Lost Eden

Everyone has a picture, a feeling, a sense of a place which is ideal or perfect. Paradise is depicted as being a place where there is no disease, no want, no lack for anything which is needed for survival. It must have been such a boring place for Adam and Eve. Man has an inquisitive mind and it is constantly asking questions and wanting to find out how things work. To live in a place where he cannot be challenged because everything is provided for him must have driven Adam crazy. One can immediately surmise that this business of Paradise is really something impractical, or contrived, or something which does not exist at all.

How can I say this? Very easily. A simple observation tells us that the world is built on conflict. In the oceans which covers much of the earth the dictum is: Big fish eat Small fish. On land it is pretty much the same thing. Plants that cannot move are eaten by herbivores which are in turn lunch for the carnivores. One can also observe that there are more herbivores than carnivores which leads me to think that Nature has arranged for some balance to be preserved. The predators cannot increase so much in numbers or they will decimate their prey thereby dooming their species to sure extinction. This is probably the reason why only the strongest male or the Alpha male can mate with the females which ensures that the best genes are replicated while keeping the number of offspring down.

I suppose that Nature in its pristine form might be considered Paradise since there is a balance which gets automatically maintained without much thought by the residents therein. There is always enough food for everyone. The sick and the dying herbivores become easy prey to the meat-eaters which is a simple way to recycle resources while preserving the strength of the species. The old and the infirm will only slow down the herd and their demise can be seen as a sacrifice to better the chances of rest to survive and reproduce.