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FROM MY CORNER: Who to Be?

Howell Hurst Education, God, Humans, Nature, People

FROM MY CORNER: Who To Be?

Nice, France . . .

October 3, 2021

Continuing to read “Mythology,” the fascinating book by Edith Hamilton, I was struck by the  thought: “who would I have wanted to be, if not myself?” It instantly was as clear as a virgin creek of clear water.

Christopher Hitchens is my choice. He popped up, I believe, because he too so often quoted ancient Greek and Roman writers as they strove to understand life in our mysterious Universe and on this surprising planet.

If you’ve never heard of Christopher Hitchens, prepare yourself for a delightful awakening. If you will on the Internet enter in a search for “Christopher Hitchens Videos” you will receive a lifetime supply of intriguing views of and by Christopher and his assessment of the Universe and world we inhabit.

Hitchens possessed two amazing and rare human traits: He was massively intelligent and massively well educated. He had a brain that seemed able to capture and store incredible amounts of facts about human life.

It was a brain that also had the capacity to instantly call up from all these facts any relevant points he needed to support his arguments on any subject. I know that my brain does not have the capacity for any of Hitch’s ability. That’s why I would have loved being him.

Ah, well. I must make do with what I’ve got, apparently.

But – all of us can benefit from hearing and viewing and listening to and learning from this  unique man, who was taken from us far too early in his life at 62 by cancer. A warning, though: if you hold factually unsupportable beliefs, you will not care for his findings.

Hitch, as am I, was a believer in humankind as the best chance we people have of our race continuing for a few thousand more years. He was convinced that humankind’s uniquely powerful (though often faulty as a broken mouse trap) brains could accomplish almost anything if we would only put our minds to it.

He most commonly supported this belief with the conviction that Gods (which 85% of all people believe in) quite simply don’t exist. The Greeks agreed with Hitch. Their original conception of Gods came from their own minds. They created the idea. The first idea of Gods was clearly, the Greeks firmly asserted, the original idea of human beings themselves. Not the reverse.

History supports this. Some 10,000 years ago the first humans able to create fictional stories from their imaginations produced the first recorded concept of Gods. Our historical mythology documents this most forcefully.

The Greeks warned everyone at the time not to take the idea of Gods seriously. It was clearly entertainment. Fiction made up by us humans, not the product of some superior intelligence that theoretically created us from some hidden heaven somewhere out in space.

Space was dubbed Olympus or various other names, which has evolved into today’s “Heaven,” and whose boss was Zeus, or Jupiter in Roman terminology. Zeus was essentially considered in such terms to be what we today call the Universe.

It was only when political leaders ages ago saw how useful the concept of Gods would be, and invoked them as their inspiration to control their populations, that humans got the whole idea mixed up in their minds.

Instead of acknowledging the intelligence we humans actually have, we started belittling ourselves and passing on all we accomplished to some imagined super intelligence. We copped out on ourselves and attributed everything henceforth to gods, or God) instead of accepting our most unusual selves and our singular mental capacities.

So, as you age and hopefully grow wiser, if you would like a look at what one of humanity’s most favored minds was able to glean from the experience of living on the Earth in an immense Universe, do search out ‘Christopher Hitchens Videos’ on the Internet.

And learn. Learn how to free yourselves from any psychologically debilitating and inhibiting dogma all the allegedly learned religions have marketed (and financially profited from) throughout the centuries.

There may yet be hope for humanity. Christopher thought there was. I do too – if we will only wake up from our self-imposed ideological nightmares and engage with the real physical Universe and our tangible life on this planet.

Hal

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