Anthropocene
When Time Is Short: Finding Our Way in the Anthropocene by "Timothy Beal"
I bought the above titled book many months ago and promptly forgot about it for many months. While scrolling through my ever growing collection of unread books I came across it again and started reading. Within the first few pages I was hooked. I love to read, but I love collecting books to read more than I love to read. Currently I am in the middle of reading at least a half dozen books. I tend to switch between the books I am reading based on the mood I am in at that moment. However, Timothy Beal's book was one I just could not put down and I read it exclusively for three or four days until it was complete.
gods with anuses
In our life we are reaching for heaven but in the end we will all become compost. We will return to the soil from whence we came. This reality has forced us as a species to create immortality vehicles - or "hero systems" as a means to escape death and achieve "immortality" by being remembered. However,being forgotten is the chief result of every person. Do you remember the name of the richest person in the world in 1830? I do not. Only once in a great while does someones name become enshrined in the public consciousness for more than a century. The rest of us are doomed to be forgotten long after we have been consumed and returned to the soil from "whence we came". We are living in a cycle of eating to be eaten. "Seen from this elevation creation is a mind-boggling bloodbath of murder, death, consumption, and rot, of life entwined with death."
acceptance
"How much unnecessary suffering is required by this system of denial of death as a species? How much harm to other beings, animate and inanimate, and to other humans—indeed to whole cultures and continents—do we cause through the ever-accelerating practices of exploitation and extraction that feed our pursuit of immortality through infinite growth?"
Many scientists agree that the extinction of the human race is all but assured. For example our rampant extraction of the earth's ground water has lead to irreparable damage to our planet. Our axis, rotation, orbit, and magnetic field have all been permanently altered. Timothy Beal posits that we should begin as a species to collectively consider palliative approach to our destruction. When someone is dying the palliative approach is to minimize their suffering while maximizing the time that they have left. As our time on this earth becomes short what should we focus on for our communities and our world? Peace, stop extracting resources for the sole purpose of gaining wealth. Restoring species and people groups to their native land/habitat. Pay reparations to those we have exterminated, to those we have held back through systems of racism, slavery, and forced poverty.
capitalism
"These are apocalyptic times. We are witnessing the revelation, the unmasking of American exceptionalism’s deep dependence on white racism, violence, and exploitation. Will it be enough to break through the denial that sustains our delusions of chosenness and special blessing as a nation?"
For too long our country has wielded the bible as a weapon to justify the rape of first our pristine continent and then our world. We took and took and took until there wasn't anything left to take and then we figured out a way to take something else to replace the thing that was no longer there to take because we took it all. We did all this in the name of G_d. We raped, we exterminated, we oppressed, we hated, we judged, we extracted, we overruled, we dominated - all in the name of Jesus.
final thoughts...
This book was a hard read for me. It made we weep, it made me angry, it made me despondent. But more importantly it woke me up to the fact that I cannot sit idly by and watch from the sidelines while my country destroys itself and the planet we call home. Things are getting bad and things are getting worse - or maybe it just seems that way to me but this is how every generation thinks since the dawn of time. I do not know but what I do know is that Timothy Beal is right - christianity has been terribly wrong in the past, present, and if we do not change we will continue to be so in the future. The time is now - it is too late to save ourselves. But it is not too late to change and do something good, do something right, to love, and to make peace.