from these experiences, and they form the sang raal of spiritual experience from which all the major religious traditions have been borne. We therefore have a conscious avenue to explore the ultimate mysteries of existence and need to deal with these with the same spirit of open mindedness that is the hallmark of scientific discovery.

Ultimately we come to the cosmic question. What is the ultimate meaning and purpose of life, if, although it is in principle immortal, it will nevertheless ultimately be extinguished by the solar system being consumed by the Sun, or the eventual universal heat death or big crunch. There are two types of answer to this question.

One explanation lies in the universality of cosmic consciousness - the idea that all conscious beings are a manifestation of the cosmic mind, bundled up in a constrained form in each mortal biological being. Clearly the biota, with their complex brains, are the one place where we know complex intelligent conscious life can become manifest, but our experience of the world comes entirely and directly through our subjective consciousness, so it also appears to have an existential status as fundamental as the universe. Existential reality thus appears to be a complementarity between subjective consciousness and the objective physical world, just as wave and particle aspects are in physics. The brain processes supporting subjective consciousness appear to be highly unstable whole brain states attuned to be arbitrarily sensitive to changing circumstances in the world around us. The brain appears to use edge-of chaos dynamics and may also use quantum entanglement among brain wave excitations in these uncertain states, enabling our subjective conscious experience of free-will  to influence the fate of the universe around us through our actions.  There may even be forms of entanglement over space-time between the conscious experiences of disparate sentient beings similar to the forms of entanglement that we have discovered in quantum phenomena. Hidden quantum entanglement within an eternal universe at large has also been proposed to explain the nature of elapsing time that is key to the changing events around us in real time.

The other explanation lies the eternal relativistic conception, that life, in addition to being a perennially immortal passage of the generations in elapsing time, once it has come to climax is eternally present in space-time, which is itself eternal, extending from cosmological alpha to omega, so the fact that conscious life has come into being in the universe during some epoch mid-way through its evolution gives life its eternal 'meaning' and 'purpose' in a universe becoming conscious of itself. Religious believers may thus seek the eternal in an 'afterlife' because we sense that, in the completion of the universe, all we have done and will ever do is imprinted and encapsulated in this eternal nature of existence. The never-ending nature of heavenly bliss is basically a vision of this eternal unchanging reality.

True Nature and Belief in God

I'll try to give you an outline of where things stand from my 'point of view', re life, the universe, and everything including Yeshua and the Bible. It does have something deep to do with fractals. It's a fair challenge on the part of life itself. It is working within the religious tradition to try to bring about a natural flowering of future goodness.

I grew up as an Anglican, which is hardly a religion since it was invented by Henry the 8th for a divorce, but it still has traditional protestant features and keeps the communion. I went to Sunday school and sang in the choir and feared God as an invisible entity, who I thought I should do right by and prayed to in the night.

Then when I came of age in the 60s, the psychedelic revolution hit me. I can remember the first time I read of LSD in the local tabloid, long before it became notorious. The article immediately made my hair stand on end. I fearfully knew I would somehow, sometime, somewhere end up discovering its 'psychotic' secrets as part of a far-ranging exploration, from Eastern mysticism to Finnegan's wake. When I did, in London as a graduate student, I died and was reborn - a number of times. The overwhelming irreversible conclusion I came to was that the universe, and is inner secrets, were deeply and fundamentally different from anything like our traditional idea of God and religion, and much more ingenious and confounding in their manifestations.

Tissues are fractal manifestations of the symmtery-breaking of the forces of nature.

From that point, I had to know how life began, what consciousness is, how evolution gave rise to the conscious brain, and how all this relates to the cosmological process. I hesitate to call it the 'design of nature' because this intimates echoes of the 'intelligent design' idea, which is a gross metaphor for technology. As we design a watch, so God designs us even more ingeniously than we can imagine. This makes no explanatory sense, and is just a recursive projection of our industrial culture on to the cosmos. And who designs the designer? We are a self generative fractal cosmos, not a toy made by a skeleton in the closet.

