The Devil's Workshop?

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CONSIDER THE LILIES


 Have you ever wondered what could be going on in the mind of a cow lying placidly in a pasture, chewing the cud balls she stored up in her morning feed. Or that lone horse in a pasture you drive by on your way to and from work who—standing on three legs as resting horses do—could be a lonely, living statue ... day after day after day. Surely absolute, unmitigated boredom is the lot of the domesticated animal species we imprison for our pleasure and nourishment.

            I’m intrigued by the creation myth in the first chapters of Genesis, primarily because it’s an  attempt to visualize what could make us so different from all other living things. Consciousness—or the knowledge of good and evil as Genesis calls it—is imagined to have been a choice fraught with such danger that the creator predicts that “if you eat of it, you shall surely die.”

            Scribes gathering and composing the text of Genesis 1-3, could see the fruit of this choice all around them; it was written during a time of bloody wars of conquest and revenge. Later, Charles Darwin would discover that it wasn’t choice, but natural selection and survival of the fittest that resulted in one species of life developing this knowledge of good and evil, this wonderful, yet dangerous, consciousness that gave humans a god-like-ness when compared to all else that lives.

            Consciousness makes boredom not only possible but probable, I think. Because conscious minds can imagine, predict, analyze and plan, humans can imagine unlimited possibilities, a visualization which in turn incites a hunger for variety, for change, for unending newness.

            A knowledge of good and evil implies a moral consciousness, or conscience, a sensitivity about what’s right and what’s wrong to do. Unfortunately, our hunger for newness tends to override our moral judgment. Take killing devices: stick to sword to crossbow to rifles to explosives to nuclear weapons. Were we guided by a morality prohibiting the taking of life, laying down the stick would have ended the sequence in its infancy. If you eat of it, you shall surely die begins to feel like a prediction with merit when we consider the wickedness by which so many relieve their boredom. 

            I’m a Christian because even the flawed and sometimes perverted gospel of Jesus’ teaching answers the problem predicted in Genesis; namely that the core of righteousness will in the end be found NOT to have been the unflinching preoccupation with self-preservation, but the striving for the health of the species. Love your neighbour as yourself; greater love hath no man than that he should lay down his life for his friend; how can one love God whom he has not seen, if he cannot love his brother whom he can.

            The great gift of consciousness has power to kill us, or set us free.

            And although the placid cow and the tripod horse may never feel the frustration of boredom, I’m pretty sure I will never want to change places with either (although three legs might allow me to chuck my cane). 

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