There’s no doubt William Golding wrote a great novel with his Lord of the Flies. It pinpointed humankind’s plausible fallen nature in a troop of British schoolkids. But haven’t we come some distance since the year one? Hasn’t Western Civilization changed with the advent of the Jewish Redeemer?

Then there were those six Polynesian boys, stranded for fifteen months on a desert isle. They were from a Catholic school in Tonga, and they behaved far more advanced than William Golding thought boys would behave. They had been educated with the best thoughts Western Civilization could offer through that Catholic school, and believe me, if they were bored, nevertheless they performed. The doctors who examined them in the hospital after the rescue said they had set their fellow’s broken leg bone perfectly, and they had not killed one another like Golding’s boys.

So dare one say that Western Civilization’s heritage has advanced humankind? Certainly those six Polynesian boys proved it. By the way, they paid for the stolen sailboat with the money they earned from making a documentary of their spree. That was done through Captain Peter Warner, their rescuer.

But it turned out just the opposite.  The six boys from a Tongan Catholic school were rescued in 1966 after having survived for fifteen months on the uninhabited island of ‘Ata, all still alive and healthy.  They even set the broken leg of one of their members.

This outcome, unlike that of William Golding’s fiction story, shows what humankind can accomplish, given the right education.  The story was covered by the journalist Rutger Bregman, in The Guardian, a British newspaper.  The six boys had decided to go on a spree in a stolen sailboat (they contradicted their training) , were shipwrecked during a storm, and were luckily able to swim to the abandoned island of ‘Ata.  They caught rain in coconut shells, and fished, to survive.  They organized someone to watch the fire, and the coastline, and it finally paid off for them, unlike for Golding’s less civilized boys.

Their rescuer was Peter Warner, the free-spirited son of an Australian millionaire.  I don’t know if he got the lesson of these boys’ education.

One spring day I saw a feral cat come out from under the tarp with which I had covered the patio furniture, which it had used as a part time winter home, as I found out on uncovering it all.  The tarp had come all the way to the ground and had, for a cat, a scary way of blowing its folds in the wind.  She had used a seat cushion for a bed, a decision she made probably sometime after I winterized the patio.

That cat, to me, was somewhere on a midpoint between a rock and something spiritual. (You don’t believe in the spiritual?  Well, is knowledge material?)  The cat shows order, some discernment, and some planning.  Humans have ascended that ladder to an even higher point.

You really think the human mind is the highest known point of intelligence in the universe?  Who made the stuff we’re still discovering?  Chance?  Then you’d say chance has an intelligence higher than we.  Whom am I dealing with?

Although I come from a family from which a tradition of mercenary soldiers may have been recruited as far back as 1500 AD, I love peace and its fruits.  It is during peace that the Galileos discover the solar system, and the Wright brothers discover flight.  Pres. Trump was feared for getting us into war, yet he was a backslapper with Kim Jong Un, and a handshaker with Pres. Xi, who gave us the coronavirus in return.

I do believe that war is justifiable under certain circumstances, for instance, against the terrorists who behead Christians.  And they do this against the people who offer them the knowhow of getting along.

But a Thomas Edison doesn’t prosper if the winds of war ration his food.  Life is too varied to be spent killing others.  So let me do my thing – pray to the Father of a great Brother and us all.  

As I said in my book, Faith: A Layman’s Find, an atheist is a wonder of creation, like the bombardier beetle.  He exists, with impunity, in a world created by the being whose existence he loudly denies.  He uses only human reason where we have now discovered something beyond human reason in Quantum Mechanics.

Undoubtedly he serves a purpose.  Even reason will tell us that he keeps those who follow a universal Father from becoming complacent or self-satisfied.  As a name he doesn’t last long—who among us remembers the French philosophes?

But you can’t let him have his way.  Look at the deaths due to Hitler, Stalin, Mao, and lesser tyrants.