I'm going to need a bigger god box.
I had a random thought while turning in a textbook I borrowed.
I was thinking of life as a bunch of shelves on a wall, that get full of odds and ends and such throughout a lifetime. As a person gets older, they have the capacity to figure out more and more of the various things that they see on the shelf, may not ever figure them all out but can get a healthy number of them.
A science minded person may read books to try and figure out as many as possible, another person might be comfortable realizing that they may never know what all the things on the shelf are but occasionally may take a piece down and ponder it.
The religious person may resort to a different tactic altogether. Because they are uncomfortable not knowing what something is and not desiring to take the time to learn what something might be, they simply take the item off of the shelf and put it in a box labeled god.
Over time, the smaller, simpler things that they put away in the box get forgotten and those same smaller things, if they had taken the time to understand them, would have made the larger things that got put on the shelf later easier to understand. Rather than address those smaller things in the hopes of gaining understanding of the larger things, they just toss the larger things in the box too. Eventually their whole life is in the box and the shelves are empty and so are they.
If you try to take away the box then they have to look at all the things in the box that they avoided understanding and that overwhelming idea is why they cling so desperately to the dang thing.
I was thinking of life as a bunch of shelves on a wall, that get full of odds and ends and such throughout a lifetime. As a person gets older, they have the capacity to figure out more and more of the various things that they see on the shelf, may not ever figure them all out but can get a healthy number of them.
A science minded person may read books to try and figure out as many as possible, another person might be comfortable realizing that they may never know what all the things on the shelf are but occasionally may take a piece down and ponder it.
The religious person may resort to a different tactic altogether. Because they are uncomfortable not knowing what something is and not desiring to take the time to learn what something might be, they simply take the item off of the shelf and put it in a box labeled god.
Over time, the smaller, simpler things that they put away in the box get forgotten and those same smaller things, if they had taken the time to understand them, would have made the larger things that got put on the shelf later easier to understand. Rather than address those smaller things in the hopes of gaining understanding of the larger things, they just toss the larger things in the box too. Eventually their whole life is in the box and the shelves are empty and so are they.
If you try to take away the box then they have to look at all the things in the box that they avoided understanding and that overwhelming idea is why they cling so desperately to the dang thing.