I open the email from Hubby, a forwarded newsletter about energy and about China not doing its part in abiding by the rules to help with carbon reduction and how the USA under Trump will focus on more drilling for natural gas and oil.
I respond...
"More fracking & drilling...All for the manufactured need of more energy because of the manufactured need that we humans need to go faster & build machines & computers to do more faster so that the ultra-rich can make more money...I wonder how Earth will respond..."
The essay brought to mind something I'd heard recently: that the amount of energy required for one AI data center would be enough energy to power over 40,000 homes. (If true, I find it appalling.) I do not know how accurate that is, and I don't feel like researching it. But, like so much in this world, the money involved is gut-churning.
The next day I open an email, a newsletter I am subscribed to. In this issue there is a link to an essay. by Wendell Berry, entitled Against killing children. (I'm a Wendell Berry fan. I find meaningful company and comfort in his nature poems.) It was first published in October. Now, it is linked again -- two days after another school shooting in the USA. The shooter this time? A fifteen-year-old female...
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As far back as I can recall, I have thought of (and still think of) humans as part of the animal kingdom. But Berry's essay caused me pause. Perhaps I am wrong about that, at least from a biblical point of view. Perhaps we were and still are (from birth) made in the image of Elohim. Wow, that's quite an image. It was Elohim that "in the beginning created the heavens and the earth."
One of The Way's doctrines is referred to as "body, soul, and spirit." The body was "formed." The soul was "made." The spirit of God within humans was (and now is) "created." (Create means to bring into existence something from nothing; only God can "create.") The Way bases its interpretation on the Hebrew words for formed, made, and created (and the word for soul and creature).
To try to explain, in short...1) In the beginning, God "created" the earth. The body of man (and any living creature?) was then "formed" from the dust of the ground. God didn't have to "create" something from nothing; He "formed" the physical body from something he had already created - the earth.2) God first created breath (soul) for the animals, so God did not have to recreate it for humans; He simply had to make it for humans. Since "the fall," humans are born with soul life, (passed down via the bloodline from Adam and Eve, which is the same breath life we share with the creatures, i.e.: animals). But humans are not born in God's image, which is spirit. We are born with a sinful nature, corruptible seed, impure blood, in need of a redeemer.3) God had to create His image (which is spirit) within humans; God's spirit in mankind had not existed before. It had to be created. One thing that separates humans from animals, at least in the beginning, was this spirit of God. To this day, only the human animal can receive this spirit, this connection to God. Since Jesus Christ's completed work, at the very instant a person gets "born again," God "creates" His spirit within that person. Even though it is the gift of holy spirit, it is tailor-created for that individual.
So, humans draw breath because of the same mechanism, the same soul life, that is found in the animals. The first humans also (along with that soul breath life) housed the spirit from God, of God, until Adam committed high treason and lost that spiritual connection. (Referred to as "the fall.") A redeemer was then required to be sacrificed to again make that connection available. Jesus Christ was/is that redeemer.
As I share elsewhere:
Upon birth, a human is body and soul; we are not born with God's spirit abiding within. "Soul" is breath-life, encompassing genetics; all animals have soul until their last breath. A person does not receive the spirit of God until they decide to become born again (also known as being saved, made whole, redeemed, or the new birth). However, children are counted as saved as long as one parent is saved. This continues until the child reaches an age of accountability when the child is able to independently make a decision to be saved or not.Way followers believe that a person gets born again by believing Romans 10: 9 and 10. That is, a person must confess with their mouth (out loud is not necessary) that Jesus is Lord (not as God, but as Master) and believe in their heart that God raised Jesus from the dead. To accept Jesus into one's heart or to believe that Jesus is God does not result in a person being born again; those are counterfeit formulas. Once a person is born again, they cannot, for any reason, lose their salvation. The only people who cannot be saved are those born of the seed of the serpent, the devil.
That's a really short version of a deep and complex subject.
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Below are a few excerpts from Berry's essay.
Perhaps it will be enough to entice the reader to read more.
The essay is a long but worth the time.
Wendell Berry is 90 years old.
Link to the essay: Against killing children ...
"... like many children of my generation, I enjoyed a freedom that has become rare, almost extinct. The best part of my early education was the free, unsupervised playing and rambling with other children in our small towns and the freedom to wander in fields and woods. We were to a degree endangered, of course, by the world’s native hazards and our inexperience, but we acquired experience, too, the kind of experience that supervision excludes, and thus something in the way of caution.......we have got to ask if there is a point at which Christian conscience, or any conscience, can say no to a technological 'advance' of any kind. I will mention again, as I have done often before, the Old Order Amish, who have maintained an effective freedom of choice for themselves by limiting the economic scale of their lives and by asking of any proposed innovation a single question: 'What will this do to our community?' ......Trainability, as we know from our dealings with parrots and dogs, is a mark of intelligence. Perhaps because of our big brains, we were easily trained to want television sets and computers......Genesis 1:27 declares that 'God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him: male and female created he them.' I would like to read that for what it is: not history or science, as we understand those terms, but a part of the King James translation of a Hebrew poem about the origin of everything. As religious statements often do, this one places us between two perfectly symmetrical impossibilities: nobody can prove that God created us in his own image, and nobody can prove that he did not......To be made in the image of God is to be made unique among the other creatures, to be made especially uncomfortable in our dealings with them and therefore especially in need of instruction. Unlike the other creatures, we need laws to keep us in harmony with heaven and earth and with one another. And so God reveals himself from the first as a lawgiver. His laws come as light in darkness, allowing us even when we disobey them—which we are free of course to do and often have done—to see what we are doing and to know what is expected of us. This is why the blessed man of the first Psalm delights 'in the law of the Lord.' He recognizes the relief and the immense privilege of knowing the difference between right and wrong...."
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Click here to read the history of this song composed from a poem by Longfellow which he wrote during the USA Civil War.
Two verses of his poem are excluded from the song. Those verses are...
Then from each black, accursed mouthThe cannon thundered in the South,And with the soundThe carols drownedOf peace on earth, good-will to men!It was as if an earthquake rentThe hearth-stones of a continent,And made forlornThe households bornOf peace on earth, good-will to men!
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