Is it possible to extend our first principles for those who harbor hostility?

Taking our very first statement (this link goes to it) used for the first principles of the television series, Small Business School, we attempt to extend it here to engage all things divisive, especially religious language and those who oppose religious language.

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.

* 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?”

 

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Even between atheists and believers

Perhaps all it comes down to is an answer to the question, “Whose metaphor is more meaningful?”   You will not find many atheists who deny science.  They do not deny the constants and universals that are always in the back of the science textbooks.

There are three constants within the sciences that remain clear, in spite of quantum mechanics.  The first is that there is order and continuity in the world.  It is the basis of knowing.  In every discipline there are multiple parameter sets where this is true.  Beginning in mathematics, a rather pure form of thought, abstraction and representation, we then move into physics.  It has multiple parameter sets as well.  There is one for Newtonian mechanics, another for General Relativity and Special Relativity and yet another for quantum mechanics.  Then chemistry and biology have their own parameter sets.  All these parameters simply establish the boundary conditions of what is being measured within them.

Each has a formalized language.  And, each has a metaphorical language that pushes into the edges of the unknown.

The sciences all embrace varying definitions of relations yet all of these definitions are understood by a symmetry function.

Specialized disciplines with each of the sciences hypothesize about the nature of the unknown, just beyond their limits of knowledge, and all these hypotheses are a study of the deepest dynamics of their discipline.  The experience of insight, the “ah-ha” of the creative surge, is experienced as a concrescence of symmetries or harmony.

The atheists mostly object to the use of specialized language.  They understand rules, mores, and societal law and order  even though many are nihilistic, others narcissistic, and many both.

Yet, change will come.  Some of  these folks will begin to realize that time is not a fundamental frame of reference and that there are qualities of life that permeate everything in every way, and that these qualities empower order, relations, and dynamics, and that these three scientific functions with the faces of continuity, symmetry and harmony just might also be understood with very personal language.  When and if they do, they are on their way to create a personal bridge to religion and some of the brave among them just may cross it.