Imperial genocide is a theological crime
Synopsis: My purpose with this essay is to break the nexus between traditional theology, imperialism and genocide. My method is to replace the top down omniscient creator of Genesis with a model of creation that begins with an eternal, omnipotent structureless initial singularity. This singularity differentiates through an evolution of life from our last universal common ancestor.
My model uses the symmetry of quantum mechanics with respect to complexity to show that all the discrete entities in the world are autonomous entities with a ‘quantum personality’ that governs their interactions with one another. This symmetry holds from elementary particles to people and nations and supports bottom up democratic process rather than the top down imperialism so common in the world today. This autocracy seems to be the source of genocidal imperial wars motivated by the search for theological and ideological hegemony. This approach was made possible by the development of technologies of physical violence like swords and spies which have developed into nuclear weapons and electronic devices for surveillance and autocratic control [think China].
The model for this evil is the evolutionary strategy of predation taken beyond the limits of survival into a search for power illustrated by the depredations of the Putin government in Russia and the Netanyahu government in Israel. Both seeking to take control of a theologically designated Promised Land established by a fictitious deity.
The heart of the idea here is that the universe is itself divine so that physics and theology have the same subject. It is from physics that we can derive the verifiable evidence to create a scientific theology. We have learnt that doctors have no borders because human physiology is globally identical. Analogously, we might seek global spiritual direction from the physical unity of the universe we inhabit. We may exploit the physical unity of our environment to establish harmony in our lives just as common DNA enables the trillions of autonomous cells in our bodies to work together to insure their common lives. I have a book that describes this thesis in detail wending its way through a publisher at the moment. Jeffrey Nicholls (2025): Cognitive cosmology: a systematic integration of physics and theology
Tale of contents
1.Trump, Catholicism and physical evidence
2. The truth of Roman Catholic Church
3. The Galileo affair
4. Pope Saint John Paul II and the “Two Truths”
5. A new theory of creation: evolution by variation and selection
6. Probability in the evolution of everything
8. Quantum mechanics identifies stationary points in the moving world
9. Fermions, bosons and classical spacetime
10. The death of imperialism: the end of violent physical predation.
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1. Trump, Catholicism and physical evidence
It is easy to mock Trump’s 30,573 false and misleading claims because the Washington Post Newspaper has produced a comprehensive inventory of them coupled to the actual reality they distort. There is physical evidence to refute every one of Trump’s claims. His second presidency has continued in the sane vein, and he continues to assert propositions that are refuted by the public record. Glenn Kessler, Salvador Rizzo & Meg Kelly (2021_01_24): Trump’s false or misleading claims total 30,573 over 4 years
2. The miraculous foundation of the Catholic Church
It is not so easy to deal with the propositions asserted by the Roman Catholic Church. This institution has spent nearly two millennia building up a comprehensive social, artistic, political and theological ecosystem that provides a framework of credibility to its doctrines. The whole edifice is relatively coherent in itself, but the only possible physical evidence available for the afterlife and the existence of its God is the occurrence of miracles.
Jesus and many others are credited with miraculous cures, but it is only as we come into the modern age that scientific evidence is available to support the miraculous events required by the Church to qualify an individual for sainthood. The claim is that some intractable pathological condition has been cured by the advocacy of a candidate saint vis-a-vis God . This evidence establishes a between the saint and God. In general the sample of cures is small and from a scientific point of view the claims generally one-off and questionable.
3. The Galileo Affair
The principle literary foundations of the Catholic Church are the Old and New Testaments of the Bible. The authors of these books are believed to have been inspired by God and their content to be trustworthy when officially interpreted by the Church.
The Aristarchos of Samos (310 - 230 bce) was one of the few who disputed the obvious fact that the Sun revolves around the Earth. In the time of Galileo Copernicus, Brahe and Kepler revived this dispute, contradicting both Aristotle and the statement in the Old Testament book of Joshua that the Sun stood still as a result of Joshua’s request to Yahweh (10:12-13).
Aristarchos had used data collected during an eclipse of the Moon to estimate the diameters of the Sun and the Moon and concluded that since the Sun was bigger it should lie at the centre of the Sun-Earth system. He had no way of proving this.
