The Earth as We Know it

Something that I have been thinking about as I've been reading Robert Alter's Genesis translation, is that God gives all things on earth to humans for their use.

Genesis 1: 26 states "Let us make human in our image, by our likeness, to hold sway over the fish of the sea and the fowl of the heavens and the cattle and the wild beasts and all the crawling things that crawl upon the earth."

While this is seemingly insignificant as a sentence, it has enormous implications as to what many religious people must have thought (or still think). This idea could be interpreted to mean that, we as humans have a right to use the earth's life and resources in a way that pleases us, because God gave us these resources. While this interpretation may seem as a stretch, there is no place in Genesis where God explicitly commands humans not to kill other animals, or not destroy environments.

 Most people of Abrahamic religions living in the US hold the ideology that we need to coexist with the world around us, and that fish in the sea etc. are not infinitely abundant. One possible reason for this is because most people of Abrahamic religions living in the US do not read Genesis literally today.

However,  most churches during the times of early the early US did read Genesis literally. Upon their arrival, and push westward, they (obviously not everyone, but many people) cut down forests, slaughtered buffaloes, and took over Native American lands. This is not to say that Religion is to blame for these things, but that the settlers had a sense of entitlement, that may have originated from a literal interpretation of Genesis.