Abel - the first "Good Shepherd"

I tried staying away from writing for a month and I just about made it:

Having a Nice Day™?  That certainly seems to be the sincere wish of just about every convenience store clerk I’ve ever met.  Well, not wishing to go against their wishes, I’d say if you are having a Nice Day, you should probably skip reading this.  Seriously, these ideas (like a few of the more recent posts) are beyond just politics - pretty far beyond, actually.  I suspect this general subject is not really ready for prime time, but (to change metaphors) dancing around on thin ice is one of my specialties.


So, with that cautionary note, venture forth if you are strong or already bummed out for the day:

It’s not a day brightener to consider that our species, although increasing in number, is actually in decline in several key aspects.  We are realistically looking at, and at some point should give strategic consideration for, the end game for our kind.  But this really doesn’t have to spoil your day.  Everything’s fine, keep shopping.  We may not be able to change the outcome much but we have time to think this through.

We evolved, for better and worse, to possess a brain that outfoxed itself and we seriously botched the management of all our affairs related to species survival.  We sense this, and we try different solutions, but they seem to just create new problems.  (e.g. biofuels, cap and trade, carbon credits, etc.) We have exploited and overused the resources we depend on, spoiled the environment with waste of all kinds, and thoughtlessly mistreated members of other species, as well as our own.  We’ve been doing all this for several thousand years and the consequences are now showing up more frequently and urgently than ever before.

We can hang our heads in shame, but that's not an answer.  Also, while we are complicit in a crime so vast it can’t be fully appreciated, we can reasonably argue that there could not have been any other possible outcome to our evolution- but that still doesn't justify apathy.

At some point, we were simply tired of being eaten by saber toothed tigers, and we also wanted to more efficiently kill woolly mammoths.  And, we also wanted to kill those bad guys in the cave next door before they kill us, and do it from a safe distance.  Because we wanted these things, we made it happen with sharp sticks and rocks instead of clubs and fists.  In fairly short order, we had stealthy nuclear weapons and here we are.

In fact, humans evolved to be self-limiting.  (If, by the way, you believe in Intelligent Design, can you point out which is the intelligent part? ) Darwin pegged the motivation - survival of the fittest, period.  The fittest is us, but our fitness didn’t include the ability to project the distant future that holds the logical consequences of our “advanced” survival behaviors.  The distant future only stays distant for so long, and then it’s imminent.  Seven billion and counting....

. . . . .

I'd credit someone for the following if I knew the source(s):

There is an ironic take on particular aspects of the story of Jesus, the Savior, that illustrates some anthropological parallels for the development of man:  Because Jesus had such an uncomfortable message, and because he consistently delivered in the faces of the wrong people, he was persecuted and put to death.  But by killing him and silencing his message, we cut off our path to salvation.  (That was the path where we actually had to change our behavior to be like his.)  Luckily for us, there's the other path to salvation.  In his encore as the Holy Spirit, he offers a kind of a plan B route.  This route assumes no change is going to happen, so we can still find grace by simply praying for forgiveness.


(There's a joke going 'round the internet about this:  "I prayed to God to give me a bicycle, but then I remembered He doesn't work that way.  So, I stole a bicycle and prayed for forgiveness.")

In a symbolic sense in this metaphor, Jesus is the stand-in for our actual savior.  Our real savior is not an individual, but an archetype or at least a generic representative of a sort.  That is the prototypical "indigenous" human, of late Stone Age vintage, from any given inhabited region.  


In the Old Testament, Abel is a symbolic, Biblical precedent of this: one living in grace.  He stands for the kind of heathen that we despised and persecuted, not in the dramatic single event, or over the course of a week or so, but over millennia.  Civilized and settled man (descended from the surviving brother, Cain) is largely self-defined by his distinctions from, and his presumed superiority over, the hunter-gatherers.  It turns out they had the grace-filled, sustainable lifestyle about right, except for the fittest for survival part.

(In a double ironic twist, it is believed by some researchers that a period of climate change about ten thousand years ago may have forced hunter-gatherers to take up farming in the first place.  Eventually, they evolved to climb up on diesel-gulping combines to harvest the GMO corn that we enjoy today in our breakfast cereal, while we read the newspaper stories about the current climate change.)

We’ve systematically purged our planet from practitioners of a way of life that was our means of salvation.  We cut off our path back to an actually sustainable way of being.  Why?  The same reason they killed Jesus, and the same reason Cain killed Abel:  Those responsible (which could have included any one of us) didn’t want to be reminded of the way they had fallen from grace.  In our case, we didn’t want the natives to remind us of our own fall from grace, our lives of excessive greed and fear.  Eliminating those still living in grace was and still is the easiest way to assuage our guilt.  Kill the last of them and then swing by the mall for the clearance sale.

So, where does this all leave us, besides screwed?  It leaves us to finally and fully embrace reality on an individual basis.  Reality is that we should love one another, just as Cain should have loved his brother.  He was, and we are, our brother’s keeper.  At this point, love for one another is about all we have left, and in truth, that’s all that ever was important.  Jesus died trying to point that out.