I have heard, as everyone in the west has heard,
the story of Adam and Eve and the fall of man…
They ate the forbidden fruit of knowledge and was cast out
of Eden…
and to every person born thereafter, was cursed by the “Original”
sin………
and as I have stated, the “Original” sin was the gaining of Knowledge…
this fall of man is a story that has been one of the central stories of western
civilization, for over 2000 years, this story has been one of the focal points of
how we see human beings… as fallen…
but I see a different picture…
I reject the notion that we were once in “paradise” and lost it because
of some “original” sin…
follow the course of history, both individual and collective…
individually, we are born in ignorance, the society then fills that
“Tabula rasa” with information that I have likened to “habit, superstitions,
prejudice, ism’s and ideologies”… for example, we teach children to
believe in Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny…and that “knowledge” has
some value but it doesn’t last very long in a child’s life… at some point,
that knowledge of there being a Santa Clause or an Easter Bunny is dropped…
the child has “real” or “True” information about the universe and realizes that
there is no such thing as Santa Clause or an Easter Bunny…
that becomes a step into growing up… but one could argue that
the lost of the old knowledge is a loss of paradise, we have fallen, so to speak…
but the reality is that we are really becoming… at every step we learn to shed
our childhood habits, superstitions, prejudices, ism’s, bigotries… and at every step
we are becoming more adult like… where we learn new habits, superstitions, prejudices,
isms and ideologies and of course, bigotries…
or we can think about it this way… in the beginning was animal, we were animals…
and over a million years plus, we learned to go from animal to animal/human…
we left the paradise of being simple animals to become complicated animal/humans…
this is the true story of human existence… there was no fall and there has never been
a fall… we have simple grown from being animal to animal/human and slowly
we grow to become human, fully human…
the individual growth of human beings match the growth of the human race…
so I don’t believe in nor accept the idea of a fall or of sin……
I do believe in the growth of human beings from animal to animal/human
and I accept the growth of children from infants to toddlers to children to
teens to young adults to adults to middle age to senior citizens to old age…
at my age, of being a senior citizen, I no longer hold the same beliefs
I held when I was a teenager or young adult or even middle age…
some might say I have fallen or an in sin, but I am simple growing into
something else… and this growth will continue until I die… a simple
movement from birth to death, from animal, of being an infant,
to animal/human of being middle age and hopefully of growing into
an human being by old age……
collectively and individually, we travel the same path… we grow
from birth to death and we grow from animal to becoming human…
becoming a human being isn’t about my physical appearance but about
my understanding of what it means to be human… as I grow less
dependent upon instinct and grow more into a thinking, reasoning being,
I become more human… animals are instinctual creatures, animal/human
are slightly less instinctual and fully human is even less so instinctual…….
to become human, fully human we must grow into something but
we also leave behind… we leave behind not only instinct, but
we leave behind our need for the negative instincts, hate and anger
and lust and fear and greed…
to grow into becoming human requires us to overcome our negative
instincts and become our positive instincts of love and justice
and hope and charity… among the other positive instincts we must engage
with if we are to ever become human, fully human……
what have you done to overcome your negative instincts or what
have you done to become more human?
Kropotkin