(no subject)

I was talking with Quelonzia t'other day about the dream in the previous entry.

"But if the trees are my protectors, why does one of them want to fall on me?"

"Because your protector is also your destroyer. And that's why you're one of Papa Coyote's favorite children."

Indeed. That's Mother Nature all over, isn't it? She gives us everything we have, even our lives. And she takes it all away, in the end. Our creator, our protector, our destroyer. But we have free use of it all in the meantime.

Evil bothers me, philosophically. It's the rock that all major religions founder upon, in my opinion. (YMMV and more power to you.) Where does it come from? How can Nature, who loves everything, destroy everything?

I was thinking about that after talking to Quel, and I remembered what the Bible says about it in the book of Genesis. I may not believe in what people have done with the Bible, but face it; a book doesn't remain the ultimate best seller from before there even WERE best sellers, down to the present day, unless it has sparks of greatness in it.

Back in my Sunday School days they told me Adam and Eve were kicked out of the Garden of Eden because they disobeyed God. They ate the apple, after God told them not to. Therefore he booted them out. What kind of a god would do that? Take away everything they had, drive them away from home, and sentence them to death, for an APPLE? It must have been out of spite.

Well, as with most of what I was told, it doesn't jibe with the original record. Adam and Eve didn't eat the apple. They ate the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil.

Whoa. Think about that. What an insight that is!

Because we, each and every one of us, have to do evil things every single day in order to survive. We eat living things, which means we had to kill them. We murder, and call it war or execution. Or a necessary side effect of allowing people to own personal vehicles, even; selling cars, knowing some of the drivers will die. We throw people in jail cells, and call it justice. We extort money from everyone, and call it taxes. No matter how we try to rationalize it or ignore it, no matter how we try to pretend we're not killing by calling it something else, the fact remains that we are all destroyers. We have to be destroyers, because we can't exist otherwise.

Our only justification is we have no choice. But that's very little justification at all. The punk who blows your brains out to steal your car would say the exact same thing, if you could ask him.

But in Nature, animals do some horrible things. A male lion, taking over a pride, will drive off or kill the previous male. He will kill all the cubs. For us to do this would be unspeakable evil. The lion, on the other hand, just does certain things. He doesn't know why. He probably doesn't even know he's going to do them, in advance. He remains innocent of any crime because good and evil are choices, and he has no choice. He is what he is, that's all. He couldn't possibly be anything else.

So he's still innocent. But we aren't. We know the difference. We were never really kicked out of the Garden of Eden at all. We still live where the Garden was, but it really existed only in our minds. When our minds changed, it vanished from us forever.

Good and evil are our inventions. Good inventions too, because they allow us to live together, cooperate, have friends, create civilizations. But out in Nature they aren't just irrelevant; the fact is, they don't exist at all.

Some think nature is evil, a constant struggle, survival of the fittest, unrelenting warfare and death. Some think nature is good, sunlight, flowers, Mother Nature in a long white gown petting a newborn fawn. In truth, Nature just IS.

But I believe in good and evil. They apply to me. So how should I think of this most powerful of goddesses?

She'll destroy me some day. But in the meantime, I get to do so much, see so much, know so many people. Perhaps even to understand a little.

So.. it's all good.