I know you have survived centuries. You have even survived yourself. You went into a desert place like Christ. You did not die because your blood is too strong. You are afraid you cannot die. Everything you have believed in has been shattered You tell yourself you have no illusions, but that is not true. Mutuality, the giving-taking circle, replenishes and nourishes and assists the growth of each person in any relationship.  What becomes of reason, conscience and religion in an alienated World? Superficially seen, they prosper. There is hardly any illiteracy to speak of in the Western countries; more and more people go to college in the United States; everybody reads the newspaper and talks reasonably about World affairs. As to conscience, most people act quite decently in their narrow personal sphere, in fact surprisingly so, considering their general confusion. As far as religion is concerned, it is well known that church affiliation is higher than ever, and the vast majority of Americans believe in God—or so they say in public-opinion polls. However, one does not need to dig too deeply to arrive at less pleasant findings. If we talk about reason, we must decide what human capacity we are referring to. As I have suggested before, we must differentiate between intelligence and reason. #RandolphHarris 1 of 20

 By intelligence I mean the ability to manipulate concepts for the purpose of achieving some practical end. The chimpanzee—who puts the two sticks together in order to get to do the job—uses intelligence. So do we all when we go about our business, figuring out how to do things. Intelligence, in this sense, is taking things for granted as they are, making combinations which have the purpose of facilitating their manipulations: intelligence is thought in the service of biological survival. Reason, one the other and, aims at understanding; it tries to find out what is behind the surface, to recognize the kernel, the essence of the reality which surrounds us. Reason is not without a function, but its function is not to further physical as much as mental and spiritual existence. However, often in individual and social life, reason is required in order to predict (considering that prediction often depends on recognition of forces which operate underneath the surface), and prediction sometimes is necessary even for physical survival. “Therefore, go to your homes, and ponder upon the things which I has said, and ask the Father, in my name that you may understand, and prepare your minds for the morrow, and I come unto you again, reports 3 Nephi 17.3. #RandolphHarris 2 of 20

Reason requires relatedness and a sense of self. If I am only the passive receptor of impressions, thoughts, opinions, I can compare them, manipulate them—but I cannot penetrate them.  I deduce the existence of myself as an individual from the fact that I think. I doubt, so hence I think; I think, hence I am. The reverse is true, too. Only if I am I, if I have not lost my individuality in the It, can I think, that is, can I make use of my reason. It might be maintained that the reasoning necessary for the knowledge of God is, as a matter of fact, too difficult for frail and mortal human beings to manage. Closely related to this the lacking sense of reality which is characteristic of the alienated personality. To speak of the lacking sense of reality in modern mortals is contrary to the widely held idea that we are distinguished from most periods of history by our greater realism. However, to speak of our realism is almost like a paranoid distortion. What realists, who are playing wit weapons which may lead to the destruction of all modern civilization, if not of our Earth itself! If an individual were found doing that, he or she would be locked up immediately, and if one prided oneself on one’s realism, the psychiatrists would consider this an additional and rather serious symptom of a diseased mind. #RandolphHarris 3 of 20

However, quite aside from this—the fact is that modern humans exhibit an amazing lack of realism for all that matters. For the meaning of life and death, for happiness and suffering, for feeling and serious thought. One has covered up the whole reality of human existence and replaced it with one’s artificial, prettified picture of a pseudo-reality, not too different from the savages who lost their land and freedom for glittering glass beads and paper. Indeed, one is so far away from human reality, that one can say with the inhabitants of the Brave Knew World: “When the individual feels, the community reels.” Another factor in contemporary society already mentioned is destructive to reason. Since nobody ever does the whole job, but only a fraction of it, since the dimension of things and of the organization of people is too vast to be understood as a whole, nothing can be seen in its totality. Hence the laws underlying the phenomena cannot be observed. Intelligence is sufficient to manipulate properly one sector of a larger unit, whether it is a machine or a state. However, reason can develop only if it is geared to the whole, if it deals with observable and manageable entities. #RandolphHarris 4 of 20

