Why The Christian God Cannot Be Proven Without The Bible

A thought experiment: Image you’ve never read or heard of the Bible and don’t know anything about religion(s). Now think about yourself and the world around you. Also think about the breadth of the entire universe while you’re at it. Is there anything about your body, the planet Earth, and the universe at large that SPECIFICALLY points to a single omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent being that created the universe who also exists outside of the universe? Moreover, is there anything about your body, the planet Earth, and the universe at large that SPECIFICALLY points to the plans or desires of this entity? 

No.

The greatest problem facing the validity of the creator-god myth is something that doesn’t get brought up enough, if at all. 100% of the time, knowledge of a such a god precedes the alleged evidence found in nature for such a deity’s existence. No one ever in their right mind* with no knowledge of religion has ever looked around themselves and at nature and said, “This is all so incredible, a single entity of some sort must’ve created everything.” No one would say this having any knowledge of how complex things are created and built. While some complex objects can be built by a single designer and engineer, we know that this is no small feat and requires lots of time; typically more than six 24-hour days. There is also every indication that the more complex something is to design and build, the more people are required to complete that task. The Empire State Building in New York City had four architects and required hundreds of people to build it. No one, not even a person who knows next to nothing about erecting buildings would say of the Empire State Building that it looks like something a single person designed and built.

[*By ‘in their right mind,’ we should say ‘in possession of analytic skills’ as primitive men obviously possessed little in the way of reason. Modern man still doesn’t.]

Every single time, knowledge about a religion exists prior to viewing one’s self, the Earth, and the universe through that lens to conclude what one sees aligns with and affirms their beliefs. Here, we should ask why, then, are scriptures the only thing that establishes the existence of a creator-god? Why isn’t the existence of any such deity (and their plans) obvious from our existence and the world around us. A person left to their own devices, growing up alone and never coming into contact with another person would not come to the conclusion of the biblical god, for example. There is absolutely nothing about our bodies, our minds, the world outside of us, or the universe beyond Earth that specifically states that we should obey the 10 Commandments or accept Jesus as our Savior, for instance. No one is born with that specific knowledge. While Christians are fond of saying everyone is born a sinner (thanks to Original Sin), at the same time atheists are fond of saying everyone is born an atheist, the only difference being is that the atheist can’t be disputed and that’s no small thing.

It might be objected that, well, a book is just the way a monotheistic god goes about teaching people about his existence and the need to be saved. I can’t help but think, though, that imprinting his existence and desires directly into our minds without the need for other people’s input would be a much better idea, especially considering you risk eternal damnation for not believing in him. Considering that, God does not seem too wise to me when I can think of a better way of doing things, and particularly in the creation of humans. In creating a person, I would also re-design the knee, which is a poorly ‘designed’ joint. I would dispense with much of the universe as well, seeing how humans will never traverse most of that space. So why would I worship a deity I can outsmart on matters of design? Why would I worship a deity whose own book is the only way to ‘truly’ know them be so obtuse as to lead to numerous sects of Christianity that all profess to be the One True Religion? If this deity did exist, I wouldn’t have much respect for their intellect.

So the challenge to apologists stands: Is there anything about your body, the planet Earth, and the universe at large that SPECIFICALLY points to a single omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent being that created the universe who also exists outside of the universe? Moreover, is there anything about your body, the planet Earth, and the universe at large that SPECIFICALLY points to the plans or desires of this entity?

I already know (because I’m omniscient) that at least one Apologist will chime in with DNA as their proof. Only, the complex structure of DNA does not speak to a single creator as I’ve already pointed out, nor does the complexity of DNA tell us anything about the plans or desires of any deity beyond the proclivity to reproduce.

I’ll be waiting a long time for a good answer because all apologists are already tainted by and biased towards their belief, unable to be objective. Meanwhile, I am willing to be objective because I am rational, open to the possibility a creator-god exists given the appropriate proofs, those proofs being arguments or evidence of that single creator as described in the monotheistic traditions that do not fail, that cannot be objected to.

Come, Watson, come. The Game is afoot.

The Key to Being A Real Man

The hashtag #metoo trended across social media this past week in an attempt to make men understand how disgusting and rampant their sexual abuse of women is. This sparked an online conversation between a friend of mine and a male associate that went like this:

“Do you know how to hold these?”

Every female reading this knows exactly what I’m talking about. Someone who shall remain nameless IM’d me yesterday, asking what is “me too”. I explained to him that women were posting that to their FB pages if they had been sexually harassed or assaulted. He was skeptical that many women had “something like that” happen to them.