Seven years later I took my first sabbatical from university, split from my partners and young family and wandered India as a sadhu, meeting some very high lamas and other spiritual practitioners, looking into the depths of the contemplative mind, which the Eastern tradition claims is a reflection of the cosmic conscious self, or no-self, as the case may be, in the reality contest between the Upanishads and Buddhist perspectives. In Europe and the US I investigated molecular biology. Finally I made a journey to the native origins of the world's power plants, taking peyote with the native American Church, the magic mushroom teonanactl in many places, and ayahuasca - the vine of the soul - with a leprous shaman in the Amazon basin.

Since then I have spent most of my life studying developments in the origins of life, evolution and consciousness, with a mathematical basis in chaos and quantum uncertainty, which in turn has something deep to do with free will. What I have to say about the 'design' of the universe is this: The universe is a cosmological fractal unfolding in space time. All the laws of chemistry and of molecular biology, from proteins up to tissues, and whole organisms give rise to an evolving quantum fractal. It is the Sigma of interactive complexity - paradise on the cosmic equator - that forms and apex between Alpha and Omega of creation and destruction. The theory of everything at the core is not just to make galaxies, stars and black holes, but centrally to make life and the evolution of complex sentient conscious life possible - for a purpose which is the universe discovering itself, through the biota over epochs. This is a sacred, cosmic and spiritual reality, which is also physical and natural reality. We don't need to fudge it to God. It's here and it's real and it's urgent that we understand it deeply and act toward it respectfully, and very sensitively, for the future of all life and the generations to come depend on us.

If we look out at the physical universe and try to ask where is it that we will find the spark of conscious awareness, the answer is not in the centre of stars or in the dark matter and energy in the vast reaches of the heavens, but in the very biota of which we are an integral part. It is we who carry the crucible of consciousness within us and it is to ourselves we must thus turn to discover the inner secrets of gnosis which we have a deep urge to pass on to God. This is not something we can afford to renege on, or we will surely fail and possibly annihilate ourselves in apocalyptic tumult.

The origins of life are not a precipitous divide between God's perfect design and blind groping by chance. The fractal laws of nature not only make life possible, but to all intents and purposes richly abundant, on the cosmic equator in space-time, of which life on Earth is a pearl of an example. The idea that life cannot come into being spontaneously is rapidly fading due to discoveries over the past couple of years showing how simple molecules can, through their fractal relationships, reach the point of the last universal common ancestor. I have references to these developments in my papers on Biocosmology and the Tree of Life on my website http://www.dhushara.com.

Because we are conscious and have inherited, through our own actions, personal responsibility for the future of life on Earth, we HAVE to come to terms of guardianship that will ensure the continuity and diversity of life for the generations to come. This is an heroic quest, which stands very clearly in the context of the messianic quest for world redemption, so, with or without God, we have an undeniable responsibility to assume what you might call Christ nature, or Madonna nature.

I have researched in depth the cultural origins of the Judeo-Christian God acting in history. In 1999-2000 I also made a millennial sabbatical vigil to Jerusalem, at the invitation of the son of one of the founders of Tel Aviv, and gave a workshop on the Tree of Life and unveiling reunion in a litle academy on the Old City overlooking the main souk down to al-Aqsa and the Temple. What I learned about Christianity from my time in Israel was intriguing and also disturbing, as it showed me that fundamentally the Hebrew religion was the true mother tradition and Christianity was a pagan distortion of the path of the covenant, looking ever more degraded and hollow in the Old City and surviving best a long distance from its source, where myth and fable take the place of hard realities.

Now this brings me to the person of Jesus and the apocalyptic quest. I have a great deal of admiration for Jesus and regard him as a benefactor and forerunner of our own existential dilemma. I have spent a long time poring over his many paradoxical sayings in both the synoptic gospels and founding gnostic works, such as the Gospel of Thomas, which I hold very dearly, as well as his 'miraculous' deeds. In my opinion Jesus was a genius reconceiver of the cultural and religious paradigm, who attempted to rescue, not just the lost sheep of Israel, but bring about a cultural fusion of the diverse spiritual traditions of his day, on the basis that, if the apocalyptic unveiling were to be real, it would require celebrating it in a manner that flowed from every tradition, both pagan and kosher.

