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Human Beings Have a Desire for Oneness

Dear Friends,

Human beings have a desire for Oneness. They can approach this Oneness through an unselfish love for all human beings without exception, across all differences in religion, race, color, class, cognitive condition, and so forth. But human nature is a mixed bag, and people sometimes seek this Oneness by the systematic process of eliminating or enslaving those “others” who are different than “us” in some way. Thus, they seek Oneness not by openness and tolerance, but by reduction, as through Genocide, including the destruction of women and children. In our world today, we see the heavy conflict between those who want to achieve Oneness by overcoming boundaries and affirming our common humanity, and those who seek a Oneness that comes from the brutal elimination of whole communities and peoples. Those who prefer to eliminate are always arrogant and have a false Certainty about whatever they happen to believe to be true. They cannot tolerate ambiguity. This is why we need a humility theology, a theology about how little we know, especially about “God.” A friend of mine once wrote that human beings have no more certain knowledge of the Divine than a clam does about the nature of the sea, nor will they ever have. I for one believe that any Oneness consistent with life, liberty, love and freedom of conscience is not likely to come from the mixed human substrate or by reason alone, but through a spiritual sense that we are all equally loved by a Supreme Being (Ultimate Reality, Ground of Being, One Mind, “God,” etc.) and participate in it. In other words, hope lies in an Unlimited Love that Hindus, Christians, Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, and all other great spiritual traditions identify with an Infinite Mind preceding the Big Bang, beyond time and space, sustaining the universe, and that made us for purposes of free and loving creativity.

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Thanks,

Stephen G. Post, Ph.D., President