Earth/House/System

I'm reading a book by Phillip Ball, called: Water, Matrix of Life. If you want to know more about water, it's fascinating and well written. I particularly like this quote of his: “Water is the agent of geological, environmental and global change. It confers fecundity on parched regions, while it's passing turns grasslands into deserts.”

Water does all this and more. But water is incredibly effective at what it does because water is a team player. Apparently there's water on the moon in the form of patches of ice, but it's inert, it doesn't do anything because it lacks the other team players. Let's introduce these other team members.

Water is a compound not an element although the Greeks and the Chinese thought it was one of the “four elements” - Earth, Air, Water and Fire. Let's run with this idea but let's assume that fire can mean all types of energy, especially the Sun. Let's use a bigger name for Air. We'll call it the Atmosphere. Let's say that “Earth” means the planet and not just a hunk of rock. Now let's add a fifth element, and call it “Life”.

Put these five elements together and they will interact spontaneously. And these interactions form the great geophysical systems of the Earth.

The Earth's surface has mountains and basins. It's lowest points are where most of the water is – in the oceans. The Earth's gravitational field is strong enough to hold all the gases: the oxygen, nitrogen, carbon dioxide, and water vapour that make up the atmosphere.

Think of Earth as a house without a switch because it runs itself. It's roof is the atmosphere. It lets vital energy from the Sun in and gives us a bit of insulation at night. Too much insulation is not good, as we see with the planet Venus, with its surface temperature of 460 *Celsius.

The Earth's got plumbing, heating, ventilation and power, mostly run by one system: the weather. But it's also got backup power from internal heat which causes plate tectonics to reconfigure the seas and continents every hundred million years or so.

It's not like a house that was designed and built, because it repairs itself. Tell me, what house that we have built repairs itself, or has lasted as long as Earth has?

As a plumbing and heating system and power system the weather is partly predictable and partly unpredictable. Sometimes we get too much water sometimes not enough. Sometimes it gets too hot, sometimes it's just right.

The weather operates under the usual physical laws. The Earth's spin causes winds to curve in the direction of rotation making cyclonic wind patterns counter-clockwise in the northern hemisphere and clockwise in the Southern Hemisphere.

The Sun's radiation heats water on Earth's surface and causes water molecules to change from liquid to gas. The water vapour can rise into the atmosphere because it contains heat from the sun.

Weather is partly predictable, we recognize the seasons, but also unpredictable, we don't know what the weather will be like a month from this day. The weather is a self-organizing system. Weather systems can last up to a week and travel thousands of kilometres.

Let's call a system: a group of parts that interact together to form a whole that is separated from the external world by a boundary.

Let's divide the world of systems into three: machines, institutions, and self-organizing systems.

Self organizing systems are systems of parts that interact via simple physical laws. The parts of the Solar system - the sun and the planets, interact by the laws of motion and gravity to form a balanced system that has maintained itself over time.

All machines are mechanical systems designed and built by humans for various goals. A house is a mechanical system that transfers heat and energy from outside and holds it inside. Houses and other machines have switches on them. When the switch is turned on, the machines start to work and when it's turned off they stop working.

What is a self-organizing system? Think of a flock of sandpipers flying low over the water – the precision and coherence of their flight. The flock swoops and glides as a unified whole as if it acts with one mind.

But each bird is acting on its own and the subtle alterations in flight that each bird makes in response to its neighbours creates an emergent unity.

Unlike machines, self-organizing systems are not deterministic. These systems have properties that emerge from the interaction of all the parts that cannot be predicted from the nature of the parts alone.


You cannot predict the weather beyond a week; Human behaviour is both predictable and unpredictable. Weather systems and large-scale human societies exhibit complex behaviour that is the hallmark of self-organizing systems.

The Earth is a self-organized system that has created life and then with the help of living organisms, such as single-celled algae,  making animal life possible by producing vast amounts of oxygen; Earth's volcanic eruptions along with life itself has  regulated the climate and the atmosphere,  producing various levels of carbon dioxide that have created periods of warming and cooling, and the oxygen, originally liberated by plant cells has been partially converted to ozone high in the atmosphere where it protects all life forms from harmful ultraviolet rays, as well as protecting the world's oceans from evaporating over eons of time from the same ultraviolet rays. Behold the Earth, which has for almost four billion years shone like a jewel in the solar system - the only planet to have life, oceans, and a life-giving atmosphere. 

How the "urge to merge" led to Language

                         

“We hold these truths to be self-evident:  That all men are created equal…”                     The U.S. Declaration of Independence

The idea that the structure of language, its syntax, and underlying rules are built-in to the human brain, perhaps initially  triggered by a chance mutation sometime around one hundred thousand years ago, that created within us a disposition to combine words, called “Merge”, is famously postulated by the MIT linguist, Noam Chomsky.  

The motivation for this theory comes from the astounding difference between human language and any other form of animal communication.  If the apes are the animals that we have the closest genetic relation to, how could such an incredible system as language have developed from ape communication?  There is a vast discontinuity here that is very hard to bridge with any Darwinian step by step explanation.

 Humans are a type of primate, but the only primate that talks.  Monkeys, apes, and many other animals vocalize.  These are stereotypical calls that are emotional responses to dangers, conflicts and potential mates.   Vocalizations are often, but not always involuntary.  They are conditioned responses to stimuli.  Laughing and crying are human vocalizations, and they follow the same pattern as in animals;  They are often but not always involuntary.

Apes can communicate with gestures, and gestures, unlike vocalizations are entirely voluntary. Speech could have come from vocalizations, but it’s more likely it first came from hand gestures and then shifted to voluntary vocalizations. This would explain why we still like to use our hands when we talk, especially when we are emphasizing a point.

 All the areas of speech specialization are in the cerebral cortex, the more conscious part of the brain that controls the voluntary muscle movements.   The number of throat and tongue muscles involved in speaking is mind boggling and the degree of coordination between groups of muscles that is needed to be able to speak rapidly, defies the imagination.  We must have had a lot of time to develop this, five or six million years maybe.

 

By the way, no attempt by humans to teach apes to talk has succeeded or will ever succeed, because they lack the fine motor coordination of the human vocal apparatus.  On the other hand, there has been some success teaching apes sign language.

It seems likely that language developed from some form of voluntary intentional communication.  This would suggest that language is less instinctual and more of a learned habit or skill which uses a fair bit of real estate in the more conscious and voluntary parts of the brain.  This is also supported by the evidence of  the plasticity of infant brains, the prolonged human infancy, and the prolonged period of learning that it takes to master a language.

In my view we have neglected the importance of agreement, and rule formation in the question of how language originated.  All languages have vocabularies of words used to refer to objects, actions,  mental states and ideas.  When words are combined to form complex descriptions, narratives, and declarations, they are combined according to set rules.  The body of these rules are known as syntax or more commonly as grammar.

 Where do rules come from?   Many rules  come from agreements.   The act of agreement is often signified nonverbally,  by a handshake,  sometimes even a nod of the head.

