20 December 2006

Regarding Them Commentary: What About Morality?

Inference #2 fromRegarding Them Commentary: What About Objective Reality?: Given that cognitive scientists have found that actual moral concepts are not structured as rules with specific propositional structures (as in the ten commandments or an algorithm for solving all moral problems), but rather moral concepts are based on diverse literal body-based experiential conceptions; and given that morality is fundamentally about well-being at every level of human experience; then virtues, as the most common method of conceptualizing behaviors that lead to well-being, are a universal tool for conveying morality. (references: Moral Imagination by Mark Johnson, Varieties of Moral Personality by Owen Flangan and Philosophy in the Flesh by George Lakoff & Mark Johnson)

The universality of virtues is a scientifically testable assertion that is based on the reported experiences of the authors of The Family Virtues Guide, Linda Kavelin-Popov and Dan Popov, in the course of having traveled the world teaching about the virtues. Dan Popov is a scholar of world religions and in the course of his studies of seven of the world’s most popular religions he identified several hundred that are taught in all seven, and after co-authoring The Family Virtues Guide and traveling around the world, he has not found any religious traditions that do not teach most of the same virtues. Thus virtues may provide us with a set of tools for the development of universal human values that transcend all barriers to harmony and unity, like the diversity of rules for being religious.

The new three R’s, virtues for a Common Society: Respect is the combination of “re” the prefix for again, and the root “spect” which refers to seeing. Thus, I take the literal core of respect to be about taking another look at a person or situation. In the sense of a virtuous way of being respectfulness is the habit of taking second looks before you make judgments and interpretations about a person or a situation. Specifically, I am suggesting that the second look move us away from our propensity for defensive enemy thinking and intentionally guide towards reinforcing our concepts and habits that assume human unity through the language of virtues.

Responsibility is the combination of “response” and “ability.” Thus I take the literal core of its meaning to be about having the ability to respond. This is in distinction from the habit of reacting, which is what we all do when we are too harried to marshal all of our skillfulness in formulating an appropriate way of taking the most graceful or most respectful actions within our lives.

There were a number of interesting studies done on altruism that showed that even when people are holding in mind morality tales like the Good Samaritan they are not generally guided by the moral content of the story, but rather by what they perceive to be the constraints of their situation. If the subjects of the study felt pressed for time they were less likely to help. Although even some of those who were in the situation of having an abundance of time chose not to help, my guess is that they did so for reasons that would probably indicate they saw some other kind of limitation on their ability to affect the outcome of the other persons situation. I’m saying that when people are passing by someone in need, then it is their sense that they have the time, knowledge and others resources to help that empowers them to offer assistance, not just the emotional experience of compassion and, perhaps, empathy for the person. The compassion and empathy are prerequisite but not adequate to inspire helping behavior.

In order to shape our lives by the virtue of responsibility we have to ensure that we put ourselves into situations and groups that call us to be skillful and the best we can be. In this understanding of responsibility it is not simply a result of willful self-control, but also a product of the community context within which you are embedded.

Resourcefulness is the combination of “re” that prefix for again, again, the word ‘source’, and the word ‘fullness.’ Thus I take the literal core of its meaning to be the experience of being full of your source again. The source of your being, in every religious tradition that I am aware of, would be God, so the idea is to be full of God again, just like you were at some point before. This would be the moments in your life when you experienced grace or joy or bliss. Depending on the tradition, they describe the experience of being full of your source in different ways. In recent research in psychology they have come to refer to these kinds of experiences as optimal experiences or as their subjects, across many cultures and referring to a great variety of activities, have said, “being in the flow” or “fully in the moment.” Thus, even the humanists are referring to the same thing as the other more traditional religions.

Thus, we can all get down to some level of agreement on many, if not most, of the core concepts of what gives us well-being. Things like respect, responsibility, resourcefulness, freedom (lack of physical impediments to movement) or love (a nurturing warmth emanating from a being pretty much like me, only bigger.) My call to unity at the end of Regarding Them is based on the possibility that we can probably find at least a few core values that all people can agree on.



Regarding Them Commentaries:

Regarding Them Commentary: What About Objective Reality?

Regarding Them Commentary: What About God?

Regarding Them Commentary: What About Morality?

Regarding Them Commentary: What About God?

