Ozodi Osuji
The trajectory of science, since Nicolas Copernicus, Galileo Galilei, and Isaac Newton reintroduced it to the Western approach to phenomena, is that it sees people as victims. Scientists may not overtly state so but their work indicates that natural forces outside human control shape people. Although with careful study of those forces, we can understand some of them and manipulate them via technology, they are nevertheless more powerful than we are.
Science, for example, has shown us what goes on in stars. Our Sun is a star. We now know that the sun is a cloud of hydrogen gas (with minor other elements in it), in whose core enormous heat and pressure get hydrogen atoms to fuse into helium atoms and in doing so release light and heat and that light and heat walk their way to the surface of the Sun and escape and travel in space. It takes a little over eight minutes for light from the Sun, traveling at 186, 282 miles per second, to reach planet Earth.
The light and heat from stars that travel through space and get to Earth are responsible for biological life on Earth.
As the earth formed, 4.5 billion years ago, and cooled down, and water covered 70% of its surface, somehow, some elements (such as carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, calcium, potassium, magnesium, Iron, and others) mixed in the waters and combined into molecules that eventually transformed into biological cells (of plants and animals).
On Earth, trees absorb light energy from the Sun and through photosynthesis use it to produce green leaves.
Animals eat those green leaves, drink water from the ground, and somehow use them to produce their flesh (cattle, sheep, goats, and other herbivores do so). Human beings eat green leaves from trees and meat from animals and use them to form their bodies.
Our bodies are the product of energy from the Sun; without the Sun we cannot exist. If the sun dies in a supernova, as it is expected to die in about five billion years, the Earth will die and certainly all biological life on Earth will die.
Hopefully, before our Sun dies, science and technology will have advanced to the point that human beings will have devised the technology to travel to exoplanets suitable for our kind of biological life and keep living there. And when those planets’ sources of energy, stars, die, we move on to other planetary systems. That way we migrate from planet to planet.
Eventually, we shall have the technology to go from our Milky Way Galaxy to other Galaxies (there are trillions and trillions of galaxies, each with at least 200 billion stars and numerous planets).
We go from galaxy to galaxy and when our universe overexpands and gets cold and dies (Big Chill) in a few trillion years, we will have developed the science and technology to discover wormholes through which we migrate to other universes.
The concept of multiverse posited by Hugh Everett states that there are infinite universes.
What runs through this summary of the scientific perspective is that natural forces produce human beings and destroy them and although they can understand nature and manipulate it to extend their lives, they are still vulnerable and over time will be defeated in their struggle to eke out a living; nature is overwhelmingly more powerful than man.
Science has replaced God with nature and now reduced people to the victims of nature, as religions used to see people as insignificant banks of clay compared to the gods, and people were victims of the gods. Read Homer’s Iliad and Odessey and Virgil’s Aeneid and appreciate what playthings people were in the hands of poets’ gods.
The point is that ancient religions and now science see people as nothing and see forces outside them controlling their lives.
Human beings do not like to see themselves as totally lacking control over their lives. Whereas old-time religion gave more power to the gods it left some to people; people could indirectly control God by being moral human beings and flagellating themselves before him and he had mercy for them and helped them.
These days science tells people that they are little particles of dust controlled by the workings of nature, workings that they have barely begun to understand. We have less than one percent understanding of nature. Indeed, 96% of nature (dark energy and dark matter we know nothing about); and the 4% of the visible part of the universe we have begun to understand we have not understood one percent of! We, in religious metaphor, live in darkness, not yet in the light of knowledge.
We are victims controlled by nature. But we do not like to see ourselves as controlled by forces outside us.
Since old-time religions, such as Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism, do not help us control nature and emphasize our weakness and victimhood, New Age religions emerged and tell us that we create our reality.
Jane Roberts’ Seth Speaks, Helen Schucman’s A Course in Miracles, and countless other Bibles of the new age religion tell us that we create our reality. What they are trying to do is give us back the power of efficacy that old-time religions and science have taken away from us.
It is intoxicating to be told that you create your reality. It makes you feel powerful to believe that you create your reality with your thoughts.
