Deriving the Ten Commandments

By Tihamer Toth-Fejel

 

Did we really need God to carve a bunch of stone tablets to tell us right from wrong? 

 

Of course not.  When I taught seventh-grade Sunday School at St. Patrick's in Brighton, MI, my class was able to re-derive the ten commandments in half an hour - with only a little bit of nudging.

 

The best place to start is at the beginning – the very beginning – i.e. the Big Bang.  Who started it?  Whoever it is, he/she/it is our creator and deserves a heck of a lot of respect, not to mention gratitude.  If you look at the details of creation, like the nucleosynthesis of carbon and how dependent it is on the fine-tuning of the fundamental forces, you can’t help but be impressed enough to say, “Wow!”  That is the essence of worship.  Furthermore, if we have a creature-creator relationship with anything else other than this creator, we’re making the same mistake as people who really love their cars, and treat their spouses as objects. So worshiping God and no other false idols seems like a good idea.

 

Second, how should this worship take place?  Well, what do we know about this Creator?  It turns out that because of Moses, we do know His name: “I am”.  Well, duh – the essential characteristic of an independent creator is existence.  Given the power of words, it would seem like a good idea to respect His name, especially in our speech.

 

Third, what did the creator do again?  Oh yeah, He created the world.  How long did it take?  Six divine days (whatever they are; it’s not literea), and then he took a break.  Now, since we’re made in His image and likeness, that means… (Remember that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery) … Yep, it would be respectful for us to take a break after every six days, just like He did.  OK, it didn’t really take six days, the “divine days” is juat a ceremonial symbol.  Tell me, how would you feel if someone took your picture (a ceremonial symbol) and dropped it in the toilet?  Or burned you in effigy?  It is fairly obvious that symbols have power.

 

Fourth.  Ok, enough about God, the universe and everything.  What about you?  You specifically.  Where did you come from?  Yep, they do teach sex ed in schools – you came from your parents.  Not just your genes; you didn’t starve to death, you got your inoculations against polio, diphtheria, and tetanus, and you didn’t freeze during the winter.  Now you’re potty-trained, you can tie your shoes, and you can even push buttons on your TV remote--all because of your parents.  What is the logical response?  Shoot them and have their brains for dinner?  Not quite – if that had been the logical and reasonable thing for you to do, then they would have prevented it by feeding you to the family dog as soon as you were big enough to make it worthwhile (for the dog).  Might gratitude be an appropriate response?  Duh.  What about blind obedience?  Nope, because they might get annoyed and tell you to go play in traffic (parents aren’t perfect, you know).  The reason you obey your parents is because that is the best way you can get ready for when you don’t have them around anymore.  As you get to be an adult, and can handle the consequences of not obeying them, you don’t have to obey them any longer.  But does that mean that you should stop being grateful?  No.  How does one show that gratitude?  Yes, honoring your parents sounds like a good middle ground between obedience and indifferent rebellion.

 

Fifth, we’re still near the beginning:  If each person wants to exist, then what is the most important thing any two people need to do?  Obviously, they need to continue existing, and if there are two (or more) of them, then the other(s) shouldn’t stop that existence.  So, the most important guideline that all people must follow is to not murder each other. Another way to think about it is this:  What is the most awful thing that happened to Adam and Eve within 30 years of them screwing up?  Hint: Cain and Able. I can’t think of anything possibly worse for a parent. Just don’t do it.

 

Sixth, getting back to your parents, or to you when you become a parent.  OK, everyone has agreed to not murder each other. What else do the children need to do in order to survive and be happy?  Hint: What did Judith Wallerstein discover about divorce? That’s right, the children need both parents, and they need both parents to love each other.  So what hurts that love more than anything else? That’s right, adultery. So for the good of their children, the parents better avoid it. And if they don’t have children, ask a copy why they hate (and fear) answering domestic disturbance calls.

 

Seventh, now imagine a couple of people living near each other who have agreed to not murder each other and to stay committed in marriage.   What else do they need to do in order to survive and be happy?   Well, they’re busy hunting and gathering, and some people are busier than others, so those people get more stuff.  What’s to stop the lazy people from taking from those who have worked hard?  Violence, or at least the threat of violence and then we’re back to number five.  What happens if someone always takes the results of your hard work?  Will you continue to work?  No.  So the next famine wipes out all of you because nobody worked.  Therefore, the group needs the concept of property, and even a four-year-old recognizes that when that property is taken away from him, “that’s not fair!”

 

Eighth, let’s say you come home from hunting and gathering, and your stuff is gone.  Angrily, you ask your neighbor Joe what happened to it.  He claims that some animals took it.  Or he says that he didn’t see anything.  Or he says that Bill took it.  Obviously, in order to enforce the other rules, members of a happy and productive society will tell each other the truth. Society works much more efficiently that way.  Go to Wikipedia and compare the transparency index of countries with their standard of living.

