Still Reading: All Tomorrow's Parties, William Gibson. I'll get it finished one of these days.
Just Acquired and Reading: Mutant Message Down Under, Author....good question and I'm too lazy to walk across the room to see. Good reading, though.
Quote of the day: From my windows start up: "Calvary's here. Calvary's a frightened guy with a rock but it's here." ~ Xander, Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Damn it was chilly last night! The only thing I could think when Kitt and I jumped into bed to warm up was, "Autowash!" (Think Leeloo from the 5th Element)
Trip Report: Unchanged. Sexy and cute as hell.
O.k. I have to get this rant off my chest. It will drive me insane if I don't.
I cannot stand bad science of any kind and this case, I'm talking about bad archeology. Don't get me wrong, I am no expert on the subject (far from it) but what gets my goat are these people who try to use archeology as a means of furthering their religious agenda. It's especially vexing when the person at hand is one with absolutely no credentials at all.
There is a 'museum' here in Tennessee dedicated to the work of one Ron Wyatt. Mr. Wyatt considered himself something on the order of a Christian Indiana Jones ~ right down to the clothing. He claimed to have found not only the Ark of the Covenant (his version looked amazingly like the one from the movie with a few alterations), but also that other ark that Noah built as well as Jesus' burial tomb, Sodom and Gomorrah, the exact spot where the Red Sea was crossed and the bones of pre-flood people who stood 15 feet tall.
This guy should be a household name, right?
I was originally going to rip through some of these 'theories' and tell what I really thought about them (is 'complete and utter (udder? :::snicker:::) bullshit' too vague?) but I won't. Never mind that Mr. Wyatt's theory of how land came to be exposed and some comets formed after the Flood totally ignores the Coriolis effect on the planet. Never mind how some of the artifacts he presented as being from the same story were made of iron ~ totally ignoring the fact that iron didn't come into use until 1000 B.C...and even if it had been in use before then, it was have not been in as good of shape as it was. Not after spending thousands of years in the ground with nothing but equally old wood to protect it. Never mind that he and the people who picked up his work think that earth and the whole shebang is only six thousand years old.
Let me repeat ~ never mind. That's not really the point I want to make. (I think. Did I mention that bad science makes me batty?)
The idea of such religious fervor strikes me as being absolutely looney ~ imagine what kind of response I'd get if I found a pair of deer antlers in the woods one fall and ran to the newspapers screaming, "I found the antlers of Cernunnos!!!!" (Of course, this begs the question ~ would Cernunnos shed his antlers or would they be more permanent?) Yet, there are people screaming everyday that christianity is the one true faith because yet another icon has been found and no one seems to question, let alone challenge, it.
Why are these people so intent on finding evidence of a story? Why isn't the story enough? Stories are not meant to be taken so literally. True, the best stories always have a measure of truth to them. Storytelling is a way of explaining why we're here and who we are. Stories are a way of saying what really can't be said in everyday life: the world can be a scary place and that we can be scary beings ~ we can do evil things beyond imagining...and we can do some incredibly good things just as unimaginable.
Frank McConnell writes in the preface of Neil Gaiman's anthology, Sandman: Book of Dreams:
"How do gods die? And when they do, what becomes of them? You might as well ask, how do gods get born? All three questions are, really, the same question. And they all have a common assumption: that humankind can no more live without gods than you can kill yourself by holding your breath.
We need gods ~ Thor or Zeus or Krishna or Jesus or, well, God ~ not so much to worship or sacrifice to, but because they satisfy our need ~ distinctive from that of other animals ~ to imagine a meaning, a sense to our lives, to satisfy our hunger to believe that the muck and chaos of daily existence does, after all, tend somewhere. It's the origin of religion, and also of storytelling ~ or aren't they the same thing? As Voltaire said of God: if he did not exist, if would have been necessary to invent him."
In my book, religion and storytelling are the same thing. Perhaps we need the stories of the gods because we can't accept the real scary truth ~ that they are really us and nothing is truly beyond our reach.
Page Copyright 2002 D. Firewolf
