Life Is Sacred
- All successful life is
- Adaptable,
- Opportunistic,
- Tenacious,
- Interconnected, and
- Fecund.
-OctaviaButler, Parable of the Sower
What does the word "sacred" mean? I'm not entirely sure, but "something worthy of worship" is a good first approximation. Of course that only begs the question, what makes something worthy of worship?
Life is the force that gave birth to humanity through the blind forces of evolution. We belong to it; we are a part of Gaia. Gaia, the body of all Life on Earth, is worthy of worship partly because in some ways, She resembles the gods of other monotheistic religions: She created us, and She can easily destroy us if need be. Love, awe, and fear are all natural emotional responses to Gaia.
Why shouldn't we worship anything that is not alive? Gaia includes systems that we don't commonly think of as alive, after all: the global geochemical cycles of essential elements that pass through the oceans, atmosphere, and rock. This is little different from the structure of a tree trunk, where Life processes occur only near the surface of the bark and the whole core of the tree is technically dead.
But be that as it may, the tree itself is certainly alive, and so is Gaia. I wrote the prohibition mainly as a criticism of the materialistic worship of things humans created: money, governments, and great monuments to the power of technology such as the pyramids or skyscrapers. The works of humanity can certainly inspire love, awe, and fear, but they belong to us, we do not belong to them, and it is often deeply unhealthy to pretend that we do. (You may belong to your country, in the sense of being a member of a group of people that live on a certain piece of land, but that doesn't mean you should worship it. Nationalism, like so many other isms, is dangerous.)
--Scifiben 23:46, 3 August 2007 (PDT)
