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Summer guests

filipvk

Updated: Jul 27, 2022



As the summer really draws to a close, one last "encore" for the swallows, as they were the guests who brought me the most joy last summer (aside from the human guests).

Each time it was pure joy to watch these creatures perform their antics near the roof of our house.

It was as if they had marked out a course where they took turns showing off their skills, performing breakneck maneuvers to avoid the gutter near the roof or my head at the last minute. You could just feel in your bones how much these creatures enjoyed this, just like skaters or circus acrobats.


A neo-Darwinist would probably explain to me that these birds are just flesh-and-blood robots, created by random mutations in a dead universe where blind forces interact meaninglessly and purposelessly with the sole result being the pointless production of creatures whose sole purpose is to maximize their self-interest and spread their genes to the max. And that their antics have a purely biologically determined function that is solely focused on competition and blind survival instinct.

To that neo-darwinist I would say, "all that you say, you are yourself".

But then that neo-darwinist would probably agree with that of course.


Actually, neo-Darwinism, along with the broader materialistic paradigm of which it is a part, is one of the strangest religions ever created by man.

Religion? Yes, because, like other religions, it rests on a set of metaphysical assumptions that are by no means "provable," and thus do not conform to the rules of that paradigm itself.

And so although those articles of faith of the 'religion of science' are assumptions, just as much as the heliocentric universe or the immaculate conception were, we believe them as if they are a fact. To sum this up simply, I think it is the saddest form of legend ever invented. No wonder things aren't going so well for us or for the world. And that sad belief is in the blind spot of our world view.


For those interested in the sense and nonsense of our materialistic paradigm, I would like to refer you to Charles Eisenstein's magnum opus, "The Ascent of Humanity. In it he makes a razor-sharp and refined analysis of the 'religion of science' (and mind you, he himself is scientifically trained, with a doctorate in mathematics and analytical philosophy from Yale).

It is not the scientific method itself that is a religion, says Eisenstein, but the entire body of beliefs that we have constructed around that method over the centuries, beliefs that are thus often not even supported by the scientific method. On the contrary, science itself points more and more in other directions than those which are propagated and preached with religious fervor in the church of materialism.


Other thinkers, too, have already demonstrated the strange inconsistencies and assumptions of the materialist paradigms. For example, in her masterful essay "What Remains", the Flemish philosopher Patricia De Martelaere gave a brilliant analysis of a number of fallacies in those materialist paradigms and of their representatives in the popular scientific literature in only about seventy pages.

And fortunately the vanguard of science itself has long since moved on to a completely different terrain, but the scientific 'peloton' is still plowing far behind on a sort of swamp-like mud road, and unfortunately we have all been thoroughly indoctrinated in the materialistic paradigm and neo-Darwinism since elementary school.


It should therefore come as no surprise that a "civilization" that ultimately views life as a meaningless side effect of blind soulless processes in a meaningless and hostile universe is therefore, after a geological split second, busy eradicating that life, and is busy maneuvering itself towards its imminent demise. If we want to prevent the demise of our own species and that of most other species with whom we share the planet, we will first of all have to change the beliefs from which we view the world and life. If anything, this is even more urgent than eliminating our greenhouse gas emissions. For the climate crisis is only a symptom of a much deeper crisis, and that is the crisis of a consciousness that fundamentally views itself and the world as a meaningless and soulless mechanistic process that is really not about anything and has no purpose.

The swallows told me otherwise.


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