Personal Experience
Yesterday I spent an hour or so walking around my wife’s garden. She farms about 6 mu … the equivalent of one acre. Her garden area is not a single contiguous patch of ground … rather several separate patches of one mu or so. The patchwork separation of the land is a remnant of the land reforms of 70 years ago. At that time land was given to families based on the size of a family … the intention being that each family would have enough land to feed their family.
A few individuals who live in our apartment community offered their family land to my wife for a token rental fee. Apparently these people no longer depend on the land to feed their families and they are tired of the hard work required to farm the land. The small patchwork separation of the land precludes the use of modern machinery and equipment … not that the individual owners could afford such equipment.
For example … in rural China most peasants still use a single furrow plow … the use of this rig is rather unique. The plow is not pulled along behind a horse or donkey … it’s pulled by a man walking backwards across the field. Obviously these peasants never had enough land to feed horses or donkeys. What ingenuity! I saw a two person single furrow plow as well. The wife pulls on the front end and the husband guides the rig in the rear … used for preparing a furrrow for planting peanuts.
The peasants are artists … they take such care to ensure their field work is ‘pretty’ … not my wife … who is stubbornly independant and lacks the 40-50 years of practical experience. For example … my wife’s rows of corn meander like a snake while her neighbor’s rows are straight as an arrow.
On discussing God and religion.
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Seeds and soil are passive elements when separated … together they develop a symbiotic relationship. So it is with people and God.
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The goal of modern farming techniques is to maximize output with optimal efficiency. To achieve this goal man has developed artificial actors … chemical concoctions … pesticides, fertilizers … equipment that attempts to enforce regularity/uniformity. Seeds are planted at exactly the same depth … with identical space between them … even seed DNA is re-engineered for optimum and uniform output.
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So it is with religions … the goal being to homogenize large communities of individuals for the sake of efficiency in control … manipulation.
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So it is with cultures/societies.
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Despite all the effort … absolute uniformity/conformity eludes the program’s authors.