Galileo (1564 - 1642) was able, with his telescope, to observe the phases of Venus and so collect the data that Aristarchos needed to prove his hypothesis. The data revealed, without doubt, that Venus orbited the Sun inside the orbit of Earth. Galileo first published this observation in 1610, supporting the heliocentric hypothesis. His observation was the experimentum crucis distinguishing the hypotheses Sun orbits Earth from Earth orbits Sun.
The Holy Inquisition judged his discovery to be heresy. It was empowered by to torture suspected heretics and even take their lives to maintain the ideological purity of the Church. Galileo was found guilty, sentenced to imprisonment and required to “abjure, curse and detest his discovery”. He recanted on 22 June 1633, knowing that his denial would make no difference to the facts. Galileo Galilei (1633): Recantation of Galileo (June 22, 1633)
4. Pope Saint John Paul II and the “Two Truths”
Many people thought that Galileo had been badly treated by the Church.
On 10 November 1979, at a celebration of the centenary of Einstein’s birth, Pope Saint John Paul II foreshadowed a new historical study of the “Galileo Affair”. On 3 July 1981 the Papal Academy of Science established a Study Commission for this purpose. The Pope announced the conclusions of this Commission in an address to a Plenary Session of the Academy on 31 October 1992:
4. [. . .] One might perhaps be surprised that [. . .] I am returning to the Galileo case. Has not this case long been shelved and have not the errors committed been recognised?That is certainly true. However, the underlying problems of this case concern both the nature of science and the message of faith. It is therefore not to be excluded that one day we shall find ourselves in a similar situation, one which will require both sides to have an informed awareness of their field and of the limits of their own competencies. Saint John Paul II (1992_10_31): Saint John Paul II (1992_10_31): Address to the Plenary Session on ‘The Emergence of Complexity in Mathematics, Physics, Chemistry and Biology’
Throughout his discussion of the Church’s treatment of Galileo the Pope sticks firmly to the theological dichotomy between revelation and science.
He explains:
12. [. . .] There exist two realms of knowledge, one which has its source in Revelation and one which reason can discover by its own power. To the latter belong especially the experimental sciences and philosophy. [. . .].Humanity has before it two modes of development. The first involves culture, scientific research and technology, that is to say whatever falls within the horizontal aspect of man and creation, which is growing at an impressive rate. [. . .] The second mode of development involves what is deepest in the human being, when, transcending the world and transcending himself, man turns to the One who is the Creator of all. It is only this vertical direction which can give full meaning to man’s being and action, because it situates him in relation to his origin and his end.
All the second mode information provided by the Catholic Church comes from just one source, written a couple of thousand years ago by people who knew nothing about our world. Does the Church really think we can learn anything relevant to our current lives from this ancient source?
The Old Testament tells us that God created the world and everything in it in six days. It then goes on to tell a long history of the relationship between humanity and this God, beginning with the initial disaster, the original sin. God punished the whole human race with with work, pain and death.
None of this has changed, but the New Testament adds a new dimension to the story. Work, pain and death are still in place but the crucifixion of Jesus of Nazareth, the Son of God, is claimed to have softened the Father’s heart and we are redeemed. We no longer really die. Those who meet certain standards defined by the Church will enjoy an eternity of bliss in a life after visible death and those who fail will suffer an eternity of pain.
This redemption has had no discernible effect on current reality apart from the 4th century establishment, by the warlord Constantine the Great, of the Roman Catholic Church to act as God’s agent, managing the details of our redemption.
This Church has grown to be an enormous institution with great political and proxy military power. In particular it has defined the crime of heresy and empowered itself in the name of God to kill people like Galileo, judged to be heretics. Millions have since lost their lives in religious wars waged in the name of the Church to gain hegemony over heretics.
Can we believe this disastrous story about an invisible and unverifiable reality? Is there an alternative? Let us look back to the beginning again when only the creator existed.
5. A new theory of creation: evolution by variation and selection
The most powerful and disruptive text of the scientific era that began with Galileo is Darwin’s Origin of Species, published in 1859. Darwin turned most of the old mythology upside down. Instead of everything being the creation of ancient deities in the heavens with complete knowledge and control, Darwin explains how new forms of life have been created from the last universal common ancestor. This species is the parent of all life on Earth. We know this because all known forms of life have the same basic chemical metabolism beginning with the first single celled entities, the Archaea. Last universal common ancestor - Wikipedia.
