Take a Step Back
Perusing a museum of natural history recently, a friend remarked to me upon the travesty of what he termed “premature dinosaur exposure”. Our young, in his view, are educated about these long-extinct reptiles far too early — the result being an implicit association between dinosaurs and children. When they move on to fascinations with dragons and aliens, dinosaurs are pushed back to their eternal status as a thing of the past.
I have to agree with my friend on this. Imagine being twenty years of age and seeing the complete skeleton of Tyrannosaurus rex for the first time. It is doubtful that you would believe it to be genuine. Yet in our reality, a typical young adult would find such a thing bordering on mundane. Fossils are dull, museums are boring, and dinosaurs are cartoon creatures for little boys. Focus, really focus, and you might be able to take a step back from this inexplicable reaction to some of the most incredible creatures to have walked the ground you now stand on. Try to imagine dinosaurs from the perspective of a completely naive visitor to our place and time.
This approach is warranted in many other aspects of our lives. In some cases, like the dinosaurs, we should use it to experience the full, awestruck reactions that certain events deserve. The computer you are reading this on could most likely be used to instantly communicate with a large percentage of the human population, provided you know their name. The blue and green globe you see in pictures from the International Space Station is the home of every non-astronomical event you have ever heard of, and countless more than you never will hear of. The small white planetoid that hangs above the night sky has been walked on by people who are still alive today. If you live in Australia, you are closer to the pitch-black ocean floor of the Atlantic, 12,000 kilometres beneath your feet, than its surface — and everything you hear about in America happens almost upside-down relative to you.
Taking a step back from these concepts can provide you with a fresh appreciation. But in other cases, we should do so not to experience awe, but confusion. Just like we are ingrained with the false “normality” of walking on the Moon, most of us have been ingrained with the “normality” of the belief that an old book holds the words of a supernatural force. “Miracle”, “religious”, “divine”, “sinner”, “resurrection” — all words we have heard enough times so as to become mundane. Even a non-believer might implicitly accept another’s belief in the story of Noah’s ark — in which water appears from nowhere to flood the entire world, killing everyone except one man and his family — as more “normal” than someone’s belief in the Wall of Fire — in which a race of aliens called the Galactic Confederacy brought billions of human to Earth, piled them around volcanoes, and destroyed them with hydrogen bombs. Of course, both of these stories are equally ludicrous, and to a completely naive modern-day person, ignorant of the religious and science fiction genres, they would be rejected.
We look to modern fantasy stories for entertainment, and ancient fantasy stories for holy revelations about the universe. Clearly there is something off about this particular accepted “norm” of our culture. Some of these ancient stories, like the Books of Ezekiel and Revelation, are particularly indistinguishable from science fiction. “Gods”, uniquely from humanity’s rich catalogue of mythical creatures and characters, are normal to believe in. This is why I no longer partake in debating with proponents of specific religions. Even the name or personality of your god, let alone the details of your arbitrary dusty book, are unnecessary embellishments of a concept that is only considered sane because we have grown up in constant exposure to it.
The biggest mistake anyone can make is cherishing their own beliefs. There is no reason to ever become attached to a piece of information you have picked up on your way through life. Never stop looking for reasons to discard them. Make a regular habit of taking a step back, taking stocktake, and taking measures against information that does not hold up.