So on this basis, Jesus was anointed by a woman, followed by the women of Galilee, supported by the women out of their very substance. His miracles stem not from the Hebrew tradition, but from the tradition of miraculous dread of Nabatea where Dhushara the Lord of Seir, was an ancient and later Dionysian god, whose tragic mask of death was the portal to immortal life. It is here we find the turgid and turbid nature miracles, from walking on water, through causing the pigs to drown, to the true vine and water into wine on the very day of the epiphany of Dionysus, not in the Hebrew path which abhors 'miracle' workers and aspires always for a living human messiah, who will bring about a long-term epoch of peace and prosperity, as Solomon did, despite his many wives and their many strange religions.

As we have seen, Jesus' actions also stand in the fertility tradition. His mission took off in echo of John the Baptist, whose head was taken on a plate by Salome who danced Ishtar-Inanna's dance of the seven veils, returning from the underworld to claim her improprietous husband Tamuz-Dumuzzi, now in the person of Jochanan as the mortal sacrifice, just as Jesus was sacrificed, having been anointed to his doom by a woman, who is also reputed to have been his partner. According to Josephus, this sacrifice of John was caused directly by Herod taking his cousin Herodias his brother Philip's wife, for his own, rejecting his previous wife - no less than the princess of Nabatea - who had to flee for her life, resulting in a war between Herod and King Aretas and Queen Shaqilat, the conjoint rulers of Nabatea, which was the cause of the generals being present at the feast of John's beheading.

This attempt to bridge fertility and Hebrew apocalyptic religion is why the Talmud claims Jesus was Balaam the Lame who hearkens out of Edom. It is why he has never been recognized as the true messiah of Israel, although there is a small following of Jewish Christians who think otherwise.

Nevertheless I find Jesus' lessons and insights profound. However we both know that, before his death, he said that people would not see death before he returned on the right hand of power, and the Christian church is founded only as a temporary guardianship until the return of the Lord as the 'thief in the night'. But we find 2000 years later that it is the church that is centrally responsible for making it impossible for any flesh and blood messiah to save the world and its living diversity, by launching Jesus into a pagan demi-God status unlike any Jewish messiah, making it impossible to move on to the phase beyond the self-destructive tumult of apocalypse, to the bridal unveiling of reunion under the Tree of Life, which we all ultimately seek, and hunger for, in paradise.

Now regarding the authenticity of the books of the old testament purporting to prophesy Yesha's coming, such as Isaiah. Although Christian forefathers have bent over backwards to construe as many 'prophecies' as they can into Jesus' mission and crucifixion, this doesn't mean Isaiah is not a genuine text. I would accept that Isaiah has been edited by two to four authors (deutero, tritio etc.) at various times through the period of the exile and possibly up to around 200BC. But this doesn't mean that they have been tampered with to make them look as if Jesus was the prophesied messiah. Jesus played out very carefully a Dionysian tragedy in his mission and the crucifixion, which was crafted to be a fulfillment of the prophecies, in an ultra-Shakesperian act of genius, from the blasphemous 'rebirthing' of Eliazer, the journey of the palm King of fertility, and the turning of the tables, all the way through the breaking of the phallic reed staff, to the casting lots on his garments and the waters out of the belly. It is not just Isaiah that echoes with this apocalyptic mission but Zechariah and deeply the Psalms. Notice how the men all fled while the women stayed to witness the event, significant of both fertility religion and Zechariah's apocalyptic tale of the foolish shepherd.

But we now have to return to God and the disquieting role God plays as a jealous and violent lover of old Israel and as a schizophrenically bipolar father, who sacrifices his own son, so that we can all have forgiveness and be saved. If this isn't a toxic recipe for millennia of mayhem, from martyrdom, through Crusade, to Inquisition and genocidal war, I can't think of a more poisonous one.