 As the American Philosopher John Searle has described in his book, The Construction of Social Reality,  In our everyday existence we find ourselves already embedded in a world of human values, a world created and maintained by successive  collective agreements.  These agreements can be present right now, as in a signing ceremony, or they can remain implicit, and hidden, and often forgotten.

Rules and agreements, in order to be sustained over generations, need the basis of a “level playing field”  We expect those who enter this “field”  to follow the rules and we watch for rule-breaking,  and  “out them” if they do break the rules.  

  Rules are agreed to because they apply to everyone equally.  Rules, such as - “Do unto others…” ,  and “you cannot have more than one wife” -  only  work if people believe in them and expect that others will follow them also.

 If we speak correctly others understand what we are saying, because both the speaker and listener are mutually following the rules.  The interesting thing about our mastery of language is that we take it so much for granted that it is hard to imagine not following the rules of grammar, etc.

We can look to evidence from brain damaged individuals showing various incapacities to speak or to understand.  Evidently these individuals have become incapable of following certain rules, not out of choice, but because the brain circuits that they used each time they followed those rules have now been destroyed.

Rules and agreements are each foundations for further rules and agreements.    So that over a million years it is conceivable that evolution could carve out new grooves in our cerebral cortex  for the use of learning these rules, and that as we did so the older rules would be more forgotten because a superstructure of rules has been laid down on top of them.

Imagine teaching apes rules.  It would  not  be easy,  especially if your intention was to get them to use the rules spontaneously or for them to teach the rules to their fellow apes.  But learning and teaching rules is an easy task for a six year old human child.  In my opinion, apes don’t take to rules because they live in societies with an alpha male.  

There is no level playing field with an alpha male.  There is no concept of rules applying equally, because there is only one rule: “MIght Makes Right.”   When a new alpha topples the old alpha he may have different expectations and preferences from the previous alpha, but these will just be changed again when he loses to a future alpha,  and so, the one rule rules them all.

Chimpanzees, our closest relatives and Gorillas, our more distant relatives have dominance hierarchies ruled by alpha males.  They don’t have language.  Humans have dominance hierarchies, but they are rule-governed and we have language.

An interesting exception is the bonobo, an even closer relative of chimpanzees.  Bonobos are smaller, but look similar.  And they have very different social behaviour  from that of chimps.

 In most ape societies, when an alpha is eliminated he is soon replaced with another alpha, but that doesn’t happen in bonobo groups.  Unlike male chimps, bonobo males are prevented from using their superior physical strength to dominate  females, because bonobo females always gang up on individual males before they can get away with their bullying.   But bonobos don’t live monogamously  and they don’t have language either.

Note the element of collective intentionality that’s always present in the elimination of the alpha.  Bonobo females act together to overpower males and have managed to maintain this system for possibly millions of years.   Bonobos prefigure humans because the females control male dominance collectively.  Even though they don’t have words they have some rudimentary concept of right and wrong because they punish or threaten to punish males for their behaviour.

Most of the great apes live in tropical forests, with enough fruit and nut trees in one area to support a group of about thirty.  There is a role for the alpha to help rally and bolster the troops over boundary disputes and defense of territory.  But hominins, the ancestors of humans, were walking greater distances together and the idea of defending  this as “territory” probably stretches the role of alpha too far.

Three million years ago hominins were pursuing a different niche strategy outside the forest, due to the contingencies of severe climate change, as a series of brutal ice ages descended over the earth.   In order to survive over time, they needed to be able to migrate during seasonal or prolonged droughts.

In my opinion, alpha males would have been a distinct liability for migrating hominins.  Their presence would have discouraged the kind of cooperation and functional cohesion that aids survival when a group is on the move.

Alpha males could always be replaced by another alpha, unless a collective decision was made by everyone else in the group to eliminate the alpha and suppress any new candidates.  Female bonobos have done this without the use of language. It’s interesting that the most advanced case of language ability in an ape is the bonobo, born in captivity,  named “Kanzi”  

When an individual chimpanzee or a coalition overpowers an alpha, a new alpha comes to power.   Only eliminating the alpha by a collective decision makes it possible to create and maintain a system where humans bond in pairs, and dominance is separated from other forms of competition.

We know that agreements are possible without language because we can observe animals hunting in packs and then sharing the kill, usually according to hierarchical status.  Lions can agree to hunt together and share the kill, but they can’t seem to agree to share things equally.  This seems to be related to the presence of an alpha male based hierarchy.  

Certainly there are all too numerous examples of humans sharing unequally, but if we narrow our examination  to include only  nomadic hunting and gathering societies,  then, according to the findings of Anthropologist Christopher Boehm, described in his book, Hierarchy in the Forest,  nomadic hunter-gatherers from the far corners of the earth, universally distribute shares of meat from large kills in a roughly equal fashion to all families in their group.

Not coincidentally, as Boehm notes,   hunter-gatherers are often obsessed with  suppressing greediness, boasting, and anger, They use social control through ridicule, gossip, and shunning.  they create a “moral community” that actively promotes egalitarianism.

Eliminating and  suppressing alpha-male behaviour has enhanced the survivability of hunting and gathering societies. One reason for this is that hunters are not always lucky, and if successful hunters don’t share in good times,  they risk starving when they hit a dry spell.

 By eliminating the alpha male, then establishing pair-bonds, human communities were first able to collectively regulate behaviour by community-enforced “rules”, although, before language they were not rules as we know them today, but more feelings and emotions.   The feeling of what is fair and what is not, can be shared amongst a group, and the desire to be with one’s beloved  and to facilitate the same for others does not  necessarily require words.

Monogamy could have been inspired through emotions, perhaps even love, before language or any form of reason existed.  But the collective creation and maintenance of monogamy  created a level playing field   in which those who excel at things other than dominance,  can contribute to the whole  community,  rather than taking over everything, as the alpha does.

According to  Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection, all living things are descended from a single ancestor.  What I am proposing, is that all human collective decisions, including those that were used to create  language, are descended from that first collective decision to eliminate the alpha male and replace him with monogamous pair-bonds.  

By this collective act, a level playing field was created,  the idea of equality was born, and from this beginning language as a rule bound way of sharing information became possible.

Even though language wasn’t asking to be spoken, we collectively created it  by  first calling into being the conditions of its possibility -  monogamy and equitable sharing.   It was in this collective act that we created ourselves as human beings.

As the Declaration of Independence states, humankind was created equally, and the concept of equality comes from the human ability to maintain equality through collective action.

Jimmy Carter's Eloquence on Sexual Equality

   

OBSERVER

Jimmy Carter was president of the United States from 1977 to 1981.

This was published 15 years ago

Losing my religion for equality

ByJimmy Carter

Women and girls have been discriminated against for too long in a twisted interpretation of the word of God.

I HAVE been a practising Christian all my life and a deacon and Bible teacher for many years. My faith is a source of strength and comfort to me, as religious beliefs are to hundreds of millions of people around the world. So my decision to sever my ties with the Southern Baptist Convention, after six decades, was painful and difficult. It was, however, an unavoidable decision when the convention's leaders, quoting a few carefully selected Bible verses and claiming that Eve was created second to Adam and was responsible for original sin, ordained that women must be "subservient" to their husbands and prohibited from serving as deacons, pastors or chaplains in the military service.

