MY CREATION MYTH

Genesis

The following tale is a compilation of my ideas drawn from sources as diverse as Darwin and the Bible, including direct experience and information from a spectrum of versions written about the nature of life in the universe between them and outside both. I don’t propose it to be truth to be believed, though I do have expectations and intent that it may resonate a sense of truth in the experience of fellow strugglers against the myth.

My creation myth begins ten thousand years before the creation of heaven and earth for the Christians and billions of light years after as far ago as Hubbell can see. This is not a story about creation per se, such as painting, story telling, dancing, singing and tool making. It is about creating the assumption that man’s creativity had carte blanche from ultimate authority to use the life of the planet any damned way it chose. No, “Because we can, should we?,” about it, full steam ahead.

It is belief in such authority that changed some hunter-gatherers, who were learning to husband nature symbiotically where and as it grew naturally, into totalitarian farmers wiping out all plant and animal life in the way of feeding the hunger of a newly accelerated increase of population now having to earn what they once gathered. Guaranteed year round food gave the farming folk godlike status in the eyes of those still nomadic hunter-gatherer-herdsmen and their well fed, swelling population fostered imperial expansion and the practice of demonizing those heathen, fellow humans who have what one wants, and live where one wants to live. The grass is greener syndrome gone berserk, as painfully being played out between Israel/Palestine, US/Middle East Oil, developers/9th Ward N.O. today. To salve their still compassionate consciences for massacring practitioners of the old symbiotic ways of living on the planet guided by nature oriented myths of the goat god pan and his pantheon of nature spirits, priests twisted Pan into the image of D’evil and nature into a chaotic wildness to be conquered, tamed and exploited upon the most supreme authority guilt manufacturing/manipulating priests and community leaders could concoct. What a deal: a citizenry who will do ones most atrocious bidding while paying one a tithe to absolve them of the natural guilt that comes with genocide — all out of the thin air of belief. Genius. In some form or other, that is how the creation myth, of western civilization at least, got created, and a strong foreshadowing of the things now condoned or unnoticed by a citizenry being spoon fed it from birth for longer than they believe the earth has existed.

For me, belief seems to be lazy hypothesizing, hope-othesizing, as it were, theories taken to be conclusions to ward off incessant contradictions in daily experience and thus avoided with the label, “tests of faith.” The theory my myth above out lines undergoes constant alteration — lately it has been inclusion of facets of civilized behavior as yet unlinked to the genetic inheritance of natural tendencies, unless this accelerated expedience and inexplicable behavior I witness down town and in businesses I visit reflects a confusion between the fight and flight instincts in knowing that the best way to bring the enemy to its knees is to break our own addiction to its poison — the enemy is us.

Without our willing participation, religious or not, political or not, in lining up at the store for what we have lost the ability to grow or make or do without for ourselves or cooperatively in a communal tribe, the untouchable spender of vaults full of our blood money would wilt like a starving tick.

Belief is so strong a blinder that one may gain fortune, fame and power enough that, despite having left a blatant trail of ineptitude and irresponsibility in ones every endeavor otherwise, has never failed to be able to buy ostensibly elected government posts as up front as governor and president, with the balance tipped by playing the god card and its inherent fear factor among the hesitant Christians. The “Uniter” in highest office today has rewed church and state in a ceremony after which he referred to the religious right as a “bunch of nut cases.” But useful tools, eh?

Just as gratitude for sex can be mistaken for love, gratitude for security found in the arms of a supreme being that is, far more than the aloofness of the universe, interested in and manipulative of our personal lives and insecurities, can be mistaken for actually being responsible for the shelter part of life’s big two necessities, food and … the food part is taken care of at mcdonalds. If the separation of the individual from responsibility for his actions, while separating the fruits of his labor from his wallet, is the intent of our church-state, they have succeeded very well. Even if the infinite resources our entire economy accelerates to consume weren’t a core belief in a divine promise whose lie causes all life on earth to suffer more every day, human population has gone out of control due to the original idea of totalitarian agriculture creating a planetary glut of ourselves and our food at the expense of the stability the diversity of life we extinguish. Any biologist knows that a population is controlled by its food supply, and the ostensibly humane idea of increasing food production in sympathy for the starving can only increase the number of starving people on the economic fringes while their portion of the burgeoning population remains the same as biologically predictable. Agriculture is not the cure for famine, it is the cause.

Well, hell, I’ve just begun on ramifications of a population acting on the belief that their entire environment belongs to them, the wannabes have to pay off the mortgage first. So I guess I’ll just call this chapter 1, next I’d like to tackle the difference between creativity and destruction.