The Double Triangle celebrates what it means to be human intellectually, culturally, and biologically. It emphasizes human origins and human legacies. The Double Triangle applies Revelation 1:8 (I am Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the ending, saith the Lord, which is, and which was, and which is to come.), not to a god, but to each of us. A family tree has the form of this Double Triangle, with the individual at the focus where the two points meet. The upper triangle represents our ancestry, which expands as one goes back in time: two parents, four grandparents, eight great grandparents, sixteen, thirty-two, sixty-four, and on and on. The lower point of the upper triangle is the culmination, the omega, of this long descent in a single individual. Each of us is also the alpha, the beginning, sitting atop the lower triangle, representing our descendants, which also tend to expand in number with successive generations. Each person is thus a singular gateway between a vast past and an expansive future. We revere our ancestors since they have made us what we are, both genetically and culturally. We do not revere them for their sake. They are gone. We revere them for our own sake so we can understand our human identity. God is not our maker. Our ancestors are. We should carefully educate our children and treasure them since it is they that provide an afterlife for us in their thoughts, actions, and genes.
The Double Triangle’s meaning is more powerful when applied to ideas. The upper triangle represents the culture, history, and thoughts that have come before us. A selection of this vast information converges in our minds. Through the amazing process of human cognition, we are able to use this information as the launching point for new insights, ideas, and creative expressions. These products of our intellect truly define us and form the most significant basis for our future legacies in our lower triangles. Our thoughts, unlike our genes, can draw broadly from a wide range of places, times, and cultures. We can work and study to increase the size of our upper triangles. And, unlike our genes, our thoughts have the potential for an influence that goes far beyond our biological descendants. The Double Triangle represents the convergence and subsequent divergence of information–genetic, intellectual, and cultural–as it flows through each of us, from the past into the future.
All the double triangles of all the people who have lived, are living, or will ever live overlap to create the fabric of human existence. Each of us is the focus of our own double triangle, but we also reside in the lower triangles of everyone who has taught us something, either directly or indirectly. We reside in the lower triangles of the important thinkers of past ages, and the people that invented, among other things, the pneumatic tire and the flush toilet. We will sit in the upper triangles of all those that we influence either directly or indirectly, now and through the generations.
There are double triangles of light and double triangles of darkness. Open minded, well intentioned people project the light of their own ideas and tolerance for the ideas of others into the world and into the future. By contrast, narrow minded people, those that would force doctrine upon others, are double triangles of darkness. They would have their views block out the light of reason and free inquiry for others. Significant sources of double triangles of darkness include racism, repressive political regimes, and organized religion. Of course, these dark influences frequently occur together in various combinations. Any system of thought that emphasizes obedience to revealed truth rather than open debate and inquiry generates double triangles of darkness through its followers.
The Double Triangle’s meaning is more powerful when applied to ideas. The upper triangle represents the culture, history, and thoughts that have come before us. A selection of this vast information converges in our minds. Through the amazing process of human cognition, we are able to use this information as the launching point for new insights, ideas, and creative expressions. These products of our intellect truly define us and form the most significant basis for our future legacies in our lower triangles. Our thoughts, unlike our genes, can draw broadly from a wide range of places, times, and cultures. We can work and study to increase the size of our upper triangles. And, unlike our genes, our thoughts have the potential for an influence that goes far beyond our biological descendants. The Double Triangle represents the convergence and subsequent divergence of information–genetic, intellectual, and cultural–as it flows through each of us, from the past into the future.
All the double triangles of all the people who have lived, are living, or will ever live overlap to create the fabric of human existence. Each of us is the focus of our own double triangle, but we also reside in the lower triangles of everyone who has taught us something, either directly or indirectly. We reside in the lower triangles of the important thinkers of past ages, and the people that invented, among other things, the pneumatic tire and the flush toilet. We will sit in the upper triangles of all those that we influence either directly or indirectly, now and through the generations.
There are double triangles of light and double triangles of darkness. Open minded, well intentioned people project the light of their own ideas and tolerance for the ideas of others into the world and into the future. By contrast, narrow minded people, those that would force doctrine upon others, are double triangles of darkness. They would have their views block out the light of reason and free inquiry for others. Significant sources of double triangles of darkness include racism, repressive political regimes, and organized religion. Of course, these dark influences frequently occur together in various combinations. Any system of thought that emphasizes obedience to revealed truth rather than open debate and inquiry generates double triangles of darkness through its followers.