I asked: When you are walking around town by yourself, how do you hold your keys?
Him: What do you mean?
Me: Not a trick question. When you are walking around by yourself, how do you hold your keys?
Him: They are usually in my pocket.
Me: The next five women you see, ask them that question. They will know exactly what I’m talking about.

[I clarified that he needed to ask the next five women * he actually knows *, not just random women. Didn’t want him to creep anyone out. ]

Me: After they show you how to properly hold your keys, ask if they have ever been sexually harassed or assaulted.
Him: I’m NOT asking anyone that!
Me: Why not?
Him: Seems awfully personal.
Me: How do you expect to learn anything if you are not willing to have an uncomfortable conversation or two? Explain that you are trying to educate yourself on what women face in their lives. Explain that you don’t need details, you are just trying to understand the scope of how many women you know personally who have gone through something like that. It will be an uncomfortable conversation. And, yes, you’re right - maybe save that question only for women you REALLY know well. But if you don’t even believe that many women on FB have experienced these things, then you, sadly, are part of the problem. As women, we have all at some point in our lives experienced not being believed or listened to. That is specifically why some women don’t/won’t discuss it/come forward for YEARS. Some won’t ever talk about it. Every woman I have EVER met has experienced sexual harassment at the least. A staggering number of women I have ever met have experienced worse. It doesn’t matter what a woman looks like, her education, her economic status, her… anything. I have yet to meet a single woman who hasn’t experienced a moment of concern for her safety at some point in her life.
Him: I can’t even imagine.
Me: You’ve never had to.
Him: Well, men get harassed too.
Me [Oh for fuck’s sake. heeeere we go ]: And this is where we end the conversation because… No shit. No one is saying that. While it’s equally wrong, and should also be stopped, it happens in far less frequency than it happens to women. Hell, you don’t even need to know how to properly hold your keys.

Still Me: I’ve given you all the education I can stomach for now. Go educate yourself and get back to me. Go talk to your mom, your sister, your wife. Get back to me.

Men have enjoyed – and I use that word literally – a position of power over women for well over two thousand years now. While this statement doesn’t apply to every society on the face of the planet that ever was or exists now, it applies to enough societies to demonstrate the Patriarchy is real, that so many men have benefited from it and continue to do so (particularly religious zealots) that anyone who denies it is utterly clueless, like the man in the conversation above. The Patriarchy, as a societal concept, has even swept into U.S. government offices a score of men hellbent on controlling women, from denying them key elements of healthcare coverage especially as it relates to reproduction to ad hominin attacks against women like Senator Kamala Harris as being ‘hysterical’ when questioning a Trump cabinet appointee (men are never spoken of like this, not even Al Franken who clearly hates almost every Republicans) to ways of talking about women in a demeaning manner which has no bearing whatsoever on whether a man should be U.S. president or not. The whole point of the #metoo hashtag was to bring attention to this fact, that virtually every woman a man knows has experienced at least some sexual harassment, and that these same men – in being oblivious to it – are complicit to it. And this made me think; have I ever sexually harassed a women or treated a women as less than human because they were a woman?

The answer is, I don’t think so, at least not intentionally. I may have catcalled a woman in my youth, I’m not sure. If I did, I was wrong. Have I ever objectified a woman? Yes, and hopefully she was okay being objectified as I assume most Playboy centerfolds hopefully have. What I’ve certainly never done is badger a woman to date me or kowtow to my sexual advances. (Frankly, whenever a woman said ‘no’ from the start, I never pursued it further; I guess I’m either missing the ‘asshole’ gene or understand that a woman who isn’t interested at the moment isn’t likely to be interested later and I don’t have any right to assert my personal agenda on them – which I guess is what an asshole does.) I’ve certainly never approved of any legislation telling women what they can do with their bodies, and definitely not after what I may have done to their body, if you catch my drift. Jesus, can you imagine men being denied access to erectile dysfunction medicine? How fast do you think Congress would act? Faster than they would on gun control after 59 people were murdered and hundreds were injured in a mass shooting, that’s for sure.

Men, again like the one in the conversation above, have had the luxury of ignoring the problem because they are typically not the victim. Most men are so blind to the problem they don’t even think any form of sexual harassment has happened to any women they know. Well, men, imagine another man viewing and treating your mother, wife, sister or daughter as being less than human simply because they lack male genitalia, because that’s exactly what’s happening. Human beings love to exert power over each other and the Patriarchy makes it so easy for men. Why shouldn’t men be oblivious to the plight of women when they benefit so greatly from it? Because that’s what monsters do. Wait, what? Don’t like being characterized as something less than human, guys? Interesting.

