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From the Village Square


PURPOSE.

By Joe Mangiamele
Monday, Mar 17 2008, 08:55 AM

Human intellect, I suppose as all creature and plant intellect, was meant as an extended sensing device to coordinate all of our senses, meant for coping with our closest environment.

Ours went far beyond coping with environment but even to modifying it. Other species also have an ability to modify. Our ability to intellectualize improved to the point where we even dream of new environments.

This activity has taken us to new and different places and to shaping the environment that spawned us and that we were meant to be part of.

The moon was meant for viewing from here as an awe inspiring creation of nature. But we thought that that might be a place that we could actually walk on and at sometime begin to modify.

Our intellect has enabled us to move beyond coping with nature to changing it to suit us. We've developed the ability to analyze all that is external to ourselves, ourselves as interrelated beings and ourselves internally.

And with this ability we've also developed the skills to modify all that is human and even to creating the new humanity that we call civilizations.. All well and good, we might say, but to what purpose?

Does a vegetable plant or an ant think of purpose? Can an ant like humans, build a concrete skyscraper or a steel bridge, a space machine or design a city?

There has never been "purpose, " but we invent our own purpose and purposes and usually go from there.

Comments

Jaime   

'plant intellect'...reminds me of a botany class taken at UW-M years ago! Our professor wrote the names of plants in upper case and everything ELSE in lower case, in order of his regard of importance in the grand scheme of things! Taking nothing away from the grandeur of creation, I don't know that I can ascribe 'intellect' to plant life in the same manner as humans and animals!

That said, your piece this morning has been thought-provoking, Joe!

March 17, 2008 9:21 AM

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