Baby's first encounter with the divine.
I remember my first real thought of the divine.
This was before the middle brother was born, so I was less than 3 years old. I was in the back seat of my mom's green Dodge Swinger. It was sitting in the back of the car thinking about whatever children think about, and I looked up in the sky. It was afternoon so the sun was in the west and there were big clouds blocking it in that way where golden rays of light beam down from around the clouds.
You know... Something like this, but more golden
To me, at that age - a near clean slate, I thought this was beautiful and something truly special. It was not an everyday occurrence. At that moment , I made a connection.
You see, back then, mom and dad used to get some sort of magazine/pamphlet regularly for being members of the Church of Christ. As I remember it, every cover of those things had a sky very similar to the one above painted on it. To me at that young age, mom had already associated that magazine/pamphlet to church and to god.
So in my young, preformed mind with baby logic concluded...
Rays of light from the sky = Rays of light like the ones on the church book = heaven = god... god is standing behind those clouds making that happen.
At that young age I already logged plenty of hours in a church pew. I'd been in sunday school and heard the stories of the baby Jesus and Noah and Jonah and Cain and Abel. But the connection to the divine wasn't there in my brain yet. But here I was in the backseat of this Dodge Swinger and with the paltry information around me that I had already glommed from the world tried to name something that was incomprehensible to me.
This is how society worked for years. This is why religion has such a huge stake in America's hearts today. It's easy to just stop investigating, put a flagpole down and blame it on superstition or give the credit to a god.
But some people are just curious by nature. Some people need to know the mechanics. They need to open the hood and look in there to see that there is a sparkplug and a timing belt and a windshield wiper fluid dispenser.
During undergrad, I took a shit-ton of optics classes. They were tedious, but they were also illuminating (no pun intended). Now, I understand what causes those light rays. There is no need to evoke a deity. All you need is a light source and to block it a particular way.
Yes, some magic disappeared from my existence. (this is also why I don't particularly care for fireworks.) But now I don't have a fear of the rapture.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crepuscular_rays
This was before the middle brother was born, so I was less than 3 years old. I was in the back seat of my mom's green Dodge Swinger. It was sitting in the back of the car thinking about whatever children think about, and I looked up in the sky. It was afternoon so the sun was in the west and there were big clouds blocking it in that way where golden rays of light beam down from around the clouds.
You know... Something like this, but more golden
To me, at that age - a near clean slate, I thought this was beautiful and something truly special. It was not an everyday occurrence. At that moment , I made a connection.
You see, back then, mom and dad used to get some sort of magazine/pamphlet regularly for being members of the Church of Christ. As I remember it, every cover of those things had a sky very similar to the one above painted on it. To me at that young age, mom had already associated that magazine/pamphlet to church and to god.
So in my young, preformed mind with baby logic concluded...
Rays of light from the sky = Rays of light like the ones on the church book = heaven = god... god is standing behind those clouds making that happen.
At that young age I already logged plenty of hours in a church pew. I'd been in sunday school and heard the stories of the baby Jesus and Noah and Jonah and Cain and Abel. But the connection to the divine wasn't there in my brain yet. But here I was in the backseat of this Dodge Swinger and with the paltry information around me that I had already glommed from the world tried to name something that was incomprehensible to me.
This is how society worked for years. This is why religion has such a huge stake in America's hearts today. It's easy to just stop investigating, put a flagpole down and blame it on superstition or give the credit to a god.
But some people are just curious by nature. Some people need to know the mechanics. They need to open the hood and look in there to see that there is a sparkplug and a timing belt and a windshield wiper fluid dispenser.
During undergrad, I took a shit-ton of optics classes. They were tedious, but they were also illuminating (no pun intended). Now, I understand what causes those light rays. There is no need to evoke a deity. All you need is a light source and to block it a particular way.
Yes, some magic disappeared from my existence. (this is also why I don't particularly care for fireworks.) But now I don't have a fear of the rapture.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crepuscular_rays