Inference from Limitations on Truth from Regarding Them Commentary: What About Objective Reality?: Because of the universal religious claim that God is inherently beyond human conception, conceptions of God are neither right nor wrong, only different. And those conceptions are entirely exhausted by the four possibilities created by the fact that God has to be conceived of as either personal (having qualities that embodied humans also have) or impersonal (not having human qualities) and either immanent (within the universe) or transcendent (outside of the universe). (In reference to the work of Rev. Fred Campbell.) Thus there are only four possible ways to conceive of god:

1. A personal/ immanent God, (Deism, human qualities within the universe)

2. A personal/ transcendent God, (Mysticism, human qualities outside the universe)

3. An impersonal/ immanent God, (Naturalism, non-human qualities inside the universe) or

4. An impersonal/ transcendent God, (Humanism, non-human qualities outside the universe)

Therefore all conceptions of God are all correct and incorrect exactly to the degree that they constrain God within human body-based conceptions, which are the only kinds of conceptions that we have available. And they are not incompatible with each other, just different ways of getting at different aspects of what God must be since we have consistently postulated that God is beyond human comprehension. Any one person can use any or all of them at their discretion in any combination. Another option is simply not to consider God at all, there is no requirement that one must attempt to conceive of that which is beyond them.

Asserting the completeness of these four options of God concepts is an assertion that is empirically testable, thus it is a question that science can verify or perhaps falsify. Specifically, cognitive linguists can collect data on conceptions of God and figure out if there are any other actual conceptual structures that occur.

Corollary to Inference #1: Conceptions of “objective” reality are constrained by exactly the same limitations as those of our conceptions of God, but are not contained by an equally simple conceptual structure. Every conception that can be generated by science occurs within a cultural and historical context that strongly influences its content. Thus science as a process of on-going conceptual development has far a greater potential capability to thoroughly explain complex phenomena. (reference: The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas Kuhn)



Regarding Them Commentaries:

Regarding Them Commentary: What About Objective Reality?

Regarding Them Commentary: What About God?

Regarding Them Commentary: What About Morality?

Regarding Them Commentary: What About Objective Reality?

In my story Regarding Them the refrain, “and if everyone agrees, then it must be true” is repeated many times. Of course, you’re thinking “Just because everyone agrees doesn’t make it true. What about objective reality?” That refrain is not, as this response suggests, a negation of the possibility of an objective reality, but it is an assertion that we human beings are limited in our ability to verify the existence and actual nature of what we refer to as an “objective” reality.

We derive all our possible concepts from literal bodily experiences and a set of culturally determined linguistic formalities to connect them. We imaginatively use the logical structure of our literal experiences, with only the very minimum of reference to the original literal content, to understand other kinds experiences, i.e., How can a man be out of his mind? (reference: Philosophy in the Flesh by George Lakoff & Mark Johnson)

What separates us from our primate cousins who have successfully learned to communicate via sign language is that fact that we can talk about minds and how to be out of them, whereas Koko the gorilla and other signing apes cannot get beyond the correspondence of symbols with literal experiences. The signing primates demonstrate the communicative abilities of about four year old humans and make no further progress because they cannot maintain the logical structure of a symbol independent of the content of the experiences that the symbol indicates.

When researchers teach apes to sign they do it in mostly the same way we teach children, through an immersion in an environment where language is a very useful and frequently used tool to achieve individual and social purposes. When we want to communicate with small children we are most successful when we are able to use concrete and literal language. A cup is a concrete object and the concept of a cup is understandable to both four year olds and signing primates. Another example of a concrete idea is a room. What cups and rooms have in common is that they share in the logical structure of bounded regions in space.

When we say that a man is “out of his mind” we have utilized several methods of abstraction. First, the abstract concept referred to by the word ‘mind.’ A mind is a cause of behavior. When you are in your right mind, you cause your behavior and are responsible for what results from those behaviors. When you are out of your mind then the behaviors that occur were not really caused by what we consider to be the real you, therefore you are not held fully responsible for the results of those behaviors. Thus, ‘mind’ consists of causal interpretations of different sets of behavioral patterns with normative implications.

