Monday, March 16, 2009

Where is He?

I feel the depictions of nature and the struggle for life in "Eternal Enemies" flagged the resounding question "Where is your God now?". Talking about Darwinism and the theory of survival of the fittest is all well and good inside the classroom, but without seeing it firsthand very few can truly understand its nature. The documentary served to un-romanticize the theory and show what it truly is: a bloody, vicious struggle for survival. There is no beautiful picture of the majestic lion as the king of the jungle in the garden of Eden, merely the delirious and drooling head lioness stumbling around on her deathbed. Gone is the picture of the cute little lion cub prancing around, replaced with the reality of its carcass being torn to shred by laughing hyena's. It tears to shreds the view of this perfect world crafted by this perfect creator full of perfect animals and reveals the true nature of existence on this planet. As far as he inference to human nature, I fail to see how we are so different. The hyenas and lions fought over food and territory; we fight over oil and territory. Hyenas gang up on one lioness and use sneak attacks; we bomb innocent people in Dresden. It would be nice to say that this inference is simply that man is the same as these animals, but I would suggest that a true inference is that perhaps we are worse for two main reasons. One, they fight for food, we fight for oil. We do not need oil to survive, we had not used it massively before 200 years ago. I know I mentioned that it was also about territory, but territory just boils down to resources. The second and perhaps most damning is the fact that we are aware that our opponent and victim is in great pain and suffering when we hurt them, yet we do anyway. Perhaps animals have some sense of their prey being wounded or in pain, but they cannot truly comprehend the suffering going through them and are too blinded by instinct to do anything about it. But when man sees a small girl whose hands have been blown off from trying to pick up a landmine in the Middle East, he is aware of the pain she must have gone through and the difficulties she will face for the rest of her life. Yet he still insist on fighting, even though he knows this fate will fall upon many more innocent children. This gift and curse of reason almost seems to make man worse than these animals, as they have no choice or understanding about the way they are living and how they survive. We do, yet we continue to butcher and kill each other anyway. There was the inference that we cannot control our fate and are damned to simply follow these instincts that make us harm one another, but I am not skeptical enough to believe that we can do nothing about it. However, neither am I naive enough to believe that we will do anything about it. If this is the fate some creator or god has given too us, I'm not sure he even cares. So the greatest inference I can see from this video and its parallels with human nature is simply the question: Where is your god now?

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