Darwin’s theory covers all forms of life and together with the modern science of genetics gives us a comprehensive framework to explain the tree of life. It embraces billions of species over billions years of evolution.
The first step in evolutionary creation is variation. Darwin’s most powerful assumption was to reject determinism. The creation of new species requires random input, variation based on chance. His theory built on the variations he noticed in domesticated plants and animals. Charles Darwin (1875): The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication
The traditional Christian creator is considered to be omnipotent, omniscient, and in complete control of everything that happens. Theologians have concluded that when God created the world they knew exactly what they were doing and were in total control. As the medieval theologian Thomas Aquinas (1224 - 1275) argues, God has immediate providence over everything. From this point of view, the world is deterministic. Aquinas, Summa, I, 22, 3: Does God have immediate providence over everything?
We may regard the present state of the universe as the effect of its past and the cause of its future. An intellect which at a certain moment would know all forces that set nature in motion, and all positions of all items of which nature is composed, if this intellect were also vast enough to submit these data to analysis, it would embrace in a single formula the movements of the greatest bodies of the universe and those of the tiniest atom; for such an intellect nothing would be uncertain and the future just like the past would be present before its eyes. Laplace's demon - Wikipedia
A consequence of this view is that such an omniscient deterministic intellect cannot create anything new. The whole present and future is simply a consequence of the past.
The second phase of evolution is selection. Darwin noted how farmers and gardeners consciously or unconsciously select the best individuals to breed from, slowly moving domesticated species toward their agricultural and horticultural ideals. He proposed that natural selection worked in a similar way by the simple tautological fact that the species existing at any time are those able to reproduce in the environment where they were born.
6. Probability in the evolution of everything
The evolution of life on Earth began about 4 billion years ago. The universe had already been evolving for 10 billion years setting the scene for life to emerge in the solar system. The cosmic analogue of our common ancestor is the initial singularity which is proposed as the origin of the big bang which brought our universe into existence. Initial singularity - Wikipedia
From the official Roman Catholic theological point of view the initial singularity is God and their properties were established by Aquinas. The doctrinal importance of Aquinas in Catholicism is asserted in the Code of Canon Law, the constitution of the Church. Canon 252 §3 on the formation of clerics states:
There are to be classes in dogmatic theology, always grounded in the written word of God together with sacred tradition; through these, students are to learn to penetrate more intimately the mysteries of salvation, especially with St. Thomas as a teacher.
The properties of divinity developed by Aquinas were formally asserted by the First Vatican Council in its third session on 24 April 1870:
The holy, catholic, apostolic and Roman church believes and acknowledges that there is one true and living God [. . .].Since he is one, singular, completely simple and unchangeable spiritual substance, he must be declared to be in reality and in essence, distinct from the world [. . .] Papal Encyclicals Online: First Vatican Council: Dogmatic Constitution on the Catholic Faith
As Aquinas had argued, the Council asserts that the creator must be both absolutely simple and omniscient, properties associated with spiritual substance by ancient authors stretching back to Plato and beyond. We can no longer agree with this, since all information, like the content of this essay, must be represented by physical symbols like the alphabet printed here.
With respect to the history of theology the natural choice for an initial singularity to create the world within itself is the god of Aquinas less the attribute of omniscience. We will understand the creation of the universe as the creation of the physical mind of god, analogous to the development of mind in a newly conceived child.
The initial singularity is an eternal, absolutely simple omnipotent entity which we will identify with gravitation, the codeless force that creates and interacts with every particle in the universe. As pointed out by Richard Feynman, this entity, like the known universe as a whole, has zero energy. We guess that the energy of the universe is created by the zero sum bifurcation of gravitation. Quantum mechanics collaborates with gravitation to produce the kinetic and potential energy which establish the structure of the universe. We approach this ideas through Augustine’s theory of the Trinity.
7. Augustine: On the Trinity
Christianity made a radical change in the nature of the divinity. The Hebrew God Yahweh was resolutely single: “Thou shall have no other gods beside me” (Exodus 20:1-3). In order to accommodate the facts that Jesus styled himself as the Son of Yahweh coupled with the appearance of the Holy Spirit, the authors of the Christian New Testament introduced the doctrine of the Trinity.