Koko and a four year old can both understand that someone can be crazy. It means they are behaving abnormally. But they will fail to understand the phrase “out of his mind” unless it is explained to be the same as being crazy, or in the case of the four year old you can wait a year or two and it will make complete sense. The difference is in how the phrase refers to the logical structure of bounded regions in space to the abstract idea of mind as a bounded category of behaviors within which is normal behaviors and outside of which are abnormal behaviors. Thus the logical structure of bounded regions in space, such as rooms and cups, are applied to the categorization of behaviors into normal and abnormal with implications for the proper assignment of personal responsibility for the results. The apes do not appear to be capable of preserving the idea of bounded regions in space independent of the concrete experiences of cups and rooms, nor to be able to conceive of causal interpretations of different sets of behavioral patterns with normative implications. In other words, they will not understand the word ‘mind’ as a reference to anything real nor how a person can be inside or outside of one. (reference: The Symbolic Species by Terrence Deacon)

Because the only conceptions we can ever have about Truth are based on experiences of having the kinds of bodies we have, then the only truth that we can ever validate through shared experiences are, based on this fact, those that can be conveyed to others with similar bodily experiences. This does not negate the possibility of experiences that are ineffable, that is unique to an individual and incapable of being conceived of and/or expressed within language. However, if any aspect of “objective” reality occurs in a way that is beyond the scope of body-based conceptions, then we are incapable of sharing them with anyone else and therefore they cannot in any meaningful way be validated. The only kinds of experience that can ever possibly be validated by anyone else would have to be expressed through body-based concepts. Thus I feel obligated to qualify the very term ‘objective’ with quotation marks because it’s normal usage as a form of reality that is collectively validated is in important ways self-contradictory based on this understanding of our existence.

We are, therefore, equally limited in our ability to verify the existence and nature of anything that could qualify as a “spiritual” reality, as well. Thus science and religion are on equally shaky ground with regards to capital ‘T’ Truth. Thus I have drawn the conclusion that universal human agreement is the highest Truth we can ever hope to obtain, and it can, exclusively within the constraints of the logic and extent of bodily concepts, change.



Regarding Them Commentaries:

Regarding Them Commentary: What About Objective Reality?

Regarding Them Commentary: What About God?

Regarding Them Commentary: What About Morality?

How can a man be out of his mind?

Our ability to understand this concept is based on our sharing a number of key aspects of the phrase that are normally only implicit and unconsciously evoked. Consider the parallel construction, “a cup can be out of its cupboard.” This is a literal concrete case that illustrates the logical relationships involved in both concepts.

We know, by the use of ‘its’, that cups belong in cupboards, which are bounded regions in space.

We implicitly know that cupboards are a feature of rooms, which are also bounded regions in space, therefore we know by logical inference that cups belong in rooms.

We know that in this instance we are considering the cup as a location even though it, too, is a bounded region in space.

We know that the cup-as-location has the possibility of being in specified relations to (out and, by logical inference, in) the cupboard though in only partially specified relations to the room (we do not know from this phrase if the cup can be out of the room though experientially we know it can.)

Returning to what we know about “a man can be out of his mind”-

Minds are what cause the behavior of creatures.

A man is the kind of creature that has a mind which is an important aspect of his whole self.

A mind can be understood as a bounded region in space, presumably within the space that constitutes a whole self. Thus, a mind is logically equivalent to the cupboard and a whole self is logically equivalent to the room in which the cupboard is located.

A man’s true self is another distinct part of the whole self and the true self can be understood as a location that has some relationship to the bounded region of mind. Thus, the true self is logically equivalent to the cup that is supposed to be in the mind which is located within the whole self.

While a mind is only one aspect of self, it is distinct from a true self which is the locus of will and a person’s will must be present as one behaves to be held responsible for the consequences of those actions. We make exceptions to important rules for social behavior based on this normative conception of what it takes to be held responsible for our actions.

Under some circumstances the true self is not the cause of a man’s behavior.

When the true self is located outside of the bounded region that causes his behavior then we can say, ”he is out of his mind” which implies that he is not behaving normally and is not strictly responsible for what occurs as a result of those particular behaviors.

