Commuting Thoughts 2 : The Anti-Life Movement

The problem with the state of things in a nutshell is that the major religious forces that are antithetical to life have dominated our cultural development for well over two millennia. Their influence has seeped even into aspects that do not claim to have direct ties to religion (consumerism, capitalism, technological advancement, science and that harder to define general sense of life by the common 'man'). These types of behaviour, perception and thinking have been made possible and bloomed, for the most part, out of the manure of organized, Judeo-Christian religious forces. We may feel that the yoke of superstitious religion has been lifted from the shoulders of the world to some degree, but we see that organized religion is still blatantly pushing to influence the direction of the world even today (the USA's religious rights foray into politics and the media, the Islamic world's pushing back with terrorism against, from their side of the fence, these godless heathen). I would argue that the more insidious forces at work in the culture of consumerism, of urban being-ness, of virtual transgressions of the material and biological world through the use of electronic information technologies, are actually more frightening for being taken as inevitable, natural, scientifically supported, or what have you, and being more difficult to question for they seem to have no obvious underlying philosophy or dogma supporting them (though they do). It may seem inevitable or in our nature to undertake the destruction of our environment, that our appetites are merely too ravenous and our vision too nearsighted as a species, but I think it is more likely that the heavy influence the philosophy of these religions have had on the ages is still being felt and has not been analyzed enough to allow us to see it for what it truly is and how it has operated on our lives and our perception of the world/self dynamic.

The trick of time, our lifespan, our difficulty in maintaining a perspective on a larger picture may make what I'm saying seem ridiculous. It may seem that the path we are currently taking is the good one, the better one, a path that seems to have been leading us out of darkness and into some kind of superior status vis a vis our world and ourselves, fighting and resisting the darker angels of our nature (and in part it is, and we could also very well stumble upon a better way of living from out of this mess, but not without some deep and radical intentional or accidental alterations of the foundations of our perspective). But what I am trying to argue is that there have been and still are intense anti-life forces at the heart of our cultural achievements. While we may feel a sense of advancement, achievement, and progress, this current state of things is likely but a blip on our evolutionary radar and may very well do us in. In short, the experiment of the anti-life movement in human culture hasn't been going on all that long given the overall timeline of our existence, we have little to compare it to (though many smaller examples of the collapse of civilizations can be looked at for parallels: Mesopotamia, Rome, Aztec culture). Unless we analyze it for what it is and resist and change it we can expect the experiment to end badly.

The anti-life movement began at a time when humanity probably felt a burning need to try to see hope beyond the immediate, material circumstances of existence. To deny this time and place and the life it supports as merely a test, a game, an illusion, a preliminary state of being before the eternal and virtual existence of the soul in heaven, is to allow us to treat the world as expendable, as ours for the using, as, ultimately, not the be all and end all of existence. By embracing this view, it ignores the human to need to connect to the world and the mystery of existence without recourse to an afterlife. It is shortsighted, selfish and banking on a myth that can't be proven (but which can easily be cast into doubt by the very fact that history and archaeology shows us that the Bible, the Torah and the Koran are all just examples of cultural documents humanity has conjured up out of their imagination and that they are relative to the culture that produces them and therefore not inevitably true).