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The God Code…

The Messages of Our Past

The Promise of Our Future

By Gregg Braden

In January of 1999, the WorldWatch Institute stated “The bright promise of a new century is clouded by unprecedented threats to the stability of the natural world.” This, and similar reports, suggest that beyond the dangers posed by natural disasters and disease, it is humankind itself that appears to be the greatest threat to our future. Today, our use of science and technology has given us the power to preserve, or destroy, all that we cherish as a species. We may discover that it is precisely the presence of such power that now compels us to find a single principle of unity—undeniable proof—that as a global family we are greater than any differences that have ever separated us. Our survival may now depend upon our ability to do so.

HISTORY The Story Of Our Differences

In our world of diversity, it has often been easier to focus on the differences that divide us, rather than the principles that unite us. Ours is the story of a species defined by religion, the color of our skin, the wealth of our societies and the advancement of our technology. During the approximately 250,000 years that scientists estimate humankind has been on this world, we have managed to seek out our differences, and transform them into the invisible boundaries of class and society that fuel our sense of separateness.

Based upon those boundaries, countless members of our global family have suffered in ways that seem unthinkable, even unimaginable, in the minds of rational and loving people. Together, we share the darkness of a history punctuated by persecutions, inquisitions, enslavement and attempts to eliminate entire races from the face of the earth. The development of hi-tech weapons in the last-century made it possible to destroy enormous numbers of lives in a single day. History shows, however, that something even more disturbing is responsible for creating what historian Eric Hobsbawm has called, “the most murderous century in recorded history.”

In his assessment of the toll taken by what he calls “politically motivated carnage”, Zbiginew Brzezinski, former national security advisor under the Carter administration, estimated that by 1993 the violence of the 20th Century based on our differences had cost between 167 and 175 million lives—roughly the equivalent of the populations of Great Britain, France and Italy, combined!

Along with the battles to settle disputes over borders and resources, the last century also saw a rise in the horrors of a different kind—the seemingly relentless efforts to “cleanse” societies based upon characteristics that set them apart from others around them. In 1948 the United Nations General Assembly chose the term genocide to describe this kind of violence, and defined it as, “…a denial of the right of existence of entire human groups (Article II of the 1948 U.N. Convention on Genocide).”

While not easy to acknowledge such statistics, they tell the sobering story of our willingness to use the power of technology to destroy the things that we dislike, disagree with, or simply do not understand. Unfortunately, in the first years of the 21st Century many of the conditions, and much of the thinking that justifies such violence, appears to remain.

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