An Interfaith Dialogue

Keith Crowe

     One of my nieces acquired a “robot” floor sweeper for her house. It is a disc about the size of a large platter and about 3 inches thick. It’s only purpose is to sweep her hard-surfaced floors. It came with a “charging station” which is mounted on the floor, against the baseboard in some remote part of a room. At a programed schedule the sweeper will detach from the charging station and begin sweeping in straight lines until it encounters stationary objects (furniture), at which time it will randomly change directions and continue until it encounters another stationary object, etc., all the while, recording its movements and location. When its battery becomes almost depleted of energy, it consults its memory data to locate and return to its charging station until such time it is programed to begin its appointed cleaning cycle again.

     When a door is opened to an adjacent room from which the sweeper is located, it will also include the additional room in its duties and add it to its memory, the new room size and location of stationary objects, as well as the route necessary for its return to its charging station.

     If, second and third sweepers are installed in other rooms of the house, they will map out the description of their environments as well.  If all 3 sweepers are given access to the whole house, the 3 sweepers will undertake to clean and map all of the rooms they are permitted to access, before returning to their respective charging stations.  If, and when, the sweepers encounter each other, but do not engage a second time at that location, the meeting will be classified in their memory banks as a “temporary” barrier, such as a pet, someone’s foot, etc.  When the memory data of all 3 sweepers is compared, there will be a different descriptive map of the house by each sweeper. Each will be correct, but from the perspective of different charging station locations, in the same way an elephant is described by several blind persons touching different parts of its body. Each description may be accurate, but does not describe an accurate picture of the whole. As efficient and intelligent as the robotic sweepers are in their given tasks, they can have no knowledge of other sweeper’s perspectives or the essence of their designers or creators.

     For billions of years, life forms, both flora and fauna, have been evolving and expanding to occupy every niche of this planet. Humans, like the organisms, molecules, and atoms which have combined to construct our bodies, have become cultural organisms. We, like all life forms, are herd animals living and thriving in fields, groves, flocks, pods, herds, villages, tribes, and nations, experiencing and learning the ways of the valleys, deserts, forests and jungles, we live in. Our experiences have been recorded in a common knowledge bank that contains a history and tradition of our story. None of these histories tell the whole story, nor are they a full description of the whole house, or an accurate description of an elephant.

     Hominid man has existed on this planet for over 3 million years (i.e.: Lucy – AL 288-1). There were approximately 200 to 400 million people living in tribes and cultures all around the planet during the period when the religious canons of three major cultures were compiled. The sources of these canons occurred in a very small corner of the planet, during a very brief period in the history of mankind, addressing traditions peculiar to Middle-Eastern cultures in Hebrew, Aramaic, Greek, Roman, and Arabic languages. These canons used the deities, Yahweh, God, and Allah as their “authority,” in vague interpretive languages to address rules and laws of social relations and human behavior. The obvious question then is; why would any deity(s) elect to converse with mankind, so late in the history if mankind, and to only a handful of Semitic people, while 200 to 400 million people lived all around the world?

     Abraham, Moses, Jesus, and Mohammad (the Big Four), were certainly not the first, nor the only persons throughout the history of man, who have invoked disciplines of tolerance, peace, humane treatment, health or hygiene. The Torah, New Testament, and Koran were not written or compiled by the “Big Four” who have been traditionally credited with their origins. Information contained in these books was collected, edited and compiled by hundreds of likeminded, but fallible humans, primarily from oral traditions. Within the cultures, for which the books were compiled, people have found comfort and support in their creation stories, but beyond their culture of origin these books have become weapons to be used against other cultural legends. The will to live, traditions of survival skills, an impetus to be treated fairly, are all far more ancient than any cultural concept of deital invocation.

     Although our knowledge of forests, jungles and plains from which we originated and where we were preoccupied in a primitive daily survival, has expanded into a sophisticated universe, we still do not have a knowledge or words to describe a Creator of it all. The definitions and words used by religions, suggest their Gods are little more than jealous genies, and disagree on a definitive concept. How is it possible for any created entity to ever know or even define its Creator? That we are aware of a Creator beyond our Mother’s womb is miracle enough. To imagine anything beyond that is speculation based on myths and legends of cultural experiences.  The robotic floor sweeper couldn’t begin to imagine its maker; the animal kingdom cannot imagine a creation of 13.7 billion years; neither can we ever know a definitive creator. Are the deities of different cultures, Yahweh, God, and Allah, the same or equal to, the Creator of the Universe? The words used to describe these Deities by the various canons do not aspire to a Creator of the Universe. They sound more like a distant friend or relative in whom we are to confide, and make our requests for things we have no power to provide for ourselves - or else there may be consequences.

     All life forms exist only briefly in the spectrum of time and space, from the few frenzy minutes of the Mayfly, to the thousand years of Giant Sequoias, all for the sole purpose of supporting the wave of life rolling through a universe of time. All multicellular life is composed of only the same few types of atoms, configured by a common DNA Spiral produced by two parentally donated chromosomes, and exists for only a brief spectrum of time before all the building blocks are returned to the environment, waiting to be used again, and again. Everything in the universe is subject to the same fate, planets, stars, galaxies, all live finite existences. The only thing that even remotely endures to resemble an eternity are the elements of which the universe and all life forms are made, from dust and gas produced in the death of ancient stars.

     The largest man-made tool in history, the Large Hadron Collider (CERN), is buried underground near Geneva Switzerland, and has been created in part as an attempt to a peek behind the curtain that veils the initial cataclysmic event that occurred 13.7 billion years ago when energy was transformed into matter, in the remotest possibility of seeing the Face of our Creator.

     Cultural perspectives can never describe the “whole” picture, or purpose of creation.  For humans to continue to quarrel about the existence of which we know so little, is the epitome of illogical logic. So, let us begin a new culture.