Okay, time to get my Geek on. Then I'm going to get deep and maybe a little preachy. Hopefully I'll do so in a mildly amusing way.
Way back during the filming of the original Star Trek series, a Vulcan philosophy called IDIC was inserted into the series. I've read it was done mostly as a marketing gimmick. Regardless of why it exists, I was exposed to it as a young boy and the concept spoke to me. "Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combinations." Being who I am, I turned that over in my head and rubbed it against other concepts in my life, and after twisting it around to suit me, made it part of my own personal philosophy.
Frankly I think a lot of who I am comes from reading and watching Science Fiction. For example, my sense of personal responsibility? I'll give that to Heinlein, mostly from Starship Troopers, the book. Which despite the awful movie, really isn't about being a testosterone poisoned idiot and killing giant bugs while driving space ships
way too close together.
As it happened, this IDIC idea rubbed against something one of my teachers told me as a child. She was a young lady with a child only slightly younger than myself and her other students. One day she told us a cautionary tale about failing to see the wonder in the world as we grow up. Her story, as I remember it, went thusly...
"My daughter and I were walking along the side walk yesterday, and I stepped over a weed growing in a crack. After a few steps I noticed my daughter had stopped and was looking at the weed. She said, "Isn't the flower pretty mama?" She didn't just look at the weed, she saw the weed, and that there was indeed a beautiful flower growing from it. You should hold onto that ability to see the wonder around you as long as you can. That is something that is hard for adults to do."
I have worked hard since that time long ago to do that. And it is. Keeping a "child like" sense of wonder, while behaving like an adult is not always an easy or simple thing. It definitely get's me "looks".
For example, the other day I was standing in front of row of server enclosures and just stopped to consider what I was looking at. Enough storage to contain all the text of all the books ever printed conventionally. Enough computing power to have solved all of NASA's moon shot problems in a couple of hours. All that from pocket calculators in my lifetime! I was literally dumbfounded with wonder. The person I was with looked at me as said, "Something wrong?" My reply, "No. You ever look at this and consider the complexity and wonder of it? That it all actually WORKS!" Result: Look from fellow techie signaling, "You are a weirdo."
Among all that computing power were connections to a literally world spanning network of such machines that has given rise to a whole new concept of being. Virtualness. I'll save talking about that can of worms for another post.
While progressive thinkers in the entertainment industry have certainly shaped my thought. So have words and traditions as old as man. I had a childhood steeped in the Christian religion. Not just one sect either. My parents seemed to be having something of a crisis of faith as I grew up and we went to many different churches over several years. Among them; Pentecostal, Catholic, Jehovah's Witness, Baptist, Evangelical. I spent much of my teenage years in discussions, some rather quiet and thoughtful, some not so much, with people of other Christian beliefs, as well as Atheists, Jews, Wiccans, even the occasional Buddhist, Hindu and Moslem.
And from these experiences many things coalesced in my personal philosophy. Two of them tightly bound. A total lack of trust and support for organized religion, and an abiding respect for the rare true believers. An envy almost. I'm not talking about zealots who preach against this, or that. I am convinced they are either deluded, damaged or hypocritical. And if I had to make up a list of sins, hypocrisy would be pretty far up on it.
No the true believers preach FOR things. Peace. Understanding. Love. They may be saddened, or angered, by the actions and beliefs of others. But they don't rail against them. They don't blow them up. They pray for them. Or they try to demonstrate by how they live and act, that their way is the right way. Those people have the power to save a soul if anyone does.
When I looked at how all this worked, it seemed to me that the only workable basis for me to look at life, was to try and see the wonder of creation. If god exists, his message to us is in that creation. And one of the most important parts of that creation to us humans, is us humans.
Stop. Take a breath. Put aside as much as you can of any personal preferences, beliefs, bias, etc. Think about it, what ONE thing is constant in all of creation?
Diversity
Infinite variations on a theme. Regardless of how it came to be. Created by God in seven days, or evolved from the big bang in 14 billion years...Infinite variation. In energy and matter. In animal species. In us.
So, to use the modern vernacular, don't hate. Look around. Take delight in the variations. Stop and enjoy the beauty of a weed growing up through the sidewalk. Look at your fellow man and his, her or hir peculiar notions and wonder that the same sort of being as yourself has come up with something so radically different from what you might have produced.
Do you need to embrace it? No. Just pause, consider, and enjoy the sight of the pretty flower in an unexpected place. My recommendation, take delight in the infinite diversity of creation.
