The Fruit of Knowledge
But, if we're waxing Biblical again, this planet, Earth, was our Promised Land, even our Garden of Eden. And we've trashed it.Ironically, we did so by disobeying the first commandment the Bible records: we partook fully of the "fruit of knowledge."1 It is, after all, partaking of the fruit of knowledge whenever you use intelligence to gain a competitive edge--like being able to stay warm by building a fire; keeping the vegetables just for yourself by saving up the seeds and then putting up a fence around your garden; powering your numerous tools by damming rivers and building power plants; etc., etc. Perhaps appropriately, then, more like Adam and Eve than Moses and his meandering band, we are now condemned to lose the best thing we ever could have had. If we survive at all.
Despite its emotional appeal, however, this imagery is all basically wrong ... this is not about man's relationship with God. It's not about mysticism ... [i]t's about physics and depletion of resources and the delicate balance of the Earth's ecosystem. It's about natural consequences, not divine intervention. But most of all, it's not about humans. Humans may be the species that have destroyed Earth's future, and they are certainly the only species with a chance of getting us--any of us--to a survivable alternative, but it is not, and never was about humans. It's about Life: the life of Gaia.
1 The King James version always adds "of good and evil," but I've never seen it that way. I figure some clever cleric from antiquity added that phrase because it made more sense as an evil to him than "fruit of knowledge" alone. Not so to me.