Without further ado, I want everyone to give these guys your best LA welcome

Science Mike and Michael Gunger!

Off on, up, down, left, right, north, south, light, dark, matter, space,

sky, straight, male, female, Christian, secular, self, not self. Our world is made of opposites.

Everything you've ever seen on a computer comes from ones and zeros. Music is sound waves,

made of beats, of vibration between on and off. The faster that the on off happens, the higher the pitch.

There is no me without a you and there is no us without a not us. There is no conception of good without also necessitating a concept of evil.

So why does this binary way of experiencing reality exist and how does it influence our experience of our world together?

How does it influence our ideas of coming together like this? Who are we to answer that? We also have to ask who are we not?

Every good story starts with a hero, right? Well, maybe not. It seems like most of the time we talk about the villain. I mean, who is Luke Skywalker without Darth Vader?

Who is Frodo without that burning red eye, right? So in the very nature of story, there is no protagonist without antagonist.

There is no hero without an enemy. And the way that our consciousness is structured, the very nature of homo sapiens using language sets our life experiences up as a story that makes us the hero and anyone who opposes us the enemy.

How should we think about the enemy though? So much of human history is playing out this very question. Most of the time we demonize, we dehumanize, and it seems to always culminate in bloodshed.

And it just seems to be who we are.

So how do we deal with this violent, this way that human beings seem to deal with the idea of enemy?

There have been philosophical and religious voices through the centuries who have argued against the more mainstream thing, which is violence.

But people from all different major religions who have produced individuals and groups who are advocates of pacifism or non-violence.

But as we've talked about in the podcast before, is complete non-violence even a realistic idea? Is it a tenable position in a world where every living thing needs to eat and every meal kills something?

Most of us, we live in this tenuous position of how to relate to the enemy and how do we love the enemy? Like Jesus said, most of us have probably leanings that way.

We heard Jesus say things like love your enemy and it sounds really beautiful to our ears. But what does it mean exactly?

In some ways, it seems simple. In other ways, you know, it's not a person sexually assaulting you, for instance.

What does that look like to love them? What does it look like for somebody to directly be attacking your personhood? How can you love them without enabling?

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