kerravonsen | Gardening as a Metaphor for Good and Evil (Reply)

Just started watching "Moon Knight". (yeah, yeah, late as usual.) Interesting show.

And there's a line from the first episode which has stuck in my head.

(about the goddess Ammit) "She grew weary of having to wait for sinners to commit their crime before punishing them. Would you wait to weed a garden till after the roses were dead?"

Would you wait to weed a garden till after the roses were dead?

That's pretty profound. Flawed, but profound. Because of course most people would say, "No, you wouldn't wait; you would weed the garden to protect the roses."

The God of Abraham is not most people; let me remind you of the parable of the wheat and the tares.

Another parable he set before them, saying, The kingdom of heaven is like a man that sowed good seed in his field: but while men slept, his enemy came and sowed tares also among the wheat, and went away. But when the blade sprang up and brought forth fruit, then the tares appeared also.

And the servants of the householder came and said to him, "Sir, did you not sow good seed in your field? Why then does it have tares?"

And he said to them, "An enemy has done this."

And the servants said to him, "Do you want us to go and gather them up?"

But he said, "No; because while you gather up the tares, you might root up the wheat with them. Let both grow together until the harvest: and in the time of the harvest I will say to the reapers, gather up first the tares, and bind them in bundles to burn them; but gather the wheat into my barn."

(Matthew 13:24-30)

There are a number of interesting things here:

He would rather let the weeds grow in order to prevent the destruction of any of the wheat.
- Whereas Ammit is more interested in the destruction of all the weeds.
He waits until the harvest (death); there isn't any more growing to do for the wheat or the tares.
It is harder to distinguish between wheat and tares than between weeds and roses. But it is easier to distinguish between tares and wheat at harvest time, because their fruits are different.
- Ammit's judgement, which includes all the crimes a person will do in the future, assumes that people cannot repent or change.
- Consider Jonah -- not the whale, but the fact that he was pissed off that his mission worked; the people of Nineveh repented.

To strain the gardening metaphor even further, it isn't that weeds (or tares) are Inherently Bad. It is simply that they are growing in the wrong place. Wickedness isn't what you are (being a weed) but what you do (interfering with other plants).

Which also means that destroying all the weeds is impossible, because it isn't their weediness which makes them weeds. Any plant could be a weed if it is in the wrong place. If you want to eradicate all the weeds, you're eventually going to kill all the plants. That is the "Peace of Death"; the moral equivalent of a pesticide which poisons that which it is supposed to protect. Jehovah already tried the "kill all the evildoers" method; it was called The Flood. Didn't work. Not going to do that again.

Would I kill Hitler? No. I'd try to get him into a different career.