ORIGINAL THOUGHT
Given the vast number of people that live and have lived, and the fact that we share the same genetically programmed instincts, most of our thoughts are not unique. Someone, somewhere, and at some time has thought the same thing. In most cases, many people, in many places, throughout much of history, have had similar insights. However, anyone who does any kind of creative work, either professionally, or as a hobby, has the potential to carve out new lines of cognition for humanity. When we write, compose, draw, paint, photograph, perform, build, or even redecorate, we hover between the points of the double triangle, drawing from the past and producing unique thoughts for the future. People that work in research or in industries based on innovative technology are almost by definition producing original thought. If you want to create new products and new markets, obtain patents or publish research papers, then the results and ideas must be original. As we think original thoughts we are performing the most divine act of secular humanism. We cannot count on the existence of a God, but we can count on our own ideas.
A few people have world altering ideas that greatly impact subsequent human history. Akhenaten, a heretic, ancient Egyptian Pharaoh, went against the religious establishment to invent, or at least be the first to promote, the idea of monotheism. His ideas either strongly influenced those we now attribute to Moses, or it is even possible that Akhenaten and Moses were the same person.[ref] The shock waves of Akhenaten’s profoundly original ideas reverberate throughout the world today, having only gained in strength over the millennia.
Why would a doubter of religion revere the inventor of monotheism? Because I am, first and foremost, a secular humanist. I revere human ideas and human achievements as they are devised, executed, and passed on through the Double Triangle. The courage and the genius of the individual who opposed entrenched authority to cast away thousands of years of polytheistic mythology and mumbo jumbo in favor of simple, monotheistic sun worship is truly inspiring. Given that virtually all the energy that animates the face of the earth comes from the sun, Akhenaten’s reverence makes perfect sense for his time, and still makes much more sense than the layers of mythology later generations imposed on his one god. We should not worship gods. We should revere great achievements in human thought. The transition from polytheism to monotheism, initiated by Akhenaten, stands in the first rank of those achievements, even if we now need to take the evolution a step further and admit that the existence or nonexistence of a God is unknowable.
Other examples of transformative religious thinkers are Abraham, Paul of Tarsus (the originator of Christianity), and Mohammed. In the world of science, people like Newton, Einstein, and Darwin come to mind. How about George Washington, one of the very few leaders of a successful, armed revolution to insist on imposing limits on his own power and limits to his own term of office? Today, Washington has become a symbol, largely divorced from the historical person, onto which people project what they admire or what they hate about the country he helped found. This is a great disservice to a dedicated public servant that towers as a good example over other victorious revolutionaries (Lenin, Mao, Napoleon, Fidel Castro, Oliver Cromwell, Robert Mugabe, etc.) who more often than not seize and hang onto personal power, repress dissent, fail to establish a legacy of workable governance, and end up presiding over something worse than what they overthrew. Mahatma Gandhi came up with an even better idea for achieving revolutionary change: non-violent protest.
How some individuals at certain points in history have conceived very original and important ideas is a mystery worth contemplating. This process requires just the right upper triangle. The individual needs the right cultural and educational background to enable their ideas. However, many others have shared this culture and had similar education and even similar experiences, yet produced no original or important thoughts. The process also requires just the right lower triangle. Their ideas need to be disseminated and adopted by others. No doubt, many more earth-shaking ideas have been conceived in people’s minds than have ever been communicated to the public or acted upon. There are important philosophies to be discovered on skid row and great geniuses in insane asylums. Some people may be insane because they are unable to deal with the torrent of their original ideas—ideas that do not interface well with the time and place in which they live. Perhaps they have gone insane because they can’t get anyone to listen to them or take them seriously. Some of these ideas may be truly profound and capable of transforming the world, but alas no one will ever know about them.
Finally, the process of transformative, original thought requires just the right individual interacting with the right set of immediate circumstances at the focus of the two triangles. The three components of upper triangle, lower triangle, and the individual need to come together in just the right way, and this matching of components is subject to the fluctuating nature of events. By random chance, some people may have the right background and the right ideas, but might be killed or otherwise muzzled before they can disseminate them. Others might have a bully pulpit, but nothing significant to say. In an analogy to the role of chance in genetic evolution, the set of great ideas and great thinkers that we have in the world is profoundly influenced by randomness. If we could do history over again, the fluctuations would be different, and thus the individuals and their ideas would also be different.
We should revere our intellectual and cultural ancestors because they have built our upper triangles. We should also meditate on the mysterious coupling of culture and technology, original thought, and randomness.
A few people have world altering ideas that greatly impact subsequent human history. Akhenaten, a heretic, ancient Egyptian Pharaoh, went against the religious establishment to invent, or at least be the first to promote, the idea of monotheism. His ideas either strongly influenced those we now attribute to Moses, or it is even possible that Akhenaten and Moses were the same person.[ref] The shock waves of Akhenaten’s profoundly original ideas reverberate throughout the world today, having only gained in strength over the millennia.
