The Garden West of Eden
YOU COULD HAVE EXISTED IN THIS GARDEN FOREVER...not
I grew up thinking that my ancestors screwed up. They lived in Eden before the Word and could be there today fulfilling the fundamental god imperative. Kill to Live. You may doubt that Kill to Live is the fundamental imperative, but that is exactly what drives the carnivore. We could be herbivorous I suppose, but then killing an artichoke is not much different than killing a cow expect that the artichoke doesn’t make an audible death vocalization.
Other inhabitants of the garden, that didn’t invent the word, that did their very level best to fulfill the god imperative, didn’t survive. Was this a broken promise? The Dinosaur population, giant reptiles that roamed and killed at will to solve the size v speed equation on the side of size, disappeared. What horrendous infraction did they commit against the god imperative that justified their extinction? Did they want to be gods? Did they covet control over all birth and death in the universe? Did they invent? Did they seek to understand? And yet, it is as if the god imperative has an amendment attached that says basically, do this in memory of me........until I decide that you are not much fun and that it is time for a new and improved specie to dominate.
The dinosaur, of course, was not created in the image of god. It was created in the image of......? God can only create plants and animals in the depths of his imagination, so the images must be of his making. God created the dinosaur in images that he formulated in his psyche. He didn’t promise them everlasting life in the garden. He gave them a time limit. Why on earth do we think that our covenant has legitimacy? Now that we broke the covenant, and took it upon ourselves to understand the making of life in petri dishes, can there be any question that our clock is running out of time?
If we understand that the human animal is not very much different than dinosaurs, marching on an inexorable voyage to extinction, what then becomes the fundamental human imperative? To leave the planet as we found it? Not possible. To improve it? How can we improve on the paradigm? Kill..... not to live? Kill not.......... to live?
Improving the planet is to invent a specie that lives without consuming the flesh of animals or plants. An intelligent vegetable specie perhaps that has all the capacity of communication, invention and motivation to be godlike without the negatives. An intelligent vegetable that lives on air and water, and yet understands how to turn minerals and crystals into useful products to promote and encourage speciation. The role of god n’est-ce-pas?
God never made the promise of Eden. Not to us and not to the dinosaur. He gave us the opportunity to walk on the planet for a limited time and to use time to our best advantage. We could hope to make that a march in perpetuity, in spite of the geological evidence to the contrary. Or we could make the attempt to improve the process of speciation. That can be the only imperative we are capable of. To improve our understanding and to improve the understanding of other species, that time is a limited commodity and that in the time we have been granted, we should do our best to stop killing each other off as well as the incidental collateral damage to other life forms.
That we should leave the planet in better shape is to leave it with more species than we found it. That we should increase our understanding is to begin talking to each other of the Garden west of Eden, that god intended, but never invented. A place where our progeny will use biology as a tool, not a weapon. Bob