Is it possible to extend our first principles for those who harbor hostility?
Divisiveness in business, family life, culture and ethics,, political life, religion, and even the sciences actually hurts all business. Divisiveness includes lying, stealing and cheating as well as waste, greed, and corruption.
What makes us human? … ethical? What gives us hope, depth, perspective?
Deep within the fabric of life there is an abiding thrust to make things better, more perfect. Though a cornerstone of business (value creation and exchange), there is much more.
There are three forms within functions that define an increasingly perfected state within every experience:
• The first form that defines our humanity is continuity, and its most basic function, a simple perfection, is to create order. In the traditions of the Abrahamic faiths — Judaism, Christianity, and Islam — this is the Creator-Sustainer God. Any order, that creates continuity, is a metaphor as well as a direct expression for the Creator-Sustainer God.
• The second form is symmetry and in its perfection functions to create relations. In the Abrahamic tradition the perfection of that symmetry is the love doctrine, i.e., to love God with all one’s heart, soul, mind and strength, and one’s neighbor as oneself. Any symmetry that creates real relations is a metaphor and a direct expression of the presence of the Love of God.
• The third form is dynamics and its perfection, a complex symmetry extended within time, is harmony. Again, in the Abrahamic tradition, the gift of the Holy Spirit is God transcending a moment in space and time to create a profound joy, deep insight, compelling love… simply a moment of perfection. Any dynamic experienced as a harmony is a metaphor, albeit the real presence, of God’s Holy Spirit within that moment.
Every scientific and religious assertion, both seeking to understand and define the universal, begins with the same first principle and evolves within its own understanding to the second and third. Therefore we have a diversity of faith statements which includes all of the sciences.
This is also the basis of the value chain. The more perfect a moment or an experience is, OR the more perfected a thing or system is, the more valuable it becomes. Thus, we have the beginnings of business. Here is the baseline beginning of value and values.
Any assertion that counters life’s evolving perfections is not religion (at best, it’s a cult*); it is also not business (it’s exploitation or a bad company); certainly it is not good government; and most often, it is not even good science.
There are scientific endeavors that observe, quantify and qualify that which is fundamentally based on discontinuities or chaos, but these studies require the inherent continuities of mathematics and other universal-and-constants to even grasp the nature of that discontinuity. –BEC
* Extremism (also, a radical elitism) in any form is not religion; it is a cult. Those groups that condone killing could readily be labeled a cult of death that respects only their own, self-defined principles of continuity that inherently create discontinuities. Although there is a lot of attention being focused on the extremists within all religions, Islamic extremists demand the most attention. These people have not grasped the fullness of Allah, and the distinction between the historic revelations and the universal revelations. They also fail to grasp and integrate the necessary universals that extend from the sciences through Allah. And for those of us who do not know Arabic, Allah is the Arabic word for God, yet without question the many different “takes” on God could be more readily integrated if all religions were to ask, “What is God’s perfection? How can we know anything about it?”