God, humans, and toil

The god of Genesis instructs humans:

The book of Genesis also says that

This dichotomy is not one of humans in control and in conflict with nature, but rather the two passages represent god’s a way of making humans realize they were a part of the world. Abundance is there, but work is the cost of abundance. We humans still live in the Garden, live on the ground from which we have sprung. Since the god of Genesis made humans from the soil of the Garden, when it sent us forth from the Garden to till the ground whence we were taken, it merely turned Paradise from leisure to toil. It was not punishment but a blessing, one that made humans even greater than gods because gods could not grow stronger from work, nor could they grow in wisdom or love (or conversely, ignorance and hatred) from work. The god that meant to punish us underestimated the gifts of intelligence and skill we used to figure out how to bring forth fruit from the lands from which we had sprung.

Unfortunately, our redemption was also our burden. In figuring things out, we began to believe we were in charge, and that the natural world was not a part of us, nor we a part of it. We were mistaken, however, on several counts, not the least of which that God was a human-like man or that our ancestors were human like us.

In short, we accepted the notion that the natural world lies outside of us, that we are somehow in charge of it. We have forgotten that we are the same stuff—an assortment of minerals, compounds, and electrical charges—in different forms. Whether we accept it or not, in changing the natural world, it changes us. It builds in us more than muscle and callus. It’s changes our personalities, our definitions of self, our perspectives of our own pasts and where we stand in our present. It shapes our species even as we think we shape it.