This view that women are somehow inferior to men is not restricted to one religion or belief. Women are prevented from playing a full and equal role in many faiths. Nor, tragically, does its influence stop at the walls of the church, mosque, synagogue or temple. This discrimination, unjustifiably attributed to a Higher Authority, has provided a reason or excuse for the deprivation of women's equal rights across the world for centuries.

At its most repugnant, the belief that women must be subjugated to the wishes of men excuses slavery, violence, forced prostitution, genital mutilation and national laws that omit rape as a crime. But it also costs many millions of girls and women control over their own bodies and lives, and continues to deny them fair access to education, health, employment and influence within their own communities.

The impact of these religious beliefs touches every aspect of our lives. They help explain why in many countries boys are educated before girls; why girls are told when and whom they must marry; and why many face enormous and unacceptable risks in pregnancy and childbirth because their basic health needs are not met.

In some Islamic nations, women are restricted in their movements, punished for permitting the exposure of an arm or ankle, deprived of education, prohibited from driving a car or competing with men for a job. If a woman is raped, she is often most severely punished as the guilty party in the crime.

The same discriminatory thinking lies behind the continuing gender gap in pay and why there are still so few women in office in the West. The root of this prejudice lies deep in our histories, but its impact is felt every day. It is not women and girls alone who suffer. It damages all of us. The evidence shows that investing in women and girls delivers major benefits for society. An educated woman has healthier children. She is more likely to send them to school. She earns more and invests what she earns in her family.

It is simply self-defeating for any community to discriminate against half its population. We need to challenge these self-serving and outdated attitudes and practices - as we are seeing in Iran where women are at the forefront of the battle for democracy and freedom.

I understand, however, why many political leaders can be reluctant about stepping into this minefield. Religion, and tradition, are powerful and sensitive areas to challenge. But my fellow Elders and I, who come from many faiths and backgrounds, no longer need to worry about winning votes or avoiding controversy - and we are deeply committed to challenging injustice wherever we see it.

The Elders are an independent group of eminent global leaders, brought together by former South African president Nelson Mandela, who offer their influence and experience to support peace building, help address major causes of human suffering and promote the shared interests of humanity. We have decided to draw particular attention to the responsibility of religious and traditional leaders in ensuring equality and human rights and have recently published a statement that declares: "The justification of discrimination against women and girls on grounds of religion or tradition, as if it were prescribed by a Higher Authority, is unacceptable."

We are calling on all leaders to challenge and change the harmful teachings and practices, no matter how ingrained, which justify discrimination against women. We ask, in particular, that leaders of all religions have the courage to acknowledge and emphasise the positive messages of dignity and equality that all the world's major faiths share.

The carefully selected verses found in the Holy Scriptures to justify the superiority of men owe more to time and place - and the determination of male leaders to hold onto their influence - than eternal truths. Similar biblical excerpts could be found to support the approval of slavery and the timid acquiescence to oppressive rulers.

I am also familiar with vivid descriptions in the same Scriptures in which women are revered as pre-eminent leaders. During the years of the early Christian church women served as deacons, priests, bishops, apostles, teachers and prophets. It wasn't until the fourth century that dominant Christian leaders, all men, twisted and distorted Holy Scriptures to perpetuate their ascendant positions within the religious hierarchy.

The truth is that male religious leaders have had - and still have - an option to interpret holy teachings either to exalt or subjugate women. They have, for their own selfish ends, overwhelmingly chosen the latter. Their continuing choice provides the foundation or justification for much of the pervasive persecution and abuse of women throughout the world. This is in clear violation not just of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights but also the teachings of Jesus Christ, the Apostle Paul, Moses and the prophets, Muhammad, and founders of other great religions - all of whom have called for proper and equitable treatment of all the children of God. It is time we had the courage to challenge these views.

OBSERVER

Jimmy Carter was president of the United States from 1977 to 1981.

Huckabee's Second Favorite Book

About five years ago during the run-up to the Presidential elections, the Republican  candidates  were each asked what book they would bring to the White House if they could only bring one, Mike Huckabee, the Southern Baptist minister and former governor of Arkansas, spoke in glowing terms of the book How Should We Then Live,by Francis Shaeffer. Huckabee, the most popular Presidential candidate among evangelicals, has won the Republican Primaries in some of the southern states, but overall he's a distant second to front runner John McCain.

You can certainly tell a lot about a person by the books he recommends and How We Should Then Live is no exception. When I heard that Huckabee was praising it my ears perked up because I've got that book and I've even read it. The author, Francis Shaeffer is considered by many to be one of the leading intellectual lights of the religious right. How Should We Then Live was conceived in 1974 and published in 1976 along with a film version. I picked up the book for 50 cents at a garage sale about five years ago. The DVD sells for $60 but it can be rented out.

The book is a brief but comprehensive survey of art, theology, and philosophy from the time of the Roman Empire to the 1970's. The subtitle of the book is a good indicator of what it contains: The Rise and Decline of Western Thought and Culture. According to Shaeffer, who is a Calvinist, the pinnacle of Western civilization was the Protestant Reformation in the 16th Century. Why? Because "...they (the reformers) took seriously the Bible's own claim for itself - that it is the only final authority."

Shaeffer's thesis is that Western Civilization has been declining ever since because of the corrupting influence of humanism. By "humanism" Shaeffer means the doctrine that "human reason alone can think out the answers to the great questions which confront mankind." "At its core", he says, "the Reformation was the removing of the humanistic distortions which had entered the church."

What bugs Shaeffer, Huckabee, and all the other Fundamentalists about humanism? Shaeffer does a good job of summing it up: "unless there is an absolute, these things are lost to us: morals, values, the meaning of existence, and a basis for man." "If there is no absolute beyond man's ideas then there is no final appeal to judge between individuals and groups whose moral judgments conflict - we are merely left with conflicting opinions."

While I admire Shaeffer's clarity I take issue with his conclusions. If there is absolute truth, how do we know it's absolute, and how do we know that his interpretation or anyone else's is the right one? Just look at all the numerous sects of Christianity, all based on different interpretations of the Bible.

I believe that knowledge is provisional. We can approach the truth using scientific method, but we can never know if something is absolutely true. We need to listen to conflicting opinions because there is always the chance that we are wrong. Believing in absolute truth is psychologically satisfying for some people, but it is very dangerous for political systems. Fundamentalists like George W. Bush, believe that they are following God's plan and therefore they ignore criticism and bypass legal checks and balances in order to get their way.

If I know the "absolute truth" then those who disagree with me are dangerous heretics who should be put down. It becomes OK to torture people if I think that they are terrorists and they might have information about terrorist plans that they don't want to tell me willingly. If I'm privy to the "absolute truth" then how can I make a mistake? Nor do I ever need to be corrected or to learn anything new.

