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As an animal-angel hybrid, human beings have a foot in both the physical and the spiritual realm. Insofar as human beings are angelic, they possess the magnificent faculties of creative imagination, rational thinking and free choice. Yet, all too often, human beings demonstrate an internal schism between the scientific and the poetic, the literal and the metaphorical. On top of this, the human being's ability to reason is limited to seeing only a few things in full and a few more things in part. Finally, human will, which leads humans astray as often as it leads them aright, almost guarantees that as humans progress in one direction, they lose their way in another. Sadly, even in the Information Age, knowledge is not being unified as it ought to be and proper action is not being taken as it could be, and so injustice and violence - that is, unjust hurt - abound.
Nevertheless, in this essay, I do not want to talk about injustice or violence in general, but rather one type of injustice or violence: injustice against darkness and those creatures associated with the dark. Since the beginning of time, human beings have vilified darkness, and while at times this vilification has been just, all too often darkness, and creatures associated with the dark, have been absolutely reviled, the ultimate result of which has been gross injustice not only to nature in the form of light pollution and a certain kind of speciesism, but also to human beings in the form of a weakened aesthetic imagination and an uncertainty about their place on the Earth and in the universe. Consequently, drawing on insights from science, religion, philosophy and literature, I want to examine what the human being's proper response to darkness and creatures associated with it should be.
According to the physical sciences, light is electromagnetic radiation of any wavelength. More specific to human beings, light is visible radiation or electromagnetic radiation with wavelengths capable of causing the sensation of vision. Opposed to light, and defined negatively or in terms of what it is not, is darkness, which is simply the absence of light. Setting aside the universe's dependence on the mysterious substance, dark energy, which makes up about 72% of the universe, and...