There was never such a time in this country. He wants to take us all back to some magical time when everyone believed in the same God, worshipped him in the same way, and understood that their safety in the universe depended on completing the same religious rituals and stomping anyone who was different. The current state of the country does not suit him. “Jarret insists on being a throwback to some earlier, “simpler” time. Apparently, that can be surprisingly seductive to some people.” Its promise is of hard work and brand-new possibilities, problems, challenges, and changes. Its promise is not of mansions to live in, milk and honey to drink, or eternal oblivion in some vast whole of nirvana. For the human species, immortality is something to be won by sowing Earthseed on other worlds. It promises its people immortality only through their children, their work, and their memories. Earthseed’s heaven is literal, physical-other worlds circling other stars. In Earthseed, there is no promised afterlife. All that makes me wonder how a belief system like Earthseed-very demanding but offering so little comfort from such an utterly indifferent God-should inspire any loyalty at all. “I’ve seen religious passion in other people, though-love for a compassionate God, fear of an angry God, fulsome praise and desperate pleading for a God that rewards and punishes. That will break the old cycle, even if it’s only to begin a new one, a different one.”Įarthseed: Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents And some of the new people who emerge from all this will develop new ways to cope. Our new worlds will remake us as we remake them. We can fulfill the Destiny, make homes for ourselves among the stars, and become some combination of what we want to become and whatever our new environments challenge us to become. Or we can make something more of ourselves. We can choose: We can go on building and destroying until we either destroy ourselves or destroy the ability of our world to sustain us. But we can do something no other animal species has ever had the option to do. The human species is a kind of animal, of course. If there weren’t, the cycles wouldn’t keep replaying. “There seem to be solid biological reasons why we are the way we are. That’s the way things always have been.” “It is,” Len said. And when we look at all of that in history, we just shrug our shoulders and say, well, that’s the way things are. We go on having stupid wars that we justify and get passionate about, but in the end, all they do is kill huge numbers of people, maim others, impoverish still more, spread disease and hunger, and set the stage for the next war. “We keep falling into the same ditches, you know? I mean, we learn more and more about the physical universe, more about our own bodies, more technology, but somehow, down through history, we go on building empires of one kind or another, then destroying them in one way or another.
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