The fact that George W. Bush's most loyal supporters were evangelicals is pretty strong evidence that they have no monopoly on truth or morality. And the fact that evangelicals support Huckabee show that they haven't learned much from experience.

Jesus for Unitarians

...Beware, keep alert; for you do not know when the time will come. It is like a man going on a journey, when he leaves home and puts his slaves in charge, each with his work, and commands the doorkeeper to be on the watch. Therefore keep awake – for you do not know when the master of the house will come, in the evening, or at midnight, or at cockcrow, or at dawn, or else he may find you asleep when he comes suddenly. And what I say to you I say to all: Keep awake. Mark 13: 33-37 NRSV

Don't you find people who talk this way irritating? “Beware, keep alert...” For what? It's bad enough that we get stressed out by things in everyday life:  our jobs, traffic, the news, our kids, our neighbours, our health without piling some bigger but hypothetical concern on top of everything else. That must be the way a lot of people feel about environmentalists: “look I realize that we need to do something about pollution. But there's nothing I can do about it right now so quit bothering me!” That sense of urgency. It can really get under your skin because after all we've gotta get on with our lives, no matter how urgent worldwide problems are. And it's hard to know if what we do can ever make a real difference.

.....It is like the mustard seed, which, when sown upon the ground; is the smallest of all the seeds on earth; yet when it is sown it grows up and becomes the greatest of all shrubs, and puts forth large branches, so that the birds of the air can make nests in its shade. Mark 4: 30-32

But what if you heard some guy saying stuff like that and you dropped everything you were doing and followed him. Your family and friends would be saying: “Get real. Are you crazy? You've got a job, you've got responsibilities. Get over it.” But no. All of a sudden you've got a sense of purpose. You want to help save the world and nothing else matters. Are you crazy? Maybe, but there's something about this guy. You've never met anyone like him before. He cares about people, forgotten people, the ones that have been left behind and he doesn't defer to any big shots or the rich.

Not very likely that we would drop everything and follow such a person is it? And two thousand years ago when Jesus told these two parables it wasn't very likely either. Let's face it, his group of followers was small. The New Testament exaggerates his influence when he was alive because, well, that was the writers' job. During his lifetime Jesus was essentially an unknown. His teacher, John the Baptizer was much more well known than him and had a bigger following. How do we know? Because we have reports about John from an independent source: Josephus, The Antiquities of the Jews. Be that as it may, what was Jesus' message?

The kingdom of God is as if a man should scatter seed onto the ground and would sleep and rise night and day. And the seed would sprout and grow, he knows not how. For the earth brings forth fruit of herself, first the stalk, then the head, then the full grain in the head. But when the grain is ripe, at once he goes in with his sickle because the harvest has come. Mark 4: 26-29 NRSV

According to Mark, Jesus starts his ministry by proclaiming: The time is fulfilled , and the kingdom of God is at hand, repent, and hear the good news. Like the man in the parable, Jesus doesn't bother with explaining why the time is fulfilled, it just is. The Gospel of Mark is the only one of the four New Testament Gospels that shows that Jesus was an apocalyptic prophet. Apocalypse was a kind of perspective among certain groups of Jews in the first and previous century – particularly the Essenes, the Pharisees, and the followers of John the Baptizer. This perspective is oriented towards the near future when God will destroy this world along with all the evil people in it and create a new world populated with the few righteous people left. It's basically wish fulfillment for seriously oppressed people. Jesus preached that the apocalypse was immanent, eg., “The kingdom of God is at hand....”, which might explain his spontaneity and sometimes rash judgment.

Apocalyptic thinking has had a pernicious influence, right up to this very day. And that sense of urgency to speed things along – the “Let's have an apocalypse now.” mentality is alive and well in the Christian Right's neglect of the environment and encouragement of war.

Jesus taught that very soon the coming of God's kingdom would result in a radical reversal of fortunes. The Gospel of Mark in the New Testament quotes him as saying “The first shall be last and the last shall be first” And he practiced what he preached. He befriends notorious sinners and outcasts. His disciples are poor and illiterate. He tells a rich young man who wanted to join him to come back after he gives all his wealth to the poor. Of course the rich young man does no such thing. So Jesus loses a potential convert. But he doesn't care. He tells his disciples: “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.” People walk away amazed by what Jesus says or they are outraged.

He acts spontaneously. He picks his disciples on the spot and they decide to follow him – a bunch of fishermen: Andrew, James, Peter and John; a tax collector, Matthew; a zealot named Judas. (Zealots were the first century equivalent of terrorists) Perhaps being spontaneous he sometimes makes errors of judgment.

According to Mark, Jesus taught in parables. These are short stories that are often kind of earthy, often about farming or some aspect of nature: planting seeds, running a vineyard, feeding the pigs.... all of them ostensibly simple but all with a paradoxical twist at the end.

This tells us something about Jesus. He's not a philosopher or a theologian. He doesn't lay down his beliefs deductively. Parables are open-ended – they create ambiguity in the listener's mind because the conclusion is left open, so it invites active participation from the audience. It gets people to think about things in a different way.

The apostle Paul's letters are the first surviving Christian documents. But the Gospel of Mark is the first written narrative about Jesus. It was probably written about thirty years after his death. My Mennonite friend believes that it is a first person account of Jesus – as if to say that Mark was one of the disciples who hung around with Jesus, writing down everything he said or did with a quill, a bottle of ink and a papyrus notebook.

But if you read Mark with an open mind you will find, like reading any other book, it has a point of view. And that point of view rejects the authority of Jesus' disciples. So it's not likely that Mark was one of them.

Mark never tires of pointing out how the disciples didn't understand what Jesus was really talking about. It doesn't matter how clearly and simply Jesus explains what he's about, they just don't get it. They're a bunch of dimwits. According to Mark, even Jesus' family think he's a nut-case and want to get him committed. Jesus most important disciple, Peter, who Mark acknowledges is the first person to recognize that Jesus is the Messiah – still doesn't understand what his being the Messiah actually means.

(Jesus asked:) “Who do you say that I am?” Peter answered, “You are the Messiah.” Then he gave them strict orders not to tell anyone about him; and he began to teach them that the son of man had to undergo great sufferings, and to be rejected by the elders, chief priests, and doctors of the law; to be put to death, and rise again three days afterwards. At this Peter took him by the arm and began to rebuke him. But Jesus turned around, and, looking at his disciples, rebuked Peter. “Away with you Satan,” he said, “you think as men think, not as God thinks.”

Mark 8 29- 33

This passage is the key to Mark's Gospel. According to Mark, what Jesus' closest followers didn't get is that Jesus was supposed to be crucified. Being a Unitarian my theory about this is that Jesus didn't get it either. He had no idea that he was going to be crucified. Why then was he crucified? I think Mark gives us a pretty good indication, although for his own reasons he doesn't treat it that way.

Passover, is the Holy day when the Jews celebrate their covenant with God through the retelling of the story of Moses and their deliverance from slavery. On the day before Passover Jews from all over the Roman Empire have gathered in Jerusalem to make sacrifices in honour of Passover, and all such sacrifices take place in the Holy Jewish Temple in Jerusalem. Within the precincts of the temple there are stalls of money changers, sacrificial pigeon sellers, etc. But Jesus has a thing about money. He is quoted as saying: “You cannot serve two masters... You cannot serve God and money.”

