Culture and Nature

[euthanasia]

This rock is Nature, if I sculpt it, it passes to be Culture. It passes to be human. So every day there is less Nature, and more Culture. Every day, the fight against this two giants is being won by us and our Culture. Do not lie to yourself. It is a battle. Just the fact that the expansion of one transalates into the destruction of the other. Wether we are aware, wether this forces are aware, there is a battle. Culture wins by slaughtery.

I rejoy to the fact that we have already outpassed Nature. By creating the concept of Culture, we deny ourselves being Nature. And most of the time, as we think about Nature, we think about divine, about gods.

Please open. Nature is not that bird singing in the tree. Nature is the opposite of Culture. Nature is the pure. The untouched. Our hand makes Culture. Our hands build culture. God builds Nature. God is Nature. We are Culture.

It kind of feels great to know you are killing God.

[Conan_McMurtrie]

I'm not so sure about that. Obviously there is a conflict between what is the creation of the human mind and what is nature's creation. Although one could say that the mind must be dependent on nature (which is completely true) it has attempted to rebel and break free of this dependence for millenia, which it can't do, although it forever tries. So I don't agree that this is some kind of battle between immense, equal forces: its like a small rebelion within the whole.

Also, I don't agree that with 'culture' you are destroying 'God'. I think God is one of culture's most beloved tools. 'Culture', the mind, tries to break free of the natural cycles by setting numerous ideals in front of itself which are actually extremely strenous to live for. Think about it: the pressure to look good, for example, rather than how you exactly are. This is all that culture is from my point of view. The pressure to love when you don't, to do good when you don't want to, to work hard when you just can't be bothered.

The body, or the natural, doesn't actually give a shit about any of these things, its our minds that dream them up. God, or ultimate perfection, is as extreme as this mechanism gets. Of course, true religion could be said to be the dawning that God is not mind, but that nature we're speaking of. However, it doesn't seem to be how people world wide eventually interpret it. So again, I don't think that God has anything to do with nature: would a dog or a flower really give a hoot about God?

Finally, there is no damn way that the human race has any competions against natural forces. It just isn't going to happen, the laws of physics just don't work that way. So again, I'm afraid I disagree(don't worry, my friends always accuse me of being an argumentative bastard).

[GregoryWohlwend]

i think you are confusing the word God with a guy with lightning bolts in the sky. i interpret it as God being "the chance" the chance that this matter, gravity and energy has come together in such a complex manner for life to arise at this very moment is God. The divine causer, the force or pattern which allows reality to be reality. such an entitiy may not be an entity or even matter, whatever the force is, it has it's hand in everything natural... planets, stars, galaxies, gravity, trees, mountains, sea water, flowers, animals and us. the many concepts of society have skewed the idea of God to mean an ideal human or simply the word of "perfection" when none of this seems likely. i find this in the addage "cleanliness is next to godliness." on a recent journey i found dirt, mud and decaying bark are much godlier than any sort of detergent, soap or creme which is applied to the body or one's habitat in order to be clean. there is nature, and then there is art/culture. i hold nature above any piece or collection of culture any day, for the nature is responsible for my existence, the culture is responsible for my species eventual demise.

[Andy DV]

In the grand scheme of things, our culture is in no way winning the battle against nature. In this infinitely small slice of time, it may seem as if we are, but this planet is but a speck of the universe, and in another flicker in time this planet will be consumed and scattered throughout the cosmos. So any battle you feel we are winning is surely an illusion. I suppose we should learn to enjoy the ride. This desk I'm sitting at is as much a part of nature as anything else. How can I be so arrogant to believe my creations are seperate from nature? It would be hypocritical for me to say I don't enjoy the creations of my species, how else would I be communicating with you people at this instance?

[Conan_McMurtrie]

i think you are confusing the word God with a guy with lightning bolts in the sky

Nah man. What does God mean? God doesn't mean anything aside from interpretation. Anything that is interpreted by the human mind is, unfortunately, mind, or culture. So if you want to call it 'forces', 'the perfection' or 'the perfect being' it is mind taking a concept, in this case God, and adding all its opinionated theories to it.

We, by nature, try to rise above the basic organism that we are: seeying, smelling, touching, hearing, tasting, and thinking(that is functional, survival thinking). That is what we are, that is what our function is. The blood cells, the muscles, every system in the body has its function. Ours is to receive the senses and provide some kind of action. However, that's not good enough for us humans: we want to know about God, we want to have it figured out. We want some kind of divine theory about ourselves that makes us something above what we are: and that is all we do, whether its talking about God as the perfect being, the 'chance' forces, or whatever. I'm not dismissing what you said because in a sense I guess we are just a part of a perfect system of force, but the fact that we need to even think about that is, unfortunately, culture, the human problem, the arrogance of insisting that we are something other than we are.