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I have also read that the Pox was caused by accidentally coinciding climatic, economic, and sociological crises. It would be more honest to say that the Pox was caused by our own refusal to deal with obvious problems in those areas. We caused the problems: then we sat and watched as they grew into crises.
I have watched education become more a privilege of the rich than the basic necessity that it must be if civilized society is to survive. I have watched as convenience, profit, and inertia excused greater and more dangerous environmental degradation. I have watched poverty, hunger, and disease become inevitable for more and more people.
Some of the faces of her god are biological evolution, chaos theory, relativity theory, the uncertainty principle, and, of course, the second law of thermodynamics.
Yet Earthseed is not a fatalistic belief system. God can be directed, focused, speeded, slowed, shaped.
“Jarret is down in the polls!” Jorge said. “His people are scaring everyone to death with their burning churches, burning people. He might not win.” “Who the hell do they poll these days?” Michael asked, shaking his head.
“So you’re saying praying doesn’t work.” “Oh, no. Praying does work. Praying is a very effective way of talking to yourself, of talking yourself into things, of focusing your attention on whatever it is you want to do. It can give you a feeling of control and help you to stretch yourself beyond what you thought were your limits.”
“Even if when I pray, I ask God to help me?” he asked. “Even so,” I said. “You’re the one your words reach and strengthen. You can think of it as praying to that part of God that’s within you.”
There are more gardens, and old-fashioned skills in food preservation are being revived. People barter for goods and services where cash is rare. They use hand tools and draft animals where there is no money for fuel or no power equipment left.
I’ve read history. Things weren’t always this way. They don’t have to go on being this way. What we have broken we can mend.
No Christian minister could ever hate sin as much as Marc hated chaos. His gods were order, stability, safety, control.
“It’s a beginning. It’s a way of trying to build tomorrow instead of cycling back into some form of yesterday.”
All prayers are to Self And, in one way or another, All prayers are answered. Pray, But beware. Your desires, Whether or not you achieve them Will determine who you become.
It was as though my teachers believed that all the possible stories had already been created, and it was a sin to make more—
“If God is Change, then…then who loves us? Who cares about us? Who cares for us?” “We care for one another,” I said. “We care for ourselves and one another.” And I quoted, “Kindness eases Change. Love quiets fear.”
“That’s what Earthseed was about,” I said. “I wanted us to understand what we could be, what we could do. I wanted to give us a focus, a goal, something big enough, complex enough, difficult enough, and in the end, radical enough to make us become more than we ever have been.
The human species is a kind of animal, of course. But we can do something no other animal species has ever had the option to do. We can choose: We can go on building and destroying until we either destroy ourselves or destroy the ability of our world to sustain us. Or we can make something more of ourselves. We can grow up.
