Have we crucified the butterfly? The war between science and religion
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Have we crucified the butterfly? The war between science and religion
What happens when religion and science forget their true source and origin, part company with each other, and try to grab and ‘own’ knowledge? What happens when they decree that their knowledge is the only truth and the only way to negotiate our way through life?
Answer: A real mess for everyone – humanity and planet earth.
Science and religion enter into bullying each other, declaring war with each other, and then the prevailing state of affairs works most efficiently to keep the light of truth out of sight and out of mind, if not totally buried under the collateral damage of the battle. R.I.P.
Most are familiar with the fact that Copernicus’ De revolutionibus orbium coelestium (1543) and Galileo’s Dialogo (1632) were both put on the Index of Prohibited Books by the Roman Catholic Church, who did not want to know about the truth of the heliocentric universe because of their investment in the geocentric world view which lay firmly entrenched as part of the corrupt foundations of their dogma and their control over the masses. Galileo was trialled at the Inquisition and lived under house arrest until he died in 1642.
Galileo wrote to his friend Kepler, ‘What do you have to say about the principal philosophers of this academy who are filled with the stubbornness of an asp and do not want to look at either planets, the moon or the telescope, even though I have freely and deliberately offered them the opportunity a thousand times? . . . these philosophers shut their eyes to the light of truth.’ This was just one notable incident in the war between scientific discovery and religious doctrine. Down the track there came an extraordinary time in human history as the dominion of religion over humanity was beginning to lose its grip, looking more and more like threadbare superstition held precariously together by ritual, faith and a dogmatic adherence to reductionist beliefs.
The great adventure of science in the late 19th early 20th century with its openness, discovery, and exploration into the very heart of matter, offered us a freedom from the shackles that religion had adopted to maintain its control. Starting with the discovery of the first subatomic particle, the electron, it became clear that the atom was made more of space than physical or material constituents. And with the advancement of quantum physics it was revealed that even the most ‘solid’ part of the atom – the protons and neutrons of the nucleus – were actually packets of orientated energy. The deeper we looked, the greater our understanding, and the more the solidity of the atom dissolved into the wondrous subatomic world of energy and space.
These discoveries engaged the human psyche, tantalising us with the promise of answers to our most challenging questions about life – questions that had previously belonged to the domain of religion.
Yet it was not long before science, co-opting religion’s ‘territory’, began to wield the same controlling supremacist dictatorship that religion had imposed – becoming the dogma of the day. Today, evidence-based science and the proof it derives have become the final and only arbiter of our truth. We are attempting to establish this way of thinking as the founding principle of human life, the only permissible way to view life. It is taught in our schools and has permeated agriculture, economics and medicine. Such control is seen at its most extreme in the behaviours of skeptics with the intolerance of anything they deem implausible, illogical or un-provable.
How easily we forget that 2,400 years prior to the uncovering of the atom by Dalton, the scientist and philosopher Leucippus (5BC) knew that all matter on this planet was composed of atoms. He required no equipment, no experimental method, no evidence base to prove his assertions.
How are we to understand a man like Leucippus with his prescient knowledge of the nature of the atom? --- Was he a mere quirk, a man who made a lucky guess that secured him a place in history until such time as real science with its proof could deliver truth beyond doubt? Was he a genius of such stature that we can only stand awed in the shadow of his intellectual might?
Or does he indicate a greater point, one that we have been missing for millennia in a world where knowledge has become something to be fought for and thus owned by a heartless mind?
We are so much more than we know. We come from a magnificent intelligence that knows and comprehends truth and our universal interconnectedness – an intelligence that is not owned by anyone and that knows that science, philosophy and religion are not separate bodies of knowledge but different faces of the one-unified truth.
What has come to pass that we have recklessly abandoned this knowing and instead taken up a kind of cardboard cut-out version of thinking, which dissects the living whole into the dried remnants of the fragmented parts... a butterfly dissected and no longer a living harmony and joy to behold?