This posed a serious problem for traditional monotheistic theologians. A solution came from Augustine of Hippo, one of the most powerful and prolific of the Fathers of the Church. In his book On the Trinity written early in the 5th century he proposed that the image of God reflecting upon themself is also divine, the Son, Word or Image of God. The love of Father for the Son was also divine, the Holy Spirit.
Our postulated initial singularity has all the properties of the traditional Catholic divinity except omniscience. It is capable of reflecting upon itself but we place no theological limit on the number of reflections. A mathematical mechanism for this reflection could be Brouwer’s fixed point theorem which tells us that under certain conditions the mapping of a set onto itself by a function f(x) yields a point x which is fixed: it maps onto itself, f(x) = x. Brouwer fixed point theorem - Wikipedia
Because the initial singularity has no defined structure, the appearance of a fixed point within it are random uncontrolled events. It is rather like the structureless continuum that forms the foundation of Kolmogorov’s axiomatic treatment of probability. Here we find the creative randomness that makes the evolution of the universe possible, a task impossible for a deterministic divinity. Andrey Nikolaevich Kolmogorov (1956): Foundations of the Theory of Probability
8. Quantum mechanics identifies stationary points in the moving world
We do physics by assuming the existence of a certain space of objects and then finding rules to constrain the objects to move in a way that looks like reality. Isaac Newton started with Euclidean space and universal time and found four laws of motion which define a close approximation to the motion of the solar system.
Quantum mechanics is a theory of waves in the abstract Hilbert space defined by John von Neumann . Vectors in this space are represented with complex numbers. We have chosen gravitation as the observable face of divinity because it is featureless, universal, we feel it all the time and it controls the shape of most big visible things in our world. John von Neumann (2018): The Mathematical Foundations of Quantum Mechanics
Complex numbers also have a form of universality. They enable us to find solutions to the polynomial equations that show us how quantum mechanics plays its essential role: selecting stationary structures in the sea of variety created by fixed point theory in the initial singularity. Like the creation of living species, we see the creation of the universe as a process of variation and selection.
Quantum mechanics is very simple. It works by superposition which means adding the complex vectors that represent waves together. We can see an analogous process at work by throwing two stones close to one another into a tranquil pond. Each impact creates a ring of waves and we will see these two sets of rings moving through one another, adding and subtracting from one another to form a complex pattern.
If we look closely, we see that between the waves there are points on the surface of the pond which are left sitting at the same level as the original surface of the pond. These stationary nodes in the waves are analogous to natural selection in evolution.
We guess that the quantum mechanical selection of stationary points in the initial singularity induces gravitation to split into potential and kinetic energy. The kinetic energy makes the stationary forms created by quantum mechanics into real particles. The potential energy, precisely equal to the kinetic energy (as we can see in the motion of a pendulum) provides the potential that binds particles together. It is gravitational potential that stops the people on the other side from falling off Earth.
9. Fermions, bosons and classical spacetime
The evolution of life has produced billions of different species over 4 billion years. In its initial stages, the collaboration between gravitation and quantum mechanics produces elementary particles like photons and electrons. There are only about 60 species of these particles and many of them are more or less copies of one another. The same ones appear in every experiment and they do not seem to have changed from the first moments of the Universe. They do not evolve.
Here, down at the beginning of the Universe, things are very simple. We find that all these elementary particles fall into one or another of two classes known as fermions and bosons. Fermions are the massive charged structural elements of the world. Boson are the messengers, carrying information between the fermions, coupling them together to form about 200 different atoms. Evolution does not really get going until atoms begin to unite to form molecules. There is an almost an infinite number of different molecules, many of which have become parts of living organisms. There is no limit to the complexity of networks of fermions connected by bosons.
10: The union of physics and theology
The hypothesis that the universe is divine implies that physics and theology have the same subject. One ancient objection to this hypothesis is that theology is about spirit, which is alive and vibrant, whereas physics is about matter which is dead and inert.
Here we arrive at a question similar to that faced by Galileo and his contemporaries. They had to understand how Sun and Earth relate to one another. To unite physics and theology, we have to understand how spirit and matter relate to one another.