To be clear, the power men have over women is not based on respect, it is based on fear. Power based on fear takes no mental effort. It takes no improvement of the self. It is weak power. This kind of power is not long-lasting; the oppressed will almost certainly seek a way out of their predicament if they are able. But to be respected – that lasts a long time. A gun in the face only lasts as long as the gun – or Bible or Koran or whatever – is around.

Certainly, there are women who do not mind being oppressed (maybe not raped, but repressed, sure). These are people who share a very human trait to not think too hard, to want to get by without having to do too much in life, who are content to let the whims of fate control them presumably because being the master of your own destiny takes effort. Far be it from me to insist any slave rise up and rebel, but it takes a certain simplemindedness not to see how accepting the role laid out for you by other people reinforces the system that enslaved them in the first place. Oh well, let the men deal with it; everything seems fine after all. Yes, a woman – if that’s their thing – is free to pursue this avenue of thinking. But they are not free to foist it on others and that is what their complicity in the Patriarchy is doing.

If it isn’t clear yet, it goes like this: Women do not exist for the sexual gratification of men*; they are not toys. They do not exist solely to bear men children; they are not property. They are conscious living beings who have rich experiences just like men. To say anything to the contrary begs for the man to justify his righteousness and SORRY, a book of mythical spouting isn’t going to cut it. ‘Cause if that’s the excuse, I’m sure I can find some sacred scripture that allows me to violate another man with a plunger and be totally justified.

[*Scores of men love to use women for this. I gather, though, that they do not like it when a women uses them for pleasure – men generally hate the idea of a woman having pleasure on their own terms – and then moves along. I’ve been there but there was the fact that the woman and I had an understanding before our ‘involvement.’ That aside, it’s also fun to imagine here what a world in which men forced themselves on each other and then claimed the victim was asking for it would look like. Okay, maybe not, but that’s the world women live in.]

It’s time for men to take responsibility for the power they wield. It is less then human to treat women as less than human. There’s no more being oblivious to what women deal with on a daily basis, not in the Information Age. Men need to start treating sexism as terrorism; if you see something, say something. You can’t take a backseat to this anymore. Own what is happening, what HAS been happening – that’s what a real man does. If you can’t handle the responsibility, well, what are you, a girl?

Me? I personally do not care about anyone’s gender or gender identity as it relates to daily life. I don’t care about anyone’s skin color. When it comes to people, all I care about are two things: That they are not an asshole and if a job is place in front of them, can they get the job done. I hesitate to call myself a Feminist not because I’m for the equal treatment of women but because I’m a human being with no special status in the cosmos* – in other words, mostly like everyone else – and this makes me understand that everyone deserves a fair chance. We, as humans, all on equal footing, should be lifting each other up, not preying on each other. Preying on each other – not some imaginary breakdown in a subjective, divine moral code – is to blame for the world such as it is. So enough already. Enough.

[* Don’t even think it, guys. Your god does not favor you. It’s a lie you tell yourselves to justify your actions.]

The Absurdity of The Book of Genesis (Part One)

The Bible has always bothered me on a fundamental level. Its basic problem is that if you were to read it without any prior knowledge of God or gods, basically not knowing anything at all about the Bible, it would all be very difficult to take any of it seriously. This problem is compacted by the assertion by its adherents that the Bible is the Word of God. This is to say that if the Bible is the Word of God, it should be understandable in its own right with no need for anyone to interpret its meaning(s). I believe anyone going in for a cold reading of the Bible would be blown away by its tall tales, lack of necessary detail and unscrupulous arrangement.

This is as evident in the Book of Genesis as anywhere else in the Bible. So, since Genesis is the beginning of the scriptures sacred to so many, it seems like a good place to prove my point. In doing this ‘cold reading’ I am going to use the King James Version of the Bible (KJV) because, uh, why are there different versions of the Bible? Obviously there would be a version for any given language, but for any single language? This bespeaks of fiction before I’ve even begun.

At any rate, I am going to open up the Bible to Chapter 1, verse 1 of Genesis. It reads: “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.”

