City Life

"Cain also became the founder of a city, which he named after his son Enoch." Genesis 4:17.

Nomads, which we call hunter gathers today, lived together in small groups of a family or at best a clan and moved with the wild herbivores and with the changing seasons. They spent roughly 3 hours per day in getting the food for the day, four hours preparing it, and ten hours sleeping. The spent the remaining seven hours of the day contemplating nature, talking to each other, exploring, and leading a life-style called happy-go-lucky today.

The first real effort to organize nomads to do something was at Gobekli Tepe in Turkey. There, aliens, the sons of heaven from Genesis 6:4, induced the nomads to build a temple. From that organization flowed the idea of settling down and tending crops. Cain was a farmer and lived in an organized society. Genesis 4:4. The inevitable result of farming and sedentary lifestyles is technology. See Genesis 4:20-22. The sedentary lifestyle is subject to many things which we like today, but which G-d calls evil. Evidently some thought that the city life was so reprehensible that G-d would destroy that world with water in the great flood. There is nothing left of that great civilization which lasted from 9500 BCE until 7200 BCE. It was swept away by some cataclysm, may be a flood, but whatever it was the people about 7200 years ago decided to bury the cause of their troubles and buried Gobekli Tepe with many tons of earth.

The situation in the Americas was no different. At least three civilizations were destroyed by climatic events: the Mayans, the Anasazi, and the Mississippians. These people built great cities and multiplied due to much increased crops, but G-d sent drought or other cataclysms and destroyed their civilizations.

It is amazing that in every case, the very same people who once lived in a sedentary lifestyle made use to luxuries and order easily devolved after the destruction and that devolution in most cases was worse than the problems which justified the destruction of their civilizations.

In cities of today, we see those who live in trailers, in trailer parks, as the most itinerant and most red-neck. We much fun of them and say bad things about them. And yet, I just witnessed the descendants of the Anasazi in the four corners area of the United States. Many descendants of the Anasazi have opted for an American lifestyle complete with city life and high incomes. They in giving up their devolved lifestyles and returning to city life like their ancestors live in fine houses and enjoy the benefits of modern society. While their country cousins live in squalor, complete with trailer houses, broken trucks and cars, trash, and garbage, they claim to be spiritual people following the teachings of their ancestors. Apparently, they do not mean their Anasazi ancestors of the high culture, but some devolved ancestor who was a rube even to the Anasazi.

What I conclude from my High Mountain is that G-d must be the center of your life and then it does not matter where you live.