Dear God People Julia Cole

The speaker addresses the importance of discussing and examining our beliefs and values in order to address the challenges we face as a society. They question the idea of human specialness and the harm it has caused to the environment and other species. They argue that our current system of wealth and privilege is based on a hierarchy created by humans, and that we have the power to change it. They advocate for a culture that values and respects all living beings and promotes mutual agreement and cooperation. The speaker emphasizes the need for love, understanding, and collaboration in order to create a better future for all. Dear God people, we're friends. We work together. We keep our love lights burning. There's so much we share. We believe in justice, mutual aid, community. We fight for change. Mostly, we get along by not talking about our deepest beliefs. And in a perfect world, we could ignore and respect the differences between us. The life or death troubles we now face together, however, leave us no choice. We must become fearless and open allies in order to survive. It's time to talk candidly about ways that our loving beginnings may have been shaped by unloving ends. I'll be honest, this journey into our past and future might be difficult for you. It certainly has been for me. But will you hear me out and tell me what you think? Every day I see reminders on the news, on social media, and now in the highest courts of our land, that human life is sacred. I'm asking you with the greatest urgency, could we talk about those words? For me, sacred means something deeply mysterious, something I love and cherish above all else. And I think we might agree on that. Life is sacred. Where I think we might differ is this. I can't understand why every other living being isn't sacred too. If you say, but of course they are, then could you help me understand why there are so many God-fearing people across this nation fighting tooth and nail to keep tiny clusters of human cells alive, while across the globe other species are going extinct at an ever-increasing speed? Perhaps sacred can mean something more, like chosen by God and be founded in belief that people were blessed with morals or intelligence or something else and so made more valuable. How strange, then, that this heavenly idea of human specialness appears to promise a hellish ending for our kind. If I ever need a prayer, it's this. Plants eat soil, sunlight, air and water to make food we can eat and air we can breathe. And insects help plants make fruits and seeds. And they eat plants and animals. And animals eat insects, plants and other animals and breathe air. And animals and plants die. And bacteria and fungi eat them, making soil for new plants. And so on. Forever and ever. Amen. In the great life-death-life cycle, even viruses have an important role to play. They kill bacteria in water and recycle huge amounts of carbon. From time to time, they also wipe out populations of other creatures which, for one reason or another, have become vulnerable. Ask a gardener, doctor or farmer and they'll tell you that everything alive is connected. So much so that even a small change in a living system can have far-reaching consequences. And human technology changes so much faster than biology that the stuff we make, from airplanes to plastics to smartphones, has, unfortunately, begun to push whole communities of life out of balance until they're teetering towards collapse. A tiny being called COVID-19 has killed more than 6.5 million people since it first leapt into human bodies. And the most vulnerable among us are still being taken. The impacts that humans are making on the other life-forms that share this ball of rock, however, surpass any plague we have ever known. In our time, a million different species will explode into a starburst of memories and then go dark. Anyone who studies life soon comes to realise that we're digging our own graves because human beings thrive in a tangled web of connections. And we're destroying the creatures and conditions that keep us all alive. It's biologically impossible for God to love people without also loving everything else. A paradox There's a whole other level on which I find it hard to believe that God would really make people more special or tell us that the rest of creation is there for our own unlimited use. This is because I find it surprising that a loving God would favour humans who choose to live so wastefully above, say, a forest that provides us all with food, medicines, useful materials and clean water, and pumps out lungfuls of cool, breathable air. Is it possible that God really meant to design a superior model, but something went wrong and we turned out to be a two-legged brain box that was still too stupid to keep itself alive? This seems unlikely to me, if only because everything else has pretty much figured out what survival means. If we weren't around any more, the rest of life would recover and get along just fine. Well then, can you imagine God in a white coat, calmly jotting down data on a clipboard like some scientist testing whether free will was a good idea or not? Star date 13.8 billion. Hmm. Now let's see if the beloved specimens in this little thinking game are smart enough to avoid complete and painful self-destruction. I sometimes find myself in this state of mind when I'm in my greenhouse, spraying a soapy, suffocating mist onto a plague of aphids. Somehow, though, reckless and fatal experiments feel more human to me than godly. If you, too, find it hard to understand why humanity might stubbornly fail to correct our path towards suicide, then what if the big idea itself is wrong? What if the story of a God who gave us a planet just simply isn't true? A force fuelled by desire. What if it was a few brainy creatures like us who invented the story of a heavenly father basically as a way to get rich? What if we suddenly realised that if we wanted to chop down the forests and fence the land, or corral the beasts and seize magic from the earth, then we'd have to uproot and replace the wide-open, everywhere gods of life? If that seems shocking or ridiculous, please bear with me a little longer. I'm really not questioning the sacred here, but instead the way we turn sacred matter into vast and profitable piles of stuff. We know that when early people were in an everyday, personal relationship with the natural world around them, they valued a gift economy. They fought like animals to defend tribal lands and resources, just as we do today, but humanity's first notions of a moral self were as part of a larger whole. We built relationships, took and shared, challenged and obeyed limits, just like the rest of life. As our brains and lives grew increasingly complex, what happened? How did we become a culture that encourages endless desire, that keeps on sucking until the well runs dry? Quite easily, it seems. Perhaps it was when our ancestors first learned to love and then to lose, that the feeling of never having enough began to grow. A child's tiny body might return to the earth and nourish the trees that gave his mother shade, but how could she not long to meet that sweet soul once again? When I'm hurt, I want to feel better. Did this ancient mother also yearn to make her suffering more bearable, at least until her own death came? Just as a bedtime tale lulls a child to sleep, the promise of a happy ending would comfort a mind that had begun to wonder, is this life really all there is? Abundance, rekindled love, life without end in a palace high above the hardships here on earth, what's not to like about that? But then what happened