Wednesday, October 23, 2013

Co-Creating Community of Responsible Compassion

Where does vomit and diarrhea fit into The Sacred Scriptures? It is so easy to talk about heroics that include blood caused by war and sacrifices of flesh to the gods, but nobody wants to talk about the heroics of carrying on with your responsibilities when your womb is bleeding every month to expel a readiness that was not, and may never be, needed. Nor do we discuss the chores that are still done when this same process has the woman doubled over with pain. We simply walk away or continue to call out, "When are you going to feel better and take care of your responsibilities?"

Physicians refuse to remove the offending organ unless the physician determines that it is diseased. They willingly remove a man's reproductive capability as soon as the man asks for the operation and pays the going price. Dis-ease is defined as that which makes a person feels discomfort. Why do we allow physicians to decide when our discomfort becomes dis-ease and when it is simply another burden we have to bear because our ancestors angered the wrong god?

Before paternity could be proven, a woman was grateful for any man who would support her and her offspring.Though she may have been forced to bear the offspring, at least she had some hope of help in feeding herself and her family.Childbearing was a bit more progressed than in the purely animal environment, but not by a large measure. The lucky children were born to people who wanted to protect their family seed in order that the children could take care of them as they weakened, and to continue their lineage. Sex-on-demand was the reward human males were to receive in exchange for resources given to the mother to support her life and to enable her to parent the offspring. Of course, that usually doesn't happen when babies are vomiting on the mother.

It seems to me not an accident that human males became more attentive to their children when birth control for women became readily available and effective. It also seems to me that men became more open to having themselves sterilized when DNA analysis began to prove paternity. All the religions in all the world, for all of human history didn't scare people, through promises of peace or punishment in the afterlife, into behaving with responsible compassion toward their own offspring or other vulnerable parts of the population.

The religious people had a back door of sacrifice to the gods in order to redeem themselves in their own minds and communities. The children were often the scapegoats in these efforts. The non-religious felt no sense of wrongdoing, unless and until, they got caught and the wrongdoing could be blamed on them. Neither really believed that training the children in responsible compassion, through parental example, was important until science changed our ability to hold each other accountable for our actions.

We are still animals in human skin. Sex without committed compassion connected to committed community is simply the satisfaction of animal instinct, like eating and eliminating our waste products from our bladders and bowels. The promise of  family levels of commitment comes from religions; but, in fact, the blood of our own families is still stronger incentive to care for the young than is the blood of the animals sacrificed to "God" or gods.

It takes many years of devotion and example to bring a child up to their full capacity for humanity. Responsible compassion must be modeled for our animal selves to trust in the power of passion of a community not of our own blood. So few people in today's society take the time to passionately and compassionately parent their own offspring; the commitment is even more rare in parenting the offspring of others. Is it any wonder the we still experience both  territorial alpha and scared, submissive animals in many of our social endeavors?

Even Heaven is seen as having only so many seats, so the tribes continue to fight for supremacy in their sacrifices to their "God." We reap what we sow on earth. When will we realize that we have to work at being each fully human here on earth, while we build a community committed to creation of heaven on earth with each other?

Until this time comes, it seems to me that abortion is more responsible than the abuse of the poor little homo sapiens who may never have any human teach them how to become fully human themselves.