Homily Addendum

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Homily addemdum -- Confession as Enablement:

An excerpt from a recent interview in Slate with Pulitzer Prize- winning myrmecologist and sociobiologist E. O. Wilson (Altruism and the New Enlightenment). Mr. Wilson is an Alabama boy who has evolved in his thought:

So it comes down to a conflict between individual and group-selected traits?

Yes. And you can see this especially in the difficulty of harmonizing different religions. We ought to recognize that religious strife is not the consequence of differences among people. It's about conflicts between creation stories. We have bizarre creation myths and each is characterized by assuring believers that theirs is the correct story, and that therefore they are superior in every sense to people who belong to other religions. This feeds into our tribalistic tendencies to form groups, occupy territories and react fiercely to any intrusion or threat to ourselves, our tribe and our special creation story. Such intense instincts could arise in evolution only by group selection—tribe competing against tribe. For me, the peculiar qualities of faith are a logical outcome of this level of biological organization.

Can we do anything to counter our tribalistic instincts?

I think we are ready to create a more human-centered belief system. I realize I sound like an advocate for science and technology, and maybe I am because we are now in a techno-scientific age. I see no way out of the problems that organized religion and tribalism create other than humans just becoming more honest and fully aware of themselves. Right now we're living in what Carl Sagan correctly termed a demon-haunted world. We have created a Star Wars civilization but we have Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions and godlike technology. That's dangerous.

Mr. Wilson ironically echoes the words of Martin Luther King, Jr., who said, “Modern man suffers from a kind of poverty of the spirit which stands in glaring contrast to its scientific and technological abundance”

“Through our scientific genius, we have made this world a neighborhood; now, through our moral and spiritual development we must make of it a brotherhood. In a real sense, we must learn to live together as brothers, or we will perish together as fools.”