On the burning of Sodom

 

Let’s be honest, Sodom was not burned because the degradation of morality had led to homosexuality, nor was it because the faith had been forgotten, given that the inhabitants of Sodom could still recognise when they were visited by an angel of God. Sodom burned because, upon setting their eyes on the angel, the people of Sodom could only manifest their appreciation of its beauty in a carnal manner. 

They tried to rape God’s emissary. If you try to rape the ambassador of China for example, it is quite likely that more than a few of your cities will burn. This is not an issue of homosexuality, since all angels are genderless, asexual. In this case the crime was rape.

Moral degradation means falling back to an animalic state, foregoing all that makes you human. One of the things that separate humans from animals, indeed one o the most powerful, is the capacity for self-restraint. Humans are different because they can control their base instincts and their animal urges. Without this self restraint, every man would go about raping 5 or 6 women per week, not counting all of the murders, robberies and other such antisocial behaviour. In the case of Sodom, the inhabitants had grown so decadent that they could no longer show restraint and knew no other way to appreciate beauty than carnally. For this reason, and likely none other, they were deemed vermin, and were treated as such.

Why wisdom should replace religion

Let's be honest, we have too little wisdom and too much religion. As explained before, wisdom is an underrated virtue, whereas religion is, bluntly put, faith turned into politics. Neither wisdom nor faith lead to murder. Here, then, is an argument why wisdom should replace religion.

Short story: Because it does not focus on the destination (i.e. what is after death or what is the point of all this) but rather on the journey there. Since nobody KNOWS the answer to any fundamental question, those who seek wisdom know not to listen to anybody claiming to know it. Prophets might claim to know the Truth so as to gain political support, and some might be genuinely convinced in the truth of their beliefs. Yet, in the paradigm of the wise, truth is always a matter of perspective, and the Truth of everything should be pursued individually, because only those who start the journey from scratch can fully understand its meaning.

Texts, legends, stories, rituals, traditions and other such religious practices are merely shortcuts on the path to understanding, and they are misleading. Imagine climbing Mount Everest all the way to the summit. Starting from sea level and reaching the top is a much more spiritual endeavor than parachuting a few hundred meters from the summit. Yes, these few hundred meters are going to be difficult, even with a map, the right equipment, and training. However, you will still have picked up from a shortcut left to you by predecessors. You will trust their judgement and their decisions as to how to reach the summit.

This approach is great for science, as it means you don't have to reinvent the wheel, or map out a new path to reach the summit of Mount Everest every single time. You merely use tried and tested things to create, discover or innovate. Yet it is not the case with religion, nor with wisdom. Any study of religion on the path to Truth relies exactly on questioning and reinterpreting your predecessors' versions of what they believed to be the Truth, in a way that cannot be proven or disproven effectively for lack of a way to measure effects of a particular theory. Religion demands that you believe what others have believed in the past, and accept the answers given to you, even though there is no way to test their validity beyond reasonable doubt. Going back to the metaphor, it is akin to making you use wooden wheels to get around, even if there are no trees where you live.

Wisdom, on the other hand, is all about rediscovering the wheel with every generation or climbing Mount Everest without any shortcuts. The point is not to reach the goal, to find the Truth, but to pursue the goal, to experience the journey... to craft your own wheel. This is the only way one can shape their own identity. There is no satisfaction in being dropped off by helicopter on the summit of Mount Everest, any more than there is in being told what to believe. Yet journeying there, feeling every footstep, seeing every sight, is the true prize. Wisdom is not about finding answers, but pursuing them. Truth is in the pursuit, not the destination, because the destination is irrelevant. Say you are told the Truth at a young age. What, then would be the satisfaction in life? What would you live for? What if knowing the Truth is the same as not knowing it? Nobody knows. And because nobody knows, wisdom should take the place of religion, and each person should find their own beliefs.

What kind of appreciation would you have for a Truth that took no effort to discover? Similarly, what faith can you have in a Truth delivered to you? It is not your Truth, but that of whoever believed it. Having a message appear to make sense to you is no reason not to pursue your own Truth. Who knows... in place of the wheels you were told to use, you might just discover wings.

On wisdom

Let’s be honest, the most important and most underrated virtue of all is wisdom, more so than courage or love. The reason for this is because nobody is born into wisdom. Children, when they are born, do not know fear or shame or guilt or hatred... WE teach all of these things and many more. Children are, indeed, born a whiteboard where ideas and ideals, values, virtues and vices are added by anyone having access to their minds. This is not an ideal state of being, as children are also born given to foolishness, driven by emotion and wants, and carrying a heavy baggage of genetic material that may be flawed. Yet, most do know love, as they feel, offer and receive plenty in its purest form from parents first and foremost, and some do know courage, either by lacking fear or facing it innately. The same is true of all virtues: generosity, kindness, mercy, patience etc. Some are simply born possessing such things and must struggle to retain these qualities later in life. Yet not wisdom. No child has ever been born wise, save for legends and religious tales, and even then, the spirit that dwelt within the body was much older and had witnessed much.

Wisdom is the most important of virtues because it is the most difficult to attain, and the one that shadows all the others. Indeed, one needs to master all the others before even contemplating wisdom. Now, defining wisdom is as difficult as defining love or honour. You will know it if you see it, but in its authentic form it is rare ... and precious. Wisdom is not just the cumulation of all other virtues, it is also the one that can never be had in excess. Yes, it is possible to have an excess of love (to the point of being blinded by it), or of courage (to the point of insanity), or of kindness (to the point of self-destruction) or of patience (to the point of never acting on impulse even when the time is right for it), etc. Yet there can never be an excess of wisdom, since wisdom commands not just what action should be taken and when, but also to what degree. It implies not only understanding of surroundings and awareness of the bigger picture, of players and consequences, of characters, times and strengths or weaknesses, but also intuition, knowledge, foresight and freedom of mind.

Wisdom is difficult to grasp and even harder to attain, which is why it is never too early to start pursuing it. Like the ideal of an absolute truth, full wisdom will never be truly attained, because the upper limits of it are as undefined as those of love and as infinite as the capacity for human greatness. There will always be room for better, yet the world today does not need for all to be Zen monks, but for a few more to set their minds on becoming wiser, without waiting for the passage of time to do it all for them. If time is an infinite river, flowing into a sea of absolute wisdom, one will always travel further by paddling than by simply being carried by the flow and by the wind. Even if, in the end, you are no closer to reaching the sea of absolute than the ones doing nothing or paddling against the flow, the first step in becoming wiser is understanding that the goal is not reaching the sea, but travelling away from foolishness each day. In the end, one must not seek to compare the distance travelled, but to respect the perils of any journey, as no two rivers are alike, and no two journeys through life are the same.

As it stands, wisdom is not laughed at or berated, nor are the wiser persecuted or their advice forbidden. To do so would be an acknowledgement of wisdom. Instead it is ignored, both in policy and in culture. It is treated as either a feat of time and experience, or is misrepresented as being different in each culture, when it actually isn’t. There are no songs about wisdom, no poems about its merits and it is often not even mentioned among virtues.

Why this is so has, to my knowledge, not been researched. Indeed, to research why wisdom is underrated and often overlooked would mean one first has to stop overlooking it and understand its potential. My guess is that there is simply no room for wisdom in a world dominated by the desire to have more. The wisest of us need neither power nor wealth. They are not heavy spenders and do not engage in political struggles, because they understand that such things are not only useless to living a complete life, but also harmful to the individual, to the species and to the planet... in short, to humankind as a whole.