Go ahead. Let it out. You’ll feel better.

One of the places where human justice falls down is the belief, embedded in every story we tell our children from their earliest days, that bad things inevitably happen to people who are bad and that good behavior is rewarded. I’d go so far as to say that the recognition of the failure of that axiom is the source of every crisis of faith ever experienced. The innocent starve. The wicked get wealthy by cheating and stealing. Natural disasters take lives indiscriminately. We believe this unsupportable notion of the inherent fairness of the universe so strongly that when we see evidence strongly to the contrary, it is literally intolerable. We feel it as pain.

We demand justice — or we sink into depression, because all actions are futile and the results of those actions are arbitrary.

No related posts.

This isn’t a problem with all religions, mind. In fact, it’s only a problem with a handful. However, it’s a problem with the most popular, and the most violent — and, anthropologically speaking, the most recent. And this is the problem concept: that humans are special, are blessed, are chosen to be God’s favored children, are somehow above the animals and plants and everything else that lives, and have a God-given right of power over life and death with respect to them.

I’m not sure how all of that made it into the dominant narratives, because much of the scripture it’s based on stops well short of the worst of that in wording. But religions are made out of a huge body of traditions that, in those that do have scriptures, have very little support in those scriptures.

No related posts.

We look up in the sky and see ten thousand points of light (give or take a few orders of magnitude depending on location and light pollution) and then, because knowing where the stars are in the sky helps us pinpoint where we are in the seasons despite the vagaries of the weather, we draw lines around them and connecting them and give the drawings names. And we make up stories about the drawings so that we can remember them, and remember that the positions of the stars are important, and, if we’re clever enough with the stories, why.

That’s “why the positions of the stars are important to us”, not any bigger sort of why, like “why are stars the things that are important”. Certainly not a “what”, like “what are stars”. Nor a “how”, as in “how do the positions of the stars drive the planting and harvest cycles”.

Well, that’s not true. The stories can actually address such things. It’s just that when they do, the risk of bullshit is dangerously high.

No related posts.