I’ve never understood Fundamentalism. To be a fundamentalist, you have to pick a point in your learning and stop. You can’t go beyond say 4th grade. It’s at that point when you think, “Wait…OK…we’ve got Adam, and we’ve got Eve. Where did all those other people come from?” You begin to think there’s more to what you’re being told, or you become too afraid to ask the obvious questions. If you decide that there’s more, then you start to question things, and if you’re lucky, become enlightened to a larger, sometimes scarier, yet far more interesting world. In short, you learn that eating the apple wasn’t such a bad idea after all.
The problem is that many people go the other way. If someone tells them it’s just a story, they plug their ears and scream. Their reaction is to dig their heels in so deep that even the most basic of logical questions will set them on the path of the Spanish inquisition. “The world is round! Here are the facts!” Heresy, burn them at the stake! No amount of contrary evidence will sway them the other way. They are so afraid to question their core beliefs as to think a bolt of lightning will come down from above.
Which brings me to the point of this rant…
Religions began as a philosophical way for humans to understand the world around them. It gave us our laws and a basic framework on how to treat others. It also provided us a foundation for basic hygiene. However, if you’ve read the Bible, you get the feeling that Moses had OCD. There are really 613 commandments listed in the book of Moses (we only took 10 for the Bible…or what I like the call the Torah’s cliff notes). Someone had to break them down to 10 just so the rest of us wouldn’t get discouraged.
I doubt there is a being standing around just waiting for one of us to screw up so he can strike us down. I don’t think it’s that simple. I think there really are more things in this universe far more important than the human race. At least I hope so. I doubt any of us has the answers. In fact, I don’t think any one of us is even close. Most of us are just afraid. In the words of reggae musician Peter Tosh “Everyone want go to heaven, but no one want die.” Rarely a more poignant truth was ever uttered. The problem is that we have become so attached to this world that we can’t consider anything else. We think our petty squabbles are so important to us, that they MUST be important to God.
If God looks down at us at all its most likely how a parent looks at a child: full of a combination of amazement and amusement, knowing full well that we can’t begin to comprehend the reality of our situation. We’re so wrapped up in our petty political, social, and religious differences that we can’t see they really don’t matter in the larger scheme of things. I would imagine that if the books are correct, we are children. Petulant two year olds, hording our toys, afraid to go to sleep because we think we’re going to miss something. The problem is we’re not missing anything. And holding onto our childish ways is no different than a toddler fighting off the inevitable. Because just like the child, we don’t even come close to having the capacity to truly understand the Universe.