Lessons from the new Star Trek movie

In the latest Star Trek movie, “Star Trek Into Darkness,” Captain Kirk is told to follow Star Fleet directive by Mister Spock and not expose a primitive civilization to their unauthorized and upsetting presence to avoid altering the primitive society's history. It means Spock will die and the planet may be destroyed but adherence to the rule is Spock’s main and only priority. Kirk questions destroying the planet rather than showing themselves and also wants to save his friend. It seems win-win to him but if he must adhere to rules, he can’t do it. Because heroes save planets and their friends, Kirk disobeys the directive and of course, loses his command. So it should be understood that there are consequences for making it up as you go along. A person making a decision to go against rules or morality or ethics or decency or laws will always have to pay a price. It is often the price of freedom. Free thought isn’t at all free. It never has been. What it came down to for Captain Kirk is a priori vs. a posteriori decision. One means true by rule, the other is true by observation. Objective vs. subjective. One means removing one’s own personal opinions from any decision making process. The other means to use your personal opinions or beliefs in the decision making process. Rules do tend to objectify any decision making process. Making the rule might have been fraught with the subjective evaluations of the law-makers but once established, it becomes a priori true and therefore closer to objective than subjective.  One example would be federal, state or local laws or regulations. You are given a job and told to follow the rules. No one pays you to think, you follow orders. Failing to do so subjects you to punishment. Here’s the thing. If you can only follow the rules, without question, there is no point to having a brain.

Are mass murderers, pedophiles, perverts, and dictators free thinkers? You bet they are. So there’s the rub. If Captain Kirk is a hero for using his powers of observation and logical thinking to disobey policy to save a civilization and a friend but serial murders who cut up their victims for fish bait are heinous and reviled sub-humans, is subjectivity safe?

Religion traditionally provided believers with an ultimate set of values that a believer could rely on when tempted by personal leanings. In the recent mass-murder bombing at the Boston Marathon, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the surviving bomber, scribbled notes to himself in the boat he was later captured in describing his brother and co-bomber as a martyr who was in heaven enjoying the fruits of his jihad. Crusaders rode their horses through palaces in Jerusalem chopping the limbs off infidels to the greater glory of God. Societies provide laws for direction. Our society believes that “thou shalt not kill” until it becomes necessary to put murderers to death as punishment or declare war on another country when it feels threatened and reward medals to sanctioned killers. So even societal laws are not absolute. They are subject to the majority's subjective interpretation.

As rules go, I think the golden rule is pretty cool. Living to serve others in equal proportion to serving yourself, or if truly heroic, even more. Avoiding inflicting pain. Being a positive force for truth telling. Trying to listen and understand others. Being empathetic. That came from a religion.

But here’s the thing about religion. It needs to make sense. I also personally think it needs to make sense both globally and universally. Let me use an example. You are born and raised a Methodist, Baptist, Lutheran, Catholic, Presbyterian, Church of Christ or other flavor of Christianity. You have the one “true” God. You are promised ultimate forgiveness for sins if you believe in the resurrection of Christ and you are truly sorry for your sins. One other thing, you will have life everlasting for your belief. Also: other religions are just plain wrong. They worship false gods. Unless or until they reject their native beliefs and convert to yours, they will not achieve the kingdom of God and if they are sinners, may spend eternity in hell, being punished.

So let’s check the sense of this. There are 7,086,000,000 people on earth, 578,000,000 of which are some form of Christian. That leaves 2 out of every 3 persons alive on earth today left out of concepts and ideas some of them will never be exposed to. But Muslims believe their god is the one true god. Buddists, Jews, Hindus, Zoroastrians, Sikists and another dozen or so major religious beliefs tend toward a certain exclusivity of true knowledge of the metaphysical. If I were born in a society and raised a particular religion, it stands to reason I would hold my beliefs dear. If not then I would be one of those “free thinkers” I referred to above. I would not adhere to rules, I would reject my upbringing, disavow my parent’s core beliefs and using some personal exclusivity I have that my peer’s lack, adopt foreign orthodoxy as my own. So there we have it. If Christianity (to use as an example) is the one “true” religion, it means 2/3s of the world’s population needs to reject their core values and adopt the one “true” God. Not their own god, somebody’s else’s. It would be true not because Western Europeans and North Americans are like the rest of the world. No, it’s the opposite. it means their superiority of thinking, culture and beliefs trumps the rest of the world. It means the rest of the world, the 2/3s majority of people alive on earth are just plain wrong. Their societies are based on untruths. Their histories and cultural growth was misguided for centuries and centuries. If this makes sense to you, then God bless. It is on the face of it, exclusively chauvinistic, jingoistic and totally illogical but then if you only follow rules and don’t think about it, it doesn’t need to make sense, you need to follow it without question. I assume Western Europeans and North Americans want Muslims to abandoned jihad, even though it is, like, proselytization, a tenet of their religion. But of course some people are just "right," by rule and others are just wrong, again by rule. We stand by and observe the horrors brought on historically by religious differences but it just has to be that way until one religion finally wins out over all and then everything will get a lot better. Not sure how many millinea people will suffer through but still.

