Unfinished Kris

I remember reading somewhere, pre-internet, that human brains have a need to classify everything they encounter. I connected the dots then (as we humans are want to do) that this is the reason for prejudice in our society. Prejudging, in itself. is not a bad thing, but a necessary thing. Human beings have needed to quickly judge situations for their own survival for thousands of years. 20,000 years ago an early human had to judge whether a situation was safe or dangerous quickly, or he may get trampled by a herd (pack? swarm? murder?) of mammoths or poisoned by a delicious looking berry. Today, we still have to judge whether we’re in safe or dangerous situations all the time. Dark alley? Nope. I’ll stay on the lit sidewalk, thanks.

We humans determine how to file each situation based on our previous experiences and overall knowledge. Of course, the less experience or knowledge you have, the more narrow and/or scattered your classifications might be, while the more you know, the more accuracy you can achieve. Classifying with limited knowledge, or ignorance, is how negative prejudices are formed (such as thinking that all people of a certain make-up think and act the same way, desirable or otherwise) and really bad decisions get made (such as naively strolling down that dark alley), but it’s also how inaccurate conclusions about the natural world lead to inventions of the divine.

Peoples with little or no understanding of things like weather patterns, the inner-workings of the human body, diseases born of bad hygiene – basically any scientific understanding of the world around them, would have been forced to create some interesting classifications based on their conclusions – good or evil and divine or animal for example, as opposed to meteorological or biological.

Can you imagine having no awareness of what causes rain or lack of rain? Or what causes hurricanes and tornadoes? You would absolutely begin to fear whatever lived up there that kept beating you down with lightning and wind and yelling at you with thunder…or not giving you any of the rain you need to keep your crops alive.

I can totally picture this scenario:

Join me in imagining a time way back, before the internet, before remote controls, before air conditioning, before cars, certainly before weather radar, perhaps back when fire and the wheel where still pretty fresh on the scene….. 

Two neighbors are out hoeing and plowing their fields one day under ominous clouds, and one neighbor gets struck by lightning. Because these people know nothing about the principles of electricity, they don’t attribute his death to the fact that he was holding a metal rod above his head in a lightning storm, which caused him to become a nice path to ground for the electricity. They, instead, attribute it to some act of an angry, unseen God. But you can imagine that a random smiting without reason is very hard to make sense of. How can you live each day knowing that at any time your God could randomly strike you dead for no reason??

Randomness is just too damn …random! You can’t DO anything to keep safe from random happenings. And that sure is scary.

So the neighbor who wasn’t punished starts trying to find meaning in the sudden smite through reasons and rules that make it all feel less random. Yep, that sinful neighbor MUST have been struck because he didn’t follow this list of things that God doesn’t like. If I make sure to follow these rules, I should be fine. If somehow it turns out I am not fine and I get struck by lightning too, it must be because I didn’t have enough faith or someone else broke the rules and as a way to punish them, God struck me down. His ways are so very mysterious, but there is a reason for everything. Right?

Consider, if you will, the rainbow – that beautiful promise from God that He won’t dump any more rain on you – or is it simply a beautiful play between round droplets of water and light that happens when a cloud moves to go dump rain on someone else?

I’m convinced that if thunder, rain, tornadoes, hail, and lightning came from the ground, instead of the sky, people would point down when referring to God, or look towards the ground while praying. The world would believe that God must live deep within the Earth surrounded by some kind of mole-like guardians, instead of up on fluffy white clouds in the sky surrounded by winged people.

At least, these are the conclusions that my brain has come to in order to make it all make sense to me. ::shrug::