BROTHER-TIME THOUGHTS - On our first day of Brother vacation we visited the Hoover Dam. It's an awe inspiring combination of natural beauty and human engineering. It was a celebration of God's and man's awesome achievement from 90 years ago. And it's provided the energy to turn this desert into a garden. Which we witnessed when we drove back the Vegas to view "Post Card from Earth" at the Sphere.The Sphere is another celebration of human achievement. The $2.3 billion cost of construction incorporated the creative and engineering genius of the 21st century. But like much in the 21st century the special effects are fantastic, but the narrative is insipid. The chairs shook when the spaceship landed on our new planet of the exiles. Then, as the exiles woke up, Mama Earth pumped a "Postcard" into their wakening brains. She reminded them of all they left behind and why they had to go into exile. Mama Gaia described how she "decided" to create life billions of years ago. And then how Life "decided" to diversify and become complex until we humans showed up. When she displayed her glory in the drone-footage flying through all her majesty, the wind blew in your face. In the curved visual, the approaching elephant loomed toward you and seemed magnified ten times over. Everyone gasped when the gigantic jumping spider lunged into our faces. Then there were awesome scenes of humanities achievements in all their beauty. Interestingly, there were great scenes of religious worship and incredibly beautiful churches and temples and monasteries. But Mama Gaia explained that all that religious activity was aimed at Her. Humanity saw Her beauty and worshiped Her.But then it all turned dark. We reproduce too much. We exploited and abused our Mother. These visuals of mines and crowded markets and slums throughout the world were stunning also. Finally, our Mother had enough of our unnatural ways and spit us out. The ending was a bit obscure. One scene seemed to imply that the seas rose over us and covered the land. But then we were building spaceships and taking off to the moon and settling there. From there we could search the galaxy for "Mama Bear" planets. Then the new Adam and Eve on the ship would plant a magic "Life" ball and the whole planet would terraform. Meanwhile, Gaia told us that without humanity to abuse her, She'd recover and to her original state. And she'd allow only a few of us to return and play on Her again. But only with the lightest of touches. Who would choose these fortunate elite wasn't touched upon. Throughout the entire experience I was smiling at the impact of the visuals and chuckling at the absurdity of the narrative.We talked about it afterwards. I told Chris that I loved the visuals. But that the narrative was the most anti-human misanthropic screed I'd ever heard. As in Romans chapter one, when they "worship and serve the creature, more than the Creator" insanity is inevitable. I laughed at Mama's postcard saying that Muslims, Christians, and Jews are really only worshiping Her when they believe deeply that they are worshiping her Creator. From its beginnings, humanity looked out on the earth and into their own souls and came to the most obvious conclusion that there had to be a Creator of all this beauty and complexity. In Gaia's postcard, there is not a whisper of Him or that humanity ever even posited His existence.In my Christian worldview, the earth is not our mother, but our Fallen wayward sister. Like us she is but one creature of the one Creator. But only humanity was created in His Image. But like her, we are Fallen images. Our sister is dangerous, unjust, and threatens us. But even before we fell, we were called to subdue her wildness. We are to care for her as a garden and not worship her wildness. In mindful humility of our own fallenness, we are to subdue earth's fallen wildness in the service of the Images of God. To subdue the earth to the cause of human flourishing is His design. It was accomplished in the Hoover Dam. Not so much in the Sphere.God called us "to be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth". There is still much empty space. Our sister is not overburdened by our billions. But in the fallenness of our souls, we have abused and damaged her to our own detriment. We need to conserve and maintain her resources and beauty for the sake of our own flourishing. The very purpose of our brother-time is to praise God for the beauty of His creation."Other Earth" is an unconscious abstraction. She has no will or purpose. She is the fallen background to the Grand Story of God's design to redeem His fallen images and mold them into his perfect images. It's a poetic beauty to personify Mother Earth. It is blasphemy to deify her. The Great Green Myth of her fragility is unscientific. Science shows her to be most resilient and with many self-correcting systems that balance each other out. And that balance is God-ordained for the survival of His Images.I sometime experience slight feelings of the absurdity of Christianity with its "God becoming Man, dying for our sins, returning to redeem our fallen earth". But my rational mind reminds me of the even greater absurdity of the alternative. That an unconscious "Mother Earth" or "Life Force" could design and execute the sublime complexity and interrelationship required to make a single cell live is a scientific impossibility. So, the Great Green Gaia Myth only makes me shake my head and laugh. But Chris' take was that it's nothing that we haven't heard since our college years and first Earth Day in 1970. Still the power and extravagance of this piece of propaganda is new. The "flash" of the effects covers up the absurdity of the substance. |