There’s another thing about it though. Go out at night at look up at the sky. Check out the stars.

You can't see them all, or course, but there are in the neighborhood of 300,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 planets and stars surrounding earth in every direction. Much of what you're seeing no longer is active, it takes so long for the light to get to us, we are viewing the past. That means they no longer exist in a recognizable form and in some cases, reversed their energy and are eating the planets and stars around them. So here's the hubris part. Get ready. Several million to over a billion people believe in a document that says a big guy, looks like us, rolled up a ball of clay and created "heaven" and earth. You have to assume we're looking up at what must be considered heaven in that document (or not, up to interpretation). Anyway, the earth is the center of the universe and the rest was created as a side show for us to marvel at. Next, all you have to do is flip a mental switch and believe something and when all the rest of the show has burned out in trillions and trillions of years, you'll still be around, living eternally with God. Others, who disagree with you, will be gone or suffering eternally in a hot and hellish place, perhaps somewhere inside the core of our planet.

So human beings, who are likely to be extinct in a fairly short period of time, if you use a shelf life of 4,500,000,000 years for earth, during which between 50,000 and 200,000 years of which "humans" walked around. Since humans got intelligence, they now are in the driver's seat, controlling their universal destiny. Humankind will one day be gone. Might last another 100,000 years (a hiccup in the life cycle of the earth). Then, eventually, the Earth will be gone. The universe will be undergoing changes we can't conceive of and certain people, who read and understand certain orthodoxy will outlast it all. Wow. Individual human beings who might catch cold and die in 24 hours, will outlast the entirety of the universe, which is so vast we can't even begin to describe it's magnitude in our puny lifetimes. For me, I don't think so.

Is there a point to this? Yes. The more we learn, the less we realize we know. Any belief that excludes a majority of humanity is misguided. Any belief that claims eternal life for fealty is over-promising. That's an understatement. Exclusive religions that promote "us against them" and require everyone else to be wrong, are intolerant.

People need something to believe in? Believe in inclusion. Believe in an open mind. If you consider yourself a loving, decent person, adopt what you can of all the wisdom of humanity from Christ to Buddha to Mohammad. The Ten Commandments, zen koans, meditation, the golden rule, the reverence for all life of Hinduism, on and on. Listen. Absorb. Read. Seek understanding. Not just of your culture. Of others, too. Embrace the ideas of others as valid. Understand that an accident of birth put you where you are. Had you been born on the other side of the earth, you would be different. Stop believing you have the "truth" and everyone else is "wrong."

Do you seek eternal life? You have it. In the space/time continuum you are living your life over and over in another place in the universe no different than seeing a star that has burned out long ago. You will be spinning along at incredible speeds reliving every phase of your life somewhere out there for a long, long time. Is that not enough?

Fill your heart with joy, every day. Help others by listening to them and trying to understand them. Adopt from them what makes the most sense. 

This will require making it up as you go along. Learn from Captain Kirk. Abandon a priori truths and adopt a posteriori truths that tend to make the most sense. The ones that save your friends. That save alien societies. Because All Universal Truths are not always adequately defined by mortals. Some, like animal sacrifice, which was required in the old testament, no longer make much sense to us. We guess and we conjecture but a lot of the universe if still unknown. If we re-trench to old idioms and dogmas, it will stay unknown. Seek new truths. Adopt the things that work best. That's how you'll save your friends and others you don't know. Don't let old tired axioms rule your life. Reach beyond your current grasp. Life is a miracle and a fabulous gift. That's the best secret of our universe, as I know it. Open up to the promise of it all. Continue to learn all you can even if it seems foreign at first. Love your neighbor as yourself, while always understanding that your neighbors circle the globe. Embrace new knowledge for the gift it is. The rest will take care of itself as you "explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no man has gone before."