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Copyright William C. Kiefert. All Rights Reserved.
Chapter Two, Part Five: The Need for a New Logic
We need for the world to be different. We cannot go on as we have been. Reasoning which divides the world into opposing camps leads to hatred and fighting throughout the world, from internal conflicts between religious groups, as in Ireland and Bosnia, to tribal genocide in Rwanda. The attitude of us-versus-them is responsible for bombing in the streets and airports, the downing of airplanes, and the killing and injuring of people at the Olympics. 911 is also the consequence of this reasoning, and so is our response to it. Whether it be crime in our streets or war between nations, we cannot continue down this path to destruction. Social conditions may be approaching a critical threshold.
Scientists use the word “critical” to refer to a turning point or place of transition. There are critical angles in optics, for example, where total reflection occurs, critical temperatures at which liquids become vapors, and critical points at which fluids merge into gases. Have we reached a critical time in human history? Our times seem to call out desperately for a change, a transition into a new way of thinking. As psychologist Alfred Adler has written, “There is a Law that man should love his neighbor as himself. In a few hundred years it should be as natural to mankind as breathing or the upright gait; but if he does not learn it he must perish.”
Our future depends upon harmonizing our heart and our reason: actions of kindness, compassion, and brotherly love must become rational and logical if they are to be deemed practical. Quite simply, heaven on earth requires a new rationality, based on new ways of thinking that can harmonize the morality of our hearts and the practicality of our reason. If we adopted this new rationality, civilization may be born anew, on the grounds of oneness, love, harmony, and peace between individuals and between peoples and nations of our world. But for this we need to reason differently, on the basis of a new logic, a logic of love, or as Gnostic Christians call it, nonjudgmental logic. How to achieve this new process of reasoning is what this book is about.
Christians look forward to “the rapture” and to Armageddon, the last days when Christ will return. Perhaps the return of Christ will take place in the hearts and minds of people everywhere, in the form of a renewed mind that Paul talks of in Rm 12:2.
Gnostic Christians, like some “Indians, believe that there will be what Christians call the Armageddon, an end time…. Not an end in a physical sense, but an end in a way thinking. It will be a transformation from abuse and domination of nature and people to a way of harmony, kindness, sharing –a natural way, an Indian way.”
Let us now see where the old logic and ways of reasoning have failed us. Let us see what we have missed in life because of civilized man’s inadequate and inappropriate process of reasoning. In short, let us lay the groundwork for a heaven on earth by expanding our system of logical laws.