However, the rational part of your thinking tells you that we have not even understood one percent of how our bodies work and are not in control of them, that part of us tells us that our best hope is to keep slogging it out with science and, hopefully, in millions of years we shall have enough understanding of our bodies and subsequently use the laws of biology to control our bodies but in the meantime, we accept some powerlessness.
The rational part of us sees New Age religion’s postulate that we create our reality as overreach and disregard it.
I used to know this guy. He gave workshops where he taught his New Age religionist’s perspective that we create our reality. The next thing I heard was that he had cancer and was running from state to state seeking the best cancer treatment hospitals!
Of course, we do influence aspects of our reality. If, for example, you love yourself, love the people around you, and have only love for all people in your mind, you tend to be happy and live a peaceful life. But this does not mean that you are in charge of your life.
Consider Fascism. Since the reelection of Donald Trump, I have been reading books on fascism and now am a walking encyclopedia on the subject, I could teach seminars on Mussolini, Hitler, Stalin, Mao Zedong, and other known fascists. I equip myself with knowledge of fascism because I think that we are entering one of those ages where human beings’ minds are taken over by madness and they do the incredible and kill members of their species.
Europeans and Americans currently feel overwhelmed by nonwhite people washing ashore in their countries. Their nationalist politicians are sprouting up everywhere, preaching nationalism and conservatism. Sooner or later, some of these deluded politicians trying to make their people feel powerful will go to war to destroy nonwhite folks. That is what fascists do.
As these things always work out, those perceived as weak always defeat those perceived as strong. White folks currently see Africans as primitive, but the average African child is more educated than the average white child, but white folks do not know it. When the coming racial war breaks out, white folks will be surprised because what they had thought was a piece of cake, a walk in the park, as Hitler thought was the case when he launched Operation Barbarossa on Russians in June 1941, well, when the boogaloo that white racists are itching for begin, their American civilization will be the first to die. Read that again. That is how civilizations decline and collapse, from underestimating those perceived as primitive, barbarian, and weak.
As I have pointed out in several essays, Europeans and North Americans have every right to prevent being inundated by folks from nonscientific cultures hence lowering their standard of living. I recommended that the realistic solution is to go to third world countries and improve their education and change their largely unscientific culture to what I call scientific culture, a culture that accepts the scientific method, reduces the population by requiring no couple to have more than two children, and build factories that employ the people and that way enable third world people to survive in their world.
As long as they remain poor, they will seek to crash into developed parts of the world. In the future when all places are equalized no one will be trying to crash into Europe or North America, in fact, the reverse would be the case, people will want to live in tropical lands if those lands are at the same level of material culture as the temperate West.
I am digressing.
In this essay, I am trying to say that New Age religions rose in response to science taking away power from human beings by telling them that nature is in control of their lives. I see scientists with the emotional level of a nine-year-old, such as Neil DeGrasse Tyson on social media saying that there is no God and making science a replacement God. They are not aware that they are like drunk human beings teaching man’s powerlessness and such an attempt to reduce people to powerlessness over nature (and make shabbily educated scientists the new gods) man resents.
Man’s resentment leads him to what is now called New Age religion, which tells people that they are in control over their lives and that they create their reality. Well, Jane Roberts and Helen Schucman, two new-age prophets, died from cancer; they did not use their minds to create cancer that killed them unless they also created cancer and wanted to die from cancer.
Let us leave foolishness aside. I am a philosopher. I use my mind to understand my world. I have a college-level understanding of physics and chemistry, so I am not a naïve country bumpkin. What I do know is that nature is still mostly in control of the universe but that we shall eventually understand that nature, not in the next one thousand years, and have the technology to improve our lives but as of now we are not in total control of our lives and certainly do not create all of it.
I do not even know how we dream. A few days ago, I was talking to one of my brothers, Paul. We see our mother, Teresa, as a saintly woman. We call her Saint Teresa. Talking about her death generally puts me in a funk. I felt depressed. In my sleep that night my mother appeared; it was she, me, and one of my brothers, Geoffrey, at a supermarket. We got groceries, put them in a cart, and expected her to pay for them, as she normally did. When we got to the checkout counter she was no longer there, and we both looked for her and did not find her. I decided to pay for the groceries and as I got out a credit card I woke up.
