The Human Race (Part 6)

When I consider your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars, which you have set in place, what is man that you are mindful of him, the son of man that you care for him? You made him a little lower than the heavenly beings and crowned him with glory and honor. You made him ruler over the works of your hands; you put everything under his feet: all flocks and herds, and the beasts of the field, the birds of the air, and the fish of the sea, all that swim the paths of the seas. Psalms 8: 3-8 NIV

What is man that God is mindful of him? The Holy Bible teaches us that man was created “a little lower than the angels”. 

However, this is the ancient Greek translation. . .

ηλαττωσας αυτον βραχυ τι παρ’ αγγελους δοξη και τιμη εστεφανωσας αυτον Psalms 8:5 Greek OT: Septuagint

But in the original Hebrew it translates:

For thou hast made him a little…

m`at  (meh-at’) Almost (some, very) few(-er, -est), lightly, little (while), (very) small (matter, thing), some, soon, very.

lower…

chacer  (khaw-sare’) to lack; by implication, to fail, want, lessen — be abated, bereave, decrease, (cause to) fail, (have) lack, make lower, want.

than the angels…

‘elohiym  (el-o-heem’)
angels, exceeding, God (gods)(-dess, -ly), (very) great, judges, mighty.

and hast crowned…

`atar  (aw-tar’)
to encircle (for attack or protection); especially to crown — compass, crown.

him with glory…

kabowd  (kaw-bode’)
weight, but only figuratively in a good sense, splendor or copiousness — glorious(-ly), glory, honour(-able).

and honour…

hadar  (haw-dawr’)
magnificence, i.e. ornament or splendor — beauty, comeliness, excellency, glorious, glory, goodly, honour, majesty.

If we take the liberty to extrapolate from the Hebrew translation it would read:

What is man that you are mindful of him, the son of man that you care for him? You made him a little lower than Yourself . . . Elohim (or God). . . and have encircled him with your divine protection, copious splendor, beauty, magnificence and glory. 

Thus, the truth about humanity is . . .

Temporally, we have been wonderfully crafted in God’s image.

Positionally, we are just a little lower than God Himself. 

Exponentially, we have been given stewardship over all creation.

So how have we wandered so far from our original design? With all the hundreds of religions in the world why is humanity still living so far beneath its privileges (or position)?

 

 

 

How does racism and prejudice penetrate a human heart which is`atar  (aw-tar’), encircled (for attack or protection) from evil? Is it like a cancerous cell already indigenous to the body but is sparked by a free radical cell revolt?

And why would human intelligence ever defer to evil? 

How could humanity enslave and kill and judge members of its own family? 

Why would humanity dishonor what God has hadar  (haw-dawr’) with magnificence, i.e. ornament or splendor — beauty?

 

 

 

Why is God so mindful of us?

Could it be because at our best we are ‘elohiym  (el-o-heem’) angels, exceeding, God (gods)(-dess, -ly), (very) great, judges, mighty?

(Part 6 of 6) 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

  

 

The Human Race (Part 5)

 

Race is the least important aspect in determining character, yet it is often the most significant factor in how we are perceived.

Biologically, we are brothers and sisters. Genetically, we share a common mother and father. Ancestrally, we are one family. Spiritually, we are all children of God. Our variation in skin color is merely adaptation. Our variation in genetics is hereditary. Our variation in culture is learned behavior. Our variation in intelligence is environmental as well as individual. Our variation in perception is experiential. Our variation in our capacity to love is metaphysical.

We are not born hating. We are not born racist. We are not born conservative or liberal. We are not born democrat or republican. We are not born Christian or Muslim. We are born human.

So what does it mean to be human . . .

What does science say? 

We are blessed with the ability to know our mother. We are conscious of more than our selves. And just as a child sees a mother, the species’ vision clears and sees mother universe. We are getting glimmers of how we are related to space and time. We can ask, what am I? What is this place? And how am I related to it? Physicist Jim Gates

The critical unique factor is language. Creativity. The religious and scientific impulse. And our social organization, which has developed to a prodigious degree. We have a record of history, moral behavior, economics, political and social institutions. We’re probably unique in our ability to investigate the future, imagine outcomes, and display images in our minds. I like to think of a generator of diversity in the frontal lobe
– and those initials are G-O-D.  Neuroscientist Antonia Damasio

What does religion say?

Humans are the creatures towards whom God turns special attention. Humans have the capacity to control and dominate other creatures; The question of human identity is connected somehow with our unique relationship with God. Reverend Dr. Llewellyn Smith

Though we are made of dust we are nonetheless made for God. The Veritas forum – University of Virginia

What does politics say?