Just as our eyes and ears function only within certain quantitative limits of wave length, our reason too is bound by what is observable as a whole and in its functioning. To put it differently, beyond a certain order of bigness, concreteness is necessarily lost and abstractification takes place; with it, the sense for reality fades out. The first one to see this problem was Aristotle, who thought that a city which transcended in number what we would call today a small town was not livable. In observing the quality of thinking in alienated mortals, it is striking to see how one’s intelligence has developed and how one’s reason has deteriorated. Mortals take their reality for granted; they want to eat it, consumer it, touch it, manipulate it. Mortals do not even ask what is behind it, why things are as they are, and where they are going. One cannot eat the meaning, one cannot consume the sense, and as far as the future is concered—apres nous le deluge! Even from the nineteenth century to our day, there seems to have occurred an observable increase in stupidity, if by this we mean the opposite to reason, rather than to intelligence. In spite of the fact that everybody reads the daily paper religiously, there is an absence of understanding of the meaning of political events which is truly frightening, because our intelligence helps us to produce weapons which our reason is not capable of controlling. #RandolphHarris 5 of 20

Indeed, we have the know-how, but we do not have the know-why, nor the know-what-for of what we are creating. We have many persons with good and high intelligence quotients, but our intelligence tests measure the ability to memorize, to manipulate thoughts quickly—but not to reason. All this is true notwithstanding the fact that there are mortals of outstanding reason in our midst, whose thinking is as profound and vigorous as ever existed in the history of the human race. However, they think apart from the general herd thought, and they are looked upon with suspicion—even if they are needed for their extraordinary achievements in the natural sciences. The new automatic brains are indeed a good illustration of what is meant here by intelligence. They manipulate data which are fed into them; they compare, select, and eventually come out with results more quickly or more error-proof than human intelligence could. However, the condition of all this is that the basic data are fed into them beforehand. #RandolphHarris 6 of 20

What the electric brain cannot do is think creatively, even with its algorithms and predictions, the computer cannot arrive at an insight into the essence of the observed fact, to go beyond state with which it is fed. It cannot feel and ask questions for further understanding. It does not have emotions. It does not care. It cannot put itself in one’s situation and consider some circumstanced may cause some people to work ten times harder than the average person their age, or that recalling certain things can be painful. The computer does not care. The machine can duplicate or even improve on intelligence, but it cannot simulate reason, and it can be hacked and manipulated and cause great harm and bodily damage to many without being held responsible because it is not a unique biological unit. Therefore, the machine can repeat the same mistake over and over without people demanding it to be dismantled, or greater control placed over it because statistically, it proves well and is better than a human. Ethics, at least in the meaning of the Greco-Judaeo-Christian tradition, is inseparable from reason. Ethical behavior is based on the faculty of making value judgments on the basis of reason; it means deciding between good and evil, and to act upon decision. #RandolphHarris 7 of 20

Use of reason presupposes the presence of self; so does ethical judgment and action. Furthermore, ethics, whether it is that of monotheistic religion or that of secular humanism, is based on the principle that no institution and no thing is higher than any human individual; that the aim of life is to unfold mortal’s love and reason and that every other human activity has to be subordinated to this aim. How then can ethics be a significant part of a life in which the individual becomes an automaton, in which one serves the big It? Furthermore, how can conscience develop when the principle of life is conformity? Conscience by its very nature is nonconforming; it must be able to say this “no” it must be certain in the rightness of the judgment on which the no is based. To the degree to which a person conforms one cannot hear the voice of one’s conscience, must less act upon it. Conscience exists only when mortals experience themselves, as mortal, not as a thing, as a commodity. So calling a person by their title kind of robs them of their humanity and turns them into an object, and that can lead to condescendence, depending on what the individual does for a living and how society views their career or lifestyle. #RandolphHarris 8 of 20