Note that a mind does not literally occupy space. We cannot literally perceive minds in any concrete way. Minds are a concept we use to think about the causes of people’s behaviors, this is the literal core meaning of the concept of a 'mind.' Since we also conceive of a person's behavior as classified into separate groups, normal behaviors and abnormal behaviors, then we use the metaphor of boundaries within the space of mind to understand different type of behavior. There is a literal core, but the ways we think and reason about minds are mostly metaphorical. A man can be out of his mind because of the ways we understand the logic of literal spatial relations as applied to the idea that a mind is the cause of behaviors.

On Education and the Embodied Mind

As I see it there are four major schools of mainstream educational theory and they think of themselves as being at odds with each other. I do not think they are strictly at odds with each other but are at odds with the findings of cognitive science to the degree they mistake their metaphorical conceptual tools for understanding education to be literally true. The central guiding metaphor in mainstream educational theory (of which all four schools are variations) is that units of knowledge, skill and information can be transferred into a student’s mind. Each of the four schools are distinguished from each other by where they locate the source of the units that students receive. The primary sources are identified as the teacher, the student, the relationship between the teacher and the student, or the larger social context in which the student is embedded. Below is a diagram that illustrates how they fit together.

The first major school of educational theory was the behaviorists or external constructivists. The dominant industrial system of schooling was designed with the idea that the teacher is the proper source of the units of content in a student’s mind. A teacher standing in front of a roomful of students delivering a lecture is a classic image that depicts the most well-known method of this theory of education.

Criticism of the industrial teacher-centered theory was given it’s most solid grounding through the work of John Dewey starting in 1914 with the publication of his classic Democracy and Education. Dewey was the initiating spark and torch bearer of the Progressive School Movement, and the school of educational theory that resulted was based on the idea that the student does not simply receive knowledge, skills, and information, but actively constructs it based on the kinds of experiences that occur in the school setting. In a student-centered school the emphasis is on providing a set of experiences that are designed to assist the student with their process of constructing a world view. Waldorf and Montessori schools are early classic examples of student centered education. Both had very strong ideas about what kind of world view should be constructed by their students and their systems of schooling are largely defined to enable the construction of those world views.

Relationship centered schools are a synthesis of the teacher- and student-centered schools where the emphasis is on supporting the development of the teacher-student relationship as the true source of educational content. I suspect that most classroom teachers today would probably be described as blended constructivists who are unconvinced by either of the extremes of student- or teacher-centered classrooms but would like to be able to operate their classrooms in a manner that allows them the maximum freedom to focus on their relationship with their students.

The final theoretical school is based on the ideas of situated cognition and communities of practice, which are instrumental in the movement known as contextual education. This type of schooling is organized primarily around providing authenticity. Meaning that if a student wants to learn about a subject then the best way to accomplish that is to immerse them in authentic situations in which that subject is actually utilized in the solving of real problems. The idea is that we are socially constructed and therefore the totality of the environment in which we have experiences is the major source of what we really learn. This view is critical of classrooms as fundamentally inauthentic as social learning situations compared to the reality of the situations they supposed to prepare students to cope with. Until the students are immersed in authentic situations they are not going to be capable of properly understanding the relationships between the abstract units that are presented within a classroom environment. In this view classrooms are still useful, but only after the students have concrete experiences that relate closely to the abstract problems presented within a classroom context. Before the students have the background in concrete experience of the subject, the classroom is primarily going to teach how to behave in a classroom, not in an authentic, real-life situation involving problems that are experienced in ways that cannot be reproduced in the classroom.

The problem is that these different theoretical schools assume that their conception of the educated mind is literal. Taking each conception as literal means that their ways of understanding the mind and how it becomes educated appear mutually exclusive of each other. In order for the underlying metaphor to be taken literally then there would necessarily be evidence that the mind is composed of particular units of knowledge, skill and information and that those units had a source outside of the individual whose mind is composed by them. But that is not the case. Cognitive science, the field that deals with our concepts of the world, has found that we have only a very sparse literal core of understanding about minds, and everything beyond that is metaphorical.

The fact is that all four theoretical schools are at least partly right, but only to the degree that their guiding metaphor, that units can be delivered into the minds of students, is a satisfactory way of describing the reality that they claim to be describing. Since their conceptions of mind are, in fact, metaphors for getting at a complex, non-literal, non-concrete phenomena, then they are not mutually exclusive.

