OK, for some reason I never write anything much on my own blog; I prefer to write on other folks blogs (see the great discussion over at ‘Jesus Radicals,‘ <http://www.jesusradicals.com/r-r-reno’s-“preferential-option-for-the-poor”/> initiated by a trenchant and provocative posting by DanO over at “Journeying With Those In Exile” <http://poserorprophet.wordpress.com/>) But I am going to try and start posting more new stuff and cannibalizing what I write elsewhere, Starting with our trip to see Werner Herzog’s new documentary movie “The Cave of Forgotten Dreams.”

This movie posits that Neanderthals and Homo Sapiens existed at the same time 35000 years ago and that the H.Sapiens. beat out the N.Derthals in Nature’s evolutionary contest. I can’t help but wonder as we reach the end of life as we know it on this planet, (and, coincidently, the nomination of Michele Bachman for president) if Nature badly f#%ked up and bet on the wrong horse. If so, I don’t see why we should believe in ‘Nature’ (phenomenology, Gaia, math,) any more than (G)god(s) (horoscopes, magic, Zeus). Of course, if it’s true (and I believe something like this is true) that the incarnation and death of Jesus is an eternal and consequential event, then Jesus died for the Neanderthals too. But what kind of sins are Neanderthal sins? Experts speculate that Neanderthals wore animal skins so we at least know that they ate from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. But there is no evidence of a Neanderthal tower of Babel, or salt pillars testifying to rampant buggery (or sinfully underfunding their socialist safety net) so maybe they were simply wiped out in the flood and their lack of ark building skills did them in? But were the Neanderthals responsible for their their own extinction as we will be? Seems like they were done in by by the encroaching 9000 foot deep ice sheet engulfing Europe and the competition for scarce resources with their hairless cousins with the big foreheads and better spear points. So as we witness Walter Benjamin’s ‘storm of progress’ finally overwhelm us (radioactivity form Japan, colliding with the gigantic pacific island of plastic garbage and the gulf oil spill), and Paul Klee’s “Angel of History” sorrowfully spreads it’s wings over the catastrophic pile of ruin overwhelming us; and as those last few survivors clamber to the top of this heap of wreckage still waiting for Jesus to beam them up even as the rising tide of toxic sludge reaches their nostrils; then maybe we Homo Sapiens will know how the Neanderthals felt as that last starving, and barren couple were driven from a rotting mammoth carcass by selfish and hostile homo sapiens and forced into the barren ice scape to starve. What was their prayer and did God hear it? Obliged.