strange beliefs 4/5/2016 0 Comments   by E.L. Christianson Jr. Human beings are amazing.  Without TV, people in the past spent their time looking toward the sky.  This has been a major activity of people for as long as we have been here on Earth.  Ancient peoples were much more familiar with the sky than modern people. For one thing, the sky... the heavens were the home of the gods throughout most of human history and on most parts of the planet.  Watching what was going on 'above' was an important aspect of life. Any celestial event got noticed, but comets were, and are, major attention getters.  More so than meteor showers, northern lights, novas and eclipses, comets were interpretated in many different ways, some good and some bad. But, today, in this modern world we know much more than our ancient ancestors knew.  We recognize, from a scientific mind-set, that 'heavenly events' are the result of predictable circumstances.  Recently, we humans sent our rocket up and landed on an incoming comet so that we could analyze its substance more accurately. That's progress. And yet, here we are in the 21st century and we are still following the examples set by people 10 thousand years ago.  We have divided ourselves based, at least in part, on some vague belief system that involves looking toward the 'heavens' as the home of gods. We run around the planet killing those whose belief in god is different from our own belief in god.  Even when we claim to beieve in the very same god, we still kill based upon the variations of that belief... Protestants and Catholics kill each other over this varied beilef and Shia and Sunni kill each other over this same variation of believing in the same god.  Jews, Muslims and Christians all claim to believe in the same "God" but find reason to hate based upon some variation of that belief. In 1456, Pope Callixtus III excommunicated Halley's Comet because he believed it to be an "instrument of the devil and apparently, he believed, as an agent of 'God', he had the power to do something. In the 15th century, when humans knew so little and were despeartely trying to understand how things were, 'God' had a place.  Witches, werewolves, dragons, devils, and a whole host of things had a place.  They offered explanations for humans at a level that humans could understand. Belief in a magical god who lived in the sky and watched over human activity with a protective eye was comforting when there were no better explanations available.  That 'God works in mysterious ways' is feels better than 'we don't know or understand'. But that was then and this is now.  We have transmitted detailed information about a particular comet through space and received that information on our instruments here on Earth.  We now know that comets are not omens and bearers of bad news. And yet, at least in this Christian country, most people who don't actually follow the teachings, profess some sort of belief in that magical god. Scientific knowledge works. Yet beliefs, claims that are not and often can never be known, have caused human beings to kill each other in wars at least since the first city states were organized around 4,000 BCE.  The people who lived in these states believed that their cities were protected by patron deities and when the cities went to war, the war was thought of as fought for or even by the deities themselves. Ever since, war has always had a religious aspect. Armies have always gone into battle believing god was on their side, even when two peoples who claimed to believe in the same god fought each other. The absurdity of that seems to have always eluded people. It is noteworthy that even today the leaders of nations ask their patron deities to bless their countries. The American president, for instance, always asks god to bless America, never the American people. Gods, it seems, only protect states, not their peoples who are decimated in wars for the sake of their nations. Remember John F. Kennedy’s “ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.” Throughout human history, people, like soldier ants, have always existed to preserve the state rather than visa versa. So here we are, seven millennia since the founding of city states, still acting just like the pagans of Mesopotamia. For seven millennia of belief guided human history, the progress of human nature has stood still! ... and that's the truth !!!