Religion
Related: About this forumIn the beginning, "god" put two lights in the sky.
One for day and one for night. That was a very, very early attempt at an explanation of why there is night and day. It's the best the storyteller in a tribe of itinerant shepherd and goatherds could come up with. "god did it." There are lights in the sky.
Jump ahead a few thousand years, and people are creating charts of the skies so they can predict the seasons of the year, etc. The "lights" in the sky move in a daily, annual and even millennial pattern that can be predicted, although the timing of that movement changes. That can be predicted, too, though, through keeping of detailed records.
For a very long time after that, it was thought that the sun and moon and other lights in the sky did the moving, with the Earth as the stationary center of that movement. It was complicated. Early stargazers kept more and more detailed records to make their predictions even more accurate. Complex diagrams were drawn to explain why things moved somewhat erratically.
Eventually, a few of those early astronomers and astrologers finally figured out that it wasn't really the sun and moon moving around the earth. It was much easier to explain if the earth was turning and circled around the sun. Then, the awkward diagrams could give way to a more sensible system. A system that even explained the weird apparent movements of the planets. About that time, the more or less spherical nature of our planet was understood, and things put more or less in their proper places.
We're even better at all that now, and have a very good understanding of the solar system and even of the nearby galaxy we're part of. We keep adding to our knowledge, through observation, mathematics, and other modern inventions.
And yet. And yet, there are still people who claim that everything in Genesis, the first book of the Bible is god's own truth. Every word of it is accurate and true. The simplistic explanations of a early tribal storyteller are still being told. Religion is like that. It holds onto everything and resists any other explanation. Now, almost all Christians understand the solar system and all that stuff, more or less, but the Bible story is still true, see. Imagine all of the other stories in that ancient scripture. Same story-tellers. Same time period, more or less. Same level of accuracy. We know better about the sun and moon now.
What are we missing with the rest? Why do we cling to those old fables, still? There's the question, really.
The Velveteen Ocelot
(120,953 posts)MineralMan
(147,606 posts)Compared with the historical time of human existence, Galileo lived not so long ago, really. Estimates of the time of the writing of Genesis have it being written a few millennia ago. Galileo is recent history, really.
I mean, we're still attending plays written by Shakespeare at about the same time, after all.
And yet it moves.
LongTomH
(8,636 posts)Probably there were multiple sources there. I've read that the earliest sources were actually polytheistic.
Docreed2003
(17,816 posts)Well, you'd be wrong, sir...just check out this fine exhibit at the "Ark Encounter" in Kentucky!!
(Lol, sorry...I couldn't resist!)
MineralMan
(147,606 posts)so they drowned in the flood and got fossilized near the Grand Canyon, see...yeah, that's the ticket...
God did it, dammit! And don't you forget that.
The Velveteen Ocelot
(120,953 posts)plus Noah and his family. It still doesn't make any sense!
MineralMan
(147,606 posts)They ate, you know, cabbages and stuff. You've got them all wrong. Children played with them, even.
The Velveteen Ocelot
(120,953 posts)MineralMan
(147,606 posts)Journeyman
(15,148 posts)1 In the beginning Man created God;
And in the image of Man created he him.
2 And Man gave unto God a multitude of names,
that he might be Lord over all the earth when it was suited to Man.
3 And on the seven millionth day Man rested
and did lean heavily on his God and saw that it was good.
4 And Man formed Aqualung of the dust of the ground,
and a host of others likened unto his kind.
5 And these lesser men Man did cast into the void. And some were burned;
and some were put apart from their kind.
6 And Man became the God that he had created
and with his miracles did rule over all the earth.
7 But as these things did come to pass,
the Spirit that did cause Man to create his God
lived on within all men: even within Aqualung.
8 And Man saw it not.
9 But for Christs sake hed better start looking.
Ian Anderson (Jethro Tull): Liner notes for Aqualung
MineralMan
(147,606 posts)More or less, anyhow...
Pope George Ringo II
(1,896 posts)So many pantheons involve one of the gods putting the sun in the sky, or moving it across the sky each day, or building a new sun each day. or whatnot. It's one of the central, existential questions which religion pretends to answer so most invent a fairly central story.
But even their beginning is just a screwed-up version of the birth of our solar system, rather than the universe. And while many of these creation stories do at least manage to guess right about our sun being (probably) the last star here, I can't actually think of one which genuinely acknowledges that our sun had at least two predecessors right here in our little patch of matter. Put aside all the problems with biology, chemistry--and all the other problems with physics--and it's like their gods were very late to the game somehow. Where were these gods in the earlier stars' lives? Any god who showed up that late really isn't big enough for my universe, all things considered.
It's enough to make you wonder if their gods were completely unaware of how stars function and this is all just a bunch of malarkey invented by superstitious people with no idea how the world worked.
MineralMan
(147,606 posts)who had no freaking idea about anything. Feh! I recognize that you know that, just in case you misunderstood.
Pope George Ringo II
(1,896 posts)But I find it curious that their imagination creates gods not big enough to encompass reality. And nowhere is it more apparent than in astrophysics that their imaginary friends are simply too pathetic to mean anything.
MineralMan
(147,606 posts)We have learned the real answers to most of those questions now, and are continuing to learn even more. If we don't pay attention, we might just destroy it all, actually.
Major Nikon
(36,900 posts)...and where grandma and grandpa went.
10,000 yrs later we are still telling fairy tales to children with some adults pretending to still believe it.
MineralMan
(147,606 posts)It made sense then. It no longer does. It's time for humans to grow up and recognize that magic is not the answer. We know what the answers to those basic questions are.
Major Nikon
(36,900 posts)Just because something is unknown doesnt mean made up mythology is a reasonable solution.
MineralMan
(147,606 posts)What happens to grandma might seem to be such a question. There is an answer, though. "Grandma is gone. But she will always be part of us. We have her genes. We also have all of our memories of her. You will pass on her genes to your children, if you have children. You will also pass on your memories of her and teach the lessons you learned from her."
That is truth. That is how rational, non-religious people explain it. It is truth without magic.
How hard is that?
Permanut
(6,656 posts)That "light" was created on the first day, but the sun was not created until the fourth day. Still working on the physics of that.
Act_of_Reparation
(9,116 posts)You know the rules. If it sounds nonsensical or horrible, you're probably reading it wrong.