Ishmael

I just finished this book and though I have found its intricate arguments which take one outside of oneself and give a new view from which to perceive the world appealing, there are many points represented with which I do not agree.

One major revelation that I had with this book revolves around the idea of religion and its association with agriculture and technology. For us humans to become 'takers' we create agriculture, enabling individuals to stockpile more food/goods than they need. This action of assuring ourselves and family food and taking more land than necessary, was a way of stating that we didn't trust the 'god(s)' to provide for us. Thus, we took the role of producer into our own hands. This symbolic movement of humanity from a 'leaver' culture to a 'taker' culture can be assimilated to eating the fruit from the tree of knowledge. In this single movement we refuted trust in 'god' and assumed the ability/position to decide for ourselves what is good and evil. Through this, taking godly decisions into our own hands, we take an act or position which denies the power of god, making god obsolete.

It is certainly strange that the most crippling wars have been fought in defense of religion..religion which does not focus on relinquishing power to the god(s), but focuses on ourselves and our power. "We must stop thinking we know who should live and who should die on this planet". (p.248

Another qualm I have with the story told through ishmael, is the way that mother culture/nature contradicts herself. We want to fight hunger, so we send out food. We need to stop overpopulation, but do we send out contraceptives? no! The world has been corrupted by people taking more than they need. This began with agriculture taking up more land than necessary and generating profits for the growers. We cannot begin to call any of this earth ours. Many problems have sprung from this. Obesity, overproduction, obscenely rich people, obscenely poor people, alcoholics..along with whole world of individuals living in consumption cultures where over-consumption is the norm.

Another topic that was broached in Ishmael that I wish to discuss is life support. I do not believe in life support. I think that a lot of money is wasted on keeping vegetables alive. I understand that if this someone is close to you, your opinions on keeping them alive than if you are not connected. However, I believe that we should not play God in certain situations. We should not be able to decide who lives and who dies, this simple factor, along with others is preventing the continuation of evolution. Human's existed on this earth for 3 million years before agriculture began. In living a hunter-gatherer type of lifestyle, human's got the food they needed by hunting/gathering on an average of 2-3 hours per day, living quite leisurely lives. This type of life allowed for survival of the fittest to ensue and helped humans evolve into homo-sapiens sapiens. If we hadn't taken the reigns when we did, the next strand of humanoids could have super powers by now. We could all be flying or have the capacity to move things with our thoughts. We only use 8.5% of our brains. The homo sapien sapien strand of humanoid is flawed. We will never knew what was meant to follow our brand of human. We are destroying the world bit by bit.

On another note. I drift off to alien life forms. Imagine if their smartest creature realized the flaw of pretending to be a god and evolved further than us? I believe this is highly likely.

UGH there are so many topics to chew on from this book. It truly was a pleasure to read and left me with a altered/pro-animalistic view of reality.