'Are We Destroying The Garden of Eden?'
By James T. Moore (03/10/07)
When astronauts landed on the moon they found nothing but a lot of dust, huge rocks, and barren horizons. But when they turned the camera on Planet Earth and we saw that exquisite, perfectly-shaped, blue ball suspended tranquilly in space, it did more than boggle our minds.
Personally, it gave me a new perspective on creation that may sound nutty, but hear me out.
God, they say, created everything in six days. He turned on the light, hung up the heavenly bodies, made land and water appear, brought forth herbs, seeds, fruits, and every living creature and creeping thing. Then God made man. He created him in His own image, gave him a woman for a soul-mate, placed them in a garden called Eden, and told the first couple to take care of it.
But they blew it.
And taking their misconduct as our temporal template, we have been blowing it beautifully ever since. In the first place, why are we beating our brains out looking for the garden where all our troubles started? To find closure of some kind? Perhaps. But for whatever reason we look for the garden, we may be looking in the wrong place.
What if the Garden of Eden isn’t on Earth at all? What if Earth IS the Garden of Eden? Why not? Before all the “civilized” glut of cars, planes, buildings, weapons, concrete, oil, bridges, billboards, and cell phones, what was here? Probably the loveliest, virgin. green, fruitful, unsullied paradise in the whole blessed universe.
Couldn’t the “Garden of Earth” be a possibility? After all, we’ve been trying for years with telescopes, radio antennae, and other space-probe gizmos to see if anything is “out there.” And all we’ve come up with is deafening silence and planetary atmospheres so inhospitable as to make them unthinkable as garden venues.
True, there are billions of galaxies, containing trillions of stars, planets, and other celestial phenomena, but God said very little about these, except that He created them. As for the Earth, God said he put the Garden of Eden there. He did not say exactly where, just that it’s on land wherever in the world we might be standing.
So in my humble opinion, the Earth itself could be the Garden we’ve been looking for.
First, it’s the only heavenly body we know of that was made elegantly serene, full of life, and totally self-sustaining. And thus far, nothing in deep space even comes close to having that kind of an Eden.
Second, the way we human beings have mistreated Earth since we were put here unquestionably reflects how, like lemmings, we have followed in the footsteps of our First Parents and kept alive, through the eons, the unholy tradition of screwing things up.
And now, in our time, we have the means of blowing things up. We have discovered atomic and nuclear elements capability of blowing up huge areas of the Earth garden; and even more bizarre, we seem to have a grotesque propensity for doing so without giving it a second thought.
I don’t how you feel, but I’ve come to the conclusion that looking for the Garden of Eden anywhere but in our own backyard seems like a monumental waste of time. And if we are not too absorbed with self-destruction to recognize this, maybe we still have time to kick off the “apple” curse and finally start getting it right.
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