The need for philosophical synthesis of religion
12. Survival technology
Nowadays, in the era of globalization, when further barriers dividing nations disappear, in order to communicate and coexist, we must develop a certain global standard of ethical norms. The lack of an effective global system of regulating the behavior of individuals and societies has become a barrier to development, a threat to the human community. Until now, people, educated from animals, have been guided by instinct, behavior patterns resulting from adaptation to life in the bosom of nature. Centuries ago, in various civilizations, germs of ethics appeared, a new way of adapting a man to the growing social environment. Ethics, the canon of the behavior of the individual cementing the society, is a reaction of the living populations of organisms to the threat of the natural and social environment. The threat from the environment must be removed and this triggers adaptation mechanisms in the endangered society. One of these mechanisms is the gathering of knowledge about the environment and cooperation in its use to develop survival technology.
What is survival technology?
Technology is a way to achieve the assumed goal conditioned by the state of knowledge and social efficiency (Lem 1974: 32-33).
Our goal is to survive the oncoming climate crisis, which is the most important and inevitable threat for us, which is why we need to gain knowledge and social skills. What does it mean to gain knowledge – we understand, but what does it mean to be socially fit?
A socially-minded society must cooperate in order not to waste energy (energy) and to effectively achieve the purpose of survival. It is a society with a high ability to cooperate, an ethical society. Therefore, social efficiency is based on social bonds. It is based on an ethics that saves social energy in achieving the goal of survival. The ethics of society is a function of its knowledge accumulated in response to a threat. Static society, not counteracting crises, is exposed to revolutions. Each revolution looks the same – the rebellion of citizens against deteriorating living conditions. You must find a guilty crisis situation – a victim of aggression – they have always been the richest because the best-educated social elite.
Each time the extermination of the elites caused dark ages in the life of the community. The conclusion is that contemporary elites should create mechanisms for educating and enriching the poor masses to prevent anticipated crises.
Our Modern Survival Technology will determine the use of all of our civilization’s output and it will probably look like this:
1. mechanisms that provide everyone with the opportunity to acquire knowledge and wealth,
2. organizing peaceful migration of nations from overcrowded lands,
3. developing a uniform ethical system.
We see that we need to develop knowledge about social mechanisms and mass means of transport to develop a policy of implementing the first two demands. However, without a uniform ethics, ensuring consistent cooperation of the global community, we will do nothing. A unified ethical system must be created for the whole world community, based on the universal principle of saving all energy, which will enable close international cooperation.
Global climate change has always caused social conflicts and mass migrations. They can only be prevented by the consistent implementation of modern survival technology, expressed in the equation:
KNOWLEDGE + ETHICS = ENERGY = LIFE
Applying knowledge and ethics will give effectiveness (energy) to our global activities. The limits of knowledge are wisdom, and the boundary of ethics is love. May clever love between people provide us with the highest effectiveness in overcoming the oncoming climate crisis. This will ensure a peaceful life for future generations.
Climate warming is currently under way, which causes aggression in Asia and Africa to grow due to the decline in agricultural production and deteriorating living conditions. Migration from these continents to the USA and Europe is growing. At the same time, in the G-8 countries there is the phenomenon of agricultural overproduction with a decrease in the size of the population. All this together causes the financial and economic crisis. The logic of history allows us to expect the emergence of an outstanding figure, the creator of a new order and a universal ethical system that unites humanity on the way out of the crisis. This leader will have to apply the message of Jesus Christ, who said: “Share bread for my remembrance” (Luke 22:19), because this is the love of your neighbor. If the warming continues, it will worsen the situation in the equatorial countries. There will be a wave of migration to food-rich countries. If cooling comes, it will bring a disaster for the civilization of the white man, a decline in the volume of agricultural production and a sharp global rise in food prices. In such an event the world will not survive and the situation will start to destabilize. We can not allow this.
The fruit of my thoughts is the theory that universal ethics have a physical dimension. The ability of individuals and societies to save all forms of energy, including social energy, is a measure of ethics. An effective ethical system makes the society more efficient and more dynamic. The ethical person is the man who lives at the expense of using the least amount of energy. Ethics is the art of saving energy.
