How we view our history and future can be skewed, or even screwed if we don't see either well. I promised my readers I would…
Rescuing Eden and Helping it Thrive
I want to remember, rescue and revive Eden, and I want you to help.
Eden is more than the natural world. It includes humanity and how we live in it. Yes, sustainability is a good initial step, but that implies barely staying even. I want us to revive nature and sustain it to thrive as never before. I want us to change how we exploit, extract, and poison the life we all rely on – to promote cycles of replenishment. We need systems that automatically re-invest in life, so much so that universal abundance in a beautiful, resiliently diverse system of life on Earth becomes Eden again, only loved by us, better than ever.
Living well in our larger culture and environment is our calling as ethical humans. Our place in the story of humanity on earth calls us to care for ourselves, each other, our society, and especially our one and only home. Whatever our political predicament, we are the incarnated generation for now, and all the problems and promise of the past is ours to steer into a collective future.
Hence my web site earthlyreligion. Too much, many religions dwell on an afterlife or an instead-of life. They mislead us away from the life we are built of and must live in. Not enough do we devote our lives to enjoying, protecting, and promoting the life we have and must have.
So, late in life, I start again. I take my place in this moment in history – cultural and environmental. These two came before me and will go on beyond me. But how will I have affected them? I have inherited the bounty of a free and lucrative society that met my life’s needs. I have enjoyed freedoms and benefits that others established and I have eaten from trees I didn’t plant. Have I lived up to this good fortune? Have I given back? Have I done my part to veer the vast momentum of ideas, social trends, technologies, and life systems? Have I lived fully, gladly, and responsibly? I am getting older and poorer but I have vitality, education, and money enough to try to give back to the beautiful bounty. I’m starting, and if you feel so-called, I want you to help.
Please visit my blog often and help spread it. Get involved here; I want a world-wide community of intelligent, heart-full, caring, creative, fun people. I’m no expert in all things. No one is. We’re all limited in what we know and can do; we are interdependent specialists. But, flawed and stressed though we often are, we give what we can to each other and this human calling. Many partial people can make for a more whole people. Together, we can take our place on Earth seriously and gloriously. We can both save and savor this world. We can do this religiously. Welcome.
Poke around. Join the discussion threads. Get others involved who agree. Though my blog topics will be wide and varied, the underlying thread rests on the grand goodness that builds us and houses us, the goodness we should both enjoy and serve, the goodness affirmed in Genesis One. Natural creation is good; let’s go with that goodness, for that is what we are built of and for.
Yes, we need to “change how we exploit, extract, and poison the life we all rely on — to promote cycles of replenishment.” All of nature is thus engaged, and in having set our species apart, we have betrayed our responsibility to the rest of the nature that has brought us forth and has always sustained us. Our cultural, and thus individual, challenge in recognizing the latent Eden here and now is our immersion in the culture we’ve collectively created, developed and defended — the culture of separation: I and thou; us and them, kill or be killed — distortions… Read more »
Yes, Jim, you get it. (And you’re the first to use the Reply function on my web site, now that Tobias has fixed it.) We’ve created a social, political, technological meme structure that, too much, exploits and exhausts Eden, and we need to change the meme so that all those functions serve to rescue and revive Eden. I’m interested in those underlying mythical ideas that steer us into foolishly believing we’re fallen (and then live that way, thinking we’ll be redeemed by mere belief) and changing them to work with the Eden in us that we live in. In theological… Read more »