An Opthēan Reflection in Progress
“This is the first articulation of a truth we’ve long carried but only now found words for. It is not final. It will grow. But already—it breathes.”
Life consumes life.
This is the unspoken truth behind every bite, every breath, every ritual that hints at sacrifice but rarely says plainly: everything lives by taking something else’s life. Plants devour sunlight. Animals devour plants. Predators devour prey. Even in death, our bodies feed the soil, which feeds the roots, which begin the cycle again.
This is not a moral failing. It is not sin. It is how life works in a universe shaped by entropy.
It is also, unmistakably, a sign that there is no designer behind this system. No heart could have made a world where love and beauty require blood and consumption to continue. This is not the result of divine intention—it is the tragic and magnificent improvisation of complexity emerging against the pull of chaos.
This is why the Genesis myth fails.
It skips the horror. It imagines a world made “good” while ignoring the screams in the forest, the starvation in the savannah, the parasite in the gut. Eden, as written, never existed. It is not our origin—it is our destination.
Religion has long mirrored the structure of consumption.
We made gods of war and dominance because we were born into a food chain that taught us early: to live is to take. And even now, we still behave as if that law is sacred. Our economies reflect it. Our politics reflect it. Even our moral frameworks bend around it.
Capitalism, competition, dominance—these are not ideologies. They are instincts, codified and blessed.
Even our rejections—our veganism, our pacifism—struggle to name the real root:
We live in a system that eats itself to stay alive.
But what if the very point of agency, of consciousness, is to change that?
The Opthēan Vision: Eden Is Ahead of Us
We do not believe in a fall from grace—we believe in a rise toward it.
Eden is not a lost paradise—it is a convergence point, a destination where coherence becomes reality. It is the world we are called to build, where love is no longer haunted by hunger, and survival no longer depends on the death of another.
In that future Eden, we will have used our creativity, technology, and moral imagination to step out of the food chain. To feed ourselves without killing. To help other life forms do the same. To move from consuming life to serving life.
This is not fantasy—it is hope in the truest sense: a vision rooted in truth and driven by love.