I interpreted the dream as my mother telling us that she was a provider for us when she lived on earth but that now we have to provide for ourselves, we have to pay for our groceries and not expect her to pay for them, we have to overcome our prior dependence on her and become independent and fend and shift for ourselves.
I said that my mother said these things, but I do not know that she is still alive; the rational part of me would thus say that a part of my mind produced that dream and projected the role my mother played to her.
Okay. But how did my mind produce the dream in the first place? There are just too many things that we have not understood. And don’t talk to me about what some psychobabble says about dreams, those are pure superstition.
The point is that I did not know how my mind/brain produced this dream and did other things. Nobody understands how we dream. There are just millions of things about us and nature that we still do not understand; therefore, saying that we create our reality is overreach, a fantasy, a magical belief that makes us feel in charge of our lives.
We understand aspects of our lives and can improve them but not all aspects of them. New Age religion overreached in its efforts to empower people, a people depowered by old-time religions and spurious science.
We must seek balance. A situation where we accept that we do influence what happens to us, at the individual and collective level, and at the same time accept that many things happen to us that we do not understand why they happen to us.
Life remains a mystery.
Maybe the joy of living lies in not knowing it all. If we did know it all, would we not be bored by life on Earth?
I do not understand many things.
Note
Whereas I consider myself agnostic, I suspect that there is God. I have tried to explicate what God means to me. I understand that my God is the philosopher’s God, not the God ordinary folks flagellate themselves to give them their daily bread. There must be an unimaginably formidable intelligence that underpins this mysterious universe. In our universe, it all seems pointless yet you sense that there is meaning in it but what is that meaning? It is left to the individual to figure out what gives him meaning and devote his life to living it. It gives me meaning to love all people and I love all people; I cannot hate any human being, man or woman, black or white or Asian. We are all members of one family, and I just love all of us to love my whole self. There I stand.
Ozodi Osuji
January 7, 2025Ozodi Osuji
The trajectory of science, since Nicolas Copernicus, Galileo Galilei, and Isaac Newton reintroduced it to the Western approach to phenomena, is that it sees people as victims. Scientists may not overtly state so but their work indicates that natural forces outside human control shape people. Although with careful study of those forces, we can understand some of them and manipulate them via technology, they are nevertheless more powerful than we are.
Science, for example, has shown us what goes on in stars. Our Sun is a star. We now know that the sun is a cloud of hydrogen gas (with minor other elements in it), in whose core enormous heat and pressure get hydrogen atoms to fuse into helium atoms and in doing so release light and heat and that light and heat walk their way to the surface of the Sun and escape and travel in space. It takes a little over eight minutes for light from the Sun, traveling at 186, 282 miles per second, to reach planet Earth.
The light and heat from stars that travel through space and get to Earth are responsible for biological life on Earth.
As the earth formed, 4.5 billion years ago, and cooled down, and water covered 70% of its surface, somehow, some elements (such as carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, calcium, potassium, magnesium, Iron, and others) mixed in the waters and combined into molecules that eventually transformed into biological cells (of plants and animals).
On Earth, trees absorb light energy from the Sun and through photosynthesis use it to produce green leaves.
Animals eat those green leaves, drink water from the ground, and somehow use them to produce their flesh (cattle, sheep, goats, and other herbivores do so). Human beings eat green leaves from trees and meat from animals and use them to form their bodies.
Our bodies are the product of energy from the Sun; without the Sun we cannot exist. If the sun dies in a supernova, as it is expected to die in about five billion years, the Earth will die and certainly all biological life on Earth will die.
Hopefully, before our Sun dies, science and technology will have advanced to the point that human beings will have devised the technology to travel to exoplanets suitable for our kind of biological life and keep living there. And when those planets’ sources of energy, stars, die, we move on to other planetary systems. That way we migrate from planet to planet.
Eventually, we shall have the technology to go from our Milky Way Galaxy to other Galaxies (there are trillions and trillions of galaxies, each with at least 200 billion stars and numerous planets).