when people started to love things as much as other humans and felt the same sense of loss when they didn't have them? Slowly did dreaming of bigger piles of stuff become our daily habit? And with every improvement in our lot since then, haven't we endlessly wanted more? If we'd still been listening to the gods of nature, we might have heard them say, you can only have this much, or you can only take it in this way. We would have traded making better or making do for a future. But once we dug the source of life's mysteries out from the fertile ground beneath our feet and flung it up into the wide blue sky, the living world was no longer sacred. This new god could promise humans anything we wanted to take from the land. From ours to mine. Time passed. Our appetite for comforts grew and so did our skills to supply them. Then, at some point, everything changed again. A few social climbers began to want a whole lot more and worked out a fiendishly clever way to get it. They harnessed the labour of animals and other humans to increase their own stores rather than those of the community. Slipping free from the give-and-take world, these new rulers climbed high on their piles of bounty. At first, they must have dealt with some friction as the news story rubbed up against the ancient understanding that community survives as a whole. And, obviously, there could be no servants if everyone became a master. So, the story had to change. Access to God's special grace had to switch from humans only to only some humans. I'm asking you to consider this, that wealth and privilege were made possible only by the invention of a god who loved some kinds of things more than others. So, how did those special ones get away with making others work for them? Some were just bullies, of course, but others backed up their new ideas with slick PR stories like, I'll take care of you. Or, I'm better than you so I deserve more. Or, God loves me more because I built this swanky shrine. If you funded a nice holy day or made sure the priest lived well, your stories could get a nod from the angels. Spend a few more clams on the Sky God and the Big Book of Rules could set you up for eternity. In no time at all, blessings were something only a select few could come by. For all the rest, the cry went up, Abandon the pagan earth gods now, and you'll get pie in the sky when you die. If you can't or won't, you'll pay. Banishment to a hell that spans both life and death. A palace gate built by people in the name of their Sky God was all it took to set up a world in which inequality would seem both completely natural and never-ending. Gains and Losses Darwin's story about the survival of the fittest has helped us understand why everything from humans to viruses changes over time. Unfortunately, this idea is often misused to explain why social orders never change. Unless you look carefully at the big picture, it can be easy to miss the hidden mistake. In the real world, individuals who thrive by destroying everything else can only ever be fit in the very short term. And anyone who claims that people who are winners naturally trump losers simply ignores the very human way that advantage gets passed on from one generation to the next. Over time we've lived as nomads in the wilderness, farmers and city-building industrialists, and now we're launching into cyberspace. Step by step, we've become less connected to the web of life and less aware of its sacred power. Perhaps if our future is a silicon chips, then no bot will care. But, if we still want to live inside our flesh and senses in form, then we simply have no choice but to change and grow. Meanwhile, however, the North American story of manifest destiny continues to unfold. Though many pioneers set out looking for humble improvements in life, a place to raise a family, the freedom they knew, an end to their hunger, the true costs of our settling have become ruinous. Some of us see what's happening and we call out. But even as increasing numbers see the perils growing in the world, the takers just can't seem to stop. Night and day, workers convert nature's bounty into absurd amounts of wealth, earning barely enough to keep themselves alive. Despite their suffering, despite the piles of toxic waste left behind, despite the killing heat or the way disease infects our weakening systems, the favoured few tell us they are bound by God's will to continue. I ask you, how can this be love? The strength to survive adversity depends on having alternative options, and diversity is our seed bank. And yet, using God's love as their knife, the wealthiest humans continue to whittle and slash with stunning efficiency, as countless other ways of being are silenced one by one. What would our life together look like today if we refused to think like this? If we'd never learned to slot human beings into rigid moral rankings? What if our story had struggled with the possibility that we're all a mash-up of better and worse, and that any way of being that respects others is worthy? This is hard, I know. I strain to see even a glimmer of good in some folk. But imagine this, if we learned to see this puffed-up idea of human specialness as the root of so much cruelty, couldn't we perhaps begin all over again? We seem to be fatally stuck, but I cannot allow myself to let go of the possibility that human beings will work out how to become more loving, more aware, and even more inventive. Many humans in the world today are guided by serious moral and ethical standards, even though they don't believe in a creator who gave people dominion over the earth, and don't favor some humans over others. Many of us celebrate life's spirit inside of people, in the networks of energy that crackle around the earth, and perhaps even out across our vast universe. If you imagine a pattern of relationships flowing to and from a god in heaven, the shape you see might look like an arrow or a pyramid, maybe a stack of circles or a Venn diagram. But if instead you think of wonder woven into the center of each living being, the pattern tends to look more messy, like fog or waves, like fungal mats and nerve nets, like telepathy. The idea that we are the ones who must shape our own future is, of course, terrifying. It's overwhelming to think that together we might be responsible for choosing morality and value. It's sobering to recognize that no one else could be responsible for our many mistakes, and to know that we're the only ones who can fix them. This may seem daunting, but for me the most beautiful consequence of humans being in charge of our own future is this. If we're the ones who invented such brutish moral standards, then we can put our heads together and change them any time we choose. In the secular world, we've loosely called this democracy, though clearly we're still struggling to make the vision work better. Ideally, we'd talk and listen to each other openly, we'd think deeply, then we'd carefully evaluate the next steps based on the best interests of both individuals and the system as a whole. How could there ever be a way to do all that perfectly? Nevertheless, if the things we believed and did were guided by mutual agreement rather than invisible chains of command, we would at least be turning towards the possibility of a human future. Learning to love a billion shades of grey What would have to change if we lived in a culture in which the entire living world had value and was worthy of respect? Wouldn't every conversation about life or death have to negotiate different points of view in a much more generous way than our courts currently do? 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