The next 23 chapters drone on about God creating the Earth over the next five and a half days. Well, this would seem quite incredible even if we didn’t know anything about science either. You mean someone made the Earth in six days, all of it? Even if we were to accept this, Genesis is not at all clear about who or what God is which would be a likely place to start given the entire scope of the Bible. Worse, we’re given no reason why God created the Earth. (One of the most important things when writing literature is to give your character motivations.) Yet we’ll forge ahead since there may be as yet unrevealed motivations, though we might want to call into question the length of a day. [We might note here that use of the 24-hour day did not come into use until 4000 years ago, courtesy of the Egyptians and Babylonians.]

Chapter 1, verse 26: “And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.”

The first thing we might notice in this cold reading is that the word ‘our’ is used here, so it is therefore reasonable to assume that someone besides God is at work here. Who? We do not know because God leaves out these kinds of important details. God also makes man is His image, thereby giving God a definite gender. As for why God gives man dominion over the Earth and its creatures, again we don’t know. It appears God loves omitting details.

Chapter 2 gives us another account of the creation of man for no apparent reason except to clarify that woman was created from the rib of man, a feat surely no one has ever done before and should therefore seem extraordinary to everyone reading the Bible. Interestingly, though we know that woman are treated unequally to men in most societies, there is no indication here that women are inferior to men despite being created out of a man. Chapter 2 also begins to tell us about a place east of Eden where there is a garden in which the first man and woman will live. And, in this garden God plants two unique trees: the Tree of Life and the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. At this point we’re not sure why God plants these trees, but as we’ll see in the next chapter, this comes off as something of a set-up.

Chapter 3 begins with another of God’s creatures, a serpent, talking to the woman Eve. Eve tells the serpent about how the fruit from the unique trees is forbidden to eat as God has told Adam and Eve they will die if they do so. The serpent (which keep in mind is just a serpent because nothing here tells us otherwise) lies to the woman telling her she will not die if she eats from the Tree of Knowledge. The serpent also tells Eve the truth that if she eats the fruit from the Tree of Knowledge she will know the difference between good and evil. Chapter 3, verse 6-7 describes what happens next: “And when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was pleasant to the eyes, and a tree to be desired to make one wise, she took of the fruit thereof, and did eat, and gave also unto her husband with her; and he did eat. And the eyes of them both were opened, and they knew that they were naked; and they sewed fig leaves together, and made themselves aprons.”

Funny, Adam and Eve now know that being naked is bad and cover themselves up. So…okay…why didn’t God cover them up to begin with? Is God a pervert? And, knowing they have done wrong by eating the forbidden fruit, Adam and Eve hide from God the next time God comes around. Further in the reading, God has to call out to Adam to find out where Adam is and doesn’t appear to know that some serpent told them it was okay to eat the fruit from the Tree of Knowledge. So, nothing here tells us or even implies that God is omniscient, a trait modern believers always attribute to God.

But here’s the real problem with this entire scenario – Before eating the fruit Eve has no reason to suspect the serpent is lying. Even if she did know the serpent was lying, before eating the fruit she doesn’t know that lying is evil. Eve cannot even begin to contemplate the consequences of eating the fruit until after she does so no matter what warning God gives. At the same time, Eve did seem to know that the acquisition of knowledge is good. Though this is an inconsistency in the narrative, what we’re almost forced to take away is that God didn’t want Adam and Eve to know the difference between good and evil. Wtf? Angry with Adam and Eve, God banishes them from the garden before they eat from the Tree of Life and live forever. God also punishes the serpent by making it crawl on its belly forevermore, punishes Eve by subjugating her to her husband and intensifying labor pains, while Adam gets off relatively easy being punished to work the land for food despite the fact that Adam is just as guilty as the woman for this whole farce. (That is, Adam likewise didn’t know that eating the forbidden fruit would be bad for the couple but does it anyway and gets himself punished as well. With both people being guilty here, why does Adam get off easier?)

Closing the door on the first three chapter of Genesis, what have we gathered and what questions might we ask? We see that God made the heavens and the Earth but not why. We see that God made the Earth in six days and needed a rest afterward – an indication that whomever we are dealing with is powerful but not all-powerful. We see that there are other gods besides God, though according to this text, this god created us. (But, from what we know about created things, God probably had help.) We are unable to conclude God is good or even perfect given the circumstances surrounding God’s creation’s disobeying their creator. Do perfect creations disobey their creator? is a fair question here. We also see that God frowns upon the acquisition of knowledge and the idea of immortality, a disturbing inference since God’s motivations are nowhere in sight.