One step back and we have the holy communion, an endless cycle of cannibalistic drinking of the flesh and blood of the redeemer, without which there is no remission from sin, surpassed only by Aztec ritual, and respected by them for its core of human sacrifice. Who ever said life works this way? Who said we have to be sacrificed to the death to be saved? We have to have carnivores, just as we must needs have both plants, and animals that survive on eating plants, but why do we need to be saved by a father who murders is own son to make a point and then blames it on the Jews? If we are going to have a genuine sacramental religion, let it be one involving power food where the sacrament is a genuine spiritual catalyst of epiphany and enlightenment, just as the Native American Church and the Union Vegetale do in the Amazon.

Let's step back a bit further and think about this in social and biological terms. God is jealous because he is functioning as an entity that can keep us all in line. He is a moral actor who we can't see, but he can see right into our hearts and souls. So we can fool one another, but we can't fool God, because we are stark naked in His presence. This is a perfect catch 22 and it has strong evolutionary undertones. It inhibits intra-social strife, while accentuating inter-social dominance. It will, over time, result in societies with minimal internal conflict, even if through draconian punishments like stoning for adultery, which will become larger than other societies, even if fascist theocracies, and be able to dominate their competitors, even by genocidal war.

Thus we can expect that belief in God and personality types which sacrifice inquiry for belief in a higher authority, and the rule of divine order, will become an evolutionary feature of human behavior, committing to moral respect for fellow religionists in fear of God, and when we err, confession in the forgiveness of God. We will repress the heretics and unbelievers, consider it our duty to go on Crusade, foment jihad in the name of al-Llah, and stand ever closer to the red nuclear button in the sure conviction that, with God on our side, even if we have to leave the late planet Earth, we will have the face of God, and heaven to greet us, just as all Islamic martyrs are taught and believe. If God IS real, why DOES He depend on such belief to be 'real'? It's a bit like Jesus not being able to perform any mighty feats in his home town of Nazareth, where people knew him too well and said "physician heal thyself", possibly referring to the very lameness noted in the Talmud.

The acid test to me is this: Our duty is to the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. Jesus said in his last moments before Pilate "for this reason I came into the world - to bear witness to the truth". This truth is nature , life and consciousness and the enchanted loom of sexuality, perhaps the most altruistic trick the universe has managed to come up with, through which we all become mortals, but give birth to endless new forms of life, by contributing only half our genes, along with half from the beloved 'other', a complementarity, just as mind and body and wave and particle are complementary.

It is true that humans are capable of what we might call evil, but the prisoners' dilemma teaches us that faithfulness and deceit are two parts of the complete reality. Survival requires astute character, balancing a good degree of cooperative faith with enough competitive defection, or 'betrayal', to keep our own genes alive. Survival of the fittest is not pure selfishness, nor is it a suckers game of unvarying cooperation, but a complex social system based on character and compassion as well as jealousy and hate. To build the whole model of reality on sin, evil and fallibility, is itself a fundamental and evil betrayal of the long-term evolutionary viability of human nature. Rather than original sin and the need for a God to destroy evil to order us into a mindless state of absolute perfection, we need to learn how our original virtue as a species has evolved a capacity to love one another and to care, even for strangers, far beyond the bounds of genetic kinship.

To have Christ nature we cannot afford to believe, because this will inevitably muddy the pool, just as the angel rustled the waters in the Pool of Bethesda. Neither can we stare at the perfect mirror of consciousness assuming the cosmic self, or no-self exists, as the Buddhists and Vedantists vie over. But we need to look ever more deeply into the holy grail of existence ceaselessly and patiently, casting no lots on the garments of the universe.

To learn to be Christ, we have to take the personal responsibility to save the world, for the life of the future generations to come, without any predilection, belief, or commands, or demands upon others. Only in our mutual liberation from bondage will the paradigm of paradise come.

This is the lesson of Isaiah 61 which Jesus read out in his first sermon at Nazareth, for which he was nearly thrown off the cliffs for swearing Elijah and Elisha performed only for Naaman the Syrian and the woman of Sidon - "and we shall renew the old wastes, restore the waste cities, as the garden causeth the things that are sewn in it to spring forth". So is the pronunciation of the Tree of Life, "as the Bridegroom decketh himself with ornaments and the Bride decketh herself with her jewels', for this is the unveiling reunion, under the Tree of Life - hidden since the foundation of the world.

love and regards,

Chris King