Day 583: And God Created...

God created wonders and horrors alike - depending on your perspective.

When you look at nature, the beauty and interdependency of it all can be awe-inspiring, but if you look a little closer, you see all the little horrors that lurk beneath the pretty picture. Nature is a harsh thing, everything must devour something else to survive.

Then you get the design flaws that make you question the nature of this so-called "God". Did you know that as a horse ages, it's teeth are constantly erupting in order to keep up with the wear from eating 18 hours a day. The problem is that when the horse gets to a certain point in its life, their teeth become less capable of grinding down the food and the horse eventually starves to death.

Did you know that a kangaroo's molars slowly move to the front of its mouth to replace the front teeth, new molars do grow to replace the old ones, but eventually those too will wear down and fall out, causing the kangaroo to starve to death (if it is (un)lucky enough to survive that long in the first place).

Having cared for horses for a few years now, I have learned that it's not all sunshine and roses like you see in the photos. There are a myriad of health issues that can arise, most commonly from one (or both) of 2 causes: human intervention (forcing the horse into a lifestyle to which it is not well suited) or just bad design. What kind of God would inflict upon a horse, that spends most of its waking hours eating, the bad genetic code of having an overbite, causing it to have difficulty doing that which it was designed to do?

This is a cruel world. Nature is cruel. Animals are cruel. It's not that it is the intention of nature or of animals to be cruel, it is simply a matter of survival. Survival is always the most important thing for any thing in this world, and the way everything has been designed means that in order to survive, everything has to eat something else. You may remark at the beauty of certain plants and animals adapting to support each other, but this was done out of self-survival, not from a point of compassion for the other life form. It was simply a mutually beneficial endeavor.

Imagine if we were to develop the capability to alter the nature of life on earth from being all about survival to being all about co-habitation and co-existence - not only in our own species - but in all species. Imagine if we were to create that opportunity for each life form to live it's life without fear and without the drive to survive overruling all other potentially enjoyable parts of life. How? I don't know - what I do know is that if we were to even be able to find out if it were possible we would have to divert a whole hell of a lot of our attention, skills and resources towards investigating this path. Obviously these resources would have to diverted away from "essential" things like conflict, fashion, stuff, politics, profit, extracting fuels and other resources from the earth and so on.

Doing this would also require that humanity recognises that there is not controlling force in this life other than us. God is just a fantasy. We are the reality, our choices and actions have real consequences that effect this entire ecosystem on earth. If anything is going to change life on earth, it's going to be us.

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