by Elizabeth M Young

Created on: July 02, 2010

There are a few ways of looking at our world in terms of its perfection or its perceived flaws and faults. Since the world is large, unmeasurable in many aspects and therefore unknowable in many ways, it can be more of an intellectual or philosophical exercise to determine whether the world meets our personal or group standards of perfection.

From the first perspective, this is the only world that humans, with our capacity for making up ideas, have. We have no other similar or equivalent world available and it is unlikely that one will become available for the foreseeable future of thousands of years. As our only possible option, then yes, this world is perfect by default.

From another perspective, this world is perfect in its way to correct, adjust and repair itself, to provide biomes and habitats that sustain life, and to remain stable enough in its orbit, atmosphere and surface. This world is also perfect in its way of getting rid of living things that aggravate it to the point where the living things die and other living things come along to replace them. Humans mistakenly believe that the Earth exists only because of and for them, when it may be the other way around.

From a humble perspective, given the alternative, we humans should regard this as a perfect world if it would do so much to put up with us. If and when we are gone, the world will heal in its own time, not caring whether we were ever here or not.

From the perspective that humans are a narcissistic and often ridiculous species. We are far too eager to impose our interpretations of reality on reality, itself. There is far too much of humans as the only reason for the existence of the Earth; as the ones who should decide whether to destroy the planet and all life on the planet; and as the ones who can save the planet from the damage that will either happen naturally or because of the grand stupidity and mistakes of mankind. We are so good at ignoring the fact that the planet was here before us and will be here after us, but was never here because of us.

We make up mythology about great gods who formed the planet for us and who set us here to thrive and eventually destroy ourselves through our own foolishness. But that mythology rarely concludes that, even if one powerful deity created the Earth, that deity may have had other ideas than those that come from the minds of men and women.

But who is to know? Those men and women threatened terrible and eternal consequences for anyone who refused to believe them, making humans a cunning and manipulative, as well as a crazy, self absorbed and self aggrandizing species.

In the end, we do not know how we came to be set here with the duty of service to this planet and to all life here, but we too easily forget that this may be our sole purpose and the only pathway to any eternal reward. Yes, for our purposes, this is a perfect world, but humans have far too much power to make it an increasingly imperfect and eventually unlivable world.

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