Jesus goes up to Jerusalem on the day before Passover and walks into the Jewish Temple. He sees the money changers stalls, the pigeon sellers. He is insulted that people are openly making money in the precincts of the Holy Temple. Jesus is not a violent person. At a previous time and place he tells people that if someone strikes you you should turn the other cheek instead of striking back. He tells people that the meek will inherit the earth. But this time something in him snaps. Impulsively, he kicks at their stalls, and overturns them. Money is spilling all over the floor. The stall owners are yelling at Jesus. People are running over to see what's happening and sacrificial pigeons are flying off in all directions. There's general pandemonium, and in the confusion Jesus somehow slips away. That afternoon a woman comes to visit Jesus and she pours an entire bottle of expensive perfume over his head. His followers are incensed at the waste of money, especially Judas. But Jesus defends her. It's the last straw for Judas. That night he goes to the Jewish authorities who are gunning for Jesus for his causing a riot and tells them where they can find him. The next morning they apprehend Jesus and turn him over to the Roman procurator Pontius Pilate who has him crucified the same day. All of Jesus' disciples are completely dispirited and flee the city.

This is not a very flattering portrait of Jesus: on the last few days of his life his own followers are bickering with him, while one of his hand-picked disciples betrays him to his enemies, When he's apprehended his followers scatter to the four winds. It's all the more reason to believe that this actually happened, because why would people who worship Jesus as the Messiah make these things up about him? But it's also a strong reason for Mark to incorporate damage control into his story. It all happened this way because it was supposed to happen. And Jesus followers were not united behind him because they just didn't get it. But Mark and his readership do know better and that's why he's telling the story. So that we can get it, so that we can achieve closer access to Jesus than his own disciples did. It's pretty exciting stuff, even today, two thousand years after this story was first told.

Being a Unitarian I'm interested in the story of Jesus, I'm fascinated by hearing what he did and said, but I'm skeptical about Jesus' divinity.  Still I don't deny that there is something very significant about who Jesus was. And there is plenty of evidence in the New Testament that that's the case, especially in the accounts of his resurrection.

But being a good and skeptical Unitarian how can I possibly use the accounts of his resurrection as evidence? What was the resurrection all about? According to all four gospel accounts in the New Testament no-one saw Jesus actually rise from the dead. The most ancient accounts of the gospel of Mark do not include any accounts of his resurrection, but the entire gospel implies that he did rise from the dead. In later versions of Mark , and in the other three gospels and the book of Acts there are numerous accounts of Jesus' followers experiencing Jesus as alive after he was crucified – people see him , talk to him, eat with him, and even touch him.

There is no doubt in my mind that people experienced Jesus as alive after he died for two reasons. First, in being crucified, Jesus died a shocking and horrific death. But, if that's all that happened why was a religious movement born out of it? There must have been some collective experience that was powerful enough to bring a scattered and demoralized group of his followers back together to form the first Christian church. Secondly One of the authors featured in the New Testament claims that he himself experienced the resurrected Christ and his account is independently corroborated by a different author. This is an account written by the apostle Paul in his letter to the Galatians and first letter to the Corinthians describing his experience and also in several places in the New Testament book of Acts which was written by somebody calling himself Luke. In these famous accounts Saul, who never met Jesus during his lifetime, is riding to Damascus in order to persecute Christians there, when he is suddenly blinded, falls off his horse and hears Jesus voice speaking in Aramaic: “Saul, why do you persecute me.”  Instead of persecuting the Damascus Christians as he had intended, he meets with them, converts to Christianity, changes his name to Paul, hangs out in the desert for a while to think things through, and a couple of years later goes back to Jerusalem to meet with the apostle Peter and James the brother of Jesus.

What is behind the resurrection experiences? For those who knew Jesus there must have been something about him as a person that was very special – perhaps his spontaneity, or his selfless generosity, or his unconditional love for people who were normally despised and rejected. In any event it must have been profoundly personal for his followers to have experienced his resurrection.

But for someone like Paul who never knew Jesus personally, the reasons for his resurrection experience must have been more in a theological vein. After all, he started out by persecuting Christians, so he must have had a reason for that. Paul tells us that he studied under a famous Pharisaic teacher named Gamaliel, and Pharisees figure prominently in the New Testament as intellectual opponents of Jesus. There are discussions about what ought to be allowed or disallowed on the Sabbath, where Jesus' authority comes from, whether it's right to pay taxes to the Emperor, and so on. They are the kind of discussions that could have gone on between friendly rivals. But there was obviously some sticking point, some area of intense disagreement, or Pharisees like Saul would not have been persecuting the early Christians.

Jesus' saying, “The Last shall be first and the first shall be last.” comes to mind. For it could be seen to imply that non-Jews or Gentiles could be more easily saved than Jews who follow the Jewish Law. And that could have been hard to take for someone like Paul who spent the first part of his life learning to be a pious Jew. The fact that Paul later appoints himself as the apostle to the Gentiles, points to this kind of reversal in his philosophy. There are universal elements in Judaism, elements that imply that God's Justice ought to reach all peoples equally and this comes out in Jesus' teachings and may have spoken directly to Paul, first enraging him and later converting him.

The interesting thing is, what was Paul thinking about during those two years he spent in the desert? Bart Ehrman, a New Testament scholar, suggests that the process of Paul's thought goes something like this: If Jesus is resurrected from the dead then he must be the Messiah,(the Messiah being a Jewish Apocalyptic figure who was thought to be the person who God chose to rule the world and vanquish all evil.) But Jesus was crucified by the Romans. But God wouldn't have allowed his Messiah to be crucified unless he meant it to be that way. But why would He have meant it to happen that way? Paul reasons that it couldn't have been for anything Jesus did so therefore he was meant to be crucified because of what everybody else has done. God was making the ultimate sacrifice in order to save all of humankind, both Jews and Gentiles together if they accepted Jesus as Lord.

I believe that it is significant that Paul states in his first letter to the Corinthians that he received the idea of the ceremony of the Eucharist from the resurrected Jesus himself. The Eucharist which is the symbolic sharing of Jesus' body and blood is a reenactment of Christ's sacrifice of his life. It would make sense that if Paul was the person who created the idea of Jesus dying for our sins he would also have created the ceremony which physically reenacts that sacrifice.

Most Christians believe that the Eucharist was passed from Jesus to his disciples at his last supper, the night before he died. That's because it's part of the passion narratives of all three synoptic gospels. I admit it makes for a great story but being a Unitarian I'm skeptical, (we're such killjoys).... First Jesus was Jewish and Jews do not believe in human sacrifice. Of course Paul was Jewish too. But he is known to have stretched the rules by not requiring gentile Christians to eat kosher or gentile males to be circumcised. And what's more interesting is that Paul tells us in his letters that he did this in opposition to the Jerusalem church. Indeed, Paul argues logically that because Jesus saves us through his death on the cross, Jewish laws such as keeping kosher and circumcision are no longer necessary.

