« Eden as a Protest Story That Rejects Superpowers »

The Jews living as captive refugees in foreign Babylon protested what they heard and saw there by compiling their own stories of how things had come to be as they were. Eden, Cain, and Abel are at their core protest stories, mythology rooted in dissent from Multi Earth ways.

But in addition to saying “No” to Babylon and empires, these stories also plotted a new direction for themselves. Living under Babylon’s Multi Earthers, the Jews saw anew the wisdom of the One Earth worldview. “How had they gotten so far away from it?” they wondered. Shunning the Babylonian Enuma Elish creation story in which humans and empires rise out of acts of violence among the gods, the Jews told stories that reconnected their own origins to an incredibly good Creation brought forth by powerful, nonviolent words of the Creator. They compiled Genesis as their anthology of their origins, including origins of what went wrong. 

Once I knew how and where the Eden, Cain, and Abel stories came to be, I recognized them as stories that know our situation today. The authors had lived in the bitterness of Multi Earth conquest more deeply than I have. They knew what it feels like to be living in the Multi Earth culture of a superpower and having to listen to its self-justifying stories. The stories they created in protest then, energize my turning from the Multi Earth story today and to make the story for One Earth living more fully my own. 

And now, I’d love to hear your comments on how retelling the stories of Cain, Abel, and Eden in this way radically reorients their significance for you facing the macro-issues today. 

Comments

[Dan]

I learn three things: God is in control. We are responsible as stewards of creation. Even though resistance to the dominant system often seems hopeless we know empires come and go and the Word of the Lord remains. See Habakuk 3:17-19. See also this about one ancient indigenous empire...http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/08/120821115001.htm

[Chris Morales]

In harmony of Dan's third lesson, I will repeat a post of my friend a couple days ago, and in turn a quote of Gandhi: "When I despair, I remember that all through history, the ways of truth and love have always won. There have been tyrants, and murderers, and for a time they can seem invincible, but in the end they always fall."
And then that same friend, who works and lives in Guatemala, posted a question today: "A question of mining: How did we ever get so disconnected from the land that we came to believe that destroying the flora and the fauna that surrounds us, tearing huge holes in the earth that feeds us, and contaminating the water that sustains us… is a good idea?!?"
I responded with: "I believe this happened around the time of the 'enlightenment' when modern science was born, and when our previous notions of interconnectedness got lost amidst the separation of reality into individual components, and the linear time scale changed our view of what 'progress' means..."
Yet it seems from your blog that the 'multi-earth' story started much, much earlier. Just how far back have you traced it, and to what source?

[Lee Van Ham]

Dan, your link to Indigenous empires reveals the same kind of divorce from One Earth ways that happened among other peoples. The TRADITIONAL Indigenous ways relate differently to Earth, as you know so well. But from what I know of those empires, they contrast with Indigenous traditions. Isn't it interesting that even in this article the six centuries of empire are treated as the great time of the Mayans, not the aberration. In that sense, the authors are writing from a Multi Earth perspective. Many of today's surviving and scattered Mayans tilt more to One Earth perspectives. In that One Earth worldview, the Word of the Lord that remains is written in Creation and Earth as well as spoken in words and written in scriptures.
And, Chris, thanks for the great quotes. I believe that the Multi Earth story began about 12,000 years ago, coincident with the Holocene Era as geologists measure time, or the approximate end of the last glacial age. At first, Earth's resources, being so immense, handled this new way of organizing human life (we call it civilization) with minimal ill-effects. Multi Earth practices took centuries to develop and millennia to be what they are today. But I see the birth back then. Though we have thought of the word "civilization" as describing great progress, those who tended the wild and valued the commons have throughout history been following the Word of the Lord written throughout the heavens and Earth. By contrast, the "enlightenment" and industrial age accelerated Multi Earth living way beyond all the speed limits of the creational order. So, your reply identified a most significantly destructive point in the civilization story. How good that you could be in that particular conversation.