This post is based on the Christian view of human history. Which claims that quite shortly after creation there was “the Fall of Man”: an event where man separated himself from further community with God by giving in to the temptation of evil. And that event entailed that our world is now in a “fallen condition”: man is morally deprived, animals kill each other (humans too), and if not getting killed they die anyway. And the like.
However, what exactly is broken?
Animal-to-animal cruelty, natural desasters, death etc. are not the heart of the problem. This stuff would even be manageable by humanity if we wanted. If we wanted? That points into the right direction … the most important fallen thing is the mindset of humanity. How much difference the mindset alone makes is apparent from cases where people got expelled from their home country with just a few tools in their hands, but were able to build a flourishing economy in their new spot (initially a wilderness). Examples include the small Mennonite community in Paraguay (a mere 0.22% of the population).
And what exactly is broken in our mindset? Our values. It seems that the rest of our “human program” is self-repairing as it emerges from the right values by learning (self-education and mutual education). But if the values are broken, they are broken. Values are the operating system of the mind: MindOS. If the OS crashes, a computer is irrevocably crashed.
And the values that would make this fallen world a paradise are even totally simple: “Love God, and your neighbor as yourself” [cf. Mt 22:37-40 ESV]. And loving is, to enjoy somebody’s company and well-being, and therefore to work for both. In other words, love is to count somebody else’s well-being as that of my own.
So now we know the formula for paradise. God, could I get a firmware update …
Addendum: Instead of developing EarthOS I should probably rather research about MindOS. EarthOS will emerge from that, and “runs on” MindOS. MindOS, that’s the core of the problem … including the resistance of adults to change in character, and them teaching their children their silly values. I would like to see a metric / index to evaluate how much perfect a person’s values are (where “perfect” is derived from the formula for paradise, above). We probably would not get any significant step nearer to paradise by this metric and self-help … but it shows the problem and its extent, and we might seek help from God and His Holy Spirit.
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