Spiritual epiphany

This amazing bolt of insight hit me the other night that I felt like sharing.  I wasn't doing anything special.  It was late, I was done working for the night, so I was knitting on a hat and ignoring an old episode of "House" on my laptop.  I was a little spaced out (which is normal when I knit) and my mind wasn't even on spiritual matters, and then out of left field it struck me: 

Everyone in the world is equally wrong about god, the after life, and everything else that we try to explain in spiritual terms.  

It sounds dumb, but I actually find it reassuring.   To me this means that it's okay not to agree with how anyone has laid out religion or atheism because they are all wrong.  In fact I don't think that we are biologically capable of coming up with the right answer to any of life's big questions.  That doesn't mean we can't try, but it sure takes the stress out of coming up with the right answer.  Like most academics knowledge is of paramount importance to me, so it's weird to be comforted by the realization that in this life I'll never be capable of answering a question correctly.  

Sunday Morning Philosophy

There was a tremendous thunder storm last night, a rare occurrence in this area.  It was a long and drawn out storm, punctuated with periods of silence during which you roll back to unconsciousness, only to be ripped from sleep by thunderclaps so earth shaking you're screaming in terror before you realize you're awake and alive. 

In the sleep addled aftermath of a stormy night shared with a houseful of terrorized pets I've been thinking about thunder and other terrifying forces of nature.  I've been trying to imagine more primitive humans without clear scientific understanding of such events.  Imagining feeling terrorized by gods, or spirits, some powerful being raining down fire from the sky in a deafening roar of anger.

We modern humans are raised with a basic scientific understanding of lightning that can be very comforting.  Where it is most likely to strike, how to calculate the distance of the storm, this knowledge makes us feel that we have some meager amount of control.  But in that brief second after being pulled from sleep and before conscious awareness settles, no scientific explanation can come to mind, your are functioning with a primitive brain and all it can think of is terror.

God stole my car keys

Yesterday, in a ridiculous moment of fuzzy-headedness brought on by to much heat and exertion and not enough food and water I "miss-placed" my car keys (they were never really lost, grrrrrr.)  I naturally began to panic when all my searching could not locate them, it did not help that I was at my field research site with no cell phone reception, and a 3.5 hour drive (plus a long embarrassing explanation to my colleagues) away from another set of keys.  

In a fit of near-tears-panic I found myself saying a little prayer in my head to locate the keys.  Even in my fuzzy headed state I thought what an odd thing to do.  Who exactly was I asking for help?  Did I think the Flying Spaghetti Monster had reached down from the sky and plucked the keys from my pocket?  Holding them hostage until I showed his meatballs the appropriate reverence? Of course not, but in the absence of any corporeal help it was, apparently, my first instinct to ask for assistance from some non-corporeal being.  

The logical part of my brain finally screamed at me loud enough to be heard over all the static, “retrace your steps, go through everything, they must be here! start with the most likely places…..” and quite quickly I literally ran right in to them (the keys having been laying right out in the open for nearly a hour while I frantically search all around them.)  And after I located the not-really-lost keys what was my immediate instinct?  To once again thank some non-corporal being.  

What did the Flying Spaghetti Monster, Shiva the destroyer, or Ra the sun god have to do with my not-really-lost keys?  Diddley.  But in my fuzzy headed state the need to rely on someone or something else was so strong I couldn’t contain it.  The impulse has to be more than simply the effect of our culture, for culture only names the non-corporeal being.  The impulse to give up control, to put a situation in someone else’s hands when feeling helpless, must be much deeper than that.