Where Was The Warning?

Hebrews believe that god gave Israel and Palestine to them and Christians believe that god gave them the rest of the world and the entire universe. The truth is we are only renters here on this planet and act like if we foul the place we can just move elsewhere in the night. When the authors of the books of the Bible set out to write down their beliefs about the origins and destiny of their species, they knew nothing of global-wide pollution, depletion of fish in the Mediterranean Sea, or the impacts of over-population on their world. The author of Genesis only declared that god gave man dominion over all living things and the land. He did not know that there were other civilizations on the move in their direction and that one day they would collide and try to out compete each other for limited resources.

About the worst thing man could do to damage the land was to order it to be sown with salt to poison it and use the lack of food as a weapon against and enemy or conquered people. There were no massive petro-chemical corporations that would make a beneficial concoction while dumping toxic waste products into the rivers and onto the land. There were no plumes of heavy particulate smoke to blanket the landscape in the wee hours of dawn and choke the people to death or damage their future generations with mutations. I don't want to get into a discourse about how much god didn't appear to tell man when he was dictating his word to the scribes. A lot of that essential information would be useful just about now as Conservative Christian factions in the US and the world declare the Bible to be literal, absolute and unalterable while also declaring that god creates all bad environmental events as collective punishment for acts that men and women are squeamish about.

Some omniscient cautions would have been helpful to guide man in the "ways of righteousness" such that he could actually be an effective steward of Creation and not its ultimate destructor. Corporate mentality is only a microcosm of the mentality of a people steeped in the notion that everything belongs to them and that they have an inexhaustible amount of resources to exploit in an inexhaustible amount of time. The trouble is that even if the scriptures are only several men's notion of the divine, they did get it right that Time itself is a resource that is not infinite. Whether it is Time itself that runs out or there is a god who says that Time is up, either way man is never promised tomorrow.

There is a crack in our hourglass and sand is leaking out as we argue over who or what is responsible for the loss of sand. The biblical notion that man will not know the hour or the date of the end is actually quite prophetic even if you are an atheist, or believer in another dogma. Geologic, environmental, solar, galactic and cosmological events have a way of sneaking up on us even as we divert attentions to the trivial pastimes of professional sports, TV reality shows, political campaigns, culture clashes and war. Whole cities such as Pompeii can disappear from the surface of the earth for 17 centuries while emperors and kings play chess with the lives of other cities and towns in their domains. We neglect the doom that is spelled by fossil fuel burning even as the Russian Bear grabs a natural gas transit nation in a revanchist move to reunify its former territory.

Much of the nature of current events, faith conflicts, and socioeconomic discord masks the truly "end-times" scenarios that we have set in motion with carbon loading of the air and sea, poisoning of our food crops, and our relentless pursuits of personal longevity and family propagation. No deity has warned us against those things.