Emi­grants from the Irish potato famine, via Wikipedia

Peo­ple some­times get pretty worked up about con­vinc­ing each other of an mat­ter of press­ing impor­tance. We think we have The Answer about The Issue and that if we just repeat our­selves loud enough and often enough the obvi­ous­ness of our posi­tion will win out. It becomes our duty, in fact, to repeat it loud and often. If we hap­pen to wear down the oppo­si­tion so much that they with­draw from our com­pan­ion­ship or fel­low­ship, all the bet­ter, as we’ve achieved a patina of unity. Reli­gious lib­er­als are just as prone to this as the conservatives.

These are not the val­ues we hold when talk­ing about the nat­ural world. There we talk about bio­di­ver­sity. We don’t cheer when a species mal­adapted to the human-driven Anthro­pocene dis­ap­pears into extinc­tion. Just because a plant or ani­mal from the other side of the world has no nat­ural preda­tors doesn’t mean our local species should be superseded.

Sci­en­tists tell us that bio­di­ver­sity is not just a kind of do-unto-others value that sat­is­fies our sense of nos­tal­gia; hav­ing wide gene pools comes in handy when near-instant adap­ta­tion is needed in response to mas­sive habi­tat stress. Monocrops are good for the annual har­vest but leave us espe­cially vul­ner­a­ble when phy­toph­thora infes­tans comes ashore.

It’s a good thing for dif­fer­ent reli­gious groups to have dif­fer­ent val­ues, both from us us and from one another. There are pres­sures in today’s cul­ture to level all of our dis­tinc­tives down so that we have no unique iden­tity. Some cheer this monocrop­ping of spir­i­tu­al­ity, but I’m not sure it’s healthy for human race. If our reli­gious val­ues are some­how truer or more valu­able than those of other peo­ple, then they will even­tu­ally spread themselves–not by push­ing other bod­ies to be like us, but by attract­ing the mem­bers of the other bod­ies to join with us.

God may have pur­pose in fel­low­ships that act dif­fer­ently that ours. Let us not get too smug about our own inevitabil­ity that we for­get to share our­selves with those with whom we differ.