The capacity of rules to make people safe has diminishing returns. In the end, each additional rule adds very little and may take away more than it adds. But the developing and deepening of human potential, through education, habituation and the experience of freedom, is limitless. It is what human beings are designed to do. Humanpolitics.org

What does the global human consciousness movement say?

There is, of course, no end to the magnificence and horror in the human drama. Across the continents, humanity rises to every challenge, sinks to any depth. We cherish each heartbeat and murder at will. We bless nature’s miracles, yet trash the hood.

We accept this polarity as human nature and we move on in our ‘glassy essence’. All the while our righteousness lords over other life; yet we beseech gods for mercy. Our angers flare to violence and we demand justice. We covet ceaselessly, give generously. Our wallowing is legion, yet we take art and science to Olympian heights. Tony Balis 9/11/2001

So what is the Truth?

(Part 5 of 6)

 

 

The Human Race (Part 4)

 

“People of the world don’t look at themselves, and so they blame one another.” Rumi

We are all Africans. We originated in Africa. That is proved by the continent’s rich genetic inheritance. Africans are more diverse than the rest of humanity put together, because they are drawn from the pool of humans who did not leave. As many anthropologists point out, two Africans from the same village could be more divergent from each other than either is from a non-African. The question is whether this new scientific reality and understanding of human genetics will reinforce prejudices or help end them.

What would it mean to the religious communities throughout the world for science to proclaim that we are only a couple of thousand generations removed from Adam? What if scientists could correctly illustrate in genetic detail the physical appearance of Adam? Would it matter to your belief in God if Adam were a black African man?

Photo of a San Bushman

There is agreement that Y-chromosome Adam would have looked much like a San Bushman of the Kalahari, with an epicanthic fold over the eyes, a hairless cocoa body, and a loose graceful gait. The descendants of Adam would have eventually migrated to East and southern Africa and would have been scattered with hunter-gatherer groups. They probably would have spoken click languages similar to the San.

Imagine this…

Some 99% of the human genome is shuffled from one birth to the next. The Genographic Project traces the 1% of the genome which is not shuffled—mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) through the maternal line and the Y-chromosome through the paternal. These allow geneticists to work back to our common ancestors. Our mtDNA appears to coalesce in a single woman, who lived on the African savannah 150,000 years ago. Our Y-chromosome survives from a single man, who lived in the Rift Valley of Kenya or Tanzania 59,000 years ago. So Adam and Eve did exist—90,000 years apart. The discrepancy is because, unlike the biblical Adam and Eve, this couple only represent the last common Ancestors we can trace genetically.

If you can suspend religious reflex for just a moment and indulge me you too can bear witness to something very beautiful . . . The thought that we all share a common mother and father. The thought that we are all one family. The fact that we are brothers and sisters. Not just spiritually, but biologically.

How do you truly feel about this? Be honest with yourself because we have to get past this stick point in our evolution as human beings. For God’s sake and our own, we have to look at ourselves so we don’t blame others for the ugly things that still reside within us. Like racial prejudice. Like racial hatred. Like racial stereotyping. Like historical memories and images of racism that still burn like effigies within our minds and hearts. No matter how deep we have buried them they are still there. We cannot pretend that Jim Crow laws and racial segregation, which daily strangled our parents like some prescribed angel of death, somehow passed over our households as a harmless mist. We are not intellectually immune to our memories. And this is why we have become static water. This is why we must empty ourselves into the flowing rivers of life. For this concept of race is killing our humanity. It has proved to be a very serious cancer of the soul.

(Part 4 of 6)   

 

The Human Race (Part 3)

“I know of no great men except those who have rendered great service to the human race.” Voltaire

The essentialist concept defined race as a division of the human species based on differences in physical features that are determined by heredity. Thus, traditional race concepts gave an inaccurate picture of human variation. The picture is inaccurate because these concepts suggest that each ethnic group has a significant level of uniqueness. However, the genetic variation in populations such as Europeans and Asians are actually subsets of the variation in the African population.

Humanity has lived in Africa far longer than anywhere else, which has allowed the population in Africa to accumulate more of the small mutations that make up human genetic variation. Because only part of the African population migrated out of Africa, only part of Africa’s genetic variation moved with them. For this reason, most genetic variation found in people living outside Africa is a subset of that found among Africans. For instance, Asians and Europeans possess almost the same set of variations. Most variations found in Asians and Europeans are also found in Africans. However, Africans also possess many variations that are not found outside of Africa. 

This is contrary to traditional thinking. The purpose of not teaching these truths as primary education is obvious. There is too much historically invested in keeping humanity divided. Many would rather believe in the concept of race and any perceived differences between groups because they can continue their fallacious argument that some people are genetically superior to others.