 

Ninth.  What is the process by which people do anything wrong?  Exactly -- they think about it first.  It turns out that people generally don’t have too many problems honoring their parents, and while honoring them is very important, your parents generally don’t affect your everyday life after you grow up.  Similarly, while murder is very serious, it is also a mean, vicious business with a wicked wrongness that is so obvious that it doesn’t need repeating.  On the other hand, when in a boring or difficult marriage, the enticement of a member of the opposite sex might be so alluring, and the consequences so distant, that a commandment against adultery does need to be repeated. Don’t even think about it.

 

Tenth.  Same with thievery.  The temptation is powerful.  So don’t even think about that, either.

Be Careful of the Myths You Celebrate

Nightwish is the best band. Ever. Probably the best that ever will be. In the history of rock and roll, no other band has ever written and sung such powerful songs about such a wide variety of subjects. The Beatles have had more popular hits, but they were just that: formulaic and catchy pop with the depth of an advertising jingle. I will bet that no other writers in the history of music--with the possible exceptions of Beethoven and Wagner--have captured the power of music as Nightwish has. I can’t believe I didn’t encounter them until I was in my 50s.

In the beginning of their career, Nightwish often sang about Christian themes and references (e.g. "The Carpenter" and "Angels Fall First" (1997), "Deep Silent Complete", "Bare Grace Misery", and "Crownless" (2000), "Bless the Child", "End of All Hope", and "Dead to the World" (2002)). Their genius songwriter Tuomas Holopainen is the one who often included these rather obviously Christian themes and references, which added powerful metaphoric imagery to their songs. 

With Endless Forms Most Beautiful, Holopainen has changed the myth, at least as far as the lyrics are concerned. Unfortunately, he picked a myth that is rather dull and powerless.  As one otherwise very sympathetic reviewer noted, being argumentative and negative ("Weak Fantasy" and "Yours is an Empty Hope", respectively) is at best out of place, and at worst  bad art [1].

I'm a research engineer, so I love science and technology much more than ordinary people do. My published articles indicate how much I believe in technology's capability to solve many of the problems we face today [2]. With a minor concentration on humanistic perspectives of technology, I also understand the philosophy of science better; it is partially why I don't worship science or technology.  Also, I learned early in my adult life (while competing in a wrestling tournament in Cuba) that false gods make false promises. 

Darwin, Sagan, and Dawkins were all brilliant scientists, and while science is totally cool, their myth is self-reflective and therefore as inspiring as our reflection in a funhouse mirror.  That said, if you have a message and you want to make it look strong and beautiful, have Nightwish deliver it.

The music in Endless Forms Most Beautiful is great and powerful, but that is undoubtedly because it comes from myths buried so deep in Holopainen’s subconscious that he couldn't remove the no matter how hard he tried. He grew up in Finland, for goodness sake! The sources of his music are the myths of Northern Europe--the same ones which inspired everyone from Christians like C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien to gnostic Richard Wagner and atheist Fredrick Nietzsche. The Norse gods have power; they inspire heroes with a bitter courage who stand fast to what right and good, even when there is no hope at all. They inspired Nietzsche's Will to Power, and his Endless Return; they inspired Tolkien's Lord of the Rings, and Wagner's Flight of the Valkyries.  With a genius like Holopainen to give form to the hidden myths of the Norse, it should be no surprise that next to Nightwish, all other bands are either wimpy and insipid or just loud noise.

But what will happen to Nightwish if their lyrics follow insipid myths? Their album announcement gushed over how one song borrows from a poem by Roy Fuller, which states "even scientists shudder before the beautiful". This is absolutely true. However, if evolution is truly blind (as materialism assumes it must be), then all beauty is fundamentally meaningless.  "We were here" is the oft-repeated phrase from both "Alpenglow" and "The Greatest Show on Earth", and it captures one of the most serious self-deceptive errors of the new myth. It is reminiscent of graffiti, a desperate grab for attention in order to fill the emptiness inside, and a futile attempt at immortality.

If we are to be consistent with the materialist myth, then it doesn't matter that we were here.  Why should the universe care? It doesn't. Mother Earth is a psychotic bitch who tortures and slaughters 98% of her children in the name of "survival of the fittest"--why should she care about you?  In fact, most devout environmentalists will tell you that humanity is a cancer on the face of the Earth. But to follow the materialist myth to its logical conclusion; “So what?”