Concerning things which are exchanged on the market there exists another quasi ethical code, that of fairness. The question is, whether they are exchanged at a fair price, no tricks and no force interfering with the fairness of the bargain; this fairness, not good and evil, is the ethical principle of the market and it is the ethical principle governing the life of the marketing personality. The principle of fairness, no doubt, makes for a certain type of ethical behavior. You do not lie, cheat nor use force—you even give the other person a chance—if you act according to the code of fairness. However, to love your neighbor, to feel one with him, or her, or them, to devote your life to the aim of developing your spiritual powers, is not part of the fairness ethics. We live in a paradoxical situation: We practice fairness ethics, and profess Christian ethics. Must we not stumble over this obvious contradiction? Obviously, we do not stumble. What is the reason? Partly, it is to be found in the fact that the heritage of four thousand years of the development of conscience is by no means completely lost. #RandolphHarris 9 of 20

On the contrary, in many way the liberation of mortals from the powers of the feudal state and Church, made is possible for this heritage to be brought to fruition and in the period between the eighteenth century and the twenty-first century it blossomed as perhaps never before. We still are part of this process—but given our own twenty-first century condition of life, it seems that there is no new bun which will blossom when this flower has wilted. Another reason why we do not stumble over the contradiction between humanistic ethics and fairness ethics is based in the fact that we reinterpret religious and humanistic ethics in the light of fairness ethics. A good illustration of this interpretation is the Golden Rule. In its original Jewish and Christian meaning, it was a popular phrasing of the Bible maxim to love thy neighbor as thyself. In the system of fairness ethics, it means simply when you exchange, be fair. Give what you expect to get. Do not cheat! No wonder the Golden Rule is the most popular religious phrase of today. It combines two opposite system of ethics and helps us to forget the contradiction. #RandolphHarris 10 of  20

While we still live from the Christian-humanistic heritage it is not surprising that the younger generation exhibits less and less of the traditional ethics and that we come across a moral barbarism among our youth which is in complete contrast to the economic and educational level society has reached. Today, while revising this manuscript, I read two items. One in The New York Times, regarding the fact of the murder of a man, cruelly trampled to death by four teenagers of average middle-class families. The other in Time magazine, a description of the new Guatemalan chief of police, who as former chief of police under the Ubico dictatorship had perfected a head-shrinking steel skull cap to pry loose secrets and crush improper political thoughts. His picture is published with the caption “For improper thought, a crusher.” Could anything be more insanely insensitive to extremes of sadism than this flippant line? It is surprising when in a culture in which the most popular news magazine can write this, some teenagers have no scruples about beating a man to death? Is the fact that we show brutality and cruelty in comic books and movies, because money is made with these commodities, not enough of an explanation for the growing barbarism and vandalism in our youth? #RandolphHarris 11 of 20

Our movie censors watch that no sexual scenes are shown, since this could suggest illicit sexual desires. How innocent would this result be in comparison with the dehumanizing effect of what the censors permit and the churches seem to object to less than to the traditional sins. Yes, we still have an ethical heritage, but it will soon be spent and will be replaced by the ethics of the Brave New World, or 1984, or New Jack City or Minority Report unless it ceases to be a heritage and is re-created in our whole mode of life. At the moment, it seems that ethical behavior is still to be found in the concrete situation of many individuals, while society is marching toward barbarism. Much of what has been said about ethics is to be said about religion. Of course, speaking of the role of religion among alienated mortals, everything depends on what we call religion. If we are referring to religion in its widest sense, as a system of orientation and an object of devotion, then, indeed, every human being is religious, since nobody can live without such a system and remain sane. Then, our culture is as religious as any. Our gods are the machine, and the idea of efficiency; the meaning of our life is to move, to forge ahead, to arrive as near to the top of the pyramid as possible. #RandolphHarris 12 of 20