I have taken as my starting point for constructing a new and better educational theory the idea of the embodied mind by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson in their book Philosophy in the Flesh:

”The mind is what thinks, perceives, believes, reasons, imagines, and wills. But as soon as we try to go beyond this [literal,] skeletal understanding of mind, as soon as we try to spell out what constitutes thinking, perceiving, and so on, metaphor enters. …[M]etaphors are necessary for any detailed reasoning about mental acts.”

“Our understanding of what mental acts are is fashioned metaphorically in terms of physical acts like moving, seeing, manipulating objects, and eating, as well as other kinds of activities like adding, speaking or writing, and making objects. We cannot comprehend or reason about the mind without such metaphors. We simply have no rich, purely literal understanding of mind in itself that allows us to do all our important reasoning about mental life. Yet such metaphors hide what is perhaps the most central property of mind, its embodied character.”

“[O]ur metaphors for mind conflict with what cognitive science has discovered. We conceptualize the mind metaphorically in terms of a container image schema defining a space that is inside the body and separate from it. Via metaphor, the mind is given an inside and an outside. Ideas and concepts are internal, existing somewhere in the inner space of our minds, while what they refer to are things in the external, physical world. This metaphor is so deeply ingrained that it is hard to think about mind in any other way.” (p. 266)

So my challenge is to conceive of mind in a manner that utilizes the container image schema necessary for conceptualizing mind in a useful way, but in a manner that would still overcome the problems of a separation between our body and mind and the implication that ideas and concepts are somehow independent of the external physical world in which the body/mind is embedded.

My answer is to conceive of mind as a kind of shell. Think of a clamshell or a snail shell. I imagine that the formation of a shell occurs because of three sets of dynamics; internal, external and boundary dynamics. Each set of dynamics influences the nature of the shell; its size, shape, thickness, strength, composition, etc. A shell protects the most vulnerable parts of a creature and yet enables the creature to interact with its environment.

In looking at a variety of real shells from snails or clams there is a lot of evidence about the nature of the dynamics that caused each individual creature to have the kind of shell it had. The exterior of the shell will give an indication of the kind of external conditions that the creature had to endure. There are great differences between the shells of sea creatures who endure the pounding of waves over the rocks on the shoreline and the garden-variety snail that lives in my yard. The sea shell is very strong, whereas the snail in my yard has a fragile shell.

The interior of the shell will indicate some aspects of the interior life of the creature. While the shell itself, its exact composition for instance, will reflect other aspects of the life of the creature that grew it. The shell grows over time and records significant aspects of the pattern of living conditions in which the creature grew.

Exploring the philosophical extension of Fritjof Capra’s definition of life (in his book The Web of Life) as the interactions of structure, process, and pattern, I take these as basic principles for understanding living things. And in this case it is not merely trying to understand one thing, but to understand the interaction between two things, a creature and it’s environment. Thus, I believe I need two sets of structure, process and pattern.

Thus taking the shell as a metaphor for a mind then there are internal, external and boundary dynamics of the mind. The internal dynamics of mind are cognitive order and cognitive complexity. The external dynamics of mind are agency and cooperation. The boundary dynamics of mind are optimism and purpose.

I propose these sets of dynamics based on synthesizing the works of many people, particularly Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi from his research into optimal experience, which gave me cognitive order, cognitive complexity and purpose. The other three dynamics were suggested by work on intrinsic motivation by Kenneth W. Thomas, Edward Deci, and by research into self-efficacy and happiness from a great variety of sources.

Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience by Csikszentmihalyi lays out order, complexity and purpose as the key dynamics that each individual had the maximum ability to influence. I noticed that he was implying the necessity of other, more externally oriented dynamics, so I thought that the simplest possible model of the mind would result from matching those three with three others. Thus, over time I settled on agency, cooperation, and optimism as the structure, process and pattern for externally oriented influences. In my book, Attitude First, I discuss my understanding of psychological dynamics but that was before I had the mind shell metaphor to illustrate it.