The first part of the answer came in 1900 when Max Planck found that energy is a product of vibration. Energy, E = ℏ𝜔, where ℏ is a new very tiny fundamental constant, the planck constant, which sets the scale of the detailed dynamic structure of the universe. 𝜔 is the frequency of a wave.
In 1905 Einstein found the second part of the answer. It is an implicit property of the Minkowski space of special relativity that m (for mass) = E / c2. Matter is now like spirit, alive and vibrant with energy. So far in this essay I have introduced a divine initial singularity within which elementary particles and spacetime were created by a collaboration of gravitation and quantum mechanics.
Scientists, like modern physicists, have to take the world as they find it and try to explain that they see. This brings us to a final barrier between physics and theology. In the early days when quantum mechanics seemed far too weird to be true Werner Heisenberg wrote paper that clarified the problem. His idea was to put aside all the old ideas and concentrate on explaining the facts that we can see and measure. The question here is are bosons and fermions a product of Minkowski space or is Minkowski space a product of bosons and fermions? Werner Heisenberg (1925): Quantum-theoretical re-interpretation of kinematic and mechanical relations
Modern axiomatic quantum field theory builds the Hilbert space of quantum mechanics on top of the 4D Minkowski spacetime that we use in fundamental physics and cosmology. In other words, Minkowski space is assumed to be the foundation of field theory Streater and Wightman write:
Since in quantum mechanics observables are represented by hermitian operators which act on the Hilbert space of state vectors, one expects the analogue in relativistic quantum mechanics of a classical observable field to be a set of hermitian operators defined for each point of space-time and having a well-defined transformation law under the appropriate group. Streater & Wightman (2000): PCT, Spin, Statistics and All That
Quantum mechanics is built on top of spacetime so that the rules of special relativity apply to quantum mechanics.
Steven Weinberg points out that quantum field theory is the way it is because (with certain qualifications) this is the only way to reconcile quantum mechanics with special relativity. Steven Weinberg (1995)
From a technical point of view the difference between between bosons and fermions is that bosons have integral spin and fermions have half-integral spin. The standard explanation of this is the spin statistics theorem which is understood to connect the difference in behaviour between bosons and fermions to special relativity. Ian Duck and E.C.G. Sudarshan (1998): Toward an understanding of the spin-statistics theorem
Our story here is that quantum mechanics is the source of fermions and bosons and fermions and bosons are the source of Minkowski space. If this is correct, and there is no spacetime in quantum mechanics, the old distinction between natter and spirit which has been a foundation for theology for two thousands years fails. We no longer need a spiritual god outside the universe. Physics and theology are united.
11. Agency: the political consequence of physical theology
Top down Catholicism claims to act with the infallible and omnipotent power of God to dictate its followers. In 2000 years of consistent deception the Church has become a global descendant of the Roman Empire. Here we work from the bottom up. A key to the connection of theology and physics is symmetry with respect to complexity. Although the difference in scale between fundamental particles and an ideal democratic polity is immense, they are formally quite similar. Democratic politics fits Hilbert space. Voting itself is linear, a form of superposition. Individuals and political parties are characterized by their directions in political space which may be modelled as vectors in a Hilbert space. Every person is represented by a basis vector and their sums in various combinations present us with a comprehensive picture of the political directions in an electorate. There seems to be fundamental harmony between democratic politics and the nature of the world.
Everything I have written so far has just one purpose: to use the theory of evolution destroy the top down theology of imperialism that empowers dictators to slaughter people wholesale in the interests of ideological purity.
Darwin had no detailed knowledge of genetics. Gregor Mendel made careful studies of different crossings of pea plants and discovered that there are definite genetic relationships between parents and children. He was aware of Darwin’s work, but Darwin knew nothing of Mendel.
Since that time molecular biologists have discovered DNA and understood its critical role in reproduction. Every living thing carries two copies of itself: one is its formal specification, written in a long sequence of molecular characters DNA. This code has four letters, adenine, thymine, cytosine and guanine and the human genome contains about 3 billion of these letters, equivalent to about 300 bibles.
The other copy is the creature itself.
Aristotle, following his mentor Plato devised a similar structure for every object in the world. He saw everything as a form realized in matter, a theory called hylomorphism.