We go from galaxy to galaxy and when our universe overexpands and gets cold and dies (Big Chill) in a few trillion years, we will have developed the science and technology to discover wormholes through which we migrate to other universes.
The concept of multiverse posited by Hugh Everett states that there are infinite universes.
What runs through this summary of the scientific perspective is that natural forces produce human beings and destroy them and although they can understand nature and manipulate it to extend their lives, they are still vulnerable and over time will be defeated in their struggle to eke out a living; nature is overwhelmingly more powerful than man.
Science has replaced God with nature and now reduced people to the victims of nature, as religions used to see people as insignificant banks of clay compared to the gods, and people were victims of the gods. Read Homer’s Iliad and Odessey and Virgil’s Aeneid and appreciate what playthings people were in the hands of poets’ gods.
The point is that ancient religions and now science see people as nothing and see forces outside them controlling their lives.
Human beings do not like to see themselves as totally lacking control over their lives. Whereas old-time religion gave more power to the gods it left some to people; people could indirectly control God by being moral human beings and flagellating themselves before him and he had mercy for them and helped them.
These days science tells people that they are little particles of dust controlled by the workings of nature, workings that they have barely begun to understand. We have less than one percent understanding of nature. Indeed, 96% of nature (dark energy and dark matter we know nothing about); and the 4% of the visible part of the universe we have begun to understand we have not understood one percent of! We, in religious metaphor, live in darkness, not yet in the light of knowledge.
We are victims controlled by nature. But we do not like to see ourselves as controlled by forces outside us.
Since old-time religions, such as Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism, do not help us control nature and emphasize our weakness and victimhood, New Age religions emerged and tell us that we create our reality.
Jane Roberts’ Seth Speaks, Helen Schucman’s A Course in Miracles, and countless other Bibles of the new age religion tell us that we create our reality. What they are trying to do is give us back the power of efficacy that old-time religions and science have taken away from us.
It is intoxicating to be told that you create your reality. It makes you feel powerful to believe that you create your reality with your thoughts.
However, the rational part of your thinking tells you that we have not even understood one percent of how our bodies work and are not in control of them, that part of us tells us that our best hope is to keep slogging it out with science and, hopefully, in millions of years we shall have enough understanding of our bodies and subsequently use the laws of biology to control our bodies but in the meantime, we accept some powerlessness.
The rational part of us sees New Age religion’s postulate that we create our reality as overreach and disregard it.
I used to know this guy. He gave workshops where he taught his New Age religionist’s perspective that we create our reality. The next thing I heard was that he had cancer and was running from state to state seeking the best cancer treatment hospitals!
Of course, we do influence aspects of our reality. If, for example, you love yourself, love the people around you, and have only love for all people in your mind, you tend to be happy and live a peaceful life. But this does not mean that you are in charge of your life.
Consider Fascism. Since the reelection of Donald Trump, I have been reading books on fascism and now am a walking encyclopedia on the subject, I could teach seminars on Mussolini, Hitler, Stalin, Mao Zedong, and other known fascists. I equip myself with knowledge of fascism because I think that we are entering one of those ages where human beings’ minds are taken over by madness and they do the incredible and kill members of their species.
Europeans and Americans currently feel overwhelmed by nonwhite people washing ashore in their countries. Their nationalist politicians are sprouting up everywhere, preaching nationalism and conservatism. Sooner or later, some of these deluded politicians trying to make their people feel powerful will go to war to destroy nonwhite folks. That is what fascists do.
As these things always work out, those perceived as weak always defeat those perceived as strong. White folks currently see Africans as primitive, but the average African child is more educated than the average white child, but white folks do not know it. When the coming racial war breaks out, white folks will be surprised because what they had thought was a piece of cake, a walk in the park, as Hitler thought was the case when he launched Operation Barbarossa on Russians in June 1941, well, when the boogaloo that white racists are itching for begin, their American civilization will be the first to die. Read that again. That is how civilizations decline and collapse, from underestimating those perceived as primitive, barbarian, and weak.
