Quote:
Originally Posted by awareness
You'll like this one bro ZNP. If man had live only by his animal instincts, like all the rest of the critters, the population would have remained balanced. But something happened. We developed self consciousness and intelligence -- symbolized by the tree of knowledge of good and evil -- and took control, told God to screw off, that we'd no longer trust in His providing for sustenance, and would "TAKE" it away from Him. That was the birth of Totalitarian Agriculture. More food, more population. That's an evolutionary principle, that all the rest of the species live by.
Maybe that's why God rejected Cain's offering ... God didn't like Totalitarian Agriculture, as the Cains' "fruit of the ground" symbolism may represent (Gen 4:3).
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It was the "tree of good and evil". Prior to that we didn't have this concept. Every tree, every animal had a place, a position, a function. After this certain crops were good and others were "weeds". Certain animals were valuable and others were "pests". This in turn is the tree of death. We developed herbicide and pesticide. We had to keep coming up with better and more ingenious ways to kill. How do we kill the "evil" plants. How do we kill the "evil" insects, the "evil" critters. This in turn has thrown the entire earth out of whack. Brazilian rainforest is burned down so that cows who are not native to Brazil can have a grassland for hamburgers. All of the empires turned their lands to deserts. I think it is pretty clear in hindsight that the "agricultural revolution" was lacking any vision or revelation from God. Cain is a good example of one who was devoid of God's word. Abel on the other hand understood from God's actions that we would need to be covered in skins. He read between the lines and began to be a shepherd. The reason the Judeao Chrstian religion spread across the globe was because we were shepherds and kept herds of animals. The resulting childhood diseases wiped out all the indigenous people. Why didn't they keep herds? There were no animals on their continents that were suitable to be domesticated. Perhaps that is the legacy of the flood and Noah preserving the animals in the boat, that may be why 18 out of 19 of the world's domesticated animals were in Mesopotamia. It may also be why so many large herbivores around the globe suddenly and without explanation went extinct about 10,000 years ago.