Stuff in the Backyard

We're proud of our gators in Florida and protect them if we can. This week they ate a woman, a German Shepard and took a big chunk out of a horse's flank. I guess it's the mating season and they get more aggressive this time of year. The twelve-footer below swims by most days. The gardeners feed him parts of their lunch....yesterday he leaped out of the water and came down on a hapless fish like a fox on a mouse burrow.

Theists are humans who believe in a God or gods. Spiritualism is the state of being concerned with the human spirit. A Venn diagram of all humans might show two overlapping circles. Some humans would be in both circles, some in one or the other and still others fall outside both circles The Universe appears to us to be a strange, complex, wondrous and ultimately incomprehensible place. How did it get here? How big is it? How many stars are there? Why do I exist? These are human questions. Our answers have increased greatly in complexity over the centuries..

Perhaps our brains lack the necessary processing power for science to provide any ultimate answers. We have only slightly evolved cognitive abilities compared with other animals on this thing we call a planet. Our brains are very tiny meat computers. We may not have the necessary intelligence to even ask the right questions, let alone understand the answers. Our DNA is only one percent different than that of chimpanzees. A chimpanzee can use boxes and sticks to reach high bananas. A chimp would be stumped at the problem of ordering delivery of bananas from Whole Foods over the Internet. Understanding own existence is probably further from our own limited abilities than we are from the talents of the smartest chimps.

Our very existence seems incredibly improbable. We are each the product of one sperm and one egg out of billions of sperm produced by a father and tens of thousands of eggs from our mother.. That run of astounding luck goes back in an unbroken chain perhaps 4 billion years. Luck seems to define life. What are the odds of a habitable environment on a rock just the right distance from the right type of star? Many humans find comforting answers to their questions about existence in theism. That is understandable and deserves our respect in all its many forms. Buddha the Great Spirit? Plausible.

A sergeant asked me for my religious preference 55 years ago so that he could make my first set of dog-tags. I told him I was an Existentialist. He asked me to spell it. Existentialists believe that the nature of man is essentially plastic, and that humans are capable of fantastic extremes of good and evil. A human can choose to be a Doctor Mengele in a concentration camp, a Mother Teresa in a hospital in Africa or a volunteer in an Ebola ward. Existentialists believe that human have the freedom to make choices about their behaviour. They believe that honesty and authenticity are of paramount importance and that each human should strive to live a life that reflects credit on human existence.

Precepts of good and evil come from the Judeo-Christian tradition for many Existentialists. Some Existentialists are theists and some are not. There are good and bad, practicing and non-practicing Existentialists. Martin Heidegger was a leading Existential German philosopher who later became a Nazi. So it goes.