The mind protects a person from the world, but also allows them to interact with it. An examination of the mind can reveal many aspects of the life of the person who has grown that mind. A person has different dynamics that have influenced the kind of mind that they have. Internal dynamics, external dynamics and dynamics at the boundary between them and the world. Properly undestanding the mind requires understadning the different sets of dynamics that shaped that mind. In order to influence the shape that a mind grows into requires altering thre dynamics that shape that mind. All of the dynamics that define the mind are body-based concepts. This concept of mind assumes larger social factors beyond the individual mind, but they impinge upon the mind in the forms of agency and cooperation. There are also smaller cognitive factors within the individual mind and they impinge on the individual in the forms of cognitive order and cognitive complexity. What is uniquely and exclusively individual about a person is their optimism and purpose, the dynamics that occur at the boundary between the forces that impinge from above and below.

In this view of mind the crucial factor in education is not the content of the mind, it is access to improving the quality of the dynamics. Each of the dynamics has two negative poles and the mid-point between them is an optimal state that provides the name of the dynamic. Cognitive order is the optimal mid-point between distraction and boredom. Cognitive complexity is the optimal mid-point between simplicity and chaos. Purpose is the optimal mid-point between obsession and spiritual hunger. Cooperation is the optimal mid-point between tyranny and slavery. Optimism is the optimal mid-point between passive cynicism and disengaged pessimism. Agency is the optimal mid-point between obedience and independence.

The consequence of being educated is maximum access to optimal states of mind, independent of the contents of mind that are used to create those mind states. How the content of the mind becomes solidified into memories, experiential filters, and other mental structures will reflect on the life that a person has lived to have the kind of mind they have. (For a discussion of experiential filters see my book, Attitude First.)

Education is not dependent on the contents of mind, therefore the source of the content is not of great importance. The content of mind does have to come from some source and the four educational theories are each attempting to acknowledge one or another source of content. My criticism of most schools is that they are focused on content and not on the quality of experiences. Educational movements that provide notable exceptions to the focus on content are the unschooling sub-culture within the homeschooling movement and democratic schools. There may be other exceptions, but I am not yet aware of any.

In order to further promote the validity and even superiority of these forms of education I propose to replace the delivery metaphor with a metaphor of cartography. Eliminating the delivery of content as a primary concern, the new primary focus is enabling students to create optimal experiences and then providing them with the knowledge, skills, and information to navigate back to that kind of experience any time they find themselves in non-optimal states of mind. This navigational ability needs to be entirely independent of the content of their experiences, otherwise when they find themselves in a situation that has unfamiliar content that they have never encountered before, then they may be unable to cope.

The four schools of educational theory that dominate mainstream education are good for describing the positive aspects of the source of content that they focus on. They are not exclusive of each other, and fit very well together when they are understood to be metaphorical conceptions of the whole phenomenon of education. When education is understood to be a process of cognitive cartography intended to result in deliberate access to optimal states of mind, regardless of the content of the mind, then the sources of content are less important than the development of a cartographic process. A map making process that takes as it’s defining purpose the development of methods for moving towards cognitive order, cognitive complexity, optimism, purpose, agency and cooperation.

08 December 2006

Regarding Them: Moral Values for a Pluralistic Society

Prelude to My Story

Once upon a time we were “better than” them.
Twice upon a time they were “better than” us.
Thrice upon a time we are them and they are us, and we put “better than” away on the highest shelf in the back of our closet, practically lost but not entirely forgotten.


My Story

My story begins long, long ago in a faraway place
I think it was just yesterday when we were visiting next door.
Our people thought we were better than them, those Other people.
You know the people I am talking about, those people who are different from us.
The ones who are not as pretty as us, not as handsome as we are, not as strong, not as upstanding, not as smart, and their things are not nearly as good as ours.
And we thought God wanted it that way.

But it is really hard to tell what God wants because
God’s voice is louder than all noises and quieter than silence,
God’s body is bigger than the whole world and smaller than the mote of dust you can only see when the sun shines on it just so,
God points the way faster than light and moves slower than a mountain,
God completely embraces us in the warmest love and gives us the ultimate freedom to be ourselves.
And sometimes we think that our own thoughts and ideas about what is right and good must be God’s ideas, too.
And if everyone agrees then it must be true.

So we looked at the world, and we saw that we were pretty and handsome.
We saw that we are strong and upstanding.
We saw that we had the right answers.
And we got together and talked about how good we are, and how different we are from those people.

But they were still over there and did not seem to be aware that they were at such a disadvantage.
So we went to them and tried to teach them about how to be as pretty and handsome as us, as strong and upstanding as we are, and how to get the right answers.