Why would a doubter of religion revere the inventor of monotheism? Because I am, first and foremost, a secular humanist. I revere human ideas and human achievements as they are devised, executed, and passed on through the Double Triangle. The courage and the genius of the individual who opposed entrenched authority to cast away thousands of years of polytheistic mythology and mumbo jumbo in favor of simple, monotheistic sun worship is truly inspiring. Given that virtually all the energy that animates the face of the earth comes from the sun, Akhenaten’s reverence makes perfect sense for his time, and still makes much more sense than the layers of mythology later generations imposed on his one god. We should not worship gods. We should revere great achievements in human thought. The transition from polytheism to monotheism, initiated by Akhenaten, stands in the first rank of those achievements, even if we now need to take the evolution a step further and admit that the existence or nonexistence of a God is unknowable.
Other examples of transformative religious thinkers are Abraham, Paul of Tarsus (the originator of Christianity), and Mohammed. In the world of science, people like Newton, Einstein, and Darwin come to mind. How about George Washington, one of the very few leaders of a successful, armed revolution to insist on imposing limits on his own power and limits to his own term of office? Today, Washington has become a symbol, largely divorced from the historical person, onto which people project what they admire or what they hate about the country he helped found. This is a great disservice to a dedicated public servant that towers as a good example over other victorious revolutionaries (Lenin, Mao, Napoleon, Fidel Castro, Oliver Cromwell, Robert Mugabe, etc.) who more often than not seize and hang onto personal power, repress dissent, fail to establish a legacy of workable governance, and end up presiding over something worse than what they overthrew. Mahatma Gandhi came up with an even better idea for achieving revolutionary change: non-violent protest.
How some individuals at certain points in history have conceived very original and important ideas is a mystery worth contemplating. This process requires just the right upper triangle. The individual needs the right cultural and educational background to enable their ideas. However, many others have shared this culture and had similar education and even similar experiences, yet produced no original or important thoughts. The process also requires just the right lower triangle. Their ideas need to be disseminated and adopted by others. No doubt, many more earth-shaking ideas have been conceived in people’s minds than have ever been communicated to the public or acted upon. There are important philosophies to be discovered on skid row and great geniuses in insane asylums. Some people may be insane because they are unable to deal with the torrent of their original ideas—ideas that do not interface well with the time and place in which they live. Perhaps they have gone insane because they can’t get anyone to listen to them or take them seriously. Some of these ideas may be truly profound and capable of transforming the world, but alas no one will ever know about them.
Finally, the process of transformative, original thought requires just the right individual interacting with the right set of immediate circumstances at the focus of the two triangles. The three components of upper triangle, lower triangle, and the individual need to come together in just the right way, and this matching of components is subject to the fluctuating nature of events. By random chance, some people may have the right background and the right ideas, but might be killed or otherwise muzzled before they can disseminate them. Others might have a bully pulpit, but nothing significant to say. In an analogy to the role of chance in genetic evolution, the set of great ideas and great thinkers that we have in the world is profoundly influenced by randomness. If we could do history over again, the fluctuations would be different, and thus the individuals and their ideas would also be different.
We should revere our intellectual and cultural ancestors because they have built our upper triangles. We should also meditate on the mysterious coupling of culture and technology, original thought, and randomness.
THE AFTERLIFE
If we understand that the only sure afterlife is in our genetic heritage and the heritage of our ideas and culture that we leave behind, then we should be concerned about the long term survival of humanity. Our lower triangles can only exist as long as human culture survives both physically and intellectually. Therefore, we should be very worried about those that would promote religion based "science" to school children or agitate for the inclusion of principles from their particular religion in civil law. They would like their lower triangles to obliterate all others. This must not be the case. Our afterlives depend upon it.
We should have a healthy concern about physical threats to the existence of life on Earth. Some secretly might be hoping for an all-out nuclear war or a comet impact because they think it will pave the way for the second coming of Jesus. The only thing such unthinkable events would accomplish is the obliteration of human life and civilization. Then our afterlives–our consciousness preserved in the minds of our descendants and in our writings, science, art, and values–will simply vanish from the universe for all time. With the end of the Cold War, a full nuclear exchange is less likely. A regional nuclear war between India and Pakistan or Israel and Iran, while devastating, will not erase all human life and culture. A disease pandemic could kill millions, or hundreds of millions, or even a billion. But, the diversity built into our gene pool will ensure the survival of enough of the population for the continuation of human civilization.
The scariest threats to long term human survival come from outer space. Space is a hostile and violent place in the extreme, and it seems that only through a very fortuitous series of accidents has our little planet arisen as an unusual oasis which shields its inhabitants from titanic forces and extreme conditions.