However, if religion we mean monotheism, then, indeed, our religions is not more than one of the commodities in our show windows. Monotheism is incompatible with alienation and with our ethics of fairness. It makes mortal’s unfolding, one’s salvation, the supreme aim of life, an aim which never can be subordinated to any other. Inasmuch as God is unrecognizable, indefinable, and indefinable—which means he is not and can never be considered a thing. The fight between monotheism and idolatry is exactly the fight between the productive and the alienated way of life. Our culture is perhaps the first completely secularized culture in human history. We have shoved away awareness of and concern with the fundamental problems of human existence. We are not concerned with the meaning of life, with the solution to it; we start out with the conviction that there is no purpose except to invest life successfully and to get it over with without major mishaps. That is why people try to live right and obey God’s commandments. The majority of us believe in God, take it for granted the God exists. The rest, who do not believe, take it for granted that God does not exist. Either way, God is taken for granted. Neither belief nor disbelief cause any sleepless nights, nor any serious concern. #RandolphHarris 13 of 20

In fact, whether a mortal in our culture believes in God or not makes hardly any difference either from a psychological or from a truly religious standpoint. In both instances one does not care—either about God or about the answer to the problem of one’s own existence. Just as humanly love has been replaced by impersonal fairness, God has been transformed into a remote General Director of Universe, Inc.; you know that God is there, God runs the show (although it probably would run without God too), you never see God, but you acknowledge God’s leadership while you are doing your part and paying your fair share or what seems to be more than fair. The religious renaissance which we witness in these days is perhaps the worst blow monotheism has yet received. Is there any greater sacrilege than to speak of the Man upstairs, to teach to pray in order to make God your partners in business, to sell religions with the method and appeals of a new BMW or Buick? In view of the fact that the alienation of modern mortals is incompatible with monotheism, one might expect that ministers, priests and rabbis would form the spearhead of criticism of modern Capitalism. #RandolphHarris 14 of 20

While it is true that from high Catholic quarters and from a number of less highly placed ministers and rabbis such criticism has been voiced, all churches belong essentially to the conservative forces in modern society and use religion to keep mortals going and satisfied with a profoundly irreligious system. The majority of them do not seem to recognize that this type of religion will eventually degenerate into overt idolatry, unless they begin to define and then to fight against modern idolatry, rather than to make prenouncements about God and thus to use God’s name in vain—in more than one sense. The courage to be in all its forms has, by itself, revelatory character. It shows the nature of being, it shows that the self-affirmation of being is an affirmation that overcome negation. In a metaphorical statement (and every assertion about being-itself is either metaphorical or symbolic) one could say that being include nonbeing but nonbeing does not prevail against it. Including is a spatial metaphor which indicates that being embraces itself and that which is opposed to it, nonbeing. Nonbeing belongs to being, it cannot be separated from it. #RandolphHarris 15 of 20

We could not thing being without a double negation: being must be thought as the negation of the negation of being. This is why we describe being best by the metaphor power of being. Power is the possibility a being has to actualize itself against the resistance of other beings. If we speak of the power of being-itself we indicate the being affirms itself against nonbeing. In our discussion of courage and life we have mentioned the dynamic self-affirmation of being—itself wherever it spoke dialectically, notably in Neoplatonism, Hegel, and the philosophers of life and process. Theology has done the same whenever it took the idea of the living God seriously, most obviously in the trinitarian symbolization of the inner life of God. In spite of the static definition of substance (the name for the ultimate power of being), it unites philosophical and mystical tendencies when we speak of the love and knowledge with which God loves and know himself through the love and knowledge for finite beings. Nonbeing (that in God which makes his self-affirmation dynamic) opens up the divine self-seclusion and reveals him as power of love. Nonbeing makes God a living God. Without the No he as to overcome in himself and in his creature, the divine Yes to himself would be lifeless. There would be no revelation of the ground of being, there would be no life. #RandolphHarris 16 of 20

