In The Beginning!

I grew up surrounded by religion, although the members of my own nuclear family were not regular church people. In fact, in my personal search for truth, I was more involved in the local Presbyterian Church than either my parents or my five brothers and sisters. Later, as a student at the University of Cape Town, I flirted with the Students Christian Association although I admit the attraction was enhanced by a number of attractive girls who attended regularly. All the while I struggled with the usual great questions of cosmology and theology:

v Where did it all begin?

v What are we doing here? And

v What or who made it happen?

The third of those unanswerable questions turned out to be the easiest for me. I very soon accepted that god, or whatever the local deity was called was the embodiment of the limit to human understanding. As far down the road we can take out thinking in any direction upon these imponderables we get to a line in the proverbial sand where our knowledge and imagination can take us no further. Just across that line is god! He takes over and performs/creates the inexplicable. So for me at least the subject of a super-being was a non-issue.

The problem is that, having come to this conclusion, answering the first two questions is made even more difficult. I don’t think we are going to answer the first question any time soon, even though I do have my own thoughts on this subject and it has nothing to do with quarks and big bangs, but it is the second question that has prompted me to write this blog.

What I have concluded is that evolution, or history or circumstance, call it what you will, has dictated a purpose in all life including human life. That purpose is the noble task of the preservation of our future on this planet, and in this universe. And right now as the human race, we are not doing a great job.

It is all about the children.

In the beginning, prehistoric man was created an animal evolving from an animal, and was placed in the the jungle of existance. In common with the other animals in the same jungle, his primary objective in life was his own survival and that of his family, particularly his offspring.

He would hunt and gather, fight and protect, provide love and nurture, and training and discipline. He did this not because he was good. He did it because instinctively he knew that the long term survival of the species, his species, depended upon it.

As time passed, man became civilized, (although sometimes I wonder if that is the right word) and added extended family and other groups to his domaine. In so doing, he did not change his primary objective, nor did he change the underlying instincts that had developed over thousands of years. Remember the earliest civilizations were a few thousand years ago, whilst man split from his ancestors hundreds of thousands of years before that. When we added the overlay of religion and society, we still did not lose these objectives either, nor those instincts, it just became a whole heap more complicated.

So as we go down the road together, let us not forget that the future of our species, of our nation and of our families depend on the children. They are the future, our future, and they are what we make them. Thus, and only thus, is the future in our hands!

All our views and decisions on the structure of our society and our families must be based solidly on this single premise!