U.S. Decline Brings a New Moment for Faith in One Earth Mythology

The failing infrastructure in U.S. education, roads, mass transit, soil and biodiversity protection, drinking water quality, and waterways all indicate a superpower in decline. So do our lagging behind in green energy and rapid rail. As has happened throughout the Multi Earth story’s history, empires lose resiliency as their interior weakens.

The Jews in Babylon way back in 587 B.C.E. give us one such historical example. They knew that their own Multi Earth experiment in the monarchies of David, Solomon, and their successors, ended horribly. Plus, when they heard their conquerors’ stories, these conquered Jews knew beyond a doubt that they needed stories to help them understand how humans were being repeatedly tricked into believing the shining lie of Multi Earth living. Like them, I too want stories that expose Multi Earth ways and speak truthfully about the possibility of One Earth living. With the great U.S. superpower in decline, those stories have a new moment to be embraced.

My search for such stories and practices has been all the more challenging because of the many voices I’ve heard over my lifetime who’ve taught me to think of Eden more as history. As a story of the past, it tells how we humans fell into sin and that ever after we’ve been in a weakened state. In our fallen condition, human greed and Multi Earth ways become too mighty to be mastered. Capitalism is partly based on this idea. Since greed cannot be fully mastered, markets must be designed to make the best of greedy urges. But as myth, the choice of Eve and Adam in the Garden was for Multi Earth views, a terrible choice with sinful consequences, but not some psychological taint that has forever been passed along in historical succession. It’s just that too many humans have continued to choose Multi Earth views. Whenever we do so, we take our own bite from the forbidden fruit.

Over decades many teachers and authors have invited me to look through different lenses. As a result, I’ve been led to unbelief regarding Multi Earth stories and any reinterpretation of Eden or other One Earth myths that make them support the Multi Earth system. Instead, I’m putting faith in the One Earth paradigm and now seek the stories and interpretations that express it.

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. 

Imagine! D.C. and New York City Destroyed, Their Leaders Forced to Live in Bejing

Wes Howard-Brook explains how Genesis, as we read it today, came together in Babylon among Jews whom the Babylonian military had removed from Jerusalem, marched forcibly to Babylon, and put into settlements there designed for captives taken in war. The Jews were hurting badly and needed stories that gave meaning to their ugly situation.

Living as Jewish refugees in the capitol city of the empire that had conquered them and their beloved Jerusalem, Genesis was their answer to what is otherwise the oldest written book of origins that we know, Enuma Elish, the Babylonian book of origins. Enuma Elish told how Babylon had been established by the gods. With that kind of lofty sacred heritage and divine authority, Babylonian Multi Earthers justified their right to bring their “superior ways” to the world around them, using force as necessary.Their expansionist plans included the land to their west which was controlled by the monarchy of Judah, a weak monarchy that was in considerable disarray. By 587 B.C.E., the Babylonians completed the leveling of Jerusalem. Included in the destruction was Solomon’s great Temple.

This double destruction of the two anchors of their culture had been inconceivable to the Jews. They were in as great a disbelief at what had happened as we would be if Washington, D.C., and New York City were demolished along with all of their economic centers, national shrines, and houses of religious worship. Furthermore, imagine all of the ruling elite of these cities being taken captive to live in Beijing, China, or any other foreign city of power. 

The same Jews who had that unimaginably devastating trauma brought together the story of Eden and its immediate sequel Cain and Abel. More about how these stories vigorously protest empire will follow in subsequent blog posts.

What stories would we tell if two of our city-centers of power and wealth were destroyed and military reprisal was NOT an option?