As I have pointed out in several essays, Europeans and North Americans have every right to prevent being inundated by folks from nonscientific cultures hence lowering their standard of living. I recommended that the realistic solution is to go to third world countries and improve their education and change their largely unscientific culture to what I call scientific culture, a culture that accepts the scientific method, reduces the population by requiring no couple to have more than two children, and build factories that employ the people and that way enable third world people to survive in their world.
As long as they remain poor, they will seek to crash into developed parts of the world. In the future when all places are equalized no one will be trying to crash into Europe or North America, in fact, the reverse would be the case, people will want to live in tropical lands if those lands are at the same level of material culture as the temperate West.
I am digressing.
In this essay, I am trying to say that New Age religions rose in response to science taking away power from human beings by telling them that nature is in control of their lives. I see scientists with the emotional level of a nine-year-old, such as Neil DeGrasse Tyson on social media saying that there is no God and making science a replacement God. They are not aware that they are like drunk human beings teaching man’s powerlessness and such an attempt to reduce people to powerlessness over nature (and make shabbily educated scientists the new gods) man resents.
Man’s resentment leads him to what is now called New Age religion, which tells people that they are in control over their lives and that they create their reality. Well, Jane Roberts and Helen Schucman, two new-age prophets, died from cancer; they did not use their minds to create cancer that killed them unless they also created cancer and wanted to die from cancer.
Let us leave foolishness aside. I am a philosopher. I use my mind to understand my world. I have a college-level understanding of physics and chemistry, so I am not a naïve country bumpkin. What I do know is that nature is still mostly in control of the universe but that we shall eventually understand that nature, not in the next one thousand years, and have the technology to improve our lives but as of now we are not in total control of our lives and certainly do not create all of it.
I do not even know how we dream. A few days ago, I was talking to one of my brothers, Paul. We see our mother, Teresa, as a saintly woman. We call her Saint Teresa. Talking about her death generally puts me in a funk. I felt depressed. In my sleep that night my mother appeared; it was she, me, and one of my brothers, Geoffrey, at a supermarket. We got groceries, put them in a cart, and expected her to pay for them, as she normally did. When we got to the checkout counter she was no longer there, and we both looked for her and did not find her. I decided to pay for the groceries and as I got out a credit card I woke up.
I interpreted the dream as my mother telling us that she was a provider for us when she lived on earth but that now we have to provide for ourselves, we have to pay for our groceries and not expect her to pay for them, we have to overcome our prior dependence on her and become independent and fend and shift for ourselves.
I said that my mother said these things, but I do not know that she is still alive; the rational part of me would thus say that a part of my mind produced that dream and projected the role my mother played to her.
Okay. But how did my mind produce the dream in the first place? There are just too many things that we have not understood. And don’t talk to me about what some psychobabble says about dreams, those are pure superstition.
The point is that I did not know how my mind/brain produced this dream and did other things. Nobody understands how we dream. There are just millions of things about us and nature that we still do not understand; therefore, saying that we create our reality is overreach, a fantasy, a magical belief that makes us feel in charge of our lives.
We understand aspects of our lives and can improve them but not all aspects of them. New Age religion overreached in its efforts to empower people, a people depowered by old-time religions and spurious science.
We must seek balance. A situation where we accept that we do influence what happens to us, at the individual and collective level, and at the same time accept that many things happen to us that we do not understand why they happen to us.
Life remains a mystery.
Maybe the joy of living lies in not knowing it all. If we did know it all, would we not be bored by life on Earth?
I do not understand many things.
Note
Whereas I consider myself agnostic, I suspect that there is God. I have tried to explicate what God means to me. I understand that my God is the philosopher’s God, not the God ordinary folks flagellate themselves to give them their daily bread. There must be an unimaginably formidable intelligence that underpins this mysterious universe. In our universe, it all seems pointless yet you sense that there is meaning in it but what is that meaning? It is left to the individual to figure out what gives him meaning and devote his life to living it. It gives me meaning to love all people and I love all people; I cannot hate any human being, man or woman, black or white or Asian. We are all members of one family, and I just love all of us to love my whole self. There I stand.
Ozodi Osuji
January 7, 2025