Don't get me wrong; both songs are gorgeous.  But their lyrics reflect the bleak Gaian myth that all species must eventually die out. Sez who? It is true that a species that fouls its nest and destabilizes its ecosystem must correct its behavior or it will kill itself off.  But even if we changed our behavior to lock-step with our ecosystem, some football-field-sized rock travelling 10 miles per second will show up in the next few million years and do to us what its sister did to the dinosaurs. Those brainless reptiles were too stupid to build a space program that was advanced enough to stop the K/Pg asteroid, and so far, we're just as stupid.  The problem is not that difficult--from an engineering standpoint.  And before the start of the next century we'll have the technology to keep the Earth from being burned to a crisp when our Sun turns into a red giant 500 million years from now (a problem so simple that a high school student can calculate the math). It's our atheistic Gaian myths that stand in the way. There is no other explanation to the abysmal lack of imagination and dismal view in our culture regarding the future.  To make matters worse, Endless Forms even has a song about Carl Sagan, who certainly had relatively imaginative outlook that embraced the stars.  On the other hand, Sagan only wanted to look; he never had the foresight to view the extraterrestrial environment as a place into which the ecosystem of Earth could expand for as long as the universe exists.

Fortunately, most of us do have the imaginative myth created by Gene Roddenberry. Of all the modern mythmakers, he is one of the few who saw that humanity doesn't just have "a few decades under the sun", but millennia under the stars. Why is that so difficult to see? The sad thing is that many of us are living under a self-fulfilling prophecy.  But why do people want to be dead pessimists instead of living optimists?

The album's title track, "Endless Forms Most Beautiful" references a quote from Charles Darwin. “There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.”  Darwin was a bold and brilliant scientist, but sometimes even brilliant people say dumb, self-contradictory things.  In this case, what is the evolutionarily objective value of beauty? Does it contribute to the survival of the fittest?  How is objective beauty even possible in a universe driven by dumb luck?

Nightwish's hit single "Élan" comes from the French word meaning spirit, zeal, momentum. And it's an absolutely wonderful song (though it is rather strange to hear my elementary school-age children humming it over breakfast). Holopainen is undoubtedly referring to "élan vital" which was a term coined by philosopher Henri Bergson in Creative Evolution to explain what he believed was the driving force behind evolution. Bergson believed that living things are inhabited and propelled by a vital impulse (élan) that enables them to create their future by reacting creatively before all the obstacles they run into [3]. Strictly scientifically speaking, this is nonsense. Evolution has no driving force other than survival of the fittest. For the fittest to win a genetic lottery, the non-survivors must be tested to death.  Because life forms don't know in advance which direction to flexibly change, the primary value is not flexibility per se, but struggle.  Perhaps the Norse gods, who saluted a valiant struggle against insurmountable odds, are getting some thoughts in sideways?

Regarding "Élan", Holopainen said: "I live to be the ruler of life, Not a slave. To meet life as a powerful conqueror, and nothing exterior to me will ever take command of me.' This beautiful quote from my hero Uncle Walt [Walt Whitman] was the starting point for writing 'Élan'...The underlying theme of the song is nothing less than the meaning of life, which can be something different for all of us...It's important to surrender yourself to the occasional 'free fall' and not to fear the path less travelled by." (http://www.blabbermouth.net/news/nightwish-tenth-endless-forms-most-beautiful-making-of-trailer-available/)

Older Americans will immediately recognize the allusion to Robert Frost's poem, "Road less Traveled." And younger people of every age will rejoice at the opportunity of surrendering to the momentary free fall of a trampoline, a sled jump, or (for the less sane among us) a parachute jump. As Viktor Frankl pointed out in his "Man's Search for Meaning", figuring out the meaning of your life is much more important than fame, money, or pleasure. However,  Holopainen’s desire to be the ruler of life... well, yes, that would be nice.  But according to all realistic and ancient myths (Norse, Greek, Christian, Native American, African, Chinese, etc.), this is a fallen world in which everyone suffers, and eventually (even if nanotechnology enables us to overcome the seven mechanisms of aging) everyone dies. Our power over life, even with technologies such as CRISPR and DNA Origami, is rather limited.

One of the brilliant, and until now and almost unheard-of things that Nightwish did with "Élan" was to invite other musicians to cover it in a music contest. Bands and individuals from all over the world competed, and many of them were quite good.

A submission from Anahata, a Hungarian duo living in Romania, stood out for a number of reasons (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QycMGlCig1I). First, they rewrote the lyrics in Hungarian.  This sounds easy, but as Tuomas himself has admitted, he would rather write lyrics in English than in Finnish. This is probably because Finnish only has 301,000 words, while English has more than a million words (possibly because as a nation of immigrants, Americans introduced words from every other nation). Even though Hungarian is also a Finno-Ungric language, it only has 120,000 words. This means that generally, it is more difficult to be precise in one's communication. However, this ambiguity is *perfect* for poetry and songs--you can easily insert many levels of meaning--a more difficult task in English.