What has come to pass that we have taken up a version of thinking which is so insecure, jealous, and prideful that it seeks to establish itself as the dominant and supreme mode of thinking, and in fact, only way of understanding? And if you do not entirely agree with it and stick to its parameters it proceeds to bully, beat, punish, and exile you. In fact, billions of people, our fellow brothers, have been tortured and killed by this version of thinking which we have ignorantly adopted as our daily currency. The allowing of the dominance of this thinking is in itself a crime against humanity. And most of us are, or have been, accessories to this crime without realising it.
The reality is that Life IS. It has a spherical wholeness to it, a living divinity whose universal law and order ceaselessly pulse harmony, rhythm and expansive-ness within and around us, way before we begin to start putting words upon it. It already IS. It would make ‘great good common sense’ to feel and observe our place within the magnificence of this life before we begin to describe, prescribe and inscribe it. This means observing and feeling everything, including our very own physical body. Our real trust in knowing truth lies in our body, whose very particles are of God’s divine substance and thus responds to the intelligence of the universal impulse. When we choose to vacate our body for this ‘alternative’ lifestyle that we have created on earth and which we imagine is ‘the real thing’ (like coca cola), we compensate for no longer having that powerful physical trust by giving away our power to trusting in manufactured beliefs about the world – including a whole litany of ‘scientific’ beliefs.
If we were to observe, feel, and inhabit the physical body, it is very possible that the words we utter would resonate with a potency and truth that words coming from a disconnection from the body and the whole do not, and cannot ever have. Without the vital connection to our inner-most we are left with empty words, words ‘full of sound and fury, signifying nothing’, forever taking up the space and fooling us about the true nature of life and the universe.
It is clear to see that even the very word 'science' and its true meaning have been kidnapped by a consciousness that operates in disconnection from the truth of the body.
How has it come to pass that we place all our trust in scientific theories that may have been spun from a scientist who is disconnected from the stupendous whole we come from? Wouldn’t it make sense to plug into the intelligence of the universe before uttering words?
There have certainly been such luminaries as Heisenberg and Einstein from the realm of science who have approached their enquiry in this humble way. But a scientific theory that tries to ‘pin down’ a living world from a consciousness of fragmentation, can only ever be transient and only lasts until the next ‘bit’ is formulated, the ‘next’ scientific discovery hits the headlines. Next, next, next! And so we stay bound on the carousel of ‘knowledge’, creating more and more ’bits’ like the human refuse circulating in outer-space, imagining that we are growing, progressing, making things better. Such bits can undoubtedly be useful in creating an invention. But if the ‘bits’ themselves are made to be our idol and arbiter of truth we have already crucified the butterfly on the pin.
Why not, before choosing to place our trust in a theory hypothesised by someone who may possibly be disconnected from truth and therefore dealing in the ‘bits and ‘parts’ industry, instead choose to reconnect through our bodies to the universal data that is continually being pulsed forth with the latest updates, and discern what is on offer. We know well that if we do not plug into the modem we will not be connected to the Internet. And if we do not have a connection and relationship with the universal Source, our ultimate website, it is not possible to know true science, or true religion.
We need to be honest about the victors and casualties of this man-made war. Science, imagining itself to hold the supremely intellectual upper hand, has declared itself the victor – after all, is it not our saviour from the environmental, social and medical dilemmas that are piling on top of us? How interesting then that religion sees itself as the winner; it is the owner of the intangible, metaphysical solution to the spiritual suffering of society rendered empty of meaning in the age of rational, scientific scepticism.
The truth is neither have won, nor can they. And the casualties lie everywhere. Every man, woman and child on this planet is the loser, as they must choose to align themselves to one and only one side of an indivisible whole. That religion and science lose is a given. Any claims of victory ring hollow when the victor holds a shell, empty of Truth, in their upraised hand; a lifeless trophy torn from that which is indivisible and lives eternally. This is a loss that neither will recognise whilst they hold with fixed determination to the notion that they, and only they, are right.
All lose when we are denied that which is our birth-right, the religion that is our connection to the eternal and only source of Truth, and the science that brings the understanding of its outplay in energy and in the material of this world.
When in connection to our inner truth we deeply know that both science and religion are from the one source, from God, and that these two can never be at war, but only ever abide together in the divine harmony they originate from.
Based on and inspired by the teachings of Serge Benhayon and the Ageless Wisdom.
Filed under
Science, Religion, Humanity, Connection
