Sparks of Divinity in the Heavens

When I sit by my campfire and watch the sparks rise, each time the logs settle into place, I can't help but look up and wonder. If the stars above us are showing us places where God has created worlds, and today science is discovering that most stars have planets, then does it seem right that these should be barren?

God tells us that He created the Heavens and the Earth, and on the Earth He created life and placed Humanity to watch over it as stewards. But if we dig just a tiny bit deeper, we hear that the whole point of creating the Cosmos was to achieve the creation of Adam and Eve. He created them in the image and likeness of his own Divinity. And once He had done that, then on the seventh day He rested.

Right. Now someone is objecting that I have presumed to set up the Greater Anthropic Principle. You are correct. I am stating it plainly, as a matter of faith. God designed the Cosmos to facilitate the emergence of life and intelligence. Why? The Bible doesn't answer that specifically, humbly admitting that we cannot delve into God's motives. But we can look at His subsequent behavior. What happens next? He walks around in the Garden of Eden, and talks to us! Apparently, there isn't much better that God wants to do than to spend time in conversation with people!

Whoa!! Hold up, right there! I'm not saying that we are the only, or by any measure the best, people in the Cosmos. The universe is far too unimaginably vast for it to be empty. And Humanity clearly started out on the wrong foot on its journey to civilization. But God isn't limited like we are. He can spend time talking to lots of people, without short-shrifting anyone on personal attention or one-on-one time.

Maybe He likes us best because we are so difficult. We are slow learners, after all, always doing what we know that we shouldn't. We continually get ourselves into trouble, and somehow get Him involved in it along with us. Of course, He would prefer it if we could just get it right, for a change. Our stupidity and lack of faith costs Him a lot ... more than most of us would be willing to pay, for someone else's problems. But yeah, He gave his only Son to shock us out of our sinful attitudes, and to tell us that we can have all of the help we need to change our lives. (This is not theology. I'm speaking in broader terms.)

God is trying to put the essential laws of morality into our hearts. But from the beginning, we have been a bunch of deviants, refusing to listen and obey. We can't observe even the simplest rules without looking for an edge, a way to promote our own personal interests, even when we know it will cost someone else. But He has made it plain enough already. He makes the rules for our benefit. It is only by living together in harmony that we can ever get to where we are meant to go. He has planned out a magnificent destiny for us, if we are willing to trust Him and cooperate.

Even better than a city on a hill, a beacon of hope for the downtrodden and the despairing souls, crying for someone, anyone to care about them ... which is what we should be doing now. That is what God has asked of us, for the past 2,000 years. Show everyone how we are supposed to be living when we have faith, and choose to obey Him. But the time for learning how to do that is getting shorter. It's time to look up, not to the mountains from where our hope has so often come, but to the stars. We are close to being ready for Heaven.

We have been building and improving our technology for the last 6,000 years or so. We began with learning how to plant crops and build cities. And for all that time, we have been struggling to learn how to live together harmoniously in close quarters. But over and over, we keep getting hung up on our fear and distrust of strangers. Of course it's often justified, but just as often it's merely paranoia.

Only recently have we arrived at the concept of "trust, but verify," so that we can get past the self-interested inclination to cheat whenever we can. Good diplomats have always had spies, and they also had the discipline to refuse to steal secrets. Their spies watch to see if anyone else is cheating. The game of competition and one-upmanship has always led eventually to conflict, but playing fair leads to lasting friendship.

The world seems so much smaller in our times, because of electronic devices for communication and satellites observing the whole globe every 90 minutes. So we know each other better than we have ever been able to before. We can see who wants to compete, and who is willing to cheat, and we know who our friends are.

And we also know how absolutely devastating an all-out war would be, and want to avoid it. The fools who would precipitate a nuclear war would set us all back by centuries, to the point of having to piece ourselves together from scraps and fading knowledge. And the survivors would have a decade of frozen famine, when the dust clouds block out the sun so that crops won't grow. It wouldn't be the best of us who make it out of that alive, but only the most fierce and the lucky. That world would be Hell, and deservedly so.

So we have a choice. We can decide that we should change the rules of the game, and agree that people have the right to choose what kind of government they want. No one should have any ideology imposed on them without consent. We know what our ideals are: Truth, Freedom, Love and Wisdom. And we know that religion should be about helping people to become the best that they can be. No form of conquest is ever acceptable. And no form of deception is ever acceptable either. As for economics, why should we let greed run our systems? We are close, technologically, to being able to build the kind of abundance that can support everyone with enough of what we need. But we need to regulate  the markets to facilitate more equality between citizens, and we have to choose to invest in the machines and robotic tools to do it.

So those are the sources of conflict we can avoid. We can choose to create a better world for everyone, if we agree on these instead:
1. government by consent
     - political tolerance, caring for people
2. choice of religious beliefs
     - free choice, better morals, high ideals
3. economics of abundance
     - more equality & robotic technology
4. fair use of resources
     - renewables, recycling, treaties & space
5. limits on pollution
     - reclamation, restoration & regulation
6. justice without violence
     - universal human rights, fight corruption

"Yeah, right," I can hear the sarcastic remarks. "Dream on," they say. But then the whole concept of Heaven is a dream. Just like the open frontier that led Americans to the idea of "manifest destiny," it doesn't have  to always work out exactly as we have seen it in our dreams. But if we work at it honestly, with our ideals in mind and the best of intentions, the world gets better for our having tried. Nor do we have to have a plan for how it should be done. Let the diplomats and negotiators do their jobs. Just give them the mandate for what needs to be done, and the flexibility to let each party do it their own way. Then trust, but verify.

And then what? What come after we establish the "Pax Tolerans"? The answer is, quite simply, the Heavens are full of unlimited opportunities. Which is not to say that we have to wait until we solve our problems, before we can reach out for the next steps. Space is a part of the solution. But once we learn how to live there and use the resources at hand ...

We can go out into the rest of the solar system, and develop our capabilities for really living in Heaven. When we can look up at the Moon, and see city lights on the dark side, we will know that our chances of achieving Heaven are improving by leaps and bounds. The freedom to innovate and build unique societies in space will be a dream come true, and the more we learn, the closer we will get to success.

So, let's go back to the original vision of sparks in the night sky. Yes, humanity is about as crooked as the branches we toss on a campfire, and the majority of us are consumed with our private concerns here on Earth, but the  best wood gets chosen for building and we can be shaped and trimmed of our irregularities. But just watch the sparks rise into the darkness, floating away in search of a spot to rest and start a new fire. If we can learn to work together, and build new habitats in space, and equip them with whatever propulsion may get them to the stars, we too can go out in search of a place to rest, and start a new branch of civilization, aflame with the zeal and enthusiasm of the knowledge that we will have at last arrived in the Heavens. And maybe we will find the other angels, whom we expect to meet in Heaven. Then we will be doing our part to make sure that all those stars, with all those worlds, don't remain barren.

A magnificent destiny, indeed.