[at-l] Grand Unification Theory

[saunterer@jimbullard.org (saunterer@jimbullard.org)]

At 09:18 PM 06/04/2002 -0400, Clark Wright wrote:
>...clip...Why is it that
>we label all of the things that mankind [and womankind] have produced as
>"unnatural?"  Why is it that the things human beings have created for
>housing, transport, etc. are considered "unnatural perversions" while
>the beaver's dam, the eagle's nest, and the mud dauber's home are all
>considered miraculous, perfect evidence of the natural order?  Are we
>not natural, too?  Are we not created in God's image, albeit broken with
>sin?  Do we have to carry over biblical concepts of sin into our
>qualitiative definitions of what is environmentally natural, or have we
>rather just taken our religious baggage carte blanche over into the more
>recent lines of thought on ecology, natural systems, etc.?

Whoa.  I wasn't saying that the manmade (species man, not gender man) world 
was unnatural, sinful or any of that stuff but we (the species) do tend to 
get overly focused on and attached to our creations at the expense of 
awareness of the world as mother nature created it.  When we do that our 
view of our place in the world on which we are dependent gets out of 
balance.  Mother Earth News used to have a quote on the title page of each 
issue and one that I recall was (paraphrased) 'For all man's culture, 
science, art and intelligence, he owes his existence to 6 inches of topsoil 
and the fact that it rains'.

>...clip...
>
>Could there possibly be a better moral and logical system of thought to
>apply to all of this - something to the effect that we, too, are natural
>creatures, and all that we create is natural as well, with the sole
>distinction being that we inherently wrestle with the fundamental pull
>of many generations of the past, as we face the future?  Let's take the
>long view - can we really hope to maintain this
>"one-foot-in-the-wilderness-and-one-foot-out" gestalt for, say, the next
>1,000 years?

That's exactly the point.  It's not that what humans create is inherently 
bad but that we need to fit what we do into an overall system that, like it 
or not, we cannot completely change without destroying it and possibly 
ourselves with it.

sAunTerer