When someone uses nature, their own or in the abstract or a dispassionate concept of evolution as the reason for something drastic, my first question, with real curiosity, is “whose death or suffering are you willing to accept on their behalf, whose death and suffering do you support?”
If you want to make Nature your god, know that it is worse than any human god you lost faith in.
Siding with nature, adopting its ways, necessarily involves killing or neglecting hundreds or thousands, watching with a joyless glee, till you get what you want or a thoughtless unthinking “nature” reaches a stable balance. From bacteria and plants to your own loved ones.
Is there pride in surrendering to this god?
The cruelty of nature, the cruelty of man in nature without nurture, the cruelty of nature without humanity being the best of it– its consciousness and self-awareness– is why we came to be, here and now, building civilizations and aspiring to divinity. The only way is forward.
Every evil that has ever been done is humans attempting, in some way, to romanticize, give in to or “go back” to an amoral, thoughtless, loveless place that we can never go back to. Nature is ours to control and create.
Which is really just nature finally controlling itself.
The only question is if we’re doing it well, in a way where each day feels like a small step ahead, or if we’re doing it so badly that we feel we were healthier and happier with the uncomprehending uncaring forces and the evil that we built God to defeat, and we let any being die on their sacrificial altar as long as it isn’t us.
We will never create our potential, as long as we define ourselves as by this one planet and its primordial soup.
We are something entirely new. The first, and not nearly the last. Our hearts and minds already traverse the vast expanses of the universe, our bodies and our ways must follow.
Will we aspire to godless hedonism? mind-numbing religious stasis? cowardly ineffectual middle pathing?
Or can we aspire towards unprecedented greatness, grandeur and variety?
We must have the ambition to want to be gods, but the humility to know we aren’t yet anywhere close.
Related pieces: