I think human beings are just. If we strip away the strata, hardened by years of familial, cultural, national, religious settlement; if we let the true desire for self creation shine through, I think human beings are just.
We are creatures who take what is put into us and spit it out in a way that we perceive advantages ourselves, selfish to the end - selfish in our belief that a god or afterworld will somehow preserve our present consciousness in a recognizable manner, selfish in our belief that our progeny, biological or intellectual will do the same.
We only see our own death, but because of that we ultimately are just.
But we need to strip away those things that keep us from seeing, understanding, reasoning that death. We need to see ourselves naked, without comfort, without the intellectual masturbation so common to the west and without the anger born of abject deprivation so common to the vast majority of this world that lives in poverty - for our world actually lives in poverty.
In many ways the rest of the world has something to teach us - finding beauty in what you can. In other ways, the masturbation of riches can show the beauty of the nether world - something not there, but that could be.
We live our lives in completely different ways. Our center is different.
There are structural reasons for this. Economic prejudices and idiocies abound.
But the only way that we, as a species, return to the idea that we are just, that we can reason, that we can see our own death, requires the recognition of the most human perception. And in the most exhaustive accounts of what we are in our everyday life, the idea of recognition, of being seen for what we are, takes precedence. Even beyond the seeming materiality we exist within, we all always ask ourselves who we are and how we are perceived. In fact, in American culture, these questions drive our materiality - our desire for clothes, our desire to learn the tricks on the new video game, our desire for competition in sports, our desire to outstrip our neighbors. We want our kids to outstrip the neighbor's kids. We want to outstrip the world. We have a need to be exceptional.
Though misguided in the economic quagmire of this country that disguises the realities of life, these are true urges of humanity - this is what we are: the creators of our own lives. That is what reason in its earliest formulation is: of that which is, that it is, humanity is the measure. This is science - the thought that by our own ingenuity in interpreting repetititve events, we can devine physical laws defining what we believe to be the world - and they can be [at least in part] universal - they can work. We can engineer things based on this knowledge. They may not be the ultimate truth, as even mathematically speaking, we have no way to capture truth, we only ever approximate it, but they can build the Verrazano Bridge, put humans in space, and destroy the planet.
Human knowledge is real. Our knowledge is real. Our lives are real & very much our own. We aren't debating any longer that we're simply the imagination of a greater being. Whether one believes in a diety or not, we know beyond a doubt that we exist, that we live on a planet that we share, and that we face a serious threat of extinction, from so many fronts. All threats to extinction relate to the things that divide us.
These threats erase time.
We must, as a species, remember time. We must reflect on and express our own time, we must recall time past, we must dwell in the most hellish examples of what we are and we must live with our greatest exemplars.
We must imagine what we will be, regardless of class, race, sex, nationality, religion, education. Time is forgiving for all its stenography... kind of like Jesus in a strange way.
I say this as an atheist who has studied all religions extensively, who has a very clearly defined philosophical outlook that blends the sophists, Aristotle, Kant, Marx, Nietzsche, and some incredible authors in the magical realist school that touch a spiritual vein within my own scientism, transforming me into someone who believes in ghosts.
The kingdom of heaven is indeed at hand, as per the Gospel of Thomas. It is at hand in everything we do. It is at hand when we shop at the supermarket or when we enable a junkie on the street with some spare change.
The kingdom of heaven is what we make of it. Our consciousness of death is what we make of it. Our reason is what we make of it.
We, as human beings, albeit selfish beings, for all our faults and genius, make this world. The sooner we all recognize that, 8 billion strong, we might live in justice - because, again, when you strip away what we're taught to be, we, in ourselves, and with each other,
are just.