Dear Marion,

As I reflect on our correspondence about our families,
I can't help comparing it to a script for a puppet show,
Kasperletheater, Punch and Judy show, - dramatizations which
as a child and adolescent always offended me for the obvious
reason of their incompatibility with being etwas Besonderes.
Now, in old age, I understand all too clearly, that I can't
escape banality, and might as well make a virtue of necessity.
I'm the puppeteer, you're the audience.  I play tricks, and
you laugh. What follows will make you laugh so loud, that your
laughter will ring all the way from Minnesota to Massachusetts.
I can hear you now.

We avenge ourselve on our parents by treating them as puppets,
investing them as convenience dictates with virtues and vices,
ad lib. I've indicated before, that in the spirit
of dialectic, I'm always ready to switch sides, dress up the
presumptively good parent in evil doer's garb, and vice versa,
invest the bad one in the robes and the halo of a saint.
I've heard often enough from Shakespeare, - and my father
would, if he were alive, emphatically endorse the sentiment, -
that my dalliance with dialectic has started me on the road 
to Hell.  However, if only for the sake of consistency,
I'd like to argue that equivocation, if it's the way to hell,
may also be the path to heaven.

Knock, knock. Who's there in th' other Deuils Name?
Faith here's an Equiuocator, that could sweare in both
the Scales against eyther Scale, who committed Treason
enough for Gods sake, yet could not equiuocate to Heauen:
oh come in, Equiuocator.  (Macbeth, II,iii)

If that's where I'm going, so be it. Equivocation is,
of course, also the crux of my Spinoza optics, and I
find it useful, perhaps even indispensable, in unraveling
the secrets of the Origin Story, which, like the diffraction
grating on my credit card, reflects the image of Darwin or
of Moses, depending on the angle from which I scrutinize it.

Take another look with me at the two competing Origin Stories.

1 In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.

2 And the earth was without form, and void;
_ and darkness was upon the face of the deep.
_ And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.

Verse 2 refers to the original chaos, the apeiron of Anaximander,
the chaos which in Darwin's account is the randomness out of which
mutations intrude into the order of established organic life.

Both Origin Stories then proceed to account for the development of
the organic world. Both accounts aim at what Aristotle would have
called a telos, a target. The target of the Darwinian Origin Story
is the fittest who survives, who has survived, and who will survive,
and that fittest mind you, is ME, the fact that I tell the story
is proof that I have survived, and have done so, cause I'm fitter
than everybody else, and, incidentally, I'm also fitter than you.
It's capitalism, mind you, it's the capitalism of nature where the
fit gobble up them that ain't. Hurray for Adam Smith and the
Reverend Thomas Malthus.

The target of the Mosaic Origin Story is GOD, the ultimate egomaniac.
He created the world to demonstrate his own power and his own glory.
He said to Adam and Eve: My way or the Highway, and to Noah and
Abraham and Moses HE said the same thing. With the benefit of Spinozist
optics one can see that God being within, the Glory of God in the
Heavens is a projection of human megalomania into the cosmos.
The Mosaic Origin Story is the account of the Monarchy of nature,
and although I'm not supposed to say it: the Monarch is ME.

The two Origin Stories then are identical in to the extent that their
effective consequence is the aggrandizement of their respective believers,
be he that specimen of fitness which has and which will survive,
or be he GOD's alter ego, who shares in GOD's glory. As Lessing said,
Ein jeder ist sich selbst der liebste. The difference between the two
Origin Stories is the respective mechanism by which the aggrandizement
of the believers is achieved. This mechanism is a reflection of the social
and political environment in which each Origin Story was perpetuated.

The Mosaic Origin Story reflects the power of literature to compel assent.
It is an example of the way in which the mind that develops in a simple
society is shaped and controlled by the language, by the stories with which
it is molded in its infancy.

The Darwinian Origin Story reflects the power of organized science to
compel assent. It is an example of the way a mind that develops in
a complex technologically dominated society is shaped and controlled
by the logical algorithms that such a society prescribes and enforces.
In the case of the Origin Story, the promulgated algorithm is of no
practical consequence. But where other intellectually integrated social
activities are concerned, and the list is very extensive, as extensive
as the technical achievement of our culture is great: medicine, engineering
in all dimensions, "scientific thought" of all kinds, for these the
semantic and mathematical uniformity of the symbolism that constitutes
our "knowledge" is indispensable. Mental discipline, uniformity of
thought and coincidence of intellectual action is the be-all and
end-all of our society.

For Darwin, selection is "natural"; it occurs in the wild.
It's consequence is survival of the fittest: the survival of ME.
In Genesis selection is domesticated, it occurs in a world
that is an extension of a garden.  But selection in Genesis
is also "natural" to the extent that selection satisfies the
"jealousy" of God, i.e. the function of selection is to affirm,
to glorify GOD.  First Noah, then Abraham is "selected",
then Jacob, then Israel are "selected", all for God's glory.

If my GOD is the projection into the cosmos of my subjectivity,
then there really isn't much, if any difference, between the
two cosmologies.  Because if Darwin preaches the survival of
the fittest, why, obviously, the fittest is ME, I have survived.
Let's face it, in Eden the fittest is not Adam and not Eve,
in Eden the fittest is GOD, and it is GOD who survives.
And if GOD is ME and ME is GOD, why then if GOD is the survivor
of Eden, as he obviously is, then ME is also the survivor
of Eden. Inasmuch as ME is obviously also the survivor of
Darwin, Darwin and Genesis amount to the same: both are
black boxes with the same input: Deus sive natura, and the
same output: ME.  q.e.d.

Jochen