He's got a valid argument if you accept the premises. So why did the Jerusalem church not see things the same way? After all they were the ones who sat in on the last supper. Boy are they ever stupid! Jesus tells them all this stuff about his having to die for us and they still don't get it. Or, maybe they didn't get it because they knew Jesus and he never said those things because he had no idea he was about to be crucified.

The only place in the Bible where someone says Jesus told me “This is my body....” is in Paul's letters. Everywhere else it's in the third person, it's “Jesus told them...” Could it be because all the narratives about Jesus were written under Paul's direct or indirect influence? The vast majority of Biblical scholars agree that Paul's letters predate all of the Gospels. And the last half of the book of Acts, which is written by the same author who wrote the Gospel of Luke, is basically a narrative about Paul spreading the Christian gospel to the far corners of the Roman Empire. The one gospel with the least influence from Paul is the gospel of John and , oddly enough, it's scene of the last supper has no mention of the Eucharist.

You don't need to go outside the Bible to some esoteric interpretation of Jesus sayings to learn that things are not as they seem. When you think about it the New Testament is simply an astounding treasure trove of documents. You've got Paul's letters. You've got four different narrative versions of Jesus' life to compare and contrast. You've got a biography of Paul. The only thing you don't have is anything written by Jesus but that's because he never wrote anything.

I admit it's a bit of a dilemma trying to figure out what Jesus really said and did. It makes things a lot more complicated than if you just believed everything that's written in the Bible is true. But it's the doctrine of the atonement that is crucial here because it's how one treats this doctrine that ultimately determines how you look at everything else. And I mean “everything else”. Fundamentalists believe that all that's really important about Jesus is that he was the son of God who was born a human male and died on the cross so that our sins could be forgiven. Liberals and Unitarians believe that what Jesus actually said and did during his life is important enough to know that it is worth the risk of eroding some of the basic tenets of Christian faith to find out. It was liberal Christians who, in setting out to uncover the authentic Jesus, became the first religious group in history to critically analyze their own sacred texts. And Christian fundamentalism evolved out of a widespread reaction to the liberals' critical text analysis. Unfortunately, by holding the atonement above everything else, fundamentalists have backed themselves into a corner that they can't get out of. That's why they insist on the literal truth of everything that's written in the Bible and that's why they reject the theory of evolution and a lot of other scientific knowledge.

Fundamentalists were more motivated by the fear of change than by the pursuit of truth and so they closed their minds to the truth. “Stay the course.” Let's continue to wage war, let's continue to create social inequality, let's continue to pollute and degrade the environment, and let's continue to consume more and more of the earth's resources. “Stay the course.” “Stay the course....” And if we do, in less than one hundred years our global civilization will collapse. Much faster than what happened to the Roman Empire. The Roman Empire lasted four hundred years after Jesus died so his timing in claiming that the apocalypse was to happen within the lifetimes of his audience was a bit off. But in some important respects Jesus had it right. If we want to have a future for the human race we must reject inequality, war, and overconsumption and embrace simplicity.

Someone asked Jesus, “Which commandment is the first of all?” Jesus Answered, “The first is, “Hear O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might.” The second is this, “You shall love your neighbour as yourself.” There is no other commandments greater than these.” ( Mark 12: 29-31, note also Deuteronomy 7: 4-6)

There are no other commandments greater than these. We can follow him or we can persist in misunderstanding him. And we don't have much time to choose.

A Message From the Garden

One of my favorite stories is the story of the garden of Eden. As a story it's got everything: sex, nudity, the loss of innocence, the quest for power, deceit and betrayal... It could have been written yesterday.

When God first made the world God made a garden and created a man and a woman to live there. God named the first humans Adam and Eve. Before there were any other people Adam and Eve didn't wear any clothes – not a stitch. They didn't need to work because everything they needed was ready at hand, in the garden. God told them that there was only one thing they couldn't have and that was to eat from the fruit of the tree of knowledge. God told them straight out: if they ate from that tree they would die.

In the garden lived a talking snake. And being innocent, Eve didn't realize that snakes are something to be afraid of. So she listened politely as the snake suggested to her that, in spite of what God said, she and Adam could really benefit from eating that forbidden fruit. “God is putting you on.” said the snake, “God knows that if you eat of that fruit you won't die. Instead you can use this knowledge to become as powerful as the Gods.”

So Eve talked it over with Adam. And being a man it's hard to argue with a naked woman. So they both ate of the fruit and their eyes were opened. And the first thing they realized was that they were naked. Ah knowledge – there goes innocence. So Adam and Eve made the first pair of bermuda shorts out of a bunch of fig leaves. Then they hid from God because, having knowledge, they knew they were in big trouble.

But God also knew what was going on and so God called out to them: “Why are you hiding?” At this point Eve knew that there was no sense in lying to God because God knew everything. So she confessed to their eating the forbidden fruit. Even though God knew everything, this still made God angry. “No more innocent fun for you two. Adam, from now on you will have to work by the sweat of your brow. Eve, you will have to suffer the pain of childbirth.” And God sent them out of the garden.

What do we get from this story? Even when we humans come to know things we still get it wrong. Knowledge is not certain knowledge. We can only make guesses and the longer we are around the better we are at guessing what is going on. But we can never be certain. Being human, we are guaranteed to screw up because we can't know everything. But we can learn from our mistakes and improve.

Christians call this “original sin”, but I call it being fallible. If we are fallible then we must be open to other points of view because we can never be certain that our point of view is the truth. This leads to Open Society. Since we always fall short of perfection we should always be open to improvement.

Fundamentalist Christians call the idea of Open Society “secular humanism” and “moral relativism”. They believe that there is only one standard of truth and it's in the Bible. When there is only one standard you don't need to ask questions, you simply follow what authority says. This is Closed Society. There is no room for improvement because we have certainty, no learning from mistakes because we don't make
mistakes, no listening to other points of view because every point of view but ours is wrong.

The problem is there are as many interpretations of the Bible as there are people. How can we know which interpretation is the “true” interpretation? If the story of the garden of Eden is anything to go on – even when we think we have certain knowledge, we still get it wrong.

Gaia and Global Warming

Life originated in an atmosphere of ninety-five per cent carbon dioxide. We know carbon dioxide as the gas that we breathe out and that forms the bulk of a car's exhaust. Four billion years ago or four eons ago it was volcanoes, not cars that were belching it out. The air would have been poisonous to humans and any other animal life. You wouldn't think that such an atmosphere would be conducive to life and yet it was. The sun was younger four eons ago and it was a lot cooler – twenty-five per cent cooler than it is today. If it wasn't for the atmosphere of carbon dioxide the Earth would have been a ball of ice, just like the outer planets. But the carbon dioxide magnified the heat from the sun because it is a greenhouse gas. It is transparent to the sun's light rays, letting them pass directly through to the Earth but reflecting back the infrared heat rays that emanate from the Earth.

