2000-06-26 - 15:15 MDT

June 26, 2000

Quests

It seems to me that if there hadn't been a few people of each generation who went on that enigmatic journey we would all still be shivering in caves, hungry, wet, cold and fearful.

At each stage there were ones who sought to bring civilization to life, ones who managed to learn and teach the rest of us. The hunters of truth asking those eternal, changing but ever present big answers. How ? How to make each aspect of life more comfortable, well supplied with the necessities, safer and more organized. Who ? Who to organize, who to plan, who the most suited to do the job, who to make chieftan of the tribe. When ? The need has always been, yesterday if not sooner, of course. Each improvement is centuries late but adds to the overall store of knowledge, and magnification of mans strength. When some unknown man thought of a way to move something beyond his puny strength by using something as a lever, it had been needed since the beginning of man and displayed one man's perhaps instinctive understanding of applied force and what the use of a fulcrum and a prying object could do. Each contrivance seemed to involve some way of multiplying people's strength. How many centuries of "When" did it take before humankind learned to use flint to form the cutting edge, and how long before he thought to attach a pointed cutting edge to a shaft and invent arrows and spears. Those persons, conquering some of the difficulties of survival, hunting and defense against the beasts, answered some of the when questions. Each improvement seemed to ignite the fire in some Quester's mind seeking to improve the advances in expertise and knowledge.

There has always been the Big WHO, question and it seems that some of the seekers are still at odds with each other as to what that entity must be. Seems that many of the groups of humanity have begun to feel that there is One God. One point of agreement still opening doors to further progress and further contention.

And then the stinger, closely associated to the WHO is the WHY of everything. We have been into space after the answer for that question, we now have the repaired Hubble telescope, the new and improved electron microscopes, the transistors and the grouping of thousands of them into the micro-chip. This listing could go on forever but still not catching up to listing all rapid improvements made for humanity.

Even so, still not yet proving to himself the exact existence and form of the One God.

Still fighting fruitless battles of religious destruction over that question, haggling with each other on points of philosophies and trying to institute methods of procedure. Strangling in our own effluvia with Questers trying to better that condition.

So, in this man's humble opinion we advance micro inch by micro inch towards the understanding- - - with many reversals, of the WHY ? And creeping toward the perfection that the supreme being wishes us to achieve. The course seems to be moving further upward and forward, always gaining ground, three steps forward and two back with the imminent danger of the world and all that is in it being destroyed by some fool misusing one or another of the tools of improvement for a vicious and misguided effort to assert supremacy.

So, there are many questions answered and many quests in process to answer others, with improvements being demonstrated all along the way. But society is still wondering WHY ? and still haggling over that.

What is the answer and outcome of all this ? I truly don't know and would like to be around when this Utopian condition arrives to see the answer to why, myself.

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