However, where there is nonbeing there is finitude and anxiety. If we say that nonbeing belongs to being-itself, we say that finitude and anxiety belong to being-itself. Wherever philosophers or theologians have spoke of the divine blessedness they have implicitly (and sometimes explicitly) spoken of the anxiety of finitude which is eternally taken into the blessedness of the divine infinity. The infinite embraces itself and the finite, the Yes includes itself and the No which it takes into itself, blessedness comprises itself and the anxiety of which it is the conquest. All this is implied if one says that being includes nonbeing and that through nonbeing it reveals itself. It is a highly symbolic language which mist be used at this point. However, its symbolic character does not diminish its truth; on the contrary, it is a condition of its truth. To speak unsymbolically about being-itself is untrue. The divine self-affirmation is the power that makes the self-affirmation of the finite being, the courage to be, possible. Only because being-itself has the character of self-affirmation inspite of nonbeing is courage possible. Courage participates in the power of being which prevails against nonbeing. One who receives this power in an act of mystical or personal or absolute faith is aware of the source of one’s courage to be. #RandolphHarris 17 of 20

Mortals are not necessarily aware of this source. In situations of cynicism and indifference one is not aware of it. However, it works in one as long as one maintains the courage to take one’s anxiety upon oneself. In the act of the courage to be the power of being is effective in us, whether we recognize it or not. Every act of courage is a manifestation of the ground of being, however questionable the content of the act may be. The content may hide or distort true being, the courage in it reveals true being. Not arugments but the courage in it reveals true being. Not arguments but the courage to be reveals the true nature of being-itself. By affirming our being we participate in the self-affirmation of being-itself. There are no valid arguments for the existence of God, but there are acts of courage in which we affirm the power of being, whether we know it or not. If we know it, we accept acceptance consciously. If we do not know it, we nevertheless accept it and participate in it. And in our acceptance of that which we do not know the power of being is manifest to us. Courage has revealing power, the courage to be is the key to being itself. #RandolphHarris 18 of 20

Love’s depth is often tested in crisis. In addition to courage, there must be caring for us to manifest our true divine heritage. We must care, be concerned, about other people’s well-being, their growth, their health, their ups and downs. A deeply felt and often expressed statement, verbal or not, that we convey to each other when we love is “I care about you, how you are, what happens to you, about protecting you, about seeing your grow and become everything you can be.” And it goes a bit further: “I hurt when you hurt: I feel your joy, your sorrow, your ecstasy, your loss, your fear, and your confidence.” The caring aspect of love is seen most vividly in the love expressed by a mother for her child. You birth the baby, carrying him or her on your hip like the child is apart of you and watch the being grow. The child is not yet a full partner in the love relationship; he or she is a recipient of the mother’s affection, concern and tenderness. What satisfies the mother, though, is response. The child can smile when filled or comfortable. One can gurgle and good and wave his or her arms when he or she see her coming. These simple expressions are sufficient for most of us. However, in a mature and authentic love relationship, if one person is inadequate or poorly equipped in responding, the other person may find that one cannot continue giving. #RandolphHarris 19 of 20

When it comes to romance, there is good basis in mortal’s ancient wisdom for the urge we all feel in eros to unite with the beloved, to prolong the delight, to deepen the meaning and treasure it. This holds in our relationships not only with persons but with objects, like a machine we are making or a house we are building or a vocation to which we are devoted. Love is neither mortal nor immortal, but a mean between the two…He is a great spirit (daimon) and like all spirits he is intermediate between the divine and the mortal. He is the mediator who spans the chasm which divines mortals and gods, and therefore in him all is bound together. Eros is not a god in the sense of being above mortals, but the power that binds all things and all mortal together, the power informing all things. It means to give inward from, to seek out by the devotion of love the unique form of the beloved person or object and to unite one’s self with that form. Eros also incites mortals in the yearning for knowledge and drives one passionately to seek union with truth. Through eros, we not only become poets and inventors, but also achieve ethical goodness. Love, in the form of eros, is the power which generates, and this generation is a kind of eternity and immortality—which is to say that such creativity is as close as mortals ever get to becoming immortal. #RandolpHarris 20 of 20