Carbon dioxide is what kept Earth at just the right temperature given the weakness of the sun relative to today. And the conditions of the sea were just right for life to develop at .9 % salinity. Today the sea is 3.5 % salt. The conditions were just right. What is it about life? Life is bound by certain constraints and living cells perish when conditions are not right.

So how did life survive in the face of changing conditions if it needed the conditions to stay the same? Just as the environment changed life, life began to change the environment, affecting the salinity of the oceans, changing the content of the atmosphere, and altering the climate. And it wasn't by conscious purpose, it was more a consequence of certain properties of life.

James Lovelock, a British scientist, tells us how these environmental constraints work:

.... They depend upon the tolerances of the organisms themselves. All life forms have a lower, an upper, and an optimum temperature for growth and the same is true for acidity, salinity, and the abundance of oxygen in the air and water. Consequently organisms have to live within the bounds of these properties of the environment.

Notice Lovelock talks about the optimum amount of oxygen – and yet I've been telling you that there was no oxygen in the atmosphere when life was born. Now there is 21% oxygen in the air. If there wasn't we'd be having trouble breathing because all animals and insects need at least 15% oxygen in order to make their muscles move. At the same time if the air had 25% oxygen, even wet vegetation would burn and all the forests on Earth would go up in flames in a matter of months. At the time that life came into being there was only trace amounts of oxygen in the air. Oxygen is a very reactive element. It's what gives many red things their colour, like red rocks, the surface of Mars, and blood. Oxygen in the atmosphere is also what gives the sky its blue colour.

The very first life was a cell. A bacterial cell we call “Archaebacteria” . Its closest relatives are still living today – but they survive only in places where there is very little oxygen. In muds and in the guts of herbivores like cows. All living cells are related to Archaebacteria because it was the first cell.

Life is 3.8 billion years old. That's old. And during those 3.8 billion years – that's one quarter the age of the universe – the Earth's environment has always supported life, even though the heat of the Sun has increased by 25% during that time. Eventually the Sun will grow too hot for life to exist on Earth and life will perish. We've only got about one billion years left. Better make your wills now. But it could be a lot sooner if we manage to raise the proportion of greenhouse gases high enough.

Remember James Lovelock's saying that life needs to live within environmental constraints. I call this the “goldilocks property of life” because life prefers to live in just the right conditions like baby bear's porridge - “not too hot and not too cold”; not too salty, not too watery, etc. Lovelock lists three other significant properties of life.

The second property is that if the right environmental conditions open up a living organism will grow vigorously until it has occupied its entire niche. I call this the “kudzu property” after the aggressive green leafy vine that inundates vacant lots and fields in the American South.

When life first existed, the conditions must have been just right – ocean salinity was in the right range because of the ocean's relative youth, and the temperature of the Earth was in the right range. So archaebacteria was able to thrive and fill its entire niche – which happened to be the entire global ocean four eons ago.

But archaebacteria didn't just fill its entire niche. It started changing, generation after generation. And some of those changes survived and new types of bacteria developed. This brings us to Lovelock's third property: All life undergoes Darwinian natural selection – organisms with the most progeny survive. We often understand Darwin's theory of evolution to mean: When the environment changes, organisms that can adapt to those changes survive and those that don't become extinct. The problem is if the environmental changes become too extreme then no life can survive.

Two and a half eons ago a bacteria called cyanobacteria came into existence. The big difference between cyanobacteria and archaebacteria is that cyanobacteria can photosynthesize. It can take carbon-dioxide out of the air and by using energy derived from the sun, split the molecule into carbon and oxygen, keep the carbon atom for its own use while liberating two atoms of oxygen into the air. And that's what cyanobacteria did for two billion years until the amount of oxygen had built up to its present concentration of 21%.  At the same time it was producing all this oxygen it was sequestering carbon and so the amount of carbon dioxide diminished.

That leads us to Lovelock's fourth significant property of life: All organisms change their physical and chemical environment. The easiest way to understand this is to think about breathing: we change the air every time we breathe by taking in oxygen and breathing out carbon dioxide. If we are in an enclosed space and there is no air circulation then the air would quickly become too high in carbon dioxide and too low in oxygen and if we weren't removed from that environment we would die. If there were no photosynthesizers on Earth, the same thing would happen to our atmosphere, but it would take thousands of years. But it is not just the air that gets changed according to Lovelock:

Evidence... shows the Earth's crust, oceans, and air to be either directly the product of living things or else massively modified by their presence. Consider how the oxygen and nitrogen from the air come directly from plants and microorganisms and how the chalk and limestone rocks are the shells of living things once floating in the sea.

To summarize so far: James Lovelock has listed four significant properties of life which I call:

1. The goldilocks property
2. The kudzu property
3. Darwinian natural selection
4. Life's ability to change its environment

These four properties are the main ingredients of a recipe for “Gaia” according to Lovelock. What exactly is Gaia? And who is James Lovelock?

“Gaia” is the Greek name for the mythical Mother- Earth goddess. Lovelock used that name to call the Earth, seen as a single physiological system, an entity, ... that is alive, at least to the extent like other organisms, its chemistry and temperature are self-regulated at a state favorable for its inhabitants.

Gaia is an evolving system, a system made up from all living things and their surface environment, the oceans, atmosphere, and crustal rocks, the two parts tightly coupled and indivisible. It is an 'emergent domain' – a system that has emerged from the reciprical evolution of organisms and their environment over eons of life on Earth. In this system the self-regulation of climate and chemical composition are entirely automatic. Self- regulation emerges as the system evolves. No foresight, planning, or teleology are involved.

James Lovelock is a British scientist who invented several devices that measured the presence and amount of trace gases in the atmosphere. In the 1960's he got a job working for NASA at the Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena California. At the time, one of NASA's goals was to discover whether or not there is life on Mars. Lovelock, after thinking about the problem, realized that the easiest way to tell whether there was life on Mars was by examining its atmosphere – which could be done without actually sending a rocket into space. Needless to say, this was not a popular point of view at NASA because their main purpose is to send rockets into space.

I argued that if there was life on Mars it would have to use the atmosphere as a source of raw materials and as somewhere to deposit its wastes; this would change the atmosphere's composition and make it recognizably different from a dead planet.

Since the atmosphere of Mars is ninety per cent carbon dioxide, there is no methane, and only trace amounts of oxygen, Mars is chemically inert and very stable. On Earth there is oxygen and methane in the atmosphere, which means that Earth's atmosphere is chemically unstable. Over time free oxygen will combine with the surface rocks and with hydrogen in a process called oxidization. Only the continued existence of life could keep that proportion of oxygen in the atmosphere stable over time. On Mars there is no life. You may recall that I said that when life first began on Earth the atmosphere was mostly carbon dioxide with almost no oxygen, which, it turns out, is the same atmosphere as Mars has now. There is very little water on Mars, but there is evidence that there used to be water on Mars. Lovelock argues that it is the presence of life on Earth that is the reason Earth has water and it is the absence of life that has led to Venus and Mars losing theirs. It is the presence of life that changed Earth's atmosphere to what it is today, hence it is the absence of life that left the atmosphere of Venus and Mars unchanged.

