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Chrishayden
"Cyniquian" Level Poster
Username: Chrishayden
Post Number: 2666
Registered: 03-2004
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Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Wednesday, August 30, 2006 - 01:05 pm: | 
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Sisters Nineties Magazine is going to publish this essay in its Summer Edition
Earthseed: A New Path to God?
by Chris Hayden
All that you touch
You change
All that you change
Changes you
The only lasting Truth
Is change
God
Is change
This poem introduces Earthseed: The Books of the Living, a fictional work quoted throughout the late (1947-2006) Octavia Estelle Butler’s science fiction novels The Parable of the Sower (1994) and the Parable of the Talents (1998).
These books are set in a post apocalyptic near future America where an authoritarian fundamentalist Christian government has come to power. Lauren Oya Olamina, a Black woman who suffers from a fictional hyper empathy syndrome (it causes the sufferer to believe that she feels the pain and pleasure of other people), is the creator of a movement she names Earthseed, a basic tenet of which is that the ultimate destiny of humanity is to “take root among the stars.”
Lauren's father is a Baptist minister and teacher who tries to uphold traditional religious beliefs and practices, but Lauren rejects his approach. She ponders the nature and existence of God. She begins analyzing everything—herself, life around her, and history. She concludes that “God would have to be a power that could not be defied by anybody or anything. Change. Everything changes in some way.” (Parable of the Sower, page 200).
Lauren jots down her meditations, often in verse form, in notebooks that she ultimately gathers into the book she titles Earthseed: Books of the Living. Lauren insists that Earthseed is not a religion and explains that her writings are not the product of divine revelation or visions; they come from logical analysis. She "finds" the name for her movement "weeding the back garden and thinking about the way plants seed themselves.” (Parable of the Sower, page 71). Thus by observation and logical analysis she discovers that God exists and that God is not an omnipotent anthropomorphic supernatural being but is that natural process we call Change.
______________________________
Copyright © 2006 by Chris Hayden
continued next page
“Earthseed: A New Path to God?” continued
Humans are not manipulated by but can manipulate God—indeed Lauren constantly exhorts her followers to “shape God” through the exercise of logical, action-based, rational planning.
Is Earthseed a mere plot device, or is it a new belief system--a new path to God?
Lauren is a teenager when she creates Earthseed. In an interview Ms. Butler gave to Amazon.com she stated that she created “something that I could have believed in and joined when I was 18.”
Butler was no theologian. She was a science fiction writer. In the cold, super rational atmosphere of that genre God is almost always absent or unmasked as a fraud or delusion.
Despite the predictions, explicit and implicit, of science fiction (and the proclamations, more than a century ago, of Nietzsche’s Superman) God has not eparted from human affairs; in fact, lately it seems God has returned to the world with a vengeance.
Many readers of the Parables series marvel at how accurately Butler’s books have predicted current events: the rise of religious fundamentalism; its injection into politics, the public discourse and international affairs; and the subsequent effect this has had on the discussion and conduct of such issues as the teaching of evolution, the cloning debate and reproductive freedom—matters which might seem outside the purview of religious thought—its role in the clash of civilizations.
Science fiction writers have often addressed important social issues: overpopulation (Stand on Zanzibar), colonialism (War of the Worlds) overabundance created by technology (The Midas Plague) totalitarianism (1984, Fahrenheit 451) and war (Slaughterhouse Five).
Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, held by many to be the first work of modern science fiction, warned that science unchecked, in that case creating Life in a laboratory—in effect playing God—might lead to disastrous consequences.
Could Butler, out of concern for the fate of humanity, have created Earthseed as a rational alternative to the fear and superstition that is the basis of fundamentalist religious belief?
"Fixing the world is not what Earthseed is about," Lauren says. But then she adds, "This world would be a better place if people lived according to Earthseed. But this world would be better if people lived according to the teachings of almost any religion.” (Parable of the Sower, page 254)
In the conversation Butler had with Amazon.com the interviewer calls Earthseed a religion and Butler does not correct her. Some articles which discuss Earthseed also refer to it as a religion.
There is now a real sect based on Earthseed principles called Solseed, so at least some have found Earthseed principles serve as a viable base for a real religious system.
Sigmund Freud, psychologist (and atheist) supposedly said, “Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.” Perhaps Earthseed was just a plank Butler laid over a plot hole, but she may have deliberately planted Earthseed with the intent that it grow into a new path to God; one based on observation, rationality, logic and science; a path leading humanity to survival and its rightful and ultimate destiny.
If you are interested in Sisters Nineties Magazine contact
D. Morrow Loving
PO Box 4506
St . Louis, MO 63108
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Libralind2
"Cyniquian" Level Poster
Username: Libralind2
Post Number: 379
Registered: 09-2004
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Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Wednesday, August 30, 2006 - 09:55 pm: |
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Chris..do you mind me posting this on GodIsChange..?? Thanks
LiLi |
Chrishayden
"Cyniquian" Level Poster
Username: Chrishayden
Post Number: 2668
Registered: 03-2004
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Thursday, August 31, 2006 - 10:53 am: |
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Not at all, just mention that it is appearing in the Summer Edition of Sisters Nineties Magazine. |
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