by Alton C. Thompson / September 23rd, 2017
Forty-five years ago the late Gregory Bateson [1904 – 1980] wrote these ominous words:
If you put God outside and set him vis-à-vis his creation and if you have the idea that you are created in his image, you will logically and naturally see yourself as outside and against the things around you. And as you arrogate all mind to yourself, you will see the world around you as mindless and therefore not entitled to moral or ethical consideration. The environment will seem to be yours to exploit. Your survival unit will be you and your folks or conspecifics against the environment of other social units, other races and the brutes and vegetables.
If this is your estimate of your relation to nature and you have an advanced technology, your likelihood of survival will be that of a snowball in hell. You will die either of the toxic by-products of your own hate, or, simply, of overpopulation and overgrazing. The raw materials of the world are finite.
Although Bateson was prescient in asserting that the “likelihood of survival” of our species is “that of a snowball in hell,” his statement needs to be corrected/updated in several ways:
- When some humans began conceiving deity as transcendent—i.e., as existing apart from Earth System—(rather than immanent), this “advance” was not the beginning of our problems as humans.
- Although conceiving deity as transcendent did play a role in the downward path that our…