One of the most popular photographs, perhaps the most popular photograph ever, is a snapshot taken by an astronaut of the Earth – from the window of an Apollo spacecraft as it journeyed from the Earth to the Moon. You can see Antarctica, almost all of Africa, the Arabian peninsula, the South Atlantic and Indian Oceans and a massive weather system in the Southern Ocean. This picture has had a profound effect on many people. We all live here on Earth but it's difficult to see the bigger picture because we are in the midst of it. But this particular photograph changed many peoples' perspective. In James Lovelock's view:

.....to see the Earth from space forces questions about the composition of the air we breathe not previously asked.

For instance:

......Why is everything on our planet so comfortable and well suited for life? .......The air is a mixture that almost always keeps constant in composition. My flash of enlightenment that afternoon was the thought that to keep constant something must be regulating it and that somehow the life on the surface was involved.

A living cell regulates its internal environment – keeping its salt content at .9% and all the other essential elements at various optimal concentrations. This it does in spite of changes in the external environment..... up to a point. If the environmental changes are too severe - if the salt content of the water bathing the cell reaches 6% the cell dies. And the same thing happens if the salt content of the water bathing the cell becomes too low. Life is bound by constraints. And if those constraints are breached life perishes.

A cell cannot regulate its internal temperature because it is too small. But multicellular organisms can. Cold-blooded animals do not regulate their body temperature internally but they can do it by changing their behavior – by seeking the sunlight to raise their temperature and seeking shade in order to lower their temperature. Warm-blooded animals can also regulate their temperature through behavior. Birds in the northern hemisphere fly south for the winter. People make clothes and build houses.

Our bodies regulate our temperatures by a complex interconnecting system of internal organs. When we are cold our autonomic nervous system causes our muscles to twitch uncontrollably – this is called shivering. The blood vessels near the skin surface constrict, keeping the majority of blood in the body's well-insulated core. When we are hot the blood vessels in the extremities open up, passing the body's heat into the surrounding air. Glands in our skin secrete sweat and this cools our bodies through the evaporation of water. Although no solitary cell is able to regulate its internal temperature, over vast spans of time, life has evolved the ability to do this because it enhances an organism's survival.

Now we are a life form, a part of Gaia, and like Kudzu we have thrived and our population has expanded until we have filled our biological niche. But there is a big difference between us and other forms of life. Because we use automobiles and many other kinds of machines, we are magnifying our environmental effects on Gaia exponentially. We are producing so much carbon dioxide that it's affecting the global climate. By now most everybody except a President and his extremist followers believe this to be true. But suppose Lovelock is right and Gaia is a self-regulating entity. Then we have just fooled with Gaia's thermostat. By continuing with business as usual we will be undermining Gaia's ability to repair herself and ultimately to support us. The consequences are likely to be very unpleasant and we have very little time to correct what we have done.

Scientists predict a rise in global mean temperature of as much as five degrees centigrade in this coming century. However, they may have underestimated the projected rise in temperature because many of the climate change models leave out positive feedback effects.

There are several positive feedback mechanisms that could come into play in a hotter world. One is the “albedo” or reflective capacity of the Earth's surface. Ice has a high albedo – it reflects the Sun's rays and helps keep the Earth cool. Open water has a low albedo – it absorbs heat from the Sun. As sea ice melts away and as the Earth's glaciers shrink in size, the Earth's albedo will decrease causing an acceleration of warming.

There is frozen methane at the bottom of the Arctic Ocean and locked away in the Arctic permafrost. If it were to melt, we would have significant increases in the amount of methane which is an even stronger greenhouse gas   causing more global warming.

There is the problem of forest fires. As temperatures increase more moisture evaporates from the soil leaving forests dryer and more prone to catch fire. As more forests burn more carbon dioxide is released into the air causing yet more global warming.

There is the ocean plankton. Plankton consists of microscopic algae and animal life that forms the basis of the oceans food chains. It gets its sunlight because it is always in the surface waters. It gets nutrients from the deep waters that form upwellings along the continental shelves. As the temperature of the surface waters increases, the top layer of warm water expands, thus growing lighter. This locks away the heavier colder nutrient-rich waters deep underneath, decreasing the upwelling and starving the plankton of nutrients. Result: less carbon dioxide will be absorbed and sea life in general will decline.

Finally there is the solubility of carbon dioxide in water. The warmer the water the less soluble is carbon dioxide. As the temperature of the oceans increases they will release carbon dioxide into the atmosphere increasing the amount of global warming. Note, that when the oceans are cooler they have the opposite effect, they act as a negative feedback on global warming by absorbing carbon dioxide.

About these positive feedbacks to global warming there is nothing we can do.... On the other hand, there is one way of reversing global warming that we do have control over. We can decrease our use of fossil fuels. By doing this we may be able to limit global warming before it becomes a runaway process.

The solutions are all around us – small-scale hydro, solar and wind power, tidal power, wave power, nuclear power, increasing household energy efficiency, local community supported agriculture, investing in mass transit, bicycles, recycling, walking.

Global warming is not just a problem for some people. It is a risk to the entire human race. It therefore has the potential to unify human society because no-one can escape it. Like the tsunami in Banda Aceh, when enough people realize that it threatens everyone we should unite in order to save our future.

One of our key problems is inertia. It is natural to overestimate the cost of change and underestimate the cost of doing nothing. It's not just Global Warming deniers who do this. We all do it. Think of the decision to get out of bed on a cold morning. The idea of throwing off the covers and braving the cold can seem daunting . Yet, when we finally do it it's no big deal. What paralyzes us is the perception of being cold, not the reality.

James Lovelock concludes his latest book, The Revenge of Gaia, by

saying,

.....Our task as individuals is to think of Gaia first. In no way does this make us inhuman or uncaring; our survival as a species is wholly dependent on Gaia and on our acceptance of her discipline.

The human race now faces the greatest challenge in history. We've already seen how denial and ignorance can bring out the worst. If people unite to face this challenge it can bring out the best in us. I want to conclude with the words of Al Gore from his book “An Inconvenient Truth”:

The climate crisis also offers us the chance to experience what very few generations in history have had the privilege of knowing – a generational mission; the exhilaration of compelling moral purpose; a shared and unifying cause. The thrill of being forced by circumstances to put aside the pettiness and conflict that so often stifle the restless human need for transcendence, the opportunity to rise...

It is about who we are as human beings. It is about our capacity to transcend our own limitations, to rise to the new occasion, to see with our hearts, as well as our heads, the response that is now called for. This is a moral, ethical, and spiritual challenge.We should fear this challenge. We should welcome it. We must not wait. In the words of Dr. King, “tomorrow is today.”

c. 2006 by Charles Justice

Books Quoted:

James Lovelock, Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth

Oxford University Press, 1979.

James Lovelock, The Ages of Gaia: A Biography of the Living Earth

WW Norton, New York, 1988.

James Lovelock, The Revenge of Gaia

Penguin Books, 2006.

Al Gore, An Inconvenient Truth

Rodale Press, 2006.