You can see the contending forces of good and evil, love and hatred throughout the world. Many would like to cling to the belief that our differences are oppossing forces in the world which affirm God’s desire to separate humanity into races, but this too is a lie. How is it both possible for God to create mankind in his own image and there not be unity in man? All hatred, violence, ugliness, disease, prejudice, poverty, and chaos are manifestations of humanity being a divided house. For hatred and division is love energy moving in the opposite direction.

(Part 3 of 6)

The Human Race (Part 2)

 

We have a stake in one another … what binds us together is greater than what drives us apart, and … if enough people believe in the truth of that proposition and act on it, then we might not solve every problem, but we can get something meaningful done for the people with whom we share this Earth. BARACK OBAMA, speech, Dec. 1, 2006.

Every river is constantly emptying itself into the ocean. The problem is only with those who have become ponds, closed, not open to flow, having forgotten that contributing to the ocean is their destiny. For to be a pond is to commit suicide, because there is no growth anymore, no new spaces, no new experiences, no new skies.

To be human means we are all stakeholders in this earth project. To be human means you must drop the static state and become a changing, moving, flowing river. It does not matter when you reach the ocean. What matters is that you continue to the ocean. And this universal truth has been forgotten. It has been forgotten because mankind has been conquered and is now a divided house. And the greatest division is still based on the color of ones skin. The greatest division is still based on ones so-called race.

Skin color is a pond. Race is a pond. And humanity is the flowing river emptying itself into the universal ocean which is God. But this is why human progress has stagnated. This is why there is still so much division and strife. This is contrary to what God dreamed for mankind. Falling into the ocean was already predetermined, it was so from the beginning. The whole beauty of being human is predicated on this beauty, this freedom.  

The color of ones skin was also predetermined. The whole beauty of human variation was determined from the beginning. All skin color whether light or dark are simply adaptations to the sun. Skin color is merely small water droplets which contribute to the sustainability of the river.

Skin color, one of our most visible physical features, has long been used to divide people into racial categories. Anthropologist Nina Jablonski, Ph.D. theorizes that variations in human skin are adaptive traits that correlate closely to geography and the sun’s ultraviolet radiation, not race.

The Human Genome project opened many doors and helped modern science  understand many of the mysteries and fallacies surrounding human genetics and variation. What Scientists now know is that a certain amount of ultraviolet radiation (UVR) from the sun helps the human body use vitamin D to absorb the calcium necessary for strong bones. However, too much UVR can strip away folate (folic acid), an essential nutrient to the development of healthy fetuses. Skin pigmentation developed as the body’s way of balancing its need for vitamin D and folate. Those closer to the equator had darker skin to prevent folate deficiency. They measured skin reflectance (a way to quantify skin color by measuring the amount of light it reflects) in people around the world. Their actual observations of skin reflectance closely parallel their predictions.

Skin color is simply the realization that the human race is more like the river, whether in a dewdrop or in the ocean itself, skin color and variation is all from the same source. For every dewdrop contains a piece of the ocean in it, and the ocean itself is made up of dewdrops.

(Part 2 of 6) 

 

 

 

The Human Race- Human Variation

 

“Our greatest strength as a human race is our ability to acknowledge our differences, our greatest weakness is our failure to embrace them.” Judith Henderson

Humanity is a divided house. It is separate. It is not equal. And nearly every room is full of darkness. Some family members live upstairs in Master bedrooms while other family members sleep outside underneath park benches. Some family members drive several cars while other family members walk barefooted. Some family members pray in a church or temple while other family members pray for clean water and food.

Humanity has been successfully divided and conquered. We still rape and murder and hate and steal and enslave and prostitute and covet and make war with our neighbor. We still close our eyes to human suffering and pain. We still cross the street, or worse, move to another side of town so we don’t have to be accountable to the crying voices or drug addicts or little babies with bloated stomachs (the ones with disease carrying flies and neglect covering their little faces) or suicidal children in our classrooms or hope dying on our city streets from gang violence. Even after Socrates, Mother Teresa, Rabbi Yitzchak Kaduri, Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Siddhartha Gautama (Buddha), Zarathustra, Mohammad, and Jesus Christ, humanity is still separate. Why? Why does the spirit of division and hatred continue to dominate the hearts of men? Why is racism (as if it were some deeply rooted philosophy) still an obstruction to human progress? Why do we still put profit over people? Why does slavery still exist throughout the world? Why after electing the first African American President in its history are Americans still so divided over race and ethnicity? Why hasn’t the collective consciousness of humanity evolved into love and peace? Why do the sins of the fathers continue to be visited upon their sons and daughters?

Current science tells us we share a common ancestry and the differences among people are not as great as they seem. While the Holy Bible teaches us that all human life originated from a single source. But if this is true then why are we still so divided? Why is this phenomenon of “race” in the 21st century still such a mystery?  

It is because Humanity is a divided house, and nearly every room is full of darkness.  

(Part 1 of 6)