This Carbon Based Life

By David Glenn Cox

The problem, it seems, is that we as a species are morally defective. Mark Twain once said that we were higher than the monkeys, but lower than the angels. I tend to think that diagnosis is too kind. Homosapien evolutionary propaganda, if you will. Somewhere we’ve missed the boat. Ten thousand years of prophets, preachers, seekers, seers. Messiahs, missives, swamies, rabbis and priests. And yet, as a species, we haven’t evolved one foot from the spot where we began.

There is a component missing from inside of our big brains. We have eaten from the tree of knowledge but have skipped the tree of morality entirely. We use our big brains to paper over our murderous shortcomings. Twain also said, “God created man because he was so disappointed in the monkey.” If that is so, God is so disappointed in man that he’s given up creating entirely. Thrown away his tool box and given up the practice. Who says we sit upon the evolutionary throne? Oh, that’s right, we do! How convenient.

Dolphins don’t know war. Elephants don’t know murder. Dogs don’t know cruelty. There is something inside of us we can’t expel or hurl out. Jesus is the artificial manifestation of what we wish we could be. Our big brain tells us this is a goal to aspire to, but our biology corrupts that goal. God could send an army of Messiahs to save us and we would still murder them all. And what’s more, the crowd would still cheer us on as we did it! How can we say “sorry” for a massacre of innocents on a beach when it will only happen again, somewhere else, at some other time.

From the rape of the Sapiens to the killings in Venezuela, that is sadly who we are as a species. Murder is the dominant trait in humanity. I have a theory about what happened to the Neanderthals. Archaeologists tell us more and more that they were nearly as intelligent as Homosapiens. I imagine them as gentle giants, and we hounded and pursued them into extinction by their vicious, cruel cousins. Perhaps they were missing the murder gene? The entire course of humanity is a bloody trail of wars, genocides, and murders.

We have three great (So called) religions dedicated to peace and good will among men and we could build a stairway to heaven with all the dead bodies they have produced. Dozens of others teaching of spiritual enlightenment through fasting, prayer and self-reflection and all for naught. Rome was built on war, slavery and cruelty and we refer to it as a golden age. Rome taught us the lesson of prosperity. With enough grand palaces, slaves and creature comforts, we can blind ourselves to who we really are.

I don’t exempt myself; in the days of my warm prosperity I was suitably blind. I could live in my big house and drive my new car. I earned it; I told myself. But when I lost everything when the bankers crushed the economy. I came down to earth and learned about myself at the university of adversity. I learned what prosperity does to us. It separates us from one another. Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos must be about the most wretched characters on the face of the Earth. They step across starving children to build rockets and spaceships. They throw themselves on the psychiatrist’s couch, crying. Why am I not happy? Look at Jeffrey Epstein, if you don’t believe me.

It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter into heaven. A funny thing happened on the way to salvation. Since the Covid pandemic, church attendance has declined by 35%. Mega churches are closing their doors and folding. The evangelical movement is dead. It seems the diet of abortion politics, Gay marriage, prosperity gospels and the persecuting others has left the multitude spiritually unfulfilled. They have sowed the wind and are now reaping the spiritual whirlwind.

If we were created in his image, it explains our shortcomings, as well as his own. He created angels and gave them immortality and painless lives in paradise. And yet, at the first opportunity, the angels tried to overthrow him. The archangel Michael carries a sword and is known as the soldier of God. This god of peace and good will needs soldiers. Or Michael is the justification for our own soldiers. If God needs soldiers, then so do we!

A war in heaven, a war to clear the holy city of the infidels. A war to clear the land of heretics and apostates and non-believers. A war to clear Armenians, Yazidis, Native Americans and Jews. All in the name of god. It’s no wonder he has abandoned us. When we so often use his name as an excuse to commit genocide, ethnic cleansings and murder. Saying sorry just doesn’t seem to cut it anymore, somehow.

Our modern society, through technology, wishes to create a soulless, heartless electronic god. To lay off the multitudes and maximize profits. Do you see the justification? I didn’t do it! The machine did it! I didn’t make them poor; the machine did. I’ll fly to my private island where I won’t have to look at them. I’ll dark tint the windows on my limousine. They just aren’t smart like me. I deserve my wealth and so, ergo; they deserve their poverty.

Preachers and politicians use hate to fill coffers and win elections. Hitler had no love for Catholics either, but there were too many Catholics to persecute. Most people, if comfortable and well fed, want no part of violence. They also want no part of political office. But those seeking the pulpit and power use the handiest weapon available. They weaponize that ingrained ugly streak inside of us towards anyone different. The foreigner or the freethinker. The atheist or the woman or the man with darker skin or facial traits. They whip up a frenzy of fear and recriminations. Creating a victim for the multitudes to slaughter.

Jesus, Moses, Muhammad, Dionysus, Hercules, Heracles, Xerxes, Ra, Joseph Smith or Jim Jones. It always ends the same way, doesn’t it? We create our messiahs to prove we are better than our base instincts would imply. We have had ten thousand years to improve ourselves and yet; it seems we are going completely the wrong way, and have demoralized even god. I bet he’s sorry he ever started with us after his angels had let him down so badly. We’re no angels, we’re just murderous monkeys in shoes.

Strange, indeed, that you should not have suspected that your universe and its contents were only dreams, visions, fiction! Strange, because they are so frankly and hysterically insane—like all dreams: a God who could make good children as easily as bad, yet preferred to make bad ones; who could have made every one of them happy, yet never made a single happy one; who made them prize their bitter life, yet stingily cut it short; who gave his angels eternal happiness unearned, yet required his other children to earn it; who gave his angels painless lives, yet cursed his other children with biting miseries and maladies of mind and body; who mouths justice and invented hell—mouths mercy and invented hell—mouths Golden Rules, and forgiveness multiplied by seventy times seven, and invented hell; who mouths morals to other people and has none himself; who frowns upon crimes, yet commits them all; who created man without invitation, then tries to shuffle the responsibility for man’s acts upon man, instead of honorably placing it where it belongs, upon himself; and finally, with altogether divine obtuseness, invites this poor, abused slave to worship him! – Mark Twain