April 18, 2006
Lease
One of the reasons Eve and Adam lost their lease was that they had trouble keeping the ground rules straight. They didn’t ask to be created, of course, but if they just had to be maybe because God wanted some company, they for sure got the best of all venues in which to practice life. It was apparently just that they couldn’t manage the basic stewardship.
Now that we’ve had Moses and the prophets and Jesus as mentors and examples, things are still pretty much the same, if not even worse. We’ve forgot all about the lease and have got the silly notion from somewhere – probably from Screwtape — that we own the place and can do with it as we damn well please.
For openers, how about the climate? We can’t live much without it. There are some messy methane hydrates frozen under the bottom of the ocean just waiting to get warm enough to turn the greenhouse gases brown and twenty times more deadly than carbon dioxide. In the meanwhile, the White House is complacent if not downright paralyzed on the subject of global warming. Of course, one needn’t expect “C” students to be much on science, or on governing, either, for that matter.
But then, it was just this kind of faulty stewardship that shortened the term in Eden. Of all people, the religious right ought to know that the ground rules haven’t changed any since then, and that we’ll just keep on getting it religious wrong if we cannot come up with anyone more obedient than the current keepers of what’s left of the garden.