The story of creation presented above follows a similar line. Every particle has a form derived by quantum mechanics from the random events in the initial singularity. These forms are given reality by receiving energy from splitting zero energy gravity into equal amounts of potential an kinetic energy. Every particle, at every scale, interacts with its peers, often binding with them to form more complex structures. At the peer to peer level we can see these interactions as the democratic conversations described by Zurek in his discussion of quantum measurement. Wojciech Hubert Zurek (2008): Quantum origin of quantum jumps: breaking of unitary symmetry induced by information transfer and the transition from quantum to classical
Stable structure is maintained by error free communication which may be maintained in the face of random noise by the quantization of messages described by Claude Shannon. Claude Shannon (1949): Communication in the Presence of Noise
Nevertheless failures of quantization occur enabling the incidence of evil consequent upon the random foundation of evolutionary creation. The ultimate evil for an individual is death which may be cause by predation or the failure of the internal processes which maintain life.
Implicit in the Genesis story is the idea that the creator was a benevolent person with the welfare of the human race at heart. This assumption runs into difficulty when we observe that there is a lot of evil in the world, a situation known as the problem of evil. One commonly proposed solution is that in addition to a divine source of goodness there is an opposing principle, a personal source of badness who has come to be called Satan or the Devil. The late Pope Francis believed in the existence of Satan. They have been described as a fallen angel and given a role in the Catholic Catechism §§391-395. Here we have no need for God or Satan: we find both creation and evil implicit in evolution.
One of the objections to Darwin’s theory is that nature is red in tooth and claw, nothing like the gentility of enlightened civilization. Alfred lord Tennyson: In Memoriam A. H.H. Obiit MDCCCXXXIII
Imagine you are a lion watching the crucifixion of Jesus of Nazareth who has been condemned to death by the priests of Yahweh. After he has hung there for a while a merciful soldier breaks his legs so that he can no longer support his weight and breathe, so unconsciousness follows. A little later a soldier with a lance stabs him with the lance.
Toward evening his friends come and take his body down and hide it in a cave. They do not eat him. What a waste thinks the lion. They have killed him for nothing.
We are smarter than the lion. We know that in the civilized human world those who question theological beliefs are heretics and certainly deserve death and torture. As the emperor Constantine realized, the best way to hold an empire together is common belief and he coopted Christianity for this purpose. He organized a meeting of powerful politicians in Nicea to sign off on this decision. They produced the Nicene Creed, a bureaucratic account of Christian belief that made no mention of the two commandments emphasized by Jesus for which he was killed, love god; love your neighbour.
We can see three sources of evil in evolution.
Variation arises from lack of control, the failure of determinism, a necessary foundation for creation. The failure of control generally results in some sort of evil: falls, crashes, explosions, fires and all manner of violent events that are the natural cause injury, pain and death.
The second source of evil in an evolving world arises from selection. In most of nature, only a tiny fraction of the individuals that are born go on to live a full life and have offspring of their own. They are often injured, starved or become food for predators. It is only well organized social mammals like ourselves in peaceful societies that can carefully feed, protect and educate their children and bring them to adulthood. In modern societies, the offspring may be 30 years old before they are capable of leaving parental care and going out to fend for themselves.
The third source of evil in evolution is predation. The simplest predators are viruses. A virus is just collection of genes in a vehicle which can invade a cell and commandeer its reproductive mechanism to copy themselves. Viruses need to kill the cells that create them to escape and infect new cells. This led cells to develop immunity to viruses, a means to recognize and destroy viral genes.
The interaction between predators and prey is a central issue in evolution. Animals eat plants and one another, and both plants and animals develop defences against being eaten. On the other hand, plants often need mobile creatures to help them reproduce, so they produce flowers, flavours and odours to attract animals.
We accept that predatory killing is a natural part of evolution, since all living creatures are food for one another and it is natural to kill to eat. Genocide falls outside this evolutionary category. The purpose is to eliminate a certain class of people and although the party committing genocide may be motivated by acquiring the property of the people they kill, it seems that there is a deeper ideological motive which we shall associate with the religious theology of the perpetrators.
