Jan. 8, 2007
 
MANN TALK: The Necessity is a Universal Family
 
By Perry Mann
 
Hinton, WV (Special to HNN) – A member of a family will work for it, sacrifice for it, and die for it. A member of a tribe will work for it, sacrifice for it and die for it. A citizen of a state will work for it, sacrifice for it and die for it. For a nation it is the same. And the loyalty of a citizen of a nation to those beyond the boundary of his nation depends upon whether or not those beyond the boundary are like those within his boundary and have similar political and economic agendas. Otherwise, they are potential enemies.
 
Once, families fought for dominance. Once, tribes fought for dominance. Once, a coalition of tribes fought for dominance. States fought for dominance, to wit: the America Civil War. Even in more enlightened times, nations fight for dominance, as manifested by two World Wars. And now learned men write and speak about World War III, in which the West, which is Christian, is at war with the East, which is Muslim.
 
The irony is that Christianity and Islam trace their origins to Abraham, a Jew, and further to Adam, whose father was the god Jehovah. And further irony is that if one accepts the theory of evolution, all men and women and all life on earth have a common ancestor. So whether one believes in Genesis or in Darwin he is, whatever his race, religion, nationality, sex, sexual orientation or any other distinction, a member of the human races, who are all kindred and who are brothers and sisters in the language of the religionists.
 
After WWII, learned leaders of the world came together to establish the United Nations. I cheered this innovation and its prospects to bring mankind together to work for peace and justice in the world. It did not succumb to the attacks of men with tribal orientation as did Wilson’s effort to establish a League of Nations. But the United Nations, the hope of mankind, is scorned, belittled and ignored by the present president of these United States and those whose minds and spirits are as parochial, insular and chauvinistic as is his.
 
During the war in which I spent years of my youth, the army indoctrinated this nation’s men and women and trained them to kill Japanese and Germans. In the Korean War, it trained them to kill Chinese and North Korean. Today, many of the veterans of those wars drive a Japanese-made automobile. They buy goods produced by a rejuvenated Germany. They wear shoes and other clothing produced by Chinese labor. The people they would kill are now friends producing what this nation buys and loaning to this nation billions to pay for the purchases.
 
During WWI and WWII, the British and the French fought the German nation with barbarous ferocity and mercilessness and the nation that produced Beethoven, Goethe, Erasmus, Zwingli and other great thinkers, artists and musicians responded with equal ferocity and mercilessness. Millions died terrible deaths and most were civilians who wished nothing more than to do a day’s work, eat with family and sleep the sleep that labor brings. Now, those nations are part of a union of nations, nearly every one of which has a history of warfare against the other.
 
Today, this nation, who believes in the teachings of Jesus Christ, the son of its God, and claims therefore to be a Christian nation, when attacked did not consider turning the other cheek or doing good for evil as Christ taught or consider even seeking satisfaction by an eye for eye as the Jews taught -- but instead preemptively loosed the hounds of war against Iraq and killed there thousands that were Adam’s or Darwin’s descendants -- the kindred of all other peoples including their killers---who wished nothing more than to avoid the killing and who have done nothing to justified their being slaughter. Their deaths are formally and coldly consigned to the curse of conflict: collateral damage.
 
The descendants of the men who lived in caves and either allied with those who lived in the neighboring caves or warred with them---have advanced remarkably, for today there are nations instead of tribes and a combination of nations known as the United Nations. Man has advanced remarkably politically since the Neanderthals roamed the earth. But George Bush and the neocons have by their preemptive war incited an internecine warfare that is so horrendous as to astonish and numb even Neanderthals.
 
The need and hope of mankind is that Adam’s descendants or those humans that evolved from Darwin’s spark of life, both of whom are of one flesh and origin, will finally, before it is too late, complete the congress of all the people in the world in which all disputes are resolved in a war of words instead of a war of blood. History hints a hope for it.
 
The good news of man’s advance politically is dampened by the bad news of his lack of advancement religiously and his religious intransigence to consider ecumenism---the morphing of all faiths into one faith. When will the lambs and wolves of Christianity and Islam lie down together at ease? Or when will supernatural beliefs, which are the foundations of religions, be so weakened by secular knowledge that the day will come when every belief that a man lives by is derived from the study of the natural world and every goal and agenda is its preservation and the perfecting of man’s mind and body and the implemented hope of his harmonious living with nature’s mandates?
 
The additional need and hope of mankind is that whatever religion survives the strife, inquisition and dogmatism of the current plague of religious fundamentalisms is one that is not supernaturally oriented and premised but secularly base with a theology that includes, without question as to belief, all of Adam’s progeny everywhere on earth and has uppermost as its goal to succor the men, women and children wherever they reside on earth and to help them make the most of their lives in this world without promise of salvation in a postmortem paradisiacal world.
 
This nation’s foreign policy should be to use its military and economic power to bring about a reconciliation and union of the world’s peoples, not to divide them with the horrors, destruction and costs of war. And to use its powers, prestige and presence to persuade the world’s religions to an ecumenical union. If the god of the Christians and the Muslims is the same entity, or even if there no god, isn’t it insane for Darwin’s descendants to slay with claw and tooth one another with the intent to rid the earth of the one or the other?