But they would not change and some of them even disagreed with us.
Most of them saw how good we are, and some were even grateful that we were willing to share but then they mostly went back to their old ways again.

So it was clear to us that they must have misunderstood.
Perhaps, we thought, they are just so very different that we couldn’t really communicate.
We decided that we had to be a little more clever and creative to help them see how to get our advantages.

So we made up a game.
Not just a little game, but a big game.
A game that everyone has to play.
And we got them to play, not because it was our game, but because we showed them how when we all play this game then we might have a lot of fun together.

But since the game was one that everyone had to play all the time, most of us forgot that it was a game.
Of course, the whole point of the game is to teach those people how to be like us and have all the right advantages.
So in order to really teach them, the game had to show them how
our way is God’s way to be strong, upstanding, pretty and handsome.
And whenever part of the game was not quite right, we changed the rules, just a little bit to better teach the lesson that God wants everyone to play the game our way because it is exactly how God made us.

But it is really hard to tell what God wants because
God’s voice is louder than all noises and quieter than silence,
God’s body is bigger than the whole world and smaller than the mote of dust you can only see when the sun shines on it just so,
God points the way faster than light and moves slower than a mountain,
God completely embraces us in the warmest love and gives us the ultimate freedom to be ourselves.
And sometimes we think that our own thoughts and ideas about what is right and good must be God’s ideas, too.
And if everyone agrees then it must be true.

And since we are not God, and do not always know what God really wants we made a game that was not really fair.
The game was made by us to help teach people about how it is to be us.
And we are the best players of our game because we have the most practice at being like us, and know the game better than anybody else.
But if we set up the game to make us win all the time, then those people lose all the time.
And in case you haven’t noticed yet, it is not fun to lose all the time.
Part of the fun of games is the possibility that you could win, sometimes, even if it’s really hard.

Now, God did make a game for us to play, but it’s not the game we made up.
The game God made up is one in which God is the only judge, God is the only one who enforces the rules of God’s game.
For instance, one of the most basic rules of God’s game here on earth is that up is up and down is down and if something doesn’t have support it falls down, not up.

But not all of God’s rules are so easy to figure out,
in fact, we really don’t know what all of God’s rules are,
we don’t even know how many there are.
That’s why we have invented really big games like religion and science.
Both science and religion are games that we play to discover God’s rules for the universe, but science only looks for some of the rules while religion looks for the others.

Religion is a game we play to discover the other rules that science can’t figure out.
In my religious community, Unitarian Universalism,
we say that everyone gets to decide for themselves which game of religion to play and therefore which rules for being religious to obey.
And after they have decided what religion they will practice they are expected to be
respectful of Others,
responsible for their own choices and
resourceful at getting what they need to be a good person.
We believe that each person has to figure out their own way of deciding what God wants.

But it is really hard to tell what God wants because
God’s voice is louder than all noises and quieter than silence,
God’s body is bigger than the whole world and smaller than the mote of dust you can only see when the sun shines on it just so,
God points the way faster than light and moves slower than a mountain,
God completely embraces us in the warmest love and gives us the ultimate freedom to be ourselves.
And sometimes we think that our own thoughts and ideas about what is right and good must be God’s ideas, too.
And if everyone agrees then it must be true.

Did you know that all people everywhere on earth play ball games?
But, the kinds of games they play with balls are all different.
All people play with balls but they all have different rules for making their ball games fun.
Thus, balls are a universal tool for making fun games.
Those three things I mentioned a moment ago;
respect, responsibility, and resourcefulness,
are just three of the hundreds of tools that all religions agree are necessary for making good people.
All those tools are called virtues.

Virtues are taught in every religion on earth.
Virtues are not the rules of the game of religion,
they are the absolutely necessary equipment that you need to play the game.
How each religion practices each virtue may be a little bit different,
but what all the virtues have in common is that they are the ways that we take care of ourselves, our families and friends.

“Better than” is not a virtue, it is not even a vice which is the opposite of a virtue.
But it is a tool that we use to compare things.
“Better than” is an important tool, because without “better than” we would not be able to tell which water is better for drinking and which food is better for eating and which tool is the best for the job at hand.
“Better than” is a tool that is necessary but it is one that we have to be careful about how we use.
It can be hurtful to compare people in some ways, so we need to take another look before we compare people to make sure that the comparison we make is going to be helpful and not hurtful.
“Better than” should be about how to take care of ourselves and Others, about how to have well-being for everyone, without exception.