The emergence of cities, kings and armies began in Egypt and Mesopotamia about 5000 years ago. This development seems to have been driven by a combination of military force and theological hypothesis. Many ancient theological texts appear to have been written by the literate servants of warlords. One exception is Zahiru'd-din Mohammad. Zahiru'd-din Mohammad Babur (2020): The Babur Nama
The leading example of theological imperialism in Western history is Constantine’s capture of Christianity to unify his Empire. This led to more than a millennium of genocidal religious wars as Christianity struggled for hegemony over what Christians considered to be the forces of heresy in the Mediterranean and the East.
A legal definition of genocide is provided in the 1948 United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (CPPCG). Article 2 of this convention defines genocide as "any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such: killing members of the group; causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life, calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; forcibly transferring children of the group to another group."
Simply put it is one group of people trying to eliminate another group of people. This may be for practical reasons like taking their property or land, or for ideological reasons, trying to eliminate a certain line of thought by destroying the people who hold it. In the theological context, this is often understood as a fight against heresy.
Here I accept that genocide is a crime, generally involving large scale murder, committed by one community against another.
When it comes down to is establishing a moral framework to guide human behaviour given that we know for sure that some behaviour is bad and some is good the guidance in evolution comes in two stages.
The first is fundamental physics which cannot be changed. It has led from the initial singularity to the establishment of elementary particles and classical spacetime in which these particles cooperate with one another to form more complex structures. This evolution described by Darwin has given us the life we have now and raised the question at issue here: how can we guarantee the safety of this life insofar as its future is a consequence of our own collective behaviour.
As Darwin saw, survival is a function of environment. The basic strategy of imperialism is to create and environment where the formal intellectual conformity of people is rewarded with prosperity, and deviance from the imperial standard with poverty, imprisonment and death.
The imperial age is built on theological genocide. Imperialism is unnatural mindless violence. The imperial idea is to nip variation in the bud and kill evolution and creation to make things comfortable for the rulers. The would be king of the US, preaching freedom of speech, is using his power to block the influence of anyone who disagrees with him. We now wait with abated breath to see if the American successor to the British Empire will also fall on its sword.
From an entropic point of view power is the enemy of independence. The only way to balance this may be democracy and democracy can only work if every one of the constituent personalities is responsible for its own constraint, ie the personalities must respect one another.
There are at the moment two ongoing instances of theological genocide in the news and many other examples of theocracies around the world trying to achieve hegemony using genocidal methods. Both have deep roots in history.
The Putin government of Russia is trying to re-estalish the Soviet Empire by waging a genocidal invasion of Ukraine. The Russian government characterizes this invasion as a holy war against Nazism. It is supported by the Christian Patriarch of Moscow.
The Netanyahu Government of Israel is conducting a genocidal slaughter of the indigenous Palestinian people in Gaza as part of its long term strategy to prevent the emergence of a Palestinian state in what it considers to be the Promised Land granted to Israel by their God Yahweh. This genocide is concentrating on women and children using indiscriminate heavy bombing. The first records of this imperial action are to be found in the book Joshua of the Hebrew Bible when Yahweh stopped the Sun to give Joshua daylight to kill the previous inhabitants of the “Promised Land”.
At the heart of genocide is the deprivation of the natural agency of people by methods listed in the definition above. Here we note that the Roman Catholic Church denies the natural spiritual agency of women. In 1994 Pope (now Saint) John Paul II stated that:
in order that all doubt may be removed regarding a matter of great importance, a matter which pertains to the Church's divine constitution itself, in virtue of my ministry of confirming the brethren (cf. Lk 22:32) I declare that the Church has no authority whatsoever to confer priestly ordination on women and that this judgement is to be definitively held by all the Church's faithful.John Paul II (1994_05_22): Ordinatio Sacerdotalis: On reserving priestly ordination to men alone, 22 May 1994
Until this is corrected, this Church and similar organizations fail to qualify for a social licence.
Galileo flirted with death by Inquisition when announced his observations of the phases of Venus. 2000 year earlier the philosopher Socrates took his own life after being sentenced to death for impiety and corrupting the youth. It is heartening that about half the inhabitants of regions with comprehensive education systems class,ify themselves as “nones” no religion Dominik Balazka (2020_07_08): Mapping Religious Nones in 112 Countries