A comet or major asteroid impact could wipe out human life like the dinosaurs had been. According to astronomers, the next killer impact is not a matter of if, but when. The multi-million year evolution of our species and the multi-thousand year evolution of our culture have taken place in a window of time, brief in both geological and celestial terms. It has taken place between the last killer impact and the next. Perhaps we will develop the technology to send up rockets to deflect these space projectiles, but there are other threats as well.
Very long term, billions of years, the fact that the moon is slowly receding from the Earth will cause Earth’s rotation to become unstable, playing havoc with the planet’s weather. The cooling of Earth’s molten iron core will reduce the planet’s magnetic field which shields life on Earth from dangerous solar and interstellar radiation. This situation would make the ozone hole look very minor indeed. And finally, the sun, someday, will swell into a red giant, totally engulfing the inner solar system and incinerating the Earth.
So why should we spend any time thinking about disasters that are billions of years in the future? Well, we really should not worry about these things in any immediate way. We as individuals will be long gone. A billion years is such a long time that our remote descendants, who may look totally different than we do, will no doubt have developed the knowhow needed to survive. They will have this knowledge as long as humanity keeps inching forward, generation after generation, and avoids retrograde ideas, particularly religious fundamentalisms of all stripes. The adherents of these ideas would have humanity praying to fanciful personifications of divinity as the dooms-day comet hurtles toward Earth.
Instead, humanity must learn how to live and travel efficiently in space, Terra-form other worlds, and spread our seed throughout our little part of the Universe. And only by putting our eggs in many baskets will we ensure our afterlife: the perpetual existence of our genes, thoughts, and culture. Eons from now, on another world, the manifestations of our genes and our culture might be vastly different from what we know today, but we will still be part of these descendants, residing in some small corner of their upper triangles. Humanity is God, and Humanity must continue.
We should have a healthy concern about physical threats to the existence of life on Earth. Some secretly might be hoping for an all-out nuclear war or a comet impact because they think it will pave the way for the second coming of Jesus. The only thing such unthinkable events would accomplish is the obliteration of human life and civilization. Then our afterlives–our consciousness preserved in the minds of our descendants and in our writings, science, art, and values–will simply vanish from the universe for all time. With the end of the Cold War, a full nuclear exchange is less likely. A regional nuclear war between India and Pakistan or Israel and Iran, while devastating, will not erase all human life and culture. A disease pandemic could kill millions, or hundreds of millions, or even a billion. But, the diversity built into our gene pool will ensure the survival of enough of the population for the continuation of human civilization.
The scariest threats to long term human survival come from outer space. Space is a hostile and violent place in the extreme, and it seems that only through a very fortuitous series of accidents has our little planet arisen as an unusual oasis which shields its inhabitants from titanic forces and extreme conditions.
A comet or major asteroid impact could wipe out human life like the dinosaurs had been. According to astronomers, the next killer impact is not a matter of if, but when. The multi-million year evolution of our species and the multi-thousand year evolution of our culture have taken place in a window of time, brief in both geological and celestial terms. It has taken place between the last killer impact and the next. Perhaps we will develop the technology to send up rockets to deflect these space projectiles, but there are other threats as well.
Very long term, billions of years, the fact that the moon is slowly receding from the Earth will cause Earth’s rotation to become unstable, playing havoc with the planet’s weather. The cooling of Earth’s molten iron core will reduce the planet’s magnetic field which shields life on Earth from dangerous solar and interstellar radiation. This situation would make the ozone hole look very minor indeed. And finally, the sun, someday, will swell into a red giant, totally engulfing the inner solar system and incinerating the Earth.
So why should we spend any time thinking about disasters that are billions of years in the future? Well, we really should not worry about these things in any immediate way. We as individuals will be long gone. A billion years is such a long time that our remote descendants, who may look totally different than we do, will no doubt have developed the knowhow needed to survive. They will have this knowledge as long as humanity keeps inching forward, generation after generation, and avoids retrograde ideas, particularly religious fundamentalisms of all stripes. The adherents of these ideas would have humanity praying to fanciful personifications of divinity as the dooms-day comet hurtles toward Earth.
Instead, humanity must learn how to live and travel efficiently in space, Terra-form other worlds, and spread our seed throughout our little part of the Universe. And only by putting our eggs in many baskets will we ensure our afterlife: the perpetual existence of our genes, thoughts, and culture. Eons from now, on another world, the manifestations of our genes and our culture might be vastly different from what we know today, but we will still be part of these descendants, residing in some small corner of their upper triangles. Humanity is God, and Humanity must continue.