The social environment arose as a form of defense against an unfavorable natural environment. The emergence of ethical systems regulating the behavior of individuals in the social environment is therefore an adjustment mechanism to the surrounding environment. The lack of an effective ethical system is therefore a sign of lack of adaptation to the environment. In other words, ethical standards needed for man are the result of reactions to the surrounding natural environment. The world we live in constantly improves us, makes us more ethical. Better people create a more and more perfect human world. Our world is developing. So probably the goal of the world is development.
Ethics is the result of the evolution of the collective consciousness of people reacting to threats coming from the surrounding environment. Probably ethics, as our limitation to the social environment, will replace the less and less needed primary instincts that in the earlier stages of evolution determined our reactions to nature. The global development of a unified ethical system will remove the development barriers facing mankind and will affect the development of civilization. The growing Internet, removing barriers to access to knowledge, is a new form of collective consciousness of humanity. It is a new environment in which we learn to live. Probably in this new online environment that brings people closer, new, unified ethics will be created. Unified ethics will enable peaceful cooperation of the world community and use, thanks to the Internet, all knowledge accumulated by humanity. Skillfully used knowledge will discover new sources of energy which will open amazing perspectives to people. It will probably enable our consciousness to grow into the limits of the world. The boundaries of this world will be determined by the resources of available energy. Until we can ignite the stars and create a new world.
The need for philosophical synthesis of religion
Ram Mohan Roy- “One of the important features of Roy’s worldview was also his religious universalism. It has already been mentioned above that Roy had a research workshop that enabled him to undertake real comparative research in religious studies. He knew the Koran, the Holy Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments, the Vedas and Upanishads, and came to the conclusion that the core of these religious systems is identical – the only God in the spiritual form, the immortality of the soul, ethical discipline as the basis of spiritual life. The differences are of a secondary nature, they result simply from different traditions of particular religious groups “(Justyński 1985: 42).
This is what the Buddhist Daisaku Ikeda says about the need for a new religion:
“I am convinced that only the new religion will be able to take on leadership in a civilization that will combine science and philosophy on a higher plane. However, the religion we need will have to inspire the scientific and philosophical spirit of humanity and will have to face the needs of a new age. It must be a religion that can transcend the differences between East and West and – binding all of humanity into one body – to save the West from its current crisis, and the East from its current difficulties. The discovery of this kind of religion is the most important task facing mankind today “(Toynbee, Ikeda 1999: 321).
“Earth is our only home. According to the current state of scientific knowledge, this may be the only planet on which life was created. The view that made the biggest impression on me was the first picture of the Earth seen from space. The image of a blue globe floating in an unlimited space, shining like a full moon against the backdrop of a clear night sky, made me realize with great force that we are in fact one family living in a small house. I clearly felt how ridiculous are all these differences of views and disputes in our human family. I have noticed the nonsense of persistent insistence on what divides us. From this cosmic perspective one can see the fragility and sensitivity of our planet circling in a limited orbit, squeezed between Venus and Mars in an infinite vastness of space. If we do not care about our home, what else makes sense? (Dalai Lama 2006: 160).
Religion as such is a system that embraces all races and all denominations, it is a path leading everyone to brotherhood. Regardless of how believers embody their faith, they generally recognize values such as love, respect, tolerance, forgiveness, mercy, human rights, peace, brotherhood and freedom, proclaimed by religion. Most of these values have found their wonderful expression in the messages of Moses, Jesus and Muhammad as well as in the teachings of Buddha and Zoroaster, Lao-tsa, Confucius and Hindu thinkers.
The above text was written by the eminent Turkish thinker Fetullah Gulen in “The Need for Interreligious Dialogue” – this text is available on the website about the link:
http://en.fgulen.com/content/view/6/13/.
Organized religions, if they are to survive – they must accept the view that revelation is not the ultimate and given thing, but from the will of God the truth must be obtained evolutionarily step by step. Our mind is subject to constant development through knowledge. (…) Teilhard (Father Teilhard de Chardin *) – whose actions were not recognized by his religious superiors or the Roman curia – showed that Christianity can not only incorporate into its system all the achievements of modern science, but also for a philosophical-religious synthesis that secular philosophy does not provide (Mieroszewski 1999: 25).
Warsazwa, 9 December 2017, 4:20 Bogdan Góralski