"Ishmael" Chapter 9

As a person who was raised in a Christian setting but is now atheist, this chapter of "Ishmael" was very jarring for me in many ways. It also pointed out a factor and side of the book I had failed to pick up on before. Additionally, I had to do some research to really understand the context behind Quinn's probable intent. This factor was the religious references, both subtly and obviously made throughout the work. 

Quinn, before completing his bachelor's degree, was studying to become a Trappist Monk, which is part of the Roman Catholic Church, but his spiritual director ended his studies. After that he began writing and publishing more, and stopped practicing Catholicism. He did, however, continue believing in a higher power, but just not in the same strict sense. Following my discovery of these facts, I felt my view on the chapter shifted entirely. I did, finally, relate to my fellow classmates in the sense that things were being "shoved down my throat." I would speculate that I finally understood this because it was the first time I disagreed with the author, or Ishmael's teaching. While his talk of the Bible is merely another one of his many analogies and visualizations, using a story that many people are at least vaguely familiar with, I went back through the text and found that there are so, so many times he speaks of higher powers and gods. Before, this did not affect me, as I never took it literally, but knowing that Quinn really felt this way had an impact on me.

http://www.isleroyalewolf.org/data/data/home.html
An interesting article that explains the fragility of the food chain,
right here in MI!

While Quinn's religious beliefs do not truly impact his ideas, this newfound discomfort forced me to reevaluate my stance on the book. I am still in complete agreement with the ideas and the laws governing the natural world balance, but I simply believe it is just the way of science, rather than a higher power, that creates these laws and animal instincts to protect those laws. One such example was the food chain idea, and the system of not harming your competitors in order to have more food. In my freshman year of high school, we created fun food webs that illustrated a particular environment. If one species kills of it's competitor, the prey they once competed for, will, for a short time, flourish. This will then allow the killer species to grow larger, which will affect everything that eats it, allowing their populations to get larger. But at a point, when any one of these species inevitably hits 'too large,' the entire system will fail, all the way down to the bottom and all the way up to the top. This is because the food web really is like a spider web, in that it is delicate. You cannot harm just one small bit of it without also damaging the rest. It needs to be protected, which most animals naturally do so, as their instincts tell them to only kill what they need, or what their community members need. Humans, however, have destroyed many portions of the large, large web, which will eventually lead to its collapse.