But, when I looked at just one of those people,
(you know the people I am talking about, those people who are different from us,
the ones who are not as pretty as us, not as handsome as we are, not as tall, not as young, not as nice, and their things are not nearly as good as ours)
I saw a little girl who got a cut on her finger.
And her cut finger hurt her just like mine did when I cut it once.
Her blood was red just like mine was when I bleed,
and when she cried, her tears were wet, just like mine.
In that moment when I looked at her I saw comging out from inside of her the dearest and most personal things in every human life; pain, blood, and tears.

Seeing her in just that moment I saw how all those things that are usually hidden inside her are exactly the same kinds of things that I usually have hidden inside me.
I have pains that help me remember the hard things that I have to face and make me who I am.
I have red blood that helps me to remember the sacredness of life and remember the mixing of blood that all the fathers and mothers, and the grand mothers and grand fathers before them, have passed down to make me who I am.
And I have water in me, like the salty tears in my eyes, that help me remember that the earth is mostly covered in the same kind of salty water.
And how the water flows out of the sky, down the mountains, through the rivers and lakes to us
then through us continuing the journey to oceans and
eventually returning to the sky again to start all over.
And that water inside me also makes me who I am.

When I remember all those special things that are inside her and me both,
I realize that she is not really that different, after all.
She is not really one of Them, she is one of Us.
And when she and her people remember that, too, then we are them.
And that is how God wants it to be.

But it is really hard to tell what God wants because
God’s voice is louder than all noises and quieter than silence,
God’s body is bigger than the whole world and smaller than the mote of dust you can only see when the sun shines on it just so,
God points the way faster than light and moves slower than a mountain,
God completely embraces us in the warmest love and gives us the ultimate freedom to be ourselves.
And sometimes we think that our own thoughts and ideas about what is right and good must be God’s ideas, too.
And when everyone, and I mean all of Us and Them,
When everyone agrees
then
it really is true.

Postlude to My Story

Once upon a time we were “better than” them.
Twice upon a time they were “better than” us.
Thrice upon a time we are them and they are us, and we put “better than” away on the highest shelf in the back of our closet, practically lost but not entirely forgotten.

But now the time has come when we have a project to complete and the tool for the job is to compare our options and decide which is “better than.”
The project is how to unify the voices of all humanity to bring about a global harmony that resonates with all creation.
The challenge is to create opportunities for all beings to have wellness.

We have today an unprecedented ability to recognize and honor the wellness of our global ecology, our society, our organizations, us as individuals, our cells and even the molecules that make us up.
With this powerful opportunity for insight across vast scales of magnitude we also have the powerful responsibility to honor this more-than-human world in which we were given existence.

My call to you today is to join me in reviving “better than” as a tool for the transformation of our society from one in which we compare ourselves with each Other by the outward shells of behavior, custom, and circumstances
into a society in which we know we are united by our pain, by the blood we hold sacred and the water that flows in and through both us and our one and only planet to keep us connected and alive.
I ask for your help in transforming our “better than” habit from a tool of oppression and hurtfulness, into a tool of hope and reconciliation.

Let us use the universal language of virtues as both the starting point and end point for understanding the Other’s actions.
Let’s work together to reserve “better than” for comparing the results of our own actions with the well-being we were planning to promote, while giving the Other guy the benefit of the doubt.

I think that God would want it that way.

But remember that it is hard to tell what God really wants because
God’s voice is louder than all noises and quieter than silence,
God’s body is bigger than the whole world and smaller than the mote of dust you can only see when the sun shines on it just so,
God points the way faster than light and moves slower than a mountain,
God completely embraces us in the warmest love and gives us the ultimate freedom to be ourselves.
And sometimes we think that our own thoughts and ideas about what is right and good must be God’s ideas, too.
And when everyone agrees then it really is true.

Regarding Them Commentaries:

Regarding Them Commentary: What About Objective Reality?

Regarding Them Commentary: What About God?

Regarding Them Commentary: What About Morality?