Second, everyone knows that an original song is almost always better than its cover. And when the original is Nightwish... well, everyone else might as well pack it up and go home.  So when I saw two young teens/twenty-somethings cover "Élan" in an old apple orchard, at first I did not expect much. True, Andrea Kovács has a beautiful, clear voice, but it was the lyrics that absolutely blew me away. How could Andrea and Necro Mango surpass the genius of Tuomas Holopainen?  I'm still in shock. It helps that I can speak Hungarian (at least at a 3rd grade level), but the power of their lyrics even resonates in the English translation.

How exactly did they do it?  The difference is between the myths referenced in the respective lyrics. Tuomas emphasized the luck and chance of evolution ("Finally your number came up... Writing noughts till the end of time"), while Andrea and Necro challenged listeners to forcefully embrace the struggle ("Destiny is yours, and is the world... Your will is steel... let some scars appear on you"). This difference is rampant everywhere you look; for example, in the cultural touchstones of Forrest Gump and Terminator 2.  The essence of Forrest Gump's life is artistically rendered in the opening scene -- a feather being helplessly tossed around in the wind. In contrast, the Terminator-destroying Sarah Connor carves the words "No Fate" in the picnic table, indicating that she has no fate but the one she makes. As a result of the myths they believe, Sarah has an internal locus of control, while Forrest has external one. And that makes all the difference in the world.

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[1] http://www.ign.com/blogs/conkersbadfurday/2015/04/12/nightwish-endless-forms-most-beautiful-review

[2] E.g. "Non-evolvable indirectly replicating nanorobots with self-assembling parts",

http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/articleDetails.jsp?reload=true&arnumber=1508500, "The Ethical and Political Implications of the Hall Weather Machine" http://www.nanotech-now.com/columns/?article=486,  and "A few lesser implications of nanofactories: Global Warming is the least of our problems" 

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/235889282_Toth-Fejel_Tihamer_2009_A_few_lesser_implications_of_nanofactories_Global_Warming_is_the_least_of_our_problems_Nanotechnology_Perceptions_537-59

[3] http://www.nightwishforum.com/index.php?/topic/3341-endless-forms-most-beautiful-2015/page-78

Response to Penn Jillette's "An Homage to Hummer"

Penn Jillette wrote "An Homage to Hummer" in the WSJ. He was trying to be funny and thought-provoking at the same time, and to some extent he succeeded.
The article is at http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304510004575186243922694492.html

A few thoughts:

First, the true freedom is choosing what is good (see http://www.acton.org/publications/randl/rl_interview_307.php) . The problem is that not that everyone knows what good is. Penn Jullete, for example. (Actually, it’s not clear that Schwarzenegger knows it either, judging from when, in his breakout movie Conan the Barbarian, he quoted Genghis Khan’s definition. OK, it was just a movie.).

Second, if Jillette’s Mini gets hit by a Hummer, he will be mincemeat. Not good. One point for the Hummer.

Third, the purpose of a car is not to feel good (applies equally to H2 and Mini drivers), but to get from Point A to Point B. Preferably in all sorts of weather and despite the lack of roads. Another point for the Hummer.

Fourth, most SUVs can double as tow trucks. I’ve pulled many people out of ditches with my Jeep. Of course, without warning lights it is a bit dangerous, as people have been killed by other drivers… But still, a point for the Hummer.

Fifth, the Hummer’s milage sucks. Granted. OTOH, the Army has been working on hybrid and electric Humvees (see http://dodenergy.blogspot.com/2008/09/hybrid-humvee.html ).

The current Hummer (H2) is a sissified non-off-road version of the converted military vehicle. The H3 is barely worth mocking. Ten points off for the H2 (and H3), and for the GM executives who decided to build them. Thank goodness they’re all getting fired (we should hope). Why didn’t they make a practical (i.e. normal wheelbase) off-road car with the portal gears so that they could keep the amazing 16” clearance?

Like Jullete, I’m not really a car guy either. My jeep is fourteen years old, and it’s my fourth one. What I really want is a transporter. But since they’re impossible, I’ll have to wait for the nanotech revolution and get Josh Hall’s aircar (see http://autogeny.org/aircar/index.html). Then we get global warming fixed for free.

Of course, then we’ll have other problems.

What do you want from life?

Everybody wants to be happy; the lucky few know that happiness is overated. And paradoxically, they are the happiest, for they know the meaning of their lives. The rest yearn for happiness and suffer in quiet desperation.

Deep down, we all want to be like Saints and Heros, who are utterly non-selfconscious about themselves;  They are aware only of their goals, and how they go about attaining them. But we draw back, frightened at the sacrifices they make.

The first Nobel Truth of Buddhism is that life is suffering. Therefore, if one wants to find meaning in life, then one must find meaning in suffering. The person who finds that has conquered the world.