Possibly most damaging to the Bible’s narrative is that if we research and compare this cold reading of the Bible to cold readings of other myths of the region of the same general time period, the creation stories are noticeable similar. (e.g. Babylonian, Sumerian, and some African creation myths.) Do we dare read any further?

My Top 10 Favorite Books

I got the "Name 10 Books That Stuck With You" Challenge from my friend, Ruth. This was not easy since I like to read so many different things. So, yes, it was a challenge, unlike the ice bucket challenge which is just inane. In as close order as I could get them...

10-The Information by James Glieck. A fascinating review of the transmission of information throughout human history. I know, probably interesting only to me.
9-Hithching Rides with Buddha by Will Ferguson. Reading this right now and not even finished but this is my favorite travel memoir ever that recounts the author’s comic adventures as he hitchhikes his way across Japan, chasing the cherry tree blossoms.
8-Me Talk Pretty One Day by David Sedaris. My first and hardly last David Sedaris book. His memoirs are hysterical.
7-The Great Big Book of Horrible Things by Matthew White. The top 100 atrocities in human history, few of which which actually caused by religion (much to the horror of New Atheists everywhere).
6-The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand. Finer in scope than her more well-known Atlas Shrugged, The Fountainhead is about a man who holds himself as the measure of all things. I identify deeply with the protagonist, Howard Roark.
5-Lila by Robert Persig. This sequel to the cult classic Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance really hammers home some of the greatest problems facing Western Philosophy as a path towards knowledge.
4-The Tao of Pooh by Benjamin Hoff. I’ve always found Taoism attractive as far as life philosophies go, and here the author makes its ideas relatable through analyzing Winnie the Pooh’s characters.
3-The Bible. As entertainment, the Bible is hard to beat.
2-Encyclopedias. I grew up reading them because I wanted to know more about the world. I think it’s important to know a little bit about everything.
1-Comic books. Not strictly a book, but some of the greatest stories ever told have come out of comic books. Some of my favorite stories of all-time include Marvel's The Thanos Quest, DC's Watchmen, and Batman's A Death in the Family.

The Power and No Glory

"Nature, red in tooth and claw.” Lord Alfred Tennyson

There are many facets of human existence, yet none are as insidious as an individual’s hunger for power over other people. The hunger for power over others and the exercise thereof – the most obvious manifestations of Nietzsche’s Will to Power – has caused untold suffering throughout human existence. But the hunger for power is not unique to Homo sapiens; it extends back long before the birth of our species. Gorillas and chimpanzees, for example, in fighting over resources and mates routinely go so far as to kill their competitors (if not within, then outside of their group). This behavior is not unique to our closest genetic relatives either; such behavior can be observed in animals far older and removed from us, but who with whom we still share a common ancestor, such as lizards.  [Lizards share the same Phylum as Homo sapiens; Chordata.] The behavior of one human seeking power over another human has a long history. This raises some questions: What is any one individual getting out of it? What are we getting out of it collectively, as a species? Are the ramification for better or worse? Should we accept this aspect of our nature or seek to overcome it?

“Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man's character, give him power.” Abraham Lincoln

What does an individual get out of seeking power? The reasons for any one individual seeking power over others is pretty clear as it is the same reasons mentioned earlier – it is a battle for resources and/or mates. Seeking power may also be for the sake of securing one’s own safety or the safety of their group (though their own safety typically supersedes that of the group’s) or to inflate one’s sense of importance, from which other ventures requiring confidence can then take place. We can see these reasons manifested in examples such as an unscrupulous CEO that suppresses information concerning the safety of their product for the sake of making money, any clergyman or self-described mystic (or any person in general) who claims special knowledge, authors of self-help books who must first convince you that there is indeed something wrong with you, and we can see it in porn that typically treats women as objects. A March 2013 paper that appeared in Psychological Science concluded power makes people happy. Happy people are generally healthier than unhappy people, so there appears to be a biological benefit to having power on several levels, so long as you’re the one who has it.

