Article: I Saw A Shooting Star
In my feeble attempt to prolong my life and get some much needed exercise, I have begun taking daily walks around my neighborhood. The summer of 2010 has been very hot here in the Midwest so to avoid the heat I’ve taken my walks very early in the morning before the sun comes up. This morning I happened to glimpse a sight I don’t see too often in the well lighted suburbs where I live; I saw a shooting star, or to be more precise I saw a meteor.
I’ve not seen more than a handful of meteors in my entire life so I was very awestruck at the coolness of seeing a light rapidly streak across the sky and disappear into the darkness. But as I marveled at the glory of nature I couldn’t help wonder what an ancient tribesman would have made of the sight 2000, 3000, or 5000 years ago.
The Ancient Perspective
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Most ancient cultures viewed the sky as |
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Over time most civilizations built up this dualistic philosophy of the heavenly immutable sky above and the corrupt, defiled Earth below. From earthquakes and volcanoes they later added a third netherworld below filled with fire, death and misery.So what happens when a regular everyday fisherman or farmhand, fed this belief in a perfect unchanging heaven above sees a meteor streaking across the sky? A typical meteor is a very quick, silent event that happens so quickly you could easily miss it. I could easily imagine that a single person could easily be the only one to see it.
Would our ancient observer think he was mad? Since it contradicted everything he had been taught by the local priest, would he dismiss it? Would he risk being ostracized for saying he saw it? If he stood to loose credibility in his tribe, might he not be wiser to dismiss or outright deny he ever saw it? Think about it, he would risk becoming one of the “UFO abductees” of the ancient world; the kook who sees things in the sky.
Let us say that he does build up enough courage to talk to his tribal priest, medicine man or shaman about his vision. Better yet, let us imagine that it was the priest himself or maybe even the chief or a king who saw the shooting star. Then what would happen?
Most assuredly it would be seen at least as a sign, maybe it is a prediction that the current king would die or that a new one would be born. Or perhaps our priest or king was particularly imaginative could see even deeper implications in this event; he realizes that for a star to fall, it must have been tainted somehow with the corruption of Earth. This small piece of the heavenly host became tinged with the evil sin of our world and as punishment has been cast down from heaven.
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Perhaps this heavenly being is an angel rebelling against the powers that rule the heavens struck down for pride. Almost every civilization in the ancient world saw the sun and planets as gods and the stars we their servants. Maybe the fallen one wasn’t being cast out at all, maybe he chose to drop to earth to bring us some great gift, perhaps salvation itself. Perhaps it was the son of god bringing us redemption from the corruption of this world.The Modern Perpective
If you ask me, a man in the 21st century, I know that the sky (heaven if you prefer) is made out of the same elements we have down here on Earth. We don’t know everything and probably never will, but we know that the shooting star I saw is most likely a rock, a piece of ice or old debris from one of our space programs. I realize that this knowledge is a lot less romantic than seeing an outcast angel or a fallen son of the most high, and it ruins the feeling of mystery.
But I believe this knowledge is far more valuable than any mystery, that knowing is always to be preferred to superstition and conjecture. It seems terribly wasteful to spend your life lusting after mystery when using experimentation and thoughtful deduction we can know verifiable answers.
This is what I see a life dedicated to religion as being, conjecture on the unknowable and the unprovable instead of paying attention to what we can know is real. Doesn’t it seem foolish to spend a lifetime inventing fanciful stories about fallen gods when the ability to know is completely within our grasp?
Think about it!