Friday, March 25, 2005

Who are those guys?

I'm acquainted with some of these folks, but not many. I'm talking about the 76% of Americans who, according to a recent Rasmussen poll, actually believe Jesus rose from the dead.

How can so many people believe something for which there's not only no scientific support, but which is actually contraindicated by accepted tenets of physiology? Are many of these believers the same people who believe there were WMD in Iraq? Do they believe because it makes them--makes their existence on the planet--more comfortable than acceptance of the alternative, namely that the story of Jesus is a fable, well-intended and finely based, but, after all, just a tale--a tale that tells us how to live a moral life, but doesn't demand that we do so in order to achieve some eternal reward?

Perhaps so. After all, it wouldn't be the only occasion in which human understanding has been based on what's comfortable, what's comforting. For centuries, Westerners believed the Earth was the center of the universe in spite of solid, contrary observations; or that the Earth was flat, even though sailboats appeared to sink, but then emerge, on the horizon. The idea of a spherical, isolated planet--one object of billions massed and scattered through the universe--wasn't acceptable until supporting proof was undeniable, and until we'd been sufficiently conditioned to accept it, to adopt it within our sense of things, to make it comfortable.

So--what about this idea? Maybe, someday we humans will become evolved enough to quit this bullshit about the existence of a God and/or Allah, with sons and spokemen like Jesus and Mohammed and Krishna and so on. Maybe we have to kill each other, fight and litigate and destroy each other for a few more centuries until we tire of these silly notions and just plain stop and become that which we truly are: Billions of animals trying to find a way to survive in peace on Earth.

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