What does a group get out of seeking power? Since groups consist of individuals, it stands to reason that groups of people would seek power for the same reasons individuals do. By extension, you get similar examples of this behavior as before; a CEO extends their power to a board which runs a company with a clear hierarchy and agenda, the mystic who creates a religion around themselves, a multibillion dollar sector of the book-selling industry, and institutionalized misogyny. Even capitalism, assumed by many to be a mere economic system with no inherent flaw, in practice ultimately becomes a system that sees people working in unison to gain power over each other through the accumulation of wealth. (If you’re going to argue that this is a stretch, I would counter with the need for reports on a country’s health in which economic growth is a heavily considered factor.) The social arrangement of groups that seek power form hierarchies where those closer to the top benefit more from the arrangement. Even those at the bottom get something from the arrangement, assuming they are not forced into the group by coercion or threats of violence. Individuals run great personal risk to their freedom (if not overall health and safety) by operating outside the confines of the dominant group. You need only to ask anyone in the U.S. who is not a Christian for confirmation. Even at a most basic level, social groups form some kind of hierarchy; there appears to be a need for some people to be more important or thought of as more important than others.

“What do men of power want? More power.” The Oracle to Neo in The Matrix Reloaded

Without doubt, there are benefits to seeking power whether as an individual or group, but it is clear that both individual and group survival and reproduction are the driving forces behind the behavior. But, what are or have been the ramifications on a scale beyond the individual or group? Generally speaking, death, suffering, repression and imprisonment for those of a lower or outsider status at the behest of those in a group fearing giving up whatever status they have attained. Those who have power don’t want to share resources or are reluctant to change their own ‘tried and true’ ways. Historically, groups seeking more and more power have formed tribes and tribes became nation states (though tribalism is still very much alive), with the leader of any given group easily leading their group to war with another group. What all this power-seeking does is legitimize the notion, through killing or some form of repression, is that some lives are more valuable than others. From an evolutionary standpoint, it is easy to understand why individuals or groups would think this way. If this is the way we really want to think or want to believe that it is perfectly okay to seek power though other people’s lives are the price, then we have to be able conclude – across the board and without question – that some people actually are more important than others and are therefore deserving of their lofty or privileged positions.

“Judge not, least ye be judged.” The Bible, Matthew 7:1

Traditionally, there are several ways to examine a person’s worth; it can be measured in terms of a person operating within a society or in terms of the individual itself, free from the constraints of a society. But to talk of a person’s importance free from the constraints of society is irrelevant; there’s no need to measure a person’s importance if they stand alone on a deserted island. A person’s importance is then measured by that individual. Again, irrelevant. Individual worth can only be measured by those outside of any given individual and in being given this power to judge another human being is to begin the process of power-seeking itself. Any judgment by one person upon another person is for the person doing the judging to effectively say, I am – in at least some way – better than you and should therefore have power over you. In Western societies at least, the rush to judgment is so quick, so automatic that it implies that collectively, we think that some people are in fact better than others. If some people are better than others, than to seek power over other people is perfectly acceptable.

“Since mankind's dawn, a handful of oppressors have accepted the responsibility over our lives that we should have accepted for ourselves. By doing so, they took our power. By doing nothing, we gave it away. We've seen where their way leads, through camps and wars, towards the slaughterhouse.” Alan Moore in V for Vendetta

Certainly, we draw arbitrary limits on exactly how much power one person should have over another. Murder and rape are generally illegal. So are many predatory economic practices. (Though, if you’ll notice, there is often a loophole regarding such things.) But, in general, it’s okay to seek power. Those, who when being judged angrily lash out with “Don’t judge me!” are saying so because they don’t like power being in the hands of others. Of course, those same people judge others all the time, though I suppose for people to be hypocrites is nothing new. Again, collectively, at least in Western cultures (and surely many others), we agree that power-seeking is okay and that the global impact it has is not so great that we regard the consequences as acceptable. Think about that – billions of lives lost since the beginning of recorded history alone – means there are lots of people who have existed that essentially deserved to be put to death or repressed for the greater good of others having power (or for anyone in general to seek power). If the consequences of power-seeking are not acceptable, the only recourse is to treat each person as equals with no regard for gender, ethnicity, personality or skills. Naturally, this is completely impossible, especially when it comes to personality and skills.

“The day the power of love overrules the love of power, the world will know peace.” Mahatma Gandhi

It may be that we tend to seek power over others because the alternative is impossible. Yes, we can and do place limits on the amount of power one has over another, but those limits are always governed by the ones who have the most power and the will to use it. So what do we do? I suppose recognizing the behavior is a step towards dealing with it, like alcoholics who have to recognize they have a problem before they can get clean. (Where by “dealing with it” I mean start a dialogue towards finding a balance between power-seeking and treating people equally since the alternatives are either negative while the other is impossible.)

I do not offer any solutions here; this is merely a reflection on what I perceive as a problem for the human species. Do you think there is a problem? If so, you have passed judgment on the human race. It is not so easy to fight our nature.